THE NEW RIVALRIES
Apple vs Xiaomi Snapchat vs Twitter Facebook vs Microsoft and more
SMART MONEY
Why mobile payments are big business in SA
GWYNETH KNOWS BEST HER BRAND IS POWERFUL AND DIVISIVE. CAN SHE BUILD A BUSINESS THAT MATTERS?
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CONTENTS Double act “I’m a big believer in the ampersand,” says Paltrow. “I don’t see it as I’m leaving something behind; I see it as this year I probably won’t make a movie or I probably won’t do a TV show or a play, and I’ll focus on the business [Goop].”
COVER STORY
Gwyneth Inc. Gwyneth Paltrow, Oscar-winning actress, is working to transform Goop, her newsletterturned-lifestyle site, into a business of scale by consciously coupling editorial with commerce— critics be damned BY ANJALI MULLANY Page 36
2 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
September 2015
Back in the day, alarm clocks didn’t have snooze buttons Nowadays, however, procrastination is just a snooze button away. And for business owners, hitting the snooze button and delaying making a business decision, could mean missing out on the next big opportunity! We say: don’t snooze. Go out and make it happen! If you believe that your business could be more successful, contact us and we’ll help you achieve your business goals. SMS your name and the words Fast Company to 44332. One of our Entrepreneurial Scouts will then give you a call to discuss how we can help you accelerate your business’ success.
Contents A gentle breeze To effect change in a culture that largely prides itself on resisting it, Princess Reema says she must simultaneously invigorate and soothe, while being careful not to alienate conservative thinkers by wielding her ambition too aggressively. (page 48)
F E AT U R E S 28 Oh Snap!
Could SA’s swift uptake of mobile payment services pose a threat for ‘outsiders’ such as Apple Pay and Android Pay? BY TOM JACKSON
NEXT
48
18
Driven
Listen Up!
58
56
Dead Ahead
New School
Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud wants to empower the women of her native Saudi Arabia—but first she must inspire them BY KAREN VALBY
The creators of The Walking Dead, TV’s most watched show, hope to turn their production company, Skybound, into the anti-Marvel BY NICOLE LAPORTE
76
When In Rome…
Today, the mantra for global brands is simple: Act local or die. Doing so is where it gets tricky BY GABRIELLA REGO
80
The New Rivalries
The competitive landscape is changing—fast. We go inside six head-to-head battles that will define our future, from Apple vs Xiaomi to Facebook vs Microsoft
4 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
The music-streaming field is getting very crowded, and very interesting. Inside the mad scramble for our ears— and wallets BY JONATHAN RINGEN
San Francisco–based startup, Master Class, hopes to perk up online education by recruiting famous instructors such as Serena Williams and Dustin Hoffman BY NIKITA RICHARDSON
88 Growing Forward
Women need to close the self-assurance gender gap if they really want to succeed in business BY ROANNA WILLIAMS
WHAT IS PAYFAST?
facebook.com/payfast @payfast
PayFast is a payments processing service for South Africans and South African websites. We enable easy, secure and instant transfer of money from online buyers to sellers. There are no setup or monthly fees and we allow sellers –individuals, businesses and charities– to accept secure payments from online buyers in a variety of ways. www.payfast.co.za We Process
Contents
REGULARS 10 From the Editor 12 The Recommender 16 Life In The
Second Act
Researcher and author Brené Brown explains how Pixar storytellers helped inspire her new book, Rising Strong BY KENRYA RANKIN NAASEL
34 Lights, Camera, Action!
The new Drift Stealth 2 is a small camera with big ambition
C R E AT I V E C O N V E R S AT I O N 24 Periscope’s Wide Lens
CEO Kayvon Beykpour discusses the world-changing potential of mobile live-video streaming INTERVIEW BY JJ MCCORVEY
66 Disrupt-It-Yourself Why Rick Treweek has brought the spirit of the Maker Movement— empowered by 3D printing and other tech—to South Africa BY CHRIS WALDBURGER
70 Take A Load Off Herman Maritz and Dan Wells’s awardwinning app is shedding some light on Eskom’s blackout schedules INTERVIEW BY EVANS MANYONGA
72 Help Is On The Way There’s nothing artificial about the power of assistive intelligence BY OM MALIK
74 Chuck It Converse’s VP and general manager, Richard Copcutt, on his latest endeavour: reinventing the classic Chuck Taylor All Star BY JOHN BROWNLEE
90 Fast Bytes 93 The Great
Innovation Frontier
African entrepreneurs are leading the world when it comes to business innovation with a social and environmental impact BY WALTER BAETS
6 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
94 Fast Events 96 One More Thing A Generation Flux member discusses the perks (and perils) of settling down for a full-time gig BY BARATUNDE THURSTON
GUTTER CREDIT TK
Here and now With Periscope, live news has the potential to be more immediate, says its CEO. “It’s difficult to put three cameramen, an audio guy and a reporter on a truck or a plane and send them somewhere. It’s easier for someone who’s already there to pull out their phone.” (page 24)
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Cover: Williams + Hirakawa Gallo Images/Getty Images/Amy E. Price/Jamie McCarthy/ Sascha Schuermann, Dollar Photo Club, Getty Images, iStock.com, Benedict Evans, Brian Stauffer, Sascha Schuermann, Jamie McCarthy, Ian Allen, Williams + Hirakawa,
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No article or any part of any article in Fast Company South Africa may be reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher. The information provided and opinions expressed in this publication are provided in good faith, but do not necessarily represent the opinions of Mansueto Ventures in the USA, Insights Publishing or the editor. Neither this magazine, the publisher or Mansueto Ventures in the USA can be held legally liable in any way for damages of any kind whatsoever arising directly or indirectly from any facts or information provided or omitted in these pages, or from any statements made or withheld by this publication. Fast Company is a registered title under Mansueto Ventures and is licensed to Insights Publishing for use in southern Africa only. 8 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
FROM THE EDITOR
Virtual is reality
T
HE GROWTH OF mobile payments in South
Africa seems to have come about quite suddenly; however, these have been in the pipeline for a long time. Countries such as Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe are already ahead of the curve with their mobile money services. In actual fact, South Africa is playing catch-up, with the big financial institutions scrambling to get on an equal footing.
One could argue that the pace of change has forced these banks to adopt the new technology, lest they be left behind. First National Bank has developed Cell Pay Point, while Absa uses Payment Pebble; Nedbank has made a massive investment in PocketPOS, and Standard Bank has a widely popular partnership with SnapScan. They have not only invested in mobile payments but e-wallet services as well. Competition is fierce, particularly with the imminent arrival of ‘outsiders’ such as Apple Pay and Android Pay (see page 28). But according to Craig Kilfoil, MD of ExactConsult, “the big five banks control the merchant-card acceptance infrastructure and completely dominate card issuance in South Africa; as much as Apple and Google may make the mobile payment technology available, it just won’t work without the permission and co-operation of the banks.” South African financial institutions should take note of what Microsoft founder Bill Gates writes in his 2015 Annual Letter. He argues that “digital banking will give the poor more control over their assets and help them transform their lives. By 2030, at least two billion people who don’t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payment with their phones”. I completely agree that mobile payments and smartphones will have a massive impact on the fiscal economy in the very near future. South Africa has a huge unbanked population, estimated to be above 67%— with many people turned off by the banking system due to exorbitant fees and onerous Fica requirements, among other things. On the other hand, the country has one of the highest levels of mobile penetration in the world. Soon every spaza shop, restaurant, metered taxi and supermarket will be
10 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
forced to embrace mobile money as an alternative form of payment. It’s simple, it’s fast, it’s accessible—and more importantly, it’s safe. But another stumbling block at this point is the legislation stymieing small businesses from embracing this method. However, legislation is always pushed forward by disruptive technology. And as the rate of disruption increases globally, there will also be greater rivalries emerging, with companies no longer defining themselves by a single market or expertise. Our feature on page 82 highlights six of the most unexpected business battles that are changing the future of technology, social media and live news. We hope you enjoy this edition—which also includes a look at how silver-screen star Gwyneth Paltrow is embodying her lifestyle brand, Goop—and look forward to your constructive feedback.
Evans Manyonga evans@fastcompany.co.za @Nyasha1e
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THE RECOMMENDER What are you loving this month?
Favourite books Christelle Fourie Lucy Worsley
CEO, Empire Experiential Marketing
Bossypants by Tina Fey: Fey shows
women how to defy the odds, pursue their passion and ignore naysayers along the way. She showcases just how she pursued her dream in the midst of hardship, and how she beat the odds in doing so. Bossypants shows women how to stop fearing becoming their own ‘boss’. A must-read for women like myself who have plucked up the courage to build their own ‘Empire’ and strut their stuff while they do it.
Robbie Stammers Fast Company SA publisher, shares his latest book choice:
CEO, MUA Insurance Acceptances
How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits by Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas: In my quest for all things Parisian, I discovered this gem. From four stylish, real French women, the book is a funny and spirited take on what it actually means to be a Parisian: how they dress, entertain, have fun and attempt to behave themselves. This book will make you laugh as you slip into their shoes to become bold and free and tap into your inner Parisian cool.
How to Fly a Horse by Kevin Ashton:
Published by Penguin Random House, this book provides insight into how people create—while dismantling the myth of creative genius. We can all create, if we put in the time and effort. Ashton illustrates this with engaging stories ranging from how the Wright brothers mastered aviation (a problem they thought of in terms of learning to fly a horse), to how Trey Parker and Matt Stone come up with South Park. An enlightening romp through creation, invention and discovery.
Favourite toy Gideon Galloway
CEO, King Price Insurance
Lego: Lego is something I’ve loved ever since I was a child, and is something that has carried on well into adulthood. We all need fun in our lives, and at times adults lose the ability to play—Lego combats that. At the office it’s a great idea for fun, which leads to better customer interaction and service. While I’m the CEO of an insurance company, I also part-own an ad agency, and believe anyone can be creative in their own way; Lego allows all of us to express that. Outside of the office, Lego can be enjoyed on one’s own or, as in my case, as part of quality time with my kids.
12 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
Favourite destination Lesego Matabane
Favourite wine Zohra McDoolleyAimone
Head of Corporate Affairs for Africa, Trafigura Services
Lourensford Viognier Winemaker’s Selection: Despite having lived for years in France, I discovered this delightful wine while dining at Erinvale Hotel, right next door to where it’s expertly created at Lourensford Estate in Somerset West. When the light floral flavours laced with spicy tones touched my palate, it felt like falling in love!
Favourite exercise routine
Ntombi Langa-Royds
Marketing manager, Club Med South Africa
Istanbul: There’s no
amount of research that can adequately prepare you to experience Istanbul. Simply put, it’s a burst of experiences, and certainly one of my favourite cities in the world. Istanbul presents a different kind of modern. All manner of amenities you would expect from a global city are present, except with a calmer temperament than one would experience in cities like London and New York. Mosques and heritage sites stand tall next to contemporary restaurants, galleries, nightclubs and shops—and the result is a glorious skyline that lends itself to the most exquisite sunsets and sunrises.
Non-executive director: Mpact, Murray & Roberts, African Bank Ltd
Zumba: I love Zumba! It’s the one time in my weekly schedule when I can be completely carefree, dance my lungs full of air, get a great workout, and feel superfit and flexible afterward. It’s loads of fun, you don’t have to compete with anyone but yourself, and the best part is that you don’t even feel it. Those who know me know they should do their best NOT to interfere with my Zumba schedule!
Favourite food Jason Goliath
Director, Goliath and Goliath
Authentic Durban bunny chow: The thing about a Durban
bunny chow is that you can eat it only in Durban—it just doesn’t taste the same elsewhere. There’s something about the altitude and humidity and the baking of the bread that makes it so delicious and goes straight to your arteries. The curry is kind of uncomfortable, but just hot enough to be pleasurable. Then you dunk the fresh white bread into the sauce, mixed with the carrot salad and vinegar from the chilli pickle—it’s the combination of these things that just makes it so amazing.
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 13
The Recommender
App Alley
Jennifer Sanasie
Producer & presenter, News24 Live
Naadiya Moosajee Co-founder, WomEng
Vivino: I love this
ScanBizCards: I attend a lot of networking events, and I’m always swopping business cards. The app allows me to scan cards, save contact details and send out follow-up emails once these have been saved on my phone. It reduces the stress of “What did I do with that business card?”
app just as much as I love a good glass of wine! It’s like having an easy-tounderstand little sommelier in your pocket. It’s been there for me many nights as I stood in the wine aisle, trying to decide what to buy for a dinner party. All you have to do is scan the label of a wine bottle, or search a wine by name, and in seconds you have all the information you need to make a delicious decision.
Andy Colquhoun
GM of Corporate Affairs, SA Rugby Union
Bryan Habana
Springbok wing and record-holding try-scorer
Snapseed: Despite being a massive Candy Crush fan
and a Words With Friends addict, I play around a lot with Snapseed. It’s an all-inone, simple-to-use and pretty rad photoediting app that makes beginner photographers like myself look professional!
14 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
Opus Domini: Back in
the mists of time (the 1980s), almost everyone on the corporate ladder used to tote around a Filofax to: try and look corporate; try and manage their lives; and try to feel important. Opus Domini digitally auto-updates your to-do lists each day (it syncs with your other devices) and you can see— in screaming red—all the things you didn’t manage to get done the previous day. And for those of us old enough to remember, it even looks like a Filofax—digitally ringbound in leather.
Destroy your environment, destroy yourself. Save both at www.ewt.org.za
Next
HOW I GET IT DONE
T he e p i p h any Feel the shame
Last year, Brown gave a talk at Pixar Animation Studios, where president Ed Catmull (who helped save Pixar with Toy Story) and his team explained the middle of the creative process is the hardest part. In the script, it’s where the main character must face a tough journey to learn a lesson. That shaped her theory: You can’t skip the second act. “People don’t recount the middle of the story often,” Brown says. “[It has] the most potential for shame. But it’s where everything important happens.”
“That messy middle is where leaders are born,” says Brown.
Singular vision Beykpour wants Periscope to showcase users’ individual points of view.
T h e exec u t i on
Wallow in your failure W I T H H ER L AT E S T O FFER I N G , AU T H O R , R E S E A R CH ER A N D T ED S TA R B R EN É B R OW N S AY S LE A D ER S C A N O N LY EM ER G E B E T T ER , FA S T ER A N D S T R O N G ER BY EM B R ACI N G W H AT W EN T W R O N G BY KENRYA RANKIN NAASEL
Photograph by Benedict Evans
16 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
From summer block busters to famous corpo rate turnarounds, the best comeback tales always focus more on heroes’ bold, clever manoeuvres than on the hours they lie awake at night obsessing over where they might have gone wrong (and how they can fix it). But according to Daring Way founder and CEO Brené Brown—the researcher and storyteller whose TED talk “The Power of Vulnerability” has been viewed 20 million times—a crucial opportunity exists in spending time with our failures. Her new book, Rising Strong, explains how it can even transform the way you lead. Here’s why she wrote it.
Brown analysed data from more than 24 000 people in various professions and interviewed 2 000 others— from corporate executives to war veterans at West Point. She also plumbed her own experiences, including a marital squabble during a vacation. This led to a threestep process for leaders wanting to bounce back from adversity: Examine your emotions and actions (“The Reckoning”), confront the challenges that are holding you back (“The Rumble”), and write an ending to the story that will transform how you face future obstacles (“The Revolution”).
The issue Brown—both as a professor at the University of Houston and as CEO of Daring Way, which trains counsellors in her work—has spent 14 years studying the link between vulnerability and courage. In 2012, she set out to learn why some people grow from their setbacks while others “get stuck on the ground” or “fall around the same issues over and over”, she says.
T h e ta ke away Good leaders can become revolutionary ones when they take charge of their own narratives. “The moment we deny a difficult experience, it owns us,” Brown says. “If we are brave enough, often enough, we’re going to fall. Rising Strong is about what it takes to get back up and keep being courageous with our lives.”
Next
INNOVATION AGENTS similarly underwhelmed, and Taylor Swift later joined the naysayers, protesting Apple’s plan to withhold royalties on songs streamed during the service’s free trial period. Meanwhile, another music superstar, Jay Z, was pushing his own streaming service, Tidal, and competitors such as Rdio, Deezer, Amazon Prime Music and Google Play were all clawing over a share of the booming music-streaming market (not to mention web-radio giant, Pandora, which doesn’t allow userchosen streams but has signed up some 80 million active users). If this spectacle were a rock concert, it would be a hell of a show. Yet, you’d be excused for feeling like you’ve seen it before. The music business has been in continuous upheaval and internal struggle for the past decade, and all the noise has long threatened to drown out any melody. Still, this moment offers something new, an inflection point of importance—if you know how to deconstruct it.
1. S t r e a m i ng h a s w on
Listen up! A PPLE A N D S P OT I F Y A R E I N A H E AT ED B AT T LE FO R A M ER I C A’ S E A R D RU M S . H ER E I S O U R FI V E- P O I N T PR I M ER O N W H AT CO M E S N E X T BY JONATHAN RINGEN
Illustrations by Brian Stauffer
18 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
“Oh, okay.” That was how Spotify CEO Daniel Ek responded—in a quickly deleted tweet—to the June announcement of Apple M usic, the company’s long-awaited songstreaming and online-radio service (which costs single subscribers R59.99 per month and families, R89.99). The rest of the music and tech worlds seemed
Steve Jobs believed that fans wanted to own their music, so he focused on selling downloads via iTunes. He was right—until he wasn’t. Last year on-demand music streaming surged 54%, to 164 billion streams, according to Nielsen; the biggest service, Spotify, now has 75 million users. Meanwhile, sales of digital tracks, like the ones on iTunes, are trending firmly downward, sinking nearly 13% in the same period. “The numbers we saw in Q1 of 2015 are almost double what we saw in Q1 of 2014, which was by far a record-setting year for streaming,” says Nielsen senior vice president David Bakula, who tracks music sales. “Consumers go to these services because they provide what people want: Almost all the music, all the time, at a price that isn’t crippling.” Yes, the music business is undergoing yet another fundamental shift.
But which service will end up dominating the market—and which business model will prove most sustainable?
2. A d - s u p por t ed s t r e a m ing is h a t ed b u t e f f ec t i ve It’s no mystery how Spotify has become so big so fast: by offering a huge selection of music at no cost. The company’s free tier acts as a feeder for its pay service (which costs $9.99—about R130—per month), letting users stream unlimited songs on their desktop computers in return for listening to occasional ads. In the same way record labels have long hoped radio spins would convince
fans to buy the full album, Spot ify’s “freemium” model is meant to draw in listeners who may otherwise never consider paying. “Our freemium business exists for one reason: It’s the only way to grow paid users,” says Spotify’s chief content officer and boss in the US, Ken Parks. And it’s working: Parks says the conversion rate is 25%. Spotify now has 55 million non-paying users and 20 million subscribers. But there’s a catch: Spotify pays a lower royalty rate on freetier streams than on paid ones because the ad revenue is far
Let’s face it: A return to the head-spinning numbers of the NSYNC era is wildly unlikely.
lower than what subscriber fees deliver. Some artists and labels are now pushing back against this two-tier model, arguing that music is worth more than the fraction of a cent per spin they’re getting from freemium. It’s a battle in which they are unlikely to prevail—not because their logic is flawed, but because consumer expectations have permanently changed. The boom times, when listeners paid en masse to own songs and albums, aren’t coming back. “It’s worth remembering that we account for a significant fraction of the entire record business right now,” says Parks, whose company issued more than R3.8 billion in royalties in the first quarter of 2015.
3. Tay l or S w i f t c a n’t ch a ng e t h e b u si ne s s on h e r ow n. . . Pop’s biggest star has also been streaming’s most vocal critic. Last year, Swift removed her music from Spotify to protest freemium, and then there was that open letter to Apple bemoaning the lack of trial-period royalties. Within hours, Apple’s head of software and services, Eddy Cue, called Swift to let her know the company would change its policy, and soon after, Swift announced her current album, 1989, would be available to stream for the first time anywhere—via Apple Music. But as powerful as Swift is, there’s only so much she can do given the realities of today’s music business. If Spotify scrapped freemium, users may jump to YouTube (already the most popular destination for on-demand music), which pays artists an even lower rate than Spotify’s free tier; or, worse, they’d switch to one of the many music-piracy sites, which pay nothing. Many artists have stopped depending on revenue from recorded music altogether, focusing on touring and merchandise, which they can control. “How do I feel about streaming?” asks Brittany Howard, lead singer of Alabama Shakes, whose second album, Sound & Color, debuted at No. 1 earlier this year. “I have two answers. One is about my peers. It takes money to make a record, and just because it can be shared doesn’t mean that a lot of hard work and soul didn’t go into it. But for me? I could care less if it’s on Spotify or the Internet. Because as long as we’re touring and people are coming to the shows, I’m going to be okay.”
4 . . . . A nd ne i t he r c a n J ay Z The rapper-businessman debuted Tidal in March with a surreal,
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 19
Creative Conversation star-studded event that was widely mocked online, and since then the streaming service has failed to get much traction—in June the company lost its second CEO in six months. Co-owned by more than a dozen A-list artists including Kanye West and Madonna, the subscription-only Tidal is trying to differentiate itself with exclusive music (the Rihanna single “American Oxygen”, for example, was only available there). “If acts want to put out exclusive content, we have a lot of that coming up, almost on a daily basis,” says Tidal senior executive, Vania Schlogel. “If artists want to give back to their fans, this is their playground to do so.” As it turned out, though, the Rihanna single failed to connect, peaking at No. 78 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. This has reinforced scepticism about the long-term effectiveness of exclusivity as a marketing tool. “It’s fundamentally a bad idea,” says Anthony Bay, CEO of the subscription service, Rdio. “Say, if I want Beyoncé I have to subscribe to Tidal, and if I want Taylor Swift I have to subscribe to Rdio. Are people going to subscribe to both?” Bay suggests we will see more “windowing”, where a new album may be available exclusively on iTunes or CD, or on one particular streaming service, for a short period. This allows artists and labels to capture premium revenue from their most devoted fans, without sacrificing the lower perlisten revenue of the mass market.
BY THE NUMBERS T HE WAY PEOPL E L IST EN TO MUSIC IS CH A NGING REM A RK A BLY FA ST T O TA L N U M B E R O F M U S I C STREAMS WORLDWIDE 164B 106B
2013
2014
E S T I M AT E D N U M B E R O F P E O P L E W H O PAY T O S T R E A M M U S I C 41 M 8M
2010
2014
REVENUES FROM DOWNLOADS, CDS AND STREAMING IN THE US Music downloads CD sales Digital streaming
5. A pple has some a d vantages—but that doesn’t mean it w ill w in
2 1 0
2013
2014 Sources: Nielsen, International Federation of Phonographic Industry, Recording Industry Association of America
BILLION DOLLARS
3
Despite Spotify’s huge head start, Apple is in a good position to reach fans who are already accustomed to paying for songs via iTunes. The company has access to 800 million users’ credit-card numbers, and new Macs and iPhones will have Apple Music pre-installed. Still, moving forward, the challenge will be converting the next-generation
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Fight club Artists like Taylor Swift (right) and Jay Z (below, second from right, at the Tidal press conference) are intent on getting musicians more money for their music.
audience, who haven’t grown up with a collection of music they own. Spotify’s freemium model could have the edge with this rising cohort, which could in turn help its relationships with artists and labels. It’s all about scale: If enough users flock to Spotify, payouts will start to add up. The most devilish detail in all of this: Neither Spotify nor any of its streaming competitors has ever turned a profit. That’s partly because they’re in furious growth mode, investing heavily. But this raises an uneasy spectre of the future. Selling music subscriptions is a hard way to make money. How many listeners have spent more than R700 per year on music, as Apple Music’s model (and Spotify’s pay tier) requires? Not many. Even at the music business’s historical peak, in 1999, per capita annual US album sales hovered around five, at an average of around $13 (R165) apiece, or roughly R825 in total. That year, the industry pulled in $14.6 billion (about R90 billion at the time) in the US alone. By 2014, US revenue had fallen by more than 50%. Let’s face it: A return to the head-spinning numbers of the NSYNC era is wildly unlikely.
On the positive front, the public’s passion for music clearly hasn’t gone away, and streaming is resonating with all market segments. And when it comes to the proliferation of services, maybe there doesn’t have to be just one winner—competition could be good for everyone. “There are a heck of a lot of consumers who still need to be shifted [to streaming],” says Lars Murray, a senior vice president at onlineradio site, Pandora. “You can’t underestimate Apple [as a competitor], but the history so far has been when more players come into the market, the market becomes bigger.” Streaming could prove to be an iTunes killer that eventually gives way to something else. But it also could be the technology that finally revives the revenue trajectory of the music business after years of decline. Wouldn’t it be a treat if the industry could accept the new reality in a way that makes everyone—consumers, labels, streaming platforms and, yes, artists—happy? As Swift put it in a newspaper op-ed she wrote last year: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Valuable things should be paid for.”
