In Sahelian Africa, a region that spans the continent and is bordered by the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south, the roofs of many houses are built with bush timber and straw. But amid population growth and rapid deforestation in the region, people have begun to seek out an alternative: corrugated iron sheets, imported from Europe, that are expensive and have to be replaced every five to seven years.

Though they’re more “modern,” these roofs have failed to deliver sustainable housing to the majority of people in the region. “To build their houses, they have to dip into their meager food, health, and education budgets to buy these imported and expensive materials, which plunges them into a vicious circle of poverty,” Cécilia Rinaudo, deputy director of the Nubian Vault Association (AVN) tells Fast Company.

The program began in Burkina Faso, when a French mason named Thomas Granier, who had learned of the ancient technique, traveled to the country to see if it could take root in a region that, though unfamiliar with the technique, was in need of housing and had the resources to support it. Along with Seri Youlou, a Burkinabe farmer, they built Burkina Faso’s first Nubian vault in 1998. As they continued to trial the building method, “they discovered that it was not just a simple experiment but the real solution to the housing issue in West Africa, where which millions of families are struggling because of the disappearance of wood and straw used for traditional buildings,” Rinaudo says. Granier founded AVN in 2000.

In Sahelian Africa, Rinaudo says, housing is a necessity, yet precarious for many families. Despite the fact that Sahelian populations have contributed very little to climate change, they are particularly vulnerable to its effects: extreme temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns, and desertification. In rural areas, many people work as subsistence farmers outside formal economies and live on around $2 per day.

To date, AVN has supported the construction of 2,000 buildings and housed 24,000 people across Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Benin, and Ghana. Through training masons and apprentices, the nonprofit estimates that its contributed around $2.6 million to local economies and saved an estimated 65,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions (calculated over a 30-year lifespan of the building). The homes, Rinaudo says, “represent a real solution for climate change mitigation and the adaptation of the housing sector in West Africa.”

As AVN continues to scale, it hopes to deploy its program in other western Sahelian countries including Togo, Ivory Coast, and Guinea, and eventually expand to Sudan and Rwanda. Rinaudo says the nonprofit aims to house 5% of the Sahelian population (around 20 million people) in Nubian vaults by 2050. While AVN’s efforts are focused in Africa, Rinaudo says this ancient method of construction could potentially take root in any part of the world where rainfall is scarce and timber is in short supply. While the Nubian vault technique was developed thousands of years ago, returning to it now makes sense: As we search for ways to mitigate climate change caused by a disregard for our environment, it’s only fitting that we look to a time when our relationship with our planet and its resources was not so destructive as it has become.

Before the California state legislature began cracking down on agricultural pesticide use in the mid-1980s, farmers injected their lands with pest-killing fumigants, oblivious to their toxic effects on humans. Two such pesticides were Telone, made by Dow Chemical, and D-D, made by Shell. Both contained 1,2,3-trichloropropane, or TCP–a carcinogenic byproduct of the processes used to develop soil fumigants, that, even according to the manufacturers, contributed little to the products’ efficacy. TCP never should have been in the pesticides in the first place, but by the time the Dow and Shell stopped manufacturing the products in the mid-80s, the carcinogen had already leaked into the state’s water supply, where it still remains.

Since 2001, TCP has been detected in the water systems serving over 8 million Californians, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group. It’s also been detected in water supplies in 13 other states across the country. Because the chemical is unregulated by both the state of California and the Environmental Protection Agency, public utilities are neither required to test their water for TCP levels, nor install filters to clear the water of the chemical. But after more than 40 towns and communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley–the state’s agricultural heartland–filed lawsuits against Dow Chemical and Shell in the mid-2000s. Now the California State Water Resources Control Board is beginning the process of setting a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) on TCP for the first time. Setting a MCL would require public water systems to test their water and, if needed, install filtration devices to bring the supply into compliance with the legal limit.

The San Joaquin Valley communities brought the lawsuits after learning that high TCP levels in their water supplies were linked to increased incidences of cancer and kidney disease. The MCL would hold utilities responsible for testing their water supplies for TCP, and the lawsuits would make Dow and Shell to absorb the cost of removing the contaminants by paying out a sum of money that the local utilities could then use to install filtration devices; a case already settled in the town of Clovis saw the Shell paying out $22 million in damages. A handful of other states, including Hawaii and New Jersey, have pushed their state legislatures to adopt a limit on the chemical, but their efforts have so far been unsuccessful.

Though TCP is legally unregulated, that doesn’t mean the state has been unaware of its health risks until now. In 2009, California set what’s called a “public health goal,” a guideline (but not a legally enforceable limit) determining the amount of a chemical in the water supply that will cause no more than one additional case of cancer out of a million people who drink it and shower with it daily for a lifetime. For TCP, it’s less than one part per trillion–that’s around 1,000 times smaller than a single drop of water in an Olympic-sized pool. “To put it in perspective, the risk of most chemicals is measured in parts per billion,” Bill Walker, a senior scientist at the EWG, tells Fast Company. The stringent nature of the TCP public health goal demonstrates how toxic the chemical is, yet 94 public water systems have TCP levels above that limit.

One of the ongoing missions of the EWG, Walker says, is to inform people about what’s in their drinking water. The organization regularly works with a database compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, which includes information on the testing the EPA asks utilities to do each year for contaminants that don’t yet have federal standards. “We think it’s very important that people realize there are contaminants in your drinking water for which there aren’t any standards, and are known to be quite harmful,” Walker says.

Since the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended in 1996, the EPA has ordered monitoring for over 80 unregulated contaminants, Walker says, including chloromethane, an explosive byproduct that can form when chlorine is used to disinfect water, and bromomethane, a combustible gas used as an agricultural fumigant. They have moved forward to set regulations on just one: perchlorate, an explosive ingredient used in rocket fuel and found in water sources all over the country.

Regulating such contaminants, Walker says, “is a log jam in the EPA program–part of that is due to lack of resources, and a lot of it can be attributed to lack of political will.” The IRIS Program, through which the EPA evaluates chemicals for their toxicity, is on the chopping block in Donald Trump’s 2018 budget proposal. Utilities and related industries also oppose regulations, as it would cost money for them to come into compliance with the limits. For evidence of how little recourse communities affected by poor water quality have to advocate for political assistance, look no further than Flint, Michigan, where blatant lead contamination in the water supply plagued the city for at least two years before the government stepped in. It will likely take another two years for the city’s pipes to be replaced.

But if the state of California moves to establish an MCL on TCP in a vote later this month, it will give communities more leverage in court to pursue lawsuits against companies like Dow and Shell, who were initially responsible for the presence of the chemicals. Because many of the most affected communities in California are at the lower end of the economic spectrum, they could not afford to absorb the cost of installing filters in their water systems alone–Walker estimates that would increase the cost of household water bills tenfold. But by holding corporations responsible under a legally enforceable limit, the state and communities could begin to move forward on alleviating a public health risk that’s too often disregarded.

In the last three months, Uber has been battered by a seemingly endless series of scandals: perceived strikebreaking outside of JFK airport; a backlash for joining President Donald Trump’s advisory council; a loss of 200,000 users; accusations of sexual harassment; a broken human resources department; allegations of trade-secret theft; law enforcement evasion; stalled self-driving efforts; and finally a salacious story involving Uber execs, Korean escorts, and karaoke. The accumulation of incidents has painted Uber as a win-at-all-cost place with little regard for its workers’ well-being.

CEO Travis Kalanick is believed to be the seed of this mentality, which begs onlookers to inquire: Why does Uber keep him?

That question continues to linger as pundits call for his removal. Any one, and certainly any two, of these violations could have led to the company’s CEO being dismissed. Even in Silicon Valley, where the cult of the company founder reigns, the last two years has seen founders pushed out for gaming the regulatory process and creating noxious workplace environs.

Last year in particular saw several high-profile departures. Zenefit’s CEO Parker Conrad stepped down after reports of unlicensed insurance sales representatives. Cofounder Tony Fadell left Nest amid rumors he fostered a difficult company culture. Outside of Silicon Valley, Roger Ailes departed Fox News following explosive allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. And, Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf was pressed to resign when it was discovered employees were opening fraudulent bank accounts under existing clients to meet aggressive sales goals.

And yet, Kalanick remains in charge. While this doesn’t sate our hunger for public execution, it may be better for the business to have Kalanick stay put at the top.

Firing CEOs Is Bad Business

A 2002 study from the Harvard Business Review shows there is no measurable gain from firing a CEO and replacing them with a new one (particularly an outsider). The article looked at the top 500 corporations for 1997 and 1998 and found that companies that had fired their CEOs gained a trivial bump in earnings in the short term, but suffered on stock returns two years after the fact. More compelling were performance comparisons between companies that had dismissed a CEO versus those that naturally cycled one out due to retirement or illness. Companies where a CEO had been forced out trailed behind on operating earnings, asset and stock returns. The author notes, “I couldn’t find a single measure suggesting that CEO dismissals have a positive effect on corporate performance.”

Since 2012, the number of CEOs to exit top 500 companies has climbed upward slowly and deliberately, according to board intelligence provider Equilar. In 2012, 48 such CEOs departed; in 2013 that figure creeped up to 51; and in 2016, that number rose to 59. We can’t yet know what departures from more recent years will mean for each company’s future, but CEO turnover at other institutions may provide some insight.

One of the most prominent companies to cycle through CEOs is Yahoo, which is still in the process of being sold to Verizon for $5 billion. Since its start, the company has had six CEOs—all of them were ousted. No one has been able to restore Yahoo to its former glory. For much of the last 20 years, the stock price has rolled back and forth from less than $10 to just above $40 per share—less than half its 1999 value. No doubt each chief executive has made his or her own mistakes.

But it’s also possible that they didn’t have enough time at the helm to renovate the internet portal’s business. Not only do turnarounds take time to pull off, there are also market factors that are outside the control of whoever is in charge. And while six years may seem like enough time to usher in change, traditionally CEO roles have been held for longer. In 1984, more than a third of CEOs held their post for more than 10 years, according to a report from the New Yorker on why CEOs are more likely to get the ax these days. The writer, James Surowiecki, went on to point out that activist investors (like Yahoo’s Dan Loeb and Carl Icahn) are partly to blame for this phenomenon. Driven by their own mandate to seek out fat returns, these board members can hurt long-term growth.

Kalanick’s Talent For Growth

Unlike Yahoo, Uber’s problems are largely with its company psyche, not its ability to generate revenue. For all the complaints against Uber—its male-dominated company culture, flimsy human resources department, and disdain for regulators—Kalanick has kept the company going and growing.

Uber continues to draw in more riders and drivers. On a call with journalists in March, head of North American operations Rachel Holt insisted the business was doing better than ever. “In [the U.S.] we’ve grown faster in the first 10 weeks of 2017 than in the first 10 weeks of 2016. Looking at less mature regions like Latin America, trips were up 600% in February, year on year,” she said.

“It could be significantly detrimental to the company’s growth path and market expansion to have a leadership change,” says says Arun Sundararajan, author of The Sharing Economy and professor at NYU Stern Business School. “What perhaps is on the mind of the board is that he’s also driven an unbelievable pace of growth and a tremendous amount of fundraising and market leadership position in numerous countries around the world,” he adds.

Kalanick’s narrow focus on brisk expansion has succeeded in propelling the company from a fledgling Silicon Valley startup to a global company valued at $70 billion. In less than seven years, Uber has matured from a handful of employees operating in San Francisco to 12,000 workers globally (not including its network of 1.5 million drivers) offering its ride-hailing and delivery services in over 70 countries and 450 cities. Not only has Uber catalyzed strong momentum, but it’s done so while facing regulatory challenges all over the world. It has been banned several times over, in places as disparate as Newark, New Jersey, and Berlin.

And then there’s the board: Kalanick is fairly entrenched as far as CEOs go. According to a report from Backchannel, the board can’t fire him thanks in part to his allotment of super-voting shares. The only other people on the board to have super-voting shares are cofounder Garrett Camp, Uber’s SVP of global operations, Ryan Graves, and two investors. There are four empty board seats that have super-voting shares and should Kalanick face opposition he could fill them with supporters. Having a CEO with so much power isn’t always good for business, because it empowers them to act in their own interest rather than that of the company.

For Kalanick this tethering of his name to the company serves to keep him as captain in even the choppiest of waters—like Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber’s self-driving truck outfit Otto. This too could be fine. If the lawsuit upends Uber’s business as some are suggesting it might, then would a new CEO really be able to save the burning ship?

What To Do About Bad Boy CEOs

In the case of Kalanick, what is most disturbing is that his effective and ruthless business tactics have created a company with values that don’t jibe with the mores of either the tech media or the denizens of Silicon Valley. It reminds me of another complicated company, known for swallowing up market share like a mushroom cloud: Amazon.

