Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Fast Company

Could 2018 be a watershed for women entrepreneurs? In July, Tina Sharkey, cofounder and CEO of direct-to-consumer company Brandless, announced a $240 million Series C funding round—an apparently unprecedented sum for a woman-led private company. A few days later, Aileen Lee’s Cowboy Ventures said it raised $95 million to invest in tech startups. In this month’s cover story, Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton reveals that by year’s end her fund will write $1 million checks to two companies founded by black women. There’s still much work to do, of course. As Melinda Gates notes in an essay (page 42), women founders receive just 2% of venture capital dollars. And according to a new survey conducted by Fast Company and our colleagues at Inc., running one’s own company doesn’t insulate women…

INNOVATION AGENT SARAH ULLMAN Founder, One Vote at a Time After Orlando’s Pulse nightclub shooting left 49 people dead in June 2016, Los Angeles film maker Sarah Ullman sat on her couch, shaken. A few days later, she came to a career-changing realization. “I wanted more people in [political] office who would do something about this issue,” she says. By the end of the year, she had launched One Vote at a Time, an organization that brings together female filmmakers to create free campaign ads for progressive candidates in local and state elections. In 2017, Ullman worked with 19 candidates in the Virginia state elections. This year, she’s producing films for 250 candidates in 10 states ahead of the November midterms. “I didn’t expect to disrupt political media or campaign…

Entrepreneurs aren't thrilled with the current political leadership. Eleven percent voted for President Trump, and only 12 founders rated his performance as “strongly favorable.” Many of the rest are taking action: “I listen more. I read more. I’m more vocal with my peers,” wrote one founder. “And I put my money where my mouth is.” Trump disapproval 84 % WILL NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP IF HE RUNS IN 2020 0 NUMBER OF VC-BACKED WOMEN WHO WILL VOTE FOR TRUMP IF HE RUNS IN 2020 How Trump voters financed their companies *INCLUDING HOME EQUITY, FRIENDS/FAMILY, CREDIT CARDS, AND SBA GUARANTEED LOANS “Before the [2016] election, i would give a couple hundred dollars to [mostly] local candidates.[now] i donete more, including state and federal I give my employees election day off to…

SPECIAL REPORT STRONG FEMALE LEAD To change the world, it helps to get capital into the hands of people who have a different vision for it. A few years ago, I began quietly investing in “nontraditional” venture capital funds—“nontraditional,” of course, being industry parlance for a fund that isn’t completely overindexed on companies led by white men. With these investments I joined a growing community of funders who believe that worthwhile investment ideas are more evenly distributed among the population than the current flow of venture capital dollars would suggest. My journey to Sand Hill Road began, of all places, on a beach in Tanzania. It was 1993, and Bill and I were in East Africa to celebrate our engagement. That trip was our first encounter with the daily realities…

Gillette Treo razor THE PRODUCT: Gillette has been designing razors since 1900, but last year the company began testing its very first assisted-shaving razor, created to help caregivers give a close shave to elderly or disabled men. It’s “a massive part of men’s dignity,” says Matt Hodgson, Gillette’s principal design engineer. For non-barbers, shaving another person pre sents unique challenges. Since most assisted shaving happens outside the bathroom, Hodgson and his team devised a razor handle with a built-in tube that dispenses a water-based gel. The team gave the blade a unique guard that reduces clogging (originally created for the Indian market, where men tend to shave less and use less water) and adjusted the angle between the blade and the handle so that caregivers can hold the razor like…

Google Google Earth VR The Product: Google Earth VR enables users to teleport virtually anywhere in the world. The free desktop application, which works with an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset, compiles satellite and aerial imagery to reconstruct a simulated globe that is rendered from the user’s point of view. Users can explore any major city, rural outpost, or childhood home. Since its debut in late 2016, the app has been downloaded more than 900,000 times. It’s also gotten faster and received two important upgrades: Users can now search by place name or address and use Street Views to explore 360-degree photos at ground level—or even under water in some spots. The experience can be so profound that researchers at Simon Fraser University’s iSpace Lab are using Earth VR…

Frontend.com Moot In an era of rising populism, with extremism and distrust warping civic dialogue, a group of Irish designers and researchers are harnessing technology to help reverse the erosion of faith in public institutions. Moot, an AI-powered platform devised by Dublin-based UX consultancy Frontend.com, lets citizens submit questions and comments to their representatives, and helps these local officials engage directly with constituents. Moot (the name derives from a medieval term for assembly) organizes messages by topic to make them easier for government officials to respond to, and shares updates and facts through a chatbot. A pilot study of the platform with the Cork County Council yielded promising results: Citizens using Moot had a 32% more favorable view of the council than those not using the platform.…

