Olin

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Fortune 500

Industries included in the sector are diversified and specialty chemical manufacturers.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Chemicals

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-472-Olin

Olin is one of the leading ammunition manufacturers in the United States; it sells that product through its better-known Winchester brand. Olin also produces various chemical products such as cleaning solutions.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-481-Olin

The manufacturer of ammunition and chemical products was founded in 1892.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Olin (OLN): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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The creator of large collaborative art installations at world-renowned arts festivals will share details on her latest work, “Power Prism,” a special commission for Fortune MPW, designed to showcase how different generational perspectives refract and strengthen leadership. 

Dialogue Through Art

Conferences

All right, now I would like to introduce Caroline Ghon, an experienced architect who in 2024 designed the Temple of Together, the largest ever installation at Burning Man, the world renowned arts festival held annually in the Nevada desert. Ghon is with us here in Rio. and she's created a special installation for Fortune titled Power Prism. Hopefully you saw it outside, celebrates connection and dialogue across different perspectives and different generations. To hear more about the purpose of this installation and the meaning behind it, please welcome Caroline to the states. Hello, hello. OK, so, um, you are in addition to all of the things I just said and we wanna hear more about experience architecture, but you're also an entrepreneur, so just give us like real quick your career trajectory, your journey. Well how do you connect the dots here? So I started out in my career at McKenzie and Company and then I started my first business when I was in my early twenties in New York. It was called Levo and it was a professional network that. Focused on the development and community between women in the 1st 10 years of their career, and we went from 0 to over 10 million members in a matter of a few years so it's this incredible experience of creating community and finding this symbiotic relationship between mentees and mentors that informs a lot of my work today. OK, so now I can, I can connect the dots. OK, it makes sense in my head. So tell us a bit about the installation, what the meaning is, and how can. Women in this room engaged with it. Well, I'm so excited to introduce Power Prism to all of you and to officially open it with this conversation, so thank you. So as you may have observed when you came in, there's a prismatic structure in the entrance, and it's called Power Prism. So it's a piece I designed specifically for Fortune MPW and it's about the wisdom that's exchanged between generations of women. So the structures represent all of. Generations of women interacting with each other and the prismatic film represents the way in which when you basically reflect your story you refract your wisdom and you don't know how the story you share is going to impact someone's life. You may not even see them 15 years later when they still remember the thing that you said to them. And so our encouragement is to use our time here today to share our stories and influence this next generation of leaders. So I Be outside and I would invite you to participate. You'll be able to draw a card, so draw your fortune at fortune and answer that question directly on the sculpture, and then we're going to take all of that information and with the help of AI create a very dynamic personalized basically map of the wisdom that we have in this room. So we're really looking forward to your participation. So one thing, yeah, yeah, and please, please. Anticipate um one thing I didn't mention when I talked about your Burning Man installation is that the whole thing with Burning Man is that you burn it after um please nobody burned this one that's not the intent it's not part of the plan but, but talk a little bit about, you know, as uh as an artist, as an architect, um, what is that like first of all to create something that is meant to be destroyed and how do you approach work differently when it's not. Yes, I love this question so much. So I had the opportunity last year to work on the temple, and it was 10 months, the process of 10 months of preparation and actually only 19 days in the desert, in high desert to assemble it with over 1000 volunteers and then open it up to over 75,000 people to interact with it and make it their own. And I burned it, so the artist is the one who sets fire to it. So it was an incredible experience of letting go, but what it taught me was two things the Importance of human connection. The messages that were written inside of that piece were so consistent. They were about finding your authentic self and connecting with others in community and the importance of that. And then number 2, in the process of creating something so um intense and beautiful and then actually letting it go, I reflected on the nature of life. Someone came to me and said, How can you spend nearly a year of your life making something that's meaningful to you in community and then knowing that it's it's gonna go back. To the ashes, and I paused and I said, Well, how is that any different than our journey here just on a different time scale. So it's given me the opportunity to reflect on life and what I love about Power Prism is that in a way it's also ephemeral. We're only here for 2 days, but there's also this continuity that we hope to bring into the digital space to experiment with those two things together. Caroline, thank you so much and again I encourage everybody to engage with the installation so we can learn from each other. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. See you out there.

