Ro Khanna, a freshman congressman from California, took a trip to build a bridge between the tech sector and "Silicon Holler."

The disconnect between Silicon Valley and the American heartland was one of the issues highlighted by Donald Trump's surprise victory, which was largely attributed to working-class voters who felt ignored by business elites and left behind by the forces of globalization. After all, when you're a 50-year-old in Kentucky who was just laid off at the coal mine, the tech giants aren't likely to help you find a new job, and the digital economy must not seem like it's improving your life beyond offering you expensive new smartphones.

Ro Khanna wants to do something about that, to spur the tech sector to harness the energy and initiative of workers in coal country and the Rust Belt. He's the 40-year-old freshman congressman from the Silicon Valley region in Northern California—representing tech-centric cities such as Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and San Jose—who is intent on bridging that divide. So when longtime Kentucky congressman Hal Rogers called him up and invited him to visit his district—one of the poorest in the country, ranked 432nd out of 435 districts in median per capita income, per Politico Pro—he jumped at the chance. Last week, Khanna went to Paintsville, a small town hugging the banks of Paint Creek in eastern Kentucky, to meet with former miners who were training to be mobile app developers.

On Wednesday, I talked to him about his experience and the lessons he learned about how to link Silicon Valley to "Silicon Holler," as Rogers has dubbed the region.

What prompted this trip?

The trip was at the invitation of Hal Rogers, the congressman there. They call themselves "Silicon Holler," and they're focused on reinventing their community to take part in the 21st-century economy.

What was your impression?

What struck me was how optimistic they are about taking part in the digital economy and how open they are to diversification.

Someone told me about their father who was laid off three times in one year, who had been working in the mines. They want more opportunity to pursue other careers as well. I kept hearing them talk about diversification—it allows them to stay in the community, in Eastern Kentucky, in Paintsville, where they have generations of family, and which they love.

And they can still participate in the workforce through the connectivity the technology provides. They were very excited about partnering with Silicon Valley.

From The Mine To The App Store

Tell me about one of their programs, TechHire East Kentucky (TEKY), a federally funded program that trains mobile app developers. How does that work?

It helps coal miners' kids and coal miners themselves who have no tech background to learn tech skills and learn iOS and Android. And at the end of those four months, you have 34 folks who were hired.

In the past, they've had so many scams in Appalachia that promise jobs. But what gave them confidence here is they knew that if they did the training, they would get a job. They knew they would get $400 a week during the training. They were so excited, they were telling their friends and family.

Since the trip, have you reached out to companies in Silicon Valley—Google and Apple and others—to tell them about your experience?

I've reached out to them. But it can't be top-down, it can't be imposed from Washington, D.C., or Silicon Valley. There have to be local buy-ins, locals instructing education leaders on what types of skills are necessary. In the past, it was how to replace hard drives. But there are no jobs for that. Now it's user design or graphic design on iOS, or basic quality control where you can have a job that doesn't require a computer science degree. And it's about local leaders like the governor [Matt Bevin], with whom I disagree on so many things, but he needs to be part of the solution, and Hal Rogers, who's been a visionary in talking about Silicon Holler.

They have an extraordinary work ethic that can be tapped, and we have to think about how tech can harness that energy.

What the Valley Can Offer

Silicon Valley has been criticized for being disconnected from the needs of working-class Americans. What should they be doing?

We can do a better job—to bring them into the 21st-century economy. And how are we going to provide a middle-class life for them? For me, that means investing in the apprenticeship and training programs. Creating partnerships that rewire labor markets so that people are getting the right skills and employers are taking a chance on those skills.

Those are the types of things the Valley needs to be thinking about, not what's good for the Valley, necessarily, but what the Valley can do for the country. And it's time for the Valley to answer the national call to service.

Those 34 jobs that were created, those were local, right? Those workers are not moving to California.

They're local. Interapt is one company and Bitsource is another company that's been hiring coal workers. It's a great example because they're local jobs. One of the points that hasn't been written about is that John F. Kennedy went to West Virginia in 1960 and talked about 35% unemployment in McDowell, West Virginia. And Bernie Sanders went there in 2016 and talked about 35% unemployment. Fifty years of social and governmental policy has not moved the needle there. And now Eastern Kentucky is much better, it's only 10% unemployment.

But the point is, now across Appalachia, there is now the possibility for technology to be not just disruptive and negative, but positive and uplifting and inspirational. Folks now have more opportunity perhaps to engage in the workforce while staying in their communities than they've ever had before, because of the development of apps, because of the connectivity of the internet, because you can stay in your community and still have jobs. And so what Silicon Valley ought to do is to talk about the aspirational possibility of technology to help provide work and opportunity in communities that haven't had them as a solution: One part of a solution to problems that have existed for the last 50 years where we haven't made much progress.

Taking On The FCC

I know you've been talking a lot about net neutrality and the Lifeline program. Any progress on that? It sounds like there's a lot of pushback from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the administration.

There's tons of pushback. [Former FCC chairman] Tom Wheeler was in my office yesterday, and we were talking about doing an event in Silicon Valley to highlight the two basic aspects of net neutrality. One is that it's critical to keep the internet as an engine for innovation, because you don't want incumbency—basically determining what price someone is going to pay for access to the internet. And the gutting of net neutrality is basically incumbent protection, it's supporting monopolistic anti-competitive practices. So the free open internet is not just an issue of free speech. Even some Republicans like [South Dakota Senator John] Thune get [that]. It's an initiative of fair and open competition.

What about Lifeline?

You know, I've written to [new FCC chairman Ajit] Pai about that. That was one of the first things I did when I got to Congress. Here he is going in front of Congress, playing up about how he gets that we need to increase access to people who don't have broadband. And the first thing he does is curtail a program that's providing access to rural communities? The type of infrastructure we need in this country is massive investment in broadband technology in all these communities. Because they're saying we want to stay in our communities, yet we want jobs. So the answer to that is greater connectivity, and it's why the trip to Appalachia struck such a nerve, because the solution is there. And it's not a D.C.-imposed solution. It's not a Silicon Valley solution. These communities are imagining taking part in the future in a way that they're excited about. We just need to help facilitate their ability to do that.

You think there's a chance that Pai will allow some of these companies that have been vetted to keep providing Lifeline?

I hope so—he's curtailed the program. Were going to keep vigilant and keep making the case for why he needs to expand it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Founded by veterans of ILM, Disney, EA, and other media giants, Nomadic plans on building rich experiences that can be refreshed regularly.

I'm standing on top of a building, desperate to cross a wide gap to another rooftop (so I can thwart evil) and to do so, I have to make my way gingerly over a narrow and extremely rickety plank. It's a long fall on either side.

This is scary stuff. In the back of my mind, I know there's no danger at all. After all, I'm really just playing in virtual reality, and that plank (or at least the long fall) is purely digital. But while I know this intellectually, my brain is screaming at me to forget my evil-thwarting plans and stay on solid ground.

This is the mark of a good VR experience—a true belief that the virtual is real, even when you know for a fact it's not. And here, it's at the heart of a new business that its creators think could help revitalize moribund shopping centers and cinemas.

Welcome to Nomadic, a new location-based VR experience company that's launching today. Built around a system of "modular environments," essentially quick-to-install physical components like walls, doors, cabinets, and, yes, planks, that can be set up or torn down in just hours, and rich, prop-filled, story-driven virtual content, Nomadic is "the Ikea flat pack of VR," says CEO Doug Griffin.

San Rafael, California-based Nomadic, like others in the location-based VR industry, including The Void and Zero Latency, is capitalizing on the growing buzz around virtual reality—a business that is expected to grow to $38 billion by 2026. But where owners of consumer systems like the high-end Oculus Rift or Samsung's mobile Gear VR have limited physical movement, if any at all, systems like Nomadic's allow for sprawling experiences inside spaces as big as warehouses that give users a sense of walking around cityscapes, interacting with physical objects like guns, doors, drawers, and more.

In the demo I saw, I was tasked with taking on a powerful villain intent on destroying society. I had to cross that plank—I succeeded, despite my trepidation—grab a gun out of a drawer, shoot a bunch of attacking drones out of the air, open a door, wave out of a window, and more. It felt realistic, up to and including the big red lever I had to pull to set off a (virtual) electro-magnetic pulse that would finally defeat the villain.

Nomadic's special sauce is based on its founders' years of experience at top-tier entertainment companies like Industrial Light & Magic, Disney, Electronic Arts, and others. Indeed, the backpack and headset I donned were covered in motion-capture sensors that made it possible for the system to know exactly where I was and how I was moving, much like those that are used to record and translate actors' movement in visual-effects-heavy movies. And that's how—as I walked around the warehouse space below the company's headquarters where the demo was set up, physical prop gun in hand—it was able to track me with admirable precision.

While the technology behind Nomadic was without question cool—and the experience quite compelling—what may be more interesting is the company's strategic plan, which is centered around developing partnerships with the owners of retail and cinema spaces who are eager for fresh content that can keep customers coming back again and again, ideally with the whole family in tow.

"We're creating experiences that blur the line between virtual and reality," says Griffin. "We want to be able to bring this to communities...really get it to where people can go to it. You don't have to fly to an amusement park."

The model doesn't work if the content gets stale. You have to have constantly-changing experiences—only then will customers return on a regular basis. And that's why Nomadic decided on its modular approach, which allows partners to pull all the components out of boxes, install them on specially designed floors and walls, and make it different every time.

"You bring in our kit of components, [set it up] and turn on the lights," says head of growth Kalon Gutierrez. "It becomes a virtual environment."

Those environments are likely to be 40-foot by 60-foot spaces, and the experiences will last up to 15 minutes, either for individuals or multiple players. In the future, Nomadic hopes that some of its many different forms of content will be tied to motion pictures and may even be installed alongside the very theaters showing them.

In the last few years, as people have turned more and more to their mobile devices for just about everything, from watching movies to shopping, malls have struggled. Sales at shopping malls are down 0.8% per year since 2012, according to IBISWorld, and are expected to drop 2.5% this year, and an average of 1.7% every year through 2022. And why? "Falling mall foot traffic due to the rise of e-commerce kept the industry's decline steady" over the last five years, IBISWorld wrote in a recent industry report.

Nomadic knows full well that the mall industry has been struggling and is betting that owners of such venues are desperate for new kinds of businesses to bring in, and keep, would-be customers. And there's some evidence the company is right.

"Consumers are looking for more than just shopping when they go to their local mall or shopping center," says Stephanie Cegielski, a vice president and spokesperson at the International Council of Shopping Centers. "They want experience. This can mean dining, entertainment, or even a virtual reality experience."

A big part of Nomadic's plan is that it would refresh the content it makes available to its partners frequently, perhaps every 90 days. That is key to its success, the company believes, as well as to its partners' interest.

"Offering new content every 90 days [would keep] the customer engaged," says Cegielski. "They will return to see the new experience, which means they will likely do other ancillary activities such as shop or dine. It is beneficial to retailers and property owners."

To be sure, it's only beneficial if it's good, and if it's priced correctly. So is what Nomadic's built compelling?

I think it is. As noted above, it imparts a strong sense of connection between what you see while wearing the VR headset and what you encounter in the physical space around you. Moreover, you feel safe physically walking around in an unfamiliar environment because, for example, when you see a door in front of you and know you're supposed to reach out and turn the knob to open it, that handle is precisely where your eyes tell you it should be.

This, of course, is what makes walking that plank frightening. I've been through countless VR demos before, so I was very much aware that there was no danger in walking across it. Yet my brain screamed at me not to do so. Will this deter people with less VR experience? Perhaps, but Nomadic thought of that, building in a backup narrative just in case someone won't walk across.

