Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec/Jan2025 - Issue 65 i Fast Company South Africa

What is it about some restaurants that makes fine dining a pleasurable experience? While food is top of the list, there should be a space up there somewhere for those who serve it. In a country that pays waiters and waitresses a pittance, it may be difficult to grasp the true value of people who connect the restaurants with patrons – and in the process create wonderful experiences. Thelma, who is unique among waitresses, says it’s all about engagement. This is clearly visible from her interaction with patrons, as they come in with requests at an eatery in Stellenbosch. This engagement, however, does not end in the restaurant. She takes it to social media, mainly LinkedIn, where she shares – frankly and honestly – about her experiences. Sometimes she blogs…

Through the early Nineties, as South Africa charted a course towards real democracy, there were leaders who helped steer the country away from a terrible past towards a better tomorrow. They are a well-known group, one that includes struggle heroes, politicians, senior clerics and captains of industry, many of whom went on to help shape South Africa’s future. There is another group, however, whose behind-the scenes contributions to nation-building do not always receive the praise they deserve when the credits are rolled. Among them is Nathan Reddy, one of the country’s most respected and awarded creatives. In late April 1994, the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela won South Africa’s first democratic elections. Reddy was among the creatives who crafted the ANC’s communication strategy led by Louis Gavin at AMC…

FOUNDER, PAT MCGRATH LABS WHEN MAKEUP ARTIST PAT MCGRATH launched her eponymous beauty line in 2015, she included “Labs” in the name for a reason. McGrath, the first to elevate runway makeup to a realm of artistic fantasy on its own (feathers as eyelashes for Valentino, lacquered masks for Alexander McQueen, 30,000 Swarovski crystals covering rapper Doja Cat for Schiaparelli), is an alchemist at her core. She had spent decades inventing formulas to achieve products that made her job easier. And with Pat McGrath Labs, she found a way to bring her innovations to the everyday user. McGrath pioneered beauty’s direct-toconsumer model, launching her first product, Gold 001, a luxe gold pigment, on her social media channels in 2015, a month before Kylie Jenner debuted her lip kits. McGrath mastered…

FOUNDER, INNOVATIVE GENOMICS INSTITUTE; PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY WHEN BIOCHEMIST JENNIFER DOUDNA and her research partner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, published a paper in Science 12 years ago, they had a hunch that their findings would transform how genomics is used in medicine. The paper outlined a method they’d developed for editing DNA that used an RNA-based system known as CRISPR-Cas9. The approach was more efficient and precise than any prior gene-editing technology. By the time Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020, CRISPR (short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) had engendered a biotechnology revolution. Today, researchers around the world are employing CRISPR to develop diagnostics for the Zika virus, disease models for Alzheimer’s, and therapeutics capable of attacking cancer cells. What started as a “cut,…

WRITER, LYRICIST AND ACTOR WHEN HAMILTON DEBUTED OFF BROADWAY IN 2015, telling America’s founding story through the language of hip-hop, it became a sensation, immediately yanking the American songbook into the 21st century. The show went on to earn nearly $1 billion in Broadway ticket sales, won a Pulitzer Prize, and generated a media universe spanning book publishing, music—the album has sold more than 10 million copies—and streaming; the TV debut essentially launched Disney+. It has had several lasting effects, too, encouraging other producers to merge history with pop scores (see: Six and Suffs), establishing new industry norms around the need for robust social media campaigns and direct promotion, getting middle and high schoolers interested in history, and even factoring into the Treasury Department’s decision to keep Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. In…

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW (CES) JANUARY 7-10 LAS VEGAS, UNITED STATES The CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is one of the largest annual exhibitions and technology conferences in the consumer electronics and technology industry. It is organised by the CTA (Consumer Technology Association). The exhibition allows numerous companies, from startups to industry giants, to showcase their products and technologies. These range from AI and robotics to smart home devices and autonomous vehicles. At the event, industry leaders and experts will participate in panels, talks and discussions on emerging trends, innovations and the future of technology. The CES attracts numerous industry professionals, journalists and investors, offering a major opportunity for companies to promote their innovations and for individuals to get a glimpse into the future of the tech world. DIGITAL RETAIL AFRICA (DRA)…

