Mayors are leading the country forward with a positive agenda for America. While most of our eyes are glued to investigations and scurrilous revelations at the federal level, mayors are still hard at work solving the biggest issues facing their communities. In cities, we find proactive policy prescriptions–whether it’s mayors standing against a retrenchment on sanctuary city policies or making the case for infrastructure investments, they are focused on creating welcoming, safe communities.

In their annual State of the City addresses this year, U.S. mayors expressed their priorities for our cities–focusing on the economy and infrastructure, keeping community members safe, and investing in the future.

By analyzing mayoral speeches for our National League of Cities’ annual State of the Cities report, we get a detailed picture of the most pressing issues happening on the ground in cities. Our latest research finds some common themes–economic development, public safety, and infrastructure–continue to be core issues for cities.
However, while cities are seeing an increase in job opportunities and economic growth, they also face serious challenges including housing affordability, crime, and aging infrastructure. Federal and state challenges also continue to grow as cities meet resistance from the federal administration and state legislatures wielding power to blockade city-led initiatives.

But, mayors are not dismayed. Rather than dithering over basic governance, mayors are concerned with impactful issues like laying the groundwork for economic inclusiveness and exploring possibilities surrounding innovations such as self-driving cars, the sharing economy, and more.

Our State of the Cities report examined 120 State of the City addresses in cities large and small—these are the top 10 issues that matter to cities:

Technology is increasingly embedded into city operations. As technology becomes even more essential to business and education, cities are implementing programs that expand access to underserved communities. Some cities are also beginning to plan for the implementation of autonomous vehicles and the technology needed to communicate with self-driving cars.

Mayors countered national anti-immigration fervor with positive statements about the diversity of their communities. Many sought to contrast the nation’s discordant and acrimonious politics with the consensus building in cities—noting the welcoming nature of their communities, taking pride in cultural diversity, and celebrating the broad tableau of American society.

Mayors are addressing the opioid crisis and trying to create a culture of health. The opioid crisis continues to be a major topic of concern in cities nationwide, with mayors assessing policies aimed at addressing the epidemic. Additionally, there is a much stronger focus on creating a culture of health in cities, as leaders consider how the environment greatly affects health outcomes.

In many areas of the country, building resiliency against climate change is no longer a desire but a necessity, and mayors are planning accordingly. We are seeing cities embrace clean and renewable energy sources to protect the environment, save money, and usher in a clean energy future.

Cities are devoted to preparing the workforce of the future. Mayors generally lack direct oversight powers over school systems, therefore many cities coordinate programs that engage children in activities outside of traditional schooling. From expanding after-school options to summer internship and job programs, city leaders are seeking to prepare the next generation for fulfilling careers.

Affordable housing, homelessness, and zoning ordinances are top of mind for mayors. Cities of all sizes, and especially our largest cities, are grappling with rampant challenges around affordable housing. Mayors are also leading collaborative efforts with nonprofits to address homelessness and looking to change zoning policies to help alleviate housing problems.

After years of slow recovery, cities are much more fiscally stable. Cities are now able to make critical investments that languished during the downturn. However, this environment is challenged due to the reliance of cities on state and federal grants. Many leaders are wary, though, of the signals being sent from the federal and state level on these key shared partnerships for success.

With improved finances, cities can now begin to afford to address maintenance issues with roads, transit, and other infrastructure. Cities across the country voted overwhelmingly to support transit investment referenda in the last election as well, and this coupled with better bond ratings for many cities creates opportunity. At the same time, active transportation infrastructure–from bike lanes to hiking trails–continues to be a popular issue in cities.

Cities are investing in public safety infrastructure and human capital. We saw an increased focus on investments in police departments, with cities enlarging or at least returning their forces to fully staffed levels. Further, with tensions between police officers and the communities they serve receiving greater press attention, cities have been increasing officer training and investing in technology like body cameras to foster transparency and trust.

Mayors typically kick off their addresses with economic growth taking center stage, with a particular focus on the number of jobs created and developments breaking ground in the community. This year, mayors increasingly reported wages and employment rates rising to levels not seen since before the Great Recession. However, this growth–while broadly reported–has not been equal among or within cities. As a result, economic inclusiveness is a major priority, with cities rethinking how to use economic development funds and investing in workforce development initiatives.

At the end of the day, mayors are America’s leaders. They seek to lift people up, not pull support from the most vulnerable in society. Mayors are leading on the key issues of our times, whether that be opioid addiction, automation and workforce shifts, active transportation, and climate change. Even when there are fractures in the larger civic puzzle, cities remain a bastion of hope, with mayors serving as the champions for our future.

In January, when Starbucks announced a plan to hire 10,000 refugees over five years, it may have hoped to gild its reputation for doing good. But, if so, it was in for a rude surprise. By mid-February, its brand perception score had fallen by two-thirds, according to one ranking.

Apparently many consumers were influenced by a #BoycottStarbucks outbreak on Twitter (a patriotic “movement” according to Breitbart) and by a meme suggesting the coffee giant was privileging foreign workers over veterans (even though Starbucks has a separate program for veterans).

Starbucks’s experience shows how brands are not immune to political and cultural polarization. These days, companies often feel compelled to pursue social impact and to take value-based positions on issues of the day. But sometimes those actions can get them into trouble.

“We’re seeing these brands break along partisan lines just as the rest of the culture is,” says Sebastian Buck, CEO of Enso, a L.A.-based brand marketing agency that commissioned the research. “Brands operate in a social context and people make choices about brands every day within the context about what’s happening.”

The online survey of 3,000 people measures “how people perceive a brand’s purpose, how closely it aligns with their own values and motivations.” It’s not, in other words, a measure of actual do-gooding, but rather of how people perceive the mission and purpose of organizations (some nonprofits are included).

NPR, NBC, Ben & Jerry’s, and Target also score much more highly among Democrats than Republicans (at least 50 places), while the opposite is true for Exxon Mobil, Boeing, Pfizer, Unilever, and AT&T, all of which skew Republican.

Among the population as a whole, three tech brands appear in the top 10 (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft), with Goodwill and Girl Scouts of America in the top two places. Dove and Subway make the top 10 as well, indicating, says Buck, that consumers may value utility and convenience as much as more conventional social good activities.

Though it may be tempting to be all things to all people, companies may have to increasingly choose which side of the fence to be on. “We think brands have to stand up for their values and the things they care about,” says Andrew Wisniewski, a junior strategist at Enso. “There’s less opportunity to straddle that line and sit in the middle. Instead, they’re going to have to come down on one side or the other.”

The survey shows generational divides when it comes to purpose perceptions. Baby boomers tend to favor old-line brands like Proctor & Gamble, Hewlett Packard, and Newman’s Own, while millennials rank brands like Twitter, Starbucks, and Spotify most highly. (Newman’s Own ranks 59 places lower among millennials, despite giving all its profits to charity.) Meanwhile, millennials are more likely to say that creating change in the world is a “personal goal” (68% to 42%) and less likely to “buy American when I can” (62% to 88%). Partly because of ideological and generational preferences, the rankings throw up some strange results. Patagonia, which skews “elite” and “male,” places only in 118th place, despite widely being seen as a social business pioneer. Salesforce.com, which is favored by “traditionalists” (that is, “those who identify as uninterested in experiencing other cultures”) ranks in 138th place. This despite its founder, Marc Benioff, inventing the Pledge 1% philanthropy model.

The gaps between reality and perception could encourage companies to pursue marketing over substance. In other words: to ensure the world knows about its good deeds as much as actually carrying out good deeds. But Buck says inauthenticity is dangerous. “I think the Pepsi debacle was an example of that,” he says. “I think people are getting a lot more discerning about things that look like a veneer of doing good.” He adds, “The gap between perception and reality has to narrow [over time], given the world of transparency that we live in. It’s becoming more important for brands to ask not just ‘what is our latest cause marketing campaign’ but ‘substantively what are we actually doing to improve people’s lives?'”

Last week, after President Donald Trump announced the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his departure from the White House’s business council. It was a symbolic gesture, one that positioned Musk as a counterweight to Trump in the fight for the future of America’s energy policy. To win that battle and prove that the private sector can lead the country toward renewables, Musk must now set his sights not on Paris (or Pittsburgh), but Buffalo, NY, where he and his newly acquired company, SolarCity, are trying to build the largest solar-panel factory in the western hemisphere, despite significant obstacles in recent years.

The Gigafactory 2, as it is now called, is a 1.2-million-square-foot facility just a short drive south of downtown Buffalo, on an 88-acre site called RiverBend that was once home to a steel plant. It has become a symbol of hope and revitalization for the city, a bellwether partnership between the private sector and state government, which has invested nearly $1 billion in the project to date, that promises to bring innovation to the Rust Belt, along with manufacturing jobs.

As we detail in our new feature on Tesla’s controversial $2.6-billion acquisition of SolarCity, the solar company founded by Musk’s cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, the Gigafactory 2 was a selling point for the merger and is key to the future of a new product: the Solar Roof. But for the past several years, the Gigafactory 2’s development has run into a series of project delays, automation challenges, and budget overruns, according to people familiar with the matter. With pressure now mounting on Musk to lead the clean-energy revolution, the stakes couldn’t be higher for him to deliver on the Gigafactory 2’s promises. “This factory was supposed to help save the city of Buffalo, as well as the planet,” says one source involved. “If it fails, it will set back the entire solar industry.”

Related: The Real Story Behind Elon Musk’s $2.6 Billion Acquisition Of SolarCity And What It Means For Tesla’s Future–Not To Mention The Planet’s

Tesla and SolarCity have maintained that the Gigafactory 2 is on track. “Timing and strategy shifts for cell and module manufacturing were either as a result of wanting to increase the capacity of the facility or transition our focus to Solar Roof rather than traditional panels,” a Tesla spokesperson says via email. The company initially approved Fast Company‘s request to visit the facility, but later reversed course. (Instead, Fast Company was allowed to see inside Tesla’s other Gigafactory, near Reno, NV, a factory focused on battery production that is far more developed.) The following account of the factory’s evolution, based on interviews with scores of sources familiar with the project’s development, includes many previously unreported details.

The genesis of the Gigafactory 2 can be traced back to SolarCity’s acquisition of solar-panel startup Silevo, in June 2014, for $200 million in stock plus an additional $150 million tied to certain development targets. The company thought Silevo’s panel technology could achieve “a breakthrough in the cost of solar power,” as Lyndon and Peter wrote in a blog post at the time along with Musk, who was then SolarCity’s chairman and largest shareholder. The trio also touted a deal Silevo had inked with the state of New York to build a manufacturing plant in Buffalo, and sought to ramp up the factory’s output. “Silevo originally had modest goals for Buffalo, but when Elon, Lyndon, and Peter came into the picture, those goals jumped 5x,” says a former high-level employee. “We had to scramble to figure out how to do it.”

“Project Whitney”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo committed $750 million to fund the project, on the condition that SolarCity would generate 1,460 direct manufacturing jobs at the facility and spend $5 billion in related area investments in the next decade when the plant becomes fully operational. The arrangement was made in collaboration with with Empire State Development, a public agency that promotes regional economic development, and the State University of New York (SUNY) Polytechnic Institute. Musk and the Rives targeted an annual production capacity greater than one gigawatt by the first quarter of 2016. “[Lyndon] Rive said, ‘I’m going to build SolarCity, my vision, my baby, my future right here in Buffalo,’ because he believes in Buffalo,” Cuomo said in September 2014, at the groundbreaking ceremony for the factory.

