Athysw45yfast company november 2015 by fooperastiz

THE FAST COMPANY INNOVATION FESTIVAL NOVEMBER 9–13 / NEW YORK CITY 23andMe 72andSunny About.com Adobe AltSchool American Museum of Natural History Atom Factory Bionic Yarn Birchbox Bjarke Ingels Group Box Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator Brooklyn Nets Charity:Water DANNIJO Data & Society DonorsChoose Drive Change Droga5 Dropbox Eataly Eileen Fisher Ellevate Enjoy Etsy Food52 Frog GE General Assembly

Multiple Stages, Behind–the–Scenes Tours, Live Performances, Exclusive Demos, and more! HBO Huge IBM Design Lab iHeartMedia Industry City Instagram KIND Levo League littleBits Local Projects L’Oréal Maiyet Malala Fund Man Made Music Material ConneXion Metropolitan Museum of Art Midroll Media MLB Advanced Media Museum of Modern Art NEW INC Nike NYC Football Club Ombligo Pentagram Pepsi Design Center Perkins+Will Prinkshop

Samsung SoulCycle Sprout Squarespace Sub Rosa The Black List The Foxgrove The Rockefeller Foundation Tumblr UN Foundation Union Square Hospitality Group Valrhona Chocolate VaynerMedia Walker & Company Warby Parker West Elm Whistle Sports White House Digital Service WME Yahoo

J O I N U S ! I N N O VA T I O N F E S T I VA L . F A S T C O M P A N Y. C O M THANKS TO OU R PART N ER S

November 2015

Contents

COVER STORY

Fast Company’s annual guide to getting everything done. Begins on page 64 Owning it 6 6 Oprah Winfrey explains how she runs a complicated media empire while making time for a host of deeply personal projects. By J.J. McCorvey

15 easy ways to work smarter 9 4 From napping on the job (really!)

to playing games in meetings, some ideas to help get more from your day. By Ste p h a n ie Vozza

The O Team

Styling: Kelly Hurliman

“I try to surround myself with people who really know what they’re doing, and give them the freedom to do it,” says Winfrey. (page 66)

On the cover and this page: Photographs by Herring & Herring

November 2015 FastCompany.com 7

Contents

SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

Eric Garcetti 74 Mayor, Los Angeles

L o r r a i n e Tw o h i l l 7 6 Senior VP of global marketing, Google

Belinda Johnson 7 8 Chief business affairs and

legal officer, Airbnb

Aziz Ansari 8 0 Comedian

Joy Cho 8 2 Designer and founder, Oh Joy!

Ken Washington 8 4 VP of research and advanced engineering, Ford

Alex Blumberg 8 6 Cofounder and CEO,

Gimlet Media

Marcus Samuelsson 8 8 Chef

Julie Larson-Green 9 0 Chief experience officer, Microsoft

Steve Aoki

Endless voyage “If you’re a classical musician, you can go, ‘I can play that piece perfectly,’ ” says Ansari. “With stand-up, you’re never quite done.” (page 80)

Photograph by Peter Ash Lee

Styling: Dana Covarrubias; grooming: Asia Geiger at Art Department

9 2 DJ and producer

THERE’S NO STOP IN YOU.

Fly toward something better with the help of 80,000 employees who do everything they can to help you explore what’s possible.

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Contents

Paper trail “I have so much going on, if I don’t write it down, I will forget,” says designer Cho. (page 82)

HIGHLIGHTS

punctual people 7 5 How to always get there on time.

master delegators 8 1 Ways to better manage

your team.

ex p e r t t i m e - s a v e r s 8 8 Taking charge of your 24 hours.

people who achieve i n b ox z e r o 9 3 Steps to eliminate your email

backlog.

14 FastCompany.com November 2015

Photograph by Emily Berl

ÂŠ2015 NGC Network US, LLC and NGC Network International, LLC. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL and the Yellow Border design are trademarks of National Geographic Society; used with permission.

Contents

Under his skin “I realized big companies are not my thing,” says Enjoy CEO Johnson. “I love creating, and I love beginnings. It felt like, ‘I can do this.’ ” (page 110)

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

S n a p c h a t ’s u n t o l d s t o r y

22 From the Editor

100 The teen-focused social app has

grown into a media and advertising powerhouse. Here’s what makes it so confounding—and so special.

M o s t I n n o va t i v e C o m p a n i e s 24 Updates on Louis C.K.’s pro-

By Austin Carr

duction studio, Evernote, Nokia, and other companies.

The redemption of Ron Johnson

The Recommender

110 After career-defining stints at

28 From perfect camera bags to seamless flower delivery, business leaders share what they’re loving right now.

Target and Apple, retail genius Ron Johnson failed to revamp JCPenney. Now he’s attempting a comeback with his own startup. By Max Chafkin

One More Thing 128 Why won’t web companies ask

users to pay for their services? By B a rat u n d e Th u r sto n 18 FastCompany.com November 2015

Photograph by John Francis Peters

Contents

A cut above “Comfort and feeling good are what wearers expect now,” says Levi’s Hillman. (page 56)

Pinterest moves the needle 33 An inside look at the

company’s effort to bolster the diversity of its workforce.

Off the grid 40 How Dutch startup Sustainer

Homes builds stand-alone, zero-impact housing out of old shipping containers.

R e d d i t o r- i n - c h i e f 42 CEO Steve Huffman returned to the Internet’s front page to tackle massive changes.

The shoe fits 46 Footwear startup Feetz uses

3-D printing to put an end to pinched toes.

Girl talk 48 Lena Dunham on building a community of like-minded women through her new, socially minded newsletter.

T h e Ta b a s c o e f f e c t 52 Hot sauce has changed American tastes—and grown into a billion-dollar industry.

Fabric of our lives 56 Karyn Hillman, Levi’s first

chief product officer, explains how she’s revamping denim.

Booze crews 58 Absolut Vodka taps into the

craft-distillery movement.

Virtual reality saves the world 60 Can VR really help combat humanitarian crises? The United Nations thinks so. 20 FastCompany.com November 2015

Photograph by Damien Maloney

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From the Editor

I first heard about “vertical video syndrome” 18 months ago. A colleague introduced me to a faux public service announcement on YouTube that humorously pokes at those who neglect to turn their phone to landscape view when filming. Posted in 2012 by an outfit called Glove and Boots, the satire is so spot-on, so funny, that it now has more than 6.7 million views. But 18 months is a long time in the world of media these days. Vertical videos, which used to be a joke, are now a booming entertainment format, thanks to one company: Snapchat. When it launched, Snapchat seemed like a curiosity—photos that disappear after you view them!—but it has grown into the social platform of choice for 100 million people, 86% of whom are between the ages of 13 and 34. If there’s a single media entity that has a passionate hold on millennials, it’s Snapchat. And because the company and its users have embraced vertical videos, media titans such as ABC and the Viacom-owned MTV and Comedy Central are now shifting their aesthetic assumptions to satisfy them. Snapchat may mystify nonusers—as well as many investors, partners, and competitors. And that may be one of its key advantages (as Austin Carr explains in “I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost,”

New puppeteer Glove and Boots’s viral YouTube hit skewered vertical video, but Snapchat has turned the format into a serious business.

Robert Safian editor@fastcompany.com 22 FastCompany.com November 2015

Celine Grouard (Safian)

Be careful what you laugh at

beginning on page 100). In today’s era of flux, there is no formula for success, no one-size-fitsall strategy. As this issue’s cover package on the Secrets of the Most Productive People (page 64) illuminates, what works for some will not work for others. Oprah Winfrey has literally retreated into a closet in her office to find a moment of peace; Google’s Lorraine Twohill goes to the other extreme, scheduling 17 to 20 meetings each day. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says he needs at least seven hours of sleep a night to maintain his equilibrium; DJ Steve Aoki has trained himself to go days on catnaps, yet manages to thrive across time zones and continents. We can learn from all of these examples (including Stephanie Vozza’s “15 Easy Ways to Work Smarter,” page 94), but that doesn’t mean we can copy someone else’s tactics wholesale. The irony of our digital age is that while it has dramatically improved efficiency in so many ways, it has also enabled—and requires—more personalization, even the atomization of activities and strategies. For us as individuals, and for businesses, this makes things both easier and harder than ever before. As our Snapchat story shows, we can’t afford to stand still: Just when we think we know which social media platform is most important (Facebook, Twitter), or what matters most in TV and advertising, our assumptions are upended. Even the generation that we’ve dubbed “millennials” continues to defy categorization. Perhaps it’s always been like this. We need to find ways in which we are alike, and at the same time recognize how each of us is different. That’s the essence of human existence, even in a digitally driven time. Snapchat’s photos and videos may disappear—even Snapchat itself may succumb to competition in the future—but our individuality will always define our world.

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Most Innovative Companies Updates from the alumni

EVERNOTE

C.K.’s pay-whatyou-want album was recorded at his Madison Square Garden run in January.

“We’ve been looking for the perfect CEO to build a great company that’ll go head-to-head with the behemoths that dominate this space.”

Milestones In a bid to compete with Yelp and GrubHub in the $70 billion food-delivery sector, the daily-deals platform launched Groupon To Go, a takeout and delivery service that promises to save customers up to 10% on orders.

Phil Libin Executive chairman, Evernote

Challenges The company, which has been harshly criticized by Wall Street for its consecutive profitless quarters, will subsidize Groupon To Go discounts by taking smaller commissions from restaurants.

Milestones Cofounder and CEO Phil Libin stepped down in July, handing the reins to Chris O’Neill, a former business operations head at Google X. Libin, now “executive chairman,” expressed faith that O’Neill is the person to finally take Evernote public. Challenges In September, a widely shared article predicted that Evernote would be the “first dead unicorn,” citing a lack of product innovation and recruitment issues.

Louie presses pause PIG NEWTON Louis C.K.’s production company, Pig Newton, appeared on the Most Innovative Companies list in 2013 for pioneering a directto-consumer model to sell his comedy specials and stand-up tickets, wresting distribution from middlemen. Now, C.K. is branching further out into Hollywood with his favorite funny people in tow. Shortly after breaking the hearts of fans of Louie—the FX hit that Pig Newton produces—by announcing an “extended hiatus,” the company conﬁrmed it would produce three other comedies for the 2015–2016 TV season: Better Things, an FX show featuring Louie costar Pamela Adlon; a yet-to-be-named series 24 FastCompany.com November 2015

for Amazon starring comedian Tig Notaro—whom C.K. helped rocket to fame by selling her work on his website—and Baskets, in which The Hangover star Zach Galifianakis will play a graduate of a Parisian clown school. (Yes, you read that correctly.) But everyone’s favorite schlub is still innovating for fans: He recently released an album from his sold-out run at Madison Square Garden, which people can purchase for whatever amount they choose—even via bitcoin. Milestones C.K. will write, direct, and star in I’m a Cop, his first film since 2001’s notorious Pootie Tang. Challenges FX Networks CEO John Landgraf recently said that Louie’s hiatus—the second of its five-season run—could last up to two years. Buzz

Louis C.K. Founder, Pig Newton, to fans via website

Buzz

DSM

Buzz

NOKIA Milestones Shortly before selling its Here maps to driverless-car aspirants Audi, BMW, and Mercedes for more than $3 billion in August, Nokia was cleared to merge with French telecom Alcatel-Lucent— acquiring its Chinese outposts and the famed Bell Labs in the process. Nokia’s recent N1 tablet and Ozo, a virtual-reality camera (below), have some predicting its comeback as a major electronics maker. Challenges Nokia, which sold its mobile assets to Microsoft in 2013, will now compete with powerful new market entrants— including China’s Xiaomi. Buzz

“I’m giving you the option to set your price anywhere from 1 dollar to 85. I hope you like it.”

GROUPON

Milestones Livestock produce 44% of the methane emissions that build up in the earth’s atmosphere each year, which contributes to global warming. But a recent study of a “clean cow” powder developed by Dutch life sciences company DSM found that feeding the substance to cows can curb emissions by more than 30% with no deleterious effects on the animals’ health. DSM hopes to obtain regulatory approval and make it commercially available by 2018. Challenges The consumer market for meat and milk is projected to skyrocket in developing nations— including in South Asia, where demand will grow by 125% by 2030—which will mean a sharp increase in bovine burping. Buzz

Jacob Blickenstaff/Corbis (C.K.)

For the people

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS IMPOSSIBLE, IT’S JUST A MATTER OF FIGURING OUT HOW The words of our Chief Engineer, Haruhiko Tanahashi and a principle we live by at Lexus. It’s what has inspired our latest project, a real, functioning hoverboard. To see it in action and to find out how we made it visit amazinginmotion.com

Most Innovative Companies

IKEA

V O X I VA

“Healthcare IT until very recently was basically billing systems.”

Insatiate insects Diamondback moth larvae are resistant to common pesticides.

Paul Meyer Chairman and president, Voxiva

Challenges The company’s reputation recently suffered, following the deaths of two small children from improperly mounted Ikea dressers. In response, it now offers free anchoring kits at all stores. Buzz

P O LY V O R E Milestones In a deal estimated at $230 million, Yahoo purchased the social commerce site, gaining access to Polyvore’s 20 million–plus users and relationships with 350-plus retailers. Challenges Pinterest, which crossed 100 million users this fall, recently added a buy button and (finally) became a direct competitor to Polyvore. Buzz

E B AY Milestones To help celebrate its 20th anniversary, in September, eBay revamped its apps with sleeker browsing and realtime analytics for sellers.

Milestones A recent study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that users of Voxiva’s Text4baby program, which regularly sends pregnant women and new mothers health information—such as infant safety videos and alerts for important checkup reminders—were twice as likely to get flu vaccinations as those who don’t use the service. Challenges The program, heralded as “historic” by former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra in 2010, only reaches 900,000 users today. Buzz

CRISPIN PORTER + BOGUSKY Milestones The ad agency recently helped Dominos roll out a new system that allows customers to order a pie using a simple pizza emoji or tweet. The campaign, which the agency followed with literacy cards to help parents desperate to understand emojis, earned CPB a Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival of Creativity.

Challenges Following a long-anticipated split with PayPal, eBay announced that it would also be ending its same-day delivery service and apps for motors, valet, and fashion.

Challenges Parent company MDC Partners, which also owns L.A. ad powerhouse 72andSunny, is currently weathering a major investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Founder Miles Nadal resigned in July amid the scandal.)

Buzz

26 FastCompany.com November 2015

Creative pest control OXITEC Everyone hates bug bites, but when the tiny offenders carry dangerous disease, they can transform from mere nuisance to harbingers of devastation. Enter biotech ﬁrm Oxitec (a Most Innovative Company in 2013), which this year put its scientists to work on field trials in Brazil and Panama, where they eliminated populations of the yellow- and dengue-fever-carrying

“Over the last 50 years, dengue has risen thirtyfold— a virtually unchecked expansion of the disease.” Hadyn Parry CEO, Oxitec

Aedes aegypti mosquito. And this past summer, Oxitec applied a selfreplicating gene technology—which introduces insects incapable of producing viable offspring—to combat another harmful pest: Plutella xylostella, or the diamondback moth, an insect whose larvae ravage cruciferous vegetable crops such as broccoli and Brussels sprouts and require $5 billion annually in pest-control costs. In several early experiments, Oxitec was able to significantly curb the population growth of diamondback moths. The company might make its genetically modified moths commercially available following field trials and USDA approval. Milestones In August, U.S. biotech giant Intrexon acquired Oxitec for $160 million. The change will enable Oxitec to broaden its efforts in insect pest control and focus on combating the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes. Challenges Facing off against mosquitoes, which live in almost every corner of the world, is no easy task: According to Oxitec, mosquito-borne illnesses kill a person every 12 seconds. Buzz

Courtesy of Oxitec (diamondback larvae)

Milestones In August, the furniture retailer said it would sell only LED–based lighting at its 300-plus stores starting this fall, as part of a broader sustainability push that includes investing in renewableenergy startups.

The Recommender

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2 TO SELL

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28 FastCompany.com November 2015

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30 FastCompany.com November 2015

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Doing the math Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou kicked off the company’s diversity discussion with a blog post about gender imbalance.

Pinterest’s great expectations One of the first Silicon Valley companies to draw back the curtain on its lack of diversity, Pinterest is now trying to engineer a solution. BY VAUHINI VARA Photographs by Ryan Young

This past summer, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann and cofounder Evan Sharp gathered the majority of their more than 600 employees in the office cafeteria to discuss how to make their workforce more diverse. Facing a room filled largely with white and Asian men, Silbermann and Sharp made a case for the importance of diversity in fostering creativity. More varied teams are more creative, they argued, and more creative teams lead to better products and greater success. With Pinterest rapidly expanding—it added more than 150 new employees in the first half of 2015—

N E X T

November 2015 FastCompany.com 3 3

they had to move quickly to change the composition of the company. The gathering should have been a celebration. Nearly two years earlier, Tracy Chou, a female Asian-American programmer at Pinterest, had disclosed in a much talked-about blog post entitled “Where are the numbers?” that almost 90% of her engineering colleagues were male. The Medium post, which was approved by Silbermann and Sharp, was one of the first times a major Silicon Valley business had so explicitly quantified the diversity (or lack thereof) of its staff. A chorus of calls for similar disclosure at tech companies followed, and Pinterest got credit for spurring discussion of an important topic. In the summer of 2014, Pinterest published more specific statistics on its employees’ gender and race, with a plan to update the figures in a year, and announced ambitious measures to improve the mix. Other companies, including Facebook and Google, did the same. It seemed like an auspicious start. But as this summer rolled around, Silbermann and Sharp

As other companies unveiled their latest diversity figures, a pattern emerged. “We just hadn’t made any progress,” Sharp admits. were forced to admit that Pinterest still looked too much like them: a couple of dudes. The proportion of women in tech roles at Pinterest (21%) remained unchanged from the previous year; same with the percentages of African-American and Latino employees overall: 1% and 2%, respectively. As other 34 FastCompany.com November 2015

companies unveiled their latest diversity figures, a pattern emerged. “We just hadn’t made any progress,” Sharp admits. Chou had spent much of the year watching with disappointment as she received email after email introducing new Pinterest colleagues, most of whom did little to move the diversity needle. It wasn’t for lack of effort. Pinterest had mentored female programming students, recruited at events for female, African-American, and Latino engineers, and instituted training in unconscious gender and racial bias. But none of it had made a difference. What went wrong? Pinterest’s quest to find out is part of an uncomfortable self-examination taking place throughout Silicon Valley. Google and Intel have each begun multimillion-dollar programs to investigate and address the diversity problem, with others launching more modest efforts. Like Pinterest, many of these companies assumed that training and mentorship programs for engineers from underrepresented backgrounds would expand the pool of candidates, as would recruitment at these programs and universities with high proportions of black and Latino students. Yet so far, the results have been unimpressive. When Sharp saw Pinterest’s lackluster numbers this past summer, he was ready to overhaul their approach. “My reaction was just, ‘We’ve got to do something more effective this year,’ ” he says. In retrospect, the flaws in Pinterest’s efforts were clear: Despite the fact that recruiters had brought in applicants from nontraditional backgrounds, managers often continued to prioritize people from places like Stanford and MIT, which have less broad student bodies. And while Adam Ward, Pinterest’s head of recruiting, and Abby Maldonado, its diversity-programs specialist, had encouraged colleagues to pass along résumés from a range of candidates, most of the referrals were still of white or Asian men (after all, that’s who people tended

FAST PIN T EREST COF OUNDER E VA N SH A RP ON T HE COMPA N Y ’S DI V ER SI T Y P USH

W H AT ’ S D R I V I N G Y O U R N E W H I R I N G G O A L S ? Having diverse points of view, diverse ways of thinking, diverse backgrounds—everything I’ve read says empirically that that leads to more creativity. So we really believe that there’s an advantage in doing this well.

W H AT H A S I N F L U E N C E D Y O U R T H I N K I N G ? Companies end up being a reflection of their founders, for better or for worse. So if we’re going to do this, I also need to find a personal mission in it. I just read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and it’s devastating. Books like this have helped me understand the narrative of our country and its formation—the distorted, unfair systems that determine the course of people’s lives. It’s not a tactical book. We have plenty of tactics we can try. This is more about helping me reframe why this is important and investing myself in it.

D O Y O U T H I N K Y O U R E F F O R T S C O U L D H AV E A B R O A D E R I M PA C T ? It can’t be that hard to have an impact. We set these goals— they’re good goals, but it’s not like they’re amazing. They’re aggressive; they’re aggressive for any tech company. But the bar is so low, it’s insane, honestly.

BY THE NUMBERS HOW DI V ER SI T Y A DDS UP AT SOME OF T HE TOP T ECH COMPA NIES PINTEREST GENDER

APPLE

AMAZON

42%

37%

Women

63%

58%

GOOGLE 31%

69%

FA C E B O O K

30%

70%

INTEL

32%

68%

TWITTER 24%

76%

30%

70%

Men

RACE/ ETHNICITY

49%

60%

54%

60%

55%

54%

36%

32%

59%

White

1.3% Black

43.4% Asian

15% Source: Figures reflect the proportion of total employees and are companies’ own; all are from 2015, except Amazon and Twitter (2014).

18%

31%

29%

13% 11%

2.3% Hispanic

4% Other

to have worked with in the past). In other words, Pinterest’s diversity campaign had remained siloed in its human resources department. Pinterest’s experience resembled that of many other tech companies. Sharp says he and Silbermann realized that they had neither given employees enough reason to care about diversifying Pinterest nor defined their goals. As at many companies, their efforts just hadn’t received the same staff-wide attention and careful tracking that, say, launching a big product or meeting a sales target did. And while Sharp is personally passionate about the societal benefits of making Silicon Valley more inclusive, he had to make a case to employees that was less about ethics and more about the bottom line: “This is not a charity; it’s a business.” The first step was to use the creativity angle to sell employees on the diversity measures, which 36 FastCompany.com November 2015

9% 3%

4% 8%

9% 4%

Silbermann and Sharp did in that summer meeting. And they unveiled speciﬁc hiring goals: In 2016, they declared, 30% of their new employees in engineering roles would be female, and 8% would be from

Sharp had to make a case to employees that was less about ethics and more about the bottom line: “This is not a charity; it’s a business.”

underrepresented ethnic minorities, such as African Americans and Latinos. They took pains to emphasize that these numbers were guidelines, not quotas—but semantics aside, the priority was clear. Pinterest is also partnering with the consulting ﬁrm Paradigm on an unorthodox project called Inclusion Labs. The program tests the effectiveness of various diversity measures, borrowing from Pinterest’s iterative approach to product building—repeatedly testing new ideas, continually making adjustments. The Labs takes a research-oriented approach to study how subtle changes in areas such as recruiting, hiring, and promotion inﬂuence the success of female candidates and those of color. This includes creating test groups and control groups, a logic that resonates with Pinterest’s engineers—and should help the internal credibility of any results.

