Meet the World’s Most Unconven tional CEOs | OZY’s Highlights

This OZY original series will teach you all about business leaders who lead straight off the beaten path.

Look, we get it. CEOs are cookie-cutters in suits — the same degree, the same tie, the same eat-or-be-eaten approach.

Except that’s not really true. Not anymore. OZY’s series on Unconventional CEOs is here to tell you all about a crop of business leaders who aren’t doing the same old thing — whether that’s with their employees, with their shareholders’ money or with their own lives.

Anni Chen runs a wildly successful platform for comic artists in China. And she’s thinking bigger.

Chen remembers always drawing. In kindergarten, she wasn’t satisfied with tracing Chinese characters. Her hand would find blank spots on pages to fill with fish or birds. Her teachers didn’t mind, she says; they liked her illustrations. There weren’t many well-known Chinese comic books in the 1990s, so Chen devoured Japanese anime like Doraemon and Naruto. And she kept drawing, filling more space with more personal images. In primary school, as she drew frames in the style of her favorite comics, she began adding herself as a character.

Arsen Tomsky believes he’s created a ride-hailing app for freedom-loving folks.

A young Egor Fedorov was stunned when he walked into his first interview around a decade ago with his future boss — a big-thinking Siberian whose innovative ride-hailing app, inDriver, is quickly gaining popularity despite its roots deep in Russia’s hinterland. Prepared for the usual range of boilerplate questions (Where did you study? How much experience do you have?), Fedorov, 33, now the company’s chief marketing officer, realized he was in for something entirely different.