Lubna Olayan broke ground as one of Saudi Arabia’s first female business leaders. Now she’s focused on what comes next, backing a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. In this opening conversation, she’ll share insights on the country’s evolving landscape, the value inclusive leadership, and why she believes we’re entering a new era for business – and for women.

A New Era for Business

Hello everybody. And I was just corrected backstage. hello Lubna, that it's Lubna Elean, right? um, you know, one of the one of the things that I, you were actually on our most powerful list 12 times, um, until 2018 if I'm not mistaken. So then why did you drop me? Well, I think we're about to discover whether we made a mistake. How about that. So, so let's start. I want to back in 2016 when you were at MPW, you spoke about, you said it was just after Vision 2030 and you said, I think women will be driving soon. Turns out you were right. So let's look at today, the landscape today for women and what you've seen. Are you surprised? Give us a sense of Where we are now, given where you thought we'd be in 2016. You mean in 2016 where we would yeah, here we are today. We've seen a lot of advances beyond driving, of course, and give us your sense of this. To be honest with you, I think the changes that had happened in the country is beyond my expectation. Now, uh, I think your colleague before said I was the first woman working in our company. And I started working probably before many of the people in the audience here were born. I started. So I started quite early and uh and I made it to a CEO and I was the only woman for 18 years and then in 2001 as a group we started hiring women even before Vision 203016, but the I. And in '04 I gave a speech where I said my vision for my country and I was advocating for gender remembered for your, for my head actually it was remembered for my headpiece falling down rather than the content of the speech, which I really worked so hard. But it, I guess the appearance was more important than than the content of the speech, but uh and I also said the key thing my message was there can be truly no progress without change and what we're seeing here is the tremendous progress that we've seen. Since 16 is because of this mindset, the change in mindset that we have to change. We have to progress. To go to your question, I truly I wasn't expecting that we would be where we are. The goal for women employment in the workforce has already been met for 2030. It's already met and exceeded, so we have to put a new goal for that. In our company we have around 36% women employment. I I wasn't even. From 2001 employee number 2 who's a woman now today you're 36% and uh I mean we have more than 1000 women in the company, so just to put it in so. And you know, I'm now also I have the honor of chairing a bank where you're the 1st, 1st, you're the first Saudi woman to chair a bank, right? And you're also the first Saudi woman to join a public a Saudi company public board as well. So breaking. OK, so let's go back to where you are today. Can I make you a soothsayer since you talked about plans? Let's take a What you call it vision 2040, but let's say where we are today, how do we create this infrastructure for all these women entrepreneurs, leaders to get to the next level where they will be running companies as large as the one that you did? What what would be your priorities if you were giving advice? I'm sure a lot of people ask you. I think to keep doing what we're doing, we have to bring women to leadership position, invest in them. I mean, in the bank we in the bank that I'm chairing, we have 36% of minus 1 are women. They're going to be the future leaders. We were 42. I joke with some of my friends in the banks, whether Brian Moynahan, Bank of America, which have the honor of. On the advisory board or a city we are in Saudi Arabia in that bank ahead in N minus 1. I love that. Take that Brian Moyna. How does he respond to that? Oh, he loves it and he is the most person who encourages and is all for women empowerment, so. He is a great example for all of us. You know, one of the things I want to recognize is you joined the company that your father started in 1947. There is this power it feels with family businesses in this region as incubators of talent for women. Is that something you feel because I know your sister as well has been my sister Hadam is the CEO and now she's the chair of the shareholders board of our group. Uh she was the chair of the corporate board and we switched just so we are both quite actively involved and yes, our father encouraged us both to join the group and and it was a great platform for us to keep growing with the 2nd generation handing over to the 3rd generation. But yes, to go back, family business is very important in the Arab world and I guess also in Europe and across, and women involvement is natural there for for women to be in, you know, to be involved either in governance or in leadership role. And so yes, and the Saudi Arabia has a lot of family businesses, so it's. Now you said, I know we said you were investing in the next generation of women. I think you're also investing in the next generation of men. What are you personally doing now in terms of Investments because I know in fact let me um after you answer that question, I know there's somebody in the audience who has been mentored by