What’s the one problem freelancers complain more about than anything else? It’s getting stiffed—or getting paid long after the job is done.

With the number of freelancers growing, a group of applications and platforms have emerged to help make money matters go more smoothly. The latest entrant is Felix, a mobile app that lets freelancers set up autopay with clients.

Started by former tutors David Phelps and Thomas Howell, Felix lets hourly workers log their time weekly and invoice clients who agree to issue automatic payments. After each weekly invoice is generated, vendors have 48 hours to cancel if there is a dispute.

In some ways, it provides much of what PayPal does for businesses, but inside a sleek mobile interface that auto generates an invoice based on time, date, hourly rate, and expenses. Like PayPal, Felix charges a processing fee (3.9% plus 30¢). It is aimed at the legions of workers like babysitters, tutors, piano teachers, and swim instructors who offer one-on-one recurring services and are typically paid with cash (or through Venmo)؅.

The emergence of Felix and apps like it indicates that contingent workers have reached a scale to where a market is finally rising to meet their demands. More than one-third of workers are freelancers, according to a 2016 survey. The report found that these workers have two major problems with their self-employed lifestyle: getting paid fairly, and getting paid on time.

“I file invoices, but they just ignore them,” says Katherine Packer, a freelance social media blogger, about her clients. While these tools are beginning to roll out in bigger corporate settings, individual freelancers are still struggling with an antiquated billing system.

Unlike having steady full-time employment, getting paid as a freelancer can often be unpredictable. This has become such an issue that last year, the New York City Council approved the Freelance Isn’t Free Act, requiring businesses to pay contractors no later than 30 days after services have been rendered. The rest of the country has been slow to afford protections for the contingent working class.

Companies are rising up to provide a number of services to bridge that canyon. Work Market, a company that manages freelance workers for big enterprise, launched a way to pay workers faster in February. Another company, Prefer, created an app to help freelancers and self-employed workers manage scheduling, payment, and the process of finding new clients. Intuit too, started to provide tax services for gig economy workers two years ago.

With many of these apps, the ultimate goal is to go beyond just getting people paid.

Felix founders Phelps and Howell see a big opportunity to create a community on Felix, where they can connect workers to information about how much they should be charging clients and potential benefits. That could also manifest through partnerships with companies that provide services like a 401(k) or IRA.

Says Phelps, “The more that we can create a community out of this, and the more that we can create a network where people can exchange advice, share tips, and empower each other, the stronger their businesses will be, and the more money we’ll get paid.”

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

Californians who watched cable news on Thursday before, during or after Trump’s error-ridden Rose Garden speech, kept hearing—from Senator Rand Paul, from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, and from Trump himself—that the Paris climate agreement was a “bad deal” for Americans. Paul, the Kentucky Republican, asserted on CNN that the agreement required too little of other countries; Pruitt, that it somehow hindered American independence. Trump promised he would “exit and renegotiate any deal which fails to serve America’s interest,” he said, and so that’s what he was doing.

But what the U.S. signed onto in Paris 18 months ago wasn’t really wasn’t really a “deal” at all; it was a voluntary agreement, without the force of law or the treaty imprimatur of the U.S. Senate. It was so manifestly not an ironclad deal, in fact, that reportedly Secretary of State John Kerry, four hours before deadline, refused to sign unless the word “shall” was changed to “should” in the segment about the U.S. providing $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which helps poorer countries in their efforts to establish clean-energy economics. (Trump on Thursday referred to that sum as “a vast fortune.”)

Nor was the U.S. government’s “nationally determined contribution,” or NDC, to greenhouse gas reductions all that “draconian,” as Trump claimed. California has a near-term legislative mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and an executive order to achieve 80% below 1990 reductions by 2050. An international coalition of regional and local jurisdictions led by California, the Under2 MOU, assumes only reductions of 80% to 95% by 2050 will keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), by the end of the century. The Paris compact hewed to the same climate goal, but when John Kerry put his pen to the agreement in December of 2015, the U.S. had agreed to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions to, at best, 28% of 2005 levels by 2025. By some estimates, thanks mostly to the decline of coal-fired power, the nation is already a third of the way there.

Which doesn’t mean Paris was useless. The 21st “Conference of Parties,” or COP, an assembly mandated under a United Nations treaty the U.S. Senate ratified in 1992, is where governments come together and share observed data on climate impacts, exchange technological fixes to dirty energy plants and, most of all, affirm individual commitments to climate mitigation. The United States has so far not withdrawn from the UN treaty, and consequently, it must still participate in that process. And dozens of U.S. states and cities remain committed not just to the Paris goals, but to even more aggressive standards arrived at in separate constructive alliances.

Governor Heads To China For Clean Energy Meeting

In fact, as the news broke Thursday that Trump would pull out of the Paris accord, California Gov. Jerry Brown was packing his bags for China. On Friday, he’d be on his way to a convocation of multinational energy policy makers called the Clean Energy Ministerial. On his agenda next week is a Beijing gathering of the Under2 group, which Brown and Winfried Kretschmann, the minister-president of the German state of Baden-Württemberg initiated two years ago to promote local solutions to a global problem. So far, over 170 regional and local jurisdictions from 33 countries have signed on, including Oregon, Minnesota, and the city of Austin, Texas. With the recent additions of Canada and Mexico in April, the coalition now represents 37% of the global economy.

The Under2 Coalition may be California’s most significant contribution to climate mitigation since 2006, when then-assemblymember Fran Pavley successfully pioneered legislation to control climate-forcing pollutants. Brown insists that the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accords will only fuel its momentum. California’s too: “California will resist this misguided and insane course of action,” Brown said in a statement. “Trump is AWOL, but California is on the field, ready for battle.”

Informal, information-sharing collaborations with other countries such as Under2 are well within any state’s constitutional rights, says Michael Wara, an associate professor of environmental law at Stanford University. But there are other ways in which states need to be careful. As much as Brown wants to present California as a vanguard nation-state, there are limits to the state’s autonomy. “There’s a problem for us in the Constitution in that it dictates that the nation speaks with one voice. And that voice is, as we’re learning, the president’s voice.”

Could States’ Carbon Markets Clash With Federal Law?

That principle applies to the carbon markets as much it does to any other trade deal. California’s chief contribution to the clean-economy model is a greenhouse-gas market trading program, where big polluters buy credits from lesser polluters to meet state-mandated emissions caps. By state law that market can link to other greenhouse gas markets whose requirements are at least as strict, but so far, only Canadian provinces have qualified. California and the Canadian province of Quebec linked their carbon markets in 2013; California and Ontario have laid the groundwork for the province to join in 2018.

It’s those arrangements that could land the state in dicey legal territory should the Trump administration decide to get tough. “We’re tiptoeing up to something that looks like foreign policy,” Wara says. “That was fine under Obama, because the U.S. government agreed with California. But we’re moving out of that pretty quickly.”

Wara cites a 2003 case that involved European insurance companies failing to reimburse policy holders whose families lost everything in the Holocaust. “California passed a law in 1999 that said you can’t do business in California if you don’t release the names of all the Jewish people who held policies during World War II,” he says. The law conflicted with what the U.S. government under President George W. Bush called the “voluntary, non-adversarial mechanisms” it was supposedly employing to resolve the victims’ claims. In a contentious 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the California law.

“The basic idea is that it’s the privilege of the executive branch to conduct foreign policy,” Wara says.

Nothing in that decision, however, says that California regulators can’t enter into partnerships with willing governments to share expertise gleaned from actual experience. “There aren’t that many entities that have experienced environmental regulators in the world,” Wara says. California’s cap-and-trade program has weaknesses; the price of credits has dropped too low to motivate polluters to mend their ways, and environmental justice groups complain that it concentrates pollution in disadvantaged communities. The program expires in 2020, and legislation that would extend it for another decade fell three votes short in the Assembly Thursday night. Another bill to radically overhaul the trading program is in the works.

But for now the current program still functional, Wara says, “and California’s learned a lot from it.” When China launches a planned carbon-trading scheme this summer, it will be with the “tremendous advice” its regulators gleaned from California regulators through the Under2 program.

“California’s history on air pollution and the environment is that we invent stuff and share it,” Wara says. “That’s what we should continue to do.”

There are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of passionate sports fans around the world. And yet, according to Intel, no more than 1% of those people will ever get to see their favorite team in person.

That massive experience gap is at the center of Intel’s ambitious live-sports virtual reality efforts, a series of initiatives that over the next couple of years should solidify the company’s “as if you’re there” philosophy about sports, said Jeff Hopper, the business strategy lead at Intel Sports Group.

In the short term, those efforts will focus on single-user, individual experiences. But over time, Intel plans on making it possible for fans to be right in the middle of their favorite team’s action, create personalized 3D highlights, and share them with friends.

This week, Intel and Major League Baseball announced a three-year partnership to live-stream one baseball game a week in VR. That followed a similar pact between the NBA and NextVR that kicked off at the beginning of the 2016-2017 basketball season.

Fans watching the games—via Intel’s True VR app on Samsung’s Gear VR headset—will be able to choose from multiple camera angles around a stadium, each of which will give them a wide, immersive view of the action.

“We’re excited to work with somebody like Intel, [a] leader in the sports technology space,” Kenny Gersh, executive vice president of business at Major League Baseball Advanced Media, told Fast Company, “to define the VR experience for baseball [and] present the game in a different way to our fans.”

While analysts have predicted that virtual reality will be a $38 billion industry by 2026, it’s not yet a mainstream technology. Companies like Samsung have sold millions of VR headsets, but data suggests few people are using them regularly. And that’s why Gersh said he’s not certain that VR will succeed as a mainstream technology. Still, Major League Baseball wants to be part of shaping what VR could become. “I’d rather be there and help shape it,” he said, “rather than ignore it, and if it does take off . . . we’re not there.”

That’s where companies like Intel are playing a vital role.

The Santa Clara, California, tech giant is, of course, best known as a chip maker. But its portfolio goes far beyond powering computers and other devices. Recently, it decided to be a leader in VR, acquiring two companies that it hopes will solidify that position. First, it bought Voke, a developer of the VR cameras and technology that’s now at the heart of the Major League Baseball project. It also purchased Replay Technology, which has built a system for panoramic, 360-degree capture and playback of sports highlights.

Those two deals together could make VR sports a billion-dollar business for Intel, according to Axios, and will be “one of the big pillars for Intel for the future,” said Sankar Jayaram, the CTO of Intel Sports Group.

What’s clear is that Intel sees VR as a nascent technology, something that shows early promise for transforming a sports viewing experience that it says hasn’t fundamentally changed in 75 years, but will eventually be much more—a way to step into the action, being able to see plays in 360 degrees almost as if from the perspective of, say, Tom Brady.

In the short term, those views are going to be curated by Intel, its league partners, and broadcasters. But over time, the company hopes, it will be able to let fans personalize how they see the most important plays by their favorite teams, and eventually, even be able to “walk around” inside live action.

To be sure, the latter goal isn’t coming to a VR headset near you anytime soon. That’s going to take at least two years, if not more, Intel says. It’s coming, though, and when it does, fans should be able to experience sports in the way we’ve all wanted to our whole lives—being on the field, in the huddle, able to see how everyone’s moving, and following the ball as it moves. All without having to take a hit from 300-pound linebackers or 7-foot-tall centers, or having to actually try to hit a 95-mile-per-hour fastball.

Stereoscopic Now, Volumetric In The Future

When Major League Baseball begins live-streaming games in VR with next Tuesday’s Cleveland Indians versus Colorado Rockies matchup, fans with a Gear VR will be able to select from four different camera views that place them in different parts of Denver’s Coors Field. They’ll also be able to see up-to-the-moment player and team stats, and listen to announcers tailoring their commentary for VR.

Gersh noted that what fans see when they immerse themselves in the first live MLB VR streams next week will likely have little in common with what they see by the end of the three-year partnership with Intel, given that VR capture, processing, and distribution technology will almost certainly improve significantly over the next few years.

One way it’ll likely get better is by the eventual merging of the stereoscopic technology from Intel’s True VR group and the volumetric capture that came via the acquisition of Replay Technology.

Fans have already gotten a taste of the volumetric approach—during NBA games, and more recently the Super Bowl.

You’ve no doubt seen it on TV. The broadcast shows a replay of an exciting LeBron James dunk, when suddenly it pauses, rotates, and shows the paused play from 360 degrees. It seems like computer-generated magic. But it’s not.

It’s actually the output of more than a couple dozen 4K cameras mounted all around arena and algorithms that automatically stitch all the imagery together into that one amazing replay.

For now, all that’s possible is those static replays, shown either during TV broadcasts or in curated highlights that could be available through a mobile app.

