On April 30, the Ten Thousand Villages fair trade store –stocked with things like shawls hand-woven in India and jewelry made by the Tuareg tribe in Niger–that had sat in Denver’s Cherry Creek North shopping center for over 35 years shuttered its doors. Founded in 1946 and the oldest fair trade supplier (even though the designation wasn’t formalized until 1958) in North America, the organization’s more than 75 retail outlets had faced a tough couple of years as e-commerce sales grew and more fair trade purveyors opened as competition; around 30 Ten Thousand Villages stores have closed since December 2016. The Denver community was devastated; loyal patrons flocked to the shop’s Facebook page to talk about how they loved visiting the store to buy gifts and support its mission of sourcing from 20,000 makers in 30 developing countries.

But Amy Lavan, who had moved from Richmond, Virginia to Denver around two years ago to work as the assistant manager of the Cherry Creek North store (the same position she held at Richmond’s Ten Thousand Villages outpost, where she had worked since graduating college), decided to take action. “Villages was the only place I had worked since graduating,” Lavan tells Fast Company. “I couldn’t just let it go.”

A mobile unit, Lavan thought, would be more manageable. She found a gutted 1975 Airstream, once used as a tiki bar and painted on the outside with tropical flora, and is aiming to raise $16,000 by July 9 to install solar panels (the whole operation will run on renewable energy), renovate and re-wire the interior, and weatherproof it. Following the Indiegogo campaign, Lavan is also looking into entering startup competitions or applying for small business grants to get the Dream Stream fully operational by the fall.

Lavan imagines the Dream Stream will use Denver as its base; in addition to the globally sourced fair trade products like Peruvian scarves and Senegalese baskets that will be sold in the Airstream, Lavan will also source from local Colorado-based makers with a social impact mission. But it’s a mobile store for a reason, and her ultimate goal is to take the Dream Stream on the road to festivals like South By Southwest and Coachella. “I’m trying to recreate the feeling of surprise and not knowing what you’re going to find that people associate with going to a market,” Lavan says. “It’s just a more modern approach.”

On Wall Street, shareholders wield enormous power. In just the last few months activists have shoved Whole Foods into Amazon’s $13.4 billion embrace, kicked Etsy’s CEO out the (handcrafted) door, and sent shivers down the spines of GM’s top leaders.

Silicon Valley founders want no part in those battles. To protect themselves, they have been building legal fortresses in the form of super-voting shares and opting to stay private as long as possible. Last year there were just 16 technology IPOs in the U.S., a historic low. In parallel, founders that do go public are taking unprecedented steps to further deter activists—Snap Inc. cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel, for example, sold only non-voting shares when his “camera company” made its New York Stock Exchange debut in March.

But as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick learned this week, founder control is something of an illusion when a company needs constant infusions of investor cash in order to survive. Kalanick held on to Uber’s reins in the face of scandal after scandal—sexual harassment, discrimination, obstruction of regulatory enforcement, privacy violations. But when shareholders (with checkbooks and connections) at last found their voice, he had little choice but to step down. Quite simply, he needs their money. Uber has raised $12 billion since its founding, and will need to raise more. Despite enormous growth, it continues to subsidize every ride.

But notably, Kalanick remains on Uber’s board of directors—an indicator that he and his shareholders are making an economic decision, and not a purely ethical one. “You can have the legal power to keep yourself king, but still voluntarily abdicate if that’s what it takes to obtain much-needed capital,” says Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in corporate governance. “Who wants to rule over a collapsing kingdom?”

Kalanick’s dramatic exit also points to Mark Zuckerberg’s enduring legacy. The Facebook CEO is credited with ushering in Silicon Valley’s era of founder control, giving the generation of entrepreneurs that followed him greater leverage versus VCs. But make no mistake: Facebook’s profitability, and not its governance structure alone, is what makes Zuckerberg’s position secure.

“This all comes down to bargaining and negotiating power,” Noam Wasserman, author of The Founder’s Dilemma, recently told Marketplace Tech. “The sexier the company, the more demand there is for it, the more the founders will be able to go and dictate those terms.”

Now the task of making Uber “sexy” once again—and maybe even profitable— will fall to a new CEO, while Kalanick waits in the wings.

Moby, much like most rationally thinking individuals, has been nothing but candid about his less-than-fuzzy feelings about Donald Trump and his current administration. Always one for putting all his feels into his music, Moby, along with his band The Void Pacific Choir, released These Systems Are Failing last year, which one can take a wild guess at its overall theme from the title. And Moby & The Void Pacific Choir are back with the album More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse. The video for their lead single “In This Cold Place” ravages the innocence of throwback cartoons by injecting them with the brutal reality of the world we currently live in–namely, all the destruction Trump is engineering.

The United States might be the second richest country on earth, and you might hear politicians laud it as the “greatest country on earth,” but measured by its capacity “to meet the basic human needs of its citizens,” the United States isn’t even in the top 10 on Earth. It ranks in 18th place, well behind world leaders such Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland.

That’s according to the latest Social Progress Index which compares nations for their social and environmental performance. Globally-speaking, the U.S. isn’t doing too badly (18th puts us at a similar level to France and Japan). But, while we’re dominating measures like access to higher education, we’re failing badly on tolerance, inclusion, personal safety, and environmental protection. And like much of the advanced world, we’re largely standing still, rather than moving forward.

The SPI is one of several initiatives arguing for a broader view of a development than a country’s economic wealth. Global output, measured by GDP, has doubled since 1970, and extreme poverty has fallen from 40% of the world’s population to 10%. But this progress has been uneven, reflecting how money isn’t everything. Inequality is rising in richer countries, many of the poorest people in the world are in “middle income” countries, and GDP is a crude measure of advancement, counting up all the good stuff and all the bad. GDP doesn’t discriminate, for example, between sales of school textbooks and the handguns that teachers might now bring to school to protect themselves.

“Rising income usually brings major improvements in access to clean water, sanitation, literacy, and basic education,” the report says. “But on average, personal security is no better in middle–income countries than low-income ones, and is often worse. Too many people–regardless of income–live without full rights and experience discrimination or even violence based on gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.”

Given their wealth, the world’s biggest nations should have made more social progress in the last four years, the report argues. France, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, and China should all be ahead of their social and environmental outcomes. Instead the U.S. has been “flat-lining on social progress since 2014,” says SPI CEO Michael Green.

The U.S.’s falling scores for intolerance and inclusion are similar to those in Poland and Hungary, which have seen increasingly divisive rhetoric aimed at immigrants and refugees. We’re also falling down on measures of community cohesiveness. Gallup asks people worldwide the extent to which they feel they can rely on friends and family in a time of need. We rank only 31st place. “You think of the U.S. and that civic quality of coming together, but it does as well as Belarus in terms of the social safety net,” Green tells Fast Company.

On average, the world falls somewhere between the social progress of Indonesia (rank 79) and Botswana (rank 80). In the last four years, the world’s overall SPI ranking has increased by 2.6% (from 63.19 in 2014 to 64.85 in 2017), with the highest scores in nutrition and access to basic knowledge and the lowest scores in tolerance and inclusion and access to advanced education.

Nordic countries have consistently topped this and other non-economic country rankings. The U.S. consistently falls down on health and wellness indicators, and our relatively high levels of violence, including gun crime. We rank 82nd for suicides, suggesting poor mental health, and 27th for life expectancy. Our overall health and wellness ranking puts us on par with Turkey, hardly a lofty honor.

Green is now with working governments with governments in India and Europe to develop individual SPI metrics and spread the message on non-GDP measures of progress. “The Social Progress Index isn’t a replacement for GDP, it’s a complement. GDP does give some measure of progress, but something like this can complete the picture,” he says.

Last spring, Zillow’s CEO and cofounder, Spencer Rascoff launched a program called Community Pillars to extend the services of the online real estate search company to the affordable housing market. Under the program, more than 20,000 monthly users have used the website to connect with property managers and landlords registered as “community pillars” for offering housing to those who qualify as low-income or have an imperfect housing history.

The feature was developed by Rebekah Bastian, the VP of product at Zillow, “who is passionate about affordable housing and worked on the feature at Hack Week,” Rascoff says. Zillow’s employees then volunteered their time to build out the tool, and the company collaborated with public and social sector organizations. “We ended up shipping it. And everyone–our employees, the industry–was fired up about it.”

Over the last decade, Zillow has emerged as the leader in online real estate searches; with more than 165 million users every month, it represents more than two-thirds of the market. The company’s success, according to Rascoff, a founding team member, can be attributed to its ability to empower consumers with the same information that professional realtors have access to.

“At Zillow, we’ve always had a consumer-first mindset. Prior to Zillow, the leading real estate website was Realtor.com, which is licensed by the National Association of Realtors. Even though technically, it is an independent company, it has always had an industry-first mindset,” Rascoff says.

This customer orientation has helped the company develop products and services that have disrupted the market by freeing up information and expertise. Rascoff points to their forecasting feature, “We provide Zestimate forecasts, which show what a home will be worth in 12 months. Obviously, that’s incredibly valuable to the buyer or seller to show what the future might hold for that home’s value.”

Marketplace Challenge

Rascoff is one of many successful tech entrepreneurs who define their value in terms of making marketplaces more efficient. Though this has created tremendous value in society by making products and services more transparent and readily accessible. It has also, however, raised questions about the role of moral leadership in a marketplace.

Prior to joining the founding team at Zillow, Rascoff co-founded the travel site, Hotwire. Two years later, it turned out that the company had sold some of the airline tickets to the 9/11 hijackers for their September 10th flights, which positioned them to be in place for 9/11–and Rascoff lost a friend in the tragedy. “I ran a company that sold airline tickets to the hijackers. I lost a friend in 9/11 and now all of a sudden, our business is collapsing. There was a lot of guilt and culpability around that,” he says.

