The first thing you notice on entering Story, a retail concept store in Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea arts district, is that it’s full of fake grass. The stuff even accents the plywood tables, which are laid out with carefully curated items including $8 tarragon lip balm, Jonathan Adler copper finished candles, Public Supply notebooks, a sous vide machine, myriad cookbooks from Food52, and a beach cooler with a blending attachment and frisbee holder.

This space is updated to accomodate a new theme or partner every few months, and starting this week it’s a collaboration with the discount online retailer Jet.com, which Walmart acquired for $3.3 billion last year. But despite what some reports may have led you to believe–CNBC called it a “temporary brick-and-mortar grocery location,” Mashable touted it as an “artisanal grocery,” and Business Insider claimed it’s “now selling some of its products IRL“–this is not anywhere near an attempt by Jet to start selling at retail. You can’t even buy the groceries.

It is, however, a marketing stunt that offers insight into the way Jet is thinking about competing with Amazon Fresh through its deliver-to your-door grocery service.

Mixed into those delightful tables full of knickknacks are glass and ceramic containers brimming with fruits and vegetables: mini zucchinis, sunset colored grape tomatoes, avocados, red onions, and some small slightly blemished lemons. Each one wore a circular sticker bearing Jet’s logo: a “j” with a second tittle mirroring the dot atop Jet’s lowercase j that forms a sort of half-smiling face.

Celebrating Day 1 of our Fresh Story! ???? Join us for fresh food & fashion inspiration at @thisisstory in #NYC 'til Father's Day – and stay tuned for workshops, cooking classes, guest appearances from pros like @mariobatali @justbobbibrown & more. Deets ????go.jet.com/jetfreshstory and the link in our bio!

A post shared by Jet (@jet) on May 10, 2017 at 12:06pm PDT

“We put those on there,” an attendant at the store explained to me. She also said the merchandise in the store isn’t sold on Jet, but it turns out that you can indeed buy all of this food and many of the products from Jet and have it delivered to your door.

But you cannot buy it in the store (the attendant did, however, encourage me to take whatever I wanted, and I promptly pocketed an avocado). Other than that, Jet’s presence in the store is minimal, mostly represented by a mural in the back of the store composed of purple Jet boxes and a silver fridge full of fresh produce organized by color.

Jet’s presence here is a far cry from Amazon’s data-driven bookstore reinvention, where books are curated according to popularity and displayed face front. Neither is it reminiscent of Amazon’s drive-through grocery pickup locations. Rather, the Story partnership is curated around a set of events. Local lettuce goddess Gotham Greens, which sells its leafy vegetables on Jet, is hosting a trunk show. Bobbi Brown and Refinery 29 are giving a talk about fresh food as a tool for beauty inside and out (no doubt coconut oil will make an appearance). Mario Batali will divulge secret recipes (and you can buy orange crocs with his signature molded into the shoe’s strap at Story). The ingredients discussed at all these events can be retrieved online through Jet.com.

But you still can’t buy them at the Story shop. And that’s because Jet has no interest in physical retail. “We are part of the world’s largest retailer from a brick and mortar stand point,” says Jet president Liza Landsman. “I don’t see any reason why we would build stand-alone Jet retail stores.”

Right now, Jet’s goal is to increase loyalty and attract new customers. Sitting in this cross section of camera-slung tourists and well-to-do Manhattanites Jet hopes to help passerby and Story frequenters to discover new recipes, cool brands, a $50 gold farfalle-shaped keychain, and perhaps its grocery delivery service.

This installation is part of a wider trend among e-commerce brands that are dabbling in glass-front stores. They are, at root, very fancy billboards. Everlane has a showroom and “retail experiment” where you can look at new collections and try them on, but you can’t take them home–you’ll have to order online and have your purchases shipped. Away opened a boutique in New York that sells both its collection of travel gear as well as complementary products from other brands. Cuyana has three locations and only one is actually designated as a store (it has a pop-up in Boston and a showroom in San Francisco).

The two players with the largest spread of stores, Warby Parker and Bonobos, don’t actually let you take merchandise home. That’s because these locations, which are unlikely to grow to the size of traditional retail outlets like Gap Inc. with its 3,700 global storefronts, are touch points. They are opportunities for consumers to discover and interact with product that ordinarily is untouchable without a purchase.

Jet’s lightly branded store and supplemental talks and demonstrations is an extension of this same idea; it’s a mechanism for getting its existing customer base to associate fresh produce with its online store, rather than just toilet paper and shampoo. I’m not convinced that this marketing pitch will pay off in the form of new customers, but you can decide for yourself: The events taking place at Story for the duration of Jet’s stay will either be live-streamed or posted on Jet’s site.

So even if foot traffic on 10th avenue is slow, or Story’s events fail to connect real-life patrons with Jet’s online market, eternal online content might just convince someone in some other city far, far away to buy up ingredients for a soothing coconut oil mask.

Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to Jet.com’s collaboration with Story as a pop-up shop and “would-be storefront,” which is not entirely accurate, and failed to note that Jet.com sells some of the products as well as the food. The story has been updated to reflect these changes.

There’s an old saying that goes something like, don’t say it if you wouldn’t say it in front of your mother. But for actors on HBO shows that can be pretty tough. So the cable network recruited some moms to recite dialogue from shows like Veep, Insecure, Crashing, Ballers, Divorce, and Vice Principals.

Created by Mekanism, the spot stars the moms of Danny McBride, Sarah Jessica Parker, Pete Holmes, Issa Rae, Rob Corddry, and Tony Hale reading some salty stuff from their children’s shows. It’s… a bit awkward. But ultimately a fun way for the network to celebrate Mother’s Day.

The morning of May 12, just two days before Mother’s Day, a woman who had been held in an Oakland jail for a week before facing trial for a minor charge received word that her bail, which had been set at $25,000, had been paid. The woman had a four-year-old daughter at home, and when she heard that she could go back to her, “she put the phone down behind the glass that was separating us and just cried out of gratitude,” Gina Clayton, the executive director of the California-based Essie Justice Group, tells Fast Company.

Essie Justice Group is part of a coalition of black-led activist organizations campaigning to raise money to pay the bail of black women jailed for minor offenses in time for Mother’s Day on May 14 of this year–and raise awareness of the failings of our justice system. The groups–which include the Atlanta-based Southerners On New Ground (SONG), the national organization Color of Change, The Movement For Black Lives, and The Ella Baker Center For Human Rights–which had set a goal of raising $250,000 through the initiative they’ve entitled Mama’s Bail Out Day. Marbre Stahly-Butts, Law for Black Lives co-director, says the campaign has brought in over $350,00, and they’re pushing for more.

That $75,000 should only be enough to free just three women who haven’t yet been convicted of a crime–and even if they are, the charges are for minor offenses–is staggering, and to Clayton, that’s the point. The money raised through Mama’s Bail Out Day will likely not be able to release more than 100 women nationally. But “the problem that we’re pointing out is that nobody can afford to pay these exorbitant bills,” Clayton says.

The women who will be freed through Mama’s Bail Out Day are not felons; they pose no risk to society. Many of them were thrown in jail for low-level offenses like loitering or drug possession–offenses for which they have not yet even been convicted. Because even these violations can constitute bail fees in the thousands, 62% of people given bail are unable to come up with the money, and have to remain in jail to await sentencing (though they are still innocent in the eyes of the law), rather than being allowed to return to their lives and families. Eight in 10 of the women in prison are mothers, and for those who are unable to make bail before a trial, many face the threat of job or housing loss.

The organizers are clear on the fact that their efforts will go toward helping bail out all mothers–queer, trans, young, older, and immigrant. But they’re also attuned to the disparities rampant in incarceration rates: Black women are more than twice as likely to be jailed than their white counterparts, and one in five trans women have spent time in prison or jail. (In total, the U.S. incarcerates 127 out of every 100,000 women.)

In January, a group of black-led organizations met to address the inequities in the criminal justice system and coordinate a bail-reform effort. The meeting stemmed from the policy platform outlined by the Movement for Black Lives last summer, which calls for an end to bail, a demilitarization of law enforcement, and a reckoning with the systemic biases against black people and LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming people. As the director of SONG, an Atlanta-based LGBTQ organizing group, Mary Hooks had noticed the outsized effect of money bail on LGBTQ communities, and suggested an initiative, according to The Nation, to use “our collective resources to buy each others’ freedom.”

The idea to focus specifically on mothers, added Arissa Hall, a project manager at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, stemmed from a recognition that motherhood, while revered culturally, is often not granted respect by the justice system, and mothers who struggle with poverty, addiction, and mental health, often face stigmatization.

The bail outs facilitated through Mama’s Bail Out Day happened in the days leading up to Mother’s Day; on May 14, the initiative is organizing Bail Out Days in nine cities, including Oakland, Houston, and Atlanta, to issue a set of demands to local lawmakers and stakeholders. City councils and county commissions, they say, should pass legislation that supports automatic release for municipal offenses, and establish a fund for community organizations that provide pre-trial services; district attorneys and judges should coordinate to limit the use of bail. The Mama’s Bail Out Day requests these reforms scale up to the state and federal levels as well, calling for comprehensive bail reform and robust data collection on bond practices. If you give after Mother’s Day, don’t worry, the fund will continue paying mothers’ bail and supporting bail reform organizations.

As the coalition of activist groups continues to facilitate the bail of women across the country, Clayton hopes their efforts will ignite local support for legislative change. “One of the things that people can do immediately is support the locations that have legislation pending, in which we need the voices of people to say to legislators: stop this,” she says. In California, a bill to eliminate the bail system is making its way through the state legislature, and Essie Justice Group and Color of Change have organized an online petition to deliver signatures to the lawmakers who will be voting on the proposal.

But until comprehensive bail reform is enacted, activists and communities are stepping up to stymie the systemic injustice. “Our mamas are not disposable,” Ruth Jeannoel, lead organizer for Power U Center for Social Change, said in a video for Mama’s Bail Out Day. Communities depend on mothers of all kinds–birth mothers, chosen mothers, mothers of all races and identification–to hold together, Jeannoel adds, and it will take a community effort to bring them back.

You’re walking out of your job interview and playing everything back in your head. Maybe it’s for your dream job, maybe it isn’t–but you feel great. You think you really nailed it. Now you all there’s left to do is sit back and wait for an offer.

It never comes. Weeks later, you realize something must’ve gone wrong. Either the competition was a lot steeper than you’d imagined or (gulp) you choked and just didn’t realize it. More than likely, something went wrong at the last step of the process.

This is more common than you might think. Lots of candidates get really far along in a drawn-out hiring process, only to lose out on the offer at the very end. Here are three of the more common mistakes job applicants tend to make despite thinking they’ve nailed an interview, only to wind up surprised when that offer never arrives.

