Fortune February/March 2022

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 to be the dominant digital…

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 a nascent industry. Why had the…

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 effects of the…

JORDAN FLOWERS, an Amazon warehouse worker, is a thorn in the side of his employer. He regularly speaks at labor rallies and leads protests against the online retail giant over how it treats workers. But being an activist doesn’t pay. And his income—he’s currently out on disability—doesn’t always cover rent for his apartment in New York City, medical bills related to his lupus diagnosis, and the cost of caring for his dog, cat, and bearded dragon. So in early 2021, Flowers applied for a stipend from a crowdsourced fund created to help the growing number of protesters and whistleblowers speaking out against Big Tech. Eventually, he received good news: He would get a $2,500 check. “It gives me opportunities to travel across the city, to go to more rallies, to speak up at…

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 and, at…

IN MID-DECEMBER, as the value of her ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) was plummeting, Cathie Wood doubled down on her career-long bet on adventurous, world-shaking technologies. In an interview with Bloomberg, the ARK Invest founder and CEO predicted that her flagship fund would generate 40% annual returns over the next five years. The reason: The cratering of ARKK shares presented a matchless buying opportunity. As Wood tweeted around the same time: “Innovation stocks are not in a bubble. They are in deep value territory.” Wood’s definition of the V-word would be unrecognizable to actual value investors, from Warren Buffett to Carl Icahn. Value stocks are generally defined as those that produce lots of earnings for the dollars you’re investing. Wood’s buzzy portfolio is full of the opposite: stocks that remain vastly overpriced…