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Uber’s Implosion Marks A Tipping Point For Overt Workplace Sexism

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Uber is overhauling its internal operations in light of an investigation into its corporate culture. Though the fruits of their labor have yet to bear, it feels like an important moment in the battle against sexual discrimination: one where women are actually being heard.

Since January, Uber has hemorrhaged top talent, leaving its executive leadership barren. In the last week, the company has lost 20 employees, two execs, and one board member. Emil Michael, SVP of Uber business and second in command to CEO Travis Kalanick, has left the company. It’s unclear whether Michael resigned voluntarily, or if he was fired. Kalanick is taking an indefinite leave of absence, and board member David Bonderman has stepped down.

The board has accepted 13 pages of guidance from the law firm Covington & Burling, which include reducing Kalanick’s responsibilities and passing on certain duties to a yet-to-be-hired COO. It will also mean implementing changes to its protocols around human resources, company culture, training, oversight, compliance, and employees’ ability to transfer between teams.

Both Kalanick and Michael are in many ways the embodiment of Uber’s  old hypermasculine values to “always be hustling,” “toe steppin’,” ‘in the mind-set of a champion,” and “super pumped.” Recent character-tarnishing accounts of Michael and Kalanick paint both as the kind of people that accompany colleagues to a South Korean escort bar or who sit idly by as a colleague obtains the medical record of a rape victim in order to question the veracity of that claim. That Michael has left and Kalanick is taking time off indicates that Uber may actually be serious about changing its internal culture.

This rapid turn of events has me wondering: Could 2017 be the year that companies stop getting away with sexist behavior?

Perhaps we’re feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse around the acquisition of President Donald Trump, a man who bragged openly about sexually assaulting women and who, throughout his campaign, taunted women in sexually discriminatory ways, like “nasty woman” Hillary Clinton.

Just a few months into Trump’s presidency, his failed travel ban, unpopular health care bill, and ongoing Russia investigation have left his approval rating hovering just below 40%, according to FiveThirtyEight. Coincidentally, that’s roughly where Uber’s approval rating sits, according to Morning Consult’s brand intelligence data. That’s the lowest rating the analytics agency has recorded for Uber since it began to track the ride hailing company in October 2016.

What this might say is that more Americans, though initially enchanted by tough-guy theatrics, are ready to reject the behavior inherent to chest-thumping men that win at all costs. While Trump’s approval hasn’t dipped as a direct result of his sexist behavior as Michael’s and Kalanick’s has, it may be a sign of our collective fatigue with machismo as a leadership style.

Travis Kalanick [Photo: Flickr user GES 2016]

What Led Us To This Boiling Point

Back in 2014, Michael was engulfed in his first snafu: getting caught making snide remarks about hiring a team to conduct research into a female journalist with the express goal of turning up some sort of damning information.

That year, Whitney Wolfe sued Tinder over sexual harassment and discrimination— it was ultimately settled for just over a million dollars. American Apparel founder Dov Charney was squeezed out of his company over claims of misconduct and multiple sexual harassment suits. This was also the same year that companies including Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter started to release information about the diversity of their workforces.

If 2014 was the year that we started paying more attention to workplace culture, it was the following year that indicated there was a difference in opinion on what constituted sexual harassment and discrimination. In 2015, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against her former employer Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers on claims of sexual discrimination and sexual harassment went to court. The case was hotly followed in Silicon Valley, and though there was (to some) gross evidence of misogyny at Kleiner Perkins, Pao lost the suit. Much like Anita Hill’s 1991 case against Clarence Thomas, it succeeded in highlighting bad behavior, but failed to secure a win.

Kleiner’s defense attorney Lynne Hermle painted Pao as an ill-tempered shrew who couldn’t get along with anyone, despite records that she was a high performer. Managing partner at the firm John Doerr even noted in an email, “I  don’t know how a junior partner could have a better year than Ellen did, measuring results, profits, increase in value.” Characterizing women as difficult or in any way insinuating they deserved the maltreatment they got is an age-old trick for silencing them. During Wolfe’s scandal the previous year, certain media reports wrote her off as a slut. Even three years ago, these portrayals felt like a threadbare dish towel; one that has been used for centuries to wipe away the legitimacy of the women complaining about the status quo.

Still, these high-profile events spurred other cases. In 2015, Chia Hong filed a complaint against Facebook on charges of sexual and racial discrimination as well as retaliation for complaining about the former. Another, from Tina Huang, accused Twitter of sexual discrimination in a class action lawsuit. Hong dropped her suit against Facebook later that year, though it’s unclear whether or not she settled out of court. Sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits are often handled in the shadow of settlements. That makes it hard to discuss or understand the fundamentals of environments that breed both harassment and discrimination. With little visibility into corporate cultures gone awry, we are left to speculate about what actually went on.

But in 2016, Americans heard the details of one of the most explosive sexual harassment suits the country has ever seen in the case against Fox News founder Roger Ailes. It went well beyond spilling M&M’s down a colleague’s blouse in order to cop a feel. Gretchen Carlson recorded a year’s worth of conversations with Ailes in which he tried to pressure her into a sexual relationship. Before Carlson settled for $20 million, numerous women lined up to tell their own stories in the press of not only harassment, but also psychological and physical abuse by Ailes. Throughout the course of 2016, we not only got a peek into the grotesque sexual life of Ailes, but we also saw the condescending ways in which other members of Fox News treated their female colleagues.

In kind, we saw departures. In light of the accounts shared in the media, Ailes was let go. This year, aNew York Timesinvestigation brought to light that Fox paid out $13 million to various women to settle claims of sexual harassment against prominent right-wing commentator Bill O’Reilly. He too was let go. After O’Reilly, Bill Shine, the network’s co-president, was forced out for enabling Ailes’s toxic behavior. The whole exercise marked a win for working women, particularly in the media industry. But that victory may have been superficial. There’s no way to know that Fox, a place that has mastered the art of having PhD-holding women play dumb blondes to gain better ratings, has changed its internal culture.

The End Of Toxic Male Leadership?

Shortly after reports emerged concerning O’Reilly, Susan Fowler, a former engineer at Uber, published a detailed blog post about her experience of being propositioned for sex by a manager, and the myriad ways Uber’s human resources bungled its response to her complaints. According to Fowler, members of HR repeatedly lied to her about the extent to which her tormentor had harassed others, and what her legal rights were. Her story furthered a call among consumers to #deleteuber and instigated a sweeping investigation into the ride-hailing company’s dysfunctional culture. The results have been intense, and it was a blog post, not a lawsuit to be settled into oblivion, that set everything in motion.


Related:What Can Uber Do To Fix Its Broken Culture?


Before the report was released, Uber hired a spate of very talented women both to its board and its leadership. This year added Harvard academic Frances Frei, former Googler Liane Hornsey, and Apple Music’s beloved marketing exec Bozoma Saint John to its leadership. It’s also adding Nestle executive Wan Ling Martello as a director on its board.

Skeptics will say that much of the announced change coming to Uber is merely an attempt to optically skew people’s perception of the company. But with the executive team essentially vacated, 20 other employees fired, and now a board member short, it seems Uber will be starting from scratch in many ways, regardless of its desire to stay the same. Furthermore, the response from Uber to a blog post is a stark contrast to what that response would have been just three years ago.

The fact that Uber has given so much attention to this issue and is making major leadership changes seems to me rather remarkable, considering the lackluster results we’ve seen from other tech titans to make their workplaces more equitable.

And it points to something else: Rather than finding justice in a courtroom, women are finding it through airing their stories in the press and on the internet. When Uber’s leadership announced the findings of their report, they nodded to the Fowler blog post that roiled the company.

That’s not to say that Uber’s efforts haven’t felt staged at times. There are still major questions about who will be added to the board to help create an ethics and culture oversight committee, as suggested by Covington & Burling. But Uber has actually agreed to a rather thorough road map that could lead to cultural change. The recent rash of firings and simultaneous hiring of big league women feels like a reckoning–one we wanted in 2015, and in my opinion didn’t get.

Yesterday, as Uber’s leadership relayed its plan for transition to a room full of Uber employees, board member David Bonderman made a gross and archaic generalization about women, showing that that the culture shift in their leadership still has a long way to go. As Arianna Huffington touted the growing percentage of women on the board and said that there is a high likelihood that the presence of one woman leads to a second woman being on the board, Bonderman interrupted to say, “Actually, what it shows is it’s much more likely to be more talking,” according to audio obtained by Yahoo.

Bonderman apologized after the negative press attention that followed, and then late that evening, he resigned from the board. It signals that at the very least, Uber is willing to take action rather than pollute the world with insincere apologies.

Whether or not Uber is able to take itself from truculent startup to mature corporate culture is to be determined. More important is that women’s tales of discrimination are out in the open, and as such are forcing companies to deal with them. This new paradigm is in itself problematic. Women are being forced to chose between airing their grievances publicly in order to seek change, or to fight in court and potentially receive compensation for mistreatment in a vacuum. Hopefully, the next milestone on this long road will give them both.


Pony Sweat Is Dance Aerobics For The Body-Positive Era

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Before every Pony Sweat class, Emilia Richeson reminds the group gathered at her L.A. dance aerobics studio that “Pony Sweat is fiercely noncompetitive.” With the ground rules set, she kicks out the jams and embarks on an hourlong class of body-positive, dance-based aerobics that would make Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons proud. That’s exactly what Richeson was aiming for when she started Pony Sweat out of her bedroom back in 2014. “Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I always loved aerobics, and have always been a big fan of a lot of ’80s bands, so there was already an aesthetic that is close my heart,” the 34-year-old dance instructor tells Fast Company. “Richard Simmons was always a role model in my family.”

Richeson, a “queer punk ray of sunshine,” according to a press release, started attending Simmons’s dance classes when she first moved to L.A. in 2006. “He’s been such a huge influence on me. He created an inclusive space for people to express joy through dance,” says Richeson. “It was so powerful watching people open up and share where they were at, what they were struggling with, and then all of us dancing together.”

Richeson used exercise as a way to battle her depression, but she struggled to find a workout routine that she enjoyed, especially since Simmons had retired from his studio. A few friends encouraged her to come up with her own dance aerobics routine instead, and soon Pony Sweat was born. “Pony Sweat the class came from a real need for connection and inspiration,” she explains. “Dancing to music I love makes me like being in my body. I want to offer a safe space for folks that feel that way, too.”