Since the research is ongoing and early, Paradigm CEO Joelle Emerson and others are not yet prepared to discuss it in detail, but Ward offers one basic example: Given that some nontraditional job candidates aren’t as familiar with the quirks of Silicon Valley interviews, what if those candidates were sent an email, before their interview, describing what to expect? Would they then have a better chance of being hired? Meanwhile, Pinterest’s existing, and more ad hoc, diversity efforts continue to search for footing. In late August, a small group of employees convened to plan for the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, in October, a high-profile gathering of female engineers. At last year’s conference, Pinterest hired 12 engineers and interns, all of whom were recent graduates. This year, they hoped to hire 24—some ideally with more experience. Pinterest had already committed to sending nearly 50 employees to the event, yet most would be young and unlikely to connect with the higher-profile candidates. As the group brainstormed creative work-arounds, it was clear that Pinterest’s initial, instinctive approach to building diversity sometimes still prevails. There is lots of hope but little certainty about what works. Pinterest won’t, of course, be the only company camped out at the Grace Hopper conference. Morgan Missen, an independent recruiter who has worked at Google and Twitter, explains that for seniorlevel positions, many Silicon Valley companies are going after the same small pool of nonwhite, nonmale candidates. “You can imagine how in-demand these candidates are,” she says. That just intensifies the pressure on Pinterest. As Sharp points out, the company faces a simple math problem: As the absolute number of employees grows, each new hire will have a smaller impact on Pinterest’s overall composition. The problem will only get harder to solve. Says Sharp, “It’s kind of now or never.”

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DI S PATC H FROM…

New York City A Q&A WITH ELIZABETH SUDA AND CAMILLE HAUTEFORT, COFOUNDERS OF ARTICLE 22

Bringing ethical jewelry to reality with the #peacebomb collection made by local Laotian artisans—turning fashion into impact. Brought to you by the Marriott Rewards® Premier Business Card

What inspired you to start Article 22?

A | Working as a Merchandising Assistant at Coach, I realized the powerful force of fashion consumers and I thought, what if this purchase power not only enables people to look good but also to do and feel good? At that time, I was very interested in traditional textiles, handloom weaving, and natural dyeing, so I moved to Laos to learn from women who weave according to the skills their mothers and grandmothers have passed to them. This was the beginning of the journey that led to the brand, Article 22, named after the 22nd article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states everyone’s right to economic, social and cultural security. This is our ethos, which reminds me, and my partner, Camille Hautefort, that the future is not fated and that it takes consciousness and dedication to build the world we want. Camille Hautefort (left) and Elizabeth Suda, Article 22 cofounders

How do you see your company as a model for better business practices among fashion and jewelry retailers?

RAPID FIRE

A | We know each person who helps craft each piece that we sell. Our supply chain is composed of humans linked together working toward a common goal. We know who they are, and they know who we are.

WHAT ARE THREE THINGS THAT YOU CANNOT TRAVEL WITHOUT?

• Cashmere socks for ﬂights • iPhone® • La Roche-Posay BB cream with SPF WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE APPS FOR KEEPING CONNECTED ON THE GO?

• Facebook Messenger to communicate orders to our artisan partners in Laos • Google Calendar • Evernote

Can you talk about your audience: Are your customers primarily U.S.-based or do you have a global reach? How do you plan on expanding your audience and message?

A | Our community is composed of cosmopolitan clients across the globe. Peacebomb ships to more than 39 countries and is purchased by men and women attracted by the story, beauty, and modern simplicity of the jewelry. About 60% of our sales are U.S.-based and 40% are international. We ship [V (\Z[YHSPH HUK ,\YVWL ^LLRS` >L HYL J\YYLU[S` WYVK\JPUN UL^ Z[VYPLZ HZ ZOVY[ Ä STZ [V YLHJO new audiences.

WHERE ARE YOU OFF TO NEXT?

Paris, Chicago, Brazil, and Laos, with New York in between, of course!

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How important is being on the ground in Southeast Asia for the humanitarian and community-building work you do?

A | Our full-time Country Manager in Laos, Manivone, ensures we are present at all times. But, of course, our annual trip allows us to work on new design and technical innovations that bring the artisans more skills, work, and income. Some of our pieces are now polished like mirrors thanks to basic electric WVSPZOLYZ [OH[ OH]L ILLU PU[YVK\JLK PU[V [OL Ä UPZOPUN WYVJLZZ 6\Y [YH]LSZ [V 3HVZ HSSV^ \Z [V Z[YLUN[OLU our supply chain, whether reviewing pricing and division of labor or training artisans on quality-assurance best practices. JW Marriott® Chicago

Visit fastcompany.com/dispatch-from to learn more about other on the go business owners.

What’s next for Article 22?

A | New projects in India and Colombia!

Prototype

POWER The Sustainer uses hybrid solar panels that gather both energy and heat from the sun. In temperate climates, 280 square feet of panels, plus two small rooftop wind turbines, should fulfill the home’s energy needs. (If production dips, a 20kilowatt battery with about two days’ capacity makes up the difference.)

WAT E R

Sustainability starts at home Meet the startup turning used shipping containers into zeroimpact housing. BY CORINNE IOZZIO Illustration by Sam Glynn

The idea of off-the-grid living has a romantic, back-to-nature feel to it—but the reality is significantly more complicated if you want anything more than the most basic amenities. Dutch startup Sustainer 40 FastCompany.com November 2015

Rainwater flows through a series of gutters on its way to a 689-gallon storage tank. Debris such as leaves and twigs are filtered out first, then electric pumps send water either to the shower (via a simple carbon filter) or through a fine membrane that sterilizes it for drinking.

Homes is attempting to eliminate at least some of the difficulty by producing the world’s ﬁrst off-theshelf, zero-impact dwelling. Set in a converted shipping container, the 323-square-foot space includes a bedroom, bathroom, full kitchen, and living room, all constructed from wood-free, Ecoboard panels. The entire thing costs $78,000, approximately $1,300 of which would be made up annually in heat and electricity savings. And because it’s completely self-contained, it can be shipped anywhere and set up in minutes. Several pilot programs, which will rent out Sustainer Homes to travelers in the Netherlands, are in the works for early next year. If all goes well, these houses-in-a-box could be available internationally by next fall.

WA S T E Wastewater from the sink, shower, and composting toilet runs through a plantbased filter six times to mimic the earth’s natural filtration mechanisms before being sent back out into the ground.

TECH An onboard computer and smart thermostat help balance energy production and consumption, while a 4G LTE modem provides high-speed Internet for up to 10 devices. In tests, the container’s steel facade has acted like a giant antenna, strengthening the cellular signal. Future Sustainers in more remote areas might rely on satellites or older mobile networks.

Stuck in trafﬁc. Ideas

still moving for ward.

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Creative Conversation

“Reddit has been home to some of the most authentic conversations” With more than 160 million unique visitors each month, the influential 10-year-old online message board Reddit is coming off a rocky year that included the resignation of CEO Ellen Pao and calls for bans on some of its content. Cofounder and newly appointed CEO Steve Huffman talks about rebuilding community, racism, and free speech online.

Photographs by Noel Spirandelli

Some people say that Reddit and other Web 2.0 companies need to “grow up” to be successful. Do you agree? I don’t know if grow up is the right term. Reddit, the company, we need to get our act together. The site has not changed meaningfully in a very long time, nor has our technology, nor have our strategies. We’re a 10-year-old company behaving like a one-year-old company, but we are actively maturing. I think, a year from now, we’ll be very different. After Ellen Pao resigned in July, you came back as CEO, leaving the successful online travel company Hipmunk, which you also cofounded. Why did you return? I felt like I had a moral obligation to return to Reddit and try to fix it. It’s a very egocentric thought, but I truly believe that I’m the only guy in the world who knows Reddit well enough to actually fix it. One of the first things you did after your return was release a new content policy and ban a list of particularly offensive subreddits, including the racist /r/CoonTown. Is this part of the fix?

42 FastCompany.com November 2015

both in the real world and on Reddit, to know what humanity is all about. There is racism all around us. If we pretend it doesn’t exist, we’re only holding ourselves back as a society.

INTERVIEW BY JILLIAN GOODMAN

I didn’t ban CoonTown for being racist. I don’t like that they’re racist. I ﬁnd those users sickening, but that’s not why we kicked them off of Reddit. We kicked them off of Reddit because that was a toxic set of users with a game plan for how to undermine Reddit itself. They were actively invading other communities, and generally dragging everybody else down. So if you make Reddit worse for every single other person, we will exercise our right to ask you to leave. But we’re not going to go on a scorched-earth policy looking for every sign of racism on Reddit. That’s not practical, and I don’t think it’s smart. It’s important,

How so? My concern right now is building out the team and getting a consistent product cadence going, rebuilding our relationship with the community and with the moderators. And then we can start worrying about monetization. Historically, online communities have been difﬁcult to monetize. We don’t make nearly as much money as we could with our current ad products. So we’ll improve those. But there are just so many business models inside of Reddit. Twitter makes tons of money selling

Homecoming king As one of Redditâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s founders, Huffman has returned to the site with an eye for its strengths and flaws.

Creative Conversation

sentiment data 140 characters at a time. We’ve got way, way more data. I’m just not stressed about that at all.

Will you change the Reddit interface? It looks old, but it’s also iconic. I used to claim that at least it’s very functional, but I don’t even know if it’s that functional anymore. We always liked the effect of seeing a wall of text, but I don’t know how much I still like it these days. That’s just me as a user talking. I’m not going to touch the UI until I’ve got a ton of goodwill with the community. Are complaints from the community distracting? No matter what I do now, there are people who are vocal supporters, and there are people who are very vocally against it. There’s a certain freedom in that. Have you noticed the community changing in a big way? The tenor of the site is very much the same as it was a decade ago. Since the day we added the commenting feature, Reddit has been home to some of the most authentic conversations you can have online. And Redditors have always complained about the state of Reddit, for as long as I can remember. As a founder of the company, what do you think you bring to Reddit that previous CEOs weren’t able to? I know why we made all of the decisions we made, because if I didn’t make them, I was in the room when 44 FastCompany.com November 2015

STEVE HUFFMAN

30-SECOND BIO

What about packaging AMAs [Ask Me Anything forums] as their own product, as some people have suggested? I’ve not actually really heard that idea. [Laughs] I guess it’s funny for the CEO to say. What’s cool about AMAs is how built into the communities they are. Certainly Reddit will facilitate getting more people doing AMAs, whether it’s celebrities or just interesting people. That’s one of the magical things about Reddit, how intimate those conversations can be.

Tit l e Cofounder and CEO, Reddit; cofounder, Hipmunk H o m etow n Warrenton, Virginia Ca r e e r - b u i l d i n g r e l at i o n s h i p s His future Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, was a freshman dorm mate at the University of Virginia. Fellow Y Combinator 2005 classmates include current Y Combinator president Sam Altman, Hipmunk chief scientist Chris Slowe, and Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, cofounders of Twitch Favo rite s u b r e d d it s Ask Science; Ask Historians; Circle Jerk (a satirical version of Reddit); IAmA; Explain Like I’m Five

they were made. A lot of them were very arbitrary. There’s lots of stuff that Reddit does that’s sacrosanct on the site or internally where it’s like, “No, no, that’s just a hack that I did seven years ago.” Then there’s just the practical aspect of it, which is, I am an engineering and product guy. I’ve got a mountain of feature ideas that I’m excited to plow through with the team here. Were you coming up with those ideas during the Hipmunk years? My approach to product development has always been to just use things until they make you angry, and then whenever you’re angry, that’s an opportunity. And I found Reddit making me angrier and angrier. So there’s lots to do. When you and Alexis Ohanian started Reddit a decade ago, what did you think it would be? Well, it depends. We got into Y Combinator in 2005 because they liked us, but they didn’t really like our original idea. Reddit was basically the result of a brainstorming session of things that we could build. At that point, I just didn’t want to look stupid in front of [Y Combinator cofounder] Paul Graham. At the start, Alexis and I used to fake a lot of the content on Reddit. I had scripts that would download a bunch of news sites and show me new links, and we would submit them to Reddit under various user names and manipulate the vote score so it would look like we had actual users. [A few months in,] I took a day off. Back then our front page would dry up if it didn’t have enough submissions. So I was like, “Shit, I forgot to check.” When I checked, it was full, and all links were from real users. That was a really cool moment. That was the day where it was like, “Oh, we have a real thing here.” Did you have a set of values for the site? Mostly we had these anti-values: We weren’t going to make you enter email addresses. We weren’t going

to spam you with this and that. We weren’t going to force you to categorize things. We weren’t going to remove offensive content. Unless we had to do it, we weren’t going to do it. We wanted people to show up on Reddit and be entertained. How have those values evolved? Now on Reddit, there are many, many communities, and anybody can create one. Back then, it was basically clones of Alexis and me: young tech dudes . . . that’s about it, pretty much. Now, we’re global. We have men and women on the site across all interests, and that helped us grow. And then, of course, we’ve

“It’s important, both in the real world and on Reddit, to know what humanity is all about. There is racism all around us. If we pretend it doesn’t exist, we’re only holding ourselves back as a society.”

had to confront content controversies over the years, with pornography, with hateful stuff. It’s forced us to reevaluate what we want the community to be: what we’ll tolerate, what we won’t, and that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, we still, as much as we can, want Reddit to be an unﬁltered view of humanity. Do you have any ideas for new companies kicking around? I’ve already got two startups. I don’t have time to think about other things to do.

Now, let’s see. Behind us, on both sides of us, and down in front.

Let’s put the days of scraping our wheels against

the curb or scratching our side paint behind us. As well as nudging our front ends way out into cross-traffic to see what’s coming. Cameras will help us with all that now. And you know what? They’ll do it with clarity and in amazing color. Let’s finally feel like we’re operating our vehicles with a little more awareness, and a lot more confidence. We’re not talking about just one camera. We’re talking about four cameras with one mind. A vehicle that now has the ability to help us see 360 degrees all around us. It’s actually quite visionary. And it’s just one of the truly amazing innovations you’ll discover in the entirely new Lincoln MKX. LincolnMKX.com/360Camera

T H E F E E L I N G S TAY S W I T H Y O U. Available features shown.

Tech Forward

Sole mates A 3-D cobbler is making bespoke footwear mainstream. BY JULIE TARASKA Photograph by Hannah Whitaker

46 FastCompany.com November 2015

Nursing a grande mocha latte in Starbucks after a frustrating hour of shoe shopping, Lucy Beard had an epiphany: Why was her coffee more customizable than her footwear? She decided she could do better. Four months later, the Zynga and Intuit veteran started Feetz, the ﬁrst company to offer customized, fully 3-D– printed shoes for everyday wear. Due to launch early next year, Feetz remakes every step of the cobbler business. The company’s app translates photos of customers’ feet into virtual 3-D fit models. Users then select their color and style from among ﬁve offerings, including a Cubist flat (pictured) and a street shoe with a Flyknit-like weave. Within 24 hours, Feetz’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory prints the footwear from TPE, a rubbery material common in shoe soles. Initially, Feetz will cost between $200 and $300 a pair, though Beard expects to halve that once the process is streamlined: “We see 3-D printing not just as something to use to prototype, but as the basis of a new manufacturing system.”

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Passion Project

A site of one’s own

With their online newsletter Lenny, Girls collaborators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner are giving feminism a fresh voice. BY KAREN VALBY

It was the young women Lena Dunham met on the road last fall on her sold-out, 12-city tour for her best-selling memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, who ﬁrst lit the spark. Her millennial fans—earnest-minded, eager, spilling over with their own stories, and blissfully free of the toxicity that pollutes the average comments section of websites— convinced Dunham of the need for a 48 FastCompany.com November 2015

different kind of gathering place online. In March, she emailed her best friend, producing partner, and Girls showrunner, Jenni Konner, with the wisp of an idea: They needed to create an Internet presence, something more than what was available to women at the time. Six months later, Dunham and Konner launched Lenny, the weekly online newsletter and website

whose far-reaching goals include getting the first woman president elected and hawking the cutest nail art stickers. In addition to the interview with Hillary Clinton that appeared in the first issue in late September, Lenny includes personal essays, political features, and a weekly “Letters to Lenny” column in which Dunham and Konner offer advice on everything from relationships to professional crises and ambitions. “We wanted to create a space that was funny and smart and feminist without the snark and infighting,” says Dunham. There’s been a temptation to lump Lenny into the growing dough ball of lifestyle websites created by actresses such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Blake Lively, and Reese Witherspoon, a reflex the Lenny women find reductive and insulting, as though all these efforts are cute but indulgent side projects. “When George Clooney starts his tequila line, nobody bats an eye,” says Dunham. “But when a woman wants to take on a very serious project where she already has expertise, suddenly it’s, ‘Stay in your own lane.’ ” What’s more, Lenny has little in common with other celebrity-helmed websites. Whereas Paltrow’s Goop, for instance, offers readers a clean window into an enviable life, Lenny is more interested in encouraging an engaged one for young feminists. And although e-commerce will be a growing part of Lenny, its editorial thrust will remain socialminded content. “Our fantasy is we’re building an army of women,” says Konner. Their first move in bringing Lenny to life was enlisting Konner’s ex-husband, Ben Cooley, a former music tour manager, as their CEO. From there, they assembled a team (now installed in a Brooklyn

Trunk Archive

Dunham envisions the activist-minded Lenny “acting as a big sister to young radical women on the Internet.”

coworking space) that reﬂects the unapologetically liberal interests of the newsletter. Editor Jessica Grose is a veteran of Jezebel and Slate; editorat-large Doreen St. Felix brings an interest in pop culture and race. Rookie alum Laia Garcia, Lenny’s associate editor, took over Lenny’s social media accounts, curating a rousing collection of pop-culture memes, book and music recommendations, and subscriber selﬁes. And to create an intimate, journal-bound aesthetic, Dunham and Konner brought on graphic designer Howard Nourmand, who was responsible for the logos of both Girls and Dunham and Konner’s production company, A Casual Romance. “I like to think Lenny looks like something that 20 years ago could’ve existed as a pamphlet passed out on a corner of Bowery and Houston,” says Dunham. Even with a breakneck schedule that includes work on Girls and a

Creative partner Along with Dunham, Girls showrunner Konner has a hand in every item that goes into Lenny.

50 FastCompany.com November 2015

Passion Project

“Advertising is a brave new world for us,” Dunham admits. “I’ve never done a sponsored tweet in my life.” forthcoming documentary about gender and fashion, Dunham and Konner have their eyes on everything Lenny publishes. Before the newsletter’s launch, Lenny already had 160,000 subscribers, thanks to Dunham’s galvanizing social media presence and the release of preview items like the summer ﬁction issue and a moving interview between Dunham and Chenai Okammor, a friend and collaborator of Sandra Bland’s, who had previously only

been known to the public from the brutal footage of her traffic arrest in Texas. Dunham and Konner are also using their connections to secure personal essays from the likes of Reese Witherspoon and J.Crew creative director and president Jenna Lyons. “We want to talk to celebrities about the things celebrities don’t normally talk about,” says Konner. “Like, we’d love to get Kim Kardashian to talk to us about finance. She is a businesswoman, after all.” When it comes to the crucial task of figuring out an advertising model, Dunham and Konner are proceeding more cautiously. “Advertising is a brave new world for us,” admits Dunham. “I’ve never done a sponsored tweet in my life; we’ve never done any version of product placement on the show.” Within weeks of Lenny’s official launch, Dunham and Konner had yet to commit to any ad partners and were still paying for everything themselves. “But we want to be able to expand,” Dunham says. “We want to give our staff health insurance, and we want to be a place where when you write for us you don’t feel exploited.” They’ll also soon debut an e-commerce wing. The collection of products, primarily made by women, will include everything from leggings to “totally random housewares,” says Cooley. Most items will be exclusive designer collaborations with the site and priced between $50 and $100, so they won’t break the average Girls viewer’s bank account. “We’re not expecting to build an e-commerce empire,” Dunham explains. “We just want to share a couple of really great things at a reasonable price that are special and ethically made.” One thing that Dunham is amply prepared for: the inevitable sneering of her ubiquitous troll army. “So much hostility has been directed toward me on the Internet already that it’s like getting an immunity shot,” she says. “If everything I do is going to be dissected, but I also know that it’s going to be valuable to x number of women, then why not just go for it?”

A little help from their friends HOW SE V ER A L K E Y A DV ISERS WERE ESSENTI A L IN SH A PING THE LENN Y V ISION

Gw ynet h Pa lt row “We went to her for little details on everything along the way,” says Konner. “Gwyneth ran Goop herself for so long without investment partners. She’s a fierce businesswoman who knows technically how to do this.”

David Plotz The journalist and Atlas Obscura founder helped them settle on the newsletter format rather than a web magazine, says Cooley. “It’s cheaper to produce so that we can spend more on writers and stories.”