The Everything Store has easily survived the reports about poor work culture inside its corporate offices and a lack of care for its warehouse workers and contractors. Uber isn’t ignoring the negative stories either. In fact, it’s apologized and promised to do better and is hiring a co-operator to help lead those efforts. While these are positive moves, separating Uber’s salient business practices from its appalling culture may prove more difficult. But Kalanick doesn’t have to pull this off, he only has to give the appearance of doing so.

As a colleague reminded me over dinner recently, businesses don’t have to be ethical, they only have to make bottom lines. It’s usually the government’s job to step in and prevent abuses that arise from vigorous tactics. But in an industry that regularly eschews regulation in the name of innovation, what’s to be done about bad boy CEOs?

Related: Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, And The Struggle To Do The Right Thing

As a child, Odelia Acolyte fled her home of Liberia to neighboring Nigeria to escape the bloodshed of civil war. But she returned home frequently to visit family and always felt that what would help people in her country most would be to give them a job. “When I would go home, I would always find people sitting around,” says Acolyte, “I wanted to be part of change in society.”

That dream stayed with her for close to a decade, and following her return to Liberia, she became the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college, earning a sociology degree from United Methodist University in Monrovia in the capital. The idea remained alive even after she found a prized job with a local telecommunications company in Monrovia, one of only a limited number of formal, private sector jobs in a country where the International Labour Organization estimates that nearly 20% of men and 35% of women are unemployed.

Acolyte is part of a new generation of entrepreneurs helping Liberia recover, following the carnage of the outbreak and the country’s years’- long civil war that ended in 1997. Focused on growing employment opportunities and filling market needs, these young entrepreneurs are emerging to help push the country toward economic sustainability and prosperity even while international aid organizations pack up and go home.

“There is a lot of entrepreneurship in Liberia, and one of the reasons for that is because there are so few formal opportunities for young people to build livelihoods,” says Nate Crossley, program manager for the Prospects program at the aid organization Mercy Corps. Mercy Corps offered Acolyte a $13,000 grant as part of the program for marketing and to help implement business systems, professionalize recruitment, and train her employees. “In some ways they are forced to be creative.”

And that is just the start. Now that she has a core group of women working for her, Acolyte has helped her employees to begin saving: Those who choose can have a third of their salaries automatically deducted and placed in a savings account that they can use in the event a child is ill or they have problems funding their children’s education. Acolyte sees her job as helping to jump-start her workers access to financial services and begin to save.

“It is about helping them: People get paid, they can afford school fees for their children,” Acolyte says. “That can help to change society.”

Helping this rising class of entrepreneurs learn the basics of business is the Branson Scholarship Program (created by Richard Branson), a 9-to-12 month session that teaches entrepreneurs business fundamentals and matches them with mentors and overseas training opportunities. So far, 35 entrepreneurs have completed the training and have gone on to create 3,000 jobs in total, says program manager Wilson Idahor. The program now is seeking funds to train another class of business owners. The biggest benefit Idahor sees is a generation of young people pushing others to dream big.

“A lot of entrepreneurs we have worked with have become fairly successful, so people see them as role models for other young people,” Idahor says. “People are seeing this is possible, you can start your own business and prosper instead of getting a job with the government.”

The entrepreneurs who take part in the program say the knowledge they gain builds and strengthens their businesses for everyone’s gain.

“Liberia is challenging—you have to be active to find ways to make it all work,” Paasewee says. “Some days you want to pack it up and run away. But it is not just about you, you have to think about the 13 people” working for you. But jobs at small business like Paasewee’s are still rare. While more and more Liberian women have formally registered their businesses in recent years (women now manage nearly one-third of formal firms in Liberia), the majority–60%–still operate in the informal sector. For male entrepreneurs, that number is 45%.

For Veria Sumo, that drive to start her own business came from being unable to find a job in the formal sector. In 2008 and 2009, Sumo looked for work without success. So she decided to create a job for herself–and for others. She began with a freight clearing business. But a few years later, Ebola arrived. Like Acolyte, she used the drive for sterility and cleanliness that came with the disease and founded Golden Gates Services, a business that produces hand sanitizer stations with a sensor-triggered dispenser.

“You don’t touch anything,” Sumo says. “I started these stands because I wanted to make this service accessible no matter where you are.”

Sumo’s plan is to sell enough units to bring down the unit price and make the stands accessible to all Liberians. “That is my dream,” Sumo says, “for us to keep up with our hygiene, especially after the crisis we have been through.”

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is the author of the New York Times best-sellers Dressmaker of Khair Khana and Ashley’s War and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been writing about entrepreneurship in emerging economies since traveling to Afghanistan in 2005 during her second year of MBA study. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Newsweek, and she’s contributed pieces to Fast Company. You can follow her work at @gaylelemmon and at http://www.gaylelemmon.com

As you put the finishing touches on your tax returns, remember that while U.S. companies face tax rates of 35% (the highest in the advanced industrial world) many don’t actually pay that much. Instead, they choose to keep their profits offshore. The last few decades have seen a steady–and perfectly legal–accumulation of income in havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Apple, for instance, now has more than $200 billion offshore. The 50 companies that keep the most money offshore combined this year to keep a total of $135 billion from the IRS, new figures from Oxfam, the international charity, show. Historically, they’ve kept an astounding $1.36 trillion in total revenue out of the U.S., so it won’t be taxed.

The top five spenders on tax lobbying were General Electric, Verizon Communications, Comcast, AT&T, and Exxon Mobil, together accounting for a quarter of all tax lobbying by the top 50 companies. The companies with the most money offshore are Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, GE, IBM, and Merck, according to the report. In 2015, the top 50 had a total of 1,751 subsidiaries in tax havens, while receiving a total of $423 billion in various federal tax breaks.

This untaxed money sits idle, doing little for Apple’s–or any other company’s–productivity. It’s lost to R&D departments, to investors, and to U.S. taxpayers. Most experts, left and right, agree that we should work to get that money home where it can be more useful. And, indeed, corporate tax “reform” now being considered by Congress aims to do just that. Republicans want a tax repatriation “holiday” of 10% (instead of 35%) to encourage companies to invest their money in this country, as well as a cut to the normal corporate rate to 20% (Trump actually called for 15% during the election). At the same time, they’ve also proposed something called “border adjustment,” which effectively taxes imports at a rate 20% higher than exports. That way, the argument goes, companies are encouraged to make stuff in the U.S. instead of importing it from China or another low-cost locale. Even Democrats may be open to modest corporate tax reform: President Obama proposed lowering the rate to 28% and one-time holiday at a 14% rate.

Oxfam, however, makes a strong case that these changes, while decent in theory, won’t have the positive economic effects that their proponents claim. While repatriation might save the 50 corporations more than $300 billion in taxes, there’s no guarantee they’ll spend it on things that benefit ordinary people. In 2004, during the Bush administration, another repatriation period resulted in a net loss of 20,000 jobs, $3.3 billion in lost revenues for the U.S. Treasury, and ongoing incentives for companies to stash even more money offshore, a U.S. Senate investigation found. Pfizer, for instance, brought home $35.5 billion in overseas earnings, but cut 11,748 jobs in the U.S. between 2004 and 2007.

“Repatriation holidays reward companies for keeping money offshore and avoiding their taxes—to the detriment of the U.S. Treasury and taxpayers. This incentivizes companies to move their profits to tax havens in expectation that they will eventually benefit from a one-time tax cut,” the report says.

Meanwhile, the Border Adjustment Tax (BAT) could lead to higher prices for clothing, gasoline, and electronics, hitting low-income Americans the most. And it could be disastrous for poorer countries, Oxfam argues. The BAT would remove taxes on exports and stop companies from deducting imports as business expenses. That would make it harder for foreign companies to sell goods into the U.S., and probably raise the cost of paying debts dominated in dollars. Many economists think a BAT would cause the dollar to appreciate, meaning that anyone holding dollar-debt would effectively have to pay more than before. Turkey, for instance, has dollar debts equivalent to 50% of Turkish gross domestic product, Oxfam says. Moreover, a BAT wouldn’t necessarily stop tax evasion. Rather it would create a different “game of whack-a-mole,” the charity says.

In an interview with Fast Company, report coauthor Robbie Silverman says more effective tax reform would concentrate on fixing loopholes. That includes ending “deferral,” which allows companies to keep cash offshore indefinitely without it being taxed, and “inversions,” where companies merge with rivals in low-tax countries for tax purposes. Oxfam also calls for companies to disclose what they pay in taxes in every location in which they’re based (the U.K. and several other countries have adopted this approach). “You need more international cooperation,” Silverman says. “Instead these [Republican] proposals are nationalistic, and they just make a bad situation worse.”

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Correction: This article previously misstated the tax amount avoided by companies this year: It’s $135 billion for 2016, and they’ve also kept $1.36 trillion–not billion–off shore to date.

Kendrick Lamar just dropped his fourth studio album, DAMN., which is essentially 14 reasons why he’s one of the greatest rappers of this generation.

DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar.

A post shared by Kendrick Lamar (@kendricklamar) on Apr 11, 2017 at 3:15am PDT

DAMN. comes two years after Lamar’s Grammy Award-winning opus To Pimp a Butterfly, and what he’s proven yet again is his ability to construct impeccably crafted narratives. Themes of police brutality and social injustices intersect with tracks laying Lamar’s vulnerabilities and insecurities bare. Lamar has long been in the exclusive class of hip-hop artists who aren’t just technically gifted rappers, but who are nuanced storytellers. DAMN., much like To Pimp a Butterfly and 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, isn’t just an album, it’s a statement.

Although DAMN. should be played from start to finish, there are a few tracks in particular that deserve some shine.

“LOVE.”

Of the three tracks with features, “Love” is by far the sleeper hit. Up-and-comer Zacari definitely sticks out among DAMN.’s other featured artists Rihanna and U2, yet it’s only a testament to Lamar’s good ear. However, what truly sets “Love” apart from the rest of the album is the song’s sound. A large portion of DAMN. bumps with deafening bass or hits with Lamar’s machine-gun rhymes. “Love” is something of a palate cleanser. The synth-trap slow-jam beat mixed with Zacari’s airy vocals is a welcome breather from DAMN.’s weightier subject matter.

“FEAR.”

Some of Lamar’s best work comes out of what, at times, feels like him working through his own deep-seeded issues out loud. (“So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street when gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me? Hypocrite!”—“Blacker the Berry,” To Pimp A Butterfly.) “Fear” is split between Lamar’s adolescence and adulthood. The concept of fear shifts from that of a child under the stern eye of a mother to being a young adult worrying about getting screwed over financially and losing the creativity that got him where he is. “Fear” is bookended by a voicemail message from Lamar’s cousin Carl quoting Deuteronomy 28, which basically lays out the glories and punishments for obeying and disobeying God.

“DUCKWORTH.”

It’s worth mentioning once again that Lamar is hands-down one of the best storytellers in music. “Duckworth” is the condensed life story of Anthony Tiffith, founder and CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment, where Lamar is signed. Tiffith’s life of dealing drugs and gang banging brought him back to the brink of robbing the same Kentucky Fried Chicken he knocked over years prior. It just so happened that Lamar’s father, Kenny “Ducky” Duckworth, was working at that KFC and knew Tiffith’s history, leading him to curry favor with the man by offering free chicken and extra biscuits. Ducky’s plan apparently worked and through a butterfly-effect rationale, contributed to DAMN.’s very existence:

Whoever thought the greatest rapper
Would be from coincidence
Because if Anthony killed Ducky
Top Dawg could be servin’ life
While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight.

What makes this track even better is the fact that it loops directly back to the start of the album where Lamar is trying to help a blind woman (presumably Lady Justice) and he gets shot in the process.

Serial entrepreneur Carlos Armando Garcia was raised by immigrant parents in a Texas border town. Both parents worked, which instilled a strong work ethic in Garcia, who earned an engineering degree from MIT and later founded a hedge fund. “But when it came to thinking about money for the longer-term, for the future, we never had these conversations,” he says.

The same is true of many Latino families; only one in four has a retirement account, and just half own a home. As a result, the median net worth of Latino households trails that of white households by over $100,000. For black households, the statistics are similarly alarming. The most recent data, from 2013, shows that two-parent black families ($16,000) and two-parent Latino families ($18,800) are even worse off than single-parent white families ($35,800), in terms of wealth.

Income is certainly a contributing factor; whites have out-earned blacks and Latinos for decades. But Garcia believes that there are other factors in play, as well: “It’s about culture, habits, and access,” he says.

