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The Best Advice From 2017’s Commencement Speeches

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There’s no bigger pep talk than a college commencement speech. Someone who has achieved an admirable level of success takes the stage to give advice to those just starting their journey. This year, several speakers took the opportunity to get political, but there were also nonpartisan gems of wisdom that those of us without a brand-new diploma can appreciate.

Here are six commencement speeches with the takeaway you can use to become as inspired as a new graduate.

“You’re never not afraid.”–Will Ferrell

Will Ferrell admitted to students at the University of Southern California that he wasn’t confident when he was going after his dream of being an actor. “I would think to myself, ‘Oh well, I can always be a substitute schoolteacher,'” he said. “I was afraid.”

Ferrell later realized that fear is a natural part of growth. “You’re never not afraid. I’m still afraid. I was afraid to write this speech,” he joked.

Instead of being controlled by fears, do it anyway. “My fear of failure never approached in magnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all?” he said.

It helps to try to enjoy the process without succumbing to the pressure of the result, he said. “Trust your gut; keep throwing darts at the dartboard,” said Farrell. “Don’t listen to the critics and you will figure it out.”

“Never give up is bad advice.”–Adam Grant

“Never give up your dreams” is common advice for graduates, but Adam Grant, Wharton School management professor and coauthor of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, told students at Utah State University that sometimes quitting is a virtue.

“Grit doesn’t mean ‘keep doing the thing that’s failing,'” he said. “It means, ‘Define your dreams broadly enough that you can find new ways to pursue them when your first and second plans fail.'”

Grant had to give up on his dream of being an NBA player, but he didn’t give up his dream of becoming a halfway decent athlete. “Sometimes resilience comes from gritting your teeth and packing your bags,” he said. “Other times it comes from having the courage to admit your flaws.”

He offered one caveat: Don’t give up on your values, but be willing to give up on your plans. “Today, my advice for you is to take a page out of the Goldilocks story. Watch out for virtues that burn too hot, not just too cold. If you want to be resilient, find the right amount of generosity and authenticity and grit,” he said.

“Open your mind.”–Stephanie Ruhle

It’s easy to get attached to big ideas and labels, like “Republican,” “Democrat,” “feminist,” or “engineer,” Stephanie Ruhle, anchor of MSNBC Live, told graduating students from Lehigh University. “We use these labels to find our tribes, get comfortable, and stick with them, and it is suffocating,” she said.

That’s because today’s world often promotes sameness. “We live surrounded by people who sound like us, vote like us, spend like us,” Ruhle said. “We get only the news we want to. And then scream into the social media echo chamber that is designed to serve us up information we already like.”

Instead, be willing to open your mind. “Just because something doesn’t confirm your existing beliefs does not mean it’s a hoax,” Ruhle said. “The smartest and most successful people I know are the people who are constantly evolving, always learning. It does not end with school. Seek out different perspectives. Maybe even change your mind.”

“Don’t get caught up in the trap of comparison.”–Octavia Spencer

It’s natural to compare yourself to others, but it’s also dangerous, actress Octavia Spencer told the graduating class at Kent State University.

“Ignore the silly ’30-under-30′ list that the internet throws at you before you’ve even had your morning cup of coffee,” she said. “Those will be the bane of your existence post-graduation, trust me. Trust me. Comparing yourself to other’s success only slows you down from finding your own.”

Spencer said if she had read a list of 25 actresses who had made it by the age of 25, she would have stayed in bed. “Because I guarantee you that none of them looked like me–none of them,” she said.

You need to lead your own journey, not emulate someone else’s. “No one came here the same way, and you won’t all achieve success the same way,” said Spencer.

“Treat people like people.”–Dame Helen Mirren

As graduates head off to entry-level jobs, they’re likely to be the low person on the totem pole, but how you treat others as you rise in your career is important, said Dame Helen Mirren. The actress told the graduating class of Tulane University that one of her favorite life lessons was learned from another actress as they shared a ride in a car.

“She got her cigarettes out and before she lit up, she offered the driver one,” she said. “So simple, but, you know, thoughtful. To her, he wasn’t a ‘driver person,’ but a ‘person person’ who might want a smoke.”

Every single person, whether they have dominion over your life or not, deserves equal respect and generosity, Mirren said.

“Always trust yourself.”–Howard Schultz

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz encouraged students at Arizona State University to trust their instincts. He gave them three questions that can serve as their guide.

  1. How will you respect your parents and honor your family?
  2. How will you share your success and serve others with dignity?
  3. And how will you lead with humility and demonstrate moral courage?

“You are leaving this campus as the best prepared generation in the history of our country,” he said. “You each possess entrepreneurial spirit, the passion, and the commitment to create the future you deserve. However, don’t stop there. Try not to rely only on what you have learned in the classroom. Instead, let your compassion, curiosity, empathy towards others, and commitment to service guide you. Give more than you receive, and I promise you, it will come back to you in ways you can’t possibly imagine,” he said.

“You can and you will make your mark on our country and our shared humanity. Dream big, and then dream bigger, a more innovative dream, a more inclusive dream.”


This Is The Part Of Your Resume That Recruiters Look At First

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If you want to land job interviews, your entire resume needs to be great, but only one part of it has to be really great. Think of it this way: recruiters and hiring managers are most likely to encounter your resume as an email attachment or a PDF you submit through a company’s online submission form, right? When they open the file, only the top half—at most—is going to fill their screen. That’s the part you need to lavish the most attention on. If you don’t give them a reason to scroll down and read more, it’s all over for you.

Here’s what it takes to make the best use of that high-value real estate.

Use Limited Space Wisely

In web design, this section is referred to “above the fold”–an expression that originated in the newspaper industry, where the most important headlines were printed literally above the part where the paper folded in half. For designers today, the same principle holds true: What’s visible to a reader when they open a webpage or document is the part where those crucial first impressions take place.

On your resume, the area above the fold sits within the red-dotted line in this example.

Since you can only fit so much into this amount of space, you’ve got to choose wisely what goes in there. Keep your page margins to a minimum and your contact details brief, this way you can squeeze the most critical info into that area.


Related:Three Ways To Add Personality To Your Resume (And Three Ways Not To


But don’t just cram in as much as you can. Think of your resume’s top quarter as your shop window. You want to place the most attractive items inside it, to entice more visitors into your store. That means you want to use this space to introduce yourself in the most compelling–though not necessarily the most comprehensive–terms possible, bullet out your core skills, and still have some space left to show off your most recent role.

Sell Yourself With A Punchy Profile

Your resume is essentially a marketing document for your services as an employee, so starting with an elevator-style pitch is a great way to reel people in.

A profile section of around five to eight lines that gives a high-level summary of your abilities in a well-written, persuasive manner, can set the tone for your resume.

Just make sure that your profile doesn’t read like an objective statement–employers don’t want to know about what you want (presumably, that’s the job you’re applying for). Your resume should be written purely to sell your talents and get your foot in the door. A profile, on the other hand, while a little unorthodox, lets you summarize your experience and skills persuasively and tells the employer the benefits that you can provide to the role.


Related:The Most Common Resume Lies (And Who Is Most Likely To Tell Them) 


If you decide to write a profile section, avoid tired clichés like, “hardworking team player, dedicated to achieving results.” Although impressive-sounding, this overused, generic expression doesn’t describe what you’ll actually do in the workplace. You may well be a hardworking team player, but it’s better to demonstrate this point with evidence, rather than simply stating it. Instead, try something like: “established IT sales consultant with five years of experience providing multimillion-dollar database solutions to global retail organizations.”

The key is to offer a concise snippet of context, factual evidence, and even metrics, while giving the impression that you’re a results-driven hard worker—all before getting to your work experience section.

Add A Core Skills Section

A core skills section is a simple bulleted list that sits underneath your profile and highlights your most in-demand skills and knowledge. This section should give recruiters an instant snapshot of your skillset at a glance.

Make sure you do your research to determine which skills to promote here. This section should be reserved for essential talents only, and each point should be kept short and punchy–at three words or less.

Highlight Your Most Recent Role

If your most recent role is the most relevant one to the vacancy you’re applying for, then you should make sure a good chunk of it is visible when someone opens your resume.

Head the role up with an outline giving a description of the organization you work for, where you sit within the hierarchy, and an overall summary of your accomplishments on the job. The key here is to demonstrate as many sought-after talents above the fold as you can.

If possible, try to add some impressive achievements with quantifiable results to prove the impact you’ve made. Any instances where you saved costs, generated revenue, or improved efficiency are always worth noting. For example: “negotiated new supplier deals resulting in a 10% decrease in budget spend annually” or, “delivered all project deliverables three months ahead of scheduled deadline.”

Statements like these allow recruiters to see the true scale of your work and benchmark you against their own standards.

If you can create a well-structured resume that highlights the best you’ve got to offer all within the first third or so of the document, you’ll increase your chances of landing interviews. Remember, if you can’t get recruiters interested in the first few lines of your resume, they’ll have no reason to read the last few.


Andrew Fennell is an experienced recruiter, founder of London CV writing service StandOut CV, and author of The Ultimate CV Writing Guide.

From To-Do List Hacks To Note-Taking: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories

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This week, we learned how taking notes obsessively can save you from a difficult boss, how to write job applications that actually make it past screening software, and the tips and tricks CEOs use to manage to their to-do lists.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of May 22:

1. Why James Comey’s Obsessive Note-Taking Is A Smart Strategy For Surviving Difficult Bosses

Former FBI director James Comey kept detailed notes of his conversations with President Donald Trump. While this is standard practice given his line of work, it’s a good strategy anytime you’re dealing with a difficult boss. Not only can it help you earn buy-in from your boss and teammates, it also gives you something refer to if you ever get confused over the details–or for that matter, disagree about them.

2. How To Trick The Robots And Get Your Resume In Front Of Recruiters

As much as you might hate it, many companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter job applicants. One recruiter, who shares the same hatred of ATS as most job seekers do, shares some insider tips on what it really takes to get past the robots and still sound impressive. After all, they’re not going away anytime soon.

3. IBM’s Remote Work Reversal Is A Losing Battle Against The New Normal

Last week, IBM extended an ultimatum to its remote workers: Come back to the office or go elsewhere. The company’s stated rationale was improving collaboration and innovation, but some saw the move as a cost-cutting measure. Comparing it to Yahoo’s decision to end remote work back in 2013, Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel argues that it’s a bad move for IBM, likely to send its top talent to competitors while stripping away an important incentive for modern job seekers.

4. These 10 CEOs’ Top To-Do List Hacks

Organizing to-do lists should be simple, but it rarely is–especially with so many systems and apps that claim to solve all your productivity woes. Ten CEOs share the to-do list strategies they like best—from forcing themselves to write lists as short as possible, to setting strict time limits on particular tasks.

5. Emotional Intelligence Is The Real Secret To Getting Promoted Faster

These days, it’s no longer enough to be good at your job to score that promotion. Technical chops might have landed you the role, but they’re unlikely to advance you, at least not on their own. Those “soft” interpersonal skills might be even more critical–like not losing your cool when you’re stressed, and taking responsibility for your screw-ups.

Are Tech Companies Funding Online Intolerance?

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“Follow the money.” That Watergate-era mantra has been reinterpreted for today’s politics–not as a tip for how to investigate a scandal, but as a road map for how to attack your political enemy. In recent months, activists have organized boycotts of Ivanka Trump products and O’Reilly Factor advertisers, focusing on high-visibility targets. Now some of them are also going after other sources of income for groups they oppose, by pressuring the back-end services such as as PayPal and Squarespace that process their payments or donations. A liberal organization called SumOfUs, for instance, has collected over 200,000 signatures demanding that online store provider Shopify drop Breitbart as a client–eliciting no response from Shopify.

But other sites are far more provocative than Breitbart, promoting white supremacy, black supremacy, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and Holocaust denial. They belong to organizations that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), labels “hate groups.” Many rely on mainstream services to raise money.

Some of these companies espouse free speech principles that tolerate nearly all views (short of those advocating or facilitating crime). But private companies aren’t bound by the First Amendment and some of them require users to agree to terms of service that strictly limit extreme and racist content, for example.

For them, it becomes a task of making judgment calls to determine whether some content has crossed the bounds. It’s thankless work and it never ends. I reported on the difficulty of these situations while researching my feature “Activists Are Pushing Back Against The Tech Platforms That Quietly Empower Hate Groups.” Here is a list of where some of the major e-commerce and payment providers stand on the issue and the sites they serve or have dropped.

CafePress

The online store provider’s user agreement bans sites connected to SPLC hate groups, and many types of content, including “obscenities, vulgarities, and/or offensive remarks that harass, threaten, defame, or abuse others such as F*** (Ethnic Group).” Furthermore the company told us that, “CafePress uses SPLC as an internal resource to help identify hate groups that may be selling merchandise on CafePress.”

CafePress dropped three SPLC-listed sites after I asked about them:

Stop Islamization of the World, which features an animated burning Quran and sold T-shirts with messages like “Islam Sucks.”

VDARE, a site that argues for the genetic and cultural superiority of whites and opposes nonwhite immigration to the U.S.