Sheryl Sa ndberg “I can call her at any time, day or night, with a question,” says Dunham. “Watching the way she expanded Lean In—taking it slowly because she understood that what was important wasn’t just expansion but being involved at every step—has been inspiring.” Illustrations by Electra Sinclair

Larry Busacca/Getty Images (Konner); JB Lacroix/Getty Images (Paltrow source image); Andrea Mohin/The New York Times/Redux (Plotz source image); Praveen Negi/Getty Images (Sandberg source image)

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Trending

Hot Sauce, U.S.A. Where once was Tabasco, there is now sriracha, gochujang, and more. What the condiment aisle says about American consumers. BY ELIZABETH SEGRAN Photograph by Maurizio Di Iorio

Ted Chung is a man who’s thought long and hard about hot sauce. “It’s something I take very personally and spiritually,” says Chung, the founder of Cashmere, a marketing agency that targets multicultural millennials. As the son of Korean immigrants to the U.S., he noticed as far back as the 1970s that his parents put Tabasco on everything, wherever they ate. “They were longing for the spiciness that is common in Asian foods,” he says. Today, the Chungs don’t have to rely solely on Tabasco for their hit of heat. While Tabasco accounts for 18% of the hot sauce market, there are now hundreds of varieties available in the U.S.—from Tapatio to Texas Pete—and more than a few of them with foreign roots. If you’re looking to spice up your omelet at your local diner, you might ﬁnd Thai sriracha, Mexican Cholula, or even Korean gochujang. These exotic ﬂavors have quietly crept into restaurants and supermarkets across the country, resulting in an explosion in hot sauce sales, which 52 FastCompany.com November 2015

Packing heat Surging hot sauce sales have led to a spate of hot sauce–themed festivals, restaurants, and even documentaries.

have grown by more than 150% since 2000—more than ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, and barbecue sauce combined. The ﬁery condiment is now the foundation of a billion-dollar industry. An NPD study published this year found that 56% of households keep hot sauce on hand, including many brands that have

transcended the ethnic communities they hail from. But how did hot sauce conquer the American palate in the ﬁrst place? One reason for the rise of hot sauce in the U.S. is the country’s shifting demographics. “Millennials are more adventurous and curious than previous generations,” says Chung, who’s helped brands

For the past three years, Mercedes-Benz and Fast Company have invited entrepreneurs to tell us how a Sprinter van would drive their business forward for the chance to win not only a new van, but also $10,000 towards vehicle customization. In 2015, we relaunched the contest to celebrate a new addition to the Mercedes-Benz vans family, the mid-sized 2016 Metris. Packing large capabilities into a smaller footprint, while living up to the high quality and safety standards Mercedes-Benz is known for, the 2016 Metris attracted a new class of contestants, many working in urban areas where the van’s more compact design and tighter turning radius stand out as key features.

EDGING OUT HUNDREDS OF ENTRIES, T H E W I N N E R O F T H I S Y E A R ’S M E R C E D E S - B E N Z D R I V E YO U R B U S I N E S S FO RWA R D C O N T E S T I S :

SOCIAL IMPRINTS

Based in San Francisco, Social Imprints has become one of the most successful branding companies offering clients a one-stop service for screen printing, promotional products, embroidery, paper printing, and extremely convenient online account management services, custom web stores, and fulﬁllment solutions. In addition to a traditional workforce, Social Imprints not only provides career opportunities and a living wage to people who need a second chance—from formerly incarcerated individuals, to low-income individuals, to veterans—but also a support and role modeling system for employees who are looking for more, both in their careers and personal lives. A customized Metris van, built by Automotive Designs and Fabrications, will provide a mobile storefront to distribute product at music festivals and regional events, storage for transporting materials and gear, and additional exposure for the growing brand.

VISIT FASTCOMPANY.COM/METRIS FOR THE FULL STORY.

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like Red Bull and Hot Pockets reach that elusive and free-spending age group. For example, sriracha—the Southeast Asian chili pepper–based condiment popularized by “rooster sauce” maker Huy Fong Foods—was primarily sold in Asian supermarkets before hipsters in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and San Francisco made it into a cult item. Huy Fong astutely picked up on this behavior and started distributing the sauce to food trucks and larger grocers. (Today, it’s stocked in 16% of households headed by millennials.) Some analysts also suggest that the spike in hot sauce consumption is connected to America’s increasingly diverse population—by 2020, more than half of the children in the U.S. will be part of a minority group.

Hot sauce brands have struck a balance between playing up cultural traits and appealing to a larger swath of consumers. To capitalize on this shift, some hot sauce brands have struck a balance between playing up their products’ cultural traits and appealing to a larger swath of consumers. For example, since 2005, Chung Jung One—currently the biggest U.S. manufacturer and distributor of the Korean gochujang, a fermented red pepper paste—has eschewed wheat ingredients to make the sauce gluten-free and vegan, and replaced traditional twist-top bottles with a squeezable variety (like ketchup or mustard). “We left a little Korean writing on it to make sure that people understood that we are the timeless, authentic gochujang brand,” says Brian Tompkins, Chung Jung One’s VP of sales and marketing. Other brands are letting customers make the discovery on their own. Cholula, a chili-based sauce produced in Mexico, moved north into

San Antonio in 1989, then expanded nationally throughout the 1990s via distribution at grocery stores and restaurants. “It naturally sold in markets where there was a larger Hispanic and Latin influence, like Texas and Southern California,” explains Cholula’s director of brand marketing, Sharon Nevins. As Mexican food became widely popular in the U.S., grocery store buyers would stock Cholula alongside the taco mixes and tortillas. Nevins says the company has never launched a national ad campaign, yet Cholula has nabbed 10% of market share in the hot sauce category and sells 10 million bottles a year. “We rely on people stumbling upon it at a restaurant and trying it out,” Nevins says. Many hot sauce companies avoid overt advertising, but fans of sriracha, gochujang, and Cholula have been keen to share their culinary adventures on social media. So where does all this leave the nearly 150-year-old Tabasco, America’s original hot sauce—the one Ted Chung’s family poured on everything? Although it’s still the market leader, its share has diminished over the last two decades as new brands have entered the industry. But Tabasco is fighting back. “Consumers are very enthusiastic to point out that when they make a certain dish, they want this particular hot sauce flavor and heat level,” says Tony Simmons, Tabasco’s CEO and a member of the McIlhenny family, who created the sauce. And so, Tabasco has been developing new flavors. Earlier this year, it launched its own sriracha—adding to a stable that includes chipotle and habanero sauces—and even opened a Tabascothemed restaurant. More competition could be on the horizon, in the form of upand-coming global cuisines making their way to the States. “One of the reasons I’m obsessed with hot sauce is that it reveals how connected different cultures are,” says Chung. “Everyone has their own interpretation, but spice, pepper, and chili are things we can all relate to.”

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Karyn Hillman went around the world and back to tell Levi’s exactly what women want in a jean. BY LAUREN SCHWARTZBERG Photograph by Damien Maloney

How I Get It Done

Though Levi’s is practically synonymous with denim, the iconic brand has had to contend with increasing competition in recent years from boutique labels and the rise of athleisure. But Levi’s is fighting back with chief product officer Karyn Hillman, who spent the past two years updating the brand’s women’s collection. The project culminated this summer with the release of Lot 700, a revamped line of jeans with new styles and more forgiving fabrics. Here’s how Hillman got the denim maker to stretch its boundaries.

Levi’s created a unique C-suite role for Hillman, who came from Calvin Klein and Gap. As CPO, she is responsible for both the design process and the production machine. Maintaining communication across the innovationfocused Eureka lab, where new fits are dreamed up; the denim mills, where fabrics are made; and the designers and technicians who execute the final product, Hillman ensures that the “signature Levi’s DNA” remains top of mind. Making the cut “It’s an ongoing process,” says Hillman of creating a wardrobe staple for people whose tastes keep evolving.

Hillman and her team began by giving the existing Levi’s portfolio a ruthless edit, going over everything from styles and cuts to smaller design details. They ditched stitching that had become “too modern and ornate” in favor of the more minimalist aesthetic of Levi’s jeans past. And fabric was vital. “Comfort and feeling good are what wearers expect now,” Hillman says. For skinnier styles, they developed a new fabric with up to 90% stretch that still has the look of true denim.

Hillman’s team road tested a prototype of their new collection on women in a half-dozen cities from Beijing to Chicago. When Hillman noted that the first thing women did when putting on the jeans was check their backsides, the designers adjusted the pockets, making them thicker and lower to accentuate the area. They also found that women wanted a style between a skinny and straight leg, along the lines of a slim cut. Back at Levi’s, they made a new set of prototypes, and went out on the road again. “We knew we had something when women didn’t want to give them back,” Hillman says.

Though Levi’s launched the collection with a campaign starring singer Alicia Keys, Hillman and her team haven’t stopped iterating in their quest for the perfect jeans. “Women’s expectations continue to change,” she says. “It’s a breathing, living item of clothing, and we’re going to evolve with it.” 56 FastCompany.com November 2015

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the buying power you need >9 2/6: 9?>F > C9?< 8/A 9I -/L

Leading Edge

Team spirit Our/Detroit partners (from left) Lynne Savino, Jeanmarie Morrish, and Kate Bordine celebrated their location’s first anniversary in August.

All drinking is local Pernod Ricard figured out how to be a global behemoth and a small-town distiller at the same time. BY JENNY MILLER Photograph by Ryan Lowry 58 FastCompany.com November 2015

When the small-batch spirits movement began gaining momentum about seven years ago, few were watching as closely as Åsa Caap, who was then the innovation director for Absolut Vodka. “There was a lot of talk about the growing craft and local trend,” she recalls. Rather than panic, Caap took it as a challenge. “I couldn’t get it out of my head: Why couldn’t there be a local brand that’s also a global brand?” Her solution: Our/Vodka, a network of semi-independent distilleries under the umbrella of Absolut’s parent company, Pernod Ricard. As CEO of Our/Vodka, Caap partners with entrepreneurs to help set up their facilities, which include tasting rooms and bars. The distillers run the operation as their own,

creating vodkas based on the same Pernod Ricard formula, but with local ingredients for a distinct ﬂavor. After debuting in Berlin in 2013, Our/Vodka now has outposts in Detroit and Seattle. But it’s expanding quickly, with distilleries in Amsterdam and London about to open, and ones in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and Paris on deck. The key, according to Caap, is tapping into a growing entrepreneurial community that’s not too slick or “glossy,” but also not resistant to working with a large brand such as Pernod Ricard. “We didn’t want to be in Brooklyn or Austin or Portland,” where residents can be too picky about the localness of their products, says Caap. “Early on, we ended up defending why we’re not local enough. We want to be global and local.” In that regard, Detroit, with its entrepreneurialdriven urban revitalization, is an ideal destination. “It was just a perfect match with us,” Caap says. Our/ Detroit, which opened in August 2014, operates as a bar four nights a week, sells bottles of vodka and other Detroit-made products, and doubles as a gallery and event space. Its founders have hosted dinners for local micro-grant organization Detroit Soup and completed a pocket park on the distillery’s block. “We have all the freedom to do what we want with the brand,” says partner Kate Bordine, who is also the creative director of Detroit coworking space Ponyride. So far, none of the locations have turned a proﬁt, but Our/Berlin expects to be in the black by the middle of next year. Meanwhile, Caap is starting to think about Asia, Australia, and Latin America, though she’s taking it slowly. “We’re still dreaming about conquering the world,” she says, “but at a good pace.”

How to bring a global brand back home A S T EP -BY-S T EP GUIDE

01 Find the right people An Our/Vodka partner must have entrepreneurial experience and be involved in their community. Says Caap, “You could be a super businessperson, but you have to have your heart in the right place.”

02 Choose a cent ral location “We want to avoid the crafty, Brooklyn-type areas, but we do want to be in New York City.” Often, Caap confesses, “we can’t afford to be picky. In Manhattan, I think there were just seven buildings that had the right potential zoning.”

03 Pe rson a lize t he space Our/Vodka handles installation of distillery equipment, but leaves the aesthetics to local partners. Detroit, for instance, has a spare, industrial-chic look, while Berlin has garage doors that roll up for events.

04 Get t he com m u n it y on you r side Local partners have free rein over how they run their distilleries, with one exception: They must do community outreach. Other than that, Caap says, “we give away the keys.”

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Social Good

Reality check The United Nations is using virtual reality to tackle real-world problems. BY BLAKE J. HARRIS Illustration by Boyoun Kim 60 FastCompany.com November 2015

Though there’s still much to be learned about the power and potential of virtual reality—from the release date of upcoming VR headsets to how this nascent technology will shape entertainment, education, and social interaction—ﬁlmmaker Chris Milk has already arrived at one important conclusion. “Virtual reality, fundamentally, is a technol-

ogy that removes borders,” he says. “Anything can be local to you.” Milk should know. The trailblazing director, who made his name creating cutting-edge, immersive music videos for bands such as U2 and Arcade Fire, recently founded the Vrse.works production company to push the boundaries of virtualreality filmmaking and offer tools and support to people interested in the medium. One of his first big projects: teaming up with the United Nations to create a series of short VR films highlighting some of the most pressing global challenges facing the organization, including the Syrian refugee crisis and climate change. The result is a powerful new approach to storytelling—one that could change the way relief organizations and other NGOs approach raising awareness and funds. Milk’s collaboration with the UN—an organization known for progressive ideas but rather conventional approaches—is not as unlikely as it sounds. That’s because his partner in the effort is Gabo Arora, a senior adviser (and self-described “bureaucratic ninja”) for the United Nations Millennium Campaign with a talent for forming creative alliances and leveraging new media to promote social causes. Arora was exploring the prospect of using virtual reality when he met Milk last year at a launch party for U2’s Songs of Innocence album (introduced by the Edge, naturally). Within a month, they had developed a plan for Arora to direct the UN’s first VR documentary on his next visit to a Syrian refugee camp in the Jordanian desert. Milk equipped him with the tools to make it happen and then supervised editing of the film from his base in Los Angeles. Clouds Over Sidra debuted in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where more than 120 diplomats waited in line for a chance to put on a Samsung Gear VR headset and be transported across the world. It went on to screen at Sundance, TEDx in Vancouver, and South by Southwest. The eightminute short draws attention to the

Social Good

Syrian refugee crisis by chronicling the day-to-day life of a 12-year-old girl named Sidra who, along with more than 80,000 other refugees, lives in the Za’atari camp in Jordan. In August, Milk and Arora rolled out Waves of Grace, which looks at the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak by following a Liberian survivor. Documentaries exploring industrial pollution in India, disaster relief in Nepal, and climate change in China and the Amazon are scheduled for release later this year. The key to these films is their uncanny ability to elicit empathy in viewers, an idea that Milk explored in a recent TED 2015 talk. Arora had been seeing diminishing returns for more traditional UN advocacy campaigns, ones that enlist celebrities or eminent people to write op-eds and joint letters. VR, by contrast, spotlights an issue by offering an inescapably immersive experience that transforms viewers into participants. Instead of having audiences passively watch Sidra in school or at the market, Clouds Over Sidra enables them to actually walk alongside her through the camp. “What you have is a set of tools that we’ve never had in any other form of media,” Milk explains. “Cinema allows us to feel compassion for people who are very different from us.” Arora and the UN are strategically rolling out these films with impact in mind, bringing them to high-level meetings where policy makers, philanthropists, and big donors are present. After the suc-

cess of Clouds Over Sidra at Davos, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon insisted that the film be screened at the main reception of the Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria, held in Kuwait in March. The conference was projected to raise $2.3 billion but wound up generating $3.8 billion. At the UN’s summit on global sustainable development in New York City at the end of September, the films served as the centerpiece for the organization’s first-ever interactive hub (organized by Arora), open to delegates, foreign ministers, and heads of state. To get these documentaries from decision makers to the people, Milk and Arora translated their films into 15 different languages and then partnered with UNICEF, which collects much of its donations from man-on-the-street campaigns. Through the Translating Empathy to Action program, UNICEF fundraisers in 40 countries have hit the streets with a combination of Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear headsets cued up to play Clouds Over Sidra. According to Patrick Rose, the communications director for UNICEF New Zealand, one out of every six people who saw the film donated—twice the normal rate. And it wasn’t just one-off donations; many people made monthly commitments. “A lot of people have a very emotional reaction to it,” says Christopher Fabian, the colead of UNICEF’s Innovation Unit. “I can’t even count the number of times someone has taken off the headset and the goggles are filled with tears.” For Arora, the experience has also been a chance to shake things up at the United Nations, an organization that is often resistant to change. “In some ways, it’s only through new media that we can actually get these issues out there,” he explains. And VR is a natural fit: “It really speaks to the ‘we the people’ notion in the UN’s charter,” Arora says. “It’s about listening, understanding, and bringing people’s voices into decision-making processes all over the world.”

“Virtual reality allows us to feel compassion for people who are very different from us.” 62 FastCompany.com November 2015

Not child’s play Clouds Over Sidra thrusts viewers right into the action at Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.

VR FILMMAKING 101 FI V E T HINGS T H AT CHRIS MIL K A ND G A BO A ROR A L E A RNED W HIL E M A K ING CLOUDS OV ER SIDR A

1. Throw out the playbook

The original Best Practices Guide from Oculus cautioned against moving the camera, which could induce nausea in viewers. But Milk found that “if you do it really carefully you can actually garner an emotional response.” For Clouds Over Sidra, he advised Arora to move throughout the camp while filming.

2. Perspective is power

Point of view is critical for Arora: “One of my strategies is to throw viewers into the middle of the action.” This way, audience members don’t feel like onlookers but rather part of the scene.

3. Polish, polish, polish

The postproduction process was vital to creating a moving experience. “Editing Clouds Over Sidra was actually really discouraging for a while,” Milk recalls. “It took all the pieces of the puzzle coming together and fitting perfectly before the movie clicked.”

4. Don’t be afraid to ask

The VR filmmaking community is small and supportive. “It’s like 1920s Paris,” Arora says. “We all shoot around ideas and support each other.”

5. Create your own distribution channels

Milk has been able to distribute his films, including Clouds Over Sidra, through his Vrse app, which offers a multitiered VR experience based on different headsets. If you don’t have any gear, the app also has a “magic window mode” that uses multiple vantage points to approximate a VR experience.

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F R O M T H E H A L L S O F G O O G L E A N D M I C R O S O F T T O H I G H - E N D K I T C H E N S A N D T H E L . A . M AY O R ’ S O F F I C E , U LT R A - B U S Y P R O F E S S I O N A L S — I N C L U D I N G O P R A H W I N F R E Y, C O M E D I A N A Z I Z A N S A R I , A N D D J S T E V E A O K I — O F F E R T H E B E S T W AY S T O B R E A K T H R O U G H A L L T H E C L U T T E R . Illustration by Jamie Cullen

Winfrey juggles an impressive list of endeavors with the help of her deeply trusted team.

Styling: Kelly Hurliman

Not on her OWN

OPRAH WINFREY CEO, OPRAH WINFREY NETWORK

“I only do what I want to do.” A F T E R R E VA M P I N G H E R O N C E - S T R U G G L I N G T V C H A N N E L , OPRAH WINFREY HAS FIGURED OUT HOW TO MAKE TIME FOR THE P R O J E C T S S H E C A R E S A B O U T M O S T. By J.J. McCorvey

I’ve come to interview the world’s most famous interviewer, and she has already caught me off guard. “So, what’s your intention here with me?” Oprah Winfrey asks, her legs crossed, a serious look on her face. We’re talking in Winfrey’s office at the Los Angeles headquarters of her television channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (aka OWN), and the flowing white drapes, gilded light fixtures, and flocculent, cloudlike sofa make the room feel more like heaven than Hollywood. A floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelf behind her immaculately tidy desk is full of intimidating mementos, including one of her 18 Emmy awards and a photograph of her with Nelson Mandela.

Photograph by Herring & Herring

Winfrey has invited me to spend some time watching her run her media empire, and so far, my visit has been going well. Despite her massive celebrity (and the fact that she met me just an hour ago), she is warm, huggy, and— true to her spiritual-guru persona—immediately invested in teaching me something I can use to improve my life. We have already bonded over Mississippi, where we were both born (“What a wowzer that is for me!” she says). But then she drops this oddly blunt question about my intent, and I’m unexpectedly stumped. Finally, after a bit of rambling, I come up with an answer. “I’m here,” I tell her, “to learn how Oprah gets stuff done.” “Okay, great!” she replies. “I can help you with that.” Winfrey is one of the most powerful and inﬂuential people in the world, as well as one of the busiest. With a net worth of $3 billion, she is one of just two black billionaires in North America (the other is Michael Jordan). Her 25-year run as host and producer of The Oprah Winfrey Show—which, in a brilliant business move, she solely owns through her production company, Harpo Studios—changed the TV business and has left a void since its ﬁnal episode in 2011. As the chairman and CEO of OWN, she oversees an expanding channel that’s now available in 82 million homes. Jointly owned by Winfrey and Discovery Communications, November 2015 FastCompany.com 67

Winfrey’s World OWN has nearly doubled its prime-time viewership since it launched four years ago, driven by hits such as the reality show Iyanla: Fix My Life and the Tyler Perry drama The Haves and the Have Nots. OWN has now grown into a cable success story, and the first quarter of 2015 was the network’s most watched yet, with an average of 539,000 prime-time viewers—not too far off from CNN and Comedy Central. Winfrey is also the founder, publisher, and monthly cover subject of O, The Oprah Magazine (which boasts a circulation of 2.5 million), as well as an Oscar-nominated actress (The Color Purple) and film producer (Selma). From October 18 to 24, OWN will air Belief, a seven-part docuseries that explores faith and spirituality, which she executive produced. She is the creator of a hugely influential book club, has nearly 30 million Twitter followers, and in general holds such sway over public sentiment that her influence has a name: The Oprah Effect. Oprah Winfrey has a lot going on. And, as I discover, she is on the same arduous and perpetual journey as everyone else: trying to find a way to get everything done while maintaining some kind of balance. “I am aware that there is a finite amount of time and energy in every day,” says Winfrey, who’s wearing a breezy cream cardigan with chocolate trim, dangly pearl earrings, and a pricey, 18-karat rose gold Apple Watch. “So what is really important? What do you really want to do?” She leans toward me, stretching an arm across the back of the couch, then whispers, as if confessing a secret: “Now I’m in a position where I only do what I want to do.” OWN’s headquarters are located in a five-story contemporary glass office building in West Hollywood. Spread over four floors, it’s full of luxe touches like walls of moss, exposed gray brick, neon signs projecting Oprah-isms (“Look ahead in a new direction”), and huge mounted photos, including one of Winfrey interviewing Beyoncé. The building’s second level is occupied by Will Ferrell’s viral-clip factory Funny or Die, which can make for some odd encounters: At one point I watched an FoD employee cruise into the parking lot with a car full of piñatas. Though Winfrey famously ran her talk show and Harpo Studios from Chicago, these days she’s moving her whole operation to L.A., making this expansive complex the center of her empire. By the end of the year, she will have shut down her Chicago studios entirely. The closing of Harpo is both pragmatic and symbolic, marking a shift in Winfrey’s career and in her lifestyle. “The hardest thing to get accustomed to when I left [my talk show] is that I get to order my own time,” she says. “In Chicago, when it was like, windchill-factor 42 below, sometimes I went from one garage to the next garage and never saw daylight. I had this whole little world that was just my little Harpo world.” But today? “I’m at a point where I am like, ‘Whoa, my God!’ The birds are tweeting, the sun is coming up. I mean, I appreciate every thing. I’m like a person who’s been let out.” 68 FastCompany.com November 2015

I N S I D E O P R A H ’ S E N D L E S S LY E X PA N D I N G A R R AY O F P R OJ E CT S

CEO Oprah Winfrey hit the media-mogul big time in 2011, when she launched her TV network, OWN, a joint partnership with Discovery Communications that’s now available in 82 million homes.

