That may be in part due to the number of tourists and convention-goers bringing their laptops to the city.
While ransomware can infect computers anywhere, researchers from security firm Malwarebytes say certain cities have been particularly hard hit, with the Las Vegas area at the top of the list.
The Santa Clara company detects the malicious software on devices in the Las Vegas/Henderson area at a rate 500 times the average of the top 40 U.S. cities by ransomware detection, the company said this week. The city sees the most infections overall, as well as the most infections per computer and per resident, according to the company.
That may be in part due to the number of tourists and convention-goers bringing their laptops to Las Vegas—then, after days filled with work and play, forgetting all the lessons they've heard about keeping their computers safe, says Adam Kujawa, head of malware intelligence at Malwarebytes.
"They might have a few drinks, they'll relax, they'll see a show—that kind of environment is created almost specifically to lower people's guards," he says. "It makes it a really prime situation for cybercriminals to dupe users."
After ransomware gets on a computer, it typically encrypts files and effectively holds them prisoner until the owner pays a bounty. It's often installed by clicking on attachments in scam emails or through automated downloads from malware-infected websites.
While security firm Symantec said in a July report that the majority of ransomware infections are on consumer-owned, rather than corporate, machines, the attacks have also disabled computers at institutions from hospitals to police departments. Last month, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency shut down fare payment systems and offered free subway rides after the agency said ransomware struck more than 900 office computers.
"The SFMTA has never considered paying the ransom," the agency said in a statement. "We have an information technology team in place that can restore our systems, and that is what they are doing."
In general, corporate networks get infected through the same types of attacks that infect personal machines, Kujawa says.
"The intentional attack of large organizations, while it does happen, is not that common, and much more often these people might get infected by a mass campaign that one of their employees might fall for, and then it spreads through the network," he says.
The company's study, which tracked 400,000 cases where ransomware was detected from July through October, including incidents in more than 200 countries, found the U.S. overall had by far the greatest share of ransomware attacks, with 26% of all studied incidents, similar to numbers reported earlier this year by Symantec.
"We wanted to see exactly what countries, what parts of the world, and even what cities were being hit the most," Kujawa says. "We found that the USA was actually hit the most, more than any country out there, with Germany being hit second."
Ransomware attackers use increasingly sophisticated and targeted phishing emails to dupe victims, often masquerading as banks or payment providers like PayPal, he says. Many attackers are customers of so-called ransomware-as-a-service providers, which develop the software and split profits with attackers who craft the actual emails luring victims.
"If they want to hire a scammer or spammer or somebody who might be running a malvertising campaign or just a drive by exploit campaign, they can do that," Kujawa says.
The most common ransomware variant found in the Malwarebytes study was Cerber, which first appeared in March and is believed to be created by a ransomware-as-a-service provider based in Russia. The malware will generally refuse to infect computers in Russia and other former Soviet nations, according to Malwarebytes.
Rounding out the list of top U.S. cities for ransomware infection were Memphis, Tennessee; Stockton, California; Detroit, Michigan; Toledo, Ohio; Cleveland, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Buffalo , New York; San Antonio, Texas; and Fort Wayne, Indiana, according to Malwarebytes.
Many newcomers to self-employment have no experience running a business, a fact that some companies take advantage of.
More people are working for themselves than ever before, but that doesn't mean the new ranks of gig workers, so-called "solopreneurs," and everybody in between are finally freed from experiencing the corporate world—far from it.
The clients that independent workers take on inevitably put them (back) into contact with work cultures, expectations, and financial pitfalls that many had hoped self-employment would mean a clean break with. And that's true not just of the businesses independents contract with but also of the third-party platforms that match both parties up. Here's a look at how to navigate that dynamic and some of the risks it contains.
A recent McKinsey & Company survey estimated that as many as 68 million people in the U.S. work for themselves. Some may have been lured into self-employment with the dream of becoming their own bosses. For them, the transition was deliberate and liberating. Others took on solo work simply out of necessity, for instance after being laid off.
Regardless, the growth of independent work is coinciding with the rise of populism and trade protectionism, two currents in American politics and society that we've seen accelerating in 2016 as traditional employer-employee work arrangements continue to erode. The more companies hire contract workers rather than employees, the more people will find themselves in unfamiliar territory.
And the fact is that most new independents have no experience running a business, let alone branding and marketing themselves, and that leaves many of them vulnerable. Startups and platforms have emerged to support the gig economy, leading many new independents to outsource essential business functions like customer acquisition. But all methods of starting your business in the gig economy aren't equal, and plenty of corporate clients are likely (intentionally or not) to take advantage of that.
The three main approaches to getting started as an independent—gig work, contracting, and solopreneurship—vary widely, largely depending on a few basic criteria that differs for each of them:
the ease of getting basic operations up and running
who actually owns the customers
who sets the prices
Each one may put independent workers on the hook for other businesses' cultures, expectations, and decisions—sometimes to a dangerous degree.
Typically task- or project-based, gig work is often short in duration, with terms set by a company that has access to a large customer base for gig workers to tap into. These are the Ubers and Lyfts of the world—their business models rest in part on how easy they make it for workers to get started earning an income. You can obtain clients without doing much to sell your services. And that quick access to customers can give first-time giggers a much-needed burst of enthusiasm and momentum right out of the gates.
In these arrangements, companies typically retain control over the customers and set the prices, which means they can unilaterally change the fee structure without gig workers' consent (or even notice). If the company has a hard time attracting customers, for instance, they're likely to pass off the cost of promotions on to their workforces. There's also little way to brand yourself on gig platforms, so you'll have to teach yourself the marketing and sales skills you need if you ultimately decide to leave the platform and go it alone.
A short-term gig might be a good fit if you need to earn extra money on the side of a full-time job, make money fast after an unexpected layoff, or support yourself while in school. But be careful about considering this a long-term career path. Some who've tried that don't exactly recommend it.
Often synonymous with "freelancing," contract work has become easier than ever with marketplaces like Upwork, which offer experienced professionals the resources to build a robust freelance business. You can set the price and determine the work you want to take, giving you more control than you'd typically have over gig work. Still, there are downsides to this business shortcut, too.
For one thing, the leading freelancer marketplaces often take 10–20% of your income as a fee for finding the business. For another, it can be hard to stand out against the hordes of other freelancers, many of them similarly qualified. To build your reputation on a given platform and attract enough work, you may have to lower your rate. As your only revenue source, you're dependent on the platform to connect you with high-quality work and clients who treat you with respect.
This is where your clients' work cultures can do some real damage to your livelihood. Wittingly or otherwise, customers contracting with professionals on these marketplaces can tend to see them as commodities, leading them to bargain intensely over price. When disputes arise, the platform may side with the client, and you may find yourself out of work.
If you don't have an extensive network, freelance marketplaces may be a good way to hunt down your first clients. Even then, though, your contract may restrict you from taking those customers when you leave, so you'll have to create your brand from scratch. If you plan to work for yourself indefinitely, it's usually smarter to use these marketplaces only to get started building your brand and marketing funnel.
As a solopreneur, you're wholly responsible for your income, which means you're armed with the best defenses against disrespectful or exploitative clients—which you're also free to ditch when you need to.
Building a brand takes time, so you may have to trade early revenue for having a greater say over your business. The main reason to take this path, though, is ultimate command over your customers, price, and work. It certainly takes more effort to get there, but in my experience, being in charge of your own business can be incredibly empowering.
That said, self-promotion is a major obstacle for many new solopreneurs who've never had to sell themselves outside of a job search. Gig work and freelance marketplaces are attractive because they let you avoid having to confront those marketing challenges (and attendant anxieties) head-on. But once you do, you own the tools for revenue generation, and ultimately give yourself the best chance for long-term success as a result.
Working for yourself might feel like finally gaining more freedom, but it also introduces far more risk. In the case of gig and contract work, someone else effectively owns your revenue stream; you're just renting space.
What you gain in quick income, you give up in control, leaving you vulnerable to shifts in budget, the vagaries of state law, and broader economic changes—not to mention an array of pressures from idiosyncratic clients. And as a contract or gig worker, should the marketplace you rely on shutter without warning, you're left hanging—there are no vital financial lifelines like severance pay or unemployment insurance.
Relying on a third party platform for your entire customer base leaves you tethered to someone else's business. So be careful about banking your livelihood on a platform that you don't own. However you choose to work for yourself, always put your brand and business first.
Obama built a formidable tech infrastructure in the White House. It's now Trump's to lose.
It's hard to remember how technologically backward the White House was when President Obama entered office.
These days, Obama posts selfies on Instagram and wishes Joe Biden happy birthday from his official Twitter account. He introduced hackathons to crowdsource solutions for improving cities, foster care, and the education system. He hosted a Demo Day that, in the startup spirit, invited innovators to "demo" their successes and spur other Americans to pursue game-changing ideas.
But when Obama's transition team arrived at the White House in late 2008, it was clear that they were entering an institution where tech innovation was not a priority. Dan McSwain remembers this well. He had been part of Obama's campaign, where his job was to send emails to 13 million supporters. When he showed up for his first day of work as the White House's email writer/producer, he tried to download Firefox on his office computer. He was promptly told by a government employee to cut it out: the only lawyer-approved browser was Internet Explorer. "We had been used to publishing video, streaming live events online, maintaining comments sections, posting to Twitter," McSwain says. "We couldn't do any of those things because none of them had government-ready privacy standards."
Over the last eight years, Obama has upended the way the executive branch of government interacts with technology. When President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House in January, he'll find the place buzzing with tech talent. As part of his legacy, Obama will be leaving Trump with an in-house startup called the United States Digital Service that pairs the nation's top tech talent with public servants, and a consulting firm called 18F that government agencies can hire to build websites, manage data, or do user research.
But as McSwain's experience demonstrates, it took a lot of effort to bring the government to this level of ease with technology. All of Obama's hard work is now Trump's to preserve and push forward—or squander.
To see how we got to the White House's current state of tech savviness, it's worth looking back at Obama's relationship with technology from his earliest days as a presidential candidate.
In his first bid for the White House, Obama ran the most technologically advanced campaign the country had ever seen. He fashioned his team much like a startup, complete with a chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who was tasked with finding new ways to speak to voters. This meant tapping into social media tools that had just been invented. "We were trying to involve more new people in politics," recalls Slalby, now head of mission at the tech agency Timshel. "We weren't building a lot of technology because we didn't have time, but we were opportunistic consumers of new platforms. We tried Facebook, we tried MySpace, we tried other social networks that don't even exist anymore."
When Obama won, Slaby and many of his colleagues, including McSwain, became part of the digital transition team. McSwain remembers that a big part of his job in those early days was recruiting lawyers from the presidential transition team to work with social media and internet companies to write new terms of service that were amenable to the government's data and privacy requirements. But first they had to make their way through red tape. "We should have understood more clearly that this was a harbinger of what was to come," he says. "But we were just so excited. We were 25-year-old kids and just helped elect the first African-American president. No one could tell us there was something we couldn't do."
Over the next few months, things changed. Lawyers vetted each new tech tool, from McSwain's Firefox browser to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and iTunes. There were passionate discussions about overhauling the White House website, to make it easier for citizens to engage with the President and learn about his initiatives. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in March 2010, he created a massive digital health care exchange, a task that was ambitious even by Silicon Valley standards. (Although the first version of the website, launched in 2013, was riddled with problems, most of them were fixed by the end of open enrollment 2014, when more than 15 million previously uninsured Americans signed up for coverage.) His team built We The People, a digital platform that allows citizens to petition the White House, which has garnered more than 470,000 petitions, some of which have shaped policy on issues such as cell phone unlocking and net neutrality.
