Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, BBK Electronics, Huawei, and Dalian Wanda are changing the products and services you use, whether you know it or not.
In October, Steven Spielberg, the highest-grossing film director of all time, traveled to Beijing for a meeting with Jack Ma, China's second-richest man and the cofounder of Alibaba, one of the most valuable internet companies in the world's second-largest economy. Together, they inked a deal that gives Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment production company the financial backing of the e-commerce giant, along with its marketing savvy and substantial distribution power—the elusive keys, in other words, to making a truly global blockbuster.
Ma, a film buff who reportedly loves The Godfather and calls Forrest Gump his hero, had circled Hollywood for some years, and even committed $1.5 billion to a film fund that helped bankroll and market Star Trek Beyond and Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, but this was his first direct alliance. At a press conference announcing the deal, the titans, dressed alike in dark suits with cups of tea between them, heaped praise on each other. "I never thought in my life I'd see this legendary master," Ma told the crowd in Beijing, while touting the "cultural bridge" they were building. Spielberg declared that the deal will allow them to "bring more China to America, and bring more America to China."
The sight of Spielberg, the quintessentially American storyteller, seated alongside Ma, the quintessentially Chinese tech entrepreneur, was more than just a signal of China's growing influence on the film industry. It was also the latest in a string of recent developments illuminating just how much Chinese companies are influencing some of the most innovative and important U.S. businesses. With a market that some observers argue has become the most dynamic in the world, China has become a colossal source of capital and creative thinking well beyond its shores. Increasingly, it is leading the way in everything from mobile software and services to devices and entertainment. And it's accelerating the pace for the rest of the world, whether or not consumers know it.
Alibaba is just one of a slew of ambitious Chinese tech companies that has been at the forefront of the convergence between China and America. What they have in common is a birthplace that's more crucible than cradle. This year, the Chinese box office will likely eclipse the U.S.'s. So too could the value of venture-backed investments in China, which approached $50 billion last year (up 943% since 2013). China now ties or tops the U.S. market in online retail, mobile device sales, digital payments, gaming, renewable energy investments, and more. With more than half of its 1.37 billion citizens online, 90% of them via smartphone, China has seen an explosion of tech behemoths and upstarts driving innovation hubs like Beijing and Shenzhen to become more hypercompetitive than even Silicon Valley.
Less than a decade ago, China's reputation was for spinning out shameless copycats of Western products, but today the model has been flipped. Spurred by an influx in VC dollars and talent, increased product sophistication, and a market maturing to meet the unique demands of China's population, "you ended up with this different evolution from the rest of the world, a continental internet broken off from the Pangaea, which led to different interfaces, different market dynamics," says Calvin Chin, CEO of Shanghai-based accelerator Transist Impact Labs. Then things really picked up steam. "Imagine The Hunger Games," says Connie Chan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who analyzes the Chinese technology industry. "[It comes down to] the sheer size [of the country]. For any one company in the U.S., there might be 10 equivalents in China. In order to survive, you have to iterate that much faster."
This kind of rivalry has catapulted social media platforms WeChat and Alipay well past their American counterparts. When WeChat, which is owned by Tencent, launched six years ago, it was a mere chat app, while Alibaba's Alipay basically acted as a PayPal for the company's e-commerce marketplaces. But in fewer than two years, WeChat gained 200 million users, and soon expanded into mobile payments, a move that Alibaba's Ma called a "Pearl Harbor attack" on his company. The fierce competition led to a spree of innovations, which, by 2015, had propelled China's mobile-transaction volume ahead of the U.S.'s, to $235 billion, and morphed WeChat and Alipay into services that have become the envy of Facebook, Google, and Snapchat. Hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers now depend on these all-in-one apps to do, well, everything: interact with friends; pay for cabs and utility bills; book hotels, flights, and even dentist appointments; find love; and read news.
U.S. tech companies have long dreamed of building that kind of universal experience on a single platform, and they're now scrambling to re-create what's become standard in China. This year, Facebook began experimenting with incorporating WeChat-inspired customer-service bots and other business features into Messenger, while Snapchat has toyed with integrating payments into its communication platform. Meanwhile, Tencent is already orchestrating its next paradigm shift: It just unveiled Mini Program, a new platform that allows other services to build versions of their apps inside WeChat (like bots, but better), which some believe could transform the messaging service into a full operating system. Albert Liu, EVP of corporate development at Verifone, which partnered with Alipay in October to bring its payments service to North America, now doesn't know whether to call these messaging platforms "super apps" or gateways to the internet. "The advantage of super lifestyle apps like Alipay or WeChat is they've connected incrementally more data than an app that's just focused on a single area: Alipay knows where you've traveled, what movies you saw, what restaurants you ate at," he says. "There is no comparison with anything in the U.S. Maybe Facebook eventually gets there—maybe."
The velocity of competition is just as torrid in the hardware market. Google veteran Hugo Barra, who recently stepped down as Xiaomi vice president, has witnessed firsthand the extreme market fluctuations in China, where new brands displace incumbents with lightning speed. When Barra joined Xiaomi in late 2013, the then-three-year-old hardware maker was rocketing to become the No. 1 smartphone maker in China. Clever flash sales of its sleek flagship Mi devices (which rivaled the iPhone in quality) created fervor, and weekly operating-system updates made consumers feel like they were part of the design process. In 2015, with Xiaomi's growth slowing, Huawei, a telecom manufacturing giant, stole its crown, thanks to its carrier relationships and a massive investment in using its expertise to build its own consumer devices. And then Oppo and Vivo, subsidiaries of BBK Electronics, dominated 2016, by smartly targeting lesser-developed cities (which by American standards are still enormous) while pushing youth-oriented features, such as the new Vivo V5's 20-megapixel front-facing camera, the perfect tool for the selfie-obsessed.
"Chinese technology companies, both in hardware and software, are moving so fast from one generation to the next," Barra says. "There's so much resource investment here, so much productivity, and obviously the fact that the supply chain is [in China] makes things easier too." You can be sure that Apple, whose China market share slipped 37% in a single quarter last year, is studying every move. Huawei recently announced its new Mate 9, the first smartphone embedded with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. And by the time the iPhone 8 finally lands this fall with a rumored bezel-less display, Xiaomi's Mi Mix smartphone, which features a stunning edge-to-edge screen that reviewers have called the future of mobile devices, will have already been on the market for close to a year. "The average Chinese consumer has become incredibly discerning," says Barra. "Their demand for consumer innovation is ahead of any other market in the world."
In the past year, no industry has attracted more Chinese interest (and raised American alarm) than entertainment, which Chinese companies are pursuing with a mix of prodigious capital and strategic deal-making. Tencent and real estate giant Dalian Wanda have joined Alibaba in committing billions of dollars to help produce the kind of technologically ambitious and expensive film and TV projects that appeal to global audiences. Given the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese market (traditional Western advertising campaigns tend to fall flat there, and the country places strict quotas on non-Chinese films), American studios need to partner with these companies to access this key element of the global box office. "If you're going to spend over $100 million on a movie and ignore the Chinese market," says Max Michael, head of Asian business development for the United Talent Agency, "you're not doing your job right."
Wang Jianlin[Photo: VCG/Contributor/Getty Images]
China, in turn, is intent on learning the ins and outs of filmmaking from Hollywood as it builds up its own moviemaking infrastructure. In 2016, for example, Wanda chairman Wang Jianlin, the richest man in China (just ahead of Alibaba's Ma), helped orchestrate the acquisition of Legendary Entertainment, the production company behind The Dark Knight and The Hangover, for $3.5 billion. Wang previously purchased U.S.-based AMC Theatres, which made Wanda the biggest cinema operator in the world, and more recently struck a high-profile deal with Sony Pictures to cofinance and market Sony movies in China. (Last November, he also acquired prolific awards-show producer Dick Clark Productions.) Wang is said to be looking to make similar deals with the other major studios, while working to entice Hollywood to film at Wanda's new $8 billion production facility in Qingdao. "The Chinese market loves Hollywood content. At the same time, they love to learn from Hollywood," says Jack Gao, Wanda's head of international investments and operations.
The implication of these aggressive moves is palpable. Wanda's acquisition streak has led members of Congress to request a Justice Department investigation into potential "foreign propaganda influence over American media." Meanwhile, in the smartphone arena, suspicions of Huawei's ties to the Chinese government have kept the telecom company from spreading its wares in the U.S. With isolationist trade policies and a more combative relationship with China likely during the Trump administration, some American and Chinese companies and investors with interests linking the world's two largest economies are apprehensive about the years ahead.
But whether or not a specific product or brand from China ever becomes ubiquitous in the U.S., the underlying innovations are already being imported and exported, impacting Americans regardless. You can see it reflected in the design and build of your phone, in the way you interact with friends and businesses, and in the entertainment you consume. In that sense, the "cultural bridge" Spielberg and Ma discussed in Beijing is already being constructed. And no walls, physical or digital, will likely be able to stop it.
You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be prepared.
As a job candidate, if you're asked the question, "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" in an interview, it's important to emphasize what you're good at, and minimize—but be truthful about—what you're not.
Let's say two candidates—we'll call them Francine and William—have job interviews for a customer service manager position. As always, one of the interview questions they'll be asked is about their strengths and weaknesses.
First up is Francine. When she's asked, "What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?" Francine responds, "My strength is that I'm a hard worker. My weakness is that I get stressed when I miss a deadline because someone else dropped the ball."
This answer is unimaginative, a no-brainer. Most people think of themselves as hard workers—who would actually admit to not being a hard worker? Also, Francine's weakness is technically not a weakness, plus she passes the buck: Someone—not her—drops the ball, which causes her to get stressed.
Now it's William's turn. He also has difficulty with the question. "I really can't think of a weakness," he begins. "Maybe I could be more focused. My strength is probably my ability to deal with people. I am pretty easygoing. I usually don't get upset easily."
This answer leads with a negative, and then moves to vague words: maybe, probably, pretty, and usually. William isn't doing himself any favors.
So what is the best way to answer this common interview question?
Let's get the hard part out of the way first—your weaknesses. This is probably the most dreaded part of the question. Everyone has weaknesses, but who wants to admit to them, especially in an interview?
Some examples of weaknesses you might mention include:
Being too critical of yourself
Attempting to please everyone
Being unfamiliar with the latest software
The best way to handle this question is to minimize the trait and emphasize the positive. Select a trait and come up with a solution to overcome your weakness.
Stay away from personal qualities and concentrate more on professional traits. For example: "I pride myself on being a 'big-picture' guy. I have to admit I sometimes miss small details, but I always make sure I have someone who is detail-oriented on my team."
When it comes time to toot your own horn, you need to be specific. Assess your skills to identify your strengths. This is an exercise worth doing before any interview. Make a list of your skills, dividing them into three categories:
Knowledge-based skills. Acquired from education and experience (e.g., computer skills, languages, degrees, training, and technical ability).
Transferable skills. Your portable skills that you take from job to job (e.g., communication and people skills, analytical problem solving, and planning skills).
Personal traits. Your unique qualities (e.g., dependable, flexible, friendly, hard working, expressive, formal, punctual and being a team player).
Some examples of strengths you might mention include:
Enthusiasm
Trustworthiness
Creativity
Discipline
Patience
Respectfulness
Determination
Dedication
Honesty
Versatility
When you complete this list, choose three to five of those strengths that match what the employer is seeking in the job posting. Make sure you can give specific examples to demonstrate why you say that is your strength if probed further.
Write a positive statement you can say with confidence:
My strength is my flexibility to handle change. As customer service manager at my last job, I was able to turn around a negative working environment and develop a very supportive team. As far as weaknesses, I feel that my management skills could be stronger, and I am constantly working to improve them.
When confronted with this interview question, remember the interviewer is looking for a fit. She is forming a picture of you based on your answers. A single answer will probably not keep you from getting the job, unless, of course, it is something blatant. Put your energy into your strengths statement—what you have to offer. Then let the interviewer know that although you may not be perfect, you are working on any shortcomings you have.
This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.
A rapid expansion of Prime plus bold bets in the physical world are allowing the retailer to offer even more, even faster and smarter.
Picture your ideal neighborhood. What does it look like? Is it manicured, with buildings set in a pattern so that everything flows together, designed for perfection? Or is it gritty and spontaneous, the kind of place where a restaurant might move into the space that used to house a dry cleaner? Boxes bearing the Amazon logo can arrive at doorsteps in either of these environments, of course, but Amazon's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, prefers the second type.
"I think neighborhoods, cities, and towns that have evolved are more interesting and delightful than ones that have been carefully top-down planned," he tells me when I meet him at Amazon's Seattle headquarters in November. "There's just something very human" about them, he says.
It's a surprising answer from a man known for his disciplined adherence to Six Sigma–style processes and data-driven decision making. But it's also revealing. Over its nearly 22 years, Amazon has moved into one sector after another and gentrified it, even if that meant tearing down its own existing structures. Amazon's Echo smart speaker rose on the lot where its Fire Phone flamed out. The latest version of Amazon's streaming music service, Amazon Music Unlimited, was constructed on top of its initial music store, Amazon MP3, which opened nine years ago. Amazon Studios' Emmy Award–winning original TV shows are built upon a crowdsourcing platform that the company first introduced in 2010 for aspiring scriptwriters. Even the company's fashion business—Amazon is now the second-largest seller of apparel in the U.S., according to Morgan Stanley—evolved from brand experiments in outdoor furniture (2004), home goods (2008), electronic accessories (2009), diapers (2014), and now perishables such as organic, fair-trade-certified coffee.
Unlike Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Amazon is not fixated on a tightly designed ecosystem of interlocking apps and services. Bezos instead emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way. "Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service," he says. "And I love that. It's super-motivating for us." That impulse has spawned an awesome stream of creative firsts. Just this past year, Prime Video became available in more than 200 countries and territories, following the November debut of The Grand Tour, Amazon's most-watched premiere ever. Twitch, the streaming video-game network that Amazon acquired in 2014, unveiled its first three original titles from its recently formed studios. Amazon invested millions in startups that will build voice-control apps for the intelligent assistant Alexa and give her thousands of new skills. The company opened two dozen new fulfillment centers, became the largest online store in India, and made its first delivery by autonomous drone in the United Kingdom.
Bezos's strategy of continuous evolution has allowed the company to experiment in adjacent areas—and then build them into franchises. The website that once sold only books now lets anyone set up a storefront and sell just about anything. The warehouse and logistics capabilities that Amazon built to sort, pack, and ship those books are available, for a price, to any seller. Amazon Web Services, which grew out of the company's own e-commerce infrastructure needs, has become a $13 billion business that not only powers the likes of Airbnb and Netflix, but stores your Kindle e-book library and makes it possible for Alexa to tell you whether or not you'll need an umbrella today.
Amazon is a singular enterprise, one that rises to the top of Fast Company'sMost Innovative Companies list because it has continued to be nimble even as it has achieved enviable scale. To truly understand how Bezos is meshing size and agility in 2017, though, you need to look beyond sales figures ($100 billion in 2015) and the stock price (up more than 300% in the past five years) and consider three initiatives that drive Amazon today: Prime, the company's rapidly proliferating $99-per-year membership program; an incursion into the physical world with brick-and-mortar stores, something the company has long resisted; and a restless rethinking of logistics, epitomized by a new fulfillment center an hour outside Seattle that features high-tech robots working alongside human workers like a factory of the future.