Related:Six Words And Phrases That Can Hurt You At The End Of A Long Interview Process

1. You Missed The Real Reason For The Final Interview

After several rounds of interviews, you’re brought in one last time to meet the most senior member of the team. At this stage, many candidates think that all they really need to do is stick to their script–it’s gotten them this far, so why switch it up now?

But it’s a mistake to continue presenting yourself exactly the same way you did in the earlier rounds of interviews. What you might not realize is that the criteria by which you’re being judged changes the farther into the interview process you go. In earlier rounds, hiring managers might be checking up on specific hard skills you’ll bring to a job. They’ll probe your past experience to make sure it’s a fit.

But once a prospective employer decides that your technical requirements match the needs of the open position, they’ll start judging you on a different set of skills. So if you’re called back in for a second or third time, be careful how you interpret the questions you’re asked. The same one you heard in the first round–for instance, “What’s the biggest asset you think you can you bring to the position?”–may call for a much different answer.

If you answered that question with your technical know-how earlier on, you might want to use it later on to sell your soft skills (here are a few tips for doing that in the midst of an interview). Leadership, communication, and interpersonal abilities tend to be bigger decision factors late in the interview process. How well you present them might determine whether you get an offer.

2. You Waited Too Long To Follow Up, Or Sounded Tepid Once You Did

Your job interview went so well that the hiring manager wrapped up by strongly suggesting that you’d hear back soon with an offer. So you leave and wait. But the company goes silent–you hear nothing back and can’t figure out why.

Chances are you took those surefire signs of their interest to mean your work was basically done. You were smart enough to remember to follow up with a thank-you email–but what kind of thank-you was it, and when did you hit “send”? Companies will assume you’re considering more than one opportunity, so if you’re lukewarm or late with your follow-up, they might guess that your interest is flimsy and make an offer to a candidate who seems more eager. (Some might even infer from that how passionately you’ll pursue your job once you’re hired.)

No matter what the company tells you in that final interview, you can’t stop acting like a candidate and start acting like an employee until an offer letter is in hand. Your post-interview follow-up can be as important as the impression you make in the interview room. No matter how far along you get, send an email to the team you interviewed with expressing your continued enthusiasm for the job–and do it that day. It’s your last chance to sell your candidacy and reiterate why you’re the person they can’t live without.

Related:This Is The Stage In The Hiring Process When Job Candidates Have The Most Leverage

3. You Were Slow Handing Over Your References

References are an insurance policy for many employers. They just don’t feel comfortable making a job offer without talking to people you’ve worked with in the past. When you leave the interview and the interviewer asks you to forward your references, it may sound like a late-in-the-game formality. But even if the request didn’t sound urgent, you’ve got nothing to lose by treating it that way. Once you walk out of a successful interview and the company asks you for references, you need to supply that information within 24-48 hours.

The main reason candidates are often slow to pass along references isn’t because they shrug off their importance, though. It’s because they wait too long to line them up. If you start calling around at the end of the interview process, a solid week may pass before you secure three great contacts who are willing to vouch for you, bring them up to speed on the position, and send their contact information.

While you do that, many things might happen. Someone within the company asks for the job, or a new candidate comes in and wows the hiring manager who’s waiting for your references. Maybe a higher-up raises a budget concern and the company decides to split the job responsibilities among current employees, then stops looking to fill the opening (trust me, it happens all the time). The point is, you need to strike while the company is high on you and hot on filling the role. Slowing down the process by making them wait on references is a simple way to kill your chances in the homestretch.

These mistakes are easy to fall into because things have gone so well through the rest of the interview process. Never let your guard down or assume you’ve got it in the bag. Keep trying to impress until the offer is yours.

Karen Tappin took a one-day maternity leave. It would have been shorter, if not for her husband. The day after her 2007 home birth, the founder and CEO of the beauty line Karen’s Body Beautiful put her daughter in a wrap and tried to leave for work, but she couldn’t find her keys: Her husband had hidden them. “He was like, ‘Really, Karen? I knew you were going to try to work. Let the baby take her first day in this world off.'” Tappin conceded, then took the baby to work with her the next day. Tappin’s daughter accompanied her mother to work throughout her babyhood. “It’s been a beautiful experience,” says Tappin.

There probably aren’t a ton of American working moms that would describe their work/motherhood experience as “beautiful.” Research has shown that a “motherhood penalty” results in working mothers being less likely to be hired, less likely to be perceived as competent at their jobs, and less likely to receive equal pay. And with the U.S. lagging behind many others in terms of support for new parents, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope right now for new policies to help working parents.

Related:This Is What Paid Leave Looks Like In Every State In the U.S. 

When the right support is available, many working mothers find that motherhood actually boosts their careers.

Here are some of the ways that working moms–those with access to family support or child care–find that parenthood makes them better at their jobs.

1. Motherhood Helps Grow A Bigger (And Better) Network

For many working parents, the school parking lot is full of potential contacts. Darlene English is the director of education and outreach for The Housing Center, a fair housing organization in Cleveland, as well as a freelance writer covering social justice. An outgoing person by nature, English realized that connecting with her parent friends at soccer practice, daycare and school was as important for her career as it was for finding resources for her children. “I’ve just been appointed to a couple of boards, including the ACLU of Ohio and a literary arts organization,” she says. “These directly came from the parents I knew from school.”

Sophia Yen, a Silicon Valley doctor and CEO of the family planning startup Pandia Health, thinks child-free people miss out on the parents’ network. After she had her first child in 2006, she bonded online with other mothers from the same cohort. “We were all buddies, commiserating together about the value of community and working and networking,” she says. Later, Yen netted a major resource for Pandia Health through the friend of a mom friend.  “We have kids the same age, and she’s a headhunter for a major VC firm. Anytime I need to make a hire, I go to her.”

Catherine Merritt, the Chicago-based founder and CEO of FinnBin, has found that working mothers instinctively share both ideas and empathy. “When you look at working moms who are able to thrive, there’s a huge social impact level to their success. With [my first startup] I’d email people for advice, and even the CEO of Patagonia responded to me and let me ask her a few questions. I was so floored by that.” Now Merritt makes sure to pass it on. When she gets requests from other moms for advice, “I’m always happy to find time to help people. That’s also kind of inherently unique to mothers, this desire to lift people up.”

Related: Patagonia’s CEO Explains How To Make On-Site Child Care Pay For Itself

2. Parenthood Makes Moms Approach Their Work With More Purpose

Motherhood helped Katie Altemus, who handles software support for a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical laboratory, decide what she really wanted out of her career. Before she had kids, she worked as a client service representative, but then she took time off after the birth of her first son. During that time, she says, “I realized two very important things: I was not happy being a full-time parent, and when I re-entered the workforce, I had to find something that tickled my fancy intellectually.”

Now, Altemus is happy in a career where she doesn’t have to manage people, whose culture works for her, and is in line with her interests and personality. “It allows me to integrate science and technology, communication, triage, and investigation all in the course of a day,” she says.

Once her sons were in school, freelance writer Jennifer Gregory began to take dance lessons at her local YMCA in New Jersey. “I have an MFA in modern dance and choreography,” she explains. Dance got tabled in favor of a career and then child rearing, but with new time on her hands, Gregory rediscovered her passion for dance. After inquiring whether they were hiring, Gregory now teaches dance lessons at the Y. “Being a stay-at-home parent gave me the luxury of exploring my interests,” she says. “I couldn’t be happier, and it probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for motherhood.”

Related:What I Learned By Reconfiguring Maternity Leave My Second Time Around

Yen also found the time to explore new opportunities once her children were school-aged. After completing medical school, her residency, and a fellowship, she had two kids. After years of enduring the schedules of a med student and a new parent, Yen was surprised and delighted by how much energy and time she had once her children were both in school. So she created PandiaHealth, her startup. “I discovered, ‘Oh my god, I have so much energy, I have so much time,'” she says, describing the company as her third child. “I don’t think I’d be willing to take that on if I hadn’t had kids.”

3. Motherhood Helps Maximize People Skills

Judith Levy, who worked in public relations for Coca Cola prior to joining the startup DesireList, says that parents have a leg up in the workplace when it comes to understanding differing perspectives and coming up with a plan of action. “When there are meetings going on, you can see the parents in the room, because they listen to other people’s perspectives. People who are used to dealing with conflict between children do better when dealing with conflict between adults, too.”

Related:Are Kids Of Working Moms Better Prepared For Their Future Careers?

Once she became a mother, Danielle Driedger Babbitt, a Seattle YA librarian and author, felt empowered to increase her workload and responsibility by going from a part-time to a full-time job. Her experiences handling her child gave her the confidence to make the move. “I think managing a toddler made me realize I could be an administrator,” she says. “Dealing with a 2-year-old’s personality makes me more patient with other people than I would have been before being a mom.”

4. Working Moms Are Skilled At Making More Out Of Less Time

Author and editor Rachel Bertsche Levine looks back at her time working at Yahoo! Parents wistfully. “I loved that job: It was a bunch of really smart women who valued their personal time. When we were there, we worked hard and smart to get the job done. There was no ego, no wanting to hear ourselves talk unless we were adding value.” Bertsche Levine thinks this efficiency can only come from people who realize that there is a limit to the time each day they are willing or able to work.

“People want to be successful and productive, but also want to go home and sign off, so if we had a meeting, we’d go through the action items, ask, ‘What are the takeaways?’ Then go and get it done. Everyone respected everyone’s time.”

When applying for her new library position, Babbitt was confident she could make the time for the job. “Because I’m used to juggling a workload and a kid, I was able to take it on and not let any balls drop.” The same way that she spends distraction-free playtime with her son, “When I’m at work, I’m all in. I’m not worrying about anything at home. I know I have limited time to get everything done at work because I can’t stay late, so it causes me to really prioritize what I really need to get done.”

5. Working Moms Are More Confident In Their Abilities

Altemus found that advocating for herself got easier after she had children, “whether it meant requesting schedule adjustments to better accommodate life and finances, or burning out PTO hours on things like doctor’s appointments, or just saying no to an after-work gathering. All of those things got much easier to do, because I was honestly too tired to care about what anyone thought of me beyond if I got the work done well and on time,” she says.

Related:Why Becoming Parents Makes People Better Employees

6. Motherhood Can Bring Inspiration

Motherhood brought Catherine Merritt new ideas. After her first son was born, she sought to patent an insert that could turn any luxury purse into a diaper bag. The idea didn’t bear fruit, but the experience of starting her own business paved the way for Merritt to form Mumzy, a crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurial moms (which Merritt later sold). “Entrepreneurial traits–multitasking, prioritizing, risk analysis, [those are] inherent in moms,” she says.

7. Being A Working Mom Sets A Good Example For Kids

English is the first person in her family to attend college, and as a result, didn’t have many role models in her life. Parenthood, she says, has made her want to be a role model, especially to her daughter. “There’s something about having a daughter that makes me really want her to know you can do things and you shouldn’t be limited,” she says.

