Hristo Gyoshev is hiring data scientists right now, but he isn’t just looking for people with advanced technical know-how. It takes more than that to land a job offer.

Now the head of business operations and strategy at MasterClass, the online education startup, Gyoshev has a background in product strategy and operations at consumer web companies, including Yahoo, as well as enterprise businesses. So he’s had a front-row seat to the sorts of projects data scientists actually wind up working on inside companies. As a result, Gyoshev prizes learning, flexibility, and a strong sense of context just as much as analytical chops.

Here are a few of the non-technical skills he looks for in data science candidates.

Range And Adaptability

“One of the main assets we look for is a desire to work on projects across a very broad range of analytic disciplines,” says Gyoshev, “from quantitative market research and/or designing, conducting, and analyzing user surveys to statistical analysis, business intelligence, and analytics. We also look for candidates who are comfortable learning something new to remove bottlenecks and keep a project moving.” As Gyoshev sees it, that comes down to two skills:

1. Sufficient knowledge of statistics to determine what is or isn’t a valid statistical inference, [to] recognize and prevent biases, etc.
2. The desire and ability to obtain and work with real-world data (which is always imperfect) and derive actionable insights.

In addition to working in Excel, SQL, Python, and R, Gyoshev says MasterClass also needs data scientists who have “experience in social science research or market/user research, through either academic or industry work” as well as business reporting and analytics. Range is a good thing.

Related:Every Data Science Interview Boiled Down To Five Basic Questions

An Eye For Context

“Strive to understand and keep in mind the broader context of the problem you are being asked to solve—or the problem behind the question you are being asked,” Gyoshev suggests. “Whenever you are asked to perform a certain analysis, or build a model, someone at the company believes that this would help them solve a particular problem.”

“Sometimes you can tell in advance that it won’t, and sometimes you can suggest a better approach. Your analysis, model, [or] other work product will always be better if you start from a good understanding of the core objectives of the ‘clients’ of your analysis.” (That’s a good rule to remember for data science job interviews, too.)

Problem-Solving Skills

This one should come as no surprise. While interviewing candidates, Gyoshev says he tries to ask about challenges data scientists have faced in previous jobs—and what they did to overcome them. “We may ask for examples of specific types of projects they have worked on, and then ask them to walk us through their approach and thinking, the tools they used, the major challenges they encountered, and how they resolved them.”

Sometimes MasterClass also asks candidates to demonstrate their problem-solving abilities through a short project “to see how they approach some specific problem,” says Gyoshev, “and, yes, to be able to see the quality of a deliverable they produce.”

Going Beyond Data-Wrangling

Compared to other data science roles, Gyoshev says the ones he’s hiring for at MasterClass aren’t heavy on “machine learning or algorithms, and only minimal data-wrangling.” Instead, the company needs experts who can perform “a very wide variety of analyses that would inform a broad range of decisions—about the products, business, and operations of the company.”

That obviously means some degree of exporting, processing, and so on, Gyoshev adds, “but would also involve building various predictive models; designing, conducting, and analyzing surveys or experiments; helping to define and set up reporting and metrics; and conducting one-off analyses related to various aspects of our business operations.” In other words, it’s a grab-bag of data-based skills that might stretch the usual job description you’d find other other data-scientist postings.

Gyoshev wants candidates who find that exciting—even if they don’t walk through the door knowing everything they’ll need to on day one: “We do need them to be highly versatile and familiar with a number of other aspects of data analysis,” he says, but “we also need them to be willing and able to learn tools or methods they may not have previously used.”

This article is adapted with permission from Springboard’s Data Science Interview Guide. Springboard recently launched a data science career track bootcamp.

Three years ago, our remote company joined Slack. Until then, we had relied on a mix of email and an internal tool called Wedoist for all our communication. But our steadily growing team based across several time zones made it hard to stay on the same page and feel cohesive.

Something had to change. So we tried Slack. To say the app was a game-changer would be putting it mildly. Communication between team members across continents exploded. Almost overnight, we went from a group of 30 individuals to a true team.

But then, two years in, we decided to quit Slack cold turkey.

Group chat apps like Slack are built for a specific kind of communication –one-line-at-a-time, real-time conversations. This form of communication is sometimes useful (e.g. in emergency situations) but presents significant downsides when it becomes your team’s primary way of communicating. Here’s why we eventually opted out.

Related:Slacklash: Group Messaging Apps Are Stressing Some People Out

It Was Addictive

Because conversations in Slack happen on a one-way conveyor belt, our team began feeling like they had to stay constantly connected to keep up. This style of communication was especially problematic for a remote-first company like ours. How do you stay in the loop when earlier topics have already been discussed and are buried by the time you even wake up? It wasn’t healthy for our team, and it wasn’t helping us focus on the hard work that really moves projects forward.

It Was Built For Shallow Conversations

Slack was useful for quickly checking on things, but we found that it was a troublesome channel for big-picture discussions. It was nearly impossible to sustain a full conversation from start to finish.

Even when conversations stayed on topic, everything still required an immediate response. With Slack, there was no breathing room to take a step back and follow up on it later. We still needed separate tools–in our case, email and Wedoist–to have deeper conversations about our work.

It Was Disorganized

With multiple, simultaneous conversations happening inside a single Slack channel, we began losing track of things. Ideas were proposed, discussed for a bit, and lost. As a result, the same questions and issues were often brought up multiple times.

Related:The Unexpected Design Challenge Behind Slack’s Threaded Conversations

It Only Simulated Transparency

The lack of organization inside Slack had real consequences for our team’s access to information. We quickly discovered that real-time messaging wasn’t meant to preserve history or promote transparency.

Slack had awesome search if you were looking for something very specific like a file, but there was no way to get insight into what was happening in any given channel without manually skimming through it.

That led to a frustrating contradiction: In theory, everyone on the team had access to all the communication that happened in public channels. But in reality, even I couldn’t keep track of all the conversations that were happening at the company.

Finding A Different Way To Work Together

We realized we needed an alternative that was asynchronous, more mindful, and better organized. In fact, Slack the product wasn’t the issue. It was real-time messaging itself that was the problem. So in 2014—roughly one year into our Slack experiment—we started building “Twist.” Our goal was to design an entirely new platform– one that centers around calmer, more organized, and more productive communication. And on March 23, 2016, we moved all our team communication to the platform.

Related:Why You Need To Master In-Person Conversations In Your Slack-Driven Office 

I firmly believe we wouldn’t be the team we are today if we hadn’t pursued this challenge and made the switch. Twist has given us a space to fully discuss complex ideas and projects from start to finish, to give more meaningful feedback, to promote transparency in our decision-making, and to disconnect to do the deep work that we’re truly excited about.

Along the way, we’ve made a few design decisions to prioritize asynchronous communication over real-time messaging:

Thread-First Communication

Threaded conversations have been at Twist’s core from the beginning. They let anyone on the team create a conversation about a specific topic and ensure that whole conversations– ideas, issues, answers, and decisions – stay organized around that topic. Many members snooze all notifications for significant portions of the day, and some don’t have notifications turned on at all. This gives them complete control over their time and attention to do deep, thoughtful work.

Slack recently introduced the concept of threads inside the app as well. The feature is great at what it’s designed for– to hold small side conversations that branch off the main channel– but it doesn’t solve any of the issues we faced. When everything else is built around group chat, real-time communication will always be the default.

Truly Transparent Conversations

From our experience with Slack, we knew that merely making conversations public wasn’t enough to guarantee equal access to information across the company. Instead of having to skim through single stream-of-consciousness chat channels, our team can now browse topics to get an overview of the discussions happening across the company. We can delve deeper into just the conversations we’re interested in, even if we’re not directly involved. We often share links to whole threads as reference so people can look and see how a certain decision was made.

As CEO, having all our team conversations in Twist threads lets me keep my finger on the pulse of the company without getting overwhelmed. It frees me up to do other work without worrying that I’m missing important things.

We’ve found that Twist has helped us stay connected in more meaningful ways—not just socializing, but actually sharing in the important conversations that determine the core of who we are as a company.

Leaving Out The Online Presence Indicator

A small but impactful design choice we made in creating Twist was to leave out the online presence indicator. If you see that a teammate is online, you expect an immediate response. But if you see someone is offline, you’re more likely to postpone sending a message because they probably won’t get back to you right away.

Without the presence indicator, our team has adapted to adding comments and sending messages whenever they need to. They have no way of knowing if the person is online, so they don’t expect an immediate response. Conversations may happen more slowly, but more real work gets done.

Real Time Off

Another example of how we’ve designed Twist to foster mindful communication is the time-off feature. Twist lets you set up a Time Off status that mutes all notifications from the app, changes your avatar to a “vacation” avatar, and lets your teammates know when you’ll return. This way people can properly recharge and take a well-deserved vacation, and everyone knows not to expect a response until they get back.

Products That Improve Productivity And Well-Being

Today’s communication apps compete to grab your attention and maximize your time spent inside their apps. We want Twist to do well and be profitable, but we want it to be because it truly empowers teams (including ours) to do their best work, not because it hijacks their time and attention. It’s about having a product that’s built to serve users’ needs and not the other way around.

Calm, asynchronous communication isn’t the norm. It’s going to take a major shift in thinking to recognize that focus and balance are vital assets that companies need to protect in order to be successful.

We’re betting that in the future, the most successful companies will be the ones that make that shift—the ones that don’t require their employees to be constantly connected, who see the value in creating space for deep work and setting aside time to fully disconnect and recharge. We’re excited to be a part of that movement.

A version of this post originally appeared on Doist and is adapted with permission.

Nearly one-third of Americans don’t trust charities to spend their donations wisely. But new research by nonprofit evaluator and watchdog Charity Navigator proves such feelings generally unfounded, at least among the largest and longstanding cause groups operating within America’s major cities.

The organization has ranked the top charitable cities in the country, analyzing tax forms and publicly disclosed information to figure out where groups with the best financial health, accountability, and transparency practices tend to cluster. The winner is San Diego, followed by Houston, Saint Louis, the combined Tampa and St. Petersburg area, and Dallas.

The report includes only organizations with at least $1 million in revenue that have been around seven years or longer. “We all focus on the bad apples and certainly they’re out there and donors have to do their homework,” says Sandra Miniutti, Charity Navigator’s former vice president of marketing, who released the report. “This study reinforces the message that the vast majority of charities are doing good work.”

When looked at this way, blindspots emerge. Saint Louis, for instance, has no major human and civil rights groups active. That’s not to say there aren’t smaller groups in the area, but there’s certainly room for more. In many cities surveyed, in fact, equality-focused groups appear to make up 2% or less of the total charities operating there. The research was conducted in 2016, so things may have shifted since the presidential election.

For philanthropies looking for places to expand, they should know that large organizations in Houston, D.C. and Los Angeles are receiving, on average, more than $4 million in contributions annually, nearly double what groups in Philadelphia, Boston, or Minnesota can count on. Salaries for CEOs tend to fluctuate by market, too, because they can shift based on cost of living and hiring competition. The national average is about $130,000, which as Fast Company has reported means they’re likely still underpaid for the work being done.

