T H E N E W

NEW R U L E S O F B U S I N E S S

1 O F 4
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TH
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D e f i ne
C OV

RULE N o. 3

ANNIVERSARY
ISSUE

LEADERSHIP ADVICE
YOU NEED NOW

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1 BRING DEMOCRACY TO WORK

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 contents.

O NE D OPE Q UEEN
Comedian and
podcaster Phoebe
Robinson talks
about growing
her media
empire. (page 12)

PHOTOGRAPH BY
D AV I D C A B R E R A

ON THE COVER
ON OUR 25TH
A N N I V E R S A R Y,
NEW GUIDEP OSTS
FOR THE NEXT
25 YEARS

O CTOBER/
P.0 9 P.3 1 P.1 1 2
NOVEMBER 2020
Better Business The Exit Strategy
Now is the perfect time for
companies to move beyond
Recommender Introducing our inaugural
“Six Under Six” list, showcasing PAGE
“woke capitalism” and actually A Surrealist chess set designed the young innovators

01
change their behavior. by photographer Man Ray, color- rapidly shaping our future,
ful jugs, and other things Fast for better or worse.
Company is loving this month.
contents.

NEW RULES
Cultique’s Linda
Ong is a member
of the Fast
Company Impact
Council.
(page 40)

PHOTOGRAPH BY
JESSICA CHO U

O CTOBER/
NOVEMBER 2020

PAGE

02
 The problem with advertising unbelievable — like buy one and
these days is that it is too get 197 free — that you don’t
focused on sales. For an ad like have any choice but to put down
this one to be the maga-
considered zine you
successful, are reading
it has to and rush to
first get your the store to
attention and purchase the
then provide product. Good
you with some- thing that
thing so amazing this ad for
— like a set of Oatgurt* isn’t
features or unique like all those
selling points or modern ads. It’s
a solid promise only interested
— that you’ll put in providing you
down the magazine with an oversized
you are reading cute visual of the
and rush to the store package, an over-
to purchase the product. To help promising headline, a totally
increase the chances of this nonsensical call to action but-
happening, some ads include a ton and an asterisk with a side
“call to action” feature, which note to tell you what the product
is a gimmick so ridiculously actually is.
*As a side note, Oatgurt is not yogurt, because yogurt is made with dairy and has no oats, while Oatgurt is made with oats and has no dairy.
contents.
Planting a Vaccine Annie’s Digs Deeper Instagram
P.16 P.1 8

Instruction Designing Data Opening the Factory

P.2 0 P.2 2 P.2 6

The Fast Company Impact Council Index P.4 6

22 18
MASTER CLASS
Mona Chalabi
(right), data
editor for The
Guardian, uses
statistics to
tell a story.

31

Celine Grouard (Chalabi); Dan Forbes (Behind the Brand); Yudi Ela (The Recommender); Emily Suvanvej (Data Dive)
20

O CTOBER/
NOVEMBER 2020

PAGE

04
PAT T I P O P P E

President and CEO, Consumers Energy

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 from the editor.
A B etter Way
of Doing Business
STEPHA NIE
M E H TA
In 1995, I was a cub reporter at The Wall Street Journal
covering small businesses and venture capital. I
thought it was the best job in journalism, writing about
entrepreneurs and their backers, but my work wasn’t
exactly front-page stuff. The Journal, like the corporate
leaders and investors it served, valued news about the
public markets, scoops on companies such as General
Electric and AT&T, and profiles of star CEOs who maxi- climate change, and a global health crisis
mized profits for their shareholders. are forcing companies to rethink their place
That same year, editors Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, in the world. Some of the organizations that
entrepreneurs in their own right, unveiled a new maga- rushed to address COVID-19 are recognized in
zine with a thoroughly different view of capitalism. “We our Innovation by Design Awards, featured
want to shape the conversation about business at its best in this issue. Fast Company has been honor-
and the real meaning of success,” they wrote in the pre- ing design change makers since 2004, when
miere issue of Fast Company, published 25 years ago this then editor-in-chief John Byrne launched the
month. Taylor and Webber weren’t peddling soft news— annual Masters of Design package. My prede-
they cut their teeth at Harvard Business Review—but they cessor, Robert Safian, expanded the program
also weren’t primarily interested in what moved the mar- in 2011 to honor innovators and businesses
kets. They wanted to throw out big ideas, highlight the im- using design to solve big problems—a man-
portance of human connections in the workplace (even date that seems especially urgent this year.
as they extolled technological Motivated by a similar imperative, we
achievement), and explore gathered members of the Fast Company Im-
W O R D S TO LEA D BY the role of business in society. pact Council, entrepreneurs and executives
The cover of Fast Corporate culture has, in from different industries and disciplines,
Company’s debut
many ways, come around to to offer a road map for business leaders for
issue, in 1995,
established Taylor and Webber’s vision. the next 25 years. Their New New Rules of
the New Rules Unrelenting income and ra- Business, which appear in this issue, call for
of Business. cial inequalities, worsening companies to be more humane and to put
innovation and corporate responsibility at
the center of their business.
I’m not so naive as to think that most
companies will choose the planet over profit,
nor will many CEOs rethink their lavish pay
packages. But I am heartened that so many
executives are initiating conversations about
equity, sustainability, and long-term think-
ing. Perhaps in a few years—let’s hope it isn’t
25!—our New New Rules of Business will feel
de rigueur, and Fast Company will have to
draft even more ambitious guidelines.

Postscript: I eventually took a job reporting

on telecom companies at The Wall Street
O CTOBER/ Journal, before assuming writing and edit-
NOVEMBER 2020 ing roles at Fortune, Bloomberg Media, and
Vanity Fair. Twenty-five years later—and al-
most three years into my stint working with
PAGE
Fast Company’s outstanding editorial, cre-

06 ative, and publishing teams—I once again

Kagan McLeod

think I have the best job in journalism.

Small business is no small task.
So Progressive offers commercial auto and business
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The Power of Positive Impact
In late June, 100+ members of the Fast Company Impact Council convened for a
virtual program dedicated to identifying THE NEW NEW RULES OF BUSINESS.

In a year unlike any in living memory, which also happens to be Fast Company’s
25th year in publishing, the talented cohort of leaders and creators of the Impact
Council spent time with the editors in virtual breakout roundtables aimed at
identifying the many critical ways business and society can move forward with
positive impact.

AN I M PAC T AG E N DA

The June 30 virtual annual meeting of the Impact Council included scintillating
virtual keynotes with global leaders such as Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and Anthony D. Romero of the ACLU. Fast Company cofounder Bill
Taylor joined the meeting to offer a look back at the founding of the magazine,
and to emphasize how its original mission is more relevant than ever.

SPECIAL THANKS TO FOUNDING

KNOWLEDGE PARTNER
 next.
PAGE

09
O CTOBER/
NOVEMBER 2020

Illustrations by B I G I DEA
Jorsh Peña

B eyond
Woke
Capitalism
What it’ll take to get
companies to the prom-
ised land of an equitable
relationship with both
workers and society
BY KRISTIN TOUSSAINT

A day after the August NBA

strike in response to yet another
police shooting—this time, Jacob
Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin—
Uber’s head of diversity and in-
clusion, Bo Young Lee, tweeted
out the company’s new billboard
campaign. “If you tolerate rac-
ism, delete Uber,” the sign read.
Lee added, “Now is the time for
all people and organizations to
stand up for what is right.”
Corporate America had al-
ready been examining its com-
plicity in furthering systemic
racism and inequality in the
wake of a summer rife with
police killings of Black people.
Uber, for its part, was one of
many companies standing up
for what’s right—so long as it
didn’t have to change too radi-
cally. Several weeks earlier, Uber
had committed to anti-racism
education for riders and driv-
ers, established that it had no
tolerance for discrimination,
and pledged $1 million toward
criminal justice reform. Even
so, the company had committed
more than $30 million to over-
turn AB5, the California law that
requires its contract drivers be
 O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

10
NEXT

BIG IDEA

treated as full-time employees. In other words, Uber was arguing Both companies have built reputations as the rare in-
against the single biggest thing it could do to foster equity: give its stitutions that care about their employees, the com-
drivers, which some estimates have put at two-thirds non-white, munities in which they operate, and the environment.
the stability of healthcare and benefits. (When asked for comment, Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s are also certified B Cor-
Uber pointed to previous statements on how it’s fighting AB5 be- porations. This means that they meet certain standards
cause its workers want flexibility.) for corporate transparency, worker benefits, and energy
Uber’s moves embody what’s known as “woke capitalism,” where efficiency (as set by the nonprofit B Lab), and that they
businesses respond to societal issues such as systemic racism with consider a broader array of stakeholders than just fi-
representational gestures, from sobering statements to strategic nancial shareholders.
donations. For some people, this is enough. Or so executives hope. Although B Lab has attracted more than 3,500 com-
But for others, society’s multiple, overlapping crises have cre- panies since 2007, its cofounder and CEO Andrew Kassoy
ated an opportunity to make companies more accountable—and, has long known that this way of doing business needed
ideally, more innovative. “There’s basically no one arguing for share- to be more prerequisite than perk. “If we want to have
holder primacy anymore,” says Julius Krein, founder of the public- an economic system that creates value for all stakehold-
policy journal American Affairs. “[Corporate leaders] don’t want to ers, that creates jobs that have dignity and opportunity,
leave the current model because they don’t know what comes next, and that lift up people who have been marginalized or
and they’re afraid.” A movement argues that they don’t have to be. made vulnerable by the system that we’ve got, then [all]
companies need to be like B Corporations,” says Kassoy.
For a glimpse of the future, business leaders need only look That’s why B Lab has also spent the past decade advo-
to the companies that have best handled the tumult of 2020. They cating for a legal option for incorporation. Benefit corpo-
were the ones that were “woke” long before this year. Patagonia’s ration status requires an annual public benefit report and
decision to pay employees while stores were shuttered during lock- protects that broader purpose from shareholders, who,
downs was not the first time it put workers first: The company has under traditional corporate law, could hold a company li-
offered on-site childcare for more than three decades. The call Ben able for decisions that don’t prioritize profits. (B Lab also
& Jerry’s made to dismantle white supremacy following the police audits certified B Corps.) Since Maryland became the first
killing of George Floyd was not a bandwagon move: The ice cream state to recognize the benefit corporation, in 2010, more
brand had supported a congressional bill that would study the ef- than 35 other states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico
fects of slavery and discrimination and recommend reparations. now legally allow companies to serve the wider public.
But this effort has its limits. A company has to
choose to incorporate as a benefit corporation. “Volun-
tary initiatives in the private sector—that’s been the na-
TH E YE AR I N WOKE ture of socially responsible business and investing for
C A P I TA L I S M 30 years,” says Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president
Some nods toward justice were purposeful, of the Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit research in-
and so me were for show.

MOST MEANINGFUL

WNBA players Delta Air Lines Sony Interactive Walmart Merck Nike
Before the season The carrier estab- Some gamers trash It commits $100 mil- CEO Kenneth Frazier, The swoosh delivers
opener, Layshia Clar- lishes a strict en- the sequel to the lion to create a cen- a Black man, ex- a powerful message
endon and Breanna forcement policy for video game The Last ter for racial equity, presses outrage at in support of Black
Stewart leave the passengers to wear of Us because of its improve access to the George Floyd lives, but has to deny
court in protest of masks, ejecting more inclusion of an LGBTQ Walmart for minority killing, saying it could reports of forced
Breonna Taylor’s kill- than 100 people character, but Sony suppliers, hire non- have been him. He Uighur labor making
ing. Players later for not complying. dismisses the criticism violent former pris- doesn’t announce its apparel in China.
strike because of the and the game oners, and recruit any new programs.
Kenosha shooting. sets sales records. more at HBCUs.
 The
pandemic
has only
sharpened
stitute focused on building a fairer econ-
omy. “We are now at a pivot point where
bipartisan federal charter to “create a legal obligation for the corpo-
ration to account for the public effects of its actions” and
it needs to move into policy.” calls for a legislation mandating that companies let workers elect “a
significant portion” of their board. Meanwhile, both Rep-
Kassoy sent up a signal flare of the new model resentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sena-
movement’s next phase when he and sev-
eral colleagues published a white paper
of doing tor Ron Johnson (R-WI) have introduced proposals to tie
COVID-19 relief funds to promoting employee ownership.
in September that takes the stakeholder business. These initiatives wouldn’t just benefit workers, but
capitalism fight to the federal level. The corporations, too. Shareholder primacy has inspired mass
timing was strategic: It came just after layoffs, tax avoidance, and share buyback programs, all
the 50th anniversary of an influential 1970 New York of which enrich top executives and shareholders with no discern-
Times article written by the economist Milton Friedman, ible benefit to the business itself. “[Share buybacks] deprive the
bluntly titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is company of money that it could use to pay people who are better,
to Increase Its Profits.” That manifesto set in motion a to give better jobs to people who have more experience, and who’ll
decades-long effort to overthrow what had been a placid produce products of the future,” says William Lazonick, an econo-
era of corporate America supporting unions and welcom- mist who studies innovation and competition. Apple, for example,
ing legislation that regulated consumer, workplace, and announced in June a $100 million program to promote racial justice
environmental safety. B Lab seeks to retack, making com- inside the company, but it spent $67 billion on share buybacks in
panies and investors responsible for the social impact the last fiscal year. There’s “renewed interest from the right,” Krein
of their actions. “It’s a good moment to say, ‘The next 50 adds, “for a new model to correct declining U.S. competitiveness.”
years should look totally different,’ ” Kassoy says. “If there are things that society needs—dealing with climate
He already has a surprising number of allies from change, a pandemic, or racial inequality—then companies can’t
across the political spectrum. Senator Elizabeth Warren innovate and solve those problems,” Lazonick says, unless their
(D-MA) introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act in “normal business practices” are realigned. Friedman’s 1970 arti-
2018, which would require a federal charter for compa- cle was partly a response to a proposal for General Motors to add
nies with more than $1 billion in revenue that obligates board members who would advocate for safer, more fuel-efficient
directors to consider all stakeholders in their decision- cars. Friedman called this plan socialism, but Lazonick argues that
making. In a 2019 report, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) it would have spurred GM to compete against imports which met
argued for prioritizing long-term corporate investments this consumer demand. Says Lazonick, “They lost out.”
over short-term profit maximization. When we consider the world after this pandemic, the protests,
The pandemic has only sharpened bipartisan calls and the election, we can’t just hope that businesses will do better.
for a new model of doing business. In an outline of pol- “The way you change corporate behavior,” says Bharat Ramamurti,
icy proposals focused on COVID-19 recovery, the liberal managing director of the corporate power program at the Roosevelt
think tank Roosevelt Institute calls for a Warren-esque Institute, “is to change the law, and then enforce that law strictly.”

LEAST MEANINGFUL

Pizza Hut Pinterest Lego Unilever Uber Boeing

The company ap- The social network The toymaker The company prom- Uber Eats adds an The besieged airline
points its first chief hires its first Black— paused digital mar- ises to redesign the in-app promotion manufacturer’s com-
equity officer, and female—board keting of its police- packaging of its skin- waiving customers’ munications chief
Chequan Lewis. member in the wake and fire-themed sets lightening products, delivery fees for abruptly resigns
Despite the lofty title, of a toxic-workplace after the Floyd kill- which promote ordering from Black- after an article he’d
he reports to the controversy that in- ing, but never halted whiteness as a virtue, owned restaurants. written in 1987 sur-
head of HR and not cluded a scathing their sale, as was but would not re- Uber did not waive its faces stating that
to the CEO. critique of its culture alleged by President move them for sale. fees to the businesses. women shouldn’t be
by its former COO. Trump and others. in the armed forces.
 O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

12
NEXT

C R E AT I V E C O N V E R S AT I O N Photograph by David Cabrera

How did you get into stand-up? I was

The Comedian working at an indie film company in 2008.
Is In One of my friends was taking a stand-up
class, at Carolines on Broadway, in Times
Dope Queen Phoebe Robinson is Square, and I signed up. The first class was
using her new platform to explore all just going to watch a stand-up show. Seeing
sorts of hang-ups: her guests’, the energy of everyone laughing, and realiz-
her industry’s, and even her own. ing, “Oh, Kevin Hart performed here!” was
BY YASMIN GAGNE the coolest thing. I got laid off from the film
job and took it as a sign from the universe
to dive in. I would do shows at an Irish pub,
or take the $10 bus to Boston to do a show
and sleep on people’s couches.

T
Do you feel like comedy has changed? I
am seeing changes. I love seeing Bowen Yang
on Saturday Night Live. I think about how [his
casting] is going to make things easier for
the next generation. A lot of people in com-
edy are defensive and act like they are on the
outskirts of society. They think there should
be this total freedom in being a comedian.
And to me it’s like, yeah, there is freedom, but
also, we all live on the same freaking planet.
You can’t operate like you’re not tethered to
the world the way the rest of us are.

In the wake of protests against police

brutality targeting Black people, some
THE COMEDY BUSINESS, LIKE SO networks have pulled episodes of TV
many others, has a diversity problem. shows, such as 30 Rock, where blackface
Phoebe Robinson believes that the only was used. Do you think that’s the right
thing to do? I’m kind of like, maybe we
way to fix it is to start at the beginning.
could just stay away from doing that? Black-
The podcaster, author, and TV host, who face is just trash, so let’s not ever do it. I will
got her start in stand-up before joining say, I’m a huge fan of Mad Men. There’s a scene
fellow comedian Jessica Williams to cre- in the show where [advertising-executive
character] Roger Sterling is in blackface, and
ate the 2014 podcast 2 Dope Queens, is it felt like social commentary. Mad Men was
working to develop a fresh wave of tal- reflecting the fact that the ’60s were not great
ent via her new production company, for Black people. The narrative reasoning be-
Tiny Reparations, and a book imprint of hind that makes sense to me.
the same name under Penguin Random How did you and Jessica Williams meet
House. Finding diverse writers and pro- and decide to create 2 Dope Queens?
ducers “is not going to work if you’re only In 2014, I saw this listing [to act in the back-
looking for white guys named Scott!” ground of a scene] on The Daily Show. It was
on a segment that Jessica [then a correspon-
she says. “No offense to all the Scotts out dent on the show] was doing about Black
there.” Robinson recently debuted an ad- women’s hair in the military. We met and hit
vice podcast, Black Frasier (after the TV it off. I asked her to be a guest on my podcast
in my rinky-dink one-bedroom apartment
psychiatrist), and her new Comedy Cen- that had a mold issue. [When we were tap-
tral show, Doing the Most With Phoebe ing the podcast] she said she wanted to try K8P0V4L

Robinson, airs next year. stand-up. I asked if she wanted to cohost a

PHOEBE
ROBINSON

HOMETOWN
Cleveland

FIRST JOB
Working at
an indie
film company

FA M O U S S I B L I N G
Older brother
Phillip Robinson
is an Ohio state
representative

CURRENT
RESIDENCE
Park Slope,
Brooklyn
 NEXT O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

C R E AT I V E C O N V E R S AT I O N Illustration by Ryan Putnam 14

with anyone because I was just so embarrassed
SOOOOO MANY PROJECTS and felt so much shame. I got more comfort-
A guide to Phoebe Robinson’s ongoing multimedia breakthrough
able talking about my problems as I got older. I
stopped [adhering to] this narrative that society
perpetuates, which is that by 30 you should be
Sooo married and start having kids. There’s no one-
2 Dope Many You Can’t Touch size-fits-all way of living. And I thought, I’m go-
Queens White Guys My Hair: And ing to share my truth [on the podcast]. Let me
(2016–2018) (2016– Other Things I Still
present) hear yours. Let’s talk about it. And then let’s feel
Have to Explain
(2016)
a little bit better afterward.

PODCASTS
PODCASTS Doing the Most takes a similar format, but
it adds more of you, conquering your fears.
Why was this important to you? I am either
working or going to a U2 concert. That’s [been]
my mission: I want to do comedy and hear
“Sunday, Bloody Sunday” in every different
2 Dope Everything’s
Queens Trash, time zone. But because [of that], I haven’t devel-
(2018, 2019) But It’s Okay BOOKS oped skills I need. I don’t know how to drive. I’m
HBO (2019) afraid of heights. I wanted to do a show where
I got to learn how to be a person while having
great conversations. Doing activities [on cam-
Tiny
Reparations era] lets my guests talk about things outside of
(launched 2020) whatever project they’re trying to promote. It
New imprint with was fun to have [Queer Eye’s] Tan France teach
Penguin Random Doing the me how to bake. He got to talk about growing
House Most With Phoebe
Black up and things that he’s overcome.
Frasier Robinson
(launched (debuts next year)
August 2020) Comedy Central Let’s talk about the name of your new pro-
TV duction company, Tiny Reparations. What
does it mean to you? I always joke that I’m
never going to get that reparations check the
government owes me. So instead, whenever
something good happens in my life, I exact my
show with me at Upright Citizens Brigade tiny reparation. For example, when Bono sent me flowers for my birthday, that
East. [When we] got up onstage [to do Blaria was a tiny reparation. When I started the production company, I took the name
Live!], we felt chemistry. more seriously. Everything that I put out, that’s my reparation. That’s my way
of helping to make things more inclusive.
How do you approach hiring people for
your various shows and projects? When Recently, you launched a book imprint under the same name, with Pen-
I am looking for a writer or a story producer, guin Random House. What kind of stories are you hoping to tell, and
I just say, “I’m not going to start the inter- what voices do you hope to amplify? It’s wonderful when Crazy Rich Asians
view process until the list of candidates you or Little Fires Everywhere breaks through, but a lot of times it does not happen
send me is diverse.” I set [that requirement for authors of color. I [also] think there is this assumption that because you are
on Doing the Most], and [Comedy Central] a person of color or because you’re a queer person, all you want to do is write
came back with an amazing list of candi- about race or sexual orientation. But that’s not the totality of who everyone is.
dates. I think a lot of times in this indus-
try people say, “We’re trying, but we can’t What have you been reading or watching to get through quarantine?
find the right people.” It’s actually that they I’ve been rewatching Living Single, because my British boyfriend—I call him Brit-
haven’t made [diversity] a priority. ish Baekoff—has never seen it. I’ve also been watching How Stella Got Her Groove
Back to feel inspired. Recently, I read this book, Franchise: The Golden Arches of
The podcast field has gotten extremely Black America. It talks about how McDonald’s reshaped Black communities across
crowded. How do you plan to make Black the U.S. I’m still listening to the U2 radio station. Their music has helped me out
Frasier stand out? When I was in major fi- of the depressing energy that is 2020. It’s not all bad, though. I’m doing this in-
nancial debt, in 2009, I never talked about it terview in my apartment on the couch, and I’m actually not wearing any pants.
A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE FIRST WAVE OF 5G VISIONARIES

WATCH NOW

SPEEDOFTHOUGHTFILM.COM
 O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

16
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M AT E R I A L W O R L D Illustrations by Audrey Malo

Preparing
the Virus
2
1 The companies’
scientists identify an
antigen—a version
of the virus that
will elicit an immune
response without
triggering symptoms
in a patient. These
must be specifically
formulated to work
in plant carriers.

