Want to innovate? This is how to break out of your ‘yes bubble’
51:22 Share

This is Most Innovative Companies from Fast Company, where we speak to visionary founders to understand how they think, how they innovate, and what lessons they have to help you and your businesses of every shape and size. I'm James Vincent, a founding partner at Foundr.

So this is a story about surrounding yourself with independent working minds and making sure that the input that you're having isn't in some kind of echo chamber in order to keep innovating.

I want to tell a story around, I don't know whether everybody recalls, but there was an iPhone that was brought out that ended up being called AntennaGate because the phone had an antenna that went all the way around the edge of the phone. And if you held it a certain way, you put your two fingers in a certain place where those two antennas met, didn't work.

And so this was obviously a major crisis within Apple around that time because they'd never really brought out a product that didn't work. In fact, they prided themselves on bringing out products that really worked like better than anything, any other product company, because they are the original obsessive product company, as you all now know.

So let me tell you the story. So I walk into a room full of just sort of PR wizards and surrounded by all of Steve's counsel, great thinkers on how to position and handle crisis management because we had a problem. And, you know, at the time, what had come out is when Steve had been asked about the phone and does it not work sometimes, Steve's response had been, they're not holding it right.

Which, upon reflection, wasn't probably the final word on the issue and maybe not the right response that when Apple has time to have a considered response, which is what this meeting was all about. So I went around the room and everybody kind of spoke and Steve talked about, you know, holding it right and we need to talk about all the antenna technology that we have and how ahead of everybody else we are, which everybody agreed was awesome.

Interestingly enough, around that time, there'd been a few criticisms of Apple that they had become a little too overconfident, a little too brash. And I remember saying at that time, I'm like, Steve, I know we've talked about this together, so I just want to remind you about it. But maybe this is a moment where we make a brand deposit. You know, as Obama would say, don't let a good crisis go to waste. And maybe the very first thing you say when we do this special announcement is we're not perfect.

As people, we're not perfect. Our products aren't perfect. But by God, do we work hard to be perfect. And let me tell you the 20 different ways in which we're working to be perfect. But we're also human. Of course, the next day, the headline was, we're not perfect. And Steve Jobs somehow said that Apple was not perfect. And I think that that was a moment of humility that actually...

provided a brand deposit for Apple in the long run. And I think some of the role that people like myself around Steve played was being an independent working mind. So just make sure that you surround yourself with independent working minds and you'll never stop innovating.

Speaking of independent working minds, my next guest is Joanna Coles, who plays exactly that role on a bunch of boards and really understands culture and brings that kind of lens to lots of conversations in many, many companies and has a huge influence on innovation.

Today, I'm super excited to speak with my friend and colleague and much admired media maven, Joanna Coles, who, for those people that don't know, come from a very blue chip media background in journalism from The Guardian, from BBC, from

went on to edit Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, was chief content officer at Hearst, has her own TV show called The Bold Type, has written a book about love in the digital age called Love Rules. And I think that's only half of what she's doing, but she's pretty busy. And she's now on the board of multiple incredibly innovative companies, has been on the Sonos board for many, many years, Snap board all the way through for many, many years. And

and many other very interesting companies that we'll probably come on to. So hi Joanna, great to see you. How are you doing?

It's very exciting to see James in action like this with an enormous microphone in front of him. I actually haven't been on the Sonos board for many, many years. You're making me sound fantastically old. I've been on the Sonos board for two and a half years. I've been on the snapboard for seven years. Seven years. That's right. And actually, you and I met with Brian Chesky at Airbnb. We did. That was in 2015 or something. I

I recall we were all helping Brian with the various elements of launching the brand around that time.

and that was when you and I first started working together and appreciating each other's talents. Well, I remember hearing your colleague, they did a very interesting thing at Airbnb. They invited a series of companies in to pitch and they had the other companies in the pitch meetings, which I thought was really interesting. And I was not pitching anything. I was there because Brian and I were developing a magazine, Airbnb Mag. It turned out to be

But I've been invited to sort of listen to the ideas around branding. And when you and your colleague got up to talk, Stephen, yeah, Stephen Butler, I couldn't believe how interesting and different you were from everybody else in the room. And obviously, Brian realized that too. But I then realized you were a fellow northerner from the north of England. We had very similar journeys, mine through content, yours through advertising. And here we are.