Now Garcia wants to help his fellow Latinos push back against those challenges and close the wealth gap. In February, he launched Finhabits, an online investing service designed for first-time savers. The company directs user savings toward traditional and Roth IRAs, with portfolio allocations based on the user’s risk profile, and charges $1 per month for accounts under $2,500 (above that threshold, the fee is 0.5% per year).

Digital investment advisors are a dime a dozen these days, with startups like Betterment and Stash competing alongside “robo” offerings developed by such industry stalwarts as Charles Schwab. Finhabits stands apart in two ways: its focus on Latinos (there is a Spanish-language version of the product) and its decision to reach those customers via their employers. By Garcia’s count, there are millions of minorities, including Latinos, working for small businesses that do not offer 401(k) benefits. According to the National Institute on Retirement Security, only 38% of Latinos (versus 62% of whites) have access to a sponsored retirement plan through their employer.

“Expert advice should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their background and portfolio balance,” Garcia says.

Lucia Islas, a Texas resident born in Mexico, exemplifies the type of customer that Finhabits hopes to win over. “From a very young age, I was taught to work really hard,” she says. “But I don’t think I was ever taught to save and to think about the future.”

She adds, “My parents didn’t save for retirement. There’s this belief that God will take care of us.”

Islas landed her first part-time job at age 16, and after college, she began a career in fashion. She didn’t think about saving for retirement until she got married and soon became pregnant with her first child. Her parents, still working, have struggled to make the time to visit their granddaughters. “It got me thinking: What do we want our old age to look like?” Islas says. She and her husband signed up for a financial planning course offered through their church. “It taught us about how to save for retirement, what kinds of accounts we’re supposed to use to invest in our kids’ future. These are the kind of lessons that just aren’t passed down in our culture.”

For Garcia, the savings wake-up call came after college, during his first Wall Street job at Merrill Lynch. Two years in, a coworker mentioned that he had already set aside a healthy nest egg, thanks in part to the firm’s matching program. “Matched, what’s that? I didn’t know what it was,” he says. “It was a missed opportunity, and I don’t want that to happen to others.”

Many of us come to job interviews hoping to please. You arrive prepared—maybe even overprepared—for anything the hiring manager might throw at you. You have a plan for how to answer just about every imaginable question. You even have a few smart questions on standby to ask when the interview is wrapping up, and it’s your turn to pick the interviewer’s brain.

But by that point you’ve already missed an opportunity or three. The truth is that you can and should take charge of the interview, turning it into a genuine conversation where both parties ask things of each other. And that means posing your own questions all the way through, rather than waiting until the end. But this requires some tact and preparation, or you’ll come off as trying to yank the reins out of your interviewer’s hands. The key to slipping your own questions into the interview is looking for openings right after you’ve been asked something similar. Here are a few to look out for.

1. When Did The Last Person In This Role Leave, And Why?

Career coaches usually suggest asking this question, so it may not be that unfamiliar. But it could be a mistake to wait until the very end to ask it. Instead, ask how the role opened up just after you’ve finished explaining why you left a previous job or are looking to make a change. It’s a natural segue.

Related: Four Hidden Ways To Find Out If You’ll Hate Working Somewhere

2. How Would Previous Employees Describe Working Here?

It’s great to ask a hiring manager why they like working at the organization, but posing the question this way lets you compare the interviewer’s response with the employee reviews you’ve already read on sites like Glassdoor and Payscale.

A great time to ask this is when you’re asked about your own current or past employers—what you’ve liked best about working for them, or how they might describe you. You could also expand this to ask about the turnover rate, either in the position you’ve applied for or in the organization overall. It may not be possible for you to speak to the person who was last in the position, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

3. What’s The Biggest Problem You’re Facing Right Now?

Again, a tried and true question to ask a hiring manager, but one that can elicit an underwhelming response if you can’t slide it in before the very end of the interview. Where’s there an earlier opening? There are a few. Being asked about your weaknesses is one good segue for asking tactfully about any negative aspects of the organization you might’ve uncovered in your research—pain points or otherwise. When you’re asked to describe how you solved a major challenge at work is another good opportunity.

You might already have landed on the answers to questions like these from your research, but it’s always better to hear directly from a hiring manager. Not only can it give you the inside scoop, that can also provide you a chance to explain how you can help them with the problem that keeps them up at night.

4. What Are You Most Proud Of Right Now?

When you’re asked to name what you consider your biggest strengths, turn the tables and ask about the company’s latest achievements, as well as its values and strengths. Every company can post their “core values” somewhere on their website, but it’s a different thing entirely to ask your interviewer what they personally think the company is getting right.

5. What Opportunities Will I Have To Learn And Advance?

Another common interview question that’s deceptively tricky to ask. There’s often a risk that you’ll phrase this in a way that suggests you’re more interested in future promotion opportunities than in the job you’re interviewing for. Finding a chance to ask this question earlier can help you get it right. When you’re asked to describe a memorable learning experience or how quickly you pick up new things, you could jump on the chance to inquire about training programs and growth opportunities.

6. How Would You Describe The Work Culture Here?

Anytime you’re asked to discuss the things that matter to you—your hobbies, values, or what you do in your spare time—is a great chance to look for clues about an employer’s work culture. Ask about the company’s community involvement and how it offers employees work-life balance. You could even probe further to ask how common overtime work tends to be, how much travel the job entails, and so on.

If you can weave questions like these into the interview earlier on, you’ll come away with much more information than had you just tried to squeeze in a couple of them when it’s finally your “turn” in the last few minutes. What’s more, you’ll create a more genuine back-and-forth with your interviewer—which will show off the kind of emotional intelligence they’ll undoubtedly be looking for.

Okay, so it didn’t work completely as planned. But you’ve got to give Burger King credit, the idea to troll Google Home users with a quick spot that activates the smart home assistant to explain just what a Whopper is, was just the kind of marketing mischievousness we welcome from the fast feeder that brought us Subservient Chicken, Whopper Sacrifice, and the McWhopper.

Sure, Google Home early adopters didn’t think an ad hijacking their precious butler tech was very funny, but for the 95% of us who don’t have the device sitting next to our couch, it’s a goofy shenanigan we’d all love to pull off. It’s the corporate version of changing your buddy’s ringtone to the Divinyls. Of course, Google wouldn’t let this ad aggression stand, but high fives to BK for having some fun (and collecting a gaggle of earned media while they’re at it). Onward!

Chipotle “Confessions”

What: Comedian Sam Richardson (Veep, Detroiters) gets confessional in Chipotle’s new brand campaign.

Who: Chipotle, Venables Bell & Partners

Why We Care: First of all, Jeffrey Tambor voiceover. Second, it’s directed by David Shane. The campaign also includes comedians Jillian Bell and John Mulaney getting real, all in the effort to convince us all to look past its food safety woes and step inside a giant burrito. Hearing Richardson talk about his severe glitter allergy is a good start . . .

SickKids Foundation “Momstrong”

What: The newest ad in SickKids’ ongoing “VS” campaign, that focuses on the determination, strength, and vulnerability of mothers with gravely ill children.

Who: SickKids Foundation, Cossette

Why We Care: Umm, we have a beating heart? The ad features real stories from real moms with kids being treated at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and some of the moms appear in the spot itself. SickKids Foundation vice-president of brand strategy Lori Davison told me earlier this week, “It was a profound emotional experience for the moms to revisit and describe those moments in their lives. It’s important for authenticity–this is always an important element for us. And so much of what SickKids Foundation needs to raise money for is connected to supporting the family. It’s important to get that message out there in a genuine way.”

Jordan Brand “From Big O to Big O. #WhyNot”

What: A new Jordan Brand ad to celebrate Oklahoma City Thunder star Russell Westbrook breaking the NBA’s single-season triple-double record, previously held by hall-of-famer Oscar “Big O” Robertson.

Who: Jordan Brand, R/GA

Why We Care: I’m a sucker for vintage sports footage. And here it helps remind us of one of the all-time greatest, in the service of putting into perspective the very modern accomplishments of Westbrook, all to the tune of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” This is what sports ad swagger is made of.

Burger King “Connected Whopper”

What: A quick ad that hijacked Google Home devices by mischievously saying, “OK Google” and asking for more info about a Whopper, triggering the devices to read aloud the burger’s Wikipedia entry.

Who: Burger King

Why We Care: Was it divisive? Sure. The ratio of YouTube likes and dislikes is almost even–with thumbs down in the lead. Tech heads didn’t like corporate ballyhoo interrupting the voice-activated peek into our digitized utopian future. But c’mon, it’s still funny. Almost as funny as people editing the Whopper Wikipedia entry to say things like it contained “100% medium-sized child.”

Kaiser Permanente “Curry Overcomes”

What: A new campaign for the health care brand that introduces a different side of NBA MVP Stephen Curry’s training regimen.

Who: Kaiser Permanente, Translation

Why We Care: It’s stylish and interesting, but most impressive is how this spot (and the rest of the campaign) alters our expectations for what a health care ad can be. As Translation chief creative officer John Norman told me earlier this week, that was part of the plan all along.

Elizabeth Schwartz wants to make it very clear that she didn’t decide to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail because of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild. “My motivation was very different,” says Schwartz. “I wasn’t looking to find myself or look through emotional baggage. It didn’t feel quite so dramatic.”

That depends on how you define dramatic.

Schwartz, the chief operating officer at Austin-based software startup Square Root (and the first paid employee of the 55-person company), took five months off work to backpack the length of the trail between May and September of last year. In her capacity as COO, Schwartz manages operations, human resources, product, data science, and engineering teams. While no day is typical, she can often be found toggling between strategy and resource planning to hands-on help with teams. So her absence would be felt in all parts of the company.

But Schwartz felt like the time was right to take a corporate sabbatical. She tells Fast Company her initial interest was sparked years ago when she first heard of the trail. “It was one of those things that just struck me like a bolt of lightning,” she recalls. “I couldn’t fall asleep that night,” just thinking about it. But Schwartz confesses she’s not really an avid backpacker. “About 10 years ago I had four weeks off between jobs, and I hiked a quarter of the Appalachian trail by myself,” she says. There were no other extended trips in between. But when her younger brother got laid off from his job and announced he was going to hit the trail, Schwartz starting thinking about it again. ‘For anyone in the middle of a career, the timing is never right,” she muses, “but it may be now or never.” So she starting to plan how to make it work.

Telling Your Boss and Other Logistics

Initially she told Square Root’s founder and CEO Chris Taylor, “I’ll just join my brother for one or two weeks.” But as Schwartz coordinated the short trip, she says the idea of taking a longer time to do the trail in its entirety was too tantalizing to ignore.

Schwartz says Square Root is the kind of company that gives its staff a lot of autonomy, and since it’s small and growing, there was no policy around taking a sabbatical. “We have no vacation policy,” Schwartz explains. “Just take it when you need it.” Schwartz notes that she had no expectations of being paid for the entire time off, but she was paid for part of it. And while she kept her condo, Schwartz points out that backpacking isn’t all that expensive. She estimates it cost her $4,000 for the whole trip, including food and equipment.

In part constrained by nature (the trail is only open between April and September because the snow makes it impossible to pass in certain stretches) and business demands (“I needed to make it back to our quarterly meeting,” she notes), Schwartz determined which stretch of time she needed to take off. She worked it out with Taylor, then told the head of HR, but they didn’t share it with the rest of the staff until about a month before Schwartz was scheduled to leave. And even then, it was open-ended, “because so many things are out of your control,” she observes, like how many miles you’ll be able to cover in a day and what could happen with the weather. Schwartz says that the staff was told when Taylor gifted her a compass to mark more than five years with the company, and said simply that she’d be out for “a while in the summer.”

Delegating All Parts Of Your Job

Now it was time to start doling out her responsibilities to other team members. Schwartz is a self professed “die-hard project planner,” and pulls out her spreadsheet to verify that she made 57 delegations to 12 different people for her time away. “It helped to delegate up the chain, sideways, and down,” she notes, because there were good growth opportunities for everyone, including Taylor, the CEO.

Schwartz says that she gave him the task of having one-on-one meetings with key staff, which allowed him to establish more personal connections. More rote tasks such as the company’s accounting processes were outsourced completely.

Schwartz says a lot of work went to Courtney Branson who heads up HR, but the two had previous experience sharing responsibilities when Branson was on maternity leave. In Schwartz’s absence, “Courtney introduced management training,” she says, “and had the clout to lead all the managers with a shared set of best practices.” Those duties ultimately remained with Branson after Schwartz returned. She also revamped performance check-ins, and those no longer involve Schwartz.

Did Schwartz ever worry that her sabbatical might leave her without a role when she returned? “I had to be courageous enough to see I might not be needed,” Schwartz contends. But overall, she says the staff supported and encouraged her.