Planting
a Cure For the past 80 years, eggs
have been a main ingredi-
In the race to manufacture ent in vaccines for measles, Infecting the Plants
billions of doses of mumps, rubella, chicken Once a safe and effective antigen is determined,
the companies submerge the nicotiana benthamiana
vaccines, could plants be a pox, the flu, and others. Typ- plants into an antigen-infused solution and
secret ingredient? ically, modified genetic ma- force the viral particles into the leaves via a vacuum.
BY LARA SOROKANICH terial from a virus is inserted
into an egg’s proteins, and
those proteins are then in-
troduced into the human body to “teach” it an immune response.
But since each egg must be modified individually, the lag time for
egg-based vaccines can literally be a killer. In the U.S., for example,
3 Incubation
and Growth
The antigens rapidly
replicate inside the
the CDC must predict in January what strains of the flu will erupt
plant, taking one
nearly a year later, to give drugmakers time to manufacture enough to two weeks to fully
inoculations. A handful of companies, however, are pioneering vac- infiltrate the host
cines developed in plants, which can be grown and treated in bulk. cells and transform
them into antigen-
Using a cousin of the tobacco plant (nicotiana benthamiana), bio- carrying proteins.
medical companies Kentucky Bioprocessing (KBP) and Medicago Because plants can
have been pursuing plant-based flu vaccines for years, and are cur- be grown quickly
and affordably,
rently working on COVID-19 immunizations. The companies also KBP estimates that
both began human trials of vaccines over the summer. Here’s how it could make
they turn plants into lifesaving weapons against illness. 3 million doses of a
vaccine in five weeks,
compared to three
to six months for

5 traditional vaccines.

Harvest and Transformation

Plants are harvested and go through a
purification process that turns them into
a medical-grade solution that, com-
bined with other ingredients, can be in-
jected directly into the human body.

Scaling Operations
Medicago medical officer Brian Ward says that because
they’re cheaper to grow and incubate, plant vaccines
have the potential to “democratize vaccine production.”
Medicago estimates that its large-scale facility opening
4
in 2023 could produce 1 billion vaccine doses per year.
 Courtney & Stephanie
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Annie’s B et s
the Farm
To help save the planet, the
General Mills subsidiary
is leading the industry toward
regenerative agriculture.
O nce a pot of water is boiling, it takes less than 10 minutes to turn a box of
Annie’s mac and cheese into a bowl of warm, creamy goodness. But that
convenience belies a complex ongoing effort on the part of the organic
food pioneer’s parent company, General Mills, to enable the product to
do vastly more. The 154-year-old consumer packaged goods giant has
emerged as a leading champion of regenerative farming practices, which sequester carbon in
the soil rather than releasing it into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming.
As climate change imperils food systems around the world, disrupting the supply chains
BY AINSLEY HARRIS that General Mills relies on to make Cheerios cereals, Yoplait yogurts, and more, the company’s
executives, looking to mitigate risk, have found themselves taking a closer look at the types of
agricultural practices that trailblazing food companies like Annie’s—which the conglomerate
acquired in 2014 for $820 million—have long advocated. Last year, General Mills publicly prom-
ised to “advance regenerative agricultural practices on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030.” (To
put that figure in perspective, in the U.S. today there are just 5 million acres of organic farm-
land.) Now the company is leveraging its market power to spur change on farms both big and
small. “Our business resilience depends on the health and well-being of Mother Nature,” says
Mary Jane Melendez, chief sustainability and social impact officer for General Mills. “For us,
 19
NEXT O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

BEHIND THE BRAND Photograph by Dan Forbes

it’s both a business and planetary imperative GROUND who oversees Annie’s in her role as manag-
that we address [climate change], because we WA R FA R E ing director of natural and organic for Gen-
want to be in business for another 150 years.” Carbon dioxide in the eral Mills. “It’s not going to be enough to win
atmosphere contributes the marketplace going forward.”
Annie’s, which was founded in Hampton, to global warming.
Regenerative agricul-
Connecticut, in 1989, has grown under Gen- Gunsmoke Farms, a massive 34,000-acre
ture traps carbon
eral Mills’s ownership to include dozens of dioxide in the soil. site west of Pierre, South Dakota, is a key
products, from cheesy rice to strawberry location for General Mills’s experimenta-
toaster pastries. But mac and cheese re- tion with regenerative agriculture. Annie’s
mains its top seller, and the reason Annie’s
is the most successful natural and organic
kid-food brand in the U.S.
2,500
GIGATONS
signed a strategic sourcing agreement with
investment firm Sixth Street not long after
Sixth Street bought Gunsmoke, in 2017. Af-
Creating organic products on a scale like The amount of carbon
ter three years of building soil health through
this is difficult. General Mills has often had to stored in soil globally planting legume cover crops and other re-
source ingredients overseas, where regulatory generative practices, Gunsmoke received
systems are far from perfect. In 2017, for ex- its USDA organic certification in July, mak-
ample, The Washington Post discovered large 3 inches ing it one of the largest organic conversions
shipments of corn and soybeans, originating ever achieved in the U.S. The organic hard red
in Ukraine and Turkey, that had been grown 14 inches spring wheat that Gunsmoke produces will
using pesticides but mysteriously labeled as Topsoil depth before make its way into the pasta in Annie’s mac
organic during transit. In the U.S., meanwhile, and after one farm and cheese—a rare direct buy from an indus-
switched from conventional
many conventional farmers have been reluc- try that typically relies on intermediaries.
(Topsoil depth, Soil organic matter, Soil farmed regeneratively), Organic Trade Association industry survey 2020 ($50.1B), USDA 2016 organic production survey (0.55%)

to regenerative farming
Sources: “Soil Carbon Storage,” Nature Education Knowledge, 2012 (2,500 gigatons), “Regeneration of Our Lands: A Producer’s Perspective,” TED Talk by Gabe Brown

tant to convert to organic. While their land is Over time, Gunsmoke’s use of crop rotations
in transition, a process that requires a painful and pollinator habitats will further sink car-
three years as their soil goes “cold turkey,” they bon deep into the property’s claylike soil and
can’t sell to organic buyers and often see their 1.7% help make it an entirely regenerative farm.
yields fall dramatically. Even after gaining cer- As always with farming, nature has had
tification, it can sometimes take an additional 11.1% ideas of its own. Cover crop alfalfa, for exam-
three years before they can obtain insurance. ple, has run rampant in some areas of the
Consumers trust the “organic” label—an farm. Last year, 30 inches of rain fell—twice
official USDA designation for two decades, Soil organic matter the typical amount, and in bursts punctu-
before and after one farm
promising no synthetic pesticides or growth switched from conventional ated by micro-droughts. Then COVID-19 ar-
hormones—and continue to buy organic food to regenerative farming rived, grounding many organic inspectors
in slowly increasing numbers. But while or- and putting Gunsmoke’s certification process
ganic foods might be better for people’s on hold. Chad Hutchinson, managing direc-
health, they’re not designed to be better for the tor at Sixth Street and a former Dallas Cow-
planet’s. To combat climate change, General 1X 2X 3X boys quarterback, has learned to expect the
Mills believes it will need to not only support unexpected with agricultural investments.
the expansion of organic farmland but also Soil farmed regenera- “You have to have a long-term perspective
lead the industry toward the idea of regen- tively can absorb and store and great partners, because you’re going to
three times the amount
erative agriculture, a term that goes beyond of water as soil
have years when it doesn’t go well,” he says.
pesticide elimination to encompass practices farmed conventionally. Nonetheless, the first harvest of Gun-
with the power to enrich soils, restore water- smoke organic wheat will show up in the
sheds, and more. “Regenerative” has no of- brand’s colorful mac and cheese boxes in

$50.1B
ficial criteria, and (relatedly) low consumer December, around the same time that re-
awareness. For General Mills, that could be designed packaging is scheduled to hit gro-
an opportunity. Through a self-assessment cery shelves. “Goodness starts in the soil. So
tool for farmers, the company is collecting Size of the U.S. organic we grow our yumminess from the ground
food market in 2019
data on three aspects of regenerative agricul- up,” reads the text on the back of the re-
ture: farmer resilience, soil health, and biodi- vamped mac and cheese box. Competition
versity. Being able to show Annie’s customers in the mac and cheese category is cutthroat,
how their purchases are helping in these ar-
eas could be a distinct competitive advantage.
“I don’t think it’s enough just to be natu-
0.55%
Organic as a percentage
and kids, as many parents can attest, are
the world’s pickiest customers. But when it
comes to protecting the planet they are des-
ral or just to be organic,” says Emily Thomas, of total U.S. farmland tined to inherit, it’s well that they should be.
 20
NEXT O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

D ATA D I V E Illustration by Emily Suvanvej

In recent years, much of the investment in online learning has focused on

Class Is Now companies such as Coursera, which offer users affordable college courses and
Streaming professional development. While these more traditional education platforms
have seen huge spikes in users and funding during the pandemic, consumers
have also demonstrated a growing appetite for online classes geared toward
entertainment and enrichment. MasterClass is adding more content, while
Airbnb and Instagram Live have emerged as learning hubs, with influential in-
structors teaching everything from dance to poetry writing to cocktail making.

Investment
Since February, online-learning
companies have received
a rush of funding. Major invest-
ments include:
Drawing a Crowd
In 2020, Airbnb
has launched $100M
MasterClass

700+
online
$130M Coursera

experiences.
$66M
Skillshare
They’ve
earned hosts
more than $50M

$2M
Udemy

$30M
since April.
Quizlet

Sources: All investment, user, and course catalog numbers were self-reported by included companies. Instagram viewership is
Creative Class
Instagram Live has become Who’s Enrolling?
a way for brands and individuals In March and April of 2020,
alike to reach new audiences. Coursera’s sign-ups increased

represented by the most popular video on each company’s Instagram Live, as of press time, September 2020
A sampling of viewership over the previous year among:
numbers for popular classes:
2018 2019

697K General Business

657K
consumers subscriptions

255K

112K 398% 324%

Special Interests increase increase
Since it launched, in 2015, MasterClass’s catalog
has rapidly expanded, this year adding classes from
Robin Roberts, Tan France, and more.
Goop’s organization tips
with life coach Shira Gill
Ryan Heffington’s
Sweatfast dance class

Colourpop Cosmetics
makeup tutorial

Rupi Kaur’s
poetry class

Government University
80 77 partners students

60
Number of
classes

40

20

0 277% 1,662%
2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 increase increase
 3M Archer-Daniels- Chubb Dow Garmin Intuit Maxim Integrated Omnicom Royal Caribbean Under Armour
A. O. Smith Midland Church & Dwight DTE Gartner Intuitive Surgical McCormick ONEOK S&P Global Union Pacific
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AbbVie Arthur J. Gallagher Cincinnati Financial Duke Realty General Electric IPG Photonics McKesson Otis Worldwide SBA United Rentals
Abiomed Assurant Cintas DuPont General Mills IQVIA Medtronic PACCAR Communications UnitedHealth
Accenture AT&T Cisco DXC General Motors Iron Mountain Merck Packaging Universal Health
Schlumberger
Activision Blizzard Atmos Energy Citigroup E-Trade Genuine Parts J.B. Hunt Corporation of Services
MetLife Seagate
Autodesk Citizens EA Gilead Sciences J.M. Smucker America
Adobe Mettler-Toledo Sealed Air Unum
AutoZone Citrix Eastman Global Payments Jack Henry Parker-Hannifin UPS
ADP MGM Resorts Sempra Energy
AvalonBay Clorox Eaton Globe Life Jacobs Engineering Paychex
Advance Auto Parts Microchip ServiceNow US Bank
Avery Dennison CME eBay Goldman Sachs Johnson & Johnson Paycom
AES Micron Sherwin-Williams Valero
Baker Hughes CMS Energy Ecolab Google Johnson Controls PayPal
Aflac Microsoft Varian
Ball Coca-Cola Edison H&R Block JPMorgan Chase Pentair Simon Property
Agilent Group Ventas
Bank of America Cognizant Halliburton Juniper Networks Mid-America People’s United
Edwards VeriSign
Air Products & Coldwell Banker Lifesciences Apartment PepsiCo Skyworks
Baxter International Hanes Kansas City Communities Verisk
Chemicals Richard Ellis SL Green
Becton Dickinson Eli Lilly Hartford Southern PerkinElmer Verizon
Akamai Colgate-Palmolive Mohawk Industries Perrigo Snap-on
Berkshire Hathaway Emerson Hasbro Kellogg Vertex
Alaska Air Comcast Molson Coors Pfizer Southern Company
Best Buy Entergy HCA KeyCorp VF
Albemarle Bio-Rad Comerica Healthpeak Mondelez Philip Morris Southwest Airlines
EOG Keysight ViacomCBS
Alexandria Real Biogen Conagra Brands Equifax Henry Schein Monster Beverage Phillips 66 Stanley Black & Visa
Kimberly-Clark
Estate BlackRock Concho Hershey Moody’s Pinnacle West Decker
Equinix Kimco Realty Vornado
Alexion BNY Mellon ConocoPhillips Equity Residential Hess Kinder Morgan Morgan Stanley Pioneer Natural Starbucks Vulcan Materials
Align Technology Boeing Constellation Essex Property Hewlett Packard KLA Mosaic Resources State Street W. R. Berkley
Allegion Booking Holdings Brands Estee Lauder Hilton Kohl’s Motorola PNC Steris W.W. Grainger
Allstate BorgWarner Cooper Companies Everest HollyFrontier Kraft Heinz MSCI PPG Stryker Wabtec
Altria Boston Properties Copart Evergy Hologic Kroger Mylan PPL SVB Walgreens Boots
Amazon Boston Scientific Corning Eversource Home Depot L Brands Nasdaq Principal Financial Synchrony Walmart

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Ansys Regency Centers Tractor Supply
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Aon Discover Regions Financial TransDigm
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 O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

22
NEXT

MASTER CLASS Photograph by Celine Grouard

D
D ata tells a story, and when it’s in the
hands of Mona Chalabi, data editor for The
Guardian U.S., the tale can be riveting. The
London-born, New York–based journalist of
Iraqi descent has made a career of creating
striking visualizations that highlight un-
expected issues ranging from female hair-
removal to anti-Semitism in Europe, which
have been shared as many as 2.2 million
times on her personal Instagram account.
Recently, she has garnered attention for de-
picting statistics related to the novel coro-
navirus and police brutality targeting Black
people in the United States. Here, Chalabi—
who has also hosted and produced Strange
Bird, a Guardian podcast on how numbers
shape our lives—talks about bias in data col-
lecting, how she developed her signature
style, and why she makes graphics for her
least-informed reader first.

T RU ST YO U RSE L F
While studying for a master’s degree from
the Paris Institute of Political Studies,
Chalabi took a position with the Interna-
tional Organization for Migration, where
she compiled information on topics such
as the number of Iraqis displaced within
the country and those who’d become ref-
ugees. Though she enjoyed the work, she
didn’t feel that it had much of an impact.
“We’d work for months, and [our reports]
would be read by 10 people. That was frus-
Drawing trating,” she says. After a one-day work-
shop on data journalism presented by an
Conclusions editor at The Guardian, however, she grew
inspired by the potential of numbers to
Data journalist Mona Chalabi communicate information. Chalabi stayed
delivers messages to the masses. in touch with him and soon started intern-
BY YASMIN GAGNE ing at the paper while freelance writing to
 What if
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 O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

24
NEXT

MASTER CLASS

make ends meet. Her persis- M O N A C H A L A B I ies and reports from nonprofits, but she is always conscious of what’s missing
tence paid off: She was eventu- in the research. “Data gathering is a reflection of existing systems, and it can
HOMETOWN
ally offered a full-time position London be manipulated to serve a purpose,” she says, adding that she always looks at
at the paper, in London. Soon the demographics involved in a study and asks herself whether there are any
she took another risk, moving F I R S T J O B outliers in the data. Her creative method—she often plots data out precisely on
to New York to join the then na- Researcher at the a computer before drawing over it by hand—evokes this: “On a computer, data
scent media startup FiveThirty- International looks slick. I draw over it to show that data isn’t always precise. The lines aren’t
Organization for
Eight. She quickly regretted the Migration completely straight to show that there is a margin of error in all data sets.”
decision, feeling that her work
was going unrecognized and C U R R E N T J O B GET IT RIGHT
her ideas were often being dis- Data editor at Chalabi can get nervous about negative reactions to her work online. “I con-
The Guardian U.S.
missed. (FiveThirtyEight de- stantly think, before I publish, This is going to be the post that will get me can-
clined to comment for this I N S TA G R A M celed.” To quell her fears, and avoid making mistakes, she seeks feedback from
story.) In retrospect, Chalabi at- @monachalabi editors and stays open to criticism. She even started a Patreon account to offer
tributes this to being a woman readers a peek at her process and build a community she trusts to give her feed-
of color in an environment that was largely back on early drafts. “My work often deals with sensitive subjects,” she says.
white and male. “There was nothing I could If commenters on Instagram point out a mistake, as they did with a chart she
have possibly done to convince the edi- made on gendered languages, she will often take the post down and repost a
tors of my worth,” she says. It was during version with a caption explaining her changes. “I am always open to the pos-
this period that Chalabi started drawing by sibility of being wrong,” she says.
hand with colored pencils as a creative out-
let for her frustration. She began illustrating
data-visualization projects to contrast with
the more traditional computer-generated
graphs and charts on the site. She further
THE NUMBERS Mona Chalabi’s hand-drawn graphics address
developed her signature style, which com- hot-button issues directly, yet artfully.
T E L L T H E S T O R Y,
bines computer graphics and freehand BUT SHE HELPS Lines can look imprecise for a reason.
drawing, when she returned to The Guard-
ian, in 2017. “I started regaining my confi-
dence and trusting myself.”

M A K E YOUR P OI NT
Chalabi creates her graphics for the broad-
est possible audience, taking pains to
make them easy to grasp by her more than
400,000 followers on Instagram, and not
just “highly educated people,” she says. Re-
cently, she has gotten involved in activism,
making posters—displayed by volunteers
along the Brooklyn Bridge—outlining sta-
tistics related to government spending on
the NYPD. And while many data-viz cre-
ators take pride in simply presenting infor-
mation in a digestible way so that readers
can draw their own conclusions, Chalabi in-
terprets the numbers to tell a story. “I don’t
even pretend to be objective,” she says. “Part
of journalism isn’t just informing people but
giving people tools to act on information.
Hiding behind objectivity feels like negli-
gence,” she continues. “I’m always trying to
find ways, as well, to say, ‘If you care about
Mona Chalabi

this, go vote here.’ ” To source data, she relies

on nonpartisan organizations such as the
Census Bureau, as well as academic stud-
 Hoping can’t keep your kids from using drugs.
But you can. And we can help.
We partner with parents and families to help keep teens from using drugs and alcohol.
We provide families with free, science-based resources to help them deal with
teen substance abuse, information about the ever-changing drug landscape, programs that
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 O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 PAGE

26
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B UILDIN G BLO C KS Illustration by Leonie Bos

On the INVITING COLORS

Each wing of the
Vestre factory will be

Plus Side dedicated to a

different step in the
manufacturing
Norwegian furniture-maker Vestre process and color
and Bjarke Ingels Group reimagine coded with bright,
whimsical tones that
the factory as a hub for jobs, mirror those used
tourism, and community gatherings. in Vestre’s furniture.
BY LARA SOROKANICH

W
When Jan Christian Vestre, CEO
of the family-owned urban fur-
niture company Vestre, wanted
to build a new factory, he had
big ideas of what the facility
could—and should—be. “We
want to produce smarter and
greener and faster,” says Vestre.
“Even more important: We want
to bridge the gap between cli-
mate, nature, biodiversity, and
the need for new jobs and eco-
nomic growth.” The result is
the Vestre Plus, a 70,000-square-
foot state-of-the-art facility
in Magnor, Norway, designed
with Bjarke Ingels Group, which
broke ground earlier this year.
In addition to incorporating
environmental innovations
that reduce the plant’s carbon
footprint (such as solar panels
and a fleet of Tesla trucks), the
Vestre Plus redefines the role
a factory can play in its sur-
rounding community: It’s set
on 300 acres that the company
plans to turn into a public park
(a fitting setting for the benches,
picnic tables, and urban fur-
niture Vestre is known for).
The factory itself will be “radi-
cally transparent,” with floor-
to-ceiling windows throughout
and no gates or restricted areas
on the campus.
 OUTDOOR SPACE
Vestre hopes that
the Vestre Nature
Camp will entice vis-
itors from all over
the world to come
see how his factory
works. “The manu-
facturing industry is
mostly ugly build-
“I wanted it to feel GREEN SHIFT ings. It’s not eco-
like Charlie and the Topped with solar friendly, and it’s not
Chocolate Factory,” panels and made architecturally
Vestre says, noting of wood and other driven at all,” he
that applying color- green materials, says. “We want peo-
ful powder coats to the factory is ex- ple to come and see
the industrial ma- pected to produce how we’ve done it,
chines will be one 50% fewer green- and get inspired and
of the trickiest house emissions bring it back home.”
parts of the factory’s than similar
construction. facilities, with
90% lower energy
demand.

FORM MEETING
FUNCTION
The Plus isn’t Vestre’s
first foray into high-
design facilities:
Snøhetta designed
its headquarters in
Oslo and another
plant in Torsby,
Sweden. Vestre
hopes that younger
generations will
appreciate the mar-
riage of design, sus-
tainability, and
function, and con-
sider careers in
manufacturing.
What every business
must know about the
new era of broadband
AS 5G NETWORKING BECOMES A REALITY, A NEW WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY AWAITS.
WHETHER OR NOT YOU’RE READY MAY DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF YOUR COMPANY.

As wireless net works ad–

vanced from 2G to 3G to 4G
LTE, businesses quickly
learned how to take advantage
of faster data speeds to reach more cus-
tomers, launch new products, and
streamline operations. But the leap to
5G networks is poised to unlock a new
range of possibilities for businesses. 