To make this happen, there had to be an infusion of tech talent. And Obama's team knew exactly where to find it: Silicon Valley.
Following Obama's victory, Katie Stanton, a Google executive who had volunteered for the campaign, received a call from the presidential transition team. They asked her to become the director of Citizen Participation, which would create channels for people to communicate directly with the White House.
Stanton brought her knowledge of technology and her ability to tackle these challenges nimbly; but she also brought her digital rolodex of contacts. When the team needed an expert, she could scroll through her phone to find someone with strong internet security credentials or someone who understood how to create open data platforms. Before the White House launched its Facebook account, she called a contact at the social media network to discuss the best practices to keep the account secure and reach the largest audience.
In some cases, the digital teams got advice from their friends in the Valley for free. In others, they would bring on advisors as official contractors or full fledged-employees for a short period of time. This was very different from previous administrations that relied on hiring big, expensive government contractors like Lockheed Martin for their technology infrastructure. "I understand why they are there, but it often wasn't the best outcome for the government because it just cost too much," Stanton says. "We were able to tap into innovators in the tech industry to ask them about better, less expensive ways to solve a problem."
Dozens of people like Stanton descended upon the White House during the early days of Obama's first term, though it was challenging to convince some of them to leave plush jobs in Silicon Valley to move to Washington. Stanton had always dreamed of pursuing public service of some kind, but even for her, it was a difficult choice because she had three young children who were happily settled in California. "It was a financially reckless decision," she says. "I was forced to sell all my Google stock. My salary got cut to a fifth of what it was."
Over the last few years, the administration has been refining its pitch to Silicon Valley talent. When he was White House CTO, Todd Park came up with the idea to create the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which invites techies to serve a "tour of duty"—i.e., a post for a limited amount of time, from a few months to a few years—and then return to their previous jobs. To maximize the efficiency of these short-term hires, the U.S. Digital Service connects techies with public servants to solve specific problems that can be solved in a more compact timeframe. Megan Smith, the current CTO, is continuing to develop this program. "When I went, it was ridiculously hard, because I had to just quit my job," Stanton says. "There are now guidelines so you don't have to lose your equity in your company."
Todd Park[Photo: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy]
Park has since left Washington for the Bay Area, where he recruits full-time for the White House. The large number of tech workers who have already spent time in the White House makes his work easier. "The government is definitely not a black box anymore," Park says. "People understand the decision to come serve. They understand how it works."
All of this set the stage for the current White House tech revolving door, through which top Silicon Valley talent enters the government on a temp basis, then returns to their native habitat. Stanton went back to Northern California after two years in D.C. She was proud of what she'd accomplished, including setting up a texting service that allowed American citizens to raise $33 million in a single week for the victims of the devastating hurricane in Haiti. She went on to run Twitter's international operations and now serves as the CMO of Color Genomics.
The influx of tech talent in the government means that more people are coming into contact with sensitive information, including troves of data about the American population. In fact, the government is now managing and deploying so much data that the White House created a new position last year: chief data scientist. D.J. Patil, who has held data and security positions at LinkedIn, Greylock Partners, Skype, PayPal, and eBay, was hired to fill the role. (Prior to entering the private sector, Patil served in the Department of Defense, developing systems to detect emerging digital threats to the U.S. post-9/11.)
The White House is now tackling more ambitious data projects than ever before. Take the Precision Medicine Initiative that was launched a year ago. The plan is to collect large quantities of data about American citizens to adjust medical treatments to an individual's unique makeup: their genome sequence, microbiome, health history, and lifestyle. Tailored treatment has already been shown to improve the outcomes of cancer and mental health treatment, among many other diseases.
But success depends on health care providers and patients sharing data—and sharing it in a format that can be easily transferred between parties. "Right now, you get your genome sequenced but you don't see it when you go to the pharmacist," Patil says. "How do we move the whole entire health care system into the genomic era? And how do we get the whole country there, rather than just small pockets?"
The government has already begun laying out some of the security principles that will have to be enforced so that this data doesn't get leaked and end up harming citizens in unforeseen ways, like influencing how insurers or employers treat people. To complicate matters even further, the White House is now working within an open data framework which seeks to make aggregated, anonymized data accessible to companies and individuals who want to use it for research or to develop new products. "Our mission is to responsibly unleash the power of data to benefit all Americans," Patil says. "Our goal is to make all these files open and machine readable because people want to use this data, whether it's weather data or health data."
Patil points out that these are data security issues that tech behemoths have been tackling for years. Google, Facebook, and Amazon already have stores of information about millions of users, while banks and health care companies have digitized user files. These organizations are at the forefront of data security, focused on encryption, anonymizing data, and creating tiers of security clearance.
Hiring tech experts familiar with these processes is advantageous: They bring the institutional knowledge with them and collaborate with various government agencies, such as the IRS or the Department of Education, to educate those agencies about the latest technologies and help them to keep the data secure. "They never have the data just sitting on a hard disk that somebody can just walk away with," Patil says. "If you work for—pick your favorite social media company—when you leave, you don't ever take the data with you, and you also turn in all of your equipment and credentials. That's just good data hygiene."
There's no doubt that bringing in an army of tech workers has allowed the White House to act more effectively in the digital era. But there are drawbacks too.
One issue is that the increased presence of techies in the government would seem to advance the Valley's ideology that technology is an inherently positive, democratizing force in society. Yet earlier this year, the World Bank determined that technology companies are exacerbating economic inequality, not improving it. The digital revolution has made technically skilled people more valuable to the workforce, while those without the requisite skill set have been shut out. This exclusion contributed to the anger and dissatisfaction that the working class expressed during the election. And while sharing-economy companies like Uber, Postmates, and TaskRabbit have created new jobs requiring various levels of expertise, workers are often on unstable footing as freelancers without the benefits of insurance.
But as Patil points out, the government does not function like a corporation, nor should it. While companies narrow in on one segment of consumers, the government must serve all citizens. And to that end, technology should be a positive force for everyone. "In the startup, the classic thing that we do is to focus on one market or one population that will be the end cases," he says. "But those end cases have names, those end cases are human. And when we ignore them because they don't make sense in the market, those are real lives that matter. We can't say, 'Sorry, we don't care about people who don't have connectivity or access to widgets.' We have to make sure it serves everyone, otherwise you don't build for the 100%."
Problems also arise when individual tech firms get too close to the White House. It is no secret that Google is the most popular tech landing spot for former White House officials. Records show that nearly 250 people have moved from the government to Google over the course of the Obama administration.
This has raised concerns that Google could be in a position to receive special favors from the White House. The Wall Street Journalstudied White House visitor logs and determined that Google met with high-ranking administration officials an average of once a week, which was significantly higher than other companies. (Google's lobbyist had three times more meetings at the White House than Comcast's, for instance.) Google employees were the second-largest source of donations for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, and hundreds of workers moved from Google to the White House or vice versa over the past eight years.
The Journalsuggested that this intimacy has worked to Google's advantage. In 2013, the FTC announced it was investigating whether the company was using anticompetitive tactics and abusing its monopoly in the marketplace. But Google managed to avoid a potentially damaging antitrust lawsuit because presidentially appointed FTC commissioners voted to end the probe. These days, Google's relationship with Washington is being closely watched by the nonprofit Campaign for Accountability, which will track future interactions between the two bodies.
Slaby believes that this kind of scrutiny is good and is facilitated by the fact that the White House makes all visitor logs public. "The lines around incentives can get blurry for people who are going back and forth, so positive revolving door rules around former elected officials lobbying their colleagues or political appointees lobbying their former teams are really important," he says. "We are losing a culture of public service by allowing public servants to optimize around future profit when they leave."
When Trump assumes office in January, he will have an army of tech talent at his disposal. Many jobs at 18F and the U.S. Digital Service have been written into the budget for the next few years and will remain, unless there is a special effort to eliminate them. It is possible that some tech employees will leave because they don't agree with Trump's policies. But others will likely choose to serve in the government because they feel a responsibility to the American people. "The most patriotic thing you can do is show up," Slaby says.
It is unclear what Trump plans to do with the tech infrastructure that Obama built. The White House laid out a plan for the digital transition, explaining how it will archive information and hand off social media handles to the next administration. However, Trump has said that he is in favor of a downsized government, so some tech jobs may be on the chopping block.
Even if Trump keeps the digital infrastructure largely intact, his approach to technology may prove to be quite different from Obama's. The current administration has used social media as a two-way communication tool, as much a platform for posting White House updates as it is a forum for the American people to offer feedback. So far, Trump's transition team has used technology primarily to communicate unidirectionally to the public. When Trump presented an update about the transition on YouTube last month, all comments were disabled. And transparency has not been a cornerstone of his campaign. He has withheld his own data—including tax returns—from the American people.
"It's a shame because there are a lot of fears in a lot of communities about what this administration could mean for them," McSwain says. "The technology that the Obama administration set up could be used to set up conversations with those communities. If they don't do that, it's a huge missed opportunity."
There are also concerns that some of Obama's tech platforms will be used for darker purposes than originally intended. There are fears, for instance, that social media becomes a tool for propaganda and online databases designed to help people end up harming them instead. Recall the recent talk of a Muslim database, for instance. Obama's 2012 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program invited undocumented immigrants to voluntarily hand over their personal information to the federal government to shield them from deportation and give them temporary employment authorization. Now the more than 800,000 people on that list feel extremely vulnerable, given that Trump has vowed to deport undocumented immigrants.
Some of these anxieties arise whenever there is a change of administration. Trump has not made any statements about whether technology in the White House will remain a priority. "We don't really know what President-elect Trump believes about how we get services from government," Slaby says. "We just haven't seen that level of detail." Trump's spokesperson did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Those who helped bring about Obama's vision for a tech-forward and innovative government will be paying close attention to what happens after January 20. But their hope is that Trump will take full advantage of the infrastructure that they spent years perfecting. "I desperately want his administration to succeed," McSwain says. "I desperately want his administration to leverage technology to the fullest extent that they can to deliver better services, increase government accountability, and show people that there's a real reason to have faith in their government."
Growing up with a speech impediment, one writer learned to hide behind confident people early on. Then he picked up their habits.
Growing up with a speech impediment, I was constantly in awe of confident people. Not only the way they talked, but the way that they moved and made me feel when I was around them.
But it didn't occur to me until much later that the one quality all my friends seemed to share was great confidence. I must have subconsciously chosen to hide behind them as a way to feel protected, to mask my own insecurities. After all, sometimes the safest place for the quietest kid to sit is behind the strongest kid.
Fast forward to age 23, when I did something really stupid: I got a sales job. Finding myself in this intimidating environment, I did what I always did and I buddied up with the most confident people in my office. It wasn't because I grasped the strategic importance of allying myself with well-liked people, it was just out of instinct—find the most confident people and hide among them.
This recurring defensive move has turned out to be the smartest thing I've ever unknowingly done. And after 38 years of doing it, I have picked up on a few common characteristics that are consistent in confident people—and managed to boost my own confidence in the process. Here are a few of those traits.
The truly confident always try to learn about the perspectives, thoughts, and feelings of the people around them, for the simple reasons that they like people and want to do good by them. They possess an "I can and will learn from everyone" attitude, with the belief that everyone has something to bring to the table.
Next time you're in a group setting, take note of who guides the conversation and how: Who asks the most thoughtful questions, and who listens more than they speak? Confident people don't need to control a conversation. They know their own agenda; they want to learn about yours.
