WHAT: A thorough breakdown of all the jokes during the credits of each Silicon Valley season.

WHO: YouTube video essayist Shots Fired.

WHY WE CARE: Apparently, Mike Judge didn’t even want an opening title sequence for his hilarious technocracy sendup, Silicon Valley. After HBO set him up with design firm yu + co, however, the series creator ended up putting together a typically iconic sequence for the premium network that can stand alongside memorable predecessors like Game of Thrones and The Sopranos.

Silicon Valley’s animated titles show the changing landscape of the titular location the show is set in, as new startups bubble up and burn out. True to the subject matter, the sequence changes each season as new companies are flung into the mix and others disappear. As this video from Shots Fired proves, however, there have been a lot of involved in-jokes in the credits across the show’s four seasons. For instance, the sequence doesn’t just reflect the companies as they are, but as they see themselves. Amazon’s hypothetical PrimeAir drone service can be seen delivering pizzas at one point, and Google/Alphabet’s long-gestating expansion campus is seen in assembly. Okay, so they’re not all hysterical jokes, but they do comment in interesting ways on the world the show depicts. Have a look at the full video above–and let us know on Twitter if there are any jokes missing from it.

As the minimum wage goes up in Seattle–with with workers now required to make as much as 15 an hour, and all workers set to make that much by 2021–the city has become a bellwether for other communities that are looking to raise their minimum wage or have one already scheduled. Instead of arguing about economic theory, we can finally look at real data. One recent report found that the changes haven’t led to a loss in jobs in food service, a key industry for low-wage jobs. But another new study says that the effects are more complicated: While the overall number of restaurant jobs might not have changed much, the researchers believe that low-wage workers in the city are working fewer hours. Even though those workers might be earning more per hour, the study finds, they’re losing an average of $125 a month.

The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is still a work in process and has not yet been peer reviewed (it has also already attracted significant criticism). The researchers, economists from the University of Washington, used unique data that includes both hourly wages and the number of hours worked for individuals, something that past studies haven’t; only four states, including Washington, collect such detailed data.

“Because other studies didn’t have this rich data, they would pick a proxy for low-wage workers–the standard one has been the restaurant industry, because it does employ a lot of low-wage workers,” says Robert Plotnick, a public policy professor at the University of Washington and one of the authors. “But when you look at the restaurant industry in total, you’re also including a lot of medium and high-wage workers…you can’t quite answer that question as well as we can.”

Compared to a scenario where Seattle didn’t raise the minimum wage–a model the researchers call “synthetic Seattle”–the study estimates that workers earning less than $19 an hour worked 9.4% fewer hours after the wage rose to $13 per hour. The income lost because of the reduction in hours outweighs the gains from an increase in wages.

Critics say that the study has flaws. For one, it didn’t include the employees from large businesses that have locations both inside and outside of Seattle, McDonald’s, for example. In a letter to the mayor of Seattle, Michael Reich, a professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley and one of the authors of the other recent report (also not peer-reviewed) that said food service jobs had not been lost in Seattle, said that excluding multi-site employers excludes 48% of Seattle’s low-paid workforce. As well, workers who left a single-site employer for a larger company are counted as losing a job, while their new wages don’t factor into the analysis.

The University of Washington’s researchers’ model of what would have happened in Seattle without the wage increase might also be flawed. It’s tricky to isolate, as Seattle’s economy has also grown rapidly during the same period, and an increase in higher-wage jobs and a decrease in low-wage jobs could also be the result of a hot economy. To build the model, the researchers compared the city to other communities that didn’t increase their minimum wage, but they were limited to Washington, where other hourly wage data was available. Reich argues that the economies used to create the model aren’t anything like Seattle, where the booming tech sector is creating economic growth totally separate from the rest of the state.

Still, the researchers used an algorithm to choose the places that had low-wage jobs most similar to Seattle, and saw a clear divergence at the point when the minimum wage in Seattle went up to $13 an hour.

“Seattle’s economy’s been doing very well for a number of years, and there’s nothing magical about the first quarter of 2016,” says Plotnick. “It’s been booming really since the recession ended. But the fact that we see this impact right when the wage goes up is strong evidence. Could something else have driven it? Perhaps. But it was our best judgment that we were picking up a real effect and not something that was a coincidence.”

Like the Berkeley researchers, the University of Washington researchers found that the number of food service jobs didn’t sharply drop because of the raise in wages. But they did see a drop in hours. “When we shift the focus using our better data we do find negative employment effects about the same as we found for the overall city,” Plotnick says.

The drop in hours worked suggests that restaurants might be hiring more experienced, efficient workers, potentially making it harder for others to get an entry-level position. The researchers hope to do more research on how different demographics are affected–whether heads of households finding it hard to get enough hours or low-wage work, for example, or whether the impacts are higher on teenagers or others who would add a second or third income to a household.

“To really make a policy judgment or a final judgment you really like to know who those workers are…We don’t have that,” he says. “We plan to look at that in the future. If you’re making policy, the distribution matters, along with the average. What we’re presenting is average effects.”

He also makes it clear that the findings of this study don’t necessarily apply to other cities, and not to states. “If a state passes the minimum wage, it’s much harder to shift your workers out of state than it is to move them out of the city,” Plotnick says. Other cities can have very different economic structures, and different geographic proximity to nearby cities where companies or workers could move.

“We know people would like to sort of take the lessons wholesale elsewhere,” he says. “We think that’s beyond what our data can tell us. We want to be very careful about that. You shouldn’t generalize it.”

The link between severe sunburn early in life and skin cancer later on is well-drawn: Even one blistering sunburn as a child more than doubles a person’s chances of developing life-threatening melanoma as an adult. There’s an obvious fix for this scenario, and it’s good-quality sunscreen. But as it turns out, getting sun protection into the hands of schoolkids can be a complicated matter: In many school districts and states, sunscreen is considered medicinal—on the same level as Tylenol—and bringing it to school requires a doctor’s note.