Wireless networking firm Cradle-

point developed  the software and
hardware that will allow businesses
to take advantage of this new net-
work technology. And this past June,
the company, based in Boise, Idaho,
partnered with Australian mobile net-
work operator Telstra to launch the
world’s first 5G service for business
based on its comprehensive, enterprise-class 5G solution. high-performance slice for applications like VR that need
Cradlepoint’s NetCloud platform and specialized hard- a lot of bandwidth, or a less-expensive slice of data for
ware—including wideband adapters and routers—serve low-bandwidth IoT devices. In short, you can buy only the
as the foundation of the carriers’ unique 5G offering. Here,  data and performance you need. 
Cradlepoint CEO George Mulhern explains what businesses
need to be ready for in a new, 5G-powered world. How can companies get ready for 5G?
The best way to embrace 5G is to be using LTE today within
What types of innovations will we see coming from the enterprise wide-area network (WAN), because the
businesses, thanks to 5G? two are going to coexist for many years as 5G continues
Everyone’s trying to predict what the killer apps will be to roll out. But companies must start the shift to wireless
with 5G. But there was no Uber before LTE, and nobody WAN today or risk being behind the cur ve. That’s why 
predicted that LTE would open the door to a whole host of Cradlepoint develops solutions that allow companies
new on-demand service apps. The same is true for social to manage both LTE and 5G networks under the same
media—LTE has transformed how people connect to each cloud platform, NetCloud, with the same analytics and
other through smartphone apps like Facebook. 5G allows capabilities. That way, companies can be ready to make a
you to transmit massive amounts of data with milliseconds seamless transition to 5G when and where it’s available in their
of latency at fiber-like speeds. It’s going to open up a new network.  
generation of business capabilities and applications. I think
it’s going to be a field day for entrepreneurs.  How long has Cradlepoint been developing 5G products?
We’ve typically been the first-to-market when it comes to
Do businesses fully understand 5G’s potential? enterprise innovations around the cellular market. Several
Most businesses understand 5G’s promise of more band- years ago, it was clear to us that 5G represented a huge tech-
width and better performance, but there’s so much more nological jump forward. We invested then, and as a result, we
that 5G can offer to businesses. Flexibility is one: Today, were first to launch a 5G solution specifically designed for
you buy a data plan from a carrier, and you receive a certain businesses. That means everything, from installation to per-
level of performance. With 5G, you’ll have the f lexibility formance to management, is enterprise-grade—which is just
to order individual slices of the network. You might buy a what IT leaders require.

SP ONSORE D C ON T E N T C RE AT E D B Y FA S T C O W ORK S
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O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 P H OTO G R A P H S BY Y U DI EL A F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M 31

 S T A F F
P I C K THE DAILY SOUNDTRACK

Music for
Ever y Moment
Daniel Lubetzky,
founder and executive
chairman, Kind Snacks
Waking Up
01 “OH YEAH,” YELLO
This song was popu-
larized in Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off.
I play it when I want
to get my kids
up in the morning.

Driving
02 “FIDELIT Y,” REGINA
SPEKTOR
I love Regina’s voice
and mood.

Working Out
03 “BELIEVER,” IMAGINE
DR AGONS
This song has a great
feel. I also love U2’s
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trations for our articles.” —Samir Abady, digital photo editor, Fast Company 04 “CL AIR DE LUNE,”
CL AUDE DEBUSSY
I always work to
classical music—it re-

Harris Poll conducted exclusively for Fast Company, June 23, 2020 (Hire Learning)
Source: “Do you show your face in Zoom meetings? Your gender may play a role,”
HIRE LEARNING minds me of my dad.

Who shows their face in a Zoom meeting? Get Psyched

05 “ROSAS,” L A OREJA
“Always” or “sometimes” enable video Will do their hair DE VAN GOGH

Women 55% Women 85% I love French, Span-

ish, Mexican, and
Men 65% Men 74% Israeli contemporary
music. This really
energizes me.
Disable video because they don’t like
Will clean the work space
how they look Mellowing Out
Women 39% Women 83% 06 “MY FUNNY
VALENTINE,”
Men 25% Men 77% CHET BAKER
If I really want
to feel melancholic.

32 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y M I C H A E L N Ÿ K A M P O C T O B ER5N O V EM B ER 20 20
 Instagram Show Podcast Twitter
@SHOW_THE _ HAMILTON ON L ATINA TO L ATINA @AUSCHWITZMUSEUM
BOARDROOM DISNEY PLUS
MSNBC’s fabulous The content being
WHAT I CHECK FIRST Many corporations I was a playwright Alicia Menendez and produced by the
have announced for the Powerhouse producer Juleyka Auschwitz Museum is
My Daily Media Diet [diversity] programs. Theater when Lin- Lantigua-Williams so important today,
I check Show Manuel was working created Latina to La- as we confront white
Nathalie Molina Niño, president, O3; the Boardroom on Hamilton’s first tina, which tackles supremacy in the U.S.
author, Leapfrog: The New Revolution for to see how their act. Now you can subjects important to and the risk it poses
Women Entrepreneurs boards look. stream it! my community. to our democracy.

T H E
S P L U R G E

OFF SWITCH

Good night,
Molly
“I say good night to my
yellow lab, Molly. When
I stop scratching her
belly, I get a disapprov-
ing look. Then I put
my phone [away] and
do breathing exercises.”
—Henrik Werdelin,
cofounder, Bark

WORKOUT

“I bought a Pilates
reformer by
Merrithew. It helps
Man Ray: Chess Pieces me stay in better
($400, C H ESS HOUS E .COM) shape when I’m sit-
Portrait illustration: Michael Nÿkamp

“Man Ray, the photographer and art icon closely associated with the Dada and Sur- ting for too many
realist movements, designed this geometric chess set (pawns are spheres and the hours at my laptop.”
king and queen are triangles). I may not be good at chess, but my opponent will —Shiza Shahid, cofounder,
know that I have great taste.” —Yasmin Gagne, associate editor, Fast Company Malala Fund; founder, Our Place

34 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y C E R E N D A B A G O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas,
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THE RECOMMENDER my operating JOY REID
NEWS ANCHOR
Illustration by
Louise Pomeroy
system.

What’s always
in your bag?
Hand sanitizer 5 SOCIAL
and lip balm.
MEDIA
ACCOUNTS TO
What TV show
are you mid-binge FOLLO W
on? I May Destroy
You, on HBO. It’s
full of brilliant writ-
ing and acting,
and it takes place
in my husband’s
hometown area
(Hackney, London).

What is your @YASHAR

go-to food Always in
for fast fuel? the know.
Fries.

Is there a meal
you fantasize
O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20

about? Smothered
chicken, greens,
and sweet potatoes,
@WORLDOF
with a glass AFRICATV
of sparkling wine.
Culture and
What’s your beautiful
“get pumped” photography.
song? Nicki
Minaj’s “Chun-Li.”

Do you have a
favorite object in
The host of The ReidOut, on MSNBC, your office? A
takes our career questionnaire. sculpture that looks @PROJECT
LINCOLN
like a lump . . . of
something. When Always
I’m on hiatus I take trolling.
What’s your best Did you have Is there a book classes, like sculpt-
habit, and a career fork in you recommend to ing, where I am
what’s your worst? the road? Quitting everyone? James the least talented
I never quit, and my job in local Baldwin’s Notes schmuck in the
I never quit (so I don’t news over my objec- of a Native Son, be- room. I like being a
get enough sleep). tions to the Iraq cause people need beginner and mak-
War (after the op- to pay closer atten- ing art for the pure @BLAVITY
Is there a famous ed I mentioned) to tion to the history joy of what clay You can get
person you work on [the John of race in America. feels like between all the good
admire? Kerry campaign] my fingers.
dance and
Ava DuVernay. against George W. What’s the advice
comedy
Bush, in 2004. That you’re glad you ig- Do you have
What is the move launched me nored? Don’t quit a mantra? videos here.
buzzword you into campaign poli- your job until you “The little things
never want tics, steered me into have [another] job. are the big things.”
to hear again? talk radio, and set
Six Sigma. up my job on the What advice How do you
F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M

Obama campaign, would you give congratulate

What’s the best which launched me your younger self? someone?
mistake you ever into punditry and Skip the whole [I send them] @RATEMYSKYPE
made? Writing an cable TV news. premed thing and Red Bay coffee, ROOM
op-ed against the major in history. from Oakland, The style...
Iraq War as a news How do you un- California. the snark...
employee at an plug? I watch Do you have a work Everyone I know the judgment
NBC affiliate in TV. [I like watching] uniform or ward- loves coffee, that we all
2004 that acciden- something robe staple? and I want to secretly
tally had my spooky, action- Sweats and an in- support this Black- crave.
36

work email on it. adventure, or sci-fi. teresting T-shirt. owned business.

The future of user experience
design starts with AI
SALESFORCE LEANS ON SMART TECH TO LET COMPANIES BUILD
WEBSITES THAT ADAPT TO THEIR USERS

Every person is unique. We all experience the world CULTIVATING A CULTURE OF TRUST
through our own subjective lens. But when it comes Salesforce’s culture is central to fueling employees’ innovative
to user-experience design, most companies choose ideas and encouraging them to experiment. “Trust is our
a one-size-fits-all approach. Salesforce, best known number-one value,” Rohde says. “When it comes to innova-
for its customer-relationship management tion, that value means we have permission to fail. That gives
platform, is hoping to change that. The company is using us the safety net to really
ar tif icial intelligence to deliver personalized digital push the boundaries when
experiences and build customer relationships by design. it comes to new, innova- “ IF WE DON’T DISRUPT
It’s this type of program that earned Salesforce a spot on tive ideas.” OURSELVES, THEN
Fast Company’s list of Innovation by Design award winners. Internal transparency OUR COMPETITION
Salesforce’s goal was to bring automation into a design is also key to the creative
WILL DO IT FOR US.”
process that is traditionally very labor-intensive. “If you success. Salesforce hosts
were to personalize design today, it would take a designer, events where teams share
developer, and data scientist a month of work,” says Sönke details about their projects, which can help bridge gaps between
Rohde, vice president of Salesforce’s UX R&D team. “That’s co-workers and teams in different areas of the company.
why we looked at the intersection of user experience and “When you can see people in other departments doing
artificial intelligence to find out if we could cut that time interesting, related work, it sparks new ideas and inspires more
down to minutes by automating parts of the process and collaboration.”
generating personalized design at scale.” Rohde adds that keeping an organization of 50,000 employ-
The result is Einstein Designer, which Salesforce unveiled ees asking questions, dreaming up solutions, and creating
in late 2019. The platform is powered by a tool the UX brand-new tools requires an explorative attitude. “We have this
R&D team developed called Deep Learning UX, or DLUX notion that if we don’t disrupt ourselves, then our competition SALESFORCE’S
(pronounced: deluxe). The AI tool learns a brand’s design will do it for us,” he says. “So, we’re working closely with our EINSTEIN DESIGNER
tailors content to
system—from its preferred color palette to typefaces and customers to strengthen relationships with their customers and better connect with
font sizes—and generates design variations within the co-create the future of product experiences.” individual users.
brand’s style.
Those variations can also be tailored to
better connect with individual users.
Two users shopping for sneakers, for
example, could visit the same website and
see two different displays. A shopper
motivated by bargains might see a page
emphasizing price, while a shopper who’s
inspired by reviews will see a page high-
lighting ratings.
AI-generated design can result in a
better experience for customers and
more efficiency for companies. Einstein
Designer lets businesses streng then
relationships w ith customers by
personalizing each customer’s digital
experience and lets designers put their
creative energies toward more rewarding
work. “There are so many repetitive tasks
designers are doing manually,” Rohde
says. “If we automate them, it frees them
up to address complex challenges and
take better advantage of their skills. Our
goal is to enable more data-driven design
and help elevate the profession.”

C RE AT E D B Y FA S T C O W ORK S C ON T E N T S T UDIO A ND C OMMIS SIONE D B Y

 W A N T
I T
NECESSARY VICE

“90 Day Fiancé. It’s

the best reality
TV show in history.”
—Katie Sturino, founder,
Megababe

RETREAT AND
ADVANCE

The Turtle
Conservancy
in Ojai,
California
“It’s heaven—just a few
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built to rehabilitate en-
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renting a beautiful ($50, DUS E N DUS E N .COM)
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while contributing “I’ve been trying to use fewer plastic bags, and I keep stealing my girlfriend’s Du-
to an incredible cause.” sen Dusen market tote—it’s perfect for taking to the supermarket or to the beach.
—Scott Sternberg,
Who doesn’t love colorblock?” —Matthew Strauss, news editor, Pitchfork.com
founder, Entireworld

01 01 03 04

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Illustrations: Ceren Dabag; portrait illustration: Michael Nÿkamp

The Power of AI and a New the Subscription Navigating

Being Creative Generation Model Will Be Fake Companies,
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Robinson’s TED Talk Economy What to the Post-Trust Era
READING LIST Do About It
“How Schools Kill of the Future SHIV SINGH AND
The B ooks Creativity” [is amaz- HEMANT TANEJA TIEN TZUO ROHINI LUTHR A
This serves as
ing]. He explores Taneja outlines how This is the subscrip-
That Inspire Me why it’s essential we’re moving from tion playbook by a practical guide
to [foster] creativity mass markets to per- one of the earliest to understand
Steven Wolfe Pereira, in education, sonalization, driven employees at Sales- bias and finding
Cofounder and CEO, Encantos work, and life. by machine learning. force, Tien Tzuo. your own truth.

30 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 10 10
JESSICA ROBINSON

Executive Director, Michigan Mobility Institute

“ TH ER E ’S N O
B E TT E R PLACE TO
B U I L D A MO BIL IT Y
B U S I N E SS T HAN
M I CH I GAN .”
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 P A G E 4 0

I N V E S T

I N
BE
C O M M U N I T Y
AUT H ENTIC

B R I N G
DE F IN E D E M O C R A C Y
YOU R PUR POS E T O W O R K
C U R I O S I T Y

I S

C U R R E N C Y
THE
NEW NEW
RULES
O
F

C H ANGE
I S CONSTAN T
BUSINESS
O C T O B E R / N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 0
 Democracy in work isn’t
merely a new rule of business.
It can be a business model.
Hello Sunshine, Reese Wither-
spoon’s media company, was
launched four years ago to pro-

SOMETHING I
S
HAPPENING, duce female-centric content long
overlooked by Hollywood. “In
this moment we’re . . . doubling
and tripling down on our mis-
sion,” says CEO Sarah Harden.
AND IT AFFECTS US ALL . A GLOBAL REVOLUTION IS
INVEST IN COMMUNITY
CHANGING BUSINESS AND BUSINESS IS CHANGING Companies have no choice but to
rethink the way they engage and
T H E W O R L D.” T H A T W A S H O W C O F O U N D E R S B I L L invest in the communities they
operate in. Not only has philan-
thropy become “hyperlocal,”
TAY LO R A N D A L A N W E B B E R I N T R O D U C E D FA S T C O M PA N Y
says Kara Medoff Barnett, exec-
utive director of American Bal-
let Theatre, but it is increasingly
embedded in business. Tory
Burch, creative director of her
eponymous lifestyle brand, says
to readers in November 1995. “A invitation-only group of forward- As companies respond to em- putting the president of the Tory
new generation is rewriting the thinking corporate and nonprofit ployees’ calls for racial justice, Burch Foundation on the corpo-
rules of business,” they added, leaders, CEOs, innovators, and sparked by the police killings of rate operating board was “piv-
and they emblazoned these new founders—to help draft the new George Floyd and other unarmed otal” for aligning company and
tenets on the cover: Work Is Per- new rules of business. During a Black citizens, leaders need “to philanthropic goals. Scott Har-
sonal. Computing Is Social. Knowl- series of conversations this past listen, be empathetic, and then rison, founder and CEO of Char-
edge Is Power. Break the Rules. summer, they aided us in de- act,” says Tony Prophet, chief ity: water, cites Patagonia’s 1%
Taylor and Webber’s man- veloping a prescription for the equality and recruiting officer for the Planet initiative (which
ifesto proved prescient. But 25 next 25 years, and beyond. (Ex- at Salesforce. “It begins with lis- commits 1% of sales to environ-
years later, as society confronts a cerpts of these roundtables may tening to the community that’s mental causes) for ensuring that
global pandemic, the worst eco- be found on fastcompany.com.) affected.” Leighanne Leven- giving doesn’t cease altogether
nomic downturn since the Great saler, EVP of corporate strategy in downturns. Morgan Stanley
Depression, and demands to BRING DEMOCRACY at Workday, says this means in- last year underwrote a $1 billion
end systemic racism (on top of TO W O R K specting every aspect of hiring green bond for PepsiCo. “We are
climate change and growing in- When the spread of COVID-19 and promotion, noting that com- focused on how we can lever-
come inequality), it’s time to re- forced many employees to work panies undergo financial and age finance” to advance a sus-
write the rules yet again. Some from home, all illusions about compliance audits all the time, tainability agenda, says Audrey
changes had begun before the the value of hierarchical leader- “to make sure there’s fairness in Choi, the financial services com-
existential crises of 2020—hourly ship “blew up,” says Aaron Levie, the process.” pany’s chief marketing and sus-
wage hikes, pledges to lower car- cofounder and CEO of enterprise But as companies rush to am- tainability officer. Justin Moore,
bon footprints—but they were tech company Box. “In fact, it’s plify previously marginalized executive director of the New
largely reactive, and not adopted actually an anchor and a tax on voices, they must guard against York City Public Design Com-
broadly enough to meet this mo- how we work.” But a flatter orga- tokenization, says Samantha mission, calls on companies,
ment. Taylor, who has gone on nization isn’t just about working Skey, CEO of She Media, or crush- nonprofits, governments, and
to write three books about lead- faster or cutting out expensive ing the originality of fresh per- grassroots organizations to “al-
ership, recently said, “It’s hard layers of middle management— spectives, says Gigi Pritzker, of low for new and complete ways
to sustain a great company in a it is essential to creating fairer entertainment company MWM. of caring for our communities
deeply troubled society, to build and more inclusive workplaces And Arianna Huffington adds and our public spaces.”
a healthy corporate culture in and corporate cultures. Leaders that democratization needs to
a world where so many people should voluntarily share data extend to workers at all levels, D E F I N E YO U R
struggle with discrimination, about pay and diversity metrics, noting that her behavioral health PURPOSE
lack of access to healthcare, and a encourage employees to speak up company, Thrive Global, is now “Purpose is seen as a massive de-
planet that keeps getting sicker.” when they see wrongdoing, and working with Walmart to pro- parture from capitalism, which I
We editors asked the Fast find ways to extend benefits and vide well-being tools to the re- don’t think it is at all,” says Frank
Company Impact Council—an opportunities to all employees. tailer’s 2.2 million employees. Cooper, global chief marketing

42 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
officer of giant asset manager and the one I personally picked C H A N G E I S C O N S TA N T the ‘who,’ ” says Rob Katz, chair-
BlackRock. But many compa- is curiosity,” says Genpact CEO Companies say they embrace man and CEO of Vail Resorts.
nies that have pronounced them- Tiger Tyagarajan. For individu- change, but all too often they “Who are the people who can
selves “purpose driven,” he says, als, inquisitiveness may be what are really just reacting to exter- change, who have that ability to
don’t actually know what their keeps their jobs from being au- nal forces. “What if what we’re let go of something they’ve been
purpose is—they confuse it with tomated or displaced by artificial trying to create is not some doing a long time?”
mission. The answer can emerge intelligence. “That which can be new stasis, but organizations Will these new rules of busi-
through conversations not just digitized will be, but [machines] that are capable of rapidly chang- ness be as prophetic as the ones
about sustainability and gover- cannot replace the things that ing as conditions require?” says Fast Company put forth in 1995?
nance practices but also business require creativity and human- Barbara Humpton, CEO of Sie- We hope so. But as Bill Taylor
strategy. Newer businesses have ity and curiosity,” says Gretchen mens USA. Such organizations, and Alan Webber would caution
baked purpose into their busi- Buhlig, CEO of the ASU Founda- she says, will “gain from disrup- (“Break the Rules”), even they will
ness plan. “Being good stewards tion. Teachers, schools, and par- tion rather than be- soon need rewriting.
of the world and leaving the place ents, meanwhile, will have to ing broken by it.” For In these fast-moving
a little better than we found it is “shift from education to learn- many leaders, creat- PP UR OR PF IOTSSEF O R and uncertain times,
a sustainable competitive advan- ing,” says Steven Wolfe Pereira, ing nimble organi- “The reason I started the only thing any
tage,” says Stuart Landesberg, cofounder and CEO of edtech zations comes down my company was business can pre-
to start a foundation,”
cofounder of natural products company Encantos, and embrace to people: “Change says designer pare for is change.
company Grove Collaborative. “a lifelong-learning mindset.” is not the ‘what’ but Tory Burch. —Stephanie Mehta
Profits and purpose can coexist.
“The more profit we make, the
more social impact we can have,”
says Jonathan Neman, cofounder
and CEO of Sweetgreen.

BE AUTHENTIC
Perhaps no word is at more risk
of devolving into corporate-
speak than authentic, and yet the
concept behind it is more cru-
cial than ever. For leaders there
seems to be no greater virtue;
for brands, no higher aspiration.
As today’s crises are prompt-
ing a more candid, raw dialogue
among colleagues, “we’re at a
point where we, as leaders, are
being asked to open up and share
our own hearts,” says Jeff Titter-
ton, chief marketing officer of
Zendesk. “Empathy is a nonne-
gotiable leadership skill,” adds
Alicia Tillman, global chief mar-
keting officer of SAP. Jolie Hunt,
founder of communications
agency Hunt & Gather, stresses
that honest messaging requires
thoughtful consideration. “You
can’t stand for something if you
don’t stand for something.”

CURIOSITY IS
CURRENCY
For companies trying to stay
ahead of business and social
trends, it’s imperative to question
assumptions. “Our values are cu-
riosity, courageousness, and inci-
siveness on a bedrock of integrity,

P H O T O G R A P H B Y H E AT H E R S T E N O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 “PURPOSE
IS SEEN
AS A MASSIVE
DEPARTURE
FROM
CAPITALISM,
WHICH
I DON’T
THINK IT IS
AT ALL.”
—FRANK COOPER, BLACKROCK

WE’RE SEEING AN
ACCELERATION BY COMPANIES
TO ACQUIRE AND SCALE
SOLUTIONS TO MEET CONSUMER
DEMAND FOR MORE
SUSTAINABILIT Y, TRANSPARENCY, Companies are
AND CIRCULARIT Y.” going to have to under-
— C A R O L I N E B R O W N , C LO S E D LO O P PA R T N E R S stand where their
employees come from—
the pressures and
realities that they live
in—in order to create an
How do we ensure quality, return environment where
on investment, and outcomes ever yone can perform
in education, particularly for our to their potential.”
NEW METRICS underserved populations —EDITH COOPER, MEDLEY

Architect and urban

designer Justin Moore
that are going to be less likely to
says success should have access to tools for
be measured by
equity and care for measuring that up front?”
people and spaces. — R A C H E L R O M E R C A R L S O N , G U I L D E D U C AT I O N

44 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y M I C H A E L H O E W E L E R
 THIS IS A MOMENT OF BR AND VOICE

TRUE ACCOUNTABILIT Y, Companies

increasingly will have
AND TRUE ACCOUNTABILIT Y to behave like activists
and speak out on
STARTS WITH DEEP social issues, says
Linda Ong of
SELF -REFLECTION AND Cultique.

