Stop reaching for unrelated compliments to sweeten your critiques. Here are some better options.
Giving criticism—whether by email, over the phone, or face-to-face—can always be awkward. Even if the message is basically the same, the way you deliver it plays a huge role in how well (or badly) it's received. No manager is going to get through to a struggling employee if they don't find tactful ways to broach the subject.
If that much is familiar, then so is the "praise sandwich" many a manager has been counseled to deliver. This is when a point of criticism is wedged between a couple of compliments. It goes something like this:
Wow, you really killed it on the introduction to that sales presentation. The middle seemed to slow down a bit too much with the overload of sales numbers, but the end was really fantastic.
Voila! You've packaged your criticism in between two compliments, like a porcupine nestling among a couple of pillows. And maybe some employees will respond well to that, but chances are you can do a lot better. Here are a few subtler, and ultimately more effective methods to deliver effective feedback.
This may seem like another way of saying "compliment sandwich," but bear with me. If you stop grasping for related compliments you can stick onto the criticism and just whittle down to the criticism itself, it's usually easier to deliver a coherent piece of feedback.
From: The text in your presentation was good, but the charts need work.
To: The text in your presentation was great. We need to improve the charts so they're just as good.
From: You need to do more research for your last analysis.
To: The first analysis in your report was right on. Let's do the same amount of extensive research in the last analysis that made the first one so good.
In both examples, you've ditched the contrived structure of a compliment sandwich and related the point of criticism to the bright spot—they form part of a coherent whole. You're essentially saying: "You did great here, so I'm sure you can do great over here." It's an extra warm and fuzzy way of wording criticism because you use an aspect of their own work as the new standard to strive toward.
Instead of directly criticizing by saying a presentation needs to make use of more resources, or that a report needs to be revised, you can ask questions that lead your colleague to the answer themselves.
From: You need more resources to support your presentation's credibility.
To: Could you find any resources that would improve the credibility of your presentation?
From: This report needs some revision.
To: What do you think needs to be revised in this report?
In both cases, you're empowering your team member with a chance to take personal responsibility and find their own ways of improving their work. You're also telling them to do something through your question. In the first example, you're asking them to look for resources, which they may not have known to do. In the second, you're making it clear that the report needs to be revised—and asking them to reflect on how—without commanding them to do so and leaving it at that.
A great way to criticize without raising the ire of your employees or coworkers is to blame it on a recognized authority on the subject in question.
From: Finalizing financial statements without first shoring up the cost estimate may turn out to be a mistake once we go to the bank for a loan.
To: It says on page three of the bank's terms and conditions that they "require accurate cost estimates when evaluating financial statements."
You may sound a bit like a know-it-all, and this method may still irk some colleagues. But if you phrase it well, it becomes you and your colleagues against those darn terms and conditions, not you against your colleagues. If it doesn't go over well, you can always say, essentially, "I don't make the law, I just enforce it."
Instead of saying that an argument is unconvincing, you can let your colleague know that, if it were you, the argument would have to be more convincing. For example:
From: That sales pitch isn't going to convince anyone.
To: I'm not sure if that sales pitch would convince me.
This one may not seem as sensitive as the others, but it does allow you to let your colleague know that their presentation needs work without dismissing the whole thing as worthless. By saying the presentation wouldn't work on you, you're still allowing for the possibility that it might work on someone else.
This last one may sound obvious, but in practice there's a subtle difference between criticizing a person and criticizing a piece of work produced by a person. Plus, so much of the received wisdom about giving feedback cuts the other way—it's all about being sensitive to the personal element. But flipping that around doesn't force you to be harsh and unfeeling.
From: You made mistakes all throughout the memo.
To: There were lots of mistakes in the first draft of the memo.
Everyone knows you're saying that your colleague made a bunch of mistakes, but by eliminating the "you," it sounds like you're just commenting on the memo alone. This makes everything seem less personal. We're blaming the draft, not the person, which is much more palatable. Likewise, it's the memo that needs correcting, not the person who drew it up.
The core idea behind each of these methods is to inform your colleague or team member of the shortfalls you noticed, while providing them at least one of two things (and ideally both): a second chance, and a way to save face. Either way, work gets better and everyone's feelings are spared. Everybody wins, and no one needs to gulp down praise sandwiches they don't want to eat.
Chris Meyer is a freelance writer who runs bizwrites.com, blending business writing and art with self-improvement.
Has your company drawn up a handbook to help employees go on family leave? Here's an inside look at Buffer's in its entirety.
Thinking through our very first family leave policy at Buffer was a new and exciting thing for our young company. I was personally honored to be the first teammate to take a leave and put this into practice, and more recently, I got the chance to help craft our more inclusive leave policy.
And yet, for all our planning and research, there was one vital part we had overlooked: A great family leave policy doesn't just help the teammate taking leave. It also helps managers and team leads understand the best way to support these folks in their new journey.
The majority of our managers are not parents, and we realized this was an area where we could provide a lot more direction in the form of a guidebook for managers. Every parent's experience is unique, but we want to provide the same support to all our Buffer parents.
We're proud to share our manager's guide to family leave at Buffer, which includes best practices for before, during, and after a family leave experience. We hope this will assist our team to better support families, and perhaps some of the resources might benefit your organization, too.
This is intended to serve as a guide for managers who have teammates going (or have been) on family leave. Though we strive to cover many scenarios here, every person, every family, and every team is unique. It's best to use personal judgement and seek advice in uncertain situations.
Supporting our team members during these big life events is a major part of Buffer's belief in bringing our whole selves to work. This is also a meaningful and valuable way to invest in each person. The gift of time with family is irreplaceable. We feel this is in line with our vision of becoming the workplace of the future. Here's to a growing team and many new family members!
The first step for all our managers is to please get to know Buffer's playbook on family leave—this explains what we believe and why. Here are some of the basic tenants of our family leave playbook at Buffer:
All parents, regardless of gender or sexual identity, are treated equally.
We strongly urge a timeframe of 6–12 weeks of fully paid time off.
Typical leave time can vary from country to country. If it feels best to take more than three months, we'd love to chat this over on a case-by-case basis and find a solution that works for the team and each family.
We'll be excited to welcome teammates back following their leave, no matter how much time was spent away. Their place in Buffer will be waiting for whenever it feels right to step back in fully.
There are three key discussions that are important to have regarding a teammate taking family leave:
Sharing the news
Logistics and timeline
Finalizing the handover plan
These discussions might take the place over the course of many meetings. Sometimes setting up times separate from regular one-on-ones can create more focus on the bigger picture.
Sharing the news of a new child can be an exhilarating and terrifying moment for all parents, whether it's their first or fifth child. Many times, there is a feeling of guilt right away: "Oh gosh, I'm going to let my team down by taking time away."
When: Whenever your teammate chooses to share the news! We want to ensure that no one is pressured into sharing things too early or before they feel fully ready.
What to say:
"Congratulations!" Spend a good amount of time celebrating! Ask questions (Are you going to find out the gender? Do you have a name in mind? How have you found the process or adoption or fostering so far? Is there anything we can help with? Are the siblings excited?)
Reassure that they have a place and home at Buffer no matter how much time they take. Assure that you will work with them to make sure it's a smooth transition.
Ask if the doctors have any concerns or recommendations for working considerations. (This applies to mothers and fathers—fathers might be needed to help out more if the mother needs to be on bedrest.)
Ask about plans to share with the team or not and be sure to respect privacy and wishes.
What to do next? First and foremost, take care to never make the leave feel like a burden to the team; new parents wrestle with tons of guilt, whether or not it is warranted. Send (and keep sending) the signal that the teammate is 100% valued and supported (especially if the teammate is a fairly recent hire.) Our policy is to offer this time for folks at Buffer no matter how long they've been on the team. Babies happen in their own time!
Don't press for too many work or leave details at this time—it might be too early, and if this is a first child or first adoption, there are so many questions and unknowns. It's okay to let things settle a bit.
Don't decide the leave length in this discussion: Keep things light, perhaps offering, "Let's start thinking about your leave length, but let's not decide anything yet!" Instead, reassure: "Don't worry about the 'how' or 'who' in regards to your workload—let's think about what is best for your family situation and I, as your lead, will figure out the rest."
If the teammate is hesitant to take our recommended 6–12 weeks, emphasize the signal they give to others with their decision. By framing it as, "You help to set the culture that this is okay," managers give stronger permission and validation that time off helps rather than hurts the team.
This is the discussion where some key decisions will be made, so be sure to provide plenty of time and space for listening. If possible, start planning at least one full quarter before leave starts to make sure others can cover for your teammate's responsibilities while out.
When: two to three months before leave begins
Learn more about your teammate's workload. Ask:
"What are the projects you're working on that need to be handed off?"
"Does anyone come to mind? If not, don't worry. We will figure it out and I can approach others on the team."
If the teammate indicates a time range they're thinking about, default to the largest end of the range. We strongly recommend at least six weeks for secondary caregivers and at least three months for primary caregivers.
Both primary and secondary caregivers are welcome to the same range of time and we'd love to work toward normalizing this. Some anecdotal evidence shows some of our secondary caregivers are itching to get back to work at around the two-month mark, and we recognize that remote work allows easier work access while still being able to help with baby at home. For birth mothers, there is a stretch of physical recovery time needed that can vary from four to six weeks, or six to eight weeks for C-section births.
Be sure to work with the teammate to share the news fully with everyone they work closely with so expectations are clear.
Your job as a manager is to develop a transitionary plan to figure out who exactly will take over the most essential work/projects. Assign someone (or multiple people) to be the point of contact in out-of-office emails while your teammate is out.
Sometimes these long absences for one of your team members can reveal what work is truly essential and what can "fall through the cracks" with little repercussions. Here's a post about Alfred taking a sabbatical and the process we took before and during and after with distributing his tasks.
During the last month before your teammate's leave, begin to work on off-ramping them and make sure no major new projects are undertaken. If there is a clear starting date for the leave, the week prior should focus solely on handing over tasks for a smooth transition offline. (Of course, you might not have that luxury—babies can surprise us!)
When: Shortly before leave starts, ideally two to three weeks before the planned leave date
First, celebrate again! This period of waiting for baby to arrive or for an adoption to process can be a nerve-wracking and special time.
If not already discussed, will your teammate return full- or part-time? (Ask both moms and dads—be careful not to assume.) Reassure that it's okay to change their mind.
Then find out how to check in: How often would the teammate like you to check in while on leave, and by what means? Make sure you decide before leave starts what works best for your teammate. Some might really want to be invited to big things like all-hands meetings and impromptu hours, or have more casual contact like texts. These should be "social" invites: use text messages or Facebook messenger. Don't pull your teammate into Slack or work email!
Urge and empower them to truly disconnect. Remind them that this time is special, and short in the scheme of things.
Finally, reassure your teammate that they're valued. Their time away doesn't change that, and they can take the time they truly need. Buffer will still be waiting for them whenever the right time is to fully step back in.
In general, this should be a fully disconnected time for the teammate on leave.
Communicating too much with the teammate on leave can inadvertently create stress, and what your teammate thinks they want might be quite different to what they actually want when in the situation (especially for first-time parents who aren't quite sure what to expect!) Respect your teammate's family time by letting them disconnect and not starting any on-ramping until the official return date.
While your teammate is away, try to record important meetings and keep a log of vital team happenings that you can share later as part of a "welcome back" package. Coming back can be a scary time where your teammate feels very out of the loop, so help to make it an easier and less overwhelming return.
Ways to keep the team up to date:
Record all relevant syncs (and even seemingly irrelevant ones!), share in a Dropbox folder that team members all have access to.
Note important events your teammate would want to know about (things like new hires, people moving on, role changes, vision updates).
Share smaller cultural happenings, too: The latest GIF, meme, or new Slack room.
How to check in periodically:
Be sure to respect your teammate's wishes for contacting them (or not) during the leave.
Keep any check-ins purely social (i.e. via Facebook) and don't mention work.
If there is an emergency at work, find a way to handle it without interrupting your teammate whenever possible. (Grab advice from me or the People team as needed!) Calling someone back into work should not be an option.
It's scary to return to work (even after a second or third baby!). Your teammate is likely going through a huge identity change. Expect a gradual return to work and a slow ramp-up back to full-time levels. Here's how to welcome your teammate back:
Share your log of team happenings and recorded meetings with your teammate on their first morning back. Reassure and discuss expectations for slowly getting up to speed on what has changed (likely a lot!). During this time, very regular check-ins (i.e., one to three times a week, daily by Slack) are vital to make sure the work is at the right level (stimulating but not overwhelming).
Be careful and don't assume you know what is best for the teammate. Women coming back from family leave often report they do not get enough work or enough challenging work. This can come from a place of empathy ("I didn't want to burden her with the new baby") but can manifest as gender stereotyping. Be mindful of your teammate's preferences and goals to avoid putting them on a "mommy track" (or a "daddy track") when that is not what they want.