Confident people are connectors. They know their goals and do what they can to help others achieve theirs. How do you feel when someone introduces you like, "You have to meet Tom, he was the guy I was telling you about earlier who is great at _____"? Pretty incredible, right? (Much better than just, "Oh, and this is my colleague Tom.") Confident people intuitively seek out how they can add value to their circle and extend it every chance they get.
Confident people know what they want, and they have the gumption to keep fighting for it, even when the odds are stacked heavily against them. Then again, plenty of people do that. What separates the truly confident from the overconfident is their ability to seek out advice from people with varying points of view.
Not only that, but confident people tend to have the wherewithal to act when presented with a better alternative that challenges their own opinion. It's not a question of who's right or wrong. If there's a better idea, confident people adopt it, then thank the person for their advice and pay the favor forward.
Try not feeling important when someone says to you, "How's your amazing new project coming along?" Confident people check in on the progress of the people in their lives, because they truly care about their success. They listen attentively, recognize what's important to others, and then they follow up. It's a simple yet effective recipe for creating relationships that last, not just making great first impressions and leaving it at that.
When spending time with confident people, you'll not only see that they're being attentive, you'll feel it—in the way they position their bodies and make eye contact. They lean in when they sense something means a great deal to you and touch you when they feel a connection. Researchers have found that this congruence—between what's said out loud and what's communicated without words—is crucial for establishing trust. A very subtle touch, like a tap on the shoulder, can go a long way in reinforcing verbal support.
Attention feeds the human appetite on some level for everybody, but the truly confident, as Kareen Abdul Jabbar once put it, just want "to play the game well and go home."
I recently overheard someone say, "Surely you heard about what I did?" The crowd thinned out pretty quickly after that one. Confident people play for the name on the front of the jersey and deflect most attention onto the team—or onto someone who went unnoticed. They know that sharing the spotlight is far more satisfying than going it alone.
If you know what you want and are on a path to achieving it, what's stopping you from truly being happy for somebody who fought hard to achieve one of their goals? Confident people take real pleasure in seeing other people succeed and recognize the importance of supporting others. They remember how they, too, are empowered by others at key times in their lives. After all, being truly happy for other people has this funny way of adding to your own happiness.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned, though, is that while we all have fears and flaws, the key is not letting them get in the way of being you and going after what you want. My friends taught me that, and in turn taught me the true definition of confidence: Taking care of your own and giving them the power to one day take care of others.
Michael Thompson is a Barcelona-based freelance consultant working with entrepreneurs and small businesses that focus on career development and communication skills. He is the current brand manager of CORPORE Wear and lives in Catalunya.
The public divide between the intelligence agencies and the president-elect, who questions such Russian ties, is dangerous, say experts.
Just before Donald Trump takes the presidential oath of office next month, the Obama administration plans to release a full report on Russian connections to cyber attacks during the election, officials said Friday.
Trump has cast doubt on the Kremlin's involvement in politically charged hacking and fake news efforts prior to this year's election while leading members of Congress have called on the administration to share what it knows about the Russian connection and pushed for a wider investigation, leading to a potentially fiery showdown over the issue. And such a public divide between the president-elect and intelligence agencies is unusual and dangerous, say experts.
"To evaluate Congress's response appropriately, we would like all Members to have a comprehensive understanding of what the U.S. Intelligence Community knows regarding Russia's involvement in these actions and attempts to interfere in our election," the lawmakers wrote this week in an open letter to President Barack Obama.
Officials sometimes purposely share with Congress "only what is necessary for them to perform proper oversight," partially as a safeguard against unintentional leaks, says Chris Finan, a former White House cybersecurity advisor and CEO of Bay Area security startup Manifold Technology. But in this case, Finan says it was more likely that intelligence agencies are still working to establish precisely how various efforts to influence the election link back to the top levels of the Russian government.
"They'd want to try to find deliberate command and control links—instances where people were directed by a Russian official," he says. "I think that there's probably a lot of interest and focus in, are these proxy groups operating on their own based on what they thought Moscow would want them to do or were they acting on a directive from somebody in the Russian government."
Prominent Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced a bill on Wednesday calling for a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian attempts to influence the election. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings cited October statements from intelligence officials blaming Russia for hacks targeting Democratic Party servers and subsequent leaks of embarrassing emails.
"The head of the National Security Agency said there is no doubt that this was a targeted and conscious effort to achieve a specific result," Cummings said in a statement. "And the Intelligence Community also said that they believe that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
Prominent Republican senators including Arizona Senator and Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina, and Tennessee Senator and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker have also all expressed interest in investigating Russian hacks, despite the president-elect's skepticism. House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, has also recently publicly condemned Russia for the attacks despite his support for Trump.
Trump said in an interview with Time magazine, which named him 2016's "Person of the Year," that he doesn't believe Russia interfered with the election and thinks intelligence agency conclusions may have been politically motivated.
Trump's statements drew a strong rebuke from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, who called his comments "enormously damaging to the country" and to intelligence officials.
"Notwithstanding the abundance of evidence that Russia hacked our political institutions during the Presidential campaign and dumped documents in an effort to meddle in our political affairs, President-elect Trump's comments this morning continue to contradict our intelligence professionals and carry water for the Kremlin," Schiff said in a statement.
Schiff declined through a spokesman to comment further on the matter, and a Trump spokeswoman didn't respond to an email seeking comment.
Such a divide over the legitimacy of intelligence reports is highly unusual, particularly when conclusions within the intelligence community seem so unanimous, Finan says.
"Not only is it unusual—it's incredibly dangerous," he says. "To question the veracity but also to question the professionalism of our intelligence community, that is potentially very damaging to morale and it's going to put the nation at risk."
This video group-chat app is about hanging out, not broadcasting. And with more than a million users, it's off to a good start.
On February 29th, 2016—that's Leap Day—the team members behind Meerkat secretly launched a new live-streaming app. Rather than pitch reporters or spend money on ads to promote it, they opted to just put the app in the App Store and see what happened. To help keep their identity secret and avoid potential coverage, they identified the developer using a pseudonym rather than credit Alexander Herzick, who happens to be the husband of the app's cofounder, Sima Sistani .
Houseparty is actually the fourth attempt by Meerkat's creators to build the perfect live-streaming app. The idea behind remaining secretive about its origins was so they could determine if this new app truly fulfilled that vision.
"The mission of the company is to connect people in the most human way possible when physically apart," says Sistani. "And our hypothesis has been that mobile live video is the best way to do that."
Meerkat offered one-to-many broadcasting and appealed to people like influencers, brands, celebrities, and media companies, most of which already had existing audiences somewhere else that they wanted to connect with through live video. But it missed the mark when it came to the company's mission of connecting individuals.
"The metaphor that we kept using internally was we built a theater, but for everybody to use this and for it to be a daily habit, we should build a house party," says Sistani. As they started to build the product the name stuck, and Houseparty was born.
Meerkat launched in February 2015 to a great deal of excitement but was quickly overtaken by Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live, both of which have a better built-in way to connect users with viewers. Meerkat originally used Twitter to connect friends, but the social network cut off its access to the Twitter graph during last year's SXSW, offering just two hours notice. It was a warning sign for the Meerkat team, who soon began working on something new, something they hoped would help users connect to friends better than Meerkat was ever able to do.
"We went to the board and kind of explained why Meerkat is dead and why live video basically is going to be owned by Facebook and we should just move on," says cofounder and CEO Ben Rubin. (The Meerkat app disappeared from app stores last September.)
The idea behind the app is to create a virtual space where you can hang out with your friends—a "house party" where everyone you know is invited. When a friend loads the app, you'll get a notification letting you know they're in the house. If you're around and want to chat, then you launch the app and join as well.
"We believe that live is the most true form of communication," says Rubin. "We're trying to become this internet living room or place where you go and you hang out with people that you actually care about."
Chats are organized by room, and anyone you're friends with on the app has a virtual invitation to drop in on your conversation. Their friends can also join, in which case you'll see a "Stranger Danger" message. Beyond that, it's just like any other "party" where you can just freely chat with friends. Up to eight people can be in a room at a time, and you can casually move between rooms to interact with different groups of friends. When you want to prevent people from joining a private conversation, you can lock the room.
It's a different approach than broadcasting tools such as Facebook Live or Periscope. "We're just trying to bring you closer to your real-life network, not something that's like vying for likes or hearts or followers," says Sistani.
What makes the experience compelling is its casual nature. Rubin notes that if someone talked about hanging out with friends tonight, you'd assume that meant in the same physical location. But with Houseparty, that get-together can happen virtually, and with people you might not otherwise have the opportunity to see.
One weekday night, for instance, I started chatting with a Los Angeles friend of mine who I haven't seen in quite some time. I've never video-chatted with her before, in part because that's always seemed like something you would set up beforehand—"Hey, want to video chat at 6 p.m. on Tuesday?"—rather than do on an impromptu basis. We're both busy people, too, so coordinating anything would likely have been a nightmare.
She happened to be live in the app, and I joined a room with her and her father, who she was trying to convince to download the app so they could stay in touch. We chatted for a while, and then another friend of hers joined the room, and then two of my friends—one in North Carolina, one in Las Vegas. Soon we had six people from around the country in a single room hanging out, all unplanned. That room led to a few spinoff rooms, and soon we had something that was starting to look like a real party on our hands.
And speaking of parties, Houseparty is a popular one. Just two months after that stealthy App Store launch, it rose to #1 in the store's overall rankings and #2 for social networking. The only marketing the company did was to tell students about the app at their alma maters.
"And then the back-end totally shit the bed because we weren't ready for that kind of scale," says Sistani. Through June and July the app's servers failed for hours at a time, sometimes to a point where people couldn't even log into the app. When the team was finally able to get everything up and running perfectly in August, miraculously enough, users came back—and they brought their friends. It resonated so much with them that they were willing to deal with some (huge) technical snafus.
Since August, Houseparty has seen steady growth. Currently, it has over a million daily active users and is the #2 app on Apple's free social networking chart, right between Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself. It's being used for everything from catching up with family across the country to recapping the day's activities after school with a group of friends. Teens are holding virtual study sessions and brushing their teeth together before bed. (For now, the company is focusing on expanding its user base even further; turning it into a moneymaking business will come later.)
Houseparty's target audience and its primary users are Gen Z, the next generation after millennials. A whopping 60% of the apps users are under the age of 24. Sistini remarks that the Gen Z audience, in particular, is interested in being involved more in things that are "me, plus my people" instead of platforms, like Meerkat, where they're the sole focus of all of the attention and have to present a polished, perfect version of themselves.
"They're looking for that authenticity, says Sistani. "I think that's what we're doing well with Houseparty. It's wholesome and it's authentic."
A newly formed group of executives from large companies hope to hold each other accountable for their gender hiring goals.
Technology may be pushing the rate of change ever faster, but so far, no app or bot has been able to accelerate the pace of parity for women in leadership.
According to the most recent report by LeanIn.org and McKinsey, women account for only 20% of staff at the senior vice president level and 20% of line roles that lead to the C-suite. This is based on the report's survey of 132 companies that employ more than 4.6 million people. This is a problem because line roles are often a direct pipeline to the C-suite. In 2015, 90% of new CEOs in the S&P 500 were promoted or hired from line roles. Overall, this has translated to having only 27 female CEOs at the helm of major public companies, according to the latest S&P Capital IQ. No wonder Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg lamented, "If NASA launched a person into space today, she could soar past Mars, travel all the way to Pluto, and return to Earth 10 times before women occupy half of C-suite offices."