She started putting on a weekly class of high-energy aerobic workouts soundtracked by a mix that ranges from the Cure to Santigold to Nine Inch Nails, Robyn, Prince, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and posting on Instagram about her #danceaerobicsisforfeminists. “It was meant to be a venue for friends to come together and sweat it out to music we loved,” she says. “Eventually, folks started telling other folks, and I started teaching more classes to more people!”

Her inclusive classes (“It’s for EveryBody,” she says) have spread throughout Los Angeles as exercise junkies look for a way to whip up a sweat while having fun.

But don’t call it a major business enterprise yet. Richeson is adamant that Pony Sweat is and will remain a labor of love, built on a “punk/DIY ethos.” She is also generally opposed to the idea of fitness as a money-making industry. “It makes us feel like the next trendy workout will be the solution to achieving idealized body types that are sexist and racist, and promote the oppression of folks outside that ‘ideal,'” she says.

She adds that the promise to new instructors and trainers of immediate steady income is not always realistic, and that can put pressure on instructors to see financial gain as their only metric for success. That said, she is slowly and organically growing Pony Sweat. She currently teaches classes at three locations, hosting 10-45 students per class, and is training a new teacher to help expand further. She is also hoping to reach people outside of the Los Angeles area, particularly in places where body-positive alternatives don’t yet exist.

That mission is directly from the heart of the Pony Sweat’s everyone-is-welcome ethos. “I want it to be a space for anyone who wants to belong to it,” says Richeson, adding that there’s no experience necessary to get in on the fun. “Pony Sweat is a practice in im-perfection, which I think is a very radical and necessary thing for us to practice.”

In the meantime, she’s launching her first official workout video, Pony Sweat: Volume 1. The nearly hourlong video will let people around the world throw on their favorite leotards and leg warmers and channel their inner Jane Fondas in their own living rooms while working out to Richeson’s routine. If sweating to the beat isn’t your thing, though, Richeson doesn’t mind. “I hope everyone finds a way to like being in their body,”she says. “I think that moving your body is the best way in, so whatever way that is for you—do that!”

Photo-Sharing Phenom VSCO Is Teaching Computers To Interpret Art Like A Human

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Since launching in 2011, photo-sharing app VSCO has found a healthy niche among professional photographers and others looking to get feedback and improve their skills. On the surface, it offers an experience comparable to Instagram. But the idea is to share images as a way to connect with others and draw inspiration, not to increase your follower count or reach a certain number of likes, comments, or shares. (In fact, it doesn’t have comments or likes at all.)

“It’s really about that creative journey of becoming a better creator, and a place to find inspiration … and education,” says Joel Flory, cofounder and CEO of VSCO.

That goal led the company to its newest addition, Ava, a piece of machine-learning software that looks at every photo on the platform, identifies key attributes, and then uses that information to connect users with other creators who work in a similar style or often capture the same emotions. This tagging was previously done by humans at VSCO. Now Ava will handle the heavy lifting, using data from all the entire body of work on the service.

Ava autotagged this image with concepts such as sand, desert, dirt, dry, arid, empty, and beach. [Photo: Jaclyn Campanaro, courtesy of VSCO]
“What really makes it unique is how we married it with four years of human curation data, and how it will continue to be powered and trained by our curation team here VSCO,” says Flory. “So instead of just object recognition, we’re looking at it in the way that a human would be looking at a photo and trying to understand the quality and subtlety of it–not literally based exactly on what’s in the photo, but what you also might be inspired by if you’re inspired by that image.”

For instance, a photographer might enjoy capturing photos of sadness. Ava will be able to detect that in photos, see it as a theme across a person’s work, and then suggest other artists on the platform that shoot in a similar style that the poster might find interesting. “When you open the app every time, you feel that it’s there just for you,” Flory says.

How Ava Works

Ava is built on top of Sens, VSCO’s proprietary image-processing platform. Announced late last year, it’s the core piece of technology that everything on VSCO is built on top of.

“If you ever played with Legos as a kid, Sens is that green building pad that everything’s built on top of,” Flory says. “This is what’s allowed us from a photo perspective to kind of push the boundaries.” For example, Sens has already allowed the company to roll out support for the high-quality RAW file format in iOS, as well as introduce short video clips within the app.

“What we’re most excited about is what we can do with it moving forward,” says Flory. “We’re really trying to think about what the future of expression is and how we can build for the culture creators.” That means coming up with a smart way to look at the millions of photos that are posted on VSCO to learn not only about images but the artists behind them. Ava’s technology is doing that based on years of curation data from humans.

“What we’re doing is forcing Ava to look at photography from a very different perspective,” says says VSCO CTO Mike Wu. “It’s not just about subject matter. It’s also about the artistic view of how we look at photos.” VSCO’s human curators, he adds, have “looked at these photos and identified everything from feeling to themes to quality to more abstract concepts. We’ve taken that and had Ava train against it.”

And those human curators aren’t going anywhere. Instead, they’ll be helping Ava learn more. “Our team can actually go in and say ‘That’s not accurate’ and then Ava can continue to train against that updated data,” Wu says.

Identifying The Influencers

Another place VSCO sees Ava coming in handy is with influencer marketing. In an age where brands are looking for content to publish on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms, finding creators can be a challenging process. As the need for more content has risen, the budgets that those agencies and companies have to create that company has not, at least not at the same speed.

“That’s a problem that the industry is facing that we believe we can help solve,” says VSCO’s VP of marketing, Gene Paek. The company recently brought on Paek, who was the former head of business marketing at Instagram. He thinks VSCO’s technology, particularly Ava, can help match brands with the right content creators.

“So it’s not just matching you up with who we think might be the best creator for you, but if your brand or agency has specific requirements of what type of creator you need–one that shoots in this style or that captures happiness better than no other, leveraging Ava technology we are able to take your attributes and match you up with a creator that produces that type of content,” he says.

“In this day and age it’s all about your numbers and your popularity metrics, so it’s very hard to be discovered by a brand unless you have a big presence,” says VSCO cofounder and chief experience officer Greg Lutz. “Whereas with Ava, this allows your content based on what you like to shoot, what you’re good at, and the quality of that to rise up.”

Ultimately VSCO plans to offer a marketplace where brands will be able to indicate what they’re looking for, and VSCO will match them with a creator. Once matched, VSCO will handle pricing and make introductions, helping to work past some of the hiccups of negotiating with an independent creator on platforms like Instagram.

“When you look at our overarching vision and mission of empowering creators and helping people create with intent, we think Ava is going to help them in all aspects of that,” says Wu. “Everything from the creation process, to even potentially connecting them to people and companies they want to work with.”

Inside The Lab Of The Silicon Valley Startup Making Milk From Peas

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“This is our cow,” says Adam Lowry, CEO of Ripple, a Silicon Valley startup known for making milk from peas. He’s pointing at a small tabletop homogenizer, a device that blends fat, sugar, and protein to test milk recipes in the company’s small lab in Emeryville, California. The company’s goal: to make plant-based dairy products that anyone, including non-vegans, will actually want to eat and drink.

At the base of the products is a proprietary ingredient the company calls Ripptein, made in a patent-pending process that the company says strips out the flavor of plant material and leaves almost purely protein, so its milk product doesn’t taste like peas. And after a successful launch in 2015, the company is now poised to expand its pea-based dairy offerings: half-and-half and Greek yogurt that the company says will have the same protein content as dairy products (and, ideally, the same taste), with a fraction of the footprint.

“I think the traditional food industry, Big Food, is just not set up to take advantage of the opportunity.” [Photo: courtesy Ripple]
“From a biochemical standpoint, milk is protein, and fat, and sugar,” says Neil Renninger, cofounder and CTO at Ripple. “There are plenty of plant sugars you can use, and plenty of plant fats. There are also plenty of plant proteins you can use, but the problem is that they all taste like the plant they derive from. We had to figure out how to make a plant protein that didn’t taste like a plant protein.”

Lowry hands me a spoonful of pea isolate, a yellowish powder that is currently used in some other products, such as almond milk, to add protein (a serving of typical almond milk has only a gram of protein, versus eight grams in a serving of dairy milk). It tastes very much like peas. The impure isolate is the reason, he says–as he hands me a sample of a competitor’s almond milk made with extra pea protein–that most nondairy milk has a slightly off flavor and texture. Compounds like isoflavones and phenolics are among the usual culprits. “It’s the stuff that adds complexity and texture to taste of red wines and whiskey,” says Renninger. “Not surprisingly, not so good in milk.” I then taste a sample of Ripptein; it isn’t flavorless, but close. Pure protein molecules have no flavor.

Renninger, who was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer of Amyris Biotechnologies, began product development in his kitchen–using his children as test subjects–in the fall of 2014. “I quickly realized that we could build up something that had the same nutrition and creaminess as milk from plant-based sources,” he says. The company launched in December 2014, moving into a lab and bringing in experts who began developing the company’s method to separate flavor molecules from protein. By the following spring, the team had developed its process, which uses a combination of heat, pressure, temperature, and other factors to purify pea protein. By December 2015 they had scaled up to commercialize, and by May 2016 their line of pea-based milk was on shelves at Whole Foods. A little over a year later, their sales at Whole Foods have grown 300%. Monthly sales across all outlets are now in the seven digits.

Ripple calculated that it produces roughly a third of the emissions of dairy for a glass of milk. [Photo: courtesy Ripple]
Part of that growth is due to the strength of plant-based milk products in general. While dairy milk sales are dropping–one report suggests that total sales will fall 11% between 2015 and 2020–nondairy milk is predicted to grow from a $2 billion market in the U.S. now to nearly $3 billion in 2020.

In the past, consumers often tended to choose nondairy milks because regular milk wasn’t an option for them–they were vegan, or allergic to dairy. But the leading reasons now are nutrition and taste concerns; sustainability is also a driver. Milk has a large carbon footprint because of the production of grain for cows, methane from cow burps and manure, and the energy used to produce and distribute the final product. In a life-cycle analysis, Ripple calculated that it produces roughly a third of the emissions of dairy for a glass of milk because the main ingredient, peas, takes far fewer resources to produce–and peas don’t burp. Almond and soy milk have similarly low carbon footprints (though because almond milk has far less protein, if you compare the carbon footprint on the basis of protein, its footprint is significantly worse than dairy). Almond milk also has a much larger water footprint.

Plant-based milk can also have health benefits compared to dairy milk, as it has less sugar and fat. In the case of soy and pea milk, it still offers a similar amount of protein.

If consumers are choosing nondairy milk just to be more responsible (rather than because they can’t digest lactic acid, for example), Ripple believes that taste is critical. “Those motivations are more wants and desires, so if those aren’t met in the products they’re using, they’ll just switch back to milk,” says Lowry.

