Fast Company June/July 2018

One of the many insights Mary Kaye Schilling gleaned from spending time with Reese Witherspoon is that the award-winning actress and producer likes to play a parlor game with her family: They’ll watch television, and Witherspoon will pause the programming and ask her husband and kids to describe what they just saw. They might offer an observation about the product or the characters in an ad. Witherspoon will note how many (or few) women were featured. Witherspoon’s commitment to increasing the number of women in prominent roles in Hollywood—on screen and behind the scenes—predates the rise of the Time’s Up movement, of which she is a leader. It is at the heart of Hello Sunshine, her media company, which aims to tell women’s stories across a variety of platforms, and it…

Silicon Valley showrunner Alec Berg just wanted to let viewers in on the joke. When he started writing the satirical HBO series five years ago, the Valley seemed to him like a caricature, rife with overhyped tech products and self-aggrandizing corporate mission statements. It was full of “arrogance” masquerading as “altruism,” Berg says—and he and show creator Mike Judge began skewering the startup industry for dressing up dumb social media apps as world-changing innovations, producing self-driving cars that can’t follow directions, and lionizing machinelike engineers who build things without fear of the consequences. “Those people scare the shit out of me,” laughs Berg, who remembers meeting with various developers in the early years of writing the show and being alarmed by how little consideration they gave to the potential dangers…

1. May 1963 William Shockley, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who cocreated the transistor—the building block that put the silicon in Silicon Valley—gives a speech in which he reveals that he’s a eugenicist. His peers condemn his unscientific racial theories, but his views are a harbinger for the current gulf between Silicon Valley’s meritocratic rhetoric and its not-so-diverse reality. 2. June 1975 NBC News airs a series detailing how the Pentagon has used Arpanet, its new computer network (and internet forerunner), to spy on antiwar and civil rights activists. “Congress has always been afraid that computers, if all linked together, could turn the government into ‘Big Brother,’” the show reports. 3. May 1982 Residents of Santa Clara County, where Silicon Valley lies, discover that underground chemical tanks from companies such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel…

Rent the Runway Since launching in 2009, Rent the Runway has transformed from an evening-wear rental company to, in cofounder and CEO Jennifer Hyman’s words, a full-service “closet in the cloud,” offering members clothes and accessories for work, proms, weddings, pregnancies, and more. With 9 million customers and a new unlimited plan (for $159 per month), Rent the Runway has developed a sophisticated back-end platform that includes tools to manage its inventory and same-day delivery and dry-cleaning services. Now the company is lending that logistics expertise to luxury fashion brands. “We’re opening our capabilities to any retailer that not only wants to monetize their inventory,” says Hyman, “but also access our customer base.” That means instead of just playing middleman, Rent the Runway will allow customers to rent directly from brands—either through…

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Jaclyn Corin, Emma González, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, and Alex Wind Cofounders, March for Our Lives Cameron Kasky recalls the eerie realization that descended upon the kids huddled in the Marjory Stone-man Douglas High School classroom where he and his younger brother, Holden, were hiding from a 19-year-old former student with an AR-15. “I remember seeing a lot of people not confused anymore,” says Kasky. After all the years of lockdown drills, it was happening to them. Since that February day in Parkland, Florida, when 14 students and three faculty members were killed, Kasky and fellow classmates Emma González, David Hogg, Jaclyn Corin, and Alex Wind have dedicated themselves to preventing it from happening to anyone else. In the week after the shooting, these five teens helped form the core leadership of what…