Fast company february 2016

We’re like, ‘Maybe this is gonna happen to us.’ ” Milestones Last year, Dropbox hit 400 million users and crossed 150,000 business customers.. The stories and donations remind me why we

His business

is worth

$25 billion, but Chesky still rents out his couch for

$40 a night

R U L E B R E A K E R S

How Warby Parker,

Instagram, and 23andMe

“Think Crazy”

5 7 L E S S O N S O F

I N N O VAT I O N

Insights from Apple, Nike,

Facebook, Google, and more

COMBINE DARING DESIGN AND WATCHMAKING SAVOIR-FAIRE.

ABCs of change

“I had to get out

of Silicon Valley to gain perspective and see the world in

a different way,” says Nest CEO Tony Fadell (page 58)

from Warby Parker to the

White House—share their

insights on what matters

most in a business world that

never stands still.

Younger and wiser

“I think it’s important to

follow your instincts of

what pleases you,” says

Oscar-“ F i r s t o f a l l , j u s t l i s t e n a n d l e a r n ”

62 Apple senior vice president of retail Angela Ahrendts on why the tech com-pany’s culture is its greatest strength

“ P r e s s u r e i s a p r i v i l e g e ”

68 Nike CEO Mark Parker and tennis powerhouse Serena Williams on what it takes to stay on top

“ T h i n k c r a z y ”

72 CEO Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe discusses the science of risk taking and breaking the mold

L E S S O N S O F

L E A D E R S H I P

Contents

Tomorrow belongs to the fast.

Winners and losers will be decided by how quickly they can move from what they are now to what they need to become.

In every business, IT strategy

is now business strategy.

Accelerating innovation.

Accelerating transformation.

Accelerating value.

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of your organization is ready to be written

The next new industry is ready to be created.

The next breakthrough that pushes the world forward is ready to be made.

And we are here to help everyone go further, faster.

Accelerating next

© Copyright 2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP.

One rad app

Tinder boasts 9.6 million

daily active users and

1.4 billion swipes per

day (page 84)

A i r b n b’s $ 2 5 b i l l i o n c u l t u r e w a r

76 CEO Brian Chesky has an audacious

plan to remake cities, the hospitality

industry, and our definition of sharing

Forty million guests in 191 countries

are currently cheering him on

By Max Chafkin

T i n d e r ’s c u r s e

84 How CEO Sean Rad’s outsize

personality has spurred the dating

app’s amazing boom—and undercut

its credibility

By Austin Carr

Contents

When it comes to

your wealth, the

questions you ask

could be your most

valuable asset.

Ask questions.

Be engaged Own your tomorrow.™

,QGHSHQGHQWUHJLVWHUHGLQYHVWPHQWDGYLVRUVÜDGYLVRUVÝ DUHQRWRZQHGE\DI÷OLDWHGZLWKRUVXSHUYLVHGE\6FKZDERULWVDI÷OLDWHV6FKZDESURYLGHVFXVWRG\WUDGLQJDQGRSHUDWLRQDOVXSSRUWVHUYLFHV IRUDGYLVRUV1RWDOOSURGXFWVDQGVHUYLFHVDYDLODEOHWKURXJK6FKZDEDQGLWVDI÷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÷QDQFLDODGYLVRU\VHUYLFHV WKURXJKLWVRSHUDWLQJVXEVLGLDULHV,WVEURNHUGHDOHUVXEVLGLDU\&KDUOHV6FKZDE &R,QFÜ6FKZDEÝ 0HPEHU6,3&RIIHUVLQYHVWPHQWVHUYLFHVDQGSURGXFWVLQFOXGLQJ6FKZDEEURNHUDJH DFFRXQWV,WVEDQNLQJVXEVLGLDU\&KDUOHV6FKZDE%DQNPHPEHU)',&DQGDQ(TXDO+RXVLQJ/HQGHU SURYLGHVGHSRVLWDQGOHQGLQJVHUYLFHVDQGSURGXFWV$6.48(67,216%((1*$*('2:1

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16 From the Editor

M o s t C r e a t i v e P e o p l e

18 Former Spotify exec

Ken Parks on leaving

music for video streaming

M o s t I n n o v a t i v e C o m p a n i e s

20 Snøhetta sets a record,

Dropbox drops off, and more

T h e R e c o m m e n d e r

22 From a subscription ser vice

for kids to on-demand shoe repair,

what we’re loving right now

O n e M o r e T h i n g

100 In his final column (for now),

Baratunde Thurston shares his

hopes for the future of tech

Bumper crop

When fried, dulse ops a strong umami flavor “It disappears

devel-in your mouth,” says Portland, Oregon, chef Vitaly Paley (page 42)