Aim to hand back one to two tasks a week and keep communicating on how it's going, adjusting as needed. Practically, handing back the tasks from the teammate who took over during leave should happen gradually. Staggering the tasks is key; don't hand them all back at once.
Encourage a flexible schedule (naps for new parents are important, too—they are most likely not getting anywhere near eight hours of sleep!). There are also many postnatal medical appointments for mothers and babies. For fostering/adoption, there can be a lot of paperwork/legal proceedings to plan around, too.
Reassure your teammate that it's okay for babies or family interruptions in meetings, and help your teammate set realistic expectations. (For example, cut their to-do list by 10%–15% for first few months after baby) and, urge them to work on . Smaller-scoped projects that still have impact but are not crucial, time pressured, etc., might be a good fit for your teammate. (Make sure this is their preference, not yours.)
Acknowledge that sleep deprivation is a real challenge and is linked to a drop in cognitive function, memory and judgment, and an increased risk of depression. Your teammate might not have the same physical work capacity they did before. Understand that both moms and dads will likely be facing a lot of emotional turbulence. So during this period, ask about the baby and the family often!
Keep in mind that one week will not look like the next for your teammate at home. Children progress through many stages and routines can change often. This requires a lot of flexibility for parents and means working asynchronously is more important than ever. Normalize working fewer hours. Actively encourage working smarter, not harder. Your teammate will get as much if not more done if they are working fewer hours.
Follow best practices for Slack and all communication channels (this is something we can explore more as a whole team). Really encourage the use of "Do Not Disturb" settings. Can your team do on-call shifts? Encourage offline time—this is super important for everyone! Encourage vacation time at some point after the family leave; remind the teammate if you have to that family leave is not vacation.
A version of article originally appeared on Buffer. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.
The best way to beat the vague anxiety that you're not doing your best is to find some concrete ways to start doing better.
One part of your brain feels pretty sure you've been doing a really good job at work lately. But the other part's suspicious that you're not. Nobody's told you that's the case, and you've even gotten some positive feedback from your colleagues recently. But still, you can't help but wonder if you're one mistake away from losing your job.
After all, if you had to be honest with yourself, you're nothing but a no-good fraud who shouldn't have the position to begin with, right?
If this inner monologue sounds familiar to you, don't worry—you're not alone. As Muse writer Ximena Vengoechea writes in an article on impostor syndrome, many people fall victim to it at some point or another. But instead of getting too caught up in fears that you're not good enough at your job, work to overcome them instead.
I'm often guilty of assuming that I'm helping someone when I say, "That thing you're worried about is not really a thing, so you'll be better off if you can just get over it." And sure, some people are just predisposed to whining for the sake of having something (anything!) to complain about.
But in many other instances, the person on the receiving end doesn't understand that you just need to work through your worries aloud. That's especially the case when it comes to your career fear of being "found out to be an imposter."
Unless you've assembled the least sensitive group of friends on the planet, I bet you can think of one or two people who are really good at listening to you vent. So, reach out to those people and explain how afraid you are that you'll walk into work one day and run into your replacement on the way in. Let them know you're just looking for someone to listen to you—and not to resolve your problem.
The benefit of having someone around to simply listen is simple: Many times, you'll feel better after you've had a chance to talk through your concerns aloud.
Personally, whenever I get nervous that my boss isn't pleased with me, I lose sight of the fact that I've gotten a lot done recently. And while it wouldn't do you any favors to email your entire company with a list of recent achievements, it never hurts to review your accomplishments for the sake of reminding yourself that you bring a lot of value to your role.
There are a few ways you can do this. For me, I keep track of my to-do list with a free app called Trello, which allows me to organize things the way I want. For you, it might be a handwritten list of the things you've knocked out of the park lately. There are no rules to keeping track of what makes you not-so-replaceable. Find what works for you, and treat yourself to regular check-ins to remind yourself that you're doing some important work.
On the surface, this might sound crazy to a lot of people. After all, not everyone has a manager who understands basic human goals and fears the way we hope. And if you happen to have a boss who micromanages you, it's perfectly understandable if your first instinct isn't to go to him and open up about how afraid you are that you're not living up to expectations.
But if you do have a good relationship, it might be worth your time to have this awkward conversation. Because there are really only two outcomes you'll experience if you do. If you're doing a good job and are just paranoid about being replaced, your boss will reaffirm the fact that you have nothing to worry about.
However, if there is something you could be doing differently (and your suspicions are right), there's no better person to discuss next steps with. Your ultimate goal is to avoid getting replaced, and because of that, nobody on the face of the earth would have better advice than the person who supervises you every day.
So, take a chance on your boss and say something along the lines of, "I wanted to check in on my recent work and see what you think I could be improving on."
It's never a good feeling to go into work and think, "Uh oh, today's the day my boss decides to upgrade my role with someone better than me." And trust me, you're not the first person to feel this, and you're definitely not the last.
But at the same time, take a step back and think about where this fear is coming from. Is it coming from long talks with your manager and HR about your performance, or is it stemming from a recent mistake (or even fear of a mistake) you made? If it's the latter, do yourself a favor and find ways to get the affirmation you need right now. You deserve it more than you might even realize.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai are just some of those expressing concerns about the order banning refugees from 7 countries.
This story is being updated with the latest developments.
A growing number of tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, are denouncing President Trump's executive order that bans refugees from 7 Muslim-majority countries: Syria, Iran, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan. The orders were signed by the president on Friday.
Pichai wrote a memo to his staff saying that the order will impact 100 Google employees, adding that "it is painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues." And Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union when he was just 6, attended the protest at San Francisco Airport against the order though he declined comment to reporters. Amid massive protests at airports around the country over the detention of immigrants arriving from those seven countries, late on Saturday night a federal judge in Brooklyn issued an emergency ruling allowing those detained immigrants to stay in the U.S. "We won," Dale Ho, ACLU's director of Voting Rights Project, told the NY Daily News, adding that the government must provide list of names of those affected. "Stay is national."
Apple CEO Tim Cook emailed his staff on Saturday that some of his employees were also impacted by the order, adding that "Apple believes deeply in the importance of immigration," reports Vice News. "Apple is open. Open to everyone, no matter where they come from, which language they speak, who they love or how they worship."
Cook, who is in Washington to meet with government officials and was spotted having dinner with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner a few blocks from the White House, also chimed in on Twitter, including an image of a quote from Abraham Lincoln:
Uber's Kalanick posted on Facebook this evening to say that the company's People Ops team has reached out to the dozen or so employees impacted by the order, adding that the ban is going to "impact many innocent people—an issue that I will raise this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump's first business advisory group meeting." Due to his continued willingness to work with Trump, some riders are boycotting Uber and protesters formed a human chain outside the company's San Francisco offices on Friday.
And Airbnb's Brian Chesky tweeted that the company "is providing free housing to refugees and anyone not allowed in the US," asking people to contact him personally if they needed housing.
Other tech leaders also chimed in throughout the day to express their condemnation of the ban:
Companies like Stash and Wise Banyan are growing fast. Will their success be their own undoing?
If you're a first-time investor with, say, $15,000 in savings, you have plenty of options these days. Newfangled robo-advisers like Betterment and Wealthfront will happily take your money, as will incumbents like Charles Schwab, which have launched improved digital products. But if you're starting at zero, with practically nothing in the way of savings, you would have found few options designed to serve your needs—until now.
There are suddenly half a dozen startups eager for your first saved dollar. They aspire to grow with you, transforming your initial commitment into a healthy nest egg. But for the foreseeable future, they have set themselves up to manage small accounts—$100 here, $1,000 there, growing by maybe $5 or $10 per month. And because they are in no position to make a healthy profit by charging fees as a percentage of their assets under management (AUM), they are instead searching for alternative sources of revenue.
The results are varied. On the one hand, there is Stash. Founded by finance veterans Brandon Krieg and Ed Robinson—and propped up by $25 million in Series B financing, as of December—Stash has the look and feel of a calculated millennial machine. The app's exchange-traded fund (ETF) options, for example, have been relabeled with catchy titles like "Clean & Green" or "Defending America." Stash users aren't picking stocks, but the app succeeds in delivering some of the same rush that accompanies a more active approach to investing. (Robinson likes to imagine a Stash customer proudly telling his prospective father-in-law, "'I've got a bit of money in China'—it's very empowering.") It takes just $5 to open an account.
Stash
On the other hand, there is Wise Banyan. The company quietly raised $3.5 million last fall, bringing its total funding to just under $10 million. Unlike Stash, Wise Banyan takes a passive approach to investing, orienting its user experience around life goals like "rainy day fund" or retirement. With a muted blue color palette and friendly illustrations, the product interface has the look and feel of something that your most responsible friends might design. Which, as it happens, cofounders Vicki Zhou and Herbert Moore might very well resemble. Millennials themselves, they bonded over a shared frustration with extravagant or oblivious peers who had yet to start saving (after brunch with an old friend, Zhou recalls going home and writing up a long set of instructions for her to follow). Wise Banyan customers can start with as little as $1.
Their styles could not be more different, but Stash and Wise Banyan are in some ways playing a similar game. Both are much more concerned about growth in customers than growth in AUM—an argument that investors seem to finally be warming to.
"In the past, people would ask, how much AUM do you have? We were always battling that," Zhou says. "We're trying to help people get started, and it was hard for people to see the value of our client base. We look at AUM, but we also look at what people are on track to save for." Wise Banyan's 20,000 customers have so far saved around $100 million, she says, but are making progress toward goals worth $4.5 billion.
Wise Banyan
Stash's Krieg echoes that stance. "AUM is definitely not the KPI that we look at today," he says. "It puts too much pressure on us, it puts too much pressure on our customers. If we start measuring AUM, we're conflicted at that point." Like Zhou, though, he keeps an eye on leading indicators, like "Auto-Stash." Today, 40% of Stash's 360,000 customers are using the auto-deposit feature to set aside $20, on average, per week. "Look 12 months out, and our assets are going to be quite nice." (Krieg declines to provide a figure for AUM, but Auto-Stash customers alone could bring in $150 million in AUM this year, if that weekly average holds steady.)
But as these founders say, AUM is to some extent beside the point. Micro-investing services like Stash and Wise Banyan want to be valued as technology companies, not financial companies, says Lex Sokolin, director of fintech strategy for Autonomous Research. "The attention of that [younger] demographic is more valuable than the assets that they bring to the table," he says. (The average age for both Stash and Wise Banyan hovers at around 29.) "In the tech economy, in the attention economy, you're fighting for people's loyalty rather than their wallet."
With a large and loyal customer base comes the ability to layer on premium features, serve up recommendations for third-party products, monetize user data, and more. The trick is to do so in a way that maintains user trust.
"Financial literacy is a huge issue in the U.S.," Krieg says. "Our view is that if we can help people, we build trust and a really long relationship with the customers." Like any good technology company, though, he has aligned his incentives with that of a highly engaged user. "The landscape is made up of a lot of the robos, but we're not a robo-adviser," he says. "We want our customers to invest with intent. We want them to have a say in their investments, because that's when it becomes more meaningful." 80% of users with money in their accounts and 96% of Auto-Stash users open the app at least once a month.
"The black box 'set it and forget it' is sort of paternalistic in a way," says Valar Ventures founding partner Andrew McCormack, who led the company's recent Series B.
On the Stash blog, zeitgeisty posts like, "Would you invest in Westworld?" and "Friends with Bond-ifits" draw readers in. There is no post, however, on doing the basic math that might raise questions about Stash's $1-per-month fee. Stash charges that amount for all accounts with an average daily account balance of at least $1 (accounts with balances over $5,000 pay 0.25% per year, charged monthly and calculated daily). That means that a customer who puts just $100 in the Stash app could easily wipe out his or her investment gains by the end of the year.
"There's a school of thought that says, if I had done this with most discount brokers it would have cost $10 or $12 to do the trade," Krieg says. "So it's a wash, because we don't charge a trading commission."
In other words, you pay for the privilege of seeing yourself as an active investor.
Wise Banyan offers less choice, but for the compelling price of "free." The company doesn't charge for basic investment management services; instead, it plans to layer on extras like tax-loss harvesting (which, to be fair, is already included in the base fees that Betterment and Wealthfront charge).
"I would rather have 100,000 people starting with a dollar than one $100,000 client," says Zhou. "We're really thinking about how to make this accessible to everyone." Over time, she wants to use data to get smarter about helping Wise Banyan customers work toward goals like home ownership. Combine location information with annual income and household size, for example: "We'll give you a recommendation for a down payment, and tell you how much to put in every week or every month."
Wise Banyan is not a B-Corp, but it has raised money from Village Capital, which invests in social enterprises, and the Financial Solutions Lab operated by CFSi, a nonprofit dedicated to financial health. For Zhou, it's a natural fit. "I grew up in a household that was in that fuzzy gray area between underbanked and banked," she says. Four generations lived in her family's Las Vegas home, relying on minimum wage jobs to get by. "At one point my mom worked at a Wendy's, my dad was cleaning dishes. When I was older they both worked in casinos."