Through the course of this past year, as South Africa celebrated 30 years of democracy, observers have reflected on the country’s achievements and weighed in on its unsolved problems. But while a lot was written and said about the well-known political leaders who have helped shape the nation’s path over the past three decades, not much was heard about the creatives who influenced this important period in our country’s history. Among them is Nathan Reddy, the founder of award-winning advertising agency Grid Worldwide. In this issue of Fast Company, where he features as our cover star, we examine the creative role Reddy has played in shaping several of South Africa’s most iconic brands. Spending time with him has left me thinking deeply about the role creativity could play in addressing…

TED SARANDOS PAT MCGRATH LINA KHAN RYAN REYNOLDS JENNIFER DOUDNA JOSÉ ANDRÉS SARA NELSON LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA SATYA NADELLA ISSA RAE…

CHAIR, FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION BEFORE SHE BECAME THE YOUNGEST head of the Federal Trade Commission in history in 2021 (at 32), Lina Khan spent a lot of time thinking about chickens. Specifically, while working as a researcher at the think tank New America after college, she investigated how giant chicken processing companies forced small farmers into opaque, lopsided contracts that jeopardised their livelihoods and scared them from speaking up. And government regulators weren’t acting. As long as these monopolies weren’t hiking prices for consumers, the prevailing thinking went, there wasn’t much for antitrust enforcers to do. “It made a deep impression on me,” Khan says, and sent her on the path to becoming perhaps the country’s most ambitious, compelling and controversial antitrust thinker in a generation. As a law student,…

CHEF AND FOUNDER, JOSÉ ANDRÉS GROUP FOUNDER, WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN THROUGH HIS MORE THAN THREE DOZEN restaurants, various TV series and specials, and podcast, Spanish-born chef José Andrés has popularised paella and introduced Americans to jamón ibérico. But his impact goes far beyond cuisine. Andrés’s 14-year-old nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, has emerged over the past decade as one of the world’s leading food-aid organisations because of its unique ability to respond nimbly to all manner of humanitarian crises—from natural disasters to war. WCK harnesses local networks of chefs, waitstaffs, restaurants and food warehouses to quickly make and distribute meals, with an emphasis on culturally relevant offerings (tahina and za’atar in Gaza; Easter cakes in Ukraine). To date, the nonprofit has served more than 400 million meals, with Andrés’s own presence…

CEO, MICROSOFT ASK MICROSOFT CEO SATYA NADELLA about his approach to innovation and he tends to reminisce. He’ll name-check Skype Translator, the real-time languagetranslation tool he unveiled soon after being tapped to run Microsoft in 2014—a crucial early sign of his commitment to AI leadership, as he sees it. Or he’ll turn way back to what it was like to join the company in 1992, as computer networks were just taking off—still one of the industry’s most epoch-shifting moments. In other words, according to Nadella, what seem to be inflection points are usually the result of years of patient investment. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, ChatGPT just launched— it’s time to take [AI] seriously’, ” he says. “That’s too late.” But his remarkable run at the software behemoth, which has seen…

“WELCOME TO THE FRONT PAGE OF THE INTERNET.” EVERYONE WHO ENTERS REDDIT’S SAN FRANCISCO HEADQUARTERS IS GREETED BY THAT PHRASE, EMBLAZONED ABOVE THE FRONT DOOR IN BOLD RED LETTERING. IT’S HOW THE COMPANY HAS DESCRIBED ITSELF FOR YEARS. BUT COFOUNDER AND CEO STEVE HUFFMAN ACKNOWLEDGES THAT IT NO LONGER CAPTURES THE SPRAWLING, 19-YEAR-OLD COMMUNITY SITE’S ESSENCE. Likening Reddit to a newspaper’s front page was originally “an aspirational joke”, he tells me. “And then maybe it felt more true than not for a while.” That was the midaughts, when much of the action took place on the site’s homepage, a list of links from around the web submitted by users and ranked by interestingness via upvoting and downvoting. The results amounted to a snapshot of what the internet was obsessing about…

When transportation company Uber was launched in the United States, there were some in South Africa who looked and decided it was something that would never work in the local transport sector. They were wrong and it did, despite the efforts of some who tried to stop the ride service, saying it was unfair on those who were required to get a permit to operate. Uber was something many found hard to swallow. Fast-forward just over a decade, and the local transport industry appears set to face a pair of equally difficult-to-accept changes. The more immediate of the two is the fast-growing global transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric ones. The other – and likely a more distant one – is the move to driverless cars. And while…

