Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

In early 2022, the meal delivery company I founded, Tovala, went out to raise $100mm from venture capitalists. Our business could not have been hotter. We’d crossed $110mm of revenue, growing over 100% YoY. We had retention that was 3–4 times better than other meal delivery services. We had low awareness, lots of room for product innovation, and a seemingly clear path to an IPO. Then the war broke out in Ukraine, and capital markets started to get spooked. All of the sudden, fast-growing, unprofitable consumer businesses were out of vogue. We managed to raise $32mm, not a small sum, but it felt like a failure. It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to…

Our culture equates busyness with importance, overcommitment with achievement, and exhaustion with value. For high-achieving professionals, this belief system isn’t just inconvenient, it’s quietly eroding energy, focus, and fulfillment. Meetings pile up, emails never end, and the pressure to “do it all” becomes a measure of worth. And yet, this version of productivity is deeply misleading. The truth is, sustainable success doesn’t come from cramming more into your day. It comes from aligning what you do with who you are, and giving yourself permission to prioritize energy, clarity, and presence over perpetual motion. Because motion for the sake of it is meaningless. …

Soooo, do you Labubu? The furry creature went viral this year thanks to Dua Lipa, Blackpink’s Lisa, and Kim Kardashian all buying into the adorably bizarre, plushy monsters. The results were millions in sales, long lines, and frantic scrambles as people tried to get their hands on this latest trendy phenom. Labubu’s Chinese parent company, Pop Mart, reported global revenue for Q3 (July through September) jumped by about 250% compared to a year earlier, and sales in America were up by more than 1,200%. But it goes beyond Pop Mart, as brands from South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries are finding more inroads into American culture. Just as American cultural influ…

The most anticipated quarterly earnings of the month will be announced on Wednesday, November 19, as AI chip giant Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) reveals financial results for its 2026 fiscal third quarter. A lot is riding on these results—and not just for Nvidia. Investors are increasingly on edge about a possible AI bubble, and if Nvidia posts good or better than expected earnings, it could give those investors faith that AI infrastructure is on solid ground and has plenty of room to grow. But if Nvidia’s earnings disappoint—or show signs of upcoming weakness—it could spell bad news not just for NVDA stock, but for the stock prices of all companies opera…

Agentic AI is coming, whether you’re ready for it or not—a PwC survey published earlier this year found that 88% of U.S. companies are beefing up their agentic AI budgets, and a broad majority have adopted AI agents in some capacity. When it comes to using AI agents for shopping or in the commerce space, more than half of consumers are or will be doing so by the end of the year. But many people still aren’t quite sure how or when to use AI agents. They may not know where to find them, how to prompt them, and in some cases, if the agent they are interacting with is legit or potentially a disguised bad actor. Fetch, an AI firm founded in 2017 in the U.K., is trying to…

Five years ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong did a bold thing. He banned political conversations at work. He made this decision because he knows what the job of a business leader is: to deliver for customers, employees, and shareholders. More recently, another executive did the opposite. Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s fame left the company as part of a row with its parent company over social activism. For Greenfield, political stances are not just part of the company; they ultimately outweigh everything else. This stark difference is very instructive at this time. Amid America’s rising polarization, what stance should businesses take? Many people who think…

If the football games, boxing matches, and comedy specials weren’t indication enough that Netflix is making a bold move for the live television market, here’s another: Beginning in 2026, it will air live baseball for the first time. Major League Baseball announced a new three-year media rights agreement on Wednesday with NBC, ESPN, and Netflix that could see baseball fans channel surfing to find their games. The shakeups in the agreement mostly see NBC and its parent company, NBCUniversal, commanding a larger share of baseball coverage, picking up several key games and events previously aired by ESPN, including “Sunday Night Baseball.” And, for the first time in …

