At midnight, the shore of Hunts Point–where the Bronx meets the East River–comes alive. Crew unload up to a million pounds of fish from shipping containers and haul them into the New Fulton Fish Market, a 700,000 square foot warehouse that replaced the original Fulton Fish Market, which operated in Lower Manhattan from 1822 until it was shuttered in 2005 and moved to the Bronx. Seafood streams into the market from fisheries along the Atlantic Seaboard and around the world, where it lands in a system that, as Mike Spindler, CEO of the startup FultonFishMarket.com tells Fast Company, “really has not changed or modernized in several hundred years.”

FultonFishMarket.com is not, as it may seem, the catchall website for the New Fulton Fish Market. The market itself is a cooperative made up of 24 individual multigenerational, family-run large fish wholesalers that have been in business for decades, some over a century, and distribute to retailers and restaurants in the New York area. FultonFishMarket.com is a separate venture–a startup that curates and sells a selection of fresh, sustainable fish sourced from those wholesalers, and distributes it to both restauranteurs and individual consumers across the U.S. The startup prides itself on speed: An order made in San Francisco, Spindler says, will reach its destination within the same time frame as an order placed in New York. While FultonFishMarket.com will sell frozen fish on occasion, most of it, Spindler says, is delivered fresh.

The fish is then packed in cooler boxes, labeled, and sent off to the airport. Most of the flights that FultonFishMarket.com uses leave between 6 and 7 am; to get the fish there on time, it has to depart the market at 4 am. The whole process of selection, recording, and distribution takes around four hours, but it’s designed, Spindler says, to equip consumers with more awareness of the origins and impact of their purchase.

FultonFishMarket.com provides all those details, Spindler says, but only after a consumer places an order–making it somewhat hard to make the most sustainable choice. “The available seafood on any given day may be selected from one dock versus another, or one boat versus another because it is fresher,” Spindler says. “What that means is that the boat, dock, catch method and fishery won’t be known until we actually select the fish for your order.” But the overall aim of the startup, Spindler says, is to deliver only those fish that have been caught by methods which minimize the environmental impact on the locations in which they’re harvested.

FultonFishMarket.com aims to be an alternative to that system by prioritizing fish caught in U.S. waters, where both farmed and wild-caught fish and shellfish are regulated by state and federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. The startup also sources some of its fish from overseas farms, but only those with a proven record of sustainable practices, like Bakkafrost in the Faroe Islands, which raises its salmon on non-GMO feed and uses no antibiotics.

Through the website, individual consumers and restauranteurs can select from the available fish; FultonFishMarket.com also works with what Spindler describes as a “community-supported fishery” model, where a group of people can go in on an order together, and pick up a share of whatever the startup’s quality assurance director has selected as that day’s choicest fish.

FultonFishMarket.com is still a new venture, and as such, its reach is relatively small. “If you measure us against the overall seafood market in America, we’re a blip on the radar,” Spindler says. But the startup’s business has quadrupled since last year, and its revenue is in the millions. That, to Spindler, signals the potential for further growth, but what will drive that, in the end, will be the quality.

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.”

Philanthropy’s deepest-pocketed donors often short-change the causes they claim to care about the most. That’s because while the majority of the world’s wealthiest givers have expressed interest in solving complex social issues like poverty, educational inequity, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses, only 20% follow through with funding of $10 million or more to actually try to create some fundamental change.

In philanthropic industry parlance, that reluctance even has its own term: “the aspiration gap.” As Bridgespan partner William Foster, whose nonprofit and philanthropist consultancy coined that term, puts it: The ambition of philanthropists to put “meaningful amounts of money to move meaningful change into the toughest social problem is as present or more present than ever. The difficulty [for most] is figuring out how to do it.” Many donors simply aren’t aware of all the potential social impact strategies they might deploy.

How to effectively make these so-called “big bets” is a question consuming the philanthropic world today. Dropping a windfall on an organization already doing great work doesn’t matter if the group doesn’t have the capacity to spend it wisely, just as spreading the wealth between too many cause groups might dilute the chances of any of them having enough capital to do anything revolutionary. “The gap is not about desire and what [issue] they want to put money into,” Foster says about major funders. “The gap is about finding places that philanthropists feel they can effectively move the needle.”

But Bridgespan has crunched some numbers to help with that. After an analysis of 900 big bets placed between 2000 and 2013, the group has identified 10 separate strategies that the biggest and boldest charitable backers have used to spark change. The results, which appear in a Stanford Social Innovation Review report called Ten Ways to Make a Big Bet on Social Change, explores both what’s been tried why under what conditions some wagers seem to especially pay off.

To goal, says Foster, is to create a roadmap of “pathways” for billionaires to consider, which includes factors like how active they might want to be in managing the distribution of their funds, or how to best prop up–or bypass–existing support networks, depending on how well they’re working.

Based on Bridgespan’s analysis, most big bettors give an average of four smaller grants to related initiatives or entities before raising the stakes to an average 10-fold increase in funding. “People aren’t finding something and taking a wild risk and hoping for the best,” Foster says. “The big bets are the product of multiple years of engagement and multiple grants that build understanding and confidence to lay the groundwork.” A classic refrain is “it takes a lot to do a lot,” he adds, but the bets that truly pay off involve substantial patience to first learn how the industry works first.

Among the methodologies that Bridgespan explores, the most obvious are, not surprisingly, more popular than those that seem counterintuitive and perhaps underused. In fact, the top four big bet styles–funding ongoing operations, purchasing physical assets like buildings or land, founding an organization, and giving to an aggregator–account for roughly three quarters what’s being gambled.

That doesn’t mean aren’t strings attached. As Bridgespan reports, giving extra operational funding works best when directed toward a group that might naturally encounter a shortfall because it’s working in an area that excludes common resources, say, public policy advocacy, which can’t receive government support, or charter schools, which often cost more because specialized teacher training, equipment, or low student-to-teacher ratios.

Building facilities or securing land for groups seems like straightforward enough actions, but also works best for places that truly need the associated buildings or real estate to accomplish their mission, like “community health centers, charter schools [and] conservation efforts” notes the report. In some cases, it might even make sense to split such gifts up, earmarking a share to any uptick in associated operating costs.

To that end, founding your own organization sounds dreamy, but should really only be done if there are no other players doing “good enough” in the space. Otherwise, you’re wasting valuable cash and brainpower when you could just invest directly with those who already know the space. When there is that gap, however, a new organization can do wonders. For instance, ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization that isn’t affected by declining circulations, continues to publish important investigatory work.

On the flip side, some of the lesser used concepts, including “building a field” and “wage an advocacy campaign,” might need to be employed more often. There are instances of these being incredibly successful although they can take more time and imagination to roll out.

Take field-building, which includes historical successes, like the Rosenwald Schools program, which launched around 5,000 new schools in the 1930s to bring more educational opportunity to African-American students in the South. That dramatically improved the field of equal educational access providers. More recently, the Rockefeller Foundation, Omidyar Network, and USAID have grown interested in impact investing substantially by supporting the Global Impact Investing Network, which works to increase the accessibility of the practice. In both cases lots of collective, often small-scale actions have led to long-term gains.

Philanthropists may have shied away from advocacy efforts in the past because they envision their names associated with hot-button, perhaps intractable issues like gun control. But there plenty of other substantial, less politicized issues where concentrated donations have made major change, including Dallas billionaire Lyda Hill’s work to address the health crisis of antibiotic resistance that has curbed some livestock-raising practices and changed what’s on the menu at restaurants and in grocery stores.

One largely underused tactic that could prove effective would be to create organizational endowments to cause-related organizations, which could then manage the wealth and distribute annual grants at their discretion. “Almost every university gift of significance is either an endowment or a physical asset, both of which are perpetuities,” Foster says. “People don’t do that for homelessness organizations or environmental groups.” Perhaps that may start changing now. Find the full report and playbook here.

It’s an unconventional conference to say the least. To help celebrate Fast Company‘s annual list of the Most Creative People in Business, our editorial and events team lined up two days of engaging site visits, lunches, and cocktail parties at companies throughout Los Angeles. Here are a few photos capturing the fun from day one, and you can follow along on Twitter at #FastCompanyLA.

“I like to call this the cathedral.” So says Matt Barnard, CEO and cofounder of the vertical farming startup Plenty. We’re standing in a room at the company’s headquarters in a former electronics distribution center in South San Francisco, staring up at glowing, 20-foot high towers filled with perfectly formed kale and herbs.

The company isn’t the first to build an indoor urban farm in a warehouse. Aerofarms, for example, grows greens in a 70,000-square foot former steel factory in Newark, New Jersey. Nearby, Bowery, another tech-filled indoor farm, grows what it calls “post-organic,” pesticide-free produce. But Plenty, which has received $26 million in funding to date from investors such as Bezos Expeditions and Innovation Endeavors, believes that it has the technology to grow food more efficiently–at the same cost or less than crops grown in the field–so it can more easily scale up to supply supermarkets around the world.

Inside another gleaming white room, wearing a food processing uniform and gloves, Barnard reaches up and picks rare varieties of basil, chives, a mustard green called mizuna, red leaf lettuce, sorrel, and Siberian kale, eating each and handing me samples as he talks. None of these are available in the average grocery store, because they wouldn’t survive the supply chain. Most produce available now has been bred or engineered to last through rough handling in distribution centers and long distances in trucks–not for taste. The heirloom seeds that Plenty uses, which were bred for taste, are more delicate.

Unlike most other indoor farming companies, which typically grow food in rows on shelves, Plenty grows food vertically–each plant popping out of the side of a tall, skinny tower. Lights are also arranged vertically rather than pointing down from above. (BetterLife Growers, which plans to open in Atlanta this fall and provide jobs for underserved communities, is another example of a company that uses a vertical growing system; on a smaller scale, Tender Greens is using vertical systems to grow salad ingredients at some of its restaurants).

“When you’re not outside and you’re no longer constrained by the sun, you can do things that make it easier for humans to do work and work faster, and for machines to work faster,” says Barnard. “You can do things like use gravity to feed the water and the nutrients rather than having to use pumps, so you can be more energy efficient.” The farms are less expensive to build than other configurations. They also grow more food in less space than competitors like Aerofarms or Bowery. While Aerofarms claims to grow 130 times more produce than conventional farming in a given area, Plenty claims to grow 350 times more than conventional farming.

The design allows for what the company calls “field-scale architecture”–rooms that can produce the same output as a fairly large farm field in a tiny space. Some early companies in the urban farming industry were constrained by smaller production.

“Small-scale growing in 2017 is not a profitable enterprise, and there are a lot of systemic reasons for that that aren’t going to change,” says Barnard. “Growing at a small scale, you can’t get to the labor efficiencies that you need. It requires, in essence, too many people.”