Yahushua Dual Seed Christian Identity Ministry, which claims “Many of the people we call Jews today are indeed descendants of Satan…”

PayPal

The biggest online payments processor has a breezy Acceptable Use Policy that prohibits “promotion of hate, violence [and] racial intolerance.”

Customers that might violate those policies include:

Vanguard America: “We are White, we are nationalists, and we are Fascists.”

Vanguard America

National Policy Institute (NPI): White nationalist/supremacist organization headed by Nazi-quoting, alt-right leader Richard Spencer.

Radix Journal: NPI’s publication, which criticizes Jews and argues the genetic superiority of whites.

Nuwaubian Nation Of Moors : Whose jailed founder teaches that blacks are a supreme race and has called white people “the devil.”

We sent a list of 12 sites, including the above ones, to PayPal, which sent a prepared statement that read in part: “We carefully review actions reported to us, and we discontinue our relationship with account holders found to violate our policies.” PayPal declined to elaborate on the sites we asked about.

Shopify

The Canada-based online store’s Acceptable Use Policy prohibits products or content that “condone or promote violence against people based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, medical condition, or veteran status.”

Customers include:

Generations, whose director, Kevin Swanson, supports Uganda’s legal crackdown on gays and reminds audiences that the Bible’s penalty for homosexuality is death.

Shopify declined to comment for this article.

Squarespace

The point-and-click website host also provides e-commerce services for customers. A section of its Acceptable Use Policy called “Being A Jerk,” says “Don’t advocate bigotry or hatred against any person or group based on their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual preference, age, or disability.”

Customers include:

National Policy Institute

Radix Journal

Squarespace declined to comment for this article.

These and many other examples point to conflicting tech industry philosophies: a libertarian streak that scorns value judgments and a progressive, new-economy strain that promotes racial, gender, and sexual-orientation inclusiveness. It’s not necessarily impossible to reconcile the two while valuing freedom of expression. But that becomes harder to sustain as the speech veers more and more extreme.

Five Job-Search Myths That Are (Still) Holding Back Your Career

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Between parents, friends, colleagues, and common “wisdom,” there’s no shortage of sources you can get advice from when you’re applying to jobs. The problem is, however, that not all of that advice is good advice. While our friends and family often mean well, the labor market changes rapidly enough that one job-hunting best practice is no longer relevant a couple years later.

And sometimes, advice-givers are just plain misinformed; I once had an acquaintance tell me that I shouldn’t even consider applying to a particular job without a graduate degree, which a recruiter for the position later confirmed would have been completely unnecessary.

So if you’re really looking for tips that can help you get your foot in the door at a new job, don’t rely too much on well-meaning friends and family–leave it to the experts. J.T. O’Donnell, founder and CEO of career advice site Work It Daily, shared some of the most common misconceptions among job seekers, and what the truth of the matter really is.

Myth No. 1: You Need To Stay At Your Company At Least X Years

Once upon a time, employees were expected to stay at their companies for years on end lest they risk looking flakey or unambitious. But today, the rules have changed. Millennials change jobs an average of four times in the decade after graduating from college, about double the rate of gen Xers. And this happens for good reason–new jobs tend to be the quickest way to advance in title and salary. Besides, if you’re truly unhappy in your current position, you shouldn’t force yourself to stay–life is too short to be miserable at work.


Related:New Graduates: These Are The Unspoken Rules Of The Workplace No One Tells You 


“I still hear parents saying that you need to stay at least three years to earn credibility. But no you don’t–not if it’s not working for you,” O’Donnell shares. “You need to go find your cadence and your stride, and if it’s not happening [at your current company], you’re not helping them. You’ve got to find your own thing.”

Now, that’s not to say that you should necessarily quit a job you’re unhappy at without anything else lined up first. But if the main thing holding you back from exploring other opportunities is that you haven’t been there long enough, don’t worry. If you’re the right fit for the job, recruiters aren’t likely to write you off based solely on your previous tenure.

[Photo: Unsplash user Alexandre Chambon]

Myth No. 2: You Need To Apply To As Many Companies As You Can

You may have to apply to more than one company before you find the perfect fit, but that doesn’t mean that more applications directly translates into more opportunities. When it comes to applying to jobs, the key to success is working smarter, not harder. So rather than sending out as many applications as humanly possible, it’s better to get strategic and only apply to the companies that you feel are a great fit for your interests and experience. So how exactly can you identify those companies?

“One of the things we have job seekers do is create a list of 10 companies that you absolutely love–the product, the service, whatever it is they do, you absolutely love it. Don’t get hung up on whether you’d ever work for them or not, don’t get hung up that they’re not in your backyard. Just 10 companies you love. Then [ask yourself], ‘What’s similar about these 10 companies?'” O’Donnell says.

From there, patterns will emerge, whether that’s companies with great customer service, a culture of innovation, a commitment to helping the less fortunate, or whatever matters most to you. “It gets a lot easier to find employers once you know what those are. And the beautiful part about going to Glassdoor is it tells me similar companies,” O’Donnell adds.

Myth No. 3: Your Resume Should Only Be One Page

Don’t worry–despite what you may have heard, submitting a resume that’s more than one page doesn’t mean that recruiters will automatically gloss over it. “The reality is that you can go to two pages as long as you create white space. When I see a one-pager but they’ve got half-inch margins, nine-point font, and they’ve tried to stuff everything on the page, it’s awful. So I’d rather see you go to two pages as long as you’ve really created that white space since it’s easier for me to read,” O’Donnell explains.

However, it’s a good rule of thumb to err on the side of concision.

“Under 15 years of experiences is a two [pager], in the rare instance you’ve had a killer career of 15+ [years] is a three [pager]. The exception to that is usually people in academia or science have a lot of papers and things that they have to cite and that can take up some bulk, but aside from that . . . no more than two,” she adds.

[Photo: Unsplash user Helloquence]

Myth No. 4: Your Cover Letter Should Summarize What’s In Your Resume

“In cover letters, people tell [job seekers] to basically summarize what’s in their resume,” O’Donnell says. But using your cover letter simply as a way to repurpose what you’ve already laid out is a waste of your time. “I’m not going to read your cover letter if I know that everything in [it] is what’s in the resume,” O’Donnell shares.

Beyond being redundant, using your cover letter as a resume summary means you miss out on demonstrating passion and culture fit for the company and role in particular.


Related:Six Tips For Improving Your Digital Job Search While You’re Unemployed 


“The cover letter is your opportunity to tell me how you feel connected to me as a company–I want you to tell me how you came to learn that what we do is different, special, valuable, important. The resume will speak for itself,” O’Donnell says.

This is especially important if you’re still relatively early on in your career.

“[If you] don’t have anything where you can say, ‘Check out my incredible track record,’ what you do have is that emotional connection. And that’s what every company . . . is looking for. They’re looking for your passion for them,” O’Donnell shares. “They know they’re going to have to train you, so tell them about how you learned that the medical devices they [make] saved your grandmother’s life, or how being in financial planning is what helped your parents pay for your college–whatever the story is that connects you, that’s what you tell those employers.”

Myth No. 5: Don’t Bring Up Gaps In Your Work History

It’s natural to want to avoid highlighting the parts of your application that aren’t so strong, but addressing issues head-on is a good way to assuage any doubts that a potential employer might have. And while you don’t want to necessarily make it front and center on your resume, recruiters and hiring managers will respect an honest, thoughtful answer if they inquire about why you took a break from the working world.

“What we teach people to do is answer that question using the ‘experience, learn, and grow’ model–what did I experience, what did I learn from that situation, and how did I grow. So if I didn’t do an internship and I goofed off for the summer . . . and they ask me what happened, my answer would be, ‘That was a really great question. At the time, I had the summer off and I opted to not pursue an internship. What I learned from that experience is that I wasted an opportunity to really get some valuable experience for my career, and what I’ve learned is I’ll never do that again.’ That’s exactly what an employer wants to hear,” O’Donnell says.

On the other hand, if you’ve had a meaningful life event that’s gotten in the way of your work–whether positive or negative–you shouldn’t be afraid to proactively bring it up.

“If you were out of work because you took your sabbatical and traveled around the world . . . that would be noteworthy. If you stayed home and cared for an ailing relative or parent who passed, you may want to say [you were a] primary caregiver,” O’Donnell advises.


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

Bryson Tiller, Carly Rae Jepsen, And That Lorde & Chromeo Remix: This Week In Music

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Fast Company readers, lend me your ears for another week in music recommendations. (Or just scroll to the bottom and take our weekly playlist with you.)

Track 1. Byrson Tiller – Don’t Get Too High

Why set a release date anymore? Bryson Tiller announced his sophomore album, True to Self, would be out on June 23. But instead he surprised everyone and just dropped this Self-ie last night.

Track 2. Lorde & Chromeo – Green Light Remix

Shout out to Lorde with the dance moves. Now the electro duo Chromeo remix even more song for her to groove to, so watch out. Lorde’s new album Melodrama is due June 16.

Track 3. Carly Rae Jepsen – Cut To The Feeling

“Cut to the Feeling” was left off the Canadian singer’s critically acclaimed “E•MO•TION”—both sides A and B—and yet somehow, it still manages to transcend most other pop music in 2017. It’s unlikely to lift Jepsen from pop underdog purgatory, but in a just and fair world, this would be another #1 in a string of global hits. — Recommended by Daniel Taroy

Track 4. Travis Scott – Butterfly Effect

As Travis Scott likes to say in every song: “It’s Lit”. The singer dropped Butterfly Effect initially on SoundCloud along with two other tracks, Green & Purple and A man. Of the three tracks only Butterfly Effect made it to the streams.

Track 5. A R I Z O N A – Passionfruit (Drake Cover)

The electro-pop trio A R I Z O N A have somehow managed to perfect perfection: Their cover of “Passionfruit,” arguably Drake’s best track from his latest album More Life, transports the song back to the ’80s by making full use of the downtempo synth vibe of the original. (AND YOU CAN FIGHT ME ON THAT, RE: DRAKE’S BEST SONG FROM MORE LIFE) — Recommended by KC Ifeanyi

Track 6. Offset and Gucci – Met Gala

Migos set off to take the world on via the divide and conquer tactic; the latest collaboration with the Migos family tree is from Gucci Mane. Mane enlisted Offset of the Migos trio for the lead single “Met Gala” off his new album “Droptopwop“.

Track 7. LUXXURY – I Need You

It’s a hot summer day, and you’ve just ambled into a poolside party that seems to have been going strong since the early ’80s. The soundtrack? This dreamy synthpop, disco-infused single from L.A.’s Luxxury. — Recommended by Noah Robischon

Bonus Track. Ariana Grande – Moonlight

This reflective track isn’t new, but it is for this week, for Manchester, and for the letter by Patrick Millsaps that reminds us that “Music is the international language of peace”.

Just like last week, We went ahead and added all these new music standouts into a neat playlist below. Be advised we will be updating this Spotify listing every Friday, so it may not be evergreen. Follow the playlist on Spotify, and come back to Fast Company every Friday for our weekly updates.

Credo Mobile Wants To Help Power The Resistance (And Give Away Millions In The Process)

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Four months into the Trump Administration, political activists with their congressional representatives on speed-dial may be running a tad short on cell phone minutes.

Credo Mobile, a small national cellular carrier, sees that as a good business opportunity. Earlier this month, the company launched an unlimited data plan with a unique selling point. Its formal tagline–“Progress Without Limits”–appears in an online ad alongside images of Trump with a giant “X” over his mouth. That’s just part of Credo’s attempts to align itself with the “resistance,” though it’s in line with the values the company has espoused since its founding–and part of a continued mission to help its customers support progressive causes.

“Finally, there’s an unlimited plan that helps fund the resistance to Trump,” says CEO Ray Morris, summarizing the overall sentiment in-house. “We didn’t actually come up with that, our constituency did, but it’s really funny and it’s fun,” he adds. “And, of course, we agree, so we’re going with it.”

That constituency is the more than 5 million members of Credo Action, a political action network, founded in 1999 (under the old name Act For Change) and funded by a share of parent company Credo’s profits. The business started out with a credit card affinity program in 1985 and now operates the mobile network, a long distance calling service, and credit card company, with the commitment that 10 cents of every transaction will go toward progressive causes.

All three businesses exist in a boring but essential realm American life. The trick is that rather than contributing to a faceless corporation for those necessities, Credo customers get a chance to use commerce for social good. Credo products might not always win hands-down on price or performance, but the marginal difference is weighted against some bigger value: each transaction may be improving the world. As long as users buy into that, they’ll stay loyal.

Each month, Credo grants at least $150,000 to three causes nominated by either customers or Action network members. Voting percentage determines who receives what proportion of funds. The network also make separate contributions to causes it deems worthy on an as-needed basis: All told it gave away $2.3 million in 2016.