For consumers heavy on savings and light on credit history, a new partnership in the world of credit scores could help you lock down a loan. FICO, the company basically synonymous with the credit score, is teaming up with Plaid to bring real-time data showing how much cash you have on hand to lenders. Plaid, a fintech company that links bank accounts with financial apps, has a lot of visibility into how its customers move cash between bank accounts, payments apps, investment platforms, and just about everything else. Plaid’s technology runs under the hood across a huge network of 12,000 financial institutions that partner with the fintech startup, which has grown into…

Before Wicked opened on Broadway in October 2003, the musical’s production team took the show to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for what’s called an “out of town tryout.” The five-week run allowed the producers, writers, and director to work out the kinks ahead of the show’s Broadway debut. During the San Francisco run, University of Southern California film student Jon M. Chu happened to be home for the weekend visiting his parents, who owned a Chinese restaurant called Chef Chu’s in Los Altos, California, just outside Silicon Valley. Chu was the youngest of five children growing up in a family that spent their free time playing instruments or going to the balle…

As it faces a growing number of lawsuits alleging it helps facilitate child sexual exploitation, online gaming platform Roblox has unveiled a new age verification system. That system, however, could open it up a different sort of criticism. The popular app, which has roughly 151 million users, announced last week that it plans to require a facial age check for all users who utilize the Roblox chat system. User verification can be accomplished by either submitting a government ID or by submitting a selfie, which AI will examine to estimate the age of the user. The verification will begin rolling out in early December in select markets (which do not include the U.S.…

The Thanksgiving holiday is nearly upon us, which means tens of millions of Americans will be traveling nationwide this week to visit their loved ones and celebrate around the dinner table with them on Thursday. The majority of that travel both to and from Turkey Day destinations is expected to kick off tomorrow, Tuesday, November 25, and run through Monday, December 1, which are the dates the American Automobile Association (AAA) defines as the 2025 Thanksgiving holiday period. It’s the busiest travel period for Americans, even beating out holidays like the Fourth of July and Christmas. While several million Americans are expected to make their Thanksgiving…

Anthropic launched its newest model, Claude Opus 4.5, putting the company back atop the benchmark rankings for AI software coding. Opus 4.5 scores over 80% on the widely-used SWE-bench, which tests models for software engineering skill. Google’s impressive Gemini 3 Pro, launched last week, briefly held the top score with 76.2%. Anthropic’s Claude product lead Scott White tells Fast Company that the model has also scored higher than any human on the engineering take-home assignment the company gives to engineering job candidates. Of course Opus 4.5 does a lot more than coding. Anthropic says Opus 4.5 is also the “best model in the world” for powering AI agents and…

Meta allegedly stopped internal research on social media’s impact on people after finding negative results, a court filing released Friday claims. The filing took place in a Northern California District Court, as a group of U.S. state attorneys general, school districts, and parents launched a suit against Meta, Google-owned YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The court documents allege that Meta misled the public on the mental health risks to children and young adults who excessively use Facebook and Instagram, even though its research showed that the social media apps had demonstrated harm. “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation stud…

The Thanksgiving travel period is in full swing. Today is the last day before Thanksgiving, which means millions of Americans will be taking to the skies to reach their holiday destinations. And myriad more will also be traveling to airports to pick up their incoming loved ones. But on one of the busiest travel days of the year, flight delays and cancellations are inevitable. Here are some tools to track delays, along with information on which airports are currently experiencing the worst delays and cancellations. FAA says this is the busiest Thanksgiving travel period in 15 years Earlier this week, Fast Company reported on the American Automobile Association (…

Major dairy producer Prairie Farms has announced a recall of select gallons of its popular Fat Free Milk due to concerns that the beverage may be contaminated with food-grade cleaning agents, which could make consumers ill if ingested. Here’s what you need to know. Prairie Farms recalls select Gallon Fat Free Milk Last week, Prairie Farms announced that it had initiated a voluntary recall of select Prairie Farms Gallon Fat Free Milk products produced at its Dubuque, Iowa, facility. The reason for the recall is that select gallons may have been contaminated with “food-grade cleaning agents,” according to the recall notice posted by the Food and Drug Administrati…