To Alex Beck and Ryan Warren, entrepreneurs and the cofounders of BrightGuard, a company that distributes and installs free sunscreen dispensers, laws like this—and other barriers to applying sunscreen, like affordability and access—are exactly what they’re trying to break through with their work. “We want to remove all excuses for why people aren’t applying sunscreen,” Warren tells Fast Company.

Since launching BrightGuard in 2014–the same year the surgeon general issued a “call to action” to prevent skin cancer, citing the fact that melanoma cases have increased 200% between 1973 and 2014–Beck and Warren have installed over 2,000 free sunscreen dispensers in public spaces across all 50 states. Community institutions and municipalities like New York, for example, which is rolling out 80 BrightGuard dispensers stocked with SPF 30 across parks and beaches in the five boroughs this summer, purchase dispensers and sunscreen refill packets directly from BrightGuard “to provide an amenity and something useful for citizens,” Beck tells Fast Company. Each dispenser costs around $70, and the refill packets–sourced from a manufacturer in Florida, with which BrightGuard has developed a blend of SPF that follows the guidelines spelled out in the Environmental Working Group’s annual sunscreen guide–go for between $150 and $20 and contain enough sunblock to cover around 150 people.

BrightGuard has partnered with around 20 nonprofits around the country, which purchase their dispensers and set them up along with information about proper application and other sun-protection strategies. “It occurred to a lot of our nonprofit partners that our dispensers are a concrete way to turn their messages into action,” Beck says. So often, people read warnings about sun exposure and the importance of, say, reapplying sunscreen every two hours, but forget them once they’re out and going about their days, Warren adds. By building freely available sunscreen into cities’ infrastructure, Beck and Warren are hoping to bring about a behavior change in people when it comes to applying sunscreen.

So far, their strategy seems to be working: The work of Impact Melanoma (previously called the Melanoma Foundation of New England) was cited in a recent study from the University of Colorado as a reason for the reduction of skin-cancer rates in the northeast, and their collaboration with BrightGuard was listed as an effective way to increase public awareness about skin cancer causes and continue to drive down melanoma rates.

But schools, Beck and Warren say, are where their nonprofit partnerships are having the greatest effect. In Nevada, a state where students bringing sunscreen to school is forbidden, they’ve partnered with the Nevada Cancer Coalition, which is working with school districts to install dispensers; so far, they’ve reached 8 of the state’s 17 school districts, and aim to reach all by next year. Coupled with the dispensers, the Nevada Cancer Coalition is also working with teachers to implement more comprehensive sun-protection curriculum.

Of course, kids being kids, the real efficacy lies in making the dispensers seem cool. When Beck visited Douglas County, Nevada, he watched a bunch of fourth graders scramble to reach the newly installed dispenser. “They saw a friend doing it so they all wanted to do it—they were lining up before they went out to recess,” Beck says.

“That’s one of our biggest missions,” Warren says. “If we can impact kids at a young age to make this shift, and turn sunscreen into something they use for themselves and not because their parents are forcing them to, that’ll be a real change.” BrightGuard has a goal of reducing skin cancer rates by 20% by 2025, and their continued partnerships with nonprofits, Warren says, will be the key to making that happen.

A few weeks ago, after receiving a 21-page PDF report breaking down my so-called “emotional intelligence,” I did the logical thing and forwarded it to my boyfriend. He glanced at the list of categories on the second page and exclaimed—before reading my results—”Flexibility, uh oh!”

The report was the result of an assessment I’d taken three weeks prior called the EQ-i 2.0, which is based on nearly 20 years of research and has been taken by some 2 million people—and sure enough, it told me I’m about as inflexible as people close to me seem to think I am. Shortly afterward I scheduled a call with its developer, Steven J. Stein, who reviewed my results and offered this suggestion: “I would start looking at how you operate—what your routines are, how you get through a day.”

When I asked him for an example of a routine I might want to shake up, he said, “Like, eat a different breakfast or something.”

I glanced down. It was a Wednesday morning, and at my elbow was a Tupperware containing one of two breakfasts I pack myself pretty much every day. (Today it’s yogurt, some sliced orange, and granola.)

“Haaah, noted,” I muttered.

The concept of emotional intelligence (“EQ” or “EI” for short) has been around for over 20 years, but it’s still enjoying buzzy prominence in HR circles. The more technology reshapes (and in some quarters, automates) the workforce, the more valuable human-only skills seem to become. So I took the EQ-i 2.0 to figure out what it could tell me about my strengths, weaknesses, and what they might mean for my career.

It’s About Balance

“The ideal thing is not just getting all high scores,” Stein says, “it’s about balance.” That means that my low score for flexibility—62 in a normal range of around 40–145—isn’t necessarily “bad.” But it also means that my comparatively high score for “emotional self-awareness,” for instance (121), isn’t fundamentally “good.” The real question is whether my tendencies in other areas stack up in ways that counter any day-to-day challenges of being so stubbornly routine-bound.

“In your case,” Stein tells me, “you’ve got some wide ranges here. For example, your self-awareness is much higher than your reality testing.” What that means, he explains, is that “you’re focusing more on your own feelings than what’s going on around you,” even if I’m better than a lot of people at attending to both.

“When you’re feeling upset, you tend to know why and what it’s about, as opposed to people who are oblivious—you’ve got a good handle on that,” says Stein. But according to the assessment, I may not have an equally good handle on the goings-on around me, at least not when I’m feeling stressed.

Stein says the tool doesn’t just point out areas to work on; it also suggests how best to work on them. In my case, tackling the flexibility issue might be the key to reducing some of the other imbalances the test detected. “That’s a really good predictor of change” overall, Stein explains. “A whole range of people, from the business world to drug addicts, use that to predict success.” For me, he says, “it’s a stumbling block, but the idea here is we’re aware of it, and these are all trainable skills.”

A Different Mix For Different Jobs

The EQ-i 2.0 also points out that I’m a bit of a pessimist. “Optimism” is my second-lowest score, after flexibility. Thanks to the large data set the assessment draws on, Stein says certain patterns actually emerge by profession. While I’m “often looking at the downside—what’s wrong,” so are lots of print journalists, he says. “Whereas TV journalists are more [often] optimists, always looking for the good news, the good side—how can we make this a ‘good’ story?”

