Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023/2024 i Inc. Magazine

I had just come offstage at the Inc. 5000 Conference with Deepak Chopra, and we were sitting in my suite with a few audio producers—arranging microphones, plugging wires into sockets, taking sound levels—to record an episode of Inc. Uncensored, one of our podcasts, in which my co-host, executive editor Diana Ransom, and I try to get to the sticky, more complicated, less-talked-about stuff behind the often polished success stories startups tell. Earlier, we had finished taping with Alli Webb, founder of Drybar and now Squeeze, and shortly I’d be returning to the stage to continue celebrating the fastest-growing private companies in America. I was there with nearly my entire staff, and we were connecting with new Inc. Masters members for our annual retreat in Baja California Sur, Mexico, hearing stories…

“When I went on my first silent meditation retreat, in 2012, I was motivated by the promise of stress relief. I was working hard, stressed out, and had read about the therapeutic benefits. “The Vipassana retreat I went on was intense—10 hours of sitting meditation per day, for 10 days. No speaking, reading, or writing. No meals after noon. The bell for the day’s first sitting rings at 4:30 a.m., and if you try to skip it, a staff member comes into your room and pulls the sheets off you. It really is, as someone told me afterward, Buddha boot camp. “When I turned on my phone after the retreat, I was uninterested in the apps I had found so addictive. I also learned to notice physical signs of stress—shallow…

Kevin Guo and Dmitriy Karpman launched their company, Hive, with a strong theory: By training A.I. to flag online violence, nudity, and hate speech, they could provide content moderation on a massive scale. That theory turned out to be true—and netted them big-name clients like Reddit, BeReal, and Netflix. Recently, the com pany has become one of the top detectors of A.I.-generated content. According to Guo, as A.I.-made material proliferates, internet businesses and their customers need to protect themselves from new, cutting-edge forms of fraud. He spoke to Inc. to explain the emerging risks. “Because of the rise of generative A.I., the amount of content being produced online is going to quickly increase by a multiple of two or three, and that means businesses will need to know what they’re…

Capitalism sometimes gets a bad rap for putting the pursuit of money on a pedestal. But isn’t it a matter of perspective? Without profits, there would be nothing to plow into purpose. Hopes and dreams, sure, but those get you only so far. If you want to actually do something about the problems in this world—the injustices you want to correct, the inequities you want to eliminate, the emissions you want to curb—you need, well, capital. To honor companies that get this—and can prove it—we bring you Best in Business, our annual list of companies that put purpose before profit, or at least right up alongside it. Some build altruism into their business model, like Julie Products (page 54), a startup in NYC that donates one emergency contraception kit for…

Health Products CEO: Amanda E/J Morrison | Area of Impact: Social Justice Julie isn’t selling anything new. The emergency contraceptive levonorgestrel has been FDA-approved for over-the-counter use since 2006. But the women’s health brand is taking a new approach, based on a one-to-one donation program that’s been integral to the company’s business plan since its September 2022 launch. The plan, says co-founder and CEO Amanda E/J Morrison, is to become a force for women’s health care—no small ambition in such a polarized political environment. After co-founding the women-of-colorfocused beauty brand Mented Cosmetics in 2016, Morrison, 38, knew that she wanted her next company to be more mission-driven. With co-founders Julie Schott, 35, and Brian Bordainick, 38—who together started the pimple patch brand Starface in 2019—she asked: “How can we use…

As told to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin IT’S BEEN YEARS since Phil Libin helmed the organization-apps maker Evernote, but he just can’t resist trying to reshape the exhaustively inefficient business world. This founder is now running two remote companies with a total of 130 employees, and he spends a lot of time rethinking the post-industrial economy for knowledge workers. How do we measure asynchronous productivity? Can we eliminate the oppression of the persistent “on” of the internet? Can meetings be fewer and better? Why can’t our baseline be trust? At 51, the serial entrepreneur has learned to trust—and he has learned plenty more. 1 BREAK THE TYRANNY OF LINEAR TIME There’s a false assumption that work happens when people talk at one another in real time, in meetings or on Zoom calls.…

The Ex Factor: Kate Foster The longtime beauty exec had seen startup success before, and then Scarlett Johansson gave her a new role. In 2020, Kate Foster had just sold her startup, the product review site SwearBy, when a friend suggested she talk to Scarlett Johansson, who was looking for a partner to help launch a skin care company. Foster, 46, was reluctant to jump right back into the fray. “Startup life is allconsuming,” she says, and she wasn’t interested in being the workhorse behind a celebrity’s vanity project. Curiosity, however, eventually won out. The longtime fashion and beauty executive took the meeting and quickly learned that the Oscar-nominated actress wanted to build a company on more than just her own image. Together, they agreed to share starring roles as…

