Sommaire pour September 2015 de Fast Company

When I moved into my new apartment a year ago, I tried to throw money at Pinterest. I felt too old for Ikea’s Förhöja accessories and blank, asylum-white walls, and embarrassed not to own my own window treatments or know exactly what a duvet was. I needed interior decorating help. I needed Pinterest. Its ever-growing inventory of pictures of bespoke fashion, Etsyesque knickknacks, works of art, and home decor now totals more than 50 billion “pins.” I easily found the styles I wanted for my new place, but when I tried to purchase them, my nightmare began. The reclaimedwood coffee table I coveted was no longer for sale at the retailer linked to in the pin; neither was the brand. A Google Images search was fruitless. This happened again and…

“Oh, okay.” That was how Spotify CEO Daniel Ek responded—in a quickly deleted tweet—to the June announcement of Apple Music, the company’s long-awaited songstreaming and online-radio service (which costs subscribers $9.99 per month). The rest of the music and tech worlds seemed similarly underwhelmed, and Taylor Swift later joined the naysayers, protesting Apple’s plan to withhold royalties on songs streamed during the service’s free trial period. Meanwhile, another music superstar, Jay Z, was pushing his own streaming service, Tidal, and competitors like Rdio, Deezer, Amazon Prime Music, and Google Play were all clawing over a share of the booming music-streaming market (not to mention web-radio giant Pandora, which doesn’t allow userchosen streams but has signed up some 80 million active users). If this spectacle were a rock concert, it would…

With his slicked-back silver hair, ear stud, and ace of spades wrist tattoo, Richard Copcutt would fit in just as well backstage at the old CBGB as he does here in Converse’s new Boston headquarters. After all, a brand with as much counterculture cred as the Converse All Star needs a real live rebel at the helm—now more than ever. In late July, Converse released the first major redesign of its classic Chuck Taylor All Star sneaker in nearly 100 years. The company has experimented periodically with new colors (“citrus,” “beach glass”) and materials (denim, leather), but this is more than a style revamp. It’s a complete sole-up rethink, an honest-to-god Chuck Taylor sequel: the Chuck II. Only an iconoclast like Copcutt, the 49-year-old VP/GM of Converse’s All Star division,…

September 2008 Goop.com goes live. "My life is good because I am not passive about it," Paltrow writes, establishing the brand's earnest, authoritative tone. "I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time." October 2008 The first newsletter goes out to subscribers. "I have ... been recording information and making notes for this very moment, when I can begin to share it all with you," Paltrow writes. The email features recipes for banananut muffins and turkey ragu. December 2011 The mobile app Goop City Guides launches, offering users highly cur a ted recommendations for New York (followed by Los Angeles, London, and Paris) "like a trusted friend," Paltrow writes. July 2012 Goop.com offers its first item for sale: a Kain Label collaboration T-shirt.…

ANDY DUNN Then COFOUNDER AND CEO, BONOBOS Now EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, BONOBOS Andy Dunn—known to readers of our 2014 Most Creative People in Business issue as the “master of men’s pants”—announced in May that he was giving up his role as CEO of Bonobos, the digital-first fashion brand he cofounded. Instead, he’d be stepping into a new position as the company’s executive chairman. “My job now is to have a little bit of distance from the day to-day and be able to be our numberone ambassador,” says Dunn. (Former Coach executive Francine Della Badia has been tapped to replace him as CEO.) That’s not the only change at Bonobos, which sold its millionth pair of chinos earlier this year. In the past two years, the company has expanded to include the…

Periscope got popular really fast. What inspired you to create it in the first place? I was in Istanbul when the protests in Taksim Square erupted. It was this really dramatic and pivotal moment, and I remember asking myself whether it was safe to go out or not. So the initial seed of Periscope was, “Why is it that I can’t see what’s happening right now somewhere in the world?” That’s when [my cofounder] Joe Bernstein and I started thinking about this idea of a teleportation machine. Obviously we can’t disassemble your matter and move it somewhere, but we could get close to it. Periscope has also been playing a role in covering social unrest in the U.S., like during the protests in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray.…

