This millennial AI CEO works with Ebay and has just raised millions for her start-up—unlike tech bros she doesn’t use futuristic gadgets calling them mostly ‘useless’
Being in the C-suite is a high-pressure job with long hours, broad responsibilities, and intense scrutiny. But what is it like to be a top executive when you’re off the clock?
Fortune’s series, The Good Life, shows how up-and-coming leaders spend their time and money outside of work.
Today we meet the co-founder and CEO of Faircado, Evolena de Wilde.
The 31-year-old entrepreneur based out of Berlin got her start in the high-energy startup world, working at burgeoning tech companies for five years before starting her own venture. She’s held professional stints at airline passenger compensation company Airhelp, and community-centric skincare brand HelloBody.
In 2022, she launched AI-powered second-hand shopping assistant Faircado with her friend Ali Nezamolmaleki. The advanced tech scans product images to connect users with the best second-hand purchasing options, aggregating information from different online marketplaces. It was voted the Product of the Day on Black Friday in 2023, and in 2024 the company closed a €3 million funding round led by World Fund, Europe’s leading climate VC.
Faircado has since become one the largest second-hand shopping tools in Europe through its partnerships with eBay, Vestiaire Collective, Sellpy, Back Market, and more. The AI function now aggregates more than 100 million offers across electronics, books, fashion, and more. De Wilde’s value of sustainability comes into practice at Faircado, too—she says users have saved millions of dollars and tons of CO2 by purchasing used goods through the digital add-on. Most recently, Faircado expanded into the UK with the launch of its browser plug-in.
De Wilde was able to connect her passion for sustainability with her professional background in Berlin’s startup scene. And she practices what she preaches in her own life—from where she buys her coffee and indoor decor, to how she celebrates her career ‘wins.’
“I’ve always tried to furnish anywhere I’ve lived sustainably,” she tells Fortune. “In fact, it’s at the heart of why I started Faircado.”
The finances
Fortune: What’s been the best investment you’ve ever bought?
A flat in Brussels, where I’m from. I bought it 2 years ago, and it has been a profitable investment since day one, as the rent covers more than my mortgage. I’ve done some renovations to make it more energy efficient so the value has increased already, and it will probably continue to rise as it’s well located. It was quite a bit of work, but I really like to build stuff made to last.
And the worst?
Nothing yet. I’ve been lucky.
What are your living arrangements like: Swanky apartment in the city or suburban sprawling?
I live in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. It’s considered a calm, fancy, family-friendly neighborhood, with a lot of small cafés and yoga studios. My flat is filled with art and Scandinavian vintage furniture. I’ve always tried to furnish anywhere I’ve lived sustainably. In fact, it’s at the heart of why I started Faircado.
Back in 2021, when I moved into this unfurnished flat during the pandemic, I couldn’t just go out to a shop and buy second-hand furniture. So I started doing it online and realised how clunky and time consuming the experience was. Same for clothes, books and electronics.
How do you commute to work?
By bike! I bike at least an hour a day. It keeps me fit and refreshes my mind. I don’t own a car (and hope I never will need to).
Do you carry a wallet?
I rarely have cash. My favourite bank is Tomorrow, a sustainable bank that invests my money into social and environmental projects. Plus, their cards are really beautiful.
Do you invest in shares?
I’ve played around with Trade Republic a bit. I invested in renewable energy companies that are doing really well at the moment, for instance. Also, eBay, because I truly believe that second-hand is the future, and Spotify, because it’s one of those products that just makes life nicer.
I’m not going to give anyone advice on the topic, but I would say it’s a good tool to promote businesses you understand and believe belong in the future of our economy.
What personal finance advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
Save 20% to 50% of your salary. Move it directly to a savings account on the day you get paid. Make sure your spendings don’t increase at the same rate as your earnings.
Buy less but better—and second-hand. Focus on high-quality things that will really bring you long-lasting joy and utility.
Never save on experiences and learnings. The things that make you grow are always a good investment (including therapy and trips to the mountains).
Be generous with the people and associations you love.