THE WILLINGNESS
TO EX AMINE ALL OF IT.”
— S A R A H H A R D E N , H E L LO S U N S H I N E
By optimizing for
what people
individually want,
social media
We can’t have the tech haves and plat forms may be
have-nots. Every person in harming what
the world needs to become a better we collectively hold
dear, as families,
digital citizen, because all as communities,
companies are now tech companies.” as democracies.”
— M I C H E L L E Z AT LY N , C LO U D F L A R E — D E B R O Y, M I T

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y F L O R A H A N I T I J O ( M O O R E ) A N D J E S S I C A C H O U (O N G ) O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 ARTHUR FILIP CHRISTINE
EVP, sales transformation HUNSICKER
and marketing, HCL Founder and CEO, CaaStle
Technologies
JOLIE HUNT
K AT H L E E N F I N C H Founder and CEO,
Chief lifestyle brand officer, Hunt & Gather
Discovery
ARIA FINGER
CEO, DoSomething.org
D AV I D F I S C H E R
Chief revenue officer,
Facebook
I–O
WINSTON FISHER
CEO, Area15
AL AN FLEISCHMANN J ESS I CA I C LISOY
Founder, chairman, and CEO, Founder and CEO,
Laurel Strategies California Baby
2 0 2 0 I M P A C T C O U N C I L LIDIA FONSECA L AUR A IPSEN
Chief digital and technology President and CEO, Ellucian
officer, Pfizer JOSH JAMES

MEMBERS
TORI FORBES- Founder and CEO, Domo
ROBERTS A D I T I J AV E R I
SVP, reservations sales and GOKHALE
customer care, Delta Air Lines EVP, chief commercial
D AV E G I L B O A officer, and president,
Cofounder and co-CEO, investment, products
Warby Parker and services, North-
western Mutual
E VA N G O L D B E R G
Founder and EVP, N ATA S H A J E N
Oracle NetSuite Partner, Pentagram Design

K ARA GOLDIN CAROL JUEL

Founder and CEO, Hint CIO and EVP, Synchrony

L A U R A G O N Z Á L E Z- MICHAEL K ANA AN
E S T É FA N I Author, T-Minus AI; director
Founder, CEO, and general of operations, U.S. Air
partner, TheVentureCity Force Artificial Intelligence
Accelerator
H O L LY G O R D O N
Chief impact officer, R O B K AT Z
Participant Chairman and CEO,
Vail Resorts
JON GOSS
Chief brand officer, BR AD KEY WELL
NeueHouse Founder and CEO,
Uptake Technologies
CHRISTOPHER
GOULD PA R A G K H A N N A
Managing partner,
SVP, corporate strategy,
FutureMap
and chief sustainability
CAROLINE BAUMANN TO RY BU RCH EDITH COOPER and innovation officer, ANDREW KING
Former director, Cooper Executive chairman and chief Cofounder, Medley Exelon Corporation Managing partner,
Hewitt, Smithsonian creative officer, Tory Burch, Bastille Group
FR ANK COOPER III KIRSTEN GREEN

A–H
Design Museum and founder, Tory Burch Founder, Forerunner JENNA KING
Global CMO, BlackRock
Foundation Ventures
K AT I A B E A U C H A M P CEO, Amionx
Cofounder and CEO, K E L LY C A M P B E L L L AV E R N E C O U N C I L
CEO, Emerald One JERILAN GREENE TOM KOLDITZ
Birchbox President, Hulu Chief communications and Director, Doerr Institute for
G AIL BECKER VINCE CAMPISI JILL CRESS public affairs officer, Yum New Leaders, Rice University
Vice president, consumer
S Y LV I A A C E V E D O Founder and CEO, SVP, enterprise services, Brands, and chairman and
MIKE KONZEN
marketing, PayPal CEO, Yum Brands
Former CEO, Girl Scouts Caulipower and chief digital officer, Chairman, PGAV
of the USA Raytheon Technologies PAT R I C K C R I T E S E R Foundation
LES LI E BLO D G ET T Destinations
P R A N AY A G R AWA L Author; creator and founding BARIE CARMICHAEL President and CEO, SAR AH HARDEN
Tillamook County CEO, Hello Sunshine R O B I N K O VA L
Cofounder and CEO, CEO, bareMinerals Batten Fellow, Darden President and CEO,
Creamery Association
Fractal Analytics Business School; senior SCOTT HARRISON
M A RL A BLOW Truth Initiative
WILL AHMED SVP, social impact,
counselor, APCO Worldwide N O O P U R D AV I S Founder and CEO,
EVP, chief product Charity: water MARGERY KR AUS
Founder and CEO, Whoop Mastercard C H R I S TA C A R O N E Founder and executive
and information security
President, CSM Sport DA N IEL H E A F
CRISTIANO AMON JASON BLUM officer, Comcast chairman, APCO Worldwide
and Entertainment Vice president, Nike Direct,
President, Qualcomm Founder and CEO, VINOD KUMAR
Blumhouse JEAN CASE NORMAN DE GREVE Nike
JESPER ANDERSEN CMO, CVS Health CEO, Vodafone
Chairman, National JEFF HENNION
President and CEO, Infoblox NEIL BLUMENTHAL Business, Vodafone Group
Cofounder and co-CEO,
Geographic Society; CEO, RICHARD DICKSON Cofounder and managing Services
S H E L LY E Case Impact Network President and COO, Mattel partner, Woodside Ventures
Warby Parker SAR AH L AFLEUR
ARCHAMBE AU AMY CHANG
MARC BRODHERSON PHIL DUNCAN MICHAEL HERMANN Founder and CEO,
Author; board director,
EVP and GM, collaboration Chief design officer, P&G President and CEO, Wicked M.M.LaFleur
Verizon Partner, McKinsey &
technology group, Cow Studios
Company J O N AT H A N D U N N STUART
K AT E A R O N O W I T Z Cisco Systems
Design partner, GV CAROLINE BROWN Partner, McKinsey K AT H Y H I B B S LANDESBERG
NIREN CHAUDHARY & Company Chief legal and regulatory Cofounder and CEO,
Managing director, Closed
ANA BAKSHI CEO, Panera Bread officer, 23andMe
Loop Partners ADNAN DURRANI Grove Collaborative
Executive director, the
IMR AN CHAUDHRI Founder and CEO, Saffron CHELSEA MARY BETH
Oxford Foundry, University H O WA R D W. Cofounder, Humane Road Foods HIRSCHHORN L AUGHTON
of Oxford BUFFETT
Adjunct associate professor AUDRE Y CHOI C I N DY EC KERT Founder and CEO, Frida President and CEO, Athleta
PENNY BALDWIN CMO and chief sustainability
and research scholar, CEO, The Pink Ceiling JOSH HOFFMAN LEIGHANNE
SVP and chief marketing
Columbia University’s officer, Morgan Stanley
officer, Qualcomm ALEX ELIAS Cofounder and CEO, LEVENSALER
School of International and
SUSAN CHOK ACHI Founder and CEO, Qloo Zymergen EVP, corporate strategy,
M A R YA M Public Affairs
President and CEO, Workday, and managing
BANIK ARIM A B B Y FA L I K JEFF HUBER
G RETCHEN BU HLI G Gucci America CEO, Home Instead director and co-head,
Head of marketing, Founder and CEO, Global Workday Ventures
CEO, ASU Foundation
Nextdoor JOANNA COLES Citizen Year ARIANNA
GEORG IA BULLEN Executive television HUFFINGTON A ARON LEVIE
JON BANNER Executive director, producer and board director, Cofounder, chairman,
EVP, communications, Founder and CEO,
Simply Secure Snap, Sonos, Blue Mistral, Thrive Global and CEO, Box
PepsiCo, and president,
and Density
PepsiCo Foundation BARBAR A HUMPTON
President and CEO,
Siemens USA

46 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
OLIVER LIBBY LIN DA O N G G AY L E S C H U E L L E R JON STEIN LISA UTZSCHNEIDER MARIANNE WU
Managing partner, Founder and CEO, Cultique Vice president and chief Founder and CEO, CEO, Integral Ad Science Managing director, 40
Hatzimemos / Libby sustainability officer, 3M Betterment North Ventures
JON ORINGER P I E R R E VA L A D E
STEPHANIE Founder and CEO, DA N SC H U LM A N CHRISTINA CEO, Jumbo Privacy F R A N K YA N G
LINNARTZ Shutterstock President and CEO, PayPal STEMBEL Founder and CEO,
JAMES VINCENT Simplehuman
Group president, Marriott Founder and CEO,
PRIMO ORPILLA JEFF SEMENCHUK CEO, FNDR
International Farmgirl Flowers
Cofounder and principal, SVP and chief innovation DEBOR AH YEH
J U L I E WA I N W R I G H T
DA N IEL LU BETZK Y Studio O+A officer, Blue Shield DA N STREETM A N CMO, Sephora
Founder and CEO,
Founder and executive of California CEO, Tibco Software
D AW N O S T R O F F The RealReal FO R EST YO U N G
chairman, Kind Snacks
Chief content and DA N A SET TLE A DA M SUSSM A N Global principal, Wolff Olins
D A R R E N WA L K E R
BR ADLEY LUK ANIC advertising business Cofounder and partner, President, Epic Games
officer, Spotify Greycroft
President, Ford Foundation FR A N K YO U N G
CEO, CannonDesign
TROY SWO PE President, vertical market
J U S T I N WA N G
S U S A N LY N E VIVEK SHARMA Cofounder and CEO, software solutions,
Cofounder and CEO, Larq
Managing partner, BBG Founder and CEO, InStride Footprint Global Payments
Ventures M AY N A R D W E B B
K A R E N S I LV E R M A N SHELLEY ZALIS

P–S
Founder, Webb Investment
TEREZA MANUKIAN Founder and CEO, The
Network
CEO, The Female Quotient
CSO, Buyaladdin.com Cantellus Group
M I C H E L L E Z AT LY N

T–Z
J U DY W ERT
ROTH MARTIN A R I E L S I LV E R S T O N E Cofounder and COO,
Cofounder and president,
Cofounder and president, Managing partner, Cloudflare
Wert&Co
Rothy’s Data Protectors
W I L L PA C K E R SHERRIE WESTIN
ANDRE W MASANTO R YA N S I M O N E T T I
CEO, Will Packer President, social impact
Cofounder, Cofoundant Cofounder and CEO,
Productions and Will and philanthropy,
Convene B I L L TAY L O R
A L A N A M AY O Packer Media Sesame Workshop
President, Orion Pictures SAMANTHA SKEY Cofounder, Fast Company
G O R D O N PA D D I S O N CEO, She Media
BARBARA WHYE
CE ASAR MCDOWELL CEO, Stradella Road
JEN N IFER TEJA DA Corporate VP of HR and
Professor of the practice of JEREMY SKULE CEO, PagerDuty chief diversity and inclusion
civic design, MIT
C I N DY PERET TI E CMO, Nasdaq officer, Intel
CEO, Foundation Medicine
S U D A R S A N T H AT TA I
PETER MCGUINNESS JEFF SMITH CIO, Lineage Logistics BR AD WINDBIGLER
President and COO, Chobani
KEVIN PHALEN CEO, Smule Head of investor relations,
SVP and global head of Visa
MARK THOMPSON
C-suite leadership treasury, and payments
SUSAN MCPHERSON Business Solutions, Visa J U L I E S M O LYA N S K Y finance, The Western
Founder and CEO, President and CEO, coach, Mark Thompson
BRUCE POON TIP Leadership Coaching Union Company
McPherson Strategies Lifeway Foods
Founder, G Adventures STE VEN WOLFE
K AR A MEDOFF D AV E S TA N G I S ALICIA TILLMAN
GIGI PRITZKER Global CMO, SAP PEREIR A
BARNETT Founder and CEO,
Cofounder and CEO,
Cofounder and CEO, 21C Impact
Executive director, American
Madison Wells Media
JEFF TIT TERTON Encantos
Ballet Theatre CMO, Zendesk
V I N C E N T S TA N L E Y
TONY PROPHET ANN WOO
C H RIS M ELEDA N D RI Director of philosophy, DA R A TRESED ER Senior director and head
Chief equality and recruiting Patagonia
CEO, Illumination SVP and head of global
officer, Salesforce.com of corporate citizenship,
Entertainment marketing and TO PPLE THE
ALEX ANDRA Samsung Electronics
BEN PUNDOLE S TA N T O N communications, Peloton HIER ARCHY
NASIR MEMON America
VP, brand experience, Widespread remote
Professor of computer CEO, Empire Global Ventures T I G E R T YA G A R A J A N
Edition Hotels
science and engineering, CEO, Genpact work will flatten
Tandon School of M AT T H E W P U T M A N the org chart, says
Engineering, New York Cofounder and CEO,
SHEEL T YLE
University Nanotronics
Founder and CEO, Amplo Box’s Aaron Levie.
MICHAEL GEORGE PYNE
MENDENHALL Founder and CEO, Bruin
SVP, CMO, and chief Sports Capital
communications
officer, TriNet
MIGUEL QUIROGA
CEO, Visible
SAR A MENKER
GREGG RENFRE W
Founder and CEO, Gro
Founder and CEO,
Intelligence
Beautycounter
MARC METRICK
JANA RICH
President and CEO, Saks
Founder, Rich Talent Group
Fifth Avenue
RICH ROBINSON
MICHELLE MEYER
CTO, Standard Industries
Head of U.S. economics,
Bank of America HEIDI ROIZEN
Partner, Threshold Ventures
J O N AT H A N
MILDENHALL R ACHEL ROMER
Founder and CEO, CARLSON
TwentyFirstCenturyBrand Cofounder and CEO,
Guild Education
T Y M O N TA G U E
CEO, Co:collective D EB ROY
Executive director, MIT
JIM MOORE
Media Lab
Creative director at
large, GQ ALI RUBINSTEIN
Chief creative officer and
JUSTIN MOORE
co-CEO, Meow Wolf
Executive director, NYC
Public Design Commission; T O M R YA N
member, BlackSpace Cofounder and CEO,
Pluto TV
ANDREW MORSE
EVP and chief digital officer, RESHMA SAUJANI
CNN Digital Worldwide Founder and CEO, Girls
Who Code
J O N AT H A N N E M A N
Cofounder and CEO, BRENT SAUNDERS
Sweetgreen Former chairman and
CEO, Allergan
K AT I E O ’ C O N N E L L
MARSH L AURIE SCHALOW
Chairman and CEO, Platform Chief corporate affairs and
One Media food safety officer, Chipotle
Mexican Grill
L I O N E L O H AY O N
Founder and CEO, Icrave KERN SCHIRESON
Chairman and CEO,
Known Global

P H O T O G R A P H B Y A N A S TA S I I A S A P O N O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
Q
FACEOB OK’S
QUADRU PLE
FAST
COMPANY

P.4 9

BY

PY
HARRY
MCCRACKEN

T HE TECH
J UGGERNAUT
I S WEAVING
T OGETHER OCTOBER/
I TS FOUR NOVEMBER 2020
M EGA APPS—
I N S T A G R A M,
W H A T S A P P,
M E S S E N G E R,
A ND
F ACEBOOK
I TSELF—AT
T HE VERY
M OMENT
W ATCHDOGS
A ND
ILLUSTRATIONS
R EGULATORS
BY RAMONA RING
A RE CLOSING
I N. N O
B I G D E A L:
O NLY
D EMOCRACY
H ANGS
I N THE
B A L A N C E.
S
S T A N CHUDNOVSKY D O E S N ’T Instagram, and WhatsApp pretty much separate
R E M EMBER WHEN CEO MARK
started to feel increasingly unwieldy as user num-
bers for each surged well past the billion mark.
Z U C KERBERG AND OTHER
Instead of continuing to silo off each app, execs
T O P FACEBOOK EXECUTIVES concluded that “we can serve people better if the
B E G AN TALKING ABOUT experiences we are building are a little bit more in-
terconnected,” Chudnovsky says. “That truth [had]
T R E ATING THE C O M P A N Y ’S
been ringing in our ears for a long time. What was
P O R TFOLIO OF SERVICES never obvious is how would we exactly go about it,
M O R E L I K E, W E L L, and how would we prioritize it.”
A P O R T F O L I O. THE CURRENT To kick-start the process, Zuckerberg did what
he often does: He posted about it on Facebook. On
V P FOR F A C E B O O K ’S MESSENGER
March 6, 2019, he shared a 3,219-word manifesto ti-
S E R VICE SIMPLY RECALLS tled “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Network-
T H A T THE C O M P A N Y’S ing.” He drew a contrast between social networking’s
O R I GINAL TENDENCY TO KE EP
“town squares”—the largely public meeting areas of-
fered by Facebook and Instagram feeds—and its more
F A C E B O O K, M E S S E N G E R,
intimate “living rooms,” as exemplified by private

50 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
 ALL IN THE FAMILY
A B I G C H U N K O F T H E W O R L D’S P O P U L A T I O N A L R E A D Y
L I V E S I N T H E C O M B I N E D R E A L M O F F A C E B O O K,
I N S T A G R A M, M E S S E N G E R, A N D W H A T S A P P.*

100
B IL L I O N +
messages per day
3.1 4
B IL L I O N
monthly
active
users

2.47 B IL L I O N
daily active users

ONE
B IL L I O N
stories per day
$6.10
Average quarterly
revenue per user

still vastly profitable) town squares he presides over. And it’s not just
because the more private apps are gaining in popularity.
Though private messaging has problems of its own—WhatsApp
and Messenger have both placed limits on message forwarding to
slow the spread of misinformation—much of the controversy that
dogs Facebook stems from its publicness. The fact that any disin-
formation, hoaxes, and hateful rhetoric shared on the site can be
disseminated to millions of people in an instant has made the com-
pany a target for politicians and watchdogs. Even some Facebook
employees—historically, true believers in the company they work
for—have pushed back, tweeting their discontent and staging a vir-
tual walkout in June.
The spotlight has only grown hotter for Zuckerberg since he pub-
lished his post, as 2020’s grinding real-world turmoil—including the
COVID-19 pandemic, protests sparked by the police killing of George
Floyd, and threats to the U.S. presidential election’s integrity—flowed
onto Facebook and then back into the real world. The company’s han-
dling of the chaos drew its own opposition, especially its refusal to
suppress a post in which President Donald Trump warned that “when
group chats and messages exchanged through Mes- the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Nervous about their associ-
senger or WhatsApp. ation with the social network, 1,200 brands paused their Facebook
“Today we already see that private messaging, advertising—at least for the month of July—as part of a move called
ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the Stop Hate for Profit. The company’s revenues took a negligible hit.
fastest growing areas of online communication,”
Zuckerberg wrote. He detailed a wildly ambitious, CONCERN ABOUT FACEBOOK’S POWER ISN’T NEW, BUT
years-long plan to move Facebook’s portfolio of ser- the push to do something about it has grown and intensified. Two
vices aggressively in that direction—and all together. months after Zuckerberg disclosed his new vision for the com-
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger pany, his Harvard classmate and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes
Source: Facebook. *Across all platforms, as of June 30, 2020

would follow a unified strategy to get there. published an incendiary op-ed in The New York Times, titled “It’s
While Zuckerberg, whom Facebook did not make Time to Break Up Facebook.” This past July, Rep. David Cicilline
available for this story, often makes proclamations (D-RI) grilled Zuckerberg at the U.S. House Judiciary Antitrust Sub-
about Facebook’s future, real life doesn’t always coop- committee hearings, saying, “Your platform is so big, even with the
erate. In 2014, for example, he boldly predicted that right policies in place, you can’t contain deadly content. Frankly, I be-
user-generated video would dominate the site within lieve it strikes at the very heart of American democracy.” Shoshanna
five years. It’s now been six years, and our News Feeds Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, says that “there
are still driven by text. However, it’s easy to under- is increasing mobilization within the society at the grassroots, the
stand why he would be looking beyond the vast (and sense that [tech giants], which we once thought of as the solution,

O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
END-TO-END ENCRYPTION: I
B
P
T’S D E F I N I T E L Y C O M P L I C A T E D,
U T H E R E’S W H Y F A C E B O O K I S
U R S U I N G I T, H O W I T B E N E F I T S

THE PROMISE AND THE PERILS Y

W
O U, W H Y I T’S R I S K Y, A N D
H Y I T M A T T E R S. B Y D A V I D L I D S K Y

[ *** 2
HOW DOES END-TO-END ENCRYPTION WORK? B’s phone uses its
private key to
decrypt the message.
CURRENT A’s phone gets
ENCRYPTION B’s public
LEVELS key from B reads A’s
O F F A C E B O O K’S Facebook’s message.
THREE messaging
MESSAGING APPS server.

WHATSAPP Message is sent.

End-to-end
encryption

A writes a
MESSENGER*
message to B.
Link (standard)
encryption If anyone tries
A’s phone B’s phone to intercept the
INSTAGRAM encrypts the receives message, they
DIRECT message so it can A’s can’t read it.
No encryption only be decrypted message. This includes the
* Messenger’s “Secret Conversations”
by a phone with messaging
feature offers end-to-end encryption. B’s private key. service itself.

WHY IT’S WHY IT’S ATTRACTIVE WHY IT’S NOT AS

CONTROVERSIAL TO TECH COMPANIES SECURE AS YOU THINK
IT ABSOLVES A PLATFORM IT MAKES THEIR SERVICES MULTIPLE DEVICES
1 FROM RESPONSIBILITY 1 MORE APPEALING 1 WhatsApp has tested a feature to
Because Facebook can’t read Users like the idea of their mes- allow users to access WhatsApp
the communications being sent, sages being secure, especially messages across a user’s devices.
it may be relieved of its current if they don’t have to do anything Anyone with access to them could
burden of content moderation. extra to get the privacy benefit. potentially access messages.

GOVERNMENTS HATE IT IT REDUCES TRANSPARENCY OLDER MESSAGES

2 Officials complain that end-to- 2 OBLIGATIONS 2 Messages backed up to
end encryption creates a “safe In the second half of 2019, gov- Google Drive and Apple
space” for criminals and have de- ernments around the world iCloud, for example, are not
manded a “back door” to access made 140,875 data requests of end-to-end encrypted.
end-to-end encrypted messages. Facebook, and the company co-
operated at least partially with
74.4% of them. Without access
IT SHIELDS BAD BEHAVIOR to messages, the company BUSINESS USE
3 During recent elections in Brazil, won’t have to be accountable. 3 WhatsApp messages between
Nigeria, and India, WhatsApp en- a user and a business are en-
abled the spread of disinforma- crypted, but Facebook takes no
tion and misinformation, largely responsibility for what happens
unbeknownst to the public. once a business opens them.

