Merit

See which workplaces made this year's list.

GPTW 2023 Best Workplaces tech small:medium GPTW 2023 Best Workplaces tech small:mediumMerit_1

Employees say: 
 
"Merit has given me endless opportunities to try new things and grow as an individual contributor. From the execs down to my manager, I feel that they deeply care about my personal and professional success."

Best Small and Medium Workplaces in Technology

Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work to analyze survey feedback representing nearly 100,000 U.S. employees.

GPTW Bay Area 2023-Merit

Employees say: 
 
"This company has a true 'cross-functional' mindset. Every team at Merit works together better than any other organization I have been with. The respect from the employees to one another is on another level. The executive team here truly respects the employees at every level of the company."

Best Small and Medium Workplaces in the Bay Area

Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work to analyze survey feedback representing nearly half a million U.S. employees.

GPTW Millennial Small & Medium 2023-Merit

100 Best Small and Medium Workplaces for Millennials

These are the best workplaces in the U.S. that employ between 100 and 999 people.

GPTW Medium 2023-Merit

"Our leadership is extremely intentional about building teams of people who embrace the company culture. I have never worked in a place where every person on my team is not only knowledgeable and gifted about their area of expertise, but also highly professional and wonderful to work with as human beings. The company is 100% employee-focused, and shows this in concrete benefits. I love working for Merit."

Best Medium Workplaces

These companies empower employees to bring their whole selves to work, prioritize their well-being, and grow in their careers.

Best Workplaces Bay Area 2021-Merit

Employees say: 
 
“Management is extremely transparent. We're all offered a good amount of shares regardless of our role. If the company does well, we all do well, and I love that. We also sing every Wednesday against the coronavirus!”

These are the best workplaces in the U.S. that employ between 10 and 99 people.

GPTW-Small-21-Merit

Employees say: 
 
"Merit cares so much about its employees and our families. This company has great values, a great working environment, great people and I am proud to say that I am grateful to be a part of this organization."

Best Small Workplaces

The companies on this year's list promote promote growth, transparency, and diversity in the workplace.

Merit_Best Small and Medium Workplaces Bay Area 2020

Employees say: 
 
"Truth is, I'm not sure if I've ever felt like I “work” at Merit. I get to build and the deepen inter-connection between my passions and the company's direction, I can’t imagine a more fulfilling professional path than dedicating myself to Merit." 
Read Great Place to Work review .

Best Workplaces Small Companies-2020-Merit

Employees say: 
 
"Between the balance of leadership and autonomy provided, meaningful challenges, interesting partnerships, and the deep interconnection between my passions and the company's direction, I can’t imagine a more fulfilling professional path than Merit."

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Andrew Behar

One point in the DEI debate everyone can agree on

/2025/03/18/dei-shareholders-investors-diversity-equity-inclusion/

Every day, employers face important questions about compliance, risk, and workplace culture. In this fireside chat, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas will provide executives with an inside look at the administration's current priorities and expectations, and what they mean for today's leaders.

Andrea Lucas, Chair, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
In conversation with: Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media; Co-Chair, Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit

Ensuring Workplace Equity: Inside The EEOC’s Priorities

Conferences

Does DEI promote or prevent meritocracy? After a growing number of companies announced they’d be rolling back their DEI programs, some employees were left wondering if the pre-2025 DEI movement in business was wholehearted or largely performative. How will the private sector navigate external pressures while fostering inclusive and equitable environments for employees and customers? Netflix’s inaugural Vice President of Inclusion Vernā Myers joins Anson Frericks, the author of the recent New York Times opinion essay “Working at Anheuser-Bush, I Saw What Went Wrong With the D.E.I. Movement,” for a thought-provoking and multifaceted conversation about how America got here--and where DEI is headed.  

DEI IN 2025: RETREAT OR REINVENTION?

