In 2015, the United Nations laid out its Sustainable Development Goals to track global progress against massive social and environmental challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change. But doing hitting those goals will take more than creative public and private partnerships: it will cost money. All told, the estimate is in the trillions, which neither governments nor traditional philanthropists can cover outright.

The good news is that, in just a year and a half since the call came out, the impact investing industry is picking up the slack. In 2016, investors looking for financial returns that demonstrate social good improvement committed $22.1 billion to 8,000 investments. All told, the emerging industry, which is less than a decade old, has at least $114 billion in assets under management, according to a recent report by the Global Impact Investing Network, a nonprofit organization to increase the scale and effectiveness of impact investing.

Such a global focus is certainly helping share the wealth. The 209 groups surveyed by GIIN are made up of mainly fund managers and foundations–but also includes banks, development financial institutions, family groups, and pension funds. Those are based in both traditional markets like the U.S. and Europe, as well as developing ones like Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asian. Their money is spreading geographically and ideologically into business-driven solutions for better financial services access, renewable energy, affordable housing and healthcare, and protective forestry and timber plans.

While carefully structured impact investing has proven it can generate profits comparable to standard investments, some groups–including many chasing SDG-alignment–aren’t necessarily using it that way. Roughly one-third of funders are comfortable taking below-market rate returns or break-even paybacks (so-called “capital preservation”) to grow the both field and slower rolling startups that might eventually make a bigger dent in these problems.

The Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investing group pioneered by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam, has certainly taken that approach “In some cases—perhaps even most—a strong positive correlation does exist between financial return and social impact. In other cases, a company can generate significant social impact even if its financial return is modest,” writes a team of Omidyar-affiliated authors tasked with explaining the new rules of this economy in a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review report.

To that end, Ford Foundation recently announced it’s committing $1 billion toward more cause-aligned investments. As SSIR reported, Ford, Robin Hood, The MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Starr Foundation are all pretty comfortable with concessionary tactics.

Shifting norms toward SGD alignment, in particular in a way that focuses on long term impact over short term gains may help set the standard for what’s expected as more traditional investors move into the space. After all, the entire goal is to fund solutions that can actually improve the world. “I think what that shows is that impact investors demand a pretty high bar for impact integrity,” adds Mudaliar.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on Monday, the company unleashed a two-hour storm of announcements, including both new hardware and software feature upgrades. The developer event usually focuses on software–operating systems and apps–but included a surprising amount of hardware this year.

To get you in the mood, check out this snappy video Apple showed at the beginning of the keynote, then we’ll segue into the OS upgrades that will arrive this fall:

Introducing iOS 11

New iOS 11 features dominated the presentation:

Photos. To save memory while preserving quality, Photos will store images and videos using compression standards called HEIC and HEVC, respectively. The Memories feature, which uses AI to form custom presentations of photos and videos, can more quickly scan the library to identify things like events and people, Apple said. Memories is smart enough to curate highlights of your camera roll optimized for both portrait and display modes.

Apple Pay. Apple added person-to-person payments via Apple Pay inside Messages. You can send money in the body of a message, and authenticate the transaction using Touch ID. Messages will also get the ability to sync all messages from all the user’s devices in the cloud.

Siri. As expected, Siri will get some new smarts. Most importantly, it’ll become more aware of the user and more proactive about delivering assistance. On-device machine learning will do things such as let Siri suggest news stories to read or help you make a calendar appointment based on a booking you made in Safari.

In iOS 11, Siri will translate English to Chinese, French, and Italian, with more languages coming. It will also get some new male and female voices that Apple says are “more expressive.”

In addition, Siri will offer improved support for third-party apps, letting you use it to perform tasks such as taking notes in Evernote and bring up QR codes in WeChat.

Music. Apple announced MusicKit, an API that lets developers integrate their services more tightly with Apple Music.

App Store. The iOS App Store is getting a sweeping redesign, Apple says. A new Today tap will offer information and videos for featured apps. A Games tab will feature new releases, gameplay videos, stats on popular games, and information about new in-app purchases in games.

Maps. Apple unveiled some new iOS 11 mapping features, including indoor maps of malls and airports, info on speed limits, and assistance on which lane you should be in during navigation. Also new for motorists: a new “Do Not Disturb While Driving” mode that figures out when you’re in a moving car and turns off notifications.

HomeKit. Users in households with HomeKit-friendly gadgets will be able to configure and control their speakers in the Home app, building multi-room audio environments and using AirPlay 2 for the connection.

New for WatchOS 4

Apple announced new features in the next OS for Apple Watch, watchOS 4. The coolest among them was a new AI-driven Siri watch face that automatically suggests content you might need. Whenever you shake your wrist, the watch face will update with new, updated information on items such as travel times or flight times.

It’s called MacOS High Sierra

Some thought Apple might name the new OS “macOS 11” to sync up with the iOS 11 name. Nope. Instead, it’s doubling down on the California landmarks theme with “High Sierra,” a name which indicates that it’s a refined version of last year’s Sierra rather than something radically new. The latest version, Apple says, is far faster than its predecessor. It also features an improved Safari browser that blocks auto-play video in web pages (yeah!) and prevents web sites from tracking users as they move around the web. And Apple is working with 3D platforms Unreal and Unity to let those tools create VR content on a Mac–demoed onstage with a look at ILM Star Wars VR built in Unreal.

At Last, Amazon On Apple TV

There was very little news on the Apple TV’s tvOS software, but what there was mattered. Apple announced that the Amazon Prime Video app is coming to Apple TV later this year. The service has hundreds of movies and TV shows, and original content like Transparent and Man in the High Castle.

Hardware Aplenty

Apple’s developer event is usually reserved for the operating systems, but hardware played a key role today:

A Speaker Called HomePod

After months of speculation, Apple announced a new smart speaker–the HomePod–to compete with Amazon Echo and Google Home. Packing a large woofer and seven tweeters, it streams music from Apple’s Music service, suggests music based on its knowledge of user tastes, delivers news and information on demand, and can be used to control connected home devices like lights, plugs, and thermostats. HomePod will sell for $349 and is scheduled to ship in December.

My colleague Harry McCracken just had a listen to the new device, and liked what he heard.

An iMac for the Pros

The iMac line got an update.  The 21.5-inch, 21.5-inch Retina 4K, and 27-inch machines all moved to Intel’s Kaby Lake processors. Each gets a bump in graphics power, too.

Apple also announced a new $5,000 iMac Pro (in gunmetal gray) designed with the high-end specs that creative professionals–a group often concerned that the company is forgetting about them–need to do things like develop VR games. Check out the video:

The current MacBook Pro line, as well as the 12-inch Macbook, will be outfitted with Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors, and will sport 50% faster solid-state storage. Even the almost-forgotten MacBook Air is getting a little faster.

Love For The iPad

For months now, scuttlebutt has had it that Apple would announce an iPad Pro with a 10.5-inch screen that offered more screen real estate than the iconic 9.7-inch model but more portable than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The company announced that machine, along with a revised 12.9-inch model which–like the 9.7-incher–offers improved screen technologies and upgrades to its cameras.

To sweeten the deal, Apple announced a bevy of new iOS 11 features designed for the iPad. New drag-and-drop features let users move images, links, and other items between two apps—even two apps running separately in full-screen mode. A new Files app will make the iPad seem more like a work machine than a content consumption device. It can also be used to work with files on third-party services like Dropbox and Box.

Apple Edges Into Augmented Reality

Perhaps the most surprising announcement of the day was Apple’s quick leap into the AR space. The company announced a new development tool called ARKit that will let developers create AR experience for the iPhone or iPad. The technology uses the phone’s sensors to detect things like depth of field, ambient light, and motion sensors. This information is needed to place digital items within the scene in a natural-looking way.

In just a bit over two hours, Apple packed even more news than usual. With some of the stuff it unveiled not shipping until late this year, it’ll take a while to gauge all of its significance. But overall, the company made a strong case that it’s keeping up with rivals Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft in the contest of the tech platforms.

Two years ago, when Ian Rogers became LVMH’s chief digital officer, his good friend Mike D (of Beastie Boys fame) pointed out that Rogers’s fashion sense seemed to be inspired largely by Jay Z. “That was his version of saying, ‘You’re not the most fashionable guy I know,'” Rogers tells me, with a smile.

In some ways, Rogers isn’t the most obvious person to reimagine LVMH for the modern shopper. While the 45 year old spends his workdays in the plush, beautifully furnished Paris offices of the world’s largest luxury conglomerate–which counts Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Givenchy among its 70 brands–he often thinks back to humbler times. He spent his teenage years in Goshen, Indiana, crisscrossing the concrete on his skateboard, wearing baggy Carhartt and Dickie’s clothes purchased from Walmart. “We were literally dressed like janitors,” Rogers recalls.

But what Rogers lacks in haute couture experience, he makes up with a proven talent for helping industries transition from the analog world to a digital one. For 21 years, he worked in the music industry, helping to shape how people accessed artists and bands online. Along those same lines, he’s now tasked with translating the in-store luxury shopping experience for the internet.

For months Rogers has been working on a top-secret project, known only by the code name Babylon. Today, LVMH is revealing the fruits of his labor with the launch of 24 Sèvres, an online version of the high-end 180-year-old Parisian department store Le Bon Marché. This new e-commerce operation will be LVMH’s opportunity to experiment with new approaches to selling luxury to the digital shopper. Le Bon Marché is owned by LVMH, so this will be the only place that some brands within the portfolio, such as Dior and Vuitton, will be sold by a multi-brand online store. But 24 Sèvres will also include many brands that are not owned by LVMH. While Rogers has been helping strategize how this site will unfold, he’s been working closely with Eric Goguey, the site’s CEO, who runs its day-to-day operations.

LVMH’s CEO, Bernard Arnault, brought Rogers on because there is a feeling at the company that the $1.2 trillion luxury fashion industry is on the verge of major disruption. At present, 98% of luxury purchases happen in brick-and-mortar stores, and 40% of luxury brands don’t sell their products online at all. But consumer behavior appears to be shifting. Between 2003 and 2016, online luxury sales grew 20-fold. And the pace of change is quickening: In 2016 alone, the online luxury goods market grew by 13%, far outpacing the rest of the luxury goods market, which only grew by 4%. “Retail is about to change fundamentally, in much the same way that music changed,” Rogers says.