52 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y G O R A N F A C T O R Y
have now become the problem. In my view, it’s this the app’s tasteful aesthetic. “I’d see things like that, and then they’d
shifting sense of public malaise, of public fear, that just disappear,” remembers one former staffer. “We won those fights.”
has finally mobilized lawmakers.” If anything, WhatsApp remained even more of a principality unto
There’s no way to square this kind of take with itself. In 2014, after Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition bid had been
Facebook’s self-image. VP of product and social good announced but before it had cleared its final regulatory hurdles, CEO
Naomi Gleit, one of the longest-tenured employees af- Jan Koum told me that his company had “no plans to change any-
ter Zuckerberg, still laments “the gap between what thing about how we execute” once the deal was done, and it didn’t.
people think that our intentions are and what our in- In startup days, Koum and partner Brian Acton had been ar-
tentions are.” But the fact remains that Facebook is dently opposed to collecting unnecessary data about users and lard-
combining its apps into one even bigger, formidable ing their app with ads. “Remember, when advertising is involved,
network at the same time that many are question- you the user are the product,” they warned in a 2012 blog post, not
ing whether it should exist at all in its current form. needing to mention Facebook by name to make their point. Post-
Indeed, Facebook’s massive reengineering effort acquisition, as WhatsApp grew to a billion users by early 2016, it
coincides with several external threats at once: to its continued to spurn ads and champion privacy. In April of that year,
size, its primary revenue source (targeted advertising), it switched on end-to-end encryption that prevented even Whats-
and its liability protections for what’s published on the App from deciphering messages as they traveled between users.
platform. All of which makes this an unprecedented The freedom that Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s founders enjoyed
moment for the company, and—since this is Facebook within Facebook was remarkable for its longevity. But as recounted
we’re talking about—society itself. this year in Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story and Sarah Frier’s

T
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, it wouldn’t last forever. Sys-
HERE WAS A TIME WHEN trom and Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger came to feel that Zuck-
Facebook’s strategy for its erberg was willfully starving them of resources. Koum and Acton
component parts was to found themselves under pressure from Sandberg to incorporate the
treat them more like enti- targeted ads they despised. Acton resigned in September 2017, later
ties unto themselves. “I love tweeting a defiant “It is time. #deletefacebook.” Koum quit the fol-
when people come to the In- lowing April. Systrom and Krieger left five months later.
stagram campus, because After the founder exodus, longtime Facebook executives Adam
not everyone realizes how Mosseri and Will Cathcart took over Instagram and WhatsApp, re-
autonomous we actually spectively. Both were trusted Zuckerberg lieutenants and had pre-
are,” Instagram cofounder viously overseen Facebook’s News Feed—setting the stage for the
and then CEO Kevin Sys- unification plan to come.
trom told me in 2017. That
was soon after his company FOR YEARS, SURVEYS HAVE SHOWN THAT MOST PEOPLE
had decamped from Facebook’s sprawling Menlo Park, don’t know that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. That often
California, digs, which felt like the world’s largest dorm seemed to redound to the company’s favor. Folks who fled Facebook—
room, to its own gleaming headquarters a mile and a teenagers who deem it insufficiently cool or older users concerned
half away—decorated, inevitably, with blown-up pho- about privacy—often ended up spending more time in something
tos depicting Instagram users’ best lives. else owned by Facebook Inc.
At the time, Systrom described his relationship However, such ignorance became tougher to maintain in August
with Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg 2019, when Instagram’s and WhatsApp’s startup screens began de-
as being like that between a CEO and trusted board claring that the apps were “From Facebook.” Tying beloved products
members. “You get input and you get guidance,” he to the embattled Facebook brand was a gutsy act of transparency, says
explained. “But you also get pure autonomy, and you Ivan Kayser, CEO of strategy and design consultancy Redscout, who
get to push your vision forward—which also happens calls Facebook’s willingness to do so “weirdly positive.”
to push the larger company’s vision forward as well.” Confusion about the relationship between Facebook and the other
Letting Instagram be Instagram was good business. services under its umbrella was “long-term, not a good thing for us,”
When Facebook bought the photo-sharing phenom for says Instagram VP of product Vishal Shah. He points out that the com-
$1 billion, in 2012, it had racked up an impressive pany’s apps have always benefited from certain logical integrations
30 million users in just 18 months. Years later, Insta- and consolidations. For example, Instagram users have been able to
gram played a decisive role in Facebook’s strategy for cross-post photos to Facebook with one click. Businesses also have
staving off Snapchat, which had twice spurned Zucker- unified tools, such as a single dashboard for wrangling communica-
berg’s acquisition proposals. When Snapchat’s playful, tions with customers on both Facebook and Instagram.
ephemeral “Stories” feature took off, Systrom’s team But in many cases, Facebook had been willing to double up
adroitly co-opted it in 2016, creating a wildly popular on its efforts, if not triple or quadruple. After Instagram Stories
clone that still felt like it belonged inside Instagram. had become a blockbuster, in 2017, Facebook, Messenger, and
Did Facebook ever pressure Instagram to make WhatsApp rolled out their own takes on the idea—pretty darn
changes that felt un-Instagrammy? Absolutely. But similar, but not identical. That’s an inefficient way to build new
Systrom was able to fend off such intrusions as cross- functionality. “Right now, every time we innovate on something in
promotions with Facebook that would have bespoiled Facebook Stories, Instagram takes three (Continued on page 92)

O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 IG
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DESIGN E
BY IN D
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BY D E S IG N

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OCTOBER/

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NOVEMBER 2020

This year’s Innovation

by Design Awards
offer more than 500 IN I G N
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reasons to feel hopeful
during dark days of
unprecedented chal-
lenge. While no silver
bullet will solve all of our
most urgent problems—
202
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from the global pan-

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 emergency ventilator that has fewer parts than a traditional one
in an ICU, making it easier to manufacture locally (in Queens)
and incorporate into the city’s strategic stockpile at a time when
COVID-19 had severely strained global trade and shipments from
overseas were stymied. Newlab’s success is a testament to the
power of creative collaboration that values people over profits.
Major corporations mobilized, too. Nike, the world’s largest
athletic shoemaker (and an honoree this year in multiple cat-
egories, including Health), transformed its design and produc-
tion methods in weeks to assemble more than 360,000 pieces of
PPE for healthcare workers. The company’s product development
cycle typically takes many months. Importantly, Nike used only
supplies at hand: Its face shields have padding from shoes, plas-
tic from Nike Air soles, and a drawstring from pants and jack-
ets. As Nike’s vice president of innovation, Michael Donaghu, told
Fast Company senior writer Mark Wilson in May, the goal was to
“solve this problem with the supply chain we have, with mate-
rials we’re familiar with, and with the tools we have” to avoid
taking precious resources away from other PPE manufacturers.
Imagine if every company brought the same focus and energy
IN M A RCH , AS THE CORON A - to another existential threat facing the planet: climate change.
virus ravaged Italy, architect and MIT professor Carlo
Ratti rallied more than 100 colleagues across four con-
tinents to develop connected units for respiratory ail-
ments (CURA), open-source intensive care units built
from recycled shipping containers. Designed to relieve
the country’s overburdened hospitals, the units could
be set up as quickly as a hospital tent, but still meet the
strict biocontainment standards of an isolation ward.
The first unit opened in Ratti’s native Turin, part of the
country’s hard-hit Piedmont region, in April. Others
soon followed in Canada and the United Arab Emirates.
CURA is one of several Innovation by Design hon-
orees to showcase extraordinary design ingenuity in
response to a cataclysmic global public health cri-
sis. In the United States, the Trump administration’s
refusal to forge a cohesive strategy that would have
brought COVID-19 to heel has made the work of de-
signers more critical than ever.
They built ventilators; they made safer, more com-
fortable personal protective equipment (PPE) for health-
care workers and the public; and while Trump publicly
insisted the virus was under control, they created visu-
alizations of the data that showed he was lying.
At the same time, the design industry has faced
tremendous setbacks, amid shrinking budgets,
choked supply chains, and the exhausting demands
of remote collaboration. While design is no substitute
for a functional democracy, in times of extreme du-
ress it can help compensate for abysmal leadership
and point toward a brighter future—however distant
that may seem.
Newlab, Fast Company’s Design Company of the
Year, is an inspiring example. The Brooklyn tech hub’s
sprawling network of designers, engineers, makers,
and others convened online, after a spike of COVID-19
diagnoses shuttered New York, to devise solutions to
everything from medical supply shortages to inac-
curate case counts. One project was Spiro Wave, an
D

56 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y G E R H A R D H U M A N B

I
 I T D O E S N ’ T TA K E M U C H lic health crisis: the scourge of police brutality and sys-
I M A G I N AT IO N TO S E E temic racism against Black lives.
H O W D E S IG N H A S B E E N It doesn’t take much imagination to see how de-
C O M P L IC I T I N C R E AT I N G sign has been complicit in creating this status quo—
Confederate monuments come to mind, as do the pris-
T H E STAT U S Q U O.
ons that disproportionately incarcerate Black and
brown men, leading to what lawyer and activist Mi-
Indeed, some of the most impressive Innovation by Design hon- chelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim Crow.” De-
orees show a deep sensitivity for the environment. Unocup, win- sign underpins everything from the Minneapolis street
ner of the Packaging category, is a disposable coffee cup that folds where an officer killed George Floyd to the apartment in
down along the top to eliminate the need for wasteful plastic lids. Louisville, Kentucky, where police opened fire, slaying
WNDR Alpine Intention 110, winner of the Sports and Recreation Breonna Taylor, to the suburban neighborhood where
category, is a set of skis made from an algae-based composite that two white men chased and shot Ahmaud Arbery.
diverts plastic waste from landfills. Powerhouse Brattørkaia, win- Intentionally or not, designers have helped con-
ner of the Sustainability category, is a Norwegian office building struct a system of white dominance, and now they
that on average generates twice as much energy as it consumes, must do their part to build anew. The time has come
thanks to a vast array of solar panels—proof that the best design for designers to question every assumption and con-
doesn’t just tread lightly on the earth; it actively gives back. sider the implications of every choice. There is a com-
Now, a formidable task lies ahead, as designers work alongside mon belief that once researchers unveil a working
businesses, policy makers, and communities to envision a post- COVID-19 vaccine, life will just go back to normal. It’s up
COVID-19 world. This coincides with another urgent American pub- to designers to make sure it doesn’t. —Suzanne LaBarre

A N E M E RG E N CY
P R E - FA B IC U A
LT
H •H
E

A
E
H • H

LT
H • H
LT
A

E
E A
CURA M O B I L E H E A LT H C L I N I C H • H
LT

cluding ventilators, in the world. The

monitors, and CURA pods can
stands for intrave- be installed in about
nous fluid dispensa- an hour, making
tion. To make sure it faster than most
that the atmosphere existing options
is clean, an extractor on the market, Carlo
fills the space with Ratti says, adding
negative pressure, that even a tent
which greatly re- structure requires
The international duces the spread of more time to set up,
design firm Carlo airborne diseases. as it needs to be
Ratti Associati The units were equipped with med-
turned unused also designed with ical equipment that
shipping containers families in mind: comes preinstalled
into intensive care Two windows in CURA. “Health
units to support carved into the con- authorities can at-
northern Italian hos- tainer let people tach units to current
pitals overwhelmed check on their sick hospitals or build
during the pan- loved ones and a whole new hospi-
demic. These con- allow doctors to tal solely with
nected units for monitor progress. CURA pods,” Ratti
respiratory ailments The designers of says. “They can
(CURA) help hospi- CURA also outlined also quickly move
tals extend their tech specs in open- modules from
emergency facilities. source files avail- one place to the
Each temperature- able online so that other, following
controlled pod is the concept can the mutating front
equipped to treat be replicated by line of the virus.”
two ICU patients, in- anyone, anywhere —Yasmin Gagne

O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 G • L
IN E
N

A
• LEAR

RN
A A BE T T E R S HOE

ING
WA R E H O U S E
F O R L I F E S AV E R S

•
R E D E S IG N E D F O R N LE
ARNI

C O L L A B O R AT IO N
Y • F
UT A
A

S
E
ON & B

HI
JOHNSTON UCLA ART

ON & B
MARKLEE STUDIOS

HI
CLOVE

E
A A
UT
Y • F

When architecture SHOES FOR

H E A LT H C A R E
firm Johnston Marklee WORKERS
set out to transform
a 70-year-old factory for the
UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate to their families. also got input from
Art Studios, it wanted to “honor Clove, a shoe brand
created expressly
shoe designer
Stuart Weitzman
the legacy of the building and for healthcare work- to ensure a chic
ers, was ready for profile. When the
the rawness of the space” even this moment with pandemic arrived
as it reimagined all 48,000 sneakers that in America, many
can withstand doctors and nurses
square feet, according to partner industrial-strength bought multiple
Sharon Johnston. That meant When Philadelphia
cleaners. Before its
shoes hit the market
pairs to prepare for
the long days
creating a mix of public and hospitals filled up in late 2019, the ahead, quadrupling
with COVID-19 startup had spent Clove’s business.
private spaces that were flexible cases, frontline a year conducting “They were prepar-
and nonhierarchical to reflect the workers would wipe focus groups with ing for battle, and
themselves down hundreds of medical Clove was part of
spirit of the school. The from head to toe professionals to cre- their armor,” says
three covered yards create an with sanitizing wipes
between patients,
ate its first product,
a shoe that is per-
Joe Ammon, Clove’s
founder and CEO,
“umbrella” around the terrified of transmit- fectly tailored to who was inspired by
building to help keep it cool. ting the virus within
the hospital or
their needs: easy to
slip on and fluid-
his wife, a nurse, to
launch the business.
—Aimee Rawlins bringing it home repellent. The brand —Elizabeth Segran

• • • E
• N
R E TA I L

V
IRONME

A W H I M S IC A L TRUEBIRD THE C OFFEE

ROBOT

S E R V IC E K IO S K
•

• N
TS
• •

The automated coffee machine continues to be els) or kitchen (Corian counters), with liberal amounts
a sad, vestigial organ of hospital cafeteria culture. So of glass camouflaging the unit into its surroundings.
when Jonas Damon (pictured, right), former VP of con- With dimensions similar to an oversize hutch, Truebird
T cepts studio at Starbucks and current chief design officer glows with pools of light, and the bright orange espresso
at the robotic coffee startup Truebird, was figuring out machine—the kiosk’s single pop of color—can’t be missed
how to package an automated coffee kiosk of the future, from across the room. “That’s the long-distance cue that
he recognized that it had to break old conventions and you can get great espresso there,” says Damon.
find its own identity. “We sit somewhere on the spectrum In this era of social distancing, the robotic coffee
from vending machine to coffee shop,” says Damon. “We maker fulfills every order with a little high-tech magic
obviously want to be closer to a coffee shop. And part of show, using magnets to glide cups across the counter
being a coffee shop is it’s architectural in nature.” from the espresso machine to your pickup slot. The effect
Illustration by Malik Thomas

Damon’s team chose to hide away Truebird’s mechani- makes for a whimsical celebration of automation. “You
cal features, such as automated milk dispensers, to create can’t see any mechanics,” says Damon, “just a cup float-
a machine accented to evoke an inviting café (wood pan- ing across a white surface.” —Mark Wilson

58 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M PH OTO GR APH BY L AUREL GOLIO O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20

 S • P
CT R
U

O
• PROD

DU
CTS
A MOR E

•
T PR
ODUC
INVITING
WAY TO
P L AY

LOGITECH

ADAPTIVE
GAMING KIT

Logitech’s Adaptive
Gaming Kit,
designed for Xbox,
deconstructs the
typical handheld
game pad into
12 oversize buttons
and switches, al-
lowing people with
limited dexterity to
create the perfect
controller for their
individual physical
needs. —MW

IXD

On its surface, Newlab might enlisted members of the Newlab

A H IG H - T E C H seem impossible to run community to get two projects
CO L L A BO R AT I V E remotely. The 84,000-square- running: a COVID-19 tracker and
foot space in the Brooklyn a ventilator. The first was devel-
Navy Yard functions as a collab- oped through AppliedXL, a
orative work space, innovation company spun out of Newlab
NEWLAB lab, and prototyping facility a few months earlier that takes
for everything from robotics to a journalistic approach toward
M PA N
CO aerospace. (Member companies data, using it to tell a more com-
Y
N

pay to use the space, affording pelling story. With Stat News
DESIG

S TA R T U P them access to staff and and The Boston Globe, AppliedXL

• OF

COMMUNITY facilities; Newlab sometimes in- developed a dashboard that

vests in these companies as well.) aggregated global data on
•

H
YEAR •
E But when New York City locked COVID-19, clearly showing how
down as COVID-19 hit in early and where the virus was spread-
March, Newlab kicked into an ing. The second project was the
even higher gear. Almost imme- Spiro Wave, an emergency
diately, cofounder Scott Cohen bridge ventilator created to ad-

60 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M P H O T O G R A P H B Y S U B J E C T/O B J E C T M A N I F E S T
 A
R E D E F I N I T IO N
OF V IS UA L
JOURNAL ISM

THE NEW
YORK TIMES

• • • •
L
GENER AL EXCELLEN CE A

EX
GENER

CELL
•

E
N
• CE
• •

facts are under siege, why print isn’t dead,

and why design is key to solving journal-
ism’s biggest problems.

Several of your front pages this year broke

with conventional newspaper design. One
featured a chart of the U.S. unemploy-
ment rate that extended above and below
the fold, another mapped coronavirus fa-
talities across the country with New York
City’s death toll spiking through the Times’s
logo, and another was dedicated entirely to
names of the dead. We’re in just a remark-
able moment. I’ve never seen anything like it
in my career. The combination of a virus that
has killed historic numbers of Americans,
In May, when the United States reached civic unrest that is unlike anything we’ve
the grim milestone of 100,000 confirmed seen since the 1960s, an economic yo-yo that
deaths from COVID-19, The New York Times pushes the economy to the verge of collapse,
turned its front page into a powerful me- and the most divisive presidential election
morial, a list of every American coronavi- in modern American history. When we do
rus fatality to date: name, age, hometown, things like the [unemployment] graphic that
and a personal detail. Topped by a banner essentially became the lead of the paper, or
headline, the gray page was as solemn as all the names on the front page—that’s de-
dress the impending shortage in a tombstone. sign telling a story that you can’t tell in just
New York. Using an MIT design
It was the latest example of how the the 1,200-word traditional newspaper story.
as the prototype, Newlab devel-
oped the device and got FDA au- Times, the winner of Fast Company’s 2020 In-
thorization in less than a month. novation by Design General Excellence cat- How do these front pages fit into the pa-
Cohen says more than 100 peo- egory, is reimagining its most valuable real per’s larger mission, to report the truth,
ple worked to get Spiro off the
ground—not just engineering estate to help readers make sense of these when we have a president who is disdainful
but conducting product re- confusing and scary times. “We cannot just of facts that are inconvenient to him? Ev-
search, doing testing and qual- tell those stories with stories,” says New erything The New York Times does should
ity control, and preparing
regulatory reports. It’s this col-
York Times executive editor Dean Baquet. stand as testament to our belief in the
laborative spirit and diversity of “We need for people to pick up the front page truth. Print is arguably the most powerful
backgrounds that shows the and understand that they are in the middle testament because it’s permanent.
true value of Newlab’s commu- of something truly remarkable.”
nity, Cohen says. “An army of
people from Newlab just started Here, Baquet discusses how design can Most print papers are shrinking. Why make
doing things.” —AR amplify the truth at a time when even basic the investment? (Continued on page 102)

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y S T U D I O N I P P O L D T O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
A
CA M P U S
B U I LT CLIMBING
FOR A large interior
space includes
DISASTERS a 46-foot-high
training wall to
practice scaling
STUDIO and rappelling,
AC E S
GANG PL • and a catwalk for
&

SP high-up training
AC E S

exercises.
AC E S

FDNY
SP

&

RESCUE • PL
AC E S
C O MPA N Y 2

Rescue Company 2,
in Brownsville,
Brooklyn, is home to
some of the New
York City Fire Depart-
ment’s most highly
trained firefighters,
who are called
in for rescues from
high-rises, under-
ground subway
tunnels, and other
precarious places.
Fittingly, Studio
Gang designed
interior and exterior
spaces to mimic
these challenging
environments.
—Lara Sorokanich

CR AWLING
An underground
room simulates
smoky conditions.

62 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y T W I S T E D F O R K
 I
S Q UEEZIN G
A manhole
B
space is used
for practicing
D
confined
rescues.

SCALING
Numerous windows
and openings
at varied
angles and sizes
replicate what
firefighters
could encounter
at apartment
and office
buildings.

O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 E • U
NC S
E

E
I

R
EXPER

EXPER
A UNIVERSAL HYUNDAI EV CHARGER

R
CH A RGE R FOR CAR S

I
E
S E
NC
E • U

A dozen major auto or side. As Hyundai The result, the much inspiration The halo also “This isn’t about
manufacturers are planned its first pub- Hyundai Hi-Charger, came from self-serve serves as a status bar quietly integrating
now building elec- lic charging stations is a beacon, featur- car washes,” says that anyone nearby some great technol-
tric vehicles, but in Seoul, the com- ing a glowing halo Jeff Salazar, a part- can see, gradually ogy,” says Salazar.
the charging ports pany tapped McKin- overhead. This halo ner at McKinsey filling in with light as “This is about finding
are all over the sey to design a more rotates and drops the San Francisco. “They the 20-minute the right brand
place. Some compa- universal charger cable in just the right have the sprayer charge reaches com- expression, and ex-
nies design on the that could accom- spot, depending on hanging down from pletion. Subtle? Not perience, to lead to
front of the vehicle, modate as many the make and model the top and it kind at all. But subtlety better [electric]
others on the back brands as possible. of your vehicle. “So of rotates around.” isn’t Hyundai’s goal. adoption.” —MW

AN E ASIER
O N L I N E LOA N
P R OC E S S

SQUARE

P P P L O A N A P P L I C AT I O N

E • U
NC S
E
E
I

R
EXPER

EXPER
R

I
E

S E
NC
E • U

When the Paycheck Protection

Program rolled out in April to
help small businesses struggling
through the coronavirus crisis,
many companies found the loan
application process confusing.
Square Capital, the loan division
of Square (the company behind
those little white credit card read-
ers), developed a user-friendly
PPP application by breaking
down information into quick, at-
a-glance details: a series of
questions that would steer appli-
cants toward the correct tax
and payroll documents. As of
mid-June, Square had submitted
$873 million in applications to
the Small Business Administration
on behalf of 80,000 applicants.
“Small businesses should not
have to struggle to receive the
support they need,” says Sam
Khalsa, product design lead
for Square Capital. —Lilly Smith
D

64 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J O A N N A G R O C H O C K A B

I
 N U MBER OF ELECTRIC N U M B E R O F P R I VAT E T H E U.S. M A R K E T F O R S E R V I C E S T O S U P P O R T T H E
VEHICLES ON THE ROAD E L E C T R I C -V E H I C L E C H A R G I N G O F E L E C T R I C -V E H I C L E F L E E T S
I N T H E U.S. CHARGERS WORLDWIDE
Procurement of renewable power
Energy-management services
6.5M
Sources: PolicyAdvice, IEA, McKinsey. *Projected

2018
Ancillary grid services
1
Million 15 $1.6 B

10 $4.4 B

$ Billions
2025* 5 $8.6 B
18
Million 22%
United States 2020 2025* 2030*

T H • DA
AL
E

TA
MES • H
A BETTER

D E S IGN
STO R E

A
G
•
APPS &

SMARTER
SUBSTITUTIONS
1 Algorithms
WALMART SH OPPIN G C ONVENIENCE
assess your
previous
purchases in
order to suggest
suitable
Most people don’t alternatives for
associate Walmart, the out-of-stock
selections.
M original big-box store,
with good design. TASTY X WALMART
But under VP and head SHOPPABLE
2
of design Valerie Casey, RECIPES
Tasty,
who has worked at the BuzzFeed’s video
world’s three most iconic design firms— recipe series,
is one of the most
Pentagram, Ideo, and Frog—that’s changing. viral food brands
“Hundreds of millions of people walk in the world.
Now, using the
into a Walmart each week,” Casey says. Tasty app, you can
“How do we convert [them] to more satisfied automatically
fill your Walmart
shoppers with digital tools?” Case in point: shopping cart
Ordering grocery pickup from Walmart with the
ingredients for
is now a smoother process than getting a Tasty recipe.
grocery delivery from Amazon Prime Now.
Walmart lets you add additional items to WALMART HEALTH
your order after checkout (Amazon 3 Walmart Health
centers focus on
doesn’t), and the company doesn’t increase services such as
its shelf prices for the convenience of pickup x-rays and dental
exams, and offer
or delivery (which, during COVID-19, clear pricing
has allowed customers to social distance models so people
know exactly what
without paying premiums for service). they’re going to
Here are three initiatives that the company pay for medical
treatment before
has rolled out in the past year. —MW they get the bill.