T h e b u s i n e s s o f b e a u t y

27 YouTube star turned neur Michelle Phan is disrupting a multibillion-dollar industry with her beauty brand, Ipsy

P a y i n g i t f o r w a r d

44 Toms founder Blake Mycoskie turns a windfall into the next gen-eration of social-good companies

G a t o r a d e p l a y s t h e d a t a g a m e

48 A fuel-pod engine A turbine

Embedded computer chips Energy drinks are going high-tech

U n b r e a k a b l e

52 Snowe is the latest in a wave of appealing housewares startups

Contents

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From the Editor

2 Makeup mavens

build their own Birchboxes at its flagship store

3 Vanmoof shows off

its new smart bike

4 The Wild Feathers

perform their infused rock at Spotify’s New York HQ

country-5 Attendees

make music using littleBits computer components

5

1

“We came all the way from Bangkok for this, and was it worth it? Hell yeah!!” So wrote Kath-erine Amatavivadhana, one of 3,000 attendees at our inaugural Fast Com-pany Innovation Festival

in New York City “It was

a visit to a future world that is already here,”

another attendee from Bosnia expressed in a blog post “During five days, at a hundred dif-ferent events, you could hear about innovation from the business inno-vators themselves, from Hollywood stars, who are increasingly becoming

business people, and from entrepreneurs, who are increasingly becoming media stars.”

We set out to bring

Fast Company’s pages to life—nearly two dozen

of our cover subjects joined us, including Nike CEO Mark Parker and Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts—and in the pro-cess something magical happened: By juxtaposing perspectives and indus-tries, talents and ideas,

we unlocked a swarm of insights and inspiration

Participants connected

in ways we hadn’t ticipated Who knew that

an-Facebook VP of global marketing Carolyn Ever-son was a superfan of Rent the Runway and would turn giddy at meeting its CEO, Jennifer Hyman? Or that Saint Laurent North America president Brant Cryder would be dumb-struck at meeting GE vice chair Beth Comstock?

Or that ad agency Sunny would invite at-tendees to brainstorm for a real client? Or that science guy Bill Nye would bring down the house when he shed his bow tie and put it

72and-on DJ Steve Aoki?

“Lessons of ship,” beginning on page

11 Style icon Iris

Apfel talks

54, highlights a selection

of memorable exchanges

from the festival—with

terrific portraits thanks

to a team led by photo

di-rector Sarah Filippi—yet

it only approximates the

energy and dizzying

ar-ray of activities on display

(Dumpling tour? Fashion

show? Policy hackathon?

Yes, yes, and yes.) We’d

ini-tially planned that the

fes-tival would be a onetime

occurrence, but the

en-thusiasm of speakers and

attendees was so robust,

we felt compelled not only

to recap the gathering for

our full readership but to

commit to reprising the

event in 2016 We hope you’ll join us

Sometimes “the ture that is already here”

fu-can seem a very grim place: climate change, economic inequality, in-tolerance Our culture can exercise its most extreme instincts But there is an-other strain of cultural change afoot around the globe, from Bangkok to Bosnia, a more inclusive, optimistic set of values

The battle between posing worldviews is real, and sometimes danger-ous (Max Chafkin’s fea-ture, “Airbnb Opens Up the World,” beginning on

op-page 76, explores some

of these conflicts, mized in part by the ter-rorist attacks in Paris in November.) Yet underval-uing the power of positive change can be as fool-hardy as underestimating the threat of extremism

epito-What leadership is ally about is choice: What kind of world do we want

re-to embrace? And what can each of us contribute to making that world a real-ity? Nike’s Mark Parker talks about the need to

“edit and amplify” as ness leaders—that there

busi-is so much change, and so many possible tactics and

strategies, that we need

to focus in on what really matters We believe that events like the Fast Com-pany Innovation Festival—

and articles like those we publish each month in the magazine and each day online—help encourage that focus and act as an

accelerator for a richer ture for everyone What’s certain is that without these possibilities, we’ll never stave off the dark-ness There’s no better antidote to fear than com-munity And the commu-

fu-nity of Fast Company has

its part to play

Robert Safian

editor@fastcompany.com

Photograph by Victoria Stevens

Is passive viewing passé? With

TV watchers increasingly ditching

cable for streaming services like

Hulu and Netflix, that old habit of

flipping through random channels

is fading But while people love the

convenience and control of

stream-ing, many miss the

let’s-just-see-what’s-on aspect of traditional TV

At least that’s what Ken Parks is

hoping Last fall, Parks—who

previ-ously oversaw all of Spotify’s U.S

operations—joined two-year-old

video-streaming company Pluto TV,

a free platform offering more than

100 channels of live-running

con-tent: everything from old Cheers

episodes to a live feed of the

Bloom-berg News channel “Services like

Netflix have achieved remarkable

success and scale, but if you look at

the data and people’s behavior, the

dominant use case for TV is

lean-back, linear viewing,” says Parks

“When you actually survey what’s

happening in the space, we think

that is being neglected.”

Though for now all of Pluto’s

content is licensed (the company

makes money via advertising),

Parks is considering adding original

programming, as well as video on

demand and, not surprisingly, a

premium pay tier “One of the great

things Spotify did was walk people

through a journey from free to paid,”

he says “Freemium has been

vin-dicated You’re seeing the same

thing happening with television.”