Luxury Love Is A Tricky Thing

It’s clear that a segment of luxury shoppers–particularly younger ones–want to buy products online. But luxury brands have struggled to figure out exactly how to translate the brick-and-mortar luxury experience online. At stores, shoppers receive personalized attention from well-trained staff and they can touch products to examine how well-crafted they are. The same level of intimacy, personalization, and service is not easy to replicate in an e-commerce experience.

Case in point: In 2009, LVMH launched a website called e-Luxury that was a spectacular failure. Customers found the site boring and the service subpar, and international shoppers were annoyed by the fact that the company wouldn’t ship outside the U.S. Other luxury e-commerce sites, like Net-a-Porter and FarFetch, quickly stepped in to fill the gap, taking an editorial approach to presenting brands and collections. Every week on Net-A-Porter, for instance, clothes and accessories are presented in an online magazine called The Edit with written commentary about how to style each item, alongside celebrity interviews and lifestyle content like information about detox retreats.

Away from LVMH’s headquarters, where executives all wear the finest tailored suits and cashmere blend jackets, the employees of 24 Sèvres are coming up with new approaches to selling luxury online in an open-plan office that looks like it belongs to a Silicon Valley startup. This workforce is a good deal younger and more global than the one at the parent company, and most people joined the team in the last six months. “This is quite new for LVMH,” Eric Goguey tells me. “Our development process is very agile, so what is true on Monday might not be true on Wednesday. You have people here wearing shorts, whereas you will never ever ever see someone at Le Bon Marché wearing shorts.”

A Visual Experience

With 24 Sèvres, Rogers and Goguey have pushed for the site to offer customers a rich viewing experience, inspired by the most immersive visual social media sites–Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and the like. Le Bon Marché is known for its elaborate in-store displays. The store often invites artists to create vast exhibits in the building’s central hall. Ai Wei Wei, for instance, installed enormous monster sculptures that appeared to be floating in midair. This artwork gives people a reason to stop by the store and elevates the space beyond the everyday shopping experience.

24 Sèvres will bring a similar approach to the website. Artists and designers will be invited to create interactive digital storytelling displays about some sort of topic, such as castles or animals. The images will change each month, so customers will want to return to the site. Some of this art will incorporate products, but much of it will just be aesthetically pleasing. This is a trick that Instagram bloggers discovered long ago: By leading with gorgeous imagery, rather than just product suggestions, followers will want to spend time in the online world that they’ve created. “We’ve created a canvas, if you will, which we call the ‘window,'” Rogers explains. “In the real world, visual merchandising for Vuitton and Dior is an art installation. It’s not commerce or marketing; it’s just an expression of the brand.”

Goguey explains that 24 Sèvres will tap into the talent that is involved with creating the physical windows for the brands within the LVMH portfolio, including Faye McLeod, Louis Vuitton’s visual image director. “We have access to crazy creative people who have this expertise,” says Goguey. “24 Sèvres is a fascinating marriage between the geeks and the creatives.”

The site will also take a different approach to how the products are displayed. In most luxury e-commerce, each item is generally shot against a white background with a couple of model shots, much like Amazon or any other retailer. But in stores, products are presented in a lush ambiance. (Think of those high-end watches that are displayed on velvet stands in gleaming glass cases.) 24 Sèvres will take a similar approach, photographing products against colorful, textured backgrounds. All of this is designed to present products within a broader luxury brand experience. “It’s an artistic vision,” Goguey says. “We’re always using props, whether it’s a stone or wood, that puts the product in context. It’s what we do in a store, but translated into a digital medium, meaning we’re taking the same creativity and playing around with it online.”

The brand will also try to take an elevated approach to service. Besides the things that customers have come to expect online–plenty of exclusive products, fast shipping to 70 countries, free returns, easy pickups in stores, a loyalty program–24 Sèvres will also have live assistants on hand to help with styling or product selection. “From the app, you click to talk to a stylist and, boom, you get a real Parisian woman who can walk you through the site and help you pick something out in a way that is very similar to what you would have in store.”

The prospect of tinkering with a brand’s image online can feel frightening to brands that have been carefully cultivating their identities for decades–if not centuries. They don’t want to lose their exclusivity, status, and prestige with a few unfortunate missteps in the digital realm. Rogers has been working to make the case that their reputations will not disintegrate on the internet. “Online doesn’t change exclusivity at all,” he says. “Anybody can walk into Bloomingdales and Vuitton–that experience is not only available to some people. The price point of the products and the limited editions means that the brands are only available to some people.”

What’s changed, Rogers argues, is that luxury culture used to only exist in big cities, but now “even if you live in small-town Indiana, where I grew up, you can buy a Louis Vuitton handbag online, the same way as anybody else.”

If you live in Detroit and make only $10,000 a year, you still might be able to buy a newly constructed house. On two vacant blocks in the city’s northwest side, a new neighborhood of tiny houses was designed to help people living in poverty become homeowners.

Through a rent-to-own program, residents will pay $1 per square foot in rent each month. For a 250-square-foot house, for example, rent is $250, when a similar home in Detroit might normally cost twice as much. After a maximum of seven years, the house can be fully paid off.

In some other programs, such as homes built by Habitat for Humanity, residents are required to have a mortgage. “People making that small amount of money can’t qualify for a mortgage,” she says. “So they’re essentially locked out of housing that serves as a piggyback for the rest of us. In addition to the pride of having a place you can call your own, the beginning of wealth, or the security of having an asset you can call your own, was very important to us. More important than the tininess of the home.”

The tiny size, along with quality insulation and windows, also makes utilities cheap. Even when the weather is coldest, residents should only pay around $30 a month to keep the house warm and the power on.

Each month, residents are required to take classes in financial literacy and home maintenance. Nearby, the Cass Community headquarters provides access to social services like mental health counseling and education and nutrition programs.

Seven homes have been completed so far, with 25 tiny houses planned in total for the neighborhood. In a second phase, the organization hopes to build 10 slightly larger homes for families. Because Detroit didn’t have zoning restrictions or minimum size requirements for tiny homes, the process has been relatively straightforward. The first residents are expected to move in this month.

As the project provides housing, it’s also transforming a blighted neighborhood. “The neighbors are ecstatic,” says Fowler. “You get the sense that with these tiny, bright, beautiful new homes there’s a renaissance occurring in a small way in a neighborhood that hasn’t had much to celebrate for a long time.”

Shortly after Trump announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris agreement on Thursday–saying that he “was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”–the mayor of Pittsburgh reaffirmed his city’s support for the agreement (and pointed out that his constituents voted overwhelmingly for Clinton). By the end of the day, 82 U.S. mayors had signed a pledge to adopt the agreement. By Monday, that number had grown to more than 200.

In a separate declaration released on Monday called We Are Still In, a group of 125 mayors, nine governors, 183 university presidents, and 902 businesses, including Apple, Google, Ikea, and Target, said that they continued to support climate action–and many leaders believe that it will be possible to meet the U.S.’s original pledge to reduce emissions, despite Trump.

“What this [withdrawal] is immediately doing is creating a galvanizing moment,” says Seth Schultz, director of research, measurement, and planning for C40, a global network of megacities committed to fighting climate change. “You’ve just seen this very swift and immediate response saying the Trump administration pulls out of this, but America is not stepping away from this–from our commitment, from our responsibility to each other and to the rest of the world.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies will donate $15 million to the UN agency that coordinates the operations of the Paris agreement–money that it won’t be getting from the U.S. federal government–and will then work with all the cities, states, and businesses that take climate action to measure their plans to reduce emissions, and submit a new pledge totalling those commitments, along with reports on progress, to the UN.

While only nations are officially party to the Paris agreement, Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said in a press release that the organization “welcomes the determination and commitment” from cities, states, and businesses. According to a representative from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the UN will accept the emissions reduction numbers reported by the new organization even though it is not a national government. The group’s pledge and reports will be in parallel to what the federal government was supposed to provide (and is still supposed to provide until the U.S. officially withdraws, a process that will likely take until November 2020).

In the Paris agreement, the pledges each country made to reduce emissions were voluntary, and many of those working on the state and local level believe that they can still be accomplished. The U.S. pledged to cut emissions 26% to 28% by 2025 compared to 2005 levels, and the country has already achieved half of those cuts.

“These pledges were bottom up,” says Carl Pope, senior advisor to Michael Bloomberg. “They were what people wanted to do. And we believe there will be enough things people want to do that when we add them all up it will take us the rest of the way.”

Many cities already have ambitious plans underway. Los Angeles started working on its Sustainable City Plan in 2014, before the Paris agreement was signed, and set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with what science said was necessary, or 45% below 1990 levels by 2025 (and 80% lower by 2050). Its city-owned power company stopped contracting with one coal plant in 2015, and will stop using another other–Intermountain Power Plant in Utah–by 2025.

“That wasn’t initially intended to be in the face of Trump’s rollback of fuel efficiency standards, but certainly it’s a counterpoint at this stage showing that cities are going to create the demand for these vehicles and put them to use,” says Matt Petersen, the city’s chief sustainability officer.

New York City, which plans to reduce its emissions 80% against a 2005 baseline by 2050, has implemented programs like the Green Housing Preservation Program, which helps small apartment buildings become more efficient in exchange for promising to keep rent affordable, and is moving to power city buildings with renewable energy. Washington, D.C., has expanded its successful bike-sharing program to make it affordable for low-income residents. Seattle, which plans to reach zero net emissions by 2050, is focusing partly on making the city more walkable and bikable and improving public transit.

While several cities already have ambitious plans, Trump’s announcement has motivated city officials to do even more. “All these cities have all made commitments to reduce emissions, and they’re delivering on those,” says Petersen. “Now we’re going to see what additional actions can be taken in the next few years to accelerate our greenhouse gas reductions while growing the clean economy of today. That’s what we’re doing. It’s not just rhetoric. We’re really trying to back it up with specific actions where it makes sense for mayors at the political level, along with their staff, to come together, see how we can transform the markets, and learn from each other.”

The announcement is likely to have an even greater impact on cities that are earlier in the process of reducing emissions. “There are a lot of cities that have large ambitions but not yet strong plans,” says Pope. “I think a lot of this will be on the execution side.”

