Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2019 i Inc. Magazine

The idea that entrepreneurs can change the world is central to Inc.’s mission, but the sentiment can be overstated. Witness how early episodes of HBO’s Silicon Valley lampooned the bloated pledges of certain tech founders: “Making the world a better place, through minimal message-oriented transport layers.” At Inc., we don’t dismiss good business ideas, even if they don’t lend themselves to snappy slogans. And yet it’s inspiring to see companies swing for the fences. Our May issue focuses on businesses that are tackling big, complex issues that affect everyone. Executive director of editorial Jon Fine identified four key areas in need of innovation: climate change; community; food and drink; and health. He and his team then found the companies—some big, most small—that are pushing fresh approaches and creating the industries…

Victory Belt Publishing (Las Vegas) FOUNDED 2006 PROJECTED 2019 SALES Mid-eight figures “When I started Victory Belt, I was a published author of nearly a dozen books and a professional practitioner of muay thai, a martial arts discipline native to Thailand,” says owner Erich Krauss. “My goal was to publish health and fitness books on subjects I liked and had researched. In 2014, we published our first keto book, Keto Clarity. I knew keto would be a wave and publishing niche. Keto worked for me, and I knew it could work for others, and that if I brought highquality titles to market quickly, they’d sell.” Keto-Mojo (St. Helena, California) FOUNDED 2017 2018 SALES $16.5 million “In early 2015,” says co-founder Dorian Greenow, “I went on a keto diet. I bought…

In 2017, Cameo was a website for booking appearances and personalized videos by athletes. One of its first sales: a $20 video from the NFL’s Cassius Marsh that a fan in Renton, Washington, bought for his daughter. The man filmed his daughter’s reaction—tears of joy—and sent it to co-founder and CTO Devon Townsend and his team, which prompted them to focus entirely on videos and start inviting web person alities with rabid fan bases onto the platform. Cameo has now signed up more than 10,000 celebrities—from Ice-T to Kevin O’Leary—who charge as much as $1,000 per shoot. (The company keeps 25 percent of each booking.) Cameo is now super hot—but Townsend swears he won’t sell. “I would just have a lot of money, and I would be bored,” he says.…

The world’s most ubiquitous manmade material is also one of the atmosphere’s arch foes: Between 4 and 7 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from cement production. A decade ago, Rutgers materials scientists Vahit Atakan and Rik Riman set out to tackle this problem by inventing a new cement-making process that subs out some of the traditionally used limestone for a synthetic version of the mineral wollastonite. The new method—for which the company, Solidia Technologies, owns dozens of patents—requires lower temperatures and less energy, helping to reduce the carbon footprint by 70 percent. Also part of that smaller footprint: Wet Solidia hardens by absorbing CO2. While other companies have developed alternate forms of cement before, Solidia has also demolished major obstacles to adopting it. “If I have to…

Images of sea creatures ensnared by plastic six-pack rings are a common source of environmental anguish. They also provided inspiration for the Mexico City–based startup E6PR. E6PR (which is short for “eco six-pack ring”) was founded in 2017 and grew out of a collaboration between New York City ad agency We Believers (founded by Marco Vega and Gustavo Lauria), biodegradable-product specialist Entelequia (founded by Elizabeth Nava García), and a group of seasoned investors to develop a six-pack ring from natural fibers for Florida’s SaltWater Brewery. Those natural fibers not only make it compostable, but sea animals can eat it as well without suffering any ill effects. And, unlike plastic six-pack rings, which last for decades, E6PR’s naturally disintegrate. Everyone’s getting on board: Leading Mexican brewer Corona is joining increasing numbers…

Having built a femalefocused co-working space—One Roof, in Los Angeles—Gianna Wurzl and Ashley Sumner knew what women thought was missing from such places: intentional gatherings and great conversation. They also had concerns about affordability. With that in mind, the two circulated an informal email to 1,000 women describing a way to bring down costs by moving co-working spaces to their homes. Within 48 hours, 300 women signed up to become hosts. That became Quilt, which gathers women in homes for co-working, guided discussions, and informal classes. Over eight months, Wurzl and Sumner raised $3.8 million and launched in L.A., in 2017; Quilt is also in New York City and San Francisco. The pricing is à la carte. Unlike some co-working spaces, Quilt doesn't collect a monthly fee. Hosts charge from…

Nearly a decade ago, Corey McCann, a PhD-MD and McKinsey wonk turned serial entrepreneur, was intrigued by the formative concept of software-as-a-drug: a prescription program that collects data and helps modify behavior to heal patients. The thing was, no program like that existed. “What was missing,” McCann says, “was a hybrid company that was able to execute with the rigors of a pharmaceutical company and the agility of a tech company.” So, in 2013, he founded Pear Therapeutics—the first such company to get to market. Its reSET-O is a prescription app that delivers a series of interactive therapy lessons including a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) component, fluency training exercises, and contingency management for those taking buprenorphine to recover from opiate addiction. (Pear’s reSET works on other substanceabuse disorders.) Patients download…