In the early going after launch, Nomadic, which has only six full-time staff right now, is going to create some of the content in-house, and lean on partners to create more. Over time, the company imagines a variety of experiences ranging from all-original content such as a Journey To The Center Of The Earth-esque adventure or perhaps escape-room challenges. It's also hoping to ink deals to build experiences around existing movies, games, and toys.

As for pricing, Nomadic isn't yet saying exactly how much it'll charge. But it does seem like the startup wants to keep the cost to roughly the same as a movie ticket. That would be a key to ensuring a Nomadic experience is affordable, especially when you consider an entire family wanting to try it out.

That pricing would also set it apart from what it costs to go through The Void's one U.S.-based experience, Ghostbusters: Dimension, at Madame Tussaud's in New York. That, technically, is just $20, but you also have to buy a $29 ticket to the wax museum itself. For a family of four, that would be a hefty cost.

It's way too early to tell if Nomadic has a future. The company got off the ground with $1 million from family and friends, and recently raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital. It plans on hiring up quickly, and hopes that customers will be able to start going through its experiences sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

The biggest hurdle to its success, says Laurie Beja Miller, a longtime retail industry consultant who is now a Nomadic advisor, is getting people to try it out for the first time.

"People have very varying degrees of experience and understanding of what virtual reality is, and what they can expect," Miller says. "I couldn't wait to do it again, to see if I was going to walk across the plank without freaking out. I just froze. I love that."

Poor solutions to misinformation by technology companies and others don't address systemic civic problems—and could lead to self-censorship.

In his recent manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg asserts that the response to our dysfunctional and conflict-ridden politics is to build a stronger global community based on ubiquitous interconnection. We know of course that Facebook stands to profit from this utopian vision, and we should be skeptical of the motives underlying Zuck's position. But it's worth taking a second look at the idea of working on underlying economic and political issues in our societies, rather than focusing on the effects of online expression—particularly in the context of the moral panic over "fake news."

The consternation about fake news from Western journalists, scholars of propaganda, and policymakers has inspired waves of stories and talk-shopsaddressing its growth as a threat to our public discourse, our journalism, and our systems of governance. And we see many attempts to understand, fix, or apportion blame. Yet many of the proposed fixes are deeply problematic because they advocate overly broad and vague restrictions on expression. Solutions that would limit suspected "fake" expression or strongly encourage private intermediaries to restrict some kinds of speech and prioritize or "whitelist" others are particularly troubling.

This week, Germany was the latest country to introduce a plan that would force social media companies to monitor and censor some kinds of online expression. Justice minister Heiko Maas wants to put regulatory pressure on social media companies, and especially Facebook and Twitter, to police expression, asserting that they have failed to do so voluntarily. Draft legislation proposes to fine social media companies up to €50 million for failure to quickly delete hate speech, fake news, and other types of misleading speech.

In this context, we can look to countries that have created regulatory regimes to control online expression—such as China—not as entirely "other", but perhaps as cautionary examples. When posing solutions to fix fake news, we should be extremely careful not to build our own self-censorship machines.

"Fake" News And The Role Of States

Many recent false news stories have come from groups not affiliated with states, but examples from Russia, China, Iran, and many other countries should remind us that the biggest threat to our public discourse is false information used by and to the advantage of governments. Governments, after all, have the authority to couple shifting narratives of truth to state mechanisms of control. We ought to be especially attuned to states that restrict the "false" expression of their citizens, while at the same time creating misleading narratives and stories about themselves. When states attempt to control narratives, it's time to start looking for signs of tyranny.

For the past 20 years, we have seen states or their affiliates use internet-based false news and disinformation as part of broader agendas to shape public opinion for political ends. Well-researched examples include China's 50 Cent Party, Russia's troll factories, and astroturfing bot engines contracted by the U.S. government, all of which are designed to flood internet forums and social media with falsities and distractions.

At the same time, some states have taken steps to regulate, restrict, and even criminalize "false" stories produced by citizens and journalists as a punitive method of controlling expression. In Bahrain, China, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and elsewhere social media users have been arrested and prosecuted for sharing information deemed by governments to be false or misinformed. New regulations in China forbid the use of "unverified facts distributed via social media platforms" and prohibit websites "from quoting from unnamed or fake news sources and fabricating news based on hearsay, guesswork, or imagination."

A recent declaration issued by a group of intergovernmental organizations, including UN Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression David Kaye, discusses these regulatory efforts from the perspective of international law and norms. They emphasize that international human rights doctrine explicitly protects expression that may differ from or counter governmental positions, even when it is factually inaccurate. Regulatory and technical approaches to reduce fake news should, they argue, continue to safeguard the diversity and abundance of speech. They write:

the human right to impart information and ideas is not limited to "correct" statements…the right also protects information and ideas that may shock, offend, and disturb, and that prohibitions on disinformation may violate international human rights standards, while, at the same time, this does not justify the dissemination of knowingly or recklessly false statements by official or State actors…

What's The Problem, Exactly?

The real-life consequences of fake news are unclear. A recent study by the MIT/Harvard research project Media Cloud, led by Yochai Benkler and Ethan Zuckerman, examines the effects of right-wing information sources in the U.S. It suggests that rather than wringing our hands over "fake news", we should focus on disinformation networks that are insulated from mainstream public conversations. Benkler and his colleagues challenge the idea that "the internet as a technology is what fragments public discourse and polarizes opinions" and instead argue that "human choices and political campaigning, not one company's algorithm" are the more likely factor to influence the construction and dissemination of disinformation.

Nevertheless, projects seeking to control fake news are running full steam ahead. These efforts have the potential to affect what information is easily available to the public, and if we aren't careful, could even diminish our rights to expression. Approaches tend to fall into three broad categories:

• Fix online discourse by nudging technologies that control or censor some categories of speech
• Fix the public by making us better at distinguishing fact from fallacy
• Fix journalism, generally with massive cash transfers from the technology sector

Notably, these approaches all focus on mitigating effects rather than confronting the underlying economic or technical incentives in the structure of media, or the broader social, economic, and political incentives that motivate speech.

Fix Online Discourse

In seeking to build systems to manage false news, technology companies will end up creating systems to monitor and police speech. We will quickly find that they need to use ever-more granular, vigilant, and therefore continuously updated semantic analysis in order to find and restrict expression. These proposed solutions to fake news would be in part technological, based on AI and natural language processing. They will automate the search for and flagging of certain terms, word associations, and linguistic formulations. But language is more malleable than algorithm, and we will find that people will invent alternative terms and locutions to express their ends.

The slipperiness of language could cause the hunt for "fake" or hurtful speech to become an end in itself. We have already seen this in the hunt for "toxic" language in a recent project called Perspective, made by Google's Jigsaw, and other efforts will surely follow.

Companies are likely to supplement their automated processes with human monitoring—from social media platform users flagging suspect content to contractor armies interpreting those flags and implementing restrictions. Added to this, perhaps, will be ombudspeople, feedback loops, legal processes, and policy controls upon the censors. Those systems are already in place to deal with terrorism, extreme hate speech, extreme violence, child pornography, and nudity and sexual arousal. They can be further refined and expanded to police other types of expression.

Proposed solutions in this vein mostly fail to acknowledge that the technological incentives that encourage fake news are the same as the forces that currently finance the digital media industry—that is, advertising technology masquerading as editorial content.

The internet theorist Doc Searls calls this "adtech", emphasizing that it is a form of direct marketing or spamming. The rise of fake news is driven in part by organizations seeking revenues or political influence by creating sensational and misleading stories packaged for highly polarized audiences. Producers of this content benefit from a system already designed to segment and mobilize audiences for commercial ends. That system includes the monitoring of consumer habits, targeted advertising, direct marketing and the creation of editorial products appealing to specific consumer segments. These forces coalesce in a dance of editorial and advertising incentives that leads to further polarization and segmentation.

Fix the public

The next approach — that we fix ourselves — relies on the Victorian idea that our media systems would work if only people behaved in ways expected of them by the builders of systems. Media literacy campaigns, public education, fact-checking, calling out and shaming tactics, media diets, whitelists of approved media: these solutions require that we blame ourselves for failing to curb our appetites. It is not wrong to suggest that we are susceptible to the allure of the media's endorphin-injection strategy to hook us on the sensational and trivial, or that education is important for a healthy civics. To focus blame primarily on individuals, however, is victim-blaming of a sort.

Fix Journalism

The third approach—devoting more resources to better journalism, is an example of the journalism community jumping on the current moment to reassert their expertise and value. While a more proactive, better-resourced media is definitely vital for the long-term health of our civic life, conversations about journalism need to start with the trust deficit many journalistic outfits have accumulated over the past decades. That deficit exists precisely because of ever-more sensational and facile reporting, news as entertainment, and the corporate drive to maximize profits over the interests of audiences and readers.

Given that the business model of the liberal, capitalist media is primarily to sell eyeballs to advertisers, they should not be surprised to find those of us being sold becoming wise to the approach. And while efforts to strengthen journalism and public trust in the media are important and much-needed, they will not make fake news go away.

So What Are We Really Talking About?

The technological and the human-based approaches to controlling inaccurate online speech proposed to date for the most part do not address the underlying social, political, or communal causes of hateful or false expression. Instead, they seek to restrict behaviors and control effects, and they rely on the good offices of our technology intermediaries for that service. They do not ask us to look more closely at the social and political construction of our communities. They do not examine and propose solutions to address hate, discrimination, and bias in our societies, in issues such as income disparity, urban planning, educational opportunity, or, in fact, our structures of governance.

Frustratingly, we have seen these approaches before, in efforts to reduce online "extremism", and also with dubious results. Countering violent extremism (CVE) projects suffer from similar definitional flaws about the nature of the problem, but that doesn't stop governments from creating misguided responses. For examples, look to the many "counter-narrative" projects such as "Welcome to ISIS Land" funded by the U.S. State Department. These projects, supported by governments, international organizations, and companies, seek an array of technical, communications, and policy-based approaches to controlling extremism.

David Kaye, in an earlier joint declaration on CVE, notes the "fail[ure] to provide definitions for key terms, such as 'extremism' or 'radicalization'. In the absence of a clear definition, these terms can be used to restrict a wide range of lawful expression," but still inflict collateral damage, with pervasive surveillance and tracking that triggers the self-censor in all of us, resulting in the reduction of civic participation and dialogue.

How do we begin to tackle the larger challenges, those beyond simple technological fixes or self-blame? There are no easy solutions for the economic and social inequities that create divisions, and the technological and economic incentives that underpin our current information ecosystem are deeply entrenched. Yet we need to find a way to start serious conversations about these systemic challenges, rather than tinkering with their effects or simply assigning responsibility to the newest players on the field.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, has urged that we reform the systems and business models we have created to fund our online lives. He points, for example, to the use of personal data by companies as the driver for the creation of surveillance societies, which exerts chilling effects on free expression. He suggests seeking alternatives to the concentration of attention and power in the hands of a small number of social media companies that derive profit from showing us content that is "surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases." He's concerned by the use of these same tactics in political advertising, and its effect on our systems of electoral politics.

Confronting our social and economic inequities is even harder. It is the challenge of our time to find the language to conduct honest and frank debate about how we construct our economies and our states, how we apportion benefits, and which values guide us. Building civic communities that are rooted in trust, both online and off, is the ongoing and vital work necessary for public conversations about our collective future.