The thrift she learned is apparent in Wise Banyan's New York office, a fifth floor walk-up just four blocks from Stash. When the team moved in, Zhou recalls, they had trouble hanging whiteboards on the walls because none of the floors or ceilings followed straight lines.
"They built a lean operation, and figured out how to make money at a much lower threshold," says Ryan Falvey, managing director of the Financial Solutions Lab, pointing to the company's ability to settle transactions without a broker. "As they grow it will give them a pretty significant advantage."
Stash and Wise Banyan are not alone. M1 Finance, a Chicago-based company that launched its app last fall, tries to split the difference between the two, combining goal-based passive investing ("2060 Conservative") and stock picking ("AAPL") in a unified, pie chart-based user experience. "You're the boss," "be invested," the company proclaims on its website, drawing a contrast between its approach and that of established robos. The minimum to get started: $100.
Plus there are companies like Acorns, which has raised nearly $62 million, and Digit, which has raised just over $36 million. Sokolin doubts that all will survive. "The competition for micro-investing is just more brutal, because the revenues are lower," he says.
For those that do make it, there's a secondary concern: When a customer passes $15,000 or $20,000 in savings, will they ditch their "training wheels" app and migrate to a platform designed for the mass affluent? Wise Banyan is perhaps better positioned in this regard than Stash. But it doesn't help that Betterment and Wealthfront have been lowering their minimums, signaling that they too would like to capture customers early.
In the meantime, the ETF industry is reaping the benefits of investment apps' willingness to pay hundreds of dollars to acquire each new customer. "The biggest winner from a lot of these companies growing have been ETF providers like Blackrock," says Evan Morris, an alternative investments analyst for Pitchbook. Blackrock's ETFs pulled in $140 billion in new business last year, while Vanguard's attracted $97 billion.
"The big question is how this space can survive a big market downturn," Morris adds. "It remains to be seen how investors will react when their portfolio drops overnight." Especially when the news arrives via mobile notification.
What catches their eye—or pass you by? You might be surprised.
When you're looking for a job, your LinkedIn profile is a 24/7 information resource for the recruiters who are looking for talent. In fact, in the Jobvite 2016 Recruiter Nation Report, 87% of recruiters find LinkedIn most effective when vetting candidates during the hiring process.
But what really catches a recruiter's eye when they're scrolling through your profile? Here, several weighed in about profiles that make them reach out—or recoil.
When Cassandre Joseph, senior talent acquisition visionary and strategist at recruitment firm Korn Ferry, looks at a profile, she wants to see your work experience, education, and accomplishments. Incomplete profiles make it more difficult to determine whether you're the best match for the job, because she can't get the whole picture. It's a bad first impression, she says.
"I find somebody's profile and it says they've worked at, according to the profile, four different places simultaneously. They're adding the new places, but not putting end dates. That says they haven't updated their LinkedIn profile in X amount of years," she says.
Your profile photo makes the first impression, so put a little effort into it, says resume expert and retained search consultant Donna Svei. It should look professional and representative of the job you are seeking. Selfies and vacation photos tell recruiters you couldn't be bothered to make yourself look more professional.
Profiles with just a few contacts are also unappealing, says Molly O'Malley, a tenured recruiter at Adams Keegan, a national HR management and employer services provider. The most effective people have robust networks, and your LinkedIn profile should represent that. You don't need thousands, but 300 or more is ideal, she says So, beef up your contacts before you look for a new job.
Joseph says recruiters often look at profiles to confirm information about a candidate. So when your dates of employment, job titles, or other facts are different on your profile than they are on your resume, a recruiter might worry about how detail-oriented you are—or if there's reason to believe that you're not being truthful on one or the other.
Think of your summary like a copywriter would, Svei says. Highlight what's in it for recruiters to contact you, such as your achievements, honors, and success stories. Use short copy blocks and bullet points so they can read your summary easily. As more recruiters use mobile devices, your copy should be easy to read on small screens. Svei says it's also critical to include keywords about your industry for easy searchability.
Recruiters may also find your LinkedIn profile via Google instead of the platform itself, Svei says. Google search results will typically include your location and the professional headline that appears under your name on your profile. Make the most of that headline by clarifying your industry and job function.
If your title is something along the lines of "supreme conveyer of IT knowledge" or "social media ninja," don't expect a recruiter to try to figure out what you do, O'Malley says. Make your job title and what your company does clear. Jargon or vague language wastes everyone's time.
During your job search, maintain an active profile, says Melanie Lundberg, assistant vice president of talent management and corporate communications for Combined Insurance. "Read news feeds, share content, comment—it shows a level of professional engagement," she says. Similarly, link to articles you've written or other examples of your work. Many will also be looking for professionalism in what you post.
Recruiters are mostly unimpressed with recommendations unless they're short and really highlight something about your capabilities or strengths, O'Malley says. Don't ditch them, but don't put too much stock in them, either.
By using the Open Candidates option, you can privately let recruiters know that you're looking for a job. Svei says it's a good idea to use this option, which indicates that you want to hear about potential opportunities.
Elaina Giolando's career has taken her to 50 countries and counting before turning 28—virtually by accident.
At 27, I have almost a decade of meaningful international experience. I've worked professionally in more than a dozen countries, including Mongolia, South Africa, Turkey, Qatar, and Nigeria, and now I'm part of the international operations team of a major Silicon Valley startup in Mexico and Australia.
However, I used to have a much less exciting job. Having worked in the consulting division of a huge multinational company, I know what it feels like to be plugging away in a cubicle in New York or Chicago. But what I've found—completely by accident, in retrospect—is that there are a few clear strategies for launching the globe-trotting career of your dreams. Here are six of the ways I've managed to pull it off.
I come from a small city in upstate New York, so as soon as I started college in 2007 I went after every opportunity to go overseas. I won a scholarship to study at the National University of Singapore, and later I landed fellowships to do research in countries like Guatemala and Egypt, studied Mandarin in China for six months, and traveled independently to dozens of other countries in the process.
Not long after I graduated, I was able to leverage those undergrad experiences (plus two years in a management consulting firm; see point No. 3 below) to land a job with a global media company, where I traveled across five continents for two years. Thanks to those years of global experience, it's actually hard for me to get anything but an international job now.
Go abroad early in your career. Take any opportunity you can—take a salary cut if you have to, volunteer, do anything that "globalizes" your resume.
If I wanted to move into commercial banking in the Middle East, I've got a contact for that. If I wanted to break into the modeling scene in Taiwan, I also have a contact for that. Hell, if I wanted a job producing Norwegian techno music in India, I literally have a contact for that, too. The beautiful thing is, I didn't seek these people out and I never tried to "network" with them—I just met them while couch surfing across Asia or having drinks in Addis Ababa.
Once you get started doing work that involves some form of regular international travel, your network goes global. And as long as you continue on this type of career path, you'll find that it inherently sustains connections like these. Because all of a sudden, you need to connect with other people who work overseas just like you do, since they're the ones who can help you find other opportunities. It's a virtuous circle.
In order to build a global career in your 20s, you don't necessarily need to leave college with your bags already packed. In fact, I don't think I would've been able to make the leap into a global sales role without a Fortune 500 company on my resume. The people I know who looked for entry-level jobs overseas right after graduation wound up compromising on their professional interests in order to land anything that paid. And most of them struggled to break back into the U.S. job market after their time overseas.
In my experience, it's best to start your career at home, get a solid skill set under your belt, begin to complement it with international experience of any sort (and foreign language skills if you have them), and only thenwork your way into a job abroad. Believe me, it doesn't take as long as it sounds.
I actually majored in Chinese during university, but it's been Spanish that's gotten me hired time after time.
Like many Americans, I started learning Spanish in middle school and took advanced courses through college, but it was working in Guatemala and traveling through South America that finally set me on the path to fluency. Now I speak Spanish while I work here in Mexico, and the full language immersion continues to develop one of my key professional assets.
I'm not necessarily single on purpose, but it definitely makes it easier to accept jobs that people with partners and families can't. My first international employer sent me to Nigeria, but being young, adventurous, and uncommitted made it an exciting and career-advancing opportunity for me.
I've also been nomadic since 2013. I have the disposition to feel at home just about anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat, which has already proved a compelling asset for many companies looking to staff their emerging markets. The only way to figure out if you have that attitude, too, is simply to take a job that demands a lot of international travel and see how it suits you.
For better or worse, all of my 2,000 Facebook friends and the tens of thousands of visitors to my site know exactly what I'm up to at all times. That's actually how I landed my latest gig in Mexico: A friend from university whom I hadn't spoken to in six years knew what I've been up to because of my blog, then connected me to a friend of hers who happened to be recruiting for someone with precisely my background.
Be vocal about who you are and what you want in your life and career—even while you're still figuring that out. People want to help, so help them help you by communicating your talents, ideas, and goals.
After all, those will keep evolving with you. I learned all of this by clumsily chasing my curiosities around the world for the past decade, but the lessons are universally applicable. As I've found through trial and error, the formula boils down to a few key principles, rather than some master plan:
Build a strong skill set at home.
Pick up any international experience you can early on.
Learn to speak an in-demand language.
Be open to going anywhere.
Nurture a global network.
But most of all, never give up. I've applied to dozens of jobs all over the world, walked away from opportunities, and truly followed my heart. Be curious, persistent, and smart about your international career hunt, and you'll land the job of your dreams—however far from home it may be.
Elaina Giolando is an international project manager and digital nomad who's lived and worked in more than 50 countries. She writes about global careers, unconventional lifestyle design, and meaningful travel on Life Before 30.
The automated coffee kiosks promise fast, tasty, hot coffee without the possibility of human error. Is this the future of java joints?
For seven years I worked as a barista at Starbucks. I was freelancing for a few magazines out of my home, and I took the Starbucks job because I felt like I was slowly turning into a hermit. I really enjoyed getting out and talking to people in person from behind the bar for a few hours each day. Of course, the free coffee was a nice perk too, but the human connection aspect was what kept me around for so long.
I wasn't the only one that used Starbucks as an opportunity to meet people. The retailer has a whole business built around the idea of creating a "third place," somewhere that customers feel is a comfortable extension of their home, a real-life Cheers where everyone—or at least your regular barista—knows your name (if only because they write it on a cup every morning). During my stint at the coffee bar, I made friends with a number of customers who stopped by daily, looking for the same thing I was: a human connection.
But a new coffee shop opening today in San Francisco has the exact opposite in mind: Instead of getting your daily cup of joe from a friendly barista, you'll get it from a robot.
Called Cafe X, the small shop inside San Francisco's Metreon shopping center allows customers to place orders via smartphone or an iPad kiosk. The orders are prepared and delivered by a robo-barista. The place is not so much a coffee shop as a fully enclosed kiosk that looks like a hybrid between a café and a vending machine. Inside are two WMF espresso machines that can make one of seven different beverages, each offered with three different coffee options from local roasters, as well as organic milk and add-on features like syrups. Drinks are all served in eight-ounce cups and cost between $2 and $3. (Drinks are available in that particular size only for quality control. The roasters the company works with endorsed it as the best ratio of coffee to milk. Adding additional sizes in the future is a possibility.)
The privately backed company has raised $5 million in seed funding from investors including The Thiel Foundation, Social Capital, Khosla Ventures, Jason Calacanis, and Felicia Ventures. A Cafe X in Hong Kong (next to a Starbucks) that's been in operation for a month currently serves more than 1,000 cups a week.
Cafe X's model is similar to another San Francisco favorite, Eastsa. That company also allows mobile and in-house kiosk orders and delivers quinoa bowls to small pods inside the restaurant. The goal is to serve customers food as quickly as possible.
"If you're looking for really good coffee, you often have to wait for a very long time, and if you're in rush, you have to settle for very bad coffee," says Cafe X founder and CEO Henry Hu. "We thought that by applying some automation and using mobile for placing orders, it would be possible to have really good coffee, but still really quickly."
When your order is ready, Cafe X sends you a text message with a four-digit code that you enter at the robot's kiosk. Once you do, the robotic arm (manufactured by Mitsubishi) grabs your cup of coffee from one of eight warming stations where it might be sitting, and gently rests it on a small shelf similar to what you might find in a vending machine. From there, you pick it up. The average drink preparation takes less than a minute.
The code adds a level of security that you don't usually find in your average coffee purchase. Ordering digitally means you don't have to worry about whether the barista heard your order correctly (or wrote it on someone else's cup). Collecting your drink from a personal pod also ensures that someone doesn't accidentally pick up your latte.
The robot will keep your drink warm for up to eight minutes, and after that, it gets dumped. You'll get a notification letting you know you missed the pickup window, and the cafe will remake your drink once you arrive, free of charge. Over time, Hu says that the machine will also start to prioritize drinks based on geolocation. So a double espresso might be prepared for the person standing at the machine before the chai for the customer who's around the corner. Eight warming stations might seem sparse for dense cities, but Hu says that in even in bustling Hong Kong, there has never been a problem.