The research scientist doesn’t have to think about why her lab was situated on the north side of the building, away from the glare of the sun—only that the airy, windowed lab maintains a precise climate without making her feel shut off. A lawyer need not understand glass-curtain wall construction—only that the floor-to-ceiling views spur his best thinking. Such effortless grace and utility result from intensive planning, coordination, and a sense of shared mission. Chicago-based Clayco, a real estate, architecture, engineering, and construction firm, has created hundreds of signature buildings for prominent companies—Amazon, Centene, and Caterpillar, to name a few—since 1984 by emphasizing collaboration and transparency. “We’ve worked to align all of the enterprise interests with the clients’ goals,” says Bob Clark, Clayco’s founder and CEO. As the company’s mantra,…

Airtable Airtable Part spreadsheet, part database, part vision board, Airtable lets workplace teams coordinate and collaborate on internal projects in a way that feels truly revolutionary, offering a customizable visual interface that gives users easy access to the information they need while allowing them to hide what they don’t. “What Slack is doing for communication, we [are] doing for structured software,” says CEO Howie Liu, explaining that Airtable occupies a middle ground between highly technical developer platforms, like Salesforce’s Force.com, and consumer-grade project-management tools such as Trello or Asana. Airtable, which launched to the public in 2015, says its user base has nearly tripled in the past two years and is now in the “seven figures.” Clients range from Netflix and Airbnb to cattle farmers, and include half of the…

Samsung Galaxy Tab Active2 THE PRODUCT: It feels like any other small, sleek tablet. But when it slips through your fingers and falls onto the concrete below, you’ll realize it isn’t. The sturdy Samsung Galaxy Tab Active2 is designed for employees who work in roughneck environments, from construction sites to warehouses. In fact, the Tab Active2 isn’t even marketed to consumers. “Connected business is expanding beyond the office to all the employees in the enterprise,” says Jen Langan, Samsung’s senior director of mobile computing product marketing. “FedEx or UPS have tens of thousands of employees at headquarters, but they have hundreds of thousands outside of it, all of whom need to be connected to the business.” Analyst firm IDC estimates that companies bought 385 million rugged phones and tablets in…

HIPCAMP GLAMPING Price varies by location hipcamp.com “Hipcamp is an Airbnb for glamping. You can find all sorts of yurts and tents in the middle of nowhere, fully furnished and scenically set up. It offers a no-struggle digital detox. And it really is a professional detox for me as well—I get fashion inspiration from the nature around me.” Anastasia Sartan CEO, Epytom SOOO MANY WHITE GUYS PODCAST Free iTunes “If you love the 2 Dope Queens podcast, you’ll be obsessed with Phoebe Robinson’s Sooo Many White Guys. She interviews artists and activists and one ‘token white guy’ per season. She’s hilarious, and it really makes you think.” Lee Mayer Cofounder and CEO, Havenly OUTWARD HOUND BACKPACK $35 outwardhound.com “My rescue toy Australian Shepherd mix (Forrest) and I hike a lot.…

BY THE NUMBERS CLEAN BEAUTY Demand for healthier ingredients has spread beyond the dinner plate. Interest in cosmetics and skincare products claiming to be “clean” and “natural” has grown in the past two years, with no regulation around either term. “Natural” personal care and beauty products generated more than $1.5 billion in U.S. sales in 2017, according to Nielsen. And the trend isn’t slowing down. A new report from Grand View Research predicts that the global organic personal care industry will reach nearly $25 billion by 2025. ONES TO WATCH Total funding to date of “clean” beauty startups that have raised capital in the past two years SOURCE: CRUNCHBASE THE TOP INGREDIENTS WOMEN AIM TO AVOID FRAGRANCES, PARABENS, PHTHALATES, SULFATES, AND GLUTEN SOURCE: CVS PRODUCT REPORT 12 Number of personal…

WORLD-CHANGING IDEA SWEETGREEN AND ROW 7 This fall, an ultra-flavorful variety of squash will begin appearing on the menus of fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen. Called Robin’s Koginut, the round, bronze-colored vegetable was created by Row 7, a seven-month-old seed company cofounded by Blue Hill chef (and farm-to-table champion) Dan Barber, Cornell University vegetable breeder Michael Mazourek, and seed producer Matthew Goldfarb. The company selectively breeds squash, beets, potatoes, and other vegetables to prioritize flavor along with yield, storability, and disease resistance—making them easier to grow organically. Row 7’s seed-to-table approach has earned it fans among high-end chefs. But the Sweetgreen partnership broadens its reach, part of Barber’s ultimate goal “to get this out of my kitchen and into the food chain,” he says. Here’s how he’s getting everyday consumers to…