Buy a house or a flat as soon as you can. You can then either live in it (and invest your rent into something that will be yours in 20 years), or rent it out and let the mortgage pay itself. It’s a great investment (except if you’re really unlucky, or living in an unstable country), and if sh-t hits the fan you will always have a place to live.
Where’s your go-to wristwatch from?
I still wear the one I bought 15 years ago with the salary from my first student job. I’ve heard it doesn’t fit with my vintage Chanel necklace, but I don’t care.
The necessities
How do you get your daily coffee fix?
No capsules. I fully boycott Nespresso and Starbucks. But I’m a fan of all ethical coffee brands. The ones who actually pay the farmers behind the coffee beans. I get mine from Coffee Circle, in Berlin. I have a very simple Bialetti Moka machine at home, and we have a proper DeLonghi Dedica Arte espresso machine in the office (second-hand, of course), with a milk foamer for our daily doses of Oatly cappuccinos. Very Berlin Startup vibe.
“Never save on experiences and learnings. The things that make you grow are always a good investment.”
What about eating on the go?
I go out every day, usually with some team members or investors. Berlin offers amazing lunch options for 5 to 12 euros, and as I hate to cook, I don’t see a reason not to eat out. I usually go for a salad, falafel, Italian pizza, or sushi. I don’t need fancy expensive food, just quality ingredients and good vegetarian options to be happy.
Where do you buy groceries?
At the local organic farmers market, on Saturday mornings.
How often in a week do you dine out versus cook at home?
It used to be 4-5 days of eating out for dinner, but now we have HelloFresh which delivers great healthy recipes at home. So we cook more.
Where do you shop for your work wardrobe?
I buy most of my wardrobe second-hand and only stuff that I need, so I’m shopping on resale platforms (mainly Faircado) and finding unique pieces that way. I wear second-hand Céline, Maje, Comme des Garçons, Chloé, Sézane, Samsøe Samsøe, Acne Studios, etc. The fabric being the most important thing: I almost only wear wool and cotton.
When I buy new stuff (it’s rare) it would be to support small designer labels of fair fashion, ideally produced in Europe.
What would be a typical work outfit for you?
Navy blue T-shirt, wide jeans, Chloé boots/Birkenstock Boston.
Are you the proud owner of any futuristic gadgets?
No. I find most gadgets useless. The only futuristic thing I’ve bought is my Cube Nuroad gravel bike, in smokylilac’n’black. But I would say it’s more of a piece of art. A very beautiful and useful piece of art.
The treats
How do you unwind from the top job?
My weekly therapy, journaling, a good run, a yoga class, a drawing class, a dinner with my partner and/or with friends.
“I find most gadgets useless.”
How do you treat yourself when you get a promotion?
I try not to buy things for the sake of it. If I have something to celebrate, I do things that bring me joy: go dancing with my friends, go eating in a nice restaurant, going to a concert or a festival.
How many days of annual leave do you take a year?
I don’t know. I’m never fully off and travel quite a lot for work, so it’s difficult to say.
I did spend one month in Rwanda (traveling around the national parks and working from the amazing Norrsken House of Kigali) to escape the greyness of Berlin this winter. What struck me was that the people here seem a lot happier than back home. A great reminder of what we actually need: water, some food, a roof, strong communities, a lot of dancing, singing and laughing, and a beautifully preserved environment. That seems to be the best recipe for happiness.
Here at The Good Life you don’t have to imagine what life at the top looks like anymore: Get real-life inspiration for how the most successful live life.
Fortune wants to hear from business leaders on what their “Good Life” looks like. Get in touch: emma.burleigh@fortune.com
Hermès has long held a special place in luxury-seekers’ eyes as one of the most elite brands from which to own bags and scarves. Its popularity has been no secret—still, in the past decade, sales have popped 226%, taking the brand to new heights.
With that sort of boom, particularly amid a recent slowdown in the luxury industry, it’s hard to think of Hermès as just a dusty old company that’s been around for nearly two centuries.
Instead, it’s best thought of as somewhat of a startup, said Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the French company’s artistic director and sixth-generation Hermès heir.