It was one of the hardest years of his life, he says. But professionally, it was also one of his most formative experiences. The downturn in the travel industry following 9/11 nearly tanked Hotwire. “We went from about 200 people to about 150 people and the survivors that stayed at the company had to work even harder and smarter because we were smaller.

“It looked like the whole thing was going under,” he continued. However, two years later, they had managed to turn it around, and the company was purchased by Expedia.

Learning to Lead

The Hotwire turnaround was a key learning moment for Rascoff, who had started the company at 23. It affirmed his commitment to his values and taught him about the true nature of leadership. He says, “While it’s always important to manage authentically, in challenging situations it’s even more important. The old picture (or myth) of leadership was one where the leader was supposed to project steady calm and confidence. It was the idea of the leader with a map in one hand and a sword on the other. He is running up a hill and the people are following behind him. That model is hogwash when a crisis hits.”

He says good leadership, exemplified during those challenging times is “one where the leader admits that he doesn’t have it all figured out and admits that it could be rough seas ahead. And instead of projecting calm, cool, and collected, projects authenticity and empathy [that conveys], ‘look, we’re all in this mission together.'”

At Zillow, there is free sharing of information with employees, and the systems to support that culture. He has a Slack channel to share everything from company updates to personal information, such as what he’s reading now, news articles of interest, and thoughts from his office visits around the country. He has also implemented monthly company-wide Q&As with the executive team. In addition, Zillow has an open office plan—and that includes Rascoff, who works at a treadmill desk out in the open space with everyone else.

To celebrate their teams and reinforce their values, he has implemented a program to award “‘karma points’ to employees who have gone above and beyond the call of duty.” He says, “Karma points are thank-you notes displayed on an employee’s profile page that can be seen by everyone in the company. Every time an employee receives a karma point, their manager is notified of the employee’s contribution to the company.” The company awarded 32,600 karma points last year, to 3,360 employees.

Giving back

The lessons from the hard challenges he faced at Hotwire have also informed Rascoff’s approach to giving back to the community. In addition to the program to support the affordable housing market, Zillow is also working on a multiyear initiative where “we will be donating significant amounts of time and resources to improve housing insecurity. We will be focused on those who are experiencing housing insecurity – that may include those facing temporary bouts of homelessness, those struggling to find safe/affordable housing, or being vulnerable to issues that may cause them to lose their homes (like evictions or medical events),” says Rascoff.

Though this philanthropic effort is still in its infancy, he says the goal is to ensure Zillow isn’t just making the real estate market more transparent, but also investing to make home buying (or renting) more accessible to those who are struggling. This commitment underscores what seems to motivate Rascoff in his job each day as he works to be responsive to both what their consumers as well as the community really needs.

This article is part of a series of articles by Aaron Hurst exploring how leaders find purpose and meaning in their jobs. Last fall, Hurst’s company, Imperative, released a global survey of the role of purpose at work, in partnership with LinkedIn Talent Solutions, which found that those who are intrinsically motivated to find purpose in their jobs consistently outperform their colleagues and experience greater levels of job satisfaction and well-being, regardless of country, gender, or ethnicity. They are also 50% more likely to be leaders. This series will profile those leaders, and how they connect with what’s meaningful to them in their role and the organizations they lead.

Alibaba chairman Jack Ma was in Detroit this week for Gateway 17, his company’s biggest-ever event stateside, to discuss opportunities for American small businesses to tap into the Chinese market through the world’s biggest e-commerce platform. But his chief creative officer Chris Tung was in the south of France unveiling a new suite of marketing data tools for all the brands and agencies gathered at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, to better use Alibaba’s consumer data.

Over the last 12 months, Alibaba has worked with global marketers like P&G, Unilever, and L’Oreal to develop a system called Uni Marketing, a data-driven marketing engine. “We have a unique data pool that represents more than 500 million active shoppers on our platform in a multidimensional way,” says Tung. “Alibaba today is an ecosystem, it’s not just a marketplace. There are video sites, social media like the Chinese version of Twitter called Weibo, there’s location-based service that’s like Google Maps, we have pretty much everything. So from a data standpoint, it’s very interesting.”

Often, especially in Western press, Alibaba is dubbed “the Chinese Amazon.” But with the consumer-to-consumer marketplace Taobao, the business-to-consumer T-Mall, and Alibaba’s business-to-business, plus the social media, maps, Laiwang messaging, a cloud computing service, it’s a bit more far reaching than that.

“It’s very different from the Amazon model,” says Tung. “We don’t buy products from brands, we don’t buy and sell and take a margin, as a channel. We service as a marketplace, a bridge between the seller and the buyer, through data. A lot of transactions happen on our platform–$550 billion US worth of gross merchandise value a year. The largest commerce platform on Earth. It’s bigger than Walmart. Much bigger than Amazon.”

If you want to make analogies, Tung says think of Alibaba as a combination of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, in one. Brands set up and operate their own e-commerce flagship stores on the Alibaba platform. And global brands have flocked to it, including Nike, Apple, Coke, Uniqlo, Zara, and L’Oreal.

“We’re not only the dominant e-commerce platform in China, we’re also No. 1 in countries like Russia and Southeast Asia,” says Tung, adding they also have a presence in Spain and France, as well as some South American countries. “We’re strong in the emerging market, which represents growth for the brands. So the partnerships we have with global brands is very strategic in terms of driving their growth for today and tomorrow.”

The company recently announced it expects revenues to increase by up to a staggering 49% next year. That, combined with Ma meeting with Trump earlier this year and talking about creating a million U.S. jobs, has many predicting its got its eyes on Amazon’s (and Facebook’s, and Twitter’s…) backyard. But Tung says that the real opportunity in the U.S. right now is opening up the markets Alibaba is already strong in to American SMEs.

“We’re focusing on the U.S. as a B2B market, it’s more about servicing American SMEs, to bring good quality apples to China and vice-versa,” says Tung. “We think that’s a better priority, to open up our market to U.S. businesses. It makes a lot of sense for SMEs to have a gateway to the world. (Gateway 17) is all about introducing how Alibaba is going to export, to build a gateway to emerging markets, especially in China, for American business.”

The bulk of that new growth, according to Tung, will actually come from China itself. “There’s still so much growth potential there, as 80% of businesses are still mainly doing business offline, through brick and mortar alone,” he says.

Tung uses an unnamed major brand (spoiler alert: it’s Apple) to illustrate how the attraction to Alibaba from U.S. and global brands is primarily one of sheer scale, in reach and data.

“The most reputable mobile phone, that launched its seventh generation model last year, we helped them to find 3 million potential leads for people who would consider buying their phone,” he says. “If you do the calculation of 3 million buyers, that’s a huge number. And it’s impossible for you, out of 1.3 billion people in China, to find that 3 million through any traditional advertising campaign. But because we’re reaching 500 million people, there’s bound to be a few million who would be interested in buying that phone.”

As CMO of the world’s largest retailer, Tung says he’s got two main challenges. The first is to explain just what it is that Alibaba does. “It just takes a huge effort to communicate what we do and what value we can bring to the table,” he says. “The good thing is, once people know that, they come along. It’s a no brainer. It’s a great relationship — the more they work with Alibaba, the more data they’re going to have, the more possibility for growth for their company.”

Change is coming quickly to Uber. Following news this morning that CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned, the company has now confirmed that David Trujillo—the TPG Capital partner who led the firm’s investment in Uber—has joined its board.

Trujillo will replace David Bonderman, whose epic gaffe at a companywide Uber meeting last week made all those promises to overhaul its company culture look cheap. During the meeting, in which Uber’s leadership shared the results of an investigation into corporate practices and behaviors, Arianna Huffington, another board member, was explaining the addition of Nestle executive Wan Ling Martello. She went onto cite data showing that companies with one woman on the board are more likely to attract more women board members.

Bonderman interrupted with a quip: “Actually, what it shows is, it’s more likely there’ll be more talking.”

An exasperated Huffington tried to brush off the comment and move on. After audio of the incident leaked, the internet was not so forgiving. By the following morning, Bonderman had not only apologized for the remark, but also resigned from the board.

Trujillo, 39, can hopefully bring a more evolved understanding of how to mature Uber’s workplace. In its guidance, Convington & Burling, the law firm that carried out the investigation, specifically recommended that Uber’s board help lead the company’s cultural transition by creating an oversight committee. But questions have arisen about who on Uber’s board is qualified to sit on such a committee.

In the past, Trujillo, who invests in internet-based technologies and digital media companies, has supported Uber’s decision to stay private, seemingly for the very reasons that Uber has been grappling with this year. (He also led investment in Airbnb, another major digital agitator and hugely valuable startup.) In an interview with CNBC last year, he said that for companies that have scaled quickly, like Uber and Airbnb, rushing to an IPO is not always the best solution for long-term prosperity. “They’ve gone through such hyperbolic growth that the ability to get your back office to catch up with your front office is one of the advantages of staying private longer,” he said.

Unfortunately for Uber, it hasn’t been able to avoid the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for public companies.

You’re Scott Forstall. It’s 2005. Apple’s hugely successful iPod business is facing an existential threat from cell phones that can play music. Your boss, Steve Jobs, has ordered you to assemble a team of software engineers to create–in a matter of months–what would become the first iPhone. Quick! How do you pick the right brains for the project?

The team was going to adapt the Mac OS–whose engineering Forstall oversaw–to a multi-touch mobile device, itself a daunting technical challenge. But it would use those underpinnings to build a personal computing experience that just hadn’t existed before. Apple’s previous forays into handheld devices, the iPod and Newton PDA, provided precious little guidance.