So some amazing topics I'm excited to talk to you about. It's the fast company audience. So we're really trying to make sure that... Does that mean they're very, very intelligent and very, very fast? Yeah. And from a whole vast range of companies looking to innovate of every size. And so some will be small, some will be large, some will be innovation people, some will be just CEOs, just CEOs. People interested in continuing to sort of solve the innovators dilemma at whatever size of company. And so...

One of the things I really wanted to talk to you about, because I feel like

the trajectory that you have followed is that you've come with the curiosity of a journalist to culture and you can't help yourself, right? So culture and audience and how the audience is changing is such a hard thing to put your finger on so that companies can stay out ahead. And I often think that one of the reasons why you're in such demand, either on boards or speaking on podcasts, is because you provide that connection with culture.

that you have your finger on the pulse of what is going on with the next generation, and you provide that kind of point of view. I like to think of that as the independent working mind, right? So if you're on the board, don't expect Joanna Coles to be nodding along sweetly, but to be saying, wait a second, this is what I think is happening. Let's think about how we deal with what's going on in culture. So I'd love you to talk about that. I think that's kind of your field. And how do you think about that kind of thing? I think that...

It's about paying attention. I always want to come to the table with the audience point of view. What is the audience thinking about? Where are they showing up? How are they feeling? And some of it, honestly, is common sense that's got drowned out by the sort of obsession around data and focus groups. And some of it is about paying attention and understanding trends in our world. And that

everything from what are people watching on television? What are they looking at the theater? What sports games are winning? Who are the people that are sort of floating up on TikTok or Instagram? I mean, I just had an incredibly interesting conversation

time at the Cannes Lion Festival, where I was for a week with Snapchat. And I spent several hours with David Dubrec, the fact I may even be having his name wrong, the YouTuber, extraordinarily interesting guy about how he basically filmed his life for four years. He would film himself every day for seven hours and then shrink it down to four minutes and put it out on YouTube. And he's been through all sorts of ups and downs.

He pulls all sorts of pranks. One of his friends got hurt in a prank. So he's had a bit of hate online, but he's an extremely thoughtful sort of interesting new kind of entertainment company all wrapped up in one person. And I think it's about... I mean, I remember actually...

The head of a late review, a BBC show, once describing herself as a whale sucking up plankton. And I feel that's what I'm doing, that every little bit of plankton eventually adds up to a huge mosaic. And what you're trying to do is read the mosaic. And it's constantly changing. I'm very lucky to have two

sons who are now young adults, but always throughout their life, I've been very involved in their friends. I mean, if I tell you that it took my youngest son telling me that my oldest son had sent 187,000 snaps before I even knew he was on Snapchat, that gives you a sense of the secret lives that teenagers have that

It's really important to pay attention to. So I love nothing really more than just to turn up and look at the world. I love to people watch. I love to wander through new areas in New York where I live that I don't know very well. I like to watch what people are wearing. How are they speaking to each other? Are they wearing headphones? And then pulling together what that's about.

Mm-hmm. You sound very unconvinced. You sound completely unconvinced. No, no, no. It's fantastic. I mean, it's exactly the answer I was hoping for. You know, I have a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old. I've learned more about behaviors of the next generation, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, which is sort of on their way, the TikTok generation that, you know, what's coming, which is so important to figure out what your product plans are if you

exhibit the fact, I mean, your four minute thing with your YouTuber, but that's got even now to like TikTok and, you know, what those things are and how that as a media channel, all the way back to like what Vine was nine seconds, 15 years ago, you know, they just timing wasn't right. Well, and interesting, right? Because you can have a brilliant idea and it can be too early. And I sometimes think that some of what I've done has been actually

too early, which is just as bad as being too late. But one thing I think is interesting, I was at Brilliant Minds, the conference in Sweden, where I was talking to two very interesting people about the impact of TikTok on war reporting and our understanding of the Ukraine and the Russia situation. And David Patrick Harakos has spent a lot of time reporting out in Ukraine and wrote a very good book actually called

war reporting and 140 characters. And of course, the day he brought the book out was the day that Twitter announced they were going to 280 characters. So his book title was immediately out of date. But it's a fascinating look at how when you shrink things down, you can win people over much faster. And the extraordinary ability of...