Early indoor farming companies–like Chicago’s FarmedHere, which was once the largest indoor farm in the country and had hopes of national expansion but shut down in January 2017–also struggled with the cost of components like LED lights, which have dramatically fallen in the last several years. Podponics, an Atlanta indoor farming startup, raised $15 million from investors, but went bankrupt in 2016 after struggling with the economics of its system, particularly the cost of labor. Local Garden, a greenhouse in Vancouver, went bankrupt in 2014 after issues with productivity and access to capital. Others, like BrightFarms, had to rework their initial strategy because of the high cost and challenges of working on urban land. But as technology has improved, other indoor farming companies are growing. AeroFarms, with $61.5 million in investment, has projects in development on four continents, including a farm in Camden, New Jersey, near its first location, and is on track for its plans to build at least 25 more farms by 2020. Urban Produce, a vertical indoor farm in Irvine, California, hopes to expand to 25 locations in five years.

“There’s a timing aspect to this,” Barnard says. “Our technology is necessary to get to the right set of economics. But it’s also not fully sufficient. In other words, it enables us to capitalize on what’s happening in the commoditization in other areas. Utility computing, IoT, machine intelligence, wasn’t effective enough five years ago, much less affordable. Seven years ago . . . you would have spent 64 times more to buy the same amount of LED lights. So we’ve built into our design the ability to take advantage of advances in that field.”

The company continually iterates on the design, tweaking the placement of lights or plumbing or how the towers are moved in and out of a room in order to improve cost or productivity or flavor. A custom designed “growth medium” made from recycled plastic bottles takes the place of soil, holding roots in place, delivering nutrients, and hosting microbes.

The system makes it economic to grow crops other than leafy greens, which have been the mainstay of most indoor farms to date. Strawberries may come next, and perhaps tomatoes and cucumbers, all grown in varieties that naturally have more flavor than standard offerings in stores, and preserve that flavor because of the short supply chain.

The taste is noticeably different. Rick Bayless, the Frontera chef, tried the produce at Google, where the founders started testing their core technology in a demonstration farm in 2014 (that farm is still supplying greens to Google’s cafeteria, though Plenty is not running it). “When I visited Plenty’s pilot farm, I was skeptical,” he says. “I’d had produce before that was grown under lights. And it always disappointed: weak in flavor and texture, like a shadow of the original. But that day at Google, I tasted something different. True and vibrant flavors, textures like I’m used to in field-raised greens and fruits, unusual varieties I’d only expect from really savvy growers. I knew these guys were onto something.”

By delivering food to customers more quickly, the process preserves both flavor and nutrients (after a week in the supply chain, produce can lose as much as 55% of nutrients like vitamin C). Like other indoor farming, the technology also saves arable land; Plenty says it can grow up to 350 times more produce in the same amount of space as conventional farming, with 1% of the water. In a sealed environment, there are so few pests that the company can use ladybugs to deal with them rather than pesticides. The process also cuts the cost and pollution associated with a typical supply chain.

Barnard says that “30% to 45% of the value [of produce] at shelf is trucks and distribution centers.” He adds, “And that to us doesn’t make any sense when we can be getting people better food that tastes better, is more nutritious, with less pesticides. I like to call it food for people, not trucks.”

While early indoor farming was much more energy-intensive, the improving efficiency of LED lights means that the new system can actually have a smaller carbon footprint than farming in the field, at least for certain crops. (This calculation takes other impacts into account, including the carbon footprint of transportation and distribution in traditional farming and the impact of food waste in the supply chain.) The production facilities could potentially also run at least in part on on-site renewable energy like solar power.

“The fact that we can compete with the field on cost is great, but what is, of course, more exciting is that we’re not just competing on real costs, we’re competing on carbon cost,” says Storey. Eventually, he believes that many varieties of food will be more sustainable to grow indoors than out.

The company envisions building farms in every major metropolitan area around the world. After the launch in San Francisco in 2017, other major markets will follow in 2018. “People are going to see that the nutrient-rich food in their diet–fruit and vegetable–is going to start tasting better, and it’s going to be grown in farms like this,” says Barnard. “And it’s going to happen with stunning swiftness, because we’re now at the point where we can get this into everyone’s budget.”

In an early script draft for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, writer and director James Gunn described the opening sequence as “the greatest title shot ever.” And if you’ve already seen the summer’s first major blockbuster, you know it pretty much lives up to that lofty goal.

There are a lot of reasons behind the scene’s success, not the least of which is Baby Groot shimmying to the sounds of ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.” But as our diminutive hero cuts a space rug, his friends are engaged in a pretty epic battle with a gargantuan eight-legged space monster called an Abilisk. The soundtrack may be what hits your soul, but the fantastical visuals are what hit you in the eyeballs.

Fast Company talked to Framestore animation supervisor Arslan Elver about the sheer amount of VFX heavy-lifting involved, and here are six things that made it one of the most difficult scenes of the entire film.

All In One Shot

The camera doesn’t cut once, meaning Framestore’s artists needed to create 800 frame-long effects, and had to run simulations that were thousands of frames long. The work was split up into 11 parts, and divvied up among the shop’s animators. It took them from the end of August 2016 until end of February 2017 to make it. “It’s one big shot, but internally we split that up into 11 pieces, and each piece is at least 500 frames, a minimum of 20 seconds,” says Elver. “Plus, in each shot, there are at least five characters–Baby Groot, the Abilisk, maybe a CG Drax getting slapped on the ground, there’s just a lot of stuff to look after.”

City of Gold

The battle takes place atop a golden city on the home planet of the Sovereign, which means the entire set is reflective. VFX supervisor James Fawkner recently wrote in a Framestore blog post that it forced the shop to develop a brand-new suite of tools to create the space cloudscapes, and have them move realistically. “The clouds move in a time-lapse, alongside bolts of lighting that needed to react within the clouds and light the city below,” he wrote. “The city itself is made of gold, which posed its own problems as it needed to reflect on everything and everyone in the scene.”

Baby Groot Dance Moves

We know James Gunn was the model for dancing Baby Groot at the end of Vol. 1, but it turns out the director once again called himself into dance duty for the sequel. “Using a reference from James of him dancing, we began to build the sequence,” says Elver. “One thing that became an issue quite quickly was that James was dancing on the spot, but Baby Groot needs to move forward. So we had to come up with some clever solutions to play with the perspective.” Like, say, riding what appears to be some sort of space rat creature.

Slowing Things Down

Just as the action is about to really kick off, the movie title hits the screen and there is a Matrix-like moment, when things slow right down and the camera turns. “That wasn’t originally planned,” says Elver. “It became clear that he was constantly dancing, but we decided to go for a slowed-down moment, to keep it quiet and subtle, just as the chaos behind him gets crazier and crazier.”

Intergalactic Collaboration

Elver says that the workflow passed various sections across different departments, each responsible for a different aspect of the shot. “First comes animation, then it moves to creature effects, where they work on how the cloth looks, or how the Abilisk tentacles intersect with the ground, then there are the people who put in all the lasers and shooting,” he says. “So there’s always this back and forth between these departments. Like if a character is not animated aiming their weapon correctly, which happens a lot, it has to be corrected.”

Reality Check

As VFX-heavy as it is, there are actual real shots in the scene. “Just a few,” says Elver. “When Gamora says hi to Groot, and when Drax falls next to him.” It’s understandable, however, if you still feel immersed in the intergalactic world of the movie, long after it’s over.

If there was one company that dominated computing in the latter part of the 20th century it was Microsoft. While Apple may have been first on several fronts, by the mid-90s a PC running Windows could be found in virtually every home and business in the country. But with Apple’s renaissance in the new millennium and other companies like Google and Facebook innovating on the internet and services front, Microsoft soon seemed to take a back seat to other “hot” companies of the day–especially when it came to recruiting talented developers.

Yet in the past five years, that’s changed. Microsoft is increasingly being seen as an innovator again with products like its HoloLens, its Surface line of computers, and even Windows 10. This renaissance in Redmond has made the company a top choice to intern for, according to many students I spoke with.  Will Lawrence, currently a junior in International Economics at the University of British Columbia, told me what his internship at Microsoft (that just ended last month) was like.

On His Internship Role At Microsoft

My internship took place during the winter term of 2017, between January 7th – April 28th. I was 20 and a junior at the time. I was a User Experience (UX) Design Intern in the Microsoft Garage Internship program. The unique format of this internship creates teams of six interns–five developers and one UX Designer–to work on an experimental project for a Microsoft sponsor, like Azure, HoloLens, or Cortana. Over the course of the four-month internship, we were responsible for scoping our project, building it from scratch, and working with Microsoft stakeholders along the way.

My role consisted of building the user experience for a conversational, artificial-intelligence project for our sponsor, Microsoft Teams. This included mapping user flows, writing dialogue, and a considerable amount of user testing.

On How He Found The Opportunity

A friend who completed a summer internship at Microsoft referred me in July. I took a few weeks to assemble my portfolio–a necessity for all aspiring designers. I spent long hours developing the stories behind each of my projects, paying special attention to the design process I executed for each one. After completing my portfolio, my friend submitted my details into the Microsoft referral program for a general UX design internship.

By the middle of October, I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was available for either a winter (January-April) or summer (May-August) internship for the Vancouver Garage internship. I didn’t know anything about the Garage, but I told her I was available.

On The Interview Process With Microsoft

The interview consisted of two stages: the phone screening and the on-site interviews. The phone screen was 30 minutes long and nearly the entire interview was walking the recruiter through my design process on a single portfolio item. By the end of the call, she indicated that she would be interested in moving me forward to the on-site interview taking place a week later.

This on-site portion consisted of one 15-minute portfolio presentation as well as four interviews. For the presentation portion, I discussed my unique story as a designer, a high-level overview of my portfolio, and an in-depth walk-through of two specific UX projects. Next was the four 45-minute interviews, each of which consisted of a design challenge like, “How would you design a phone for deaf people?” and a general design question, like “What is a design trend you like and why do you like it?” The interviewers were employees from various degrees of seniority across Microsoft, all of whom were very knowledgeable in the field.

On The Qualities That Helped Him Score A Microsoft Internship

I was really fortunate to get the internship, and there were three qualities that I think made me successful in the interview process. The first was that I had experience working closely with developers. This is a critical feature for this role given that your entire internship would be working with five developers to hit weekly milestones. The second quality was my background in project management. Having managed projects in two tech startups prior to this internship, I had demonstrated the ability to set agile development goals, prioritizing features, and working with a Scrum board–tasks that we ended up doing every day of the internship. Finally, I demonstrated communication skills, which are essential for the Garage program. As I soon found out, communicating through presentations and meetings became a major part of our internship, and that was a skill I brought to the table.