Gallo Images/ Getty Images/ Sascha Schuermann (Swift); Gallo Images/ Getty Images/Jamie McCarthy (Tidal)
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FAST COMPANY PROMOTION
LIGHTING UP AFRICA Southern Africa Philips Lighting and its GM Reggie Nxumalo are improving people’s lives and making a positive difference on the continent
Every time we switch on the lights or drive down the lit-up freeway, there is a high chance we have to thank Philips for that bright spark. The global giant has made huge strides in Africa and South Africa, and now has five districts on the continent: Southern Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Maghrib and West Africa. Reggie Nxumalo, general manager of Southern Africa Philips Lighting, notes the company is focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation. “By this we mean new ideas, new approaches and new solutions that make people’s lives simpler, more enjoyable and more productive—in professional as well as personal environments.” Nxumalo has been blessed with a rich and diverse career path. “I was either establishing new ventures on behalf of companies or simply organically growing entities. The former was accomplished as I established 3M Botswana, Cell C in a national prepaid sales manager role; managed print services at HP as country manager; while at Dell I launched the consumer segment and product range in South Africa; and ultimately launched eTranzact Global South Africa as CEO. “In recent times I was CEO of Nhloko Services, which broadened my horizons in the consulting arena,” he explains. Philips is the global leader in lighting. This can be attributed to the company’s desire for groundbreaking innovation and quality control. “Philips takes innovation and quality as a key priority and has embedded these attributes into every aspect of the business,” says Nxumalo. The GM is responsible for driving market share for Philips’ lighting businesses across southern Africa, including lamps as well as consumer and professional luminaires. He believes each country has different needs, and therefore adapting products to specific markets is imperative.
22 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
Enhancing life with light
These three mega-trends underline Philips Lighting’s strategy and productdevelopment efforts: M ore light The world’s population is expected to increase by one billion by 2025. New applications are fuelling demand for light, e.g. water purification, food and healthcare. M ore energy-efficient light Lighting today accounts for 20% of the world’s total electricity consumption. Seventy-five percent of the current installed base of urban lighting is energyinefficient. Philips estimates global electricity consumption can be reduced by 8% through the increased adoption of connected, energy-efficient LED lighting solutions. D igital light This is driven by the rise of LED lighting and society’s shift to digital technology. Additional functionalities and control are possible because light points can now be connected. Philips is moving toward software integration and opening up new functionality, systems and services.
The company is currently applying new LED lighting tech—Philips Hue is a great example, combining brilliant LED light with intuitive technology. The Hue is one of the first examples of ‘connected lighting’, and shows how lighting has become part of the Internet of Things. It uses one’s existing Wi-Fi connection, and the bridge works through one’s router to ‘communicate’ with the lights. “[The Hue] allows us to experiment with shades of white, from invigorating blue/white to cosy yellow/ white, or play with all the colours in the spectrum. The right light can transform entire spaces and even change the way we feel. With Hue, you get full control over the light, set the mood and change the ambience of the environment around you,” Nxumalo explains. “It can assist health and wellbeing by improving sleep patterns, using cool blue light to wake you up in the morning and warm, cosy light to help you fall asleep in the evening. “The Hue’s smart ecosystem can also help to keep your home more secure. If you’re not home, turning the lights on in the evening can make it seem like you’re still there. It can become an integral part of your day-to-day life, all tailored to the life you lead,” he adds. Philips has been on a significant drive to harness solar power in conjunction with other technologies. Nxumalo notes an estimated 560 million Africans live without electricity; many people rely on kerosene lamps and candles for light, which are not safe. To put it in perspective, the International Energy Agency estimates that primitive light sources such as the aforementioned claim the lives of 1.5 million people every year through respiratory illnesses and fires—the same number killed annually by HIV-related diseases. “Two years ago, Philips Lighting launched a range of consumer solar lighting products specifically made for Africa. ‘Innovation and You’ is not just a tagline but forms a theme around how our solar products can provide people and communities with a safer and easier way to brighten up their homes, to save resources as well as reduce fire and health risks. Products like these help bring innovation and people together, aiding in lighting up Africa,” says Nxumalo. Philips Lighting has also developed Community Light Centres that provide 1 000 square metres of highquality LED lighting powered by solar panels, limiting effects on the environment and promoting renewable energies.
Begin to see the light GM Reggie Nxumalo firmly believes “darkness holds countries back socially and economically”.
The GM firmly believes darkness holds countries back socially and economically, as there are few sporting or additional educational opportunities for youth in the evening. “Shops close early, productivity in businesses is lower, fewer jobs are created, and the quality of life is gravely affected. Roads become dangerous, security is a constant issue, and healthcare becomes problematic. A quality solar-powered solution applied in the right way helps to have a tremendously positive effect at a community level, by extending the day and enabling earlyevening community activities, education and sports.” All the goodwill and hard work have not come without their fair share of challenges, though. “Headwinds have varied from tough and changing markets, volatile exchange rates, forex shortages and credit guarantees, among other issues. I have learnt that you cannot swim against the tsunami of market trends; the sooner you read and craft an appropriate response, the better,” Nxumalo notes. A good aid has been the legislation in different markets, which he feels has simply reinforced the compliancy and quality of Philips Lighting products. He argues that this has supported the company’s focus
“SOLAR PRODUCTS C AN PROVIDE PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES WITH A SAFER AND EASIER WAY TO BRIGHTEN UP THEIR HOMES, TO SAVE RESOURCES AS WELL AS REDUCE FIRE AND HEALTH RISKS”
on striving for technical perfection, beautiful design and user-friendliness. “I believe legislation, for example Letters of Authority (LOAs) implemented in South Africa, have significantly improved the trading of quality products within the lighting industry. It is up to the industry to work closely with the authorities to ensure enforcement of these LOAs and to root out sub-standard products and suppliers. “However, there are always exceptions, where non-compliant products make their way onto the shelves in both traditional and modern retail. More regular checks on product entering our countries could aid in reducing the amount of lowquality, poor-performing and non-compliant lighting products being sold in African markets,” he adds. Looking at the future, Nxumalo says Philips Lighting will move forward, trying to “enhance life with light” by using the power of light to improve people’s lives and make a positive difference. The global lighting market— worth between R875 billion and R948 billion—is forecast to grow 4% to 6% per year in the period up to 2016. Philips Lighting has what it takes to meet all these needs and is taking a leading role in changing the game and shaping the future.
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 23
CRE ATI V E CON V ERSATION
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“Periscope has become a medium that can build truth and empathy” PER I S CO PE WA S ACQ U I R ED BY T W I T T ER FO R A SU B S TA N T I A L SU M O F R 1 .11 B I LLI O N I N JA N UA RY, T WO M O N T H S B EFO R E I T L AU N CH ED — A N D AT T R AC T ED N E A R LY A M I LLI O N U S ER S I N I T S FI R S T 1 0 DAY S . CO - FO U N D ER A N D CEO K AY VO N BEYKPOUR THINKS IT O FFER S T H E I N T ER AC T I V E M ED I A E X PER I EN CE T H AT U S ER S H AV E B EEN WA IT I N G FO R
INTERVIEW BY JJ MCCORVEY
Photographs by Ian Allen
Periscope got popular really fast. What inspired you to create it in the first place? I was in Istanbul when the protests in Taksim Square erupted. It was this really dramatic and pivotal moment, and I remember asking myself whether it was safe to go out or not. So the initial seed of Periscope was, “Why is it that I can’t see what’s happening right now somewhere in the world?” That’s when [my co-founder] Joe Bernstein and I started thinking about this idea of a teleportation machine. Obviously, we can’t disassemble your matter and move it somewhere, but we could get close to it.
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the airport near Ferguson, and it was just so powerful, lying on the ground with him. He obviously had thought, “What tools can I use to share what’s happening?” We were introduced through a friend and he joined our beta. In June, we launched a map feature that will let users zoom into [an area like] Baltimore and see everything that’s live right now.
Periscope has also been playing a role in covering social unrest in the US, like during the protests in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained while in police custody. What do you think it provides that didn’t exist before? Periscope has become a medium that can build truth and empathy. If I can see what’s happening in Baltimore right now through someone’s eyes in a way that’s raw and unfiltered and unfettered, that’s truth. You can’t deny it. One of the people I have been watching really closely is [activist] DeRay Mckesson. He Vined the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protest at
I think about how these events are covered on cable news, where viewers are shown a continuous loop of one city block or incident, without sufficient context, if any. But if someone can zoom out and find other Periscope streams, they may see a different, more rounded perspective from what’s being offered on TV. Now you’re talking. There’s so much we can do from a product standpoint to let you explore a specific story from different angles, assuming the content is there. Paul Lewis [from The Guardian] was talking to people on the street [in Baltimore] about how it felt to have their community affected by these protests and the police presence, and the responses were impassioned in a way that you don’t get when you watch a 20-second interview on cable news. He talked to one woman for 12 minutes about how her community was changing right before her eyes. That was transfixing.
Singular vision Beykpour wants Periscope to showcase users’ individual points of view.
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How else is Periscope affecting the way news is reported? The reason journalism through Periscope is so compelling is because it’s the first time the news is not a passive experience. [With] pre-recorded content—and even live television—you sit on your couch and just consume what’s been packaged for you. With Periscope, you can contribute. Viewers can ask the broadcaster questions. The other difference is that it has the potential to be more immediate. It’s difficult to put three cameramen, an audio guy and a reporter on a truck or on a plane and send them somewhere. It’s easier for someone who’s already there to pull out their phone. I think you’ll see more coverage of notable events, more quickly. When the fire happened [in New York’s East Village] the day of our launch, there were 60 people broadcasting it simultaneously— half an hour before the first camera crews got there. Have you been approached by news organisations interested in formal partnerships? The nice thing about the type of product we’re building is that even without formal partnerships, people are interested in brainstorming with us. We can work well with news organisations—they have their trucks and broadcasting systems, but many are also using Periscope. So we can co-exist. There are several live-streaming apps competing with you, such as Meerkat, YouNow and Upclose. Why are we seeing so many new entrants to this market, and what stands out about Periscope? Live-streaming apps have been around for years, but there wasn’t mass consumer appeal. You couldn’t whip out your iPhone if you happened to be on the scene of a fire. Now the hardware is there, the network connections are there. Periscope is intimate in a way that no other application is. We created
26 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
Creative Conversation
the ability to send ‘hearts’ so the broadcaster knows the audience likes what they are seeing. We hadn’t seen that before in other products.
30 SECONDS WITH K AY V O N B E Y K P O U R
Title Co-founder and CEO, Periscope
Hometown Mill Valley, California
Career track Stanford University (BS in Computer Science); intern, Autodesk; teaching assistant, Stanford University (CS 193P: iPhone Programming); Apple Campus rep (“evangelist”); co-founder and CEO, Terriblyclever Design (developer of apps for universities); general manager and senior executive, Blackboard Mobile (after it acquired Terriblyclever)
Best use of Periscope by a brand “Netflix has this hilarious campaign. It’s a bird’s-eye view of a room divided into two sections: ‘study’ and ‘Netflix’. They put a guinea pig in the room with two pots of food. You just watch it decide whether to study or watch Netflix. Literally a five-hour broadcast with hundreds of people watching. It’s brilliant.”
Periscope made headlines when people streamed the MayweatherPacquiao boxing match, allowing viewers to bypass the $100 payper-view fee. How much of a problem is that kind of piracy? Sure, you have this one case that’s been highly discussed. But the partners, platform and users as a whole have had way more positive [experiences] come out of the ways that folks like HBO, NBA teams and other sporting institutions have been using Periscope. Of course, there are questions that need to be asked and work that needs to be done around handling cases [such as the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight] when they come up. The world is a big place, the Internet is a big place, and people are going to try things that they shouldn’t. You’re not allowed to stream copyrighted work; you’re not allowed to stream pornography. We have policies and procedures in place to shut it down, and we’ll work with those partners to be proactive in the future around how we can think about this stuff. How can Periscope augment what entertainment companies are doing with their content? Could Periscope become the Hulu for what’s on right now? We’ve already seen it impact the entertainment industry by taking us behind the scenes, whether it’s seeing Katie Couric on the red carpet interviewing actors and actresses or HBO taking us into Pacquiao’s locker room before the fight. That wasn’t on television. These media partners might have traditionally thought of their show as being from the moment the broadcast starts at 8 p.m. to the moment the game is over, when the fight is over, when the episode ends. The window now starts
before the TV broadcast starts, and ends after the TV broadcast ends. There’s a lot of stuff you can do to bookend that experience. How has the Twitter acquisition affected life at Periscope? [With] everything that happens in Periscope, we own product development, we own marketing, we own brand. We wanted to run an independent group. We wanted our own office, our own culture. When you read a tweet from Periscope, that’s our tweet. No one’s telling us what the words should be. If we want to swear, we can swear. That seems silly, but it matters to us.
“We are thinking, Are we building something that’s changing the way people can communicate?”
Is Twitter—which has made many investments that spectators are waiting to see bear fruit— viewing this as a monetisation opportunity or as part of a strategy to rev up user growth? Neither, right now. No one, except for the media, is thinking about monetisation. User growth is obviously a proxy for whether we’re doing something interesting, but I wouldn’t even say that Twitter, or we, are thinking about user growth so much as we are thinking, Are we building something that’s changing the way people can communicate? With every Baltimore broadcast, we feel like we’re creating something that people like using to share what’s happening around them. It’s early days for our motivation to be anything else.
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OH SNAP! COULD SOUTH AFRICA’S SWIFT UPTAKE OF MOBILE PAYMENT SERVICES POSE A THREAT FOR INTERNATIONAL SYSTEMS SUCH AS APPLE PAY AND ANDROID PAY?
BY TOM JACKSON
28 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
Visit any merchant in the up-andcoming Cape Town district of Woodstock, and you are just as likely to see customers paying for items with their mobile phones as with cards or cash. Mobile payments are big business across the continent.
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In Kenya, in particular, mobile money has taken off in a big way, with Kenyans of all stripes paying for goods and services via M-Pesa, the mobile-tomobile money-transfer platform. In South Africa, however, this form of mobile payments has failed to take off. But what is becoming increasingly common is the linking of credit cards to smartphones and payments through the scanning of quick-response (QR) codes. The most well-known company operating in the South African space, which also includes the likes of FlickPay and Zapper, is SnapScan. Merchants accepting SnapScan payments receive a static QR code—or SnapCode—physical identifier that is displayed next to the till. Customers are able to register for the app, link their credit card, and pay by scanning this code using their smartphone. Payment is then confirmed with a PIN or fingerprint, and the merchant receives confirmation to the business’s own mobile. It is not only in Woodstock that this concept has taken off. SnapScan alone has 19 000 merchants accepting payments through its system across South Africa. The company has partnered with Standard Bank, allowing merchants to receive money using the SnapScan app from the bank’s Instant Money solution. Merchants are issued with a voucher that is redeemable for cash at ATMs and SPAR supermarkets. In Cape Town, the company’s base, users in the CBD can pay for their parking using the app, with every parking marshal equipped with a unique QR code that motorists scan to pay the fee. It is even possible to buy a copy of The Big Issue using SnapScan. And it is these value-added services that Kobus Ehlers, cofounder of SnapScan, believes have allowed the company to grow its user base so quickly. “We always maintained that building cool tech was not enough; we had to focus on adding real value to the payments process,” he says. “This applies to both users and merchants. We can help business owners accept fast, easy payments, and users have caught on to the convenience of leaving their wallets at home and just paying with their phone.” Allowing users to pay for street parking in the Cape Town CBD was a great example of a use case that delivers on both these aspects. “We love how adoption is growing in this space.” The ability for users of SnapScan and other such services to leave their wallets at home may also provide a reason that uptake has been so great. Credit card fraud has become a major issue in South Africa. The South African Banking Risk Information Centre says losses from fraud grew by 23% in 2014 to hit R453.9 million from R366 million the year before—with debit card fraud on the rise, too. Zapper also has had several hundred thousand downloads, and is growing exponentially month-on-month. “South Africans realise that credit card fraud is a massive problem, and presents a very real and tangible threat. By removing the physical card from the process of payment, their card cannot be copied, cloned or skimmed,” says Zapper’s South African country manager, Derek Wiggill. “For the first time, they handle payments entirely on their own and are completely in control, much as if they were logged into their online banking site and making an EFT without all the pain and process of having to create a beneficiary.” Though such apps have seen quick uptake from the usual early adopters, less tech-savvy South Africans have also become regular users after seeing the initial benefits of the service. “We see that phone—and specifically smartphone— penetration is remarkably high in South Africa, so a lot of users have been able to leapfrog legacy technologies and adopt these payment methods without any trouble,” Ehlers says.
Toying with other ideas SnapScan co-founder Kobus Ehlers says they are tapping into the growth of online shopping in South Africa by testing a plug-in for e-commerce sites that will enable customers to buy goods using the app. The process almost mirrors the physical process in stores.
The clear benefits to customers and merchants alike, he adds, account for the swift uptake, and mean SnapScan will be able to make itself even more accessible in the future by moving away from credit cards into alternative payment types. “Credit cards are a convenient and reliable entry into the market, but we look forward to providing a variety of payment types as the product matures.” The potential success of the SnapScan product received further validation last year with the launch of Apple Pay, which enables iPhone 6 users to buy goods using an ID fingerprint-recognition system, as well as
late in penetrating the market and will be hindered by its reliance on near-field communication (NFC) technology and the need to own an iPhone 6. Furthermore, according to Craig Kilfoil, MD of ExactConsult, “the big five banks control the merchant-card acceptance infrastructure and completely dominate card issuance in South Africa; as much as Apple and Google may make the mobile payment technology available, it just won’t work without the permission and co-operation of the banks.” However, one positive impact, according to Gilles Ubaghs—Ovum financial services technology senior analyst—is the market visibility and “bling factor” Apple Pay will bring, potentially boosting the likes of SnapScan. “One of the things we have seen in other markets where Apple has launched Apple Pay, is that the wider market has seen a heightened level of development, with everybody rushing to be competitive,” he says. Ehlers is unconcerned over the arrival of these ‘outsiders’, believing the fact SnapScan has been designed to suit a wide variety of shops—from large retailers to small street vendors—will give it an edge over the more restrictive services. Moreover, he feels the launch of these smartphone payment platforms in South Africa will boost the industry as a whole and get more people paying with their mobile, whether with Apple
The ability for users to leave their wallets at home may also provide a reason that uptake has been so great. the upcoming Android Pay, with which Google says users will be able to simply “tap and pay”. The former is set to arrive in South Africa this year, yet experts believe Apple may be a little
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 31
Safe and simple With Zapper, users can pay for a meal at a restaurant, or a taxi or any other bill in seconds; as well as log in and sign up to websites, make online payments or even donations. They can handle transactions entirely on their own and are completely in control, says country manager, Derek Wiggill (pictured below).
Pay, Android Pay, SnapScan or any of the other competitors. “We’re very excited about this tech being introduced in the market, and look forward to integrating technology like Apple Pay into SnapScan. This will allow consumers to use this to pay at any of our existing SnapScan merchants, without the merchants having to deploy expensive NFC infrastructure. Any product that allows users to move from cash to using their phone to pay for wares is good for the industry.” According to Ehlers, the company still has challenges in rolling out its service, though it is gradually overcoming them. “The biggest problem we face is probably building the network of merchants accepting SnapScan across the country, simply because it’s such a large area to cover. But we’re happy with our
32 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
progress so far.” Says Zapper’s Wiggill, “The more merchants who adopt the technology will, by default, broaden out the network of venues accepting mobile payments, and in turn provide the opportunities for more consumers to adopt it and enjoy the benefits that mobile commerce brings.” SnapScan is moving with the times, launching services that allow it to tap into the growth of online shopping in South Africa. Previously only available in retail outlets, SnapScan is in the process of testing a service for e-commerce plugins. The system currently being piloted enables customers to buy goods from certain websites using the app. The process almost mirrors the physical process in stores. Users head to the e-tailer’s checkout, and select the SnapScan payment option. A QR code is then generated, which the buyer ‘snaps’ with the SnapScan app in order to complete payment. “Customers who have engaged with our pilot set of merchants seem to be very happy with the process. That’s the important part of this trial phase: to get a good sense of what the best user experience needs to look like,” says SnapScan’s head of new business, Rupert Sully. Further growth for the company and others like it seems inevitable, given the extent to which South Africa already has enthusiastically embraced mobile payments. Around 50% of the country owns a smartphone, a figure that is exponentially rising—and paying through the phone is becoming more common. “As the base of people paying via mobile tips critical mass away from dumb plastic, the more this momentum will propel the industry forward and lead to more and more innovation and opportunities for all parts of the ecosystem—from consumer to merchant to the providers of the platform,” says Wiggill. “It really is just a question of time until this becomes the new normal for consumer transacting.” The challenge for companies in this space will be obtaining enough market share to survive. But SnapScan, Zapper and the likes should be able to hold their own, even faced with the pending arrival of Apple Pay and Android Pay.
Around 50% of the country owns a smartphone, a figure that is exponentially rising—and paying through the phone is becoming more common.
WANTED
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Lights, camera, action! THE NEW DRIFT S T E A LT H 2 I S A S M A LL C A M ER A WITH BIG AMBITION Drift Innovation, a sports and lifestyle company specialising in camera technology and accessories, has released its eighth-generation and smallest, lightest, most aerodynamic action camera—the Drift Stealth 2. Tiny but tough, it is rugged, durable and weatherresistant. “The Stealth 2 is a step change in our drive for constant innovation,” says Graham Lynch, CEO of G&L Agencies, which distributes the camera. “Our users live in a big world with endless possibilities to express their creativity and share their most exciting experiences. Our goal with the Stealth 2 was to create a small camera for this big world.”
The perfect shot Measuring 80mm x 41.9mm x 27.6mm, and weighing a mere 90 grammes, the Stealth 2 is an innovative miniature action camera that can be mounted anywhere without impacting its performance. The 300degree rotatable lens also helps to get all the best angles. The camera has the ability to film full HD video in 1 080p at 30fps, and 720p at 60fps for slow motion.
Screen time The camera includes features such as timelapse, photoburst, video tagging and Car DVR Mode for in-vehicle and on-bike stability. A 1.3-inch scratchresistant LCD screen lets users quickly alter modes;
In the palm of your hand Ideal for professional and casual users alike, the Stealth 2 is feature-rich yet easy to control.
34 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
the screen changes colour with each mode, and when the camera is powered on or off. Other action cameras feature a 170º field of view, which can make objects seem further away—but the optical FOV on the Stealth 2 has been reduced to 135º for sharper images.
Controlled shots
Over the air
Uninterrupted viewing
With the free iOS and Android mobile app, Drift Connect, users have ultimate control over the camera with Wi-Fi connectivity for shot setup, remote-control recording, photo capture and playback. Sharing videos via social media from a mobile device will be possible soon.
The Stealth 2 is compatible with Drift’s two-way remote control (sold separately), which communicates the function status to the user. The remote can also control multiple Drift cameras at once.
With its 1 500mAh lithium battery, users will never miss a shot due to the loss of power—even in the coldest conditions. The Stealth 2 costs R3 999 and is available from retail outlets nationwide. For stockist details, visit www.driftcameras.co.za.
What Would Gwyneth Do?
Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s newly ambitious lifestyle platform, has been polarising since the day it was launched seven years ago— and that may be its greatest asset By Anjali Mullany Photograph by Williams + Hirakawa
36 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
Paltrow is the founder—and the living embodiment—of the lifestyle brand, Goop, and is in Chicago on this April afternoon to oversee the launch of a pop-up store in Chicago’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. She walks across the showroom, past racks of R25 000 Stella McCartney dresses and R5 000 Phillip Lim gym shorts, to sit beside Goop’s CEO Lisa Gersh on a burnished steel French daybed. She folds her arms, clutches her elbows and calls out to her head of brand collaborations Brittany Weinstein to turn up the heat.