Our mobile-first, on-demand world finds its roots in Amazon's founding idea: that digital commerce will radically reshape our marketplace. The company's impact has already been staggering. In January, the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 independent businesses, half of them retailers, asking them to cite the biggest threats they faced. Competition from chains and big-box stores, health care, finding employees, and rising rents all ranked near the bottom as modest concerns. "Way above everything was competition from Amazon," says ILSR codirector Stacy Mitchell. (The study also found that Amazon's expansion in 2015 led to a net loss across all businesses of 149,000 jobs.)
Despite all the twists and surprises in recent decades—all the newcomers with youth, funding, and can-do enthusiasm—Amazon remains the undisputed leader, a startup at heart still striving to remake our expectations. And to repeatedly remake itself.
Nearly all of Amazon's most recent innovations share a connection to Prime, which by some estimates accounts for 60% of the total dollar value of all merchandise sold on the site. Between 40 million and 50 million people in the United States use Prime, and, according to Morgan Stanley, those customers spend around $2,500 on Amazon annually, more than four times what nonmembers spend. (Amazon refuses to offer any hard numbers related to Prime membership—that would be competitor focused rather than customer obsessed, as the executives there say—but it will confirm that Prime members spend more and shop across a greater number of categories than other users.)
If you somehow manage to take advantage of every Prime membership feature, it's undeniably a good bargain. Along with free two-day shipping for millions of products, and tens of thousands of items available at your door in an hour or less through Prime Now, there is one-hour restaurant delivery, a free e-book a month (including the entire Harry Potter series), and ad-free viewing of a streaming video-game channel on Twitch—all included in the annual fee. You can get early access to Amazon's best deals, 20% off diapers, and unlimited photo storage. For a few more dollars, Prime can be upgraded to include unlimited audiobooks, grocery delivery, and a subscription to HBO that can be watched on Amazon's Fire TV streaming media player. More than 50 "benefits" were added for members around the globe in the second half of 2016 alone, says Greg Greeley, Amazon's global VP in charge of Prime. "I would like to say that the team thinks, 'Oh, boy, we'll take a deep breath here,' " he says. "But the way this company [is], it wouldn't surprise me if we continue to keep accelerating."
What Amazon Prime is selling most of all is time. Every executive I spoke to, when asked about how it all fits together, cites this desire to get you whatever you want in the shortest window possible. Stephenie Landry, the Amazon vice president who launched Prime Now in 2014 and has overseen its expansion into 49 cities in seven countries, explains that her business merely has to answer two questions: "Do you have what I want, and can you get it to me when I need it?" The rest of the customer experience is built around answering both questions in the affirmative.
The more products and services Amazon is able to cram into Prime, the more likely users are to renew their membership and buy more stuff, which gives Amazon more data about their tastes and what they are likely to buy next. That information is used to spin out new products and services, such as the Dash button, which replenishes popular items with a tap, and Alexa, which is built, in part, for shopping. "You can just say, 'Alexa, reorder toothpaste,' " says Bezos. "And it knows which kind of toothpaste." That's why he has repeatedly called Prime the company's "flywheel": a device used in engines that provides constant energy. It is both an accelerant to Amazon's forward motion and a beneficiary.
A sizzle video for Amazon Go, an automated convenience store being tested in Seattle.
Bezos says that people have been asking him for 20 years whether he would ever open physical stores. The answer, consistently, has been no. "I've answered pretty much the same way the whole time, which is that we will if we have a differentiated idea," Bezos tells me. Yet today, suddenly, Amazon has four concepts in the works.
Why the shift? In part it links back to Prime; retail stores offer a tangible lure for the uninitiated. But, as Bezos explains, Amazon's technological sophistication also now makes it possible for in-store shoppers to interact with its digital platforms in all-new manners. Monitoring the interplay is a classic Amazon way to spot new opportunities.
The first wave of Amazon stores is somewhat traditional: More than 30 pop-up shops showcasing Amazon's electronic gadgets—Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, Fire tablets, and Dash buttons—dotted the country by late last year. The next phase: expanding the highly curated Amazon Books stores—which showcase titles with a higher-than-four-stars customer rating alongside excerpts of reviews from the website—from three locations to eight. But it is the third leg of the company's retail experiment that begins to rattle expectations. Amazon Go is a convenience-store concept the company announced in December (it will launch publicly in Seattle in early 2017). After a shopper swipes a code on her mobile phone at the entryway turnstile, she can grab whatever items she likes; they are magically added to her digital cart and automatically paid for when she leaves, through her existing account. This ability to skip both the line and any cash register on the way out is made possible by Amazon's cloud computing, machine learning, voice control, and logistics know-how. It's also another example of Amazon creating a technology platform that could be sold to other businesses.
Finally, and more quietly, another grocery-store concept is also being prepped. Although no one inside Amazon is willing to talk about it, documents filed with local buildings departments in Seattle and the San Francisco suburbs of Sunnyvale and San Carlos show that the company is erecting stores in all three locales. (Construction at the Seattle location—where a Chinese restaurant once stood, on a busy commercial thoroughfare in the fast-growing Ballard neighborhood—appears to be nearly complete.) The documents describe a system that would seem to extend the AmazonFresh grocery service: Customers load their digital carts remotely and pay online, then schedule a physical pickup within a two-hour window. "When picking up purchased items, customers either can drive into a designated parking area with eight parking stalls where the purchased items will be delivered to their cars, or they can walk into the retail area to pick up their items," the filings say.
These stores are not likely to change the way most Americans get their cornflakes overnight. Still, Amazon has always been good at being patient—and incrementally improving its offerings. Since AmazonFresh launched in 2007, the service has slowly expanded to dozens of cities. The Amazon neighborhood continues to change.
Planted on the edge of a military base, Amazon's recently opened fulfillment center, in DuPont, Washington, looks from the outside like a generic warehouse, with a line of idling trucks snaking around the building waiting to load and unload product. But what's inside represents a huge advance in the way Amazon sorts, packs, and ships orders.
It starts with a "vision tunnel," a conveyor belt tented by a dome full of cameras and scanners. As each box comes off the truck, it is photographed and scanned on all sides. Image-recognition algorithms then sort each parcel based on variables such as the type of product or size and weight. What takes humans with bar-code scanners an hour to accomplish at older fulfillment centers can now be done in half that time.
Boxes are towed from the docks into the million-square-foot warehouse, sometimes by driverless vehicles. This facility handles the largest items that Amazon ships, which is why there's also a huge, 6-ton yellow robot on the main floor. It has a six-axis arm that could pick up a car with ease, but today it's mostly lifting pallets loaded 4 feet high with diapers and Keurig cups to the second floor of the warehouse where they will await shipping. The arm performs a constant, mostly silent waltz with an ensemble of rolling Amazon robots, which represent the next-generation offspring of the company's $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012, and were only fully integrated into the fulfillment center workflow last year.
Amazon One, a Boeing 767, is part of a fleet of 40 cargo planes Amazon plans to roll out over the next two years.[Photo: courtesy of Amazon]
Once a package leaves the warehouse, it may end up on a Boeing 767 with the Prime Air logo emblazoned on its side. Bezos rolled out the first in a fleet of 40 wide-bodies last summer, which will be operated in partnership with two aircraft-leasing companies. In January, Amazon announced that the fleet would be supported by a new air hub in Kentucky that will employ 2,000 workers—a $1.49 billion investment, according to a spokeswoman with the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The planes, like the thousands of cargo trailers that already sport the Prime logo, make Amazon less dependent on its partnerships with FedEx, DHL, and the United States Postal Service. And, pending FAA approval, those fully operational Amazon delivery drones might one day cut delivery time down to 30 minutes or less.
Amazon stresses that its new automated fulfillment centers actually require more human workers than the old ones did, because the warehouse can store a significantly larger number of products—which all still need people for boxing and general oversight (plus, someone's got to service those robots when they need repairs). The plant in DuPont, active almost 24/7, employs more than a thousand people full time. At stow station 1405, for instance, I watch a young guy with tattoos, a man bun, and large-gauge flesh-tunnel earrings grab item after item from orange robots, scan each one, and, after the computer gives the green light, send it to be boxed. Over the holiday season, Amazon hired an extra 120,000 workers at centers nationwide to help meet demand. This is what the future of American factory work might look like.
"I have the best job in the world because I get to work in the future," says Bezos.[Photo: Peter Hapak]
Amazon's business is not without its challenges. The company's imperative to deliver more stuff faster has racheted up its annual shipping costs north of $11 billion, reinforcing the pressure to wring efficiencies out of the company's processes and its people. In the run-up to last year's holiday shopping season, pilots who work for Amazon's Prime Air shipping contractors went on strike, demanding hiring increases to reduce their workload. It's no wonder that the blistering 2015 New York Times article about bruising work environments at Amazon remains in the popular consciousness.
Amazon is working to counteract this legacy. The company pledged in January to create more than 100,000 full-time positions over the next 18 months, and it's building a new headquarters complex in the heart of downtown Seattle. Five buildings and a 2,000-seat auditorium will surround a trio of glass-enclosed spheres that, when completed in 2018, will contain more than 3,000 species of plants and trees from around the world. There will be flexible, couch-filled work spaces and an "Expressions Lab," where employees can learn to knit or attend a "Bob Ross Paint Night." One floor will include a small outdoor dog park, and there will be several markets and cafeterias. Amazon is also funding an additional streetcar for the city, as well as bicycle paths leading to the three-block complex, which includes 1.7 acres of public space. "The biggest thing is probably just that we're not in a suburban campus," says Bezos, "which I think would change the vibrancy and energy of Amazon."
In November, Amazon released a video ad portraying a pair of aging friends—a priest and an imam—laughing, hugging, and then ordering the same knee braces for each other. It is a sensitive and moving vignette, portraying Amazon as a connector of cultures, the kind of compassionate business it has not always been given credit for being. The ad arrived just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, so I ask Bezos what the company's role might be in bridging the divides that exist in the U.S. After all, he bankrolls the Washington Post, which went after Trump aggressively during the presidential campaign (and was an early and influential opponent of Trump's immigration ban). His answer is almost laughably narrow. "Well, I'll tell you one way that I don't think anybody is divided," Bezos replies. "Everybody wants fast delivery. Low prices. I'm serious about this. Our job is to provide a great customer experience, and that is something that is universally desired all over the world."
It's tough to argue with his words. And yet this Bezosian boilerplate is certainly less than the full story. Because Amazon is doing more than delivering our next tube of toothpaste. By using the "divine discontent of the customer as a North Star," as Bezos puts it, the company is energizing a culture of relentless progress. The neighborhood may be changing, but maybe that's good. Maybe that's what business in the modern era is all about.
Expert mechanics can detect what's wrong with a car without lifting the hood. So can deep learning robots, says startup 3DSignals.
Sometimes, machines just don't sound right.
Brakes squeal, hard drives crunch, air conditioners rattle, and their owners know it's time for a service call. But some of the most valuable machinery in the world often operates with nobody around to hear the mechanical breakdowns, from the chillers and pumps that drive big-building climate control systems to the massive turbines at hydroelectric power plants.
That's why a number of startups are working to train computers to pick up on changes in the sounds, vibrations, heat emissions, and other signals that machines give off as they're working or failing. The hope is that the computers can catch mechanical failures before they happen, saving on repair costs and reducing downtime.
"We're developing an expert mechanic's brain that identifies exactly what is happening to a machine by the way that it sounds," says Amnon Shenfeld, founder and CEO of 3DSignals, a startup based in Kfar Saba, Israel, that is using machine learning to train computers to listen to machinery and diagnose problems at facilities like hydroelectric plants and steel mills.
And while most current efforts are currently focused on large-scale machinery, Shenfeld says the same sort of technology might one day help detect failures in home appliances or in devices like self-driving cars or rental vehicles that don't spend much time in the hands of an owner who's used to their usual sounds.
"When you have car-as-a-service, the person in the car doesn't know the car," he says. "If it sounds strange, you're losing this link with the human in the car deciding it's time to take it to the mechanic."
Initially, 3DSignals' systems can detect anomalous sounds based on physical modeling of particular types of equipment, notifying an expert mechanic to diagnose the problem. And once the problem is fixed, the mechanic's diagnosis is added to 3DSignals' database, which it uses to train its algorithms to not only detect unusual sounds, but also interpret them to understand what kind of repair is needed.
"The next time we hit this signature on the same machine for the same customer or another customer using the same type of machine, it will not just be anomaly detection," says Shenfeld.
And while 3DSignals focuses entirely on using its machine learning tools to process acoustic data—an area Shenfeld says is surprisingly neglected outside of speech recognition—other companies are using a variety of other types of data to detect and diagnose mechanical problems.
Systems from Augury, a startup with offices in New York and Haifa, Israel, monitor vibrations, temperature ultrasound, and electromagnetic emissions from machinery, typically large-scale heating and cooling systems. The company offers a portable tool a technician can use to capture a reading to an iPhone or Android device, where an app offers a real-time diagnosis as well as a continuous monitoring system, says cofounder and CEO Saar Yoskovitz.
"One of our customers, located in Ohio, had a thunderstorm at 2 a.m., and the whole building went dark," he says. "The generator was supposed to pick up automatically but it didn't, and the way that they learned about it was through an alert they got from Augury."
In more complicated situations, the system uses machine learning-based algorithms and a growing library of signals of different types of errors to suggest what's wrong and what technicians can do to repair the machine, he says.
"Over time, we've collected probably the largest malfunction dictionary in the world for our types of machines," says Yoskovitz.
For another startup, called Presenso, also based in Haifa, the exact type of data being monitored is less important than how it changes over time and what that signals about the machine's operation. The company's systems record data from sensors already installed in industrial equipment as part of existing control processes, streaming readings to Presenso's cloud servers.
"We don't care, or we don't need to know, if the sensor we're analyzing now measures temperature or voltage or flow," says CEO and cofounder Eitan Vesely.
Presenso's software tools use a variety of machine learning techniques to effectively build a model of a machine's operations based on the sensor data it receives. The tools provide visualizations of unusual readings, and how different they are from normal operations.
"They don't need any human guidance or [to] know what the physical attributes are that are being measured," Vesely says. "The goal is for them to learn by themselves how the machine operates."
And while real-time breakdown detection is obviously useful for companies operating machines in their own facilities, experts say it could also be useful to equipment vendors or insurance companies providing financial coverage in the case of downtime.
"If a company has downtime or business interruption insurance, that's something where it becomes incredibly relevant and also a money saver," says Ryan Martin, a senior analyst at ABI Research.
Having more reliable predictions of when machines need maintenance could also spur equipment makers to effectively offer time as a service, charging industrial users either extended warranties or even charging by the hour for the guaranteed use of their equipment without incurring too much risk to themselves, says Augury's Yoskovitz.
"One of the problems with this business model is they hold all the risk," he says. "If anything goes wrong, they pay for it, and they're looking for ways to lower this risk."
The New York-based mattress company is using science, design thinking, and whimsy to make sleep products worth talking about.
