Fast company june 2014

100 MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE IN BUSINESS #8

ANNA KENDRICK’S PERFECT PITCH # 32

CHINA’S BRAND ARTISTS

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AMAZON’S DRONE PILOT # 33

DISNEY’S FROZEN QUEEN

# 26

JERRY SEINFELD IS A MAD MAN #1

A VISIONARY SAUDI PRINCESS # 41– # 44

FOUR DATA SUPERSTARS

Adidas Google Facebook Tinder Lego Pinterest Uber Patagonia GE What makes Kendrick feel like “a mover, a shaker, and a little badass”? See page 70.

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June 2014

CONTENTS Look again:

Cover: Set design: Eric Hollis; hair: Craig Gangi/Tracey Mattingly; makeup: Vanessa Scali/Tracey Mattingly; wardrobe: Neil Rodgers/Tracey Mattingly

Sonal Gupta and co. started Rank & Style as a resource for shoppers looking for the best value. Now it’s the Consumer Reports of fashion. (page 82)

100 Most Creative People in Business 2014 On the cover: Photograph by Eric Ogden This page: Photograph by Jonathan Snyder

Meet this year’s most inspiring leaders in technology, design, media, music, movies, marketing, television, sports, and more.

Begins on page 60 JUNE 2014 FASTCOMPANY.COM

3

Contents

THE 100 INDEX 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud Gur Kimchi and Daniel Buchmueller Jill Wilfert Mario Queiroz Raj Talluri Soleio Cuervo, Tim Van Damme, and Gentry Underwood Anthony Foxx Anna Kendrick Sallie Krawcheck Michael Heyward Theaster Gates Sean Rad and Justin Mateen Jamie Miller Sophia Lindholm Scott Goodson Amanda Musilli Jorge Odón Sarika Doshi, Pooja Badlani, and Sonal Gupta

19 Palmer Luckey 20 Billy Parish 21 James Carnes 22 Anna Marie Chavez 23 Tim Kendall 24 Mike WiLL Made It 25 Mariam Naficy 26 Jerry Seinfeld 27 Naval Ravikant 28 Anthony Perez 29 Max Ventilla 30 Scott Howe 31 Ruth Gaviria and Linda Ong 32 Adam Schokora, Jimi Zhang, Leon Yan, and Taylor Shen 33 Jennifer Lee 34 Gorden Wagener 35 Jen McCabe 36 Fleury Rose 37 Camille Gibson

38 Charmian Gooch 39 Dan Harden 40 Thor Fridriksson 41 Joel Dudley 42 Linda Avey 43 Anmol Madan 44 Chase Adam 45 Vikram Vora 46 Emil Michael 47 April Bloomfield 48 Deborah Lloyd 49 Deena Varshavskaya 50 Li Na 5 1 Ty Ahmad-Taylor 52 Molly Guy 53 Ma Yansong 54 Gerry Graf 55 Meredith Perry 56 Michael Phillips Moskowitz 57 Naveen Tewari

58 Catherine Hoke 59 Andy Dunn 60 Jehane Noujaim 61 Carl Hart 62 Anya Fernald 63 Stacy O’Connor 64 Adam Fleischman 65 Grace Helbig 66 Kathryn Hunt 67 Kelly Schoeffel 68 Monica Rogati 69 Michael Comish 70 D’Wayne Edwards 71 Jami Curl 72 Fred Gelli 73 Izzie Lerer 74 Hugh Evans 75 Bob Richards 76 Alan Schaaf 77 Boris Sofman 78 Tim and Karrie League 79 Michele Clapton 80 Le-Marie Thompson 81 Claudia Perlich

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ida Skivenes Rob King Jenji Kohan Margaret Barbour Ariane Daguin Siddhartha Lal Trent Reznor José María ÁlvarezPallete 90 Geneviève Dion 91 Sangeeta Bhatia 92 Joy Howard 93 Kate Orff 94 Rebecca Goldman 95 Iolanthe Chronis 96 Amanda Peyton 97 Julia Greer 98 Taylor Steele 99 Roger Norris Gordon 100 King Bach

Hanging ten: Surf-film director Taylor Steele dives deep with Innersection.TV, which uses crowdsourcing to create popular surfing videos. (page 138)

4

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Photograph by Mark Tipple

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Contents

F E AT U R E S The princess who dares 62 Saudi Arabian Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud is challenging her country’s conventions by inviting women into the workforce.

By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Anna Kendrick finds her voice

The passion of Hugh Evans

Jerry Seinfeld’s online series has shown some advertisers that unorthodox promotion can work wonders. (page 90)

122 By tapping companies like FedEx and HP and celebrities like Ben Affleck and Beyoncé, Hugh Evans has rallied millions behind his Global Poverty Project.

By Jeff Chu

6

Photograph by Pari Dukovic

Comedians in cars making money:

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Grooming: Rebecca Restrepo/The Wall Group

70 She’s an actress, a singer, and a brand unto herself.

But she doesn’t have a business manager, and she isn’t about to hire one.

By Josh Eells

Contents

D E PA RT M E N T S

NEXT

12 From the editor

Can we disrupt diversity?

22 Boys will be boys, which is the problem with Silicon Valley.

14 Updates Catching up with Most Creative People alumni from Fab to Intel to Nest.

One more thing 144 How growth hacking hurts us all .

BY BA R ATUNDE THURS TON

BY MAX CHAFKIN

No fault in this star 30 How author John Green built a following through radical authenticity.

Straight into Compton 36 The city’s new mayor is showing citizens how city hall is on their side.

Let no infrastructure go to waste 38 Cities across the world are repurposing outdated landmarks.

New-age wake-up call 42 Can design improve your morning? Meet the Aura, an alarm clock and crafted wake-up solution.

How to pass the Marc Andreessen test 46 The visionary venture capitalist reveals why some creative ideas have no expiration date.

Uber has gone Google 50 The cab-hailing app and the search giant have some key things in common.

BY OM MALIK

Couture chemistry 52 Intriguing new headgear shows what’s going on inside your noggin.

Jewelry for a Cause melts illegal guns into bracelets, cuff links, and more. (page 54)

The Recommender 54 Jewelry that melts hearts, Korean flavors, the best new apps, and everything else you need to try right now.

Courtesy of Wowhaus (park)

Top:

Bottom: Russia completely rebuilt the plaza near its statue of Peter the Great as a public park. (page 38)

8

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014 2014

Art credit teekay

DIGITA L What’s happening in the FC network

ONLINE

FASTCOCREATE.COM

Thoughts can be contagious Rosario Dawson’s advocacy group, Voto Latino, helps mobilize Latino millennials to vote. Now, with her recent role in Cesar Chavez, she's learning even more about the power of contagious ideas—and how to champion them.

FASTCOEXIST.COM

Building your own Internet, bit by bit Step into my office The Runway Incubator in San Francisco houses young startups. Yes, in an igloo.

Your very coolest work spaces Not all offices are created equal. And they’re not all filled with rows of soul-crushing cubicles and cartoonish stacks of paper so high you can’t see over them. The innovator’s floor plan is now crafted with furniture and layouts to get the creative juices flowing. Getting the most out of your office has been a hot topic around Fast Company HQ recently, inspired in part by photographer Todd Selby’s book Fashionable Selby, where he showcases the work spaces of world-renowned fashion designers. So we asked readers to send in photos of their own great work spaces. Submissions ranged from bare-bones and rustic to modern and sleek. Take a look at the indoor igloos, giant chessboards, and mural installations, and please show off your own. Just tweet to @fastcodesign with the hashtag #mycreativespace and we’ll add our favorites to our creative work space Pinterest board. fastcodesign.com

INSTAGRAM

Part of a well- balanced breakfast We scoured readers’ Instagrams to see where they’re reading the magazine—we’re popular in airports and often paired with a morning coffee.

Use #fastcompany or @fastcompany to tag us. This shot via @Ianroyalnelson.

10

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Since 2008, littleBits has been known for its circuitry kits that come together in a snap. Now it wants you to connect your creations to the Internet of Things with Cloud Module, a tool that brings Wi-Fi to other littleBits creations. Hello, automated fish-feeder! “You can make your own Jawbone, or create your own new thing that doesn’t exist yet at all,” says CEO Ayah Bdeir.

FASTCOLABS.COM

I fought the law Airbnb is valued at $10 billion but constantly battles with lawmakers and the hotel industry. Uber is a musthave app for the cab crowd, but taxi commissioners want to rein it in. Yet the venture capital keeps coming in. Hear from investors who don’t shy away from legal scrapes.

NEW SERIES

FASTCOMPANY.COM

Health care’s new challenges Fastcompany.com’s ongoing Healthware series highlights what happens when innovation meets health care. One example: Intel’s work with the MIT– Harvard Broad Institute, which helped researchers analyze a full genome in just one day, is 300% faster than before.

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THE CLASS OF 2014 WHEN JARED LETO won an Academy Award earlier this year, I felt proud. Not that I had anything to do with his captivating portrayal of Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club. Far from it. But Leto was featured in our Most Creative People issue in 2012 and has participated in multiple Fast Company events. We’ve written about his entrepreneurial efforts, as well as his acting and singing.

As he told a Fast Company audience at South by Southwest last year, “I’d rather have 10 followers that actually give a shit than a million who don’t.”

The word creativity is thrown around a lot, but having creative impact is more rare. In January, we launched an ongoing digital resource called the Most Creative People 1000, which highlights an exclusive group of influential leaders from technology, design, entertainment, health care, and more. Leto is part of the MCP 1000, as are other well-known names like Jeff

Fast Friend: Jared Leto, a Most Creative alum, with his Oscar this past March

Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Diane von Furstenberg.

With this issue, we add 100 all-new honorees to that community. None of them have been profiled in our print magazine previously. Some may be familiar to you— actress Anna Kendrick, say, who is on our cover. But most are relative unknowns. They won’t stay that way for long.

Ranked No. 1 on this year’s list is a woman who won’t even let her face be photographed, for reasons of security. Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud is a part of the Saudi royal family. She was educated in the United States, and returned home to a country where opportunities for women are highly restricted. All she’s done is take over a struggling piece of the family business and get it back on track—and now she’s aggressively creating work opportunities for women in her country, ruffling feathers and opening doors in equal measure.

The class of 2014 also includes the founders of Tinder, Whisper, and Oculus VR. It includes a university professor who is challenging our assumptions about addiction, and an activist who has rallied millions to the cause of global poverty. There are marketers who have sparked new discussions about diversity and climate change, and data scientists who are unlocking health care solutions. There’s even an Obama administration cabinet secretary who is delivering unexpected progressive change.

Jared Leto wasn’t exactly a nobody when Fast Company first had him come speak at an event: He’d been on TV and in movies, and fans of his band, 30 Seconds to Mars, crashed our conference to swoon loudly when he took the stage. (He wasn’t there to sing; his “performance” was a cogent takedown of archaic practices in the music business and an explanation of his renegade efforts to find a new model.) But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t cheer a little louder for the wider recognition he’s now receiving. It’s how we felt when Andrew Wilson, an MCP honoree from 2012, was named CEO of Electronic Arts; or when Pharrell Williams, who appeared on our 2009 MCP list, won four Grammys in January. This year’s class will no doubt have breakout stars as well. We can’t wait to see who they’ll be.

Robert Safian editor@fastcompany.com

12

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Celine Grouard (Safian); Camera Press/Redux (Leto)

FROM THE EDITOR

PAPER because it’s part of the creative process.

Whether the end product is for print, digital or a combination of the two, it just helps to see it on paper.

So regardless of which stage of the process you’re in, use Domtar Printing Papers — Cougar,® Lynx® Opaque Ultra and Husky® Offset. Learn more at PAPERbecause.com.

MCP 1000 UPDATES

Keeping up with the Most Creative

Anne Wojcicki

It’s been a busy—and in some cases, challenging—year for many of the leaders in our growing Most Creative People 1000 community. Here’s where some of them are now.

ANNE WOJCICKI

BRADFORD SHELLHAMMER

CEO, 23andMe

C h i e f d e s i g n o f f i c e r,

Weeks after she was on our November 2013 cover, the FDA ordered Wojcicki’s genetics company to halt sales of its DNA analysis kits. 23andMe complied with the request, and Wojcicki and her team are now working with the FDA to meet its regulations.

ASHIFI GOGO CEO, Sproxil

Sproxil, which enables people in emerging markets to verify whether something they bought is real or counterfeit, was No. 7 on our 2013 Most Innovative Companies list, and the honors have kept on coming. The White House named Gogo an Immigrant Innovator Champion of Change, and the Schwab Foundation named him a Social Entrepreneur of the Year.

B a c k c o u n t r y. c o m

Shellhammer often boasted about the speedy growth at his design startup, Fab. Turns out it was all happening a bit too fast. The business laid off more than 100 employees last fall. In November, he left his job as Fab’s chief design officer, before joining outdoor-recreation retailer Backcountry.com in the same position this past March.

Ashifi Gogo

Bradford Shellhammer

DEBORAH CONRAD Former CMO, Intel

In her 27 years at Intel, including six as CMO, Conrad oversaw Intel’s launch and expansion throughout Asia, and Apple’s migration to Intel processors.

She left the company in April, but remains on the Intel Foundation’s board.

L E I L A TA K AYA M A Photographed for Fast Company by Celine Grouard at our events in New York (January 29) and San Francisco (February 4) honoring the Most Creative People in Business 1000

14

Senior user experience r e s e a r c h e r, G o o g l e X

In 2012, Takayama was teaching body language to robots. Now she’s a userexperience researcher at

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Photographs by Celine Grouard

don’t want to throw it away, can we eat it instead?

Nutritious packaging – a dream our software could bring to life.

Innovative thinkers everywhere use INDUSTRY SOLUTION EXPERIENCES from Dassault Systèmes to explore the true impact of their ideas. Insights from the 3D virtual world enable manufacturers to investigate new ways to package their products that improve both their commercial and environmental performance. How long before they’re improving their taste too?

It takes a special kind of compass to understand the present and navigate the future.

3DS.COM/CPG

MCP 1000 Updates

Nathan Hubbard

Google X, refining how humans interact with bots and computers.

MARK ROLSTON

cities. The greenhouses, which conserve waste and provide quality produce year-round, are already atop select A&P, Cub, and Pathmark stores.

Founder and chief creative, Argodesign

YA E L C O H E N

For more than 20 years, Rolston was a mainstay at iconic design agency Frog. But in late 2013, he left to found his own company, Argodesign.

It’s part incubator, part agency, and part productdevelopment group.

Founder and CEO, Fuck Cancer

N AT H A N H U B B A R D H e a d o f c o m m e r c e , Tw i t t e r

Hubbard had a tough job at Ticketmaster: Lead one of the most reviled companies in America. During his time there, he worked to make concertgoing more social, and boosted revenue by more than $5 per ticket. Then in August 2013, he left for one of America’s corporate darlings: Twitter, where he’s now head of commerce.

PA U L L I G H T F O O T CEO, BrightFarms

Lightfoot’s company designs, builds, and manages rooftop greenhouses atop supermarkets, and secured nearly $5 million in funding in early 2014 to expand into eight U.S.

SCOOTER BRAUN Ta l e n t m a n a g e r

Cohen and Braun are engaged; they announced the news in January.

Fast Company would like to take full responsibility for bringing these two together: Braun was No. 28 on our 2011 list, and Cohen was No. 38 in 2012.

N AT E S I LV E R Data wonk

The king of election prediction drove huge amounts of traffic to the New York Times website, where his section, FiveThirtyEight, lived during the 2012 elections.

We put him at the top of 2013’s Most Creative People list. This March, he moved his empire into a new, ESPN–funded website, Fivethirtyeight .com. It’s using data to report on everything from food to sports.

TONY FADELL CEO, Nest

Google acquired Nest (and the services of Fadell) for $3.2 billion in February.

The purchase could put Google ahead in the race to create a fully automated home. In April, however, there was a hitch: Nest halted sales of its new smoke detector, stating that it may be slow to respond in some cases.

16

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Yael Cohen and Scooter Braun

Leila Takayama

want exclusive style, can our home become a fashion house?

The 3D virtual shopping experience – a dream our software could bring to life.

Innovative thinkers everywhere use INDUSTRY SOLUTION EXPERIENCES from Dassault Systèmes to explore the true impact of their ideas. Insights from the 3D virtual world are unlocking new shopping experiences that bring consumers and designers closer together. How long before the living URRP DQG WKH À WWLQJ URRP EHFRPH RQH"

It takes a special kind of compass to understand the present and navigate the future.

Our partner: Julien Fournié 3DS.COM/CONSUMER-GOODS

FAST COMPANY MEDIA

SOCIAL

Connect with us—everywhere

Facebook.com/ FastCompany

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@ FastCompany

TWITTER

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EXCLUSIVE VIDEO! Download our iPad app or go to fastcompany.com to see cover star Anna Kendrick in an unforgettable role.

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@ FastCoExist

MAGAZINE

The World’s Most Innovative Companies Get to know the businesses making the greatest impact on industry and culture

The Most Creative People in Business Fast Company’s coveted list of the business world’s most forward-thinking people

Innovation by Design An in-depth exploration of the vital intersection between design and business

The United States of Innovation Bold ideas that are improving communities within the U.S.—and around the world

The Secrets of Generation Flux A look at the enterprises and individuals thriving in our fast-moving times

DIGITAL ONLINE

FA S T C O M PA N Y. C O M Innovation, leadership, and technology, featuring the Most Creative People in Business 1000

CO.DESIGN Highlighting the best examples of design and innovation working in concert

C O . C R E AT E Creativity in the converging worlds of entertainment, tech, and branding

CO.EXIST The world-changing ideas that will improve the way we live

CO.LABS Where the coding community can learn, collaborate, and build

APPS

TA B L E T & E - B O O K S Our print issue is available as an app, and exclusive e-books are on Byliner and Vook

18

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FC @ C2MTL

TWITTER

@ FastCoLabs

MAY 27–29, 2014, MONTREAL

The League of Extraordinary Women Up close with executives and thought leaders improving women’s lives globally

EVENTS

An interactive—and highly theatrical—exploration of creativity’s role in business

FC @ Advertising Week

YouTube.com/ FastCompany

SEPTEMBER 29–OCTOBER 3, 2014, NEW YORK

Fast Company’s unique take on creativity and innovation is held during Madison Avenue’s annual gathering

TUMBLR

Blog.FastCompany. com

Innovation by Design Awards and Conference OCTOBER 2014, NEW YORK

A day-to-evening event highlighting the year’s best designs

Pinterest.com/ FastCompany

Innovation Uncensored NOVEMBER 2014, SAN FRANCISCO APRIL 2015, NEW YORK

Two marquee live events showcasing visionary leaders and creative companies

LinkedIn.com/company/ Fast-Company

FC @ SXSW Interactive MARCH 2015, AUSTIN

A five-day event convening a who’s who of South by Southwest talent in a Fast Company–curated environment

INSTAGRAM

@ FastCompany

Fast Talks ONGOING

Custom events that bring together Fast Company editors and the world’s thought leaders

FLIPBOARD

Video still by Eric Ogden

RE A D THIS ISSUE ON YOUR

IPA D. KINDLE FIRE. NOOK. D O W NLOA D NOW AT FA STCOMPA N Y.COM/ TA B L E T

Fashion far forward: With 4,000 stones coated in special inks, this hat changes colors with the wearer’s brain activity.

Page 52

NEXT

Silicon Valley’s biggest problem Page 22

Novelist John Green and his Nerdfighters Page 30

Marc Andreessen has a few opinions Page 46

The Recommender goes Korean Page 54

Photograph by Mitch Payne

JUNE 2014 FASTCOMPANY.COM

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Next

MEME

SILICON VA LLE Y HAS A PROBLEM Tech companies like to say they are building the future.

Do they think women won’t be there too?

By Max Chafkin Illustration by Brian Stauffer

22

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

THE BOYS OF SILICON Valley sure are busy these days: They’ve got secrets to disseminate on Secret, bitcoins to trade, and the very first season of their very own comedy, Silicon Valley, to stream! There’s that whole digital revolution to seed, the thousands of jobs to create, the billions of dollars in market value to grow . . . all the stuff that enriches our lives in ways both trivial and profound. But while they’ve been changing the culture, they’ve been utterly blind to one change the culture has made all on its own: By 2043, the United States will be a majority-minority country. Meanwhile, women will be better educated than men, more likely to occupy professional jobs, and more responsible for an even

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Meme

greater share of consumer spending.

I bring this up because it seems strange that Silicon Valley would want to be increasingly divorced from our country’s rapidly approaching future. Study after study has shown that startups with diverse teams fail less often and generate higher rates of return than companies managed by men alone. Companies that don’t embrace diversity of race and gender, on the other hand, run the risk of becoming insular and stultified.

And yet men, and especially men who happen to be white and straight, continue to fill the vast majority of partnerships at top venture-capital firms and are the ones getting their startup ideas funded. “It’s like an episode of Mad Men,” says Jamie Wong, the founder of Vayable, a San Francisco–based travel website that she started in 2011. Wong notes that VCs she meets often talk about “pattern matching,” or trying to invest in founders who remind them of other success-

ful entrepreneurs. Her worry: “The pattern I fit is the receptionist.”

Silicon Valley investors aren’t supposed to think like midcentury Madison Avenue suits.

They think about how we can move faster to a brighter tomorrow. They are people who spend a fair amount of time worrying about what my Internet service provider’s failure to stream Netflix at the fastest rate possible might mean for the future of our democracy, or why my car can’t drive itself yet, or why I have to put up with the inconvenience of pulling out a credit card to pay for something.

Thanks for that, fellas. These questions matter a great deal to youngish, white, geeky guys like me—and even to minorities and women.

Bravo! But when it comes to the diversity of your own teams and of the teams you back, you’re falling behind.

Recently, the boys have been behaving their worst with women. Case in point: GitHub, a

platform where people share and develop code, which has raised $100 million in seed capital while even garnering some press as “a great place for women to work.” GitHub’s founders even sponsored a speaker series for female engineers, Passion Projects, and installed a rug in the lobby that proclaimed, in giant letters, THE UNITED MERITOCRACY OF GITHUB. The reality was, at best, more complicated; at worst, the slogan was simply a lie.

Starting around 6:30 p.m. on a Friday night in March, a GitHub developer named Julie Ann Horvath, the person behind Passion Projects, published a rapid-fire series of tweets alleging a pattern of harassment, intimidation, and gender discrimination at the company. “What I endured as an employee of GitHub was unacceptable and went unnoticed by most,” Horvath wrote, adding that she hoped her decision to quit would serve as “a reminder that what looks good from the outside may be systematically

NUMEROLOGY

Gooooal?

I N T E R N AT I O N A L R I VA L R I E S A R E PA R T O F S O C C E R , B U T D I S P U T E D G O A L S D O N ’ T H AV E TO BE. HERE’S WHY THE WORLD CUP WILL USE TECHNOLOGY TO KEEP ITS EYE ON THE BALL.

THE MOST INFAMOUS GOAL-LINE CALL EVER

1966 WORLD CUP FINAL

ASIDE FROM 1966, GERMANY HAS FINISHED AHEAD OF ENGLAND IN EVERY WORLD CUP SINCE 1954 GERMANY

ENGLAND

1 st 2 nd 3 rd 4th 5th 6th 7 th 8 th 9 th 10 th 11th 12 th 13 th DNQ 1954 1958 1962 1966 1970 1974 1978 1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 2010

24

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

FOURTEEN

Year that soccer set in place its current system of employing one referee and two linesmen

Together they capture 500 images per second. Officials get alerted within a second if a goal is scored.

GEOFF HURST

WHY WORLD CUP ARBITERS NEED SOME HELP

SOCCER REFS COVER LOTS OF GROUND REFEREES

2014 WORLD CUP KEY DATES

JULY 8 JULY 13

First chance for England to play Germany

ENGLAND DID NOT QUALIFY

1891

The final

TENNIS

FOOTBALL

BASEBALL

SOCCER

At Wimbledon, 10 umpires cover a standard singles court of 2,106 ft 2.

Seven referees cover NFL games on fields of 48,000 ft 2.

Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the biggest, at 116,600 ft 2.

Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana, host of the 2014 final, is Brazil’s biggest, at 76,815 ft 2.

211 FT 2

6,857 FT 2

19,433 FT 2

25,605 FT 2

PER REFEREE

PER REFEREE

PER REFEREE

PER REFEREE

Lennart Preiss/Getty Images (ball); Brown Bird Design (diagrams)

England beat West Germany at Wembley Stadium when a referee awarded a goal to England’s Geoff Hurst—even though his shot never crossed the goal line after smashing off the crossbar. This year's network of cameras aimed at the goal line, created by GoalControl, a German firm, would have caught the error.

CAMERAS USED BY THE GOALCONTROL SYSTEM

fucked on the inside.” It’s not enough to just hire some female engineers, guys—it also helps to build an office culture that doesn’t scorn them.

It’s a sentiment worth contemplating, especially in light of comments made two months earlier by one of GitHub’s earliest investors, Y Combinator partner Paul Graham. “We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook, because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years,” Graham said.

This sounded sexist, but Graham defended himself by pointing out that 16 of the 68 companies in Y Combinator’s most recent class have at least one female founder.

Sad to say, but including women 24% of the time makes Y Combinator a model investor. According to a study by Dow Jones, just 6.5% of venture-backed companies are led by a woman. And these numbers, embarrassing as they should be, don’t even begin to tell the story of what it’s like to be a female entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. “I know women who have been grabbed on the butt during pitch meetings, or who have had VCs profess sexual attraction and then pull out of the [investment] round when it’s unreciprocated,” says Kathryn Minshew, founder of the Muse, a careers website. Minshew is quick to add that most investors she knows, including Graham, behave professionally. She calls the bad eggs “a small but impactful minority.”

Even the gentlemen tend to be kind of lazy: According to a study published earlier this year, researchers at Wharton, Harvard, and MIT played investors a recording of either a male or a female actor reading presentations from a business-plan competition. Study participants preferred the men’s pitches over the women’s by a margin of two to one—even though the scripts themselves were identical.

Meme

When played recordings of the same investment plea read by a man and a woman, people preferred the man’s pitch by a two-to-one margin.

You’ll find glaring disparities like this all over Silicon Valley once you start looking for them. This past February, two startups successfully raised funds for websites that offer formal-wear rentals. One has a female CEO and is called Little Borrowed Dress; the other is fronted by two dudes and is called Black Tux. Guess which one raised $2.6 million and which one raised half that?

I suppose it is possible that Black Tux is twice as awesome as Little Borrowed Dress. After all, it is guys who buy all those clothes, right?