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Then she crosses her legs, stretches her neck as high as it will go, poses her arms to one side, and looks off serenely into the distance. Paltrow is often criticised for seeming, at best, removed from the cares of ordinary life, and right now she does look like she belongs to a different, superior species. The public has always felt this way about her—simultaneously drawn to, and repelled by, her seemingly unattainable perfection. In 2013, for example, she was named People magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman and also Star magazine’s Most Hated Celebrity. Spend a little time on the Internet—or mention Paltrow’s name at a dinner party—and you’ll quickly see that people tend to have a strong, visceral reaction to her. Paltrow knows that she has this effect on people. And she believes it has been good for her personal business, Goop: a website and newsletter that offers style, food and wellness recommendations
Previous spread: Set design: Mike Malandra & Bette Adams at Mary Howard Studio; styling: Jill and Jordan at The Wall Group; hair: Derek Yeun at Starworks Group; makeup: Jillian Dempsey at Starworks Group; manicure: Tracy Clemens at Opus Beauty
Gwyneth Paltrow removes her coat, revealing a sleeveless black Atea Oceanie wrap dress. The dress is simple, trimmed in white and very low cut, the effect both wholesome and daring. Her hair and skin glow. Her arms look soft and strong, like those of a woman decades younger than 42.
Goop’s Chicago pop-up shop was designed to resemble an apartment. Items for sale included (clockwise from top left) baby alpaca blankets from the Citizenry (R2 500), watches from Skagen (R1 500), clothes from designers i ncluding Phillip Lim and M ichael Kors, a Tanya A guiñiga wall hanging, Staub x Goop cast-iron cookware in Goop Gray (from R900), a plum-coloured Aga radiantheat cooker (R102 000) and Bob Kramer knives (from R2 500).
from Paltrow and her circle of elite chefs, spiritual thinkers and alternative-health professionals. This enterprise, which also sells fashion and home products, now has nearly 1 million newsletter subscribers and reportedly receives more than 3.75 million page views per month. Even people who’ve never heard of Goop (a play on Paltrow’s initials) might have heard of “conscious uncoupling” and “vaginal steaming”—just two of the phenomena that went viral after they were written about on Paltrow’s website, inviting both curiosity and mockery. They might also have heard that Paltrow’s product recommendations sometimes venture into rather exclusive price ranges: R3 800 pajamas, a R60 000 juicer, a R25 800 safety-pin earring (just one, not a pair). But while she is often criticised for being out of touch, it’s precisely her privileged lifestyle— she is the Oscar-winning daughter of the late television producer Bruce Paltrow and the actress Blythe Danner, and was married to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin until last year—and her highly specific sense of style (she’s a red-carpet staple and a regular on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar) that give her the authority to make recommendations about living the good life. Now the question is whether Paltrow can turn the public’s powerful feelings about her and her brand into a profitable business of scale. In the past year, Goop has been gearing up for a major expansion, hiring Gersh as CEO, moving its headquarters from the UK to Los Angeles, amassing a 25-person team, pitching investors, building an advertising unit, and planning its first private-label product: an organic skin-care line due out in 2016. Gersh has restructured the company so that it’s in a position to realise a vision she and Paltrow share: to turn Goop into a “contextual commerce” brand, in which editorial and sales work hand in hand to sell product in a more seamless way than other lifestyle brands (such as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, from which Gersh stepped down as CEO in 2013). Gersh and Paltrow hope to sell Goop fashion and home collections
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 39
GOOP DREAMS From turkey ragù to white T-shirts, Paltrow has grown her brand one well-sourced ingredient at a time
September 2008 Goop.com goes live. “My life is good because I am not passive about it,” Paltrow writes, establishing the brand’s earnest, authoritative tone. “I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time.”
October 2008 The first newsletter goes out to subscribers. “I have . . . been recording information and making notes for this very moment, when I can begin to share it all with you,” Paltrow writes. The email features recipes for banananut muffins and turkey ragù.
December 2011 The mobile app Goop City Guides launches, offering users highly curated recommendations for New York (followed by Los Angeles, London and Paris) “like a trusted friend”, Paltrow writes.
July 2012 Goop.com offers its first item for sale: a Kain Label collaboration T-shirt. It’s white. It has a line on it. It costs R750. “We like to wear ours untucked,” Paltrow advises.
March 2013 Goop partners with Band of Outsiders for Goop’s first capsule collection. More follow, with Diane von Furstenberg (top left), Stella McCartney (bottom left), Amour Vert, Loeffler Randall and others.
September 2013 Goop celebrates its migration from email platform to webbased operation. “I look back and I don’t even really know why I started it. What the F was I thinking?” Paltrow muses. “And now, here we are. A community. A business. A team.”
May 2014 Goop launches its first pop-up store, in Brentwood, California.
October 2014 Lisa Gersh, former head of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, becomes Goop’s CEO.
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and make the brand s ynonymous with chic, minimalist, high-quality living. Pop-up stores like the one in Chicago may act as t esting grounds for more Goop-branded brick-and-mortars in the future. The pop-ups serve another purpose: exposing the brand to people who have a strong opinion about Paltrow, but have never visited her website. “I do think a lot of the misperception comes from people who haven’t actually gone on the site, because a lot of the things you see or hear, we’re like, ‘We never said that, never wrote that, that’s not the price point, or this was totally out of context,’ ” Paltrow says earnestly, after tucking her hair behind her ears. “It seems that when people really engage, they understand who we are and what we’re doing.” Of all the activities on Paltrow’s professional pie chart these days— acting, investing, writing cookbooks, expanding her chain of high-end gyms with Tracy Anderson (see sidebar, page 42)—Goop “is the biggest slice”, she tells me over the phone a month later, as she drives her car across LA. She started the company in 2008 at her kitchen table in her house in London, having reduced her acting schedule to about one film per year in order to spend more time with her children. For years she had been compiling notes on how to live an elevated life. At the same time, she found herself asking questions about food, fashion, health and spirituality, and not finding a place on the web that answered them. So she decided to start one, sharing tips makeup artists gave her before magazine shoots, restaurants she loved, unique spa treatments in far-flung locations, even advice from her therapists. Paltrow would test newsletter recipes in her kitchen and call to her editor Eliza Honey—who was working upstairs— when they were ready to taste. “Like many other things in my life,” Paltrow says, “I sort of found myself in the middle of doing them before I really understood how I got there. It was the same with my movie career, or my cookbooks.” As Paltrow was launching Goop, other fashion and lifestyle websites were popping up that would gradually expand into e-commerce. Refinery29, for example, had begun as an editorial site in 2005 (also at its founders’ kitchen table; it would open its shopping feature in 2012). Goop was also the first in a recent wave of celebrity-driven lifestyle brands. The actress Rachel Bilson launched her fashion collection, Edie Rose, in the same month that Paltrow started her newsletter. Jessica Alba co-founded the Honest Company, which sells non-toxic nappies and home cleaning products, in 2011. Blake Lively’s Preserve, which features shoppable lifestyle stories, launched last year, followed by Reese Witherspoon’s Southern- inspired fashion-and-home brand, Draper James. Though the media presents these women as competitors, Paltrow bristles at the suggestion. “I feel there’s something slightly misogynistic about it,” she told TIME magazine in June. And the comparisons are not entirely apt. Honest pulled in around R1.7 billion in revenue in 2014. Goop, with meager earnings in comparison, has always been a different kind of business, one that’s editorially driven and guided stringently by Paltrow’s voice and personal aesthetic. (Paltrow is not a big fan of the colour brown, for example, favouring whites, pinks and what Brittany Weinstein refers to as “Goop gray”.) The product offerings on Goop are therefore highly curated and, so far, available only in limited quantities. “The edit is really, really specific,” Weinstein says. “[Head buyer Patrick Devlin] always says that we should never sell anything we wouldn’t all want to wear.”
“I wasn’t aware, from a trending perspective, where the Internet was going,” Paltrow says. “I sort of just got lucky.”
Everything on Goop—including life advice and merchandise—represents something Paltrow does or would do or buy in her own life. Shopping on Goop is not unlike shopping in Paltrow’s closet. At first, Goop was mostly a writing project. Paltrow focused on sending subscribers a weekly newsletter that contained a little bit of content— recipes for a post-holiday cleanse, photos of herself modelling winter wardrobe suggestions, or advice from one of her many gurus. “When I think back on it, I’m afraid to press send,” she says. “But at the time, I had this belief in what I was going to do.” She views this foolhardiness as a hallmark of her career. “My future self is always afraid when I look back,” Paltrow says. “I had this the other day where somebody was asking me about [the movie Emma], which I did in England when I was 22. It was really my first starring role, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. And I remember at the time people saying, ‘Weren’t you intimidated to play this English heroine? You’re this American girl.’ ” Now, she says, “When I think about it, I would be petrified.” Many of the clothes Paltrow’s newsletter initially highlighted— R12 500 Bottega Veneta riding boots, R25 800 cashmere trench coats from Tod’s—were expensive, and critics quickly painted her as disconnected from ‘normal’ people, even though her newsletter also featured lesspricey options from fashion chains like Zara. The health and wellness advice often came from high-end osteopaths and New Age spiritual experts. That Paltrow was showcasing her ability to spend money— including hundreds of dollars on cleanse diets—as a financial crisis was hitting America, fuelled the backlash. But her fans responded: The newsletters boast almost a 40% open rate (the average number of subscribers who actually open the newsletter each day), double the lifestyle category average, and drive approximately 35% of Goop’s traffic. “I think it was a lot of idiot savantness,” Paltrow admits about her decision to start with email newsletters and only gradually build up a website. (“It’s not clear why she bothered to put [the site] up with so
Photograph by Ryan Lowry
little content on it,” one Los Angeles Times blogger snarked. “It feels like something that won an award for web design in 1998.”) “I really wasn’t aware, from a trending perspective, where the Internet was going, or what was going to happen—that newsletters would become something that everybody did,” Paltrow continues. “I sort of just got lucky.” Goop evolved slowly—no one can accuse Paltrow of building or failing fast. Using her own money, Paltrow hired a COO, a website editor and a CEO, Seb Bishop, in 2010. Bishop had been an investor in Summly, which Yahoo acquired in 2013, and was no stranger to celebrity-fronted projects; for three-and-a-half years, he had been the international CEO of Red, U2 singer
CEO Lisa Gersh (left) is helping Goop scale. “It couldn’t be Gwyneth and one person writing all of the content anymore,” she says.
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 41
Bono’s licensing brand for raising funds to fight HIV. But the pace remained unhurried. When Paltrow’s company launched its travel app, Goop City Guides, in 2011, it featured just New York; it added one new city every year or so—Los Angeles, London, Paris—in part because Paltrow wanted every recommendation in the app to come personally from her or someone she trusted, down to every restaurant and menu item suggestion. Paltrow and Bishop explored options for monetising the site and newsletters in a similarly patient way. “We used to have a lot of discussions about how we were going to do it,” Paltrow says. “There was ShoeDazzle, and there were all these subscription things—were we going to do that? Were we going to be only media? Were we going to sell physical product?” In 2012, Goop tested the commercial waters, offering one limited-edition product for sale per week, each an exclusive collaboration between Paltrow and an existing brand. Goop fans, after reading about the product in the newsletter or directly on the site, could instantly buy it. The first item for sale, a white Kain Label T-shirt, was embellished with grosgrain piping and sold for $90 (R750 at the time). Predictably, the Internet howled over the price point, given how simple the item was—but the shirt quickly sold out. Over time, Goop evolved beyond the weekly single-product format, featuring products from hundreds of brands and collaborating with designers including Monique Lhuillier and Diane von Furstenberg. One reason Goop grew so slowly, Paltrow admits, was simple nerves. “I had trepidation about taking that leap and defining myself as an entrepreneurial person,” she tells me as she drives, sounding looser and more open on the phone than when we chatted in Chicago. “I think that I felt, Who am I to start a business? If you’re already a public person, and you decide to become entrepreneurial, it just comes with a great deal of scrutiny.” (Even now, she adds, “Unless I see something very, very clearly, I don’t pull the trigger.”) “It wasn’t until Goop started getting a lot of traction in terms of moving tons of product for other people, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of product, and millions of dollars of product for other brands, that I started to think, You know, there might be more of a business here,” Paltrow says. In 2012, the company made approximately R13 million in revenue, though it ended the year about R350 000 away from actually turning a profit and also carried about R10 million in debt, according to financial documents filed with Companies House in the UK. But the pace of change was about to pick up. The next year, she moved her family back from the UK to California. Then she announced, via that now-infamous Goop post—which drove a wave of new attention—that she and Martin were separating. In the midst of all this change, she officially relocated Goop’s headquarters to LA; Bishop, who chose to stay with his family in London, remained on until a new CEO was in place. A few days after the Chicago pop-up launch, I meet Gersh at Goop’s New York offices at WeWork, near Bryant Park, where she and the company’s business teams are based. Gersh is wearing a tight-fitting black jacket, her blond hair pulled back. Trim and toned, Gersh is, like Paltrow, a Tracy Anderson fitness d evotee—in fact, they met through the famous trainer. Paltrow invited Gersh over for dinner last year, and the two brainstormed about what Goop could become. By the end of the night, Paltrow had offered her the job. Gersh had recently left Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where she’d
“ I had trepidation about taking that leap and defining myself as an entrepreneurial person,” Paltrow says. “Who am I to start a business?”
42 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
GWYNETH INC. If you know her only as an actress, you may be surprised to see how many places she’s been hitting her marks
Film and TV The Oscar winner has appeared in nearly 50 films and TV shows. The Iron Man movie franchise alone has raked in R31 billion worldwide.
Endorsements Paltrow spent four years as Elizabeth Hurley’s successor as the face of Estée Lauder, pulling in R38.7 million annually, and has endorsed several other brands including Max Factor, Coach, Baume & Mercier and Tod’s. In 2013, she inked a R25.8-million deal with Hugo Boss to represent the company’s new fragrance.
Cookbooks Although The New York Times alleged that her 2011 release, My Father’s Daughter, was ghostwritten, Paltrow insisted via T witter that there was “no ghost writer on my cookbook; I wrote every word myself.” That book and her subsequent one, It’s All Good, are New York Times best-sellers. A new book, on “clean comfort food for the family”, is due out in early 2016.
Fitness Famous (and infamous) for her unwavering exercise regimen, Paltrow is the co-owner of her personal trainer Tracy Anderson’s eponymous global franchise, which includes six studios, more than 15 DVD sets, video-streaming subscriptions, equipment, clothing and nutritional supplements. The duo are working on a line of luxury athletic wear. (continued)
Food In May 2015, Paltrow, Anderson and entrepreneur Maria Baum launched 3 Green Hearts, which offers organic meals on the go (free of gluten, soy and dairy) at Tracy Anderson studios in New York’s Hamptons.
Media/Commerce Goop, the website and e-newsletter Paltrow began in 2008, now counts nearly 1 million subscribers and attracts around 3.75 million page views per month.
Hospitality The Arts Club, a private, c ulture-oriented London social club co-founded in 1863 by Charles Dickens, plans to open an outpost at the site of a former H ustler store on LA’s Sunset Strip, reportedly featuring a nightclub and restaurant. Paltrow is an Arts Club adviser and investor.
Beauty Paltrow is an investor, with her hairdresser David Babaii, in the 48-salon international franchise Blo Blow Dry Bar. She just became an investor in and creative director of the organic skin-care line, Juice Beauty.
been for a year-and-a-half, most recently as CEO. The move to Goop was notable to anyone who had read what the grand doyenne of lifestyle media had said in Porter magazine a month earlier: “[Paltrow] just needs to be quiet,” Stewart had grumbled. “She’s a movie star. If she were confident in her acting, she wouldn’t be trying to be Martha Stewart.” (Gersh, according to a Goop insider, had to wait several months before joining Goop officially, due to a non-compete clause she’d signed at MSLO.) “I went to Martha Stewart with the purpose of creating contextual c ommerce,” says Gersh, referring to the strategy of allowing audiences to shop seamlessly as they consume content. But her efforts to bridge the editorial and business arms of the struggling empire—and enable buying through storytelling—were unsuccessful. “It’s hard because
of traditional beliefs about content and traditional beliefs about commerce,” Gersh says. “It’s hard to change cultures.” Though Gersh oversaw a massive restructuring and helped grow MSLO’s digital ventures, a product-side deal she helped broker with JCPenney resulted in a high-profile breach-of-contract lawsuit between Martha Stewart and Macy’s. By Gersh’s own account, she and the company were never the right fit. (MSLO, which has had six CEOs since 1999, was acquired by Sequential Media in June for R4.5 billion.) What attracted Gersh to Goop was Paltrow’s belief that editorial could be merged more seamlessly with the shopping experience. “The brand had what I think are the important components to contextual commerce,” Gersh says. “The recommendations have to be what you actually believe in, or it doesn’t work at all. And you need to have an audience that’s leaning in, in order to make it work.” Gersh has helped Paltrow raise a seed round of funding for Goop, as well as an approximately R129-million Series A (first significant round of venture capital financing). Investor Amanda Eilian, co-founder of video-editing startup, Videolicious, visited Paltrow in the actress’s apartment in New York’s Tribeca to hear her pitch. “The first time I met Gwyneth, she sat down and talked about her vision for the business—but also how committed she was to it,” Eilian says. “She wasn’t just endorsing it. It was her company, she started it, she put her own money into it. Up to that point, it had really been all her. She made me very comfortable that she had the ability to make this a real business—and successful. She definitely wasn’t looking to Lisa and other people in the company to answer questions for her.” With expanding resources, Gersh set about diversifying Goop’s business model. She assembled an advertising team to drum up a second stream of revenue (brands like Chanel are already running sizable ads on the Goop website); she worked with head buyer Devlin and head of brand collaborations Weinstein to increase Goop’s product offerings on the site; and she beefed up the content teams. “It couldn’t be Gwyneth and one person writing all of the content anymore,” Gersh says. According to the company, revenue in the first half of 2015 was up 62% over the same period the previous year. “Lisa brings all the scaffolding,” Paltrow says. “She has taken a thousandth-floor view of what we could be.” Before Gersh came on board, editorial director Elise Loehnen says, “we were reporting to no one”. Gersh instituted basic concepts, like organisation charts. “She’s been coaching everyone to get into their lanes, and building structure and creating process, and gearing us in a way that we’ll be able to scale,” Loehnen adds. Most importantly, Gersh installed Weinstein as a bridge between the content and product teams, helping to ensure a seamless reading-to-purchase experience. “We don’t buy anything we can’t tell a story around,” Weinstein says. Gersh, a self-made, Bronx-born entrepreneur who put herself through college and law school and made partner at a New York law firm before cofounding Oxygen Media, enjoys the camaraderie at Goop. “I find women to be very collaborative in the workplace,” she says. “I love working with women who have kids, because they’re highly efficient, and they’re also problem solvers.” Plus, she adds, “It’s great to start a meeting talking about shoes rather than the hockey score.” Paltrow is surprisingly hands-on as a boss, overseeing Goop’s editorial team much like the head of a traditional magazine would. She leads brainstorming sessions with the LA-based edit staff—sometimes in the
“Generally, when people experience the site, they’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to like it, but I loved it,’ ” editorial director Loehnen says.
SEPTEMBER 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 43
Goop office, but often while lying on the floor of her Brentwood living room, “hanging out with the dogs and the kids”, as Loehnen puts it, or sitting around the kitchen table. (Weinstein often joins, to ensure the product and edit teams are in alignment.) Paltrow approves all story ideas, as well as screen grabs of articles and visual spreads; she sends back “incredibly specific” notes, says Loehnen, before anything gets published. Paltrow is equally involved on the commerce side of the business. “Gwyneth sees every single piece that we sell on the site,” says Weinstein (who bears no relation to the film producer behind Paltrow’s Oscarwinning vehicle, Shakespeare in Love). “I’m at Goop every day,” Paltrow tells me in Chicago. “It’s my main job. I’ve made commitments to people and I’ve taken their money, so I’m going do everything in my power to make sure that the brand scales.” Paltrow’s relative absence from the big screen has left some wondering if her passion for film is waning. But Paltrow refutes the idea that she can only have one career. “I’m a big believer in the ampersand,” she says. “I don’t see it as I’m leaving something behind; I see it as this year I probably won’t make a movie or I probably won’t do a TV show or a play, and I’ll focus on the business. It’s our tendency to want to put women in one little category,” she continues, making a pinching gesture with her hand. “That’s where we like them.” Despite advances on the business front, Goop continues to trigger intense scepticism, particularly on social media. While many Goop diehards Instagram meals prepared from Paltrow’s cookbooks or tweet articles when the weekly newsletter arrives in their inboxes, sniping often erupts s imultaneously—about price points or the more ridiculous aspects of certain recommendations, such as a dessert recipe for “sex bark”. The phrase conscious uncoupling still triggers eye rolls from people who see it as a pretentious substitute for divorce, as if Paltrow even thinks she knows how to break up better than everyone else (the term is actually meant to describe a process, created by therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas, for peacefully ending a marriage). A tiny Goop item about an unusual treatment offered at an LA spa led to thousands of negative news articles and blog posts about Paltrow’s “vaginal steaming” advice. Paltrow once drew ire for writing about a book which, she said, claims that “negativity changes the structure of water”; in January, a book about pseudoscience was published, bearing the title: Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? “I think that it would be easy to feel crippled by some of the backlash,” Loehnen says, but Paltrow “really just encourages us not to ever feel scared, not to ever hold punches, because I think she feels, and we all feel, that what we’re doing has value.” Take, for example, that legendary term, which became a Goop headline that Paltrow didn’t even write. “When I announced that I was separating on the website, [Loehnen] titled the piece ‘Conscious Uncoupling’ and I had no idea,” Paltrow says. The Internet erupted in a swarm of jokes—and Paltrow knows that such moments can be a little scary for her staff. “When something like that happens, I think everybody is like, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” she says. “I just tell them that I think we are creating interesting discussions.” Paltrow also defends Loehnen for having written the vaginal-steaming piece. “This is a thousands-of-years-old practice in Korean spas,” she says. (Loehnen stands by the recommendation, too. “It feels good, it’s not harmful—it’s not like we’re urging people to go out and buy AK-47s,” she says.)
“I’ve made commitments to people, and I’ve taken their money,” Paltrow says. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that the brand scales.”
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Though Goop is still very much a small business in startup mode—editorial headquarters is a barn on Paltrow’s LA property—the decision to offer more product is working, especially when it comes to ‘elevated basics’ like blazers, which regularly sell out. And then there’s its first proprietary launch, the organic skin-care line Goop will unveil in the first quarter of next year. Goop is collaborating with Juice Beauty, a company with its own chemists, to produce the line. (The partnership is a complex one: Juice is an investor in Goop, and Paltrow is an investor in Juice. As part of the deal, Paltrow became Juice’s creative director for makeup in January and is helping Juice design a makeup line, due out in January 2016, which will be sold on the Goop website.) Paltrow recognises that it’s a luxury to have a strong brand. “You can put a lot of people in a room who have strategy, money and experience in marketing and say we want to do something and this is how we’re going to do it, but it’s actually a tricky thing to create a real brand,” she says. “I feel grateful that I started sort of unwittingly with a brand.” Questions about how to monetise the company, Paltrow says, “are much easier problems to have than how we are going to create something that people are going to resonate with and identify with.” Gersh, sitting near her at the pop-up, nods subtly in agreement. Looking back, Paltrow sees that part of the reason the email list grew was that she focused on the content before she ever thought about how Goop might make money. “I was doing something from a very real, very honest place,” she says of those early newsletters, her hands clasped and eyes wide. “There wasn’t anything commercial about it. So when we decided to foray into commerciality, there was something to trust.” Goop understands that big brouhahas can bring big readership numbers, and that haters can wind up becoming unwitting Goop converts. “That’s the general trajectory,” Loehnen tells me. “People are resistant, and then someone gives them her cookbook and they’re like, ‘These recipes are kind of amazing’, and then they become fans. Generally, when people experience the site, they’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to like it, but I loved it.’ ” Paltrow is amused by these reactions, and heartened by them. “I always like it when there’s a big response to something because it tells me, ‘Oh, we’ve touched a nerve here, this is really interesting,’ ” Paltrow laughs. “There are a lot of media companies that would die to have the kind of response we get from our content.” “Love us or hate us,” Gersh says, “you want to know what we think.” amullany@fastcompany.com
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FAST COMPANY PROMOTION
UNLOCKING POTENTIAL Keep your eye on these innovators, who have all been guided by the SABS Design Institute
They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and this dictum also applies to the world of innovation and design. The term ‘innovation’ can be defined as something original and more effective—and, as a consequence, new—which breaks into the market or society. This is key for an innovation to be deemed successful. Here are three innovators who have been assisted by the SABS Design Institute to break into the market.
