Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2020 i Inc. Magazine

I was amazed at how deeply A.I. is embedded in the company’s activities. Amazon was an early adopter of artificial intelligence, and has injected it into almost every aspect of its business. For example, the company used to conduct weekly retail reviews with up to 60 managers. They’d negotiate what to buy, how much, and which warehouses needed what amounts. Now, algorithms do all that. My biggest surprise? Finding out that Jeff Bezos was cloning himself throughout the organization. When I spent time inside Amazon, I learned that Bezos and his top lieutenants religiously use a shadowing program that has promising young managers follow their boss every day for two years. By the end, the “shadow” knows how Bezos and his best executives think and has internalized the Amazon formula…

CLOTHES MADE THE MAN Dunn co-founded menswear retailer Bonobos with Brian Spaly in 2007. (He is seen here at the Madison Avenue store in New York City.) BIG CHECKS The company landed $127 million in venture funding before Walmart acquired it for $310 million in 2017. PARTING COMPANY Dunn stayed at Walmart as SVP of digital consumer brands, working on a direct-to-consumer brand effort. He left in February. How did the deal with Walmart materialize? An old business school friend suggested I talk to Walmart executive Marc Lore, who had been a mentor. We mind-melded on the future of e-commerce. Then we went out to dinner with the CEO, Doug McMillon, where I learned how he was transforming Walmart. After that, I was literally praying that the deal would happen.…

Climb Every Mountain The alarm clock buzzes at 6:30 a.m. “A lot of founders have these amazing morning productivity hacks, like meditation,” says Vechery. “For me, the single greatest motivating factor is to just be doing something I love. And so, uh, that translates to emails in bed when I wake up.” After that, Vechery typically bikes to work. During the crisis, she’s swapped her commute for an early-morning ride to the top of San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. It doubles as me time. “It’s really helpful to understand what’s going to bubble up from your subconscious when you’re not being stimulated sitting in front of a computer,” she says. Face Time Vechery’s days in quarantine include more one-on-one meetings than they did before, but that’s the cost of keeping information…

A former editor and founding CEO of the ad agency Droga5, Andrew Essex is currently the CEO of Plan A, a marketing services holding company, the author of The End of Advertising, and a recognized authority on branding and brand storytelling. In this continuing column, he’ll provide advice to founders on the importance of narrative to creating a better business. Hey, Mr. Brand Guru, do I really need to sell a brand_? Isn’t that just a distraction—a way to push an inferior product by confusing the buyer with a bunch of piffle paffle? Isn’t my product the most important thing? As an advertising executive who’s spent the past few decades at the pinnacle of the marketing food chain, I have heard this tedious inquiry, this confident dismissal of brand and…

It’s late in the afternoon on March 24, 2020. By this time, Covid-19 has disrupted, oh, just about everything. Many people are dying. Raj Kumar and his team are unfazed. They’d been planning for Covid-19 since January—and for pandemics since forever. “Most people want to say, ‘This crisis, it’s a black swan event,’_” says Kumar, who is the founding president and editor-in-chief of Devex, the Bloomberg-ish hub for information on events in developing nations. “In the world of Devex, we did not view it that way. Crisis is the new normal. Disruption is the new normal.” For 20 years, Kumar and his team of 120 globally positioned employees have been providing on-the-ground reports and risk assessments on famines, floods, pandemics, and every other imaginable calamity. Devex’s audience includes well over…

From the day Aimee Woodall (above) started her marketing firm, the Black Sheep Agency, in Houston in 2009, she knew success would depend entirely on breaking with what she calls “agency culture.” “It’s a lot like legal culture,” she says. “You’re tied to billable hours, and you’re always grinding.” So she threw a wrench into those gears. Black Sheep has no formal policy around flextime or working from home, and offers unlimited paid time off. The only rules are to respect your colleagues, respect the work, and over-communicate. Woodall says it’s better for clients, too. Such flexibility “keeps our energy levels high, so everybody can bring 100 percent, and helps us stay efficient,” she says. About six months in, Black Sheep worked with a large Texas nonprofit, and Woodall saw…

