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In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasnt the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over 30 yearslonger than his fellow founders had been alive. The Georgia Tech students are Ian Boraks, Jacob Justice, Drake Kelly, Ella McCheney, and Abhinav Vemulapalli, all of whom happen to be 21. The Sac State student/tech veteran is Bill Nguyen, whose past startups amount to a guided tour of Silicon Valley trends over the years, from push technology to unified messaging to digital music to social networking to telehealth. Their new company, Olive.isOlive for shortis developing technology to make AI better at grasping the full meaning of spoken communications, as conveyed by elements, such as inflection and dialect, that current models may gloss over. It plans to offer its tech as a service for enriching AI-powered applications in education and other areas. Olives name references the companys ambitious hope of fostering better understandingan olive branch, if you willbetween humans and machines. Its still in the process of researching and developing its AI model, and has raised $5 million in seed funding from education-focused venture capital firm Owl Ventures and Georgia Tech. The unusual founding team was a selling point to Owl, which also backed one of Nguyens previous ventures, Hazel Health. As students themselves, the Georgia Tech founders are deeply connected and have a lot of recency with the ideal cohort of potential users that are going to benefit from all this technology, says Owls Lyman Missimer. But Bill is giving this team the full kind of Silicon Valley hustle out in the middle of Atlanta. More than words can say When I first met Nguyen in 2006, he was already a Silicon Valley vet and burbling with enthusiasm for a company hed founded called Lala, which helped people trade CDs through the mail. (It later moved into music streaming and was acquired by Apple in 2009.) His knack for high-energy pitchmanship helped his next company, the location-based, photo-centric social network Color, raise $41 million from firms such as Sequoia. It was ultimately best known for crashing and burning, as detailed in a 2011 Fast Company feature by Danielle Sacks. Today, Nguyen is as exuberant as ever when discussing Olives goals and origin story, and doesnt seem to have aged nearly 20 years since our earliest encounter. As he explains it, AI models for turning speech into text, such as OpenAIs Whisper, have gotten uncannily good at correctly transcribing the literal meaning of what they hear. Yet the words we choose hardly convey our intent all by themselves. Elements such as inflection matter, tooand are sometimes absolutely crucial to understanding what someone is trying to say. There’s definitely a lot in human conversation that gets chopped off by LLMs, says Nguyen. For example, if you ask me a question and I go, Yeeeeeees?he infuses the word with uncertaintyit’s not really a Yes. But an automated speech recognition system will basically truncate all that nuance, get rid of it, and just put it as a Yes. If existing LLMs struggle with some of the subtleties of how we talk to each other, its at least in part because theyve been trained on material thats publicly available in vast quantities, such as podcasts. Such recordings probably sound really, really clean and they’re great audio, says Nguyen. But that’s not how we actually converse. Nguyens interest in this current limitation of AI is intertwined with his long-standing passion for education. Years before he went back to school to become a teacher himselfhes halfway to earning his degreehe cofounded a public charter school near Lake Tahoe. As a result, he learned that few doctors in the area accepted Medicaid, greatly limiting student access to healthcare. That helped catalyze Hazel Health, which provides telehealth services through K-12 schools. It now serves 5,000 of them in 19 states. Bill Nguyen and Ella McChesney, two of Olives six cofounders. [Photo: Olive.is] The Hazel experience left Nguyen attuned to the real-world challenges schools face as they adopt technology. He provides an example relating to speech recognition. In a school district, one of the things that they have to focus on is the ability to understand when to do an intervention for a student around reading, he says. In theory, AI might help by analyzing audio of them speaking. But only if it understands what theyre saying, regardless of whether a student has a Mexican-American vernacular, African-American English vernacular, or Hawaiian vernacular. To complicate matters, Children are especially hard [for AI to understand], because they have very limited vocabulary, says cofounder McChesney. So in order to express themselves, they find more creative ways to use words. And so what we’ve seen is that that can mean that models misinterpret them more, which can have negative consequences, especially when teachers are trying to leverage these tools to help them bring better experiences to the classroom. The glimmer of opportunity in the idea of training AI models using audio that reflects how real people talkespecially studentsled to Olives founding. How Nguyen, based in Tahoe, ended up collaborating with a bunch of young techies