With Travis Kalanick finally booted from Uber, we thought it was time to put some other CEOs on blast who have, improbably, escaped the same fate. Perhaps, like us, you forgot some of these folks were still clutching the reins of their respective companies. After all, the Teflon CEO was supposed to be a thing of the past: Over the past 15 years, investors and boards have wielded more power, especially after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which sought to protect investors by ensuring accurate financial reporting.

CEOs are now judged more harshly for their actions, both by the press and by activist investors who pour money into companies (as was the case with Uber). The same is true of the general public: A study by Stanford’s business school surveyed 1,554 Americans and found that half of them believed “CEOs should be fired (or worse) for unethical behavior.”

The past year has seen the ousting of CEOs from startups and corporations alike: Etsy’s Chad Dickerson, Thinx’s Miki Agrawal, Chipotle’s Monty Moran, Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf, and Ford’s Mark Fields, to name a few. Though Kalanick is arguably one of the biggest offenders in recent memory, there are more than a few CEOs who, by most accounts, should not still have jobs. Let’s dig into why those CEOs should be probably be fired—and how they may have managed to hang on.

Elizabeth Holmes: Theranos

We probably don’t have to explain this one to you. If you frequented the internet from late 2015 to mid-2016, chances are you know Theranos’s problems began when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published a story that called into question the accuracy of the startup’s blood tests.

In January, Theranos laid off 155 employees—41% of its workforce—just months after cutting a whopping 340 employees last fall. But! Holmes is still CEO, despite the layoffs and the dismissal of questionable board members like Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz. Problem is, Holmes has a compelling origin story. She’s a Stanford dropout—and a woman tech leader in a field dominated by men—who started Theranos at 19. Holmes has been breathlessly described as “Jobsian,” right down to her sartorial choices.

Plus, Theranos was a deeply personal endeavor for Holmes, who had always been scared of needles, and was repeatedly told by her Stanford professors that her blood-testing concept wasn’t feasible. According to the WSJ, Theranos also has no more than $54 million in cash left—and just this week, the company reportedly reached an agreement to settle a suit brought by Walgreens for about $30 million. Who could—and would want to—take over if she were fired?

Steve Ells: Chipotle

Since the E.coli outbreak heard ’round the country, Chipotle has struggled to bounce back. Though the rash of food poisoning—which included Norovirus and Salmonella outbreaks—didn’t continue into 2016, Chipotle’s bottom line has been slow to recover. The company finally exceeded analyst expectations this April in its Q1 earnings, with same-store sales up 17.8% after a long decline.

But while the incidents at Chipotle were relatively contained, the brand itself took a beating and, ironically, Chipotle’s cult-like status was likely part of the reason for that. As described in Fast Company‘s recent deep dive into Chipotle’s recovery, the company has taken a number of steps to ensure it doesn’t suffer another outbreak, including revamping its food safety protocols and enforcing audits to prevent sick employees from working. Unfortunately, it also meant scaling back its local sourcing efforts, despite Chipotle’s very public mission of “Food With Integrity.”

Founder and CEO Steve Ells remains at Chipotle in spite of former co-CEO Monty Moran’s ousting in December. Shareholder calls for Ells to step down as chairman have gone ignored, and Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung said recently that, even before the outbreaks, “we were losing our edge in terms of what it takes to run a great restaurant.” As described in our Chipotle feature, Ells didn’t always prioritize Chipotle’s bottom line, often spending money on ideas that were near and dear to him. From the story:

What’s dismaying to those who know Ells well is that he has always fought to do what he thought was right to improve the food Chipotle serves, even when it didn’t benefit Chipotle’s bottom line. He once spent a year and a half cycling through prototypes for an egg cooker so Chipotle could offer breakfast burritos. “We chased that to no avail and spent who knows how much money,” recalls a former executive who worked intimately with Ells and had knowledge of the failed effort. Once, Ells wanted to wedge a Jamba Juice–style blender operation into every Chipotle restaurant so workers could freshly squeeze limes, even though its kitchens only consume a half-cup of citrus juice per batch of guacamole. That didn’t work out either.

It’s understandable that Chipotle may not want to topple Ells, who, as its founder and a former chef, has long set the tone for the company. But Chipotle has historically been slow to evolve—one example being how little its menu offerings have changed during its tenure—which could hamper its growth as it navigates a crucial period. This is also true of Chipotle’s board, which until recently had seen little turnover. The same could be said of Ells, who has been at the company’s helm since he founded it in 1993.

Josh Tetrick: Hampton Creek

Hampton Creek first infiltrated shelves at Walmart, Whole Foods, and Kroger with its most visible product: Just Mayo, a vegan mayonnaise. The plant-based food company has since expanded its lineup to include flavored mayonnaise, salad dressing, pancake mix, and cookie dough.

But last year, Bloomberg reported that Tetrick and his team had been buying up large quantities of Just Mayo from stores where it was stocked, which looked like an effort to boost overall sales. Tetrick shrugged it off as qualify control. But Hampton Creek employees were also encouraged to pose as customers, call up grocery stores, and request the company’s products, seemingly to drum up demand. Tetrick told Fast Company‘s Ruth Reader that Hampton Creek started buying back its mayo in 2013, due to temperature control issues. Tetrick claims this tactic barely made a dent in the company’s sales but secured shelf space for Hampton Creek in major grocery stores.

One of Hampton Creek’s investors, Ali Partovi, told Tetrick—and the board—that he was essentially lying to investors. “If an investor discovers it during due diligence, we could lose financing and run out of cash,” he reportedly told Tetrick in an email, according to Bloomberg. “If they don’t, they’ll realize they were duped within months, and they might have a case for fraud.”

The company has struggled to bring in funding, perhaps a result of the buyback debacle. Last month, Tetrick let go of his CFO, COO, and head of HR; in total, Hampton Creek has lost a dozen senior execs in the past year. The company was reportedly losing $10 million a month last year, though that number was reduced to about $4 million this April. It’s possible Tetrick is still around only because he has majority voting power over Hampton Creek’s board.

Nick Woodman: GoPro

When GoPro first arrived on the scene in 2004, it did something novel, creating an accessible, commercial action camera where there hadn’t been one before. (Remember, this was before smartphones were ubiquitous.) It was a game changer for athletes, many of whom use GoPro devices for training. For a while, GoPro was flying high, and three years ago, the company went public in a soaring IPO that valued GoPro at $3 billion. But that’s when GoPro’s troubles began. Rather than ceding the consumer drone market to major players like Chinese firm DJI, the largest drone seller in the world, GoPro decided it was time to create a drone of its own.

That drone was supposed to launch in 2015. Instead, GoPro debuted a new camera—the Hero4 Session—which was derided as overpriced and uninspired. The Karma drone’s launch was pushed out to fall 2016, then recalled less than two months later after reports of power outages mid-flight. As GoPro CEO Nick Woodman told Fast Company last year, he relied too heavily on the buzz from the IPO and didn’t prioritize marketing at a time when fewer people were investing in cameras. He also admits that hubris got the better of him.

It’s surprising that Woodman has remained in his role as long as he has—upward of 13 years at this point. And given that the next few months could be crucial, perhaps it’s time GoPro rethinks its management. Surely GoPro’s precipitous drop in stock price has investors quaking in their boots? Frankly, we’re baffled by this one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Jack Dorsey: Twitter

This might be a controversial pick, but hear us out: We’re not champing at the bit for Dorsey’s exit, but we’re surprised he hasn’t gotten the boot. Dorsey is effectively a part-time CEO, juggling his duties at Twitter with his role as Square CEO. And how much has gone right for Twitter since Dorsey was brought back as CEO? The company has seen an upswing in users recently, which Twitter says can largely be attributed to “resurrected users” who have returned to the platform to keep tabs on political news. Its live-streaming efforts have snagged eyeballs and shown some promise.

Dorsey was, of course, famously fired from Twitter in 2008 due to poor management and for letting startup life get the better of him. Perhaps it’s unfair to pin Twitter’s problems on Dorsey; maybe the company was doomed from the start. But if Dorsey’s calling card is his ability to articulate Twitter’s vision, then it’s fair to expect the board and investors to think critically about whether he has actually done that in the past two years.

YouTube thinks that immersive videos are the future, and that as viewers’ appetites for them grow, creators will respond to meet that appetite.

But shooting high-quality virtual reality video requires expensive cameras. As a result, while the number of 360-degree videos available on YouTube today has multiplied into the tens of thousands since it launched the format in 2015, the quality is often middling. Solving some of these problems could help VR become what some analysts expect will be a $38 billion industry by 2026.

Today, YouTube–along with Google’s Daydream virtual reality team–introduced a new video format, called VR180, as well as specs for cameras that shoot in the format. These new products, YouTube says, will make creating high-quality VR videos cheap and easy for everyone. The company hopes that that will lead to an explosion in the amount of VR content available on YouTube.

New Format

According to Erin Teague, YouTube’s lead VR product manager, one of the biggest problems with 360 video is that image quality is sacrificed when editing software stitches together the output from the multiple lenses on cameras, like Ricoh’s Theta, that shoot in 360 degrees. Creators also often struggle with the fact that when making 360 videos, they either have to worry about making sure nothing or no one gets in the way of what they’re shooting.

The solution to both problems, Teague explains, is 180-degree video. By limiting what viewers see to 180 degrees, creators don’t have to worry about anything behind them interfering with their shots, or that image quality suffers in a video-stitching process.

That’s the idea behind VR180, which offers high-quality stereoscopic video–meaning that what’s close to the camera looks close to viewers, while what’s far away looks far away. When viewed on mobile or desktop, VR180 videos look the same as normal 2D YouTube content, with the edges on both side cropped. But when watched on a VR headset, viewers will see 180 degrees of high-quality, stereoscopic immersive video. (The format is compatible with Google Cardboard, Google’s Daydream VR, and Sony’s PlayStation VR.)

VR180 also supports live streaming, which Teague says makes the format ideal for shooting and live-streaming sports, music, and other entertainment.

Teague says YouTube is still fully committed to supporting 360 video, but that with the launch of VR180, it’s giving creators more choice. “We think that with different content types, both 360 and 180 will shine,” she says.

New Cameras

With a new video format comes the need for new cameras to create content. That’s why Google’s Daydream team has been working with LG, Lenovo, and Yi on the development of devices geared to shooting VR180 video. The cameras are expected to be available later this year, and each should have the same size, weight, and price of standard point-and-shoot models. The prices have not been disclosed.

YouTube knows it has to seed the new VR180 ecosystem with content, so it already has a number of cameras available at its YouTube Spaces studios in cities like Los Angeles, New York, London, and Paris. Content creators will be able to borrow those cameras effective immediately by reaching out to their Spaces partner manager, Teague says.

The development of the VR180 format, and the forthcoming release of compatible cameras, isn’t expected to undercut Google’s efforts to promote high-quality 360-degree VR content. In April, Google announced the $17,000, second-generation Jump camera, produced by China’s Yi. That 17-lens device is designed for professional content creators.