It is no small irony that the communications systems that we built to support such debate are imperiled, both by those who would explode the social norms of civic discourse for their ideological ends, and through resultant attempts to control extreme or misleading expression. It is easy to find fault with the technologies that facilitate our collective civic life. It is much more difficult to look at our civic life as a whole and determine whether and how it may be failing.

Ivan Sigal is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the executive director of Global Voices, where this essay originally appeared.

The regulatory environment under Trump makes it far more possible, but T-Mo may still be playing hard to get.

You might say they're made for each other. In the wireless market you have four main players. Two of them—AT&T and Verizon—tower over the others (T-Mobile and Sprint). A combination of the little guys might actually be able to compete with the big guys. And, believe it or not, even consumers might benefit.

It's not quite that simple, of course, but 2017 could once again see Sprint court T-Mobile. Sprint tried for the merger in 2014, but the deal fell through when it became clear that the FCC wouldn't approve it.

But a lot has changed since 2014. Most importantly, we now have a GOP-controlled FCC that's far less likely to reject a merger. New FCC chairman Ajit Pai disagrees with former chairman Tom Wheeler's belief that true wireless competition requires a four-carrier race.

The FCC is currently engaged in a spectrum auction, and during that time no bidding company can hold formal merger discussions. But after the auction is over and the prohibition lifted, M&A talks are likely to begin in earnest, industry experts tell Fast Company.

"In wireless, consolidation is already so widely expected that it has arguably been fully priced into the stocks and then some," MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett says via email.

At least one telecom analyst is fairly sure that Sprint and T-Mobile will begin merger talks immediately after the auction concludes.

"We continue to believe a Sprint/T-Mo announcement is likely given the benefits of moving from four wireless players to three and the significant synergies it would create," writes UBS analyst John Hodulik in a recent investor brief. "In addition, we believe the timing is appropriate: (Sprint's parent) SoftBank has already recovered its cost basis, turned the asset [Sprint] around operationally and financially . . ."

Sprint has managed in the past few years to build out its network to improve its coverage and capacity. It's stopped bleeding subscribers every quarter. And it also holds a lot of valuable 2.5 Ghz spectrum that could greatly benefit T-Mobile. In addition, SoftBank has already signaled that it might be OK with T-Mobile controlling the combined company's network and business.

T-Mobile has prospered during the last few years, and has now overtaken Sprint as the No. 3 carrier. "There are still very real questions about when T-Mobile will be as eager as Sprint," Moffett said. "T-Mobile arguably gets paid to wait, as they're getting stronger while Sprint is getting weaker."

Still, wireless companies like Sprint and T-Mobile have good reasons to seek merger opportunities. They need to increase their scale or broaden their product offerings, because selling broadband and voice service is no longer the high-growth business it used to be. Finding new customers has gotten harder, and competition has tightened. In fact, for three of the four big wireless carriers, revenues have shrunk over the past year. Meanwhile, the wireless carriers are now faced with the expensive prospect of rolling out fancy new 5G networks.

Signs And Signals

The recent comments of T-Mobile executives have been telling. T-Mobile CFO Braxton Carter recently said at an investor conference that he believes some type of merger activity is inevitable. "There are significant benefits that we'll see with convergence, both from a wireless carrier standpoint as well as a broadband cable standpoint."

But Carter expressed doubt that another try at a Sprint/T-Mo tie-up would end well. Regulators, he says, never really change, and the risk of a rejection on anti-trust or anti-competition grounds is real. Carter suggests that T-Mobile might be more likely to merge with a cable or satellite provider. A merger with Sprint would make T-Mobile more able to take advantage of economies of scale, while a merger with a cable provider would give it a whole new set of products to sell.

But Carter's comments might just be T-Mobile playing hard to get, which could strengthen its hand in any eventual merger negotiations with Sprint. T-Mobile US CEO John Legere has also played down the chance of a Sprint merger.

" . . . they [T-Mobile] are likely to at least test the waters with some of the possible alternatives to a Sprint deal, like one with Dish or cable, before they fully commit," Moffett says.

T-Mobile's U.S. CTO, Neville Ray, speaking at a telecom conference in London recently, says his company isn't currently entertaining a Sprint courtship, but went a long way to point out that T-Mobile could integrate Sprint's network and customers if it came down to it.

"When I think about network integration, and migrating Sprint customers on to a better network performance and better coverage, it is a good thing," Ray said. "Migrating from a lesser performing network to a better one is a plus."

Even in a favorable regulatory environment it's hard to predict what might happen. Wells Fargo equities analyst Jennifer Fritzsche wrote in a recent investor brief: "While we do believe Sprint likely will strike toward T-Mobile while a Republican administration is in the majority, in many ways, predicting moves of the next few months (especially the weeks after the broadcast auction results are disclosed) is a bit like trying to predict moves in a chess game."

So stay tuned. A Sprint-T-Mobile merger could have a real impact on your monthly cellular service bill, regardless of who your carrier is. The competitive environment would be radically changed. It's just hard to tell if it would be a change for the better.

Bold, visionary projects are leading the way toward improving how we live, eat, and learn.

There are 192 finalists in the 2017 World Changing Ideas Awards, in categories from health to urban design to food. They run the gamut from internet-connected wells that collect water data to vegetable-based hamburgers that bleed like real meat. Here are eight more of our favorites.

Correcting Vision From The Cloud

Connected Eyes, Microsoft and L V Prasad Eye Institute

There are around 55 million visually impaired people in India, up to 80% of whom could be helped by everyday procedures like Lasik. Medical and surgical resources, however, are limited. In April 2015, nonprofit L V Prasad Eye Institute, in Hyderabad, India, teamed up with Microsoft India to create Connected Eyes, a cloud-based machine-learning research project that uses data from tens of thousands of eye patients to identify the likelihood of success for new surgery, plus a probable regression rate, so that doctors can deploy those resources most effectively. Last December, Connected Eyes linked up with institutions in Brazil, Australia, and the United States to create the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare, which will build a universally available service that offers eye doctors immediate predictions for their patients. "This will be a global pool of knowledge that everyone can benefit from," says Anil Bhansali, managing director of Microsoft India R&D. —Ben Schiller

Rethinking The Factory

South Side Soapbox, Method Products and Gotham Greens

The Chicago manufacturing facility for the eco-friendly cleaning-products company Method looks nothing like a traditional factory. Brightly colored, airy, and powered by solar panels and a 600 kW wind turbine, the South Side Soapbox opened in 2015 as the world's first LEED Platinum–certified plant of its kind. "We want to show that a factory should be something that fuels innovation, not hampers it," says Garry Embleton, Method's VP of op­erations. Large enough to tackle the majority of the San Francisco–based company's manufacturing, bottle production, warehousing, and distribution on-site, the Soapbox produces more than 30 million product units each year and has slashed the company's carbon emissions by 200 metric tons. Tightening the supply chain and investing in renewable energy will, in the long run, grow Method's bottom line, Embleton says, but the Soapbox also points to how the factories of the future will need to think beyond company interests: Through a partnership with urban-farming startup Gotham Greens, the Soapbox features a rooftop greenhouse that each year sells up to 1 million pounds of leafy greens such as bok choy and kale to Chicago-area residents. "For a factory to be truly sustainable," Embleton says, "it has to benefit both the environment and its community." —Eillie Anzilotti

Taking Back The Block

Avalon Village, Avalon Village

"You look at this street, and it's like a phoenix rising," says Shamayim "Shu" Harris of Avalon Street in Michigan's Highland Park, an impoverished city of 10,000 people in the Detroit metro area. She and fellow residents are installing a heating and cooling system in a run-down home that this summer will become the Homework House, equipped with a kitchen, reading area, and computer lab, where local kids will be able to gather after school to study. Down the block, shipping containers will become a women-run business hub, a greenhouse will generate fresh produce, solar panels will generate power, and a retention pond will collect rainwater for plumbing. All of this activity represents the initial phases of Avalon Village, a local effort to transform the neighborhood into a self-sustaining, off-the-grid community. Harris moved to the once-blighted block in 2008, after her 2-year-old son was killed in a hit-and-run near Avalon Street, planning to clean it up in his memory. But property values were low, so Harris decided to buy up the lots—through crowdfunding and seed grants—and turn them into local assets. She also intends to build a wellness center and affordable housing. "Things don't have to stay the way they were," Harris says. —EA

Respecting Marine Life

Edible six-pack rings, E6PR

To a fish or a seagull, plastic trash in the ocean looks like lunch (to often-deadly results), but a new six-pack ring actually is. Made from beer process waste from breweries or wheat by-products from agriculture, the edible six-pack ring also breaks down in seawater, unlike typical plastic. "The best solution would be no packaging at all, or 100% recyclable behavior from human beings," says Marco Vega, cofounder of ad firm We Believers, which launched the concept in 2016 as part of a brand-building campaign for Florida-based craft brewer Saltwater Brewery. After massive demand from other breweries, the agency spun off a new company, called E6PR, to begin broader production; consumers will start seeing the rings on shelves this summer. Meanwhile, E6PR is working with a major beer company and factories in the U.S. and abroad to test whether the rings can be manufactured economically at enough scale to become the new industry standard. —Adele Peters

Keeping Tabs On Your Little One

Owlet Smart Sock, Owlet Baby Care and R/GA

The Owlet Smart Sock measures infants' heart rate and blood oxygen levels and alerts parents in the next room should any of these vitals ever enter dangerous territory. More than 80,000 units have been sold since the product's debut in 2015. This spring, the Lehi, Utah–based company is releasing an updated version that offers historical readings and trend analysis. In time, they plan to use collected data to predict when problems might occur, not just when they already have. For example, certain heart-rate profiles may indicate that a baby has a fever, even before she's sweating. Retailing at around $300, the Owlet system represents how high-end hospital-grade equipment—in this case, a pulse oximetry machine—can be miniaturized, consumerized, and made relatively affordable. Insurance reimbursement or philanthropic programs might soon make it more so. "Our vision is for every parent to have access to this," says cofounder Kurt Workman. —BS

Maximizing Space—And Resources

Heijmans One, Heijmans

The prefab 420-square-foot Heijmans One house is designed to be installed in a day on a vacant lot, and then moved when that lot is developed, providing quick new urban housing for the growing number of people who live alone and struggle to find affordable places to live. Heijmans has sold 58 of the solar panel–equipped homes so far in the Netherlands, primarily to investors and housing associations, and is waiting for regulations to catch up with demand. Most municipalities are "still not ready for temporary rental houses," says Heijmans's commercial manager, Kees Strooper. —AP

Steadying The Wind

Wind-hydropower hybrid project, GE Renewable Energy and Max Bögl Wind AG

Wind is an abundant and increasingly cheap source of energy, but it's intermittent. Depending on how the breeze is blowing, turbines can generate too little power, or even too much, raising headaches for grid operators and casting doubt on wind energy's large-scale viability. High in the hilly Swabian-Franconian Forest, in southern Germany, GE and Max Bögl Wind developed an elegant solution: Their wind-hydro energy-storage project will combine giant turbines (each is 584 feet high), several reservoirs, a hydroelectric station, and a mountainside into a giant battery. At moments of high electricity demand, water is released from the reservoirs on the mountain, which generates power below. When there is less demand, wind-powered pumps carry the water to the top again. "We're making wind almost like a base-load resource," says Ulrich Suedhoff, director of business development for GE Renewable Energy in Europe, meaning that it's essentially on all the time. "We can balance the grid so there's power when it's needed." The wind portion of the project will connect with the grid in southern Germany by the end of this year, and the hydropump storage by 2018. Suedhoff says that GE is scoping out sites for up to 100 more wind-hydro projects around the world. —BS

Helping Students Shoot And Score

NBA Math Hoops, Learn Fresh Education Co.