“Finally, there’s an unlimited plan that helps fund the resistance to Trump.” [Photo: courtesy Credo]
The company, formerly dubbed Working Assets, launched its credit card line under that same name first, followed by the long distance service in 1991, and mobile about a decade afterward. The group was cofounded by two early social entrepreneurs, executive chair Laura Scher, who now teaches social innovation and entrepreneurship classes at Stanford University, and current board member Michael Kieschnick, a former economic advisor to California Governor Jerry Brown, who teaches micro-finance at Stanford and had previously launched social investment funds.

According to a profile by The New York Timeswhen the company was founded, the goal was always to find a way to use consumerism for something more positive than just the accumulation of wealth. “The purpose all along was to start a business that uses proceeds to fund progressive groups and causes,” Morris says. As the group evolved, however, the mechanism for doing that changed from annual donations to monthly ones, which allows donations to respond more quickly to current events.

So far, the group has donated more than $83 million to nonprofits working on issues like women’s rights, economic justice, voting rights, and climate justice. Recently, that’s included Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Black Lives Matter. “It’s often true that the selections will mirror what’s happening in society,” Morris says.

Those eligible for money this month are Demand Progress, which lobbies for protective civil rights policies, UltraViolet, which fights sexism, and Win Without War, which advocates for progressive forms of national security.

“We did see a bump after the election,” says Morris, noting that both business and their ability to encourage activism have been “off the charts” since the inauguration. “I think everybody has crossed that threshold of pain and they want to do something.” In this case, that might mean putting money where your mouth is.

A Rugged Box Of Education Tech With Its Own Internet Connection, And Other World Changing Developing World Technology

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A lot of technologists have worked to wire up the world’s classrooms, but few can claim this: the ability to wire up more or less any school anywhere. That’s what the KioKit does, and it’s one reason the Kenyan-born project won the developing world technology category in this year’s World Changing Ideas Awards (you can see the full list of finalists below).

Developed by a dedicated group in Nairobi’s “Silicon Savannah,” the KioKit is an electronic school in a hardened Pelican case. It contains 40 tablets, a power source and internet connectivity (from the multi-functional BRCK), and plenty of content, including digital textbooks, language quizzes, and Khan Academy modules. It’s robust, flexible and designed for any context, including humid and dusty environments in Africa, and classrooms full of playful and destructive kids.

It’s robust, flexible and designed for any context, including humid and dusty environments. [Photo: courtesy BRCK]
“BRCK started as a company that says ‘why do we keep using Western technology that’s designed for and by someone else?,'” says Nivi Sharma, president of BRCK Education, the startup behind the kit. “We thought ‘why are we using [foreign technology] in Africa rather than developing it on our own?'”

Before her current role, Sharma launched another startup, eLimu, which digitizes the Kenyan curriculum. She’s seen how importing computers developed in easier-going environments can lead to problems. The tablets she bought from China and the U.S. broke down once they were exposed to Kenyan conditions. The KioKit tablets, by contrast, are fully ruggedized: water and dust resistant, and designed to withstand a hard fall from desk-height.

“We thought ‘why are we using [foreign technology] in Africa rather than developing it on our own?'” [Photo: courtesy BRCK]
“No school in Kenya has a computer in every classroom, so these devices need to be plugged in and unplugged and moved from one classroom to another,” she says. “They’re taking a real beating that they maybe wouldn’t in other parts of the world.”

The KioKit is based around the BRCK, an all-in router, server, and battery. It connects to WiFi if it’s available, but also delivers content to the tablets on an offline network. The tablets can be charged enough to get through an eight-hour day (so there are no worries about power failures) before they’re recharged overnight. And the BRCK contains a SIM card slot, allowing access to a mobile network. As new content is made available, it updates automatically when possible, appearing simultaneously across the tablets.

When you switch on the tablets, they immediately go to the KioKit’s walled garden of content, Sharma says. There’s no need to open apps or browsers, or for teachers to deliver elaborate instructions. The aim, she says, is to maximize teaching time and minimize “friction and disruption between when the bell rings and the learning begins.”

[Photo: courtesy BRCK]
The content itself is divided into three sections: “learn,” “play” and “grow.” Play includes chess, math and memory games, plus an introductory programming language game (“Scratch Junior”). The Grow section is about life skills and advice, covering everything from environmental topics to menstruation. There’s also an extensive library of ex-copyright classic books.

Now in 40-plus schools in Kenya, the KioKit has since been exported to 13 other countries, including Mexico and the Solomon Islands. Schools can install their own local content, depending on curriculum needs and languages.

Down the line, BRCK (a for-profit company) may develop a larger tablet with a keyboard, so students can create content as well as consume it. It would be great, says Sharma, if students could write more easily or develop their own code. The KioKit already opens up a lot of knowledge wherever the need, and it promises to do even more in the years ahead.

Here’s more about the finalists in the developing world technology category:

DoctHERs

DoctHERs

DoctHERS is a telemedicine project in Pakistan that makes use of a big neglected resource: thousands of trained female doctors who’ve stopped working after they’ve got married. Patients visit neighborhood clinics, get a basic exam from a nurse, then consult with an at-home women doctor via an internet connection. The result is more doctors in circulation and less wasted medical training.

Charity: Water sensor project

Charity: Water

New York nonprofit Charity:Water has dug thousands of water wells across the developing world, but it wanted a better way to track their performance. The Google.org-funded project puts sensors on every site, measuring flow rates and generating daily reports. Now each well now has its own profile page, complete with data and testimonies, allowing better maintenance and more transparency for donors.

Sato, Lixil
Japanese toilet giant Lixil has sold more than one million SaTo (“Safe Toilets”) in Africa, raising hygiene standards in places without sewers. The toilet has a counterweighted trap door that opens to let poop and pee down, separating user and waste and reducing smells. Underneath the pan is a half-inch cup that fills with water creating an airtight seal. The SaTo is cheap and practical and now part of its own division at the company.

Fresh Fit

Sanergy

Founded by M.I.T. graduates, Sanergy has built a business providing basic, hygienic sanitation in Nairobi’s slums. Its Fresh Fit toilets separate poo and pee, allowing the former to be collected and turned into agricultural fertilizer. Customers lease the toilet for their homes for about $6 per month (including collection) and several franchisees are now developing their own micro-enterprises selling the design.

Tricog

Tricog Health Services

This Bangalore-based health tech company installs ECG heart devices in primary and secondary clinics, helping speed up diagnosis of conditions leading to heart attacks. Within minutes, trained specialists have analyzed a person’s reading and sent a consultation to the first doctor’s phone. By saving time to diagnosis, Tricog is helping to save lives.

Neopenda

Neopenda

Originally developed by students at Columbia University, the Neopenda cap tracks a baby’s vital signs including heart and respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation and temperature, sending data wirelessly to a nurse’s tablet. The device is getting its first clinical pilot studies in 2017 and the for-profit social enterprise hopes to sell into hospital systems and NGOs in under-resourced places, including in East Africa.

PlayPallets

PlayPallets

PlayPallets are, as the name suggests, pieces of sports equipment rendered from shipping pallets. Aimed at refugee camps, the kits can be built into basketball net stands, soccer goals, skateboard ramps, and cricket stumps. PlayPallets wants every kid to be able to play and using pallets makes shipping easier.

Pregnancy High Risks Toolkit

Philips

Philips’s pre-natal kit contains a battery-free fetoscope helping midwives and birth attendants to listen for heart irregularities inside the womb.

World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator

World Food Programme

Furthering its reach beyond aid distribution, the World Food Program is launching an accelerator to empower impact startups. Projects so far include the very successful ShareTheMeal crowdfunding app, Agriup, an app that gives smallholders farmers market pricing and weather information and Building Blocks, a blockchain-based system for cash-based transfers.

M-Tiba

PharmAccess

Modeled after the blockbuster M-Pesa mobile money system in Kenya, M-Tiba is a mobile savings account for health care. It lets individuals put away money for emergencies or for aid groups to disburse funds directly and efficiently. Since its launch in June 2016, more than 140,000 people have registered on the platform and at least 300 health care providers have said they’ll accept payment through the service.

RippleNami

RippleNami

This California-based startup has a cloud-based, map-making tool aimed at relief agencies and other groups working in remote places. By mapping resources and emergencies, it can help distribute aid more efficiently, for example. “RippleNami delivers real-time information on any device, empowering users to solve problems, make critical decisions and collaborate like never before,” the company says.

PermaNet

Vestergaard

Insecticidal bed nets prevent malaria infections, but the main chemical used for treating net is losing its resistive power. Based in Switzerland, Vestergaard makes a “long-lasting insecticidal net with increased efficacy against insecticide resistant mosquitoes.”

Be

B-Change Group

This app is aimed at Southeast Asia’s marginalized communities and their allies. It offers information about LGBTI-friendly service providers and safe meet-up methods.

Prosthetics in a box

Not Impossible Labs

From Mick Ebeling’s impact technology design shop, a modular kit for building affordable, workable replacement limbs. The box weighs just two to three pounds but allows someone with minimal training to create a prosthetic in under two hours.

Solar-powered water generator

SunToWater Technologies

Looking a bit like a standard home air conditioner, the Water Generator extracts humidity from the air and converts it into pure drinking water. Using solar power, the device pulls in air and pushes it over a salt desiccant. According to the company that makes the unit, it works even in the driest and most arid environments, making it a good bet for droughts and long hot spells.

Drinkwell

Drinkwell

Drinkwell franchises water filtration technology to villages in South Asia. In this way, it helps guard against contamination (including arsenic and bacteria like E.coli) and offers entrepreneurial opportunities for local people. The franchise model makes local people responsible for the service, increasing chances the filter will be maintained.

On-the-Go H2O

Ford Motor Co.

Two Ford engineers have developed a way to collect condensation from vehicle air conditioners and turn it into drinkable water. John Rollinger and Doug Martin say a typical car can produce 24 ounces of water per hour–about three cups. Potentially, just half the U.S. fleet could produce 18 million gallons of fresh water a day, they say, though Ford currently has no plans to commercialize the idea.


I Hated Growing Up Evangelical In Sweden, But It Made Me A Better Entrepreneur

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I was brought up in a highly religious family in Sweden, where evangelizing was encouraged from a very young age. I was just seven years old when I first had to preach to a crowd of over 700 adults. Soon afterward, I was sent out to go knocking on doors in search of potential converts.

I hated every minute of it.

As an introvert, it was an absolute nightmare. Ten minutes before that first speech, I had to rush to the bathroom and vomit, because I knew my performance would be mercilessly (and publicly) critiqued by people much older than me as soon as I’d finished. When people answered the door, I’d be sweating–I’d go into shock and I’d forget every word of my carefully prepared pitch.

It would be years before experiences like these proved valuable in the tech world. For a kid just halfway through primary school, though, the pressure was just about unbearable. Still, I had no choice but to go through with it again and again until I learned to conquer my fear.


Related:How I’ve Learned To Lead As An Introverted CEO


An Unintentional Training Ground

As an entrepreneur, you’ve probably been through much the same experience while pitching. Talking to clients or investors can be nerve-wracking. Your mind goes blank, you feel nauseous, and you’re bombarded with questions from skeptics who don’t share your passion or your convictions. Many entrepreneurs I’ve met describe similarly agonizing experiences from their early days in business.

But in many ways, the skills I learned preaching on doorsteps are the exact same skills you need when pitching in a boardroom, at a conference, or in a bar. Although I’m no longer a part of the religious organization I grew up in, I have to admit that without that upbringing, I’d probably be a coder working behind the scenes in a dark room, instead of a successful entrepreneur with multiple startups under my belt.

For all its serious drawbacks, that intensive training meant that by the time I was 17, when I started my first business, I had over a decade of experience trying to convince strangers to listen to my ideas. That gave me a huge advantage over other first-timers.

Done Right, “Product Evangelism” Lives Up To Its Name

Today, evangelism is actually one of my favorite roles as a tech entrepreneur. I love talking to people about my companies and my products, sharing my vision with them, and filling them with the same enthusiasm that I have. But none of the skills that takes came naturally to me–I had to learn them.

Growing up, I was coached to take every opportunity to talk to others about our faith. I learned to listen for the conversational keywords that could give me a way in, and I gradually figured out how to tune the message to each person I spoke with. Not only did it take time to master these habits, but it took a huge effort of will to push past my visceral discomfort in the process.

Successful entrepreneurs–even extroverted ones–likewise have to drag themselves out of their comfort zones; it’s just part of the job description. You know you don’t have all the skills you’ll need when you start out, but you have to be prepared to go ahead anyway and give it a shot. It’s a common process: Try, fail, accept criticism, learn, and then come back stronger. If pitching isn’t something you enjoy, tough luck–you’ve got to make yourself do it, then keep doing it until it becomes second nature. A lot of the time it’s your confidence and charisma that will make or break your business.

Perhaps even more important, you need to show the same passion and belief that drives religious evangelists. You can’t inspire people with a simple recitation of why your product is amazing, even if your product really is amazing. You need to be convinced deep down that what you’re selling will change your customers’ lives if they accept what you’re offering. That’s why the practice of “product evangelism” has earned its name–it’s no overstatement.