Frustrated by the incremental gains, a group of female business leaders got together in June 2015 to see if they could find a way to speed up women's progress. The result of brainstorming with a larger group of male and female CEOs, executives, board chairpersons, and academics is a newly launched coalition called Paradigm for Parity (P4P).
Their call to action is to achieve full gender parity in all businesses across all levels of corporate leadership by 2030, with a near-term goal of women holding at least 30% of senior roles. To meet the metric, the coalition came up with a five-point action plan that includes setting measurable targets for women's representation at every level and communicating that progress regularly, providing both mentors and sponsors for high performing women, basing promotions on performance and not just presence in the office, and training employees to identify unconscious bias.
A broad range of leaders who have pledged to make this happen are the CEOs of Accenture, Bank of America, CocaCola, Huffington Post, LinkedIn, and more than 20 other organizations.
P4P doesn't have any formal measures in place to hold participating companies accountable, but it encourages them to report on progress. As for the early goal of achieving 30% parity, P4P cochair Ellen Kullman stated that "companies are in very different places" with gender diversity. Rather than push for parity immediately, the cochairs and the other executives agreed that 30% would be a good shorter-term metric. "Showing real progress creates momentum," Kullman says.
For instance, some companies have already made progress toward gender parity in leadership. Pierre Nanterme, chairman and CEO of Accenture, who was also on the conference call announcing the program, spoke of the company's current progress toward its own diversity goals. In February, Accenture became the first major consulting firm to publish a detailed report card on the diversity of its workforce. In the U.S., women account for 36% of its staff, and about one-third of its executive team. Said Nanterme, "Going public is incredible incentive to exceed the goals."
One company that's planning to go public as a result is global leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder. Karl Alleman, the U.S. managing partner who also signed the pledge, points out that the company has already made strides. "We are applying the P4P to the consultant group, which is made up of 472 consultants, 33% of whom are female. In the firm, we have just under 1,800 employees, 67% of whom are female," he explains. Additionally, he says 40% of the firm's executive committee is female.
Now Alleman says Egon Zehnder is planning to share its diversity profile on its external website soon, but it will first be shared internally in January.
The willingness of these companies to publish progress stands in sharp contrast to a recent announcement by Twitter, eBay, Salesforce, and Pinterest, which have decided to delay the release of their latest diversity stats and hinted that future reports may focus more on hiring initiatives.
Another big piece of P4P's so-called road map for parity includes providing sponsorship so female employees can be primed for leadership roles. Each of the six executives on the call reiterated the importance of sponsorship—someone within the company actively advocating for an employee's advancement—to get more women promoted.
A 2014 survey of 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates found both men and women equally ambitious, yet men were significantly more likely to have positions in senior management, direct reports, and profit-and-loss responsibility. More recent research from Katina Sawyer and Anna Marie Valerio published in the Harvard Business Reviewrevealed that not only do male sponsors help level the playing field for their female proteges, they tend to do so by involving both men and women to help with that advancement.
Sawyer and Valerio write:
Although many organizations have attempted to fight gender bias by focusing on women—offering training programs or networking groups specifically for them—the leaders we interviewed realized that any solutions that involve only 50% of the human population are likely to have limited success.
By being more inclusive, these "male champions" send the message that they care about the entire workforce more broadly.
Although P4P cochair Sandra Beach Lin maintained that each company would choose how they wanted to share their progress, shining a light on the sponsorship process could go a long way toward educating other companies on how to advance talented candidates from within.
Cyber attacks—and president-elect Trump's criticism of encryption and interest in expanding government surveillance—warrant more vigilance.
Protecting individual privacy from government intrusion is older than American democracy. In 1604, the attorney general of England, Sir Edward Coke, ruled that a man's house is his castle. This was the official declaration that a homeowner could protect himself and his privacy from the king's agents. That lesson carried into today's America, thanks to our Founding Fathers' abhorrence for imperialist Great Britain's unwarranted search and seizure of personal documents.
They understood that everyone has something to hide, because human dignity and intimacy don't exist if we can't keep our thoughts and actions private. As citizens in the digital age, that is much more difficult. Malicious hackers and governments can monitor the most private communications, browsing habits, and other data breadcrumbs of anyone who owns a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or personal computer.
As an ethical hacker, my job is to help protect those who are unable, or lack the knowledge, to help themselves. People who think like hackers have some really good ideas about how to protect digital privacy during turbulent times. Here's what they—and I—advise, and why. I have no affiliation or relationship with any of the companies listed below, except in some cases as a regular user.
When you're communicating with people, you probably want to be sure only you and they can read what's being said. That means you need what is called "end-to-end encryption," in which your message is transmitted as encoded text. As it passes through intermediate systems, like an email network or a cellphone company's computers, all they can see is the encrypted message. When it arrives at its destination, that person's phone or computer decrypts the message for reading only by its intended recipient.
For phone calls and private text-message-like communication, the best apps on the market are WhatsApp and Signal. Both use end-to-end encryption, and are free apps available for iOS and Android. In order for the encryption to work, both parties need to use the same app.
For private email, Tutanota and ProtonMail lead the pack in my opinion. Both of these Gmail-style email services use end-to-end encryption, and store only encrypted messages on their servers. Keep in mind that if you send emails to people not using a secure service, the emails may not be encrypted. At present, neither service supports PGP/GPG encryption, which could allow security to extend to other email services, but they are reportedly working on it. Both services are also free and based in countries with strong privacy laws (Germany and Switzerland). Both can be used on PCs and mobile devices. My biggest gripe is that only ProtonMail offers two-factor authentication for additional login security.
It is less straightforward to privately browse the internet or use internet-connected apps and programs. Internet sites and services are complicated business, often involving loading information from many different online sources. For example, a news site might serve the text of the article from one computer, photos from another, related video from a third. And it would connect with Facebook and Twitter to allow readers to share articles and comment on them. Advertising and other services also get involved, allowing site owners to track how much time users spend on the site (among other data).
The easiest way to protect your privacy without totally changing your surfing experience is to install a small piece of free software called a "browser extension." These add functionality to your existing web browsing program, such as Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. The two privacy browser extensions that I recommend are uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. Both are free, work with the most common web browsers, and block sites from tracking your visits.
If you want to be more secure, you need to ensure people can't directly watch the internet traffic from your phone or computer. That's where a virtual private network (VPN) can help. Simply put, a VPN is a collection of networked computers through which you send your internet traffic.
Instead of the normal online activity of your computer directly contacting a website with open communication, your computer creates an encrypted connection with another computer somewhere else (even in another country). That computer sends out the request on your behalf. When it receives a response—the webpage you've asked to load—it encrypts the information and sends it back to your computer, where it's displayed. This all happens in milliseconds, so in most cases it's not noticeably slower than regular browsing—and is far more secure.
For the simplest approach to private web browsing, I recommend Freedome by F-Secure because it's only a few dollars a month, incredibly easy to use, and works on computers and mobile devices. There are other VPN services out there, but they are much more complicated and would probably confuse your less technically inclined family members.
If you don't want anyone to know what information you're searching for online, use DuckDuckGo or F-Secure Safe Search. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn't profile its users or record their search queries. F-Secure Safe Search is not as privacy-friendly because it's a collaborative effort with Google, but it provides a safety rating for each search result, making it a suitable search engine for children.
To add security to your email, social media, and other online accounts, enable what is called "two-factor authentication," or "2FA." This requires not only a user name and password, but also another piece of information—like a numeric code sent to your phone—before allowing you to log in successfully. Most common services, like Google and Facebook, now support 2FA. Use it.
Encrypt the data on your phone and your computer to protect your files, pictures, and other media. Both Apple iOS and Android have settings options to encrypt your mobile device.
And the last line of privacy defense is you. Only give out your personal information if it is necessary. When signing up for accounts online, do not use your primary email address or real phone number. Instead, create a throw-away email address and get a Google Voice number. That way, when the vendor gets hacked, your real data aren't breached.
Timothy Summers is Director of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Engagement, University of Maryland. A version of this article originally appeared at The Conversation.
This week's top stories may help you disagree more constructively with your manager and write better networking emails.
This week we learned what to write in emails to networking contacts so they won't ignore you, why GE is rethinking which kinds of job candidates it considers "qualified," and why winning an argument with your boss may be no better than losing it.
You recently scored someone's business card, and now you're ready to shoot them a note—only you're worried they might not remember you. Don't be, one expert urges. The fastest way to screw up your next move is by starting your email with, "Hi there, you might not remember me, but . . . " Here's how to get it right.
Not all conflict is bad, and sometimes a constructive difference of opinion is just what you and your manager need. But as one psychologist points out this week, your goal isn't necessarily to win the dispute. "Emotionally intelligent people," Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explains, "notice when they reach their limits of persuasion and give up before the argument escalates."
GE is working hard to flatten its organization, take more risks, and streamline the way the company operates. To do that, says SVP of global operations Shane Fitzsimons, it's taking a fresh look at its workforce. "We're more likely than we've ever been to hire someone who fits our culture and shows promise," he explains, "even if they aren't traditionally 'qualified.'"
Twitter and Pinterest haven't released comprehensive updates on their internal demographic data for around 16 months, a delay that comes amid stalled progress for diversity in tech. Both companies say they're retooling their efforts and remain committed, but one Fast Company editor asks whether their long silence helps that cause: "Isn't failure (and transparency around it) a rallying cry in Silicon Valley—a call to action, not a reason to add more time to the clock?"
Can watching YouTube videos about the universe or microbiology encourage your brain to make better long-term choices? Actually, it might, says one expert. The experience of awe—as distinct from happiness or joy—has been linked by researchers to more altruistic decision making. And best of all, you may not need to hike the Grand Canyon to induce it.
After a year of hard work, everyone deserves more than a cup of wine by the copy machine. Here are some creative ideas.
This holiday season, about 80% of businesses will have a holiday party—and almost a third will hold it on company property, according to new survey data from the global consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Jeff Kear, co-owner of the event management software company Planning Pod, puts that number even higher based on what he's seen from his users' data. He estimates that about three-quarters of his customers hold their holiday parties in the office.
There are certainly benefits to having your festivities on-site. No one will get lost on the way there. You have a captive audience, so turnout may be higher. But there are also significant reasons to consider moving the celebration elsewhere. Here's why you may want to consider doing that—and where to go instead.
There's always another email to open, another call to answer—and at least one coworker who just can't bear to step away from any of it. Edward Yost, an HR manager for the Society for Human Resource Management, says holding the party off-site helps employees shake off their work responsibilities and focus on having fun. It will also spark more interesting conversations. It's easier to leave work talk at the office when you actually leave the office.
Whatever their personal reasons, not everyone wants to join in the office holiday festivities. Yost says it's easier for an employee to skip an outside event than to sit uncomfortably at their desk while everyone else celebrates in the next room. On the flip side, Kear says you're likely to see better attendance in general—especially if employees can bring a date—when the party is out of the office, since significant others often feel awkward showing up to an in-office event.
Kear says that most office parties are planned by employees who have very little experience with event planning. It's usually an extra chore tacked on to their regular responsibilities. As a result, either their real work suffers or they put off planning the party. Greg Jenkins, cofounder of the event planning firm Bravo Productions, says inexperienced planning can lead to "missteps or gaps in coordination." It also saddles someone with the unpleasant role of cleanup crew. Take the event elsewhere so that every employee can enjoy the party as a true guest.
