Forbes Daily Briefing

Alex Bouzari isn’t one for the tech-founder uniform of khakis and a hoodie. Instead, he largely designs his own clothes. Think Willy Wonka on a bender: Regency-inspired suits, huge popped collars and crocodile-skin shoes.

The interior of his Paris pied-à-terre, a grand 19th-century apartment on a leafy avenue radiating off the Arc de Triomphe, is just as maximalist. Everything from the marbled carpets to the lime-green sofas and even the chinaware is the product of the 65-year-old French-Iranian émigré’s imagination. “I just love to design,” says Bouzari, the cofounder and CEO of data storage company DDN. “Over the years, I’ve developed this network of people who can translate my scribbles into things that can be made.”

By Iain Martin,

Forbes Staff
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Earlier this year, an unsettling survey finding bounced around the internet: 70% of women say they feel increasingly invisible as they age. However, the sixth annual Forbes 50 Over 50 tells a very different story. Women across the country are doing some of their most ambitious, influential and powerful work after age 50.
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On September 19 last year, the husband-and-wife cofounders of e-commerce company Pattern, David Wright and Melanie Alder, walked up together to the NASDAQ podium in Times Square—both dressed in black button-up shirts and custom blue and purple Nike Air Forces. Wright, CEO of the Lehi, Utah-based company, took the microphone to thank the room full of employees. “Mel and I get asked, ‘How did you do it?’ We didn’t…it’s a team sport,” Wright exclaimed as he took off his shoe, eagerly holding it up to the crowd.It was a surreal moment for Wright and Alder: Ringing the NASDAQ bell was something they’d never imagined when they first began reselling fridge magnets on Amazon out of Alder’s living room in 2013. “We were just trying to bring in a little extra money on the side,” Wright explains from a conference room overlooking Utah’s sprawling mountainscape from Pattern’s headquarters in the tech hub known as Silicon Slopes. “Yeah, in the beginning, it was just us trying to support our families,” Alder chimes in from the seat next to his. At the time, both were married to other people: Alder was raising four children with her now ex-husband, while Wright had six of his own with his now ex-wife.

By Alicia Park,

Reporter
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OnEaster Sunday in 2014, Christian Angermayer, the German investor, was on the beach on the Caribbean island of Canouan with three friends, contemplating whether he should take magic mushrooms.

Before he made his decision, he called a professor he knew who studies psychopharmacology. He explained to Angermayer that he was in the perfect set and setting, was of healthy mind, and he should try it.

So Angermayer, who says he feared he would end up freaking out and living as “a farmer in Argentina,” sprinkled some mushrooms in yogurt, ate it, and let the drugs take hold.

“I always say that I need to build a huge mushroom statue there,” says Angermayer, now 48 and worth $1.2 billion. “It was the most important positive experience of my life. When I came out [of the trip], although it took me years to get the thesis right, I had the first inclination that if it helped me this much as a happy healthy person, I can see the validation for how it can help people with mental health issues and beyond.”

Angermayer spent the next three years working on that thesis. On December 29, 2017, he took another trip, this time he came away with message from the divine: Go forward. There is no downside.

By Will Yakowicz,

Forbes Staff
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When U.S. sales teams from Silicon Valley’s big data-labeling startups visited this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul, Korea, they arrived prepped to court the industry’s big spenders. The data companies—collectively worth tens of billions of dollars and generating billions in annual revenue supplying training data to customers like OpenAI and Anthropic—are used to chasing AI labs that are notoriously demanding, fickle and difficult to satisfy.

They found another eager customer waiting for them: China’s AI industry.

Some Chinese companies have shopping lists. Tencent—which has previously been designated by the U.S. government as associated with the Chinese military, a characterization the company disputes— circulated with prospective vendors a detailed request for training data spanning finance, cybersecurity and one of AI’s most coveted research goals: AI systems capable of improving themselves.

By Anna Tong,

Forbes Staff
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