Here’s the good news: This failure is also an opportunity. “When people ask why I invest in diverse teams, I tell them it’s because I’m going to make more money,” says Adam Quinton of Lucas Point Ventures. He sees investing in women-led companies as an arbitrage play to get an edge over standard VCs. “If investing in diverse teams improves the probability of success and lowers the risk of failure, why wouldn’t I?” he asks. Quinton has backed eight companies over the past two years, including the Muse, Minshew’s startup. All have female CEOs. Go ahead and point to all the big successes founded by white men, if you like. But given the inevitable demographics, do you really want to bet the future on them alone? In February, two top VCs—Jennifer Fonstad of DFJ

SMALL WORLD

Chet’s Mix Soon, the Supreme Court will render a verdict in the case of American Broadcasting Companies Inc., et al. v. Aereo Inc., otherwise known as the epic battle between subscription web-based broadcasting service Aereo and TV as we know it. Does Aereo have an in?

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Barry Diller, who is married to the legendary fashion designer . . .

Chet Kanojia is the founder and CEO of Aereo. One of the current members of the board is the media mogul . . .

Diane von Furstenberg, who pioneered the CFDA/ Vogue Fashion Fund. One of the 2008 finalists was . . .

and Theresia Gouw of Accel—quit their jobs and launched Aspect Ventures. They plan to use gender diversity as a selling point, investing in companies that target the hundreds of millions of female Internet users.

Fonstad tells me the story of an all-male development team that built an app for finding babysitters but inadvertently designed it so that it was almost unusable for women with long fingernails.

That may help explain why, in the wake of Horvath’s resignation, GitHub behaved almost admirably. The company’s CEO apologized publicly to Horvath—no small thing in these litigious times—and promised to do better. For his part, Graham, the Y Combinator founder, published an essay acknowledging Silicon Valley’s problem and organized a successful conference for female founders—with his wife (and fellow YC partner), Jessica Livingston. “Things are moving in the right direction,” Minshew says. “I love the fact that we’re having this conversation out in the open.”

When Minshew pitches VCs, she generally begins by cautioning them to keep in mind that her product is for men and women who are often simply trying to find jobs, not bigscore investments. “Most of you in this room haven’t looked for a job in over a decade,” she’ll say, adding, “but you’re not like most Americans.” Indeed.

Jason Wu, who designed both of the dresses worn at the Obama inaugural balls by the First Lady . . .

Michelle Obama, who, at a Supreme Court dinner for the members of the Senate, sat next to . . .

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose vote will be one of the nine justices deciding Aereo’s fate.

James Estrin/The New York Times/Redux (Kanojia); Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Alamy (Diller); Celine Grouard (von Furstenberg); Gregorio T. Binuya/ Everett Collection/Alamy (Wu); Pete Souza/The White House (Obama); Alliance Images/Alamy (Ginsburg)

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YOU DON’T SHARE A SEAT. WHY SHARE A SCREEN? When it comes to entertainment, no one knows what you like better than you. That’s why Delta is the only U.S. airline that offers personal, on-demand entertainment at every seat on all long-haul international flights.

So now you’ll be able to watch what you want to watch at your own seat.

And the rest of the passengers can do the same.

DELTA.COM

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Nerd power The novelist and web-video maven John Green offers advice for building and maintaining a passionate audience.

By Rob Brunner Photograph by Ryan Lowry

A signature marketing move: Green is so devoted to fans, he agreed to sign the entire first printing of The Fault in Our Stars. All 150,000 copies. “That dramatically expanded the initial reach of the book,” he says.

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MASTER CLASS

John Green Author, The Fault in Our Stars

How did a young-adult novel about teens with cancer turn into a best-selling phenomenon that makes even skeptical grownups weep all over their Kindles? Partly because John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars is irresistible, mixing wit and emotion without a hint of mawkishness. But credit also goes to Green’s devoted online fans, known as Nerdfighters. Green and his brother, Hank, have grown the group through an ongoing series of hugely popular YouTube videos, which have attracted a total of 1.5 billion views (yes, billion). With a movie version of TFIOS opening June 6 (and Green and his wife’s new online contemporary-art show,

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Master Class

The Art Assignment, now on PBS.com), that fan base could soon get even bigger. Green explains his approach to creating community.

Hey, your book is a movie!

When Green and his brother began making videos in 2007, their ambitions were modest.

“It grew very slowly. When we’d made 120 videos, we had fewer than 200 subscribers. If our goal was to have a wildly successful career on the Internet, we would have quit. But we really liked the people who were watching.

That was enough. Then in July 2007, my brother made a video about Harry Potter the day before the last book came out, and almost overnight we went to more than 7,000—which at the time just seemed infinite.”

P H O N I N E S S I S D E A D LY

01

02

03

SEEING IT COME ALIVE

P L U G G I N G T H E PA C E R S

A CAST CONNECTION

“I couldn’t believe a major Hollywood studio was making a movie in which the female lead has tubes in her nose the entire time. That took guts. It’s an extraordinarily faithful adaptation.

The producers and the studio are very conscious of the Nerdfighter community and, in a healthy way, a little bit scared of them.”

“I live in Indianapolis, where the book is set, and I put [a character] in [former Indiana Pacers star] Rik Smits’s jersey in one scene in the book. Getting a Rik Smits jersey into a movie was pretty exciting for me, and it’s actually my jersey, so that was pretty cool. It’s an old-guy thing.”

If your goal is real connection, never pretend to be something you aren’t. “You have to be authentic with your audience. When you treat them well, they respond generously. We do a lot of nonprofit work, and a lot of times [those organizations] say, ‘We want young people to like this, so we’re going to do this “hip, young” thing.’ I just wince. All you can be is yourself.

In my case, part of that is being old. I don’t know about One Direction, and they forgive me because I don’t pretend like I do.”

“Meeting [TFIOS costar] Willem Dafoe was amazing, because his parents lived five doors down from my parents. I often saw him when I was a little kid, but I was always too terrified to talk to him. And then he was in the movie version of my book, which was surreal.

And I was like, ‘I grew up on your dad’s street.’ He was just shaking his head for the next three days [Laughs].”

Stars stars: Shailene Woodley, right, and Ansel Elgort appear in the film adaptation of Green’s book.

BE AN OPEN BOOK Sharing your life—adversity and all—makes an audience genuinely care, and Green was open with fans about his four-year effort to write TFIOS. “They’d seen me struggle, they’d heard me read [parts of books] that had to be abandoned. It made them feel invested in it from the beginning. I’m more likely to read a book written by a friend, and if you extend that idea out, people are more likely to read books if they feel a personal connection to the person who created it, and to the process.”

D O N ’ T S E T T L E F O R T H E O R D I N A RY Marketing yourself requires imagination. “I like feeling like I’m part of a community of fans, so that’s what my brother and I have tried to do.

My brother is a musician and is very personable onstage. We put together an hour-and-15minute show and toured the country in this ridiculous van that was painted in the colors of The Fault in Our Stars. Then in 2013, we did a real show [at Carnegie Hall], and it was much more

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of an experience. Generally, I think book tours only work when they provide experiences.”

came out. I always understood that once a book is finished, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

It belongs to the readers, for better or for worse.”

U S E YO U R A U D I E N C E F O R G O O D The brothers’ charitable efforts are an important part of how they relate to fans. “People don’t tend to become Nerdfighters unless they are passionate about making a difference. If you make stuff that’s in accordance with your values, you will end up with an audience that shares them. It’s so much more fun to genuinely like and care about your audience than it is to be like, ‘Ugh, these people again?’ We’ve been lucky, although it’s very much on our minds as the movie ramps up. But I never had a sense of ownership over The Fault in Our Stars after it

K E E P C R E AT I N G Green’s next book is coming slowly. “It’s a big question: How do you develop and care for an audience while doing the time-consuming, introverted work of writing? I’m still trying to find that balance. It’s hard to write a book when you’re in the shadow of another book.

That’s a problem I’ve never been lucky enough to have until now. Usually you write a book and three weeks later it has disappeared. It’s sad, but then you get to work. But I’m still talking about The Fault in Our Stars.”

Illustration by Gluekit

James Bridges/Twentieth Century Fox (source image)

S TA R T S M A L L

Green’s three favorite things about The Fault in Our Stars going Hollywood

Vegas means business.

The average Las Vegas trade show delegate spends more time on the floor. To be exact, 11 hours here vs. 5.9 to 9.5 hours in other cities. With world-class meeting facilities, an extensive range of hotel rooms, and a city unrivaled in event and convention experience, here, business as usual is better than usual. Find out all the reasons why so many FORTUNE 500 ® companies choose Las Vegas. ®

FORTUNE 500 is a registered trademark of Time Inc. Used with permission.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

A PIONEER IN AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING

At Fast Company, we believe that great design is innovation you can touch and that our greatest innovations are propelled by technological breakthroughs. While solid examples of this mantra in action dot the business landscape, truly soul-stirring executions are rare—yet Porsche race cars have done just that at the world’s oldest endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Porsche’s first win came in 1970 with the 917, a vehicle which became the blueprint for balancing speed and agility without sustaining mechanical damage. This short-tail model had a 12-cylinder engine designed for heavily twisting roads, fast racetracks, and high fuel velocity. With a steel-plastic synthetic body, the car’s weight remained low, allowing for effortless gliding at an average speed of 246 miles per hour.

1970

1980

PORSCHE: 16 WINS AT LE MANS, 1970–1998 1990

2000

Mission 2014.

PORSCHE’S RETURN. As the only sports car manufacturer with such success, Porsche continues to compete with itself with each new design. For Porsche, returning to the highest performance Prototype 1 class at Le Mans in 2014 and debuting the Porsche 919 Hybrid means pushing to new limits and beyond.

PORSCHEUSA.COM/MISSION2014

Š2014 Porsche Cars North America, Inc. Porsche recommends seat belt usage and observance of all traffic laws at all times.

Porsche recommends

and

We spend years designing cars to be timeless.

And give them 24 hours to prove it.

As the most prestigious and grueling endurance race in the world, the 24 Hours of Le Mans has often pushed us to our very limits. And in a few races, even beyond. Which is precisely why we’re thrilled to be returning to the pinnacle of racing in 2014, where once again we will face our toughest competitor— us. Our legacy of winning at Le Mans is the standard we always hold for ourselves. But all we learn in the process about durability, efficiency and performance will find its way into the one thing more important than another win in a famous race. The sports cars we put on the road. Porsche. There is no substitute.

The Porsche 919 Hybrid at the 24h of Le Mans.

Mission 2014. Our Return.

porscheusa.com/mission2014

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M Y WAY

Straight into Compton Compton’s 32-year-old mayor, Aja Brown, is convincing skeptical voters that City Hall is on their side—for a change. She’s a pothole pol for the Twitter age.

Photograph by Jessica Haye and Clark Hsiao

Aja Brown Mayor of Compton, California

“The community of Compton has had so many leaders who abused the public trust.

So we have been moving very, very quickly to change core policies. City-assisted development projects must now make 50% of their hires from local people. We offer training for the type of journeyman jobs needed for reconstruction projects, which will have a big impact on unemployment. We’ve also eliminated hourly motel rentals, which cuts down on prostitution and human and child trafficking. One motel is going to be reopened as a community services center.

We’ve had awesome Coffee With the Mayors, we’ve had great town halls with 50 or even 100 people there. Some citizens have said they’ve never met their mayor before. A couple of weeks ago, a citizen sent me a Facebook message saying that a city employee out on the street repairing a pothole had left another pothole unfixed—I guess because there was no work order on that one. I did a screenshot of the message and sent it to the city manager.

They went right back out and fixed it. The next day, the citizen sent me a thank-you note.

Anytime there is change, there is going to be resistance from one direction or another.

I try to address everything with a really positive perspective. People are starting to get a greater sense of pride in their city. It’s really been phenomenal.”

—As told to Jillian Goodman

Family values: “My mother instilled in my brother and me the idea that we were a team. She had the authority, and she was a team member.

Even though I’m the mayor, we all have an equal stake.”

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FAST CITIES

2013

Infrastructure, lost and found In Moscow, Seattle, and Shenzhen, crumbling architecture provides a blueprint for new development.

People change much more quickly than cities, and eventually their needs may outpace a city’s ancient capacity. That’s why the example of New York’s High Line—repurposing outdated infrastructure for current requirements—has spawned a global mandate for urban change.

Google Maps (2011); courtesy of Wowhaus (2013)

2011

Moscow’s new park Near the city center, architects from Wowhaus turned a four-lane highway (above) into a treefilled park with bike and pedestrian paths, art studios, and hills that can be used for sledding in the winter (at right). The park will connect with a longer bike and pedestrian trail that will eventually run throughout the city. Explains Wowhaus cofounder Dmitry Likin, “It’s part of a project to integrate underdeveloped Moscow embankments into city life.”

Seattle’s new neighborhood A sprawling mall parking lot has been transformed into a pedestrian-oriented community, Thornton Place, featuring hundreds of LEED–certified apartments, new retail stores, and a park. “This is one element of what will ultimately be a very high-density urban center,”

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says Bert Gregory, CEO of Mithun, the architecture firm involved with the project. “It’s also part of a story about the nature of urban America and the evolution of an automobile culture.”

Shenzhen, China’s new farm A once-abandoned glass factory became the footprint of a 20,000-square-foot urban farm, producing cabbage, chard, and bok choy for the port city’s residents. Designed as part of the Shenzhen–Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale, the space was created to serve as a model for food production in vacant spots throughout China. —Adele Peters

Urban sprawl turns sprawling green: A Moscow area once distinguished solely by a 322-foot-tall monument to Peter the Great is now a handsome multiuse park.

The statue, at one time voted the 10th ugliest building in the world, remains.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

EVERY DAY, TECHNOLOGY CHANGES, MORPHS, AND MOVES. CREATIVITY IS DRIVING THAT.

FC: How are Windstream initiatives driving creativity and bringing big ideas to life?

JG: Innovation is a mind-set. A great idea can come from anyone at any level.

We see creativity as a culture and belief system. It is the part of our brand promise that helps us deliver smart solutions and personalized service.

FC: What are some challenges you face in getting ahead of today’s trends?

A LOOK INSIDE WINDSTREAM.

JG: Technology is ever-changing, and the

Windstream is a leading provider of advanced network communications and technology solutions. Fast Company reached out to their executive team to find out how they view creativity as a driver of innovation. See what they had to say.

ways people use technology are evolving

Fast Company: What role does creativity play in business?

Jeff Gardner, President & Chief Executive Officer: Creativity is everything.

It’s a competitive edge and a sustainable point of differentiation. Doing things that haven’t been done before. Asking different questions. Trusting your instinct. That’s creativity at work.

FC: How is “thinking differently” essential to any business model?

Matt Preschern, Senior Vice President – Enterprise Chief Marketing Officer: Creativity and innovation are all about imagining the impossible, turning

daily. We have to anticipate our clients’ needs, ask the right questions, and really listen.

“Doing things that haven’t been done before. Asking different questions. Trusting your instinct. That’s creativity at work.”

plenty, but the responsibility is great. You have to know how to quickly scale the

FC: How have Windstream’s innovative solutions helped resolve challenges customers face today?

ideas that are working—and when to pull the brakes on the pilots that are not. You

JG: We like to roll up our sleeves, get our

have a very short period of time to conceive an original idea and get it to market. It’s

hands dirty, and work with our partners

an exciting time, but you have to turbocharge your thinking to stay ahead.

to gain an entirely new perspective.

challenges into opportunities and piloting new ideas, day after day. The rewards are

We’re not just experts in our industry,

FC: How can technology enable big ideas?

we’re experts in our clients’ industries as

Brent Whittington, Chief Operating Officer: Ideas are the catalyst for technology.

well. We learn the ins and outs of their

But technology can help make a big idea become real, be shared, and be fully utilized.

business, know what keeps them up at

True enablement comes through collaboration with our customers and partners.

night, then we focus on tomorrow.

windstreambusiness.com

GAME CHANGER. Big wins are the sum of small victories. Though each team member owns a different task, they all share a common goal: elite performance. Four out of ďŹ ve Fortune 500 companies rely on us for advanced business technology and customized solutions to ďŹ t their needs. Our team of experts help produce the types of wins that propel your business to the next level. Week after week. windstreambusiness.com

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WANTED

S LE E P LI G H T Forget ringtones— the Aura wakes you up with sensors and colors.

By Margaret Rhodes Photograph

by Junichi Ito

Withings Aura Smart Sleep System $299

WITHINGS.COM

“There are multiple pillars of wellness,” says Raphael Auphan, product manager at Withings. “One is exercise, the other is nutrition, and the third one is sleep.” In the wearable wellness-device market, that third pillar is so far the least examined. Withings was early to fitness tracking; the French company released a smart scale in 2009 that could sync weight to an app via Wi-Fi. Its new Aura alarmclock system goes on sale this spring, and represents a big move beyond tallying up figures (steps, pounds, hours slept) to actually offering help. It’s designed to appeal to the very laziest among

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us: Slip a fabric- covered sensor under the mattress and open an app, and the Aura gets to work.

That sensor measures movements, so over time the Aura learns the optimal time to rouse a user from sleep (within a dictated window).

Even more futuristic is its use of colored light to hack our alertness: At night, the orb glows a deep, comforting orange, like a setting sun; in the morning, it slowly turns on a blue light that Harvard scientists say can suppress melatonin.

“You don’t have to do anything or wear anything,” Auphan says.

“It’s like a small electronic friend on the bedside table.”

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

NEW AND INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO

TACKLING SOCIETAL CHALLENGES As part of today’s Solution Economy a new cadre of problem solvers—or “wavemakers”—are emerging.

With innovative business models, disruptive technologies, and clever behavioral incentives as their tools, this group is stepping in where traditional governments leave off to resolve societal challenges big and small.

CHALLENGE: CHILDREN AFFECTED

BY UNMET SANITATION NEEDS By changing its lens, Unilever launched Project Shakti to address unmet sanitation needs and opened new markets. The company employed 48,000 women in Indian villages to sell soap and created awareness of hygiene among millions of households.

CHALLENGE: RECYCLING Using a combination of emerging technologies, Recyclebank gamified recycling, growing activity by sevenfold in some jurisdictions.

CHALLENGE: ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER

CHALLENGE: TRAFFIC CONGESTION In the U.S., 77% of commuters drive to work alone and only 5% use public transit.

Ridesharing innovations like Carma, Lyft, RelayRides, and Sidecar are taking advantage of new technologies to crowdsource solutions to our shared gridlock problem.

By rethinking resource constraints, inventor Dean Kamen was able to develop a new solution in the Slingshot water purifier. He then partnered with Coca-Cola to scaleup production and distribution while bringing down costs.

$ CHALLENGE: LOW-COST HEALTH CARE FOR THE POOR In India, wavemakers of all stripes are hard at work trying to break the trade-off between high-quality health care and low health-care costs. Organizations and hospitals including Narayana Hrudayalaya, Lifespring Maternity Health, and Aravind Eye Hospital have reduced healthcare costs between 60% and 95%.

CHALLENGE: ACCESS TO QUALITY FOOD Walmart is solving problems by targeting gaps. The company is opening new stores in “food deserts,” or places with limited access to healthy food. To further improve access, it is actively helping customers to buy differently by reducing prices on fresh produce and cutting fat, sugar, and salt from its Great Value brand.

STRATEGIES FOR GROWING THE SOLUTION ECONOMY MEASURE WHAT MATTERS TARGET THE GAPS RETHINK CONSTRAINTS EMBRACE LIGHTWEIGHT SOLUTIONS BUY DIFFERENTLY CHANGE THE LENS

Select and apply the right combination of measures to gauge impact Develop new markets by meeting neglected needs Rally external resources around shared goals, expanding your network’s collective capacity Simplify your concept to its “lightest touch,” lowest intervention form—and reap the cost savings Ask the tough questions to source supplies and services more responsibly Think bigger and focus on the desired outcome

For more on The Solution Economy, visit dupress.com/collection/the-solution-economy Source: William Eggers and Paul Macmillan. The Solution Revolution: How Business, Government, and Social Enterprises Are Teaming Up to Solve Society’s Toughest Problems.

Copyright © 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

Prodigy turned sage: Netscape, which Andreessen founded in 1994, burned bright before flaming out.

Has he learned any lessons that would have saved the company? “Oh, hundreds,� he laughs.

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Marc Andreessen

CRE ATI V E CON V ERSATION

Cofounder, Andreessen Horowitz; inventor of Mosaic, the first popular web browser

“ I N S O M A N Y WAY S , I T ’ S

P R I M E T I M E F O R T E C H N O L O GY ”

His VC firm has backed Airbnb, Box, Facebook, Jawbone, Pinterest, Skype, and Twitter, among others. Now it has another hit—VR firm Oculus Rift, which Facebook is purchasing for $2 billion. We asked Marc Andreessen how a great creative idea can survive the long haul to become a tech success story.

Interview by Rick Tetzeli Photograph

by Noel Spirandelli

Fast Company: How long do you think it takes for a truly significant technology to take hold?

Andreessen: The really big ones are generational.

People are strange. On a micro level, everybody likes a new product, a new TV show, new software, a new smartphone. At that micro level, people love change.

At the macro level, we hate change. Big, new ideas that challenge preconceptions make people really angry.

So it’s young people growing up in the developing world who are going to be the vanguard of something like bitcoin [Andreessen Horowitz has invested some $50 million in bitcoin-related startups]. A young person who’s 16 in a country like Argentina or Mexico, with a shambles of a government and a shambles of a financial system and a terrible currency, who finds out on their smartphone that they can have a currency like bitcoin that lets them transfer money freely and not have it be stolen or inflated away? They’re going to love it, adopt it, and use it. There’s an inevitability to these changes, a generational shift.

Let’s turn to one of your portfolio companies with a big idea, the virtual-reality startup Oculus VR. This one is very apropos of our discussion about how long technologies can take. I worked on virtual

reality 25 years ago, with access to the world’s most advanced supercomputers. We were trying to visualize stuff, like what it would be like to be inside black holes and thunderstorms. There was Jaron Lanier and his VR glove and goggles, and it all just didn’t work well enough. It was too early. It was like the Apple Newton—the Newton and the iPad are pretty much the same product, but the Newton was 20 years too early.

Virtual reality didn’t work in the ’90s, so in the 2000s, everyone just gave up.

The founder, Palmer Luckey, is one of our Most Creative People in this issue. Can you walk me through the process of turning a creative idea like his into a business?

A couple of years ago, Palmer is in his garage tinkering around. And since he’s 17 at the time, he doesn’t know that VR’s “not possible,” right? But he does realize that a smartphone screen is amazing, and that new graphics cards and chips and new interconnection technologies and new gaming engines are all amazing. And he thinks, You know what, I don’t see why this couldn’t be made to work! So he puts together a prototype [of a video-gaming headset that places a gamer in an all-encompassing VR world], sets up on Kickstarter to raise money, and a whole generation of kids who didn’t know this was “impossible” say, “Oh, that looks like a great idea!”

This is where the magic of Silicon Valley kicks in.

The former CEO of Gaikai, Brendan Iribe, had just sold his company to Sony. He meets Palmer and they team up. Brendan pulls in a bunch of people he had worked with in the video-game industry. They get venture funding. They send a prototype to John Carmack, the father of 3-D video gaming, the guy who built Doom and Quake, and John emails Palmer and says, “This is real cool! Can I help?” That’s like Bill Gates emailing, “Your

JUNE 2014 FASTCOMPANY.COM

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software’s real cool. Can I help?” So with John on board, now they’re just hiring all the good VR talent around.

So what happens to the creative founder in that case? What did Palmer’s role become?

We and his other partners just build a company around him. He’s being surrounded by experts in all the areas that are known and understood. Supply chain, consumer marketing, distribution, the development of an ecosystem that supports developers—those are all known and understood topics. So Palmer can spend his time on new ideas. He’s the chief visionary. He’s the guy with the original insight, and he’ll be the source of ongoing insight.

There is another universe, you know, where Palmer would have never found Brendan. And in that universe, who knows? Maybe Palmer is still in his garage. Maybe he’s still on Kickstarter. Or maybe someone else would have done VR, two years from now. Clearly, the time is right—so somebody’s going to do it.

And now it’ll get done at Facebook, I suppose. Could you have traveled that kind of alternate universe path, and never created Netscape, say?

Oh, yeah, of course. But the times have changed. I had never heard the term venture capital before I arrived in Silicon Valley, let alone met an actual VC. Now it’s so much more obvious how you start your own company. Palmer

“There’s still a view that technology is going to destroy all the jobs. So everyone’s going to be poor. The alternate view is that that view is entirely wrong.” just goes to the Internet and types in the words venture capital. Next thing you know, he’s reading about everything that it took me a decade to learn the hard way.

Why does your firm focus so much on public relations? Your emphasis has changed the way other VC firms have to think about the subject.

The stuff the industry is doing today affects the whole world. It used to be that you could be HP or DEC or IBM, with 5,000 total customers and maybe 50,000 people paying attention. Computers didn’t matter to most people on the planet. Even during the ’90s and aughts, people in the developing world couldn’t afford a computer.

With the smartphone, we’ve shrunk the supercomputer to a palm-sized device and made it available to everyone on the planet for $100. At Qualcomm, they predict that between 2013 and 2017, 7 billion smartphones will be sold. That’s amazing! That’s amazing! For

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a lot of those people, their smartphone will be the first computer they ever have, the first phone, the first connection to the Internet, the first way to learn online and organize politically and get accurate information and access to global markets. So the burden on the industry has increased. We have a responsibility to explain this to everybody. Then, the burden on the rest of society and business is to adapt and respond. In so many ways, it’s prime time for technology.

You wrote an op-ed piece celebrating bitcoin just before the largest bitcoin trading site, Mt. Gox, collapsed. Any regrets? Isn’t that the peril of PR? Mt. Gox actually reinforced my thesis. The largest bitcoin exchange in the world went down in flames, and bitcoin was unaffected. It was a stress test of the system, and the transaction network just kept running. Contrast that with Lehman Brothers.

Bitcoin is the most powerful innovation in financial technology in decades. I compare it to the emergence of the Internet 25 years ago, when there was enormous confusion, skepticism, and scorn. People are going to look back at some of the things being said now, and they will be embarrassed.

Doesn’t this fear connect to the “class war” going on in San Francisco? It’s as if the world is still trying to come to grips with the power of technology.

That’s a great example. There’s still a view that, basically, technology is going to destroy all the jobs. That these computers and the Internet and robots are all going to be great, except we’re not going to have anything left for people to do. So everyone’s going to be poor.

The alternate view is that that view is entirely wrong.

Ask a young person anywhere in the world, “Would you rather make your way with your parents’ technology or with a smartphone, a tablet, a PC, and an Internet connection; with online learning, access to online markets, the ability to find work online and to work remotely with teams around the world; with the superpowers that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google give you?”

Obviously, they want the new tools, tools that augment their capabilities. How is that worse for the world?

I don’t see how people will have all those tools and find nothing whatsoever useful to do with them.