Last summer, Casper—the New York–based mattress company that aims, as its founders say, to become the Nike of sleep—introduced a surprising new product. It was only Casper's fourth major launch, after its high-tech foam mattress (which debuted in 2014) and extra-breathable sheets and pillow (2015), but it differed from those products in a major way. This one, it turned out, wasn't meant for humans.
The Casper Dog Mattress, which sells for $125, promises "to create a sleep environment that caters to canines' natural behaviors." An R&D team spent 11 months conducting dog sleep studies, consulting with canine psychologists and churning through more than 100 prototypes. "Which is a crazy idea," admits Neil Parikh, one of Casper's five cofounders and its COO. "It's a dog bed!" The mattress ("Designed for top dogs, by top dogs") is selling briskly. But that's only part of the value. As Parikh puts it, it's an opportunity "to [show] people how we think—to remind them that, 'Hey, here is a cool group of people that thinks in an interesting way.' "
If you're going to convince consumers that sleep is a pursuit as worthy of obsession as exercise or eating, you have to approach things differently. Three years after launching the original one-model-sleeps-all bed-in-a-box, Casper is combining science, design thinking, branding, and a winking sense of humor to redefine the humble mattress and its accoutrements into lifestyle statements. And its hundreds of thousands of customers are proving that being well-rested is finally getting its due. The company, which pulled in an estimated $200 million–plus in 2016 revenue (double the previous year's), has begun expanding internationally, entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the U.K., with more countries soon to follow. "We've set up the infrastructure so within a couple months we can turn on a new geography," says Parikh. "We've got, like, a SWAT team that can go in [and be] operational within eight to 10 weeks."
To an outside observer, such excitement for selling mattresses—a single model at that—might seem curious. But as their foray into dog beds demonstrates, Casper's founders are on a different mission. "When we talk about becoming a lifestyle brand," says Luke Sherwin, another cofounder and the chief creative officer, "it really is about the idea that whatever question you have about sleep, Casper will have an answer."
Casper gets its whimsy—and relentless drive—from its founders. Parikh, 27, dropped out of medical school, horrifying his physician parents (especially his sleep-doctor dad), to pursue sweet mattress-sales dreams with a group of guys he describes as his closest friends. Sherwin, 28, and chief technology officer Gabriel Flateman, 26, attended Brown University with Parikh. (When Sherwin describes fostering a company culture, he tends toward words like dialectically.) Chief product officer Jeff Chapin, 40, spent a decade at Ideo, where he designed toilets, car seats, and mattresses, the latter for one of the major players. And CEO Philip Krim, 33, first saw opportunity in mattresses as an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin, where he sold them, among other products, via an early e-commerce startup he ran out of his dorm room. None of the five has kids, all are hyperarticulate and chatty, and their social and professional lives are completely intertwined. "Where we got lucky was that we found people we really enjoyed working with," says Parikh. "People will hear us yelling in a room and looking like we're gonna throw shit at each other, but that's because it's a part of our DNA that we debate everything."
When Casper launched in 2014, the founders' confidence in the idea was based on several core insights. One, of course, is that buying a mattress is typically an awful consumer experience. Another is that the vast margins (often 100% or more) that the major manufacturers bake in created an opportunity for a nimble new player. And then there were a whole series of fundamental assumptions about consumer behavior that the company cheerfully upended, from the idea that people want a mattress designed for their specific sleep style to the perception that word-of-mouth sales would be impossible to generate because nobody talks about their mattress (a notion that was shattered by an immediate boom in viral unboxing videos). "Maybe [the videos were] a function of the fact that they like our brand, or the unboxing experience is exciting," says Parikh, referring to the way the mattress, which comes compressed into a surprisingly tiny roll, unfurls and expands in a dramatic fashion. "But the fact that people actually want to talk about sleep is pretty interesting."
That last idea became a kind of umbrella insight—that sleep is becoming a thing, a major lifestyle component, with a new cohort of evangelists proselytizing that the key to productivity and overall health stems from maximizing the quality of our slumber. (It's a belief that has found adherents in everyone from users of sleep-tracking apps to Arianna Huffington.) That thinking runs through all of Casper's subsequent products. Its sheets, for example, challenge the assumption that higher thread count equals higher quality. From both human testing and material-science research, Chapin's team concluded that densely woven sheets don't allow for cooling airflow, making the microclimate under the covers uncomfortably hot and humid. "The mattress, sheets, and pillow are fundamentally very simple things, so the science around the materials is really critical for how well they work," says Chapin. "We've gotten really good at understanding things like pressure distribution and heat and moisture management." Chapin and friends are now building out an R&D lab in San Francisco, which will allow for rapid prototyping and even in-house sleep-study bedrooms. Each space can be adjusted to mimic any possible sleep environment in terms of temperature, humidity, and other parameters. "It's sick," says Parikh. "[We're] gonna be able to prototype something, then watch people actually sleeping on it, while our team is at work upstairs."
The art is how Casper has prioritized this science while cultivating its playful image. If Wes Anderson made a movie about a mattress company, it would probably look a lot like Casper—and not just because they've conducted sleep studies with dogs. It's also about the way the marketing is built around meme-y blue-and-white cartoons designed to get people—even if they're years away from needing new bedding—thinking about the brand. Or the company's tastefully cheeky nods to the way the mattress, via its springy latex layer, can enhance "indoor sports."
Casper has maintained this puckishness as it moves into physical retail. It's a dramatic shift for the company, opening it up to more traditional customers who might not feel comfortable making a major purchase online. (A queen-size mattress costs $950.) The company's showrooms, currently in New York, Los Angeles, and London, feature elements one would never find in a Mattress King, including trompe l'oeil paintings of furniture and secret napping spaces in back. In addition, Casper struck a major partnership with the furniture retailer West Elm, which allows customers to check out the mattresses in person at more than 90 stores across North America. (West Elm, for its part, gets a welcome frisson of Casper's millennial-friendly vibe.) "We went full force with Casper," says Nancy Tsuei, West Elm's senior VP of merchandising. "We've given them significant real estate in our stores, online marketing, home-page marketing, and space in our catalog, which goes out to millions of homes."
Parikh won't say specifically where else he's trying to bring the Casper sleep experience, but allows that it includes pretty much anywhere you might find yourself snoozing: in hotel beds, on cruise ships, on airplanes. "We're in the final legs of probably closing some stuff [with an airline]," he says. "How do you turn a pseudo-average experience of sleeping on a plane into something awesome? Usually that's going to involve: How do we make the seats better? How do we think about eye masks, duvets, pillows?"
What Parikh finds most exciting about Casper going mainstream is that it gives him and his buddies the chance to test their own foundational assumptions. "When we first started the business, the demographic we thought we were going to hit was millennials," he says. But hundreds of thousands of customers later, Parikh and company found their beds appealing to a much wider group of users: "I mean, people who are 65 who live in Nebraska also need mattresses," he says. And if not them, their dogs.
CEOs are expected to recognize when somebody is no longer the right fit for a job. But what if it's you?
By now, I've learned to start my firing conversations the same way every time: "There's no easy way to say this, so let's just get at it. At this stage in the company's growth, you're not the right person for the job you're in."
And then, bang—they're gone. Not because I'm a heartless jackass, though. For me, it's usually because I've spent six months to a year wrestling with the sick, sinking feeling that the colleague in question really isn't the right person for the job they're in, and it's holding the company back.
But it was a different sort of wrestling match when the "colleague" in question was me. I stepped down as CEO of my startup just last week, but I'd been having that conversation with myself for a long while before then, and it wasn't much easier in my head than it was sitting across from one of my employees.
After a year spent bootstrapping my company, then three years of chiseling away at a giant-but-ill-defined Mount Rushmore of market need, we were succeeding. We'd discovered the clear outlines of a monumental opportunity and our elegant solution to it. We had also reached honest-to-goodness profitability. After all the skepticism, all the stress, all the struggle, the company just needed to execute, execute, execute.
But as operational year No. 4 wore on, that familiar "this isn't the right person" dread began to creep back in. It started as the barest whiff of risk aversion. A nagging sense that things were going well but falling materially short of what felt possible. A slight sensation of helplessness when it came to solving stubborn, recurring problems. Gut-level founder stress.
I always say I'm really good at connecting dots. When I connected these, the picture that emerged looked an awful lot like underachievement. And I was the chief executive underachiever.
That thought entered my brain and amplified as the months went by. But what to do? Did my senior team recognize it, too? If they didn't but I did, and I fessed up to it, wouldn't that shatter their confidence in the flightworthiness of the structure we'd built together? And even if they believed enough in what we were doing to keep the faith, how in the world was I going to find a replacement—especially when I wasn't sure I knew exactly what a replacement should look like?
I spent a solid six months wrangling that sick, sinking feeling. "Not the right person for the job they're in": My own words, running on a hissing tape loop in my brain.
I finally reached the conclusion that the company I had worked so hard and so long to build—now better positioned to succeed than I could've imagined at the outset—was in danger of missing its window. Not because anyone had caught us or rivaled us, but because I didn't have the skill set for that "execute, execute, execute" thing. Not at scale. Not in an orderly, systematic way.
I'd love to tell you I knew exactly what to do next. We weren't cash-flush enough to undergo a big-time search, and I didn't want to raise capital on the false pretense that I was the leader to march us down the road we were building. I felt like Batman in the old TV series, stuck and calmly sinking in quicksand.
But as the saying goes, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man." With the humility that set in after the anxious suspicion that I wasn't the person the company needed now came an unexpected watchfulness: Suddenly, and almost involuntarily, my eyes and brain began to look around for what (and who) the company would need without me helming it.
So when I heard that a noted tech CEO friend of mine was looking for his next mountain to climb, I sent him a text (on October 18, 2016, to be exact) and boldly asked him if he'd consider talking to me about taking over my company as CEO. Before he could even respond, I sent him two more:
I'm incredibly proud of what we've created & genuinely believe our company can change (our industry). But I've concluded that's a whole lot more likely with a real CEO driving it.
Worth a coffee?
He did his homework on us, and we did a heroic amount of work together to make sure of the fit going forward. Just shy of four months later, he officially came aboard, and I disembarked.
Well, not entirely. I'm still here, after all. Realizing that I wasn't the CEO my startup needs most right now helped me reassess my own strengths. And the process of stepping aside and hiring my replacement taught me something valuable about what I know I can do well: I'm a pretty capable salesman, strategist, and evangelist, and I'm going to keep focusing on those strengths. Plus, I'm still the company's biggest shareholder.
Sometimes you need to fire yourself from a project that you can tell will succeed better without you in order to know what you're really cut out for. Right now, I feel engaged and energized, and incredibly relieved.
They say when you reach the conclusion that a team member's got to go, you're rarely wrong, and you're doing both the company and the individual a favor by taking the action.
Even when it's you.
Dave Maney is the founder and chairman of Deke Digital, LLC and two companies before. He is a father of six and a frequent commentator on the information-flooded economic revolution we're all living through.
We asked recruiters how they wish people would respond to, "Where do you see yourself in five years?"
"I personally don't like that question," says Facebook's Hyla Wallis, and probably neither do you. Yet the old standby, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" keeps popping up in job interviews, even though it's less relevant to the way the future workforce will function.
Few people know better than Wallis, a university recruiting manager at the tech giant, that "people are constantly changing"—these days more than ever. "We're not doing the same jobs for five or 10 or 20 years." In fact, it's now much more common to change jobs every two or three years.
But pointing that out to a hiring manager probably won't get you an offer. So Fast Company asked the experts to weigh in on better ways to answer the five-year question. Here's what they said.
According to career expert and Fast Company columnist J.T. O'Donnell, the key is "to focus on what level of expertise you hope to be at in five years," then prove why that skill set will be worth more than what you can offer now.
"We need to constantly create value for employers," O'Donnell points out. "We do this by becoming specialists in various skills that are in demand. If we choose the right skill sets, then by default, we will be in demand." She suggests comparing your current skill to what's listed under "qualifications" in the job description as a starting point. "Then ask yourself, 'How would I upgrade these skills, and what would be the financial impact for [the employer]?'"
Refinery29 recruiter Taylor Smits agrees. "You should highlight both what you will commit to—learning a software, growing a team—and what the company ends up with as a result—a manager who makes data-driven decisions, a more powerful salesforce. After all, who wouldn't want an employee whose focus is improving himself to reach a company objective?"
Framing your answer this way, says O'Donnell, "helps employers see that you understand the business relationship between the two of you. It also proves that you are forecasting the future of your industry or profession, and [can] see where it is going."
Wallis is less sure that job seekers can make such clear forecasts, and doesn't recommend trying to do so. "So much can change in that period of time," she says, especially now, when more frequent job hopping seems to be on the rise. "But where that's really valuable is when people move, they learn more about what they love to do."
And as she sees it, that self-knowledge can benefit employers, too—because if a candidate sees a real opportunity to learn, they're more likely to stay and apply their growing expertise.
Recruiting expert and Fast Company contributor Lars Schmidt also thinks it's often a mistake to try calculating a direct ROI for the employer. "Today's workers are more likely to be on a nonlinear path, so the traditional—and expected—answers may not fit," he says. Instead, "consider shifting the answer to frame it around intangibles, knowledge, and experience you hope to have gained in five years . . . Make it less about job title [or] level, and more about growth and what you've learned."
Wallis agrees. She says candidates should answer, "What are the short-term things that you want to learn, and how do you feel like you can be better? In what ways can you push yourself to get there, and where do you need help?" Job seekers may be coached to project confidence, but "being able to ask for help is really important," Wallis believes. "Sometimes with those five-year plans, you can pigeonhole yourself with your own expectations and the expectations of others."
By asking the five-year question, hiring managers are "just trying to gauge whether you have realistic expectations about where this position could take you," write The Muse cofounders Kathryn Minshew and Alexandra Cavoulacos in their forthcoming book The New Rules of Work. "So good answers could include, 'In five years I'd love to have advanced to a management role' or, 'In five years I envision myself working with a diverse group of international clients.'"
But don't manufacture a response like this if it isn't true, they warn. "If you really have no idea, it's fine to say that you're not quite sure what the future holds, but that this job will play an important role in helping you shape that five-year plan."
Whatever you do, Minshew and Cavoulacos suggest refraining from "the not-so-classic" response: "In your job!"
BuzzFeed recruiter Dan Geiger admits that he's "never been a five-year plan person. I think it makes it easy to set yourself up for frustration or disappointment," he says.
Geiger has interviewed people who feel similarly, and had a creative way to explain it. "I've had a few candidates tell me that the job they want in five years doesn't yet exist. I really like that! It shows an awareness of this rapidly changing industry."
"Maybe it's not the most specific answer," he says, "but with how quickly technology and other factors are changing this industry, there's often not much specificity in anything."
How Glossier, Kenzo, Clique Media Group, Hypebeast, and Rewardstyle are using social media to create eager audiences for their products.