But the project ran into challenges. The goal was to build what are known as high-efficiency solar panels that feature premium cells that can convert sunlight into energy at a materially higher percentage and at a cost on par with what SolarCity had been paying to Chinese manufacturers for more standard-efficiency solar panels. (The latter may produce around 250 watts per panel and convert sunlight at an efficiency rate of around 13% to 18%.) While the company had focused on developing a more standard-style solar panel at first, its attention eventually shifted to one that featured roughly 330 watts per panel, which it hoped would reach a solar-cell efficiency rate of about 22%. Internally, teams referred to this panel-development effort as “Project Whitney.” But panel prices globally were plummeting to the point of commoditization, down more than 75% since 2009, and the Silevo team wrestled with creating an economically viable product. On a call with shareholders in February 2015, Lyndon delayed the timeline: The factory, he indicated, would now be built and ready for equipment by early 2016 (while that one-gigawatt production target wouldn’t be reached until the first quarter of 2017).

To reach the 100-megawatt goal, sources indicate that the pilot production line in Fremont would eventually need to yield between 800 to 1,000 high-efficiency Whitney panels per day. But the team was not able to automate the process consistently enough to produce more than dozens of Whitney panels per day, according to people familiar with the matter. Most of the production resulted in “scrap,” they say. “The big problem was simply that they couldn’t scale up the technology to the point where you could run it in a factory,” a source familiar with the development explains. A spokesperson for SolarCity acknowledges that the company ran into issues with some of its automation equipment, but says this was “not necessarily” due to its cell technology.

Multiple sources also claim that even the Whitney panels that did make it through the automation process in Fremont were not reliable enough for the market. Normally, solar panels are designed to last several decades on rooftops, but according to these sources, in early 2016, the Whitney panels failed internal tests that determined whether they met industry-standard longevity. SolarCity decided to go ahead with installing trials on around 70 customer roofs. But in many cases, the Whitney panels lasted just weeks before malfunctioning, and later needed to be removed, according to two sources familiar with the matter. (A SolarCity spokesperson says the trial deployments generated data that have since helped improve the product, and that its customers were reimbursed for any lost solar production.)

To date, there are just roughly five customer homes still equipped with Whitney panels.

Trouble in RiverBend

Meanwhile, in Buffalo, SolarCity was burning through hundreds of millions of dollars of government funding to get the factory built as fast as possible. Because of its leasing arrangement with the state of New York, SolarCity acted as a tenant of the facility, meaning that the property and equipment purchased with state funds was owned by the state through the SUNY Polytechnic Institute. But SolarCity was nonetheless essentially directing the facility’s layout and making decisions about equipment for future operations. Even though the production line in Fremont had not been finalized, according to multiple sources, the company purchased more than $250 million in custom machinery for Buffalo in 2015 and 2016 using state funds. Much of it sat idle while layouts were being reconfigured and the building was still being constructed. (A spokesperson for SolarCity suggests that ordering some of this machinery in advance was partly due to equipment lead times of 12 months or longer. Around this time, federal investigators reportedly began looking into questionable practices of how the Cuomo administration awarded third-party developer contracts, which some insiders suggest also delayed the project.)

Moreover, the equipment was purchased in such a way that panel manufacturing couldn’t begin in earnest even if the building had been ready for it. The company aimed to get to one gigawatt of annual production capacity there by manufacturing 10,000 high-efficiency panels per day, on four to five production lines. But instead of starting by creating, say, one or two production lines in Buffalo at a time, it purchased a fraction of the equipment necessary for even a single production line of Whitney panels. “At Tesla’s battery factory [in Reno, NV], they [added] on to make it more and more functional, whereas in Buffalo, SolarCity tried to do the whole thing in one shot,” says one knowledgeable source. “In hindsight, it was really crazy.” (A SolarCity spokesperson says the company “phased the significant orders [of equipment] for the first 550 megawatts of cell production.”)

In the first half of 2016, SolarCity’s financial pressures were also intensifying, and, another source involved says, “It all just stopped. We were going to rely on SolarCity’s money to finish the Buffalo project, but our sales were so far down that all the money just stopped.” The company confirms that there was “limited activity” in Buffalo during this period but explains that “the intended operations in Buffalo were shifting and management attention was squarely focused on this.”

As Tesla was considering its acquisition of SolarCity in mid-2016, Musk visited the Fremont facility to assess the company’s manufacturing progress. According to several sources, while touring the site, he told the team that he thought they “could do a lot more than one gigawatt” in Buffalo. He proposed that they try to double or triple the Gigfactory 2’s output. In the weeks ahead, the company redesigned the factory’s layout to try to fit more equipment into the space to increase production capacity. Most sources say this was a smart, long-term decision, even though it also meant altering certain scheduling and financial assumptions. “Things were just constantly changing. The management was never able to settle on a goal,” says the source familiar with the Gigafactory’s development.

In an earnings call later that summer, Peter Rive, who was then SolarCity’s CTO, explained the merits of the changes to shareholders: “We don’t want to rush to actually initiate some of the equipment installation for the cell line and then have that be a regretful layout only months later.” He added that SolarCity’s module manufacturing was actually “ahead of schedule.” The company, by that point, had also begun considering how it might be able to manufacture its new “solar roof” product in Buffalo, which led it to reassess whether it should actually be producing Silevo’s so-called “flat-plate” modules at all.

In November, the site was finally almost ready to accommodate machinery. But the building cost had gone over budget by at least $130 million, and in order to pay for the remaining equipment, SolarCity would need to pony up an estimated $200 million of its own, according to people familiar with the matter. The following month, SolarCity, having determined that Silevo would not achieve two of its three production and technology milestones, decided that it had to bring in an outside partner, Panasonic, to help bear the costs and to take over solar-cell manufacturing.

City Of Light

Since the merger, Tesla and SolarCity have been able to share expertise and resources, and shifted their attention to producing Solar Roof tiles at RiverBend rather than Whitney panels. But according to sources, with Tesla focused on ramping up Model 3 production at its other factories, Musk himself has yet to tour the Buffalo plant. The CEO and CTO of Silevo have departed the company, and there have been additional layoffs in Fremont and Buffalo. While the state of New York has invested more than $900 million of taxpayer funds to date into the project and its associated developments, SolarCity has spent just around $20 million in capital expenditures in Buffalo so far, according to multiple sources. (The company confirms this figure, but says in the coming years, “We expect the project to contribute vastly more in job and economic value than the state expends.”) SolarCity currently does not expect the Gigafactory 2 to reach one gigawatt of solar-module production until 2019.

Governor Cuomo’s office and the SUNY Polytechnic Institute declined to comment for this story. In a statement provided to Fast Company, Jason Conwall, a spokesman for the Empire State Development corporation, says that “the Tesla facility in Buffalo will soon begin to produce the most advanced solar technology on the market. The Gigafactory at RiverBend will make products for distribution across the country and continues to remain on schedule, with its official opening slated for the third quarter of 2017.”

The financial consequences for Tesla will be significant if the Gigafactory 2 does not achieve its goals. Per its agreement with the state of New York, if the company does not meet its obligations during any year in the decade after it hits full-production capacity, Tesla must pay a penalty of $41.2 million per year and may lose its lease to the Gigafactory. In a May SEC filing, Tesla said, “Although we continue to remain on track with our progress at Gigafactory 2, our expectations as to the cost of building the facility, acquiring manufacturing equipment and supporting our manufacturing operations may prove incorrect, which could subject us to significant expenses to achieve the desired benefits.”

The pressure is now on Musk and Tesla to live up to the promises SolarCity made to the city of Buffalo and the state of New York. For a clean-energy industry already facing political headwinds, and a high-profile CEO often highlighted as America’s best bet to end the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, the years ahead will be crucial. Even before President Trump announced the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, many industry observers say the odds were stacked against Tesla and SolarCity, considering the competition it faces in China, where the country’s investments in solar and other renewables far outpace the rest of the world. Says Shayle Kann, the head of GTM Research, which analyzes the renewable-energy industry. “Building [this solar factory] is hard to do. It’s a tough road ahead, but that is Elon Musk’s speciality.”

For the residents of Buffalo, the pressures Tesla faces are less of an immediate concern than their need for a job at the Gigafactory 2. The forecast has been lowered for the number of direct manufacturing opportunities the facility will offer, with documents indicating that just around 500 positions will be created at the plant itself. At a series of job fairs held around the city in December, recruiters told potential hires that the facility would likely be heavily automated. “I’m going to try to apply for something in manufacturing,” a disappointed job hopeful told me after one of the recruiting sessions. “I would like a supervisory position–I’ve been a machinist for 35 years and was recently laid off–but [the SolarCity rep] said if I want a job, it would be entry level, paying around $15 an hour.”

“Now that SolarCity has been merged with Elon Musk’s company,” Mayor Byron Brown told me in December, “it truly brings the eyes of the world to Buffalo.”

Maybe you didn’t successfully negotiate that promotion (maybe you didn’t even try). But while it’s true that how far your career advances—and how quickly—is largely up to your boss, you might have more power than you think. And particularly if you’re a woman, you may need to use it if you’ve got your eye on a leadership role down the line.

In a 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review, researchers Herminia Ibarra, Robin J. Ely, and Deborah M. Kolb referred to a “second-generation gender bias” that’s often harder to diagnose than overt workplace sexism. They find that women get caught in a loop that puts them into the same kinds of jobs they’ve already shown proficiency in—often roles that veer away from the operational track, like human resources or investor relations.

One possible solution for breaking this cycle, however, is what Catalyst researchers term “role negotiation”; by negotiating for more high-level job duties, they find, women can find opportunities for advancement that more formal changes—like changes in job title—would otherwise lead to, which many women still find frustratingly inaccessible to them. In my personal experience as a CEO, employees who see the organizational big picture and think accordingly about their own roles are the ones who catch my eye and get tapped for stretch opportunities that build their resumes.

Here’s how to make use of the untapped potential in shaping your own role, project by project, regardless of the job title that’s printed on your business card.

Related:How To Create Your Own Opportunities At Work

Why You’re Overlooking Role Negotiation

A role change may not sound as impressive as a title change, but that’s no reason to pass it up. In fact, renegotiating your day-to-day job titles can prove decisive in whether or not you ultimately land the position you’re gunning for later on. A true role change can give you the chance to learn new skills, get acquainted with other departments, and raise your visibility in your organization. More than that, it can give you the room to actually innovate in a role whose original job description doesn’t.

Taking matters into your own hands isn’t about a power grab; the first misconception you need to shake is that you might be overstepping your bounds. Every company’s top performers look for “stretch” projects that might take them outside their formal roles—and companies value that. Another thing to disabuse yourself of is that role negotiation requires sitting down with your boss to request more opportunities. It doesn’t.

Think of “negotiation” in a loose sense—less sitting across the table making a deal, and more in terms of navigating new terrain (the way you might say a rock climber “negotiates” her next foothold on a cliff face). So for example, if your endgame is to become CEO of a global company, look for international opportunities (and yes, you can do this in your 20s), exposure to operational issues, P&L experience, and special projects with high visibility.

None of these pursuits might be a part of your present job path, but don’t let that faze you; the most effective leaders rarely land those roles from traditional corporate ladder climbing anymore. At any rate, failing to proactively seeking these kinds of opportunities stalls far too many women on the leadership track—don’t let that be you. These are a few ways to propel yourself forward by making some strategic role changes:

1. Don’t Wait For Assignments To Come To You

Keep a lookout, and speak up as soon as you spot a project you want a hand in. We already know that women ask for raises with the same frequency as men but are simply granted them at lower rates—an outcome of workplace gender bias that’s only compounded when you hesitate to advocate for yourself. Claim what you want and walk with intention toward your boldest goals.

2. Talk To People Who Are Doing What You Want To Do

Do your homework. Catalyst’s director of research, Anna Beninger, says there’s an untapped potential in simple curiosity. Be curious—and conspicuously so—by asking questions of the colleagues who are working on projects that bring real value to your organization. It doesn’t matter if they’re senior to you or work on other teams. Think of it as in-house networking. Take the time to investigate, and you’ll be better positioned to make the best case for your inclusion in an ongoing project or one you propose. When in doubt, never underestimate the power of, “Let’s get a coffee.”

