Americans have always loved to gamble, and not just at the blackjack table. The analogy between Wall Street and a casino is nearly as old and durable as Wall Street itself: Just a few months ago, Warren Buffett blasted the Street as a “gambling parlor.” But in recent years, our appetite for risk has taken more quotidian and pervasive forms—the ubiquity of sports-betting apps, meme-stock mayhem, the peak/valley cycles of crypto. Main Street has become a casino, too.
The theme of risk permeates this issue of Fast Company. I’d be lying if I told you this was intentional. But as I read through this month’s features, I found the thread undeniable. In a sense, the fact that it was an editorial accident makes the point. Our attraction to risk is everywhere, cloaked in a variety of disguises.
If there’s a better example than the NFT mania that recently seized the crypto world and then the broader world, I’m hard-pressed to find it. At the heart of that speculative frenzy was a mysterious company called Yuga Labs, which birthed the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the 800-pound gorilla of NFT projects. In a Fast Company exclusive, associate editor Yasmin Gagne and staff writer Connie Lin, with an assist from deputy editor David Lidsky, tell the strange and supremely entertaining story behind Yuga Labs—and lay out its plans to write the next chapter of the internet.
The value of a digital ape is debatable. The value of homeownership, generally speaking, is not. But what happens when Silicon Valley enters the residential real estate market and tries to disrupt the American dream? That’s the subject of senior writer Ainsley Harris’s brilliantly reported investigation of Divvy Homes, a major player in the nascent but growing rent-to-own business. As she reveals, this new model injects new risk into what has always been considered the safest of investments.
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