Indholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2024 i Fast Company

ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT FAST COMPANY IS ITS range. For a publication with a specific focus—business innovation—we roam all over, covering everything from tech to live events, fashion to manufacturing, food to space exploration, and pretty much any other industry you can think of. Never is this more true than with the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies, our largest and most brand-defining franchise. And this year's list is our biggest yet. We're honoring a jaw-dropping 606 companies across 58 categories. The sweeping nature of our reporting is exemplified by the two companies we've chosen to devote the most space to in our coverage of the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2024 (page 8): Nvidia, the chip giant that takes the No. 1 spot, and Taco Bell, which…

IT'S THE SHOT TAKEN round the world. Novo Nordisk's weight-loss and diabetes medications Wegovy and Ozempic, which are a hit with patients and frequently used off-label, have vaulted the Danish drugmaker into the ranks of the world's most valuable companies, with a market cap hovering at $500 billion and 2023 sales hitting $33.7 billion, up 36% year over year. But Novo's blockbuster drugs, based on a quarter-century of R&D, are more than just a windfall. They're also unlocking therapeutic possibilities beyond stimulating insulin secretion in people with type 2 diabetes and reducing appetite for others. After a study of more than 17,000 people, released last year, indicated Wegovy's ability to reduce heart attacks, strokes, and death from heart disease, the company is seeking expanded FDA approval for cardiovascular conditions. Other…

“WOMEN'S SPORTS IS A HISTORically underinvested asset class,” says Jessica Berman, commissioner of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). Since Berman joined the NWSL in 2022, she's been on a mission to elevate the league by commanding more for its teams. That starts with valuations. In the past, new NWSL team franchises were sold for roughly $5 million. But in 2023, the league auctioned off expansion rights in Boston and the Bay Area for $53 million apiece, with the new owners pledging to invest an overall $100 million and $125 million, respectively, into their teams. The 11-year-old Portland Thorns, meanwhile, sold for a record-breaking $63 million last year. “We reset the enterprise value of our franchises by more than 10 times,” says Berman. These valuations mirror the league's ballooning audience,…

TACO BELL FOR SHOWING THE WORLD THAT TACOS ARE A STATE OF MIND NO ONE REALLY KNOWS who first came up with the idea of Taco Tuesday. One of the earliest references can be found in a newspaper ad for El Paso, Texas's White Star Cafeteria from Monday, October 16, 1933, urging readers to come out and enjoy, ostensibly the next day, three “Mexican tacos” for 15 cents. In the decades that followed, the term began to appear explicitly in ads from Wisconsin to Arizona; in 1973, South Dakota's Snow White Drive In ran an ad in the Rapid City Journal with the line “Stop In on Taco Tuesday.” But it wasn't until 1982 that anyone put a legal stamp on the term. That was the year that Gregory's Restaurant…

MUSICIANS OFTEN COLLABORATE WITH COSTUME DESIGNERS for big performances, but Beyoncé rewrote the playbook for her Renaissance tour, produced by the megastar's company Parkwood Entertainment. Across its 56 stops, she wore a reported 140 custom-made designer outfits. There were the red Telfar looks that she and her daughter Blue Ivy danced in, the colorful Pucci jumpsuit with Leigh Bowery drama, and the surrealist Loewe catsuits emblazoned with reaching hands. Every outfit was complemented with bling from Tiffany, the tour's official jeweler. By transforming her stage into a runway, Beyoncé raised the profile of her tour and concert film—and the associated fashion houses. Retail intelligence company Edited saw brands aligned with Beyoncé experience skyrocketing sellout rates during the tour, and data analytics firm Launchmetrics calculates that this also translated into tens…

A CELLPHONE WAS STOLEN IN BRAZIL APPROXIMATELY EVERY three minutes in 2022, the downside of Latin Americans increasingly tying financial information to their phones. Nubank spent much of 2023 fitting easy-to-use security features into the lives of its more than 90 million customers—starting with Modo Rua (Street Mode). Introduced in early 2023, ahead of Carnival season, Modo Rua lets customers limit payment amounts and transactions from their phones when not connected to a trusted Wi-Fi network. About 750,000 revelers adopted it during Carnival; by year's end, Modo Rua had more than 1 million users. Nubank also began offering Me Roubaram (They Stole From Me), which lets users quickly shut off a lost or stolen credit card, and to secure online transactions, it added temporary virtual credit cards that expire after…