In the past few months, you’ve been very public on Twitter about subjects like bitcoin, eBay, virtual reality, and anonymity. Why? Twitter is an amazing conduit. It’s a direct pipeline to the entire community of founders, to the press, and to the customers our companies sell to. And I really enjoy it. I’m sort of a hybrid introvert/extrovert. I’m an introvert when it comes to face-to-face conversations.

But something that lets you talk to 83,000 people while you’re wearing your boxer shorts and drinking a glass of Scotch? What could be better?

, ʂKʝɦ , ʣLʔɚ , ɭOR

I Document scanners for your digital life. © 2014 Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Fujitsu and the Fujitsu logo are registered trademarks of Fujitsu Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Visit http://Ez.com/fastcomp

TECHNOVORE

UBER IS THE NEW GOOGLE T H E I R S H A R E D LOV E O F S P E E D A N D DATA M A K E B OT H B I G W I N N E R S .

JUST AS TWO people can have similar person-

alities, two companies can have a remarkably similar approach to business. Google may be more than 15 years old and a search-andadvertising behemoth, and Uber may be a fiveyear-old startup remaking urban transportation.

But they think the same.

Google came of age when search was inefficient and cluttered, and made it simple and easy to find what you wanted online. Then everyone got broadband, and Google could use speed as a strategic weapon. It saved copies of the mostsearched pages so it could serve them up even faster. The cost to search in terms of time and effort became infinitesimal. Then Google used data on how and what we searched, and went on to become even better at predicting what we wanted. “I’m feeling lucky” isn’t an accident but rather a lot of data used smartly.

Uber, like Google, is taking a highly disorganized business—in its case, private transportation such as taxicabs and private limousines—and ordering it neatly. Just as broadband served as rocket fuel for Google, smartphones and the always-on mobile Internet are powering Uber. CEO Travis Kalanick is playing the speed game as well: Uber has expanded rapidly into more than 90 cities in 34 countries worldwide, adding drivers (and cars) by the thousands because more cars means getting one to pick you up more quickly. The faster that happens, the less likely you are to look elsewhere. As a result, both Google and Uber are hated by those who fear the repercussions of the more efficient worlds they’re creating.

Our ubiquitous mobile access has made time and location important data points in how businesses can now be built and managed. The more people who open the Uber app and order car

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WHEN I ASK UBER CEO TRAVIS KALANICK ABOUT HIS COMPANY BEING GOOGLE-LIKE BECAUSE OF ITS APPROACH TO DATA, HE POINTS OUT THAT UBER’S TASK IS MUCH HARDER.

Om Malik

service, the more info Uber has to predict both demand and where demand might come from. So Uber doesn’t just collect data; it puts it to work. “What you are aiming for [as a service] is the equilibrium of supply and demand,” Kalanick says.

Kalanick has structured Uber to learn from all that data, and to have more of it than anyone else. Uber’s algorithms, with help from dozens of in-house data wranglers, try to figure out urban traffic flows—trillions of bits that help them become even more accurate about where and when customers will pull out their phones and open Uber’s app, and where its cars are when that happens. “A perfect day,” Kalanick tells me, “is when you set an all-time record for trips per hour with zero surges.” That means that Uber’s algorithms never have to raise prices to try to get more cars on the road to serve customers. A few weeks ago, Kalanick tells me proudly, there was a whole week in New York City when there wasn’t even a minute of surge pricing. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that days after I spoke with Kalanick, Uber announced a delivery service in New York to take advantage of its optimized platform.)

If Google’s primary weapons are relevancy and speed, then Uber’s are cost and speed. It not only has to get cars to customers faster, but it also has to do it at the lowest possible price. If Uber can get that right, it will surpass its competition—just as Google’s proficiency has kept us from searching elsewhere.

When I ask Kalanick if he agrees that Uber is Googlelike in that they’re both data-deterministic, he pauses for a moment, and then points out that Uber’s task is much harder, because it is about “taking bits and translating them into atoms” and vice versa. Google, in other words, never has to worry about a search result getting stuck behind a trash truck. “The real world is a lot more complicated,” he says.

Maybe that’s why Google invested more than $250 million in Uber at a rumored valuation north of $3.5 billion. You always see yourself in the mirror.

Om Malik is a partner at True Ventures, an early-stage investor.

He is also founder of Gigaom, a Silicon Valley–based, tech-focused publishing company.

Illustration by Owen Gildersleeve

Daniel Salo

Next

Next

WANTED

COUTURE CHEMISTRY The catwalk meets the chem lab in Lauren Bowker’s colorchanging designs.

By Margaret Rhodes Photograph

by Mitch Payne

Lauren Bowker, The Unseen Studio

Lauren Bowker is an alchemist.

It would be simpler to call her a fashion designer, but her métier isn’t fabric—it’s complex chemical compounds. At her London studio, Bowker concocts custom inks that change colors once they’re stimulated by heat or moisture.

She created this headpiece with Swarovski Gemstone (a different group from Swarovski Crystal) using more than 4,000 synthetic magnesium-aluminum stones, all coated in one of Bowker’s inks. The stones are similar to human bone and are highly conductive. Once the piece is placed on the wearer’s head

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FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

(where humans lose a lot of heat), colors start to ebb and flow.

Like a very technical mood ring, it can turn from orange to blue depending on what region of the brain is active. “It acts as a sort of visualization of what’s happening in the head,” Bowker says.

Next year the piece will be at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, after which Bowker will work with a university to test its accuracy against real MRI scans. Bowker’s work with ink has caught the attention of the health care and auto industries; this particular piece could appeal to psychologists.

Hair: Montana Lowery; makeup: Sophie Higginson

SEETHEUNSEEN.CO.UK

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• Enter the contest where you could win a similar experience, including $25,000 for your business.** • Enter at wellsfargoworks.com

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Every day, small business owners across the country work hard to make their entrepreneurial visions a reality. For Jou Lee Xiong and Golden Harvest Foods,* that meant looking to Wells Fargo for guidance on employee retirement plans. Helping business owners like Jou is why we created Wells Fargo Works. It’s our commitment to small businesses everywhere. By offering a wide range of products, resources, and guidance, we help businesses take the next step.

Welcome to Wells Fargo Works. Let’s make it work for you. * Wells Fargo awarded Jou Lee Xiong $25,000 to help with her expansion plans. ** THIS IS A JUDGED CONTEST. NO ENTRY FEE OR PURCHASE REQUIRED. Wells Fargo Works Project Contest runs from 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time (“PT”) on 5/1/2014 to 11:59 p.m. PT on 6/30/14 (“Contest Period”) at WellsFargoWorks.com/project (“Website”). Open to legal U.S. Residents, 18 years or older, who are independent owners/ operators of a small business that has been in continuous operation for no less than six months from date of entry, has no more than $20 million aggregate in gross revenues and no more than 100 full, part-time, or volunteer employees. Non-profit organizations are eligible. Owners of a franchised business are not eligible. To Enter: submit up to a 2 1/2 minute video, or 600 word essay with photo, that responds to the contest questions. Prizes: (25) $1,000 Finalists and (5) $25,000 Grand Prize winners selected from Finalists to be awarded. Contest subject to full Official Rules. See rules on Website for full details including complete eligibility, contest questions, judging criteria, and prize redemption requirements. Void where prohibited. © 2014 Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. All rights reserved. Member FDIC.

wellsfargoworks.com

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THE RECOMMENDER What are you loving this month?

APP ALLEY

Domingo Guerra P r e s i d e n t a n d c o f o u n d e r, A p p t h o r i t y

H O B N O B “I find it difficult to stay connected when on the road, as even KO D A B L E Gretta Monahan Style guru on The Rachael Ray Show

J E W E L RY F O R A C A U S E “This New Jersey–based business tackles the important mission of getting illegal guns off the streets by melting the metals down into superchic bracelets and cuff links. I’m always inspired by fashion brands that incorporate pressing social issues into their plan. It’s a modern approach to business and style.”

“My kids and I spend lots of time on this coding app, and even though it’s fun, I feel like I am working on a life skill with them.

I use it on the plane and fly guilt-free.

What parent is going to feel that bad that their 6-year-old is coding all the way to California?”

with 4G LTE hotspots, connections are often spotty. Hobnob helps me stay connected at very fast speeds by combining local Wi-Fi spots with 4G connections over various networks. At $20 a month, it’s a steal.”

—Christiane Lemieux Founder and creative director, DwellStudio

ROOMHINTS “You literally just take a picture of your space and upload it to get interior-designer advice and recommendations. I love the idea of easy design help, crowdsourcing, and product in a couple of hassle-free clicks.”

Paul James Global brand l e a d e r, W H o t e l s

—Lemieux

“IT’S AN UPSCALE MEN’S GROOMING SITE THAT LETS ME FILL MY DOPP KIT WITH ALL THE TSA– APPROVED, TRAVEL-SIZE PRODUCTS I NEED.”

What color pillows would go with this couch?

Hi, I’m Alex, your designer. Here are a few hints!

Credible edible: Learn to make kimchi and impress your on-trend friends.

GLIPH

Toby Joe Boudreaux C T O a n d m a n a g in g p a r t n e r, p r o d u c t d e v e l o p m e n t, Control Group

ABLETON PUSH “I love synths and maintain a decently large eurorack modular synthesizer.

The Push is a hardware controller that lets me control my modular quite well, in addition to being a controller for composition within the sound editor on my laptop.”

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Willie Degel H o s t of F o o d Net wor k’s Re staurant S t a k e o u t

NOMIKU “You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on fancy sous vide appliances.

This portable device lets you turn any pot of water into a slow-cooking water bath. It controls the temperature and the movement of the water, so it removes all the guesswork for you.”

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

“Security and privacy are huge concerns of mine. Gliph allows you to create disposable email, online, and phone identities so you don’t have to share your real email or phone number when you are selling something on Craigslist, say. It even has a bitcoin wallet.”

—Guerra

SOUNDTRACKING “A bit like Instagram meets Shazam, it also helps me build a sonic diary of my travels when I flip back and see what songs I was listening to and where.”

—James

MAANGCHI.COM Lena Kwak C o f o u n d e r, C u p 4 C u p

“Korean flavors have been trending high in both the restaurant and consumerproducts industries. I like how approachable the formats of these recipes are.

There are step-by-step photos, and even helpful tips and videos for further support.”

P R E P PA D

“This digital kitchen scale has a built-in Bluetooth system that connects to your iPad. Using the app combo, you can track your eating habits, or scan a bar code and pull up a visual breakdown of the item placed on the scale.”

This page: TheMotley.com (kit); Food Network (Degel); Greg Rannells/StockFood (kimchi). Next page: Ocean/Corbis (tennis balls)

THE MOTLEY

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

WOODFORD RESERVE MASTERS AUSTIN

Fast Company partnered with Woodford Reserve to create the hottest space in downtown Austin, The Fast Company Grill.

The Grill provided the most inuential festival-goers with a place to recharge and relax, while enjoying Woodford Reserve signature cocktails and an entertaining GIF photo booth.

CRAFT CAREFULLY. DRINK RESPONSIBLY. Woodford Reserve Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 45.2% Alc. by Vol., The Woodford Reserve Distillery, Versailles, KY

The Recommender

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DO THIS

“Most office workers’ physical problems start where they least expect it—their feet,” says New York Times best-selling fitness author Adam Bornstein. Sitting all day deactivates sensors in the feet, which reduces ankle and feet mobility. That can lead to knee and back problems. His recommendation for staving off pain: Keep a tennis ball at your desk, and do this routine daily.

PLAY THIS

SOLVE THIS PUZ ZLE TO SEE A RECOMMENDATION FROM LIZ BOHANNON, FOUNDER OF SSEKO DESIGNS. INSTRUCTIONS Here are nine pairs of corporate logos. First, write out the name of each company in the spaces provided.

Then look for strings of letters within each name that, when put together, form the answer to the clue.

1

2

3

Rolling the ball

Flexing the toes

Working the calf

2 to 3 minutes per foot

20 reps per foot

1 to 2 minutes per leg

With your shoe off, push your foot down on the ball and roll back and forth.

You’re loosening up soft tissue called fascia, which tightens up as you sit all day.

With your heel up, grip the ground with your toes for 10 seconds. Now extend them up for 5. Activating these little foot muscles awakens the rest of your body.

Roll the ball atop and on the sides of your calves, and press in. If it hurts a little, that’s fine—you found more tight fascia. The more often you roll, the better it’ll feel.

01

06 SCI-FI ANTIHERO

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PA RT N E R S H I P O F F E R I N G TA X B E N E F I T S

07 P U N K R O C K “ FA M I LY ”

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G E T S TA RT E D

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FOR EXAMPLE G L O B A L WA R M I N G C O N T R I B U T O R

COMC AS T

MERCE D E S

EXCHANGING MONEY COMME R C E

04

Note: The correct letters won’t always be in the very beginning of a company’s name.

FINAL STEPS Collect the letters in the highlighted spaces to spell out Bohannon’s recommendation.

—Francis Heaney

09 R U L E E N F O R C E D BY PA R E N T S

BARGE IN

05

Answers are on inside margin.

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TYPE OF PIE

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

“It shuts down all my notifications and creates a serene and simple environment on my screen.

I do my best work on it,” Bohannon says.

H E R R E C O M M E N D AT I O N RELIGIOUS TITLE 1

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Puzzle design by Pop Chart Lab

Puzzle answers: 1. Lufthansa + Polo = Han Solo, 2. Paramount + Guinness = Ramones, 3. MetLife + Chanel = Methane, 4. Acura + Safeway = Curfew, 5. Bacardi + McDonald’s = Cardinal, 6. Marriott + Volkswagen = Marriage, 7. Infiniti + Allstate = Initiate, 8. Quiznos + Chevron = Quiche, 9. Sprint + Prudential = Intrude. Recommendation: Omm Writer

How to work out at your desk (without anyone noticing)

Live the M life at this MGM Resorts International速 Destination

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Illustration by Jp King

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Princess Reema (who prefers not to show her face for privacy and security reasons) is challenging Saudi gender conventions.

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MCP 100

01

Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud C E O, A l f a Int l.

FOR INVITING SAUDI WOMEN INTO THE WORKFORCE

“You cannot have half of your population not working,” says Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud, CEO of Saudi Arabian luxury retailer Alfa Intl., who is bringing meaningful change to one of the world’s least-progressive cultures. “The second a woman is responsible for her own finances, she’ll want to explore more of the world for herself and become less dependent.”

JUNE 2014 FASTCOMPANY.COM

63

A customer gets her makeup done by female employees at Riyadh’s Harvey Nichols department store.

Over the past two years, Princess Reema has been making bold moves toward women’s empowerment.

At Riyadh’s Harvey Nichols department store, she has ousted several dozen experienced salesmen to make room for the same number of female clerks. It’s a controversial, highly unusual step in a country where women have traditionally not interacted with men outside the home at all, much less in service positions.

(Women make up just 15% of the Saudi workforce, up from 5% in 1992.) Saudi traditionalists consider it a radical act.

But it was an act born of compromise. In recent years, the government has issued a series of decrees expanding job opportunities for women within retail—including banning men from working in lingerie and cosmetics shops that serve female-only clientele.

Before then, stores that employed women were often closed down by the religious police, who enforce Sharia law. New regulations allow for increased female employment while adhering to some of the previous standards (separate break rooms and specified ratios of women to men in any given space, for in-

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“OUR SOCIETY TENDS TO CHANGE A BIT SLOWER THAN OTHERS. WE HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO PEOPLE THAT IT’S EVOLUTION, NOT WESTERNIZATION.”

stance). “Our society tends to change a bit slower than others,” Princess Reema says. “We have to explain to people that it’s evolution, not Westernization.”

Born in Riyadh, Princess Reema grew up in Washington, D.C., where her father, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, served as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States (he is a grandson of Saudi Arabia’s founder). She majored in museum studies at George Washington University, and after graduation spent a few years working at L’Institut du Monde Arab in Paris and the Field Museum in Chicago, helping oversee her mother’s extensive art collection. When the collection returned to Saudi Arabia in 2008, Princess Reema came home as well. She had been planning to spend some time as a stay-at-home mom, but Alfa, which her family partially owns, was struggling with Riyadh’s underperforming Harvey Nichols store. She had a few ideas about how to turn it around. “It hadn’t been renovated in a while, so we started with that,” she says. “We gutted the store and started from scratch with empty shelves.” Soon she found herself running the entire Alfa operation.

One of the reasons the Harvey Nichols store has been so successful in integrating women is that it provides workplace accommodations that go far beyond American standards. For one thing, women still can’t legally drive in Saudi Arabia, so the company provides transportation to and from work. It’s also among the few Saudi workplaces that offer day care. “I wanted to avoid the obstacle of the mother-inlaw or husband at home saying, ‘Who’s going to take care of the children?’ ” Princess Reema says. And the company lets employees make their own decisions about whether to wear a veil, a major personal choice for Saudi women: “I will never ask a lady to cover or uncover her face.”

But solving these workplace issues has been easy compared to handling the business impact of social change. The Riyadh department store—which opened in 2000 as Harvey Nichols’s first location outside the U.K.— weathered a 42% drop in profit last year, partly because of opposition to the female sales force and partly because of loyalty to the far-more-seasoned salesmen it replaced. “The women don’t have the experience yet,” says Princess Reema. “It’s almost like throwing them to the wolves. But I buy into this. The training is the investment that we’re making in these ladies. I want women to have better opportunities.”

Some Saudis are apparently still adjusting to the new face—and faces—of Harvey Nichols Riyadh, but Princess Reema seems confident that they will ultimately come around. “It’s just social perception,” she says.

“And that’s going to change.”

—Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Previous spread: Andrew Hobbs. This page: Kate Brooks/Redux

MCP 100

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MCP 100

02

Gur Kimchi & Daniel Buchmueller V P of Prime A ir; sof t ware development engineer of P r im e A ir, A m a z o n FOR PROVING THAT THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT

The first item that shipped via Prime Air, Amazon’s drone delivery system, was a Kindle. Team leaders Gur Kimchi and Daniel Buchmueller chose it for its compact size, but the symbolism in this test flight was clear: If the Kindle revolutionized Amazon’s business by enabling the company to deliver goods digitally, Prime Air could bring that same level of instant gratification to the physical world. In December, Amazon unveiled Prime Air on Illustration by Zohar Lazar

60 Minutes, wowing viewers with its portrayal of a future where unmanned aerial vehicles zip around the sky ferrying parcels to your door in 30 minutes. Right now, the system isn’t ready for market, and some have called it a PR stunt, considering the questions left unanswered: How would drones deliver in big cities or bad weather? But Kimchi and Buchmueller say it demonstrates Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s appetite for bold bets. “The culture here allows you to be creative without being constrained by what’s possible,” Kimchi says. “For every project like Prime Air that you know about, we probably have 100 more that you don’t.”

As with many ideas in Seattle, this one was hatched over coffee. On a rainy day last year (Amazon, oddly, wouldn’t confirm when), Kimchi and Buchmueller were at a coffeehouse in Seattle’s South Lake Union when they started discussing the potential for a drone delivery system. “Getting stuff into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less is this mythical point that only pizza companies have achieved,” Kimchi says. The inevitable next step of delivery, according to Buchmueller, was to “look to the sky.”

The pursuit would involve geospatial knowhow, which, as it happened, both possessed.

Buchmueller served in the Swiss army for six years, in electronic warfare and communications intelligence, while Kimchi served as a board member at Waze, the social-mapping startup Google recently acquired. The pair have a passion for aviation and worked together for years at Microsoft, developing its next-gen Bing location services.

At Amazon, in an R&D lab filled with 3-D printers,

chalkboards, an espresso maker, and the everpresent smell of epoxy glue, the two engineers began cranking on the idea that would become Prime Air. Buchmueller had built drones as a hobby and was unimpressed with commercially available technology, such as Parrot’s popular AR.Drone Quadricopter. “I was on vacation in Switzerland when I used a Parrot outside, and the wind blew it into the side of a building,” he says. They aimed to develop a more robust drone with eight rotors for increased stability. The resulting craft can navigate autonomously via GPS and carry a payload of 5 pounds, a promising start considering that 86% of Amazon’s inventory fits into that weight class.

During their months of experimentation, Kimchi swears the duo “never felt like we had to ask Jeff for permission.” But at some point, the idea caught the attention of Bezos, who made a big splash by unveiling Prime Air on national television. In the clip, which has been viewed more than 14 million times on YouTube, an Amazon drone picks up a package at a fulfillment center and flies off to a customer’s home. “I showed it to my kids and said, ‘Hey, this is what I do at work!’

They were like, ‘Cool! Can we [come] see it?’ ” Kimchi recalls. “I was like, ‘Nope!’ ” Prime Air, the pair say, will be ready for when the FAA issues regulation on commercial drone systems, expected as early as 2015. “The difference between science fiction and reality is not as distinct as it used to be,” Kimchi says. But then he stops short. “Well, there’s still time travel. I can announce that Amazon is not working on time travel.”

Well, not yet.

—Austin Carr

Jill Wilfert 03 V ic e pre sident for glob al lic en sing and enter tainment, Lego FOR MAKING TOY BRICKS A BIG-SCREEN HIT

Lego tinkered with movie ideas for years, but the pieces took a long time to lock together. Persistence paid off: The Lego Movie, released in February, earned more than $400 million and rapturous reviews. “The brand is all about creativity and imagination,” says Jill Wilfert. “It had to be a fantastic, entertaining movie experience above anything else. We know exactly how kids interact with the brand.” Not surprisingly, a sequel is in the works.

Mario Queiroz 04 V P of product man age m e n t, Google FOR RATTLING THE $200 BILLION SMART-TV INDUSTRY WITH A $35 SOLUTION

Cord cutting has sparked a revolution in the living room, and Mario Queiroz is Google’s conquering hero. It took merely 18 months for him and his team to bring Chromecast from idea to market.

At $35, it’s a cheap streaming player that forgoes the set-top box in favor of a dongle that plugs into an HDMI port.

The elegant workaround has sold millions, even though many consumers are waiting for Apple or someone else to build the next-wave TV set we all want. In the meantime, Chromecast delivers Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Go—and lets users “cast” web content, such as YouTube videos, to their own big screen.

JUNE 2014 FASTCOMPANY.COM

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MCP 100

05 Raj Talluri S V P of product management, Qualcomm FOR TEACHING YOUR DEVICES TO TALK TO EACH OTHER

Imagine opening your front door and having the lights blink on, the TV start up, and the thermostat kick on. It’s a wild idea, but one that may be imminent, says Raj Talluri. Last December, Qualcomm hinted at its power to make that happen with the release of Toq, an Android-powered smartwatch that syncs up with your smartphone and never turns off. It’s one piece of Talluri’s larger vision.

Unlike the pioneering, recently Google-acquired Nest, which owns the connected-thermostat and smoke-detector space, Talluri and co. are betting that Qualcomm, as the chipmaker that owns more than 50% of the smartphone market, will be able to craft a universal dialogue among household appliances. There’s a lot left to do, but Talluri is optimistic: “This technology isn’t magic anymore.”

The next step, he says, is working with open-source communication platform AllJoyn to develop the language all devices share.

Soleio Cuervo, Tim Van 06 Damme & Gentry Underwood De sign te am, Dropbox FOR HAVING AN INVISIBLE TOUCH

“People often ask, ‘What do you do at Dropbox?

Everything looks white,’ ” says designer Tim Van Damme. “The answer is, we have some of the most talented designers in the industry to keep everything as simple as possible.” The company’s design division includes leader-since-2012 Soleio Cuervo, who created Facebook’s LIKE button, and Gentry Underwood, who founded email client Mailbox and sold it to Dropbox last year for $100 million. Their latest act of simplicity: Dropbox for Business, which allows users to manage (without confusing) their personal and work accounts.

07

Anthony Foxx

U.S. S e cretar y of Transpor tat ion FOR (FINALLY!) MODERNIZING HOW WE GET FROM HERE TO THERE

Anthony Foxx persuaded the FAA to ditch electronic-device restrictions and ushered through DOT approval of collisionpreventing vehicle-tovehicle communication.

He streamlined the environmental-impactreview process to reduce approval time on infrastructure projects. And in February, he launched a public call for new apps and solutions based on the agency’s data. “Part of seeding ideas in government and creating a culture of innovation,” he says, “is giving everybody the rope to be creative and come back with different answers.”

Illustration by Cristian Turdera

Save the date 26 − 28 May

2015

| C2MTL.com

Content & Media Partner

Founding Partner

Leadership Partner

MCP 100

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Photographs by Eric Ogden

“I know the idea of a brand is something I’m supposed to not care about,” says Kendrick, “but I do think it’s part of my life, and I’m trying to just be in control of it, as opposed to ignoring it.”

Anna Kendrick A ctre s s FOR KNOWING THAT HER BEST ROLE IS HERSELF

By Josh Eells

“Oh, I love this guy,” Anna Kendrick says, as a bichon frise greets her hand with its tongue. “Hi, pal!

You’re a good guy!” The 28-year-old actress is sitting on a bench in a Hollywood Hills dog park, where a half-dozen or so of California’s chicest hounds are frolicking in a grassy meadow, enjoying a lazy morning on the last day before spring. Off to Kendrick’s right, a galumphing golden retriever chases down a slobbery tennis ball. “I want to steal that fucking dog,” she says.

The pooch-loving Kendrick doesn’t own a dog right now; having six movies coming out over the next 18 months puts a bit of a crimp in pet ownership. (The closest she’s come recently was a Jack Russell terrier that belonged to an ex, but she lost him in the breakup, which seems to bum her out more than the breakup itself.) Occasionally she’ll get lucky and dog-sit for friends, but today she’s here to get her fix vicariously: “Just creeping,” she says.

Before long, a yappy-looking mutt scampers over to the bench, lifts his leg, and, before Kendrick can stop him, marks his territory all over her Kate Spade purse. “No!” she says, shooing him away. “Cheeky!”

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gutter credit here

DOWNLOAD THE JUNE ISSUE IPAD APP OR GO TO FASTCOMPANY.COM TO SEE ANNA KENDRICK STAR IN THE EXCLUSIVE SHORT FILM THE CALL.

Set design: Eric Hollis; hair: Craig Gangi/Tracey Mattingly; makeup: Vanessa Scali/Tracey Mattingly; wardrobe: Neil Rodgers/Tracey Mattingly

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It’s hard to imagine Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow ever “just creeping,” much less letting their bags be despoiled by an overfriendly Chihuahua. But Kendrick—who broke out in 2008’s Twilight, did an Oscar-nominated turn opposite George Clooney in Up in the Air, and rose to genuine stardom with 2012’s Pitch Perfect—is part of a new breed of actresses who somehow manage to seem eminently approachable while also remaining heroes to their legions of fans. (See also: Jennifer Lawrence, Lena Dunham, and, to some extent, Emma Stone.) Kendrick’s reach is particularly vast: She counts 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 2.2 million on Twitter, all of whom tune in to hear her say whatever’s on her mind, the more inappropriate the better. Her hit single, “Cups (When I’m Gone),” from the Pitch Perfect soundtrack, shot to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to 120 million viral-video watchers. An increasing number of brands want to tap into her fourquadrant appeal to help push their products; and—oh, right—she’ll appear in three films this year, including Disney’s take on the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, in which she stars as Cinderella alongside Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep.