On The Average Workday Of A Microsoft Intern

My typical day could be broken down into four parts: team meetings, stakeholder meetings, design tasks, and hanging out with interns. We would start every day with a “standup” team meeting where we would talk about our progress the previous day and what we intended to work on today. At a separate team meeting, we would set weekly milestones for ourselves called “sprints.” After each of these sprints, we would have a “sprint retrospective,” where our team touched based on our progress and reflected on our mistakes.

Next, we had one or two stakeholder meetings a day with either our project sponsor, program manager, or coaches. All of these people were very invested in our project and wanted us to succeed, so they offered their help wherever possible. I personally enjoyed these meetings because they allowed us to demonstrate progress and get feedback from people who were experienced with the product development cycle.

Then came the actual work of designing my project. This was easily the best part, as I had complete creative freedom and great resources to get the job done. I organized my days into tackling one large task, like designing a logo, making a conversation dialogue tree, or user testing, because it let me maximize the amount of time I spent in a productive flow state. The type of tasks was constantly changing as the project continued to move along the product development cycle. This kept things interesting throughout the internship, as it forced me to work on tasks that were new and challenging.

Finally, a large part of my internship was spending time with the 23 other interns in the Garage. I spent my fair share of time playing chess, foosball, or ping-pong during our breaks and going to new restaurants in downtown Vancouver for lunch. One of the best parts of the internship was that our office had a maker space stocked with 3D printers, laser cutters, drones, and all the latest tech. I found myself coming in on weekends to work on side projects or just play with the toys.

On Some Of His Best Experiences As A Microsoft Intern

We took a trip to Microsoft HQ in Redmond to demo our products to our entire sponsor division, including the corporate vice president, the leadership team, and about 300 full-time employees. At the end of the internship, we were able to have an internal release for our project. This was a big milestone for me because it was the first time that I had the ability to ship a legitimate product (i.e., not a hackathon project) to a real audience (i.e., not my mother). We also organized a ton of awesome weekend trips around British Columbia, including winter surfing in Tofino, snowboarding in Whistler, and a road trip through the Canadian Rockies in Banff National Park.

On Whether Microsoft Could Improve Its Internship Experience

The Garage internship is unique and is therefore not well suited for everyone. There are many talented developers or designers who may not succeed in this internship because it has a heavy focus on teamwork, project management, and independent decision-making. With that said, I think Microsoft needs to promote this internship more because I think it is a great learning experience for students who are interested in entrepreneurship and project management.

On The Lasting Benefits Of A Microsoft Internship

This internship has opened many doors for me, both inside and outside Microsoft. Interning at a company like Microsoft signals to others that you pass a certain bar of hard skills and aptitude, so people are generally more receptive to speaking with you when they know you’ve had the experience at a company like Microsoft. People were a lot more receptive to my cold emails and, as any student can tell you, this is a huge advantage when securing future jobs.

Moreover, being exposed to how Microsoft operates is a huge asset when looking for future roles. Microsoft has high standards for their product development cycle, and I was, fortunately, able to learn more about these processes, which I feel makes me a better designer moving forward. For example, when releasing a product through the Microsoft Garage, products must go through compliance processes around Accessibility, Security, Privacy, and Global Readiness. Going through this procedure and understanding what is necessary to release a product at scale is very attractive to future employers.

On What Others Could Do To Land An Internship At Microsoft

Work on projects: Your academic work is close to irrelevant in the hiring process; I’m the perfect example of that–I’m studying International Economics, but got hired as a UX Designer. Microsoft only cares about the projects that you’ve worked on that demonstrate your abilities. Speaking specifically to design, build out your portfolio by going to hackathons, redesigning websites for companies you like, or reimagining the onboarding process for your favorite apps.

Understand your value proposition: Understand your unique value proposition and play to it in your interviews. For example, I knew that my communication and project management skills were some of my strengths, so I continually referred to them throughout my interview. This will allow you to steer the conversation toward your strong suits and reinforce your key offerings.

Practice behavioral interview questions: When people think of the recruiting process for tech firms, they focus almost exclusively on practicing for the technical portion of the interview. While this section is important, what separates mediocre candidates from great candidates is their ability to answer questions like “Tell me about yourself,” “Why Microsoft?” and “Tell me about a time you needed to work on a team.” The key when answering these questions is to be memorable–that means avoiding clichés and being honest.

Master of None, which just returned for an impeccable second season, is a stylish, studied comedy about identity, self-discovery, and the winding path toward fulfillment. (Not to mention pork and pasta. It’s also about those.) Although the show is an extremely personal expression from creators Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, its main themes are perfectly reflected in the story of how one of its writers got his job.

Like just about every sentient being with Netflix access in late-2015, Cord Jefferson swooned over Master of None’s first season. He didn’t merely admire the relentlessly tasteful series, though; he thought he might like to write for a show like that one day. What separated him from most other writers in fantasy career draft mode is that he’d gotten himself into just the right position to actually make it happen. Jefferson ended up becoming a staff writer and story editor throughout the show’s second season, with a coveted story-by credit on the “New York, I Love You” episode–a medley of loosely connected vignettes that cohere into an offbeat tribute to the city. He had to write like hell to get there, though.

Jefferson first began attracting attention for his writing on sites like The Root, and later as an editor for Gawker. He was a journalist who also wrote searing essays–often about the black American experience–from both a general and intensely personal perspective. While his writing revealed untold depths of self-knowledge, Jefferson had not yet architected a vision for his next stage as an author. He had no secret pilot script to plug away on at night, nor a dusty, half-finished novel beckoning for closure. Mainly, he was just trying to stay afloat in the years before Gawker went belly-up.

“For a long time my only ambition with regard to writing was to continue finding people who would pay me to do it,” he says. “There was a significant period of my life when success to me was making enough money writing that I didn’t have to ask my parents for rent money.”

He’d watched friends hit high watermarks in their fields and worried that true success was eluding him. Gradually, the desire for something more metastasized. He’d always had the idea that he would end up dabbling in many different mediums, the way some of his writer heroes like James Baldwin and Joan Didion had, but he wasn’t sure where to even start.

Then everything changed rather quickly.

In the summer of 2013, Jefferson wrote a piece of satire for Gawker about a melee at a surfing competition–a faux-handwringing exegesis on the “culture of white violence.” The post, which mocked the hypocrisy of certain media coverage of black culture, made the rounds online that day. Among its many admirers was Chris Hayes, who invited Jefferson on his MSNBC show, All In, to do a desk piece based on what he’d written. He crushed it, his deadpan delivery piercing the piece’s target even more savagely.

Just as Aziz Ansari’s character Dev playfully wrestles with identity in episodes like “Religion” and the first-season standout, “Parents,” Jefferson’s cultural introspection turned out quite entertaining. The clip of his All In appearance went viral, eventually finding its way to Jermaine Johnson, a manager at 3Arts Entertainment. Johnson was impressed; the next day, he asked Jefferson to meet for coffee.

When an agent or manager invites a writer out for coffee, it might be the beginning of a big break or it might be nothing at all. Jefferson was going to do whatever it took to avoid Option 2. Johnson convinced him he should be writing for TV, and that if he didn’t have a spec script stashed–which he did not–he’d better get cracking.

About six months later, Jefferson had a pilot script in hand. It was a veteran story centered around a military clergyman. Not exactly the debut script one might expect from a future comedy writer. Before he even had the chance to seriously shop it around, however, he caught another big break–this one even more out of the blue.

Former sitcom star-turned-showrunner Mike O’Malley was looking for writers for a series he was putting together with LeBron James, of all people. O’Malley was a recent fan of Jefferson’s writing who reached out to his literary agent on a whim. Shortly after another fateful coffee in LA, this time with O’Malley, Jefferson had a legit TV writing job offer. It would be a 13-week stint helping create the pilot for what would end up becoming Survivor’s Remorse–a show that is now closing in on its fourth season. The offer came in on a Friday, and it required Jefferson to turn up at the writer’s room the following Monday. After some quick deliberation, he gently let the editor-in-chief at Gawker know he had to leave suddenly to go see about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If Jefferson’s opportunity seemed to arrive suddenly, it also ended just as quickly. After 13 weeks of creatively challenging work writing the first season of Survivor’s Remorse, Jefferson was freshly out of a job. He didn’t last that way for very long, though.

After a spirit-testing summer interviewing for TV writing gigs with all the major studios, Jefferson was nearly ready to go back into journalism. Then his agent got him an interview with Rory Albanese, late of The Daily Show. Within two months, Jefferson was moving to New York to help launch the the replacement for The Colbert Report. He was the first writer hired for what ended up being The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.

“Anyone who’s ever been part of a late-night show will tell you it’s exhausting work no matter what, but we had the added labor of trying to figure out what the show was going to be, what the tone was going to be, what our recurring bits were going to be, who our recurring characters were, etc.–all while producing a show every day,” Jefferson says.  He adds, “I once saw a motivational poster that said, ‘Entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and trying to build a plane on the way down.’ I hate to quote some dumb motivational poster, but that’s what it felt like sometimes.”

The Nightly Show is where Cord Jefferson came into his own as a TV writer. It was a stress factory, pushing the novice toward the top of his wit and intellect without relying on formulas as a crutch–and then having to do it all again the next day.

“I had to learn how to do everything very quickly in order to not get left behind,” he says.

By the time Master of None went fishing for talent, Jefferson had completed two comedy spec scripts and had a project in development at HBO. He had real material for Ansari and Yang to vet. The pair liked one of his scripts, and Jefferson ended up getting on the phone with them in March of 2016.

The following month, he was in the writer’s room on one of his favorite recent TV shows.

Although he enjoys his job, and hopes to continue writing TV “for as long as TV is a thing people watch,” Jefferson is now also looking beyond. He’d love to write a book or a movie eventually, and he’s giving serious consideration to penning a stage play centered around a racehorse. Despite having definitively made the leap from Gawker to prestige TV, Jefferson continues to thrive partly fueled by the unshakeable uncertainty that plagued him beforehand. If it’s gotten him to this point, though, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing.

“I’ve felt Impostor Syndrome in every job I’ve ever had in my adult life. I’m feeling it right now, answering these questions,” he says. “But I hope I’ll always choose Impostor Syndrome and overcompensating with extra effort over being a ding-dong who strolls through life with a lot of unearned confidence.”

This story reflects the views of these authors but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA), a piece of legislation that, if signed into law, is likely to impact the health care coverage of nearly every American, including the 50% of Americans who receive insurance through their employers.