Yen once asked her daughter, “When you picture a CEO, do you picture a woman, man, or both?” Her daughter replied, “Both, but only because of you.” Says Yen, “As a parent, we’re affecting their view of the world.”

Donald Glover is tired. Like, bone-tired–the kind of tired that crushes his normally bright voice into a monotonous murmur. “This is a different level of production than anything I’ve ever been involved in, you know?” he says. It’s close to 9 p.m. London time, and Glover is coming off another grueling 10-hour day on the set of his latest movie–the as-yet-untitled Star Wars film in which he plays the beloved Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi character Lando Calrissian. It’s a part that has required Glover to not only undergo intensive stunt training but also participate in daily weight-lifting sessions and abide by a strict muscle-building diet. Most nights, he says, he leaves the set barely able to walk.

Related: See The 100 Most Creative People In Business 2017

Though shooting a mega-budget sci-fi blockbuster has proven more extreme than his typical workday, Glover has lately been getting used to fatigue. Consider the relentless pace of his last 24 months, a period that has ce­­mented his reputation as one of the entertainment industry’s premier polymaths. In addition to playing Calrissian in the eagerly awaited Han Solo-focused prequel (due next summer), he will appear in this July’s Spider-Man: Homecoming in a mysterious role that has been the subject of much online speculation. (Glover won’t divulge anything for fear of, as he puts it, getting “dragged away by the Marvel police.”) Last December, while still making the Spidey film, Glover released his third official album under the name Childish Gambino–the well-received Awaken, My Love!–and in September he put on a sold-out, three-day multimedia event in Joshua Tree, California, to debut his new music.

But the project that has truly kick-started Glover’s career–that has transformed him from a well-respected performer into one of Hollywood’s most exciting and in-demand creative minds–is the FX television series Atlanta, which he created, stars in, cowrites, and executive produces. When it premiered last September, the show quickly established itself as something original and important: a cerebral not-quite-comedy that uses the 30-minute-sitcom format to explore issues of race, class, ambition, friendship, relationships, parenthood, and other endlessly complex subjects. It’s all filtered through Glover’s unconventional aesthetic, which blends pathos and humor with a giddy surrealism that comes and goes like fragments of a dream.

Atlanta has been celebrated for its diversity: The cast is composed entirely of people of color, as is the writers’ room. Glover stars as Earnest “Earn” Marks, a Princeton dropout who washes back up in his hometown, crashing with his on-again, off-again girlfriend (Zazie Beetz) and their toddler daughter. Dead broke, Earn ingratiates himself with his cousin, a rapper who goes by Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and the first season loosely follows their travels through the local hip-hop scene. Atlanta is a show created by an African-American man in 2017, and its concerns, if not always overtly political, are necessarily wrapped up in questions of what it means to be young and black in America today. (Atlanta recently won a Peabody Award, which recognizes, in part, societal impact.)

Over the course of its 10-episode run, the show built an impressive audience. By its November finale, Atlanta was averaging more than 5 million viewers per episode across platforms, making it the most-watched comedy in FX’s history. It went on to win two Golden Globes–one for Glover, for best actor, and one for best television comedy–and FX quickly announced it was re-upping the series for a second season, which is due next year.

Related: “We Never Wanted ‘Atlanta’ To Feel Important”

In January, the network tapped Glover for an unusual exclusive overall production role, which enables him to create an unspecified number of other shows (including a recently announced animated take on Marvel’s Deadpool, which will air on FXX). “FX, to me, feels like a safe creative place right now,” Glover says. “I’m hesitant to say that, because it’s owned by a big conglomerate [20th Century Fox], but I mean it: If I have an idea, they’ll find a place to put it.” To the network, Glover represents the rare kind of visionary talent who can attract intense interest at a time when it’s harder than ever to break through the cultural clutter. “He’s remarkably multifaceted,” says FX president John Landgraf. “I look at Donald first and foremost as a creator, but also as an entrepreneur–someone who is almost boundaryless, who can do almost anything they set their mind to.”

Though Atlanta is not autobiographical, Glover did grow up in a suburb of the city, the son of a postal worker and daycare manager. After graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2006, where he was a member of a popular comedy group, he was handpicked by Tina Fey to lend some millennial savvy to the writers’ room of 30 Rock, and three years later he scored an acting role on cult-favorite sitcom Community, playing Troy, a washed-up jock. Though it was a supporting part, Glover’s endearing performance earned him outsize attention and appreciation. When Glover started releasing music as Childish Gambino, many fans and critics were skeptical. But it turned out he was serious about broadening his creative purview, and his albums Camp (2011) and Because the Internet (2013) won some devotees. His most recent, Awaken, My Love!, a carefully crafted tribute to Funkadelic and other sounds of the 1970s, has been admired by both fans and music critics.

Glover now essentially juggles four separate careers, any one of which would be a full-time occupation for most people: star and showrunner of a hit TV show, in-demand film actor (he will also voice Simba in the upcoming remake of The Lion King), creator and producer of multiple future FX programs, and recording artist. Today, in operating this culture factory, Glover has come to rely on a team of colleagues and family members, which includes his longtime manager, Dianne McGunigle, and his kid brother, Stephen Glover, a rapper and one of the writers on Atlanta. Glover refers to this group as a “hub” that gives him a creative base as well as advice, especially as the number of opportunities that come his way have multiplied. “Freedom is responsibility,” he says. “This idea that the only thing stopping you is your own imagination–that’s beautiful, but you still need structure, you still need boundaries, even if you’re making them yourself.” A similar dynamic is at play with the Atlanta team. “At its best,” he says, “it’s like a Ouija board. We’re all pushing and pulling together.”

Surprisingly, he does not himself actively participate, having deleted all of the posts from his public Twitter and Instagram accounts two years ago. “I wanted, when I said something, for people to know I meant it,” he now explains. “Instead of 140 characters with no detail, I’d rather be like, ‘Here’s this thought. I made a thing out of it, and there’s a whole world contained in there.’ I want you to be able to immerse yourself in it.”

I ask Glover whether, during rare moments of downtime while shooting the Star Wars movie, he finds himself thinking about his next big projects. He admits that he feels an intense sense of urgency. “The way I look at things, I have only a couple more years of being dangerous,” he says. “A couple more years of making risky moves.” After that, he seems to be saying, he’ll be fully caught in the Hollywood machine–less able to gamble with a show as irresistibly strange as Atlanta. “But while it’ll be from a very different place, I hope I’ll still be making good shit.”

30-Second Bio: Donald Glover

Hometown: Stone Mountain, Georgia

Notable movie roles: A NASA astrophysicist in best-picture nominee The Martian; a stripper in 2015’s Magic Mike XXL

Early break: Glover cofounded a sketch-comedy trio called Derrick Comedy while at NYU. The group’s online videos won a significant fan base, including Tina Fey, who hired Glover to work on 30 Rock.

Source of inspiration: When Glover was getting ready to film Atlanta, he watched BBC nature docu­series Planet Earth II on repeat. “It’s the most beautiful, honest, visceral, and universal show,” he says. “I love that you could show it to a person anywhere in the world and they’d be in awe.”

What the Fast Company community is loving this month.

1. Scarlet & Violet

Prices vary, scarlet-violet.myshopify.com

“Vic Brotherson is the owner of this flower boutique and has been our florist for years. Her style is classic with a vintage twist. If you can’t get her arrangements, at least get her book, Vintage Flowers: Choosing, Arranging, Displaying.” —Jens Grede and Erik Torstensson, Founders, Frame

2. Hormone Horoscope App

Free, myhormonology.com

“This app tracks hormonal levels during a woman’s monthly cycle and provides insights on daily energy levels. So if my progesterone is up, I may chill at home and wait until estrogen and testosterone are peaking to conquer the world!” —Jessica Iclisoy, Founder and CEO, California Baby

3. Angel’s Envy Rye

From $75, angelsenvy.com

“I’m loving Angel’s Envy whiskey, especially the rye. It’s handcrafted in small batches and finished in rum casks, giving it an edge that makes you hum.” —Mark Bell, VP of industry affairs, NCTA

4. Firewire Timbertek Surfboards

From $500, firewiresurfboards.com

“The most influential product in surfing. The core is made from 20% recycled foam, and the skin is made from sustainably grown Paulownia wood.” —Jim Moriarty, Director of brand citizenship, 72andSunny

5. Goodwell Bamboo Toothbrush

$18.99 for three-pack, thegoodwellcompany.com

“This is like Brita for your teeth—the charcoal bristles make your mouth feel like a hazmat team came in and mopped it. And what were we thinking, not using wood toothbrushes all these years? Wood > plastic.” —Alex Chung, Cofounder and CEO, Giphy

6. Cord Tacos

$12 each, thisisground.com

“This Is Ground products are useful, well made, and beautiful. My wife gave me a cord taco last year, and it’s been a staple of mine ever since.” —Adam Eskin, Founder and CEO, Dig Inn

7. Chloe’s Soft Serve Fruit Co.

About $4 per box of four, chloesfruit.com

“Chloe’s makes cold desserts with just fruit, water, and cane sugar. It’s like frozen fruit in a soft serve or Popsicle: healthy, refreshing, yet still a treat.” —Jennifer Kapahi, Cofounder, trèStiQue

8. Pacific Breeze Beach Tent

From $70, pacificbreezeproducts.com

“This tent blocks sun, for hot places like L.A., and wind, for cold places like San Francisco. I’ve been enjoying Zen moments at the beach a lot more ever since I bought one.” —Mike Ghaffary, CEO, Yelp Eat24

9. Recharge

Prices vary, recharge.co

“Recharge lets you book luxury hotel rooms for fractions of the day. I travel almost every week, and I often need a quiet place to regroup and prepare before a big meeting or speech.” —Reshma Saujani, Founder and co-CEO, Girls Who Code

10. Grand Banks Restaurant

grandbanks.org

“My wife and I love Grand Banks in New York. Dinner on a boat with a view of One World Trade Center, craft cocktails, fresh oysters, and amazing fries.” —Scott Harrison, Founder and CEO, Charity: Water

11. Slow Factory Scarves

$140, slowfactory.com

“These scarves are beautifully made and feature images of iconic women from NASA. The designer is passionate about using fashion as activism and often partners with nonprofits to fund social and environmental initiatives.” —Ayah Bdeir, Founder and CEO, littleBits

If you live in a new apartment building in Chicago, you might be more likely to spend a typical night downstairs at a mixology or bike repair class–or sitting with neighbors by a fire pit, watching your dogs run around the building’s dog park–than in your apartment watching Netflix.