O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 EA
EA •

• EM
EM

E
A

•
•
EMEA

A N E L E CT R IC
BI K E FOR rather than the elderly,” says VanMoof director of smart
products Jean-Paul Niellissen. The Amsterdam-based
U R B A N ST R E E T S company noted that even in its bike-friendly home city,
commuters often opted for cars when traveling more than
5 kilometers (3 miles). The S3 ($1,998) is designed to
VA N M O O F
be as sleek as a regular bike, with a few added features.
L. Sorokanich

S3 BIKE

CONNECTIVIT Y
Bluetooth tech-
nology allows the
bike to be locked
and unlocked
remotely, track
rider mileage,
and be reported
stolen or dis-
abled, all from
a smartphone.

66 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M P H O T O G R A P H B Y S U B J E C T/O B J E C T
 S H IF T I N G
An automatic
e-shifter
makes the bike
extremely smooth
to ride on any
incline, and can
be customized
through a
connected app. MOTOR
The electric
motor, which
boosts up to
20 mph, is hidden
in the wheel hub.

M A NIFEST O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 brands such as Dior friends had been comes with an ergo-
A BETTER and Smashbox. But
five years ago, while
expressing over
the years as they
nomic wand, along
with a mascara
BEAUTY KIT on a shoot, Bryant
noticed her fingers
struggled to master
the makeup tech-
tube that slides onto
the finger like a ring,
quivering. Her doc- niques that had allowing for more
tor diagnosed her always come so eas- control. The products
with Parkinson’s, ily to her. This real- have been available
a degenerative dis- ization spurred her since February
GUIDE BEAUTY ease that affects to launch Guide on the company’s
AUTY • For 25 years, motor skills. The ill- Beauty, a startup website. “In the
BE makeup artist Terri ness might have tor- that’s redesigning end, my illness has

FA
&

Bryant dexterously pedoed her career, beauty products been a gift,” says

SH
IO N

INCLUSIVE applied eyeliner and but Bryant found to make them easier Bryant. “My goal is

IO N
MAKEUP mascara on models opportunity instead. to use. She part- to democratize
SH

and celebrities, and She began to un- nered with industrial makeup, by making
FA

BE &
AUTY • taught others how derstand some of designers at Essen- even the trickiest
to do the same as a the frustrations her tial Design to create look accessible to
beauty educator for less dexterous an eyeliner that everyone.” —ES

IXD

68 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y G E R H A R D H U M A N O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 Every brand can make an impact
THIS YEAR, WE’VE SEEN WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN BRANDS RALLY
TOGETHER TO CREATE MEANINGFUL CHANGE. JOIN MEALS ON WHEELS
AND DOZENS OF BRANDS TO KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING.

TAKE PART MEALSONWHEELSAMERICA.ORG/DONTSTOPNOW

 As a researcher at the MIT sign could be if we harnessed all
A Media Lab and a creative resident the biological advantages of the
D E T E R IOR AT I N G at Ginkgo Bioworks, Andrea Shin decomposition process.” Nature
IT
Y • S Ling studied the science of decay: has designed materials to de-
E L EG A NCE L U
how environmental factors such compose and return to the earth.

S
INAB

TA
as moisture and heat affect the But in human-made environ-
decomposition of biomaterials. ments, structures and objects that

INAB
Her work focuses not on prevent- no longer serve a purpose be-

TA
ANDREA SHIN LING
ing this biomaterial decay but come waste, polluting our envi-

I
U L
IT
Y • S on controlling it, allowing objects ronment, seas, and bodies. Less
to change color and shape over than 10% of plastic, wood, glass,
D E S I G N B Y D E C AY time in aesthetically pleasing and metal is recycled. Ling’s work,
ways. Her work, she says, “is an ex- which earned top honors from the
ample of what architecture or de- European Commission’s 2020

70 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M PHOTOGRAPH BY HENRY HUNG

STARTS Prize and is scheduled to
be exhibited later this year at Ars
Electronica, in Linz, Austria, and
Bozar, in Brussels, suggests a radi-
cal new possibility of controlling
the decomposition of materials
safely at scale. “Even as an archi-
tect, when your building is sup-
posed to last hundreds of years,
it is ultimately destined to break
down,” Ling says. “My work is
about exploring how we can use
nature not just as a model, but
also as a tool for design.” —ES

G •P
IN A
G

C
• PA C K A
A CLEVER

KA
GING
FOL DI NG C U P
G

•
N PA
C K AGI

UNOCUP S U S TA I N A B L E C U P

Tom Chan was just a sophomore at Coo- the traditional lid with paper folds that
per Union in 2015 when he came up with seal the drink tightly. “When people think
the original Unocup concept: a single unit of sustainable solutions,” Papo says, “they
with an origami-like lid that you fold into think of certain compromises that have to
place to seal liquid inside, eliminating the be made. What’s really exciting about this is
need for single-use plastic lids. Countless that it’s a sustainable and practical solution
coffee-shop interviews and more than a at the same time.” Currently fulfilling small
thousand prototypes later, he and long- orders, ranging from 10 to 2,000 cups, that
time friend Kaanur Papo founded Unocup, have come off Kickstarter, Chan and Papo
in 2019. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, are meeting with investors and aiming for
they are now marketing their cup, a 100% a larger rollout to restaurants, coffee shops,
plastic-free, compostable unit that replaces and airports by early 2021. —L. Smith

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J O A N N A G R O C H O C K A O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
A MON E Y G U I D E FOR T HE
L AT I N X C O M M U N I T Y
E• F
NC I
A

N
N

AN
CE • FI

CE • FI
FINHABITS FINANCIAL ADVICE

AN
N
N AN
CE • FI

Despite high rates of entrepreneurship build an emergency fund has been partic-
and increasing middle-class buying ularly popular. “Instead of saying to peo-
power, the Latinx population continues ple, ‘You should have three to six months of
to be ignored by many financial institu- your expenses [saved],’ we say, ‘You should
tions. Finhabits, launched by former Wall start with $1,000, and build from there,’ ”
Street investor Carlos Armando Garcia in says Garcia. “It’s much better to talk in
2017, has developed a series of bilingual, dollar figures.” Paying attention to those
mobile-friendly lessons designed to teach types of details, with regard to both lan-
Latinx people about topics such as retire- guage and consumer behavior, has made
ment and credit so they can better seek out Finhabits the leading money app for Latinx
LES S RIGID
financial tools that will grow their wealth. people, with 500,000 registered users. Following tests
During the pandemic, a tutorial on how to —Ainsley Harris at Harvard-
and Stanford-
associated
hospitals,
U.S. L A T I N X I F T H E U.S. L A T I N X C O M M U N I T Y W E R E A
engineers
P O P U L AT I O N C O U N T R Y, T H E Y’D R A N K...
redesigned the
3RD 8TH stem (previously
in GDP in the rigid) to be
growth world in more flexible.
rate GDP

GROWTH IN U.S. L A B O R F O R C E
U.S. L A B O R P A R T I C I P AT I O N R AT E S
FORCE
SINCE THE

59.9 G R E AT
RECESSION
67.4%
Latinx
MILLIO N

82%
18.3% of the population, Latinx 62.4%
making it the largest ethnic non-
minority group Latinx

PROJECTED NUMBER AV E R A G E A G E A N D L IF E E X P E C TA N C Y
O F W O R K I N G -A G E I N T H E U.S.
PEOPLE ADDED TO
T H E U.S. E C O N O M Y Average age Average life expectancy

+30M
University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting and

100
Latinx 81.8 A N E W WAY
Collaborative U.S. Latino Report from California Lutheran

80 78.5 TO C O N T R O L
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 2019 Latino Development

D ATA
60
Years

the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine

40.5
40 29.3
IKEA/W ORK & C O
2060
Now

20

-1M C O N S U M ER P R I VA CY
non-Latinx Latinx non-Latinx

72 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
 A MORE
FLEXIBLE
T E ST I N G H • H
LT E
TO O L A

A
E
H • H

LT
CA R B O N TIP

H • H
The tip of the

LT
swab is made of
CARBON AND

E
flexible carbon E A
LT
RESOLUTION H • H
lattice that
MEDICAL
conforms to the
shape of the
nose and can
rotate in the THE
nasal cavity, RESOLUTION
improving MEDICAL
patient comfort. L AT T I C E S W A B

This past spring, as

medical facilities
faced a shortage of
nasopharyngeal
swabs for COVID-19
testing, Carbon3D
and Resolution
Medical designed,
manufactured, and
launched a new
swab featuring
a carbon lattice
tip. All of this took
less than three
BET TER SA MPLES weeks, thanks to 3D-
The tip’s hollow printing techniques.
cage structure The company is now
leaves ample producing up to
space to collect a million swabs a
and remove mucus, week. —YG
which improves
the efficacy of
COVID-19 testing.

For all their talk of transparency, well as how long Ikea keeps their want that in exchange for being
most companies continue to data. Unlike many sites, which tracked. It builds trust.” Future
make it difficult for consumers to make privacy options almost im- features will let users see exactly
exert control over their personal possible to find, Ikea’s data con- how a given data point influ-
IG N • DA
ES data. Ikea wanted to approach trols are seamlessly integrated ences the search algorithm or
TA
• D ATA D

the issue differently, and collabo- into the shopping experience— changes the personalized rec-
D E S IG N •

rated with digital product firm users can swipe up to view and ommendations. “I hope this leads
Work & Co on a new set of digital change their preferences at any to a larger paradigm shift,” says
tools that put privacy front and time. “There is real value being Thomas. “Instead of signing
N
G

DA
TA D E S I center. Customers can choose if exchanged,” says Dever Thomas, away all of your rights by press-
and how their browsing and pur- associate design partner at Work ing an ‘okay’ button when you
chase histories are used to inform & Co. “[Many] people know what first land on an app, [you] under-
product recommendations, as a personalized experience is and stand how data is used.” —AR

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y A D A Z I E L I N S K A O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 ME • HO
O
H

M
ME •

E • HOM
A 3D-PRINTED

HO
LAMP

•
E
• H
OME

G A N T R I/ HOME
AMMUNITION LIGHTING

behind Beats by Dre and the Ember smart

mug, partnered with the lighting startup
Gantri to 3D print a collection of stylish lamps
from plant-based plastic, making them
cheaper ($148 to $498) and more sustainable
than competing high-end brands. —SLB

D
B
I
 TY • H
LI O
A

S
• H O S PI

PI
TA L I T Y
S I S T E R C I T Y/ KÓRSAFN
A N E VO LV I N G M I C R O S O F T/

TY
BJÖRK

•
SOU N DSCA P E I HO
S P I TA L

In the lobby of Sister City, a sleek Manhattan hotel “The intention of the hotel was to make a space in the
from the creators of the Ace Hotel chain, no song is ever middle of Manhattan that is very different from the street
played twice. In fact, none of the music has ever been around it,” says Amy Sorokas, director of strategic brand
I played before. It’s all being composed in real time on the partnerships at Microsoft. “Björk was very involved in the
roof. Computer vision technology—built by Microsoft process. She was curious about how it could all come to-
for manufacturing and other enterprise applications— gether, and what kinds of options there were for what
captures video footage taken by a camera on the hotel’s the AI could learn. She was most interested in what it
rooftop. Then snippets of choral music, produced by Ice- could express—how to apply it as a creative tool as part
landic artist Björk over the past 17 years, combine and re- of a [musical] piece.” COVID-19 temporarily closed Sis-
combine in real time in response to clouds, birds, light, ter City in March, but the roof cameras are still on, and
and more, creating a dreamy soundscape, which Björk you can still “visit” the lobby by listening to Kórsafn on-
named Kórsafn (Icelandic for “choral” and “archives”). line at sistercitynyc.com/bjork. —SLB

CE • W
LA O
P
RK
• WORK

AN A S M ART E R
P L AC E

IRREVERENT
SMART
E

C R E AT I V I T Y
•
C

W
ORKPLA
HUB
S P E A KE R
STUDIO M C D O N A L D’S
O+A I N N O VAT I O N C E N T E R
GOOGLE

N•••
IG •

S
NEST MINI

NO
B E ST D E
The playful redesign

RT H A
of the McDonald’s
•

M
ER
Innovation Center,
•
IC A • •

in Romeoville, Illinois, was

the brainchild of Studio Like its predecessor, sponds more quickly
O+A. The colorful space is the second genera-
tion of Google’s
to user questions,
with better sound
decorated with oversize compact and af- quality. The com-
fordable smart pany also integrated
graphics of patent designs speaker, released a notch to give cus-
and other innovation-themed in October 2019, tomers more options
lets users play music, for wall mounting
images, while large glass make phone calls, and added another
doors and windows and control home appli-
ances, and use the
color, a soft blue
called Sky, to the
writable surfaces encourage internet, all through existing Charcoal,
voice control. It Chalk, and Coral
employees working on features the same choices. Another in-
technological and culinary soft fabric texture novation: 100% of
and circular shape, the new Mini’s outer
creations to intermingle and blending unobtru- casing is made
take their work anywhere— sively into homes.
But Google updated
from post-consumer
recycled plastics,
a departure from the the device with a and the external
Illustration by Malik Thomas

building’s previous, mazelike larger speaker and

a machine learning
enclosure is made
from 35% recycled
layout. —L. Sorokanich chip so that it re- plastic. —YG

O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20 P H O T O G R A P H B Y S U B J E C T/O B J E C T M A N I F E S T F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M 75

 R D S
WA
Deng, Axel Kilian,
S • W Stefanie Mueller, MIT
ER

A A method for designing Hospitality

I
N
• WIN
and 3D printing objects

S IG N

NERS •
with dynamic color, TWA Hotel

Y DE
texture, and reflectivity MCR/Morse
0
N B Development

S
202

AT I O
R W
INNE A transformation of

O V Fashion and Eero Saarinen’s iconic 1962

INN
TWA Flight Center at New
Beauty York’s JFK International
IN Airport into a chic hotel
NO Clove
VA Design Company Clove
TI
O N of the Year A cushioned, liquid-
repellent shoe designed Learning
to make healthcare
20 Newlab workers safer and more Outlier.org
20 Newlab comfortable on the job Outlier.org
S A Brooklyn tech hub that A for-credit college-
D has enabled entrepre-
neurs to develop solutions
education platform that
uses sleek design to
Finance
R to urgent public-health
problems during the
help students pass classes,
and reduces the cost of
A COVID-19 pandemic Blueprint
Swing Left
courses by more than 80%
compared with traditional
W A donation website that
encourages users to sup-
universities, potentially
saving American students
A General
Excellence
port Democratic candi-
dates in competitive races
billions of dollars a year

20 to maximize the impact

20 New York Times of their giving and advance
COVID-19 front pages a progressive agenda Mobility
The New York Times
DE Sproute
SI A nontraditional Move lab by Free Now
GN front-page layout using
Graphic Design A navigation app that lets
VAT I O N • B Y •
graphics to spotlight
O the unprecedented scale you choose your journey
I NN DE and horror of the
Hong Kong protests: based on parameters
• S COVID-19 pandemic
The full story such as the best-lit streets
N IG in infographics or the most beautiful
South China
IG

landmarks, rather than

N

Morning Post just the fastest way to get

S

•
DE

from point A to point B

Apps and Games
20
A series of illustrations,
IN

maps, animations, and

•

Redesigning the
NO

Supernatural videos that tell the

Yellow School Bus
T IO N • BY

DS
Within complex story of Hong
Zūm
VAT I O N

Kong’s anti-government
A virtual-reality fitness protests in an accessible, A system for efficiently

R
app that transports users visual way transporting school chil-
to far-flung corners of the

A
dren in Oakland, Califor-
earth, from the Galápa-
nia, that reduced the

W
gos’s Isabela Island to
percentage of kids travel-
• B
O VA

the ruins of Machu Picchu,

Health
A
ing more than 60 minutes
to make exercising at
each day from 70% to 3%
Y

home feel like a vacation

The Resolution
N

20
IN

Medical Lattice Swab

DE

Carbon and
Cities Resolution Medical Packaging
•

S
IG
N

A 3D-printed nasopharyn-
IG
N
New Story geal swab (developed in
Unocup
S •
Fuseproject less than three weeks to Unocup
DE IN
• NO meet critical shortages in A foldable paper cup de-
ON • B
Y VAT I A 3D-printed community
COVID-19 testing) that has signed to eliminate the
for families in Latin
a unique lattice structure need for wasteful, single-
America living on less
that improves patients’ use coffee lids
than $200 a month
comfort and makes it eas-
N INNO ier for healthcare workers
IO V to collect samples
T Products
A

Data Design
20
A

T
IN NOV

IO

AW Scout Logitech G Adaptive

Home Gaming Kit
N

Kohn Pedersen Fox

DE SIGN Associates Bearaby Tree Napper
Logitech
D
AR
A $100 kit, featuring
A web platform that Bearaby
an array of buttons
E

visualizes thousands of
N

SI

A weighted blanket that’s and triggers, to enable

architectural design op-
IO

DS
filled with Tencel fabric more than 46 million
GN DES

tions, empowering clients

T weights, instead of plastic, people with disabilities
and community members
I N N O VA to co-create buildings
to promote a good night’s to play video games
sleep without damaging
GN

and neighborhoods
20 the environment
SI

Retail
IG

AWA
E

D
DE SIGN
N Experimental Environments
Illusory Material: “The Truth Is Local”
3D Printed Optical Storefront
Textiles Installations

2020
Jiani Zeng, Honghao Local Projects

RDS
76 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
An audiovisual installation Headed South Self-Shaping Wood—
in vacant New York TS • FI Ustwo the Urbach Tower
storefronts that brings The IS Institute for Computational
Wellness Minecraft Earth

N
L
New York Times’s local Design and Construction

• FINA

AL
reporting to life Microsoft, Mojang Studios
Silk II

ISTS
ChildSafe Harvey E. Nod
Najim Children and MIT Media Lab
Hopelab and Grit Digital
Family Center Health Totems

•
Social Good Overland Partners T
NAL IS
FI
Spotify Kids app
MIT Media Lab, Mediated
A trauma care center for Matter Group
Spotify
CURA abused children in San Venous Materials
Carlo Ratti Associati Antonio that highlights the St. Noire MIT Media Lab, Tangible
restorative power of nature, Virsix Games Media Group
An intensive care unit for
COVID-19 patients with ample views of the
made from converted outdoors, natural materials, Design Company
shipping containers and a healing garden
of the Year Cities Fashion and
Adobe City of Oslo Brand
Beauty
Spaces and Workplace Form Us With Love Identity
Places Logitech Creuna Norway Deep Sleep Cocoon
ZShield Flex Nike Vollebak
ZVerse Sabai COVID-19
Courtyard Management Hub Dyson Corrale
Kindergarten A face shield with an Ustwo Dyson
Walmart Unqork
MAD Architects adjustable neck mount
that’s built to be safe and Work & Co Denny Substation Giorgia Lupi & Other
A kindergarten built comfortable enough NBBJ Stories
around a traditional for service industry workers Pentagram
siheyuan courtyard in Bei- Mira
to wear for hours Guide Beauty
jing, with a rooftop that Studio Gang Architects
Guide Beauty
doubles as a playground General NYC Waste and
Hiki
Excellence Recycling Receptacle
Hiki / Arfa
Best Design Group Project
Asia-Pacific Reimagining Homes Ministry of Supply’s
Sports and Ammunition x Gantri
for Tomorrow’s Cities 3D Print-Knit Mask
(APAC) Ammunition
Recreation Juno
Ministry of Supply
Clove NuCycl by Evrnu
WNDR Alpine BadGood app Clove Stormwater Park,
Evrnu
Intention 110 BadGood Limited North Miami, Florida
Google Maps Live ReInc
Checkerspot Van Alen Institute and
An app that lets users View Pentagram
Department Design Office
A ski made of an algae- shake, scream, or type their Google
based composite that dra- frustrations into their phone Saint Laurent Cit-e
to physically release stress
Google Nest Mini backpack x Jacquard
matically reduces the Google
amount of petrochemicals by Google
used to manufacture it Guide Beauty Data Design Google ATAP
Guide Beauty
Best Design Ikea digital tools 150 years of Nature
Europe, Middle Work & Co MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab,
Students Nature, Northeastern Finance
East, and Africa Interracial Couple University
Emoji
Dots (EMEA) Emojination Einstein Designer— Cash App Investing
Valentin Weilun Powered by Deep Square
Gong, Xiaohui VanMoof S3 & X3 Logitech G Adaptive
Learning UX Finhabits Money
Wang, and Lan Xiao, VanMoof Gaming Kit
Salesforce Journeys
Royal College Logitech
An electric commuter bike EVA—Evidence on Finhabits
of Art and Imperial that hides a range of tech- Nike Air Zoom
College London Alphafly Next% Violence and Float
nologies, from built-in
Nike
Alternatives for Ideo.org
A body-gesture recognition theft control to a nearly
Women and Girls
system that lets people silent motor, in a sleek, Scotch Flex & Seal Café.art.br
with disabilities customize stylish frame Shipping Roll
their own interfaces 3M Giorgia Lupi & Other
Stories Graphic
Spiro Wave Pentagram Design
Best Design Spiro Devices
Ikea digital tools
Sustainability Latin America Totems Work & Co
MIT Media Lab, Mediated
826NYC
Powerhouse (LATAM) Matter Group New York Times CBX
Brattørkaia COVID-19 front pages City of Oslo Brand
Snøhetta Claro The New York Times Identity
Work & Co Organized Crime Creuna Norway
The world’s northernmost
energy-positive building, An app for Brazil’s second- Apps and Index—Africa Emoji Kitchen
largest telecom company Café.art.br
located in Trondheim,
that streamlines the cus-
Games Google
Norway, which produces Tableau COVID-19
more than twice as much tomer service experience GE Healthcare’s
Adobe Aero Data Hub Edison Design System
electricity as it consumes
Adobe Tableau Software GE
on average every day
Adobe Photoshop Interracial Couple
Best Design Camera Emoji
North America Adobe Experimental Emojination
User Experience Onward Brand
(NA) BadGood app
BadGood Limited Identity
Figma Bracelet of Silence Firebelly Design
Figma New York Times Daily Harvest app Human Computer
COVID-19 front pages Work & Co Integration Lab at
A free, cloud-based inter- The New York Times University of Chicago
face design tool that makes Google Maps Live
prototyping as simple A nontraditional front- View Futurecraft.Loop Health
for marketers and product page layout using Generation 2
Google
managers as it is for de- graphics to spotlight the Adidas
signers and developers unprecedented scale AI Algorithm for
and horror of the Matternet Station Mammography
COVID-19 pandemic
I Matternet CureMetrix