How do you grab shoppers' attention at a time when the retail landscape is narrowing (ahem, Amazon) and online distractions are manifold? Killer content. The following five companies illustrate the power of building a brand atop an authoritative editorial voice, whether it's in the form of viral videos and lifestyle blogs or influencer 'grams and disappearing Snaps. They're also fostering conversations with consumers—sneakerheads, fashionistas, and beauty obsessives alike—that inform everything from product design to distribution and marketing. In their hands, content has become a robust engine for commerce.
For collaborating with customers to create cult cosmetics.
The beauty industry has generally flowed in one direction: Executives in glass towers decide which products they're going to put on shelves, and women buy them (or don't). Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss has turned this process into a two-way conversation by asking readers of her beauty news and reviews website, Into the Gloss, to weigh in on every aspect of her three-year-old skin-care and makeup company. In 2016, Glossier, which grew by 600% year over year, released a slew of hit products, including the Milky Jelly face wash. Its development started months earlier when Weiss asked her flock what they'd want in their dream cleanser—"to make sure we were putting something into the world that really mattered," she says. Comments poured in, signaling an eager audience. "It's our most replenished product," says Weiss.
Glossier gets fans to preach (or post) the gospel in other ways. The brand's modern, minimalist packaging is designed to look good in photographs, and Glossier products arrive in a reusable pink pouch that doubles as an Instagram backdrop. "We think of things from a content perspective: How would this show up in a user-generated photo?" Weiss says. Glossier further buffs its credibility by touting other brands on both its Instagram feed and Into the Gloss. "Where most beauty companies have tried to ignore the fact that women are in an open relationship with beauty brands," Weiss says, "we have embraced that."
"There [is] no reason to be shy. The world is hungry for new things," says Kenzo co-Creative Director Carol Lim of the approach she and Humberto Leon take to content marketing.[Photo: Pari Dukovic]
It was probably the lasers. Yeah, when actress Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers) shot lasers from her fingers during an epic dance routine in the Spike Jonze–directed short film Kenzo World, that's likely when every marketer on earth went slack-jawed. Commissioned to celebrate the launch of the French fashion house Kenzo's Kenzo World fragrance, the surreal and surprising spot, which went viral in September and won a top industry award in November, led to a wildly successful soft launch of the perfume—no paid media or marketing required. (Parent company LVMH cited the campaign as helping to drive the 8% growth in its perfumes and cosmetics division during the first nine months of 2016.)
Kenzo creative directors Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, who also run the retailer and clothing brand Opening Ceremony, have consistently pushed Kenzo beyond fashion and into the larger realm of pop culture through creative risk-taking and collaboration. "It's exciting for us to tap into culture in any way we can," says Leon. Two more visionary projects followed in a six-week period, including a Carrie Brownstein–directed short satirizing the hyperbolic world of social media, which served as Kenzo's fall/winter lookbook, and a video featuring Chance the Rapper that announced Kenzo's partnership with H&M. "We don't come from a background of carefully mapped-out marketing," says Lim. "We just move."
Clique Media cofounders Katherine Power and Hillary Kerr use their in-house data team to inform everything from website content to product development.[Photo: The Collaborationist]
Known for its hit lifestyle and e-commerce websites—Who What Wear (fashion), MyDomaine (home decor), and Byrdie (beauty)—Clique Media leaped out of the digital world and into the physical one in January 2016 with a clothing line for Target. The millennial-minded Who What Wear collection offers runway trends at big-box prices ($34.99 for velvet pants, $44.99 for a cape blazer) and keeps up with the frenetic pace of fashion by committing to 12 updates a year. It's a natural evolution for the 11-year-old company, which grew out of the Who What Wear blog started by Elle magazine veterans Katherine Power and Hillary Kerr. "We felt that the high-end fashion magazines spoke down to women," says Power, who now serves as CEO. "We wanted to create this friendly voice that felt like your most fashionable friend."
Today, Power's team uses the information gleaned from Clique Media's verticals and social media accounts to figure out what will sell. "We have amazing insight into what's converting: what brands, what silhouettes, what material," says Power. "We're also engaging the customer along the way. We'll be looking through fabric swatches and go on Snapchat and say, 'Which one do you like better?' " The crowdsourcing has worked: Who What Wear's Target collection has recently expanded into shoes, and Clique Media has more retail collaborations in the works. Last July, Clique Media organized an IRL meetup for readers of Obsessee, its new social-only "publication" for gen-Zers. It put together a pop-up shop at a Los Angeles mall that sold Obsessee-branded T-shirts and school supplies. Teenagers thronged. Over the course of three days, the store processed more than 1,700 transactions. Revenue wasn't the only goal. "Everything was sold for social currency," says Power. "To purchase something, you had to make a Snapchat or post an Instagram, and, of course, tag Obsessee." It's step one in building a content brand that sells.
Kevin Ma transformed his blog into a public company with the debut of Hypebeast on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last year.[Photo: Chris Schoonover]
For uniting sneakerheads into a lucrative demographic.
"In the world of hype, in the world of cool, you need to be the coolest platform selling the coolest products," says Kevin Ma, the unflappable founder of the Hong Kong–based streetwear site Hypebeast. Championing edgy brands such as Raf Simons, Vetements, and Hood by Air, Ma's site has grown from a simple sneakerhead review hub (created in his Vancouver bedroom) to a multifaceted arbiter of all manner of urban fashion and culture that includes Hypebeast, the year-old female-focused Hypebae, and an online marketplace called HBX that sells everything from Yeezy Boosts to Leica cameras. Proof that Ma knows how to stay on just the right side of the hype cycle: Much of Hypebeast's 46% increase in revenue in the first six months of last year was fueled by its growing creative services division, which helps brands such as Gucci and Adidas produce advertising for both Ma's sites and others'.
Ma is also manipulating the tentacles of his operation to maximum effect. He ignites followers with weekly "Top Drops" on HBX, featuring sales of limited-edition sneakers and T-shirts, and leverages the data generated by Hypebeast and its associated sites to figure out what to stock on the e-commerce arm. "Once we publish an article about things that we think will be hot, we can see the data and reaction and engagement from the community," Ma says. "It's a mix of technology and so-called big data that influences our buying decisions." Hypebae, for example, was born last February from the insight that women account for 15% of the traffic to the male-dominated Hypebeast. The company is now growing its editorial staff as it prepares for further global expansion. The United States already accounts for more than half of its sales; mainland China and its billions of feet, Ma hopes, are next.
RewardStyle is realizing the social media world's longtime dream of converting influence into e-commerce opportunity. Founder Amber Venz Box has channeled her frustration as a fashion blogger who wanted to make more money into a full suite of back-end publishing and tracking tools. Today, RewardStyle allows her and her fellow bloggers and Instagram personalities the chance to earn commissions on the products they promote. "Our mission is making [influencers] as economically successful as possible," she says. Users who like a RewardStyle influencer's 'gram receive an email on where to buy the featured look, a clever work-around that avoids forcing people to shop while they're browsing their feeds. Venz Box negotiates commissions for influencers and provides tools to help them track the impact of their posts.
In 2016, RewardStyle grew its influencer network to 11,000 people (more than 100,000 have applied) and drove more than $700 million in sales for its retail partners, which include more than 4,000 stores and brands, among them Kate Spade and Sephora. Its stylish crew now creates original content for 30,000 products daily, much of it on Instagram. (RewardStyle's Instagram-optimized LiketoKnow.it platform drives almost 30% of the company's sales.) The company's data and its relationships help it make the best matches between retailers and pitch folk. "If [brands] want someone who drives a high volume of sales in accessories from $50 to $100 and lives in the Midwest," Venz Box says, "we can [connect them with] that person." As the shopping potential of Pinterest and Snapchat grows, RewardStyle is pushing to bring its tools to those platforms next.
Former Nixon counsel John Dean, who went to jail, is troubled by Trump's Russia scandal but doesn't think it will lead to impeachment.
A clumsy crime that could unravel a giant conspiracy. A paranoid president who lashes out at the media and expresses deep distrust of the intelligence agencies. A top official accused of lying to federal agents. A cover-up that could be worse than the crime. And angry Democrats demanding: "What did the president know? And when did he know it?"
While discussing his thoughts, Dean paused to read a news alert from the Washington Post about Flynn lying to the FBI about his conversations. He nervously laughed, talked about his fear of the damage that Trump could do to the presidency, and expressed his amazement at how social media and the 24/7 news cycle has turned this scandal into a black hole that swallows up time. The only question he couldn't answer? Who in Trump's administration would fill the role played by Dean during Watergate—becoming a witness for the prosecution and spilling the beans on the scandal?
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Fast Company: So, reading the headlines and watching CNN today, what's your reaction?
John Dean: That [Trump] press conference was pretty amazing. My first presidential press conference, I was still an undergrad. It was an Eisenhower press conference, very dignified, everyone was very nice. There were no rants. And I've either watched or been in the room for hundreds of them. And I've never seen anything as classless as this one. What troubles me is that Trump's dragging down the high office he holds. It's like he doesn't care.
Everyone is making the Watergate comparison - does that make sense to you?
There is certainly the hint of it there, not quite to Watergate 2.0 yet but it could happen. As we're talking, I noticed before I sat down that the Post broke the story that Flynn lied to the FBI. Obviously the NYT got a whiff of that. I tweeted about that. U.S. Code 18 USC 1001 which prohibits making false statements to federal officials. That's a statute you don't want to violate. I learned about it there during Watergate. It's unpleasant to be on the wrong side of that.
Some are even saying that this could eventually lead to impeachment.
I don't think he'll be impeached. I think the president is safe as long as the Republicans control the House and Senate. Nixon would not have been impeached if he had Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. Parties have a very high tolerance for misconduct by members of their party. But the question remains what happens in 2018. If Republicans lose control [in those midterm elections], then his presidency could be over. As long as he's there signing into law things they want—like allowing crazy people to have handguns, as long as he doesn't bother them, he'll be safe. Or if he does something so outrageous—like if he's been compromised by the Russians, for example, and it's much more serious than his conversation on the bus with Billy Bush, if he's seriously compromised by the Russians, then this could get very serious.
What similarities do you see to Watergate? There have been so many -gate controversies from Travelgate to Troopergate, but this one seems more to echo the original one.
Do you know where that started with all the gate scandals? The New York Times' Bill Safire noticed that there was a wine scandal in France during Watergate and they had used that suffix gate over there. So Safire started attaching it to everything and really got it to grow. The whole reason he did it was that by naming everything a gate, it made Watergate seem less serious.
The parallels here are very troubling. I was literally having nightmares. I was following a different set of polls from most of the major ones and they kept having Trump win. I had the feeling that Trump was going to win a couple of weeks before the election, and I had a knot in my stomach, because of my own knowledge of how the machinery works and how that can be used and abused. It's unbelievable what he's doing.
There has been speculation that some of this is the revenge of the intelligence agencies - what do you think?
I didn't understand why he went out of his way to offend the intelligence community. Yes, it was a totally "unintelligent" thing to do, and these aren't people you don't want to pick a fight with. They didn't like Nixon's policy on Vietnam and were very suspicious that he had interrupted the peace process that LBJ was trying to employ in '68, which turned out to be true. For Trump it's self-inflicted trouble, you don't have to go to conspiracy theories. To be insulting to these people, many of whom take their life in their hands every day.
What do you think of rumors that GOP leaders want Trump to get impeached, so that [Mike] Pence can take over, who's much more dependable.
Nixon brought Ford in when Agnew got himself thrown out of office for not paying taxes on his bribes. And Nixon thought that no one would want Gerry Ford to be president. The reverse might be true here—many would love to have Pence here. But if Pence is privy to all of this [Trump aides' conversations with Russian officials], who knows? I got a lot of calls during the Bush administration because of Cheney trying to reverse all the things he saw as WH chief of staff for Ford, that a strong president is much more important than a strong Congress. And he did reverse much of that. I got the first feel for that [Watergate deja vu] at that time.
Now, there are direct echoes of Watergate but the speed with which it's happening is much different from Watergate. We used to only have one paper that covered Watergate initially and the Times a little bit and three networks and PBS. But it unfolded over 900 days. Now, it's so different. Larry Tribe made a comment that this has been like a black hole for history: Everything has accelerated, it's all familiar but it's happening in just 900 hours or less.
A new study from Glassdoor offers a more in-depth look at exactly what motivates people to quit their jobs. Based on analysis of resumes of more than 5,000 workers who changed jobs in the last nine years, researchers identified several trends. Some trends seem obvious, such as people quitting to work at another company or getting a raise when they make a move. But what didn't factor into employees' decisions to leave (work-life balance) is more surprising.
After examining these trends, Glassdoor's statistical analysis surfaced the three factors that matter most for employee retention:
Company culture
Employee salary
Getting stuck in the same job for long periods of time
Glassdoor's chief economist Andrew Chamberlain and data scientist Morgan Smart say it's not surprising that good company culture makes people want to stay at a workplace (just think of the reputation of some of the top places to work like Google and Facebook).
As for just how much money it takes to keep employees happy, they write, "On average, we find that a 10% higher base pay is associated with a 1.5% higher chance that a worker will stay at the company for their next role."
Finally, Glassdoor's analysis revealed that for each additional 10 months a worker gets stuck in the same job, there's a 1% higher chance they'll leave the company for their next role, which the researchers say is a statistically significant impact.
By contrast, they found that while work-life balance, liking their senior leadership, and benefits may matter for overall employee satisfaction, they don't impact turnover. That's an interesting comment on the American workforce right now. For all the reports on the importance of work-life balance, it's company culture, money, and the ability to progress that reign supreme.
Since the election, media outlets are increasingly using tools that allow secure communication with sources. They're built to maintain anonymity, though extra precaution is advised.
Even before President Donald Trump took office, much of the public's understanding of the inner workings of his administration has come from what's been called an unusually large wave of leaks to the press.
Many of the leaks undoubtedly come from insiders with existing relationships with reporters—the anonymous senior administration officials familiar to readers of political journalism. But media organizations have also rolled out digital tools designed to allow would-be whistleblowers within the Trump administration, other layers of government, and private industry to communicate anonymously and securely with reporters. The stakes are potentially high for would-be sources, as Trump increasingly rails against leaks and vows to track down their sources.
The tools, such as the Freedom of the Press Foundation's SecureDrop and the GlobaLeaks platform backed by Italy's Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, harness encryption and the anonymizing network called Tor to let sources send secret messages and files to reporters without revealing their identities, locations, or IP addresses. And since Trump's election, a wave of media organizations have deployed this new infrastructure for secure communication, a kind of modern-day answer to the clandestine meetings in parking garages and secret signals made famous by such movies as All the President's Men.
"We've seen a massive increase in news organizations that want to run a SecureDrop since the election—so much so that we are trying mightily to keep up," says Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. According to a directory maintained by the foundation, SecureDrop (which traces its history back to code written by the late internet activist Aaron Swartz) is being used by long-established publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and by newer outlets like Vice, ProPublica, and BuzzFeed.
Univision's Gizmodo Media Group, which includes the millennial-focused Fusion and former Gawker properties Deadspin and Jezebel, has even taken out Facebook ads that target government officials and urge them to visit a site called TellOnTrump.com, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The site offers sources a variety of ways to leak to Gizmodo's investigative reporters, including SecureDrop, encrypted email, and encrypted messaging tools.