“I would say it’s the most social building I’ve ever seen,” Daniel Ellch, a tenant, tells Fast Company. That’s by design: The developer, Property Markets Group or PMG, is entering the coliving market, offering slightly smaller private spaces and prioritizing common areas built to foster interaction. It’s the path followed by WeLive, Ollie, Common, and other startups, but, as a large developer, PMG is going bigger, with 3,500 units planned in the next five years, built and operated by a new branch of the company called PMGx.

PMG, which is headquartered in New York City with offices in Miami and Chicago, has completed 85 residential buildings in New York and more than 150 real estate projects in the United States since it launched in 1991. The company bought the land for each of the new PMGx buildings, and is building them from the ground up.

If most early attempts at coliving used existing buildings–either hacker house-style conversions of single family homes, or adaptations of existing apartment or office buildings–the new building was designed from scratch for this purpose.

“Adaptative reuse–changing an existing product–is incredibly expensive and inefficient,” Koles says. “Trying to reverse engineer a vision for a building is also really hard because it’s literal walls and a lot of infrastructure in the way. We have the advantage if we start from the pile of dirt and we get to say, What can we build here that is going to be exactly what we want it to be? And we have the resources to do it at a larger scale than anyone else.”

All of the buildings will also have carefully designed common areas. “We try to make the space as actually usable as possible,” he says. “There’s not just a game room that no one is going to use, but we’ll double down on coworking space, because we think probably about 20% of our residents will be working from home.” Some buildings will have public space in the lobby, such as a coffee shop or a cocktail bar. While third-party property managers handle day-to-day operations like rent payments, PMG staff are on site to plan and participate in events, from potlucks to movie screenings.

Each detail of the space is designed for socializing. “We designed furniture in a way that sort of forces people to interact,” Koles says. At the first building, called L after Chicago’s train line, a converted train car near an outdoor grill puts neighbors side by side. “We tend to avoid things like armrests and physical barriers as much as we can so that we can get people actually next to each other.”

“It makes people think about a dorm or maybe like a kibbutz kind of shared living,” says Koles. “We prefer to think of it as social living. Meaning you have your own private space, but you live here because you want to live most of your life in the common areas with your neighbors having fun, or doing work, and just generally doing well together.”

It believes that it has a better chance of success than some competitors, like Campus, a startup that had more than 30 coliving spaces in converted houses, but closed in 2015 after admitting that it couldn’t figure out how to make it an economically viable business.

Still, OpenDoor, which now has 40 bedrooms in three houses, is currently expanding with six more projects that will have 140 more units, both in the Bay Area and in Portland, Oregon. (Three of these are renovations of single-family homes and duplexes, and the other three are newly constructed coliving apartment buildings built in partnership with a developer).

PMG is convinced that people want to live in social buildings, and that the trend will continue. “We think the scale of this is pretty endless,” says Koles. “I think the macro trends . . . are here to stay. People are going to be more transient. They’re going to expect more connectivity. They’re probably still going to be staying single longer, which lends itself to this kind of product. We don’t see it as a trend. We’re building buildings to be around for hundreds of years, and we plan to hold them.”

When James Anderson arrived in Tel Aviv, Israel, in October 2014, the city was in the midst of an immigration crisis. Tens of thousands of Africans, having fled the poverty and conflict of their native countries, now resided in the southern neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan. In less than a decade, the area’s population had grown fourfold, resulting in overcrowding, unemployment, and cultural rifts between some members of the migrant community and native Israelis. “It was the opposite of vibrant city life,” Anderson, Bloomberg Philanthropies‘ head of government innovation programs, says tactfully, recalling a flea market set up inside a former bus depot as a particular bright spot of the trip.

Related: See The 100 Most Creative People In Business 2017

City officials had ramped up trash collection and were maintaining the overloaded sewage system, but these kinds of measures only treated the symptoms. A couple of months later, Anderson invited Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai to join the new “i-team” program he had launched in 2012: Bloomberg Philanthropies would fund and coach a cross-disciplinary innovation squad (project manager, analysts, designer, etc.) for three years to help local officials address systemic issues.

Today, that once-depressing bus terminal has a kindergarten on one floor, a city-backed business accelerator on the next, and an international food market in the parking lot. Various Neve Sha’anan community groups share a Facebook page, where officials and service groups post information in multiple languages about how to register for school or what emerging sports, chess, and music programs are available to, say, Eritrean or Sudanese transplants. The i-team keeps detailed records of all of these efforts, so that other cities can learn from them.

As global leadership has fractured–and people migrate more and more to urban centers–mayors have arguably become the most high-impact players in government. Their frontline efforts in civic engagement, social service, environmental action, and economic development have never been more central to our future. What Anderson and his crew at Bloomberg Philanthropies are doing is creating an ecosystem to help mayors become “much more agile, creative, and in partnership mode [with other mayors],” Anderson explains.

Today, most local governments are aware of only 3% of the various interventions being applied around the world, according to Citymart, a public-solutions procurement firm. (Eco-friendly, traffic-decongesting bike-sharing programs, for instance, have virtually no downsides, yet have been adopted in fewer than 30% of the world’s largest cities.) Anderson’s goal is to “Bloombergize” urban development, as he puts it, empowering municipalities to create models that others might later adopt. “Cities should not have to reinvent the wheel time and time again,” he says. “I am obsessed with the notion that [cities and mayors] can serve as distribution networks for ideas that work.”

Since joining Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2010, Anderson has devised and led ambitious programs that have channeled more than $215 million to urban projects reaching 290 cities across 25 countries. They include the Mayors Challenge, which awards cash prizes to metro areas with the most forward-looking and potentially replicable plans to improve city life, and What Works Cities, which provides smaller cities with data-driven ways to improve services and planning. These efforts pay ongoing dividends around the world. In December, Stockholm began implementing its 2014 Mayors Challenge-winning project, which uses plant waste to reduce carbon emissions and produce alternative energy. Mysore, India, and Parma, Italy, are planning to incorporate the Stockholm model this year. Meanwhile, Aspen, Colorado, has implemented Santa Monica, California’s Wellbeing Index, a tool for measuring citizens’ quality of life that won in 2013.

“One of the things that I learned from Mike Bloomberg is that borrowing ideas is a badge of honor,” says Anderson, a onetime activist with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network who spent eight years working alongside the former mayor of New York City, first as a senior adviser in the homeless division and then as communications director. During that time, the Bloomberg administration was actively searching for solutions that other mayors had successfully pioneered elsewhere, including conditional cash transfers, bike lanes, and bus rapid transit. The concept for New York’s successful community-action hotline, for instance, was based on a project that originated in Baltimore; New York improved it by mapping the complaints received to reveal the underlying issues–and then systematically addressing them. On the flip side, when other mayors asked about copying one of Anderson’s own programs, called CoolRoofs–covering rooftops with reflective white paint, which lowered building cooling costs and carbon emissions–he founded a nonprofit called Cities of Service so everyone could share their precise blueprints and lessons. It’s now part of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“Jim is a great interrogator,” says Louisville, Kentucky, mayor Greg Fischer. “One, I think he is a lifelong learner. But, two, he’s heard a lot of BS in his days.” Fischer, through Bloomberg’s What Works Cities program, has been able to apply new methodologies that have led to a boost in parking-violation collections, the repurposing of vacant lots, and more animal shelter adoptions.

Anderson, who has at times held private, closed-door meetings with mayors to answer their most basic questions, is now investing further in their potential. In July, his organization will launch the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a sort of mayoral MBA program for top city officials that will offer free virtual classes and executive coaching sessions developed in tandem with Harvard Business School and its Kennedy School of Government. Jorrit de Jong, who leads Harvard’s government innovation studies and will oversee the program, says that modern city planning without data analysis is like driving a car blindfolded. “It’s really important that the mayor gets it,” de Jong says.

Last fall, Anderson returned to Tel Aviv to attend a pitch session for community projects designed by people living in Neve Sha’anan. An art center had been cleared out for the hackathon-style event, and the city’s i-team director, Itai Eiges, and other officials were on hand to award microgrants. “I think things are changing there, but it will take time,” Eiges says.

Not long after, a delegation from Tel Aviv visited Seattle to ga­ther information about economic-stimulus opportunities: Tel Aviv learned how homegrown powerhouses like Amazon, Boeing, and Starbucks are scaling successfully, while Seattle received tips about nurturing a thriving startup culture. Tel Aviv mayor Huldai has also joined nine other mayors in a joint initiative by Bloomberg and the Aspen Institute to explore how the driverless-car revolution can be harnessed to improve citizens’ lives. The work these leaders are doing will go toward solving their own issues–and others’ as well. After all, Anderson says, “every elected official needs to produce results.”

These whimsical corporate characters helped launch their brands to enduring success.

1. Michelin Man, 1898

The Michelin brothers, who ran a rubber factory, anthropomorphized a stack of bicycle tires to sell consumers on the superiority of their products.

The impact: Michelin is the world’s No. 2 tire seller, and its spokescharacter has endured for almost 120 years by changing with the times. Today’s version barely resembles the original.

2. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, 1939

Montgomery Ward department store copywriter Robert May created Rudolph for a Christmas promotion, and he fast became a holiday tradition.

The impact: In 1947, May secured rights to Rudy and turned him into an icon, with red-nosed-reindeer songs and cartoons now ingrained to the point that its origins have mostly been forgotten.

3. Juan Valdez, 1958

The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia deployed this fictional farmer in a successful attempt to elevate its commodity product into a global brand.

The impact: Valdez proved so powerful that many still think he’s a real person, and the co-operative now has more than 500,000 members.

4. Poppin’ Fresh, 1965

Poppin’ Fresh, colloquially known as the Pillsbury Doughboy, was named for the company’s innovative canister technology, which let it launch a line of ready-to-bake pastry products.

The impact: An instant and enduring hit, the Doughboy inspired a successful toy line and a chain of Poppin’ Fresh Pies shops.

5. Chuck E. Cheese, 1977

When Atari creator Nolan Bushnell launched a chain of pizza restaurants designed to spotlight his arcade games, he created an oddly endearing singing rat that shared the business’s name.

The impact: Bushnell helped invent theme dining and won over kids who were wowed by the eateries’ animatronic Chucks and other puppets.

6. Max Headroom, 1985

The computer-generated “artificial intelligence” created a sensation in the United Kingdom as dystopian satire about corporate greed, so of course, Coca-Cola tapped Max to sell New Coke.

The impact: The Max Headroom campaign ran for three years, made Max a global phenom, and helped him land an ABC sitcom.

7. Jack Box, 1993

In the wake of a horrific E. coli outbreak that killed four children, ailing Jack in the Box reinvented the clown mascot it had retired in 1980­.

The impact: Jack, recast as a pinhead in a suit and said to be the chain’s CEO, irreverently reinforced changes the company made to its kitchens and menu, helping bring customers back by 1996.

8. Geico Gecko, 1999

The Gecko had appeared in just one ad for the car insurer when the 2000 actors’ strike pressed him into a full-time gig proselytizing for Geico’s simplified take on a traditionally complex product.