By comparison, the new VR180-ready cameras are expected to be used by everyday content creators, including regular people who want to go to events, pull a device out of their pocket, and feel confident that they can start shooting high-quality VR footage without any of the time-consuming and expensive setup required of a professional 360-degree production.

“It’s definitely a consumer experience,” Teague says. “Anyone can buy [the cameras], and anyone can use them.”

In early June, a nonprofit called Feeding Children Everywhere launched its own meal kit delivery service, dubbed Fed40, bringing a simplified version of the pre-portioned cooking craze free to impoverished families. Users can access a Fed40 app or go online, enter their address and how many family members live there, and receive 40 shelf-stable meals within one business day.

The goal is to mimic the success of the doorstep-cooking craze, a $1.5 billion market that for reasons of cost and convenience now caters to nearly every kind of eater, except perhaps those who could use such services the most. After all, 42 million Americans—about 13% of the country—are food insecure, meaning they’re unsure where their next meal may come from. It’s a condition far more likely to affect households with children, many of which also struggle to create healthy meals because they live in food deserts, surrounded by many fast food chains and convenience stores.

To undo that, Green pushed his group to think less like a service provider and more like a tech company. “We recognized that through a mobile app we could utilize technology to very efficiently connect people who need something. In this case, it’s food assistance to a lot of food that is available.”

For now, the menu is limited to just one meal, Red Lentil Jambalaya. It consists of rice, protein-rich lentils, dehydrated vegetables for nutrients, and sea salt. Unlike, say Blue Apron, the preparation doesn’t have extravagant components—it’s a simple base, one that’s easy to make and easily altered with extra spices, seasoning or other ingredients to remain palatable.

Feeding Children Everywhere didn’t start out with home delivery in mind. It was formed in 2010, after Florida couple named Don and Kristen Campbell send food to earthquake survivors in Haiti and decided to continue the effort elsewhere abroad. Gradually the group’s focus has shifted toward U.S., where progress against child hunger has remained uneven.

Traditionally, FCE’s delivery logistics have been a tad complicated. To ensure they tackle the systemic issues behind hunger overseas—long term, you don’t solve anything if you treat the symptoms and not the cause—they partnered with other nonprofits working to address things like poverty, education, or the lack of women’s health services in trouble spots.

In the U.S., things work differently because there are supposedly lots of societal support systems already in place. Public schools provide education while welfare and jobs programs can assist low-income parents in finding ways to support their families. So FCE always has always given to food banks, pantries, and school hunger programs, which it will continue to do.

Families that for whatever reason can’t access that cache, however, will quickly fall apart. Ultimately, Green sees Fed40 as a sort of stopgap: People who use the service more than four times may be contacted to ensure they’re aware of all the support services they have in the area.

One obvious way to defer costs would be to allow online payments through SNAP, something Green is open to but only as a “pennies on the dollar” sort of value proposition. The goal is to augment the food that’s available, not compete for subsidy dollars. The tech and protocols to make that happen aren’t here yet but may be soon. Companies like AmazonFresh and FreshDirect are reportedly in the midst of a federal pilot for how online ordering and delivery programs with food stamps might work.

In the meantime, FCE is working on broadening that menu. In July, it will roll out Apple Pie Oats, the first in a line of breakfasts, to make sure other meals are being covered. Desert-like name aside, it’s made out of puffed brown rice, steel cut oats, dehydrated apples, and a dash of nutmeg. There is no added sugar.

“We really see this as really essentially the food pantry of the future,” Green says. “Not only do we hope to address the issue of food insecurity in those communities. We really want to have an impact on public health.”

Before the media and technology calendar has even reached its halfway point, the year has typically already seen its fair share of can’t-miss events, such as the Consumer Electronics Show, SXSW, and Cannes Lion. And seeking to become a larger industry player in 2017? VidCon.

Once considered a less professional, more community-driven gathering of online video stars and their devoted fans, VidCon has become more robust with greater corporate and industry presences. Now in its eighth year, the conference, which runs June 21-24, has made an increasingly convincing case to be taken seriously as a must-attend event for the entertainment industry.

What is VidCon?

Started in 2010 by the Vlogbrothers (John and Hank Green), VidCon was envisioned as a place for creators and fans to finally connect in person. What launched as a 1,400-attendee community gathering nearly a decade ago has now become a Mecca for major industry players to meet with their viewers, share trade strategies, and get face-time with other big names. In 2016, more than 25,000 attendees swarmed Anaheim, California, for the event.

@VidCon, conceived as a place for online video creators and fans to finally connect in person, has become a must-attend event for the entertainment industry. We've got an inside look at #VidCon over the next two days. Tune into our Instagram Story to watch it live, get behind-the-scenes chats with @Instagram, #YouTube and #Snapchat personalities, and more! Hosted by our very own @danieltaroy

A post shared by Fast Company (@fastcompany) on Jun 22, 2017 at 1:47pm PDT

What happens at VidCon?

Billed as the quintessential online video conference, VidCon has increasingly moved in the direction of SXSW Interactive to become a large industry conference–albeit one that feels more like a party. That Comic Con-type atmosphere is thanks to the many branded activations that line the crowded expo hall. But when attendees (broken up into Community, Creator, and Industry tracks) aren’t scrambling up NBC’s American Ninja Warrior obstacle course or playing with Nickelodeon’s Slime VR station, they can sit in on panels with everyone from their favorite Instagram influencers and YouTube Red stars to producers on The Late Late Show with James Corden and CEOs of major tech companies. And while major creators now avoid walking the floor at the risk of getting mobbed, fans can still meet their idols up close at meet-and-greets.

New in recent years, however, is the increase in meetings between executives, all of whom schmooze, network, and discuss business deals at the nearby Hilton and Marriott hotels. And that makes attending VidCon worth more than its weight in gold, or green slime.

Davis Smith knows what he’s doing when it comes to e-commerce. A 38-year-old serial entrepreneur, he founded, and later sold, an online pool table retailer straight out of business school; that venture lead him to cofound Baby.com.br, Brazil’s largest baby care retailer, for which he raised over $40 million in venture capital funding.

But when Smith approached his attorney, with whom he’d worked through all his startup ventures, with the idea to found an outdoor gear brand with a humanitarian mission—and incorporate, from the beginning, as a benefit corporation—his attorney said no way.

But even with that leeway, Smith’s attorney saw launching as a benefit corporation as a risky move. “He said we should incorporate as a C corporation like everybody else, then convert to a benefit corporation once we’d figured out how to make the business work,” Smith says.

Smith did not take that advice. He founded Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear and apparel e-commerce brand, in 2013 as a benefit corporation, and began to raise venture capital funds from there—Cotopaxi is the first of the approximately 4,000 existing benefit corporations to take that route. “One of the biggest ideas behind Cotopaxi was the belief that I could have a bigger impact by building a business than I could if I just did humanitarian work on my own,” Smith says. “If there’s an investor that won’t invest in me because I founded a benefit corporation, and am giving some of my money away from the get-go, that’s not the right investor for us.”

In 2001, when Smith was in college, he spent a summer interning in Cusco, Peru, where he met a nine-year-old kid named Edgar, who shined shoes on the street to support his family. Smith made a habit of finding Edgar every day and sharing his food with him. “Meeting him was the highlight of my time there,” Smith says. By the time he boarded a bus out of Cusco, Smith had made a commitment to himself: to find a way to help kids like Edgar.

The way Cotopaxi does so is by allocating 2% of its annual revenue to make dedicated grants to nonprofits working in the developing world. “We’re aiming for a more holistic approach to poverty alleviation,” Smith says. While some companies, like Toms, approach humanitarian aid with a one-to-one giving approach, Smith wants to shoot straight to the core of the problem. “If we were just to donate one of our backpacks for every backpack sold, it’d get a kid a backpack, but if she doesn’t have a backpack, she probably doesn’t have access to clean drinking water or basic health care,” Smith says.

On a recent trip back to South America, Smith managed to find and reconnect with Egdar, who is now in his early twenties and, with Smith’s support, training to be a tour guide. Smith’s past in South America continues to impact the way he does business: Recollecting time he spend in Bolivia, where many llama farmers in the Andes mountains live in extreme poverty, making only around $200 per year, Smith is sourcing llama wool from the farmers to use as lining in Cotopaxi jackets and sweaters. The brand will be buying hundreds of thousands of llama wool from the farmers this year. “We’re able to have a tremendous impact on their livelihoods,” Smith says. “We can really have impact through our supply chain by taking our purchasing power and using it for good.”

Cotopaxi is by no means alone in the cause-branding approach (Patagonia, for instance, donated all of its nearly $10 million in Black Friday sales in 2016 to nonprofits grassroots environmental nonprofits), but Smith hopes he’s paving a fresh approach for how brands can engage with consumers and do actual good in the world. Cotopaxi hosts 24-hour “adventure race” events throughout the year, called Questivals, in which teams perform community service projects while exploring their city—in 2016, each Questival raised several thousand dollars for the International Rescue Committee, and resulted in nearly 2,000 food donations to homeless shelters, and 322 trees planted. This year, the brand is hosting around 70 Questivals, and expect the impact to be even greater. “We’re a tiny, brand new company, and we’re able to make an impact in the world,” Smith says. “If we got more companies thinking in this way, that impact would only grow.”

The city of Seattle is in the process of gradually phasing in a $15-per-hour minimum wage: It has now reached $13 for workers at large companies and will move up to $15 in 2021 for all workers. As the wage rises, the city is providing a lot of data on the effects of the policy, and that data is continually proving helpful to activists as they work to raise the wage in other cities, states, and nationally (and embarrassing to the economists who sounded alarm bells about how damaging a living wage would be for the city).

One common critique of higher minimum wages is that they also raise the cost of living. But last year, an initial study from the University of Washington found that retailers, despite having to pay their workers more, weren’t raising prices. Another is that higher pay will lead to fewer shifts and fewer jobs. And while those same UW researchers are analyzing the data, other researchers at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) used an innovative model to prove that the city’s increased minimum wage has had no negative effect on job availability.

The report on Seattle is the first that IRLE has planned in a series analyzing specific city and state minimum wage policies, and their effects on jobs and retail prices.

To test the higher wages’ effect on Seattle’s job market, the IRLE team created a “synthetic Seattle,” to use as a control against which to compare Seattle itself. To create this synthetic Seattle, the researchers compiled employment data for all the counties in the country that roughly mirror Seattle in size, and weighted them to create a fictional county that behaves, economically, roughly like Seattle. The researchers were careful to select only from counties, which, like Seattle, index their minimum wages in accordance with inflation to ensure the value of the minimum wage doesn’t erode each year. (Cities and states that index apply the percent increase of inflation to the minimum wage itself, which is why you get minimum wages like $12.87 in San Francisco instead of the round numbers thrown around in policy debates.)

“So when you look at the data, you pinpoint where Seattle has an increase in its minimum wage, and synthetic Seattle does not, and determine whether employment statistics diverge or don’t diverge,” Allegretto says.

In IRLE’s simulation, the difference in employment (or elasticity) across four categories—food service as a whole, restaurants, limited-service restaurants, and full-service restaurants—was negligible.