Vladimir Zelensky to capture the hearts and minds with a few extraordinary posts on social media has totally changed geopolitics. And no one saw that coming. And also when you look at how far

Putin is behind, how old he looks and flaccid. Out of date. And aggressive. Yeah. And bullying. And that extraordinary picture of him with the telephones. And you're like, those are telephones that America used in the 1970s. Nobody has telephones like that. You know, when you think of modern media,

It's like a Watergate telephone. Yes, exactly. And you think of the BlackBerrys, which some of the politicians still use, or the iPhones that they're all carried around with. I mean, he looks so out of date. Right. Doesn't mean he's not winning, but he did look very out of date. You're just describing the new media context. And maybe there's people listening to this podcast that are still trying to get their heads around it, right? So in the last decade,

10 or 15 years, it's clear that, you know, the established traditional media has been a major shift towards more digital media, clearly, but also social itself has rapidly changed and you and your, with your unique purview on the snapboard and being close to Evan, how is social evolving? And I know you also wrote the book about love in a digital age, love rules, which is like

Some 60% of people now meet digitally and fall in love first. So tell us about the media landscape and how should people be thinking about that now in terms of where it is today? Well, I think what's happening with the media landscape is it's increasingly fragmented to single individual voices.

And you think of someone like CNN right now wrestling to stay relevant because lots of journalists have gone off on their own and created their own news channels. You think of Jessica Yellen with News Not Noise. She just talks direct to Instagram viewers and two or three times a week turns up with her take on the news. And she has a big following.

And you think of Substack, you think of Puck, you think of all the immediate ways that journalists very much...

creating their own personal brands are now presenting their take on the news. And I think increasingly people are going to follow people they trust and they like that don't have the baggage of a big media organisation. And I think we're at the beginning of it. And it's going to be increasingly difficult for companies like CNN or the big branded news to

companies to stay relevant. Very hard to feel that any kind of news on CNN is exactly relevant to what I want, whereas I can curate my own feed over social media and get exactly the voices that I want. I may be in my own filter bubble. I may hopefully bring in some voices I don't necessarily agree with, but I now have the tools as a reader to

to put together my own news feed, which is more interesting to me than what the traditional news channels are offering.

Right. I think you look technology, the new mass is sort of multi-niche, right? So it's like mass CNN. Everybody went for their news 20 years ago. It's multi-niche. It's micro brands. It's micro brands. Okay. So I'm, I'm, I'm a marketing person in a company, a big company. Like what do I, how does this impact how I think about building brand? How does this think about how I have an impact on culture?

Well, it's complicated because you then have to decide, are there individuals that you want to put some money behind? That's fraught with all sorts of difficulty. Do you want to play it safe and stay with the bigger, well-known brands? I think you have to do a little bit of all of it and it's complicated and it's difficult. And you also have to decide if you want your content

or your branded content showing up in a feed where you don't necessarily have much control over what's on either side of it. I mean, the sort of surrealness now of TikTok, for example, and also very interesting to see what's happened. I mean, you saw Brendan Carr, the commissioner at the FCC, write to both Apple and Google and say, for national security interests, you have to take TikTok out of the stores. This should not be an app on Americans' phones. That battle is just beginning.

Yeah. So I want to jump to another topic, which is because, you know, this is about innovation and you've been talking about not sort of like formal desktop research, right? You're not looking at numbers. You're actually talking, you're qualitative, not quantitative for the researchers amongst us, right? So I'll tell one little, just, and I'll let you answer this question, but one little Steve quote, right? In 1900, if you did research and you asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

Of course, what they wanted was a car, but they didn't know about the car, right? So invention and innovation, you don't go and ask people in Boise, Idaho through research, what do you want is my hypothesis, my question to you.