Stein rightly points out that in my line of work, skepticism is helpful for asking tougher questions and assessing motives. But I know what he means when he says there are times it can get the better of me.

As for other traits that could hold back my career, I score somewhat low on problem solving. Frankly, I’m (ahem) skeptical of that one. Luckily, so is my boss, Fast Company senior editor Kate Davis. When I shared my results, she said this about my problem-solving score: “I haven’t noticed it in a big way in your performance, but as a manager, that’s helpful to know as a potential area that I can help you develop.”

But it’s a good example of how interconnected these attributes can be. “The idea is to balance your emotion and your logical thinking” to solve problems, says Stein, so he muses that my pessimism and inflexibility might be culprits. “It could be that you focus so much on how you’re feeling,” he says, that my emotions cloud my reason, or that “you’re so pessimistic that you discard those feelings,” and overlook some possibilities.

What EQ Means For The Way You Work

It’s not hard to see the interplay of these types of factors in an ordinary workday. For instance, I might be able to lean on others more in order to strengthen my problem-solving muscle; my “interpersonal relationships” and “empathy” scores were high, which could mean they’re underleveraged resources.

Stein gives another couple of examples: “If someone ranks highly for reality testing, they’re more likely to know when they are the one not pulling their weight.” This way they probably won’t have to be convinced that they bear some of the blame when a team isn’t performing up to par. “If someone ranks highly for assertiveness,” he says, “they’re more likely to honestly express their thoughts and feelings in a common situation like meetings, where there are tough or challenging issues to discuss.”

Short of actually taking the EQ-i 2.0, these are a few questions Stein says anyone can ask themselves to determine approximately how they rank on some of the major components of emotional intelligence:

• Empathy:“Do I really listen to people when they talk about their issues, or do I just try to give them a solution? Do people tend to confide in me?”
• Emotional self-awareness:“When my body gives me physical signals that something is wrong, do I pay attention to it and sense what’s going on?”
• Self-actualization:“Am I doing the things in life that I really feel passionate about—at home, at work, socially?”
• Impulse control:“Do I respond to people before they finish telling me something?”
• Interpersonal relationships:“Do I enjoy socializing with people, or does it feel like work?”

If these feel kind of abstract, well, they are. Our thoughts and behaviors are highly situational and influenced by countless factors, many of them that our conscious minds never detect. But patterns tend to emerge anyway—in my experience, uncannily so.

Perhaps the true measure of the predictive power of emotional intelligence itself is that a 15-minute online quiz is all it takes for a researcher to tell you how you eat your breakfast—and how you should consider eating it tomorrow.

It’s Friday morning at Nasdaq headquarters, and that means demo time. Adena Friedman, a Nasdaq veteran who became CEO of the exchange in January, breezes into a 30th-floor conference room overlooking the neon thrum of Times Square. “These are always the fun meetings,” she says, taking a seat at the center of the table alongside her CTO and some of his top developers.

Fun—and mission-critical. Nasdaq was a technology trailblazer in the 1970s, when it became the world’s first electronic stock market. Over time, the company developed a reputation as the listing destination for Silicon Valley stars like Apple and Oracle, and a valuable provider of market data to boot. But the forces that catapulted Nasdaq to success are no longer a competitive advantage: IPOs (and listings) are in decline overall, arch-rival New York Stock Exchange has been landing many of the top tech IPOs, and electronic trading is now de rigueur. Friedman, the first woman to run a U.S.-based stock exchange, will have to get creative and look outside of Nasdaq’s core business to deliver growth.

Friday product demos, reflecting work in progress at Nasdaq’s innovation lab, are a first step toward that goal. Friedman settles back in her chair as a software developer turns on an Alexa device and begins to play the part of hypothetical customer, in this case an investment relations officer at Berkshire Hathaway.

“Sell-side commentary about Berkshire Hathaway has been positive,” Alexa says in response to his first question, her dispassionate alto filling the room. She goes on to describe Berkshire’s largest investors (“Fidelity Management is the largest holder with a 3.7% position”), read from an investor report, and emails a meeting invitation before signing off with a flash of blue: “Goodbye. Nasdaq is always here to help you.”

With just a few minutes of Friedman’s time remaining, a developer who has been experimenting with augmented reality slides a Microsoft HoloLens over his glasses. The lights dim, the blinds lower, and the room quiets. A copy of the HoloLens field of vision has been projected on a screen for all to see; as Nasdaq’s trading data comes into 3D relief, Friedman’s face briefly appears in the bottom corner. Her eyes are locked on the data—blobs of pink, blue, yellow, and green—as the developer playing data scientist zooms in and rotates the plot with choreographed gestures.

Friedman delivers a brisk summary when the lights turn back on. “So it’s just the beginning of time for us on this,” she says as heads nod. “We’re going to continue to work on it. This is obviously terrific.” A dozen pairs of tense shoulders relax. Friedman stands and then darts a final raised eyebrow toward an attendee taking advantage of Nasdaq’s evolving dress code. “I like the jeans,” she says, before disappearing out the door.

If Friedman could have just one futuristic technology in her own life, it would be a Star Trek–style transporter. For almost the entirety of her nearly 20-year career at Nasdaq, she has lived outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two sons, while commuting to New York for work each week. Perhaps that’s the reason she has sometimes been absent from the “most powerful women on Wall Street” lists that the industry rags like to publish.

But make no mistake, Friedman has earned a spot near the top. She rose at Nasdaq from MBA intern to C-suite executive over the course of two decades, before leaving in 2011 to take the Carlyle Group public as the private equity firm’s CFO. When she rejoined Nasdaq in 2014, then-CEO Bob Greifeld, now chairman of the board, began laying the groundwork for her promotion. She stepped into the role of CEO on January 1.