IT TOOK MORE THAN 20 years, but one of the final pieces of the redevelopment of the World Trade Center complex is now in place. The Perelman Performing Arts Center, opened in September 2023, is a cube-shaped jewel box of a building that brings grace to a complicated site and breaks new ground in theatrical design. Architecture firm REX struck a nearly impossible balance: honoring the history of the site (it abuts the 9/11 reflecting pools) while making room for artistic creation. “It has to be deferential to the memorial,” says REX founder Joshua Ramus, “and also somehow independent.” The result is a feat of contextual design. The building's elegant cube form—clad in thin, backlit slabs of marble that seem to glow at night— stands out in Lower Manhattan. Its…

TYPICALLY, NEW MENU ITEMS AT CHIPOTLE undergo lengthy testing. But current food manias travel fast, and in 2023, Chipotle leaned in, responding at meme velocity. In late 2022, Chipotle noticed online chatter about customers ordering customized quesadillas at the counter as opposed to via the app, where the item is exclusively featured. The company soon figured out why: TikTok creator Alexis Frost had made a video urging people to ask Chipotle staffers to add fajita vegetables to a steak quesadilla, and it got more than 30 million views. In March, Chipotle added the Fajita Quesadilla to its digital menu, which it says almost doubled its quesadilla sales overnight and led to a 37% week-over-week surge in loyalty program sign-ups. A commenter on Frost's post, creator Keith Lee, suggested dipping Frost's…

BEFORE ELECTRIC VEHICLES BECAME mainstream, Horace Luke, cofounder and CEO of Taiwan-based company Gogoro, had the idea of changing how people live in modern cities by creating a network of electric scooters with swappable batteries. Since its founding in 2011, Gogoro has become the number-one electric scooter brand in Taiwan, supported by more than 12,000 battery-swapping stations at 2,500 locations. Gogoro and its partners have made more than 50 two-and three-wheel vehicles between them. But Gogoro isn't stopping there. It's intent on transforming transportation networks around the globe—often by courting delivery drivers, then making its vehicles available to everyday users. The company has launched successfully in the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Israel, Japan, and Korea, and it recently announced partnerships in Chile and Colombia. In 2024, it's making its most ambitious…

THE NONPROFIT 4 DAY Week Global wants to create nothing less than a million new years of free time. The organization took the concept of a shortened week from fringe to main-stream last year, onboarding some 190 companies for trials of four-day weeks; forming partnerships in Brazil, India, Australia, and Germany; and publishing research on previous pilots, including one involving 61 companies in the U.K. During the six-month trial, 71% of workers reported feeling less burnout and 48% were more satisfied with work—and at least 90% of the organizations planned to stick with four days. To bridge the gap between curiosity and adoption, the nonprofit also launched an online course covering such topics as redesigning meetings and fostering efficient communication, and offered bespoke consulting services to help the larger companies…

REAL-TIME PAYMENTS HAVE BEEN A DREAM IN THE UNITED States for decades, but the financial capital of the world has lagged behind other countries, including China, India, and Japan. Recent events such as the 2021 GameStop drama, where the stock's extreme volatility stressed brokerages in part because of the multiday process to settle transactions on the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network, led to calls for modernized payment rails. Plaid, which provides the digital plumbing for more than 8,000 fintech apps to interoperate with over 12,000 financial institutions, has ushered in a system that moves money at the speed of the internet, while real-time networks, such as the Federal Reserve's FedNow, are still being rolled out. In late 2022, the company introduced Plaid Signal, a transaction risk engine that uses machine…

WHILE MANY MUSIC industry veterans greeted the arrival of generative AI last year with dread, Universal Music Group (UMG) saw opportunity. The world's largest music company has been coordinating the industry's response to the technology while working behind the scenes to rewrite the way streaming royalties work— and doing both under the banner of finding artist-centric solutions to the threat of AI. Alongside the Recording Industry Association of America, UMG helped assemble a coalition of 150-plus organizations last year for the Human Artistry Campaign, which established a framework for the ethical use of AI. UMG has since used that policy structure to lobby Congress for stronger AI regulations and to guide strategic partnerships that take advantage of the technology. At the same time, UMG has cannily used the flood of…