—Sarah Lawson

W H AT I N S P I R E S H I M “Opportunities that arise out of change From all that I’ve experienced, change happens fast The world can look really different in a few years’ time.” B E S T R E C E N T T E C H D E V E L O P M E N T

“What’s happening with health care and gene therapy and verypersonalized approaches to treating cancer.” FAVO R IT E T H I N G TO WATC H

ON PLUTO “I love the extreme-sports channels, and I watch the Hockey Fights channel, which is 24/7 hockey fights I grew up in Philadel-phia in the era of the Broad Street Bullies I guess that’s just in my blood.” S W E AT I T O U T “I’m an avid exerciser I do a round of resistance training and cardio training five days a week It helps me think better and negotiate better.”

Most Creative People

“I focus on the goal we’re trying to achieve maybe six months out and prioritize everything attached to that Everything that’s not, I try to clear out of my day.”

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T E S C O

Milestones The British

grocery giant launched a

“Brand Guarantee” tive, which offers shoppers immediate discounts when they present brand-name items sold more cheaply

initia-by rivals

Challenges Tesco

recently sold its South Korean stores—the most profitable unit among its international holdings—

to a group of investors for

$6.1 billion Most of the funds will be used to pay off large amounts of debt

Buzz

T- M O B I L E

“Part of being the Un-carrier means telling it like it is.”

John Legere

CEO, T-Mobile

Milestones As part of its

ongoing campaign against competitors, T-Mobile revealed in November it would offer free and unlimited streaming from services such as Netflix and HBO Go

Challenges Critics

pounced on the data-plan price increase that followed the streaming announce-ment, which came on the heels of a cyberattack that exposed the personal data

of as many as 15 million customers

Buzz

B Y D

Milestones The Chinese

battery producer and maker is heading to Europe:

auto-Last fall, it inked a 10-year development contract with ADL, the U.K.’s largest bus manufacturer, and later unveiled an electric double-decker that can go 186 miles on a single charge

Challenges BYD exec

Stella Li has stated that the company is eyeing the U.S

consumer car market, where it faces competition from Tesla and Toyota

Buzz

P AY P A L

Milestones Last fall, the

mobile-payments pany released PayPal.Me, a service that lets users send and accept cash via a URL

com-And in its first financial report since breaking from eBay, it revealed a 29%

spike in profit and a 14%

revenue increase

Challenges PayPal is

under pressure to keep up with several hot payments startups—including the

$5 billion Stripe and the recently IPO’d Square—as well as a rumored peer-to-peer service by Apple

Buzz

N O VA R T I S

Milestones The Swiss

drug developer recently started a program in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Viet-nam that allows NGOs and other public entities to purchase 15 medications for chronic illnesses for $1 per treatment, per month

Challenges Novartis’s

profit dropped by 42%, due

in part to a $390 million settlement for allegedly giving kickbacks to phar-macies that pushed its fed-erally covered drugs

Buzz

the gentrified SoMa district Rather than cave to commercial pressure to join the skyline-forming fortresses nearby, Snøhetta aims to open up SFMOMA to the neighborhood The 10-story expansion, located behind the main building, features sunlit public spaces and a fiberglass facade that offers passersby glimpses of the galleries Upon completion, it will make SFMOMA the largest museum

in California—and the largest seum of modern art in the country

mu-Milestones The firm was recently

hired to update the Bay Area’s scenic Presidio Parklands

Challenges Snøhetta’s civic

maneuvering will be tested in the wake of criticisms toward New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Times Square, which has become increasingly notorious for nudity

Buzz

"A building is not just about itself, but the place where it resides.”

Craig Dykers

Founding partner, Snøhetta

Most Innovative Companies Updates from the alumni

Snøhetta’s first project was the

1989 reconceptualization of the

Li-brary of Alexandria, a lost wonder

of the world Nearly three decades

later, the Norwegian architecture

firm is still updating iconic cultural

centers: Along with a highly

publi-cized Times Square makeover, it’s

also designing a

235,000-square-foot expansion of the San Francisco

Museum of Modern Art, which

reopens in May after a three-year

closure “Alexandria [involved] tons

of international stakeholders,” says

Claire Fellman, a director at the firm

“We developed a skill shepherding

a vision through a complex

pro-cess.” This helped the firm during

its work on SFMOMA, which sits in

B E I J I N G G E N O M I C S

I N S T I T U T E

Milestones In September,

the genome-sequencing

giant revealed its

geneti-cally modified

micro-pigs—and its plans to sell

them as pets for $1,600

a pop (The 30-pound

ani-mals were originally bred

for research.) BGI says

buy-ers can eventually request

certain physical features

for their mini-swine,

set-ting a precedent for

com-mercial gene editing

Challenges Some in the

scientific community have

raised ethical questions

regarding the micro-pigs,

calling for greater

regula-tion and expressing

con-cerns over what other

animals might be subject

to such modifications

Buzz

M O D E M E D I A

Milestones Last year,

the company formerly

known as Glam Media

embarked on a massive

rebranding, uniting all of

its video sites—including

Brash, Foodie, and the

fashion-focused Glam—

as customizable verticals

under the umbrella site

Mode.com Viral series

such as 100 Years of

raised the company’s

pro-file, and it announced in

August that it had reached

1 billion total video views

Challenges The

13-year-old company—which

scrapped plans to go

pub-lic in 2013—must fend off

YouTube, which recently

launched commercial-free

paid subscriptions, and

new video giants such as

Facebook and BuzzFeed

Buzz

would become As a result, box’s rivals now include its insti-tutional investors BlackRock and Fidelity, both of which downgraded their stakes in Dropbox by as much