Related:5 Steps For Turning “Let’s Get A Coffee” Into A Productive Career Move

3. Inventory Your Skills

Figure out what you need to learn in order to get to your goal—don’t let others decide the route for you. Sometimes the best way to gain skills is to volunteer to help out. (In fact, companies themselves are already wise to this; in a recent Deloitte survey, hiring managers and recruiters say volunteer work is one of the most underrated job skills out there.)

You don’t need to find a charity to spend your Saturdays with, though. Just ask, “How can I help?” more often than you’re used to. It’s helpful to start taking on parts of a job before going for a whole new role. This lets you try a new job function on for size and build your skill set gradually before drawing up a plan and going full in. As Beninger and her colleagues have found, the paths to some of the most high-impact leadership roles often runs through everyday tasks and goals—they often occupying unstaked, even disruptive, territory.

Related:How To Know Which Skills To Develop At Each Stage Of Your Career

4. Develop A Vision, Then Share It

Another obstacle to professional women’s advancement that Ibarra has identified, along with her colleague Otilia Obodaru, is “the vision thing.” They’ve found that one critical difference between men and women at the top is how effectively they convey their own visions for the future to their team. Be the one who sees the big picture and inspires others. (And by the way, you don’t need to be a futurist to do this well; a huge piece of the whole “vision thing” is all about communication.)

Another piece of it is how you envision yourself. Regardless of your job title, you need to see yourself as a leader. Don’t settle for being the one who keeps the trains running on time. Maybe you’re genuinely uncomfortable with power? You’re not alone, but try seeing power as the tool it can be; rather than having power over others, you’ll be using power to create, innovate, and lead.

5. Pay It Forward

Keep at it, and be patient. The path to the leadership role you’ve got your eye on might not come through a steady march up your company’s org chart. But once you’re finally there, pay it forward. Sure, you had to do some of this role negotiation all on your own, but now you can be the mentor or sponsor you didn’t have for the next talented woman coming up. After all, you’ll need her brilliant ideas and passion on your team when you’re running the show.

Like a lot of musicians now, Scott Hansen was pretty skeptical of Spotify. To Hansen, the mastermind of chilled-out electronic music outfit Tycho, the streaming service and the new era it seemed to herald posed troubling questions: Am I getting paid enough to support myself? Is my craft doomed? Is this whole streaming model even sustainable to begin with?

Anxious questions like these remain unresolved for many artists as the music industry reshapes itself and streaming becomes its biggest source of income. Thanks to streaming, record labels are finally seeing their revenue grow after years of decline, but the gains don’t always trickle down to musicians and songwriters. Spotify recently settled a $43 million class action lawsuit over royalty payments that went unpaid to certain artists, likely due to a metadata error. In other cases, the royalties flow, but not always in large sums. One of Spotify’s own executives recently conceded publicly that streaming doesn’t pay artists “enough.”

But for an increasing number of artists, including Tycho’s Hansen, the advantages of the streaming era are beginning to come into sharper focus.

“I definitely think we’re in a better place than we were three years ago, that’s for sure,” says Hansen, by phone from somewhere outside Cologne, a stop on the group’s recent European tour. The tour’s been a big success, he says, something he attributes, in part, to an experimental marketing project at Spotify. (The group’s recent Grammy nomination likely didn’t hurt either.) By aiming email and web ads at listeners who seemed likely to care the most about their music, the program helped the group sell about 1,600 tickets in Europe, Hansen says, and a total of more than 4,000 tickets this year. “I see it getting better as more people adopt that way of consuming music,” says Hansen.

Early sales—along with listener location data—also informed the band’s decision to extend its tour to more European cities than they typically play. In a career first for the band, its entire European tour sold out. “This European leg has just been crazy.”

Amid a slow growth in royalty payouts, Spotify is investing in a range of projects aimed at keeping artists happy, mostly by leveraging the company’s huge goldmine of listener data. The effort includes new metrics tools for musicians, steadily improving fan targeting, and a range of curated and algorithmic playlists to help artists reach new listeners.

It’s the beginning of a new era, powered as much by musicians, managers, and curators as by big data and machine learning. “It’s kind of a golden age for artists at this point,” Hansen says. “You have everyone consuming via a monetizable platform, as opposed to the wild west scenario that we had five years ago.”

As Spotify seeks to build better relationships with record companies and music publishers—and as artists seek new sources of cash—the company’s executives and artists say the efforts are already helping, providing precise data to help artists make smarter career decisions, and leading to bigger ticket and merchandise sales. Collectively, the company says, the relatively young effort has generated millions in additional revenue for musicians–results that, after years of industry upheaval, are hard to ignore.

Spotify’s artist-focused initiatives aren’t sheer acts of generosity, of course: They also have a direct bearing on the company’s future success as a business. The Stockholm-based firm, last valued at $8 billion in 2015, boasts 50 million paying subscribers but steep losses ever since it was founded a decade ago. And the competition, which increasingly comes from tech giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon, is fierce.

The more indispensable Spotify becomes to creatives, the stronger its leverage in negotiations with record labels. The company is currently in the long-awaited process of renegotiating deals with labels and rights holders, who are anxious for better terms. But like every other streaming platform, it’s eager to shift the basic math of the new music economy further in its own favor, especially as it prepares to go public later this year. It also doesn’t hurt that a more artist-friendly posture can help improve its public image in the wake of famously critical jabs from the likes of Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke.

Tracking And Targeting Binge Listeners

The negative attention around the streaming industry has led to a small cold war between platforms, as they try to one-up each other with pitches designed to make artists feel at ease about the future, and, of course, attract us listeners with star power. Apple Music and Tidal have famously made an artist-friendly vibe central to their marketing efforts, while Pandora is repositioning itself as a platform that caters to musicians as much as it does to fans.

Rather than paying massive sums to score exclusive new albums like Tidal and Apple, Spotify prefers to use its reach as a promotional vehicle for new releases. Recent partnerships with The Weeknd and Katy Perry included a heavy push for the artists’ latest albums in the form of artist-focused playlists, prominent (even excessive, some might argue) placement within the Spotify app, targeted emails notifying fans of the album releases, Facebook ads, and a billboard campaign.

Of course, not every artist can realistically expect this kind of free marketing push from Spotify. In an attempt to build stronger personal ties to the recording industry, promote and develop artists on Spotify, and bolster the company’s artist-facing tools, Spotify hired investor and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter last year as its global head of creator services. Carter’s job, interfacing with artists, managers, and labels, is about being “better partners,” he says “whether it’s helping you co-market a product on our platform, helping you understand how the international market works, or how our playlisting works.”

With the help of Spotify, Tycho, which has 1.2 million monthly listeners on the service, has seen the long-envisioned promise of streaming begin to bear out: Paltry per-stream royalties can add up. “We do better than we were doing in album sales a few years ago, that’s for sure,” Hansen says of his band’s income from streaming. During the second half of 2016, Tycho saw 53% of their revenue come from Spotify. But Tycho is one of the lucky ones.

With the average per-stream royalty rate stuck at a fraction of a cent, most artists still struggle to scrape together enough cash from streaming royalties to get by. While services like Spotify pay the vast majority of their revenue to record labels and rights holders, complex math sits in the middle of the equation, dictating–in conjunction with the amount of streams an artist gets–how much money out of Spotify’s earnings ultimately trickles down to songwriters and artists.

Spotify’s beta email targeting project, Fans First, is aimed at improving that equation for artists. Using data to identify the band’s most obsessive listeners in specific locations, the project is able to target potential ticket-buyers via email with special offers–in this case, the option to buy pre-sale concert tickets before they’re available elsewhere. Spotify has already opened the service to a few hundred acts, and continues to expand it.

Again, Tycho has been one of the lucky ones. “Scandinavia is a place we’ve never really done much,” says Hansen, guessing the band had played “in front of a total of 600 people there in our whole career.” After spreading the word about upcoming shows through Fans First, though, “we sold out three nights in a row at medium-to-large size venues.”

“We’re always looking for the person that doesn’t know the concert is in town,” says Bryan Duquette, who manages Tycho and also works as a concert promoter in the San Francisco Bay Area. “A lot of people who aren’t seeing print ads or hearing ads on traditional radio have no idea artists are coming through town, but they’re listening to them two or three times per week.”

For promoters and managers, this level of insight is incredibly valuable. The data, combined with Spotify’s massive reach (it has 100 million listeners), offers something that no stakeholder in the old music industry–not managers, big labels, concert venues, or anybody else–could have ever dreamed of providing: a real-time, direct, and reciprocal fan-to-artist relationship that can yield some demonstrably meaningful results.

While email marketers are typically lucky to see a quarter of recipients open their messages, let alone click-through rates higher than 3%, according to industry benchmark statistics, Spotify boasts more impressive numbers: its campaigns have seen an average email open rate of 40%, with about 17% of recipients actually clicking on the link inside.

“As a promoter, I love when Spotify gets involved, because I know that they’re adding a marketing element that we wouldn’t have,” says Duquette. “With [the band] Alabama Shakes, for example, we didn’t have access to their super-fans in a given area when they toured. But Spotify did.”

Concert listing and ticketing apps like Songkick, Bandsintown, and Pandora’s TicketFly have already mastered the art of alerting music fans to upcoming shows. And platforms like Tidal and Pandora have run a few ticket pre-sale campaigns of their own. But Spotify is able to super-charge the practice with more granular data about listening habits and an expanding artist relations effort that enables them to offer more than just standard concert tickets.

Related: Inside Spotify’s Plan To Take On Apple Music, Why Spotify’s Discover Weekly Playlists Are Such A Hit, Inside Pandora’s Plan To Reinvent Itself–And Beat Back Apple And Spotify

Spotify’s Fans First program is also being used to sell exclusive merch and offer invites to special events. Last year, Spotify pressed a limited edition green vinyl EP by The Strokes and offered it exclusively to the band’s top listeners on the platform. It sold out within an hour. Other merchandise offers made through the program include perks from Vince Staples, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Run the Jewels.

“Right now, we’re seeing that we can help generate about $40,000 per individual Fans First campaign for a full tour,” says Shane Tobin, Spotify’s head of creator insights and activations. “We’re generating tens of millions of dollars in gross revenue for these artists.”

Numbers like may this sound impressive, but they still leave smaller, independent, less-known artists continuing to wonder: What’s in it for us? Tobin is hoping to start answering that question soon.

Spotify says it’s now figuring out to scale its Fans First initiative to more musicians. Right now, each campaign is born out of discussions between Spotify’s creator services department and artists’ teams, and then crafted to meet an agreed-upon goal–selling tickets, hocking merch, or letting super fans skip the line at Spotify’s SXSW showcases. What works for Guns ‘n’ Roses probably won’t make sense for an up-and-coming dream pop songwriter who needs to book a tour or sell merchandise to offset their recording costs. Whatever shape these artist-facing services may take, they’ll be built on top one common feature: a mountain of listener data.

“There are a lot of different things that we’re thinking about, in terms of tools that we could potentially offer to developing artists. We’re also thinking about how we can bundle some of these services together,” says Tobin.

“Apple Will Never Reveal Any Numbers. With Spotify, All Cards Are On The Table.”

Another obvious way to help musicians, especially those without household name recognition, multi-million dollar contracts, or substantial royalties: Give them direct access to the data. The company recently opened up Spotify For Artists, a new analytics dashboard for artists and their managers. Developed over a 16-month beta period, the dashboard breaks down an artist’s listeners by geography, demographics, and loyalty.

By mapping fans and super-fans across cities, for instance, Spotify can help managers and musicians plot their tours in a much more informed and lower-risk fashion. It may even reveal opportunities that musicians may not have otherwise thought about. If an indie rock band from Michigan gets music blog traction and their Spotify plays spike in New York and Philadelphia, perhaps a small summer tour along the East Coast is worth the gamble.