After all, as an evangelist, you’re not just selling a product. You’re selling a dream, especially in a startup. You’re selling leadership. You’re selling hope. You’re selling a vision of the future that you strongly believe it’s in customers’ and investors’ own interests to buy into. And if you don’t, you can’t expect anyone else to do the same.


Andreas Hassellöf is the CEO and founder of Ombori Group. Follow him on Twitter at @hassellof.

Three Reasons Your Boss Is Constantly Disagreeing With You

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You know it’s important to speak up at work. But let’s be real: You contribute with the hope that your ideas will be taken seriously. It’s hard to feel that way if your boss is constantly shooting them down and taking things another direction. And it only makes matters worse if it’s not simply a difference of opinion, but you feel that they’re straight-up wrong.

When you’re at that point, all of the solutions can seem drastic: Do you just accept that you’ll hate going to work every day? Do you have a sit-down and hash out why you disagree with your boss every single time? Or do you quit, and look for a supervisor you’ll see eye-to-eye with?

Before you get to one of those options, be honest with yourself: Have you really thought about why you always disagree? Because once you have an answer to that (beyond “I like my idea more”), you’ll have a better sense of what to do next.

1. Your Boss Is Trying To Change Things

If you’re in the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” club, it’s hard to get on board with someone changing things, apparently just for the sake of it. It’s frustrating that your new boss is implementing new strategies when things have been going just fine.

Your strategy: build credibility. If your main complaint is that her approach is different, your best course of action is to do it her way across all projects.

Wait! Before you click out in frustration, I’m not suggesting this as a forever change. Rather, it’s to help you decide when to push back–and make a stronger argument when you do.

If you refuse to try any new approaches, your case is weak (and likely to be ignored), because you can’t make a true comparison. Plus, you look more like someone who’s stuck in their ways than someone who cares about the very best way to do things.


Related: 6 Red Flags That Say Your Boss Is Going To Be A Nightmare 


Once you’ve tried the new strategies, you’ll be able to pick your battles–and point to specific reasons why you think a certain old process works better than the new one.

If you still think the new approaches suck and that your manager is ignoring your feedback, you’ll have less regrets when you start looking for a new role.

2. You Think There’s A Low Likelihood Of Success

Unlike the person who resists new methods, you’re at odds because you don’t want to be set up to fail. You can’t imagine “going along to get along” when the plan’s one you foresee crashing and burning.

The “just try it the new way” approach can seem too risky if you’re pretty sure it’ll cost huge time or money, or lose you a client.

Your strategy: get clear on your goals. In a former job, my supervisor made sure that we knew our “role and goal” for every assignment. Because the fact is, organizations evolve and these things shift, so it’s helpful to continually make sure you’re aiming for the same target.

By inquiring about your role in the project and the goals you’re supposed to hit, you may learn that your boss’s main objective is innovating or piloting a new process–and that he’s okay with what you’d assume is a “failure,” so long as you’ve tried.

If, however, your boss has different goals, and you feel like you’re being asked to do the impossible–not in a way that adds to your professional development–but in a way makes you dread going to work, then don’t feel like you have to talk yourself into staying.

While every job can include some degree of trusting your boss even when you disagree, you should never be made to feel like your job requires you to perform daily miracles.

3. Your Boss Is A Micromanager

Maybe you constantly disagree with your boss because he never gives you the freedom to actually do your job. Or, if you go out and take initiative, he wants to see the project totally redone based on his vision.

Your strategy: be honest with yourself. In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, author Ron Carucci suggests that employees consider whether a boss is micromanaging them because their work isn’t up to par.

In other words, your manager is more likely to breathe down your neck that you have to do things her exact way no matter if you disagree—if your last few projects have been late, unfinished, or poorly executed.

If this rings true, then, truth talk: You’re stuck doing things her way for a bit. However, go out of your way not just to meet, but to exceed expectations, and show your full potential. Once you’ve earned back her trust, you can start suggesting innovations and pushing back with why your ideas are better.

But if your work’s been top-notch all along and she’s just a serial micromanager, tell her it’s important to you to have the opportunity to take initiative and make more of a contribution. Then, listen to her response about whether or not you’ll be able to do that in this role.

Finally, there’s another reason why people disagree with their boss–and that’s when they’re asked to do something they think is ethically questionable. This is not the time to “try it their way.” Schedule a meeting with HR (or your boss’s boss if there’s no formal HR department) and share that you disagree with what you’re being asked to do. (Here’s more on what to say.)

Of course, even when it’s not at “whistle-blower” level, we’re still talking about the manager you report to every day, and so you’d like to have a positive working relationship. So, start by seeing if you can’t try to learn more about where they’re coming from. Because, while it won’t always be easy, if you’re able to constructively work for someone with a completely different style, you’ll learn a lot.


A version of this article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is adapted and reprinted with permission 

More From The Muse:

Here’s How To Find A Minute Of Mindfulness Anywhere

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Everyone’s mind wanders.

Mindfulness is paying attention to what’s happening in the present moment. So if you’re aware that your mind is wandering, you’re halfway to a successful mindfulness practice.

The other half of mindfulness is gently returning your attention back to the here and now. But this doesn’t mean you have to yank your misbehaving mind back to reality. Instead, think of it as a compassionate return to consciousness. Picture a feather on the ground, lifted up by a gust of wind and then floating back down to rest on the pavement.

Wandering. Awareness. Return.

Practicing A Minute Of Mindfulness No Matter Where You Are

And here’s something cool: The easiest tool for achieving that gentle return to the present moment is always available to you. Focus on one single physical sensation.

It could be feeling your back against the chair, your hand holding the fork, your finger on the touch screen.

The key is to aim all of your awareness directly at one physical sensation of your choice.

Pick one part of your body that’s in contact with an object. Let’s say it’s your feet on the floor. Pour all of your awareness right down into the soles of your feet. What’s the sensation there? Are your feet resting on the floor lightly, or are they pressing against it? Now wiggle your toes a bit, and notice how the sensation changes. Are you wearing socks? If so, can you feel the fabric against your feet?

If you had to assign a feeling to this sensation, would it be pleasant? Unpleasant? Neutral? This is all about noticing what is, rather than making a relative comparison to anything that you are not experiencing right now.

All we’re focusing on is the feeling.

See? That took all of a minute. And you weren’t ruminating on the past or fretting about the future. It’s impossible to be fully present in your body with a wandering mind. If you pick the presence, the mind can’t meander.

Wandering. Awareness. Return.

When Your Mind Wanders

When you notice your mind drifting, give yourself a pat on the back for being aware.

Gently return to the here and now by choosing one part of your body that’s in contact with something else. Feel everything about it. Be a physical sensation detective and say things to yourself like: “I feel my fingers grabbing the steering wheel pretty tightly,” or, “I’m noticing the slight weight of these glasses resting on the bridge of my nose,” or, “This chair feels kinda hard under my backside.”

Don’t follow that last statement with a thought like: “I really should get a new chair,” since that’s not a physical sensation and could lead to less feeling and more thinking thoughts like, “I need to earn more money before buying a new chair,” which sends rumination an invitation to join you. But by all means, if you discovered through this mindfulness exercise that your current chair hurts your bottom, go ahead and spring for a new one.

Wandering. Awareness. Return.

Why Mindfulness Matters

I know this might all seem ridiculously simple. And it is. It’s the mind that complicates things when it takes us out of the here and now. So making the choice to pay attention to how you’re feeling in the moment is a crucial first step to actually being in the moment, which will increase productivity and focus.

It will also make you happier. In a study published in the journal Science, Harvard researchers found that people spend nearly half their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are doing at that moment, and that this distraction from the task at hand “typically makes them unhappy.”

When we’re fully present, we’re better communicators. We’re less reactive and more responsive to the people around us, at home and at work.

We’re also more fully here for ourselves, since we’re in better touch with how we feel and what we need.

And by gently returning our awareness back to the present moment when we notice it has wandered off, we begin to feel a bit more in control in a world where so much is out of our control.

Elisa Boxer is a Columbia-trained, Emmy Award-winning journalist. She’s also a health advocate and mindfulness coach. Follow her on twitter at @eboxer and visit her website at Elisaboxer.com.

Activists Target Cloudflare For Enabling Hate Sites

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The growth of the alt-right and other forms of nationalism have reinvigorated neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements in the U.S. and abroad over the last decade. Anders Behring Breivik, who regularly posted on white nationalist message board Stormfront, killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. That horrific killing was enough to shock the site’s owner, Don Black, a prominent leader in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, who later wrote in a post on the site, “This makes me want to pull the plug on this place and never look back.”

Black never pulled the plug on the site, and it’s currently thriving. But the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) wants someone to shut it down. SPLC lists Stormfront in the annual roster of what it calls “hate groups.” Its 2017 list of U.S. organizations runs to 917–less than the record of 1,018 groups in 2011, but on the increase after a few years of decline. To bring down Stormfront and many other members of its hate group list, the SPLC is targeting a San Francisco company called Cloudflare.

If you aren’t a networking geek, it may take a moment for you to wrap your head around Cloudflare. The company’s network sits at what’s called the “edge,” between website hosts (say, GoDaddy or DreamHost) and the open Internet. There, it provides a shield against threats like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as well as “optimization” by using clever routing and caching to speed up delivery of content around the world. Cloudflare serves about 6 million websites, but it’s getting a lot of unwanted attention for a small fraction of them.

“We had figured out a year ago that Cloudflare was providing DDoS protection for almost every hate site that we monitor,” Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s hate-tracking Intelligence Project, told Fast Company. (SPLC dropped its own Cloudflare account based on that research.)

In March, SPLC accused Cloudflare of violating laws in several European countries, such as Germany and France, that prohibit Holocaust denial or the incitement or promotion of racial hatred. “Obviously that wouldn’t apply to the United States because we have the First Amendment,” says Beirich. But by operating data centers in Europe, Cloudflare is hosting illegal content from at least 48 hate groups, according to SPLC.

A few choice ones from the list include leading neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer, Holocaust denier Carolyn Yeager, black separatist group Nation of Islam, and the Westboro Baptist Church, whose motto and URL are “God hates fags.” White nationalist/supremacist sites are also on board, such as American Renaissance and The Right Stuff. And Brandon Russell, member of neo-Nazi client Atomwaffen Division, was recently arrested in Florida for shooting and killing two of his roommates over a political argument, reports the Tampa Bay Times. Investigators found conventional bomb-making materials and the presence of some radioactive source. (Atomwaffen is German for atomic weapons.) Cloudflare says that it doesn’t discuss individual clients.

An alert about Cloudflare providing security to Atomwaffen Division, hosted on Iron March site.

Pressure on companies serving hate sites could grow if legislation proposed by the British Conservative Party goes into effect. The rough outlines would introduce fines or prosecution for companies that don’t remove illegal content. Social media companies like Facebook seem to be the focus, but the final law might affect other tech companies that bring the content online. Britain has several laws against hate speech, like the Public Order Act 1986, which prohibits “stirring up of racial hatred.” Later laws added religion and sexual orientation protections.

What Does “Host” Mean?

If someone were to bring legal action against Cloudflare, the company’s likely response would be that it doesn’t actually host anything. “Even if you take down our service, it doesn’t fundamentally change the relationship between the person making the [web page] query and the [site’s] host,” Cloudflare’s general counsel, Doug Kramer, told us. All these sites, hosted on different companies, would still be online, just without the benefit of Cloudflare’s security and optimization services. Content simply passes through Cloudflare’s system; it doesn’t live there, according to Kramer.

Beirich calls that explanation “bullshit,” saying that Cloudflare has to host multiple copies of these sites around the world so that they are closer to (and delivered faster to) people who visit the sites. “We believe them to be in violation of European hate speech laws based on what they copy from hate sites on to their European servers,” says Beirich.

“When you look at the nature of where we sit, we’re really providing a technical utility service sort of thing for the internet,” says Kramer. “It seems like a uniquely inappropriate place to try and solve the problem.” Though the content would be online regardless, removing Cloudflare would make it easier to find the appropriate place. Currently, checking sites with common tools like the WHOIS lookup service makes Cloudflare appear to be the host. “With a properly secured website, there’s no way for an external user to find out where a website is hosted,” says Kramer. “It is an essential element of our security that we don’t provide a shortcut that makes it easy for people to target hosts.”

Since website hosts are effectively hidden behind Cloudflare, the company passes any complaints, such as copyright infringement claims (the vast majority of complaints), offensive content, or alerts about things like child pornography on to the companies that actually host the sites. For a time, it also forwarded all complaints, complete with names and contact information, to the site owners themselves. This is to make it easier for sites to settle the disputes–which are often spurious claims such as bogus copyright violation charges, says Cloudflare. But a May 4 article by ProPublica resurfaced ugly experiences with Cloudflare customer The Daily Stormer (a movement with both a website and 31 clubs around the country).

The Oncoming Storm

This practice sent people’s personal info to Daily Stormer’s owner Andrew Anglin, leading to online harassment by him and his followers, several people told ProPublica. “It’s a very distasteful thing when that happens,” says Kramer. Since January 2015, he says, Cloudflare no longer sends contact info to website owners for reports of child pornography, violent threats, or other “sensitive” issues that could lead to retaliation.