More than half the women said they experienced some form of harassment or bias—including gender, race, sexual orientation, or age discrimination—in their capacity as founders. Most chose not to take any legal action. As one founder put it, “[I] let it roll off my back. It’s going to happen. It’s just reality.” 35 WOMEN REPORTED EXPERIENCING SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THEIR CAPACITY AS A FOUNDER “My husband is my co-founder and co-CEO, but I run the company day-to-day. We would walk into a room with bankers or industry leaders and [they would] address him, until it became clear that I was actually running the company.”—Courtney Nichols Could, cofounder and CEO, SmartyPants Vitamins 53% HAVE EXPERIENCED BIAS OR HARASSMENT IN THEIR CAPACITY AS A FOUNDER Who's crossing the line The women who…

Apps and Games Design Company of the Year Experimental Fashion and Beauty General Excellence Graphic Design and Data Visualization Health Products Retail Environments Social Good Spaces, Places, and Cities Students Timeless Design User Experience Web Design Workplace Recently, a group of Irish designers and researchers conducted a study to see if technology could repair the relationship between citizens and local government. Their work (see page 56) revealed that a cleverly designed, communication-facilitating chatbot could increase faith in government. It’s a heartening demonstration of design’s ability to strengthen ties between citizens, government, and society—a real feat at a time when the world is witnessing all too clearly how seemingly smart design can also contribute to the erosion of democracy. The past decade has seen the rise of user-centered design, a philosophy…

One Concern Seismic Concern As a teen in Kashmir, Ahmad Wani survived a devastating earthquake, and the experience inspired him to become a structural engineer. While pursuing his master’s at Stanford, he teamed up with two other grad students, Nicole Hu and Tim Frank, on a project that applied machine learning to historical earthquake data, creating precise predictions of future damage that could guide emergency response. The three cofounded One Concern in 2015, and five cities, including Los Angeles, Cupertino, and San Francisco, are now using the company’s Seismic Concern platform to monitor more than 12 million residences and nearly 700,000 commercial buildings and run evacuation and rescue simulations. The platform recently helped emergency workers in San Francisco identify evacuees following a high-pressure gasline rupture. Universal Favourite Complements modular chocolates…

Google Multiple projects We all remember the face-plant that was Google Glass. Or the time when, in an infamous fit of overengineering, Google tested 41 shades of the color blue on ad links to find the most profitable hue. Since then, however, the company has been steadily refining its design strategy to get out of the way and put users first. Last year, Google’s Allo messaging app was an honoree in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards. This year, the company has presented a slate of sophisticated new products—including a range of smart speakers, a globe-trotting virtual experience, and a new interface for communicating via Morse code on smartphones—signaling a design-first sensibility that has earned Google our first-ever Design Company of the Year Award, honoring high-quality, ambitious design work across…

Major League Baseball At Bat VR Over the past decade, serious baseball junkies have been cobbling together multiple apps and platforms to immerse themselves more deeply in the experience of watching live games, toggling between TV, laptops, and mobile devices to see box scores alongside pitch location and ball velocity. Now Major League Baseball has integrated all of this data into a single platform by enhancing its popular 10-year-old At Bat app with virtual-reality capabilities. In addition to layering statistics over high-definition video of the game’s action, the app offers a catcher’s-view perspective that allows the fan to track each pitch as it approaches and passes through a 3-D strike zone, showing the hot and cold spots for every batter, courtesy of MLB’s Statcast tracking data. MLB worked with TV…

Modern Meadow Zoa shirt Suzanne Lee was a fashion de signer in the early ’90s when she discovered in a lab that biofabrication processes could produce leatherlike materials via yeast fermentation. She spent the next 10 years experimenting with giant vats of bacteria while advising clothing brands on how to incorporate newly invented materials. Recently, as chief creative officer at biotech startup Modern Meadow, she’s helped lead the development of an animal-free leather material called Zoa and is now collaborating with industrial fermentation company Evonik to scale the biofabrication process As the world becomes more affluent, people want more meat and leather products, but the planetary stress is unsustainable. Here, we design and edit DNA, put it into yeast cells, and then use a fermentation process to scale. We can actually…

