What's on Your Mind?

Fast Company’s Creative Director Mike Schnaidt shares a first look at the magazine redesign. So if you are a typeface fanatic, you won’t want to miss this breakdown. View the full article

As more and more drivers purchase electric vehicles, some people have voiced concerns about how the EV boom could further strain our aging, stressed electricity grid. More EVs means more electricity demand, which could require costly infrastructure upgrades or limit when drivers can charge if demand is too high. But one long-talked about promise of EVs is that they could actually make our electricity grid more resilient. Through bidirectional charging, EVs could essentially act as batteries parked outside your home, powering houses so that they don’t need to rely on outside electricity. They could also even send energy back to the grid. A handful of EVs c…

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) returns to Las Vegas from Jan. 6 to 9, the tech industry is gearing up for its annual spectacle of prototypes, silicon benchmarks and AI-branded gadgets. But one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise technology over the coming year will unfold far from the keynote stages and demo floors. HP, the 85-year-old Silicon Valley company long defined by PCs, printers, and enterprise hardware, is repositioning itself as a work-intelligence platform—where devices learn continuously, services anticipate needs, and AI dissolves the traditional boundaries between hardware, software, and the cloud. Under Jim Nottingham, senior vice p…

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…

Over the course of its 40-year history, J.Crew has explored all kinds of design collaborations. Last year, for instance, it partnered with the designers Christopher John Rogers and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. But if you walk into a store, you might also come across slightly more unexpected collaborations. On a recent visit to J.Crew’s Columbus Circle store in New York, I found a collection of kids’ clothes emblazoned with the logo of the Fire Department of New York. In February, to celebrate The New Yorker magazine’s centennial anniversary, J.Crew created a special line of sweaters, rugby shirts, and baseball caps featuring the magazine’s logo. And last summer, it dropped wo…

A grassroots effort to track price gouging has emerged in the form of a Google Sheet that’s now circulating on social media. Community members have reported Zillow listings of rental properties with substantial price increases –upwards of thousands of dollars – just as 150,000 California residents found themselves displaced. View the full article

People remember many things about Windows 95, which turned 30 a couple of months ago. There were its signature new features, such as the Start Button, taskbar, and long file names. The launch event—hosted by Jay Leno—at Microsoft’s campus. The TV commercials with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” The crowds of PC users so eager to get their hands on the upgrade that they descended on computer stores at midnight. Here’s a fact about Windows 95 that isn’t exactly iconic: It was the first voice-enabled version of Microsoft’s operating system. A collection of technologies known as the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI) provided support for speech recognition and synthesis, lett…

In the early 1980s, the National Basketball Association (NBA) faced a crisis. Television ratings were plummeting—the 1981 NBA finals were among the lowest of all time. Spurred by failing franchises, low game attendance, and declining corporate sponsorships, the league’s cultural relevance in the United States waned. Then in 1984, the league responded with a structural shift that would change the culture of sports for decades to come. “ We came together with the collective bargaining agreement where the players and the owners would work together to grow the game and expand the game and the values that we established in the Players Association,” says NBA legend and cur…

The term brand entertainment is tough to define. For many people, it’s an oxymoron and these two words should never be in the same room as one another. For many others, though, it’s simply when brands make stuff we actually want to pay attention to. It could be a short ad, or a feature-length film, or a live event. What it isn’t is an annoying waste of time interrupting our attention from actual entertainment like TV, sports, music and movies. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Brand New World podcast looking at different ways different brands are doing this right. From WhatsApp creating a Netflix doc about the Mercedes F1 team, to Dick’s Sporting Goods formally es…

The robots are coming—and they’ll need a good map to get around, whether they’re delivering our packages, driving us around, or doing any of the myriad of other tasks robotic helpers may perform for us in the future. “Without spatial intelligence, your robot really can’t do what you want it to do,” says John Hanke, the former CEO of Niantic Spatial who transitioned into the role of the company’s executive chairman a week ago. “Your Roomba is operating just in your house. But as we’re about to start operating at city scale, we need these big, large-scale, shared, accurate representations of the world.” This week, Niantic is taking the next step towards building tha…