And welcome. Thank you for being with us today. We're excited to start our 2nd day of conversations and connections. We have lots to dive into today, like multi-generational workforces and how to manage them under one roof and the debate over return to office policies. We'll look at the trend of skills over degrees. We'll talk about integrating AI as your new employee. We'll hear lessons on career building from a Hollywood power player and we'll step into the world of the hit show Severance to see how corporate dystopia is brought to life. It's gonna be so much fun and we're going to get right to it all, but first, a quick reminder about what can be shared and what's off the record. What's said on stage or in our breakout sessions is on the record, including the open Q&A. Feel free to post on social media. And tag us using hashtag fortune workplace summits. What's said over the table during a meal or on breaks is private and off the record unless that's agreed upon by those involved. In just a moment, Fortune's next to lead editor, Ruth Umo, we'll kick off our conversations, but first, our partner McKinsey and Company wants to share some thoughts on getting the most out of tech. Tech has limitless potential, but how do we turn that into value? Unlock the power of AI at scale, reinvent tech delivery, build innovative products, and entirely new businesses. We rewire organizations to get the most out of tech, from strategy and talent to operating model, data and governance, capabilities, and culture. Great tech is essential, but with McKinsey, it's never just tech. Hey, good morning, everyone. Let's start with a big question. Is DEI DOA dead on arrival? Diversity, equity and inclusion in America is at a crossroads. Critics argue DEI initiatives have gone too far, creating new divisions and unfairness. Supporters say DEI strategies are necessary to address workplace inequities and can drive business success. We're gonna dive into both sides of the debate, and we have two great guests to do just that. Anton Ferris is co-founder of Strive Asset Management and a business leader who believes talent and results should take priority over diversity metrics, and Bernie Myers is founder and president of the Vernie Meyers Company, which helps organizations build effective DEI strategies. Please welcome them to the stage. Welcome, welcome, thank you both for joining us. Let's cut straight to the chase. Anson, you have argued that one of the fundamental failures of corporate DEI movement is that no one has ever clearly defined what it was trying to do. Let's do just that to level set. How do you each define DEI? What do you think it is actually trying to accomplish? something you want to take it first here, Renee, ladies first here. Thank you, thank you. So I am now start not saying DEI anymore. I'm saying diversity, equity and inclusion. When I say diversity, I mean talking about a difference and a mix, quite frankly, of culture and identity and experience when I'm talking about inclusion. It's about how do you make all of those differences work on your behalf, right, creating an environment where people of all backgrounds feel included. I often say expected, respected, and also reflected that's that's the idea of inclusion and with equity it's what you need to do the processes and. And the, the kinds of, uh, I would say tools that are necessary in order for that inclusion to actually flourish and for you to get the best out of human talent. Same question for you. Yeah, and I think, I think one of the biggest problems with diversity, equity, inclusion, it's never been well defined. If you ask everybody in this room, they're going to give you a different answer. I think that. Bernay's answer was a very plausible answer for DEI, and I think if you go back in time 5, 10 years ago, I think probably everyone in DEI wanted just to go out and find the best and the brightest. DEI was about finding a diverse group of candidates, trying to make sure they had an equitable opportunity or an equal opportunity to be able to succeed, and then we want to be inclusive of all people and walks and different backgrounds. I think there was a lot of positive in the initial DEI movement. why it's become controversial and I'll define why I think it's become controversial is DEI instead of just providing equal opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds. I think it's about now perceived in a lot of circles as forcing equitable outcomes for people as opposed to equal opportunity. So based off of your race, sex, gender, etc. the diversity piece has been about a lot of quota systems in certain. Companies we're going to hire people based on their race, sex, gender. That's become very controversial. The equitable piece is not about sort of equal opportunities, but making sure that everybody gets promoted in an equal way or an equitable way based on race, sex, gender, and then even the inclusive pieces, I think, become very challenging because the inclusive piece is very difficult to define and I actually think stifled a lot of open debate and free speech and dialogue. So I want to thank you for Having this conversation because I think it's incredibly important, but that's how I think about DEI and think about the two different definitions of what it was and I think what it's become. Well, Renee, let me turn to you then. What is your response to critics who argue that DEI, to his points, often rewards identity over performance and risks sidelining the most qualified candidate, um, in the name of representation? I'm gonna say poppycock. Right, because the whole point of DEI is to allow for merits, right? And it is much older than 5 years ago or 10 years ago. We've been doing the work of DEI since the civil rights movement. In fact, that's the birth of diversity, equity inclusion, and the idea is that it is hard to get to merit when there are obstacles, unfair. Obstacles in the way and so there is no MEI without DEI. In fact, it is impossible and and and what is so upsetting for me and I feel like it's, I would say morally unjust and bankrupt to suggest that we could just move forward as if we had somehow managed to level the playing field. You cannot get. To equality without recognizing inequality, it is impossible to do that and in no other business setting would we have an objective, not measure it, not looking at outcomes and how well the actual operation is either delivering on equality or not. And so we've got plenty of data that would suggest that it's not equal. I mean, if I look at women right now in the C-suite. We've got, uh, I, I actually brought the numbers because I am always not, I'm not always on numbers, but I know that there's 28% now women in uh the C-suite and that's up. It was 17% in 2017. So the work we did to get women to be recognized for their merit is working. In fact, I think this backlash against the EI is because we're winning, is because we are leveling the playing field and not because by identity. But by allowing people to actually share and exhibit what they're capable of, I will also say that if we look at women of color in the suite, C-suite, it's much, much lower. So let me jump in here because I do want to hear from you, Anton. Yeah, thank you. Uh, and, and I love that this is a spirited debate because Anne Sandy, you wrote, uh, a New York Times op ed, um, and you pointed to Anheuser-Busch, where you worked for some time as a cautionary tale of DI gone wrong, but was the real failure DI itself, or was it the clumsy way that DI was executed? Why is it a failing of DI overall and not just how they leveraged that business strategy potentially in a in a way that was erroneous. I think that DI there was a failure in terms of definitely how it's been implemented in companies, and I think what I think about sort of a company and why does a company exist, you have a clear mission statement that most companies have, you know, if you're a beer company, you were supposed to, our mission as a company was to create a future with more cheers. That was the mission of the company as a as a beer company, perfectly good mission. There's lots of other missions as well. Coinbase is doing crypto. Indeed is, I don't know, empowering people and finding jobs, whatever it is. Those missions are great. Then I have a view that we should find people and attract people that's going to help the company fulfill that mission. And if you're, you know, in the business of fighting fires, you want to have firefighters that are brave and resilient and all these things. If you were a beer company and the way that InBev worked and Anheuser-Busch and 3G, it was a very hard-nosed finance kind of driven company. And if you're a healthcare company, you probably have different people for that, and you should have different sort of characteristics and adjectives that you can describe to recruit people, and I think that each company needs to define those own adjectives to create. the sort of workplace they went in, but every company, I think before defining what those values were of who they wanted to recruit, they first looked at it through a DI