Getting approached about a job opening can feel super flattering (and it’s a sure sign that you’re doing something right!), but depending on where you are in your career, figuring out how to respond can be a bit of a headache.

You don’t want to come off as rude or dismissive if you aren’t interested, and you definitely don’t want to seem desperate or needy if you are. So yes, finding the right words can be tricky, but these five templates will make responding to recruiters a breeze—regardless of your current status.

1. If You’re 100% Not Job Searching

You love what you’re doing, and there’s nothing anyone can say or do to convince you to consider a new opportunity—at least not for the foreseeable future. But you don’t want to close the door on what could be a potentially helpful relationship down the line, either.

Hi [Name],

Thanks for reaching out! This certainly sounds like an interesting job, and I appreciate your consideration.

I really love the work I’m doing for [your company] and am not in the market for a new opportunity at the moment. That said, if I find myself looking to make a change in the future, I’ll be sure to get in touch.

Thanks again!
[Your name]

If you happen to know someone who might be interested in this role, you could also add something like, “I may have a colleague who could be a good fit for this role; would you mind if I passed your contact information on to them?” For recruiters, the next best thing to finding the right candidate is finding someone who knows the right candidate.

2. If You’re Open To The Right Opportunity

You’re pretty happy where you are and haven’t given a lot of thought to finding a new job, but this role sounds like it could have some potential. The goal here is to be upfront about your status while also conveying your interest. You’re essentially playing it cool—if this person wants to schedule a quick call, great; if he doesn’t, that’s fine, too.

Hi [Name],

Thanks for getting in touch!

I’m pretty happy in my current role with [your company] and am not actively looking to change jobs, but I’d be open to discussing this role, as I never turn down a chance to chat about [compelling trait about the job description, e.g. software development or sales enablement]. Would it be possible for us to connect sometime next week? I should be available for a quick call on [dates and times that’ll work with your schedule].

Moving forward, you can reach me directly here: [your email address and/or phone number].

Looking forward to speaking with you!

Best,
[Your name]

3. If You’re Actively Searching But Aren’t Interested In This Job

When you’re in the market for a new job, hearing from a recruiter is really exciting—until you realize that the job she’s approached you about isn’t at all what you’re looking for. But don’t worry too much about the role itself; this is a great opportunity for you to establish a relationship with someone who might be able to help you find the right one. Now’s your chance to tell them what you’re looking for and ask whether they know of anything that lines up with your goals.

Hi [Name],

Thanks for thinking of me for this role! I am currently exploring new opportunities, but would ideally like to find a position that would allow me to [traits of your ideal position here, e.g., work from home, expand on my content development experience, step into the nonprofit space, earn at least $X annually, etc.]. It sounds like this particular role isn’t quite what I’m looking for, but do you happen to know of any other opportunities that may be a better fit? If so, I’d love to connect!

I’ve attached my resume for your review, and can be reached directly at [your email address and/or phone number] moving forward.

Best,
[Your name]

4. If You’re Intrigued By This Opportunity

Now we’re talking! You’re open to new opportunities, and this one sounds like it could have some serious potential. You can keep your response pretty straightforward—the goal here is to confirm your interest and get an initial interview on the calendar.

Hi [Name],

This sounds like a really interesting opportunity—thanks for thinking of me!

As you probably saw on my profile, I have [X years] of experience in the [industry or job function, e.g., digital marketing or project management] space, and am particularly interested in opportunities that allow me to [relevant job duty/deliverable, e.g. leverage my creativity in a design-focused role or build new programs from the ground up]. Based on the information you’ve shared, it sounds like the role certainly could be a great fit!

I’d love to schedule a time for us to discuss how my skills and experience could benefit the team; would it be possible for us to connect sometime this week? I’ve included my availability below:

[dates/times]

You can reach me directly at [your e-mail address and/or phone number]. Looking forward to connecting!

Best,
[Your name]

Related:How To Turn Your Current Job Into Your Dream Job

5. If This Is Hands-Down Your Dream Job

Be cool. Your dream job just literally fell into your lap. You’ve got this.

Demonstrating enthusiasm for a role’s always a great move (recruiters love working with motivated candidates), but don’t forget that you’ll want to highlight the myriad reasons that you’re absolutely perfect for this job. A response that demonstrates your excitement and emphasizes your transferable skills should all but guarantee that you’ll land an initial interview.

Hi [Name],

Thanks for getting in touch! Based on what you’ve shared about this role, I’d be eager to learn more.

It sounds like you’re looking for an [job title] with [relevant skills/experience] expertise and a talent for developing [insert outcomes, e.g. unique and compelling marketing campaigns across a variety of digital channels]—that’s me!

As someone with [X years of experience] in the industry, I know what it takes to deliver [deliverables based on job description, e.g., flawlessly executed e-mail campaigns from start to finish]. In my current role at [your current company], I [description of relevant experience and tangible results based on job description, i.e. guide the production and execution of 25 unique monthly email campaigns and have grown new lead generation by 50% in just six months].

I’d love to schedule a time for us to discuss how my skills and experience could benefit the [company name] team; would it be possible for us to connect sometime this week? I’ve included my availability below:

[dates/times]

You can reach me directly at [your e-mail address and/or phone number]. Looking forward to connecting!

Best,
[Your name]

If you happen to have something in common, like a shared connection or alma mater, it wouldn’t hurt to mention that at the end of your message. Try saying something like, “By the way, I noticed you’re a Chico State alum, too. It’s always great to hear from a fellow Wildcat!” or “it looks like you’re also connected with [Name of Mutual Acquaintance]. I used to work with her at [Company Name]!”

Going beyond the basics serves to establish a more personal connection and might just give you an edge.

Finding the right candidates to approach about an open position can be a tough job, and recruiters spend a lot of time trying to track qualified people like you down, so receiving a response—even if it’s a “Thanks, but no thanks!”—is always appreciated. Taking a few minutes to write back will help you to establish what could be an invaluable career ally. And if the role you’ve been approached about is exactly what you’re looking for, even better!

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

More From The Muse: 

• 4 Truths About Working With Recruiters That They’ll Never Tell You
• 4 Little Things That Recruiters Find Just As Awkward As You Do
• 3 Interview Lines That Make Recruiters Roll Their Eyes

Nine months ago, I became a people manager for my team of privacy engineers here at Google. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to be a manager. As it turns out, there are some things that aren’t necessarily obvious when you step into a management role for the first time. Here are a few of the biggest lessons I’ve learned firsthand.

It’s Okay Not To Know Everything

Before I became a manager, I felt pretty secure in the knowledge that it wasn’t my job to know everything. I had my own areas of focus and could rely on others to deal with things outside my own scope. But once I became a manager, I felt much less sure about this conviction. Were my reports going to expect me to know everything I’d earlier considered beyond my scope?

Fortunately, they didn’t. I’ve started to take a broader view of what’s going on in my own engineering organization, but that still doesn’t mean I need to know everything myself. Instead I’ve focused on knowing the people who know things. My team knows that they can bring questions to me, and I’ll get them an answer or point them to somebody who can.

Never Hesitate To Lean On Your Peers

Advancing as an individual team member usually means doing the same stuff at an ever-increasing scale, bit by gradual bit. Becoming a manager isn’t like that. You’re more or less dropped into the deep end. Suddenly, there are lots of things you’ve never had to do anything remotely similar to before. But I found that my fellow managers were an invaluable resource for getting myself up to speed—as long as I was willing to ask.

I’ve had run-ins with imposter syndrome before, and being a woman in a male-dominated industry hasn’t always helped. Coping with that required convincing myself I could “fake it ’til I make it” (in retrospect, I had definitely already“made it”—it just didn’t feel that way at the time). As a manager, I wasn’t willing to employ the same strategy—the stakes were too high. My overriding need to “get it right” helped me to just ask those “stupid” questions. I’m glad I did.

Related:3 Crucial Things I’ve Learned In My First 30 Days As A Manager

Listen More, Not Less

After becoming a manager, you might expect others to spend more time listening to you. My experience so far is that the best results come from doing the exact opposite: spending more time listening to others. I try to spend as much time possible in my one-on-ones, listening to what my team members have to tell me. Meanwhile I try to keep my own feedback and advice to them as concise as I can.

Don’t (Just) Be A “Crap Umbrella”

I’ve heard effective managers described as “crap umbrellas,” shielding their team members from the stuff that prevents them from doing useful work. The best managers I’ve ever had were extremely effective at shielding me from crap, so that made a lot of sense when I heard it. The thing that truly made them great, though, was that they didn’t just put up a brick wall. They made sure to keep me involved in the important parts of whatever we were working on together, while filtering out the distractions.

Now that I’m a manager, I try hard to do the same. Listening to my team members helps me figure out where they do and don’t want to be involved. That way I can be an effective shield for my team without isolating them from the larger organization.

Related: I Joined Google At 19—Here’s What I Learned

Look For Small Ways To Lend Support—Before You’re Asked To

Finally, I’ve learned quickly how to be more proactive in the way I offer support. Instead of waiting for my team members to ask me for something, I try to anticipate what they need to know. This isn’t limited to strictly work-focused needs, either—it also extends to emotional support and quality-of-life issues. During a particularly stressful week for the LGBT community a while back, my own manager proactively reaching out with a word of sympathy meant the world to me. I knew I wanted to try and do the same for my own team once I became a manager.

Even small gestures, like asking a new report if they have any dietary requirements before planning a team lunch, can go a long way in building psychological safety. In fact, Google’s re:Work effort identified psychological safety as the foundation on which all other qualities of high-performing teams are built. So simple gestures like these are deceptively powerful opportunities I’ve tried to take advantage of wherever I can.

I’ve found out firsthand how important it is for new managers to continue to learn and grow. When you’re in charge of a group of other people, you’re a force-multiplier for your team; every way you yourself can improve has a disproportionate overall benefit. That responsibility can be a bit scary, but seeing your team succeed is incredibly satisfying. I’m glad I took the leap.

Amber Yust is a privacy engineering manager at Google.

A giant squidlike creature commands the screen and breathes fire. “The fate of the universe lies on your shoulders,” a voice-over intones, and for the next two minutes, viewers of the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 teaser trailer are treated to a mashup of exuberant space battles, cool gadgets, and comic vignettes, set to the 1975 power-pop anthem “Fox on the Run.” Marvel, the studio that created the Guardians franchise, posted the trailer online in December, five months before the highly anticipated sequel was due to hit multiplexes. Within 24 hours, the clip, featuring the film’s ragtag superhero vigilantes—a foulmouthed raccoon, a baby tree, and the hunky-but-relatable Star-Lord, played by Chris Pratt—racked up 81 million views. Even the song hit No. 1 on the iTunes rock chart. Hearing the news, James Gunn, who cowrote and directed both the first, $773 million–grossing Guardians and its sequel, jumped on Facebook to exclaim, “Holy crap!,” adding that the trailer was “the biggest Marvel Studios Teaser ever! No kidding—I’m, like, floored.”

For Marvel, though, outdoing itself has become something of a regular occurrence. When Guardians Vol. 2 hits theaters on May 5, it will mark the studio’s 15th movie since it started making its own nine years ago, and each one has been a hit. Just as impressive as Marvel’s box-office record (these films have grossed more than $10 billion globally): the billions more in revenue it has generated from toys, merchandise, fragrances, and even cruises (yes, there is a Marvel Day at Sea). Disney, which acquired Marvel in 2009 for $4 billion, has seen an impressive return on its investment.

The outsize success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the company has dubbed its interlocking slate of films in which characters routinely overlap, is currently reshaping Hollywood in Marvel’s image. “Any press release about any movie these days comes with the term ‘cinematic universe,’ ” says Joe Keatinge, a comic-book writer who’s worked for both Marvel and DC Comics. “If Magnolia came out today, it would be part of a cinematic universe.” Universal, which is building a shared world around the movie monsters it first made famous in the 1930s and ’40s, such as the Invisible Man, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Bride of Frankenstein, will release the first of its “Monsterverse” pictures, The Mummy, in June. Legendary plans to interconnect a different set of classic monsters such as King Kong and Godzilla; its initial effort, Kong: Skull Island, performed modestly in March. Meanwhile, Paramount is revisiting its Hasbro toy lines: The studio has outlined the next decade of Transformers movies, and it’s creating a separate universe around G.I. Joe, Micronauts, and M.A.S.K. (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand) vehicles. In March, Warner Bros. executives admitted that they were contemplating a return to The Matrix as grounds for a character universe, and Disney, which successfully revivified Star Wars, is thinking about a Tron-iverse.

Marvel, which has ramped up production to be able to make three movies a year, is proving that, if done correctly, these character universes can resemble successful technology platforms—ecosystems that enable both creative risk taking and significant growth and profits. But too often, other companies look at the winning result without appreciating the forethought that produced it. Look no further than Marvel’s arch nemesis, DC Entertainment, which, in conjunction with Warner Bros. (its parent company), has tried to catch up to Marvel by launching its own “extended universe” of characters. Last year, it released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, both of which frustrated fans and fell short of $1 billion in global box office. Its Wonder Woman movie will arrive in June amid negative buzz and reports of a troubled production.

