Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i Entrepreneur Magazine

My days as a rookie reporter were full of panic. I was interviewing people who worked in complex places—city government, local industry, hospital administration. I wanted them to trust me; I wanted them to think, This kid understands what I’m saying, and will accurately report it. But of course, I didn’t understand them. I didn’t even understand their language. A local mayor would say “RFP,” and I’d nod and make a note to google the letters when I got back to my desk. If I asked what it meant, I figured, the mayor would consider me a clown. One day, however, an older reporter gave me some liberating advice. “Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions,” he said. “A source would prefer explaining something to you than having you report…

ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON in late spring, 32-year-old Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss rides the elevator to the penthouse level of her company’s downtown Manhattan headquarters. She’s a thoroughly millennial girlboss in jeans, sneakers, and a royal blue sweatshirt with weiss embroidered in small white script. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and for the founder of a beauty products company, she wears notably little makeup—just some mascara and possibly a swipe of Glossier Lip Gloss, a recent product release touted online as having a “fuzzy doe-foot applicator.” A former teen model, Weiss is beautiful but not intimidating, either by nature or by design (probably a little of both). After all, her company’s popularity is directly related to her ability to cultivate a feeling of friendship with…

HIS DRONE, he believes, will be revolutionary. It will come equipped with artificial intelligence so it can recognize faces and objects and pick them out in a crowd; it will help police departments find lost children, ranchers monitor their herds, cities inspect buildings. If all goes according to plan, it will do for drones what the iPhone did for phones. It will make them useful, helpful. It will change the way we live. And it will be very, very fast. Yet, until a year ago, whenever its creator, George Matus, went to see a venture capitalist to ask for money to bring it to market, his father had to drive him. That’s because Matus didn’t have a driver’s license. He wore braces, lived at home, and was still in high…

Do not ask Dani Arps for beer kegs, ball pits, or beanbag chairs—the interior designer won’t give them to you. As frat-minded features have become ubiquitous in startup offices, often in an attempt to communicate youthful energy, Arps has made a name for herself by doing the complete opposite: forcing entrepreneurs to act like adults. “An office can be fun without being infantile,” the 33-year-old says. Since launching her eponymous firm in New York in 2014, Arps has designed workspaces for such brands as General Assembly, Venmo, Contently, and SeatGeek, and has become an expert at convincing 20-somethings that an office can foster creativity without looking like a dorm room. Her portfolio contains visually quiet workspaces with neutral tones rather than brand-driven patterns. She nods to clients’ personalities with restraint,…

Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns is responsible for such genre-defining and genre-defying documentary series as The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, to name a few. As he and collaborator Lynn Novick prepare to debut their new 10-part documentary film series The Vietnam War on September 17 on PBS stations nationwide, we spoke with the tireless documentarian about leadership, productivity, managing gigantic projects, and how to achieve immortality through storytelling. So you just finished this incredible documentary about Vietnam. Are you already thinking of the next three documentaries down the road? Sorry to say, in a kind of admission of foolishness, I’m thinking usually about 13 or 14 films ahead. I’m now working on six or seven at the same time, which is insane. A lot of that has to do with…

Kevin Gibbon had a serious side hustle in college: eBay Powerseller. “I’d buy products and sell them for profit—jewelry, clothing, sports equipment,” he says. But as business took off, he was stuck fulfilling orders in his parents’ garage for hours. “Nearly 50 percent of my time was spent packaging and shipping. Remove that and I would have been a lot more successful.” Nine years later, in 2013, Gibbon created Shyp, an on-demand service that picks up, packs, and mails anything on a customer’s behalf. No more post offices, ever. From his own experience, he knew this could be a transformative resource for small-business owners. In fact, he expected businesspeople to make up the bulk of his customers. But when he launched Shyp, he did something that seems counterintuitive: He ignored…

In 2009, Kathryn Minshew was sure of one thing. She did not want to work as a consultant at McKinsey anymore. But the next step was less certain. After typing “business strategy director” into a major job-hunting search engine, she stared in disbelief at more than 5,000 returns. Worse, each listing was woefully incomplete. Not one job listing even hinted at what it would actually be like to work at a company on a day-to-day basis. Minshew, who was 23 at the time, knew this was no way to attract young talent. How was a millennial, still new to the job market, supposed to know the magic search terms to surface her dream job? “There wasn’t a product solving the most persistent pain points for people who either weren’t sure…

Nisha Dua is a true girl’s girl. When the former lawyer and Bain consultant joined AOL in 2013 to embrace her love of media and technology, she quickly found herself leading a charge to support young women who were also interested in the space. Now the 34-year-old is cofounder and partner at the AOL-backed BBG Ventures, which invests in female-led companies and has bankrolled some of today’s buzziest brands. Why? Because it’s good business. Have you always been interested in promoting equality for women in business? I come from a long line of overachievers, from an academic Indian immigrant family in Australia. Performance was expected. I never grew up feeling that I couldn’t succeed because I was a woman. But when I was working as a lawyer, I saw that…