For a vascular surgeon like John Martin, the chief medical officer of Butterfly Network, ultrasound imaging—crucial for everything from diagnosing cancer to identifying a baby’s gender—has forever been what he sends a patient to get, and then waits to analyze the results of. There’s been no other way to do it: Ultrasound technology has always been expensive and bulky, and requires serious expertise to run and interpret. Butterfly Network smashed that paradigm when it introduced the Butterfly iQ portable ultrasound device, which will make ultrasound imaging widely available and roughly as difficult as operating a smartphone. And at a vastly reduced price: An iQ costs $2,000, versus the $25,000 to $100,000 required for yesterday’s ultrasound machinery. Butterfly’s sales this year will exceed the 30,000 units sold by the entire industry…

Koch’s Turkey Farms sits on 300 acres in a hilly part of Pennsylvania at the southern edge of the Pocono Mountains. For four generations, since 1939, the Koch family has been raising turkeys there. In the 1990s, the company became known as an industry pioneer for its humane practices and the clean diet that its turkeys eat. It sells around a million turkeys each year, 30 percent of them in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Like that of all farms, Koch’s Turkey’s business rises and falls largely according to forces outside of its control: the price of grain, trade conflicts, diseases that threaten its flock. But, in 2015, something entirely different happened. On Thanksgiving Day that year, a New Yorker named Alice Norton posted on an online cooking forum that her…

GHOSTING • verb Not what your ex did, but when “a worker stops coming to work without notice and then is impossible to contact.” Jobs and dating have officially collided. Next, watch out for “hot bedding,” “work-love balance,” and “360-degree performance appraisals.” Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago FAKE SPONCONS • noun Wannabe “influencers” hyping themselves with social media posts that falsely imply they contain sponsored content. Which reminds me: Thanks, #Bollinger, #Rolex, and #Bentley! Source: The Atlantic SYMBOL BRAND • noun By dropping its name from its logo of interlocking red and yellow circles, Mastercard aspires to join the elite rank of “symbol brands,” which are universally recognized by a shape. Hey, it worked for Christianity. Source: Mastercard GENERATION ALPHA • noun “The tech-savvy young children of millennials whose…

Following a stint in private equity, where she did due diligence on in vitro fertilization clinics, Afton Vechery knew why infertility rates are rising: Women are choosing to have children later. The problem, she thought, was women don’t get relevant fertility data until it is too late. So she envisioned a company that gives women a snapshot of their fertility while speaking like an “ob-gyn who also happens to be your best friend.” (For that voice, she needed co-founder Carly Leahy, a branding whiz who helped launch Uber Eats.) In 2017, they launched Modern Fertility, which charges $159 for at-home blood tests that help women assess, say, how many eggs they have and how close they may be to menopause. Customers receive a full report along with a free one-on-one…

In 2005, Tammy Agard took a break from her barista’s job to help low-income Mississippians rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina. She soon spotted an interesting pattern: After being refurbished, the homes saw their energy bills cut, typically by 50 percent and sometimes by up to 80 percent. That’s because poor, rural Americans pay some of the highest energy rates in the country, on a per-square-foot basis. Their substandard homes are energy inefficient, yet many owners can’t afford to upgrade. So they keep paying excessive monthly bills—and burning more fossil fuels. Agard and another volunteer, Johnnie LaCaze, saw the pattern repeat when they joined a Clinton Foundation program that did home repairs. In 2015, they formed EEtility, a Little Rock–based startup that works with utilities to finance efficiency upgrades—often as…

Renee Dua and Nick Desai, the married founders of a fast-growing startup, were exhausted after their third child arrived late last year. But when it came time to set up and get her to her first pediatrician appointment, Desai whipped out his phone and opened an app. A few taps and swipes brought a doctor to their door the next day. Desai was using Heal, created by the startup he and Dua founded in 2014, in Los Angeles. The app allows patients and caregivers to hail a doctor seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., for pretty much any service a primary-care physician can provide. Visits are covered by insurance or a flat $90 fee. Medical assistants, who are Heal employees or contractors, drive the docs to…

Many people forget to take their pills or don’t take them correctly—expensive and dangerous mistakes. According to the Altarum Institute, patients, or their insurers, spend more than $500 billion annually on prescriptions, but many don’t fully benefit from them. But that’s not the patients’ fault, says Andrew Thompson, who co-founded Proteus Digital Health in 2001; it’s the industry’s. There’s a huge gap between medications’ “potential effectiveness and what is actually realized,” he says. His company's solution: Don’t swallow just medication; swallow a sensor along with it—an ingestible event marker, or IEM, in Proteus parlance—that tracks how you and your pill are getting along. That sensor records when the pill was taken and how your body responds, as measured by your heart rate, respiration, body angle, temperature, or even how many…

