Portfolio | August 2017

ISSUE

140

THE TITAN

GOING WITH THE FLOW

The Rockefeller legacy

How the water industry took off

DANISH DESIGN

INDIAN ENTREPRENEURS

How Denmark branded itself

The new breed of business

Alpha bet Google Search

I’m Feeling Lucky

WHAT DOES ALPHABET WANT? Why Google is betting big on an automated future

AUGUST ISSUE 140

The business of life & living

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OBAID HUMAID AL TAYER MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR IAN FAIRSERVICE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR GINA JOHNSON GROUP EDITOR MARK EVANS marke@motivate.ae SENIOR ART DIRECTOR SARA RAFFAGHELLO sarar@motivate.ae DESIGNER RALPH MANCAO ralph@motivate.ae SUB-EDITOR SALIL KUMAR salil@motivate.ae EDITORIAL ASSISTANT LONDRESA FLORES londresa@motivate.ae GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION SUNIL KUMAR sunil@motivate.ae PRODUCTION MANAGER R MURALI KRISHNAN muralik@motivate.ae PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR VENITA PINTO venita@motivate.ae CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER ANTHONY MILNE anthony@motivate.ae GROUP SALES MANAGER MICHAEL UNDERDOWN michael@motivate.ae SENIOR SALES MANAGER MICHELLE QUINN michelle.quinn@motivate.ae

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AUGUST ISSUE 140

CONTENTS UPFRONT

12

WATER

How the bottled water industry works

LIVING

74

20

GREEK CHARM

HOTEL

A Corfu villa that oozes charm

A vibrant bolt-hole in the centre of Manchester

22

80

How car makers are raising the interior design stakes

From Auckland to Zurich, we’ve got you covered

INTERIORS

WHAT TO PACK

32

84

Phil Knight’s eyeopening account of his years building Nike

The rise of blended whiskey

SHOE DOG

FOOD & DRINK

88

EXHIBITION

A Picasso exhibition at London’s Gagosian

90

COLUMN

Jason Calacanis on the joys of angel investing

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37,415 copies July - December 2016

AUGUST ISSUE 140

CONTENTS FEATURES

34

GOOGLE’S END GAME

One of the world’s biggest firms is aiming to change the way we live

42

INDIA’S NEW ENTREPRENEURS

We meet the new breed of Indian entrepreneurs who are driving the country’s economic success

50

THE TITAN

John D. Rockefeller went from an assistant bookkeeper to the richest man in the world.

We trace his unlikely rise

58

DANISH DESIGN

How Denmark has used design as an economic and cultural tool over the past half-century

66

SILICON VALLEY GIVES BACK

How Silicon Valley’s tech companies are embracing CSR and helping improve their reputations in San Francisco

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UPFRONT

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AUGUST / MARKETING

ISSUE 140

The water industry Lauren Razavi explores the billion-dollar bottled water industry, one that is growing by 15 per cent a year around the world

W

hen Gustave Leven purchased the Perrier water company in 1946, workers were still filling bottles by hand at the firm’s spring in southern France. Over the next three decades, Leven would transform the company into the country’s leading bottled water brand before setting his sights on the US. In the late 1970s, Perrier launched a television advertising campaign that would turn Americans away from their taps.

The commercials painted Perrier as an indulgent companion to fine food, part champagne and part health tonic. “Its natural sparkle is more delicate than any made by man,” purred Orson Welles in one 1979 promotion, which saw the legendary actor wax lyrical over the image of bubbly water tumbling into a glass garnished with lime. Leven’s campaign was a runaway success, and by 1990, Perrier was the topselling mineral water in the world.

Today Perrier is just one of many brands of H2O lining supermarket shelves across the world. Whether it’s Evian or a humble store-brand offering, each bottle has a job to do: convince consumers they want to pay for

something they can get cheaply, and often safely, in their own homes. Tougher still, water brands have had to make sure their products are more appealing than the soft drinks they’re so often spotted next to.

In recent years, warnings about the health impacts of excess sugar intake have driven consumers away from juices and sodas. Last year, for the very first time, sales of bottled water surpassed those of carbonated soft drinks in the US, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a New York-based drinks industry consultancy. However, the giants of the soft drink industry aren’t scrambling to regain market share, as many of the world’s major water brands – from Smart Water to San Pellegrino – are owned by the likes of Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

“Marketers have exploited people’s fears of bottled soft drinks and they have offered an alternative product that promises to be healthy and pure,” says Richard Wilk, a professor of anthropology at the University of Indiana who has researched the consumer culture around bottled water. “What they’ve encouraged people to do is switch from other bottled beverages to

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UPFRONT

Marketers have worked very hard to convince the public that their brand of clear, flavourless liquid stands out from the others

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water, which has undercut their soda business. At the same time, the water market has grown so dramatically that it has more than made up for it.”

Consumers don’t simply view bottled water as an alternative to the tap, but as the healthier choice in a sea of growing concern surrounding sugar and artificial sweeteners. The popularity of packaged water crosses borders, with the Asia-Pacific region predicted to lead the market in sales volume between 2016 and 2022. Meanwhile, bottled water revenue in India is expected to grow more than 15 per cent annually for the next five years.

Any thirsty customer knows that not all bottled waters are

created equal – and marketers have worked very hard to convince them that their brand of clear, flavourless liquid stands out from the others. Whether a customer is dining out in style or rehydrating after a workout, the bottled water industry has devised a product for every occasion.

“What’s convenient and stylish at work or leisure will be different from what we use at the family table or select in a restaurant,” says Richard Hall, chairman of Zenith Global, a leading food and drink consultancy based in the UK. “But choosing a water is not just about design or taste.

There are many other messages, from provenance and exclusivity

1899

Year the alpine water company San Pellegrino was founded

through to social benefit and environmental protection.”

Marketers eyeing the luxury segment of the water market make a point of emphasising their product’s unique qualities.

San Pellegrino, the alpine water company founded in 1899, built a globally recognised brand around its Italian heritage. The red star that was used to mark high quality export goods in the early 20th century still sits front and centre on the firm’s green bottle. The signature art nouveau architecture of San Pellegrino Terme, the spa town where the water is sourced, is also pictured on the water’s neck label.

Even new brands can play up their product’s origins. Fiji water, which was founded in Colorado in 1988, sources its supplies from an artesian aquifer in the Pacific island nation. Its strapline – “bottled at the source, untouched by man” – plays up to the image of

AUGUST / MARKETING

the lush tropical paradise not yet spoiled by people and pollution.

“Because water is just water, marketers need to be very clever about differentiating their products from others’ and about enhancing perceived value,” explains Elizabeth Royte, an American nature writer and author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale. “If water comes from protected springs – and is more costly to produce than municipal water – brand owners need to pay even more attention to brand or regional identification.”

Some brands, like Pepsi-owned Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, source their supplies from public water processing plants. But “bottled onsite at a treatment plant in Kansas” just doesn’t have the same allure as “captured at a mountain spring” so both brands rely heavily on ideas of freshness and clarity in their marketing.

When Dasani launched in the UK in 2004, for instance,

it claimed to use a “highly sophisticated purification process” to create its final product. As it turns out, the water was just captured from a tap at a CocaCola factory in Kent. To make matters worse, the liquid also contained high levels of bromate, a known carcinogen. Dasani was quickly pulled from UK shelves.

Part of bottled water’s appeal lies in the belief that it is a cleaner and safer alternative to tap water.

This is particularly true in the US where just nine states reported safe levels of lead in their water supplies last year. “It’s hard to give up the bottle if you don’t trust your utility to provide safe water, don’t know how to learn about your tap water quality, or don’t trust that the pipes in your home are safe,” Royte says.

Packaged water has a dirty little secret: though its markets itself as a pure product of the earth, fewer than half of the plastic water bottles purchased last year were

A Dasani bottling plant in Salt Lake City, Utah. When Dasani launched in the UK in 2004, it claimed to use a “highly sophisticated purification process” to create its final product.

As it turns out, the water was just captured from a tap at a Coca-Cola factory in Kent

ISSUE 140

actually collected for recycling. As the popularity of packaged water increases, so will the number of empty bottles littering the world’s oceans. This idea doesn’t sit well with the new generation of ecoconscious water companies, with some firms, like Michigan-based Boxed Water, doing away with plastic packaging altogether.

Boxed Water ships its 100 per cent recyclable containers to filling locations in flat boxes, which take up far less space than bottles. This means that the firm’s paper-based packaging requires fewer trucks to ship the same number of products.

London’s CanO also designed its packaging, a resealable aluminium can, with the future of the planet in mind. Cans have a higher recycling rate than other types of beverage packaging, and contain more recycled content than their rivals. Ariel Booker, one of CanO’s three founders, hopes that these credentials will attract ecoconscious consumers.

“All three founders are between 25 and 30, and we feel that we’re the demographic that we’re marketing to,” says Booker.

“Young people are becoming more conscious when it comes to choosing fast-paced consumer goods and this is because we’re the future generation who have to suffer the consequences of what came before us.”

At first glance, there isn’t much that differentiates one brand of unflavoured water from another.

But this is where branding comes in. Sparkling mineral waters can serve as a luxury companion to fine food, whereas their still peers are the perfect thing to quench the thirst of a busy commuter. Words like “clean”, “pure” and “natural” appear on labels and in ads time and again. In the end, consumers aren’t just paying to stay hydrated.

They’re buying a few drops of heaven – clear, uncomplicated and unspoiled by human hands.

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UPFRONT

Changing of the guard Jennifer Johnson examines the slow decline of oil and what will happen next to the car industry

T

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he combustion engine’s days are numbered.

For decades, geologists, environmentalists and investors have been pointing out the obvious: one day the oil wells will run dry. But now even global energy companies are signalling that the party may be ending sooner than previously thought.

According to Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell, demand for oil could enter terminal decline within just 10 years. The end of insatiable crude consumption is now within sight and global investors are beginning to reassess their portfolios. While demand for oil may be projected to shrink, demand for cars isn’t going to vanish with it. Battery-powered vehicles might move silently, but the companies that produce them are making plenty of noise on capital markets.

No analyst could have predicted that the humble battery would help to seal the fate of the oil industry. Placed under the bonnet of a car, a lithium-ion battery is proving to be a serious threat to the global dominance of fossil fuels – and oil firms are starting to take note. Joel Couse, chief energy economist at French

oil major Total, predicts electric vehicles (EVs) will make up 15 to 30 per cent of new vehicles by 2030, after which time fuel demand will flatline.

Meanwhile, governments across the world are establishing targets and incentives to increase the uptake of EVs. In China, the world’s largest car market, a draft policy issued in September will require eight per cent of automakers’ sales to be battery electric or plug-in hybrids by 2018.

Zero-emissions vehicles in the Netherlands are also exempt from paying registration tax, while EVs in Norway are spared the country’s hefty 25 per cent sales tax.

With policymakers creating incentives for both automakers and consumers, it’s no longer a question of if EVs will reach the mainstream – but when. As demand for EVs grows, so will the market caps of leading car manufacturers and their suppliers.

For investors seeking exposure to the expanding EV segment, the race is on to identify the first company that will bring an affordable battery-powered car into mass production.

“So far, EV adoption has been largely limited to the high-end

AUGUST / TECHNOLOGY

ISSUE 140

A Tesla being powered up. The company is betting on its Model 3 to bring its sales to a new level

luxury market because those buyers could afford the higher cost vehicles. But battery production costs are falling rapidly and capacity is increasing,” says Jay Jacobs, director of research at New York’s Global X Funds, a fund management firm that offers a lithium and battery technology exchange-traded fund (ETF). “We expect that many mass market consumers will choose EVs over gas-powered vehicles as battery prices continue to fall, given that EVs have more simple designs, lower maintenance costs and cheaper fuel costs.”

There is one automaker that is already renowned for its innovation in electric vehicles: Elon Musk’s Tesla. The firm’s first model, the Roadster, only entered production nine years ago and its market value overtook 114-yearold Ford this April. Even casual

Model 3 will be produced at a rate of 5,000 vehicles per week in the fourth quarter of this year and will be ramped up to 10,000 per week some time next year. With a price tag of $35,000, the car is poised to be the first affordable, massproduced EV. Investors who buy Tesla stock aren’t just betting on the success of the Model 3. They’re also buying into Musk’s bold vision for the future of transport. In a recent interview with online media organisation TED, the inventor and entrepreneur outlined plans to build a network of self-driving EVs that could provide on-demand rides at a lower cost than public transit. It’s this kind of forwardthinking that has led ARK Invest, a New York-based investment manager, to place Tesla in one of the top positions in its Industrial Innovation ETF.

Tesla only delivered 76,000 vehicles last year compared to Ford’s 6.7 million, but its new $35,000 car will be the first mass-market electric vehicle industry observers know that Tesla is one to watch – despite the fact the carmaker delivered just 76,000 vehicles last year compared to Ford’s total sales of 6.7 million.

Though its production numbers are small, there are good reasons for investors to believe that Tesla will be the first company to bring EVs to the mass market.

One factor driving faith in the firm is the upcoming release of the allelectric, four-door compact sedan known as the Model 3. Due to go into production in July 2017, the

“EVs and autonomous tech are the two waves of disruption currently hitting the auto market.