in Atlanta is a story in itself. At first, he noodled on the idea with Justice, who is his son as well as a fellow Olive founder. As they forged ahead, the project expanded to include more people from Justices social circle. McChesney, whose credentials include high-school work at the Department of Defense and four years interning at Lockheed Martin, hadrecently returned from a study trip to Korea when she joined the effort, right as Nguyen was prepping to pitch the company to investors. I got a text while I was in Costco from Drake, and he’s like, Bill wants your résumé, send it in the next 10 minutes, she remembers. Which would’ve been great if I wasn’t in a Costco with my phone at 5% and no cell service, because Costco is a giant steel box. She Airdropped her CV to a friend, who sent it to Nguyen just in time. Olives iPhone app, as seen in the process of analyzing audio. [Screenshot: Olive.is] The Atlanta-based cofounders do much of their partnering with Nguyen over Discord, though they quickly ran into the limitations of typed messages as a form of collaboration. In their minds, that only underlined the richness of verbal communications and the importance of teaching AI to comprehend it. We’d always end up doing late-night calls, because that was the easiest way to communicate amongst ourselves, and the easiest way to really get our ideas across and understand what people are saying, says McChesney. There’s no ambiguity, the way there is in a lot of these text messages, and we can iterate faster. That really inspired what we’re trying to do here. Its all in the data To overcome current AI models limitations when it comes to capturing how humans express themselves verbally, Olive had to start with better data. More specifically, it had to start with raw audio of people talking to each other in unscripted situations. Our whole idea was if we can get really clean data sets, if we don’t remove any of the information, if we train a model that actually retains all of this context, then we can solve these mission-critical cases, says Nguyen. More specifically, it decided to start with audio recordings of students engaged in conversations with professionals such as teachers and therapistsrecorded, it stresses, with the participants permission and awareness that they could be used for training. As the company was finding sources of such material, Nguyens background at Hazel Health came in handy. We worked with school districts, we worked with universities, he says. The data set is pretty extensive now. Its north of 40,000 hours. The company also built an iPhone app of its own, which I tried in pre-release form. Taking advantage of the beefy AI capabilities of Apples newest smartphone chips, it builds an understanding of the users needs by applying Olives models to verbal input. All processing is done on the phone, and input isnt used for training purposes. Olive doesnt see this app replacing other AI tools so much as enhancing them. For instance, you could talk into the Olive app at length about an app youd like to create, then have it turn your verbal meanderings into a product requirements document to feed into a vibe-coding platform. Youre using your voice to have a more engaging conversation and actually hash it out, says McChesney. That’s what makes this so cool. However, Olive isnt building its business around this iPhone app. Nor does it intend to provide fully-baked applications based on its technology. Instead, it plans to offer its AI model as a cloud-based service. Other companies will be able to use it as a technological layer in their own creations, providing them with a deeper understanding of speech than theyd get by relying entirely on existing voice models. Along with possible uses in educationranging from tutoring to helping scale up college counselingOlive is targeting hiring, healthcare, and finance as areas where it hopes to find customers. These are all high stakes, and theyre all regulated in terms of what you can do, says Nguyen. Theyre also all places where the limitations of existing AI may introduce harm that Olive hopes to overcome through better, fairer comprehension of a wider range of communications styles. You want AI access to be more equitable, says McChesney. You want everyone to be able to leverage these tools, because these tools are inherently part of our workforce. The companys home page is currently devoted to a sobering blog post, Covert Racism: The Voice Inside the Machine. Heavily footnoted, it cites research that shows how prejudices are baked into AI in ways that can be difficult to detect even if its creators are actively trying to combat bias. The part of it that’s mind-blowing to me is people are not getting jobs, Nguyen says. People are getting declined on loans. People are having adverse health effects. And no one knows why. Olives potential to steer AI in a better direction might be particularly relevant in education, where the technology is still in the process of finding applications and the company has a shot at being foundational. Every major new technological shift is developed, built, and scaled, and then 10 years later it finally finds its way into education, says Owl Ventures Missimer. When we saw what Bill and team were building, we knew that the edtech market