And so I'm assuming that's kind of how you think about things, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. Well, I think it's a combination of the two. It's always helpful talking to people in Boise, Idaho, especially because they've always been patronized by traditional media and by advertisers. I'm not saying that they would necessarily come out with

the iPod or the iPhone, but it's always worth talking to people. I think the question is, what are you asking them? What are you listening for? And what are you not hearing when they tell you things? So it's really about paying attention. And often people say the opposite of what they mean. And often people do the opposite of what they tell you that they do. And

And that's where the training as a journalist is quite useful because you're paying attention to everything. One of the things I always find interesting is what are the photos that people are displaying of themselves? Because there are always going to be photos that display what they want you to think their life is, which is probably not what their life is. There are just

Clues everywhere. People come forth with clues. And so you're trying to be a detective to figure it out. And I wouldn't ever say that you don't want data. Data is incredibly useful as long as it's good. But don't ignore the human. The human is really important. Well said. And humans don't act logically. And yet in marketing in particular, we often behave as if they do. And then we're surprised when people don't behave logically.

Because the assumption is people will behave rationally, but actually they don't. So the difficult thing is negotiating for irrationality. Definitely, I wasn't trying to totally dismiss quantitative research, but I think the sort of somewhere in that liminal space in between sort of what they say and what they mean is some of where culture is going. And so founders have this tendency, I think, sometimes to be surrounded in

in a yes bubble. And I'll say that in the nicest possible way, meaning they're celebrated. They have often ultimate power. They have a board they have to deal with. And I understand the dynamics of the board, but sometimes the board is

full of people that have invested in the company, which is great because they know an awful lot about and have learned a lot from lots of other companies. And so they provide incredibly valuable contribution. Maybe there's a lawyer, maybe there's a finance person, maybe there's a, but I think what I'm interested in here and my observation about the people we just mentioned, those founders, is that they were always open to being surrounded by independent working minds and

that are willing to challenge, that are wanting to challenge, that are asking the kind of unaskable question or, or just saying, I'm not sure about that because here's another thought on that. Like, just think of it this way, or because my sense is that a lot of founders are kind of in a yes bubble. And I've always thought of you as being someone that they hire in order to make sure that every board meeting isn't a yes bubble.

Is that too much of an extreme characterization? I mean, I think you're right about the yes bubble, but I think it's very understandable because what happens is often, well, first of all, there's a sort of founder fetish in our culture at the moment, partly because of the lack of political leadership. And so people look to founders as people who are innovative and creative and can get stuff done. It's incredibly hard to start a company. Which is true. And to grow it and to make it successful, super hard. And so...

We as a culture now turn to these people for sort of wisdom, some of which they provide. And sometimes the ask is too big. I think often what happens is when you start a company, you start a company with a group of friends and believers from the beginning, and then you grow it together. And hopefully those people grow with you and are able to operate their own organizations within the company.

And often, especially now, because the tools of tech allow founders to start things so much earlier, they often haven't worked anywhere else. So they're creating a company in their own image. So from the outside, it can look very strange. It can also look like

they are recreating the wheel all the time, which they don't always need to do. And there's a tremendous suspicion when you're a founder and you've often made decisions that other people didn't approve of. Or I remember Brian Chesky has a file of

all the rejections he got from venture capitalists when he went out to try and raise money, right? And he's got some quite bitter, angry letters of rejection, not simply letters that just said, hey, Brian, thanks so much for coming in to see us. Love the idea. It's not right for us, but we wish you well. You've got letters in there that are like, this is a terrible idea. It will never work. Of all the pitches we've seen, this is the worst pitch. And he keeps it as a

talisman, a motivational talisman. Yeah, I've read some of the letters. It was fascinating. He's famously said, think of an idea that doesn't scale and then figure out how to scale it. And I'm sure that most people thought, well, like renting out your house to someone else with the toenail clippings at the bottom of the bed and no one's going to want to rent your house. Why would they want to do that when there's perfectly good hotels down the street? That doesn't scale at all, right? And of course,

The rest is history. He's proven that he does. Well, yeah, but also he launched Airbnb four times before anybody took any notice. And I always talk about that to other people that I work with, especially when they do something and nobody's paying attention. It's increasingly hard to get attention. And what Brian and Joe Gebbia did was to create these enormous boxes of cereal that they sent out to people. Huge Captain Crunch boxes of cereal, really big artistic things, which they still have.

And that's actually what got people to sort of sit up and take notice. So my point is that often companies are started with people who aren't necessarily, yes, people, but are friends from the beginning. Companies are often created from scratch by young people, often young men who've never worked anywhere else. So they create it themselves.

to follow their own strengths, but obviously increasingly their own weaknesses become apparent. Got it. They often don't realize they should hire to their weakness, which is an incredibly important thing to do. So you're balancing out things.