The list of mayors who have signed the pledge to adopt and honor the Paris commitment includes Republican mayors, such as the mayors of Miami and San Diego, and mayors of smaller cities such as Carmel, Indiana, where the city is making plans to make streets more walkable and has switched streetlights to LEDs. Des Moines (mentioned by Mike Pence in a variation of “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” saying the president was “more concerned with Des Moines than Denmark”) is on list. Cities in the heart of coal country, like Blacksburg, Virginia, are on the list. Cities from every part of the U.S., including Houston, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Knoxville, are on the list.

A C40 report published in December 2016 estimated that if all cities with populations larger than 50,000 took climate action, it would account for more than a third of the pledge the U.S. made for the Paris agreement. (There are nearly 500 cities of that size in the U.S., and though fewer than half have pledged to support Paris so far, that number is growing.)

Compared to many other countries, U.S. cities and states have more autonomy in decision-making. Local government can often regulate transportation and buildings; cities also participate in creating the Uniform National Building Code, which is run by a private body rather than the federal government. Some cities, such as L.A., can directly shift to clean electricity. Others can negotiate with utilities to make that happen.

“Even three years ago, it was sort of assumed that electricity was controlled by monopoly utilities,” says Pope. “But that model’s been breaking down.” Salt Lake City, for example, negotiated with its utility to get a deal for 100% renewable electricity (and save residents money on power bills). Twenty-nine U.S. cities have now committed to renewable electricity.

Some states also have ambitious plans, and some have already taken ambitious action. On a press call immediately after Trump’s announcement, California Governor Jerry Brown made the point that despite following policies tougher than the Paris agreement calls for, the state’s economy increased 40% faster than the rest of the U.S. in 2016. “California, we’re all in,” he said. “We’re on the field ready for battle. While our president may be AWOL in the battle against climate change, we’re not.”

There are obvious losses from the lack of federal action. Obama planned to regulate methane from the oil and gas industry on federal land, for example. But if oil and gas emissions might be higher than expected, “we’re going to see bigger reductions from the electricity sector and in buildings than Obama projected,” says Pope. He estimates that if the utility sector continues the pace of the last three years–driven largely by market forces like the collapse of coal because of natural gas and the rise of renewables–the sector’s emissions would drop to 50% of their 2005 level by 2025. “That in itself would close the gap,” he says, letting us hit our Paris targets.

The federal government also could have provided funding to help smooth the transition to clean power–but federal money hasn’t been a major factor in how far cities have already come. “We need to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy, and we need to do it very quickly,” says Schultz. “So where that comes from is important, and the national government has a huge role in that, and that is also at risk. But you talk to a lot of the mayors in C40 and they are, I’m telling you, completely unfazed because they haven’t gotten that money for years. And they’re figuring out how to do it anyway.”

If the international community reacts negatively to the pull out, he says, that could also make it harder for cities and states to do deals or get international financing. But despite these challenges, the overall impact of Trump’s decision may be positive, because it has launched so many local governments and businesses into action. “I think emotionally, and in terms of the ambition, it’s actually not hurting cities at all,” he says. “It’s only making them redouble their efforts. It’s making them stronger advocates. It’s making them more vocal . . . hearing that [the U.S.] is pulling out of the Paris agreement, they haven’t even batted an eye. Just the opposite. It’s been, we’re doubling down. We’re taking this to the streets. You’re giving us more confidence and we’re going to shoulder the load.”

One of the food delivery industry’s biggest and most well-funded meal-kit subscription companies, Blue Apron, has filed its intent to go public. The company’s stated goal is to take on grocery stores and dining out. “We believe our customers choose to buy Blue Apron meals instead of shopping at grocery stores, ordering takeout, or eating at restaurants,” its filing reads.

But while interest in meal kits is growing, there isn’t strong evidence that most people are ready to give up entirely on the grocery aisle. Meanwhile, Blue Apron’s marketing department is spending an exorbitant $94 per customer to get people to sign up for its service–and in the last year, its customer growth rate has actually slowed. So is Blue Apron really cut out to be a public, stand-alone company?

Meal-kit subscription companies fancy themselves innovators, refashioning grocery shopping for a digital world. But not everyone is equally enchanted by this newfangled shopping experience. Recipe cards and quick meal prep packages represent less than 1% of retail food and alcohol spending in the U.S., according to a recent report from research firm Morningstar (Editor’s note:Fast Company‘s owner, Joe Manuseto, is executive chairman of Morningstar.)

Among meal-kit adoptees, the metrics are more encouraging. Food box loyalists are known to spend 13% of their weekly grocery dollars outside the traditional grocery store, the report notes. The research asserts these kits could be the catnip that convinces consumers to shop for groceries online–not just for meal kits, but as part of their regular grocery routine (online grocery shopping has had many false starts as it attempts to go truly mainstream).

That puts Blue Apron in an interesting role—a pied piper luring the masses to online grocery shelves. Though Blue Apron was one of the first to offer meal-kit subscriptions, it’s not alone. There are countless meal-kit offerings out there from a bevy of providers–both brand names and newcomers. These adversaries are all aggressively waving their own coupons and rock-bottom deals as they attempt to attract customers.

Notably, one in four Americans has tried a meal kit–with 70% continuing to purchase them, according to Nielsen. All the price competition, however, enables someone with an interest in meal kits to hop from one platform to the other, sopping up discounts as easily as bread in pasta sauce. That means not all meal-kit consumers are staying loyal to just one service.

Given the high cost of customer acquisition–thanks to hyper-competitive pricing and epic marketing budgets–turning this product into a consistent profit generator is one of the biggest challenges Blue Apron and businesses like it face. The whole scenario calls into question whether meal-kit subscriptions are a sustainable business on their own–or if they are better off as components of a larger digital grocery spread.

The Challenge

Meal-kit subscription services endure a lot of customer drop-off. In its filing to the SEC, Blue Apron notes that while its high spending has grown its customer base, its expansion efforts have the potential to lose steam. “Over time our customers on average order less frequently or sometimes cease ordering.” That statement is echoed in Morningstar’s data, which reports that a year after trying a meal kit, only 8% to 18% customers remain with that particular service. Some of that drop-off is circumstantial–for example, you might not restart a meal-kit subscription you paused while you were away on vacation.

That’s problematic because meal kits–especially those hoping to capture a wider market like Blue Apron–are limited in their ability to increase prices on kits without losing customers to competitors offering better deals. “Meal-kit startups can’t raise their prices too significantly because they’re competing with traditional groceries as well as other meal kits, which limits margin potential. Therefore, their main way to grow is by adding customers, pushing them to focus heavily on costly customer acquisition,” says CB Insights’ Natan Reddy, a tech industry analyst.

Signing up and keeping loads of customers in this space is a fraught endeavor. Meal kits are at once trying to change a deeply ingrained customer behavior and attempting to introduce them to a new brand. In order to get people on board, they need to spend heavily on marketing—particularly cost-intensive offline marketing like television ads. On top of that, they have to keep their product affordable–they can’t make up for the cost of their high marketing spend with higher prices on their products. Because many of these players, like Blue Apron, have received a lot of venture funding, they’ve been comfortable spending a lot to get customers, says Reddy, “even in the face of reportedly high churn.”

When I met with Sunbasket CEO Adam Zbar last month, he claimed his company could be profitable tomorrow if not for its marketing spend. The same seems to be true for Blue Apron. Though it enjoyed a quarter of profitability from January to March last year, in the first quarter of 2017 it took a loss of $52 million. Already this year it’s spent $61 million on marketing, setting it up to nearly double last year’s spend. Yes, you read that right.

Not The First

Customer acquisition is an age-old problem in the digital grocery world. Both Webvan and Peapod attempted to build web-based grocery delivery in the late 1990s. Webvan went under and Peapod, which went public, found an acquirer in Royal Ahold N.V. The main issue for both? Not enough orders and mounting costs. By coming under Royal Ahold N.V., which owns Giant and Shop & Stop retail grocery stores, Peapod was able to access a ready customer base.

What Peapod has done in the years since it was acquired is well worth paying attention to. Peapod still does grocery delivery, but exclusively for its parent company stores. It also has its own meal kits, which it sells in tandem with its online grocery service. That allows customers to do their normal weekly shopping in addition to buying instructional meal kits. Incorporating a la carte meal kits into a bigger, a la carte online and offline grocery service allows customers to be flexible in their approach as they shop for food. They don’t need to cancel a subscription meal kit service if they go on vacation because they are buying meal kits individually, and Royal Ahold N.V. doesn’t have to worry about customers dropping off after they come back from a holiday the way most meal-kit subscription services do. Even if customers don’t race online to order a meal kit when they get back home, they’ll probably run to the grocery store to pick up some staples for their first meal back.

This need for fluidity makes obituaries for retail grocery businesses appear premature: “I think people love going to the grocery store to find new products and to be a part of their social community and it is just a part of the fabric of how people exist,” says Andy Levitt, CEO of vegan meal kit Purple Carrot.

Blue Apron and many meal kits are rigid in format and as such largely supplemental to traditional grocery stores. That makes them potential targets for acquisition by grocers with a digital strategy—like Peapod’s scenario in the early aughts. Because Blue Apron’s meal kits are something of a luxury–not necessary products that a standard household can’t live without–it makes them susceptible to getting nixed when belts need to tighten.

Other Opportunities

Blue Apron’s last uttered valuation was $2 billion, making it unlikely to get bought up—and this may be a part of why it’s going public. At the end of March, the company had $61 million in cash, but its working capital was negative $84.8 million. It’s possible that Blue Apron is going public to raise more money. The last time it raised privately was in 2015.

Another reason: Right now Blue Apron is still considered an emerging company, which entitles it to disclose less in its public filings. Once it starts earning more than $1.07 billion in revenue, that stops being the case. If it waited until after it was earning more, Blue Apron would have to report on executive compensation and more readily comply with certain accounting standards.

Going public in the immediate future gives the company a little bit of shield from prying investors and reporters while it figures out how to become reliably solvent. To that end, there are still unexplored revenue channels that Blue Apron has yet to take advantage of.