Contrary to the simple supply-and-demand theory, higher minimum wages, Allegretto says, may end up saving companies money in the long run. “We know that turnover decreases when you increase minimum wages,” she says. “If companies invest more in their workers, the workers are going to be more satisfied. In industries like the restaurant industry, where the turnover rate is sometimes above 100% in a year, that’s a lot of money to spend on recruiting and training and re-recruiting constantly,” Allegretto says.

While the phase-in processes for the 19 cities and states raising their minimum wages will necessarily slightly differ, and IRLE’s future reports and analyses on these efforts will take those differences into account, “the salient point is that the $7.25 federal minimum wage is far too low, and we should be moving beyond it regardless,” Allegretto says.

Twenty years ago, before anyone imagined e-sports becoming a global billion-dollar industry, the Guinness Book of World Records anointed Dennis Fong as the world’s first professional gamer.

When he was a teenager, Fong—known to gamers as “Thresh”—reigned as world champion of Doom, Doom 2, Quake, and Quake 2, garnering six-figure endorsements and winnings, including a Ferrari. Last year, he was inducted into the ESL (formerly Electronic Sports League) Hall of Fame.

What Fong didn’t realize back in the ’90s was that his gaming obsession was honing his entrepreneurial skills. The spirit of teamwork, the mental agility, the ability to read his competition and trust his intuition—it’s all informed his business decisions, from conceiving products to pitching VCs to knowing when to move on to the next project. This is clear during our conversations with Fong—via phone recently and in person last year at San Diego Comic-Con, where he participated in an e-sports panel. “My companies came from a passion for gaming,” Fong tells Fast Company. “I didn’t start companies because I thought I could make billions of dollars. I wanted to create something in gaming that was missing. All the companies and products I’ve started are about connecting people.”

And as a CEO, he can still compete. “I have an obsession with winning, which is both positive and negative,” Fong says. “When I was competing on a team, I would drag my teammates over the finish line to win. In real life, it’s not that easy. There are egos and other things to consider. Sometimes it’s better to let someone fail small. I learn most when I fail. Because it pisses me off so much that I don’t want it to happen again. That’s what drives me.”

On The Threshold

Fong began gaming at age 11, shortly after his family moved to Los Altos, California, from Hong Kong. At 16, he gravitated to the first-person shooter games Doom and Quake. This was the early ’90s, when the nascent public internet was attracting early adopters and the technologically curious. Online games were a gateway to that community—Fong often played against another avid gamer named Elon Musk—and a burgeoning world of computer networking, modems, and programming.

“Single-player games weren’t of interest to me,” Fong says. “What drew me was, for the first time, you could play against a live person, in real time, online. This is before MMOs [massively multiplayer online game]. You used dial-up modems to call each other.”

Fong’s growing reputation eventually caught the attention of a Wall Street Journal reporter looking into the new gaming craze. In true teen gamer fashion, Fong slept through their appointment.

“I’d completely forgotten,” Fong says with a laugh. “He showed up at the door and ended up waking me up. I asked if he could come back in a half hour so I could take a shower.” The reporter trailed Fong for the day and when the story landed on the front page in August, 1996, the 19-year-old became the face of online gaming.

Immediately, Fong started getting calls from the likes of Hasbro and Earthlink, offering lucrative sponsorships and consulting deals. Known for an uncanny ability to anticipate his opponents’ moves (dubbed “Thresh-ESP”). “I went from playing games at home to making a bunch of money within a year,” he says. Although he’d been earning some prize money for a few years, in 1997, he jumped to $150,000 in sponsorships and winnings, plus the trophy that many credit with putting e-sports on the map: the custom Ferrari 328 GTS that he won at his Red Annihilation Quake tournament that May.

“I viewed it as a thinking game, like micro-speed chess,” Fong says. “‘Thresh ESP’ came from my always seeming to know what my opponents were going to do. I have very strong intuition, which translates well into business. It’s about understanding other people’s context. If you want to work for someone, you try to understand their world. If you’re trying to raise money, you need to care about the context the investors care about. Marketing is seeing the world through the user’s eye.”

The E-Sporting Life

While gaming in 1996, Fong used his burgeoning winnings to found his first business, GX Media (i.e., Gamers Extreme) with his brother, Lyle. The company launched the Gamers.com community portal and FiringSquad video gaming site, which became that era’s most trafficked gaming destinations.

He kept the business going when he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he lasted only a semester before dropping out (to the chagrin of his academically oriented parents) to return to pro-gaming and focus on his startup. By 2000, GX Media had ballooned to an organization with 130 employees that put increasing demands on Fong’s time. That, plus worsening carpal tunnel syndrome—an occupational hazard—forced him to retire from pro-gaming at age 23.

By then, the brothers noticed that Gamers.com—designed as a scalable, flexible community platform for players—was attracting a slew of unrelated sub-communities and corporate requests to license the platform for their own use. Selling the gaming sites and shuttering GX Media, they reorganized the remainder as Lithium, a software-as-service business that manages online communities for Fortune 1000 companies such as Dell and Sony. Lyle assumed Lithium’s daily operations while Dennis launched XFire, a gaming-friendly instant messaging and social media platform that wouldn’t distract players or crash games. When MTV bought Xfire in 2006, Fong readied gaming social media platform Raptr for a 2007 launch. Last month, the brothers sold Lithium, which had grown to a few hundred employees with subsequent acquisitions, and are no longer shareholders.

Lyle is now pursuing his own ventures, while Dennis continues to oversee his startups. One Raptr product, Plays.tv, a video recording application for e-sports and gaming that launched in 2015, grew so quickly—drawing 10 million users—that earlier this year, Fong spun it off into its own company, which now has a staff of 36. The startup raised $15 million in a January 2017 financing round led by Shasta Ventures that included such investors as San Francisco 49ers owners and Brooklyn Nets basketball star Jeremy Lin.

Plays.tv’s automated artificial intelligence software records, bookmarks, and edits gameplays in real time for easy upload. “There’s no other product like this out there,” Fong says. “It figures out when you do something important in the game, like make a kill, and turns them into video highlights, instead of the player having to do it manually. We didn’t design it for that, but now it’s become a popular self-improvement tool.”

Fong believes that his forte in serial entrepreneurship is the hands-on aspect of launching new ventures, then, when the time is right, handing them off to leaders more adept at daily operations and growth. “There are people who are really good at managing people, making them feel really empowered and not micro-managing them,” Fong says. “I have to find people like that to pair myself with because they’re much better at it than I am.”

“I believe everybody has a super power—something they’re incredibly good at, that they don’t really have to try very hard to do,” he continues. “Mine was gaming and then creating companies. If you can find that in your life and apply that to a career, then it never feels like work and you’re just really frigging good at it.”

They say you never know what happens behind closed doors.

But one new show helps you eavesdrop.

Half voyeuristic, half educational, Where Should We Begin is a new podcast that lets you in on couples’ intimate therapy sessions. Launched in late March, it invites listeners to listen in on individuals struggling with infidelity, sexlessness, impotence, parenthood, and plenty more relationship dilemmas.

“Many couples are often isolated on lonely islands—they don’t know if what they’re experiencing is normal, unique, shared, manageable,” says host Esther Perel, a renowned Belgian psychotherapist .

Each week, the relationship guru shares a 45-minute segment of a 3-hour therapy session, featuring a wide range of couples—some are wealthy, some are poor, some young, others grandparents. Through various voices, Perel hopes to offer up a “mirror” to those suffering the same issues at home.

Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, does not share metrics, but a rep confirms that Where Should We Begin is one of the fastest growing of its podcast catalog, currently topping their best seller list. It debuted at number 3  on the itunes.

In one episode, Perel talks with a lesbian couple in which one partner bemoans that the other’s fixation with their children leaves little room for her. In another, a husband and wife attempt to forge through the stages of anger following an affair.

In one heartbreaking episode, a married couple reports they are “sexually mismatched.” The college sweethearts are both survivors of childhood sexual abuse and former members of Evangelical Christianity. There was no sex prior to their wedding, and now, years later, the wife admittedly states she’s not—and never was—attracted to her husband.

These are all people who wrote in essays for a chance to be treated by Perel. All names have been changed, but, “we don’t change the voices and we don’t script one word,” she confirms.

“We look for diversity of story, of issues, of class, of background, of nationality, of language—to cover a broad spectrum of human experience,” she says. Some will stay together, some will separate. She doesn’t promise everyone’s problems are fixable.

Jesse Baker, vice president of original content development at Audible and an executive producer of Where Should We Begin, originally assumed listeners would be drawn to the voyeuristic element of the show. But fans say the appeal lies in the listeners’ connection not only with the faceless characters, but Perel as well.

“It might start off [as a voyeuristic experience] but 10 minutes in, you’re thinking ‘Esther is talking to me. I do that, my partner does that, my relationship with my mom is just like that.'”

Building A Reputation As A Modern Relationship Guru

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Perel says both trauma and the response to it—”living life with a vengeance”—were woven into her mentality from a young age. Through her parents she learned the stark difference between “not being dead” and “being alive.”

For the first two decades of her career, Perel, who speaks nine languages, worked with refugee families and mixed couples (intercultural, interracial, inter-religious). She has always, to some degree, worked with individuals who are stressed, confused, navigating the new, or negotiating their status quo.

Perel brings that mind-set to sex and love, particularly how emotional wounds (not just of war, but of one’s childhood, an affair) impair the human spirit, but also jump-start new paths to self-identity.

It’s why her specific work on affairs amassed millions of fans, both men and women alike. (Her TED talk titled “The Secret To Desire In A Long-Term Relationship” boasts nearly 10 million views, while “Rethinking Infidelity” has over 7.6 million views.) She understands crisis management, yet comes at it from a humorous, thoughtful perspective. She investigates the why, without sacrificing the warmth.

Her first book, Mating in Captivity, released in 2007, examined the paradoxical relationship between domesticity and sexual desire. It quickly became a bestseller and now has 25 translations. She’s since spoken at dozens of Fortune 500 companies, been dubbed invaluable by Gwyneth Paltrow, served as a consulting producer for the Showtime drama The Affair, and launched her own educational platform for therapists called Sessions With Esther.

There are also plans to plans on expand into more topics with TED, including the subject of relationships at work and, “the plight of men, masculinity, and the rethinking of manhood.”

Finding The Underserved In An Oversaturated Market

There is no lack of relationship content on the market. Numerous podcasts tackle modern love issues, though the majority rely on the call-in format, in which hosts answer listeners’ questions.

There’s Dear Sugar, in which columnist Steve Almond and acclaimed Wild author Cheryl Strayed read fans’ questions and answer in a sympathetic, insightful manner. In Anna Faris Is Unqualified, the star of the CBS show Mom brings on celebrity guests like Lisa Kudrow and Sharon Stone to discuss relationship issues with a heavy does of banter. Dan Savage’s Sage Lovecast takes a more humorous, sometimes crass approach to love, sex, and taboo topics.

Then, of course, there’s The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast. The critically acclaimed show, based on the paper’s weekly column, features notable personalities like Angela Bassett and Kathryn Hahn reading poignant essays from the paper’s library.