Yost notes that serving booze at the office or letting young kids rummage through the supply closet can lead to accidents and injuries. Then there are the food allergies to track and the access to private company data or pricy electronics to worry about. Holding the party outside the office removes any legal issues that can result if your company is the host.
First think about your employees. Would they be more excited for a sporty challenge or a fancy dinner? Do most people have families they'd want to bring? Do they love dancing? Use those answers to start forming a list of venue ideas that fits your budget. (Kear says a holiday party budget should roughly split into 50% to 60% for food, another 20% for venue expenses, and 20% to 30% for entertainment or employee gifts.)
Restaurants and hotels are the go-to options for a reason—they're often the easiest to organize, and many have event planners who will take care of the details. But there's also room for creativity. Marsha Chernoff Golob, an event planner in Minneapolis, says former factories and empty storefronts in her city have been offering themselves as party rentals. She recommends looking through local magazines to find listings for unique spaces.
Jenkins says art galleries and museums can make interesting party backdrops, too, and they typically offer after-hours rentals at reduced rates.
Even if your budget is modest, there are still options for an out-of-office event. Take a hike together and have a boxed lunch at the end. Volunteer at a local food pantry or animal shelter and grab pizza on the way back. Hold a potluck (or if you have warm winters, a barbecue) at a manager's house.
When Kear worked for an advertising agency, the company hired limos to shuttle staff around Denver on a scavenger hunt. They ended back in the office with a champagne toast—and he says no one was talking about work.
Yost's office once rented out a movie theater for the afternoon. After a catered lunch inside the theater, they all sat down for a private screening. The movie? The Chronicles of Narnia (2005). That's how much this creative holiday celebration impressed Yost: It's still on his mind 11 years later.
The Fast Company Innovation Festival, which ran from November 1-4, 2016, in New York City, featured more than 200 business leaders sharing insights and behind-the-scenes looks into their companies with a global audience nearly 6,000 strong.
The Fast Company Innovation Festival, which ran from November 1-4, 2016, in New York City, featured more than 200 business leaders sharing insights and behind-the-scenes looks into their companies with a global audience nearly 6,000 strong.
In the slideshow above, look back on just 33 of the countless inspiring, energizing, and exclusive moments that took place during the week, and read all of our coverage from the Fest here.
The anonymous chat app is facing significant layoffs, but a damaged reputation may not be the only thing plaguing the once-popular platform.
Yik Yak, the anonymous chat app whose rapid rise to prominence on college campuses in 2014 was followed by a deluge of controversy over bullying and harassment, may be dealing with the same money-related issues that plagued its now-defunct competitor Secret. The company has reportedly whittled its staff down from 50 employees to just 20, writes the Verge, as it faces the ongoing challenge of trying to grow its user base. According to mobile download statistics from App Annie, the anonymous platform has seen a dip in popularity, indicating it may have never recovered from the reputation-damaging issues that dogged it last year.
In part, that may be thanks to a persistent culture of bullying. The problem has been underscored by high-profile incidents like the murder of a feminist student at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, who was threatened on the platform. This year, another woman, who goes by Elizabeth, filed a petition to shut down Yik Yak after she found anonymous posts on the platform telling her to end her life. The Change.org petition has garnered some 83,000 signatures.
In addition to the ire, Yik Yak had managed to raise $73.5 million in investor funding, most likely because of its initial popularity with college students. That means it's deeply indebted to deliver a return on that massive investment—bullying or no.
But while online abuse may have hindered Yik Yak's ability to grow its audience and limited its potential for acquisition, there maybe something else at play here, too. Earlier this year, I spoke with tech entrepreneur Steve Blank, a guy who's written a lot on startups and business, about the overall changing market for budding companies seeking big exits. In short, he says, developing companies without a clear monetization strategy may be a thing of the past.
"There was a path of liquidity to selling to other people who might want your user base," Blank told me. He called it the YouTube effect: Build an audience and someone who wants those users will buy them from you if it's cheaper to do so than building the audience themselves. (In the case of YouTube, Google scooped it up in 2006 for $1.65 billion.) But that idea may not be so relevant anymore. A decade later, investors and acquirers are not as keen to gobble up startups that are losing money.
This is not to say that anonymous platforms can't find a path forward. After all, Reddit and Whisper—both of which have tried in earnest to rid their platforms of noxious bullies—are succeeding in keeping user interest and bringing on advertisers.
But Yik Yak, while it once did have a promising user base, has yet to come up with a plan for earning revenue. Now, as it loses steam with users, the potential for acquisition is not only lower, but so too is the possibility that it can morph into a sustainable company in its own right. And without a path to profitability, it will be hard for Yik Yak to compete for investor dollars to fuel further growth.
"In the 1980s or '90s you couldn't go public without at least the last five quarters showing profitable revenue growth and you couldn't stay public, meaning your stock price couldn't stay afloat, unless after that you could follow it with four more profitable quarters," says Blank. "Those days might be returning."
Would this founder recommend others try it? Not exactly—but here's what it taught him.
Waking up on the backseat of my Volkswagen Jetta on a frosty morning in late 2015, I check the time. It's 5 a.m. I pull out of the Walmart parking lot and head to my gym, 24 Hour Fitness. After a quick shower, I'm ready to start work, surfing the Bay Area's Wi-Fi hotspots. From around 6 a.m. until 11 at night, I'm perched in the backseat of my car, coding my new website.
On October 10, 2015, I cleared out my Mountain View apartment, packing the necessary essentials into my car, and made it my new home for the next six months. I know it sounds extreme—and it was. But my half-year of self-imposed penury wasn't some sort of lifestyle experiment, or just playing tourist with constraints that other people face indefinitely because they have to.
For me, it was simply a practical measure: I dreamt of creating an online sports-apparel platform, but had sharply limited means to realize that dream. What I did have, though, was a willingness to dramatically cut back my living costs and give it my all until time and money ran out—or whichever came first.
After all, bootstrapped startups are a part of Silicon Valley's culture—by one measure, around four in five are self-funded. Of course, launching a new business from the backseat of your sedan is less common. But I had a hunch I could do it, whereas the odds of getting my startup off the ground while hemorrhaging money on rent and utilities would dramatically lower my odds of succeeding. Some entrepreneurs ditch the U.S. altogether in order to finance their new ventures. For me, stripping back my expenses while staying tapped in to the Valley's resources seemed the better option.
Without a doubt, my approach probably isn't the answer for every founder, but it did teach me a few lessons that have helped me—and my company—survive an ever-more-forbidding startup environment.
A peak of VC funding in 2015 has spawned a startup scene characterized by capital-rich new businesses and a culture of excessive perks. But the funding has since begun to tighten. Many companies that failed to live up to high expectations have seen big devaluations from nervous investors. These wounded unicorns have been forced to rethink unnecessary costs. Dropbox, for example, recently cut spending, revoking its free shuttle and limiting its meal service. Frugality is on the rise, even at the top.
At the lower echelons of the entrepreneurial world, of course, it's just a fact of life. When you start a new business you need to live within your means—you can't bank on future profits and borrowed investments. During my time in the car, I budgeted down to just $200 a month. This covered my most basic expenses, namely for food and my 24-hour gym membership (particularly for the showers), as I made use of free Wi-Fi connections around the city.
Living within tighter means won't pay off if you don't tap into the networks that are already available to you. That includes free networking events, which for me included VLAB, SV Newtech, and the various tech-focused events Stanford University hosted with startup founders and VCs, all in the Bay Area. Alternatively, check out Meetup, Eventbrite, and Facebook's location-based event search tool for upcoming networking opportunities.
Lean on the support of friends or old colleagues, too. I enlisted the help of a friend who worked with me to develop our product. This made a big difference, since it sped up the time it took to launch quickly and start turning a profit. Saving money is only half the battle—it matters what you do while you're living on the cheap, and leveraging your network is key to that.
Even the leanest startups still need to make a handful of investments. Some are unavoidable, while others are advisable, potentially driving strong ROI or positive longer-term effects.
According to the World Bank's Doing Business report, the administrative costs of launching a new business in the U.S. top out at around $750 on average. This gets your company's name registered along with an operating agreement and certification. In my experience, we also had to pay for servers and customer support, and we invested a small amount into marketing our project.
There are tools like Hubspot CRM, MailChimp, and others to help organize your customer contacts and email campaigning in those early days. We spent around $100–$150 per campaign on Google and Facebook ads. Google Adwords delivered the best results for us; we used it to test customer responses to new features and gain insight on how different audiences interacted with the product.
In retrospect, I would have focused more on sales much earlier on. It's really important to tell people about your product and get them excited about it—even before launching. I've realized there's no need to wait for having the perfect product, though; you just need to launch ASAP and then constantly improve it through ongoing iterations.
There are a number of great tools that are either free to use or offer free trial periods. We used FreshDesk for customer service interactions, SendGrid for email marketing, and Trello to manage our internal product schedule and planning. Make sure to focus your efforts, prioritize your roadmap, and make sure you invest at the right time in order to get the most out of it while the clock is ticking.
Throwing your all into a new venture means giving yourself no alternative. I knew I had a short period to put my head down and launch the site—there was no other choice, and I didn't want to live out of my VW forever. When you take a leap of faith, you're forced to deliver.
This may be surprising to hear in an era that's witnessed the rise of the part-time entrepreneur and side-gigging. But if you ask me, there's a risk there of spreading yourself too thin and failing to commit. Sometimes it may even mean you don't totally trust in your business—and if that's the case, why should your customers? If you really want to get things off the ground, you can't just dabble. But once you're all in, you've got to set milestones. That could mean scheduling an investor meeting, contacting an incubator or accelerator, or publicizing a hard launch date or presentation.
Applying for attendance at a conference or startup event, such as TechCrunch Disrupt, is a great way to get your product in front of industry experts and grab some good media coverage, too. If you don't get accepted, don't fret; keep in mind just 2.5% of applicants make it into Disrupt Startup Battlefield. Still, the least you can do is prepare a date for your Product Hunt launch in order to turn the heat up on yourself. Then follow that up by sharing your story on HackerNews with a bigger audience. Just make sure you're realistic with your targets so you don't get burned.
After six months of icy winter sleeps and hot summer days cooped up in my car, the launch was finally complete. People starting talking about the new company, and we started to see some traction. I moved into a new apartment and was ready to face the world again.
Since then, my experiment has become a piece of our founding narrative, and I hope it communicates something to our customers and new hires about who we are as a company—and our determination to bet it all on something worthwhile. After all, adding your own personal story to your business launch helps differentiate your brand and catch your customer's eye.
But more than that, the experience showed me how important tight budgeting and an ambitious timetable can be. If you really want to succeed, you don't necessarily need to stop paying rent and start showering at your gym. But just about every entrepreneur will need to strip back costs and focus all their energy on launching the best product they can in a short period of time. That's what bootstrapping is all about, but it applies just as much to self-funded startups as those that have received VC investments.
Whatever you do, take full advantage of resources, no matter what they may be. You just need enough gas in your tank to keep you going.
Nick Zamanov is the founder and CEO of AmpleFind, a curated shopping platform for sporting goods with over 4 million top-rated items from the best retailers in the industry.
From the pediatrician who reinvented swaddling comes the most advanced baby sleeping solution ever. But does it work?
Impulsiveness. Moodiness. Headaches. The side effects of getting too little sleep can feel a bit like a hangover—or being tipsy, but without the fun and social part. Parents experience a lot of joy, but the first three to six months of raising a newborn can also be a marathon of sleep deprivation on par with Navy SEAL training. Getting just 15 minutes more sleep can sometimes be a life saver, literally. Because exhausted parents make stupid mistakes.
The pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp, author of the best-selling book The Happiest Baby on the Block, calls it "drunk parenting." The statistics back him up: Of the 3,500 sudden unexpected infant deaths tracked by the Centers for Disease Control each year, 875 are due to accidental suffocation in bed. Many of those are the result of exhausted parents who bring infants into their own bed, or worse, fall asleep next to them on the couch. That's why Karp and his wife, Nina Montée Karp, set out to create the safest, most advanced baby sleeper ever invented, the SNOO.
It's not the only reason: SNOO, which was released in October, is a smart baby bed, part of the emerging universe of connected devices for your home. But it's more accurate to call it a robot, because the SNOO attempts to replicate the soothing sound and motion of a parent or nanny, gently rocking babies through a series of jiggling motions and shushing noises until they fall asleep.
"At times it could feel a little like I was outsourcing my parenting to technology," says Kate Davis, a Fast Company senior editor who tested the bed with her newborn baby, Ben, for a few weeks this fall. But it also allowed her, at times, to stay in bed a bit longer.
A desperately bleary-eyed parent will pay almost anything for a few more winks. SNOO is not cheap: It sells for $1,160. There are more expensive baby beds—a custom crib can set you back $3,000 or more—but there are also plenty of perfectly safe options available in the $300 and under range, too.
To fully understand the SNOO, you have to know a bit about Dr. Karp's thesis on babyhood. "The concept is that babies are born three months before they're ready for the world," he says. A mother gives birth when she does in part because the baby won't be able to get out if the head gets any larger. And in Karp's view, that means a baby's so-called fourth trimester should be spent replicating the experience inside the womb as much as possible.
One way to do that is by wrapping your baby up in a blanket, snug as a bug in a rug. When The Happiest Baby came out in 2002 and recommended that parents swaddle their newborns, it was an instant trend. Well into the 1800s, swaddling was a widespread practice until doctors came to believe it was harmful to children because it straitjacketed their mobility. And around that same time, fussy babies were being treated with opium and alcohol concoctions—Stickney and Poor's Pure Paregoric syrup was a popular brand. And that remained a an option for pediatricians all the way until gen-Xers were born.
"When I was training at Albert Einstein [College of Medicine] in the Bronx in the 1970s, I was taught how to prescribe opium for babies," says Karp. Now, of course, your doctor could be put in jail for doing such a thing.
But swaddling is back in a big way. Today you can buy swaddle blankets in all colors and styles; some even have velcro so that you don't have to learn how to fold. Despite being responsible for this resurgence, Karp has never released a swaddle blanket of his own, until now. The SNOO sleep sack, or "five-second swaddle," which is included in the package and comes in three sizes, is a more breathable and easier-to-use variation on the original theme. Inside the sack, a velcro strap goes across the baby's chest to keep the arms down. The sack then zips up to the baby's chin, and there are mesh openings across the middle and bottom to let air flow through. There's also a zipper on the bottom in case you need to change a diaper.
The most important part of this swaddle is that it has two "wings" that come off the side of the swaddle and have loops on the end. Those loops attach into hooks on the inside of the bassinet, ensuring your baby can't roll over. The SNOO will not work unless these straps are in place. "And it's actually because of this, in large part because of this, that this is the safest baby crib that's ever been created," says Karp. "Because we've never in the history of parenting had the opportunity to know that babies are going to stay in that same position all night long."
With the baby safely strapped to the bassinet, the real magic begins. Before I explain it in detail, just watch this video showing infants falling asleep inside the SNOO.
Cute babies falling asleep in their SNOOs.
When you first put a baby into the SNOO and turn it on, either via a button on one end or using the mobile app, it starts to jiggle while making a low shooshing noise. There are four different levels of sound and motion, each lasting about six minutes. Karp says the motion is probably like what a baby feels in the womb when mom goes up and down stairs.The sound, which comes from a small speaker under the mattress, is similar to rain on a rooftop, but set at a lower pitch.
The SNOO glides through each level, down, down, down, until the child is asleep. Anyone who has dozed off during a plane takeoff, a train ride, or a long road trip can appreciate why this is an effective technique for putting a child to bed.
Three microphones around the rim of the sleeper listen to the baby so that when she wakes or cries out, SNOO will increase the amount of motion and volume of the white noise in order to lull her back to sleep. If the baby makes noise for three minutes, SNOO automatically shuts itself off—it knows that the baby needs more than it can provide. Other than that, it moves continuously all night long.
This constant motion was the first concern for Davis during her test of the SNOO. Don't babies become habituated to the motion and noise, thus making it difficult for them to sleep in a crib that doesn't move and make noise later on? Karp says it will be no harder than breaking a baby of other habits, such as using a pacifier or a dangling musical mobile.
The bigger problem is that the bed's sound sensors were far too noise sensitive, at least in Davis's small New York apartment. "A short list of things it reacted to: my hair dryer coming from the next room, pots and pans in the kitchen, the cat meowing, my husband and I talking," Davis says. "It would also react to some of Ben's fussing (and certainly his crying), but not all of his fussing." She thought that pairing the sound with a motion sensor would improve the accuracy. Or perhaps just having a bigger house would have solved things.
Still, the SNOO is something of a technological marvel. It took five years to create, and pairs MIT engineering with design by Yves Béhar. The real breakthrough is the internal motor. A retired automobile engineer helped the team devise a brushless gimbal that allows the crib to change speed as well as amplitude smoothly and without any gears—a set of rubber O rings run back and forth on a track instead. This was difficult to pull off, and had to be perfect—the tiniest squeak or chunking of a gear would ruin the entire purpose of this device.
And it had to stand more hours of wear and tear than your average baby swing. Those work great but are only made to run for about an hour a day, and go back and forth maybe 200,000 times. The SNOO is meant to be used 14 hours a day for six months, and is built to run for at least 2 million cycles. "And actually, our testing stops at 15 million cycles," says Karp. "Which should be enough for two or three babies."
Since the primary purpose of the SNOO is to rock your baby to sleep, it's fair to wonder why it needs to have a Wi-Fi connection (which is hidden inside the foot of the crib under a shield that will prevent any potentially harmful radiation). As with most devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) world, this allows the crib's inner workings to be updated remotely over time. It can be used to fix minor problems or add new features. But mostly it's so that the mobile app can connect to the crib from another room.
The app was initially going to be much fancier, says Karp. In 2010, when his team members began to work on the sleeper, the quantified self was the tech trendlet of the moment. They were going to include a bunch of analytic data points about the baby, primarily to measure sleep. But over time they realized that the data was kind of pointless. The SNOO itself did the thing that so many IoT products fail to do, which is use data and feedback to provide an actual solution. So the app was simplified to be a fancy remote control that lets a parent stay in bed while adjusting the activity level of a crib that might be in another room.
"The best aspects are that it helped him fall back to sleep when he'd wake up from gas," says Davis of her experience testing the crib with Ben. "And when all else was failing to put him to sleep, I knew I could put him in it, and it would—I'd say 80% of the time—make him fall asleep."
The SNOO isn't a magic solution to your sleepless nights, and shouldn't be expected to transform your baby. But it's a useful tool—if you can afford it—that makes new parenthood a little easier and safer.
Our emotions help us make decisions. Great communicators know that—without exploiting it.
Last September, Elon Musk publicly unveiled a sweeping vision to colonize Mars. The SpaceX founder and CEO framed those ambitions as nothing less than a bid to save humanity from self-destruction.
Whatever your opinion of Musk's plans, his presentation of them was rhetorically effective—and a memorable departure from the tech leader's notoriously dispassionate Twitter voice. In introducing his Mars plan, Musk tapped into two foundational emotions that every effective leader should know how to activate: hope and fear. Here's how.
"One path," Musk said, "is we stay on Earth forever, and there will be some eventual extinction event . . . some doomsday event." Then he switched to a more hopeful outcome: "The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multiplanet species." Turning to a video illustrating SpaceX's vision for what travel to Mars might look like, Musk added, "The Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse, kind of like Battlestar Galactica."
Throughout his talk, Musk didn't resort to high-flown, flowery language—he never has. Still, he deftly crafted his message to generate an emotional response, something that the most effective leaders know how to do. It's no secret why: Emotions help make people more likely to embrace a certain belief or idea, persuade them to follow, and spark change.
And change of any kind can stir emotions. Neuroscientists believe that the emotional parts of the brain are the first to respond to new and unexpected events through the "sympathetic" nervous system—which is responsible for the "fight or flight" response. In other words, our minds have evolved in order to anticipate events that haven't happened yet, and our emotions are a big part of the way they do that. In his book Stumbling on Happiness, author and researcher Daniel Gilbert describes the brain as an "anticipation machine, and making the future is the most important thing it does."
So when leaders describe in captivating detail how the world could be different, people feel something—they don't just think about it. We automatically imagine ourselves there, in that future state or condition, and try to determine if the change will be good or bad for us. If it registers as a potential threat, our brains tell our bodies how to react—with fear. Our hearts race, palms sweat, and arms and legs get ready for action.
Great leaders get out ahead of this negative emotional response by gauging the mood of their audiences and listening to their concerns with empathy. Then they figure out the best way to invoke emotion to help sway them toward their own point of view and propel them to act.
Hope acts as a defibrillator to a lifeless heart, creating a jolt of positive energy that inspires people to once again think goal-oriented thoughts. What stands in the way of action, though, is most often fear. It fuels anxiety, which creates a defensive or protective energy that prevents people from embracing new ideas, immobilizing them.
But that doesn't mean fear can't motivate people to action, too. In fact, both of these highly charged emotions, when channeled in constructive ways through communication, can help leaders guide their constituents toward productive goals.
Fear can push people away from certain ideas or situations and drive them toward a desired action. The adrenaline rush it often initiates can make them pay closer attention, think more clearly, or even perform better. For example, one recent Harvard Business School study found participants who reported feeling more anxious or excited about tasks like singing, giving a speech, or tackling a math problem actually sang better, spoke more persuasively, and outperformed on math tests.
Still, there's a big difference—both practical and ethical—between using justifiable anxieties as motivation and exploiting people's fear. Sometimes people's worries make sense in light of imminent threats, like a competitor that's gaining ground, customers or partners at risk, or unfavorable conditions. Those situations make for good opportunities for leaders to tap into. You can explain the reasons you're also frightened about a situation, share stories from people on the front lines where the danger is greatest, and empathize with your teams' concerns.
What you don't want to do is stoke fear in ways that threaten or marginalize others, or blow things out of proportion. To help you strike that balance, you need hope.
As Commander William Adama in the Battlestar Galactica series Musk referred to once put it, "It's not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for." Hope moves people to pine for something better. It focuses attention on a desired outcome and inspires them to imagine what their life will be like when that future arrives.
Hope pulls people toward your vision and gives them courage to persevere through fear and sadness—because something worth fighting for awaits them. To trigger feelings of hope, give people something specific to look forward to: a noble cause, a clear vision of a glorious yet attainable future, the promise of great reward—won fairly, through hard work, and not at others' expense.
Musk first used a physical analogy about Mars to drum up some excitement: "It would be quite fun, because you have gravity, which is about 37% that of Earth, so you'd be able to lift heavy things and bound around and have a lot of fun." He followed that with a more fear-inspiring comparison, pointing to the long-term sustainability challenges faced by the 7 billion people on Earth, relative to the zero people on Mars.
Whether or not he succeeds, Musk knows that executing such a bold vision requires a lot of energy from stakeholders as they leap, fight, and climb their way to the future. Tapping into the most fundamental emotions that animate us as humans is one of the surest ways to sustain all that energy—and channel it into a productive cause.