Forstall’s team was responsible for things so basic to the iPhone that we barely notice them today–the way information scrolls on the screen at the touch of a fingertip, the way the app icons appear on the home screen.

I spoke to Forstall about this challenge Tuesday night after former New York Times tech reporter John Markoff interviewed him onstage during an iPhone 10th anniversary event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “Steve told me to go assemble an entire software team, but only from people within Apple,” Forstall said. “He didn’t want anybody from the outside to see any of the interfaces, because he was so afraid of leaks.” (Jobs, said iPhone hardware team leader Tony Fadell in Brian Merchant’s new book One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, “was just naturally paranoid.”)

That secrecy narrowed the field considerably, so the selection criteria for recruits for the new project (codenamed “Purple”) became even more critical.

“During all the interviews for the team, we screened for people who were growth mind-set,” Forstall told me. Forstall said he had been a fan of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor known for her theory that people exist somewhere on a continuum between “fixed mind-set” and “growth mind-set.”

Fixed mind-set people, Forstall explained, believe their accomplishments are the result of a fixed set of skills that don’t really change. “They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb,” Dweck said in a 2012 interview.

“Growth mind-set” people, Forstall told me, believe their abilities can grow as a result of new challenges and good teaching. “You can see this in children,” he said. “There are some types of children who, when you give them a puzzle to do and they complete it, they want to do a harder puzzle.

“Other children, when they complete the puzzle, then they just want to do the same puzzle again,” Forstall added. “The growth mind-set child will just say, ‘I’ve already mastered that one, give me something harder.'”

Dweck’s research shows that about 40% of people (students and adults) have a growth mind-set, 40% have fixed mind-sets, and the rest are somewhere in the middle.

Decisions And More Decisions

Forstall could already see that getting to a completed iPhone would require a ton of iteration and learning. Hundreds of feature and design questions had to be answered, and hundreds more questions waited behind those, all impossible to see from the starting line. Forstall may also have sensed that the project was bigger than the combined skill sets and experience of any team he could assemble. Nothing quite like the iPhone had ever been done before. He needed people who could fail well, learn, and grow.

“We were dealing with a project that was impossible or next to impossible, so we needed people who were going to be able to survive that,” Forstall told me.

Forstall, whether he thought about it as such or not, may have been looking for people who thought like Steve Jobs. Here’s Carol Dweck talking about Jobs in the same 2012 interview:

I’ve thought about it a lot when I read Steve Jobs’ biography, and I think Jobs had a real growth mind-set about himself. He was constantly experimenting, using the feedback and creating new things from it.

The story of the many app, interface, and hardware builds and rebuilds during 2005 and 2006 is a long one, and isn’t fully known. The engineers on Forstall’s team were worried about software bugs (some of which, they feared, weren’t even known yet) right up to the time Steve Jobs gave the first demo of the first iPhone onstage at Macworld Expo in January 2007.

Many ex-Project Purple hardware and software engineers showed up at the Computer History Museum event to hear Forstall and other creators of the iPhone tell their stories. When a questioner in the audience Tuesday night asked what it was like for the iPhone engineers to watch Jobs give that demo, one Apple engineer seated behind me said, “Sheer terror.” Others in the vicinity could be seen smiling and nodding their assent.

“There’s always that chance that he’s going to hit some bug that nobody has ever seen before, and he’s going to hit it onstage during the keynote, and it’s going to be one of the things that I’m responsible for,” said one of Forstall’s software engineer hires, Nitin Ganatra. “Or that there’s this grand finale at the end where Steve’s using four different apps and doing five different things.”

There was an unmistakeable celebratory feeling in the air during the event Tuesday night. Forstall was forced out at Apple in 2012 for a number of reasons, allegedly including issues with other executives (such as Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller) finding him increasingly difficult to work with. But he’s one of a handful of people who can be credited with envisioning and creating the device that elevated Apple to its place in the world today. One of the reasons for his success, his team’s success, and ultimately the iPhone’s success, is that he knew how to hire people who believed deeply they were capable of tackling and mastering bigger and bigger things.

Not long ago the average American would be hard pressed to name a tech leader whose name didn’t end in “Jobs” or “Gates.”

A generation later, countless tech executives walk red carpets, are featured on magazine covers, are interviewed on prime time television and enjoy much of the same admiration, as well as scrutiny, as any other celebrity.

“The tech business in the ’80s, that was Revenge of the Nerds,” says Fadell, who was credited as one of the inventors of the iPod and iPhone before founding Nest Labs in 2010, which he sold to Google in 2014. “We were geeks, we were looked down upon.”

Fadell tells Fast Company that he never imagined a career in the tech industry would turn him and his contemporaries into household names, adding that he responded with shock the first time he was asked to walk a red carpet. “I was like, ‘are you kidding me?’ It seemed crazy,” he says.

Fadell has many concerns for an industry still adjusting its eyes to the spotlight, and advice for up-and-coming techies who might find themselves in a role they weren’t prepared for.

There Are No Kardashians In Tech

Being famous for the sake of being famous may be a reality for a lucky few in today’s pop culture, but nobody achieves celebrity status in the tech industry without first delivering the goods, warns Fadell.

“You’re a zero, then you become a hero, but if you don’t deliver that community throws you out,” he says. Fadell adds that hot new startups often become the talk of the town when its founders raise an impressive amount of money. Suddenly they’re rubbing shoulders with other tech royalty, getting a taste for how the industry’s most successful live, forgetting that they still have a business to build. “There are a lot of young founders that are almost like child actors that got famous too early,” he says.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

When public interest in the technology industry began to bloom a certain mythology blossomed with it, one that Fadell fears newcomers may believe represents reality.
“It’s almost like learning how to have sex by watching porn,” he says. “When they read it through the media, now that it’s been so sensationalized, they think this is how you create a startup company.”

Fadell explains that when people regularly see tech executives on keynote stages, magazine covers, and red carpets they begin to imagine that’s what starting a technology company looks like.

“You really have to understand what it takes to build a company, and it comes at the other side of success,” he says. “Celebrity is the other side, but people get into it now because they want that [celebrity].”

Stay Focused On Your Product

In order to avoid getting sucked into the gravitational pull of that mythology Fadell believes it takes a strong support team to stay focused. He explains that, like in other industries, there’s a certain amount of “fake it ’till you make it” in tech, but it’s important for tech founders not to fake themselves out.

“They’re creating this story to get more funders around them to raise the valuations when there’s not enough fundamentals to drive the business, and then it all unravels,” he says. “[The attention] can be positive or negative, just like any drug; you need to have good people around you and a good environment, not just funders who are trying to chase the dollar.”

Use The Attention To Your Advantage

While there is the potential for a more public profile to serve as a distraction from the core business Fadell believes that founders would be wise to acknowledge the potential advantages it can provide, if used properly.

“Remember you are not a celebrity like a movie star, it’s not about being in the public eye because that’s what drives your business,” he says. “It’s about being in the public eye to help grow your business. ”

Fadell adds that it’s important to show restraint, advising founders to be selective with their public appearances.

“You should not be going public with all kinds of information, you should not be celebrating when you raise money,” he says. “You should only use the press sparingly, and only to do something to drive your business.”

Remember Who You Are

Fadell’s final piece of advice to those in the tech industry that are starting to get some notice is to avoid taking other people’s opinions to heart.

“Don’t read anything about yourself, don’t watch anything about yourself, don’t do anything like that because you can get lost with everybody analyzing you, and then you start to self-modify and self-edit,” he says.

Fadell explains that there needs to be a clear separation between a tech star’s public persona and their genuine self. “Don’t lose the person you are because you read what others say and modify who you are based on other people’s hyper-analyses of you,” he says.

A lot of you enjoyed last week’s interview with Fast Company’s own Joe Berkowitz about his year exploring the subculture of competitive punning.  This is an exclusive excerpt from the book born out of that year:Away With Words: An Irreverent Tour Through the World of Pun Competitions,which is available now.

Although it’s become passé at this point, one longtime mantra of this city is Keep Austin Weird. It’s splashed across T-shirts sold at Zilker Park during the annual Kite Festival, it’s plastered on paint-peeled bumpers of Toyota Tercels en route to yarn-bomb a tree, probably, and it’s nowhere near the nude bodies undulating in the clothing-optional swimming park called Hippie Hollow. Although the vast empire of high-rises and high-end restaurants have added a slick sheen recently, Austin is still indeed weird. Its weirdness is thrust upon you the moment you arrive at the airport, greeted by fifteen-foot, psychedelically colored guitars in a v-formation around the baggage claim, as if standing sentry lest ill-tempered mutant drums invade. If the town in Footloose was weird for outlawing dancing, Austin seems like the type of weird where dancing might be enforced on certain government holidays. It’s a weirdness that encompasses Brooklyn’s, in that both places seem like they might have a hopscotch league, but Austin’s stands out more for being an oasis in the reddest of red states. The friends I’m staying with live next to a chrome rocket of a food trailer called Ms P’s Electric Cock, and a wax museum built like a grimy gothic castle with functional dungeon. When I go for a run, it’s over a bridge known colloquially as Bat Bridge, for reasons I don’t want spelled out until I am far away from the bridge. This is a weird city and the O. Henry Pun-Off definitely belongs here.

Punning itself may not be that weird, but the ceaseless spigot of puns that flows unimpeded at the Pun-Off might as well be directed by David Cronenberg. To oblivious passersby, it must sound like a foreign language one intuitively knows to be Elvish or Klingon, a knotty thicket of nerd twaddle. To the people inside, though, it’s paradise. Anywhere else, the chance of being overheard could be embarrassing for punsters, but not here. Those who are magnetically pulled to the Pun-Off are like Amish teens on Rumspringa. For one weekend, any and all interruptive, conversation-killing word balloon animals are not only welcome—they’re encouraged. There is no safe word here. (If there were, though, it would be a pun and it would be terrible.)