“Anywhere you have a plant-based protein is a space we could potentially play.” [Photo: courtesy Ripple]
Lowry previously cofounded Method, the cleaning product company, which became the largest green cleaning company in the world. He wants to take a similar approach with Ripple. “It brought green cleaning products to the mainstream, rather than pulled mainstream to green,” he says. “It was that bridge. It was the brand that you tried when you said, ‘I want to try green cleaning products’ but didn’t want to buy that crunchy brown paper bag stuff. That’s still happening. [With nondairy milk], those trends are already happening to a greater degree than they were in the green cleaning segment, and the products are even worse relative to the conventional.”

Ripple’s pea milk doesn’t taste exactly like milk. But it has a similar creaminess, as opposed to the watery texture of some alternatives, and it doesn’t have the odd aftertaste of those alternatives. Using its tasteless protein base, the startup is beginning to launch other products that it believes can tempt consumers away from dairy. A pea-based half-and-half, which blends into coffee like the real thing (without the calories), and can be used in cooking, will launch in July. At the lab, I tasted the half-and-half along with prototypes of pea-based Greek yogurt that may launch at the end of 2017 or the first quarter of 2018.

Both new products were challenging to produce. “With half-and-half, the challenge was getting something that worked well in coffee, but also would work well in a culinary situation,” says Renninger. For coffee, they needed something that would stay stable–many plant proteins turn solid in coffee–whiten the drink, and taste clean. “It’s a bit of a balance providing that creaminess and a clean taste. Protein is an important part of the creaminess in half-and-half, but if you don’t have clean protein, you can’t get that creaminess without adding off flavors.”

A little over a year after launching, Ripple’s sales at Whole Foods have grown 300%.

For the yogurt, which is still in development, the team had to figure out how to deal with the fact that fermenting milk is different than fermenting plant “milk.” “Something I always like to do when thinking about fermentations is to ‘think like the bug’—bug being a shorthand for the cultures that do the actual fermentation,” says Renninger. “We’re not the only ones who do this—I find a lot of fermentation professionals think the same way, whether it’s making a pharmaceutical, brewing beer, or making wine. In this case, imagine yourself swimming in a vat of milk and all of the richness that exists there; now compare that to swimming in a vat of plant milk. What’s different? It’s the differences that drive the differences in fermentation, and the fermentation drives the taste and consistency of the product.” While the current prototype doesn’t taste exactly like yogurt, it tastes good; the same could not be said for an almond yogurt that I sampled.

Other products, such as ice cream, will come later. “Anywhere you have a plant-based protein is a space we could potentially play,” says Lowry. “We don’t have any business plans to get into the meat world, but clearly the technology that we have could really apply to the meat substitute world.”

The company is pouring about half of its current revenue into research and development. “I think the traditional food industry, Big Food, is just not set up to take advantage of the opportunity,” says Renninger. “Out here, we think of innovation, and we think of the Facebooks and the Googles and the Genentechs of the world, companies that are spending 10, 15, 20% of revenue on R&D. A typical CPG company spends a percent of revenue on R&D, and most of that R&D is focused on packaging and how I deliver something to you as a consumer rather than the stuff you’re actually eating. It’s a lost opportunity for them, and it’s something that we’re taking advantage of.”

The company’s process could also be used with different ingredients, such as soy; for American consumers, because of allergies and concerns (whether legitimate or not) about plant estrogens, the company is focusing on peas, but if it later expands to the Asian market, soy may be a better option. In the lab, the company is experimenting with other ingredients such as spent brewers grains and other byproducts that could help improve its sustainability footprint even more, and lower cost.

Even using peas, the company believes that it will soon be able to produce its milk for the same cost as a dairy. “The amount of natural resource inputs that go into making ripple are a lot less than dairy, so in theory you should be able to make it for a much lower cost than dairy,” says Lowry. “Now dairy is a massive, massive scale, but we think we’re going to get to that point by the end of next year, where we’ll be able to actually make plant-based milk for less than the cost of cow’s milk. When that happens, for sustainability, health, and from a business standpoint, that is an incredibly large opportunity.”

5 Charts That Illustrate The Racial Bias In The Nonprofit World

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Of all the things philanthropists are trying to fix, there’s one major issue the sector seems to continually ignore: itself. As a new report by the Building Movement Project, a nonprofit research group, points out, there’s an intense lack of racial diversity among nonprofit and foundation leaders, an issue that remains unaddressed despite having been well documented for at least 15 years. Considering equality and social progress are supposed to be a core facet of cause work, the lack of commitment to that within the industry’s offices and boardrooms is perplexing.

Or at least that’s the polite word for it. Another one would arguably be “discriminatory.” As has already been widely reported, white people hold more than 80% of the industry’s top positions. That leads to homogeneity in approaches to problem solving, and lowers the chances that those in power might actually understand root concerns within the diverse populations they serve.

And things get even more homogeneous (closer to 90% white) when the field is narrowed to the largest 315 nonprofits and foundations, according to another study by Battalia Winston, a recruiting group. That means the people within places that can potentially make the biggest difference are probably way too much alike.

There are lots of ways to try to explain away the disparity, including default explanations: that there may be a lack of qualified candidates or that people of color aren’t as interested in top-level petitions. The truth, of course, is the exact opposite, according to BMP, whose report is entitled “Race to Lead”: After surveying more than 4,000 people within the philanthropy world, the group has developed an extremely clear picture of the industry’s scope of inequality, how it works, and why it continues to persist.

Here are five charts that tell that story:

All Top-Level Candidates Start Out Equal

As you can see in the pie chart, there’s not much difference between the baseline credentials of white people and people of color in the sector. The white population has a incrementally greater collection of bachelors and masters degrees, while people of color are more likely to have advanced doctorates or law or medical degrees.

[Image: Building Movement Project]

Minorities Are More Interested in Being Promoted

When BMP researchers asked the following question—”Are you interested in become an executive director/CEO of a nonprofit someday”—more than 50% of minority candidates said yes. That’s actually 10% more than their white counterparts.

[Image: Building Movement Project]

But Recruiters and Hiring Boards Are Often Biased

Regardless of race, the majority of those within the industry agree that recruiters aren’t doing enough to find and court qualified diverse candidates for top-level positions. But many minorities feel like they’ll be denied because they’re not the right “fit,” an intangible that study authors suggest represents “implicit bias.”

[Image: Building Movement Project]

And Whiteness Perpetuates More Whiteness

To highlight exactly how the racial gap continues, Community Wealth Partners, a social entrepreneurship consultancy, created the following flow chart.

[Image: Building Movement Project]
The group found over 80% of nonprofit staff recruit from their own professional networks. That’s a problem because 75% of white Americans don’t have any minorities in those networks. Add to that the fact that applicants with stereotypically white names are reportedly 50% more likely to get an interview than those with African-American ones. And white hirers have been shown to recommend white candidates over black candidates when all things are equal.

That Creates A Toxic Environment With Uneven Standards

As the graph below shows, people of color within the philanthropy field are far less likely to want to work in white dominant organizations. Many believe there’s an unfair standard for promotion, meaning they need to develop more skills and training that normal because their white counterparts receive an unfair advantage. Success only breeds more complications, as many minorities think that discrimination from funders might hurt their ability to raise money.

[Image: Building Movement Project]
Tellingly, more than 20% of those minority respondents uninterested in chasing leadership positions were considering leaving the profession entirely.

Find the full report, along with BMP’s suggestions for how groups can become more accountable here.

Do These Four Things To Make Your Boring Presentation Sound Interesting

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Let’s be real for a second: You don’t have a monumental bit of news to report every time you have to give a presentation. Maybe the third Tuesday of the month has just rolled around, and it’s time to update your team on the latest batch of figures. And whatever status report, project review, or operational details you’re going to share with them, you know it’ll be dull.

So how do you make those basic facts and figures more than a form of ritualized torture? Here are a few pointers.

1. Turn Data Into Images

If you’re worried your presentation is going to be boring because it’s heavy on numbers, try using imagery to describe the data. Numbers can become dull if you don’t give enough context about what they all mean and amount to. Unless you make the data concrete, your audience will start to zone out.

It’s simpler than you probably imagine. Think about the last weather report you caught on TV. Maybe the meteorologist was reporting on the size of hail. They didn’t list off the average hailstone’s diameter or weight; they said “golf-ball sized” or “softball-sized.” By using imagery, they become much more engaging and memorable. What’s more, you don’t need to be a graphic designer to throw together effective visualizations; here are a few tips.


Related:PowerPoint Isn’t Dead Yet—Three Presentation Tips That Still Work In 2017


2. Make Sure You’re Selling Something

The surest way to wreck an already boring presentation is to just be the messenger, delivering data or giving an update. In reality, you’re always selling. As the CEO of a Fortune 500 company told me, “Every time you present, you are selling. You’re either selling your idea today or planting the seed for selling your idea in the future.”

And to sell successfully, you need to position yourself as your audience’s trusted advisor. As Mitch Little, VP of sales for Microchip Technology, describes in his book Shiftability, that means getting past “features” to talk about “benefits”—matching your ideas to your listeners’ needs. They’ll trust you when they see you as a partner whose opinion they value—who helps them see things they might’ve missed.

Yes, that might sound like a tall order when you’re giving a quarterly update. But try stepping back for a moment and thinking about the purpose of that update. Move away from, “I’m just giving them information and telling them why it’s important” toward, “I want to explore how we can move forward together more creatively.” This change in mind-set will can help you position your data in a more “benefits”-oriented way.

3. Add More Context

Sometimes the reason your presentation is so dull is because there’s not much numerical change since the last time you presented. This is really common for leaders who are asked to report on market share, for instance. If you’ve maintained the same market share since your last presentation, how can you make that interesting?

The answer is to just add more context around the latest figures. Let’s say your organization’s market share was the same from the first quarter to the second quarter. To make your presentation more interesting, you could discuss some of the outside factors that were at play. Obviously, you always want growth. But perhaps a competitor introduced a new product—in that case, maintaining the same level of market share was actually positive news.

You can also put information in context through comparison. For example, if I tell you that Poland exported $1.6 billion of chocolate last year, that’s not necessarily an interesting data point. But if I tell you that it produced twice the amount of chocolate that Switzerland did, that might surprise you. So if you’re having trouble making your facts and figures sound interesting, look for comparisons.

4. Share Something They’ve Never Heard Before

Finally, if you’re struggling to spice up a dull presentation, tell your audience something unfamiliar. Share a compelling conversation you had or some insider information that few people know about yet. That can create an “aha” moment for your audience to come away with.