That’s just the beginning, though.

Starting this fall, the NFL will have this technology, called FreeD, installed in several stadiums, making it available to fans at games on JumboTrons or on mobile apps. Intel and the NFL have agreed to install the system at 12 stadiums, according to Preston Phillips, the director of business development for Intel Sports Group.

One of those venues is Levi’s Stadium, the Santa Clara home of the San Francisco 49ers. There, Intel has installed 38 5K cameras, which together capture terabytes of data, all of which is compiled into the futuristic replays.

The goal, according to Phillips? To eventually supplant the traditional broadcast experience, based on six static cameras, with a fully immersive, real-time VR viewing experience that could put fans right in the middle of the play.

Today, though, the technology is being used as a highlights product, he said. Fans at stadiums like Levi’s will see up to 11 of these clips a game—generally the “game-changing moments” that determine who wins or loses.

Leagues like the NFL will also be able to use those highlights in whatever ways they want, for example, sending them out to fans the day after games.

Yet, the 10-to-15-second replays can be produced in less than a minute, thanks to fiber connections between the cameras and a control room in each stadium. There, two Intel technicians, the “pilot and navigator,” in conjunction with the broadcasters, choose the plays they want to highlight, and turn them out. What fans see is essentially a virtual camera that shows the play from all angles.

While the highlights are produced at stadiums today, the goal is to eventually do the processing in the cloud. That would mean that Intel, the leagues, or the broadcasters could process clips from multiple venues in a single location as they scale up.

That all sounds great—until you realize that in a year or two, fans will be able to control these highlights themselves on their mobile devices. They’ll be able to choose the clips they want to watch, and eventually, even control the camera views themselves.

They’ll be able to share the clips with friends, and, Phillips said, fans will be able to “be Tom Brady as you watch the game.”

That will help fans better understand their favorite games, see how their favorite players explode off the line of scrimmage or dunk the ball, and simply get that much better an understanding of how the game works.

“This is going to bring me much, much closer to [sports] than ever before,” Hopper said. “I think that value, these experiences, you might hear them referred to as ‘fan engagement,’ but for me, it’s far more than that. It’s immersion into the passion I have for my sport, my team, my players.”

It’s a Friday night in late March in Raleigh, North Carolina, and everyone at this hip two-story bar has spent the afternoon talking about politics. At one end of the bar sits a 29-year-old man with a broad chest, a thick dark beard, dressed casually in a hooded zip-up sweater and jeans, with a long pour of whiskey in hand. People in the room are seeking him out. They ask him his plans. Some people offer advice, others want to fund his not-yet-launched campaign. He greets the attention with the relaxed air of someone who is good at making small talk peppered with the occasional college basketball reference.

His name is Wisam Naoum and, like many others around the country, he had a crisis of conscience after the presidential election. “I grew up as the resident ethnic kid,” he told a packed room at a nearby hotel earlier in the day. He was the one with the weird ethnic food at lunch, he joked. The son of Assyrian immigrants, Wisam’s parents fled Northern Iraq in the early ’80s and eventually landed in Detroit to start a new life. His family, living in a suburb outside the city, kept their culture alive and vibrant in the house, but “I was the only dark kid on my block,” he said, with the cool, deep cadence of a nice guy on a college Frisbee team. “I had to learn how to balance the culture at home with the culture at school.”

Wisam Naoum (pictured second from left). [Photo: Lincoln Pennington]

The kids on the bus knew him as “Peter”—his American name—because the bus driver couldn’t be bothered to pronounce Wisam. In time, he tells me later, he learned how to blend the two worlds into one. As a young adult he worked with a group of fellow immigrants that advocated for state and national resolutions to recognize the Assyrian conflict. He describes it to me as his first taste of politics. He majored in political science as an undergrad at Wayne State University in Detroit and went on to law school at the University of Michigan. He landed a high-paying job in Chicago as a corporate lawyer. That was three years ago.

Donald Trump’s win moved him to act, he tells me. “After the election I kind of was stuck, because I knew I wanted to do something, but I wasn’t sure what that was,” he says. Now the plan is beginning to take shape.

At the end of his speech earlier in the day he announced: “I’m leaving my job, I’m moving home, and I’m stepping into the arena.”

The Arena—that’s why we’re here. It’s a metaphor, a mind-set, and in practice, a recurring conference organized to cultivate Democratic talent for upcoming elections. Since even before the election, there has been a concerted effort to cultivate a new grassroots movement. A reclamation of what it means to be progressive. This has long been an issue boiling just below the surface of the mainstream Democratic machine, but there wasn’t enough collective momentum to do anything about it.

Related Video: Can Young Political Outsiders Save The Democratic Party?

Now, many believe, things are different. We’re in the Trumpression, and swift action is needed. Here, in Raleigh, is one attempt to make tangible change happen. The Arena is an organization that hosts summits to source new talent to run for office in red or swing states. It uses nomenclature from the tech startup playbook to illustrate how it stands apart (“We are the sherpas for these new civic entrepreneurs,” announces The Arena website). It’s even launched an “accelerator” to help fund candidates and organizations.

There are other, similar organizations, like Emily’s List, which was established in 1985 to focus on finding and electing more pro-choice women politicians. And Flippable, launched last year, uses technology to find the local races with the greatest chance of flipping blue and then dumps resources into those fights. There’s also Women’s March, Indivisible, the list goes on. These groups aren’t vying for institutional dominance per se—and they all work together and attend each other’s functions.

These individual groups are all trying to define a movement that has yet to fully steep. The Tea Party gained dominance by going local and tailoring its message to the everyday American. Members went to town hall meetings, provoked engagement, and then ran for local office. And they won. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn.

Bernie Sanders excelled at making disparate, and often disillusioned individuals want to act, with income inequality being the common denominator. The Democrats are now trying to bottle up that energy and rebrand it. The challenge for The Arena—and other organizations like it—is in creating a community that speaks for something larger than its own election-winning ends.

Michael Bloomberg recently told Frank Bruni that Trump has a 55% chance of being reelected. Why? Because the Democrats never coalesced around messaging. “They’ll step on each other,” he told the columnist. Even Hillary Clinton has admitted that the party is in disarray. “I inherited nothing from the party. It was bankrupt,” she said at Recode’s Code Conference.

Everybody wants to be part of a new progressive movement, but it’s not clear what it is, how it will work, or for whom it speaks.

I see this at a local meetup in New York City, which I attended a month before the Raleigh conference. The event, hosted by members of The Arena’s digital platform, is a microcosm of the national Arena organization. The attendees, mostly in their mid-twenties to thirties, sipped wine, milled about the large one-bedroom apartment, and talked about the work they’re doing to reinvigorate the Democratic Party and bring about a more localized effect—something that many people told me they found missing from the party over the last few years.

Some of them are hosting affinity groups for certain political causes, such as reproductive rights. Others are raising funds for local races, or simply felt the need to join active political groups. One man in the room recounts how his family forced him to attend gay conversion therapy for years, and he’s now mulling a run for political office with the ideological platform that no child should endure what he did. And one woman has set up what she says is the largest meditation meetup at the top of the World Trade Center (the political outcomes of this one were unclear). Many of the attendees hail from the technology sector, and quite a few of the attendees go on to attend the summit in North Carolina.

Naoum attended the first Arena conference last December in Nashville, along with about 400 others. But he wasn’t really sure why. Some friends had told him about it, and he was intrigued by the promise of a way to learn how to build a new progressive resistance in the Trump era. He went on a whim. At the time he had no notions of running for public office. But something about the spirit of the event and the idea of becoming more politically engaged clicked. After leaving Nashville he couldn’t shake the idea of entering politics.

“If you’re in a red state, I need you right now,” proclaims Michigan state senator Ian Conyers to the Raleigh crowd on the first day. Conyers, a dapper, mustachioed 28-year-old with a gelled side part, has already done what The Arena is encouraging its attendees to do. He went to Georgetown and did some political work in Washington, D.C., before moving back to Detroit to run for the state senate. He is now the youngest person to ever hold that office, and sees his example as a way to show people that the path is possible. And, as I follow Naoum for the rest of the weekend, I notice Conyers’ keen interest in the young Assyrian.

Naoum’s not at The Arena for the motivational speeches, though. He’s here to gain real tools for running a campaign and meeting with the right people who may be able to help him win. At a “crafting your message” session, dozens of attendees funnel into a small area where four personal branding experts explain how to weave a narrative: Don’t list accomplishments like a resume, be authentic; always tells a story. A candidate for the governor of Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, takes the stage and tells his tale. He talks about growing up Muslim in the Detroit suburbs. The 32-year-old worked his way up from physician to city health commissioner, and now he’s running for the highest state office. His strategy is to take his personal struggles as a person of color and make it into an uplifting narrative that everyone can relate to. “No way to be anybody but who you are,” El-Sayed says. Naoum scribbles notes.

Another session Naoum attends focuses on “traditional fundraising,” and it illustrated a much more fraught political reality. The room is significantly less packed than the message-crafting one. It goes through the nuts and bolts of figuring out who to call and how to get people to donate to your candidacy. More than a few people leave mid-session. Here is the less inspirational side of politics writ large.

The conversation ultimately leads to big donors, namely Super PACs. Some people in the audience feel uncomfortable with taking such money—especially on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid. The panelists disagree—”you’re not making any promises,” says one panelist. “I’d sooner say don’t take individual money,” says another.

This doesn’t sit well with Naoum, who campaigned for Bernie Sanders. “It’s pissing me off,” he says. Super PACs are a “system for the wealthy. I should know—I worked with the wealthy.” Later, he tells me he sees his political message as standing for the oppressed. “I’ve always been anti-establishment,” he says. He first became politically engaged going to Ralph Nader talks, which he didn’t necessarily take seriously yet felt a real affinity toward. Sanders, however, sealed the deal for him. “What Sanders showed is that millennials our age, we do care, we do want to get involved,” he tells me. So, after working as a corporate lawyer, and nearly joining the one percent, he changed his mind about what he wanted to do with his life: He believes in the political process and does not want to accept corporate money.

Herein lies the rub: Naoum is probably going to need the DNC’s fundraising machine in order to succeed, but the DNC is going to have to change in order to continue attracting people like him into their ranks.

A few weeks after the Arena, Naoum is elected to the finance committee of Michigan’s Democratic Party. He’s also helping organize the next Arena summit in Detroit in early June. As a synecdoche for the Arena and a dozen other progressive organizations, he’s perfect—both disillusioned and hopeful about what’s next. He has a deep-seated need to do something big, but the road ahead is murky.

[Photo: Scotty Crowe]

Lucky for him, he’s got a community and knows the people there. He is returning to the place where he grew up because he feels a need to reclaim it. Where progressives are scrambling to make a cohesive and electable movement that speaks for an entire disenfranchised people—many of whom are not ideologically aligned—smaller players with skin in the game are starting to make real progress. The Democrats need Naoum, just as much as he will need their support down the line.

These uncertainties hover in the smoke above my last conversation with Naoum at the summit. We were sitting outside another hip bar and discussing the future between puffs from a cigar. He talks about the time his law firm became giddy at the prospect of facilitating layoffs for a client in the name of saving a few bucks, and how his culture led him to seek out a more politically active life. He’s received the weekend’s wisdom and is ready to go forth.

“Are you ready?” his friend asks.

He responds, cigar in mouth, “for whatever comes next… yeah, I am.”

Congrats on earning that diploma! Now you’re ready to hit the job market—or possibly break the news to your parents that you don’t intend to, because what you really want to do is become a full-time artist, writer, musician, actor, or whatever creative pursuit you have your heart set on.

And, hey, it is possible to make money from your art without “selling out.” But it won’t just happen.

Even if your dream job is to do something creative full-time—especially while working for yourself—you’ll still have to get used to the business side of whatever you do. That means shaking some of the habits you might’ve learned in college to produce great work, or ditching some assumptions (about getting your foot in the door, among others) that led you to take that unpaid internship last summer.

Above all else, it means always charging what you’re worth—starting now, no exceptions.

Related:Warby Parker Cofounders Tell New Grads It’s Fine To Make It Up As You Go Along

Charging Brings Dignity To Your Craft

Few of us, especially when we’re starting out, are comfortable with asking for money for anything, but particularly things we enjoy. This is all the more true for creative people, who tend to do free gigs in hopes of building a portfolio, while the world does little to dissuade them from such madness. We’re told to offer our services at no charge in exchange for “exposure” or because “it’s a good opportunity.” Don’t buy it.

A study of unpaid internships explored this question a few years ago. For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers asked graduating seniors whether they received a job offer after a paid or unpaid internship, and for all three years the results were the same: Unpaid internships don’t give college grads an advantage at all. In fact, more often than not, these unpaid “opportunities” put them at a disadvantage.