“I always like to say that Hermès is an old lady with startup issues because we’ve grown so fast in such a small period,” Dumas said during a CBS News 60 Minutes episode released in December. “How can you grow so fast without changing what makes you strong?”
There are several ways in which Hermès is doing things differently than its competitors, such as prioritizing quality over quantity. That’s why, Dumas said, even if Hermès bags come with a price tag of over $10,000, it’s for a justifiable reason.
“Speed is the structuring value of the 20th century,“ he said.
“We went from horse carriages to the internet. Are we going to be so obsessed with speed and immediate satisfaction? Maybe not? Maybe there is another form of relation to the world, which is linked to patience, to taking the time to make things right.”
PARIS, FRANCE – FEBRUARY 26: (EDITORIAL USE ONLY) Pierre-Alexis Dumas attends the Harper’s Bazaar Exhibition as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2020/2021 At Musee Des Arts Decoratifs on February 26, 2020 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
The Hermès formula is unlike that of its rivals, but it has worked. Its 2014 sales were €4.1 billion, and by 2023, those figures had swelled to €13.4 billion. The company’s shares have risen 284% in the last five years.
Hermès’s journey has been so spectacular that it’s spawned millionaires among the founding family’s distant relatives. Dumas has been with the French bagmaker for nearly two decades, presiding over the recent growth wave.
Few others have been able to replicate Hermès’s success in maintaining a loyal client base among the affluent while remaining relatively inconspicuous. For instance, the company doesn’t have a marketing department. Yet demand for iconic Hermès bags has consistently outstripped supply—a phenomenon that has unintentionally added to the French company’s allure.
Scaling new heights: Hermès style
A single craftsperson works on a bag, which can take at least five years of training and several hours to make. That automatically creates scarcity as Hermès produces fewer bags than mass-produced brands, which, in turn, pushes prices up.
Some critics have raised issues about the bagmaker creating artificial scarcity. But Dumas pushes back on this idea.
“It makes me smile that this is a diabolical marketing idea. That can only come out of people obsessed with marketing,” he said. “Whatever we have, we put on the shelf, and it goes.”
The company has been looking to train more artisans to help quench a seemingly insatiable thirst for Hermès bags.
Another criticism of Hermès’s model is how shoppers can’t simply walk into a store and expect to buy a Birkin. They must work their way up with a proven purchase history of other Hermès items before they can see their most sought-after bags worth thousands of dollars.
A few shoppers have recently rallied together to sue Hermès for deliberately making it difficult to buy its top-tier products, even if people are willing to pay the money for them.
So far, that case hasn’t yielded consumers any success, as a U.S. judge said during a hearing last year that “Hermès can run its business any way it wants. If it chooses to make five Birkin bags a year and charge a million [for] them, it can do that.”
Despite Hermès’s methodical approach to bag-making, the sixth generation of the founding family has also sought to learn from their ancestors’ mistakes.
“I don’t want to be like my predecessors in the family, that is to say, to die in office,” Axel Dumas, the executive chairman of Hermès, told the Financial Times in September when speaking about succession planning. “The risk is falling in love with what one has made, and not being able to change. At some point, you need fresh eyes.”
Representatives at Hermès didn’t immediately return Fortune’s request for comment.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Dec. 17, 2024.
Hype is growing from leaders of major AI companies that “strong” computer intelligence will imminently outstrip humans, but many researchers in the field see the claims as marketing spin.
The belief that human-or-better intelligence — often called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) — will emerge from current machine-learning techniques fuels hypotheses for the future ranging from machine-delivered hyperabundance to human extinction.
“Systems that start to point to AGI are coming into view,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman wrote in a blog post last month. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has said the milestone “could come as early as 2026”.
Such predictions help justify the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into computing hardware and the energy supplies to run it.
Others, though are more sceptical.
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun told AFP last month that “we are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs” — the large language models behind current systems like ChatGPT or Claude.
LeCun’s view appears backed by a majority of academics in the field.
Over three-quarters of respondents to a recent survey by the US-based Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) agreed that “scaling up current approaches” was unlikely to produce AGI.