Related: This Guy Spent A Year Exploring The Subculture Of Competitive Punning

For Gary Hallock, an old school Austinite, this sanctuary has no exit. Puns are an indelible part of his life, year-round. The green zone this town has created for ardent wordplay enthusiasts has encroached ever further into Hallock’s head, annexing his brain and claiming it as pun territory.

Beneath a rotating haberdashery of unconventional headgear, Gary has a friendly face with soft-blue eyes and deep-set laugh lines, probably collateral pun damage. His hair is the color of sidewalk, but his bushy eyebrows are a shade darker. He has a rascally gleam in his eye, like he’s always either just heard a joke or is about to deliver one. As Gary tells me his life story, though, he slips in very few puns. It’s unclear whether the omission is for my benefit—all the unmade puns quietly eating him up inside.

Puns are there in his waking hours, and they’re there when he goes to sleep.

“I put music on in the background at night to keep the idle parts of my brain from thinking about puns,” Gary tells me. “I fall asleep with a little speaker in my pillow, listening to talk radio, because if I don’t, I will lie awake thinking of stuff, and inevitably, I’ll think of a pun, and then I’ll wish I could get up and go write it down.”

We’re inside of a vegan ice cream shop in North Austin that Gary’s friend, Valerie Ward, owns. You can tell one of Gary’s friends owns it because we’re seated perpendicular to a doctored poster for the film A Time to Kill that now reads A Time to Kale. A young Matthew McConaughey, sleek as an otter, is arguing a court case dead center, his clenched, emotive fist made to look as if it’s clutching a stalk of kale. When I gesture toward it, Gary chortles. He has probably heard or said the word kale in place of kill thousands of times more than the average human.

Gary first competed in the Pun-Off in 1985, and did not do particularly well. He kept coming back, though, until he won first place four years later. At that point, he decided to retire, going out on top like when Michael Strahan left the Giants and also when he left Live! With Kelly & Michael. Gary sensed that the competition had grown a tad stale over the past few years, and needed some shaking up. When he spoke to the curator about it, she charged him with restoring the O. Henry to its former glory the following year. Gary accepted, forming a committee of like-minded word-nerds to assist with the reformation, founding a group called PUNY—Punsters United Nearly Yearly. Together, they codified some long unspoken rules of the competition. They also added “World Championships” to the title, so that upstarts like the Almost Annual Pun Competition in Eureka, California, wouldn’t beat them to the punch.

Despite his devotion, though, Gary originally became a punster by default. Growing up, he’d strived to be a comedian, dutifully going to open mics and doing his time onstage, but it just never gelled. All it took was one round at the O. Henry, though, for him to realize he was a punster who enjoyed comedy and not a comedian who enjoyed puns. Gary admires stand-up comics who can get away with puns, but he recognizes that they’re few and far between. (He cites as an example Carrot Top, the shockingly jacked prop comedy golem fated to haunt Las Vegas forever like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.) Following that first O. Henry, Gary spent the next thirty years deeply involved in pun competitions. It’s long since become an integral part of his identity. He may be a property manager by trade, but that’s not who he is. He is Mr. Pun.

“When you have a reputation like I do, any time I open my mouth, people are expecting it, and bracing for it, and cringing,” he says. “When I start talking, I can sense that tension. People are waiting for me to throw a pun in. So if I do go ahead and throw one in to relieve the tension, people think that’s the point I was trying to make, and they miss the point. It’s like dressing in a clown costume and expecting people to take you seriously. Because I’m basically in a clown costume 24/7.”

Joe Berkowitz will be celebrating the book with a comedy show and podcast at QED in Astoria, Monday 6/26 at 7 p.m. He will be joined by comedians Christian Finnegan, Myq Kaplan, and the champions of Punderdome.

For many yogis, achieving balance has to do with much more than just nailing the one-legged tree pose. It often has to do with more existential questions of being at one with the earth, which means protecting its future. This was certainly true for Melissa Chu, who grew up in the Bay Area, where everyone recycled obsessively and looked for ways to cut down their carbon footprint–when they weren’t off at a meditation retreat, that is. “Climate change was an ongoing topic of conversation,” Chu says.

Seven years ago, Chu moved to Hong Kong for her job in the hotel industry. The city was far more crowded, busy, and intense than she had expected. “It was like New York on crack,” she explains. “To cope, I felt the need to deepen my yoga practice to manage the stress and the culture shock.”

A behind-the-scenes shot from our photoshoot yesterday. RUMI X core collection is coming soon – designed to make you feel good! Every pair of Rumies saves 16 PET bottles from ending up in landfills or oceans. ♻️✌????Join the #feelgoodmovement . . . . . #summerfashion #athleisure #athleisurewear #rumixfeelgood #fitspo #getfitgirls #activewear #photoshoot #instadaily #instafitness #instafashion #rumigirl

A post shared by RUMI X ♻️ (@rumixfeelgood) on May 20, 2017 at 4:50am PDT

She would take trips to India to study under famous gurus and spent hours in Hong Kong studios doing sun salutations. But she began to wonder: Why isn’t yoga gear more sustainable? Why do yoga devotees sweat through trendy outfits made from virgin materials that are sent to a landfill when they’re worn out? When she started thinking about it in earnest, the immensity of the waste killed her zen.

For the last couple of years, activewear has been driving the apparel industry forward. Morgan Stanley’s research suggests that by 2020, the activewear market will represent $83 billion in sales, stealing market share from other clothing categories such as denim. But in order to keep up with demand, dozens of brands are popping into the market, churning out new designs regularly and driving down prices, in the same vein as fast fashion.

There is plenty of innovation happening when it comes to the technical aspects of athletic garments, with brands like Lululemon and Nike developing new fabrics that are adapting to different types of physical activity. But few brands are investing as heavily on creating eco-conscious activewear.

In 2015, Chu decided to launch a line of activewear called RumiX that would be made from the most sustainable fabrics she could find. She was still living in Hong Kong, which happens to be one of the sourcing capitals of the world. So she set out to see what kinds of recycled materials would work in yoga pants. “It all came together,” she says. “I decided I wanted to create a business where we would turn waste into wear.”

It turns out, there’s a lot of innovation in terms of sustainable materials. Chu found one German manufacturer that turns spoiled cow’s milk into thread by adding a protein powder to it. Another company sweeps up the husks of flax seeds from the floors of production mills and turns it into a fiber for the production of fabric.

Since many of these manufacturers are new and use cutting-edge technology, Chu is often able to work closely with them to develop materials that are perfectly calibrated to meet the needs of her customers, who would be using the pants, bras, and shirts for yoga. For instance, she wants the fabric to have four-way stretch but also feel very soft and organic, unlike many sportswear brands that make clothes that feel synthetic and Spandex-like. Given that many of her customers are based in Asia, where the climate is hot and humid, she also works to ensure that the fabric is thin and moisture wicking. And there’s one added benefit of using coffee grounds: no stinky clothes. “The final fabric still has the odor management properties of natural coffee beans,” Chu says.

Chu is currently working with another company to create fabric made from discarded crab shells. The bulk of crabs are made of a natural chemical called chitin, which is a biopolymer. Scientists in Bavaria have found a way to extract chitin and use it for a wide variety of purposes, including fibers. This material, which blends together the crab shells with viscose, is called Crabyon. It’s particularly good for RumiX because it has natural anti-bacterial and anti-microbial qualities. “Ironically, it’s super soft,” Chu says. “We can make very soft T-shirts out of this material.”

When it comes to marketing, Chu doesn’t focus on the interesting materials used in the clothing, but instead describes the brand’s ethos of feeling good and being at peace with yourself. The brand’s name pays homage to the 13th-century Persian mystic, Rumi, who often wrote about how to live a meaningful and spiritual life, and each garment has one of his poems inscribed in it.

Ultimately, she believes that people will purchase RumiX over Lululemon or Nike because they appreciate the brand’s values and love wearing the product. The fact that the clothing is sustainable is an added bonus. “We’ve noticed that some markets that we sell to do appreciate the fact that we’re eco-friendly,” she says. “Other markets don’t really care at all. So we always lead with design and slowly try to educate our customer about what our mission is.”

But she hopes her company helps encourage others in the fashion industry to think creatively about using waste material to create clothing that is high quality and comfortable. “We’re really passionate about not wanting to create more waste,” Chu says. “Our goal is to reduce waste in any way we can. There are lots of companies creating really amazing fabrics out of stuff that we would otherwise just throw away.”

Less than a decade ago, the concept of autonomous vehicles roaming streets and highways seemed nothing more than a moonshot. Today, we now have Uber and Google and NuTonomy and Tesla testing and tweaking their tech in the race to take driverless vehicles mainstream. While most trials are successful, there have been enough accidents for consumers and policy makers to worry that public safety and solving traffic congestion is taking a backseat to rapid-fire innovation.

As designers of cities, we’ve been watching the spasmodic innovation unfold in the news and on the ground. Without question, autonomous vehicles (AV) will have limitless impact on how we live. The good news an AV revolution brings is the possibility to replace vehicle-serving cities with urban environments that reduce car-dependency and put people first.

Expert predictions of what the world will look like when the floodgates of AV open are in no short supply, mostly in advocacy of its necessity to make us smarter, more connected, more efficient, and more resourceful. Superhuman, if you will. Is it possible, however, that the insurgence of AV will make us less machinelike and more human? Our bet is on yes, because the proof for the future is in the present.