lens, and I think that was problematic in saying that before we find people that are brave or empathetic or compassionate or hardworking or whatever adjective you want to describe for that company, first you have to look through this lens of, well, what's people's race or sex or gender or others, and I think you know there's a why is it you used the word before. Why can it all happen at the same time? This is just my experience working at Anheuser-Busch and then also running Strive Asset Management where we're investors in hundreds of different companies across the S&P 500. It just didn't. It probably can, but I think most people, they look through sort of the lens. Wells Fargo is a good example of a company that said in 2020 that we're going to have to interview 50% of all candidates have to be minority candidates for any job that's over $100,000 and then they were actually accused of literally encouraging minority candidates to apply for jobs after they'd already been filled just so they could check a box. And I think that's sort of the problem of like a lot of people just implemented DEI policies poorly and wrongly. And they became, I think, frustrating for, I think, a lot of minority candidates. They were supposed to help. And then also conversely became very frustrating, I think for non-minority candidates or even say candidates of background that were Asian or Indian or others that might have been passed over for a job because they weren't called the check the box right minority. Let's dig into it really quickly, and I think you might actually be about to touch. On this because you mentioned DI quotas, hiring quotas, and we saw a number of companies, uh, that instated the certainly post George Floyd and so if, if, if the argument is that DI initiatives result in these diversity quotas, Verne, how is that not trade in one form of exclusion for another? Let's, let's, let's get the language right. There's no such thing as quotas. Quotas are illegal. They've been illegal for a very long time. Kenji Yoshino last night yesterday explained to us it's not about quotas. That's another example of a disinformation campaign. It was about goals. And every company, if you want to achieve a change or cultural transformation, you have to have goals. How else are you knowing whether you are making a difference with what you're implementing, right? So people said unless we pay attention to this problem, the problem being the underrepresentation of groups of people over a long period of time due to exclusion, both intentional and Unintentional. This work does not get done unless you pay attention. It's attention and intention. People often think, well, just let it go. It'll just happen. It never just happens. I mean, you know, people will quote that like the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you, MLK, my love. It doesn't bend by itself. You have to bend it. I'm a, I, I came into the legal profession. I was the first black person in my law firm, the only black lawyer, I should say, in my law firm. When I went back to my Harvard Law School, um, women in Harvard Law School, I learned that in 19. 53 when they finally let in women, they had no toilets for no bathrooms for the women. So you can say they had gender diversity maybe, but you cannot say they had gender inclusion and if you arrive in an environment and it's not set up for you, it's not conducive for you. It's insisting that you emulate the person or the group that has been there. And who have dominated for a period of time and if you don't, you can't advance because somehow we have this idea of fit and that's about our own comfort and it's a lot about our prejudice and also our biases and that is what DEI is hoping to do to create an environment where everyone can succeed versus being. Held back because of an identity, it's just the opposite of what is being perpetuated these days about the disadvantaging effects of DEI. Who has been disadvantaged? We have no data that would suggest that white men are being disadvantaged by the work of DEI. Well, let me ask you that, do you think that white men have been disadvantaged by the work of DEI? No, but I think definitely like Asians have 100%. If you take a look at Harvard versus Fair admissions, it was all the Asian students that had to essentially have twice the SAT scores, twice the whatever the scoring rubric was that that that black students have to have to get into Harvard. So I think yes, there's definitely been, and if you look at med school admissions, you look at other admissions, definitely certain races have been excluded, and I think We have to get back to the MLK's dream is that we have to get back to finding a place where we don't discriminate based off of race, sex, gender. Like any type of even reverse discrimination is discrimination. And so if we're discriminating against Asian people for advantaging black people, that's discrimination. I think we have to have an open and honest dialogue and conversation about that, and the data shows that the people are being discriminated. No, I don't think which data? Well, if you look at any admissions data for Harvard University, that's why affirmative action was overturned. And even if you go back like, you know, you're right, the Civil Rights Act that started in 1964. Hubert Humphries, who was the floor leader at the time, said this ever leads the quota systems, I'll eat my hat. Affirmative action, you're lower by background. California versus Bakke essentially said that you cannot have quota systems. When the California system literally set aside a quota of 16 positions for minority students in med school, they said that's illegal, but you can do affirmative action to take into race considerations. That was upheld in Michigan in the Supreme Court case in 2003. But even Sandra Day O'Connor at that time said at some point the affirmative action has to go away. At some point we can't just keep giving. Certain people an advantage based off race, sex, color, gender, and Sandra Day O'Connor said within 25 years. And so maybe it was 5 years earlier than she originally anticipated when Harvard versus Fair Students for admission overturned affirmative action, but it went away and at some point we have to get to the point where we're not looking at people based on race, sex, gender, sexual orientation. We're looking at them as individuals and say when do you want to do that? When do you want to do it? Do you want to do it now when we still have deep Equality and disparities not just in outcomes but just how people are being treated and in fact I feel like what we're doing what we're hearing is a way of trying to divide and distract and keep people from being connected and being unified across their differences and their commonalities and so I'm saying to you, when do we just stop doing it and. When do we start to acknowledge that there is still an enormous amount of work to do? We've been at this DEI work for a long time. It's not time to stop it. It's time to continue to evolve it. So let's talk about that evolution because we are running up on time. If we strip away all of the buzzwords, is there a version of diversity, equity and inclusion that both skeptics and supporters could agree on? What does that look like? And let's try and make it quick. OK, I think that what it looks like is, uh, I'm going with the, I'm going with the R's. I think we have to actually reassess. We need to redefine, we need to reimagine, and we need to re-engage. We need to redefine what we mean because obviously folks have a different opinion about what DEI means and what it means to have equality, right? And I do think we need to really try to do an assessment. What are we doing that is working and what are we doing that might be holding people back or making certain people feel excluded and then how do we reimagine a new idea, a new possibility, and then how do we re-engage, which is a lot of listening and a lot of caring? Yeah, 20 seconds for you. Yeah, I think it's the most exciting time if I was in the HR world because we don't have to do DEI specifically anymore and every company essentially adopted DEI. Yes, they had a different little flavor of it, but it was very similar to DI. Every company should have their own program to hire people and as long as we have a baseline, we don't, we don't discriminate based on race, sex, gender, then come here with your own program. It could be MEI, it could be whatever program you want to come out with. But talk about what's unique about your company, the people you want to attract, the values that they have, and talk about that and extol that being unique to your company. I think that will create an amazing workforce. We'll create amazing HR, uh, business partners in this room where you guys can really define what is unique about your company and who's gonna thrive there. Well, we'll end here. Thank you both for an illuminating conversation. Although you have cons shots and viewpoints, clearly, uh, your insights underscore the importance of continued dialogue. So thank you, thank you. So that's That's this way. OK, thank you so much.