Maybe you work in financial services and need to give a status report. Unfortunately, not much has changed. But you did have an interesting conversation with someone from the Federal Reserve, who told you that a proposed regulation was going to be rolled out slowly. This would be something you could tell your audience that would make your presentation more intriguing.

You might feel like you work in a boring industry or department, but that doesn’t mean you can’t engage your audience. These simple strategies can help you leave more of an impact—even if the facts and figures, all on their own, don’t.

Your Best Business Partner Is Your Polar Opposite; Here’s How To Get Along With Them

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Successful startups often have partners who have different strengths. One person might be the technical genius, while the other takes what they do and sells it to the masses. But what if partners have similar strengths and strikingly different personalities?

Jonathan Kay and Eli Sapir had to overcome that exact challenge when they teamed up to launch the mobile app marketing firm Apptopia.

Sapir, CEO, is an idea guy, says Kay. “He has more brilliant ideas than can ever be executed on in an entire lifetime, but he can’t focus to execute,” he says.

On the flipside, Kay describes himself as “execution oriented.” “I would never have a good enough idea to start a company, but I have an ability to execute on anything,” he says.

Success is not a solo activity, says Hugh Blane, management consultant and author of 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership: Create A Mindset of Passion, Innovation and Growth. “Without the accompanying friction that comes from differing personalities and perspectives, a business will underperform,” he says. “Every idea can be improved on, enhanced and made more compelling when a strategic diversity of perspectives is deployed.”

Kay agrees that his relationship with Sapir allows the pair to yield a sum greater than two parts. “If you have two very different people, your ceiling is the best idea of one of those individuals,” says Kay. “For us, the end result is neither of our ideas; it’s a hybrid solution based on our discussion.”

But their differences initially caused problems. Kay admits that during the first two years, he got mad and stormed off a lot.

Personality Vs. Purpose

To last, a partnership must have two things, says Antony Bell, leadership consultant and author of Great Leadership—What It Is and What It Takes in a Complex World: “First, they have to be committed to the same purpose and vision for their business,” he says. “Differences in personality can create a healthy debate and can allow for complementary approaches and perspectives; differences in purpose and vision tend to generate competitive and destructive conflicts.”

Second, both partners need a high level of self-awareness, and, by the same token, a deep appreciation for the differences between the two partners. “The pursuit of this kind of self-awareness needs to be deliberate and intentional, and without it, innocuous differences become divisive differences,” says Bell.

Kay and Sapir knew they were strong together, and the solution to their differences was creating a veto plan. “Each one of us has the ability to use veto power, but it needed to be used sparingly,” sys Kay. “It says you can end this discussion if it’s something you feel unusually strong about.”

The plan helped them push past initial objections, says Kay. “We would say, ‘Talk me through what it is you don’t like or would change,'” he says “When it comes down to it, we were only about 15% to 20% off. That delta is amazing. One of us is deep and one is on a higher level. They’re seeing things you can’t see because you’re not on fifth floor of the building.”

At cellphone service provider Ultra Mobile, David Glickman and Tyler Leshney had to learn how to compromise on the pair’s opposite appetites for risk: “I’m the guy who is always grasping for big opportunities and more customers and with that is plenty of risk,” says Glickman, founder and CEO. “I go with my gut, while Tyler comes from more analytical background. The two styles butt up against each other at times.”

The pair worked out their differences through better communication. “One of the things I’ve learned is keeping David involved instead of thinking, ‘I’ve got this,'” says Leshney, president of the company. “Our fundamentally different views bring better results. I think we come to middle ground every day, and the basis is trust.”

Taking Advantage Of Your Differences

Having two personalities allows each individual to grow, says Leshney. “David pushes me in Socratic way,” he says. “He knows I’m competitive and lights that fire even on things I think are audacious or absurd. I’ve gained an ability and willingness to experiment. I realize there were times that I held myself back looking for the perfect solution.”

If you can’t be challenged by a partner, you probably shouldn’t be in business at all, says Kay. “Friction is hard but it’s really productive. If you don’t have ability to be challenged, you shouldn’t start a company, because you’ll be challenged every hour of every fricking day by customers, investors, and employees.”

The Top 5 Ads Of The Week: Cannes Preview Edition

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Look, despite the mountains of brand marketing manure we’re all forced to confront every minute of every day each year, it really is practically impossible to narrow down all the best brand marketing creativity to just five picks.

The scale and scope of the work is as vast as our own media consumption. It’s why among the upwards of 15,000 people heading to the south of France next week, for what’s often been called the Oscars of advertising, will be people from IBM and Deloitte, mingling with people from Snap and Facebook, strolling with names like A$AP Rocky, Helen Mirren, Elizabeth Moss, and Halsey, all surrounded by some of the best and brightest from ad agencies around the world.

Anyway, that’s a long way to say for the purposes of this pre-Cannes list, I’m sticking to the good ol’ fashioned film category, as good a barometer as any for brand creativity, since its demise has been reported for about a decade now, yet it keeps on ticking. Of course efforts like Addict Aide’s “Like My Addiction,” TAC Victoria’s “Meet Graham,” and State Street’s “Fearless Girl” will also be highly awarded across other categories. Fear not, I’ll put together a Top 5 winners post after the festivities have wrapped on the Croisette. So, caveats aside, here are five ads — and pretty safe bets — we’re pulling for heading into Cannes Lions. En avant!

Sandy Hook Promise “Evan”

WHAT: A PSA that brilliantly illustrates the need to watch for warning signs of gun violence.

WHO: Sandy Hook Promise, BBDO New York

WHY WE CARE: Sandy Hook Promise says that 80% of school shooters and 70% of individuals who completed suicides told someone of their violent plans prior to taking action, yet no interventions weren’t made. This expertly told story aims to raise our awareness to better see and hear the potential warning signs. As BBDO New York creative director Peter Alsante told me back in December, one of the biggest challenges in crafting a story for this issue is that it’s often difficult for most people to relate to. “It’s such a tragedy, and so many people say, ‘That’s terrible but it would never happen here.’ Our big goal or challenge going into this is to take this thing that’s so abstract to so many people, and frame it in a way that it becomes believable, relatable, something tangible,”

Kenzo “My Mutant Brain”

WHAT: WHAT?!? Possibly the greatest fragrance ad of all time, directed by Spike Jonze and featuring Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers, The Nice Guys) moving her body–and face–in mesmerizing, and sometimes explosive, ways to the sounds of “Mutant Brain” by Sam Spiegel and Ape Drums.

WHO: Kenzo, Spike Jonze

WHY WE CARE: Aside from just being a swift kick to the funballs of your brain, it’s also a result of creative directors Humberto Leon and Carol Lim’s approach to advertising and their goal to infiltrate culture with culture (which also helped them land Kenzo on Fast Company‘s 2017 Most Innovative Companies list). “We’re cultural nerds and buffs, and it’s exciting for us to tap into culture in any way we can,” Leon told me back in October. “Two years ago we said, ‘How can we do advertising that feels different?’ I came up with the idea to do short films and then do print ads that were done up like movie posters for the short films. Super simple idea. And it worked out really well for us.”

Samsung “Ostrich”

WHAT: A Samsung ad that takes on a new perspective for the inspirational potential of its Gear VR.

WHO: Samsung, Leo Burnett

WHY WE CARE: It’s product demo as an expression of pure joy. Not an easy feat. That, and pairing Elton John and a charming, giant flightless bird can never go wrong.

Channel 4 “We’re the Superhumans”

WHAT: A fun, inspirational look at the athletes to promote the UK broadcaster’s coverage of the Paralympic Games in Rio.

WHO: Channel 4, 4Creative London

WHY WE CARE: For too many, the Paralympics get relegated to afterthought once the Olympic Games are over. Here, Channel 4 serves up plenty of reasons to watch, celebrating the athletes’ accomplishments on and off the athletic field of competition, in a delightfully inspirational way, all set to a snappy Sammy Davis cover.

Donate Life “The World’s Biggest Asshole”

WHAT: A PSA campaign to raise awareness, particularly with young men, about the importance of being an organ donor.

WHO: Donate Life, The Martin Agency

WHY WE CARE: Narrated by Will Arnett, this is the story of Coleman F. Sweeney (played by Thomas Jane), one of the world’s preeminent a-holes. Knowing that millennials like to be entertained even when the topic is serious, that they like darker, edgier storytelling, and see through marketing BS faster than any other demographic, and if they like something they share it with friends, Coleman seemed like a great way to get a point across.

Martin Agency group creative director Wade Alger told me back in August, “We also realized given today’s media-drenched society, we wouldn’t just be competing with other nonprofit work that is out there–we are competing with everything that is out there,” says Alger. “So we had to do something that really stood out. And while the campaign uses language that may be startling to some, it is increasingly routine among younger audiences.”


How To Mentor A Remote Employee

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Full or part-time remote work is growing trend. Gallup’s “2017 State of the American Workplace” report found that nearly four in 10 employees does some work from home.

Gallup’s research found remote workers overall to be slightly more engaged than their in-office counterparts. However, the report also indicated that those who spend more time working remotely rather than in the office may miss “important social and collaborative opportunities that are integral to engagement and well-being.”

But Jody Greenstone Miller, CEO of Business Talent Group, says that managing remote workers isn’t much different than managing other employees. By building relationships and mentoring workers, you can develop employees and keep them feeling very much a part of the team, she says. And while mentoring people who work elsewhere offers some challenges, it’s not much different than mentoring people you see regularly, she says.

To create an effective remote mentoring program, focus on four key pillars.

Set The Same Expectations

Remote workers need to be on the same page as in-office workers in terms of expectations and policies, says Phil Shawe, cofounder and co-CEO of TransPerfect, a translation technology company. Lay out the rules on employee spending, vacation time, business trips, etc. for everyone, regardless of their location. “You don’t want to have a different set of standards for remote and non-remote workers,” he says. To understand how well you’re developing your employee, you need to know that you’re starting with a basic level of knowledge about the company and its policies.

Similarly, get on the same page about what each person expects out of the mentoring relationship, he says. Stay in regular contact without micromanaging, but you need to be sure how your protégé is feeling about issues like workload and deadlines so you can find areas where the individual needs help developing new skills or overcoming challenges.

Build A Relationship First (IRL If Possible)

Leanne Beesley, CEO and cofounder of remote work consulting company Coworker.com has both a remote mentor—her business partner, Sam Marks—and a remote protégé. One of the key challenges of remote mentoring arrangements is being able to build enough rapport so that they’re comfortable asking questions and to get to know them well enough that you can spot strengths and weaknesses. A mentoring relationship is a two-way street, so it’s crucial that you build a connection with your “mentee” early on so they don’t feel intimidated by you, she says.