TV producer How much does Winfrey believe in Belief (1), the seven-night documentary series about faith that premieres on OWN on October 18? She financed the ambitious program herself, shepherding it through a three-year development process. She is also the executive producer of Oprah’s Master Class, a biographical series that features celebrities recounting life lessons.

Movie producer Harpo Films, a studio that produces movies and scripted television

programs, is currently developing two films: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which will premiere on HBO and is based on the best-selling book, and The Water Man, a sci-fi family drama that will star and be coproduced by David Oyelowo (Selma).

Curator Nearly 20 years after launching her best-selleranointing book club, Winfrey still makes each selection. Her most recent pick is Cynthia Bond’s Ruby (2), the rights to which have already been snatched up by a movie production company. Which one? Harpo Films, of course.

Celebrity interviewer Nobody coaxes intimate confessionals quite like Winfrey. With Oprah Prime (3), she steers news makers

A scene in Belief captures the Hindu Holi festival in India.

3 7

through revealing (and sometimes teary) conversations. Memorable gets include Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, and Lance Armstrong, who for the first time publicly confessed to doping.

inspiration with Super Soul Sunday, in which she often interviews uplifting figures at her home.

Self-help guru More than 4 million people across 200 countries have participated in the “Oprah and Deepak 21-Day Meditation Experience,” which offers online audio meditations led by Winfrey and New Age sage Deepak Chopra (4). It’s part of a large e-learning platform that she’s building on Oprah.com. Winfrey also serves up weekly

comedian’s grandmother, who raised him while running a brothel. She is also set to appear in the OWN drama Queen Sugar, which she is coproducing with Selma director Ava DuVernay.

Emcee Publisher With her self-branded magazine, O (5), Winfrey has managed to avoid one big issue: who to put on the cover. Every month she herself is the face of the publication, still somehow discovering new poses 15 years after she launched it with Hearst. Now the country’s 18th biggest magazine, O features a monthly column by Winfrey that was compiled into a book last year.

Actor Having costarred in The Butler (6), Winfrey will reteam with director Lee Daniels for a Richard Pryor biopic, set to start shooting early next year. Winfrey has been cast as the

She doesn’t just come to your TV; she comes to your town. In 2014, Winfrey brought her “Live your best life” message to eight cities (7), offering presentations from the likes of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. In December, she will take a similar tour to six cities in Australia and New Zealand.

Philanthropist The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (8), which serves 275

Above: Winfrey chats with Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo on Oprah Prime.

young women from grades 8 through 12, opened in South Africa in 2007, and graduates have continued to colleges such as Stanford, Spelman, and Brown. In 2014, Winfrey teamed with Starbucks to create a line of tea blends called Teavana Oprah Chai. A portion of the proceeds go to charities such as the mentoring program Girls Inc.

Broadway producer After earning an Oscar nomination for her role in the 1985 film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, Winfrey helped bring a musical version to the stage a decade ago. This year she will help bring it back to Broadway in a production starring Jennifer Hudson.

November 2015 FastCompany.com 69

This newfound freedom didn’t happen by accident. Winfrey has structured OWN so it can run without her constant oversight, leaving plenty of time to pursue additional projects that she’s passionate about. To make that work, she has installed a pair of trusted longtime employees as copresidents: Erik Logan, who joined Harpo as an executive vice president in 2008, and Sheri Salata, who started as a marketer at Harpo in 1995 and rose to executive producer of The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006, which she oversaw until the end of its run. The trio refer to themselves as a “threelegged stool” that supports OWN’s organization of about 200 employees, with Logan mostly handling business and operations, Salata primarily steering creative, and Winfrey, of course, as the brand. “I try to surround myself with people who really know what they’re doing and give them the freedom to do it,” Winfrey says. Salata and Logan, who frequently complete each other’s sentences, oversee a leadership team that includes several other longtime Winfrey veterans, some of whom have worked with her for as much as two decades. Together, they’ve developed a keen sense of how she would likely react to any given issue. “I’m right about 89% of the time,” jokes Salata. “There’s a beautiful sifting and sorting process that happens with people who’ve been around the mission for a really long time.” Words like mission are common when you talk to Winfrey’s most trusted executives; conversations are full of terms like disciples, sacred, moral compass, and spiritual leader. “We work for a person who has a mission on earth,” says Salata. “It’s a great North Star. Not just because she’s the boss, but because she is the heart and soul, and the spiritual leader of this organization.” When you work at OWN, Winfrey’s voice isn’t just your product—it’s your guiding spirit. Consequently, signature Oprah queries become part of every aspect of OWN’s process. “What’s your intention?” is one important example, I eventually learn; it turns out that nerve-racking opening challenge wasn’t cooked up especially for me. The “church of Oprah” has been parodied plenty, but at OWN, it’s a highly effective management tool. “It’s a mindset,” says Logan. “When people deeper in the organization have decisions to make, they can keep that present, because they ultimately know, as it flows up the organization, that that’s how we look at it too.” Winfrey is both the boss and the inspirational figure who leads by example. “What would Oprah do when you’re leading a meeting and you have a difficult person?” asks (Continued on page 120)

I look up and see tears streaming down Winfrey’s face. “Would you get me some Kleenex, please?” she yells to her publicist.

70 FastCompany.com November 2015

How She Does It T H E TO O LS , T R I C KS , A N D T R U T H S T H AT H E L P OPRAH GET EVERYTHING DONE

“I function very well on five and a half hours of sleep. Anything less than that, I notice a lack of focus, a listlessness, a waning energy, and not-assharp thinking. If I do two or three days of that in a row, I’m no good. I’m literally just sitting at my desk and I can’t remember where I put anything.”

deadline. And then I’ll change that deadline when that deadline shows up [laughs]. ‘Okay, by 3, I’m going to make that call.’ Four o’clock comes around—‘Okay okay, by 5 today. Oh, everybody’s left New York! Can’t make that call!’ So now I sit and ask myself, ‘What’s the worst that’s going to happen here, and why do I fear the confrontation?’ ”

Morning routine

Key tools

“My body wakes up between 7:16 and 7:23 a.m., like clockwork. If I make it to 7:23, it’s like, ‘Wooo!’ I don’t use alarm clocks. They make me agitated. Everything begins and ends with stillness: a conscious awareness of my presence within the greater presence of all, whether I’m paying attention to the way the sun’s rising, or whether it’s misty out in the morning on the trees. When I wake up now I have the privilege of listening to real twitter.”

“I have an iPad Mini and I do everything from there. I haven’t used a computer in probably three years. I’ve gotten every kind of app that’s supposed to help you keep up, but that means you have to check that thing every day! No. I don’t do to-do lists. It’s all right here [pointing to her head]. I have a wonderful chief of staff who every night sends me my itinerary for the next day. I look at that, put it in my head, and that’s it.”

Sleep schedule

Go-to motivator Strategy to beat procrastination “I procrastinate with confrontational things and uncomfortable conversations. I’ll give myself a

“I have a box of quotes that says ‘365 Truths,’ and just this morning I pulled out about three. When I’m standing in the kitchen and waiting on my tea to brew, I’ll read one for every minute it takes to finish brewing. Everything from Gandhi to Thoreau.”

Coping tactic “I close the door, wherever I am—at my old office in Chicago, I’d literally go in the closet—and just sit and breathe.”

It’s Good Not to Be Home. Spending Time Out of the Office with Wiley Cerilli PRESENTED BY HYATT REGENCY

HYATT REGENCY KNOWS THAT SOMETIMES IT’S GOOD NOT TO BE HOME— OR IN THE OFFICE. WE COULDN’T AGREE MORE, SO WE SAT DOWN WITH WILDLY SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR WILEY CERILLI TO UNDERSTAND HOW HIS LIFE OUTSIDE THE OFFICE AND ON THE ROAD FUELS HIS ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

iley Cerilli dropped out of NYU to join the founding team of Seamless before going on to found SinglePlatform—a company that connects businesses with consumers in their local area—which was then acquired for $100 million. Today he is a venture partner at First Round, an early-stage tech fund that funded SinglePlatform. Wiley attributes much of his success to experiences out of the office and on the road. “A big part of getting where I am today was a trip I took after I lost my father to cancer when I was 16. To raise money for cancer research, I biked cross-country, covering 100 miles a day and raising $30,000.” “This gave me a new kind of strength,” he says, which he wouldn’t have found in conventional circumstances. “Moments that break you from your routine are what deﬁne you.”

”When I returned from the bike trip, the plan was to attend NYU,” he laughs, “but I dropped out to work at Seamless, which I truly believed in.” Today, Wiley remains as active as ever. “I’m not slowing down,” he says. Q: Can you tell us what you do outside of the office to stay productive? A: I‘m always trying to learn new things, and staying active is critical to keeping me productive and staying refreshed. I recently started swimming, and I’m learning to meditate and play guitar. I’m a huge supporter of organized sports like ﬂag football. Q: As someone who is frequently traveling and starting something new, how do you keep a clear head? A: I actually love traveling and being in hotel rooms. I get a lot of work done and in some ways am even more productive on the road—it’s easier to set rules, an agenda, goals, and then follow up with all of the above, because you have an excuse. Unstructured time comes around more frequently when traveling, so it can be a perfect chance to make calls to family and friends or to network with someone new—the next big thing could be at the bar downstairs.

Q: Do you have a vice/indulgence while traveling? A: I love to see friends and family (especially my mom) or check out a local art museum, but if I can’t, I like to stay in and unwind with room service and a movie. Q: Can you tell us about your favorite things to do when you’re not in the office and not at home? A: I love working with Experience Camps—a free, weeklong sleepaway summer camp for children who have lost a parent or sibling. I spend several weeks a year volunteering there. Being there in the bunks as a camp counselor with the kids provides me with an immense amount of perspective, gratitude, and inspiration. manitouexperience.org.

Q: What words do you live by? A: I love this quote by Peter F. Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” I think it’s essential to enact your own future and be proactive about your goals rather than letting whatever surrounds you dictate what’s going to happen in your life. Q: If you could share one piece of advice with an eager entrepreneur, what would it be? A: Try to solve a big problem that excites you and surround yourself with people who will support that. Someone once said, “Set your life on ﬁre and seek those who fan your ﬂames.” You can’t start a business alone, and especially in the beginning, when you’re working long hours and hitting roadblocks and you’re not sure if it’ll work out the way you want it to. You need people you trust and respect beside you, you need to cultivate a real team with a common goal, and you need a good support network outside of work.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT INDUSTRY LEADERS’ LIVES OUTSIDE OF THE OFFICE—AND WHAT GOT THEM WHERE THEY ARE TODAY—VISIT FASTCOMPANY.COM/OUT-OF-OFFICE-WITH. THE BEST WORK IS OFTEN DONE OUTSIDE OF THE OFFICE. THE NEXT TIME YOU’RE ON THE ROAD, BOOK YOUR STAY WITH HYATT REGENCY AT HYATT.COM.

Key man Garcetti plays jazz piano to help unwind.

Since taking office in 2013, Eric Garcetti has tackled tough issues such as water conservation, raising the minimum wage, and homelessness. His next order of business? “Being a builder,” says the onetime international affairs professor and human rights advocate. “Building a great city, building an economy, building an infrastructure, and, ultimately, building people’s trust in government.” He’s also a delegator, a traveler, and a master napper. Strategy to beat procrastination “Schedule every second of every minute of every hour of every day.”

“ You

can’t let the urgent overcome the important . ” Coping tactic

Biggest productivity issue “Being reactive. That’s part of my job description: There is always going to be a fire, a shooting, a crisis, but you can’t let the urgent overcome the important.”

Sleep schedule “The greatest gift I have is my ability to sleep. I can sleep basically at the drop of a hat: for two minutes, for 20 minutes, for two hours. I can sleep in cars. I’ve slept on subways. I’ve slept on jumping speedboats and even trotting horses. I don’t have any problem turning off my mind and falling asleep. And I need my sleep. If I get much less than seven hours a night, it’ll be tough.”

Time-management system

Spot illustrations by Burnt Toast Creative

“I have an executive officer who can be like a second brain. The higher up you go in leadership, the less control you have to have. Just cede control of your schedule to the smarter people [on your staff] and they will make you work from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.”

Photograph by Tommaso Mei

“When I’m overwhelmed I like playing Ruzzle. It’s like a Boggle game on your smartphone. I’m pretty good at unplugging when things get stressful and just kind of breathing.”

Go-to motivator “My household and my daughter. My wife and I have been foster parents, too, and that motivated me in a very personal way. The other one is my city: the highs and the lows of human existence, which mayors have a unique window into.”

Decompression method “I play music. I’m a pianist, and I write music. Jazz is my main area, but I’ve written musicals and singer-songwriter stuff. I can clearly carry a tune, but you want somebody else to sing it when you record it. Also travel. I’ve been to 75 countries and all seven continents, and that definitely is a spiritual recharge.” —As told to Jillian Goodman

THE SECRETS OF

PUNCTUAL PEOPLE •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

ERIC GARCETTI M AYO R O F LOS ANGELES

THEY’RE METICULOUS CALENDAR KEEPERS. Never rely on your memory. “My calendar is the tool I’ve put in place to remind me when to do things,” says Kara DeFrias, deputy director of 18F Consulting, a civic consultancy for the federal government. “If a notification doesn’t pop up for a meeting, I’ll miss the meeting.”

THEY EXPECT D E L AYS . Being on time means being prepared for the unanticipated. “I always double the amount of time Google tells me it will take to get somewhere,” says Alexandra Lee, senior vice president of strategy and partnerships for the creative studio Crush & Lovely. “Inevitably a subway is late, or there’s bad traffic and I can’t find a cab.”

THEY SAVE A TASK FOR WHEN THEY ARRIVE. “The reason many people are late is they’re trying to squeeze in one more thing before they head out the door,” says Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives. “If that’s your pattern, one solution is to have something you’re going to do when you get there. You feel urgency to go so you can complete the task.” —Jessica Hullinger

November 2015 FastCompany.com 75

Go-to motivator “I get out of the building and go for a walk and look at the trees. Time to think is the scarcest resource in life. I use my drive to and from work to think, but it’s never quite enough. For me, going for a walk and being in fresh air is almost a form of meditation.”

Meeting master Twohill has as many as 20 a day—and makes them all count.

Email pet peeve “I still believe the best form of communication is talking. I know this is very antiquated. The most common email people get from me is two words: ‘Call me.’ ”

Approach to prioritizing “Every morning, I look through all my emails and star the ones that I want to have cleared by the end of the day. I have made peace with myself that I may not get back to all the rest. You get older and wiser and realize you can’t do it all. You can’t even begin to do it all. You have to be realistic.”

Meeting strategy

LORRAINE TWOHILL SENIOR VP OF GLOBAL MARKETING, GOOGLE

“ Time

to think is the scarcest resource . ”

“I have between 17 and 20 meetings in a day. I’ll do stand-up meetings, walking one-on-ones. In my role, a lot of people want to run stuff by me, and I don’t want to be the bottleneck. I’m obsessive about making meetings highly productive.”

Decompression method

“Google is a very fast-paced place,” says Lorraine Twohill, who oversees product launches and ad strategies for all of its many projects. “It’s never gotten boring, but you also have to be super organized.” A 12-year Google veteran, Twohill is intimately familiar with the company’s productivity tools. But she’s also fond of a more natural sort of Google resource. 76 FastCompany.com November 2015

“I go to SoulCycle at 5:30 p.m. on Friday. It’s a cleansing ritual. It makes me feel like I have earned my glass of wine. And when I walk into my home, I’m done. The kids take over, giving you hugs and telling you about their day. It’s family time. Kids are the best way of balancing your life.” —As told to Elizabeth Segran Photograph by Amy Harrity

decodingDNA .slack.com

The MacArthur Lab hunts for the genes that will change the way we understand and diagnose serious disease. Their teams use Slack, an easy-to-use messaging app |_-| bm|;]u-|;v b|_ o u ; bvঞm] |ooѴv -m7 ]-|_;uv -ѴѴ o u 1oll mb1-ঞom bm om; rѴ-1; |Ľv |;-l ouh l-7; vblrѴ;uķ lou; rѴ;-v-m|ķ -m7 lou; ruo7 1ঞ ;

work on purpose

BELINDA JOHNSON CHIEF BUSINESS AFFAIRS AND LEGAL OFFICER, AIRBNB

“I

have to force myself to take breaks . ”

For the past four years, Belinda Johnson has been responsible for Airbnb’s regulatory efforts, a tough, sometimes controversial position as the company has grown. Now she’s been promoted to an even bigger role, helping to steer Airbnb’s overall strategy and adding a host of new responsibilities, including public policy, communications, social initiatives, and philanthropy. In other words, her already epic to-do list just got a whole lot longer.

Organizing principle “Rigorous prioritization. In the morning I look at my calendar and think about whether things that aren’t critical can be moved to the next week.”

Key tool “Apple Notes. I use it all day long. As I’m going through my email, I’m either taking care of things in the moment or making [an entry] in Apple Notes that I need to deal with it later. At the end of the day, I go through all my notes and make sure I’ve addressed everything.”

Strategy to beat procrastination “I have the opposite issue, which is that I try to get everything done. That ends up being an endless stream, so I have to force myself to take breaks.”

Sleep schedule “I try to get seven hours. I’m in bed by 10, but I may not actually go to sleep until 11. It doesn’t take long. I just breathe in and out maybe 10 times, and that does it.”

Work on vacation? “I definitely check in once in the morning, then in the afternoon and at night. Just to make sure there’s nothing urgent. That helps me relax.”

Coping tactic

Air club Johnson taps into the buzz of a busy day.

78 FastCompany.com November 2015

“I never really feel overwhelmed; I feel energized by what goes on in our day. But I have a bracelet I look at. My husband gave it to me for our 23rd wedding anniversary and it helps me get back into perspective.” —As told to JG Photograph by Chloe Aftel

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AZIZ ANSARI COMEDIAN

Laugh factory To Ansari, a comicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is never finished.

Photograph by Peter Ash Lee

Biggest productivity issue “I waste an hour or two every day looking at mindless stuff on the Internet. I go down a wormhole from Google News or The New York Times. I’ll watch movie trailers and stuff like that. It’s like, ‘A 15second video on Instagram of a guy with a light saber! Look at that!’ But I wrote a bit about that, so it did help in that way.”

Sleep schedule “It’s hard when I’m doing stand-up. I may do three or four shows in a night, and the last one could be at 12:30 a.m. If people are

laughing, I feed off that energy. I’m wired. I get home and I’m the most awake I could ever be. I try to fall asleep, but usually I just keep my girlfriend up, irritating her.”

THE SECRETS OF

Great advice

MASTER D E L E G AT O R S

“A friend told me, ‘Don’t tell yourself you’re going to write for six hours. Tell yourself you’re going to write for an hour.’ If you really focus and write for an hour, that’s a lot.”

THEY HAVE A T O - D O N ’ T L I S T.

Productivity myth “While we were writing [Master of None], we would work until 6 or 7 p.m., and then we’d be done. There are other writers’ rooms where people spend nights in the office. I can’t imagine you’re doing your best work then. You’ve got to be a person and do other stuff, or you’re not going to be inspired to write.”

Go-to motivator “Fear that it’s all going to go away. The week before the Oddball Festival, I did a ton of stand-up shows. Why? I don’t want to tank up there. The other comics on the show are really funny. If I don’t come out really strong, I’m going to eat shit. That’s a pretty big motivator.”

Quitting time “With stand-up, you’re never quite done. If you’re a classical musician, you can go, ‘Okay, I can play that piece perfectly. I’m done with my work.’ With stand-up, the piece is constantly changing and evolving.” —As told to Bruce Fretts

Nobody would accuse Aziz Ansari of slacking off. He is cowriting and starring in the semiautobiographical new Netflix sitcom Master of None, which will be available on November 6, and he’s also the coauthor of the best-selling sociological study Modern Romance. Plus, he’s been touring as a stand-up alongside Amy Schumer in the Oddball Comedy & Curiosity Festival. But his life isn’t all work. “I paint a picture of myself as this crazy workaholic, but I do think it’s important to have a well-rounded day,” Ansari says. “I like to eat, drink good wine, and smoke amazing weed.”

It’s important to quickly identify tasks that aren’t worth your time. As a reminder, Fran Hauser, a partner at Rothenberg Ventures, keeps a running catalog of things she always hands off. “It’s really liberating once you set those filters,” she says. “It’s like a little formula.”

THEY ARE SUPER CLEAR WITH INSTRUCTIONS. “I have an Excel spreadsheet with roles and responsibilities,” says 18F Consulting’s Kara DeFrias. “For a particular task, these are the duties.”

THEY’RE THE RIGHT KIND OF SUPPORTIVE. Delegating only works if your employees can handle it. “Part of it is letting them fail,” says DeFrias. “It’s a great opportunity to let people grow. I’ll often say, ‘Talk to me about the thought process that got you to this decision.’ It helps me understand what I did wrong in explaining the expectations.” —JH

November 2015 FastCompany.com 81

Key tool JOY CHO DESIGNER

“ Things

are always racing in my head . ”

Joy Cho, the Los Angeles–based designer, author, and founder of the lifestyle site Oh Joy!, has big goals: “To make life happier and prettier and more meaningful,” she says. One of Pinterest’s most influential users (she has more than 13 million followers), Cho is known for creating cheery, brightly hued patterns that have graced Hygge & West wallpaper, Nod children’s bedding, specially designed BandAids, and even a Microsoft mouse. Next spring, she will introduce her second line of products for Target, which is sure to increase her following—and her workload.

“I put everything I need to do on Google Calendar. There are different categories and a color code. My brain works in color: Green is active things I need to do, and once something is done, I change it to gray, which fades to the background.”

Biggest productivity issue “When you hear that ding, you have this compulsion to check [your phone]. I already work too much. There’s nothing wrong with reading a magazine or a book or even staring into space.”

Sleep schedule “I get six to seven hours, which is not terrible. Things are always racing in my head. The minute I go to bed, I have an idea that pops up. I don’t like to keep loose paper around, so I write in the iPhone’s Notes app. If it’s something specific I need to do, the Reminders app is great—I can set a very specific time.”

Great advice “It sounds obvious, but ‘write it down.’ I never understand how waiters in restaurants just remember orders! I have so much going on—with kids, with my business. If I don’t write it down, I will forget.”

