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Antitrust advocates have warned that such opportunistic deals risk widening the gap between the largest players and their smaller competitors
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The coronavirus is disrupting all aspects of our lives. Add one more: The symbiotic relationship between digital advertisers and news sources is suffering a major shock at a time when we desperately need trusted information.
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This story is part of Fast Company‘s first-ever Queer 50 List. Click here to see the full list.
As people seek to isolate themselves during the coronavirus outbreak, many are ordering food online, rather than braving the supermarket. Enter Stephenie Landry, Amazon’s vice president of grocery. The Seattle-based executive, who has worked at Amazon for 16 years, now has the enormous responsibility of overseeing all of Amazon’s grocery delivery services, including Amazon Prime Now and Amazon Fresh.
“We’ve been in the space for a long time,” Landry says. “I worked on a local grocery delivery service a decade ago, but recently we’ve made a large push to make groceries more widely available to customers.” (Though Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime Now are technically different services, functionally both provide customers a way to get groceries delivered same-day from Whole Foods. Prime Now is a separate app that also offers quick delivery of other home goods, as well as food from local grocers in certain areas.)
Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Amazon has hired an additional 175,000 workers and increased order capacity by more than 160% to keep up with increased demand. In a recent blog post, Landry pointed to additional COVID-19 safety measures for workers in response to the scrutiny Amazon has faced after employees at multiple fulfillment centers described a lack of precautions.
According to Landry, food purchasing norms were already shifting; grocery delivery has become increasingly popular over the past couple of years. The coronavirus has accelerated this trend. “If you think back a couple of years ago, people weren’t sure that you would ever buy clothing on the internet; they thought you would have to see it and feel it,” she says. “A lot of the same trends are happening for food right now,” she says, adding that her mission is to change people’s behaviors and expectations around buying food.
Before her transition to overseeing grocery deliveries, the New York native oversaw the super-fast Prime Now delivery service, which lets customers receive orders on certain items within the hour. “[I’ve been at Amazon for] over half the life of the company. . . . I’ve had a love affair with consumables—the products you eat, you use, or you put on your body,” Landry says. Other divisions of the company she has worked on include North American books, baby products, fine jewelry, and hazardous materials.
Landry has been active in promoting the queer community at her company. She is the executive officer of Amazon’s gay, lesbian, trans, and ally affinity group—internally dubbed “Glamazons”—which counts more than 5,000 members and has 100 chapters worldwide. The group helps members connect with each other, and helps organize gatherings at Pride festivals throughout the world.
The group has also changed company culture, researching and writing policies around coming out as transgender in the workplace. “[We were] making sure that a manager has the appropriate tool kit available to them, that employees knew where they could find resources, and that HR was completely up to date on how to deal with it,” she says. “I spend a lot of my time thinking and imagining what kind of world do we want to live in, and how can we move toward that future?”
WATCH: Queer leaders on why Pride is even more important in 2020
The inaugural Fast Company Queer 50 is compiled by Fast Company editors, with input from a number of trusted sources. Lesbians Who Tech & Allies provided a comprehensive list of leaders from the tech community. A panel of expert judges reviewed our top candidates for the list. They provided input and made recommendations on ranking.
The judges are entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban, Landit cofounder and CEO Lisa Skeete Tatum, Cowboy Ventures founder and partner Aileen Lee, and Beth A. Brooke-Marciniak, former global chair, public policy, EY.
The editors also wanted to surface a wide range of LGBTQ women and nonbinary innovators. A call for entries on fastcompany.com led to nearly 1,000 compelling nominations from across industries.
We considered five criteria in compiling this list of leaders, thinkers, and innovators:
- The size and growth prospects of each person’s business or organization
- Their place in the broader business and social conversation
- How cutting-edge, timely, and relevant their contributions are
- Their career trajectory over the past 12 months—and potential for growth
- Their activism and advocacy for the queer community
This list was put together with a strong eye toward inclusion—10% are trans and 44% are people of color, including 30% who are black or Latinx.
Contributors: Kathleen Davis, Lydia Dishman, Yaz Gagne, Julia Herbst, Jessica Klein, Stephanie Mehta, Pavithra Mohan, Gwen Moran, Olivia Powers, Katharine Schwab, Diana Shi, Stephanie Vozza.