Each show has its own voice and unique approach to solving love dilemmas, but Perel offers something uniquely different: Intimacy. The ability to listen in on a couple’s seamless, vulnerable conversation in which they bare all with a professional vastly differs from reading a fan’s two-line question, or asking a celebrity to lend their voice to an edited newspaper column. There are tears, strained accusations, breakthroughs.

Perel also distinguishes herself by providing refreshing a cultural, historical, and nearly philosophical frame of how and why couples feel tormented in an age of endless choices. Perel asks her patients to redefine every label they use: their needs, their roles, even their gender. She asks them to experiment with their identities and how they use language to both separate and connect themselves.

A big part of what makes Perel so popular is that she gets how our emotional requirements far differ from our ancestors. She explains that society asks one’s partner to satisfy our need for stability, commitment, security, and predictability yet simultaneously surprise us and fill us with awe, mystery, imagination, and novelty.

“We ask from one person what we once asked an entire village to provide,” she says. “People don’t know how to date, or how to commit, or how to leave—all the stages and nuances are up for grabs,” she says.

Perel explains that past decades provided codified systems, via culture or religion, that detailed how to handle relationships, what our responsibility was, and what meaning we gave to them.

“None of that is available today—everything has to be redefined,” she says. “It is an entire cultural system of relationships that is filled with uncertainty and hence with self-doubt. There’s a lot more freedom, but a lot more uncertainty.”

We are left by ourselves to figure it out, and with that, “there is a hunger for conversations about relationships—the full spectrum of them,” she stresses. “And the truth is not what you parade on Facebook. The truth is a different story.”

That she’s grown a following, Perel says, speaks to a category she finds wholly underserved.

Reaching Across Demographics

The ability to speak to a new generation of exhausted lovers–empathizing and investigating their woes versus slapping on a simple solution–is what propels Perel’s media empire. This is an audience that craves more than the average advice of “plan a date night.”

Instead, Perel talks a lot about the complexity of modern life, hearkening everything back to individual expectations. She’ll say things like, “we used to divorce because we were unhappy—today we divorce because we could be happier.”

Above all, says, Perel, she wants to find new ways to disseminate her information–to reach as many diverse groups as possible. She has the books, the online videos, and now the podcast. But the relationship specialist is, as she was taught by her parents, passionately pursuing her life’s calling. There might be new educational platforms, webinars, or online coaches on the horizon as Perel attempts to invigorate individuals’ connection with one another.

“I try to speak to people in [people’s] different languages—their preference for learning,” she says of her various modes of information. “I speak to them.”

You’re often nervous when it’s your turn to get up to speak. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a packed auditorium or a small conference room with less than a dozen colleagues: your palms sweat, your mouth feels dry, and your heart races.

This type of response is aggravating, but also aggravatingly predictable—and you can blame evolution for that.

Hunters And Gatherers (But Not Orators)

Just for a second, forget the presentation you’ll have to give tomorrow. Close your eyes and image yourself 25,000 years ago, creeping through the scrub with a few members of your tribe. You’re out hunting, and it’s dangerous business. That pit in your stomach reminds you there are predators out there, and even your prey could turn on you at any moment. Your senses are heightened, your muscles tense.

Human beings have dominated the planet because we can cooperate, not because of any physical gifts that make us fearsome creatures. Many of the animals our early ancestors encountered would’ve had advantages in terms of size, speed, and the ability to fight with their bodies. But it was humans’ ability to work together and create tools that allowed us to make it.

Related:8 Master Strategies For Public Speaking

Because our social interactions are so crucial for survival, we developed psychological mechanisms that support our ability to cooperate. Languages, for one, are sophisticated communication systems allowing us to transmit complex concepts to others. We also have elaborate and largely unconscious systems for evaluating others’ competence and trustworthiness. After all, if you’re going out on a hunt, you’d like to know you can rely on the people you bring with you.

In the modern world, all these social mechanisms come into play in public speaking. Standing in front of a group gives everyone a chance to evaluate your abilities. What if they conclude that you’re not actually that valuable to the team? That could be devastating.

The Cave-Dweller’s Guide To Beating Stage Fright

The social environment has evolved much more quickly than our bodies have; 25,000 years is a long time for humans but not such a long time for evolution. Unfortunately, the stress response we developed in a much different environment is poorly adapted for the pressures of public speaking. Your focus of attention is narrowed. Your working memory capacity (which determines how much information you can hold in mind at once) is diminished. Your muscles are prepped for quick action (which would be helpful, I suppose, if you suddenly had to leap from the stage).

All this might be useful for hunting elk or wild boar, but it’s not so good for thinking on your feet in front of a crowd. Worse yet, stage fright can become self-perpetuating: You’re afraid you’ll screw up part of your presentation, so you do. That increases your anxiety about the next presentation, which can then lead to even more errors.

What can you do? First, you should over-prepare your presentations. Many great speakers can get up on a stage and give a fantastic presentation with little work beforehand. But when you’re first starting out or know you have a tendency to freeze up, you should leave very little to chance. Give your talk to the wall of your office several times—until you can predict what’s coming on the next slide without having to read it.

Second, try practicing under pressure. The best way to excel in a stressful situation is to practice in the conditions you’ll be performing under. Get a colleague or two to listen to your presentation. Go through it with friends or family to get used to people staring at you while you speak. Have them scowl as you talk, so you can acclimate to a crowd that isn’t reacting positively to what you say. And take a few questions so you can prepare to think on your feet.

Finally, in the hour leading up to your presentation, don’t practice anything—just try and relax. If you’re truly prepared for your talk already, then you need to remind yourself at this point that you know the material better than anyone. Before you get up to speak, try a simple mindfulness exercise: Count your breaths and focus on breathing slowly and deeply. Deep breathing helps calm your anxiety and gives you the chance to shine when you hit the stage.

After your presentation, pay attention to the reaction. Chances are that even if you give a terrible presentation, your audience will generally be supportive. In fact, the consequences of messing up won’t be that bad in the grand scheme of things—you won’t starve in the wilderness or get eaten by an angry predator. Enjoy the compliments you get. Over time, you’ll find that you start to fear giving presentations less. Eventually, you might even come to like them.

This week on the Leadership section we considered whether Amazon is heading toward a platform monopoly after its Whole Foods acquisition, we learned how to write work emails that don’t sound passive-aggressive, and heard what it’s really like to intern at Tesla.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of June 19:

1. It’s Time To Break Up Amazon

Last week Amazon announced that it’s buying Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. Media theorist and digital economics professor Douglas Rushkoff argues that the deal poses a threat that’s unique to the digital economy. As he sees it, when companies are platforms, they see every new market they enter as a means to an end—and eventually “extract all the value from a given region before closing up shop and moving to the next one.”

2. How To Write A Work Email When You’re Really Pissed Off

There will be times in your working life when you’re really angry and need to write an email to check in on whatever it is that got you fired up. Your first instinct might be to pour your heart out, or else to spend so long agonizing over your response that all the words on the screen start to blur. Don’t do either. This week, writer and editor Jennifer Romolini shares how to keep it short, simple, and as emotionless as possible.

3. This Flowchart Tells You Which Fictional Boss You Are

Everyone’s leadership style is different–and like everything else in life, there’s no consensus on which one is best. That might be why TV shows portray bosses in so many ways, from ice-cold and buttoned up to go-with-the-flow and slightly disorganized. If you want to know how your leadership style stacks up to your favorite onscreen characters, this flowchart is for you.

4. Diary Of An Ex-Tesla Intern

In recent years, Tesla has been at the forefront of innovation in the automobile industry. Its reputation for building cutting-edge products—not to mention that of its founder Elon Musk—has made the company a hot destination for engineering internships. Eddie Wattanachai Lin was one of them, and this week he shared what it’s really like to intern for a brand that people have come to associate with “electric cars.”

5. Just Got Laid Off? This Is The Two-Month Plan You Need To Follow

Losing your job is never easy, no matter whether it’s one you absolutely loved or one where you dreaded Monday mornings. But you’ll recover and get back on your feet either way. Here’s a day-by-day plan for any time you find yourself laid off, balancing the need for self-care with doing all you can to bounce back.

Shortly after Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this month, I wrote that the announcement of Apple’s new augmented reality developer tool ARKit would lead to new 3D sensors in future iPhones. That’s true, but it seems inevitable that it’ll lead to something more interesting–a set of AR glasses–a little later on.

Apple has very likely been prototyping such a device for some time now. Its strategy is the opposite of that used by Google to introduce its ill-fated Glass glasses (dumb name too, come to think of it). Apple is getting developers working on creating the AR experiences before eventually announcing its iGlasses, or whatever it’ll call them.

Here’s IDC analyst Tom Mainelli writing for Techpinions shortly after WWDC:

“I fully expect to hear Tim Cook announce during [Apple’s fall event] the number of AR-enabled apps already available in the iOS App Store,” Mainelli wrote. “And the success of developers in creating AR apps for the iPhone and iPad will naturally lead to what logically comes next: a head-worn AR product from Apple.”

He’s spot on. While I watched Apple giving developers a taste of some of the AR experiences they might create with ARKit, it was clear to me that most of them would work way better on a head-worn device, preferably a device in the vein of the sunglasses or reading glasses we’re already used to.

Heads-up, Not Phone-up

There are various, fairly obvious, reasons that the glasses will be preferable to the current mode of experiencing ARKit creations–through the screen of the iPhone. Excluding owners of the iPhone 7 Plus (which has two camera lenses), most of the iPhones that will play ARKit apps are single-camera phones. The field of view of a single iPhone camera is limited, as is the display width of a phone held in front of one’s face is limited.

The AR scene in an ARKit experience moves with the view of the camera and the angle of the phone, but that movement depends on movement of the user’s arm and hand (or entire body, through feet-shuffling). This feels a little awkward because we are used to shifting our field of view by moving our eyes and our head. The first AR glasses probably won’t respond to our eye movements, but they will allow us to shift our field of view via head movement.

And, of course, AR glasses would leave both hands free. This is a big deal, because many of the best AR experiences will be ones that guide us while our hands are busy doing other things. You can imagine seeing driving directions or place markers in the glasses while both hands are on the steering wheel.

Some AR apps we’ve already seen use graphics superimposed on the real world to guide our hands. Imagine wearing AR glasses superimposing assembly instructions over the new Ikea table and chairs you just bought. Try doing that with a phone held up to your face.

Playing The Long Game

Apple has been thinking about AR and VR for years. Tim Cook told The Washington Post last year that “AR is an extremely interesting and sort of a core technology.” He’s also said AR should be a “heads up” experience. This suggests Apple was and is thinking very seriously about an AR headset or glasses, with AR on phones an interim step.

At the same time, Apple is very thoughtful–and even skeptical–when it comes to shiny new technologies like AR. It’s inclined to hang back and wait for evidence that consumers really care. Apple’s introduction of ARKit should be read as a definite commitment to AR, but it can also be seen as a way to collect more information–to see how truly serious and excited the developer community is about the technology.