WITH MORE THAN 9,400 SATELLITES ORBITING EARTH AT LAST count, being able to dodge space junk and avoid collisions has become critical to the space industry. Increasingly, companies are turning to Slingshot Aerospace for help. “We are building the common operating picture for space,” says Audrey Schaffer, VP of strategy and policy for the California-based company, which collects data from multiple sources and then uses AI to predict where objects are going to be and identify anomalies (like a Russian satellite it found reportedly gathering intelligence last October). In 2023, Slingshot expanded its optical tracking network to 150 proprietary telescopes and ultrawide-field-of-view sensors. It also added its first low-Earth-orbit “staring” telescope system, which can take in most of the visible sky in a given location at once (seven more are…

HOW DO YOU TURN A centuries-old game like chess into a spectator sport? Like any good chess match, it requires making the right moves well before advancing the attack. For Chess.com, that meant “investing in content and community,” says cofounder and CEO Erik Allebest. Over the past several years, the freemium chess platform has become known for not just its online chessboards but also its viral chess bots (which simulate the play of grandmasters, sports pros such as the NBA's Luka Dončić, and even skillful cats) and tournaments featuring celebrity amateurs. Most significantly, it's pulled an evergrowing stable of Twitch streamers and YouTube experts into its orbit, equipping them with tools for their streams and videos, from ad-free game boards to ways to let them play their followers. Helping get…

When Chief Operating Officer Stephen Tober joined software company Giant Machines in 2018, his first order of business was to move his fast-growing team out of their shared coworking space in midtown Manhattan. The malfunctioning equipment and unstocked restrooms were bad enough, but the bigger issue was the culture. Tober would encounter folks playing ping-pong, drinking beer in the common room, or napping on their desks midafternoon. “ We were bringing in clients from big banks and financial firms, and the environment didn't reflect [our] seriousness and professionalism,” he says. That all changed four years ago, however, when Tober first set foot in Convene, a hospitality company that offers meeting, event, and workspaces in the U.S. and U.K. Tober found the experience to be much more aligned with his needs.…

THE COMPANY THAT dented the universe in 2022 continues to leave its mark. OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM), released in March 2023, is considered 10 times more powerful than its predecessor, discerning context and nuance better, as well as delivering more accurate and coherent answers. GPT-4 Turbo, released in November, can take in about 300 pages of text in a single prompt, has knowledge of more recent information, and costs less for developers to access. According to OpenAI CTO Brad Lightcap, there are now more than 2 million developers building on OpenAI's API, and more than 90% of the 500 largest companies use its products. GPT-4's debut was just one of several new offerings from OpenAI in 2023, including a ChatGPT Plus subscription ($20 per month) and a version…

1 Blood Extraction Patients take mobilization medicine,” which moves blood stem cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream; their blood is collected. 2 Cell Separation The patient's blood is separated into different cell types. HSPCs—special cells that give rise to other blood cell types—will be used to manufacture Casgevy. 3 Modification The HSPCs are shipped to a manufacturing site where they are modified using CRISPRCas9. The system uses a snippet of synthetic RNA attached to an enzyme called Cas9 to form a “construct,” which works like a pair of scissors to cut DNA at a selected site in a cell's genome. 4 Cell Production To make Casgevy, the CRISPRCas9 construct targets a gene called BCL11A, which turns off production of fetal hemoglobin in adults. Cutting out this gene allows…

A 65-YEAR-OLD DOLL THAT AMERICANS have had mixed feelings about for at least half that time never exactly screamed “summer blockbuster.” Yet when Mattel made the brave decision to put Barbie in the hands of producer and star Margot Robbie and writer-director Greta Gerwig, an unlikely fairy tale unfolded. By empowering the filmmakers to subvert Barbie's established brand values and messaging—and parody Mattel in the process—the company opened up boundless new revenue potential for its signature product. “It's all about bringing the best talent in the industry” to a film “and trusting their creative process,” says Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz. The Mattel and Warner Bros. coproduction earned $1.4 billion globally, making it the highest-grossing film of 2023. (Savvy partnerships with brands such as Xbox, Airbnb, and Gap helped stoke excitement.)…

HOW DO YOU MAKE A MUSIC GROUP INTO A BLUEchip advertising product? For Hybe, the $6 billion market cap K-pop company behind BTS, it starts with developing a strong brand identity. Since Hybe's five-member girl group NewJeans debuted in 2022, the band has stood out for its analog vibe, R&B-adjacent songs, and fuzzy, dreamy visuals. This creative direction is care of Min Hee-jin, the former graphic designer who is CEO of Hybe's ADOR label. “My background is my weapon,” she says. “I think an image can be expressed in graphics but also in sound.” As the group's albums have sold millions and garnered critical acclaim, ADOR has cleverly pulled brands into the NewJeans universe. In addition to being ambassadors for the likes of Chanel, Gucci, and Dior, the band members…

