How Fast Company’s Stephanie Mehta Broke the Mold

In an industry largely dominated by white men, the magazine’s editor-in-chief has brought a fresh perspective to the business reporting world.

(Source: Insider)

By JP Mangalindan

In many ways, Stephanie Mehta has broken the mold for what it means to be a journalist in business and tech. Not only is she the first female editor-in-chief of Fast Company since the magazine rolled off the presses in November 1995, but she’s also one of the few South Asian faces in an industry largely dominated by white men. She has pushed for diversity in both editorial coverage and conferences, launching Fast Company’s Queer 50 list in 2020 and Vanity Fair’s Founders Fair conference for women entrepreneurs in 2017.

But spend time with Mehta, even over Zoom, and you don’t sense a hint of bravado. The 51-year-old media veteran doesn’t aim to be a large personality, something her peers echo. When I speak to other executives in her industry, they praise Mehta for her “old school” nature, for her universality rather than for her eccentricity. Adam Lashinsky, former executive editor of Fortune Magazine, who co-chaired the annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference with Mehta, describes her as an “every-position-of-the-field-player.” Hers is a modest power, but one that has taken her far in the competitive, brisk-paced world of media, driven largely by a versatile talent capable of reporting, editing, and moderating discussions across a vast array of topics.

Ask her about her distinguished career — spanning nearly three decades and publications including The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg, and Vanity Fair — and she attributes that success to a simple combination of “really good luck and hard work.”

Mehta (L) with Pharrell Williams and Chris Meledandri at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2018. (Nan Palmero)

Since Mehta joined Fast Company as Editor-in-Chief in March 2018, the brand has largely grown. According to SimilarWeb, over 7 million people visit the site a month, with nearly half coming from outside the U.S. Registrations for Fast Company’s virtual and live events surged 180%, and sponsors more than doubled year-over-year for its cornerstone Fast Company Innovation Festival in October 2020, which went virtual due to the pandemic. Fast Company also launched two new franchises — “Brands That Matter” and “Next Big Things in Tech” — as well as the Queer 50 list, all of which Mehta championed.

“The [Queer 50] list is exciting, because it’s not the usual suspects,” explained Mehta. “One of the things we were trying to correct for is that if you look at a lot of the traditional power 50 lists or gay power lists, it does tend to be very media-heavy: lots of power players in Hollywood, and maybe to a lesser extent, Silicon Valley. We wanted to try to expand the definition of what power looks like in the gay community, and by shining a spotlight, particularly on women and non-binary individuals, and by making it about business success, we were able to create something that was very different.”

Mehta grew up in Mount Prospect and Arlington Heights, Illinois, to a Gujarati father and Filipino mother. “We were one of those families that did everything together. We went to the grocery store together on Saturdays. We went to dinner on Friday nights together as a family. Like some of my mother’s friends would say, ‘Why do you have to go to the grocery store together?’ But we just were a very close-knit family, in part, because when I was growing up, we didn’t have any relatives from either of my parents’ families in the United States.” She also grew up with a younger brother. “It was just the four of us...I cherish that time a lot.”

Mehta with her family. (Courtesy of Fast Company)

She was a voracious reader, poring over the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau. Her parents regularly perused Time, Newsweek, and the Chicago Tribune, although neither really gave much thought to how the whiz-bang world of media operated.

“I don’t think they really...knew much about the mechanics of how a newspaper or a magazine were put together, but they were very supportive of my decision to pursue a career in journalism,” said Mehta. “Sometimes you hear about Asian parents really trying to steer their kids into professions in medicine or law — or in my dad’s case, engineering — but I think they never expected me to follow their paths. They were very supportive of whatever career I wanted to follow.”

After graduating from Northwestern with a master’s degree in journalism in 1992, Mehta landed an internship as a staff reporter at The Virginian-Pilot, a daily newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, where she covered real estate. A series of stories she wrote for the paper about an unfinished real estate project in downtown Norfolk helped her land a job at The Wall Street Journal.