Drop-as 24%, fueling skepticism about its

$10 billion valuation and making

it a symbol of the purported tech bubble Dropbox is now courting more enterprise-level clients, hiring

IT brokers, adding features such as team messaging, and rolling out the Google Docs–esque Paper But can Dropbox act fast enough? (After all, it bought the startup whose tech powers Paper nearly two years ago.)

“Craigslist [was] used for

every-thing,” Houston told Fast Company

“Then Match.com takes some, and Airbnb comes along We’re like,

‘Maybe this is gonna happen to us.’ ”

Milestones Last year, Dropbox

hit 400 million users and crossed 150,000 business customers

Challenges In December, Dropbox

announced that by spring it would shutter its once-lauded stand-alone apps Mailbox (for email) and Carousel (for photos)

to focus more on "simplifying the way people work together."

Buzz

“There’ve been these misconceptions [that] we’re not serious about business.”

Drew Houston

Cofounder and CEO, at the Dropbox Open conference in November

At the end of our April 2015 profile

of cloud-storage startup Dropbox, cofounder and CEO Drew Houston mused that he worried more about being eclipsed by a startup than by giants such as Google and Micro-soft that had targeted his business

Houston’s fears have been borne out, as the messaging tool Slack has emerged as the future-of-work platform that he had hoped Dropbox

I N D I G O

“The IPO will bring retail investors back to the airline sector.”

Kapil Kaul

CEO, South Asia, Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation

Milestones Already the

largest airline operator in India, IndiGo’s parent com-pany, InterGlobe Aviation, launched its IPO in late October to the tune of

$459 million—the highest

in the country since 2012

Challenges Analysts

ques-tioned IndiGo’s financial model, which relies heavily

on buying aircraft and leasing them to companies

at higher cost

Buzz

F R I T O - L AY

Milestones Frito-Lay has

been on a marketing tear, from its “Do Us a Flavor”

contest, which resulted

in such Lay’s varieties

as Southern Biscuits and Gravy, to its rainbow Doritos, which honored the Supreme Court’s historic gay marriage ruling (and drew the ire of conserva-tive politician Mike Hucka-bee) Frito-Lay was just one of two PepsiCo units

to post revenue gains in Q3 of 2015

Challenges A report by the

research firm Mintel revealed that despite snack makers’ efforts to offer healthier products, more than 50% of consumers are still concerned about ingredients used by manufacturers—signaling more pressure for PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi to diver-sify its potato-chip empire

Buzz

“My Kaikado canister

holds the single-origin

coffees I drink The 140-

year-old Kyoto com pany

designs them to get

more beautiful with

time I love my iPhone,

but in two years it will

TO DITCH YOUR WALLET

“The touch-screen Plastc

Card, now in beta, loads

your credit cards and even key fobs onto this device I don’t like to carry a wallet with me, so it simplifies what I keep in my pocket.”

Ben Goorin

President and CEO, Goorin Bros.

3

TO GIVE GLOBALLY

“Watsi’s donations plat form

helps people who can’t afford health care The stories and donations remind me why we do what we do at Eligible.”

Katelyn Gleason

Founder and CEO, Eligible;

Fast Company MCP

2

TO MINE YOUR NET WORK

“How better to find people

to connect with than by using those who already

follow you? Audience

Owl finds the influencers

in our email list and lets

us solicit direct feedback.”

Kamal Patel

Director, Examine.com

“Coming home on a flight,

I found that I couldn’t

stand up My left knee

was locked The RolPal,

a next-level foam roller,

helped me walk again

It’s designed to massage

trigger points, and it

comes in a travel size.”

Scott Harrison

Founder and CEO, Charity: Water; Fast Company MCP

The Recommender

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Lara Crystal

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“My favorite fashion designer at the moment

is Stella Jean I love the multicultural cool vibe of her pieces.”

Grace Choi Founder, Mink

3 FOR CONVENIENT REPAIRS

“Cobbler Concierge

marries the modernity

of the Internet with the skill and traditions

of expert cobblers The service for shoe and handbag repairs is flaw-less and convenient You complete a form online and a box arrives for you at home In a quick turnaround, your pre-cious items are returned looking as good as new.”

Alexandra Wilkis Wilson

Cofounder and CEO, Glamsquad

H E A D -T O -T O E F A S H I O N

2 FOR EASY ESSENTIALS

“Outlier is my go-to

brand for basic clothing It really fits with my mantra

of packing light and living with less.”

Sam Rosen

Founder and CEO, MakeSpace

The Recommender

“I highly recommend Kiwi

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interested in teaching

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entrepreneurship They

send monthly kits for

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Founder and CEO, Luxe

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return home to

HungryRoot meals,

which last 20 days in

the fridge and are about

500 calories They make

veggies into delicious

pastas and desserts.”