Out of the roughly 9,200 students surveyed, 63% of those with paid internships received at least one job offer, whereas only 37% of those who were not paid received offers. When it came to salary, the results were even worse. For those who were offered jobs, the unpaid interns received less money than those without any internship experience, period.

Working for free is not the “opportunity” we often think it is. Opportunity doesn’t pay the bills. Exposure won’t put food on the table. And working for free—especially early on in your career—sets a bad precedent that’s hard to break later. You can’t just constantly do a favors for people and expect it to lead to anything other than bankruptcy.

Related:How I Finally Quit My Job At The Gap To Freelance Full-Time

The Rule Of Value

New grads are routinely instructed to follow their passions, but they’re rarely exhorted as passionately to make money from them. Yet it’s rare that even the most passion-driven work gets produced without some kind of economic motive.

Imagine if Michelangelo had never charged for his art. Would he have been able to create such a massive body of work, spending most of a century on it? What about Hemingway? If he had written only for the love of his craft, would the world have ever received The Old Man and the Sea? It’s doubtful. Here we’re faced with an important principle, the “Rule of Value”: Starving artists work for free; thriving artists—like professionals generally—know what they’re worth. As artists, we have to value our work before others do.

One of the oldest lies that far too many creative, talented grads enter the workforce believing is that if you do something you love and charge for it, the money somehow taints the work. When it comes to some trades, payment is expected (and—sometimes just as unfairly—room for creativity isn’t); but with writers, photographers, designers, and other artists, consumers seem to think they don’t warrant the same serious treatment that an engineer or carpenter might receive.

Don’t Be A Martyr, Be A Professional

Part of the blame for that belongs to us. Artists, writers, and other creatives are often complicit in devaluing their own work—we, who are already prone to self-doubt and insecurity, feed into the questioning of what real value we offer. So when someone asks for a favor, we go along with the request. Real artists don’t have to get paid to create, do they? Can’t we just do it for the love of it? Maybe not.

When we undervalue our work, we often end up playing the martyr, resenting the free gig halfway through the process. “When I notice myself resenting my clients and wanting to quit,” Melissa Dinwiddie, a writer and artist, recently told me, “I realize I don’t need to quit. I just need to raise my prices. If you’re feeling resentment at all, you’re charging too little.”

In the years since her first-ever commission, Dinwiddie has transitioned from hobbyist to professional. “We live in a culture that takes money very seriously,” she points out. And because we take money seriously, we take seriously the things we pay for. But at the same time, income isn’t everything. Becoming a thriving artist isn’t just about making a living; it’s about setting your work up for success. Money becomes the means to doing more work. In fact, it’s part of the process of becoming an artist, if for no other reason than it affirms you are a professional.

But the decision to be taken seriously is yours alone. You set the tone for how people will treat you, which means you must believe your work is worth charging for.

This article is adapted with permission from Real Artists Don’t Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age by Jeff Goins.

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the Love Canal crisis, when toxic chemicals were found to be leaking from an underground dump into homes in Niagara Falls, New York. State and federal agencies relocated more than 200 families out of the affected area. A state investigation later found elevated rates of birth defects among families who had lived at Love Canal.

This disaster called public attention to health risks from improperly controlled toxic waste. In response, President Jimmy Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund, into law in December 1980.

Superfund has supported cleanups of toxic waste sites in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia. But its funding decreased by nearly half between 1999 and 2013, and President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal calls for an additional 30% cut, despite EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s assertion that Superfund is “absolutely essential.”

As an economist specializing in housing issues, including the relationship between toxic cleanups and property values, I have published several studies of Superfund sites. In my view, further funding cuts will make it extremely hard for EPA to clean up more than 1,300 sites still on the Superfund list. Slower cleanups will leave more people exposed to harm from toxic chemicals and will hurt adjoining communities by lowering property values and impacting future development.

Making Polluters Pay, Where Possible

Under Superfund, EPA has the power to place heavily contaminated sites on a National Priorities List, and find and force parties responsible for the damage to pay for cleaning them up. Initially, if polluters could not afford to pay or the responsible parties could not be identified, cleanups were to be financed from a trust fund supported by a tax on chemical companies and crude oil.

In the program’s early years, only a few sites were cleaned up and minimal funds were recovered from responsible polluters. To speed up remediation, Congress passed the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) in 1986. SARA directed EPA to pursue permanent remedies for toxic contamination rather than seeking simply to contain waste. It also increased the trust fund from US$1.6 billion to $8.5 billion. Three further rounds of reforms in the 1990s expanded public involvement and enforcement, highlighted environmental justice and attempted to make the program more cost-effective.

In 1995 the Superfund tax expired and Congress did not renew it. Critics argued that EPA spent too much money on litigation trying to get polluters to pay, that few sites were cleaned, and that those that were cleaned took longer than necessary. In addition, they asserted that sites should be cleaned up to levels that were appropriate to their future uses, rather than to a uniform level.

Since 1995, although a majority of cleanups has been paid for by the responsible polluters, EPA has requested funds from Congress to remediate sites where the polluter cannot be identified or has gone out of business. The state where the site is located pays 10% of costs for these projects.

Between 1999 and 2013 Superfund appropriations decreased by 45%, from $2.1 billion to $1.1 billion, although EPA received an additional $600 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, funding shortfalls forced EPA to delay the start of approximately one-third of new projects that were ready to begin during this period. Spending at cleanup sites fell from roughly $700 million yearly to $400 million annually, and the number of project completions declined by 37%.

Nearly one in six Americans lives within three miles of a Superfund site.

Health And Economic Payoffs

In spite of shrinking budgets, Superfund has been relatively successful. In total, 392 sites have been cleaned up and delisted, ranging from landfills to former military sites. Currently there are 1,337 sites on the Superfund list, with another 53 proposed sites under review. At Superfund sites that are being reused, EPA estimates that in 2014 approximately 3,400 businesses were operating, generating $31 billion in sales and employing 89,000 people.

Research shows that removing toxic waste from these sites provides major health and economic benefits. A 2011 study estimated that cleanups reduced the risk of congenital anomalies in newborn babies living near sites by 20% to 25%. Another study estimated that residential property values that were within three miles of a cleaned and delisted Superfund site increased by approximately 19% to 25% between 1990 and 2000.

Toxic waste sites also raise environmental justice concerns. Several analyses have found that neighborhoods around Superfund sites tend to be lower-income and have more minority residents. One study examined the duration of cleanups and found that sites in neighborhoods that were black, urban, and had lower-income residents took longer to be cleaned up prior to 1994. However, this effect diminished over time–possibly as a result of SARA reforms that required program managers to give greater weight to environmental justice concerns.

Doing Less With Less

In 2016 the Environmental Protection Agency received approximately US$1.1 billion from Congress for the program and obtained nearly $1 billion from identified polluters of Superfund sites. President Trump’s 2018 budget asserts that cutting support for Superfund by 30% will reduce administrative costs and make the program more efficient. It also calls on EPA to find ways to return sites to community control more quickly.

Superfund budget reductions over the past decade reduced the number of sites cleaned up and increased the time required to complete them. If EPA is expected to clean up more sites at a faster pace, cuts will have to come from other parts of the program, such as enforcement, research, planning, and preparing for emergencies, such as oil spills and chemical releases. Scott Pruitt may praise Superfund, but if he wants to reduce the cleanup backlog and get more properties back into use, he will have to fight for it.

Katherine Kiel is professor of economics, College of the Holy Cross. This essay originally appeared at The Conversation. 

If you stand next to an experimental Google StreetView car in Oakland, you’ll hear whirring. On top of the vehicle–below the usual cameras taking photos of the street–a mechanical system with pumps is pulling in the outdoor air, feeding it through a set of tubes to air-pollution monitoring equipment in the trunk, and then pumping the exhaust back outside again.

The car is one of two from Google Earth Outreach that Aclima, a San Francisco-based company, equipped with a mobile air-quality platform. Over the last year–as each car drove six to eight hours a day around Oakland, repeatedly sampling every street in one section of the city–researchers collected the largest-ever set of urban air pollution data, and studied how the system could be used to better understand city air quality. The project was convened by the nonprofit EDF.

The system on the StreetView cars–which could later be added to buses, Ubers, and Lyfts, and other vehicles that cover large distances in a city every day–can show pollution in fine detail. The study found variations in the levels of black carbon, nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide (all of which worsen air quality and are harmful to people) not only within neighborhoods but on given blocks. “Maybe the most striking thing is how much air pollution can vary even within a city block,” says Apte. “One end of the block could be five, eight times more polluted than the other end of the block.”

Looking at the data from Oakland, the researchers saw that streets with city bus routes were more polluted than those without; neighborhoods closer to Interstate 880, one highway that cuts through the city, were more polluted than those close to Interstate 580, one of the few highways in the country that bans trucks (perhaps not surprisingly, people living near 880 are poorer). Interactive maps from EDF point out why some spots on the map are more polluted; in one neighborhood with high levels of black carbon, for example, people live next to both a car salvage company and a car manufacturer. In another neighborhood, heavy truck traffic to a metal recycling plant makes pollution worse.

In the study, each car was driven intensively, but the researchers found that it would be possible to get a clear picture of air pollution with relatively few trips.

“We wanted to know how much you need to drive before you’re not learning anything new,” says Apte. “It turns out you don’t need to drive that much before you start to see really consistent patterns in air pollution. Maybe you need to drive down a street 20 times in a year, if you sample randomly. That’s a really small number. Why that’s so important is that you could take this method to other places much more easily than how we started here.”

The cars in the experiment also used relatively large laboratory equipment, with separate instruments to measure the pollution. But next to that stack of boxes was a prototype of Aclima’s own, smaller platform. “This is the box that we want to really scale with,” says Lunden. “This is the start of the Fitbit for the planet.” The latest version, not installed in the car, is roughly the size of two shoe boxes, and could easily fit even in small cars. All of the data is fed into Aclima’s software platform for analysis, and turned into visualizations. While the company says that the stationary air-quality monitors in use in cities now can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain, the mobile platform can be between 100 and 1,000 times less expensive, while far more detailed.

The company is currently working on making the units to quickly scale up and begin installing them in other types of vehicles, in other cities. “We’re in a number of discussions now about where we can have the most impact,” says Lunden.

Four out of 10 Americans regularly worry about not having enough money for the future. And one in three fear the U.S. will be involved in another world war–just as many report concern over global warming and climate change. And more Americans (25.9%) are afraid of public speaking than are afraid of heights, devastating natural disasters, police brutality, and even dying?

Now, imagine what that experience is like for a non-native-English speaker who is, say, pitching her startup idea to a group of very white funders. That’s tough. The good news is, of course, that there’s an app to help with that.

“The one thing we had in common is that English was not our first language,” Dhamani tells Fast Company. “Paritosh grew up in India. I was born in Pakistan, but my family moved to Tanzania when I was very young, so I was raised in Africa. When we came to the U.S., it was hard–from job interviews to networking events, talking in front of groups of people.”

To improve their communication skills here in America, both cofounders enrolled in Toastmasters International, a global public speaking club. But they came to the conclusion that most people can’t afford such programs, much less a private speech coach. If it’s not the cost (Toastmasters costs $65 for the first six months), it’s the time. “There had to be a better way,” Gupta said. “So we put techniques into a smartphone app that anyone can use anywhere to become a better speaker.”

Opening the app gives you a short menu of exercises. “Tongue Twister,” obviously, has you speak and record yourself saying a phrase three times quickly. “Elevator Pitch” gives you 90 seconds to practice presenting your million-dollar idea, and the “Um Challenge” asks you to speak for at least 30 seconds about your favorite TV show while intentionally saying “um” every other word. It sounds counterintuitive, but the challenge quickly makes you realize how useless and distracting filler words really are.

“Public speaking is like going to the gym. You can’t go once and get bigger biceps—you have to train on a consistent basis,” Dhamani says. To that extent, Orai creators say its algorithms are sensitive to the “nuances of human speech,” and the app’s reward system presents trophies and shout-outs for elocutionary excellence. You can also set reminders to practice and upload your own text to the app, so you can work on your specific presentation, and not need not rely on preloaded (regularly updated) text.

Reading a basic 30-second prompt, I received an 81% for speech clarity. Orai recommended I try adding one- to two-second pauses between sentences to improve comprehension. Turns out I was speaking at 176 words per minute. Orai let me know that was about 30 words too fast. “Try to calm yourself down before you start speaking. Then aim to distill your thoughts–not spill them, so ground yourself and proceed mindfully.” On top of all that, my recording was graded an uninspiring monotone–but, hey, at least I didn’t have any fillers.

