Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 i Fast Company

Scarlet & Violet Prices vary scarlet-violet.myshopify.com “Vic Brotherson is the owner of this flower boutique and has been our florist for years. Her style is classic with a vintage twist. If you can’t get her arrangements, at least get her book, Vintage Flowers: Choosing, Arranging, Displaying.” Jens Grede and Erik Torstensson Founders, Frame Hormone Horoscope app Free myhormonology.com “This app tracks hormonal levels during a woman’s monthly cycle and provides insights on daily energy levels. So if my progesterone is up, I may chill at home and wait until estrogen and testosterone are peaking to conquer the world!” Jessica Iclisoy Founder and CEO, California Baby Angel’s Envy Rye From $75 angelsenvy.com “I’m loving Angel’s Envy whiskey, especially the rye. It’s handcrafted in small batches and finished in rum casks, giving…

Pamela Fletcher Executive chief engineer, GM Pamela Fletcher oversaw the development of the breakthrough Chevrolet Bolt EV, a $37,500 all-electric hatchback that can go 238 miles on a single charge—the first electric car to achieve that kind of range at such a low price point. Fletcher explains her approach to building the well-reviewed vehicle, which is rolling out nationally this year. How much pressure did you feel to get the Bolt to market before Tesla released its competing Model 3? We wanted to be fast, and we wanted to be first. With all the products we’ve done, we’re highly motivated—and I’m personally motivated—to make technology available to as many people as possible. Was there a key development step? All of our experience has built to let us deliver a car…

Ganesh Bell Chief digital officer, GE Power As GE Power’s first chief digital officer, Ganesh Bell is leading the 125-year-old company— known for building industrial turbines and generators— toward a software-driven future, where data analysis is as important as energyproducing hardware. He began by aggregating the data from sensors on machines used by GE Power customers, which include Japan’s Futtsu naturalgas power station and the New York Power Authority, operator of the Niagara Power Project, among other clean-energy plants. Then he ran that information through GE’s fiveyear- old industrial operating system, called Predix, which analyzes machine data on everything from jet engines to freight trains, to offer energy customers vital, actionable information. Over the past couple of years, Bell and his team have built suites of apps to help utilities…

Massimo Bottura Chef and cofounder, Food for Soul Massimo Bottura is famous for upending Italian cuisine at Osteria Francescana, in Modena, Italy, which topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2016. With his refettorio—or “dining hall”— projects, he’s doing a different kind of groundbreaking work. Beginning with 2015’s Refettorio Ambrosiano in Milan, followed by outposts in Rio, London (opening in June), and, soon, the U.S., Bottura is helping to feed the hungry, reduce the 1.3 billion tons of food waste accumulated each year, and rebuild communities. How do the refettorios work? Food for Soul [Bottura’s nonprofit] connects with local charitable organizations, [and] these groups invite the poor and homeless people we serve each week—as many as 100 meals per day in Milan. An abandoned theater was donated by a…

Bernadette Aulestia Executive vice president of global distribution, HBO Bernadette Aulestia’s job is to put HBO on users’ laptops, tablets, and smartphones, particularly if they don’t have a traditional cable subscription. In the digital video industry, where every company that could partner is also a competitor, Aulestia has to forge these relationships diplomatically. Last December, she made a deal with Amazon for it to sell HBO directly to Prime members. The partnership helps HBO reach customers who want the convenience of watching Game of Thrones via Amazon Video without having to manage another account, app, or bill. In return, Amazon receives an additional enticement to sell Prime—and another tool to threaten Netflix. Any HBO shows that Prime members watch will boost Amazon’s streaming traffic totals, a key metric used by…