“If someone gives you an opportunity, you better maximize it so that he wants to give you the next one,” Friedman says, reflecting back on her early years at Nasdaq. A senior manager was impressed by her work ethic, and began giving her more and more responsibility. “I was always first in, last out, but not inefficiently,” she says. That first year she found herself at the office on her birthday, helping manage an emergency as the clock inched toward 9 p.m. “It was one of those things where you did what you needed to do. I had that attitude of, ‘I’m early in my career. I want them to know that I’m here for them no matter what.'”

“Those middle years are the ones that every CEO should be really, really focused on,” she says. “You tend to have a little more turnover in general in those middle years, and then put on top of that the fact that women have a lot more responsibilities once they have kids. It just adds to that pressure and stress, and at the same time they may not see the advancement opportunities. They start to say, ‘Is this what I want to be doing?'”

At Nasdaq, Friedman wants to make sure that the answer is “yes.” Her first addition to Nasdaq’s board of directors was a woman—telecom executive Melissa Arnoldi, who is president of technology development at AT&T. Friedman is also proud of the percentage of Nasdaq’s senior vice presidents who are women—21% (by way of comparison, 16% of partners at Goldman Sachs are women, the bank’s highest-ever rate).

After working her own way up the career ladder, Friedman found herself on the defensive less than a month into her tenure as CEO. On January 30, Snap Inc. announced that it would IPO on NYSE, a further blow to Nasdaq’s reputation as the listing venue of choice for technology innovators (in recent years it also lost bids for Box, Fitbit, LinkedIn, Shopify, Twitter, and Yelp). “Bizarro: It’s an upside-down world where Snap is listing on the NYSE and Hamilton Lane is listing on the Nasdaq,” deal reporter Dan Primack wrote in his popular newsletter. Even more embarrassing, Nasdaq had seemingly used every weapon in its arsenal to charm Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, going so far as to film the Manhattan skyline using Snap’s video-streaming Spectacles—from a helicopter.

“We compete for every listing,” Friedman says. “We’d like to win them all, but we don’t.” Snap was a “headline-grabber,” she says, with little resemblance to the B2B technology companies, like newly public Nutanix, that have been Nasdaq’s bread and butter. Last year, as in years past, the company had a higher IPO win-rate than the NYSE.

All the same, IPO pickings are slim in our unicorn era—and wins are all the more important as a result. In the U.S. in 2016, there were just 16 tech IPOs and 105 overall (20 years ago, the total was seven times that number). Meanwhile, private giants like Airbnb and Uber continue to attract billions of investment dollars. On average, they are staying private for at least twice as long as startups did 15 years ago.

New listings are central to Nasdaq’s public brand, but in reality they are just one piece of the company’s operations. The $11.7 billion organization Friedman inherited is increasingly resilient, thanks to smart efforts to expand into related products and services. Nasdaq not only owns and operates exchanges in the U.S. and Europe, it also uses its technology to power over 90 independent marketplaces in 50 countries. In addition, the company sells market data to Wall Street, and corporate services like investor relations to over 18,000 clients (if Nasdaq’s Alexa skill ever goes to market, they would be its target).

It’s all part of a mad dash to stake out territory amid macro shifts in the public markets. Passive investing is newly dominant, attracting $1.5 trillion in assets since 2013 ($800 billion fled active investments during that same time frame). In parallel, the number of publicly listed companies has declined by nearly half since the mid-1990s. When Friedman joined Nasdaq in 1993, there were 6,329 firms listed on U.S. exchanges. Today there are around 3,700.

So far Nasdaq has had some initial success applying its strengths to adjacent opportunities and partnering when necessary. Its surveillance solution, for instance, has become essential for many Wall Street institutions, which have seen their compliance needs (and budgets) balloon since the financial crisis. They now spend millions to detect illegal behavior, like spoofing—i.e., faking interest in a trade in order to manipulate prices. Nasdaq has developed its own surveillance solution, which mines trading data for insights, and last year invested in a startup called Digital Reasoning, which specializes in monitoring unstructured data from email, social media, and other communications. 

With an eye toward the longer-term, Nasdaq has also been experimenting with blockchain, the much-hyped distributed ledger technology that provides the infrastructure for bitcoin. Blockchain is most commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, but its potential applications are far more sweeping. Most notably for Nasdaq, blockchain can serve as a system of accounts for private market transactions. Ownership records at a unicorn like Airbnb, for example, can get unwieldy, as the company adds additional investors and some early investors sell their stakes. Today, those records exist in some combination of paper certificates and Excel. With blockchain, owners would have an immutable central record of their transactions.

“[Unicorns] need all the same services as a GE would need from an exchange, but without a publicly traded stock,” says Rob Jaeger, a partner at Wescott Capital. “It’s an experiment, and I think it should be called as such.” But when it comes to innovating, he says, “Nasdaq is the real deal. It’s not a ‘check the box’ exercise.”

Of course, there is a fundamental tension in making it easier for unicorns to keep raising venture capital dollars—a public company is far more profitable to Nasdaq than a private one. There is also a question of scale; private market trading volume pales in comparison to trading volume in the public arena. Even on a 10-year horizon, Nasdaq may have to look even farther afield to deliver growth.

Solving that challenge is the responsibility of silver-haired CTO Brad Peterson, who also leads the innovation lab. Peterson is the type of manager who seems content to let his team own the spotlight, while drily contributing the occasional one-liner or piece of context from the sidelines. He arrived at Nasdaq after spending five years at Ebay, where as chief information officer he mastered the ins and outs of online auctions. At an abstracted level, auctions and exchanges are similarly Nasdaq’s core expertise.

“We’ve broadened our view of what could be our opportunity, and it’s significantly bigger than just financial services,” Peterson says. Wall Street trading has gone “machine to machine,” and operations in other industries will soon follow. That creates a window of opportunity for someone like Nasdaq, with experience managing markets (what Silicon Valley would call a “platform”). “We have a CEO who’s looking beyond the current landscape, plus we have the tech capability.”