Looking back over the past year, four top entrepreneurship gurus share the stumbles that newbies repeatedly make.
Business owners make a lot of mistakes, especially first-timers—I'm one, and I know I have. But some entrepreneurs' entire businesses are based on helping others start their own. And since those experts interact with hundreds and even thousands of first-time entrepreneurs each week, they have a wider view than most of the types of errors new business owners keep making as we head toward 2017. These are a few of the most common they've seen over and over again in the past year.
Regina Anaejionu is an "infopreneur" whose online courses, books, and workshops help people get started with their own freelancing, self-publishing, and coaching businesses. With more than 10,000 students enrolled in her courses, Anaejionu knows a thing or two about what those newbies typically get wrong.
"No business person grows a successful company completely on their own," she says. "Collaborators, motivated early adopters who spread the word, and influencers can all help a first-time business owner reach a willing audience, but knowing how and when to connect with these people seems to be something entrepreneurs find difficult," Anaejionu explains.
"It's like we all read the same terrible book on how to approach someone you don't know when you want something from them. The answer is not cold-pitching them and offering nothing of value in return."
The solution. "Practice connecting with people before you want or need anything from them," Anaejionu advises. "Begin to find potential collaborators and influencers in your industry or audience and buy their products, share their content, engage in conversations, ask questions, and establish some good, old-fashioned human connections."
"Super successful and surprising business stories obviously receive more press and attention than stories of startups and companies that grow slowly, or companies that fail, or businesses that are successful but haven't seemed newsworthy yet," Anaejionu adds. "This can cause many first-time business owners to create unrealistic expectations of their experience, their income, [and] the process of getting a business off the ground."
The solution. "Try to join in-person or online communities with more business owners in a similar stage. Listen to the stories, frustrations, triumphs, and ideas of others, and try to learn from them as you go," Anaejionu recommends. Then, "clearly define what success is to you, so that the way you measure your happiness is not dependent upon the latest startup funding story, income report, or fancy entrepreneur interview you read."
Lewis Howes is the New York Times best-selling author of The School of Greatness as well as a lifestyle entrepreneur, business coach, and speaker. His popular podcast, which shares his book's title, has been downloaded more than 25 million times since it launched in 2013.
According to Howes, emotional intelligence is sorely underappreciated by many new entrepreneurs. "The more I learn about how to manage and understand my emotions," he says, "it helps me understand other people. This is massive for relationships, hiring, and much more."
The solution. It's all about whom you interact with and how. "I've been able to find solid people to bring on my team and invest in their development, which has paid off big time," says Howes. "This is also a big part of how I've been able to develop so many relationships with influencers and highly successful people," he adds.
"Most people don't understand the value of investing in your brand and your own development," Howes finds. "When you're starting out, it seems like you need to cut corners and keep things cheap, but I've never regretted investing in myself, my skills, or my brand, no matter how tight things were."
The solution. It's okay to skimp on inessentials as long as you don't cut corners where it really counts. "Paying for really high-quality photos, graphics, design, etc. is really important as soon as you can afford it," Howes advises. "The internet has made visual design really important for businesses." The same is true for crafting "a strong, authentic voice for your brand," he says. "Take copywriting courses, hire really good photographers, and invest in quality design to make your brand look amazing."
Brandon Gaille hosts one of the most downloaded marketing podcasts in the world, The Blog Millionaire, where he teaches the same growth-marketing hacks that helped him build his blog audience to over 2 million monthly visitors.
"Each year I receive thousands of emails from people that read my blog," says Gaille, "and most of them are from first-time business owners. The common theme in these emails is a reluctance to figure out how to do something on their own. They either want a magic bullet or someone else to do it for them." As he sees it, that's not so much a mark of laziness as an impatience with personal development—but it's a huge liability. "If you have this mind-set, then you are doomed for failure."
The solution. "Successful business owners are constantly learning new ways to make their businesses grow and operate at a higher level," Gaille notices. "They are reading industry blogs, listening to podcasts, attending conferences, and taking courses." By now, these resources are plentiful and often pretty cheap—but they do take time to explore. Carving off some time to keep learning may seem like an impossible luxury for many newbie business owners, but it couldn't be more crucial.
"Whether you have a local brick-and-mortar business or an online store, every first-time business owner needs to know how to leverage email marketing," Gaille recommends. But few know how to do that properly—and many don't even try.
The solution. What can you offer to give away in exchange for someone's email address? Answer that question, and you're well on your way, says Gaille. "A simple coupon will usually do the trick"—don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to. "Then you can email them a new coupon before every holiday of the year," for instance. "Start by keeping it simple and giving them what they want on a consistent basis."
Jenn Scalia helps entrepreneurs face their biggest fears and fine-tune the ways they share their messages with the world. She's a single mom who went from rock bottom to creating a seven-figure business within three years, and self-promotion was key to her success.
It's nearly 2017, but many new entrepreneurs still "think it's sleazy to promote themselves and their businesses," Scalia believes. "The takeover of social media in business" is now complete—and has been for some time—she says, meaning that "self-promotion is a necessary evil."
The solution. "People need to know who you are," Scalia points out—and that's been true for time immemorial. "They need to know what you offer and you need to ask them to buy . . . If you're uncomfortable with self-promotion, ask yourself what's in it for the potential customer or client," she suggests. It's not just about talking yourself up. "Come from a place of service, and you will start to see your promotions as an avenue to help people who need what you have."
"Most new entrepreneurs don't have the proper mind-set around money, worth, and the value they bring," says Scalia, but many aren't aware of that in the first place. So it bleeds into their decision making: "They undercharge, feel bad asking for the sale, and end up broke," Scalia says.
The solution. "Having clarity around what you bring to your customers and clients will allow you to charge what you're worth and make more money," says Scalia. Starting from the bottom can be daunting, but if you feel like you need to build up your experience first before charging competitive rates, you may never get there.
After all, you can't be "new" to entrepreneurship forever—and getting your footing starts with tackling these common errors right away.
Christina Nicholson is a former TV reporter and anchor who now owns and operates a full-service public relations firm, Media Maven. She is getting ready to launch "Master Your PR," an online course that teaches small business owners and marketers how to handle public relations on their own.
Some research hints that agreeable people and those who smile a lot may face hidden obstacles in the workplace.
Here's something to smile—or, on second thought, not smile—about: If you're one of those people who involuntarily scowl even when you're feeling fine, your boss and coworkers just might treat you better for it.
Researchers Alixandra Barasch (New York University), Emma E. Levine (University of Chicago) and Maurice E. Schweitzer (Wharton School) tested the link between the magnitude of positive emotions people display and others' perceptions of them. Their findings concluded that people who appear really happy also appear to be more naive than people who seem just a little bit happy.
Read on to learn what your boss and coworkers really think about that smile of yours, as well as when to use it to your advantage.
The researchers found that very happy people are believed to shelter themselves from negative information and be more trusting of others. In other words, very happy people purposely wear rose-colored glasses to filter out potentially important negative information from their field of vision.
But the real problem is how very happy workers can be taken advantage of in the workplace. The study found that very happy people are more likely to receive biased advice ("You can totally show up late to that meeting with the boss," says the coworker who arrives to the same meeting five minutes early to kiss up to the boss) and are more likely to be exploited in distributive negotiations (because that big perma-smile makes you seem gullible).
Smiling can even hurt your chances of getting a job, according to researchers at Northeastern University. The study found that smiling too much in an interview can have a negative effect on applicants in any profession, especially in roles that may be seen as more "serious," including reporting and data entry. However, in jobs that are seen as more sociable, such as teaching, sales, or DJ-ing, smiling apparently causes less of a disadvantage.
But this doesn't mean you should immediately start practicing your best pout for your next interview. "Less is better than more, but if you never smile, you probably won't make a very good impression," Judith Hall, a coauthor of the Northeastern study, told the Huntington News.
The researchers found that it's best to smile at the beginning and end of the interview and less during the middle when you're answering questions. Think about it: Should you really be smiling when talking about a time you failed or a challenge you faced?
It's a fine line, as you don't want to appear cold and stiff, but you also don't want to be so animated that you're putting on a show. Like the warning label on a case of beer that says to "consume responsibly," you're going to want to smile in moderation both during the interview and in the workplace.
A version of this article originally appeared on Monster. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.
These older professionals share how they've overcome age biases later in their careers.
"I turned 50 and seemed to have been thrown out of the public relations profession, my industry of 20 years," says Lisa Wells, who recalls having traveled repeatedly from New York to Philadelphia and Boston for job interviews—all without having any luck. Desperate, Wells sought some professional help. But "after going to a head hunter's office in Midtown to meet a young woman who seemed to be in her pajamas," she recalls, "I went home and decided to open my own consulting business."
Her experience isn't unique. An AARP Public Policy Institute analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that the average duration of unemployment for job seekers ages 55 and older was 54.3 weeks in December 2014—more than five months longer than the 28.2 weeks younger workers typically remain unemployed.
Tom Smith, a 58-year-old marketing executive, says he's applied to over 2,000 jobs since turning 50. After a grueling 27-month job search, Smith finally accepted an offer for 64% of his previous salary, just in order to secure a job with benefits. Soon afterward, his role was redefined and his salary cut 43%.
According to AARP research, 64% of workers report experiencing age discrimination, which can take many forms—ranging from the overt and individual to the implicit and institutional. (In the tech industry, just to take one example, self-advertised "young, nimble startups" all but tell older candidates to look elsewhere right in their job postings.)
All these forms of age discrimination persist thanks to few core assumptions about older workers in a modern, ever-changing job force. They include:
Young people invest more in developing new skills.
Young people feel more excited by their jobs.
Older people neglect their health.
Older people get exhausted by their work.
Older workers are looking to slow down and coast toward retirement.
Older workers have less interest in exploring new ideas and opportunities.
Yet each of these assumptions—about younger and older workers alike—were shown to be statistically untrue in a study by London Business School researchers Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott.
Groundless biases aside, many organizations may simply not to want invest in people they believe to be close to retirement, preferring someone with more "growth potential." This is often a fallacy, too. By one measure, some 58% of millennials expect to leave their jobs in three years or less. That figure is high, but it isn't especially remarkable. For context, a separate study estimated that nearly half of workers worldwide expect to leave their jobs just within the next year. The retention problem is so acute that companies are constantly dreaming up new ways to keep their best and brightest around for longer.
At all events, there's really no evidence that investing in a younger worker is a "safer" bet or offers a higher ROI potential than investing in an older one. As AARP's CEO Jo Ann Jenkins puts it, "Ultimately, I don't think employers need to see older employees as being much different than younger ones." If anything, she says, "older employees often tend to be especially loyal, focused, and bring unique experience that others simply don't have."
So how can older workers improve their chances of landing rewarding, fairly compensated work in an environment like this? There are a few practical steps to take.
Todd Williams was a business owner before adopting his two young granddaughters. But "the demands of starting a family over are not necessarily consistent with running a business," he's found. "Family time is critical," and being an entrepreneur cuts into it too much. So Williams, 59, has started looking for W2-based work. "I am looking for a good salary, life and health insurance, vacation, 50% or less travel," he says.
The first place he's begun to look for those opportunities is inside the network he's built up as a business owner. In fact, Williams says networking "has landed more contracts that meet my needs. It also has me in the running for two W2 jobs that have not been posted—and may never be posted—as they are creating positions for me."