Developers, after all, must make real-world decisions about whether to dedicate precious resources to developing on this platform or another one. The extent to which they embrace ARKit will say a lot about real demand for consumer AR. If developers can define or create markets for their AR apps, we’ll almost certainly see Apple give consumers something better than a phone with which to consume AR content.

Apple did some important things to sweeten the proposition of developing on ARKit. It offered a huge, immediately addressable market; anybody with an iPhone ( with an A9 chip or higher) can run the ARKit apps the developers create. And developers don’t even have to start from scratch–they can use ARKit to imbue existing apps with AR magic.

“Later, when the company has figured out the right user interface and form factor to produce a pair of Jonathan Ive-approved glasses, it will already have a sizable installed base of AR apps ready to go,” Mainelli wrote in an email to Fast Company Thursday. “As is often the case, Apple is playing the long game here.”

Wait For It

How long that game really is will depend in part on advances in chips and optical tech.

“The technology needed to create the type of glasses that would work really well and also be fashionable is just not here yet,” says Creative Strategies president (and long-time Apple analyst) Tim Bajarin.

“I have looked at all that are out already and a few in the works and none of them deliver on the type of design and function that anyone would want to use a lot as the go about their daily business,” he adds.

And that’s the big difference between the AR we’ve seen to date and the AR that’s coming. Today AR is being used for highly specialized tasks, then put aside when the task is done. Tomorrow’s AR will be far less episodic.

“Instances of AR on phones and tablets are incredible, but they only deliver augmented experiences,” says Brent Marcus, VP of Strategy at the science fiction prototyping firm SciFutures. “AR glasses could deliver an augmented existence.”

Bajarin believes we are still two to three years away from seeing a pair of consumer AR glasses good enough to have mainstream potential.

By releasing ARKit when it did, Apple, has started the time clock for the tech-buying public to get warmed up the AR concept. Right now Pokémon Go is the closest most people have ever come to understanding and appreciating it. A new wave of impressive ARKit apps, games, and other experiences might convince everyone that there’s more to AR than Pokémon. A less compelling first wave of apps might keep wide acceptance of AR moving at a crawling pace. Apple’s challenge is to be ready with a killer pair of AR glasses when the public is ready–not before, and not after.

WHAT: An interactive short film about our increasingly relaxed standards of privacy when it comes to personal photos.

WHO: This unsettling experience was written, directed, and programmed by Noah Levenson.

WHY WE CARE: It’s so natural to get used to the way things are that one seldom stops to question how odd it is to constantly come across intimate photos of friends, family, and acquaintances. The delightfully disturbing new short, Weird Box, presents the act of scrolling through another person’s Instagram in an analog format (the titular box full of photos) as though Instagram itself never existed. A woman confronts her boyfriend about why he is collecting photos of a stranger and his answer is an exaggerated version of the truth. Over the past decade, we have normalized stalking people we barely know or don’t know at all. And the fact that the person being stalked in this instance is YOU should induce shudders.

All Oslo wanted to do was lighten its environmental footprint. But the Norwegian capital’s noble goal—to cut greenhouse gas emissions down to 95% of their 1990 levels by 2030—necessitated restricting car traffic. And that’s where the troubles began.

Transit accounts for 61% of Oslo’s carbon emissions; private cars are responsible for 39% of that total. So in 2015, the Oslo government decided to cut right to the heart of the issue and propose a car ban in the entire city center, which would’ve made Oslo the first European city to do so, leapfrogging ahead of others like Paris and Barcelona who have been toying with car restrictions for the past several years.

It seemed foolproof: In the heart of Oslo’s city center, 88.1% of people do not own a car; just 7% commute by private vehicle, with the majority preferring public transit, biking, or walking. But so vehement was the backlash from Oslo’s conservative faction, including of its automobile lobby, that the Oslo city council had to go back to the drawing board.

To ease the city center into this new iteration–to which there is still a substantial amount of objection, particularly from car owners and businesses–the car-limiting strategy will be rolled out in three phases: In stage one this year, all on-street parking in the central district will be removed, and the planned installations will go up; in 2018, the stage-two year, several streets will be closed to vehicle traffic and 40 miles of bike lanes will be built. During stage three in 2019, the city council will assess its progress, Berg told The Guardian: If the parking ban proves sufficient to set Oslo up to substantially slash carbon emissions, the city will extend the strategy; if it feels inadequate, the city council will resuscitate its initial plan to instigate an all-out car ban.

For those businesses owners concerned that the lack of parking in the central district will hamper their sales, a study of a Toronto neighborhood, previously covered by Fast Company, should give them some peace of mind. The study found that business owners drastically overestimated the percentage of their customers who arrived by car, and as such, voiced opposition to eliminating street parking in favor of more pedestrian routes and bike lanes. Visitors to the shops, on the other hand, far preferred the more humanized streets, and pedestrians and cyclists, as it turns out, were far more loyal customers, lingering longer in the shops, buying more, and exploring more outlets in the district instead of beelining back to their cars.

A handful of U.S. cities like Portland and Buffalo have eliminated or lowered parking minimums attached to new developments, recognizing that mandatory parking spots end up allocating more city space for vehicles than people, and make it impossible to reach the kind of carbon-reduction goals cities like Oslo are setting out. As planning professor Donald Shoup wrote in The High Cost of Free Parking, parking minimums “distort transportation choices toward cars, and thus increase traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption…they damage the economy and degrade the environment. They debase architecture and urban design.”

Through converting its city center streets to more human-centered use, Oslo hopes to instill the logic of going car-free in its residents, rather than force them to do so by law (it will also have to figure out how to accommodate people who are unable to walk to the stores). But as Beathe Radby Schieldrop, communications manager for Oslo’s trade association, told The Guardian, the success of the whole plan will be contingent on getting business owners engaged, too. “Make every street a success, and then celebrate the transformation,” she said. “Success is totally dependent on the participation of shops and cafes—no one will sit on a bench in an empty street.”

There are lots of reasons to go freelance–time off whenever you want it, the freedom to pick and choose your projects, and the ability to see your work through from start to finish. In some ways, working for yourself can be more fulfilling than office life. On the other hand, lots of people wonder how they’ll move forward in their career after several years of flying solo.

Usually, freelancers have built themselves up to a certain level in order to be qualified to go out on their own, but it’s natural to wonder: After freelancing, what exactly are you qualified to do, and how do you find a new position that fits your unique skill set? Even more importantly, how do you get used to going back to the daily office grind when you’ve been enjoying a life of total freedom? We talked to career and job search consultants to find out.

1. Evaluate The Pros And Cons Of Your Current Setup

If you’ve decided to leave your freelance career behind, at least for now, there are probably some pretty specific reasons you want to go back to a full-time gig.”Given that the dynamics between working for yourself and working full-time for someone else are quite stark, take careful stock of which aspects of your freelance life have and have not served you well,” suggests Joseph Liu, career consultant and host of the Career Relaunch podcast. Then, look for a job that has the best elements of your current setup, while leaving behind the worst ones.

Related:5 Of The Hardest Lessons I Learned Going From Freelancer To Startup Founder 

“For example, if you love the flexibility of freelancing, focus on companies that have cultures that embrace flexible working arrangements, and be wary of environments that feel too traditional,” he says. Similarly, if you have had a hard time working alone during your freelance time, seek out a collaborative team environment in your next position. Looking ahead, during your interview is a great time to parse out how well your wish list stacks up to the realities of the jobs you are being considered for.

2. Figure Out Your “Unfair Advantage”

The first step to marketing yourself post-freelance life is to consider what you can do better than those who have been working in offices exclusively. “I always recommend that freelancers consider their ‘unfair advantage,'” says Liu. “In other words, the skills you’ve amassed as a freelancer that other non-freelancers would have a hard time replicating. Honing in on these specific skills will form the foundation of your unique selling proposition as a way of differentiating you and helping you stand out from others who may have only worked full-time.”

What do you have that traditional office workers don’t? Experience working on a super tight budget, relying on only yourself under pressure to problem solve, and marketing yourself organically are all great examples of things you probably have gained from being a freelancer. Many of these unique-to-freelancing skills are incredibly valuable in an office environment. “Try to hone in on three to five skills that freelancers uniquely possess,” suggests Liu, and in your discussions with potential employers, “ensure you capture specific examples of how those skills have driven results in a way that could also be relevant to your target company.”

3. Target The Right Gigs

Anyone can tell you that job hunting can be a tedious and exhausting process, but one of your skills as a freelancer is likely finding work. Good news: You can use that freelance hustle to find yourself a permanent job and make the process as painless as possible. As for what types of jobs to start with, “Look for something that is similar in field or function to a freelance engagement you did,” advises Nancy Halpern, Principal at KNH Associates, a talent management firm.

If you’re comfortable, “Maybe even pitch yourself to a client if you see that they have a repeating need,” she adds. If you’re not sure where to start, Halpern recommends looking to skill sets you’ve received the best feedback on as a great place to start. Make sure to highlight these competencies on your resume in a “representative engagements” section. “Showcase the companies you did freelance work for, what problems you solved, and which clients gave you repeat engagements” in this section, she suggests. Also, keep in mind that “demonstrating that you had diverse clients but a focused area of work makes you a more readable ‘brand’ to employers.”

4. Prioritize Your Salary Considerations

When it comes to salary, you’ve got to figure out what types of compensation are most important to you, according to Rebecca Zucker, Partner and head of Career Transition Services at Next Step Partners, a leadership development firm based in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. “Are you looking for a job at a company because you want more income security and health insurance? Then you may be willing to take a discount to your peak income years,” she points out.

Related:How To Avoid Losing Freelance Work To Your Own Collaborators 

Similarly, you might want to have proper vacation time built in (after all, freelancers are always on call), so you may be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for proper vacation days so you can take some real time off for a change. On the other hand, “You may require a large premium to make up for the loss of independence you’d experience,” Zucker says. “Regardless, you should do your due diligence and know what the market rates are for the contribution you’d be making to the organization.” Of course, Glassdoor’s Know Your Worth feature can also help you figure out your target compensation range.

5. Prepare Yourself For The Inevitable Mental Adjustments

As you probably know, things will be different when you leave the gig economy, for better or worse. “Especially during transitions, you need to be very clear about what tradeoffs you’re willing to make,” says Liu. “Understanding you will likely need to give up certain things to get these other things is half the battle.”

So what should you be prepared to let go of? According to Liu:

• Control: Being able to control which projects you work on and how you execute them may get replaced by projects being assigned to you with clear project management plans already in place.
• Flexibility: Working whenever and wherever you want may get swapped out with working Monday through Friday, eight straight hours a day, in a physical office in a fixed location.
• Autonomy:“Being your own boss will certainly get replaced by reporting to someone,” says Liu. That’s going to entail feedback, performance evaluations, and being held accountable by someone other than a client.
• Some freedom: Technically, freelancers can take “vacation” whenever they want. Now, you’ll have to get any days you want to take off approved by the higher ups. Freelancers have the luxury of being able to take “vacation” when and for however long they wish. It’s also possible you’ll have less flexible free time to spend with your family and friends.