The impact: Geico has almost tripled its assets with the Gecko—and transformed insurance marketing (see: the Aflac Duck and Progressive’s Flo).

9. Mr. Mucus, 2004

Mucinex’s manufacturer wanted to break through in the crowded cold-remedy aisle. Rather than put a cuddly face on lung congestion, it hawked up Mr. Mucus, a disgusting blob.

The impact: Mr. Mucus is unappealing, but Mucinex is not: It’s the top cough medicine, and its spokescharacter is an antihero for its times.

10. Invention Donkey, 2015

GE introduced this pocket-size burro—who grants innovation wishes—in a surreal ad that explains the work GE does to foster big ideas.

The impact: The Invention Donkey continued GE’s fun messaging about its work and culture, but his short run is emblematic of how characters today play a specialized role in a sped-up world.

Snapchat surprised every­­one last fall by changing its company name to Snap and introducing Spectacles, the elegant camera-equipped sunglasses that capture videos to share on its popular social media platform. That Spectacles could succeed in being the most exciting new gadget launch of the year in a field where Google Glass failed and Microsoft and Magic Leap have been slow to commercialize a compelling product is a testament to Lauryn Morris, who happened to have a decade of experience in wearable computing and high-end fashion eyewear. Morris had studied industrial design in college, where, for her senior thesis project, she devised a conceptual “head-worn device that allows you to experience music in ways other than hearing it,” she explains, such as through vibration and color. “It created this immersive experience that totally fascinated me.” After graduating, Morris designed eyewear collections for the likes of Michael Kors, Zac Posen, and Diane von Furstenberg, but didn’t want “to get pigeonholed in fashion,” she says, so she consulted for various companies tinkering with wearable technology. “With eyewear, you’re designing a product that enables people to feel beautiful–something they’re excited to wear, and I really like that aspect. But what’s so interesting about tech is that you get to solve real problems for people.”

Related: See The 100 Most Creative People In Business 2017

Snap came calling in late 2014, and Morris joined a small team secretly at work on early prototypes of what would become Spectacles. She set about refining the eyewear, defining target customers and use cases, exploring materials, and collaborating with the company’s engineers to work through weight and form-factor issues–what she calls a “marriage of the old-school classic eyewear world and the consumer electronics world.” It helps that cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel is a designer by trade, too. “Evan would bring us college textbooks on optics, children’s books about the human eye, and tell us all these stories about the invention of different camera models,” Morris says. “We even in­­vited PhDs to talk to us about how the brain processes memories in the modern age of photography.” This explains why the field of view that Spectacles capture is circular: It mimics the way the human eye sees. “We went off on a lot of tangents in the first year. It was a good example of how the design process can be both messy and beautiful.”

The resulting product–with its big round lenses, flashy color options, and camera and LED lights accented in yellow in the upper corners of the frames–is a reflection of Snap’s brand: It is designed to be, Morris says, “happy and playful and simple and not meant to be taken too seriously.” Snap always wanted Spectacles to be “like a regular pair of sunglasses that you would have a lot of fun with,” she says. Surprisingly, this meant embracing the product’s tech component. Spectacles “celebrates the camera; it doesn’t hide it,” Morris says. Her team also oversaw Spectacles’ packaging, along with the “Snapbot” vending machines, which have popped up everywhere from Miami to the Grand Canyon to help distribute the device. “Essentially, every customer touchpoint has come from our team,” Morris says. “It’s like having a mini design firm [inside Snap].”

But what Morris continues to value most about the product is that it solves a problem. No longer do people need to interrupt or delay a moment by pulling out a camera; with Spectacles, the experience is immersive and “quite intimate,” she says, citing such recent Spectacles uploads as a baby’s first steps and a couple holding hands on a boardwalk (selfies be damned). Morris herself loves shooting video of her stepdaughter while riding the roller coasters at Disneyland, or building sand castles with her niece and nephew on the beach while her hands are covered in sand. (A user can save his or her videos, but footage shared with friends, like most content on the Snapchat app, eventually disappears.) “These are all perspectives you can’t get with any other product,” she notes. “And that’s what makes it really meaningful to us.”

Seconds after Kylie Jenner launched her first three lines of lipstick, on November 30, 2015, all three sold out online. Less than two years later, Kylie Cosmetics is a full-service, direct-to-consumer beauty brand, with offerings that include its signature lip kits (lipstick and liner) plus eye shadows, blushes, and tools. The 19-year-old Jenner, famous for her own perfectly plump pout, continues to draw upwards of 10 million people to her Snapchat makeup tutorials and has led the brand to a reported $400 million in revenue since its launch. That’s why Jenner is No. 57 on our list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2017.

Fast Company spoke with the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan about how she creates those lust-worthy lip kits and what she’s learned so far from building out her own niche in an infamous family.

Fast Company: Why go into makeup?

Kylie Jenner: I can’t leave the house without lipstick. Everyone was so interested in the color I was wearing. But nothing was ever perfect for me. I just thought, Why not make my own lip kit with a liner and lipstick?

FC: You sign off on every decision at your company, plus you’ve got season 13 of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, your own upcoming show, and personal social media accounts to maintain. What’s a typical day on the job for you?

KJ: I wake up and immediately check in–what orders are coming in, what’s selling the best. My manufacturer brings me products every day. I have a spot in my house, my creative room, and we just have meetings after meetings.

@lapetitechicmommy KKW SWATCHES

A post shared by Kylie Cosmetics (@kyliecosmetics) on May 4, 2017 at 3:25pm PDT

FC: What goes into creating a new lipstick?

KJ: I’m always thinking about what I want, and what I think people want. For example, the smell of the lipsticks–I knew I wanted something sweet. I was in the lab, and they gave me 12 options, and I picked my favorite. Then we did the percentage: “Do you want 50% or 75% smell? Do you want it strong or weak?” It took a long time. Then on Instagram, I’m on my Kylie Cosmetics [page] all day curating it. It has to be perfect.

FC: How has social media played into your marketing strategy?

KJ: I don’t pay for advertisements. I don’t do commercials. Social media is the only way I push it: Snapchat, Instagram. I’m usually the one posting everything, but I have another girl who’s on the team who helps out sometimes if I’m busy. Sometimes I delete all her pictures. I’m like, I don’t like that, it needs to look like this.

FC: Kylie Cosmetics products aren’t sold in traditional stores, but your pop-up shops draw tens of thousands of visitors. How do you prepare to release a new product?

KJ: Everyone knows when I’m releasing a product on Snapchat that I will be MIA for the next hour and a half. I’m running around my house, finding the perfect lighting, the perfect swatches. My housekeeper, I use her arm for my Snapchats. She has the best arm for swatches. She’s so nice and just sits there and has her arm ready and lets me do my thing. I care a lot about what my products look like when people first see them.

FC: When things go wrong with packaging, shipping, or other product-related stuff, it tends to be publicized widely by customers on social media. What do you learn from those issues that come up?

KJ: People will tweet me and be like, “Kylie, how dare you! Kylie, how could you do this?” People know who is behind the curtain, they know it’s me, so they attack me sometimes. But things happen, and I have to understand that and learn from that. It’s a new business, and I’m going to make mistakes. Kylie Cosmetics blew up so fast that I didn’t have that much room to make mistakes. Starting businesses make a thousand mistakes, and no one ever sees them. Everyone on my team tries their hardest to not make any, because they know it goes back to me.

FC: What’s it been like to have some­thing that distinguishes you from your high-profile family?

KJ: I used to ask my mom, “What’s my thing?” Kendall has modeling, what’s my thing? And I’m just so happy that now I have this. It motivates me every day. I want to expand into a full cosmetics line–foundations, concealers, everything under the sun.

Every month, Fast Company checks in on the businesses in our Most Innovative Companies community. From SoulCycle’s new bicycle to Walmart’s acquisition of quirky e-tailer ModCloth, here’s what some of the most exciting companies have been working on lately.

SoulCycle

In April, SoulCycle, the chain of boutique fitness studios with 78 locations in 15 markets, launched its first-ever brand campaign, featuring a two-minute spot starring actual sweaty, attractive class instructors. As the music swells, they explain that SoulCycle–and its cult following–is not about the bike but rather about the rider. With the company expecting to add another 15 studios this year, the ads target both newbies and veteran cyclists in the company’s biggest markets (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco), where there’s almost always a trendy new fitness option.

Despite the ad’s vociferous stance regarding soul versus cycle, the campaign debuted just a month before the company introduced a major redesign of its signature SoulBike. “Our riders are getting stronger, physically and mentally,” says CEO Melanie Whelan. “We want to continue to evolve the equipment and the workout for them.” In partnership with Colorado-based Stages Indoor Cycling, SoulCycle focused on making the bike more customizable, especially the handlebars, which had been thick and static. The new ones are thinner and can move up and down, which makes them easier to grip and adjustable for different body types and exercises. The bike’s new magnetic-resistance, carbon-fiber belt drive creates a smoother ride while requiring less testing, cutting 1,200 hours of weekly maintenance by a third. Meanwhile, small angle changes to the bars correct posture by adding wrist support. The new bikes rolled out in New York studios in May, with 6,000 bikes to be replaced this year. “We tested these at our New York headquarters,” Whelan says. “Even some of our master instructors were sore for days after.”

Milestones: SoulCycle just opened its first studio outside the U.S., in Toronto, with a Vancouver debut planned for the summer.

Challenges: Stationary bike maker Peloton has created an on-demand, at home spin experience to try to disrupt SoulCycle’s so far in-studio-only offerings.

Buzz: Positive

Nintendo

The hottest new consumer-electronics device of 2017 has been a system that combines the on-the-go nature of smartphone gaming with the power and detail of a home console. The Nintendo Switch, as it’s known, sold a reported 1.5 million units in the first two weeks of launch, making it the fastest-selling console in Nintendo history. As of the end of March, it has sold 2.74 million units globally.

Part of the Switch’s beauty is its simple design. Users can undock the central, 6.2-inch touch screen and attach the two controllers to either side for an experience akin to Nintendo’s handheld DS device. The other key component is the games themselves, particularly The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which players have lauded as the best addition to the Zelda franchise in years because of its open-world, discovery-based format.

Nintendo needed to get the Switch right. Its most recent console, the Wii U, failed to establish value to customers over the original Wii and reportedly sold around 85 million fewer units than the company had anticipated. Amid criticism that Nintendo should move away from its console business and focus on opportunities such as its first major mobile game for Apple’s iOS, 2016’s Super Mario Run, and Pokémon Go, the Switch proves that for Nintendo, as with Apple, hardware and software go hand in hand. “If we were only a game developer, there’s no way we could have introduced Wii Sports, because there was no platform before Wii with motion control,” says Nintendo of America president and COO Reggie Fils-Aimé. “Game developers can’t take advantage of technology that doesn’t exist.”