This means companies marrying autonomous technology to their electric vehicle efforts will be particularly well positioned,” says Sam Korus, industrial innovation analyst at ARK Invest. “Tesla is the only auto manufacturer to install hardware in its cars to autonomously collect driving data that can be used to train its autopilot. Given its install base, Tesla is collecting data from

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AUGUST ISSUE 140

UPFRONT / TECHNOLOGY

Lithium could be a smart bet for investors looking to ride the electric car wave

thousands of vehicles on the road.”

Convincing as Elon Musk’s plans for the future might be, the strongest portfolios are diversified.

There are a number of ways for would-be EV investors to gain exposure to the market’s growth.

It’s important to remember that as consumer demand for the vehicles themselves ramps up, so will manufacturer demand for their component parts.

Just as oil fuelled the rise of the combustion engine, lithium – the key ingredient in rechargeable batteries – will drive the rise of EVs. In an interview with the Financial Times, Luke Kissam, CEO of leading global lithium producer Albemarle, said demand for lithium will likely grow by 20,000 tonnes per year until 2021.

Investors would do well to identify the lithium miners and battery makers currently making

waves in the industry.

Panasonic, for instance, has partnered with Tesla to produce lithium-ion batteries for use in energy storage systems and the Model 3 at the carmaker’s Gigafactory. General Motors, which makes the all-electric Chevy Bolt, has also diversified into battery manufacturing and plans to build its own battery factory in China this year.

“We believe that investing in lithium mining companies and battery producers is a more targeted approach to playing the rise of electric vehicles,” says Jacobs.

“Lithium miners and battery producers stand to benefit from the rise in EVs as it will increase demand for lithium, potentially resulting in higher lithium prices and greater lithium production.”

The EV revolution is just getting started and investors

Royal Dutch Shell CEO, Ben van Beurden

$35k

Price of Tesla’s Model 3

20k

Demand for lithium will likely grow by 20,000 tonnes per year until 2021

should be prepared to weather further waves of disruption.

While Tesla might seem like a frontrunner when it comes to market share, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on its competitors.

Anticipation is running high among investors and speculators – but any anxieties will only be put to rest once a mass-market EV is on the road. Until then, it’s wise to invest broadly across the EV production cycle.

“There is a decent amount of risk at the moment, because the industry is changing and expectations are so high,” says Ted Franks, partner and fund manager at WHEB Asset Management, a London-based investment management firm focused on environmental markets. “These risks will be reduced when vehicles hit the mainstream and we start to see who the winners are, what the key drivers of success are, who can generate the right margins and who can create a stable, investable business.”

Investing in EVs is about more than just making a quick return on the back of a consumer trend. The transition to renewable transport is a global imperative and, as in any industry, there are bound to be winners and losers. As the mass adoption of EVs draws closer, investors must be on the lookout for the pioneers that will redefine the road towards sustainable transit.

18 FORD EMBRACES THE BIKE Ford has recently filed a patent for a built-in bike carrier that folds into the car when it is not being used.

Currently bike owners have to buy a purpose-built bike rack, which can be cumbersome and hard to fit.

Sports car owners have also found it hard to buy a bike rack that works on the smaller models, so this design could help cyclists get around in style. The documents and sketches were submitted to the US Patent Office last month and could see the racks being developed in the next 14 months.

UPFRONT

Corfu charm A beautiful bolthole in Greece’s northwest coast that is perfect for large family gatherings

Gardens

Fireplace

4 Bedrooms

3 Full baths

Outdoor Pool

A

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beautiful, homely villa located on Corfu’s stunning west coast, this property combines privacy with accessibility, being only a 10-minute drive to the airport and Corfu Town. The interior mixes oldworld style with modern touches: think exposed brick work, wood-beam ceilings and wide-plank floors. There is a large covered porch that overlooks the verdant garden, while upstairs, the master bedroom features a fireplace and spectacular views of the surrounding countryside. One of the villa’s highlights is the pool, framed by thick groves of olive and cypress trees. There is also a small cottage across the garden, which is perfect for guests. This is a beautiful Greek bolthole, which would be perfect for large family gatherings.

Greece

PRICE $1,059,000

christiesrealestate.com

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UPFRONT

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AUGUST / MOTORING

ISSUE 140

The inside job Driverless cars are coming and with them, a complete revolution in automotive interior design as manufacturers look to enhance the driving experience. By Dejan Jovanovic

T

he biggest challenge facing cars in the near future isn’t about autonomy or sustainability. It isn’t even universal legislation for self-driving vehicles, nor is it a battle against Big Oil to shun fossil fuels in favour of clean hydrogen (the most abundant gas in the universe) and the coming salvation of electricity.

Car companies have a problem – they are at the dawn of a seismic tech shift. The first practical automobiles surfaced in the late 19th century and after more than a century of doing business one way, (and pretty much one way only – three-box vehicle designs with internal combustion engine in the front, drive in the rear, and passengers in the middle) now car companies are grappling with their future identities. The danger is in commoditising: these companies have had decades to build their brands and technologies and customers, and there is a clear hierarchy in the minds of the car buyer and carmaker. Toyotas are cheap, Mercs are expensive.

Everyone knows that.

But what happens when every car company in the world starts using the same batteries, the same motors, produced by the same industry suppliers, offering the same energy density and performance, at the same cost? Brands renowned for monster V12s or motorsportinspired turbocharged flat-six

engines suddenly lose their USP. Electricity is the great equaliser.

What happens when the selfdriving cars all end up looking like giant jelly-beans? What if, the horror, they end up government regulated, with pedestrian safety high on the list of lawmakers’ priorities getting rid of lowslung bonnets, sharp creases and signature styling cues that brands imprint in the masses mindsets over many decades? Autonomous vehicles are coming and electric, zero-emissions, drive is a billiondollar bet for every carmaker out there from Audi to Volvo.

Let’s take those two, precisely, as examples. Audi is preparing to launch its first all-electric vehicle next year, with two more models due to arrive by 2020. Volvo’s performance arm Polestar has just announced it’s becoming an allelectric brand, and Volvo itself will start manufacturing electric cars in China from 2019. Everyone in between is doing much the same things. Autonomy will follow.

So, with less than a dozen key moving parts in an electric drivetrain, there is no engine up front, no drive shaft going through the vehicle robbing leg room, and no bulky transmission intruding from the centre tunnel into the cabin. It’s just a flat floor, flat batteries, and some in-wheel motors. In other words, design traditions and brand images acquired over a century potentially go out the window.

3

Number of all-electric models that Audi is planning to launch by 2020

Car companies will need to express their identities from the inside. When the automobile finally lives up to its dystopian name – auto, mobile – and becomes merely a transport pod, its interior becomes ever more important for the consumer.

Although true Level 5 autonomy is still decades away car companies – again, everyone from Audi to Volvo – are already exploring the future of mobile interior design.

Naturally, car designers speak in their own language, made up of buzz words like ‘premium’, and ‘dynamic’, and ‘emotional’.

Well, in the future when your car is little more than a waiting room on wheels, that all goes right out the window. Designers will just need to learn to speak like the rest of us.

Yeah right. The new catchwords are phrases like ‘360-degree lounge’, and ‘inside out design’, and ‘emotional lighting’, and ‘spatially efficient’, and ‘intelligently connected’ and ‘health management’.

Audi has already embraced the company’s ‘virtual cockpit’ concept, which entirely replaces the traditional analogue gauges with a digital screen. Eventually, the German company will replace entire dash panels with touch screens in an aim to further decrease the number of physical controls inside the car, until there’s nothing left to push but the window switches.

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Mercedes has a thing for screens too, turning the whole windscreen of the company’s ultra-dreamy Mercedes-Maybach 6 concept into a transparent display. It relays information and geographical data across its full width, but Mercedes understands that technology alone doesn’t create the emotional desire played out at the upper end of the automobile segment.

Mercedes uses Elm wood decking inspired by yachts, and the softest leather on the deepbuttoned seats, except the buttons are really sensors detecting the occupants’ bodies to adjust things like the climate control, or even the massage function. The sensors can also detect your mood and use that information to trigger the cabin’s ambient lighting. The company is cautiously hopeful future generations won’t lose all touch with human social skills, and includes ideas for loungelike autonomous cars so all the occupants can sit and face each other while they check their likes.

With its Concept-i launched earlier this year in Las Vegas, Toyota has demonstrated a different vision for the cockpit of the future – the car shuns screen altogether in favour of coloured lights in the foot wells that indicate which vehicle driving mode the car’s in, and projectors in the back beam information to help you navigate blind spots on the road.

Since cars in the future will be inter-connected and able to relay information to each other in fractions of seconds, Honda uses its future cockpit concept to show off screens that show you what’s unseen. The displays can use information transmitted from other cars to show the driver what’s coming up around the bend. When all cars talk to each other, there will be no human accidents, just

computing errors. Insurance claims will be a new one.

US carmaker Ford, on the other hand, is pursuing facial recognition software inside its vehicles, to recognise the driver and provide an added means of convenience and security. Different drivers can be identified immediately by cameras and personalised vehicle settings adjusted to suit. When the car recognises your teenage daughter sitting behind the wheel, or the joystick, whatever, it for example won’t start if you’ve told the system that she’s grounded for two weeks.

Although it’s currently just a study and Ford won’t actually start watching your driving

through cameras yet, the system is already at a stage where the facial recognition software can send a photo to the vehicle owner’s smartphone if it detects an unknown occupant. The owner then has the option to set driving permissions remotely.

If it’s a young, inexperienced driver, the restrictions can be customised to limit the vehicle’s speed or even the audio volume and mobile phone use.

Ford, along with BMW and most others, is also pursuing gesture control so you can adjust the car’s features by making the correct hand motion in thin air. Sensors pick up your body

AUGUST

Manufacturers are using natural materials such as cork, wood and leather for their cars’ interiors movement and, say, turn up the volume, answer the phone, or change the climate control temperature. It’s already in practice in production cars, and in the cockpit of the future it’s set to minimise physical switchgear.

BMW’s i Inside Future concept, premiered earlier this year, isn’t really a car at all.

BMW calls it a sculpture, an open question to the car of tomorrow.

The study asks what we’ll be able

to do in an interior of the future.

Well, a book shelf filled with actual paper books fitting underneath the seats is an optimistic suggestion.

The BMW i Inside Future imagines the car’s primary controls as a hologram, meaning there’s never any actual contact between the user and the user interface.

Like everyone BMW agrees a major advantage of upcoming all-electric driverless platforms is the space it frees up without

increasing exterior dimensions.

This means vehicles will feature reclining seats and other comfort features, putting more emphasis on designers’ ability to create a sense of luxury in such an open space. Despite environmentalism supposedly at the forefront of the industry’s shift from fossil fuels to electricity, traditional materials such as wood and leather aren’t going away any time soon.

Manufacturers are increasingly using natural materials like cork for noise insulation, and BMW’s even planted some garden moss in its i Inside Future, for no other reason than to highlight the possibilities of organic materials inside future cars.

Or not. Earlier this year also in Las Vegas, Japanese electronics giant Panasonic showed off an autonomous cabin vision for the travel experience in cars of tomorrow and it’s full of faux wood trim. The company has developed a ‘smart material’ that can act as a display and show you all the vehicle information you need to see, or, when not in use, provide mood lighting or morph to look like real wood. Or metal, or leather. The material is made of a special resin which even provides the textured feel of wood, or metal, or leather, depending on the mood you’re in that day.

The car’s windows also feature a special film bonded to the glass, which can augment real objects outside the moving vehicle. Drive past the Burj Khalifa in Dubai?

The window can augment pointof-interest information and display it on the glass as you take a tour of a city. On a long road trip with the kids in the back, maybe it will even play ‘I Spy’ with you.

Because only one thing is for certain inside the driverless cars of tomorrow – we’d better find something to do.

ISSUE 140

LITHIUM CYCLES LOOKS TO THE FUTURE Lithium Cycles is an e-bike maker based in California, which got $300,000 worth of equity crowdfunding earlier this year.

Lithium’s latest bike, the Super 73, was designed collaboratively with a YouTuber called Jesse Wallens. It has a 20mph top speed, a 40-mile range, storage racks and head and brake lights. There’s a 500-watt motor that powers the thing and it looks great. The cost? $1,699.

/ MOTORING

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UPFRONT / SPEND

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OMEGA SEAMASTER A classic diver’s watch, the Seamaster range was launched in 1970, designed to endure the deepest depths, while smart enough to wear at any social occasion.

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GINZA GETS NEW LUXURY MALL Filling an entire block in the centre of Ginza, Ginza Six is the latest luxury mall to open in Tokyo. With a design inspired by the traditional Japanese Noren (room dividers), it features 47,000sqm of space across 19 floors. The interiors are stunning, with spiralling lattice strips in the atrium and gold finishes. There’s also a rotating art show, an underground theatre, a huge rooftop garden and more luxury brands than you can shake your wallet at.

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UPFRONT

Southern charm Rebecca L Weber discovers a Cape Town design studio that is redefining modern African style

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he places we inhabit can – but often don’t – reflect who we are. An interior designer who doesn’t understand who their client is, how they live, and what their taste and aesthetics are will wind up creating a space that doesn’t truly feel like home for the people living there.

Unfortunately, most of us can’t articulate this information easily.

This disconnect often left Cape Town-based Stefan Antoni Architects (now SAOTA) in an awkward situation. After designing an exquisite home for a client, the new living space

would be filled – and undermined – by furniture and art that were out of sync with the building.