How Allyson Felix—the most decorated American track and field athlete in history— stepped into her own with her shoe brand, Saysh. Insider Expert advice from Inc.’s inner circle When Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix’s longtime sponsor Nike refused to build mater nity protections into her contract, the celebrated athlete did more than search for another running shoe option. She decided to make her own. In 2020, two years after her daughter was born, Felix co-founded Saysh (pronounced say-sh) with her brother, Wes Felix, a former champion sprinter. They hired footwear designer Tiffany Beers, who’d spent 13 years at Nike, and made a discovery: Women’s sneakers, it turns out, weren’t designed for women’s feet. Shoemakers used dimensions from men’s feet and mark eted sizeddown versions to women— an approach known as shrink…

1 JUNE 2020 Techstars New York City Accelerator Diem’s first funding paid salaries for its co-founders, an outsourced engineer, and two interns, one of whom became a full-time employee. Through this experience, Bates learned the importance of projecting confidence when pitching. “If you’re doubting yourself, why would someone invest money in you?” she asks. $120,000 2 DECEMBER 2020 - JUNE 2022 Angels, Friends and Family As you build a robust pipeline of potential VC funds, build your network of potential angels as well, Bates says. Through this network, Diem amassed six figures of funding to buoy operations. These investors offer other skills, too, she says: “I could send them a quick email and be like, ‘Hey, what do you think we should do here?’ ” $250,000 3 MARCH 2021 Acrew…

“For me, product creation always comes down to two things: There’s a big gap in the market to fill, and you can innovate and make something better. If you can do those two things, then you’re on to something. It’s going to be a decent business. But that innovation has to be real. You have to have a different approach and a best-in-class product. People inherently want to try things, but consumer habits are really hard to break. So it’s about showing customers where there is a real upside. The proof is in the product. You’ve got to create something that works as well as the rest and gives added benefits. “I think it was ultimately in those insights that Safely and our plant-based cleaning products were born. The brand…

“I could immediately tell as I started reading this book how much it resonated with Hill House,” says Nell Diamond (above), 35, founder of the New York Citybased clothing brand. After opening her third brick-andmortar storefront in 2023, Diamond read Jack Mitchell’s Hug Your Customers: Love the Results, recommended by a mentor. It taught her how to make customers happy online and IRL. “It’s about empowering employees to make the best decisions for customers. That could mean being flexible with a return policy if there’s been an issue in someone’s life. That also means getting to know customers— our Palm Beach store hosted a birthday shopping party for a customer. It makes me happy that our store managers feel like they can do those things on their own.” Hug Your…

Like many a novelist before him, Marcus Sakey valued the rite and reward of savoring a cocktail while pondering plot twists, especially with his good friend and drinking buddy David Crooch. But he also knew that gin, in particular, has a bad temper, and is nobody’s friend the next day. One evening, over drinks and a chess game, the pair pondered a new business plot: gin and whiskey analogs that could deliver the experience—the ritual— of a mixed drink without the alcohol. Laura Taylor was a corporate warrior, an engineer by training, who was marching along in a career with the likes of Rockwell, Accenture, IBM, and Tableau. She routinely mixed work and drinking until the drinking got to be a bit too routine. But trying to stop proved difficult,…

Consumer Products CEO: Nate Rajalingam | Area of Impact: Local Charities Lots of entrepreneurs donate a percentage of revenue to charity—typically in the low single digits. But Nate Rajalingam, 44, founder and CEO of Uncommon, has considerably upped the ante. He chose to donate 10 percent of revenue, a figure he says is truly meaningful. “It’s 100 percent alignment from everyone, that what we’re doing is bigger than all of us,” he says. “And if we do it correctly, we will all benefit—meaning our brands, we financially, as well as the community. And it seems to be working.” The Minneapolis-based sales agency reps some 40 brands sold at Target, half of which are minorityowned. It has doubled the number of brands it reps in the past year. Within its charity…

Consumer Products Co-CEOs: JeffRaider & Andy Katz-Mayfield Area of Impact: Mental Health Harry’s co-founders Jeff Raider, 43, and Andy Katz-Mayfield, 41, didn’t set out to help nearly two million men with their mental health. But while reviewing early user feedback on the men’s grooming line they launched in 2013, they were struck less by opinions on how many blades make for the perfect shave, and more by essays about the cathartic role grooming played in their customers’ lives and struggles with depression. “A lot of our guys didn’t have anyone to talk to,” Raider says. “They were reaching out to us for support.” Rather than shy away from the responsibility, Raider and Katz-Mayfield took it on. They learned that men account for 80 percent of suicides in the United States,…