My second test run was with the “My Favorite Things” exercise, which asks you to describe your favorite food, restaurant, or late-night haunt, and I performed slightly better. My average words per minute was down to 85, rated slightly too slow, but speech clarity, measured by AI voice-to-text comprehension–was up to 84%, I still didn’t have any fillers, and the recording was listed an ideal “energetic.” (The app said I’ll be hosting a TED Talk in no time.)

“This app can level the playing field,” Dhamani said. “Anyone can be entrepreneurial, get job interviews, get whatever thing they’re seeking–and I think Orai can really help with that by empowering every single person in any part of the world with the voice to unlock tons of opportunities.”

The experience does sound promising, and, even as a native speaker, Orai made me more aware of what I was saying and how I should be saying it. Dhamani and Gupta said they had plenty of Orai success stories, including a 13-year-old using the app to prepare for a class debate, which she won, and a college student leaning on Orai’s instant feedback in rehearsing the defense of his PhD dissertation.

The cofounders are fine examples, too. Over the past year, the well-rehearsed duo have pulled in about $60,000 in seed funding in business plan pitch competitions, and were named finalists in the recent Microsoft Imagine Cup in Seattle.

John Baugh, an expert in sociolinguistics and linguistic profiling at Washington University in St. Louis tells Fast Company he likes the idea.“To the extent that someone that moves to the U.S. who’s not a native speaker of English has encountered people who are critical of their speech, and then any feedback that they can get that might help clarify their speech is potentially beneficial.”

But there’s another side of the coin. In these United States, nothing is certain except death, taxes, and discrimination. Baugh says bias toward or against a particular accent–which you’ll still obviously have after using the app–is almost unavoidable, and that profiling takes place whenever you open your mouth. So while Orai might help you land startup funding, crush your next performance review, or even help get your name on a lease, there are still many other obstacles to overcome.

Let’s just remember that bilingual speakers are by definition fluent in two languages yet are too often deemed uneducated or undeserving of opportunity simply for sounding not quite like the people we see on TV.

Orai is in its early days, and the app is far from perfect, but the cofounders continue to use machine learning to teach its AI to “understand the nuances of human speech.” That’s being done to offer more human-like feedback to users. Eventually, Gupta and Dhamani hope to introduce languages other than English to the app.

After no more than 20 total minutes on the app, I’ve already become more conscious about what I’m saying, and how I’m saying it–even in casual conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. I also can’t help but quietly judge other people’s speech patterns.

“Orai is not just a business for us. It’s our passion,” says Dhamani. “Orai has helped us become better at public speaking, and we want it to help other people, too.”

You’ve been brushing up on your negotiation skills in anticipation of that big job offer. But, once you land it, you’ve gotten a big surprise: The company doesn’t negotiate salary.

For a variety of reasons, there are times when a salary on a job offer isn’t open for discussion. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t score a higher-value compensation package overall, says Ted Jenkin, co-CEO and founder of oXYGen Financial, Inc., a financial planning firm that counsels clients on negotiating high-value compensation packages. You just have to be creative and know where to focus.

“Sometimes, companies have set [limits and] human resources policies. It can be easier to negotiate one-offs or things that are a little bit out of the box,” he says.

Here are six areas you might target to boost your compensation without increasing your salary.

Student Loan Repayment

Student loan debt hit more than $1.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2017 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. If you’re writing out a check every month to a pay off your education, your future employer might be able to offer some help, says Matthew W. Burr, founder of human resources consulting firm Burr Consulting, LLC. According to the Society of Human Resources Management, 4% of companies offer student loan repayment assistance, and that number is growing.

“It’s a relatively new trend—I call it the ‘dental insurance for our generation’—but it’s going to be more relevant,” as student loan debt grows, he says. When Burr landed his first job out of graduate school, he negotiated $3,000 onto his signing bonus, which he used to pay off student loan debt.

Transportation

Depending on where you work, your commuting expenses might include bus or train fare, automobile mileage, parking, tolls or others. Michael A. Wheeler, a retired professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who still teaches negotiation, advises understanding the expenses that will be involved with your new job and looking for ways to offset them. “In some instances, a company car would be nice and, in others, having some sort of discretionary budget,” he says.

Jenkin advises understanding what the real costs of traveling to and for work and being ready with that information in your negotiation. You should at least be reimbursed for mileage you drive on behalf of the company, he says. (Typically, the reimbursement rate follows IRS guidelines.)

Rewards And Stipends

According to the 2016 SHRM survey, bonuses have been on the rise over the past five years, including “spot/bonus awards, sign-on bonuses for executives and non-`executives and retention bonuses for non-executives,” according to SHRM. Fifty-six percent of organizations offer service anniversary awards, 51% offer non-executive bonus plans, and 44% offer executive incentive bonus plans. Twelve percent offer a stipend if you use your own technological devices for work. Employee referral bonuses are also on the rise. So, look for ways that you can be rewarded for benefiting or saving money for the company.

Your Next Raise

If you can’t get a salary bump right off the bat, you may be able to move up your eligibility for your first raise, Wheeler suggests. If the company does annual performance reviews, request a performance and compensation review in six months to measure your progress.

“You may be able to work out when you will be eligible for a promotion, and obviously, the sooner you’re ready for that, the sooner it happens, and the higher you’re going to go up the compensation ladder,” he says. For this to work, you need clear goals and performance metrics to prove your case that you’re adding value, he adds.

Time Off

Time off and flex time might not seem like a compensation boost, but having the ability to shift your hours or work from home can cut commuting expenses and give you better work/life balance, Burr says. An extra week of vacation or a few additional holidays might also be a possibility if you’re a high-value candidate, he adds.

In addition, more companies are open to or instituting paid leave, Jenkin says. Even if having or adopting children isn’t in your immediate future, consider negotiating paid parental leave in case you need it in the future, he says.

“I think that companies are realizing that it’s totally unreasonable to do FMLA [Family Medical Leave Act] where you have 12 unpaid weeks when you have a child,” he says. So, more are willing to add that to the mix if they don’t already have a policy in place.

Professional Development

As companies scramble to retain great talent, striking a “win-win” agreement isn’t far-fetched, Jenkin says. So, if you plan to earn a graduate degree or want training for a skill, ask the company to invest in you, which benefits both of you. That may be tuition reimbursement or an agreement to send you to a training program once a year.

“So what [the employer] is saying to an employee is, ‘Look, I’m willing to invest in your education. If you’re willing to seek that education and help grow the revenue of the company,'” he says. If the company is going to pay for you to get your MBA, there is typically an expectation that you’ll stay with the company for period of time—typically two or three years—after you’ve completed your degree to deliver some of the benefit of that education to the company, he says.

The 2016 SHRM Employee Benefits Survey, 88% of organizations offered professional membership benefits in 2016, a 23% increase over the past 10 years, so you might also be able to negotiate professional membership dues as part of your package.

When you’re negotiating your overall compensation package, think about the areas that are most important to you and try to be creative, Jenkin says. Often, you can find ways to increase the overall value.

As commencement ceremonies wrap up across the country, throngs of new grads are revising resumes, networking—a few might be prepping for one last summer of travel—but they’re almost all thinking about the same thing: jobs. That means recruiters will soon have a new crop of young talent to sort through.

Of all the roles they’ll have to fill, developer jobs can be one of the trickiest. Developers have more power over most of our lives than we tend to think. Sometimes it’s something tiny, like the way “snooze” works on your smartphone’s alarm clock; sometimes it’s something bigger, like the stories Facebook’s algorithm puts into your news feed. Yet despite developers’ hidden influence, most businesses, especially outside of Silicon Valley, still treat them like glorified typists.

But developers don’t have to make for such notoriously difficult recruiting targets. Over my career in tech, first as a software engineer, then as a startup CTO, and now as COO for Stack Overflow, I’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to hire (and hang onto) talented programmers.

Related:Your Degree In Scandinavian Mythology Can Still Land You That Tech Job

1. Build (And Promote) A Developer-First Culture

Thousands of developers out there are being deprived of the opportunity to put their talents and coding prowess to use. They’re sitting in open office plans, unable to concentrate with someone yammering on the phone next to them. They’re struggling to use decade-old computers, coding in languages they don’t love for companies that don’t love them back. And worst of all, they’re being spammed by recruiters who don’t know the difference between Java and Javascript—often for jobs that are poorly defined to begin with.

If you want to attract tech talent, don’t just advertise open positions. Focus on the careers you can offer and the types of experiences you can give developers. Developers care about learning and growing, so talk about your training programs. Let employees attend conferences, facilitate internal tech talks, and above all, encourage new ideas. If your culture doesn’t reflect the values and preferences of the developers you’re looking to hire, you can’t expect to succeed in hiring them.

2. Rethink Your Org Chart

Programmers want to report to programmers—or at the very least, to recently promoted ex-programmers. They can’t stand having to explain technical issues to non-technical managers. They’re always going to be happier in organizations that respect, train, and promote developers to lead other developers.

You’ve also got to make sure your developers aren’t shoved into some other department where they’re stuck reporting to someone who’s never written a line of code. Explain how your dev teams work and who manages them. It’s the day-to-day experience that’s going to make the difference, so you have to make sure your company’s management structure offers the right one.

3. Highlight Independence

Every programmer can tell you a story about a time they were miserable because they had to do something in a way they considered stupid. Developers want to feel like they have control over their work, and that means actually giving them some meaningful level of autonomy.

I’ve run into this many times in my own career, and it’s usually come in the form of technology standardization: “Here at company XYZ we’ve standardized on the Javascript language and the Linux Operating system. Because, well, standards are good, right!?” Sure, maybe—but it’s kind of like saying, “Here at company XYZ we’ve standardized on hammers and screwdrivers.” Yes, they’re both useful for many things, but if I’m trying to drill a hole in sheetmetal, there are better solutions than hammering away at a Phillips head.

4. Tap Your User Base

It’s essential that your developers actually care about the work they do as least as much as the people they’re doing it for. No matter what you produce, you have a group of users out there who love it. So use the tools at your disposal—Twitter, Facebook, user groups—to find your superfans. Even if they don’t come work for you, they’ll send their friends.

At Stack Overflow, we’re lucky enough to have a built-in resource: our user community, which is where just about every programmer on the planet goes when they get stuck. We mine our power users for new developer hires all the time. But even if you don’t have a huge base of knowledgeable tech users you can constantly tap, remember this: If somebody is asking good technical questions about your products, they’ll likely make a great developer for those same products.

5. Provide The Right Tools

When your job revolves around technology, it’s incredibly important to have the right tools. When it comes to computer monitors, two is better than one–ideally, 30-inch monitors. This might sound like a minor issue, but it’s not. Buying programmers the tools they need to do their jobs will show that you respect their work and value them.

At Stack Overflow, we do our best to give our programmers what they need, whether that’s a high-end keyboard, three monitors, or the ability to work remotely. We also have an open-door policy for new ideas and feedback across the organization. We’ve found that this combination of tools and transparency make all the difference.

The bottom line is that if you can’t treat developers like critical stakeholders in your company’s strategy, they’ll find another company that will.

Jeff Szczepanski is chief operating officer at Stack Overflow, where he leads the definition and operation of revenue-bearing products and services. Jeff was previously founder and CTO of Allworx Corp, which reached a successful exit in 2007.

Last year, Malia Obama made headlines when the White House announced that she would defer her admission to Harvard in order to take a gap year. The news gave rise to increased scrutiny of the yearlong break from work or school–a common practice in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, but not in the U.S.

Opinions on gap years are complicated. The rising cost of college and lack of guaranteed financial returns have stirred discussions on the worthiness of a college degree, yet the idea of postponing your education is often seen (especially by parents of recent grads) as a distraction from focusing on your future career.

But despite the conflicting opinions, many gap year participants report gaining immense benefits from their time off. When theNew York Times profiled adults who took a break before or during college, many expressed high satisfaction with their careers and even credited their gap years with finding opportunities that would later prove crucial to their professional lives.

Related: The 3 Types Of People Who May Want To Consider Skipping College 

But how do you make your experience seem valuable to prospective employers? Fast Company recently spoke to Ethan Knight, founder and executive director of the American Gap Association, for some insights on how job applicants can make their gap an asset in their resume.

Treat Your Experience Like A Job

One of the first things that Knight recommends is to highlight–not hide–your gap year experience in the application materials. For example, if you spent six months volunteering in a national park, that should be treated like a job as opposed to a line under “interests” or “volunteer work.”