Soraya Darabi

Cofounder, Zady.com;

Fast Company MCP

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N E X

A new model

Ipsy’s Phan has

logged more than a

billion views for her

beauty tutorials

Serious beauty

YouTube star and Ipsy founder

Michelle Phan is at the forefront of

the social reinvention of the

$39 billion cosmetics industry

“Hi! I’m Michelle.” Michelle Phan is poking her head into a spacious room

at the Ipsy Open Studio in Santa Monica, California, an outpost of the San Mateo–based beauty subscription company she cofounded four years ago

A young woman named Sophie Torres is sitting at a table, neatly arranging brushes, bottles, and tubes in preparation for a video tutorial she is going

to film about hard-to-pull-off hairstyles She is a member of Ipsy’s extended family of online beauty influencers, who, like Phan, are using YouTube, Instagram, and other social media to build careers as beauty gurus

Phan is the biggest guru of all Since 2007, when she started making videos of herself applying makeup in her bedroom and uploading them

By Nicole LaPorte

Photographs by Rene & Radka

to YouTube, she has amassed a

following of more than 8

mil-lion subscribers who tune in to

watch her dreamy-voiced

instruc-tions on everything from “grunge

beauty” to how to achieve the

Dae-nerys Targaryen look from Game

of Thrones Now, through Ipsy, she’s

helping others follow in her

foot-steps—last May, Ipsy opened this

10,000-square-foot studio,

com-plete with 360-degree cameras,

state-of-the-art lighting, and

elabo-rate props, for its network of beauty

vloggers to shoot their videos

Torres seems a little flustered

by the sudden appearance of the

28-year-old Phan and apologizes

for not wearing any makeup Phan,

who’s dressed in a simple black

turtleneck dress and colorful Nikes,

smiles warmly “It’s fine We don’t

judge here I don’t have any makeup

on either.”

few videos a month that are Ipsy related; the rest is up to them,” Phan says Together with Ipsy’s in-house stylists, they generate 300 million social media impressions a month for the company Ipsy gets exposure (it has so far done very little paid advertising) and more views of its ad-embedded YouTube content In exchange, it gives these vloggers access to the Open Studio, men-toring, networking, and publicity opportunities, and special tools, such as a mobile app that helps with beauty giveaways

“There are hundreds if not lions of beauty content creators

mil-online We want all of them,” says

Goldfarb The idea is to develop

a whole stable full of Phan-level gurus promoting and creating con-tent, who, in turn, will draw in and help retain subscribers As Cam-beros says, people join Ipsy to get

Camberos and president Jennifer Goldfarb, have been busy They bought back her two-year-old cos-metics line, Em, from L’Oréal, to reassert creative control and fully profit from its sales But their am-bition is much more far-reaching

While Birchbox takes in a reported 35% of its revenue from sales of full-size beauty products online and in flagship stores, Ipsy remains focused on using its community

to drive subscriptions Its bet: that

as the cosmetics industry grows ever more decentralized, Ipsy will emerge as the go-to source for beauty advice and intelligence

To realize this, Ipsy is investing heavily into building up its already 10,000-person-strong network of amateur beauty vloggers, such

as Torres These content creators aren’t bound by a stringent con-tract “They just have to make a

Beauty squad

Ipsy president Jennifer Goldfarb

is a veteran of Bare Escentuals; CEO Marcelo Camberos (left) came from viral-video website Funny or Die.

It’s true But though there is nary a hint of kohl or foundation

on Phan’s porcelain complexion, it’s

clear she takes beauty very seriously

Phan has written a book and is veloping a premium video network and music label, but Ipsy demands most of her attention—and brings

de-in the most money The tion service works in much the same way as rival Birchbox, send-ing out a set of personalized beauty goodies each month in an ever-changing set of “Glam Bags.” Ipsy now boasts more than 1.5 million subscribers (who pay $10 a month for the bags), surpassing Birchbox

subscrip-at just over a million In the fall, Ipsy raised $100 million in Series B funding from the high-profile firms TPG Growth and Sherpa Capital, valuing the company at a reported

$800 million Since then, Phan and her partners, CEO Marcelo

“The standard of beauty, the idea of beauty, is changing The one-size- fits-all look no longer really exists.”

the Glam Bags, but the community

experience “is why they stay.”

Ipsy’s plan reflects where the

cosmetics industry is heading No

longer do many women

(particu-larly millennials) get their makeup

tips at the department-store MAC

counter or from a celebrity

spokes-person Rather, they head to the

Internet and binge-watch DIY

vid-eos posted by people like Phan and

Karen O, one of Ipsy’s in-house

stylists The fact that these new

voices of authority are both diverse

and relatable makes them

invalu-able marketing tools for brands

One recent study by Defy Media

found that more than 60% of 13- to

24-year-olds said they would try a

product suggested by a YouTuber

“The standard of beauty, the idea

of beauty, is changing,” says Phan

“The one-size-fits-all look no longer

really exists in this new paradigm.”

