For WIRED's Smart List, we ask industry leaders – from Melinda Gates to Richard Branson, Steven Pinker to Jennifer Doudna – to name a person in their field who they think will become a global force in the future. Their nominations, taking in art, science, technology, design, and business, may not be household names today, but might just be the innovators and icons of tomorrow.
Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack selects:Nina Tandon, Co-founder and CEO of EpiBone
Stewart Butterfield's failures have shaped the way we use the internet. When his first attempt at building an online game ran out of steam in 2004, he created Flickr, one of the first photo-sharing sites. In 2012, realising his second online game would never recoup the millions of dollars investors had put into it, Butterfield switched gears and built Slack, a work messaging app that grew out of the chat system his company used while building the game.
"I don't think we imagined the scale that it would reach," Butterfield says. At his first pitch, he told investors that Slack could one day make $100 million (£79m) in revenue, and be worth a billion dollars. It turns out he'd hugely underestimated its potential. In April 2016 - just over two years after Slack's public release - a $200 million funding round saw the company valued at $3.8 billion. In October 2016, annual revenues flew past the $100 million mark.
Five million people log in to Slack every day, with more than one-and-a-half million paid customers. Facebook and Microsoft both launched their own workplace messengers in late 2016, and when the latter unveiled Teams, Slack responded with a full-page ad in The New York Times offering the company some irony-laden tips for getting started. "They're formidable competitors," Butterfield says, but Microsoft already owns a whole suite of communication products including Yammer, Skype and Outlook, and he has a hunch that internal conflicts within Microsoft will reduce its ability to compete. "All those [products] have senior executives associated with them and those executives are very competitive with one another," he says. "If it wants to be successful, it is going to have to be a lot more open to working with competitors than it typically is."
Openness has been high on Butterfield's agenda for a while, as he transforms Slack from a workplace messenger app into a platform that weaves together all the software used during a typical working day. Slack's own app store, launched in December 2015, includes 750 integrations allowing users to access tools such as Google Drive and Salesforce from directly within Slack. At the same time, the company launched an $80 million investment fund which it has used to fund 25 startups, the majority of them building bots enabling everything from serendipitous workplace meetings to AI-assisted hiring.
When Butterfield first came online, back in 1992, the world wide web was in its infancy. "It was a mind-expanding experience for me - I was totally fascinated by it," he says. The first browsers were just tools for reading and writing documents, but they quickly became the portal through which we did absolutely everything. Slack is trying to recreate that formula for the world of work, Butterfield says. "It's really a mad dash against ourselves at this point."
For the 2017 WIRED Smart List, Butterfield nominates Nina Tandon, CEO and co-founder of New York-based EpiBone, the first firm to grow living human bones for skeletal reconstruction.
"With EpiBone, Nina developed technology that allows patients to grow their own living bones for skeletal reconstruction," Butterfield says. "She's a pioneering scientist who's devoted her significant talents and energies towards a solution that radically improves the lives of a million patients every year. Throughout her life, she's demonstrated the deep curiosity and creativity that are hallmarks of the best entrepreneurs. I can't wait to see what she does next. The world will almost certainly be better for it."
Richard Branson, Founder of the Virgin Group selects:Holly Ransom, CEO of Emergent
"Young people will inherit the world that we leave behind and therefore should have a major role in shaping its future. One young person already having a significant impact today, and will go on to do a lot more tomorrow, is Holly Ransom," Branson says. "The CEO of millennial consultancy Emergent has thoroughly impressed me with her knowledge, poise and new ideas. I suspect you'll be hearing from her in the future as more and more female CEOs come to the fore, changing business for good." As co-chair of the United Nations Global Coalition of Young Women Entrepreneurs, 27-year-old Ransom is leading global efforts to break down barriers that prevent women becoming successful entrepreneurs, particularly in the developing world.
Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi Foundation selects:Tim Mamtora, Master engineer of integrated circuit design, Broadcom
Tim is the ASIC project lead in the VideoCore graphics team at Broadcom in Cambridge. He joined as a graduate in 2006, having studied engineering at the University of Cambridge and spent a year at MIT. "He rose through the ranks faster than anyone I've ever met," Upton says. "Under his leadership, the team has pushed the limits of low-cost, low-power, high-performance 3D graphics hardware. Every time I think they've hit the wall they seem to come up with another 20 per cent increase in power efficiency or take another square millimetre of silicon out. This is what we're going to need if VR technologies such as Oculus are going to reach the mass market and go beyond the $1,000 (£820) PC plugged into the wall to a $100 smartphone running on batteries. I managed to persuade Tim to write a chapter on 3D graphics for my recent computer architecture book, and felt pretty smug until I had to upgrade all my chapters to match."
Andrew Blake, director of the Alan Turing Institute selects:Zoubin Ghahramani, Professor of Engineering, Cambridge University
Ghahramani is the leader of the University of Cambridge's machine-learning group and has written more than 250 scientific papers on statistical machine learning and other areas of computer programming. In 2013, he won a $750,000 grant from Google for his work on a project attempting to build an "automatic statistician". "Zoubin is a pioneer in machine learning and AI whose research is making a serious impact: in December 2016, his startup Geometric Intelligence was acquired by Uber as its new AI research arm," Blake says.
Frances Morris, director at Tate Modern selects:Fujiko Nakaya, artist
"Fujiko Nakaya has been making work since the 60s, but she is as radical and relevant as ever and is only now starting to get the international recognition she deserves," Morris says. "As a member of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) alongside artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, she always used the latest technologies to fulfil her creative vision. That vision still feels so contemporary, as if the world has finally caught up with her - whether she's staging live encounters or exploring the links between the man-made and the ecological." In March, Nakaya is bringing her immersive fog sculpture to the banks of the Thames as part of a Tate Modern exhibition.