Here’s how Knight sees this as something that can set you apart. “The bulk of the interview conversation is not about your credentials–you wouldn’t have gotten in the interview stage if that wasn’t already apparent. The majority of the conversation is about the gap time. The beauty about that is that it distinguishes you,” she says.

Make It Clear Why You Took A Gap Year

Knight also points out that that employers are much more likely to see the benefits when you’ve put a lot of thought and planning into your gap year experience.

From an employability standpoint, the most valuable gap years–according to Knight–tend to have four components. “You need to have a volunteer component. That demonstrates empathy and it demonstrates your ability to work not from a place of entitlement but from a place of understanding.” The second component should be “some amount of career exploration or an internship. If you can show that you know what you’re getting into, at that employer’s office, you’re going to be far less of a risk for them to invest in.”

Knight also recommends that participants, particularly college students and graduates, include some amount of paid work in their gap years, as it demonstrates a certain level of ownership. The last component is to allow a little bit of time and space for unexpected opportunities. “Students grow and mature in profound ways that they don’t often suspect would happen and in ways they didn’t even think they would grow.”

Related:New Report Finds More Mid-Career Professionals Opting For A Gap Year 

If a prospective employer asks what benefits your gap year can bring to a job, Knight suggests framing it as making an investment in yourself, which resulted in a lot of learning and growth. Then tell your prospective employer that you’re planning to bring the same level of investment in the workforce.

Identify The Key Skills That the Employer Seeks, And Illustrate How You Have Honed Them In Your Gap Year

It’s also important to identify the key skills that are crucial to the job you’re applying to. The beauty of gap years is that participants come away with a set of soft skills that are more difficult to hone in a college environment. Knight suggests thinking of your gap year experience from three lenses that an employer will likely value: the ability to work independently and be a self-starter, the ability to collaborate in a team, and the ability to think on your feet and be entrepreneurial when necessary.

Participants of gap years, according to Knight, usually tend to have those skills well documented and well experienced. But it’s important to identify specific instances where they were able to practice those skills, and communicate them to a prospective employer in the interview process.

Rehearse Your Conversation Before The Job Interview

Yes, there are many arguments against sticking with an interview script. But when it comes to articulating something that might not be immediately obvious to an employer (or even yourself), it’s important to have those points rehearsed so that you’re capitalizing on the opportunity to make yourself the most attractive candidate possible.

Knight urges, “Make sure that you have [a] dialogue already rehearsed before you go into those conversation. They do make you stand out, but you can’t stumble your way through them.”

Edit Your Social Media

While this may be an obvious job application tip, Knight urges that gap year returnees pay even more attention to their social media pages to avoid giving the impression that they spent their entire time partying. “It’s common sense these days, but if you’re having some drinks, that shouldn’t be every photo that you take. Document the good stuff, the volunteer work, the cultural engagements and of course the self-reflection.”

Despite the skepticism that many in the U.S. still hold toward gap years, Knight remains optimistic that many more institutions are beginning to view them as an “educational” experience rather than a luxury.

“There’s such a significant output for the student that’s not only a benefit to them personally,” but to the colleges that they attend and the careers that they end up getting into, Knight asserts.

“I think a lot of it just comes down to: They had an opportunity to explore the world, and they know what they’re missing as well as what it is they aren’t missing.”

It might have been the least expected Super Bowl win ever–not just the Patriots historically dramatic comeback–but the fact National Geographic had what many considered the best big game ad of 2017, a promo for its new show Genius, about Albert Einstein, starring Geoffrey Rush.

Now for its latest marketing push around the show, it’s honoring the life, inspiration, and imagination of Einstein in 10 short films. The network and agency Pereira O’Dell worked with show director Sam Spiegel for two headlining films, The Instrument and The Mirror. Then for the eight remaining episodes, they partnered with the Tongal filmmaking community–a crowd-sourcing platform that connects brands with creatives–to give new filmmakers a chance to contribute.

Andy Baker, SVP global creative director of National Geographic channels, says that the “10 Days of Genius” Film Festival idea is a result of knowing that TV audiences are a sophisticated bunch. Trailers and traditional promos are great, but there are more creative ways to attract viewers. These short films are connected to Genius in concept and spirit rather than a direct reference–and Baker says it’s important that they can stand on their own, while still tying back to the show.

“What makes these content extensions more interesting is that they don’t simply exist to push people to the linear TV network to watch the show. Yes, that’s awesome if it happens, but it may not always be realistic,” says Baker. “The extensions become more of a multi-platform brand play, too. As long as those audiences are engaging with our brand, and seeing that it is relevant and entertaining and telling great stories, no matter which platform it’s on, that’s a good thing. So we have been creating these additional storytelling tools as a way to reach new audiences, tell new stories, and not just sit back and rely on the same tactics that we did 10 years ago. In the same way that peoples’ media consumption patterns have changed, we have to evolve how we get their attention.”

While the show’s Super Bowl stealing spot was created with McCann New York, this time the network teamed up with agency Pereira O’Dell. The executive creative director Dave Arnold says the idea started with a collection of short films that answered a simple brief: imagination is more important than knowledge.

“As we got closer to production, we decided to focus our resources on Instrument and Mirror, but in the edit as we were seeing the potential of the films, Andy suggested sharing the brief with Tongal to build on our platform,” says Arnold. “We asked their community to interpret Albert Einstein’s most creative quotes with very few rules. The rest has been a true creative experiment.”

Now that we’re in an era of prestige TV, where many series are getting the talent, attention (and often, budgets) of feature films, Arnold says the marketing around these shows should reflect the same level of sophistication.

“The networks are very good at trailers and tune-in promos, so it becomes important for outside creatives to think about awareness around an entertainment property,” says Arnold. “Taking a step back and thinking about the logline of a show the same way you would a traditional brief. What’s the big storytelling opportunity and what are the interesting parallel paths to get there?”

Baker says declarations of the 30-second ad’s demise have been premature, but networks still need to think far beyond it.  “The key to marketing any show or product now is to expand beyond relying just on the 30-second spot or poster art. You need to think about innovation, storytelling, short formats, long formats, events, experiences,” says Baker. “That is what will get attention, get shared, get seen. Ultimately, you need your fans to become marketers for your brand, and that requires extra creative effort. And that’s what could get people to actually watch your content.”

Gravity, the self-described “weighted blanket for sleep, stress, and anxiety,” recently   raised over $4.7 million on Kickstarter. Maybe the product’s developers meticulously orchestrated this awareness strategy, or maybe they just fell ass-backwards into it. It’s so well-done I’m inclined to believe it’s the former, but who knows?

What I do know is that every startup founder needs to get people aware of and excited about an idea that nobody’s ever heard of at first. To do that, you need to make some kind of a promise that your customers want you to keep.

Getting anyone to do anything is tough, of course. Yet Gravity got thousands of people to spend $200 on a heavy blanket, sight unseen. That’s crazy, but it’s not completely inexplicable, and the most likely explanation makes for a lesson every startup founder needs to learn.

Related: How I Successfully Pitched Investors As A 22-Year-Old Startup Founder

The “Why”

I ask every founder that applies to Tacklebox, my startup accelerator, the same three questions. I look for founders with good answers to the first two questions and an exceptional answer to the third:

1. Why you?
2. Why now?
3. Why at all?

For Gravity, let’s ignore question one; I don’t know if its supply chain is scalable, if the margins work, or even if the product does what it claims to (a few weeks ago the company notably scaled back one of its key health claims); that’s all founder-driven stuff better left to another discussion—like this one, if you’re interested. For the sake of building awareness, the “why you” part is irrelevant, but the the latter two questions are critical, and Gravity nails them.

Why now? Gravity couldn’t have existed a decade ago: No Kickstarter, no Gravity. Kickstarter empowers entrepreneurs to do what they do best—tell stories. Ten years ago, a weighted blanked would’ve lived at Brookstone, folded in a stack next to a couple of vibrating chairs, being decidedly uncool. For years weighted blanks have been prescribed to treat a number of medical conditions and disorders, but without crowdfunding, ordinary consumers wouldn’t have given one a second look.

How? Kickstarter has created a platform that gives life to products that need some level of education in order to take off. That’s set some new ground rules whereby as customers, we’ve entered into an agreement with entrepreneurs: You tell us your story in a short, well-produced video, and we’ll play our own mini game of Shark Tank. If you’re able to make a promise we want you to keep, we’ll fund you.

This automatically creates a measure of urgency, something entrepreneurs kill for. Customers are forced to make a decision—buy, or miss out. When the campaign is up, we no longer get the early adopter price. This feels distinctly different from a sale, so the brand isn’t diluted.

All of this allows founders to flex their empathy muscles. They get a chance to prove how well they understand their customers’ problems, and they get two to three minutes to do it. In this kind of environment storytellers win, and Gravity’s story clearly resonates right now. The reason it does is impossible to answer definitively, but the fact that it does goes straight to the heart of that third question . . .

Why at all? Answer: because a lot of people feel effin’ stressed right now.

Stress isn’t new. But whatever particular brand of 2017-minted stress might be in the air these days, it seems to play directly into Gravity’s strengths as a product. In its Kickstarter video, Gravy savvily frames “anxiety” as a national epidemic: “Forty million people suffer from prolonged anxiety,” we’re told. “That is 18% of the country.” Hearing that recently, a lot of people thought to themselves, “That’s me!”

It probably hasn’t hurt that newish brands like Casper, Parachute, Headspace, Brooklinen, and others have spent lots of time and money teaching consumers about the scientific benefits of stress-reduction and strategies to combat anxiety so that Gravity didn’t have to. In our current environment, Gravity didn’t even need to tell consumers where it thinks all that stress and anxiety might be coming from—just pointing out the supposed problem felt timely anyway.

And while I’m only a sample of one, I’ll bet that whichever way you lean politically, you didn’t consume anywhere near as much news 18 months ago as you do today. My humor and startup podcasts have been replaced by political podcasts. I’ve traded reading books or articles I enjoy for political articles that scare me. My WhatsApp group titled “Gmen,” which includes a bunch of high school buddies who for the last five years have talked about the Giants, is now 90% politics. No more Netflix binges or Westworld—I’ve got depressing, hour-long news shows to watch.

I bet I’m not alone. I bet you’ve made similar shifts in what you consume, too. And since we’re all busy, any shift in consumption habits that might’ve taken place would be a zero-sum game—out with relaxing, stimulating content; in with the chaos. So as bad as this may be for our mental states, it represents a change we’ve made all by ourselves. That’s potential gold for entrepreneurs.

Founders spend their lives trying (often unsuccessfully) to get people to make tiny changes in their existing behavior. If Gravity seems so compelling to so many people, it’s probably because the antidote it’s offering—basically, a security blanket for grownups—is such a simple, targeted solution. You don’t have to stop watching Last Week Tonight or book an appointment with a sleep therapist. That’s one powerful value proposition. “A heavy blanket might be the key to reducing my stress levels? And for just $200? Give me three.”

Magic Beans

Early on, your product will only grow through word of mouth. Jonah Berger, the author of Contagious, taught us that 93% of product talk is face to face. This means you’ve got to arm your customers with a simple, differentiated value prop that they can remember and share with others—something they can clearly envision themselves benefiting from. And that’s why I think “magic beans” get a bad wrap.

Cynical as it sounds, magic beans are actually the goal, the Holy Grail of entrepreneurship. Your product really should do what it promises—don’t ever sell snake oil. But you want to know your customers well enough to solve their biggest problem without requiring them to poke a single toe outside their normal routines.

If I’m a farmer, I want to swap the ordinary beans I’m planting, which don’t grow, with magic beans that do. Done. It’s easier to get people to switch gyms than to start exercising. Meditation apps, yoga studios—they’re promising to remove my stress, but there’s a lot of effort on my part. They’re trying to change people’s behavior. I need to “start exercising,” in yoga’s case, literally.

Gravity is pitching me something much easier to get on board with. I can picture myself using the product immediately. I already have a blanket; I’ll just swap it out with this heavier one. I can picture myself lounging on my couch, relaxed, reading a book—or heading to sleep after a long, anxiety-packed day. No more stress. I’ve got 25 pounds of blanket taking care of that.

When just in case your BS meter wakes up, it’s soothed with the reassurance that Gravity has “studied the incredible science and medical research” to develop a blanket whose even weight distribution “increases serotonin and melatonin levels while decreasing cortisol levels.” As a customer that’s a promise you want Gravity to keep.

And it doesn’t just go for consumer products. If you’re pitching inventory management for restaurants or a hot-sauce subscription box or a mystery novel, you’ve got to have a clear, differentiated promise your customer wants you to keep. Straightforward but hard to pull off. The simple, bold solutions—whether or not they actually work—are always the most attractive.

