Wheel of Fortune
Business analyst or corporate fluffer?
Fortune is a mainstay business magazine so I was curious to find out how they covered Osmo, the great and powerful startup of smell (Inside the $130M AI Quest to Decode Scent, July 16, 2026).
They had senior writer and editor Allie Garfinkle host a video on Fortune’s YouTube channel in which she interviewed Osmo CEO Alex Wiltschko, Osmo Master Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, and Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe (an early Osmo investor). The video is only eleven minutes long but it’s enough to make your head spin.
Why? For starters, it’s a rehash of outdated clichés (e.g., dogs have a better sense of smell than humans) and bogus Osmo PR talking points (e.g., we published more fragrance patents in 2025 than the entire industry combined).
It’s also full of nonsequiturs and misdirections. Take, for example, the segment beginning at 3:30 where Ms. Garfinkle wanders around the NYSE sniffing things.
“We took Osmo’s tech to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to see if a machine could actually capture the smell of ambition.”
Here are some questions that came to mind as I watched this segment.
Q: Who is “we”? What person or technology from Osmo accompanied AG to the NYSE?
A: We are not told.
Q: Was an air sample taken from the NYSE?
A: Evidently not.
Q: So in what sense did a machine “actually capture the smell of ambition”?
A: Alex Wiltschko entered a prompt (“What does the New York stock market smell like?”) into the proprietary Osmo Studio software and it returned two fragrance formulas.
Q: How were these formulas evaluated for realism and/or match-to-brief?
A: Ms. Garfinkle smelled and responded to them on camera.
Here is her take on the first trial:
Well, it smells a lot better than the New York Stock Exchange, which is frankly a little bit of a sweatier place. But it does actually smell like the digital quality of it.
Q: What does the “digital quality” of a stock exchange smell like?
A: I don’t have a freaking clue.
This is her take on the second trial scent:
This feels like a marble lobby where a musky warmth settles on polished stone. I can’t stop smelling.
Q: What does polished stone smell like?
A: It appears to smell like a compliant, accommodating video host blowing hot air to fill screen time.
I’ll leave it at that, but there is a lot more puzzling stuff to explore here.
>Why does a company with a revolutionary, smell-predicting AI need to employ not one but two Master Perfumers?
>When Garfinkle asks Wiltschko “Who are your competitors?”, he answers with a classic startup faux pas: “I don’t think there’s anybody out there that’s as weird as we are.” Why does she let that slide?
>How does creating fast fragrances for fledgling perfume brands pair up with discovering disease-specific odor profiles to make business sense as a single company?
Look, if this was a video by a monetized YT influencer I wouldn’t be posting about it. But this is Forbes Magazine profiling a flashy tech startup. Viewers might reasonably expect a couple of incisive questions. Or at least one. Instead they get something that plays like a paid promo. It’s embarrassing to watch.