And yet, Kendrick says, “Not only is strategy not my strong suit, it doesn’t even enter into my thought process.” She doesn’t have a business manager or even an assistant; recently, when she went to buy a new, used Prius—which she only assented to after her 2002 Prius died on her—she brought along her BFF Aubrey Plaza, of NBC’s Parks and Recreation and the forthcoming zombie rom-com Life After Beth, which Kendrick has a cameo in.

“I’m a terrible negotiator,” Kendrick says. “The guy was doing all the cliché car-salesman things, playing hardball and going to talk to his manager, and all I could say was, ‘Why are you being so mean? Stop it!’ ” Fortunately, Plaza—who’s known for her biting sarcasm and droll demeanor (says Kendrick: “I envy her. I think people would be thrilled to pieces if she threw a drink in their face”)—came prepared to live up to her rep. Their good cop/bad cop routine worked, and after a bit of backand-forth, Kendrick drove off the lot at Toyota of Glendale with a preowned Prius for exactly what she wanted to pay. “We did it,” she says with a grin.

Each of the actresses in Kendrick’s loose cohort has forged a connection with her fans in her own distinct way. Lawrence does it by charming talk-show audiences with embarrassing anecdotes and navigating awards-show red carpets like they’re filled with marbles wrapped in banana peels. Dunham does it with her brilliantly honest HBO show, Girls, and her liberty with her body. And Kendrick does it via the Internet.

“I CAN THINK OF SO MANY THINGS I DIDN’T TWEET BECAUSE THEY SEEMED SO SCANDALOUS.”

“Sometimes when I try to make jokes or have a sense of humor in interviews, it doesn’t go over very well,” she says. “But Twitter made my life easier in this way that I didn’t expect. It would have taken probably 10 times as long for people to accept my voice and my sense of humor if I didn’t have Twitter.”

The evolution of Kendrick’s Twitter feed is a study in how the medium itself has evolved. When she started using the platform in July of 2009, she tweeted mainly about TV appearances, impostor accounts, and requests for tech help. (Even Kendrick seemed to recognize the problem: “Tweets thus far are RIVETING, no?”) But in December 2011 she took a six-month hiatus, and then, like a butterf ly emerging from a chrysalis, unveiled her current Twitter voice fully formed: self-effacing, bawdy, whip-smart, and occasionally drunk. Herewith, a few of our favorites: January 28, 2013: Watching a documentary about Meth. “If you can bake cookies, you can make meth.”

Well great, now I want cookies and meth.

April 1, 2013: The little girl with the wine stained teeth in this Game of Thrones episode is sooo creep—okay that’s a mirror.

May 28, 2013: Walnuts, you can fuck off out of my banana bread.

She basically treats the medium as a stand-up comic might, with a dozen or so drafts-in-progress on her phone at any given time. (“They’re mostly jokes that made sense at 2 a.m.,” she says.)

Kendrick says she spent her first year and a half on Twitter scared she might offend someone. She used to text friends to ask, “Is this joke okay?” or wait half an hour before posting to make sure it couldn’t be taken the wrong way. “I can think of so many things I didn’t tweet because they seemed so scandalous,” she says.

“Like, one time I dropped off some laundry and the dude was kind of flirting with me, and I was going to tweet something like, You can either flirt with me or wash my underwear, but you can’t do both. And my friend was like, ‘You can’t tweet that, that’s way too scandalous!’ ” Cut to two years later, when Kendrick is writing things like this: “Ugh—NEVER going to a Ryan Gosling movie in a theater again. Apparently masturbating in the back row is still considered ‘inappropriate.’ ” If you scroll back through Kendrick’s online history, a few themes emerge. Dogs. Baked goods. Jet lag and/or hangovers. Sweats, Snuggies, and other comfy clothes.

Game of Thrones. She also has a few social media rules she thinks everyone should abide by, about which she is surprisingly passionate. Two Instagram photos a

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day, max. (“I‘ve got a really itchy unfollow button.”)

Links, @ and # signs, and quotation marks should be avoided. (“It looks like I’m reading fuckin’ code.”) Melancholy is okay on Instagram, but not on Twitter. (“Just say something funny.”) And above all, never, ever overpromote. “That’s one of the things that annoys me most,” says Kendrick. “When my entire time line gets filled up with actors being like, ‘Check out my short!’ or ‘I’m on Craig Ferguson!’ It’s just bad business.”

Because of her large, passionate following, Kendrick says, she’s been approached by several companies that want to pay her to tweet about their products. “But the reason I have a large following is because I use it wisely,” she says. “If I’m doing something with a company and part of the deal is 10 tweets, I’m like, ‘Are you out of your mind? That does not help you or me.’ I may have had 30,000 retweets on the Ryan Gosling thing, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna get 30,000 retweets.

You’re gonna get maybe 37.” If there’s something about the concept of a personal brand that Kendrick still finds a little . . . uncool, she’s also too smart to pretend it’s not important. “I know the idea of a brand is something that I’m supposed to not care about,” she says. “But I do think it’s a part of my life, and I’m trying to just be in control of it, as opposed to ignoring it.”

Which prompts the question: What is the Anna Kendrick brand? In a nutshell, she’s the girl who gets to do lots of glamorous stuff, but is supremely stoked about it. Her three most popular Instagram posts provide a

“WITH STUFF LIKE MEETING BEYONCÉ, I THINK PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS COOL BECAUSE I WAS HONEST ABOUT HOW EXCITED I WAS.”

nice case study: One is a photo of her scarfing down In-N-Out at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party in March, another is of her freaking out while meeting Beyoncé at the Grammys, and the third is of a solid-gold macaroni pendant that Kraft sent her for being a vocal mac-andcheese fan. What all three have in common: a (ahem) pitch-perfect mix of outsider awkwardness and insider cool. She’s the girl at the party other girls wish they could be—and more important, the girl they think they could be.

“When I first moved to L.A.,” Kendrick says, “and people were doing all these things that I wasn’t able to do yet, it was easier for me to deal with my envy when people were genuinely enthusiastic. When people acted like it was no big deal I was like, ‘Fuck you.’ So with stuff like meeting Beyoncé, I think people thought it was cool because I was honest about how excited I was.”

An important side note here: Although Kendrick also tweets about nerd bait like Lord of the Rings and astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson—and hangs out on Reddit dropping film-geek knowledge under a pseudonymous screen name—she’s not the type to proclaim herself a nerd. “Some girls have cultivated this image for themselves like, ‘Oh, I’m a gamer,’ ” she says. “I hate that. These days it feels like saying you’re a nerd is just another version of wearing a push-up bra.” She shakes her head. “I would have played Magic: The Gathering with my brother if I’d known it would have given me so much sex cred later on.”

The Beat Goes On HOW ANNA KENDRICK SPARKED—AND FANNED—A PHENOMENON

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JUNE 8, 2011 Musician Anna Burden releases a video of herself performing that same routine, which hits Reddit and goes viral.

JULY 2011 Anna Kendrick watches Burden’s clip and teaches herself the choreography.

AUGUST 2011 Kendrick performs the song for the Pitch Perfect producers, who want proof that each cast member can sing.

Impressed, they work it into the film.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2012 Pitch Perfect opens in limited release and grosses $14.8 million, third behind Taken 2 and Hotel Transylvania.

OCTOBER 4, 2012 Kendrick reprises “Cups” on The Late Show With David Letterman.

The next week, Universal Pictures expands the film’s release and box-office grosses rise 191%.

Universal Pictures/Photofest (Pitch Perfect)

JUNE 8, 2009 British duo Lulu and the Lampshades release a clip in which they sing “When I’m Gone” (an Appalachian folk tune originally recorded by the Carter Family in 1931) while doing the “Cup Game,” a percussion routine dating back to the 1980s.

Kendrick grew up in Portland, Maine, with a banker dad and an accountant mom. “They’re both very businessy, which makes it funny that I’m not,” she says.

“That’s the technical term, right? Businessy?” At 6, she appeared in a community-theater production of Annie, and by 10 she was driving to New York with her parents to audition for Broadway. She was nominated for a Tony at 12, and by 17 had moved to L.A. by herself to shoot a pilot called Kid Mayor (she played the mayor’s snarky sister). “It was so apparent that it was terrible—after the first episode, they were like, ‘You can all go home,’ ” Kendrick says. “But then, I was just here.”

Kendrick spent the next few years auditioning for basically every show on TV: “All the CSIs, all the Law & Orders, definitely House, Psych, I’m sure Rules of Engagement, Bones for sure. The best-case scenario was that I would get on a procedural where I could occasionally be funny and not just do soul-crushing shots of me looking through a microscope,” she says. “Basically be the wisecracking so-and-so on whatever version of CSI they did next.” But the plan changed in 2009, when she more than held her own against George Clooney in Up in the Air and soon found herself on casting agents’ shortlists all over town.

According to Peter Cramer, senior VP of production for Universal Pictures, producers auditioned “hundreds” of actors before casting Kendrick in Pitch Perfect—a romantic comedy set in the world of competitive a cappella. “We wanted someone who could handle

JANUARY 12, 2013 “Cups (When I’m Gone)” debuts on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 93.

Digital sales account for 69% of its chart points and streams for 31%, while radio accounts for 0%.

The song is an online wonder.

EARLY 2013 Teens flood YouTube with their own “Cup Game” videos, most of them instructional.

FEBRUARY 2, 2013 The Pitch Perfect album passes Les Misérables to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s soundtrack charts.

APRIL 2013 A new music video for the song, helmed by Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore, hits YouTube. To date, it’s been watched 115 million times.

An extended cut of the song is released by Republic Records.

the comedic stuff, to make sure we separated ourselves from Glee,” Cramer says. “Anna had some cachet, she’d been in a lot of great movies already, and she signaled that this wasn’t going to be another piece of fluff. The movie had a little edge, and I think that had a lot to do with Anna and the credibility that she brought.”

Pitch Perfect went on to gross $113 million worldwide—an eye-popping sum considering its $17 million budget. “It far exceeded what we were hoping for,” says Cramer. Mostly this CONTINUED ON PAGE 140

APRIL 2013 Universal Pictures green-lights Pitch Perfect 2, which starts shooting this summer and is due in theaters May 15, 2015.

JULY 2013 The extended “Cups” single peaks at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Radio is now a major driver of its success.

DECEMBER 2013

DECEMBER 2013

Fifteen hundred students and staff at a school in Québec break the world record for the most people performing “Cups” at once.

Pitch Perfect becomes the bestselling soundtrack of 2013. By year’s end, the film has sold 5 million copies on DVD/Blu-ray.

JUNE 2013 Pitch Perfect begins airing on HBO and goes on to be one of the top on-demand titles of 2013.

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A DV E RT I S E M E N T

BRILLIANT MINDS

Fast Company’s MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE IN BUSINESS 1000 are changing the face of culture and commerce. Get quick hits of inspiration, and discover what drives them in our new series Brilliant Minds.

“I think we are wired as animals to look for harmony, and we interpret this harmony as beauty.”

GADI AMIT Founder, NewDealDesign

“We ask ourselves ‘What hasn’t been done before that will be unique and change the fan experience?’ We don’t want to limit ourselves.”

RUSSELL WALLACH President of media and sponsorship, Live Nation

IN DESIGNING FOR SUSTAINABILITY, beauty is too often sacrificed. Utility is, of course, important, but skimping on aesthetics can be a dangerous misstep. As Gadi Amit sees it, creating beautiful, culturally relevant objects can literally reduce waste—the products we fall in love with become a part of our lives over time, while those that miss the mark quickly find their way to landfills.

Watch the videos:

fastcompany.com/brilliant-minds

“Ideas alone aren’t ‘innovation.’

Innovation is the magic that transforms a creative idea into a sustainable, scalable business.”

KATIE RAE Chairman, TechStars Boston

Where Brilliant Minds rest their heads.

Whether you are being whisked to the airport in our chauffeur driven car, networking at our onboard bar or dreaming in our fully at beds, we make sure every Virgin Atlantic experience is designed to inspire your brilliant mind.

Experience more at virginatlantic.com

TO SEE MORE IMAGES OF THIS PROJECT, GO TO FASTCOMPANY.COM OR DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE ON YOUR IPAD.

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Sallie Krawcheck

O w n e r, 8 5 B ro ad s FOR EXPANDING FEMALE EXECUTIVES’ OPPORTUNITIES

Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney, calls herself a “recovering research analyst.” The latest step in her recovery: purchasing the women’s networking club 85 Broads and helping the organization’s 35,000 women thrive in their own careers.

Founded as a platform for Goldman Sachs employees and alumnae (the group is named after the firm’s former Manhattan headquarters at 85 Broad Street), Broads has opened its doors to all kinds of professional women, who join at annual membership levels ranging from $25 to $1,000. Since Krawcheck took over last year, the company’s revenue is up more than 100%.

“Creativity is not sitting in a room by yourself thinking big thoughts,” she says. “Creativity is exchanging ideas, clashing ideas, bringing ideas together, and helping to funnel them.”

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Michael Heyward

F o u n d e r, C E O, W hi s p e r FOR SHARING PEOPLE’S SECRETS

Like Snapchat and bitcoin, Whisper is designed to keep digital footprints to a minimum. App users type out a short, often confessional message, overlay it on a related image, and share it anonymously (there are no user profiles or friends to follow) with the Whisper community.

You can “heart” Whispers, privately message other users, or respond with your own Whispers, a model that’s transformed the two-year-old service into a viral powerhouse.

“It’s not about whether

WHISPER’S MODEL HAS TRANSFORMED THE TWO-YEAROLD SERVICE INTO A VIRAL POWERHOUSE. you think Whisper is going to be a multibilliondollar company,” explains CEO Michael Heyward, “but whether you think anonymity is going to be a big deal.” Sounds like it already is, with millions of users each averaging 30 minutes a day on the platform, fluttering through a whopping 3.5 billion page views per month—roughly double what the New York Times’ site receives per quarter.

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Theaster Gates, a Chicago-based potter turned conceptual artist with a background in urban planning, is using culture as a strategy to improve poor neighborhoods. He’s turned vacant homes into cultural spaces and transformed a former housing project into a mixed-income residential and arts hub. His efforts have been so successful that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has taken note, offering his approval and support. Gates is now working on a big art project for the Chicago Transit Authority, among other ventures.

Fast Company: What is the common thread in your work?

Gates: One thing that’s really important to me is thinking about the role artists play in public life.

In addition to painting and drawing and sculpture, artists can imagine they have the right as creative people to transform the city and the world.

Your urban-redevelopment work started organically in 2006 because you needed a place to live and wanted to improve your neighborhood. Now you’re transforming a sprawling historic former bank building into a library that will house an archive of AfricanAmerican history and a restaurant space.

TG: I started with residential property because it’s what I could afford, what I understood. With the bank-building property, the South Side and the West Side of Chicago are bereft

of great cultural institutions in the black space, and I really get tired of going to other neighborhoods to have a decent drink and a nice meal. It’s part of an evolving way of reimagining that culture should be central to the way our cities and neighborhoods work.

What does the Chicago Transit Authority project entail?

TG: People kept saying they wanted art that would reflect the now and also pay homage to the great legacy of AfricanAmericans on the South Side, and that kind of art can get didactic pretty quick. We asked if the Transit Authority could partner with public radio stations to create content that will resonate with the community. It might create a new kind of public space. I want us to reimagine what public art means and what can happen in the public sphere. That’s artistic leadership, not just artistic production.

Gates turns unused buildings like this old Chicago bank into multiuse arts spaces.

Photograph by Daniel Shea

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11 Theaster Gates A r t ist, founder of Rebuild Project, dire ctor of ar t s and public li fe at t he Universit y of Chic ago FOR MASTERING THE ART OF URBAN RENEWAL

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Jamie Miller

CIO, GE

12 Sean Rad & Justin Mateen Cofounders, Tinder FOR SIMPLIFYING THE SEARCH FOR LOVE

Until 21 months ago, online dating involved a series of agonizing questions: Do I like him? Does he like me? Do I like him more than he likes me? Sean Rad and Justin Mateen cleaned all that up with the swipe of a thumb. Their app, Tinder, enables singles to vote yea (swipe right) or nay (swipe left) on potential mates based on their photos, locations, and other data scraped from their Facebook profiles. It’s an intuitive interface that “captures the moment when your eyes connect with someone,” Mateen says, and—ideally—the “feeling that you need to know someone.” Which is to say, using Tinder is like falling in love . . . or at least, shopping for lust. The app’s simplicity and guarantee of mutually assured attraction (potential couples are notified only if both parties swiped right) have made people fall in love with Tinder as well: The app generates 10 million matches and 750 million swipes per day, up from 400 million in November, and has partnered with popular dating site OkCupid to improve the user experience of OkCupid Locals (both companies are owned by media conglomerate IAC). Next for Rad and Mateen is functionality to help users refind the one who got away. “We will be solving that in a fun, lightweight manner that’s very much Tinder,” Mateen says. Swipe right.

FOR BOOSTING TECH WHILE SAVING TIME AND MONEY

“I’m metrics based,” says Jamie Miller, formerly GE’s controller and chief accounting officer. “I start with the outcome— increasing efficiency, lowering scrap and cost—and then execute toward that.” In the past year, she helped launch GE’s SmartOutage initiative, in which sensors collect realtime data from industrial machines and offer predictive rather than reactive maintenance.

Internally, she put tablets in the hands of field workers and is implementing Predix, a software platform that gets the entire company, even those tireless sensors, speaking a common language.

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Sophia Lindholm

S e nior ar t dire ctor, Forsman & Bodenfors FOR PERFECTING THE ART OF THE SPECTACLE

CHECK OUT THE MAKING OF THIS ILLUSTRATION

BY DOWNLOADING THE JUNE ISSUE ON YOUR IPAD OR

BY GOING TO FASTCOMPANY.COM.

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Maybe it was the Enya vocals. Maybe it was the slow reveal. Actually, let’s just admit it was 1990s action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme’s perfect horizontal split between two moving trucks that, last November, made us (and 70 million online viewers) fall in love with Volvo’s hit viral ad. Sophia Lindholm is part of the team behind a string of ambitious spots for Volvo’s truck division, which relaunched in 2012.

“We have to stay relevant to truck enthusiasts but make these ads spectacular to attract interest from everyone else,” she says. Is that a stretch?

Van Damme might call it a power straddle.

Illustration by Wendy van Santen

PETER DASILVA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

FASTCO CREATE.COM FASTCO DESIG N.COM FASTCO EXIST.COM FASTCOLABS.COM

Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box

FASTC OMPA N Y.C O M

T H E F UTU R E OF BUS INES S WHERE THE MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE AT THE WORLD’S MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES GET THEIR NEWS.

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Scott Goodson

S e n i o r d e v e l o p e r,

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Jorge Odón

I n v e n t o r, O d ó n D e v i c e

Facebook Paper FOR GETTING EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE

FOR EASING CHILDBIRTH IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

Designers and engineers usually speak different languages. When Scott Goodson got to Facebook in 2012, he helped build a platform to aid their communications. Tweaks, as it’s known, allows engineers to easily adjust code so designers can make changes without a major overhaul. This enabled the dialogue that led to the creation of Paper, Facebook’s elegant mobile app that was released in February.

Reviewers touted its hyper-responsive gestural interface—the result of designers and engineers truly talking.

THE PROBLEM: Ninetynine percent of mothers who die during childbirth live in countries where doctors lack access to the training and tools to assist in difficult deliveries.

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THE EXECUTION: Though he had no medical training, the father of five (all delivered by C-section) constructed a glass uterus and used one of his daughter’s dolls to demonstrate the idea.

Odón showed the device to specialists at CEMIC, a Buenos Aires teaching hospital, who helped him apply for patents and connected him to the World Health Organization. On March 1, 2011, Odón’s birthday, he and his team launched 30 live trials. All were successful.

Amanda Musilli

Mis sion, cult ure, and h i g h e r p u r p o s e c o o r d in at o r, W h ole F o o d s FOR INTEGRATING FOOD INTO THE COMMUNITY

Detroit is one of the country’s largest “food deserts,” where fresh produce is scarce. Whole Foods decided to move in. “This is a really new process for us,” says Amanda Musilli, who spearheaded the project.

On advice from local activists, she held community meetings, which led to an advisory group of not-for-profit, government, and community organizations to plan outreach and create jobs.

On opening day last June, 72% of employees were local residents. “We are really changing the way we do business because of this,” she says. Variations on that strategy are now in use by Whole Foods nationwide.

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THE EPIPHANY: In 2006, Jorge Odón, then a 52-year-old car mechanic living in Argentina, watched his employees emulate a YouTube video demonstrating how to remove a cork stuck inside a bottle using a plastic bag. That night, at 4 a.m., Odón woke up with an idea: What if the bottle were a uterus and the cork were a baby?

THE RESULT: This year, Odón left the garage for good to work full time on perfecting the Odón Device. Meanwhile, research continues with women across the globe.

“No one should be discriminated against for not ever getting the opportunity to study,” Odón says of his own foray into medicine.

“We are all creatives.”

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

From left: Badlani, Doshi, and Gupta lead shoppers to the very best.

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Sarika Doshi, Pooja Badlani & Sonal Gupta

C E O, C C O, C O O, c of o u n d e r s , R a n k & S t y l e FOR BUILDING THE CONSUMER REPORTS OF FASHION

In 2011, Sarika Doshi did a Google search for “best natural sunscreens.” “The results I got back were overwhelming,” she says. “There was so much rich content, but it wasn’t aggregated or cross-referenced.” Doshi, along with Pooja Badlani and Sonal Gupta, realized that other women must face the same e-valanche of information about consumer products, so in April 2013 they launched a platform that uses an algorithm—based on blogger buzz, editor input, and user reviews—to compile lists of the 10 best items in any given trend category. “We have a list on best skinny jeans, but next year”—as the company expands—“it’ll also be best skinny jeans under $100, or best maternity skinny jeans,” says Doshi. Meanwhile, Rank & Style is syndicating its content to a growing group of style-minded sites including Lucky magazine, Bloomingdale’s, and Refinery29, which, in turn, can create in-house lists. Says Doshi, “We’re ultimately on a mission to rank the world.”

Photographs by Jonathan Snyder

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MCP 100

3. COURTING THE GOLIATHS: After E3, Luckey spent the summer prepping a Kickstarter campaign. He also showed his headset to game developers, including Valve’s Gabe Newell and Mike Abrash. Not only did they appear in the Kickstarter video, but they also agreed to develop Riftcompatible VR modes for Team Fortress 2 and other games.

19 Palmer Luckey F ounder, Oculus V R FOR MAKING VIRTUAL REALITY A REALITY

When Facebook bought virtual-reality company Oculus VR in March for a head-spinning $2 billion, some people were confused. Didn’t everyone give up on expensive, complicated VR technology back in the 2000s? Not Oculus founder Palmer Luckey: In 2009, as a 17-year-old garage tinkerer, he started working on a system that would eventually run so smoothly, it might now finally fulfill VR’s potential. So far, the Oculus Rift headset is only available as a developer’s kit, but Facebook’s backing will likely ramp things up. Luckey explains how he came up with his game-changing creation.

1. A SERIOUS HOBBY: As a kid in Long Beach, California, Luckey loved “learning about electronics, engineering, how the world ticks,” he says. After experimenting with game-console modifications and high-voltage toys like Tesla coils, he started playing with old VR equipment he bought online and at auctions. Intrigued, he decided to create his own device.

2. SHARING PAYS OFF: After a brief stint at the University of Southern California’s virtualreality-focused Institute for Creative Technologies, Luckey left to pursue his own VR system full time. He continued developing prototypes using cell-phone parts, and he posted all of his work in online 3-D forums. That openness turned out to be key: In early 2012, Doom cocreator John Carmack saw the plans and asked to buy a prototype. “I gave it to him for free just because he’s an awesome person,” says Luckey. Carmack then used the Rift headset for a Doom 3 demo at E3 in 2012, which really got the press’s attention.

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4. OCULUS SOARS: The 2012 Kickstarter campaign raised $2.4 million, and 60,000 kits have since been shipped.

A fully built consumer version of the Rift is the next step, which will pit Oculus against Sony and several other companies that are said to be working on their own VR systems. But Rift has a head start, with a small army of outside developers building support for it into their products.

“Community is what makes any technology successful,” says Luckey.

“If you don’t have a bunch of people helping you, you have to work a lot harder to succeed.”

5. FIND THE PERFECT PARTNER: Facebook’s megabucks acquisition of Oculus is the technology’s biggest endorsement yet. Why the giant price tag? To Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the technology is about much more than gaming.

“Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting on goggles in your home,” he wrote on Facebook after the announcement. “This is really a new communication platform.”

20

Billy Parish

C of o u n d e r, pre sident, Mos aic FOR OPENING ACCESS TO THE SOLAR ECONOMY

A former clean-energy activist, Billy Parish wants to help individual investors become part of the movement. “The shift from fossil fuels to clean energy represents one of the largest wealth-creation opportunities of our time, if we can democratize ownership of the assets,” he says. Mosaic, launched to the public in 2013, is a crowdfunding engine that connects accredited

“THE SHIFT FROM FOSSIL FUELS TO CLEAN ENERGY REPRESENTS ONE OF THE LARGEST OPPORTUNITIES OF OUR TIME.” investors—and in New York and California, anyone with at least $25 to spend—with solar projects in need of financing.

So far, 3,100 investors have put more than $7 million into loans for commercial solar projects, achieving returns of 4.5% to 7%. Earlier this year, Mosaic started offering solar loans to homeowners as well.

Illustration by Eric Frommelt

MCP 100

21

James Carnes He ad of global de sign, Adidas

FOR LEADING A PRODUCT MARATHON

Sports apparel is usually a sprinter’s race, with new products sometimes hitting shelves in as little as six months. James Carnes specializes in a longer game—and has led three of the company’s biggest recent launches:

22

WiLL Made It 24 Mike

Anna Marie Chavez

Music producer

C E O, Gir l S c ou t s

FOR PRODUCING UNSTOPPABLE HITS

FOR PLEDGING TO MEAN SOMETHING TO TODAY’S GIRLS

The cookie program still reaps annual sales near $800 million, but with Girl Scout membership consistently dropping, Anna Marie Chavez is working to lead the organization into the future. Girl Scouts now offers programs and badges in STEM–related fields such as robotics and video-game design, and Chavez recently launched the program BFF (Be a Friend First) to help girls avoid traumatic conflict on the web or in school. In March, she teamed up with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to launch the provocative “Ban Bossy” campaign, which encourages the development of young leaders. Even Beyoncé chimed in: “I’m not bossy,” she says in the video. “I’m the boss.”