WATCH: Queer leaders on why Pride is even more important in 2020
In a moment when some companies are putting diversity and inclusion goals on the back burner, it’s more important than ever to highlight queer trailblazers and advocates.
A mainstream business publication (or any editorial publication, for that …
This story is part of Fast Company‘s first-ever Queer 50 List. Click here to see the full list.
In 2013, Martine Rothblatt made $38 million, making her the highest-paid female CEO in the country at the time. Though Rothblatt told New York magazine that topping the list was like “winning the lottery,” it didn’t quite sit right with her. “I can’t claim that what I have achieved is equivalent to what a woman has achieved,” she said at the time. “For the first half of my life, I was male.”
Rothblatt, the founder and CEO of pharmaceutical company United Therapeutics, transitioned in 1994, at the age of 40. “It was not hard for me to make the transition,” she says of the experience. “Everyone was very kind and understanding. I simply told everyone that I worked with that I was going to transition in a couple weeks, and I’d be Martine instead of Martin.”
At the time, the former space law attorney had launched multiple satellite communications companies—including Sirius Satellite Radio—and was onto her next venture. This one was personal: Rothblatt’s daughter had been diagnosed with a rare disease called pulmonary hypertension, which means the arteries that carry blood between your heart and lungs are constricted. Over time, the heart can give out from the strain of working harder to pump blood into the lungs. There were few treatment options, one of which was a drug that had to be delivered intravenously—and continuously—through a portable pump.
Rothblatt thought there was a better way. And after Sirius had gone public, she was feeling a bit antsy, even mulling retirement. She first started a $3 million research foundation but wanted things to move faster. So she made a career pivot: In 1996, she launched United Therapeutics, with the intent of pursuing a potential treatment that had been shelved by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline because there wasn’t enough demand for the drug. Rothblatt’s goal was to create a pill, to appeal to both pharma bigwigs and patients like her daughter, who yearned for a more frictionless treatment.
Though United Therapeutics went public in 1999, it wasn’t until more than a decade later that Rothblatt finally got FDA approval—after two failed attempts—for a drug that could treat her daughter, called Orenitram. (That’s “Martine Ro” spelled backwards.) It’s a moment she cites as a highlight of her career. In the years since, United Therapeutics has started selling a number of FDA-approved drugs to treat pulmonary hypertension and has grown to boast a market cap of more than $4 billion. “I do consider it a major achievement, especially as a transgender woman, to have led a publicly traded company to a market cap more than 10 times what we went public at,” she says.
Rothblatt says she sees herself as a technologist, someone who “brings new technologies into being.” It’s only fitting, then, that her company’s mission has now expanded to include something that sounds like the stuff of science fiction: cross-species organ transplantation. “I always try to convert a moonshot into an earthshot,” Rothblatt told Forbes in 2018. “The moonshot is to have an unlimited supply of transplantable organs.”
To make that a reality, United Therapeutics is now experimenting with genetically modifying pig organs to transplant into humans. And in recent months, United Therapeutics has been investigating the efficacy of two potential drug treatments to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome, which can be caused by COVID-19. The company has also expanded on a partnership with biotech startup Celularity to conduct a clinical trial testing a new cell therapy on about 80 COVID-19 patients.
As a futurist, Rothblatt believes that sooner rather than later, our world might look more like the future conjured by the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror—one with digital copies of our identities, dubbed “mindclones” in Rothblatt’s 2015 book, Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality. “My vision of the future is that software-based consciousness will gradually be accepted by more and more of humanity as equivalent to brain-based consciousness,” she says. Rothblatt has even offered a window into her vision by creating an AI robot called Bina48, a prototypical mindclone inspired by her wife.
Rothblatt also has another hope for the future—that young people will see her far-reaching career as an inspiration. “In general, males get a lot more encouragement to be successful in business and technology,” she says. “I feel blessed that I can now be a role model to young people that any body can take you anywhere. My mantra is ‘mind is deeper than matter.’”
WATCH: Queer leaders on why Pride is even more important in 2020
