Inhoudsopgave van February/March 2022 - Fortune

ONE SUMMER MORNING in 2014, I had an eye-opening breakfast with the prominent startup investor Jeremy Liew. The even-keeled—and ever-fashionable—partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed had by then developed a reputation for spotting trends early. Liew was the first institutional investor to put money into Snapchat, betting on the app when it still had fewer than 100,000 users. (It now has nearly 300 million globally.) As we sat down that day at the Battery, a trendy members-only club in San Francisco, I asked Liew about his latest fascination: Bitcoin, then trading below $500. “What do you make of it? Is it just hype?” I asked. Liew paused, then gave a measured response. Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology that powered them, he explained, were here to stay. Would Bitcoin continue…

KATIE HAUN IS WALKING ME THROUGH her art collection. Conveniently, the tour doesn’t require schlepping to a gallery, or even her house—Haun’s preferred medium is NFT, so we’re browsing the full catalog of digital images on her phone. These digital collectibles (the initials stand for non-fungible token) are stored on the blockchain much the way cryptocurrencies are, and are currently the hot thing in Haun’s corner of the tech industry. She scrolls through lush, floral images and edgier, cyberpunk-inspired avatars (“My collector taste is pretty varied,” Haun allows) in search of one of her favorites. While some of the buzziest pieces on the explosive NFT market have sold for tens of millions, this one, a pixelated graphic of a girl with hot-pink pigtails, didn’t cost her a penny—it was a…

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY. “When we started, I knew some aspects of the business, but I didn’t know beauty, I didn’t know retail. And I gave myself a chance.” A BEAUTIFUL BEGINNING What inspired you to start Nykaa? NAYAR: I was a longtime investment banker, and I took a lot of companies public in India. 1 I met a lot of entrepreneurs, and I saw their passion and belief in their ideas. That really inspired me to set up a business of my own, against a popular belief [about the viability of beauty e-commerce] at the time. Beauty was extremely successful in the West and in Asia. In India, I didn’t see that. I believed there would be demand for beauty, but it was…

JUST A FEW YEARS AGO, video game retailer GameStop seemed primed to go the way of Toys “R” Us, RadioShack, and Sears. Mired in debt and waning sales, it risked becoming just another relic from when people shopped in person rather than from the couch. But a gang of everyday investors—college kids, musicians, and dentists—had other thoughts. Rather than seeing a floundering retailer, many in the pack chatting on internet message board Reddit about tendies (Reddit lingo for investment gains) saw GameStop as just needing the right leader to usher in its next act. The rest is Wall Street history: They banded together to send GameStop’s shares to the moon—from single digits to $483. The traders had created the meme stock phenomenon of mom-and-pop investors pouring money into zombielike companies…

IN THE EARLY AUGHTS, David Baszucki stole the show at his kids’ middle-school science fair. The software designer turned entrepreneur brought with him a new invention, a 3D-simulator project he’d been working on day and night. Yes, the 59-year-old Baszucki is that dad who leans into his geekiness. The project was based on a program he had created back in the 1980s, a two-dimensional simulator called Interactive Physics. His former company, Knowledge Revolution, licensed it to school districts around the country, where students could use it to simulate science experiments. But the addictive part was building and modeling digital objects—houses, cars, whatever. What’s more, users could take their simulated cars, for example, and crash them into something, and inspect the damage. That’s when a light bulb went off. Users “wanted…

AT FIRST GLANCE, THE VIDEO is impressive: A monkey plays the classic Atari game Pong, using only its mind, its mental commands wirelessly transmitted to a computer. Uploaded to YouTube on April 8, 2021, it has been viewed 5.7 million times and received some 120,000 likes. Among those who really like the clip is Elon Musk. That’s not just because monkey MindPong is the kind of sci-fi stuff that gets Musk jazzed. It’s because that monkey—it’s named Pager, the video’s narrator tells us—is Musk’s monkey. Or rather, Pager belongs to Neuralink, a company Musk founded in 2016. Neuralink is dedicated to developing a device that, once implanted in the human brain, would allow a computer to translate a person’s thoughts into action—eventually allowing the individual to do anything we do…

JUST AS IT DOMINATES OUR ECONOMY, Big Tech now dominates Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation. For the third year in a row, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft rank first, second, and third, respectively, based on our poll of some 3,700 corporate executives, directors, and analysts. It’s Apple’s 15th straight year in the No. 1 spot, a fitting coronation for the world’s most valuable company. As a global pandemic limped into its third year, meanwhile, companies on the front lines of the medical battle gained new respect. Pfizer, codeveloper of one of the most effective COVID-19 vaccines, vaulted all the way to No. 4, appearing on our All-Stars list for the first time in 16 years. And Danaher (No. 37), whose COVID tests and drug-development equipment are pivotal tools in…

ROLLING HILLS lit up like a green screen; gnarled vines with leaves so fat they could serve as fans: Such is the fantasy of Northern California wine country. The reality in recent years? Record drought, record heat, and wildfires, which have plagued the region, destroying crops, cellars, and livelihoods. Not to trivialize climate change, but perhaps it’s a good thing that grapes like to struggle. The fermented form of that biblical fruit continues to flow through Napa and Sonoma as though nothing’s awry. Wine connoisseurs? They’re coming back in droves. But they’re less likely to want to gather en masse—creating a raison d’être for intriguing new venues that promise intimacy and privacy amid the uncertainties of an ever-evolving pandemic. “We’re seeing a year of pent-up demand,” says Allen Highfield, general…

BUSINESS. DISTILLED. Every Monday night, senior leaders at RPM International gather virtually to review one of their company’s most important metrics: the global number of COVID-19 cases. An Ohio-based manufacturer of paint, specialty coatings, sealants, and building materials, RPM has spent countless man-hours tracking and tracing how COVID moves through and impacts its 16,000 employees, spread across 122 facilities in 26 countries. On Mondays, managers harvest the fruits of that labor, spending anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours analyzing case counts and tailoring their safety strategies. It’s an operational step the Fortune 500 company can’t afford to skip: After all, says CEO Frank Sullivan, a manufacturer doesn’t have the option to tell employees to work from home. So when Omicron hit, RPM was ready. While it hasn’t avoided the…

The December before Kent Taylor died, the Texas Roadhouse founder started handing out copies of The Book of Joy to family, friends, and employees. Taylor, an avid reader, was known for giving away his favorite tomes—often including a personal note inside. The book, an accounting of a weeklong dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was a departure for the restaurant entrepreneur. He’d mostly leaned toward leadership and management classics—Built to Last, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—that he had read for inspiration as he built his company into an enterprise valued at more than $5 billion. But Taylor had been feeling more introspective of late. In November 2020 he had contracted COVID and since then had suffered from severe tinnitus, a condition in which the brain…

GLOBAL GDP PROJECTIONS CURRENT PRICE GDP ESTIMATES AND FORECASTS IN INTERNATIONAL DOLLARS THE WORLD ECONOMY IS POISED to reach a remarkable milestone in 2022: Total annual GDP will soar past $100 trillion for the first time, two years earlier than previously forecast, according to the latest projections by London-based economic consulting firm CEBR. Perhaps even more notable is that total GDP is predicted to then double to $200 trillion by 2035. In part, the current surge reflects how effectively the world’s biggest economies have adjusted to the pandemic. But rising inflation, particularly in the U.S., is playing an even bigger role in driving up GDP right now than true organic growth, says Karl Thompson, an economist at CEBR. Looking ahead, China is expected to pass the U.S. as the world’s largest…