23

Tim Kendall

He ad of product, Pintere st

Springblade, a radical shoe design with 16 flexing polymer blades on each sole angled to propel a runner forward, took six years to create. Its launch last July was the most successful for a running shoe in company history.

1

Boost, another running shoe, took several years to produce but was also worth the wait. Carnes is adding its proprietary cushioning—shock-absorbent foam used in car bumpers—to other running and basketball shoes.

2

3 Brazuca, the 2014 FIFA World Cup official ball, was tested by more than 600 top athletes during its three-year development.

The aerodynamic design and grippy material enable moredazzling dribbling, passing, and shooting than its predecessors, and maintains the same weight when wet. To hype it, Adidas built one with six HD cameras inside, then had the pros kick it around.

The company expects to sell millions of Brazucas, which will contribute to an anticipated $2.7 billion in soccer revenue this year.

“I have a few key mantras right now,” Carnes says. “Intuitive, premium, precise, and innovative.”

Illustration by Mark Smith

FOR SHARPENING THE PINNING PROCESS

Tim Kendall had a dilemma: How could Pinterest be more useful on mobile? The answer came in a thousand details unveiled last summer, when Kendall launched iPhone, Android, and tablet apps that let recipe pins include ingredients, for example, and travel pins include photos and maps.

The result: Some 75% of traffic now comes from mobile platforms. “It was the summer of apps,” he says, “and we worked at breakneck speed.”

By the time Michael Len Williams II, aka Mike WiLL Made It, met Miley Cyrus, he’d already worked with Rihanna and Kanye West. Cyrus, then still best known as Hannah Montana, was a lessobvious collaborator.

But the producer, who has an album of his own due this year, was impressed. “Her voice is crazy,” he says. “There’s really nothing she can’t do.” The result of their partnership, Bangerz (featuring the single he cowrote, “We Can’t Stop”), debuted at No. 1 last October.

Naficy 25 Mariam

F o under, CE O, Minte d FOR CONNECTING DESIGNERS TO PAPERLOVING BUYERS

Minted doesn’t just sell greeting cards, wall art, and other paper goods; it really helps independent artisans flourish. After users critique works in progress and vote on their favorites, Minted manufactures and sells the most popular creations, paying artists a cash prize plus 6% to 8% of sales. Its products have reached 40 million households, partially through a partnership with West Elm. “It’s not really about stationery,” says Mariam Naficy. “It’s about encouraging and nurturing creative talent.”

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MCP 100

Seinfeld’s hit web program is “an antishow about a nonevent,” he says.

26 Jerry Seinfeld

Cre ator, Comedians in Cars Get t ing Cof fee

Grooming: Rebecca Restrepo/The Wall Group

FOR REVVING UP WEB PROGRAMMING— AND ONLINE ADVERTISING

Jerry Seinfeld’s high-concept web show chronicles him picking up various comedians (Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Howard Stern) in notable, old automobiles (a 1969 Lamborghini Miura, a 1959 Fiat 600 Jolly) and engaging them in amusing banter over delicious caffeinated beverages. But it is viewers who are feeling the rush. Since it debuted in 2012, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, as it’s aptly titled, has become a hit for Sony’s digital-only Crackle network, racking up more than 35 million views as it has grown into a web phenomenon. And Seinfeld isn’t just the host. Starting with season 3, which premiered in January, he has also been the driving force (along with Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld) behind the unusually entertaining Acura ads that frame each episode. Here, he shows us what’s under the hood.

Photograph by Pari Dukovic

Fast Company: You could work on anything you wanted. Why this?

Seinfeld: The only thing that appeals to me is being shot into an unknown universe. If I were to walk into a major network and say, “I have an idea for a TV series,” no matter what the idea is, so much has already been decided before I even walk in that door.

We know it’s going to be 21 minutes and 45 seconds. We know how we’re going to promote it. We know too much. The most fun game is one you’ve never played and you’re inventing as you go along.

Why create your own Acura ads for the show?

JS: I kind of like advertising, and did some in the ’90s for American Express. It just seems like the Internet is screaming at artists to be creative.

It’s like an art-supply store: You walk in, and there’s paper and cameras and paint and pencils. It’s like someone throwing down the gauntlet.

How do you put the ads together? Do you crank them out while watching the Mets game?

JS: When I’m watching the Mets game I don’t do anything else: I’m watching the game. But when the ads come on I get nauseous. It’s just horrible. To me, car advertising was another venue that was suffocating from a lack of creativity.

How did you tackle that?

JS: By making bad ads on purpose [laughs].

The premise was, we transport a 2014 Acura back to an incompetent ad agency in 1965. A lot of the verbiage in there is real stuff from the ’60s.

I mean, “out to impress” was a very common phrase in the ’60s in advertising. Nobody talks

like that anymore, but in the ’60s that’s how they talked about cars. “We’re out to impress.”

In the Tina Fey episode, you asked what she would love to be doing in a year. I’m going to ask you the same question.

JS: Acura and I have just made a new deal to make more shows [season 4 premieres later this year] and commercials. I was intending to make 10 [episodes], just as a thing to do. Now people really want to be on the show. In the beginning I had to explain to them what it was.

But now it feels timely.

JS: I don’t think I could’ve done it even a year or two before I did. You had to have this thing where everybody’s walking around with TVs in their pocket. People expect things on the Internet to be very personal. I went through a period a couple of years ago where I was obsessed with Timberland. I started looking up videos that people make of themselves unboxing new Timberland boots.

I don’t want to use sexual terminology, but there’s something pornographic about it. It’s the sound of the paper, the lacing up of the boots, the boot on the wood floor, the squeak sound. I love these videos. That very personal microniche that the Internet world created— it’s like a honeycomb with millions of hexagonal cells, and you’re just interested in four. That seemed like a fun place to play. “I like taking videos of coffee and cars and comedians.

Maybe I could weave them into something.” It’s not really a show. I used to say it’s an antishow about a nonevent.

And you don’t say that anymore?

JS: No, it still is. [Laughs]

27

Naval Ravikant

CE O, A n gelL ist FOR REINVENTING HOW STARTUPS FIND INVESTORS AND— MAYBE—HELPING YOU TO GET A PIECE OF THE ACTION

Last fall, Naval Ravikant launched Syndicates, a web platform that helps Silicon Valley influencers collect investor “backers” and funnel the pooled money into promising startups. So far, backers have to be “accredited,” i.e., rich, but when the SEC loosens crowdfunding rules, Syndicates could help retail investors connect with the next Twitter. Meanwhile, the company’s must-read emails remain crucial in bringing startups to the attention of major investors. AngelList is “a way to open up deal flow and share it,” Ravikant says.

28

Anthony Perez

Dire ctor of c onc ept de sign, S tar bucks FOR CONSTANTLY RETHINKING WHAT A COFFEE SHOP CAN BE

Anthony Perez and his team are working to imbue each Starbucks with a uniquely local— and sustainable—flair.

In the past 18 months, he has introduced a LEED– certified Starbucks built from a cargo container, honed the idea into a 500-square-foot walk-up store covered partially with reclaimed lumber and local art, and developed variations of these shops that can squeeze into spaces where larger Starbucks might not fit. “We need to make sure whatever we do is provocative,” Perez says. “If people walk by and don’t notice it, something is wrong.”

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29

Max Ventilla

31

F o u n d e r, A l t S c h o o l

E xe c u t i v e v i c e p r e s i d e nt of c o r p orate m ar ket ing, Uni v ision C ommunic at ion s

FOR BRINGING THE STARTUP MODEL TO SCHOOLS

Linda Ong

Looking at schools for his young children, Max Ventilla was dismayed: The best of them touted single-digit acceptance rates. But in the tech world, great products are all-inclusive. How he tackled the issue:

P re sid e nt an d bran d st rate gist, Tr u t h C o.

FOR EXPANDING UNIVISION’S VISION

1

Make a plan.

Early in 2013, Ventilla quit his job as an engineering exec at Google, raised $5 million in seed capital, and dove into learning about education. He developed two goals: to grow a network of excellent elementary schools that hearken back to the single-room schoolhouses of long ago, and to use the schools as labs to learn, iterate, and improve on the model.

2

Open the doors.

AltSchool launched its first one-room school in San Francisco last September and now has 20 students in grades K–5. Teachers work with a “playlist” of activities that can be mixed and matched based on their students’ needs.

3

Keep learning.

Armed with $28 million in venture-capital funding, AltSchool is now building a network of schools in the Bay Area and around the country. “You want to avoid thinking you know more than you do,” says Ventilla. “But there is a science to education.

The ideal approach is not for every teacher to do just whatever comes naturally to them. There should be a rigorous analytical approach.”

92

Ruth Gaviria

30 Scott Howe CEO, pre sident, Acx iom FOR LETTING CONSUMERS SEE THEIR OWN DATA

In 2011, Scott Howe took over one of the country’s most secretive and voracious data outfits and chose a new path, offering consumers more transparency and control. Its groundbreaking site, AboutTheData, launched last year. Here’s why: THE PROBLEM: The more digital our lives become, the more marketing data we create—and that someone else collects. “People are getting increasingly anxious about that information and how it’s used,” says Howe. Not surprisingly, they often distrust companies like Acxiom, which spends billions each year on consumer info that it aggregates and sells to marketers.

THE EPIPHANY: Early on as CEO, Howe asked, “What information does the company have about me?” Unable to get a straight answer, he decided it needed a consumer portal— the industry’s first—that would offer a peek behind the curtain. “In the future, people will manage their data as easily as they service their car,” he says. “This is the first small step.”

THE EXECUTION: Acxiom, a B-to-B company, struggled with creating a consumer site.

AboutTheData had to present profiles clearly and explain the data sources. “Essentially, we wrote the site for my parents, who are in their seventies,” Howe says. He also started a blog about the project, humanizing the once-mysterious company.

THE RESULT: Initially, Acxiom’s board feared consumers would see what had been gathered on them and choose to opt out of Acxiom’s data collection. But only 2% of the nearly 630,000 registered users have done so. Meanwhile, 11% corrected their information, benefiting Acxiom and its clients. Traditionally, “our industry has been a one-way communication,” says Howe. “There has to be give-and-take.”

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Last July, Univision issued a press release satirically addressed to ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, with the subject “Número Uno Is the New #1.” For the first time, the 21-year-old Hispanic network had beaten the major broadcast networks in prime-time ratings for the 18-to-34 and 18-to-49 demographics. The rebranding and revitalization of Univision as the “Hispanic heartbeat of America” is largely the work of Linda Ong, who runs Brooklyn-based branding firm TruthCo., and Univision’s Ruth Gaviria. When Ong was hired by Univision in 2011, she says her first mission was to push the network “to envision themselves outside their traditional competitive set of Spanish-language networks, and recognize that they deserved to compete with the English-language media.” The pair have also helped the brand reach out to second- and thirdgeneration Hispanics by introducing some English-language content, launching the Uforia digital-music imprint, and rebranding the telenovela-and-sportsfocused TeleFutura channel as UniMás, with programming that more clearly differentiates it from the parent network.

Throughout the process, says Gaviria, “we learned that we had more permission from our consumers for innovation than we thought.”

Illustration by Mirko Ilic

Clockwise from top left: NeochaEdge’s Zhang, Schokora, Shen, and Yan at their Shanghai studio

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FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

Photographs by Xiang Sun

MCP 100

32 Adam Schokora, Jimi Zhang, Leon Yan & Taylor Shen NeochaEdge FOR CONNECTING CHINESE ARTISTS TO GLOBAL BRANDS

The 1930s Shanghai town house is buzzing with activity: In the ground-level photo studio, stylists are tying a dozen orange helium balloons into a male model’s long black hair as part of a shoot for Red Bull energy drink. Up the staircase, which bursts with colorful Chinese graffiti art, video gurus are adding animation to some clips for Gap jeans and cutting together footage from a relaunch party for Adidas’s Stan Smith sneakers.

In another office, a young woman in a stocking cap is scouring the Internet, scouting for Chinese street artists, musicians, photographers, and sculptors to feature in a bilingual web magazine she updates daily with new discoveries. The door to her shared work space bears an Andy Warhol quote: Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Welcome to NeochaEdge, a hub of Chinese creativity and commerce that’s got global brands banging at the door. The company’s nimble group of two dozen whiz kids is sussing out some of the freshest young Chinese artists, marketing their talents, and generating content for multinational companies including Volvo, eBay, Esprit, Nike, and Vans. Along the way, they’re taking a sledgehammer to the notion that China can only copy—not create and innovate.

“The goal is to be the first internationally recognized Chinese creative agency, because there just isn’t one yet,” says NeochaEdge and driving force Adam Schokora, 33, a Detroit native and fluent Mandarin speaker who’s been living in China for more than a decade. “As late as 2006–07, the creative industry in China was still hit or miss. But there’s been a huge jump in the last couple of years. It’s tremendous, the number of great artists, designers, and creative thinkers coming out of here.”

Schokora first visited China as a teen; postcollege, he landed at global PR firm Edelman in Beijing, where he began consuming Chinese pop culture and learning his way around

the developing Chinese Internet. He struck out on his own about seven years ago, teaming with friends to build a social media site—along the lines of MySpace—for Chinese artists. They dubbed it Neocha (cha means “tea” in Mandarin).

Despite attracting about 100,000 active users, they struggled to generate sufficient ad revenue.

Then, inspiration struck: Instead of trying to peddle companies and products to China’s artistic community, why not sell Chinese artists to corporations eager to attract the mainland’s young masses? Neocha began matching artists in its network to corporate clients with myriad needs— graphic designs for T-shirts, illustrations for books, music for film scores. Eventually, Neocha opened its own agency, NeochaEdge, staffing it with multihyphenates such as Jimi Zhang (account director– stylist-producer), Leon Yan (filmmakerphotographer), and Taylor Shen (curator-editor).

The Neocha social media site became a curated platform, and the top artists were highlighted in a polished web magazine edited by Shen. The best of the best, fewer than 200 artists so far, have been invited into a community called Edge Creative Collective. NeochaEdge draws on this group to supercharge its clients’ projects. An e-store sells prints, toys, and books made by members.

International brands are eager to affiliate themselves with local artists and influencers— from rural handicrafters to indie bands and urban graphic designers—to communicate to consumers that they’re part of the contemporary cultural fabric.

“NeochaEdge has managed to create an amazing network of artists,” says Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s vice president for creative and content excellence, Asia Pacific. “They have influence and access, because they are continuously scouting and advocating with artist communities. . . .

Large ad agencies, multinational agencies, they don’t have this kind of reach or influence.” NeochaEdge helped CocaCola understand music trends in the region’s smaller cities to shape a marketing campaign.

Grace Wong, Shanghai-based vice president of marketing for Gap Inc., has enlisted NeochaEdge on numerous projects; Schokora and Zhang recently put together a campaign in which 10 artists—five from China and five from the U.S.—will reimagine the clothier’s logo for a new “Remix” collection of T-shirts hitting Chinese stores in May. “Adam has really tapped into the Chinese psyche, and specifically that younger person between 20 and 30,” says Wong. “To have such an understanding of that market is pretty cool.”

Adidas recently had the company execute a guerrilla-style street-art project in Beijing and Shanghai—which briefly landed two NeochaEdge employees in police custody. (“The cops took them in, and we sort of had to bail them out, whatever,” says Schokora.

“It was a lot of fun.”)

Whatever NeochaEdge does, there’s one point it doesn’t budge on: The artists always get paid. “It is something I believe in strongly,” says Schokora. “One of the best things we can do is create consistent, paying opportunities for the most talented folks we see.” —Julie Makinen

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MCP 100

33 Jennifer Lee Codirector, Frozen FOR BREAKING BARRIERS WITH HER BILLION-DOLLAR SECOND CAREER

With Frozen, Jennifer Lee cracked two glass ceilings at once: She became the first woman to direct a Disney animated feature and the first writer to ascend to the director’s chair on one of the company’s animated films (she cowrote Wreck-It Ralph). And she did it with a risky project. “It was a big musical with two female leads,” says Lee, who quit her job as a graphic designer in book publishing to enroll in film school at age 30. “So it was a let’s-try-tobe-fearless-and-see-what-happens kind of thing.” What happened was, the fairy tale of two sisters, released last Thanksgiving, earned $1 billion and became the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, not to mention a multiple Oscar winner and merchandising juggernaut—thanks in large part to Lee’s collaborative style (songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez helped pen the script). Tween girls can’t seem to let it go and are throwing Frozen-themed parties. For dessert? Ice-cream cake.

34

Gorden Wagener

He ad of de sign, Mercedes-Benz FOR GIVING LUXURY A NEW LOOK

With the 2015 MercedesBenz C-Class, Gorden Wagener faced a challenge most car designers would love to have: make a best-selling car sell even better. Here’s how he messed with success.

1

Scale up and slim down.

The 2015 model is longer and wider, but weighs 200 pounds less due to a partly aluminum body, which also offered more freedom when it came to curves and detailing.

“It’s about the materials you don’t see, but you feel and hear through different senses—that’s how we design,” he says.

2

Focus on the details.

To give the C-Class a selfassured look, Wagener patterned the headlights after a human eye, with the circular torch as the eyeball and a row of LEDs above as an eyebrow (and turn signal).

3

Make it perform.

Wagener pushed the cabin back, lengthening the hood and shifting the focus of the car to the rear. He also tapered the cabin and raised the back for a classic “dropping line” stance.

“We took inspiration from 1930s streamlined design,” he says. As a result, the C-Class is unusually aerodynamic.

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35

Jen McCabe

He ad of hard ware, Ve g a s Te c h F un d FOR MAKING SURE THAT WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS DOESN’T JUST STAY IN VEGAS

Can a group of tech investors turn downtown Las Vegas into a hub for innovative digital businesses? That’s the goal of Zappos founder Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund.

Jen McCabe oversees the company’s hardwareinvestments division, which seeks to turn promising ideas into physical products. So far, she has funded such startups as Skycatch, which uses

“MY JOB IS TO FIND COMPANIES THAT I THINK ARE GROUNDBREAKING, THAT ARE OBSESSED WITH A BEAUTIFUL PRODUCT EXPERIENCE.” drones for agriculture and construction, and littleBits, which makes colorful, Lego-like circuit boards. She’s currently turning a 15,000-squarefoot building in downtown Vegas into a lab for hands-on development of prototypes. “My job is to find companies that I think are groundbreaking, that are obsessed with a beautiful product experience, that know their customers, and that are providing a solution that is cost effective and wonderfully designed,” she says.

Illustration by MMJ Studio

YOU’LL NEVER

STUMBLE ON THE

UNEXPECTED IF YOU STICK TO THE

FAMILIAR. “[Catmull] has written what just might be the most thoughtful management book ever.” —Fast Company “Everyone interested in managing innovation—or just good managing— needs to read this book.” —Chip Heath www.CreativityIncBook.com #CreativityInc

A RANDOM HOUSE

HARDCOVER & eBOOK

Wherever books are sold.

MCP 100 Rose once studied fine art. Now she’s bringing those skills to a much smaller canvas.

36

Fleury Rose Nail ar t ist FOR ELEVATING THE ART OF FINGER PAINTING

The Brooklyn-based fingernail decorator’s intricate designs—inspired by everything from Chanel to manga to Twin Peaks— helped spark the recent obsession with over-the-top polish creations. Now Fleury Rose is courted by celebrities, fashion editors, beauty-product companies, and runway designers, while trendsetters such as Nicki Minaj and Martha Stewart are getting in on the craze. Nail art has gotten so popular that manicure supplies have now officially surpassed lipstick sales.

Fast Company: How did you get into this unusual line of work?

Rose: Before doing nails, I studied fine art: illustration, comics, painting, sculpture.

I knew I wanted to do something creative, but I wasn’t sure what. I found a community of girls on Tumblr who were doing cool nail stuff.

I just love doing tiny, detailed little paintings. It never dawned on me that I could make a career out of it.

When did it turn into a career?

FR: Social media was definitely a big part of it. Also just living in New York, you never know who will see your work. For instance, [fashion writer] Madison Stephens was a client and was interning at Teen Vogue. She would always come in and get these really cool, fashion-inspired nails.

We’d do all the prints from the new Givenchy collection, or whatever. Her boss would see Madison’s nails, and they ended up doing a really big story on me.

Photograph by ioulex

You’ve done work for Carly Rae Jepsen, Emma Watson, and Florence Welch, among others.

Who’s your favorite celebrity client so far?

FR: It’s very hard to decide, but I think my favorite was Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi got black nails with a big golden dragon that went all the way across, inspired by one of her tattoos. I got to go to her home and meet her daughter and granddaughters, and did all of their nails.

How do you keep yourself inspired?

FR: Right now, I’m painting my leather jacket. I’m always personalizing my clothing. Over the summer, I also did a tour poster for the band Black Flag. In addition to nail stuff, I do a lot of other projects as well. It’s what keeps your style fresh and true to what makes you an artist.

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37

Camille Gibson

V P of m ar ket ing, General Mills FOR SHOWING WHAT FAMILIES REALLY LOOK LIKE

The advertising industry has always trailed behind societal norms, but Cheerios caught up in a big way last May with the debut of its “Just Checking” ad. In it, a little girl asks her mother if it’s true that Cheerios are good for your heart; a beat later, her father wakes up from a nap in the other room, covered in Cheerios. But the big reveal isn’t the cereal spilling all over him—it’s the fact that he’s AfricanAmerican and his wife is not. The response from some corners was both hostile and immediate.

Camille Gibson made the decision to turn off comments on the ad’s YouTube page, telling USA Today, “We are a family brand, and not all of the comments were familyfriendly,” but she and her team stood by the ad.

“There are many kinds of families,” she said, “and Cheerios celebrates them all.” Reflecting on it today, Gibson says that “while we did have a little bit of controversy, on the whole it was very, very positive”—not to mention a boon for the brand, increasing its online exposure by 77%, according to content-marketing firm Kontera. While Gibson won’t comment on future plans, she did bring back the “Just Checking” family for a second spot, which aired during the Super Bowl.

“It’s an event where a lot of family members sit down together,” she says.

“It was a great place for our brand to be.”

100

38

Charmian Gooch

Dire ctor, Global W i t n e s s

39

Dan Harden

C of o un d e r, C E O, W hip s a w

FOR SHINING A LIGHT ON CORPORATE SECRECY

FOR BEING DESIGN’S SECRET WEAPON

“When people say something is really crazy or naive, that’s when you know you’re onto something,” says Charmian Gooch of her latest campaign to end corporate secrecy laws. These are the tangle of rules— common in states such as Delaware and in countries around the world—that Gooch says enable drug dealers, mafia groups, and dictators to use anonymous shell companies to launder money.

Corporate secrecy is a problem that’s more entrenched and less sexy than the crusades that made Gooch famous: a 1998 exposé that showed, for the first time, how the diamond industry had been underwriting a civil war in Angola, and her effort to end illegal logging. But Gooch’s 80-person team of campaigners, lawyers, researchers, and investigative journalists is already attracting highprofile attention to the cause. Last year, Michigan Democrat Carl Levin introduced a transparency bill to the U.S. Senate, and in March, Gooch was awarded the $1 million TED Prize. She pledged to use the money to create an online registry that will include ownership information on companies around the world. The plan is ambitious. Gooch says that’s the point.

Between a yoga studio and a pool hall in downtown San Jose sits a small office where Dan Harden quietly crafts some of the world’s smartest products. Harden, a Frog Design veteran who has collaborated with Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, has made his 36-person shop the go-to firm behind such landmark creations as Nike’s FuelBand and Google’s Chromecast device. Here’s how it shaped 2013’s award-winning Livescribe 3 Smartpen, which links with an iPhone or iPad to digitize handwritten notes.

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

1

Hide the tech.

“Livescribe came to us with a mess: a circuit board with a battery, an optical component, a pen cartridge, a Bluetooth antenna with a USB connector for recharging.

They said, ‘We also want a nub on the end for touchscreen [interactions],’ says Harden. “We got rid of the display and removed evidence of a battery or circuit board.

We didn’t want to overburden the end user with a lot of techno-design.”

2

Appeal to emotion.

“There’s a certain joy from writing with a pen.

It’s a direct extension of your cerebral cortex.

The narrative we wanted to create was, ‘Hey, I’m just a pen—pick me up.’ ” 3

Study the lineage.

“We wanted it to have that premium feel, so we highlighted the end with a chrome tip, as almost a reference to quill pens.”

40 Thor Fridriksson F ounder, CEO, Plain Vanilla Game s FOR . . . CAN YOU GUESS?

When it came out last fall, the addictive trivia game QuizUp surpassed Draw Something as the fastest-growing app in history. It has since garnered more than 12.5 million downloads and attracted $22 million in funding. But creator Thor Fridriksson’s path to stardom was not as simple as the app’s celebrated design.

MCP 100

F R I D R I KS S O N ’ S S T O RY, Q U I Z U P - S T Y L E 1

PRELUDE

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B E F O R E F O U N D I N G P L A I N VA N I L L A G A M E S , T H E I C E L A N D I C ENTREPRENEUR WORKED AS:

THE CEO OF A HYDROELECTRIC POWER C O M PA N Y

A PIZZA CHEF

A TV-NEWS REPORTER

LAUNCH

F R I D R I K S S O N S TA RT E D P L A I N VA N I L L A I N 2 0 1 0 A N D D O V E I N T O T H E I O S M A R K E T W I T H A N E D U C AT I O N A L G A M E C A L L E D :

A PIG FA R M E R

THE MOOGIES

THE C O WA B U N G A S

THE SUGARCUBES

YO GABBA GABBA

BREAKTHROUGH

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W H E N H E H I T O N T H E I D E A F O R W H AT W O U L D B E C O M E Q U I Z U P, H E S C R I B B L E D I T D O W N O N :

A 500-KRONUR NOTE

A NAPKIN

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AN OVERDUE ELECTRIC BILL

I N S P I R AT I O N

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W H AT D O E S F R I D R I K S S O N T H I N K I S A N U N D E R A P P R E C I AT E D S O U R C E O F C R E AT I V E E N E R GY ?

BEER

EXERCISE

HIS HAND

BEAUTIFUL VIEWS

2X BO NU

LAST ROUND

S!

F R I D R I K S S O N S AY S H E D O E S T H E B E S T O N Q U I Z U P C AT E G O R I E S “ G A M E O F T H R O N E S ” A N D :

PETS

PHYSICS

“THE BIG LEBOWSKI”

ANCIENT ROME

NAME THE FLAG

THE ANSWERS

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TV reporter. After Vodafone bought his broadband–ISP startup, Hive, in 2007, he wanted to try something new, so he got a job as a journalist. But it wasn’t for him. “I wanted to be the news instead of reporting it,” he says.

