The world’s first craft beer hotel, where you can wake up inside a brewery. BrewDog’s DogHouse Columbus will greet you each morning with aromas from our gently fermenting foeders even before you head down for breakfast!

If Brewdog is the beer for punks, this is the ultimate place for punks to stay. Beer taps in the bedrooms, beer fridges in the showers, a museum to the art of brewing on site – just opened in Columbus, Ohio – now officially the “hoppiest place on Earth.”

At least, so says James Watt, cofounder of BrewDog, the Scottish ‘punk brewer’, which has now opened its long-awaited beer hotel, the DogHouse, which claims to be the world’s first hotel to offer guests a night’s stay inside a brewery.

And it promises a suitably beer-soaked experience. Guests first enter a lobby dominated by a bar rather than a reception desk, with a bartender to handle check-in while also serving new arrivals with a welcome beer.

Each of the 32 bedrooms (including eight suites) features beer on tap, minibars stocked with BrewDog’s craft brews, and views of the facility’s large wooden foeders. Aside from the aforementioned in-shower beer fridges, bathrooms are stocked with hop-infused toiletries.

Other facilities at the DogHouse include an interactive museum detailing the brewing process and providing a history of craft beer, a media room, a fitness centre and a coffee bar in the lobby. There’s even a menu of beer-based spa treatments is also apparently in the works.

DogHouse is the world’s first beer-themed hotel built inside the BrewDog brewery in Columbus, Ohio. Here’s what it’s like to stay inside this hotel with its beer-themed amenities:

Even if you’re not planning an overnight stay, the DogHouse is well worth the trip for beer lovers.  There’s a museum dedicated to the history of BrewDog and Craft Beer, sensory and training rooms, meeting rooms, a lounge and an observation deck.

The Brewdog story

James Watt started a rebellion against tasteless mass market beers by founding BrewDog, now one of the world’s best-known and fastest growing craft breweries, famous for beers, bars, and crowdfunding. In this smart, funny book, he shares his story and explains how you too can tear up the rule book and start a company on your own terms. It’s an anarchic, DIY guide to entrepreneurship—and a new manifesto for business.

After spending seven years on the high seas of the North Atlantic, James Watt started BrewDog craft brewery in Scotland with his best friend, Martin Dickie. They didn’t have a business plan. All they had was a mis­sion to revolutionize beer drinking and make other people as passionate about craft beer as they are.

They’ve succeeded. Within a few years, BrewDog was huge—a world-famous craft brewery with beer bars around the globe and hundreds of thousands of fans. Those fans became literal backers of their business with the introduction of an unprecedented crowdfunding movement, Equity for Punks. And in rewriting the record books and kickstarting a revolution BrewDog inadvertently forged a whole new approach to business. Watt’s book Business for Punks bottles the essence of Brewdog an accessible, honest mani­festo, including mantras like

  • Cash is motherf*cking king … Cash is the lifeblood of your company. Monitor every penny as if your life depends on it—because it does.
  • Get people to hate you … You won’t win by try­ing to make everyone happy, so don’t bother. Let haters fuel your fire while you focus on your hard-core fans.
  • Steal and bastardise from other fields … Take inspiration freely wherever you find it— except from people in your own industry.
  • Job interviews suck … They never reveal if someone will be a good employee, only how good that person is at interviews. Instead, take them for a test drive and see if they’re passionate and a good culture fit.

Here is a longer list of the best moments and messages from the book, delivered in typically provocative yet inspiring style:

  • At BrewDog we reject the status quo, we are passionate, we don’t give a damn and we always do something which is true to ourselves. Our approach has been anti-authoritarian and non-conformist from the word go.
  • Ultimately for a crew to be effective leadership needs to come from the top down, the bottom up and everywhere in between.
  • Michael Jackson led to Martin and I deciding to take the plunge, follow our dreams and start our very own craft brewery. Michael, upon tasting one of our home-brewed concoctions, told us to quit our jobs and start brewing beer. It was the last bit of advice we ever listened to.
  • Rip up those stuffy old text books, reject the status quo, tear down the establishment and embrace the dawn of a new era.
  • The decisions you make during your business’s formative months will define your place in the world. They will be the most monumental decisions you will ever make, shaping your fledgling business in ways you cannot yet imagine. So you’d better buckle up, hold tight and step up to the challenge. You will need to make sure your ideas, and their realization, are nothing short of awesome.
  • Businesses fail. Businesses die. Businesses fade into oblivion. Revolutions never die. So start a revolution, not a business.
  • Your biggest challenge from day one is to give people a reason to care, and that reason has got to be your mission.
  • The market for something to believe in is infinite. You need to give people something to believe in.
  • If money is your motivation then you need to be the greediest, meanest son of a bitch on the planet to make a business work. Solely money-focused businesses do exist, but I don’t like being around them or their people.
  • Assume no one will care, assume no one will give a damn, assume no one will want to listen. Then figure out how to make people want to care about what you do. If you can’t, then your business is doomed.
  • Twenty-first-century consumers increasingly want to align themselves with companies and organizations whose missions and beliefs are compatible with, and enhance, their own belief systems.
  • Advice is for freaks and clowns. The thing about being driven is you need to know your own way.
  • The only thing you learn from mistakes is that you are not good enough and that you need to get better.
  • Don’t follow when you can lead.
  • Be a selfish bastard. Seriously, you have to be. If you’re not 110% up for it, no one else is going to give a damn. So dance to your own tune and do it your way. Make crafted products you love, create environments you want to hang out in and give the kind of service you’d love to receive yourself.
  • Choose a business partner as wisely as you would choose a spouse.
  • The power of any brand is inversely proportional to its scope.
  • Planning is merely glorified guesswork. Long-term planning is a vain, self-indulgent fantasy. Don’t waste your time.
  • Act, don’t plan.
  • Constraints are just advantages in disguise and opportunities to be innovative and imaginative. Cherish constraints. Embrace them.
  • Be very wary of external agencies and partners. They all speak a good game and promise the earth but at the end of the day they have no reason to care as much as you.
  • Living the punk DIY ethic means not relying on existing systems, processes or advisers as this would foster dependence on the system.
  • You need to be an independent, an outsider, a nomad, a libertine. You need to be completely self-sufficient and not rely on anyone for anything. If a skill set is important to your business, then you better learn it and learn it fast.
  • You need to create pull to be sustainable. And you don’t create pull through sales.
  • Everything you do is sales and all of your employees are selling all the time. Act accordingly.
  • Pretty much all you need to do for people to hate you is to be successful doing something that you love.
  • When you manage to get the Holy Grail of other businesses copying you, whilst others are hating you, you know you have hit a home run.
  • Eighty per cent of all new businesses fail. And they always fail for financial reasons. The more you understand the numbers the less likely they are to crush you and your dreams.
  • Comfort zones are places where average people do mediocre things. If you are even the tiniest bit comfortable then you need to push harder.
  • The lifeblood of your business is cash. If you can’t manage a cash flow, then you can’t run a business.
  • Spend every last dime as if it actually was your last and ensure that your team spend every single cent as if it were their own.
  • It was about empowering the change-makers, the misfits, the libertines, the community, the frustrated, the independents, the punks. Together we can, and will, change anything.
  • There is a huge difference between making a sale and actually being paid for that sale.
  • If you price down you down-sell everything, and there’s no going back.
  • You need to defend your price point like a junkyard Rottweiler.
  • The best way to decide how to allocate your cash and resources is to fully comprehend the opportunity-cost implications of every possible decision you could make in any situation.
  • Everything you and your business does is marketing. Modern brands don’t belong to companies, they belong to the customer.
  • Anything that you do, anywhere in your business, which is not completely aligned with your mission and your values is like a tiny little suicide.
  • Today the only way to build a brand is to live that brand. People want to feel like they are buying into something bigger than themselves. Your brand must give them that opportunity.
  • For a stunt to really work then it needs to be intrinsically linked to your mission and you already need to have a really strong following and a credible brand.
  • Whatever type of business you are in you need to start building a community and start turning customers into fans.
  • The biggest mistake you can make is actually caring what people think. To hell with opinions, conventions and consequences. It is all just a game.
  • We hate bad beer so much that we are on a permanent campaign to destroy as much of it as we possibly can.
  • Chasing someone else’s perception of cool is one of the stupidest mistakes it is possible to make.
  • Having a target market and explicitly marketing to them is a sure-fire way to patronize and alienate pretty much all of the intelligent population.
  • There are only three very simple things you need to know about sales.
    • Focus on the product.
    • Be open and honest.
    • Don’t compete on price.
  • Sales are merely the by-product of being great elsewhere.
  • If you can’t get your staff to fall in love with your business, you haven’t got a chance in hell of a customer to even consider liking it.
  • Any great business today is built on these simple yet enduring and all encapsulating pillars. The three pillars are:
    • Company culture
    • The quality of your core offering
    • Gross margin
  • Studies show that employees working in a company with a strong company culture are more than twice as effective as employees working in a company with a weak culture.
  • The things that apply to your business externally are just as important, if not even more so, inside it.
  • People mimic the behavior and beliefs of their leaders so make sure that you, and the people leading your business, live and breathe the behavior you want to perpetuate.
  • It isn’t enough for people to know what their business is doing. They have to know why it is doing it.
  • Companies need to wise up and max out. Smart companies realize, rather than minimizing wages, it is infinitely more productive and profitable in the long term to look to maximize engagement, loyalty, retention and productivity.
  • Culture has to be a priority from the get-go and it has to start with the founders and then flow from the early employees.
  • Working on your company culture is actually a much more effective form of marketing than pretty much all traditional marketing mediums combined. Culture is marketing. Culture is brand. Culture now resonates much more with consumers than advertising does.
  • We have two simple rules for hiring:
    • They have to be as passionate about our mission as we are.
    • They have to be the right cultural fit.
  • If you want your team to really rumble you’ll need to recognize their efforts. Explicitly and frequently. Leave your heartfelt praise and encouragement ringing in their ears and the impact can be off the charts.
  • Unless you add amazing people to your team, you are going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get average people to consistently make great decisions.
  • Teams tend to operate at, or close to, the ability level of the weakest team member.
  • Whatever happens, good, bad or ugly, it is a direct consequence of your leadership.
  • Leaders are rare inspirational beings. Managers are ten a penny; the world is full of adequately competent middle managers trapped in corporate hell.
  • Work harder, think smarter and focus with laser-like efficiency.
  • At BrewDog we have a fifty-fifty rule for our five directors. I and the other four people who lead our business are only allowed to spend half of our time working on the day-to-day operations of the company, on solving current challenges and dealing with existing issues and we have to spend at least half of our time working on ways to improve, grow and develop our business, on ways to drive us towards our next phase of growth.
  • Look for inspiration everywhere. The only place you should never look is within your own industry. Screw what all the other clowns are doing. Ignore it, blank it out; it is of no relevance or significance whatsoever.
  • Comfort zones are places where average people do mediocre things.
  • You will not always get it right. But every time you move, every time you make a bold decision, it will take you one step closer to finding the path you are searching for.
  • Your actions will determine your destiny.
  • The more action you take, the more opportunities open themselves up to you.
  • Your team should be governed by your values and your culture and not by policies and rules.
  • Keep the team as well informed as possible so they can buy into the excitement of what the business is both planning and currently achieving, both of which act as a great motivator.
  • Put systems in place before, as opposed to after, they are needed and put an infrastructure in place for where you want to be in two years’ time.
  • Write down your five biggest problems, sit down in a room with your team, and solve them. Then on to the next five.
  • Attitude is the difference between a setback and an adventure.
  • So whilst the fools, rats and wannabes are massaging each other’s egos you need to be plotting your revenge. Not on them specifically, but on the system that bred such morons. You need to be quietly planning how to blow the status quo to pieces and create a whole new world order.
  • You should always imagine the communication from the other party’s perspective. Put thought into what you say and how you say it.
  • Don’t shout too often, so that you can make sure it truly counts when you want to roar.
  • It is paramount you track at least ten of the most important performance indicators of your business monthly.
  • When it comes to your management accounts you should definitely be tracking sales, cost of sales, overheads, gross margin, EBITDA and net margin. You will also need to monitor items on your balance sheet at regular and short intervals, such as debtors, creditors and, most importantly, your cash position. In addition you should track certain other KPIs (key performance indicators), depending on what is important in your business and your current focus. For instance, you should consider tracking things like: average spend per transaction, staff turnover, customer complaints, referrals, shipment accuracy, sales mix, refunds, wastage, sales growth, additional customers, online engagement or staff happiness (to name but a few). In determining which items you need to keep close tabs on it really depends on your business and your objectives.
  • No measurement = no reporting = no visibility = no one cares = your ultimate demise.
  • Always do your negotiation homework. Find out about the other party, what makes them tick, their likes and dislikes. Ultimately think about what’s in it for them. Then build your argument around how the deal helps them, because at the end of the day they care much more about what is in their interests than yours.
  • Find a solution, structure and deal they feel comfortable with, and positive about. But one that is ultimately engineered around what you want.
  • You need to provide the vision, strategy and tools to help your team achieve your goals.
  • Whatever goals you’ve set, you should have a list of pint-sized systems, things which you rigorously adhere to without fail, that if consistently applied will help ensure you both achieve your goals and strengthen your brand and company in the long run too.
  • Committees are breeding grounds for compromise as the tyranny of conformity rules the roost. Conformity is no place for risk and compromise is no place for innovation.
  • Individual vision is always the force behind truly remarkable ideas and concepts.

Microsoft’s Redmond Campus is huge. It’s gigantic, sprawling, and when you arrive in the reception building, you feel like you’re entering a futuristic college. It’s got a hallway dedicated to high fives.

Just outside of Seattle, it’s more like a town than a headquarters, with 125 buildings spread across a 500 acres of beautiful campus that is rich in pine trees, and well-tendered vegetation. To get around, the 40000 folks who work here take green Microsoft shuttles, but its still incredible easy to get lost.

I found the easiest way to see the campus was to get up early and go for a run around the campus’ many running trails. The nearby Aloft Redmond hotel is a perfect start point for this. In 45 minutes you can see the whole campus, from Bill Lake (where founder Gates met his wife Melinda) to Satya Nadella’s cockpit office in building 34. There are cricket pitches and shopping malls, soccer fields and even a pub too. It’s a stimulating place – beautiful fresh air, inspiring decor, mixed with tech history and the future.