As a proof point, Peterson cites Nasdaq’s partnership with the New York Interactive Advertising Exchange (NYIAX), which launched this past March. NYIAX facilitates the buying and selling of digital ads weeks or months in advance of their placement, using Nasdaq’s blockchain technology. While NYIAX is just getting started—its initial pilot included 10 publishers—the exchange’s founding team believes that other media organizations will follow, drawn by the lure of greater transparency and data security.

Nasdaq can be nimble and partner with startups because the company modernized its systems and transitioned operations to the cloud under the direction of Friedman’s predecessor Bob Greifeld. “We do not have mainframes, like a lot of the big banks. We have a very elegant architecture,” Peterson says. But the company’s overall vision for that modern technology, before the CEO changeover, was more limited: “Let’s stick to our knitting.” Friedman, Peterson says, has the “confidence to try things, and really focus on the customer.”

Friedman’s confidence runs deep. She seems entirely at ease amid Wall Street’s big-shouldered suit-and-ties, with arrow straight posture and a black belt in taekwondo (an achievement featured again and again in coverage of her career, which perhaps says more about financial services and its power-pose culture than it does about Friedman). 

But taekwondo is a relatively recent hobby, ranking far below her lifelong love of droids, light sabers, and intergalactic travel. Friedman was a 10-year-old kid growing up in Baltimore when the original Star Wars hit theaters; she was soon hooked alongside her older brother. Her father, in turn, introduced her to Star Trek, which became an equal obsession. Among friends, her sci-fi geek status is well-known: Many assumed her son Luke had been named after a certain Skywalker (he was not). Luke and Logan are now full-grown, but the Friedman family living room still contains a life-size model of Darth Vader, purchased on Ebay.

What attracts her to sci-fi is less the fantasy, and more the sense of real-world possibility. “One of the things I liked about the movie Minority Report was they used a lot of futurists as consultants to really try to understand what the world really would be like in 50 years,” she says, before making an expert CEO transition to her business agenda. “I like the idea of using all this science and technology to allow for our clients to have a deeper insight into the market. Now, whether or not someone is going to put one of those [HoloLens] headsets on and work through the day, I’m not so sure.”

But if Wall Street does move in that direction, the Nasdaq that Friedman is building will be ready to help make it so.

Save

You already know that sticking to a good morning routine can set the tone for your whole day. That’s why I like getting my first article of the day finished before doing anything else. It’s just a habit that has made me a successful writer. But a morning routine won’t account for everything you need to do. And sometimes even a really effective one can be a distraction for the important things you haven’t done.

That was my case last year.

I noticed over a period of several weeks that three important things on my daily to-do list just weren’t getting done: studying French, expanding my writing vocabulary (in English), and reading. Missing out on these longer-term projects was starting to sap my confidence.

So I eventually decided to break myself out of an otherwise totally productive morning routine—again and again and again.

Related:How To Finally Stop Procrastinating (For Real This Time)

What Wasn’t Getting Done

At first, I’d just tried pumping myself up in the morning, assuring myself that I would definitely, definitely make progress on those three big-ticket goals at some point. But that definitely didn’t work. I always found myself doing everything but the things I had delayed.

To take the pressure off, I tried giving myself a one-month hiatus from making any headway on those three personal-development goals. But instead of letting myself off the hook, that just left me feeling crappy. The longer I waited, the more my procrastination weighed on my conscience. It didn’t matter that I’d been killing it in the writing world, or that I’d been transforming lives in my coaching career—I felt inept all the same.

Those three things that I hadn’t done were driving me nuts, and I knew something had to give. Then it occurred to me: Why not build a morning routine that was meant to be temporary—something I could stick to for awhile, then burn to the ground and reconstruct on a regular basis?

Pick A New Frog To Swallow

“Win the morning, win the day.” Cliché as it sounds, that’s the motto I live by as an independent worker. So the thought of changing my morning routine continuously gave me some initial anxiety, even if I could see its appeal in theory. I mean, it was the one thing that had finally got me off my parents’ couch after spinning my wheels earlier in my twenties. I still needed to write that one new article first thing every morning in order to feel whole—or so I thought.

The fact was staring me in the face that I couldn’t have it both ways; I’d have to choose. So I flipped the formula completely: I ditched my tried and true morning routine and front-loaded the vocab, French, and reading time at the beginning of my day, writing be damned.

The difference was immediate. A mental weight was lifted. Free from looming regret, I suddenly found the inspiration that had eluded me for a month. When I did sit down to write in the afternoons, I  wrote better. I coached better. And, paradoxically, I seemed to have found more time in my days.

Related:How The Most Successful People Start And End Their Workdays

Doing the hard things first is hardly a revolutionary productivity strategy—you’ve probably heard Mark Twain’s “eat the frog” directive quoted endlessly by startup wonks on Twitter—but it makes sense. The only factor this formula doesn’t account for is that the hard thing (the “frog”) might change over time. So why can’t your morning habits change, too?

After a few weeks, once I’d regained momentum on my three personal-improvement projects, I shuffled them out of my morning hours and back into their afternoon slots. Then I took a fresh inventory and searched for more confidence-sapping, back-burner tasks to front-load. I realized I hadn’t been playing guitar as much as I’d wanted, so for awhile I did that first thing each day  to regain the habit. I hadn’t pitched as many magazine articles as I knew I could, so I scheduled that before anything else for a few days, too.

Over the course of several months, I repeated this process with a hundred different things that had been clogging up my mental channels. All the stuff I’d been procrastinating on got a few days or weeks in the spotlight as part of my morning routine.

How To Making Routine-Switching A Habit

I’ve since come up with some ground rules that allow me to change up my morning habits whenever I feel myself procrastinating on something I want to give more attention to.

Every Sunday, I clear out 30 minutes to reflect on my biggest unmet needs heading into the upcoming week. They could be projects I haven’t started, people I haven’t connected with, books I haven’t read, habits I’ve let slide—anything that’s been tugging at my mind. Then I create a priority list: whichever tasks I’ve put off longest, or that I’m scared of, those go first.