Spotify isn’t the only company peddling music data to artists, but its offerings—thanks in large part to its size—are probably the most comprehensive. Pandora, which beat Spotify to the concert pre-sale game with 2015 campaigns for The Rolling Stones and Odezsa, is using recent acquisitions of ticket-selling app TicketFly and music data service NextBigSound to further flex its data muscles in artist-focused ways. Apple Music, which reportedly pays the highest royalty rates, also makes some listening analytics available to artists through third parties, such as the label services and music publishing company Kobalt. But the two-year-old music service has been relatively shy about sharing its data.

“I’ve sat with Apple Music and the big difference is that Apple will never reveal any numbers,” says Brandon Ginsberg, an artist manager at Red Light Management. “There’s no conversation there. With Spotify, all cards are on the table.”

That’s the type of selling point Spotify hopes will resonate with uncertain artists. In an era when musicians are expected to play a more hands-on, entrepreneurial role in growing their own careers—with or without the help of a label—data can remove some of the friction and mystery from the decision making processes.

“This is something we’ve never been able to do before in the music business,” says Carter. When listeners buy merchandise online, of course, sellers know a lot more about them. “When you’re selling merch at a concert, there’s no way of knowing exactly who bought that piece of merch. Even going to a concert, you don’t know who bought that ticket.”

Spotify’s creator services team is already fielding requests for more metrics. Regional listening data charts make it easy to sketch out locations for tour routes, but a savvy artist may also want to overlay a map of how much money they made in each of those markets on their last tour, for example, or tie listening data to social media analytics to learn more about new fans.

How Spotify’s Quiet, Hit-Making Playlists Work

Spotify’s popular playlists don’t just help guide you through an endless sea of music to music you might like and keep you listening longer: They’ve also become a prized tool in Spotify’s arsenal for promoting upcoming artists.

Being included on a high-follower playlist can result in a massive spike in streams for an artist, with or without a label. Famously, Lorde’s 2013 breakthrough hit “Royals” was propelled to popularity by its inclusion on a popular Spotify playlist. As Spotify has grown, this effect has been dramatically amplified. In some cases, flashes of streaming success can nudge budding careers toward major milestones like recording contracts. Australian singer-songwriter Starley signed with Epic Records after making the Spotify playlist rounds and skyrocketing to over 2 million daily streams.

The power of playlists—governed by both humans and algorithms—has also become a source of competitive tension. Pandora pretty much invented personalized internet radio, fueled by algorithms built on top of human knowledge about music. Since then, music services like Google Play, Deezer, and iHeartRadio have all taken a crack at discovery using some blend of human and machine smarts. Apple, Spotify’s fiercest competition, sets itself apart by betting on the wisdom of real people: it combines its army of skilled playlist curators and the more traditional, FM radio-style approach of Beats 1. Indeed, if there’s one thing that makes Apple Music compelling, it’s music curation.

Spotify was well-armed to weather the threat posed by Apple’s mid-2015 launch. The previous year, the company made a fortunately timed acquisition when it snatched up the Echo Nest, a music intelligence data platform used to power the Pandora-style “radio” feature on a number of different music apps. This gave Spotify a team of high-caliber engineers at the forefront of fields like machine listening and data science, and the technology required to power a new generation of algorithmic music recommendation features. At the same time, the company was busy hiring its own team of in-house music editors.

The company’s team of over 50 music programmers spend their days hand-crafting and maintaining playlists based on genre, mood, activity, decade, and other themes. These in-house playlists–which are different from user-created playlists or the ones operated by record labels–are maintained by editors and genre specialists who populate them through a combination of external pitches from labels and managers and their own gut intuition.

“It’s a global team contributing to breaking down borders and finding music from every corner,” says Doug Ford, the company’s director of playlists and editorial for North America. “We’re like the elected officials of Spotify.”

Often, songs come from real-world experiences, like when curators see a new artist perform live or hear something good blasting from a passing car. Spotify touts its system as a purely democratic operation, having explicitly banned “playola”–the practice of paying for placement on playlists–in 2015 after press reports suggested a pay-for-play culture was developing around the streaming business’s playlists.

“The idea was to build these networks and prove that we can move songs along the path of discovery and break artists and break songs,” Ford explains. “Every step of the process is very intentional.”

Lauv, an unsigned musician and then-student at New York University, had his song “The Other” picked up by a Spotify playlist editor in late 2016. The track quickly rose up the curation ranks and went from 20,000 daily streams to over 730,000 daily streams. To date, Lauv has amassed 45 million streams, all without major label support.

Related: Five Steps To Becoming a Successful Artist on Spotify 

These company playlists operate side by side with its more data-driven, personalized ones. Most notably, the company’s Discover Weekly feature—a list of 30 auto-selected songs based on a combined analysis of one’s musical taste and patterns in the playlisting habits of Spotify power users—exploded to 40 million listeners in its first 10 months. According to Spotify, more than 8,000 artists saw at least half of their listens come from Discover Weekly during its first year alone.

“For artists, it’s moving the needle in a really fundamental way,” says Matt Ogle, the product director at Spotify who oversaw Discover Weekly before leaving in May to work at Instagram. “Artists are seeing this net lift of new listeners that they weren’t getting through any other channel before.”

After the success of Discover Weekly, Spotify’s product team wove similar logic into other areas of the app. Release Radar is a personalized list of recently released songs and Your Daily Mix effectively supercharges the shuffle button, focusing on favorite tracks and injecting Discover Weekly-style recommendations into the mix. Fresh Finds, another weekly-updated playlist, derives its songs from algorithms that crawl music blogs and other web sources to sniff out the rising tide of buzz surrounding new songs and artists. This allows artists to get a shot at streaming stardom organically by simply creating music and promoting it online.

“We’ve routinely seen artists go from 400 listeners to 40,000 listeners through Fresh Finds in the space of a couple weeks,” says Ogle.

What often winds up happening, Ford explains, is that a listening spike from Discover Weekly or Fresh Finds tips off the company’s editorial team to new music and they’ll include it on one of the in-house playlists. These three flavors of curation combine to create a few different funnels–either by being hand-picked by a flesh-and-blood editor or scooped up organically from the Fresh Finds web crawler–for artists to enter and rise through the ranks.

“I envision it as this beautiful cycle, working together,” says Ford. “Data informing curation, informing data, informing curation. And data informing what’s working and not working for the listeners as a whole.”

From Playlist To Tour

Last year, a dance-friendly electronic pop duo called Frenship saw their single “Capsize” unexpectedly picked up by one of Spotify’s pop playlists. The song performed well, quickly breaking 1 million streams, and started climbing up the hierarchy to other lists, eventually landing on the New Music Friday and Weekly Buzz playlists and competing with artists like Drake in the performance metrics.

“It was insane,” says Brandon Ginsberg, who manages the band. “It could take years to get to a million streams for a lot of artists. We were like, ‘Who’s behind this? What’s going on?'”

Somewhere just shy of 180 million streams, record labels started calling. Having already proven their viability with viral success on Spotify, Frenship and their management were well-positioned to choose the best path forward, be it a record label, label services company, or forgoing a contract all together. In May 2016, the band signed to Columbia Records and started booking a 50-date North American tour.

“It’s actually creating this sort of conveyor belt that basically onboards new artists,” says Ogle of the combination of automated and human-curated playlists. “And then at each step if their stuff is good and fans respond to it we amplify that and it just keeps spreading and spreading.”

Spotify has also experimented with booking its own concerts, using its trove of data to pick artists and invite fans. Last year, it turned the basement of its Boston office into a venue and hosted an intimate Fresh Finds showcase featuring bands who had recently landed on the playlist. Then it mined local listening metrics to find local people who binged on these new acts and invited them to the show. Using data as a bridge between digital and physical spaces, Spotify was able to provide an experience for both the artists and their fans that likely would not have happened otherwise.

“A corporate concert, it always feels a little bit like you have to get on the mic and be like, ‘Yeah Spotify!’ or whatever,” Ogle says. “But there was none of that. They were just so happy to be there and to connect with their fans that had come to the show.”

The showcase was a small-scale, one-off experiment, but Ogle doesn’t rule out the possibility of Spotify getting more into data-driven show booking in the future.

“It was really gratifying to see it genuinely making a difference in these artists’ lives, especially when you hear all the stories about the new music economy being a horror show,” he says.

Like Fans First and its other artist-empowering initiatives, Spotify’s early efforts are neither perfect nor comprehensive. But amid Spotify’s fight against deep-pocketed competitors like Apple and its race to its stock market debut later this year—along with ongoing royalty negotiations with the record industry—the project reflects a larger paradigm shift around the music business: With fewer royalties, artists will be “paid” in increasing mountains of our listening data. It’s a tectonic transition that leaves musicians, perhaps first among many, guessing about the future.

“It is hard,” says Ogle of the music industry’s transformation. “It’s still being built and rebuilt. And there’s a lot of bumps on the road. But it was nice to see computer programs making a difference in art.”

All eyes will be on the Senate Hart Building’s Room 216 today at 10 a.m. when former FBI Director James Comey testifies about his conversations with President Trump. It’s the climax of a simmering dispute between the two men and the first time that Comey has spoken in public since being unceremoniously fired by the president almost a month ago amid an investigation into possible links between Russia and Trump campaign officials.

It could also be the most highly anticipated Congressional hearing in history, surpassing even the Iran-Contra hearing in 1987 and the Watergate hearing in 1973. (Already bars from D.C. to San Francisco are opening early to handle crowds who want to wash down the drama with a few drinks.)

The release of Comey’s prepared remarks just added to the drama. Trump’s critics are declaring that they confirm recent reports that Comey was pressured by Trump to drop the FBI probe into former national security adviser Gen. Michael T. Flynn. Meanwhile, the White House is focusing on how Comey’s remarks validate Trump’s claims that he was not personally under investigation. The most revealing parts of Comey’s historic appearance will be his answers to questions posed by members of the committee. The Russia and related investigations will likely carry on for many months, but Comey’s answers could shed more light on some details and spark new lines of inquiry.

Here are nine questions we think Comey should be asked:

• Do you think that President Trump meant to obstruct your investigation into alleged links between Russia and his campaign?

• Do you consider that obstruction of justice?

• Do you think that the Trump campaign or any of its advisers colluded with Russia to disrupt the U.S. presidential election? If so, how did they collude with Russia?

• When you left the FBI, was the president a target of any FBI investigation? Were any members of the White House staff the target of any FBI investigation? Was any member of the president’s family a target or a person of interest in any FBI investigation?

• When you left the FBI, did you inform the attorney general or deputy attorney general of the status of these investigations?

• Do you stand by your testimony given during previous hearings about the 2016 election and investigations related the election—or would you like to revise some of your previous responses?

• Are you going to give this committee all of your memos and notes on your conversations with President Trump, White House staffers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Sally Yates, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

• Have you authorized anyone to look over your notes and to share them with media outlets?

• Have you been contacted by any White House staffers since leaving the FBI?

Last December, Evernote announced plans to update its privacy policy. Most notably, it changed the wording to help it use machine-learning technology to make its note-taking service smarter, based on analysis of its users’ notes. Those changes, which were supposed to go into effect on January 23, were met with a tremendous amount of backlash from the Evernote community. What Evernote meant to be a way to help make the product better for users, its most loyal fans saw as a change that would give Evernote employees unfettered access to users’ private notes.

“We screwed up, and I want to be really clear about that,” Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill told me back in December after many customers promised to leave the platform. “We let our users down, and we let our company down.”

The uproar prompted the company to put the new policy change on hold so it could think further about how to approach privacy in a way that gave users confidence in the service going forward. Today it’s releasing a new privacy policy based on that introspection. In many ways, it does the same things as the December revise that never went into effect. But it makes it much clearer what notes Evernote will have access to–and crucially emphasizes that users will opt in to sharing their data, not will not be forced to do so.

“It starts with modernizing the policy,” O’Neill says. “We think that modern privacy policies should be straightforward. They should be simpler and shorter and written in user-friendly language both for our end users that use our products as an individual and those that use it in a business context.”