More broadly, she says, managers could benefit from the thought experiment of having others take on every part of their jobs. “All too often [delegation] degenerates to ‘what I like doing least,’” she observes. Or it can become an exercise in eliminating more junior or rote tasks. But what of the stuff you put your touch on? Would there be someone who could do them better and allow you to focus on something else?

For his part, Taylor maintains that it’s not just harder to replace executives who could take extended time off without fear of losing their jobs. “At Square Root, we empower everyone on the team to pursue their passions, both personally and professionally,” Taylor says. “When we have a special request for an amazing opportunity like Elizabeth’s, our goal is to find a way to say yes–regardless of the person’s title or tenure.”

Not Completely Off The Grid

Schwartz does point out that she was in touch with Square Root staff while she was on the trail (when she had access to Wi-Fi). The longest stretch with no contact was eight days, she says. But otherwise, there weren’t any urgent texts or emails asking her to step in to handle something. When she returned, says Schwartz, “I fit right back in.”

Getting back into the work routine was “a different story,” says Schwartz. She had gotten used to consuming “3,000 calories of sugar and fat” per day while doing all that hiking, and was making hourly trips to Square Root’s snack kitchen.

Her other concern was concentrating. Would she be able to focus in meetings again after all that time spent outdoors? “The increased human connection was really nice instead of walking alone,” Schwartz says. “The only time I really had trouble was reading something for a long period of time, like scrutinizing a contract was a skill I had to relearn.” Fortunately, she’d acquired a treadmill desk back in 2013, and was now spending more time using it.

Long-Term Recharging

And while she wasn’t looking for any big epiphany on the meaning of life, Schwartz says she did find a level of peace that stayed with her long after the trek was over. “I was always go, go, go and task-oriented,” she says of herself before the sabbatical, so much so that she feared she might be bored during the journey. Instead, she says she was able to embrace the relaxation and the joy of discovering what might be around the next bend. “That kind of serenity helps me,” she says. “I can still be task-oriented, but I recognize the value of recharging,” says Schwartz, which could be as simple as doing bootcamp exercise for an hour with other Square Root staff on the front lawn of their offices.

Schwartz says taking a sabbatical was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and she’ll be eternally grateful to the entire team for their support. She hasn’t taken another vacation yet, but notes that she could if she wanted to.

“This is the kind of culture that will keep people there 10 years or more.” 

From the outside, Paisley Park resembles a less ambitious Ikea or a suburban medical center—the kind where podiatrists and dentists make their living. The 65,000-square-foot, clinically white compound is surrounded by a traditional parking lot and a few evenly spaced trees. In the distance of the residential area of Chanhassen, Minnesota, you’ll spot a day care center and a public storage facility right before a highway entrance. It would more seemingly be the home of the film “Office Space” than one of most creative musicians of our time.

Yet inside, one is transported to a kaleidoscope of trippy colors and questionable interior design decisions. As you enter, a six-foot horizontal mural of Prince’s eyes seductively stares you down—it was the artist’s way of letting guests know he was watching them. From there, you walk into a colorful atrium with large piano keys drawn into the ceiling and plush purple velvet sofas anchored on either side. Heavenly cloud designs on the wall are meant to symbolize that this was a place of “no limits.” Beneath you, the artist’s insignia is inscribed into marble tiles. A caged dove coos from a second-floor balcony.

"Paisley Park is pretty much representative of everything I am musically." #Prince #PaisleyParkIsInYourHeart #LovePaisleyPark #Prince4Ever

A post shared by Paisley Park (@officialpaisleypark) on Oct 29, 2016 at 8:21am PDT

Further down lie several recording studios and bland offices, as well as a “galaxy room” filled with ultraviolet lights and drawn planets meant for one to practice meditation. There’s also a spacious nightclub complete with a stage, theater screens, and velvet ropes where Prince would throw concerts or parties for up to 1,000 guests. Sometimes, though, he would play Finding Nemo for them instead.

In some ways, the entirety of Paisley Park feels a lot like Prince himself—a successful combination of corporate aggressiveness and psychedelic creativity, with just a dash of kookiness. Business in the front, party like it’s 1999 in the back.

“There Is A Park That Is Known…”

While the icon passed away last year, his sanctuary lives on, albeit in a much different way. Paisley Park now serves as a museum run by Graceland Holdings LLC, the same company that manages Elvis Presley’s Graceland. But prior to his death, Paisley Park functioned as a revolutionary symbol for the music industry. What Prince created was more than just a home and recording studio—he created an entirely new way for musicians to envision their production.

"There is a park that is known 4 the face it attracts. Colorful people whose hair on 1 side is swept back. The smile on their faces it speaks of profound inner peace. Ask where they’re going, they’ll tell U nowhere. They’ve taken a lifetime lease on Paisley Park." #Prince4Ever #PaisleyPark #Love4OneAnother

A post shared by Paisley Park (@officialpaisleypark) on Oct 27, 2016 at 4:36pm PDT

Following the meteoric success of Purple Rain in 1983, Prince Rogers Nelson decided he wanted to build his very own recording studio. At that time, he was living in a residential area of Minneapolis in what was dubbed “the purple house” because it was the only house painted the regal hue in what was effectively a rather homogenous block. (The neighbors, it’s been said, were not pleased.) He already had an in-house recording studio, but with all his different projects, the young musician was spending outrageous amounts of money renting additional commercial recording studios.

Bret Thoeny, architect and owner of Boto Design Architects in Los Angeles, was only 23 years old when Prince’s manager tapped him to design the purple house recording studio. Shortly thereafter, he was summoned to produce what would become the $10 million Paisley Park.

Upon arrival, the architect discovered that Prince’s team had already purchased a warehouse in Eden Prairie, a suburb south of Minneapolis.

“He really had a vision that he wanted to have a creative complex that was his—that wasn’t in Los Angeles or New York, but in Minneapolis, where he was born and raised and felt comfortable in,” says Theony. “So he could bring everything to him, not the other way around.”

Professor Sarah Niblock, associate dean of the University of Westminster and co-author of Prince: The Making of a Pop Icon, regards Prince’s physical dedication to his Midwestern roots as symbolic. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, the African-American community consisted of less than two percent of the Minneapolis-St. Paul population. Growing up as an African-American in one of the whitest American cities was key to forming Prince’s talent for melding a unique blend of musical styles, explains Niblock. That he also overcame local radio stations and music clubs—which had traditionally refused to associate with black music—made him a trailblazer.

“Prince went through huge battles to put the Twin Cities on the map as a global center for black musical innovation,” says Niblock. “No wonder he wanted to create a permanent monument to that struggle, right on the highway so no one could ignore it.”

On a lighter note, Prince once told Oprah that he chose to remain in the Midwest for more practical reasons. “The cold keeps the bad people out,” he said coyly.

Minneapolis was non-negotiable, but the chosen property wasn’t large enough to execute Prince’s demands: a complete multi-use complex of recording studios, Hollywood-equipped sound stages, vaults to hold unreleased songs, multiple dressing rooms, editing suites, offices, and enough space to film movies and hold full concert tour rehearsals. It would also include living quarters so that, if need be, Prince and his team could rest following late hours. That means the Purple Rain star could compose at any hour of the day, whenever he pleased, in his very own sound factory.

“The music, for me, doesn’t come on a schedule,” Prince asserted in a 1996 interview with The New York Times. “I don’t know when it’s going to come, and when it does, I want it out.”

Such a compound was revolutionary for its time. It might be standard fare for popular artists today, but back then, musicians strictly worked with commercial studios. The only similar project belonged to George Lucas, who built Skywalker Ranch in 1978.

“Artists weren’t doing this,” stresses Theony. “It was forward thinking, [this idea] of combining everything under one roof. It had never been done by an artist.”

Theony was tasked with finding another property, so he simply drove further north into the suburb of Chanhassen, a quiet area that had a few industrial complexes peppered throughout. Theony stumbled upon an open piece of land—six acres—with nothing but several beehives. It would become the future site of the production plant that was Paisley Park.

“They’ve Taken A Lifetime Lease . . .”

For the next year and a half, Theony worked alongside The Purple One to execute the first recording facility of its kind. Not that working with such a demanding—and visual—artist was by any stretch simple. For example, Prince didn’t want to look at blueprints. Such documents didn’t help him imagine the end product. Instead, Theony was required to make a scale miniature model of all of Paisley Park.

“I would show him in 3-D, and he really got into it—looking inside the little rooms and making suggestions,” Theony recounts.

Some of the facility was pre-determined due to its production specifications. The high ceilings throughout the complex were a direct result of the large sound stages built. Other details, though, were specifically requested: “He wanted pyramids,” says Theony, who positioned one in front and one by the living-quarters suite in the middle. The latter would light up in a soft violet glow whenever Prince was in residence, much like the Queen’s flag at Buckingham Palace. He also preferred that the structure be mostly windowless to protect his privacy and to limit sunlight.

Other aspects were functional. The entryway had double doors to prevent the cold weather from seeping in. Once inside, there was a small gathering point so guests could warm up. “It had some public aspects,” says Theony.

Some details were a hybrid between the two professionals. Theony designed the building exterior’s white metals panels, which he thought would serve as a dramatic contrast against the green front lawn. Prince took it a notch up by using them as a canvas with which he would either light up in purple lights or flash various images on.

During his time with Prince, Theony was also witness to some of the singer’s lovable eccentricities, including his appreciation for fan mail. “A fan had sent him a white dove and that dove lived in his office,” recalls Theony. “It became a [Paisley Park] mascot for a while.”

When it was completed in 1987, “Prince couldn’t believe it,” says Theony. The singer, who was 29 upon its opening, had been on tour for a good portion of that last year. “He was quite happy.”

“Everything was in one place so, at the drop of a hat, he could do whatever he wanted, 24 hours a day,” explains Niblock. “If he wanted a new album cover, his in-house photographer could have the shoot set up in an instant. If he wanted a new outfit rustled up, he could phone down to the wardrobe department. Whenever the energy felt right, he could jump into a studio and lay down vocals or, if he wanted, do an impromptu stage performance video with his band at 3:00 am.”

“Ask Where They’re Going, They’ll Tell You ‘Nowhere’ . . .”

Life was busy at Paisley Park, which served other artists from the get-go. Steve Parke, author of the upcoming book Picturing Prince: An Intimate Portrait began painting with the artist in 1988 and ultimately became his art director for 13 years. He recalls the early days of Paisley Park filled with musicians, actors, and directors who were renting the premises for a number of projects. It was not unusual for him to walk past someone like MC Hammer in the halls.

“It was definitely more of a corporate entity,” says Parke. “The estate had its own sustainable income.”

But over the years, the direction of Paisley Park changed: Prince slowly took up more of the studios and reclaimed his investment. “He wanted to bounce between studios,” says Parke, who would witness the musician hustle back and forth across the atrium to record in various studios. “He’d be occupying all the spaces [until] he took it all over.” In the later years, outside recording was restricted to a few close friends and collaborators.

Prince’s refocus on Paisley Park was not only reflected in his decision to cut back on rental use, but also in his desire to rework the interior design. As Parke remembers, “One night, he said ‘’I want to change all this and make it more creative.’”

Parke had to throw ideas out in hopes that Prince would take to them. “He wasn’t super communicative, you kind of had to figure it out,” he says. Parke incorporated details like the mural of the artist’s eyes by the entrance, building a waterfall behind a drinking fountain, and designing a rug that weaved in the singer’s lyrics. “It was about making it more interesting instead of, in his mind, bare bones.”

Working 100-hour work weeks to meet the singer’s demands wasn’t out of the ordinary. Prince’s perfectionism extended beyond himself and became a work ethic he expected of his employees.

But there were perks: Parke often worked to the sound of Prince playing his piano. During late nights, Prince would challenge him to a game of ping-pong, although it wasn’t always fair. (“He cheated,” claims Parke of one memorable game.) And oftentimes, Prince would go into the kitchen to prepare him a fruit shake in big red Dixie cup.

“He was a bit like Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory,” says Parke.

Paisley Park proved remarkably productive for Prince, who recorded 30 albums there, including Lovesexy, the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s Batman, Diamonds & Pearls, The Gold Experience, Sign O’ The Times and Emancipation. In addition, the facilities were rented out by a number of bold-faced names: Madonna, James Brown, Celine Dion, and Stevie Wonder among them. It even hosted movie sets, such as the 1993 film Grumpy Old Men.

In later decades, Prince’s home became infamous for its secretive, legendary parties and recounts of adorably bizarre behavior. The Chappelle Show hilariously immortalized late comedian Charlie Murphy’s story of being schooled by a competitive Prince on the Paisley Park basketball court, while Jamie Foxx said of the eccentric scene, “It was like all these people in there just kinda left over from the set of Purple Rain.”