When eighth graders play the NBA Math Hoops game, they get to assume the role of basketball coaches, using real players' actual statistics to make decisions about whether a player should take a two-point shot or a corner three. As the kids soon disco­ver, they're applying math skills they might otherwise have considered boring. "We have a vision for every student to fall in love with every subject through things they already care about," says Khalil Fuller, CEO of Learn Fresh, the nonprofit that first created a physical edition of the game and is now launching an app version. Fuller, who watched friends drop out of high school after they fell behind in math, was inspired to develop the game after a college instructor introduced the idea. He has since formed a licensing deal with the NBA to use stats from real players to make the game extra authentic. "The students idolize these players," Fuller says. "It's kind of like your idol is coming to teach you math." Right now, 20,000 students in 35 cities play the game; the new app will target millions. And for the kids who aren't interested in basketball? Fuller is already working with an NFL team. —AP

High-tech sensors inform decisions at the fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant.

The founders of D.C.'s Mediterranean hot spot Cava Mezze embarked on a nationwide expansion with their Cava restaurant chain six years ago, an experiment that has since grown to include 24 outposts with 18 more to come this year. Its growth has been fueled by chef Dimitri Moshovitis's jalapeño-infused feta mousse and roasted red pepper hummus, plus one secret ingredient: Raspberry Pi. That's the technology behind a system of sensors that Cava uses to monitor everything from customer wait times to food-safety practices. Chief data scientist Josh Patchus explains how insights from the data continue to boost Cava's "ROI of experience."

Leave Room For Deliberation

To avoid the off-putting impression of long lines and wait times, Patchus trains motion sensors (stationed in select restaurants) on customers as they're waiting to order. What he found: Lines tend to bunch up near the menu board and while people are selecting ingredients at the serving station. "The more choices you give people, the harder it is [for them] to make up their mind," says Patchus. Rather than limit customers' options, he redesigned the menu boards so that customers know what to expect when they reach the serving station. The change has helped lines move 10% faster and hold 12% more people.

Seat Customers Strategically

Sensors in the restaurants' seating areas show that customers in urban locations often stay only long enough to eat, but in the suburbs they prefer to linger. "A lot of people are driving a long way there, so the last thing they want to do is get their food and have to move back out," says Patchus. He suggested increasing seating at the suburban outposts by 30%, allowing them to accommodate large groups. Those parties boosted revenue in the redesigned stores by 20% per square foot.

Manage What You Can't See

Patchus uses the sensors to monitor back-of-house operations. Walk-in refrigerators can now tell managers how long they've been left open, and if there have been any temperature or humidity spikes. And after data showed that Cava's burners could heat unevenly, Patchus advised the food-prep team (who make everything from scratch) to cook certain items, like the spicy lamb meatballs, from the center of the grill out, ensuring nothing is undercooked. Since then, food-quality complaints from customers have dropped 28%.

Keep The Volume Down

If the cash register is too close to the serving station, customers have to shout their choices, and it can be hard for them to hear the server's response. Sensors track decibel levels in the ordering area; if they're high, Patchus suggests a remodel. "To understand our customers, we have to be around our customers," he says. With virtual tracking technology, he can be pretty much everywhere at once.

Three of the most popular posts in Instagram history help explain the app's role in driving pop culture.

After years of shying away from change, Instagram is now evolving rapidly as it takes on Snapchat and caters to the celebrities who love the platform. Here, we examine three mega-popular posts that show how stars are using Instagram in creative ways.

Read our feature story, "How Instagram Changed—Before It Had To," for more on how the photo-sharing giant is redefining itself.

Beyoncé

@beyonce, 94.7 million followers, February 2017
Likes: 10.4 million

The photographic pregnancy announcement was classic Beyoncé, who rarely gives interviews and prefers to speak unmediated through her art and social media. As the world learned that two new Carters would soon enter the world, this image instantly became iconic, inspiring thousands of reaction articles, a few baby-announcement copycats, and even a five-story mural in Australia.

Selena Gomez

@selenagomez, 109 million followers, June 2016
Likes: 6.4 million

Though technically an advertisement for Coca-Cola, Selena Gomez's sultry sips from a glass bottle with her lyrics on it garnered massive engagement. The company nailed this #ad for its "Share a Coke and a Song" campaign by playing to Gomez's all-American aesthetic, and Gomez, who reigns as the most-followed person on Instagram, didn't come off looking like a shameless brand promoter (and got to publicize her single "Me & the Rhythm" to boot).

Kendall Jenner

@kendalljenner, 74.2 million followers, May 2015
Likes: 3.6 million

Model Kendall Jenner's heart hairstyle pic is still her most popular, and it's evocative of how she treats her Instagram feed like her own glossy fashion magazine. The image quickly went viral, even sparking a parody account in which her "brother" Kirby, a mustachioed goofball, inserts himself into her most-liked shots and mimics her poses.

The Top Chef star dishes it out on aid to farmers, nutrition trends, and the restaurant rent crisis.

Tom Colicchio is a busy man. The Top Chef personality and restaurateur whose Crafted Hospitality Group runs some of America's best known eateries is also a cofounder and board member at Food Policy Action, an advocacy group best known for its "National Food Policy Scorecard," which rates politicians on their commitment to keeping food safe, healthy, and affordable.

Fast Company caught up with Colicchio shortly before he spoke on a South By Southwest (SXSW) panel on nutrition trends, sponsored by Naked Juice, that also included New York magazine's Adam Platt, former White House policy advisor for nutrition Deb Eschmeyer, and Real Food Fake Food author Larry Olmsted.

Here are Colicchio's thoughts on food policy, free school lunches, and New York's looming restaurant crisis:

FC: What are the food policy issues that are close to your heart?

Right now, I think it's about trying to find ways to make nutrition less and less expensive. The problem in this country is that nutrition is expensive, but calories are absurdly cheap. How do you get the cost down on fruit and vegetables, and all the things that you are supposed to eat that are really expensive?

Do you subsidize the food? Do you subsidize the farms? Do you favor commodity crops over fruits and vegetables? Is there more support you can give farmers and specific things you can offer?

There are smart policies that can help. A great program, for instance, is steering local farmers towards growing food that goes into local school lunches. There's definitely a role government plays in this.

Do you have a food policy wish list?

First, more subsidies for growing fruits and vegetables. The Obama administration changed the food pyramid to a plate, and put the idea of fruits and vegetables and grains at the heart of the plate—let's support that with dollars. That's the first thing.

Then I would make school lunch free across the board.

We can end hunger in this country if put the money to it as well. A more robust SNAP program [Supplemental Nutrition and Insurance Program, a federal program which offers food assistance to millions of American families] would go a long way.

Anything else that should be on our radar?

I think right now in New York, especially, restaurants are struggling. They're especially struggling with rent. I think the trend is going to be more restaurants on the second, third, and four floor of a building because of that, and also in more mall-like settings.

Is that just in New York, or...?

You already see it in Tokyo! I think that will change here because you can't afford rent. The problem right now is that there's a real brain drain of talent leaving New York. There are a lot of young people moving out of the city—young chefs and cooks don't want to work in New York. They can't open new restaurants and afford to pay the rent.

Meanwhile, downtown Los Angeles is booming. Young chefs are moving there, and also cooks. Why? Right now, it's pretty crazy for everybody (In New York). You could come here to Austin, be a young cook with a great education, and not have to deal with living in New York for 10 years in order to afford the rent. We have to figure this out.

Thank you.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and readability.

Instagram has emerged as the new social platform for musical artists to build an audience and communicate with fans.

Up-and-coming R&B star Jovanie uses Instagram like teens do, which makes sense, since he's only 15 years old. His feed is a highly curated place to show off upcoming music, like a new single with Lil Yachty, as well as the videos that put him on Atlantic Records' radar, like one from when he was 13, where he belted out Usher's "You Got It Bad."

Fast Company sat down with Jovanie to talk about how he uses the musician-friendly platform, musical influences, and how his style has changed since he was a kid (well . . . relatively).

When did you know you wanted to start making music?

The first time I started singing, I was super nervous. I first sang to my father when I was 7, and he was playing Justin Bieber. And I started singing along and he asked, do you want to be singing? I said yes, of course. He said, I'll make it happen. My whole family's super supportive.

How do you use Instagram?

I started on Instagram just doing covers for people. I use social media to build my following, I love giving fans want they want to see. I want my fans to feel like they're my friends. I love Instagram Stories, I call it InstaSnap. It's really dope. Instagram is getting really interactive now with your fans, like with Live. You can literally sit there and read all the comments from your friends and fans. Most people on Instagram don't have Snapchat. When I'm on Snapchat I'll get a certain amount of views, but when I'm on Instagram I get way more views, only because now your fans from Instagram don't have to go to a whole different app to see what's happening.

What are you working on right now?

I'm working on a new solo project. My fans haven't heard me for a year. The music is super different. Before I was making up tempo kid-like music. This time around it's more me. I started writing more of my record, really part of these recent singles. I just dropped a single with Lil Yachty and we shot a music video. The first week we dropped it, it had about 150,000 listens in four or five days. He's dope, really laid back. Good vibes.

Do you take more of an active role in songwriting than you did before?

Last year when we released "Whip," I didn't write anything. Well, I wrote a little bit, a couple verses. But that was pretty much it. This time around I'm always writing, always coming up with melodies. Before it wasn't like if I had a choice or didn't have a choice to write, I just didn't know how to write. Now I've been with so many writers and producers that I just sync in everything I learn, and now I know how to make music for me and the music I like.

People compare you to Justin Bieber. Do you want to model your career off his?

I see myself as having my own lane. You have a little bit of who your inspirations are. What made me wanna dance was watching Michael Jackson, James Brown, Fred Astaire. New Edition taught me a lot about the music industry and performing. The people I watched growing up, I feel like I have a little part in me. That's what makes me, me as an artist.

A few years ago, could you have seen that this is what your life was going to be like?

I didn't really think about it like that. I started singing because I wanted to take care of my grandma, take care of my family. So we could experience a different life that we never had. I'm working because I love music and there's many ways I can express myself. I can show the world that I'm just like you, I go through things just like you. Music is my getaway.

A candy company that buys a dog-food brand might seem like it's barking up the wrong tree. But these curious moves would prove prescient.

Companies acquire other firms every day, usually to get their hands on a complementary technology, product, or person. (See Walmart's $3 billion grab for retail startup Jet.com last fall—which came with CEO Marc Lore, who now heads up all of Walmart's e-commerce—and its recent purchase of fashion startup ModCloth.) Every now and then, however, well-known brands make deals that appear to be head scratchers, but somehow still pay off in the end. Here are 10 such acquisitions.

1. Mars And Chappell Brothers, 1935

In an early example of portfolio diversification, the Snickers maker acquired Chappell Brothers, which manufactured a decidedly less-craveable comestible: Chappie canned dog food.

Why it was smart: Today, the majority of Mars's business comes not from treats like M&M's, but from pet brands such as Pedigree and Whiskas.

2. Tandy And RadioShack, 1963

Texas-based shoe-leather supplier Tandy purchased a flailing Boston radio-parts chain. With RadioShack as a launchpad, Tandy became an early player in the personal computer boom.

Why it was smart: It turned out to be a good fit: CEO Charles Tandy grew RadioShack into an electronics powerhouse.

