10/10 - THE 10 MOST INNOVATIVE PEOPLE OF THE LAST 10 YEARS

In honor of Fast Company's 10th Innovation Festival in September, we identified 10 industrious leaders whose groundbreaking efforts defined the past decade in business. We spoke to them about their extraordinary achievements in tech, medicine, entertainment, and more. And we explored how the impact of their work has withstood passing fads, various presidential administrations, a pandemic, and many, many quarterly reports.

- AMY WALLACE, KC Ifeanyi, Issie Lapowsky, Jeff Beer, Ainsley Harris, Amy Farley, Morgan Clendaniel, Jill Bernstein, Harry McCracken, KC Ifeanyi

TED SARANDOS

CO-CEO, NETFLIX

TED SARANDOS STEPPED OFF AN ELECTRIC golf cart in the Albuquerque summer heat, ducked into a state-of-the-art soundstage, and entered another world.

"Looks just like a hospital," he said as a production assistant guided him past wheelchairs and a mannequin strapped to a gurney. This was the set of Pulse, a new original series that unfolds in Miami's busiest Level 1 trauma center, and as word spread that the boss had arrived, co-showrunner Carlton Cuse emerged from what looked like an operating room and shook Sarandos's hand.

"That's a cut!" someone yelled, as Cuse, best known as a showrunner on ABC's Lost, began a tour of Pulse's faux hospital, featuring a two-story entryway, full-on emergency room, scrub-in area, and long hallways where actors could perform "walk and talk" scenes without running into a wall.

Pulse, set to debut next year, is Netflix's first medical procedural, or "case of the week" show. Along with crime shows like Law & Order, medical procedurals have long been the bread and butter of traditional TV. Viewers love them because they reliably deliver on an expected formula (and can be watched out of order). And they cost less to make than serialized, prestige dramas.

"What you really hope," Sarandos said as he traversed the expanded Netflix Studios Albuquerque-12 soundstages on 108 acres, with a solar array and battery storage system, geothermal heating and cooling, and 50 electric vehicle fast chargers-is that Pulse "is a long-running show so all this investment makes more sense."