Journal

The actress and Goop founder announced today at the Fast Company Innovation Festival that she is launching a book imprint called Goop Press.

Today at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she and her business partner Lisa Gersh are launching a new enterprise: a publishing imprint called Goop Press. It will complement Goop, her weekly lifestyle newsletter that offers readers advice, recipes, travel guides and the opportunity to purchase products that Paltrow and her team have curated.

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Not only is Paltrow unfazed by the media trolling Goop, she believes it’s good for her brand… and perhaps even society.

Trolling Gwyneth Paltrow over some of the more extreme suggestions on Goop has long been something of a sport in the media, but Goop founder Paltrow knows exactly what she’s doing. You might even say she and Goop CEO Lisa Gersh are trolling the media right back—and attracting more and more customers and readers to its website in the process.

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Turns out that making mistakes can be a wonderful thing.

We recently asked entrepreneurs at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, “What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started your career?” and the answers were fascinating. We asked entrepreneurs and disruptors such as Yahoo Style’s Joe Zee, Instagram’s Eva Chen, Birchbox founder Katia Beauchamp, Walker & Company’s Tristan Walker, DonorsChoose.Org’s Charles Best, and Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez, and their answers included taking more risks, enjoying taking their time to discover their passion, and why all the trials you go through launching a business are incredible lessons. Watch this video, and tell us at #FCNY what you wish you knew when you started your career.

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Gwyneth Paltrow has built a business on healthy living—but says “un-Goop” moments (think martinis and cigarettes) are actually pretty Goop.

Flip through the pages of Gwyneth Paltrow’s last cookbook, It’s All Good, and you’ll see image after image of Paltrow looking impossibly slim and beautiful while gathering and preparing an array of healthy meals. She’s famous for her commitment to exercise and is on the verge of launching two organic beauty lines this winter; the front hallway of her Brentwood home has become a staple photo on aspirational design platforms like Pinterest. At times, she has been ridiculed for advocating some unusual personal health practices like cupping and “infrared” uterine steaming (aka vaginal steaming). On the stage of the Fast Company Innovation Festival this afternoon with Goop CEO Lisa Gersh and journalist Katie Couric, Paltrow was poised and stylish in a short, simple, gray dress.

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Whether you’re a celebrity or not, values are key.

When Gwyneth Paltrow hired former Martha Stewart CEO Lisa Gersh to help run her startup Goop, she says she gained not only a partner, but a teacher. “It’s been incredible to learn how to run a business and to have a partner who is also my mentor,” Paltrow told Katie Couric at the Fast Company Innovation Festival today.

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Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s CEO, wants to improve drug discovery with big data and tailor drugs to individuals so they are more effective.

When 23andMe launched its first product—a mail-order test that analyzes DNA from a saliva sample—it was aiming to help people take better control of their health. Now, as the company is beginning to get FDA approvals to tell consumers if they carry genes for particular diseases, 23andMe is also taking a new direction: The company wants to use the same genetic data to make better drugs.

“I really want to prove that we can revolutionize drug discovery, in almost a Moneyball kind of moment,” Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe, told a crowd at Civic Hall at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival. “Having a human database can give us so much of an edge—we can do it so much faster and so much more inexpensively.”

Right now, despite the billions spent to develop drugs, once a drug is approved, relatively little is known about how consumers are actually using medications and how well different people respond to a drug in real life.

“Most medications don’t work effectively for a lot people,” Wojcicki said. “Everyone in the room, I guarantee, has taken a medication and it didn’t work. Or had a severe adverse reaction, or it wasn’t a good experience…That’s exactly what we need to change.”

By following patients as they use a drug and collecting detailed data—or better understanding the genetics behind a particular disease—drugs could be tailored to work better. Prescription bottles might eventually include genetic details on the label.

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Companies that champion social initiatives also improve their employer brand, and ultimately their ability to recruit employees.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer a choice for Indian companies of a certain size: It’s a legal requirement.

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American fathers have been relegated too long to that simplistic role, so this CEO created a way for them to connect with their kids.

Nichole Smaglick has gone through what you might describe as a career pivot.

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PC-like power and slick keyboard and stylus accessories tailor Apple’s big tablet for productivity and art—but it remains very much an iPad.

First, a disclaimer. For the past four years, I’ve used an iPad—equipped with a third-party keyboard and stylus—as my primary computer. I’ve written magazine cover stories, blogged, wrangled spreadsheets, edited photos and videos, marked up PDFs, recorded podcasts, drawn and painted, and pretty much done all the other things I was once most likely to do on a conventional computer. I started back when a fair number of people confidently maintained that iPads were useful only for consumption, not creation, and have never stopped.

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“People have been trying to use Google image search or Pinterest, but they really don’t fit the needs of a serious design conversation.”

Say you want to redesign your office. Type “modern office” into Pinterest or Tumblr, and you’ll see a slew of inspiring spaces, but you won’t find much practical information like product names and manufacturers; maybe if you’re lucky, the images will identify the architecture firm responsible. Kontor, which bills itself as “a visual network for workplace design,” seeks to bridge the gap.

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