Marvel’s approach, then, has been easy to replicate but challenging to duplicate. What is the true essence of Marvel’s success? The answer lies in the way the studio trusts its instincts, jettisons formula, and constantly looks ahead to galaxies far, far away. Here’s how other companies can obtain these powers.

Have An Audacious Vision, But Don’t Rush It

Every superhero origin story starts with tragedy, and Marvel’s is no different: The company, then an independent comic-book publisher, filed for bankruptcy in 1996 following a steep downturn in the industry. In a shortsighted turnaround attempt over the next several years, it pursued harebrained licensing deals (such as authorizing a Hard Rock Cafe–style Marvel Mania chain restaurant), and it sold off movie rights in a scattershot manner to studios across Hollywood.

One of those companies was Artisan Entertainment (later acquired by Lionsgate), where Drew McWeeny, a screenwriter, recalls a meeting in the early 2000s with a new Marvel film executive named Kevin Feige about adapting a Marvel property. “I remember sitting in a room and [Feige] saying, ‘Look, in a perfect world, as the rights become available, little by little, we’ll start buying back all the Marvel characters, and maybe down the road, just like in the comics, we’ll get them to go into each others’ movies. And maybe we’ll even try to build to an Avengers.’ And I remember thinking, He’s crazy.”

Despite the best efforts of Feige and then-chairman and CEO Avi Arad, Marvel wasn’t able to buy back all the rights—Fox and Sony still retain the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, respectively. But in 2005, Marvel became an independent studio thanks to a $525 million line of credit, and it brought all movie production in-house. Feige began to execute an intricate, multiphase plan for releasing various Marvel characters in a series of companion films that would ultimately collide in all-star affairs such as The Avengers. Not that audiences had any idea at first. Only true fans took note when, toward the end of Marvel Studios’ debut film, the smart and fun Iron Man, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury casually shows up. The interconnectivity became more apparent with each subsequent (well-received) movie, artfully laying the groundwork for 2012’s ensemble The Avengers.

This quiet, deliberate, decade-long planning stands in stark contrast to how DC has attempted to rival Marvel’s efforts. In October 2014, shortly after Guardians of the Galaxy became Marvel’s 10th smash, Kevin Tsujihara, the head of Warner Bros., suddenly unveiled a slate of 10 superhero films based on DC Comics. The first release after that announcement, the dreary Batman v Superman, is “perhaps the most egregious example of forcing a cinematic universe as opposed to letting it breathe for a very long time,” says Keatinge.

Feige’s patience is now being rewarded further: Marvel is regaining creative, if not sole financial, control over Spider-Man, by far its most valuable piece of original intellectual property. Marvel had sold off the rights to make Spider-Man movies to Sony in 1999 for a reported $7 million. Sony has made five movies featuring the webbed wonder, starting in 2002 with a trio of Tobey Maguire star turns. Its later pictures, featuring Andrew Garfield, were critical and commercial disappointments. Marvel approached Sony after the particularly lackluster fifth movie, 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, about buying back its prized character, but Sony demurred. The series needed a creative jolt, though, and the studios reached a deal: Sony would receive Marvel’s creative input on upcoming Spider-Man films, beginning with this July’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. In exchange, Marvel would get to incorporate Spidey into the Avengers universe; his first appearance was 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

Fans, needless to say, are excited, and they are looking far ahead to 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, which will feature Spider-Man. “When [Marvel] put up a video from the first day of shooting, I showed my kids. You’ve got Tom Holland as Spider-Man and Robert Downey Jr. standing on set talking to each other,” says McWeeny, who’s now also the publisher of the online film-geek magazine Pulp & Popcorn. “My kids lost their minds. Watching that reaction, I thought, Marvel’s got it locked.”

Make Surprise Your Superhero

Feige, who’s been the Marvel Studios president since 2007, develops movies based on a simple principle: Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ? Wouldn’t it be cool if the movies could match comic books’ visual dynamism? Wouldn’t it be cool if they had equally crazy plot twists and potential for reinvention? Instead of a surprise on almost every page, the films Feige makes insert deft turns—in casting, plots, and even release dates—when viewers least expect them.

Many critics lump superhero movies together into their own genre, but in truth, Marvel movies defy such a simplistic classification. The first Iron Man and Captain America are essentially war movies; Iron Man 3 is a Bond-style thriller. More recently, Marvel has trotted out the space-set buddy action-adventure Guardians of the Galaxy, the science caper Ant-Man, and the fantasy-tinged Doctor Strange, all of which were decidedly weirder than the Avengers films that preceded them. (Similarly, Fox has begun to take risks with the Marvel characters it controls, moving in a darker, R-rated direction with Deadpool and Logan.)

Not even Marvel loyalists saw Guardians of the Galaxy coming. “No matter how familiar you are with the comics,” says comic-book writer Keatinge, “that was not a property that anyone thought, Oh, Guardians of the Galaxy, that’s gonna be the next big thing.” And now they must prepare to be reoriented again. Director Gunn says that Vol. 2, in contrast with the original, is an “emotional drama” that plays more like a Tarantino film. “There’s a huge section of the movie in which we’re dealing with the relationships between the characters.”

Within the films themselves, Marvel isn’t afraid to kill off characters (Avengers: Age of Ultron,Doctor Strange), insert a big twist (Iron Man 3’s unadvertised villain), or rejigger the universe (dissolving the mortal crime-fighting agency S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Similarly, Marvel consistently uses creative casting to surprise moviegoers. Before Guardians of the Galaxy, Chris Pratt was the paunchy wiseass (and seventh-billed star) on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. What casting director worth her Range Rover would have envisioned the cerebral, pasty-faced Brit from the BBC’s Sherlock or romantic-comedy staple Paul Rudd as superheroic? Only now that all these moves and movies have worked do these decisions seem obvious. With this record, subsequent picks such as biopic mainstay Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther and indie actress Brie Larson as Captain Marvel have been generating buzz years in advance of their films’ release.

Feige publicly suggested in 2014 that he had already mapped out his future moves into 2028. Yet nothing Marvel does feels formulaic. It’s through the company’s tight control that whimsy can flourish.

Recruit Your Own Avengers

Feige has final cut on all movies, but he also enlists a lot of help, developing Marvel’s movies and their larger universe with a six-person “creative council” made up of writers and executives, much like the so-called Brain Trust at Disney-owned Pixar. The group discusses characters, plotlines, and tone before turning films over to a director. Feige hired Gunn for the risky space opera Guardians not despite but because of his prior experience, which consisted of a low-budget zombie flick and an indie superhero parody. He sensed that Gunn would bring fresh ideas while still being able to collaborate within the Marvel system. “I needed a lot of help on Guardians 1 because I’d never directed a movie that big,” says Gunn, “and I was a little afraid to push it too far. They encouraged me to push it farther, so I did.”

Gunn nailed the film’s tricky mix of humor, action, and surrealism, layering it with enough Easter eggs to reward repeated viewings. As a result, he won even more creative leeway for Vol. 2. In his initial pitch meeting for the sequel, he proposed breaking with the Marvel canon and introducing Star-Lord’s father—as a sentient planet. “I said, ‘Okay, here’s what I think is going to happen,’ ” Gunn says. “ ‘His father’s going to be a living planet, and we’re going to get into the suffering of the other characters in the movie.’ I wrote the treatment, which was 70 pages long, and they were like, ‘Okay.’ ”

Marvel’s system largely works because Feige is the calm planet in the middle of it. By contrast, ask around Hollywood who’s in charge of the DC movie universe and several executives’ names come up, in addition to Zack Snyder, who produced and directed both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. (Last summer, Warner reorganized to create a dedicated team for its superhero movies.) “The process is beating the shit out of [Snyder],” says a source close to the director. “He’s got a corporation breathing down his neck, and there’s several billion dollars riding on whether Justice League works or not.” (Warner Bros. declined to comment.)

Further helping Marvel is its fruitful relationship with Disney, which has plugged the brand into its global empire of theme parks, TV networks, toys, and more. “Disney is the gold standard on how to take a piece of [intellectual property] and put it in a million different places,” says one marketer at a rival studio. “We’re doing everything in our power to be Disney in 10 years.”

Many of the tie-ins are no-brainers, such as the Iron Man ride at Hong Kong Disneyland and the Guardians of the Galaxy attraction at Disney’s California Adventure theme park opening this summer (along with an Awesome Dance Off with Star-Lord and a Groot meet-and-greet). Disney has brought Marvel to television with Disney-owned ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., now completing its fourth season, and Inhumans, which debuts this fall. In late 2012, Netflix agreed to pay Disney a reported $300 million annually to stream recent Disney films, including Marvel movies, as well as no fewer than four series devoted to Marvel characters—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist—whose stars will join forces later this year in a fifth series called The Defenders. “Netflix allows us to tell these darker stories and to show that there are different tones to a Marvel character,” says Karim Zreik, Marvel’s SVP of original programming. “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. works well for ABC as an ensemble show. But the single character works well for this model and has shown that we can play around with tone and try some different things with our characters.”

A less visible way that Disney helps fuel Marvel’s success is through the steady IV drip of marketing. With teasers hitched to major Disney films such as Star Wars: Rogue One, digital shorts that show up on DVDs and online, directors debuting trailers on ABC shows such as Jimmy Kimmel Live, and partnerships with digital platforms like Youku Tudou (China’s online video giant), Disney makes sure that Marvel is connecting with fans at all times. “There’s never a point where Marvel isn’t in the pop culture in some way,” says Pulp & Popcorn’s McWeeny. Only Pixar arguably has a brand as resonant among consumers.

Marvel may seem invincible today, but there are several forces that could vanquish it. Marvel has already promised Disney it will release a sequel for every new title it launches. Will that diminish its creative spark? Is there another creative executive who will develop a character-filled world powerful enough to steal focus from Marvel? Thanks to Fox’s success wooing adult moviegoers with Deadpool and Logan, will superhero epics all become violent, profane fare? And finally, after 15 years of relentless remakes and spinoffs, how many superheroes can audiences take?

Comic-book creators would make you turn the page or maybe even buy the next issue to find out. For now, though, it’s pretty safe to assume that Marvel’s Universe knows no bounds.

On a recent afternoon in Washington, D.C., at a Starbucks just a few blocks from the White House, a pair of baristas are explaining why their boss Howard Schultz should run for president. Schultz, the executive chairman of the world’s largest coffee-shop chain, had reportedly considered bids for the Oval Office in previous elections, but since he announced in December that he would be stepping down as CEO, speculation has built about his plans for 2020.

Employees at this particular store seem eager for “Howard,” as they call him, to get in the race. “He’s a great guy and a great CEO,” says one of the workers, pointing to Starbucks’s unusually generous benefits and Schultz’s progressive activism on a range of current issues, which include advocating for LGBTQ rights and providing job opportunities to both military veterans and refugees. “I would consider voting for him.”

For many Washington pundits and insiders, the idea of a Schultz candidacy is hard to resist. The billionaire Brooklyn native seems to have the means, the private-sector bona fides, the platform and reach, and the strong personal brand to potentially mount a serious challenge to President Trump.

But Schultz is hardly the only executive who is generating excitement in the political world. Ever since Trump’s November victory—which was significantly aided by his image as a businessman—election watchers are looking toward a range of corporate luminaries as potential presidential candidates. Disney CEO Bob Iger is reportedly thinking about a run, as is Dallas Mavericks owner (and Shark Tank reality-TV star) Mark Cuban. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a rumored potential contender (although he has denied it, as has COO Sheryl Sandberg). Even Oprah Winfrey hinted that she might be interested.

“After Trump’s success, it’s no surprise that nonpoliticians from the worlds of business and entertainment are asking themselves, Why not me?” says Brian Fallon, who served as the press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s most recent presidential campaign. “Today, businesspeople are seen almost automatically as effective messengers on the economy, as job creators. That gives them an inherent advantage.”

Things were very different when Henry Ford ran for a Senate seat in Michigan a century ago. With his industry-building experience and virtually unlimited finances, the automobile magnate was initially thought to be a shoo-in for the seat. He ended up losing, however, in “a defeat that sent shivers through other businesspeople thinking of running for office themselves,” according to presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Generations of the richest people learned there’s a populist rebellion that occurs when voters feel there’s someone rich buying [an election].”