“I kind of covered the building like I would cover a person,” Mehta explained. “So when a mysterious out-of-towner finally won the rights to acquire the building and finish it off...I took what was sort of a fairly mundane local business news story and made it my mission to learn everything I possibly could about the people who had acquired the building and their intentions for it.” She thinks this is what impressed the Journal.

Mehta at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, 2018 (Courtesy of Fast Company)

As a staff reporter and assistant news editor at The Wall Street Journal, Mehta covered small businesses before switching beats to cover the technology and telecommunication industries. But Mehta slowly grew frustrated with her inability to write longer-form stories at the publication — the WSJ. Magazine was not around yet, and the paper’s weekend section had just recently launched.

So in 2000, Mehta moved to Fortune Magazine as a writer and, after nearly a year, she was promoted to senior writer. One feature that remains a personal favorite: her August 2007 cover story and profile of math instructor-turned-magnate Carlos Slim, largely woven together from extensive interviews of people who knew him.

Eight years and many magazine features later, Mehta rose to assistant managing editor, where she oversaw Fortune’s tech section and tech feature stories. By the time she left Fortune in June 2014 as deputy managing editor, Mehta had been editing features and co-chairing the publication’s most notable conferences, including Fortune Most Powerful Women and Fortune Brainstorm Tech, which hosted speakers such as Gloria Steinem, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Hollywood megaproducer Jeffrey Katzenberg.

While Brainstorm Tech’s annual speaker roster is now gender-diverse, that wasn’t always the case. When Mehta and Lashinsky became co-chairs of Brainstorm Tech in 2009, men dominated the speaker list. “She and I had an ongoing discussion about this where she would say, ‘We need more women,’ and I would say, ‘I totally agree with you. We need more women, but the problem is there are less women to be had,’” recalls Lashinsky. “She would say, ‘Then we need to try harder,’ and I realized over time — not a long period of time, over three years — that she was right. She was ahead of the curve on that.”

Those who know Mehta well describe her as that rare journalist capable of reporting, editing, and moderating discussions on a wide array of topics, from an interview with Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian on voting rights to a discussion with actor Robert Downey Jr. and his wife, Susan Downey, on A.I. and cellular agriculture. That extreme versatility, former colleagues and friends say, served her well and propelled her upward in her career.

“Back in the day, Fortune was full of eccentrics, many of whom were good at one or two aspects of the job, but rarely all of them,” Lashinsky pointed out. “As time went by, there was less room for those people, and instead, people like Stephanie, who could do everything, rose in prominence.”

That prominence included a two-year stint at Vanity Fair, where Mehta served as Deputy Editor, reporting to then-editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. (Just before Vanity Fair, she spent one year at Bloomberg helping the company with live events and conferences.) During her time with the publication, she edited features, coedited the magazine’s annual New Establishment list, and oversaw the New Establishment Summit, which debuted in 2014. In 2017, Mehta launched the Founders Fair conference for women entrepreneurs, hosting speakers like Hello Sunshine founder Reese Witherspoon, designer Tory Burch, and Forerunner Ventures founder Kirsten Green.

“I saw an opportunity to do something for women founders of fast-growing companies, but also knew that there was a real intersection between women founders and the sort of luxury beauty space that was key to the Vanity Fair demographic, but also overlapped with the New Establishment conference community, as well,” explained Mehta.

Mehta with Kerry Washington at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2018. (Nan Palmero)

When Mehta first arrived at Fast Company in 2018, succeeding longtime editor Robert Safian, Fast Company Deputy Editor David Lidsky describes how she made an effort to help bridge the divide between the print and digital teams — a common issue for publications with print origins. Where some top-ranking editors prefer to remain aloof, maintaining a rarefied aura of mystique and inaccessibility — a formula honed and perfected in the hallways of Condé Nast — Mehta chimes in regularly on Slack to staffers’ ideas, writes prolifically for the website, and maintains an open-door policy for staffers.