And they often don't realize that you don't have to recreate the wheel every single time. There are often either people out there that could do that for you or there are organizational tools you can employ to help the company. So I get why it happens. What's valuable about having an independent outside voice is they can just ask questions. And sometimes in the nature of the questions, you find an answer or you try and shine a light on something that you think might need help.

some more oblique angles. So let me ask you, I know that you just joined recently the board of a new company called Grover. And I think it would be great to think about the role you play there. Let's just maybe if you want to explain what Grover is a little bit, that would be helpful. I'm sure Michael would love you to do that. You'd be fulfilling your role as a board member.

Sure. I mean, Grover is Europe's largest tech rental platform. And what I loved about meeting Michael Kassow, the founder, is that he is like the founders of Uber and Airbnb, which is that he imagines big behavioral changes. And he thinks that people are much better off renting tech than they are buying it because you don't really want to finance anything, assuming you are financing the purchase, that has built in obsolescence.

So what they have is a subscription to whatever tech you want, completely multi-brand. They will update it for you and you get to stay on top of all the tech changes. And really now the difference is between people who have access to great tech and people who don't. And if you're a middle class family living in America with three kids and two working parents or even one working parent, the fantasy that everybody is crowding around the family computer in the den is obviously nonsense.

Post-COVID, everybody needs their own computer and their own phone. And people don't have a tech budget for that. You're suddenly talking sort of $8,000 to $10,000. And to keep people up to speed, especially kids who need fast internet access or parents because you're doing Zoom calls, you have to have up-to-date tech. And this allows you to do that with a subscription instead of

constantly financing several computers. And if you're a small or medium business, you don't want to be tying up your valuable cash, especially now where cash is king going into a recession, with tech that has built in obsolescence. You're much better off renting a series of computers for your staff. And that way you can titrate according to are you laying people off? Are you hiring people? What are your needs? And Grover is able to help with that. It's a remarkable company.

So tell us as much as you can with regard to the dynamics and the role that you play

as a board member of Grover with Michael? Well, I think that part of being a good board and the role of a board is to help a company actually really understand its own narrative and the discipline of having to write something out every quarter, look at the numbers, explain where you are. You're either up, you're down, or you're exactly where you said you would be. You know, bring in the external market forces that are impacting the company's growth,

It's a very useful discipline for a company to do. And you see companies when they move from a private company to public company and they have to do it by law. It really changes their attitude to things. And what I try and do on the various boards I'm on is honestly just ask the questions about the areas I know about, which is really how do consumers feel about the product? How are we telling our story to consumers and investors? And that's

then trying to help put a really good group of people around the table with all sorts of different points of view. So as the CEO or a founder, you're getting a richness of experience and voices around the table. And you don't have to pay attention to them if you don't want, but it's always helpful to hear a certain number of thoughts.

thoughtful voices. What I've done for Grover is I think put together with Michael's help a really good balance of people for what the company needs as it A, expands into America and B, expands further into Europe. So we brought in Colleen de Corsi who was the CEO and COO or CCO of Wieden & Kennedy and

because they had no one on the board who understood branding or storytelling. And I brought in Lara Sweet, who was a former chief people officer at Snapchat, because she really has extraordinary experience of growing a tech company from adding 2000 people in a year, which is what Grover at some point will need. And then we've, you know, we've got various investors, so they've got their interests covered. But we have a very interesting good group of people on the Grover board.

Right. No, I love the diversity that you're describing. And I think, you know, often, of course, getting a northern lady with a white shock of hair and a very bold, expressive, cultural, journalistic background is amazing.

a bonus for people that want to understand what's coming next. When we worked with Steve, Media Arts Lab was the like, we had to be always the most culturally set people hired from all over the world, all kinds of cool people doing cool things, bringing culture to what was a predominantly technology company that Johnny's team understood design and they were culturally connected.

We were bringing ideas from culture, and it was very important that that was constantly being fed into Apple with the launch of every product that came. And I feel like you're doing a very, very similar job in a different place, which is on a board, to CEOs, either as the independent working mind or helping individual CEOs build the right composition of their board. Yeah.