Now it’s the Senate’s turn to take up the bill. While it’s been suggested that the measure will likely see major revisions there, as it stands, it’s wildly unpopular. A remarkable coalition of doctors, civic organizations, and health care­ industry interest groups has opposed its passage, as has nearly every major health insurer in our country. As the bill stands, it will cause tens of millions of Americans to lose insurance–through cuts to Medicaid and various regulatory rollbacks, including protections for pre-existing conditions–while cutting taxes for high earners. But the AHCA’s impact on employers would go further than even the Congressional Budget Office predicted when it analyzed the bill in March (the agency has yet to publish a report on the version passed by the House).

We spend a lot of time thinking about employee health benefits as part of our day-to-day roles; Laszlo spent more than 13 years building industry-leading health benefits programs at GE and Google, and Ali, after enduring a freak medical emergency and getting stuck with $200,000 in uncovered medical expenses, founded a company to give self-insured employers more control and flexibility in the coverage they offer employees.

We’ve read the bill and have come to the same conclusion: If the employer-specific elements of the AHCA become law, American companies will be faced with a difficult decision: They’ll either limit the scope of health care coverage they provide in order to save money today, knowing that will likely lead to higher costs down the road, or they’ll decide to pay more in the near-term for health care in hopes of significantly better outcomes (and consequently lower costs) in the long run. It’s a choice between taking a little medicine now or a lot later. The law basically incentivizes the shortsighted option, which will be disastrous for employers and employees alike.

The Economics Of Essential Benefits

Health coverage is a major cost for American employers. Today, they spend a total of $1.2 trillion per year and cover more than 90% of our country’s private health care costs.

The Affordable Care Act’s mandates, along with the rise of high-deductible health plans over the last decade, have together succeeded in helping control medical cost inflation. The ACA model is far from perfect, but it was meant to encourage smarter health care spending without comprising preventive care and essentials like emergency room visits, maternity care, and behavioral health coverage. And to a considerable degree, it’s worked as intended.

But if the AHCA passes, this model would be jettisoned. Employers won’t be required to provide a federally mandated minimum level of coverage to employees and their dependents, thanks to a loophole letting them adopt the plan requirements of any state. That means a company in one state can cherry-pick from another state with more lenient essential benefits requirements.

For example, an employer could choose to not cover behavioral health or maternity care by adopting the coverage requirements of a state that doesn’t mandate those forms of coverage–even if the employer doesn’t operate there. Over the long term, this can increase the overall cost of health care as people wait longer for or avoid treatment to save money, and ultimately get sicker.

At the same time, the bill that passed the House addresses neither the underlying drivers of health care costs nor how employers, as a powerful buying group, can be leveraged to drive those costs down. That could mean enabling employers to deregulate access to clinical care, for instance, or giving them more power to negotiate bulk drug pricing, or even just adding incentives to promote healthy behaviors among their workforces. But the AHCA does nothing of the kind.

Instead, it removes a powerful incentive for employers to provide better care to employees. That’s not only a short-sighted approach to controlling costs, it’s actually one that we believe will ultimately drive them up much more significantly over the long run.

Tax Credits That Hurt Women And Help The Wealthy

One of the more confusing aspects of the AHCA as it stands is its impact on the tax advantages–for both employers and employees–that incentivize businesses to offer health care coverage. In particular, the bill appears to redefine what a qualified health plan is without providing much detail about what that actually means.

One detail, however, is clear: Employers whose plans cover abortion costs will lose eligibility for tax credits. This will mostly affect the plans of smaller employers, which depend on those credits to offer insurance to employees, but the message for working women is clear and frightening. The change would clearly disadvantage women in the workplace and further reinforce the gender stereotypes that we as a country have spent decades trying to undo. This sexist ethos extends to other parts of the bill that don’t directly affect employers; the AHCA would also let insurance companies charge patients significantly more based on medical histories that include postpartum depression, Cesarean sections, or issues stemming from sexual assault.

At the same time, another group stands to gain handsomely from the AHCA’s tax treatment: highly paid executives. The bill bizarrely changes rule 162(m), which limits the tax deductibility of salaries greater than $1 million for public companies. That’s a massive gift to highly compensated executives and CEOs, whose companies would no longer face tax hits for paying them more than $1 million every year. What that has to do with health care is a mystery to us.

Employers Have An Important Decision To Make

While the Senate reshapes the AHCA in the days and weeks ahead, employers are already facing an urgent conundrum; they’re in the midst of planning a 2018 health benefits year without a clear picture of the federal and state laws that will guide them. If the AHCA does become law, they’ll also likely face an ethical and business dilemma: Should they reap the immediate economic benefits the AHCA would hand them, or keep investing in their employees’ health?

It’s nice to imagine that employers will continue to provide at least the same level of benefits to their employees, if not actually spend more to protect the long-term health and productivity of their workforce, but many surely won’t. The reality is that the opportunity to lower costs may be too good to pass up. Collective Health recently polled more than 150 benefits leaders and found that nearly 40% were exploring new benefits solutions with the primary goal of driving down health care investment costs. These weren’t all struggling startups, either. Even successful, cash-rich technology and financial services employers–which typically provide some of the most generous benefits packages in the U.S.–have gradually begun covering a lower share of employees premiums as health care costs have risen steadily over the last decade.

When weighing the decision, it’s important to focus on the word “investment.” Yes, health care is expensive, and controlling costs is a real, pressing issue for everyone involved. But as research has long confirmed, healthy employees are critical to long-term business performance; they’re happier, better engaged, and more productive. Employees also see health benefits as a major part of their compensation packages, making it a key element in where they decide to work. So if you want to attract, retain, and get the most out of the best and the brightest talent, reducing health care coverage is simply a risky strategy. Unfortunately, it’s the one the AHCA seems to want employers to adopt.

Whatever the fate of the legislation, though, employers will still have to decide whether to make near-term cost reductions, or to build workforces of happy, healthy employees who trust that they’re cared about for the long haul. As CEOs of our own respective companies, and as executives who’ve been entrusted with the welfare of the people we serve, that choice is easy.

Laszlo Bock is the CEO of Humu, Inc as well as the author ofWork Rules!and former SVP of People Operations at Google. Ali Diab is cofounder and CEO of Collective Health.

In the traditional corporate model, strong leaders pursued a singular vision through the strong command of an organization. Today, we live in a time of rapid change, when products and services often become obsolete overnight, and competition includes startups and companies in adjacent industries–the traditional leadership archetypes need not apply.

Instead an entirely new value system is beginning to emerge for the leaders of the future, one that will continue to grow with the rise of new tools like artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation.

“There’s been a transition from thinking about corporations solely as revenues and profits, and thinking about the organization in a more inclusive way,” says Ernst & Young’s (EY) global chief innovation officer, Jeff Wong. “Clearly revenue and profits are still important, but the leading companies are starting to think beyond that.”

Wong adds that while organizations used to select leaders based on relevant management experience, there is now a premium on leaders who demonstrate drastically different skill sets; the ones that experts believe will help organizations navigate a rapidly changing business environment.

1. The Ability To Think Of New Solutions

While leaders of the past were often tasked with executing predetermined strategies, increasing efficiency, and improving preexisting processes, one of the most valuable assets of future leaders is their willingness and ability to create something entirely new.

“We know the world is changing rapidly, we know that change is accelerating, we know that when you look at companies and industries that are evolving rapidly that there will be a series of new opportunities to go after, which will also be a chance to help define the evolution of their industry,” explains Wong.

Wong explains that as industries, processes, and business models are reinvented by disruptive technologies, the most valuable leaders of tomorrow are those that can shape the impact of those changes, rather than react to them.

“They’re leaders who can seek out new opportunities, who can deliver those new opportunities, but can also help redefine their own business into what it needs to be for the future,” he says.

2. Being Comfortable With Chaos

In an increasingly chaotic business landscape, the leaders who thrive are those who work well in unknown conditions.

“There are systems and processes that have been built up from the past that were fantastic for that era, but they aren’t fast or nimble enough to match this pace of change,”says Wong.

Leaders who can demonstrate a level of comfort with the chaos that results from reinventing long-standing processes are better prepared for the challenges that await them in the future, he says.

3. An Understanding Of Technology

While the leaders of the future won’t necessarily need to be the ones writing code, experts suggest that they will at least be required to demonstrate a robust understanding of the capabilities, applications, and future potential of emerging technologies.

“Information technology is moving from more of a supporting role that creates efficiency to a differentiating role that will increase effectiveness,” says Guo Xiao, the president and CEO of ThoughtWorks, a global technology consultancy. “Corporations are taking tech more and more seriously, regardless of what industry they’re working in.”

Xiao explains that industries as diverse as retail, agriculture, and manufacturing are increasingly naming technology experts to their advisory boards, while adding more C-level positions in the information and technology space. These efforts, he explains, are in recognition of the fact that technology needs to drive core business functions in order for companies to remain competitive.

“IT staff are now sitting in the center of innovation teams, because the company understands that with ever-changing technologies their business models are facing opportunities to be disrupted or evolved,” he says.

4. High Emotional Intelligence

In a future that incorporates more artificial intelligence in the workplace, leaders who are emotionally intelligent will ultimately thrive.

“If you think about the assembly line in a very hierarchal organization, it was about measurement and control,” explains Accenture’s chief technology and innovation officer, Paul Daugherty. “Then we moved to the second generation of management, which was still about control over sequential processes.”

As part of management’s ongoing evolution that military-like control over subordinates has gone from a key leadership value to a competitive disadvantage, suggests Daugherty.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous in business processes, organizations have become flatter and less hierarchal, he explains. “As you have work processes evolving more organically, it’s going to be driven by leaders that understand and invest in people.”

Daugherty points to five traits of successful future business leaders, each emphasizing traits that cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence anytime soon. They include accountability, transparency, fairness, honesty, and an ability to design systems and processes for humans. 

5. The Ability To Work With People and Technology Together

With the increasing influence of technology on businesses both within and beyond the tech industry, the most effective leaders of tomorrow will understand how to delegate between humans and machines in a way that maximizes the capabilities of both.

“The obligation of leaders is to step back and look at not just how you apply AI to the business, but how you change a process,” says Daugherty. “Look at the roles that people play in that process and apply technology that optimizes the value of the people in those roles.”

While some look at emerging technologies with fear and anxiety, the most future-ready leaders are excited to integrate them into their workforce, explains Wong.

“The best leaders love the benefits of the two working together,” he says. “They love AI, they love bots, they love anything that makes them better, helps them make better decisions, and helps them see things more clearly.” 

Air travel is already a miserable and undignified experience, as United Airlines recently made painfully clear. Be prepared for another indignity: The White House is considering new rules that will prevent passengers from carrying laptops aboard flights from London and several European cities to the U.S. And such a proposal wouldn’t just inconvenience customers; it has the potential to devastate the airline industry by driving away customers and leading to a sharp drop-off in bookings and profits.

