2020-03-01_Fast_Company

Thanks to the perva-

siveness of AI, the pow-

er required for tasks

such as natural lan-

guage comprehension

is pushing conventional

processors to their

limits. Graphcore is a

Bristol, England–based

startup producing an

Intelligence Processing

Unit (IPU) chip that’s

optimized for industrial-

strength machine-

learning jobs. “We’re

focused on helping peo-

ple do things they’ve

been struggling to do

with existing hardware,”

says cofounder and

CEO Nigel Toon.

For instance, one calcu-

lation used for algorith-

mic trading and other

financial applications

runs in 4.5 minutes on

an IPU versus 2 hours

with traditional hard-

ware. In 2019, Dell

began shipping the

first IPU-based servers.

And Microsoft rolled

out an IPU cloud-

computing service—

giving companies on-

demand access to

Graphcore’s technology.

FOR PROCESSING

AI’S TRUE

POTENTIAL

43

Everyone’s an expert

in something—

hypnobirthing, Chi-

nese metaphysics,

you name it. But

making money off

this knowledge can

be a different story.

Online education

platform Teachable

allows subject

experts to offer

video courses to

paying audiences.

The company helps

instructors, who

often already have

sizable social media

and YouTube follow-

ings, set up digital

storefronts for their

videos, while han-

dling payments and

other logistics. “In

the past, creators

could buy their own

domain name and

set up a system to

process payments,”

says founder and

CEO Ankur Nagpal.

“We take care of

that now, so creators

can make a video

and have a course

set up within an

44

hour.” While the

average course

price hovers around

$160, Teachable

lets creators offer

premium add-on

services, such as pri-

vate video calls and

coaching sessions,

for additional fees.

(The company

charges instructors a

monthly fee and

takes a commission

on sales.) Teachable

expanded its offer-

ings last year by

allowing creators to

set up subscription

services, accept

mobile payments,

and list courses in a

new digital market-

place. In 2019,

Teachable’s 20,000

instructors made

$250 million in

aggregate, with 32

of them taking in

more than $1 million.

FOR

GETTING

AN “A” IN

INSTRUCTOR

SUPPORT

MARCH/APRIL 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY MENGXIN LI FASTCOMPANY.COM 83

“We make it as easy as possible to be a

sports fan,” says Howard Mittman, CEO of

Bleacher Report, the Gen Z– and millennial-

friendly sports media brand—78% of its

audience is under 35—owned by WarnerMedia. Sports

in the social media era have become as much about the

off-court soap operas as who scored 35 points last night,

and Bleacher Report continues to adapt, adding cover-

age of sneaker and betting cultures and beefing up its

app to pull in all the feeds a fan needs to get news and

shareable clips. The goal is to build more communities

like the breakout House of Highlights, which grew in

2019 from an Instagram-only NBA-centric account into

a full-fledged brand, with 18 YouTube series, a strong

presence on TikTok (where it has attracted 2.3 million

followers in five months), youth basketball camps, and

a branded content program capable of creating several

Taco Bell posts that were among the most viewed sports

videos on Instagram last year.

45

FOR BEING OBSESSED WITH

SPORTS CULTURE

Bra

tisl

av^

Mi

len

kov

ic^ (

Ble

ac

her

Re

po

rt)

MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES 2020