The Moogies. It was a total flop. “I was absolutely certain it was such a beautiful, polished title that it would be a best seller instantly,” he says.

“I was naive.”

The electric bill. Fridriksson sketched out the idea in just one evening.

“I wanted a platform where people could meet others combined with a quiz game,” he says. Today, that bill is framed in his Reykjavík, Iceland, office.

Beautiful views. “I’m very anal about this,” he says. “When I was searching for new office space in Reykjavík, we had to have the best view. It has a profound effect on how your brain works.”

Name the Flag. “It’s a very popular topic, actually,” says Fridriksson. “There are currently 321 levels, so more than 20,000 games have been played—which is just crazy.”

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MCP 100

Ginger.io’s Anmol Madan, in San Francisco, wants to turn your smartphone into a diagnostic tool.

Health Care’s Big-Data Boosters FOR SPLICING INFORMATION WITH QUALITY MEDICAL CARE

41. JOEL DUDLEY

4 2 . L I N D A AV E Y

43. ANMOL MADAN

44. CHASE ADAM

Joel Dudley’s research uses network modeling to predict which cancer therapies could be most effective based on the unique molecular pattern of tumors.

Curious Inc. provides an online forum for people to share their personal health data and interpret it collectively.

The Ginger.io app collects health data via periodic surveys and sensors on your smartphone. It shares the results with your doctor, who can intervene before bad habits become harmful.

Watsi is a crowdfunding platform that allows users to donate directly to patients seeking medical treatment in the developing world.

“Creativity can help break down the artificial barriers that we have in medicine. We see medical specialties as being very different and very disconnected from each other, but it’s all connected.”

“We’re all creative, and I think we can harness this creativity by listening to patients more. The traditional model of research was to cut off any conversation or engagement with the patients, but we need to get directly involved and have an ongoing conversation.”

“It’s not just the fact that the data exists that’s interesting. It’s also the fact that now you can start to play with data in a way that we were never able to before.

That’s where a creative approach is useful, to look at data in different ways.”

“With health care, creativity is a bit of a touchy subject. The biggest question is, Where and how can we be creative? It’s finding these high-benefit, low-risk areas.”

“The health field needs more design thinkers.

We need people thinking about problems, potential technological and medical solutions, and how to turn those things into better products for health care.”

“Much of what’s broken in our system at a fundamental level comes from the education process.

If we can have a little more of a cross-pollination, that would open the education process to more ideas and creativity.”

“You have a lot of people coming into the field— computer scientists and statisticians, and also venture capitalists and software and social companies. It’s going to cause the system to change from within.”

“I hope there will be more people putting thought into the user experience in health care. The health field in the United States is very business-to-business heavy, and as a result the consumer space has been slow to evolve.”

W H AT ’ S A CHALLENGE T H AT Y O U OFTEN COME ACROSS?

“People always want to zero in on one small aspect of human physiology to either understand or treat disease. But humans are complex adaptive systems with billions of things interacting inside of us at multiple levels.”

“Some people are questioning what opening up these cans of worms means for privacy. Those are worthy conversations.

But at the same time, if they are impeding progress, that’s where I get frustrated.”

“The biggest questions are, You have the data—so what? What can you predict from it? How can you act on it? Data for the sake of data is not great. So how do you make it actionable by an MD or a nurse?”

“Juxtaposing long-term vision and day-to-day execution. For instance, I believe that one day, everyone will have access to a basic level of health care. But what I’m not as sure of is the exact path to getting there.”

W H AT C A N B E T T E R D ATA O R B I G D ATA TEACH US ABOUT H E A LT H T H AT WE DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE?

“We’ve never had to deal with the idea that we can gather far more data than we understand. We have ideas about how biology works, but we have to be willing to look at those again and potentially throw them away.”

“We’re starting to see companies open up access to data. The more we have, the more we’re going to start to learn. The question is, How do we probe our bodies in interesting ways and quantify what’s going on?”

“Instead of sampling [what’s going on in the world] every six months, you can now sample once every five minutes, and sample thousands of variables.”

“People are going to require more transparency in their lives, and especially in health care. That’s fundamentally going to change. The more information you have, the better decisions you can make.”

Biomedic al infor mat icist, I c a h n S c h o o l of M e d i c in e at Mount Sinai

W H AT D O E S HE/SHE DO?

HOW CAN A C R E AT I V E APPROACH IMPROVE T H E H E A LT H CARE FIELD?

W H AT S K I L L OR MIND-SET COULD THE H E A LT H C A R E WORLD USE MORE OF?

Photograph by Noel Spirandelli

C of o u n d e r, C u r i o u s I n c .; c of o u n d e r, 2 3 a n d M e

C of o u n d e r, C E O, d at a s cient ist, Ginger.io

C of o u n d e r, C E O, Wat s i

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Vikram Vora

C of o u n d e r, C E O, M yd e n t i s t

Chef- re staurateur

FOR BRINGING QUALITY DENTAL CARE TO INDIA’S WORKING CLASS

When Vikram Vora was walking clinic to clinic selling dental equipment in the late 2000s, every customer was a disgruntled customer. “The waiting times were too long, pricing was not transparent, and materials were substandard,” he says. Vora launched Mydentist in Mumbai in 2010, basing it on the café model: clear, standard rates for every treatment (e.g., a root canal always costs 2,500 rupees—about $40), fixed waiting times, and quality materials. Profits would come through efficient sourcing and scale.

The three-year-old chain now has 72 clinics and last year alone treated 150,000 patients, most from India’s teeming working class—domestic helpers, cab drivers, and roadside vendors. “It was a segment that was underserved, people who waited for their teeth to fall out as they could not afford pricey dental treatments,” says Vora, 34, an engineer by training.

The outlets are situated around Mumbai’s bustling commuter-train stations, but treatments are site-independent. “A dental implant procedure started at one location can be seamlessly continued at another,” he says.

“No one else has done this in dentistry anywhere in the world.” The chain employs 280 fulltime dentists and 120 consultants, plus 280 dental assistants— all young adults from working-class families, all trained by the company.

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April Bloomfield

FOR FOLLOWING HER GUT

In New York, April Bloomfield has elevated pub grub (the Spotted Pig and the Breslin) and reimagined the oyster bar (John Dory). Last fall, with partner Ken Friedman, she revived a century-old institution in San Francisco, the Tosca Café. Her rustic dishes tend to have idiosyncratic origins.

Sometimes she’ll pour a cup of tea, pile cookbooks on the bed, and let hunger guide her creativity. Next up: a revamp of the Lusty Lady, a onetime strip club near Tosca; a second cookbook; and, possibly, a return to her U.K. homeland. “We have eyeballs in London,” she says.

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Deborah Lloyd

C hief c re at i v e of f ic e r, Kate Spade FOR REMAKING A BRAND—AND RESTRUCTURING A CULTURE

46 Emil Michael S V P of busine s s, Uber FOR GIVING “STUNT DRIVING” A WHOLE NEW MEANING

Love or hate Uber, you have to admit that the car service got your attention with its on-demand kittens, Christmas trees, skywriting, mariachi bands, and Vegas road trips. You can thank Emil Michael for that. Though kittens have been by far the most popular gambit, receiving about 500,000 requests in three cities, Michael admits it wasn’t his first choice (he’s allergic). These publicity stunts are only a small part of his job, however. He has also brokered deals with Toyota and GM to get Uber drivers preferential rates on new cars—another effort to get more drivers on the road. “In my six months here,” Michael says, “there hasn’t been a nanosecond that I have been bored.”

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

No matter how many directions the Kate Spade label goes in—readyto-wear, jewelry, the lower-priced Saturday label, swimwear, and its ubiquitous handbags— it always comes back to its core product: the story, with the Kate Spade “girl” as the heroine. To sell it, Deborah Lloyd has ensured that design and marketing work as one— and shoppers are buying.

Per-square-foot sales have risen for 14 straight quarters. It’s an unabashedly commercial approach, unusual in fashion. “We’ve always gone our own way,” Lloyd says simply. “That’s our girl.”

Illustration by Aaron Meshon

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Deena Varshavskaya

C E O, Wan e l o FOR BEING ANY RETAILER’S SOCIAL SOLUTION

“What we’re building is parallel to Twitter and Instagram, but for shopping,” says Deena Varshavskaya, a Russianborn web designer who created Wanelo as a side project in 2010. The site allows users to create collections and purchase products from more than 300,000 online stores.

It boasts more than 11 million customers, and they’re buying lots of stuff: Wanelo referrals generate more revenue at retailers such as clothing chain Wet Seal than either Twitter or Pinterest. “The meaning of a store is changing,” says Varshavskaya.

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Li Na

Te nnis player FOR KEEPING THE BALL IN HER COURT

To young athletes, Chinese tennis sensation Li Na is an inspiration: She broke away from her government’s restrictive sports machine—which trains athletes and demands most of their earnings—in 2008, to work with better coaches abroad. She’s since won two Majors, most recently at the 2014 Australia Open. But to Li’s peers, she’s a model of barrier-breaking acumen— the only Nike-sponsored athlete ever permitted to wear patches from other sponsors on her Nike gear. “It was always important for me to be a strong person both on and off the court,” Li says.

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Ty Ahmad-Taylor

V P of S m ar t T V s e r v ic e s, S am s un g

Women flock to Guy’s studio for gowns that make them feel like themselves.

FOR DRAWING YOUR EYES BACK TO THE TV

Television manufacturers don’t really care what you watch on your TV, as long as that screen is the No. 1 entertainment device in your home. That’s why Ty Ahmad-Taylor and his team are constantly asking themselves, How do we provide the best experience on a TV screen so you don’t have to look down? While his hardware colleagues focus on Samsung’s curved, ultra–HD screens, Ahmad-Taylor’s Social TV app mines the stream of closedcaptioning data embedded in all TV programs and uses that to search social networks like Twitter and Facebook to tap into a show’s real-time zeitgeist. “We have one approach for sports, one for entertainment, and one for news,” AhmadTaylor says. “They’re tailored to pull out the best results in those particular categories,” which are then displayed to the right of the main program’s image. When a celebrity’s name is hilariously mispronounced during an awards show, for example, you won’t have to look down at your phone, even if it’s a Samsung, to gauge the reaction. Only available in the U.S. right now, Social TV was launched in late 2013 and will be rolled out to other parts of the world if it catches on (and early metrics are promising, says a spokesman). This pacesetting foray into enhanced TV viewing is one way Samsung plans to maintain its advantage—26% global market share—over rivals such as LG and Sony.

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

52 Molly Guy

Cofounder, cre at i ve director, S tone F ox Bride FOR TAKING THE STUFFING OUT OF THE BRIDAL INDUSTRY

More Janis Joplin than Jackie O, Stone Fox Bride breaks from the rest of the $50 billion wedding industry, which is rife with price-gouging and homogeneous designs. Molly Guy’s New York showroom is a haven for artistic, professional women in pursuit of beautiful but breathable gowns, all curated by the founder. “They want structure but also want to feel really cool,” she says. “That’s what we do—provide that feeling. You still feel like you. You’re not an alien.” Today, Stone Fox Bride books 250 appointments a month in the spring, and has a cult following on Instagram. Her fan base isn’t just the betrothed: Guy’s brand is so popular, later this year she will launch an in-house line of everyday apparel.

Photograph by Samantha Casolari

MCP 100

MCP 100

53 Ma Yansong

A B O U T T H AT UNIQUE HOTEL “I see this kind of tunnel in the movies, when people time-travel. You look in this tunnel and see the sky and water on the horizon,” Ma says.

F ounder, M A D A rchitects FOR BUILDING A BRIDGE TO NATURE “Modern buildings,” says Ma Yansong, one of China’s first young breakout architects, “have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they’re isolated from people.” His, on the other hand, invite and intrigue. They curve, stretch, and shimmer, somehow looking both natural and otherworldly. Ma attributes this to a central tenet of Chinese architecture, one that remains a defining characteristic of his work: connecting

with nature. His latest, the Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort, which opened last year, is an instant Chinese landmark that literally rises out of Taiku Lake and produces—with 19,300 programmable LEDs—a nightly light show that reflects off the water. Following wins at international competitions, he’s now expanding globally: This year, he’s designing an office building in Beverly Hills, California—his first in the U.S.

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Glass: It’s the same superclear glass used in Apple Stores. “I wanted it to look transparent.”

Curves: The floor-toceiling exterior glass in each room is flat, for optimal views (1). Ma creates the hotel’s arching shape by curving the balcony railings and balcony glass.

Height: Instead of one row of exterior LED lights on each floor, Ma created two rows (2), making it difficult, from a distance, to determine the building’s height (332 feet) and number of floors (27).

Shape: The client initially wanted one tower, but Ma pushed for two that connect at the top. “You can’t put a box building in this beautiful landscape,” he says. The curves at the bottom hint that the building continues in an unbroken oval beneath the lake. “That’s what’s interesting about the water. It’s mysterious.”

Rooms: All 282 guest rooms face out, toward the lake or the land.

Bridge: A bridge, which leads over a canal to the hotel entrance, is curved—mimicking the building itself. “You experience this curve before you’re inside,” he says.

Top floor: The highest level is an enormous banquet room spanning both towers (3). The width of the building narrows, as if it’s pointing to the sky.

Lower level: The lowerlevel spa, beneath the lobby, is underwater.

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Gerry Graf

F o und e r, C C O, B ar ton F. Graf 9000 FOR SUMMONING A CONSTRUCTIVE HURRICANE

Gerry Graf has long been known for TV ads that make you laugh—just Google “Skittles beard.”

But recently he proved he can make people think too. In 2013, Graf and his agency came up with an idea to raise awareness for climate-change policy.

They teamed with the organization 350 Action to launch Climate Name Change, which used social media to petition the

“AS SOON AS THEY SAID THE FIRST SENTENCE, YOU KNEW IT WAS SOMETHING WE WOULD WANT TO DO.” World Meteorological Organization to name hurricanes after climatechange deniers. Fake news clips showed Hurricane Marco Rubio pounding the eastern seaboard, for example—and the campaign went viral. “It was just one of those times when the guys came into my office, and as soon as they said the first sentence, you knew it was something we would want to do,” says Graf. “The momentum was just fantastic.”

Illustration by Bryan Christie

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MCP 100

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Meredith Perry F ounder, uB e am

FOR INVENTING A NEW WAY TO UNPLUG

What if you never had to plug in your cell phone or laptop again?

That’s the promise of uBeam, which charges electronics using sound waves rather than wall sockets. Though Meredith Perry isn’t saying when it might be available or how much it would cost, she has raised $1.7 million from the likes of Marissa Mayer, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz to develop the product.

Fast Company: When did you decide to work on this?

Perry: I was standing in my room at the University of Pennsylvania, holding my laptop charger, and it occurred to me that, Hang on, why am I using this cord to charge my wireless laptop? It was 2011, and I didn’t understand how we could be using something so archaic.

How did you hit on the idea to use ultrasound?

MP: I started looking into types of technology that harnessed ambient energy, and I stumbled across piezoelectric [material], and I thought, If this can harness vibration, how do I induce vibration over the air? Then I realized that sound is vibration over the air.

It was a natural “aha.”

How did experts react to your idea?

MP: They gave me excuses about why it would be impossible. That was frustrating, but it taught me to be skeptical of everything, and that allows you to push forward with ideas that others might deem impossible.

Photograph by Daniel Stier

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Michael Phillips Moskowitz

Chief c urator, eB ay

Catherine Hoke

F o und e r, C E O, Def y Ve nt ure s

FOR SPOTLIGHTING THE COOLEST STUFF AT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST YARD SALE

FOR TURNING ONETIME FELONS INTO ENTREPRENEURS

Anyone with an eBay login has access to Michael Phillips Moskowitz and his band of curators, who sift through millions of items and group their favorites into collections such as “Retro Redux” or “The Natural World.” To him, they’re searching for “soul.” “We want to use the power of story to expand people’s thinking and inform behavior,” says Moskowitz, who joined the company after his Bureau of Trade site was acquired by eBay last fall. “Story is the thing that triggers our lizard brain. It’s about memorable, meaningful, measurable experiences, not just merchandise.”

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Naveen Tewari

F o u n d e r, C E O, I n M o b i FOR SENDING THE RIGHT AD AT THE RIGHT TIME, AROUND THE GLOBE

“We are a product company out of India, a country known for its technology services,” says Naveen Tewari of InMobi, which makes and distributes ads for brands such as Ben & Jerry’s and Kia, and is second only to Google in the world’s mobile-ad market. Its unique platform serves ads to its network of 759 million active monthly users based on external feeds like location, weather, and news.

So the next time you get an ad for a cold drink on an exceptionally hot day, you may have Tewari to thank for it.

THE PROBLEM: “They say that America is the land of second chances, but it’s really not. Once you have an X on your back, you almost have no opportunities,” says Catherine Hoke. “Of people who are rearrested in America, 89% of them are unemployed at the time of their arrest.”

THE EPIPHANY: According to company legend, Hoke, a former venture capitalist, had a revelation while touring Texas prisons in 2004. Drug and crime rings are organized in much the same way as major corporations— why not put those skills to good, legal use?

THE EXECUTION: Hoke started with an entrepreneurship program in the Texas prison system; then, in 2010, after moving to New York, she founded Defy Ventures.

The six-month program teaches former inmates entrepreneurship basics that participants can then use to enter business-plan competitions. After that, a three-month incubator helps graduates turn their plans into reality.

THE RESULT: Since its launch, Defy Ventures has produced 115 graduates, 71 of whom have launched their own companies. Working outside the prison system has allowed Hoke to adopt a blended-learning, onlineoffline model to “make the program more scalable, and therefore have a bigger impact,” she says. What’s next? Taking Defy national.

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Andy Dunn

F o u n d e r, C E O, B o n o b o s FOR BUILDING A RETAIL EMPIRE ONE LEG AT A TIME

Andy Dunn is the master of men’s pants: His directorder apparel company, Bonobos, has seen yearover-year sales double for five years straight and counts more than 250,000 customers in 93 countries. “Some people refer to their pants as their Bonobos,” Dunn says. “That’s a great moment in the history of a brand”—one that he has started to build on.

The company entered the women’s market this year with a new label, Ayr. Working with brand director Maggie Winter, Dunn found that Bonobos’s digitally driven structure allowed it to offer what others in the competitive arena of women’s retail struggle with: varied inseam lengths, lower prices, and extraordinary customer service. In its first four weeks, Ayr racked up the same amount in sales that it took Bonobos 11 months to achieve. Through his venture firm, Red Swan, Dunn is now exploring how to reinvent the online department store—a category that Amazon currently dominates—by gathering more directorder brands under one umbrella. “Brands can go direct to consumer, own the relationship, and have a conversational presence in their lives,” Dunn says. “That’s going to change the power dynamics in retail.”

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Jehane Noujaim Dire ctor, T h e S qu are FOR CAPTURING THE MOMENT

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim wanted to document Egypt’s 2011 uprising but was unable to bring professional videographers or equipment into her home country. So she improvised—in effect, becoming a revolution all her own. She used cheap DSLR cameras and a crew of locals whom she met in Tahrir Square to capture the coup that ousted a president. To finance the project, she raised funding on Kickstarter and

“IT’S ABOUT THE STRUGGLE FOR CHANGE. THAT’S AN ISSUE THAT RESONATES IN SQUARES AROUND THE WORLD.” through grants, then signed a distribution deal with Netflix. And when Egyptian censors stalled on the release of her film, Noujaim simply posted a free Arab-language version on YouTube. The movie itself, a heartbreaking, hopeful meditation on the Arab Spring, was nominated for an Oscar. “It’s about the struggle for change,” says Noujaim. “That’s an issue that resonates in squares around the world.”

FASTCOMPANY.COM JUNE 2014

61 Carl Hart

Neuro s cient ist, Columbia Universit y FOR ADVANCING THE SCIENCE OF ADDICTION

Much of the conventional wisdom about addiction is wrong, according to Carl Hart. His research suggests that drug abuse might be the result of environmental factors rather than, as many people believe, brain chemistry or a lack of impulse control. In 2012, he published a study showing that given the choice between a hit of meth and $20, even meth addicts will almost always take the money—suggesting their brains aren’t as hopelessly wired to crave drugs as one might expect.

He also believes that our society applies the term addiction far too broadly. This past March, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder described a mounting heroin crisis, Hart vehemently disagreed, suggesting that the government’s methods for counting heroin addicts are flawed. And his recent memoir, High Price, draws on his experience growing up in a rough Miami neighborhood to examine the links between what he says is incorrect drug science and policies that damage underprivileged communities. “I would go to talks and listen to scientists characterize drug addicts or drug takers,” he says, “and it just seemed inconsistent with what I had seen growing up—and what I had seen in the laboratory.”

Photograph by Ryan Pfluger

MCP 100

Hart’s work in neurology and public health is challenging mainstream ideas about addiction.

MCP 100

62 Anya Fernald

MEREDITH PERRY

Cofounder, CEO, Belcampo FOR SHEPHERDING MEAT PRODUCTION AT EVERY STAGE

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In the sustainable-food world, few people dream bigger than Anya Fernald: Her three-year-old operation raises, slaughters, processes, butchers, and sells 90,000 pounds of meat from 12 species annually. She learned that “vertical integration is a part of high-quality food” while studying cheese making in Europe. “If I spend all of my energy making a beautiful cheese,” she says, “and the truck transporting it is warm, it won’t taste good.” Her company started with 8,000 acres of California land and a single butcher shop; it now has more than 20,000 acres, and by the end of 2014 will have opened six shops across the state. “I want to help people see meat as a new luxury,” she says. This is her process:

1. Her “low-stress animal handling” intervenes minimally in animals’ natural behavior.

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2. The farm grows grass, grains, and beans for the animals to graze on.

3. Belcampo’s processing facility features humane holding pens designed by Temple Grandin.

4. Processing is done by hand, and packages are marked to trace the meat back to the animal.

5. Belcampo compares its butchers to bartenders, with whom customers can have a personal bond.

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MCP 100

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Stacy O’Connor

Director of product de sign, H ot W h e e l s ( M at t e l ) FOR TURNING RUBBER BANDS AND CARDBOARD INTO HIGH-OCTANE FUN

Stacy O’Connor leads a team of creatives at Hot Wheels who scrape together whimsical racetracks—in which diecast cars might fly past dinosaurs only to slamdunk through a basketball hoop—from little more than cardboard, tape, and glorified rubber bands. These are prototypes, of course, though none of their final Hot Wheels products rely too heavily on high-tech electronics anyway. Recent hits include a looping track that sticks to walls with no residue and a pinball machine that you play with cars. For O’Connor, inspiration comes from real wheels: On weekends, she drives her 475-horsepower, turbocharged Mustang up to Hells Kitchen—an infamous motorcycle bar in Lake Elsinore, California (where she’s been known to pick a fight on the pavement)—keeping her fists on the wheel as she chases down Harleys and crotch rockets on Ortega Highway. “There’s nothing like seeing the guy behind the pack swing his head around because he hears something roar behind him,” she says.

Even a moment like that carries a business lesson to her: O’Connor knows not to approach execs at Mattel with a new project until it has an irresistible momentum. “If we show something too early and no one gets it, it gets what we call ‘the stink’ on it,” she says. Her job is to ensure the smell of burning rubber instead.

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Adam Fleischman

F o under, chair man, Um ami Re staurant Group; c of o u n d e r, A d Van t a g e R e staurant P ar t n e r s FOR BEEFING UP THE AMERICAN PALATE

Adam Fleischman’s fastgrowing Umami Burger chain—launched five years ago with a single outlet in L.A.—has expanded to 22 restaurants in California, New York, and Florida.

Fleischman hopes to bring that number up to 100 in the next five years, and then take the business international. Judging from reaction in New York—where multihour lines were reported when an Umami Burger opened last year— there’s plenty of interest in Fleischman’s flavorpacked reimagining of the hamburger, which New York magazine called “superrich and weirdly meaty,” promising that it “lives up to the hype.” Among the restaurateur’s other forward-looking culinary endeavors are the Neapolitan pizza chain 800 Degrees, the “global modernist BBQ” spot Roadhouse L.A. at the Hollywood Improv, and ChocoChicken, a fastcasual concept devoted to, yes, chocolate-tinged fried chicken. “I’m able to avoid existing preconceptions,” says Fleischman, who previously worked in finance and owned a couple of wine bars. “I just do it from an amateur’s perspective, and it usually works out really well.”

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Grace Helbig S tar, i t s Grac e FOR CALLING (AND FILMING) HER OWN SHOTS IN THE ONLINE VIDEO ECONOMY

Grace Helbig’s YouTube series, itsGrace, a comedic one-woman talk-show confessional, has attracted 1.7 million subscribers since launching in January. For context, that’s halfway to Jimmy Kimmel’s 4 million, without a single celebrity guest.

Fast Company: How did you start vlogging?

Helbig: I was auditioning for TV and film and doing sketch and improv comedy.

YouTube happened by happy accident. It was just a hobby that became a career.

You’d built a huge following at MyDamnChannel.

Then you left late last year. Why? GH: It was a scary transition. MyDamnChannel was so helpful. But having ownership of my own content was valuable to me, so I took a risk to see if people would follow me to my own platform. And they did.

You interact with your fans every day. Who is your audience?

GH: It’s young females, ages 13 to 30. They’re silly and awkward and supersmart. Looking directly into the lens, in my own home, you learn that media is personal. My brand is that I’m the girl who feels like your awkward older sister—who doesn’t know what she’s doing but is

trying to help you figure it out while she does too.

What’s the hardest part of interacting directly with fans?

GH: That they are smart.

They can see your bullshit, and they will call you out on it. You can’t pretend to be perfect.

You starred in the comedy Camp Takota, which came out last February— and you sold it directly to your fans. Were they buying?

GH: It was such a fun, weird, complete experiment to see if we could cross over from YouTube videos to more traditional media with digital distribution. We shot it in three weeks, released it less than a year later, and broke even on our budget in four days.

What’s the future of online video?

GH: I have no fucking clue.

Rather than try to find out the trajectory of new media, I’m just trying to make the most intelligent shart jokes I can.

Photograph by Dan Monick

65 Helbig dishes directly with young female fans on her YouTube show, itsGrace.

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Kelly Schoeffel

C o dire ctor of st rate g y, 7 2and S unny

Group digital of f ic e r, Te s c o

FOR BRINGING BRANDS TO MF’ING LIFE

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Kathryn Hunt Paleo - oncologist FOR DIGGING INTO THE HISTORY OF CANCER

“The year I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer—which is now in remission—I’d just gotten back from an expedition to Egypt, where I was looking at bones. There were quite a few individuals who had evidence of a sort of bone disease, but because of my diagnosis, I started to think about it on another level. There are all of these subtle references to cancer in ancient literature. Why aren’t we seeing it in the bones?