Cameron Diaz, Actor; Author; Co-founder, Avaline Katherine Power, Founder and Chairperson, MERIT, Versed; Co-founder, Avaline Moderator: Emma Hinchliffe, Senior Writer, Fortune; Co-chair, Fortune MPW Summit 

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: The Multi-Hyphenates

Cameron Diaz, Actor; Author; Co-founder, Avaline Katherine Power, Founder and Chairperson, MERIT, Versed; Co-founder, Avaline, Emma Hinchliffe, Senior Writer, Fortune; Co-chair, Fortune MPW Summit 

Hello. Hello. Hi, everybody in the ladies. Yeah. Hi, Cameron Catherine. Thank you so much for being here for having us. Yeah. Thanks for having us. And I think everyone's really excited to see you and we're here to talk about your wine brand, Aveline, which I hope everyone is drinking. What a great group of women. No, totally. So Cameron, you must have had so many opportunities over your career to start a brand, whatever may have crossed your path. So why did you decide to do one Catherine power, period? Um, no, I, you know, there's obviously in the world of celebrity. Um, a lot of people come to you, they want you to sign on to whether it's a, you know, something that they're gonna pay you for something they want you to invest in. Um, there's a lot of different opportunities. I myself have never been sort of a product person. Um, my products have always been movies so I sold my films really well, you know, um, I pounded the pavement. I went out there, I pushed my, you know, push the product. Um, but I didn't really, uh, ever take on sort of a product because I didn't want to put my name on something and, um, it just wasn't my, it wasn't my back, you know what I'm saying? Um, but Catherine and I are good friends. We were, you know, we spend a lot of time together. We would always kind of find each other at, uh, friend gatherings, um, where we would sit in the corner and have a glass of wine and talk about food and houses and, you know, be a little antisocial, be a little antisocial. And um you know, one day we just sort of had that moment where we were just like, what is in the bottle? Like we asked this question about everything else that we consume. Um But we both realized we had never thought to ask about the wine because it kind of felt like one of those really romantic notions that wine was just like fermented grapes, you know, how fun that is and like squishy and warm it felt. And then we were like, but is it because I feel like every time I have like a glass and a half, you know, so like what's happening? Um So we turned the bottle around and realized that it was, you know, there was no label, there was no ingredient list and we thought to ourselves. Hm. That's very interesting. We wouldn't consume something of anything else if we didn't know what was inside of it. Like literally the ingredients and we said, is it just fermented grapes? And that led us on to a path of learning about how, what the wine making process was and how there could be over 70 ingredients added with no, you know, transparency and all the different things that those ingredients were and could become and um that we would never consume otherwise, you know, we just wouldn't, if we saw any of those on a label, we would just take our hands off of the, the, the product and never consume it. Um So we decided that we were gonna make a wine that we could drink and feel good about and put give to, to other wine lovers. Um and give, you know, really be the brand that um was leading that transparency and that people could, you know, depend on to have the highest quality so amazing, you know, Catherine. Why was it that the wine industry had not been of these conversations around ingredient, transparency, organic products, non toxic products. Those conversations have gone pretty mainstream. How had the wine industry avoided it? And has anything changed since you launched the brand? Yeah, it's a very old fashioned industry. Um And you know, it's not a product that's governed by the FDA. It's governed by something called the T TB. So they don't have the same kind of oversight as any food that we would eat or other even beverages that we would consume that are non alcoholic. Um So it used to be, you know, you would go into a wine store and if, if a wine was organic, it would be kind of pushed off to the side and it would, it would be kind of like a dirty word, right? Even though many, you know, producers and growers across Europe are farming without pesticides, making wine in this really beautiful way without a lot of additives. Um, and it was really a personal journey that we set out to, you know, find cleaner wine. And when we couldn't find it in Los Angeles, which is like the mecca of wellness, we thought this is a problem. So we would go to the restaurants, we would go to the stores and we would say, do you have any clean wine? Do you have any organic wine? Do you have any natural wine? And people would roll their eyes at us. They were so snobby and or they would say it's all organic, just grapes, you know, but we knew from doing the research that as Cameron said, you can add over 73 ingredients throughout the process. Many of which uh you know, these ingredients at high levels can be toxic um without any transparency. So we really wanted to lead the charge. Not only did we want to be able to drink, we love wine, you know, we love good wine, we wanted to be able to continue to drink it. Um So we created it, you know, first for ourselves and then felt compelled to share our story with our consumers. And I think we've really championed this whole new movement in, in better for you wines. Now, we have dedicated organic month at grocery stores and menus that note, you know, if something biodynamic or organic. And so the industry is really coming around, but it's a very old fashioned industry that needs a lot of pushing. Yeah, I'm laughing at you. I can't imagine Cameron, what does your ideal wine set up look like you're having a glass. Where are you, what's going on? I mean, in this room with these ladies, I'm, I'm arrived. Um You know, I think that one thing for us with avene, you know, you think a lot of times about wine as sort of this, you know, celebratory beverage where you're like, you're sitting down, you, you serve it at an event or you sit at, serve it at a, at a dinner party, but Catherine and I really wanted avene to be so your everyday drinking wine, the one that you put on, put on the table, you know, um and you, you know, that's why we put the, with our three core wines, we put the um the screw tops on because we're like pull the cork out. What are you gonna do? You got it, you gonna put it back in, they gonna say like how I don't want to drink the whole bottle, you know, um, so we put the screw cap on so that we could, you know, have a glass of wine with dinner and put it back in the fridge. And tomorrow night I'll have another glass of wine with dinner. I just want a glass, I just want a glass of wine. And um, so that's kind of, you know, we, we kind of say it's your, it's your everyday wine. It's the glass that you enjoy wherever you're at, whatever you're doing, doing your laundry, doing, you know, watching the baby monitor. Um I don't know, you just insert it wherever it works for you. OK. That's a beautiful vision. Um You know, Katherine as Cameron alluded to like you have launched several successful brands of your career, but this is really the only one that could be considered a quote unquote celebrity brand. So what made Cameron the right partner for you? And what's your view on what makes for a successful celebrity brand? And what does not work? Yeah, even though I have um a celebrity brand or participate in, in one, I don't necessarily believe in them just broadly, right? Um Cameron is a founder of this business. I mean, we literally, you know, the first dollars into the business were ours. We picked the pantone chips, we knocked on doors in Europe trying to convince these old world wine families to work with these two girls from Hollywood. Like, you know, it's, it, it is not a celebrity brand. It's a brand that needed to exist that we wanted to build so that it would stand on its own. And now we're at the point where when people learn it's Cameron's brand, they're pleasantly surprised, but they've actually heard of the brand first. And so that's how I know we've done a good job and I think, you know, it's, it's very hard as a venture or private equity backed