“We view the meal-kit service category as another means through which packaged-food firms can position their products to get in front of consumers,” Morningstar’s report on meal kits notes. Consumer packaged goods companies like Unilever or Nestle might pay for product placement in boxes, helping to spur an additional channel of revenue for Blue Apron.

There’s also opportunity in Amazon. With Amazon Fresh, the Everything Store is exploring a bid at online grocery and is considered the biggest threat to the brick and mortar grocery stores. But when it comes to meal kits, Amazon may offer a boost. Right now the platform is selling a meal kit from Martha Stewart and Marleyspoon through a partnership. If this initial foray goes well, it stands to reason that Amazon could team up with other meal kits, making it a distribution platform rather than a meal-kit brand of its own. On Amazon, meal kits have a chance to reach the masses they so desperately need to support their companies, possibly helping to reduce consumer acquisition costs (depending of course on the potential the terms of being featured on the site). Such an alliance could also benefit Amazon. Meal kits could act as a lure to its larger grocery store offering, giving customers access to both meal kits and all the usual items they might need in a given week.

Meal kits may be convincing some shoppers to consider going online, but it will never fulfill all their needs. Whether Blue Apron’s business model can fulfill the desires of investors has yet to be seen.

When I was in high school, one of my favorite late-summer rituals was going to the stationary store with my mom to buy a planner for the new academic year. On the surface, the organizer was meant to help me remember homework assignments. But it was much more than that. In the pre-smartphone age, it was a place to scribble quotes I loved, write down the phone number of a new friend, or doodle during a particularly boring calculus class.

Related: Millennials Are Now The Largest Generation – Get Used To It

Over the last decade, the brand has grown from a small operation based in Gotch’s L.A. apartment to a multi-million dollar brand. As Ban.do’s creative director, she helps create bags, clothes, makeup, jewelry, stationary, and more that are unabashedly optimistic and girly, and have some vintage flair. Ban.do now sells products in over 3,000 stores–including Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Macy’s, and American Eagle Outfitters. Its products are available in more than 50 countries, and the company recently collaborated with Starbucks in the Asia Pacific region to sell drinkware, stationary, and totes in-store.

you guys! look what we found in the archives…all our vintage ostrich poufs!! ????????????#bandofun @hannahsoffa #bandogirlgang #hifrombando

A post shared by ban.do (@shopbando) on Mar 4, 2016 at 1:32pm PST

Banking On Nostalgia

On the surface, Ban.do’s youthful aesthetic would seem perfect for the tween set, but in fact, a 87% of Ban.do’s customers are between the ages of 18 and 35. Figuring out what that coveted demographic wants is what’s made the company successful.

Despite being a over a decade older than her key demographic (she’s 45), Gotch has always had her finger firmly on the pulse of what millennial women want: a brand that makes them feel something–including nostalgia for their youth. “I get so angry when people tell me that the aesthetic of our brand is ‘too young,'” Gotch says. “I like to think that our brand is giving people permission to enjoy things they liked in their childhood. We’re saying that you don’t have to conform to a script about what you’re supposed to wear or like when you’re a given age.”

In 2008, Gotch and her best friend Jamie Coulter were based in L.A. doing photography and styling work. They discovered they had a knack for creating a particular ethereal look in photoshoots with the help of elaborate floral crowns crafted out of vintage millinery supplies. Gotch featured a couple of these hair accessories on her personal blog and discovered that women were clamoring to get their hands on one. “We thought of ourselves as creatives, not business people,” Gotch recalls. “But the internet made it easy enough for anyone to start a business.”

Exclusive: Viacom’s New Study Is A Marketer’s Blueprint For Millennials

So together, Gotch and Coulter, hunkered down and made fifty floral hair accessories. Gotch photographed them and enlisted her brother to build a simple website. They named this new venture Ban.do, a play on the French word “bandeau” which refers to a headband, and shared the site with a couple of bloggers. On the first day the site went live, all fifty crowns sold out. “I called my agent to cancel all my photography gigs,” Gotch says with a laugh. “I was so sure I was going to be a fucking millionaire by the end of the month.”

This timeline was a bit optimistic–it would take a few years for the brand to start raking in millions in revenue–but Gotch wasn’t far off. Ban.do had hit a nerve with women in their late teens and early twenties. More than a product, Ban.do was selling an emotion. This was the start of the recession, and many millennials were feeling scared about the future. But the happy world that Gotch and Coulter had created through the Ban.do brand felt like a bit of an escape from the struggles of everyday life.

With prices between $95 and $450 for elaborate hair decorations made from vintage materials, Gotch was worried that Ban.do might have priced itself out of the market, particularly during a down economy. But she was wrong. The hair accessories were popular on the bridal circuit: Women were lining up to wear a Ban.do crown with their vintage wedding dresses. Anthropologie wanted to stock their stores with Ban.do hair products. A few months into the business, Taylor Swift fell in love with Ban.do products and was spotted in flower crowns all over the place, including in a Seventeen magazine photo spread. “If you could pick one person to have wearing your stuff in 2008, it was her,” Gotch says. Teens around the country went wild for Ban.do.

Related: Millennials Aren’t Any More Motivated By “Purpose” Than The Rest Of US

Gotch decided to move into a proper office and focus entirely on the business. She also decided it was time to move beyond hair accessories. “Each of those wreaths was one-of-a-kind, it didn’t matter that we were building demand because we couldn’t make an item again,” Gotch says. “We had to start selling things we could make multiples of, so we could get meaningful press, have things in stock, and satisfy customers.”

So she did. Gotch began designing iPhone cases, tote bags, paper products, agendas, and drinkware. By 2012, Ban.do had such a distinct identity that Lifeguard Press, a licensing company that makes gifts and accessories for Lilly Pulitzer and Kate Spade, wanted to buy the company from Gotch and Coulter. Gotch stayed on as creative director and continues to play a central role in creating products, while the parent company worries about manufacturing and distribution. “They were looking for a brand with a strong voice,” Gotch said. “There’s a story that is woven through everything that we offer that is all about optimism, encouragement, fun, and dedication.”

In a lot of ways, this has been a winning formula for snagging millennials. These days, there’s a whole marketing machinery designed to figured out what twenty and thirty-somethings want to buy. But from early on, Gotch seemed to instinctively get it. Here’s what she believes the millennial generation wants.

Related: The Unicorn Craze, Explained

which IT GIRL are you? #party #love #cool #rebel #bandofun #bobbipin #cuff #jewelry

A post shared by ban.do (@shopbando) on Nov 4, 2014 at 3:07pm PST

Brands With People Behind Them

When Gotch and Coulter first started Ban.do, they tried to speak to their customer the way they would speak to a friend. When they first started the website, the wrote all product descriptions in a fun, conversational way. “This was not how, say, J.Crew was talking about product,” Gotch says. “But now all brands do this because they know that millennials want to connect with brands that feel like there are people behind them.”

These days, millennials still want authenticity from the brands they shop from and they can spot, very quickly, when a company is trying to hard or faking it. They can tell, for instance, when a brand is using hashtags, emojis or vernacular like “bae” or “on fleek” in a way that seems forced or put together by a corporate marketing department, they’re going to lose interest. “The word ‘authenticity’ has become a business term,” Gotch says. “But it shouldn’t be.”

Gotch has allowed herself to be the face of Ban.do, because she believes customers want to know the person behind the products. Gotch presents an unvarnished image of herself on social media, both through her own accounts and Ban.do’s.  Many of her posts don’t present an idealized version of her life, which means that when Gotch–and by extension, Ban.do–posts optimistic sayings, they don’t ring hollow, because fans know that Gotch also has bad days.

“As the business grows, there’s more at stake,” Gotch says. “If something doesn’t feel honest, we just don’t do it. Having a through line for our whole business is more important to me than cashing in on some hot trend that doesn’t feel honest.”

got this visual postcard from @jengotch and we keep asking ourselves: why is the U.S. so behind on this cotton candy trend?! ???????????????? #bandofun #tokyo

A post shared by ban.do (@shopbando) on Apr 29, 2016 at 12:29pm PDT

Things That Create Human Connection

When Gotch thinks back at the things she’s made, many of them are meant to stand out and spur conversation. Early on, the vintage hair accessories were one-of-a-kind, and later, many of the paper products and T-shirts had vibrant symbols or sayings on them. When it comes down to it, she’s always been in the business of creating things that get your friends, colleagues, or even random people on the street to stop and ask where you got that. “A lot of what I’m doing is creating ways for people to interact through our product,” Gotch says.

This is particularly important to millennials whose relationships often occur on social media. This makes real-world connections even more vital, in Gotch’s opinion. For many millennials, being stopped in a cafe by a stranger who wants to know where they got a planner emblazoned with the words, “You’re Killing It” is a pleasant experience. It might start a conversation, or even a friendship.

you're so magical. like, rainbow unicorn magical. and what does every unicorn need? an 8 foot, super soft, rainbow unicorn float! ps – you can inflate this baby with your hairdryer! ???????? #girlspopup #bandofun

A post shared by ban.do (@shopbando) on Apr 5, 2016 at 2:49pm PDT

Meaningful Products, Not Status Symbols

Gotch immediately understood that millennial women don’t spend money in the same way that generations did before. There’s certainly a subsection of women who care about buying flashy handbags with giant logos, but in general, millennials tend to be more subdued in their tastes. They judge a brand not by how expensive it is, but how it makes them feel. Does it make them laugh? Does it conjure up memories of their third-grade sticker collection? “Growing up with the internet and social media means that they’re used to having a deeper connection with a brand than what the price tag alone tells you,” Gotch says.

From a practical perspective, Ban.do’s pricing reflects this dynamic. The handmade flower crowns she started out were too expensive to be really scalable, given that most millennials aren’t interested in dropping a lot of cash on a high-end luxury products. On the other hand, twenty and thirty year olds don’t think it is a waste of money to drop a few dollars on something superfluous–like a unicorn pool float–if it will put a smile on their face. So as Gotch expanded Ban.do’s product range, she focused on creating fun, affordable products: Pins cost $12, scarves cost $30, and T-shirts are $44. A just-launched line of circle-shaped leather handbags cost between $75 and $95. Nothing breaks the bank or requires months of saving up.