Stuart Vevers Creative director, Coach When Stuart Vevers joined Coach in 2013 (along with Victor Luis as the new CEO), the company was in crisis. Its image had faded after years of discounting, with products regularly landing in bargain bins at T.J.Maxx and Macy’s. A corrective effort to pull back on supply only hurt the bottom line: Sales declined nearly $1 billion over the next three years, hitting a low of $4 billion in early 2015. But the spring 2016 collection turned things around. Vevers blended Coach’s Americana with youth counterculture—biker jackets, fringe, and faded rock T-shirts—which led to a 14% increase in profits last year. “My take on fashion through [Coach] has little to do with sta tus or wealth,” says Vevers. “I see the Coach girl and guy…

Merci Grace Director of growth product, Slack A former game developer for Electronic Arts, Merci Grace now heads the team behind Slackbot—a crucial AI tool that the workplace-communication platform Slack uses to orient new customers and help users better navigate its offerings. Represented by a grinning plaid icon, Slackbot is part help desk, part tour guide, and part friendly companion, answering questions based on simple keywords or nudging users to enable specific app integrations when, for example, they try to paste links from Google Drive or Dropbox. Grace’s background in video games has been especially helpful, allowing her to make Slackbot, and Slack in general, more engaging. The number of inapp conversations initiated by new users—a metric the company watches closely—is up nearly 17% in the past year. “Games have…

Kylie Jenner Founder, Kylie Cosmetics Seconds after Kylie Jenner launched her first three lines of lipstick, on November 30, 2015, all three sold out online. Less than two years later, Kylie Cosmetics is a fullservice, direct-to-consumer beauty brand, with offerings that include its signature lip kits (lipstick and liner) plus eye shadows, blushes, and tools. The 19-year-old Jenner, famous for her own perfectly plump pout, continues to draw upwards of 10 million people to her Snapchat makeup tutorials and has led the brand to a reported $400 million in revenue since its launch. Why go into makeup? I can’t leave the house without lipstick. Everyone was so interested in the color I was wearing. But nothing was ever perfect for me. I just thought, Why not make my own lip…

Emma Gao Head winemaker, Silver Heights China’s wine market was virtually nonexistent 40 years ago. Most people drank baijiu, a liquor distilled from grains. Today, the domestic wine industry is one of the world’s fastest growing— worth nearly $40 billion— and China consumes more red wine than any other country. Amid surging demand, most of the country’s wineries focus on bulk production at the expense of taste. But the cabernet gernischt (a local, red-wine varietal) and Burgundy-style chardonnay that Emma Gao produces at her Silver Heights winery, located near Mongolia and the Gobi desert, are increasingly prized in China— and drawing acclaim from critics such as Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson. Gao, who studied enology in Bordeaux, is known for her uncompromising technique: She uses only high-end French oak barrels…

Roxane Gay Author and professor of English, Purdue University Roxane Gay’s harrowing memoir Hunger, due in June from HarperCollins, marks the third book in less than a year for the feminist author, following January’s Difficult Women (short stories tackling race, class, and gender) and November’s World of Wakanda (an LGBTQ-themed comic-book spin-off of Marvel’s Black Panther). Just as significant is the work Gay didn’t release: In January, she pulled a project from a Simon & Schuster imprint after the publisher signed a deal with controversial far-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos (whose book has since been canceled). With a screenplay and two novels on the way—and an active Twitter following of 200,000—Gay may be the only public intellectual with an audience that spans comics fanboys, Twitter junkies, and ardent feminists. You’ve become…

Fred Armisen Producer and performer The chameleonic sketchcomedy dynamo is now melting into the role of impresario. Fred Armisen is working to create opportunities for underutilized Latino comedians and writers via Más Mejor, a “comedy studio” that produces and distributes its sketches and series on You- Tube and Telemundo, as well as Popsugar Latina and the Batanga digital network. “I help with content and looking for talent,” says Armisen, who briefly lived in Brazil as a child and whose mother is Venezuelan. Armisen—the star and cocreator of hit IFC shows Portlandia and Documentary Now!—has contributed a few sketches of his own (such as a series spoofing men’s fashion week), but the most satisfying part of his role is helping people “[get] cast on different TV shows.” In its first year,…