Compounding the problem was the difficulty in sourcing interior options in alignment with their unique blend of contemporary African luxe living.

Nearly a decade ago, OKHA emerged from the original architectural practice to focus on interior design that works in harmony with clients and the SAOTA aesthetic.

For example, a dining room might beg for a 14-seat custom table with an irregular shape.

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Cape Town has turned into a serious design city in recent years “You’re creative, you create one yourself,” says Adam Court, creative director of OKHA. “That leads to, What are the perfect, ideal chairs? They’re not out there.

They’re not on the market.”

During this same period, the city has established a new place for itself in the global design scene.

Cape Town celebrated its status as the World Design Capital in 2014 with a string of events throughout the year. Southern Guild has exhibited a range of creations by South Africans locally, as well as at Design Days Dubai and Design Miami/Basel. This September, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, the largest collection of its kind on the continent, opens in a building renovated by UK architect Thomas Heatherwick.

Availability and desire for the use of local materials and production is the designer’s equivalent of the chicken-andthe-egg conundrum. Both supply and demand are increasing, meaning that high-end residences are no longer reliant on a small handful of individuals. Quality, choice and interest have surged in art/design hybrids. “Whenever possible, we choose to specify local products. Now we are able to do that,” says Court.

For example, artist Atang Tshikare recently collaborated with OKHA on the new Metsing table, which means “place of water”. The limited-edition

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UPFRONT

In Cape Town, the natural surroundings provide so much colour that the interiors themselves should be muted

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tables, handmade from solid cast, patinated bronze, evoke motion and a sense of story.

The post-apartheid era coincided with the rapid rise in globalisation, nudging Cape Town (nicknamed “Sleepy Town” in Afrikaans) from a provincial city to a more cosmopolitan one. OKHA works mostly on residential projects that aren’t for born-and-bred Capetonians.

Europeans in search of perpetual summer and Joburgers craving low-key beach time regularly call on OKHA. Foreigners buying

homes with pounds, dollars and euros have transformed the local luxury real estate market.

High-end residential projects represent most of OKHA’s clients, both domestically and internationally. Most have been referred by a friend or colleague, or are themselves a repeat client, according to Court. Typically, expat clients don’t want to live in a piece of contemporary architecture that feels, say, North American or European. The scale is different: larger and more expansive. “You cannot apply a

European sense of scale to those interiors,” says Court.

South African design emphasises craftsmanship, and has a handmade quality. Born in part out of limitation – certain hightech manufacturing done overseas can’t be replicated – there’s a reliance and respect for the ability to transform materials by hand.

The result is an expression that resonates an impression of personal touch and connection. It’s more organic than the type of sleekness or perfection often reflected in Germany or Italy, and nuanced with human characteristics.

Landscape, climate and geographical conditions also heavily influence choices about materials and sourcing.

The writer Zoë Wicomb famously wrote that “You can’t get lost in Cape Town,” because the mammoth Table Mountain is a constant geographical reference point. The built environment wraps around the bottom of the mountain, and spreads out toward the ocean on all sides of the peninsula. With a temperate year-round climate, and a nearobsession with grilling over an open outdoor fire, indoor/outdoor lifestyle considerations proliferate.

Materials must therefore be able to withstand outdoor elements.

Timber, stone, granite, and marble are widely used and prized for their organic qualities.

You won’t see much chrome or polished metal; warmer metals that get a patina and oxidize over time are prized for their ability to grow character with age. Cotton and linen add subtle texture.

In London, strong colours may be chosen as a contrast against grey, grey, grey skies. Cape Town’s natural surroundings provide so much colour that the approach is reversed. Vibrant skies and sea invite muted palettes. Art objects, rather than the furniture itself, bring splashes of colour.

AUGUST / THE BUSINESS

Interior decorators throughout South Africa use OKHA’s website as a first port of call. About two-thirds of OKHA’s client base are interior designers and architects, with the remainder private. A showroom on the ground floor features about a third of their catalogue, which is a starting point: everything can be customised in terms of fabric specs and dimensions.

If a solution doesn’t already exist, OKHA creates it for a given project, and the piece may then

wind its way into the catalogue.

OKHA and SAOTA share a building with ARRCC, a third entity that focuses on architecture (typically smaller projects, such as renovations, or interior architecture, like an electrical layout and lighting plan) and interior design.

The trio address different needs, either independently or collectively, depending on the client. The building demonstrates the interconnection between the three specialisations that can

ISSUE 140

either work independently with a client, or be braided into a conceptual whole.

Most people struggle to understand how drawings will actually feel once built to scale.

The advent of precise, 3-D renderings helps, but there’s no replacement for taking the time to really understand how a home will be used.

A client who trusts the creative process with warmth and grace is best suited to OKHA’s style, and the homes they create.

BELLES VUES Acha Leke, an economist from Cameroon who is based in Johannesburg and travels regularly, wanted a holiday beach home in Cape Town for his family and friends. The brief: a contemporary home that referenced his cultural roots, while avoiding a pastiche effect. The relaxed vibe is wholly different than Leke’s Joburg flat, where the urban pace focuses on work. Often clients with multiple homes want a place with its own identity, to create and install a certain state of mind, says Court. A major renovation left little the same in the house, save for the concrete superstructure and the views. OKHA developed 70 per cent of Belles Vues’ interiors from scratch. Located in the beachfront suburb of Llududno, highlighting the panoramic ocean vistas was a no-brainer.

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AUGUST ISSUE 140

UPFRONT / CLASSIC READ

Shoe Dog

By Phil Knight

Knight is honest: he wanted to call the company Dimension Six and hated the swoosh logo

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usiness memoirs are a dime a dozen, but few are as candid – or compelling – as Nike founder Phil Knight’s. The story of how he set Nike up with a $50 loan from his father has been told, but what this book did is highlight the setbacks that come with turning $50 into a $30 billion business.

Unlike many business memoirs that turn the author into a genius, Knight is extremely candid about how luck played a part in his success. Knight is also, unusual among many CEOs, an introvert, shy and awkward in public, and yet, his book is unusually honest, setting scores with many of the people and companies he feels didn’t shoot straight.

Knight’s interest in sports trainers started at the University of Oregon, where he ran track.

At Stanford, where he got his MBA, he wrote a paper about the potential market for imported Japanese trainers. He reasoned that as Japanese cameras were doing well in the US market, why not trainers too? Knight put his (or his father’s) money where his mouth was, and set up Blue Ribbon Sports, which imported Japanese trainers for sale to the American market. The road was tough: Knight was almost always in debt to the banks; the margins were low and his Japanese supplier had less than full confidence in him.

Knight’s honesty is refreshing.

He admits that he didn’t like the name Nike, and wanted to call the company Dimension Six. His employees eventually convinced him otherwise. He wasn’t a huge fan of the iconic Nike ‘swoosh’,

480

Million dollars Michael Jordan makes from Nike each year

either, which he paid a graphic designer $35 for. His honesty reflects the realities of running a business such as Nike – success is often a result of hard work and lots of luck.

Knight also details the motley crew of employees he assembled, including an overweight accountant, a salesman who obsessively wrote letters to Knight, and a paralysed former track star.

This illustrates the fact that not all successful businesses are run by polished MBA graduates.

Knight also touches on one of Nike’s greatest accomplishments – the celebrity endorsement. One of Nike’s first was Steve Prefontaine, an American long-distance runner, who Nike enlisted to help sell its trainers to the running community. It worked, and before long Nike had athletes in every discipline selling the company’s shoes. The high point of this sort of collaboration was the company’s link up with Michael Jordan. Even in 2015, Jordan was earning $480 million a year from the company – good value when you consider Nike made $3 billion from Jordan branded trainers in 2015 alone.

Knight, then, is a trailblazer, having invented the modern sportswear company and changing how we perceive athletes forever.

This book is honest, funny and often surprising, and is a must for sports fans and business majors the world over.

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What does Google want?

David Nicholson explains why the technology giant is relentlessly pushing the boundaries, and how it’s aiming to change the way we live forever

WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT?

Google went from a garage in Menlo Park to one of the world’s biggest companies, one that revolutionised online commerce and the web

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n the summer of 1998 a couple of college kids with $100,000 hired a garage in Menlo Park, California. With a bright turquoise carpet, ping pong table, chunky computers sitting on desks made out of old doors, it was ramshackle, fun, with just enough technology and invention to kick-start the pair’s ambitions: search engine pioneer Google was born. Over the next few years, the company transformed the world’s ability to discover information, ushering in a new era of online commerce and communication. It was truly revolutionary.

Today, the garage has been replaced by millions of square feet in gleaming office complexes, housing more than 50,000 employees in 50 countries, making its original inhabitants – Sergey Brin and Larry Page – two of the wealthiest people in the world, with fortunes estimated at more than $40 billion apiece. At the outset, it was clear what Google wanted. Search engines in 1998 ranked pages according to the frequency of key words and phrases that appeared on them. This rudimentary system had obvious flaws: anyone could post these key words on their websites, regardless of their credentials.

Instead, Google ranked sites by the number and credibility of backlinks that connected to websites. A link was like a vote of confidence in a site: the more and better votes, the higher your ranking.

What Page and Brin wanted was good information, fast. So effective and far-reaching was this new search engine that Google quickly monetised it through advertising. By 2004, the company registered more than 200 million searches a day, then carried out an initial public offering (IPO), raising $1.66 billion for the business and making the founders instant billionaires.

From the early 2000s, Google expanded relentlessly, developing mapping systems like Google Earth, the popular e-mail server Gmail, an online translation service and much else, while also

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google and Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc

acquiring multiple companies including online video platform YouTube, the mobile phone business Motorola Mobility, and website advertising businesses like Applied Semantics. There was a common thread running through the growth: bringing an ever-greater volume of accurate, up-to-date information to consumers, whether on geographical details, foreign languages, video or commercial products. Google wanted you to know more.

Early in their careers atop Google, Page and Brin recognised their managerial limitations and hired an experienced chief executive: Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Novell software with a PhD in computing. Both of them knew what they wanted: to start up new ventures rather than spend all their time running an existing one. A further reorganisation in 2015 established Alphabet as an overall parent company, with Google as the search engine business, and the many other more speculative ventures, sitting beneath it, each with their own CEOs. This structure gave Page and Brin additional elbowroom to explore new horizons.

Some media profiles describe Brin as the more imaginative, maverick dreamer of the two. “Sergey is a beloved oddball of a guy,” an ‘industry observer’ was quoted saying in Vanity Fair magazine.

“Unlike Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, he’s the one who gets to do the cool stuff at Google.” The Vanity Fair profile theorised that Brin’s discovery in 2008 that he is genetically susceptible to Parkinson’s disease – thanks to the DNA testing company founded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki – caused him to change

WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT?

Google’s HQ in Mountain View, California.

The company now has more than 50,000 employees

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WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT?

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his lifestyle and focus. Aged 34, he began a rigorous exercise regime and donated millions of dollars to Parkinson’s research foundations.

Controversially, Brin also began dating Google marketing manager Amanda Rosenberg, leaving his wife and small children in April 2013. He had worked alongside Rosenberg to promote Google Glass – the internet-connected spectacles. This episode demonstrated the unforeseen consequences of ubiquitous information: if Brin hadn’t found out about his genetic disposition to Parkinson’s, perhaps he would not have strayed from his marriage. But he is certainly not the first wealthy businessman to date a younger employee.

Nor was he the first Silicon Valley billionaire with big, exotic dreams involving space travel, robotics and artificial intelligence. Together with Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Brin’s lofty ambitions have almost become a tech industry commonplace. And like these two space cadets, he has poured billions of dollars into futuristic R&D. A division originally called Google X, and now abbreviated simply to X, investigates the possibilities of driverless vehicles, drone transportation, and giant balloons that promise to deliver broadband to inaccessible regions of the world (among other ventures).

Known by Google employees (‘Googlers’) as moonshots, for their extreme ambition and apparent impossibility, these businesses are hugely attractive and exciting, but have produced mixed results, to put it charitably.

A satellite-imaging business called Terra Bella, founded by former Nasa engineers in 2009, was sold to space company Planet Labs in February 2017 after failing to take off. Google closed its solar-powered drone venture Titan in 2016, after dismantling its robotics division and selling Boston Dynamics, which makes humanoid and animallike robots, to Japanese tech company SoftBank.

The company managed to produce a versatile robot called BigDog, but it was rejected by the Marine Corp on the grounds of being too noisy.

In 2016, Alphabet announced Project Ara, a smartphone with interchangeable parts, but this was quickly shelved. Other schemes to have encountered setbacks and disappointment include self-driving vehicles, a vast airship, and Wi-Fi kiosks installed across New York City, which have suffered from poor adoption rates and misuse.

Thermostat company Nest and life science company Verily are still some way from profitability.

Google’s more ambitious businesses are known as ‘moonshots’ due to their impossibility

For Page and Brin, such troubles are part of the deal. They take pride in the unconventional nature of the company, how it has taken ‘very speculative, or even strange’ bets on new businesses.

“We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time,” they wrote to investors to announce the launch of Alphabet. “Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android.” This helps to justify the company’s continued idiosyncrasy, they argue: “We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.

In the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.”