***Iris Van Herpen, fashion designer selects:***Jólan van der Wiel
"Jólan creates materials that challenge our understanding of 'invisible forces'; he collaborates with nature to do that," van Harpen says. "Where a lot of material design is inspired by nature, Jólan pushes it further. He collaborates with nature and uses his processes to produce his designs. His way of thinking and the process he uses is very pure and alive."
René Redzepi, chef and owner of Noma selects:Dan Giusti, Founder and head chef, Brigaid
"I'm nominating Dan for his work as former chef de cuisine at Noma and his current work with his company Brigaid, which was inspired by the MAD symposium, of which I am the founder," Redzepi says. With Brigaid, Giusti is putting his culinary talents to work transforming the way American schools serve meals to children. Currently running trials in New London, Connecticut, Brigaid partners with local schools to redesign kitchens and puts highly trained chefs in school cafeterias to serve up top-quality school dinners that cost less than $3 a head.
Chris Milk, virtual-reality innovator selects:David Gelb, director
"David is one of the most transformative storytellers working today. In just a few years, he's rocked the worlds of documentary feature film and TV, and he's now making his mark on virtual-reality storytelling," Milk says. "His work has always focused on the human spirit behind the stories he tells, which pushes him beyond the confines of any specific category or medium. We were fortunate to work with David on his first virtual-reality film, The Possible, and I'm looking forward to seeing how David will continue to shape this medium."
Jennifer Doudna, CRISPR and genome-editing researcher, selects:Rachel Haurwitz, CEO, Caribou Biosciences
"Rachel is the 31-year-old leader of Caribou Biosciences - the biotech startup pursuing commercial applications of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology," Doudna says. "Rachel's young-female-scientist-turned-entrepreneur profile is not typical in her field and her success so far is even more unique. Like all disruptive technologies, CRISPR is often both valued and vilified. Rachel's goal is to deliver on the promise of this powerful new tech by adapting it for use in agriculture, industrial biosciences and other fields to positively impact our society."
Astro Teller, CEO of Alphabet's moonshot factory X, selects:Persis Drell, Physicist and provost, Stanford University
"I'd want to have dinner with someone who knows a tonne about some of the areas I know little about, and who is going to help shape the thoughts of many, many future technologists. For both of those reasons, Persis Drell, who is the new provost at Stanford, is very high on my list," Teller says. "Persis has been on the staff at Stanford since 2002 and from 2007 to 2012 was director of its National Accelerator Laboratory. There, she oversaw the development and operation of the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's most powerful X-ray free-electron laser, which accelerated the study of the world at a molecular level."
Gregg Maryniak, co-founder and director of XPRIZE Foundation, selects:Xavier Helgesen, CEO and co-founder, Off Grid Electric
"Africa, India and other currently energy-poor populations are significant carbon dioxide emitters. It is absolutely essential that the world’s energy have-nots gain access to affordable zero-carbon energy options,” Maryniak. “Xavier Helgesen, CEO of Off Grid Electric leads a company that has developed family scale renewable energy systems matched with ultra-efficient appliances that provide essential electricity for lighting, phone charging, refrigeration, radio and television. Using well-designed financing methods that take advantage of progressive cell-phone payments and monitoring, the company is achieving rollout at scale of these systems in West Africa."
***Deray McKesson, Civil-rights activist, selects:***Myles Johnson, journalist
"Myles' incisive critiques, thoughtful analysis and fresh perspective on identity, culture and power push us to imagine new possibilities and challenge us to examine the past and present in ways that bring forth new questions," Mckesson says. "I first read his work through Twitter and have followed him ever since. He conveys complex thoughts simply and tackles topics others may shy away from." Johnson is also the author of children's book Large Fears, about a black gay-identifying child who dreams of visiting Mars.
***Rachel Armstrong, Professor of experimental architecture selects:***Claudia Pasquero, Co-founder, ecoLogicStudio
Claudia Pasquero runs studios at University College London and also the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Barcelona. "She is pioneering bioarchitecture where natural organisms are synthesising new materials, and growing the materials that shape our spaces," Armstrong says. For Expo Milano 2015, Pasquero collaborated with Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, to create an urban algae canopy that responds in real time to weather patterns and visitors' movements. Pasquero is currently curating the Tallinn Architecture Biennale which will take place in September and October 2017, and aims to explore the boundaries between natural and artificial worlds.
***Jimmy Wales, co-founder, Wikipedia selects:***Nighat Dad, founder, Digital Rights Foundation
"Nighat is an activist and lawyer who works to protect online privacy and the right to free expression online for women and minorities," Wales says. "Her current focus is on helping Pakistani women fight online harassment and advocating for better legislation to protect freedom of speech and access to information online. These issues define not just the future of the internet, but participation and human rights at large. The Digital Rights Foundation also just launched a Cyber Harassment Helpline, a free, confidential service to victims of online harassment."
***Bertrand Piccard, pilot, Solar Impulse selects:***Fernando Nilo, founder and CEO, Recycla Chile
With Recycla Chile, Nilo keeps electronic waste out of landfill where, if left to decay, it can leach toxic chemicals into water supplies. "I have been following Fernando Nilo's work since I travelled to Chile in 2012," Piccard says. "By promoting waste management and recycling in a country where it previously did not exist, his vision demonstrates the potential to create new profitable industries that also protect the environment.
Read the full 2017 Smart List, including nominations from Jimmy Wales, Deray McKesson, Joi Ito, Steven Pinker, and Melinda Gates in the new issue of WIRED, out now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
