Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Remember when cars were just . . . cars? You turned a key, explosions happened under the hood, and wheels turned. It was simple. It was glorious. Well, kiss those days goodbye. The automotive industry is currently obsessed with turning cars into what they call “software-defined vehicles.” That’s corporate-speak for “a very expensive computer that you sit inside of.” We aren’t just talking about a slightly slicker touchscreen for your Spotify playlist. This involves massive onboard processors and cloud connectivity that will fundamentally change how your car operates. Is it terrifying? A little bit, especially if you work in cybersecurity and obsess about the p…

Across the country, solopreneurship is taking off. People are starting their own, one-person businesses in droves. But when it comes to who is doing all of this solopreneuring (yes, it’s a word), one-woman businesses are gaining more traction. More women are starting their own businesses than ever—whether solo or with employees. According to May 2025 data from small business platform Gusto, in the last five years, there’s been a huge leap in just how many women left their jobs to start their own business. In 2019, just 29% of new businesses were started by women. By 2024, that number was 49%. Moreover, over half (52%) of solopreneurs in the U.S. are now women. S…

In a new bag from Freitag, every part—from the fabric to the zipper, straps, buckles, and the thread that holds everything together—is made from a single material. The product is the latest example of a “monomaterial” design approach that some brands are beginning to use for a simple reason: It means that the products can actually be recycled when they eventually wear out. Right now, a typical backpack or bag has components made from multiple different materials. Dismantling everything at the end of its life is too time-consuming and expensive to be feasible. But using one material makes it essentially as simple as recycling a plastic water bottle. “You can basically p…

One of the biggest barriers people face to their productivity is an inability to focus. Most people are highly distracted and distractable, which makes it hard to sustain the level of attention required to complete complex tasks and to think through difficult problems. Chances are at least part of your problem is self-inflicted. We have created environments with lots of attention-grabbing information. You have learned to seek out that information regularly. Indeed, your brain has timing mechanisms in it, and the desire to check your phone or your web browser may interrupt you at regular intervals, even when you’re trying your best to get something else done. Here …

Think about the last piece of health advice you actually followed. Chances are, it wasn’t from a medical journal or even a doctor’s office. Most likely it was from a colleague, a neighbor, or a trusted friend—the kind of advice that feels personal and authentic. As humans, we’re wired to trust people we know or feel like we know. That’s why two-thirds of Americans now seek health information on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and other social platforms, where it’s easy to connect with others who have relatable voices or similar stories. The default ways we explored our symptoms in the past, i.e., by seeing a doctor or referencing a handful of known credible sour…

On February 10, 1985, an imprisoned 66-year-old male serving a life sentence was offered a conditional release that would have reunited him with his wife and children, from whom he had been separated for 23 years. The prisoner turned down the offer. His name was Nelson Mandela. In a rejection publicly delivered to the South African government by his daughter at a rally in Soweto, Mandela refused the condition that he permanently walk away from the country’s anti-apartheid movement. “I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom,” he stated, unwilling to “sell the birthright of the people to be free.” Mandela would spend another five years in pr…

Fluorescent lights that softly hum. Magazines nobody reads. A television mounted in the corner playing cable news as a receptionist mispronounces my last name. I am at my first of several doctors appointments intentionally scheduled during the winter holiday season. Not because I’m sick. Because it’s the only week of the year when nothing work-related is fighting for my time. The office is closed. The investors aren’t emailing. The product update notifications have stopped. For seven days I can put my body first. So I schedule the bloodwork. The dermatologist. The physical I’ve been postponing since March. The dentist I keep rescheduling because there’s always…

Most days, an email lands in my inbox with the promise to amplify my growth—my newsletter subscribers, the reach of my podcasts, the number of client leads, etc. I’ve gotten used to random people pitching me on their services, and some of the messages expertly prey on my insecurities as a business owner (“you’re leaving so much on the table,” et al.). I never answer any of them, but I sometimes wonder which ones might actually be legit. A few months back, I opened up the Assistant sidebar in my AI-powered browser when I was browsing one of these emails and asked if it looked suspicious (I think “this look sus?” was the actual prompt). It replied that yes, the message, wh…