Well, that's some of what I do. I mean, I also do a bit of advising. I'm also creating television shows. So I have a very sort of creative approach

part of my life too, which I'm able to mine for insights. I've just created, I've just shot a pilot for ABC, which I'm very excited about for a show called Finding Harmony, which is based around a chorus master who pulls together groups of strangers and gets them to sing together. And the science of singing is that your heart beats as one, you start breathing as one, and actually it brings joy.

The show itself triggers joy. And I think there's going to be a huge pursuit of joy post-COVID as we negotiate what feels like a very volatile and uncertain world. And I think people are really going to be looking for moments, simple moments where they feel harmonious with other people.

All those different pies you have your finger in feed each other, right? Is what I'm hearing. Is that the fact that you're doing a TV show, the fact that you're still on, you're on a bunch of boards, you're also still, you know, writing and doing podcasts. You wrote a book a year or two ago. You're probably working on another one. Like all of those things feed each other in one...

allows you to be credible in another? Is that what I'm hearing? I think so. I mean, what I hope it allows me to do is turn up with an understanding of the modern consumer landscape. Right. And when you're always making content for an audience, you're getting feedback from the audience. They either like it or they don't, or they think this or they think that, but you're looking for the conversation around what you're doing. And what I love doing is

creating stories, storytelling, and helping people engage with that content and share that content, you know, and have bigger conversations. I mean, one of the joys of working with the bowl, creating or helping create the bowl type, which was inspired by my career, both in my 20s and as I got older and was editing a magazine, is it's really a story about

three younger women and their friendship together, and three younger women having an older woman boss. And the tropes in the culture around that are pretty cliched and sort of devil wears Prada and older women bosses are always nasty. And it was important to me to try and break that down because that was not my experience. I had very supportive, smart women along the way. I had lots of smart, supportive men too, but I also had lots of great women. And I felt that those

Women were never represented in the media. You know, women in responsible jobs rarely show up as compelling storylines. And what I love is hearing from people who watch the show. And at the moment, it's on Netflix and it launched recently in India. And I've had lots of...

outreach on LinkedIn. People find me on LinkedIn and say, oh my goodness, this is the first show we've seen of its kind like this. Thank you so much. And you've inspired me. And it's not bad to be ambitious.

I saw a stat yesterday. In the next 20 years, India will be the largest country in the world, larger than China. Wow. So if you're big in India, then yeah. If I'm big in India, I'm big in Japan. That's one of those songs we grew up with. I can't even tell you who sang it. That's a cultural reference that maybe only you, me, and a couple of other people will get. So I'm going to hit you with another question. Einstein once said you can't solve the problems of today with the way they were first created.

And so problems that don't seem like problems 10 or 20 years ago or social media or those kinds of things seem so awesome at the time. Human magic. Oh, my God, this is amazing. What are the implications of that? And so I just want to talk about that cycle. And again, back to bringing culture and creativity and understanding to innovation, right?

And like situational awareness, like, am I aware where we are today? You know, oh, we're here. Okay, we're at this part of the curve. It's fine. We've got another three years of this, but we're starting to see the beginnings of that. So we should start

a product trajectory that introduces that in the next two to three years. Otherwise someone else will eat our lunch. Right. And that's maybe the way. And I know that that's certainly the way that some of the founders that we've talked about think about things, which is always to be either ahead or at least on par with what's going on and be developing it. It's no good coming and developing a product when someone else has already got there because right. You're already sort of behind too late. Yeah.

Yeah, so how do you pattern recognize that something...

fundamental is changing in culture that is not yet fully material. It's not yet got full form, but you're picking up these little liminal suggestions and ideas through social media or looking at something in New York or reading something or hearing something, meeting people. And you put those pieces together and you start to think about, okay, there's something brewing here, but it's not yet fully formed. And

But we should be thinking about X. And I'm guessing that, again, that's the role that you play as you ask those questions on the boards, which is like, are we thinking about what I think is going on, which is this?