The recent wave of interest was spurred on by Trump's openly hostile attitude toward the press and his early restrictions on public statements by many federal officials, Timm says. And, he adds, many outlets took a serious look at SecureDrop after seeing The New York Times adopt the platform soon after Trump's election. "Generally, when The New York Times does something, a lot of news organizations follow," he says.
Even before Trump, consequences for sources of even well-intentioned leaks can be quite serious. Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was essentially forced into exile in Russia for whistleblowing, and at the time of Chelsea Manning's scheduled release in July, the former soldier will have spent seven years in custody for transmitting a massive trove of documents to WikiLeaks. President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence from an initial 35-year term, but his administration presided over what transparency experts have said was an unusual number of leak prosecutions under the federal Espionage Act.
"There's a high risk of retaliation when someone becomes a whistleblower," says Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, an early adopter of SecureDrop. "It can rise to the level of an Espionage Act prosecution, but it can also be the loss of a job in the private sector."
Using a platform like SecureDrop or GlobaLeaks doesn't eliminate the risk that leak sources can be discovered, advocates stress. And developers urge sources to take extra precautions beyond Tor, like only transmitting files over a public wireless network and using Tails, a secure operating system that comes bundled with Tor and can be launched from a USB stick or DVD, leaving no trace on a source's laptop. Some people may also wish to use a cheap throwaway laptop to make contact, says Matthew Green, assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University's Information Security Institute.
Sources should also consider the fact that particular documents or facts might only be accessible to a few people, potentially making the identity of whoever leaked them easier to determine, Green says. And sources should consider printing and scanning digital documents before leaking them, or at least generating PDFs from original files like spreadsheets and word processing documents, he says. "Never give out a direct electronic copy of the document," Green says. "Things like Microsoft Word documents can have [identifying] metadata."
But using Tor ensures that journalists, and even internet service providers who could get search warrants or subpoenas from authorities, can't detect who's transmitting data and documents.
"The reality is that when a reporter's source can be identified through digital traces, the prosecution does not even need that reporter to testify," wrote Charles Berret, a fellow at Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, in a report on SecureDrop.
Organizations using SecureDrop don't even open documents they receive on internet-connected computers, instead moving them to a second disconnected machine before decrypting them, so there's less chance of them being stolen by cyber eavesdroppers.
SecureDrop and GlobaLeaks also gives journalists and sources the option of sending messages back and forth, which users say can be more valuable than one-off drops. And while publications don't always disclose which stories were reported through leaking tools, outlets including the Associated Press and The Intercept have credited stories to SecureDrop leaks. GlobaLeaks has been used by outlets across Europe, Africa, and Latin America to develop stories, says Fabio Pietrosanti, president of the Hermes Center.
"GlobaLeaks play an essential role for AWP in what regards technological empowerment," says Pedro Noel, editor of the Brussels-based Associated Whistleblowing Press, in an email to Fast Company. "Without them, our organization would have very different, probably weaker, potential of action."
The AWP operates sites around the world, including Ecuador Transparente, which has reported on homegrown state surveillance, and Iceland's Ljost, which published reports of police surveillance in the country and loans to insiders at Iceland's failed bank Glitnir.
"There are maybe 40 well-known installations of GlobaLeaks that are managed by different organizations," says Hermes Center fellow Marco Calamari. That number includes the installations used for internal anonymous whistleblowing at government agencies and private companies. He emphasizes, though, that the tool's developers may not know the full list of organizations using it.
There's also no way to definitively say whether journalists overall have received more tips through whistleblowing tools since Trump was elected or since he took office. But the Freedom of the Press Foundation's Timm says he's heard anecdotal reports from journalists that they're receiving more messages through SecureDrop. The foundation is planning fundraising efforts to effectively double the current staff of five working on the tool in order to roll out new features and support existing users.
And while Reed declined to reveal the number of leaks received through SecureDrop at The Intercept, she says the type of leaks has changed with Trump in the White House.
"I definitely can say that the quality of information is greater," she says. "It's consistently more interesting and in the public interest."
After bringing us Pong and Chuck E. Cheese's, the legendary entrepreneur built a startup factory that tackled 21st-century ideas with 1980s tech.
In the annals of Silicon Valley history, Nolan Bushnell's name conjures up both brilliant success and spectacular failure. His two landmark achievements were founding Atari in 1972—laying the groundwork for the entire video game industry—and starting Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in 1977. But there's another highlight of Bushnell's bio that has long gone undocumented: pioneer of the high-tech incubator.
In 1981, Bushnell created Catalyst Technologies, a venture-capital partnership designed to bring the future to life by turning his ideas into companies. In the era of the TRS-80, Betamax, and CB radio, startups funded by Catalyst pursued an array of visionary concepts—from interactive TV to online shopping to door-to-door navigation—that created entire industries decades later. "I read science fiction, and I wanted to live there," Bushnell explains.
His incubator only existed for half a decade, and most of the tech startups that emerged from it are long forgotten. "You might say he flew too high and his wings burned off," says Alan Alcorn, a longtime collaborator of Bushnell and the developer of Atari's Pong.
Catalyst's mostly forgotten story serves both as a reminder of the daring nature of entrepreneurship and as a cautionary tale for those who might try to do too much, too quickly. And for Bushnell, the memories remain satisfying. "It was actually a fun project for me," he says. "I enjoyed it a lot."
As a kid growing up in Clearfield, Utah, Nolan Bushnell would visit a local boneyard where he scoured the hulking bellies of rusty aircraft looking for spare parts. "They were melting down airplane fuselages from World War II for the aluminum," he recalls. "Inside the airplanes, they still had the radios, wiring, and lights in them, and we'd sneak down at night and strip them out." It was a hazardous place for a kid, but it was also a wonderland.
Around the same time, he built a small cinder block building in his backyard so he could blow stuff up safely. He was not afraid of taking risks to learn new things, and as he grew older, he also found that he was not afraid of using his personal charm and charisma to get what he wanted.
During a summer job while in college, Bushnell occupied his restless mind's spare hours by working at a local theme park. His superiors quickly promoted him to manage the entire midway, which included an arcade and a typical array of carnival games. He learned about what it took to attract customers and keep them coming back for more—two lessons that would define the course of his life.
In 1969, Bushnell relocated to Silicon Valley to work at recorded-media pioneer Ampex. In 1970, with the help of a fellow engineer named Ted Dabney, he hatched the blueprint for the commercial video game industry by designing Computer Space—the first commercial video game ever launched. It was not a knockout success. But the following year, Bushnell and Dabney cofounded Atari.
When their new startup launched an arcade game called Pong in the fall of 1972, it set the arcade industry on fire. Several other hit arcade games followed, then Home Pong in 1975. Soon, Atari was at work on a next-generation game console with removable cartridges, designed to leapfrog the oversaturated dedicated home console market.
Atari's Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Emmons, and Alan Alcorn pose with Pong.
Atari had been largely self-funded at that point. Despite the popularity of its games, it had skirted with bankruptcy. But now it needed capital to develop its new console, so Bushnell sought a buyer. In 1976, the Warner Communications media empire—the predecessor of today's Time Warner—acquired Atari.
After the Warner acquisition, Atari's ambitious CEO had trouble focusing on the intricacies of the video game business. His newfound wealth—about $15 million of the proceeds of the merger—served as a compelling distraction. Recently divorced, he sailed yachts, traveled the world, and even bought a 14,000-square-foot mansion in Woodside, California.
But he was still hungry to create new things. At the time, there were no personal robots, no high-definition TV sets, no video phones. If he wanted to see them come to pass, he realized he would have to make them happen himself.
At first, Bushnell dabbled in the future at Atari. Pizza Time Theatre, the kernel that would become the Chuck E. Cheese chain of family arcade restaurants, began as an Atari division in 1977, and it became Bushnell's pet project. Its animatronic signing robots were cutting-edge for the time. Bushnell also encouraged Atari's engineers to experiment with futuristic technologies outside the realm of video games, such as video phones (a project called "Phoney"), computerized cameras, and telecommunications devices for the deaf.
But Bushnell's overlords at Warner weren't amused—especially by the singing robots. They didn't want to be in the pizza business. To keep his dream alive, Bushnell acquired Pizza Time from Atari in 1978 while still working there. After a showdown with Warner management over the future of the then poor-selling Atari VCS console—which Bushnell wanted to ditch and replace with a more advanced system—Warner forced Bushnell out of the firm in November 1978. He was 35 years old.
Around the time of his Atari departure, an important future collaborator entered Bushnell's life. "I got a call from Nolan, and he was in the throes of getting terminated by Warner Bros," says Larry Calof, a lawyer based in Los Angeles at the time. "I ended up negotiating Nolan's termination package from Atari. That's how he and I got to know each other."
In many ways, Bushnell says, leaving Atari was liberating. Once free of the company, he could pursue any path he wanted. And with an epoch-shifting success like Atari under his belt, he was wildly optimistic. "I was a young man and I had worlds to conquer," he says today. "I think I was kind of arrogant. I really felt that I had the Midas touch."
In 1979, Bushnell ran into trouble with the Pizza Time chain and called in a new management team to help. As those executives steered the company, Bushnell began to step away from duties there and turned his attention toward new opportunities. He had so many ideas—and so many talented friends and colleagues that could implement them. But he saw a daunting task ahead of him if he wanted to do something about it: Starting a company from scratch for each and every idea would take a lot of work.
Bushnell poses with the King, one of Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre pals.[Photo: Terry Ashe/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images]
One of the biggest problems with startups, Bushnell realized, is the sheer amount of "bullshit housekeeping stuff" involved. One needs to acquire funding, find a building, buy furniture, sign contracts, get lawyers, hire management, and handle payroll, among other administrative tasks.
To Bushnell, all that got in the way of the core reason for the business: the technology. He devised a plan to start creating small businesses as fast as possible. Each one would be an investment vehicle for Bushnell's fortune while simultaneously accelerating the future's arrival.
Central to this idea would be a shared office space—a command center where Bushnell and his lieutenants would be able to guide the proceedings. "My idea was that I would fund [the businesses] with a key," says Bushnell. "And the key would fit a lock in a building. In the building would be a desk and chair, and down the hall would be a Xerox machine. They would sign their name 35 times and the company would be incorporated." All the details would be handled: "They'd have a health care plan, their payroll system would be in place, and the books would be set up. So in 15 minutes, they would be in business working on the project."
And once these microfirms were up and running, the fledglings could leave the nest and set out on their own—by getting acquired or by becoming thriving standalone businesses.
What Bushnell had just devised was an incubator. It wasn't the world's first such company, but it was very likely the first in Silicon Valley, and it was the first to focus on the high-tech world that spawned from the 1970s revolution in semiconductor technology.
Bushnell invited Calof, his longtime lawyer, to help develop the idea. Then he brought in John Anderson, the former CFO of Atari, to handle the financial side. In 1981, the three of them decided to call their new investment partnership Catalyst Technologies—with their money being the "catalyst," so to speak, of tech innovations.
They raised a venture fund, soliciting investment from others in the area, and planned to match the venture fund's interest in each company personally, although Bushnell ended up shouldering most of the financial burden.
The group leased a building on Lawrence Station Road in Sunnyvale, California—the former headquarters of Dysan, a manufacturer of floppy disks. "It was a wonderful old thing that everybody called the 'Rust Bucket' because it was made out of steel that rusts and protects itself," recalls Bushnell. The building was ideal because it had several bays that could be used for different companies. And at over 48,000 square feet, it provided lots of room—at one point, over 14 companies shared its interior, although the larger, more successful firms soon moved out and into their own spaces.
One of Catalyst's companies created a TV show about video games, playing up Bushnell's involvement.
In 1982, the Catalyst founders rounded out the team with Perry Odak, the former VP of consumer products at Atari. Between the four of them, Calof says, Bushnell had a lawyer, an accountant, a business guy, and an idea man. And Catalyst was always intended to be a skeleton crew: At its peak, its core staff numbered only seven or eight people. Calof was named president and Bushnell was named CEO.
When it came time to decide which projects to pursue, the team shunned unsolicited pitches. Instead, the ideas mostly came from Bushnell or his associates. With the constellation of talent Bushnell knew around the valley, the project took off quickly. Within the first year, Catalyst was funding 10 separate technology firms. Soon that roster grew to 14, then between 17 and 20 at its peak. (It's hard to pin down the exact number because some of the "companies" existed only briefly as research projects, and some of Bushnell's other investments were often counted as Catalyst firms by association.)
Many of these microcompanies featured Bushnell as chief investor and chairman of the board, and several were staffed with Atari alumni such as Alan Alcorn, who spearheaded the technology behind a video game distribution company called Cumma. Joe Keenan and Gene Lipkin, both Atari veterans, also joined the effort. Such choices, which rewarded loyalty as much as skill, weren't always perfect fits. But Bushnell's charismatic nature had a way of roping in those around him to help him achieve his goals. Alcorn in particular served as a trusted sounding board for many of Bushnell's ideas.
Aside from a familiar crew of Bushnell cronies, most of the Catalyst companies had another thing in common: They were almost unnaturally ahead of their time.
For example, a firm named Cinemavision pursued high-definition television and digital theater projection in the early 1980s. ACTV invented an interactive cable TV system for choosing camera angles for live broadcasts or playing quiz shows. ByVideo dealt with an early form of semi-online shopping: Users browsed items on a screen at a kiosk, served up by LaserDisc, and the machine reported purchases back to a central shipping warehouse via modem. Alcorn's Cumma allowed electronic distribution of video games through rewritable cartridges programmed by special vending machines.
Each of these firms represented kernels of ideas that would become successful decades later, in the hands of firms like Sony, Texas Instruments, Time Warner, Amazon, and Valve. But one huge thing was missing: the technology infrastructure to make them practical in the early 1980s.
Etak's pre-GPS navigation system made the cover of Popular Science in 1985.
"A lot of these things were so far ahead of their time that either there wasn't the market, or the technology wasn't there to take it to the step where it could be commercialized," says Calof. "For example, we were doing HDTV before HDTV really could be HDTV. We had an essence of a video phone working before you could do that with the technology that was available 15 years later."
That's not to say that Catalyst focused primarily on selling the promise of science fiction. The firms had engineers making real breakthroughs in the fields of optics, telecommunications, and navigation. In fact, one of the brightest stars of the Catalyst family gave birth to the entire electronic navigation industry. That firm was Etak, a company led by engineer and championship yacht navigator Stan Honey. In 1985, Etak released the world's first in-car computer navigation system, the Etak Navigator.
At the time, the U.S. government was years away from fully deploying its network of GPS satellites and making them available for consumer devices. So Etak's gadget used a combination of dead reckoning and map matching, with maps streamed digitally from cassette tape to pinpoint your location (and even provide directions) on a small screen. Bushnell envisioned the technology eventually pointing people to the nearest sushi restaurant—in 1985—which some in the press ridiculed at the time.
Even more impressive were Etak's bleeding-edge digital mapmaking, storing, and processing techniques that spawned a suite of fundamental patents, and its portfolio of digitized maps themselves, all of which ultimately proved more valuable than a navigational device for consumers.
An ad for A.G. Bear, a Furby-like toy—that predated Furby—from Catalyst's Axlon.