Microsoft has 12 different divisions that generate a billion dollars in revenues. When the Windows business is in bad shape, the Servers and Tools group, or the Office group, picks up the slack. Internally this creates focus and complexity. Focus on products and sales. But more difficult to see the bigger picture, and to harness change in more integrated ways. It’s a place where vision, influence and leadership are key.

Which brings us back to Microsoft’s leader, Satya Nadella. Having spent quite some time working with the teams at Microsoft, I dedicated my summer reading to Hit Refresh, Nadella’s bestselling book.

The FT’s review of Hit Refresh started by saying that if you ask around the tech industry these days, it is hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about Satya Nadella. It could have something to do with the deftness with which Microsoft’s chief executive has turned around his company’s fortunes. Nearly four years into the job, a company whose fate seemed tied to the shrinking PC market has found a new lease of life.

Or it could be the way he has buried the hatchet with Microsoft’s old enemies. By making up with fellow Indian engineer Sundar Pichai at Google, he ended one of the industry’s most divisive rivalries. Even Apple has become the subject of polite co-operation.

Then again, it could be just that he is so, well, nice. Empathy is Nadella’s North Star. And in this short book, he does not just elevate it to the level of a personal philosophy. It is also the foundation on which to rebuild Microsoft’s culture, and the answer to one of the most pressing questions of our time: whether we can find a way to live in harmony with the robots (and each other) in the artificial intelligence-driven future.

A heavy dose of empathy, it turns out, was not a bad antidote to the things that ailed Microsoft. Feared and disliked during its heyday, there was little sympathy as its power waned with the PC market. Nadella is too much the diplomat to criticise his predecessors. Indeed, he pays generous tribute to Steve Ballmer for encouraging him to strike out in his own direction, while also noting that it was Ballmer who set the more open course for which Nadella himself has received the credit.

For anyone attuned to Microsoft’s history, there are some knowing references. He twice criticises a culture in which everyone felt the need to be “the smartest person in the room” — clearly an allusion to the hyper-competitiveness of Bill Gates, who made the company in his image. But is empathy a strong enough foundation on which to rebuild a corporate culture? Nadella encourages managers at a corporate getaway to tap into their deepest motivations. As they indulge in uncharacteristic self-examination, “teary eyes” are in evidence.

This is the “soul” of his book’s subtitle, as in: “The quest to rediscover Microsoft’s soul and imagine a better future for everyone”.

If he stumbles in describing how he sought to build a new culture, it is because he does not have the words here to convey the living, beating heart of the company. For Nadella, key moments include watching his employees get teary over a corporate video, or describing an internal email in which he outlined a new corporate mission statement.

Yet he was clearly on to something. Breaking down some of the internal barriers has had an energising effect. And he put his finger on what had gone wrong: the frustration of a workforce that was losing and no longer considered cool. Former Microsoft engineers and others close to the company testify to the change that Nadella has wrought.

The final chapters of Hit Refresh address some of the big questions facing technology. It has become fashionable to attack the power of Big Tech. Nadella, unabashed, insists on a “moral obligation” to push forward with innovation — and an equally powerful obligation to weigh social and political impacts of technologies like AI and to make sure the benefits are widely shared. Early in this book, Nadella admits to having felt some hesitation at writing a personal account so soon in his term. He should not worry. There will be more than enough material for a deeper look when it is all over.

HBR recently wrote a case study of Microsoft’s approach to “Instilling a Growth Mindset“

Life will be much cheaper in the future, at least in terms of how much we will spend on the normal things in life today. Perhaps we will suddenly need to save up for vacations on Mars, to acquire a humanoid friend (or servant), whilst we might dream of asteroid-sourced jewellery. But if we stick to what we know, we should be spending less. Of course we might earn less too, particularly if machines can do what we do for a fraction of our cost. But that’s another story.

A recent article by Ray Kurzweil got me thinking about the declining costs of basic human needs. On average we tend to spend money on many of the same basic products and services. Consider how consumers spend their money in three large economies:

  • In the US, in 2011, 33% of the average American’s income was spent on housing, followed by 16% spent on transportation, 12% spent on food, 6% on healthcare, and 5% on entertainment. In other words, almost 75% of Americans’ expenditures come from housing, transportation, food, personal insurance, health, and entertainment.
  • In China, per a recent Goldman Sachs Investment Research report, there is a similar breakdown—food, home, mobility, and well-being make up the majority of the expenditures. Interestingly, in China, consumers care significantly more about looking good and eating better (and less about having more fun) than in the US—nearly half of consumer income goes to clothes and food.
  • In India, with a population of 1.2 billion people, expenditures on food, transportation, and miscellaneous goods and services are most prominent. Rent/housing and healthcare represent a smaller portion of expenditures.

These differences likely represent cultural differences in each of the three very different countries, but overall, you see that the majority of expenditures are in these top 7 categories:

1. Food

Additional gains will be made as we learn to efficiently produce foods locally through vertical farming (note that 70% of food’s final retail price comes from transportation, storage and handling). Also, as we make genetic and biological advances, we will learn how to increase yield per square meter.

2. Transport

When the likes of Uber roll out fully autonomous services, your cost of transportation will plummet. Think about all of the related costs that disappear: auto insurance, auto repairs, parking, fuel, parking tickets. Your overall cost of “getting around” will be 5 to 10 times cheaper when compared to owning a car. This is the future of “car as a service.” Ultimately, the poorest people on Earth will be chauffeured around.

3. Housing

Think about what drives high housing costs. Why does a single-family apartment in London cost £10 million, while the same square footage in Sunderland can be purchased for £100,000? New technologies like autonomous vehicles and augmented reality will make the proximity of your home to your job irrelevant, meaning you can live anywhere. Plus houses will become cheap to build. A number of startups are now exploring how 3D printed structures and buildings can dramatically reduce the cost of construction and the amount of time it takes to build a building.

4. Energy

Five thousand times more energy hits the surface of the Earth from the Sun in an hour than all humanity uses in a year. Solar is abundant worldwide. Better yet, the poorest countries on Earth are the sunniest. Today, the cost of solar has dropped to approx $0.03 kWh. The cost of solar will continue to demonetize through further material science advances (e.g. perovskite) that increase efficiencies.

5. Education

Coursera, Khan Academy, and schools like Harvard, MIT and Stanford have thousands of hours of high-quality instruction online, available to anyone on the planet with an Internet connection. But this is just the beginning. Soon the best professors in the world will be AIs able to know the exact abilities, needs, desires and knowledge of a student and teach them exactly what they need in the best fashion at the perfect rate. Accordingly, the child of a billionaire or the child of a pauper will have access to the same (best) education delivered by such an AI, effectively for free.

6. Healthcare

Healthcare can be roughly split into four major categories:

(i) Diagnostics: AI has already demonstrated the ability to diagnose cancer patients better than the best doctors, image and diagnose pathology, look at genomics data and draw conclusions, and/or sort through gigabytes of phenotypic data… all for the cost of electricity.