you, so, um, but what, what is your priority now and what kinds of companies you're looking for and where are you putting your energy and your. Capital. I, uh On the investment side, I think our group has uh Put in, you know, they've they've put the sectors they wanted to invest in. Which is in the technology, healthcare, renewables, and we just are investing similar to others how we are investing. Personally, Uh, I've always had, I'm the mother of three girls and I'm the grandmother of 1 girl and a grandson, so I'm not going to discriminate in gender, but it is natural that when you see the stakes are not equal to try whatever you can do in your power to. Equalize or give the opportunity for it. So I always say I, I really, if, if I'm given an opportunity equal and I look at it, one is led by women and one, but they are equal, I'll probably go for the women just because we're so much behind, but for the World Economic Forum, I mean, it's going to take 100 years where we're equal. I'm not gonna be there at that time. I take 100 years. I will be very disappointed if that is. I don't know where the statistics came from, and I think the audience in this room should prove that this is wrong. We should really try to fast track and make it as soon as possible. I don't think we can afford to wait that long. Now is Caroline Gs here? Can you pass the mic because I, because I discovered that um when I mentioned that I was interviewing you that you are actually a mentor to Caroline, so I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna just put you on the spot and ask you to say something or ask something. And by the way, Caroline is our artist in residence who's done the beautiful installation outside. She'll talk about that later, but There you go. Thank you, Diane. It's a pleasure um to be introduced that way and thank you, it's a pleasure to see you. I wanted to ask, as someone who's both been a pioneer in your field and a mentor and supporter to emerging leaders, how has your personal perspective on power and leadership evolved through your career? I should have asked that. Thank you, Caroline. It's a good question. So. You know, I think when you start working, you really don't think of power. What you, what you think about is getting the job done, getting it. The best your ability. That is the focus and I think I was talking to our young leadership in the company and they asked me a similar question, and I said I really never thought I will be where I am here, but now that I'm here, my role is different. The role now is, and I'll answer you why I'm not there, why I'm not on the list. My role here is really. To guide, to observe, to pass the baton, but I think also once you have achieved what you wanted to achieve, we should use our voices to make the change. You ask, can we make it less than 100 years? This is we can if we all work together and collaborate and Try to make the change before I let you go, I, I really wanna um get a sense of where do you get the most joy out of um your job right now, but also the most joy out of business because it strikes me, you start in '83, you could have retired a long time ago, you're incredibly active and you're still talking about what's next. So give me a sense of what inspires you at the moment. Uh I love to learn And I love to learn something new all the time, and I think being active you continuously learn. And maybe this is why I really enjoy talking to young people and spending so much time being challenged and being asked by them. So that would be one of my, I always tell our Olean Women Network forum is I'm always ready to speak to our young people there and being questioned and asked, we don't have it, of course, or like this, but we do have our conferences and I see many in the audience who's been to our own conference. Which is for that we've been having it for 12 years. I see the minister from Bahrain here, she was here in our last speaker and she was phenomenal, and that's an example of future leadership, but that is what energized me and what keeps me going. The other thing is what I say is we really, uh, I mean one thing I'm passionate about is inequality. And uh and and I'll bring it here and I think our responsibility is to make sure that people have jobs, but more importantly, I've always believed that the middle class is, is the pillar, is the backbone of any society and any society to thrive, we should strengthen that middle class. And uh and I think this is exactly what's happening in our part of the world and and we're seeing more people getting disposable income and all and that is something that I think. We should all work or strive for and I would be remiss because this is fortunes, our first MPW here and we're going to revisit those last 8 years where you were not on the list or 7 so let me ask you, what do you, what's your hope, the importance of an event like this, what do you hope this achieves? Well, we've had many conferences here. We've had many FII conferences. We've had the World Economic Forum here, but it's, I think this is the first really high caliber women conference in the region in the Middle East, so I really encourage. The international women here to get together with all the women here and really try to make that 100 year goal much achievable, much quicker for all of us. With you, I think it will be a decade. Please join me in thanking Lubna thank you so much.