couldn’t wait 10 years for this type of technology, especially in a time where voice is becoming such a larger part of the technological stack. With that in mind, Owl is helping to introduce Olive to other companies in its portfolio of education startups. They include Amira Learning, a 2025 Fast Company Next Big Things in Tech honoree that offers a suite of AI and neuroscience-based reading aids. Given that Olives strategy is to provide its AI model as an ingredient for other companies products, those kinds of relationships have everything to do with its long-term fate. For now, it remains tiny, though its already grown to nine people. Nguyen says hes reveling in the hands-on experience of running something so tiny. At his previous, larger startups, I, as the founder, was pretty separated from the actual engineering process, says Nguyen, who is not an engineer by background. But now Im not. I’m in the code base. I check it every day. I know what’s happening with it. Once again, he exudes enthusiasm. Once again, hes working on something that taps into the tech industrys current obsession. Nguyen, who dubbed himself the Don Quixote of startups in Sacks 2011 article, may not be destined to run Olive forever. (Did I mention his intention to become a grade-school teacher?) But if this startup takes flight, having helping his youthful cofounders get it off the ground will be a legacy in itself.
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E-Commerce
Say what you will about Crumbl Cookies. It’s always sure to get a reaction. Earlier this month, when a sudden swirl of social media rumors began to suggest that the polarizing bakery chain was closing down, some of the online reactions were downright gleeful. “Too sweet and too expensive!” went one typical comment. The chatter was so loud that Crumbl cofounder Sawyer Hemsley took to TikTok to dispel the rumor, explaining that the fast-growing chain is just moving offices as it prepares for its next wave of expansion. But while reports of Crumbl’s demise may be premature, the chain has in fact closed a number of locations over the last few years following a period of accelerated growth. Here’s what to know: Is Crumbl Cookies still growing? According to Rhonda Bromley, Crumbl’s VP of public relations, Crumbl now has 1,103 locations in the United States and 25 in Canada, up from just 326 at the end of 2021. And the Utah-based chain will indeed continue to expand its footprint next year. “We have no plans for growth to stop and will be opening many more stores in both the United States and Canada in 2026,” Bromley tells Fast Company. Which Crumbl Cookies locations have closed? At the end of 2021, Crumbl hadn’t closed any of its locations, which speaks to the rapid, social media-fueled growth that it had famously experienced in its early years. But over the last few years, at least 19 locations have closed, according to a Fast Company review of media reports, online review platforms like Yelp, and Crumbl’s own store locator. The shuttered stores, which were located across 10 states, are listed below. A Crumbl spokesperson confirmed the closures. California 481 Madonna Rd Ste D San Luis Obispo, CA 93405 550 Woollomes Ave Ste 105 Delano, CA 93215 2750 41st Ave Ste E Soquel, CA 95073 12274 Palmdale Rd Ste 102 Victorville, CA 92392 8126 E Santa Ana Canyon Rd Ste 167 Anaheim, CA 92808 32545 Golden Lantern Ste C Dana Point, CA 92629 Connecticut 360 Connecticut Ave Unit 4 Norwalk, CT 06854 Colorado 1805 29th St Ste 1136 Boulder, CO 80301 3480 Wolverine Dr Ste G Montrose, CO 81401 Florida 1695 W Indiantown Rd Ste 22-23 Jupiter, FL 33458 Georgia 2615 Peachtree Pkwy Ste 210 Suwanee, GA 30024 Illinois 1441 N Wells St Chicago, IL 60610 1530 E Lake Cook Rd Wheeling, IL 60090 Ohio 3038 Westgate Mall #20 Fairview Park, OH 44126 34330 Aurora Rd Solon, OH 44139 Pennsylvania 3741 West Chester Pike Ste 103 Newtown Square, PA 19073 604 228th Ave NE Sammamish, WA 98074 Tennessee 8068 Hwy 100 Nashville, TN 37221 Utah 4211 Pony Express Parkway Suite 130, Eagle Mountain, UT 84005 It’s not unusual for restaurant chains to close locations even as they grow their overall footprint, as some stores will inevitably underperform or could succumb to other unfavorable location-specific factors. A Crumbl spokesperson did not directly respond to the question of why these stores have closed. Why did people think Crumbl was closing for good? Some of the online rumors appear to have been spread by AI-powered social media accounts that post misinformation for engagement, as Reddit users pointed out in the Crumbl subreddit. At the same time, a Bloomberg Businessweek story this month took a decidedly unflattering view of the brand and raised questions about its ability to sustain hypergrowth. The story may have added fuel to the rumors that Crumbl’s days are numbered. Crumbl, which was founded in 2017, is known for its substantial social media presence. It has almost 11 million followers on TikTok alone, so it makes sense that rumors about the company would spread quickly across the internet. Also, as stated earlier, controversy around Crumbl is not exactly new. It was more than a year ago that food blog Delish.com posed the question: “Has the Crumbl backlash begun?” We’ll let you decide the answer for yourself.
