A documentary series · Published on Forbes.com
52 Icons
The unhurried observation of human ambition.
Fifty-two founders. One film each. Published on Forbes.com.
Sixty seconds, the register of the series in miniature.
The premise
Each film observes one founder the way a natural history film observes a species in its habitat: the rituals, the conditions, the odds it works against.
The narration is hushed, unhurried and completely sincere. Companies are colonies. Industries are habitats. A recession is a drought and a competitor is a predator. Nobody is sent up. By the end of nine minutes the viewer genuinely admires the subject, which is a harder thing to engineer than admiration for a product.
Fifty-two films, one a week, across a year.
Plate No. 01 / 52
The Colony
A colony with no central nest.
Adam Pisk built a company with no office and no floor. Its work happens at kitchen tables from Manila to Bogotá, in a workforce of several thousand who have almost all never met one another. The film opens at his desk in Singapore before sunrise and follows the colony west through a single turn of the earth.
See plate No. 01
Fifty-one plates are unassigned.