Bad habit “If I still have things to do after my kids go to bed, I work in bed for a couple of hours. It’s physically not good and probably mentally not good. I think I’m relaxing, but really I’m sitting in a hunched position and it’s terrible for my back. If my eyes are bugging out, I’m like, ‘Stop it, Joy. Go to sleep.’ ” —As told to Jeff Chu

Prints charming Cho has a colorful approach to getting it all done.

82 FastCompany.com November 2015

Photograph by Emily Berl

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Engine of change Washington is pushing Ford into the future.

Key tools “Email is huge for me. It’s really important to have an email-management strategy. I color-code emails that are from key contacts and strategic partners, so when they come to me I see them in the massive digital pile. I’ve been developing and honing this system for the past 10 years. The second tool I use is paper. There’s no substitute for it. You don’t need a Wi-Fi hot spot to get it to work. It never runs out of batteries. I start each week with a list of the things I want to accomplish and a list of key actions.”

Essential daily task “Interacting face-to-face with my team. When I’m [at Ford’s headquarters] in Dearborn, I consider it a good day when I can spend at least 30 minutes to an hour talking with someone on my team, inspiring them, giving them some energy, creating some enthusiasm, so they can do the same with their team.”

Go-to motivator

KEN WASHINGTON VP OF RESEARCH AND ADVANCED ENGINEERING, FORD

“There’s no substitute for paper.”

Ken Washington is Ford’s explorer. A former Lockheed Martin rocket scientist with a doctorate in nuclear engineering, Washington is leading Ford’s effort to experiment, working on autonomous cars, vehicle-subscription services, and even a smart bicycle that syncs to an iPhone. His mandate: “To advance the technology, and to innovate new capabilities and technologies that make our cars great, fun to drive, green, safe, and smart.” 84 FastCompany.com November 2015

“I put down whatever I’m working on, pick up my lab glasses, and walk into a random lab or office to get a sense of what my team is working on.”

Decompression method “I’ve got more hobbies than I probably should, because I really love so many things outside of work. I love music; I pick up my guitar. I love photography; I’ll go on a photo shoot. I love tinkering with technology. Sometimes I’ll just get out my soldering iron and an electronics board and build something.” —As told to Joel Johnson Photograph by Corine Vermeulen

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ALEX BLUMBERG COFOUNDER AND CEO, GIMLET MEDIA

“I just try to talk it out.” As the head of a prominent podcasting company with a small staff and three high-profile shows, Alex Blumberg is absurdly busy, and it’s essential for him to find ways to be productive. But not too productive. “The process of trying to launch something is fraught with inefficiency,” he says. “We want to be able to kill stories that don’t work. We want to be able to produce a pilot that won’t air because it’s not as good as we thought it was going to be. We’re trying to become cautious friends with inefficiency.” Still, with hot podcasts Reply All, Mystery Show, and StartUp in various stages of production and a host of other shows in development, Blumberg works as adeptly as he can without compromising the creative process.

Blumberg radio Gimlet’s CEO tries to reduce his to-do list by living in the moment.

Area for improvement “We should probably hire an administrative assistant. An assistant seems like a luxury, but it’s actually a huge productivity enhancement. We’ve realized that now.”

Coping tactic “I just try to talk it out. I’ll feel anxious and for some reason my instinct is to wrestle with it internally. I have to remember to talk to somebody. Every once in a while I’ll talk to my kids about it. It doesn’t really work: ‘We’re trying to make a decision at work and Daddy’s very confused and it involves money.’ They’re like, ‘What’s money?’ ”

Great advice “I learned a lot working at This American Life. My tendency was, ‘Okay, let me think about it.’ [This American Life host Ira Glass] would kick things off his list in the moment. If it could happen right then, he would do it. It wasn’t like he ever sat me down and said, ‘Listen, young Alex, this is my secret to productivity.’ But it seeped into me.”

Email pet peeve [Laughs] “People are so mad about email. I’m old enough that I still compare it to regular mail. I’m like, ‘This is a miracle!’ My main problem is I get too much of it.”

Go-to motivator “I’m just excited to be building these shows. I don’t need motivation. We have exciting shows coming down the pike, and I think they’re going to be really good and creatively interesting and new. That is very exciting.” —As told to Rob Brunner 86 FastCompany.com November 2015

Photograph by Geordie Wood

MARCUS SAMUELSSON CHEF

EXPERT T I M E - S AV E R S THEY COMBINE SIMILAR ACTIONS. Jumping between activities that demand different mind-sets will slow you down. “Bundle tasks that require similar skill sets or states of mind,” says Alex Cavoulacos, cofounder and COO of career site the Muse. For example, she answers emails while catching up with her team through online chat, occasionally stopping to make a phone call. “Those are all short, communication-based tasks,” she says.

THEY USE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS. “If you don’t, you’re losing 30 minutes to an hour a day,” says Rob Shapiro, director of product strategy at media company Muck Rack, who uses X for select and E to archive. “My E key falls off my keyboard because I archive so often,” he says.

THEY BREAK UP BIG PROJECTS. Three small tasks are easier to tackle than one huge one. “I make sure each takes 30 minutes or less to complete,” says Catherine Ulrich, chief product officer at stock-photo site Shutterstock. “Bitesize steps ensure that I make progress.” —JH

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THE SECRETS OF

88 FastCompany.com November 2015

“I

don’t have weekends. I don’t have vacations . ” Celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson’s days have been unusually full over the past year, even by his globe-traversing standards. In April, he opened Streetbird Rotisserie near his Harlem flagship, Red Rooster, and he spearheaded the Harlem EatUp! festival, held in May. There were also new restaurants in Bermuda and Sweden, along with a cookbook and a memoir aimed at kids, called Make It Messy—which is a good description of his hectic itinerary. Sleep schedule “I’m about a seven-hour guy. I don’t do a lot of stuff [I used to do]. I don’t go to [chef hangout] Blue Ribbon at 3 a.m. I don’t drink a lot. I can’t wake up with a headache.”

Staying connected “Every Wednesday, we have a team meeting at 10 a.m. No matter where I am in the world, I’m calling in. I have another conference call with my

executive team on Tuesdays. Those are the centers of my week.”

Email pet peeve “I hate [writing] long emails. You’re sitting there thinking, Is my tone right? Because there can be 50 ways of misinterpreting that email. Texting is better: ‘Let’s talk.’ Then you follow up with a conversation.”

Work on weekends and vacation? “I don’t have weekends. I don’t have vacations. When you’re a chef, you give everything to your work. My work is personal. That’s the point.”

Bad habit “I sometimes need to get out of the way so my team can create better. As a leader you’re also a teacher, and sometimes it’s easier to say, ‘The answer is right here!’ Then you’ve killed the process—no one on the team learns anything. You didn’t evolve; you just did more stuff.”

Nightly ritual “My wife and I, at around 11:30 or 12, we talk. Not just, ‘How are you?’ I like to have a soulful conversation with her, a meaningful conversation. And then after that, I fall asleep within two seconds. I am just beat. I am beat.” —As told to Amy Farley Photograph by Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Fry hard Samuelsson takes his work personally.

JULIE LARSON-GREEN CHIEF EXPERIENCE OFFICER, MICROSOFT

“ Being

lazy makes me more efficient . ”

Procrastination as a productivity tool? Julie Larson-Green’s job is to help people work smarter, but when it comes to her own day, she has a somewhat counterintuitive approach. A 22-year Microsoft veteran, Larson-Green is responsible for the overarching experience of getting stuff done with Office and other tools on PCs, phones, wearables, and tablets. “We want to help you manage your scarce resource of time,” she says. Here’s how she does that herself.

Strategy to beat procrastination

Office worker

“I’m a huge procrastinator and a fairly lazy person. Being lazy makes me more efficient, because I try to find ways that I can do the best work in the most minimal amount of time. I also know that I need pressure to perform, and procrastination is one of the levers for creating that pressure.”

Larson-Green guides how users interact with Microsoft’s products.

Time-management system “I keep a lot in my head: people I need to talk to, projects I’m working on. I usually have a running tally of things I need to get done. But I also keep a lot in Outlook. Unread mail is my to-do list.”

Media matters “I spend some time before I get out of bed looking at Twitter and Facebook, looking at headlines about Microsoft. That doesn’t always sound like the most productive thing—it sounds like leisure reading. But it often comes out in things later: ‘Oh, I read this article about that— here’s something to think about.’ ”

A quiet start “I need thinking time, so I carve out a few hours, usually in the morning. I get centered and ready to go.”

Great advice “My parents always focused on making sure you finish what you start, and you do what you say you’re going to do. That was instilled pretty early in my family. My sisters and I are all kind of overachievers, so I think it worked.” —As told to Harry McCracken 90 FastCompany.com November 2015

Photograph by Clayton Cotterell

9:06 am: Market check on the bus

7:17 pm: Portfolio check at home

1:15 pm: Barometer check at work

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horizontal for a lengthy period of time is an incredibly gratifying experience that most people take for granted.”

DJ, PRODUCER Biggest productivity issue

“In an economics class in college, there were two things the professor said. One, most businesses don’t survive the first year. And two, who you hire is going to be the success or failure of your business. Luckily for me, I’ve met so many different people from so many different avenues that it’s helped me find a more colorful team and a team that’s going to be the most efficient.”

Coping tactic Area for improvement “I have a tendency to be late. When I’m on the road, my tour manager is really good at getting me on time to places. My team at home is not that good at getting me on time to places. That’s one thing I’m battling. It’s a firstworld problem.”

“Meditation is a key component in my daily cycle now. I went through a major physical change in my life in June when I had vocal-cord surgery. I used that time to reset and think about a different set of rules to be more efficient and productive.” —As told to KC Ifeanyi

Sleep schedule “I don’t require too much. I’ve done three-week tours when I survived on naps and never had a long sleep. That long sleep—I feel lucky when I get it. Having your head

Grooming: Homa Safar for Exclusive Artists Management using MAC Cosmetics and Oribe Hair Care

Lying horizontal is a luxury for Steve Aoki. The Grammynominated DJ and producer has a relentless global schedule that finds him spinning records in places like Shanghai and Oslo, along with ongoing residencies in Ibiza and Las Vegas. He also puts out albums, including the recent Neon Future Odyssey (which collects his previous Neon Future I and II releases), and runs the record label and clothing brand Dim Mak. Fueled by catnaps and meditation, Aoki has managed to grow his empire while staying connected to his fans.

“Being on the road. It’s easy to treat that life as a vacation. Since I’m the guy who makes the parties turn up, I have the image of, ‘Let’s have fun and have no rules.’ But it’s a job. You have to have a business plan on the road. That’s why I don’t drink or do drugs, and I work out on the regular. I have a clear head, which is incredibly important to be able to balance and manage so many businesses.”

Great advice

Photograph by Jessica Haye & Clark Hsiao

High flier Aoki heads to his private plane at Las Vegas’s McCarran airport.

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THE SECRETS OF

P E O P L E W HO H AV E A CHIE V E D I N B OX Z E R O THEY FILE EVERYTHING. “Archive anything that’s an FYI or that maybe you need to refer to again,” says Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. “Then move the rest of the items, which should be action items, to a to-do list and remove them from the inbox.”

THEY UNSUBSCRIBE A N D F I LT E R . Ditch recurring emails you rarely look at, like social media notifications. And set filters for the ones you do care about. “Any subscription or mailing list skips my inbox,” says Crush & Lovely’s Alexandra Lee. “On the commute home I sort through and see if there’s anything relevant.”

THEY ANSWER Q U I C K LY. “If I can respond to an email in five minutes or less, I answer it immediately,” says Lee. —JH

November 2015 FastCompany.com 93

15 Easy Ways to Work Smarter By Stephanie Vozza

2. B E PA RT O F T H E 2 0 %.

1. Declutter your desk.

Messy work space:

Tidy work space:

Creativity may arise from chaos, but a litter-strewn office probably isn’t helping you get stuff done. “Attention is programmed to pick up what’s novel,” says Josh Davis, director of research at the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Two Awesome Hours. Visible files remind you of unfinished tasks. An unread book is temptation for procrastination. Even if you don’t think you’re noticing the disorder, it hurts your ability to focus.

People with neat offices are more persistent and less frustrated and weary, according to a recent study in Harvard Business Review, which found that a clean desk helps you stick with a task more than one and a half times longer. “While it can be comforting to relax in your mess, a disorganized environment can be a real obstacle,” says Grace Chae, a professor at Fox School of Business at Temple University and coauthor of the study.

No matter how crazy your days get, make sure you carve out and ruthlessly protect just 90 minutes— 20% of an eighthour day—for the most important tasks. “Even if you squander the remaining 80% of the day, you can still make great progress if you have spent 90 minutes on your goals or priorities,” says Charlotte, North Carolina– based productivity coach Kimberly Medlock.

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3. W O R K L E S S .

94 FastCompany.com November 2015

(OUTPUT)

Think you can get more done by tacking on extra hours? According to a 2014 study by Stanford professor John Pencavel, who examined data from laborers during World War I, output was proportionate to time worked— up to 49 hours. Beyond that, it rose at a decreasing rate, and those who put in 70 hours had the same productivity as someone who worked 56 hours.

How weekly hours of work impacted factory output

7,500

5,000

2,500 24

(WEEKLY HOURS) Illustrations by Rami Niemi

4. S T O P P H O N I N G IT I N. You might believe you’re ignoring your iPhone, but unless it’s fully turned off, it’s a major distraction. In a report published this year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, researchers from Florida State University found that even if you don’t look at your phone when it buzzes, the sound makes your mind wander.

5. Try this email hack.

6. Go heavy on HVAs. People are more efficient at things that come naturally, while tasks that feel like a struggle are likely to impede progress. If you can, delegate the duties that feel like an effort, and instead focus on “high value activities.” “HVAs are within your mission, leverage your strengths, and create impact or change,” says Hillary Rettig, author of The Seven Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer’s Block. “They also create clarity and open your schedule.” Delegating your non–HVA activities also helps create community. After all, they could very well be someone else’s HVAs.

How Alexandra Samuel, author of Work Smarter With Social Media, avoids getting distracted when she’s waiting for an important message: 1. Find the email-to-text format for your cell-phone provider with a quick Google search. Verizon, for example, is @vtext.com, so if your mobile number is 555-123-4567, your address is 5551234567@vtext.com. 2. Using that address, set up your email so it forwards messages from a specific sender to your cell phone via text (in Outlook, find “Rules” in the “Tools” task bar). 3. Shut down your inbox and ignore your emails while focusing on more pressing tasks, knowing you’ll be alerted when the important message comes in. 96 FastCompany.com November 2015

7. M E E T S M A R T E R . Three ways to get the most out of your group sessions: 1. Make a plan

8. Sleep on the job. It might be tough to convince your boss, but researchers from the University of Michigan found that taking a daytime nap counteracts impulsive behavior and boosts tolerance for frustration. The findings also suggest that workplace dozers could be more productive.

Many meetings don’t have a particular agenda, but it’s important to know what you want to accomplish going in. “Keep meetings short by limiting the agenda to three items or less,” says Alan Eisner, professor of management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “Afterward, send out minutes using your agenda so everyone knows what to work on.”

2. Banish distractions Put nonagenda thoughts into an “idea parking lot.” “People bring up ideas that are important to them but not on-topic,” says Cary Greene, coauthor of Simple Sabotage: A Modern Field Manual for Detecting & Rooting Out Everyday Behaviors That Undermine Your Workplace. “Instead of losing them, write them down.” Don’t let the parking lot be a black hole: Assign follow-up steps right at the end of the meeting.

3. Play musical chairs Walking meetings are gaining popularity, but you can get a similar benefit without hitting the hallway. Set a timer for 30 to 45 minutes. When it goes off, have everyone get up and move. “You can stand and shake it out a bit as a group, which lightens everyone up,” says workplace psychologist Karissa Thacker. “Moving regularly is good for us in all kinds of ways, including improving our ability to focus.”

9. B E W A R E THESE PRODUCTIVITY K I L L E R S. Identifying distractions is the first step to avoiding them. Here are the top five workplace attention destroyers, according to a 2015 survey by CareerBuilder: 1. Cell phones/texting 2. Internet 3. Gossip 4. Social media 5. Email

11. Stay in the slumber “sweet spot . ” It’s not surprising that getting more done starts with a good night’s sleep, but it turns out getting too many hours is as bad as too few. Analyzing the sleep and work habits of 3,760 people over seven years, researchers at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health found that under-sleepers and oversleepers were both more likely to take extra sick days. 15

MEN

(DAYS ABSENT)

WOMEN

1 0. M A K E P R I O R I T I Z AT I O N A P R I O R I T Y. To get more done, be mindful of everyday choices, suggests Lisa Zaslow, founder of the New York–based Gotham Organizers:

1. Follow your brain “We can’t operate at peak performance all day long,” says Zaslow. “When I’m feeling my best, I concentrate on important activities like writing. When I’m feeling tired and foggy, I do relatively mindless tasks like dealing with routine emails.”

SWEET SPOT!

1 2. S E E K O U T T H E S U N. 5

0 5

7.76

(HOURS OF SLEEP)

13. WA N T T O M OT I VAT E PEOPLE? B E H U M A N. Energize staff by clearly defining expectations and routinely offering positive feedback. According to a recent study by Gallup, companies that engage their workforce see a 65% decrease in turnover, a 21% bump in productivity, and a 10% increase in customer ratings.

14. Complain. But do it the right way. Present your beef with an idea for improvement. “Framing things in terms of solutions lessens the focus on the problem and who might be at fault,” says management professor Russell Johnson, coauthor of a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. “It evokes pleasant emotions instead of negative ones that cause mental fatigue.”

An office with a view sounds like a recipe for mind wandering. Actually, access to sunlight boosts productivity. In a study by the California Energy Commission, workers who sat near a window performed better, processing calls 6% to 12% faster and performing 10% to 25% better on tests that involved mental function and memory recall.

2. Practice strategic procrastination “In order to focus on urgent or meaningful activities, let some other things slide,” she says. For example, open your mail just once a week; these days, nothing urgent arrives with a postage stamp on it. And while some organizers will tell you to touch any piece of paper just once, Zaslow is more forgiving. It’s okay to toss lesspressing work in a pile for later, she says. 98 FastCompany.com November 2015

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1 5. H I T T H E E L L I P T I C A L. Exercise not only improves health, it boosts output. And you don’t have to kill yourself in CrossFit—a jog will do. Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand found that a daily 20-minute run helped lab rats complete problem-solving tasks more quickly and efficiently than their nonexercised counterparts.

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I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost

Snapchat boasts 100 million daily users, has captured the rapt attention of the media and advertising worlds— and is wildly misunderstood. Here’s what everyone is missing. By Austin Carr

With additional reporting by Nicole LaPorte Photographs by Greg Miller

November 2015 FastCompany.com 101

“ We the

millennials, bro!” Kanye West is 10 minutes and 43 seconds into his mesmerizingly elliptical sermon at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, and he’s showing no signs of relenting. MTV producers had allotted just two minutes for his Vanguard Award acceptance speech. West burned through that time onstage with muted mugging alone, bathing in “Yeezy! Yeezy!” chants from the downtown Los Angeles crowd before kicking off his homily by yelling, “Bro! Broooooooooo! Listen to the kids!” Pontificating on, well, everything—art, brands, culture, ego, Justin Timberlake, the future—West might as well be giving a TED talk on the seemingly inexplicable nature of what attracts the millennial and postmillennial audience that he’s speaking to, for, and about. Finally, he wraps up, announces his candidacy for the presidency in 2020, and drops the mic. Inside the celebrity-packed theater, I watch as attendees lose circulation in their arms from holding their smartphones aloft, the Snapchat app’s camera open, to film the spectacle from every angle. It’s exactly the kind of epic scene Snapchat is so adept at capturing. Thanks to a partnership with MTV’s parent, Viacom, the company has a team of six here. They’re racing around to shoot and curate a Live Story of the VMAs, a feature that stitches together images and videos generated by both users and Snapchat itself. The VMAs Live Story, updated throughout the evening, includes redcarpet shots of Miley Cyrus and John Legend, behind-the-scenes peeks at performances from Macklemore and Pharrell Williams, and crowd perspectives of West’s speech. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s intimate, visceral, and voyeuristic—a peek past the velvet rope that you can’t experience on any other channel, cable or digital. Then the whole thing, like all Live Stories, will disappear in 24 hours. As West puts it during his rant, “This is a new mentality!” Snapchat’s delicious montage of the event turned out to be a monster. Twelve million viewers tuned in, more than the number that flipped to the awards show on TV, even with Viacom simulcasting the VMAs across 10 of its channels. MTV’s own Snapchat account attracted an additional 25 million views throughout the day; MTV, the cable network, attracted

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only 5 million viewers for the live 9 p.m. telecast, a 40% drop from 2014. No wonder A-list brand advertisers such as Taco Bell, Verizon, and Cover Girl snapped up the limited number of ad slots Snapchat made available during the VMAs Live Story despite rates of $200,000 per sponsor. “With Snapchat, we’re putting our content into the pockets of 100 million millennials,” says Viacom sales chief Jeff Lucas. “Snapchat is targeted television on mobile.” If you still think Snapchat, a company valued at $16 billion, is just a teen sexting app, you’re not listening to the kids, bro. In a mere 15 months since its ﬁrst Live Story, Snapchat has transformed itself from a photo-based messaging app into the singular obsession of the media and advertising industries. “We have two major businesses,” says Snapchat’s chief strategy ofﬁcer, Imran Khan. “One is communication, and the other is entertainment.” Communication—a string of messaging products including photo and video sharing, voice calling, and texting features, as well as a tool to exchange money on the

Snapchat’s Plan

DISCOVER Snapchat invited media brands from Cosmopolitan to Vice to create a daily mix of content to run within the app—articles, videos, memes, and lots of emoji-related activities. What clicks and what doesn’t? We spent a month channel-surﬁng within Discover to ﬁnd out.

W H AT ’S W O R K I N G BuzzFeed The social-sharing news and entertainment behemoth is good at wooing millennials and has the size and scope to produce lots of Snapchatexclusive content. Its hilarious memes and highly snap-able content (such as a photo of a toilet with instructions to “Snap & draw yr scariest poop here”) make BF a Snapchat user’s BFF.

Mashable Mashable is a newbie but already using its channel to highlight cool, usable tech in accessible segments, like App of the Day and Tech We Wish Existed. The design is compelling and sometimes cartoony, perfect for bitesize info.