A TO Y C A L L E D T U G O Abel Chetty is an entrepreneur from Gauteng with an accounting qualification. In 2012, he joined the Design Institute’s programme with the intention of improving a construction toy for children. Tugo is a revolutionary new construction toy that combines the concepts of play and education in one environment to develop lateral thinking, concentration, gross and fine motor co-ordination, as well as cognitive skills in children at early stages. The versatile building pieces allow children to build many everyday forms such as cars, trucks, bridges, houses, tables, chairs and much
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Child’s play Abel Chetty’s novel construction toy develops lateral thinking, concentration, gross and fine motor co-ordination, as well as cognitive skills.
more. Tugo also promotes recycling by facilitating the use of cardboard. Furthermore, the components are made entirely from non-toxic, recyclable materials. Chetty came to the Design Institute to improve the configuration of his product and to improve its marketing and branding. By applying the design process, a new retail strategy was defined. An improved brand and marketing strategy was developed to assist the SMME to increase sales. In addition to unlocking more opportunities, the design process ensured the success of closing a R4-million deal with a reputable retailer, as well as a partnership agreement with a packaging company. Chetty has been actively trading online and in retail stores.
Made in Africa Siyanda Mbele creates high-end furniture pieces for individuals with a love for design and African aesthetics.
M A C A D A MI A N U T S IN A N E W G U I S E
H I G H - E N D F U R NI T U R E W I T H A S O U T H A F R IC A N TO U C H Siyanda Mbele is an entrepreneur from Umlazi, KwaZulu-Natal, with a bachelor’s degree in Interior Design. In 2014, he joined the Design Institute’s programme with a product that had not sold any units, despite having previously displayed at the Design Indaba expo. He needed assistance in redesigning his product to improve his business. The business creates hand-painted furniture inspired by the uniqueness of South African cultures. The business model is to create high-end furniture pieces for individuals with a love for design and African aesthetics. Mbele’s designs provide an unexpectedly modern variation of African furniture, and incorporate South African cultural references in the design. His differentiation is using Ndebele, Venda and Zulu patterns in the product, which are interpreted in a novel aesthetic design that also influences the shape of the furniture legs. He came to the Design Institute with a business model that was not sustainable, which created an unprofitable product and poor ability to upscale. By applying the design process, a new retail strategy was defined to assist the SMME to improve his business model and increase sales. In addition, his product was redesigned with the appropriate manufacturing cost and with sustainable massproduction construction. Mbele has been featured at various platforms such as Design Indaba and the Mail & Guardian and Cool Hunting publications, and has forged links with the Foschini Group. He is currently in negotiations with Mr Price Home.
APPLYING THE DESIGN PROCESS TO EXISTING PRODUCTS COULD SUPPORT INNOVATORS TO BRIDGE THAT OFTEN ILLUSIVE GAP OF BREAKING INTO THE MARKET
Thabo Mooketsi is an entrepreneur from Soweto in Johannesburg. He is the owner of Lentibex (Pty) Ltd. In 2013, he joined the Design Institute’s programme with a product made from macadamia nuts. Amacwa is one of these products, all made using macadamia nuts. The range includes nut oil and nut butter. Mooketsi came to the Design Institute with a product that was not tested or properly packaged for the market. The institute assisted him in ensuring proper processes were followed in testing his products, as well as ensuring his business case was clearly defined—with improvements in marketing, branding and packaging. By applying the design process, a new retail strategy was defined to assist the SMME to increase sales. In addition to unlocking more revenue, the downstream effect on the main supplier of the raw product was the creation of more job opportunities to meet the new demand. Amacwa products are now available in four SPAR supermarkets, and Mooketsi is in the process of getting Dis-Chem and Pick n Pay on board as well. These three case studies prove that applying the design process to existing products could unlock their potential—and in doing so, support innovators to bridge that often illusive gap of breaking into the market.
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“I don't want to knock a wall down,” says Princess Reema. “I just want to widen the doorway.”
In a country where women can’t legally take the wheel of a car, one dynamic leader is moving quickly (yet gently) to offer them other tools toward engagement. It doesn’t hurt that she’s a princess
driven By Karen Valby
Photographs by Rene & Radka
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“She comes from a country where women can’t drive, can’t go outside, can’t go to restaurants, can’t socialise, can’t, can’t, can’t . . .” This is how Her Royal Highness Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud—entrepreneur, social activist, former CEO, single mother and a member of the Saudi royal family—recalls being introduced by the moderator at a recent business conference in Los Angeles, where she was speaking about her efforts to better integrate women into her country’s workforce. “And she turns to me,” remembers Princess Reema, “and goes, ‘How does that feel?’ And I said, ‘Well, first of all, I need to correct you. Everything you said about life in Saudi Arabia was wrong except for one thing: We can’t drive. We hang out, I go to work, I have employees. We are a very dynamic community. Would our lives be more enriched if we were mobile? One hundred percent, but so would our economy.’ That’s not what she wanted to hear.” So the princess took it upon herself to begin the conversation anew, gracefully but firmly sidelining the moderator and turning her attention to the room. “Let me tell you about us...” she began. Princess Reema, 40, lives in Riyadh, the conservative capital of Saudi Arabia. By Western standards, the limitations placed on women there are indeed severe. Aside from having to dress modestly in public (in full-length abayas and head scarves), adult Saudi women need permission from their fathers or male guardians to marry, study and travel. Women comprise 60% of college students, but make up just 13% of the workforce (the majority are employed by female-only schools or hospitals). In 2013, the World Economic Forum ranked Saudi Arabia 127th out of 136 countries in its Global Gender Gap Report. And yet, during my four-day visit to the country, I witnessed the richness of experience that Princess Reema had tried to share in California. I was struck not by the vulnerability of the women I met but by their shrewdness—hers in particular. The princess, who hosted me at the crew quarters on her family’s sprawling property, had encouraged me to visit during Saudi Design Week, so that in the evenings I could attend events with her and meet her circle of female artist, designer, gallery owner and magazine editor friends. During the days, I sat in on her feverish planning sessions with female doctors, lawyers, marketing entrepreneurs and university students, who were all rallying around 10KSA, P rincess Reema’s potentially groundbreaking breast cancer awareness campaign that aims to bring 10 000 women together at a Saudi women’s college on December 12. Ten thousand women have never gathered in one place in the country, let alone to
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champion their worth as valued and valuable citizens. 10KSA, a female-only initiative generated, organised and hosted by women, is a profoundly feminist undertaking, particularly in a country where breast is still considered a taboo word. But, just as when she pioneered the hiring of women at Riyadh’s Harvey Nichols department store in 2011 (as CEO of her family’s luxury retail company, which owned the store), much of Princess Reema’s job involves gracefully downplaying the political righteousness of the event. Because it’s not just the religious police she’s up against. A structural engineering student I met during a 10KSA planning meeting, a smart and persuasive young woman from a wealthy family, firmly believes that women should not be allowed to drive. “There are rules in life,” she said. “[The rules] are not about being inhumane. They’re for our own good. Women here can think they’re being mistreated, but they’re not. They just want to be pitied.” “That’s what I’m dealing with,” Princess Reema— who’d listened diplomatically to the young woman and offered a pragmatic counterargument from an employer’s point of view—told me after the girl left the room. “Here, the words feminist, radical, activist, liberal, empowerment are not useful to my goals. I’ll lose half my audience.” To effect any enduring
change in a culture that largely prides itself on resisting it, Princess Reema says she must simultaneously invigorate and soothe, while being careful not to alienate conservative thinkers by wielding her ambition too aggressively. In some ways, she’s walking the same line as female professionals everywhere. But here the stakes are higher. Many educated women she meets, for example, don’t even know how to work. “They don’t know how to get themselves to an airport and through an airport,” she says, “or book a hotel room. It’s only in the past few years that women could open bank accounts without their fathers,” she continues. “But not every woman knows she can.” Princess Reema believes that achieving these small milestones is vital. She believes that having women engaged in society leads to a better society. And she’s determined to give them a hand. The fact that Saudi women cannot drive, she says, “is not the only story here! What about the women who go so far outside the box of their limitations to make those issues irrelevant to their success?” Reema bint Bandar Al Saud is one of those women. Princess Reema lives in a vast gated compound, her small but elegantly decorated apartment tucked neatly into a two-storey cream-coloured stone building. Golf carts and bicycles (driven by men and women) periodically whiz by, stopping near a fountain in the roofed courtyard. Princess Reema’s parents—her father, Bandar bin Sultan, was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005—live on the property, as do her seven brothers and sisters. The princess says it comforted her to huddle up close with her now teenage children after her divorce four years ago. One of her sisters lives in the apartment above her. Sixty metres away from her kitchen windows, a construction crew is busy building her new five-bedroom house.
A matter of speaking
“Here, the words feminist, radical, activist, liberal, empowerment are not useful to my goals,” Princess Reema says. “I’ll lose half my audience.”
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The royal treatment Princess Reema and Bob Safian, editor of Fast Company US, on stage for the “Princess Reema’s Mission to Empower Saudi Women” talk during the 2015 South by Southwest Music, Film + Interactive Festival in March 2015 in Austin, Texas.
resist sharing her concerns. “If the store is meant to be high-end, why are you selling middle- to low-end product?” Princess Reema remembers saying. “ ‘That’s false advertising. Your brand mix is wrong. Your store lighting is crap. It smells bad. Your store people have no clue what product is on the shelf.’ And they said, ‘Great, how would you fix it?’ ” Three days later, her cousin, Alfa’s then-CEO, talked her into taking over. She became the country’s first female CEO of a retail company. During the princess’s first few months on the job, King Abdullah (who died in January and was succeeded by his half-brother King Salman, Princess Reema’s great-uncle) issued a decree that women would replace male workers in lingerie shops. The move was largely in response to a campaign led by Reem Asaad, a female Saudi lecturer in finance whose humiliation at the hands of a male clerk led her to launch an online-driven boycott of lingerie shops. The king’s decree then prompted the Ministry of Labour to require that women’s department stores start a “feminisation” process of hiring. Companies that did not comply would be fined or shut down. Princess Reema was quick to recognise the cultural and business opportunity of the decree and seized it, setting a new standard among employers by going out and recruiting women to work at the store. She built private makeup rooms for newly hired cosmetic artists and created the position of female fitting-room attendants. She granted transportation stipends to female employees to ease the burden of their commute if their fathers or husbands couldn’t drive them, and installed on-site child care—the first department store in Saudi Arabia to offer an employee nursery—to head off guilt trips from home. She kept men on in select roles, obeying the rules of keeping genders separated by partitions or distance, and trusted her employees to practise self-control. “And we were crucified,” she says. Within six months, store profits had tanked by 42%. Her new staff was composed of untrained women and disgruntled men (most foreign-born, as Saudi men typically consider service positions beneath them). The “religious p olice”—the Saudi government group responsible for enforcing Sharia codes of moral conduct—hovered constantly. Crowds picketed outside. “As a nation that is moral and virtuous, we cannot promote that kind of behaviour,” Princess Reema says, paraphrasing their outrage. “My point was, ‘Why are you looking at it so suspiciously?’ But I had to step out of my ego and my experience and realise that the people I’m employing don’t mix, their families don’t mix, so this is actually shocking to the employee as much as it’s shocking to the investigator, and to the client walking in.” So the princess pivoted. Female employees remain separated from all males by glass partitions and government-mandated space requirements, and male employees now work in the restaurant and children’s sections only. It took two years, but the mood—and profits—at Harvey Nichols have fully recovered,
Gallo Images/Getty Images/Amy E. Price
We meet one morning in the compound’s recreation room, a nook for gathering that’s kitty-corner to Princess Reema’s apartment. The room is crowded with comfortable sofas, a Ms. Pac Man arcade game, and a large television in a soccerball-patterned frame. There are two whiteboards, one scrawled with the planning agenda for 10KSA and the other with her children’s tutoring and extracurricular schedules. The princess, wearing a comfortable T-shirt dress and flipflops—her formal abaya tucked away in a closet until it’s time to go out in public—is sipping rose tea at the table when her 16-year-old daughter, Princess Sarah, emerges from their apartment on her way to a dentist’s appointment with her nanny. Their driver awaits them out front. “Can I look at your shoes?” Princess Reema calls after her daughter. “Are those mine?” “No, I got them in LA on Robertson Boulevard,” Sarah says with the miffy tone of teenagers worldwide. (The family regularly visits Los Angeles, where soon Sarah will learn to drive.) “You can’t go out tonight like that,” says Princess Reema, looking at her daughter’s shredded overalls beneath her unfastened abaya. “Your father would kill me. Put on leggings underneath.” “I’m not wearing leggings under this. That’s too ’80s.” “Channel Debbie Gibson!” Princess Reema calls to her daughter’s retreating back. “All my references are ’80s, by the way,” she says. At various points during my visit she will reference Footloose, 9 to 5, The Princess Bride and Top Gun (e.g. “I don’t want to be seen as a maverick; Maverick gets Goose killed”). She keeps the entire oeuvre of George Michael in her chauffeured Mercedes. The ’80s touchstones are a holdover from Princess Reema’s formative years in Washington, DC. Her father’s job took the family there when she was 7 years old, and she didn’t return to Saudi Arabia full-time until 2006. In America, she earned a degree in Museum Studies from George Washington University, but never envisioned a career. “My mom was a great mom, and that’s all I wanted to be,” she says. “I wanted the husband and the picket fence.” It’s a fluke, really, that she found herself at the helm of Riyadh’s Harvey Nichols. By the time she returned to Saudi Arabia, the department store had become less the luxury shopping destination it billed itself as than an inhospitable bazaar selling second-rate designers. In 2010, she took a tour with board members of Alfa Intl., the store’s parent company, which her family owned, and couldn’t
the princess says. One weekday afternoon, I am taken on a tour of the store by one of Princess Reema’s protégées, Raghda Amin, a 30-year-old aspiring fashion designer who grew up wearing the exclusive brands sold here. Business is slow, she explains, because the store has just reopened its doors after the mid-afternoon prayer time. To my Western eyes, the black-cloaked shoppers seem incongruous against the opulent backdrop of colourful, showy high fashion. What’s a Saudi woman to do with 12-centimetre Alexander McQueen stilettos or a bodyconscious Carolina Herrera evening gown? Amin, whose iPhone buds drape over her abaya, explains that Saudi women care deeply about fashion; they show off their extensive wardrobes at all-female house parties or when travelling abroad. Two years ago, Amin almost quit her job at Harvey Nichols. “My mom died of a heart attack,” she tells me. “Everything was black in my mind.” Her family doesn’t depend on her salary, so there was no reason for her not to sink into grief. “Princess Reema came up to me and said, ‘Take as much time as you need. If you want to work from home, do that. Just don’t leave the company.’ Now I try to pay her back by working hard to show her that she will see the result of her support through my success.” Today Amin, who has risen to become the head of the visual merchandising department, shows off her plans for the “urban department”. It’s a sleek section targeting teenagers, which she plans to decorate like
cheques, they could maybe buy a wallet at Harvey—and probably shouldn’t,” says the princess. About half of the women wear niqabs, which cover their entire faces except for their eyes, out of modesty—or shame, because their families are uncomfortable with their daughters working in a service position. On the bulletin board outside the break room, an uninspiring all-staff HR memo written in both Arabic and English bemoans shoddy employee attendance. Workers at the store have a tendency to show up late and leave early, a result of being dependent on a father or brother for a ride. In fact, within the first couple of months of women being employed at the store, the staff suffered an 80% attrition rate. Female employees would shrink or flee when approached by male customers. If work was overwhelming or just not worth the headache of family members nagging at home, they stopped showing up. Princess Reema was struck by her failure to predict how harsh a culture shock a professional environment could be to her more sheltered countrywomen. “We were expecting them to run before they could walk,” she says. So last January, she stepped down as CEO (she still remains on Alfa’s executive board committee) and launched the social enterprise, Alf Khair, which translates to “one thousand blessings”. “I wanted to effect more change than I could within the four walls of the store,” she says. Through Alf Khair, she founded Alf Darb: a training academy for women who want to enter the workforce. Alf Darb will accept its first class of students early next year, following a pilot programme with staff from Harvey Nichols. The socio-economically diverse mix of students, attracted through trusted employers and high schools, will train at the academy three days a week and intern at hand-selected jobs the other two. Mentors, provided by Alf Darb, will be encouraged to stay in touch with the young women throughout their professional careers. The logo of Alf Khair looks like a geometric butterfly, meant to symbolise Princess Reema’s desire to create change. “Think how one butterfly alone might change a wind pattern—but many, many butterflies fluttering their wings together will cause a change in the atmosphere,” Princess Reema says. Imagine the power of 10 000 butterflies. In 2001, Princess Reema received one of the worst phone calls of her life: A close friend shocked her with the news that she was suffering from late-stage breast cancer. The friend had gone through her diagnostic and chemotherapy regimen alone, unsure of how to find support, and unlikely to have accepted it anyway. “Our community is very, very private,” says the princess. “We don’t talk. Certain diseases or personal conflicts are considered shameful to address because it means you’re ungrateful or you’ll be seen as ‘less than’. So if you have a problem, you keep it right in until it’s a disaster. Nobody knew she was sick until she was in the hospital and she’s dying.” Rocked by the subsequent loss of her friend, and devastated by the fact that nearly 60% of the breast cancer cases in Saudi Arabia are diagnosed at late stages (as compared to 30%, on average, in the US), the princess turned her attention, connections and resources toward improving women’s health. She helped a doctor named Suad bin Amer found the Zahra Breast Cancer Association, naming the organisation after bin Amer’s mother who had died of the disease. Immediately, the Ministry of Social Affairs, an influential wing of the government, argued against the word breast being a part of the official title. “We’re not going to call it the General Chest Area Association,” Princess Reema remembers insisting. “It’s called breast cancer, the same way prostate cancer is not called ‘the cancer down there’.” Women in Saudi Arabia are especially vulnerable to late-stage diagnoses because of cultural taboos against self-examination and an unwillingness to address the warning signs. In regions where polygamy is still practised, for example, a woman with a lump in her breast fears being cast off in favour of a healthier wife. Princess Reema knew that education would be key to saving lives. Zahra representatives started travelling to malls with transportable ‘pink houses’: four walls and a roof that provided timid women with a shield of privacy, in which early-detection specialists would offer counsel. Then, eager to take awareness to the next level, she partnered with Modia Batterjee, a Saudi physician and breast health and lactation specialist, to attempt to break a Guinness World Record by having almost 4 000 women line up in the form of a pink
“Ten thousand women,” Princess Reema marvels, picturing the upcoming gathering. “They've left their homes, they're saying, ‘Talk to me, I'm here, tell me something.’ ” a funky garage with famous fashion-designer quotes scrawled like graffiti. “We’re not allowed to play music in the store, but maybe we’ll try a little Maroon 5 in the fitting rooms,” she whispers to me. “If people complain, worst-case scenario is we turn it off.” One floor below, women greet each other in the private employee break room. Their smiles are shy and sweet, their eyelashes thickly mascaraed. These are not girls who benefited from private-school educations, like Amin or Princess Reema. “Within 50 pay
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ribbon in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “But do you want to know the truth?” Princess Reema tells members of her 10KSA team during a rec-room strategy meeting the next day. “We broke a record, and all of our fliers just ended up on the floor. It was madness. Nobody ended up going to our education booths.” “But I think of it as a watershed event,” says Seema Khan, the founder of a tech seedinvestment company and 10KSA board member. “Beforehand, I never heard breast cancer in the public discourse in any circle. Whereas after, it felt like everybody was talking about it.” “Okay, it was the event that brought [breast cancer] into the public discourse,” allows the princess, now looking ahead. “I’m not worried about 10 000 people coming to 10KSA. I’m worried about what they’re going to get out of it.” For December’s massive gathering, Princess Reema is working with a R8.75-million budget that’s fully covered by corporate sponsors including the Alwaleed Philanthropies, GE and Uber. (The princess’s team has already put in a request for 2 000 Uber cars to be on call that day; the company has been a game changer for Saudi women since it launched in Riyadh in 2014.) As the event’s media sponsor, the Middle East Broadcasting Centre has committed airtime to PSAs in the month of December. It will also invite team members onto its morning shows and write breast cancer into the storylines of some of its dramas. During the event itself, 10KSA, in conjunction with the National Health Care Screening Programme, will offer free, on-site mammograms as well as screenings for other diseases. GE plans to host both educational and job-fair booths. One day, Princess Reema’s friend Yasmin Al Twaijwri, a high-level epidemiology researcher at Riyadh’s King Faisal Hospital, joins us for a meeting after lunch. She’s leading a pioneering national survey of mental health, the Saudi Health and Stress Survey. (“Mental health is a taboo subject” in the country, explains the princess.) Al Twaijwri will be bringing a 15-person team to 10KSA to ask women, in a private tent, about their interior lives. “We want to know what their needs are and how we can help them in the future,” says Al Twaijwri. “Because they need advocates to go and talk to policy makers.” The event will provide her with up to 10 000 research subjects who can respond to a simple survey about possible symptoms of depression—a conversation the average woman in Saudi Arabia is loath to initiate. Princess Reema had predicted a firestorm of angry backlash to her ribbon-formation campaign in Jeddah but, with the exception of some hateful phone calls, the event went off undisturbed. Still, she knows she must continue to toe the line. The Ministry of Education granted 10KSA free use of the King Fahad Sports Stadium. “When we took a tour, the man kept saying, ‘You’re the first women to ever set foot in here!’ ” she says. “And I knew the tone of the event would turn into a women’s empowerment event of breaking barriers versus breast cancer awareness and health education. I don’t want to knock a wall down. We just want to widen the doorway.” So she chose a new venue, Princess Noura University, an all-women’s college where participants will have access to the 10 000-plus-capacity stadium, as well as to tennis courts, soccer fields and three basketball courts. “Ten thousand women from varied socioe-conomic backgrounds,” marvels Princess Reema. “They’re excited, they’ve left their homes, they’re ready to engage; they’re saying, ‘Talk to me, I’m here, tell me something.’ ” Her goal is to blueprint the entire planning and execution process so that it can be reused over and over. “We can’t be the sole beneficiaries of this,” she says. “I want to see someone copy us. Beat us, do it better, go have fun.” Speaking of fun, 10KSA is not just about education. Princess Reema is planning a festive atmosphere (“Picture the carnival at the end of Grease,” she says). There will be Zumba classes on the stadium field. A fun run inspired by the Hindu festival of Holi. Shopping and food stalls run by female entrepreneurs. A popular male DJ will spin records for a dance party—though, of course, he’ll be sequestered in a private booth. The opening-night party for Saudi Design Week is held at a posh new resort hotel about a 45-minute drive from downtown Riyadh. The chic lobby, all cool granite and groovy lounge music, is elegant and packed, every corner crowded with exhibition stalls of high-end wares from Saudi-born artists and designers. Men and women—some with heads covered, some not—mingle effortlessly while music plays over the speakers and waiters dressed in formal wear and bandoliers pass Arabic coffee, dates and trays of mini i ce-cream cones. Everyone swears that such a scene—a mixed party in public in a country where women still dine in sequestered “family” sections in restaurants—would have been unheard of just five years prior. With 50% of Saudi Arabia’s population under the age of 35, and the country boasting the highest number of Twitter users in the Arab region (“it’s unrestricted communication,” explains Princess Reema of social media’s allure), gatherings like this signify that
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change is possible. Design Week is the brainchild of Noura Bouzo, 29, the creative director and cofounder of Saudi Arabia’s first arts-and-culture magazine, Oasis, who launched the event last year with the help of her sisters and others— and the backing of the princess. “Princess Reema is a role model to a lot of us,” Bouzo tells me. “She’s female, and she’s done all these things on her own. You can’t imagine what that means for us all to see.” The princess has two stands at Saudi Design Week, one exhibiting her Baraboux luxury bag line (she’s the founder and creative director) and another inviting local artists to enter a competition to design the bottom of the 10 000 head scarves that will be worn at 10KSA—per Guinness regulations, the head-covering portion must be uniform—as the women line up to form the l argest ever human-awareness ribbon. She gracefully moves through the lobby, introducing people she thinks could benefit from knowing each other and recruiting designers for her scarf competition. On the ride home, stalled in a sea of male drivers staring idly at their mobile phones as the downtown is torn up to make way for a fully modern underground public-transportation system, Princess Reema is contemplative in the back seat of her chauffeured car. She tells me about her hero, her grandmother Queen Effat Al-Thunayan. She was an advocate for women’s education, and with the backing of the king she opened the country’s first private school for girls, in Jeddah, called Dar Al-Hanan, or “Home of Compassion”. Due to community protest, it was initially branded as an orphanage. The queen enrolled her own children there, so society ladies started sending their daughters there as well. The school still exists today, a feeder for Saudi Arabia’s first private women’s college, Effat University, which opened in 1999. Work the system until it rights itself: It’s in Princess Reema’s blood. In 2000, she cofounded a women’s-only day spa and gym in Riyadh, called Yibreen. Female gyms are still illegal in Saudi Arabia, so she and her partners opened it under a seamstress shop’s licence. They hired a seamstress, provided her with a machine, and set up an office for her. “So if religious police come in, they say ‘Okay, you have the machine and she has a good workspace,’ ” says the princess. “And we’re like, ‘Yeah, and those treadmills over there mean nothing.’ ” Fifteen years later, there’s still a seamstress working there, allowing Yibreen’s female guests entrance into an otherwise forbidden world. loop@fastcompany.com
FAST COMPANY PROMOTION
DO YOU BELONG IN THE PIONEER NATION? Levi’s is bringing together the growing community of young entrepreneurs who are defining their own future by starting their own businesses
At the heart of the Pioneer Nation movement is a very different kind of one-day festival—equal parts entertaining and educational. We have designed an amazing day of inspiration and insight for 1 500 young entrepreneurs who are just getting started or looking to ramp up their startup. Forget theory: This is on-the-ground advice from the Levi’s Pioneer Nation members who are running and building their own businesses right now, right here in South Africa. Inspired by the original entrepreneur Levi Strauss, who gave birth to a global denim empire, Pioneer Nation is committed to nurture a generation of passionate, productive folks who can define their own destiny. “We’re bringing together entrepreneurs who are doing it their own way, pioneering against all odds to rise as our modern heroes—the rock stars of the new millennium. These new entrepreneurial rock stars Live in Levi’s!” says Cal Bruns, founder of Matchboxology, the creator behind Levi’s Pioneer Nation. The festival speakers line-up comprises more than 30 Pioneers, including many of South Africa’s notable up-and-coming entrepreneurs. These Pioneers will be sharing their honest backstories of success and failure, trials and tribulations, heartaches and business-growth breakthroughs. Angel investors and entrepreneurs will take to the couches for more focused conversations with participants. Six business-building workshops from experts such as Fast Company SA, Red Bull Amaphiko Academy for social entrepreneurship, and Facebook will give practical tips on how to build your enterprise.