And that’s just what Evernote has done. The new policy is written in much simpler and easy-to-understand language and is housed in a new privacy center on Evernote’s website, making it easy to find.

Consulting The Watchdogs

In making its revisions, O’Neill says, “we spent an inordinate amount of time with privacy experts and watchdogs. We really, really vetted a lot of what we’ve done with them and got their blessing and approval.”

That sort of approval from the outside world is something that the company plans to get for any changes it decides to implement down the line. To help facilitate that, it’s put together a customer advisory board that it plans to meet with quarterly to seek input on “things big and small,” O’Neill says.

While Evernote focused on communicating its policy more clearly, one thing users will see is a new opt-in clause when they decide to take advantage of a new feature. If it requires some level of human training for the machine learning to work, you can opt specifically into sharing your info in conjunction with that one feature. Humans having access to notes is what got Evernote in hot water with users back in December, so it’s being exceedingly specific this time around about who will have access to your notes and when. And it will always do so with your expressed permission, not by default.

The new policy clearly spells out what types of data Evernote might collect about you while you’re using the service, and then explains why it needs that data with examples of how it would be used. It also goes into more detail on how the company might push back against government requests for information and when and how it might share that information.

And those unhappy campers who declared their intention to leave Evernote back in December? O’Neill says that the company “didn’t see material impact” from those threats. The hope is that the new policy will ensure that the company and its users have a mutual understanding of Evernote’s commitment to privacy from now on.

“Our philosophy has never changed,” he says. “We’ve gone through a lot of extra steps to make sure that what we propose is fitting and objectively great. There’s been no change in the types of data we collect–we’ve just simplified the language so people are clear about that.”

Before Mark Zuckerberg created The Facebook, and even before Tom Anderson of MySpace was a household name, there was Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot. In 1994, the two Cornell University students founded Theglobe.com–a sort of proto-Facebook that let users publish their own content and find friends with similar interests–out of their Ithaca dorm room. Less than four years later, The Globe issued an IPO and saw their share price jump from an initial $9 to a high of $97 before the trading day was over.

The Globe kept expanding, and Paternot and Krizelman saw unbelievable wealth at an age where most of their peers were just learning how to be adults. But bad corporate decisions and the collapse of the first dotcom bubble hit their company hard, and the pair left in 2000. The Globe’s stock price tumbled, and the cofounders gained and lost massive amounts of wealth in the process. According to a 17-year-old Los Angeles Times article, Krizelman sold approximately $2.4 million of company stock in 1999; by the time the article was published the next year, The Globe’s stock price fell from $39.47 in April 1999 to $7.78.

Being at the center of a massive corporate rise and fall taught the now 43-year-old Krizelman a few things about business. Here are some of the biggest takeaways in his own words.

Lesson 1: IPOs Can Be Mixed Blessings

I have a lot of complicated feelings about it. We lowered our stock price based on the bank’s advice very significantly to get the IPO deal done. Then the price stock basically instantly shot up, and that immediately sent a message to us as owners of the company that the bank mispriced the deal. We left a really significant amount of money on the table.

If you ever look at companies going public, they can have these huge runups that are generally not a good sign. If there’s a big difference between the price it’s opening at and the price it closes at at the end of the day, that’s all good for the bank, but not necessarily good for the company.

Lesson 2: Going Public Is Like Getting Married

Going public for the first time is a lot like getting married. It’s very similar. It’s easy to think that I’m being flip, but there are legitimate parallels. It’s an activity you do very infrequently.

Obviously, when you get married you only want to do it once, and most executives only go public once.

When I was getting married, I remember negotiating for the cake, the physical space, and the alcohol. You negotiate for a wedding once, but the person you’re negotiating with does it full time for a living. You know you’re not going to be as good as the person you’re negotiating against, and I think you feel that a lot as an executive going public for the first time.

Lesson 3: Bad Times Are Educational

You feel awful if the stock price is declining, if your performance is declining, or if growth is not as fast. I think we looked at where our challenges were and identified which challenges were structural to the industry versus which failures were created by us.

[At The Globe] we were in the early days of the internet, and we sold ads almost like a portal. We were a top 25 traffic site, and we sold ads against our audience. As the market started to crash, we really doubled down to own a younger male demographic focused around video games. Strategically, we thought that was a really good decision.

We thought the market was overhyped earlier than most, and so we started making changes and acquisitions to really try to buffer against what we thought was another market decline. We didn’t know when, but by late 1998, we knew it was going to come soon.

As a result, I thought about how to narrow our focus, so we would be positioned to weather the storm.  This led us to acquire several companies in order to improve the quality of our audience.  When the crash happened in April 2000, we were of course impacted negatively, but we didn’t go out of business or have to raise more capital.

Nowadays, it’s not that running a company is a blissful event all the time . . . it’s not. But this has been a more fun and productive run. There are many things I learned the first time that I apply now at MediaRadar that mainly relate to management.

For instance, at MediaRadar, I communicate actively with the full staff, so they understand how the company is really doing. This was something I didn’t do in 1999 at The Globe.

We host detailed quarterly updates where we go through product innovations, and also financial performance. As a leadership team, I encourage that we share what’s going on, including both successes and failure. 

We also weed out jerks from the organization, no matter how productive they are. Poor performers are easy to work out of the organization, but there is often a conscious hesitation to weed out bad seeds when they are extremely good at their job. This was something I wasn’t attentive to 18 years ago, and not 10 years ago. Today we are a much better business, and a more positive place to work.

I also learned to solicit feedback and really listen to it. This is true about product feedback, but also personal feedback, too. To get better at your job, you need to let people talk to you. This starts with me, and is true for clients too. Many of our clients share how surprised they are that we ask where we are missing the mark. This keeps us humble and contributes to our success in the market–we have 95%-plus renewal rates.

It’s the course-corrected version of my life that I wanted.

Lesson 4: Find Your Space

At MediaRadar, the last person leaves at 7 p.m. at the latest. But at the Globe, I left at 11 p.m. most nights. I have two daughters, and I want to see them. While I’m at the office, I want to be really productive.

If I want to work at home I will, and I do often, but work-life balance is about building a whole company around an ideal–being really focused at the office and not doing too many other things. Just be fastened down when you’re at the office.

The Globe was in the early days of the internet, and the market was a free-for-all with green fields in every direction. That led to some big wins, but there were also many people fighting over the same space.

At MediaRadar, we find spaces that are more niche instead. It’s a B2B business in one vertical, servicing ad salespeople, agency people, development people, and that’s it! That’s who we want: We want to be an amazing partner for them, but we don’t want to be all things to all people. It’s not just choosing the market, it’s that you want to be No. 1 at something.

Disclosure: Mansueto Ventures, Fast Company‘s publisher, is a MediaRadar customer.

You scored a summer internship, but maybe it’s not as exciting as you’d hoped. Filing, data entry, and coffee runs may not seem like meaningful work, but it’s possible to turn the experience into something rewarding.

More than three-quarters of recruiters say that past work experience is more important than a college major for entry-level candidates, and 70% of college seniors agree that internship experience is more valuable than their college GPA when applying for a job, according to a study by talent acquisition software provider iCIMS.

Instead of being disappointed with mundane tasks, here are five things to do to turn them into an opportunity for the future.

Understand Why Your Work Is Important

There is a reason that the little things need to be done, even if they may seem tedious, says Kevin Grubb, executive director of the Villanova University Career Center.

“There may be regulations that require organizations to keep orderly, physical records of specific transactions or communications,” he says. “Organizing data in a system may be necessary for a huge report that needs to be delivered to a key advisory board.”

Ask your manager what they saw as the most valuable aspect of your time, says Kimberly Schneiderman, practice development manager at RiseSmart, a career development firm. “Perhaps all you saw was that you collated papers in a file for two straight weeks, but your manager is able to see that what you actually did was reconcile 14 months of backlogged invoices that allowed the company to pursue collections with delinquent accounts,” she says.

When you detail your experience on your resume later, you can explain the work you did and why it was essential for the organization, says Grubb.

Hone Your Work Ethic

What you get out of your internship is what you put into it, says Vicki Salemi, career expert for Monster. “There aren’t any shortcuts to working hard so give it your all, even if you’re not head over heels for the job or company once you’re in the door,” she says.

Part of gaining responsibility is showing that you are capable of handling it, adds Schneiderman. “Few people will walk into a situation and be immediately trusted to manage projects or take on complex tasks,” she says. “Pay attention to the minutia of the tasks you are given and make sure you do them well.”

An internship is an opportunity to show the value you can bring to the organization, says Schneiderman. “Hit the ground running and impress your manager by finding areas where you can make an impact quickly,” she says.

Ask For More Responsibility

Once you’ve demonstrated your abilities, show interest in taking on more work. Ask questions about projects that you see going on around you, about the customers and target markets, and about the work individuals are doing, says Schneiderman. Seek first to understand what they are working on, then offer to help.

Since internships are often for short periods of time, there may be resistance to giving you something big that would need to be taken on by someone else when you leave. “Your best bet might be to be a valuable assistance on a project led by someone else,” says Schneiderman.

Approach them by saying, “I have some free time today. I’d love to be able to help you with your work in some way.” Schneiderman suggests.

Observe Corporate Culture

Internships offer an opportunity to compare real life to what you’ve learned in class or hypothesized, says John Nykolaiszyn, director of career management services at Florida International University College of Business.

“Pay attention to your surroundings, pay attention to people and situations, and pay attention to the conversations taking place around you,” he says. “If you wear headphones, you’re missing out.”

Research the internal and external environment, says Nykolaiszyn. “Don’t ask the boring questions,” he says. “Ask why the company does what it does. Ask to attend meetings as an observer. Use that opportunity to test your original assumptions.”

Network

Summer internships are the time to take initiative and start building connections. “Politely ask [people] to talk about their career path over a brief coffee break,” says Grubb. “When they agree to this, remember that you’ll be in charge of the meeting, including coming up with a list of thoughtful questions to ask–nothing too intrusive–and making sure that you start and end on time.”

Try to set up at least one meeting each week, but make sure to check in with your manager that it’s okay first. “Even though your job duties may not be glamorous-sounding, the connections you can build during your internship can pay big dividends in the long run,” says Grubb.

Also, build relationships with the other interns, says Salemi. “Instead of eating lunch alone, ask them to join you or to go for a quick afternoon coffee break,” she says. “Make friends on the job – it will not only be more fun that way, but then you’ll also have a network to tap into once you’re back at your different colleges in job search mode.”

Then keep networking after your internship is over. “Even if you aren’t hired full-time at the end of your internship, it doesn’t mean you couldn’t be hired at a later date,” says Schneiderman. “Keep those contacts warm and continue to communicate and network with the people you met during your time at the company.”

WHAT:“Hall of Frames”

WHO: Lenstore

WHY WE CARE: One has truly ascended to a certain level of legendary when their eyewear is just as recognizable as their name. To prove it, British sunglasses and contacts company Lenstore created “Hall of Frames,” a collection of 40 posters featuring the famous frames of musicians. From Buddy Holly’s signature black spectacles in the 1950s to the futuristic shades of Will.I.Am in the 2010s, “Hall of Frames” spans decades to illustrate how styles have evolved–or in some cases, how history tends to repeat itself.

Click through all 40 frames in the slideshow above.

After President Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change, many CEOs of major American companies voiced their disagreement with the decision, including GE’s Jeff Immelt, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Disney’s Bob Iger, and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein. It also prompted Apple CEO Tim Cook to send a company-wide memo outlining his thoughts on the decision.

Wednesday night, during the NBA Finals, Apple took its thoughts on the matter a step further with a new iPhone ad that makes clear where it stands. Using the same “Shot on iPhone” approach it’s been using for ages, this time backed by Carl Sagan reading an excerpt from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future In Space.