Milestones: Nintendo unveiled plans to work with Universal on a theme park in Osaka, Japan, which will debut before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Challenges: Xbox is expected to have a new console by the holidays, while Sony is still riding the success of its PlayStation 4 Pro.

Buzz: Positive

Vail Resorts

This spring, Vail Resorts, one of the largest ski-area operators in the world, extended its colossal reach with its first East Coast acquisition, Vermont’s Stowe Mountain. The timing of the buy wasn’t accidental. Late spring and summer, when skiing and snowboarding drop off, are actually Vail’s most important time of the year, because this is the moment when it starts to market next season’s Epic Pass, which offers unlimited access to 45 ski areas around the world. Over the past few years, Vail has used the off-season to beef up the $859 Epic Pass, by acquiring Canada’s Whistler Blackcomb in 2016 and Australia’s Perisher Mountain in 2015. The Stowe purchase allows Vail, which is concentrated in the western half of the U.S., to make a compelling bid for the skiing set in New York and Boston, offering access to a coveted weekend spot as well as its destination locations in Colorado and Utah.

Each Epic Pass sold brings both revenue–sales now make up 40% of lift income–and data on Vail’s active skiers. The most important information is where they come from and how long they stay. Visitors who ski four or more days are likelier to buy an Epic Pass, while information on skiers’ home bases has determined Vail’s recent strategy of acquiring small mountains outside major cities such as Detroit, Minneapolis, and Chicago. “There are more skiers in Chicago than the entire state of Colorado,” says CMO Kirsten Lynch. “The whole concept of, Oh, a season pass is for locals. . . . We’ve completely shattered that myth.”

Milestones: Annual Epic Pass growth is an impressive 16%, and the company expects to sell 650,000 Epic Passes for the 2017-2018 season.

Challenges: If climate change starts to shorten the ski season, it will put more pressure on Vail to make its resorts off-season destinations as well.

Buzz: Positive

Spotify

Milestones: In a move that could smooth the way for an IPO, the music-streaming giant struck a licensing deal with Universal Music Group that will allow UMG artists to restrict new albums to paid Spotify subscribers for up to two weeks post-release, making Spotify more attractive to premium artists such as Taylor Swift, whose label Big Machine is distributed by UMG. Similar major-label deals are likely to follow.

Challenges: Spotify still needs to prove that it can be a profitable streaming service, which means continuing to convert free users into paid subscribers.

Buzz: Positive

Samsung

Milestones: The new Galaxy S8 smartphone earned widespread praise for its nearly bezel-less design, which gives it one of the highest screen-to-body ratios on the market.

Challenges: Samsung is still mired in a corruption scandal involving top executives, like company chief Lee Jae-yong, who was indicted in February.

Buzz: Neutral

eBay

Milestones: By summer, eBay will guarantee delivery within three days for more than 20 million eligible items that are for sale on its site. Many of these items will also come with free shipping.

Challenges: eBay is playing catch-up with Amazon and Walmart, and it’s still struggling to customize its experience for individual users.

Buzz: Negative

Yelp

Milestones:Yelp‘s Grubhub competitor Yelp Eat24 has started testing self-driving robot delivery carts in San Francisco in partnership with robotics company Marble. Diners unlock their meals inside the automaton via a pass code Yelp texts them upon delivery.

Challenges: Facebook is coming for Yelp again, both as a listings destination and a food-delivery service by integrating smaller partners such as Slice and Delivery.com into its pages.

Buzz: Neutral

General Motors

Milestones:General Motors is testing a new subscription car business called Book by Cadillac, which lets customers willing to spend $1,500 a month serially swap out one Caddy for another. The new model is part of GM’s plan to target places with falling car ownership, like New York, where the plan debuted.

Challenges: GM has been riding the national post-recession wave of high automobile sales, especially with the popularity of SUVs and trucks as gas prices remain low. But with car sales starting to slip, it will need to keep coming up with ways to optimize resources (like its recent divestment of Europe’s Opel brand) to fund its investment in future technologies.

Buzz: Neutral

Cisco

Milestones: In March, Cisco completed its $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics, a software startup that monitors app performance. The deal gives Cisco a lot of fresh data to work with, which will be especially important as it builds out its cloud business.

Challenges: Cisco’s legacy network-equipment business is under threat from cloud-computing giants like Amazon, Google, and Oracle.

Buzz: Neutral

Macy’s

Milestones: Amid the closing of 100 U.S. stores, Macy’s is pinning its hopes on outlet sales. Backstage, its discount store within its stores, is opening 30 new locations this year, including its first in the Southeast.

Challenges: The shop-within-a-shop model is part of Macy’s effort to make in-store visits more worthwhile. Apple and Sunglass Hut installations inside Macy’s have been a win, but Men’s Wearhouse tuxedo shops floundered.

Buzz: Negative

Aldi Süd

Milestones: Bargain grocery store Aldi is making its first leap into China through e-commerce. It is using Alibaba’s Tmall platform to sell things like breakfast foods, snacks, and wines.

Challenges: Aldi’s revolutionary cost cutting has forced major grocery stores to chase it, which in turn pushes Aldi to lower prices further, squeezing its margins even more.

Buzz: Positive

Intel

Milestones: The chip-maker acquired Mobileye, the Israel-based company that creates cameras and sensors for autonomous vehicles, to increase its presence in the self-driving-car race.

Challenges: Intel has a mediocre track record when it comes to integrating big acquisitions, such as 2010’s failure to incorporate McAfee’s security tech into Intel products. With Mobileye, $15 billion and entrée into one of tech’s next big platforms ride on making it work.

Buzz: Neutral

Generator Hostels

Milestones: The design- and experience-focused hostel chain has been acquired by the private-equity firm Queensgate Investments, which plans to infuse more than $320 million into Generator as part of a future major European expansion.

Challenges: Hotel companies have noted the success of Generator and are now launching their own stylish hostel brands, including AccorHotels’ new Jo&Joe.

Buzz: Positive

ModCloth

Milestones: Quirky, vintage-style online fashion retailer ModCloth has been acquired by Jet.com, which itself is owned by Walmart. The buy is a continuation of Walmart’s strategy of marketing toward younger customers, particularly online.

Challenges: ModCloth’s heyday was a few years ago. The company has since struggled with layoffs while being eclipsed by newer options.

Buzz: Negative

Baidu

Milestones: Beijing-based search giant Baidu is doubling its Silicon Valley presence, via a new research and development facility that has room for 150 more employees, in the hopes of improving its artificial-intelligence acumen.

Challenges: Baidu’s revenue growth has plummeted from 35% in 2015 to 6.3% in 2016, as Chinese advertisers migrate dollars away from search engines and toward things like e-commerce and social media.

Buzz: Neutral

Microsoft

Milestones: Skype Lite, a version of the video-messaging service tailored to lower-speed, 2G networks common across India, came out this year. Microsoft is also working with LinkedIn on Project Sangam, a cloud service for job seekers in the world’s second-most populous country.

Challenges: Microsoft needs to keep attracting more developers to Azure, its cloud-computing platform, as evidenced by its acquisition of Deis in April, a small open-source tool that helps developers work efficiently with apps across the cloud and physical machines.

Buzz: Positive

As a journalist, maintaining a healthy level of skepticism is a requirement. Sources routinely put their own actions in the best possible light, while undercutting the activities of rivals. I just can’t take everything people say to me at face value.

SEE THE FULL LIST: The 100 Most Creative People Of 2017

But every now and then, I get to engage in a project that is so inspiring, my wall of cynicism melts. That’s the way I feel about our annual coverage of the Most Creative People in Business. Each year, our editorial team scours the globe to identify 100 all-new honorees whom we have not significantly covered in print before. This is how we initially introduced readers to Instagram founder Kevin Systrom–before his business was acquired by Facebook. It’s where we first talked about Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, Amazon Studios chief Roy Price, and Warby Parker cofounder Neil Blumenthal. And where we made the business case for Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s amazing accomplishments with Hamilton.

I dare you not to be stirred (and maybe a little intimidated) by all that this group is making happen. What our Most Creative People coverage reveals each year is just how broad and rich an impact business can have, regardless of any external economic and political conditions. There are always amazing things going on, if you pick your head up to notice them.

What follows is my list of creativity lessons for 2017, drawn from our honorees’ achievements. The tangible outcomes defy expectations and limitations. You can’t make this stuff up.

Related: Why ‘Atlanta’ Creator Donald Glover Is One The Most Creative People In Business 2017

1. Leaders Find A Way

As geopolitics and nationalist agendas put more pressure on cities, mayors find themselves at the epicenter of both conflict and opportunity. Which is why we highlighted James Anderson (No. 1) of Bloomberg Philanthropies, who is using technology, data, and a focus on sharing to spread best practices from Stockholm to Santa Monica. Rodney Hines (No. 16), director of global responsibility at Starbucks, is using a corporate perch to address the gnarliest problems of modern society, making good on a pledge to hire 10,000 refugees and bringing economic development to depressed U.S. communities.

2. Surprise And Delight Can Be Designed

Today’s new-product landscape mixes the high-tech and the tactile, generating a gee-whiz feel of the future. Apple’s Isabel Mahe (No. 6) developed features (like syncing with two devices at once) that have made AirPods a back-ordered hit. Snap’s Lauryn Morris (No. 37) gave us video-enabled Spectacles that are intuitive, easy to use, and stylish. ThirdLove’s Heidi Zak (No. 89) used data and computer-vision algorithms to rethink the way bras are built and sized, creating a buzzed-about brand.

3. AI Is Driving Conversation

Amazon’s Alexa has become a ubiquitous voice, thanks to Rohit Prasad (No. 9) and Toni Reid (No. 10). IBM’s Harriet Green (No. 73), who talks about “augmented intelligence,” is helping companies including BMW and North Face incorporate language-processing capabilities and other smart-services technology into their operations.

4. Positioning Can Make A Difference

When Tali Gumbiner (No. 76) and Lizzie Wilson (No. 77) were hired to come up with a message for State Street Global Advisors on International Women’s Day, they created the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street, which has become a symbol of empowerment. Phillip Picardi (No. 36) chose to try boosting traffic on TeenVogue.com by aligning with young readers’ social consciousness–and politics now beats entertainment as the site’s most popular channel.

5. Compassion Has No Boundaries

Ahmad Denno (No. 40) is guiding Syrian refugees in Germany through the cultural transition to a new home. Chef Massimo Bottura (No. 24) is feeding the hungry from Brazil to the Bronx by tapping surplus ingredients from supermarkets and networks of suppliers.