W H AT ’S N OT W O R K I N G Food Network The Guy Fieri network either tries too hard to target millennials—its “Penne for Your Thoughts” talking-pasta bit is as unfortunate as it sounds—or it doesn’t try hard enough, forcing TV clips into a vertical frame. —Claire Dodson

November 2015 FastCompany.com 103

service—will, in the near term at least, be monetized through 99¢ snap replays and branded photo filters (see “Filters” sidebar, page 107). What has everyone atwitter about Snapchat, though, is its entertainment ambitions—the company’s attempt to build both a distribution channel and a content lineup for 13- to 34-year-olds, who make up 86% of Snapchat’s U.S. users. Think Comcast for kids. Yes, we’ve heard this type of chutzpah before. In the past few years, Twitter was so going to dominate the conversation around live TV that it would ultimately siphon all the advertising dollars for itself. YouTube had such clout that it was going to woo away all the brand marketers. Facebook’s video push has made it a threat to the established order. The entertainment industry was going to disrupt itself with Hulu. You can go all the way back to Yahoo’s (cuckoo) $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast .com at the height of the dotcom bubble to find companies seeking to disrupt television. This year has also seen Apple, the most valuable company in the world, flirt with using its might to sell customers a bundle of networks. But according to media analyst Richard Greenfield, “Apple will not enter the TV business until it can create a superior product, and the TV industry is not yet in enough pain to work with Apple to enable that superior product.” The TV business, though, is desperate enough to reach millennials that it is racing to work with Snapchat. The service boasted in September that it has more than 4 billion daily video views, a figure that has doubled since June and now matches Facebook’s scale, despite Snapchat having one-tenth of Facebook’s daily user base. In addition to Live Stories, earlier this year the company launched Discover, a network of name-brand channels—traditional players such as Comedy Central and ESPN as well as digital-first ones such as Vice—producing professional content, often exclusive to it. How big is Snapchat already? The company claims that more people watch college football on Snapchat (via a packaged Live Story) than on traditional TV, and top Discover channels attract more viewers than all but a handful of premium cable channels. Players in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue speak of Snapchat’s potential with awe, bewilderment, and more than a little fear. But what, really, is Snapchat’s strategy? Can the app truly be the long-awaited digital beast that slays traditional TV? Nobody can precisely explain why Snapchat is so popular. Even supporters call its products “confusing,” its business a “conundrum,” and its cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel a “contradiction.” Spiegel himself has struggled to define the service: This summer, he published a curious video entitled “What Is Snapchat?” that befuddled viewers. Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of the advertising conglomerate WPP, points to how the youngest generations are embracing Snapchat with unique patterns of behavior, then adding, “so Snapchat seems to be really on the cutting edge,” as if that explained the cause and effect of its success. Cocky, erratic, difficult, petulant—these are some of the ways Spiegel is described by those who would give anything to work with him. He is disrupting the traditional media landscape, yet embracing its most established formulas. The 25-year-old CEO is an opinionated, independent paper billionaire who until a year ago still lived with his father. He’s a notoriously private media mogul who dates a supermodel. This is a story about understanding Snapchat’s contradictions, the seemingly irreconcilable facts that make Spiegel and his creation as inscrutable—and undeniable—as Kanye West. In interviews with key Snapchat executives,

“No one wants to see [67-year-old TV chef ] Ina Garten in the kitchen baking a casserole on Snapchat,” says one source about Food Network’s Discover channel.

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board members, investors, and dozens of advertisers and media partners including Cosmopolitan, Daily Mail, Comedy Central, Food Network, National Geographic, and Yahoo, the picture becomes clearer. While Snapchat declined to make Spiegel available, exploring these six contradictions shows where Snapchat is actually headed—and why everyone needs to take note.

ONE: User-generated content and self-discovery fuels Snapchat’s platform, yet the company is most interested in telling its users what to watch—and creating content itself.

Snapchat’s ﬁrst product enabled users to share images that disappeared, eliciting authentic, relaxed communication rather than displays of vanity. That brilliant interaction model has informed its evolution ever since. If people are more candid in a single Snapchat photo, wouldn’t a series of images (and videos) be a compelling way to communicate what happened throughout a whole day? That insight gave birth to the Stories product. Snapchat then started collecting shared experiences—allowing users at particular events to send their snaps to the company. The results have been riveting. Those communal events are now called Live Stories. They

Snapchat’s Plan

LIVE STORIES Snapchat’s Live Stories is a popular feature that aggregates user-submitted snaps of high-proﬁle events and locations to create a narrative out of shared experiences. On the whole they’re very entertaining, but what works and why, and what could be better?

W H AT ’S W O R K I N G Travelogues These immersive snaps make you feel like you’re part of the journey. This is particularly effective in the Around the World and Passport series, which offer a cool look into other cultures— and reassure us that young people party in every country. Cultural event coverage accomplishes the same goal: Spain’s La Tomatina festival,

for example, showed participants doused red in overripe tomatoes, aka the World’s Biggest Food Fight.

the three-day Live Story for Coachella brought in 40 million unique views.

Music festivals

W H AT ’S N OT W O R K I N G

From Coachella to FYF, music fests are the perfect setting for social media. People get to see clips of Seattle’s Bumbershoot headliner, Ellie Goulding, singing “Love Me Like You Do,” along with snaps of the alcohol-soaked revelry of these music marathons. In April,

Sports When athletic-themed Stories focus on the pageantry off the field and the excitement in the stands, great. But its deals with MLB and the NFL have resulted in more poorly shot highlights, which is frustrating. —CD November 2015 FastCompany.com 105

blend snippets from both usercontributed media and Snapchat’s in-house production team into packaged narratives. It’s a novel format, all the more distinctive because Snapchat itself came up with it rather than its users. That’s rare in the digital space: YouTubers, not YouTube’s cofounders, created its confessional aesthetic; Twitter’s user base, not Twitter, invented hashtags and made it a home for live commentary. Snapchat’s employees in its Venice, California, headquarters and its New York City offices curate and release Stories every single day—covering sports matches, music festivals, and world events, as well as creating travelogues. A recent Snapchat Story, for example, centered on Russian culture. It begins with a video of a Moscow crowd shouting, “Welcome, Snapchat!” and then proceeds to show early-morning city life. The clips then migrate to the countryside, where, as the Story progresses, we watch a traditional dinner being prepared. Night falls and we’re back in Red Square for a concert. The story concludes by wishing viewers good night. It’s an addictive mosaic that practically tucks you into bed. Clips like these are added throughout the day and only last 24 hours, keeping users—and advertisers—constantly coming back for more. Most Live Stories now garner between 10 million and 20 million viewers each day. Snapchat, unlike Twitter and YouTube, is not willing to leave to chance what its users see. The company isn’t afraid to bet that its audience will care about Coachella, the Ronda Rousey UFC bout, and Ramadan in Mecca, so it proactively creates Live Stories from these kinds of events. Live Stories are plotted out the way network executives program their fall lineups. “One of my favorite meetings every month is when we sit down and discuss the forward-looking content calendar,” says Nick Bell, Snapchat’s content head who joined the company last year from News Corp. Increasingly, the company is using its growing clout to get behind-the-scenes access, working with major producers to create Live Stories from events such as the U.S. Open tennis championships and Fashion Week, and then splitting the ad revenue. It is also directing the arc of its Stories rather than merely curating them from user-generated content. As with the VMAs, Snapchat is increasingly sending staff to events that it will turn into Live Stories. It’s going even further with news coverage. In New Orleans for the Katrina commemoration in August, for example, top political reporter Peter Hamby, whom Snapchat poached from CNN to oversee its news content, scored an interview with Mayor Mitch Landrieu and provided narration. “It’s early days,” says Bell, “but we have a really ambitious team, and we’re going to see a huge amount of development there.” Snapchat is also aggressively marketing Live Stories to advertisers: Executives meet regularly with brands, talking to, say, Universal Pictures about upcoming Stories so they can figure out which movies in the pipeline might make for good ads within them. If all this doesn’t scare Twitter’s shareholders, it should. Twitter has spent years trying to convince the entertainment business that it’s the perfect second-screen companion to live events. Meanwhile, Snapchat is making itself the first screen.

TWO: Snapchat aims to reinvent media consumption—by turning the clock back to TV circa 1970.

In January, Snapchat launched Discover, a new feature that goes one step further than Live Stories by giving select media partners coveted real estate inside the Snapchat app to post short-form content—videos, articles, quizzes, photo displays, and animations—in exchange for a share of advertising revenue. All of Discover’s content gets refreshed daily, with yesterday’s news gone forever. 106 FastCompany.com November 2015

That one-day life span creates an urgency that’s unprecedented in today’s distraction-ﬁlled world. “If your email inbox was going to disappear in 24 hours,” says Danielle Mullin, VP of marketing for ABC Family (its hit show Pretty Little Liars boasts 1.4 million followers on Snapchat), “you would feel the need to actually read every single email. That’s the genius of Snapchat.” This isn’t entertainment available only to those who happen to be following the right person or know what to search for, as you must, say, on Twitter or YouTube. With Snapchat, the content is limited in quantity, center stage, on demand, and often original rather than repurposed. Bell believes that Discover resonates because it has so few channels—just 15. “There’s something great about limiting selection, because you can quickly access content easily,” he says. “If you suddenly start providing too much choice, it impedes the user experience. Keeping it simple and tight is key.” The company agonized about going from 12 to 15 channels because Photograph by Ryan Lowry

Snapchat’s Plan

FILTERS Snapchat filters overlay users’ snaps, offering color tints à la Instagram and data such as time and weather. The company sells marketers the chance to create their own filters. But will users embrace them?

the extra row of icons didn’t fit as neatly on one phone screen. The Discover roster attracts 60 million monthly visitors, with channels such as Cosmo now seeing 4 million daily unique views. “I think of our Snapchat channel as having our own cable channel,” says Jon Steinberg, CEO of Daily Mail North America, a Discover partner that’s trying to tap into the BuzzFeed audience. “It has larger viewership than you’d get on most cable networks.” What’s particularly audacious is that Snapchat is asking its users to care about channels. Elsewhere in media, people prefer to follow content or personalities. Want to watch Jimmy Fallon clips on YouTube? You probably don’t go to NBC. The network’s YouTube channel has 380,000 subscribers; Fallon has 8 million. In fact, YouTube spent a reported $300 million promoting channels a few years ago and the initiative flopped. Snapchat, though, believes developing a relationship with a brand is a key metric for success. “The key number for us is around loyalty,” says Bell, who says he looks at “people who come back to a channel five out of seven days. If you look at channels like Cosmo and ESPN, the number of users that come back five out of seven days is huge.” Says Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, a Snapchat board member, “In many ways, it’s a return to the old broadcast model.” Channels may seem like an antiquated construct, but they

W H AT ’S W O R K I N G

W H AT ’S N OT W O R K I N G

Location

Location-based advertisements

Place-based filters are king here. Labels like “Coney Island” or “The Mission” help users create digital postcards and pay homage to their favorite places. It’s interactive, fun, and doesn’t feel like advertising.

McDonald’s has been testing filters to add to snaps taken at one of its restaurants. These cheesy overlays (such as hamburgers and fries as borders for users’ faces) are so lame that they almost work ironically. Almost.

Movie ads The recent Zac Efron EDM DJ epic, We Are Your Friends, offered Snapchatters the ability to add giant headphones to a selfie. The movie went on to have one of the worst opening weekends in boxoffice history. A filter can’t disguise a terrible product. —CD

are a clear rebuke to the endless torrent of content that can overwhelm other digital platforms. On Twitter and YouTube, both of which brag about how many tweets and videos are uploaded every minute, our eyeballs ricochet between all the elements on any given screen. On YouTube, if you’re stuck with an ad, you can just scan the video’s comments or peruse the sidebar of related videos. On Snapchat, drools Viacom’s Jeff Lucas, “viewability is 100%—real and pure.”

THREE: Snapchat is committed to helping its channel partners—if they adapt to the company’s wishes right now.

Two days after the VMAs, I stop by the offices of mobile-focused food-and-travel media startup Tastemade Studios in Santa Monica, a short drive from Snapchat’s Venice Beach headquarters. Snapchat had welcomed Tastemade as one of three new Discover partners just five days earlier, and the company is making the most of it. Twentysomethings sit at reclaimed-wood desks editing together shows such as Hashbrowns and Hashtags, filmed at the huge studio space next door, where DSLR cameras sit propped at 90-degree angles on tripods. Tastemade designed one set, a 1950s-era kitchen space, exclusively for vertical video, its furniture arranged to squeeze as much as possible into the camera’s narrow frame. “One hundred percent of what we’re doing here is shot specifically for the Snapchat audience,” Tastemade cofounder Steven Kydd tells me as we tour the set. In the office, TV screens are affixed to the wall sideways so employees can review Snapchat clips. Snapchat pushes its partners to create this kind of original content, especially video shot in vertical view, which fills your iPhone screen from corner to corner and which the company says has nine times higher completion rates than video shot in landscape. Snapchat also wants its partners to focus on developing a strong editorial voice and avoid click bait. While there are important stories delivered on the platform such as CNN’s ISIS coverage, they are infrequent, and Discover’s content is predominantly light and fluffy. Perhaps that’s why after Discover’s strong launch, user enthusiasm temporarily dipped. In part, this was a design issue: Discover was hidden within the app, several swipes from home base (the camera view), so once its novelty wore off, some partners saw daily visits fall by as much as 65%. Clicks rebounded with a mid-July app refresh that put Discover on the same page as Stories (one swipe from the camera). But the slowing engagement was also a signal that some partners just weren’t connecting with the Snapchat audience. In late July, Snapchat killed two channels, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Yahoo, replacing them with iHeartRadio and BuzzFeed. “It was six months to the day they changed out WMG and Yahoo,” says one top executive partner close to the Snapchat team. “For us, that indicated, ‘Hey, this is going to be Darwinian, so you’re going to have to demonstrate you’re delighting your audience.’ It turned up the heat.” WMG and Yahoo were delighting no one. According to a source close to Snapchat, Spiegel, explaining his vision for WMG’s channel, once asked, “Is there a way here to re-create Total Request Live from MTV?” WMG was not up to the task: The music giant had no infrastructure to produce daily content, so it offered a predictable collection of its music videos from the likes of Jason Derulo and David Guetta. But few of Snapchat’s users even made it that far; they didn’t know what WMG (Continued on page 121)

“Snapchat has been very clear from the beginning. ‘If you want it, you have to pay for it,’ ” says one ad exec. “Brands are probably quite grateful for that.”

November 2015 FastCompany.com 107

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The joy of retail With his new startup, Johnson shakes up shopping again.

The man who helped make Target cool and Apple Stores the most successful retail concept ever was severely humbled after flaming out at JCPenney. Only a startup could save him. By Max Chafkin

Photograph by

1862

Macy’s

H I S T O R Y O F R E TA I L I N N O VAT I O N Merchants have been trying to generate excitement and bring theater to shopping for 150 years.

112 FastCompany.com November 2015

The iconic department store lays claim to the tradition of having a Santa-in-residence for children to visit during Christmastime, a move that helped turn holiday shopping into an experience for parents and kids alike. The following decade, Macy’s introduced another holiday hit, the Christmas window display.

1941

1965

Gimbels

Kmart

During World War II rationing, the New York merchant stockpiled hard-to-get items like nylons to draw excited crowds, akin to modern product launches.

Attention, Kmart shoppers: The discount department store became a pop-culture phenomenon with its Blue Light Specials, which involved store employees setting off blue police lights to announce spontaneous, instore sales.

Everett Collection (Macy's); Seymour Wally/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images (Gimbels); amriphoto/Getty Images (Kmart); courtesy of Williams-Sonoma (catalog); Alamy (Build-a-Bear); courtesy of Michael Graves Architecture & Design (Target)

ost mornings, Ron Johnson rises just after 4 a.m., without the use of an alarm clock, and sets off on a five-mile run. “My strategy is if I wake up before 3 a.m., I go back to sleep,” he explains to a group of his employees, a dozen men and women in their twenties who listen with a mix of awe and a little horror. Next, he hits 50 chip shots in his backyard in Atherton, California—“because your short game matters”—and then, as the sun is coming up, he spends a couple of hours answering emails. Johnson’s goal is to get his blood flowing before he ever sets foot in the offices of Enjoy, the Silicon Valley e-commerce startup he founded last year and which officially launched in May. He tries to spend the entire workday in meetings, usually receiving updates and conducting informal reviews with groups of employees like this one.

into Tar-zhay, the middlebrow mega-retailer, while developing a playbook that H&M, Uniqlo, and many others have copied. Johnson’s work at the Apple Store created a business that makes more money per square foot than any other retailer in America and helped to transform a geeky niche brand into one as ubiquitous, beloved, and profitable as any American company in history. Then, he had the audacity to attempt one of the most ambitious business turnarounds in modern memory—remaking JCPenney, the ailing department store chain. Even after the public humiliation of his firing, Johnson could have found work with any number of other struggling retailers, become a very well-paid consultant or investor, or even retired. Instead he is going for broke, having raised $80 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Highland Capital Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, among other investors, including Johnson himself, to found Enjoy. The company sells consumer electronics via the web—AT&T iPhones, GoPro video cameras, Sonos speaker systems, DJI drones—and has its couriers, or “Experts,” in Johnson’s parlance, act as modern-day Maytag Men, hand-delivering the items in as little as four hours (currently in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York) and giving customers lessons on how to use them. The company offers service calls, too, with Experts showing up at your house and helping you learn how to use your digital camera or

Johnson has a desk with a computer on top of it, but he almost never sits there, and although he carries an iPhone, he mostly gestures with it. In my time with him, I never once saw him even glance at the screen. “Anytime you’re going to your phone, it’s a withdrawal from a relationship,” Johnson says. “The team needs to feel your presence, your concentration, your interest.” Johnson, 56, has found that he can be efficient this way, so much so that on most days he heads home around 3 p.m. Family matters to him—he’s married and has a daughter, 20, and a son who’s 18—and, as he explains, he’s not as young as he once was. “You’ll find, when you get older, the cycles tend to get the better of you,” he says, leaning back in his chair, allowing his legs to slide forward and his hands to fall behind his head, as he breaks into a wide smile. His audience, part of a team that delivers high-end consumer electronics to people’s homes, laughs politely. Many of them started their careers at the Apple Store, which Johnson helped create, so they regard him as a hero, and also as a bit of an alien. Although we are sitting in the offices of a small Bay Area tech company, the CEO is dressed as if he’d just stepped off the back nine at Pinehurst—white Lacoste polo shirt, light-blue trousers, athletic socks, and golf shoes. Johnson’s background, habits, and mannerisms run contrary to just about every stereotype about what makes for a successful startup CEO. Most tech company founders are coolly rational engineers; Johnson is a marketing guy with strong emotions and a penchant for showmanship. He is a regular churchgoer, a man of faith. Most Silicon Valley founders are proud workaholics; Johnson sports a tan acquired during a nearly monthlong summer vacation on the French Riviera. And then there’s the age thing: Johnson is almost twice as old as the typical founder of a venture-capital-backed tech startup, according to a Harvard Business Review study. Still, he is among the most accomplished retail minds of the past two decades, having orchestrated the design partnerships that turned Target, the Minnesota-born discount chain,

1990 Nike

With its glass showcases, video displays, and occasional visits from sports stars, Niketown became a must-visit tourist destination after it opened its first location in Beaverton, Oregon. Artifacts from iconic moments in sports history made shopping into a museumlike experience.

1972

WilliamsSonoma Renown locally for its delicate curation and display of highend cookware, the popular San Francisco store became a national brand when it launched its catalog. Its lush layouts popularized using storytelling to sell a lifestyle.

1997

Build-a-Bear The teddy bear had been around for nearly 100 years when Maxine Clark came up with the concept that let children participate in the craft of toy making, customizing their stuffed animal and offering shoppers both a hands-on activity and unique merchandise.

1999

Target The discount retailer’s hit partnership with designer and architect Michael Graves kicked off the trend of highend designers creating affordable mass-market wares. November 2015 FastCompany.com 113

“If you have thoughts, jump in,” Johnson says to me as he convenes a 9 a.m. meeting with eight employees in Enjoy’s Menlo Park headquarters late this summer. “Why not?” Having started his career as a trainee at Mervyn’s department stores, he runs Enjoy like a retail manager, paying little attention to hierarchy, preferring huddles to one-on-one meetings, and asking for direct feedback from anyone who happens to be in the room. At the time of our meeting, Enjoy is about a month away from the biggest day in its brief history: the launch of Apple’s new iPhones 6s and 6s Plus. Thanks to a deal Johnson made with AT&T, hundreds of the carrier’s customers in Enjoy’s delivery

2001

2012

Westﬁeld

Apple

The global shopping-center developer launched a digital arm called Westfield Labs to modernize the mall-going experience. Customers can shop via touch-screen window displays and participate in new-product demos. The lab, based in San Francisco, is rolling out different digital features in Westfield malls across the globe, such as a parking app in London.

The resurgence of Apple in the early 2000s is at least partially due to its retail stores, which revolutionized the computer-shopping experience with sleek outlets organized by how products could help customers and featuring Genius Bars that revamped the idea of technical support.

2006

Ralph Lauren The high-end fashion label made waves when it introduced an interactive touchscreen window that let customers make purchases with the swipe of a finger from outside its Madison Avenue store in New York. 114 FastCompany.com November 2015

2015

On Demand Enjoy brings consumer electronics such as drones to customers and helps them get the most out of it. Amazon is pursuing delivery by drone. The future of retail theater may be on our doorsteps.