Over the course of Prince’s residency, Paisley Park was subject to the artist’s private life and milestones: weddings, divorces, record contracts. Some were happy moments, others more melancholy. Following the death of his newborn son, writes his ex-wife Mayte Garcia in her new memoir The Most Beautiful: My Life With Prince, Prince destroyed a newly-constructed home area and playground he had designated for the family he would no longer have. “In the darkest possible state of mind, [Prince] had it bulldozed to the ground and the contents burned,” wrote Garcia.

But perhaps one of Paisley Park’s greatest unsung contributions is the community it built. Prince brought together a wide variety of up-and-coming musicians, proteges, and collaborators who ventured to Minneapolis to record music. He was more than a legendary singer and songwriter of funk and R&B—he was a talented producer, editor, mixer, and talent scout. His more recent proteges included Janelle Monáe, Esperanza Spalding, and the female trio 3RDEYEGIRL.

“He was a huge champion for women and women being in the position of power,” Monáe said of her late mentor last year.

“Admission Is Easy, Just Say You Believe . . .”

Today, Paisley Park is outfitted with memorabilia, exhibitions, and tours that reflect on the artist’s decades-long career. Daily tours trace the creativity that was once bred at Paisley Park; fans can walk through the recording studios, editing suites and club that are no longer in use. The museum kept Paisley Park pretty much as it was the day Prince passed away in the facility’s elevator. So much so that even a few of the musician’s personal belongings—a cat carrier in his personal office, travel luggage in the corner, handwritten lyrics on a music stand—are left as they were on April 21, 2016. A Yankee Candle (Ocean Mist scented) that lies on Prince’s editing desk is probably the most jarring reminder that despite his otherworldly attributes, he was above all, a human, like us, who enjoyed cheap candles.

In the atrium that once held legendary parties lies a hoisted elaborate model recreation of Paisley Park. In it remains Prince’s ashes. A tour guide has a tissue box on hand should you find it necessary.

The Paisley Park museum will undoubtedly excite fans who have always wanted a peek inside the artist’s notoriously private creative space. (There is, at press time, no exhibits dedicated to his personal life.) But for some, there is disappointment that a complex so very dedicated to creation—with three recording studios still fully functional—remains inactive. Prince had wanted Paisley Park to ultimately serve as a museum, but did he want it to cease its original intention?

“My personal feeling is that should be both a museum and a working facility too,” says Theony. “I’d like to see it have a double life because I think it pushes the legacy forward.”

Parke, who recalls Prince mentioning Graceland “from time to time,” harbors conflicted feelings. He recognizes it would likely be a logistical nightmare to keep a museum running while coordinating rental space of the recording studios, but “Maybe that’s something they can do in the future,” he hopes. “Prince loved kids and educating kids through music and it’d be great if there was an opportunity somewhere down the line for that to be integrated into the museum.”

The NPG Music Club at Paisley Park. So many shows. So many dance parties. So much #history. Anyone have a favorite memory to share? #PaisleyPark #Prince #NPG #MPLS #PurpleArmy

A post shared by Paisley Park (@officialpaisleypark) on Oct 30, 2016 at 1:09pm PDT

For the time being, Paisley Park remains quiet, save for the cooing of surviving dove Divinity. At the very least, says Parke, he hopes visitors remember all that Prince gave not only to the music industry, his community, but also to his fans.

“Prince worked really, really hard,” says Parke, “I’m not sure people realize that. They just see the end product.” Parke recalls witnessing eight-hour rehearsals and all-night choreography preparations, albeit it all looked effortless once the singer took stage. “He pushed himself to an incredible degree. There may have been a tiny bit of magic involved, but most of that magic was stuff he created. It wasn’t out of nowhere . . . He [built that] at Paisley Park.”

This week we learned how one Slack employee uses the popular platform to manage his workday, how tech companies like Facebook and Airbnb are trying to “do the right thing,” and the one habit that all great job candidates tend to show off on interviews.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of April 8:

1. I Work At Slack–Here’s How I Use It To Manage My Workday

Many of us probably use Slack and other group chat platforms to message our coworkers, or to make lunch plans with colleagues who sit on the other side of the office. But Slack actually has features that go beyond messaging, including bots that schedule your meetings and order your food for you. One Slack employee shares how he utilizes the app to streamline his workday.

2. Three Habits Of The Best Job Candidates I’ve Ever Interviewed

For many of us, what it takes to excel at job interviews is a bit of a mystery. But an experienced recruiter says that it all comes down to three simple habits that she’s seen time and again among candidates who have passed with flying colors. This week we learned what you can do on your next interview to become the type of candidate hiring managers love.

3. Three Questions I Ask Every Job Candidate About Their Soft Skills

Soft skills are difficult to test, especially in the highly ritualistic content of a job interview. How on earth are you supposed to grasp a candidate’s attention to detail or how quickly they learn just by chatting across a table? One entrepreneur shares the three questions he asks every candidate to screen for those traits—and the answers he’s looking for.

4. Inside My “Deadline Year” For Making My Dream Job A Reality

One former brand manager Fast Company spoke to this week is launching a cannabis dispensary, and now has a finite window for getting it off the ground. A former corporate worker is nearing his time limit—predicating on funding goals—for proving that his startup is viable. Meanwhile, a musician is now making a pivot to landscape architecture. Here’s what all three shared this week about what it’s like to pursue a passion career while the clock is ticking.

5. Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, And Their Struggle To Do The Right Thing

Most businesses aim just to maximize profits, but the current climate is pressuring many to deliver some form of social value on top of that. It’s a challenge many tech companies have often sounded excited to meet, but with the scrutiny intensifying, not all of them find it easy to fend off critics. Fast Company recently sat down with Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders in the Valley to learn how they’re trying to “do good” in 2017 and beyond.

No two freelance experiences are alike, and freelancers are unique individuals with different strengths and experiences. If two freelancers are given the exact same brief for the same job and client, they’ll most likely turn in different work. But there is usually one thing most freelancers have in common: the fear they carry related to their career.

The term “freelance fear” was first brought to my attention by a London-based advertising creative. Before she held her current position, she was a freelance copywriter for years. I’ve been a freelance writer for a decade, so we compared experiences.  We discovered that despite our different situations, we share the same fears: getting paid on time, how to say “no” to a client, how to charge a fair amount for your work and services, and more.

So I spoke with a number of successful freelancers across varying industries and disciplines to find out how they’ve overcome these fears.

Overcoming The Fear Of Rejection

Without a doubt, the biggest fear of freelancers I’ve spoken with is the fear of rejection. No one likes to be told that they aren’t the right fit for something, and this is all the more true when their livelihood depends on it. But the way to overcome this fear is knowing and accepting that it will happen from time to time, no matter how good you are.

“Rejection is like anything else in life: The more it happens, the less it scares you,” saysDavid Holmes, a freelance writer and video producer whose work has appeared at the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Fast Company, ProPublica, and the New Yorker. “Sure, rejection is never a good feeling, but it’s important when a pitch is rejected that you don’t let yourself get discouraged from pitching again to that employer or others.

“That’s because employers turn down pitches for countless reasons, and most of them have nothing to do with your talents or abilities. Maybe payroll tore through the company’s freelance budget too quickly this month; or maybe half the editors are sick or on vacation and they lack the resources at the moment to give your assignment the attention it deserves; or maybe the person you’re pitching just doesn’t get it.

“In any case, a freelancer is only as good as her last pitch, so there’s no use delaying your efforts to get back out there as quickly as possible, no matter how bummed out you are by a rejection.”

That’s somethingAmy Jordan, a freelance content marketer, agrees with. And if you do get rejected, “Know that no one wins every pitch; don’t take it to heart, learn what you can, and focus your energy on positive things like improving your pitch or services rather than worrying that you aren’t good enough,” she says.

Overcoming The Fear That You Don’t Have The Experience To Begin Freelancing

Another widely held freelance fear won’t even get you to the stage of the fear of being rejected if you can’t overcome it. That’s the fear that most want-to-be freelancers have: they don’t have the experience to go into business for themselves.

“[The worry of] not having enough experience is the sum of two fears,” saysRakesh Krishnan, freelance digital product designer. “First, the fear of not finding clients, and second, the fear of not doing a good job when you find one.

“I mitigated the former by being more aware of the market I was going to serve. I went through the job postings on freelance platforms and found that there are clients at various levels: from hobbyist individuals to multinational conglomerates, which meant there was a place for freelancers at various levels. That showed that there would be at least a few who require my services,” he says.

“I overcame the latter by being confident in myself. Confidence doesn’t come easily, you have to build it. The only way for beginners to develop self-confidence is to make themselves good at their chosen area of expertise. In my case it was design. I read books and developed a strong foundation of the core concepts of design. In addition, I continuously kept in touch with the latest happenings in design and tech. This is how I transitioned from web design to mobile design, which later became a staple of my work.”

Overcoming The Fear That You Won’t Be Able To Pay Your Bills 

Even when you’ve built up a successful freelancing career, that doesn’t mean it’s clear sailing from here on out. Ask any freelancer and they’ll tell you it’s easy to constantly worry about being paid on time. Unlike with traditional employees, there are no federal laws that dictate that a client must pay a freelancer within a certain timeframe.

If a freelancer isn’t good at budgeting and hasn’t set aside an emergency fund, this could mean being left high and dry when it comes time to pay rent. While being paid on time isn’t entirely within your control, Jordan says there are several proactive steps you can take to get paid on time.

“First things first, you need to have some savings or have clients lined up before jumping in full-time,” she says. “It can be tough to drum up business when you have no reviews or record of your previous work, so allowing yourself a financial buffer is a good idea. Second, you have a few options to reduce this risk; you can either take a deposit up front before doing work (if your clients are happy to do this), or if you have ongoing contracts, you can stop doing work if bills go unpaid, until they are.”

Even with those steps, she says it’s important to realize that not all clients always pay on time–even if they have in the past. “It’s a fact that for whatever reason, backups in accounting or just forgetfulness, you sometimes won’t get paid on time. Knowing that can help you guard against the issues it may cause. I combat the potential risk by holding some wages in my business account every month so I know if someone’s late, I won’t have the wolves at my door!” says Jordan.

Overcoming The Fear Of Turning Down Work

Another universal fear a freelancer has is saying “no” to a client. After all, you don’t want to turn down a job, only to see them go to someone else to fulfill it, and then continue to use that person for all future jobs, leaving you cut off. But understanding that saying “no” to a client can sometimes be the best thing you can do is paramount to overcoming this fear, according to Matt Goolding, a freelance writer and digital consultant and the founder ofKYO digital marketing collective.

“I went through a period of always saying yes in early 2016, and I got very close to burnout. It’s this memory that sticks in my mind, and ensures that I won’t push for unmanageable levels of work ever again,” he says. “I overcame this fear by taking a more optimistic outlook. If I do consistently good work, good clients will find me at the right time. It’s this simple shift in expectations that has allowed me to spot opportunities that are best avoided, and to wait for the right businesses, led by the right people.”

Holmes couldn’t agree more. “Last year, two outlets approached me at around the same time with two long-form assignments that each demanded a ton of background research and reporting. Despite the fact that the two deadlines were only a couple days apart and fast approaching, I said yes to both assignments in the hopes of a big payday and of seeing my name printed in a publication I’d long admired,” he says. “It won’t shock you to learn that by the time I completed the first assignment, I only had two days left to write the second–an impossible task, considering the number of sources I needed to schedule calls with. As you might guess, the publication was less than pleased. But I did learn a valuable lesson: Publications won’t blacklist you for saying no to them. But they will blacklist you for blowing a major assignment.”

Overcoming The Fear About Asking To Be Paid What You Are Worth

This final fear has become more prominent as anincreasing number of freelancers enter the workforce. More freelancers in any given field mean people are more likely to compete for a job based on price. While it’s easy to get sucked into a race to the bottom as far as pricing goes, virtually every freelancer I spoke with said not to be afraid to charge what you are worth. After all, most clients would rather pay more for good work from one freelancer than have to pay a second freelancer to fix the shoddy work of a cheaper first.

“When it comes to putting a price on your own services, the worst that can happen is someone says, ‘No, I won’t pay that,’” says Holmes. But he also notes that sometimes you may want to consider taking a lower fee counteroffer anyway. “Such assignments may be personally or professionally worthwhile if the project is important to you, or if it forges a relationship with a person or company you admire, or if you stand to greatly expand your audience or notoriety by accepting it.”