Thomas Cornwell Founder, Home Centered Care Institute There are more than 2 million homebound people in the U.S. When they get sick, many require expensive ambulance rides and hospital stays, leaving Medicare or Medicaid to pick up the bill. Thomas Cornwell’s nonprofit, Home Centered Care Institute, is training doctors to visit patients instead—a practice that could save insurers upwards of $1,000 per beneficiary annually, according to a pilot project by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid’s Innovation Center. Cornwell’s fiveyear- old institute has trained hundreds of physicians on its home-care method via intensive, 12-week programs and a new two-day session. This fall, the HCCI will open six training centers in hospitals across the country, including New York’s Mount Sinai. Cornwell has also partnered with Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from…

Katie Dill Director of experience design, Airbnb Katie Dill led Airbnb’s expansion late last year from home-booking app to full-on travel concierge via the high-profile launch of its Trips platform. Air bnb now offers travelers the ability to book unique, memorable, site-specific experiences such as Thai fruit carving in Bangkok or hanging out with TV writers in Los Angeles, while a product called Places provides mobile, locationspecific information (along with meetups and audio tours) so that users can enjoy their surroundings like a native. Dill’s challenge is to deliver a localized perspective at a global scale, making each Airbnb trip unique even as the service handles more than 100 million people worldwide. How does Trips differ from Airbnb’s regular booking platform? We do far more curation. People apply [to offer…

Naveen Jain Cofounder and executive chairman, Moon Express Born in poverty near New Delhi, India, Naveen Jain made his fortune with search engine InfoSpace, then cofounded data-mining giant Intelius, which he left after it was acquired in 2015. He’s been funding moonshots— often literally—ever since. Jain’s most prominent company, Moon Express, is a space-travel startup that has raised $45 million in its effort to become the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon—a feat Jain plans to attempt later this year as part of an effort to win the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize. Next, Jain will set about developing technology to mine the moon’s natural resources. Lunar water, for example, could be gathered and split into hydrogen (which can fuel rockets) and oxygen (which can sustain…

Jane Sun CEO, Ctrip Jane Sun had been CEO of Ctrip—China’s largest (and the world’s second largest) online travel company— for less than a month when she orchestrated the surprise acquisition, last November, of Scotland’s popular flightsearch tool Skyscanner for $1.7 billion. The bold move, which will further help Ctrip’s 250 million users find and book international flights, is part of Sun’s larger effort to create an all-encompassing travel platform that follows people through every step of their journey, whether it involves booking planes and chauffeured cars or even medical treatments. “We are not a traditional online tra vel agency,” says Sun, who served previously as both chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Even as Ctrip makes bigger investments, such as its purchase of a handful of Chinese-language U.S.…

David Stack Chairman and CEO, Pacira Pharmaceuticals Some 2 million Americans are addicted to prescription painkillers, and every day more than 1,000 people are treated in the ER for misusing them. Even with normal use, they can have debilitating side effects. “Opioids are wonderful pain relievers, but there is very little else that’s good about them,” says David Stack, a pharmacist by training. Stack heads Pacira, which developed a single-dose nonopioid to relieve postsurgery pain. Exparel is injected by the surgeon at the site of a procedure, and it slowly releases a local anesthetic over several days, allowing some patients to leave the hospital and start physical rehab sooner than with traditional painkillers. Stack has partnered with the American College of Surgeons to fund doctor- and patient-education programs on opioid…

Porter Braswell and Ryan Williams CEO and president, Jopwell Former Goldman Sachs employees Porter Braswell and Ryan Williams created re cruiting site Jopwell to let companies more easily connect with minorities. The platform—which is being used by Facebook, Airbnb, and Pfizer, among others— is also home to digital magazine The Well, which helps advise and em power minority job seekers. Two years after it launched, Jopwell has grown into a leading tool for both businesses and candidates from underrepresented communities. “You can’t seek an opportunity if you don’t know it exists,” says Williams. “We found ourselves working on Wall Street largely be - cause there was an es tablished pipeline [from certain universities to financial institutions]. We didn’t realize that we could work at Facebook or Google despite the fact…