Being uncomfortable and pursuing disruptive technologies is no problem so long as you have money to burn. So even though Alphabet’s nonGoogle assets lost $3.6 billion in 2016, according to Fortune magazine, its core search engine and advertising business turned over $24.75 billion in the first three months of 2017, delivering a profit of $5.43 billion – up 29 per cent on the same quarter in 2016. Total Google revenue was almost $90 billion for 2016 as a whole.

With figures like these, dropping a few hundred million dollars is no big deal. Prime among Alphabet’s big earning divisions is its mobile advertising operation, in which Google enjoys a 61.6 per cent share, according to research company eMarketer. Alongside Facebook, Google captured virtually all of the growth in digital advertising in 2016.

Beyond advertising, the company’s cloud computing business has performed very well in recent months, catching up with Amazon and Microsoft in this fast-growing sector, particularly since hiring computing veteran Diane Greene (co-founder of VMware) to head the division.

Altogether, Pixel smartphones, the Google Play store and its cloud computing operation earned US$3.10 billion in the first three months of 2017, 49.4 per cent higher than in 2016.

These are steady, well-established businesses, compared with the flights of fancy elsewhere in the Alphabet empire. Looking after firms’ data storage (the main business of a cloud computing company) doesn’t set the pulse racing in quite the same way as a solar-powered robotic drone delivering pizza. But it fits really well with Google’s basic mission and skillset, and after spending US $625 million on software integration company

The Art of Living.

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WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT?

Apigee in late 2016, Google’s G Suite cloud service now has three million paying customers and is competing with Microsoft’s Office 365.

Larr y Page, Google co-founder and now Alphabet CEO, often lives up to his reputation as the more tech-minded of the pair. He avoids the press, but enjoys attending industry events such as Google’s Sci Foo Camp and its Solve for X gathering, where tech wizards puzzle over the great issues of the day, whether artificial intelligence, affordable healthcare or urban planning. Like Brin, he can get excited about the wilder possibilities of space travel, but is generally more process-driven and detail-focused. At a forum organised by Fortune magazine in 2015, he described how he would quiz colleagues in Google’s data centres: “I ask them, like, ‘How does the transformer work?’

‘How does the power come in?’ ‘What do we pay for that?’ And I’m thinking about it kind of both as an entrepreneur and as a businessperson. And I’m thinking, ‘What are the business opportunities?’”

Among his mottos is ‘incrementalism leads to irrelevance’, explaining how – like Brin – he loves to take on new challenges rather than simply plug

Map by Aram Bartholl at the Hello World show in Hamburg in 2013

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Page is considered the more tech-minded of the pair, while Brin is seen as more visionary

on at the same old task. Page’s speaking voice is just above a whisper, due to damaged vocal chords, lending him an air of guru-like mystery. From a management point of view, he likes to take new technologies and product ideas, then see how far they can be extrapolated. Could the Google Now predictive search tool be extended to predict other aspects of a person’s life, for example?

This approach probably stems from Page’s early experience of founding Google. He and Brin were graduate students at Stanford University when they discovered a joint passion for website ranking algorithms. Neither man could have imagined the vast potential of this academic research, although it didn’t take them long to catch on, once the flood of interest broke over their dorm room in 1996.

Extrapolating search rankings into an advertising model, then into Google Earth, translate, and the vast panoply of the company’s services proved beyond doubt that Page and Brin had stumbled upon a world-changing idea. Keeping this commercial momentum going for 20 years is an extraordinary achievement, made possible by the lack of credible competition in search technology.

WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT?

CITY OF THE FUTURE Google has recently been fined $2.7 billion by the EU for “abusing its search engine market dominance”

Google is effectively a monopoly. This factor has lately irritated European legislators, with the EU’s competition authority fining the company €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) for unfairly favouring its own online shopping services, saying that it “abused its market dominance as a search engine”.

This case will test the limits of Google’s commitment to fairness and transparency, just as an earlier row over censorship in China caused heated debate. Traditional publishing companies such as newspaper groups typically downplay their own failings and setbacks, but Google is ostensibly a neutral platform, allowing freedom of speech and expression (within certain legal limits).

A second point of recent conflict is a boycott by some corporations of YouTube, since their advertisements had appeared alongside extremist content, including racist material. “Advertisers can be fickle and certainly the approval of the advertiser is critical, but less so than the approval of the user,” commented one media expert.

These disputes certainly don’t appear to have worked through to Google or Alphabet’s bottom line. Page and Brin have taken both of these issues in their stride, seeming to accept that with great success comes great responsibility.

They created a think tank called Jigsaw to tackle online hate and harassment, and specifically to disrupt extremist propaganda broadcast by ISIS. Head of research and development Yasmin Green describes the issue as an “access to information problem” and proposes to give potential extremists “alternative answers to the questions they have”.

As more of the world’s publishing, marketing and general communication moves onto the internet, and billions more people go online in emerging economies, these issues will only grow more urgent. They certainly lie outside the grasp of any single government or organisation, even one as vast as Alphabet or Google.

With the appointment of new chief financ i a l o f f i c e r R u t h Po r a t ( E n g l i s h - b o r n ,

In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, the authorities are mulling over a hugely ambitious plan. Google’s owner Alphabet has applied to build a high-tech ‘city’ employing the latest sensors, unlimited broadband connectivity and big data collection, aiming to create an equal digital platform for rich and poor, with minimum congestion and excellent facilities.

The Quayside district next to Toronto’s commercial centre is earmarked for the project, to be managed by Google’s Sidewalk Labs.

This group has installed dozens of internet kiosks across New York City, where they provide free Wi-Fi and have the technology to collect data on pollution and congestion among other things.

Like many a major corporation in history, Google is keen to cater for its employees’ needs, whether in its forward thinking office space, its urban designs or its connectivity. “Our view is access to internet at high speeds is as fundamental a right as electricity or water,” says Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff. “Ubiquitous connectivity is fundamental to the smart city of the future.”

In the UK, Google’s next smart new office will be next to Kings Cross in North London, in a long shallow building known as the ‘Landscraper.’

Just 11 storeys high, but as long as London’s tallest building. Inside, 7000 employees will enjoy a swimming pool, cafes, gyms and indoor sports pitch.

Gardens and fields will adorn the rooftop, allowing them to dream in peace.

Stanford-educated and a Wall Street legend at Morgan Stanley) in March 2015, Alphabet adopted a newfound sense of financial discipline. A former advisor to the US Treasury, Porat has helped the company to slim down some of its fat and given it a welcome jolt of energy.

What Google (and Alphabet) wants is more of this kind of energy, more of the transformational astonishment that greeted its launch in 1998, more of the gasps of surprise from investors when their money multiplied. What’s more likely is a steady slide towards commoditisation, as the internet gets middle-aged and competitors wear down Google’s advantage. But it’s still going to be a great ride for years to come.

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THE NEW BREED

Lauren Razavi profiles some of India’s youngest entrepreneurs

THE NEW BREED

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DR RITESH MALIK (INNOV8 / PROJECT GUERILLA)

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ndia is rapidly changing. Now the fastest-growing economy in the world, entrepreneurship is booming and exciting new startups are emerging every day. The country has a strong reputation in tech and engineering, but as its vast population continues to adopt the internet, the finance, e-commerce and fashion sectors are also transforming.

Think, for example, of the success of companies such as online retailer Flipkart. Founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (the two are not related), the company was valued $11.6 billion as of April 2017 and is now a serious competitor to the likes of eBay. Another successful example is online insurance comparison portal Policybazaar. CEO Yashish Yahiya founded the company in 2008 and developed it into the largest insurance comparison website in India. The company is aiming for an initial public offering by 2018 and has recently launched a cancer insurance awareness campaign.

No matter how diverse some of the most successful Indian enterprises appear to be, they have much in common: a strong understanding of their customers and their needs, the ability to adapt to unpredictable circumstances, and a unique understanding of markets often ignored by non-local businesses.

Profiled here are seven Indian entrepreneurs who showcase how innovative thinking can result in explosive growth and incredible success. Widely divergent in their goals, target audience, and business model, they all demonstrate the potential of India as an incubator and accelerator of talent.

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r Ritesh Malik’s achievements make him look almost superhuman. Just 27 years old, he has invested in over 26 companies, has made it onto the Forbes 30 under 30 in the Finance and Venture list (Asia), and has developed a successful real estate empire.

However, he did not start life as a businessman.

Originally Malik trained to be a doctor, but he ultimately decided that practising medicine wasn’t for him. Inspired by a business seminar he attended while studying at the London School of Economics, he founded his first company, digital marketing agency AdStuck, during his final year at university. During this time he also became an investor in a range of startups, notably Fin Robotics, a company that develops wearable gadgets.

THE NEW BREED

SOURABH KAUSHAL (XOVIAN / SMARTCIRCUITS)

In 2014, Malik went on to found his main enterprise, Innov8. The co-working and innovation centre offers space in major cities throughout the country, filling a gap in India’s booming property market. Not content with developing his own business, Malik is currently expanding Project Guerrilla, an accelerator that nurtures and develops other startups.

In May 2017, Malik invested an undisclosed amount in Pumpkart, an Indian company that sells water pumps online. And still his business ethos shows no sign of slowing. Malik’s ambitions for the future include developing Delhi into the new Silicon Valley and empowering women entrepreneurs through his #innov84women initiative. The serial entrepreneur, who claims that celebrating your failures is the key to success, is unlikely to run out of ideas anytime soon.

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hinking big is certainly not an alien concept for Sourabh Kaushal. The boy who wanted to be an astronaut grew up to become a bona fide space explorer.

At university Kaushal became fascinated by the increasing problem of space debris and invented a method to recycle space junk. His first research paper was immediately nominated for the prestigious Jerome Pearson Award and Kaushal went on to win a range of accolades, including an INK Fellowship in association with TEDx. He founded aerospace research organisation Xovian in 2011, determined to revolutionise satellite fabrication by making the process more sustainable and cost-effective. Abstract as this may sound, Xovian’s applications are surprisingly practical solutions to one of India’s major environmental problems. Its CANSAT Kit allows users to monitor pollution levels in their local community as a first step towards building a cleaner future.

Not content with just producing satellites, Kashal founded Smartcircuits Innovation in 2015.

This company builds even stronger links with Indian communities, aiming to help educate children and young people about technology and support transformative scientists of the future.

Smartcircuits develops products such as Smartbots, a toy that introduces children to robotics and coding, and Science Trek, a hands-on enquiry-based science box. However, his efforts to transform education on planet Earth have not caused Kaushal to stop dreaming about space exploration.

Kaushal is a local ambassador for the Mars Initiative, a non-profit that aims to bring one million people permanently to Mars and mine the Red Planet’s resources. For some entrepreneurs, Kaushal’s career shows the sky is most definitely not the limit.

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THE NEW BREED

VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA (PAYTM)

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orn in Aligarh to a teacher father and a homemaker mother, Sharma went to college aged just 15 and eventually founded what would become an incredibly successful online payment website. Sharma’s path to success was not easy and he managed to overcome many obstacles along the way.

Admitted to college without speaking English, he struggled with the language barrier and spent his evenings reading English-language newspapers to bring himself up to speed. One97, the communications agency he founded as a student, went into loss when the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. Sharma persevered and launched Paytm in 2010, inspired by the growing popularity of smartphones and online shopping. Initially focusing on online payments, Paytm branched out into the field of e-commerce and is currently growing its online marketplace. The company received an enormous boost when India’s government decided to move towards a cashless economy in 2016 and shredded 86 per cent of paper rupees. Though not uncontroversial, the change opened up new opportunities for Paytm, which currently has more than 220 million users.

Sharma was nominated for the Forbes 40 under 40 list in 2017 and named Entrepreneur of the Year at The Entrepreneur’s Moneytech Awards in the same year. The future seems bright for Paytm and its owner, who plans expansions in the direction of online banking and has announced that the company may start offering digital bank accounts in the near future. With the company’s reach in mind this move could have a profound impact on India’s finance sector and makes Sharma a businessman to watch.

THE NEW BREED

ROHINI KEJRIWAL (THE ALIPORE POST)

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ndian entrepreneurs aren’t just found in tech and finance. Over the past few years Bangalorebased blogger, writer and curator Rohini Kejriwal has developed her online platform The Alipore Post into the go-to place to find beauty and contemplation in an increasingly hectic world.

Kejriwal started The Alipore Post as a side project, using the format of a daily e-mail to share art, poetry and music she liked with her rapidly growing group of followers. The idea was born during a period of soul searching after she quit her job in journalism and spent several months travelling. It quickly evolved into a daily newsletter that introduced readers to undiscovered creative gems.

Initially, Kejriwal was reluctant to use social media because The Alipore Post was meant to be an escape from the everyday. However, when she accidentally sent an e-mail using CC instead of BCC, members of her mailing list began to enthusiastically interact with each other, The Alipore Post expanded to Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to give readers more opportunities to share and respond to posts.

Always looking for new ways to increase her readership and bring online beauty to a wider audience, Kejriwal took The Alipore Post into the offline world in 2016. Together with a local cafe she hosted a day of performances, music and workshops to give her readers the opportunity to meet face to face and contribute their own ideas.

Kejriwal continues to be active as a freelance writer and curates a monthly series of poetry for Scroll.in, as well as achieving a personal milestone with the release of the first edition of The Alipore Post’s online zine earlier this year.