Commuting As Communities

Daily travelers will use apps to reserve spots on AV-operated car shares. Automating short-distance neighborhood travel has the potential to streamline and de-stress daily travel. The deployment of commuter pods can eliminate the need for single occupancy vehicles, obliterate traffic congestion, and reduce transit pollution. We’re seeing the early stage of this development unfold as UberPool continues its expansion to cities outside of the urban core. In Finland, startup MaaS partnered with transport providers to develop Whim, an app to order multiple transit modes–buses, taxis, car rental, or bike share–to coordinate the journey to a single destination. The intention is to replace car ownership in Helsinki with sustainable and efficient door-to-door travel systems.

As people begin to commute as communities, building entrances can be set up like school zones. Replacing car pileup and sky-high parking prices, buildings can feature robust pickup and drop-off zones with laneways developed for safe, pin-drop precise navigation among walkers, cyclists, and commuter pods.

Recycled Parking

Fewer vehicles sitting in idle would considerably reduce, and possibly eliminate, the need for parking lots. Major human-oriented developments could emerge, like community gardens, park cafes, learning and wellness centers, shops, and homes with ultra-wide, multi-use laneways. This would allow more people to move, rest, and socialize in safety and comfort.

The rise of parklets in Chicago and San Francisco is an early example of this. Street parking turned curbside green space acts as “people spots” or leisure areas. This comes with its own economic benefits, too. Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council found that 73% of parklet users surveyed on an average afternoon would have stayed home if the miniature park didn’t exist. This increased foot traffic positively impacted surrounding small businesses, with some reporting a sales increase of 10% to 20%.

Closed-Loop Consumption

While the rise of AVs is a symptom of society in search of efficiency and convenience, it is likely to influence areas beyond transporting people and in ways that will make our communities healthier. As the world becomes smarter, waste is projected to decrease. Soon, we will live in a circular economy that will enable us to recycle or compost everything we produce, creating a chain of sustainable production and closed-loop consumption. Waste removal, recycling, and compost services operated by AVs and executed with careful design have the potential to run discreetly and infrequently. Already, semiautomated garbage trucks exist in several cities in North America doing the work of garbage collectors. As we see in Edmonton, Canada, this saves on resources and eases the physical strain of workers.

Whether by automated truck, a drone, or a six-wheeled robot, deliveries can become agile and elegant just the same. From snail mail to the mass-delivery of goods, reimagining pickups and drop-offs can eradicate the need for complex and cumbersome loading zones. Buildings and homes can adapt by architecting delivery portals, similar to how water is delivered, from distribution center to recipient. Though we have a very long way to go, this way of thinking is slowly unfolding as more warehouses use robots like Amazon’s Kiva to move and transport goods.

People-Oriented Infrastructure

With more people moving around outside as communities free up new space, people-oriented environments will overthrow vehicle-serving cities. People-scale lighting, for one, will take safety to a new and lowered level, as we’re seeing with wayfinding systems like +Light Line in Germany and the Netherlands. The LED strip lines the sidewalk’s edge and turns green to indicate “walk” and red for “stop,” alerting preoccupied smartphone users when to cross safely.

Tall and bulky streetlamps designed to illuminate roadways for vehicles can be replaced with shorter and intimate replacements. This is happening already in Nashville, where short, warmly lit streetlamps are creating environments equally inviting as functional. People-powered lighting has taken off in Las Vegas where LED streetlights powered by solar panels and kinetic footstep pads are illuminating walkways, charging phones, and powering security cameras. With every footstep, four to eight watts of energy is generated, and can save the nearly 100 million metrics tons of CO2 emitted by streetlights each year.

Closing the loop on energy use goes well beyond harmonizing lighting systems. Lakeside cities experiencing record-setting rainfall and water levels like Toronto and Chicago can look to vegetated roofs and rainwater-harvesting systems to waterproof cities. Vegetated roofs absorb rainwater, provide insulation, offer wildlife sanctuary, and control internal and external temperatures, while rainwater-harvesting systems collect rainfall to be cleaned and reused for irrigation, drinking water, and home use.

As we continue to trial and tweak AV tech, let’s benefit from rethinking the power of the real-life environments we share. The solution is in the city, because it has been all along.

Antonio Gomez-Palacio and Alan Boniface are urbanists and city builders at Dialog.

MailChimp did not start out as an enterprise obviously destined to help millions of small companies market themselves via email.

Actually, the company was originally the Rocket Science Group, a web-design firm that began fooling around with email in 2001 at the request of some of its customers. Its original email engine borrowed code from an earlier failed e-greeting card startup. Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius landed on the name MailChimp after discovering that their first choice, ChimpMail, was taken. And their initial simian-themed branding consisted of a repurposed drawing of a chimp–eventually known as “Freddie”–who’d appeared on one of the e-greetings.

The email marketing features the company built proved so useful that they began to look like a better opportunity than the design business–which, Chestnut says, “was all about billable hours and salesmanship, and those were things we sucked at.” In 2006, Chestnut and Kurzius decided to go all-in with MailChimp. “We took a year saying goodbye to all the agencies and clients, finding them new vendors,” he explains.

MailChimp really went into turbo mode in 2009, when it instituted a freemium business model that let customers send up to 3,000 emails a month to up to 500 subscribers at no cost. Letting companies get addicted to the service before requiring them to pay up proved so successful that the free version now lets users send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers.

Now MailChimp is probably the biggest name in its category–in part because its offerings are so well done and widely used, and in part because it’s cleverly promoted itself via efforts such as quirky sponsorship messages on the Serial podcast. And despite its high profile, it’s even larger than you might guess. Based in Atlanta–far outside Silicon Valley’s bubble of venture-funded would-be unicorns–the company has 600-plus employees and did more than $400 million in revenue last year. More than 15 million customers sent 246 billion emails in 2016.

There are still additional small businesses out there that need help with email, but MailChimp’s growth strategy isn’t just about finding them. It’s also committed to keeping its focus on serving small businesses rather than using them as a springboard to reach larger customers with more lavish budgets.

Though Chestnut is quick to tout the effectiveness of email marketing–he says it can return $40 in revenue for every $1 spent–he also claims “not to have any particular kind of affinity or attachment to email.” The future of the company, he says, is “to take MailChimp magic we give to email, and sprinkle it on other marketing channels.”

That vision has been apparent in the company’s product announcements for awhile now. A year ago, it introduced a recommendation engine–akin to the ones devised by big companies such as Amazon–that let its customers plunk product suggestions into the emails they sent their customers. Then in January of this year, it began helping small businesses buy Facebook ads–figuring that the expertise it had in building friendly web interfaces gave it an opportunity to make the process easier than Facebook had done on its own.

The Instagram Opportunity

As MailChimp was deciding what big ad platform to support after Facebook, it sought input from its customers. They had a clear favorite: Instagram. If you find that unexpected, you’re not alone. “We kind of thought Google might be next,” Chestnut says. “Instagram was a surprise for us.”

Once you think it over, though, that preference makes more and more sense. In March, Instagram announced that it had a million active advertisers, a milestone it reached in large part because a lot of small businesses find it to be a valuable marketing platform. Any digital business with that many small-business customers is likely to have meaningful overlap with MailChimp’s customer base.

Chestnut speculates that another reason for Instagram’s popularity among MailChimp users is that writing the ad copy required for a Google ad sounds like more work than creating an image-centric Instagram post. In fact, he says, many small companies are already adept at promoting themselves simply by having and maintaining Instagram accounts: “Anything that’s new and free, they’re going to exploit the hell out of.”

As with Facebook, MailChimp’s Instagram ad-buying feature aims to simplify the process of purchasing ads. Just as important, it allows Instagram to choose the pool of users who will see an ad by picking people similar to those in the MailChimp customer’s email file, allowing for more precise targeting. “When they use Instagram alone, they get OK results,” Chestnut says. “But when they combine it with MailChimp, they get much better results.”

MailChimp’s strategy with these new ad-buying services and other functionality it’s recently added isn’t to give itself a new revenue stream. Instead, it’s offering them as part of its existing subscriptions at the same price as before. As with its freemium model, the company is betting that the more essential it can make itself to the way small businesses operate, the easier it will be to get large numbers of them to pay on an ongoing basis.

With MailChimp’s broadening of its mission beyond email, it won’t run out of new features to roll out anytime soon. Since the Instagram feature launched in May, the company has added integration with online commerce service PrestaShop alongside its existing support for commerce platforms such as Shopify and Magento. (PrestaShop is particularly popular in Europe, and over half of MailChimp’s business now comes from outside the U.S.)

The company is also experimenting with a marketing medium I would not have predicted: direct mail, delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. It isn’t a logical option for every small business, Chestnut emphasizes–“if you’re selling something for $2, you’re not going to benefit from direct mail, you’ll lose money on it”–but for high-ticket items, it could have its place. And he adds that he’s often heard that direct mail is ripe for democratization, thereby playing to MailChimp’s strengths as an outfit that specializes in streamlining the complexity out of marketing tasks.

With its large base of email customers, MailChimp also has the opportunity to blur the lines between marketing’s digital and physical realms. “Maybe we send an email, and if you opened and didn’t buy, we send something a week later via snail mail,” Chestnut muses.

Marketing MailChimp

Once upon a time, MailChimp actively avoided conventional marketing of itself. “Ben had this idea: Instead of spending money on traditional advertising, we’d take that money and buy shirts and give them away,” says Mark DiCristina, MailChimp’s senior director of brand marketing. “It worked really well. Part of that is people like free stuff. But we made really nice T-shirts and they had Freddie our mascot on them and they didn’t have our logo anywhere. It was more like a gift they received than swag.” The fact that these freebies were so well done, DiCristina says, helped shape MailChimp’s overall desire to be a brand associated with quality.

