Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2019 från Inc. Magazine

April 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of Inc. magazine’s debut issue, and we’ve thought long and hard about how best to mark that milestone. In 1989, when Inc. turned 10, our founder, Bernard Goldhirsh, noted the publication’s “opportunity to shed light on company builders for the rest of America to appreciate,” and that he “saw the world of company builders as the continuum of economic creation in this country.” Thus, Inc.’s mission was “to encourage a large number of entrepreneurs to work away if this process of creation and economic growth were to continue.” Inc. remains proud to encourage creation and growth. That’s why, for our 40th birthday, we created the Founders Project. The Founders Project will take Inc.’s mission off the page and screen and into the real world.…

TERRAFURIE • noun “Extreme anger unleashed within those who can clearly see the selfdestructive tendencies in the current forms of industrial-technological society, but feel unable to change the direction.” Nope, sorry, nobody springs to mind. Source: Glenn A. Albrecht MONET • noun A joint venture between Toyota and SoftBank that integrates autonomous vehicles and the internet of things to ultimately “launch MobilityasaService businesses.” A portmanteau of mobility and network—but you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see the MONEY. Source: SoftBank BLOCKSPLAIN • verb When a techbro shares his crypto algo while manspreading in his Lambo. Source: Twitter user @chaosprime OMNIBUBBLE • noun “The inescapable conclusion is that we’re encircled by a series of omnipotent financial bubbles that will ultimately suffocate the world economy.” All together now: There may…

Anne Wojcicki Co-founder and CEO of 23andMe I was raised in this family culture where there was the assumption that you’re never done—you can always make something better. I would write a paper and then I’d give it to my mom, and it would come back solid red, and she’d be like, “You can either turn this in and you’ll get a C or a D, or you can rewrite it.” And then you rewrite it. “Well, now it’s better. Now it’s a B.” And you want to rewrite it again. I really admire how my mom teaches kids. She doesn’t use punishment. It’s, “You turned this in and it was bad. Learn.” I do that with people here. Someone might execute on a project really poorly, and I give…

“We do a companywide survey on a yearly basis, and some employees say they don’t want to drink or do happy hours. We’ve previously organized volunteer activities; last year, we donated 250 hours for Habitat for Humanity. And we just did our first family night—scooters and foosball and sandwiches—and met one another’s families. It was a huge hit.” MICHAEL KURLAND Founder and CEO, Branded Group (construction) 2018 RANK NO. 311 GROWTH 1,576% REVENUE $13.3 MILLION “When you do something halfway, it feels forced. Treat social bonding with as much care as your company’s business: Put the right person in charge, and set a real budget. You might spend thousands of dollars an hour on employee pay, so a $200 pizza bill isn’t that big a deal. To have everyone feeling…

Once demonized, criminalized, and the target of billions of dollars of ultimately failed law enforce ment, marijuana is now a legal recreational drug for people 21 and older in 10 states, as well as Washington, D.C. New Jersey is ready to roll. People like pot, apparently. They also need it. Medically prescribed cannabis is permitted in 33 states, with Utah and Missouri the latest to approve it, in November. For businesses, particularly multistate ones, this legal and societal shift is forcing a rethink about the zero-tolerance attitude that prevailed just a few years ago. Such a policy may now be a competitive disadvantage, especially in an ever-tightening labor market. This new reality demands that employers “closely examine current policies, or their absence, tied to marijuana usage, update or change them…

Wilfred Pinfold is not an arrogant guy. But who would have blamed him if, after 23 years at Intel, he considered Silicon Valley’s primacy a given? Then, in 2015, he and three partners launched Urban Systems, a Portland, Oregon–based integrator of smart-city technologies. They had a choice: Work solely with tech firms and cities in the U.S., or go where the action was. For Urban Systems, the action was in Europe and Asia. Cities there were older, less car-centric, and more open to alternative transportation. The company partnered with startups in Portugal and the U.K. to develop technology that plots routes for buses, rail, rental bikes, and rideshares. In Hong Kong, the company worked with another startup, in which it holds a minority stake, to investigate deploying autonomous vehicles in…

JEFF KNAUSS Co-founder of the Digital Hyve, a marketing agency that ranks 52nd on the 2018 Inc. 5000 MEIKA HOLLENDER Co-founder and CEO of Sustain Natural, which sells all-natural feminine hygiene and sexual health products Won’t politics alienate a big chunk of your customers? • When you take a stand, you can polarize the people who are actually keeping you in business. It could even be fatal for companies that have only a few clients or customers. • From day one, we’ve said we give 10 percent of our profits to women’s reproductive health organizations—primarily Planned Parenthood. Some people do abandon us, but we believe that issue builds a really strong consumer base. Should a company take a political stand when all employees may not agree? • We have 36…