Because I was a barista for so long, I believe I'll still be able to make the perfect cappuccino when I'm in my 90s. It's one of those things that gets better with practice, and when you've spent years and years making hundreds of specific drinks, you get pretty skilled at them. But not every barista has been slinging coffee for years.
Preparing coffee isn't the most lucrative job, and plenty of baristas do it part-time. On Monday your latte might be made by someone who has been steaming milk for a decade, but on Tuesday, it might be made by someone who started last week. Variables like the roast on a particular batch of beans, the grind of the espresso machine, and even the barista's mood factor into every order. Even with the same recipe, it's tough to get a consistent flavor from a human-made cup of coffee. There are just too many moving parts.
With Cafe X, the majority of those variables are controlled. The robot takes your order, and the machines are calibrated to make it exactly the same each and every time. An on-site human specialist monitors quality and makes adjustments throughout the day to ensure that each cup is as good as it can be.
That on-site specialist is the only human you'll interact with at Cafe X. That person will be on hand whenever the café is open and will be responsible for explaining how Cafe X works, testing products throughout the day to ensure quality, and offering coffee suggestions and tips to visitors. For instance, the person might be able to tell you more about a particular bean Cafe X is brewing, or offer you a selection of espresso shots so you can determine the difference between roasts. They'll also offer you a lid.
The hope is that while the café might employ fewer humans than your average coffee shop, the one that it does employ will have more time to chat with customers and offer a more personalized experience.
Is Cafe X the first step in robots taking over that job I once enjoyed? Probably not. Hu acknowledges that customers who are hoping to spend time with friends or just interact with a stranger will still likely pick a traditional coffee shop. However, for times when they're in a rush and need a cup of reliably good joe fast, Cafe X will be there.
As social networks and sensors collect more data about us, it becomes ever important for us to take an active role in how it's used.
The sunlight is nearly blinding as it bounces off the squat, square, perfectly beige and banal government complex across the street. In the foreground, a police officer squints into the camera, shrugs, and shakes his head.
Man's Voice: Look, I'm out in public taking photographs. And beyond that, it's none of your business what I'm doing.
Officer 1: Did you say it's none of our business?
Man's Voice: Yep. If I'm not being detained, you guys have a nice day.
At that, another officer pulls out a pad and the man is told he's being detained. Officers pat him down to ensure he's not carrying any weapons. When the search is complete, he gets a warning.
Officer 2: Here's the thing: just make it easy for all of us. We'll get your name; we're going to make sure you're not someone who's out here trying to kill us.
Man's Voice: Is it illegal to take pictures of you? Is it illegal?
There's a long pause as the officer stares into the camera—at least, it seems that's what he's doing. It's impossible to know exactly where he's looking, as his eyes are obscured by his mirrored sunglasses. He tightens his lips and sets his jaw; the furrow between his eyebrows deepens. Finally, he answers the man: "No."
The sun is just as bright in a second video recorded that day, but this time the glare glances on the front hood of a police cruiser. The dashcam observes the officer waiting patiently for the traffic light to turn green before he can reach a station wagon about to leave a parking lot. The officer, whose voice sounds familiar, reports his location to radio dispatch, then orders the driver to roll down his window. The officer informs the driver that he got pulled over because his license plate is partly obscured.
The driver quickly informs the officer that he used to be qualified to drive commercial vehicles on his license, but that's been suspended—something he knows might cause confusion when his license number is radioed into dispatch. Sure enough, the dispatcher says the driver's license is invalid, and the officer arrests him, not merely for driving with a suspended license but for doing so knowingly. The day wasn't going quite the way Joe Gray had planned.
Gray is a member of a citizen group that records videos of authorities in public and posts them at the website Photography Is Not a Crime. Earlier in the day, he had been conducting a "First Amendment audit," recording officers coming and going from the Orlando police department to see if they would challenge his right to do so. He hadn't expected one of the officers to follow him from the scene and arrest him for a minor traffic violation because of it.
Gray didn't record the traffic stop or his arrest. However, the police car's dashcam was recording, and that audio captured the moment the police officer changed his frequency from general broadcast to direct car-to-car communication, which he used to consult the officer who had given Gray the warning across the street from the police department.
Officer 2: Hey, do you want me to go straight to BRC [the booking and release center] or do anything special?
Officer 1: [unintelligible]
Officer 2: I'm sorry?
Officer 1: Frankie's on his way over there, and we're going to find the L.T. [lieutenant] to see if there's anything else we need to do. You're not recording right now while you're talking?
Officer 2: I'm sorry?
Officer 1: Are you still recording yourself?
Officer 2: Uh, I only have same-car right now, but the mic is running.
When it came time for Gray to challenge his arrest in court, he was lucky: the "Sunshine State" of Florida has the strongest public records laws in the United States. He could point to the note in a state attorney's office newsletter urging police officers to pull over drivers for an obstructed license plate only if it was impossible to identify the plate number. He could also refer to a Department of Motor Vehicles memo explaining why the driver of a noncommercial vehicle should not be arrested for having a disqualified commercial license.
Eventually, he could replay the dashcam footage, which made clear that his tag number was visible—and he'd also get to hear the police officers discuss whether to take him straight to booking or do something "special" to him.
As these Orlando police officers learned, because sensors have become so small and storage has become so cheap, today anything and everything you say and do might be recorded. The sign has flipped: the default condition of life has shifted from "off the record" to "on the record."
Consider the number of networked cameras that capture data about you as you go about your day. Surveillance cameras are mounted in offices, stores, public transportation; on city streets, ATM machines, and car dashboards. You or your neighbors may have installed cameras to watch over your front door; you may have a webcam watching over your valuables—perhaps even your children. Security cameras are virtually everywhere, installed both to provide a record if a crime is committed and to deter people from committing a crime in the first place. Based on an exhaustive survey of the number of such cameras in one English county in 2011, it was estimated there were 2 million surveillance cameras in the United Kingdom alone—about one camera for every thirty people.
Generalizing this to the rest of the world, there are about 100 million cameras watching public spaces, all day and all night. Yet, this is only one-tenth of the 1 billion cameras on smartphones. Within the next few years, there will be one networked camera for every single person on the planet.
Then think about the other sensors on our smartphones. There's at least one microphone; a global positioning system receiver, which determines your location based on satellite signals; a magnetometer, which can serve as a compass to orient your phone based on the strength and direction of the earth's magnetic field; a barometer, which senses air pressure and your relative elevation; a gyroscope, which senses the phone's rate of rotation; an accelerometer, which senses the phone's movement; a thermometer; a humidity sensor; an ambient light sensor; and a proximity sensor, which deactivates the touchscreen when you bring the phone to your face. That's a dozen or so networked sensors per phone, bringing us to a total of more than 10 billion sensors on mobile phones alone. And that's not counting cars, watches, thermostats, electricity meters, and other networked devices.
If technology continues to follow Moore's Law, doubling the computing power available at the same price every 18 months, we will very likely be sharing the world with roughly 1 trillion sensors by 2020, in line with projections from Bosch, HP, IBM, and others.
To record the Orlando Police Department, Joe Gray used a standard video camera, a device that could be identified from many meters away. He did not try to hide his camera, since one of his motivations for recording the officers was to see if they would challenge his right to collect the data. In contrast, while the officer who pulled Gray over knew his patrol car had a live dashcam with a microphone, Gray was never notified during his arrest that the encounter was being recorded. Further, Gray always intended to share his video on the internet. The police department may never have shared the dashcam footage if it hadn't been forced to do so under the state's "Sunshine" laws.
Not all governments give citizens the right to access the type of records that helped Gray fight his arrest. Most organizations that collect data about a person do not share it with the subject. These records of our interactions will transform expectations about privacy. Even more fundamentally, they will also change the context and conditions of our interactions. We have significant issues to consider. Why do the laws currently treat photos and videos taken within public view differently from sounds taken within public earshot?
Which new types of sensors will be treated like cameras, and which like microphones? Why would a person's "right to record" depend on the type of sensor used? Should access to data be solely put in the hands of the person or entity that owns the sensor, or should all the participants in the event have access to the recording? If a person records an event involving another person, who has a "right" to decide how those data are used? If everything is recorded, will it encourage "better" behavior? And how will the lack of any recording be interpreted?
The complications of continuous recording can be seen in another case involving the Orlando police. In court, a driver successfully challenged a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs by noting that dashcam video of the arrest wasn't available. It didn't matter to the judge whether the camera was broken or the officer forgot to turn it on: The lack of video to "corroborate" the officer's arrest report meant the officer's word was no better than hearsay.
As our world gets increasingly sensorized, we will need to come to terms with the trade-offs of collecting and sharing data about our bodies, our feelings, and our environment that others might put to some future, unknown use. Now is the time to set down the conditions for how the data can be used so that the rewards—to individuals and to society—will outweigh the risks. Small differences in the rules we set today may have tremendous consequences for the future. I believe it is essential to examine how sensor data can be utilized following the principles of transparency and agency.
Why does a camera worn at all times bother people any more than a smartphone carried at all times? I was a user of the Explorer version of Google Glass and as a social experiment, wore my Glass pretty much all the time for nearly a year. Quite a few of the people who became unsettled when they saw I was wearing Glass would probably have been comfortable with me holding my phone. I wondered if the difference was the ease of recording hands-free videos, or the difficulty for the other party of detecting when Glass was recording. Still, an attentive person might notice a reflection on the display prism—unless, that is, his attention was focused on some nearby spectacle rather than on my spectacles.
Further, while I was wearing Glass, people also seemed annoyed when they thought I was splitting my attention between our conversation and the display. I decided to "run" an informal experiment where I would pretend to look up information about the individuals I was talking to, or that I was receiving automatic "image search" results based on what was in front of me (including their faces). My companions were dismayed. They felt this put them at a disadvantage in the conversation. They were used to others having information at their fingertips, but Glass put it at the tip of my nose, where they had no way to see for themselves when I was focusing on them or on a screen.
Another possibility was that people were unsettled that I might share the conversation. I could upload a recording to the cloud, or send the video stream via my mobile phone, for others to watch in real time. What would stop someone from inviting a third party to surreptitiously listen in on a conversation? What would stop her from storing the conversation so that it could be shared with some interested party in the future?
Many people feel uncomfortable talking with someone who refuses to take off a pair of mirrored sunglasses, because they aren't able to see her eyes and get a better sense of what she is feeling about the conversation. Glass may not obscure the eyes, but it still challenges norms of conversation. The various reactions to Glass suggest that people have three main fears about living with ubiquitous sensors, and how they are either violating social conventions or forcing them to change.
First, there is the fear of information imbalance, of data being retrieved about others or the situation in a way that will alter the outcome of the interaction. When one side of a conversation has access to information and the other does not, the power imbalance can be unbearable. People may be worried about the "lemon" problem, whereby asymmetries in access to information cause them to get ripped off (as in the classic example of a used-car salesman hiding information from a buyer). There's also the issue of distractions from the immediate context, which heightens feelings of insecurity about whether the attention of your conversational partner is focused on you or something else.
Second, there is the fear of dissemination, of others sharing data with people, companies, or the web without permission. If a new person joins a group meeting in person, each conversationalist can shift the topic in response; the new "audience" is patently transparent. This transparency doesn't occur automatically with cameras, which is why organizations stick up warning notices. This allows individuals to decide how to act in view of the fact that there might be repercussions for having their actions witnessed and analyzed by the camera's owner or associates. Glass itself served as a warning notice, but it put people on alert all the time, even when the feed wasn't on.
Third, there is the fear of permanence, of others recording data and saving the data somewhere. In this case, the fear comes down to an uncertainty about how the data might be analyzed or used in the future. With no guarantee that the consequences of the recording will be positive, it might be best to assume the worst. In addition, laws differ from place to place about who is allowed to record what without permission. For instance, an individual or organization has the right to install a camera that records the movements of people visiting their property, but the people visiting the property don't have the same right. Regulation of privately owned cameras attached to drones, which can observe conversations from the air, will take years to be hashed out.
Perhaps the person with the most experience wearing a recording device is Steve Mann, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Toronto. Mann has been wearing different versions of a "Digital Eye Glass" for more than three decades. While a student in the 1980s at MIT, where Mann was a founding member of the Wearable Computing Project, he rarely removed his version of Glass and constantly experimented with applications for it, including transmitting a live web feed of everything he saw (in the early 1990s, when there were only a handful of live feeds on the web). He also coined the term "sousveillance" to describe his video and audio recordings of organizations that had surveillance cameras on their premises. Surveillance is conducted from above, sousveillance from below.
Generation 4 of Steve Mann's "EyeTap Digital Eye Glass," 1999[Photo: via Wikimedia]
Mann is an advocate of using wearable computers for personal empowerment. He believes an "always on" computer allows people to capture data they do not yet realize could be relevant in the future, even only a few minutes later. To demonstrate this, he has played around with methods to augment human senses and memory with wearables—for example, by zooming in on objects in the distance or cueing up super-slow-motion replays of information that the eye cannot process in real time. In Mann's experience, wearables allow people to filter incoming data—for example, by obscuring ads they don't want to see.