“All in all, you shouldn’t be afraid to negotiate the best possible price for your work. That said, it helps to look at the big picture,” he says. “One week you might spend five whole workdays on two pieces that net you just $150 apiece. But the next week you might stumble upon a sponsored post series that can net you up to $800 a pop for articles you can crank out in a couple hours. In other words, the lower-paying gigs tend to balance out with gigs that pay you far more than you deserve,” he says.

Don’t know what you are worth–or what you need to charge to live the lifestyle you want? Freelance designerMark Hendriks createdthis nifty calculator called Your Rate that helps you decide how much you should charge per hour based on how much you want to make and work per year.

It was a flip remark on health care by Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz that gave Dr. Kathryn Allen the final push to toss her stethoscope into the political ring. While talking about GOP efforts to dismantle Obamacare, Chaffetz suggested Americans were spending irresponsibly: “Rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care,” he told CNN.

Allen, a Democrat and family doctor, was incensed, and she wasn’t alone. The national public blowback against Chaffetz, the powerful chairman of the House Oversight committee, was fast and furious. That was when Allen sent what she calls “tweet 1.0.”

Cell phone vs. health ins. People have to make a choice. Yes they do, Jason! https://t.co/9iuL6an4og

— Dr. Kathie Allen (@kathrynallenmd) March 7, 2017

It included a link to an innovative new way for supporters to contribute: a crowdfunding page hosted by the startup Crowdpac. Allen had been using the platform, which makes it much easier for the average citizen to fund newcomers, for a few weeks by then and had already raised $18,000. “I thought I was doing great,” she says.

Related:Gender Equality Isn’t Political—See Utah For Proof

But she was about to see the real power that social media is having in local, state, and national politics. When noted Donald Trump antagonist Rosie O’Donnell retweeted Allen to her more than 1 million followers, Allen made fundraising history without the help of the political machine. So far, the Utah Democrat has brought in more than $564,000 from contributors across the United States, a record-breaking amount of money for a first-time politician.

The 2018 midterm is the first election cycle in which Crowdpac has offered its fundraising mechanism, and Allen’s success so far is a big coup, one that should be a wake-up call for the two major parties.

The idea is to “solve some of the problems of political engagement,” says Harrison. Complete party outsiders have no way to contact donors who could help them build a real campaign. But people like Allen—whose campaign Harrison calls a “textbook case study”—are able to prove their worth through small digital donations. Allen says the average donation amount has been between $35 and $45.

Harrison says Allen is not the only newcomer candidate taking to the site to challenge entrenched incumbents. There’s even a Crowdpac campaign raising funds to post billboards in Utah critical of Chaffetz. And now is the time for more outsiders to enter these races. Kansas just this week saw a special election for its 4th Congressional District where, though the Republicans ultimately prevailed, the race was significantly closer than ever imagined.

Putting The “Public” Back In Public Servant

Though this is her first time running for office, Allen’s career has been focused on helping others. She has worked as a family doctor for nearly three decades, providing medical care at a variety of facilities in the greater Salt Lake City area. She tells me the story about how she sold her private practice to a for-profit medical space and found herself in a “morally conflicting” position of working for an organization that put its bottom line above the well-being of patients. Instead of staying on for the five years she had planned to, she left early and moved to another clinic that serviced Utah’s transit authority workers and their families.

When asked why she wants to oust a five-term rep, Allen tells a familiar story. She began writing to Chaffetz about her concerns over Donald Trump’s potential business conflicts of interest. She would write letters, Facebook posts, and emails. One of her messages, which was cosigned by 200 other Utah residents, was even printed in the Salt Lake Tribune. And yet, Allen tells me, “I never got one letter back from him … I just started to think he was a poor example of a public servant.”

Allen then decided to go see him face-to-face at a town hall meeting, where Chaffetz was coming under fire for refusing to investigate concerns that Russia had meddled in U.S. politics. The outcry at the session—Chaffetz called the crowd paid protesters—was unusual for Utah. “We’re usually not confrontational,” Allen says, but “when he refused to answer questions directly, it made matters worse. He really is quite an expert in diverting questions.”

Enter Crowdpac

Allen opened an exploratory Crowdpac page, which allowed people to donate money and only be charged if the candidate reaches a certain goal. However, she admits she didn’t expect the response she got—in fact, she set her sights quite low. But thanks to that Rosie O’Donnell retweet, she gained 20,000 new followers. O’Donnell also donated the maximum amount to the campaign. After that, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow gave the doctor a shout-out on her show. The high-profile nods resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars rolling in. The amount quadrupled overnight. “It just changed the course of my life,” she says, “this one little tweet.”

Chaffetz didn’t take the competition lying down. He responded in kind by sending an email to potential donors that “Rosie O’Donnell, (yes, Rosie O’Donnell) just maxed out my Democrat opponent and is tweeting to all of her liberal followers to do the same.” He added, “I need your help to fight back.” Though he didn’t mention Allen’s name, the outside support obviously hit home. While all this went on, Chaffetz’s approval ratings continued to dip.

Beyond O’Donnell’s help, the platform, too, played a crucial part. “Crowdpac has been a great forum for me to raise money,” she says. “It made it easy to explore my campaign.” Indeed, she’s seen more than 16,000 contributions from over 15,000 contributors who have navigated to her page over the last few weeks.

For Allen, it was a perfect storm of opportunities. Not only has Chaffetz had historic gaffes of late, but she has seized the moment to grab the attention of people around the country. Utah is a traditionally red state, but she believes now is the time to show its residents that it’s better to be moral and ethical than to follow party lines. She admits that this campaign will be a “heavy lift,” but she’s hopeful.

The Real Work Begins

Looking at publicly available disclosures, the $564,000 Allen has brought in so far is a record. The person second to her Q1 sum record is Dev Patel, who raised about $527,000 in his congressional bid in 2015. Silicon Valley-based representative Ro Khanna is the only person to raise more money with the more than $800,000 he raised in 2014, but that was for a reelection bid.

Allen’s real challenge now is going beyond the virality and focusing on the local. She was able to galvanize people around the country who want Chaffetz out, but the people in Utah still need convincing. She knows she must “find common ground” with disenfranchised traditionally conservative voters as well as speak to her more liberal supporters.

In other words, the campaign is just beginning. Allen is out of the exploratory stage and has to keep fundraising, as well as reaching voters. She points to a recent poll that shows Chaffetz’s approval rating hitting an all-time low of 52%. For a conservative place like Utah, those kinds of numbers are significant. “That makes my race a lot more competitive,” she says.

Her strategy going forward is to treat this campaign like any doctor would. “We know how to listen, we know how to formulate plans,” she explains. “If you view our country as having a certain chronic illness right now,” she adds, “physicians can look at it, analyze it, and maybe get some science-based treatment plans.”

Baker Technologies, the three-year-old marijuana-marketing startup, has a stated mission to bring order and uniformity to the legal-weed business. It’s one of a number of companies—including delivery services like Meadow and Eaze—that have raised capital over the last few years to try to cash in on the green rush of this fast-growing industry.

Today, Baker is going wide with an e-commerce platform called Shop, which they’re pitching as a kind of “Shopify for cannabis.” Aimed specifically at dispensaries and tailored to the unique needs of the marijuana industry, the platform lets pot-selling establishments set up online storefronts, list what they have in stock, track their sales, and streamline their process for pickups and deliveries.

David Champion, Baker’s cofounder and chief product officer, says the idea for Shop originally began in 2014, the year pot became legal in Colorado. Back then, with the industry taking off, local dispensaries quickly filled up with curious tourists who would spend a lot of time poking around and asking questions, but not necessarily buying much of the emerald stuff. The backlog led to extra wait times that would thwart sales and frustrate regular customers.

“They were being held up in line,” recalls Champion, who chatted with Fast Company via phone from Baker’s Denver headquarters. “[Customers would] drive a half hour to the dispensary, wait in line for another half an hour, and get to the front to realize … the product they needed was not in stock.”

Long lines at dispensaries may not be a rampant problem, especially now that some of the initial curiosity around legal weed has worn off. But still, Champion says dispensaries can simplify the pot-buying process with consumer-facing websites that let customers shop for products, check inventory, order ahead, and even arrange for deliveries where permitted. Baker launched a prototype for Shop with a few dispensaries in Colorado and has been quietly inviting new ones to use it. The platform is now live in 12 states and in British Columbia, supporting both medical and recreational jurisdictions. The official Shop announcement is today.

The Complexity Of Hawking Weed

Shop wasn’t easy to put in place. The biggest hurdle with creating a uniform e-commerce system for legal weed is the confusing patchwork of state and local regulations that govern the sale and distribution of cannabis—some of which seem to be changing every day. In California and Oregon, for instance, pot deliveries are permissible. Not so in Colorado. And in Connecticut, there are restrictions on how dispensaries may display the product.

For Baker, the challenge was creating a flexible e-commerce infrastructure that could accommodate all these disparate elements, including age gates, ID medical card checks, and weight limits. Baker even has a team of compliance experts on hand to help dispensaries make sure their storefronts are operating aboveboard.

“We had to do a lot of tailoring and customization of our platform so that the dispensary can go in and set their preferences—the language, the imagery, the branding—in accordance with their state rules,” Champion says.

Baker was founded in 2014 and says it works with over 250 dispensaries. Last month, the company closed $1.6 million in funding, bringing its total capital raised to $3.5 million. But it has company. Last year, San Francisco-based Meadow raised $2.1 million to further its own cannabis-sales software, as TechCrunchreported. And, of course, the “blank for pot” pitch has been around for a while. (My personal favorite is the “Airbnb for pot” we wrote about in 2015.)

The pot industry, for all its attempts at maturity, still faces a lot of uncertainty, including recent tough talk from the Trump administration. In February, White House press secretary Sean Spicer indicated that we could see stepped-up enforcement of federal laws against recreational pot use. Even as states have legalized the drug, it still paradoxically remains a Schedule 1 drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

But there’s reason for Mary Jane fans to be optimistic about the future: Medical marijuana is now legal in 26 states, and recreational pot smoking is legal in eight. And despite Spicer’s rhetoric, some analysts predict weed could be legal in all 50 states by 2021. That gives pot-focused startups like Baker plenty of room to take root.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why Baker wanted to announce its new service now, remember we’re entering the high season of 4/20, aka stoner Christmas, and dispensaries around the country are preparing for the inevitable rush. “It’s our busiest day of the year,” Champion says.

Of course it is.

Stockton Rush is one of the few humans who owns a submarine, but initially what he really wanted was a spaceship. “I wanted to be the first person on Mars,” says Rush, and while that’s a common flight of fancy, Rush was serious. At 19, he became the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world and then went on to earn a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton. He worked on F-15s and anti-satellite missile programs, with the aim of eventually taking part in the space program. It wasn’t until 10 years ago, at the age of 44, that he realized his dream of being an astronaut on a trip to Mars was just not going to happen, because as he sees it, there’s no economic reason to venture to the Red Planet. “If someone would tell me what the commercial or military reason to go to Mars is, I would believe it’s going to happen,” says Rush. “It’s just a dream.”

Rush likes to dig in deep to his passions. He built a Glasair III experimental aircraft, which he still owns and flies today, and casually mentioned in conversation that he built his own sub, too. As he started to explore the idea of launching his own submarine company, he tried to buy daredevil businessman Steve Fossett’s submersible, after the adventurer died in a 2007 plane crash. When that didn’t work out, he struck out on his own. Starting a submarine company sounds a lot like falling in love—it happens slowly and then all at once. “As I started building the sub bit by bit, I kept waiting for someone to tell me to stop, but no one did and then I was neck deep in it,” says Rush.

Since 2010, his Everett, Washington-based company, OceanGate, has been ushering marine researchers, nautical archaeologists, and well-financed adventure travelers to the ocean depths. The privately funded company is currently targeted at the adventure travel market, which Rush estimates is $275 billion a year. “There’s a huge demand for unique travel experiences,” he says. Undersea tourism—deep undersea tourism—may be one of the most adventurous travel experiences there is, and he’s betting that some tourists are willing to shell out for it.

With a new vessel—designed to go deeper than any private submarine on Earth—Rush wants to push the limits even further, to a place few living civilians have ever been. His plan is to bring bold adventurers (Rush doesn’t like the word “tourists”) to explore the wreck of the Titanic, 12,500 feet—nearly 2.5 miles—below the surface of the Atlantic.

If testing goes as planned, the first eight-day mission to the Titanic will head out from St. John’s, Newfoundland in May 2018 with a crew of about 20 affable scientists (“they have to have the right demeanor,” says Rush), submarine pilots, operations crew, a student or two, and qualified mission specialists (that would be the tourists). In the past, mission specialists have ranged from 12 to 92, says Rush, although now he prefers explorers to be at least 18 years old.