Kim Mathews and Signe Nielsen give new life to old land. As the principals of award-winning New York landscape-architecture firm Mathews Nielsen, they specialize in transforming urban terrain, whether they’re revitalizing Lincoln Center’s public plazas, restoring the historic St. Paul’s churchyard near ground zero, or contextualizing Manhattan’s new Whitney Museum of American Art with untamed greenery that echoes the neighboring High Line. They’re currently working with architect Thomas Heatherwick on Pier 55, a high-profile island park that will be built in the Hudson River. “People at parties have asked me, ‘You’re a landscape architect based in New York City: What do you do, rooftops?’ ” Nielsen says with a laugh. “But as industry moves out of cities, space is becoming available that can be parkland. A lot of what we…

The city of Burlington, Vermont, has been experimenting with green energy since the early 1980s, when it replaced an old-fashioned coalburning electric plant with one that burned wood chips—something the state’s forestry industry could provide cheaply and reliably. It wasn’t until 2004, however, when the state agreed to join a market for renewable-energy credits recently established in the Northeast that going fully green became the goal. “That was the first time we had an inkling that this might be the right thing to do”—not just for the environment, but for the Burlington Electric Department and its customers, says Ken Nolan, who was a resource planner there at the time. The city’s long-term contract with a nearby nuclear plant had recently expired, a short-term natural-gas contract was set to expire soon,…

Film and TV The Oscar winner has appeared in nearly 50 films and TV shows. The Iron Man movie franchise alone has raked in $2.4 billion worldwide. Endorsements Paltrow spent four years as Elizabeth Hurley's successor as the face of Estee Lauder. pulling in $3 million annually, and has endorsed several other brands. including Max Factor. Coach. Baume & Mercier, and Tod's. In 2013, she inked a $2 million deal with Hugo Boss to represent the company's new fragrance. Cookbooks Although The New York Times alleged that her 2011 release, My Father's Daughter, was ghostwritten, Paltrow insisted via Twitter that there was "no ghost writer on my cookbook. I wrote every word myself." That book and her subsequent one, It's All Good, are New York Times best-sellers. A new book,…

MEANWHILE . . . ROBERT KIRKMAN HOVERS OVER A GLASS-SHARD FIRE PIT IN AN EVENT SPACE ON THE ROOF OF THE LONDON HOTEL IN WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, HIS HANDS SHOVED SHEEPISHLY INTO HIS JEANS POCKETS. NOTHING ABOUT THE MAN’S APPEARANCE SUGGESTS THAT HE’S TONIGHT’S MAIN ATTRACTION. THE HOTEL IS HOSTING A CELEBRATION OF THE UPCOMING CINEMAX SHOW OUTCAST, A GOREFEST ABOUT DEMONIC POSSESSION. WITH HIS FULL BEARD AND BURLY BUILD, KIRKMAN LOOKS MORE LIKE HE SHOULD BE SPLITTING LOGS THAN SCHMOOZING TV EXECUTIVES. And then there’s his voice: a raspy, Southerntinged rumble that suggests he’s just getting over a very bad cold. But without Kirkman, who created Outcast, wrote its pilot episode, and is executive-producing the series (which will air early next year), no one would be here drinking Outcast-themed…

“I’m in training for a long bike ride and have been logging my rides with Strava. The app breaks down my rides into segments, then compares how I did versus others. It gives me all the data I want after each ride.” Tim League Cofounder and CEO, Alamo Drafthouse “The Likary Smart Two Wheel Self Balancing Electric Scooter is basically a Segway without handlebars. Everyone loves them at the office.” David Holz Cofounder and CTO, Leap Motion “Jins is the best of Warby Parker and LensCrafters but with Japanese aesthetics, quality, and efficiency, and is less expensive than both.” Korey Lee CIO, Sumall “I travel often and hate overpaying for flights. Hopper is an app that tells me what a good price is for my itinerary— and notifies me when…