Gotch also spends a lot of time ensuring that products will stand out in a crowded marketplace. Take the agendas for instance. When they decided to launch the collection, they spent weeks analyzing what was already on the market. “Consumers now are spoilt for options when it comes to buying anything. If you’re going to create a product, you really need to think about it and make your mark.”

“Excuse me, but your laptop isn’t permitted on the plane—let me check that for you.” That’s a line some travelers have already heard while trying to board flights to the U.S.

Passengers arriving from 10 Middle Eastern and African airports are still barred from flying with carry-on electronic devices after a Department of Homeland Security rule went into place in March. Three weeks ago, the agency said that a proposed expansion covering European airports was “off the table,” then indicated later that it was “still on the table.” That’s left aviation officials unsure how to plan.

But before you start hyperventilating at the thought of hours of lost productivity in case the device ban does get extended, there are a few steps you can take to prepare. Here are four ways to use your time productively in-flight—no laptop required.

Related:How To Stick To Your Routines (For The Most Part) When You’re Traveling

1. Do Your Most Thoughtful Work (On Paper)

When you want to do deep thinking, one of the most effective strategies is to step away from your computer or smartphone. If you need to take a flight sans laptop, bring sheets of blank paper and a pen. If you’re shopping around for a paper notebook or planner, here are a couple of guides that can help.

Then pick one or two of these key projects to tackle:

• Proposals. There’s always some future project or initiative that needs thinking through. Bring printouts of any proposals you’re considering or trying to put together yourself. This way you can read and reflect on them and clarify which specific actions you need to take next.
• Strategy. What projects do you already have going on right now? Now is a great time to think through the approach you and your team are taking to a current project, or plot out the direction for a new one. In a notebook or on a scrap of paper, capture your thoughts in a mind map—here’s how.
• Challenges. Give yourself time to think through a difficult conversation, situation, or decision you’re trying to make. Allow your mind to wander on the various solutions and consider journaling your thoughts.

2. High-Level Planning

Although I’m a big fan of digital calendars for planning meetings and mapping out my workweek, I much prefer doing higher-level planning on paper.

When I plan my year (and yes, you really can plan out your entire year—and your next international flight might be a great time to do it), I take a letter-size sheet of paper and turn it on its side. Then I write out each month of the year and create a T-chart below the name of each month. On the left side of the T are my key professional goals for the month. On the right side of the T are my key personal goals and commitments, including trips I want to take.

Device-free airplane time can make for an excellent opportunity to plan your month, quarter, or year, all within the simplicity of a single sheet of paper. You can then tack this paper up in your office to make sure all the meeting invites that arrive via email actually square with your high-level goals.

Related:The One-Page Cheat Sheet To Your Most Productive 90 Days Ever

3. Professional Development

I’m old-school when it comes to books; I love reading in print and always have a physical book with me for air travel. I take full advantage of the laptop-free zones on either end of my flights by reading something interesting. So whether or not the electronics ban goes into wider effect, this is one good habit to develop.

Flying is a great time to flip through a book on your reading list, get through those trade magazines piled on your desk, or finally read that long journal article you’ve been putting off (this is a favorite strategy of my professor clients when they’re on their way to and from conferences). Instead of lost time, an electronic-free zone could give you the space for important but not urgent professional development.

4. Kick Back And Relax

For all the talk of being productive on flights, sleeping still seems to be one of the most popular air travel pastimes. If you can’t use electronics, take a nap, talk (quietly) to the person next to you, zone out, watch a movie, or do whatever else will make you happy.

You might not consider these sorts of things “productive,” but they’re underappreciated ways to recharge amid a grueling travel schedule that can upend your routines, cause lots of stress, and sap your brain power once you’re back on the ground. One of my time-coaching clients who traveled a lot for work would even use the takeoff time on early flights for his morning meditation. Sometimes not having the option to work can give you the permission to simply take a break that you desperately need.

Hopefully there won’t be an expanded electronics ban on even more flights. But if it does take effect, these strategies can help you make the most of your air time. With a little advance planning, going analog doesn’t have to cause any headaches.

When folks learn that I do most of my work on an iPad Pro rather than a conventional computer, their instant reaction is often to say that they could never do that–because iPads make it too hard to move stuff between apps.

I tell them that virtually everything I want to do involving making apps work together on an iPad is possible using features such as the “Open In” option. It’s just that it sometimes takes time to figure out how to accomplish a particular task. Once I do, the steps are often unrelated to the way I’d handle it on a Windows PC or Mac. But it’s all worth it, I add, because so many things about using an iPad feel so right.

Few people find this a satisfying answer. Rather than dealing with work-arounds and Easter egg-like hidden capabilities, they’d like to use the productivity skills they already have. Which is perfectly understandable, and might be one reason why the iPad hasn’t turned out to be the epoch-shifting PC killer it once appeared poised to become.

But at this week’s WWDC keynote, Apple announced a profusion of features in the upcoming iOS 11 designed specifically to make the iPad a more powerful productivity tool. There were so many of them that they got their own segment in the keynote, after the announcement of a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro and an improved version of the 12.9-inch model.

When iOS 11 arrives this fall, iPad users will be able to drag and drop items–ranging from photos to web addresses–between apps. They’ll also get a new Files app that supports Apple’s iCloud but also third-party storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box. The multitasking features introduced a couple of years ago in iOS 9 will get smarter–for instance, allowing you to easily return to a pair of apps you like to use on-screen at once rather than making you pull them up separately. Even the Dock will behave more like its MacOS counterpart by being available in any app rather than just on the home screen.

In Apple’s onstage demos, all of this looks nicely consistent with the iPad’s existing way of doing things. But it also feels like it’ll make sense to people who are used to dragging and dropping and managing files on Windows PCs and Macs. It requires small mental shifts rather than a willingness to leave accumulated knowledge behind.

iPad’s new multitasking UI will take a lot of retraining. It’s definitely not as convenient to invoke splitscreen as before, but > powerful

— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) June 5, 2017

Now, even with iOS 11, an iPad is going to err on the side of being true to its own interface, and some aspects of the new tools will have a learning curve. (Twitter user Steve Troughton-Smith made some good points about this; see above tweet.) Overall, though, iOS 11 directly addresses the reservations of potential customers such as the doubters who don’t quite buy my explanations of how I get work done on an iPad. If enough of them are swayed, it could be the most important software upgrade in the tablet’s seven-year history.

Last year, the top prize in the Cannes Lions Innovation category went to Google’s DeepMind group for its advances in artificial intelligence in creating the AlphaGo platform that learned how to play the complex board game Go. Needless to say, it’s not really a piece of advertising. But by advancing Google’s technology in such a way, there’s no doubt it also boosts people’s opinion of the search giant as a center of innovation.

That’s how Lions Innovation differs from most other categories at the annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, often referred to as the Oscars of advertising. The Innovation Lions shortlist, just released by the festival, reflects its place where brand creativity can be at its broadest definition, often blurring the lines between brands, science, and technology. The shortlist contains 35 projects, including Intel’s drone-led contribution to Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, Apple’s recycling robot named Liam, Tiger Beer’s effort to make ink out of air pollution, and Google’s Tilt Brush 3D VR painting platform.

Jury chair Susan Lyne, president and managing partner at BBG Ventures, says this year’s crop of entries overall represent a big step up from a year ago. “Last year I felt the winner (Google’s DeepMind) was head and shoulders above all the other entries, going into judging,” she says. “It just felt like it was in a class on its own. This year, I think there are at least six to eight entries that could end up being the top winner.”

The judging process is another differentiator between the Innovation Lions and other categories. Instead of a group of judges gathering in a room together to discuss the shortlist, all the Innovation contenders come to Cannes and present to the jury in-person.

The first question Lyne asks when evaluating a project is, is this truly new? Is there something here that is genuinely innovative? “There are many things that are smart applications of something, that solve a real world problem, but is it something that feels like it opens up a new world? I always start there,” she says. “Additionally, I’d say, have they tested this enough, and is what they’re pitching real? We saw that issue a lot more last year, where people were pitching things they were planning to build or had partially built. So that’s something we look at carefully. This year, we’ve seen many more instances of products that are genuinely going to market, or had been significantly tested, that if successful could have a huge impact.”

While there are some contenders that don’t easily fit under the marketing umbrella, there are plenty that do. These tend to be brands aiming to wow audiences with their technical flair, or ability to utilize creativity and reach to make a social impact–or both. One of last year’s winners was Toyota’s “Land Cruiser Emergency Network” out of Australia, which used the cars to provide mobile signals to remote areas.

This year, the brilliant “Meet Graham” from Transport Accident Commission Victoria and agency ClemengerBBDO Melbourne introduced us to the only human evolved enough to survive a car crash. There was also Samsung’s “Theater for All Ears” that worked with hearing-impaired people in Brazil, using VR to help them enjoy live theater for the first time.

The final winners will be announced on June 20.

There are a lot of unspoken rules of the workplace no one clues you in on. And just because you nailed what to wear for the interviews that led to the offer, that doesn’t mean you have a good grasp on how people dress for work at the office every day.

Fear not. Fast Company tapped the expertise of stylist Nicole Russo, a personal stylist with a number of clients in the tech industry where suits and ties don’t hold sway, and business casual can be more than a bit confusing–particularly in the summer.

Comfortably Casual

For starters, if you want to get ahead, even if your’s is a crappy entry-level job,  it’s important to understand the manager’s perspective. A survey by legal compliance and consulting services company Seyfarth Shaw at Work, found more than 50% of managers reported being uncomfortable when they had to deal with employees sporting overly revealing/casual summer clothing.

Related: 10 Things Not To Wear In the Office In The Summer

So how much is too much exposure? Russo says such “rules” are harder for women because there are so many more fashion categories in female apparel and accessories than there are in menswear. Thong sandals could be made of leather and have a heel, for example, but is it ever appropriate to sport them off the sand? Probably not. (No one at work wants to see that much of your bare feet.) And what about linen sundresses? Says Russo, “You can wear lightweight pretty feminine dresses, just cover up all the important bits.”

Russo recommends saving the stress about knee length hems on skirts and dresses, and focusing instead on what can be revealed when you’re sitting, standing, or walking. Ensure there’s no winking bra straps, side boob, or flashes of underwear, she advises. “If you run on the conservative side, it’s not going to hurt anyone,” she says.