business um to have a celebrity attached. I think alcohol is maybe one of the only categories where we're still seeing a lot of M and A um uh around celebrity brands, but there's often a lot of risk in that. And so they just don't trade, they don't get the investment and ultimately, you know, you have to take a business to an exit. So um as an investor, it's actually not something I'm super excited about, but for a brand like a that needed to exist, no matter who the founders were. You know, we were just two passionate people, you know, that brought different perspectives to this new business we created interesting and of course, it doesn't hurt. But yeah, well, you know, part of your strategy is targeting what you've called this xennial consumer. Who's this microgeneration between millennials and Gen X, what is so powerful about this consumer and what you get out of targeting her. I love the, the Zenol customers. So all of my businesses, um I have Aveline, I have AAA beauty brand called Merit. I have a um skin care brand called Verst. Um They all target the Zenol and um it's really somebody who has um you know, who grew up without technology, but now participates in it. They kind of bridge the, the gap between millennial and, and Gen X. Um they're very influential across all different generations. So they show up and they buy it for themselves. But she also buys a bottle of ale for her mom or she goes to Sephora and she buys a blush for her, you know, 13 year old daughter because it's clean and natural. So we feel like by targeting this consumer, we're actually reaching multiple generations, they're more brand loyal, they're higher, you know, average order value, basket size, all of that. I think it's a very exciting um sort of micro demo. Yeah, it's a really interesting strategy. Um So Cameron, you made a transition away from acting and took some time to focus on other parts of your life, including Ave. And you've spoken about wanting to simplify your life and, you know, have a more manageable lifestyle, you could handle yourself. And we have a lot of other women in the room who have similarly very high level, high powered careers that are very complex and have likely considered some of those same existential questions. So for someone else, considering whether to press pause or to pivot to something else, what advice would you give them about how to know whether it's the right choice and how to do it in a way that serves them. Well, I can only speak for myself. Like, for me it was just, um I had something I had to do. Um, it felt like the right thing for me to reclaim my own life and I just really didn't care about anything else. I didn't like, I don't, it's nobody's opinion, nobody's success, no one's offer. No one's anything could change my mind about my decision of taking care of myself and looking after the, you know, and building the life that I really wanted to have. Um And so I think it's, it really comes to, you know, what are you passionate about? You know, whether it's for me, it was to, you know, build my family for other people. It might just be, you know what? I, I went to school for this and I've done it my whole life and I know how to do it really, really well, I'm at the top of my game but it doesn't feed my soul and always like taking pictures or, you know, whatever or I always thought I could be a gardener or whatever it is. Like, that's the thing you feel in your soul that speaks to you and you feel peace in it. Um You're gonna figure it out, you're gonna find a way to go there and then um a friend of mine a long time ago said, told me this and gave me this imagery, which I thought was really interesting. It was like a, a jellyfish has to suck into itself before it can propel forward. Right. So if you think of a jellyfish, it's like all of its power even. But any of these is like comes in and it comes into itself and it pushes forward and I always thought of that. It was like I can't go forward anymore if I don't come into myself and I don't pull in all of my energy and my power to be able to thrust forward. So once you figure that out for yourself and take the time and however much time it takes you to do it, it doesn't, it's on your timeline, it's yours. Um You just do that and you'll find your way to your next, you know, passion or you'll build the passion you're in. So, wow, amazing. Um On the other side of that, you do have your first project in a while coming out in early 2025. So how did you know it was the right time for you to come back? And how would you frame that for others? You were considering whether to get back into something? Um It was just the right time for my family after the COVID. Um I was like we were in the house for a long time, which is amazing. And the problem was, is that we would probably stay there. We would still be there. Right. No, people would be like, it's over and I'd be like, no, it's not, it is not, it's not over for me. Um, so I had to push myself. My husband and I were like, you know, and my husband who's the best, he's just the best. He was just like, you've been supporting us and, you know, building the family and, you know, supporting him in his businesses. He's like, it's time for us to like, support you and let mommy, like, you know, ascend and do her, do her thing. He's like, let me see you do it, girl, I was all right. Here we go. So, are you excited with that? I'm really excited. I mean, also Jamie Foxx, I couldn't say no to Jamie. He said come with me and I was like, ok, let's do it. It's our third film together. So amazing. Great. Yeah. What have you taken with you from this time? You know, focusing on other things and including building aveline. What have you learned um from your time as a founder that you're not bringing into other parts of your life. Well, I mean, we were talking about this on the way down, you know, it's entrepreneurial endeavors are creative endeavors. You know, they're, it's about creativity is about finding something and making something out of nothing, right? And um telling a story and um you know, you know, picking to pan toes, you know. Um but we, uh you know, it's in a CRE creative endeavor. So I think it's just a natural thing for me um personally to, to create and um Catherine's a phenomenal entrepreneur who knows how to build a business and also is very creative and um you know, an artist in so many ways. Um So the two of us just, we just had a lot of fun doing it. It was just felt really natural. I don't think we ever like as many people as to who told us, no, you can't do it that way. We just were looking at him like whatever you can't do it that way we can watch us, we'll figure it out. So, yeah, that's a lot of, you know, Catherine, something that really separates you as a founder is that you've not just built one successful brand, but you have this entire portfolio where you've built so many. So what is the key to that repeat success? How do you build not just one but several brands? So they all come from a white space in the market and they usually line up with the personal need that I have or a problem that I wanna solve. Um you know, and that I wanna solve for other people. So it's, it's kind of starts with that and then, you know, I use data to validate that opportunity. And even in the early days of avene, we went on our Instagram and said, you know, ask questions about wine. Do you know what organic wine is? How often do you drink wine? And we, you know, it's just like all these things to inform, you know, what we wanted to create and you start to get signals, you know, from people from the universe that you're headed in the right direction. And then, um you know, from there, it's just about putting the right people together. Um you know, not unlike, you know, doing a film, right? It's like there's a, there's a brand, there's a narrative and then you gotta put the right team together to execute it. So Cameron has this, you know, scratched a founder itch for you. Should we be keeping an eye out for any other brands, any other projects from you? Um Only if Catherine doesn't love me. Seriously. That's it amazing. Well, thank you both so much. It was a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Yin Ye, Chief Executive Officer And Executive Director Of Bgi Group  Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder And Ceo, Insilico Medicine  Moderated By Yvonne Xie, New Media Executive Editor, Fortune China