Brooks Kraft/Corbis (Apple); Diane Bondareff/Polaris (Ralph Lauren); Hugh Threlfall/Alamy (Enjoy)

smartphone. The cost is $99 per visit, though it’s free if you buy something through Enjoy. “What we’re trying to do is deliver unimagined customer experience,” Johnson says. “It’s better than a store, it’s the same price as online, and it’s faster than even Amazon Prime.” Enjoy, like all startups these days, dreams of both changing the world and becoming an insanely valuable enterprise. But for Johnson, Enjoy is more than even that. It’s a chance to ﬁnd himself.

areas are expected to buy phones each day, which means that the company’s Experts will have to hustle to fulﬁll all of those orders. But for the partnership to work for Enjoy, AT&T customers need to see the service as more than merely free delivery. Johnson slouches in his chair, sips from a big bottle of Smart Water, and counsels the group packed into a small conference room. “You’re in the relationship business,” he says. “The measure of success is if they come back” and buy something else. “You don’t go on a date to see the movie; you go to a movie because you’re interested in a relationship.” Enjoy’s Experts hope they’ll be able to form emotional bonds with these new customers, but they will also need to gather a raft of data, including email addresses and their technology preferences, so that Enjoy will be able to market to those customers directly. The current plan is to do this through a survey on an iPad, but Johnson thinks that sounds a little tacky. “What if the Expert could do it through a natural conversation?” he asks. “That’s very different from ‘Give us all your information.’ ” He suggests that the Expert memorize the responses to input later, the way waiters at fancy restaurants take orders without a notepad. Johnson, who grew up in Edina, Minnesota, is still very much the humble Midwesterner— he often begins sentences with “my instinct” or “my intuition”—but there’s no doubt who is in charge. When the company’s head of supply chain, Omar Devlin, a former Apple operations guru, suggests that Enjoy shoot to have its Experts show up on time 95% of the time, which he says would be an appropriately impressive, and achievable, goal, Johnson starts to lose his composure. “Ninety what?” he asks. “Ninety-ﬁve percent would be a very good accomplishment. But 98% is a better goal.” When I ask Johnson about it later, he tells me that he rarely prepares for meetings, choosing instead to react emotionally to what’s being discussed. “I want to create a space where everything is in the moment.” Johnson is full of these Zen-like aphorisms, often telling employees to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” He projects this calm in part by hurrying when nobody is looking. “Underneath that calm is a boiling cauldron,” says Bill Campbell, a former Apple board member and a longtime friend of Johnson’s. If Johnson’s management style sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s modeled after that of one of his mentors: Steve Jobs. By 2000, Johnson had become a retail wunderkind (at almost 40) after recruiting acclaimed architect and designer Michael Graves to produce

a housewares collection for Target, where Johnson was the VP of merchandising. Jobs was in the market for a retail genius to run his planned stores. “Steve and I connected right away,” Johnson tells me. After all, he sold Graves by telling him, “Good design shouldn’t be expensive.” Jobs saw a kindred spirit in Johnson. The Apple Stores were, by every measure, an unprecedented success and made Johnson’s thencounterintuitive decisions—the high-end locations for a computer store, the layouts that emphasized what you could do with Apple’s products, and, of course, the Genius Bar—into retail orthodoxy. Less appreciated, then and even now, is Johnson’s idea that he could find enough employees who, as he puts it, “know technology and can love people.” He personally interviewed every Apple Store leader and insisted that those folks personally interview every employee on his or her team (often 100 people or more) to imbue Apple Stores with a culture of personal service. “My whole goal was that everyone knew someone well who knew me well,” he says. Johnson’s bet on people was expensive, but it is one of the secrets to Apple Stores’ success. “There’s a Midwestern warmth,” says Campbell. “Ron put that humanness in there.” By 2011, Apple Stores were generating $5,600 per square foot, and Johnson was the biggest star in American retail. Johnson admits now that running it had begun to feel “like hitting golf balls”—fun, yes, but no longer some great adventure. “We knew how to design a store, we knew how to deliver a great experience,” he says, “but it wasn’t challenging.” Not only that, but Jobs had already indicated that Tim Cook would succeed him as CEO; it was unlikely that Johnson would ever get that job. A few months before Jobs’s death in October of that year, the activist investor Bill Ackman approached Johnson with a particularly intriguing challenge: Could the guy who made Apple a cool retailer do the same for the venerable but dowdy department store JCPenney? Johnson’s roots were in department stores, so he was tempted. He could stay at Apple for the rest of his career, but should he? Penney’s may have been a faded brand, but it was also a very recognizable name. As Peter Bell, a friend of Johnson’s and a partner at Highland Capital Partners (which led Enjoy’s $50 million second round of financing), tells me, “You can say that Ron had bad judgment. But it would have been glorious if it had worked.” He accepted the job. Johnson’s troubles as CEO started almost immediately. His first public move at Penney’s was to stage an Apple-style launch event, where he unveiled a more youthful logo and a “fair and square” pricing scheme that ditched coupons and sales in favor of round numbers. The changes, bolstered by 116 FastCompany.com November 2015

a dramatic new ad campaign starring Ellen DeGeneres that first aired during the Oscars, represented an elegant solution to the problem of rampant discounting, albeit one that none of the company’s customers, many of them coupon-loving senior citizens, had asked for. (In his 12 years at Apple, Johnson had internalized Jobs’s disdain for focus groups and customer tests, so he hadn’t bothered vetting any of his new ideas.) “We insulted the core customer,” he now admits. Not surprisingly, sales fell precipitously, the company lost close to $1 billion for the year, and the board began to wonder if Johnson knew what he was doing. “You watch Steve [Jobs] do a turnaround and you sit there and think, ‘I would like to be the architect of something like that,’ ” says Campbell, explaining Johnson’s thought process. But, he notes, Apple’s turnaround “took seven or eight years, and Ron did not have that chance.” Under pressure, Johnson dug in, stubbornly refusing to test new initiatives and reportedly approaching the old Penney’s culture with the sort of contempt Jobs had once reserved for Apple’s competitors. With his family in Menlo Park, Johnson commuted to Plano, Texas, by private jet—all while laying off 19,000 employees. The adventure, which ended with still more losses and Johnson’s firing in April 2013, damaged his reputation (commentators began to suggest that he’d merely coasted off of Jobs’s brilliance) and his bank account. He had invested $50 million personally in JCPenney warrants, which will only mature if the stock price rises above $30 a share by 2018. Today, the share price is around $10 and Johnson’s investment looks, essentially, worthless. Those closest to Johnson say he approached failure in much the same way he approaches everything: with preternatural cheeriness. “Ron is relentlessly positive,” says John Ortberg, the senior pastor at Menlo.Church, where Johnson regularly attends services. Even so, Ortberg continues, “the criticisms marked him. There’s a recognition of things he can’t control.” Johnson’s friend Marc Andreessen advised him to take a year off, but soon after his firing, startup CEOs started calling, asking him to speak to their teams. “I think they felt sorry for me after the Penney’s thing,” he says with a chuckle. He spoke at Airbnb, Dropbox, Box, and Google, and met with founders of up-and-coming retail startups, such as the Bay Area’s Philz Coffee and the L.A.–based clothing brand Nasty Gal. (He’s now an investor in both.) He also met with a number of consumer electronics startups, including Jawbone and Sonos, which were looking for better ways to get their products into consumers’ hands. “The question that kept coming up was, ‘How do we go to market?’ ” he says. “The old way is not working.” In a meeting with Sonos CEO John MacFarlane, Johnson suggested that Sonos send representatives to customers’ homes to sell the company’s high-end sound systems. MacFarlane loved the idea—“The best place to experience a Sonos product is in your own home,” he tells me—but told Johnson that Sonos, which reportedly sells more than $1 billion in products annually, could not support such an operation. He suggested that Johnson do it himself, with a startup. Enjoy initially came to Johnson as a tagline. “One day I woke up and said, ‘Order today, enjoy tomorrow,’ ” he recalls. The original concept was simple: “What if we just brought the best of the Apple Store to the customer,” Johnson suggested to Tom Suiter, a former Apple creative director who had worked with him on Apple Store displays. Suiter, who would join Enjoy as cofounder and its head of creative, loved the idea and began working on branding right away. “I really felt like if there was anybody who could do this, it was Ron,” he says. For Johnson, who was raised Lutheran, the decision to start Enjoy was partly spiritual. He had regular lunches with Ortberg, who encouraged him to think about work as an extension of his beliefs, as “love made visible.” Johnson has never talked about his faith publicly, but it’s been a part of who he is since he was a little boy. It informs how he thinks about designing stores and creating great customer experiences. “I’d sum up the whole

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Bible in four words: Love God, love others,” Johnson says. “Most love is not emotional love. It’s rooted in compassion or help. Look at the Genius Bar. You’re just helping people. And so that’s what my governor is: How do you create an environment where you feel this love? Because love is contagious.” Johnson’s rebirth as a startup entrepreneur allowed him to recast the trajectory of his entire career. What he’d loved about Apple, partly, was that Jobs had essentially given him a blank slate. And what had doomed him at Penney’s was that it was an entrenched brand, making the wild changes he’d sought all but impossible. “I realized big companies are not my thing,” he says, despite having spent his life working within them. “I love creating, and I love beginnings. It felt like, ‘I can do this.’ ” Johnson was not shy about using his Rolodex to give Enjoy a leg up. His first call was to AT&T Mobile CEO Ralph de la Vega, who agreed to become Enjoy’s first partner, and one of Johnson’s initial investors was Oak Investment Partners, where Johnson’s mentor at Mervyn’s, Jerry Gallagher, had worked before he died in 2014. Johnson did not ask Apple CEO Tim Cook for help; he wanted to prove himself as an entrepreneur first. “If I went to Tim, it’d feel like he was doing me a favor,” he says. “I want to earn the right to serve Apple.” On a Saturday night this summer, on a bit of a whim—and okay, maybe after a glass of wine or two—I log on to Enjoy’s website. I’m tempted by a $1,500 Boosted electric skateboard, but my wife quickly vetoes that idea. I then gravitate toward the Sonos Playbar, which is basically a fancy speaker for your television that costs $700, plus tax. Seven hundred dollars seems like a lot of money to spend on a single speaker, but it’s half the price of what I really want, and my wife is open to something that would improve the sound on our TV. Enjoy has a generous return policy, so if I have any regrets, I can always send it back. And hey, this is for work, right? The following morning, my phone rings. “Hi, I’m your Enjoy Expert, Omar.” He sounds genuinely enthusiastic even though he has been assigned to come to my apartment at 5 p.m. on a Sunday. He promises to send me a text when he’s an hour away. Omar turns out to be Omar Pouerie, 26, a former Apple Store employee with a mohawk and a calming presence. He arrives at my front door at 5 p.m. sharp, having already tested and updated the software on my new speaker back at the Enjoy “house,” as the company calls its home base in each city. (Enjoy does not have traditional retail space, but rents hip lofts in New York and Menlo Park for its Experts to commune. Johnson is already looking at possible locations in Los Angeles, where it’ll likely land next.) 118 FastCompany.com November 2015

Omar, who wears a uniform Johnson designed with Uniqlo to convey trust—white button-down shirt, blue puffer vest—works efficiently, and he quickly walks me and my wife through the basics of how to use the speaker. He supervises as we each download the Sonos app onto our phones, and shows me how to connect my Spotify account so that we can stream music. Omar and I trade parenting tips—my wife and I had recently had a baby; Omar also has young children—and within 25 minutes he makes a discreet exit, without pausing for a tip, which Enjoy prohibits. “You gotta have really good EQ,” says Johnson, referring to the measure of emotional intelligence. “But you don’t want to get too personal.” The experience is incredibly convenient, and perhaps, more importantly, it makes buyer’s remorse seem unthinkable. By the time Omar walks out the door, I am committed to my extravagant purchase. After all, it’s already blasting music. This is by design. When Johnson and I speak three days later in Menlo Park, he informs me that over the company’s first 1,000 or so orders, Enjoy hasn’t had a single return, which is one of the reasons the company can afford such high-touch service. Based on typical retail margins, Enjoy probably made about $200 on my Sonos order, which means that Omar only has to make a few visits each day before Enjoy can profitably afford to pay his salary. And Omar does make a salary. Though Enjoy allows its Experts to set their own hours and work remotely like Uber drivers, they get the flexibility of the gig economy with the economic security of a very good retail job—salaried employment, with stock options and health benefits. If my Enjoy visit felt special, that’s because it literally was. During my time with Johnson and Enjoy in New York later in August, I learn that Johnson’s company—with 135 employees in two cities and $80 million in venture capital in the bank—is only selling a handful of items each day. Johnson proudly notes that on the previous day, a Monday, Enjoy Experts made 20 visits in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, a record for the company up until that point. The number seems small to me, but not to Johnson. “When you start something new, by definition it’s going to be small,” he tells his staff during an all-hands meeting shortly after lunch. “We always tend to want to be in a hurry, but what’s exciting is how quickly we’re learning and improving.” He notes that Enjoy is just nearly 100 days old, and that the 20-order day puts it roughly on pace with Uber’s run rate over the same time period. The numbers will get much bigger this fall with the new iPhone launch, when Enjoy expects to add 10,000 new customers over six weeks. “That’s what’s going to catapult us into the public consciousness,” he says, reminding his team that Apple Stores once weren’t much farther along. Johnson recalls that on the morning of the Apple Store’s 100th day, he was driving into the company’s Cupertino headquarters when he got an irate call from Jobs, complaining about a store Johnson’s team had recently opened in the Willow Bend shopping mall, not far from JCPenney’s Plano, Texas, headquarters. “The new store we opened is awful!” Johnson screams, doing his best Steve Jobs imitation. Johnson tells the story with a fond nostalgia. “These things are hard,” he says. “But we’re going to have a better 100th day, aren’t we? And no one’s gonna call me about Willow Bend.” He pauses and glances around the room. “Now, today’s sales could be lower,” he adds, with just a hint of concern. “I don’t want to ask how we’re doing today. I hope it’s good.” He smiles at the crowd—first at the Experts and then at the executives who are lined up near the company kitchen. He very much wants to know how today’s numbers look. “A drone [order] just went through,” a young woman calls out. The DJI drones that Enjoy sells start at $700, and it's another customer who may return to buy a new iPhone this fall. It’s just one sale, Johnson knows, but he exhales and a wide smile forms across his face. “A drone just went through,” he repeats.

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Oprah Winfrey (Continued from page 70)

Salata. “[When] you’re in a deal, coming up with creative? It makes the ‘nos’ really easy. [I] know what Oprah wouldn’t do.” She looks me in the eye. “You do, too,” she says. (I confess: It’s true.) As I summarize all of this in my notes, “W.W.O.D.?” The system works out well for Winfrey, who lives about two hours away on a 42-acre Montecito estate and usually spends several days a month in the office. She makes a point to “really, really, really try to avoid meetings,” instead getting detailed summaries emailed to her by her staff. To underscore this point, she tells the story of a phone call she once received from the late Coretta Scott King, who wanted to fly to L.A. to meet with Winfrey to ask for help with a project. “And I go, ‘Mrs. King, you should just tell me whatever it is on the phone and save yourself the flight,’ ” Winfrey says. “ ‘Whatever it is, I’m going to be more inclined to do it if you just ask me on the phone. Because if you come all the way here, if I don’t want to do it, I’m still not gonna do it. And then you would have wasted your time, and I’m going to feel bad, and you’re going to feel bad.’ I spent 20 minutes trying to convince her not to come.” She didn’t, “and it’s a good thing,” laughs Winfrey, who ended up granting the favor. Winfrey might not be a constant presence around OWN, but the input she does provide is crucial. “Her brilliance is in frosting the cake,” says Salata. “Baking it—those are the meetings and all that. We could spend months and months and months [on something], and we come together, lay out our wares, and say, ‘Go to town.’ Then she comes with a big bowl of frosting: ‘Not this, that’s not right, more of this.’ And you sit back and go, That’s why she’s Oprah.” When OWN launched in 2011, it initially seemed like a rare Winfrey stumble, and her approach today seems in many ways shaped by the tumultuous experience of saving her creation. Originally, Winfrey intended OWN to be a destination for the kind of live-your-best-life self-help content that she assumed her audience wanted. At launch, programming largely consisted of wellness shows—Ask Oprah’s All Stars, In the Bedroom With Dr. Laura Berman—and uninspiring syndicated fare (including reruns of Dr. Phil, no less). What’s more, none of OWN’s new shows featured its biggest asset: Oprah herself. Due to commitments with her talk show, Winfrey initially wasn’t able to host any new programs, appearing only occasionally for special events. The Oprah Winfrey Network launched, essentially, without regular on-air contributions from Oprah Winfrey. At the time, she was still based in Chicago, which also contributed to a lack of day-to-day engagement in molding the network that bore 120 FastCompany.com November 2015

her name. Early OWN ratings were disappointing, with just an average of 262,000 viewers tuning in during 2011. It turned out even the Winfrey faithful didn’t want quite that much preachy self-help. “My mistake was, I thought I could do that every day, in 24/7 programming,” says Winfrey. “I thought I was going to have people meditating in the morning, yoga classes midday, [spiritual guide] Eckhart Tolle on in the afternoon. I had a vision of what living your best life could look like. The people told me otherwise. I had to redo my vision.” In 2011, when The Oprah Winfrey Show ended, she was able to focus on OWN. “I need to be there,” she told attendees of a Chicago media conference in June of that year. “I need to be engaged and involved. I need to do the same thing I did on my show every day.” By July she did just that, taking over as CEO and chief creative officer (former CEO Christina Norman had departed in May). First she had to figure out what audiences wanted—and find a way to give it to them without compromising her values. “If we made choices based on ratings, I know that we could be a top10 network and make a lot more money,” says Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav, who created OWN with Winfrey. “But the choices Oprah’s making are purpose-driven.” To find her footing, “she spent more time looking at content and talking to the audience, learning what’s different between the cable business and the syndication business. Every week the network got a little bit better.” One major turning point came in 2012, when Winfrey approached her friend Tyler Perry, a hugely successful entertainment impresario who’s known for his lowbrow sensibility. Initially, Perry had come to her, offering his services. At that point, Winfrey wasn’t interested. “Watching how difficult it was for her, I said, ‘You know, I can help you out,’ ” Perry recalls. “Nothing came of that because, you know, Oprah’s very clear on her vision and direction.” Eventually Winfrey changed her mind, and Perry was happy to get involved. “How do you say no to Oprah?” According to Perry, Winfrey had faith that he could please his fans without straying too far outside her mission. “There was no ‘change this, do this, choose this,’ ” Perry says. “[It was,] ‘I’m gonna sit back and trust you. You know your audience like none other that I know.’ ” She was right. Today, Perry’s OWN projects include the megahit soap operas If Loving You Is Wrong and The Haves and the Have Nots, which are currently the network’s two top-rated shows. Thanks to Perry, earlier this year OWN became the No. 1 cable network among women on Tuesday nights, when The Haves and the Have Nots airs, and the No. 1 network overall among AfricanAmerican women. Perry is quick to point out that OWN’s turnaround was under way before he arrived. Winfrey had stepped back in front of the camera with a

weekly celebrity interview show (guests have included Steven Spielberg and Pharrell Williams), and she had introduced more crowd-pleasing programming to replace some of the self-help. Thanks in part to Winfrey’s greater involvement, the network had also been able to negotiate more favorable contracts with cable providers, significantly increasing revenue. But Perry’s shows established the kind of “destination viewing” that most networks dream of, and have also helped lure advertisers. According to research firm SNL Kagan, OWN netted $125 million in ad revenue last year—nearly double its first year on the air. Now OWN is adding more scripted series, including more serious fare like the miniseries Tulsa, starring Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer and set amid the infamous 1921 Oklahoma race riot, and the drama Queen Sugar, which is being written by Selma director Ava DuVernay and is slated to costar Winfrey herself. With OWN delivering both ratings and earnings—the network became profitable in 2013— it seems Winfrey can afford to be less hands-on than when she took control as CEO. “The first night after The Haves and the Have Nots, [ratings] were at such a high number that I gave a sigh of relief,” she says. “That allowed a lot of the pressure to come off, you know? That gave us some breathing room.” Later, Winfrey lights up when I ask her about her vacation schedule: “This is the first year I’ve actually said, ‘Okay, from these days to these days, I’m not going to be checking into the office.’ ” OWN’s turnaround might have something to do with a concept that Winfrey considers one of her big productivity secrets: being “fully present.” “I have learned that your full-on attention for any activity you choose to experience comes with a level of intensity and truth,” she says. “It’s about living a present life, moment to moment— not worrying about what’s going to happen at 3 o’clock and what’s going to happen at 7 o’clock.” In other words: focus. “That whole thing about multitasking? That’s a joke for me. When I try to do that, I don’t do anything well.” Being fully present is something she’s long cultivated, going back to when she would do interviews for The Oprah Winfrey Show. Sometimes the technique can be too effective, especially when she’s conducting emotional interviews. “I am listening as hard as they’re talking and taking on the energy of whatever is going on in that moment,” she says. “I had to learn how to be present but not take it all in. Because at the end of the day I’d just be messed up.” DuVernay, who directed Winfrey in Selma and has come to think of her as a “big sister,” remembers when, on her very first day on set in character, Winfrey got the news that her close friend and mentor Maya Angelou had died. “She’s getting hair and makeup,” DuVernay recalls, “and Maya’s passing is reported. It was a mournful moment, [but] it was about finishing her

business—it was about her work as an artist and an actress.” Director Lee Daniels, who worked with Winfrey when she executive produced his film Precious and costarred in The Butler, had a similar experience. “She stopped everything [to work on the movie],” he says. “She disconnected from the business world and her company that she was running. She didn’t come with a posse. She was committed to the character, and she was committed to the work.” The lessons Winfrey seems to have internalized from the OWN turnaround—being in the moment and aware, modifying your vision in service of your overall goal, establishing a trusted team you can delegate to—have helped her figure out what’s important. To friends and coworkers, Winfrey can come off as almost superhuman. At the same time, one key source of her appeal is how she still remains so humble and in touch with her vulnerability. “Most people think the way I did: that Oprah is Oprah and she’s perfect and has got all the answers,” says Daniels. “But what makes her spectacular to me is she’s aware that she doesn’t have all the answers. She’s in search of them, in a space of humility.” Some of OWN’s content is filmed on a large soundstage located right behind its headquarters. The day after our interview in her office, Winfrey is perched on a stool in Studio 7, sipping sparkling water from a can with a straw as dozens of assistants, makeup artists, cameramen, sound engineers, and lighting specialists swarm around her. She’s here today to shoot promos for Belief, the documentary series that she and longtime collaborator Jon Sinclair, along with Brooklyn-based Part2 Pictures, produced for her network. In typically efficient fashion, Winfrey is dressed for the camera from the waist up—with gold bangles and perfectly primped curls—and for comfort down below, wearing yoga pants and leather sneakers. Eventually a short and very authoritative man yells for quiet on the set, and Winfrey begins recording the spots. Salata prompts her with a series of questions about her spiritual beliefs. “I remember praying on my knees the very first night I had been removed from my grandmother,” says Winfrey, who was sent to live with her mother in Milwaukee at the age of 6. “My belief and understanding that there was a force—a presence, a power, a divine entity, a being, that loved me, and the very idea of being loved into being—is what has kept me grounded, what has kept me centered, what has kept me strong.” There’s near-total silence as Salata, sniffling, moves on to the next question. Belief traces a range of moving stories about people exploring their spirituality or looking for purpose, from a former pro skateboarder on a pilgrimage to Mecca to an atheist who finds meaning by scaling mountains without ropes or a harness. “I welcome people in all of their beliefs that allow them to aspire to the best of

their humanness,” Winfrey says. “What really mattered to me about creating a network was having a platform where I could connect ideas that let people see the best of themselves through the lives of other people.” At one point, I share with Winfrey that there’s a story in Belief I find particularly gripping, about a Christian couple named Ian and Larissa. Ten months into their relationship, Ian suffers a traumatic brain injury that renders him barely able to move or speak. Through their faith, they’re able to stay together and get married. I talk about how I identified with the couple’s ability to find meaning in tragedy, and of the similar journey that began for me after the recent loss of three close family members within a 10-month span. As I finish telling Winfrey what their story meant to me, I look up and see tears streaming down her face, threatening to ruin her carefully traced eyeliner. “Would you get me some Kleenex, please, so I don’t go ugly-cry on J.J. here?” she yells to her publicist, then turns back to me. “Weren’t you reeling, though? Weren’t you reeling?” Then she tells me she wants to talk offthe-record, and offers some unprompted insight and advice. What she shares is heartfelt, genuine, and appreciated. Winfrey financed Belief on her own, and it has been quite a project, involving three years of production, hundreds of hours of footage, and thousands of miles traveled by her crew around the globe. “We cast it, sent people all over the world to tell their stories, and have been in the process of refining in order to create this mosaic that makes sense to the viewer,” she says. When Winfrey talks about focusing on the work she cares most about, this is the sort of thing she has in mind. In fact, she says, this is why she wanted to start OWN in the first place. Though the network’s more conventional offerings continue to rake in the ratings, this is what really drives her. She’s giving people what they want in order to support the kind of programming that she feels they need. In her office, Winfrey keeps a large charcoal drawing titled Having by the artist Whitfield Lovell, which depicts two African-American women, one standing and the other sitting, wearing what appears to be simple, early-1900s-era garb. Winfrey doesn’t say why she’s drawn to it, though she has displayed it—both here and before that in Chicago—for at least a decade. But it’s easy to imagine that this image of black women in a very different time keeps her somehow grounded. “Through the grace of a force I call God,” Winfrey says, “I have been privileged to live this exquisitely inspired life. Daily, it continues to astound me that I’ve come from where I come from, and I am where I am. I feel that my role here on earth is to inspire people, and to get them to look at themselves. My genuine wish is to do better and be better to everybody. That’s not just some kind of talk for me. That’s who I am.” jmccorvey@fastcompany.com