The YouTube-wrought

democra-tization of beauty has also allowed

smaller makeup lines, which lack

the marketing budgets of bigger

competitors, to break through

Researchers at the Kline Group

es-timate that sales of indie cosmetics

brands grew by 19.6% from 2013 to

2014 (though they still represent

just 7.3% of the total market) NYX,

a Los Angeles–based cosmetics company now owned by L’Oréal, skyrocketed to $100 million in sales

in 2014, thanks largely to beauty fluencers who participated in NYX’s annual video contest

in-Given this new reality, major cosmetics brands are aggres-sively courting social media stars

Smashbox has opened its photo studios to vloggers who create

“Made at Smashbox” videos And the campaign for Garnier’s Fructis Full and Plush hair-care line last year was put entirely in the hands

of 100 vloggers; the resulting Tube videos received more than

You-3 million views “We get complaints

if we launch a product and it’s not

reviewed by key vloggers,” says Beth DiNardo, Smashbox’s global general manager

For companies unaccustomed

to the strange new world of social media celebrity, Ipsy serves as a guide, helping to get their products not only out to subscribers but also into the right tutorials In return, Ipsy gets its Glam Bag products for free “Part of our proposition to brands is ‘We will give you an amaz-ing marketing campaign and an amazing experience with our com-munity,’ ” explains Goldfarb Ipsy also provides brands with a detailed report on their products based on feedback from subscribers Accord-ing to Goldfarb, there are no plans

to charge for this intelligence, but it helps the company attract “the best

of the best” beauty companies, from more established brands such as Urban Decay to up-and-comers like the two-year-old Trust Fund Beauty

But even with its army of gers, Ipsy faces a stiff challenge:

vlog-Consumers may be getting their beauty tips online, but most still buy their products in brick-and-mortar stores According to Shan-non Romanowski, senior beauty analyst at Mintel, less than 5% of women who are 18 and older and

online use subscription services like Ipsy and Birchbox “Although the beauty subscription model is

a growing trend, beauty tends to

be an in-store purchase,” she says Ipsy’s response is to keep grow-ing its community The company’s latest effort is hosting a series of Generation Beauty conferences—a Comic Con of sorts for beauty lovers

In 2016, there will be four events in cities including San Francisco and Atlanta , up from two last year “The one we just had in New York, we had 850 creators, plus 3,000 people paying $150 each to attend, plus all these brands,” says Camberos

At the heart of Ipsy’s community,

of course, is Phan, whom Camberos calls its “soul.” Although she’s be-come fluent in MBA–speak, chatting easily about new “business para-digms,” she still uploads a video every week and is Ipsy’s primary source of trendsetting ideas As we talk, she opens up a notepad and starts absentmindedly sketching

a pair of enormous, seductive eyes with long lashes “I think this will be the design of a new bag,” she says, holding it up like a mask in front of her face “If this was the Glam Bag, you could take a selfie like this and just have fun with it.”

A former freelance makeup

artist and now an in-house

Ipsy stylist, Perkins is known

for her eyebrow tutorial

vid-eos, one of which has raked

in more than 10 million views

Nyc Dragun

SOCIAL FOLLOWING:

YouTube 39,000Instagram 116,000Twitter 2,000Dragun recently posted a

“Male to Female tion” vlog where she came out as transgender and guided viewers through her full makeup routine

Transforma-Aurora AmorPorElMaquillaje

SOCIAL FOLLOWING:

YouTube 356,000Instagram 1,600,000Twitter 1,100Mexico City–based Aurora focuses on glamorous lip and eye makeup combina-tions that help fans embrace their inner Kardashian

YazTheSpaz

SOCIAL FOLLOWING:

YouTube 66,000Instagram 156,000Twitter 16,700Turkish-Cuban model and makeup guru Yasemin Kanar spotlights creative ways to wear hijabs

Loey Lane

SOCIAL FOLLOWING:

YouTube 563,000Instagram 202,000Twitter 14,800This beauty and plus-size-fashion vlogger uses her platform to showcase stylish outfits for bigger women and promote body positiv-ity for everyone

gun owner can ate, then perhaps it makes sense that Kiyani is one He’s also a member of the National Rifle Association,

appreci-a fappreci-ather, appreci-and the survivor

of a shooting—he took a stray bullet in the mouth

as a teenager “I’ve created

a solution that I’d be ing to use myself,” he says.Knowing that some

will-of his most important stituents are people, like him, who keep firearms at home for security, Kiyani has focused the entire tech-nology on quick access

con-“As soon as the authorized user touches [the shield],

it gets out of the way,”

he explains And the metrics he employs are no different from those cur-rently being used reliably outside the gun market, resulting in a clasp that’s

bio-as simple to unlock bio-as a smartphone

Kiyani has been able

to develop and engineer his product thanks to a

$100,000 grant from the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, an incubator program launched by tech titan and billionaire angel investor Ron Con-way in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shoot-ing While some of the program’s other grantees are developing similar tools, Kiyani’s will be the first to go to market fol-lowing a crowdfunding campaign in early 2016 Kiyani plans to sell Identi-lock directly to consum-ers online, but his team

is also pushing to get it

on the shelves of national stores, like Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops, as well

as specialty retailers—which would be a huge leap forward in the main-streaming of smart- gun technology