WHATSAPP—LONG vital to users around the world—is making inroads at home; the U.S. is now the Meta subsidiary's fastest-growing market. This is due both to new privacy-focused features such as Channels, which allows creators to message thousands of users while maintaining those users' anonymity, and decisions that WhatsApp has made to capitalize on the fragmented way users increasingly organize their lives online. Gen Z tend to categorize their activity into different chats, use apps for distinct purposes, and customize features in ways social media hasn't previously supported. “The user will always be in control of the content that they see—there's no feed or algorithm recommending content to you,” says Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp's director of product. It's just what young users want to hear.…

LAUNCHED IN 2018 IN THE wake of disastrous data breaches at Equifax, Yahoo, and Facebook, Vanta helps companies automate many of the manual tasks involved in complying with security and privacy standards. The company was initially focused on helping startups attain SOC 2 certification, which attests to an organization's trustworthiness when it comes to customer data. But amid increasing regulation and the growing fraud and privacy risks that come with AI, Vanta's mandate is expanding. Valued at $1.6 billion and armed with $203 million in capital, it's been supercharging its platform to help organizations address new risks. The ongoing question, says founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo, is how do all these companies show that they are trustworthy with this data? Through a dashboard, companies can continuously monitor security and privacy…

AI: IT'S ALL FUN AND games until a company gets hurt. As CEOs hurry to pilot and implement new generative AI tools, their chief information officers have been worried about how to monitor and measure their products and systems for such things as bias, safety or security gaps, and lack of compliance with company policies and regulations. Credo AI, which Navrina Singh founded in 2020 after she recognized this issue while commercializing Microsoft's enterprise AI services in the late 2010s, provides clients with a cloud-based AI platform that meets this moment. Last May, Credo AI rolled out new governance products to manage the special risks of generative AI tools, including data leakage, toxic output, and security vulnerabilities. These services have helped Credo AI win such customers as Booz Allen, Mastercard,…

1926 Thirteen years after installing the moving assembly line, Ford Motor Co. adopts a five-day workweek, shortened from six, inspiring other companies to do the same. 1956 In a speech during the Eisenhower reelection campaign, then Vice President Richard Nixon predicts such prosperity that the country will embrace a four-day work-week “in the not-too-distant future.” 2008 To cut office operating costs, Utah implements a four-day, 10-hour-a-day workweek for state employees. The move ends in 2011 amid questions over the size of the savings. 2018 Andrew Barnes, founder of New Zealand–based estate-planning service Perpetual Guardian, implements a trial of a four-day week at his company. The results inspire him to cofound 4 Day Week Global. 2020–2021 Progressive politicians from New Zealand to the U.S. champion a shorter week to combat burnout…

1 All-Seeing Eye The Horus system links multiple cameras, allowing it to monitor a combined 360-degree swath of the night sky to collect position and brightness data on most low-Earth-orbit spacecraft and debris. 2 Going Deep Slingshot's gimbaled Varda telescopes offer the same types of position and brightness data that Horus does but can detect smaller objects, or same-size objects farther from Earth. 3 Data Shower Info from both systems is processed by Slingshot's software and provided on a continual basis to its customers, from commercial satellite operators to civil space agencies.…

ADVERTISING AND MARKETING 1. Uncommon 2. Gut 3. Deutsch LA 4. The Martin Agency 5. The Coca-Cola Co. 6. Wieden+Kennedy 7. Translation 8. Nike 9. McCann Worldgroup 10. Superconnector Studios 11. Mischief @ No Fixed Address 12. REI 13. Pencil 14. KFC 15. Ogilvy AGRICULTURE 1. Monarch Tractor 2. Cibus 3. Innovafeed 4. Biome Makers 5. Hazel Technologies 6. Carbonwave 7. Kipster 8. Farm Journal 9. InnerPlant 10. Aigen APPLIED AI (See page 84) ARCHITECTURE 1. REX 2. ZGF 3. NBBJ 4. Practice for Architecture and Urbanism 5. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 6. WRNS Studio 7. Arcadis 8. HWKN Architecture 9. Patrick Tighe Architecture 10. HMC Architects ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 1. Nvidia 2. Microsoft 3. OpenAI 4. Credo AI 5. Midjourney 6. Meta 7. Anthropic 8. Cohere 9. Databricks 10. Grammarly 11. CrowdStrike…