Since then, America’s perception of wealth, and of CEOs, has changed significantly, easing the way for business-world aspirants such as EDS founder Ross Perot, onetime Godfather’s Pizza leader Herman Cain, and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, most of whom never got much traction with their presidential efforts. (Mitt Romney, who won the Republican nomination in 2012, emphasized his tenure as governor of Massachusetts more than his experience as cofounder of Bain Capital.) While career politicians—with their easily criticized voting records—are associated with Washington gridlock and entrenched bureaucracy, business success is synonymous with a certain kind of savvy and smarts. “We’re in an era when CEOs are the leaders of America,” Brinkley says. “More people are going to be interested in the story of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs than some senator.”

Trump convinced voters that an outsider from the corporate world would be well-suited to take on big government, but certainly his enormous brand recognition and television celebrity also contributed greatly to his appeal as a candidate. Did people vote for him because he was actually a successful CEO, or because he played one on TV? “There’s no question that Trump entered this race with a great advantage for having done The Apprentice,” says Stuart Stevens, who ran Romney’s 2012 campaign. “The idea that you have to have held elected office before to run for president is now clearly false.”

If Trump benefited so greatly from his hit reality-TV show, just think about the boost Oprah would likely get given her decades of ratings success with The Oprah Winfrey Show and her extraordinarily passionate fan base. Or imagine the halo effect Schultz and Iger might enjoy with their leadership being so closely tied to such beloved brands as Starbucks and Disney. “Most people don’t experience a Trump hotel, while people all over the country experience Starbucks every day,” says Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who oversaw Howard Dean’s unsuccessful presidential campaign back in 2004.

Business leaders can also tap into certain advantages that just aren’t available to most traditional politicians. “They have the resources to run,” says Trippi, “unlike the Bernie Sanderses of the world, who can only get the resources by attracting a big following.” Mark Cuban is a highly engaged social media star with more than 6.5 million Twitter followers. Oprah publishes her own magazine and has countless famous (and wealthy) friends and admirers. And if even a fraction of Starbucks’s 170,000 U.S. employees get excited about the idea of a Schultz campaign, that would start him off with a groundswell of campaign volunteers.

But simply having a megaphone isn’t going to be enough. “Regardless of whether you own a platform like, say, a chain of retail locations or a social media network, you need that fluency in identifying and reaching the audience you’re seeking,” says Fallon. “The type of innovation happening in marketing in C-suites is probably what needs to be imported to political communication.”

With no obvious front-runner for the 2020 Democratic ticket, it seems quite likely that other unexpected candidates, each with their own unique brand and platform, will be floated for office in the years ahead. While reporting this story, I heard various politicos suggest possibilities ranging from billionaire hedge-fund manager turned environmental activist Tom Steyer to the actor George Clooney. “There’s a talent hunt on right now to fill the void,” says Brinkley. “Democrats are looking at their senators and governors and saying, ‘Yikes, they don’t have the right stuff. But what about one of these CEOs or celebrities?’ ”

But is any of this really a good idea? Do the skills required to run large companies actually translate to government? Former President Barack Obama has said that he thinks business acumen is more helpful for building campaigns than for occupying the White House. And there’s no reason to think that traditional top-down, corporate-hierarchy thinking is particularly useful in an environment where large-scale change requires consensus-building and legislative know-how (just look at Trump’s early stumbles). When I ask Mark Cuban about this issue, he responds that exceptional business leaders know how to learn quickly and can adjust to whatever challenges are in front of them, whether in a public or private capacity. “Romney had no problem adapting to being governor,” he says. “Nor should any strong candidate have a problem adapting to the job of POTUS. Historically, a preponderance of candidates have been attorneys. I’ll take businesspeople any day.”

Voters are currently witnessing the disruptive impact of having an outsider CEO in the Oval Office, and it’s possible that their appetite for future corporate politicians will depend on what happens over the next few years. “For 2020, business leaders have to start thinking about how they’d run if Trump has so polluted the water for a no-government-experience candidate,” says Trippi. “If that’s no longer in vogue, how are you going to deal with that? Because you can’t just say, ‘He was a businessman who screwed up governing, but I won’t.’ ”

It’s also worth noting that these titans of industry wouldn’t initially be running against President Trump, but rather against one another. It’s hard to picture polished corporate pros like Schultz and Iger onstage at a series of televised primary-season debates trading verbal punches. Plus, in order to mount serious presidential campaigns, they would have to be willing to endure some enormous downsides, such as the viciousness of today’s political environment and the often-brutal media coverage. “There’s one amount of scrutiny you’re subjected to when you’re accountable to a board, shareholders, and the business press,” says Fallon. “It’s a whole other thing to subject yourself to the political press corps day in and day out—to have what you’re wearing [be judged], have to be ‘on’ every day, striking the exact right tone and appearance. It’s a different set of demands, and it takes a toll.”

There is also the real risk of doing damage to their reputations should they suffer an embarrassing public defeat, like Henry Ford once did. “If you’re going to run for president, you have to have such an unbelievable hunger for the job,” Brinkley says. “If you’re the head of Starbucks now, do you want to become this beat-up, battered political figure?”

That’s why it’s quite possible that none of these rumored candidates will actually decide to run when the time comes. If any of them are seriously thinking about it, they almost certainly wouldn’t say so this early in the process, but so far, they’ve generally been evasive—as have most traditional politicians whose names are in the mix for 2020.

Iger recently said that Disney is his full-time job, and that “I don’t think the notion of running for president is something anyone considers either on a part-time basis or in a frivolous way.” (He has reportedly informed friends that he’s toying with the idea.) Cuban tells me that he is not planning to get into the race “as of now.” And when I asked Schultz about his presidential aspirations back in 2015, he responded pretty decisively: “I have no desire to be in an elected position in government. I really do believe that I can do much more as a private citizen to effect change than if I was in Washington.”

Of course, that was before the extremely unlikely rise of a celebrity real estate personality, before Hillary Clinton’s stunning electoral loss, and before voters made clear just how hungry they are for genuine, serious change. “If more people realize the stakes, and that causes people [like Schultz] to rethink the idea that they can make more of a difference outside Washington, then that’s a good thing,” says Fallon. “If Trump’s presidency might have one silver lining, it’s that, yes, politics matters. Public service is extremely relevant, and you don’t need to be a career politician to succeed at it.”

As podcasting grows—57 million Americans tuned in to at least one a month last year, up 23% from 2015—so do the marketing opportunities the medium presents. Moving beyond simply sponsoring a few episodes (“Mail . . . kimp?”), brands such as State Farm and Slack are getting increasingly involved by creating podcasts of their own. GE’s breakout eight-episode radio drama, The Message, topped more than 5 million downloads and hit No. 1 on the iTunes chart in 2015. The company followed up with last year’s AI-focused drama Life-After. “People are making a very conscious choice—to download a podcast, subscribe, and listen,” says Alexa Christon, GE’s head of media innovation. “That [kind of] relationship is something brands covet.”

In response, the major podcasting studios are building out native content arms. Slate’s Panoply Media expects such podcasts will make up about 25% of its 2017 business, while Gimlet’s branded division is doubling in size this year. According to Gimlet, the average branded podcast investment runs in the mid-six figures—far cheaper than a TV spot, and with a much more attentive audience. A recent study from NPR found that 75% of listeners took action on a sponsored message. Here, a look at how four branded podcasts are engaging listeners.

Spotify, “Showstopper”

Launched in February and produced with Panoply Media, this series is hosted by The Fader editor-in-chief Naomi Zeichner and looks at the intersection of music and TV through interviews with music supervisors for shows like Stranger Things and Girls.

Why it works: Tackles a fun, niche subject that’s perfect for podcasts, featuring a behind-the-scenes take on pop culture.

State Farm, “ColorFull Lives”

Aimed at women of color, this Loud Speakers Network show is hosted by Angela Yee, Francheska Medina, and podcaster Tatiana King-Jones, who discuss everything from relationships to financial planning.

Why it works: Puts a human face on insurance, while tapping into the increasing diversity of podcasting’s audience.

eBay, “Open for Business”

Now in its second season, this Gimlet series talks to entrepreneurs about how to build a company from the ground up.

Why it works:Takes a soft-sell approach to marketing eBay’s tools for small-business owners.

Tinder, “DTR”

The app’s six-episode Gimlet series (DTR = “define the relationship”) unpacks different topics around dating in the digital age.

Why it works: Counters the brand’s bro-heavy reputation by telling compelling and engaging stories tailored to female listeners.

Fast Company‘s latest cover story explores the various ways values and social responsibility are having an impact at companies such as Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has long pushed his company and employees to make a positive difference in the world. I spoke to him recently about his company’s approach.

Fast Company: You have talked about Salesforce as a company with purpose beyond profit. Can you explain that?

Marc Benioff: My goals for the company are to do well and do good. The most important thing to me is that we bring along all our stakeholders with us. We had a vision from the beginning that not only would we have a new technology model, which was the cloud, not only would we have a new business model, which was subscription, but we’d have a new philanthropic model, which is 1-1-1. [Salesforce commits 1% of its equity, employees’ time, and product to nonprofit work.] As the CEO I need to embrace all of my stakeholders, not just all of my shareholders. What I’m trying to do is maximize stakeholder value.

FC: How does doing good help bottom-line performance?

MB: Well, we’re the fastest growing software company of all time, so I hope it’s connected. [Laughs.] If you go to my Twitter page you can see the revenue chart. It’s a direct connection to our values. Not only are we building a great product but we’re building a great company that is trying to create a great world. Certainly it’s a source of great talent. People come to the company and stay because of the incredible opportunity and impact that they’re having on the world. Business is a great platform for change. When a business like Salesforce gets to scale, with 25,000 employees and customers all over the world, you have an opportunity to influence them in a positive way. I do believe we’re having that impact. You can see it in Pledge 1%, where the 1-1-1 idea has spread to thousands of companies.

FC: Does Wall Street support this idea?

MB: Wall Street is agnostic in terms of picking one philosophy or the other. But they certainly do invest and support companies that do good work. We’ve been public since 2004, you look at our chart, we’ve had a really good run, and I do connect that back to [the fact] that we’re building a great company. It is part of our differentiation. As you differentiate against an SAP or an Oracle or a Microsoft, Salesforce is indeed different.

FC: There seems to be heightened discussion and activity from corporate leaders on policy issues in recent months. Is that directly related to a new administration?

MB: I think you saw it before that. You’ve seen the rise of more activist CEOs who stand for things and represent their employees and their stakeholders in the same way a politician would represent the people who vote for them. I think CEOs have to think this way. They have to understand that they represent their stakeholders, all of them. They need to be able to speak and act on behalf of them.

When I went to school for business, we were not taught this. It was not part of my education. I was taught marketing and organizational development, that sort of thing, I certainly was not taught stakeholder management. This is something I’ve learned, honestly, since I started Salesforce.

I’ll come back to the 1-1-1. Because of 1-1-1, we got involved with so many nonprofits and NGOs. We support 30,000 of them. Many of these people I had never interacted with, and they really impacted my consciousness, how I think about the world. They are working on health care and the environment and with developing nations, areas where I have not spent that much time. Those conversations have been extremely valuable. What I realized is we can help them and support them in our work. As we’ve done that, our employees get a much higher level of satisfaction and fulfillment, knowing that they work for a company that supports that.

We give our employees the ability to have direct involvement too. One of our executives just went to set up a school in Africa. We give them four hours a month paid time off, six days a year—we’re paying them for their volunteerism. That only creates a better company. It’s quite selfish in many ways. This has probably done more for Salesforce. And that’s why I encourage other CEOs and entrepreneurs to take this on.

FC: When you first started doing this 18 years ago, it was novel. Do you feel the expectations on business leaders has changed since that time?

MB: Yes, increasingly so. I think you’ll see that continue to accelerate. There’s a shift for CEOs to be focused on all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders, and I think that will be more and more true.

FC: Are there cultural elements driving this?

MB: Absolutely. You can look to millennials, they have a desire to work for companies that have meaning. Yes, they want a company that is making money, focused on profitability and market share and all of that, but also that there is meaning to their work, that they’re actually improving the state of the world.

When I was at Oracle, I felt deeply inside myself that there was this bifurcation. I was working for this company, and that was one way of life, and there was another way of life that was nonprofit world or spiritual world, whatever you want to call it. I went on this tour of India in 1996, talking to gurus, incense wafting over us, and all of a sudden it became clear to me that there was a way to integrate all of this, that you could do both at the same time. Why do I have to be two people? Can’t I just be one person? I want to live an integrated life. I want to be an integrated leader.

A lot of people feel like they have multiple lives. They compartmentalize. I have an integrated life. I have one set of values, and I project that through all of my work. I’m not perfect, I have incongruency, but I try to work on that. This kind of integration is something we can all strive for. I know that the work I’m doing is making the world better. Salesforce helps hospitals and schools and all kinds of nonprofits. Salesforce gives guidance to our employees to get out there and volunteer. And I think that’s why we have high levels of satisfaction in our employees. And why we can attract people. We are creating an environment that gives them satisfaction in their work, not just financial gains.

FC: The trust people have in government is waning. Is trust in business leaders growing?