Kiki Wolfkill Studio head, Microsoft’s 343 Industries Kiki Wolfkill, a former racecar driver, likes to go fast. She oversees Halo, the sci-fi firstperson shooter series that’s one of the top-selling video games of all time, and since being promoted to studio head in 2015, she’s moved quickly to position the brand for the future in two key areas: e-sports and television. Two years ago, Wolfkill had the vision to create the official Halo Championship Series and bring the best players in the game together to compete. In March, the 2017 Halo World Championships attracted more than 13 million unique viewers online. The tournaments help Wolfkill gather feedback to enhance features (such as the potency of particular weapons). Wolfkill is also working with Pilgrim, the team behind unscripted TV series like…

Alan Faena Founder and president, Faena Group Argentinian developer and hotelier Alan Faena has revamped the sleepy Miami neighborhood Mid-Beach, creating “a new epicenter of Miami Beach based on art, culture, music, architecture, and form,” he says. The sixblock area is now a $1.2 billion cultural enclave (financed by billionaire Len Blavatnik) called the Faena District. GATSBY MEETS SINATRA The Faena Hotel, a 169-room revamp of the old Saxony (where Frank Sinatra used to play), anchors the district. It’s decked out in high Gatsby style by director Baz Luhrmann and his productiondesigner wife, Catherine Martin. The nearby Casa Faena offers the Faena experience at a lower price. BALCONY SCENE The Foster + Partners– designed Faena House became an instant landmark when it opened in 2015 for its tiers of organically…

Brennan Turner Cofounder and CEO, FarmLead THE PROBLEM: Crops are an unpredictable business. Grain farmers typically commit the bulk of their expected yield to a local buyer; if they harvest more than predicted, they need to arrange a second sale. If all the farmers in the area are trying to unload a surplus of the same crop at the same time to the same buyers, prices are driven down. Negotiating these secondary sales on the phone “takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy,” says FarmLead cofounder and CEO Brennan Turner. Farmers often employ brokers, who take a cut. THE EPIPHANY: When Tur ner returned to his family’s 40,000-acre farm in Saskatch ewan after stints playing pro hockey and working on Wall Street, he was frustrated that he couldn’t “shop…

Heidi Zak Cofounder, ThirdLove ThirdLove, the four-year-old data-driven bra company founded by former Google marketer Heidi Zak (who was inspired after she struggled to find a bra that didn’t gap or tug), has gained a reputation for making some of the bestfitting bras and having one of the easiest at-home trybefore- you-buy programs. Last year, sales quadrupled, and with an infusion of $8 million in funding, Zak has begun applying her brand’s computer-vision algorithms to a new range of products. Here are three ways she is creating the most inclusive lingerie on the market. PLUSES AND MINUSES Many women fall between traditional size designations. Shortly after it launched, ThirdLove conducted a global study of 2.5 million women and gathered 9 million data points about the cup sizes they really need.…

Jeffrey Grybowski CEO, Deepwater Wind The country’s first offshore wind farm, located a few miles from the coast of Rhode Island, started providing electricity to parts of the state last December thanks to clean-energy developer Deepwater Wind. The fleet of five 600-foot-tall, 200-ton GE wind turbines, bolted to the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean, represents a collaborative effort by a team of marine biologists, electrical engineers, and turbine designers. “I help them figure out how we can take [their] technology and apply it to projects that can be built in real life,” CEO Jeffrey Grybowski says. Grybowski was a corporate lawyer with little experience in energy when he joined Deepwater in 2010, but his background in parsing complicated policy issues proved training enough: He spent more than six years chasing…