Despite Earth being just a tiny part of what Sagan calls a vast cosmic arena, the famed astronomer says, “In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

It’s only a matter of time before every freelancer encounters bad clients. A few are just irritating, while others can be downright damaging to your business. Sometimes the project is to blame, but other times it’s actually the client’s attitude—and that’s the real problem. While projects can change, a bad client’s mind-set isn’t likely to. So even if the work is ideal, the way a client treats you project after project can become (and remain) unbearable.

In fact, I’ve actually learned to shy away from the term “freelancer,” since it tends to evoke the image of a cheap fixer-upper in the minds of even well-meaning clients, rather than the strategic partner you want to be treated as. Lots of consultants and independent workers enter the world of self-employment still thinking like employees, which opens the door for all kinds of mistreatment, willful or otherwise.

Then again, there are still plenty of clients who’ll treat you badly no matter what you do. Here are three client mind-sets you should be wary of, along with warning signs to help you avoid them in the first place.

1. The Know-It-All

There’s always a gap between what the client thinks they know and what they really understand. When pushed, some clients will readily admit they lack expertise, but know-it-alls insist they know better. If you take on this type of client, they’ll eschew your advice and demand that you do things their way.

The problem usually isn’t ego, though—it’s a lack of self-awareness. Know-it-all clients are typically self-taught, taking pride in their ability to bootstrap their business. But in certain subject areas they simply lack the competence they think they possess; they often actually have even less knowledge than they think they do.

In other words, they’ve fallen victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a common cognitive bias that leads people to overestimate their abilities. We’re all unaware of our blind spots and biases, but some people are more so than others—to the point that they believe they’re far better than the real experts. Some clients talk a good game and give off an air of mastery, but the more you learn the clearer it becomes that they’re really just a beginner. You might even start to wonder why they thought they needed you at all.

How to spot a know-it-all client: This type of client often cites for hiring you is their lack of time rather than their lack of skill. They sprinkle terms that suggest domain knowledge throughout your conversations. They come to the project with a detailed plan. At first, this sounds like somebody who’s got a good handle on things—great. But later, when you try to dissuade them from anything they suggest, they push back. Their lack of self-awareness starts peeking through, and eventually it costs you a lot of extra time and plenty of unneeded stress.

2. The Scrappy Underdog

Every client wants a great price, and many will try to negotiate down your rates. Wanting to get the best price is one thing, but then there are bargain-hunters with outsize ambitions. This kind of freelance client wants to create something legendary—for less. Woefully underfunded, they see themselves as the scrappy underdog who will defeat the giant. That leads this type of client to ignore conventional wisdom despite the odds; they just know they’ll be successful no matter the conditions, and they want you to help prove them right.

The biggest problem with scrappy-underdog clients is that they couple unrealistic optimism with under-spending. Rather than seeing themselves as skillful, know-it-alls do, this misperception is more about unrealistic optimism; they believe they’ll succeed where others haven’t. But when you look at their requirements and the budget, you know it’ll take a miracle to do this project at their quoted price. If you take on this project, you assume the risk of failing to pull it off.

How to spot a scrappy-underdog client: They use phrases like “disrupt the industry,” or “never been done.” Another warning sign is asking you to take equity in lieu of pay, or proposing a heavily discounted fee in exchange for “exposure.” Only take on this kind of client if it’s a project you’re equally passionate about and you’re able to take a financial risk.

3. The Helicopter Client

Most clients are deeply engaged in a project under their direction, but some act more like a boss. They check in frequently, outline long to-do lists in Trello, or send epic daily emails detailing what needs to get done. It’s exhausting.

Not only that, but this type of client usually expects you to be at all the meetings, wants you to record your time down to the minute, and may even ask you to submit a timesheet. Helicopter clients tend to request detailed daily status reports, and once you give an estimated timeline for a task they’ll pester you until it’s done. Maybe they’re just trying to be helpful, but there’s a bigger problem lurking: a need for control.

This type of client feels disconnected and uncomfortable when the work is out of their hands. Full of self-doubt, they have serious control issues. With a helicopter client, you’ll begin to feel like you have a boss again, rather than working for yourself.

How to spot a helicopter client: They’ll bring detailed notes to your initial discussions. Maybe they’ll ask for several references and if they can’t reach them all, will ask for more. The intensive vetting usually doesn’t end there. They might also ask for numerous work samples or want to have you do a small project for free. Unless you like structure to the point of micromanagement, you should avoid working with a helicopter client.

Why? Because there are plenty of good clients out there. You should never feel like you have to put up with bad client behavior. By asking good questions and picking up on any early red flags during the negotiation phase, you’ll be able to spot these three types of mind-set before you’ve got a nightmare client on your hands.

In 2007, Feike Sijbesma, the CEO of the Dutch vitamin and nutritional-supplement company Royal DSM, attended the World Economic Forum, where he heard in a breakout session with several African leaders that the humanitarian aid that flows into the continent from western countries does as much harm as good. It was an argument that had been percolating for a while–2007 was the same year that Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda gave his provocative TED talk, “Aid for Africa? No Thanks,” in which he describes how aid hinders economic independence and growth in the developing world.

But the argument against aid Sijbesma heard was specifically around food assistance. “The leaders were saying to me that the food help western countries give, which mainly involves flying in staple foods from Europe and the U.S., certainly keeps people alive, but it also makes them ill because the food is not really nutritious,” Sijbesma tells Fast Company. Staple foods are mainly carbohydrates, which fill out caloric intake minimums, but the inadequately diverse diet leads to anemia, infectious diseases, and stunting. “In a closed-door session, I heard one leader say that people stay alive but become ill and cannot participate in the economy, this makes our countries poorer,” Sijbesma says. “And you call this humanitarian help?”

But DSM’s latest nutritional aid initiative goes beyond food delivery and toward establishing the economic independence Mwenda argued humanitarian aid precludes. A manufacturing facility in Rwanda, which has been operational since November and officially unveiled on May 31, is bolstering the country’s economy while producing the fortified grains, porridge flours that are supplemented with vitamins A, B6, B12, C, E & D and calcium, zinc and iron, to support infant and maternal health.

To source the maize and soy that forms the base of the porridges, the AIF consortium is working with 7,500 Rwandan smallholder farmers, the majority of whom are women; the AIF plant has also created 314 new jobs, all filled by locals. “It’s an astounding fact that over half the people in the world who suffer from hunger are small-scale farmers,” says Rick Leach, president and CEO of the World Food Program USA. “Sourcing from local small-scale farmers will help to deal with extreme poverty and chronic hunger in the country.”

Rwanda, Sijbesma says, was the ideal country to pilot this initiative in, having both a demonstrated need for nutritious food and enough political stability that the various private-sector and philanthropic stakeholders could work with the government to ensure the program takes root. The country ranks 151 out of 187 countries on the Human Development Index–a composite metric tracking life expectancy and per-capita income–and despite its relative political stability now, is still struggling to recover from the 1994 genocide that ravaged the country’s population and landscape.

The support of the government, Sijbesma says, is crucial for the initiative in Rwanda, and will be should DSM be able to scale–as it plans–this models to other countries. “At DSM, we wanted to be the initiative-taker,” Sijbesma says, “but we don’t want to own this operation.” The idea behind AIF, Sijbesma says, is that DSM and other stakeholders can fund the factory’s development (they won’t release exact financials, but the project totaled in the tens of millions of dollars), and eventually create a model that’s economically self-sustaining, and locally supported. By 2022, AIF estimates it will contribute $36 million annually to the Rwandan economy through spending on materials, transport, water, employment, and sales.

The aid-via-economic-development model represented by the AIF facility is, Sijbesma says, breaking down the silos that have long been drawn around development initiatives and emergency aid. Instead of relying on the constant cycle of crisis followed by flown-in assistance, the facility, Sijbesma hopes, proves that resilience can be built into communities and independently sustained. Leach agrees. “Ultimately, the goal of aid organizations like WFP is to leave,” he says. “If we can create enough local capacity to help a country evolve to the point where they no longer need international support, that means we’ll have gotten somewhere.

Sometimes you have to write harsh emails. You need to share feedback with someone in a different office, or disagree with a stakeholder, or tell someone they messed up–and setting up a call or in-person meeting would be an overreaction (and risk making the situation an even bigger deal).

That said, when the most benign notes can be misinterpreted, the stakes are even higher when you have something critical to say.

As someone who works remotely, I’m constantly emailing people with feedback. And even though I’ve done it hundreds of time, I still get a little pit in my stomach when I’m writing that someone’s work needs a lot of changes.

Related:How To Give Constructive Feedback To Your Boss Without Getting Fired 

But people often respond much more positively than I would’ve imagined. I credit a formula I use that makes harsh emails come off as kind and helpful as possible. Here’s how it breaks down:

Line 1: Say Something Friendly

When you’re writing the opening line (after the salutation, that is), it can be helpful to imagine it’s a conversation. If someone walked up to you and dove right into their point, you’d be put off.

That’s why a line like How was your weekend? or I hope this note finds you well, as superfluous as it may seem, helps kick things off on the right note.

Line 2: Thank Him Or Her

If applicable, it’s nice to note the other person’s efforts. You don’t want to dive right into what they did wrong without acknowledging the time they spent on whatever they sent over.

It’s as easy as:

Thanks so much for your [work/thoughts/efforts/time] on this.

Line 3: Point Out Something Positive

No one wants to feel like an idiot (or like you think they’re stupid). So, while you don’t want to beat around the bush, it’s important to take the time to point to one strength of the other person’s work.

Try, I can see where [whatever positive thing they did] would lead to [positive effect.] For example, you might tell a direct report that you can see how the strategy they implemented would help the team operate better. Or, you might tell a colleague that they did a great job addressing the client’s main concern.

Of course, it’s important to keep this comment honest. You should mention something that’s actually beneficial, and you shouldn’t lavish praise so extensively that the rest of your message totally blindsides the recipient.

Body Of The Email: Walk Through Changes (And Results)

Believe it or not: People appreciate knowing why you chose to do things differently. It’s counterintuitive (because who wants to hear how they messed up in detail?), but in actuality, it shows that you have a high opinion of them.

It demonstrates that you wouldn’t disagree with them just for the sake of it. Beyond that, it shows you think they’re smart enough to learn from feedback and deliver on your expectations moving forward.

To avoid overly elaborating on what went wrong, limit yourself to sentences that follow the format of [change made]… [reason or result]. And if you have more than one change, use bullets.

It looks like this:

We decided to go a different direction, because we needed a strategy that prioritized cost-effectiveness, due to budget constraints.

Or:

You’ll see that we made some changes to the pitch deck, based on feedback from the leadership team.

Or even:

Along those lines, I’d love to see those changes carried through other aspects of the presentation, because we’d like them to be consistent.

Last Line

Always end by asking if you could clarify anything or answer any questions.

While Please let me know if I can answer any questions, might seem obvious, it serves a purpose. It makes the whole spirit of your email more collaborative.

Related:Here’s When You Should And Shouldn’t Ignore Other People’s Feedback

Suddenly, it goes from saying, “Here are changes–period” to, “Here are changes–would you let me know if any of them don’t make sense?” It shows you still value the other person’s opinion.

Then, all you have left is a sign-off–any standard sign off (best, sincerely, thanks!) will do.

Putting It All Together

Dear [Name],

How is your week going?

Thanks again for your [thoughts/ work on] [project/ the attached]. You definitely got the heart of [assignment]./ It’s off to a great start./ I particularly like [one thing]. I made some changes/ took things in a new direction, which I’d like to explain:

[Example of change and how it will yield a positive result.]

[If applicable: example of second change and how it will yield a positive result.]

[If applicable: example of third change and how it will yield a positive result.]

Please let me know if you have any questions!

All the best,
[Your name]

Now that you’ve composed truly constructive feedback, take a minute to think about your subject line. Maybe all you need is to hit reply, but it could be that a small change affects the whole tone. (Did you know that “today” is preferable to “urgent”? More on that–and other words to avoid–here.)