6. Learning Is Never Finished

Anant Agarwal‘s (No. 68) nonprofit digital university edX has served 11 million students, and is now offering graduate-level programs that can count toward a traditional university degree. Meanwhile, Justin Hall (No. 56) is teaching former coal miners in Kentucky how to code, allowing them a vibrant new start in a changed economy. Sesame Workshop’s Sherrie Westin (No. 71) is using a hijab-wearing Muppet to champion female literacy in Afghanistan.

7. Moonshots Are More Than Dreams

Made for just $1.5 million, director Barry Jenkins‘s (No. 18) Oscar-winning Moonlight has earned 40 times that at the box office–proving that nontraditional story lines can have outsize impact and can break down stereotypes. David Stack (No. 43) of Pacira Pharmaceuticals is commercializing a non-opioid pain treatment that can help reduce recovery times and addiction risks. Naveen Jain (No. 27) has raised $45 million for his aptly named Moon Express, a startup that will begin test flights this fall with a goal of making space travel possible for all.

8. Fintech Is Charging Ahead

Square’s Jacqueline Reses (No. 14) is providing $1 billion in customized, automated real-time loans to merchants, as a low-cost, low-risk cure for liquidity crunches. Vijay Shekhar Sharma‘s (No. 28) Paytm is displacing India’s traditionally cash-centric business culture with digital payment platforms. Wayne Xu (No. 49) of Zhong An has built that Shanghai-based online insurer into China’s largest with a customer base of 535 million.

9. Power Is Shifting

Ganesh Bell (No. 11) is using GE’s Predix data-analysis software to improve the efficiency of utilities–from nuclear to natural gas–and businesses, helping GE Digital generate $3.6 billion in revenue. Jeffrey Grybowski‘s (No. 99) Deepwater Wind is pulling clean energy from offshore farms in the northeast Atlantic Ocean.

10. Healthy Living Is Getting Easier

Dana Lewis (No. 78) hacked together code for an “artificial pancreas” online for anyone to use. Harvard Medical School professor Tom Delbanco (No. 88) launched an OpenNotes movement that has given 13 million patients easy access to their own records. CVS executive Helena Foulkes (No. 5) is moving people “from sick care to self-care” with wellness products, CVS Curbside, and a pharmacy app that improves speed, safety, and customer service.

11. Openness Should Be Embraced

Former Goldman Sachs employees Porter Braswell (No. 52) and Ryan Williams (No. 53) are connecting underrepresented communities across the country to companies via their recruiting site Jopwell. “We’re going to help you climb the ladder,” says Braswell. Massachusetts state senator Patricia Jehlen (No. 44) is making equal pay for women a legal requirement.

12. Unlocking Human Potential Is An Art

From cover subject Donald Glover (No. 8) to writer-director Phoebe Waller-Bridge (No. 48), artists are infusing entertainment with social impact. In the corporate world too, the human factor is at the core of our advancements, even as technology and science provide a swath of dynamic new tools. As Facebook’s Fidji Simo (No. 2) puts it, “Feelings are universal.”

We’re all creatures of habit for good reason. While the brain comprises 4% of our body mass, it consumes at least 20% of the body’s blood glucose to do all the hard work of thinking and running our bodies. That extra drain on resources makes the brain an inefficient system, so it conserves energy by routing neural messages along the most efficient and least resistive pathways.

“It’s similar to pathways in the woods; you can move more quickly on a well-worn path than if you need to forge a new one,” says Karen Gordon, CEO of 5 Dynamics, teamwork consultants whose clients include LinkedIn, IDEO, and Harvard.

The fact that our brain prefers the path of least resistance has implications on teamwork. Based on the research of differential learning diagnostician W. Michael Sturm, Gordon says there are four strengths–or paths–people use when moving through a process:

1. Explore. Someone who loves offsite meetings, brainstorming sessions, and looking at what-if scenarios is high in the explore category. They understand the complete situation, see relationships, and develop creative solutions.
2. Excite. Someone who is very focused on learning about people, making connections and participating in conversations is high in the excite category. They invest their energy exciting other people about the idea, busting silos, developing internal support, and building a team.
3. Examine. Someone who loves data spreadsheets, analyzing work, and looking at historical aspects is high in the examine category. They develop an implementation plan using data; create schedules, budgets, timetables, clear roles, and rules; predict problems; and find faults.
4. Execute. Someone who is focused on accomplishing what matters, creating to-do lists, and checking off tasks is high in execute. They aggressively implement the plan, holding people accountable, and measuring performance.

While 5 Dynamics has an assessment that identifies an individual’s strengths, you can probably determine preferences by thinking about what you enjoy doing and the tasks that give you energy. “Those that drain your energy are where you don’t excel,” says Gordon.

How To Manage A Team By Focusing On Strengths

Understanding your strengths and the strengths of others can help you connect on a higher level. When each team member can complete tasks and feel fulfilled and challenged, you can create a team environment that avoids burnout and fosters success, says Gordon.

Using strengths can take away friction that can show up in relationships. “You can identify a good place to lean in, and a place where a teammate might be comfortable in the space,” she says. “Before, you might have felt like someone wasn’t carrying their weight.”

Identifying someone’s weakness helps with inclusion. If someone doesn’t enjoy brainstorming, for example, it doesn’t need to exclude then from the process, says Gordon. “Let them know that they can hang in for a while, and that it’s okay if they need to step away if it’s draining,” she says. “It’s about energy: What gives you energy or what takes it away. It also appreciates differences; what may give you energy is taking away someone else’s.”

Strengths help foster good working relationships, too. “If I deal with someone who is high in the examine category and cares about numbers and what can be proven, I don’t want to go into his office with half-baked ideas,” she says. “I need to do research and homework and come in with facts and data. When I do that, I respect his working style and meet him in a place that’s comfortable for him.”

It’s important to identify weaknesses, especially to engage teams, says Gordon. “If I’m lowest in the excite category, I have to make sure I create daily habits around reaching out to my teammates, recognizing the work they’ve done,” she says. “It’s important to connect with them, and you have to make sure you don’t skip over that.”

It’s possible to have more than one strength; Gordon rates high in excite and execution. “It’s my natural pattern to go from idea to execution, and I would be frustrated wondering why my team isn’t helping me,” she says. “I realized I was skipping over the middle steps, and all of the steps are an important part of the process.”

To remedy the situation, Gordon spent time creating a better communication plan that identified how everyone fit into the project. “Then we could execute together, because everyone understands and aligns around the plan,” she says.

The important thing is to align your team around individual strengths. “You can accomplish goals by using energetic preferences,” says Gordon. “It’s all because of awareness.”

It was a typical overpriced Mexican joint in Manhattan–the kind of place that charges $16 for a quesadilla, without the guacamole included–and I entered only knowing the birthday girl. So I already felt knots in my stomach anticipating the awkward end-of-meal check-paying dance I knew was coming. It was my second year in New York City, and my salary had recently increased from $25,000 to $37,500. This still didn’t leave much leeway for pricey guac and margaritas. But it felt uncomfortable turning down a birthday dinner invite from a longtime friend out of fear of the projected price point.

Determined to be proactive, I researched the menu beforehand and went to dinner prepared to order the cheapest meal on offer. I factored my meal + $12 for tax and tip and an extra $5-$7 to help cover the birthday girl’s meal to equal $40. But people kept ordering pitchers of sangria and margaritas. Appetizers appeared from nowhere and were hoarded by five people at one end of the table. My palms started to sweat–but I figured they’d kick in extra for their appetizers and third pitcher of sangria.

By the time dinner wrapped and the check reached my end of the table, with only three of 10 people left to pay, the balance showed a $240 deficit. “$80 each?!” my mental financial planner screamed. “You can’t afford that! Plus, you had a mediocre quesadilla and didn’t even drink. You shouldn’t have to pay for margaritas you didn’t get to down!” Hold on–clearly the first seven people hadn’t covered their portion. Splitting the bill evenly would’ve meant $50 each–only about $10 over my prepared budget. That my bank account could stomach, but not having to pay twice as much because a few people shortchanged the rest of us.

Related:How To Save Money No Matter How Crappy Your Paycheck Is

Before I could go full Lady Hulk on those sangria-swilling bastards, the birthday girl’s boyfriend plucked the bill from my hand and marched down to confront the cheapos. They coughed up the extra money, and my bank account was saved.

Most of us have experienced some form of this dilemma when navigating finances with friends and coworkers. Money is already a taboo subject, so speaking up about not having enough–or pointing out that someone is shorting the bill–feels socially repugnant. You don’t want a reputation as a penny pincher. It’s one reason we often default to splitting a bill evenly, but you may not be able to afford that luxury early on in your financial life.

Before you start turning down every social invitation, or just accumulate credit card debt because you’re too nice to say no, there are a few tactics that can help you predict your future money drama with scary (but helpful accuracy) in three common situations:

Dining Out With Friends

Is it a “split this evenly” or “cover your portion” situation? Who’s going to “forget” about tax and tip and short the bill, leaving the rest of you to play an obnoxious game of Clue to sniff them out? Take the anxiety out of the situation and just ask early. As you get older and grow into your career, it’ll become natural to just start splitting the check most of the time, but it’s understandable if your early-career salary doesn’t let you routinely afford $50.

Travel Plans For Reunions

Your friends all scatter after college, so of course you want to take time each year to meet up. It’s easy to keep it cheap in the early years when most people aren’t making a ton of money, but as you age and some friends take life steps like marriage or baby making and others progress quickly in careers, it can become harder for everyone to agree on destinations for reunions. Do you go to an exotic locale? (Not everyone can afford that.) Do you just visit someone’s home? (Not everyone wants to do that.) Once you find a location, what kind of activities do you indulge in when not everyone has the same amount of discretionary income? You get the picture.

Weddings . . . So Many Weddings

One of the biggest budget busters of all time. Whether you’re in the wedding, invited to the bachelor party or bridal shower, or just attending as a guest, wedding season in your twenties to early thirties can leave your bank account a barren wasteland. Dropping $1,000 or more to be part of someone’s special day can quickly lead to financial ruin. Don’t be part of a wedding unless you’re prepared to spend the money (and won’t get pissed off about it). You should also start putting aside a little money each month around the time you hit 25 to begin preparations for Weddingeddon. It comes for us all.

No matter which version of these conflicts you experience, there’s really only one way to deal: Be honest. You don’t have to disclose your salary or student loan debt or general lack of budgeting skills, or even just your preference for more frugal amusements. You do, however, need to explain that you don’t want to participate, or that you do, but have a cap on what you can spend–and then not bitch about the results.

This article is adapted from Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together by Erin Lowry with the permission of TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2017 by Erin Lowry.

WHAT: A fake ad for a new smart home device, Amazon Echo Silver.

WHO: The team at Saturday Night Live.