Anyone who’s ever organized and designed a conference knows how hard it can be to attract and engage attendees. And as the events space grows more crowded and more complex, the task is only getting harder. That’s why some of the world’s biggest companies seek a true hospitality partner to help them think outside the box—and the hotel ballroom. Take Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) popular conference, re:Invent. In 2016, AWS hosted around 32,000 attendees across five days at the Venetian Las Vegas and the resort’s adjoining conference facilities. As the five-year-old conference has grown by leaps and bounds, re:Invent has tapped the Venetian’s expertise, working hand in hand to achieve the sort of creativity and innovation that has established re:Invent as a model event. “We’re experts at serving and entertaining…

Fidji Simo Vice president of product, Facebook Fidji Simo is responsible for virtually everything Facebook’s almost 1.9 billion users see when they open the big blue app, from news to advertising. For each new feature, Simo starts by asking her teams a simple question: “What is the feeling you want people to have?” she says. “Feelings are universal.” Last year, when Simo launched Facebook Live, the breakthrough streaming-video application, the goals were “excitement” and “anticipation.” That’s why Simo inserted a feed of viewers’ real-time comments and encouraged video crea tors to integrate them into their broadcasts. The interactivity was such a hit, she’s rolling out a feature called “go live with a friend,” enabling two users to broadcast together, no matter where they are. All of this has helped turn…

Rohit Prasad and Toni Reid VP and head scientist, Amazon Alexa; VP, Echo devices and Alexa Rohit Prasad and Toni Reid have turned Alexa, the always-listening virtual assistant that’s built in to Amazon’s two-year-old Echo devices, into a categorydefining consumer experience. Now, to stay ahead of competing technologies at Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, they are finding clever ways to make Alexa both smarter and ubiquitous. In the past few months, they’ve helped bring Alexa’s voice-powered technology to the iPhone and Ford vehicles. They’ve rolled out cheaper alternatives to the $180 Echo—the $130 Tap and the $50 Echo Dot— and expanded into the U.K. and Germany. They’ve also enabled developers’ creativity, building a platform that has inspired programmers to create more than 10,000 voice-controlled “skills,” such as getting WebMD health…

Jesus Delgado-Jenkins Chief merchandising officer, 7-Eleven Last July, a six-rotor drone, toting a special insulated box, took to the air carrying Slurpees, a chicken sandwich, doughnuts, and a few more items, all from a Reno, Nevada– area 7-Eleven. It was the first commercial drone delivery to a U.S. home—part of an ongoing pilot program helmed by merchandising head Jesus Delgado- Jenkins, a onetime Treasury Department CFO under George W. Bush. When he arrived at 7-Eleven in 2010, Delgado- Jenkins pushed to stem a decade of customer attrition by launching an innovation group, increasing private-brand offerings, and adding new prepared-food items. He also began experimenting with delivery, which was already such a departure from 7-Eleven’s 90-year-old business model—building a store pretty much anywhere someone might desire one—that the prospect of drones…

Ty Stiklorius Founder and CEO, Friends at Work Longtime music manager Ty Stiklorius—who steers the careers of John Legend, Ciara, and Lindsey Stirling, among others—launched a new firm in 2015 called Friends at Work, which combines traditional management services with social activism. “We don’t work with artists who are not engaged in using their platform for good,” says Stiklorius. “I have no interest in just having another pop hit on the radio.” Together, Stiklorius and Legend launched the #FreeAmerica campaign, which raises awareness about mass incarceration and other issues, and she’s partnered with attorney Adam Foss in activist group Prosecutor Impact. Stiklorius, who cofounded and helps run Legend’s Get Lifted film-production company, is also helping Stirling turn one of her ultra-popular YouTube channels into a destination for raising awareness for…