‘Genie out of the bottle’
Some academics believe that many of the companies’ claims, which bosses have at times flanked with warnings about AGI’s dangers for mankind, are a strategy to capture attention.
Businesses have “made these big investments, and they have to pay off,” said Kristian Kersting, a leading researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and AAAI fellow singled out for his achievements in the field.
“They just say, ‘this is so dangerous that only I can operate it, in fact I myself am afraid but we’ve already let the genie out of the bottle, so I’m going to sacrifice myself on your behalf — but then you’re dependent on me’.”
Scepticism among academic researchers is not total, with prominent figures like Nobel-winning physicist Geoffrey Hinton or 2018 Turing Prize winner Yoshua Bengio warning about dangers from powerful AI.
“It’s a bit like Goethe’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, you have something you suddenly can’t control any more,” Kersting said — referring to a poem in which a would-be sorcerer loses control of a broom he has enchanted to do his chores.
A similar, more recent thought experiment is the “paperclip maximiser”.
This imagined AI would pursue its goal of making paperclips so single-mindedly that it would turn Earth and ultimately all matter in the universe into paperclips or paperclip-making machines — having first got rid of human beings that it judged might hinder its progress by switching it off.
While not “evil” as such, the maximiser would fall fatally short on what thinkers in the field call “alignment” of AI with human objectives and values.
Kersting said he “can understand” such fears — while suggesting that “human intelligence, its diversity and quality is so outstanding that it will take a long time, if ever” for computers to match it.
He is far more concerned with near-term harms from already-existing AI, such as discrimination in cases where it interacts with humans.
‘Biggest thing ever’
The apparently stark gulf in outlook between academics and AI industry leaders may simply reflect people’s attitudes as they pick a career path, suggested Sean O hEigeartaigh, director of the AI: Futures and Responsibility programme at Britain’s Cambridge University.
“If you are very optimistic about how powerful the present techniques are, you’re probably more likely to go and work at one of the companies that’s putting a lot of resource into trying to make it happen,” he said.
Even if Altman and Amodei may be “quite optimistic” about rapid timescales and AGI emerges much later, “we should be thinking about this and taking it seriously, because it would be the biggest thing that would ever happen,” O hEigeartaigh added.
“If it were anything else… a chance that aliens would arrive by 2030 or that there’d be another giant pandemic or something, we’d put some time into planning for it”.
The challenge can lie in communicating these ideas to politicians and the public.
Talk of super-AI “does instantly create this sort of immune reaction… it sounds like science fiction,” O hEigeartaigh said.
Dollar Tree really has a discount for everyone. A group of private equity investors agreed to buy the flailing Family Dollar chain for $1 billion, a sharp loss for the Dollar Tree, which acquired it ten years ago for roughly $9 billion.
Brigade Capital Management and Macellum Capital Management will take over the nearly 7,000 Family Dollar stores. That’ll halve the number of stores Dollar Tree operates under its umbrella.
Why couldn’t Dollar Tree make Family Dollar work?
When Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar in 2015, it outbid rival Dollar General in hopes of cementing its status as the king of budget retailers. But Dollar Tree quickly learned that it had snapped up poorly maintained stores and found that Family Dollar had a different customer base that proved to be challenging to serve.
Family Dollar serves lower-income shoppers and sells a range of household items at varied, but still cheap, price points. Dollar Tree’s customer base tends to have higher incomes and tends to use the store for craft and party supplies that predominantly cost around $1.
But when Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores were near each other, they were just similar enough to cannibalize each other’s foot traffic. The business also faced stiff competition from retailers like Amazon and Walmart.
The icing on the small, heavily discounted cake was the Justice Department slapping Family Dollar with a record $41.6 million fine for selling items that were stored in a West Memphis warehouse that was littered with not just live rats, but dead and decaying ones as well.
After it drops the Family Dollar baggage…Dollar Tree said yesterday it’s gaining market share among its higher income customers and may aim to offset President Trump’s tariffs by raising prices at some locations. In 2021, the chain increased prices to $1.25 saying it would allow stores to offer a wider range of products.—MM
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