MB: Nothing is more important today for business than trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer says trust with CEOs, companies, government is at the lowest point in a long time. We are in a crisis of trust. CEOs get caught in this crisis of trust and it gets amplified for them. That’s why I come back to that 1-1-1 model. It brings a set of values into the company. If you do have an incongruent moment, you’re going to be able to seek forgiveness for that. I’ve had those moments myself. For those people who are only out there to make money, when you hit that incongruent moment, you don’t get air cover, you’re going to be in trouble because you didn’t create the good karma.

You have the opportunity to set up companies that do good in the world. It’s easy. There’s all this incredible energy in your company and you can unleash it for good. If you’re not unleashing it, you’re missing something. I really think people are inherently good and want to give, I think companies are inherently good and want to give. The ability to do it is relatively straightforward. All you have to do is open the door.

FC: So is this more important than meeting the expectations of Wall Street?

MB: You have to be able to do both. It’s not an either/or. Yes, you better hit your revenue and earnings goals. But there is no linear success. If you look at my stock chart, you’re going to see ups and downs, but where is it over time? From that same perspective, your company isn’t always going to be perfect, we’re human beings, there are going to be problems and challenges along the way. But when you aggregate it all up, it’s like the stock. What is your compound growth rate of your equity over the years? What is your compound growth rate of good over the lifetime of your company?

In 2008 I went to Bhutan. They don’t measure gross domestic product. They measure gross national happiness. We don’t live in Bhutan, but we can look to Bhutan for inspiration—we can have companies with more happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment but that are also able to achieve strong financial outcomes. This something every CEO can do, easily, and I’m encouraging companies to do this. It’s probably more important than any time in human history that we’re all focused on improving the state of the world.

Whenever you have a space dominated by two powerful factions, people are naturally going to take sides. Coke versus Pepsi, Apple versus Microsoft, Red Vines versus Twizzlers . . . people are always eager to declare themselves part of “Team [Blank]” and will defend their choices like knights of the realm. The Marvel vs. DC debate has raged for decades inside the walls of comic book shops, but the struggle burst onto the mainstream in previously unimaginable ways when DC revived Batman from his Joel Schumacher-induced exile with 2005’s Batman Begins and Marvel gingerly took its first steps towards a cinematic universe with 2008’s Iron Man.

Since then, both sides have seen their triumphs and failures magnified as even their most C-List heroes have people flocking to theaters (“Paul Rudd is Ant-Man” is a real thing that exists) and superheroics have gone from niche obsession to the pinnacle of pop culture mainstream–attracting the type of accomplished A-List talent (Oscars winners like Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lawrence, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Brie Larson) who would have viewed putting on a cape and cowl as career death 20 years before. Now that we all can agree that we have at least some investment in the fortunes of Marvel and DC Entertainment, let’s explore where each one stands currently and where each one is poised to go from here.

Universe Creation

Marvel: 2008
DC: 2013

We know what you’re thinking, “Didn’t they just say Batman Begins came out in 2005?” Yes, and that’s precisely why we’re looking at–currently–a very one-sided movie battle in Marvel’s favor. Although the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy (2005’s Batman Begins, 2008’s The Dark Knight, and 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises) were critically-acclaimed, wildly successful, instantly iconic, and even earned a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger, they also painted DC and Warner Bros. into a giant, bat-shaped corner. Nolan crafted a very reality-based world for Bruce Wayne, one that was impossible to use as a springboard to introduce orphaned aliens, ring-powered space cops, and Amazonian princesses from ancient myth. So DC had a monster hit that they couldn’t capitalize on for further cinematic growth. So they had to wait until the Superman reboot Man of Steel in 2013 to begin laying some groundwork. By then, Marvel had already had two Iron Man installments, successful solo runs for Captain America and Thor, and had already built up to The Avengers.

Projects To Date

Marvel: 14 films; 10 TV series
DC: 3 films; 5 TV series

DC has staked its claim to television in a big way, and has enjoyed a great deal of success with shows that harken back to the comic company’s best days–days when they successfully mixed science fiction with pulp action and just enough pop-colored silliness to make it all congeal into a satisfying whole. Green Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl have given fans exactly what they want while not alienating newcomers looking for some fun. Unfortunately, the willingness to be bright and occasionally goofy on TV has only magnified the strange choice to make the cinematic world so oppressively dour and one-note. Marvel struggled with TV for a bit until they teamed up with Netflix, which allowed them to explore some of their grittier, street-level heroes like Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist while not having to draw hard lines between “the movie universe” and the “TV universe” the way DC has. Sadly, DC once again cultivated a successful world that they somehow can’t or won’t mine for movie success–hence why there’s a TV Superman and Movie Superman, a TV Flash and a Movie Flash, and so on. Jessica Jones might not show up in Avengers: Infinity War, but she lives in that same world.

State Of World Domination

Marvel: Hulk smash! In the past five years, it produced 4 of the 12 top-grossing films in history; Netflix-based miniverse is humming along with six series in production.

DC: Movies, shmovies! Its blockbusters  are not beloved by critics or comics fans, but its live-action and animated TV series are kicky fun.

Marvel was fine weathering those rocky first few episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. thanks to their box office dominance, while DC really needed television to prove they could adapt their heroes successfully while the films struggled to please fans, general audiences, and critics the way Marvel’s had. But the tide might be turning (again, thanks to Netflix), as Luke Cage not only inspired a million thinkpieces when it debuted but has just recently nominated for a prestigious Peabody Award.

Maestros

Marvel: Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige focuses on comics fans, bringing everyone else along later.

DC: Jon Berg, Ben Affleck’s favorite executive, and Geoff Johns, a comics writer who’s branched out into video games, TV, and film, co-run DC Films.

The key to Marvel’s success has been the fact that Feige has been the point person from the start, keeping everyone on the same page and everything speaking in the same voice. Geoff Johns is a revered name among DC comic book readers and he did executive produce 2015’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but he and Jon Berg weren’t named to co-run DC Entertainment and manage the DC movie universe until May of 2016. By that point, the cruise ship was well on its way and changing course would be extremely difficult.

Essence In 10 Words

Marvel: People in capes running around and punching folks—plus jokes.

DC: People in capes moping around in the rain—plus brooding.

That’s pretty much it. Marvel understands that humor is essential here (and, oddly, DC understands it, too, but only on TV), because once you start to take these things too seriously, they become deeply, deeply silly. The occasional wink is needed. One issue may be DC’s insistence that the movie universe be filtered through Batman’s worldview. In the comics, his brooding, self-serious nature is a great counterpoint to the primary-colored, old fashioned heroism of Superman and Wonder Woman. But if everyone in the movies is Batman, then no one is Batman.

Creative Consiglieres

Marvel: Yeoman directors who don’t complain too much that Feige is in charge but gradually earn more leeway, such as Joe Russo and Anthony Russo (Captain America: Civil War).

DC: Visual stylists like directors Zack Snyder (Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) and David Ayer (Suicide Squad), whose work is more personal.

The stories of Marvel’s tendency to micromanage filmmakers are well known–just ask Baby Driver director Edgar Wright, who ran from Ant-Man when it became clear that his vision for the tiny hero was not going to jive with Feige’s overall vision. Meanwhile, DC’s struggle has come from the fact that its directors’ strong wills have come at a cost to creative coherence.

Superpower

Marvel: Making four separate films (or TV shows) before doing the team-up everyone’s waiting for. See The Avengers.

DC: Making popular, tween-friendly animated series such as Young Justice and Teen Titans Go!

Released from the pressure of having to introduce characters or concepts on a broader stage, DC’s animated films are free to mine specific works by specific comic creative teams for their adaptations, such as the late Darwyn Cooke’s beloved Justice League: The New Frontier or the All-Star Superman title by writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely. Meanwhile, Marvel has been able to keep things simple by building on the classic, archetypal versions of their heroes even as their comic book counterparts barely resemble them anymore (love Chris Evans as Captain America? You might not want to look at what Cap is up to in the comics these days)

Sore Subject

Marvel: Fox keeps making X-Men movies—Logan was good!—and retaining the rights.

DC: The sad Ben Affleck meme from the BvS press junket (and his decision not to direct the next Batman).

“Sadfleck” was the meme that wouldn’t die, especially as fans and critics began savaging Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. His decision to drop out of The Batman directing duties was seen by some as the Oscar-winner slowly backing away from the Dark Knight entirely. So far, though, he still hasn’t relinquished his cowl. And Marvel’s dicey relationship with Fox has been petty from the start, and it’s been made all the more glaring now that Marvel and Sony are playing nice over Spider-Man. And it’s not just the X-Men, either. The fight between Marvel and Fox over the Fantastic Four got so bad that Marvel actually cancelled the team’s solo title a little less than a year before Josh Trank’s much-maligned 2015 Fantastic Four movie–exactly the time Fox would be looking for a comic book tie-in to help sell the film. Marvel was willing to wipe their “first family,” a staple of their universe since 1961, off shelves completely.

Corporate Masters

Marvel: Disney has given Marvel the freedom to spend a reported $2.5 billion on 14 movies because they drive merchandising, theme-park rides, and so forth.

DC: Warner Bros. reorganized its film business last year to create a dedicated division for DC movies while continuing to excel at producing TV featuring its characters.

Resources are clearly not a problem for either side, even if Disney’s tendency to draw immovable lines between “boys things” and “girls things” when it comes to merchandising rubs up against Marvel’s attempts to make the comic book shop more inclusive.

Coming Soon To A Theater Near You

Marvel: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (May 5), the sequel to 2014’s space buddy comedy.

DC: Wonder Woman (June 2), which Hollywood has been trying to bring to the big screen since 1996.

The original Guardians of the Galaxy proved that story and performance top name-recognition, as only the hardest of the hardcore Marvel fan knew who Groot or Ronan the Accuser were before the movie hit. The shackles are pretty much off now, and Marvel is continuing to dig deep into its mythos in surprising ways (in GoTG 2, Kurt Russell plays an even more obscure character called Ego The Living Planet). DC does beat Marvel to the punch when it comes to one thing, though: A female-led movie helmed by a female director. Wonder Woman hits theaters well before Captain Marvel, with director Patty Jenkins hoping to re-set the course for the movie universe ahead of Justice League.

Bingeworthy TV

Marvel: The gritty adventures of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage on Netflix have fans excited about a meetup in the forthcoming series TheDefenders.

DC: The Flash, which features poppy visuals, an ensemble cast, and a delightfully light touch.

TV hasn’t just been kind to Marvel and DC. Streaming services and the dominance of shorter seasons and controlled releases have been good to comic books in general. This kind of serialized storytelling is tailor made for a la carte TV, and the “big two” have a lot of company alongside comic adaptations like Walking Dead on AMC (originally published by Image Comic). DC has also been adept at mining more fringe material for TV (such as their DC Universe-adjacent comedy Powerless, or AMC’s Preacher, based on a comic published by DC’s mature content imprint Vertigo)

Ghost Who Haunts Them

Marvel: Marvel creator Stan Lee, whose cameos have led fans to speculate he’s the protean comics character named the Watcher.

DC: Christopher Nolan, whose Dark Knight trilogy led DC to buy into dark superhero dramas in the first place.

Of the two, Nolan has proven the more damaging. Lee’s cameos have always just been winks and nods and nothing more, but Nolan’s vision for Batman cast a shadow so large and deep that the movie universe just can’t seem to get out from under it, even when they’ve made clear that the Ben Affleck Batman is not the Christian Bale Batman. And don’t even bring up the Joker–Heath Ledger’s performance may have effectively ruined the character forever (and Jared Leto’s methhead Scarface attempt only further proves that point).

Potentially Fatal Flaw

Marvel: Fans might tire of the cross-platform synergies, fragrance deals, and everything else.

DC: It keeps fiddling with its long-term vision for its cinematic universe.

It’s inevitable. Marvel will hit a wall. Avengers: Age of Ultron showed signs of weakness, but strong returns on Captain America: Civil War and Doctor Strange have kept the ship afloat (and anticipation for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming are sky high). And DC will eventually find its footing, most likely when it stops trying to catch Marvel–which, at this point, is like trying to build your Formula 1 racer while you’re in mid-race–and settles into its being its own thing.

After his 2014 Academy Award win, John Ridley took his nuanced, issue-oriented storytelling to network television. Through his production company, International Famous Players Radio Picture Corporation, he writes, produces, and directs the Emmy-Award winning ABC anthology drama American Crime. In March, the show returned for its third season, tackling the hot-button topic of immigration. That’s just the start: On April 16, Showtime begins airing Guerrilla, a limited series starring Idris Elba and Freida Pinto that Ridley wrote, produced, and directed. His documentary, Let It Fall, about the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, will debut on ABC on April 28.

Fast Company: You’ve had great success in movies. How did you end up going all in on television?