What qualifies a person to join the crew? Their willingness to pay the hefty $105,129 price tag (the inflation-adjusted cost of first-class passage on the Titanic in 1912, $4,350), their physical ability to get in and out of the sub, sit inside an enclosed space and not panic, and their promise to avoid perfumes and certain foods during the journey. “Smells can be significant,” says Rush, discreetly.

OceanGate is still sorting the logistics of getting the adventurers to and from the boat, which will be anchored near the wreck site. Currently the plan is to put travelers on helicopters in Newfoundland and fly them to a landing deck aboard the dive support ship. Once on board, they will live and work with the crew, taking dives to the legendary shipwreck. As the weather allows during their eight-day stay, five at a time will make several 90-minute descents into the briny deep to attempt to make a 3D model of the Titanic, with help from the nonprofit Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory (AIVL) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The people who sign up to explore the underwater world are certainly in for an adventure, but for Rush, the high-end tours are a gateway to a more profitable business. “The long-term value is in the commercial side,” says Rush. “Adventure tourism is a way to monetize the process of proving the technology.” He compares this to how Virgin Galactic earned credibility with its tourism push and has now added satellite launches to their business.

Rush, it turns out, has a lot more in common with Richard Branson than Steve Zissou. While he certainly loves the mystery and allure of the sea, he is also a businessman—he earned a business degree from Berkeley and helmed a few IP ventures—who can’t help but see the ocean as a vast mass of resources filled with oil and gas reserves, diamond mining, and rare earth minerals to be harvested and profited from.

“There’s all these resources to be explored and I couldn’t understand why there weren’t any manned subs,” he says. “Turns out one of the reasons was that people had not looked at the business aspect of operating a manned sub, because operations were funded by governments through universities for research. Nobody thought about cost, nobody thought about revenue.”

Rush is definitely thinking about revenue, and he has a plan mapped out in charts and graphs to prove its viability. It all begins with OceanGate’s elite crews of “citizen scientists,” or what most people might call well-to-do tourists.

OceanGate’s current submarines can dive 1,500 feet below the water, which is enough to take intrepid travelers to the wreck of the Andrea Doria, off the coast of Nantucket. They’re leading seven “missions” to that wreck in August of this year, at $25,000 apiece. They also have trips planned with the Bahamas’ Cape Eleuthra Institute. “That will be more modest, only 10 to 15,” says Rush. (The zeroes on the end are implied.)

As the summer season keeps their shallow-diving sub busy, the company is putting the finishing touches on its new deep-diving submarine, reinforcing the hull with carbon fiber and making other tweaks to make sure the sub can withstand the greater pressure of around 6,000 psi. When the sub hits the water for testing in November 2017, it will be one of a few on Earth. “There are only four subs on the entire planet that can go to half the ocean depth,” says Rush and, yes, that includes naval submarines. “More people have been to space than to half the ocean depth.”

While Rush is all business, a bit of childish glee bubbles up as he explains the new machine, called the Cyclops 2. “It’s extremely rare,” he explains. In fact, it’s the only manned sub in the world capable of reaching depths of 4,000 meters that is not owned by a government (or, perhaps, a Dr. Evil-style villain). It’s that rarity that makes the trip to the Titanic such a hot commodity—it’s already sold out for all seven of the trips it’s slated to make in its first year.

These bold adventurers are willing to pay a premium to be some of the earliest paying deep sea tourists—which is exactly what Rush is banking on. “The most expensive Virgin Galactic flight is the first one with Richard Branson,” he explains, and while OceanGate doesn’t have Branson, they are working on having some cast members of Titanic on their first mission to the wreck site.

Aside from cash flow and an attention to the rigors of the journey, it also takes a certain nexus of personality traits to be willing to climb aboard a submarine and head to the ocean floor. Perhaps these are the same traits that make someone jump at the chance to be a civilian in space. “The first nine clients for the Titanic are all Virgin Galactic clients,” Rush says.

Eventually, as the pool of wealthy adventure-minded travelers willing to take a dive in a sub dwindles, Rush hopes that his submarine technology will be well proven, and he can start to contract with the biggest of the high rollers: oil and gas companies. “The biggest resource is oil and gas, and they spend about $16 billion a year on robots to service oil and gas platforms,” he explains. “But oil and gas [companies] don’t take new technology. They want it proven, they want it out there.”

The Titanic trips help make the case, showing those oil and gas companies that his technology works, while making a profit—something the company hasn’t quite done yet. “We’ll be profitable with the Titanic trips,” says Rush. “The Titanic is where we go from startup to ongoing business.”

That’s the future, though. For now, the company is fully focused on its journeys to the bottom of the sea, while keeping an eye on the bottom line, buoyed by those with the ability to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime adventure aboard a submarine. There’s no doubt that the price tag to join a mission is hefty, but Rush makes a compelling pitch.

“It really is a life-changing experience and there aren’t a lot of things like that,” he says. “Rather than spend $65,000 to climb Mt. Everest, maybe die, and spend a month living in a miserable base camp, you can change your life in a week.”

Electricity grids are some of the most complex systems ever invented. Serving millions of homes and businesses across thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines, they’re an incredible tangle of electron flows. And, compared to other infrastructure, they’re generally not very up to date: much of the design still dates back to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

Operators have a surprisingly limited grasp of how power is shifting about at any moment. Take my home in Brooklyn. Because the local utility (Con Edison) has yet to install two-way “smart meters” in my area, a worker has to come to the door every few months and ask to read the meter. The company doesn’t know how much power I’m using hour to hour.

This lack of grid visibility creates a challenge as we add more “distributed” resources, like solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles, to the network. The grid is evolving from a one-way system, where power flows down to your home from large plants, to a two-way system, where power goes back and forth (say when rooftop solar panels export excess power to the grid). At the same time, solar and wind aren’t constant sources. They vary in usefulness depending on the time of day and the state of the weather.

That’s why we badly need software like GridOS, which recently won the energy category in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas contest. (You can read more about the other finalists below.) Developed in Toronto by Opus One Solutions, the grid modeling technology gives grid operators more visibility into power flows, allowing them to identify inefficiencies, balance supply and demand, and make better trading decisions.

“The grid is very blind,” says Joshua Wong, Opus One Solutions’ founder and CEO. “What you can’t see, you can barely control, and what you can’t control, you can’t optimize and put a value on. When you can’t put a price [on a resource], you don’t know how to modernize the grid.”

The value of a distributed, or “edge,” resource is relative and situational, and dictated only partly by its installation cost. A wind turbine is likely to be worth more in the middle of the day (when demand is high), or when a traditional power plant isn’t available (maybe it’s down for maintenance). GridOS shows the marginal value of an edge resource at any moment, enabling better hour-to-hour and day-ahead management, and better planning. Operators can see where they might need to upgrade a transmission line, or put in more energy storage to handle excess supply (say, when turbines are generating more power than consumers need).

Wong founded Opus One in 2011, and has since built several micro-grids in Ontario, including one athletes village at the 2015 Pan-American Games. Wong says these projects helped inform GridOS’s sophisticated algorithms and grid modeling techniques. Opus One Solutions is currently building a micro-grid on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, as part of New York’s experimental Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) program. The project prices the value of distributed resources and aims to help utilities integrate renewables more effectively. REV reforms the economics of the New York’s power industry, so utilities have greater incentives to use solar and wind.

In the long term, generating power from renewables isn’t likely to be a problem. By 2050, sources like solar, wind and geothermal can meet 80% of demand, a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed last year. (And that’s just with currently available technologies, never mind what inventions might emerge from the energy industry over the next few decades). But enabling the grid to cope with that much distributed generation will require a lot of investment in new infrastructure and more advanced planning systems, like the one GridOS offers.

The end goal, says Wong, is a fully “transactive” energy system, where every home, business, electric vehicle, and generation site works in concert, constantly trading power back and forth, depending on availability and need. “The level of participation needs to increase,” he says. “The network is always more valuable than what anyone can do on their own.”

Here’s more about the finalists in the energy category:

GE hydropower turbines

by GE Renewable Energy and Max Bögl Wind AG
Located high in the Swabian-Franconian Forest in southern Germany, GE’s wind-hydro energy storage project is like a giant battery. When four giant 584-feet turbines generate more electricity than the local grid needs, the power is used to pump water up a mountainside into a series of reservoirs. When the grid needs electricity, the water is released, so it runs through generators at the bottom. The project offers an elegant solution to wind power’s intermittency–the way turbines may generate too little power, or too much, raising headaches for grid operators.

Sandstone Energy 10X

by SolarReserve
SolarReserve already has one massive solar thermal energy site: the $1 billion Crescent Dunes project in Tonopah, Nevada. It has 10,347 tracking mirrors concentrating energy onto a central concrete tower full of high-temperature molten salt. The proposed Sandstone Energy 10X would raise things to Hoover Dam dimensions, with 20 gigawatt-hours of energy storage, or enough power for 1 million Californian homes.

ChargePoint Home

by ChargePoint
ChargePoint offers more than 30,000 public charging for electric vehicles. But people also need to charge at home. This product, designed for a garage, offers 25 miles per charging hour and comes with a mobile app, so you can keep track of your car’s battery levels.

Totem

by Totem Power
Developed by a New York company, this solar-powered “utility pole” incorporates WiFi, a 4G mobile connection, electric vehicle charging, street lighting and energy storage. It’s stylish public infrastructure with multiple uses.

d.light A1

by Ideo.org

Too many the world’s poor still rely on kerosene for lighting, putting their health–and too much of their income–at risk. This classic solar lamp, the first of its kind, has “empowered over 3 million lives,” according to Ideo.org, which designed it in 2014. The d.light is marketed by a social enterprise of the same name.

Solar savings for all

by Arcadia Power
One million homes now have rooftop solar. But, while that’s impressive, it’s still only a small sliver of the potential (about 1% of utility customers). Almost 80% of residential power customers can’t get solar because they don’t own their home, they don’t have the right type of roof, or there’s too much shading over their property. Arcadia’s community program allows people to buy into local solar projects on a subscription basis.

Smart Green Tower

byFrey Architekten
Conceived by a German architecture firm, the Smart Green Tower generates and stores all its own electricity. On the outside is a glass photovoltaic facade. Inside is a massive battery. The building is due to be constructed in Freiburg im Breisgau, in south-west Germany, in 2017. It could become part of a local mini-grid, says the developer, playing a supply-and-demand balancing role.

AMIE 1.0

by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
The Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy project (or AMIE) is a combined 3D-printed house and 3D-printed car. Made with a series of low-weight, ultra-engineered materials, the two parts wirelessly share renewable power, making for a highly-efficient, low-waste whole.

Orison Tower and Orison Panel

by Orison
Orison makes sleek residential energy storage devices, allowing homeowners to bank power when it’s cheapest. The Orison Tower and Orison Panel offer backup in case of a blackout, says the company. And they also help manage the wider electric grid by charging during times of low demand and discharging during higher-demand periods.

GoSun Grill

by GoSun
You can cook more food than you might think with this portable solar cooker: everything from meat and vegetables to soup and breads, according to the manufacturer. Described as a “turbo-crockpot,” the oven has parabolic reflectors on the outside, which draw solar heat to a central metal vacuum tube that gets as hot as 550°F.

Modular Indoor Micro-Climate (MIMiC)

by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Architecture Science and Ecology
Still in development, this micro-climate control technology aims to offer localized heating and cooling, cutting waste and delivering personalized temperatures. Developed by the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), a research collaboration between the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), a design and engineering firm, the system splits a room into zones, letting users choose between cooling, heating, and ventilation modes using an app.

The Kathleen Grimm School for Leadership and Sustainability at Sandy Ground (P.S. 62)

by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Also designed by SOM, this school claims to be the first in New York to generate more onsite energy than it uses. With 40 roof mounted solar panels to heat water, geothermal heating and energy-efficient equipment, the 68,000-square-foot, two-story school in Staten Island educates 444 pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students. SOM says it uses 50% less energy than a typical New York City school.

Hans Zimmer’s “library”—a windowless bunker in an anonymous building on an otherwise industrial stretch of Santa Monica, about 14 blocks from the beach—exudes the old world, mahogany refinement of a secret gentlemen’s club.

Arrayed with velvet furniture and Persian rugs, flickering candles and vast banks of vintage musical equipment (like the Moog synthesizer Mick Jagger played in the experimental 1970 drama Performance), this dimly lighted space built by “three heavily boozing French carpenters” has incubated every note of the Oscar-winning soundtrack composer’s musical output since 2001. That was the year Zimmer took over the building from director Ridley Scott (with whom the German producer, incidentally, has collaborated on six films).

