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Days after Spirit Airlines shut down in the middle of the night, a lawyer for the defunct budget carrier stood before a bankruptcy judge and apologized to the price-conscious customers who might struggle to find affordable flights in its absence. “We apologize most specifically for those Americans who may now be priced entirely out,” Spirit lawyer Marshall Huebner said in court, thanking all the passengers who relied on the airline during its 34-year run, many of whom, he said, “could not otherwise have afforded air travel.” Spirit’s May 3 demise is not the only curveball confronting people planning trips a week before the summer travel season has its traditional U.S. l…

Everlane—once an icon of ethical fashion—is reportedly being sold for $100 million to Shein, arguably the least ethical fashion brand on the market. Everlane had been on shaky financial ground for years, and majority owner L Catterton began shopping it around in March. But few expected it to sell to a Chinese retailer credibly accused of forced labor and labeled by Yale researchers as “the biggest polluter in fast fashion.” It’s the latest blow to a wave of ethical consumer brands that sprung up in the 2010s to court millennials. Last month, Allbirds—the sustainable sneaker startup—sold off its footwear assets, abandoned its environmental mission, and pivoted to artific…

When Bob’s Red Mill began in 1978, it was a flour company operated out of a literal red mill by one dedicated married couple. Since then, it’s grown into a grocery store staple with more than 200 products—and, along the way, its fascinating brand story has gotten lost amidst a sea of colorful, overwhelming packaging. To fix that, the company has spent three years on a full branding overhaul to bring all of its products back under one mill roof. Bob’s Red Mill began as the passion project of the late Bob and Charlee Moore, a husband and wife duo who started their own flour milling business as a way to introduce more whole grains into their family’s diet. And, according…

It starts with Jason Sudeikis in the make-up trailer for what must be the latest season of Ted Lasso, where he’s asked if he’s heading back stateside for the World Cup. He says no, then for some weird reason, taps his script with his Visa card. Poof! The script is now a World Cup match ticket. Thus begins Sudeikis’ surreal trip home, as dramatized in Visa’s new World Cup commercial “Tap in.” The campaign uses a simple play on words—in football, a tap-in goal is the easiest there is—to illustrate the ease with which fans can use Visa in and around the 2026 World Cup. Along the way in the campaign we see football stars Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland, Jorge Campos, and le…

For the past two years, companies have been asking the wrong question: how do we use AI in our processes? That question made sense at the beginning. When large language models first appeared, the instinct was natural: take what already exists, from workflows to functions, decision chains, etc., and try to accelerate them. Add copilots. Add assistants. Add automation layers. Improve productivity. But as we’ve seen, that approach doesn’t scale. As I’ve argued in previous pieces, enterprise AI hasn’t failed because the technology doesn’t work. It has failed because we tried to place it in the wrong layer. Large language models were never designed to run a company, …

AI may be attracting billions in venture capital, but money is not flowing to every founder with a chatbot demo and a slick deck. In fact, as AI makes building a great product faster and more accessible, founder behavior, judgment, and credibility become even more important. In a crowded market where every pitch claims “category-defining AI,” red flags can surface fast. Founders must recognize that most investors are not just underwriting your product. They are underwriting you as a person for the next seven to ten years. If they sense weak leadership, poor decision-making, or shaky ethics early on, the meeting or any next steps is often over before diligence even beg…

When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in April 2006, they were two Stockholm entrepreneurs with a prototype so skeletal that Per Roman, the cofounder of investors Bullhound Capital, who would later back the company, says his first look at it was “world-changing,” despite there barely being a product to look at. Two decades and 300 million subscribers later, Spotify has become a defining force in the Swedish tech scene: a company whose alumni have gone on to found, fund, or run many of the most ambitious startups Stockholm has produced, in much the same way Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia shaped the U.S. tech ecosystem. It’s one of several tentpole companie…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Modern CEO has reported on disparate levels of enthusiasm for AI between corporate leaders and the general public. More worrying, there’s an emerging trust gap in the workplace, with only 27% of workers in the U.S. saying they “trust their employers to use AI responsibly,” according to…

A father-son duo has vibe-coded a gaming company that’s generated nearly 30 million plays and 20 million visits across four mini-games in just 90 days. Say hello to Dialed. Dialed is a gaming website that tests players’ senses and memory in games about color, sound, time, and shape. Geoff Teehan, chief design officer at the payments services company Lightspark and former vice president of design at Meta, created a color-matching game using Cursor and Claude during a hackathon. The project was inspired by an old college professor’s comment about how bad humans are at recalling color. “They think they’re really good at it, but you show them a color and then they go …

In a recent speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University, Pope Leo XIV warned that investments in artificial intelligence and high-tech weapons could push the world into what he called a “spiral of annihilation.” Leo has identified AI as a critical issue for humanity and is expected to soon release a papal encyclical (a kind of open letter on Catholic doctrine) addressing the subject. His concerns reflect a broader debate taking shape across religious communities: Though artificial intelligence in its current form has only been in the marketplace for a few years, religious leaders and scholars from traditions stretching back centuries or more have already weighed in on the te…

One cold Friday night a few years ago, I collapsed to the ground in the arrivals hall of a small French airport. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. It took physical collapse for me to acknowledge that I was burned out and that my work life was unsustainable. In the time since my own burnout, the term has become ubiquitous. And given the abundance of research on the topic, I’m not going to deny its dangers. Burnout is real, serious, and measurable. However, I don’t believe that we’re living in a burnout epidemic. What we are living through is an epidemic of the use of the term burnout. And that overuse is blunting the urgency of a massive global issue. What burno…