Is that a fair representation of the role you play? Well, sometimes I play the role of the skeptic, actually, especially when I'm listening to tech innovators who are telling me how we will be using tech in 15 years, because I can't always make the leap of imagination. Like, I'll give you a good example. I mean, and I've got nothing to do with it. But for example, Clubhouse, when there was so much excitement around Clubhouse, I just thought, I'm

I'm going to sit this one out. There was a week where I must have got 30 invitations to join Clubhouse. And I just thought, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't want to be part of this. I'm going to sit it out. It's a COVID phenom. Meanwhile, Andreessen was announcing it was a

It had a $4 billion valuation. Money was pouring into it. And I thought, oh, God, maybe I'm at a point where I don't understand the new thing. I remember having that conversation with myself and thinking, should I invest some time really understanding this? And then I just thought, no, I'm going to sit it out. And one of the things you can do as you get older is notice the excitement around something which you realize doesn't really make sense. I know it's still...

going on Clubhouse. They have 100 employees or whatever. But as a cultural platform, it doesn't really make sense. And so I would say I play the role of the skeptic more than I do the soothsayer. But I definitely try and talk about what I think the mood is of people and where I think

people's sort of psychological state is going as opposed to this is new technology that's going to change the way we think about the world. My point in Love Rules is that people are happier when they have relationships, that people are better in social situations, even if you're an introspective person and you're an introvert and you don't think of yourself as an extrovert, irrelevant in terms of, you know, people need a social structure. It's very hard to have that in our culture right now, especially in America. It's such an individualistic culture.

We have an epidemic of loneliness, social media and our computers, which were supposed to connect us, have actually separated us in a sense and made us feel that we're more nomadic than we really are. And there's such a misunderstanding of what a nomad is to this idea of being a digital nomad. Hey, you take your computer, you plunge yourself down anywhere. That's not what nomads were. Nomads were very.

tight, constructed societies that move from field to field, but they all move together. With social cohesion. Yes, exactly. So, you know, who wants to be sitting on their computer on their own? It's why WeWork has cropped up. It's why Neuerhaus has cropped up. You know, people want instant communities that they can plug into

for everything from saying hi to someone at the coffee machine or the kombucha machine to saying hi to someone in the bathroom. It's lonely if you don't have that structure. And I think that's been devastating during COVID. This is probably fairly obvious. With all of everything that you're talking about and COVID included, do you find yourself to be a future optimist at this moment with regard to the role that technology can play and its impact on the human condition?

Yes, I definitely do. And I think there are really basic things where tech is going to show up, like massive desalination plants to ensure that we still have enough water. I mean, you know, resources is clearly a big issue. Climate change is a big issue. There are certain countries that are going to be underwater if we don't pay attention. So I have huge faith that there will be all sorts of innovations that people are already working on, actually, around climate change that will really help.

And I do think eventually we'll be able to vote on the phone, which I think will be hugely helpful. We'll be able to vote digitally, which will stop all the issues of people standing in line forever and then being turned away or not being able to go to the polling stations.

So that has a marked effect on how people show up for democracy. Because then everyone can vote because you just like double verify and click and vote and off you go. Yeah, listen, if you can buy something on Amazon with your credit card, you should be able to vote. It's ridiculous that you can't do that. I mean, I was at a...

an event with Tony Blair last week about the future of Britain. And one of the things he said, which was really powerful, was that, you know, sometimes you have to fight for things. And very clearly, we're in a fight for democracy and we have to show up

and actually take it seriously and something that we've taken for granted for a long period. And the West is incredibly good at criticizing itself, pointing out all its faults. You do not see boats of refugees trying to get into Russia. You do not see boats of refugees trying to get into China. They are all coming to the West. We have something that people want, which is freedom.

I think part of what will be increasingly important in the next few years is people's waking up to this and being prepared to defend it. And the West is going to have to go on the defense, I think, in a way that it's been, you know, staring at its own navel and picking at its own skin. So my last question then is, what role can commerce and founders and innovators play in

in helping the thing that we love and we just assume, which is freedom of speech, democracy, the capitalism that comes from it. So how might companies, without getting too political, because I think... Well, companies are terrified, rightly so, of wading into some

political areas. And I don't think every company needs to have a point of view on every question. And I've seen some egregious abuses by senior staff who haven't tweeted their support for this, that or the other. I think it's wrong. I think it's incredibly important for companies to get involved in their local communities.

There's nothing more important than paying attention to what's going on in the village or the town or the city that you live in, that companies have an investment in that town, that they're paying attention to who gets elected, that they're paying attention to the divisions and the inequalities of wealth in that town and where there is likely to be disruption.