But it still sent that information to the hosting companies, which Cloudflare does explain on its abuse policy page, and the hosts often forward the info to site owners. “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” wrote Anglin in a December 2016 post on his site. In it, he detailed a complaint filed by Scott Kelley Ernest, which was passed on to him from his hosting company, complete with contact information. Anglin posted that and whatever additional contact information he could find for Ernest, including email addresses, phone numbers, and online usernames.

“[W]hy not hit this guy up?” Anglin suggested to readers in his post.

They have a record of hitting people up. Anglin is currently being sued by the SPLC on behalf of a Jewish realtor, Tanya Gersh, who says her family received over 700 harassing messages from Daily Stormer readers. They didn’t stem from a filed complaint, but rather regarding a business dispute with Sherry Spencer, the mother of white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.

In a discussion-forum post titled, “Jews Targeting CloudFlare Service for Protecting Daily Stormer,” a reader posted photos and contact information for ProPublica writer Ken Schwencke, with members hurling epithets like “nasty pieces of shit,” “faggot,” and “crypto-fag Jew.” They also expressed admiration for Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “Let’s all take a second to applaud his stand (so far) of not making determinations of who can use their service based on judging people’s content,” writes the poster. “If all he hears from are the noisy kike media on this issue, he could easily cave in.”

Prince was swayed by press attention to an extent. A few days after the ProPublica article, he wrote a blog post outlining revised policies to allow fully anonymous reporting of threats and child sexual abuse material. Neither the site owner nor the hosting company will receive the name or contact information of the person making the complaint. “While we clearly had a significant blind spot in how we handled one type of abuse reports, we remain committed to our belief that it is not Cloudflare’s role to make determinations on what content should and should not be online,” writes Prince.

“Our goal is to make sure that all the stuff on the internet happens as users intended for it to happen,” says Kramer. But activists like the SPLC and sites like Daily Stormer clearly have different intentions and opinions about what is right.

Qualcomm’s New Wi-Fi Router Tech Will Boost Your Smart Home’s IQ

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You may know Qualcomm as a kingpin of smartphone processors, but lately the chipmaker’s fingerprints have also shown up on the wireless router renaissance. Mesh network routers like Eero, Google Wi-Fi, and Netgear Orbi all rely on Qualcomm’s underlying technology, which chains multiple routers together to form a vast home network These products have reversed a long race to the bottom in the price of home routers, as consumers happily pay a premium to alleviate their Wi-Fi woes.

So it’s worth noting when Qualcomm says a new version of that technology is coming. Qualcomm’s latest mesh network tech, announced on Monday, will play nicely with speakers and microphone arrays, giving router pods the same voice controls as an Amazon Echo or Google Home. Router makers can also build in support for popular smart home protocols, so users can automate their lights, door locks, and other devices without needing a separate hub or bridge.

By helping vendors add those features, Qualcomm aims to transform the router from a dumb Wi-Fi pipe into the backbone of a smarter home. But if the chipmaker is successful, router makers–and, by extension, consumers–will soon have to decide which of those smart home and voice assistant platforms to bet on.

Qualcomm’s mesh router reference design supports voice commands.

Mesh Routers: Not Just For Wi-Fi Anymore

Qualcomm’s mesh networking system isn’t just a microchip, but a set of software features that manage the Wi-Fi connection. Router makers still determine the design and range of each pod, and can throw in extra features such as parental controls or guest access, but ultimately Qualcomm’s tech determines where users should install each pod and how traffic should flow between them.

Qualcomm’s new system extends coverage from just Wi-Fi to other smart home protocols, including Bluetooth, CSRMesh, and 802.15.4 (which forms the basis for the ZigBee spec used by products like Philips Hue light bulbs). Typically, these protocols require a separate hub or bridge to communicate with smartphones and the internet. Qualcomm is trying to consolidate everything onto a single router system, which could support platforms like Wink or Samsung SmartThings.

“You don’t have to have these extra hubs lying around your house,” says Jesse Burke, Qualcomm’s product marketing staff manager. “You just connect everything to your router.”

The idea of a combined Wi-Fi router and smart home hub isn’t entirely new. Google’s OnHub and Wi-Fi routers both include basic ZigBee support, for instance, as do several Almond routers from Securifi. But Patrick Moorhead, the principal analyst for Moor Insights and Strategy, says Qualcomm’s integration of all the necessary radios and software should be cheaper and more power-efficient.

“I’ve been waiting for this for five years, for this one piece of silicon to come out,” Moorhead says.

Qualcomm is also throwing in software that can turn a router pod into a voice assistant, using systems like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to play music, answer questions, and control smart home devices. Router makers still have to supply the microphone array and speakers, but Qualcomm provides the voice recognition, noise cancellation and connection to cloud services from Google, Amazon, and others. Alternatively, Qualcomm is offering a mesh router reference design that includes all the necessary hardware.

“You’ll see that in the market pretty quickly, this convergence of these voice assistant products with the mesh networks that are also out there,” Qualcomm’s Burke says. “It makes a lot of sense for those two things to converge.”

Choose Your Router Wisely

Qualcomm’s new system adds up to a vision in which the mesh router system provides everything you need to build out a smart home, from protocol support to voice controls. The hope is that once those connections are readily available, we’ll see a boom in the number of sensors and other smart devices that can interact with one another inside the home.

“There’s a lot of things that a platform can do when it’s the nervous system of the home, and that’s where we’re trying to push the industry,” Burke says.

But keep in mind that Qualcomm itself isn’t betting on any particular smart home platform or voice assistant service. That’ll be up to the router makers, who will still have to decide between competing voice assistants (such Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and perhaps Microsoft’s Cortana) and automation platforms (such as Wink, Samsung SmartThings, Lowe’s Iris, and maybe even Apple HomeKit).

“When Netgear launches a product, or any other OEM launches a product with these types of capabilities, how and which of those services are integrated into them are really up to the partnerships they can strike, or the APIs they can port in,” Burke says. “The point we’re trying to make is that we have made it completely available and possible to do that on this platform.”

It’s not hard to imagine a land grab happening as a result. Although mesh routers are barely more than a year old, they now account for more than one fifth of all U.S. router revenues according to The NPD Group. The sudden growth, combined with Qualcomm’s new router tech, presents a chance for smart home platforms to insert themselves into the mainstream.

“in the end, these companies want everybody to support their ecosystem,” Moorhead says, “so I could see a Samsung paying somebody, or enabling a Netgear to have ‘Works with SmartThings.'”

After all, consumers tend not to replace their routers more than once every three to five years, and are likely to see pricey mesh systems as a long-term investment. With Qualcomm making home automation and voice commands easier and cheaper to include, better Wi-Fi may soon come with a side of platform lock-in. As if deciding which router to buy wasn’t agonizing enough already.

Exactly What To Wear For Your First Job Interview

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If you’re a recent grad, the amount of prep for your first big job interview can be nerve-racking. And after studying up on the company and practicing potential answers to possible interview questions, what you are going to wear is probably low on your list. Your parent’s platitudes about dressing for the job you want are woefully nonspecific, and wearing the wrong thing can mean losing the job before you open your mouth.

So we asked Nicole Russo, a personal stylist ‎who works with a number of clients in the tech industry in New York City, to tell us what a jobseeker can wear to an interview to nudge the odds–especially if their only previous experience is internships. She even selected a few images from Instagram to illustrate the looks she recommends.

Hacking The Snap Judgment

“Sometimes confidence is the biggest power move you have,” Russo says, thinking back to the time she landed her first styling gig with very little experience. In order to look the part, Russo says putting effort and care in your choice of clothing can signal confidence and assuredness as opposed to indifference. “Not knowing how to pull yourself together comes across as incompetent,” Russo says.

Fit, Fabrics, And Fabulousness

That’s why she recommends making sure that whatever you select fits really well, is clean, and not wrinkled. If possible, garments should be made of silk, wool, leather, or other natural fibers. If you lean toward vegan leather for bags and shoes, Russo advises to take a good look at the construction and make sure it’s quality. “Nothing in a bright color,” she cautions, “especially if it’s not finely made.” Overall, Russo suggests taking a good, hard look at all your accessories like belts, watches, or other jewelry. “If they look plastic to you, they probably look plastic to everyone,” she observes.

Color Coding

As for clothing colors, Russo says “keep it simple.” Black, gray, or navy are fail-safe choices. “You will never go wrong with a shirt or blouse in a classic color palette,” she points out. A 2014 study by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder bears this out. Interviewers associated positive personality traits with those colors.  For example, black signaled leadership, blue was for team players, and gray was associated with logic and analytical behavior. Bright colors should be avoided, as Russo says. A quarter of hiring managers associated orange with lack of professionalism.

Vision without execution is hallucination. ???????? Put in work!

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Changing Up Your Look

If you get called back for a second or third round of interviews, Russo says make sure you’re not repeating outfits exactly. “A lot of people worry they don’t have money,” to buy multiple ensembles. Russo suggests making sure you have two pairs of pants and three shirts to switch around. “Take advantage of sales and consignment shops,” she advises, where you can find better quality pieces at discount. “You want to feel like you are showing up as the same person with the same skills, but slightly different,” she says. Each appearance is an opportunity to “reveal another part of the onion,” Russo suggests.”People do pay attention to little details.”

Revealing Your Personality

Russo does recognize that a job in a creative environment might call for a splash of personality conveyed through sartorial choice. That’s why she loves leather jackets. “If you are a little overdressed, a leather jacket can calm it down,” she notes. If you’re too casual, a leather blazer can elevate the look. “It’s almost a year-round piece,” Russo asserts.

She also mentions that while it’s more appropriate for candidates to let a tattoo or piercings show in more creative workplaces, “Just think about your market,” she underscores. Finance and law have more buttoned-up cultures as a general rule.

“I don’t believe in hiding,” she says, especially as workplaces move toward more equality, openness, and self-expression. Rather than risk getting eliminated because of tribal tattoos,” Russo contends that candidates need to remember who and where they want to work. Given the wealth of information available about companies online, especially through social media, Russo says there’s no excuse for showing up to an interview in something that clashes with a company’s existing office culture.

Cracking The Office Dress Code

Russo has a little hack for figuring out what people in a company dress like before you get hired.”Find people who work there,” she advises, and search their social media for work-related events. Russo says it’s also helpful to search from hashtags. She once found one for a company holiday party on Instagram. “You got a taste of how everyone was dressing,” she says, “A Christmas party is the most risqué people ever get.”

If you’re still unsure of what to wear, Russo suggests taking advantage of working with a store salesperson. They’re usually not on commission and just love to help, says Russo, recalling her own experience in that job. Above all, Russo says, err on the side of caution. “It’s just like a date. You want to put your best face forward and you don’t want to hide who you are,” she says. “With the best fit and fabric, you’ll feel your best.”

It Could Be 10 Times Cheaper To Take Electric Robo-Taxis Than To Own A Car By 2030

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Ask a typical industry analyst how long it might take Americans to take most trips in electric cars, and they might say the middle of the century–or later. The Energy Information Administration predicts that only about 3% of miles traveled in the U.S. in 2050 will happen in electric cars. But a new report suggests that it could happen in a little more than a decade.

Self-driving cars, the report predicts, will make ride hailing so cheap that the market will quickly transform–and because electric cars can last longer with heavy use, it will make economic sense for those cars to be electric, as well. By 2030, 95% of passenger miles traveled in the U.S. could be happening in on-demand, autonomous electric cars owned by fleets rather than individuals. The average family could be saving $5,600 a year on transportation. Also, the oil industry could collapse.

Read the full report here. [Image: RethinkX]
The linear, incremental growth of electric vehicles predicted by some analysts might be wrong. “This is not an energy transition,” says James Arbib, a London-based venture investor who co-authored the Rethinking Transporation report with serial entrepreneur and author Tony Seba. “This is a technology disruption. And technology disruptions happen in S-curves. They happen much more quickly.”

Arbib and Seba saw that policymakers and others tend to make decisions without understanding how exponential change happens, and founded a new nonprofit, RethinkX, to study those disruptions. The transportation report is their first.

Read the full report here. [Image: RethinkX]
The report predicts that autonomous cars could be ready for widespread deployment–and have regulatory approval–by 2021. The exact year may vary, but the researchers have confidence it will happen between 2020 and 2025, based on announcements from car companies and how quickly self-driving pilots are growing. They also believe that regulators will want to support the technology.

“There are enormous gains for the economy, gains on a social and environmental level, and so on, and we think that generally there will be a supportive attitude,” says Arbib. “Any technology that can save a number of lives as autonomous vehicles might do–there’s sort of a moral imperative to try to introduce it when you can. From a regulatory perspective, we expect there to be a supportive framework.”

Read the full report here. [Image: RethinkX]
Within 10 years–after the technology is ready and regulators have approved it–even though individually owned gas cars will still exist, the report predicts that virtually all trips will happen in electric robo-taxis.