Improvisation is a skill needed by creatives, and improv can delight theater audiences. Is improvisation the ultimate test for artificial intelligence? Since 2016, Piotr Mirowski has deployed AI as a creativity support tool for live improvised theater performances with a cast of humans and robots, engaging audiences at Edinburgh Fringe about generative AI, storytelling, and ethical co-creation with machines.

Making Stuff Up: Improvising LLMs and Spontaneous Robots

Had some great conversations during the roundtables. How many people went? Raise your hand. Yeah, all right. They were both really good. I popped up my head into both of them. Now we're switching gears and getting a little bit more spontaneous. Our next session explores a fascinating idea. Is improvisation the ability to be funny and respond creativity cre creatively in the moment? Something that's hard for humans to get right to, in addition to speaking apparently, the ultimate test for AI to show us what that looks like in action, please join me in welcoming research scientist at Google DeepMind and director of the Improbotics Theater, Pyt Mirovski. What you gonna do? Hello, London. So, hello. Let me leave that thing and unplug the little robot and maybe say a few words about myself. I do have a day job, um, and as a matter of fact, I was studying computer science and improv for a very long time, almost like 20 years, each of those. And I did my PhD at NYU with a professor called Jan Lukan back in the time when he still had time for students and back in the time where AI was a dirty word, we had to avoid it putting in publications in order to get accepted. And in my day job I've been working on various AI research, for instance, learning to navigate or learning to predict the weather, essentially trying to make up things that happen in the future using machine learning. So that's essentially my day job, but in the evening I've been going to theater school, to drama school in London, and also doing improv comedy as well. I really love theater and I love improvisation because improvisation is one way to really engage and connect with the audience. Um, some researchers, some academics have defined improvisation as real time dynamic problem solving. Other academics like Gla Spolin and Keith Johnstone have talked about spontaneity, being a 6 year old again and doing the most obvious thing, which is surprisingly difficult once you become an adult. Improvisation is all about reacting in split seconds to whatever is thrown at you and saying the most obvious thing that comes to your mind. And if you want to see some improv in London, you can go to see our friends from showstoppers who improvise a two-hour musical, uh, every month, fully from scratch. So, this is improv. Uh, one of the reasons why improv is so valued in business environments is that it's all about collaboration and it's about learning to listen to your stage partner. So something happened in my mind about 9 years ago. I was working um at Bing. Um, at Microsoft on the 2nd most popular search engine Bing, and I was working on query autocompletion trying to basically predict what people are going to tell based on the context, and I was doing improv and then I realized that there was a strange connection being delivered two things machine learning, maximizing the likelihood, and being obvious, saying the most obvious thing on your mind, so that. How the idea of improvising with a robot came to be. So I built an AI. I trained a language model on the dialogue from 100,000 films from open subtitles. That was 8 years ago, and I brought this on stage and I called the AI and the robot Alex Artificial Language experiment. And the way this worked, I had a microphone. I would speak to the robot using speech recognition, and it would use a language motor to reply. Nothing surprising for anyone who has used an AI system in the last few years. And of course the AI would take typically, I don't know, 5 seconds to come up with an answer, which seemed an eternity on stage. So I had to actually make up for that. I was improvising alone, but soon after I met someone fantastic, Corey Matheson, a PhD student in robotics in Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, an improviser at the Rapid Fire Theater who had the same idea. So I wrote to him a 3000 word email. He flew to London the day after. We met. We became friends. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and we started working together. From Corey's perspective, improvisation. is the art of making your stage partner look good on stage. It's not about you, it's about them. He would have this shtick where he would invite someone from the audience who never did improv before, and he would make him look good, make her look good for 15 minutes on stage. So we created this company Inrobotics human Machine, and we started doing improv shows remotely via Zoom or Skype, and we had this show in London and Portland, Oregon, 8 time zones apart of that's what we thought until we realized the day before that actually, you know, daylight setting time is not always coordinated. So that created a bit of a logistical problem. And also, um, the previous show of a run, we didn't have time to check the microphone levels. The robot literally crashed and burned on stage. Everything was going wrong. And the reviewer came. And they wrote 2 stars chaotic, never worked with robots to a PhD student in robotics and to someone who was working on robots in his daytime, daytime. Did we listen? Absolutely not. So we created this theater company where we actually replaced the robot by humans, getting lines the earpiece from the AI and essentially becoming the embodiment, the cyborg, improvising with all the humans on stage, and that's how it looks in practice. We have an AI system that generates lots of candidates, lots of suggestions. There is a curator, a human in the loop who is choosing the best lines, the least offensive, or maybe the ones that make most sense, and we want to show that to the audience because we want to make sure that the audience understands that AI is not about an oracle giving an answer, but it's about a stochastic parrot generating answers all the time, and it's up to you to choose the best one. And one of the improvisers wear a headset, wears a headset, and they deliver the lines with physicality, emotional expression, etc. We have been evolving the formats. We have created 4 different companies in 4 different countries. We have been publishing academic research on the subject in human computer interaction, and we have replaced the earpieces by augmented variety glasses, which we might know later. And we have also been working on telepresence. How do we improvise during COVID where everyone is miserable at home. Everyone gets a green screen, and one of us is live video DJing us to place two improvisers on a horse or in a car or in a bathtub and see what happens next. Uh, so this is a demo of the system during COVID. We have also worked on live translation because that's the origin of large language models, translation, and we have done multilingual shows where one person may speak in Polish, another one in French, and both get understood because they have live translation. So does the audience. We have incorporated image generation, exploring PowerPoint generation, uh, you know, improvised TED Talks, PowerPoint karaoke made by AI. Or even incorporated deep fakes in a very consensual way to basically inform the audience about the potential to actually get a live deep fake in real time and to explore maybe a more fun aspect of it while informing about the potential dangers of all the technologies. This is something I've been doing on my side, but I've also incorporated it in my day job working on social technical aspects of AI. For instance, 3 years ago we worked on scriptwriting and playwriting using large language models before Chad GPT was released, and we partnered with playwrights and screenwriters to explore the potentials of the tools and its limitations. or we have also been talking to comedians and to artists about all the possible uses of AI that empower the artists instead of replacing them, and that's all that I have to say, but I believe that Andrew has a few more questions. So welcome, welcome back, Andrew. OK. All right, so all of this is fantastic. I just want to say, uh, I'm, I'm a drummer, OK, so, uh, you know, we, we start with the fundamentals of jazz when you, when you learn