Once I have that priority list nailed down—and it’s intentionally short, usually no more than three to five items—I schedule them to be done before 12:00 p.m. each weekday, Monday through Friday. That way my conscience is clear. I know exactly what I need to be doing to feel the drive and purpose to carry me through the week, and I have the momentum to breeze through the rest of each day’s tasks.

It’s true that routines give us stability and purpose. And because we depend so heavily on them, changing them can cause a lot of anxiety. But I’ve found that the results I get are more important than the makeup of the routines themselves—and that to get those results consistently, I need to do the things I’ve been putting off longest at the beginning of the day.

After all, the things you procrastinate on will change with you. So should your morning habits. Don’t believe me? Give it a shot.

The name Toshio Matsumoto may only ring a bell for the most astute film aficionados. Even then, he’s usually attached at the proverbial hip to the far more recognized director Stanley Kubrick. It’s well-documented that Kubrick drew a good deal of inspiration for his seminal film A Clockwork Orange from Matsumoto’s 1969 feature-length debut Funeral Parade of Roses–and it’s not hard to understand why.

As an avant-garde artist, filmmaker, and theorist Matsumoto’s work was steeped in the experimental and subversive, mainly expressed through short films like For My Crushed Right Eye, Mona Lisa, and Mothers. Among a bevy of shorts, Matsumoto directed only four features, but it’s his first that remains one of the most groundbreaking films in the Japanese New Wave–and the restoration and distribution team at Cinelicious Pics is making sure Matsumoto and Funeral Parade of Roses are more than just a footnote to another director’s legacy.

Cinelicious Pics recently re-released Funeral Parade of Roses with a 4K restoration that Matsumoto was able to be a part of until his passing in April. Like the Japanese animated cult classic Belladonna of Sadness and other films in its catalogue, Cinelicious Pics chose to pursue Funeral Parade of Roses based primarily on passion.

“We’re all just giant movie nerds, so everyone has a running list of dream projects that we would like to pursue,” says David Marriott, vice president of acquisitions and distributions at Cinelicious Pics. “This is one that Dennis [Bartok] suggested and we were all immediately like, absolutely. This is the sort of overlooked, pathbreaking, transgressive film that we want to be doing as part of this larger collection of films we’re building at Cinelicious Pics.”

“It’s one of the most kinetic films I’ve ever seen,” says Bartok, executive vice president of acquisitions and distributions at Cinelicious Pics, and general manager at American Cinematheque. “You really feel the passion and the fervor, and the excitement of moviemaking in Funeral Parade of Roses throughout almost every image and every scene in the film. Visually, it’s a stunning movie–the black and white cinematography and the imagery in the movie are some of the most memorable that I’ve ever seen.”

Funeral Parade of Roses plunges into the gay and drag bar scene in 1960s Tokyo. The film is a mishmash of documentary-style interviews, fourth-wall-breaking asides, and innovatory interludes that shatter the would-be linear story of Eddie (Peter), a young host at the gay bar Genet, who becomes embroiled in a love triangle with the club’s fading madame Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) and its philandering owner Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). The rivalry between Eddie and Leda, and Eddie’s love affair with Gonda all come to a shattering end on the level of a Greek tragedy that Bartok so accurately describes as a “sucker punch.”

Funeral Parade of Roses is a dizzying patchwork of styles and techniques, yet the film as a whole feels cohesive. A Benny Hill-style fight scene with cartoon speech bubbles somehow isn’t contextually disjointed from an ultra-tight close-up of a torrid sex scene. Once its understood that reality is some barely tethered entity in the world Matsumoto has created, nothing is out of the scope of possibilities.

“Leave all of your expectations at the door. Really, you will never have seen or never will see again a movie quite like Funeral Parade of Roses,” Bartok says. “My wife saw it for the very first time [during a recent screening in Los Angeles] and she was completely blown away. She said, ‘I can’t believe they were allowed to make this movie at that time.’ And that’s the feeling that I still carry away whenever I watch the movie because it is so transgressive. I’ve seen it many times during the restoration and I’m still blown away at the insane experimentation–the kind of Warholian quality of it.”

It’s one thing to have an appreciation for a director’s dissident approach to filmmaking, but the other half of the question Cinelicious Pics has to answer when resurrecting a film is, will it sell in today’s market?

Obviously, restoring and redistributing films like Funeral Parade of Roses isn’t like shopping for the latest hit at Cannes or Sundance. According to Marriott, his work falls more in-step with that of a detective, tracking down who has the rights to the film and even the physical film itself. In the instance of Funeral Parade of Roses, the entire process to restore and bring the film back to theaters took about three years.

“We all have to think it’s a masterpiece. We all have to be over the moon for it or we’re not going to do it. And we also have to think that it’s going to have a place in the landscape right now,” Marriott says. “We’re treating these films very much like like they are new because in a lot of ways, we’re introducing them. So we need to feel like there’s going to be an audience for it.”

“When I look at Funeral Parade of Roses, I’m amazed that nobody championed it before 10 or 20 years ago,” Bartok continues. “Given the whole cultural and social discussions going on right now about [LGBTQ] rights, I have to say it is a really great time to be putting this film out there.”

I honestly feel for recruiters who are tasked with filing data-science and machine-learning job openings. The list of requirements that employers draw up for those roles is pure bravado with a side of madness: “10 years of data science with at least five years in natural-language processing and either a Master’s or PhD” (never mind that I can count on one hand the number of data scientists who were building for production back in 2007). Others ask for experience with three different programming languages, 10 platforms, a niche algorithm set, leadership skills—and by this point I’m typically only halfway through reading the job qualifications.

Ask any tech recruiter and they’ll tell you about the stack of job openings like these that they’ve been unable to fill for the past six months to a year. Every couple of weeks, the client calls and berates them for not being able to send them quality candidates. After awhile everyone involved throws up their hands and calls it a “skills gap.” It isn’t.