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

When it comes to liking your job, the way you feel about your manager could be the deciding factor. In fact, according to a recent employee engagement survey, 50% of people who quit identify their boss as the reason they left.

This rings true for me. I’ve experienced both good and mediocre supervisors, as well as a few who made me want to rip my hair out. One created such misery that I was constantly devising my exit strategy. But before you turn yours into a scapegoat for all that goes wrong in your life, hear this: Blaming everything on her may be more comfortable, but the real problem could actually be you. Yes— you.

You’re Assuming She Can Read Your Mind

Two years ago, my company’s senior vice president and I were discussing a rough patch my team was going through. Because we had a good rapport (most likely because he supplied our office with the very best snacks), he had no problem being straightforward.

“Look,” he said, “I can’t read your mind. I have no idea what you’re thinking. If you want something, you need to just say it.”

Related:Four Easy Ways To Reboot Relationship With Your Boss This Year 

I’ve repeated this advice to myself and others many times since then because it’s so spot on. Not only is your boss not a psychic (most likely), but she also isn’t sitting around all day attempting to decode your every move. Yes, part of her role is managing you, but she has other responsibilities, too.

If you need help, ask. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, tell her. (This article lays out how to have that conversation.) If you’re disappointed she didn’t give you a promotion, discuss what you need to do to get one. Don’t wait for her to come to you about everything. You’ll just end up feeling frustrated and disgruntled. And nobody wants that.

You’re Not Keeping Her In The Loop

Shortly after starting a new position, my supervisor and I had an uncomfortable conversation. Another department’s director wasn’t thrilled with the quality of my work, and my manager wasn’t very happy.

After sharing my side of the story, her understanding and support were a relief. But, of course, my initial thought when she called was, wow, I can’t believe she’s coming at me like this.

But she’d felt blindsided. In our most recent one-on-one, I’d indicated that everything was “oh fine, just fine,” and then she heard something different. If you’re a team leader, it’s not fun when it appears as if your team isn’t up to snuff. Imagine if, instead, I’d said, “I’m struggling with this,” or, “I just wanted to give you a heads up about [insert issue].” She would’ve felt much more prepared to field complaints, and we probably could’ve avoided our awkward phone call.

If you’re ever hesitant about bringing a potential (or definite) issue to light, just do it. It may not end up mattering, but if it does, it’s best to have it out in the open as early as possible.

Your Performance Isn’t Up To Par

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but if you’re dropping the ball, your boss probably won’t react very favorably. She may lose confidence in you and not assign you to new projects. Or put you on a performance improvement plan. She may never give you a raise or a promotion. And hey, she may even demote you. (Womp womp.)

Related:How You Justify Sticking With Your Bad Work Habits (And How To Stop)

None of these scenarios is preferable. Or joyful. And any of them may make you want to endlessly grumble about how utterly horrible she is. But if you’re missing deadlines, half-assing your assignments, or goofing off all day, it isn’t her fault. It’s yours.

Try to view yourself (as an employee) objectively. Is there anything you could be doing better? Are there any areas requiring more effort or fine tuning? If you improve what you can control, she may start to react more positively. And, alas, you may realize you don’t hate her so much after all.

You’re Letting Your Personal Feelings Get In The Way

The truth is, you just aren’t a big fan of her. Her laugh is too high-pitched, she always heats up fish in the microwave, and her communication style’s a little too blunt for you.

And because she’s not your cup of tea, every single thing she does is wrong. Even if it really isn’t. That email she sent to your colleague wasn’t actually a waste of time, you just thought it was because she sent it. Basically, you’re letting your personal feelings about her taint your opinions about her work.

You need to separate your feelings about her personality and mannerisms from the job at hand. Because while you may not want to hang out with her on the weekend or invite her to your birthday happy hour, that doesn’t mean she’s a bad manager. And until you remove that judgmental lens you’re viewing her through, you’re just sabotaging yourself.

The boss-employee relationship can be tough, and it seems practically innate to moan and groan about the person you report to every day. But when there are factors in your control, you should try to change them instead of playing the victim. Before you label her your archenemy, make sure you’re not guilty of any of the above.

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

More From The Muse:

• It’s Not Your Job, It’s You: The Real Reasons You’re Unhappy At Work 
• 3 Bad Boss Personalities–And How To Deal With Them 
• How To Tell Your Boss You’re Not Happy At Work 

Is there anything wrong with women applying makeup in public? If you saw the signs on New York City subways that equated a little blush with toenail clipping, you’d certainly think so. There’s obviously a massive chasm in decorum between a little makeup on the train and snipping your gnarly foot claws on your commute. But a new study for Covergirl by Ipsos found that more than half of women who wear makeup stated that they’d feel uncomfortable doing their makeup in public.

Other findings include 52% of women who felt judged for their makeup look said they’d also felt judged at work; 74% of women expressed that they feel they need to wear makeup in social settings; and 75% of women noted that they wear makeup for themselves and not for anyone else. These stats are the backbone of Covergirl’s new #ProjectPDA campaign–Public Displays of Application–by agency Droga5, that aims to celebrate self-expression through makeup and to challenge the notion that women have to apologize or hide for their makeup choices.

It’s an obvious stance for a makeup brand to take, and here Covergirl aligns its product with self-expression empowerment. It may be a bit of a stretch, but so is the idea that putting on makeup in public is somehow rude. And it’s certainly not even in the same galaxy as possessing the derangement of thinking trimming your toe talons in front of strangers could possibly be okay.

For brands, building a campaign that makes a political statement or takes a clear position on a polarizing cultural issue is nothing short of a gamble, where good intentions weigh none. What matters is execution and, more to the point, having the right to be in that space.

With Pride Month underway, many brands are once again at the ready to pull out their “ally” cards with ads featuring gay couples and families–ads that can easily tread the razor-thin line between authentic celebration and exploitation.

“Any time a brand puts out an ad that can be perceived as a social statement, the impact can be one of two things: It can be incredibly positive or it can be incredibly negative,” says Liz Nolan, executive creative director of Equinox. “As brand marketers, we all live in fear that we will make that mistake ourselves. But if you do it thoughtfully with the right partners, with the right insight, and you do your research, the likelihood of getting it wrong is much lower.”

In celebration of Pride, Equinox collaborated with The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center to create The LGBTQAlphabet, a short film that aims to prove that a community so diverse can’t be contained in just six letters. The five-minute clips give familiar and new meanings to all 26 letters of the alphabet, as interpreted through dance and voiced by members of the LGBTQA community.

As Nolan mentioned, for brands to inject themselves into social conversations in an honest way, breaking down internal echo chambers is the first place to start, which is why her team, along with agency Wieden+Kennedy, worked in tandem with The Center.

“When you exist in your own world for too long you forget reality, and being able to work with partners like The Center is really important,” Nolan says. “We didn’t want it to be us dictating meaning around what these letters stood for. ‘LGBTQA’ exists in the world and we all know what [the letters] mean. And then you have these other letters that we decided to give an interpretation of based upon the insights of real people and what it means to them–this is not is Equinox saying this is what this means.”

The direct correlation between interpretive dances from A to Z and a luxury gym aren’t apparent on the surface–and that’s what Nolan was aiming for. Within the marketing space, Equinox has leaned more on the provocative side. Equinox’s most recent campaign “Commit to Something” featured glossy editorial shots of men and women just going for it, whether it was growing a weed empire, playing the harp until you bleed, or getting a double mastectomy.

“The idea behind [The LGBTQAlphabet] was driven by a continuation of what we’ve been doing for our ‘Commit to Something’ campaign. When we launched that campaign in January of this year we really felt that the images told a strong story about identity. The theme behind the work was ‘what you commit to is who you are,'” Nolan says. “We are saturated by messaging at every moment of our lives, whether it’s through social media, television, or whatever. In order to actually make an impact you have to break through. What we have realized is that to be meaningful you have to take a risk.”

However, Nolan’s risk-taking is one that’s tempered by earning the right to comment on or be a part of a designated social space.

“When you think about why Pride is important to Equinox, if you look at our membership base, you look at our employee base, we are an incredibly diverse company,” she says. “Knowing that our community and our membership base at Equinox is so diverse, we feel like this is an area where we do have some credibility–and we would never delve into a subject that we didn’t feel that we had authenticity and credibility in.”

Nolan’s hope for The LGBTQAlphabet is that it will spark new conversations around the LGBTQA community not only among consumers, but for other brands as well.

“We went into this saying there is an [existing] idea of pride: It’s rainbows; it’s electronic dance music; it’s the parade and that’s all fantastic. But there’s also a more serious, thoughtful side of it too. What this film does is provoke a new conversation around pride and specifically a brand’s right to speak about pride by deepening this understanding of what LGBTQA means,” Nolan says. “Where brands get into trouble is when they try to cling onto trends, news stories, and events that they have no right to comment on. If a company wants to be brave, wants to make a statement, the critical thing to ask is ‘what do I have the right to comment on?’ and ‘how does that connect back to the core of who we are?’ If those two things are in alignment, and the consumer senses the authenticity of the statement you can’t fail.”

For the third time in a year and a half, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory has detected gravitational waves. Hypothesized by Einstein a century ago, the identification of these ripples in space-time–for the third time, no less–is fulfilling the promise of an area of astronomy that has enticed scientists for decades, but had always seemed to lie just out of our reach.

As a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, I am naturally thrilled to see the vision of so many of us becoming a reality. But I’m accustomed to finding my own work more interesting and exciting than other people do, so the extent to which the whole world seems to be fascinated by this accomplishment came as something of a surprise. The excitement is well-deserved, though. By detecting these gravitational waves for the first time, we’ve not only directly verified a key prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity in convincing and spectacular fashion, but we’ve opened up an entirely new window that will revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.

Already these discoveries have affected our understanding of the universe. And LIGO is just getting started.

Tuning In To The Universe

At its core, this new way of understanding the universe stems from our newfound ability to hear its soundtrack. Gravitational waves aren’t actually sound waves, but the analogy is apt. Both types of waves carry information in a similar way, and both are completely independent phenomena from light.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that propagate outward from intensely violent and energetic processes in space. They can be generated by objects that don’t shine, and they can travel through dust, matter, or anything else, without being absorbed or distorted. They carry unique information about their sources that reaches us in a pristine state, giving us a true sense of the source that can’t be obtained in any other way.

General relativity tells us, among other things, that some stars can become so dense that they close themselves off from the rest of the universe. These extraordinary objects are called black holes. General relativity also predicted that when pairs of black holes orbit tightly around each other in a binary system, they stir up space-time, the very fabric of the cosmos. It’s this disturbance of space-time that sends energy across the universe in the form of gravitational waves.

That loss of energy causes the binary to tighten further, until eventually the two black holes smash together and form a single black hole. This spectacular collision generates more power in gravitational waves than is radiated as light by all the stars in the universe combined. These catastrophic events last only tens of milliseconds, but during that time, they are the most powerful phenomena since the Big Bang.

These waves carry information about the black holes that can’t possibly be gained in any other way, since telescopes can’t see objects that don’t emit light. For each event, we are able to measure the black holes’ masses, their rate of rotation or “spin,” and details about their locations and orientations with varying degrees of certainty. This information allows us to learn how these objects were formed and evolved across cosmic time.

While we have previously had strong evidence for the existence of black holes based on the effect of their gravity on surrounding stars and gas, the detailed information from gravitational waves is invaluable for learning about the origins of these spectacular events.

Detecting The Tiniest Fluctuations

In order to detect these incredibly quiet signals, researchers constructed two LIGO instruments, one in Hanford, Washington, and the other 3,000 miles away in Livingston, Louisiana. They’re designed to leverage the unique effect that gravitational waves have on whatever they encounter. When gravitational waves pass by, they change the distance between objects. There are gravitational waves going through you right now, forcing your head, feet, and everything in between to move back and forth in a predictable–but imperceptible–way.

You can’t feel this effect, or even see it with a microscope, because the change is so incredibly tiny. The gravitational waves that we can detect with LIGO change the distance between each end of the 4-kilometer-long detectors by only 10⁻¹⁸ meters. How small is this? A thousand times smaller than the size of a proton–which is why we can’t expect to see it even with a microscope.

To measure such a minute distance, LIGO uses a technique called “interferometry.” Researchers split the light from a single laser into two parts. Each part then travels down one of two perpendicular arms that are each 2.5 miles long. Finally, the two join back together and are allowed to interfere with each other. The instrument is carefully calibrated so that, in the absence of a gravitational wave, the interference of the laser results in nearly perfect cancellation–no light comes out of the interferometer.