1 / Choose materials wisely. EXAMPLE SLICE, Manhattan “How can a material be functional and not just visually pleasing? Here, employees have a place to make calls in an open setting, and the brick enforces acoustical soundness.” 2 / Elevate the essentials. EXAMPLE ELIGIBLE, Brooklyn “A sleek, double-height nap nook allows for rest and privacy during long workdays. We upholstered it with high-quality cushions and fabric. Comfort is key.” 3 / Always multitask. EXAMPLE UNCHARTED PLAY, Harlem “This is one of the chicest spaces I designed. It's a destination for board meetings, and a testing area for [energy-generating toy] products.”…

For most college students, healthy eating goes out the window the minute freshman orientation gets under way. Wan Kim was no exception. He came to the U.S. from South Korea to study and became quickly alarmed at how many calories he was taking in. So Kim started replacing greasy meals with nutrient-rich drinks from Smoothie King and developed a love of the brand’s health-focused product. After graduation, Kim returned to South Korea and took his newfound passion with him. In 2003, he opened that country’s first-ever Smoothie King, a full 30 years after the brand launched in the U.S. Then he kept opening them. By 2010, he owned more than 100 locations—but he still wanted more. So he approached founder and then-CEO Steve Kuhnau and made an offer to buy…

WHEN YOU HEAR the term peak performer, what do you think of? Odds are it’s someone who routinely operates under intense stress, getting the job done regardless of the difficulties. We think of athletes, lawyers, astronauts. But in their groundbreaking recent book The Leading Brain, researchers Friederike Fabritius and Hans W. Hagemann offer a more nuanced take on what it means to be a peak performer. To Fabritius and Hagemann, peak performance doesn’t necessarily mean thriving amid intense stress. Instead, it means finding your sweet spot—the amount of stress (or using their term, “arousal”) that allows you to function at your highest level. If you’re the kind of person who flourishes when a colleague calls in sick and you have to take their place at a presentation, and you produce…

Travis Merrigan and Nancie Weston had a simple, elegant idea. They wanted to make a bottle that cleans water. Fill it from a dubious source—a stagnant creek or a rusty spigot in a foreign country—and then use it like a French press, pushing down on a plunger-like filter to screen out harmful compounds. In 2013, after two years of development and a successful $15,000 Indiegogo campaign, they made it. It was called the Water Filtration Cup, sold under the brand name Grayl. Their sales strategy was ambitious; they wanted Grayl to be useful to everyone. They gave it a sleek, stainless steel design to broadcast its durability and high-end elegance. Then they offered three cleaning cartridges, which were called Tap, Trail, and Travel. Tap made water taste better, and the…

NOT EVERYONE is meant to be an entrepreneur. But for those who are, trying while you’re young is ideal. Your opportunity cost is lowest! Many people I know say, “Well, I’ll work two years in banking or consulting and then look at entrepreneurship.” The reality is, soon they’re getting married or having a family, and the chances of them leaving a steady salary to take this risk disappear. And if they make the leap, young entrepreneurs are especially well-positioned to succeed. In every other industry, age equals success: The more experience you have, the more senior you are. Entrepreneurship is the one place where some of the youngest people are at the top of the food chain. Why? Because young entrepreneurs’ inexperience is their greatest asset. They can come into…

1 / Offer development opportunities. A global survey of millennials found that 38 percent of them want to quit. Why? Many don’t feel invested in. Sponsor development opportunities, and shout them loud and clear. 2 / Always be recruiting. Top talent isn’t necessarily waiting until they need a job to look for one. They’re paying attention now. Be proactive, put content everywhere—on social platforms and through events—and offer thought leadership. 3 / Be authentic. Millennials crave work that aligns with their values and personal brands, and they are unusually skilled at detecting B.S.…

ON A CLEAR DAY IN JUNE 2015, Matt Scanlan loaded $2.5 million in Mongolian tögrögs into 32 plastic bags, stuffed them into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser, and lit out into the desert. Scanlan, the then-26-year-old cofounder and CEO of Naadam Cashmere, was headed to Bayankhongor province, one of the most remote regions in the world, located deep in the Outer Mongolian Gobi desert. Each year around the same time, the nomadic goatherds in the area gather in a local village to sell their yield, which consists of some of the finest cashmere there is. Leaving from the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Scanlan spent the next two days off-roading across unforgiving desert terrain with the bags of money piled so high in the back, the driver could hardly…

By age 19, Tim Hwang had worked as a field organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and served as an elected official on Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education. Now he’s 25 and the cofounder and CEO of FiscalNote, a Washington, D.C.–based tech startup that’s trying to do the impossible: Make sense of the government. What attracted you to politics? When I was young, politics seemed like a really big opportunity to take a small amount of your time and aggregate it into a larger impact. Whether it’s local politics or a presidential campaign, it makes you feel like you’re part of a movement. So how’d you end up founding a tech company instead of running for office? The headlines after the 2012 campaign were all government shutdown, debt-ceiling crisis.…

That’s how the iconic company started, in Winston-Salem, N.C., in the 1930s. How it nearly ended, decades later, is a case study in how franchises can stumble. First there was the sale, in the 1970s, to an international conglomerate so big it peddled everything from luggage to bras to window treatments. For the new parent company, a doughnut chain was a handy way to unload products made by its other myriad divisions, including soup and ice cream—which it actually sold at Krispy Kreme outlets. To cut costs, it even committed the sacrilege of changing the doughnut recipe. Saviors emerged in 1982, when outraged franchisees banded together to buy back the company. But 18 years later, when the new owners took it public, the brand got sidelined again while scrambling to…