While such features are interesting, I believe the full value of sensor data will be unleashed only if they are shared with and refined by companies that can combine and analyze data from many different sources. In my year experimenting with Glass, I recorded many weeks' worth of video. However, I reviewed only a few minutes of the videos and never actually used them to help me make any decision or learn anything about my behavior. I wasn't able to efficiently search through and retrieve relevant parts of a video I had taken, let alone run the data through a data refinery in real time to get feedback and suggestions for what to do. I had the tools to collect data but I didn't have the tools to find data that were relevant to my current context, let alone analyze the data to recognize patterns or generate predictions.
In the next few years, as work in artificial intelligence progresses and data refineries automate the process of labeling data, this will change. Companies are discovering the value of analyzing everything from where their customers walk in a store to how concentrated their employees are, and the technology will become affordable enough for most organizations. Increasingly, we'll all depend on sensor data to give us recommendations pertinent to our given situation.
What is relevant to you varies based on your context. Take the search engine problem involved in a term like "jaguar"—which might be a cat, a car, or a computer operating system. To handle such ambiguous terms, algorithms rank search results based on a variety of content categories, highlighting the information that best matches your intentions. Knowing your context helps refineries improve the relevance of their outputs to you. For instance, let's say you search for "jaguar" on your phone while standing in a zoo. If the app knows your geolocation, it can compare your coordinates to a map of the area and rank content about the cat higher in your results. If you're standing in the parking lot of the zoo, the app could use the phone's cameras to detect whether you might be curious about the newest model of a luxury car in front of you rather than exploring a facet of big-cat life after the day's visit.
Not all contextualized search terms are as innocent as a jaguar in the jungle, however. If a person searches for "jasmine" after a long night spent at a club, it's highly unlikely that he's looking for information about the flower in the hope of squeezing in some gardening time before dawn. He might be looking for the address of a 24-hour Chinese food take-out that's on his way home, or—just maybe—he might be tempted to check out the live models on the adult entertainment site Livejasmine. Is he wandering around downtown, or is he in his bedroom? A data refinery can get him where he wants to be more efficiently, using current and recent geolocation data to personalize his results.
Taking context into account can also help us make better decisions for the long term—in Danny Kahneman's terms, "thinking slow" rather than "thinking fast." For instance, at least one bank considered offering a customer service code-named "no regrets" that looked at an individual's past transactions and current context. You walk up to an ATM in Las Vegas at 4 a.m. and ask to withdraw a thousand bucks. Instead of spitting out the bills, the machine prompts: "Are you really sure you want to withdraw that much cash right now? People like you who confirmed 'yes' in a similar situation tended to regret it later."
If the sensor is in your hands, you can choose the conditions when you share your context with the data refineries. But some of the trillion sensors that will record your life over the next decade will be controlled by banks, stores, employers, schools, and governments. There's a growing interest in using far more personal information than just where you are at any given point in time, and that interest encompasses who you're with, how you're feeling, and where your focus is—compared to where it "ought" to be.
Many police departments maintain a private database of dashcam and bodycam video recordings that are made available to the public only after a tortuous legal process. When the Los Angeles Police Department deployed 7,000 body-mounted cameras among its force in the summer of 2015, it announced that a recording would be shared with the public only if a lawsuit cites the video as evidence. But that wasn't the worst asymmetry of the system. The bodycams did not automatically record everything. The decision to record—or not record—was left up to the officer. Further, a very small group of people—the department's very own officers—were given unbridled access to the database. They could pull up and review any footage collected by bodycams before writing incident reports, including instances in which their conduct was subject to an investigation. This gives them the power to describe events in a way that would shield them from disciplinary action, by taking advantage of "blind spots" in the video. Why is there one rule for the police and another for the citizens they're pledged to serve?
The ACLU has tried to battle this blatant imbalance of power by providing a cloud platform that allows individuals to automatically upload their own recordings in real time in case they might be useful in the future. One of the apps gives users the option of alerting others in the area that an incident is being recorded, in case they are in a position to collect another point of view.
Some localities, such as the Seattle Police Department, are embracing more transparency. Twelve officers in the department were outfitted with bodycams as part of a pilot program in December 2014. "We were talking about the video and what to do with it, and someone said, 'What do people do with police videos?,'" the department's chief operating officer told the New York Times. Instead of dumping the videos into a private database, the department decided to upload them all to YouTube. In order to keep on the right side of current laws, much of the footage had to be redacted: Faces and other identifying features were blurred and in some cases the audio tracks were removed.
DATA FOR THE PEOPLE: How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You
Despite these redactions, the bodycam trial provided unprecedented access to data about the police department's conduct. If an entrepreneurial data detective wanted to, she could analyze the videos to uncover patterns in the city's policing, perhaps looking at how officers approach suspects, witnesses, and other members of the public. The data could be used to propose A/B tests to the police department to determine whether changes in training or procedures might improve the interactions between the police and community. Residents would have a powerful tool for improving their community.
Such applications don't protect us from the possibility that the data will be used against us, unfortunately. We cannot stop every click, view, connection, conversation, step, glance, wheeze, and word from being collected. But we can demand a set of rights with respect to our social data that ensures the fullest potential of transparency and agency.
A great leader possesses these seven core competencies. Does the president's background in business afford him these skills?
Plenty of people voted for Donald Trump based on the fact that he was a businessman and not a career politician. But are corporate skills transferable to our nation's highest office?
Carol Jenkins, PhD, chief analytics officer for OutMatch, a Dallas-based HR tech company, says her company's data can provide an answer. She says, "While there is not a cookie-cutter profile for all leaders," OutMatch has assessed more than 40,000 executives using predictive leadership assessments and simulations and boiled it down to seven core competencies that lead to success.
Jenkins says each of these allow leaders to set the tone for the culture of the business, define and communicate their vision, drive results in a way that inspires others, and do so with the partnership of the rest of the organization.
Greg Moran, president and CEO of OutMatch, outlines them this way:
When someone first transitions into leadership, they oversee team members and roll out new initiatives, but at the highest level of leadership, they're responsible for defining the overall vision and strategy for the company (or in this case, the country). Key personality traits. reflective thinking, assertiveness, self-reliance
Because decisions at this level impact the fate of the company (or the entire country), the ability to carefully evaluate information against possible courses of action is essential. This competency helps leaders find good solutions to difficult problems. Key personality traits. reflective thinking, fact-based thinking, realistic thinking
Transforming ideas into action begins with support and buy-in, either from stakeholders within a company or from the administration and the American people. Without it, important change initiatives will stagnate, and people will lose faith in the leader's ability to execute. Key personality traits. assertiveness, work pace, frustration tolerance
Driving for results is all about making things happen. After the vision has been defined, it must be set in motion. This competency drives leaders to challenge the status quo and strive for new levels of economic performance, resource efficiency, and more. Key personality traits. assertiveness, self-reliance, realistic thinking
Convincing others to adopt a course of action requires sharp communication skills and a persuasive argument, but this competency targets a leader's ability to connect with others and generate enthusiasm for new ideas. Key personality traits. assertiveness, sociability, work pace
Leaders at all levels must effectively direct the activities of others, encourage performance, and hold people accountable. This competency continues to be important as leaders transition from managing individuals to managing other leaders and department heads. Key personality traits. assertiveness, work pace, optimism
Leaders must have a keen understanding of organizational (or national/international) politics, and work within these dynamics to build and maintain alliances. Without these alliances, leaders will struggle to get resources and accomplish objectives. Key personality traits. insight, sociability, criticism tolerance
Moran points out that laying out a vision for the future is "the No. 1 thing an executive leader must do," especially when they are new to the position. During the first week of his administration, Moran says President Trump has done this with executive orders that outline the high-level goals of his administration.
Still, he says, as with any other executive leader, what he does next will be crucial to establish a successful trajectory. "Regardless of whether someone agrees with his positions," Moran maintains, "the president must champion change by persuading others that his vision is the correct one; work to address the challenges that arise from change; and drive to generate results through his policies and actions."
One psychologist explains why you "can't expect people to change their mind-sets the way they change their underwear."
What could possibly be bad about "staying hopeful" or wrong about trying to "think positively"? Coaches and experts routinely say that fixing our mind-sets can help us fix most of our problems. For example, if you've been fired from your job or dumped by a significant other, your first task is to cheer yourself up, push yourself to see the bright side, and begin finding happiness again. Current events or a tough economy stressing you out? A bit of optimism is all you need to see the light at the end of the tunnel once more.
On the flip side, failing to practice positive thinking risks letting your anxiety-ridden mind turn even trivial inconveniences into major drama. Or so the conventional wisdom goes anyway. But in reality, not only is positive thinking less universally beneficial than we might think, but negative thinking may not be so categorically bad.
There's no shortage of research highlighting the health and social advantages of optimism, but even that wealth of findings still leaves a few good reasons to distrust the supposedly boundless powers of positivity. These are a few of them:
If you've already broken your New Year's resolutions, you're not alone. Researchers have estimated around one in four resolutions are abandoned within the first week, and up to 90% of self-improvement attempts overall wind up failing.
That's not because of insufficient hope or weak self-confidence, though. It's due to excessive optimism. The more ambitious your goals, the more confident you're likely to feel about accomplishing them, and the more you expect to benefit from doing so—and, ultimately, the less likely you are to succeed.
On the other hand, those who skew more pessimistic about reaching their goals may be more likely to achieve them, not least because their self-doubt pushes them to work harder to reach them. When you really want something, you're better off thinking that you won't get it than assuming you will.
We tend to think of motivation as something malleable, but that may be wishful thinking. To a large extent, our willpower levels depend on our personality and core values. This is why two people will react very differently to the same experience, even in extreme cases. As population-wide studies suggest, happy people tend to stay calm and resilient even when terrible things happen to them, whereas more negative-minded people seem unable to enjoy positive life events for more than short bursts of time.
What's more, the personality characteristics that lead one person to have a generally happy disposition and another to have a rather unhappy one are largely genetic, so we can't expect people to change their mind-sets the way they change their underwear. That isn't necessarily bad news, though. The better we grasp it, the less guilty we're likely to feel for failing to harness the power of positive thinking to alter our mood states whenever we want.
Instead, how we typically feel is just another part of who we actually are. Which means we're better off coming to terms with this than trying to go against our natures and become someone else.
In the long run, at least, a sober view of things is probably preferable. While it may be comforting to interpret misfortunes in a positive light (as Oscar Wilde put it, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us look at the stars"), it may be more adaptive to face the facts and deal with them, no matter how painful that is.
Human beings are already powerfully predisposed to selectively ignore facts and data that are unpleasant. We're psychologically inclined to sacrifice the pursuit of truth in order to feel good about ourselves. So for all the talk of fake news and how the digital age is disrupting reality, we're not as interested in reality as you may think.
So-called "filter bubbles" may further harm our curiosity and critical thinking, but it's our inborn and largely subconscious desire to remain misinformed that predates them—and may even have given rise to those bubbles in the first place. In the end, would you rather be happier but disconnected from reality, or upset but in touch with it? While that may be something of a philosophical question, it's usually the case that ignorance is only bliss for a short time; sooner or later reality catches up with it.
In the grand scheme of things, a certain amount of dissatisfaction is critical to drive progress and advance civilization. It's only when we're unhappy, even upset, about things that we will feel the urgency to act and create change. Complacency is the enemy of progress, and happiness is just an extreme manifestation of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but our species's ability to suffer is an essential trigger of change. Taken too far, positive thinking threatens to inhibit it—and usually fails anyway.
The once-unstoppable iPhone has lost some of its mojo, but the technically impressive iPhone 7 Plus could be the booster shot Apple needs.
"Is Apple still a growth stock?" Many analysts have been asking this question lately. What they're really asking is whether Apple is still an innovative and surprising company. Surprises, after all, are what move money around in the stock market. For the rest of us, it's simply a question of whether our next iPhone will be something new, different, cool.
Not too long after Tim Cook became CEO in 2011, Apple had a big hit with the new iPhone 6, which had a significantly larger screen than earlier iPhones. Smartphone users loved it, and since then new iPhones have largely been variations on the iPhone 6 design theme.
But these days, consumers have lost some of their excitement. Apple has seen multiple quarters of slowing iPhone sales growth. And the iPhone still makes up about two thirds of the company's revenue.
That's why all eyes will be on iPhone sales tomorrow when Apple reports earnings for its fiscal first quarter. The sales result for the 2016 holiday season will tell us a lot about how the iPhone—and Apple—are viewed by consumers. Fortunately for the company, there's a fair chance that Apple will indeed have sold more iPhones than it did during the same period last year. After all, this year's iPhone, while still a chip off the old block, is a pretty—and technically impressive—device. The "plus" version of the phone has a new dual-lens camera, which dramatically improves the quality of zoomed and low-light photos.