The shift will happen because of economics: using “transportation as a service” in autonomous electric cars could be 4 to 10 times cheaper per mile than buying a new car, and 2 to 4 times cheaper than operating your own, old car. Ride hailing in a car shared with other passengers–like UberPool today, but without a human driver–could cost as little as three cents a mile.

The cars will be cheaper, the report posits, for several reasons. Because self-driving cars almost eliminate the possibility of accidents, the cost of insurance could be far less. Because the cars will be driven far more of the time–the typical personal car is used only 4% of the time–the depreciation cost per mile would also be sharply reduced. The cost of charging a battery is less than buying gas. And electric cars also require less maintenance and last longer on the road.

“It all comes down to vehicle degradation, essentially,” says Arbib. “When you compare the powertrain of an electric vehicle to a gasoline vehicle, there are about 20 moving parts in the power train of an electric vehicle, and 2,000 or so in a gasoline vehicle. So there’s just a lot more that can go wrong in a gasoline vehicle.” Heat and vibration in a gas car also make it degrade faster. If a typical gas vehicle lasts 200,000 miles at the most, an EV could easily last 500,000 miles; the report authors predict that by 2030, they might last for as many as a million miles. (Elon Musk, of course, has already talked about designing a Tesla that lasts that long.)

The cars will be so cheap to operate that, in some cases, companies might offer transportation to their workers for free. Businesses may choose to make money by offering the vehicles for ad space, or selling data as the cars travel, or selling the service of plugging the cars into the electric grid to manage the storage of renewable energy. The technology could yield new business models, like mobile coworking spaces or cafes in larger self-driving vehicles that offer free rides as you drink your coffee.

“Take Starbucks,” says Arbib. “I live in London, and I would imagine that the rent on a store in London would be £100,000 a year, or more in the center of town. Think what that translates into per coffee sold. It might be that Starbucks finds it cheaper to have a fleet of 20-seater buses that they kit out as mobile cafés that roam the streets on popular routes.”

If consumers can save so much more money by using transportation as a service, it’s likely that they’ll make the shift quickly. And since electric cars are an important part of the service, they can grow exponentially, too. In the past, Arbib says, most analysts have compared electric cars to individually owned gas cars.

“That’s a much slower transition,” he says. “The EV only becomes competitive on an upfront cost basis at some point in the ’20s and then gradually gets cheaper and cheaper, but it’s only ever a few percent cheaper. It’s not many multiples cheaper. This is an economic-driven transition, and we think the size of the cost difference is what drives it.”

The report also looked at how the changes will feed on each other. As gas cars become less common, at some point, gas stations will start to close, making it less convenient to get fuel. Mechanics will start to close, and parts will get harder to find, pushing more people away from traditional cars. As self-driving cars grow on roads–potentially getting their own lanes so they can travel efficiently–driving yourself may become less and less convenient.

The shift would lead to multiple major changes. Former drivers, no longer stuck in traffic, would be more productive, and add $1 trillion to the economy. Consumers would collectively have an extra $1 trillion to spend because of their savings on transportation costs. People who couldn’t afford to drive (or who couldn’t physically drive) in the past would have better access to jobs or school. With more efficient use of cars, there would be fewer vehicles on roads; parking lots in cities could be used for housing or other uses than storing cars. Because self-driving cars avoid accidents better than humans, streets would be safer. Pollution would dramatically drop.

There would also be challenges. The report predicts catastrophic effects for the oil industry as early as 2021. The affordability of the new system could tempt some commuters to abandon trains and subways, even though they’re better at moving large crowds of people. (Arbib points out that this is less likely to be a challenge in the U.S., where the vast majority of trips already happen in cars.) Some temporary congestion on roads could also be overcome if every vehicle becomes autonomous, and cars can travel closer together and faster.

“I think there will come a time where we actually decide to ban human drivers in cities,” he says. “It’s either going to be on congestion or speed grounds as people will actually see the huge gain that comes with taking humans out of the equation. Or it might be on safety grounds . . . once it’s proven that autonomous vehicles are having almost no accidents and human drivers are still killing kids on streets, public opinion might shift and it might be seen as recklessly dangerous to be a human driver.”

While policymakers could speed up the transition–or potentially slow it down–Arbib thinks it is likely to happen. “There’s a global marketplace here,” he says. “The more vehicles there are on the road, the more quickly they learn. If America, or any particular state in America, decides to hold back, we still expect the Chinese or Singapore or perhaps London to go ahead and pilot and test and develop these vehicles. The regions that don’t adopt this will be left behind, and will have to play catch up.”


A Trolley And A Dream: Texas Border City Aims To Boost Ties With Mexico

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El Paso has launched an ambitious project that defies the current political climate: Rather than wall off its south-of-the-border neighbors, it is hoping to one day run routine roundtrip trolley service to nearby Juarez, Mexico.

The dream is not as far-fetched as it may seem: From 1949 to 1974, streetcars made daily jaunts between the two cities. During its heyday, the service averaged more than 600 trips a day. Construction is already well underway for the first leg, which will stay within the confines of El Paso. The second cross-border leg is still in the discussion stage but the momentum is real.

Thousands of “hardworking Mexican national shoppers took their dollars and pesos and spent it in American businesses,” says El Paso City Representative Peter Svarzbein, 36, who grew up in the Southwest Texan city and recalls a time when American-Mexican relations were far more honored and encouraged than today’s news headlines would suggest.

El Paso sits on the border, right alongside Juarez, affectionately referred to as its “sister city,” and the transnational trolley service, the only one of its kind, was key to the economic lifeblood of both. The daily shoppers from Mexico at one point made El Paso’s J.C. Penney the highest-grossing store in the chain.

Since being retired, the streetcars had been left to rot in a desert lot near the El Paso airport. [Photo: courtesy of Peter Svarzbein]

Svarzbein, one of the major advocates of the streetcars, convinced the Texas Dept. of Transportation to earmark $97 million for phase one, and next year, refurbished vintage streetcars will connect the newly revitalized downtown to the city’s university district. Juarez will have to wait.

A Practical Solution

Inadequate staffing for border patrol screenings at El Paso’s three check points of entry means a lengthy waiting process that can take hours for the 80,000 people who travel between the two cities each day.

“These are people that are shopping, working, and going to school every day,” says Svarzbein, who wants to make it a faster, simpler, less painful process for individuals seeking opportunities. He wants to pivot the conversation away from President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall and what we don’t want—to what we do want.

Peter Svarzbein is working to rebuild a trolley that once ran daily between El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. [Photos: courtesy of Peter Svarzbein]

“It’s not enough to be against something; you have to be proactive,” he says. “We can be against [President Trump’s] wall all day, but what are those things that we’re for? What do we communicate that we we want to see here?”

That narrative is emerging all along the border, from McAllen in South Texas to San Diego in California. It’s one that gets lost in the din of the political skirmishes over Trump’s wall and his claim that he’ll get Mexico to pay for it instead of American taxpayers. The story in border city after border city is one of cultural and economic dependency that benefits both sides.

Soon after Trump said in January that he will move ahead with the wall, local officials have stood up to laud ties between the two countries. The mayor of San Diego even held a joint news conference with his Tijuana counterpart.

“We will continue our story of collaboration, our story of friendship, and we will continue working together—together—for the prosperity of our people,” said Kevin Faulconer, a Republican.

And for all the talk of “bad hombres” and fear of drug cartel invasions, San Diego’s crime rate is the lowest it’s been in decades and El Paso was ranked safest city in America four years for municipalities with more than 500,000 people.

Sister Cities

Other superlatives also help tell the El Paso story. The region is a major hub for manufacturing and international trade, the second most important trade point on the border and the 11th largest exporter in the U.S. More than 86% of what is sent out of El Paso heads to Mexico—$24.6 billion worth, according to the International Trade Administration.

“We see the border as an opportunity, not an obstacle or a challenge,” explains Jessica Herrera, interim director for the El Paso Economic and International Development Department.

“You have a constant back and forth [between the two regions],” says Herrera, who welcomes a trolley that would foster more opportunities between the countries. Like Svarzbein, she believes the city should increase its transportation offerings: “Instead of three [entry point] lanes open, we should have five lanes open,” she says.

The mayor of El Paso has already begun reaching out to Juarez to see how the two can further open up transportation, so Svarzbein believes it’s not a matter of if El Paso’s trolleys will stop in Mexico, but when.

The city of El Paso is refurbishing old streetcars that rolled through Downtown from 1949 to 1974. [Photo: Voogd075 from nl/Wikipedia Commons]

Paper To Reality

The El Paso Streetcar project actually began as a Svarzbein’s graduate art school thesis while he was pursuing a MFA in photo, video, and related media from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2011.

For the last four decades, the art-deco designed cars were left to die in the desert, on land owned by the El Paso airport.

“I wanted to save them,” explains Svarzbein, who appreciated their place in El Paso’s culture.

After graduating, he returned to his hometown in 2011 and decided to vigorously pursue his “art project.” His passion inspired officials to conduct a feasibility study for an intra-city streetcar line. The trolley idea also captured the imagination of local residents: It had character, added a sense of community, and connected the area to its history.

In 2014, the Texas Department included the $97 million in a $2.1 billion dollar multi-modal transportation plan for the state. The El Paso City Council approved Phase 1 of Svarzbein’s vision—a 4.8 mile route from South El Paso to Downtown to the University of Texas.

Construction is already underway, with the placement of 27 stops. The route will hit the city’s main attractions with shopping centers, the convention center, and downtown ballpark among them.

The trolly project did suffer a financial setback this past fall when it was the victim of a $2.9 million phishing scam. When asked whether it would impact progress, Svarzbein says that the situation has been handled. “My understanding is that the money has been recouped,” he says, “the project is on time and on budget.”

Meanwhile, six historic President’s Conference Committee streetcars are being refurbished for their return to service. The cars will be fitted with modern amenities including air conditioning, bike racks, and Wi-Fi. In a nod to their history, each will be painted in one of three original color schemes from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: mustard yellow, seafoam green, and aqua blue.

Although the trolleys won’t debut until mid-2018, it’s already impacted the local economy by redefining the downtown layout and encouraging new investments. Developers, upon learning of the route, began bidding on vacant buildings to turn into multi-apartment units, hotels, and restaurants. The boutique Indigo Hotel, part of the InterContinental Hotels Group, specifically began construction on one street corner in 2015 because of its proximity to a trolley line stop. Since then, two more hotels sprung up in the same area.

It’s stirring old memories of “the way things used to be,” says Svarzbein. El Paso once was the richest southwestern city, eclipsing Phoenix. The trolleys, he says, are “a symbol of a different time, a time when border crossing was more sophisticated.”

The refurbished streetcars will be painted in one of three original color schemes from the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s.

For Phase 2 of Svarzbein’s plan—the Juarez leg—to become reality, it’ll have to cross numerous regulatory hurdles, including local, state, and federal nods.

While El Paso is the only one considering a transnational trolley, other U.S. cities have their own collaborative projects. For example, San Diego in late 2015 unveiled the Cross Border Xpress (CBX) air terminal, an enclosed pedestrian skywalk bridge exclusively for Tijuana Airport passengers who cross the U.S./Mexico border.

Like Svarzbein, CBX COO Elizabeth Brown wanted to make it easier for the 30 million people who cross the area’s borders each year. “There has been a codependency between these two regions for many, many years—decades in fact,” Brown tells Fast Company.

Some are Mexicans that have U.S. citizenship or green card residency or they work in San Diego but live in Tijuana, or the reverse. “There’s definitely a lot of business that goes back and forth,” she stresses. “The state of California has a very robust trade environment with Mexico.”

The 390-foot long structure takes five minutes to cross.

“It’s functionally an airport terminal check-in building that just happens to have a runway in Mexico,” explains Brown. In 2016 alone, the airport saw 6.9 million travelers, with 74% of them crossing the border.  “It shows how interconnected we are,” reflects Brown.

As for talk of a wall, Brown doesn’t seem the least bit concerned, seeing that there’s already a border fence in place.

“We don’t expect it to have any effect,” she says, “we don’t expect any changes.”

That nonchalance is also exhibited by Mauricio Ibarra, planning director for the city of Matamoros, Mexico, which along with the city of Brownsville, Texas, is pushing for a binational bike trail. The project aims to connect the sister cities that see 12,000 workers cross each day. “You can’t see one city surviving without the other,” says Ibarra. “Their economies are linked.”

The trail would build upon an existing bridge and therefore doesn’t require a U.S. presidential permit. The cities, divided by the Rio Grande, already have a wall in place. “If [the wall] gets bigger, it’s still within the exiting infrastructure,” says Ibarra. “We’re just creating another solution for regular migration—for people that live in one city and work or study in the other.”

The project, says Ibarra, has been in the works for the last two and half years but is currently making significant inroads at the political level. He says there is support from Brownsville citizens, city commissioners as well as a few U.S. congressmen. The hope is that it will get clearance within the year.

Svarzbein is equally as hopeful for his plan and the rescued streetcars are already waiting for their binational return. In homage to the vehicles’ original design, each will boast both a painted U.S. and Mexican flag.