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THE NEW BREED

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RICHA KAR (ZIVAME)

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ometimes all it takes to start a successful business is a good eye for detail. With experience in marketing and consultancy, Richa Kar was quick to spot a major gap in the Indian fashion market. Not only is buying lingerie on the high street still considered a taboo in India, for women based outside metropolitan areas choices are also limited. Kar founded Zivame (which approximately translates to “radiant me”) in 2011, adapting the successful business model of brands such as Victoria’s Secret to meet the needs of Indian women. Zivame sells a wide range of lingerie for every occasion and dispatches its products in discreet packaging. It also offers customers online advice to help them buy the right lingerie to fit their body shape.

Kar’s strength as a businesswoman lies in her ability to understand the needs of her customers and to cater for a wide range of buyers, selling both premium and more affordable lines through Zivame’s online store. But the initial establishment of the business was not straightforward, with investors, banks and even her own parents being sceptical about her desire to venture into the world of underwear.

Zivame’s success has proved its early critics wrong: the company is currently expanding its offline presence by opening fitting rooms across India, offering customers physical stores where they can fit and purchase its premium brands. Kar stepped down as a CEO in March 2017, but chose to remain as an active member of the company’s board.

THE NEW BREED

SHASHANK ND (PRACTO)

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BHAVISH AGGARWAL (OLA)

havish Aggarwal founded Ola shortly after completing his degree in computer science and engineering, using his skills to address India’s growing transport problem. Like many startup founders, he started his business with a specific problem he wanted to fix.

Ola’s mission is to solve India’s lack of affordable transport and give customers a range of options to travel at their convenience. Based on a business model similar to companies such as Uber, Ola connects travellers and drivers and functions as an online cab aggregator. Customers can book cabs online, select the type of car and facilities they want, and pay through the app once they have reached their destination.

Aggarwal has mentioned persistence and determination as key qualities of successful startup founders, setting an example by subjecting his 16-hour workdays to a rigid structure and relaxing only at the gym. It’s paid off: Ola is now active in more than 110 Indian cities and operates a fleet of around six million cars and rickshaws.

Like Sharma’s Paytm, Ola has benefitted from India’s demonetisation policy and continues to expand its cashless payment options. Other new developments include the introduction of Ola Bikes: the option to book a ride on a motorbike, aimed at users who cannot afford the fee for a rickshaw or car. Aggarwal, meanwhile, has vowed to stay true to his principles. Despite being one of the youngest entrepreneurs to be listed among India’s richest citizens by the Times of India, Aggarwal has stated that he still does not own a car and never will.

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angalore-based entrepreneur Shashank ND is a great example of how startups can flourish if they carefully tend to the needs of their customers. Founded in 2008, ND’s company Practo has carved out a significant space for itself within India’s healthcare system.

The company is based on two pillars: the less visible one is selling tablets, software and digital kiosks to doctors to support their online management of appointments. But the business has become best known for the range of healthcare services it provides to the public.

Inspired by his own experiences when he tried to locate a doctor for his father, and found the complexity of the process deeply frustrating, ND devised an online portal to connect doctors and patients. Through Practo, patients can find doctors in their local area and set up appointments, a feature that has proved particularly useful in rural areas. The complete Practo package includes an online pharmacy and an extensive database of health-related resources. For patients unable to travel to see a doctor, the portal also enables live chats with verified doctors, making healthcare accessible like never before.

While mainly focused on India, ND is also looking across the country’s borders and rolling out Practo services in Singapore and Brazil.

Efficiency and customer support are what sets Practo apart from the traditional Indian healthcare system, he has claimed, citing his desire to modernise healthcare as one of his main drives. The company’s unique approach, improving healthcare by working with both patients and doctors, is set to transform the medical sector throughout India and potentially far beyond.

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THE TITAN Eighty years after his death, John D Rockefeller’s rise from poverty to unimaginable wealth – and his enduring legacy – is examined by David Whelan

THE TITAN

Right: Kykuit, the Rockefeller family home in Pocantico Hills, in Upstate New York.

Bottom: Rockefeller Jnr with members of his family, including Abby Rockefeller

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ooming some 30 miles north of New York in Westchester County, perched above the Hudson River and surrounded by the Pocantico Hills, sits the Kykuit Estate – a huge mansion built to the exacting standards of America’s first, and greatest, philanthropist, John D Rockefeller. The name – Rockefeller – has long since usurped the man, entering into pop songs and TV shows; a linguistic shortcut for wealth or privilege and more familiar to people today for its association to universities, art galleries and, of course, the vast oil empire that wrenched America to the top of the 20th century. The name feels as old as America itself – a bedrock stone of opportunity, wealth and personal success. But it was not always this way. Before there was the Rockefeller empire, there was just John D Rockefeller – a poor, fatherless teenager in Ohio, with nothing to his name but a dream to earn $100,000.

Born to a con man father and devoutly Baptist mother in July 1839 in Richford, New York, John D Rockefeller was a precocious young man. Throughout his youth, his family were peripatetic – moving around the northeast of America trying to find a home.

A great deal of this was down to his father, who went by the name of Dr William Levingston. He was, in short, a conman, journeying through America looking for the next hardworking family to swindle.

Nicknamed Devil Bill, Rockefeller’s father made his name in snake oils and cure-all elixirs which had, of course, no medical benefits whatsoever. Rockefeller Snr was a known cheat, robbing locals and passersby of their hard earned cash, before abandoning his family after being accused of rape. Growing up in the shadow of such a man taught the young John D an effective cocktail – his career would be defined by an outward strict adherence to morality and respect, while showing the ruthlessness acumen of a man nurtured on fraud.

After Devil Bill’s disappearance to the country, John D was then raised by his mother, Eliza, and his siblings – the eldest son, he became the de facto head of the household. Eliza’s religious fanaticism and Bill’s art of a deal would never leave him. A devout Baptist, he spread gospel throughout the country and became the first great philanthropist, eventually donating his vast wealth into such things as the University of Chicago, which transformed the then tiny Baptist college into one of the finest universities in the world.

It’s prudent to mention that in the 19th century, America was almost unrecognisable to the powerhouse, unified state it is now. The Californian Gold Rush of 1848 was transforming the west coast into a wild, gigantic land of opportunity – people, nicknamed Forty-Niners, flocked there in their thousands and America’s struggling economy was pumped fat with the 49 carats. Eventually, California applied for statehood in the Union, ripping it from the gigantic mass known then as the Mexican Cession.

The Pacific Coast was becoming American – Kansas was founded as a through-state from the East to West. This was not overly pleasing to a lot of the nation, and pushed forward issues of slavery, state lines and power. Naturally, war was just around the corner. The American Civil War in 1861 and the rise of the Confederate State ripped

THE TITAN

Rockefeller’s childhood dream was to earn $100,000 and to live to one hundred years of age

the nation apart. John D Rockefeller, by then 21, paid for substitute soldiers to fight for the Unionist and Abraham Lincoln. While John D Rockefeller was cutting his business teeth in the north, around 700,000 Americans died in the war; slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865. During these four years, while a large majority of Americans were dying for the identity of their nation, Rockefeller was discovering his own.

John D’s business knowledge began early – at 16 years old, he became a bookkeeper in Cleveland, Ohio, at Hewitt & Tuttle, a commission merchants and produce shippers. Learning the trade and language of business at a precocious age, with the knowledge of his father’s alternate perception of fair transactions, allowed Rockefeller a unique double-perspective: of knowing when to do things by the book, and when to burn it. By now revising his childhood dream of earning $100,000 (a huge amount, at the time) and aiming to live for over one hundred years, Rockefeller invested in a venture to commission hay, meats and grains – earning him, within a single year, $450,000. This proved enough to pay himself out of fighting the Civil War and to focus on the growth of his wealth.

Across the state, however, something larger was coming to the surface. Oil. Nicknamed ‘Black Gold’, the discovery of vast amounts of oil transformed the Union states – no longer having to rely on the gold from California, they found a substance far more useful and far more precious. John D was 20 when Colonel Edwin Drake began spelunking for petroleum in the the depths of Oil Creek, about 100 miles east of Cleveland – but news travelled fast, and it wasn’t long until the state was teeming with black gold enthusiasts, chancers and all the underhand business that comes with it. The story goes that John D, who had done well out of investments, visited the 20 or so refineries in the area and fell into a pit of oil, before calmly quipping that he was now officially “into the oil business, head and ears”.

Pennsylvania became the stranglehold of a nation – and upwards of 85 per cent of America’s crude oil was sucked from its ground.

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THE TITAN

Not satisfied with just owning a refinery, Rockefeller went out of his way to encourage investment

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Rockefeller was savvy. He shunned drilling, which was an unpredictable gamble, and opted for a refinery in 1863, which transforms crude oil into more useful substances. The base on Cuyahoga River would become the first brick in an empire that would, eventually, make Rockefeller $ 340 billion in today’s dollars. Bill Gates, by way of comparison, the world’s richest man, is worth $75 billion. It’s a gigantic amount, almost inconceivable. Nowadays, his family wealth is roughly $10 billion – which is, to be frank, still rather a lot. Rockefeller was prudent and thrifty – which separated him from his competitors. While most refineries or drillers would dump the 40 per cent of crude oil that did not become kerosene, Rockefeller kept it and worked on transforming it into other products that could be sold. He also pioneered the construction of his own barrels, which cut the prices of storage by over half. Falling into partnership with the Clark brothers and business partner Samuel Andrew at their refinery at the Flats, Rockefeller – in what oil historian Andrew Yergin calls a ‘critical action’ – bought out the Clarks for the equivalent of $1 million, thus reducing the profit split by half.

Not satisfied with just owning a refinery, Rockefeller went out of his way to encourage investment. John D encouraged railroaders to take shares in exchange for freight deals and rebates, and bankers for their millions. Ohio historian of The Research Group, Chris Eiben describes this move as “a brilliant stroke of corporate backs-

THE TITAN

Rockefeller on his 84th birthday in 1923

cratching”, which essentially began Rockefeller’s next great venture – infrastructure. John D then set about buying up the competition – after two years, Standard Oil owned practically every refinery in the Cleveland area. Following that, Rockefeller began cutting out the middle man – investing and buying up pipelines, train-tracks, terminals, Rockefeller owned every aspect of oil from well to wick. Sensing total domination, he began strangling off the surrounding land from its remaining competitors by seizing vast swathes of woodland and forests, which could, in other hands, have been used for pipeline. There was fairness and there was business.

By 1870, just seven years after founding it, John D incorporated his company as Standard Oil Co, alongside his brother William, and sold 90 per cent of the world’s traded oil. It also set up a pattern that other large companies would follow in the future – that of shape-shifting. For a decade, Standard Oil became a trust, then a holding company, slipping through the cracks of governmental regulation. It inspired new federal laws on commerce and transport, as Washington tried to keep it from outgrowing the nation. It was partly blamed for the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, where huge investment from companies such as Standard transformed the rail system of America into a house of cards – after successive wage cuts for the workers, and three strikes, over 100 people were killed. Standard opened outlets across the nation – 300 at the least, selling John D’s famous byprod-

ucts of refining, such as chewing gum. Rockefeller would also put money into constructing American road systems to assist the transportation of his products. Standard Oil became known for underhand tactics – it undersold its oil to slip past competitors, it revolutionised the transportation of products by skipping the delivery men and supplying kerosene through tank car and would feast on rebates. In 1880, for example, Standard was described by the New York World as “the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country”.

It was a dominance of trade, infrastructure and commercial space that went unchecked, ungoverned. Standard employed 100,000 people, owned 20,000 wells, 4,000 miles of pipeline and 5,000 tank cars. While it helped drag America forward as a united, wealthy nation, it also displayed the strength of the one over the nation: the American dream was fast becoming one American’s dream.

With Trump in the White House, the wealth gap wider than ever, and entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel secretly funding high-profile court cases for ex-wrestlers against media empires, it’s tough to imagine a world before billionaires ruled the planet. Rockefeller was the progenitor – the first great billionaire, whose business expansions leaked uncontrollably into all forms of American life and defined the direction of the nation.

But all great things must, eventually, change.

1911 brought the first effective movement against Rockefeller’s domination. The US Supreme Court declared that Standard Oil had to split into 34 different companies – and encouraged oil from Russia, South America and the Middle East. But, by this time, Rockefeller had expanded his interests beyond oil – into iron ore and ore transportation, as well as coal and coke mining – placing himself up against traders such as William Henry Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie. Rockefeller, by this time, also began expanding his philanthropic ways – investing greatly in education and medical science. He established Rockefeller University in 1901 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, both to

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THE TITAN

Rockefeller got more generous as he got older, more openminded, more pious, more dedicated to making a difference to the world around him

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support scientific study. The Foundation would go on to be a great benefactor for relief during World War 1. By his death at the age of 97 in May 23, 1937, John D Rockefeller had given away roughly $550 million. According to biographer Ron Chernow, “his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad”.