However, a passing gravitational wave will stretch one arm at the same time as it squeezes the other arm. With the relative lengths of the arms changed, the interference of the laser light will no longer be perfect. It’s this tiny change in the amount of interference that Advanced LIGO is actually measuring, and that measurement tells us what the detailed shape of the passing gravitational wave must be.

All gravitational waves have the shape of a “chirp,” where both the amplitude (akin to the loudness) and the frequency, or pitch, of the signals increase with time. However, the characteristics of the source are encoded in the precise details of this chirp and how it evolves with time.

The shape of the gravitational waves that we observe, in turn, can tell us details about the source that could not be measured in any other way. With the first three confident detections by Advanced LIGO, we’ve already found that black holes are more common than we ever expected, and that the most common variety, which forms directly from the collapse of massive stars, can be more massive than we previously thought was possible. All this information helps us understand how massive stars evolve and die.

Black Holes Becoming Less Of A Black Box

This most recent event, which we detected on Jan. 4, 2017, is the most distant source we’ve observed so far. Because gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, when we look at very distant objects, we also look back in time. This most recent event is also the most ancient gravitational wave source we’ve detected so far, having occurred over two billion years ago. Back then, the universe itself was 20% smaller than it is today, and multicellular life had not yet arisen on Earth.

The mass of the final black hole left behind after this most recent collision is 50 times the mass of our sun. Prior to the first detected event, which weighed in at 60 times the mass of the sun, astronomers didn’t think such massive black holes could be formed in this way. While the second event was only 20 solar masses, detecting this additional very massive event suggests that such systems not only exist, but may be relatively common.

In addition to their masses, black holes can also rotate, and their spins affect the shape of their gravitational-wave emission. The effects of spin are more difficult to measure, but this most recent event shows evidence not only for spin, but potentially for spin that is not oriented around the same axis as the binary’s orbit. If the case for such misalignment can be made stronger by observing future events, it will have significant implications for our understanding of how these black hole pairs form.

In the coming years, we will have more instruments like LIGO listening for gravitational waves in Italy, in Japan, and in India, learning even more about these sources. My colleagues and I are still eagerly awaiting the first detection of a binary containing at least one neutron star–a type of dense star that was not quite massive enough to collapse all the way to a black hole.

Most astronomers predicted that pairs of neutron stars would be observed before black-hole pairs, so their continued absence would present a challenge to theorists. Their eventual detection will facilitate a host of new possibilities for discoveries, including the prospect of better understanding extremely dense states of matter, and potentially observing a unique light signature using conventional telescopes from the same source as the gravitational-wave signal.

We also expect to detect gravitational waves within the next few years from space, using very precise natural clocks called pulsars, which send blasts of radiation our way at very regular intervals. Eventually we plan to placeextremely large interferometers in orbit, where they can evade the persistent rumbling of the Earth, which is a limiting source of noise for the Advanced LIGO detectors.

Nearly every time scientists have built new telescopes or particle accelerators, they’ve discovered things no one could have predicted. As exciting as the known prospects for discovery are in this new field of gravitational-wave astrophysics, as a theorist I’m most excited by the unknown wonders that still lie in store for us.

Sean McWilliams is assistant professor of physics and astronomy, West Virginia University. This story originally appeared at The Conversation.

President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement last week makes the U.S. one of just three countries the world over—the other two being Syria and Nicaragua—to opt out of the 31-page pact to take steps to reduce the effects of climate change. His decision puts the onus ion state governments and the private sector to bridge the gap and take action on climate change.

Related: The rebel alliance begins: Governors of New York, California, Washington form a coalition to fight climate change

But this is nothing new: As Michael Bloomberg stressed in a statement, the U.S. leading the charge in climate action had little to do with the federal government. He said: 

“In the U.S., emission levels are determined far more by cities, states, and businesses than they are by our federal government,” he said. “Over the past decade, the U.S. has led the world in emission reductions—and our federal government had very little to do with it. It happened because of leadership from cities, public opposition to coal plants, and market forces that have made cleaner sources of energy—including solar and wind—cheaper than coal.”

Here are some of the ways in which companies and business leaders can stay the course, with or without the support of the powers that be.

Disengage—Or Stay Engaged And Be Vocal

Following Trump’s decision to withdraw from the climate deal, Elon Musk has stepped down from the president’s advisory council, as has Disney CEO Bob Iger. Still remaining, however, are the likes of Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. “There’s going to be a groundswell of pressure on CEOs to step down from that advisory council,” Oxfam climate and energy director Heather Coleman says. “This decision is a pivot point.”

Coleman also noted that the private sector is often “beat up” as conscientious consumers pin their hopes on businesses when the government is ineffective. “There’s a lot of anger that people feel toward the U.S. government, and toward it not taking action, that is being displaced and put on the [private sector],” Coleman says. “And so these companies understand that the more the U.S. government stalls on this issue, the more pressure they’re going to get.”

Many business leaders have already been vocal about their feelings: Thirty CEOs—including the leadership of unlikely corporate allies like JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley—expressed their support of the Paris climate deal in the form of a letter last month. Others, like Exxon CEO Darren Woods, personally implored Trump not to withdraw from the climate deal. Since last week’s decision, countless CEOs have come forward to denounce Trump’s decision.

Kevin Moss, the director of the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Business Center—which works with the private sector to develop sustainability strategies—says that while it’s important for CEOs to show disagreement by choosing to no longer engage with Trump, as Musk and Iger have, there can be value in sticking around if you are vocal. “The one thing that’s not helpful is when companies stay engaged and stay quiet,” he says. “The important thing to do is make a statement by disengaging, or make a statement by staying inside and engaging and being forthright.”

Set Science-Based Targets

Addressing climate change is critical for the planet, yes, but it’s also good for business. “From the perspective of a business, the fundamentals remain the same,” Moss said. “Acting on climate change reduces costs and risks in a couple of different ways, and acting on climate change creates business opportunity.”

What some companies are already doing is setting emission reduction targets grounded in science, with the objective of keeping the rise in global temperature to below two degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times. The initiative—a partnership between WRI, CDP, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and the United Nations Global Compact—already boasts 269 companies, with two to three new companies signing up each week, according to Moss.

As we’ve written before, companies often set reduction goals that don’t take into account actual science, which means they may not be doing as much as they think they are. With science-based targets, Coleman says, companies are not “arbitrarily making greenhouse gas reduction goals,” but instead are making an informed decision based on “how does this actually add up to the broader whole.”

Nigel Topping, the CEO of the We Mean Business coalition, said that nearly 600 companies boasting more than $8.1 trillion in annual revenue have committed to climate action as part of a We Mean Business campaign. Included in that count is Walmart, which saved $1 billion in the last fiscal year by implementing a science-based target (Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon has decided to remain on Trump’s advisory council). And last week, Topping says, HPEnterprise became the first company to introduce a science-based supply chain goal; its target is to cut back on carbon emissions by 100 million metric tons of carbon by 2025—the equivalent of eliminating 21 million cars from the road for a full year.

Mark Barteau, the director of the University of Michigan’s energy institute, notes that this type of accountability will be crucial if companies want to reach the goals laid out in the Paris agreement. “If they’re really committed to trying to meet the Paris numbers on their own, I think having independent validation that they’re doing that is going to be important—otherwise it’s just going to look like the usual corporate propaganda and greenwashing,” he says.

Introduce Carbon Pricing

One way to incentivize the adoption of renewable energy sources—particularly when there’s little support from the government—is by imposing a carbon tax of sorts, or charging companies for the emission of CO2.

“In many industries, there’s been a conversation happening for awhile on whether or not there’s going to be a price on carbon,” Coleman says. “Some companies have established an internal price on carbon in anticipation of regulatory action.” But as Coleman points out, the companies that are likely to do this are those in the geographic areas where carbon pricing might be imposed on a state level.

As Barteau points out, if energy payback is a concern—that is, how long it takes to get a return on the initial energy investment— carbon pricing can help paint a clearer picture of energy efficiency. “That’s a fairly simple way to evaluate or take account of the carbon emissions, the carbon footprint impact, without redoing the whole way investment decisions are made,” he says.

Make Sure Consumers Hear You

Perhaps one of the most important things businesses can do is to ensure customers and employees understand the value of acting on climate change, and that it does not take away from their livelihood.

“Many present a false choice between jobs and doing the right thing for the environment,” says Patrick Maloney, founder and CEO of smart home and clean energy company Inspire. “But the solar and wind industries are each creating jobs at a rate 12 times faster than that of the rest of the U.S. economy, and the solar industry today is responsible for more than twice as many jobs as the coal industry.”

As Stephen Comello, Stanford’s Sustainable Energy Initiative director, points out, coal isn’t going to make a big comeback as a result of Trump’s decision. “What is eating the lunch of coal?” he says. “It’s natural gas. It’s cheap, it’s more efficient, it’s easier to move around . . . That’s not going to change.” In fact, according to a CBS news news report, two U.S. coal companies opted for staying in the Paris Accord with the hopes that it would foster U.S. coal sales to emerging markets that still want the fuel.

Either way, Comello says it’s unlikely that coal will make a comeback.  “Carbon capture and sequestration is a pretty promising technology, but it’s been a promising technology for years,” he says. “The capital costs involved are so high. If you really were prudent about your dollars, as either a business or a government, you wouldn’t really invest in carbon capture because it is so costly. It isn’t proven. Why, if I had a billion dollars would I put that at risk to do an R&D project with carbon capture, versus actually deploying solar and wind, which is already approved technology at scale?”

In his statement, Bloomberg pledged to uphold the objectives of the climate deal, regardless of the withdrawal, even committing $15 million to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which will go toward helping other countries meet the terms of the agreement. With so many leaders and businesses speaking out, chances are consumers will hear the message loud and clear—even if the White House refuses to.

David Yeom knows his way around a dollar store. Growing up in East L.A. in the 1990s, he would spend weekends hunting for deals in the discount shops with his mother. He has vivid memories of carefully surveying the colorful aisles and digging through display bins, armed with his $1 weekly allowance.

“It’s not a lot,” Yeom, 41, tells Fast Company. “But you can go pretty far with it at a dollar store.”

Years later, Yeom still regularly inspects bargain-priced merchandise—only now he does it as cofounder and CEO of Hollar, the first online dollar store. Brick-and-mortar versions of these shops are still thriving—with an estimated 80 million loyal customers—but none of the major chains have an online retail presence. Based in Southern California, Hollar is filling that void, reimagining the physical stores as a digital discount haven where the majority of inventory costs $2 and nothing goes for more than $10. Tens of thousands of products are available, ranging from necessities to impulse buys, and thanks to a simple U/X, browsing until something catches your fancy (a must in dollar stores) is easy. Hollar stocks brands you recognize (Huggies, Jergens, Febreze, Pop-Tarts) and ones you probably don’t (Zing, Num Noms, Bolis Ice Pops). Via the site and app, you can buy a $3 cellphone case alongside $1 dishwasher soap and $1.50 baby bibs.

It’s all adding up to good business for Yeom and his cofounders. Hollar experienced double-digit month-over-month sales in the last year and hit its first million-dollar month in April 2016, just five months after launch, with the average purchase totaling $30. (To turn a profit, Hollar needs at least $10 per transaction). “We built a model that is sustainable and profitable,” says cofounder and COO John Um, 39.

Hollar’s typical customer is female, a mom between the ages of 25-34. And, unlike the target client of most retail startups, she is not an affluent resident of the country’s coasts. She lives in suburban and rural areas, with a middle-to-low household income. “It’s an area that has been underserved,” Yeom says. “There’s been, historically, a lack of innovation to do more for this segment [in e-commerce], and you will find more and more businesses will start to cater to them.”

“It fills us with a tremendous amount of pride that 80% of the shipments being sent out of our warehouse is to outside California and New York,” Yeom adds. “It’s going to Middle America. And we embrace it.”

A Trip Down Memory Aisle

In 2015, Yeom was working as VP at The Honest Company and looking to branch out on his own. He found himself thinking about his childhood and those trips to the dollar stores. They were still in business, so why were there no online equivalents?

Yeom contacted his good friend John Um, then head of strategy at the 99 Cents Only Stores, and asked him, “How come when I go to 99only.com all I get is a store locator? I can’t even purchase a gift card on the site.”

Um explained that it was an issue of legacy: The company, which has nearly 400 locations, never evolved past its original retail model. The supply chain was never designed for it, so the format has remained status quo for decades.

Um agreed there was an opportunity: The number of dollar stores in the United States grew from 24,500 in 2011 to over 30,000 in 2016. Surely, he and Yeom thought, that audience also shops online.