In 2009, a wind-powered vehicle with no engine blazed across the Mojave Desert at a recordsetting 126.2 mph. The craft was designed by British engineer Richard Jenkins, who next decided to build one for the seas that could make the first unmanned trip around the globe. “There was no real long-term strategy,” Jenkins admits, “other than record-breaking, because that was more fun than getting a real job.” Fast-forward a decade, and Saildrone—producer of solar-powered unmanned sailboats designed to collect real-time ocean data that’s typically been prohibitively expensive to gather—is a very real, venture-backed business. The Alameda, California–based startup’s customers include governmental bodies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, as well as fishing companies and high-performance open-water-sports brands. Quantifying Global Warming “If you want to understand the planet,…

“You are making a valiant effort to do something that, in the long run, could be very important.” THE MENTOR Gary Hirshberg Hirshberg helped put organics on the map when he launched Stonyfield Farm in 1983. These days, he’s focused on sustainability issues and nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs. “I want to take that purpose-driven philosophy and apply it to this new category.” THE MENTEE Emily Darchuk A food scientist armed with an MBA, Darchuk has a bold idea for a new kind of liquor. Activision, the first third-party creator of video games, was launched in 1979 by disgruntled Atari employees. In its first decade, it grappled with a patentinfringement suit, the collapse of the console game market, a failed merger, an ill-starred CEO, and the founders’ departure. It…

ENROLL IN BRAND REGISTRY 2.0. If your brand is trademarked, you can upload all your product information into this database, which Amazon uses for automated enforcement of intellectual property rights. You’ll get pinged if a seller is doing something fishy, like using your logo or shipping from a country where you don’t have distribution. With Brand Registry, straightforward cases of trademark or copyright infringement “can be addressed by Amazon’s system very quickly,” says Andy Burger, vice president of business development at Ideoclick, a Seattle firm that helps brands manage their e-commerce channels. Still, the sheer volume can be daunting, notes June Lai, whose company, Catalyst, issues hundreds of takedown requests every month over copies of its waterproof phone accessories. It’s “like playing Whac-a-Mole,” she says. SIGN UP (AND PAY UP)…

Step into one of the 39 Luke’s Lobster locations from New York City to Taiwan and it’s easy to pretend you’re visiting a classic New England seafood shack: Diners order at simple wooden counters, sit at rough-hewn tables, and munch on a limited (and exceedingly tasty) menu of lobster, crab, and shrimp rolls and chowders, accompanied by simple bags of potato chips. But the Saco, Maine–and Brooklyn-based company’s restaurants are actually the last step in an extensive, tightly integrated seabed-totable operation—one that nearly broke the founders, Luke Holden and Ben Conniff, when they first attempted to set it up. Luke When I was growing up, my father owned and ran one of the largest lobster processors in North America. It was an intense, high-risk business with very low margins. He…

18,000 Approximate number of people employed by the $1.5 billion-a-year legal marijuana industry in Colorado (where recreational use was approved in 2014), according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve. 67% Segment of Americans who favor outright legalization, according to a recent Gallup poll. $10 billion Amount of sales tied to the legal marijuana market nationwide in 2017, according to Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics. That was up 33 percent from 2016. 603 Number of fundraising deals in 2018, worth $14.1 billion, according to Viridian Capital Advisors.…

When Gene Berdichevsky and Alex Jacobs moved into a rented house in Atlanta in September 2011, they figured it would be six months, maybe nine, before they’d made enough progress on their startup road map to return to the San Francisco Bay Area in triumph. They were off by only a couple of years. One of Tesla’s earliest engineering leaders, Berdichevsky wanted to make a new kind of lithium-ion battery, one that would represent the first meaningful advance in power storage in more than 20 years. By using ultra-efficient silicon rather than graphite to store the ions that provide the charge, he believed his company, Sila Nanotechnologies, could accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy. Berdichevsky knew companies like his were a standing joke among battery makers. The industry had…

How much money do you need to start something new? Ten years ago, the average cost of starting a business was $31,150, according to one study. That seems laughably large today. While some businesses still require lots of money to get off the ground, 42 percent of respondents to the 2018 Inc. 5000 CEO survey said they used less than $5,000 to start their first company. While there’s no one answer for how much money you’ll need to scrape together, these five questions can help you set your startup budget. Adapted from Startup Money Made Easy: The Inc. Guide to Every Financial Question About Starting, Running, and Growing Your Business, by Inc. editor-at-large Maria Aspan, published in February by Harper Collins. 1) What kind of business do you want to…

Sixty-eight teams, 13 cities, buzzer beaters, surprise winners—what makes March Madness spectacular also makes it a logistical nightmare. Enter Zach Maurides’s Teamworks. In 2005, Maurides, a lineman on Duke’s football team, was exhausted from juggling practices, meetings, scrimmages, and classes. “There were 10 or 15 parts to our program,” Maurides says. “They didn’t work together cohesively.” He created software so the staffers could message and book time slots with studentathletes. The football team adopted it, Maurides coldcalled other schools, and today the Durham, North Carolina–based Teamworks, which has raised $21 million, charges NFL, NBA, and MLB teams up to sixfigure sums annually to use its platform. In 2016, the NCAA started using Teamworks for March Madness—tracking everything from itineraries to practice schedules. Which is why the likes of Duke’s freshman…