His legacy continued through his children and his estate primarily through John D Rockefeller Jnr. Jnr moved into New York real estate – such as the Rockefeller Center, which covers 22 acres of Manhattan and attracted companies such as General Electric and Time Warner to set up offices within it. Jnr followed in his father’s footsteps and gave upwards of $540 million to a variety of causes – not least the League of Nations and the United Nations. Rockefeller Jnr’s son, Nelson A Rockefeller, would, of course, go on to become the 41st Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford, and display many of the same tendencies as his grandfather. As biographer Jeffrey Frank says, “Rocky was a builder, someone who’d be completely out of place in today’s America, where governors of both parties tend to be shrinkers, unwilling, or afraid to support ambitious, expensive public projects. He may have over-

reached – the Albany Mall was probably a little crazy. But on some level, he was an unfulfilled architect who wanted his legacy to include important monuments.” David Rockefeller, another of John Jnr’s sons, went on into finance and spearheaded the Rockefeller takeover of now ubiquitous American bank, Chase Manhattan.

2017 marks the 80th anniversary of John D Rockefeller’s death. A man born with very little who, through cunning and chance, transformed himself and the very fabric of history.

Undoubtedly, without Rockefeller there would be no United States of America as we know it. A man of such impossible wealth that he could do little else with it but donate it – nowadays, it is almost impossible to walk down any street in the country without passing under some historical shadow of America’s first and greatest billionaire.

Vice President Nelson Rockefeller speaks to the press assembled in the White House

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Design has been one of Denmark’s most successful exports for more than half a century.

Emma Woolacott discovers why

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ashions in interior design come and go: think extreme minimalism, shabby chic or Fifties kitsch.

But some items seem to have eternal appeal – and, more often than not, they’re Danish. For such a small country, Denmark has produced a thoroughly disproportionate number of the items on design buffs’ ultimate wish lists, from Arne Jacobsen’s 1958 Egg chair to Poul Henningsen’s PH Artichoke lamp.

Many classic pieces of furniture and lighting have been in continuous production for decades – for example, the Y Chair, also known as the CH4 chair or Wishbone Chair, which was designed

by Hans J Wegner in 1949 and has been selling around the world ever since.

Other pieces are rarer, and can command extraordinary prices from collectors. Five years ago, Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl’s Chieftain chair sold at auction for $547,391; three years later, a one-off dining table by Peder Moos sold for a record price of more than $777,000, more than four times the original auction estimate.

So how did Danish design come to have such a powerful appeal worldwide? How has the country managed to maintain its reputation as the design capital of the world for so long? The most important factor, of course, is the aesthetic. Danish design tends to share the qualities of simplicity and functionality, with unfussy lines, comfortable curves and solid workmanship – the type of qualities that tend to always remain in fashion. Nature and the northern climate are powerful influences too, and materials are usually simple, natural and

Classic Danish design on show in the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen

DANISH DESIGN

comparatively low cost. There’s widespread use of natural wood, leather and linen for example – even plywood is a favourite. The idea is to make good design available to all on the principle of ‘beautiful things that make your life better’.

This philosophy was more compelling given the mood across Europe in the mid-20th century, which is when Danish design came to the fore.

“After the Second World War, there was a demand for craft. Denmark hadn’t been industrialised and we had good craftsmen,” says Christian Holmsted Olesen, head of exhibitions and collections at the Design Museum Denmark. “Industry had produced things only for the war, so it was seen as industry’s fault that we had the war and a feeling of let’s go back to the old days.”

A furniture school was founded at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, attracting such luminaries as Kaare Klint – viewed as the father of Danish furniture design – and Hans J Wegner. This led to a real renewal of Danish craftsmanship, with a focus on pared-down styles, expert handiwork and, above all, function and comfort.

However, all this talent might easily have remained unknown outside Denmark were it not for early interest from the US, sparked to an extent by chance. “In 1949, a lot of American journalists were in Copenhagen, and they started writing about this marvellous Danish craft,” says Olesen. “People in New York contacted Danish cabinet-makers and asked if they could buy the furniture.” This interest was then efficiently exploited through a travelling exhibition titled Scandinavian Design that showcased the region’s products throughout the US and Canada from 1954 to 1957. Other exhibitions followed in Europe, and when the Danish royal couple visited New York in 1960, an Arts of Denmark Exhibition was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts to huge acclaim.

“Denmark was good at telling a story that was democracy, a wealthy society, that everybody was happy, and so on. When they started manufacturing products, the country was seen as having the

same qualities,” says Olesen. Danish Modern was regarded as a deeply democratic movement, with mass production and the use of low-cost materials making good design available to all. And the Danish government did its bit to support the country’s designers, allowing them to invest in manufacturing on an industrial scale – or at least on a larger scale than before.

“Public buildings, libraries and schools bought expensive furniture and invested in design, and that gave the companies the opportunity to develop their production,” says Olesen. “In that sense, the state has supported design – they wanted to give good design to everybody.”

It wasn’t always plain sailing. Danish furniture and lighting did go through a period of comparative unpopularity, particularly as industrial design, as well as more elaborate Italian styles, came to the fore. “The 1970s and ’80s were not good for Danish design because it didn’t have anything to say when the post-modernists started criticising it,” says Olesen.

Younger customers shunned the styles that their parents had enjoyed, and soon once-prized pieces were to be found only in provincial auctions and junk shops. Factories stopped making many classic designs that had been in production for decades.

H owe ve r , s l ow l y bu t s u r e ly, Danish style started to see a resurgence in the 1990s as a new generation of customers came along. In Denmark itself, stores including Klassik and Dansk Mobelkunst opened, offering second-hand mid-century classics at half the price.

In the US, companies such as Knoll, which had in 1969 acquired distribution rights for products from Wegner and other designers, played their part in making mid-century furniture popular once again. In the early ’90s, Knoll opened its New York showroom to the public (until then it was only open to designers and architects) and abandoned its offer of a 40 per cent discount to the trade, once again helping to democratise midcentury modern styles. However, with this increase in popularity came another big problem for

Danish Modern was seen as a democratic movement with mass production and the use of low cost materials

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Danish designers and the owners of those designs.

Cheaper copies of classic designs, often from China and the Far East, started to flood the market – and in many places, still do.

It’s become possible, for example, to snap up a version of Arne Jacobsen’s Egg chair for under $500 (the original would cost $5,000). Similarly, a copy of Wegner’s Y Chair can be bought for under $100, a fraction of the cost of the real thing. This so-called piracy has long been a bugbear of the owners of the original designs. Ten years ago, for example, Danish furniture company Fritz Hansen had a very public falling-out with McDonald’s, which was using reproductions of Arne Jacobsen furniture in its new restaurants. Even though the chain was using originals too – and reportedly paying $ 2 million for them – Hansen pulled out of the deal. “The decision to stop co-operation will cost our company millions in lost sales, but decent corporate governance and ethics will not allow us to accept infringements on our intellectual property rights,” said Fritz Hansen’s CEO, Jacob Holm.

Within Europe, the UK has been the worst offender when it comes to producing copies of classic furniture – but things have recently changed.

Last year, a new copyright law came into effect giving industrial design the same protection as works of art, books or music, lasting for 70 years after the designer’s death. This move means that importers of copied Danish furniture and lighting could soon face the same penalty as the Norwegian restaurant that ordered 100 replicas of Hans J Wegner’s Round Chair two years ago. The chairs were seized by the authorities. And even though the restaurant offered to pay the owners of the design rights, PP Møbler, in return for being allowed to keep them, this request was turned down. The entire shipment was smashed to pieces.

Clearly, it’s in the interests of Denmark’s makers to keep control of their designs, so the emphasis on authenticity is hardly unreasonable. There are some, however, that suggest that Danish design has moved too far away from its origins, and lost some of its own authenticity on the way. Since the 1990s,

much of the nation’s furniture production has gradually shifted to Eastern Europe, in some cases through companies opening their own facilities, but often through outsourcing deals. A good proportion of new ‘Danish’ furniture is produced in Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Meanwhile, the industry is now dominated by a few major players who are making most of the money. Companies with a turnover of more than $15 million accounted for 45 per cent of Danish furniture production and 41 per cent of exports in 1997, for example. By 2005, they were responsible for 78 per cent of production and 65 per cent of exports. It’s these large companies that are bringing the most money into the country – and it’s a significant income, with retail sales amounting to nearly half a billion US dollars during the fourth quarter of last year alone. More than 70 per cent is exported, making it an important earner for the country.

And the cool image of Danish design does a lot for the country’s prosperity in other ways too, boosting everything from tourism to literary sales and enhancing the image of Danish products across the board. “I often say that even though a designed product is not very much a big part of exports from Denmark, it means a lot because it makes Denmark famous,” says Olesen.

“For example, people are selling windmills as being part of this tradition, when in fact they aren’t all that well designed. They’re even selling bacon with the story of Denmark. Denmark has always been good at telling such stories.”

The government is, of course, aware of the country’s reputation for impeccable design – and the financial rewards it brings – and is still doing its bit to keep the country’s design heritage in the public eye.

“In 1997, Denmark implemented a design policy, only the second country in the world to do so (South Korea was the first). This policy has since been renewed several times and the latest development is the creation of Design Society, a foundation now owning the main drivers of Design in Denmark – Index: Design to Improve

A new copyright law came into force giving industrial design the same protection as art or books

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Minimalist Pelican chairs by the Danish designer Finn Juhl

Life, Danish Design Centre and Danish Fashion Institute,” says Index’s CEO Kigge Hvid.

“The government has design and design skills integrated in their education policy. In the new law for Denmark’s public schools, the government wants innovative design-skills to be an integrated part of all subjects.” Index now gives the biggest design award in the world biannually in Copenhagen, arranges exhibitions around the world and runs educational programmes as well as maintaining its own design labs.

“When the organisation was founded, the goal was to brand Denmark through a large-scale, traditional design award – hoping to attract attention, tourists and investments to Denmark,” says Hvid.

“Danish Design has a name for quality, elegance and good taste abroad that raises the coun-

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try’s profile enormously and it has a huge impact on the way Denmark and Danish products are perceived almost everywhere in the world.”

“We established the concept of Design to Improve Life, not only because it was (and still is!) globally relevant but also because in a beautiful way, it could perpetuate the humane and democratic tradition of Danish design.”

Award winning products are often a long way away from the furniture and lighting that established the country’s design reputation in the first place – they range from affordable housing schemes to a low-carbon, water-driven vertical farm and a bicycle ‘helmet’ that’s worn as a collar and incorporates an airbag for safety.

“Today, Danish design is still connected to the historic tradition, and it is still connected to the welfare society, but Danish designers focus a large part of their skills toward designing sustainable solutions to global challenges such as healthcare, climate adoption, green energy and equality,” says Hvid. This focus on sustainability is a very good way to make large-scale industrial production more palatable to consumers, and has been enthusiastically embraced by designers across the board.

The Nobody Chair from Hay, for example, is made entirely from recycled plastic bottles, while Johannes Foersom and Peter Hiort-Lorenzen’s Imprint chair uses an environmentally friendly wood fibre material. Wehlers, meanwhile, makes its coffee tables and the base of its Daybed from a material similar to MDF but made from recycled textiles from laundries. And the recycling happens

at the other end of the product lifecycle too. “We produce furniture with a background in circular economy. All our products are part of an ecosystem. When a product is no longer used, it will be returned to us and will be disposed by our suppliers,” says Wehlers owner and CEO Henrik Holm.

“We guarantee we recycle the parts [and use them in] Wehlers furniture. We hope that in this way we can make a positive contribution to the world we live in. We can’t stop consumption, but we can help make consumption sustainable.”

And this ‘green’ focus is just one selling point for Denmark’s young designers, who are becoming increasingly savvy at marketing.

“Now, the designer’s efficiency lies in a twoway approach, which is at the same time super local and super global,” says Hvid. “Danish designers seamlessly market themselves to a global audience through internet and social media and at the same time at home though personal networks.” It would surely be churlish to suggest that Denmark’s design success owes as much to clever marketing as it does to sheer quality, beauty and functionality. However, the way the country has managed to brand itself as the world leader in design has enabled it to maintain a far higher profile generally than one might otherwise expect.

“Danish Design has a name for quality, elegance and good taste abroad that raises the country’s profile enormously,” says Kvid, “and it has a huge impact on the way Denmark and Danish products are perceived almost everywhere in the world.”

Above: An employee inspects Arne Jacobsen chairs at the Fritz Hansen furniture company in Lynge, Denmark.

Left: Collaboration between Danish and Japanese designers at the Danish Museum of Art and Design

Denmark has managed to brand itself as the world leader in design, enabling it to keep a high profile globally

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GIVING BACK Nancy Kho examines how some of San Francisco’s tech companies are embracing CSR in order to change perceptions and help the city’s most needy

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hether you say that San Francisco in 2017 finds itself in the best of times, or the worst of times, you’re r ight. Average salaries in California’s fourth most populous city continue to climb, real estate values nudge ever skyward, and while job growth slowed in 2016, it’s still expanding nearly more than a percentage point faster than for the rest of the United States.

But for low-income residents, the unemployed, or the marginally housed – and those categories often overlap – the outlook is far less rosy. Anyone who has visited San Francisco lately has seen firsthand the persistent and pernicious problem of homelessness. And it’s not just the estimated 7,000 souls sleeping on the streets who may feel San Francisco has rolled up its welcome mat. When firefighters, nurses, and teachers are squeezed out of the city by rising rents, when only 13 per cent of the city’s population is under the age of 18 because of the financial hardship of raising a family there, and when nearly every week a long-established restaurant or mom-and-pop store shutters its doors, anxiety over the future of San Francisco abounds.

