Venture capital pioneer Alan Patricof started his current firm, Greycroft Partners, in 2006 with one mandate: All investments should touch the internet or mobile devices. Today, the firm has offices in New York and Los Angeles and more than $1 billion under management, including investments in digital media companies Axios, The Skimm, and, formerly, The Huffington Post.
Food is personal. Sometimes it is national.
Close to 200 Indian and international economists today (Nov. 21) appealed to the Indian government to release the national data reportedly withheld because they painted an unfavourable picture of the country’s economy.
Ron Williams joined Aetna in 2001 as its CEO and chairman, and over the next ten years, turned a $292 million operating loss into a $2 billion profit. Now, he counsels other executives on how to lead and recently published a book called Learning to Lead.
Strava is a fitness tracking app with a digital community of over 42 million athletes. CEO James Quarles, who previously held positions at Instagram and Facebook, estimates that for every minute users spend looking at Strava, they spend 50 minutes “out sweating or doing an activity together.”
Neville Crawley is CEO of Kiva, a San Francisco-based organization that, since its founding in 2005, has crowdfunded $1.4 billion in loans for people in over 80 countries. Previously, he spent four years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. and served as CEO of Quid, a company that offers text-based data analysis and visualization.
It seems like only yesterday when one of the innovators from our inaugural list, in 2015, warned the audience at a Quartz event in Nairobi that we shouldn’t “fetishize entrepreneurship.” The context was discussing the many programs in Africa designed to support entrepreneurs which didn’t take into account the fundamental challenges of local markets, such as inadequate infrastructure and poor electricity supply.
Protests in Hong Kong over the past 11 weeks have shown two things—Hong Kong people won’t easily bow to Beijing’s threats, and Beijing is working very hard to create an alternative universe of information.
Jake Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of General Assembly, a global education start-up with 20 campuses and 50,000 alumni worldwide.
In this six-part video series for Quartz members, Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, breaks down each stage of the pitching process, using Instagram’s and Lyft’s early pitches as case studies. Kupor has overseen the venture capital firm’s growth from $300 million assets under management in 2009 to more than $10 billion today. To continue the deep dive, tackle our syllabus, curated by Kupor. 📚
In 2017, Tina Sharkey co-founded Brandless, a consumer goods business that offers just one choice for each type of item. She says that she wants to turn “brandless” into an attribute, and that her mission came from listening to consumers.
Tina Sharkey co-founded Brandless with the goal of disrupting and democratizing access to consumer goods—by stripping products of their “brand.” Sharkey believes that, while it’s a company’s leaders who define its mission, it can only spread through employees’ actions. And for that to happen, says Sharkey, it’s critical for companies to “acknowledge the communities that they’re in.”
Esther Wojcicki has three daughters: Susan heads YouTube, Anne co-founded 23andMe, and Janet teaches at UCSF. Esther herself runs an award-winning media arts program.
Brandless co-founder and co-chair Tina Sharkey finishes her all-hands meetings by inviting employees to share good news from their personal lives. She says that this small tradition is actually key to building a larger sense of mission into the company, and there are countless other ways to do so on a grassroots level.
Throughout her tenures at Brandless, BabyCenter, and AOL, entrepreneur and investor Tina Sharkey has developed a somewhat unconventional formula for hiring. After checking expertise, background, and references, she says, every employer should have a custom filter for someone who will embody the values of the company. For her, the filter is simple: a willingness to empty the office dishwasher.
According to Brandless co-founder and co-chair, Tina Sharkey, every company has a raison d’etre, a sense of meaning that drives the operation forward. At Brandless, she says, it’s about democratizing access to consumer goods. Most items on the site are priced between $3 and $9, enabling the company, says Sharkey, to “be for profit and for purpose at the same time.”
Updated Mar. 19, 2020
Aaron Levie dropped out of college in 2005 to co-found the file-storage company Box. Ten years later, Box went public; today, it serves 70% of the Fortune 500.
Aaron Levie is co-founder and CEO of the file-storage company Box, which serves 70% of the Fortune 500. He says that he completely flipped what Box promises its customers after conversations with investors. (Its marketing message now is a “disruptive model for what the future of enterprise software would look like.”)
In 2005, Aaron Levie dropped out of college to co-found the file-storage company Box. Since his early 20s, he’s cold-emailed, Snapchatted, and Facebook-poked his way to key investments, including six figures early on from Mark Cuban. Box now has over 2,000 employees and serves 70% of the Fortune 500.
Dan Doctoroff, currently CEO of Google’s Sidewalk Labs, earlier in his career founded a nonprofit, NYC2012, to bring the Olympic Games to New York City. After the September 11th 2001 attacks on the city, he became a deputy mayor, and led the rebuilding effort. However, he continued to champion the city’s Olympics bid.
James Quarles is CEO of Strava, a fitness tracking app with 41 million users and a million athletes joining each month.
Since 2017, James Quarles has run Strava, a fitness tracking app that sees a million new athletes join every month. In the fourth video of our members-only series on how to start and grow a business anchored in an online community, Quarles explains how Strava’s members are more likely to remain committed to their fitness regimen when they actually go offline and do something with a friend or group.
Updated June 21, 2019