An Inc. series about entrepreneurs who refocus their talents to do right by others. If you were to pluck co-founders from a crowd, Monica Peraza O’Quigley and Sydney Sherman would not make an obvious duo. But when O’Quigley, a mother of four who was then running the online importing business Alegreea, sat down at an Austin coffee shop in early 2019 to meet with Sherman, a 28-year-old traveler who splits her time between Guatemala and New York City, both felt it was kismet. “There was an incredible connection,” says O’Quigley, “and within the first 15 minutes, we said: Let’s do this together,” this being the ambitious goal of raising the incomes of women in developing countries by creating an online marketplace to connect them directly to conscious consumers in wealthier…

Julie Corbett, a California financial adviser, was wandering the aisles of her local supermarket in 2007, looking for liquid laundry soap in an environmentally friendly container. Her elementary school daughters were learning about recycling and had begun whipping the Corbett household into recycling shape. “Your kids come home and become the enforcers,” recalled Corbett. They were even weighing her trash. But she was having a tough time finding an alternative that fit the bill. So, Corbett decided to take on the challenge herself. The granddaughter of Canadian paper mill workers, Corbett had grown up with the sounds and smells of paper, and unwrapping a smartphone slickly wrapped in paper gave her an idea. “I thought if we could manufacture paper in curves, could we make a bottle of it? It…

In the fall of 2016, Rahul Vohra was testing a powerful email service called Superhuman. Between meeting potential customers, he would demo his $30-a-month service and spend nearly an hour training buyers. After 200 or so of those one-on-one calls, he began to notice something remarkable: “The retention of customers was high, churn was low, and they were making a lot of referrals,” he says. Today, Superhuman’s onboarding process, condensed to 30 minutes, teaches new users the ropes, including shortcuts to help them achieve inbox zero. It’s key to the Bay Area startup’s popularity. Why would anyone pay for email when they could get it for free? “With Amazon having nailed price and convenience, you need to have resonant customer service,” says David Bell, co-founder of advisory firm Idea Farm…

TECHSTARS A global three-month accelerator. LAUNCHED 2006 LOCATIONS Of Techstars’ 47 programs, 29 are based in the U.S. Other locations include London, Montreal, and Tel Aviv. PROMINENT GRADUATES PillPack, ClassPass, Zipline GENER8TOR Five companies are given $100,000 and participate in a 12- or 16-week accelerator. LAUNCHED 2012 LOCATIONS Milwaukee, Madison, and Minneapolis-St. Paul PROMINENT GRADUATES Panty Drop, Bright Cellars FOUNDERS SPACE An incubator and accelerator combined. LAUNCHED 2011 LOCATION San Francisco PROMINENT GRADUATES MyDigitalHealth Network, EquBot IDEALAB A full-time incubator that devises concepts for startups and brings in founders to develop businesses. LAUNCHED 1996 LOCATION Pasadena, California PROMINENT GRADUATES Evolution Robotics, Picasa, X1 Inc. has the lowdown on the best incubators and accelerators in the nation. Find the one you need to grow your business at inc.com/incubators. In the Fast…

Way back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT decided to have a little fun. To demonstrate the artificiality of computers—how soulless and very unlike humans they were—Weizenbaum created a little program called Eliza, which he designed to behave like a bored psychotherapist. When a user asked Eliza a question, it would spit back some programmatic response. Weizenbaum hoped to show how impossible it was for computers to imitate humans. The opposite happened. People were so taken with Eliza, so charmed by its manner, they treated it as one of them, even knowing they were chatting with a computer. Weizenbaum had given Eliza—the first chatbot—just enough of a personality to make “her” seem sufficiently real to believe in. Over 50 years later, it seems like everyone has a startup featuring…