B O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20

D
 FDNY Rescue Ubicoustics
Company 2 Karan Ahuja, Jason Wu,
Studio Gang Architects and Gierad Laput,
Retail Carnegie Mellon University Wellness
La Brea Tar Pits
Environments Master Plan Venous Materials
Weiss/Manfredi Architects Hila Mor, MIT Media Lab, Celliant upholstery
Tangible Media Group Designtex
ColourZ WorkWonder Aurora Flagship New Story
Ideo.org Bayha Group Aurora Cannabis, Bruce Fuseproject Compassionate
Mau Design Search: Bringing Men-
CURA Yoto Player OpenHome tal Health Treatments
Carlo Ratti Associati Pentagram Delivering the Smart
Last Mile
Bensonwood, Sustainability to Pinterest
Face Shield by Joe KieranTimberlake, Brainstorm: The Stanford
Enjoy Lake Flato
Doucet Aguahoja II Lab for Mental Health
Joe Doucet x Partners Galeries Lafayette RISD North Hall Innovation
Mobility Bjarke Ingels Group NADAAA
MIT Media Lab, Mediated
Human-Centered Matter Group Daily Harvest app
Design for the Indian NikeLab Re-Creation The Vidro Work & Co
Airstream 2020 Center c/o Virgil Abloh Amager Resource
Health Service Soluri Architecture Center ElliQ Sidekick
&Partners Globetrotter 30RB Nike
Airstream Bjarke Ingels Group Fuseproject
Model M1 Truebird Micro-Café
Backyard drone Truebird The Dasher Model M1
Open Source Respirator Open Source Respirator
Allbirds
Prism
delivery in Grand
Velofix corporate fleet Sports and
Forks, North Dakota, Design by Decay, Tempo
Artefact and Seattle to ease COVID-19
Velofix Recreation Decay by Design Tempo
Children’s Hospital health crisis Andrea Ling + Ginkgo Vesper Touch & Tease
Spiro Wave Flytrex GMR by Jacquard by Bioworks Crave
Spiro Devices Google x Adidas x EA
BMW IconicSounds Social Good Sports Fifa Mobile
The Essential
Walmart Health Electric Collection
Google ATAP
Massa Multimedia Mirrored Media Sabai
Bans Off My Body
Architecture
Google Maps Live Planned Parenthood
The Inlet From Oru
Google Nest Mini Workplace
Yona View Kayak Google
Federation of America Oru Kayak
Frog Design Google and Planned Parenthood A8 Height Adjustable
The Interceptor
Joyn Action Fund Nike Air Zoom Unvrs The Ocean Cleanup Table System
Nike Minimal
Layer Compassionate Mohawk Continuum
VanMoof S3 & X3 Search: Bringing Plano Edge All-Remote at GitLab
Home Mental Health Smart Design
Process
GitLab
VanMoof Mohawk Flooring
Treatments to Specialized S-Works ArtLens for Slack
The Always Pan Pinterest On & On Collection
Power Saddle With Barber Osgerby The Cleveland Museum of
Our Place Brainstorm: The Stanford Mirror Technology Art
Lab for Mental Health
Ammunition x Gantri Packaging Innovation
Specialized Bicycle PFAS-free
DPR Construction
Ammunition Components compostable bowls
Sweetgreen and Footprint Sacramento Office
Dyson Pure The Clean Deo COVID-19 Tracker Tottenham SmithGroup
Humidify+Cool Beautycounter and County Hotspur Stadium South Bay Sponge
Preparedness Index Retractable Pitch James Corner Field McDonald’s
Dyson
Guide Beauty AppliedXL and Stat News Populous and SCX Special Operations Innovation Center
Flo by Moen Smart Guide Beauty Projects Studio O+A
Water Detector Help Supply Spinnova printed-
Loop Tote Work & Co Wahoo Kickr Bike clothing collaboration A Neurodiverse-
Flo Technologies Loop Wahoo Fitness Marimekko and Spinnova Friendly Workplace
Home Care Lego Audio and HOK
PFAS-free Braille Building
Membership Bundle compostable bowls Steelcase Flex Mobile
Truman’s Instructions
Sweetgreen and Footprint Lego Group Power
Ode World’s First Moms Demand Students User Experience Steelcase
Branch Creative
Recyclable Tube Action website and
The Sero TV Colgate-Palmolive app design Illusory Material Bringing Accessibility
Samsung Electronics Upstatement Jiani Zeng, Honghao Deng, Factors Into Color
America Axel Kilian, Stefanie Creation Best Design
New Story
Fuseproject
Mueller, MIT Adobe APAC
Products Kaiku Living Color Checkout-Free
Nike Air Zoom Pulse Nicole Stjernswärd, Technology System China Tech City
Hospitality Forgo
Nike
Imperial College Grabango South China Morning Post
Form Us With Love Nod London and the Royal
Hopelab and Grit Digital College of Art
Galaxy Z Flip Flex Lemo
Kórsafn, AI generative Google Nest Mini Mode
Health Augmented Human Lab,
lobby score Google Magsense Samsung Electronics University of Auckland
collaboration with Park in a Truck Irmandy Wicaksono, MIT America
Sister City, Microsoft, Moxie Thomas Jefferson Media Lab
and Björk Embodied University
Google Maps Live
Atelier Ace Parking Ticket Reform View
Nike Air Zoom in Chicago Google Best Design
Outlook Shelter Alphafly Next% Design Camp at IIT Institute
Collective Retreats Nike of Design
IBM Watson Discovery EMEA
Santa Monica Proper Sarcos Guardian Spaces and IBM
Sápu The Long Shot
Kelly Wearstler XO Full-Body, Places Danielle Coffey,
Industry-First Curved
Powered Industrial Northumbria University OLED Display Identv
Singita Kwitonda Exoskeleton General Motors
Lodge BaseCamp Lyngby Match
Sarcos Robotics Supervisor
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Art Studios Royal College of Art
Johnston Marklee

78 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
 Guide, a new product Census Intelligence Lemo
in My Collective app Center Augmented Human Lab,
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Powered Industrial
•

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MENT

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compostable Retail Lyft
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MakeContact Inform agency for hard-of-
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Account ProxyAddress Institute of Interaction
Analogue Pocket Innovative Thinking Design
Capital One Analogue ProxyAddress Weiss/Manfredi Architects
Athena Club Safe Hands Kenya
Branch Creative Dalberg Group

80 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
 LEARN FROM THE

BOLD LEADERS
T H AT S H A P E D H I S T O R Y

Time to Lead is a book is about great men and

women, their actions in leadership that have
withstood the test of time, what we can learn
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for us here and now.

For seasoned and aspiring leaders, Steenkamp

includes assessment tools, takeaways, leader-
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readers to utilize the same tactics when facing
daunting challenges in their own lives.

“This book will give you the tools to deepen

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leadership unfolds.”

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X D
82 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M
I O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
AN ESSENTIAL LEADERSHIP GUIDE

“Elevated Economics frames

a powerful argument for
change with a pragmatic
approach on ‘how to.’”
senior lecturer,
Harvard Business School

CONSUMERS AND INVESTORS

HAVE INNOVATED THEIR GAME.
NOW YOU AS A LEADER MUST
INNOVATE WITH THEM OR FACE
THE CONSEQUENCES.

AVA I L A B L E
NOW
E L E VAT ED EC O N O MIC S .O R G
E V E RY W H E R E
B O O K S A R E S O L D
 L O V E

T H Y

N E I G H B O R
BY
MORGAN
CLENDANIEL

PAG E
85

N E X T D O O R,
THE
SOCIAL
NETWORK
FOR
LOCAL
COMMUNI-
T I E S,
HAS BET
ON
KINDNESS
TO
POWER
IT TO AN
I P O.
I F O N LY
THE
LOCALS
D O N’T
R U I N I T.
 residents walking in neighborhoods were
often photographed and posted on the site
as suspicious, and crime reports often only
PAG E had one description of the suspect: their race.
86 Ever since Sarah Friar arrived from
Square, in December 2018, to be Nextdoor’s
CEO, she has been trying to outrun the plat-
form’s checkered reputation and transform
the company into a powerhouse marketing
channel for local businesses. The COVID-19
lockdown displayed the potential in Friar’s
vision, which has centered around the con-
cept of “kindness.” As shelter-in-place or-
ders started to take effect in mid-March,
Nextdoor released a Help Map for neighbors
to post lists of what they needed so others
could fulfill them. The company encour-
aged neighbors to share information about
which businesses were open—even if just
for curbside pickup and delivery—and fa-
cilitated the purchases of gift cards to help
local establishments while they were shut-
tered. Nextdoor experienced an 80% month-
A T 2 : 5 4 P . M . THE over-month surge in daily active users.
COMEDY “I just spent the last year and a half of my
NEXT life evangelizing why your neighbors are the
Pacific time on Sunday, May 31, the Twitter account for DOOR first line of defense and why you want to have
Nextdoor, the fast-growing, neighborhood-centric social The subgenre strong ties,” Friar tells me when we chat via
network for sharing local news or promoting a yard sale, of Nextdoor Zoom in May, her from the room over the ga-
“pettiness
let its almost 40,000 followers know how the company felt rage of her Marin County home and me in my
posts” has
about the nationwide anti-racism protests in response to become fodder San Francisco apartment. By the last week
the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. for ridicule. of February, before any U.S. cities had locked
On a black card, the white text read, “Black lives mat- BEST OF
down, Friar had been preaching readiness
ter. You are not alone. Everyone should feel safe in their NEXTDOOR during stand-up meetings with employees.
neighborhood. Reach out. Listen. Take action.” “Quality “It was clear that this was happening, and
A flood of companies issued similar pro-BLM social neighborhood that we had to step up to lead.”
media posts, and many were mocked for the way the drama” Nextdoor has become a digital microcosm
message ran counter to their actions regarding race, but of America’s real-world problems. The pan-
few received a response as fierce as Nextdoor’s. Beyond Nextdoor launched demic has endangered the long-term health
in 2011 with the
the digital scorn, NBC News soon reported that Nextdoor promise that its local
of the local businesses and neighborhoods
users were spreading false rumors about anti-fascist pro- sites were private, that are Nextdoor’s customers and users, re-
testers being bused into neighborhoods, fueled by Pres- but as the service spectively, while Amazon’s market share and
ident Trump’s rhetoric. BuzzFeed and The Verge followed grew, posts started dominance in retail only grows and Facebook
to break out into the
up with stories about Nextdoor’s moderators deleting wider world. Since and Google dominate the information—and
posts about Black Lives Matter and the platform’s lack of October 2017, PR advertising—landscape. But perhaps even
tools to help them navigate difficult conversations. The professional Jenn more crucially, as the pandemic rages on
Takahashi has
usually buoyant Best of Nextdoor, a comedic Twitter ac- posted about 11,000 and questions of social inequality persist, it
count that shares outlandish posts from Nextdoor’s more tweets, sharing the seems unclear whether our future will be one
than 265,000 global neighborhoods, launched a petition wildest ones. of random acts of generosity, as preached by
with demands including that moderators undergo bias Friar. Or if panopticism will rule the day, and
training and accept a code of conduct. neighborhoods will become prisons of our
Before the pandemic, Nextdoor was known for per- SAMPLE T WEET own making, powered by a stitched-together
haps two things: absurd posts that broke free from the “Someone keeps surveillance regime of doorbell cameras and
delivering soup to
neighborhoods in which they emanated (such as the my house with a
accusatory social media posts.
recent one about a feral peacock roaming around an note that says ‘soup
Oakland, California, community), and its role in racial for my perfect little NEXTDOOR WA S FOUNDED
profiling and over-policing. Soon after the company an- soup boy.’ I appreci- in 2010 by seven friends, most of whom had
ate the free food
nounced a round of funding in 2015 that valued it at more but I don’t like soup. worked together at Shopping.com. They built
than $1 billion, an article in Fusion reported that Black Please stop this.” the prototype in Lorelei Manor, a coveted
 micro-neighborhood made up of fewer than were close with their Catholic neighbors—deal with more sectarian members of
100 homes on just four streets in the Sili- their extended family. “I always appreciated that my parents would really try to
con Valley town of Menlo Park and ruled by talk them through it,” she tells me. “Not like, ‘Here’s why this religion isn’t bad,’ but
a homeowner’s association, those bastions they would just constantly give examples like, ‘The next-door neighbors brought
of niggling rules and supercilious neigh- us over a cake last week.’ There was kind of a humanity, instead of being labeled.”
bors. As the founders worked with the locals Friar wants people to stop cackling at their neighbors’ antics, get off the app,
in their mid-century ranch houses, Prakash and make connections—social or, preferably, business—in the real world. “We re-
Janakiraman, Nextdoor’s chief architect and ally don’t want people to spend a lot of time online,” she says. “Metrics like ‘time
a cofounder, recalls a Lorelei resident asking, in app’ would be very bad for Nextdoor. If you think about potentially being a
“ ‘You’re building this, and you’re building it public company, that’s a known metric that investors often ask about. But I think
just for us. What if we love what you build, but it will lead us wrong. . . . The job to be done is not ‘Take me into an app and suck
you don’t love it as an idea?’ and [one of the me in and have me read a whole bunch of stuff that’s not related’—and actually
cofounders] looked back at him and said, ‘You take away the time that I could be spending on my family or on community.”
know what, I’m pretty sure that if you love it,
we’re going to love it.’ ”
The site was an immediate success. Most
of the neighborhood was online within
a few weeks and it became the model for
Nextdoor’s national rollout, though the
ideal community would have about 1,500
to 2,000 households, verified for member-
ship by the company or other neighbors to
confirm their standing as a local resident.
Unwittingly, the Nextdoor founders had
hit upon the promise of what Brown Univer-
sity historian Marc Dunkelman calls the “mid-
dle ring” of American relationships. These are
not our closest connections (our “inner ring”
of family and friends), nor are they the “outer
ring” of people we barely know. The middle
ring is folks who are “familiar but not inti-
mate, someone with whom, if you bumped
into in the street, you’d be able to ask about
something more than the weather,” he says.
“Nextdoor is sort of like a gateway drug
for community,” says Dunkelman, author
of 2014’s The Vanishing Neighbor: The Trans-
formation of American Community, who has
consulted with Nextdoor. Someone giving
away their kid’s scooter on the platform
to someone who lives close by them could
show up to find that they’re both wearing a
Red Sox cap. “It enables people to find one
another, and then it’s up to them to exploit
that opportunity.”
When Friar joined the company, she par-
ticipated in an exercise where employees are
asked what neighborhoods mean to them.
This page and previous spread: Todd Hido/Edge Reps

She wrote: “A safe place to have the most divi-

sive conversations.” This belief that proxim-
ity and difficult conversations are the solution
to disunity comes from her upbringing. Friar
grew up Protestant in Northern Ireland during
the Troubles, the often violent, multi-decade
ethnic-nationalist clash between Protestants
and Catholics. Her hometown of Sion Mills,
though, was notable for its integrated com-
munity, even during the height of the con-
flict. As a girl, she watched her parents—who
 “Europe was an expert in local business
a leading
sales and built a reputation
indicator,”
says CEO Sarah as a strong and stable leader.
Friar of her With Dorsey’s time being
insight into split with Twitter, she be-
COVID-19’s came the rare CFO who was
effect.
“Nextdoor was
a public face of a company.
becoming this She was so associated with
go-to place.” Square’s success that when
Nextdoor announced her
appointment, Square’s stock
price tumbled 6%.
Friar’s first step toward her goal has
been to try to change Nextdoor’s public per-
ception to make it more advertiser friendly.
She replaced the company’s mission from
“to bring back a sense of community to
the neighborhood, one of the most impor-
tant communities in each of our lives” to
what she hoped to see on the platform—
Nextdoor helping to “cultivate a kinder
world where everyone has a neighborhood
they can rely on.” To assist her, she created
a seven-person “Neighborhood Vitality Ad-
visory Board,” consisting of leading aca-
demics in the field of psychology as well as
the head of the NAACP and
a domestic policy expert
from the American Enter-
NEXTDOOR prise Institute, the conser-
THE [UNAF- vative think tank.
FILIATE D] Soon after, Friar turned
SERIES precept into practice. In
“Real Nextdoor September 2019, Next-
app posts and
PAG E comments brought door introduced Kindness
88 to life for your Reminder, which checks
entertainment.” to see if a user’s post has
words in it that in the past
T H E A LT E R N AT I V E TO T H E AT T E N T I O N - D R I V E N In February 2020, tended to be flagged as
actress Julie Birke
“engagement” of a rival like Facebook, which has more than 400 mil- began staging and
abusive, and then asks
lion participants in groups they find “meaningful” (these groups include acting out select them to rephrase before
neighborhoods but also go well beyond them), is utility. “Communica- posts, distributing it’s uploaded. The goal,
tion on the [Nextdoor] network, if you look at it on a percentage basis, them across TikTok, says Tatyana Mamut, Next-
IGTV, and YouTube.
is highly utilitarian,” says Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist who’s best Each episode ends door’s chief product officer,
known for early investments in Uber, Snap, and Stitch Fix and who also with a screenshot of is to make people “renorm
was the first to back Nextdoor. “You can see it in the search results. Peo- the actual post their behaviors, under-
so viewers see the
ple are looking to solve problems.” (The company hit an all-time high of source of the dra- stand that these are real
125,000 daily searches in May.) matic reenactment. people that they’re talking
And, he hopes, they are willing to spend money to do it. to, right? These aren’t just
This is why Gurley and his fellow board members hired Friar, in 2018. usernames on the screen.”
In effect, they asked her to make Nextdoor the sort of small-business jug- SAMPLE EPISODE Nextdoor built Kind-
gernaut Friar created in her last job. In 2012, Friar had joined Square as “Bins,” which starts as ness Reminder based on
its CFO, when the financial startup had just a few hundred employees and a complaint about the work of another aca-
trash cans blocking
cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s sometimes fantastical ideas for facilitat- a driveway and
demic, Stanford psychol-
ing digital payments. Friar not only steered the company to its 2015 IPO, then takes several ogist Jennifer Eberhardt,
she also helped launch its highly successful loan product, Square Capi- turns, including an who studies bias in pol-
tal, giving its customer base access to short-term loans that it could re- unbelievable rant icy and is the author of
about Elon Musk
pay out of gross receipts processed by Square’s merchant services. Friar, that someone Biased: Uncovering the Hid-
who did stints at Goldman Sachs and Salesforce before Square, became actually posted. den Prejudice That Shapes
 PHOTOGRAPHS BY
NICHOLAS ALBRECHT

What We See, Think, and Do. Eberhardt had buy groceries, pick up prescriptions, just make a phone call to say hello—and
worked with Nextdoor since 2015, help- lets people in need select what help they want. More than 420,000 users of-
ing the company craft a narrow solution in fered help on the tool.
the wake of its racial-profiling scandal (re- But the Help Map had almost come out very differently—in a way that pre-
ports of crimes would need to include more saged what was to come during the anti-racism protests. A separate prototype
than just race), and is a member of its advi- let people who needed things delivered post about what they required. In the
sory board. The Kindness Reminder quickly end, it didn’t get built, because, as Mamut, the product chief, says, “that seems
proved to be a success: Nextdoor claims a well-meaning but it could have, you know, not great consequences.” A ran-
30% reduction in reported content. It rein- dom person coming up the stairs uninvited could just as quickly arouse suspi-
forces Nextdoor’s self-conception as a place cion and scrutiny on the app as
for feel-good stories about neighbors find- neighborly appreciation.
ing lost pets and giving away outgrown bi-
cycles (tales every Nextdoor executive is IS NE XTDOOR W H AT N E X T D O O R
programmed to share). executives seem loath to
The pandemic made the turn toward A PANOP TICON acknowledge is that Nextdoor’s
cultivating kindness rather prescient. The OR PUBLIC central appeal is not its practi-
Help Map, which debuted on March 18, just cality but rather that our neigh-
as U.S. cities started to lock down, allows S Q UA R E? bors are weird, cantankerous,
Nextdoor users to post the kind of things A MESSAGE and prone to bicker over mi-
they’d be willing to do to help a neighbor— nutiae. In my neighborhood, a
BOARD OR A man posted a photo of a dead
MARKE TPL ACE? hawk, along with the caption
“Hawk killed by drone in Dolores
I T M AY N OT Park.” He provided no evidence
of the raptor’s cause of death and
BE ABLE TO BE
never commented on the image
A L L O F T H E M. again. The post, first uploaded
in December 2019, was still gar-
nering comments four months
later, with neighbors arguing
over whether flying drones over a park is le-
gal, demanding a necropsy of the bird, debat-
ing whether drones are good or not, discussing
San Francisco’s new district attorney, and even
someone asking, “What, praytell, is a ‘drone’?”
The company seems alienated from the fun
of reading these posts. Cofounder and original
CEO Nirav Tolia said that his comms people “hate
Best of Nextdoor.” Friar is slightly more sanguine,
but she told Bloomberg TV in April 2020, “We’ve
been posting a lot of what we call the ‘actual best
of Nextdoor’ . . . the teddy bear hunts, the 6-year-
old getting his birthday party. . . .”
In the same way that the relentless focus on
kindness may blind execs to what is delightful
about Nextdoor, it may have prevented them
from seeing what is dark and dangerous, too.
Nextdoor has always ex-
isted as part of a constellation
of new apps and technology
that have created a distributed
“It was really
surveillance state. Along with
important that
the com munity the rise of crime-reporting app
felt empowered Citizen and the growing ubiq-
to manage uity of Ring doorbell cameras
their creation,” constantly recording video of
says Nextdoor
cofounder
the street, they have served
Prakash to create a world where any
Janakiraman. public behavior can be labeled
criminal and put online, the quintessential example being a grainy video of a per- keep watch, communicate, and mobilize
son merely walking down the street labeled as “suspicious person casing cars.” when necessary.”
This isn’t just a case of users bending the platform to their own needs: The platform created a “Forward to Po-
Nextdoor has trumpeted its ability to serve as an ad hoc neighborhood watch lice” button that allowed users to send posts
for years. In 2013, after a new round of fund- directly to their local police de-
ing and a product refresh, the company made partment. CityLab, Bloomberg’s
this explicit: “Nextdoor funneled more re- urbanism news site, reported in
sources into security tools such as urgent alerts “I JUST DON’ T May 2020 that the company often
pushed to mobile devices and integrations THINK THE Y ARE lavished all-expenses paid trips
with police and fire departments,” accord- to its San Francisco headquarters
ing to a contemporaneous VentureBeat article. AU T H E N T I C A L LY on law enforcement agencies to
“These features help form virtual neighbor- H Y P E R L O C A L ,” entice them onto the platform.
hood watches, where residents can collectively Before the Floyd killing,
F R I A R S AYS Nextdoor touted its work with
OF NE XTDOOR local governments as an essen-
tial third element to creating a
R I V A L S A M A Z O N, successful community, along
with citizens and merchants.
F A C E B O O K,
For public agencies—often tech-
A N D G O O G L E. nologically behind but desper-
ate to communicate with their
constituents—being able to
target messages to specific ar-
eas of the city can make a huge difference.
Fire departments can post about gas leaks.
Transit agencies can post schedule changes.
The government of Washington, D.C., for
instance, found huge success during its
COVID-19 response in being able to micro-
target messages about newly opened test-
ing centers to specific hot spots.
But the agency that’s had the most
success—and certainly the most visibility on
the platform—has always been the police de-
partment. “[Government] is a whole segment
of a community that gets why they need to be
talking to neighbors,” Friar told me in May,
before the groundswell of outrage against
police violence. “Now, sometimes you have
to kind of introduce them to Nextdoor, like
why Nextdoor over a different platform, but
the fact is that they need to be where their
customers are. The police have customers,
it turns out.”
When she and I speak again in June amid
the George Floyd–inspired protests, Friar ad-
mits that racial profiling is “always a little
bit of an undercurrent on the platform,” but
says she was still taken aback by the angry
responses to their BLM post. Before the tweet,
Friar had consulted with the internal “Black
at Nextdoor” group, and then, at the com-
pany’s usual all-hands two days before the
tweet, she says she made it clear that Next-
door had to do more for its Black employees.
Todd Hido/Edge Reps