Related:How To Satisfy Demand For The Biggest Job Of The 21st Century

Scrap Your Stupid Job Qualifications

Google doesn’t require a PhD to be a machine-learning engineer. A recent survey found that only one in four data scientists has a PhD. Yet I still see advanced-degree requirements on the vast majority of data-science and machine-learning job descriptions. Most companies just throw it in unthinkingly. But unless they’re investing heavily in advanced research, it’s pointless.

Requiring a set number of years of experience is equally stupid. Forget years and start thinking in terms of problem-solving abilities. I love formulas, so here’s mine for hiring a great data scientist:

Platforms + Business Problems = Required Skills

There are no years of experience in the equation. Has the candidate solved the business problem on the same or a similar platform before? Great! Data scientists are used to working with uncertainty. We’re used to turning business problems into technical solutions. Tell us your problems, show us your platforms, and take us to your data. We’ll outline a roadmap in the job interview that leads to a solution. If you like it, hire us. It really is that simple.

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

Both these mistakes, and several of the other common ones, come from the myth that every data-science team member needs to be some kind of multitalented wunderkind. Most businesses just need one person with the rare trio of strategy, engineering, and mathematical modeling chops. The rest of the team is built around this person and supports their work. So setting more sensible job requirements for those roles can actually help you build the right team structure. When every member isn’t expected to do everything, hiring gets a lot easier.

There Are Thousands Of You And One Of Me

When job candidates start sounding like Kanye, you know demand is high. But who can blame them? We’re all trying to stay humble and grounded amidst a massive hype cycle that we neither started nor have any long-term interest in perpetuating.

When I was hiring software developers a decade ago, we tossed candidates aside who seemed to feel they were hot commodities; we didn’t want to hire a bunch of arrogant, aloof divas. These days, the race for data-science talent has built up egos in a similar way that does a disservice to hiring managers and job seekers alike.

That’s not to say that businesses don’t need to attract rare talent that gives them a competitive edge. Data scientists and machine-learning practitioners are in high demand for good reason. But the businesses that succeed in finding candidates for these roles don’t compel them to be as boastful as possible; they follow much the same approach as they do for recruiting senior-executive talent. It’s a relationship-building process, more focused on the company selling the position than the candidates selling themselves.

What Does “Better” Look Like?

The bigger problem is that many companies view data science and machine learning as checkboxes on their operational to-do lists. Hiring a data scientist checks the box, and they’re done. Businesses that haven’t really teased out the connection between that type of role and the return on investment they’re expecting from it won’t ever have the right tools to hire appropriately. This can also help you avoid both overpaying and underpaying data scientists. How much they’re worth is a lot clearer once you know how much value that person will bring to your business.

The hype cycle bears a lot of blame for this problem. Companies are afraid of missing out on the benefits of data science and machine learning. Investors are starting to ask tough questions about how these emerging technologies will play into businesses’ larger strategies. And that’s all good and well. But very few are talking about concrete solutions. Hype gets all the likes.

Doing better means integrating these emerging technologies as strategic solutions to clearly defined business problems. It means more executive oversight for these roles and sticking to a clear schedule of deliverables. And yes, it also means less sexy, over-the-top job listings—which will be much easier to fill.

Based on my experience in the field, there are actually plenty of data scientists to go around. Clarity around how data science and machine learning solve business problems is a lot less plentiful. If you ask me, that’s the real skills gap.

Vin Vashishta is founder and chief data scientist at V-Squared Data Strategy Consulting. Follow him on Twitter at @v_vashishta.

In his book, The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future, AOL co-founder Steve Case makes two big predictions. First, he says startups will increasingly take on challenges in healthcare, education, energy, and transportation that Silicon Valley overlooked in the past. And, second, that those startups won’t all come from San Francisco. The third wave will see a “rise of the rest,” Case writes, slowing the startup-creation dominance of the coasts in recent years. The Bay Area alone currently accounts for about 40% of U.S. venture capital investment.

A new report looks at how “Middle America” can close the funding gap and identifies ways lots of places are already innovative, if only the coasts would care to look. The “culture scanning” approach from Sparks & Honey, a New York marketing agency, identifies cases of innovation in the heartland, spies ways Middle America startups may be different from those in Silicon Valley, and lays out how the rest of the country might emulate Silicon Valley without becoming Silicon Valley.

According to Chris Olsen, a venture capitalist who swapped Silicon Valley for Columbus, Ohio, the switch away from the coasts is already happening.  In a few years, the Midwest will have more startups than California, he wrote in a piece for VentureBeat last year. “Every time we go to the coasts, we hear the same old reasons why the Midwest won’t work for startups,” he said. “I have yet to see anyone validate these claims with data. In fact, every piece of information we find confirms the contrary.” He argues the reasons for Silicon Valley’s dominance are partly that everyone keeps repeating them: that it’s only place to find and retain talent, the only place to “scale,” the only place to find investment, the only place to find people who understand your technology.

Sparks & Honey pinpoints some tech success stories from Middle America: how Chattanooga, Tennessee, has invested heavily in publicly-owned fiber optic broadband to attract companies like OpenTable; how Montana incentivized telemedicine by instituting a parity law that reimburses health providers at the same rate as in-person services; how Columbus won a $50 million federal grant to create an autonomous transport system that will link up under-served poorer neighborhoods with downtown; how Cleveland has created a series of worker-owned businesses serving hospitals and universities, thus keeping wealth within the local community.

Olsen and Sparks & Honey argue that innovation in the Midwest and Middle America tends to be more humble, human-sized, and equitable. “This [innovation] is opposed to the stereotypical idea of Silicon Valley with its winner-takes-all mentality. What we see in Columbus, Cleveland and Minneapolis is a holistic approach to making cities work for everyone, for all income levels,” says report coauthor Barbara Herman.

“With all the controversy coming out of Silicon Valley about workplace practices, there is really a benefit to having strong values,” adds Emily Viola, a cultural strategist at Sparks & Honey. “That doesn’t have to be family values or Christian values, but it might be a commitment to the community and having strong work ethics and loyalty. These allow companies to innovate and stick around for a long time.”