“When I started mentoring one of our remote employees, I flew her out from Toronto to Barcelona to work with me in person for a week. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made as the impact it had on our communication has been huge,” she says. Using personality profiles can give you a shortcut to help understand the person and how to best communicate and interact with them, she says. (Beesley prefers a form of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator).

Build In More Structure

Remote mentoring relationships need more structure and communication than you might think is necessary, says Nancy Halpern, principal of workforce consulting firm KNH Associates. You need to determine how often you’ll be in touch and through what formats. Keeping that cadence will help you ensure that you’re communicating regularly enough to have an impact.

“Mentoring relationships often fail because they can’t land in the sweet spot between overly casual and overly engineered. It’s critical when connecting remotely to have an initial agenda and a loose plan—so that the framework is there but you’re willing to adapt,” she says. You may also need to set aside time during each of your sessions to discuss development needs and planning—something that may occur more naturally or intuitively if you were spending more face-time with your protégé or mentor, she says.

And that structure may change over time, especially as you get to know each other better, Beesley says. She and Marks met when she was freelancing for a tech company. He had the strategic background she wanted in a mentor. As they began to build Coworker together, the mentoring relationship became more informal with less structure. Now, instead of calls or video-conferences, they use WhatsApp voice messaging several times a day. “Hearing each other’s voice helps bridge the gap that not being in the same office can cause,” she says.

Feedback And Recognition

Creating systems for feedback and recognition can help strengthen both formal and informal mentoring relationships, Miller says. At her firm, she instituted “feedback Fridays” where employees and managers are encouraged to engage with each other and share feedback to improve their communication with each other and recognize both areas for improvements and jobs well done.

She says the role of the manager is getting harder, overall. Managers face new challenges and need to be clearer than ever about the definition of success in the job and what it takes to get there, she says. It also requires more effort to stay connected with people to get a true understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, she says.

“I think the basic core values of assuming positive intent, having a very high ethical culture because you’ve got people remote. You’ve got to have that. You can’t monitor what everyone’s doing. The values of a company, I think, becomes really important in a remote situation,” Miller says.

Advertising Superstar David Droga Knows How To Get In Your Head

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Just over a month after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, The New York Times launched its first major ad campaign in recent memory. At its center was a powerful, minimalist TV commercial that debuted during the February 26 Academy Awards broadcast.

In the spot, the disembodied voices of cable-news pundits chatter away as various statements flash in black letters on a plain white screen:

The truth is our nation is more divided than ever.
The truth is alternative facts are lies.
The truth is women’s rights are human rights.
The truth is we have to protect our borders.

It concludes with a tagline: “The truth is more important now than ever.”

The commercial went viral, racking up more than 15 million YouTube views. Stephen Colbert made a parody version, publications across the country covered it as a news story of its own, and the president himself turned his Sauron-like eye on the campaign via his favorite channel of unfiltered communication, Twitter: “For first time the failing @nytimes will take an ad (a bad one) to help save its failing reputation. Try reporting accurately & fairly!”

For ad-industry watchers, it was this repetition and amplification of the original message across so many channels that was most impressive. In fact, it’s one of the signatures of the New York–based agency that created it, Droga5. From its founding in 2006, the company has looked for novel ways to feed its messages into the larger media and pop-culture machine, dramatically increasing reach and impact. The strategy doesn’t always work, but when it does—as with the New York Times campaign—the effect is significant. “Just knowing you’re putting something out there that could take on a greater life, that’s our sweet spot,” says David Droga, the agency’s Australia-born founder and creative chairman. “That’s what we try to do.”

Droga—who has a reputation for being outspoken, edgy, and critical of his industry—is one of the ad business’s key thinkers at a moment of major uncertainty. Last year, digital marketing in the United States exceeded television advertising for the first time, with $72.5 billion spent online versus $71.3 billion paid for TV spots, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report. With 30-second TV spots increasingly being replaced by programmatic advertising on Facebook and Google, the creative work done by traditional agencies matters far less than data analytics and targeting.

Yet despite these industry-wide challenges, Droga5 is thriving. As an early master of virality and shareability in the Facebook–YouTube era, Droga has learned how to cut through the clutter. His company won $65 million in new business in 2016, and total revenue was up from $126 million in 2015 to $170 million last year. The agency is as comfortable with social media strategy as it is with big-dollar TV spots, which has attracted a wildly diverse roster of clients, from Chase (for which it helped a New York bakery create a viral sensation around a giant doughnut as part of a credit-card campaign) to deep-pocketed athletic-wear brands such as Under Armour (celebrity-stoked ads starring Michael Phelps and the ballerina Misty Copeland) and tech firms like MailChimp (a surrealist, multipronged effort designed to increase brand awareness). Last year, Droga5 even did a few ads for the Hillary Clinton campaign, including a widely shared spot that depicted kids watching some of Trump’s most notorious statements. “I look at the strategy and what happened, and secretly I wish we spent more time building her up, rather than attacking Trump,” Droga now says. “We were so emotionally invested in that idea [of going after Trump].”

Related: David Droga Picks His Five Key Campaigns

As Droga’s approach has gone mainstream, competition has increased significantly. Several of the planet’s biggest management consultancies, including Accenture and Deloitte, are creeping onto Droga5’s turf by buying up smaller ad firms and folding them into their portfolio of services, and virtually every major brand, from Boeing to Pepsi, has launched in-house ad divisions, cutting out independent agencies with years of messaging expertise. And within the agency world, shops both small and large are embracing data and technology as part of the trend known as “Agency 3.0.”

Like the rest of us, Droga generally finds advertising invasive and annoying. As he notes, “We work in an industry where people invent technology to avoid what we create.” Which is why he’s relentlessly focused on crafting campaigns that consumers receive willingly, because of their humor or pathos or just by virtue of being really interesting. “Droga has incredible range,” says David Rubin, The New York Times’s head of brand. “They have the ability to tell stories in lots of different emotions, and that’s really important.” Droga himself has a simple take on what his agency does best. “It’s crude, but the essence, whether we’re talking to a billion-dollar client or a startup, is: Why would anyone give a shit about what we’re making?” he says. “Not, Do we think it’s cool or clever or funny or worthy? It’s, Why is this relevant?”

[Photos: Tobias Hutzler]
Droga is sitting in his corner office at the company’s Wall Street headquarters. The agency moved to the handsome prewar tower in 2014, and it recently expanded from five floors to eight. “At first, I was like, ‘No fucking way am I moving to Wall Street,’ ” says Droga, whose firm was previously housed in a loftlike space in the hipster-friendly zone of NoHo (there is also an office in London). “But when I saw the building, it was unbelievable—so now there’s this sea of plaid and facial hair coming out of the subway every morning.”

He’s wearing a slouchy blue blazer, white polo shirt, tan corduroys, and a pair of artfully battered work boots. An oversize black-and-white photo of Muhammad Ali dominates the wall behind his desk, part of an excellently high-low mix of objects on display—from big-ticket pieces by artists like Ai Weiwei to a replica of racing legend Ayrton Senna’s helmet. Droga’s office also contains the first piece of art he ever purchased. (He’s now a major collector, with a particular interest in Chinese art, and sits on the board of New York’s New Museum.) It’s a small sculpture, set into a deep frame, depicting a pair of cartoon spiders gazing at a web that blocks the bottom of a playground slide. A caption taped to the frame reads, “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.” When he was 18, Droga spent all the money he had—something like $2,000—to buy the piece, which turns out to be one of a very small series of three-dimensional Far Side comics created by the cartoonist Gary Larson. “All my friends were like, ‘What are you doing buying that thing?’ ” he recalls, laughing. “But I was just so drawn to it.”

The anecdote, along with the piece itself, captures a lot of what drives Droga: an attraction to simple, hilarious ideas; a comfort with risk; an obsession with images that move him. He grew up in rural New South Wales, Australia, where his father owned and ran a ski resort and his mother, who is from Denmark, was an artist. Droga was the fifth of six kids; the agency’s name comes from labels his mom sewed in his clothes. “My mother couldn’t give a fuck about”—he gestures around the office—”this. I mean, she’s happy that I’m successful, but she judges everything on, ‘What are you doing for others?’ and ‘Are you creating beautiful things?’ My father, on the other hand, was a classic well-educated businessman. I’m kind of like both of them: My mother grew up wanting to save the world, and my father grew up wanting to rule the world.”

Despite the shots Droga likes to take at his profession—within a few minutes of meeting him he’ll tell you that he doesn’t watch commercials on TV and that most of advertising is just “chest-puffery” or “fireworks that disappear the second they’re out there”—it’s all he ever really wanted to do. He skipped college and got a job in the mailroom of a Sydney agency at age 18; just four years later, he was a partner and creative lead at another Australian firm. By the time he started Droga5, he had made his way, via increasingly prestigious posts at ever-larger agencies, from Sydney to Singapore to London to New York, where he landed as the worldwide chief creative officer at Publicis—a job, he likes to say, that was so well compensated and influential that you’d have to be crazy to quit. But Droga did leave, wanting to escape the ever-consolidating, increasingly corporatized industry, and also to grow a business of his own.

Droga5’s very first work established its influential sensibility. In 2006, back when the agency had just a few employees, it created a digital spot for streetwear brand Ecko Unltd in the form of a highly convincing lo-fi video that appeared to show founder (and graffiti artist) Marc Ecko breaking into Andrews Air Force Base and tagging Air Force One. The clip became an early viral smash. A series of much-discussed campaigns followed: In 2008’s “The Great Schlep,” Sarah Silverman encouraged Jewish grandparents to vote for Barack Obama; 2014’s “If We Made It” had the beer brand Newcastle describing the Super Bowl ad it would have made, if it only had the budget.

In 2013, Droga sold 49% of his agency to the Hollywood powerhouse WME, for a reported $225 million. The move has created some interesting opportunities, not least of which was the possibility of taking on Hollywood stars as clients. There are now four or five of these deals, including one with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Droga5 helped Johnson team with Under Armour (another Droga client) for a line of popular shoes and athletic wear, and the agency promoted the star’s latest movie, a Baywatch remake, by concocting a viral stunt that involved hundreds of people jogging through L.A. in slo-mo, in a nod to the Baywatch TV series’ cheesy beach-running sequences.