(ii) Intervention/Surgery: In the near future, the best surgeons in the world will be robots, and they’ll be able to move with precision and image a surgical field in high magnification. Each robotic surgeon can call upon the data from millions of previous robotic surgeries, outperforming the most experienced human counterpart. Again, with the cost asymptotically approaching zero.

(iii) Chronic/Eldercare: Taking care of the aging and the chronically ill will again be done most efficiently through robots.

(iv) Medicines: Medicines will be discovered and manufactured more efficiently by AIs and, perhaps in the near future, be compounded at home with the aid of a 3D printing machine that assembles your perfect medicines based on the needs and blood chemistries in that very moment.

7. Entertainment

Entertainment (video and gaming) historically required significant purchases of equipment and services. Today, with the advent of music streaming services, YouTube, Netflix and the iPhone App Store, we’re seeing an explosion of available selections at the same time that the universe of options rapidly demonetizes. YouTube has over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.

There’s an ever-growing list of global challenges facing us all. From cybersecurity threats to income inequality to extreme weather to homelessness to food and water insecurity, the range of problems is broad, and the issues are deep.

However more companies than ever are using the profit motive to help the planet and tackle social problems, and are doing so in a way that creates value for the business. Now in its fourth year, the Fortune Change the World list celebrates the changemakers—those pioneering business leaders who look at social issues material to their long-term success and say, “We can do things differently.” They’ve embarked on a strategic shift towards shared value, a smarter business model that reimagines the way companies build new markets, innovate, create distinction, and contribute to a thriving society and planet.

At last year’s Thinkers50 European Business Forum, Michael Porter joined me on stage, and focused on his most recent book Creating Shared Value. It’s impact can be huge – think of the global retailer that builds a talent pipeline to create opportunity for underserved communities that actually delivers more productive employees; the multinational utility that seeks to end energy poverty while it creates new markets; and the shipping company that’s transforming its fleet to be more fuel efficient, saving money and lowering its carbon emissions. Today, many of the world’s biggest and most innovative companies are engaged in initiatives that can contribute to a better society and the environment while they drive their businesses.

#1. Reliance Jio

If access to the Internet is a basic human right—and the United Nations declared it one in the summer of 2016—then Reliance Jio deserves more credit than most for expanding access to it. The telecom upstart, launched in September of that year by Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, likes to say it provides the public with “digital oxygen.”

Two years ago, there wasn’t much oxygen to go around in the world’s second-most-populous country. Mobile phones crawled on 2G networks, and consumers typically paid more than 200 rupees ($2.88) for one gigabyte of data. India had just 153 million mobile Internet subscribers among its population of 1.3 billion. Enter Jio, with a speedy 4G network (which it spent billions building out), free calls, and dirt-cheap data (as low as 4¢ per GB). It has since issued a super-lowcost smartphone and is rolling out fixed broadband service as well. Reliance Jio, which says it’s profitable, has amassed 215 million subscribers in just 22 months.

The resulting “Jio-fication” has been nothing short of revolutionary; with data use surging and Jio’s competitors scrambling to match its offerings, the development has jump-started India’s digital economy. The biggest winners are those in rural areas or of modest means—the farmers, students, and entrepreneurs who finally have in their hands the tool they need to participate in the modern economy.

#2. Merck

The timing was tragic. Merck embraced a vital mission in 2014 when it began developing an Ebola vaccine in collaboration with Canada’s public health agency and NewLink Genetics, not long after the deadly virus broke out in West Africa. Effective vaccines take months to create, and by the time V920 could be deployed, the disease had claimed thousands of lives.

But when the scourge rose again earlier this year, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Merck was ready. It shipped nearly 13,000 doses of V920 to the World Health Organization, which provided vaccinations to more than 3,300 people. The DRC’s health ministry says no vaccinated people developed the disease—and with another outbreak declared in the eastern DRC in August, Merck’s lifesaver is on the front lines once more.

#3. Bank of America

In 2007, even as the financial crisis began taking huge bites out of its balance sheet, Bank of America committed to lending, investing, and otherwise raising $20 billion for low-carbon and sustainable business. It has since added $125 billion to that commitment—and deployed $96 billion—financing everything from green skyscrapers in Manhattan to cleaner cookstoves in Kenya. The bank helped invent, and is now the biggest player in, the market in “green bonds,” which secure better financing for climate-protecting projects; green bond issuance worldwide soared from $13 billion in 2013 to $161 billion last year.

#4. Inditex

Mindful of consumers’growing desire to know their clothes were made under safe working conditions, Inditex, the retailer and parent of fast fashion chain Zara, has steadily shifted production to suppliers with stronger safety records. Last year, 95% of its products were made at those better factories, up from 80% in 2012 and well above industry averages. Acting ethically hasn’t hurt the company financially; Inditex has posted 7% annual sales growth since 2012. The company also conducts its own training on worker safety, with an emphasis on educating women—85% of its factory staff—about how to recognize gender discrimination and defend their rights and their value.

#5. Alibaba

Alibaba wants to drive money into rural China in a fairly literal way. Its popular maps service, Auto-Navi, launched a “poverty alleviation map” feature in Henan province this year, designed to entice day-trippers into remote countryside towns. It flags what facilities are available, helping local restaurants, gas stations, and shops draw customers and develop an online presence.

When I was 10 years old, I joined the school running club. Mike Henry, the teacher at Thomlinson Middle School in Rothbury, had a love of running and took a group of 15-20 of us for a 3 mile run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtime. Along the country lanes we would go, passed the Whitton Tower farm, and to the turning point at Carterside Farm. For the first year, I was always at the back of the group, struggling to keep pace with my more talented peers. On my feet were a pair of Adidas trainers, more like tennis shoes, and probably the cause of many injury problems in future years!

After a while I got fitter, and discovered an aptitude and ultimately a lifelong passion for running. In September 1978 my first ever race was on the horizon. I’d been selected to run for the school, against other local schools in the Morpeth area. Mike suggested I should invest in some new footwear. It would be a hilly course and I really needed some proper running shoes. He told me about the Wally Waffle. A specialist children’s running shoe from a new American sportswear company called Nike. That Saturday, I persuaded my parents to part with the £9.99 for my first shoes with a swoosh. I loved them. They were light and fast. And I even saw my hero Brendan Foster wearing similar shoes on television. For the last 40 years (Is it really that long?!) I have continued to run, and worn nothing but Nikes though that time. I must have bought over 100 pairs of Nike trainers, racers, and spikes over the years!

This summer as I read Nike founder Phil Knight’s autobiography, Shoe Dog, all those moments came back to me. It was quite incredible to think that at the same time I was buying my first Wally Waffles, Phil and his maverick team of “shoe dogs” in Beaverton Oregon were desperately trying to grow their start-up company, Blue Ribbon Sports, into an international operation. Having started as an importer of Tiger shoes from Japan, then falling out with them and creating their own line with a $35 swoosh logo, they were desperately trying to balance cashflows, product innovations, internal relationships, and lawsuits too. To me they were just cool trainers, but now I realise what went in to making them a reality.

The story of Nike

Shoe Dog is addictive as both autobiography and business book, and then as an economics book, it is both educating and inspiring.