Though the idea of using technology to improve firearms safety has been around for decades (and stymied by politics for just

as long), a forthcoming product offers hope that

2016 could be the through year for smart guns Created by Detroit entrepreneur Omer Kiyani, Identilock is a biometric clasp that shields a gun’s trigger and releases only when it detects the own-er’s fingerprint The goal:

break-Curtail the estimated 2,000 accidental shoot-ings that hospitalize chil-dren and adolescents in the U.S each year and

reduce the market for stolen handguns

The first device of its kind, Identilock is expected to become avail-able this spring—and Kiyani hopes that it will change the conversation around smart-gun tech-nology “Identilock is the one product that brings both sides of the gun debate together,” he says

The main difference between Identilock and, say, the Armatix iP1—a smart gun that went to market in 2014 and was met with fierce resistance

by gun-rights activists—

is that Identilock is not a gun It’s an accessory, cre-ated to fit a broad range

of existing handguns If that’s a difference only a

happy

Could a biometric lock be

the key to gun safety?

By Darrell Hartman

Illustration by Steve Courtney

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On one otherwise unremarkable

day in May 2013, August de los Reyes

fell out of bed, hurting his back The

then–42-year-old designer was just

six months into his dream job at

Microsoft: running design for Xbox

and righting a franchise that was

drifting due to mission creep He had

worked at Microsoft before, on

proj-ects such as MSN and Windows, but

had returned because the world of

gaming had an almost spiritual

ap-peal to him “I believe the universe

is play,” he says “And I believe there’s

a moral imperative to play.”

At first, de los Reyes didn’t think

the accident was serious But several

trips to the hospital later, he finally

underwent emergency surgery He’d

broken a vertebra, his spinal cord

had swelled, and, with breathtaking

quickness, he was unable to walk

ever again The agonizing months

adapting to his new life awakened

de los Reyes to the thoughtlessness

that hides all around us He couldn’t

How studying underserved

communities is helping the tech giant create better products

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Photographs by Chloe Aftel

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meet friends in the usual

restau-rants, simply because no one had

made the effort to pour a tiny

con-crete ramp A tipped-over garbage

can blocking a sidewalk would force

him to circumnavigate an entire

block Disability, he came to believe,

isn’t a limitation of a person; it is a

mismatch between a person and the

world that has been designed around

him “That was what radicalized

me,” he says as we sit in his office

in one of the colorful new design

studios scattered about Microsoft’s

sprawling Redmond, Washington,

campus The question was:

Radical-ized him to do what?

De los Reyes rushed back to work

after just three months of

rehabilita-tion Within weeks, he spied an

op-portunity Albert Shum, who’d

become famous within Microsoft for

designing the company’s elegant

mobile operating system, had

re-cently been elevated to oversee all OS

design He called his top deputies—

including de los Reyes and Kat

Holmes, Microsoft’s principal design

director—to help define a new

mis-sion De los Reyes pushed for the idea

that design should include everyone

Holmes, a seasoned user-experience

researcher, was familiar with

“uni-versal design” as propounded by

companies like Oxo: It held that, for

example, by making kitchen goods

with the arthritic in mind, you create

something easier for all users She

also realized that in helping to create

Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Siri,

earlier that year, she’d already

stum-bled upon a new kind of process, one

tive They eventually hit upon clusive design—a vein of research descended from universal design, which had been pursued for years

in-in academia but had remain-ined largely unknown in the world of technology Holmes is now helping

to lead Microsoft’s charge into this new realm, which the company

that brought outsiders into the fold

She had a hunch that applying that idea more formally to the digital world could be profound

De los Reyes and Holmes went

on a quest to transform a squishy idea into something tangible enough to move even the most business-minded product execu-

D E S I G N F O R A L L

Long before it reached the

halls of academia (and

Microsoft), universal design

had been informing

products all around us

Here’s a brief history.

Pellegrino Turri invents the working typewriter to help

a blind friend write legibly.

1808

Joseph Friedman creates the flexible drinking straw so his young daughter can drink from her cup more easily at the table.

The telephone emerges from Alexander Graham Bell’s many attempts

1948

Icon-based keyboards, now ubiquitous, are first developed to assist those who are unable to speak to use speech synthesizers.

hopes will inspire groundbreaking

ideas for new products De los Reyes,

still on the Xbox team, is one of the

principal designers realizing that

aspiration, one detail at a time

Inclusive design begins with

studying overlooked

communi-ties, ranging from dyslexics to deaf

people By learning how they adapt

to their world, the hope is that you

can develop better products for

everyone Say, for example, you’d

like to build a phone that’s easier to

interact with while you’re driving

You could just study drivers Or you

could study the blind How do they

know when their phones are paired

with another device? What aural

feedback do apps need to provide?