“There wasn’t a lot of evidence because people didn’t know what to look for. It lit my fire. A few years ago, a few colleagues and I put together the Paleo-oncology Research Organization, and I’ve collected more than 230 cases of evidence of cancer in ancient societies. Now we’re making an open-source database with interactive maps and forums where researchers can discuss and share information. In April, we brought 10 of them together for the first time to strategize.

“Our next step will be getting funding to look at individuals who might have had cancer—doing a radiological analysis and potentially a DNA analysis. If we can trace the global history of cancer, we might be able to identify patterns. Patterns don’t necessarily tell you facts, but they do indicate areas to focus on.”

Photograph by Alexis Facca

She may hold a PhD from Harvard, but her claim to fame is making foulmouthed fictional sports hero Kenny Powers into K-Swiss’s MFCEO. Kelly Schoeffel also connected Samsung with Jay Z to give away a million copies of Magna Carta Holy Grail.

“That’s when things are really fun, when you can get your brand out in culture and give people something exciting,” she says. For Target, Schoeffel led a back-to-school Instagram campaign that boosted traffic by 50% and sales by 12%. Oh, and she also planted kale in her L.A. office’s garden.

It’s the Magna Carta Holy Grail of vegetables.

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Michael Comish

Monica Rogati

V P of d at a s c i e n c e , J a w b o n e FOR USING DATA TO MAKE US HEALTHIER

Jawbone’s Up fitness trackers have taught Monica Rogati a ton about how we sleep. Women, for example, log an average of 20 more minutes per night than men; men are 19% more likely to browse the web after 5 p.m., which results in 37 minutes less sound sleep. Now Rogati and her team are channeling that info into new products.

“It’s about anticipating choices people are going to make,” she says. Up’s “Today I Will” feature, for example, challenges users based on their data—to put down that latte, say, or go to sleep by a certain time. It’s the next level of self-improvement, finally with instant data results.

FOR TURNING A RETAIL GIANT INTO A DIGITAL DYNAMO

Ever since Tesco acquired his video-on-demand company, Blinkbox, in 2011, Michael Comish has led Tesco’s push into digital entertainment, buying streaming music and e-book startups while finding clever ways to integrate digital goods into the United Kingdom’s largest supermarket chain. “We want to be the world’s first successful multichannel retailer,” Comish says. “Entertainment is where you fight that battle, because you’re tapping into something most people are passionate about.”

That vision is enabled by what he describes as “amazing data” from Tesco’s 17 million Clubcard users; Comish is funneling all that insight into Blinkbox, now the company’s digitalentertainment unit, to bundle offers with shoppers’ favorites—dinner from Tesco’s shelves and a streaming movie from Blinkbox as a discounted date-night package. It is offering new releases sooner than Netflix—and 10 times more of them, Comish says. (That’s because, as a subscription service, Netflix has to wait longer to get those from studios. Blinkbox is just rent or buy.)

Last year, Blinkbox’s TV and movie sales jumped 245%. Plenty of people are watching those movies on the Hudl, Tesco’s low-cost tablet—which comes preloaded, of course, with Blinkbox apps. The retailer has sold more than 500,000 so far, a faster start than the iPad and other bigname tablets.

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MCP 100 TO SEE MORE IMAGES OF THE DESIGN ACADEMY, GO TO FASTCOMPANY.COM OR DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE ON YOUR IPAD.

70 D’Wayne Edwards F ounder, Pensole F oot wear De sign Academy FOR TEACHING FUTURE SHOE DESIGNERS TO WALK THE WALK

Edwards at the Portland academy, teaching a class called “The Sole of Oregon,” offered only to local designers and students

THE PROBLEM: The $50 billion sneaker industry had no pipeline to bring in young, talented footwear designers.

THE EPIPHANY: “When I was design director on [Nike’s] Jordan Brand in 2001, I wasn’t happy with what I saw in résumés and portfolios,” D’Wayne Edwards says. So he challenged his company. “I said, ‘You’re telling these kids who spend billions on your product that they can run, jump, and dunk.

But what about changing the conversation to say they can design the product they’re purchasing?’ ” THE EXECUTION: For a few years, he mentored promising designers, and in 2008, he started the Future Sole competition for high schoolers. During a sabbatical in 2010, Edwards used his own money to fly 40 kids to the University of Oregon for a two-week program.

That has since evolved into Pensole, an independent school with its own Portland facility that hosts intense classes that run one to four weeks.

“It’s a job, man,” Edwards says about the program.

“I put the students through everything: long hours, tight deadlines— the parts they don’t tell you about in school.”

THE RESULT: Via partnerships with Nike, Parsons, MIT, and others, more than 60 Pensole alumni have gone on to jobs at footwear companies. This May, Edwards launched the World Sneaker Championship, a singleelimination tournament bringing 21 students from eight regions to find the best sneaker designers in the world.

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Photographs by John Francis Peters

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Fred Gelli

F o un d e r, Tát il D e sign FOR LETTING NATURE BE HIS GUIDE

The drop, says Brazilian designer Fred Gelli, is the “minimal unit of liquid in nature, with the best relationship between volume and surface.” So last year, when his design firm, Tátil, helped create sustainable packaging for Natura’s new Sou line of hair and skin-care products, he delivered a colorful, drop-shaped pouch that allows users to extract products until the very last . . . you guessed it. To help further mesh nature and business, Gelli counts a biologist among his team and teaches a college course on biomimicry.

He’s even helped launch Pipa, Brazil’s first startup accelerator. Naturally.

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Izzie Lerer

F o u n d e r, T h e D o d o FOR POUNCING ON AN OPPORTUNITY

Curl’s lollipops are crafted out of fresh fruit.

71 Jami Curl F ounder, Quin FOR OFFERING CANDY JUNKIES A CLEAN HIGH

Photograph by Hannah Whitaker

Imagine a Tootsie Roll. Now imagine a better Tootsie Roll—a lovingly crafted little chocolate log made with natural, local ingredients. Jami Curl’s Portland, Oregon, candy store specializes in modern riffs on American classics, such as gumdrops and Starburst, and boutique sweets, like lollipops made with fresh-fruit purees and marshmallows that you can buy by the inch. “We’re not trying to go with crazy flavors,” Curl says. “It’s pullingat-your-heartstrings, nostalgia-type food that taps into memories—but better.”

Cat videos remain the Internet’s most powerful known click bait, but Izzie Lerer wanted to reach viewers eager to “take it a step further,” she says, who “are interested in the animal-welfare movement.” Launched in January, the Dodo mixes silly content with serious stories about animal-rights issues. “The readership is there,” says Lerer (daughter of BuzzFeed chairman and VC star Ken Lerer), who’s working on a PhD in philosophy at Columbia with a focus on animalhuman interaction.

Apparently so: The site quickly hit more than 1 million uniques a month.

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“It is possible to see an end to extreme poverty in our lifetime,” says Global Poverty Project founder Evans. “We can do this.”

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Hugh Evans F ounder, Global P over t y Project

FOR TURNING MUSIC LOVERS INTO ACTIVISTS

Hugh Evans had no idea what he was getting into when he boarded the plane. He was 14 years old, and he was leaving his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, to spend several weeks doing community service in Manila, the sprawling, poverty-ridden Philippine capital.

As part of the service program, Evans, already a do-gooder at heart, spent a night with Sonny Boy, a young man who belonged to a community of scavengers living in a massive garbage dump called Smokey Mountain, so-named for the noxious gases rising from the festering waste piles. After cooking and eating dinner in Sonny Boy’s shanty, they turned in. “Cockroaches were crawling all over us,” Evans recalls. “The smell of rubbish was all around.”

As Evans failed to sleep, he says, “I realized it was pure chance that I was born where I was born and he was born where he was born.”

A decade later, in 2008—after volunteering in India with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for not-for-profits—Evans founded the Global Poverty Project (GPP), an insanely optimistic effort to help the world’s needy. It’s an innovative cocktail of entertainment, social media, and gamification, and has rallied millions of people worldwide, including celebrity supporters like Ben Affleck and Denmark’s Crown Princess Mary, and an array of corporate backers such as Hewlett-Packard and FedEx. “It is possible for us to see an end to extreme poverty in our lifetime,” he says. “We can do this.”

Photograph by Joseph Michael Lopez

Evans, 31, the son of a geologist and a jeweler, is not interested in awareness campaigns or special days that do little more than remind us yet again that poor people exist. “People don’t need to become more aware of poverty—they need to know how to end it,” says Evans, who in 2004 was named Young Australian of the Year for his antipoverty activism. “If I create a thunderclap on World Such-and-Such Day, that’s great, but what do you then expect us to do? The majority of campaigns, they don’t ask for anything.”

Slightly dorky and irrepressibly earnest, Evans will gladly humble himself to win someone’s ear, attention, and backing. In 2007, he met the actor Hugh Jackman at a cocktail party in Canberra, Australia. “I thought he was one of the waiting staff, he was so young,” Jackman recalls. When Evans approached, Jackman asked for a drink. “So I brought him a drink,” says Evans, who has a master’s in international relations from Cambridge. He graciously served it with an extended discourse on the problem of poverty.

Jackman was captivated. “I spent two hours with him and realized he was not only a hell of a lot smarter than me but probably the smartest guy in the room,” the actor says. “Every idea I’d had of how to use my profile to help make the planet a better place was trumped by his vision, his passion, and his dedication.”

Today, Jackman serves as ambassador for Live Below the Line, an ongoing GPP program that encourages participants to try to live on less than $1.50 a day—the extreme-poverty line—as 1.2 billion people around the world still do. (GPP doesn’t trot out celebrity spokespeople and photograph them hugging the poor.) While Jackman acknowledges that, for most of us, “it is impossible to know what the reality of extreme poverty really is,” this exercise in participatory empathy hints at the challenges—and, as with all of GPP’s programming, spurs people to action.

Even as he asks people to do more, Evans knows the limits of altruism and the need for market incentives.

So, like Blake Mycoskie of Toms, who has made giving easier for buyers of shoes and sunglasses, Evans has paired charity with a fixture of modern life: music.

GPP’s flagship event is the Global Citizen Festival, a concert held each September in New York’s Central Park during the UN General Assembly. The 2013 edition featured John Mayer, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, Janelle Monae, and Kings of Leon. But you can’t buy tickets. The 60,000 attendees earned their spot in the audience through action they took in one of four areas: global health, women’s equality, universal education, and global partnerships. (GPP, which has 57 employees worldwide, prefers to raise money for other NGOs’ onthe-ground efforts rather than starting its own.) Points

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were awarded for smallish gestures such as signing petitions and tweeting at CEOs to encourage corporations to give more money, as well as more significant time investments like fundraising for antipoverty NGOs and volunteering in developing countries. The more points you racked up, the more entries you could “buy” in the ticket lottery.

Evans has been iterating on that model, acknowledging the limitations of a single annual event. Two years ago, GPP began building a proprietary online platform called Global Citizen. At globalcitizen.org, volunteers register their actions and bid for tickets to concerts in the U.S. and, as of this past winter, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. Hundreds of artists, including Beyoncé, Pearl Jam, and One Direction, have donated two tickets for each tour stop, and more than 110,000 tickets have been given away in total, representing 10 million individual poverty-fighting “actions.” At South by Southwest in March, GPP also launched a series of Global Citizen Nights across America: similar but smaller concerts in heartland cities including Chicago and Nashville. And this month in Washington, D.C., it will hold a concert featuring electronic-dance stars Tiesto and Krewella—an event designed to encourage the U.S. government to ramp up its funding for global child survival.

Music, of course, has long been used for good causes: Live Aid focused on fundraising for Ethiopian famine victims, while Live 8, like GPP, put the spotlight

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From top: Alicia Keys performs at 2013’s Global Citizen Festival in New York’s Central Park; actor Hugh Jackman (with Evans) is one of GPP’s most active supporters.

on global poverty. But those were one-off events. GPP has sought to build an ongoing relationship with the music industry, and its strategy is particularly clever on two fronts. For the talent, two tickets to every concert is a very small donation. For fans, it gamifies antipoverty activism. “Music has a catalytic role in our culture—it has always been a fire starter,” says Michele Anthony, EVP of U.S. recorded music at Universal Music, who chairs the Global Citizen Tickets committee.

“There are kids who are initially on there because they couldn’t get two tickets to a tour that was sold out. But the feedback that we’re getting is that even kids who may not be that politically inclined are learning.

They’re getting engaged.” And music is only the beginning. “The idea,” Anthony says, is eventually to “start expanding into sports and other entertainment.”

Of course, it’s fair to ask what good it really does— beyond scoring some points in the program—to tweet at a company’s CEO about the poor. While Evans criticizes “clicktivism” generally, he says it’s a good entrylevel form of action that he hopes will encourage “global citizens.” For instance, last year GPP launched a campaign to pressure telecommunications companies to improve their support of mobile-health initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. After receiving hundreds of thousands of tweets and emails, the British telecommunications giant BT specifically cited the GPP effort as a stimulus for it to increase the company’s giving by hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

One chilly February afternoon, Evans invited a small group of artists, actors, and other influential people to his organization’s New York offices for a 90-minute presentation on poverty. He blitzed through a dizzying array of statistics. He pointed out that governments around the world spent a total of $8.5 trillion during the recent global financial bailout. But it would take just a small percentage of that—an estimated $165 billion—for us to fulfill the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, key milestones to ending extreme poverty worldwide.

He spoke about meeting Sonny Boy in that Manila dump, reminding everyone of the children.

The goals were, in his view, eminently reachable, if only we cared enough, did enough. “I want to invite you to become ambassadors,” he said finally. “We need to take action quickly.”

The actress Rachel Brosnahan (House of Cards) nodded more and more in agreement as Evans worked his way through his presentation. She was the last person in the room to stop clapping. And with that, he’d won one more soldier for his antipoverty army. —Jeff Chu

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images (Global Citizen Festival); Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images (Evans and Jackman)

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Alan Schaaf

F o u n d e r, I m g u r

75 Bob Richards Cofounder, CEO, Moon E x pre s s FOR TURNING MATTER INTO FUEL

The MX-1 spacecraft weighs 1,300 pounds fully loaded, fits in the back of a pickup truck, looks like a metallic inner tube, and, in 2015, is going to the moon, “hitchhiking” alongside a satellite headed into orbit. Bob Richards’s goal is twofold: to mine precious lunar minerals and to power the MX-1’s return home by converting ice on the moon into hydrogen peroxide. Richards, whose project is backed by NASA, sees water as the oil to power space exploration. “We’re after our first gusher,” he says.

Cofounders, Alamo Drafthouse

FOR BEING THE WHATSAPP OF IMAGES

FOR MAKING THE MOVIE THEATER FUN

With 130 million uniques each month, Imgur, a trove for viral memes and photos, is now one of the Internet’s most-visited sites. After seeing a social network bloom, Alan Schaaf and his team have added features such as comments and private messaging, along with galleries of its most popular images. This year, the company raised $40 million in a round of funding.

“People come home from work and they just want to unwind,” Schaaf says. “[On Imgur,] they don’t need to log in, they don’t need to create an account, they don’t need to pick interests. They just hit the NEXT button.”

There is nothing Tim League—who owns an Austin-based alt-cinema institution called Alamo Drafthouse, where alcohol and food are served, and a distribution company called Drafthouse Films— won’t do to get you to see a movie he loves. To promote Drafthouse’s dark delight about escalating dares titled Cheap Thrills, Tim challenged the director, producer, and star to drink beer until one of them peed his pants.

(Tim lost. The video evidence is online.) “It was a fun and creative stunt,” says his wife, Karrie. “But would I say it was a proud moment?” No, pride stems from their recent success: The Alamo opened eight new theaters nationwide in 2013, bringing the total to 17, with plans to hit 50 by 2017. Drafthouse Films’ The Act of Killing had the highest-grossing opening of any documentary in 2013 and was nominated for an Oscar. The Leagues took films from their annual Fantastic Fest, the largest genre-film festival in the U.S., to eight markets. They also hosted the debut of Forever Fest, a gleeful weekend in Austin devoted to programming by and for smart women.

And with his widely publicized ban on Madonna, who made headlines after being caught texting during a non-Alamo screening of 12 Years a Slave, Tim is now a champion of proper filmgoing etiquette. “We want people to be excited about going to the movies,” he says, “and we want to make sure that in all Alamo theaters, they know how to behave.”

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Boris Sofman

C ofo und e r, C E O, A nk i FOR REVVING UP ROBOTICS WITH HIGHTECH TOY CARS

Robotics and artificialintelligence company Anki is bringing previously outof-reach technology to consumers. Its first product, Anki Drive, is a racing system that lets you control AI–powered miniature cars with a mobile phone.

The toy—released in October—is so sophisticated that it could help improve self-driving cars and other machines. “The core problems you face in robotics [have a lot in] common,” says Boris Sofman. “It’s the same types of algorithms and strategies and approaches.” Apple, for one, is impressed: Anki was the only outside company that presented at the keynote of its Worldwide Developers Conference last year.

Illustration by Aron Filkey

Tim & Karrie League

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Michele Clapton Cost ume de signer FOR DESIGNING CLOTHES FIT FOR KINGS— NOT TO MENTION QUEENS, NIGHT’S WATCHMEN, AND WILDLINGS

Clapton creates a different look for each of Game of Thrones’ wildly diverse fictional locales.

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Photograph by Garth Badger

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Michele Clapton won an Emmy for the medievalflavored costumes in HBO’s Game of Thrones, which have inspired fashions at Valentino, Helmut Lang, and Derek Lam. Between seasons she works on film projects, such as Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert—about the life of writer and explorer Gertrude Bell (due out in 2015)—and the Memento-like Before I Go to Sleep (out this fall).

Fast Company: Game of Thrones is based on books about a fictional world, so you must have had a lot of latitude when creating the costumes.

Clapton: I love the freedom of Game of Thrones.

Developing the visual sense of the character— that’s the essence of all costume design.

The show is set in various far-flung locations, and you make individual collections for each region. How does that process work?

MC: I create the visual rules of each area. I’ll draw sketches to represent each area based on what [materials] they have available, the transport, the climate. I work with the production designers to see what the architecture is. I think that is what’s successful about Game of Thrones: It’s not just fantasy for fantasy’s sake. You can almost imagine that it was real.

But because it’s not historical, nobody can fact-check you, right?

MC: A lot of the book [readers] do. Whenever you read a book, you have images in your head of how people look. And then someone comes along—in this case, me— and designs, and it’s not what’s in your head.

People react to that. But I don’t worry because it’s our version and that’s all you can ever do.

In Before I Go to Sleep, you dressed star Nicole Kidman in modern clothing.

MC: In contemporary films, the clothes are so often not noticed. That’s almost the beauty of them—they have to tell the story without being celebrated. Sometimes that is the hardest to do because everyone thinks they know clothes.

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Le-Marie Thompson

F o under, Net tadonna FOR HELPING BUSINESSES AVOID CONFLICT

Tech companies often grapple with the issue of conflict minerals: substances mined amid armed conflicts and human-rights abuses, particularly in the Congo.

Le-Marie Thompson and her company are combating the problem with their ConflictFreeElectronics platform, an online source (still in beta) for companies—and eventually consumers— to get information about suppliers worldwide.

“Most of us engineers want to create cool stuff without guilt that our creations have brought about harm,” she says. “ConflictFreeElectronics is something I could do to help.”

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Claudia Perlich

Chief s c ient ist, D st iller y FOR SERVING UP NEW ADS AT WARP SPEED

How do online advertisers know to show you the exact pair of shoes you’ve been coveting?

Claudia Perlich and her team are among the leading creators of algorithmic analytics—the dark art that connects advertisers with consumers. And now, with real-time auctions, she’s doing it fast.

The moment people land on a web page, ad space is auctioned to advertisers based on pages people have viewed and other info—within 30 milliseconds. Dstillery is fielding some 10 billion requests a day. Handling them, Perlich says, requires “an incredible mix of intuition and creativity.”

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Rob King

S e nior V P, S p or t s C e nte r and n e w s, ES P N FOR HELPING FANS FOLLOW THEIR TEAMS FROM SCREEN TO SCREEN

CHECK OUT THE MAKING OF THIS SELF-PORTRAIT AT FASTCOMPANY .COM OR BY DOWNLOADING THIS ISSUE ON YOUR IPAD.

82 Ida Skivenes Instagram ar t ist FOR USING EDIBLE ART TO ENCOURAGE BETTER FOOD HABITS

Some people find social media stardom via hilarious Twitter oneliners or well-curated Pinterest pages. For Norwegian artist Ida Skivenes, Internet renown started with toast. In 2013, Skivenes launched a series of art pieces that re-created famous masterpieces on toasted bread. She parlayed the ensuing attention into a devoted online following. These days, Skivenes—known to her more than 200,000 Instagram followers as IdaFrosk, which is Norwegian for frog—constructs whimsical little art pieces using hand-cut vegetarian food items that she arranges to resemble anything from Yoda to a van Gogh painting. She snaps each one with her iPhone, posts it to Instagram, and then—no waste here!—eats her work. “It resonates with my values: getting people to eat healthy, fresh food in a variety of colors,” she says. “I just want [you] to be more playful in your everyday life. It’s spreading a lot of joy surrounding food through my little canvas.”

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Last year, Rob King led a major redesign of the most downloaded mobile app in sports. SportsCenter is a clever and exhaustive reimagining of the earlier, scores-focused version (called ScoreCenter) that allows, say, Chicago fans to personalize the app around their beloved Bears, Bulls, and Cubs, and quickly get the latest video clips, stories, and stats on the go. So far, more than 16 million people have used it. Recognizing that highlights are gold in social media, King, a graphic artist and newspaper editor earlier in his career, formed a team that in just three minutes edits TV highlights into clips for ESPN’s digital platforms, voiced by its anchors. Fans are now watching more than 300 million clips a month—and King has created a starring role online for SportsCenter, the network’s franchise broadcast player. The app is having an impact internally as well. “It’s been a huge catalyst in how we think about covering news,” says King. For this summer’s coverage of the World Cup, which will undoubtedly draw ESPN’s biggest audience of the year, anchors inside SportsCenter’s new stateof-the-art broadcast studio will weave realtime Twitter chatter, viral videos, and game highlights into their reports, essentially bringing the app to life on TV.

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Jenji Kohan Cre ator, Orange Is t h e New Black FOR TURNING ORANGE INTO GOLD

Jenji Kohan’s women’sprison dramedy, Orange Is the New Black, became a breakout hit when it premiered on Netflix last summer. Now back for season 2, the show makes the most of its refreshingly diverse cast and sharp writing. Kohan, who previously created Showtime’s Weeds, walks us through her approach.

1

Hire undervalued performers.

Orange’s team of female actors (including Taylor Schilling, Danielle Brooks, and Lea DeLaria) are expanding ideas about what TV stars can be.

That was intentional.

“I love Los Angeles, but one side benefit of shooting in New York is casting.

Here was this whole new pool of talent. It was an embarrassment of riches because I was looking for types that are underutilized.”

2

Make TV that you yourself want to watch.

Kohan doesn’t worry about pleasing everyone.

“I’m entertaining myself and hoping other people find it funny. It’s just how I like to write. It’s really gratifying to do that and be recognized for it.”

3

Embrace the pressure.

Expectations were relatively low when the show first hit Netflix. Not anymore. “Is it stressful?

No question about it.

You brace yourself for a backlash, but all you can do is make the best show possible.”

Illustration by Ida Skivenes

For years, the onetime British motorcycle brand Royal Enfield has only been available in India. Now that’s about to change.

MCP 100

The Heritage-Brand Revivalists FOR GROWING WHILE STAYING ROOTED

85. MARGARET BARBOUR

86. ARIANE DAGUIN

8 7. S I D D H A R T H A L A L

THE C O M PA N Y

The 120-year-old British outerwear brand has recently seen record profits thanks to a canny expansion into fashion via collaborations with Adidas and Pantone, plus young designers including Christopher Raeburn.

D’Artagnan is America’s most influential heritage-meat purveyor. This spring, it debuted Green Circle chickens, which are fed vegetable scraps.

Royal Enfield is the world’s oldest continuously produced motorcycle brand. Started in England in 1901, it died there in the 1960s but survived in India. Siddhartha Lal wants to bring it back to the U.K.—and beyond.

GOAL

“To become the best British lifestyle brand.”

“To have in the center of the plate the best product possible.”

“To reinvigorate the midsize motorcycle segment globally.”

“I was 28, with a little girl of 2, when John [her husband and then head of Barbour] died, and I was left with a majority shareholding. I set about learning everything, including how to make a jacket.”

“I am from Gascony, in southwest France. I am the seventh generation in the restaurant business.”

“My father [who’d retired in 1997 as CEO of Eicher but was still the majority shareholder] told me, ‘We’re thinking of selling Royal Enfield.’ I said, ‘Let me give it a shot.’ I thought, How difficult could it be to sell a few more motorcycles? I was naive.”

“Fashion. We can’t stray too far from our heritage.”

“The perception of the value of food in America. A heritage chicken that lives twice as long as a commodity one costs at least twice as much.”

“Expanding beyond India. The roots of the brand are very much English, but today, we’re 95% Indian, 5% overseas.”

BIG A D VA N TA G E

“Being a small company, we can move and change quickly. We’ve also been careful and live a fairly modest life.”

“More than 60% of our business is restaurants.”

“A low cost base—our operating margins are upwards of 20%—and a brand that’s not new.”

BEST MARKETING TOOL

“Our photography. We recently photographed a girl in a ball gown, and she was wearing a Burghley, a long coat. It was shot in Cambridge— there’s a historical purpose to it.”

“An educated consumer will take time to read what’s on the label.”

“The rides we conduct. Last year was our 10th year of what we call a Himalayan Odyssey. We took 100 people along, but it inspired thousands to do similar, shorter rides.”

“Move very, very carefully, and never so far from the heritage that people don’t recognize the brand.”

“Be authentic. This cannot be a marketing strategy or gimmick. It is a way to do things right.”

“Take the essence of what the brand meant and convey that. For us, it’s not the motorcycle but the idea behind it.

It’s fun.”

“We’ve started making different shapes. The Chinese and Japanese— their figures are not like ours!”

“Go step by step. You can’t go from a factory-farmed chicken to the poulet de Bresse, a superexpensive chicken raised for 120 days. We would have sold five a year.”

“Add value to the things people touch on a daily basis—the seats, the instruments, the foot pegs. Make them really beautiful.”

“Especially when you’ve been through a recession, people tend to buy what they know is value for money and will last. Cheap things may appeal to a teenager, but they’re rubbish.”

“[The food business] messed with nature and went faster and bigger, like the Long Island duck that is ready at five weeks. It used to be at least nine weeks. People used to take time to raise the animal and have respect for it.”

“There’s an instantly warm, fuzzy feeling, a sense of recognition, in a day where things are getting colder and more remote.”