NVIDIA FOR BRINGING THE CHIPS TO THE AI PARTY “IN THE 1920S, WATER WENT INTO A GENERATOR, AND DC POWER CAME OUT. NOW ELECTRONS GO INTO A GENERATOR, AND INTELLIGENCE COMES OUT.” I'M CHAT TING WITH NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG AT the chip giant's Silicon Valley headquarters, where one of its DGX H100 computing modules sits partially disassembled before us. Stuffed with blazingly fast processors and other cutting-edge components, the box, which can sell for as much as $500,000, is a foundational building block of the supercomputers used by huge companies, startups, and universities alike to power transformative new AI experiences, and Huang has turned to a previous technological revolution to explain its significance. It's an evocative comparison: AI running on Nvidia hardware changing everyday life as profoundly as electricity…

HOW DID UNCRUSTABLES become a ubiquitous adult snack? Gradually, then suddenly (with apologies to Ernest Hemingway). From Uncrustables' humble beginnings 25 years ago as a no-fuss school lunch option, the frozen, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have become a national phenomenon through word of mouth. Smucker produced 1 million Uncrustables per day in 2015, 3 million by 2022, and almost 5 million last year yet has still struggled to keep up with demand. Last year, everyone from Drake to the Kelce brothers revealed their love of the snack. The company spent years perfecting the form, focusing mostly on keeping the bread pillowy, air-pocketfree, and leakless. That required proprietary equipment as well as a special rounded loaf shape that Smucker won't say much else about. “Imagine a scenario where we…

ANY WHERE YOU LOOK in the entertainment ecosystem, Taylor Swift is dominant. Her career-spanning Eras Tour surpassed $1 billion in revenue in December, and it's just getting started internationally. Aided by her strategy of rerecording her masters, she accounted for 1.3% of all songs streamed in the U.S. last year and sold more than 1 million vinyl copies of 1989 (Taylor's Version) after its October release. She took home Album of the Year at the 2024 Grammys, and her next album is imminent. And her concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, upended Hollywood. Not only did Eras become an instant concert movie, available seven months after the tour began, but Swift's Taylor Swift Productions struck a groundbreaking distribution agreement with AMC Theatres after negotiations with the major film studios…

SINCE LOOP'S LAUNCH in 2016, the company has created eye - catching, meant-to-be-seen earplugs for a range of attenuation levels, from a full-quiet model to a pair that offers mild noise reduction. But more models led to new consumer behavior: The company discovered in 2021 that its superfans were swapping their Loops in and out for different scenarios up to 12 times a day. Two years and 30 prototypes later—in October 2023—Loop launched the Loop Switch as one earplug to unify them all, leading to $100 million in annual sales. The Switch fits into your ear like a traditional Loop, but by twisting the circular piece that sits atop your ear canal—a brilliant bit of micromechanics that adjusts internal filters by micrometers—you can toggle among three different attenuation levels to…

MANY POWER UTILITIES in developing countries are unable to extend power lines, let alone clean energy, to rural users. In these areas, high-polluting diesel generators are often the norm— if there's any electricity at all. Manoj Sinha, cofounder and CEO of Husk Power Systems, has been on a 15-year quest to give millions of people access to cleaner electricity and more. The company has deployed more than 200 mini-grids across India and Nigeria powered by a combination of solar and biomass energy and batteries (with some diesel when needed). Husk's systems have reached more than 500,000 people and 10,000 shops, factories, clinics, and other small businesses. Husk has also expanded into e-commerce, with an app that sells energy-efficient options for its new outlets: appliances, electronics, and manufacturing machines—with financing to…

A MAJOR CLImate change culprit is hiding in your kitchen: food scraps. Apple cores, carrot tops, and uneaten bits of dinner are a surprisingly potent source of emissions, spewing methane as they decompose in landfills. Mill, a stylish garbage bin (really!), dehydrates food scraps and grinds them up into a fine, odorless powder that can then be upcycled into chicken feed, offering a lighter-lift alternative to kitchen composting. Designing lustworthy hardware to inspire climateconscious behavior change has become a specialty of Mill cofounder Matt Rogers, a former Apple software engineer who cocreated the Nest smart thermostat. With city-run compost collection programs struggling to take hold, Mill offers an appealing alternative. “You can't start at the curb,” says Rogers. “You need to do it at the kitchen level.” The company sold…