Pioneer Nation is the place to kick-start your startup and fuel your passion for productivity. Some of the speakers to look out for include:
Jonathan Ratcliffe Jon made a name for himself as a Google marketing maestro, helping brands and advertisers across the African continent come online and reach their consumers in a meaningful way. He has since left Google and heads up MOFILM Africa, a crowd-source platform for filmmakers to develop their career by connecting their reels to global brands.
Craig McLeod CEO and co-founder of Build, a PaaS (platform as a service) website builder, Craig has forged strong partnerships with Google, 2Checkout, Microsoft, Facebook and many others. He sits on the emeritus boards of quite a few startups, and serves as mentor to a number of hubs, venture-capital funds and incubators. Previous highlights include doing work for Mark Shuttleworth, the writing of an online bank, security consulting to governments, and UX design as one of the world’s top-selling template authors.
Jared Pillai Jared is a serial entrepreneur, an eccentric, fast-paced marketing professional, and the inventor of TodPod—a 3-in-1 multifunctional bag that converts into a table and chair for toddlers. Jared was featured on Dragons’ Den SA in 2014 and successfully received an investment of R1 million for the TodPod from three of the dragons.
Miles Kubheka Watching a TV ad showing a young and ambitious, “beeeg beeeg dreamer”—Vuyo—and how he started a humble ‘wors brand’ and grew it into a global business, Miles sat back and realised this story was his entrepreneurial destiny. In December 2012, he opened his first restaurant, Vuyo’s in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. He wanted to turn the brand into the country’s most loved fast-casual restaurant that will take South African cuisine global.
Levi’s Pioneer Nation, hosted by the Sci Bono Discovery Centre in Johannesburg’s Newtown Cultural Precinct, will take place on September 25, 2015. Tickets are R150 for the full day and discounts are available for groups. For more information and to buy tickets, go to www.pioneernation.biz.
Iman Mkwanazi and Nene Mboweni Iman and Nene decided the world of construction was not only for men, so they grabbed some hard hats and started Mkweni Groundworks. Iman is a BSc graduate and signed model at Boss Models, but standing around looking pretty was not enough for her. She runs Ihlanzekile Cleaning Services in both the private and public sector, and also co-owns and runs Mkweni Groundworks with business partner Nene. Nene is currently enrolled at Wits University, studying medical biochemistry to complete the final three years of her MBBCh degree. Just like Iman, she has several things on the
go other than her studies and construction: an online virtual patisserie and decadence catering company called Nnüa Cakes; science and maths tutoring at Bophelo-Impilo School; she has also incubated several community initiatives including Courageous Ladies and AfriSun Trust.
S izwe Nzima A young Khayelitsha businessman has brought convenience to the township with his medicine-on-wheels business, Iyeza Express: serving dozens of community members unable to brave long queues at local clinics to collect their chronic medication.
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PASSION PROJECT
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New school O N LI N E T E ACH I N G PL AT FO R M , M A S T ER CL A S S , I S S I G N I N G U P M A J O R S TA R S TO T E ACH I N - D EP T H W EB LE S S O N S — FO R A PR I CE
Want Serena Williams to come over and troubleshoot your backhand? Sorry, that’s probably not going to happen. But a new online education platform lets you come close. Called Master Class (masterclass.com), the San Francisco–based startup launched in May 2015 with online courses from the tennis superstar, Oscar-winning actor Dustin Hoffman, and mega-selling novelist James Patterson (tutorials from Usher and photographer Annie Leibovitz are also in the works). Unlimited access to each multi-instalment class costs $90 (about R1 160)—and while the instruction tends toward the remedial, the teachers’ wisdom and charisma make the videos more entertaining than typical instructional clips. Here’s a quick look at Master Class’s core curriculum. —Nikita Richardson
Best quote
SERENA WILLIAMS Duration 2 hours (10 lessons) What you’ll learn Tennis fundam entals, as well as more advanced concepts like “controlling the court”
Best quote
JAMES PATTERSON Duration 3.5 hours (22 lessons) What you’ll learn How to launch a career in writing, from devising plots and characters to promoting the finished product
“Try and write every chapter as if it’s the first chapter in the book— as if it’s that important. Don’t write a single chapter that doesn’t propel the story forward.”
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“When I’m behind in a game I relax, because I realise usually it’s not going to get worse than this. . . Someone with nothing to lose can be a very dangerous opponent and a very dangerous person.”
Best quote
DUSTIN HOFFMAN Duration Over 4.5 hours (24 lessons) What you’ll learn A little about how actors create memorable characters, a lot about Hoffman’s 55-year career
“I don’t want to see [actors say], ‘This isn’t me, it’s the character.’ Come on, we’re all everything. We’re all mean bastards. We’re all funny. We have all those aspects to us.” Illustration by Aaron Lloyd Barr
SCI BONO CENTRE JOHANNESBURG
25 SEPTEMBER 2015
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A FESTIVAL TO INSPIRE A GENERATION 3 STAGES
30 YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS SHARING THEIR STORIES
8 INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS - FACEBOOK, SME STORYTELLING, RED BULL AMAPHIKO SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND MORE! ENTREPRENEUR UP CLOSE SOFA SESSIONS
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VISIT WWW.PIONEERNATION.BIZ FOR TICKETS AND PROGRAMME DETAILS
DEAD AHEAD W I T H Z O M B I E C O M I C TH E WA L K I N G D E A D , R O B E R T K I R K M A N C R E AT E D A F L E S H - C H O M P I N G P O P - C U LT U R E P H E N O M E N O N. N O W H E ’ S B I T I N G I N T O A B I G G E R C H A L L E N G E : R E D E F I N I N G H O W H O L LY W O O D D O E S B U S I N E S S BY NICOLE LAPORTE I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y M AT T R O TA
FRANK DARABONT, THE WALKING DEAD’S SHOWRUNNER, ATTENDS SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON IN JULY 2011 TO ADORING CROWDS.
PREVIOUSLY . . . AFTER HIS WALKING DEAD COMIC BOOK TAKES OFF, ROBERT KIRKMAN SPENDS YEARS PITCHING IT AS A TV SHOW.
THINK OF IT AS A ZOMBIE MOVIE—THAT NEVER ENDS. WE LOVE IT, BUT CAN YOU DO IT WITHOUT ZOMBIES?
SARAH WAYNE CALLIES, WHO PORTRAYED LORI GRIMES:
THE GREAT THING ABOUT SEASON 2 . . .
WE LOVE IT, BUT WHAT IF THEY WERE SUPER ZOMBIES? . . . IS THAT YOU START TO REALISE . . .
WE LOVE IT, BUT WE CAN’T GIVE YOU ALL THE RIGHTS YOU WANT.
. . . THAT THE MOST DANGEROUS THINGS OUT THERE . . .
SO, IT’S REALLY A CHARACTER DRAMA . . . . . . AND THE ZOMBIES ARE JUST THE BACKDROP?
THE WALKING DEAD PREMIERES ON AMC ON HALLOWEEN NIGHT, 2010. . . . ARE THE MONSTERS INSIDE.
FINALLY, SOMEBODY GETS IT.
ITS STYLISED GORE AND HAUNTING SENSE OF DREAD HOOK VIEWERS, PARTICULARLY YOUNGER ONES.
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THREE DAYS AFTER COMIC-CON, DARABONT IS FIRED AMID REPORTS HE STRUGGLED TO ADAPT TO SERIES TV AND HAD BUDGET CLASHES WITH AMC.
KIRKMAN, WHO MOVED TO LA FROM KENTUCKY AT THE BEGINNING OF SEASON 2 . . . GLEN MAZZARA, A TV VETERAN WHO WORKED ON THE SHIELD, IS SUDDENLY ELEVATED TO SHOWRUNNER IN THE MIDDLE OF PRODUCING SEASON 2. DESPITE SOME CRITICISM OF THE SHOW’S SLOW PACE . . .
BUT MAZZARA CLASHES WITH OTHERS—INCLUDING KIRKMAN— WHO FEEL THE SHOW IS VEERING TOO FAR FROM THE SPIRIT OF THE COMIC.
. . . IT QUICKLY BECOMES THE HIGHEST RATED SHOW IN BASICCABLE HISTORY.
. . . BECOMES A MORE ACTIVE PART OF THE WRITERS’ ROOM . . .
. . . ALONGSIDE NEW SHOWRUNNER AND FANBOY, SCOTT M. GIMPLE. “MORE THAN ANY OTHER SHOWRUNNER, SCOTT ACTUALLY READ THE COMICS REGULARLY AND WAS A HUGE FAN BEFORE THE SHOW EXISTED,” KIRKMAN SAID. “HE ABSOLUTELY LOVES THE MATERIAL.”
WHEN YOU’RE THE CREATOR, YOU CAN SAY, “THIS IS WHAT THE SHOW IS” . . .
. . . I DIDN’T CREATE THE SHOW, I DIDN’T CREATE THE COMIC . . .
. . . SO I’M JUST GLAD I WAS ABLE TO CONTRIBUTE.
MAZZARA IS LET GO AFTER FINISHING SEASON 3.
WITH SEASON 5, THE WALKING DEAD SHOWS NO SIGN OF SLOWING DOWN. ITS 90-MINUTE SEASON ENDER IS THE SERIES’ HIGHEST RATED FINALE EVER. LOOKING TO CAPITALISE ON THE SHOW’S SUCCESS . . .
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•••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• •••••••••••••• ••••••• . . . AMC ANNOUNCES FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, A SPIN-OFF SET IN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, WHICH DEBUTED ON AUGUST, 23 2015 IN THE US. AND KIRKMAN USES HIS WALKING DEAD CLOUT TO SPEARHEAD A HOST OF OTHER PROJECTS, INCLUDING A FILM AND YET ANOTHER TV SHOW, CALLED OUTCAST.
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MEANWHILE . . .
ROBERT KIRKMAN HOVERS OVER A GLASS-SHARD FIRE PIT IN AN EVENT SPACE ON THE ROOF OF THE LONDON HOTEL IN WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, HIS HANDS SHOVED SHEEPISHLY INTO HIS JEANS POCKETS. NOTHING ABOUT THE MAN’S APPEARANCE SUGGESTS THAT HE’S TONIGHT’S MAIN ATTRACTION. THE HOTEL IS HOSTING A CELEBRATION OF THE UPCOMING CINEMAX SHOW OUTCAST, A GOREFEST ABOUT DEMONIC POSSESSION. WITH HIS FULL BEARD AND BURLY BUILD, KIRKMAN LOOKS MORE LIKE HE SHOULD BE SPLITTING LOGS THAN SCHMOOZING TV EXECUTIVES.
And then there’s his voice: a raspy, Southern-tinged rumble that suggests he’s just getting over a very bad cold. But without Kirkman, who created Outcast, wrote its pilot episode, and is executive-producing the series (which will air early next year in the US), no one would be here drinking Outcast-themed cocktails and ignoring series star Patrick Fugit (Gone Girl), who’s milling around nearby while television VPs in expensive suits and women in strappy high heels lavish attention on Kirkman, selfie sticks in tow. The 36-year-old budding mogul is best known for creating the zombie-apocalypse phenomenon The Walking Dead, a comic-book series turned TV show that has been the mostwatched drama on all of television among 18- to 49-year-olds for three years running (Fox’s Empire edges it out in total viewers). Kirkman’s video-game version of The Walking Dead, made with TellTale Games, has sold 44 million copies. And then there are figurines, hats, Nerf toys and even Walking Dead Risk and Monopoly games. As the show enters its sixth season, Kirkman is using its success as a launchpad for what he hopes is a developing entertainment empire. In addition to Outcast, Kirkman is overseeing AMC’s Walking Dead spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, which premiered in August in the US. In the same month, his production company, Skybound Entertainment, released its first feature film, Air, a sci-fi thriller starring Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus. Skybound—which Kirkman runs with his manager and business partner, David Alpert—also has a slew of other projects in the works: comic books, video games, toys, live events and even original content for Samsung’s Milk virtual-reality headset, which is due out at the end of the year. Many of these exist in a broad metaverse in which everything is loosely connected, an approach familiar to fans of another enterprise that’s found huge success turning comic books into popular entertainment: Marvel. But while that company—which has
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With their busy production company, Skybound, Kirkman (right) and Alpert (opposite) are putting creators at the centre of their strategy.
generated billions from international smashes such as the Iron Man and Avengers series— functions as a brand-first character factory, Kirkman is committed to an unusual (for Hollywood) strategy of putting comic-book creators at the core of everything his company does. It’s a philosophy born from Kirkman’s own experience as a writer at Marvel where, he says, “Your book could be published and you’d be like, ‘Oh, they didn’t even tell me they were changing what this guy was saying.’ ” Though it’s unlikely that guests at the Outcast party grasp the true scope of Kirkman’s plans, he’s thinking much bigger than undead flesh eaters. He wants to create a very different kind of comic-book-based entertainment company: the anti-Marvel. By the time Kirkman (barely) graduated from high school, near Lexington, Kentucky, he knew a few things for certain. He wasn’t going to college. He didn’t want to work for anyone else. And he’d do anything to create comic books. Kirkman had loved comics since he was a kid, and had plastered his walls with posters of Spider-Man and G.I. Joe. He never had any kind of career goals—until the day he realised the names on the covers of comics belonged to real people who actually got paid to dream up superhero stories. In 2000, while Kirkman was working as a purchasing agent at a Kentucky lightingsupply company, he started a publishing company, Funk-O-Tron, and created his first comic series, Battle Pope, which followed the exploits of a demon-fighting, scotch-swigging pontiff. Two years later, Kirkman was hired to write for the indie publisher, Image Comics, which had been formed by a group of disgruntled Marvel artists who wanted creators to keep the rights to their own work. He soon started pitching his own titles: Tech Jacket, Invincible and, most notably, a series about a guy who wakes up from a coma and finds himself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. At the time, Kirkman didn’t consider
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KIRKMAN IS THINKING MUCH BIGGER THAN UNDEAD FLESH EATERS. HE WANTS TO CREATE A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF COMIC-BOOK-BASED ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY: THE ANTI-MARVEL.
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himself a horror guy. But he loved zombie movies like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and he always felt unsatisfied when they ended. What happens next? he wondered. Does everyone just get on with their lives? It didn’t make sense. The Walking Dead was his answer to that question. Illustrated by Kirkman’s high-school buddy (and Battle Pope collaborator) Tony Moore, the series debuted in 2003 and caught on quickly with an audience that went beyond comicbook fans. Some 145 issues and 145 million copies later, it’s one of the all-time best-selling series not put out by the two big publishers, Marvel and DC. The Walking Dead got Kirkman noticed, and in 2004 Marvel called, offering him a job as a writer. Working for the company behind Spider-Man and X-Men is the ultimate dream for anyone who grows up obsessed with making comics. How could he say no? Kirkman—who continued writing The Walking Dead on the side—was almost immediately miserable, he says, frustrated by Marvel’s rigid structure and lack of creative freedom. “It was them deciding what book I’d do, them deciding what artist I would work with, them telling me which story I’d write,” he says. “They would call me into the office and say, ‘I read your Image books and they’re better than your Marvel books and I don’t know why. Why don’t you give us the good stuff?’ And I would say, ‘Because I pitch you guys the good stuff and then you tell me I can’t do it or to hold off.’ ” (Marvel declined to comment for this story.) Kirkman quit in 2008. Soon afterward, he returned to Image as a partner, where he was given his own comic-book imprint. By now, Kirkman was working closely with Alpert, who’d signed on as his manager and producing partner. A polished, evenkeeled Long Islander who was captain of the swim team at Harvard and studied law at NYU, Alpert was aggressively working to get Kirkman established in LA. He’d made a deal at Paramount for Kirkman to adapt his comic book Invincible into a movie (the project never went anywhere), and had even sold Battle Pope to SpikeTV.com as an animated web series (eight episodes aired in 2008). In 2009, they landed their biggest coup. After four years of shopping around The Walking Dead as a TV series (NBC had optioned it at one point and then ended up passing), Kirkman and Alpert finally closed
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“WE’RE NOT A COMPANY THAT SETS ARBITRARY GOALS AND THEN CUTS CORNERS TO MEET THEM.” 64 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
WITH THE WALKING D E A D AT ITS P E A K, C R EATO R R O B E R T K I R K M A N’ S P R O D U C T I O N C O M P A N Y, S K Y B O U N D E N T E R TA I N M E N T, I S E X P A N D I N G ITS P L AT F O R M
Air AUGUST 14, THEATRES IN THE UNITED STATES
Skybound’s first movie stars Norman Reedus (above) and Djimon Hounsou as custodians who struggle to stay sane while living in an underground bunker with cryogenically frozen people meant to repopulate society.
Fear the Walking Dead AUGUST 23, AMC
The first spin-off series from the mother ship is set in Los Angeles during the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. “It’s a companion show that’ll be a completely different experience,” Kirkman says.
Gone LATE 2015
Skybound was tapped by Samsung to create this scripted series for its virtual-reality platform, Milk VR. “In comics, characters can’t nod,” Kirkman says. “We get to try to tell a story when you don’t know where the viewer’s looking. We’re defining what’s possible in camera. It’s kind of awesome.” continued...
windfall that allowed Skybound to be more than a vanity company. And it gave proof to Kirkman’s vision of keeping creators at the core. “It was like, Okay, now it’s not just a guy in a cubicle,” Alpert says. “We were able to say, ‘Hey, we can do this for other people.’ ” Skybound’s sleek glass-and-concrete offices, located in Culver City, California, are a geek’s paradise. Alpert’s Tesla is parked right outside. (Kirkman, who’s more inclined to collect Garbage Pail Kids—’80s trading cards that parodied the Cabbage Patch Kids—than Corvettes, drives a Hyundai SUV.) And the lobby is full of toys, comic books and other tchotchkes inspired by The Walking Dead and other Skybound properties, most involving severed limbs and torture devices. Millennials in skinny jeans and plaid button-downs scurry around the office, where there’s an air of nervous energy—San Diego’s Comic-Con, the massive annual geek-culture convention that’s the biggest event on the Skybound calendar, is 52 days away. Right now, Kirkman’s projects are driving most of the company’s revenue—and not just on the TV front. In May, The Walking Dead and Outcast comics sold roughly 69 000 and 29 000 copies, respectively, while Skybound’s other books each sold fewer than 10 000. But Kirkman is overtaxed. He currently has three comic-book series going, in addition to work related to his three TV shows. Last October, when he was flying back and forth between Outcast’s South Carolina set and LA, where Fear the Walking Dead was in preproduction, Kirkman was forbidden by Alpert from coming up with any new ideas. “We were working on those shows like crazy and Robert would be like, ‘Oh, man, I’ve got this great movie idea,’ ” Alpert recalls. “I’d be like, ‘Why are you telling me that? What are we going to do with that? Now you’re just teasing me.’ ” Moving forward, Alpert wants to reduce the big gap between his star and the other Skybound players. The goal is to eventually “have a small group of creators who we’re as passionate about as we’re passionate about Robert, and do as much stuff as they want us to do.” Kirkman, who’s been up since 5 a.m. writing when we meet one Friday afternoon, explains that Skybound is “designed to appeal to the Robert Kirkman who was doing Battle Pope”, a talented outsider who will benefit from editorial support and Hollywood connections. Maybe the creator’s idea ends up being published as a comic book, or maybe
Courtesy of Skybound Entertainment
a deal—with AMC. The network was starting to invest heavily in original programming and was eager for a populist, ratings-friendly show to complement more cerebral fare like Mad Men. At first, Kirkman wasn’t much involved; veteran director Frank Darabont served as showrunner, with Kirkman acting mainly as a consultant. But Darabont was fired during production on season 2, so Kirkman moved to LA and joined the writers’ room. He handled the transition well, according to executive producer, Gale Anne Hurd. “A lot of people come in thinking they’re going to reinvent the process,” she says. “He was very smart in observing and paying attention. He didn’t believe it was his place to veto everything.” When Kirkman and Alpert closed the TV deal, they had insisted on keeping the merchandising rights to the Walking Dead comic book, which meant that through their newly formed production company, Skybound, they could sell T-shirts, toys, video games and anything else that didn’t use specific images from the TV show. When Skybound’s The Walking Dead video game came out, it was a critical hit as well as a sales one; by contrast, AMC’s version, produced by Activision, bombed. “I don’t mean to be a jerk about it all, but the Activision game was an embarrassment,” says Kirkman. “As good as some of the merchandising that AMC produces is, there’s not a soul to it. There’s not an extra level of consideration that comes from a human being who cares.” The savvy move provided a licensing
SEIZING THE MOMENT
it becomes an online video or a video game— or even a movie. The model isn’t all that different from the way most production companies and studios think about projects—who doesn’t want to build a franchise?—but Skybound is committed to keeping creators directly involved rather than casting them to the side, as often happens in Hollywood (with the exception of superstars such as JK Rowling). Of course, not every comic-book author has what it takes to steer movies and TV shows, and Marvel’s approach—putting its properties in the hands of successful Hollywood professionals—has paid off with phenomenal box-office and critical success. Christian Cantamessa, a video-game writer and designer with no film experience, is perhaps Skybound’s biggest test of the company’s creator-first concept. Cantamessa co-wrote a script called Air and said he wanted to direct it; Skybound said, Why not? He is also involved in developing a video game based on the film, and is talking with Skybound about other movie and TV projects. In April this year, Skybound signed a first-look deal with Universal, which means that Cantamessa’s next movie would likely be on a bigger scale than his debut, a limited-release film with a small budget. Universal or any other studio is unlikely to hand over a big-budget movie to a newbie. “Some guy or girl who’s written a comic book, if they write a script, no matter how good it is, it doesn’t matter,” says one agent who works with A-list writers. But if Skybound can help build raw talent into names with smaller projects, then Skybound’s mantra of “Creators first, creators centre, creators forever”, as Alpert puts it, has a shot at surviving as the company expands into a bigger operation. Alpert argues that Skybound’s real strength is the content it’s creating—the characters and stories that are, in the end, what drives a company like Marvel. The Disney-owned comics giant had a 70-year head start on Skybound, but the general principle is the same: Stockpile original ideas that can be pushed out and marketed through various media with the endorsement and imprint of a respected creator. Kirkman, Skybound hopes, will be a modern version of Stan Lee. “I talk to producers all the time, and the biggest thing for them is finding intellectual property,” says Alpert. “ ‘How do I get the rights to this? How do I put it together?’ Skybound is designed to solve that issue. I can say, ‘Hey, I know what the next 12 projects
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Siezing the moment continued
Outcast EARLY 2016, CINEMAX
Kirkman’s next TV show is a take on another horror subgenre, demonic possession. “People are hungry for new things,” Kirkman says. “You don’t have to do another lawyer show.”