That general directive goes for men, too. Save tank tops, shorts, sandals for weekends and vacations.

How to Wear a Hoodie and T-shirts

Speaking of menswear, there’s nothing that gets Russo more frustrated than the mind-set many men have: “If you dress up you are trying too hard.” She believes men can still wear the same category of clothing they’re most comfortable in on the weekends, albeit upgraded for the workday. “You don’t have to become this person who wears a tweed sport coat and monk straps,” she says, adding, “and it doesn’t have to look like you pulled it out of a hamper.”

Hoodies can be made of cashmere or other lightweight wool, for instance, and leather sneakers can be more stylish than a beat-up pair of Nikes that have been worn well beyond the gym. Even T-shirts can be appropriate for the office. She recommends a basic gray with a slight v-neck worn under a zip-up cardigan or blazer.

How to Find the Most Flattering Outfit

Russo recommends that women find a slim cut, cropped pant. “Almost everyone looks good in this style,” she asserts. And the length works equally well for those under 5’5′ as well as taller.  “There are affordable versions from H&M,” Russo notes, as well as those bearing steeper price tags from designers. “You can cheat with fabric and buy them in three colors,” she suggests. Paired with a few neutral colored silk or other good quality fabric button up shirts, and you’ve got a proven outfit combination that can help establish your credibility, Russo maintains.

Don’t Forget Bags And Shoes

How you accessorize these basics does matter over time. Russo advises investing in quality bags and shoes, even if they’re not real leather, because they’ll hold up better to daily use. Women can and should try to find a bag that works for both office and beyond. Fast Company’s Liz Segran did a thorough review of the best ones recently.  And if you aren’t quite ready to quit slinging a backpack over your shoulder, Fast Company also compiled the best tips for buying a work-appropriate backpack.

Fit And Finish

Above all, Russo says, make sure everything fits well. She’s a fan of showing clients how much better they look with small adjustments in sizing like sleeve or pant length. From there it’s an easy step to finding a uniform you are comfortable in. “Dressing well is a soft skill that’s not in a job description, but it’s like having brevity in email,” she says, each of which is extremely important to master. If you’re still floundering, Russo says, “Find someone in job that you want who dresses well, then do it better.”

The Governors Ball music festival took over New York City’s Randall’s Island Park this past weekend for three whole days, and Fast Company was there to capture some of the action. The festival is like an in-person curated custom playlist that you can walk around in, standing just feet away from the voices in your headphones, which this year included more than 60 different artists. Our top three performances from the entire weekend were the prestigious Wu-Tang Clan, a little heavy metal band called Tool, and the electro-rock duo Phantogram. Fast Company jumped behind the camera lens to take a closer look at the power of these band’s brand to turn digital streamers into experience goers. So feast your eyes on the festival in the slide show above, and see for yourself how the business of music is thriving.

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When I was in college in the early 2000s, I looked forward to getting J.Crew catalogs in my mailbox, mixed in with Jane magazine and postcards from my parents. I loved the gorgeous spreads: lithe models traipsing around the world, spending a luxurious weekend in Jaipur, scooting through the Tuscan countryside on a Vespa, lounging on a beach in Santorini. This wasn’t the preppy white fantasy J.Crew let loose in the ’90s. After Mickey Drexler joined the company in 2003, the brand became more worldly. Before we could travel the globe via Instagram photos, J.Crew’s carefully constructed lifestyle shoots were my passport to everywhere.

Each season, J.Crew designers highlighted the craftsmanship of each featured material: Indonesian batik, Italian cashmere, French lace. I distinctly remember a series of videos J.Crew created about the various spots in Italy where the company made shoes, shirts, and prints. Back in those days, flats cost about $150, while wool coats would veer toward $300. These were aspirational price points for a college student like me, but they were more within reach than any other luxury brands on the market that offered the same level of quality. By the time I graduated and was drawing a paycheck, J.Crew was an affordable luxury. If I was at a mall–which was something we still visited back in 2007–I would always pop into the store.

But since those days, J.Crew has spiraled into chaos. Yesterday, 72-year-old Drexler announced that he would be leaving the post of CEO after 14 years. This comes after Jenna Lyons, president and executive creative director of the brand stepped down in April. These changes follow several years of poor performance. For 10 quarters, sales have been falling. In the 2016 fiscal year, J.Crew sales were down 6% from the previous year, hitting $2 billion. Drexler will be succeeded by Jim Brett, the president of the furniture brand West Elm.

In many ways, Drexler’s “affordable luxury” formula was a winning one. Many other companies popped up over the last few years offering high quality and excellent craftsmanship at lower price points. Everlane is perhaps the most notable example of this, but dozens of other startups have followed suit, including American Giant, Cuyana, M.Gemi, Idoni, Oliver Cabell, Citizen’s Mark, and Margaux.

While this crop of fashion brands have found a market–and many are scaling quickly–J.Crew appears to have lost its focus. First, there were drops in quality. I first noticed it in the flats, which were made in Italy in 2011, but in Brazil by 2014. I noticed that the brand’s featherweight T-shirts sprang holes after a single wear and dresses were increasingly made of polyester rather than silk.

Then, incomprehensibly, J.Crew began to increase its prices. Loyal customers began to write open letters to the brand protesting these new unattainable price points. In 2015, the Hairpin posted a handwritten letter (complete with drawings) by Tricia Louvar that tallied the price of one J.Crew “everyday” outfit to $596, together with a list of other things she could by for that amount, such as a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Honolulu. That same year, a customer named Eliza Cohen posted a letter that went viral about how to fix the company, pointing out that its collaborations with luxury brands often resulted in $500 garments. Even Drexler admitted that the brand had lost its way. “We became a little too elitist in our attitude,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

If J.Crew had stuck to its original vision of offering world-class quality without the inflated prices, it might have been better poised to compete with the new flock of fashion brands that have risen up in its wake.

Are you getting enough sleep? Before you answer, try this: Sometime during your workday, sit down (at your desk is fine) and close your eyes. For the next few minutes, just focus on your breathing, paying attention to each inhale and exhale. This is a standard mindfulness exercise. If you find yourself getting drowsy, then sorry, but you’re not sleeping enough.

You might feel reasonably well-slept while you’re going about your work. You might even come out of that brainstorm with your team energized about the ideas you’ve all come up with. But those subjective assessments are more likely to tell you where your energy levels might be at a given moment—not how well rested you actually are. Here’s why your brain may need more sleep than you’re giving it, even if you don’t feel sleepy right this second.

Everyone’s Sleep Debt Is A Little Different

The typical person needs about eight hours of sleep, though there are big individual differences in what counts as optimal shut-eye from person to person, and the amount of sleep people need tends to decrease as they age. Nonetheless, most people don’t get the amount of sleep they need; as one study suggests, six hours of sleep—which might sound like a solid chunk—can be as bad as none at all.

Humans are surprisingly resilient creatures; our bodies and minds are pretty good at making do with things that aren’t exactly good for us, like chronic sleep deprivation. It’s easy to see how people quickly fall into a pattern of getting too little sleep, and then conclude that that’s just their normal baseline.

Even after a really long workday, you still may need to decompress in the evening, so you surf social media or watch a little TV. Before you know it, it’s an hour past when you should’ve gone to bed. On weekends, you stay out late to see a concert or watch a movie and hope to catch up in the morning, but your internal clock wakes you up close to when your alarm would anyway. Before you know it, you’ve run up a big sleep debt.

Maybe you only feel a little tired as a result, though, and with a little extra coffee you can still get by just fine. But just beneath the surface, your cognitive functioning is paying an unseen price. Here are a few of the areas where your brain might be struggling, even if that doesn’t consciously register.

Concentration

One of the first things to go when you’re under-slept is your ability to concentrate. It’s just harder to stay focused on the work you are doing when you are tired—which you might chalk up to just about anything.

This is particularly true when the work you’re doing is self-paced. On tired days, you’ll find yourself shifting between tasks and getting distracted by new emails, voices drifting over from the next cubicle, and even just the random thoughts you have. Not to mention that you may fall asleep in the middle of reading something important.

Working Memory

Sleep deprivation also narrows your working memory capacity. “Working memory” refers to the amount of information you can hold in mind at once. The greater your working memory capacity, the more complex thinking you’re able to do. Solving the most difficult mental puzzles is actually a task for your memory—in order to land on a good solution, you need to yank relevant bits of information out from your recollection. But when your working memory is more constricted, you’ll have a harder time wringing out of it what you need—and, subsequently, making tough decisions well.

Learning

Third, when you don’t get enough sleep, it’s harder to remember new things. Sleep actually has two different effects on memory; recall (above) is only one of them. It also impairs the functioning of a brain structure called the hippocampus, which is crucial for helping you to learn new things. And unfortunately, giving yourself a hit of caffeine won’t help the hippocampus work better, even if it does make you feel more alert.

Believe it or not, you actually continue forming new memories while you sleep, in a process called “consolidation.” That’s when your brain fits together the string of recent experiences you’ve had into coherent memories that get stored away. If you don’t sleep enough, this consolidation process can’t take place very effectively, and when you wake up again, you’ll have trouble remembering new information you encountered.

Mood

Not sleeping enough also hurts your mood—which probably isn’t news to you. The only thing, though, is that we tend to attribute being in a “bad mood” to a wide range of experiences. Maybe you tell yourself it was your boss’s annoying request this morning, or your aggravating commute that set your teeth on edge. But it’s pretty likely those things wouldn’t have bothered you so much if you were more well-rested.

In fact, disruption of your sleep cycle can increase symptoms of depression. You might not feel that you’re clinically depressed (or even all that tired) just because you’re finding it hard to be nice to your coworkers. But your lack of sleep might be the culprit.

Long-Term Damage

Finally, the quality of your sleep can have long-term consequences for your brain. As you get older—say, into your 40s and 50s—a lack of sleep on any given night doesn’t have as big an impact on your ability to function as it does when you’re younger, in your 20s and 30s. So you may actually have more trouble telling when you’re not well-rested the older you get. But that doesn’t mean you can just trust your subjective instincts (“Do I feel tired?”) while you’re younger.