To Etak's benefit, Catalyst's shared office building encouraged the cross-pollination of ideas between companies. Alcorn, while working at Cumma, recalls being fascinated by the activities at Etak. During development, he snuck into nearby Atari's coin-op division building with Etak engineers to show them the hit 1979 arcade title Asteroids. The game used a vector display that produced fluid animations with low-cost hardware. It's little surprise, then, that Etak's final on-screen representation of the car in its shipping product was a vector triangle nearly identical to the ship from Asteroids.
More than 30 years later, that bit of Atari-derived inspiration lives on: Many car navigation systems today still use a triangle with a slightly inverted base as a symbol for your car, and it comes directly from Asteroids.
Another Catatlyst success was Axlon, one of Bushnell's favorites. It most notably created a line of successful electronic pets called Petsters and an interactive teddy named A.G. Bear.
Bushnell's mind moved at a million miles per hour, and he created more companies than he realistically had time to deal with. It was a lot to manage, and he often found himself bouncing from one company to the next throughout the day, poking his head in to offer ideas. "He would be constantly talking to people all the time," says Caloff. "It was one of his weaknesses, because he wouldn't focus on anything for very long."
In 1977, George Lucas's Star Wars ignited a frenzy for personal robot technology that lasted into the 1980s. Everybody wanted a C-3PO or an R2-D2 of their own. The Catalyst firm Androbot landed firmly in the center of that cultural movement, and Bushnell promised big things.
Androbot's conceit was to create a personal robot butler called B.O.B.—short for Brains On Board—that would react to voice commands, fetch you things, and ideally do other simple household chores as well. The startup planned to do all this at a time when the typical microprocessor ran at under 2 MHz (and when 64KB of memory was cutting edge).
An Androbot demonstration at the Winter 1983 Consumer Electronics Show ramped up the public's expectations of the young firm to unrealistic heights. Calof remembers Bushnell taking the stage, asking a B.O.B. prototype to fetch something. "The engineers had been up all night," Calof recalls. "And it hadn't worked, and hadn't worked." The audience was packed with press and potential investors who waited anxiously for the robot to make a move. "Sure enough, B.O.B. came out on stage, got Nolan a beer, and brought it out to him," says Calof. "The place went absolutely nuts."
But behind the scenes at Androbot, the firm's engineers faced serious trouble. "The technology was giving us fits," recalls Bushnell. They soon realized that their ambitions were exceeding reality. Even today, no firm is yet capable of creating a practical robotic butler—much less one that could be mass produced and sold to consumers, as Androbot planned to do.
Meanwhile, the firm had to bridge the revenue gap with a scaled-back product called Topo, which was bascially a glorified Logo turtle in the flesh. It hooked up to an Apple II computer, and it would move based on your commands. Otherwise, it did nothing, but Bushnell continued to stoke the robot hype to fever pitch.
Around that point in 1983, the press began to grow skeptical of Bushnell's claims. A few reports even called him "the P.T. Barnum of Silicon Valley," implying similarities between Bushnell with the 19th-century impresario who peddled sensational hoaxes and is widely credited with saying, "A sucker is born every minute." Bushnell never shied away from the nickname, happy to be compared to a master showman.
When starting Catalyst, Bushnell had a rule that he would not put more than $300,000 of his own money into any one company. But he violated it with Androbot. "I fell in love with the product," he explains. "The product was so fascinating, but the technology was so hard that I kept funding it and funding it."
As Bushnell sunk more of his dwindling fortune into Androbot, he saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Merrill Lynch offered to underwrite an Androbot public stock offering. If Catalyst could sell Androbot, Bushnell could get his money back and carry on as usual. But the plan hit a huge snag in the summer of 1983. "A week or two before the auction was to take place, the whole high-tech market collapsed," recalls Calof. Merrill Lynch became skittish, having been burned by two or three IPOs of what they called "pre-revenue companies" in the recent past. So they withdrew the IPO, and Bushnell was devastated. "I was left high and dry," he recalls.
Topo and Bushnell in an Androbot ad.
In 1984, Bushnell had another very bad year. While he was busy scurrying from one project to the next, one of his most promising business ventures, Pizza Time Theatre, ran into trouble. The chain had overextended itself, building too many franchise locations to be profitable. In March 1984, Pizza Time filed for bankruptcy and ended up being acquired by its principal competitor.
The Androbot IPO disaster combined with the bankruptcy of Pizza Time marked the beginning of the end of Catalyst. "The net effect was that the venture community lost faith in Nolan," says Calof. "They basically said to us, 'We're not going to continue to fund these companies as you go forward, because we don't believe in them anymore.'"
With no source of funds to keep the pre-revenue Catalyst firms running, many of Catalyst's lesser businesses either sold at a loss or slowly petered out over the next three years.
"Catalyst was a company that made money when we had an exit," says Bushnell, referring to the sale of its firms. "Up until then, it was cash-flow negative. Once Androbot sucked my cash, it was hard to keep it afloat."
In 1986, Bushnell resigned all of his Catalyst firm chairmanships except one: The toy company Axlon, where he consolidated his business interests and personal attention. Before long, Odak left Catalyst, followed by Calof and Anderson. When the five-year lease for their "Rust Bucket" headquarters expired in 1986, Bushnell declined to renew. Catalyst was no more.
In considering Bushnell's legacy, it's important to remember that Catalyst was an investment vehicle. As long as the firms sold to larger companies—even if they did not sell profitable products themselves—the ultimate business goal was achieved. So how well did Catalyst do on its investments?
According to Bushnell and Calof, seven out of the 14 major Catalyst firms ended up making money for their investors. Two broke even. And six ended up as losses. Some of the successes were impressive: Etak, Magnum Microwave, and ACTV later sold out to larger firms for handsome sums of money. Etak started an industry. Axlon went public and was later sold to Hasbro.
In the years since Catalyst shut down, Bushnell has been unrelentingly busy. He's pushed Bushnell-brand home video games (Atari, 1988), computer/TV integration (Aaps, 1989), multimedia learning (Commodore, 1991), business-wide computer messaging and telephone integration (Octus, 1993), internet jukeboxes (PlayNet, 1997), casual games (uWink, 1999), networked gaming restaurants (uWink Bistro, 2006), and online education (BrainRush, 2015). Most recently, he's dipped into mobile gaming and virtual reality.
Bushnell in 2007 at uWink, his eatery equipped with touchscreen game machines.[Photo: Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images]
Modern evaluations of Bushnell's legacy often end up polarized, portraying him either as a legendary tech demigod or a washed-up huckster, with little room in between for the nuanced truth. The key insight into his personality is that he's fundamentally restless. He explains his flitting from activity to activity by saying that he has "five-year ADD." He tends to get bored and move on. Especially once things get settled: "I've always felt that once something is figured out and running, a lot of people can learn it. Why should I do it?"
As a result, Bushnell's 45-year parade of companies is dizzying. His frequent startup hopping has left industry observers dazed—and maybe slightly jaded—about the potential for Bushnell to actually bring any of these technologies to life. After all, he dreams big, sells hard, and appears to believe his own hype.
There's also the timing problem: "I think that being ahead of the game sometimes works and sometimes doesn't," Bushnell says. "I'm convinced that my success at Atari was because I was ahead of the game at the right time. Everything lined up, and it made it easy."
With Atari, Bushnell's timing was flawless not only just for the video game industry but also for Silicon Valley entrepreneurship in general—a vital force that he helped create. His relaxed management style rubbed off on employees who left Atari to form other companies, including a young engineer named Steve Jobs. (The oft-forgotten third Apple founder, Ronald Wayne, was also an Atari alum.)
Alcorn delights in crediting Bushnell with planting the seed for Apple's culture at Atari. "When I worked at Apple, I was an Apple fellow," he says. "In the interview process, they were very serious, asking, 'Can you fit into our culture?' That was a no-brainer for me, because the culture came out of Atari."
What keeps Bushnell going, after experiencing decades of both stunning heights and painful setbacks? "It's really the belief that no matter what happens, as long as you've got your health and your family is good, you can always make it again," he says. "Money is actually not that important in the scale of things. It's the projects."
And then he adds, "I loved having the big house in Woodside, but I don't miss it that much."
Some people will burn bridges even if you don't, making your career path a little clearer.
Throughout your career, you'll have the opportunity to make choices, big and small, easy and hard. At some points you'll have to decide if you should follow the rules. While I'd typically err on the side of saying you won't regret it if you do, I'll also say that even if you do pay your dues and check all the boxes, you could still end up in a place you don't want to be.
Take my story, for example. Many years ago, I managed a small, family-owned restaurant in Brooklyn. It was just after I returned from a year of backpacking around South America, in desperate need of a job—any job—to replenish my dwindling bank account. In the back of my mind, I knew that someday I hoped to return to the publishing/writing/editing industry, but at that point in time, I really wasn't thinking about my career path, and the restaurant gig served me well.
I had a great relationship with my boss, one of the owners, and I lived 10 minutes away. I enjoyed free food and drinks, a steady paycheck plus benefits, and built-in friends (anyone who's ever spent any time working in the hospitality industry knows exactly what I'm talking about).
But after almost two years, I got restless and decided to seek out a bigger opportunity. And so I started interviewing for management jobs across the bridge in Manhattan. It wasn't long before I accepted an offer and prepared to let my boss know that I was moving on.
Although I'd expected him to be disappointed, I assumed he'd also be supportive and encouraging because, you know, I was checking off all those boxes—telling him in person, following up with a letter of resignation, offering to help wherever needed before my departure. But I quickly realized that playing by the rules wasn't enough to save me from his hostility upon hearing the news.
I thought I'd feel relieved after telling him. But instead, I felt confused. Both he (and his wife) unfriended me on Facebook immediately. That was followed by two full weeks of his looking past me, either giving me one-word responses or barking orders at me, and, finally, in response to my generous and kind parting email, a rant telling me that my quitting was very, very personal and also selfish—and no, he wasn't overreacting.
I didn't scream, "I quit!" and run out the door, so why did he react like this? It was a slap in the face because I'd done everything right, much the same way I imagine it'd feel to be this close to getting a job and having it go to an internal team member. Or working your tail off for months, only to have the promotion you'd been coveting go to a colleague who didn't work half as hard.
Being a professional—in my case, giving the standard two weeks' notice and promising to help train my replacement—failed to protect me.
It was a rough two weeks of digesting the fact that things weren't going as I'd hoped or even anticipated. And although a part of me wanted to not honor my remaining time as a take-that-you-big-jerk move, I knew I couldn't let the staff down.
And actually, I think I hoped that he'd come around, recognize the mistake he was making in burning this bridge, and patch things up with me before it was too late.
We exchanged a couple of emails before my departure in which I tried to get him to soften his stance and treat me with a modicum of respect—or at least talk to me about it more, but he wouldn't budge.
This just goes to show that you can plan things out perfectly, you can even play out a bunch of different scenarios based on varying reactions from the other party, but there will always be factors out of your control. Simply put, you can't orchestrate how someone else—your manager, the CEO, the recruiter—is going to respond.
I won't pretend that it doesn't suck when things go off track in a way that's upsetting or disappointing to you, yet simply being aware of this fact may make it easier to accept the unfair things that fall on your path.
You can waste energy being offended and hurt, or you can do as I did and learn from the lessons. If you do that, you can take them with you as you move onward and upward.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
This week's top stories may help your resume stand out again and show you how to compress your normal workweek into just four days.
This week we learned how some of the most productive people free up their Fridays, which resume buzzwords no longer stand out to recruiters, and how Trump's immigration ban may hurt victims of human trafficking.
Your company may not be one of the lucky few that have switched to four-day workweeks lately. But there's nothing stopping you from reorganizing your own weekly workload. This week The Muse's Kat Boogaard explains how some people are figuring that out on their own.
You're "hardworking," sure, but so is everybody else—or so they claim. Here's a hit list of trite, overused, meaningless terms that aren't doing your resume any favors.
There are a number of factors behind the high rates of employee turnover and perennially low "engagement" rates Gallup has been tracking for years. But one issue couldn't be easier to fix on a person-to-person basis: communication.
Of the many unintended consequences of the Trump administration's recent immigration ban that is currently stalled in the courts, one is especially troubling: Trafficking victims and their families may be barred from accessing crucial resources.
Struggling with work-life balance, many working parents try not to talk about their jobs at home. But one solopreneur says she's grateful her own parents never drew that line in the sand. "From my mom, I learned what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry and how to handle myself," among other things, writes Kristi A. Dosh. Here's what else she picked up as a kid.
Instead of waiting for someone else to help you reach your goals, ask yourself these questions to take matters into your own hands.
Procrastination, blame, and downright laziness. It's easy to put off tasks and responsibilities, but if you want to be successful, you need accountability. A lot has been written about the power of partners or groups, but you may be the best person to get you where you want to go.
John G. Miller, author of QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life, says, "It's natural and normal to externalize and look outside of us for answers and find fault with others when things go wrong. We ask, 'Who dropped the ball?' 'When is that department going to do its job right?' 'Why do we have to go through change?' We start to get things done, however, when we practice personal accountability."
Being accountable requires adopting a new way of thinking. Start by eliminating questions that begin with "why," "when," or "who."
"When you ask 'why,' you go into victim thinking," says Miller. "When you ask 'when,' you're putting off action, and that is procrastination. And when you ask 'who,' you're blaming. Blame is the worst sin inside corporations because you point the finger at your own team, and that damages morale and productivity."
Instead, turn those questions around, looking for the question behind the question, says Miller, and these questions start with "what" or "how."
"In the moment it's easier to think, 'Why doesn't my boss do this?' Or 'When is the world going to give me more?'" he says. "It takes discipline and emotional strength to ask, 'What can I do to be my best today?' and 'How can I be better to avoid mistakes the next time?'"
The next step in moving toward personal accountability is to begin statements that contain the word "I" instead of "we," and this can take bravery. "It's easy to hide behind a group," says Miller, whose company, QBQ, Inc., has provided accountability training for Fortune 100 companies. "When you say, 'The team didn't get it done,' all you're doing is hiding behind them and blaming. You need to ask different questions, such as, 'What can I do differently today?'
"You can't change we," he says. "It can be painful to look in the mirror, but I can only change me. Personal accountability always comes back to me."
After you change the questions, your answers must contain actions, says Miller. "What action can I take?" he asks. "This takes you immediately out of the blame game, out of victim thinking, and out of procrastination. Procrastination is a friend of failure."
Goals should include concrete actions, says Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before. "If you resolve to 'get more joy out of life' or 'embrace the present,' it's hard to hold yourself accountable," she writes on her blog. "It's easier to be answerable for a specific action like 'spend at least one hour a week hiking' or 'sit in a chair for 15 minutes every day with no distractions.'"
Once you know where you're going, track your results. Rubin suggests keeping a chart as a visual way to hold yourself accountable, and she carries hers around with her. "At least once each day, I review and score my[self]," she writes.
This is also the time to course correct and chart your next steps, adds Meridith Elliott Powell, author of Own It: Redefining Responsibility. "Set aside quiet time when you can reflect on what you are doing that is working, and on what you are doing that is not," she says. "Then establish what you need to change, adjust, or get help with in order to continue to improve your overall success rate."
