This article was taken from the March 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
We love pirates at WIRED -- not the Somali buccaneer types, but the freethinking entrepreneurs and creative troublemakers who refuse to accept conventional wisdom. They tend to ask for forgiveness rather than permission -- look at how Uber and Airbnb are scaling despite their regulatory impediments. They take a contrarian approach to business, typically answering Peter Thiel's question, "What valuable company is nobody building?" And they don't let anyone constrain their thinking, whether they're 3D-printing couture dresses or recording albums on to DNA.
This month, we celebrate the rule breakers in all their diversity -- the entrepreneurs growing meat in a lab, turning cars into aircraft, using drones to defy government censorship and using their own bodies to test their medical theories. Some of our stories are about entrepreneurs: Pavel Durov, who created Russia's version of Facebook, broke the rules in a literal way when he refused to bow to Kremlin censorship and had to flee Moscow rather swiftly. Now exiled, he's building a new kind of messaging app called Telegram that he insists is faster and more secure than the ones you are probably using. But we are also celebrating cultural rule breakers whose strength of character we find inspiring -- such as Pussy Riot, brave young musicians who have taken great personal risks to showcase the repression facing free-thinkers in today's Russia.
Sometimes our inspiration for a WIRED story comes unexpectedly.
As I was preparing to leave the TED conference in Vancouver last March, I got pulled into a conversation with a strategy adviser named William Charnock in which Stanley McChrystal's name came up.
I knew McChrystal as the retired US Army general who had helped lead the asymmetric war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan. What I didn't know was that he was now transferring his skills to the business world -- helping executives confront today's battlefield of lean-startup competitors and digital insurgents.
We're currently accepting applications for WIRED 2015 Innovation Fellows -- 12 emerging stars we'll be mentoring and introducing on stage at WIRED2015 in October. This year we're partnering with The Space to give away £100,000 to three additional Creative Fellows to make digital art. Find out more and apply: wired.co.uk/fellows.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
