Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission set new rules for people seeking to use online platforms to raise money for their companies. Soon, some startups could start raising funds not from venture-capital firms or wealthy individuals, but from the general public. Think Kickstarter, the Web site that helps artists raise donations to fund their work, but for businesses. It’s part of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, signed by President Obama in April of 2012, and the goal is to spur economic growth.
In the five years since its launch, the yogurt company Chobani has reached a billion dollars in revenue. In this week’s magazine, Rebecca Mead profiles the founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, and traces his company’s rise from a factory in upstate New York to near ubiquity on supermarket shelves. In this video, Ulukaya recalls his earliest experiences making and eating yogurt with his family in Turkey, and the flavors that have travelled with him.
On a Friday afternoon in September, Vicente Canales’s iPhone began to vibrate with messages almost immediately after a private screening at the Toronto International Film Festival of an Argentine film called “Metegol.” Three film distributors in South Korea wanted to buy the rights from the firm run by Canales, a rumpled Spanish rights agent.
It was a big turnaround for the movie, an animated feature about the table game known as foosball (or, in Argentine Spanish, metegol). Two years earlier, when the film’s producers were pre-selling the rights based on a script and a teaser—a common practice—a Korean group had offered two hundred thousand dollars, far below the five-hundred-thousand-dollar asking price.
“People don’t always realize that pumpkin carving is a business,” says Marc Evan, the co-founder of Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, who carves hundreds of pumpkins every fall with his partner, Chris Soria. Evan and Soria started out etching pumpkins for local bars and clubs in 2008; word spread, and their clients now include big brands like Dos Equis and the New York Botanical Garden.
Evan and Soria, artists by trade, say that it was a challenge to turn their love of pumpkins into a successful business. Early on, they charged a flat rate of fifty dollars a pumpkin, even if they were spending many hours on a single piece. Now they have a small support staff and a pricing scheme that accounts for their time and materials, allowing them to turn a profit: pumpkins now cost between a hundred and fifty and five hundred dollars, depending on the level of detail of the design.
Thirteen years ago, I flew to the state of Madre de Dios, in Peru’s southeastern Amazon jungle, and was mesmerized by the view from my plane’s window: a vast forest canopy stretching to the horizon. The purpose of my visit was to check out the recently created Tambopata National Reserve, a two-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-hectare protected area and surrounding buffer zone, created to preserve one of the Amazon’s most biodiverse zones from gold mining and other destructive practices.
I travelled to Madre de Dios again in September, to see how the conservation efforts had panned out. From the air, the lush vegetation was broken by a giant patchwork of pus-colored toxic holes. A few days later, the Peruvian government released alarming statistics: illegal gold mining has devastated more than forty thousand hectares of Amazon forest in Peru, up from about six thousand hectares in 2000. Tambopata isn’t safe, either: miners are believed to have destroyed more than fifteen hundred hectares inside the protected area and six thousand hectares in the buffer zone—and park officials fear that the extent of the damage could be even greater.
A hundred days from the start of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, none of the marquee sponsors—among them Coca-Cola, Atos, Dow, General Electric, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, and Visa—have stepped forward to aggressively protest Russia’s new anti-gay law.
“There were early indications that they might,” Masha Gessen, one of Russia’s most prominent gay-rights activists, told me. She added, “I think they are waiting for a strong threat from the gay community in the United States to force them to do something.” Four months after Russia passed a controversial law that bans “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships to minors,”—allowing for the criminalization of any talk of sexual orientation or gay rights—that threat has not materialized.
When Twitter, on Thursday, set a price range for its I.P.O. that valued the company at around eleven billion dollars, observers described it as a cautious move. Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih, writing for Reuters, called it “modest.” At Bloomberg, Sarah Frier, Lee Spears, and Leslie Picker wrote that Twitter’s valuation was “as economical as its 140-character tweets.”
Journalists immediately started guessing at Twitter’s motivations. Was the company trying to avoid a debacle like the one Facebook experienced, when its shares plunged right after the I.P.O? Was it starting low and leaving room to boost the range once executives meet with investors on the company’s road show and gauge their interest?
It’s now established that a secretive political group linked to the billionaire conservative activists Charles and David Koch has agreed to pay a record fine for violating California’s laws requiring the disclosure of campaign donations. But much else about these dark-money maneuvers remains shrouded in the mystery that inspired the title “Covert Operations” for the story I wrote about the Koch brothers in 2010.
When the comedian Noré Davis was getting started, he would drive into Westchester County for his day job, in graphic design, and at night he would head to open mics in New York City—as he put it, “Collecting lots and lots of miles on my first car.” He wasn’t getting paid; the draw was having a chance to practice his new material and to see the headliners who took the stage after him. “The best way to learn is to watch,” he says. “There’s no formula, you just have to do it, see where you fall, and make adjustments.”
In the past, a city was said to have “Manhattanized” when it bulldozed old storefronts to make room for dense clusters of commercial skyscrapers: think San Francisco in the nineteen-sixties or Miami in the early aughts. Recently, however, city dwellers have adopted the colloquialism to refer to a different New York City phenomenon.
“How do you Manhattanize a townhouse?” Christabel Gough, a New York resident and the secretary for the Society for the Architecture of the City, asked last year in a speech about Brooklyn’s brownstones. “First, you pay a seven- or eight-figure price to buy it. Then you destroy it—except, of course, for the street front, if it is in an historic district. You expand underneath with new underground levels, which may include a swimming pool, a dog-grooming room, and other such essentials….” The list went on.