Skybound ONGOING, YOUTUBE
In partnership with YouTube’s Maker Studios, Skybound experiments with new ideas, such as a live version of its Superfight! card game. “We get tremendous data on what works,” says Skybound co-creator David Alpert.
KIRKMAN THINKS HIS CREATOR-FOCUSED MODEL CAN HAVE A BIG IMPACT, BOTH CREATIVELY AND FINANCIALLY. “I WANT TO EVENTUALLY TEAR THE SYSTEM DOWN, AND THEN BUILD A BETTER ONE.”
I want to do are, because they’re right here.’ ” Outcast, for example, started out as an idea for a comic book, but when Kirkman casually mentioned the concept to an executive at Fox International Channels, it was fast-tracked as a TV show. It debuted as a comic book last year, seeding the audience for the show. Kirkman and Alpert could rinse and repeat with this formula, but they aren’t interested in forcing projects for the sake of filling up a slate. “I don’t think either of us sits around going, ‘We have to have a movie this year, let’s make sure we have five next year,’ or, ‘I want to have 17 TV shows by 2020,’ ” says Kirkman in a not-so-veiled shot at Marvel recently unveiling its film slate seemingly into perpetuity. “Our goal is to continue growing and not let exciting things slip through our fingers. We’re not a company that sets cold, arbitrary goals and then cuts corners to try and meet them. That’s not our style.” Unlike Marvel and other franchise factories, Skybound prides itself on its indie status. There are no shareholders or investors, therefore the company can grow organically at its own pace. That doesn’t mean Kirkman lacks ambition. Quite the opposite. Though he’s up against decades of Hollywood tradition and competitors who crank out superhero sequels with nine-figure budgets, he still thinks his creator-focused model can have a big impact, both creatively and financially. “I want to eventually tear the system down,” he says quietly at one point. “And then build a better one.” Kind of like recreating society after the zombie apocalypse. laporte@fastcompany.com
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Disrupt-ItYourself W H Y R I C K TR E W E E K HAS BROUGHT THE S PI R I T O F T H E M A K ER M OV EM EN T— EM P OW ER ED BY 3 D PR I N T I N G A N D OT H ER T ECH—TO S O U T H A FR I C A BY CHRIS WALDBURGER
The first computers took up entire rooms. Now the smartphone in your pocket could conceivably be used to blow up the world (provided you have the right nuclear launch codes). The humble scientific calculator, used by schoolkids in all its lo-tech glory, is more powerful than the Apollo 11 on-board computer was when it guided Neil Armstrong to the moon. The point is that technology has the tendency to democratise power. And as the technology’s rate of development increases exponentially, social practice battles to keep up.
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MASTER CLASS
Jono Wood (Treweek), Oli Sari Goerlach (robots)
Gutter Credit Tk
T I N K E R , TA I L O R I T
This is what Johannesburg entrepreneur Rick Treweek means by “disruptive” technology: technology that disrupts how we traditionally have done things— “tech that has yet to have rules set, its purpose set, as these are all things you can only unlock by means of interaction”, he explains. Over the last few decades, perhaps some of the most disruptive technology has been seen in the form of mobile Internet access and 3D printing. Being able to connect with billions of other people and their information remotely has undoubtedly changed the way we live. Being able to make virtually anything, so long as one has the necessary blueprint and a 3D printer, will undoubtedly change the way we live in the future. Rick Treweek’s career has bridged both revolutions. He began his career as a website designer for businesses such as bed-and-breakfast establishments. When the old Nokias began to include flash technology, he and Stefan Wessels (co-founder of Treweek’s gaming design business, Breakdesign) realised they could design animation for the phone’s software and thus build an interesting game. The first game was called Dawn of The Fly. “We messed around and eventually had a little one-button game where you controlled a character that ate flies as they flew past. We were geeking, so decided to try and put in a little highscoreboard that worked online; this enabled us to see from where people were playing the game— at least, when they submitted a score,” says Treweek. “We then also built a tiny shoutbox so people could say what they wanted on the game. We really didn’t know what we were doing at that point—it was all about playing, making and
Art credit teekay
Why people are changing from being consumers to makers According to ADWEEK’s definition of the Maker Movement, “Makers tap into an … admiration for self-reliance and combine that with open-source learning, contemporary design and powerful personal technology like 3D printers. The creations, born in cluttered local workshops and bedroom offices, stir the imaginations of consumers numbed by generic, mass-produced, made-in-China merchandise.” Treweek says that for him, the Maker Movement is “the future of how we live, learn and play. Knowledge is out there; it’s free and accessible. You can do things yourself. You have the mind to do it. Everyone is a maker—you just need to unlock it. The movement is a collection of tinkerers, makers, craftspersons, artists, geeks—all using disruptive technologies.” The Maker culture has become a worldwide phenomenon. The Shuttleworth Foundation has sponsored the development of the Global Village Construction Set, which is an exemplar of the spirit of the movement: people taking hold of development and industrialisation for themselves in a post-industrialised, globalised world.
getting into the tech of the time. The game unexpectedly starting popping up all over the world after we uploaded it for free on the web. We suddenly realised there’s a big, networked world out there—and these guys enjoyed what we had made!” This networked world drew the attention of Macromedia, now Adobe, and suddenly Treweek’s partner was travelling the world, speaking about flash technology on mobile. Their work gained the most traction in Singapore, where they found people really keen on mobile apps and games. “This led to our first project where we created an app collaborating with Ogilvy in Singapore. After arriving in Singapore, just on the MRT [mass rapid transit] subway we were amazed at how many people had on headphones and engaged with their mobile devices. This was the
place to be,” Treweek recounts. “After a stint in the underworld of advertising, we took a step back and relooked what had got us here—our passion. We then applied for funding for a games community idea we had wanted to build since Dawn of The Fly. In turn, we received funding from Nokia America and Adobe to build our games community, Barking Seed. Through this funding, we got the attention of Nokia in Singapore which had seen our system, and offered an amazing collaboration where, in exchange for exclusivity, we were paid to make our own games.” It was then that Treweek discovered the next great disruptor—the 3D printer. “I have always made little characters from clay to break from the computer, and have a fascination with new tech, so I just had to get one; it was like
What’s mine is yours Treweek not only designs and makes Trobok Toys but also sells the 3D-printable files that one can download and print oneself. “The files can be painted, cast, sanded, burnt, made as a shrine—whatever you want,” he says.
As Treweek explains, “The way we now learn and share information is enabling individuals to learn and empower themselves by creating and making their own things. It’s about looking at the world at a different angle. If something breaks, can I fix it? If I need something, can I make it myself?”
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Master Class
M E E T YO U R M A K E R S
the perfect combination of my two worlds. This then led me into the Maker Movement [see sidebar on previous page]. At that time in Singapore, it was just beginning. 3D printing meet-ups had just started and the first whispers of the Maker Movement were coming through. 3D printing started taking over my mind. It was that feeling I had the first time I got my iMac—an opening through which you cannot possibly see the end.” It was the natural points of contact between the democratised manufacturing promised by 3D printing and its consequent Maker Movement, with South Africa, that drew Treweek back to his homeland. “Thinking about this in Singapore, I could not stop thinking of this technology in South Africa; the Maker
Etsy has become a superb vehicle for makers to sell their products to users around the world. Here’s how On Etsy.com, makers sell or curate their goods (handmade and vintage items, craft supplies); shoppers buy these unique products; the Etsy-approved outside manufacturers partner with the sellers to help them grow; and Etsy employees maintain the online marketplace.
“3D printing started taking over my mind. It was that feeling I had the first time I got my iMac—an opening through which you cannot possibly which is all about bringing the see the end.” spirit of the Maker Movement— Movement seems so natural to South Africans; it’s where it’s needed most. It was time to come back and see how this technology would go down at home.” Since returning to South Africa, and setting up shop in Braamfontein, Treweek has divided his time between multiple projects—all with that same spirit of ‘hacking’. He maintains his role as chief designer of Breakdesign, which is still based in Singapore, but perhaps the bulk of his time goes into ‘making’. Once he moved back here, he quickly set up African Robot,
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empowered by 3D printing and other disruptive tech—to South Africa. African Robot currently offers 3D-printing services, training and brainstorming sessions to a variety of industries in South Africa and internationally. There is a strong educational bent to its work. “Locally, we are working with a lot of corporates and educational institutions, growing the industry and having a strong look at how education is going to be disrupted. Long term, we want some ‘makerbuses’ that can travel around the country, sharing knowledge, the Internet and technology. Education here has to change—
A new dawn The success of Rick’s global mobile-games community, Barking Seed, began with a little one-button game called Dawn of The Fly.
this can change it. We need to look at access, we need to look at cheap data; this is choking the country for technology growth,” he says. Alongside Breakdesign and African Robot, Treweek also finds time for his passion brand, Trobok Toys, which brings his animation designs into the world of collectibles and printing. He is also involved with setting up the Digital Innovation Zone (powered by Wits University), which forms part of the Tshimologong Precinct—an innovation hub for new technologies. As South Africa deals with slowing growth and a calcified education system, disruption à la Rick Treweek may be the very thing we need.
The website was founded by Rob Kalin and two friends in June 2005 in an apartment in Brooklyn. In true maker style, they designed the first site, wrote the code, assembled the servers and spliced the cables themselves. In 2008, Chad Dickerson joined as the first CTO, and became CEO in 2011. The founders wanted to “reimagine commerce” through an online community where crafters, artists and makers could sell their wares— transforming every aspect of how goods are made, bought and sold. Etsy now has 21.7 million active buyers and 1.5 million active sellers online (as at mid-August). Sellers range from hobbyists to professional merchants; some do it for extra pocket money, while others support their families with their trade. Etsy connects makers in nearly every country in the world, across languages and devices. Buyers can also meet up with sellers at the boutiques, craft fairs and flea markets they frequent. To become a seller, you register for a free account and pay 20 US cents (about R2.55) to set up an Etsy ‘shop’ online. There are guidelines that will help you through the selling process.
THE NEW RIVALRIES
Apple vs Xiaomi Snapchat vs Twitter Facebook vs Microsoft and more
SMART MONEY
Why mobile payments are big business in SA
GWYNETH KNOWS BEST HER BRAND IS POWERFUL AND DIVISIVE. CAN SHE BUILD A BUSINESS THAT MATTERS?
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YAHOO FOR MOBILE! CEO MARISSA MAYER’S PLANS TO REINVENT THE PORTAL COFFEE AND CODING WHY DEVELOPERS ARE MEETING FOR A CUPPA GREEN CARS CAN AUTOMAKERS CLEAN UP THEIR ACT?
I T IS MORE THAN A M AG A ZINE, I T'S A MOV EMEN T T H E D I G I TAL V E RS ION O F FAST COMPANY SOUTH AFRICA I S NO W AVAI L ABLE O N APPL E I PAD A ND AN D R O I D TAB L E TS
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HOW I GET IT DONE
App dominion Maritz and Wells’s EskomSePush won the People’s Choice and Best Breakthrough Developer App accolades at the 2015 MTN Business App Awards.
Take a load off H ER M A N M A R I T Z A N D DA N W ELL S’ S AWA R D -W I N N I N G A PP I S S H ED D I N G S O M E LI G H T O N E S KO M ’ S B L ACKO U T S CH ED U LE S INTERVIEW BY EVANS MANYONGA
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You’re about to make a much-needed cup of coffee when the power goes off. Eskom’s at it again… Many South Africans are never sure when their area will be experiencing loadshedding, or whether or not the stage will change during the day. Others simply can’t figure out the online roster. Well, you needn’t be left in the dark anymore. EskomSePush has been widely credited as the best loadshedding app in South Africa, having
become one of the most downloaded—more times than either Facebook Messenger or Instagram. The free app enables users to choose from over 50 000 areas for which to get loadshedding push notifications and predictions. The app also recently won the People’s Choice and Best Breakthrough Developer App accolades at the MTN Business App Awards. We caught up with the two co-developers,
Herman Maritz and Dan Wells, who work on the project in their free time.
Fa s t C o m p a ny S A : W h a t is your core area of ex p e r t i s e ? Maritz: I’ve been working on banking apps for the last five years. I’m part of a team who built multiple local and international banking apps. Mobile has always been a big interest and hobby of mine. Wells: Mine is
Electronic Engineering from Stellenbosch University. I wanted to build very loud speakers. I fell in love with mobile technology while studying. Wells: I have a master’s in Computer Science from Rhodes University. I’ve been tinkering with computers since I was very young; it seemed the logical choice to gain a deeper understanding of the field.
How did the idea for EskomSePush come about?
systems integration: understanding how various complex systems communicate with each other in the most efficient and effective ways. I often refer to myself as a “hacker”—not with the malicious connotations but because of my method of working. I like getting my hands dirty to fully understand a system.
W h a t d i d y o u s t u d y, a n d w hy ? Maritz: I have a master’s degree in Electrical and
Maritz: When loadshedding was becoming a reality back in December, we decided we didn’t want to get caught by surprise during the holiday season. So we used an app called PushBullet to send push notifications to ourselves and allowed others to subscribe to our channel to also be informed. Dan wrote the server code (schedules and PushBullet integration) in Python and I did the branding (icon, etc). EskomSePush was the obvious name: push notifications for Eskom’s loadshedding. We hosted the server for $5 and it was just a few hours of fun work. At the time, it was available only for Stellenbosch (where we work) and the City of Cape Town (where we live). We had 70 users on the system—mostly friends and family.
Wa s t h e n a m e “ E s ko m S e P u s h” intentional? Maritz: Obviously we see the pun [on a well-known Cape Flats insult]. But it’s never been about that; it was never meant as an insult to Eskom. It’s just a funny name that makes sense: It’s push notifications (the
technology) for Eskom’s loadshedding. Simple! For us, it’s about making South Africans smile every time loadshedding starts.
How did you actually create the app? Maritz: In February we heard on the radio that loadshedding was going to be with us for a long time. PushBullet was fine for small scale, but we wanted something better. So we decided to build an app for that. Dan added more municipality schedules and we ended up with more than 30 000 areas on the system. The first version of the app was written in one weekend using Ionic Framework. (I highly recommend using Ionic for building apps quickly.) After I got married in April, Dan and I spent more weekends on the app, iterating quickly to get a good app on the App Store. By the end of May, we had more than 100 000 users. It was amazing!
What is your biggest m o t i va t i o n i n l i f e ? Maritz: Bacon! But if I had to dig deeper, I’d say it’s about making an impact. I really enjoy building products that customers love to use and talk about. I can’t get enough of that feeling I get when it happens. It’s something special. Wells: I agree—it’s about impact! It’s also about constant movement forward: If something is not working out and you’ve tried to fix it, cut it and move on to the next big thing.
WE ASKED THE CO-DEVELOPERS ABOUT THEIR INTERE STS OTHER THAN TECHNOLOGY
HERMAN MARITZ Favourite app OLX. I work at OLX now. Watch this space.
Favourite book The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein. I enjoy books about time travel.
Favourite pastime Mountain biking with my wife. When I’m not feeling lazy.
Favourite saying My wife always says, “Jy moet die lewe vir jouself lekker maak”—“You must make your own life awesome”. No one else is going to do it for you. South Africa is not a boring place; there’s a lot we can fix by just doing projects to improve our own lives.
DAN WELLS Favourite app At the moment? Slack and Trello: Slack for team communication, and Trello for organising lists of things.
Favourite book The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. Make your life an adventure—no matter what. Don’t sit back and watch it go by.
Favourite pastime I take full advantage of living in Cape Town, and love visiting wine farms—there’s such diversity, which changes every year.
Favourite saying
Who are your models of creative thinking? Maritz: All app developers
“No matter where you go, there you are.” Take advantage of opportunities, make the most of them and smile!
who go for users over money. Don’t focus on the money from the start. Do it the WhatsApp way: Get the users, and money will follow.
H o w m a ny p e o p l e a r e currently utilising your app? How are your systems coping? Maritz: We’ve had 260 000 downloads so far. About 120 000 users use the app on a daily basis; normally 70 000 people open the app at the same time when loadshedding starts.
What separates your app from the rest? Maritz: The name certainly helps us stand out. But for us, it’s all about making the information simple and easy to understand. That’s what separates us from the rest. The fact that we are merely two guys trying our best in our free time also makes it interesting.
What have you done y o u r w ay, a n d h o w h a s it helped you get to w h e r e y o u a r e t o d ay ? Maritz: Making the app about getting users, not money. We focus on getting as many users as possible and keeping them happy. We’re just two guys, but we’ve replied to over 7 000 emails in our free time. Our approach is similar to punk rock: 1. Keep it simple. 2. Have some guts. 3. Get and keep fans. 4. Experiment. 5. Have fun. Maybe we’ll sell out one day. We’ll have to wait and see...
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Help is on the way T H E R E ’ S N OT H I N G A RT I F I C I A L A B O U T T H E P O W E R O F A S S I ST I V E I N T E L L I G E N C E
“I
’D LOVE TO GET together. Cc’ing Clara on our end to set a time on the calendar.”
A lot of people I know now have an assistant named Clara. And each of these Claras is remarkably deft at cutting through that often unending chain of time-wasting emails that result from trying to make an appointment. This is not some strange fluke of social science. People named Clara are not preternaturally gifted meeting makers. Clara is a digital avatar, a special blend of data, machine learning and algorithms which is backed by humans and designed to make sure you never have an embarrassing (or devastating) calendar failure. It’s the product of a stealthy startup named, yep, Clara Labs. For less than $400 a month, anyone can have an assistant that is, as Clara promises, three times more reliable than a human. That puts Clara Labs at the forefront of a movement to augment our increasingly overwhelming daily lives with what I call assistive intelligence. This feels like science fiction only until you realise that we’re already using many products and services that are preparing us for assistive intelligence. When the Internet exploded in size in the late 1990s, we abandoned human-powered tools, such as Yahoo’s website directory and bookmarking favourite sites in our browser, in favour of letting Google ‘remember’
OM MALIK
everywhere we wanted to go online. Once our capacity to recall, sort and save bumped against the sheer size and scope of the Internet itself, we needed machines to help. As recently as the early 2000s, humans had limited ways to stay in touch with everyone from our school days, our neighbourhoods, our extended families and our previous jobs. The social web, starting with Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook, has been a software-based augmentation of our need for human connection. Facebook (as well as LinkedIn) helps us organise the thousands of people we meet in a lifetime, supplementing our memories and ability to catch every bit of news with algorithmically driven birthday reminders, baby notices, marriage albums and career moves. Some people quibble with the outsize power we’ve given these services to prompt us to connect with the people we know, but their relationship-management skills are simply a fact of modern life. As more and more of our existence intersects with the digital domain, humans are undoubtedly going to need even more help. Gyroscopes, compasses, accelerometers, embedded microprocessors, radios and sensors are cheap. They are all around us— in our phones, our wearables and our connected appliances, to name just a few. The proliferation of sensors is what author Chris Anderson calls the “peace dividend of the smartphone wars”, and they are all throwing off data streams. We aren’t going to be able to manage all these streams. Machines will have to talk to machines to help us do our jobs and live smarter. Tools that plug into a car’s data port to track how you drive are intriguing, for example, but consider the efforts of Sascha Simon, the former head of the advanced planning group at MercedesBenz, and now the founder of Apio Systems. Simon and company are building a platform that takes all sorts of sensor data from your phone and your car, and sends it to its cloud to make sense of it all. The goal: Avoid accidents and let even partially self-driving vehicles be aware of what’s happening around them. Is this artificial intelligence or just technology at its best? I opt for the latter. Om Malik is a partner at True Ventures, an early-stage VC firm. He blogs at Om.com and interviews luminaries about tech and culture at Pi.co.
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Illustration by Bratislav Milenkovic
Daniel Salo
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Chuck it W H Y D I D CO N V ER S E M E S S W I T H I T S I CO N I C—A N D CO N S I S T EN T LY LU CR AT I V E—S N E A K ER , T H E CH U CK TAY LO R A LL S TA R ? I T CO U LD N ’ T A FFO R D N OT TO BY JOHN BROWNLEE
Photographs by Matthew Monteith
BIG IDEA
WITH HIS SLICKED-BACK silver
hair, ear stud and ace-ofspades wrist tattoo, Richard Copcutt would fit in just as well backstage at the old CBGB hard-core punk music club in Manhattan as he does in Converse’s new Boston HQ. After all, a brand with as much counterculture cred as the Converse All Star needs a real live rebel at the helm— now more than ever.
In late July, Converse released the first major redesign of its classic Chuck Taylor All Star sneaker in nearly 100 years. The company has experimented periodically with new colours (“citrus”, “beach glass”) and materials (denim, leather), but this is more than a style revamp. It’s a complete sole-up rethink, an honest-to-god Chuck Taylor sequel: the Chuck II. Only an iconoclast like Copcutt, the 49-year-old vice president/ general manager of Converse’s All Star division, would dare screw around with a product formula that is to footwear what Coca-Cola is to soft drinks, let alone slap a Coke II–style roman numeral at the end. “I’m kind of an ageing punk rocker, I guess,” Copcutt says, which is rather appropriate. The 98-year-old sneaker, originally designed for basketball, was co-opted in the ’70s and ’80s by bands such as Blondie, the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and has been the de facto sneaker of the counterculture ever since. Copcutt knows what this demographic may say about a redesign: “Don’t f*** with my Chucks.” The Chuck II definitely still looks like a Chuck, with a few luxe touches. A lining made from a foam-like material called Lunarlon, developed by Nike— which acquired Converse in 2003—heightens the cushion. The All Star patch is stitched on,
Time is a flat circle The Chuck II may look like the original, but it’s been rebuilt from the sole up.
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Crowd-pleaser
not ironed. Padding in the tongue and outer canvas helps the shoe hold its shape a little better than the Chuck I. Put them on, though, and the feel is like a whole new shoe. So why take the risk? Copcutt’s boss, Converse CEO Jim Calhoun, says it’s because the brand is bigger than ever. Converse reported $1.7 billion (R21.8 billion) in revenue in 2014, with Chuck Taylor All Stars “by far” the biggest part of that business, Calhoun says. Converse sold more than 70 million pairs of Chucks last year, 35 times its yearly sales of a decade ago. All of this good news makes Calhoun nervous. “Business is full of stories of companies that threw that last party just when their world was about to burn,” he says. Now was the right time for Converse to disrupt the Chuck, Calhoun says, because it couldn’t afford for someone else to come along and do it. Calhoun’s mandate to the All Star team was simple: Assume we don’t know our customers as well as we think we do—get to know them better. Copcutt did so by playing roadie to his son’s London-based rock band, Zoax. He spent weeks at a time tagging along as they played beside bands with names like The Howling, Axewound, and Cancer Bats, asking everyone who’d talk to him what they wanted from a pair of Chucks. A lot of them wanted the same performance-based improvements from their All Stars that athletes want from their Air Jordans: more cushioning, more comfort, more support and more traction. But if it didn’t still look like a Chuck, they wouldn’t wear it. Converse’s brand VP Geoff Cotrill was getting to know customers too. Cotrill is in charge of Rubber Tracks, a Conversebranded recording studio with locations in Brooklyn and Boston that offers free time to local
Copcutt, VP/GM of Chuck Taylor All Stars, is in charge of keeping Converse’s fans happy.
musicians. Rubber Tracks isn’t just a nice thing for the recording community. It’s also a way for Converse to stay connected to its core consumers—something the company learnt the importance of the hard way. “In the ’70s and ’80s, the Chuck was being adopted by musicians and artists, and we were actually fighting them,” Cotrill says. “We were saying, ‘No, we’re a sports brand!’ The reason we got where we are today is because creative people adopted us almost against our will.” When Cotrill and Copcutt compared notes back at Converse headquarters, they were faced with a challenge: deliver the performance improvements
“Business is full of stories of companies that threw that last party just when their world was about to burn,” says Calhoun.
Chuck fans were asking for without sacrificing the look they loved. The two execs put Converse’s design team, led by ex-skater and metal sculptor Damion Silver, to the delicate task. With a price tag of $70 (R900)—versus $50 (R650) for the original—the finished product is an upgrade, but still accessible for Converse’s core customers. One question remains. “Now that there’s a Chuck II, is there going to be a Chuck III, a Chuck IV, a Chuck V, and so on?” Cotrill asks. “We’ll see.” There are always needs that can be met. For instance, “People keep telling us they don’t wear their Chucks when it rains.” Sounds like the answer is “yes”.
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When in Rome... Today, the mantra for global brands is simple: Act local or die. Doing so is where it gets tricky
By Gabriella Rego
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Glocalising is the adaptation of a global product or service to suit a specific culture, location and market where it is sold. All the multinationals are doing so, some well and others not. The key to successful glocalising? Correct analysis of data and the death of assumptions.