A description of the new proposal was buried in all the coverage of President Trump’s latest controversy–divulging classified intelligence to Russian officials about an ISIS plot to develop bombs that could be hidden in laptops and iPads. The proposed security measure vastly expands the ban imposed by the Department of Homeland Security in March on passengers from 10 predominantly Muslim countries from carrying devices larger than a cellphone on inbound flights to the U.S. That was vigorously opposed on civil rights grounds but this new proposal would likely cause chaos at airports, say travel experts.

The laptop ban is currently being discussed by aviation authorities in both the U.S. and the E.U. As of right now, they have decided not to proceed with it. One unnamed official told the Associated Press that the proposal is “off the table.” But given how volatile the White House has been in recent months, it’s unclear whether it is really being nixed or what other measures might be put in place to protect passengers. More talks are scheduled for next week in Washington, D.C.

“If this ban is expanded, I’m concerned that we are in for a summer of international travel hell,” says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and principal at Atmosphere Research, writes in an email. “Airports will become zoos. The additional security screening time may require passengers to arrive at airports four or more hours in advance of flights.”

As anyone who’s traveled on a plane since 9/11 knows, boarding a flight has become increasingly laborious in recent years due to all the new security measures adopted after the latest terrorist threat. At most American airports, boarding a flight now involves taking off your shoes in the security line, going through a body scanning machine, and throwing out liquids in containers larger than 3.4 ounces. The ban would add an additional nuisance to the the two-thirds of transatlantic passengers who travel with an electronic device larger than a cell phone. Clive Irving writing in The Daily Beast, says this ban would effectively be a win for terrorists because they would be, “inflicting the most serious disruption of air travel since the 9/11 attacks.”

It’s also worth noting that transferring electronics into the plane’s cargo compartment is also unsafe, since lithium ion batteries are known to occasionally catch fire when they are damaged or short-circuit. A concentration of these batteries will only increase the ferocity of a fire. Some critics point out that the danger of a battery blaze might outweigh the dangers posed by potential terrorists.

For airlines, the ban could be financially devastating. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that the ban would cost more than $1 billion to implement, when you add up lost productivity and travel delays. And airlines are worried that many travelers will simply cancel their plans altogether or find alternative means to get to their destination.

“An expanded electronics ban would disproportionately affect airlines’ most profitable customers–business travelers,” Harteveldt continues. “Within this group, three high-value, high-volume customer groups–investment banking, consulting, and technology professionals–are likely to be affected. These travelers are often required to keep their company-issued electronics with them on a plane, and are told not to check laptops or other electronics. As a result, these travelers may cancel trips or their companies may explore chartering aircraft.”

Alexandre de Juniac, the head of IATA, has suggested to aviation officials in an open letter that there might be better ways of dealing with this impending threat. For instance, airports could use screening devices that detect traces of explosives in laptops or train security staff to detect unusual behavior. “The current situation is not acceptable,” de Juniac says. “We must find a better way. And governments must act quickly.”

Thanks to plenty of research, we know that more than half of American workers are burned out or just not into their jobs and would happily jump ship to work at a company with a better culture (and a bigger salary).

Which companies are those jobseekers eyeing and where are they landing? LinkedIn offers up a list of 50 of the most in-demand companies to work for.

The most-desired workplaces include:

1. Alphabet
2. Amazon
3. Facebook
4. Salesforce
5. Uber
6. Tesla
7. Apple
8. Time Warner
9. Walt Disney
10. Comcast

LinkedIn says companies were awarded a blended score based on the behavior of the social network’s users–and there were billions of actions by its 500+ million members to mine. LinkedIn analyzed metrics including job application numbers, the number of professionals who viewed a company’s career page, and the amount of time people remained employed at each company.

The top of the list isn’t all that surprising–those tech giants have dominated other “best of” lists pretty consistently in the past. Uber’s recent controversies and toxic culture might make it seem like a bit of a stretch for fifth place. However, LinkedIn’s senior editor Caroline Fairchild addressed this seemingly contradictory ranking by pointing out that year over year, the number of people who view and apply to open positions at Uber is in fact up by more than 35%–but in the aftermath of Susan Fowler’s blog post detailing discrimination and sexual harassment at Uber, those views and applications dropped by 15%.

“When it comes to job applications, views on job postings and retention of new employees, Uber ranked higher than top brands like Apple, Tesla, and the Walt Disney Co. If you look at the number of people Uber is poaching from other top companies, the ride-hailing Goliath is luring more than Amazon, Apple, and its top competitor, Lyft,” Fairchild writes.

It’s interesting to note that benefits and perks outside the traditional offerings of health insurance and 401(k) plans are cited at many of the top companies.

Coming in at #17, Twitter doesn’t track vacation days. Edelman (#48) offers an “Escape” program that provides a select group of employees with $1,500 and a week off to either “live a dream” or “give a dream.”

Other employers are taking the responsibility for gender parity and paid leave into their own hands in the absence of a government mandate. Second-place Amazon offers “leave share,” which allows employees to give six weeks of paid leave to a spouse or partner who isn’t eligible for parental leave at their own employer. Number-four-ranked Salesforce spent $6 million to give women and men equal pay–which translated to raises for 11% of its employees.

Then there’s #33 ranked Morgan Stanley, where a 12-week paid internship program is offered for experienced workers who want to come back to the workforce after an extended break. Since the program launched, more than 60% of participants have received offers to join the bank’s staff.

Finally, as Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief, pronounces: “Size matters.” Americans want to work for big companies. “On average, companies on the U.S. list have 66,279 global employees, roughly 20% more than the list’s global average,” he writes. “Amazon (#2) leads the U.S. list in number of employees, with 341,000 workers.”

Well over a year ago, I backed a Kickstarter campaign for a clever gizmo intended to make an iPhone look and work more like a point-and-shoot camera. I pledged $100 and took note of the fact that its creators planned to ship their invention in November 2016. Then they reported that they had run into manufacturing issues once the device went into production. They pushed their ship date from November to January. Which turned into April. And then, last week, I got an email notification that my reward was finally on its way.

The timing was uncanny: When that notification slid onto my screen, I was on the phone with Scott Miller, the CEO of a Boston-based company called Dragon Innovation. Dragon helps companies deal with the infinitely complex challenge of turning ideas into products that can be manufactured within the constraints of a particular budget and timetable. And it’s part of an upcoming program from Kickstarter called Hardware Studio. Launching in September, it’s designed to help the the creators of hardware campaigns bring their projects to life with a minimum of surprises. Along with Dragon, Avnet–an enormous distributor of electronic components–is teaming with Kickstarter on the effort. (Kickstarter arch-rival Indiegogo already has similar partnerships with Riverwood Solutions and Arrow Electronics.)

When products funded on Kickstarter run into problems, it’s often because of lack of planning–and planning is especially tough to do for the sort of small grassroots teams responsible for many crowdfunding campaigns, who are often trying to accomplish something they’ve never done before. The good news is that this is a solvable problem, especially if such a team can map out a plan in consultation with experts who have deep knowledge of how to bring products to market on time and within budget.

“The whole trick is doing all of this work up front,” says Miller, who spent years in China working on manufacturing issues for iRobot, creator of the Roomba. “Once the campaign launches, it’s an incredibly busy time, and once it closes you have a commitment to doing what you said you’re going to do.”

“We’re really providing [creators] support before they launch,” adds Julio Terra, Kickstarter’s director of design and technology. “So when they click ‘Start,’ their rewards are properly priced, and they have a really clear understanding of all the steps required to bring projects to fruition and the schedules associated with that.”

Rise Of The Crowdfunded Gadget

When Kickstarter launched in 2009, the initial goal was to help artists such as musicians get up-front funding for ambitious creations. It soon turned out that the crowdfunding model was applicable to gadgets, too: According to Kickstarter lore, the moment that made that clear was a 2010 campaign for the Glif, a smartphone kickstand/tripod adapter. Within a couple of years, ambitious consumer-electronics products such as Pebble’s smartwatch were raising millions on the site. They still do, to the tune of $1 billion in total funding over the years for tech and design projects.

Failing to meet original schedules is so common for hardware projects that I’ve never paid much attention to the dates associated with campaigns I’ve backed, choosing to instead think of my rewards as happy surprises. Along with deadline trouble, campaigns sometimes suffer from budgeting woes. And worst-case scenario, that sort of bungled planning leads to meltdowns such as the Coolest Cooler, which raised more than $13 million on Kickstarter in 2014 and says it still can’t afford to send out coolers to all the campaign backers who pledged enough money to get one.

All along, Kickstarter has not been comfy with the notion that anyone might mistake the site for a gadget store. (In case anyone was unsure on that point, its founders titled a 2012 blog post“Kickstarter is Not a Store.”) But the company is trying to steer hardware and design campaigns in a direction that keeps Kickstarter feeling like Kickstarter and leaves campaign backers happy they put up their money, without being too heavy-handed about it. Hardware Studio is following Request for Projects, another new effort, launched last month, that encourages hardware and design campaigns to focus on unique, creative projects rather than me-too stuff.

Hardware Studio will offer two tiers of assistance for creators in the early stages of readying a campaign. For starters, anyone who’s putting together a campaign will be able to participate in Hardware Studio Toolkit, a community site with webinars, tutorials, and other resources put together by Dragon, Avnet, Kickstarter, and veteran creators.

A higher level of service, Hardware Studio Connection, will offer personalized “office hours” advice from Dragon and Avnet staffers, plus discounts on components. Participants will also get access to a Dragon online tool called Product Planner that helps hardware companies budget time and money. Kickstarter may also provide extra promotional attention to campaigns spawned from Hardware Studio Connection once they’ve launched.

Creators must apply to get into Hardware Studio Connection, and Kickstarter will let Dragon and Avnet choose who makes the cut. “It needs to be a project that is complex enough electronically,” says Terra. “Beyond complexity, they need to have a certain level of ambition.” To qualify, products will need to have progressed well beyond the raw conceptual stage by the time they become a Kickstarter campaign.

The sort of assistance that can come out of Hardware Studio will start with fundamentals such as identifying the components needed to create a product; determining the cost of acquiring them all; and tallying a total so that you know how much you’ll need to crowdfund. And it will range up to big decisions such as figuring out where to go for manufacturing–which is most typically done in China, although small batches can effectively be produced in the U.S., according to Miller. “Finding the right factory is almost like finding the right spouse,” he says. “If it’s done right, you’re going to have a very long partnership.” (Dragon has worked with many Kickstarter campaigns on such matters, including Pebble–which, even though it eventually sold itself for parts to Fitbit, was one of crowdfunding’s biggest success stories with more than 2 million smartwatches sold.)