3. General Mills And Play-Doh, 1965

Seeing synergies between kid-focused foods and the toy market, General Mills snatched up Play-Doh maker Rainbow Crafts. That paved the way for its purchase of Kenner toys two years later.

Why it was smart: General Mills soon merged Rainbow and Kenner, and a bet on licensing Star Wars toys paid off big after the 1977 film blew up.

4. Getty Oil And ESPN, 1979

Getty Oil spent $10 million on an 85% stake in what was then known as the ESP Network, a little-watched 24-hour satellite sports channel.

Why it was smart: Cable TV soon grew into a massive business, with ESPN as one of the medium's major anchors, and ABC purchased the network in 1984 for around $200 million.

5. Turner And MGM, 1986

When cable upstart Ted Turner bought storied studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, home of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, it was jarring evidence of a fast-changing media landscape.

Why it was smart: Turner tapped MGM's library when he launched movie-oriented channels TCM and TNT, which helped expand his media empire.

6. Starbucks And Hear Music, 1999

The coffee chain purchased a small San Francisco–based music retailer and record label, broadening its in-store offerings beyond food and beverage with exclusive albums.

Why it was smart: The move helped cement Starbucks's image as a lifestyle brand—a "third place" between home and work.

7. Coca-Cola And Odwalla, 2001

Coca-Cola poured $181 million into a deal to purchase California juice maker Odwalla, which had cultivated an image as a healthier alternative to soft drinks.

Why it was smart: Coca-Cola has used Odwalla and brands such as Honest Tea to help fill the gap from slipping soda sales.

8. Clorox And Burt's Bees, 2007

Best known for peddling bleach, Clorox created buzz when it bought Burt's Bees, a Maine-based purveyor of natural personal-care products.

Why it was smart: Burt's Bees helped the company tap into the eco-products market: Clorox soon launched Green Works, a line of natural household cleaners.

9. Apple And P.A. Semi, 2008

Steve Jobs quietly paid a relatively small $278 million for a tiny maker of low-power chips. The move let Apple start designing the cores of its products rather than relying on Intel.

Why it was smart: Controlling its own chips proved crucial as Apple developed products such as the Apple Watch, iPhone 7, and AirPods.

10. Facebook And Oculus, 2014

Virtual reality was virtually irrelevant when Facebook spent $2 billion to buy the Oculus Rift.

Why it was smart: Though VR sales have been slow, the Oculus deal set off a tech race—from Microsoft to HTC to Samsung—and established Facebook as a bona fide hardware player and leader in a new computing interface.

Krista Tippett has spent years interviewing some of the world's greatest thinkers. Here's what she's learned about being an enlightened leader.

Conceiving a breakthrough product or navigating administrative entanglements is exponentially more difficult when you—and your staff—are distracted by what feels like the fourth disturbing news brief of the day. But, according to Krista Tippett, a Peabody Award–winning public radio host and author of Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living, there's a way to offer stability and foresight in the face of uncertainty. It's a subject she's covered widely in On Being, the radio show on which she has discussed such topics as the intricacies of evil, forgiveness, and prayer with Elie Wiesel and cultivating courage from struggle with Brené Brown. Tippett's time studying visionaries has convinced her that wisdom, though often considered elusive, is actually quite attainable. "Wisdom is not a possession you can point to as much as it is a way that a life has of imprinting the lives around it," she says. "If we think about the wisest people we've known, it's how they affect others, how they change others, calm others, ground others." Here are her five truths for leading with insight.

Politeness Isn't Always Productive

Tippett says that, in recent years, our language has become increasingly caustic, sarcastic, and threatening. But tempering that kind of expression by being overly polite isn't going to help you problem solve. Rather, approach difficult conversations with a basis of civility and an openness to disagreement. When faced with conflict, Tippett advises avoiding framing discussions as debates—"Do you believe this or that?"—and instead considering what is at stake for the overall group or company. Asking such questions as "What do we all care about?" and "How can we find solutions that address those shared concerns?" promotes unity and inclusiveness, she says.

There's No Such Thing As Meaningless Work

Tippett points to Bill George, who spent a decade as CEO of the medical device maker Medtronic (and is now a professor at Harvard Business School), as a prime example of a sage leader. It's easy to see how someone running a company with a mission of saving lives could readily convince employees that what they do matters. But George didn't just focus on his company's end product. He also attached importance to the environment in which the products were made. "The truth is that this is as much a struggle for mission-driven nonprofits as it is for the most profit-oriented businesses," says Tippett. "Just because you have a great mission doesn't mean that you have wise leadership or an organization that's infused with [institutional] character." Effective managers can create a greater sense of purpose for their employees, in "the process and the culture and the ethos" that go into the end product.

You Can't Separate Work And Life

Historically, workers checked their personal convictions at the door. That's changing, and Tippett says it's important to recognize that people bring their "whole selves" to work. "A hallmark of wisdom is an acknowledgment of the fullness and complexity of what it means to be human," she says. While the office still isn't the best place for a political rally, leaders shouldn't pretend like everything is normal when there's discord in the world. "Speak the truth. Say, 'We're all a little unsettled right now,' " says Tippett. "Offer ways everyone can be together with their particular differences, not denying it but grappling with it. We have to come up with new forums for figuring out how to navigate this in our workplaces. It isn't optional anymore."

Warmth Is Not Weakness

Humiliation and fear are poor motivators—something good bosses keep in mind when holding employees accountable for their performance. When pointing out a mistake or need for improvement, default to a kind word, generous act, or attempt at better understanding. If your words elicit a strong response from an employee, be curious rather than reactive, and try to understand how he or she might interpret what you're saying. Don't "assume [their] language is loaded down with the things it carries in your imagination," says Tippett. "It rarely is." And when someone does something well, don't assume they know it—tell them. Feeling appreciated, Tippett says, is one of the most effective motivators.

Everything Needs Time

The fallout from an unpopular decision can weigh on your mind long after the company has moved on. Tippett says it's important to be comfortable showing vulnerability, something she learned when she spun off On Being from American Public Media into its own production company. Hiring missteps and the pressures of growing her enterprise made her feel lonely. Her mentors assured her that what she was experiencing were necessary growing pains. "Sometimes we get wise not by learning new things, but by recovering old things we knew and then forgot," she says—like the fact that you're allowed to make mistakes, even when you're in charge. The willingness to show weakness is crucial to the humanity of an organization. "Tenderness and power actually do go together," says Tippett. "That's the real learning curve ahead."

With The Handmaid's Tale, Hulu may have an original hit to rival those of Amazon and Netflix.

Hulu is banking on more than live TV and a robust library of Modern Family and Parks and Recreation episodes to distinguish its new skinny bundle from competitors. It's also pouring resources into its original-content unit in an effort to increase its own programming, which topped out at 19 shows last year.

"Original programming is really the best way for us to define our brand," says Hulu's senior VP and head of content, Craig Erwich. "It's very important for us to be able to say, 'Only on Hulu.' " Though the service has a cult favorite in its astringent comedy Difficult People, and has enjoyed critical success with shows such as Casual and The Path, the company hasn't yet had a pop-culture hit that stands up to those of Amazon, HBO, or Netflix. It hopes to change that with the April 26 premiere of its 10-episode dystopian drama, The Handmaid's Tale. Starring Elisabeth Moss and based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, the show has already generated buzz, thanks in part to its resonant patriarchal and autocratic undertones.

"People are [already] celebrating pop culture on a regular basis on Hulu," says Erwich. Now, he hopes to generate conversation. In March, Hulu debuted Harlots, which tells the story of sex workers in 18th-century London (and is written and produced exclusively by women), and this fall it will release a new drama based on Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Looming Tower, an investigation into the events leading up to September 11. The goal, says Erwich, is to establish Hulu as a great place for all kinds of storytelling. "Hulu isn't just appealing to one demographic," he says. "We have to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people."

Streaming Wars

Hulu is not the only skinny bundle to enter the ring. Here, a look at its live-streaming competitors.

1. Sling TV: Dish Networks' Sling TV is the cheapest bundle, starting at just $20 a month, but it's also the skinniest. The basic "orange" plan gives you more than 30 channels, including Disney and ESPN, but no major broadcast networks. The "blue" plan, for $25 a month, will get you Fox and NBC, but you lose the Disney channels.

2. DirecTV Now: DirecTV Now is more expensive but offers the most complete lineup of channels. Plans range from $35 to $70 a month for between 60 and 120 channels; the latter includes MTV Classic and Sundance TV. All the major networks are available except CBS.

3. Sony PlayStation Vue: One of the biggest perks is that the Vue has a cloud-based DVR and allows for profiles for different family members. It also supports up to five simultaneous streams at one time—more than any of its competitors. Plans range from $40 to $75 a month for between 45 and 90 channels, including CBS.

Trade-in luxury denim, a cult-favorite perfume, coffee for delivery, and more.

What the Fast Company community is loving this month.

1. A.P.C. Denim

From $125, usonline.apc.fr

"A.P.C.'s Butler denim program enables customers to trade in their preloved A.P.C. jeans for a new pair at half price. The old ones are curated, reshaped, refreshed, and signed by their previous owner for the new buyer to enjoy." —Sébastien Fabre, CEO, Vestiaire Collective

2. Clare V. Purse

From $345, clarev.com

"I'm obsessed with Clare V.'s luxury leather bags. The gift wrapping comes with a handwritten note, which is such a special touch." —Joanna Rose, SVP of corporate communications, Related Companies

3. Bowflex Dumbbells

From $499, bowflex.com

"These compact, adjustable Select-Tech 560 dumbbells integrate smart technology to track reps and weight for you." —Garett Press, founder, Verst

4. Chamomile Toner

$32, ceciliawongskincare.com

"I love living in New York City, but it makes my skin sad. I carry around Cecilia Wong's all-natural chamomile toner, which revitalizes my face with just a spritz." —Laura Hood, VP of marketing, YouNow

5. Allbirds Runners

$95, allbirds.com

"These sneakers are made entirely of wool, are super breathable, and you don't even have to wear socks." —Jordana Kier, cofounder, Lola

6. Daily Harvest

From $6.99, daily-harvest.com

"The preportioned Daily Harvest smoothie kits are a game changer. They get mailed to my door, and in no time I'm making delicious smoothies and can get back to the hustle of building a technology startup." —Dan Reich, cofounder and CEO, Troops

7. Le Labo Fragrance

From $75, lelabofragrances.com

"Le Labo's stores are amazing—like a madman's chemistry lab—and their scents are super unique." —Terry Lee,COO, MeUndies

8. Within VR App

Free, with.in

"If you have Google Cardboard, Within is a terrific way to try out a variety of virtual-reality content. Lovr, about falling in love, is my favorite, even if it did make me a little dizzy." —Stephanie Chan, head of operations and editorial, Poncho

9. Nudo Adopt

From $69, nudoadopt.com

"Nudo lets me adopt an olive tree in Italy and receive bottles of its olive oil. Every time a new bottle arrives I get a whiff of Europe in my kitchen." —Morgan Hermand-Waiche, founder and CEO, Adore Me

10. "In the Company of Women"

From $35, artisanbooks.com

"This book by Grace Bonney, creator of Design Sponge, is lovely to have as a resource. It's full of inspiration for creative, entrepreneurial women. It features over 100 interviews with the likes of Tavi Gevinson and Janet Mock." —Elizabeth Groeschen, marketing and partnerships coordinator, B&H Photo Video

11. Oura Ring

From $299, ouraring.com

"I have been skeptical of wearables in the past, but the user experience and insight the Oura ring and app give me is invaluable. It tracks not only my sleep, but also my heart rate, activity, and general health. Because your finger has a stronger pulse than your wrist, it's also very precise." —Marcela Sapone, CEO, Hello Alfred

12. Brain.fm

Free, brain.fm

"Brain.fm is AI-composed music that's made specifically to improve focus and overall brain function. Just pop your headphones into your phone and voilà!" —Mike Swift, cofounder and CEO, Major League Hacking

13. James Perse Clothing

$375, jamesperse.com

"I travel a great deal, so it's important to be comfortable. I love James Perse's cashmere—they're incredible for those long flights." —Guive Balooch, global vice president, L'Oréal Technology Incubator

14. Driftaway Coffee

From $12, driftaway.coffee

"Freshly roasted coffee arrives at my door weekly from Brooklyn. I give this as a gift because everyone adores the tasting kit." —Juanita Soranno, developer

15. Foragers Market

$3.99, foragersmarket.com

"These savory scones have ingredients like Gruyère, rosemary, and apple. Go early, and get them hot out of the oven at this New York City market." —Tevis Trower, founder and CEO, Balance Integration

Black Lives Matter gets tech-y, Farfetch brings on the Store of the Future, and more from our Most Innovative Companies alumni.

