Start with purpose

Sean Hinton, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, SkyHive

Prior to launching SkyHive, a cloud-based workforce management and reskilling software provider, in 2017 I was a very successful corporate CEO. In 2016, I had no aspirations to become a founder and was perfectly content running the company I had been hired into. In early 2016 I attended a conference in the Middle East, and on day one of that conference a group of Syrian women spoke on a panel. They had escaped Syria and were living in the UN refugee camp in Lebanon. For an hour they spoke to us about the atrocities of the treatment of women during the civil war in Syria.

I had a stream of consciousness during that hour, and when the panel ended I knew right then and there that I had to dedicate the rest of my career to helping the world; that was the genesis of SkyHive. The most important thing I learned from that experience was the true definition of purpose and how important it is to live and work with purpose.

Ensure business is a force for good

Joaquin Villalba, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Nextail

The fashion industry, while beautiful and much beloved, has inherited many operational efficiencies, from a reliance on legacy approaches to aligning supply and demand. Given the complexity of today’s retailing, limited tools make it impossible to meet customer demands and reach business goals, and, worst of all, they often lead to unnecessary waste.

I have a passion for improving complex processes. So, after a few years in fashion as Head of European logistics of Inditex, I identified an opportunity to push the industry forward. By placing tech and data science at the heart of decision-making, I knew we could better meet demand through improved predictions and automated decision-making.

Since founding Nextail, a smart retail platform that empowers fashion merchandisers, in 2014, our mission has been to make the retail world a better, more sustainable place. We help retailers become more agile and predictive so they can use less of the world's resources while maintaining the same, or better, product availability. My greatest lesson has been that business truly can be used as a force for good. In fact, it’s been easy to create a team of like-minded industry professionals with a passion for data and tech that want to make a positive, tangible impact on the world.

Read more at ALL ARK LLC