Importantly, Liu points out that it’s a good idea to be vocal about the fact that you understand how different your working life will be once you’re full-time again. “Being comfortable and clear on these tradeoffs yourself is critical to convincing the hiring manager you know what you’re getting into.”

A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is reprinted with permission.

Thursday morning, on the hot steps of New York’s City Hall, a group of 15 Uber drivers gathered to celebrate a piece of legislation that would require ride-hailing platforms to enable customers to tip. For six years drivers have asked Uber to create an experience where clients could reward them with a few extra bucks for a job well done. But Uber was steadfast in its refusal. That was until last week.

On Tuesday, Uber announced 180 days of change for drivers, including the addition of tipping. The abrupt change in position is part of an overhaul to improve the scandal-plagued company’s image after the loss of several executives including CEO Travis Kalanick.

New York City drivers say that they are the ones who forced the company’s hand to make the change. “Even though we’re putting pressure on them,” says Jose Molinas, an Uber driver and member of the Independent Drivers Guild, “at the end of the day they take the credit for it.”

It’s this sort of failure to acknowledge drivers that makes them feel little real change is coming to the company or the platform. But some drivers have been heartened by Kalanick’s departure. “I think they needed somebody different,” says Michele Dottin, a driver from Brooklyn. “He’s not considering the people and the drivers who are really the ones who keep your business. Without drivers, you have zero business—I don’t care how you slice it.”

Dottin, who has a short sweep of purple-gray hair, started driving for Uber a little more than a year and a half ago. Her niece talked her into it, by noting how much she loved meeting people. As a former executive assistant, she’s used to working long hours.  The difference is that before when she was working 10-to-12-hour shifts behind a desk she could look forward to a weekend. Now she’s working every day. “I have to force myself to take a day to recoup,” she says.

Sunken wages are a primary concern for drivers, who feel overworked by Uber. Still, the consternation among the dozen drivers I spoke with went well beyond money. It is not that they think that Uber’s whole system has been designed against them, but rather without them in mind. For example, drivers sometimes have to return phones left behind by riders. Doing so is an arduous task requiring drivers to spend time and fuel without compensation.

Even when the company does seem to keep drivers in mind, like when it created a digital queue for fare pickups at La Guardia airport so drivers could park and not waste fuel while they wait to be matched with a rider, the drivers say that the company doesn’t listen when problems arise. In the case of the airport queue, the system relies on mobile connectivity. One driver told me that he has had to wait multiple times up to five hours to get a fare at the airport, because of inconsistent mobile reception. He had asked Uber to arrange for Wi-Fi at the airport for drivers, but has never heard back. Often, drivers told me, Uber sends them blanket responses when they make suggestions.

“If you’re sending a generic response then you’re not addressing the issue,” says Dottin. Between an ill-conceived driver experience, weak fare pricing, and a general non-responsiveness to their gripes, they say it’s become clear that the person leading the company isn’t concerned about their needs or wants.

“It starts at the top and it trickles down,” says driver Freddy Tello. He says that he believes that Kalanick should have been out a long time ago. But he doesn’t really think anything is going to change at Uber even with him gone. That’s in part, he says, because Kalanick isn’t really going anywhere—he’s still on the board. It’s also because it might be hard to undo the knots that Uber has already tied.

“The culture is embedded over five years,” he says, sitting among a band of fellow drivers in a shady portion of the stairs leading up to City Hall.“I know the board of directors and investors want different outcomes, but it would take a while to change the entire mentality that this guy set.” Tello says he believes that the company prizes low prices in order to grow quickly and maintain majority market share.

There are other components of Uber’s business that will be hard to reverse. Customers have become accustomed to cheap trips where they don’t have to do anything but exit a car when they’re done. Not tipping has become routine and customers may find that habit hard to break. Also, with denigrated pricing has come behavior that results from a service so affordable anyone can use it.

“When you try and offer for the cheapest price you’re going to get the worst clients,” says Arturo Canelas, leaning his gaunt face into the cluster of drivers to be better heard. Everyone lets out sighs of sympathetic exasperation.

Tello relays a story wherein one of his fares came over to his car carrying an oil-wet slice of pizza. He says he told the would-be passenger she couldn’t get in his car with food and she promised that she would be clean and careful, “like I’ve never heard that before,” he scoffs. “I’m like, no absolutely not.”

Dottin chimes in, “When you tell them no you can’t do that, they make a mess in your car [on purpose].”

The number of alterations necessary to fit the platform to the needs of the drivers will take more than a single expert tailor. But Tello and his compatriots don’t see the incentive for change. “From day one their long-term goals have always been autonomous cars,” he says. “That tells you that they don’t give a shit about the driver—why should they? They could [have] 24-hour driving and they’ll never hear complaints from anyone.” He pauses and chuckles, “except passengers who are about to get in a car that’s been thrown up in all over the place.”

A knowing laughter rumbles through the drivers and drifts away like a car speeding off.

The last few years have been tough for anonymous social networks. Yik Yak, the popular collegiate bulletin board once valued at $400 million, recently sold its engineering team to Square for less than $3 million and shut down. Confessional site Secret went belly-up in 2015. But Whisper, a Los Angeles-based company backed by approximately $70 million in venture capital, is soldiering on.

Whisper’s multipronged survival strategy includes innovative content partnerships, investment in AI, aggressive content moderation, and multiple monetization schemes.

The young-skewing app (75% of users are 18-34) boasts approximately 30 million active monthly users on their mobile app and website who come to discuss and post—anonymously—about everything from painful personal struggles to bad boyfriends, politics, and PMS.

The privately owned company keeps its financials close to the vest but says its ads garner a billion impressions monthly and that it has inked immersive advertising deals with partners like Disney/Pixar, Coca-Cola, and Netflix.

Related: Get Inside Whisper’s Secret Economy

Different clients do different things: Coca-Cola, for instance, sponsored an ad asking users to anonymously suggest ways to combat cyberbullying, while Disney/Pixar paid to have stills from The Good Dinosaur offered up as image backgrounds for posts.

Whisper is also experimenting with new content tools: Automated videos made using text from user-generated content–in other words, public, anonymous content posted to the service–have been turned into distributed content for partners like Tronc.

It has also released a new widget for publishers called Perspectives that automatically generates stories or video that “provide readers with contextually relevant perspectives from millions of Whisper users,” the app’s execs say.

“Media Company Of The Future”

At Whisper’s helm is its founder and CEO Michael Heyward, who comes from the more computer science school of startup executives. When certain topics come up—techie things like machine learning, subject taxonomy, or automated video creation—his eyes light up.

“People ask if we’re an app or a publisher,” Heyward tells Fast Company. “We think that we’re building the media company of the future, and the tenets of that are things like our ability to scale high-quality content production without being limited by how many people we have making content. We can produce 50,000 hours of video with the same resources as producing 50 hours of video.”

While Whisper’s content increasingly appears on other partner platforms, its mobile app remains at the core of the business. According to Google Play store metrics, their app has been downloaded between 5 million and 10 million times on Android devices alone.

New users are given a randomly generated handle (that they can change) and account tied to their device. Also at the core: the promise of a safe space and that user posts, or “whispers,” are 100% anonymous. The company says it collects no personal identifying information from its users.

Weathering The Storm

Whisper survived what might have meant sudden death for other apps: A Category 5 public relations disaster from a series of Guardian pieces in October 2014 alleging the company was indeed tracking users, including one identified as a “sex-crazed lobbyist.” The news organization was considering expanding a partnership with Whisper when it said the app’s staffers dropped the bomb.

The allegations prompted the suspension of Whisper editorial staffers, and the editor-in-chief departed several months later. Heyward even found himself fielding questions from the Senate Commerce Committee.

In March 2015, The Guardian issued an extensive  “clarification” of its original report, and even deleted from its website an opinion piece that slammed Whisper—moves the company says vindicated it.

Heyward is still visibly uncomfortable discussing the fallout from the original story.

“It was pretty crazy because it was so off base and not factual,” he says. “The story was a big deal for people in New York media and the Twitter-sphere, the blue checkmarks of the world. […] We had this experience that was really challenging.”

How Secret, How Safe?

Whisper says the only way users can be outed is if they do it themselves, though the company will cooperate with law enforcement in certain circumstances. Privacy issues are not uncommon—Facebook and Twitter have had their share. Whisper’s most recent privacy policy, which was updated at the end of 2016, is less intrusive than that of most other social mobile apps:

Location information is tracked for advertising purposes, for instance (unless users choose to opt out), but there is no trawling of users’ address books or social network graphs. Posts from the geographically dispersed users can be sorted by popularity, proximity to your location, or how recently they were posted.

Whisper’s algorithms and architecture are also designed to minimize harassing posts and, as our own Harry McCracken previously wrote, ferret out the “mean, gross, and/or illegal.” Through a piece of software called “The Arbiter,” the company keeps an eye out for more than thousands of keywords and other factors. An offshore & U.S.-based human moderation team also helps keep Whisper civil.

In the year following publication of the Guardian articles, Whisper “took a break from making PR a key priority” to concentrate on AI initiatives and audience development initiatives. Whisper notes traffic continued to grow in the 12 months following publication of the initial Guardian article.

The Facebook Effect

The audience development portion of things included more emphasis on middle America and more targeting younger users who’d otherwise spend leisure time on Kik Messenger or Reddit. Heyward and Whisper’s leadership also made realistic calculations about where their user base, which is more female then male, actually are.

Alongside generating content on their own service, they also invested heavy resources into building a Facebook presence with over 3 million fans and partnering with other media services.

Whisper’s Facebook presence effectively serves as free advertising for the service. Although it removes the anonymity of the company’s main product as users like or share posts, it allows Whisper to promote their content to a much wider audience.

Beyond their primary Facebook page, Whisper also operates 14 separate theme pages devoted to topics like Relationship Goals. Many of these pages contain minimal Whisper branding; they also create a platform for Whisper to sell lucrative branded content to match the subject matter.

According to CrowdTangle data, Whisper’s Facebook page was the top-performing media fan page for interactions on the social network with approximately 200 million interactions in fiscal year 2016. If these metrics are correct, Whisper outperformed CNN, Vice, and BuzzFeed on Facebook for interactions.

Outlasting Yik Yak

A few years ago, Yik Yak was the new next great thing. seemed poised to become the next great social network. Targeted specifically at high school and college students, Yik Yak created geofenced anonymous message boards at different campuses. But it was slow to figure out the money side of things; that and several badly executed business decisions sealed their fate.

Secret also squandered early growth with their decision to leverage users’ address books and push anonymous posts from other Secret users they knew through other social networks or real life. It turned the site into a reputed magnet for industry gossip and harassment. While the drama attracted users, it also made it more difficult for the startup to make money.

Unlike Secret, Whisper made a deliberate choice not to leverage phone address books or social network social graphs. They also appear to have made deliberate design choices that attract wide, mass-market demographics of users rather than the Silicon Valley and Wall Street power users that fueled Secret.

“There’s nothing about you for Whisper as a user that improves with more of your friends on it. WhatsApp gets better for me as a user with the more friends I add,” Heyward tells me. For Whisper, that is emphatically not the case.