Innovation Forum 2024: Shaping The Next Era Of Healthcare

I, I'm thrilled to have Alex and Y with me today, the work you're doing is really shaping the future of healthcare. And please note missing, we'll be speaking in Chinese and headphones at your seat for you. Um As my, we just noted the fight against COVID-19 is really a worldwide collaborative effort. And now as we are entering the post Pande era, um which area of collaboration in the healthcare sector are most critical Alex. So I think that it's extremely important to collaborate in drug discovery. Uh That is the most critical area for all of us because we can live without a cell phone even. Well. Nowadays, it's difficult but we can live without a better car, we can live without uh you know, flying business class, but we cannot live without cancer, drugs or drugs targeting Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or infectious diseases as we've just learned from the pandemic. So I think the global collaboration in drug discovery is fundamental and of course biology is so complex that we need to work together to solve it. Um So Mr Ying, what, what's your view? Uh I will continue on that and talking more about data actually, we have mentioned that we are now in the era of artificial intelligence. So we will have a lot of data. If we not, we if we don't share the information from like China American and European, then we will enter the silo effect which will cause waste. Actually, when we first identify the genome of human being, scientists have mentioned that we need to share this kind of information uh when we protect the personal privacy. So I believe that such words are right for the present, whether it is for the anti aging research, we really look forward to that it's really critical and in which area can the results of collaboration can be seen most immediately? Alex. So again, I think that uh we need to collaborate on drug discovery, that's where you would be able to see the results of collaboration most immediately. Uh because patients cannot wait and when it comes to aging, all of us are patients and we should be very impatient patients. Uh So uh we probably will see the result of collaboration uh immediately in personalized medicine because uh that's where we can use already existing drugs to repurpose them towards specific diseases that might have not been targeted by those drugs immediately. Uh So that's one of the areas where we need to collaborate. And by the way, China is the world's largest developed uh uh market with 1.4 billion people. More than 1.4 billion people. So having a very good understanding of how different drugs work and different diseases. And so many people can uncover huge potential for us to live longer and better life and very rapidly because we are looking at already existing drugs. And the second wave of course, of course, innovative novel drug discovery. Uh they are China over the past 20 years, has developed the world's largest and the most efficient infrastructure for chemical synthesis, biological uh manufacturing and very rapid testing. So if you are designing anywhere in the world, you might want to come to China and do the testing and uh synthesis and uh you don't need to rebuild this infrastructure. Of course, it's a good idea to have that infrastructure in every country. But I think that right now we need to focus on efficiency and delivering really fast um uh very effective solutions to patients in need who are dying. Mhm um So Mr Yy, what would be your ideas? I think that's still about the uh data, for example, about those rare disease, it seems rare by the name. But if we um take the humanity, all the human beings as a whole, we have, for example, like we have 8 billion people in uh every year, we will have 90 million newborns every year. And the um the incidence rates of the birth defect about 4 4%. So if we can share all this data altogether, we can have uh like more insights for the precision medicine. So we will be a community of shared future. Alice. You mentioned that before the A I develop, develop drugs can really hit the market in silico. Your company still has a long way to go and you are still facing a lot of obstacles. What are these obstacles you're facing? So sure there are several obstacles that everybody is facing. And one of these obstacles is that biology is very complex. Biology is perhaps the most complex area that humans need to be focusing on collaborating and making a lot of bets that are going to fail. So in drug discovery, currently, if you start with a novel mechanism of disease, so you never touched that target before the protein that is driving the disease and you want to take it to the market. The probability of taking it to the market is less than 1%. So it's not about the time or the cost is just the sheer probability of success is low. That's why I like to call it the molecular casino. Uh And in this molecular casino, the wheel is is spinning for 12 years and you actually, every time it touches some number there is a probability of success of failure. So 90% of the drugs that are in human clinical trials that enter human clinical trials fail. That is why uh people who invest in this field are extremely sophisticated and they understand the risks and benefits and the payouts if you've got the drug approved are gigantic because a lot of people start using the drug and the health care system reimburses uh your research and development expenses. Uh So just complexity of human biology and the probability of failure, that's our greatest threat. The second greatest threat is actually currently that something that I don't understand is geopolitical tensions. So previously, I thought that that would be off limits, right? Because we all agree that life is the fundamental human, right? After that, there are no rights after you're dead. So we need to figure out how to collaborate internationally, at least in this area. Um So uh so for Mr Yin, you have already um led the team to uh to, to serve for those rare diseases like a Os, including th uh he is a famous patient of a Os. So when you are helping these people, what are the biggest obstacles ahead of you? Can you introduction of Mr Tale? Maybe uh today, not many people know him in this event. Uh Actually Tale is really famous and when we and actually Tale is a patient of a Os and you may, when we talk about a Os, you may think of ice bucket challenge or Stephen Hawking. So during the past several cents centuries, we do not have a cure, direct cure for L OS. And at the beginning of this year, Tale had a conversation with Ban Ki Moon and as