Particularly given MailChimp’s current broadening of its horizons, the company is now more interested in marketing itself in a way that feels more like marketing–while still feeling like MailChimp. Its current efforts began with a campaign that like that memorable Serial spot, riffed on its own odd name. It involved terms such as “JailBlimp,” “MailShrimp,” and “KaleLimp,” and was about as far from a hard sell as imaginable. “Rather than coming out of the gates with all this stuff explicitly about functionality, we [showed] them we’re still the same MailChimp they love,” Chestnut explains.

Now the company has followed up with “MailChimp vs. the Black Hole,” a set of ads that do tout specific benefits such as the ability to use your MailChimp customer list to pinpoint prospects on Instagram. They remain quirky–the black hole even talks in some of them–but the quirkiness serves the straightforward goal of explaining what MailChimp is and what it can do for small businesses.

Which brings up another marketing medium that the company has found effective for telling people about its expanding portfolio of features: email! MailChimp, it turns out, is a happy MailChimp customer. “In all seriousness,” Chestnut says, “it gets us the best ROI when we email our customers and tell them this stuff is available.”

Don’t be surprised if over the next few days you start seeing videos of your friends posing with a very realistic-looking Spider-Man in your social feeds.

That’s because today, 8i, a Los Angeles-based virtual and augmented reality technology company, launched Holo, a mobile app for iOS and Android that lets users insert 3D holograms into everyday scenes and then shoot video or photos of them that can be shared.

At launch, the app will feature hundreds of holograms from several 8i partners, including Sony Pictures, Cosmopolitan, and celebrities like actress Debby Ryan or YouTube star Matt Steffanina.

8i, a leader in volumetric capture, a technology that allows VR and AR content creators to integrate photo-realistic human avatars in their projects, first unveiled Holo at the Sundance Film Festival in January. There, attendees were able to interact with a hologram of actor Jon Hamm as a promotion for the film Marjorie Prime. Then, in March at SXSW, 8i rolled out a virtual reality experience featuring a holographic astronaut Buzz Aldrin on Mars.

With the broad rollout of Holo, though, the company is now putting holograms in everyone’s hands. It’s a continuation of 8i’s strategy of helping partners create high-quality, realistic VR and AR content featuring 3D human performance.

And the new app is the logical extension of the increasing comfort with which people are mixing the digital with their real worlds—as apps like Pokémon Go, Musical.ly, and Snapchat have demonstrated, said Steve Raymond, 8i’s CEO.

Here Comes Spider-Man

With Holo, users peruse collections of holograms, each of which includes dozens of poses of, say, Spider-Man—as a promotion for the new film, Spider-Man: Homecoming. These are not computer-generated images, however. They’re live-action, shot at 8i’s Culver City, California, studio, using the company’s volumetric capture tools.

The company sees three main types of content that Holo will include over time: Things like summer one-offs with branded content, pets, or other novelties; content from long-term partners; and content with new partners featuring regularly updated material.

The hope is that people who are already creating and sharing lots of content on their phones will take quickly to Holo, downloading holograms of their favorite characters and YouTube personalities, Raymond said, and then mixing those holograms into their lives and shooting—and sharing—funny videos.

Over time—though not at launch—Holo will feature video-cutting tools like those in Vine, making it possible for users to create stop-motion videos. Even without that tool being initially available, though, users can export the videos they shoot in Holo into other video-editing software in order to create Vine-like quick films.

As an example, Raymond said, a Holo beta user in Australia—an Instagram influencer—created multi-scene Vine-style videos starring himself and holographic zombies going out for coffee. The zombies, Raymond added, were like actors in the scenes.

Holo-Bombing

While some creators will take the time to create complex videos with the holographic content, 8i expects that most people will focus instead on quick hits—especially using a technique the company calls “holo-bombing,” where someone shoots a video in a public place with a holographic character blending into a scene without anyone knowing it’s happening. Picture Spider-Man dancing behind someone sitting and reading at a cafe table.

The release of Holo doesn’t impact 8i’s commitment to helping partners create VR experiences featuring volumetric characters. But Raymond said it does represent the next stage of the company’s strategy—being a major player in helping a wide variety of partners create augmented reality content across several industries, among them e-commerce, education, advertising, and so on.

“As a brand, I can give you Spider-Man,” Raymond said. “I can give you IP in the form of celebrities, YouTube stars, and say, ‘What can you come up with?’ Share it with a hashtag, and we’ll feature the best ones. We see 3D immersive content as being a really broad category that is going to have lots of use cases.”

In that sense, he added, Holo is “low-hanging fruit” since no one’s ever before built an app that makes it easy for millions of people to create custom videos featuring high-quality 3D representations of their favorite characters and personalities.

There’s a longer-term play here, as well, Raymond said. He expects the proliferation of AR glasses from multiple sources over the next few years, all of which should be capable of incorporating the kinds of holographic content featured in Holo. With glasses like that, he said, wearers could walk around, see something they want to make a video of with holograms, and easily shoot and stream it.

“Everything we’ve created for phones will work on [AR glasses] from day one,” Raymond said. “It’s the same format. For us, that’s another selling point for advertisers and media companies—start building your content libraries now, because the use cases are just going to grow.”

Here’s a thought experiment: Think of the two cultures of Los Angeles and New York City. Got a mental image of both? Great. Now try to strip out everything geographical—major landmarks, local weather, and so on. What are you left with?

When we think of “culture,” so much of that is tied to a physical location. And that’s just as true of work cultures as urban ones. But here at Goodway Group, a digital marketing company with over 400 U.S.-based employees, we have a work culture that’s earned high marks on Glassdoor and kudos from Fortune‘s Great Place to Work initiative and the Society for Human Resource Management—and we all work from home. In fact, around a dozen of our team members live in RVs.

In my experience, it isn’t the tools and tech that make a 400-plus remote workforce successful. Those things only enable remote work to happen at its most basic level. They don’t build an effective, collaborative, award-winning culture. Here’s what does.

Related:IBM’s Remote Work Reversal Is A Losing Battle Against The New Normal

Make It The Norm

You know the person who works from home on Fridays? And whenever there’s a meeting, they have to dial in but it’s basically like they’re not there? They don’t feel like they’re there, either. Letting some people to work from home some of the time is a recipe for frustration at best. Even if the schedule is well laid out, the playing field feels uneven. This is especially true if upper management is in the office and others aren’t. Everyone has to be outside of a central office to make it work.

One of the main benefits our employees cite about working from home is that it lets them do those important “life” things that they’d otherwise struggle to handle if they had to commute to an office every day. Things like spending time with their families, exercising, cooking, house work, staying employed when their families need to relocate, and so on. By allowing people the flexibility to tend to their lives during the workday, you award people an incredibly valuable benefit that they grow to cherish. If you hand this benefit out to only a select few, it’ll backfire by sowing envy among your staff.

For those that do want to work from an office environment from time to time, we provide WeWork memberships, which can help provide that flexibility and interaction even though the workspace isn’t specific to our company.

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

Hire People Who Can Thrive In A Remote Environment

People usually fall into one of two categories: the “I would love to work from home! I get so much done!” camp, and the other being, “I can’t work from home. I just get so distracted.” What many CEOs fail to understand is that they’re currently employing a large number of people who fall into the first category already, those who are simply more productive out of the office. These people are then forced into a less productive environment because it’s just the norm.

Operating a successful remote workforce means hiring right, which is really no different from hiring a successful onsite workforce. It’s just that onsite employers rarely think of it this way. We use assessments like Wonderlic’s Personal Test to screen for characteristics like “achievement striving,” “dependability,” and “efficiency,” all of which the tool’s developers have found are great predictors of success in a remote environment. As part of a rigorous interview process, these assessments have helped us get pretty good at determining early on whether someone will be a good fit to work remotely.

Default Toward Documenting Things

Think about how many impromptu in-person conversations you have in a week. In how many of those are agreements or decisions made? Usually quite a few, right? But these go undocumented, simply because both parties made eye contact and talked about it in-person, which seems to create enough commitment on both sides for there to be follow-through. Eye contact doesn’t have enterprise value, though. Documentation does.

When joining our company, new employees are exposed to “the wiki.” It’s Atlassian’s Confluence, but it has achieved a kind of ever-present, pervasive presence in our culture. Notes from every meeting are on the wiki. My one-on-ones with my direct reports are protected to just that person and me. But department notes, leadership team meeting notes, and most all other meeting agendas and notes are left open. This inspires trust and accountability, too. There are follow-up tasks on every page with the assignees called out.

Related:How Trello Employees Use Trello

Want to know where your business has process and documentation gaps? Have everyone work from home for a week. Seriously! If nothing else, it’s an amazing audit tool.

Getting Together Should Be A Celebration, Not A Chore

I’ve never met anyone who’s truly excited to go into work every day. But we’ve found that when you rarely have a chance to get together with your coworkers, most people are legitimately excited once an opportunity comes around. At Goodway, we’ve been going to Deer Valley, Utah, in the summer, and Las Vegas around the holidays for a week apiece. Those big meetups are absolutely packed with meetings, work, and celebration.

When people arrive, they’re genuinely excited to see each other—hugs abound because we literally haven’t seen each other in six months. For remote employees, seeing their work family can be as exciting as seeing extended families. And like any family reunion, come Friday, everyone is ready to head home.

One of the main reasons companies screw up while trying to create flexible work environments is because they do it halfway (two days a week, for instance), or as an exception for some and not all. The “right mix” is that there is no mix that’s right: You’ve got to go all in and commit to a fully remote culture. Let people opt into an office environment when they want to, and use resources like coworking spaces to accomplish that. When people make their own choices, it shouldn’t surprise you how much more they appreciate the results.

Jay Friedman is COO of Goodway Group, where he’s helped grow the company from just 19 employees in 2006 to an over 400-person workforce.