Phoebe Waller-Bridge Writer, director, producer, actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sexually frank, fourth-wall-breaking dark comedy Fleabag, which launched on Amazon Prime Video last year, stars the writerproducer as a self-centered Londoner awkwardly navigating encounters with men, friends, and family while grieving the loss of her best friend. Never has a funny woman on TV also been so deeply bitter, lonely, and sad—or so intimately connected to the viewer. Waller-Bridge, who starred in and wrote another British sitcom in 2016 called Crashing (now on Netflix), is currently writing a second season of Fleabag and a spy thriller for BBC America. She is also, in a sign of emerging clout (see Donald Glover, page 42), voicing a character in the upcoming Star Wars spin-off about Han Solo. Fleabag began as an awardwinning, one-woman stage…

Justin Hall President, Bit Source Justin Hall was running a coding academy for kids in Lexington, Kentucky, when the owner of Bit Source, a software company deep in the state’s struggling coal region, asked him if he could teach coal miners to code too. Hall agreed and came up with a business plan in which Bit Source would hire former miners as “apprentices”— paying them $15 per hour (thanks to federal funds available to jump-start the region) to learn a curriculum he developed involving HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In March 2015, Hall selected 10 former miners— chosen from more than 900 applicants—who quickly became fluent not just in coding basics but also in programs including Drupal, Xamarin, and Unity. Since then, they have completed dozens of projects, including repeat business…

Barrie Loberg Cofounder, Dirtt Dirtt is a Canada-based company that designs and builds modular interiors for hospitals, universities, and other workplaces. To help clients create better spaces, Barrie Loberg, Dirtt’s resident tech expert, oversaw the development of a proprietary augmented-reality system that digitally superimposes potential renovations over existing spaces: new cabinets, say, or different paint colors. Users of the software— the first of its kind in the construction industry—can even move walls around to get a virtual sense of how a new layout would impact the space and get updated price and schedule information as they make changes. Called ICEreality, it runs on Microsoft’s HoloLens and Google’s Tango platforms. “It’s about creating when you’re in the space, not sitting at a computer,” says Loberg, who revealed the software last June.…

Kim Ng Senior vice president for baseball operations, Major League Baseball A former assistant general manager with the New York Yankees and serious competitive softball player, Kim Ng has now taken on a broad mission to introduce America’s pastime to new audiences around the globe, and in the process work to further diversify the ranks of professional ballplayers in the United States. Over the past six years, Ng—who is baseball’s highest-ranking female corporate executive and an odds-on favorite to become the first female general manager of a team in the sport’s history—has exponentially expanded the number of international training programs that are used to feed MLB squads, and her efforts have started showing tangible results. First-base phenomenon Gui Yuan Xu, a graduate of one of three MLB training facilities in…

Ben Rubin Founder and CEO, Houseparty When it launched in early 2016, Houseparty was an immediate hit, attracting more than a million users in just a few months (it now has almost 2 million). The video-hangout app—a stripped-down, youthoriented take on Skype where groups of people in different locales can drop in on a whim and converse with each other— was built by a team led by Ben Rubin, who had previously created live-streaming pioneer Meerkat. “We wanted a place where you could casually meet 20 people you care about with out having to schedule anything,” says Rubin, whose company secured a $50 million investment from Sequoia Capital in December. “You don’t need to set up a call and feel awkward for FaceTiming somebody.” 83 84 For providing working women…

Jerry Lorenzo Founder, Fear of God Last fall, sneakerheads went wild for a pair of sleek $1,095 Desert Storm–inspired high-tops created by Jerry Lorenzo. The L.A.-based designer behind a four-yearold line of high-end, masculine streetwear—which has earned the approval of Kanye West, Rihanna, and Travis Scott—also created the merchandise for Justin Bieber’s 2016 Purpose tour, which immediately sold out at pop-up shops across the country. How do you describe your aesthetic? Some guys, when they start buying luxury [fashion], start to dress less and less like themselves. I’m trying to make a guy feel comfortable, to keep him the same dude. You weren’t trained as a shoe designer. How did you get started with your now-iconic military sneakerboot? I asked my buddy [luxury sneaker designer] Jon Buscemi whether he had…