It is a first-person chronicle of Phil Knight’s founding of Nike, or rather its predecessor Blue Ribbon Sports in 1962, ending with Nike’s initial public offering in 1980, mixing insight and inspiration, and stories about fire drills that involved jumping out of his bedroom window with a bedsheet while his mother timed him. 

As way of a quick summary, here are a few anecdotes from the story of Oregon-trail entrepreneurialism which became a cut-throat international business.

Knight’s running talent: Frustrated by his own inability to break 4 minutes for the mile whilst at the University of Oregon, Knight turned to business. More strictly, he first trained to be an accountant, getting a job with what is now PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He also lectured on finance at the local college, which is where he met his wife Penny.

Bowerman’s waffle iron: USA track coach and Knight’s co-founder Bill Bowerman was always tinkering with shoes. His famous waffle-iron inspiration for a studded sole actually emerged because of his obsession with creating a authentic running track. Knight described getting the waffle sole patented as the most magical moment in Nike’s history.

Nike v Adidas: Of the 1970s, Knight writes, “I was developing an unhealthy contempt for Adidas. Or maybe it was healthy. That one German company had dominated the shoe market for a couple of decades, and they possessed all the arrogance of unchallenged dominance. I despised them.” Today Nike is twice as big as Adidas.

Inspired by Japan: His frequent business trips to Japan in the ’60s and ’70s endeared him to its people and culture … “I sat, contemplative, reverent, beneath swaying ginkgo trees, beside a beautiful torii gate.” He started by importing Tiger (now Asics) shoes, and eventually developed his own brand (Nike) made in Japanese factories, financed by Japanese trading companies.

Nike or Dimension Six: The name “Nike” came to Jeff Johnson, Blue Ribbon Sports’ first full-time employee, in a dream (“Any good brand should be short with a click in it – like a K or X”). But it  took an enormous effort by everyone else to convince Knight that his preferred brand name, “Dimension Six,” was “unspeakably bad.”

The annual Buttface: Knight held a regular retreat called “the Buttface” for his close team, a few days of problem solving and planning the future (alongside “some serious drinking and partying”). Apart from these days, he largely left his people to work on their own, focusing on the outputs not how they did it. He always worried about his leadership style being too hands off, but his people thrived on it.

Nike’s story of business 

The Canadian economist Reuven Brenner once referred to macroeconomics as “a tautology and a myth, a dangerous one at that, sustaining the illusion that prosperity is necessarily linked with territory, national units, and government spending in general.” Phil Knight would likely share Brenner’s contempt for the macro side of economics.  He’s lived Brenner’s quote, and much more.

In Knight’s case, Nike, is a creation of his passion for running, persistence to create a business, and creativity in finding a way over a million hurdles on the way.  Just about every item ever produced by the shoe company was manufactured somewhere not the United States, not to mention that Knight’s financial savior in Blue Ribbon’s less prosperous days was a Japanese trading company, Nissho.

Interesting about Shoe Dog is that it pretty much ends in 1980 when Nike was taken public.  On that day Knight was worth $178 million, while many of his early employees had holdings in the $6 million range.  To Knight, Nike’s early history, one defined by near constant fear of bankruptcy, was the story to tell.  Despite the agony, despite the countless times his creation nearly died, it’s this part of the story that Knight says he would live again if he could.

Knight writes about how some of his first employees, Jeff Johnson (employee #1) and Bob Woodell, still visit the company’s Beaverton campus to tell stories of the early days.  How lucky Nike employees are that they get to hear about how it all began in Knight’s parents’ basement, all of this before Blue Ribbon could afford to rent a space connected to a raucous bar, with broken windows that the fledgling company lacked the funds to fix.

Knight’s seeks to nourish Nike’s culture, and also to hopefully remind the 5,000 well-to-do employees in Beaverton that somewhere there’s a “shoe dog” with drive and ambition similar to Knight’s.  This entrepreneur is working feverishly to knock Nike off of its lofty perch much as Nike did formerly #1 Adidas.  No doubt it’s easy for the employees of today to forget how very ephemeral success is.  Johnson’s and Woodell’s stories, along with Knight’s amazing book, hopefully remind the employees of this truth, all the while enhancing their already bursting pride in what they’re a part of.

From an economics standpoint, Knight’s tale of nearly always being in debt for the first 18 years of the company’s existence, of always fearing the one incorrect move that would bankrupt Nike, is instructive on its own. He stared failure in the face nearly every day from his company’s creation in the early 1960s right up to 1980.

Money for Blue Ribbon, and eventually Nike, was always tight.  As Knight recalls about his company’s austere past, “Any dollar that wasn’t nailed down I was plowing directly back into the business.” Focusing on the year 1970, Knight recalls that “I spent most of every day thinking about liquidity, talking about liquidity, looking to the heavens and pleading for liquidity.  My kingdom for liquidity.”

Many will remember the negative moments in Nike’s journey, such as the sweatshops around the world that “exploited” poorly paid employees.  Yet when Nike arrived in Vietnam the workers in its factories were walking to work.  Once in Knight’s employ they were soon enough riding bikes to work, then scooters, then driving automobiles.  As Knight notes, “Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in.” Interesting about Nike’s overseas factories is that the company always paid above the prevailing market rate; sometimes so much above it that Nike, according to Knight, was “disrupting the nation’s entire economic ecosystem.” Translated, there were times when “exploited” Nike factory workers were earning more than doctors in the impoverished countries that Nike entered.

About early finance for his company, Knight dealt with the very local First National Bank of Oregon.  He recalls that banks, including First National, were very risk averse back then.  Suffocatingly so.  “They wanted you to never, ever outgrow your cash balance.” Not much has changed since.  Knight reports that around the founding of Blue Ribbon, 26 out of 27 companies failed.

Lest we forget, Knight spent the first eighteen years of his time running Nike worrying on a daily basis that his company would soon go under thanks to a lack of cash.  This is important because Knight plainly spent a lot of the company’s limited funds traveling on the other side of the world in search of factories capable of making his shoes.  He wouldn’t have done this if there had been manufacturing capacity in the States capable of and willing to make the shoes for him here.

Why did Knight succeed? It’s hard to say exactly.  He admits to being intensely competitive, doesn’t hide the truth that his boys suffered his devotion to his “third child” through lost time with their father, he was courageous and full of vision, etc.  All those things make sense, but it also can’t have hurt that Knight had a major chip on his shoulder.  And with the latter in mind, we’re constantly told that discrimination is harmful, that it discourages the otherwise talented.  Really? What stories of entrepreneurs almost invariably tell us is that these outsiders were and are discriminated against, almost as a rule.  Precisely because they’re doing things differently, few take them seriously. The discrimination fuels them. As Knight recalls about the employees of a much younger Nike, “Each of us had been misunderstood, misjudged, dismissed.  Shunned by bosses, spurned by luck, rejected by society, short-changed by fate when looks and others natural graces were handed out.  We’d each been forged by early failure.” Yes!

Throughout the course of human history, the biggest cities have always seemed impossibly large.

For many millennia, it was almost unfathomable for a city to sustain more than 1 million residents. In fact, it wasn’t until the 19th century that the largest cities globally, such as London and Beijing, were able to consistently hold populations beyond that impressive mark.

