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A startup called Orion is ready to take on America’s sleep loss epidemic with a new, AI-enabled mattress cover that can adjust its temperature throughout the night to maximize comfort and rest. Cofounder and CEO Harry Gestetner previously cofounded the startup Fanfix, which helped Gen Z content creators build paid subscription programs. After the company sold to SuperOrdinary for a reported $65 million, Gestetner says he became interested in sleep and its well-documented links to health and longevity. “Every longevity expert tells you that sleep is the cornerstone of longevity,” he says. Gestetner found that most sleep and fitness trackers could detect bad …

In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead. Read more How YouTube A…

This week, news reports revealed that Meta would be cutting hundreds of jobs in its AI division. The layoffs will impact employees who work on AI products, research, and infrastructure. They come after Meta went on a hiring spree to shore up its AI efforts. But despite the job cuts, Meta’s chief AI officer told the Wall Street Journal that the company would, however, continue hiring “AI native” talent—a term that seems to have quietly slipped into the corporate lexicon amid the AI arms race. For the last decade, the term “digital native” has been circulating to describe Gen Z, as many of them don’t know life without the internet. The cohort following them, Generat…

Every week, another executive asks me: Where do we even start with AI? As we enter 2026, this question drives explosive demand for AI upskilling platforms and AI-powered learning solutions. Yet most enterprise AI training programs fail because they lack a systematic framework that moves the organization from confused to fluent to truly differentiated. Think of it as Maslow’s hierarchy, but for AI capability development. And 2026 is the year to climb that hierarchy. An effective AI upskilling platform must address five levels of organizational capability: foundational literacy, company-specific application, durable skills development, breakthrough innovation, and co-in…

Marks & Spencer is one of the latest U.K. high-street brands to launch a skiwear collection. Even supermarket Lidl is in on the action, with items in its ski range priced at less than 5 pounds (roughly $6.75). This follows earlier moves by fast-fashion retailers such as Topshop, which launched SNO in the mid 2010’s, and Zara’s imaginatively titled Zara Ski collection, which launched in 2023. Fast-fashion brand PrettyLittleThing’s Apres Ski edit (a collection of clothes chosen for a specific theme) tells potential shoppers that going skiing is “not necessarily essential,” which is good, because many of the products in the collection are listed as athleisure, not sp…

The phrase quiet quitting has been cast as a generational rebellion, a disengagement crisis, and a leadership failure, all rolled into one. The narrative suggests that half of your workforce has decided to coast, collecting a paycheck while doing the bare minimum. According to new global research from Culture Amp, which analyzed the experience of 3.3 million employees worldwide, fewer than 2% fit into the definition of quiet quitting—that is, employees who lack motivation to go above and beyond but still plan to stay with their company. That finding challenges the viral narrative, suggesting that what’s happening inside organizations is more nuanced than a mass wi…