Also, there are indications that that phone, which is more expensive and presumably has a greater profit margin, sold as well or better than the smaller iPhone 7. If that turns out to be true, Apple is indeed likely to beat its revenue take for the 2015 holiday quarter (Apple's Q1 2016).
Apple has forecast revenue of between $76 billion to $78 billion for the quarter. This, says Above Avalon analyst Neil Cybart, implies that iPhone unit sales will hit somewhere between -2% and 2% compared to the 74.8 million phones it sold last year. Cybart believes Apple will end up selling more than the previous year.
A consensus of 34 analysts gathered by Yahoo Finance says Apple will pull in revenue of $77.8 billion, compared to $75.87 in last year's quarter. Apple typically sells far more phones in the holiday quarter than in other quarters. The company, of course, will face challenges in the near future as the newness of the iPhone 7 wears off and the world awaits the arrival of the much-hyped iPhone 8.
We'll have a report after Apple announces its earnings after the close of the markets Tuesday afternoon.
Wikis, Google Docs, and other collaboration tools are powering a mass political movement with one goal: to put Democrats back in power.
No one was more blindsided by Donald Trump's election victory than liberals who had been so confident in a Hillary Clinton win. November's unexpected loss left many of them scrambling for ways to respond, and within weeks they did, thanks to online collaboration tools—everything from wikis to Google Docs—that mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers almost instantly.
The result is a newly galvanized political opposition focused on resisting Trump's agenda and reinstalling the Democrats to power. It's a likeminded collective whose rapid organic growth mirrors that of a very different political force that emerged eight years ago.
"It's very, very similar to the way that the Tea Party started," says Sarah Dohl, a former staffer for Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas, who watched the rapid rise of the anti-Obama movement in 2009 and 2010. In late November and early December 2016, Dohl and other Hill veterans created an online handbook for liberals called Indivisible Guide, based on the same political-organizing strategies that were effective against the Democrats.
After Trump's election win, Dohl says she and her collaborators "saw a lot of very well-meaning people giving very bad advice." People suggested signing toothless petitions or calling Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, for instance. "Having worked in these offices, we know that if you don't live in the First District of Wisconsin, Paul Ryan doesn't work for you, and he does not care what you have to say," she says. Since its launch in December, Indivisible Guide has spawned over 4,500 groups that lobby their local members of Congress, says Dohl, and over 600,000 people have searched the site for a group to join.
And last week, the people behind the guide announced that they had filed to become an official nonprofit organization. It's one of a number of crowdsourced anti-Trump groups to spring up quickly since the election—a consequence of an upset that few had predicted.
"Had there been a clear possibility through the election cycle that Trump would have won the election, I think people might have geared up sooner," says Jan Miksovsky, who founded Presterity, which is essentially a Wikipedia for tracking news about the Trump administration. After launching the day before Trump's inauguration, the site already has about a dozen sections on such topics as federal departments, foreign policy, and Trump's cabinet. Presterity is a portmanteau of "press" and "posterity," and was conceived around Thanksgiving.
Presterity allows anyone to submit articles about the Trump administration, which moderators review before posting.
Miksovsky, who founded the Seattle web-development firm Component Kitchen, has a long history in the tech sector, as do several of the early volunteers who helped create Presterity. But time was tight when they were building it, so they went with wiki software called Confluence from the enterprise software maker Atlassian. "We were able, within a few minutes, to have a wiki to start from," Miksovsky says.
Presterity has adopted bookmarking plugin Raindrop for volunteers to annotate and submit articles.
Anyone can submit articles to Presterity through the free bookmarking app Raindrop. It allows them to rename, annotate, and tag the links before sending them to Presterity's volunteer moderators for review. People don't have to join the organization to submit news, nor is there a political test. "I'm eager to find conservatives that share our concerns and listen to our cause," says Miksovsky.
SwingLeft, an organization focused on flipping the House of Representatives to Democrat control in the 2018 elections, also started on the eve of Trump's swearing in—this one with emails and social media posts calling for volunteers. Over 250,000 people have since signed up, pledging to help on campaigns in the 52 "swing districts" that could easily go Democrat or Republican in 2018. These and other organizations have popped up without staff or much money, relying on a lot of volunteers who can each do a bit of work.
"You don't need to have 30 years in a field to have an impact," says 26-year-old Samuel Sinyangwe, who launched an anti-Trump information site similar to Presterity, called Resistance Manual, on January 17. "What we're trying to do is create a broader resource that contains a lot more information about the issues and why they matter to people," he says. Resistance Manual runs on the same free software, MediaWiki, that powers Wikipedia, so newcomers already know how to navigate it.
Resistance Manual is another Trump wiki, this one with a stronger activist bent.
Indivisible Guide began in Austin, Texas, with a barroom chat on Thanksgiving Day between wife-and-husband team and former Hill staffers Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, along with their friend Sara Clough. It grew to a group of about 30 who collaborated on a Google Doc, and then it went live with a tweet and a Facebook post on December 14. Indivisible Guide took off on social media, and the press picked it up almost immediately.
Traffic soon overwhelmed the Google Doc, and the group needed to transition to a website, pronto. "When we launched our website, we went with Squarespace, just because it was the easiest way to get a site up in 12 hours," says Dohl. The core group, which has expanded to about 70, includes developers who are already working to revamp the site, likely moving it to a more sophisticated platform. Presterity is doing the same. "We can gradually migrate bits and pieces over to something that's custom-built for our needs," says Miksovsky.
The ease of setting up new networks could result in too much of a good thing for activists, however. "The internet, as a distributed system, crowdsources research, questions, answers, and actions," writes tech and marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang in an email. "The downside is there's often not a clear leader, and groups can splinter, resulting in multiple groups repeating the same work as a similar group."
That doesn't seem to be happening too much yet, and organizers say there is already talk of teaming up. "We have been talking and exploring options for coordination with Indivisible and other organizations in the space, for sure," writes Michelle Finocchi, one of the SwingLeft leaders, by email.
Politics has always been a battle of alternative ideas, but now it's one of "alternative facts," in the words of presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway. Fake news sites are thriving, and Donald Trump has said many things that are verifiably false.
All of this makes the task of tracking the president's actions even more difficult. "There's deep concern with the way he and his team play fast and loose with the truth," says Miksovsky.
Meanwhile, media-fueled distractions abound: Endless debates about inauguration and protest turnout drown out reporting on signed executive orders or suspended programs. It's too big a project for one person. Just ask an anonymous activist who goes by the online handle motocollard. In November, he started to build a public Google spreadsheet to track erratic behavior on the part of the president. "No crowdsourcing. Which is probably why I burnt out in December. Trying to find the right balance," motocollard told me in a Twitter chat. (He declines to provide his real name for "privacy concerns," he says.)
On November 20, motocollard's project got a shoutout from Atlantic writer James Fallows, who had been authoring a series of columns, called the Trump Time Capsule. "Its purpose is to catalogue some of the things Donald Trump says and does that no real president would do," as Fallows described it. In the same post mentioning motocollard, Fallows also pledged to evolve the Time Capsule into an ongoing research project to chronicle the new administration.
But that project hasn't materialized yet, so Miksovsky and friends built their own, as did Resistance Manual's Samuel Sinyangwe: The wiki covers 15 areas, such as Obamacare, immigration, mass Incarceration, and climate. All of the entries are action-oriented, ending in a "How You Can Resist" section that mainly recommends contacting public officials. "It's a living document that can change and adapt," says Sinyangwe.
Mapping Police Violence uses crowdsourced reporting to track fatal encounters between blacks and police.
Sinyangwe was already a data activist. In March 2015, he built a site called Mapping Police Violence. It displays fatal U.S. police encounters, by year, on a national map and in other graphics. In lieu of comprehensive official statistics, Sinyangwe joined up with Black Lives Matter leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, whom he met on Twitter, to collected figures from three crowdsourced databases of police shootings and fed the figures into data-visualizing software Carto. "One look at that map, in two seconds, you knew this was happening everywhere," he says. "It wasn't just a Baltimore problem or a Ferguson problem."
On his first day in office, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. One of its products was Data.gov, a portal designed to make government information more accessible to the public. The administration encouraged citizens to slice and dice data and propose ways to make government run better. Data.gov is still online, but other sources of information may be in jeopardy under the Trump administration.
"My sense is that this top-down trend is going to die under Trump, at least in government," Hélène Landemore, a Yale political science professor and author of the book Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, wrote by email. "But now we see a similar movement emerging among activists who have embraced the idea of crowd power and crowd intelligence as a possible check against state power."
Cincinnati: People took numbers[Photo: courtesy of Indivisible Guide]
Since the election, sizable national organizations have emerged almost instantly, overwhelming the handfuls of people who started them. "We all have day jobs, we all have families," says Miksovsky. And clearly, that's not an exaggeration. In reporting this story, I traded emails with, and Twitter-stalked, apologetic organizers who kept reminding me that they are volunteers. By the time I got Sarah Dohl from Indivisible Guide on the phone, she was battling pneumonia.
Sustaining the effort requires dividing big tasks among a lot of people online. "The tools that we're talking about—wikis, social media—those are becoming more mainstream," says professor Anatoliy Gruzd, who focuses on social media at Ryerson University in Canada. "So more people can be able to contribute to those tools, where before you had only very small niche groups—groups of advocates."
The Black Lives Matter movement has taken advantage of the trend. In August 2015, the activists behind Mapping Police Violence cofounded Campaign Zero, a project with the lofty goal of eliminating violent interactions between the police and the public. The group created a 19-question survey with the free online tool Typeform, asking about people's skills, areas of interest, and availability to volunteer. In two weeks, Campaign Zero had 17,000 people researching issues, developing proposals, and planning political action. "That is sort of a pilot program to what is needed now," says Sinyangwe about plans to expand into overall Trump resistance.
Campaign Zero polled people to understand how they could contribute.
Success for such groups requires avoiding many organizational perils. Gruzd and Landemore point to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing as a major step in crowdsourced research. The FBI asked anyone who had possible evidence, such as photos and videos, to share them with investigators. That part was very successful, with the manhunt concluded in just over four days. But the call also led to crowdsourced detective work by amateurs in forums like 4Chan and Reddit that led to mistaken allegations, casting suspicion on innocent bystanders. "Absolutely, there's danger of crowdsourced tasks like that," says Gruzd.
But while the Boston Marathon effort was on the border between the wisdom of crowds and mob rule, the new anti-Trump projects have a core group of people who vet volunteers to weed out troublemakers and check submissions for misinformation. "Wikipedia is a very good example of the moderation part," says Gruzd. "It's actually a very hierarchical structure, so there's very few people who would be allowed to do any corrections."
These are the early days of a new insurgency on the left. Activists are bootstrapping and figuring it out as they go along—not unlike how the insurgency on the right began in 2009. Just as the Tea Party evolved into a collection of disciplined and well-funded organizations, the new left groups are already starting to solidify their structure.
"There is a tendency of projects like that, which may start in a decentralized nature . . . to quickly become more centralized," says Gruzd. He says that's because the groups that set them up realize that they have to be managed if they are to thrive. But everyone I spoke with, Gruzd included, says that crowdsourcing is here to stay, be it in politics, business, academia, or other endeavors. The extent to which the crowd will participate is still very much in flux, but then so is everything else in U.S. politics today.
To compete with incumbents like Charles Schwab and Vanguard, Betterment will have to become more like them.
Betterment pioneered the idea that software could do a better job of managing investments than good old-fashioned humans. But now the robo-advisor is turning to tradition—and wealthier customers—with the introduction of higher-tier products that layer in-house financial advisors on top of portfolio technology.
"This offering appeals to the folks who want a little more hand-holding," says Jon Stein, founder and CEO. He expects to see a relatively small percentage of Betterment's 210,000 existing customers, who pay 0.25% in fees, choose to upgrade. Instead, the hybrid plans are designed to appeal to a new category of customer, one that might not otherwise have felt comfortable with Betterment's software-based approach to investment allocation.
If the hybrid strategy succeeds, it could significantly increase Betterment's average account size, which today hovers around $35,000. Betterment Plus, which includes one consultation per year, will cost 0.4% and require a minimum balance of $100,000; Betterment Premium, which includes an unlimited number of consultations, will cost 0.5% and require a minimum balance of $250,000.
The new tiers are also a tacit acknowledgement that robo-advisors and established players are fast-converging, and increasingly competitive. (The CFP® professionals and licensed experts that Betterment has hired hail from Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard.) Soon, everyone will have migrated toward a lower cost structure, enabled by technology. And soon, everyone will have found ways to serve retail investors looking for cheap solutions alongside millionaires grappling with complex tax scenarios.
Though Betterment is considered a leader among its robo-startup peers, it remains a small fish in the big pond of investment management. The company manages $7.3 billion in assets; in contrast, Vanguard added $97 billion in new assets to its ETF business in 2016 alone.
