This weekend marks the twenty year anniversary of Fast Company Magazine.

Founding editor Bill Taylor sent out a tweet asking for fans for their favorite stories under the hashtag #fastcompanyreunion.

I recently wrote my letter of love for the My Favo(u)rite Magazine project. It seems like the perfect time to share that piece a little more widely.

I encountered Fast Company in its early teens and quickly fell in love. Each month, I waited by the mailbox for the next issue like I was eleven years old again awaiting the arrival of the Christmas Wishbook from Sears .

Founding editors Alan Webber and Bill Taylor described their vision for a new business magazine as a cross between Fortune and Rolling Stone. At its height, Fast Company was certainly that. Its pages showed corporate elephants could dance alongside agile upstarts, both groups newly supercharged by the spread of technology’s disruptive energy.

I bought into the vision. I drank the Kool-Aid. I even left the too safe corporate gig to find my Free Agent/Purple Cow/Brand You world. All because of a magazine.

I could pick almost any issue from those early years for the impact they had on me, but the September 1999 issue still stands out. The cover package looks straight past Y2K crisis looming on the horizon and asks what is going to be important in the 21st century. The magazine was never about now; it was always about next.

The apex of the dot-com boom gave them the ad pages to publish a 364 page book that month. The magazine put Muhammad Yunus across from Andy & Kate Spade. They report on U.S. Special Operations Command and an Australian real estate company. They visit outdoor equipment maker K2 and ask J. Craig Venter about the future of genetics. And they present AOL’s acquisition of Netscape as a three act play with a sidebar recommending a 19 year old book, best for dealing with organizational change.

Fast Company drew inspiration from any and all appropriate sources. Business as a pursuit was always reported in the positive and the possible. They suggested a new agenda for the new economy, asked us to talk amongst ourselves and then go make something happen in the new century.