The friends then recruited former ShoeDazzle executives Eddie Rhyu and Thanh Khuu, as well as Brian Lee, cofounder of LegalZoom, ShoeDazzle, and Honest Company. During the initial concept phase, the cofounders took to calling their project “hollar dollar,” a play on the popular slang expression “Holler!” They acquired inventory, purchasing merchandise largely from Chinese manufacturers (as well as some American companies). In November 2015, they shortened the name and established headquarters in Commerce, California, near Los Angeles, in a warehouse that, fittingly, once belonged to the 99 Cents Only store.

The location choice was strategic. Setting up shop next door to the Port of Long Beach and Port of Los Angeles gives Hollar easy access to closeout buys. Whenever there are overruns of current-season items or canceled orders from big box retailers, Hollar can sweep in and purchase them.

The team knew that for Hollar to succeed, the site had to encourage browsing—just like a physical shop does. “A typical dollar store is really about the joy of discovery,” Um says. “It’s about finding things you didn’t know you needed and things you need every day.” Dozens of best-selling and trending items on the homepage invite shoppers—90% of whom come to Hollar without a specific item in mind—to scroll through and “like” them. It looks a lot like Pinterest.

“The Pinterest model was intentional,” explains Eddie Rhyu, 45, Hollar’s chief creative officer. “We love the simplicity of it.”

The similarity to Pinterest has proved appealing to millennial moms, who make up a full 85% of Hollar’s customers and are usually in the market for deals in the top categories of toys and home goods. The company’s best-selling product ever—sold out indefinitely—was a $2 light-up jumbo pillow that came in different formats: sparkling unicorn, pink puppy, and shimmering purple seal. They were so popular, Hollar had to institute a one-per-household limit.

That Hollar is a hit with a young generation of parents doesn’t surprise the executive team. The recession of 2008, says Yeom, changed the consumer mind-set: New moms in their early 20s to late 30s migrated to dollar retailers out of necessity. After the economy recovered, they stayed put. “They want deals, they want value, they want convenience,” Yeom says. “And these type of [dollar store] retailers cater to that.”

Marketing To Millennial Moms

Tiffany Faust, 22, a stay-at-home mom from Henderson, Tennessee, was looking for an AngleCare baby monitor ($19.95) for her daughter when Hollar showed up in a Google search. She says she was “beyond impressed” by the product quality and spent some time checking out the company’s other affordable offerings. “The app is dangerous because I find myself adding more and more to my cart daily,” she says.

Jamie Wolcott, a 40-year-old full-time mom from De Queen, Arkansas–population: 6,600–discovered Hollar through Facebook ads. To date, the former nurse has bought more than two dozen items ranging from toothpaste, shampoo, and razors to toys like an Angry Bird camera drone and a water slide.

“The products all seem to be of your normal quality of what you would find in your regular, everyday retail stores, such as Walmart, Kmart, and Target,” Wolcott says via email, noting that Hollar prices are on par with competitors’ and sometimes even less expensive. “There is no way that I could have bought some of those items for less than $5 at Walmart.”

Wolcott enjoys shopping through Hollar’s website and app since it means she she doesn’t have to, as she says, “hunt all over the place” in person for thrifty buys. The seemingly endlessly scrolling possibilities lead to happy accidents. “Even Walmart online can be a difficult site to shop through at times,” she says.

In addition to Facebook, Hollar reaches new customers like Wolcott by partnering with influential mommy vloggers like Do It On A Dime’s Kathryn Snearly, who lives in Matthews, North Carolina. Last year, the company sponsored a “Hollar Haul” video in which Snearly shows off all her storage-solution purchases. To date, the video has been viewed 93,000 times. The company’s first TV ad, meanwhile, debuted in January and has racked up 43,481 views.

Snearly says she was a Hollar fan before the company contacted her for a partnership. “I remember my excitement at shopping discounts from my phone,” she says, noting that it’s particularly gratifying to check off items on her to-do list while in her pajamas at home. “As a mom of two young kids, it’s hard to get to the stores to find the best deals on items for my family, so the convenience factor is huge.”

There’s no question that the country’s widespread move to mobile has added to Hollar’s success. While one in five American households still doesn’t have a home computer, nearly all own a smartphone—and they do everything on it. “This is a business we couldn’t have built five years ago,” Yeom says. The vast majority of transactions, he notes, come from mobile.

Holler Atcha Growth

Hollar has been successful sourcing merchandise directly from companies (MGA Entertainment, Bumkins, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt among them), but last fall, when the executive team noticed that items in the home organization category consistently sold out, they decided to launch an in-house line of goods. Hollar has sold tens of thousands of its own $4 acrylic makeup trays and $4 home storage cubes, which sell for $1 less than a similar version sold at Target.

“We don’t have a lot of the burdens of legacy–a store infrastructure that we have to pay for, an internal logistics infrastructure to pay for, and we don’t have a huge overhead,” Yeom says. “So we can offer that value at considerable product margin and price extremely competitively–and that’s really the trend where retail is going: direct to consumer.” Hollar does not disclose financial details, but confirms that margins for private label items are substantially higher than those from vendors.

The price is right, but what about quality? The majority of items I recently ordered did not seem flimsy or poorly assembled. A $3 hat box easily accommodated a sizable quantity of nail polish bottles; a $5 two-pack of food-storage containers keep a week’s worth of leftovers from spoiling; and a $2, 40-page coloring book got my tween niece’s stamp of approval.

Yeom says that inventory will more than double over the course of this year, with the in-house line expanding into more categories (specifics will be announced in the coming months). Simply put, he wants more products at better prices because that’s what would please his picky mom. He knows the struggles of cash-strapped parents and he’s determined to make digital dollar store shopping as easy and widespread as signing up for Amazon Prime.

Thinking back on his childhood, Yeom says, “We watched every dollar. But at the end of the day, [my mom] would walk out of the store feeling like a winner because she found a treasure. And that’s the exactly the feeling we want to replicate with our customers.”

This concert sounds insane. It’s not just that the electronic, laser-like sounds coming from the modular synthesizer onstage recall an intergalactic battle from a sci-fi movie. It’s that they’re firing away all around me, bouncing from speaker to speaker inside the room. It sounds like I’m somehow in the music.

The performer is Suzanne Ciani, the electronic music pioneer and composer who was recently given the Moog Innovation Award at the Moogfest music and technology festival. This show is one of dozens of performances held during the four-day celebration, but it sounds different from the others. For many years, Ciani has performed using a quadrophonic sound system: a setup that uses four primary speakers placed in the corners of the venue, which allows the music to be split into four channels. The audio, not unlike that of a surround-sound home theater, can travel around you in a way that standard stereo systems can’t. One sound might come from behind you, while another chimes in from above or in front of you.

“People love quad,” Ciani tells me. “But it’s hard to get sometimes. You have to fight with the venue. You have to fight with the promoter.”

Her performance nearly didn’t happen as planned. But if anyone is going to be receptive to a sound-bending demand like this, it’s the Moogfest organizers. The daytime conference-style programming featured several workshops and discussions about three-dimensional spatial sound, an increasingly hot topic discussed at the bleeding edge of the music/tech nexus.

Why A Decades-Old Idea Is Coming Back

The resurgence of interest might seem odd, considering that spatial audio is hardly a new innovation. The quadrophonic version of immersive sound employed by Ciani has been around since the 1950s and peaked in the 1970s, after the format failed to gain much traction with consumers. In 1967, the famously experimental Pink Floyd played what is believed to be the first surround-sound rock concert using their own custom-built quadrophonic speaker system, the Azimuth Co-ordinator. Binaural recording, the process of capturing three-dimensional sound, had been in use for nearly a century when Lou Reed released the first binaurally recorded pop album, Street Hassle, in 1978. By then, attempts to release music on quadrophonic vinyl and other new multi-dimensional sound formats had largely been abandoned by the music industry, which opted to stick with stereo.

So why is spatial audio itching to make a comeback now? The shortest and most obvious answer: Technology. Back in the 1970s, capturing high-quality, three-dimensional audio was expensive and cumbersome for the music industry and for consumers to enjoy it would have necessitated costly home audio systems (or special headphones). At the time, it wasn’t clear that there would even be enough demand for spatial 3D audio to warrant the heavy investment required to produce and market it.

But technology, of course, tends to get smaller and cheaper as time marches on. Today, it’s easier to capture 3D audio and it’s even becoming easier to adapt older recordings to work in spatial formats. On the consumer side, the market is awash in relatively affordable home speaker systems that allow for surround sound, driven in part by the development of formats like DTS and Dolby 5.1 for movie theaters and home theater setups. Indeed, lots of albums get remixed in 5.1 surround sound for hardcore fans, like the recently reissued Beatles classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This type of sound is slowly finding its way into concert venues as well. For now, electronic artists like Ciani have to demand it on their tech riders at shows (“If you say it is nonnegotiable, they will come around,” Ciani says), but the request may soon become easier to fulfill. In late April, musician Christopher Willitz opened Envelop, a venue in San Francisco with a 28.4 channel sound system that specializes in immersive 3D audio. The venue’s 28-speaker “Ambisonic” system has also been adapted to a mobile sound space called Envelop Satellite, which can be deployed at music festivals and other temporary locations.

Virtual Reality Pushes 3D Sound Forward

Virtual reality is another major factor behind the push toward spatial audio. As VR and augmented reality gradually creep into the mainstream, the immersive content created for these formats needs spatially rich, 3D audio.

In a rare display of early tech adoption, the music industry has embraced VR, eager to carve out its own slice of a market that’s expected to be worth $120 billion within a few years (and perhaps try to preempt another technology-driven disruption of the business). In the last six months, Universal Music and Warner Music have inked partnerships with MelodyVR to develop VR music content, and Viacom released what it calls the first-ever VR album. Virtual reality music videos and live concerts filmed in 360 degrees are becoming more common, even as VR headsets remain relatively rare in households. If the VR hype turns out to be a sustainable growth sector, though, the music industry will need to be prepared with material that sounds good in that world.

However the VR market plays out, the heightened investment seems to be driving renewed interest in spatial audio more generally. One of companies trying to push 3D sound forward is Sennheiser, the German microphone and speaker manufacturer that was an early pioneer in binaural recording. Sennheiser’s Ambeo sound format offers a 9.1 channel immersive 3D mix that can be used in home audio setups, theater sound systems, and even specialized headphones. An Ambeo remix of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” was recently used in the new exhibit about the band at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where the song is played on 25 speakers, with different layers and details of the track coming from various directions in the room.

“With Ambeo, we try to create situations where there’s no difference between being there and not,” says Daniel Sennheiser, who runs the company along with his brother, Andreas. “If you close your eyes, your perception tells you its real.”

Very few of us will ever have museum-grade sound systems in our homes. But Sennheiser is working to make its Ambeo format more accessible to consumers and music engineers. Its Ambeo VR microphone is a $1,650 gadget that records high fidelity sound in three dimensions for use in VR and other immersive media. They also make Ambeo-enabled earbuds for the iPhone that allow for binaural 3D recording on the go.

The purpose of devices like these is to lower the barrier of entry for 3D recording so that sound designers, music producers, and consumers can become familiar with the concept. As awe-inspiring as the Pink Floyd Ambeo remix may be for fans of the band, not every artist has the means to have their work remixed at Abbey Road Studios by world-class engineers, which was the case with “Comfortably Numb.” To help nudge things along, Sennheiser published instructional blueprints for audio engineers looking to dabble in spatial audio. The hope is that, in the future, music will be recorded in a more 3D-friendly format so that intensive and costly remixing projects won’t be necessary.

For Sennhesier, getting their 3D sound into public installations is a way of marketing the idea to people who otherwise may not realize this technology exists.

“One of the difficult parts of this is that you have to let people experience it to really understand it,” says Andreas Sennheiser. “It’s like a great bottle of wine. To get somebody from buying a $5 bottle to a $15 bottle, you have to invite them to taste. That’s what we’re after.”

The hope for Sennheiser and others toying with 3D sound is that in time, the technology becomes more commonplace. Its adoption requires costly hardware and engineering that smaller venues may not be able to afford–and to be sure, not all music would necessarily sound great in 3D–but if widely implemented, the experience could enhance live music just enough to attract more people and bump up ticket prices.

Immersive audio can also be used in live broadcast scenarios to effectively increase the size of the audience for big shows. The Pink Floyd Ambeo installation at the V&A Museum certainly mimics the experience of being at a concert, both with sound and imagery. The next time Adele tickets go on sale and invariably sell out in minutes, promoters may well consider holding a satellite viewing of the show shot in 360 degrees and mixed in 3D to open up the event to people who couldn’t get tickets to the actual show. With more and more money being poured into creating live music VR content, there’s no reason that those virtual concerts need to stay crammed inside an Oculus Rift.