Then they turned to their users to see

what was happening on the platform. See-
ing the discussions there, Friar says, “we
felt collectively as an organization that we
wanted to put something out there in the R I A R I S V I S I B LY
world that just said Black Lives Matter. Un- more passionate and up-
equivocal: Black Lives Matter.” But after beat talking about the small
the post, on the forum the company runs businesses on the platform,
for neighborhood moderators, many ex- and it’s clear that creating a
pressed anger and frustration at the Black way to help local business
PAG E
Lives Matter movement, asking why the recover is where her sense
91
company wouldn’t post an “All Lives Matter” of mission lies for the com-
statement as well, according to BuzzFeed. pany. “I feel like I’m on a
Although Nextdoor faced a media fire- crusade, for God’s sake!”
storm, unlike other companies facing similar she says. “Imagine, if you
scrutiny there was no mass exodus of adver- walk out after all the shel-
tisers. So the company’s response, nearly a ter in place, and it’s devas-
week later, was as vague as its initial mes- tation of your High Street or
sage. It followed up a few days after that with your Main Street. Then that
more specifics, stating that it would get rid of has a ripple effect, because
its “Forward to Police” function. “It was kind that means the people around you don’t have jobs. It really becomes a self-
of just one of those features that was there and reinforcing downward spiral.”
honestly I hadn’t really looked at it,” says Friar. The company is not yet profitable, and with the country in a deep reces-
“Shame on me, but it’d been there since—I sion, Nextdoor will need to fight for every digital advertising dollar. Friar is
think, 2016, we rolled it out—and I never re- a small-business owner herself—she’s the cofounder of Ladies Who Launch,
ally thought about what it was doing.” She is a community and lecture series for women entrepreneurs—and she feels a
also pushing to recruit new neighborhood kinship with the companies she sees teetering on the brink. “You can’t help
leads who match the demographic makeup but start to feel deeply, deeply connected to who these people are,” she says.
of their communities, rather than just letting “It’s very brave to say, ‘I’m not going to do the corporate desk job. I’m going
the first person who starts a neighborhood to start my own thing.’ ”
be the moderator. Nextdoor prom- After Nextdoor rolled out the Help Map, it rushed to launch
ises to make sure that leads can see a series of tools for small businesses originally scheduled for
the community guidelines as they’re NEXT UP the fourth quarter. Starting in June, businesses could now post
deciding whether to delete posts, and ON using the app, with their content appearing in users’ main
it will give its 445,000 neighborhood NEXTDOOR feeds and Nextdoor giving them access to metrics about how
leads anti-bias training. The com- “We make fun of it performs. Friar has visions for business use cases both im-
pany also renamed the site’s Crime your neighbors so mediate and far off: a pizza place with extra dough quickly of-
and Safety vertical to simply “Safety.” you don’t have to.” fering a bargain to people within walking distance in the few
But Friar still believes that the hours before closing, but also a plumber being alerted by your
platform should be a place for peo- Nashville podcaster “smart” faucet to show up at your house before you even know
Kent Peterson (Blame
ple to discuss issues of race, just as Your Brother) and you have a leak.
hard discussions about the Irish Chicago comedian The appeal for marketers to be able to push ads directly to peo-
conflict helped her family better un- Brad Claggett ple they know are real—and know live in a specific location—is
started this podcast
derstand the other side during the in January to share
obvious. H&R Block, for example, can advertise each of its roughly
Troubles. So it’s hard to pin her down posts from their 70,000 local tax professionals precisely in the neighborhoods they
on what exactly the new guidelines respective neighbor- operate. Any product the company launches, Friar says, “will be
will mean beyond “Do not delete hoods, focusing on different from what Facebook or Google or Amazon is going to do,
one (and its com-
posts about Black Lives Matter.” “If ments) each week. because I just don’t think they are authentically hyperlocal.” Left
someone is actively putting racist unsaid is that its rivals’ utilitarianism is cold, not kind.
content, that comes straight off,” But as the company rolls out new tools to connect its users
she says. “And if they are being rac- to local businesses, connecting people to each other remains
SAMPLE EPISODE
ist, and it’s a nuanced thing, then “Rabbits Gone Wild,” an ongoing peril. Is Nextdoor a panopticon or public square? A
members get reported and get re- in which the residents message board or a marketplace? It may not be able to be all of
moved as well.” What’s the differ- of Chicago’s Upper them: Nextdoor needs the engagement of its most ridiculous—
Edgewater and
ence between racist content and Rogers Park neigh- and controversial—posts to get people coming back to the site,
being racist? “I think it’s ultimately borhoods express but do people want to get a recommendation for a babysitter
incumbent on all of us . . . at some concern about the from the person with a Blue Lives Matter flag when their house
proliferation of
point you have to find your line. wild rabbits, which
honors Black Lives Matter with a yard sign?
. . . And will it change? Absolutely. It’s prompts the existen- Janakiraman, a Nextdoor cofounder, says, “Anything that hap-
a living thing, because humans are tial question: “How pens in the real world is going to reflect in our local communi-
living, evolving creatures, and the many rabbits would ties.” At one point, Friar tells me the same thing. They mean it to
you need to see
things we do to each other change before posting about be hopeful. But more often these days, it’s not.
and evolve over time.” it on Nextdoor?” [email protected]
 messaging. Without setting a deadline, he and abuse, terrorism, and foreign adversar-
Facebook said in his 2019 post that users of Messen- ies’ attempts to undermine democratic val-
ger, WhatsApp, and Instagram’s messaging ues and institutions.”
(Continued from page 53) feature—each historically a walled garden— Law enforcement officials often propose
would be able to communicate across all adding a “back door” to encryption schemes
three services in a project referred to within that would allow them access to data in ap-
months to implement that same feature the company as “interop.” In September, the propriate circumstances. But that idea is
inside Instagram Stories, and vice versa,” company took a first step by allowing users fiercely rejected by privacy advocates, who
sighs Fidji Simo, who, as VP of the Facebook in a few countries to exchange messages be- say that any sort of bypass would be an ir-
app, is responsible for the company’s flag- tween Messenger and Instagram. (See side- resistibly juicy target for hackers and others
ship product. bar, “End-to-End Encryption.”) who would abuse it. “The moment you pro-
Contrast that with last spring’s rollout of Still to come: adding WhatsApp to the mix vide a back door to an end-to-end encrypted
Rooms, a Zoom-esque videoconferencing ser- and implementing encryption across all three product, it’s no longer an end-to-end en-
vice that the company pushed out months services. Messenger VP Chudnovsky won’t crypted product,” Jan Koum told me in 2017,
ahead of schedule when the COVID-19 pan- say when the interop project will be com- when he was still CEO of WhatsApp. “Anybody
demic hit. Though officially part of Mes- pleted other than that it won’t be this year. can find that back door.”
senger, Rooms can also be launched from “I assumed it was going to be very compli- Chudnovsky and WhatsApp’s Cathcart
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Other cated,” he says. “I think it’s somewhat more told Barr that Facebook wouldn’t implement a
recent launches, such as Facebook Pay and complicated than we originally thought.” back door, calling it a “gift to criminals, hack-
Facebook Shops, follow a similar one-service- The challenges aren’t merely technical. ers, and repressive regimes.” The debate is
everywhere strategy. (In August, the company Facebook’s history is pockmarked with ex- likely to continue regardless of the results of
folded all of its payments-related initiatives amples of its playing fast and loose with its November’s election.
into a new group called Facebook Finan- users’ data in service of its behemoth adver- Facebook watchers also wonder what per-
cial, led by former Messenger chief David tising business. The likelihood that Zucker- vasive encryption would mean for the com-
Marcus—who was once president of PayPal.) berg would face widespread cynicism about pany’s ad business, which still delivers 98%
Also in the works at press time is Accounts his vision of a more private future was so high of company revenue. How can Facebook tar-
Center, a one-stop hub where users can view that even he had to acknowledge it. “I under- get ads toward users if it can’t scan the con-
and change settings across Facebook’s apps, stand that many people don’t think Facebook tents of those users’ messages?
including the ability to automatically cross- can or would even want to build this kind of Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of marketing plat-
post among services. That might sound privacy-focused platform—because frankly form Socialbakers, thinks that Facebook’s
mundane. But given an app like Instagram’s we don’t currently have a strong reputation scale alone makes it essential to market-
historic independence and cultural quirks, for building privacy protective services, and ers. Encryption wouldn’t stop the company
the project faces some definite challenges. we’ve historically focused on tools for more from acquiring other information about us-
On Facebook, for example, people are open sharing,” he wrote. ers that makes them valuable, such as who
limited—at least in theory—to a single, real- At least Zuckerberg could point to Whats- they communicate with and for how long.
identity account. On Instagram, having a App as a model. Long after its disaffected “Messaging can be a very good channel for
pseudonym is fine, and some young people founders quit, the service’s end-to-end en- monetization—it’s just that the experience is
maintain a “fake Instagram,” or “finsta”: a cryption and general reputation for privacy going to be different,” he says.
second, secret account meant only for close remain intact. “They haven’t screwed it up, Besides, Facebook may finally be on the
friends. The last thing anyone would want is which is kind of neat,” says technologist and cusp of succeeding at tapping into a source of
their finsta posts popping up on Facebook. author Bruce Schneier, though he quickly revenue that doesn’t involve ads—and mes-
“Users need to decide that [Facebook and adds that Facebook “is not going to do too saging is at the heart of it. Last April, Facebook
Instagram accounts] can be interrelated,” much that doesn’t let them spy on you, be- invested $5.7 billion in India’s Jio Platforms, a
says George Lee, a Facebook director of prod- cause their business model depends on it.” wireless carrier launched by industrial giant
uct and former Instagram head of growth. If Facebook follows through with its Reliance Industries in 2016. Thanks to radi-
The braiding together of sites has required promise to bring WhatsApp-level privacy to cally low pricing—as little as 7 cents a day for
adjustment on everyone’s part. Shah joined the rest of its services, a long-simmering ten- voice and data—Jio reached consumers who’d
Instagram in 2015, when it was a more self- sion over the tech industry’s relationship with never had a cellphone and rapidly became the
contained operation. Today, he says, “I tell the law is likely to boil over. Governments country’s largest wireless carrier.
people, ‘If you’re here because you miss the hate end-to-end encryption, because it makes Facebook’s investment gives it the op-
old days of how we used to build and experi- messages impervious to standard monitor- portunity to participate in Jio’s ambitious
ment in a vacuum, maybe this isn’t the right ing techniques, even with the assistance of plans to further unlock the Indian market
place for you now.’ ” (That didn’t stop Insta- the tech company. Last October, U.S. Attor- through new services. For instance, the com-
gram from recently unveiling Reels, a Tik- ney General William Barr and officials from pany intends to help millions of kirana—
Tok doppelgänger that’s only available inside the U.K. and Australia signed an open letter to neighborhood mom-and-pop stores—finally
Instagram; Facebook says it has no current Zuckerberg opposing his plans to spread end- shift from cash to digital payments. Al-
plans to spread it to other apps.) to-end encryption throughout Facebook’s ser- ready, many such shops accept grocery or-
But the trickiest part of Zuckerberg’s vices, calling it a calamitous hindrance to ders via WhatsApp, making them prospects
plan is the intensified emphasis on private investigations of “child sexual exploitation for something like Facebook Pay (not yet

92 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20
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available in India) or even Novi (Facebook’s Any endgame is likely to take years to play
still-under-development cryptocurrency, for- out. (AT&T’s forced breakup, in 1984, followed New York Times
merly known as Calibra). more than seven decades of controversy,
Over time, in India and elsewhere, Whats- three antitrust suits, and eight years of liti- (Continued from page 61)
App could evolve into something resembling gation.) But even if Facebook remains intact
Tencent’s WeChat. In China, that app lever- and recognizable, the era of it taking out ri-
aged its preeminence in messaging to be- vals by gobbling them up is over. Acquisitions Print is still a big part of our business. But
come an all-encompassing platform that lets on the scale of Instagram or WhatsApp are it’s not just that. The goal is to give people
hundreds of millions of people do everything unlikely to pass regulatory muster in today’s something different. It’s unfortunate that
from hail a ride to schedule a dentist appoint- climate; when TikTok’s U.S. operations hit the a lot of local news organizations are strug-
ment or buy insurance—often facilitated by market as a result of geopolitical drama, pun- gling to put out powerful print papers, but
Tencent’s WePay. dits didn’t even pause to take Facebook seri- we fortunately have the resources to do it.
A bonus for Facebook: India implemented ously as a potential buyer. Its $400 million And we’re going to keep doing it as long
a ban on Chinese apps in July, eliminating lo- acquisition of meme search engine Giphy, as we can.
cal competition from WeChat itself as well as in May—not a seismic transaction by histor-
ByteDance’s TikTok. And even better, the fu- ical standards—is under scrutiny from both How does design factor into the Times’s
ture of Facebook in India isn’t just about one the Federal Trade Commission and U.K. anti- coverage? Either Steve Duenes [deputy
market, enormous as it is. “If you can scale trust regulators. managing editor who oversees the graph-
up something in India, then the chances are All of this only intensifies pressure on ics department] or Tom Bodkin [design di-
higher that you will end up scaling really fast the company to ensure that its new vision rector] is in most of the key meetings. And
in other parts of the world,” says Tarun Pathak, works—especially since Facebook has been I throw questions to Steve. I’ll say, “How do
an analyst at Counterpart Research. (Face- famously bad at generating new hits in- we cover a president who has a daily press
book has been banned in mainland China— house. “There’s just this whole slew of really briefing and he’s not always telling the
another market of potentially game-changing crappy apps that Facebook tried to develop truth? Give me some ideas.” Some of that
proportions—for more than a decade.) on its own,” snarks one former Instagram is going to be a design solution.
business-side executive. “The acquisitions
AS ZUCKERBERG PREDICTED IN were much more successful.” How has your understanding of design
his 2019 post, skepticism about Facebook’s Facebook faces another hurdle: The evolved over the years? There was a time
promises is running high. Some critics see tighter integration on which so much of when editors didn’t fully understand the
Facebook’s efforts to stitch together its prop- the plan rests might simply not excite the value of designers. They thought design-
erties as a preemptive gambit to make itself masses. “I literally cannot imagine some- ers were the people who made a little room
tougher to disentangle, should current spikes body who’s using WhatsApp thinking, ‘Hey, on the page so that pages would look great.
of antitrust fever on Capitol Hill turn into gov- I really wish I could message this person on As a young editor, I had that ailment my-
ernment action to break it up or impose new Facebook, too,’ ” says one Silicon Valley vet- self. I learned to think otherwise when I
restrictions on its behavior. “The fact that eran, whose résumé includes time at Face- was the managing editor of the Los Ange-
they’re continuing to race to do that is really book. “I would love to hear a more compelling les Times. The editor, the late John Carroll,
irresponsible,” says Sarah Miller, executive value proposition.” saw me meddling too much with the de-
director of the American Economic Liberties Facebook acknowledges that it doesn’t signers, and he pulled me aside one day
Project, which has called for the breakup of yet have all the answers. “I think the main and said, “You should let them make you
both Facebook and Google on the grounds that thing is really figuring out all of the experi- look good.”
their dominance of major internet services ences along the spectrum,” says Facebook
harms society and democracy and makes app chief Simo. “If you go from a completely Do you see design becoming more or less
them too big to regulate in their current form. public space to a completely private space prominent at the Times? More prominent.
“It’s also disrespectful to policy makers and to like Messenger, that’s not something that Design is part of the answer to every prob-
our democratic institutions that have raised people understand well.” It’s critical that up- lem facing journalism. With newspapers,
clear and obvious concerns with their acqui- coming changes be both comprehensible we’ve known how to build a print paper
sition strategy over the years.” and enticing. that displays our best stuff so that people
In some form, at some point, “regulation Writing a manifesto, after all, is easy. Fig- could very easily find it. It’s not as easy with
is coming, and if [Facebook] doesn’t figure out uring out how to go through fundamental the phone. And who knows what comes af-
a better approach to policy questions more change—when your company is being chal- ter the phone? Design is going to be more
generally, then it’s going to get subverted by lenged from every direction—is hard. As so important as technology evolves and we
governments,” says Dipayan Ghosh, codirec- much of Facebook’s history has shown, what try to figure out ways to build a news re-
tor of the Digital Platforms and Democracy happens next could be as unpredictable as it port where people can find our best work.
Project at the Harvard Kennedy School and is profound. Design is going to be struggling with that
a former member of Facebook’s policy team. [email protected] forever. —SLB
Fast Company  Issue Number 241. Copyright ©2020 by Mansueto Ventures, LLC. All rights reserved. Fast Company® is a registered trademark of Mansueto Ventures, LLC. Fast Company (ISSN SP
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102 F A S T C O M P A N Y.C O M O C T O B ER/N O V EM B ER 20 20

We often work globally, but we always
live locally. So, when we can, when
it makes sense for the business plan,
when all other things are equal, let’s
partner with the local company. Small
choices can have a huge impact. When
we support domestic makers, we build
the companies that build community.
And that’s a big idea.
Let’s reboot the maker mentality in this country. Let’s
refurbish the old and put up new plants to manufacture in
and distribution centers to send our goods on their way.
Let’s restore and reshore. Let’s keep people employed and
contributing right here at home so that we can begin to
strengthen local economies and our sense of community.
Let’s make it here.
The gig economy is wearing people out. Let’s create the kinds of jobs
that come with benefits and a paycheck that provides something more
than the minimum wage. Manufacturing does that. Moreover, making
things and getting paid for it matters. It also helps parents tell their
kids what they do for a living in a way that makes kid-simple sense.

“Cheap” is expensive. Purchasing decisions have power and consequences.

When what we buy is made overseas, frequently by exploited people working
in sweatshop conditions, we not only encourage those practices and deny our
neighbors badly needed opportunity, we also tacitly go along with countries
whose rules and regulations are not up to our standards as they continue to
recklessly pollute the air that circles the planet. We have very little say in what
happens beyond our borders, except when we speak with our pocketbooks.
Fast companies expand faster than most. And when you want a bid
from a local company for building at your next location, well, as one
free-market trader to another: We’ll be ready to take your call, and
we think you’ll like what you hear. Zekelman Industries is a family of
companies, 100% domestic manufacturers. We make structural steel
and pipe products that let the water flow, keep the lights on and
help builders build. We’re revolutionizing the off-site construction
industry with modular building innovations to quickly and efficiently
put up facilities for companies of all kinds nationwide, not to mention
multi-family housing for your future employees.
American factories are the cleanest and greenest in the world, particularly
when it comes to manufacturing products made of steel. We know firsthand.
We’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of millions putting up manufacturing
facilities of our own that keep the air clean, protect the people that work in
them, and actually leave the water cleaner than it was when we set up shop.
Waste and inefficiency are not only damaging to the environment, they
simply can’t compete in the U.S. marketplace. Resources here are called
“precious” for a reason.
We get it. We understand what it means to compete,
what kinds of odds companies face. How fickle the
market, how nimble you have to be. How determined.
We understand what it means to take risks, to try
and fail, to try again, fail again and then finally, with
a little luck and a lot of hard work, to find success.
We also know that doing the right thing isn’t only
good for peace of mind. It’s good for business.

Yes, it’s a partisan world we live in,

at least right now. But let’s align
on this one thing. Let’s all agree
that taking the steps necessary — 
and being thoughtful as we take
them — to bolster our GDP and
strengthen our economy will
go a long way toward making
the country a better place
for all. Discussions regarding
reshoring and manufacturing are
happening all around us. Join the
conversation; let people know
what you think.
We all serve the market, and that means
people. And so we stand in support
of putting up facilities that encourage
training and education, that improve the
standard of living for the family that lives
down the block, that steward the planet
and help restore our infrastructure. This
country is a place for people with dreams
to make them real. Let’s keep it that way.
Let’s get it together. Let’s make it here.

20MXZI005-04-144915-1
 PAGE

112
Illustrations by
Braća Burazeri
exit strategy. O CTOBER/
NOVEMBER 2020

1 2
N O É, 6 *
1
Tampere, Finland
Perfected ear-splitting
screech that abbreviates
tutoring sessions

H A N U N I, 5
2
Mombasa, Kenya
Repurposed expired N95
masks to design a new
line of hats for puppies

B E R N A R D O, 3
3
São Paulo
Secured R$30 angel round
from dad for return of golf
clubs used to build fort

3 4

5 6
C Y N T H I A, 5
4
Flint, Michigan
Designed energy-free
household intercom system
using duct tape and TP rolls
*Noé was only five and a half at the time of selection

H A R P E R, 4
5
Auckland, New Zealand
Created belly button plug to
tease her brother about the
“grotty hole” in his stomach

N I C, 2
6
West London, England
Scored a six-figure
sponsorship for his “milky
tea mustaches” Instagram
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