JAMIE SIMINOFF CAN’T CONTAIN himself. The 47-year-old founder of doorbell-cum-home-security company Ring leans over the edge of the caramel leather sofa on his chartered private jet, like an excited child in the window seat. “There’s the river,” he says, craning his neck to spot a prize piece of land he owns 20,000 feet below. “The farm is going to be right over there now!” We’re flying over the patchwork fields of northeastern Missouri, far from his homes in Los Angeles, Nantucket, and Aspen, Colorado. Siminoff ’s 75-acre spread lies just outside La Belle, Missouri, a farm town of around 650 people whose population, like its primary indus try, has been slowly dwindling for 100 years. Siminoff, who sold Ring to Amazon in 2018 but didn’t leave the tech behemoth until…

If you own a business and have employees, you’ve probably come to understand that the right or wrong teammates can make or break a company. So, how to be sure that you have the right cooks in your kitchen? Find out in the following pages, where we’ve assembled a silver platter of insights from repeat Inc. 5000 honorees and other successful founders. They’ve shared their best practices for everything from determining your organizational hierarchy to designing C-suite roles and recruiting the right people to fill them. And if your menus aren’t a hit, we’ve included some strategies for fixing them. Bon appétit! To avoid chaos in the kitchen, everyone needs to know what they’re supposed to be doing and how their work relates to everyone else’s. A winning org chart…

Inc. 5000 COMPANY SPOTLIGHT N°192 2023 Ranking 2819% 3-Year Growth $20M 2022 Revenue 50 Employees Small business’s access to capital remains a huge barrier to growth. Banks are tightening credit availability under regulatory pressure at the same time as small and midsize ventures are seeking to scale their operations. Backd has stepped into that void to help growing companies obtain the capital they need to expand, says CEO Xan Myburgh, landing itself near the top of the 2023 Inc. 5000 list. Given that 99.9 percent of U.S. businesses are categorized as small—meaning having fewer than 500 employees—and were more than 33 million strong as of 2023, per the U.S. Small Business Administration, the market for small business lending is massive. At the same time, “banks don’t really play in this…

When Walter Driver co-founded the mobile gaming company Scopely in 2011, he never thought that one day it would have more than 100 million monthly players. As it approached that milestone, its wildly popular games like Marvel Strike Force and Yahtzee With Buddies also caught the attention of the Saudi government-backed esports company Savvy Games. In July 2023, Savvy acquired the Los Angeles- based Scopely for $4.9 billion, making it one of the largest gaming deals ever. We spoke to Driver about growth through acqui si tion, and how to negotiate a multibillion- dollar deal. The discussions with Savvy Games started organically, as we were introduced by mutual friends. While we weren’t actively looking to sell, we were always looking for opportunities to expand our potential. No matter how much…

Minimal design Saysh’s founders didn’t want the shoes to look overly feminine, hence their unfussy design. Better alignment As the Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association found in 2009, female feet differ in shape from male feet. The shoe’s wider forefoot and narrower heel align with the more triangular shape of women’s feet, preventing bunions and blisters, which are more common among women. Subtle elevation With a slight slant heel to toe, the design prevents overstretching of the Achilles tendon, which tightens and shortens in women who regularly wear high heels. Lighter step A relatively light foam midsole accounts for the average weight ranges of women, who typically weigh less than men.…

MAKE A MENTAL TO-DO LIST IN THE A.M. “Don’t touch your phone for the first 30 minutes of the day, if you can help it. When you pick up your phone first thing in the morning, you’re wiring your brain for distraction. You’re in a relaxed, very suggestible state when you wake up. During that time, I do a one-minute visualization exercise. I imagine myself at the end of the day, saying, ‘It was such a wonderful day. I crushed it.’ Then I imagine what has to happen for me to feel that way: I think of three personal things and three professional things that, if accomplished, would make my day a win.” BREAK FOR LUNCH “When you eat lunch without working at the same time, you go into something…

“We are not investing in people per se. Instead, we are investing in our people. We are providing specialized training to our peak performers, in terms of sciencebased strategies to increase productivity and flow state.” —Steve Weisbrot, president and CEO, Angeion Group, Inc. 5000 (2023, 2019) “Financial planning and analysis software to measure key metrics faster by linking operational and accounting data, and A.I. to interpret results more effectively. We made a big investment two years ago, and already that software is obsolete. This new investment is more robust by multiples.” —Mackey McNeill, founder, Mackey, Inc. 5000 (2022) “Marketing and PR. We have a voice and are good with content— now we just need to make sure people hear it and see it.” —Brianna Rooney, CEO, TalentPerch, Inc. 5000 (2022,…