In 2006, Amazon Web Services was a fledgling—and a bit of an oddity. Amazon had taken the cloud-computing technologies it had created for its own operations and turned them into a business. Any organization could use them to build out an online presence without managing any infrastructure. Amazon watchers struggled to suss out what the e-tailer was up to: “I have yet to see how these investments are producing any profit,” carped one Wall Street analyst. At the very start—when it was still a big deal if AWS collected $100 in revenue in a single day—an AWS product manager named Matt Garman had lunch with a friend who worked in another part of the company. “[The coworker] a…

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy Most leaders will tell you they play the long game, and it is one of those things that sounds right and costs nothing to say. What is harder, rarer, and worth talking about is what underpins their conviction. Artemis II is a 50-year case study in exactly that. On April 1, four astronauts will board the Orion spacecraft and fly around the Moon in the first crewed lunar mission since 1972. The mission did not survive nine adm…

In the past, women’s work bags were designed to assert power. Women marched into the boardroom with hyper-structured “girlboss” totes or aggressively minimalist tech clutches. But there’s a shift taking place. Many work–life bags today are softer, both visually and physically. They’re lighter. They collapse. They transition seamlessly from the office to the many other things that fill your life: The mid-day grocery run, a coffee meeting that turns into school pickup, dinner with friends straight from the office. Every year, I test dozens of bags in search of the ones that best capture how we’re actually living and working right now. It’s clear that work bags are …

For the 150th episode of my award-winning podcast series, FUTURE OF XYZ, I sat down with Nick Foster, former head of design at Google X and leading futures designer. We quickly found common ground in our strong belief that society doesn’t think about the future in the right way. ​​Too often, the future is reduced to flashy visions, both in media headlines and through messages from leading corporations. The future feels like a sci-fi movie that still seems far away. Nick and I both believe the future isn’t some distant fantasy, but rather a tomorrow already unfolding before us. To prepare, we must pay closer attention to what we know now and how people are acting today. W…

In the fast-paced world of consumer packaged goods (CPG), innovation has become one of the most overused—and misunderstood—terms in our vocabulary. Walking the halls of Expo West this year, the sheer scale of innovation on display is staggering. Every aisle promises a new solution to our food system’s woes—higher protein, added fiber, or the latest superfood infusion. Yet a troubling question persists: How much of this is actual food innovation, and how much is marketing dressed up as engineering? The modern CPG landscape excels at generating hype but often fails to create lasting value. Brands appear overnight, fueled by venture capital and massive marketing spends, onl…

For a company with one of the most important jobs in information security, assessing the risks and opportunities of AI might feel less like an analytical exercise and more like a roll of a 20-sided die. That’s because a password manager, which already has to defend a customer’s most valuable credentials against both outside attackers and the customer’s own carelessness, now has to contend with AI on multiple fronts. AI can help a password-management firm develop code and find vulnerabilities faster, but it may also enable clients to ship sloppy, vibe-coded apps that expose passwords. And while AI agents promise to zip through complex tasks with a single-minded foc…

Investors are feeling less hot about the makers of cooling systems for data centers after the CEO of Nvidia Corp. stoked concerns that demand for their products could dry up. Shares of Modine Manufacturing Co. led declines in this sector, tumbling as much as 21% Tuesday before recovering some of those losses to close about 7.5% lower. Other makers of water-cooled systems and similar products—including Johnson Controls International Plc, Trane Technologies Plc, and Carrier Global Corp.—also fell as much as 6.2% on Tuesday. To blame? The next generation of Nvidia’s computer chips, announced on Monday, which won’t require the same type of cooling systems. That’s be…

Picture a data center on the edge of a desert plateau. Inside, row after row of servers glow and buzz, moving air through vast cooling towers, consuming more electricity than the surrounding towns combined. This is not science fiction. It is the reality of the vast AI compute clusters, often described as “AI supercomputers” for their sheer scale, that train today’s most advanced models. Strictly speaking, these are not supercomputers in the classical sense. Traditional supercomputers are highly specialized machines designed for scientific simulations such as climate modeling, nuclear physics, or astrophysics, tuned for parallelized code across millions of cores. What dr…