In such turbulent times, it’s human nature to seek a scapegoat. And while there are myriad and complex reasons creating the divide between San Francisco’s haves and have nots, the rapid growth of the tech sector is clearly a factor. An easy target of activists’ ire? The lumbering shuttle buses full of Google, Apple and Facebook employees heading south to Silicon Valley for work each morning and back up to San Francisco each evening, come to pump up the demand side for everything from housing to parking spots to restaurant reservations.

“Visible wealth is pouring into San Francisco, and so much of what tech companies are doing is ubiquitous and visible, like Uber and Airbnb,” says Tiffany Apczynski, vice president of public policy and social impact for Zendesk, a San Francisco provider of customer service software.

“That makes it easier to frustrate community members who don’t feel like they’re a part of

Tech workers are easy targets for San Francisco locals angry at the city’s spiralling cost of living

Zendesk staff serving meals at St Anthony’s homeless centre

it.” Victoria Westbrook, director of programmes and operations at Code Tenderloin, which provides entry-level job training to residents of San Francisco’s downtrodden Tenderloin neighbourhood, characterises the general reaction of the community to the tech influx as: “We want you to put your flag down next to ours, but your flag doesn’t need to be bigger or higher than ours.”

Some San Francisco tech companies, including Zendesk, are working hard to reverse the perceptions of themselves as a separate and privileged class, by undertaking sustained community engagement and corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts that both align with corporate strategy and create empathy between tech and non-tech residents. In so doing, can tech companies solve some of the problems that their rapid growth helped create – and set an example for other industries to follow in the process?

The notion of CSR – which the European Union in 2001 defined as “a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with stakeholders on a voluntary basis” – has been around for decades. Think John Rockefeller and his largesse in funding medical research and public sanitation efforts, or George Eastman of Eastman Kodak funding historically black universities and medical schools in the 20th century. But in the 2000s, the movement to treat CSR less as an afterthought and more as an integrated strategic initiative with measurable bottom-line benefits gained momentum.

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A homeless man begs in The Tenderloin District. There are about 7,000 homeless people living on San Francisco’s streets

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Anthony Singer, communications and PR manager for St Anthony Foundation in the Tenderloin, which serves meals and provides medical care and job training to San Francisco’s poor, says that under the old model, companies often made generous one-time financial donations to non-profits and moved on. “We are very grateful for those, of course,” says Singer. “But corporate partners are now looking for deeper involvement.”

St Anthony’s Tenderloin neighbourhood is the nexus both for the conflict between the two populations, as well as for engagement and innovation. In 2011, San Francisco rolled out a controversial payroll tax exclusion for businesses who would set up shop along gritty and often-intimidating mid-Market Street corridor and adjacent Tenderloin area. The idea was to keep tech companies from moving operations to Silicon Valley, and to revitalise an area of the city plagued by violence and homelessness. The ‘Twitter Tax Break’, as it came to be known, lured companies like Twitter, Zendesk and Yammer to the area, and with it an influx of young tech employees.

Companies taking advantage of the tax break were required to create a Community Benefit Agreement in which they share their plan to improve the neighbourhood, and that had a visible effect on nearby nonprofits like St Anthony. Singer says there are now 157 companies, including Zendesk, who provide 6,000 volunteers each year to help serve meals in the dining room and support St Anthony’s initiatives in areas like health care, emergency winter shelters, tech training, and addiction services.

“Zendesk is hugely supportive,” says Singer, while Salesforce.com has every new employee volunteer at St Anthony’s as part of their onboarding process,

and Dolby Laboratories has organised St Anthony’s computer network and underwrites the foundation’s annual back-to-school event.

“We see tech employees at their best,” says Singer. “They’re interested both in understanding the systemic problems, and fixing the problem that’s right in front of them at the time.”

For tech companies who have made a strategic and long-term CSR commitment in San Francisco, the benefits are profound and multi-faceted.

Zendesk employees are encouraged to get out into the community from their first day on the job. Teams of Zendesk volunteers fan out regularly to St Anthony’s, but also to the food kitchen at Glide Memorial Church, to the Bay Area Video Coalition, and to a long list of other nonprofits. Apczynski says, “Our latest partnership is with Cycling Without Age,” an innovative programme that uses specially designed rickshaw-style bikes so volunteers can take seniors for spin through their community, addressing the physical isolation from which seniors in the Tenderloin too often suffer.

Apczynski sees an active CSR programme as a benefit that helps attract and retain its largely millennial workforce, critical at a time when the tech industry is perpetually short of qualified applicants.

So too does John Leonard, senior programme manager in charge of CSR for Optimizely, which provides customer optimisation software in its downtown San Francisco location. The company has a wide range of volunteer activities available for its employees, from working in St Anthony’s kitchen, to adopting a nearby apartment building where Optimizely staff deliver Meals On Wheels each day, to an annual Impact Week during which every employee worldwide gets out into the community to help.

Leonard says: “Millennials grew up doing community service in high school, so it’s become something they expect to continue to do.” He adds that a recent engineering hire said he had several job offers but chose Optimizely precisely because they give so much back to the community.

There can also be tangible benefits around customer service and product design. Leonard says, “We are focused on empathy for customer problems, and this helps.” As part of its CSR effort, Optimizely donates its software to nonprofits.

“They tend to be less tech savvy and have smaller marketing and IT staffs, so the lessons we learn from these nonprofits help us make our products better for all of our customers.”

Apczynski believes that corporate volunteering can work well as a quasi-professional development opportunity. “Putting people in these volunteer situations can make them more patient, more curious, and better problem solvers,” she says.

GIVING BACK

Without taking away from the positive impact of CSR, there remains a stubborn issue without an easy solution: how tech companies can create sustainable job opportunities that go beyond even CSR as a means of creating tangible economic change for those outside the tech bubble. “We know that getting a job that pays enough to sustain your family is the biggest predictor for successfully reducing recidivism and homelessness and preventing relapses,” says Westbrook.

Leonard says: “In the short term, we have some pretty robust diversity and inclusion efforts. But there are also longer-term issues. We bring local high school students to our office and teach coding via Build.org, which provides entrepreneurship

Tech companies need to create job opportunities that go beyond traditional CSR projects

Optimizely HQ at the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District

training to at-risk kids. It’s a long-tail intervention; we see it as building the pipeline for people who might apply here in five to 10 years.”

Westbrook points out that her constituents, who may be homeless, ex-felons, in recovery, or suffering from obstacles like PTSD, face especially high barriers to employment. “Our people aren’t stupid. They have good work ethic, but they’ve made poor choices at some point,” says Westbrook, who has herself been in federal prison. “The front door into a job isn’t going to work for them, but if you can create an alternate employment pipeline, like apprenticeships, there’s a whole population here to tap.”

Code Tenderloin works with volunteers from corporate partners like GitHub and LinkedIn to help members craft elevator pitches, perform mock interviews, and workshop resumes. “It does so much to break down the barriers and get rid of this us versus them attitude, on both sides,” says Westbrook. She says that face-to-face networking with their tech industry counterparts has enabled Code Tenderloin participants to land entry-level jobs at Microsoft and Dolby, and one to

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“All you have to do is open the door and if you are employing the right people, they’ll embrace it”

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secure a LinkedIn engineering apprenticeship that eventually led to a job offer.

Zendesk is also trying to tackle the shorter-term employment question. “We created a Zendesk curriculum that is an introduction for folks to use an online ticking system, which can help people get started in customer service,” says Apczynski. “It needs tweaks – in the first cohort only about a third of participants got hired.” But it’s a laudable approach to achieve more stability and opportunity for San Francisco’s workforce over the long haul.

For companies wondering where to start with CSR, Singer says it’s as easy as picking up a phone and contacting a nearby nonprofit. “We’re good at meeting companies where they are,” he says, whether for an introductory visit by a small group of employee volunteers, or as part of a more fully configured CSR program. “Every one of those companies we work with now took the crucial first step. It was what they did from that point forward that made the difference.”

Taking the time to listen first is important. When they first moved to the mid-Market corridor, says Apczynski, Zendesk assumed that they could be helpful by providing tech support and training to its neighbours. “But we first talked to community stakeholders in the neighbourhood, and we let the nonprofits tell us what they needed.” That’s how they learned that the Tenderloin Technology Lab was already doing some of the vocational training Zendesk had envisioned providing, and have added their support to that existing programme rather than starting something new.

Active listening continues as a crucial responsibility. As Zendesk’s relationship with local nonprofits deepened, so did the level of trust. “As the nonprofits get to know us and know what we can do, their asks become more sophisticated,” Apczynski says. She cites the recent development of Link-SF, the first mobile-optimized website to connects homeless and low-income residents with nearby critical and life-saving resources. It was created entirely by Zendesk engineers who had gained

Optimizely staff have embraced their company’s attempts to support the community in which they operate

an in-depth understanding of the community’s needs through their own volunteer efforts.

Making it easy for employees to participate is also key. Says Leonard: “Eighty per cent of our employees are millennials and they’re supportive, but busy. If they can sign up in three clicks, they’ll do it.” Setting up an online volunteer portal when he joined Optimizely two years ago was one of Leonard’s first priorities. “And it also lets me track participation, which is key. Metrics are important to making a case to senior leadership.”

That leadership buy-in is crucial. “We have a really supportive executive team at Zendesk, and the CSR team feels like a startup within a startup,” says Apczynski. When the CEO serves meals at St. Anthony’s kitchen, as Mikkel Svane of Zendesk did one day in early July, it sends a powerful message to employees about the company’s culture, and sets expectations around how its employees will comport themselves in the community in which they operate.

“All you have to do is open the door and if you’re employing the right people, they’ll embrace the opportunity,” says Apczynski. “CSR may not be the sexiest product, but it has everything to do with culture.”

Northern soul The Principal is big, brash and a whole lot of fun

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LIVING / HOTEL

PRINCIPAL MANCHESTER

WHERE TO STAY

Manchester

PRICE From $700 per night

phcompany.com/ principal/ manchester-hotel/

 MAN

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anchester is one of those cities that has everything – from spectacular architecture and a worldclass music scene to friendly locals, great food and thriving nightlife; it’s hard to fault the place (apart from the weather, of course). Manchester was a relatively small market town until the Industrial Revolution, when it became the engine room of the world. Reminders of that legacy are everywhere: from the converted warehouses of the Northern Quarter to the revitalised Salford Quays.

There is a buzz about Manchester, an air of possibility that drives the city forward; a swagger that sets the place apart from anywhere else in the UK. Ask a Mancunian and they will tell you they are the best at music, at football and at fashion, and all three are well catered for

There is a swagger about Manchester that sets the city apart from anywhere else in the UK

throughout the city. From the state-ofthe-art football stadia, to the countless live music venues to a thriving fashion and arts scene, this is a city very much in the ascendence.

The city’s history can also be seen at Principal, located in the centre of Manchester in a Victorian-era office building. The hotel manages to combine size with charm, and a real sense of fun.

Take The Refuge, a huge space that features a restaurant (Volta), a bar, a glass-enclosed Winter Garden, work stations, seating areas and a Den with table football and billiards tables.

The rooms are spacious, elegantly simple and feature high ceilings and large windows, which ensure a lot of light, even on the murkiest of Manchester days. Principal is a lot like Manchester: confident, fun and worth a repeat visit.

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FROM THE CONCIERGE

SEE

Museum of Science and Industry One of the UK’s most impressive museums, this is an ode to Manchester’s place as the engine of the world during the Industrial Revolution. The museum features parts from the world’s first commercially available computer, working steam mill engines and the oldest surviving train station.

EAT

Street Food Manchester has embraced the foodie revolution with aplomb and there are plenty of street food venues on offer.

Altrincham Market House is superb, as is the GRUB food fair at Mayfield. And not forgetting the global food stalls at Piccadilly Gardens.

DO

Watch a match The football seasons starts again this month and both Manchester clubs will be hoping to push for the title this year. Tickets are available online for both City and United, although you’ll have to wait until December for the first Manchester derby.

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Eames Chair A mid-century classic that has endured the test of time

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The armrests are connected to shock mounts that are connected to the backrest by glue, allowing the backrest to flex.

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Unlike most chair cushions at the time, the Eames cushions were sewn with a zipper around the outer edge. This means the chair’s lines are clean, further enhancing its design.

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Charles and Ray were revolutionary in their use of wood – they blended laminated plywood, something no one else was doing at the time. This allowed them to create the curves the chair is renowned for.

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classic piece of furniture design, the Eames Lounge Chair and ottoman was designed by Charles and Ray Eames for the Herman Miller Furniture Company in the 1950s. Released in 1956, after years of design work, the chairs were an instant hit, and their design has been copied by other furniture companies for the past 60 years. That’s not surprising: the chairs are bonafide design icons (they are on permanent display at MoMa in New York) and are as stylish now as they were in the 1950s. A new Eames set will cost you more than $6,000 today (it sold for $310 when it was launched). Why has the chair proved so iconic? It looks beautiful, of course, but it also marries form with function: it just works. It’s comfortable yet sturdy, flexible yet solid, and it lasts a lifetime. It was also a signifier – have one of these in your home and visitors would know you had some money (and taste). It ushered in an era of interior design and furniture as a design piece among the suburban classes. Still much copied, never bettered, this is a furniture icon.

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What to pack ...for autumn weather in Zurich and beyond

Average temp

15°c

London Paris Sydney Munich

ALSO WEAR IN...

