Inc. Magazine May/June 2020

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU Members of Inc.’s editorial staff at one of our daily Zoom confabs. It’s been a struggle to write this note, which is supposed to celebrate Inc.’s annual Best Workplaces awards. BWP, as we call it internally, is long planned, and popular with readers, and we look forward to producing the issue in which the winners are named. But now everything is different, of course. My writerly struggles began when I lost a few days of work to a fever, 102 degrees—too high to think, let alone write. Still home and feeling better with no other symptoms a few days later, I resumed writing only to learn that several officemates tested positive for Covid-19. We stopped everything and closed our office, figuring out how to report, write, edit, and photograph…

The sign on the door says “Chief Creative Officer,” but for Tyler Malek, co-founder of cult ice creamery Salt & Straw, work means sampling 15 to 20 varieties of each new ice cream at the company’s R&D kitchen, where such flavors as Arbequina Olive Oil and Honey Lavender were born. Salt & Straw was launched in 2011 by Tyler and his cousin, CEO Kim Malek, who recruited him out of culinary school to compose flavors for the Portland, Oregon-based operation. Soon, Tyler was hanging out with brewers and chefs and translating their heady conversations into ice cream creations like India Pale Ale (made with dry-hopped vodka), Brown Ale & Bacon, and Bone Marrow & Smoked Cherries. He had the scoop shop tinkering with traditional ice cream recipes, even swapping milk and…

JENNIFER MATTHEWS Co-founder and creative director of Tempaper, a Brick, New Jersey-based maker of temporary wallpaper. MICHAEL LASTORIA Co-founder and CEO of &Pizza, a Washington, D.C.-based purveyor of ultra-customizable pizza. ADVANTAGE: MATTHEWS Customers still want to talk to people. As reported by the Harvard Business Review, a 2017 study by research advisory firm BIA/Kelsey found that calls to businesses are expected to exceed 169 billion per year in 2020, and that calls are 10 to 15 times more likely to generate a successful sale or follow-up activity than text-based communication. That’s not to say that texting isn’t more useful for some businesses than others—it allows information to be distributed faster, and data to be collected more easily. And it can be popular with a younger crowd. But the numbers say you shouldn’t give up that…

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

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

COMPANIES TO WATCH ▶ Breadware To cut operating costs, cofounders Daniel Price and Danny deLaveaga relocated their startup from California in 2017. It’s a move that many other companies have made in recent years. Breadware, which helps companies build and launch products for the internet of things, is now in its fifth year and thriving: It booked $1.9 million in revenue last year. ▶ TrainerRoad Reno’s homegrown cycling analytics and training platform has bootstrapped operations since it launched in 2010. Co-founder and CEO Nate Pearson, who previously worked as a web developer for International Game Technology, started the business with Reid Weber and Chad Timmerman. ▶ Panty Drop 1 After launching her underwear subscription service in 2014, Julie Arsenault moved to Reno from San Francisco to give the business a little breathing room…