Modern artificial intelligence is smart enough to beat humans at chess, understand speech, and even drive a car.

But one area where machine-learning algorithms still struggle is explaining to humans how and why they’re making particular decisions. That can be fine if computers are just playing games, but for more serious applications people are a lot less willing to trust a machine whose thought processes they can’t understand.

If AI is being used to make decisions about who to hire or whether to extend a bank loan, people want to make sure the algorithm hasn’t absorbed race or gender biases from the society that trained it. If a computer is going to drive a car, engineers will want to make sure it doesn’t have any blind spots that will send it careening off the road in unexpected situations. And if a machine is going to help make medical diagnoses, doctors and patients will want to know what symptoms and readings it’s relying on.

“If you go to a doctor and the doctor says, ‘Hey, you have six months to live,’ and offers absolutely no explanation as to why the doctor is saying that, that would be a pretty poor doctor,” says Sameer Singh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Irvine.

Singh is a coauthor of a frequently cited paper published last year that proposes a system for making machine-learning decisions more comprehensible to humans. The system, known as LIME, highlights parts of input data that factor heavily in the computer’s decisions. In one example from the paper, an algorithm trained to distinguish forum posts about Christianity from those about atheism appears accurate at first blush, but LIME reveals that it’s relying heavily on forum-specific features, like the names of “prolific posters.”

Developing explainable AI, as such systems are frequently called, is more than an academic exercise. It’s of growing interest to commercial users of AI and to the military. Explanations of how algorithms are thinking make it easier for leaders to adopt artificial intelligence systems within their organizations—and easier to challenge them when they’re wrong.

“If they disagree with that decision, they will be way more confident in going back to the people who wrote that and say no, this doesn’t make sense because of this,” says Mark Hammond, cofounder and CEO of AI startup Bonsai.

Last month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency signed formal agreements with 10 research teams in a four-year, multimillion-dollar program designed to develop new explainable AI systems and interfaces for delivering the explanations to humans. Some of the teams will work on systems for operating simulated autonomous devices, like self-driving cars, while others will work on algorithms for analyzing mounds of data, like intelligence reports.

“Each year, we’ll have a major evaluation where we’ll bring in groups of users who will sit down with these systems,” says David Gunning, program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office. Gunning says he imagines that by the end of the program, some of the prototype projects will be ready for further development for military or other use.

Deep learning, loosely inspired by the networks of neurons in the human brain, uses sample data to develop multilayered sets of huge matrices of numbers. Algorithms then harness those matrices to analyze and categorize data, whether they’re looking for familiar faces in a crowd or trying to spot the best move on a chess board. Typically, they process information starting at the lowest level, whether that’s the individual pixels from an image or individual letters of text. The matrices are used to decide how to weight each facet of that data through a series of complex mathematical formulas. While the algorithms often prove quite accurate, the large arrays of seemingly arbitrary numbers are effectively beyond human comprehension.

“The whole process is not transparent,” says Xia “Ben” Hu, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M and leader of one of the teams in the DARPA program. His group aims to produce what it calls “shallow models”: mathematical constructs that behave, at least in certain cases, similarly to deep-learning algorithms while being simple enough for humans to understand.

Another team, from the Stanford University spin-off research group SRI International, plans to use what are called generative adversarial networks. Those are pairs of AI systems in which one is trained to produce realistic data in a particular category and the other is trained to distinguish the generated data from authentic samples. The purpose, in this case, is to generate explanations similar to those that might be given by humans.

The team plans to test its approach on a data set called MovieQA, which consists of 15,000 multiple choice questions about movies along with data like their scripts and subtitled video clips.

“You have the movie, you have scripts, you have subtitles. You have all this rich data that is time-synched in situations,” says SRI senior computer scientist Mohamed Amer. “The question could be, who was the lead actor in The Matrix?”

Ideally, the system would not only deliver the correct answer, it would let users highlight certain sections of the questions and answers to see the sections of the script and film it used to figure out the answer.

“You hover over a verb, for example, it will show you a pose of the person, for example, doing the action,” Amer says. “The idea is to kind of bring it down to an interpretable feature the person can actually visualize, where the person is not a machine-learning developer but is just a regular user of the system.”

Forming a first impression of someone takes seconds, and that can feel impossible to nail when you’re in a job interview. Luckily, most hiring managers take more time to form their opinion. A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology found that the first 15 minutes are when an impression is made during an interview, and that’s enough time to connect and sell yourself.

We spoke with hiring managers and found out what impresses them. Here are eight things to do to help you land the job.

1. Know That Your First Impression Starts Right Away

Be careful when waiting for the interviewer to come get you, as the receptionist may get a first impression that he or she can share with the interviewer, says Patricia H. Lenkov, founder and president of the recruiting firm Agility Executive Search. “Don’t talk on the phone, doze off, or otherwise act unprofessional, even if you believe the interview has not yet begun,” she says.

These first few moments matter, adds Nicole Cox, chief recruitment officer at the recruiting firm Decision Toolbox. “I have seen hiring managers ask reception staff about their interaction with a candidate,” she says.

Zappos is known to interview the shuttle driver when they bring a candidate in for an interview. If the person was less than courteous, they get sent home.

2. Smile

It sounds simple, but smiling is a powerful part of your first impression. Research from Cornell University found that facial appearance affects how we judge someone. “These facial cues are very powerful in shaping interactions, even in the presence of other information,” writes Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology and lead researcher.

Neutral expressions, for example, can hinder a person’s likeability, while people who smile and lean forward a bit come off as being warmer.

People see a smiling person as more intelligent, attractive, relaxed, sincere, and reliable than a person who’s not smiling, says Denise Dudley, author of Work It! Get In, Get Noticed, Get Promoted. “Smiling also does some pretty amazing things to your body,” she says. “It helps decrease the amount of stress-induced hormones circulating through your bloodstream, lowers your blood pressure, and makes you feel more relaxed and happy by stimulating the release of feel-good neurotransmitters in your brain.”

When others see a smiling face, the reward centers in their brains become activated, releasing the same feel-good neurotransmitters that are already making you feel so great, says Dudley. “In short, each time you smile at someone else, both of you will experience activated reward centers and a release of positive chemicals in your brains,” she says.

3. Give A Firm Handshake

If your handshake is weak or if you lack eye contact, it can be challenging to overcome, says Lenkov. “I am often surprised when meeting otherwise successful and accomplished people who have a limp, ‘dead fish’ kind of handshake,” she says.

A good handshake is firm but not excessively so, Lenkov adds. “It doesn’t hurt, but it also leaves the subtle impression of confidence,” she says, adding that it must be combined with eye contact. “Shaking hands without looking the other person in the eye takes away from the good impression one of trying to create.”

4. Start To Build Rapport

At the greeting stage, try to be the first to initiate conversation, says Cox. “It shows respect and confidence all at once,” she says, adding that you shouldn’t hurry or rush the greeting. “That can make you appear nervous.”

Then balance listening and speaking, says Jill Larsen, senior vice president of HR and talent for Cisco. “Many times candidates try too hard to say as much as they can in the interview,” she says. “Most candidates who get an in-person interview have the basic technical skills for the role; it’s the cultural or personality fit that’s important. Do your best not to be nervous, and try to connect with the interviewer.”

5. Summarize Your Experience

Without looking at your resume, be able to tell the hiring manager a summary of your career path, says Phil Shawe, co-CEO of TransPerfect, a global content management and translation services company. Include factors that influenced your choice of schools, the jobs you took, the moves you made, and the life experiences that make you ready to start a new chapter with your interviewer’s company, he suggests.

“From my experience, if someone cannot give a coherent summary about themselves, then they will have a hard time being an ambassador of their department internally, and a difficult time achieving further success,” says Shawe.

6. Share Statistics

Before going to the interview, review your career and list your major accomplishments, says Brian Binke, president and CEO of The Birmingham Group, a recruiting firm. Be specific about areas where you were able to save or make the company money, brought in new business, exceeded quota, or reduced turnover.

During the interview, ask exactly what the hiring manager is looking for, says Binke. “Most candidates will talk about what they have done,” he says. “The prepared candidate can be very specific. They can discuss how they have been highly successful in the past, and how their former company has benefited. For example, ‘We were able to save the company $600,000,’ or ‘First year turnover was reduced by 55%.'”

7. Be Willing To Be Vulnerable

It’s great to be able to showcase your successes, but it’s also important to be able to describe situations where things didn’t work out as planned, says Larsen.

“When a candidate describes how they dealt with failure and what they learned from it, it gives a hiring manager insight into a person and how they react in difficult circumstances, giving them an edge over other candidates,” she says.

8. Ask Great Questions

Great questions give candidates information about whether the position is right for them, while allowing them to sell themselves, says Binke. For example, “If I make a change, my goal would be to find a company that I can retire from. Where do you see XYZ company five, 10, 15 years from now? If I do an excellent job, where can I be with your company?”

“This is a great question for a candidate that’s interested in finding a stable opportunity that offers upward mobility,” he says. “One of the most important things hiring managers look for when interviewing a candidate is one that will be with them for the long haul and is promotable.”

You may not know about GitHub if you’re not a programmer. To those in the software business, GitHub or rival products like Atlassian Jira, are essential for dividing up coding tasks among team members and tracking what everyone is working on. Inside the San Francisco company, its 600 employees, nicknamed Hubbers, have found other uses for their online service—managing not only code but any collaborative projects, such as legal documents or HR policies. “We’re going to treat legal issues like bugs in the code,” says Julio Avalos, GitHub’s general counsel and chief business officer.