OZ Architecture McMurdo Station Outside, winds can howl at 115 miles per hour and winter temperatures dip to–30 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet inside Antarctica’s McMurdo Station is a bustling hub for research. McMurdo would be a big city by Antarctic standards, if the continent had any actual cities or towns: Hundreds of scientists from around the world live here to study everything from climate change to astrophysics. “It’s a community that’s devoted to one thing,” says Rick Petersen, principal at the Colorado-based firm OZ Architecture. The National Science Foundation, which funds the research hub, and contractor Lockheed Martin commissioned Petersen and his team six years ago to rethink the station’s inefficient design—a hodgepodge of buildings, some dating back to the 1950s, that need to be heated primarily by fuel delivered by…

The Zagat site remains largely unchanged after being acquired by The Infatuation last March, with Google ratings—pumped in through an outside application—appearing alongside existing Zagat reviews. The Infatuation CEO, Chris Stang, expects to release a new platform for “community-driven content” by the end of 2019, and says that he and his team are currently testing the format and rating system for reviews internally. In the meantime, the company is experimenting with ways to apply Zagat’s heavily quote-driven restaurant reviews to Instagram. Currently, geotags can alert editors to where diners are posting from, and then editors can “re-gram,” layering user comments beneath related food pics. It’s also looking back to the company’s roots. “I was joking with [Tim and Nina, saying], ‘You were basically building an app but on paper, a…

THE BIG PICTURE FORTNITE With mere seconds to go before 1:30 p.m. ET, on a mountaintop overlooking Snobby Shores, Muselk scrambled up a makeshift ramp, lowered his sniper rifle, and peered down at the launchpad below. Like everyone else, he was here to see the rocket. An alarm sounded. Boosters rumbled. Fiery orange jets began pushing the missile skyward. “Oh. My. God. Yaaaaaaaaow! It’s going, boys, it’s going!” Muselk shouted to his friend LachyDachy. He peered through his rifle’s scope to get a better look as the rocket disappeared into the night sky. For a moment: silence. But then the rocket returned, first as a drifting star, and then—suddenly—as a murderous projectile, bearing down on the world below. The missile careened low across fields, buzzed buildings, and then shot upward…

MASTER CLASS HASAN MINHAJ Comedian and host, Patriot Act The unofficial theme of Hasan Minhaj’s breakthrough 2017 Netflix special, Homecoming King, is “Log kya kahenge,” a Hindi phrase that translates to “What will people think?” The first-generation Indian American refers to the line in anecdotes that explore racism and cultural tradition—including a heartbreaking story about a hate crime committed against his family on September 12, 2001. Although he prods his audience to let go of the “Log kya kahenge” outlook, Minhaj’s talent for influencing what people think has been a hallmark of his career. It’s a skill he honed as a former correspondent for The Daily Show and as the host of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April of last year. After his remarks garnered praise from both sides…

About half of the respondents raised outside capital to launch their companies. The rest leaned primarily on their savings, friends and family, and business bank loans. Of the women who did raise money, 38% reported that they specifically sought out female investors—often because they felt strongly about supporting women VCs. "Beingan all-female management team, walking into rooms of mostly men and selling them on a female-targeted product was difficult. We could usually tell early how it was leaning. There were a lot of snap judgments."—Molly Howard, cofounder and CEO. La Ligne 52% RAISED LESS THAN $50K Fundraising totals Getting started didn’t always break the bank 48% RAISED $50K OR MORE Women think big—even if they raised little Many respondents reported that their prime motivator for starting a business was that…

The majority of our respondents have at least one child and work between 40 and 60 hours per week. Thirty-nine percent report feeling that they have good work/life balance, or at least that they have more balance than they did before they became entrepreneurs. Only 30% report working more than 60 hours per week. Paid leave advocates They provide the benefit at almost double the national average. *SOURCE: WORLD ATWORK Who prioritizes paid leave Women-led companies are more likely to offer family leave as their revenue grows—up to a point. “I've sacrificed my time and sleep [to be an entrepreneur]. I could perhaps be making more money inside a bigger company but I'd have to sacrifice my freedom, my vision, and my highest opportunity to make a difference.”—Cheryl Contee, CEO,…

Polis Station Studio Gang On a recent summer day in Chicago, the rooftop of architect Jeanne Gang’s Art Deco offices feels like a park. Nicknamed Sky Island, the outdoor space includes an eighth of an acre of biodiverse native prairie grasses and wildflowers that supports birds, butterflies, and several beehives. Gang’s work is focused on resilience—not just in nature, but in people. “Ecology is the study of relationships between all living things and their environment,” she says. “And that’s exactly what architecture does, too.” Gang, a 2011 MacArthur “genius” and a leading architect of her generation, is currently addressing some of the biggest civic-impact challenges facing cities today. In addition to developing innovative solutions to abandoned or neglected public spaces (Studio Gang’s waterfront and school reuse projects in Memphis are…