Oxford Dictionary just revealed its official word of 2025. It’s “rage bait.” According to an official announcement post, Oxford Dictionary’s team of lexicographers choose a shortlist of potential words each year by analyzing data and trends to “identify new and emerging words and expressions, which our lexicographers think of as a ‘single unit’, and examine the shifts in how more established language is being used.” This year’s final contenders were “aura farming,” “biohack,” and “rage bait.” In the end, 30,000 members of the public voted for their top choices, and Oxford chose rage bait as the winner. Per the Oxford Dictionary’s editors, rage bait is defined …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active inventory is still up year-over-year, the pace of growth has slowed since summer as some home sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted their properties. Indeed, according to Redfin, U.S. delistings as a share of inventory recently ticked up to 5.5%—a decade-high reading for this time of year. Looking ahead, in markets seeing the biggest jumps in delistings right now, many of those listings will likely return to the resale market in spring 2026—or test out the rental market. Without a corresponding increase in housing demand…

Apple just lost a top design talent. Meta has hired Alan Dye, who was the head of Apple’s human interface design team. The company is filling his position with Stephen Lemay, who CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg “has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999.” Before being poached by Meta to become its chief design officer, Dye worked at Apple since 2006, where he oversaw projects including Liquid Glass and Vision Pro. By the end of his tenure, Dye reported directly to Cook. His departure is the latest in a game of musical chairs for top design roles at Apple. Apple’s former longtime chief design officer Jony Ive left the company in …

Raquel Urtasun is the founder and CEO of self-driving truck startup Waabi as well as a computer science professor at the University of Toronto. Unlike some competitors, Waabi’s AI technology is designed to drive goods all the way to their destinations, rather than merely to autonomous vehicle hubs near highways. Urtasun, one of Fast Company’s AI 20 honorees for 2025, spoke with us about the relationship between her academic and industry work, what sets Waabi apart from the competition, and the role augmented reality and simulation play in teaching computers to drive even in unusual road conditions. This Q&A is part of Fast Company’s AI 20 for 2025, our roundup…

Rachel Taylor began her career as a creative director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. “I had control of the script,” she remembers. “I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes.” That was before she pivoted to helping AI companies shape the personality of their assistants. Rather than handing a digital helper a script, the best she can do is point it in the right direction: The technology “sometimes feels like a toddler that you give a permanent marker to and see what it writes on the wall,” she says. After joining DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup Inflect…

As Sir Isaac Newton discovered, the core scientific law of gravity is that what goes up must come down. The principle applies in many areas, which is why markets are jittery about the near-unchecked, three-year growth of stock prices fueled by the strength of the generative-AI revolution. The market is on a tear, with a large gap growing even wider between public market valuations and the significantly higher private-market valuations of AI-exposed companies. The top five tech companies in the U.S. are, collectively, valued at more than the combined size of the Euro Stoxx 50, the U.K., India, Japan, and Canada—and account for around 16% of the entire global public equ…

So far, Nvidia has provided the vast majority of the processors used to train and operate large AI models like the ones that underpin ChatGPT. Tech companies and AI labs don’t like to rely too much on a single chip vendor, especially as their need for computing capacity increases, so they’re looking for ways to diversify. And so players like AMD and Huawei, as well as hyperscalers like Google and Amazon AWS, which just released its latest Trainium3 chip, are hurrying to improve their own flavors of AI accelerators, the processors designed to speed up specific types of computing tasks. Could the competition eventually reduce Nvidia, AI’s dominant player, to just anot…

European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations that they said could leave users exposed to scams and manipulation. The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA. It’s the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, u…

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It fuels boardroom debates, guides priorities, defines access to information, and nudges consumer experiences. But while AI promises sharper insights and faster action, it also accelerates blind spots leaders already struggle with. The paradox is this: AI can widen vision, but if used without the right insight, it narrows it. And when those blind spots meet the speed of AI adoption, the consequences multiply. I’ve seen this play out across industries—through my leadership roles at Google, Maersk, and Diageo, and in advising executives shaping some of the world’s largest organizations. The pattern is clear: technology does not…