C h air m an, J. B ar b o ur an d S o n s

PERSONAL HISTORY

BIG CHALLENGE

ONE SECRET T O I N N O VAT I N G W I T H H E R I TA G E S T R AT E G I C DECISION

W H Y H E R I TA G E I S I M P O RTA N T T O U S T O D AY

Photograph by Jeff Brown

F o under, CE O, D ’A r tagnan

C E O, E i c h e r/ R o y a l E n f ie l d

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88 Trent Reznor Musician; composer; CCO, Beats Music FOR NAILING THE ART OF CREATIVE EXPLORATION

“I try to keep myself in a place where I don’t feel comfortable,” says Trent Reznor, who released a sonically adventurous new Nine Inch Nails album, Hesitation Marks, last year and was instrumental in creating the streaming service Beats Music, which launched in January. “It has the ability to turn people on to the beauty of music and provide the soundtrack to their lives,” he says of Beats. “That feels like something that’s worth spending time to figure out.” Reznor and composing partner Atticus Ross are currently working on the score to David Fincher’s October film Gone Girl, their third collaboration with the director (the duo won an Oscar for their music for The Social Network). What’s next for the multihyphenate, who’s currently on tour with NIN? Reznor laughs. “Isn’t that enough?”

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José María Álvarez-Pallete

F o un d e r, Wayra; C O O, Te lefónic a S. A .

FOR CREATING SILICON VALLEYS ACROSS LATIN AMERICA AND EUROPE

While traveling in Silicon Valley in 2010, José María Álvarez-Pallete was struck by the number of talented developers and designers he met— particularly the number who were Latin American.

“I asked myself why these people had to leave their countries to work,” he says, and why Telefónica’s Latin American offices were forced to order their tech supplies and software programs from abroad. For Telefónica to grow, the Madrid-based exec knew that local tech ecosystems would have to grow. In early 2011, Álvarez-Pallete pitched an accelerator project that would be called Wayra, the Quechua word for wind. Living up to its name, Wayra was off the ground within six months, and by year’s end academies were set up in Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela. In 2013, Telefónica invested $13.4 million in Wayra projects, and Wayra now boasts 14 academies that have received 23,000 applications and accelerated more than 330 startups, becoming one of the world’s largest accelerators in less than two years.

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Geneviève Dion

Dire ctor, S him a S e ik i Hau te Te c h n olo g y L ab o rator y at Drexel University FOR STRETCHING THE POTENTIAL OF FABRIC

A former fashion designer, Geneviève Dion now leads a team of engineers, medical researchers, scientists, and designers who use digital fabrication and computerized knitting machines to develop high-tech textiles. She is working on fabric that could harvest and store energy or be wired with sophisticated sensors to monitor fetal activity and track wearers’ vital signs.

“GORE-TEX WAS INVENTED TO USE ON THE MOON. NOW WE USE IT EVERY DAY.” Garments would have the look and feel of regular clothes without any cumbersome straps or wires.

Dion got hooked on textile innovation in the 1990s when, as a young designer, she experimented with ways to create permanent pleats in chemically treated silk.

“I became more interested in the process of making the textiles than in the fashions,” she says.

But even if she’s mostly left style behind, Dion still hopes that her pioneering work will one day show up at the mall.

“Gore-Tex was invented to use on the moon,” she says. “Now we use it every day.”

Illustration by Karen Davison

44%

of accountants say a sales tax audit is more stressful than a divorce.

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Sangeeta Bhatia Director, Laborator y for Mult is c ale Regenerat ive Te chnologie s, MI T FOR GETTING CREATIVE WITH CANCER TREATMENTS

Photograph by Geordie Wood

MCP 100

Bhatia is making cancer testing more accessible in developing countries.

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Joy Howard

F o unding p ar t n e r, S C A P E

Glob al V P of m ar ket ing, Patagonia FOR TURNING CRUNCHY ENVIRONMENTALISM INTO EFFECTIVE BRANDED CONTENT

To medical researcher Sangeeta Bhatia, art and science have more in common than you might think. “You have to explore and play and tinker, and see what things merge and coalesce,” she says. To do that, Bhatia tries to create an atmosphere of serendipity in her lab, recruiting scientists and engineers with diverse backgrounds and interests and telling them to spend 20% of their time on “submarine projects”— things they only need to tell her about if they make significant progress. As a result, her team has developed breakthroughs such as nano-size gold-rod injections that make tumors more susceptible to treatment. Here’s how she approached another cancer-combating project: T H E P R O B L E M : Seventy percent of cancer mortality occurs in the developing world, but current diagnostic technology is expensive. “If you have a patient in a rural clinic, you don’t want to send them home and order a lab test,” Bhatia says. “You want a test that’s inexpensive—in an hour.”

T H E E P I P H A N Y: Bhatia’s team had been working on tumorseeking magnetic nanoparticles that could be injected into patients as a way to improve the imaging capability of MRIs. During tests, one of her students noticed that bladders of cancerous animals were glowing brightly on the MRI. “We were like, ‘What is this?’ ” she says. “We realized that the tumors were changing the nanoparticles and fragments were coming out in the urine. If we were able to measure something in the

urine, then we’d have a completely noninvasive way to monitor the tumor. That was the ‘aha’ moment. Then we went back and did it deliberately.”

T H E E X E C U T I O N : The team developed a system that worked like a pregnancy test for cancer. “Once we knew we wanted to detect it on paper [test strips],” she says, “we changed the nanoparticle a little bit so it would be easy to capture.”

T H E R E S U LT: Bhatia’s lab just received funding from MIT’s commercialization center for a startup that could eventually get the effective, economical tests into the hands of doctors in the field. Next she’s working on a variation that can detect other serious conditions, including blood clots and liver fibrosis.

Kate Orff

“There is a lot of really cool, old-school environmental activism that we do, but I see my role as making it that much more sticky and getting the next generation engaged,” says Joy Howard, who joined Patagonia last fall after a previous job as vice president of marketing for Converse All-Star at Nike. “I’m homing in on using outdoor sports adventure as a way to turn consumers into activists.” Here are two of her recent endeavors that use content as a centerpiece: 1

A 30-minute film called Worn Wear premiered in 15 retail stores on Black Friday last year and encouraged consumers to repair their clothing rather than purchase brand-new stuff. Surprisingly, sales increased by 42% over the previous year’s Black Friday, according to the company.

2

A feature-length film called DamNation, which won an audience choice award at South by Southwest, advocates dam removal to promote river restoration. Howard created the marketing and distribution strategy behind the film’s nine-city tour this spring (followed by a June debut on Vimeo and a college run this fall).

The brand will also urge consumers to take action and sign a Change.org petition that pushes President Obama to crack down on the nation’s deadbeat dams.

FOR PERKING UP URBAN PARKS

Nature and cities, says architect and park designer Kate Orff, “are intertwined, whether we’ve designed them to be or not, so we’re simply trying to choreograph that interface.” Instead of preserving nature as a separate space, Orff integrates it. Current projects include redesigning Lexington, Kentucky’s Town Branch creek, which runs under the city (the plan is to create pools that filter runoff while serving as social spaces), and fashioning a Minneapolis park along the Mississippi River. “The landscape for me is never in the background,” she says. “It’s always playing a role in shaping the public realm.”

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Rebecca Goldman

Dire c tor, Good Robot FOR TELLING PHILANTHROPY’S STORY

“You often see a cause tacked on to a movie just as it’s being released,” says Rebecca Goldman, who heads up the oneyear-old philanthropic arm of Bad Robot, the film and TV company cofounded by uber-producer and director J.J. Abrams. Her mission is the opposite: building causes directly into TV shows and movies.

So far, she’s connected writers on Bad Robot’s NBC show Revolution with the United Nations (to raise awareness about the one-fifth of the world’s population who live without electricity) and used Star Trek: Into Darkness to promote a group that helps post– 9/11 vets—some of whom Abrams cast, too.

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Julia Greer

P rofe s s o r of m ate r ial s science, Caltech FOR PIONEERING “NANO-ARCHITECTURE”

Julia Greer has made a career of exploring how materials can change properties—by getting much stronger, for instance—when reduced to microscopic sizes.

A year ago, she had a revelation: What if you could fabricate nanotrusses— materials made up of tiny, intricate geometric structures linked together—in a way that might resemble, say, the webwork of the Eiffel Tower? A hunk of metal engineered from nanotrusses might look ordinary, but it could be both stronger and lighter, since it’s mostly air. The

95 96 Iolanthe Chronis & Amanda Peyton Cofounder, S wish; cofounder, Grand S treet

“WE’RE AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS. AND NOW WE’RE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SCALE IT UP.”

FOR FILLING IN GAPS IN THE CROWD FUNDING ECONOMY

IOLANTHE CHRONIS

AMANDA PEYTON

W H AT SHE DOES

Chronis and her team aggregate crowdfunding campaigns from across the web, and host campaigns as well.

At Grand Street, an online marketplace for innovative electronics, Peyton helps entrepreneurs reach a large but targeted audience of early adopters.

WHY IT’S I N N O VAT I V E

Successful crowdfunding can be an unexpected curse: Entrepreneurs aren’t always ready to handle big sales bumps. For a fee, Swish manages sales and shipping—for projects it hosts and even ones from other sites.

Grand Street provides companies with software solutions to help them market new products, process sales, and track analytics.

A crowdfunding campaign for Pyro Pet (a kitten-shaped candle) collected thousands of orders, but the makers lacked the resources to ship all those candles by hand. Swish did it for them.

Peyton discovered the Side Kick, an immersion circulation cooker. Usually, these cost thousands, but the inventor had created one for $200. He was selling two or three a week out of his studio. When his product debuted on Grand Street, he began to sell hundreds.

“You only get one shot at your launch,” says Chronis. “Being able to talk to backers about shipping dates, letting customers update their shipping addresses, and offering call-in customer service are all really important.

We’ve built those tools so you can get back to work on your creations.”

“We create a bridge to consumers for new tech,” says Peyton. “We also provide a beta-testing platform. If you need feedback on a cool electronic that’s already in production, our knowledgeable community means you don’t have to rely on your mom for advice.”

CASE IN POINT

OVERALL GOAL

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technology could be revolutionary for energy, transportation, and electronics. Her team is now designing and building nanotrusses in their Caltech labs. The next challenge is manufacturing. “How do you make these materials in large sheets?” she asks. It helps that Greer, a Stanford PhD, knows her way around Silicon Valley— she has worked at both Xerox’s famed PARC facility and Intel. Already, Google and other tech companies are interested in her discoveries. “We’re at the beginning of this,” she says. “And now we’re trying to figure out how to scale it up.”

Illustration by Miles Donovan

© 2014 CORT. A Berkshire Hathaway Company.

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98 MCP 100

Steele offers a platform for upand-coming surf filmmakers who are hoping to make a splash.

TO SEE MORE OF TAYLOR STEELE UNDERWATER, GO TO FASTCOMPANY.COM OR DOWNLOAD THIS ISSUE ON YOUR IPAD.

Norris Gordon 99 Roger Cofounder, pre sident, F o o d C o w b oy

THE PROBLEM: Each year, 43 billion pounds of America’s food supply rots in garbage piles because grocery stores won’t take less-thanperfect produce. Trucking the rejects to the needy is too timeconsuming and expensive to make donations feasible.

F ounder, Innersect ion.T V FOR MAKING WAVES IN MODERN CREATIVE MEDIA

Taylor Steele was already a legendary surf filmmaker in 2010 when he launched Innersection.TV, a unique media platform that merges the instant gratification of social media with the crowdsourced content of web video—plus the high production values of traditional filmmaking. Wave riders from around the world post their best footage every month to gain attention and vie for a spot in an annual Innersection film and a $10,000 prize. The 2013 project was its most ambitious: Viewers picked their favorite six directors, and each was sent to a different exotic locale to film a section of an epic surf-travel film called Se7en Signs, which has screened around the world and is available on DVD and iTunes. “When we first started Innersection, it was to showcase the top [people], but it soon became more of a place for the future stars, both filmers and surfers,” says Steele, who funds the endeavor through advertising, sponsorships, and film sales. “By having all these filmmakers out there, we have thousands of guerrilla marketers doing a lot of the work for us.”

Photograph by Mark Tipple

King Bach Comedian

FOR CRAMMING A LOT OF COMEDY INTO SIX SECONDS

FOR REFUSING TO LET GOOD FOOD GO TO WASTE

Taylor Steele

100

THE EPIPHANY: Roger Gordon’s brother, Richard, is a trucker. For years, Roger, who was usually near a computer, would help Richard and his friends on the road find homes for their unwanted loads. On one such occasion, while Roger was online studying for the bar exam, he realized that truckers all have smartphones. Mobile logistics could match nearby shelters with unwanted food.

THE EXECUTION: In 2012, the Gordon brothers helped found Food Cowboy, a web-based application in which truckers and shelters fill out relevant information and technology facilitates a match.

Finding a home for bruised tomatoes is as simple as sending a text.

THE RESULT: With hundreds of truckers signed up and more than 500,000 pounds of food saved, Food Cowboy has drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is planning an expo to showcase new systems for handling food waste—and hopefully spark more ideas like the Gordons’.

Vine’s six-second limit is a brief window for making people laugh, but to Andrew Bachelor, aka King Bach, it’s plenty of time. The 25-year-old actor has a knack for presenting complete, outrageous stories in an absurdly truncated space, and it’s helped him leapfrog from the Internet onto TV. Bachelor posted his first sixsecond looping Vine video under the name King Bach on May 29, 2013, and within a month had a million followers and a deal with United Talent Agency. “I don’t really write them out.

If something funny happens, I think of how I can turn it into a Vine,” Bachelor says of the clips, which feature, among other motifs, some increasingly bizarre attempts to get ladies’ phone numbers. (He posts up to four clips a day.) “A lot of Viners do more relatable stuff, but I try to stay away from that. I try to maybe take a relatable situation and Bach it up.” Today, he has 6 million followers, a regular role on Showtime’s House of Lies, a forthcoming project with Adult Swim, and the attention of such comedians as Patton Oswalt, Keegan-Michael Key, and Jordan Peele. The King’s reign is just beginning.

CONTRIBUTORS: JENNIFER KEISHIN ARMSTRONG, JEFF BEER, SKYLAR BERGL, JOE BERKOWITZ, SYDNEY BROWNSTONE, ROB BRUNNER, AUSTIN CARR, MAX CHAFKIN, JEFF CHU, JOSH DZIEZA, JOSH EELLS, JASON FEIFER, BRUCE FRETTS, DAN FRIEDELL, JON GERTNER, JILLIAN GOODMAN, REBECCA GREENFIELD, ALEX HALPERIN, LOGAN HILL, KRISTIN HOHENADEL, BRYAN HOOD, SARAH KESSLER, SARAH LAWSON, JESSICA LEBER, JULIE MAKINEN, JENNIFER MILLER, TARA MOORE, EVIE NAGY, SARITHA RAI, MARGARET RHODES, CHUCK SALTER, ARIEL SCHWARTZ, ALICE TRUONG, NEAL UNGERLEIDER, KAREN VALBY, JENNIFER VILAGA, KAT WARD, JESSICA WEISS, MARK WILSON

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was due to the young-woman demographic; on opening weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, 81% of the audience was female and 55% under age 25. In February, Universal announced that Kendrick and costar Rebel Wilson were both on board for Pitch Perfect 2, due in May 2015.

But there was another surprise. Kendrick’s smash single “Cups (When I’m Gone),” which started as a one-minute snippet in the film, turned into a bona fide pop-radio smash. (See sidebar, page 74.) Kendrick’s recording went on to sell 3 million copies, making it, according to Billboard, the 21st-biggest single of the year— beating out songs by Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Jay Z. The song and accompanying video were boosted by the Cup Game, a patty-cake-style routine performed with an empty cup that’s been a summer-camp favorite for years, and which Kendrick’s performance helped go newly viral, inspiring thousands of fans to upload their own versions—and no doubt practice endlessly to their parents’ regret. (“The phrase ‘It was cute at first’ has been said a lot,” Kendrick says with a grin.)

The song’s success came slowly and organically, too late to help the movie while it was still in theaters, but just in time to boost home viewing. “The DVD performed like a movie that did twice as well in theaters,” says Cramer.

Nevertheless, Kendrick says she has no plans to pursue a recording career: “I’m just going to quit while I’m ahead.” (Although, with a Pitch Perfect 2 soundtrack on the way, don’t count on it.) But she does enjoy seeing the looks on kids’ faces when they approach her about the Cup Game. “They tell me they can do it—and then desperately look around. Because there’s never a cup around. I’m like, ‘I believe you, girl!’ ” After a male admirer starts to get a little too close at the dog park, Kendrick makes her way to a quiet café down the hill, where she orders a butternut squash salad and a glass of kombucha. “And now I have to do something quite embarrassing, which is take out my retainer,” she says. She slips out her Invisalign and clicks it into a plastic case. “Supergross.”

It’s this kind of down-to-earth, pretensionfree charm that has endeared Kendrick to Madison Avenue—a budding relationship she’s eager to pursue as well. “Lately I’ve really been trying to get into business with brands I

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like,” she says. “That’s the only time when having a business hat on is really fun for me.

It doesn’t feel like I’m buying a car and I just want it to be over. It feels like playing Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada—being a mover and a shaker and a little badass.”

Kendrick’s first big campaign was an ad for Newcastle beer. Since winning the Newcastle account in 2012, ad agency Droga5 has created a series of meta-ads that poke fun at beer marketing, artisanal chic, and Newcastle itself.

(Example: “From the country that brought you British food comes a delicious beer to wash away the taste of British food.”) “Newcastle is kind of stuck between two categories, with the big megabreweries on one side and the craft beers on the other, so our strategy for standing out is to be the honest, no-bullshit beer,” says Ted Royer, Droga5’s chief creative officer. With Kendrick, the company shot an online video, to be unveiled during Super Bowl week. Its conceit was that the brewer had booked Kendrick for a Super Bowl ad, only to back out when they didn’t want to spend the money.

“We knew we wanted to have a sexy female lead, because that’s what beer marketing goes for, but we also wanted someone funny enough to acknowledge that she was being used for her sexiness,” Royer says. “Not only is Anna hot and very savvy and smart about her image, she also has fun with it.”

“I didn’t know what she was going to poohpooh and what she was going to be game for,” says director Randy Krallman. “But she was a total champ. She went full-bore—harder than what’s in the final edit. And she was so good that she literally didn’t flub a line, ever.”

In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the commercial was watched online more than 4 million times. “We don’t have the sales figures yet,” says Royer, “but brand conversation on social media went up 400%.” With more than 600 organic media mentions, the ad also dominated the Super Bowl commercial conversation, even at the expense of actual Super Bowl commercials. “We made so many Top 10 lists, and we didn’t even buy an ad,” says Royer.

Since then, says Kendrick, she’s been trying to be more proactive about pursuing partnerships with brands she favors. “It’s really fun to be like, ‘Why are we not in business together? Let’s do this,’ ” she says. One of these partnerships is an as-yet-unnamed clothing company she’s been in discussions with. “I found myself in the middle of their store in New York, talking about their stuff as though I was in a commercial,” Kendrick says. “Like, ‘When did their accessories get so cute?’ ” She

laughs. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, lightbulb. This makes sense to me. I can do this.’ ” She’s also smart enough about herself to know what kind of ads she can’t do. “I had one offer for, like, an operating system, which, I have no idea. Honestly, when things like that happen, I have to remember that sometimes there’s no focus group and no research being done, and it might be as simple as somebody at that company has a daughter who’s obsessed with Pitch Perfect.” Similarly, she says, “If I’m talking to some sexy fashion house, and they’re like, ‘We’re going for an elegant thing,’ it’s so easy for me to be like, ‘Well, then, Madame, I am not your woman!’ Because elegance is not a thing that I aspire to.”

And then, of course, there is her day job. Despite occasional forays into popcorn fare (see: the Twilight movies), Kendrick has been remarkably adept at doing only the kind of movies she wants to do. Forget the old adage of “one for them, one for me”; Kendrick’s ratio seems closer to “one for them, eight for me.” For the upcoming Happy Christmas, in which she costars with Lena Dunham, Kendrick earned $2,000 for a month of work. For last year’s Drinking Buddies, she worked for scale. Success has given her the financial leeway to take smaller jobs—but she’s also been smart about choosing roles that set her up to be in demand.

“The money has always followed the work for me, as opposed to the other way around,” she says, “which I feel superlucky about. I never want to be in a position where I have to do a movie I hate to pay the mortgage. Because that’s a much, much bigger bummer to me than doing something with a brand.”

Of course, playing Cinderella in a big-budget Disney musical, as she’ll do this December with Into the Woods, is about as far from working for scale as you can get. But lest you think about floating a comparison between her and Cinderella in real life—the ordinary girl thrust into extraordinary circumstances—think twice.

“Oh, boy,” she says, rolling her eyes before I can even finish the question. “Oh, brother!”

“Okay, here’s the thing, since I’ve now had to explore that character,” Kendrick says. “The actual story, the Brothers Grimm story, is of a girl who is beaten and abused by her family who is supposed to love her . . . and then gets a shot to maybe meet a dude. So, for me, that’s not really the same as just being a normal person. I would say the closest I ever come to feeling like Cinderella is when I’m at an awards show, and people compliment my dress or jewelry. I’m like, ‘None of this is mine,’ ” she laughs. “ ‘It all goes back in the morning.’ ”

MCP head shots: Google (Queiroz); Qualcomm (Talluri); Chris Connolly (Van Damme); Nima Salimi (Underwood); Amy Fletcher (Krawcheck); Diego Giudice/Archivolatino/Redux (Odón); Oculus VR (Luckey); Adidas (Carnes); Diwang Valdez (WiLL); Carlos Arrieta (Naficy); Univision Communications Inc. (Gaviria); Rosario Safina (Ong); Mercedes-Benz (Wagener); Emily Wilson (McCabe); General Mills (Gibson); Plain Vanilla Games (Fridriksson); Anu Karwa (Madan); Uber Technologies (Michael); Melanie Dunea (Bloomfield); Hana Haley (Varshavskaya); Sheraton Hotels & Resorts (Yansong); Chut Janthachotibutr (Moskowitz); InMobi (Tewari); Defy Ventures (Hoke); Alexander Thompson (Dunn); Maggie Hudson (Curl); Anki Technologies (Sofman); Rhonisha Franklin (Thompson); ESPN Images (King); Daguin (D’Artagnan); Drexel University (Dion); Brandon Fayette (Goldman); Steven Serdikoff (Gordon)

Anna Kendrick

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© 2014 Hennion and Walsh. Securities offered through Hennion & Walsh Inc. Member of FINRA, SIPC. Investing in bonds involves risk including possible loss of principal. Income may be subject to state, local or federal alternative minimum tax. When interest rates rise, bond prices fall, and when interest rates fall, prices rise. *Source: Moody’s Investor Service, March 7, 2012 “U.S. Municipal Bond Defaults and Recoveries, 1970-2011.” Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

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JUNE 2014

Baratunde Thurston is the author of the New York Times best seller How to Be Black and CEO and cofounder of Cultivated Wit, a creative agency that combines the powers of humor, design, and technology.

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Fast Company Issue Number 186. Copyright ©2014 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.

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Illustration by Stan Chow

Celine Grouard

WHEN AN APP SPAMMED ALL MY CONTACTS, IT SURE FELT AS IF BEING PERSONALLY AND PROFESSIONALLY RUINED WAS GOING TO BE THE INEVITABLE RESULT.

ER

THE APP WAS called Have It All. It promised smarter contacts, calendar, messaging, news— basically a smarter life. Imagine having a personal assistant that never sleeps, saves you time, money, and stress—and doesn’t require food. That’s how they sold it. Facebook told me 27 friends wanted me to try it. The last time 27 of my friends agreed on anything, the United States elected its first black president. I figured I would trust them with an app recommendation.

Upon first launch, I tapped through the various requests for access to my email, calendar, and social media accounts. Installing apps has become so routine, I wasn’t suspicious. How could this app manage my life without access to it? Then the app prompted me to invite friends. “Like life itself, Have It All is better with friends. Do you want to avoid not inviting friends to have it all?” I didn’t quite understand what that meant, so I clicked what looked like the SKIP button and was told to “Wait while Have It All optimizes your digital life and rocks your world!”

My world was rocked, all right. Over the next few hours, it became clear the app had sent a text to every single one of the 3,746 people in my address book saying, “I have some big news to share about my life. See what I’m talking about!” and a link to download Have It All. And it emailed everyone I’ve ever interacted with via Gmail a note saying, “Fire your personal assistant. Join me, and Have It All!” In a twisted way, Have It All did simplify my life: I now have no friends. The investors I was courting have gone silent. They didn’t like being

UM

W H AT A R E T H E R E P E R C U S S I O N S O F E N G I N E E R I N G R A P I D S U C C E S S AT A N Y C O ST? J U ST M E S S I N G W I T H P E O P L E ’ S L I V E S , T H AT ’ S A L L .

invited to Have It All three times a day for a week, probably because they’re venture capitalists and already actually have it all. Now that my smartphone, once my trusted companion, had become a torture device, I am more inclined to leave it off. My Google account was suspended for “suspicious activities.” Mashable called me “The Most Annoying Person Online.” My face is even on a billboard in Uganda above a message pleading, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO INTERNET. The above scenario didn’t happen exactly like this (though some office-supply company did use my face in a Ugandan billboard ad), but when an app spammed all my contacts, it sure felt as if being personally and professionally ruined was going to be the inevitable result.

You see, I was the victim of growth hacking.

“Growth hacking” is what happens when developers (mostly app makers) go beyond merely building in social hooks that help products go viral and instead try to force virality at the expense of the user. They indiscriminately “select all” when posting to contacts. They force you to publicly endorse the product just to get access.

They send misleading messages using our names without giving us a chance to see or edit them first.

If you’ve done or even contemplated any of these tactics in order to achieve rapid growth, I have two words for you. Oh, I can’t use those two words? Then let’s just say: Stop it.

I understand that it’s hard to be the one-billion-andthird item in the App Store. It’s hard to satisfy growthobsessed VCs. It’s hard to get media coverage. These days, attention is our most precious natural resource.

You’re desperate, and your competitors might be more desperate. But you have to remember something about attention. Yes, it’s possible to buy, grab, or even steal it.

But it’s far better to earn it.

Y

H E L P, I ’ V E B E E N GROWTH-HACKED!

Baratunde Thurston

FA S T C O MPA N

ONE MORE THING

©Siemens AG, 2014. All Rights Reserved. The Baton Pass™ runs through September 5, 2014. For every time the Baton is passed, Siemens will donate $1 to fund cancer research—up to $1 million.

The fight against cancer is in your hands.

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More healthcare stories with happier endings.

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When someone becomes seriously ill, the story of his or her life changes. So does the story of the people who unselfishly care for them every day. Parents. Siblings. Children. Doctors.

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Somewhere in America, the people of Siemens spend every day creating answers that will last for years to come.

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