CO-CEO, NETFLIX TED SARANDOS STEPPED OFF AN ELECTRIC golf cart in the Albuquerque summer heat, ducked into a state-of-the-art soundstage, and entered another world. “Looks just like a hospital,” he said as a production assistant guided him past wheelchairs and a mannequin strapped to a gurney. This was the set of Pulse, a new original series that unfolds in Miami’s busiest level 1 trauma centre, and as word spread that the boss had arrived, co-showrunner Carlton Cuse emerged from what looked like an operating room and shook Sarandos’s hand. “That’s a cut!” someone yelled, as Cuse, best known as a showrunner on ABC’s Lost, began a tour of Pulse’s faux hospital, featuring a two-storey entryway, full-on emergency room, scrub-in area and long hallways where actors could perform “walk and talk” scenes without…

COFOUNDER, MAXIMUM EFFORT; CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER, MNTN BY NOW, IT’S THE STUFF OF LEGEND. RYAN REYNOLDS had been trying to get Deadpool made for at least a decade when a piece of test footage was somehow leaked online in July 2014. The viral reaction was enough to persuade 20th Century Fox to flash the green light. Yet the film’s $58 million budget left pennies for promotion. So, Reynolds and the studio’s head of digital marketing, George Dewey, got creative. They decided to break the fourth wall, poking fun at movie marketing in a way that hadn’t been done before, and audiences loved it. The film earned more than $782 million worldwide, making it, at that time, the highest-grossing R-rated film ever. Thriving under financial constraints quickly became the foundation of…

PRESIDENT, ASSOCIATION OF FLIGHT ATTENDANTS TEN YEARS AGO, WHEN SARA NELSON was elected president of the Association of Flight Attendants—the union that represents airline workers at United, Frontier, Alaska and other airlines—the picture for the US labour movement was grim. “We were clearly failing the working class,” says Nelson. Stories of striking autoworkers and organising Starbucks baristas were not yet dominating national news. “We were still in a place where the narrative was that the labour movement was outmoded, that it was something for the past,” she says. “We couldn’t yet awaken people to their power of withholding their labour.” But through her work—both as the leader of her own union and as a vital, powerful communicator on television, at rallies and on Capitol Hill—Nelson has been at the vanguard…

ACTOR AND PRODUCER; FOUNDER, HOORAE ISSA RAE TOLD AN INTERVIEWER ON THE 2017 Emmy Awards red carpet that she was “rooting for everybody Black”. It wasn’t just a sentiment about the nominees that night—it’s at the core of everything her increasingly sprawling empire touches. “I don’t know anybody else who’s been a television and film producer and entrepreneur [who has] successfully prioritised us at every turn,” she says confidently. “I’m going to just stand on that.” It started with The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, the 2011 YouTube series she wrote, crowdfunded, and starred in, which sidestepped typical tropes of Black female characters of the era. The show became a hit among Black millennials for its timeliness and authentic point of view, and Rae became emblematic of an emerging new…

By preventing AI purveyors from just grabbing its data, Reddit set the stage for the second phase of its strategy: signing formal deals with the industry’s key players. In February 2024, it announced a partnership with Google that gave the search giant access to its API and enabled Reddit to use Google AI on its own site. The deal could be vulnerable now that a federal court has ruled against Google in an antitrust suit, but if it stands, it could alleviate concerns that its surging Google Search traffic could take a dive: “Google has a long history of crawling us, indexing us, and sending us lots of users,” says Huffman. “That’s worked really well for both of us, and we want to see that continue.” (In July, 404 Media…

Based on the number of customers, Capitec Bank is the biggest retail bank in South Africa. Its name derives from a combination of the words “capital” and “technology”, and as is made clear by TJ Strydom in Stalking Giants, the first word refers not only to the institution’s financial but also its important human capital – the millions of South Africans who have chosen it as their bank. This book traces the bank’s beginnings (it was founded 23 years ago) in Stellenbosch and lists those business leaders and others who clubbed together to turn it into the financial giant it became. Among other things, Strydom looks at its early microlending footprint and examines Capitec’s roots, in small towns across the country, where it came across “hundreds of thousands of potential…