“It symbolizes values and identity we share,” says Svarzbein in a follow-up email. “We have a border that we prefer and need to cross and which defines us and celebrates the way music, family, food, and economy cross every single day.”

“In the same way jazz defines New Orleans or New York has its skyscrapers, El Paso has Juarez and Juarez has El Paso,” he tells Fast Company. “We value and we celebrate border crossings.”

Here’s How To Track The Smartphone Apps That Are Tracking You

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When it comes to websites, we have ever more sophisticated techniques at our disposal to block the ads that sometimes track our wanderings around the internet. But most of us spend much of our time these days in mobile apps that offer no transparency on how we’re being tracked or sold–nor tools for blocking that behavior.

We must rely on operating system makers–primarily Apple and Google–to promulgate guidelines to developers on legitimate practices when it comes to tracking behavior, asking for personal information, and transferring data to remote servers. OS makers are also responsible for enforcing those requirements. The rules in place are very broad, and except for abuses that can be quickly checked by in-house reviewers, come into play most often when users and researchers report violations.

Apple’s rules, for instance, require that apps must obtain someone’s permission before transmitting personal data, and have to describe how and where the data will be used. Apple doesn’t police these rules by performing network communication interceptions or demanding to audit remote databases. (The company declined an interview for this story.)

“When applications ask for permissions, that is not really done in a manageable way,” says Franziska Roesner, an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, who researches computer security and privacy. “iOS doesn’t know necessarily whether it’s reasonable for an application to use your location, and that’s why they ask the user,” she says.

Apple has to rely on a developer’s disclosure as to what’s being done with that location data. Some of Roesner’s work tries to match up an app’s purpose and interface elements with the kind of permission being asked, to make sure a request isn’t misused.

Many developers embed functionality in the form of third-party analytics packages and ad-technology code, which may associate seemingly innocuous user details with information collected from other sources. Thus, even if the data sent from an app seems benign in isolation, it might uniquely identify a user or be used for purposes that the developer is unaware of. Developers typically haven’t audited this code and couldn’t tell you in detail what it does.

A recent case study was the app Meitu, made by a firm of the same name, which applies anime-like styling to people’s facial photos. The free app was available in China for years, but an English-language version went viral. When security researchers examined the software’s innards, they found that it was laden with analytics and ad packages, only some of which were linked to working code, and that it asked for extensive permissions in Android and iOS.

Meitu told me at the time of the kerfuffle that it included certain geolocation and app-checking code to comply with advertising network requirements in China, where jailbroken devices can be used to defraud advertisers, and advertisers may demand that their messages be geofenced to appear only in certain regions. Apple confirmed that the app was and remains in compliance.

This Haystack Project visualization provides a stark picture of the extent of mobile app communications with other parties, benign or otherwise.

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission can’t intervene on behalf of consumers unless there’s a suspicion that a company has either broken a law regarding information privacy, including COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule), or that a company has made a representation about what it does and lied. The FTC’s site has a page on its lawsuits and results on data privacy, including ones related to apps.

So what’s a user to do? Academics are on it. Two complementary efforts, which are in the process of cooperating further, will turn more control over to those with mobile devices to monitor app connections, helping to expose bad actors and poorly designed private data security transfers, and allow scrubbing private information or blocking it altogether from being sent.

Listening In On Your Behalf

A team led by Northwestern University’s Dave Choffnes, an assistant professor in its College of Computer and Information Science, developed ReCon, a sort of virtual private network (VPN) for personally identifiable data (PII in the field’s jargon). Unlike a regular VPN, which protects data in a secure tunnel between a user’s device and a data center or corporate server to prevent snoopers, ReCon also uses the VPN connection to act as a scanning proxy to examine all the data passing between your smartphone and the rest of the internet. It works by installing a network profile in iOS or Android, just like regular VPN services.

ReCon can fully examine the contents of the unencrypted connections, which would also be in the clear for anyone on a public Wi-Fi network or other points of network interception when a VPN isn’t in use.

Choffnes and his colleagues found some surprising practices. For instance, he says, GrubHub unintentionally sent user passwords to Crashlytics, a Google-owned firm that helps developers pinpoint code failures. When informed, GrubHub revised its code and had Crashlytics delete all the associated data that contained passwords.

The group extracts data from app communications, and tries to determine what parts of it are PII. This is both harder and easier than it might sound. Most data is sent in a structured way, using an API and often in the standard JSON format, which groups data into a label (the “key”) and its associated value. But the team also applies machine learning, allowing it to identify PII more broadly, even when it appears without using any standard structure format, or shows up in surprising places.

The ReCon project publishes some data derived from a few hundred early users, listing apps, the kind of data they passed, a severity score, whether a developer was notified, and when misbehavior was fixed (if indeed it was).

For those who have installed the app, ReCon has a web-based console that allows users to block or modify information that’s sent. For instance, a user can block all examples of a given kind of PII, or block all location data sent from a given app. However, because some apps fail without location coordinates, the team is looking into coarsening GPS information instead of blocking it entirely. An app’s backend still gets relevant information, “but other parties aren’t able to pin down where you are to a few meters,” Choffnes notes.

Of course, examining a flow of data from users itself raises massive privacy red flags, which is part of the evolution of ReCon. Its creators don’t ask for passwords, try to avoid storing the values sent, and check only to see whether, say, a password is obviously being passed without encryption. The group ultimately wants to perform distributed machine learning without users disclosing private or secret information, such as domains they’re visiting.

Before It Ever Gets Off The Phone

The Haystack Project, a collaboration at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley, among multiple academic institutions, starts with an Android app that captures data right at the source. (It’s not yet available for iOS.)

Like ReCon, Haystack’s Lumen Privacy Monitor app acts like a VPN, but it shunts data internally, rather than sending it off the device for analysis. Because it’s in user control, the app can be given permission to intercept https connections and analyze everything sent between apps and servers. ReCon, sitting outside the device and the network, can’t, although it can identify a connection went to a particular destination, the rough payload size, and the frequency of communication.

The Lumen app monitors what Android apps do with your data
The Lumen app monitors what Android apps do with your data.

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, a researcher at ICSI, says that the fact that Lumen doesn’t send data off the device means that its developers have to be more careful about bogging down a smartphone with processing tasks. At the moment, the tool measures and reports what apps are doing, though it could offer blocking controls in the future.

The app reports back fully anonymized pieces of information, allowing researchers to understand the kind of personal information that’s being extracted and transmitted. “We’re seeing tons of things like some applications linking the MAC address of the Wi-Fi access point as a proxy for location,” says Vallina-Rodriguez. (A base station’s MAC address identifies it uniquely, and is used by Wi-Fi location databases run by Apple, Google, and other firms.)

While certain kinds of personal data requires an app to trigger Android to ask for user permission, “we have found applications and third-party services that are somehow using inside channels without user awareness,” says Vallina-Rodriguez. He notes that an Android file that contains a variety of system-information details, like buffer size, may also have unique network identifiers, including an IP address, and that’s being sent without user consent.

Fortunately, the two projects have both a friendly competition and plans for collaboration. The efforts will likely remain separate, but incorporate aspects or associate data to get a bigger picture about app behavior.

And the ReCon team would like to develop software for a network appliance, a Raspberry Pi that would act as a sniffer or proxy or firmware for a network router, to let someone see the interactions across all network devices—especially Internet of Things equipment, which have all sorts of privacy and security issues of their own.

Both ReCon and Lumen are working on obtaining more funding to improve the projects and make them viable for a large-scale consumer rollout.

[Photo: Unsplash user Oliur Rahman]

Policies Instead Of Gobbledygook

As informative as RecCon and Lumen are, what apps are doing with our data remains an impenetrable subject. Many privacy experts and researchers point to the use of dense legal documents to define disclosure without those being linked to verifiable discrete elements that software (or humans) could check. The privacy disclosures are nearly impossible for typical users to parse, and even lawyers trained in the field might need to devote hours of effort to confirming whether they’re being followed.

Choffnes notes, “The privacy policies, which is what they’re claiming they’ll do, tend to be written in a very broad way,” which gives them wiggle room to avoid running afoul of FTC deceptive business-practice regulations. The more vague they are, the less chance they’ve failed at disclosing information they grab.

“As long as you disclose, almost anything goes,” says Stacey Gray, the policy counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum, a group that pulls from industry, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders. “If you’re not being deceptive in your policy, you can do almost anything.”

Where matters become especially murky, she says, is where data usage is “unexpected, inappropriate, or sensitive.” A restaurant-finding app might ask for location to give you recommendations around you. But if it’s also selling your location as a revenue stream without disclosing so, “that’s unexpected or inappropriate.” You wouldn’t give up that right intentionally, but it could be easily hidden in a miasma of legal terminology.

Gray also points out unintended consequences, where the app maker and a third-party ad tech network could both act within reasonable terms, but an unrelated party could violate privacy. She cites a situation in May 2016 in which a company claimed to be able to use advertising targeting to find women in the vicinity of Planned Parenthood clinics and serve them ads about anti-abortion religious counseling services. That action is possibly legal, but certainly not desirable by the users, ad networks, or publishers involved. (The service’s operator said he could place ads on Facebook pages; Facebook stated it could find no record of him or its ads.)

The same conflicts that have driven the ad-blocking wars make it unlikely that the business models behind mobile apps will provide more transparency, making the research behind ReCon and Lumen all the more important. As Choffnes explains, “Most of the advances in this area are coming from academia; these are things that are a clear public good and would not come out of the business community, because their incentives are aligned to promote this behavior instead of consumer privacy.”

How To Advance Your Career In A Crappy Entry-Level Job

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In the ideal world, post-collegiate life comes with a job offer related to your major. In that perfect entry-level job, you are given the guidance to move up in the company and advance your career.

Of course, this scenario is, well, unrealistic. No matter how hard you work in college, landing a job in your desired industry post-graduation is not guaranteed. And it’s not always because you lack the skills and experience either, sometimes there’s too many candidates for too few entry level jobs, or companies you want to work for just don’t have the budget to hire and train someone new right now.


Related: New Graduates: These Are The Unspoken Rules Of The Workplace No One Tells You


Whatever the reason–sometimes you just have to take a job that’s not exactly what you set out to do. But is it possible to still advance in your career when you’re stuck (for now) in a crappy entry-level job? I asked career professionals who’d gone through career changes themselves–here’s what they said:

1. Treat Your Job Like It’s Your Dream Job

So cold-calling prospective clients and entering data on a spreadsheet is really not what you want to be doing out of college. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t find a way to bring the same level of energy and enthusiasm to this role that you would if it were your dream job.

Rachel Bitte, chief people officer at recruitment software Jobvite, says that this is one of the most important mind-sets to have when you’re starting any job. “Part of it is that, even if you know that you don’t have your dream job, you’ve accepted it. Go into it as if it’s your dream job. People can tell if you want to be there. You never know what you’re going to learn.”


Related: How These Recent Grads Landed Jobs At YouTube, Giphy, And SoundCloud


Bitte herself started out working as a receptionist in a consulting firm before working in HR after spending four years studying international relations. But a coveted internship at the United Nations showed her that the nonprofit world wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and she decided she would be better off working in private corporations. Her receptionist role led to an office manager gig for a PR firm, where she was involved in company admin, as well as HR and finance. She ended up tackling more and more HR projects, began taking night classes taught by professionals in the industry and eventually landed a recruiting job at Apple through her instructor.

2. Take On Challenging Projects

Part of bringing your full passionate self to work is to look for opportunities where you can take charge and be of value. Bitte says that the beauty of having an entry-level job that’s not in your desired field is that you’ve got nothing to lose. “You can take a risk. Look for projects that are really meaty that some people might shy away from.”

Daniel Ospina, an organizational design specialist who started his career as a chef, echoed this sentiment. “Instead of focusing on the industry or the job title, focus on the problem that you want to solve and look for insights from a variety of sources. Most problems these days are best approached with a multidisciplinary perspective. Coming at them from a different angle can be quite valuable in the market.”

Everyone likes a self-starter. Many skills, like communication and project-management, are also relevant to almost every industry. Having a few successful projects under your belt can only benefit you when you go for your next interview, particularly if there is a way of quantifying your success.

3. Make An Effort To Network With Your Coworkers

You’ve probably heard this advice many times before, and we know, it’s extremely tempting to give this the old eye-roll. But this is a crucial thing to do when you want to remain on the lookout for new opportunities.

“I think networking is absolutely critical.” Bitte says. “You just never know who’s connected to what in your network.” You might find, for example, that the account coordinator you had lunch with yesterday knows a recruiter at a company you’re dying to work at. Or that the CEO’s assistant is related to the project manager of the contract position that just opened up–which you’re considering putting in an application for.

Or they might just have connections to people who work in the industry you want to get into, and that’s valuable in itself. Rebecca Zucker, a partner in leadership development consultancy Next Step Partners, previously told Fast Companythat this is a great way to find out exactly what you can do to bring yourself closer to where you want to be. You might think you know what skills you need for that wish-list job, but it’s much smarter to go and ask someone who’s currently there. 