a patient, he has, he he he really advocates a big um research over this rare disease. So I think for rare diseases, the most important thing is that we need to acknowledge it, we need to know it, we need to under it. So for a rare disease, if there is only for example, like 1000 patients in one country, there are so many countries in the world, the total population of this rare disease will be really big. And also there is a cognitive misunderstanding thinking that there are no rare diseases in their ancestors for eight generations and they will not get them. It's a misunderstanding because no one is perfect on genome. For example, I personally carry seven serious defect genes. The important thing is that my wife cannot carry the same position. Otherwise our offspring will have high probability of getting sick. So the rare disease are actually born by normal people and the normal people is in quotation marks. And currently the cost of treatment is too, is very expensive. And now the gene therapy drugs is really is very, very costly, about 2 million to million. So we have a long way to go to conquer rare diseases. But anyway, we need to start from understanding these rare diseases. Yes, indeed. So the first step is to make all the rare diseases being seen. Thank you, Tyler. Thank you, Stephen. Um There is the first step and always the last mile and what's the last mile in application of A I developed drugs? What what factors influences um its scalability of these drugs. So A I discovered drugs in my opinion, are actually better than the drugs discovered using scientific serendipity. Because intelligence design allows you for multi parameter optimization. Where instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, you create multiple perfect needles and you test those perfect needles in a test setting that is geared towards a very specific disease or a broader spectrum of diseases. So we've demonstrated several times already that we can design molecules with surgical, with nano perfection that are like to become good drugs. So they are yet to be brought to the market. But we sold one for example, for $80 million upfront. So demonstrating that it could become a very solid business model. So it's not just blah, blah, you create a drug using A I uh in like a year, you sell it to a company that is specializing in drug development and you make $80 million upfront. Plus you take milestones and royalties. So we actually think that A I discovered drugs are likely to be better than the drugs that you can find using high throughput screening or from molecular libraries. So and the biggest bottleneck right now for us is actually testing. So very unlike images or that is A I generated where humans can very quickly look at the output and say, oh it's correct. I like it. In drug discovery. You actually need to perform the experiment and first you perform the experiment on animals, then you go humans, you can go more humans, you can go different humans, bigger human population. So that is the bottleneck and that is a very well regulated area. You can, you can basically like Tesla, you can accelerate from 0 to 60 then you move with the speed of traffic because it's very regulated. So we would of course like to figure out ways to go around that. And on that point, if I do have a little bit of time, I'd like to expand on als. So one really cool example that I can bring of our global collaboration. Recently 2022 in March, I go to a conference at Johns Hopkins called Answer A LS Consortium. It's the head of Neuroscience Chair of Neuroscience at Harvard MG eight JH Merit. If Merit is listening, uh the B and Jeffrey Rothstein for counterpart at Hopkins, they created a massive data set of A LS patient data openly available. You can apply for it and take the data. So we applied for that right after the conference, took this data for um cells collected from IPs for LS patient and reprogrammed into human neurons. So it's a very, very good data source. We combine it with many other sources of data, run it on our A I platform identified new targets and possible drugs to repurpose, tested it in Mayo clinic's model of flies, fly neurons in real flies show that some of those targets worked. And then uh we met Dr Lu Bai Bai Lu, very famous Chinese American neuroscientist at Tsinghua University who is pioneering multiple neurodegenerative diseases including A LS. He found one of those targets to be very promising to one of those already existing drugs and started a phase two clinical trials in China. Um Principal investigator in this, the target was to enroll, I think 60 patients in the US. It would take you years to enroll so many in China A S is not a rare disease, they are fully enrolled right now waiting for the outcome. So even if it fails, just the sheer speed of that exercise and global collaboration can take this process of trial and error that fails most of the time anyway to the next level. That's why global collaboration is extremely important and that's what we need to do more and more. So collaboration is definitely our keyword for this discussion and the keyword for this whole summit is A I. So uh Mr Yin has BG I already deployed generative artificial intelligence. What role can I play? Actually, we're doing it. We are actually helping doctors and even public quickly understand the language of life. Uh language like languages including English and Chinese or languages used by human beings. Um And English is a um unilateral, it is actually a one dimensional language. And for Chinese, I think it's a two dimensional language because we have characters. But for DNA, it's a three dimensional language and it has a or it is a four dimensional one because it has a space. So I think we can use N LP or A IGC to do development and we can also use uh and also for A I, there are three pillars uh algorithms commuting power and data. And now I think we still do not have enough data to uh to support the development. And for the, for the first, for the first human genome, we spent $3.8 billion to produce the first human genome. But now it will only cost us $99 and we can have a multi uh we, we can have a multigene, we can combine all of those different materials altogether. And nowadays, um nowadays, we have the evidence based medicine, they only accept inductions. That's so, so even if we can use A I to predict things, we, we should still prove that in the real world. So we need to have a digital twin here. So we will be very time costly. You need to have a lot of time, spend a lot of time to prove that. Um Alex I noticed you recently published a study in