Personal accountability not only benefits the individual; it builds strong companies. When employees feel accountable for their work, they are more likely to contribute to solving problems and achieving organizational goals, says Miller.
"Believing that if others would change, everything would be better, drives people apart," he says. "The fastest way to enhance relationships is to remove the blame that breaks them down. Whether it's selling more products, building stronger connections, or making political change, owning up and taking responsibility can help us move forward."
As more people with autism and ADHD begin to advocate for themselves at work, some employers are changing their workplaces.
When Sam Briefer, 23, was hired by Ernst & Young last year, he had two concerns: that he wouldn't make friends with his coworkers, and that his office environment would distract him from his work.
These sound like the concerns of any new hire, but for Briefer, they went beyond typical new-hire jitters because he has autism. He was hired after graduating from college as part of the company's pilot program to recruit employees who have been diagnosed with autism. The company plans to expand this program, says Lori Golden, diverse abilities strategy leader at Ernst & Young.
Briefer says all of his concerns were unfounded, in part because of the support Ernst & Young provides. He says he is friendly with his coworkers and has socialized with them a few times after work. He's allowed to listen to music using headphones because it helps him to concentrate on his tasks and, when an assignment to schedule multiple Skype meetings for his team became a bit overwhelming for him, Briefer's manager and job coach helped him to find the solution of delegating and asking coworkers for help.
The key to working with employees with autism, says Briefer, is for managers to listen to their needs. "Let the employee explain their learning style, how they like to work in certain environments, and how they would best cope," says Briefer.
The practice of listening to the employee's preferences has worked well for human resources manager Kelly Burns, who recalls the time an intern told her and a manager that he had Asperger syndrome. "He told us he was working with a coach to help him prepare for life in the workplace," says Burns, who is now an HR manager at Summit Consulting LLC. "He came to us with suggestions about working and interacting with others, and that really took the pressure off his manager." Burns says he even let them know that he might not always laugh at their jokes, and that we shouldn't take that to mean he wasn't an engaged or happy employee.
There is an increasing awareness in the workplace for certain conditions that are being diagnosed and how these conditions can be considered a disability, says attorney Susan Warner. "We are seeing more requests for accommodations in general," says Vanessa Matsis-McCready, assistant general counsel and human resources manager for Engage PEO, a company that offers HR solutions for small- to mid-sized companies.
While employers are accustomed to providing ergonomic workstations for employees with repetitive motion disorders or flexible hours for an employee returning to work after surgery, Matsis-McCready says, employers are just beginning to get comfortable accommodating employees for other disabilities. "The best thing for an employer to do when they need to make an accommodation is to start an open dialogue with the employee about what they need," Warner says.
For employees diagnosed with ADHD or autism, the widespread adoption of open floor plans in the workplace has made it more difficult for them to focus on their work, Matsis-McCready says. Employees with ADHD or autism might need to work in a quiet area with fewer distractions, she says, but their colleagues shouldn't assume they don't want to be part of a team or work collaboratively. There are other ways to accommodate an employee with ADHD, Matsis-McCready says, including providing noise-canceling headphones or allowing them to work a flexible schedule that is outside normal business hours, where they come into work a few hours earlier or later than other employees so they have quiet time to complete their work without distractions.
Burns says accommodations for an employee diagnosed with autism include:
Being specific, clear, and concise with directions.
Anticipating a lack of emotional response and not interpreting it to mean that person isn't engaged in their work or with the team.
Limiting your team's use of sarcasm and hyperbole.
Looking for opportunities for team building outside the office besides happy hour and team sports.
In addition to Ernst & Young, other large companies are developing programs to recruit and retain employees with autism. For instance, SAP has a goal of hiring 650 employees with autism by 2020. So far, the company has hired 116 individuals with autism who range in age from 22 to 59, are located in 17 locations in nine different countries, and spread across 100 teams, says Jose Velasco, head of SAP's Autism at Work program in the U.S. To help them succeed, SAP provides six weeks of pre-employment training, and once they are hired, they are supported by their manager, who has been given autism awareness training; an office mentor, who has volunteered to help and is from another work team; and a job and life skills coach, Velasco says. SAP and Ernst & Young are informally working with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard to share best practices for hiring and retaining more employees with autism.
SAP and Ernst & Young have found that hiring employees with autism bring benefits. They provide a different perspective to problem solving and the creative process, Velasco says. Working with an employee diagnosed with autism can help you become a more effective communicator and manager, says Jamell Mitchell, an associate director at Ernst & Young who manages Briefer and several other employees with autism. "I have found myself pausing and saying, 'I'm not as clear as I can be,'" he says, "and then taking the time to recraft a communication so it's clear and I am hitting the key points."
Neuroscientist and author of This Is Your Brain On Music Daniel Levitin talks about information overload.
When it comes to music and the human brain, Daniel Levitin's expertise is hard to top. The musician, professor, and neuroscientist quite literally wrote the book on the topic when he penned the 2006 bestseller This is Your Brain On Music. His most recent book The Organized Mind furthers his exploration into our brains with a focus on how information overload is affecting cognition and what we can do it about it.
Over the last two years, he's been working with smart speaker maker Sonos on new research into how music affects people's minds and behavior at home. As part of its new marketing campaign centered around what the company regrettably diagnoses as "the silent home"—the relative dearth of music being played out loud as families stare into their phones or tune into Netflix—Sonos enlisted Levitin to help design a new survey of people's listening habits at home. We sat down with Levitin at Sonos's Boston offices last week for a conversation about science, music, the brain, and how to stay sane in the age of Trump and Twitter.
You've been working on some new research into music and people's lives at home. What are some of the most interesting or unexpected things you've learned about how music—or the lack thereof that affects our lives at home?
Levitin: I think one of the most interesting things is the number of people who really don't have music playing in their homes. It's quite striking across the nine countries we surveyed. Something as simple as entertaining friends and family: 84% of people in Sweden, 83% of people in the U.K., 79% of people in the U.S. don't play music when they have friends over. That just seemed surprising and weird to me. I'm of the Boomer generation, so music was just something that you did and it's the way that you related to other people, and even the generation behind me. These are people from all age brackets. It's not just the digital natives who aren't playing music. Nobody is.
Other activities like cooking dinner, doing the dishes, relaxing in the evening and weekend. In Denmark, 69% of people and in France 82% of people did not listen to music to relax for the evening or the weekend. That was one thing that was surprising. The other is the yearning that people have for more contact, juxtaposed with the amount of time they spend in their own isolated, digital words. 86% want to spend more time doing activities in person with others. It's as though two wheels are in a rut and they can't figure out how to get back on the road that they used to be on. We've got to encourage people to take screen-time breaks and to establish shared spaces in the home where they can enjoy communal activities.
These days, it's pretty common to go out to a restaurant and see an entire family staring into their phones. What are some of the effects of this isolation and, based on the research you've done and seen, what might the impact be of changing these habits?
Levitin: The research on this is still in its infancy, of course. It's a somewhat new phenomenon, and so any data that we can get is helpful. I think that related to this, we've learned recently that kids who don't interact regularly with their parents but are instead put in front of educational or instructional television don't learn language properly. Language learning has to be interactive. It can't be just passive, receptive. I think we're also seeing that increasingly digital natives are reporting that they've got shorter attention spans than non-digital natives. Colleagues of mine at other universities who teach these large classes or even seminars say that in the last few years, a whole new breed of students come up to them during their office hours in the first week of class, say, "Professor, I have to read 20 pages tonight? I don't know how I'm going to do that. That's too much." They are accustomed to being constantly distracted and we know from neurochemical studies, people get addicted to that distraction.
Your book, The Organized Mind, deals with this quite a bit: the information overload and how our digital lives might be affecting our brains. What is your advice for people in the workplace? How do you deal with this deluge of information when you're trying to be productive?
Levitin: One piece of advice I have is based on our modern understanding of the different attentional modes of the brain. There's the mind wandering mode, the idea that the brain has this whole separate mode of existing where you're not in control of your thoughts and they're loosely connected from one to the next. Often, I think that when we're at our desks at work or if we're out in the field doing work, after a certain amount of time, we feel our attention flagging. The modern reaction when that happens is to double down. Maybe have another cup of coffee and keep pushing through.
In reality, your brain is telling you that it needs a break. Taking a break and getting yourself into this mind wandering mode by giving into it for 15 minutes at a time every couple of hours or so, you effectively hit the reset button in the brain, restoring some neurochemicals that had been depleted through focused activity. There are a lot of different ways to get into this mind wandering mode. One of them is listening to music. Another is going for a walk in nature. Listening to nature sounds. Looking at art, reading literature. Not reading Facebook posts. Literature has this special quality that it invites you to let your mind wander. I think that's part of the answer. Going off and searching the Web for your 15-minute break is not a break.
We've grappled with information overload for years now, but in our new political climate, there's a certain intensity and anxiety that's now tied to a lot of the stuff that people are seeing online everyday. How do you think this might be affecting people's mental health? And what should we do about it?
Levitin: My reading of the research is that we really are, as a society working harder than before, but we're not working as efficiently. We feel overloaded by the onslaught of information, and so I think that creates the conditions in which things like fake news and alternative truth can exist because we just throw up our hands and say, "I can't deal. It's somebody else's job to deal with this, not mine." I don't mean to get on a soapbox, but I think that's when we begin to see democracy falter, when people don't want to get involved.
I think that we need to recover some sense of community and engagement with one another and with our towns and our neighbors that only comes from face-to-face interaction, not from retreating into our own digital devices. As President Obama said in his exit speech, democracy is not easy and is not free. You have to work for it. I think that work is putting our minds in a state where we can evaluate claims and information and stories as they come by. Evaluate them for ourselves or in discussion with other people. Start talking to people who disagree with us, which has become unfashionable. I don't mean yelling at people who disagree with you. Just talking.
I've had a couple of interesting conversations just in the last few months with people who I disagreed with strongly about a number of political issues, and the conversations were productive because we saw from each other's point of view how we came to hold those beliefs and discovered that we had really a lot more in common than we had differences. We were able to agree on the facts. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped, you're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts. We agreed on the facts, but our opinions about how to address the problems, we had different views about what would be effective, but we wanted to end up in the same place where people were happy and prosperous and safe. I think that creating shared spaces in the home and shared moments in the home, if music can be part of that or talk radio or just art, some kind of discussion, I think that that's the antidote to all of this.
It seems like it's partially a matter of people reconfiguring that balance between their digital lives and the time they're actually spending face to face. I assume those conversations you refer to weren't on Twitter or Facebook.
Levitin: One of them was in person. One of them was on the phone. It was 45 minutes long and we talked about a lot of things. This is somebody who is polar opposite of me politically and is quite in the public eye and his opinions are very well known, but I was astonished that we agreed on far more than we disagreed on. I ended up admiring him for his stance for coming to the conclusions he came to, even though I still don't agree, but I can see how he got there.
This is the conversation that Republicans and Democrats aren't having anymore. I never thought I'd look back nostalgically at the Johnson presidency, but in the Johnson days, the two parties worked things out. They did that pretty much through more or less through the next couple of administrations. The polarization is a problem, and I think that the digital age has only put a hyper focus on polarization because of the echo chamber that you've covered already in your magazine.
You wrote This Is Your Brain On Music in 2006, so it was pre-iPhone, pre-Spotify. It seems like music is more pervasive in people's lives than ever. How has music—both as an industry and in terms of our relationship with it—changed in the last decade or so?
Levitin: I think we're living in a golden age of music, as we're living in a golden age of TV. There's a lot of creative people engaged in it. The barriers to entry are much lower than they used to be. Anybody with a laptop and a $200 mic can make something that sounds as good as most of the Rolling Stones records that were made in professional studios. That's great. The problem, of course, is that we haven't figured out how to monetize it. As Keith Richards said, for a period of time you could make recordings for a living and you could make a good living at it, but those days are gone until we figure something out. We're living in a world now where a lot of artists have to have day jobs. I would like to live in a world where "artist" is a job and a person can earn a living doing that. I don't want Bono to be writing songs in his spare time after a day of heavy labor making sandwiches. I want him to be able to devote himself to it.
I would say there's been a Balkanization of music sources in the way there's been a Balkanization of the media. When I was a kid, and maybe when you were a kid, you ran into the proverbial man in the street, woman, somebody you didn't know at a bus stop and you started talking about the news, you probably got your news from one of the same small handful of sources. You agreed what the news was, and you probably listened to music on one of the same two or three radio stations. Now there are thousands of places to get your news, thousands of places to get music, and so the common ground that we share is much less. Sure, there's still hit songs, but it's different. I see that changing. There's good and there's bad in that. The so-called long tail means that people can really fine tune their musical taste or their taste in books and independent films, find exactly what they love, but at the expense of the shared experience.
I don't think that there's any evidence that music is more pervasive. In fact, we found that 60% of people we surveyed said they listen to less music now than when they were younger. I don't know why that is, because there's more music available and it's free, but people don't make the time for it. It's not a priority the way it once was. I think that's a shame. I'm not thinking people should do nothing but listen to music, but as part of a balanced life that involves exercise and a good diet and nature and movies and ballet and literature and all the finer things.
Tell us a little bit about your own music consumption and how it's evolved. How do you listen music now?
Levitin: I always fantasized in my twenties about buying a physical jukebox from a bar and restoring it. I had a nice collection of 45s. Now I have something even better: I have 20,000 songs on my hard disk and I just stick it in random. I got them in my car now and I have them in my backpack and I have them on my computer and at home, and that's most of my listening. I have 20,000 of my favorite songs. It's my own radio station. Anything that comes up, I'm going to like. I may not like it at that particular moment, depending on what I'm doing.
The second source is that friends who are making music send me advances of their stuff. Rodney Crowell, Paul Simon, people that I know who are actively working as songwriters and musicians will send me stuff. A friend of mine who manages Bob Dylan is just sending me the 36 CD boxset. It's supposed to be there when I get home tonight. I burn the CDs to my hard disk and then put them in the mix.
Then the third source is I stream. Once I got Sonos in the home, I found it easier to deal with things like Spotify and streaming radio and Apple Music. For one thing, they weren't playing out of these crappy little speakers in the computer. Typically, my wife and I will put one of the jazz stations when we're in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes and while we're eating. We hear a lot of good music that way.
How do you find the mental space to focus and be productive?
Levitin: I get more work done on airplanes than anywhere else. I wrote my last two books primarily on airplanes touring for the previous book. You've got the white noise of the engine. Somebody bringing you food.
Yeah, it's great. When I really need to focus, I tend to need to get away from the internet too. I turn off Wi-Fi. Sometimes I leave my phone at home to avoid the distractions.
Levitin: I do that once in a while and it's very refreshing. My wife and I hike a lot, because we're in California. So we'll go and we just won't bring the phones. We'll bring them in the car in case we have a breakdown or something, but when we're hiking, no phone and it's lovely.
Speaking of California, I just called an Uber because I have to get myself to the airport.
Your brain doesn't deal that well with background noise, but even small doses of silence can help rejuvenate it.
Shhh. Hear that?