4. Start A Side Project Related To Your Desired Industry

Just because you’re not working in your desired industry doesn’t mean you can’t develop your expertise in it. Ospina suggests trying to gain experience while you’re still in the job (that way, you can still pay your bills while you make yourself a more attractive candidate for your dream job). “These exploratory projects can be organizing a community of interest, hosting themed dinners, creating small conferences, or interviewing people in the industry for a podcast or blog. By providing value to others (for example, through exposure or simply a nice meal) you can grow your network. Over time, that which you have given others will serve you the most.”

5. When You Leave, Make Sure That You Have A Good Story

From a recruiter’s perspective, Bitte says that the key to turning an irrelevant experience into a relevant one is to have a good story. Take the example of someone who someone who landed a PR role but would really prefer a journalism job. They might want to articulate their passion and commitment to journalism but frame their experience from a learning angle; i.e. they had the opportunity to learn how things work from that side of the media. They might then want to think about how the lessons they learned through their PR job make them a better journalist. Perhaps it reaffirmed their commitment to the profession, or it gave them some fresh perspectives they never would have gotten otherwise.

Lihi Gerstner, an architect turned entrepreneur who cofounded space-renting and listing platform Splacer reminds graduates that the start of their career is the perfect time for experimentation. In other words, getting a job in an unrelated field doesn’t make you doomed to adulthood failure.

“Every job should open new doors and possibilities. It’s important to be open to experiences and not be afraid to get your hands dirty–you are young, this is the time to learn and to experience new things. You’ll always have time to decide what you want to be ‘when you grow up.’ “

This CEO Doodled A Chart To Help Your Startup Balance Growth With Profit

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Growth or profit? For tech startups, it’s a million-dollar (and sometimes billion-dollar) question. If you want to expand your business, you generally have to spend money. But when does growth at all costs become a reckless strategy? How do you find the right balance between growth and burn?

The tech world’s last major reckoning with this question was back in March 2014, when Silicon Valley darling Box filed an S-1 indicating it was ready to IPO. For years, Box, which offers cloud-based content-management software to enterprises, had been growing at a fast clip. Investors were willing to overlook the massive amounts of money the company was losing, citing its long-term potential.

But then something unexpected happened. The markets shifted. Investors hunkered down. Whispers went out that Box’s “unit economics” weren’t working. So the company waited nine long months before finally going public. The new attitude: Growth was important, but companies needed to be profitable (or show at least clear path to profitability), too.

So what’s the optimal ratio between these two fundamentals? Ultimately, the answer is still fairly subjective, but there’s an insanely simple chart that can help you sort it out.

Meet The Growth-Profit Matrix

There’s no shortage of methods out there for assessing whether your startup has got the growth-profit balance just right—the real question is what “just right” actually means. The now-famous “Rule of 40,” for example, suggests that a successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup’s growth rate plus profit should add up to 40: If you’re growing at 60% rate, you can afford to lose 20%, for instance.

But I’m a highly visual person and started to wonder whether there was a way to express this dynamic graphically. Thinking about Hootsuite‘s own trajectory, I threw together this super-simple chart:

[Illustration: courtesy of Ryan Holmes]
Now, I realize this is far from scientific, and I also know the underlying concept isn’t new or revolutionary—everyone from Boston Consulting Group to the venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz have used graphs like this to assess businesses. It’s very basic, but—at a glance—it should let you know if your company is headed in the right direction.

Needless to say, the bottom-left quadrant here is the one you generally don’t want to find yourself in. With few exceptions, you don’t want your startup to be losing money and not really growing. That’s a sure sign that you haven’t mastered product-market fit yet.


Related:Making The Case For Hiring Less And Growing Slowly


The top-left quadrant is where most promising startups start off. It’s definitely where Hootsuite was in its early years. We were losing money, but for all the right reasons: burning through our investments in order to grow fast. In retrospect, this approach let us gain a huge early lead on our competitors in the social-relationship platform space.

As we matured, our priorities shifted. Growth remained important, but investors and analysts became increasingly focused on seeing a path to profitability. So we reduced our spending, tightening belts and asking employees to do more with less. Last year, we achieved a cash-flow positive milestone. There’s no doubt we’re a healthier company now, one built to make money and built to last doing it.

A Constant Game Of Four Square

The idea of just “breaking even” may not sound like a milestone, but if you look at similar-sized companies in our space, it’s actually kind of revolutionary. We’re an eight-year-old business, we’re still growing at a great pace, but we’re actually cash-positive. For most cloud companies—from Zendesk and Marketo to Hubspot and Shopify—the idea of breaking even doesn’t enter the picture until anywhere from two to four years after IPO.

So when it comes to the growth-profit matrix, it’s all about angling yourself into the right quadrant at the right time—knowing it might not be in your best interest to try and stay put there forever. For many startups, this is easy to miss.

If we were to think of these four types of growth-profit ratio as phases, on the other hand, stretched out chronologically, we might be setting ourselves up to fail. I hardly think of our high-growth days as over and done with. While it’s not easy to achieve high profitability and high growth at the same time, there’s one way to break into that elusive top-right quadrant of the chart (and back into it if you’ve had to slow down and refocus for awhile): continuous innovation. By developing new product lines and finding new ways to bring real benefits to customers, it’s possible to sustain high profits while also expanding market share.

In our case, for example, we’ve built new functionality into our core platform, including the ability to buy social media ads. And we’re adding features that make our dashboard useful not just to marketers but to net new audiences—namely, sales and customer service teams. All these steps align with our long-term goal–one that’s predicated on high growth and high profit—of becoming a $10 billion company.

The profit-growth question doesn’t have easy answers. What’s more, you can never stop asking it because the right answer might change according to circumstance. Depending on your industry and the stage of your company, “success” might mean a very different ratio than it does for a different startup in a different phase. Ultimately, every investor cares primarily about one thing: how much cash flow your company generates over its lifetime. You may not be profitable now, but there needs to be a clear route to profitability, ideally in your near future—no matter how groundbreaking your business idea may be.

8 Things We Learned About “House Of Cards” Season 5 From Its New Showrunners

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The fourth season of House of Cards found President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) and his wife/running mate, Claire (Robin Wright), actively on the campaign trail, working against assassination attempts and terrorist organizations to realize their goal of a two-term presidency. When the season ended, the actual American election had just hit the primaries–and the Underwoods were still three weeks away from Election Day.

Yet in the nearly 15 months since Netflix’s flagship series released new episodes, the American people endured a grueling general election, an unprecedented victory, and an exhaustive 100 first days in a fledgling–and woefully inept–administration. And behind the scenes, the show saw its own transition of power when series creator Beau Willimon stepped down as showrunner, making room for Melissa James Gibson and Frank Pugliese to serve as co-showrunners in his stead.

Both writers on the show since the third season, Gibson and Pugliese found themselves in the unique position of having to build upon last season’s cliffhanger ending while coming up with a fifth season that wouldn’t pale in comparison to true life politics–something that hadn’t been a concern until now. Here, Fast Company speaks with the new House of Cards showrunners about learning on the job and writing against a (somewhat) real-world Underwood-ian president.

Having a theater background is helpful for any rookie showrunner

The biggest challenge, as with any new career move, was wrapping their heads around the scope of responsibilities involved with running such a series. “In this job, it’s a real skill to manage time and creative decisions that are getting made on a daily basis–and especially how you manage the time you should give to each decision,” Pugliese says. “Luckily, Melissa and I come from the theater, where we’re used to collaborative processes. I ran a theater company for a while, too, so that was helpful in a way because there, you’re in collaboration with large groups and you get used to seeing how each decision gets made.”

[Photos: David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix]

Like in politics, there was a peaceful transfer of power

For all the drama that unfolds onscreen, the changing of the guard behind the scenes was actually far less dramatic. Because the writers’ room moved down to the shooting location in Baltimore for the third and fourth seasons, Gibson and Pugliese had two years’ worth of being on set in a limited capacity–the perfect means of getting to know the cast and crew. “It’s a really well-oiled machine,” Gibson says of Netflix’s setup. “The transition was really seamless because we’d worked with everyone in the past.”

Surprisingly (and perhaps most importantly), everyone involved in production–“the whole gamut,” Pugliese stresses–seemed as invested in season five as they were from the get-go. “There’s an allegiance that comes from just everyone being clear that we’re all trying to make the best episode of television we can,” he says. “Once that’s understood, everybody’s onboard.”

[Photo: Pete Souza, courtesy of Netflix]

Season five is all about “terror and fear”

The fifth season premiere seems to possess more kinetic energy than the average House of Cards episode, moving faster through plot points thanks to the high-stakes ending of season four. When viewers last saw them, Francis “Frank” and Claire Underwood (Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright) were on the verge of fomenting chaos and “basically threatening World War III.”

The challenge for the new showrunners, then, was coming up with a means of saving the Underwoods from the corner they’ve been backed into. Their ultimate solution felt eerily appropriate. “We came to this idea of playing with terror and fear, and how it’s manipulated and how it plays out in the imagination of the American people,” Pugliese says. “I mean, probably the most terrifying place is inside the imagination when it comes to terror.”

“To us, that felt very Underwood-ian,” Gibson adds.

[Photos: David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix]

There was no temptation to reboot

Despite being handed near-absolute creative authority over the series, Gibson and Pugliese felt no compulsion to shake things up or course-correct plotlines from seasons past. “We came in at a point where there was a number of stories that were already in motion,” Pugliese says, offering Underwood chief of staff Doug Stamper’s storyline as one of several demanding follow-through. “How we juggle them and how we tell the story is our decision, but a lot of that was already in play. And we were being responsible to what had come in the four previous seasons.”

[Photo: Pete Souza, courtesy of Netflix]

Season five was written before Trump was elected…

Ever since the shocking election results in November, Gibson and Pugliese have understood the natural inclination to draw parallels between the soap-opera-meets-politics elements of House of Cards and the real world. Yet despite whatever similarities viewers might divine from this new season, the truth is that season five had already been broken and finished months before Trump would unexpectedly win the election. “We were actually shooting episodes 10 and 11 by that time,” Gibson clarifies.

Thanks to the disparate timelines–season five picks up in the middle of the general election–writers had little room to either re-tool or scrap ideas entirely. “If any changes happened, they were in the moment,” Pugliese says. “Maybe a line of dialogue here and there. But as far as the story and everything we had laid out, it basically stuck to what we had laid out months before the election happened.”

[Photo: Pete Souza, courtesy of Netflix]

…but they foresaw Trump’s rise to power

While House of Cards’s writers couldn’t have predicted or used specifics from the Trump administration for the series, their rigorous news consumption and regular consultation with political experts kept them in touch with global goings-on, both culturally and politically. By Gibson and Pugliese’s account, that’s what makes this season–which kicks off with a fictional tightening of border security, not unlike Trump’s restrictions–so eerily relevant.

“We were just feeding off the same stuff that might’ve created Trump,” Pugliese says. “That stuff was in the air and had been in the air for a while. Any similarities exist because the conditions are similar. In a way, nationalism and populism is something we’ve been talking about and playing with since season three. This idea that a figure might come along and take advantage of that. For us, it’s Francis. In the real world, it’s someone else.”

[Photos: David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix]

Frank and Claire’s marriage takes center stage once again

The first 100 days of Trump’s presidency had been so outlandish that it almost seemed impossible for House of Cards–still caught mid-election–to keep up with the pace of the real world. And while there was some worry about coming back while viewers were otherwise preoccupied, Gibson and Pugliese acknowledge they had no choice but to tell the story they promised to tell. And while the series won’t be able to avoid looking politically uninspired next to the current administration, it plans on playing up one of its more entertaining and foundational elements.

“We have to respond to the zeitgeist at a certain level, sure, but the other thing that’s at the heart of the show is this fascinating marriage,” Gibson says. Where seasons three and four watched the White House couple drift apart and scheme separately, season five puts the emphasis back on Frank and his Lady Macbeth together. “We have to serve the political landscape on one hand, but that relationship and the power struggle between them, in context, is really part of the show’s heartbeat.”

[Photos: David Giesbrecht, courtesy of Netflix]

Similarities between Underwood and Trump haven’t gone unnoticed

The series’s central Machiavellian politico seems all the more sinister when mirrored against Trump. Both have a proclivity for theatricality and distraction tactics, not to mention an unsettling sense of doing whatever it takes for the sake of getting what they want. But the similarities, Pugliese says, stop there. “Both characters are just responding in the moment, but ultimately, they’re different,” he says. “Francis operates on the inside, and Trump operates on the outside. One thing that I will concede is how they might do anything or say anything for the sake of power. Those are similarities that are scary to see, but the way they do it is fundamentally different.”

If anything, Gibson says today’s real world political climate presents an opportunity of introspection for House of Cards‘s viewers. “Francis has asked for the audience’s complicity from the very beginning of the series,” she says. “And part of what the show is doing this season is taking that to its outer limits. It’s asking: How far are you willing to go along? How complicit will you be? And I do think that that’s a question that has resonance in the real world. If it makes you question what’s going on in the world around you, then great.”

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