To make room for more housing without losing green space, planners in a new Toronto neighborhood flipped the usual approach: Instead of carving out room for parks and plazas, they made the streets do that work instead. “The street is almost like a public courtyard,” says Rasmus Astrup, design principal and senior partner at SLA, the Denmark-based firm that was part of the design team for the new neighborhood, called Ookwemin Minising. The main street will be car-free, “like a linear park,” he says, and filled with 400 trees. Other streets will allow cars, but prioritize large swaths of green space. The design gives residents public space, and doubles as climate infrast…

One of the best days of Gabriella’s career was also one of her hardest days as a parent. Gabriella, who asked for a pseudonym to protect her children’s privacy, had just filmed the launch video for her new company. On the train ride back home, she got a call from her daughter’s school. The new nanny she’d hired, who had been thoroughly vetted, had left her two-year-old son locked in the car in the school’s parking lot and disappeared for half an hour before teachers heard the crying and rushed to help. “I remember feeling so guilty and crushed, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t feel like I can leave my children because I don’t know how to find childcare that I can trust,’” G…

It’s graduation season and my email inbox is flooded with inquiries from students entering the workforce, looking for career advice. How do I land my dream job? What should I do at the company where I’ve been recently hired to get where I really want to be? How do I go from what I have to do to what I want to do? What I’ve gathered from these students is not much different from what we more seasoned professionals struggle with day in and day out. How do we square the incongruence between our duty—the thing we have to do to survive, pay our bills, and keep the lights on—and our conviction—the thing we feel called to do? The job, of course, is our duty. The gift is our co…

I used to think I was a great salesperson because I had all the right answers. I knew my product inside and out. I could explain every feature, every benefit, every reason someone should say yes. And I did what most people do—I led with that. Confident. Certain. Ready to convince. And I lost deals I should have won. I remember one pitch early in my career like it happened yesterday. I walked into the room fully prepared. My slides circled the room like a victory lap. I spoke for ten minutes straight, laying out exactly why my offer was the perfect solution. When I finished, the client looked at me and said, “That’s nice… but that’s not what I’m looking for.” It was a gut…

In a recent survey of senior leaders at large U.S. and U.K. professional services firms, 61% said they had abandoned at least one AI project in the past year because their people lacked the skills to deliver it. Deloitte’s “2026 State of AI in the Enterprise” report, based on a survey of more than 3,200 business and IT leaders across 24 countries, found that insufficient worker skills are now the single “biggest barrier to integrating AI into the business.” There is no quick or easy solution to this problem. While it is possible to bring in new hires or contractors with the short-term capabilities you need, this approach is not sustainable in the long term as it is both …

Ah, the olden days of choosing where to spend your money on dining, travel, and all that connected those experiences. Neighborhood restaurants would drop flyers in your apartment lobby to let you know they were there. Hotels would rent space on billboards and place ads in newspapers and magazines. Some joined industry groups, such as the Leading Hotels of the World, which got its start by promising ship passengers when they arrived at their destinations there would be appropriate accommodation for them. The go-to reference for figuring out where to eat would have been the iconic burgundy Zagat guides, one of the original crowdsourced review guides with quotes from ordina…

One of the more annoying things that could happen is that you spend $3,300 on a brand-new display, only to find out that, just after you’ve passed the return window, the price has dropped by $400. Nothing else has changed; just the price gets cheaper after you’ve already paid for it and can no longer return it to the store. That’s what happened for customers who bought Apple’s brand-new Studio Display XDR, the company’s high-end mini-LED monitor targeted at professionals with a few grand to spend on a monitor. The company offered the Studio Display XDR with two stand options—a VESA mount adapter and what Apple calls a “tilt-and-height-adjustable stand.” Both versions …

There’s a quiet trade-off happening inside high-growth companies right now. We’re moving faster than ever, and teams are more efficient. AI is handling work that used to take hours, and asynchronous communication means decisions don’t have to wait for meetings. On paper, it’s all an upside. But underneath the speed, something else is happening. Leaders are moving further away from their teams. Not intentionally and not dramatically—just gradually enough that you don’t notice it until alignment shifts: decisions that need to be revisited, priorities that aren’t as clear as you thought, or challenges surfacing later than they used to. The assumption that new…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. A look at the AI landscape for small businesses So much of the conversation around the great AI transformation of business has centered on enterprises, meaning companies with more than 500 employees. That makes sense: For AI and cloud companies, landing a large enterprise customer can mean securing a significant stream of recurring revenue. But if we’re really talking about AI reinventing work and making everyone more productive, small and medium-sized businesses should be a much bigge…

For high school senior Aliyah Pack, getting distracted during school is the norm. Kids in her Pennsylvania school district use iPads starting in kindergarten, switch to Chromebooks in second grade and get their own MacBooks in eighth grade. Aliyah has ADHD, and finds it difficult to concentrate when she’s learning from a screen. She’ll watch Netflix in class on her school laptop, hiding her earbuds behind her long, curly hair. “It’s very hard to get into the mindset of being in school,” Aliyah said. Aliyah’s mother saw her grades were falling and asked the school to take away her laptop. But she was told that wasn’t possible. Across the country, parents are voicing co…

Ian Yang saw a business opportunity sitting on the table of a restaurant. In the darkness of the room, a small portable light meant to make it easier to read a menu jumped out to him as just the kind of product his lighting company, Gantri, should be making. The challenge was that these common restaurant lights are all wireless. “They’re very dim, they’re very small, they’re not really fully fledged, like residential full-power products,” Yang says. But, he thought, they could be. That instinct led to three new wireless lighting product lines being released this week by Gantri, alongside a new digital manufacturing platform that will make it easier for other d…