No? That's surprising. Odds are, you can hear something right now: A siren, the hum of a fan, the blur of background conversations, the ticking of a watch. It's seldom that our worlds are fully silent—so seldom, that complete silence feels shocking.
We welcome sound into our lives unthinkingly, sometimes to our detriment. And according to the latest research, silence is perhaps one of our most underappreciated productivity tool.
It's common knowledge that the jarring sound of a jackhammer—or the loud blasts of a rock concert—can damage our hearing, but that's not the only type of harmful noise. There are actually two other kinds of everyday noise that can be bad for us. One is excessive noise, such as the prolonged loud noise of being near an airport. The other is simply the distraction of general noise around us, such as conversations or interruptions from colleagues in the workplace.
The former may seem worse, but both can be detrimental to our productivity. Those of us who don't live or work near an airport or a highway may not necessarily have it easy. The daily noise of even a relatively "quiet" office still tends to involve a lot of auditory interruptions and distractions. Coworkers, meetings, phone calls, bustling cafés, street noise, and our phones' notification sounds all vie for our attention as we try to work.
And these problems are often magnified if you work in an open-plan office. Ollie Campbell, CEO of Milanote and part of Navy Design's multidisciplinary team, says open-plan offices come with their own implicit values. They make team members feel that disruption is acceptable, collaboration is the key priority, and serendipity is worth the interruptions it requires. As Campbell points out on Medium, "In most workplaces, focused work is left to chance. If nobody's called you for a meeting that day, you might get an afternoon to yourself."
That's if you're lucky.
Distractions and interruptions are such a common part of our workdays, we don't even think of them as excessive noise anymore. It's often more obvious when we don't hear the noise of distractions around us at work than when we do. A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that knowledge workers have focus periods of just 11 minutes on average in between interruptions. As Campbell said, "if you need to focus, 'work' is pretty much the worst place you could be."
Collaboration is important, but so is focus—particularly for those of us who are creators. For knowledge workers, our work happens between us and the blank page. Disruptions and noise only interrupt that process.
Between interruptions, distractions, background noise, and general lack of calm and quiet, the noise of the office can be harmful. With a buzzing office around you, a bustling street out the window, and something distracting you every three minutes, it's almost impossible to create anything of value.
Shutting both types of noise out—literal (and excessive) sound, and the more general commotion of the modern workplace—can improve our ability to focus and create our best work.
For a long time, researchers used silence as a control in experiments testing the effects of sound or noise. After realizing silence was fascinating in itself, researchers started focusing more on the effects of silence than relegating it to control status.
In one experiment testing how the brain reacts to different types of music, silence was used as a control between the different music clips. But silence actually produced one of the most interesting effects. When compared with so-called "relaxing" music—or even long silence before the experiment began—short, two-minute silent pauses between the music actually proved more relaxing on the brain. It seems the effect of silence is heightened by contrasting it with noise.
Perhaps our strong reaction to silence's relaxing effects is related to how our brains work when they're not bombarded by the outside world. Research suggests our brains are never really quiet—instead, they're always working, even when we're not actively engaged in a conscious activity. In fact, science suggests when we do engage our brain in a conscious effort, it actually overrides the brain's "default mode," temporarily diverting resources to what we want to do.
Complete silence, then, allows the brain to return to its normal default state and continue its processing.
Our brain's ongoing background processing seems to be responsible for the sounds our brain makes, too. For instance, when a song you know well is stopped in the middle of the chorus, your brain will often fill in the gap by creating the sound of the next line of the song. You're not actually hearing anything, but rather creating that sound inside your mind, according to Robert Zatorre, an expert on the neurology of sound. "In the absence of sound, the brain often tends to produce internal representations of sound," Zatorre told writer Daniel A. Gross in a 2014 Nautilus article.
Silence isn't simply relaxing for the brain, either. One study of mice, which Gross cites in the same story, found that listening to silence for two hours every day prompted the subjects' brains to grow new cells in the hippocampus, which is related to our brain's memory abilities. While new cell growth doesn't always provide health benefits, in this case those new cells did become new, functioning neurons within the mice brains. In other words, silence could make you a little smarter.
The ability to shut out the world around us can be beneficial, beyond the pure benefits of silence. Both thinking creatively and considering long-term decisions are skills that, according to psychologist Jonathan Smallwood, "allow us to generate novel solutions to problems," and to stick to our plans long enough to reach our goals.
"It seems that the capacity to disengage from the outside world when the external environment is sufficiently benign reflects a skill set that is important to almost every human endeavor," says Smallwood. Put simply, these skills help us achieve success.
Smallwood isn't the only one who thinks getting away from the noise of the world is a useful habit to build. French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal believed humans should learn to be quiet more often, remarking, "All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber."
Derek Sivers, writer and founder of CDBaby, says spending time alone, away from the noise of the world, provides the best opportunity for creating new work: "It's not that I hate people. The other best times in my life were with people. But it's interesting how many highlights were just sitting in a room, in that wonderful creative flow. Free from the chatter of the world."
For Sivers, spending time unplugged, disconnected, and in silence is where he feels most creative. "Silence is a great canvas for your thoughts," says Sivers.
At design agency Navy, the struggle to get work done in the office was real. The constant distractions and regular noise was such an issue that employees were staying home when they really needed to focus. To fix this, the Navy team instituted daily "quiet time."
Before lunch at Navy HQ, the team agrees to be completely silent. Not just in person, but online, too. No emails, no Slack, no tapping colleagues on the shoulder, and especially no meetings. They even put their phones away in drawers so they can really focus. As Campbell explains, "Quiet time is a contract: a few hours a week where we agree to work, even if we don't feel like it."
Though it took months to get used to regular quiet time, after doing it for four years, Campbell reckons that the team is now 23% more productive. They're also less stressed overall and able to take Friday afternoons off because they get so much done during the week.
It worked. "Work has become the best place to get things done," says Campbell.
You can't always escape noise. Sirens will go by, you'll get stuck at an airport for hours, and you can't force your coworkers to be quiet. And sometimes, you'll want to work from a noisy coffee shop or attend a concert.
But when you can, it's worth choosing silence. Perhaps you can start by adding a period of strict quiet time in your workplace. Strive to find small pockets of silence for yourself during the day, and savor the silence. Or, if you can, perhaps it's time to add extra insulation and block out the consistent noise from your home and office, something that might pay for itself in increased focus and direct health benefits.
Finding silence and a calm space for yourself won't just improve your health—it'll help you do the best work you can.
A version of this article originally appeared on Zapier. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.
The (contested) refugee ban has led to the creation of several new apps designed to help refugees, who often carry smartphones.
For refugees escaping conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere, simply communicating with people in new countries can be a big challenge.
Groups helping refugees in Canada and the United Kingdom have found language barriers make it harder for newcomers to integrate into society and find work. And even in some refugee camps, aid workers who speak the same language as the people they're there to assist can be in short supply, says Abubakar Abid, one of the cofounders of Tarjimly, a new Facebook Messenger bot designed to connect refugees and people assisting them on-site with volunteer, real-time translators who might be somewhere else on the globe.
"All they do is message the [Facebook] page and they are routed to whatever translator is available in the language they are seeking," Abid says. "They can send text messages, snippets of text, voice notes, pictures, or whatever media they like."
Tarjimly
Tarjimly's cofounders, who are Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni, were inspired by a friend's experience volunteering at a camp in Greece. "He went there expecting to help with operations or logistics," Abid says. "He actually spent more than 90% of his time serving as a translator because he happened to be able to speak both Arabic and English."
The founders announced the project January 30 and have since received sign-ups from more than 1,500 volunteers interested in serving as translators. They plan to test the tool with small groups of translators and users over the next few weeks and aim for a wider release in early March. They're also exploring options for funding, including accelerators and incubators focused on social enterprises. Abid believes that using the Facebook platform to handle message routing should make it easy for the app to scale.
Tarjimly is just one of many apps and digital tools aiming to help refugees communicate, navigate, and find resources as they make their way in unfamiliar places. While refugees often leave their homelands in haste with limited possessions, those traveling from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East have typically made sure to bring mobile phones. They're often packed in a waterproof bag alongside identity papers, says a journalist based in Germany who operates the online directory AppsForRefugees.com under the pseudonym "John Tucker." He says he adopted the name to avoid online harassment from anti-refugee trolls.
And since refugees began arriving in large numbers in Europe, software developers have sought to build apps to assist them. Tucker says the most visited apps from his site have included phrasebooks and dictionaries. Other popular apps include those that connect refugees with people who are offering items like furniture and household items and another that puts them in contact with locals looking to cook meals together.
"The people [arriving] here in Germany had no idea how to deal with authorities, with daily life, with the language, and so on," Tucker says. "There are lots of apps on the market and websites which try to fill these gaps to connect these people with each other and give them some information about the country they're in."
In the United States, aid to refugees took on new urgency for some activists after President Donald Trump's executive order, now blocked by a federal appellate court, banning new refugees and people from seven majority-Muslim nations.
The London-based makers of the Refugee Aid App, which catalogs assistance available to refugees in particular areas, quickly deployed the app in 19 U.S. cities after Trump's order went into effect. "Our whole team just kind of worked round the clock to call these different organizations in these cities where there were airports where people were getting stranded," says Shelley Taylor, CEO of Trellyz, the company behind the app.
The app, also known as RefAid, provides a menu of assistance, from legal advice to nearby health care. Taylor and her colleagues wanted to make sure that information on legal support would be available to refugees stranded in U.S. airports, provided they had time to access their phones before being detained. "We wanted to make sure that they could make phone calls to local organizations to get legal help before too many bad things happened to them," she says.
Trellyz works with aid organizations around the world to help spread the word about their offerings and to assist them in digitally coordinating with each other. The company also relies on those same organizations to inform potential refugee users about the app's existence. According to an October blog post published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), many refugees prefer to receive information from speaking directly to aid organizations, rather than from digital sources, especially with legal issues and other factors in flux.
That's especially true after some apps released in haste during refugee crises reportedly failed to deliver on their promises, which AppsForRefugee's Tucker acknowledges can be an issue. "It's not always clear where these apps come from, and the quality is very diverse, let's say that," he explains.
But developers willing to ensure that their offerings actually match the needs of refugees and the people working with them can still make a difference, according to the UNHCR post.
"There's also just an incredible desire of people around the world to help refugees," says Abid. "And I think being able to tap into that is very, very valuable."
At last week's Grammy Awards, Beyoncé's Lemonade lost Album of the Year to Adele's 25, much to her fans' dismay. This wasn't the first time that the record, Beyoncé's sixth studio effort, found itself at the center of an uproar.
When it was released on April 23, 2016, Lemonadecredited 72 writers—and earned a swift public backlash as a result. One person on Twitter wrote, "Is this the time of year where we call Beyoncé a musical genius even though she has 50 [to] 100 writers and producers for each album[?]" Another said, "Beyoncé has FIFTEEN writers on one of her songs. But she's a genius, they say."
This raises some important questions: Do geniuses work alone? And for that matter, do any of us do our best creative work solo?
Beyoncé's detractors believe geniuses work alone, but history and modern research both suggest not.
When Michelangelo moved into the Medici Palace in Florence in 1489, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Not only was this an incredible opportunity to share his art with a rich patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, it was also a chance to be influenced himself.
In Lorenzo's household, Michelangelo found himself rubbing elbows at dinner parties with thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli and being mentored by Bertoldo di Giovanni, who'd studied under Donatello. The year before, Michelangelo had apprenticed under Domenico Ghirlandaio. This remarkable creative education was a hallmark of the Italian Renaissance, where passing on of knowledge from one master to the next was common. And to this day, it's still how great work is done.
Yet we still cling to the notion that groundbreaking creative work happens in isolation. And there's no shortage of productivity experts who will rush to point out that the toughest, most high-value work takes mastery and deep focus—that distractions are bad, and that most distractions result from other people, all being forced to collaborate and failing miserably at it.
But according to creativity researcher Keith Sawyer, "You cannot be creative alone. Isolated individuals are not creative. That's not how creativity happens." Sawyer, who's coined the term "group genius," claims that creativity is more about relationships than any sudden flash of genius. Nor does this just apply to the arts, he believes—it's true across business, science, and nearly every other area of life.
Many of us resist this idea, not just because we may personally dislike teamwork, but because we'd prefer to see the people we admire as earning all the praise we heap on them. When fans discovered how many collaborators Beyoncé had, a common sentiment was that she was getting more credit than she deserved. It was much the same with Kanye West's The Life of Pablo, released a few weeks before Lemonade, which credits more than 100 writers. Is he not a true artist?
But this is nothing new. Thomas Edison who built and tested his ideas. Was he not a true inventor? Michelangelo relied on literally hundreds of employees for the last 40 years of his life to help him with his work. Was he not a genius?
Diana Glyer has spent decades studying the Inklings, that famous literary group that birthed the careers of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. And as she sees it, the myth of the starving artist who works alone is not only wrong, it "robs writers and other creatives of the possibility of writing the way that writing or creating normally takes place, which is in a community."
Embracing that reality, rather than resisting it, can actually encourage creativity itself by helping us find like-minded creatives to collaborate with. If anything, our success is contingent on our ability to work well with others—which may be just one reason why employers seem so desperate lately to hire people with high emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. Of course, we need to spend significant amounts of time alone with our craft. But we also need significant amounts of time with people who can guide us in doing better work.
Otherwise, creative output becomes a much slower, more grueling slog than it needs to be. As Glyer puts it, "the life of an artist, [or of] any kind of creator, is fraught with discouragement. You need people to correct your path." The best kind of work, then, is a result of both "deep work," as author Cal Newport calls it, and a strong network.
With that in mind, here's a rough three-part road map to honing your craft—both alone and with other people:
First, find a "master" and study their work. Read everything they've written. Listen to their podcasts and interviews. Almost every leader has some kind of footprint these days, and it's your job to find it. Get more familiar with their work than they are.
Of his poorly paid muckers, Edison said it wasn't the money they wanted "but the chance for their ambition to work." One of his employees confirmed this, saying that "the privilege which I had being with this great man for six years was the greatest inspiration of my life."
Second, emulate your mentor's work. Borrow what you like most about their style and build upon it, making it better without undercutting it. Yes, you're "copying" their work at this stage, but it's an important exercise. Before long, you'll do it so well that they can't help but be wowed by your skill. They'll be more likely that way to invest in you and take credit for your growth. Let them!
This isn't just sycophantic flattery. It's how you build a creative community that will ultimately support you when you're ready to forge your own approach. You can begin experimenting with more originality at the same time, but since you've already struck a collaborative relationship with your mentor, you'll be promoting their work through your own. You acknowledge where you came from and give credit where it's due. This only strengthens both of your reputations and encourages constructive feedback from an engaged and growing audience.
So yes, creative geniuses may retreat to a solitary location now and then to finish a book or album, but their work is always being refined by a community. These "collaborative circles," as researcher Michael Farrell calls them, are constantly evolving. Longtime members fall into the role of mentors, bringing in new protégés, and those who've been mentored for a while start to find their own voice and boost the credentials of those who'd helped them up.
As it's been for a long time, so it'll always be: Creativity is more a collaborative art than a solitary one, no matter who wins the accolades or tweets what in response.