You’ve probably seen glocalising happen more often than you realise. McDonald’s is a prime example of a global brand that has successfully cracked the model. Its brand and standard offering remain the same around the world, but it takes things one step further by tailoring its menu to suit the cultures and needs of each city it enters into. Coca-Cola is another brand that has done this well: positioning its product as though it is the lifeblood of the local culture in which it finds itself—right around the world. With the rapid progression of digital and the rise of social media, more and more companies worldwide are acknowledging the need (and value) to relook their marketing and digital strategies to ensure they glocalise effectively. A one-size-fits-all approach is not enough these days. STA Travel is the world’s largest youth and student travel company known for its innovative and quirky marketing campaigns, as well as unique worldwide travel and adventure options for travellers. It employs more than 2 000 people in 11 countries, and works with franchisees, joint ventures and licensed partners in a further 52 countries. A global brand with a footprint this large needs to ensure its business model and approach is glocalised effectively. Anna Smith, STA Travel South Africa product and marketing manager, affirms that a global brand cannot expect to be recognised and valued optimally without ensuring its product, services and brand are tailored to its local audience. “Our global product and marketing teams work alongside our divisional teams to develop product, and a brand that appeals to students and youth in each local market. A global concept is only global if it appeals to all. It’s a fantastic opportunity, but the task shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is imperative for brands to understand their local audience from a local’s perspective, and only then can they tailor their global strategy accordingly.” As much as brands both locally and internationally are having to work on a glocalising model, agencies around the world are having to do the same to ensure they can meet their clients’ ever changing needs. There are agencies here at home, working on the model to be able to compete on an international level—and impressively so. Flume is a South African digital-marketing agency that creates processes and models whereby it targets online users for Flume’s clients through paid media and digital campaigns. With clients such as Old Mutual Group (based in London) and Old Mutual Wealth UK (based in Southampton), Flume is an example of a local agency that has started glocalising its processes and models. What does this mean, though? Flume’s recent work with Old Mutual saw the digital agency consolidating the multinational’s global social media presence. It was tasked with establishing an architecture that is optimal from a consumer and a back-end perspective, on each of the social networks on which Old Mutual has a presence—in over 20 countries around the world. Jacques du Bruyn, MD at Flume, explains that the agency had to take a global view of Old
Mutual’s policy and brand, and adapt that for each country. In other words, it had to glocalise. “Old Mutual is based in London, but with business units sitting in the US, Columbia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Italy (to name a few), it’s critical to do research and understand each market specifically so as to integrate Old Mutual from a global level— while at the same time adjusting to fit the local environment. We’ve had to do a deep dive into their [UK and Zimbabwe] markets by analysing local data, consumption trends, as well as learn how to adapt for a completely different audience. “The challenge of thinking glocally aids us in innovation and fresh ideas. In digital marketing, you can never make assumptions; that’s why data is so important to us. It helps us understand an audience we’ve never targeted,” he adds. MD at Halo Advertising, Dean Oelschig, affirms that when you are working with a client or brand in a market outside of South Africa, it is essential to deep dive into the culture and habits of that particular market for optimal success. Over the past four years, Halo has worked with the Commercial Bank of Africa in Kenya in handling its above-the-line strategy, and has had to adapt its approach to suit the Kenyan market. “The most interesting fact about working in East Africa is how different you have to think about banking, money and spending. It’s as if East Africa skipped the debitand credit card culture and jumped straight into mobile money. Everyone uses payments and money transfer via mobile. Bank-to-bank
Flume’s Jacques du Bruyn (left) and Anna Smith from STA Travel South Africa (below) agree that in marketing, one can never make assumptions—one has to understand the local audience from the locals’ perspective.
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“I cannot imagine working on a brand in another country without spending an enormous amount of time understanding the people, their cultures, dreams and ambitions,” says Dean Oelschig from Halo Advertising.
local markets. They may feel they can ‘relate’ to a certain market, or perhaps have a ‘recipe’ for success, and often assume that campaigns they have used locally will work in another country. “Being an agency in South Africa, we consider ourselves very African, and yet we have made a lot of foolish assumptions about the way a particular target market consumes brands, themes and products in countries as close as Zambia, Zimbabwe and Kenya,” Oelschig admits. “In South Africa, we see coffee as a very aspirational product, particularly in light of the third wave of coffee experienced recently. Kenyans consider coffee a commodity, one produced at possibly the same level as wheat or maize. Sevens Rugby, from a South African perspective, is seen as a fun alternative to 15-man rugby—whereas in Kenya, Sevens Rugby is a sport as aspirational as golf or polo,” he explains. Du Bruyn echoes these sentiments: When dealing with crossborder markets, one has to have a change of paradigm. “You cannot approach the market with your recipe for success; you have to pretend you have no past successes because past success can sometimes taint our approach as marketers. The nature of digital means we can run campaigns remotely. However, what we forget is time-zone differences. Your 8-to-5 just became a 24-hour day,” he notes. Flume’s work for Old Mutual Zimbabwe forced the company to take a step back and really decide how best to tackle the market online. It recognised that most of its successful campaigns in South Africa would need tweaking, or may not work at all.
When it comes to deep diving into international communities, data (more so, the right kind of data—and a lot of data) is essential. Du Bruyn emphasises that it is vital to speak to local and international data companies to provide the right information, particularly from a digital perspective—and from there, to analyse, analyse, analyse. “With Old Mutual UK, we did a deep dive into the culture of the audience we were targeting [in the UK]. We found a few case studies and life examples that we worked on as archetypes of the people we were targeting. When you know the culture and local environment [politics, geography etc.], then you’re able to paint a really good picture. From there, your targeting, creative and delivery fall into place. That said, data is pretty much the key to successful glocalisation.” Oelschig affirms that advertising and branding is 100% about resonating with the insights of the people in a specific market. “Generally, some brands can survive across borders, but there are tiny, almost invisible nuances that exist from country to country. I cannot imagine working on a brand in another country without spending an enormous amount of time understanding the people, their cultures, dreams and ambitions.”
With the rapid progression of digital and the rise of social media, more and more companies worldwide are acknowledging the need (and value) to relook their marketing and digital strategies to ensure they glocalise effectively. transfers take too long, so the normal transaction takes place from my bank account to my phone, from my phone to your phone or a service provider, and then from your phone to your bank account. Mobile money is also accepted anywhere—for a plumber, a taxi or even a golf bet (true story)—and creates a lot of opportunity and learnings for us in the way a user really engages with a device. Kenya also has over 50 banks, and with choice comes a greater need to find products that solve real needs for customers.” It’s easy to understand that agencies and brands can get stuck in a rut when targeting
This then begs the question: Can brands add real value without glocalising and taking into account the local environments? Du Bruyn thinks not. “Brands can’t simply change a culture; they have to portray themselves as part of a culture. It’s essential to adapt to a location. The other side of the coin is services—adapting a service or service philosophy to fit a local culture and target audience.” When looking at the rapid growth and progression of digital, it’s clear it has changed the glocalisation game. Ten years ago, we were still writing emails and posting letters. Today we have Facebook and Twitter, which means we instantly know what’s going on around the world. The progression of digital is a big factor inevitably driving glocalisation; the faster digital technology advances, the faster brands become glocal.
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80 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A SEPTEMBER 2015
The New Rivalries Six of the fiercest, most unexpected business battles that are changing the future of technology, social media and live news Photographs by Mauricio Alejo
Forget what you thought you knew about competition. Companies are no longer content to define themselves by a single market or expertise, and that means rivals are everywhere. As the rate of disruption across the globe reaches a blistering pace, rivalry is not simply a matter of assessing winners and losers. It is a prism for identifying compelling flashpoints in the innovation economy— from China to the EU, drones to social media, virtual reality to live news—and offers essential clues to navigating the shifting business landscape.
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Apple vs Xiaomi FIGHTING OVER ONE OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SMARTPHONE MARKETS—AND BEYOND
When the new iOS 9 comes out this September, Apple’s iPhone Maps app will finally offer public-transit directions. At first, the feature will hit 10 cities worldwide. Except in China, where it’s launching in 300-plus localities at once. This is just the latest indication of how much Apple treasures China and its booming class of affluent consumers, which CEO Tim Cook expects to become Apple’s largest market. If he’s right, it will be because the company has fended off one of the most unstoppable forces the tech industry has ever seen: Xiaomi. Founded by serial entrepreneur Lei Jun in 2010 and based in Beijing, Xiaomi announced its first smartphone in 2011. Three years later, research firm IDC declared Xiaomi to be the industry’s third-biggest player by global unit sales, trailing only Samsung and Apple. Nearly all of the 61 million handsets it produced in 2014 were for the Chinese market. In the West, Xiaomi has a reputation for cribbing the iPhone’s stylistic cues and applying them to dirt-cheap phones. That’s clearly Apple design chief Jony Ive’s take: “I think it’s theft, and it’s lazy,” he snapped, when asked about Xiaomi at a conference last October. Xiaomi is doing too many interesting things to be dismissed as an Apple wannabe, though. Its Mi phones appeal to a “geeky, typically younger sort of customer who can’t afford a top-of-the-line Apple or Samsung phone,” says Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery blog is followed by tech insiders. Xiaomi sells Android devices with fast chips and high-res screens on its website (often via flash sales) and forgoes profits on
hardware, instead generating them from its marketplace for apps and other content. It rolls out weekly software updates based on input from its online community of fans, who propose tweaks and features. And it’s using its direct-marketing muscle to enter new product categories, from 4K (ultra-HD) TVs to air purifiers. None of this has prevented Apple from thriving in China, where the iPhone’s powerful image as a luxury item helps it continue to command a high price tag. In fact, for two quarters in a row, Apple has sold more smartphones in the country than Xiaomi has. The companies’ global ambitions are starting to collide, as Xiaomi has begun experimenting in markets outside China. It recently moved to sell accessories like headphones in the US and Europe, though many factors that make it a phenom back home, such as Lei’s celebrity, are moot here. Xiaomi also lacks the patent portfolio required to fight intellectual-property lawsuits from Apple and others.
Its value proposition—high specs at low prices—may not resonate in fully developed economies. In the US, Xiaomi’s ideal customer “just doesn’t exist”, says Thompson. “Most geeks and enthusiasts can afford an iPhone.” A more promising battleground for Xiaomi could be India, where it has been wildly promoting the Mi4 and is setting up local manufacturing (to bring the price tag of its devices even lower), and where the freespending types who snap up iPhones are scarcer than in China. There’s also Brazil, which Xiaomi entered by storm in June with its $160 (about R2 075) Redmi 2. (The iPhone retails for more than $1 000 (almost R13 000) in that country.) As Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, puts it: “They’re very big markets nowhere near saturated, where Xiaomi’s strategy could do really well.”—Harry McCracken
Snapchat vs Twitter FIGHTING FOR PERMANENCE IN EVANESCENT SOCIAL MEDIA
S N A P C H AT
Daily Active Users Nearly 100 million
The enemy of Facebook’s enemy is not a friend but maybe an even bigger rival. Both Snapchat and Twitter have been defined as potential threats to Facebook, but they’re really competing against one another. Both services court media companies for content— especially video—and both see their greatest business and cultural potential in coalescing massive audiences to share a live experience together, whether it’s an awards show or a music festival. Which platform—to share what’s happening now—is built to last?
Approx. 150 million
Daily Activity 700 million snaps
500 million tweets
Largest Demographic 18 to 24 (37%)
25 to 35 (22%)
Next Big Thing Ads that don’t get in the way of a good time
Project Lightning— curated channels for news and live events
Advertisers’ Wish Better targeting; e-commerce
Better targeting; e-commerce
Secret Weapon Live Stories, which incorporates users’ snaps into a single sizzle reel
Mobile live-streaming service Periscope
Source image: ©iStock.com/DrPAS (feathers)
Disconcerting Leadership Signal
Illustration by Matt Chase
CEO Evan Spiegel’s annoyed responses to anodyne questions
Interim CEO Jack Dorsey’s Lincoln beard
Outlook Will likely continue to struggle to discover winning ad formats until it builds more features so that ads can be unobtrusive but effective.
Will likely continue to struggle with user growth until it’s further down its features to-do list and it launches its first-ever ad campaign.—Matt McCue
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Vice vs CNN FIGHTING TO BE THE MOST TRUSTED B L A C K T- S H I RT I N N E W S
On the surface, Vice and CNN appear to be polar opposites. Over the past 35 years, CNN has become the go-to channel for breaking news, while Vice has spent its 21-year existence finding creative ways to curse. Even their respective leaders bristle at the comparison. Last year, Vice co-founder and CEO Shane Smith made his feelings about CNN clear when he said, “Everything they do is a fucking disaster.” Meanwhile, CNN president Jeff Zucker shrugged in response, “They produce 15 hours of television [a month]. We’re going to do that between now and tonight.” The sniping belies the fact that Vice and CNN are pursuing the same pool of revenue and remarkably similar strategies. The bulk of CNN’s earnings come from cable-subscriber fees (R7.8 billion in 2014) and advertising (R4.3 billion). But this won’t last forever.
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“CNN is essentially a forced subscription service,” says Newsonomics media analyst, Ken Doctor. As the cable bundle erodes, “its half-dollar per subscriber will be in jeopardy.” Meanwhile, global digital ad revenues are predicted to outstrip those of US TV by 2017. Vice, which was birthed as a free magazine in Montreal, now specialises in documentaries that feature immersive reporting, such as journalist Medyan Dairieh’s infiltration of ISIS. Similarly, Zucker’s investment in original CNN programming—most notably Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown—provides a library of content that won’t grow stale with the next news cycle and can be disseminated and monetised across TV, mobile and the web. This bet on personalities who can breathe life into stories on topics from Iran to bitcoin is a slightly cleaned up version of
Vice’s programming. The networks’ distribution strategies are also practically identical. Both CNN and Vice had inaugural Snapchat Discover channels, and Facebook tapped each company to help it promote the creation of more content within the social network. Vice’s Smith and his co-founders have a huge lead in integrating advertising without scaring off their fans. In 2006, they started Virtue, an in-house agency that produces content for brands that Vice viewers still want to watch. Vice’s tech site, Motherboard, originated as a partnership with Dell, and Unilever is sponsoring Broadly, a female-focused video channel. CNN is playing catch-up; in June, its parent company, Turner Broadcasting, announced Courageous: an in-house content studio that will use “journalistic instinct” to “produce relevant storytelling” for brands. While CNN tries to match its rival digitally, Vice is chasing the big dollars that are still available in traditional TV. Vice will soon have its own channel (the former History Channel spin-off, H2) through its 2014 deal with A&E, which will push lifestyle programming. Vice also scored a big deal with HBO to continue its documentary series on the pay network— and add a nightly news show on streaming service, HBO Now. The company even has TV partners in France and Italy, along with a R1.2-billion deal with Canada’s Rogers Communications to create a Vice TV channel. As a result, Vice is projecting R11.8 billion in revenue for 2015, according to The New York Times. With its hold on subscriber fees, strong ratings among younger viewers, and embrace of native advertising and digital video, CNN could maintain its dominance as the destination news brand of the future. Vice’s business model, though, is built for growth and shouldn’t be underestimated. So the fight comes down to this: Which tattooed, ageing rebel in a black T-shirt do you want to be your guide to understanding today’s world—Bourdain or Smith? —Jeff Beer
Facebook vs Microsoft FIGHTING TO ESTABLISH THE NEXT EPOCH-SHIFTING COMPUTER INTERFACE
Stunning 3D digital imagery, delivered directly to your eyeballs: This is the future of computing, say Facebook and Microsoft, which are placing big bets on virtual reality to be the new way we’ll interact with technology. Rift—from Oculus VR, which Facebook bought last year for $2 billion (R21.3 billion then)—hits shelves the first quarter of 2016. Microsoft’s HoloLens is now expected to arrive next year at the earliest. The device you prefer depends on how much reality you can handle. T H E T E C H N O L O GY
THE EXPERIENCE
K E Y A P P L I C AT I O N S
OTHER COMPETITION
U N E X P E C T E D PA R T N E R
P O T E N T I A L P I T FA L L
Oculus Rift Virtual-reality classic—a headset that completely immerses the wearer in a digital alien planet, for example.
Mind-bending. I was a believer from the moment I strapped on a prototype and was transported to outer space.
Games and movies. But Rift could potentially transform social networking, education and— inevitably—porn.
HTC’s Vive VR headset ships in November; Sony’s PlayStationbased Project Morpheus is due next year.
Microsoft! Rift comes with the company’s Xbox controller and will eventually stream Xbox games.
While hard-core gamers own the pricey, powerful PCs that Rift requires, many potential customers do not.
Fun and fascinating, but the version I tried at a recent conference evinced a cruder holographic effect than an earlier prototype did.
Minecraft (which Microsoft bought last September), and practical tasks like prototyping products and teaching
Magic Leap, the secretive Florida startup that has raised R7.6 billion for its own mixedreality product.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose scientists are using HoloLens to explore Martian terrain in simulated form.
The slick HoloLens promotional videos are splashier than the actual experience, which could raise expectations (to its detriment).—HM
Microsoft HoloLens Mixed reality—lenses that overlay 3D ima g es onto the real world, like a ‘hologram’ of a building sitting on an actual table.
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DJI vs GoPro FIGHTING TO BE KING OF THE CONSUMER DRONES
Google vs Verizon
The Stakes The two behemoths want to control the way you get Internet access, because that’s the gateway to serving up digital video and mobile advertising. Google wants to pressure Verizon’s wirel ess and high-speed home Internet FiOS businesses; Verizon aims to usurp Google’s mobile OS dominance with Android and its video hegemony with YouTube.
Key Moves In April, Google launched an “experiment” called Project Fi, a simplified wireless service that offers perks like cash back for unused data. In May, Verizon made a bet on video and ad tech by spending about R57 billion to acq uire AOL. “You’ll see us do more of always-on video, streaming 24/7,” says AOL CEO Tim Arms trong. (Translation: Verizon wants more revenue from ads and wireless data.)
Advantage Google. Previous experiments such as Fiber (ultra-high-speed home Internet) and Chromecast (Google has sold 17 million of the devices, which stream content from web to TV) give the ad giant two ways to squeeze or work around Verizon. Fi now gives it a third. All of them together could choke off Verizon’s dream of reaping billions from combining a telecom with an ad-based media business. —Ainsley O’Connell
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Imagine two drones crashing into each other mid-flight. How cool would that footage be? Now imagine DJI, the Chinese-based company that’s the world’s largest drone seller, on a collision course with GoPro, the American maker of the world’s most popular action cameras. This smash-up is going to be even more spectacular to watch. Last year, DJI and GoPro were helping each other rise to their current heights. DJI encouraged people who bought its drones to use GoPros to shoot aerial footage, and GoPro showcased the most stunning drone videos. In fact, the two were in talks to produce a GoPro-branded drone, according to DJI CEO Frank Wang, but Wang claims that GoPro demanded two-thirds of the profits, and he thought DJI deserved the 2-1 split in its favour. Now DJI is making action cameras, and GoPro is pursuing its own drone. This friendship-turned-rivalry is less about the short-term money from a joint venture and more about the long-term profits from owning the platform for a new generation of recreational devices. The consumer drone market is expected to soar from R7.9 billion in 2014 revenue to R62.2 billion by the end of the decade, according to Radiant Insights. DJI, which will reportedly generate close to R13 billion in revenue this year, views drones as the focal point of the skirmish and is working furiously to improve its technology. It has already released three new models within the past year, and in May it announced a R129-million SkyFund with the venturecapital firm, Accel Partners, to invest in
startup building tools to improve almost every aspect of drones’ reliability and intelligence, from batteries to navigation. A month later, DJI released a new drone that features an automatic obstacle-avoidance system. In that same time, it’s been iterating on its own camera. GoPro, with its first drone slated for release in the first half of 2016, faces the extreme challenge of outdoing what DJI will have on the market—which will be several times better than today’s state-of-the-art. GoPro is expected to generate more than R23 billion in 2015 revenue, and though it
Source image: ©iStock.com/dyoma (scissors)
FIGHTING TO GRAB DIGITAL VIDEO DOLLARS
Illustrations by Matt Chase (Google vs. Verizon), MUTI (DJI vs. GoPro)
may be well behind in creating a drone to rival DJI’s line-up, it has a head start in every other aspect of building out a complete experience. “They have an amazing distribution channel,” says Mike Winn, CEO of software maker, DroneDeploy. “Think about how many GoPro end caps there are [at retail].” And, most crucially, there’s GoPro’s strong brand and user community. GoPro is using these assets to evolve into a media business, with the hardware merely the kindling to ignite users’ ability to create and share videos. The drone is the ultimate GoPro accessory, albeit one that
T HE DRONE IS T HE ULT IM AT E GOPRO A CCESSOR Y, A L BE I T ONE T H AT W IL L BE MORE E X PENSI V E T H A N A C A MER A .
will be more expensive than a camera. GoPro has made several recent moves—including partnering with YouTube to help creators shoot 360-degree panoramic video and hiring Charlotte Koh, Hulu’s former head of original series, to broker deals with Hollywood studios—that are also all about the content, not the tools. Even after GoPro releases its drone, DJI will likely continue to dominate that market. DJI may win the air war, but when it comes to the ground game, GoPro remains the one to beat. —Daniel Terdiman
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WOMEN AT WORK
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ROANNA WILLIAMS
Growing forward W O M E N N E E D TO C LO S E T H E S E L F -A S S U R A N C E G E N D E R G A P I F T H E Y R E A L LY WA N T TO S U C C E E D I N B U S I N E S S
“W
HAT WOULD YOU do if you weren’t
afraid?” A very powerful question posed to women in Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead; a question I feel many women are still not yet comfortable to answer. The biggest threat to women’s success in their careers is a lack of self-confidence. This may explain why, despite progress, women are still woefully underrepresented at the senior executive level in the advertising world—with only 3% of creative directors being female. There are a few exciting initiatives such as See It Be It at Cannes this year and the Ipsos Girls’ Lounge, which are attempting to address the imbalance in the industry. Despite these initiatives, however, we as women need to help ourselves and nudge forward. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, generated from people working for some of the most successful and progressive organisations in the world, women rated higher overall as better leaders than men. Hard work and natural talents are no longer the only necessities required to make it to the top nowadays. Success correlates just as closely to confidence as it does to competence. We need to work on closing the self-assurance gender gap if we really want to make it. Women feel most confident when they are overqualified, have overtrained for a marathon, or have edited a document over a hundred times. They will do something only once they are certain they are perfectly equipped. Studies have shown this is largely a female issue. This ‘flawless attitude’ has become a hurdle we cannot get past. Perfectionism, therefore, is the enemy of Great—and it is not doing anything to build our confidence. We end up sitting on the sidelines while our male colleagues step forward and take risks.
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BY FOCUSING ON REGULARLY SHIFTING NEGATIVE BEHAVIOUR AND THOUGHT PATTERNS INTO SELF-AFFIRMING ONES, WE ADJUST OUR DAILY MINDSET
The natural outcome of confidence is action. It has been proven that when women are made to act, even when insecure, they perform just as well as men do. I recall a time when I had to step forward. It felt like I was thrown into the spotlight and forced to play the lead in a movie without having seen the script. I was hesitant, but as soon as I had accepted the role and taken on the challenge, I felt invigorated, capable and grateful for the experience. This proved that actions and confidence are interrelated—like a virtuous circle. With confidence, our belief in our ability to succeed increases, and this belief stimulates action. Taking action strengthens our belief in our ability to succeed. The amygdala, the brain’s centre for processing memory and emotional reactions, is far more easily activated in women, according to an MRI study. We are far more likely to form strong emotional memories of negative events than men, focusing our attention on what has gone wrong. Men tune out criticism and let in praise, while women tend to do the opposite. We make one small mistake and dwell on it for hours and hours— an assured confidence killer. I have been in a personal battle with self-confidence most of my life. I am truly grateful to be part of a team whose core purpose is growth. Through personal growth, I have developed a deeper awareness of my self-belief and I am now able to focus on turning it into my greatest asset. It empowers me to step into situations I would never normally have, growing me into the leader I dream of being as well as the person I have always wanted to be. Because of scientific studies of neuroplasticity, our brains thankfully have the proven ability to change from experience over time. So, by focusing on regularly shifting negative behaviour and thought patterns into self-affirming ones, we adjust our daily mindset—changing our future leadership role into a very positive one. So I would like to leave you with one question: “What would you do if you were confident?” Roanna Williams started her career in advertising about 20 years ago, and is currently creative director at Joe Public Johannesburg. Being part of the creative leadership—under the guidance of chief creative officer Pepe Marais—she is instrumental in the output for clients such as Nedbank, Foodcorp, Clover and McCain.