Despite this, in the modern era, we’ve quickly discovered that a city of 1 million people isn’t remarkable at all. In China alone, there are now over 100 cities with a million people today – and as such, our mental benchmark for what we consider to be a “big city” has changed considerably from past times.

Forget Tokyo, New York, London

Today, the largest cities in the world are Tokyo and Sao Paulo with 36 million people, followed by Shanghai with 28m, New York with 23m … and London a long way behind with 10m people. Just like a city the size of modern Tokyo was hard to imagine for someone living in the 19th century, it can be an extremely difficult thought experiment for us to visualize what future megacities will look like.

Researchers at the Global Cities Institute have provided in-depth forecasts that have been visualised by VisualCapitalist to show the potential megacities of the future, extrapolating a variety of factors to project a list of the 101 largest cities in the years 2010, 2025, 2050, 2075, and 2100.

The world’s largest cities in 2100

According to the report, human geography will look completely unfamiliar by the turn of the century. Here is a list of the 20 largest megacities projected for 2100:

Population (2100) City Country
#1   88.3 million Lagos Nigeria
#2   83.5 million Kinshasa DRC
#3   73.7 million Dar Es Salaam Tanzania
#4   67.2 million Mumbai India
#5   57.3 million Delhi India
#6   56.6 million Khartoum Sudan
#7   56.1 million Niamey Niger
#8   54.3 million Dhaka Bangladesh
#9   52.4 million Kolkata India
#10   50.3 million Kabul Afghanistan
#11   49.1 million Karachi Pakistan
#12   46.7 million Nairobi Kenya
#13   41.4 million Lilongwe Malawi
#14   40.9 million Blantyre City Malawi
#15   40.5 million Cairo Egypt
#16   40.1 million Kampala Uganda
#17   40.0 million Manila Philippines
#18   37.7 million Lusaka Zambia
#19   36.4 million Mogadishu Somalia
#20   35.8 million Addis Ababa Ethiopia

By the year 2100, it’s estimated that 13 of the world’s largest megacities will be located in Africa. Meanwhile, India will hold three of them – and there will be zero of them found in the Americas, China, or Europe.

#1: Lagos, Nigeria
Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, is expected to push the limits of how big a metropolis can get. Already, Lagos has seen explosive growth over the past few decades, and is growing so fast that no one really knows how many people live there. Over 2,000 people emigrate to the city every day, and current population estimates vary widely from 11 to 21 million inhabitants. Either way, by the turn of the century, Lagos is projected to have a population north of 88 million.

#2: Kinshasa, DRC
Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is projected to be the second largest city in the world with a population of 83 million.

#3: Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Dar Es Salaam, a city on the coast of Tanzania, has a population of just 4.4 million today. By 2100, its population is projected to jump by a whopping 1,588%, putting the total at 74 million inhabitants.

Global drinks company Constellation Brands plans to significantly increase its ownership in Canopy Growth by investing an industry-record 5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.8 billion) to make the marijuana titan its exclusive global partner.

Constellation will acquire 104.5 million shares directly from Canopy Growth for CA$48.60 per share, giving the New York-based company – which owns, distributes and markets 100 beer, wine and spirits brands, including Corona and Robert Mondavi – 38% ownership.

It is also the largest investment in any cannabis company to date and will “immediately” put CA$5 billion in the bank for Ontario-based Canopy after the deal closes, the company said in a statement.

Constellation also will receive 139.7 million new warrants, which, if exercised, would increase its ownership in Canopy to more than 50% and provide at least an additional CA$4.5 billion for the diversified marijuana company.

Canopy said it plans to use the cash to build and acquire key assets to establish global scale in the nearly 30 countries pursuing a federal medical cannabis program. The money will not be invested in additional cannabis cultivation assets in Canada, Canopy said. CEO Bruce Linton called the deal “rocket fuel” for Canopy’s international plans.

With more than 52,000 employees generating about 300 inventions a year, the Cleveland Clinic doesn’t want for innovation.

However the task facing Cleveland Clinic Innovations, a group founded in 2000, is to help as many of those inventions as possible find their way into the healthcare system. Sometimes that may be through licensing them to established companies or startups, and in other instances it involves forming new startups.

CCI also serves as a “conduit,” explains Executive Director Peter O’Neill, for “external innovations that can benefit the Cleveland Clinic.” The Clinic, with $8.4 billion in 2017 revenue, treats about 7.5 million patients in a typical year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjQzvapQjKQ

Here O’Neill tells more:

Everyone is a Caregiver

At our core, we are about commercializing ideas from the employees of Cleveland Clinic. At Cleveland Clinic, everybody calls themselves a caregiver, so I call myself a caregiver even though I don’t see patients.

To find internal innovations, we have 15 people, out of 50 Cleveland Clinic Innovations staff members, whose primary job is to interact with our caregivers. They’re meeting with caregivers all the time, learning about what they’re working on, helping them identify potentially commercially valuable inventions. We then interact with a lot of companies, a lot of entrepreneurs, and a lot of investors. A lot of those conversations are where we get a lens into external innovations and external technology solutions.

What’s interesting is that I do not report to our Head of Research. In almost any university, and in lots of other hospitals, the technology commercialization group, or the people called the “transfer group,” reports to research. The reason it has evolved that way is because research groups are prolific sources of inventions. The difference here at the Cleveland Clinic is that we commercialize technology only with a focus on translating those inventions into products that help patients. We want to maintain that clinician, patient-service, caregiver perspective. We don’t want to be pulled into an early academic research direction. So that’s why I report to the Chief of Staff, who’s the same person that all the senior clinical leaders report to.

Ideas Screening

We receive over 300 invention disclosures a year [from Cleveland Clinic employees]. Many are situations where we were talking with a clinic person before they submitted an invention disclosure. Sometimes, the first interaction we have with the person is when they know about our office and they submit an invention disclosure.

We historically do about 40 deals, or some form of license agreement, a year. We’re going to say “no” 260 times a year. Since we’re primarily focused on doing those 40 deals, we have to be efficient about positioning those other 260 things in a respectful way. Many of the inventors there are Cleveland Clinic doctors who are significant people in their field.

We look at patentability, market potential, and we look at clinical effectiveness. More and more, we look at the ability to [improve] the value of healthcare delivery, which is a combination of cost and improving outcomes. Those are the evaluation criteria that guide our decision making. [Then] we do some patent protection and some IP protection. We don’t employ patent attorneys, but we work with them a lot. We do some prototyping work, then we do some more advanced product development work. It’s all case-by-case, and it’s all driven by business decisions based on what we think has commercial potential.

We have a lot of other internal activity. We host an innovation summit every year. We had over 3,000 in 2018. There’s also a hackathon attached to that.

Cleveland Clinic is the largest employer in Northeast Ohio… And our office gets involved in economic development because inventions lead to products, products lead to companies, and companies lead to jobs. Our story frequently intersects with economic development activities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uEuQKv7CIg

Partnerships

What we’re doing more and more of is being a conduit and a source of identifying external innovations that can benefit the Cleveland Clinic.