Snapchat (Continued from page 107)

was. The channel eventually had to alter its Discover icon—adding the words Warner Music to the stylized W created by legendary graphic designer Saul Bass in the 1970s—because Snapchatters didn’t recognize it. But users still didn’t care, because their relationships are with artists, not labels. “Bottom line: The channel wasn’t performing and wasn’t being programmed for Snapchat’s audience,” says the source. In Yahoo’s case, Spiegel kicked off the relationship directly with Katie Couric, but its global news anchor ended up being part of the problem. Most Yahoo content opened like an old-school news broadcast, with Couric sitting at a desk, reading into the camera, followed by a long cut to the Yahoo logo. Kids couldn’t tune out fast enough. Snapchat informed Yahoo it wasn’t performing but didn’t offer a “ton of analytics,” according to one Yahoo source involved. Partners were only told whether their traffic placed them in the top three, middle three, or bottom three of Discover channels. The data were presented in a “vacuum,” this source explains. Snapchat and Yahoo, which work out of the same building in New York, held meetings to try to fix Yahoo’s ratings. But when rumors spread that BuzzFeed would soon be joining the Discover lineup, Yahoo quickly realized that BuzzFeed would be taking its spot. (BuzzFeed quickly proved itself: CEO Jonah Peretti revealed on a podcast that 21% of all BuzzFeed content views came from Snapchat in August 2015, its first full month on Discover.) Nick Bell, the Snapchat content head, says there are no specific milestones the company required partners to hit in terms of traffic or ad sales: “The focus is on the content.” Most Discover participants have glowing things to say about their editorial freedom and appear unfazed by any perceived performance pressure. “We won’t end up like Warner Music because Cosmo and Snapchat have the same user base,” says Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles. “If Cosmo can’t survive on Snapchat, then I’m not sure who can.” But some also admit that it’s taken time to learn what content works on Snapchat. “A lot of people just assumed, Okay, this is a younger demo and therefore they’re going to want cat videos,” says CNN executive VP Andrew Morse. “But that wasn’t the case. They’re engaging with really smart storytelling, which for us is gratifying.” One serendipitous effect of Snapchat’s quest for ratings and revenue is that it fuels competition between Discover partners. Daily Mail has been privately boasting that it will rake in $10 million to $20 million this year from Snapchat ad revenue, according to several sources, as if to say to its Snapchat rivals, Beat that! This November 2015 FastCompany.com 121

sum, according to another Discover participant, is “categorical, absolute, complete bullshit,” but it motivates everyone’s sales teams. (The Daily Mail’s Steinberg declined to discuss revenue.) When CNN began talking about how many employees it had exclusively working on Snapchat content, the implicit message to everyone else was, Can you keep up? Another partner source describes the reaction internally at his network when they heard about CNN’s Snapchat team: “We all looked around like, ‘Shit, should we be doing that too?’ ” Snapchat is pushing the competition directly as well. The company has its own Discover channel, called Snap, and it recruited Marcus Wiley, a former development executive at Fox, to program it. Snapchat has aggressively pursued original and exclusive content, including, most notably, a five-day miniseries starring Stephen Colbert in the final days before his CBS debut. The Discover channel most squeezed right now by Snapchat’s succeed-or-die dynamic is Food Network. A source close to the channel says the cable-TV staple was amped about the partnership because “ad sales [on Snapchat] were really high” and it gave them access to “the elusive demographic.” Yet the Food Network soon learned that little of its TV programming could be repurposed on Snapchat—it simply wasn’t relevant for millennials—and executives weren’t sure what original content would work. “No one wants to see [67-year-old TV chef] Ina Garten in the kitchen baking a casserole on Snapchat,” the source says. When Snapchat added Tastemade to Discover in late August, several sources indicate that Snapchat did not give Food Network a heads-up before the deal was finalized, which to some signaled its Discover spot may be in jeopardy. Ironically, Food Network’s parent company, Scripps Networks Interactive, led a strategic investment in Tastemade in 2014. What’s more, BuzzFeed and Vice are also producing food content. When asked for comment, a Food Network spokesperson replies, “We have a strong ongoing relationship with Snapchat and are in talks right now about further extending our partnership.” Discover participant Comedy Central, for one, seems to have gotten the message. The executive in charge of its channel, Steve Grimes, wonders aloud to me whether the network could have filmed Jon Stewart’s Daily Show send-off in vertical video to enhance clips of the finale on Snapchat. “We’ve been talking to our production team about, What does it mean to shoot something phone safe? How does that work? What does it look like? Because the TV is not the way [to work with Snapchat].” A month later, Comedy Central announced six new original series that it will exclusively develop for its Snapchat Discover channel. Says Snapchat’s Bell, after hearing how Grimes is thinking about vertical video: “I feel like a proud father.” 122 FastCompany.com November 2015

FOUR: Snapchat is an advertising pioneer—by following the same strategy as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Part of the reason advertisers are bullish on Snapchat is that, like TV, its content is “so rich,” says Josh Elman, a partner at Greylock and former product leader at Twitter and Facebook. “When a tweet or Facebook ad scrolls by [in my feed], I may or may not emotionally relate, but if you have my full attention for even three seconds or 10 seconds with a full-screen video, you can engage so many different emotional triggers. If Snapchat can’t monetize that, that’s criminal.” For Snapchat to justify its $16 billion valuation, it has to become an advertising juggernaut. Imran Khan, Snapchat’s business lead who previously worked at Credit Suisse, eagerly tells me that the company has already locked in several eight-figure marketing deals for 2016. Snapchat’s sales team has quadrupled in the past five months to around 50 people. That’s a good sign, because according to a leaked 2014 P&L document that Gawker published in August, Snapchat made just $3 million in the first 11 months of 2014 on losses of $128 million. While that leak produced a healthy dose of schadenfreude, the numbers were hardly shocking. Snapchat didn’t air its first ad until mid-October 2014. Plus media startups usually invest in growth at the expense of revenue at the outset. Snapchat declined to comment on Gawker’s post, but one investor tells me, “Go back and look at how much money Facebook lost before they turned on advertising. Then do the same for Twitter.” (When Facebook was three years old, as Snapchat was last year, it lost $138 million, though it booked $153 million in revenue. Twitter was four the first year that it sold advertising, and it lost $67 million, on $28 million in revenue.) This investor adds that Snapchat is “going to blow out their plan this year from a revenue standpoint. It could come in almost twice what they marketed to folks just a few months ago— tens of millions of dollars.” Recent reports indicate the company is aiming to hit $50 million in revenue this year and $200 million in 2016. Before Snapchat can IPO, as Spiegel has publicly said it will “need to,” the company must devise a better story about its valuation, which is roughly on par with Twitter’s market cap despite it having a fraction of Twitter’s likely $2 billion in 2015 revenue. “There’s a very focused awareness within the company about the revenues and potential multiples and ways of describing the value proposition and the growth prospects of the company in a way that makes sense to the broader markets,” says Mitch Lasky, a Snapchat board member who is also a major Twitter investor. “We’re very conscious of the way Wall Street has painted Twitter with Facebook’s brush.” (Twitter has been plagued by having to live up to Facebook’s metrics—such as monthly active users—even though the companies are

fundamentally different; Twitter’s stock now trades 33% below its market debut.) Snapchat is clearly trying to spin a different narrative, one that revolves around its rivals pursuing easy money. “If Evan wanted to pick low-hanging fruit, he could simply [turn on app-install ads] and do $100 million in cost-perinstall revenue tomorrow,” says Lasky. Spiegel has called the targeted direct marketing that makes up a signiﬁcant portion of Facebook’s and Twitter’s revenue “creepy.” This type of performance-based advertising, which includes Google’s pay-per-click search listings, is a growing percentage of a $156.8 billion market, but it can’t compare with the projected $578 billion in global brand advertising this year. That is Snapchat’s bet: that it’s going to be the one to migrate ads designed to improve brand awareness to digital. The global TV ad market alone, most of which is brand based, is a $213 billion annual business. “TV viewership is down almost 20% with millennials,” says Khan. “Look at the ad dollars still spent on magazines and newspapers [approximately $32 billion this year]. There’s a tremendous pent-up demand for big brand advertisers to allocate their brand advertising to digital.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all have a similar vision. Everyone believes they will be the big winner when—and it’s always when and not if—digital consumes the traditional advertising industry.

FIVE: Snapchat can deliver millennials—as long as you don’t ask too many questions.

Another good reason for Snapchat to go after brand advertising: It’s difficult to measure. It can take years before a major corporate marketer will see a meaningful uptick in affinity. And with social media, which is still relatively new, the metrics are even murkier. “Social stats can be very misleading,” says Michael Moses, Universal Studios’ cohead of marketing. Universal bought the first Snapchat ad and has purchased spots to promote everything from the niche horror movie Unfriended to Furious 7 and Jurassic World. “I mean, we have a vendor a week coming in here and saying, ‘We’ve cracked the code and we know. We’ll parse the firehose of everything that’s coming in on social and we’ll let you know exactly what it means for your movie.’ I remain unconvinced.” Marisa Thalberg, who oversees how youthoriented fast-food chain Taco Bell interacts with customers, says that Snapchat has become its “most engaged platform.” Including TV? “No, no, on social,” she quickly responds, before stopping short, reconsidering, and adding with a laugh, “Although how do you measure engagement on TV? Who knows? Maybe it is.” Both advertisers and Snapchat are still figuring out what works: In early 2015, dropout rates

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after three seconds were on the order of 60% to 70% for almost all ads on Snapchat. “We learned we needed to adjust the way we talk to Snapchat’s audience, because they detect when it’s advertising,” says Coca-Cola North America content SVP Emmanuel Seuge. The company’s ads repurposed from TV and other social networks performed poorly during Snapchat’s Live Story for the NCAA Final Four tournament. The soda brand continued working “hand in hand” with Snapchat to develop more ad programs; not long ago, as part of Snapchat’s back-to-high-school Story featuring scenes from kids’ first day of classes, the completion rate for a Snapchat-exclusive 10-second Coke spot shot up to 54%. Moses, Thalberg, and Seuge—and almost every other marketer we contacted—are Snapchat believers, even though everyone we spoke with also complained about not getting enough metrics. A Snapchat spokesperson responds that it shares viewership data with marketers and that it commissions third-party research on the resonance of major campaigns. For now, advertisers find Snapchat’s demographics and traffic enticing enough. “You know the audience you’re getting,” says one digital Hollywood executive. “Everyone who has a child between 12 and 24 knows who’s using it and the success with it. So it’s not a secret who you’re advertising to.” Then there’s the price. “When I met with them [in the beginning], they were telling me the minimum ad spend was $750,000 per day, and I felt like I wanted to throw up,” says the CEO of one big-name advertising agency. Snapchat discontinued that ad unit, replacing it with 10-second spots within Live Stories and Discover. Although a marketer can get into Discover for a reasonable five-figure sum, if it wants to own a highprofile Live Story such as the VMAs, the price is $800,000, though it can be split among advertisers. Sources universally say Snapchat’s fees are substantially higher than equivalent ad prices on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but that it’s too early to measure Snapchat in comparison. The gaudy numbers send a message about how Snapchat perceives itself to be the only way to reach 13- to 34-year-olds. That haughtiness can make the company “a pain in the ass to work with,” says one marketing exec. “They understand their power right now and they’re just egotistical about what they have.” Early on, Spiegel himself rejected campaigns because he didn’t like them and “worried about his users.” According to this person, “Instagram was the same way in the beginning. That’s changed at Instagram. Hopefully, Snapchat is beyond that.” Despite any cavils, most advertisers I spoke with are at least willing to give Snapchat time as it matures into an advertising business. They’re confident that Snapchat’s infrastructure will get better, and like all of its rivals, it too will eventually add more data analytics and improved targeting. “[Snapchat] is not going to get held to the same sort of rigorous metrics that we can now put in place for other vendors with more granular 124 FastCompany.com November 2015

data,” says Ivan Pollard, Coca-Cola North America’s SVP of connections, investments, and assets. “We’re willing to risk a bit of money to learn.” One common sentiment is that Snapchat is handling that maturation better than its rivals, perhaps having learned from their mistakes. Brands and advertisers universally deride Facebook and Twitter for their so-called baitand-switch, when they spent years encouraging companies to build up organic followings, only to change abruptly to an expensive pay-to-play model. “Snapchat has been very clear from the beginning. They’re like, ‘If you want it, you have to pay for it,’ ” says Jess Greenwood, VP of partnerships at R/GA. “I think brands are probably quite grateful for that.”

SIX: Evan Spiegel runs a storytelling company, yet he’s struggled to tell Snapchat’s story—and his own.

The “What Is Snapchat?” video, posted to YouTube last June, features grainy footage of Spiegel, clad in his usual loose-fitting white V-neck T-shirt, sitting in what appears to be a windowless conference room. In 3 minutes and 56 seconds, he condenses the history of social media, offers a Snapchat tutorial, and discusses the mobile revolution’s impact on self-identity. Years ago, he says, identity equated to the accumulation of everything representing you online. Now, thanks to Snapchat, “identity is who I am right now. It says, ‘I’m the result of everything I’ve ever done, but I’m not the accumulation of all that stuff.’ ” It’s a fitting demarcation for someone whose past is so public that he understandably would prefer it not to be linked to his identity. There are leaked misogynistic emails from his time at Stanford; evidence that he forced out Snapchat’s third cofounder Reggie Brown; the abrupt departures of several high-profile senior executives; and the correspondence ensnared in the Sony hack that reveal his board members Lynton and Lasky referring to Spiegel as “super paranoid” and board meetings as “contentious,” and generally painting a portrait of a team working behind each other’s backs to avoid “land mines.” On the day Spiegel released the YouTube video, perhaps to emphasize his point, he deleted all his public tweets. A Snapchat spokeswoman explained, “He just really prefers to live in the present.” The Evan Spiegel of late 2015 remains, well, a contradiction. A slew of off-putting anecdotes from sources seem to confirm the worst, including one from a former associate who tells me at length how cold, “truly arrogant,” and “calculated” Spiegel was in their dealings. Even Spiegel’s supporters, including his investors, will admit that he is, at times, his own worst enemy. “If you told me that some people found him incredibly brash and arrogant, I wouldn’t fall out of my chair,” says one close ally. “When

I first met him [in 2014],” recalls WPP’s Martin Sorrell, “I said, ‘You’re the first 25-year-old billionaire I’ve met,’ and he responded, ‘I’m 24.’ ” Sorrell tells me he doesn’t regard that as being cocky and lauds Spiegel for being “no BS. He’s to the point; if he’s not interested in something, he says so, but if you have a good idea, he’ll listen.” Spiegel loyalists echo this characterization and add that he has a good heart, he’s hilarious, and he loves talking music and reading The New Yorker. He’s the kind of guy who sends handwritten thank-you notes and constantly seeks advice. Take a moment and you can see all of these attributes in Snapchat, from his sense of curiosity to his single-mindedness. Spiegel’s allies contend that he is simply young and experiencing a mountain of responsibilities. There’s only one other person who has faced this kind of pressure at this age: Mark Zuckerberg. He, too, was 25 and running a company with more than 100 million users and a valuation in excess of $10 billion. Zuck’s subsequent success and personal growth have erased the memory of his youthful lack of polish. As Jonathan Teo, an investor and Snapchat adviser, tells me, “Evan is never going to write on his business card, ‘I’m CEO, Bitch,’ ” which Facebook’s CEO notoriously did. It’s remarkable how many media honchos give me their take on Spiegel despite having never interacted with him beyond crossing paths at Cannes. In this hothouse of faux intimacy, “he’s guarded,” says a top VC who is friendly with him. What Spiegel values most is loyalty, colleagues say, and just as in the app, authenticity. Andrew Watts, 20, grew up near Spiegel and contacted the CEO in 2012 to write about the pre-unicorn startup for his high school newspaper. The two kept in touch over the years, and even as Snapchat became a big company and Spiegel’s real and paper wealth soared, Watts says Spiegel was always exceedingly generous, always willing to meet and offer advice. Watts could never understand why someone who has become so successful, so famous, would still make time for a college sophomore—let alone agree to visit his campus and speak to his classmates. So he asked. “Evan told me, ‘Well, you were friends with me before it was cool to be friends with me,’ ” Watts recalls. Virtually every partner, advertiser, and investor quoted in this story is older than Snapchat’s millennial sweet spot. Spiegel wants their content and their money, but he’s building Snapchat for the Andrew Wattses of the world. Daily Mail CEO Jon Steinberg, 38, jokes that Snapchat is the first product that ever made him “feel kind of old”; he recalls emailing Spiegel to suggest an interface change he found confusing. “He wrote to me and said, ‘People will figure it out—you’re not really the target.’ ” In other words, Snapchat isn’t for you, old man! “That was kind of profound for me,” he says. “Every teen I see using this thing has no problems with it.” acarr@fastcompany.com

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ers, I have one request: Please take my money. I insist. I want to offer you my money in exchange for your services. Maybe you’ve heard of this: It’s called capitalism. I’m tired of you telling me my money is no good. Of you refusing to entertain the possibility that I might explicitly value your service. Mostly I’m talking to you, Internet businesses. For too long, people have embraced the compromised notion that free is not just an acceptable price but also the optimal one. Investors have clamored that user growth, not revenue, is what matters. Because why monetize now when you can ﬁgure it out later? And we, the people—readers, viewers, members, and users—have thought we were getting a great deal. We’ve paid—with information and tracking and invasive inter-

BARATUNDE THURSTON

We’ve paid by failing to notice that we are not the customers. The customer is the advertiser, the data miner, the bigger fish to come along and acquire the assets of a promising young company that cashed out, offering us as the asset. By refusing to turn users into customers, many of these companies have a confused loyalty. Paying customers can demand refunds. They can organize their money with that of other customers and demand improvements. It’s called accountability. I want your incentives to grow to be aligned with me, not some third party paying you to snitch on me. Private company valuations are so chimerical in part because there’s rarely a financial relationship between the business and its users. We invent these proxies for value such as time spent on a site or the number of sunset photos uploaded. Do you know what’s easier to count than all that? Money. I value those great sunset pictures, but can I exchange them for online photo-storage space? Does Amazon accept hugs as payment? Not every service should be delivered solely on the basis of a person’s ability to pay. Health care is one example. Some types of education and housing qualify too. For certain classes of services, we are all customers and we should all contribute. It’s called taxation, and we are living another myth in thinking that we can stop paying that money and still maintain the relative quality of communal services that sustain our society. Even Donald Trump understands that. We’ve been sold a false sense of “free” in both business and government. I implore you, experimental entities masquerading as financially sound businesses: Take my money. I don’t just want to be your user, a term that implies subservience and substance abuse. I want to be your customer. I want to be your primary source of funding rather than a series of investment rounds. You may think me old-fashioned to bring up this idea of money and customers in a business discussion, but lots of things are making comebacks these days: mohawks and neon-colored clothing and nationalism and vinyl records. Let’s bring customers back too.

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Celine Grouard

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Fast Company I ssue Number 200. Copyright © 2015 by Mansueto Ventures, LLC. All rights reserved. Fast Company® is a registered trademark of Mansueto Ventures, LLC. Fast Company (ISSN 1085-9241) is published monthly, except for combined December/January and July/August issues, by Mansueto Ventures, LLC, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195. Periodical postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40063884. Canadian GST Registration No. R123245250. Returns: Canada Post, PO Box 867, Markham Station Main, Markham, Ontario L3P 8K8. Postmasters: Send address changes to Fast Company, PO Box 2128, Harlan, IA 51593-0317. Subscription rates: One year (10 issues) $23.95, two years (20 issues) $47.90, in the United States. To subscribe to Fast Company: Email subscriptions@fastcompany.com or phone 800-542-6029 (U.S.A. and Canada). Printed in the U.S.A.

Baratunde Thurston is a supervising producer for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and a cofounder of Cultivated Wit, a collaborative comedy company.

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