Fortune April/May 2022

WHEN MARK ZUCKERBERG launched Facebook, he coined a now infamous internal motto: “Move fast and break things.” Innovation, he meant, requires trial and error. Error was welcomed and even encouraged—even if it came at a cost to users. Since then, Zuckerberg’s motto has evolved. (In 2014 he changed it to the more user-friendly, if less memorable, “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”) But his playbook is still gospel for many founders. Uber’s Travis Kalanick used it to scale his ride-hailing service faster than his regulation-abiding rivals. Instead of waiting to follow a city’s rules, he’d charge in with fleets of drivers, then battle regulators to keep them in place. Crypto founders are following suit. But in Web3, things move and break even faster. Startup valuations are exploding, and founders who don’t wait reap…

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY. “Philosophy is one of the best foundations you can have in tech today. I sometimes think every company should have a chief philosopher.” DATE WITH DESTINY Tinder is still the dominant dating app, but it’s now been around for a decade. 2 That’s a long time in tech years! What’s your plan to stay ahead of the pack? NYBORG: I jokingly refer to our 100-year vision. But given that we make such a big impact on relationships and on society—fundamentally human themes, not just technology themes—I don’t think it’s completely crazy to think about that. We’re addressing the role we play for the next generation, the experience for women and people of color, and building experiences that matter for local audiences. Tinder and “swipe right”…

BUSINESS. DISTILLED. For a global business that works with miners and farmers, witnessing the ravages of human suffering and even war is too often part of the job. Still, nothing could quite prepare Yara International CEO Svein Tore Holsether for what he woke to on Feb. 26—or, for that matter, what would come next. Yara, a 117-year-old Norwegian fertilizer giant, operates in more than 60 countries. For decades, Yara has had a large and fruitful presence in both Ukraine, a major wheat exporter, and in Russia, a key supplier of the potash and phosphate needed in Yara’s fertilizer production. On day three of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Russian missile blasted into the headquarters of Yara Ukraine in Kyiv. No Yara employees were injured in the early-morning air strike, but Holsether was still…

THE EXPLOSIVE-PACKED drone lay belly-up, like a dead fish, on a Kyiv street, its nose crushed and its rear propeller twisted. It had crashed without its deadly payload detonating, perhaps owing to a malfunction or because Ukrainian forces had shot it down. Photos of the drone were quickly uploaded to social media, where weapons experts identified it as a KUB-BLA “loitering munition” made by Zala Aero, the dronemaking arm of Russian weapons maker Kalashnikov. Colloquially referred to as a “kamikaze drone,” it can fly autonomously to a specific area and then circle for up to 30 minutes. The drone’s operator, remotely monitoring a video feed from the craft, can wait for enemy soldiers or a tank to appear below. In some cases, the drones are equipped with A.I. software that lets them…

FEW FACES IN BUSINESS are more familiar than that of longtime Starbucks leader Howard Schultz. But the recent announcement that Schultz would return to the coffee giant for a third stint as CEO left corporate strategists baffled. Outgoing CEO Kevin Johnson informed the board last year of his intent to retire. Still, chairwoman Mellody Hobson acknowledged in a CNBC interview that the choice of Schultz as interim chief “was recent.” A permanent replacement, she said, would be named by fall. Coming from a company of Starbucks’ size—it brought in $29 billion in revenue in fiscal 2021—such improvisation pointed to a breakdown in succession planning. “Starbucks’ board presumably had a year to find Johnson’s successor, and they weren’t able to find the right person,” says Pat Petitti, CEO of consulting firm Catalant. (Starbucks…

THE BAD NEWS? Tech stocks have been slammed recently. The good news? Tech stocks have been slammed recently—meaning there are suddenly opportunities for investors to buy tomorrow’s technology stars at attractive prices. Few tech investors have been enjoying 2022 so far. As of late March, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was down 13.8% from its November peak, versus a dip of just 5% for the broad-market S&P 500. But pros who follow the sector see a more nuanced trend behind those numbers: Many smaller, faster-growing tech companies are trading much further below their 2021 highs than the Big Tech Goliaths are. That’s partly because investors flock to familiar names when markets are rough. What’s more, when interest rates rise, investors get skittish about tech stocks in general and in-the-red companies in particular—and younger…