17°C 16°C 16°C 16°C

AUGUST

ZURICH

Chance of rain: 55%

WHAT TO SEE

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SWISS NATIONAL MUSEUM Switzerland’s best museum, this was built in 1898 and features displays on Swiss furniture, weaponry, arts and crafts, all housed in a beautiful castle by the banks of the Limmat river. The exhibits span from 2,000 years ago all the way to the 20th century and focus on all aspects

of Swiss heritage, from gothic art, sculptures, carved altars and furniture to a diorama of the Battle of Murten (where a Swiss army defeated the Duke of Burgundy in 1476). The building is located between the bucolic Platzspitz Park and Hauptbahnhof Station – an ideal location for day-trippers.

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ACCESSORIES

1 2

Burberry pebble grain leather backpack $1,064 mrporter.com

Coach Brown striped leather wallet $252 harveynichols.com

3

4

Gucci Le MarchĂŠ des Merveilles leather watch $751 matchesfashion.com

81 1. Lanvin slim-fit cotton-gabardine biker trousers $543, mrporter.com 2. Givenchy real eyes-embroidered cotton parka $2,732, matchesfashion.com 3. McQ Alexander McQueen white swallow-embroidered cotton shirt $336, harveynichols.com 4. Valentino men’s rockrunner camustars leather trainer sneaker $895, neimanmarcus.com

LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for autumn weather in Auckland and beyond

Average temp

13°c

Melbourne Cape Town Buenos Aires Vancouver

ALSO WEAR IN...

15°C 14°C 14°C 15°C

AUGUST

AUCKLAND

Chance of rain: 50%

WHAT TO SEE

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GOAT ISLAND MARINE RESERVE Established as New Zealand’s first marine reserve in 1975, this 547-hectare area is a stunning reminder of what the world’s coastlines would have looked like before human influence. The waters here are filled with fish: everything from stripy parore to snapper

surround anyone who wades into the sea. The coast here was the landing place of one of the ancestral canoes where the Maori landed. Visitors can go diving off Goat Island, a few hundred metres offshore, or snorkel from the beach. The perfect place for a day-trip from Auckland at any time of the year.

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1. Preen by Thornton Bregazzi janis ruffled-neck cotton trench coat $1,410, matchesfashion.com 2. Bella Freud sparkle 1970 metallic knitted sweater $401, net-a-porter.com 3. Rag & Bone morton sunset satin bomber jacket $724, harveynichols.com 4. Donald J Pliner celest ruching metallic sneaker, gray $168, neimanmarcus.com 5. Suzanna pointed-toe style $935, eu.christianlouboutin.com

ACCESSORIES 2

1

Valentino rockstudembellished small leather clutch $2,298 matchesfashion.com

3

Vivienne Westwood Bloomsbury silver tone watch $355 harveynichols.com

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5

Dolce & Gabbana Cat-eye acetate and goldtone mirrored sunglasses $751 net-a-porter.com

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Full blend

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hink of a fine Scotch whisky.

Chances are you’ll imagine a robust single malt from a distillery with an evocative, romantic sounding name: Glenlivet, Aberlour, Lagavulin, Cragganmore. All too often, we overlook blended whiskies in the misguided belief that they are somehow inferior to their purebred cousins. But we do so at our peril, according to Colin Scott.

Scott might be biased. He’s been master blender at Chivas Brothers for the best part of 30 years. In that time he has shaped and honed the trademark flavours of Chivas brands across the range. Now as custodian master blender, his passion for the fine art of blending is every bit as full-bodied as the whiskies he tastes every day.

“The Chivas style is about a smooth, rich balance of flavours,” he says. “It’s a bit like a tune from an orchestra. It’s all in harmony. And that is the signature style of Chivas Regal – whether it’s a 12, 18 or 25 year old, they’re all smooth, rich and harmonious.”

You could say Scott has whisky running through his veins. He was born and raised on the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, where his father worked in a distillery. After travelling south to Edinburgh to work as an accountant, the lure of whisky proved too much for the young man. He eventually became involved in quality control for whisky companies, which led him to Chivas Brothers and the wonderful world of blended whisky.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND

James Brennan meets a master blender and discovers why blended scotch is gaining in popularity around the world

 EDI

Blends account for more than 90 per cent of all Scotch whisky sales by volume. Their popularity is on the rise in emerging markets such as India, China, the Middle East and Latin America. In 2016, exports of blended Scotch reached $3.5 billion, or 69 per cent of the market in terms of value. While the EU and the US remain the largest markets value-wise, Asia is the second largest region in terms of volume. Mature whisky markets are big on single malts, but for burgeoning markets blends are all the rage.

Last year, Scotch whisky was exported to some 182 countries. So when it comes to Chivas Brothers’ whiskies, it’s Scott’s job to make sure both the flavour and quality are unchanging, from the US to the UAE. “We have the responsibility of safeguarding the integrity of all our Scotch whiskies,” he says. “We ensure the quality and taste experience is consistent, day after day, year after year.

The Chivas Regal 18 you drink today will be the same as the Chivas Regal 18 you drink tomorrow, no matter where you are in the world.”

So what is the difference between a whisky blend and a single malt? Whisky expert and editor of scotchwhisky.com Becky Paskin explains: “There are five different classifications of Scotch whisky: single malt, blended malt, single grain, blended grain, and blended Scotch.

A single malt is the product of just one distillery, while a blended malt is a ‘vatting’ of whiskies from several distilleries. The same goes for single

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Edinburgh, a city of whisky lovers

“A blended Scotch is a vatting of malt whisky and grain whisky, usually from several different distilleries”

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grain and blended grain – the word single denotes the whisky is from one single distillery. A blended Scotch is a vatting of malt whisky and grain whisky, usually from several different distilleries.”

“Malt whisky can exhibit a wide range of flavours, from nutty and malty to fruity and grassy. Grain whisky also has its own distillery character, but is a much lighter, smoother and softer style than malt, and when matured in American oak casks can exhibit notes of vanilla ice cream, fudge and cooked fruit,” she says.

“When malt and grain whiskies are combined together in a blend, the overall impact is a Scotch whisky that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The inclusion of grain whisky gives a blend a soft sweetness that sets it apart from single malt.”

Take an 18-year-old Chivas Regal as an example. At its heart is a fruity, nutty single malt from the Strathisla distillery in Speyside – the oldest distillery in the Scottish Highlands. But it might also contain smoky, peaty spirit from Islay, as well as a light, clean grain whisky from Strathclyde. What they all have in common is that they must have aged in an oak barrel in Scotland for at least 18 years.

“Chivas Regal contains a high proportion of malt, making it the perfect alternative for those who love the flavour of single malt,” says Paskin. “Full of dried fruit, vanilla and a touch of spice, it’s a great dram to share with friends.”

She also recommends The Double Single, a 19-year-old malt blend of two whiskies from the Glen Elgin and Girvan distilleries (“redolent of toffee apples, malitness, sugar-encrusted puff pastry and vanilla ice cream”). And for a special occasion, John Walker & Sons Private

Collection 2016 is a limited-edition blend of over 100 casks that celebrates the complexity of grain whisky (“unctuous, fruity and rich with notes of apples and pears, vanilla fudge and fruit syrup”).

Whisky drinkers would be hard pushed to argue single malt’s superiority over blended whisky after tasting some of the above. But there remains a misplaced snobbishness that often clouds judgement. “There is a general perception among whisky consumers that single malt is somehow ‘better’ than blended Scotch, and sadly it is a misconception generated in part by premiumisation,” says Paskin.

“Ultimately a ‘good’ whisky is determined by the drinker’s enjoyment, regardless of its style, age or country of origin.”

The magic of blends lies in the unique combination of flavours in the taste experience. “There are little nuggets of flavour that you’ll never taste

Colin Scott, Chivas master blender

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again, because they’re coming from distilleries that have been demolished, or are museums, or just not working any more,” Scott says.

The popularity of blended whisky means there’s little chance of Chivas Brothers being demolished any time soon. James and John Chivas began blending in the 1850s in response to a demand for whisky that wasn’t harsh on the palate. They set about creating a trademark smoothness of flavour that is still evident across a range of brands from Chivas Regal to Royal Salute. It has been the responsibility of Master Blenders like Scott to keep that smoothness at the heart of every sip.

“We are guardians of the past, the present and the future. If you look at Chivas 18, the whiskies were put into casks 18-20 years ago. It’s about taking these whiskies from the past to create the present.”

Does the weight of all that history and tradition fall hard on Scott’s shoulders? “People think, Wow, what a responsibility,” he says. “But when you’re working in the blending room with all these flavours, it becomes your world. And because it’s so fascinating, the actual quality comes out of that naturally. Don’t get me wrong, it can be stressful at times, but generally speaking that responsibility is not as frightening as it sounds.”

The modern art of blending may be a highly technical process in a pressurised environment, but Scott never loses sight of the romance and mystery of Scotch whisky. “It’s nature,” he insists. “Scotch whisky is 100 per cent natural. It’s all about alchemy. If you’ve got wild yeast, sugar and water, you’ll make alcohol.”

“And you can only get Scotch whisky from Scotland, which is very important,” he adds. “Whisky is distilled all over the world, in many different countries, but Scotch whisky only comes from Scotland.” We’ll raise a dram to that.

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Minotaurs and Matadors A Pablo Picasso exhibition

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new exhibition in London called Minotaurs and Matadors offers a fascinating look at Pablo Picasso’s bullfighting imagery and how it linked to the work he did in the 1930s.

Spanning the years 1889 to 1971, the exhibition traces Picasso’s fascination with the ancient rituals of the Mediterranean. The work is personal,

almost intimate, and serves as a diary, an accompaniment to where he was in his life at the time. His work during this time, centred around the 1930s, combined the theatrical nature of bullfighting with the myths and legends of the minotaur. The bull has a mythic status in Spain and Picasso tapped into that through his work. As he once said: “If all the ways I have been along were

marked on a map and joined up on a line, it might represent a minotaur.”

Made up of paintings, sculpture, prints, ceramics and a home movie, this exhibition gives a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the 20th century’s most compelling artists.

Gagosian Gallery 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1K 3QD gagosian.com

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Clockwise from opposite: Barque de naïades et faune blessé (1937), Le Matador (1970), Picasso wearing a bull’s head in France in 1949, Torero (1970), La Minotaurmachie VII (1935)

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LIVING / COLUMN

Angel investor

By Jason Calicanis

T

his year I invested $750,000 in a company that makes a robotic cafe called Café X. It eliminates two of the most expensive aspects of Starbucks’ business: real estate and humans.

When the founders e-mailed me a video of the prototype in action at a college in Hong Kong, I wrote back to them: “Is this a joke?”

They said it wasn’t a joke and so I invited them to come to my incubator where we spent three months refining the product and helping them hone their pitch. Then I introduced them to my rich, powerful and, in many cases, compulsive gambling narcissistic friends – who funded the company for millions of dollars.

If we succeed with Café X, we will reduce the price of a latte to $2, make it perfectly every time and reduce your wait time from more than five minutes to under thirty seconds (the computers know where your smartphone is and they make your coffee when you are ninety seconds away. Instead of a Starbucks on every other corner in a city, there will be a Café X machine in the lobby of every third building on the block. Instead of being open 14 hours a day, these robots will serve us 24 hours a day. We will also eliminate millions of jobs in which humans get paid to stand behind a counter and repeat back your seven precious little instructions on how to prepare your morning libation, before pressing one button.

If right now you think I’m a horrible, marauding, free-market monster, you’re only half right – I’m also a humanist who thinks there are better things for our children to do with their time. The quicker we eliminate the low-paying, repetitive and menial jobs, the quicker our species can get to work on bigger issues such as sustainability, and being multi-planetary. The jobpocalypse is coming, which is not just based on my coffee making

robots. It includes the elimination of most white-collar jobs were told were careers, such as lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, pilots, journalists and – wait for it – software engineers. The snake is going to eat its tail.

And when that happens, there’s a good change that it will be every human for themselves. A perfect storm of black swans is coming and I am going to prepare you to not only survive it, but to ride it out on top.

I’m famous for having invested $25,000 in Uber when it was worth around $5 million – it’s now worth $70 billion in the private markets. When I invested, Uber was operating in one city and they only had a couple of Lincoln Town Cars signed up. It wasn’t clear if the business could scale or make money, but I knew the founder was exceptionally driven and that I loved the product.

Uber will be the best investment I ever make. I hit the home run of home runs. And that’s why angel investing is something I believe you should consider if you want to create wealth. It can change your life if you suspend fear and focus on not just what could go wrong with a business, but what could go right. While it’s unlikely you’ll hit a return of five thousand to ten thousand times your investment, it’s very possible that if you operate for a couple of years in Silicon Valley, making fifty or one hundred investments, you will return more money than you put in. Even if you just make back the money you invested, you will be able to hang out with the most driven and creative people in the world, building an exceptional network and learning a ton. All the while, having this amazing lottery-ticket possibility of winning one hundred to ten thousand times your money. While it’s crazy to make each of these bets on an individual basis, it’s even crazier not to make one hundred of them.

“If you operate for two years in Silicon Valley making fifty to one hundred investments, it’s likely you will get more money than you put in”

90 From Angel by Jason Calacanis © 2017.

Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

High Jeweller y C ollection Chaumet est une fĂŞte