Fast Company

Fast Company is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History Fast Company was launched in November 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, two former Harvard Business Review editors, and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman. The publication's early competitors included Red Herring, Business 2.0 and The Industry Standard. In 1997, Fast Company created an online social network, the "Company of Friends" which spawned a number of groups that began meeting. At one point the Company of Friends had over 40,000 members in 120 cities, although by 2003 that number had declined to 8,000. In 2000, Zuckerman sold Fast Company to Gruner + Jahr, majority owned by media giant Bertelsmann, for $550 million. Just as the sale was completed, the dot-com bubble burst, leading to significant losses and a decline in circulation. Webber and Taylor left the magazine two years later in 2002, and John A. Byrne, previously a senior writer and former management editor with BusinessWeek, was brought in as the new editor. Under Byrne, the magazine won its first Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious honor in business journalism. But the magazine could not reverse its financial decline in the wake of the dot-com bust. Although the magazine was not specifically about Internet commerce, advertising pages continued to drop until they were one-third the 2000 numbers.