It's a murky landscape to navigate. One recent analysis by Condor Capital Management, for example, attempted to compare portfolio performance on nearly a dozen different platforms (Charles Schwab won, Vanguard lost, and Betterment landed smack in the middle). But the experiment lasted just one year, hardly an indicator of how portfolios would perform over a decades-long retirement horizon. Moreover, "moderate" risk tolerance, which Condor assumed in each case, can be defined in significantly different ways, making comparisons inherently flawed.
Expand the comparison set even further, beyond robo-advisors, and the simplest solution is often still the best. By way of illustration, look to Betterment's own website. Buried several clicks in, under "Additional data" followed by "View all benchmarks and portfolios," there is table comparing Betterment to the S&P 500 Index. Average annual return, cumulative return, return over the last 12 months—the classic index beats the robo intelligence every time.
But that won't stop Betterment and others from racing to establish strong brands and capture trillions of future retirement dollars. With a lifetime's worth of savings at stake, customer acquisition costs can soar to the hundreds of dollars.
"If two customers are learning about us and coming to check out Betterment, and one wants human advice, we can make every marketing dollar much more efficient by welcoming both of those people," Stein says.
Lingering doubts remain about the efficacy of News Feed ads, Facebook Live revenue, and the market position of Oculus.
When Facebook announces its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, it's widely expected to meet or beat analyst expectations. The tech giant has been on a roll for the past five quarters, after all. But even as analysts expect big financial growth, there is reason to believe that some cracks might start to show as well.
Here's some of what we're eager to learn about during the call:
Facebook Live growth: A big focus will be on how well Facebook's Live Video service performed at the end of last year, and whether it has become a meaningful source of user engagement as well as one that has revenue potential. A recent report from Recode indicates that the company will cease its program of paying publishers to post live content. But it's not clear whether that's because the service has simply matured and no longer needs professional content, or if the company has decided to de-emphasize live video as a source of revenue.
Gartner analyst Brian Blau thinks Facebook Live is likely to be an important platform for the company in the future, but that it's too early for the company to focus too much on monetizing the service across all users given that putting ads on live video would interrupt the user experience. Still, Facebook has reportedly begun testing ads in live video with some users. It's not known if the company will talk about that program on Wednesday.
Instagram Stories: The performance of ads in Instagram Stories will also be worth closer examination. Facebook has already warned that its News Feed-based ad revenue might finally start to slow. That puts pressure on Instagram to begin showing serious revenue growth.
Instagram, by more or less cloning Snapchat's Stories feature, has stolen quite a number of users, recent reports have concluded. The question is whether that has resulted in meaningful increases in ad revenue. The answer should also shed some light on Facebook's plans to include ads in Messenger, which it began testing internationally earlier this month.
Oculus sales figures: Facebook's high-end virtual reality system, the Oculus Rift, will be a source of great interest on Wednesday. VR is slowly making its way into the mainstream, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that the technology is one he's intensely interested in. But there have been indications that the Rift isn't selling as well as competing systems from HTC (the Vive) and Sony (the PlayStation VR), Blau said, so "if you're in third (place) out of three, I don't know if it's something you highlight."
All that said, Facebook has become a money machine, and it's very likely that it will report a highly successful fourth quarter. Overall, analysts are predicting revenues of $8.5 billion, up 45.6% from a year earlier, and earnings per share of $1.31, up 65% year-over-year from 79 cents in Q4 2015.
If there is in fact a slowdown in advertising revenue on the News Feed, it could lead to insights about the company's future plans. Executives are likely to highlight the growth of Facebook's subsidiary services, and their evolution into substantial platforms in their own right. Facebook for some time has followed a pattern of introducing new services, or buying existing ones, then tweaking them before converting them into more robust platforms. The more of those it has—Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, and even Facebook Live Video—the more protected it is from any one of them faltering. Similarly, the more platforms it owns, the more growth opportunities it has.
"If you're a parent, you hope all your children grow up to be successful," Blau said of Facebook, even if "some of them are slower than others."
AI tools could make finding jobs faster and more equitable—and cut back on recruiter spam, advocates say.
It's no secret that finding good workers isn't easy, particularly in the competitive tech world.
Hiring managers can spend hours using primitive keyword search tools to sift through half-relevant resumes on job boards, and workers with in-demand skills get bombarded with emails from recruiters offering them jobs they're not particularly interested in, says Ed Donner, cofounder and CEO of New York startup Untapt.
"Hiring tech people is an incredible pain point," says Donner, who previously headed a technology team with hundreds of employees at JPMorgan Chase. "It's still impossibly hard to find talent."
Untapt is one of a number of companies looking to make it easier to digitally dig through piles of resumes, using machine learning techniques to develop algorithms that predict how well-suited a candidate is for a job. Advocates and industry experts say that adding automation to recruiting can save time and money and can potentially help hiring managers find and consider a more diverse set of applicants.
"People are very subject to unconscious bias, and with the help of the machine, you can overcome a lot of the unconscious bias," says Tom Haak, director of the HR Trend Institute. "When the machine learns what you're looking for, it can say, if you find this type of candidate positive, here are other ones."
Untapt, which launched in early 2015, is focused on filling financial tech positions, and its software is designed to locate candidates with particular technical skills more efficiently than could be done through traditional text searches of resumes and cover letters. If a company is looking to hire developers adept at functional programming, a software development technique popular in parts of the fintech world, Untapt's tool can learn to recognize that experience in certain programming languages is likely a good sign, Donner says.
Untapt
"You're dealing with this very noisy data set with a lot of information," he says. "That kind of problem is perfectly suited to artificial intelligence and to machine learning."
The company keeps track of which candidates its software surfaces actually get interviewed and for which positions, and uses that information to continually refine its algorithms, which Donner says often already outperform human recruiters in terms of the percentage of candidates called in for interviews.
Untapt also looks to surface candidates from underrepresented groups—such as women, veterans, and people of color—and more generally find candidates who might be overlooked by traditional recruiters.
"We also have features in Untapt [where] clients can choose to mask names and photos on the resumes they're presented with, so they're making blind decisions," says Donner.
The company attracts jobseekers through a mix of techniques, including online ads, blog posts, and appearances at industry events, and only shares their resume information with companies they agree to connect with, he says. That helps attract candidates who might not want to actively participate on more traditional job search boards but are interested in exploring their options, he says.
Machine learning can also help companies efficiently find potential candidates amid resumes they already have on file when new positions open up, says Steve Goodman, cofounder and CEO of San Francisco-based Restless Bandit. The company specializes in what it calls "talent rediscovery," resurfacing applicants to its clients' previous job postings that could be promising for new positions. To suggest potential candidates for a position, it looks at application records and digital hiring system data indicating how various previous applicants to similar roles have fared, learning over time which resumes to highlight for which openings. "We learn the hiring patterns of the company," Goodman says.
In the future, the company will likely incorporate more data about how successful candidates fare at their new jobs, including information pulled from human resources systems tracking how candidates progress up company ladders. Restless Bandit also can already fetch publicly available data from the internet about job candidates, so companies can keep their files up to date as they consider them for new positions.
"One of the things we do for companies is, we actually go out on the open web," says Goodman. "We try to find that person, and we try to enrich that resume with the latest data."
What machine learning systems can't, at present, do is eliminate the need for job interviews, he says. They can't evaluate applicants' body language and conversational skills, or estimate how they'll fit into a given team's existing culture, meaning there's still a definite need for humans in the hiring process.
"We can tell you the 15 people to interview, or the 20 people to interview," he says. "We can't tell you who to hire."
Still, some companies are even developing tools that use machine learning to evaluate job candidates' personality traits and aptitudes for a job. Ideally, artificial intelligence can help companies move beyond basic personality quizzes that critics have long said can be easily gamed by applicants able to guess the "right answers" for a given job.
Cognisess, based in Bath, England, offers about 40 different game-like assessments through its software platform, measuring factors like working memory, empathy, and ability to divide attention among multiple tasks. Based on scores of existing successful workers, the platform develops profiles of who would be well-suited to a particular position and indicates how candidates measure up, says cofounder and CEO Chris Butt.
Cognisess
Since the optimal results on the various tests vary from position to position, it's difficult for applicants to rig performance, he says. "You don't know what a good match looks like as the candidate," he says.
In general, applying artificial intelligence to hiring may mean a shift away from intuitive decisions and toward more data-driven processes, says Dan Ryan, principal at Ryan Search and Consulting and a member of the Society for Human Resource Management's talent acquisition panel.
"Part of the problem with the employment, and also with the sourcing process, is there is still a reliance on gut decisions versus data-driven decisions," he says. "If you could actually have data that shows using the data-driven approach could produce better results versus using the gut feeling, that's where the results will come."
Trump created the story of his personal brand in the '70s and has been clinging to it ever since, argues Virginia Heffernan.
Read Trump's executive orders, tweets, and speeches, and you get to wondering: Is he crazy like a fox, or crazy like he belongs on a locked ward at Happy Farms? Is he Machiavellian—or profoundly unwell? The fate of the Republic seems to depend on the answer—and yet we may never get a definitive one.
But while we can't yet diagnose Trump the man, we can talk about his style of storytelling. We've been subjected to yottabytes of that storytelling, after all. Foremost, Trump's utterances are chaotic: They're semantically tangled, they show contempt for reality, and they meander into non sequitur and perseveration. As the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test reveals, Trump speaks like a 9-year-old. And when he believes his vanity is under assault, he does something far weirder than just resort to childish speech, lying, and hedging. He erects a haphazard wall of words meant to serve not as a statement, but as a flailing parry.
At 5 p.m. on Saturday—the day of Trump's executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries—the president was asked about the ban. Protests were snowballing at American airports, and the ACLU had already filed a suit in court that within a few hours would allow detainees to stay in the U.S. Trump's reply? "It's working out very nicely. You see it at the airports. You see it all over." (Trump's silliest exaggerations—"all over"—are his plainest tell). Fact-checking and reason will never work against words that are more sound and fury than sense.
But Trump's speech wasn't always so irrational. There was a time when his personal brand added up, and was his great pride. To revisit this moment is to see the narrative high he's always chasing, the one he chased most frantically in his inaugural address, the story of a nation laid to waste by bureaucrats and street crime and in need of redemption by Trump's riches, bluster, and vanity. It's a tale that so enchants Trump that he can't stop telling it, ruminating on it, and trying to force it to be true again—facts of the world be damned. And unlike the various diagnoses he's been subject to—he's a narcissist! A king! A baby!—this tale, and Trump's commitment to rehashing it, does have predictive power, and might help us know what he'll do next.
Gather round, millennials, and let me bore you: It's Gotham. 1976. Trump is the blessed age of 30. He's rich, unmarried, and certifiably handsome. No less than the New York Times takes fawning note: "He is tall, lean, and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford."
Trump's Ford-era hair is unfaded, full, and feathered—the same coif he takes pains to simulate now, a male Miss Havisham in his last costume of glory. He had, as he liked to say in those days, "flair."
Who doesn't cherish the memory of being at the height of her powers—sexual, financial, and everything in between? But in the '70s, Trump's flair even had moral value, especially in New York City, because the despoiled and feckless city was perceived as sorely lacking in it. According to the somewhat creaky fable, '70s trains were streaked with graffiti. The parks bristled with dirty needles. In Times Square were sordid peepshows. Everywhere were wolf packs of wilding thugs. Welfare moms, aided by pompous bureaucrats, blew their handouts on dope. The city was "ungovernable"—at least by the mayor, a meager and corrupt public servant.
Remember that this is a fairy tale. So what's needed is a hero—in this case, one from the private sector with short hair and clean teeth, deep pockets, and a sweeping disgust for humanity. Abstemious health habits also a plus. A kind of Travis Bickle with money. In the same dazzling-white-teeth article, the Times credulously noted that one of Trump's developments was "philanthropic" and that his midtown developments would, as Trump put it, "get rid of all that pornographic garbage in Times Square." (Trump pointedly didn't intend to extend his largess to black and brown neighborhoods: "New York is either going to get much better or much worse," he said. "And I think it will get much better. I'm not talking about the South Bronx. I don't know anything about the South Bronx.")
In 1976, this didn't play like the Joker's creepy this-town-needs-an-enema rhetoric from the 1989 Batman film. Trump's disgust was heroic in the '70s. The Times approved of it, as did many others. Trump in the '70s and into the '80s was respected, revered, and damn popular. When he said there was a crowd somewhere for him, there was a legit crowd.
At his back was even some highbrow stuff: Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, and various conservative academic economists who increasingly saw the rich as antidotes to the nation's growing malaise, its miserable stagflation. As the decade wore on and turned to the money-besotted '80s, pop culture made the fantasy cartoonish. On MTV and elsewhere, men in suits with fat money clips trickled gold over to the poor, or at least aimed to use their flair to both inspire and shame the homeless and jobless into ambition and self-respect.
For that shining moment, Trump genuinely was on the right side of history.