BioLite FirePit The $199 BioLite FirePit, which hit the market in August, is a portable device—around the size of a cooler—that creates smoke-free campfires by optimizing airflow. A fan inside the rechargeable power pack that attaches to the side of the FirePit pumps air through 51 small jets that line the chamber, one row targeting the fuel, the other fanning the flames. “Blowing air onto the wood allows the fuel to burn extra hot, and blowing directly into the flames creates clean combustion,” says Tim Connolly, product lead at BioLite. Because it burns fuel more efficiently, the FirePit requires less wood. (BioLite’s HomeStove, which provides cleaner, safer combustion for the more than 3 billion people in developing nations who cook meals over open fires, received an Innovation by Design Award…

Square Square Register Mobile payments company Square built a thriving global business by replacing cash registers with a tiny credit card reader that attaches to smartphones and tablets, transforming the way many small vendors conduct business. Last year, in response to customer requests for a more professional, robust point-of-sale system, Square introduced its own version of the cash register, an elegant system composed of two tablet screens: a larger one for the cashier to use and a smaller one that faces the customer. The two are cleverly integrated: The smaller tablet, which includes a chip reader, acts as a stand for the larger one. Since it began shipping the Register, in November 2017, the company has attracted some big new customers, such as Ben and Jerry’s. (In its first quarter…

Molekule Home One Molekule is the world’s first air purifier that destroys pollutants at the molecular level, marking a significant upgrade from standard HEPA filters, which were invented in the 1940s. Its process, called photo-electrochemical oxidation (PECO), involves shining light onto a filter membrane that has been coated with proprietary nanoparticles, triggering a reaction that breaks down pollutants of any size, including allergens, mold, bacteria, viruses, and carcinogenic volatile organic compounds that concentrate in indoor air. Mechanical engineer and veteran energy researcher Yogi Goswami spent 20 years creating the prototype—which involved adapting technology he’d previously developed to purify groundwater—in order to help his son, Dilip (Molekule cofounder and CEO), find relief from asthma and allergies. Since launching in May 2016, the company has worked to keep up with demand: The…

Ikea’s Space10 Building Blocks It looks like the sort of ridiculously pricey modernist retreat that design lovers dream of—a rich person’s spartan playhouse that could be nestled in the woods or perched on a heath. In fact, the 527-square-foot model home, an austere black box with large windows, cost only $9,408 to build and was fabricated largely from a single material (certified sustainable plywood) by a single machine (computerized cutter). Developed within Ikea’s experimental Space10 lab by Danish architecture students Johanne Holm-Jensen and Mia Behrens, the project, called Building Blocks, is a work in progress: Space10 is making all design files available for free to other architects and builders to continue developing and improving the model, an experiment in low-cost, sustainable modular homes for all us non-billionaires. Fiskars Summit Knives…

WINNERS APPS AND GAMES Microsoft Seeing AI A free app that uses artificial intelligence to narrate the visual world for blind and low-vision users DESIGN COMPANY OF THE YEAR Google Multiple projects An engineering-led company that proved it could become a design powerhouse EXPERIMENTAL MIT Media Lab AlterEgo A tantalizing look at how artificially intelligent machines and humans might communicate in the future—it turns subvocalization (saying words to yourself in your head) into computer commands FASHION AND BEAUTY Ministry of Supply Mercury A jacket that warms up in response to voice commands and uses machine learning to understand a wearer’s preferred temperature over time GENERAL EXCELLENCE Are.na Are.na An ad-free, subscription-based social network created for creatives by creatives GRAPHIC DESIGN AND DATA VISUALIZATION Wolff Olins Lafayette Anticipations A custom font…

Tim Zagat: There was a kosher restaurant, and we didn’t mention it as being kosher. They sent us a nasty note and said it was creating havoc. All these people were coming in, and when they found out that it was kosher they got up and left. I got it straightened out in a subsequent printing. Then [the owner] got upset because he’d decided he [didn’t want to be] kosher anymore, he was getting so much business. Allan Ripp, former Zagat PR director: At one point, we compared foot traffic and food ratings among some of the high-end and lower-end places. The restaurant run by the [chef who inspired] the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, its food ratings were higher than Le Cirque.… [Zagat wasn’t merely] riding a wave of a culinary…