This sort of broader thinking is now at the center of Droga5’s business. Its strategy team—which has grown in importance over the years to become a pillar of the agency—offers clients help with product development, social media planning, website design, PR tactics, and branding. “Last year, our agenda was, How do we achieve the type of Droga5 work we’re known for and scale?” says Droga5 global CEO Sarah Thompson. “This year is very much about, How do we affect our clients at a more business-transformation level?”

Sarah Thompson, Droga5’s global CEO , is steering the agency toward a strategy that goes far beyond traditional marketing. [Photos: Tobias Hutzler]
Jonny Bauer, Droga5’s global chief strategy officer, kicks back on a sofa in his office beneath a large neon sign that reads WITH FULL CONSENT—created by his wife, the conceptual artist Jill Magid. A nearby sideboard is stocked with bottles of cognac, whiskey, and champagne (Droga5’s credenza budget can’t be insubstantial, as virtually every office is equipped with a vintage teak cabinet). To Bauer, the advertising industry has reached an inflection point that Droga5 is uniquely positioned to exploit. “The biggest question is around design and what role that plays,” he says, in an accent tinged with his native Australia. “We’ve always been a nontraditional, integrated advertising agency that will do more than just TV ads. But our focus now is bringing design thinking into the development process to inform the experience: What is the product, what is the web presence, what innovation should they be creating, what is the business case around those innovations?”

When the agency takes on a new client, Bauer’s team begins a deep-dive research mission—sifting through financials, launching ethnographic research on customer behavior, embedding with various parts of the business. The goal is to unearth the client’s purpose (a word you hear constantly at Droga), which is the idea from which everything else will emerge. In Bauer’s view, it’s this process that gives the agency its biggest edge.

If you want to see this in action, the best place to go is the spiritual center of Droga HQ: a glass-walled conference room that floats above a grand staircase-slash-amphitheater connecting the agency’s 10th- and 11th-floor spaces. It’s called the Creative Box, and it’s where the Droga teams often confer with clients. One early May afternoon, the agency is hosting a strategy meeting with executives from new client Mattress Firm, the top retailer in an industry that’s found itself challenged by nimble bed-in-a-box players like Casper and Leesa. The meeting explores every interaction a customer might potentially have with the brand, from an initial Google search to post-purchase engagement. “All the bed-in-a-box guys are playing in that post-purchase space,” notes Droga strategist Dan Neumann. “With sheets, with pillows . . .” A colleague interjects, “With dog beds!”

When Droga5 started working with Mattress Firm, the strategy group had identified sleep tech—everything from cooling mattress pads to adjustable bedroom lighting—as an area ripe for the company to explore. Today’s meeting comes as Mattress Firm is preparing to roll out the first result of this plan: a new tech-infused product, the Beautyrest Black Hybrid mattress, which claims to use “multitouch” memory foam in a new way. A few weeks later, it will be revealed with an Apple-style keynote, hosted by Steve Wozniak, that Droga5 concocted. The agency also came up with a tagline for an entirely new category of Mattress Firm products: “Technology to Power Off.”

This big-picture approach is where Bauer envisions the most opportunity for the agency going forward: using the kind of thinking the company originally developed to help inform the messaging, but applying it to deeper levels of problem solving. Droga5 is doing this type of work—developing new products, refining customer service, streamlining the shopping experience—for a whole range of clients, from Sprint to Pizza Hut to Chase. “It’s about integrating the brand and the experience together,” says Bauer. “We’re having the core conversations about how they build their business.”

Global chief strategy officer Jonny Bauer is injecting design thinking into Droga5’s creative process. [Photos: Tobias Hutzler]
The way Bauer sees it, even the ad world’s most notorious recent debacle—Pepsi’s epically tone-deaf spot in which Kendall Jenner attends a Black Lives Matter–style protest and offers a police officer a beverage—was more of a strategic failure than a creative one. Which is to say, a kind of failure that Droga5 is strongly inoculated against. “What role does Pepsi have in the world?” Bauer asks. “Key peacekeeper through product sipping? That doesn’t seem like a credible strategy. No matter how beautiful the model or how poetic the music or how cinematically it was shot, no one asked the fundamental question: What is the right thing for this brand to be doing in this world? And we spend a lot of time getting to the heart of what that is.”

Not insignificantly, that Jenner spot was made by PepsiCo’s recently created in-house agency, which has increasingly been taking over messaging efforts from the brand’s various marketing partners. As a result, some industry watchers point to it as a prime example of the dangers of forgoing the perspective and expertise of outside shops such as Droga5. “I actually took less glee from it than I probably should have,” says Droga. “It just felt like another black eye for us as an industry. But what makes me optimistic is there’s work out there made with consideration, thought, and respect. Just thinking that the consumer isn’t an idiot or a moron is a great starting place.”

A master of shareable content, David Droga has created resonant ads for The New York Times, Under Armour, Chase, and other big brands. [Photos: Tobias Hutzler]
Every so often, Droga gathers the entire creative department at the office’s central staircase and runs through what’s happening with the agency. At one such recent meeting, he starts by announcing a slew of new awards the team has won. (Since it launched, the company has racked up more than 100 Cannes Lions, the industry’s most prestigious recognition.) Next, he shifts to new business. Under Armour was talking to the rapper A$AP Rocky about possible collaborations, and it turns out he is a major Droga5 fan. Droga tells the team about a recent phone call between the two of them. “He asked, ‘Do you guys do music videos?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ And he said, ‘Well, you guys are doing my next music video.’ ” Everybody laughs. When Droga asks for volunteers to work on the project, a few dozen hands shoot up.

These are the kinds of opportunities that are often coming Droga5’s way—projects that leverage the company’s skill set in entirely new ways. The New York office’s second floor now houses the agency’s new production company, Second Child. There’s a vast photo studio, bank after bank of editing suites, even podcast facilities. The idea is that Second Child can speed up the turnaround of work generated upstairs, as in the case of some recent New York Times ads that were created in the facility. It can also take on projects unrelated to agency business.

One recent success was Tree, a virtual-reality short film that was executive produced by Droga5 and appeared at the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals. Using an Oculus Rift headset and a multisensory array of scent machines, fans, and portable heaters, the film turns the viewer into a tree in the Amazon rain forest—experiencing its entire life, from seed to eventual death by clear-cutting. There’s no client to bill, or really any money to be made from the project, but to Droga it’s been well worth the investment because it adds to the agency’s understanding of a crucial new medium.

These days, Droga5 is thinking about campaigns as broad multimedia events that go far beyond the usual TV, online, and mobile content and into more unexpected forms of communication. Its recent MailChimp work, for example, was a hyperambitious nine-campaigns-in-one mega-ad that tested every skill a modern agency needs to thrive today. To raise awareness of the email-marketing service, Droga5 created a whole range of wacky interconnected content that hinted at the brand’s name, from a legitimately popular song (by a new band called VeilHymn, which included indie star Dev Hynes) to a series of surreal short films to a line of snacks (Fail Chips), which were distributed nationwide. Interestingly, the campaign gave virtually no indication of what MailChimp does—because Droga5 was confident that potential customers would find the content intriguing enough to take that next step themselves.

But no matter how ambitious and complex his company’s work gets, Droga still measures success by one primary metric: impact. “It’s not about being the biggest or the place with the most pins in a map,” he says. “We want to be the most influential. We talk about trying to build the most influential agency in the world.”

David Droga Picks His Five Key Campaigns

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From a viral stunt to a team-up with a rap superstar, here are Droga5 founder David Droga‘s choices for five advertising moments that have defined his innovative company.

1. Ecko Unltd,“Still Free,” 2006

Droga5’s first work was a bold buzz-builder that didn’t appear to be an ad. In a grainy video, fashion CEO Marc Ecko hops a fence and seems to spray graffiti on Air Force One. It wasn’t real, but CNN and others bit, which massively amplified the reach of the low-budget campaign. “Before the term ‘viral video’ came out,” says Droga, “we used the mass media to our advantage.”

2. Jewish Council For Education And Research, “The Great Schlep,” 2008

During the 2008 presidential election, Droga5 came up with a pro-Obama campaign intended to sway the votes of elderly Jewish voters in the crucial swing state of Florida. The hilarious spots, starring comedian Sarah Silverman, were aimed not at the voters themselves, but rather at the demo most likely to command their undivided attention: their grandchildren.

3. Microsoft, “Decode Jay Z,” 2009

Microsoft wanted to attract younger users to its Bing Maps. Jay Z wanted to promote his auto­biography. So Droga5 cooked up an unusual, mutually beneficial double campaign. “You can make partnerships where partnerships never existed,” says Droga. “Brands you’d usually have to pay millions of dollars will participate for nothing, because they want to be part of something cool.”

4. Prudential, “Day One,” 2011

When the insurance giant hired Droga5, there were fears—both from industry watchers and internal staff—that it might diminish Droga’s cool. “Everybody said, ‘You’ll ruin the agency,’ ” Droga recalls. “But no matter what the category, I’ll put our thinkers up against anybody’s.” The result was a series of powerful mini documentaries in which people share hopes and fears about retirement.

5. Under Armour, “I Will What I Want,” 2014

The athletic-gear company had a problem. “Women,” says Droga5 strategy chief Jonny Bauer, “thought the brand was for meatheads.” To promote Under Armour’s efforts to make items more female-friendly, Droga5 made ads with ballet dancer Misty Copeland. “Customers needed to know that the product had [truly] changed,” he says. “It wasn’t just ‘Make it pink.'”

Read the feature story: Advertising Superstar David Droga Knows How To Get In Your Head

Now You Can Go Shark Watching On A Submarine

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When you own your own submarine, every week can be Shark Week. OceanGate, the submarining company that is planning on taking tourists to the Titanic, is about to help guests get up close and personal with sharks on an adventure to the briny deep.

OceanGate Expeditions is teaming up with the Bahamas-based marine research group Cape Eleuthera Institute on a deep-sea survey of the Exuma Sound looking for sharks, other sharks, and more sharks. OceanGate is providing the submarine—its presumably shark-proof submersible Cyclops 1—and the crew, while the Cape Eleuthera Institute will bring the experts, ideally ones able to rank the sharks on a scale of “aww cute!” to “we’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Cyclops 1 [Photo: courtesy of OceanGate]

The expeditions will kick off in October 2017, with multiple weeks of diving each season over a year, hoping to provide new details on deep-sea sharks and other creatures that lurk beneath the waters off the Great Bahama Bank continental shelf. While living every week like it’s Shark Week sounds fun, the trip isn’t just for tourists to fluff up their Instagram accounts. It will serve a legitimate scientific purpose. “Having OceanGate’s manned submersible at our facility for a whole year will allow us to explore the depths of the Bahamas and collect information about deep sea organisms that are still very much a mystery, as well as observe better known creatures like sharks that are more often studied in the shallows,” said Dr. Andrew Gill, Director of the Cape Eleuthera Institute, in a press release.