Not every message you send is going to be chock full of praise–and that’s okay. If you take the time to write it thoughtfully, that’ll go a long way.

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

More From The Muse:

• 4 Reasons Your Constructive Criticism Keeps Going Over So Badly

• This Is How You Give Honest Feedback to Anyone, Anytime–Without Hurting Feelings

• 5 Common Words That Make You Sound Less Confident In Emails 

The teenage years can be awkward for anyone, but especially for young women having to deal with periods. Underwear brand Knixwear knows this and has launched a line of protective underwear called Knixteen, aimed at both helping teen girls deal with the reality of periods, but also talking about it in a way that takes away the stigma of actually…uh, talking about it.

CEO Joanna Griffiths says that ever since the brand launched in 2013, the response from customers has centered around two things: First, they wished Knixwear had existed when they were teens because so much embarrassment could have been avoided; and second, they wanted to buy them for their daughters.

“All of our best ideas come from listening to our customers, so we started to do the research,” says Griffiths. What they found was that girls are now getting their periods younger and younger, that periods were a main stress driver among teens–no one wants to be the first, no one wants to be the last to get their period. And  86% of girls are stressed about leaks, listing it alongside bullying, peer pressure, school grades, body image, substance abuse, and depression. The new campaign, created with agency Leo Burnett, shows the various socially awkward times a girl’s period could show up — a test, a school dance, the cafeteria–and bluntly says, “Hey Period Shut Up.”

“Most teens think that their periods work against them in every way possible,” says Griffiths. “We wanted to show periods interrupting teens at the worst possible times imaginable, in moments that were also timeless enough that any mom could relate to them as well. Periods and leaks have, until very recently, been a ‘taboo’ topic. We don’t think that they should be. It’s a natural, healthy part of being a woman.”

The Canadian-based brand has long been overshadowed by the louder, broader marketing campaigns and media coverage of its American competitor Thinx. But in the wake of allegations that Thinx founder and former CEO Miki Agrawal bullied and even sexually harassed employees, which broke in March, Knixwear said it saw sales jump by more than 300%.

Beyond that, with Knixteen the brand is smartly targeting a market with a rarely addressed problem. Simply put, that periods can be awkward, not a lot of people talk about it, and the legacy of advertising around the subject has too often featured blue liquid, windsurfing, horseback riding on the beach, or just dancing around your apartment in white pants. Kotex’s 2013 “Reality Check” ad may have been the first (and only) real talk ever seen in that category.

“The non BS approach and insight is pretty simple,” says Griffiths. “Generally speaking teens want to carve their own path and tell anyone who tries to get in their way or embarrass them–bullies, politicians, younger siblings–to shut up. There is something so liberating about adding periods to that list.”

WHAT: Title Drops, a long supercut of moments in which a film character drops the title into a line of dialogue.

WHO: A video editor extraordinaire who goes by the sobriquet, Roman Holiday.

WHY WE CARE: Probably the best scene in Pulp Fiction was when John Travolta looked right into the camera and said, “Man, sometimes the criminal lifestyle feels more like, I don’t know, pulp fiction to me.” What a scene! Unforgettable. Except it did not happen, probably because Quentin Tarantino generally doesn’t literalize his evocative titles at any point in his films. Can you imagine if midway through Reservoir Dogs, Steve Buscemi broke up a fight between Harvey Keitel and Michael Madsen by saying “Stop acting like a couple of reservoir dogs, whatever those are.” It would have felt odd. Buscemi did not say that; instead he said the n-word, and it was gross.

Other intrepid filmmakers, however, are less concerned with whether an effort at putting the title in the movie itself comes across as sweaty. The Upright Citizens Brigade TV show once featured a sketch about those moments, but what’s better than the real thing? A new video called Title Drops collects a staggering four-and-a-half minutes of those titular line reads, each of them gems. The films range from classics like Chinatown to whatever the opposite of a classic is, like Suicide Squad. In some cases, the filmmakers clearly knew they were being cute in dropping the title, though, so be warned that there are nearly as many eye rolls as chuckles in this compilation.

Today is the biggest news day since November 9, 2016, with most of America glued to the Comey hearings. One of the biggest talking points so far has been the former FBI director’s testimony that President Trump said he hoped that Comey would drop the investigation into Michael Flynn’s involvement with Russia. As he put it this morning:

"I took it as a direction," Comey says of Trump's one-on-one expression of "hope" that he would let Flynn inquiry go https://t.co/kgFjaliW70pic.twitter.com/K5ARFFFCh1

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) June 8, 2017

Here’s how Comey described an Oval Office meeting with Trump on Valentine’s Day, in a prepared statement ahead of today’s Senate hearing:

The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.”

The internet exploded in debate over what exactly it means when your boss expresses their “hope” that you’ll do something.

Hoping and telling are two very different things, you would think that a guy like Comey would know that. #givemeabreak

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) June 8, 2017

So if I report workplace harassment to HR and they say "I hope you won't tell anyone" that's just fine? https://t.co/vXDpqXVzls

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) June 8, 2017

Your boss, in same convo:

"Do you want to keep doing your job?"
"I hope you'll do a specific thing for me."

EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT THAT MEANS

— Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) June 8, 2017

"My boss said he 'hopes' I'll have sex with him, but he didn't order me too, so I really have no problem with that to be honest."

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 8, 2017

U.S. Senators might disagree as to whether a boss who says they “hope” you’ll do something is delivering an order, but most employees feel pretty sure it is. These are a few of the other coded ways managers give directions and express what they really mean.

“I Hope You’ll Do This”

What they really mean is: 

• “I expect you to know well enough on your own to take care of this. Please don’t make me ask you directly.”
• “You should really stop doing that other thing and do this instead.”
• “If you don’t do this, I’m going to be disappointed—and there might be consequences.”

Related:Four Times Your Boss Doesn’t Want Your Input (And How To Get Heard Anyway)

“I’ll See What I Can Do About That”

On a March 30 phone call, Comey claims that Trump asked him what the FBI could do to “lift the cloud” surrounding the White House regarding the Russia investigation. “I told him I would see what we could do,” Comey writes in his statement.” That phrase should sound familiar to pretty much anyone who’s ever had a boss.

What they really mean:

• “Yeah, no—never gonna happen.”
• “This is me politely telling you that’s a terrible idea.”
• “I’ll do the absolute bare minimum to be able to say I looked into that for you.”

“We’re Going In A Different Direction”

What they really mean:

• “You messed up with that one, and the grown-ups are taking over from here.”
• “We’re eliminating your role, sorry. Your last day will be Tuesday.”
• “Nice work on that pitch—it bombed.”

“I’ll Take That Into Advisement”

What they really mean:

• “Uh huh, I know—I already considered that.”
• “I hear you, but I’m still not taking your advice.
• “I haven’t made up my mind yet, and that idea of yours isn’t helping me.”

“Let’s Table That For Now And Revisit Later”

What they really mean:

• “I’m done discussing this. Don’t bring it up ever again.”
• “No hard feelings, but that idea is dumb.”
• “I’m going to let that proposal die a slow death by ignoring it indefinitely.”

There are a lot of different tones, phrases, and grammatical moods in which bosses deliver orders and express their wishes. As today made clear, one of them is the subjunctive.

From the look of things, streaming is shaping up to be the savior that the music industry has been clamoring for since the early 2000s. But is it really?

Streaming services now contribute over 50% of industry revenue worldwide, according to a recent industry report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Over the last two years, the recorded music industry has grown for the first time since its Napster-induced decimation over 15 years ago. Last year, it grew at its highest rate since 1997: 5.9% to $15.7 billion.

But when we refer to “the music industry,” we’re typically talking about the traditional industry—music rights holders and record labels, primarily. What about the artists? The fate of musicians and songwriters themselves remains an entirely different question with a much more complicated answer. The per-stream royalty rates of streaming are still tiny, but as services like Spotify and Apple Music scale, the numbers do start to look better for some artists.

Still, it’s not enough.

To help buoy musicians’ careers—and in turn make itself a more valuable resource to the industry—Spotify has been building out its artist-facing tools and teams, using everything from data analytics and targeted concert ticket sales to playlist placement to serve artists and assuage their anxieties about the future. It’s still early—Spotify for Artists, its analytics dashboard, just came out of beta a few weeks ago—so it’s not always clear to artists how to make the most of this new all-you-can-stream ecosystem. Here’s a primer.

Step One: Get Your Music Onto The Platform

It may seem obvious, but artists can’t reap the benefits of the streaming explosion without showing up in the first place. Unlike SoundCloud, YouTube, and Bandcamp, subscription services like Spotify don’t let you hit an “upload” button and share tracks for free. In most cases, the artist’s record label handles distribution, but for independent, unsigned acts, a third-party service like TuneCore, CDBaby or DistroKid will be required to get songs and albums onto Spotify (as well as Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, and a long list of other streaming services).

TuneCore and CDBaby both charge $50 per album (TuneCore is $30 for the first year), but TuneCore charges an annual renewal fee. DistroKid starts at $20 per year for unlimited uploads, so that’s probably the best route to go for newer, unproven artists. Each of these services has their own perks and service tiers, so it’s worth reading up on each of their pricing models before committing. From there, it’s as simple as uploading lossless, high-quality audio files (an MP3 won’t cut it), album art, and some simple meta data to publish each release across the internet’s various digital music services and stores.

Of course, Spotify and other music services contain a massive sea of tens of millions of tracks and hitting the upload button simply adds another droplet to that ocean. Getting your music heard requires a bit more work.

Step Two: Get Your Music Everywhere Else, Too

Spotify may be the biggest music streaming service, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only place to focus on. Many experts agree that the key to getting heard these days is to spread one’s music as far and wide as possible. That includes free services like SoundCloud and YouTube (which are easily embedded by music writers, should you be so fortunate). But it also includes having a meaningful social presence on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, releasing music videos, considering licensing music for TV and games (“sync” in industry parlance) and, above all else, regularly playing live in the real world.

The internet may open up new doors to exposure and help level the playing field for musicians, but nothing can replace the value (and admittedly hard work) of lugging gear around and making an in-person, musical connection with actual people with actual ears. The more places one can reasonably and appropriately get their music playing, both online and off, the more potential opportunities they’ll have with the people most likely to give a damn.

Related: Spotify’s Plan To Win Over Anxious Artists–And Win The Streaming War

Step Three: Get On The Radar Of Influential Music Bloggers And Journalists

One of the least cool and interesting parts of being a musician is promoting oneself, especially via the press. After all, people get into music to be artistically expressive, not to become publicists (which would undoubtedly be a more lucrative and stable career path). But one of the most important pieces of the online discovery puzzle is getting on the radar of influential music bloggers and journalists.

Most new artists aren’t going to land a write-up in Pitchfork or Rolling Stone right away, but fortunately there are a ton of smaller music publications, many of which focus on specific genres. Sites like Hype Machine aggregate some of the more influential music blogs and break them down by genre, so that’s a good place to get familiar with the most relevant music blogs. Local media like alt-weekly newspapers and city-specific music blogs might be easier nuts to crack than far-flung sites run by faceless editors with overflowing inboxes.

Cold-pitching strangers imploring them to check out your new EP is, again, decidedly unsexy and a little soul-sucking. The line between effective and obnoxious can be thin here. For those with the budget, hiring a professional to help with press outreach can be well worth it. For the cash-poor DIY artist, a crash course in media relations might be necessary. Of course, the easiest way to get media attention, many would argue, is to simply do cool, creative things that warrant attention. Just be mindful of the extraordinary level of noise with which you’re competing—and the extra creativity sometimes required to cut through it.

Why is this so important? Obviously media coverage means more exposure, as it always has. But today, getting a write-up and a song embed in the right place can act as a funnel into all kinds of other things. For one thing, writers at bigger publications mine these music blogs for the next big thing. So do music curators everywhere, like the people who program music for Starbucks. And yes, Spotify’s own in-house curators use music blogs (along with a variety of other signals, like catching a performer live) to find songs to include on Spotify’s playlists, which often have massive audiences.