The better you sleep—at all ages—the better the protection you give to your brain for your later years. Poor sleep habits, even in middle age, are associated with higher levels of cognitive problems, like senile dementia, later on in life.

You may not think that sleep is that big a deal. Your life doesn’t completely fall apart when you get less sleep than you might need on a particular night. But it can wear away at you slowly unnoticed. Over time, a lack of sleep really does chip away at your productivity and cognitive functioning. So tonight, shut off the TV, power down your smartphone, hop into bed, and get some rest. You’ll thank yourself later—not just tomorrow morning, but years from now.

It’s every currently employed job seeker’s worst nightmare–getting caught red-handed interviewing for a job at a competitor. Try as you might to keep it on the down-low, it can be difficult to avoid suspicion.

“When I was an in-house HR manager, I could always tell when someone, especially at manager level or higher, was interviewing or considering leaving the company. ‘Doctors and dentist appointments’ occur more frequently, a long lunch or two takes a few hours, or the need to arrive late or leave early begins to pop up,” says Christy Hopkins, human resources consultant and staff writer at Fit Small Business.

Or maybe it’s simply in your demeanor.

“I could also tell in [employees’] work,” Hopkins adds. “Employees who were normally passionate and engaged seemed quiet in meetings and lackluster in their work. Whenever I noticed the signs, I always pointed it out to their manager and left it up to them to bring it up or not. Nine times out of 10, I was right.”

But don’t worry–even though being caught might feel like the end of the world, it really isn’t. Hopkins shared a handful of steps that job seekers can take to mitigate the damage of being outed. Here’s what you should do if you’re caught interviewing at the competition:

1. Breathe–It May Not Be As Bad As You Think

Sure, it seems bad now. But often, we get more worked up in stress-inducing situations than we need to–the reactions and consequences we imagine are often much worse in our heads than what actually end up occurring.

“From an HR standpoint, I never wanted someone to get in trouble,” Hopkins says. “The reason for pointing it out was to decide if hours on my side called for looking for candidates to potentially replace the person and preparing a job posting.”

Related:Is Job Hopping Really Just A Basic Human Need? 

So take some time to decompress–go for a walk, head home a little bit early to collect yourself, or even try to do some breathing exercises or meditation techniques. Above all, stay calm and know that this isn’t the end.

2. Have An Honest Discussion

Don’t feel like getting caught means you have to immediately bolt, Hopkins says. But it does mean that you should address it in some way–otherwise, it’ll be an uncomfortable elephant in the room for all parties involved. Ask to chat with your manager or HR to acknowledge why you’re seeking other opportunities. Are you unhappy with your current pay? Do you want to embark on a different career path? Do you feel like you just need a change of pace? Depending on your circumstance, your current employer may be willing to accommodate certain requests if it means you staying.

“[It] might sound a bit crazy, [but] your openness and honesty will be appreciated and could even lead to a raise or promotion if that is why you are thinking of leaving,” Hopkins shares.

3. Consider Creating An Exit Plan

On the other hand, if you’re determined to move on to bigger and better things, don’t be afraid to let your employer know that. You can still come up with a plan together that’s mutually beneficial–they get a smoother transition between employees, and you get to leave on good terms (something that’s critical in securing future references).

“Perhaps you could create an exit strategy of 30, 60, or 90 days and leave without burning a bridge. Or you could help recruit your replacement and stay until your new job is lined up. I’ve seen many situations where a monetary incentive is added onto the exit plan for the person to stay the full time,” Hopkins says.

4. Don’t Be Afraid To Leave If It Gets Hostile

Unfortunately, though, you can’t always guarantee that an employer will take the news of your departure with grace–especially if you’ll be working with their direct competitor. If an environment becomes hostile, don’t feel pressured to stay longer than necessary. Your well-being should come first.

“I saw this once when I was working at a marketing firm as their HR manager. The management team there was six people and they had learned through the grapevine that one of their superstar account executives was interviewing with a competitor. While they didn’t take action, they did hold [it] against this person and created a very hostile work environment. I felt that they would have been better off parting ways with the employee than the solution they came up with,” Hopkins shares.

Finding yourself out of work before you’re ready is certainly less than ideal, but there are ways you can reduce the financial strain. Consider picking up a side gig, working with a staffing agency, or negotiating a severance package as a starting point.

5. Be Careful Of What You Share At Your New Role

If you decide to take a job at the competition, be careful–you may have insider knowledge of sensitive information and, depending on what you originally agreed to in the offer letter with your former company, you may not be allowed to divulge it.

Site:Four Ways To Earn Extra Money While Keeping (Or Preparing To Quit) Your Day Job 

Review your original offer letter to see what their policy is on non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements–it may state that you have to keep certain proprietary information (such as financial reports, communications, product design, etc.) private at the risk of facing legal action if it’s violated.

Starting a job is stressful enough. The last thing you need is concerns about a lawsuit hanging over your head, so read carefully!

6. Learn From Your Missteps

Once you’re finally through the thick of it, you can use your experience as a learning moment so that it doesn’t happen again. One of the best ways to ensure this, Hopkins says, is to leverage your vacation time.

“To the active job seekers who still currently have a job, remember to use your PTO leave for interviews as best as possible to avoid raising flags,” she says.

Beyond helping you keep your job search in stealth mode, it’s also the courteous thing to do for your colleagues. “When someone continually leaves early, arrives late, etc. because they are interviewing, they are usually stressing out their teammates and their manager. If you at least try to use PTO and plan accordingly, you won’t stress out the people that you probably are friends with and care about,” she concludes.

This article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is reprinted with permission.

When Pope Francis met Donald Trump last month, he raised eyebrows by handing the U.S. president his 2015 papal letter on global warming. The Laudato Si—On Care for Our Common Home pins climate change on humanity and calls for international action to save the planet.

It was days before Trump withdrew from the historic Paris Climate Accord that had been signed by nearly every nation. The Vatican called it a “slap in the face.”

Trump may have not been inspired by the Pope’s encyclical—he promised Francis he would read it—but others have been, including two venture capitalists behind the Laudato Si Startup Challenge.

Yes, the Vatican has a tech accelerator–and it’s focused on launching startups that tackle climate change.

Demo Day At The Vatican

Companies participating in the Laudato Si Challenge will receive $100,000 in seed funding in exchange for a 6% to 8% equity investment, and expert mentorship. Participating companies will initially receive four months of remote mentoring, and then travel to Rome for two months of in-person work. It all culminates in a Demo Day—a tech accelerator tradition where startups present their companies to an audience—at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican.

While companies don’t receive funding from the Catholic Church, and all investment comes from private sources, the accelerator enjoys close ties to the Vatican.

“Laudato Si functions like a typical accelerator program with capital investment, equity, mentorship, and guidance,” program director Paul Orlando told Fast Company. “There is a demo day at the end, but the twist is that all of the companies that are selected fit in one way or another into a number of big global problem areas that the pope identified in his encyclical.”

Companies applying for the accelerator were encouraged to focus on seven specific challenges: Energy, food, water, crowded cities, human potential, conservation, and finance.

Participants are not required to be Catholic and the program is open to founders of all backgrounds.

Inspired By Pope Francis

The Laudato Si Challenge is the brainchild of Stephen Forte, Fresco Capital‘s managing director, and Eric Harr of Imagine Ventures (and one of Fast Company‘s Most Creative People). In a Medium post, Forte says that the inspiration for the accelerator comes from both Pope Francis’s encyclical and the Vatican’s own interest in impact investing.

“We select companies that are doing their own work and innovation that are making the world better in these areas,” Orlando says. “I don’t think anything like this has been done before—the combination of the for-profit and a very old institution that has a deep understanding and interest in these things around the world.”

For the Laudato Si Challenge’s investors, who include venture capitalists Ibrahim Al-Husseini and Caitlin Sparks of the FullCycle Energy Fund and Google Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan, the goal is simple: Take inspiration from the pope’s encyclical, and make an investment in for-profit companies whose technology will make the world a better place.

The fact that the Vatican is involved with the accelerator just makes things more interesting.

Orlando, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business who runs USC’s own tech incubator and previously cofounded a tech accelerator in Hong Kong, says he was taken aback when first contacted about working at the Vatican.

However, after diving into the accelerator’s mission, Orlando found that “It actually makes a lot of sense. The pope himself is speaking about these things, has written about it and actually called out leaders in business, and said there’s an opportunity for you to address.”

This of course, brings us to Pope Francis’s TED talk.

TED, Accelerators, And The Vatican

In his recent TED talk, Pope Francis called on tech firms to do more to combat social and environmental ills. Speaking to attendees, many of whom come from the tech world, Francis added:

“How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. How wonderful would it be if solidarity—this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word—were not simply reduced to social work and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic, and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples, and countries.”

The Laudato Si Challenge is one response to the pope’s call to action. It’s also an undoubtedly unique one: Religious institutions don’t involve themselves every day with tech accelerators or incubators.

But it also comes with a unique payoff. Companies participating won’t just inch their way toward profitability and growth: They’ll also contribute to a better world. And, in the process, get to pitch their startup in Vatican City.

Back in March Pinterest president Tim Kendall told me that because Pinterest is a place where people plan things, it makes us more receptive to brand messages than perhaps on other social platforms. “Because it’s a platform based around discovery, people are in an open mindset,” he said. “They’re here with the intention of finding something new. The vast majority of content on Pinterest comes from businesses, brands, and partners. There isn’t a user-generated component on the platform, so people aren’t here to learn about what they’re friends are doing. They’re there to plan their lives. And people plan their lives through content that brands produce.”

Today the brand launched its first-ever ad campaign called “What If.”

Created with ad creative Janet Champ, “What If” includes Times Square billboards from media agency Giant Spoon and native ads on Mic and The New York Times. It revolves around that idea of people using Pinterest as a way to discover and plan their lives–whether that means getting a new tattoo, trying out that new hairstyle, dance move, dessert combo, and on and on.

According to a blog post from brand writer Mac Huynh introducing the campaign, 84% of people on Pinterest say it helps them learn new things, and 70% of people search, save or click through on Pins to learn more, “there’s one major barrier to trying new things, especially for women: that voice in your head that makes you doubt yourself. And that’s why our first ad campaign, launching today in the U.S., is all about putting self-doubt in its place and owning the best-case scenario. We want to bring possibilities to life through two simple words: What if.”