[Photo: courtesy of OceanGate]

If you sign up for the adventure, you won’t be merely a tourist, but will be required to help in the survey, keeping your eyes peeled for sharks of every make and model, and not flinching when you run into critters like this guy. Paying guests will also help photograph the inhabitants watery world, and learn what it takes to manage sub-communications and subsea navigation. This is no internship, though. Instead, people who sign up for the survey will have to fork over at least $15,000 to help underwrite a three-day mission, or $10,000 to help subsidize a one-day mission (get more information here). By contrast, tickets to watch Mandy Moore withstand a shark attack in 47 Meters Down run about $12, and checking Jaws out of the library is free.

How To Use Your Emotional Intelligence To Rewrite Your Job Description

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If you have a job, there’s a roughly 50/50 chance you don’t like it—at least according to one sobering study last year. Not only are those statistical odds the same everywhere, but quitting for a more satisfying gig is easier said than done. Plus, it can take awhile to learn the technical skills you might need to land a job you like more.

But there may be a useful shortcut: What if you could double down on the so-called “soft skills”—like emotional intelligence—that you already have in order to improve the job you’re in? It starts with just thinking more strategically about your relationships around the office. Here’s what to do.


Related:Emotional Intelligence Is The Secret To Getting Promoted Faster 


Step 1: Make Yourself Invaluable

If your coworkers don’t see you as a valuable team member, you won’t have any leverage to shift your job responsibilities to do more of what you like and less of what you don’t.

Being invaluable starts with being reliable. Do what you say you’re going to do; finish what you start; show up on time; be prepared for meetings; and give serious attention to your manager’s expectations. This all might seem really basic, but it’ll help you lay the groundwork you’ll be able to build on. Your goal here is just to become excellent at the job that you already have, even if you don’t like all aspects of it. Do it faster and better than anyone who has done it before, and before long your boss is bound to notice.

Why is this the emotionally intelligent thing to do? It shows empathy, problem-solving, and collaboration–all things that your manager needs in order to count on you to deliver, especially if you’re gunning for new opportunities or even a promotion. (Plus, truly mastering your craft will come in handy when you need to train someone else to do your job.)

Step 2: Think Like Your Boss Thinks

This isn’t as simple as getting them coffee. It goes much deeper. Begin to notice their habits, like the questions they ask regularly, their communication patterns, what they praise, and what tasks and goals they feel are important.

Yes, this may mean shifting your own habits. If your manager expects an answer to their emails promptly, respond quickly–even if the answer is, “I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I’m on it.” Be adaptable to their idiosyncrasies, even if those might not all be your preferred way of doing things.

If you take the time to understand your manager and anticipate their needs, you’ll be able to be there with a solution when they need one–all without having to actually learn new technical skills. Pay attention to the stumbling blocks that seem to get them every time, the kinks in the process that drive them crazy, and shift your thinking to approach problems from your manager’s perspective. It’s not kissing ass; it’s paying attention–and in that sense, it’s pretty easy.

Step 3: Ask For The Work You Want

Once you’ve totally aced everything included in your current job description, you can start stretching outside of it. And that means speaking up. Start by telling your boss what you want to do more of, then show that you can handle it and explain how it ties with your current position.

This can be small-scale stuff to start with (don’t set yourself up for failure by over-committing too soon). Want to be the go-to person for writing in your department? Offer to edit important documents and emails before they go out. If you do it well, pretty soon everyone will be running important written communication by you, and you’ll establish a sense of authority.

Love brainstorming and idea generation? Offer to lead a weekly brown-bag lunch to discuss challenging projects and offer team suggestions to problems. You might soon earn the reputation in the company as someone who brings together great ideas.

Step 4: Sell Delegation As A Learning Opportunity

Start by getting to know your colleagues better than you already do. Find out what they shine at and what they want to learn.

But it’s not about being nosy or just trying to micromanage your own colleagues–the goal is to identify the people who have the skills to do what you no longer want to. This way you can approach your boss with a few cross-training opportunities already lined up. Position the work you don’t want as a learning opportunity for someone else–a chance for them to pick up skills that will ultimately benefit the company. Just make sure that the person you’re trying to delegate to can do the work with their current workload.

Follow these four steps, and it won’t be long before you’re dreading Monday mornings a lot less. You’ll be doing more things you actually enjoy around the office–and helping your boss and colleagues in the process. If you can make that happen, why quit?


Dr. Lisa M. Aldisert is a New York City–based business advisor, trend expert, speaker, and author. She is the president of Pharos Alliance Inc., an executive advisory firm specializing in strategic planning and organizational and leadership development.

New Hires: Here’s What Not To Say In Your First Month On The Job

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When you first start a job, not only is it important to make a positive first impression, it’s also important to prove a point. No, you’re not trying to stroll into the new job and act like the head honcho, but instead, you are trying to prove your worth and potential. All eyes are on you, the new hire, and it’s your time to shine.

To dazzle your boss, align with colleagues, and be primed for success, there are not only some quick wins to achieve in the first 30 days, but there are also some definite no-nos. Listen, learn, and lean in are the must-dos. Alienating, assuming, and acting aloof are behaviors that will tarnish your reputation before you’ve even had a chance to make it to your first performance review.

Put your positive foot forward and take note of these 10 things to never say in the first 30 days of work.

1. “I Just Assumed . . . “

Don’t be afraid to ask questions–that’s what your “new hire” time is for. Steer clear of this statement, and replace it with comments like “What are your thoughts about . . . ” and “How does your team approach . . . ” or “What do you think about when trying to tackle . . . ”

2. “Isn’t That Chris’s Job? Should We Loop Him In?”

While it may be correct to include an important stakeholder in a meeting, saying “Isn’t that Chris’s job?” is a bit off-putting. It can make you sound uncooperative and may be a red flag to colleagues that perhaps you’re not a team player. Remember, teamwork makes the dream work. Pitch in where you can and be a hand-raiser in the first 30 days especially.


Related:What I Wished Someone Told Me Before I Started My First Job 


3. “I Tried My Best”

Do, don’t try. Just do! In the first 30 days, you should aim to achieve, if not exceed, expectations. Your goal should be to add value to the team and contribute as much as you can. Instead of making excuses, try making strides. Trust us, your boss will appreciate your tenacity.

4. “Why Do Parents Get To Work From Home Some Days?”

Showing distaste for the company’s flexible work policies or how coworkers schedule their work will not win you any friends at the office. Sure, there have been recent discussions about the perception of unfair workloads between single, childless workers and married colleagues or those with families. However, this is not a debate that new employees need to engage in–at least not publicly. If you want a flexible work schedule, discuss that with your boss, and leave the parents on the team out of it.


Related:Want More Flexible Hours? Here’s How To Get Them Without Asking Your Boss


5. “At My Last Job, We Did It Like This . . . “

As tempting as this one might be, watch out for how many times this slips out. Once or twice is fine, but you don’t want your new colleagues to think that you’re unable to leave the processes of your past roles in the, well, in the past. Embrace new tools, tactics, and procedures. Once you’ve learned the protocol, feel free to suggest tweaks or efficiencies.


Related:How To Negotiate Your First Salary


6. “I Should’ve Asked For More Money”

While you may have regrets about your salary negotiation or compensation, focus on the future. Set aside the “shoulda, coulda, wouldas” and focus on the work at hand. Once performance review time comes, you can use Know Your Worth to make your case for a raise.

7. “That Makes No Sense”

It’s easy to get confused when you’re new to the job. However, instead of sounding negative, simply ask probative questions to understand what your colleague is saying. Try: “I want to understand more, can you give me the background?”

8. “I’m Sorry, But . . . “

If you’ve made a misstep, own it. No need for excuses. Your boss and colleagues understand that onboarding can be bumpy. Simply apologize and move on. Next time, you’ll do better.

9. “Because I’m In Charge”

While you may be the senior team member, there’s no need to throw your weight around in such an obvious, heavy-handed way. Lead by example.

10. “I Quit”

No matter what, keep your cool. Even if you’re contemplating jumping ship, do it gracefully.


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

Someone Just Made A Mashup Album Of Beyoncé And Jay Z’s Top Hits

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As if resolidifying the message of forgiveness from the tail-end of Lemonade, some gracious soul has blessed our ears with the album Bey-Z, eight tracks featuring mashups of Beyoncé and Jay Z’s top hits. Bandcamp user “amorphous” seamlessly stitches together tracks like Beyoncé’s “Diva” and Jay Z’s “Pimpin'” or “Partition” with “Can I Get A . . .” breathing new life into already certified jams and bops. The album is on a name-your-own-price basis, so make sure you give up those coins accordingly because you already know Bey-Z slays.

Download Bey-Zhere.


The Next iPhone Will Most Likely Be Waterproof, Even Under Warranty

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For its next iPhone, Apple is under pressure to outshine rival Samsung when it comes to design, speed, and how waterproof it truly is.

The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus already had a certain amount of water resistance, It’s guaranteed to resist momentary exposures to splashes, etc., but was not built to withstand full submersion in water.

Samsung phones were rated IP68 water- and dust-resistant starting last year with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge and the Note 7 (which was obviously not explosion-resistant). This year’s Galaxy S8 and S8 Edge are also IP68 rated. Samsung users like to drop Galaxy phones into fishtanks during product demos. It’s cute. The LG G6 has an IP68 rating. So do many others–it’s becoming the norm. (See an explanation of the ratings here.)

Now iPhone assembler Wistron says the next generation of 5.5-inch iPhones (likely called the 7s Plus), expected to be announced this fall, will be IP68 waterproof (and will support wireless charging too), according to a Nikkei report. A higher-end “iPhone 8” would very likely get the IP68 rating, too.

Even though the existing iPhone 7 line is at least partly waterproof, the Apple warranty doesn’t cover water damage. Actually, Apple’s warranties don’t say anything specific to water damage. They simply state that Apple won’t cover damage from any use not covered by its published guidelines.

Those guidelines:

iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are splash, water, and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP67 under IEC standard 60529. Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.

If the iPhone 7s Plus gets an IP68 rating, the usage guidelines may shift to look something like Samsung’s for the S8. Paraphrased:

The device is water resistant in fresh water to a maximum depth of 1.5m for up to 30 minutes, and are protected from dust. The device may be damaged if water or dust enters the device. Do not expose the device to water moving with force, such as water running from a tap, ocean waves, or waterfalls.

