Fast Company magazine

Fast Company

October 2009 cover of Fast Company
Editor	Robert Safian
Categories	Business magazine
Frequency	10 times per year
Publisher	Fast Company, Inc
Total circulation (June 2012)	757,858
First issue	November 1995
Company	Mansueto Ventures
Country	USA
Language	English
Website	Official website
ISSN	1085-9241

Fast Company is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes 10 print issues per year. Robert Safian has been the editor-in-chief since 2007, having previously worked at Fortune, Time, and Money. Fast Company is owned by Mansueto Ventures and is headquartered in New York, New York.

Fast Company was launched in November 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, two former Harvard Business Review editors, and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.

The publication's early competitors included Red Herring, Business 2.0 and the The Industry Standard.

In 1997, Fast Company created an online social network, the "Company of Friends" which spawned a number of groups that began meeting in person. At one point the Company of Friends had over 40,000 members in 120 cities, although by 2003 that number had declined to 8,000.

In 2000, Zuckerman sold Fast Company to Gruner + Jahr, majority owned by media giant Bertelsmann, for $350 million. At the time this was the second largest amount for any US magazine in history. Webber and Taylor left the magazine, and John A. Byrne, previously with BusinessWeek, was brought in as the new editor. Although the magazine was not specifically about Internet commerce, readership declined sharply following the collapse of the dot-com bubble. By 2003 newsstand sales had declined by half, and advertising pages were one-third the 2000 numbers.

In 2005, Gruner + Jahr sold the magazine, as well as Inc. magazine, to Joe Mansueto's company Mansueto Ventures for $35 million.