Nokia Bell Labs has a long, storied history—producing Nobel Prize winners, creating innovative new technologies, and bolstering critical infrastructure that underlies most of the devices we all use every day. This week, it held a special event at its Murray Hill, New Jersey campus to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and it featured appearances by politicians like New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, business leaders, and even a robot named “Porcupine.” The expansive campus houses a number of laboratories where, over the past century, numerous groundbreaking discoveries and inventions have been made or perfected, including cell phones, transistors, and solar cells. Nokia a…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline…

OpenAI’s Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is likely driven by the release of new models—GPT-5.2 last December and GPT-5.3-Codex in early February—as well as the launch of Codex’s app version a few weeks ago. OpenAI says the app has been downloaded more than a million times. Across all access points—including the cloud, app, and command line—more than a million developers and other users now rely on Codex at least once a week, according to the company. Generating computer code has …

Paris Hilton’s been an entrepreneur, a reality TV star, a DJ, an author, a model, a singer, and an activist. But she says school felt like torture. “Sitting still under fluorescent lights surrounded by beige walls made me feel trapped instead of inspired,” she tells Fast Company via email. “Traditional environments were too flat, too uniform, and too quiet to support the way I think.” It wasn’t until after being diagnosed with ADHD in her late 20s that Hilton began to understand how to hone her energy and creativity — and how the physical spaces where she worked impacted her ability to focus. “Over the years, I’ve learned that when a space feels alive, so do …

In 1865, a new department store opened in Paris called Printemps (which is French for “spring”). The architecture is a stunning Art Deco masterpiece, replete with mosaics, dramatic turrets, and enormous windows with dramatic displays of recent products. Today, it sits among other iconic Parisian landmarks, like the Galleries Lafayette store and the Opera. But back then, there was nothing nearby except a railway line that only carried cargo. “When we opened our store on Boulevard Haussmann, it was a completely new area,” says Jean-Marc Bellaiche, CEO of Printemps Groupe, the store’s parent company. “It was a bet that this neighborhood would become hot and vibrant. It …

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit and cofounder alongside Alexis Ohanian, speaks with Fast Company about what it takes to be an effective leader. He explains why imposter syndrome isn’t necessarily a bad thing and how his first job helped shape his leadership style. View the full article

Fintech firm Mercury recently dropped some data that made me smile. It ranked the top five coffee shops powering founders in San Francisco based on actual transaction data: Sightglass, CoffeeShop, Equator, Saint Frank, Ritual. I’ve built Octolane with my cofounder, Rafi, from every single one of them. But here’s what the data doesn’t show: the $500,000 investment term sheet I negotiated over a cortado at Cafe Réveille. The $800,000 deal I closed while sitting next to a grad student cramming for finals. The three customers who became friends, then advocates, then our biggest champions, all because we met first over coffee, not Zoom. When I was in high school, I cle…

Featuring Tom Basden, Executive Producer, Writer, and Actor; James Griffiths, Director, Executive Producer, Tim Key, Writer, Executive Producer, Actor and Carey Mulligan, Executive Producer, Actress. Moderated by Brendan Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief, Fast Company View the full article

In 2017, Nathan Cozzolino started Rose, a “farm to edibles” brand based in Los Angeles. Cozzolino and his team cultivated organic hemp and marijuana, produced its own low-dose gummies with natural organic ingredients, and sold the product to licensed dispensaries. This structure required overhead that cost upwards of $80,000 a month. Six years in, the brand wasn’t able to sell enough products to cover its expenses despite being sold in more than 100 retailers. That changed in July of 2023 when Rose switched the entirety of its production to hemp. “We did it because it was that or go out of business,” Cozzolino says. He let go of his cannabis licenses, downsized his f…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Across industries, a new era of climate innovation is accelerating. The momentum is visible in the data: Global clean energy investment surpassed $2 trillion for the first time in 2024, double the amount invested in fossil fuels. While solar panels, wind turbines, and grid-connected batteries often grab the headlines, the low carbon economy is growing in far more corners than many realize. …