9 Visionaries Shaping the Future
The Future of Fashion Jenna Lyons / President, J. Crew She hates the word tastemaker. Hates it. And yet, she is, without question, one of the most influential arbiters of style in America today. In the 11 years since CEO Mickey Drexler gave her the freedom to chart a new course for the struggling fashion […]
Meet the Genius Behind Oculus Rift
The young man did not set out to alter the world. He simply wanted to step deeply into the land of video games. “My goal was purely selfish,” he says. “I wanted to create something for myself.” A home-schooled teenager, Palmer Luckey was used to walling himself inside the garage to immerse himself in technical […]
2013 SUCCESS Achiever of the Year: Jeff Bezos
It was 11:52 p.m. on Dec. 22—the final frantic stretch of the 2012 holiday shopping season—when the one-day shipping order rolled into the company’s West Coast servers. Somebody somewhere wanted a pair of Roxy Hot Cocoa slippers delivered to Fayetteville, Ga. Amazon’s fulfillment centers were operating at breakneck speed. On Nov. 26, the Monday after […]
The Fearless Founder
Starting a new company is never easy, but Bettina Hein knows better than most just how grueling the experience can be. She has weathered the trials of two tech startups, both during brutal economic downturns. The first, Swiss-based software company SVOX AG, which hired her as chief financial officer in January 2001, opened mere weeks […]
Become the Next Big Thing on YouTube
In the years ahead, online video will disrupt television in the same way websites have disrupted newspapers, says Bettina Hein, founder of Pixability, a big data software company that specializes in YouTube marketing. YouTube already reaches more viewers aged 18 to 34 than any cable network. That said, it takes a savvy content creator to […]
Speed Up Your Success
From TechCrunch to Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal, the business world is consumed these days with trumpeting the arrival of each new startup launched from a business accelerator. Never mind that most of those startups have yet to earn a dollar. Or that they’re usually run by founders barely old enough to order […]
Accelerators: How to Choose a Program (and Get Accepted)
Finding the Right Program for You Because the vast majority of the startups produced by accelerators are less than 3 years old, it’s hard to evaluate the effectiveness of each program. In 2011 Aziz Gilani, a director in the Houston VC firm DFJ Mercury, studied 29 North American accelerators on behalf of the Kauffman Fellows Program […]
Pete Cashmore of Mashable: The Sage of Social Media
The face is unmistakable. At 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, in walks the man who la
From Bill Gates to Tony Hsieh: 19 Seers Shaping the World
“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible,” wrote the great satirist Jonathan Swift, known for nearly three centuries as the eagle-eyed author of Gulliver's Travels . And those words ring true to this day, though in fact, back in the 1700s when he penned them, a visionary was not the sort of person you […]
2012 SUCCESS Achiever of the Year: Elon Musk
When you work on an epic scale, tossing out huge ideas as if they were pennies aimed at a wishing well, you get used to hearing the word crazy. For Elon Musk, the term springs up so frequently, he might as well print it on his business card—right in front of his name. Crazy Elon […]
How Two Companies Handled Repairing Their Damaged Brand Image
However your brand’s image was damaged, here’s what you need to know about repairing it, with example from real-life situations.
Shopping as Entertainment
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz saw the light in Italy. During a trip to Milan in 1983, he found himself marveling at the charm of the neighborhood espresso shops—the smell of chestnuts, the faint strains of opera music, the cheerful smiles on the faces of the locals as they reveled in chitchat. The realization hit him […]