Updates from our World's Most Innovative Companies alumni.

Farfetch

CEO José Neves founded his nine-year-old company with a mission to bridge the gap between physical and digital by helping luxury boutiques around the world put their inventory online. This month, Farfetch will host an event called FarfetchOS, in London, where Neves will announce a new technology suite called the Store of the Future, the latest business unit for the $1 billion company. The new concept will allow Farfetch's partner retailers to track inventory across their e-commerce and storefront arms and help further individualize in-person customer interactions. "We actually see the future of fashion as centered in the physical store, which I know is ironic for a tech business," Neves says. "I really believe that beautiful products belong in great stores. They don't belong in these dark warehouses."

But for all his attention to real-world shopping, Neves is further cultivating Farfetch Black & White, a service the company offers to fashion brands to power their e-commerce sites. The platform provides support for everything from payments and logistics to customer service and in-store returns. Since its launch a year ago, the Black & White API has grown to six clients, including Manolo Blahnik, Christopher Kane, and DKNY.

At the same time, Farfetch has been expanding its own site's inventory to include jewelry and kids' fashion, with even more categories to come. Recently, the company signed its 500th boutique, and boasted 60% growth and more than $800 million in sales in 2016. "We are not a retailer," Neves says. "We are here to help brands and retailers find what the luxury experience is of 2020 and beyond. We want to be the platform for the global fashion industry."

Milestones: In November, Farfetch hired its first-ever chief strategy officer, Stephanie Phair, a Net-a-Porter veteran.

Challenges: As Amazon ramps up its own inventory of luxury fashion, it's treading close to Farfetch's terrain.

Buzz: Postive

Black Lives Matter

Just days before Donald Trump's inauguration, activist organization Black Lives Matter and advertising agency J. Walter Thompson launched a new web application called Mark Yourself Unsafe. A riff on Facebook's Safety Check, this "unsafety check" lets African Americans label themselves on social media as in danger because, the app explains, "being Black in America is a national emergency." The app, says Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, is a reminder that "black people and other marginalized groups are unsafe under this administration."

The provocative app is part of an ongoing collaboration between BLM and the New York–based ad agency, which began when JWT creative director Mo Osunbor reached out to Cullors, offering pro bono resources to the movement. Cullors, for her part, was looking to expand the organization's reach with actionable digital tools. In December, the two created a site called Backing Black Business, a searchable map of brick-and-mortar and online companies run by African Americans. Still in beta, the site features more than 300 businesses and is adding more daily.

Meanwhile, Mark Yourself Unsafe, which has been used by thousands of people, is becoming a viral tool to teach people about police violence and inequality. Projects like these, says Cullors, are vital given our political climate: "We know that more human and civil rights will be violated. So what do you do with that?" she says. "We're planning for people's survival right now. The act of marking yourself unsafe is an act of resistance."

Milestones: Black Lives Matter protesters played a key role in the wake of President Trump's immigration ban, helping to mobilize against the executive order.

Challenges: Post-election protest movements are springing up en masse, creating difficulty for Black Lives Matter's hashtag activism to stay in the spotlight.

Buzz: Positive

Riot Games

Milestones: Thanks to a new partnership with the Big Ten Network, Riot Games' multiplayer videogame League of Legends is becoming a serious college e-sport. Twelve of the conference's schools will compete this season, with every player receiving a $5,000 scholarship.

Challenges: Activision Blizzard is building up its e-sports league for its first-person shooter game Overwatch, which will eventually include in-person spectators.

Buzz: Positive

Ford

Milestones: In a bid to create autonomous-vehicle software for its own cars and others, Ford is investing $1 billion in Pittsburgh-based startup Argo AI, run by Google and Uber veterans.

Challenges: Ford's big bet to create the self-driving platform of the future puts it up against the likes of Apple and Uber—as well as basically every other automobile company.

Buzz: Neutral

LG Electronics

Milestones: LG's new G6 smartphone moves the company away from its signature modular phone construction to prioritize usability and design. It has a taller screen ratio primed for full-view multi­tasking.

Challenges: LG has been struggling to break through in a crowded market—its mobile communications unit recently saw a 23% drop in quarterly revenue.

Buzz: Negative

Nest

Milestones: Yoky Matsuoka, who was responsible for much of Nest's signature adaptive-thermostat technology, recently rejoined the company as CTO after a stint at Apple.

Challenges: Even as other startups rush into the connected-home space, Nest is still trying to speed up its product timeline. Last fall, it released its fourth product, an outdoor camera.

Buzz: Neutral

Birchbox

Milestones: In February, Birchbox introduced a new premium tier for its current subscribers. At $14 a month, it will allow users to better customize their boxes. The company is also opening a second brick-and-mortar store, this time in Paris, which will let shoppers create their own boxes alongside beauty consultants.

Challenges: Last summer, Birchbox received a $15 million infusion to offset a rumored drop in customer subscriptions amid increased competition from Ipsy and other services. It was also beset by user complaints about repeat product samples and the changing rewards system.

Buzz: Neutral

Marks & Spencer

Milestones: The U.K. department store reported a rise in clothing sales for the first time in two years. New CEO Steve Rowe has been increasing the number of products while reducing discounts.

Challenges: Last fall, M&S announced it would shutter 30 locations and turn 45 more into food-only shops, despite the fact that its food sales grew by only 0.6% in 2016.

Buzz: Neutral

AirAsia

Milestones: In January, AirAsia X became Asia's first budget carrier approved by the FAA to fly into the U.S., opening the door to low-cost transpacific flights. First up may be routes into Hawaii.

Challenges: AirAsia was named in a bribery charge after an employee from Rolls-Royce allegedly gave a $3.2 million product discount to an airline executive. AirAsia has denied any wrongdoing, but the situation puts AirAsia under scrutiny from investigators.

Buzz: Neutral

W.L. Gore & Associates

Milestones: The company behind Gore-Tex recently unveiled new facilities at its Delaware headquarters to help it better test materials. The labs include an Environmental Chamber and Rain Tower, and they can now subject products to everything from solar radiation to high wind.

Challenges: One of Gore's biggest competitors, Polartec, has been making strides with its own breathable, moisture-wicking technology and is working with clothing company MtnLogic on a new brand of heavy-duty alpine gear to be released later this year.

Buzz: Positive

Remember back when “VUCA” (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) only really applied to companies? Those were the days, huh? Lately, with geopolitical discord abroad, political tensions here at home in the U.S., and all manner of policy shifts that could impact U.S. businesses, plenty of entrepreneurs may be wishing for steadier leadership. I know I am.

Once reserved for boardrooms and managerial scenarios, it feels as though VUCA is becoming something of a new normal, impacting leaders and organizations of all sizes, pretty much everywhere. In the opening weeks of Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post‘s Jena MacGregor reported, “Many human resources consultants say the flood of change and news is taking up much more of workers’ energy and focus than in past presidential transitions.” And since the news cycle hasn’t exactly settled down since then, we may just have to get comfortable with that.

We’re now living and operating in a very different world than the one that existed just a year ago. No one really knows what’s coming around the next corner, we’re all operating on uneven footing. Still, business leaders’ jobs haven’t fundamentally changed–we still need to spark creativity, drive innovation, and ensure sustainability. So lately I’ve tried to remind myself that while I can’t predict the future, I can make sure I’m prepared to live in it, make sense of it, and navigate whatever upheavals arise as strategically as possible. And to do that, I keep going back to these three tried-and-true lessons.

1. Your Attitude Either Attracts Support Or Repels It

Emotions are a natural part of being human, and controlling them doesn’t mean becoming an android. But how well we manage what we’re feeling affects not just our own performance but also our interactions with others. That may sound obvious, but it’s easy to overlook during times of uncertainty.

There’s lots of leadership advice for dealing with self-doubt and anxiety over your own capabilities, but what about pessimism regarding the world out there–the things you can’t control? I’ve found that whenever I’m concentrating on what’s wrong with things happening around me, I’m more liable to fixate on what I find lacking.

It takes a real effort to keep thinking positively when this happens. But personally, I’ve found using affirmations to be helpful for keeping my own objectives in view and coping with things I can’t change. I try to remind myself what I can change–and for the better. I refocus on my immediate sphere of influence, reminding myself that no matter what happens, I still need to work with others to reach our goals.

In good times and bad, I remind myself that holding onto negative emotions won’t help–it’ll just chase away potential collaborators, mentors, partners, and others. This takes effort, practice, and patience, but it’s crucial to cultivating an attitude that attracts support rather than repels it–especially when that’s hard to do.

2. Empathy Always Pays Dividends

For communication to get through on all sides, we have to be clear about what we want from each other. That’s true all the time, but especially so during periods of high uncertainty.

There’s no way to start working toward a common goal until everyone understands what it is and what’s expected of them to help achieve it. As a leader, I try especially hard to remain approachable and keep an open dialogue flowing. It’s harder to keep everyone motivated, asking questions, and sharing their concerns when a lot is changing. But getting it right just means doubling down on the type of empathy leaders love to talk about under much steadier conditions.

This means not just clearly articulating our message but also listening actively—without bias or judgment and with a real willingness to consider different perspectives. Again, this is an adage so familiar that it almost sounds trite, but it’s something I keep coming back to these days. It’s about trading messages respectfully and accurately, not just delivering them. Paying heed to their factual as well as emotional content makes for mutual understanding when that’s badly needed.

Leaders may feel their job is to reassure their teams–to talk more than they’re used to. But I’ve found listening to be even more important. When I’m actively listening, I’ll hear genuine concerns and clear a space for talking level-headedly about how to cope with them together.

3. You Can’t Slow Down

Humans are resilient creatures. We have a natural capacity to move toward the light, to make the most of bad situations. In turmoil, I know that it’s paramount for me as a business leader to define a better vision for the future. But there’s a risk of getting too philosophical and losing your momentum, your impulse toward action.

I’ve found that in trying to instill a sense of mission and purpose in my organization, I need to keep underscoring the urgency of the tasks at hand. No mission is static–it’s never just a matter of principles. It’s what you do about them that counts. Purpose-driven organizations act and adapt. No matter the political, social, or economic climate, there’s always a way to find new market spaces or gaps in existing ones. There are always problems to solve.

