Inc. Magazine Spring Mar/Apr 2020

Hi.I’m Scott Omelianuk. Or, as most people call me—my last name being hard to spell and pronounce—Scott O. I’m the new editor in chief of Inc., and I’m honored and, to be honest, a bit surprised to be talking with you right now. You see, being here is kind of ironic, coming, as I do, from a long line of failed entrepreneurs. On one side of the family, there were the relatives who treated business like an outlaw hobby. Keep books? Pay taxes? Why do that, they’d scoff—right up until the IRS came knocking. It’s a wonder none of them starred in the calamities featured in “Adventures in Entrepreneurship,” which you can find on page 56. On the other side were the relatives whose wholesome hobbies could have been businesses—for example, my…

Don Lessem is a stickler for accuracy. His company, Dino Don, fields 205 rentable robots, mostly dinosaurs, in zoos, aquariums, and museums worldwide. He also sells them. They’re full-size—a 120-foot-long Argentinosaurus is heading to the Leipzig Zoo in Germany—because “part of what’s cool about our dinosaurs is how big they are,” he says. And you won’t see any nonsense like a Hadrosaurus with webbed feet. “If you’re a 6-year-old or a scientist—the two most knowledgeable groups of people—you know that is wrong,” he says. The former journalist fell hard for the big beasts in 1988, while reporting for The Boston Globe. He launched his company in 1993 with a traveling exhibit that corrected inaccuracies in the movie Jurassic Park, on which he had served as dinosaur adviser. For years, Lessem created…

Farm-to-Table Rent the Chicken offers the joys of farming with no strings attached. Prices vary by location, but on New York’s Long Island, $1,000 gets you two hens, a coop, and 100 pounds of chicken feed for the summer. Simply buying a dozen eggs each week would be cheaper, but would they be as fresh? ALLISON KOPF Founder and CEO of Artemis, a Brooklyn-based agricultural software company. PRISCILLA TSAI Founder and CEO of Cocokind, a San Francisco-based skincare brand. Does CEO likability strengthen company culture? NO My company has a core value: “We’re a team, not a family.” I believe strongly in creating a culture in which we choose to work alongside our teammates because they are the best at what they do. YES You can’t force everyone to like you, but you spend more time together than you do…

RETURN ON LIFE • noun The novel idea that the value of wealth lies in the rich life we can create with it, and not in the status that comes with exorbitant displays of it. In other words: Do you really need that third mansion, or are the first two enough? Source: Mitch Anthony MEETNAPPING • noun “The tendency to kidnap a colleague by forcing him to attend a useless meeting.” Wait–there are useful meetings? Source: NCIA EMOTION RECOGNITION • oun Technology to “identify criminal suspects by analysing their mental state.” Like RoboCop, but with feelings. Source: Financial Times SLUDGE • noun The 9.78 billion hours of federal paperwork burdens that Americans wade through each year. It’s fitting that the academic paper defining sludge is 16,000 words long. Source: Cass R. Sunstein ILLUSTRATIONS, FROM LEFT: MONICA HELLSTRŐM (2), MICHAEL PARKIN (4)…

Keep in Touch Evan Carp founded Snuggle Buddies in 2013 to help customers combat loneliness, insomnia, and anxiety. For $80 an hour—or up to $400 for an overnight stay—a professional cuddler comes to you, offering a platonic touching experience intended to promote healing. Talk is optional. Breaks to relieve arousal may be required. My biggest surprise? Finding out these guys had limited product knowledge. Many of these entrepreneurs knew remarkably little about the products they decided to sell, whether it was razors, mattresses, or contact lenses. But they knew that they felt they were being gouged by the big players, and they figured there had to be a better way. So they reset the terms of competition. I was amazed at the damage these brands could cause the incumbents. The e-commerce revolution has only just…

STARTUP NEIGHBORHOODS Salesforce, Angie’s List, and email-marketing software giant ExactTarget are all within blocks of one another in downtown’s Monument Circle, 1 a neighborhood packed with tech startups. There’s no significant cost premium to locating in the heart of the city, which allows many companies to be close to the action. Indy’s $96 million, IndyGo Red Line 2 is a bus rapid-transit route that connects downtown to trendy Fountain Square. The HGTV-featured neighborhood has become a haven for creative startups that want to bypass the parking shortage downtown. Just northeast of Indianapolis is Fishers, a suburb that has spent the past five years wooing tech companies by lowering taxes and raising new office buildings. Nearly 600 members have joined the new 52,000-square-foot co-working space Launch Fishers, while the Indiana IoT Lab attracted 3,000…