Building those features into a phone

would benefit not only the blind

What’s more, by finding

imagina-tive analogues between groups of

people outside the mainstream

and situations that we’ve all found

ourselves in, you can come up with

entirely new product ideas “The

point isn’t to solve for a problem,”

such as typing when you’re blind,

says Holmes “We’re flipping it.”

Holmes and her team are

identify-ing the identify-ingenuity that arises

natu-rally when people are forced to live

a life different from most

When Shum convened his

depu-ties in the fall of 2013, Microsoft had

already been inching toward

inclu-sive design with Cortana, which

was developed throughout that year

before launching in the summer of

2014 The voice assistant’s

thought-ful and intuitive approach is a

testament to the process that went into creating it Led by Holmes, a research team began by coming up with communities to learn from

They eventually settled upon ing actual personal assistants—a seemingly obvious move that none-theless was very different from Ap-ple’s black-box development of Siri,

study-or Google’s creation of Google Now, which began on the whiteboards of the company’s engineers

By looking at how real personal assistants nurture trust among their clients and then creating idealized storyboards of how they work, Holmes was able to recom-mend a series of behaviors for Cor-tana The best personal assistants keep track of client preferences, but they’re also transparent about why they’re recommending certain things Thus, Cortana logs all the preference data it has extrapolated about you and allows you to edit it

Cortana also behaves as a human would when befuddled by a ques-tion Instead of giving you a flippant joke, as Siri does, Cortana admits

to what she does and doesn’t know, and asks you to teach her

Cortana and the process that led to her creation weren’t just one-offs Today, the design team’s mandate—handed down from CEO Satya Nadella, as well as Shum and Julie Larson-Green, Microsoft’s re-cently appointed chief experience officer—is to use inclusive design to address as many problems as Micro-soft can identify Dozens of projects have been completed; dozens more

directions: “Go north for 1.5 miles, then turn left at the McDonald’s Now you’re on Elm Street.”

In Redmond, de los Reyes and

I watch behind a two-way mirror

as the inclusive design process unfolds on yet another project A young grad student with a scruffy beard describes why he, as a deaf

gamer, sticks to playing World of

Warcraft on a PC, even though he

would love to play Destiny on an

Xbox One: The PC’s keyboard lets him chat with teammates in a way that simply isn’t possible on the Xbox, where players exchange strategy and advice over headsets

“A keyboard means I can lead my team [on a raid]; a controller means

I have to follow,” the gamer says, his frustration evident The solution seems obvious: better keyboards for gamers on the Xbox But as the researcher in the room keeps prod-ding, de los Reyes perks up He starts thinking beyond keyboards

to imagine creating something akin to a huddle before a raid starts, which would allow deaf players to strategize with their teammates in advance And what if, in creating these pregame strategy sessions, you made it easier not only for deaf

gamers but for all players to kick

more butt?

For de los Reyes, the promise

of this new design process isn’t in just a better Xbox, or even a better Microsoft “If we’re successful, we’re going to change the way products are designed across the industry Period That’s my vision.”

are in the works One, likely to debut soon, yielded a font and a system of text wrapping that makes reading easier for dyslexics—but also faster for those without dyslexia Another,

in the late stages of user testing, is a subtle rethinking of how directions are given on Bing Right now, almost every wayfinding app offers direc-tions according to cardinal point, distance, and street: “Go north for 1.5 miles, then turn left on Elm Street.”

But research has shown that women are more likely to navigate by land-marks and visual cues, so Microsoft built more universally relatable

Vint Cerf, who is hard of

hearing, develops email, in

part because it’s an easy way

to communicate with his

wife, who is deaf

Ray Kurzweil creates machine- scannable fonts, and the first image scanner, to help the blind.

Originally begun by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick

as a research product to create seating that wouldn’t cause bed sores in the elderly, the Aeron chair is released

Working on making emerging technologies accessible for people with disabilities, Jutta Treviranus develops the Inclusive Design Toolkit, which Microsoft later adapts.

Sam Farber founds Oxo, dedicated to making easy-to- grip kitchen tools, inspired by people with arthritis

“We’re going to change the way products are designed across the industry Period.”

at the South by Southwest tive Festival in Austin last year, they swiped right with gusto “What makes you human?” she would text, before instructing her suitor

Interac-to click through Interac-to her Instagram feed, which included a video hyp-

ing Ex Machina, a chic and heady

science-fiction thriller directed

by Alex Garland, along with venient details about the movie’s American debut, at the festival later that weekend

con-The men had been catfished Ava

was a bot, designed by Ex Machina’s

New York–based distributor, A24, using a photo of the film’s lead, Alicia Vikander The guerrilla cam-paign, which took just a month to plan, barely dented the film’s mar-keting budget but garnered global headlines After an enthusiastic

reception in Austin, Ex Machina

opened in limited release and ultimately took in more than $25 million domestically—not bad for

a $15 million production with no bankable stars

In an industry where creative courage is increasingly rare, A24 has made this sort of boldness a hallmark Taking on about 18 to 20 films annually, the four-year-old in-die distributor has earned a reputa-tion for putting out unconventional

fu-nity of Fast Company has

its part to play

Robert Safian

editor@fastcompany.com