Last month, I did something for the first time since 1994: I hung out at the mall. I bought a soda at the food court. I browsed the racks at department stores. Eventually, I bought a T-shirt. In many ways, nothing had changed. There were still plenty of teenagers and mall walkers in comfy shoes. And yet something was completely different. During that day, I shed mounds of data—not just where I shopped and what I bought, but also my intentions, interests, and idiosyncrasies. Whether you’re at the mall or on your couch, information about you can be captured from your voice, eyes, posture—even your bone and capillary structures. How often do you switch between your mobile device and desktop computer? Do you make more video than voice calls? How…

Six years ago, when I had itches of entrepreneurship to scratch, I was lucky to be introduced to Matt Mohebbi, a young man who—though coming from a much different background and expertise—was sniffing around the same problem: how to use technology to bring people better health. Matt had just left a dream job at Google, where he was thoroughly schooled in the quantitative approach to the workplace and, most significantly, the holy combination of objectives and key results, or OKRs—a method to measure what a company aims to achieve and how an employee could measurably and meaningfully contribute. After interviewing each other’s former colleagues (a step I highly recommend to any prospective co-founders), Matt and I decided to join forces as co-founders of Iodine.com. And frankly, though I was CEO…

THE DISINFORMATION DEFENDERS While Graphika does disin for mation defense for some large clients, Austinbased New Knowledge specializes almost entirely in the practice—but was criticized for weaponizing social media during Alabama’s 2017 special election. After spotting and mapping the spread of false information, these services can identify where such campaigns began and help affected companies provide the right information to law enforcement and the social media platforms. THE AMBIENT LISTENERS Most com panies won’t pay for those services on an ongoing basis, but a good alternative is to use one of the “social listening” applications that have arisen in recent years. Services like Mention and Keyhole allow you to track mentions of your company—or industry—across many social platforms. You won’t get the same level of sleuthing, but you will spot…

More than three-quarters of all Americans under 49 are on a social platform, according to Pew, but among CEOs that percentage shrinks. Are those execs who choose to sit out missing a chance to engage with customers—or dodging a bullet and a time suck? We asked Sallie Krawcheck, who has more than two million followers on LinkedIn, and Beatriz Ramos, who doesn’t even own a cell phone. BEATRIZ RAMOS Co-founder and CEO of Dada.nyc, a social network where users communicate through drawings Is having a personal brand good for business? I don’t have any social media presence besides LinkedIn. We’re trying to build a thing so complex, I need to have the fewest distractions possible. I need to put a filter between me and everybody else so I can keep…

Welcome to the newest beverage craze: High Rhode, a moodenhancing supplement that launched in December to considerable social media clamor. It’s the first offering from New York City–based Kin Euphorics, which intends to redefine social lubricatio Co-founder and CEO Jen Batchelor formerly worked in wellness. But she grew frustrated when clients’ physical goals got derailed at the hotel bar. “I thought people would want something to help transition from day to night, still have a good time—but be better for it in the morning,” she says. Research into botanics, adaptogens (herbs and fungi used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine), and nootropics (which, adherents claim, enhance cognition) led to High Rhode—named for its Rhodiola rosea, an adaptogenic herb. It took 16 months to find the precise mix that provides a noticeable-but-subtle…

Michael Lastoria cuts a curious figure on Capitol Hill: black cloak, black jeans, black Wu Wear boots. His hair hangs past his shoulders; his beard brings to mind the Amish. But he sails through the metal detectors of the Rayburn House Office Building—the hub of the House of Representatives—like a pro, marching down the hall to the cafeteria, where a line snakes around a glossy, black L-shaped structure of screens and glass. This is the 33rd location of Lastoria’s fast-casual restaurant, &Pizza (say: “and pizza”). While it looks like a food stall that would be at home in some terribly hip neighborhood, in this government building, flanked by a carpeted dining room with Formica tables that may have last been updated in the ’70s, it stands out, much like Lastoria…

In 2014, James McGoff and Charles Vincent—students at McGill University’s materials engineering program—and Brian Powers, a recent University of Pennsylvania grad, founded TemperPack, which makes Styrofoam-free insulation that keeps products cold during shipping. (Think: a customized cooler inside a packing box.) They started by “cutting strips of fiberglass and sealing them inside plastic—it wasn’t a true innovation,” understates McGoff. Still, in 2015, TemperPack negotiated a $100,000 trial run with the meal-kit giant HelloFresh. Plated signed on too, once TemperPack started using jute, a compostable insulation material. “Food companies were desperate to not use plastic and Styrofoam,” says Powers. In February, grocery giant Albertsons Companies started using TemperPack’s newest recyclable insulation—ClimaCell—for its drug-delivery business. This year, TemperPack is expected to double revenue, to around $50 million. Company TEMPERPACK Richmond, Virginia Funding…