John Ridley: I’ll tell you something, [before winning the Academy Award] I was reaching a place in my career where I was not very happy with the types of projects coming to me. It’s not as though the things I do [generate] an enormous box office. But I’d done interesting things—like U Turn,Undercover Brother,Three Kings—that have cult followings. Then around 2007, [the industry] went off the financial cliff, and Hollywood cut back on deals. It was all about the franchises. Studios weren’t betting on the more issue-oriented films.

At that point I [asked myself]: If this is going to be the last thing I can write or try to get made, what should it be? At that time I was really, really passionate about telling a Jimi Hendrix story, but a particular story, in a particular way, about a very particular moment in his life. That became [2013’s] All Is by My Side, with [Outkast’s] André Benjamin. And even though it wasn’t widely viewed, the folks at ABC—a television network—saw the film and said it was one of the most interesting things they’d seen. [They asked,] “Can you take that style of storytelling and bring it to television?” And that was the beginning of American Crime.

So it started with me sitting down and saying, You could chase this certain kind of project and that’s all you would be. Or you could be crazy enough to attempt this film about Jimi Hendrix. [I thought,] All right, let me be crazy. You don’t do things because everybody will see them. You do things because the right people will see them. And now I’m here in London, simultaneously finishing up three projects that are incredibly unique.

FC: You have a close relationship with ABC Studios, which works with your production company to develop content for ABC and other networks. How has that helped you?

JR: Business models have changed. Back in the day, you’d have a provider who’d pay a license fee, and the studio would sort of deficit-finance the project. Right now, I have somebody who says, “We really like John, we think he’s a creative person. If a content provider or distributor thinks that his idea is equally interesting, we’d love to get in partnership and help finance it.” What’s great is that I don’t have to, on a day-to-day basis, worry about where my next job is coming from. So I’m in an amazing situation. I don’t mean amazing as in “good,” I mean amazing like, I sit here and think about it, and I can’t explain to you how I ended up in a place like this.

FC: Much of your previous work showcases the stories of underrepresented people. Does that carry through in your current projects?

JR: With this season of American Crime, we address worker exploitation and workers’ rights in this country, and obviously a lot of that deals with undocumented workers. There are large sections of the show where the language is Spanish, a native Mexican dialect, French, or Haitian Creole. We’re representing individuals who don’t have the capacity to advocate for themselves in the language of the nation. I think that’s something that’s not normally portrayed—certainly not on broadcast television.

With Let It Fall, [I was] able to take a 10-year-long look at Los Angeles, from 1982 to [the Rodney King riots in] 1992. As a black man in America, much of the way I perceive race is black and white. But that is not the only discussion to be had on race in America. So [in the documentary], I explored black, white, Asian-American, and Hispanic [perspectives]. It’s not just “us against them,” but it is all of us together, working toward progressive results within this country.

FC: You also produced Guerrilla, a miniseries that follows a mixed-race couple who become radicalized in racially charged 1970s London. Like this season of American Crime, it confronts this question of who really belongs, and whose humanity gets valued. Is the political climate today informing your work?

I could not be more proud of the last eight years of [President Obama], in terms of what he represented and what he tried to accomplish. But there were still problems that were happening in our own community and the wider country. It’s great that people now feel like they need to turn out. They are energized and activated. But in some ways it’s unfortunate that it took [Donald Trump’s election] for some people to feel like, Oh, we gotta go out and do something. Because if the election had gone a different way, we still should have been out on the street, advocating for change.

FC: Let It Fall is your first documentary. Why did you decide to approach the Rodney King riots as nonfiction?

JR: Eleven years ago, Spike Lee called me up and said, “I want to do a story on the L.A. riots. You want to write it?” He set me loose, and I wrote a script about the Rodney King beating and verdict itself. I tried to bring in a variety of perspectives and individuals from across Los Angeles. It was not a typical heroic narrative. It was about systems failing, and good regular people from all different backgrounds either rising or sinking below the moment. The studio was happy with the script, but they could not land on a price [and never moved forward].

This April is the 25th anniversary of the uprisings. When ABC News learned that I had been working on [the topic], they asked if I’d be interested in presenting it as a documentary. The more I’d learned about the uprisings, the less I wanted to fictionalize them. The ABC News division, which produces documentaries, had the capacity to follow the backstory over a decade, to hew more closely to reality, to be more observant. Now we have [interviews with] people who felt the only expression they had left was to pour into the streets.

FC: In the past, you’ve been very critical of rioting in response to police violence, faulting what you call “Blacktivists” for inciting uprisings. Have your views changed, given your exploration of the L.A. riots in Let It Fall and the recent emergence of Black Lives Matter?

JR: Black Lives Matter, to me, is very thoughtful, very reasoned. It is not a single, emotive reaction to one moment. It’s a sustained movement of individuals who are looking for long-term change. I don’t have a problem when people are upset and fed up and go out in the streets and protest. I have a problem when it’s our neighbors who are hurt in our rage. I have a problem when it’s this person over here—who may look like that person I’m upset about but has nothing to do with it—who is hurt in our rage. Among the takeaways of Let It Fall is that of the more than 50 deaths following the L.A. uprising, the majority of them were black.

FC: Is it exhausting to be the writer, showrunner, creator, and director for simultaneous shows—especially when you’re grappling with issues of race and socioeconomic disparity?

JR: Very much so. This is rare for anybody. But it’s definitely rare for people of color—and I don’t know when it’s going to end. [So] you can get tired, but you can never be tired. You can be emotionally bereft, but you cannot give up. I don’t think that we can minimize the value of what happens when we normalize, through entertainment, other cultures and orientations. You look at the way people have responded in the last year to bias toward transgender individuals. You know, five years ago, three years ago, that would not have happened.

FC: You got your start in comedy. What did you learn from it?

JR: I was doing stand-up [in the early ’90s] around the time of [the rise of] Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, and those guys are fearless. I was good—I wasn’t great. What armed me more than anything was getting to a place of thinking, I’m not worried about how people are going to respond. [Today], people may love [my work], they may hate it, they may think whoever is behind it is incompetent. But you develop a self-confidence being in front of a thousand people and knowing that you can get to where you’re going.

30-Second Bio: John Ridley

Hometown: Milwaukee

Early Work: Stand-up comedy; sitcom writing for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, and The John Larroquette Show

Big Break: Wrote the novel Stray Dogs, which Oliver Stone turned into the 1997 film U Turn, starring Sean Penn and written by Ridley

Graphic Novels: Created the 2007 DC comic book The American Way, featuring an African-American hero in an alternate America of the 1960s; Ridley’s second volume, set in the 1970s, comes out this summer.

Key to Longevity: “I’ve been able to do the things that I do for more than 20 years because my work is individualized and unique in its aspirations. That’s what keeps bringing people back.”

It would be tough to argue against Marvel being one of the strongest, most recognized brand names in the world. And with that strength, comes . . . responsibility? Sure, but also requests from other brands to partner up so they too can warm themselves on your white hot brand halo. Right, Geico?

OK, movie tie-ins are no surprise, but as native advertising has become a common part of seemingly any and every publishing venture, it also lives under the same roof that Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, and so many more superheros live. Marvel Custom Solutions is marketing unit that helps lends brands a little of Marvel’s comic book magic, whether by weaving ads around existing Marvel characters, or creating new standalone characters and IP for the brands.

Related Article: Kiehl’s Enlists Captain America To Prove Real Men Moisturize

“The goal for our group is to provide marketing solutions for our clients based on their own needs and goals. Those things may include Marvel characters, they may not,” says Jon Ennis, Marvel’s director of business development, partnerships. “Certain brands want to work with us that don’t actually need our characters, but leverage our resources, the brand recognition, our art and writing talent, all these other things. Marvel has a wealth of characters–up to around 9,000 now–which is a big selling point, but it’s not the only thing we do, and we’re able to work around what a client wants.”

One thing that does differentiate this group from other native ad groups at places like the New York Times or the Atlantic, is that brands do have access to any of the comic giant’s legendary writers and artists, like Brian Michael Bendis (Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy), Clayton Henry (The Avengers), and Brian J. Glass (Thor), depending on their availability.

Now, people can be a tad skeptical when it comes to native advertising (or as John Oliver calls it, “repurposed bovine waste“), and comic book fans are a breed more sensitive than most when it comes to messing with their favorite characters and stories. Just ask Zack Snyder. Ennis says that Marvel Custom Solutions is able to safeguard those characters and stories, while still working to achieve a client’s goals.

“While Marvel owns these characters, it’s the fans who really own them, they’ve lived with them for so long, and been invested in their stories. So if those characters do something that feels counter to their brand or who that character is, they will react, and our company is very sensitive to that,” says Ennis. “We do understand that there’s a way we can help a brand get a message across, that will resonate with our fans without being too heavy-handed or turning them away because it smells too much like marketing or sales.”

They make sure characters aren’t interacting or endorsing a product, or if it’s a comic, say, for Verizon, that the integration into the story feels organic, and comes from a real place within the story. “It’s not Hulk all of a sudden deciding he needs high speed wifi,” says Ennis. “Or Luke Cage isn’t on the Avengers anymore, so if you want an Avengers story, Luke Cage will not be in that story. If you want Luke Cage, then maybe it’s a Defenders story, and that’s the kind of nuance our team knows the fans will know instinctively.”

Here are a few of the various brand integrations Marvel Custom Solutions have created over the last few years:

Visa

“Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket’s Powerful Plan”

Western Union

“Avengers Presented By Western Union”

“What The–?! Western Union Special”

TakedaPharmaceuticals

“The Unbeatables”

Magic Shave

“Luke Cage In A Close Shave!”

Lexus

“Operation Recruitment”

7-Eleven

“What The–?! Thor Joins 7-Eleven”

Kiehl’s

“Captain America: Transformation & Triumph”

Benefit Cosmetics

“SpyGal”

Florida Department of Citrus

“Captain Citrus”

When Martin J. Walsh was sworn in as the mayor of Boston on January 6, 2014, he ushered in the city’s first new administration in 20 years. Boston is an establishment city. It’s home to some of the oldest institutions in the country, and traditions and culture run deep—and not always toward the future.

Walsh ran his campaign on the promise of progress. Central to the longtime labor leader’s ambitions was reforming the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), founded in 1957 as Boston’s urban renewal engine and economic development corporation, and infamous for its abuse of eminent domain to bulldoze neighborhoods and displace people from their homes. Speaking to Next City, Jim Campano recalls “one of the most infamous acts of America’s urban renewal era: when, in 1958, the BRA seized nearly all of the working-class West End neighborhood, evicted its 75,000 residents, and tore all the housing down to build middle-class apartments. “It felt like they took part of you when they took your neighborhood,” Campano said.

Part of why the BRA was able to plow through neighborhoods in the way that it did for so long is due to the agency’s unusual role in the city: Unlike the development agencies in other cities, which are by and large separate from the local government (New York’s Economic Development Corporation, for instance, operates as a nonprofit), the BRA is self-funded but reports directly to the mayor, and as Rachel Slade notes in Boston magazine, “this town’s mayors, most recently Mayor Menino, have long recognized that the BRA gives them unusual power to shape the city exactly as they want.” This insular dynamic led to developments that have not responded to the real needs of the city. Slade writes: “Much-needed housing and civic buildings haven’t been built. Characterless towers have gone up on prime waterfront lots. And planning ideas that could have transformed the city into a national model for 21st-century development have died on the vine.”

And last fall, the BRA was reborn as the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) with the help of the design firm Continuum. The agency’s new website is sleek and user-friendly; on the home page, it greets visitors with the message: “[This website] redefines what we do, why we do it and how we go about our work. While this website does not cover every single aspect of our complex organization, it provides tools that will ensure that we lay a strong foundation and live up to our responsibilities to the city and people of Boston.” In other words, it’s an apology for 60 years of failing to do just that.

“We’ve spent a lot of our recent history trying to right the wrongs of our past,” Heather Campisano, chief of staff for the BPDA, tells Fast Company. Campisano has been at the agency for 20 years, and has witnessed firsthand how the agency’s reputation for demolition and displacement has earned it the distrust of Boston’s residents, especially those in lower-income areas who fear their homes and neighborhoods, like so many before them, will be bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal.” Steve Fox, a 30-year resident of South End, voiced his concerns to Next City: The BRA, Fox said, has the authority to do whatever it wants, adding that “we as neighborhood people have no recourse.” A 2015 audit of the then-BRA by McKinsey & Co. cited low internal and external transparency, an inconsistent project-review process, an incohesive organizational mission, and, for an agency that approves around 52 projects per year, a dearth of planning and coordination.

Going forward, the BPDA is on a mission to show that urban renewal doesn’t have to mean displacement. The idea of working with a design firm to reimagine how the agency relates to communities and the city as a whole stemmed from the understanding that channels of communication between the two were broken (or perhaps never existed), and needed to be repaired.