In the physical world?

that is being dismantled when you tell people they can work from home. Now, you're managing your own bottom line, but you also have to have a responsibility to the community that your company is in for it to work.

Yeah, I would say at Founder, I think roughly half the companies we're working with right now are doing something with regard to sustainability. They're either doing something directly as in reducing waste in the supply chain through data, grow intelligence, you know, like combining climate change data with what to grow.

understanding carbon offsetting. We work with a company called Sweep, a French company that is like understanding where is your carbon and how do you reduce it? And then, you know, choices around how do I want something to be shipped? If you give consumers good choices, they will make them.

And for me, commerce's job is to bring good choices, sustainable choices, to companies and consumers. And they'll go, oh, I'll take the, you know, my local that stopped using plastic bags. And I was like, finally, you know, great. Oh, a reusable bag. Great. You know, and those...

Oh, and then something arrived in a box and it was all cardboard and clearly recycled. And I'm like, thank God. And then a brand I really love sent me something full of plastic. And I literally went straight online and wrote them an email saying, I don't know how you think you're a current brand when what you just sent me was full of plastic, which will never degrade. And I just threw it down the chute and I don't even know where it's going. Yeah. Access packaging is completely over. Yeah.

I wouldn't necessarily give people the choice. I would make the choice for them. And I will say this too. If McDonald's is really serious about cutting down methane and climate, you have to make the Impossible Burger or whatever their version of the vegetarian burger is. You have to make it cheaper. You can't have the alternative be more expensive. You have to make it cheaper and you have to make it tastier. Or you have to keep improving it.

We worked with Oatly a couple of years ago and one of their indications of great success was when they got into Burger King. I just like, we don't want to be the expensive, like for the frou-frou granola tree huggers, you know, in Brooklyn or Venice Beach, California. We want to be for everybody. And so that level of access. Anyway, Joanna, we have to bring it to a close. I think we could go on for hours. It's wonderful to both be your friend. We've been rabbiting on.

We would rabbit on forever. But this has been a terrific conversation. I think hopefully the whole community is going to get a lot of great sage advice from very unique individuals such as yourself. So thank you so much. Been really fun. And I'll see you soon. Oh, my pleasure. And I'm very impressed by all your quotes, James. Okay, wonderful. Thank you very much. I made them all up. See you later. All right. Bye.

So that was an awesome conversation with Joanna Coles. I think we learned a lot today about the importance of surrounding yourself with independent working minds, that what she represents, where she comes from, her

Her curiosity, her journalistic background creates this constant questioning of where we're at and where we're going. And my sense is that founders need to constantly be surrounding themselves with people like that, that innovation companies of any size need to make sure that they're constantly tapping into people that are really understanding what's going on in the world, whether they're people they hire, whether they're independent entrepreneurs.

companies or whether they're just people on the board, I think the inside-outside thing is really important so you don't just surround yourself in a sort of yes bubble.

I also thought that she made some really good comments about the way that culture is changing because of technology. Some of the tech bubble that we're getting into, some of the roles and responsibilities of companies with regard to sustainability, with regard to tech accessibility. And I thought all of those points were very well put and very well taken.

And Joanna's just a very unique individual. I think one of the things that's been great is that culture is increasingly understood to have a role in the making of companies. I might argue that a company you know and understand and therefore have a relationship with, which often is called a brand, is one that understands what's going on in culture. And if you do not understand what's going on in culture, then you're not

Apple or Nike because you're insulated from it. And so whatever way you get the independent working mind attached to or inside of or part of or connected to your company, it's not a negotiable factor. It's, I think, super important if you want to stay an innovative company.

That's all for this episode. If you're a new listener, be sure to subscribe to Most Innovative Companies wherever you listen. And if you like this episode, leave us a rating, five stars awesome, and review us on Apple Podcasts. We want to hear from you. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of. You can email us at podcasts at fastcompany.com or tweet us hashtag most innovative companies.

Most innovative companies is a production of Fast Company in partnership with Founder, FNDR. We couldn't afford the vowels. The executive producer is the wonderful Joshua Christensen. Sound design and editing is Nicholas Torres. Writing is Mateus Sanchez. Our booker and production heads are Alex Webster and Nikki Checkley. This podcast was done in collaboration with my awesome partners, Stephen Butler, Rebecca Jeffries, Nick Barham, my partners at Founder.