Tinkercast named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024!
Chief Executive Tinkerer
Today, Fast Company announced their list of The World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024. The list includes Youtube, OpenAI, Taylor Swift Productions, Beyonce’s Parkwood Entertainment…and Tinkercast! That’s right, Tinkercast is #2 in the Small and Mighty category, honoring companies with fewer than 50 employees reshaping industries and culture!
WOW, WOW, WOW!!
Seven years ago, my partners and co-founders Guy Raz, Mindy Thomas, and I had a big vision to use audio stories to engage curious kids and their grownups in the wonders and wows all around them. As parents, storytellers and hope-holders for our future, we were driven by our belief that great content and playful experiences can connect parents to kids, curiosity to imagination, laughter to learning, and kids to their world. When I listened to the pilot episode of the podcast “Wow in the World” with my then 8-year-old son, we were instantly immersed in a world created entirely by sound. What this world looked like was up to our own imaginations as we learned bonkerball facts about the amazing real things happening in the world of science and innovation. I knew we had something very special to share with the world and I have been pinching myself ever since…especially today!
Over the last few years, our small and mighty team has grown from a team of 4 to a team of 21 of the most innovative, hilarious, passionate people out there. We have become a shining example of what innovation can look like at a fully remote company– thinking and tinkering together on zoom calls, playing games at meetings and gathering together multiple times a year at TinkerLabs, play-based design sprints that are structured around new initiatives we want to learn about and bring our unique “WOW factor” to.
Together, we’ve had some stunning achievements
- Extending our podcast library for Wow in the World, Two Whats and a Wow!, WeWow, Who, When, Wow!, and Flip & Mozi’s Guide to How to be an Earthling through a partnership with leading podcast distributor Wondery and United Talent Agency
- Launching the New York Times-bestselling Wow in the World book series, including The How and Wow of the Human Body, Wow in the Wild, Wow in Space, and What in the Wow?!: 250 Bonkerball Facts with partner Harper Collins
- Announcing a series of STEM toys being released this summer with Thames and Kosmos
- Touring the Wow in the World Pop Up Party stage show around the country with partner Live Nation
- Receiving a $1,000,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to bring WOW into classrooms through a free “Pod”ject-based learning program, TinkerClass
Through all of these programs and partnerships we have had the honor of adding more WOW to kids’ worlds and in doing so, we’ve become a conduit for collecting and sharing amazing facts from our listeners. To date, we’ve received over 20,000 voicemails and messages from “Wowzers” sharing what wows them about the world. And we have been wow’d by the messages we get from parents, too. Like one mother who told us that for her neurodiverse child, the ability to listen to “Wow in the World” on the way to school is “a key reason why her eight-year-old is successfully going to school!” and another that shared that their five-year-old daughter tells everyone that she IS a scientist and thanked us for “keeping science cool, fun, and relevant!”
Our “Small and Mighty” company is standing tall today as we share this “Most Innovative Companies” distinction from Fast Company with our exceptional team of Tinkerers, collaborators, and partners as well as our incredible families of Wowzers who are the WHY behind the WOW!