From summer blockbusters to famous corporate turnarounds, the best comeback tales always focus more on heroes’ bold, clever maneuvers than on the hours they lie awake at night obsessing over where they might have gone wrong (and how they can fix it). But according to Daring Way founder and CEO Brené Brown—the researcher and storyteller whose TED talk “The Power of Vulnerability” has been viewed 20 million times—a crucial opportunity exists in spending time with our failures. Her new book, Rising Strong, explains how it can even transform the way you lead. Here’s why she wrote it. The issue Brown—both as a professor at the University of Houston and as CEO of Daring Way, which trains counselors in her work—has spent 14 years studying the link between vulnerability and courage.…

30-SECOND BIO Title Cofounder and CEO, Periscope Hometown Mill Valley, California Career track Stanford University (BS in Computer Science); intern, Autodesk; teaching assistant, Stanford University (CS 193P: iPhone Programming); Apple Campus rep (“evangelist”); cofounder and CEO, Terriblyclever Design (developer of apps for universities); general manager and senior executive, Blackboard Mobile (after it acquired Terriblyclever) Best use of Periscope by a brand “Netflix has this hilarious campaign. It’s a bird’s-eye view of a room divided into two sections: ‘study’ and ‘Netflix.’ They put a guinea pig in the room with two pots of food. You just watch it decide whether to study or watch Netflix. Literally a five-hour broadcast with hundreds of people watching. It’s brilliant.”…

“I’d love to get together. Cc’ing Clara on our end to set a time on the calendar.” A lot of people I know now have an assistant named Clara. And each of these Claras is remarkably deft at cutting through that often unending chain of time-wasting emails that result from trying to make an appointment. This is not some strange fluke of social science. People named Clara are not preternaturally gifted meeting makers. Clara is a digital avatar, a special blend of data, machine learning, and algorithms that’s backed by humans and designed to make sure you never have an embarrassing (or devastating) calendar failure. It’s the product of a stealthy startup named, yep, Clara Labs. For less than $400 a month, anyone can have an assistant that is, as…

Gwyneth Paltrow removes her coat, revealing a sleeveless black Atea Oceanie wrap dress. The dress is simple, trimmed in white and very low cut, the effect both wholesome and daring. Her hair and skin glow. Her arms look soft and strong, like those of a woman decades younger than 42. Paltrow is the founder—and the living embodiment—of the lifestyle brand Goop and is in Chicago on this April afternoon to oversee the launch of a pop-up store in Chicago's Waldorf Astoria hotel. She walks across the showroom, past racks of $2,000 Stella McCartney dresses and $400 Phillip Lim gym shorts, to sit beside Goop's CEO, Lisa Gersh, on a burnished-steel French daybed. She folds her arms, clutches her elbows, and calls out to her head of brand collaborations, Brittany Weinstein,…

Air AUGUST 14, THEATERS EVERYWHERE Skybound’s first movie stars Norman Reedus (above) and Djimon Hounsou as custodians who struggle to stay sane while living in an underground bunker with cryogenically frozen people meant to repopulate society. Fear the Walking Dead AUGUST, AMC The first spin-off series from the mother ship is set in Los Angeles during the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. “It’s a companion show that’ll be a completely different experience,” Kirkman says. Gone LATE 2015 Skybound was tapped by Samsung to create this scripted series for its virtual-reality platform, Milk VR. “In comics, characters can’t nod,” Kirkman says. “We get to try to tell a story when you don’t know where the viewer’s looking. We’re defining what’s possible in camera. It’s kind of awesome.” Outcast EARLY 2016, CINEMAX…

“What do you do?” It’s a loaded question even in the best of circumstances. But when your career is a crazy quilt of activities that feed different aspects of your personality—in my case, stand-up, punditizing on news shows, writing, delivering speeches, and heading a fledgling company—the only way to answer is with a comma-separated list of titles. Meanwhile, inside my head, I am giving my interlocutor the heavy side-eye for trying to reduce me to just one thing. A few years ago, I celebrated my mobility, flexibility, and refusal to be defined in this very magazine, proudly stating, “Uncertainty is the certainty. Change is the constant. Experimentation is rewarded. Stability is an impediment.” Then, to be even more clear, I added, “If I could get a big check from TV,…