FAST COMPANY PROMOTION
TOYOTA , TAKE TWO! It’s lights, camera, communication for the world’s most loved car
A new look The 2015 Corolla has been redesigned both inside and out.
The current-generation Corolla, introduced to the South African market in 2014, leads all automotive nameplates worldwide—and the latest iteration of this evergreen Toyota staple amply demonstrates why. For 2015, the Corolla kit list has grown across the board, with all models now getting daytime running lights (DRLs) as standard. The mid-spec 1.6 Sprinter—which features a sporty style twist courtesy of the anthracite alloys, boot-lid spoiler and Sprinter-unique colour palette and trim—has also been upgraded to include Toyota’s award-winning multimedia touchscreen display with reverse monitor and guidelines. Another new standard equipment item for all Corollas is Bluetooth functionality (and steering wheel switches). This feature has now been extended to include the entry-level Esteem models as well. As a refresher, take note of the generous on-board gadgetry across the Corolla range: Remote central locking for all models, with keyless Smart Entry on Exclusive models; Power mirrors and windows (front and rear); Follow-me-home light control system, and now DRLs as well; Ambient temperature indicator; On-board computer (TFT multi-information display screen on Exclusive); 60/40 split rear seats; Air conditioning (Esteem and Prestige); Automatic climate control (Sprinter and Exclusive); Leather upholstery on all models apart from the Esteem variants; Touchscreen display audio that incorporates AM/FM
Highlights Spec upgrade for the
2015 Corolla Daytime running lights now
standard across the range Sprinter model gets display
audio with reverse camera Bluetooth functionality for
entry-level Esteem variants
radio, CD/DVD/MP3 player, Bluetooth mobile phone connectivity with music-streaming facility, and USB port for the connection of portable music players, with the facility to display iPod album cover art; A back-guide monitor fitted as standard (Prestige, Exclusive and now Sprinter)—another segmentbeating feature! A standard audio system, aux in-port and USB port on Esteem models; Bluetooth hands-free system with steering controls on all models; Electrochromatic mirror (Exclusive); Rain-sensing wipers (Exclusive); Cruise control (Exclusive) The engine line-up comprises the exceptional 1.4-litre D-4D turbo-diesel (a 2015 SA Car of the Year finalist) and three petrol engines: a 1.33-litre Dual VVT-i unit, a 1.6-litre Dual VVT-i engine and another new powerplant, the 1.8-litre Dual VVT-i unit. All engines are fitted with six-speed manual transmissions, but the 1.6 and 1.8 petrol variants may optionally be mated to Toyota’s new, high-gear, highefficiency Multidrive S CVT automatic transmission. The good news is that the resultant price hike for the new-spec Corollas is much less than the value of the extra kit offered: The increases range from 0.5% up to a maximum of 1.3% (model-dependent). The new Corolla benefits from a threeyear/100 000km warranty and comes with a standard five-year/90 000km service plan. Service intervals are set at 15 000km (including the 1.4 D). The new models are supported by the ToyotaCare Roadside Assistance Programme, which entitles customers to 24-hour roadside assistance for ultimate peace of mind. www.toyota.co.za
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FAST BYTES Fast Company SA takes a look at the innovative new ideas and products currently making waves in South Africa and abroad
S A F LO R I S T DELIVERS B LO O M I N G G O O D TA L K AT TECH4AFRICA
Warp speed, Mr Sissou Stelios Sissou is South Africa’s fastest man over one kilometre, having broken the 1 000-metre barrier with an official speed of 346.3km/h at ODI Raceway on August, 9 and in the process shattering his 2014 record for streetlegal cars. The Gauteng businessman’s Bilstein-backed 1 200kW Nissan GT-R35 endured a morning of technical niggles at the annual One Kilometre Invitational before it all came together late in the day. With his own record of 337km/h and a strong contingent of GT-R35 rivals to beat, the car underwent further refinements compared to last year’s specification—primarily an upgrade to Bilstein’s sophisticated modular damper system (MDS) suspension, which allows fine-tuning of the shock absorbers. “The MDS is Bilstein’s flagship product for high-performance cars. It allows the driver to adjust key settings to achieve a desired result, whether the car is going to be used for drag racing, track days or even a gymkhana,” explains Ted Garstang, Bilstein MD. A jubilant Sissou added: “The morning was really character-building, and something went wrong on every run. But my final run was perfect: I went for a very conservative start strategy and didn’t use launch control—but when it did all hook up, it was like riding a rocket ship. Talk about warp speed!” The victory was an emphatic one, with the monster GT-R35 faster at the 800m mark than the next fastest car was at the end of the full kilometre.
ADAPTING SAP TO NEW MOBILE CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
A new enterprise edition of OutSystems Platform for SAP enables organisations to quickly and easily build advanced, end-to-end applications that make the most of their custom SAP implementation and that run across all devices and screens. The demand for mobile applications and the resulting need to design powerful new digital experiences are compelling companies to find better and faster ways of adapting SAP to new mobile customer journeys. Using OutSystems Platform on top of SAP provides a rapid and easy path to achieve true digitisation. Further, the tight integration between OutSystems Platform and SAP allows organisations to retain the major benefits of SAP, while delivering sophisticated applications with great user experiences.
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Tech4Africa is about breaking rules, upsetting trends and unsettling institutions; but first and foremost, it’s about content that gets people talking. SA Florist delivered one of the most captivating presentations at this year’s event. Founders Nicholas Wallander and Fraser Black wowed the audience with their intriguing story. It started with Wallander’s mom, an independent florist who had to shut down her business, and it grew to the crescendo of securing the biggest investment of the first series of Dragons’ Den South Africa. Titled, “The Deal behind the Deal”, the audience was told how SA Florist tamed all five Dragons including SA Internet entrepreneur Vinny Lingham, who joined in for a live Q&A via Skype from Silicon Valley. The underlying theme was the effect of the Internet on business. Black pointed to the three waves of the web, showing how the Internet has grown from about 1 billion users in the 1990s to 2 billion in 2000, to an unknown number today. He says the third wave, “The Internet of Things”, is where everything is connected via the web including tablets, cars, security systems, TVs, homes and watches. “With the increase in access to online retail, and the speed and ease with which transactions can now take place, what demands does this put on the supply chain? And demands for instant gratification are at an alltime high,” Black explained. With sufficient capital and valuable advice from the Dragons, SA Florist can now expand rapidly to keep pace with future trends. Wallander said modern business needs to think outside the box when it comes to distribution. Decentralisation of the industry, and connecting florists with customers in their area, are making waves all over the world. Since the Dragons’ investment, SA Florist’s online corporate tool is fast gaining interest and the company is entering other verticals and looking at international expansion.
G O L I V E F O R YO U R FA N S
Every day, athletes, musicians, politicians and other influencers use Facebook Mentions to share and connect with their fans, and more than 900 million people are connected to public figures on Facebook. The social network recently released Live, a new way for public figures to share live video from Mentions with their fans on Facebook. With Live, public figures can take fans behind the scenes, host a Q&A, share announcements, and more—all in real time. Whether you have an established fan base or want to build up your audience, Live is a new way for you to connect authentically with your fans in the moment. When you start a Live video, it will appear in News Feed for your fans to comment, like and share with their friends. People who have recently interacted with your posts will also receive a notification when you start your broadcast. During your broadcast, you’ll see the number of viewers and a real-time stream of comments from people tuning in. You can respond to comments live during the broadcast, or choose to hide comments. After your broadcast has ended, your video will be published to your Page so that fans who missed it can watch at a later time. Keep an eye out for live broadcasts from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Serena Williams, Luke Bryan, Ricardo Kaká, Ashley Tisdale, Lester Holt, Martha Stewart, Michael Bublé and others.
And the winner is... Following weeks of adjudicators sifting through contending apps, MTN Business announced the top six winners of the fourth annual MTN Business App of the Year challenge at the awards ceremony in Johannesburg in August. The competition seeks to unearth innovative and customised apps that will create a distinct customer experience. WumDrop was selected the winner in the Best Enterprise category and overall winner for its courier- and fleet-management application that allows users to pick up or deliver anything, anywhere and anytime—in real-time. Developed by Benjamin Claassen and Muneeb Samuels, the WumDrop app is available to business clients and can be incorporated in their e-commerce offering. Other winners include DStv Now in the Best Consumer App 2015 category; Vula Mobile scooped the Most Innovative App 2015 category; CPUT Mobile walked away with the Best Enterprise Development App 2015 category; EskomSePush won the Best Breakthrough Developer App 2015 category; while M4JAM was conferred the Best Wild Card App 2015 category. “We are encouraged by the level of innovation and creativity that was showcased at the 2015 MTN Business App of the Year Awards,” said Alpheus Mangale, chief enterprise officer for MTN Business South Africa. “We wish to congratulate our overall winner and runner-ups for investing their time and energy to bring solutions to everyday challenges facing the enterprise sector. We are also reinvigorated by the active participation of the developers in this competition, as it complements our strategic intent of driving sustainable growth and developing new opportunities to ensure the delivery of a bold new digital world.” He added, “The key to this year’s challenge was not to simply add another new app to the current line-up, but to look for an innovative idea that is set to add value and change the way business is conducted. It is for this very reason that MTN Business uses technology as a catalyst to enable and inspire its customers’ sustainable growth and development—not only in South Africa but throughout the continent.” Through initiatives such as the annual App of the Year Awards, MTN will continue to refine its traditional product offering, as well as actively develop new opportunities to ensure the delivery of a bold new Digital World to its customers. This encompasses the company’s efforts to develop participation in the enterprise sector, adjacent sectors (such as financial services), and media and entertainment. Since MTN Business started on this journey in 2012, the intention has always been to create an enabling environment for South African developers and provide them with opportunities to compete in the global market. This has resulted in some of the previous winners going on to top the international and local app download charts.
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Fast Bytes
TA K I N G LUXU RY L I V I N G TO T H E N E XT L E V E L
Quick and safe online shopping Now anyone can shop for goods and services online using VCpay, the app that lets you pay virtually everywhere using mobile virtual MasterCards. Available on Android, Apple and Windows Phone devices, VCpay Virtual Cards let you shop online the same way a regular credit card would, with the added bonus of being quicker and safer— giving you complete peace of mind. Whether you’re buying electronics, games and fashion, or simply paying for an Uber ride or Appetite lunch, VCpay is the safe, convenient and accessible option. The app is free to download, and after a quick registration is ready to start paying online. Simply top up your account either via electronic fund transfer, cash deposit at your nearest EasyPay till point, or link your existing credit card for ultimate security. Once funded, the account can begin creating the perfect virtual card for your needs. VCpay really is the mobile payment app for everyone, offering a secure alternative to people who would normally pay with their own plastic credit card, and providing those without one with a way to finally take part in e-commerce. Learn more about VCpay by logging on to www.vcpay.co.za, or simply download the app directly from your app store today.
U P, P E R I S C O P E !
Twitter users want to explore the world of recording and sharing live video streams. The new video app, Periscope, allows you to do just that. Here are seven ways to leverage the tool: Treat your title as a tweet. Before your followers see your live stream, they will see your title— it’d better be eye-catching. Include an official hashtag if you’re broadcasting from an event. Location, location, location. With Periscope, you can choose to share your location, and your broadcast will then be included in the world map that allows it to be discovered from anywhere. Create your own ‘trademark’. Make yourself distinctively different. Your followers will recognise you immediately. Timing is everything. Before you start your broadcast, make sure your followers are connected. Practice makes perfect. Redefine your style based on follower comments. Keep momentum going. Having a regular broadcast time will help to retain those followers. Be true to yourself, and be original. The trick is to show something with a unique flavour. So unleash your creativity and show the world what you’re made of!
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Da’Realty, the investment subsidiary of the 106year-old conglomerate, Darvesh, is setting a brand new standard within the luxury sector of the property market with the launch of AURUM: a R750million, high-end, luxurious residential property development in Bantry Bay, Cape Town, which is strategically situated close to the CBD, V&A Waterfront and surrounds. It offers excellent wind shelter from the SouthEaster and spectacular views over the Atlantic Ocean, and has long been the place of choice for affluent property investors—local and foreign alike. The two sites for the AURUM Bantry Bay development will replace the Ambassador Hotel and Ambassador Suites, which neighbour each other on opposite sides of Victoria Road. These will be transformed into 15 Luxury Suites on the mountain side of the road; and eight exclusive, uber-luxurious Presidential Suites located on the ocean side. All units have been spaciously designed with modern, open-plan, single-level layouts. Both the luxury and presidential suites will boast opulent 500+ and 700+ square metre signature penthouse units respectively, fitted with exclusive designer detailing by Italian luxury brands Fendi Casa, Armani Casa and Armani Dada. Stylish interiors crafted around a neutral colour palette, combined with the highest quality imported materials and Bang & Olufsen audiovisual sound systems are but a few of the many luxurious features of the development. Each suite will also have ample underground parking.
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THE GRE AT INNOVATION FRONTIER
Make an impact, not just an income A F R I CA N E N T R E P R E N E U R S A R E L E A D I N G T H E W O R L D W H E N I T C O M E S TO B U S I N E S S I N N OVAT I O N W I T H A S O C I A L A N D E N V I R O N M E N TA L I M PACT
K
ENYA’S LORNA RUTTO was born in the Kaptembwa slums and gathered plastic litter as a child, melting it down to make ornaments. Today her company, EcoPost, which she founded in 2009, makes use of waste plastic by turning it into lumber as an alternative to wood.
Rutto has sold more than 20 000 posts, made from more than one million kilogrammes of plastic waste, and has saved over 250 acres of forest. The company generates more than R1.5 million in income per year and has created upward of 400 jobs so far. And it is growing at such a rate that it is expected to create another 100 000 jobs in the next 15 years. Hers is a great example of the new African zeitgeist of companies making a difference. EcoPost is a business innovation that is not simply filling a gap in the market but is meeting multiple needs and solving problems— environmental and social—at multiple levels. And the continent is brimming with such endeavours. Often born out of necessity, green and social business is thriving in Africa. African entrepreneurs want do more than just make an income—they want to make an impact. More than that, they recognise there is a need for an impact to be made. Now, many commentators on innovation will tell you that having the right mindset and culture is 99% of the challenge in building an innovative organisation or system. As IBM’s former CEO and chairperson, Lou Gerstner, famously said: “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.” In Africa, the social and infrastructural challenges we face can’t help but foster an innovation mindset. We don’t need to consider if our businesses should have a purpose beyond profit. Here, surrounded by social and environmental degradation, we know there is no choice. This takes some of the noise out of the system, allowing
WE DON’T NEED TO CONSIDER IF OUR BUSINESSES SHOULD HAVE A PURPOSE BEYOND PROFIT. HERE (IN AFRICA), SURROUNDED BY SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION, WE KNOW THERE IS NO CHOICE.
WALTER BAETS
us to focus on the task of creating sustainable products and services as well as business-model innovation: finding novel ways of delivering and capturing value that will change the basis of competition. How the continent capitalises on this advantage is up for debate. Clearly, we still lack the enabling framework that can fan, into a roaring flame, this spark of wanting to make a difference through business. Innovation and collaboration can be encouraged and rewarded or, in many formal and subtle ways, discouraged. The question is: which do we want to choose? At the moment, too often the answer is to discourage. While education levels and types are shown repeatedly to be strongly correlated to entrepreneurship, education levels in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are still appallingly low relative to the rest of the world. In fact, according to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report on global youth entrepreneurship, youth in SSA have the lowest level of education in the world—with one-quarter having less than a primary school education, while 55% have not completed their secondary education. Added to that, our business schools—in many ways the custodians of the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs— are often stuck in a rut, emulating established Western models and teaching, and rewarding a limited set of behaviours and outcomes. But this is changing. There is a new drive among African business schools to create an impactful and relevant model of business and entrepreneurship on the continent. And a tangible output of this is a new African accreditation system being mooted by the Association of African Business Schools (AABS). This will complement the existing and highly influential European and American accreditation systems, and will seek to find new ways to shape and reward a uniquely African style of business and leadership. According to a new report from the AABS, African business schools—not being rooted in years of tradition— are inherently more adaptable and flexible than the European and American models on which they are based. They are uniquely placed to drive innovation in business education to support the new African mindset of impact. An African hallmark and quality-assurance process is sorely overdue. It is also a mark of the continent’s coming of age; that we begin to recognise in ourselves that quality is not foreign. We can, in fact, define it. African entrepreneurs like Rutto are setting the pace for the rest of the globe in terms of green and social innovation. Let’s recognise and celebrate that. Walter Baets is the director of the UCT Graduate School of Business and holds the Allan Gray Chair in Values-Based Leadership at the school. Formerly a professor of Complexity, Knowledge and Innovation and associate dean for Innovation and Social Responsibility at Euromed Management—School of Management and Business, he is passionate about building a business school for ‘business that matters’.
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FAST EVENTS Upcoming events Fast Company will be attending
WOMEN IN ICT LE ADERSHIP SUMMIT Date: 3 & 4 September Time: 08h30–16h00 Location: The Michelangelo Hotel, Sandton, Johannesburg conferencehub.co.za/tch-events This summit is the premier professional development and networking opportunity for emerging and existing female ICT leaders, to share their inspirational journeys, challenges, opportunities and achievements in executive ICT roles across all industries. Women today have more opportunities than ever before to be successful leaders in ICT, as they are increasingly playing a leadership role in the workplace. However, climbing the corporate ladder still presents unique challenges for women. Key to success in overcoming these obstacles is the development and honing of proven effective leadership skills. The key focus areas of the summit will include: Enhancing Your Future Leadership Potential in the Rapidly Changing Environment; Understanding and Overcoming Women’s Unconscious Bias and Barriers To Progress in ICT; How to Best Structure our Organisations to Support Women in ICT; Men’s Roles in Promoting Women’s Leadership, among others.
LAUNCHLAB IDEAS WORKSHOP Date: 5 September Time: 09h00–16h30 Location: Stellenbosch University www.launchlab.co.za/events Unleash the entrepreneur in you! Discover and develop great ideas for new ventures. Learn from a master strategist, mentor and coach—Neil Hinrichsen—who has worked across South Africa with some of the top startups. The focus of the workshop is to help aspiring and practising entrepreneurs to unpack and explore their business ideas, devise their strategy and craft a compelling story. The topic for Stellenbosch is: How to excite and engage investors and the marketplace. The workshop is free and includes lunch.
WORDCAMP CAPE TOWN 2015 Date: 10 & 11 September Time: 07h30–16h45 (Thursday); 07h30–17h15 (Friday) Location: The River Club, Observatory, Cape Town capetown.wordcamp.org/2015 WordCamp Cape Town 2015 is the official WordPress community conference for the Mother City. Now in its sixth year, WordCamp has grown bigger than ever and is set to be an awesome conference from the start of day 1 to the end of the epic after-party (charge included in ticket price). The first day will be practical workshops to help you develop specific skills in your daily life, while the second day will comprise the regular sessions as with previous years. The workshops are split into two separate tracks, with one focused on the non-technical side of things and the other catering specifically for developers.
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PATHWAYS TO FINANCE DO-FERENCE Date: 10 & 11 September Time: 10h00 Location: Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Green Point, Cape Town www.gsb.uct.ac.za
This event will consist of two days of workshops, one-on-one meetings and talks by successful (social) entrepreneurs around raising early-stage finance. It is called a “do-ference”, as the focus will be on practical peer-to-peer learning and actionable outcomes. The material will be created and delivered for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs—with a dash of content from investors, academics and other professionals. Jointly with Mustard Seed, a social enterprise investor and incubator, we will host a pitch competition for 10 preselected social entrepreneurs. The winner will continue to work with Mustard Seed for the opportunity to secure funding.
STARTUP WEEKEND CAPE TOWN Date: 11 to 13 September Time: from 17h00 (Friday); 08h00–22h00 (Saturday); 08h00–16h00 (Sunday) Location: The Bandwidth Barn, Khayelitsha bit.ly/1OwQ0pX Have you ever had an idea for improving the green economy, education, health, smart cities and better living? Startup Weekend Cape Town is the perfect opportunity to transform your ideas into action in 54 hours. Find the right people with complementary skills, and the passion and dedication to build a viable product—in one weekend. Startup Weekend Cape Town begins with open-mic, 60-second pitches on Friday night which result in the formation of small teams around the best, most viable concepts. Teams spend Saturday and Sunday focusing on user research, customer development, validating their ideas and building prototypes with the help of experienced coaches from relevant markets. On Sunday, teams demo their products and receive valuable feedback from a panel of expert judges.
GIRL GEEK DINNER Date: 15 September Time: 18h00 Location: Atlantic Imbizo, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town ggdcpt.com Girl Geek Dinners are networking events for women (and men) who are passionate about technology. The September meet is proudly sponsored by M4JAM. The topic for the evening is: “How Jam is saving the world—The M4JAM (Money for Jam) story”. With over 22 years’ business startup experience, along with extensive digital marketing, legal, commercial, leadership and finance experience, speaker Andre Hugo is practised in adapting and finding new ways to change the world. He rose through the ranks at Deloitte, where he and his team launched Deloitte Digital—assisting clients to develop disruptive strategies. Hugo continues to disrupt the status quo as chief Jammer at M4JAM. The ticket price includes a three-course meal, a fabulous goodie bag and awesome networking opportunities.
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Gig of a lifetime W H AT H A P P E N S W H E N T H E P O ST E R C H I L D F O R G E N E R AT I O N F LU X G E TS A F U L L-T I M E J O B? H E R E A L I S E S T H AT P E R H A P S STA B I L I T Y I S N ’ T T H E E N E M Y
“W
HAT DO YOU DO?” It’s a loaded question even in the best of circumstances. But when your career is a crazy quilt of activities that feed different aspects of your personality—in my case, stand-up, punditising on news shows, writing, delivering speeches, and heading a fledgling company—the only way to answer is with a comma-separated list of titles. Meanwhile, inside my head, I am giving my interlocutor the heavy side-eye for trying to reduce me to just one thing.
A few years ago, in this very magazine, I celebrated my mobility, flexibility and refusal to be defined, proudly stating: “Uncertainty is the certainty. Change is the constant. Experimentation is rewarded. Stability is an impediment.” Then, to be even clearer, I added: “If I could get a big cheque from TV, that would be cool. But I’m not desperate for those things.” By “those things”, I meant that one thing would answer the question of what I do in less than a tweet. Then last September, I got offered a job co-hosting a TV show. Faced with a real-life choice between the gig economy and routine, I hesitated. The TV network, Pivot, was new and unproven. The city, Los Angeles, was not New York. The universe was testing my instability theory. The more I considered it, though,
BARATUNDE THURSTON
the more I warmed to the idea of losing my geospatial flexibility. Airports didn’t have to be my second home. I could have a daily rhythm, swipe in at a security desk every day, make small talk with the same people, and be able to predict my whereabouts beyond the next 48 hours. On October 6, 2014, I joined Jacob Soboroff and Meghan McCain as a co-host of TakePart Live, a nightly issues-oriented news-talk show. It was weird having the same schedule every day (right down to eating my post-show Sun Chips and banana), but the work was fun and the intellectual range intense. I’d learn about the plight of Ugandan refugees and then explore the racial and gender politics within the latest TV shows. The format and rules of television at that pace were foreign to me, but I felt I was adapting to it all. Then, just nine weeks into my grand experiment with steady employment, our team found out that the network would not renew the show for 2015. “But I just learnt the TV format and how to get my makeup off in less than five minutes!” protested my inner voice, adding in a forceful whisper, “And in New York, winter is coming!” In six months I had gone from not wanting something, to wanting it, to getting it, to losing it. Rather than go home to New York (again, winter), I explored LA and used my newly found time to think. For years I had preached the gospel of inevitable, persistent change and the death of security because of technological disruption. In celebrating the relentless onslaught of the future, I had undervalued the present and the benefits of developing a regimen and honing a craft day in and day out. My short-lived stint with a regular gig (forget that life on TV isn’t exactly ‘regular’) showed me what my life may look like with a little more certainty, and enhanced my respect for predictability. I’ll always embrace change; since these personal epiphanies, I’ve started a podcast and become very active on Snapchat (check me out at snapatunde)—but the experience of getting and losing that big job has given me valuable information that’s helping to craft the next one. Baratunde Thurston is the author of The New York Times best-seller How to Be Black and CEO and co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a creative agency that combines the powers of humour, design and technology.
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Illustration by Kirsten Ulve
Celine Grouard
ONE MORE THING
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