LAWSUITS FILED by companies such as the New York Times and Getty Images against generative AI companies like Midjourney and OpenAI have exposed the precarity of tools trained on unlicensed data. But Adobe, unlike most prominent companies building generative AI tools, has avoided this original sin. Adobe's Firefly, a generative AI–powered image-creation tool released this past summer, was trained exclusively on licensed imagery, including Adobe's own stock material and images in the public domain. “Our customer base is people who make a living doing creative work,” says Ely Greenfield, Adobe's CTO of digital media. “It was clear from day one that they were going to be concerned about this.” Firefly is a robust, wellreviewed tool offering a range of new features for pro designers and novices alike. According to the…

WHO SAYS YOU'RE NOT a competitive athlete? Certainly not Christian Toetzke, cofounder of Hyrox, a fitness competition that launched in Germany in 2017 and is now flexing its way around the globe. Toetzke realized a few years ago that the biggest sport in the world was working out. “About 200 million people have gym memberships, but they had no benchmark other than burning calories and nothing to train for other than aesthetics,” he says. When it came to regular gym-going, “the gamification piece was missing.” Hyrox partners with gyms to train fitness devotees to perform everyday exercises better and then offers them the opportunity to compete against their peers. The competition is the same everywhere: eight “functional” exercises—sled pulling, burpee broad jumps, rowing, etc.—interspersed with 1K runs. (Unlike other mass-participation…

DESPITE THE FACT THAT 24% to 36% of incarcerated people in the U.S. have opioid use disorder (OUD), most don't receive treatment—in part because many drug courts don't offer treatment programs. When people leave prison with untreated substance-abuse issues, there's a high chance they'll end up incarcerated again. “It's a revolving door— you relapse and end up going back,” says Ankit Gupta, founder and CEO of Bicycle Health, which offers medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) treatment via telehealth, as well as the option to meet with a recovery coach or support group virtually. In 2023, the company moved further toward its goal of making MOUD treatment more accessible, partnering with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and WellPath, which works with vulnerable patients in challenging clinical settings, to prescribe medications…

PIVOT BIO'S products help replace fossil fuel-based fertilizer with microbes that deliver nitrogen from the air directly to plant roots. The microbes— genetically edited versions of organisms that naturally coexist with crops—produce nitrogen when the plants need it. Pivot's first product, applied directly to fields during planting, replaces up to 25% of standard nitrogen fertilizer; in 2023, the company released a coating for corn, oat, and other seeds so farmers can plant with no additional step. “You're planting the same seed,” says Pivot Bio CEO Chris Abbott. “It now fixes nitrogen.” The products are being used on more than 5 million acres of cornfields, and last year Pivot doubled its manufacturing and distribution capacity, taking in more than $100 million in revenue. It also designed a platform that helps participating…

WITH STUDENT LOAN DEBT BALlooning into a $1.8 trillion crisis, education entrepreneur Tade Oyerinde has developed an affordable alternative to a traditional four-year degree. In 2022, he launched Campus, the first national online community college. While most evangelizers for online education have pursued massive, asynchronous classes, Oyerinde is betting that live learning is the key to creating a better model of higher education. After a $29 million Series A round led by Sam Altman and Discord cofounder Jason Citron (topped up by an investment from Shaquille O'Neal in early 2024), Campus began offering associate degrees and certificate programs with both online and in-person classes last year. Campus has attracted professors from such colleges and universities as Princeton, NYU, Vanderbilt, and Spelman— in part by paying around $8,000 per class, or…

THE ONLY SOUND, ASIDE FROM STEADY RAIN STREAKING THE WINDOWS, is the muffled labor of two YC partners in a makeshift subterranean kitchen, where they are practicing a chicken and dumplings recipe to serve to a group of incoming founders. Like thousands of hopefuls before them, these founders will have 12 weeks to sprint toward product-market fit and notch the kind of growth metrics that wow investors on Demo Day, laying the foundation for unicorn status and possible Silicon Valley glory—no pressure. The gentle aroma of garlic drifts upward. Garry Tan, a YC alum (summer 2008) who was named president and CEO just over a year ago, enters a glass-enclosed meeting room at one end of the banquet hall–size space, a former shipyard powerhouse. On X, formerly known as Twitter,…