Eliot & Artificial Intelligence

As with the “Arbiter,” Whisper has invested in a proprietary AI called Eliot, which is being used for the next stage of Whisper’s growth: Automated creation of articles and video that they can monetize in the future.

Heyward refers to Eliot (named after George Eliot, the pseudonym used by a female Victorian writer) as a “storytelling AI” and the platform is used both to match users’ posts to photo and video backgrounds, and to create original video and stories based on user-generated content that could become a future revenue stream.

Videos seen through Whisper’s Perspectives widget, for instance, are completely automated and generated on the fly based on the content of the page they appear on.

Two examples of automated content created via Eliot include this video story of confessions from “Dreamer” immigrants and a collection of “Super Mom Life Hacks.” The videos are created by matching text from anonymous Whisper messages with video obtained through third-party sources such as YouTube and Getty Images:

Whisper’s own user-generated content is used as training data for Eliot. Using combined text-photo and text-video pairings from posts users make on Whisper, an AI is then trained to find ways to automatically pair posts with similar posts. The company’s software also automatically generates tags for posts as well.

One example Heyward gave Fast Company was a user typing in a message along the lines of “I’ve been faking a British accent since I got to school three years ago.” Using that text, Whisper then automatically generates tags such as “dorm room” that map the text to millions of similar images, which are then used to more accurately match pictures with backgrounds in the future.

Monetizing Anonymous Content

Whisper has two parts to its advertising business: Direct sales for advertising clients like Netflix, HBO, Unilever, Disney, and Coca-Cola and ordinary programmatic ads that show up on a user’s phone when they use the Whisper app.

According to Whisper, the company offers advertising partners options such as branded question posts, sponsored polls, in-app vertical video ads, keyword targeting, and sponsored stories and videos. They work on complicated projects, such as one recent campaign by Progressive Insurance.

When Whisper users enter specific keywords into their posts, the keywords trigger a branded background. Elliot then turns those branded posts into discrete videos or articles that can be repackaged into stories used by partners like Tronc. Whisper also distributes content to partners including Conde Nast, Refinery 29, BuzzFeed, and Cosmopolitan.

Heyward is well aware that the anonymity and safe space his app provides is its lifeblood.

“It’s a place where people come on and say ‘Hey, I’m from a really religious family and don’t know how to come out of the closet’,” he says. “People aren’t sharing that on Facebook.”

Shepherdstown, West Virginia, as Brandon Dennison is quick to tell me, “is nothing like the rest of the state.” It’s a small, quaint college town of around 3,500 students and 1,500 full-timers; the buildings lining the main corridor, German Street, date from the town’s founding in the 18th century, though the storefronts now advertise bubble tea and organic wares. Maryland is visible just across the Potomac.

Dennison is neither a Shepherdstown resident nor native; he grew up in Ona and lives in Wayne, a small town deep in coal country, a six-hour drive from Shepherdstown and just a half an hour from the Kentucky border. He came to Shepherdstown for college because it was as far away as he could get from Wayne while still availing of in-state tuition, and he’s back now on a June Sunday for two reasons.

First, the pastor of the town church, Shepherdstown Presbyterian, where Dennison served as a youth minister for five years while attending Shepherd College, had recently announced his retirement; the town was gathering for a celebration of his 41-year career. Second, there’s an advance screening of the documentary From The Ashes, premiering June 25 on the National Geographic channel, was being held the same day at the local movie theater.

The film, produced by Bloomberg Philanthropies and RadicalMedia and directed by Mike Bonfiglio, traces the coal industries’ pernicious influence on the United States’s landscape, health, and economy. We see a mother in Dallas fighting to clean up the air in her city after learning that the nearby coal plant was responsible for her children’s asthma; we see the town of Colstrip, Montana, built around and supported by a four-unit coal power plant, facing an uncertain future as two of the units prepare to shut down; we see a North Carolina woman protesting her state government for failing to clean up the water soiled by coal ash. But perhaps nowhere has the reach of the coal industry been more pervasive or damaging than in West Virginia, where 200 years of relentless mining by a (now-faltering) industry that single-handedly monopolized the state’s economy has left the landscape devastated and many of its residents without a reliable source of income.

Dennison, 30, is a central character in the film. His nonprofit, which he founded in 2010 after leaving Shepherdstown and returning to Wayne, is taking on the overwhelming mission of preparing West Virginia and its residents to transition to a post-coal economy. Called the Coalfield Development Corporation, Dennison’s organization trains and employs young people and former mine workers across five social enterprises, which focus on construction (especially affordable housing), minefield remediation, arts and culture projects, sustainable agriculture, and solar energy initiatives. Through a 33-6-3 model—33 hours of paid work per week, six hours of classroom time toward an associates’ degree, three hours of life skills—Coalfield Development has trained around 50 West Virginians in new careers, launched five new businesses, and redeveloped over 150,000 square feet of dilapidated property.

While Katherine Oliver, the digital and media strategies principal for Bloomberg Philanthropies and the producer on From The Ashes, tells Fast Company that working on the film amid these transitions was rather like navigating a terrain constantly shifting under their feet (between the film’s global premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April and its screening in Shepherdstown in June, the production team had to add a line at the end testifying to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord), the timing of its release, Oliver says, “is serendipitous. The public at large is talking about this issue, and it’s important for viewers to have this window into the public health, environmental, and economic impacts of the coal industry.”

The ascendancy of Donald Trump and his promise to revive the disintegrating coal industry has struck organizers like Dennison personally. In 2016, Coalfield Development Corporation received a $1,870,000 grant through the Obama administration’s Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative, developed through the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) specifically to fund and support programs like Coalfield Development that are working to assist communities affected by job losses in coal mining by transitioning them to new economies. Trump’s budget proposes to eliminate the ARC, and consequently, the POWER Initiative—a clear indication of his intent revert to coal and ignore the warnings about the industry’s harmful effects that are so effectively spelled out in From The Ashes.

In Shepherdstown, though, it’s possible to see a new path forward for West Virginia, regardless of the Trump administration’s retrograde promises. Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative and another prominent character in From The Ashes, lives in town: In the film, she details her agency’s work of organizing successful efforts to close 256 coal-powered plants across the country; another 267 remain open. In the backyard of The Meckelenburg Inn, Shepherdstown’s iconic bar, she sits down with Dennison and Dan Conant, a local and the founder of Solar Holler—West Virginia’s first solar energy social enterprise, whose slogan is “Mine the Sun”—while the Meck’s six-month-old solar panels glint on the bar’s roof.

If there’s hope for West Virginia to move beyond coal and toward renewable energy, it will come from people like Conant, who in 2015 teamed up with Dennison and Coalfield Development to grow his team of solar installers across the state. Solar Holler, whose goal it is to bring solar energy to local nonprofits, is up to six full-time installers and another eight part-time, who have passed the training and certification course offered through Coalfield Development’s program. Conant oversees around one or two solar installs per week and receives around a dozen from West Virginia nonprofits interested in the model.

He persisted, and circumvented the state by partnering with the Maryland-based Mosaic Power, which creates virtual power grids by outfitting electric water heaters with remote controls, which synchronizes with grid demand and sells excess electricity (generated by switching the water heaters on and off in accordance with demand, instead of just letting them run continuously) to the grid. Conant convinced 100 homes and businesses in Shepherdstown to let Solar Holler and Mosaic install the remotes on their water heaters and registered the resulting network as a power plant on the regional grid; the profits from the “virtual power plant” selling its energy to the grid funded Shepherdstown Presbyterian’s solar panels. “By doing that we got outside state jurisdiction,” Conant says. Solar Holler used this virtual power plant system to fund four systems for nonprofits in the state—including one at Coalfield Developments’ headquarters in Wayne, where three active coal mines have closed since 2010.

When the solar installation went up in Wayne, which is, Dennison says, “where coal country starts,” he was surprised by the reaction. A solar company, run by a millennial from Shepherdstown–which is sometimes dismissively referred to as “Washington, D.C.” by the rest of the state for how different and removed from the coalfields it feels—coming in and installing a renewable energy system hot on the heels of the area’s coal plant closures? It could have been a recipe for resentment—and for many miners, the ones who left the town, it was–but instead, Dennison saw enthusiasm. “Miners want to do that kind of hands-on work,” Dennison says. “Solar fits right into that.”

But there is a generational divide, and it’s one that has been exploited in the coal-mining narrative popularized by the Trump administration. The image of the old miner put out of work by regulation and the incursion of renewable energy and cheap natural gas is the one that illustrated his campaign and continues to serve as the mouthpiece for Trump’s pro-coal agenda. There’s not enough talk about the Dennisons or the Conants or the Natalie Ropers—a friend of Dennison and Conant and the executive director of Generation West Virginia, which is working to develop economic opportunities for young people in the state.

They are, in part, who Bloomberg Philanthropies wants to shift the conversation toward in producing From the Ashes. The documentary is the first full-length feature produced by Bloomberg Philanthropies; production began on the film in 2014 when, Oliver says, it became clear to the nonprofit that the format could act as a way to connect audiences “with facts and solutions and a data-driven approach to a misunderstood topic.” The film tells the story of aging miners and coal communities, but its focus is on solutions, and where the hope spots are. “We wanted to get that activist community on the screen to show what it will take to make change,” says Antha Williams, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ environmental programming director. “It’s consistent with our approach of supporting local solutions and scaling up efforts when we find something that works.”

Read More:  Coal Is Dying–Coal Country Doesn’t Have To: Creating The Post-Coal Economy In Appalachia

The screening in Shepherdstown was one of dozens of “grassroots” screenings of the film organized by the Sierra Club to both raise awareness of the issues around the coal industry, and to give people a way to directly support organizations like Coalfield Development, and through that, Conant’s work with Solar Holler. As Coalfied Development stands to lose its funding at the hands of Trump’s cuts to the POWER initiative, “What can we do to help?” is one of the questions that have followed each of the grassroots screening. In Shepherdstown, where the personal connections to these organizations run deep, the concern is particularly palpable. In anticipation of this concern, Michael Bloomberg has pledged to personally match every donation made through the From the Ashes website to such coal transition initiatives.

“We’re in a situation that feels like a race against time,” Conant says. Even though life in Shepherdstown, he says, can feel isolated from the rest of the state, the economic struggles—particularly cuts to the state education department, which is planning to lay off 50 people—are universally felt in West Virginia. “We’ve got to act now to build up other industries, and it can’t just be one thing because that’s what got us here in the first place.”

And what’ll drive the state in that direction are the people and places often left out of the zeitgeist discussion of West Virginia. “That’s the hopeful part of this story,” Dennison says. “There’s this movement of people like Dan, other young people, that really love this place.” They’re clear-eyed about the problems, he adds—it’s lost on neither Conant nor Dennison that transitioning a state that at one time, had nearly half of its population working in the mines, toward a new economy will necessitate some growing pains—but the people doing this work see potential for West Virginia to represent something beyond the coal industry. West Virginia has a long history of losing young people to other industries in other states; the ones that remain, like Conant and Dennison, are here “because we really think that what we’re doing could work,” Conant says. “We have a gorgeous little corner of the world here that we’re trying to keep alive.”