But before going swimming with the next iPhone, buyers are well-advised to make sure the marketing claims of “waterproof” are backed up by the legal fine print in the warranty.

Actually, Apple tends to build more waterproofing into its devices than what the marketing materials say. Many people have reported showering with their iPhone 7 with no problems. Same thing with the first Apple Watch, which many believe offered a high level of water resistance, but did not hype it, or guarantee it.

The IP68 level of waterproofing will have real-world value for iPhone owners. It might bail out the thousands of people who drop their iDevices into sinks and toilets every year (then play the dreaded game of “rice roulette,” which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t).

The U.S. Just Picked Intel, IBM, Nvidia, And Others To Help Make Supercomputers 50 Times Faster

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In 2013, the United States ceded the supercomputing crown to China, whose Sunway TaihuLight machine is over five times as powerful as the U.S. government’s fastest system, called Titan. But the Department of Energy is working on a new generation of supercomputers that are 50 times faster than Titan—a performance boost described as “exascale.” Today, DoE awarded $258 million in contracts to six U.S. companies—AMD, Cray (maker of Titan), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia—to build an exascale system by 2021. The companies themselves are expected to add at least $172 million of their own funding to the project, since they will also benefit from the new technologies developed.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s RAM-based computer, dubbed The Machine, previews some of the technology that may be part of the Exascale Computing Project. [Photo: HPE]
Technological contributions to the Exascale Computing Project will vary. In the first phase, companies will be designing technologies that could potentially be used in a future system, says Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). It will be pushing a new computer architecture that keeps data in monstrous amounts of superfast RAM where it can be worked on all at once, rather than shuttling it to and from slower hard drives. This pool of data will be a “fabric” linking processors that work on the data. HPE introduced a prototype of this technology, called The Machine last month.

That memory-oriented approach seems to jibe with IBM’s philosophy. “High performance computing is shifting from a purely compute-centric model to one that is much more data-centric,” writes James Sexton of IBM Research in an email to Fast Company. “The ability to manage, train, sort and analyze the data ‘where it resides’ and ‘as it flows’ through the system is critical to gaining insight quickly from the plethora of data sources vs. traditional [computing methods].”

Nvidia’s contribution will be more-powerful graphics processing units for artificial intelligence—a generation or more beyond the new Volta chips going into DoE computers already slated for 2018. Beyond the hardware, DoE is also charging the companies to write powerful software to run the monstrous calculations.

What can it do?

You’d be forgiven for not grasping what the performance goal of 1,000 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) means for real-world applications. DoE lists plenty of potential examples, such as simulating the effects of earthquakes, predicting the effectiveness of cancer treatments, designing nuclear fusion reactors, and modeling the aerodynamics of giant wind farms. An April 2017 DoE presentation on phenomena that the system can model even includes the words “climate change”—once in a 30-page document.

One of the Exascale Computing Project’s green goals is to boost performance without requiring more energy. But even if DoE succeeds, it will still have a pretty high electric bill. The best-case scenario is a system that consumes 20 megawatts, enough to power about 20,000 homes.

This Mockumentary About Young Trump Superfans Is Great (Again)

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WHAT: Pilot episode for a show about an Infowars wannabe making his way through post-election America.

WHO: Comedians Conner O’Malley, who writes for Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Joe Pera, who is hilarious on Conan.

WHY WE CARE: Much of that towering tidal wave of awesome comedy we were promised from the Trump era has all too often focused on Donald Trump. A more promising subject for satire, however, is the way that Trump has turned the environment into a product of him. Take for instance the cellar-dwelling internet anarchists, overflowing with omnidirectional hatred, who have somehow latched onto his message and made it their own. These dudes found their perfect avatar in Mark Seevers from TruthHunters.com, a character created by Conner O’Malley.

You may recall the video he made last year, in which Seevers went to the RNC. Now, O’Malley has offered an update for anyone wondering how Seevers has fared since his hero rose to power, and it is glorious. TruthHunters.com is a 21-minute pilot that chronicles Seevers’ attempt to navigate a world that seems like it’s on the brink of bending to his adopted mindframe. “I’m the human version of Israel: surrounded by enemies and constantly under attack,” he says with the assuredness of someone not quite sure what he’s talking about, but passionate all the same. It’s a shame the pilot did not get picked up, but one need look no further than Twitter to find millions of Mark Seeverses yelling all the time.

How Wealthfront is Trying To Make Its Robo-Advisor Feel More Human

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Wealthfront, the only major robo-advisor based in Silicon Valley, takes pride in its origins as an engineer-driven company. Newly wealthy techies at nearby Facebook and LinkedIn, attracted to Wealthfront’s almost monastic product focus, were the company’s first customers.

Even though robo-advising is a consumer-facing financial services business, cofounder and CEO Andy Rachleff stubbornly avoided hiring marketers and “scummy” finance types (“scummy” is his favorite Wall Street adjective). “They just don’t think about doing right by the client,” he says. “And when you’ve been conditioned a particular way, it’s very hard to break that mind-set.”

But as Wealthfront has discovered, Facebook millionaires are not representative of most potential robo customers (though those tech titans are not a bad foundation—the company now boasts 130,000 clients and nearly $6.7 billion in assets under management.) In order to take on rivals like Betterment and Charles Schwab, Wealthfront will have to break out of its Silicon Valley stronghold and develop a new growth engine. Rachleff’s first step toward that goal: Hiring a vice president of marketing, at last.

Twitter and YouTube veteran Josh Grau stepped into the role this past spring, and has been racing ever since to design an overhaul of Wealthfront’s website. The revamped look launched earlier today, showcasing a softly humanized version of the company’s robo story.

“This is serious stuff and we’re taking it seriously, but we want to make people feel like we’re having this conversation in their living room,” Grau says of the user experience the company has attempted to design.

That means aspirational illustrations instead of clip art or stock photos, and a sense of real-life journey throughout the site. On a board pinned with near-final mockups of the website in Wealthfront’s Redwood City offices, there are print-outs of Instagram photos to serve as inspiration to the project’s designers, and a Post-it suggesting that the team add plants and wedding photos to a dinner party image on the site. All of it is geared toward an avatar the company thinks of as the “modern traditionalist,” Grau’s intended target within the millennial demographic.

“They’re thinking about the more traditional things like getting married, buying a home,” he says of this demographic. “But they also think about just living their best life.”

Last month Betterment, the leading independent robo-advisor as measured by assets under management, also updated its look. The company commissioned a photo shoot, including portraits of its team in action, and rewrote much of its explanatory language. If Wealthfront tells a story, Betterment offers a clear window into its own inner workings. Both companies emphasize helping customers work toward personal goals like buying a home and paying for college.

For Wealthfront, the stakes of its new approach are arguably higher. Betterment offers customers a hybrid model, wherein human financial advisors are available, via phone, for an extra fee. Wealthfront, in contrast, is all-in on the robo approach. In times of fear or anxiety—say, if the markets tank—Wealthfront’s interface will have to reassure customers with a finesse equivalent to that of a real, live, breathing human being.

Wealthfront believes that means nailing a more human-like content and tone, and building deeper relationships. For example, Grau envisions his product’s user experience eventually incorporating more features that celebrate user milestones, like saving enough for a down payment, and reward hard work and sacrifice on the part of the customer, such as increasing a monthly auto deposit.

Active investing is like “tornado chasing,” Grau adds. But passive investing should feel like a picnic in the park—just like the picnic now featured on Wealthfront’s home page.

This Program Makes Loans To Businesses In Distressed Areas: Trump Wants To Cut It

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Buried deep in President Trump’s federal budget proposal is a zeroing out of money for the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. It barely registers in the grand scheme of the government budget, but cutting it puts a dagger in the heart of a highly successful effort to provide credit to struggling small towns and communities across America–the very places the president says he wants to help.

It’s no surprise if you’ve never heard of a CDFI. They are small nonprofit financial institutions whose mission is to make loans in distressed rural and urban areas. CDFIs go where banks and other private financial institutions simply won’t go because the costs are too high and the returns too low for them to bother. There are lots of these places across the country.

There are over 1,000 CDFIs, and they operate in every corner of the country. [Illustration: panimoni/iStock]
Small businesses, developers of affordable housing and other properties, charter schools, health centers and grocery stores are among the beneficiaries of these loans. Reinvestment Fund, our CDFI, makes loans mostly in the Northeast and South, but there are over 1,000 CDFIs, and they operate in every corner of the country.

To be clear, while CDFIs are growing, they still need support from taxpayers to be truly effective. The CDFI fund makes grants and equity investments to CDFIs. The CDFIs match these contributions dollar-for-dollar with their own funds. This capital seeds a substantial amount of lending. Just last year, CDFIs received just over $200 million from the CDFI Fund and supercharged that money ten-fold into over $2 billion in investments and loans in areas across the country that have been economically left behind.

CDFIs empower cities and local governments throughout the country to make better development decisions. [Illustration: panimoni/iStock]
Consider Honor Capital, a veteran-owned and operated business, which sought to open a grocery store in the rural community of Winfield, Kansas. It was Reinvestment Fund that provided the capital and expertise needed, working with the South Central Kansas Economic Development District and Crowley County to get the store open. New jobs were created and the community had access to healthier food.

CDFIs also rely on New Market Tax Credits to further lower borrowing costs in distressed communities. These credits attract private capital into low-income communities by permitting individual and corporate investors to receive a credit against their federal income tax in exchange for equity investments in CDFIs. These tax credits are similar to those the President used in some of his own real estate developments.

CDFIs enjoy broad bipartisan support. [Illustration: panimoni/iStock]
But CDFIs are coming of age. Reinvestment Fund recently issued a general obligation bond to private investors. We needed the capital because we have outgrown the capacity of the banks to provide funding. It’s one of the first for a CDFI, and builds on the 20-year foundation of public sector support and financing for CDFIs. We are now joining other nonprofits that regularly issue bonds, including universities, hospitals, and state housing finance authorities that are critically vital to their communities.

This is no time for the Trump administration to step away from CDFIs. They meet the gold standard of how private capital can partner with public support to make a difference in communities that have been left behind. They empower cities and local governments throughout the country to make better development decisions, and they enjoy broad bipartisan support. It would be wrong-headed that just as CDFIs are finding new sources of private capital, the federal government pulls the public out of these public-private partnerships.


John Summers, Esq. is Chair of the Litigation Department of Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller and Reinvestment Fund’s Board Chair.

Mark Zandi is Chief Economist, Moody’s Analytics and Reinvestment Fund’s Board Vice-Chair.

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