To stay agile and respond to changes my team and I can never predict, I try to keep asking myself:

1. What product or service needs, customer tastes, technologies, socioeconomic factors, and cultural mores are already changing–no matter what we might be doing about them?
2. What are our competitors’ current and future strategies? Where will they be relative to us in the next quarter or the next year?
3. What does my organization do well right now? What have we always done better than anybody?
4. What can we do better by finding new partners or collaborators, or by considering mergers and acquisitions?

This is a useful checklist all the time, of course, but I try to keep it front and center during periods of rapid change. If change is embedded in everything you do already, then adapting to a period of turmoil won’t seem like such a foreign concept. In my experience, that takes a culture of experimentation and responsibility. When things are going well, innovation tends to offer incremental benefits, but when circumstances demand making big shifts quickly, you need everyone to know it’s incumbent on them to take risks, and that they have the liberty to do so.

You may not know what’s coming next, but the thing about uncertainty is that it’s never an unfamiliar feeling. There was an earlier moment where you felt just as uncertain, but you somehow made it through. For me, anyway, the key isn’t just to wait it out; it’s what you do–together–that makes all the difference.

Serial entrepreneur Faisal Hoque is the founder of Shadoka, which enables aspirations to lead, innovate, and transform with its accelerators and solutions. He is the author of Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill) and other books. Use the Everything Connects leadership app for free.

Copyright (c) 2017 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your job search started and stopped with the company you’re already interning for? Sometimes, it happens. If there’s a role available, and the position and company are a good fit, you could find yourself sitting behind the same desk you’re at now after graduation.

But while the internship-to-job track is no guarantee, those hours spent getting professional experience can help you find gainful employment. In fact, a recent report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 51.7% of students who’d had an internship received at least one job offer compared with 33.8% of those with no internship experience.

So we asked career service professionals to share advice for making the most of your internship—whether you hope to continue working at that company, or want to use it to springboard into another post-college full-time job.

If you think you might want to work at the company where you’re interning, here’s what to do:

Pick The Right Time To Express Your Interest

Turns out, there’s a sweet spot when it comes to talking with internship supervisors about future work at the company.

“Seniors should probably request a meeting with their supervisor toward the end of the semester,” says Thomas Ward from Adelphi University in New York. “Even if you are a star, students sometimes jump the gun by approaching their supervisor prematurely or too early into their tenure.”

He agrees that it’s a balance, because you don’t want to wait too long before expressing interest. But, “in most instances, there is a lead time that organizations need to transition interns into full-time employees.”

Immerse Yourself In The Company

As an intern, you’ve got a foot in the door and a leg up on the competition. So use it to get exposure to decision-makers and show what you can do for the company.

“Attend as many professional gatherings and staff-type meetings as possible,” suggests Lisa Gavigan of Wheaton College in Massachusetts, “and speak with the organization’s clients when appropriate.”

“Not only will you learn a great deal about the organization, which will serve you well when drafting a cover letter and participating in interviews,” she says, “but you’ll also be better able to determine if this is, in fact, the best next step for your career development.”

Find Out Everything You Can From Your Coworkers

Interns have another advantage over other job seekers because they can get the inside scoop on what it’s like to work for the company, as well as what kind of candidate the company is looking to hire. All you have to do is ask.

“Interns should reach out to both entry-level staff and supervisors for informational interviews,” says Vickie Cox-Lanyon from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

“You should come to the meeting prepared with specific questions about the individual’s background, career choices, and goals that go beyond what you can read on a social media profile,” says Cox-Lanyon. “At some point in the conversation, the interviewer will likely ask about your interests. That is the time to give your elevator pitch and express your interests and goals, which can include future employment within the company.”

It also pays to check out job review sites like kununu to see what a company’s current employees think about the leadership, salary, benefits, and more.

But what if you don’t anticipate full-time work with your internship? Here’s what to do:

Learn How Your Colleagues Got To Where They Are Today

Whether or not you land a job at your current internship, soak up as much knowledge as you can from your colleagues. It will only benefit you to learn from these pros—plus your enthusiasm could make an impression and they might think of you for a job in the future.

“Learn from people working at the company about the types of professional organizations they belong to, and ask to accompany them as a guest to one of the organization’s meetings,” suggests Kristen McMullen of the Charleston School of Business, in Charleston, South Carolina.

“Also find out what certifications or professional development they recommend,” she says. “Excelling in any profession is about continually developing yourself.”

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Job Search Help

Everybody you’re working with knows that you’re there to gain experience and that you’re hoping to land a full-time gig after your internship. You don’t have to be shy about asking for help finding a job.

“Ask for some advice about industry-specific job searches and perhaps even a resume review,” says Gavigan. “You could even ask coworkers to recommend open positions or provide an email introduction to someone they know that might be hiring.”

And don’t forget—one of the best things about an internship is the people you meet. “If there are no job openings in the immediate future, stay in touch with supervisors and mentors in the organization,” says Stephanie Kitt from the University of Tennessee. “Continue to network with them and make them aware of your job search.”

This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.

Over the last few years, diversity has inched perilously toward buzzword status. Tech companies have taken to talking loudly and frequently about it since 2014 in particular, when Google became the first to make its diversity stats public. In the Trump era, championing diversity has arguably become more commodified than ever, as brands infuse their marketing and messaging with their politics—emphasizing their support for women, immigrants, and minorities.

So I wasn’t surprised that in conversations with several CEOs and execs, many were quick to cite diversity as something their companies care deeply about. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into action—or cold, hard numbers. As the federal government has begun to target individuals on the basis of religion, national origin, and gender identity, businesses are increasingly under pressure to take tangible steps to boost representation in their workplaces and protect their employees from discrimination. These are a few ways tech leaders say they’re working to accomplish that.

Running The Numbers (And Sometimes Even Sharing Them)

TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot takes seriously the precedent tech companies set a few years ago on transparency. Last year, the freelance errand-runner marketplace published its demographic targets for 2016, raising African-American representation from 11% to 13%, for example, and offering internships geared toward African-Americans.

In addition to partnering this year with hiring startups like Blendoor and Jopwell, TaskRabbit is also analyzing the demographics of its Tasker community, with the goal of “ensuring that it reflects the nation’s population and the communities that we serve,” Brown-Philpot says. The company wants not just to build a diverse full-time workforce, but an equally diverse community of Taskers on the platform.

Not every company has answered the call to release hard data just yet, and some of the early momentum to do so since 2014 has flagged. Aaron Levie, CEO of the file-sharing platform Box, says his company looks “pretty similar to the Googles of the world, so we’re relatively average on a lot of our statistics.” When Box releases a diversity report later this year (it’s tentatively aiming for June), it will be the company’s first. Warby Parker, too, plans to share its diversity stats publicly this year. That puts them ahead of many other tech companies, many of which either haven’t put forth internal data at all or are subtly tempering the value they claim to see in doing so.

Snap similarly claims it cares about these issues but has yet to share numbers that prove it, while Uber published its first diversity report on Monday after weeks of bad press. Companies like Twitter and Pinterest, which both delayed the release of new data last December in order to retool their approaches, suggested that just releasing data isn’t enough.

Levie agrees. Like those other firms, he says Box’s main focus is on “making sure that we have working programs in place and things that we’ve been able to drive real activity around.” One of those programs is a new fellowship for minority college students to spend a week at Box’s headquarters to learn about business roles at tech companies. To Levie, efforts like these are more important than “just putting out another release that sort of looks exactly the same as everybody else.”

Making Pay And Promotions More Equitable

In the meantime, companies are working on curbing bias in the ways they pay and promote the employees they already have. Brown-Philpot says TaskRabbit recently overhauled its performance-review process so that now “all promotions are discussed with the entire management team and are signed off by the group before they are awarded.” That’s required bringing more people into the room to “make sure that we’re treating everybody fairly,” she says.

Levie adds that at Box, “The rate of promotion of women actually exceeds the rate of promotion of men.” And according to a spokesperson, the percentage of executive promotions of women is rising, from just 25% in 2013 to 40% in 2016. Levie says Box has now reached a scale where it’s had to “move more toward a model of intention and explicit action. The organic approach, when either speed or bias came into play, was leading to just the same kind of outcomes as a lot of other organizations.”

Hiring More Diverse Talent–Either Now Or Later

But until recently, diversity hasn’t been something every company builds policies around from the beginning. Many still don’t, and even those that do find they need to course-correct later.

“We started thinking about building a diverse team when we were 10 people in a glorified conference room,” says Kathryn Minshew, who cofounded The Muse with Alex Cavoulacos in 2011. But that proved harder than expected; like many startup founders, Minshew and Cavoulacos found themselves recruiting largely from their own networks—which meant hiring a cavalcade of women.

“All of a sudden, we realized [our team] was 10 women and two men,” Minshew says. Despite “trying to be thoughtful about diversity,” they quickly realized that relying on referrals was limiting. “Not only were we asking a high number of women for their thoughts, but on top of that,” she adds, “I think a lot of men have a tendency to refer women to us.”

Other startups are actually urged to avoid focusing on diversity until later. Tinia Pina, CEO of the agriculture tech startup Re-Nuble, works with just two other people—both of whom happen to be white men. She knows they’ll “need to be able to adapt, and that’s my biggest driver for having diversity as priority No. 1 for us.” But when looking for an operations and manufacturing manager, one adviser cautioned against letting diversity drive that choice.

Typical hires for this type of role, Pina says, are “someone in fluid dynamics or a water engineer or mechanical engineer—and most tend to be white males in those positions. I don’t go with the norm,” she says, “but my [female] mentor told me that while raising this capital, I should not actually seek a woman on the team for that position, exactly because we’d be less likely to raise that. And I was shocked.”

Minshew understands the opposite risks. “If you have a fairly uniform team, it can be really hard to find great people who are different from the mold because it’s very hard if people feel like they’re going to be a token,” she says, recalling how she “used to have other startup founders come to me and say, ‘My team is 19 dudes and we want to hire our first woman. Can you help?’ And I always say, ‘How excited would you be about being the only man on a team of 19 women?’”

Checking Culture Against Values

Minshew has found it helpful to define a clear set of “core values” her team uses to evaluate potential hires. “We created six core values that we decided were critical to someone being successful at The Muse,” she said. “Within an interview process, each candidate will be screened against each of those values at least once.” That helps hiring managers avoid the pitfalls of “a very highly subjective assessment of fit or personality.”

Warby Parker co-CEO Neil Blumenthal says hiring is just one of many places to look out for mismatches between your culture and what you claim to value. Each of the 25 conference rooms at the company’s headquarters is named after a literary character. Last month, Blumenthal went through each name and found that only six were female and six were people of color. “We weren’t as thoughtful as we could have been when we were naming the conference rooms,” Blumenthal realized.

He understands how even symbolic diversity like this can have a real, yet unseen, impact on inclusion and diversity of thought inside the company. At Warby Parker, meetings are preceded by agendas distributed in advance, and notes on what was discussed are sent out afterward. But what began as a productivity tool quickly morphed into an inclusion strategy.

“Different individuals process information differently and communicate differently, especially extroverts and introverts,” Blumenthal explains. Circulating an agenda and letting people comment ahead of time in Google Docs, he says, “helps ensure that people’s voices are heard, and it’s not just the squeaky wheel who gets the grease.”

Choosing Investors Wisely

Since women entrepreneurs have a disproportionately hard time getting funding, it’s no surprise that they often turn to female VCs. Katerina Schneider is the CEO of vitamin startup Ritual, which is backed primarily by women investors. “Investors choose you,” she reflects, “but you always kind of choose your investors as well. And I always think about bringing on investors as I think about hiring people for the team: Do they share our values? Are they excited about the product and the vision? Do they share the same kind of integrity?”