And he's been angling to get back there ever since. Today, when he's confronted with any evidence that he's not young, Redfordesque, wildly popular, and here to bring flair to the unruly streets, he balks like a man clinging to a hallucination. Tell him it's 2017—violent crime is down, "welfare queens" don't exist, the crowds at his Inauguration were limited, he has millions of detractors, his hair is white and missing in patches—and he can't stand it. By contrast, he's eerily serene in the face of attacks that should be much more painful—when his son Barron is criticized, or he's faulted for autocratic behavior or not paying taxes—because those attacks don't confound his decades-old narrative of himself.
Of course, it's not uncommon for politicians to invoke lessons and fables from past experiences. John McCain's POW heroism, Joe Biden's personal losses, Bill Clinton's "Man from Hope" saga. But Trump's rhetorical eccentricity is that he doesn't describe this time as like that time in specific ways, or suggest it is informed by it; he tightens the connection absolutely, and speaks as if 2017 is just like 1976. And he attacks like a man fighting for his life if anyone suggests that 41 years have passed, and the world is different now.
Watch how he responds to people of color in 2017: He tries to make them illegitimate in his story (as with the birther campaign) or inadmissible (as with the Muslim ban and the border wall). White America is his Times Square, threatened by heathens who simply need to be removed. There is no South Bronx in Trump's cherished narrative; he must shut it out. There is nothing but his own flair. It's 1976. He's Robert Redford. As long as he tells himself that, he will keep behaving brutally and enacting brutal policies designed to keep the truth at bay. And that's crazy by any definition.
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
"It's more about who you are than what you do," one LinkedIn insider explains.
If you've heard a lot about "soft skills" lately, it's at least partly because employers want you to develop them. According to our Global Recruiting Trends study here at LinkedIn, more employers are rolling out "soft skills assessments" to test job candidates on the cognitive and personality qualities you don't go to school to learn: critical thinking, adaptability, learning agility, communication, etc. By all indications, these factors are trading at a higher value in 2017 than they have in the past.
But since they seem to be in high demand and comparatively short supply, companies are investing in new technologies meant to zoom in on the right folks faster. Here's what it takes to earn high marks in the job market for your soft skills, whether you face one of those new assessment tools or a flesh-and-blood hiring manager on a job interview.
While some employers still use traditional interview questions to assess soft skills, others are turning to predictive hiring software. Berke, for instance, is a hiring tool that evaluates job applications according to a position's job description and tries to determine which personality traits would boost their performance in the role. Another tool, Koru (to which I'm an adviser, in full disclosure), looks at companies' current teams and aims to gauge the soft-skills makeup of their star players.
The companies that are already experimenting with this kind of tech aren't doing so behind closed doors—they want candidates to know about it, and prep accordingly. Many of these platforms and programs post tips and advice to their websites to help job seekers get a better idea of how to succeed. Koru outlines seven key traits it's built to look for in most new hires. The first one is "grit, the ability to stick with it when things get hard."
So to prepare, don't hesitate to ask an HR contact inside the company whether they're using any predictive tools to help them evaluate job candidates. If you learn that they are, do a little research on the technology you may have to face, so you can show yourself off in the best light.
If you handle change well, companies are likely to prefer you to someone who has a PhD or 10 years of experience but isn't as adaptable.
Have you been on board during a time when your company switched from a hardware model to a software model? From a product to a service? How did you respond? Maybe you transitioned off a team led by your favorite manager and joined an unfamiliar group. What was that like? You should plan to come to each interview armed with anecdotes about how you reacted to a major change, how you came to make a big decision, and how your coworkers might describe your team interactions.
At LinkedIn, we've interviewed people who are the best at their craft, but if they lack the adaptability to work through change, we don't hire them. There's no debate.
As more companies recognize the importance of soft skills, they're becoming more interested in figuring out how candidates will respond to certain scenarios. That means your job interviews over the next few years may hold more surprises than they used to. A company might even stage a miniature crisis in order to observe how candidates respond in the moment. Short of that, employers are already retooling their go-to set of interview questions in order to shift toward soft skills.
This means candidates need to rethink how they prepare for interviews. Canned answers may work even worse than they did in the past—it's all about rolling with the punches. For now, check out the most common interview questions employers are using these days to tease out soft skills, and start working on your answers.
Be honest with yourself: What would happen if you went into work tomorrow and your manager said, "We're shutting down XYZ project and we don't know what's next"? This happens all the time.
Finding yourself in a situation like this can take a toll on your health and happiness—that is, if you aren't comfortable adapting to unforeseen changes. On the other hand, if you're someone with what recruiters think of as high "change agility," make sure to find a place on the bleeding edge of it. At all events, just be honest with yourself.
If adapting quickly to upheavals is hard for you, that's okay too, as long as you're aware of it and don't try to become someone you're not (interviewers—and their growing set of tech tools—will be able to tell). Chances are you have other soft skills employers are looking for; double down on those and look for roles that are more suited to your abilities.
Employers like us still want to hear about your achievements, of course, but you'll also need to be ready to share experiences that demonstrate how you've been able to adapt, persevere, and manage change. That's the kind of candidate companies will be looking to hire in the months and years ahead.
Brendan Browne is VP of global talent acquisition at LinkedIn.
Slack started as a tool for small-ish groups, but wants administrators at big companies to manage lots of groups with ease.
On Tuesday morning, Slack raised the curtain on "Slack Grid," a new set of administrator tools for large companies that have many Slack groups running in their workplace. It also announced new SAP integrations and reviewed some work it's doing in machine learning and natural language-assisted search.
The company's CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fast Company Monday that many large companies have Slack groups spread around the enterprise but have had no centralized way of managing and connecting them. Providing such a framework is the idea behind Slack Grid. Administrators will be able to provision new users faster and easier, Slack says. Users will be able to sign in once to access multiple workspaces.
Slack says the new tools will let workers communicate better between different organizations within the enterprise. Human resources, for example, will be able to interact with the sales organization with more functionality, Slack says.
The framework also makes possible an enterprise-wide search function and a company-wide directory. As the "grid" framework grows, capturing more kinds of user data and integrating with more partner systems, it begins to form something like a "graph" that captures the life of an organization like the Facebook graph captures personal information.
Larger organizations typically have more regulatory compliance challenges, and Slack has steadily been adding more types of security and privacy support to the platform. Today the company announced new support for the HIPAA health care information privacy standard, and for the FINRA financial information security standard. This may help clear the way for Slack to sell its messaging platform into large hospital systems and insurance companies, or into investment firms and banks.
Slack's success in large enterprises may depend on its capabilities for pulling in data from legacy systems. Butterfield told me that he sees Slack as the "connective tissue" between the many systems used in the enterprise. Slack has already been busy building integrations with these systems. It's announced integrations with Salesforce and IBM systems, as well as with Google Cloud services and productivity apps.
Today Slack added SAP to that list. SAP systems and apps are used in 345,000 enterprises. Butterfield told me SAP is building a portfolio of bots for Slack. A Concur bot for handling expenses and travel is in the works, as is a SAP SuccessFactors bot for human resources and performance management.
Slack was originally built for small businesses, but conquering the enterprise may be the engine for Slack's future growth. It won't be easy. It's now facing competition of Microsoft's version of Slack, Microsoft Teams. Teams has an important strategic advantage because it's deeply integrated with the Windows 365 cloud-based productivity suite used in many enterprises.
On the other hand, in businesses that already use Slack, many users have altered their work flows to do much of their work and spend most of their time in Slack. This is especially true of highly collaborative work groups. Time will tell how big a threat Microsoft's Teams will be.
Finally, Slack says it's imbuing its search functionality with some artificial intelligence. Slack's ability to retrieve specific messages leaves a lot to be desired. Some machine learning may help. It might also expand the search function's ability to retrieve files, people, subject experts, or channels where a specific topic is frequently discussed.
Machine learning might also help Slack present a user with the most important posts in a channel, making it easier to catch up after being away. Along those same lines, Slack might someday be able to prepare for the user a daily digest containing the most relevant messages across multiple channels.
Silicon Valley is fighting Trump's "Muslim ban" by donating to the ACLU, the nonprofit helping those most at risk under the controversial executive order.
I'm used to getting Facebook notifications inviting me to play games with my friends, attend events, or view a live video streams. On Saturday morning; however, I received something a little different: an invitation to donate to the ACLU.
The American Civil Liberties Union promised that when Donald Trump took office it would fight him on any policies it found to be unconstitutional and un-American. Friday, at the end of Trump's first week in office, the ACLU made good on that promise by responding to the president's executive order that prevents refugees and nationals of several predominately Muslim countries from entering the United States. The ACLU, along with other organizations, challenged the order in court and won a temporary stay that allowed some travelers who had already landed in the U.S. to remain here. Without the ACLU, they almost certainly would have been deported. Many are still being detained.
"This is merely the first skirmish in a long battle to vigorously defend the Bill of Rights from the authoritarian designs of the Trump administration," ACLU director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement Saturday. If the ACLU is going to win the battle, it's going to need a rich war chest.
The organization has always depended on donations from the public to keep its doors open. This past weekend, though, many groups took it upon themselves to help the ACLU in unprecedented ways.
When I first glanced at that donation page my friend had invited me to, the campaign had raised a little over $250,000. Now, just a few days later, that sum has topped one million. Even more impressive, the page wasn't set up by Facebook or the ACLU, but by a private citizen (who happens to be a Facebook employee) who thought he could raise a few thousand dollars. (As of yesterday, the nonprofit had raised a total of $24 million from online donations since Saturday alone. That's almost seven times what it raised online during the entirety of 2015.)
Facebook isn't the only place where funds are being raised. The video game Dots added a splash page to its app, asking users to consider making a donation before they start to play.
"We welcome players from all over the world," the page read. "As an American company, we value the diversity of our team and players. We believe America should be a welcoming place, particularly for those most in need, wherever they come from and whatever their religion. Please join us in standing up for civil rights."
"Our hope is every individual and company that believes in civil rights finds the best way to use their voice," Dots CEO Paul Murphy said in a statement. "For some it's a protest, and others it's writing a large check. We're a fast growing, venture-backed startup, so using our cash isn't an option. But we have a massive, global audience and heavily engaged in our products. So we decided in this unique situation it was appropriate to raise awareness for an organization they could support, if so inclined. We never anticipated 500k people would take action from our games, but we're very proud with that result."
Many more companies and tech executives encouraged employees and the pubic at large to contribute to the legal nonprofit this weekend, with several offering to match donations. Often, they used Twitter to spread the word.
Chris Sacca, one of Twitter's early investors who was recently featured as an investor on ABC's Shark Tank, tweeted Saturday that he would match donations made to the ACLU up to $75k. He later decided to match his own donation, contributing $150k.
Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's head of advertising, pledged to match donations up to $25k. The tweet garnered so much attention that the $25k was surpassed in about an hour. To keep the momentum going, he lined up more people willing to match.
Nest founder Tony Fadell, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, and more followed suit with proposals of their own. Sunday afternoon, Fadell tweeted that in just 10 hours more than 413 donations had been made through his tweet, totaling $110,698.
Privately, many companies are offering support for employees and employees' families who are affected by the ban. Postmates is matching employee donations to the ACLU and International Refugees Assistance Project.
"It is evident to myself and the leadership of Postmates that these policies on immigration are morally questionable due to the impact they have on the lives that have been and will be affected," Postmates founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann said in a statement. "We see them as contrary to the long-standing precedent that the United States is a country that welcomes, values, and embraces the diversity cultivated through immigration."
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky offered to provide free housing for anyone stranded outside of the United States because of the ban.
Uber has also weighed in, though not without some controversy. On Saturday night, the ride-hailing company came under fire on social media for its decision to turn off surge pricing to JFK airport when New York City taxi drivers were on strike, refusing to drive passengers to the airport, where protests against the ban were taking place. Uber's main rival, Lyft, also continued operating during the strike, but it did not turn off surge pricing and won the PR war. By Sunday, Lyft had announced it would donate $1 million to the ACLU. Uber, meanwhile, promised legal help and three months' financial compensation for about a dozen of its employees who are currently out of the U.S. and risk being refused re-entry because of their nationalities. CEO Travis Kalanick is a member of Trump's economic advisory group and will be attending a meeting on Friday where, he has said, he will discuss how the ban impacts innocent people.
And finally, yesterday, Google employees, accompanied by CEO Sunday Pichai and cofounder Sergey Brin, staged a walkout. They raised over $2 million for nonprofit groups that are working with refugees (including the ACLU)—$2 million that the company matched.
At the event, Brin told the crowd that he himself was an immigrant who at one point in time would have been affected by the order.
"I came here to the U.S. at age 6 with my family from the Soviet Union, which at that time was the greatest enemy the U.S. had—maybe it still is in some form—but it was a dire period of the Cold War…And there was threat of nuclear annihilation. And even then the U.S. had the courage to take me and my family in as refugees."
He went on to say that this debate isn't one that should be framed as liberal versus conservative, but more as a debate about fundamental values.
"I hope this energy carries forward in many different ways beyond what our company can do, beyond what companies can do, but as a powerful force and really powerful movement."