If you have started a company, sooner or later you’re going to get asked—or ask yourself—this question: “Would you do it again?” If your company happens to be among the 25 percent of venturebacked startups that succeed, it’s an easy question to answer. But if your company is not successful—if it runs out of money, or fails to find a market, or plateaus too soon, or is sold at a loss, or comes to any other disappointing end—then this question will dog you for months, barking at you with regret and second guesses. And, if you’re like me, you will do everything you can to not answer it forthrightly. Note that this question is unlike “What would you do differently?” That one is too easy. We all have a list…

Where did the idea for Partpic come from? I started my career at Google in California, but after a couple of years there, I decided to move closer to home, to Atlanta. I got a job at McMaster-Carr, an industrial-parts distributor. We had thousands of parts, but I found working in customer service that people often didn’t know what these parts were called or how to describe them. I thought there had to be a way to organize all the products so they could be searched easily. That led me to found Partpic, a way for customers to search for and order parts using computer-vision technology on their smartphone. Did you consider returning to Silicon Valley to start the company? Silicon Valley is not the be all and end all.…

Commingling To enable speedier fulfillment, sellers can opt to have orders fulfilled with whatever inventory Amazon deems most convenient, regardless of who owns it. Problems arise when two items treated as interchangeable aren’t—as when one is a counterfeit. FBA An acronym for ‘fulfillment by Amazon.’ Through this program, third-party sellers can let Amazon handle warehousing and shipment of their inventory—for a fee. Gating Normally, any seller on Amazon is eligible to sell any product. But sometimes Amazon imposes limits, requiring the brand owner’s approval to sell. Amazon doesn’t publicize the criteria it uses to determine which brands get gated. Hijacking Selling a private-label product on a listing created by the owner of the brand. Beyond merely skimming off sales, hijackers can use various tricks to gain control of a listing—including…

As the founder and CEO of the Las Vegas–based software-development firm Gunner Technology, Cody Swann updates apps for his clients all the time. Occasionally, his employees have to take the apps offline to do this—after informing the clients, of course. But these alerts can get forgotten—and one time, after ignoring such a warning, a client got angry about being unable to access the software and threatened to fire Swann’s firm. Fortunately, Swann keeps receipts. He forwarded the client his initial email notice that the app would be unavailable, and saved the business: “I got a short reply telling me not to worry about it.” How often does he face similar disputes, with customers who don’t realize they’re at fault? Swann laughs: “Almost every day.” There will always be customers who…

Given that marijuana is becoming an acceptable recreational drug, should you do away with drug testing? Companies are headed in that direction. “It seems a little weird to think we are so interested in whether somebody has used marijuana in the last month rather than whether they’ve got the skills to perform the job,” says Peter Cappelli, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School. With unemployment at 4 percent, pools of capable job prospects are getting shallow; the prospect of a drug test evaporates more of that pool. AutoNation, for example, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida–based car retailer with dealerships across the country, maintains drug- and alcohol-free workplaces. But the company no longer includes marijuana use in hiring decisions. Cappelli believes business owners should rethink pot…

FISKER Los Angeles EV designer Henrik Fisker hired Sakti3’s co-founder to develop solid-state batteries with faster recharge times and lower resistance than those with the wet chemistry of traditional lithium-ion cells. PANASONIC Tokyo The Japanese consumer electronics firm is currently the world’s largest supplier of lithium-ion batteries. It operates Giga factories in a joint venture with Tesla. CONTEMPORARY AMPEREX TECHNOLOGY (CATL) Ningde, China Another industry powerhouse, and supplier to many carmakers, the company is on track to overtake Panasonic. DYSON Malmesbury, England The appliance maker has lots of experience in batteries. Sir James Dyson now wants to produce an EV. He bought Sakti3 to help that effort—but recently wrote off the investment. QUANTUMSCAPE San Jose, California Another entrant in the solid-state sweepstakes, the company recently got a $100 million investment…

This year, you will start to see all kinds of new mobile phones, and they will surprise and delight you: Phones with foldable screens! Phones that have cameras and buttons in different places! Phones that literally peer into your body and reveal not just whether you’ve made your steps, but whether you’re on the verge of a heart attack! But these innovations paradoxically signal an end to an era, not a beginning. Rather than a single smartphone and screen that connects us to our work, our friends, and entertainment, soon consumers will instead start using dozens of smart devices, because the smartphone’s primacy is starting to fade. Thanks to converging trends—among them 5G and A.I. in the cloud—the smartphone will spend the next decade acting more as a central hub…

When New Jersey couple Kelly and Stuart Josberger invited friends Mark and Trish Oliphant over for a barbecue in 2015, a few drinks led to an impromptu game of axe throwing. The idea for a business took root, and by April 2016, the couples had launched Stumpy’s Hatchet House. Now, the indoor axe-throwing business has 23 franchised locations and more than $1 million in annual revenue. “Most of our friends thought we were crazy,” says Trish. “They still think we’re crazy, but now they think of it as a crazy good idea.”…