Spotify’s semi-automated Fresh Finds playlist selects tracks by sniffing out online buzz from sources like music blogs. Songs that land on Fresh Finds are often heard by Spotify’s in-house music editors and can find their way onto other playlists. And if a track gets playlisted enough, it may become eligible for inclusion on Discover Weekly, Spotify’s hugely popular personalized virtual mixtape.

Step Four: Get Your Music Onto Playlists

Spotify reps are quick to stress that its in-house curation is a strictly “democratic” system, driven mostly by a combination of editorial intuition and data about how well songs are resonating with listeners. Spotify’s in-house curators do get tips and suggestions from labels and managers, but they say they don’t let those industry relationships trump editorial integrity and have strictly banned anything resembling pay-for-play on the platform. Thus, there’s no easy way to reliably pitch playlist curators. But there are ways to get onto their radar.

The simplest way for artists to get their songs onto Spotify playlists is, of course, to start building their own playlists. This is just a good idea in terms of building an audience on Spotify anyway. Well-constructed, searchable playlists are an easy path from the Spotify search box to an artist’s profile. A playlist of favorite songs by one’s biggest influences is a logical place to start and, while it might feel tacky to some, including a track or two from your own catalog alongside similar-sounding music isn’t a dishonest thing to do.

The more actively an artist curates and promotes their own playlists (with or without their own music), the more engaged they’ll be with listeners, and the greater the odds of their stuff coming across the radar of other playlisters—be it from a prominent Spotify user with lots of followers or one of the company’s in-house music programmers. By including one’s own music on a self-made mix, artists can effectively “seed” their songs in the playlist ecosystem in the hopes of getting it picked up by somebody else.

This process is decidedly difficult to influence or control directly, much like the process of getting press attention in the hopes of being picked up by Fresh Finds. Both approaches require a bit of finger-crossing and patience. While Spotify’s in-house curators are technically anonymous, it’s possible to google around to find the names and contact info of the people heading up different genres. Spotify doesn’t explicitly endorse this practice, but if you can manage to get the attention of its on-staff music nerds, it’s worth a shot.

An easier, though still clunky, approach would be to reach out to lower-level playlisters on the platform. This includes regular users who have heavily followed playlists and brands who manage their own playlists. Again, the odds of this tactic actually working will depend on the whim and tastes of the curators, but a quick search of like-minded playlists on Spotify and a hunt for their contact info may be well worth the effort.

Step Five: Dig Into Data With Spotify For Artists

Last month, Spotify opened up Spotify for Artists, a listener analytics dashboard, to all artists. This panel breaks down things like demographic info, where listeners live, how many listeners an artist has, and which playlists are driving new listeners. These numbers obviously won’t be huge for newer artists, but it’s useful to keep an eye on these metrics. Is your audience growing? Did a Spotify playlist give you a spike in new listeners? Which playlist? Maybe there’s a huge surge in streaming coming from Norway. What’s up with that?

Spotify’s analytics have been used by artists big and small to help inform decisions like how to plan their tours and which songs to include on their live set list. Keeping an eye on this dashboard will give musicians an up-to-date picture of what their audience looks like on Spotify.

As part of the launch of Spotify for Artists, the company simplified the process by which artists can get their profiles verified on the platform. Rather than having to reach 250 followers (a metric that is, somewhat confusingly, totally different from listeners or fans) in order to get verified, bands now merely need to sign up for access to Spotify for Artists and their profiles will automatically be verified once they’re approved. Verified artists are able to update their band photo and header graphic, publish playlists to their artist profile, select an “artist’s pick” song or playlist, and, presumably, customize whatever future artist-facing tools Spotify has in the works.

The ability to process things like digital camera effects, image filters, augmented reality, medical imaging, and much more could be a whole lot faster, thanks to research being done by Facebook.   

If you’re a regular Facebook user, you’ve no doubt noticed that over the years, there’s been more and more emphasis on images and on automatically identifying the people and the objects in them. For the service’s 1.94 billion monthly users, artificial intelligence and machine learning are behind the ability to quickly surface meaningful baby pictures, vacation selfies, and pet action photos.

Now, the company’s AI and machine-learning teams have developed methods for training data sets—the procedure that’s used to teach visual recognition models to distinguish between large numbers of images—that are faster than anything else available today. The company said today it has come up with a system that’s capable of training 40,000 images per second, making it possible to train on a 1k data set—the industry standard training set—in less than sixty minutes, and with no loss of quality. Until now, that was something that could take days, or even months to do.

The work is key, given that every tech company is handling a rapidly increasing amount of data these days, and counting on AI and machine learning to parse it. But with that increasing amount of data has come longer training times, something Facebook says has led to slowdowns in research and development time.

By moving to a system with 256 graphical processing units from one with 8 GPUs, Facebook was able to achieve a scaling efficiency of 90%.

Keeping with its philosophy of sharing its work freely and widely, Facebook says it’s open-sourcing the hardware stack it developed to achieve the improved training times. And that could benefit many companies that are taking in massive amounts of visual data and need to process it quickly. From digital camera tools aimed at consumers and advanced medical screening to helping develop autonomous cars and much more, this development could speed up R&D and make things easier for many people and companies.

When he was CTO at Hulu, Eric Feng focused on delivering a slick experience for Hollywood shows and movies that drew a wide audience. With his new company, Packagd, Feng is focusing on a more low-fi format, but one that still counts millions of viewers—and possibly customers: user-generated product porn.

The company’s first app, Unboxed, aggregates “unboxing” videos—those homemade documentaries of a person’s first encounter with a new gadget—from star geeks like Austin Evans, whose YouTube channel of funny reviews and how-tos has over 2 million subscribers. Starting with tech devices, Feng aims to eventually add yet-to-be-named channels for toys and beauty products, creating what he describes as an online version of QVC or the Home Shopping Network for millennials.

“What we want to do is entertain first, and we think throughout the entertainment journey people will buy,” says Feng.

Unboxing videos have become a sensation, capturing the exciting moments of opening up much-desired new products like a superstar smartphone or a high-end makeup kit. YouTube channel Unbox Therapy, for instance, has racked up nearly 1.4 billion views since 2010. But the genre has evolved from its nerdy roots.

“Unboxing is almost a synonym now for authentic product viewpoint,” says Feng. It has grown beyond unwrapping, extending to things like product reviews and tutorials, he says. But today’s videos retain at least some of the casual style of the originals—the low-budget aesthetic born in one-take, single-camera shots from someone’s living room or kitchen.

They are also quite frank. In an Apple vs. Samsung smartphone comparison, a YouTuber who goes by Canoopsy says, “The Galaxy S8 speaker is total garbage. It sounds like you’re in a fish tank filled with water and you have bubble wrap on your ears.”

“The raw nature of the video makes it also feel more authentic,” says Feng. “It’s not like 12 different camera angles and a crazy studio with special effects.”

I’m not sure what Michael Bay-grade product reviews Feng has been watching, but videos by now-establishment sites like CNet and Engadget have progressed to high production values that may seem formulaic. They are slick and informative, but not surprising or very engaging. YouTubers often cultivate relationships with fans. For her TechMe0ut channel, Jervina Coston asked viewers what style videos they would like to see in the future. They asked for themed segments, and she obliged, starting with one about Amazon deals under $100.

“Unboxers have really cracked the format of content that’s both super engaging and entertaining but also informative,” says Feng. Evans, for instance, became famous with his funny, fast-talking excitement. A 2014 video, with 5.7 million views, features unscientific tests between the iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphones. Scrawny, with wireframe glasses, spiky hair, and a splash of acne, the young Evans performs funny tests, like seeing which phone can open up and play Angry Birds faster (the iPhone) or capture better slow-mo video of him and his friend jumping around in a park (iPhone again).

Fast-forward to last May. Evans has clear skin, a better haircut, and has been flown out to Shanghai by Microsoft to preview its new Surface Pro tablet/laptop. Production value has also gone way up, too, but the style is still chatty and occasionally silly.

More laid back is Kevin Nether, aka Kevin the Tech Ninja (about 158,000 subscribers). His videos feature chill background music and plentiful onscreen graphics, but they don’t go overboard on polish. One of Feng’s favorites is a recent tutorial on smart-home devices such as the Nest thermostat. In it, the audio volume inexplicably drops for a few seconds. Instead of reshooting the scene, Nether simply superimposed the text “WTF AUDIO???” over the segment

An Online QVC

Feng has recruited a bunch of unboxers, including Evans, Nether, and Coston as curators to turns evergreen content like product reviews into six hours per day of “live” programming. Curators will pick videos (their own or others’) and host live chat with viewers as they play, mimicking the effect of watching and calling into the Home Shopping Network or QVC. Feng is obsessed with updating that successful formula for the geriatric segment into something that will grab the attention of millennials addicted to unboxing videos.

“The best, most successful example of interactive video is QVC,” says Feng. “They have video content that drives users to pick up the phone and call in.”

Feng has long been enamored of interactive video. In 2006, he founded Mojiti, a video-sharing site that allowed people to place annotations on videos. In 2007, he sold Mojiti to a startup called Hulu, which used the technology as the basis of its video platform and brought him on as CTO.

Feng later served as CTO of Flipboard—a customizable news aggregator that was one of the early hit apps on the iPad. Another inspiration was Twitch, which turned the phenomenon of people videoing their own video game experiences into a near billion-dollar business. From these experiences, Feng realized he didn’t have to create all the content from scratch, as QVC has done. “When we discovered that the community of unboxers was doing it and they had cracked the code on content, that’s when we got super excited,” he says. “We had this hypothesis, reinvent QVC based around unboxing videos.”

Packagd has raised $7.5 million, with seed funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where Feng remains a general partner, and a series A round lead by Forerunner and GV, formerly Google Ventures.

Like QVC, Unboxed blurs the line between entertainment and advertising. “The overlap of commercial content and entertainment content in this category is almost 100%,” he says. Unboxed aims to make money from both types. Videos feature buy links to the products discussed. Best Buy is the company’s retail partner, and all revenue from sales will go to the video creators—the incentive to get them on board.

“One of the things we think is missing right now is, they’re just not getting enough credit as they should for driving purchases,” says Feng.

He says that Unboxed may sell a few items—popular products from companies it has a close relationship with, such as the Microsoft Surface. But the company plans to make most of its money from sponsored video. “Say you are Nintendo, and you’ve got the new Switch launching,” he says. “Why don’t you buy an hour or a half-hour time slot inside of the Unboxed app all week of launch?” Nintendo could provide its own video or curate ones from YouTube creators, says Feng. A Nintendo product manager or engineer might host live chat with fans.

If this model works for tech products, Packagd will launch apps for other markets this year: first beauty products and then toys. (The latter could include video from kid bloggers like the wildly successful Ryan ToysReview channel, which has about 8 million subscribers and 800 million monthly views.)

Scarcely mentioned in my conversation with Feng is the word “journalism.” YouTubers may or may not adhere to a strict division between editorial and business interests the way that traditional publications do. “There’s different types of unboxers,” says Feng. “Some have celebrity status, some get paid to do unboxing or get sponsored, some get free products. A lot of people actually still purchase products.”

Feng feels that bloggers make adequate disclosure. In his Microsoft Surface video, for instance, Evans says, “Big shout out to Microsoft for inviting us out here, all the way to Shanghai.” But he doesn’t say if he was paid to do the video, or how much. “Sometimes there’s significant money involved,” says Feng.

Evans dings aspects of the product, from the selection of ports to Microsoft’s insistence that it’s a laptop even though a keyboard is extra. He also deliberately chuckles at the notion that it compares to performance of an iPad. Feng points to this video as a model for the genre. Financial interests will ultimately keep the YouTubers honest, he claims. “They’re not going to degrade their brand,” he says. “Because the truth is out, and the second they lose that authenticity for their viewers, their viewers will leave them.”