In a 2018 interview with Recode, Moiz Ali, founder of deodorant start-up Native, described how out-of-place he felt at Silicon Valley parties. Entrepreneurs, he said, would talk about how many people they had employed and how quickly they were adding staff. Ali’s small company consisted of just him. “In Silicon Valley, it’s often embarrassing when you haven’t raised money,” he told the magazine...
In 2018, Olly Bolton and Tom Proctor, co-founders of drinks company, What a Melon, entered a business competition run by Richard Branson’s Virgin Voom. They won the crowdfunding part of the contest and received as part of their prize… a double-decker bus. Instead of selling the bus and using the funds to grow their new business, the pair modified it. They wrapped it in watermelon colors, removed...
Elon Musk wasn’t happy. The team building his Starship rocket system, which is intended to fly to Mars, weren’t working hard enough. It was one o’clock on a Sunday morning and they weren’t in the workshops, hammering steel, and designing thrusters. So he called an all-hands meeting. In the middle of a weekend night, he had everyone assemble at SpaceX’s south Texas site and demanded to know why...
It started in a basement. Sarah Koenig, a producer on This American Life, a weekly radio program, had pitched a new kind of show. Instead of choosing a different theme for each episode and creating stories related to that theme, Koenig and her colleague Julie Snyder would tell a single, long story over multiple episodes. The show would follow a format as old as Dickens. Each episode would build...
In 1996, Lee Kun-Hee, then the chairman of Samsung Group, had had enough. The electronics firm was following, not leading. The marketing department would track sales figures and tell the engineers what the company could charge for a product. Their market analysis would determine the engineering budget. Original equipment manufacturers would provide lists of desired features. That would tell the...
In May 2015, Domino’s Pizza rolled out a new campaign. To order a pizza, customers wouldn’t need to open the restaurant chain’s website or even install an application. They wouldn’t need to complete an order or make a phone call. All they had to do was tweet a pizza emoji to @dominos. Customers would first have to set up a Domino’s account, select a default pizza, and connect their account to...
In 2017, RetailMeNot, a coupon site, launched a new marketing campaign. After years of focusing on television advertising, the company switched to digital video. It aimed one part of the campaign at millennial moms who search and shop with their phones, while another part of the campaign targeted slightly older moms who still use Facebook. Both parts of the campaign used videos hosted by model...
It’s now twenty years since the launch of Pac-Man, and the inspiration for that early video game is a stereotypical story of creative genius. Toru Iwatani, an employee at Japanese game company Namco, wanted to create a new kind of video game. He wanted to exclude the violence of Space Invaders, bring women into what was then the male-dominated world of video arcades, and incorporate cute...
You have to feel for Asao Tokolo. In April 2016, the Emblems Selection Committee of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games announced that the little-known artist had won an open competition to design a logo for the 2020 Olympiad. The original logo, designed by Kenjirō Sano, had been accused of plagiarizing the logo of Belgium’s Théâtre de Liège. (Sano had said that he had never even seen the...
It’s a story we’ve now come to expect. A high-flying executive leading an important industry turns out to be a bully, a toxic influence on their workplace, and a bad manager. Troy Young, the former chief executive of Hearst, is only the latest in a long line of top executives to face accusations before falling on his sword. Like many senior officials, the allegations against Young include...
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