If these walls could talk, they might very well start belting out the sea shanties Zimmer composed for Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and its multi-billion-dollar franchise of sequels. Or perhaps they’d bellow the dread-inducing horn surges and string swells Zimmer committed to tape for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight film trilogy. Or maybe even foot-stomp along to the banjo/fiddle/out-of-tune piano trinity Zimmer devised for 2009’s neo-noir Sherlock Holmes.

The quality, diversity and sheer profligacy of his work have been maintained for so long, it boggles the imagination to consider all the movie and TV music that’s issued forth from this place (and six adjoining buildings Zimmer owns): soundtracks for 12 Years a Slave, Netflix’s popular series The Crown, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the BBC documentary Planet Earth II, Iron Man, Interstellar and The Simpsons Movie, just to name a tiny portion of that discography.

So in January, it came as something of a shock to discover the four-time Grammy winner, would be exiting his library’s cloistered solitude to pick up instruments for himself and claim the spotlight before arena-sized audiences around the world.

This Sunday, accompanied by a 22-piece orchestra and full choir, the 59-year-old composer will perform a career-spanning cavalcade of greatest film score hits at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (and on the desert hipster Mecca’s second weekend April 23) before heading out on a 55-date tour that will see him travel to San Francisco and Las Vegas this month, Australia in May, then Europe through the end of June, before doubling back to North America for more dates into the late summer.

On a recent, cloudless SoCal afternoon, I met with Zimmer to get the 411 on precisely what compelled him to come out of the proverbial shadows, pass up the kind of lucrative scoring gigs that have remained his stock-in-trade since the ‘80s and hit the road as a performer. “I wasn’t compelled,” the composer said in Teutonic-inflected but otherwise perfect English. “I was forced! I was cajoled! I was bullied by three of my best friends, Ann Marie Simpson, Johnny Marr and Pharrell Williams.”

Williams, of course, is the multiplatinum-selling Top 40 hitmaker who collaborated with Zimmer on soundtracks for Despicable Me 2 and last year’s Academy Award-nominated biopic Hidden Figures. Marr is best known as ex-guitarist for the seminal British post-punk band the Smiths; he co-composed the music for 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with the Frankfurt native. Classically trained violinist-come-rock musician Simpson, meanwhile, has toured as a featured soloist with the likes of AR Rahman, Damian Marley and Dave Stewart and now tours as part of Zimmer’s symphony orchestra. Hence, they know of what they speak.

“Pharrell said things like, ‘You know, eventually you have to look your audience in the eye. Eventually, you have to start doing things in real time, as opposed to hiding behind the screen.’ And one of them—I don’t know who—said, ‘You’ve got to get out of the windowless room,’” Zimmer continued, adding: “He was absolutely right. Because I was talking about having stage fright.”

April is here and final preparations are underway. #HansZimmerLive is almost here!

A post shared by Hans Zimmer Live (@hanszimmerlive) on Apr 1, 2017 at 11:22pm PDT

To be sure, the American and southern hemisphere engagements aren’t the composer’s first live performances—just his first outside Europe. Zimmer, who claimed an Academy Award in 1995 for his soundtrack to the animated blockbuster The Lion King, and whose Golden Globe and Tony Award tally attest to his status as Hollywood’s most blue-chip scoring bay ace, headlined two sold-out performances at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2014. And earlier this year, he kicked off the tour (called “Hans Zimmer Revealed” in the US and Australia and that he jokes is billed as “Oh No, Here He Is Again” in Europe) with two more sold-out shows at London’s 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena that arrived to critical raves. “A beautiful, intricate symphony of visual delights,” opined The Times of London. “A wonderful night that feels like being in a whirlwind of interlocking dreams,” gushed The Guardian UK.

Just don’t show up to the gigs expecting anything resembling your standard symphonic music recital, he warns. “If you see a classical music concert or a film music concert, really the whole evening is spent looking at a man’s back and a bunch of musicians reading the paper,” Zimmer said, blazing up the first of several Marlboro Lights he smoked over the course of an interview. “It’s a bit like a bad marriage. I thought, ‘Where’s the entertainment in that?’

“Secondly, I’d seen some of these things like for Gladiator or Pirates—they have big screens and they show footage. The movie starts. And within five minutes, if the movie is any good, I’m totally in the movie. The only time I noticed the musicians was when someone played a wrong note! That’s not what I want to do.”

To manufacture the sense of spectacle he was looking for—a multi-layered, multimedia experience Zimmer declined to elucidate in any specific detail—the composer enlisted acclaimed production designer Marc Brickman (who earned his stripes creating performance visuals for Pink Floyd, Cirque du Soleil and the Barcelona and Nagano Olympics) to “reimagine the movies we’ve done with lighting.”

And in further defiance of established classical music protocol, Zimmer says he will eschew what should be his place of pride—at the conductor’s podium—to play a variety of instruments onstage himself. “I play bad piano, synth. I can’t help it; I play guitar. And I play that lowliest of instruments, the one that’s only there for ridicule, I play the banjo,” he said with evident glee. “What’s the worst that can happen? For the audience, to see a guy have a meltdown on stage. That could be quite exciting.”

It’s clear Zimmer is pleased to upend any set expectations of him as any kind of John Williams-esque eminence, pointing out that symphonic music was something like the original punk rock with rioting in the streets greeting new compositions by Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss in the 19th century. And given Zimmer’s background as a journeyman synth player in various ‘80s New Wave bands—he can briefly be seen in the music video for the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”—the music producer insists live gigs aren’t exactly a new thing for him.

But when I point out that his name stands out on the Coachella line-up—North America’s preeminent showcase for independent music, alt-rock, EDM and hip-hop—in a “One of these things is not like the others” kind of way, the composer nearly bristled with umbrage. “Really, what I do is a rock show. One of the things I’ve been hiding is I’m really a rock ’n roller,” Zimmer said. “That’s where I come from. We are not polite, we are noisy! You can’t get any more alternative than us! And you can’t get any more independent than us! I’ve never had a record deal beyond a single project.”

Still, the whole sudden performance tilt of Zimmer’s career begged certain questions. For his ownership claim to a blockbuster filmography that has generated $24 billion in global box office receipts as well as name-brand recognition as the world’s most identifiable working soundtrack composer, I wondered: had Zimmer simply run out of challenges scoring television and movies? Was the decision to tour some kind of mid-life crisis?

The producer demurred, pointing out that Planet Earth 2 and Hidden Figures—“a period piece about African-American women and mathematics”—that sounds like commercial kryptonite on paper but which had turned into an unexpected commercial hit and awards darling, were two of the “most relevant projects” he’d ever worked on. And with scoring recently completed on Nolan’s much-anticipated World War II epic Dunkirk, Zimmer had no plans to permanently trade soundtracks for the tour bus life anytime soon.

“No, I don’t have to go out on the road,” Zimmer admitted. “I can stay in this room. As you know, it’s pretty comfy. But I took it to heart when the Gang of Three said, ‘Eventually you have to look your audience in the eye.’ All my life, I’ve lived dangerously and on the edge of some experiment that is just about to go wrong. So this is just pushing everything a little bit further.”

For a small farmer in India, the last year might have gone something like this: She plants tomatoes, and the crop is destroyed by pests. Months of extreme heat mean that she can’t plant anything else. When she finally plants another crop, it’s destroyed by drought. After backbreaking labor, she’s still broke, or worse, in serious debt. In 2015, more than 8,000 farmers in India committed suicide, most because of their financial situation.

As climate change increases environmental risks for farmers in the area–from monsoons to heat waves–one startup is testing a potential solution. Kheyti, which recently won the Global Social Venture Competition, makes what it calls the Greenhouse in a Box, a simple, low-cost greenhouse that can sit on a small area of a farm and provide regular crops which guarantees year-round income if everything else goes wrong.

The typical greenhouse available in India was originally designed for farmers in developed countries who grow high-value flowers or vegetables–and it’s well out of the price range of a low-income farmer. The new greenhouse is simpler, with fewer materials and a smaller footprint (it’s roughly half the size of a basketball court or 2% of the land area of a typical small farm in India). Two layers of shade netting on the top reduce the temperature inside by 5-8 degrees Celsius. Insect netting on all sides reduces pest attacks 90%.

“It’s basically the same investment that a farmer would make to start a daily operation, buy two or three cows so they can make a steady income from dairy, or invest in making a small poultry shed in their farms for chickens and eggs,” Kappagantulu says. “I think it’s comparable to other small investments that farmers make.”

Still, the $400 down payment is more than the poorest farmers can afford. The startup is aiming to be able to offer it for a down payment of $100 or $200.

In experiments on the startup’s own farm, the greenhouse has performed even as the same crops fail outside. “Right now the temperature in Hyderabad is about 115 degrees Fahrenheit, I would say, and in this time, nothing grows,” says Kappagantulu. “From this time until about June, farmers aren’t able to grow anything outside. When we did this experiment side by side, all the plants [outside] died when the temperature hit 115, and all the plants inside survived and gave us a steady income.”

A drip irrigation system, coupled with the shade that reduces heat and evaporation, helps cut water use 90%. Along with the greenhouse’s ability to protect crops from pests and floods, this means that farmers can grow seven times more produce. But the startup believes that the greenhouse on its own can’t fully address the challenges that farmers face, so it also provides a suite of services.

“If we give them a greenhouse and they don’t have access to the right seeds and fertilizers to be used inside, the crop fails and they’re back in the same cycle,” Kappagantulu says. “If we don’t give them the right training needed to manage any diseases or growing practices that need to be done inside, again, the crop fails. If they can’t get access to the financing to buy the greenhouse in the first place, not enough small farmers are going to buy it.”

Over the next year, Kheyti plans to continue testing the system with around 300 farmers, gathering data about yields and how much money farmers have to repay their loans. In theory, a farmer should be able to earn $100 a month when the loan is paid off, a 100% increase in average income. In 2018, the company plans to quickly scale up. Because of word of mouth, it already has a list of 3,000 interested farmers. By 2025, it hopes to reach 1 million.

One of the tech world’s most open secrets finally has some confirmation: Apple filed for and received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving car tech on public roads. The Apple Car, in some shape or form, is real, at least as a research project.

The DMV filing showed up on the department’s website on Friday. Apple will apparently test a software and sensor sensor system installed in three test vehicles–all 2015 Lexus SUVs. The permit covers six people who will be required to sit inside the test vehicles during the testing.

The storm of speculation that arose with the first rumors of Apple’s “Project Titan” has over the past year centered on whether Apple is in fact building a full car, or, as some reports have suggested, merely building the software that controls the sensors and self-driving functions in the car.

“Even if they have a permit to test, it is most likely related to iOS, navigation, cameras, and sensors used in some type of autonomous vehicle,” says Creative Strategies president Tim Bajarin. “Apple could bring innovation to either cars being retrofitted with the self-driving technology, or to new ones designed from scratch.”

The original vision of building a whole “Apple Car” may have been diluted by the realities of actually engineering the hardware, which arguably falls well outside Apple’s design expertise in consumer technology.

Building a self-driving car from the ground up is also very expensive>, and marketing such a product would also be new to Apple, Bajarin adds.

Step One?

Above Avalon analyst Neil Cybart believes Apple is still interested in building the whole vehicle. He points out, rightly, that Apple’s first instinct it to try to design and control as much of the customer experience as possible.

“Value will flow to the companies providing the full experience produced by controlling both auto hardware and software,” he wrote in an email to Fast Company.

It’s true that in successful Apple products like the iPhone it’s been the design interplay between hardware and software that creates the positive experience.

Cybart suspects that Apple wants to perfect the software, then move to the task of building the vehicle that surrounds it. “Apple is currently focused on developing the core technologies needed to power a self-driving car,” he says. “My suspicion is that once Apple is confident in its progress, the company will once again focus on auto hardware.”

So software only or the full monty? The news of Apple’s DMV permit ultimately doesn’t do much to settle the argument.

“It would lend credibility to the idea that Apple is creating a complete self-driving ‘system,’ but doesn’t assure that this would be a car,” says analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “It could ultimately be productized as a subsystem that could go into another car brand.”

Moorhead, too, believes the software development might just be part of staged approach that will progress toward building the hardware part of the car.

Disagreement among Apple watchers might just be a reflection of disagreement within Apple. The company is said to have hundreds of people working on “Project Titan,” but progress on the project has reportedly been slowed by multiple departures of key people and debate over the best way forward for the nascent technology.

A Bloomberg report last year suggested that with the arrival of Project Titan’s new leader, Apple veteran Bob Mansfield, the company began to refocus resources on the software side of the project.

According to the DMV website, Apple is now one of 30 car companies that hold permits to test autonomous cars on California roads. Alphabet’s Waymo division, Uber, and Tesla are also on the list.