Meet Fortune’s first female CEO
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! JPMorgan's board spotlighted two women executives as leading CEO candidates, former President Donald Trump updates his stance on abortion, and Fortune names its first female CEO. Have a lovely Tuesday.
- Fortune's first. When Anastasia Nyrkovskaya was growing up outside of Moscow in a town that was hidden from maps, she decided to pursue a career in business. Her parents and their friends were all rocket scientists, part of Russia’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project. She knew she wasn’t going to follow their path—”My parents were so incredibly smart, and I knew there was no way I could do that,” she says—and set out to build a different kind of career.
That career reaches a milestone today: Anastasia is the new CEO of Fortune, the first woman to lead the media organization. Anastasia joined Fortune in 2019 as CFO and later added chief strategy officer to her title. She takes over from Fortune CEO Alan Murray and joins editor-in-chief and chief content officer Alyson Shontell in steering a women-led news organization.
Anastasia started her career with KPMG in Russia after earning her MBA. That job moved her to New York in 2001; what was meant to be a short stint in the U.S. turned into two decades here. After KPMG, she assumed finance leadership positions at several companies, including NBCUniversal, where she built her media chops in corporate strategy and M&A working on acquisitions including MSNBC.com and the Weather Channel and the formation of Hulu.
“I love that we’re creating something,” she says of the media industry. “We create something that people rely on for their decision-making abilities, for their companies, and for the bigger picture.”
As she takes the reins at Fortune, a 95-year-old magazine, Anastasia is focused on our next century. Her priorities include growing Fortune’s conference business (for example, she’s proud that Fortune established its Brainstorm AI franchise a few years before the start of the AI craze); building out Fortune’s rankings from the well-known Fortune 500 and Most Powerful Women lists to more specialized lists; and pursuing further international expansion.
She says that her early career at KPMG taught her many of the fundamentals—like agility, a must-have for the news business—that prepared her for her first CEO job. Her years as a finance exec, she says, also readied her for this role. “It gives you tremendous insight and almost a leg up because you understand numbers and know how to read them…and can connect them to one bigger picture,” she says.
As Fortune becomes a woman-led business, Anastasia points out that the company’s workforce is 70% women across business and editorial. “It’s just an incredibly iconic brand with an incredible heart,” she says. “And with journalism at its core.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