A lot of the types of external innovation are IT and operational kinds of solutions. I’m sure you’ve heard about artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain… I understand some of those in a very superficial way, and some of them I understand not at all. Cleveland Clinic is not an expert in artificial intelligence, but we know that there are AI types of algorithms that can help radiologists do a better job of screening our imaging to identify problems. We could try to develop that stuff internally, but we’re not good at AI. So we would look to partner with people who have AI solutions that have already been vetted — maybe even radiology and analytics kinds of algorithms — and bring those kinds of solutions into the Cleveland Clinic.

We have some other activities that are specific to help us [with external innovation]. We recently formed a collaboration with this accelerator called Plug and Play. Plug and Play is all about identifying startup companies and introducing them to big corporate partners to help facilitate the adoption of the startup company’s products. We began working with them in October, but kicked off the program in January. They opened up an office in Cleveland in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic, mostly in partnership with our office, and the reason Cleveland Clinic wanted to do that partnership was to increase our visibility and exposure to external solutions.

One of the main reasons we collaborated with them was that their services are free to startup companies. That’s important to us, because many of the other accelerators seemed to have some kind of a fee, whether it’s equity or cash… We didn’t want that because we want the best quality startup companies. We don’t want people who are obligated to pay, or feel desperate and have to pay. Plug and Play also has an international footprint. They have a significant presence in Europe and Asia.

We’ve formed some of our own startups. We create three to five startups of our own each year. I think of [partnerships that lead to startups] as concentric rings of influence or interaction. We have a lot of local collaborations — for example with the university systems, like Case Western Reserve University. There’s some regional economic facilitator groups. Jumpstart is one. BioEnterprise is one… The midwest is one level of the ring. Then we have national interactions with JP Morgan and GE Ventures. Then, internationally. I was in Finland last month to talk with a group of about 20 companies about how to do business in the United States more efficiently. My current boss is moving into the role of being the president of Cleveland Clinic in London. We also have activities in China and other parts of Asia, and we have a hospital in Abu Dhabi. We think of it as rings of expanding a geographic scope of influence.

Metrics

Our two metrics that we measure are dollars to the institution and service. You might say, “Dollars is a little bit mercenary for a hospital. I thought you were a caregiver.” Yes, we are about translating inventions into products that help patients. My belief is that there are no products that help a lot of patients where somebody’s not making money. It’s not a perfect score, but dollars are a pretty good way of measuring how impactful an invention is. If we negotiate the business terms correctly so we’re getting treated fairly, there should be a reasonable way of measuring our contribution to that product getting to the marketplace.

Then our service is the reason we exist. It’s the reason I report to Chief of Staff. We’re very much a service group and need to make sure we’re being responsive and [maintaining] good communication with our employees.

Explorys at the Cleveland Heart Lab was a company we spun out, grew here in town, and late last year was acquired by Quest Diagnostics. They made the decision that they weren’t going to strip it from Cleveland. Those are stories that look like a win on multiple levels. There was a financial metric about how impactful it will it be. Both companies employ hundreds of employees in northeastern Ohio. Those turn into additional regional assets.

FinTech innovations have been at the forefront of tech disruptions in recent years. By the end of 2017, there were more than 30 FinTech unicorns globally, including European companies such as Klarna, Adyen, and Transferwise.

In particular it is now the disruptive impact of blockchain, big data and most significantly AI, that are driving dramatic rethinking of the future of financial services – from banking and savings to investments and payments – enabling a new generation of brands to breakaway from the legacies of big banks, and traditional processes.

It is not surprising that established banks are seeking to partner with FinTech startups to reinvent their business models: in 2016, more than €22 billion was invested in FinTech worldwide. StartUs Insights analysed 14.000 FinTech startups, to identify technologies that will cause major disruptions in the financial industry in the near future.

This is their summary map:

Mobile Banking

Mobile banking has come a long way: from SMS Banking, which first appeared in 1999, to today’s smartphone banking apps that allow for mobile payment and management of all banking and financial services on-the-go. Not only does mobile banking reduce location dependency of financial services and operation costs, but it also provides an end-user interface for the expansion of Banking-as-a-Platform (BaaP).

Blockchain

A cryptocurrency frenzy over the past two years is how most people got introduced to the blockchain. Aside from using cryptocurrencies for private and fast online transactions, blockchain provides a transparent, secure, immutable and reliable ledger to document contracts, transactions, and records. Innovations such as Blockchain Bonds, blockchain clearing, and settlement systems have already been used to make intra-bank and inter-bank transactions cheaper and faster.

Big Data

In addition to traditional financial data collection, new data sources such as mobile banking and the Internet of Things (IoT) provide an additional layer of data gathering. Combined with Artificial Intelligence, Big Data analytics utilize large amounts of old and new data to discover hidden patterns for better risk management and fraud detection. New insights from big data improve the understanding of customer behaviors and help banks to create better and more customized products and services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI helps banks to analyze their Big Data to improve existing solutions and make better decisions. A more recent AI trend is to use its cognitive abilities to go through a large amount of unstructured text and data to generate more insights and to learn natural language. A more intelligent AI chatbot or virtual assistant can take over repetitive “low-value” operations, such as performing small amount transactions, explaining financial products and providing basic financial advice to customers.

Regulatory Technology (RegTech)

Most RegTechs are services and tools using Big Data and Cloud Computing to enhance a company’s ability to monitor, report and comply with regulatory requirements. These startups use AI and predictive analytics to automate compliance tasks, reduce risk fraud, perfect authentication and identity management. As global banking regulations become ever complex, RegTechs help banks to increase transparency and consistency, while lowering the cost of compliance.

Biometrics

Biometric technologies are often seen as the holy grail of data safety and security. They use physically unique features of an individual, including fingerprints, face, voice, retina, and other forms of recognition to enhance security and identity verification. With more smart devices equipped with better sensors, banks are able to safeguard their users, prevent cyber crimes, and identity theft better than ever.

Open Banking Application Program Interfaces (APIs)

Among the innovation areas mentioned in this article, Open Banking APIs may have the largest disruptive impact on the traditional banking model. Through open APIs, banks give not only users but also partners more transparency and access to banking data and encourage the creation of new value chains and services. Until recently, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) was seen as the main model of how FinTech startups leverage Open APIs to create new services and products that improved the banking experience for consumers and generated value. Baking-as-a-Platform (BaaP), seen as the next Open API model, allows banks to provide curated third-party different financial services and products to customers. It allows banks to retain control of customer data and ensure the quality of services provided on their platform.