Continuum, based in Boston, was founded in 1983 with a focus on medical product design and experience. Since then, it’s moved more into organizational design and transformation, which is how it landed the BPDA project. “We typically focus on industries and institutions that have large, complex problems, that have kind of gotten away from their end user,” Jon Campbell, the senior vice president of experience and service design at Continuum, tells Fast Company.

“The first step is putting yourself in a user-centered contextual space and really understanding and empathizing with the residents,” Campbell says. From that vantage, the original name–the Boston Redevelopment Authority–rang sour. “Authority” stripped residents of agency, but the new name, the Boston Planning and Development Agency, hopes to return it to them by positioning the BPDA as the enactor of change that happens as much because of resident input as it does internal decision-making.

Inside the BPDA, the agency is going through a concurrent culture shift. Part of Continuum’s plan for the agency was to establish firmer and more open lines of communication between departments and employees. There was a recognition that the inner workings of the agency needed an overhaul as much as its relationship with the city, Campisano says. “It really started with pointing the finger back at ourselves.” Continuum engaged the BPDA staff in workshopping a set of internal communication principles that would guide the development of the overhaul, and assigned staff members to teams to ensure that the four principles–to engage communities, implement new solutions, partner for greater impact, and track progress–are being met. Continuum also created a map of everyone in the agency that was rolled out at an internal staff meeting and distributed to foster greater connectivity within the agency.

For the BDPA, Continuum also created a set of guidelines specific to each of Boston’s 26 neighborhoods and labeled each with a “fingerprint” that mimics the unique street layouts in the different districts. “In talking with residents and stakeholders, it became very apparent that it was important that new developments respect the individual character of the neighborhoods,” Campbell says. To that end, the agency is making an effort to ensure their community meetings are well attended. The problem before wasn’t lack of meetings: The BRA hosted around 400 meetings per year. The problem was awareness and convenience. The meetings were not well publicized, and held at times that only worked for the nine-to-five subset of the population. The new site allows residents to sign up for alerts on all projects (filterable by neighborhood), and contains complete information and contact details for in-process plans and developments.

The idea of turning planning and development into a two-way conversation between residents and the BPDA will take a while to catch on, and longer to be trusted. Just months into the rollout, the agency still has some skeptics who worry their input won’t be enough to stop land seizures. In a statement in late 2014, Golden refuted that idea, saying: “If I felt that today’s approach to urban renewal came anywhere close to being that heavy-handed, I wouldn’t support its continued use.” And with channels of communication to the agency more open, and its internal workings more exposed to the public (the agency’s site has a road map, against which interested parties can track its progress), residents will have much more recourse to make their opinions heard before developments are green-lighted.

So far, at least, the BDPA’s strategy seems to be falling into place. Brendan Kelleher, a six-year resident of South Boston, had long wondered about the old Edison Power Plant at the end of his neighborhood. Now defunct, “it was kind of an eyesore,” Kelleher tells Fast Company. Through a neighborhood listserv, he learned that the BPDA would be hosting open houses at the site to solicit resident feedback for its redevelopment. He, along with around 60 other locals, visited the site on a weekend morning; he heard residents voice concerns about parking and housing affordability, and learned about plans for transforming part of the property into a public green space.

The plan for the property is far from being finalized. On the BPDA website, the agency writes that they’re inviting residents to view the site in the hopes of engaging the South Boston community and determining their interests and aspirations for housing, amenities, and public space–a far cry from the one-sided redevelopment decisions of the 1950s that bulldozed Campano’s neighborhood. “They were very conscious about building something that wasn’t just going to be a commercial success for the developer,” Kelleher says. Kelleher put down his email address; he says he plans to stay involved in the process as the property transforms.

To use AAA’s newest service–a one-way car-sharing startup in the Bay Area called Gig–you don’t have to own a car. The nonprofit, which is best known for its roadside assistance, is piloting the service as one step toward a future where self-driving cars, and dropping rates of car ownership, mean that the organization’s traditional business model needs to change.

When the 115-year-old nonprofit was founded, it was during another era of disruption, as commuters moved from the horse and buggy to the car.

Gig is the first service to come out of AAA’s new innovation lab, called A3 Ventures, which is dedicated to finding new ways to serve the organization’s members as transportation changes. The service aims to fill a gap in local transit options, beginning in Oakland and Berkeley. Unlike other car-sharing services in the area, it’s designed to be one-way; you don’t have to return it in the same place you pick it up. Instead, through an agreement with local government, the cars can be parked in almost any parking space in both cities.

When you want a car, an app helps locate one nearby (you don’t need to be a AAA member to use the app). You unlock the car with your phone or an RFID membership card, and then leave it wherever you’re going inside a designated “home zone”; when you want to head home, you pick up another car.

“Unlike traditional station-based models where you go out shopping for the day and you’re paying for the car while you’re not using it, while it’s sitting there parked, with the one-way model, you can take a car, drive to where you’re going, end your trip, and not have to pay for a vehicle while you’re doing whatever you’re doing,” says Hetke. “And then grab a different car to drive back home.”

The service is also cheaper than ride-sharing with a service like Lyft or Uber, because you’re doing the driving yourself.

It also has social benefits. A study at the University of California-Berkeley of one-way car-sharing in other cities found that each of the car-share vehicles is responsible for removing anywhere from 7 to 11 other cars from the road as people decide to use the service occasionally instead of buying a car. (In this way, the new service can benefit Bay Area AAA members who do own cars, and who currently suffer through the fourth-worst traffic in the world.) The study found that one-way car-sharing cars can also remove four to seven metric tons of climate pollution in a year. The Gig cars are all hybrid-electric Priuses, likely much more efficient than the cars that they will replace.

Those benefits convinced both the cities of Oakland and Berkeley to agree to let Gig park its first 250 cars on city streets, many of which offer only two-hour parking except for residents with permits. The cities are even including some metered parking spots. The challenge of getting cities on board, Hetke says, is why this type of car-sharing hasn’t existed in the Bay Area in the past.

“You can’t do this on your own,” he says. “It requires participation and partnership with the municipalities to create the super permits that enable this model. And so you have to convince municipalities, and there’s a number of competing factors for municipalities to consider. Quite frankly, we just haven’t had it prioritized in the Bay Area yet.”

In Vancouver, another AAA club, the British Columbian Automobile Association, launched the same type of service in 2016 (it quickly grew from 250 vehicles to over 1,000). Car2Go, a company owned by Daimler, operates a similar one-way car-sharing service in European cities, as well as Brooklyn, Seattle, and a few other American cities, using mostly tiny Smart Cars.

AAA’s Oakland-based innovation lab is also developing new potential services, all aimed at helping improve mobility in the current world and a not-so-distant future filled with self-driving cars. The pilot projects, if successful, will potentially spread to other AAA clubs as well.

“By charter, we’re not a for-profit member service organization,” says Hetke. “We exist to create value for members, we don’t exist to create value for shareholders or make a giant profit. So we should be constantly reinvesting our profits back into new sources of value for our members . . . [Gig] is part of a longer vision of how AAA would be positioning itself to be that consumers’ advocate in consumers making the shift to a world where cars drive themselves.”

In just two seasons, The Leftoverstook dramatic storytelling in television to its furthermost boundaries before pushing it clean off the edge. The question now with the show’s third and final season is where will its characters–and the audience–land?

Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel, The Leftovers explores the vastness of faith and loss following the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population. Season three picks up two weeks before the seventh anniversary of The Departure, a date many believe will bring about the end of days.

Mapping out the last season of any show is a daunting process, but given the emotional density and existential scope of The Leftovers, it stands as a particularly steep undertaking.

“I think seasons one and two were very much world building,” says Mimi Leder, executive producer and one of the show’s directors. “This one was far more challenging in that [co-creators Perrotta and Damon Lindelof] had to start at the end to know where to begin.”

Over the course of the series, Leder has not only directed the majority of the episodes, she’s also had a significant hand in shaping its voice and visual palette. Leder’s approach to a show like The Leftovers exists in somewhat of a paradox: being intimate on an epic scale, meaning keeping in focus the enormity of a supernatural phenomenon yet zooming in tight enough to see the finest cracks in a family’s foundation.

Much like the first episode of season two, also directed by Leder, season three starts with an event tucked well back in history that has tangential meaning in the present. Season two saw a prehistoric woman die protecting her child in the same spot where that seasons’s principle action took place. Season three’s first episode opens with a crash course into the Millerism, a religious following founded by William Miller who predicted the Second Coming of Jesus would take place in the 1840s.

“I think it was a test to give up everything you had–the material things that meant so much and ultimately meant nothing. So they gave up everything and waited for the rapture–but then, of course, it doesn’t happen,” Leder says. “The Millerites are real precursor to our Guilty Remnant.”

“Coming to Australia brought an even greater cinematic scope to getting the right visual tone. You think you’re looking at nothing but in that nothingness there is everything,” Leder says. “The details of Australia’s landscape really spoke to us–the colors, the light. It was the perfect place to explore our belief systems.”

Read More About HBO’s The Leftovers

• Justin Theroux Is Ready To Go Even Darker In Season Two Of “The Leftovers”–Are You?
• Regina King Is On A Quest To Conquer Storytelling In Front (and Behind) the Camera

How can creativity fuel your business? On May 16-17, Fast Company will show you how with deep dives into 36 different enterprises across Los Angeles, from Facebook to Giphy, Goop to Headspace. Leaders from these companies will take small groups of attendees on exclusive, intimate tours of their offices and offer a peek into their creative process. These Fast Tracks, our take on the field trip, are a break from the standard conference experience and encourage meaningful connections and stirring conversations.

Here are a few more reasons to join us!

1. Join Headspace cofounder Rich Pierson in a meditation.
2. Get in the kitchen with Sarah Michelle Gellar and hear how she and her cofounders are disrupting the $4.7 billion baking mix industry with her baking kit brand, Foodstirs.
3. Go inside Giphy’s brand-new Chinatown HQ for Giphy Studios and find out how they plan to stay ahead of the pop culture curve.
4. Join creative agency 72andSunny for a thoughtful exploration of what it means to make an impact in these tumultuous times.
5. Let Facebook’s Playa Vista design and product team take you on journey of how they created Messenger.
6. Help Aspiration CEO Andrei Cherny workshop the launch of the company’s next financial services product.
7. Gain insight into the cutting-edge cannabis-based health and wellness brand Hmbldt.
8. Go on a tour of the Goop offices with founder Gwyneth Paltrow.
9. Learn how Hasbro has taken its product portfolio beyond toys and how it makes play integral to its company culture.
10. Hear from Whalerock Industries‘ president and head of digital as they break down the success behind some of their biggest multimedia hits–like the famous Kim Kardashian West keyboard, Kimoji.

A limited number of tickets are still available!

United Airlines will probably be able to weather the storm over its recent mistreatment of a passenger because it’s such a big corporation. Your startup, on the other hand, can’t afford to be disliked. Your product may be great, your work culture excellent, and your consumers happy, but nothing kills the vibe like a marketing misstep—or several.

That much is obvious, and so is this second point: Your startup can’t afford to remain a business no one’s heard of. You need to publicize your wins. Did you sign a big client? Was your CEO recognized next to an A-lister? The world needs to know, and the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to spread good news is through social media. But what’s less obvious is that you should do it by bragging. Anything that smacks of false modesty could whip up the internet’s wrath faster than a patronizing Pepsi commercial. Here’s why, and how to do it right.

The Humblebrag Is Hereby Deceased

“Humblebragging” entered the popular lexicon around a decade ago and was added to the Urban Dictionary in 2011, where the top entry reads, “Subtly letting others [k]now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or ‘woe is me’ gloss.”

So by now you probably don’t need to be reminded that there’s a difference between bragging and humblebragging, and that it’s shamefully apparent on social media. But what we do need reminding of in 2017 is that the inauthenticity behind (but not limited to) the humblebrag is more toxic than ever. It’s what got Pepsi skewered, and as the pressure ramps up on businesses to add something of social value in addition to just adding to their bottom lines, the perils of sounding tone deaf are plentiful, frequently political, and hard to avoid.

One reason why is because social media is where advertisers and activists uneasily coexist at an especially fraught moment. Another is because of the way the human brain evolved to communicate. “The further you get from unmediated face time,” one psychologist pointed out for Fast Company recently, “the more likely it becomes that a conversation will go off track.”

So it doesn’t surprise Molly Reynolds, founder of an entrepreneurship community called The Unicorn in the Room, that “there is often a disconnect between who people are in real life and who they are in social media. If you’re speaking in person,” she points out, “you have context, tone, and intent; you don’t have that on social media. Because your only communication tool is the written word, you need to be extra careful about how you phrase your accomplishments.”