“When are you looking to retire?” It may seem like a harmless question for a boss to pose to an employee, but for older workers, it can come with a coded message—it’s time for you to end your career. “There could be insinuations, like, ‘What are you looking to do after this?’ Or, ‘how long do you anticipate being here?’” says New York-based employment lawyer Mahir Nasir, who’s had multiple older clients come to him with scenarios of getting nudged towards retirement. He’s seen this play out in various ways. For instance, say an employee’s been working at a bank for 20 years, during which they’ve established strong relationships in the specific territory they…

This marks the eighth year Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators will recognize companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. Honorees will appear in our Fall 2026 issue as well as on fastcompany.com. The final deadline for applications to this year’s Best Workplaces for Innovators program is fast approaching – Friday, March 27, at 11:59 pm PT. In addition to ranking the world’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will recognize companies in 19 different categories, , including a brand new category that focuses on…

The 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics are giving people at home a first-of-its-kind, first-person view of the Winter Games, all thanks to a fleet of custom-built drones. The small, agile drones can be spotted—not to mention heard—buzzing across Olympic venues, and they’re giving what broadcasters call a “third dimension” to the viewing experience. Instead of capturing the action only from fixed or semifixed cameras on cables and cranes, operators of these drones give viewers an athlete’s perspective as they race down slopes and around tracks. “This is the closest you can get to feeling a jump,” ski-jumper-turned-drone-operator Jonas Sandell said in a statement. …

Everything from coffee to a used car is more expensive these days, and now your music streaming service is too. Spotify announced this week that it will raise prices for U.S. subscribers – again. Spotify Premium plans will jump up to $12.99 from $11.99 starting with the next billing date. The streamer last increased prices for U.S. users in 2024 after a decade-plus run of charging $9.99 for ad-free listening on its premium individual streaming plan. The main individual plan isn’t the only Spotify subscription getting a price hike. Discounted student plans are getting bumped up to $6.99 from $5.99, the Duo two-person plan will go to $18.99 from $16.99 and the stre…

As marketing leaders, we don’t wake up thinking about algorithms. We wake up thinking about growth. For CMOs, the job has always been the same: drive real business impact, improve ROI, and prove—repeatedly—that marketing is a growth engine, not a cost center. Long before generative AI entered the conversation, marketing leaders were under pressure to connect activity to revenue, align tightly with sales, and make performance visible. The pressure to quantify value didn’t start with AI. It started when the business demanded proof. What has changed is the speed and precision with which we can now deliver that proof. AI ISN’T REINVENTING MARKETING. IT’S REWIRING …

The tiny easy chair Mikael Axelsson is holding in his hands—a dollhouse-size combination of bent wire, hand-carved foam, and hot glue—has been a white whale for the Ikea designer since he first modeled it back in 2014. The concept was simple, or at least he thought it would be: Build a frame of metal, fill it with a balloon-like cushion, and reinvent novelty 1990s blow-up furniture into a modern home furnishing. But after trying to take the Barbie-size model he’d built and expand it into a full-scale piece of inflatable furniture, he had two major problems. First, he could never quite figure out how to make an inflatable cushion that didn’t feel like an exercise ball. S…

From boardrooms to startup garages, leaders need ideas that work in the real world. These 10 books offer a broader perspective on business, helping us see the patterns behind the day-to-day grind. Learn something new every day with “Book Bites,” 15-minute audio summaries of the latest and greatest nonfiction. Get started by downloading the Next Big Idea App today! Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously) By Bree Groff When we wish away the workweek, we wish away our lives. What would it take for us to look forward to Monday? Find out in this refreshing and unconventional take on the world of work. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Bree Groff, in the …

If talent is the oxygen of a company, succession planning is the life-support system. Yet too many organizations treat it like an org chart exercise, waiting until someone resigns or retires before scrambling to find a replacement. When a leader walks out, the ripple effects are immediate: strategy stalls, teams lose momentum, and culture wobbles overnight. The bigger problem? Most companies aren’t ready when it happens. According to DDI’s 2025 HR Insights Report, only 20% of CHROs say they have leaders prepared to step into critical roles, and just 49% of those roles could be filled internally today. That means most organizations are closer to a leadership cr…