If Hardware Studio can help campaigns run more predictably, its benefits for creators, backers, and Kickstarter itself are obvious. For Kickstarter’s two partners, the initiative offers the potential to establish relationships with crowdfunders who might become thriving businesses interested in paying for Avnet’s parts and Dragon’s help on an ongoing basis.

“This gives Avnet and Dragon access to this amazing pool of startups from a leads and pipeline standpoint,” says Terra. “It’s an amazing opportunity.”

Many high achievers share a dirty little secret: Deep down they feel like complete frauds–their accomplishments the result of serendipitous luck.

This psychological phenomenon, known as impostor syndrome, reflects a belief that you’re an inadequate and incompetent failure, despite evidence that indicates you’re skilled and quite successful.

In short, it’s a hot mess of harmfulness. It can also take various forms, depending on a person’s background, personality, and circumstances. If you’re familiar with the feeling of waiting for those around you to “find you out,” it might be helpful to consider what type of impostor you are so you can problem-solve accordingly.

Expert on the subject, Valerie Young, has categorized it into subgroups:

1. The Perfectionist
2. The Superwoman/man
3. The Natural Genius
4. The Rugged Individualist
5. The Expert

In her book, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer From the Imposter Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It, Young builds on decades of research studying fraudulent feelings among high achievers.

Drawing on the work of psychologists Pauline Rose Clance, PhD, and Suzanne Imes, PhD, Young uncovered several “competence types”–or internal rules that people who struggle with confidence generally follow. This categorization is often overlooked in the conversation, but her reading of it can be really helpful in identifying bad habits or patterns that may be holding you back from your full potential.

Below is a summary of the competence types Young identifies so you can see if you recognize yourself. I also provide some examples you might relate to in your day-to-day life, as well as questions you can ask yourself.

Related:How Feeling Like A Fraud Has Helped My Career 

1. The Perfectionist

Perfectionism and impostor syndrome often go hand-in-hand. Think about it: Perfectionists set excessively high goals for themselves, and when they fail to reach a goal, they experience major self-doubt and worry about measuring up. Whether they realize it or not, this group can also be control freaks, feeling like if they want something done right, they have to do it themselves.

Not sure if this applies to you? Ask yourself these questions:

• Have you ever been accused of being a micromanager?
• Do you have great difficulty delegating? Even when you’re able to do so, do you feel frustrated and disappointed in the results?
• When you miss the (insanely high) mark on something, do you accuse yourself of “not being cut out” for your job and ruminate on it for days?
• Do you feel like your work must be 100% perfect, 100% of the time?

For this type, success is rarely satisfying because they believe they could’ve done even better. But that’s neither productive nor healthy. Owning and celebrating achievements is essential if you want to avoid burnout, find contentment, and cultivate self-confidence.

Learn to take your mistakes in stride, viewing them as a natural part of the process. In addition, push yourself to act before you’re ready. Force yourself to start the project you’ve been planning for months. Truth is, there will never be the “perfect time,” and your work will never be 100% flawless. The sooner you’re able to accept that, the better off you’ll be.

Related: Three Steps For Breaking The Impostor Syndrome Cycle

2. The Superwoman/man

Since people who experience this phenomenon are convinced they’re phonies among real-deal colleagues, they often push themselves to work harder and harder to measure up. But this is just a false cover-up for their insecurities, and the work overload may harm not only their own mental health, but also their relationships with others.

Not sure if this applies to you?

• Do you stay later at the office than the rest of your team, even past the point that you’ve completed that day’s necessary work?
• Do you get stressed when you’re not working and find downtime completely wasteful?
• Have you let your hobbies and passions fall by the wayside, sacrificed to work?
• Do you feel like you haven’t truly earned your title (despite numerous degrees and achievements), so you feel pressed to work harder and longer than those around you to prove your worth?

Impostor workaholics are actually addicted to the validation that comes from working, not to the work itself. Start training yourself to veer away from external validation. No one should have more power to make you feel good about yourself than you–even your boss when they give your project the stamp of approval. On the flip side, learn to take constructive criticism seriously, not personally.

As you become more attuned to internal validation and able to nurture your inner confidence that states you’re competent and skilled, you’ll be able to ease off the gas as you gauge how much work is reasonable.

3. The Natural Genius

People who struggle with this, who are also natural “geniuses,” judge success based on their abilities as opposed to their efforts. In other words, if they have to work hard at something, they assume they must be bad at it.

These types of impostors set their internal bar impossibly high, just like perfectionists. But natural genius types don’t just judge themselves based on ridiculous expectations, they also judge themselves based on getting things right on the first try. When they’re not able to do something quickly or fluently, their alarm sounds.

Not sure if this applies to you?

Are you used to excelling without much effort?

• Do you have a track record of getting “straight A’s” or “gold stars” in everything you do?
• Were you told frequently as a child that you were the “smart one” in your family or peer group?
• Do you dislike the idea of having a mentor, because you can handle things on your own?
• When you’re faced with a setback, does your confidence tumble because not performing well provokes a feeling of shame?
• Do you often avoid challenges because it’s so uncomfortable to try something you’re not great at?

To move past this, try seeing yourself as a work in progress. Accomplishing great things involves lifelong learning and skill building–for everyone, even the most confident people. Rather than beating yourself up when you don’t reach your impossibly high standards, identify specific, changeable behaviors that you can improve over time.

For example, if you want to have more impact at the office, it’s much more productive to focus on honing your presentation skills than swearing off speaking up in meetings as something you’re “just not good at.”

4. The Rugged Individualist

Sufferers who feel as though asking for help reveals their phoniness are what Young calls rugged individualists. It’s okay to be independent, but not to the extent that you refuse assistance so that you can prove your worth.

Not sure if this applies to you? Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you firmly feel that you need to accomplish things on your own?
• “I don’t need anyone’s help.” Does that sound like you?
• Do you frame requests in terms of the requirements of the project, rather than your needs as a person?

5. The Expert

People who fall into this competence type may feel like they somehow tricked their employer into hiring them. They deeply fear being exposed as inexperienced or unknowledgeable.

• Do you shy away from applying to job postings unless you meet every single educational requirement?
• Are you constantly seeking out trainings or certifications because you think you need to improve your skills in order to succeed?
• Even if you’ve been in your role for some time, can you relate to feeling like you still don’t know “enough”?

Do you shudder when someone says you’re an expert?

It’s true that there’s always more to learn. Striving to bulk up your skill set can certainly help you make strides professionally and keep you competitive in the job market. But taken too far, the tendency to endlessly seek out more information can actually be a form of procrastination. Start practicing just-in-time learning. This means acquiring a skill when you need it–for example, if your responsibilities change–rather than hoarding knowledge for (false) comfort.

Realize there’s no shame in asking for help when you need it. If you don’t know how to do something, ask a coworker. If you can’t figure out how to solve a problem, seek advice from a supportive supervisor, or even a career coach. Mentoring junior colleagues or volunteering can be a great way to discover your inner expert. When you share what you know, it not only benefits others, but also helps you heal your fraudulent feelings.

No matter the specific profile, if you struggle with confidence, you’re far from alone. To take one example, studies suggest 70% of people experience impostor syndrome at some point in their career.

If you’ve experienced it at any point in your career, you’ve at one point or another chalked up your accomplishments to chance, charm, connections, or another external factor. How unfair and unkind is that? Take today as your opportunity to start accepting and embracing your capabilities.

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

More From The Muse:

• How To Banish Imposter Syndrome And Embrace Everything You Deserve 
• Feel Like A Fraud? This Short Quiz Will Reveal How Bad Your Imposter Syndrome Is 
• The 3 Best Moves To Make When You’re Dealing With Imposter Syndrome 

A few years ago, Bill Gates annoyed some people in the renewables industry by saying that solar and wind were effectively expensive luxuries that only richer countries could afford. In the developing world, he said, dirtier forms of power might have to take priority, even if it meant exacerbating climate change (especially as most emissions come from advanced economies anyway). Expanding energy access was too important to worry about exactly what form that access might take.

In mid-2017, that dilemma–between electricity access and climate change–is starting to look like a false one. Prices for solar and wind are coming down dramatically, putting such technologies within reach of some of the poorest people in the world. At the same time, basic household lighting and appliances are growing more efficient, meaning the same small solar systems are gaining in usefulness.

“That tension that was definitely there a few years ago has dissipated and people are seeing [renewables] as a positive opportunity,” says Vivien Foster, an energy economist at the World Bank, in an interview with Fast Company. “The cost of clean energy has come down so much that it no longer looks unaffordable and more like commonplace self-interest.” She says a 40 watt home solar system that five years ago would have powered a lightbulb and charged only a phone can today run three lightbulbs, a phone charger, a radio, a small TV, and a digital fan. The cost of a home solar panel system, plus battery and standard appliances (like a TV, radio, fan) has fallen by up to three-quarters since 2009, World Bank statistics show.

That’s not to say the energy access challenge isn’t still immense. The bank’s latest report shows that 1.06 billion people (about 15% of humanity) still lack access to grid power. Though the figures are somewhat ambiguous–they don’t account for forms of distributed power, like small diesel generation or home solar–it’s clear that electrification is far behind where it was supposed to be by now. At current rates, the bank doesn’t see countries meeting Sustainable Development Goal 7, which calls for universal electricity access by 2030. It forecasts only 91% of the world with grid power by then–a deficit of approximately 750 million people. India alone still has more than 250 million without reliable electricity.

Extending electricity grids is expensive, and low-income families who use little power are not the most attractive customers. Micro-grids that localize supply and demand are more scalable, says Foster, while pay-as-you-go solar systems–where households pay off the cost through mobile payments–offer independence from the grid altogether. “As you get into rural areas, off-grid technologies now have quite a strong cost advantage and increasingly they’re providing more quality of service,” Foster says. “People used to think solar was a basic service. But with the declining cost and the higher efficiency of light bulbs and other appliances, you can actually get quite a reasonable level of service through a modestly-sized system.”

Foster points to East African countries like Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda as examples for the rest of the developing world to follow. Each has a national plan embracing clean energy as a way of filling in grid access and has encouraged startups to set up businesses targeting underpowered populations. Well-funded groups like Off Grid Electric, Mobisol and M-Kopa have since expanded aggressively through the region. “Governments have to think about the full spectrum of electrification options and don’t only think about the grid,” Foster says. “They can lay the groundwork for these off-grid technologies to help accelerate the pace countries can electrify.”