Harvard Business School researchers happen to agree. In a recent empirical study of self-presentation on social media, they find that the lines get blurred especially quickly whenever a person or business takes to social media for self-promotion. The study’s authors also examine the differences between good, old-fashioned bragging and two distinct types of humblebrag, one complaint-based and the other rooted in humility. What researchers found was that complaint-based humblebrags are more prevalent on social media but less effective than humility-based ones. However, both approaches to humblebragging actually make you less likable and competent in the eyes of your audience.

So it might sound odd to suggest straightforward bragging, but in context, it’s often the better marketing strategy than trying (and failing) to sound low key about your accomplishments.

Go Ahead And Boast On Twitter

For James Aschehoug, cofounder of a nascent social network called Uriji Jami, “humblebragging comes across as not being fully dedicated and even to a certain extent as unassuming. Entrepreneurs should be ready to go all out and brag, rather than fly at half-mast.” He recognizes the risks of sounding arrogant prematurely, but claims they’re far outweighed by those of the reverse approach. “Yes, you will annoy some of your friends and family,” says Aschehoug, “but that’s the price you need to be prepared to pay.”

One component of the Harvard study tested this contention in what researchers called a “dictator game.” In it, one participant, the dictator, receives a fixed amount of money, then has to decide how to allocate it between themselves and a second player, the recipient. In one version of the game, recipients were told to make their case to the dictator, either by regular bragging or through one of the two humblebragging tactics.

The dictators were significantly less generous with the humblebraggers. As a startup, you need to think of everyone you reach on social media as sitting on the dictator’s side of the table—they’re the people you need to impress and win over. So go ahead and boast. It will sound more authentic, even if you’re a brand-new company and don’t have much to show for yourself yet.

Take Zomato. Ever heard of it? Maybe not yet in the U.S., but the restaurant discovery app, now in 23 countries, is a highly valued Indian startup that last year was pointed to as proof of a looming tech bubble in that region (where analysts also noted that Flipkart’s valuation was slashed twice in 2016). Founder Deepinder Goyal took to social media and the company’s blog to punch back, and roughly a year later remains an unapologetic champion of Zomato’s success. Goyal boasted a few weeks ago that the app hit No. 20 on India’s iOS App Store with “no cheap tricks,” then followed that up days later noting it reached No. 5 in the UAE—adding that that put Zomato “ahead of Facebook.”

And #5 on the UAE store, ahead of Facebook. @ZomatoUAE@rohinthampi@pallavisangtanipic.twitter.com/4m2DxAyj3J

— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) February 28, 2017

That’s a brag, and one worth mentioning. Zomato has 971,000 followers on Twitter. You do the math.

Your boss is busy. So are you—but that doesn’t exactly put you on an equal footing. The two of you may have a strong working relationship where you ask each other for feedback, and the power dynamic is just about imperceptible. And that’s great! But it’s there, even if it’s hard to see, and you shouldn’t forget it.

So even though the traditional rules of office politics might not apply, there are still times when your manager really doesn’t need or want your input. The only problem is they might not actually tell you, “You know what? I’ve got this,” until you’ve already overstepped. Here are a few pointers on what it takes to walk the line between letting your boss make the tough calls she’s paid to make, and speaking up when you think you have something to add, but aren’t sure if it’ll be welcomed.

Related: The Better Way To Break Bad News

1. When Your Boss’s Mind Is Made Up

When your boss announces in a meeting, “I’ve made a decision. We won’t be able to put your project in next year’s budget,” it’s probably time to let go. Listen for the phrasing: “We won’t be able to” is more definitive than, “I’m not sure we’re going to be able to”; “I’ve made a decision” isn’t, “The more I think about it, I’m leaning towards . . .” Hearing this, you’ll likely feel upset, angry, and ready to take a stand and make your case. But the window has closed. It’s probably better to accept defeat, especially if the news arrives in a group setting where mounting a challenge might embarrass your boss and make you look bad.

How to get a word in anyway. Even if your boss’s mind is made up, that doesn’t mean it’s completely worthless for you to voice misgivings. You just need to be careful when and how. If you follow up in a one-on-one meeting, you might say, “I accept your decision, can you share your thinking?” If she sounds tentative in her explanation or open to your view, you may still have an in—a chance to collaborate on a better approach, possibly a compromise that includes some of your original idea.

2. When You’re Surrounded By Experts

Your boss doesn’t want you to be a know-it-all who speaks up just to curry favor and impress the room. So if you’re in a group setting with people who know more than you (and possibly more than your boss) about a certain topic under discussion, hang back and let them talk. Your silence might even be taken as wisdom and humility—never a bad thing.

How to get a word in anyway. Being reticent doesn’t mean you have to sit through a whole meeting in perfect silence. Speak up to ask a question, draw a quieter team member out, or synthesize some of the views you’ve heard. You will be projecting one of the most coveted leadership skills: the ability to pull together a discussion and get participants on sidelines involved. Your boss might even admire you for taking on this role. At any rate, it’ll probably reflect better on you than trying to pose as a subject-matter specialist—and will open up some room for you to squeeze in your opinions more tactfully.

Related: How To Avoid Fumbling These Four Common Work Conversations

3. When You Feel Negatively About Something Your Boss Doesn’t

No matter how good your working relationship, you can’t expect your boss to welcome your negativity. We all have issues that bring out the contrarian in us. We might dislike a team member, get frustrated with a customer, gripe about another department, or feel sorry for ourselves. And while it’s normal to want to vent, it’s not your boss’s job to listen to your complaints (it’s not your coworkers’ either, by the way).

That’s especially true if you encroach on a conversation your boss is in the middle of, only to interject with a bunch of negatives. If she’s talking with an account manager about a client, and you pass by remarking, “That client doesn’t know what they want!” you’re not being helpful. Negativity drags everyone down, especially the people in organizations who are responsible for keeping things running smoothly.

How to get a word in anyway. If you see a problem, have a suggestion for fixing it, and it’s a situation that affects you or your boss, speak up! But do it one-on-one. Take your boss aside and outline the problem and solution, emphasizing the latter. “I have something I’d like to share with you,” you might say. “Do you have a minute?” Then continue, “There’s an issue with . . . ” Don’t say “problem,” and don’t blame anyone or any group. Just focus on the matter in question and how you’d suggest fixing it.

4. When It’s Too Late To Make A Change

Speaking truth to power isn’t always a bad thing—sometimes it’s even necessary. But in most workplaces, sensitivity to office politics is a useful skill to have, particularly when it comes to timing. So if you say to your boss just before she launches into a presentation, “I think it’s crazy to have 90 slides in your deck,” it won’t go over well. Nor will a softer version of that, like, “Looks you’ve got too many slides.” Keep criticism to yourself when it’s too late in the game for your boss (or anyone) to take it into account.

How to get a word in anyway. There are times, though, when executives don’t want you to rubber-stamp their views or tacitly accept them. Sometimes they need your honest opinions—just delivered in time, and preferably not at the end of a sledgehammer. They may not come out and say, “I wonder if I have too many slides,” or “What do you think of our new design?”

But your boss might mention, “I’m skipping this afternoon’s meeting so I can put together that presentation”—which is your cue to offer, “No problem. Hey, I’d be glad to eyeball your slide deck before you finalize it, if that’s helpful.” If your boss agrees and offers you a chance to give it a look, make sure you kick off your feedback with something positive first, then share your constructive criticism with a phrase like, “I might suggest . . . ” or, “one thing that may work here . . . ”

It isn’t always clear when to speak up and when to bite your tongue around the workplace. It’s an important skill to master, but if you’re not sure where to start, there’s actually an easier skill you can practice to get you there—it’s called listening.

Ask any job seeker or employee about salary negotiations and one of the most popular responses is, “I would negotiate but I don’t know what to say.” Having the right words to say, or write, during a salary negotiation is vital. Communication can make or break discussions and impact your confidence to get paid fairly.

First things first, determine your current worth in the job market. Use Know Your Worth to receive a custom salary estimate based on your title, company, location, and experience. Once you have the information, it’s time to advocate for yourself.

Josh Doody, author of Fearless Salary Negotiation, knows how challenging it can be to learn to financially advocate for oneself. He took his first job without negotiating his salary. Once he got hip to the dance, he doubled that salary. We spoke with Doody about how to tackle tricky salary negotiation conversations.

Situation #1: Prying During The Prescreen

How should you respond when you’re asked about salary right off the bat? You want to demonstrate that you’re enthusiastic and cooperative, but you don’t want to tip your hand. Doody explains, “It’s a salary negotiation tactic disguised as a gatekeeper-type interview question.”

Suggested script:

Recruiter: What’s your current salary?

You: I’m not really comfortable sharing that information. I would prefer to focus on the value I can add to this company and not what I’m paid at my current job.

If the interview team doesn’t know your salary, they can’t use it as their starting point. Doody writes, “that’s probably going to mean a higher initial offer for you.”

Recruiter: What’s your expected salary?

You: I want this move to be a big step forward for me in terms of both responsibility and compensation.

Doody points out, “sharing your current salary or your expected salary is not in your best interest. . . They’re interviewing you because you’re a qualified candidate, and they need a qualified candidate. . . They would also like to get a good deal. They’re not going to stop interviewing you just because you don’t make it easier for them to get a good deal on you.”

If they pass because you won’t acquiesce, that’s a red flag. Doody says, “then they’re extremely motivated to get a bargain . . . That’s bad news for you even if you get the job.”

One last thing, resist the temptation to tell a white lie when asked for your salary during the prescreening process. If you underestimate what they’re willing to pay, you’re leaving money on the table. If the real answer is that they would compensate someone like you up to $75,000 dollars, and you guess they would pay a salary of only $65,000, you very literally may have just cost yourself $10,000.

If you overestimate and tell them your salary expectation is $85,000, you may set off red flags that cause them to rethink the interview process altogether. This is pretty rare, but you could disqualify yourself by being “too expensive” for them. If your expected salary is well above their budgeted pay range, they may just move on to other candidates with lower salary expectations.

The bottom line is you probably aren’t going to guess what their salary structure looks like, and if you try to guess you may cost yourself a lot of money.

Situation #2: Savvy Counter-Offering

After you’ve secured an offer, Doody recommends using this formula:

“The counter-offer calculator accounts for four factors—the base salary of your job offer, your minimum acceptable salary (“walk away” number), how badly the company needs you to accept the job offer, and how badly you need the job.”

Use “firm and neutral” language like this:

Tom offered $50,000 and I would be more comfortable if we could settle on $56,000. I feel that amount reflects the importance and expectations of the position for ACME Corp’s business, and my qualifications and experience as they relate to this particular position.

Or, if you had a competing offer:

Thank you so much for the offer. As I mentioned during my interview process, I am speaking with a couple of other companies. If you’re able to move the pay to [insert your number], I’d be eager to accept.

Doody explains that email is the perfect medium for this message. This way, the hiring manager can share it in a format that clearly makes your case to each person with whom it’s shared. Your case won’t get the same treatment if it’s restated recollections of a conversation.

The hiring manager will likely come back with a figure between your base salary and your counter offer. For Doody, the distance between these figures represents your “salary negotiation window.” He recommends compartmentalizing this window into increments. In the example above, the window is $6,000, so he recommends devising a response for each possible offer.

If, for example, the offer is $55,000 or above, Doody says it’s a taker. “If the company comes back with $53,000, then you say, ‘If you can do $54,000, I’m on board!’ If they stick with $53,000, then you would say, ‘I understand the best you can do is $53,000 and you can’t come up to $54,000. If you can do $53,000 and offer an extra week of paid vacation each year, then I’m on board.”

Decide which benefits, like vacation time or flexible working hours, are most important so that you can apply them to bolster the deal. Rank those benefits in your mind and use those in your bargaining.

1. Extra vacation time
2. Work from home
3. Signing bonus

If they do not accept your second-priority benefit, you move on to your third-priority benefit. Regardless of whether they accept your final response, then you’re finished; don’t get nitpicky or greedy. You have maximized your base salary and maximized your benefits as well.

Situation #3: Raises And Promotions

Doody explains, “Your primary reason for requesting a raise is that the salary you’re being paid doesn’t reflect your current value to the company. That salary was set some time in the past, so your argument is that you are more valuable now than you were. . . ” You have a fair justification. Now you need the right plan.

Start by mentioning, via email, to your manager that you’d like to discuss compensation in your next private meeting. After that conversation, Doody advises preparing a strategically constructed, easily sharable salary increase letter.

Suggested email script:

As we discussed, it has been [amount of time] since [my last significant salary adjustment—or—since I was hired], and I would like to revisit my salary now that I’m contributing much more to the company. I’ve been researching salaries for [job title] in [industry] industry, and it looks like the mid-point is around [mid-point from your research]. So I would like to request a raise to [target salary].

The letter should also highlight your accomplishments and accolades. Doody notes that if your proposal isn’t accepted on the first try, you can work with your manager to create an action plan.

I would love to work with you to put together a clear action plan and timeline so we can continue this discussion and monitor my progress as I work toward my goal.