In 2014, James Gibbons was building BlackBerry apps while living with a friend who had couch space in New York City. In his free time, the University of Waterloo computer science grad would try to organize pickup basketball games in the city but found it difficult. He didn’t know his neighbors, and everyone had crazy schedules. Biking around Manhattan one day, Gibbons asked some basketball players about using an app to organize games. Good idea, they said. His market research done, Gibbons started writing the code. “The nature of pickup,” he says, “made it easy for people to join without a long-term commitment or having to worry about costs.” In 2016, OpenSports was launched (thanks to $60,000 that Gibbons won in a hackathon) to help organize pickup games in soccer,…

In a perfect world, says Glen Tullman, the co-founder of Livongo, digitally based health care services like his would operate the way Netflix or Amazon does: deliver on demand, and use data analytics to anticipate what’s needed and improve customer service. “When we ask people about their diabetes or hypertension, they say, ‘We just want to live our lives. Make it go away,’” says Tullman, who has a diabetic son. A worthy goal for Livongo, maker of a blood-glucose meter that’s used by 120,000 diabetes patients to instantly upload their blood sugar data to Livongo’s analytic engine. Livongo has also introduced a cellphone-enabled, cuff-to-cloud blood-pressure device for people with hypertension, as well as a wirelessenabled scale. All that data is why patients pay nothing for the equipment, test strips, and…

Where Sheena Allen grew up, in tiny Terry, Mississippi, there was but one small bank. “People cashed their checks at the grocery store” and used payday lenders and other often-predatory providers, she recalls. “We’ve lived the problem.” She decided to solve it. She spent 2016 researching the financial industry, and launched CapWay, which created a “social fintech” app to show your balance and transaction information, as well as to warn you if a Netflix fee will drain your account. Up next: a debit card and smartphone-enabled microloans. The revenue model—still a work in progress—involves customer fees and payments from colleges using CapWay materials. Providing these services to the underbanked is complex, but Allen is undaunted. “We can be profitable, have a social impact—and have a great company,” she says. SHEENA…

MILES PEPPER Age: 24 Company FINALSTRAW Los Angeles Funding raised $1.9M 2018 revenue $4.8M Number of employees 20 AND ALSO Before starting FinalStraw, Pepper was developing helmet cameras for a TV remake of the 1980s film Heathers. While training for a half-marathon, Miles Pepper developed an interesting habit: picking up straws on the streets of Los Angeles. Within two months, he had 300. “I began to see how all the plastic trash got swept into the ocean,” he says. Few reusable straws were available—so he built one. He borrowed $30,000 from his parents, called on some engineering connections, and, with a 3-D printer, developed a fully collapsible straw that folds like a tent pole and fits in a case the size of a key chain. He launched it on Kickstarter…

In July 2018, Evofem Biosciences founder and CEO Saundra Pelletier learned she had Stage III breast cancer—while her company was in the midst of a Phase 3 clinical trial of Amphora, its nonhormonal contraceptive gel for women. Pelletier embarked on aggressive treatment for her cancer, undergoing chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy, and an oophorectomy. At the end of 2018, Evofem announced that Amphora was 98.7 percent effective when used as directed, and 86 percent effective in typical use. Pelletier, who never took a leave of absence, now says she is “done with cancer.” She is again appearing at investor conferences, and her hair is growing back. I couldn’t even believe it. When the doctor first called, I said, “I don’t mean to insult you, but are you sure you…

Somewhere between Jackpocket’s Series A and Series B financing rounds, founder and CEO Peter Sullivan realized he needed more managers His small team—including his three co-founders—was stretched too thin to handle the New York City–based lottery app’s increasingly complicated finances. Meanwhile, the growing demands on Sullivan’s time made it difficult for him to continue overseeing day-to-day operations: “I wasn’t at the office when people needed me the most,” he admits. But hiring people to manage his original partners and early employees has been a tricky process, one that many founders of fast-growing startups must navigate. If mishandled, you can hurt feelings—or, worse, unintentionally lose the people who helped get your company off the ground. “You want to make sure people are appreciated,” as Sullivan puts it. “Doing an org chart…

As undergrads at MIT, Zahir Dossa and Joshua Maciejewski dreamed of starting a business together. Ten years later, in 2015, the friends teamed up with Hien Nguyen to found Function of Beauty, a direct-to-consumer company based in New York City that creates personalized hair care products. Dossa, who began flying this year, and Maciejewski, who has been flying since he was a teenager, both see taking flight as a way to practice the mental discipline they need to lead their business. “Aviate, navigate, communicate—and do it in that order,” says Maciejewski. “Focus first on the day-to-day things that keep the company moving forward, and then continuously share that vision with your team.”…