WHY WE CARE: The problem with teaching one’s grandparents how to correspond through email, find Bill O’Reilly’s podcast, or browse WebMD is that it’s never a one-time thing. They will need a refresher course with every new email, podcast episode, and ailment, perceived or imagined. It’s not the case for everyone, of course, but seniors as a group tend to be terminally slow on the tech uptake. That is why assisting them with computers requires adaptability and deep reservoirs of Job-ian patience. A new fake ad on SNL takes this diagnosis into account with the smart home device, Amazon Echo Silver, which takes some of the legwork out of assisting grandparents. It answers to any name remotely close to what it’s actually called, fact-checks questions that presume we’re living in a far earlier year than 2017, and even simulates a reluctant but steady listener with it’s “uh-huh” feature. The sketch is obviously just a gentle joke, but if Amazon truly did team up with AARP to make such a device, it would likely scale immediately.

You’re smart, talented, and a hard worker, so you’ve been rewarded with stretch assignments that helped you build new management-level skills. But despite that growth, no one has yet tapped you for that first management role. Now you’ve got a conundrum–you want to update your LinkedIn profile to show your management ability, but you don’t have the title to go with it.

That’s okay, says LinkedIn expert Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing in an Hour a Day. The social media platform still offers a number of ways for you to point out why you’re management material and catch the eye of your supervisor, prospective new boss, or recruiter.

“Don’t worry right now about what your past job description said. Get in the mind-set of, ‘How did I get to where I am now?’ Never lie, but you can rewrite those sections of your profile to reflect the strengths that brought you to where you are right now,” she says.

So pull up your profile and make these tweaks and additions to help you get to the next level in your career.

What  To Say In Your Summary

The summary section gives you 2,000 characters of prime LinkedIn real estate to tell people about yourself and what you can do, says LinkedIn consultant Dan Sherman, author of Maximum Success with LinkedIn. Within that space, create a heading that highlights your accomplishments and create a list of bullet points that summarize key skills and successes.

“People hate to read blocks of text. Under ‘accomplishments,’ you might put something like, ‘Led a cross-functional team that increased productivity in our company’,” he says. If you managed a vendor or an intern, be sure to include that as well.

Hiring managers are looking for people who are effective in what they do, so the more you can quantify your impact with numbers, the better. It’s okay to blend accomplishments from different employers in this section. List your top successes across your career so far.

Add Some Media

Here is where you can show off your industry knowledge, creativity, writing ability, and thought leadership, von Rosen says. Create content that shows prospective hiring managers or your own boss that you understand your industry and are thinking about its future. Perhaps you did a successful presentation that you can share publicly. Upload it here. Wrote an article? Post it. Spoke at an event? Share the video.

“Any kind of media is proof of your management and leadership skills and proof of your knowledge,” she says.

If you don’t have much media yet, curate what’s out there. Look for thoughtful pieces by other professionals and post them with your thoughts on the piece. Make your profile a small information hub while you begin to develop your own media to share, von Rosen says.

Highlight Your Experience

Under each job you have listed, you can post a brief description of your duties and accomplishments. Again, use this space carefully to showcase your wins in brief, bulleted points, von Rosen says. If you’ve worked closely with a manager on a high-impact or high-profile project, that may be worth calling out, too.

Add In Nontraditional Education

While most people include their college and graduate school work in the education section, this can also be a great way to showcase additional seminars or workshops you’ve taken to improve your skills, Sherman says. Don’t list every half-day workshop you’ve attended, but if you have completed a certificate or well-known training in leadership, or which was related to your industry, list it to show you’re motivated to keep learning.

Ask For Some Recommendations That Highlight The Right Things

The people who appreciate your work are also in a position to help you showcase your leadership skills, von Rosen says. When asking for an endorsement or recommendation, she usually gives her colleague some tips on which skills she would like them to highlight.

“Give them bullet points, and speak to things that as a manager are important. ‘Could you speak to my team-building skills? Could you speak to my timeliness and ability to keep things on track? Can you speak to how my team helped you generate this much revenue? Can you speak to my success when I came in and worked with your company in a leadership position?’ You ask for those specifics,” she says.

Edit Your Interests

Look over the interests section of your profile and make sure it looks professional, von Rosen suggests. If there are leadership-focused industry groups or particularly active groups in your industry, be sure to join them and read what people are sharing. This can also help you make connections and gain greater exposure in your field.

Of course, read over your profile carefully and ensure that it’s clean and free of typos and grammatical errors. And set it to “public” so prospective hiring managers can see your content when they click on it, von Rosen says.

According to the latest Crunchbase data, U.S. startup funding is on the rise, up from $18 billion in the last quarter of 2016 to $21 billion in the first quarter of this year. While hefty recent IPOs like Snap’s and Instacart’s grab headlines, smaller companies in quieter industries are snagging a lot of investment right now. These startups are chipping away at problems like cancer screening, zero-emission mass transit, and deadly infectious diseases. To do that, they’ve all had to find investors willing to back innovation in difficult, often slow-moving, not-so-flashy fields. I recently asked a few of them to share why they prefer to invest in the tough stuff.

Because Everyone Deserves A Decent Tech Education

Reach Capital invests in companies that are trying to democratize educational access, according to the firm’s cofounder and general partner, Jennifer Carolan. “Given today’s high-tech, globalized economy, it seems obvious that high school kids from low-income backgrounds ought to have access to computer science courses,” she told me. “Yet, that’s not the case–access to coursework is often correlated to family income level. We invest in companies that make access to coding more equitable. The change is needed for our collective future, and that’s why I’m this kind of investor.”

Carolan says that 53% of children served by Reach Capital’s portfolio currently come from low-income backgrounds. A former U.S. history teacher, she says the investment community seems reluctant to tackle this problem. “The hard part is counteracting this outdated notion by some that the business world is binary–either high-impact, mission-driven companies or great, profitable businesses.”

“This is a false dichotomy,” Carolan says, “and in fact, companies without a soul will be the ones that miss out on business opportunities and recruiting the next generation of talent that cares deeply about social issues.”

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

Because Construction Needs To Be Safer And More Sustainable

Darren Bechtel, founder and managing partner of Brick & Mortar Ventures, grew up on construction sites in his family’s business. “Historically, construction has ranked in dead last on the list of IT spend per industry,” he says, “despite topping the list of industries when it comes to the sheer amount of data handled and exchanged–both internally and externally with third parties.” To Bechtel, “this is shocking,” not least because “society needs better ways to make construction much safer for workers and much better for the environment.”

As an investor in the space, Bechtel is excited by the “opportunity financially to bring construction out of the dark and save lives and the environment.” Globally, construction is a $10 trillion sector, according to McKinsey researchers, yet its productivity has remained flat for decades. Worse, the industry is right up there with fashion as a polluter. By one recent estimate, construction accounts for a sixth of global freshwater consumption and a quarter of wood consumption, and contributes a quarter of global waste. Bechtel adds that the rates of death in the sector’s labor force are widely underreported.

“Only very recently, with the proliferation of mobile devices, connectivity, and industrial-scale IoT [internet of things] has it even been possible to bring technology to a construction job site,” he says. But Bechtel says this has enormous potential to change things for the better, including “increased efficiency of resource deployment, safety, and overall productivity”–all reasons why he’s as excited as ever about the space.

Because Governments Need The Tools To Get Things Done

Guess who commissions a lot of construction? The government. Ron Bouganim, founder and managing partner of Govtech Fund, says there are three reasons why his early-stage fund focuses on software built for government agencies to do seemingly drab work–from health inspections to municipal bond issuance.

“First, regardless of whether one thinks we should have more government or less government, the fact is we have one,” Bouganim points out. “We just think it should be more efficient and effective. Second, he says, the software products he backs are “mission critical,” not just entertaining apps that people can afford to live without. “As a society, we simply can’t have our police officers, for example, use software that is outdated or broken–literally people’s lives are at risk.”

Bouganim knows as well as anyone that government agencies are typically beset by red tape, slow sales cycles, and legacy vendors–all of which make it a tough industry in which to make an impact. But “a whole new wave of startups has emerged in the past few years that leverage the cloud, build products–not contracted custom services–and are an order of magnitude less expensive than these legacy vendors. And,” he adds, “that’s the third reason: We can make money.”

Bouganim estimates that governments around the world together spend $400 billion a year on technology. “That’s trillions in custom-built legacy systems over the past few decades that need to be replaced,” he says. And in his view, “startups are the best vehicle we have as a society to deliver innovation at scale, so why not tackle the glue at the very center of it all: government.”

Related: Six Women VCs On How They Broke Into The Ultimate Boys’ Club

Because So Many Diseases Still Need Curing

Developing new medicines is another “glacier-pace,” capital-intensive enterprise. According to Tracy Saxton, managing partner at Pivotal bioVenture Partners, it typically takes “12-15 years and $2.6 billion to confirm the hypothesis [and] to understand whether you have a viable drug that you can take to the FDA for approval.” But even after that’s secured, it “doesn’t make the drug successful–you have to educate physicians, sometimes change the practice of medicine, do real-world studies,” she explains. “Last–and definitely not least in our current environment–you have to figure out who will pay for it.”

Biotech may be booming, but these barriers to entry still loom large. Even for someone like Saxton, who holds a holds a PhD in molecular and medical genetics, there’s no guarantee of success in such a difficult, long-tail industry. But she doesn’t hesitate when I ask her why she’s so passionate about the sector.

“[When] scientists and physicians bring a drug to the market, we are helping patients and their families. I don’t wake up in the morning and ask myself if what I do is important or if it makes a difference in the world. I know it.”

Beck Bamberger founded BAM Communications in 2008 and writes regularly for Forbes, Inc., and The Huffington Post about entrepreneurship, public relations, and culture.

When employers fail to pay overtime, withhold tips from waitresses and waiters, or misclassify workers as exempt from minimum wage regulations, they’re stealing income from the poorest members of society. “Wage theft,” the collective term for this practice, can take many forms. But it comes down to something simple: bosses stiffing workers out what they are legally owed.

This workplace larceny is worse than you might think. The Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank that investigates labor issues, analyzed records for the 10 most populous states. Looking just at one form of wage theft–failure to pay minimum wages in each state–it documents $8 billion in annual underpayments. Extrapolated across the U.S. as a whole, it calculates a total of $15 billion a year in employer misappropriation, which is more than the value of all the property stolen during robberies, burglaries, and auto thefts across the country.

The report finds 2.4 million workers affected across the ten states: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. And it says workers suffering minimum wage violations lose an average of $64 per week, almost a quarter of their weekly earnings. An average wage theft victim earns just $10,500 in wages a year–and loses up to $3,300 of that to unscrupulous bosses.

“Property crime is a better understood, more tangible form of crime than wage theft, and federal, state, and local governments spend tremendous resources to combat it,” the report, written by EPI analyst David Cooper and research assistant Teresa Kroeger, says. “In contrast, lawmakers in much of the country allocate little, if any, resources to fighting wage theft, yet the cost of wage theft is at least comparable to–and likely much higher than–the cost of property crime.”