nature biotechnology. You called it the most important paper of your life. What's the big deal of this paper? Can you explain. So sure we publish a paper every 10 days in in good journals. But that one was very, very special because it combines uh the story of drug discovery from the very, very early stages where you try to formulate the disease, identify protein targets using A I uh then generate novel chemistry, novel chemical matter using A I. Then we performed many, many, many experiments in vitro in a Petri dish, done many, many, many experiments in multiple different animal models in mice and rats and dog showing that the drug is effective in lung fibrosis and multiple other fibrotic diseases. So we perturbed that type of biology. We also did something really special called hallmarks of aging assessment for the first time. So we looked for protein targets that are implicated on aging and disease at the same time because my philosophy is that if the drug is powerful enough to work in some hallmarks of aging, it's likely to work in multiple age related diseases. And then we took in of phase zero human clinical trials just to see if it's nontoxic for, for humans, did that check mark and then we did two phase one human clinical trials demonstrating the safety. Now, this drug is in phase two. And in this paper, we are outlined this entire journey, the probability of success of that of having this uh go go to phase two is less than 1%. And I bet my life on it so it can still fail. But that milestone now published in Nature Biotic, we also created a resource even for peer reviews. When people were reviewing the paper, we provided a form of charge GP T where you can talk to the paper and ask it questions and many other in silo papers and get the response because it's such a multidisciplinary paper. When medicinal chemists look at it, they ask medicinal chemists questions but they overlook the A I part and the clinical part and the biology part. So it had many, many reviewers with many, many questions. Nowadays, if you go to five papers in silico gpt.com, you can actually talk to this paper and ask it questions today. It was accessed more than 42,000 times in the first two weeks were very popular paper. So do look at it and the gene is called tick that we've targeted. I think it is going to work in many diseases and hopefully aging recently, the University of Copenhagen showed that mice that lack those genes are they when they are put on high fat, high sugar diet. So they basically live their live on cheese cake for their life. They don't get fat and they actually muscle. That's what you want, right? So serendipity since you've mentioned about agent several times, I know that the ultimate goal of your company is to extend human life lifespan. How so sure, I think it should be the goal for everybody here because it's the most altruistic and egoistic goal. At the same time, I think that all of us are going to age and die at some point in time, it would be great to die younger later. And the way we are approaching it is in a very traditional way within the pharmaceutical, traditional paradigm where we discover drugs, put them on the market and sell and then use the proceeds to reinvest and research to understand the fundamental human biology. And actually, I think it's a shared goal even with BG because from what I know one of the founders, Wang Jian, I made a statement that he wants every BG I employee to live to 100 or 100 and 20 right? That he was criticized for making that claim, but it's not a bad claim to make, right? And it's not a bad goal to set for yourself. Because one thing that I want all of you together from this conference, from my talk at least is that the longer you expect live, the younger you are going to behave and by extension, the longer you're going to live. So just psychologically, you should already prepare for a much longer lifespans. And if you think that technology is going to stand still for the next 20 years, you don't understand exponentials because what we have done on the paper is pretty revolutionary. But look at some of our other papers for many other drugs that we are developing. Uh And uh they have like really, really good fundamental understanding of aging um come to our conference in Copenhagen. Uh And um I think that uh you should already set your longevity expectations way beyond what you have planned, what you are planning, what you uh parents live to or what the country average is. It's a very good thing and it's also a very noble goal. So if we can agree on one thing, uh you know, in the US and China is that we need to live longer and healthier. Maybe the next generation of us can be immortal sometimes. Um Anyway, uh so uh my race for Mr Yin is that for extending human life, how uh gene editing can play a role? Actually, back in 1990 the average life is VT is 30 years old. However, today it's already at 73 years old and in 1949 the life expectancy in China is 39 years old and now it's 81 years. So, and I have a good news for the women here. In any era, almost every female will have four or five years longer of life expectancy compared that with men. So I think extending life expectancy is very important and it relies on the nutrition, better medical conditions and the development of some drugs. All of that extend our life expectancy if we can intervene with tumor earlier, if we can treat the new degradation earlier, if we can treat Alzheimer's, I believe that all of you can extend your life expectancy to 90 or 100 years old. Uh However, you need to have saved enough money. Right? Because the last 10 years of human life is quite expensive. And actually we have established a uh we have a, we, we, we think, we think that now we can frozen the gene. Uh We don't talk about the ethics for now. I think we don't see any limits, maybe live for like 200 years old. That's possible. And actually, personally, I, I I'm very clear that I personally oppose personal immortality because if there is no death, every birth is a tragedy, right? It seems that the resources is quite limited. And second, I also talked about the immortality. I think that I also make a joke that the first immortal person might be physical, be killed by the second immortal person. So to some extent, we should pursue a kind of spiritual immortality, a kind of cultural immortality rather than the immortality of individuals. So that we can, we can say that we can save some resources for the next generation. Thank you for your discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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