how to play drums and so improvisation is a core component of that, and I love that. Um, I wanna ask you, so how much of AI is art versus science? And I'm thinking more about your day job than I am about this. How much of AI is art instead of science? I think there's a lot of An artistic approach to AI that is very useful in understanding the um affordances. Um, I've been very lucky to, to meet many artists working with AI in 2016. who have been exploring the glitch aesthetic and everything that doesn't work with AI to actually make work of art out of that and and they literally build upon the work on explaining AI, explaining convolutional networks. So there's a very interesting partnership that happens that kind of replicates what poets were doing with drugs in the 19th century. Am I making a comparison? Sort of, yes. Um, you have done a lot of different work in, in building your career, your day job, um, in, in different areas, navigation you've worked on, you've worked on, um, climate modeling. So what have you learned from that that you're putting in this work? Yes, um, directly climate models, there is the stochastic aspect which is vital to climate models. That's essentially how we get forecasts of the potential outcomes. You change initial conditions and you're keeping the same dynamical model, you get radically different outcomes. And so when we look at both extremely scary curves of the rise of temperature over the last 8 years, it might rise by only 1.5 degrees or by as much as 80 degrees. And this, uh, this is an illustration of a stochastic aspect of AI model. You my. With some crackling from microphone, um, that, um, I am trying to convey when coming on stage and in improv this is the same principle that we listen to minute details in somebody's conversation in. Happens on stage. What happens in the audience, and we get influenced by that and we use it in our creative practice to get inspired and to radically change the outcome of a scene. So huge parallels here. Fantastic. Well, we've only got 3 minutes left, so why don't we actually try this thing? What do you think, folks? Yes, let's improv. All right, so what I have here is a little bit of a system that will help Andrew improvise. So Andrew, have you done theater or improv? What's that? Have you done improv and theater? I have done theater in high school, but it's been a long time. Yes, have you been terrified by having to find to remember your lines? Oh, who, who isn't? Who isn't? Whose line is it anyway? Yes, yes. Well, what if I tell them what I'm seeing? Yes, what you're seeing right now on this, on these augmented related glasses is light generated by AI. And from now on, Andrew, if you can hold the phone, of course, you can only, and you can only say AI generated lines. So let's see how this is going and if. All right, so I am typing a prompt, activating the system. Don't look fashionable. All right, rebooting the system. This is a live demo. Yeah. It's coming up, um. Yes, it is coming up in those very long moments of silence on stage. So what I see are a bunch of different options in my uh in my glasses. Um, it's, it had generated um different responses and I can choose which which to deliver to in our conversation. All right. So if I say something, it's saying hello, yes. Hi, AI. Nice to be here. Well, Hello, hello, Andrew. From now on you are only controlled by AI. You can only say lines that you see in front of you. We are here at the convention center and uh we, let's imagine that we are in, um, at a bar. Do you want some drink? Can I help you? Sounds ambitious. All right. I knew you would think that, Andrew. Well, here's your Negroni. Thank you. Right, Andrew, we've been good friends. We've been living in New York, um, 15 years ago and enjoying the city. Is there something that you really remember and that inspired you when you were in New York? Oh, the rats, the rats, of course. Well, and that is the end of the show. Thank you very much. Thank you, Andrew, of course. All right. Let me pull this down and get out of the stage. You've been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Colin Kaepernick, Founder and CEO, Lumi; Super Bowl Quarterback, San Francisco 49ers Interviewer: Andrew Nusca, Fortune