It’s not the kind of ad campaign that grabs you by the collar and screams “PINTEREST!” in your face, but does effectively–and stylishly–illustrate just why so many people love it.

One of the greatest inequalities that the philanthropy sector has failed to address is why many of the groups in charge of social change don’t reflect the populations they serve. Just 18% of nonprofit CEOs are minorities, a percentage echoed in the severe lack of diversity within most staff. The industry’s rank-and-file may be female dominated, but fewer than 45% of CEO roles are occupied by women. That’s despite the fact that many of these groups are battling issues like poverty and discrimination, which greatly affect the under-represented populations.

In mid-May, Third Wave Fund, a public grant-making group led by and for women of color, and intersex, queer, and trans people debuted a new model for how funders might change that. Third Wave’s solution is called the Grow Power Fund, a grant program that offers six organizations each a six-year grant of up to $40,000 annually for the sort of crucial operational investments that most private funders often limit or leave out: overhead costs, including money for expanding staff and professional coaching.

The structure of that initiative is important in two other big ways: All of the groups must be comprised of folks who actually resemble their service population. And the majority of those members, as with Third Wave’s own staff, should be under the age of 35. The point isn’t just to fund diverse leaders, but young ones, too, who might want to help but can’t afford to take the risk.

“What we saw was that there was a need out there to have a one-stop shop to support grassroots work at the local level,” says Third Wave Executive Director Rye Young. “Third Wave have really stepped into being that movement home for people who understand that resources are critical but that philanthropy is not necessarily reaching folks where they need it and when they need it.”

Grow Power recipients include the Asian American Organizing Project in Minnesota, Assata’s Daughters in Chicago, Immigrant Youth Coalition in California, and Trans Queer Pueblo in Phoenix, West Fund, in El Paso, and Youth Organizing Institute in central North Carolina. The goal isn’t just to fund more in-touch activist groups, but to create a progressive network in areas where conservatives rule and philanthropy has traditionally been underserved. Large foundations, for instance, tend to give one-eleventh of their average aid amount per person in some southern states, according to a new report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Grant makers for Southern Progress.

“We’re kind of in a failure of our own making right now,” Young says. “I think it’s because of the long-term neglect of smaller organizations… and being too comfortable with having our power players be at the national level.”

Third Wave is a reference to third-wave feminism, a term coined and popularized by Third Wave Fund’s eventual cofounder, Rebecca Walker, in a 1992 story in Ms. Magazine. Walker, who was outraged that Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment yet confirmed to the Supreme Court, called upon women from all cultures, and of all colors and sexualities to band together and protect their rights.

The group, originally called Third Wave Direct Action Corporation, launched later that year as a political mobilization effort. It coincided with a national argument over abortion, a centerpiece of the 1992 presidential campaign. But what was lost in that rhetoric, says Young, was recognition of the “structural oppression” of policies and practices that encouraged poverty and homelessness, limited health care access and educational opportunity, and enabled sexual abuse.

In 1997, Third Wave became a funding agency, backing others to expand their work. The group has a consistent donor base of around 700 people, including institutional givers like the Arcus Foundation, M.A.C. AIDS Fund, and Elton John AIDS Foundation, which allows it to dispense about a half-million in grants each year.

All told, the group has given $3.3 million toward 292 organizations, mostly in the southern and middle parts of the country. But over the last couple years, it has also switched tactics. Instead of just funding by cause, say “reproductive health and justice” or “freedom from violence”, they’re allocating money in a way that builds more groups to further the movement as a whole.

To boost the power of existing grassroots groups more immediately, Third Wave has also launched the Mobilize Power Fund, which issues monthly rapid response grants of up to $7,000 per group or $15,000 for coalitions, which can end up shortchanged if they have a pressing need that falls outside of large organizations granting cycles. “That gives emergency grants or time-sensitive grants to organizations doing grassroots movement building so that they can address unforeseen threats and opportunities that are coming their way,” Young says.

That program, which was launched in 2015, has seen requests quadruple since the Trump Administration began. Early success include like the spread of #SayHerName by Black Youth Project 100, a campaign that honored black women who were victimized by police brutality and racially motivated violence. It served as the model for another ongoing initiative, called Flush Transphobia Fund, which give has given out $100,00 in grants to groups staging direct actions against anti-trans legislation like exclusionary bathroom bills. The group plans to add a capacity-building fund this summer to support community-led groups figure out how to become more stable and sustainable.

“Sometimes in philanthropy, you have issues take center stage above people,” Young says. Creating localized groups strong enough to make change on many fronts might be the answer, especially if the leaders understand firsthand how so many systemic issues are connected.

It’s nothing new for major brands to get connected with their fans, and the culture in which their brand exists, by promoting and helping to fund the efforts of aspiring musicians and artists–Red Bull Music Academy, Converse Rubber Tracks, Vans’ House of Vans, to name a few. But now there’s a new, rather unique, collaboration between three partners in Major Lazer, Bacardi, and Spotify.

The three have unveiled Music Liberates Music, a program designed to give up-and-coming artists a chance to share their music with the world. From June 6-30, every time Major Lazer’s new song, “Front of the Line” streams on Spotify, Bacardi will donate studio time for aspiring Caribbean artists. The more listens, the more studio time these emerging artists will get. It’ll take about 50 plays to log one second in the studio, or 180,000 plays for one hour of studio time. And given Major Lazer’s pedigree of hits notching more than 40 million plays, that studio time should add up.

In an email to Fast Company, Major Lazer–made up of the trio Diplo, Jillionaire, and Walshy Fire–said when it comes to collaborating with brands, they look for partners that are willing to go beyond just writing a check to slap its logo on something.

“Our collaboration with Bacardi is not your typical brand partnership. Over the past few months, Bacardi has offered us the creative liberty and freedom to test, learn, experiment, and create so many exciting things, like bringing epic experiences to our fans, new sounds, and our recently debuted Limited Edition Rum, which is rolling out on shelves in the next two weeks.”

Artists to benefit from the program include Mystic Davis from Jamaica; Triple Kay of Dominica; Barbados’ Shanta Prince; and Cohoba from the Dominican Republic.

In recent months, the prices of virtual currencies bitcoin and ethereum have soared to record highs amid increased investor interest.

On June 1, bitcoin traded at $2,429.20—up from just $536.42 a year before. Newer rival ethereum was priced at $214.84, a more-than-1,300% gain over its price of $13.96 a year previously, according to data from bitcoin news and information service CoinDesk.

But for many would-be investors, cryptocurrency can be intimidating. The purely digital currencies, which enable transactions through cryptographically secure, shared ledgers known as blockchains, are ultimately built around esoteric mathematical concepts and open source code. Heated debates among their developers about how that code should evolve are not unheard of, sometimes precipitating wild swings in the currencies’ trading prices that can make it difficult for casual investors to make sense of when to buy or sell. And users of at least two major bitcoin exchanges that trade the currency for traditional funds have been the victims of multimillion-dollar digital heists.

“A lot of people are starting to look into it, and invest in it, but it’s still very much kind of like the Wild West,” says Guy Zyskind, cofounder and CEO of Bay Area startup Enigma.

Enigma, started by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates, aims to help change that with a platform announced this week called Catalyst, which would enable ambitious cryptocurrency investors to effectively build their own investment funds, using algorithms of their own choosing to decide when to buy and sell the currencies. Catalyst would track their performance on a digital leaderboard, and ultimately other users of the platform would be able to invest their own money in the funds, likely paying management and performance-based fees to fund managers as with traditional investment funds.

“In the normal stock market, a lot of the trading is being done by AI today,” says Zyskind. “We’ve seen similar demand coming in the cryptocurrency space.”

The company plans to open a beta version of the platform to developers in about two months, enabling them to upload code representing their preferred trading strategies to the platform and begin developing track records of making or losing money. After perhaps six months to a year, as fund leaders’ records start to become clear, the company hopes to open the site to outside investors, letting them place investments with the funds of their choosing.

“To prevent short-lived strategies from being overrepresented, we will favor strategies that have been robust to different market conditions and have built a longer track record over time,” the founders write in a white paper.

Zyskind says the company may initially be required to limit access to trading to so-called qualified investors, who under federal securities regulations are generally people with annual incomes of $200,000 or at least $1 million in assets, considered to be enough that they can invest in riskier opportunities. Regulators have taken a somewhat cautious approach to letting rank-and-file investors dabble in cryptocurrency. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently reviewing a ruling blocking the Winklevoss twins from launching an exchange-traded fund—that is, one in which investors can buy and sell shares similarly to how they buy and sell stock—focusing on bitcoin, amid concern that the wider bitcoin market is relatively unregulated and potentially subject to market manipulation.

“From a vision perspective, we would like to be able to enable the average Joes to be able to invest in these technologies as well,” says Can Kisagun, chief product officer at Enigma.

Right now, investors looking to experiment with more sophisticated trading strategies are often limited to using off-the-shelf, open source trading bots, Zyskind says.

“You have to get your hands in some existing and not well-documented open source projects,” he says. That can be a bit intimidating for investors, even those with a coding background, since a malfunction when trading can potentially be quite costly.

A previous project by the Enigma team sought to use a bitcoin-style blockchain and sophisticated cryptography to let consumers share confidential data with big companies, whether for surveys or for transactions like bank loans, on terms they could control. But the project was slow to gain traction with the big enterprise companies who’d need to participate to make the platform work, Zyskind says.

In Catalyst, Enigma plans to make various datasets available for use in automated trading decisions, from historic price information to analyses of the overall sentiment of news stories and social media posts about cryptocurrencies. The company plans to also invite users to create their own datasets and make them available—perhaps for a fee—to those setting up funds and looking for mathematical indicators of how and when to trade.

“Since the ecosystem surrounding crypto-markets is still in its early days, relevant data sources are scarce and fragmented,” write the Enigma founders in the white paper. “We plan to change the landscape, bringing it to the level of more mature financial markets.”

That, in turn, might help make the market more attractive both to would-be fund managers and to ordinary investors, not just tech-savvy crypto fans.

“I think we’re just at the beginning,” says Zyskind. “I don’t think any one of us knows how big it could be.”