Scott Shigeoka is GoDaddy’s entrepreneur-in-residence, providing guidance to the everyday entrepreneur. Through his creative studio, he tells stories across different media and is working on his first book, which will focus on the role of curiosity in our lives. Connect with him on Instagram @scottshigeoka. Last year, I became the host of Made in America, an online documentary series on how low-income and minority entrepreneurs overcome barriers to build their businesses. In making the first season’s four episodes, I met entrepreneur Sequoia Ferguson, who bought a box truck to convert her storefront clothing business into a store on wheels. I also met Consuelo Rosales, who cleaned houses to earn the money she needed to escape an unhealthy relationship. She was in the process of hiring a team and expanding her…

STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL, FOUR-STAR GENERAL; FORMER COMMANDER, JOINT SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND; FOUNDER, MCCHRYSTAL GROUP As the Covid-19 pandemic intensified its assault at home and abroad, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal found himself in pressing demand. Since 2011, McChrystal—who, as commander of U.S. special operations in Iraq after 9/11, had orchestrated the capture of Saddam Hussein—has applied his military acumen to building a business consultancy, McChrystal Group, with former Navy SEAL Chris Fussell. The pair codified their leadership insights in a best-selling book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. When the country shifted, perhaps too gradually, to war footing against a new and unseen viral enemy, McChrystal emerged as an authority for the authorities, a motivator for the motivators—and wrote an impassioned call to arms for The…

1) In The Culture Code, Coyle uses which phrase to describe the method, concept, or quality that allowed four-person teams of kindergartners to outperform four-person teams of business school students in a contest? A__The power of play B__Iterative design strategy C__Trying a bunch of stuff together D__Failing fast Answer: C Coyle uses this plain-as-Twain phrase to describe how kindergartners bested B-schoolers at Peter Skillman’s Marshmallow Design Challenge. Now director of design at Amazon Web Services, Skillman created the contest for his postgrad research at Stanford, and then popularized it in a 2006 TED Talk. In The Culture Code, Coyle explains that Skillman “challenged each group to build the tallest possible structure using … 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of transparent tape, one yard of string, [and] one standard-size marshmallow.”…

The winners were those that met a minimum engagement score and a minimum benefits score in each size category—micro, small, medium, medium large, large, or extra large—based on the number of employees. Minimum Engagement Score/Minimum Benefits Score Micro (10 to 24 employees) 96.37 / 44 Small (25 to 49) 94.42 / 47 Medium (50 to 99) 92.55 / 48 Medium Large (100 to 249) 91.19 / 51 Large (250 to 499) 88.99 / 54 Extra Large (500 and up) 88.13 / 52 How we count benefits Inc. assigned a 1 to 4 weighting on benefits and perks. Essentials such as health insurance and 401(k)s get a 4. Child care, onsite fitness, and other services rate a 3. That beer fridge and bringing your pet to work? Nice, but each is…

When Sallie Krawcheck was raising money for Ellevest, her investment platform for women, there was one venture capitalist she just couldn’t get to commit. She told another woman entrepreneur how much she wanted that VC on board. “Actually, you don’t,” her friend replied. “That person gets drunk at my board meetings and screams obscenities.” “Excellent,” says Kraw-check in retrospect. “That was excellent information to have.” How do you get that sort of insider information? To whom can you turn when it’s time to hire a head of engineering, or when you don’t know what your org chart should look like? For female founders, turning to a peer is often the answer, and knowing how to present yourself is almost as important as knowing whom to call. Julie Rice, who founded…

What do donkeys, beer, and jogging have in common? Burro racing. Legend has it that inebriated miners in Colorado began racing alongside their pack animals in the 19th century. The sport continues today, and Caitlin Landesberg, 37, decided to give it a try when her father started fostering donkeys at the family farm in Windsor, California, last year. She and Lucy plan to run their first race in October. Landesberg will be sober, but, afterward, she’ll probably crack open a cold one crafted by her company, Sufferfest. The beermaker produces low-gluten brews designed to help athletes replace electrolytes and enjoy a bloat-free buzz. Sufferfest, which is available in chains such as Whole Foods and Target, got acquired by Sierra Nevada just last year, so even if Landesberg and Lucy don’t…