To get a sense of GitHub, start by thinking of Google Docs—an online repository for text where people can make changes and leave comments. But software projects are a lot harder to manage. They can take months or years to develop, run to thousands or millions of lines of code, and have dozens or more collaborators. So toss in project management capabilities like those in Trello, which allows people to define individual tasks that go into developing the software, track progress, and assign who is responsible for them. Then add a messaging system like Slack so that workers can chat about the projects and flag specific people by username (with an “@” symbol) to get their attention. One unique aspect of GitHub is the pull request. It allows someone to alert other collaborators of new code they have proposed and get feedback before a decision to add it to the main project.

As GitHub, founded in 2008, expanded beyond its original core of techies, employees found new ways to use it. Shortly after joining GitHub in 2012, Avalos was asked to draw up a legal liability waiver for employees to sign before an off-site meeting. He mentioned it in a GitHub discussion, and an employee recalled that a lawyer had created such a document a few months earlier. “By the time I get into the [discussion] thread 10 minutes later, there’s a pre-existing [document] that I take five or ten minutes to tailor to this event, rather than reinventing the wheel,” he says. “For me, that was some kind of a ha moment, where I get why the developers like [GitHub].”

Many open-source software projects are hosted on GitHub (a service it offers them for free). The company thinks of its internal operations as open-source for employees, allowing anyone to see and contribute (through a pull request) to projects such as its first employee handbook in 2016 (a seemingly late effort, given claims of harassment by employee Julie Ann Horvath in 2014 that forced founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner to resign).

The HR department started from a simple document called Hubber Expectations and (in the open-source spirit) from the employee handbook for game developer Valve Software. “We just built it in there through our community, through putting it on GitHub and getting feedback,” from employees, says Merritt Anderson, the head of HR. GitHub now plans to make its handbook open source so that other companies can build upon it.

GitHub also used its own platform to revamp the company’s parental leave policy, upping the time period from 16 to 20 weeks. Employees provided input through GitHub, such as pointing out more generous policies that Netflix and Pinterest were offering. Using what’s called a pull request, the HR team could alert employees of changes made to the policy or questions answered so that everyone had a chance to review them.

In our conversations with GitHub employees, we got many tips on how to use the platform better, be it for managing software development or any other projects. Here are a few that can be used for coding projects or adapted for other uses.

1) Save time with a discrete set of emojis
Emojis can easily get out of hand, and ambiguous. GitHub provides just six to express the most useful reactions, such as smile, frown, thumbs up, and thumbs down for pull requests.
Nicci Arsenault; HR

2) Use reaction sorting
You can sort by the volume of emoji-based reactions to see what issues have gotten the most engagement.
Ayman Nadeem, Software Engineer.

3) Use Projects (normally for tracking a coding endeavor) to create a to-do list, sorted by deadlines, for any type of duties.
Nicci Arsenault

4) Use Blame View to see why a piece of code was written
Blame view allows you to click on an entry in the project’s version history and see what the code looked like before that change was made. It saves you from having to dig through the file’s full history to find the part you are interested in.
Ayman Nadeem

For a long time, Kulap Vilaysack wanted nothing more than to be a star. Now she has her sights set on something else.

“I want to be the Asian Shonda Rimes,” she says. “I want to be a bad ass boss who creates expansive worlds filled with diverse characters and complicated leading women.”

She’s already well on her way. Earler this month, digital comedy platform Seeso released the third season of Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, the Reno 911-meets-Million Dollar Listing series Vilaysack created. Although “expansive” might be a generous way to describe the Hollywood real estate world the show is set within, its characters are indeed diverse and nobody would dare mistake the leading women for anything less than complicated. Owning ABC’s entire Thursday night lineup may not be quite in reach just yet, but Vilaysack’s successful baptism by fire as a first-time creator and showrunner hints that she’s fully capable of becoming comedy’s answer to the Scandal-maker.

You might be familiar with the almost aggressively bubbly Vilaysack from the menagerie of cameo characters she’s played on sitcoms and side projects in the past decade. Or perhaps you know her as one half of Who Charted?, the long-running comedy podcast she hosts with Howard Kremer. Before all that, however, Vilaysack grew up far away from Hollywood–in Minnesota, to be exact–as the daughter of Laotian immigrants.

A lifelong comedy addict, she weaned herself on a steady drip of I Love Lucy reruns and SNL, which she would watch while deveining shrimp in her mother’s restaurant. After high school, Vilaysack fled to L.A., enrolling in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. During off-hours, she consumed all the live comedy she could handle, including a taping of Mr. Show, where she met her future husband, Scott Aukerman. Pretty soon, she began to suspect that fashion was probably not what she wanted to do with her life. Instead, she considered pursuing comedy herself.

“I’d always been told I was funny,” she says. “Or at least I’d been laughed at.”

She decided to trade in the Fashion Institute for sketch and improv classes at Second City, and later on, the ubiquitous Upright Citizens Brigade theater when it expanded from New York to LA. She started creating and appearing in videos with friends. Eventually, she was auditioning for TV shows—and booking them—all with the ultimate goal of becoming a series regular.

“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s where I’ll be complete. That’s where I’ll finally know I’m worthy. As if one of these pilots equaled some long-standing role in a Friends or whatever,” Vilaysack says. “That was my fantasy, and it didn’t happen.

Though she racked up a respectable resume with parts in The Office, Reno 911, and Parks and Rec, that killer leading role remained as elusive as ever. The cumulative cosmic trauma of so many hopes dashed made her realize she actually preferred to be on the other side of the audition desk. She didn’t necessarily want to be a Shonda Rhimes-type megamogul just yet, but she craved more control. She didn’t want to be the one who gets chosen; she wanted to choose.

The comic performer was now determined to create something more substantial than the sketches she’d written and the shows she’d acted in. Various ideas for pilots came and went but nothing really stuck. In the meantime, she started the podcast, Who Charted?, which forced her to be game-tight with no script for an hour each week.

A couple years later, she embarked on a more ambitious project, the documentary Origin Story, in which she travels to Laos to meet her biological father. (Vilaysack hopes to have the finished film in festivals by the end of this year.) All the while, however, the pilot idea she’d been looking for was right in front of her.

There are probably very few people as interested in real estate culture as Kulap Vilaysack. She mainlines Property Brothers, Love it or List It, and both House Hunters International AND House Hunters Island. Her obsession even spills beyond the frame into real life.

“I like going to open houses,” she says. “I like seeing how people set up the space–I’m nosy like that. I want to go through drawers. I want to unpack my feelings. Buying a home is such an intense and loaded experience, it’s a great place for drama.”

She had a feeling it would make a great place for comedy, too.

Vilaysack had been playing with the idea of some kind of real estate show spoof for years, but the breakthrough happened when she thought of combining these kinds of shows with the improv-fueled framework of Reno 911. She realized she could have a dysfunctional team of real estate agents competing to sell hot properties to a quirky cavalcade of guest stars played by some famous, funny friends. It was too promising not to pursue.

Working with Scott Aukerman and his Comedy Bang Bang productions, Vilaysack teamed up with Reno 911 creators Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. Paul F. Tompkins was the creator’s first choice to lead the cast, and pals like Adam Scott, Busy Phillips, and Jason Mantzoukas quickly came on board as potential guests. When it came time to shop the show around, Seeso immediately responded to Kulap’s vision and her team. They bought the show un-piloted.

Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ ultimately became a key selling point for Seeso when the platform launched last January, and remains one of its top shows. Now in its third season, Bajillion has hit a groove, balancing episodic character pieces with the ongoing story of Platinum Realty. Vilaysack started out the show mostly with interconnected sketches, and now she’s experimenting more with story arcs.

During the development process, when the subject came up of who should be showrunner, Kulap didn’t necessarily see herself in the role. Even though she was indisputably the show’s creator, it took Tom Lennon urging her to take a shot at running the writers room. It’s an issue that will not come up again when it’s time to make the next show.

Now that she has a seat at the table, Vilaysack may not stop until she owns the whole house.

As the popularity of podcasts continues to grow, more marketers are considering and investing in the medium, beyond the host reading out their brand name during an ad break. Increasingly, it’s the brands themselves backing podcast production, with Slack, Spotify, eBay, and more among them. Now Microsoft has joined the fray with a new podcast called .future (dot-future), that aims to tell stories about growing technologies that touch our everyday lives–from the cloud, to gaming, to health–and how the decisions being made today will affect our lives in the future.

Launched this week, the new podcast was made with Gimlet Creative, the branded content arm of the podcast company behind popular shows like StartUp and Reply All.

Microsoft’s head of influencer relations Doug Dawson says that the podcast allows the brand to go beyond an ad to have more in-depth conversations around the biggest trends in technology with people both inside and outside the company.

“There are some ideas you just can’t get across in a tweet,” says Dawson. “In a fast food world, this is us inviting folks to sit down and take the time to enjoy a home-cooked meal with us and a few friends.”

Gimlet Creative deputy creative director Frances Harlow says they worked closely with the brand to find the right framing for the show’s concept.

“A lot of people are intimidated by the speed at which technology is changing our lives. Microsoft’s goal was to shift the perceptions of emerging technology from scary and unknown into a tool that can bring about positive change,” says Harlow. “We decided the best way to do that was to look at the future through the lens of choice. The future isn’t some inevitable, sci-fi movie waiting to happen. It’s the result of the choices we–both individually and collectively –are making every day.”

The new show marks the second branded pod launch for Gimlet Creative in the last few months, with Virgin Atlantic’s The Venture premiering back in April. As branded content goes, there is a challenge overcoming the leap of faith listeners must take to actually check out and subscribe to a podcast produced by a brand. But Harlow says with that also comes significant opportunity.

“Since it’s such an intimate medium, it’s a natural fit for a big brand that’s looking to connect with people on a more human level,” she says. “Companies that touch so many industries around the globe, like Microsoft, are ripe with stories.”