He points out that older people may actually have an advantage here; their networks are likely much bigger than those of younger professionals. Rebecca Janzon, 54, agrees. Savvy networking, she's found, can help you get past the front-line HR reps and recruiters. "Most companies still think that hiring young, inexperienced people at low pay is the answer . . . Their HR teams look for that," Janzon believes." Getting a referral, though, can help your resume (and its hints about your age) leapfrog over a company's initial screening process.
Williams also points out that one way to get in the door of an organization you're interested in is by offering services like consulting, mentoring, or coaching on a project basis first. This can let you show in real time what an asset you could be to the organization.
Professional organizations can be useful as well, says Williams, especially if you can land a speaking gig (here are a few ways to use LinkedIn to do that). Presenting to an industry group allows you to show the value of your experience to a room full of people in your field. There's just one caveat, Williams jokes: Only do this "if you have a huge amount of energy to overcome the old-fart appearance."
Older workers are acutely aware of the need to stay current, keep their skills up to date, and constantly push themselves to learn new things. But—like it or not—your outward personal brand needs to match your expertise. That means making sure the image you present to the professional world is as polished as it can be.
Some of the older professionals I spoke with even mentioned wardrobe considerations. Some recommended finding a younger friend you can trust to be honest and offer pointers to update your look, if needed. Others suggested hiring a photographer to get an updated LinkedIn photo. This can be frustrating advice to hear, particularly for women—who already confront a complex of gender-based biases, including about their appearances. But the key is simply to project the same level of polish as your younger competitors in the job market, while staying authentic to you.
Technology has changed the recruiting process immeasurably in recent years. Sue DiMartino, executive administrative professional in her fifties, whose position with a large corporation was eliminated due to restructuring, turned to a transition company when she reentered the job market. There she learned how to tailor her resume so it can get past digital scanners designed to weed out resumes without enough keywords.
DiMartino also offers a technology trick to hold in your back pocket. In some situations, she points out, it may be illegal for companies to require candidates list the dates they earned degrees; others may simply avoid it for fear of falling afoul of state and federal anti-discrimination laws. But many employers aren't so prudent. "If a company hasn't updated its computerized forms," DiMartino suggests, "answer with '9999,' which populates the field and allows you to submit the application."
Depending on their skill sets, income needs, and lifestyles, some older workers can benefit from moving in the opposite direction of people like Williams—by starting their own businesses, consulting, or picking up freelance work.
"I retired from a very lucrative career because my age was holding me back from finding a new job," says first-time entrepreneur Dick Kuiper. "I tried unsuccessfully to find a new position that would pay me a living wage in a traditional job in that career field. Then I thought, 'Why not create my own job?' I did. It worked and I'm off and running with a successful business of my own that's partially linked to my previous career."
Just because you're an older worker doesn't guarantee that you'll experience age discrimination, of course. But that likelihood may rise when you find yourself searching for a new job later in your career. If that happens, just remember that you aren't doomed simply to suffer the consequences. You may have more resources at your disposal than many younger workers—and you yourself—even suspect. You just need to know how to tap them.
Anne Loehr is a speaker, writer, consultant, and trainer. She helps leaders in large organizations connect their everyday decisions today to the workplace of tomorrow. Follow Anne on Twitter at @anneloehr.
Working for a micromanager can be trying, but that doesn't mean you can't still learn something useful.
One of the first managers I ever had was what many people might call a micromanager. If I was five minutes late to work, he knew. If a client copied him on an email to me, he wanted to know exactly when I planned on responding. If I didn't complete a weekly SWOT ("strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats") analysis of myself to discuss with him, he wasn't thrilled.
At the time, this put him squarely in the "worst boss ever" category. And while I still don't agree with a lot of his choices, I'd be lying if I said I didn't learn anything from him.
Here are a few things that stuck with me—and truth be told, actually make me a better employee today.
I'll be honest—I could probably sum up the first year of my career with something I used to say almost every day: "Meh, this is good enough." Many times I saw things from a big-picture standpoint. And by that, I mean I'd look at the requirements of a task and try my best to get them done. If a minor thing or two got lost in the process, it didn't bug me all that much.
However, my boss (on his kindest days) held me to a higher standard. Things I considered throwaway tasks suddenly became urgent, and for a long time, it drove me crazy to live under this constant pressure of "just fix this one more thing."
But a funny thing happened after I started approaching my job the way he wanted me to: People across the entire company started trusting me with bigger projects. Sure, I would've preferred to have a manager who wasn't quite so hands-on, but he did get me to see the value in paying attention to the details of even the most inane, low-impact tasks.
My relationship with my manager was simple. He'd tell me what I did wrong and how to improve it—and I'd go home to a sleepless night of worrying about whether or not I'd be employed the next day. I operated under the assumption that I did nothing well at work.
While that wasn't true, I've learned over the last few years that as much as I tell other people to seek out constructive criticism, I'm not very good at doing so myself.
And I look back on those daily critiques and wonder if the situation would've felt more positive if I'd simply asked, "How can I improve this?" whenever I turned in projects.
No matter how good I get at anything, there should always be a few things that make my boss say, "Hey, let's talk about how to get you to the next level." Sure, I didn't enjoy how often that manager came down on me for every little thing or his approach, but I've come to appreciate the honest feedback. And I know that I probably grew more as a professional because he constantly pushed me.
I can't tell you how many times I'd wake up for work and say, "Why is my boss like this? Can't he just relax for one day and stop nagging us all about every little thing?" After I left that job, I heard through the grapevine about some of the circumstances that led my manager to treat me the way he did. And honestly, I had no idea he was under that kind of pressure when I was working for him.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a bad boss who happily wore that label. And while I believe managers—no matter how great they are—should always be trying to improve themselves, I also now acknowledge that they're human, too.
And in addition to that, they have their own bosses to meet with and goals to hit. In the case of my micromanager, his hands were tied in many ways, which led him to manage us the way he did. That doesn't excuse the times he treated me poorly, but it is a good reminder that you shouldn't take continuous feedback as a reflection of your abilities (or perceived lack thereof).
It's hard to work for someone who wants to know where you are and what you're up to at all times. And if you're at a point where you're going home every night and stress eating because your manager won't ease up, I get it. But take a step back and think about why he or she is treating you this way. If you can find a silver lining or two, I have a feeling that work might be a little more bearable (at least for now).
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Founder Steve Ells will remain the sole CEO of Chipotle, which has failed to rebound from a string of food-safety incidents.
This morning, Chipotle announced that Monty Moran, the struggling fast-food chain's co-CEO and a longtime friend of founder Steve Ells, will step down from his role and board seat early next year. Ells will remain the sole CEO of Chipotle as well as chairman. The company indicated more changes to the board would be coming soon.
Chipotle has failed to rebound from a string of food-safety incidents that began in late 2015, including outbreaks of salmonella, norovirus, and E. coli. The company has seen its stock, which peaked above $750 shortly before the outbreaks, cut in half. Despite launching a handful of initiatives to attract lapsed customers such as a summer-long rewards program and an expansive marketing campaign, same-store restaurant sales decreased 21.9% last quarter. At a recent investor conference, Ells admitted he was "nervous" about the company hitting its guidance for future sales.
As Fast Companydetailed in our extensive profile in November of the "Food With Integrity" company, the food-safety crisis was just one of the significant challenges facing the company. Other issues included the treatment of its store workers (Chipotle has an annual turnover rate of 130%) as well as the growing pains of its "Restaurateur Program," a once-popular initiative that Moran developed to give employees a path to rise from the kitchen staff to a manager position but which many now criticize for having become too bureaucratic.
In an email to employees Monday, Ells said "distractions...are limiting our team's ability to deliver." In recent years, he wrote, "Our restaurant operations have become needlessly complicated. We have become overly focused on details and processes that interfere with our team's ability to deliver...I have not been happy with the guest experience in many of our restaurants, and for that, I take full responsibility."
Chipotle's stock jumped 4% on the announcement of Moran's coming departure. We've included Ells's full email to his employees below, and we'll have more for you as this story develops.
To the entire Chipotle family,
There's no question that the last year has been incredibly difficult for all of us. I'm extremely proud of all of your hard work and dedication addressing the challenges we faced. But it's especially important during tough times like these to take a step back and look at how far we've come over the last 23 years. It's hard to argue that our journey has been anything other than extraordinary. Starting with a single restaurant and the simple idea that food served fast did not have to be a typical fast food experience, we have delighted hundreds of millions of customers while helping transform the food industry—all in pursuit of a mission that truly matters.
Today, as we look toward the next 23 years, the board of directors has asked me to serve as Chipotle's sole CEO. Monty has stepped down from both the co-CEO role and his board seat, and will retire from Chipotle in the near future. Along with Gretchen and Duffy, and our talented Regional Directors, I will oversee all restaurant operations. We are already working hard to develop a plan to simplify our field operations, and we will improve the Restaurateur program and strengthen our people culture. Before I share some of the details of our plans, I want to take this opportunity to thank Monty for his exceptional contribution to Chipotle over the years.
As many of you know, Monty and I have been good friends since school. Though he joined the company in 2005, Monty has been part of Chipotle from the beginning. He was encouraging when I opened the first Chipotle, and he helped me navigate many of the challenges I faced in the early years. During his time at Chipotle, Monty's vision of an enlightened people culture has inspired us all. I have no doubt that whatever comes next in Monty's life, he will achieve extraordinary success. I consider myself lucky to have worked side-by-side with Monty for so many years, and I look forward to the next chapter of our friendship.
As I look to the future, I see many reasons to be very optimistic. First, I know that our mission is more important than ever. Over the last 23 years, we have truly changed the way people think about and eat fast food. Going forward, I envision Chipotle having an even bigger impact on food culture in the U.S. and around the world. We have proven that our approach, based on sourcing responsibly raised ingredients and preparing them using classic cooking techniques—without things like added colors, flavors or additives typically found in fast food—results in food that is extremely delicious and truly nourishing. We have the responsibility to do everything we can to make this type of food accessible to everyone, and I am more than committed than ever to helping Chipotle achieve this important mission.
I am also very confident that we already have the extraordinary teams we need to accomplish our goals. Our teams have faced many challenges in the last year, and while I am not satisfied with the pace of our recovery, I am incredibly proud of the teams in our restaurants. I'm proud that we have mastered the many food safety-related changes to our operations. And I continue to be very pleased with the delicious food we serve in our restaurants every day.
But I have not been happy with the guest experience in many of our restaurants, and for that, I take full responsibility. Ensuring that every one of our restaurants is delivering an excellent guest experience is my top priority and I will work tirelessly to remove distractions that are limiting our team's ability to deliver it. When Chipotle started, we were focused on doing just a few things extremely well, but over the years our restaurant operations have become needlessly complicated. We have become overly focused on details and processes that interfere with our team's ability to deliver an excellent guest experience. I am relentlessly focused on ensuring that we remove unnecessary complexity so that our terrific teams can succeed at providing the incredible guest experience I know they can.
I am also committing to improving the Restaurateur program, which is the foundation of our people culture at Chipotle. I will make sure that we closely align Restaurateur status with the things that ensure an excellent guest experience. And, I will work to ensure that even more of our team members achieve Restaurateur status by making the path to Restaurateur more straightforward.
I'd like to thank each and every member of the Chipotle family for your commitment and your dedication to making better food accessible to more and more people. I am honored and humbled to lead such an incredible company and promise I will work hard each day to earn your respect and loyalty. I am more committed than ever to accomplishing our mission, and I am extremely confident in the ability of our teams to build a bright future for Chipotle.
