40 companies transforming the world of business
In August 2020, Quartz started publishing something we loosely called the Company Email—a weekly spotlight on a different company that’s in the news. To mark a year of this email, we’ve summarized 40 of these profiles, categorized high-school superlative style.
Some of the companies we covered because they’d just gone public (Coursera, Casper, Coinbase) or had a great quarter (AstraZeneca, Twitch); others had a tumultuous year (WeWork, Boeing, AMC). Still others are fixtures of global business and we thought it was worth stepping back and explaining what exactly they do (BlackRock, McKinsey, and yes, Costco).
If you’ve been reading along, we hope you’ve learned a little about the companies driving the news and the forces behind the global economy. And as a Quartz member, you can expect The Company, now one of several emails just for our members, to be in your inbox every Thursday.
Click here to view the PDF version or to download the PowerPoint file. Let us know what what company you think we should feature next at [email protected].
Here are the companies we cover in the deck, in alphabetical order, with links to our profiles of them:
- AMC Slide 14 | AMC’s popularity as a meme stock hasn’t fixed its core business
- Ant Financial Slide 45 | The Amazon of money is here
- ARK Slide 24 | Is this the world’s best stock picker?
- AstraZeneca Slide 12 | Could this be AstraZeneca’s moment?
- BlackRock Slide 25 | BlackRock is forcing finance to take climate risk seriously
- Boeing Slide 15 | Can Boeing recover?
- Calm Slide 33 | Meditation app Calm is booming in anxious times
- Cameo Slide 51 | Celebrities are crashing the creator economy
- Casper Slide 9 | The future of sleep
- Chewy Slide 39 | How America’s love for its cats and dogs built the pet industrial complex
- Coinbase Slide 13 | The Coinbase IPO kicked off a new era in crypto—or did it?
- Controlled Thermal Resources Slide 37 | Geothermal energy, the forgotten renewable, has finally arrived
- Costco Slide 48 Costco is proof that in-store shopping is far from over
- Coursera Slide 32 | How to attend free college classes from home
- Discord Slide 28 | Once a go-to for gamers, Discord is vying to be a chat app for all
- Farfetch Slide 50 | The “luxury operating system”
- Jumia Slide 6 | The “Amazon of Africa” is trying to enable third-party e-commerce rather than sell more stuff
- Klarna Slide 42 | Is Klarna legit?
- Krispy Kreme Slide 49 | Why Krispy Kreme went public (again)
- Lynas Slide 23 | Lynas wants to shake up the rare earths supply chain
- Masterclass Slide 30 | How Masterclass became the style-master of MOOCs
- McKinsey Slide 27 | McKinsey faces its moment of reckoning
- NextEra Slide 38 | How wind and solar toppled Exxon from its place as America’s top energy company
- Nio Slide 35 | Tesla needs China, but China also needs Tesla
- Noom Slide 31 | Weight loss app Noom was ready for its pandemic moment
- Oatly Slide 29 | Blackstone-backed Oatly used offbeat marketing to turn vegan milk into a $10 billion business
- Palantir Slide 26 | Palantir is leaving Silicon Valley in the most Silicon Valley way possible
- Paytm Slide 41 | Paytm’s losses may not stand in the way of its IPO success
- Reddit Slide 21 | Reddit grows up on its way to an IPO
- Robinhood Slide 43 | How does Robinhood work?
- Roblox Slide 17 | Roblox is getting kids’ attention. Next stop, investors
- Shein Slide 19 | It’s pronounced SHE-in, and it’s huge
- Spotify Slide 8 | How Spotify is shaping the next era of podcasting
- StockX Slide 47 | Where can you find a PS5? Try sneaker resale site StockX
- Stripe Slide 44 | Stripe wants to be a $100 billion one-stop shop for small business
- Sustenir Agriculture Slide 36 | The indoor urban farm startup that’s undercutting importers by 30%
- Tencent Slide 5 | After Alibaba, Beijing’s efforts to rein in fintech could center on rival Tencent
- Tesla Slide 7 | Tesla changed what competitive advantages mean in the EV space
- Twitch Slide 20 | Twitch is the undisputed champion of video game streaming
- WeWork Slide 11 | Can the pandemic save WeWork?