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E-Commerce
You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else’s schedule. Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when youve only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because thats been your routine for most of your working career. Many solopreneurs don’t realize they’ve inadvertently recreated corporate life until they’re already living it. You traded a demanding boss for a dozen demanding clients. You swapped mandatory meetings for back-to-back Zoom calls. That freedom you craved? Doesnt exist in your solopreneur world. To find actual freedom as a solopreneur, you have to recognize that youre following a corporate playbookand make a conscious decision to change. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Identify your corporate workday habits Corporate habits are deeply ingrained. Weve worked that way for so long that they just feel like “how work is supposed to be done.” For me, it was the instant email (or Slack) response. In my corporate job, quick replies signaled that I was on top of things, engaged, and reliable. When I started freelancing, I brought that habit with me. If a client sent me an email, Id reply immediatelyeven if I was in the middle of the grocery store. Here’s something to try: What would happen if you took an entire day off, unplanned? Not a vacation day you scheduled weeks in advance, but a spontaneous decision to step away from your client work on a Wednesday. Does that break your clients’ expectations around your response time? Does the idea make you feel a bit squeamish? Those feelings are your corporate habits talking. To embrace your freedom, you have to undo the rigid 9-5, always on mentality. Structure your work for outcomes, not time spent Corporate life is built around a 40-hour workweek. Even if you finish your work in less time, youre often expected to fill the bucket of the workweek with more work. As a solopreneur, if you price your work by the hour, youre invariably still tied to the amount of time you workwhich has its limits. Youll have more freedom if you can earn the same amount (or more!) even if you work less. Clients pay you for your expertise and outcomes, not the number of hours you put in. Over time, youll get more efficient, and each project will require fewer hours. Youll have a shorter workweek (if you choose), and can break free from a 9-5 schedule even more. Build systems that protect your boundaries Corporate life often has no boundaries. Someone else dictates your workload, schedules your meetings, and approves your PTO. Ill never forget the time a CEO texted me on a Saturday morning because he found a typo on a blog post and wanted me to fix it right that minute. No boundaries. When you work for yourself, you might assume boundaries will naturally emerge. They won’t, unless you choose to define and enforce them. The easiest way to do this is to build systems that make boundaries automatic. Turn off notifications. Set up email filters. Block off time for deep work and use a calendar scheduling app so clients cant meet with you during that time. Boundaries are necessary if you dont want to feel like youre constantly working or letting other people control your schedule. Don’t let yourself fall back into old habits It’s easy to fall back into corporate habits because they feel familiar. It can be uncomfortable to shake things up at first. You should regularly review your work habits to see if youre falling back into patterns that arent serving you or your business. You have to be intentional about the hours you work and how you interact with clients. The way to build a sustainable solo business is to find a schedule that works for you. Maybe you still follow a mostly 9-5 schedule, even if youre more flexible with your days. Maybe you work best late at night or before the sun rises. Any of those decisions is fine, as long as youre in control of when and how work gets done. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
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