That includes creating spatial maps according to population density, effectively demarcating markets for companies to operate in. Urban centers are normally most financially viable for grid expansion, while dispersed rural areas are more suitable for fully off-grid options. Micro-grids–which combine several generation types and can be as small as 10 homes or encompass whole villages with tens of thousands of people–can take up the slack in the middle. “There are plenty of examples of small-scale private companies coming in to provide mini-grids or solar home systems and then two years later the government shows up with a subsidized grid extension, and their investments are stranded,” Foster says.

At the same time, she recommends government deregulate prices (some countries force off-grid operators to charge the same as for grid electricity) and to set minimum standards for clean energy hardware, so as to build confidence in its reliability. The report argues that energy access is a foundational human need and that many of the other Sustainable Development Goals flow from it, including improving health and education in poor communities. For perhaps the first time, it’s now possible to get electricity to everyone at a price they can afford, thus spreading many associated humanitarian benefits.

You can only get so far by thinking about stuff. Sometimes you just have to go for it. Maybe “going for it” for you means landing a full-time job someplace abroad, or maybe it’s becoming a digital nomad–traveling around the world continuously and working for yourself. But whichever path you’ve got your eye on, you’ll eventually get to a point where you’ve done a ton of research, lots of mulling it over, and now feel both really inspired and completely hopeless.

This is precisely the moment where a purposeful trip overseas can be a real breakthrough. If you’re dead set on making the type of career change that requires a valid passport, taking two weeks or longer to do some strategic networking can be hugely beneficial. Based on what I’ve seen work in the past–and after four years living and working abroad myself–here’s how I’d recommend going about it.

If You Want To Get Hired Overseas

If you’re looking for an international job, there are a few things you need to do before going on your recon mission.

Step 1: Decide where. First, you need to know exactly where you want to move. “South America” is not an acceptable search radius, nor is “maybe Colombia or Brazil.” At the very worst it can be “either Bogotá or Rio, I’m not sure which,” but any more than two specific destinations and you’ll spread yourself too thin. It’s impossible to plan a purposeful trip when you haven’t narrowed down to the specific place where you want to live and work.

Step 2: Research, research, research. Next, spend a solid month or two doing some serious homework– getting a sense of the demand for the two to three roles you know you’re qualified to fill in that market; identifying 30-40 companies (yes, that many!) where those types of roles are available over there; speaking directly with locals and expatriates (ideally people who work at those same target organizations) about those opportunities; joining Facebook groups for expats in the region where jobs are posted regularly; and asking everyone you know for everyone they know who lives or has ever lived there.

After a couple months of this, you should be getting some traction. How will you know? Because you’ll have gotten a helpful response from a recruiter or two, or maybe even a few invitations for interviews. Several expats will have given you useful advice over the phone, and you’ll have assembled a list of friends of friends who live there now and have been friendly over email. But probably no job offers yet, and no concrete hope of getting a visa yet. And that’s okay–this is enough to work with.

So you save up a bit of money, ask your boss for 10-14 days off, and book a flight. But you’re not going on vacation–this is going to be hard work.

Step 3: Build a grueling itinerary. Before departing, you ideally want to have a few interviews at prospective companies on your calendar, but it’s okay if you don’t. Either way, you set up coffee and lunch dates with anyone and everyone you know in that city. You shake your network like you’re trying to get the last crumbs out of the last bag of chips on Earth. You search for local events in your field in that city. You contact recruiters.

You schedule yourself in for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a real human being who lives in that city every single day. And every single night, you have a networking event to go to, followed by a drink at an expat bar to meet even more people. You go on Tinder if you have to and line up dates with people in your field. This is all in.

Related:Six Ways I Built A Career Traveling The World In My 20s

If you can’t get this rigorous of a schedule locked in before boarding that plane, you haven’t done enough homework–stay home until you’re able to put together a social calendar that would suit the Duchess of Wales traveling on royal business. Once in your city of choice, you go do all your interviews and meetings, connect face-to-face with as many human beings as possible, keep track of these new contacts, and get as much of a footing in the market as you can. You meet your friend’s cousin’s sister-in-law if you have to because she just might know someone who’s hiring for an account manager, and that could be your lucky break.

Step 4: Work your newfound network. This strategy boosts your chances of coming home with an actual job offer in hand, but that’s not the goal entirely. If you come back with 20 new contacts in the expat or local community who know your face and name, that’s still huge. Maybe they can put you directly in contact with their boss or their head of HR about positions you’re qualified for, or tip you off when they’re hiring–either way, you’re going to be in much better shape than when you were sitting in New York and blindly sending out resumes to international employers.

These scouting trips, when done right, can be really successful. A few years back, the boyfriend of a colleague of mine flew out to visit us in Doha for two weeks. He was an experienced web designer and film producer from Mexico looking to score a creative role in a Qatari fashion company–a super specific objective (that’s a good thing). He’d done his homework beforehand, and after two weeks on the ground had scored four job offers and a signed contract. He’s still there.

If You Want To Become A Digital Nomad

If you’re more interested in setting up a remote business or working for yourself while traveling abroad, this is a smart approach for you, too.

Related:Seven Jobs That Let You Live And Work Abroad As Your Own Boss

Step 1: Find a digital nomad hotspot. Take two weeks (or as long as you can) and ship yourself off to a digital nomad hub like Chiang Mai or Bali. If you can afford it, enroll in a program geared to helping people like you develop remote businesses, like the ones offered by the The Crew or Hubud. Or rent a coworking space and systematically get to know people who are already nomadic and working there. How are they earning their income? How did they get started?

Step 2: Learn everything you can. This is crucial networking–but think of it as an investigation of the lifestyle and business mechanics more so than an as exploration of a specific locale where digital nomads typically gather. You may not want to wind up in this spot long-term, but you’re heading there for the intel.

Step 3: Add contacts to your network. Don’t interrogate anyone, just go for some beers. Put yourself in a position where you can sit next to somebody at lunch and introduce yourself. Go to parties in Ubud and strike up friendly conversations with everyone you meet for a couple weeks. You just might run into someone who happens to have a killer e-commerce business and gives you the inspiration you need to launch your own venture.

This kind of trip requires much less planning, but it’s no less strategic. If you can’t leave with a robust base of firsthand contacts, and knowledge from people who’ve already achieved the specific goal you have in mind, you haven’t quite succeeded.

Related:The Digital Nomad’s Guide To Working From Anywhere On Earth

No matter what type of international opportunity you’re looking for, sometimes getting on a plane is the logical next step. It’s not about hopping a one-way flight after you’ve quit your job, though–glamorous as it might sound–but a sensible roundtrip ticket for a well-planned networking mission can help you stick your foot in the door of your dream life.

In my experience, there’s no substitute for meeting real people who already do what you want to do, in the place where you want to do it.

Elaina Giolando is an international project manager and digital nomad who’s lived and worked in more than 50 countries. She writes about global careers, unconventional lifestyle design, and meaningful travel on Life Before 30.

Google’s announcement yesterday that it is working with two partners on the creation of stand-alone virtual-reality headsets that require neither being connected to a smartphone nor being tethered to a PC means that the next generation of consumer VR is coming no later than year’s end. It’s also the latest example of one company designing the software behind VR headsets and then turning those designs over to outside hardware manufacturers to build consumer devices.

Virtual reality is expected to be a $38 billion industry by 2026, according to Greenlight Insights. Currently, there are effectively four levels of consumer VR, all of which require an external computing device, and which range in price from $15 to $800:

• Google Cardboard, on the low end, works with iPhone or Android
• Mobile VR headsets, like Samsung’s Gear VR (powered by software developed by Facebook-owned Oculus) and Google’s Daydream View, both of which work only with Android phones
• Sony’s PlayStation VR, which works with the PlayStation 4
• On the high end, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, both of which must be tethered to a gaming-quality PC

It’s not known exactly what the new standalone VR devices–which will be manufactured initially by HTC’s Vive division and Lenovo using a reference design from Google and based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chipset–will cost. But Clay Bavor, Google’s VP of VR and AR, said they will likely be around the same as “desktop devices,” meaning the $599 Rift from Facebook-owned Oculus or the $799 Vive, both of which also require a pricey, powerful PC.

The precise timetable for these Google-powered stand-alone VR headsets also remains unknown, but the company says they will both go on sale by year’s end. Oculus is also developing a stand-alone headset, which it has code-named Santa Cruz. It’s not yet known how much that device will cost, or when it will be available.

The new Google software for standalone headsets is the culmination of several years’ work by people on the teams of both Google’s Daydream and Tango–its augmented reality platform. In essence, Bavor said at a press briefing, the project connects dots between Daydream and Tango. It does so by combining what Google has already built in virtual reality–a lightweight, easy-to-use VR system–with Tango’s ability to see and map three-dimensional space.

The result is a Daydream-ready VR headset that offers positional tracking, meaning that users can physically move around in virtual environments rather than simply being in the center of a 360-degree scene. Low-end and mobile VR systems like Cardboard, Gear VR, and Daydream View offer the latter, while the PlayStation VR, Rift, and Vive offer the former. Oculus’s Santa Cruz prototype also includes positional tracking.

The new devices will run all existing Daydream apps–of which there are currently about 150–while new apps that are built for WorldSense will not work on existing Daydream-ready headsets.

Google’s Tango, which is now available on devices such as the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and Asus ZenPhone AR, uses internal sensors to map out 3D space. That technology is at the heart of the new stand-alone VR headsets. But they’ll utilize a new implementation of that technology, known as WorldSense, that will enable the positional tracking. It uses two cameras built into the headset, rather than the single camera that powers Tango devices.

Google also unveiled a new tool for Daydream, known as Seurat–named for the French painter–that should be quite popular with developers of graphics-intensive content. Seurat was designed to make it possible to run cinematic-quality computer-generated content on the new positional-tracking headsets, allowing users the freedom of movement within scenes that are powered by WorldSense.

As an example of that, Google is showing a short demo based on Rogue One, the recent Star Wars spin-off. In the demo, which utilizes millions of polygons provided by Lucasfilm’s ILMxLab, users can walk around a spaceship bay with robots wandering by, with real-time reflections on the polished floor looking just as they would in real life.

Seurat supports content created in professional-strength graphics tools such as Maya and game engines like Unity, meaning there’s a wide variety of potential implementations of the tool. Google says it will start out with content provided by partners like ILMxLab, but will eventually expand beyond that.

The Partner Approach

Companies that develop VR headsets have chosen two models of blending software with hardware. On the one hand, there are devices where both are made by the same company–think the Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and even Google’s own Daydream View headset.

But Bavor said that the View was meant more to help jumpstart the Daydream developer ecosystem than to signal that Google wants to be a major player in VR hardware manufacturing.