Disruptive Startups

  • Monese is a complete mobile banking company that significantly simplifies the process of opening a bank account in the UK (“instant account for mobile people”). Additionally, the startup enables users to send money abroad, receive salary transfers, and pay bills among other functionalities – all by smartphone.
  • Having raised roughly 12€ million to date, Abra takes full advantage of the blockchain technology to merge money transfer and payments by a digital cash wallet that works worldwide. No bank or other traditional organization is participating in managing, storing, sending, or accepting funds. The startup seeks to enable the purchase and storage of digital currency like Bitcoin directly on the smartphone, getting around the issue of lack of local exchanges.
  • Cignify makes use of big data to meet the needs of millions of people owning a smartphone but having no access to financial services. Through analyzing data solely from smartphones, they are able to create valid credit risk scores.
  • French startup Cognitiv+ has built an Artificial Intelligence Engine capable of identifying topics of interest in unstructured text as well as relationships between topics, companies and more. For financial institutions, AI can be used to gain quick and thorough insights into their legal documents by analyzing data from legislation and contracts.
  • The core activity of the London-based startup Percentile revolves around the needs of risk officers working in capital markets. With the help of “automation, good data management and removal of the black box and spreadsheet-driven risk processes”, Percentile achieves greater transparency and consistency for internal and regulatory needs.
  • Swedish iZettle counts as one of the front-runners enabling payment via smartphone, tablet, and the web. The functionalities of this startup’s solution are available to developers, also allowing them to integrate it with their own, thus creating new apps and services.
  • By working on predicting a user’s identity by their typing pattern, Romanian startup TypingDNA takes the application of biometrics in FinTech further. Their ambition is to use biometric typing, also known as keystroke dynamics, to protect ePayments, SaaS, apps, and devices. Developers can secure an application simply by typing biometrics through their application program interface (API).

The finance industry has already experienced many changes and disruptions caused by FinTechs. Technologies such as mobile banking, mobile payment, and biometrics have changed how many consumers interact with their banks and financial institutions every day. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have become a known phenomenon in recent years, but their real disruption potential in the financial industry has yet to be seized. Other less visible FinTechs in the areas of BaaP, RegTech, Big Data, and AI will bring fundamental change to the business model of banks. Traditional banks need to move fast in order to adapt to the next wave of disruption.

Hooi Ling Tan is co-founder of Grab, and recently ranked as one of Asia’s leading female entrepreneur by Forbes magazine.

A mechanical engineering graduate, she was previously a consultant at McKinsey & Company, advising global corporations in Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America and Australia. Hooi Ling met her co-founder Anthony Tan while pursuing their Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School in 2011. After finishing their studies, they headed home to start Grab – MyTeksi back then – in Kuala Lumpur before moving its headquarters to Singapore. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Fast forward to this day and Grab has grown into an “everyday” business, providing services in the food delivery, grocery delivery and fintech sector. It has crossed 2 billion rides in July and is on its way to achieving $1 billion revenue by end of this year. And of course, Grab is one of the two most talked-about and valuable startup in Southeast Asia.

But the startup is not going to stop at just that, it aims to become the quotidian app of Southeast Asian lives. “With Grab Platform, we’re transitioning from a transport company to an everyday super app. This is reflective of our growth over the past six years. Because we are the go-to transportation service provider in Southeast Asia, we now have a strong user base and wide distribution network, and we’ve been able to heavily invest in future services like food, payments and logistics. Today, we’re bringing it all together onto the Grab Platform. We’re focused on becoming Southeast Asia’s everyday super app, providing the most important everyday needs for Southeast Asians – food, payments, logistics, groceries deliveries.”

So, how do the two co-founders split the workload – who does what? Hooi Ling says, she oversees people and operations at Grab, while Anthony typically handles the more “external facing part” of the business. “That said, we collaborate a lot and exchange portfolios from time to time.”

In 2017, Grab raised a $2.5-billion round led by Chinese ride-hailing major Didi Chuxing and Japan’s Softbank Group. Didi’s president and a vocal gender diversity advocate, Jean Liu had told this portal that diversity is indispensable to the startup’s core value.

Similarly, gender has never been an issue for Hooi Ling and the rest of the team, where more than 40 per cent of Grab employees or Grabbers including team leads, are women, she said. “While we’re very proud of the fact that Grab’s gender balance is relatively equitable, we don’t take that for granted and we know we could still be doing more. We have a mentorship programme called Women at Grab, which started with leaders like myself and our Head of People, Chin Yin Ong, as mentors. As the programme has grown, we now have former mentees now serving as mentors to newer and younger colleagues at Grab,” she said.

The women support by Grab extends beyond the Grabbers. As women tend to prioritise family obligations much more, the flexibility of being a Grab driver and agent helps women take control of their finances while juggling family time, said Hooi Ling. “In 2017, the number of women driving for Grab grew by more than 230% and the total distance driven by women drivers increased by 570%. In Indonesia, the number of women driving for Grab went up by almost 500%!”

Some of the other programmes by Grab include Grab Academy for Wives, which provides wives of our driver partners with livelihood skills training to help them start their own small businesses and add to the household income for their families. Hooi Ling added that the startup has also hosted a UX learning workshop for a small group of its Grab driver partners’ teenage daughters to help them grow a design thinking mindset, which is “such an important life skill to have in tech and beyond.” “I’m a big believer that giving young people exposure to these kinds of ideas and skills early on lets them know what’s possible. It also helps gives them something to strive towards as they continue to grow and mature in life,” she added. Driving diversity across the board The startup world is a male-dominated one, and this is not just a general assumption or sentiment but backed by facts.

While in the US, only 17 per cent of startups have a female founder, in Southeast Asia particularly in Singapore, merely 5 per cent of tech startups are headed by women, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2014. The figure may have since increased slightly, but the 2017 report by WEC stated that globally, fields such as care economy and the emerging tech sector are the most affected sectors by gender bias, and are losing out on the benefits of diversity.

Hooi Ling says, “surrounding yourself with supporters, whether men or women, in your personal or professional life, is hugely important. We put great effort into creating that environment at Grab, where anybody can thrive regardless of gender, race, and nationality. At Grab, we don’t focus on your gender, we hire the best person for the job. We believe that if you are capable and you believe in our mission of driving Southeast Asia forward, you will be able to contribute to Grab.”

The Grab-Uber deal This year has been an extremely eventful one for Grab. Besides closing a $1-billion round from Toyota Motor Corp and launching its own venture arm, it also announced the acquisition of Uber’s Southeast Asia operations, including ride-sharing and food delivery business, in March. The deal also saw Uber pick up a 27.5 per cent stake in Grab and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi join Grab’s board.

On the merger, Hooi Ling said: “The Uber partnership made a lot of sense because we had an explosive 2017 in terms of growth and after the acquisition, we were able to pivot quickly to O2O (online-to-offline) services.” “Post-acquisition we grew our GrabFood business to six countries from two countries.

Dara (Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO) is on our board, and working with Uber has been fantastic on many fronts. We are mutually learning from each other and our partnership is truly collaborative.” However, earlier in July, Singapore’s competition watchdog had since called out the merger, saying that it found evidence that the merger has substantially lessened competition and proposed to impose financial penalties on both Grab and Uber to restore market contestability. Grab has refuted the statement and denied that the merger has harmed competition.

Among the biggest challenge of running a regional business in the multicultural, multilingual Southeast Asia, is that the region is extremely fragmented. Hooi Ling said, Grab quickly recognised that a one-size-fits-all model is not going to work because each market is distinct in terms of users’ needs and transportation infrastructure.

“The constant challenge we face is tailoring models for specific markets, and ensuring that the technology supporting, what is essentially a unique experience tailored to each of the over 200 cities where we operate, remains scalable, reliable and safe. This is why we’ve been investing heavily in our engineering and R&D teams: we have six global R&D centres, located in Bangalore, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Seattle and Singapore supporting our rapid platform, something no other homegrown Southeast Asian ride-hailing company has,” she said.