“I never asked my colleagues to do anything I would never do myself,” Mehta said. “That includes staying up and making sure that the copy is where we want it to be or, at a live event, rolling up my sleeves and stuffing a goodie bag.”

“In the mid-2010s, there was still a little bit of a divide here,” recalled Lidsky. “Early on, she made an effort to collapse any of those distinctions so everyone is just working at Fast Company and you weren’t just necessarily working on the magazine or the website or events.”

When Safian stepped down as Fast Company’s editor-in-chief in January 2018, Mansueto Ventures, which owns the publication, embarked on a search for his successor.

“Not only has [Mehta] been a reporter, writer, and an editor and done all those things, but now she has all this background in live events, which was where the business was evolving,” explained Eric Schurenberg, CEO of Mansueto Ventures. “To have an editor who is that multi-talented was really what I was looking for. The idea that someone could just be a wordsmith, and an editor is, well, that’s such a 20th-century idea.”

Mehta’s vision for Fast Company, which has a readership of 1.4 million people in print, placed emphasis on growing the brand beyond the confines of what it was already known for — the future of business and innovation — and bringing a more critical eye to business stories.

“My vision was to expand a little bit the definition of ‘innovation’ and this notion that innovation can happen anywhere and at companies of any size,” explained Mehta. “Innovation isn’t just product innovation. It can be innovation of process. It can be an innovative way that you manage your teams.”

“The other thing that was happening three-and-a-half years ago, and even before that, is that we started to see a big reckoning among the relationship that big tech companies were having with their users, and with the advertisers that use those platforms,” Mehta added. “The generally upbeat way that Fast Company positioned business as a force for good needed to be tempered with some journalism and some editorial rigor, around holding businesses accountable when they are not a force for good.”

Once Mehta joined, Fast Company began publishing tougher pieces of journalism. In 2018, it published “The War on What’s Real” by Mark Wilson, delving into the blurry ethical and technical boundaries surrounding AI-powered audio and video manipulations, widely known as deepfakes; that same year, it also published Elizabeth Segran’s essay “Stop buying crap, and companies will stop making crap,” arguing that consumers “have the power to kill off brands and force the industry to do better,” by considering both the environmental and human toll on disposable fashion.

Stephanie Mehta and Jared Leto attend the Fast Company European Innovation Festival on July 10, 2019 in Milan, Italy (Courtesy of Fast Company)

Mehta has also long been a champion of diversity and inclusion in editorial coverage. One of her first cover choices for Fast Company was Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton, for the October 2018 issue. Two years later, the publication published the Queer 50 list in collaboration with Lesbians Who Tech & Allies, media’s first-ever annual list highlighting LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary innovators in tech, finance, venture capital, media, and entertainment. This year’s list includes Black Futures Lab founder Alicia Garza, Madison Reed CEO and founder Amy Errett, Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford, Reddit COO Jen Wong, and musician and actor Janelle Monáe.

Since Mehta’s historic appointment at the helm of Fast Company as one of the few South Asian women helming U.S.-headquartered magazines, more recently, Swati Sharma has joined Vox.com and Versha Sharma has joined Teen Vogue, both as editors-in-chief. Vanity Fair’s editor-in-chief, Radhika Jones, joined in December 2017.

Looking ahead, Mehta is focused on the notion of what the business equivalent may be of “build back better,” referring to President Joe Biden’s $7 trillion COVID-19 relief and infrastructure package for American workers and families.

“We are in this unprecedented period, where we are starting to reemerge from a long period of people working from home,” she explained. “Companies are starting to rethink what the workplace looks like. We’ve gone through a massive racial justice reckoning, a massive healthcare reckoning. So how do we come back from 2020?”

“Luckily we're at a point,” she added, “especially for corporate America, where they have the resources, where they have the wherewithal to sort of rethink some of the fundamental ways that we’ve been doing business for the last 20 years, and find a way to do it better.”