That’s why the company has no plans to make a stand-alone headset itself, and will instead turn to partners like HTC and Lenovo. Similarly, Oculus developed the software that powers Samsung’s mobile Gear VR headset, while Valve designed the system used by HTC’s Vive.

For now, it’s also far too early to know how stand-alone devices like those Google has announced, or Santa Cruz, will do. Though they don’t require being tethered to a PC, they will still likely be expensive.

But they do offer one other big advantage compared to every other existing VR system except Google’s own bare-bones Cardboard–they don’t need a Windows PC or an Android phone. In other words, Apple fans won’t be shut out of the world of VR as they largely are today.

“Turns out a lot of people have iPhones,” Bavor said.

Sitting in a field in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, the 23-foot-high Smog Free Tower looks a little like a giant fan. It’s actually a park-scale air purifier, designed to pull in the city’s pollution, filter it, and create a bubble of breathable air for people passing by. In new tests, researchers found that the device can help–though only in a small area.

At last year’s Google I/O keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai laid out the company’s vision for a new era of AI-first computing. AI mattered at least as much at this year’s keynote on Wednesday. But instead of being a vision, it was more of a fact of life. That’s because it was everywhere–in Android, Google Photos, the Google Home speaker, the Google Assistant (which will add a machine-vision feature called Google Lens), and more.

After the keynote, I caught up with Google senior VP of engineering John Giannandrea–who, though he didn’t appear onstage, is deeply involved in all of the above efforts and others as the company’s lead for AI. “Last year, we talked about becoming an AI-first company and people weren’t entirely sure what we meant,” he told me. With this year’s announcements, it’s not only understandable but tangible.

The news from I/O that Giannandrea and I discussed was as wide-ranging as the keynote itself:

Intelligence Everywhere

At I/O, Google announced Google.ai–which is maybe less of an actual thing than a statement (and accompanying website) designed to remind the world of the company’s ambitious and far-flung efforts in AI. Giannandrea calls it “an umbrella brand” that shows off Google’s work in hopes of inspiring others to build upon it. “We’re saying, ‘Come use this amazing stuff, see what you can do,” he explains.

It’s not just about Google’s own apps, services, and gadgets. The AI techniques created by Giannandrea’s team may make their way into Google products such as Lens; be turned into on-demand Google Cloud offerings that can power other companies’ software and services; be leveraged in research efforts such as the company’s work to identify breast-cancer tumors; and be open-sourced so that anyone can use and tweak them for purposes beyond Google’s own ambitions.

“We see our job as evangelizing this new shift in computing,” Giannandrea says.

Giving Google A Lens

I knew that Google Lens–which will be part of both the Assistant and Google Photos–scratches a long-standing Google itch because I remember Google Googles, an app which launched way, way back in 2010. Conceptually, they’re the same thing: You aim your phone’s camera at something in the real world, and AI understands what it’s seeing and does something useful for you. It’s just that some of the things Lens will do–such as reading a Wi-Fi password off the sticker on the back of a Wi-Fi router and then logging you in–would have sounded like fantasy in 2010. (Heck, that sounds a tad fanciful even in 2017.)

Giannandrea says that Lens isn’t the result of any particular breakthrough, but rather slow and steady process in machine vision–and, particularly, the fact that the technology is getting better at avoiding false-positive and false-negative identifications. “Computers have just been getting better at seeing,” he says.

AI (Not) In The Cloud

If you think of Google performing AI, you’re likely to envision a data center full of servers crunching numbers in the cloud. On that front, the I/O keynote included the announcement of a second-generation version of the ultra-powerful machine learning-optimized hardware it calls a Cloud TPU. (“It’s exciting to have 180 teraflops of hardware devoted to learning,” Giannandrea cheerfully says.) But Google is also at work on AI-infused technologies that run directly on mobile devices, an approach that has gotten more effective as it’s learned how to perform AI more efficiently and gadgets have gotten more powerful GPUs, the chips that are suited to the high-speed calculations required by AI.

TensorFlow Lite, a new offshoot of Google’s open-source TensorFlow software for creating machine-learning applications, runs directly on Android devices, enabling features such as new features in Android O that are smart enough, for instance, to notice that the text you’re trying to highlight is an address. It wouldn’t work nearly as smoothly if it had to talk to a server across an internet connection.

“You want to do machine learning on the device as much as you possibly can,” Giannandrea says. “It’s lower latency, it’s closer to the user, it’s distributed.”

Getting It Right, Again And Again

Google Home recently gained the ability to distinguish between up to six different people’s voices–a key upgrade because it unlocks the potential for the Google Assistant service to know who’s talking and respond with more customized information, such as details about travel plans drawn from a specific person’s Gmail, for instance. I knew that telling voices apart was an impressive feat because my colleague Jared Newman wrote an entire story in March about how hard it was.

“We were pretty proud to get that out the door,” Giannandrea told me. He added that the challenge, as with many uses of machine learning, is not to prove it can work in a lab environment, but to make it so rock-solid reliable that it’s ready to use in the real world and is more likely to impress people rather than tick them off. “It’s all precision recall,” he says. “When it doesn’t work, it can be embarassing.”

Matching People With Jobs

Pichai concluded the I/O keynote by previewing Google for Jobs, an upcoming career search engine that uses machine learning to understand job listings–a new approach that is valuable, Giannandrea says, even though looking for a job has been a largely digital activity for years. “They don’t do a very good job of classifying the jobs,” Giannandrea says. “It’s not just that I’m looking for part-time work within five miles of my house–I’m looking for an accounting job that involves bookkeeping.”

I wondered if the fact that Google Jobs was the keynote’s final bit of news was an oblique acknowledgement of concerns that AI will eliminate jobs on an unprecedented level in the coming years. Declaring himself “pretty optimistic” about AI’s potential to make the world a better place, Giannandrea said that countering dystopian fears wasn’t the intent. “It’s really a reflection of the fact we want to make tools that are useful for everybody,” he says. “There’s a perception that technology isn’t as relevnt for every demographic. We strongly believe technology should help everybody, no matter what they’re trying to do.”

Challenges To Come

Google has worked its AI into so many aspects of so many of its ventures over the past year that I asked Giannandrea whether he thought it could keep up the pace in the years to come. “I actually think we’re speeding up the rate of acceleration,” he told me. “But it’s obvious there are problems we don’t have solutions for.” For instance, as uncannily effective as Google search can be, and despite the power of its knowledge graph, computers don’t truly understand what humans write. Google would like to teach them to “read anything and summarize anything,” Giannandrea says.

Another big challenge is to create machine-learning technologies that can understand facts about the world with less training. Giannandrea notes that his 4-year-old daughter saw an old-school penny-farthing bicycle, knew it was a bike, and–once he’d told her about it–was set to identify penny-farthings from then on. Today’s computers would need a lot more data to learn the same thing.

“We’d have to show them 100,000 penny-farthings and tell them it’s a bike,” Giannandrea says. Then–looking on the bright side–he adds that “once they’d seen 100,000, they’d probably be better at identifying them than humans are.”

If America ever does take the radical step of introducing a universal basic income (UBI)–that is, a regular payment to all citizens to cover their basic needs–presumably the idea will need something like universal support. To pay for such a scheme might cost more than 1 trillion dollars, and generally America doesn’t spend that sort of money unless the people are broadly onboard (except perhaps during war time).

So far, say filmmakers Deia Schlosberg and Conrad Shaw, basic income has yet to make sufficient headway beyond Silicon Valley or Washington, D.C., where it has plenty of supporters. And the way it’s discussed tends to be dry and serious, rather than human and urgent. To change that, they want to make a documentary following 20 UBI recipients (paid for by the filmmakers) across the country over two years. It’s only by showing how UBI affects people’s lives–including their choices about work, food, shelter, and family–that the idea can gain mainstream acceptance, they argue.

“The pitch to the American people needs to be done in a way that speaks to their hearts,” Shaw tells Fast Company. “You can’t have an academic paper and just reach out to the Silicon Valley types. What we found in the last election is the middle of the country is ready for something new. They need to speak up if we’re going to pass UBI, because it needs to be bipartisan and something that everyone votes for.”

Schlosberg and Shaw are currently crowdfunding $50,000 on HandUp to pay for the first two people to receive UBI payments of $250 a week for two years. Eventually, they hope to raise at least $500,000 to pay for up to 20 UBI subjects. The plan is to follow the lives of a diverse group of people–artists, farmers, former factory workers, academics–and then to release the film during the 2020 presidential campaign (that being the time when Americans are most receptive to big ideas both brilliant and crazy-stupid).

UBI has a long history and a rich intellectual pedigree, having been supported by everyone from Martin Luther King to the conservative economist Milton Friedman. Lately it’s leapt to prominence as a response to worries about the future of work and as an alternative to the traditional welfare system. The left sees UBI as evening up the scales of economic unfairness. On the right, UBI has supporters who think public assistance is inefficient, ineffective, and unnecessarily prescriptive. There are currently several experiments going on, including one set up by startup accelerator Y Combinator in Oakland, and others in Kenya and Finland.

For Schlosberg, UBI is a matter of human decency–that, as a society, we could look after everybody if we wanted to. “For me, it’s that everyone’s basic human rights are covered. The system has easily enough capacity to do that, and it’s just a societal choice [that we don’t],” she says.

Schlosberg and Shaw argue that UBI payments will lead people to “invest in themselves,” to be more entrepreneurial and risk-taking, politically active, and engaged in their communities. People are not more outwardly oriented, they say, because they’re constantly working, or looking for work, and trying to keep their heads above water. They allow that some of the 20 subjects may respond more selfishly, however, and they’re prepared to show that in their film as well. But the project is more UBI endorsement than come-what-may research exercise. “This is not a rigorous study. The point is to communicate the idea,” Schlosberg says.

I ask the filmmakers whether they considered following one of the existing UBI trials instead. First, they say, they want subjects from across the U.S., so the characters are diverse and can speak to a large cross-section. Second, they say, the other pilots are wary of outsiders coming to talk to their subjects, lest they muddy experimental outcomes. The only way to do the film, they say, is to fund the UBI themselves, even if it makes the project more expensive.

As they raise $50,000, they plan to draw lots to decide who gets the UBI payments (their mailing list already has 4,000 names and addresses). The money raised will sit with Amalgamated Bank. Amalgamated, owned by unions, has a strong history of supporting labor, and CEO Keith Mestrich says it wants to see experiments with UBI. “Artificial intelligence, computers, and self-driving cars will have a profound impact on work, and we’re going to need to have a policy approach to take care of people,” he says in an interview. “I don’t think UBI is the only public policy solution. I would favor a massive public works program. But I think it’s worth exploring. Our bank should be in a position to help find policy solutions that help working people.”