This was probably doubly true in Schneider’s case, since she was launching a product intended for women and shopping around for investors while pregnant. “I got a lot of mixed feedback,” she says.

“There was a really well-known investor that I met with who told me, ‘My wife was a pretty successful businesswoman, and then after she got pregnant, she didn’t want to work. So I’m just worried that might happen to you.’” That was useful to hear; Schneider sought funding elsewhere.

Moving Past Checkboxes

It’s no wonder that this can feel exhausting (or worse), and encourage some founders to look for ways to get beyond the gender binary. “Our branding isn’t super feminine,” Minshew says of The Muse, “it’s sort of androgynous and fun and optimistic.” This, she believes, is “really important for the longevity of the brand. We consciously look to hire great people; we’re not thinking, ‘Is it a guy or a girl?’ But we want a balance.”

Etsy, for its part, lets employees self-report gender. And with 54% of employees identifying as women (although the company has the benefit of a platform that already skews female), Etsy is one of the rare tech companies that isn’t mostly male. “To be fair,” says Brian Christman, Etsy’s SVP of people and workplace, “our employees have come to expect . . . that we are inclusive of any number of different identifiers.”

That’s by design. “We kind of go all in on operationalizing this stuff, and it sends a very clear message, I believe, to the employees that are underrepresented groups that we believe in them and we support them. This is not window dressing.”

Schneider believes diversity also means accommodating the shifting needs of different age brackets. “Now you have our generation—millennials—that are also becoming parents, and that’s kind of a new thing,” she says. “Companies have to be more accommodating of their young employees [who are] also building families. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to work.”

Ultimately, how companies solve (and don’t solve) issues like these may all just boil down to a matter of empathy. Brown-Philpot points out that she’s often been the lone black person in the room. “I have some empathy,” says the TaskRabbit CEO. “I have been the only, or one of the only [such leaders], for a large part of my life, in a lot of different situations. To know what that feels like is so powerful because I can put myself in someone else’s shoes.”

But everyone can do that, she believes. “Every single person, regardless of whether you’re in a majority group, if you’re a male, or if you’re white,” has at some point been on the margins and can recall that feeling. To Brown-Philpot and others, that represents an opportunity: Make diversity matter to everyone, and you’re bound to keep making headway.

Tech culture has the reputation for long hours, intense competition, and little time for reflection.

But Asana, a workplace-productivity management company founded by former Facebookers and Googlers, couldn’t be further from this stereotype.

The company is built on the idea that mindfulness, clear communication, and compassion are all critical to long-term success. Asana has become known for its radically inclusive, positive work environment.

This approach has paid off. Asana received a rare perfect rating on Glassdoor and a spot on Glassdoor’s Top 10 Best Places to Work in 2017. The company was also named one of Entrepreneur magazine’s best workplace cultures of 2017.

For founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, this was the goal from the start. When the two former Facebook engineers sat down to build their new company in 2008, they drafted two things before anything else: Asana’s codebase and the company’s core values.

The values included things like healthy work-life balance, inclusiveness, embracing mindfulness and equanimity, taking responsibility, and always communicating openly and honestly.

But while countless startups dream of an open atmosphere full of collaboration, that type of environment is extremely challenging to implement. For too many businesses, culture becomes viewed as something that will form naturally with enough free lunches and ping-pong tables.

Moskovitz and Rosenstein quickly understood that if they were going to realize their vision for a better workplace, they would have to take a more active approach.

“We decided to treat culture as a product,” Rosenstein says.

He explained that instead of looking at culture as something that “just happens,” he and his cofounder realized that culture was actually something that needed to be carefully designed, tested, debugged, and iterated on, like any other product they released.

This means that representatives from all areas of the company meet regularly to reassess Asana’s values and design new ways to incorporate those values into every process at the company. Once a new process is “shipped,” an intense period of user feedback begins.

“We actively survey people anonymously, and during one-on-ones, we ask what’s working well and what isn’t working well. Based on that information, we go back to the company and say, here’s what we heard, and here’s what we’re doing to do about it,” says Rosenstein.

In fact, every quarter, the entire company takes a full week off from business to road map corporate goals for the future. Many of these goals are business-related, but culture-related reflection is heavily encouraged.

When problems are brought to the table, Rosenstein says that management is quick to address the issues. Asana even has a name for these issues–“culture bugs”–and it seeks to squash them as quickly as bugs in the codebase of any other product.

For instance, at one point the issue of “false empowerment” was raised. Asana is structured in a way to give many junior employees a great deal of ownership over decisions related to their projects. However, some younger employees felt that more senior employees were negating their decisions.

Asana restructured the way responsibility was scoped among teams in order to make sure that no junior employees felt falsely empowered (i.e., their decisions would no longer likely get overturned by a more senior manager).

Rosenstein says he recognizes that a large part of culture is also cultivating a diverse and open-minded workforce.

He feels that it’s important to make sure that employees are aware of their unconscious biases which, left untreated, can lead to breakdowns in effective communication. It’s for this reason that all Asana employees complete mindfulness training when they begin work, and the company offers several employee identity-resource groups focused on things like race and gender.

In 2015, Asana poached Sonja Gittens-Ottley from Facebook to serve as the company’s first head of diversity and inclusion, and the company has since established recruiting partnerships with Code2040, the Ola initiative, and DevColor, all organizations focused on getting more minorities into tech.

“I’m just such a hardcore feminist,” Rosenstein says. “I know that it’s not enough just to say it, but there’s a very strong, deep respect for all genders and races at Asana that in some ways is more subtle than any one particular process.”

In order to supercharge its welcoming, inclusive environment, Asana also offers many top-notch perks that have become a common feature of tech startup life.

Free meals and snacks are provided in multiple areas around the company, and Asana has its own in-house cook who prepares seasonally appropriate home-cooked organic meals twice a day.

All new employees are given $10,000 to set up their own customized workspace, and for those working toward their daily step goal, a row of treadmill desks is set up overlooking the San Francisco-headquartered company’s eighth-floor view. There is also a game area, squishy chairs to relax in, and in-house yoga sessions twice a week.

If you’re looking to grow personally or professionally, the company even offers access to a life coach.

“We have a culture of work hard, live well,” says Rosenstein, who credits Asana’s top-notch culture for enabling the company to grow, and to hire and retain top talent. “I felt like we needed to set an example. Asana’s whole mission is to enable teams to work together more easily. So we wanted to be the change that we want to see.

“Even if companies are just out there to make money, they should still invest in culture. Treating each other well, being respectful to each other, building a culture you actually want to live in, these are all things that make people happier, and in the end, more productive.

“Companies that are succeeding with a more mercenary model are succeeding in spite of it, not because of it.”

Taylor Lorenz is a freelance technology reporter based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Slate, Entrepreneur, and Inc.

It’s no surprise that a lot of people dream of landing a job at Facebook. The social network’s massive reach means employees get to work on something that potentially affects billions of people. The company has also consistently placed high on the rankings of best places to work for offering career advancement, good benefits, and a positive culture. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also earned a 95% approval rating from his staff.

But how, exactly, does one land a coveted spot at Facebook?

It’s not easy to make the cut, but there is one thing their hires all have in common: “A penchant for action,” according to Vijaye Raji, engineering director and site lead for the Seattle office. Their values must align with values of the company, he says. “We are looking for makers who are bold, move fast, and get stuff done,” says Raji.

Once an applicant is selected, it’s typical for them to go through several rounds of interviewing, progressing from a phone or Skype call, to in-person rounds starting with Facebook’s recruiters and leading up to department heads.

Next to its Menlo Park, California, headquarters, Seattle is Facebook’s largest and fastest growing location. Together Raji (Facebook employee No. 15) and Melissa Nixon, Facebook’s recruiting director in Seattle, have interviewed scores of hopeful candidates. Here are some of their tips for standing out and scoring the job.

Go Ahead, Be Nervous

Nixon says feeling nervous is natural, and she’s a believer in leaning in to it. “Nerves and excitement feel the same,” she points out. Admitting that you’re nervous to the interviewer is a good way to push through it, she explains. “It’s a pretty friendly group,” Nixon explains, particularly because everyone hopes they’re someone you get to work with in the future.

Practice, Practice, Practice

It’s not only the way to get to Carnegie Hall, it’s the way to ace interviews, according to both Nixon and Raji. Preparing yourself mentally can help build confidence, says Raji, so it helps to do mock interviews with friends.

At Facebook, all the engineers are required to code on a whiteboard during their interviews. Although this sounds kind of terrifying, Raji says that it’s become familiar territory to anyone doing a technical interview. “We don’t expect you to know 15 programming languages,” Raji contends, but you do need to have basic computer science down pat. For example, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of how an algorithm works rather than memorizing a bunch of different ones.

Raji suggests picking one language and getting really comfortable with that through practice. A misstep he often sees is when engineers try to reimplement everything they know, which reduces the amount of time they have to solve the problem. Other ways to practice working through problems in real time are by participating in contests or hackathons, says Raji.

Thinking Out Loud

An often overlooked but valuable part of the interview process from the recruiter’s and hiring manager’s perspective is when a candidate is able to think through their responses out loud. At the whiteboard, this is especially true. “We understand you’re not going to come up with the most awesome solution in one shot,” Raji explains. He suggests writing an answer first, then iterate on it. “This is something we love,” he underscores. “Test it, and say how you can improve what you just wrote.”

“Don’t be afraid of making mistakes,” Nixon adds. “It’s part of everyday reality.” Talk about how you think through these things and focus on getting to a solution so the interviewer can see how you would operate on the job.

What To Say If You Don’t Have A Lot Of Experience

Many of Facebook’s hires are college grads or early in their careers, so not having a long list of accomplishments isn’t going to immediately discount a candidate. But Nixon points out that you have to be able to show what you are good at. And it’s not enough to present a laundry list of skills. “Give detailed examples from work or school,” says Nixon. For example, if you love working with all different kinds of people, tell about a time you worked well within a diverse team.

Facebook’s interviewers are also trained to ask leading questions like: “Tell me about a time when you–fill in the blank. How did you handle that situation?” Nixon again points to the importance of talking through the answer here. “We want to know people’s thought processes,” she says, because it goes back to Facebook’s desire to hire builders and makers.

Pesky Questions

Both Nixon and Raji maintain that no one interviewing job candidates is going to lob a curveball question like, “Why are tennis balls fuzzy?” Although some recruiters maintain that those questions are valuable because they can see how a person thinks on their feet, Nixon says they ultimately don’t reveal anything important about the candidate.

Tough questions that make an applicant think are part of the process. Nixon remembers her own interviews at Facebook before she was hired in February 2016 (after spending a decade at Google). “I was having a great time,” she recalls, “but then [the interviewer] asked me about the line between recruiting and engineering. I’d never been asked that.”

Nixon admits she responded with something vague that certainly didn’t speak to the values of the company. That’s when the interviewer told her, “Here there is no line, we are all in this together.” Looking back, says Nixon, she realized that every interview is a give and take. “It’s not just about us interviewing them,” she says. The right answer, and there could be many different variations on it, is to understand what Facebook’s culture is, and how that plays into whatever is being asked.

“The interviewer is never going to leave someone hanging,” she observes, because of the collaborative culture at Facebook. If they get stumped, the interviewer might give them a hint. But, she says, candidates should also ask clarifying questions to ensure they understand what the line of questioning is getting at.

The bottom line is, “Interviewing is scary. It is when you do have experience, like death and public speaking,” Nixon adds. But Raji reminds hopefuls, “Mind-set matters just as much as what you know.” Oh, and they’re hiring.