Xenex Disinfection Services has one goal: to wipe out hospital-acquired infections, which claim some 100,000 American lives annually. The company’s $125,000 LightStrike “germ-zapping robot” uses UV technology developed by two Johns Hopkins epidemiology PhDs and is now working in more than 500 hospitals and labs. As the coronavirus pandemic exploded, so did demand. While there is no clinical proof yet that LightStrike can zap Covid-19—tests are ongoing—the robot is clearly lethal to related pathogens such as MERS. THE ZAPPER LightStrike uses xenon gas to create millisecond pulses of high-intensity, germicidal ultraviolet light, which deactivates the DNA of pathogens and prevents cell replication. It’s also being used to disinfect precious surgical masks for reuse. When idle, the robot’s light-emitting head retracts into the body. Do-Gooders Xenex’s founders include Rackspace co-founder Morris…

Carey Smith started fan-and-light maker Big Ass Fans in 1999 and sold it for $500 million in 2017. Today he runs Unorthodox Ventures, an investment firm focused on helping small companies with big potential. Entrepreneurs are being hoodwinked and led astray by the very people who are supposed to be helping them. That’s my biggest takeaway two years after launching an investment company to take ideas and help turn them into long-term, successful brands. Every week at Unorthodox Ventures, we meet smart men and women who have graduated from entrepreneurship programs at top schools but have never been taught the basics of manufacturing prototypes or testing products. They think that effective marketing begins and ends with Facebook. Because they’ve received only positive feedback from mentors and professors—not to mention well-meaning…

Nearly 2,500 companies vied for the honor of being named to Inc.’s Best Workplaces list. But only this select group scored high enough—in terms of benefits, perks, and, most important, employee satisfaction—to meet the criteria. Congratulations. Abilitie Accelirate Accolade AceUp ACI Transport Acorio Addigy Advertise Purple Adzerk Aegis Business Technologies Affinity Aisle Planner AlertMedia ALKU Allego Alliantgroup AllPro Hospitality Staffing AMB Architects Ambra Health American Landmark Apartments Apex Digital Solutions Applause Applied Data Consultants AppNeta Aqueduct Technologies Arcadia Articulate Global Aryaka Networks Asana Avian Awake Security Aya Healthcare Bailard BambooHR Bankers Healthcare Group BayInfotech Beam Healthcare Beehive Strategic Communication Belay Belle Communication Bellmont Partners BenchPrep Better.com BetterUp Bev Big Cartel Binc Bit-Wizards Information Technology Solutions BizStream The Black Sheep Agency Blend Blue Jean Networks Bluetree Network BNG Team Boardsi Bold…

By the time I got to This Old House, it wasn’t exactly Victorian, but it was definitely vintage. And I had to renovate it. TOH was the original home-improvement brand—the PBS television shows, a couple of websites, a magazine, and other businesses. When I got the house keys, the show had been around long enough to have been satirized on Saturday Night Live and in The New Yorker. TOH was the impetus for HGTV, and, in reruns, it was even much of that network’s early programming. But by 2005, even with home-improvement programming exploding, TOH’s audience was drifting away. My hunch was that TOH had a problem common to many businesses—it was focused on the wrong thing. TOH had given up on its reason for being: The simple remodels it…

In September 2019, when Daniel Lubetzky stepped down as the CEO of Kind to become executive chairman, he never imagined that within six months, the company would face a historic challenge. In February, concern over the coronavirus pandemic led consumers to hoard food and other essential supplies, sending demand for some Kind products up 200 percent. Meeting that demand was no small feat. “I don’t think we’d have been prepared if we hadn’t deepened our leadership over the past couple of years,” Lubetzky says, referring to the hiring of CEO Mike Barkley as well as a new chief human resources officer, chief customer officer, and chief operating officer, among others. “We were building five years out. I didn’t know it would come in so handy so soon, particularly given the…