Brainstorm AI 2024: Colin Kaepernick’s Next Revolution 

Hey Collin, how's it going? It's great. How are you? Good, good. We uh we got a lot to talk about my friend. Um So why don't you explain the origins of loom me? Because I was fascinated to find out that it's really focused around comic book, illustrators, graphic novels, things like that. And I thought Colin Kaepernick, so please indulge us. Yeah. So part of this came out of 10 years building a media company, five years building a publishing company um and seeing the challenges that creators face. But the other part was I grew up on comics. Um And we had a whole stash of comic books. We had boxes and boxes of them. Um My brother is actually the one who really got me into them. He's 10 years older than me. Um We used to have a sounds a little sketchy now, but there was a house down the couple blocks away, we ride our bikes to and the living room was just comic books. Um So we go through and grab the ones we wanted and go back home. Um But as I went deeper down creating graphic novels, being on the publishing side and seeing the challenges that creator are facing, whether it's writers, illustrators, anchor, um colorists. Uh What we found is a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck project to project. They actually aren't creating things that they want to. Um Because they're just looking for that next gig and a lot of them have their own ideas that they want to bring to life and are just looking for the avenue and opportunity to do so. Is your company focused around the kind of creative tool and support part, the distribution part? Because that's important with publishing too, where does it come into play if you're one of those folks? Yeah, both of those. OK. Um So very focused on creating that tool set for creators to give you A I assistance where and if you need it. Um So you can go on the platform and create and never touch A I if you don't want to or you can use it through the process to help you. Um And then that is distributed directly on the platform. Um trying to solve that distribution issue that a lot of creators face. How does this company make money? Because that's the number one question when you're talking about media and publishing? Absolutely. Um So a few different ways, the first way is we do a monthly subscription. Um that's our immediate revenue generator. But as we look more broadly, we have on-demand publishing for physical publishing publishing. We've realized creators want that they need it. Um And it's a way for us to do that profitably from the first copy sold, which is a anybody that has worked in the publishing industry. Um you know, it has a very difficult space to work in and be profitable. So we solve that. And then the last piece is we help with the merchandizing of the stories that they're creating. And I've released graphic novel, multiple children's books. Um I talked to a bunch of artists around this and what we've realized a lot of them aren't merchandizing very well. And I actually didn't merchandise my own uh projects because it wasn't an easy process to be able to do that. So that's something that we're looking to solve for them as well, right? What's harder publishing for football? Depends which part. I mean, the physical tool, football definitely harder. Um figuring out how to be profitable and scale a publishing company is no small fee. Yeah. Fair, fair, fair, fair. So what is the status of Lumi right now? Where are you at in terms of a product? Where are you headed? Yeah. So right now we have a product beta testers on the platform. Um Interesting enough, we actually have contracts with school signed right now. Um And they're looking to use that as something to advance learning um project based learning to help literacy, literacy rates, um student voice, student engagement. Um So seeing a lot of traction there in use cases that they want to elevate students with. How are your uh how is your company handling? Ip we've talked about uh copyright and, and concerns about that on this stage already today. Um I think that's the big question throughout the industry, how we look at is creators own everything that they create on the platform, anything that they bring to the platform they own. We're not touching that we don't wanna touch it. We wanna be a space where creators are owning the content because that gives them longevity. And if we're serving them in the best way possible, that creates a much more reciprocal relationship. Um And it also pushes us to be the best company that we could beat for creators. Um We don't want anybody controlled or constrained by that. So that's a great point around that. If someone creates a breakout comic or graphic novel, they could take that and sell it to Netflix or Disney or any other platforms, nothing that we're doing on our end to restrict that in any way. Got it. I'm going to come to the audience for questions in just a minute. But I want to ask you one more. You've already raised funds for this company uh that took you on a, you know, the, the show uh with investors. What did you learn from that experience? Um Yeah, very similar experience to playing football. Um Oh, please go on. Yeah, so what you realize is you aren't gonna be everybody's cup of tea. Um, in football when I was getting drafted, even when I was going to college, you always looked at, it only takes one, you need one person to believe in you and then that gets the ball rolling. Um And ultimately, you want to have a chance to be in the game. We found some great investors that support us in that way. Um So any other founders or people looking to raise funds? I, you're going to get a lot of nose through that process, keep going and just look for that one person that truly believes in you and is going to support you. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the audience for questions, please. Questions for calling. Oh, yes. Right up here. Well, please wait for the uh the mic your name and who you're with when you get it. Thank you. Thank you. So, uh Lorenza Ple and I work or have worked for a while with the economist. So I think it's great what you're doing, especially uh you know, trying to help the community and to people with low resources, to create content to sell, etcetera. Um So I'm curious to, especially because I've worked for a long time, mobile apps, engagement subscriptions, etcetera. Uh Yeah, I would like to understand what do you think is the best way uh to, you know, grow your platform, but at the same time making sure that it's affordable for people uh with low resources. And uh are you partnering with any other, let's say third party companies that will help you perhaps or get them like free credits? Like, I don't know, like to publish on Amazon books or to, you know, like get some sort of partnerships with, with publications to uh yeah, help uh help those with low income. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. Um So that's actually part of the foundation of why we built the platform. Um So right now, subscriptions start 20 to $75 a month. So we take a tiered approach to make sure we're trying to give access to people who may be financially constrained. Um The other part to step back and look at the difference in where we're at on this is if you look at the lowest bar of where creators are typically entering a publishing space today, typically is through a Kickstarter and they're raising 5 to $10,000 to get a project off the ground. Um So we're drastically lowering that barrier. Now, if you look at projects that I've done in the past, typically, you're looking at a six figure investment and you're looking at a two plus year production timeline um before it ever sees the light of day. So we're trying to break down both the expense and the speed of creation for creators to be able to get their ideas out into the world. Right on another question for Colin, please. Yes. Right up here in the front. Hey, Steven Steven Wolf Beta. I'm the CEO of AL Fund company. But before that I started a kids media company focused on diverse kids media called Nandos. And one of the great areas for creators to really monetize their I pe is actually with merchandizing. Do you envision the platform actually expanding into products and giving the ability to actually have storefronts? Um Just because there's so much more to just the content, it's actually all the merchandise. 1 1000% you are, you are dead on with how we are thinking about it. Um No, one of the things that we realize is the people who are consuming the content, the people who are buying the books are also the people that are most likely to buy the merchandise, like it's a natural progression. Um Most people aren't doing it. Um And the ones who are actually, they don't love the process of doing it. They just do it as a means to an end. Um So we want to help simplify that process all the way through for the creator from creation, taking that idea to a finished product, to the publishing, to the merchandizing. So one, they can create the things they actually want to. And two, they don't have to worry about the being the business owner, the operator handling all the logistics. Um Every creator we've talked to they're like, I just want to create, I don't want to do those things, but a lot of them end up doing it because they have to today and those are barriers that we can break down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. II, I understand that mindset very well. Let me ask you a question. Colin um, you know, you've gone on this, uh, this journey po you know, post, post football every morning, by the way, you still training, of course, OK. You heard it here. He's still training. I was, I was training before I got on my flight to come out here. Now you're making me feel bad. OK. So, so, II I would love to understand, you know, who you see as a mentor for this part of your career, whether that's in Silicon Valley or somewhere else. That's a great question. Um I think there have been a few different people that have really helped me get to where I'm at today. Um One has been in the VC community, Ben Horowitz has been great person to lean on. It's given me phenomenal insight. Um Williams has been another one who has really helped me my thinking. Um Having the opportunity to sit on the board of medium has been incredibly insightful and very helpful for my own development. Um And the other one just thinking about where I'm at today is Alexis Christina, the 776 team um who is our lead investors. They're incredibly brilliant and also great people. Um so to be able to have them to lean on and ask for guidance. Um And also just pick their brains on things that we're working on. Um how we can scale things more effectively, how we can reach, reach creators more effectively. Um Especially when you have someone like Alexis who's built reddit. Um You know, you have a great person to be able to lean on in that regard and an enthusiastic one. All right. Well, let's go for one, one more question. I think there was one over here, but I cannot recall. Oh, it's way over here. Yes. Hey, Carol. Hi, I'm Carol Vanda. I chair um responsible A I for Mars Incorporated. But outside of that, I'm actually an author. So I have a question because I know a lot of authors have negative feelings when it comes to A I, they feel that it's stealing their copyright, their IP how do you overcome those objections to launch Loy? And thanks for your great work. Oh, of course. Um Phenomenal question. And we have talked to a lot of writers about it. Um I think one is understanding that A I isn't going to do the work for you. Um Two is understanding that most of the writers are already using A I, they just don't know it as A I, um we talked to a lot of writers that hesitant, they wanted to see the platform, what it was um as we talked to them and they showed us their workflow, most of them are using grammarly um and the A I in their workflow already then as we get them on the platform and they see how it actually works and how we're looking to engage with them. Um We aren't looking to do the work for them and we're looking to be there to be helpful in that process if they need help brainstorming ideas, if they're struggling and, you know, they hit writer's block and they're looking for, where can I go with this? Where can I take it? Um So we're looking to help them through that process, but they also have the opportunity to use it as much or as little as they want. And that's one of the things that was really important for us. Um, both on the writers and the illustrator side is making sure that they have the opportunity to opt out if they want to, um, or engage when they do want to. Fantastic Colin, thank you so much for joining Fortune Brainstorm A I Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Ok.

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