Always remember, your talent is precious, and you deserve to be compensated for it. Learning to foster conversations about compensation is a vital skill that yields rewards.

A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted with permission.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has had a running bit this season, in which the show gets messages directly to President Trump. (Calling him that still feels cosmically incorrect, like saying “Doctor Santa Claus” or Diet Heroin.) Oliver’s methodology involves buying ad space on Fox News during shows Trump watches, like hiding a pill in peanut butter. Alternatively, though, if Oliver is determined to make sure Trump hears what he has to say, he could seed a scene into Saturday Night Live.

Although Trump doesn’t tweet about SNL these days as much as he used to, he obviously still watches some of it–and it’s still a thorn in his side. Reports keep emerging about how the president engages with the show, a fact that is certainly not lost on the writers. Watching SNL now is like if John Oliver snuck messages into the whole runtime of Fox and Friends, instead of just the occasional ad. The show is aware of its impact and now may be hoping to use it to manipulate the president like Fox News does.

Jimmy Fallon made it clear in his opening monologue–one long dance number–that he came to party, not to make political satire so riveting viewers almost forget about when he turned Trump into a cuddly grampa on The Tonight Show two months before the election. The writers, however, had other ideas, with some searing political sketches, a fiery WeekendUpdate, and no less than three separate instances of laying into United Airlines as it endures one of the worst PR weeks of the modern era. Fallon may have been completely silent during his turn as Jared Kushner in the cold open, but the character’s presence spoke volumes.

The sketch covers tons of topical ground before Kushner even makes his appearance–with the delightful, hopefully sticky nickname: Kushball. Alec Baldwin’s Trump discusses his first 100 days with Beck Bennett as Mike Pence, going over all the many non-starters and broken campaign promises, along with the excessive amount of time spent at the private business venture he owns–Mar-a-Lago. But it’s when Trump brings in Kushner, his “little Jewish Amelie,” that things get interesting.

Fallon appears as the 36-year-old foreign policy Svengali wearing that instantly immortalized ill-fitting flak jacket. He’s summoned to the Oval Office for a climactic installment of, well, if not exactly The Apprentice, a reality competition called Who’s My Number Two? Kushner has to face off against Steve Bannon, represented once again as the shrouded, skeletal specter of death. As seems to be the case in real life, Kushner wins and Bannon is ousted back to hell. Here is where the show’s writers signal an awareness of their impact.

The other major political message this week that seemed addressed directly to Trump came with the return of Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer.

Spicer’s week wasn’t quite as much of a PR fiasco as United’s, but it was a close race. After invoking moral relativism between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Adolph Hitler, Spicer bungled several non-apologies before finally approaching a sincere mea culpa. McCarthy’s parody of the press secretary found a couple interesting wrinkles with putting a semi-apologetic, Easter Bunny suit-clad Spicer on the defensive, but what really stood out was the sketch’s dark ending. A major difficulty of working on SNL or any late night show, really, during these politically chaotic times is that there is always late-breaking news that renders some of your prepared material redundant. In the case of this past week, the late news involved increasing tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, culminating in a failed missile test on the NK side and some nuclear saber-rattling on ours. While the story came up on Weekend Update, the writers also wedged it into the end of the Spicer sketch.

“Oh and by the way, the president’s probably going to bomb North Korea tonight,” McCarthy says, not even sounding like she’s impersonating Spicer at this point, but merely reminding viewers of their actual current circumstances. “Everybody, just eat as much candy as you want because this is probably our last Easter on Earth.”

It’s a bleak note to end a sketch on, designed to reflect the gravity of the national mood back at the audience–an audience the writers know includes the impressionable president himself.

Hiring someone who is overqualified sounds like a recipe for disaster. What if they get bored and quit? Or what if they develop a bad attitude as a result of feeling above the duties of their job? Turns out you shouldn’t worry, according to new research published by the Academy of Management Journal. It found that hiring someone who is overqualified can be a win for both the employee and the employer.

“A major trend in our current economic condition is the rise in underemployment,” says Jing Zhou, a professor of management and psychology at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. “[Employers] almost universally believe it’s a bad thing to hire someone who is overqualified, but we found that there is another side to this with positive implications for management.”

Zhou performed two studies with Bilian Lin and Kenneth S. Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In the first, teachers were asked to rank their qualification level on a scale of one to seven. The teachers’ supervisors were then asked to rate the teachers’ creativity and organizational citizenship. Those who rated themselves as overqualified for their position–a five on a scale of one to seven–also received the highest ratings from their supervisors.

In a second study, toy factory technicians were given a test that measured their qualification level. Participants were then given 30 minutes to design and assemble a toy boat, using at least 30 components. The workers identified as being modestly overqualified ended up using the most parts and creativity.

In both studies, Zhou and her colleagues found that overqualified workers employ “job crafting”: They play with new ideas and sequencing, and push the boundaries of their job. The teachers, for example, had taken the initiative to implement new approaches and organized special classroom events, while the toy factory technicians created unique designs or more than one toy boat.

“Overqualified workers tend to try different things, and through the process they bring creative insights and find better ways of doing their work,” says Zhou.

And this can be important to management for two reasons:

1. They get more done. Because they’re more qualified than the job requires, overqualified employees have underused capabilities and more time to engage in other activities. “They can complete their assigned tasks more quickly than those who are not underemployed,” says Zhou.

2. They go beyond the call of duty. The extra time is used in a way that helps the organization, says Zhou. “When a situation requires it or an opportunity appears, they step outside of their job description for the organization, generating new and useful ideas and doing more than they’re required,” she says.

Managing The Overqualified

To reap the benefits, managers need to be open-minded and willing to give the employee a chance, says Zhou. “Sometimes managers say, ‘You’re not focusing,’ or ‘You’re stepping outside of your boundaries,’” she says. “Instead, let [an overqualified employee] engage in job crafting and have confidence that over time, their efforts will result in creativity.”

Amplify the job-crafting motivation by helping employees to identify with the organization. “Practices that enhance organizational identification can increase job-crafting efforts for employees perceiving themselves as underemployed,” says Zhou. “If at any time an employee stops job crafting, or their job crafting does not lead to creativity, provide guidance to try to redirect effort into productive use of time.”

But don’t push someone into job crafting, Zhou adds. “It’s the employee’s choice to do it or not–but if they want to do it, they should have that freedom, with supervisors monitoring, coaching, and advising as needed,” she says.

One Caveat

While overqualified employees can be a benefit to their companies, someone who is extremely overqualified most likely won’t, cautions Zhou. “The organizational gain from underemployment is like drawing an inverted U, with the benefit to the employer increasing to a certain point, then falling,” she says. “In our research, the curve goes down as the employee’s drive gradually diminishes, and this is understandable. The job becomes so simple compared to their capabilities that they feel discouraged.”

There’s somewhat of an automatic assumption that animated features today will have a certain level of sophisticated production, whether it’s hyperrealistic backgrounds or mouth and facial movements that match a character’s speech and emotions perfectly.

However, comic book artist and author Dash Shaw wants to pull audiences back into the dark ages of animation with his first feature film leading the charge.

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea follows best friends Dash (Jason Schwartzman) and Assaf (Reggie Watts) on what easily passes as the worst day of their lives. As the film’s title so accurately describes, Dash and Assaf’s high school drifts and sinks into the sea after an earthquake shakes it loose from its foundation.

Shaw based his film on a comic he wrote years ago that was meant to be a mishmash of the styles he grew up with: the autobiographical, (e.g. Chester Brown’s The Playboy and Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte) and the superhero adventures of Marvel and DC. As for how the characters were drawn and colored, Shaw, once again, threw several inspirations into a blender to create an abstract expressionist/manga cocktail that he figured could lend itself to film, despite its purposely lo-fi quality running against the grain of current animated films.

A large part of My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea’s charm rests with its slapdash animation, which was equally a product of budgetary restrictions and Shaw’s distinct style of drawing.

“It felt achievable with limited means,” Shaw says. “I thought of it like The Evil Dead, in that you see the director had a limited location and limited means but the movie gets by on sheer enthusiasm. I thought this movie would be awesome if it had authentic energy shot through it.”

For Shaw, incorporating authenticity meant staying true to the influences that inspired him as a kid and that shaped him as an artist–Disney need not apply.

“My favorite animations are limited animations, meaning it’s using fewer drawings. When you watch Disney cartoons, Jafar will move his hand and all of his fingers will be like these gooey squash-and-stretch movements–it always felt like overacting to me,” Shaw says. “I know that animation is beautiful in its own way but something about the open-closed mouths of [a cartoon like] Speed Racer resonates with my personality.”

“Dash is fundamentally a deadpan writer,” says My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea’s lead animator Jane Samborski. “He’s very funny but he really likes to have his emotions reserved. So that really dovetailed with the animation style that we were doing.”

Every so often, limited-animation films like the recently rereleased Japanese classic Belladonna of Sadness will break out beyond their niche followings and find a wider audience. With My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, Shaw is aiming to do just that by expanding what’s possible within the mainstream landscape of animated features.

“There aren’t very many independent animated movies. If I didn’t make this movie, someone else wasn’t going to make it,” Shaw says. “I felt like there was a hole in animation and that I had something I really wanted to contribute.”

At Facebook’s annual F8 conference, which officially kicks off in San Jose, California, on April 18, expect the social media giant to focus on the potential of augmented reality, a more powerful Messenger, and how the platform is tackling fake news and violent videos.

It’s the first conference since founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a 10-year roadmap for the company last year, focusing on technologies that will completely transform the way we use the platform. It will be the third year in a row that Facebook has held the conference, after taking a few hiatuses since launching the event back in 2007.

This year’s conference is expected to kick off with a keynote from Zuckerberg where he will unveil new Facebook products and talk about the social network’s plans for the future followed by yet another keynote on Wednesday, including more than 45 different sessions.

Until then, here’s our preview of what to expect at the highly anticipated conference. And as soon as it kicks off at 10 a.m. (PST) on Tuesday, we’ll keep you on top of all the action with live updates.

Augmented Reality

Expect a big focus on AR and its potential to completely change how we use our smartphones when we shop, travel, and play games. “Think Pokemon Go but on steroids,” notes USA Today, adding that Facebook’s AR lenses (glasses or contact lenses) won’t likely be available for a few years, but that the company is working to incorporate the experience into our phones as much as possible and in some unexpected ways for the time being.

Instagram

Facebook is likely to reveal more about some new features for Instagram, such as a Camera Effects Platform that allows you to add photo and video overlays and a Places Graph that enables developers to use Facebook’s location database. Per the description for the session focusing on the latter: “Power your app with the Places Graph. We’re providing free access to the same place data that powers Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Learn how to use data in about 140M+ places around the world to create location aware app experiences.”

Messenger

Earlier this month, Facebook announced that its Messenger service has reached 1.2 billion users. The social network is expected to launch a few new Messenger features during this year’s conference, including new chat bots for group conversations, reports TechCrunch. The bots would likely be less chatty in nature than their predecessors and instead provide information pertinent to the group such as current sports scores or stock prices.

Virtual Reality

One thing we’ll definitely see a lot of at this year’s F8: virtual reality. Since its last developer conference, Facebook has made huge strides in terms of 360 video and virtual reality experiences, now allowing 360 video and photos to be shared on the site. In March, Facebook took things a step further and introduced Facebook 360 for Gear VR.

There are eight different VR-related sessions at this year’s conference, which represents almost 20% of all the breakout sessions. Topics for those sessions include tips on creating compelling narratives in VR, building cross-platform VR content, and adding social components to your VR apps, signaling how important it is for Facebook.

Fake News And Violent Content

Given this weekend’s tragedy in Cleveland, when a man recorded and uploaded to Facebook a video of him apparently shooting a man to death and then confessing to the murder on Facebook Live, the use of the platform to broadcast such violence is sure to be addressed by Zuckerberg in his keynote. It is likely that he will announce some new ways to speed up the removal of such content from the platform. Facebook has also come under fire for the role that “fake news” played in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, the company has rolled out a number of programs to help users spot and report such stories. And at the conference we might hear more about further steps the company is taking to monitor the reliability of news on the social network.

Facebook At Work

Earlier this month Facebook made its Workplace feature free to use. Originally a paid service, the Slack competitor of sorts now works on a freemium model in which users pay to use certain features. Called Workplace Standard (the paid version is Workplace Premium), the product was in a testing phase when it was announced in early April. Come F8, Facebook might be ready to roll it out to the general public.

Voice Control

Last year Facebook acquired Wit.ai, a company that allows developers to create text or voice-based interfaces, among other things. With the proliferation of personal assistants and voice controls over the past year, particularly the prevalence of Amazon’s Alexa, now might be the perfect time for Facebook to show off some new voice features of its own. One place ripe for voice support: Facebook’s personal assistant “M” which was announced, but has yet to become available to most Facebook users.