RETROSPECTIVELY, IT’S EASY to understand which parts of our education have most impacted us. I can’t say my college European History 101 class helps me as an entrepreneur, but my seventh-grade typing class continues to serve me well, and the art class I took that same year opened me up to seeing the world in new ways. But there’s one class I never got to take, and it’s one I desperately wish had been on offer. I’m talking about education on transitional intelligence. In the past, Americans didn’t change jobs much: Half of Americans age 65 and older have stayed with an employer for at least 20 years. Today, the average worker holds 12 jobs throughout their career. Life is far less linear than it used to be, but we…

Rohit Bhargava | INC.’S NON-OBVIOUS BUSINESS BOOKS The founder of the Non-Obvious Company, Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator and best-selling author of nine books. Seinfeld was never a show about nothing. Whether joking about napping at work, double-dipping, or standing too close to others when talking, Seinfeld exposed aspects of American culture that usually go unmentioned. This is the interesting thing about culture—it’s usually invisible, even as it surrounds us. But how much does understanding culture really matter for ambitious entrepreneurs? In For the Culture, awardwinning marketer and University of Michigan professor Marcus Collins argues that culture is the most powerful force driving consumer behavior, and explains how business leaders can use cultural understanding to influence action. Deconstructing culture is notoriously difficult. As Collins writes, “Culture is our everyday…

MOD PIZZA CEO: Scott Svenson Area of Impact: Second-Chance Hiring PARAMOUNT SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS CEO: Pramod Sajja Area of Impact: Economic Opportunity SEMPRE HEALTH CEO: Anurati Mathur Area of Impact: Health Care SOURCEPASS CEO: Chuck Canton Area of Impact: Career Development TOOTRIS CEO: Alessandra Lezama Area of Impact: At-Risk Youth UNCOMMON CEO: Nate Rajalingam Area of Impact: Local Charities VIA TRANSPORTATION CEO: Daniel Ramot Area of Impact: Accessibility PORTABLE RESTROOM TRAILERS CEO: Teri Pahon Area of Impact: Homelessness REED ART DEPARTMENT CEO: Jeff Staple Area of Impact: Racial Justice SAIE CEO: Laney Crowell Area of Impact: Reproductive Rights E-Commerce CEO: Ahmed Mady | Area of Impact: Immigration ADVERTISING ACADIA CEO: Jared Belsky Area of Impact: Upskilling EYEFUL MEDIA CEO: Antonella Pisani Area of Impact: Community Development LEADS NEAR ME CEO: Ryan…

A San Francisco software startup hawking the stuff of ashrams seemed pretty far out in 2012. Over a decade later, guided meditation company Calm has expanded its app’s offerings to sleep-inducing stories, mental health products, and soothing music. The app has been downloaded by more than 150 million people, and Calm Business—the company’s fastestexpanding product—is now used by 10 million employees of 3,500 firms. We asked co-founder Michael Acton Smith how he finds flow, tunes out, and—you know—stays calm. You weren’t a lifelong student of meditation before starting Calm. How did it become personal for you? There was a time I didn’t fully understand meditation or mindfulness. My previous startup, Mind Candy, which made Moshi Monsters, was growing like crazy for years. We were the hottest London startup; everyone thought…

Inc. 5000 COMPANY SPOTLIGHT N°1365 2023 Ranking 428% 3-Year Growth $143M 2022 Revenue 250 Employees By the middle of March, Covid had shut down all the events Access had planned for its clients for 2020. State and federal regulations prohibited large gatherings, and since Access specializes in events for large groups, the company was effectively out of business. That month, there was “a complete halt,” says Danielle Phippen, chief creative officer at Access. “Everything was canceled— hundreds of millions of dollars canceled—gone,” she recalls. There was no work in sight for months and no reliable forecasts for when business might resume. But Phippen and a small team of investors were confident the company could eventually rebuild, so they gambled, bought the company from private equity, and crafted a strategy for…

Inc. 5000 COMPANY SPOTLIGHT N°720 2023 Ranking 9 Full-Time Employees 815% 3-Year Growth $5M Top Member’s Sales There is a reason why Amazon started as an online marketplace for books, notes Luke Sample, co-founder of BookProfits, a technology and training company that helps existing and aspiring entrepreneurs build online businesses selling used books. Demand for books—particularly textbooks—is large and often predictable. And selling used books can generate a sizeable profit, as Sample first experienced by helping his wife, a college instructor, sell textbooks at the end of her semester. The experience inspired Sample, a serial entrepreneur, to launch an online book-selling business with co-founder and fellow serial entrepreneur Jon Shugart. The two used their backgrounds in software development and online marketing to create several innovative technologies for the used books…