The report says less fashionable towns and cities can attract startups by offering “values over valuations,” cheaper operating space, speaking the non-partisan language of progress, selling themselves as test markets for new products and services, and by supporting collective wellbeing, as opposed to the harshness of living somewhere like Manhattan or Palo Alto.

“In Silicon Valley, there is a value in being the rockstar entrepreneur but that’s not the same value that drives innovation in other parts of the country where people are looking to innovate in a more incremental way rather than necessarily creating the next big thing,” Viola says.

WHAT: A recreation of the latest Star Wars trailer made with the computing power of a machine that’s been obsolete for 30 years.

WHO: Indonesia-based illustrator Wahyu Ichwandardi.

Cita-cita waktu masih kecil di th 80an: bikin trailer Star Wars pakai komputer Apple bermonitor monochrome, baru kesampaian sekarang. pic.twitter.com/kUV28VB5pq

— Pinot (@pinotski) June 26, 2017

WHY WE CARE: Everything old is new again, and apparently vice versa. For instance, the trailer for the intergalactically anticipated new Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, has just been remade with Apple’s 4th-generation computer, the IIc. According to Mashable, recreating the trailer was a labor-intensive process that took about three weeks to complete. The process involved Ichwandardito holding plastic sheets over the monitor and tracing every single frame from the trailer, line by line. In other words he was really determined to make this happen. The hard work paid off in a vintage-style trailer that juxtaposes nicely with the space age graphics of The Last Jedi.

WHAT: A new animated ad to celebrate Russell Westbrook’s NBA MVP award, which made the Oklahoma City Thunder star the first Jordan Brand athlete to win the league’s top individual honor since Jumpman himself.

WHO: Jordan Brand.

WHY WE CARE: Lessons are always easier to learn if they’re animated. This is just a scientific fact, whether the lesson is not talking to strangers or brushing your teeth. Now Jordan Brand comes in with its own new twist on an old school Saturday morning cartoon tradition. We get an NBA math lesson, courtesy of Phonte of Little Brother and The Foreign Exchange breaking down the numbers to pay homage to No. 0, and just how incredible Westbrook’s season was.

WHAT: A new Gatorade starring Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, the Manning brothers, Matt Ryan, JJ Watt, Kyle Schwarber and Karl Anthony Towns, all revealing the one special ingredient that makes a winner.

WHO: Gatorade, TBWA Chiat Day/LA

WHY WE CARE: There aren’t too many brands that can line up such an impressive murderer’s row of superstar sports talent in one spot. Here, Gatorade takes full advantage by flipping the script a bit from the classic highlight moments, choosing instead to focus on the tougher times. It’s a different kind of aspirational approach, one that favors sweat over celebrity. A solid addition to the classic sports ad construct, while not feeling redundant or too cliche. Electrolytes!

Bad news: We’re biologically hardwired to procrastinate. Research shows we possess a limited amount of willpower that drains throughout the day, regardless of what we do.

We can’t avoid procrastination. Instead, embrace it as a necessary chance to recharge, restore your confidence, and generate new ideas.

To use procrastination to your advantage, you first need to understand what’s behind your excuses. For your procrastination to be functional, here are break activities that address–and counteract–the reasons you want to procrastinate in the first place.

Excuse One: You Don’t Know Where to Start

What’s the difference between procrastinating and taking a break? A plan for what to do next. When we waste time indefinitely without any concrete plan, we create a secondary anxiety about what to do next.

Write an extensively detailed to-do list . . . Before you switch over to your “time wasters,” write down all your outstanding tasks and their timeframe, preferably following the SMART model of articulating specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bounded goals. Factor in any potential obstacles that might arise, like the client who requires three follow-up emails.

Related:It’s Come To This: Procrastination Nannies Are Now A Thing 

Once you’ve at least planned to complete your tasks, you’ll feel more relaxed during your downtime and fully reap the benefits of procrastination.

. . . Or a “done” list. Of course, “to-do” lists only work when you feel confident that you can actually check off some of the entries, or that completed task won’t be immediately replaced by a new one.

But if you’re not? Listing all your responsibilities will paralyze you and kickstart another round of procrastination. In that case, create a “done” list of everything you’ve accomplished during that day or week. On a losing streak? Even “did my laundry” counts.

Write down your own achievements, paying particular attention to times that you overcame overwhelming conditions to get things done. If you’ve done it before, you can do it again, right?

Excuse Two: You’re Totally Burned Out

After a week of working without a break, you can barely string two thoughts together, let alone produce anything worth presenting to others. Time to hit reset.

Add a side hustle. Your guitar jam sessions or personal blog serve a purpose beyond scratching your creative itch–it can help us withstand work stress and prepare us to solve problems in  innovative ways.

Related:How Business Leaders Get Ahead By Making Time For Passion Projects 

To avoid your side hustle from being another thing to stress about, the Huit Denim Company recommends that you remember the following things:

1. They don’t have to provide you with a living. You can still eat if they fail.
2. They don’t have a deadline. And as there is no time pressure, you don’t revert to your usual formula. You try new things. You experiment. You take risks.
3. This is a labor of love. You provide the “labor.” And you provide the “love.” So when you spend time on it, it is because you really want to. That keeps you coming back and pushing it on.

Self reflect. Career coaches recommend curing burnout with moderation and delegation. But if you knew how to moderate your efforts, you wouldn’t have overworked yourself to the point of burnout in the first place. To get there, you need to learn how to prioritize. Through a brief period of self-reflection, you can achieve this in the time it takes to get coffee.

Thirty-seven years after his future father-in-law tricked him into attending a spiritual retreat, former Baxter International CEO Harry Kraemer still reflects for 15 minutes every night. He credits that routine for helping him manage 52,000 employees–and the associated stress–without “running around like a chicken with his head cut off.”

Related:How To Practice Mindfulness When You Don’t Have The Time

When you’re feeling blitzed by busy work, separate yourself from your to-do list and remind yourself why you’re bothering to do them. Feeling stuck? Use Kraemer’s nightly self-reflection routine as your script.

1. What did I say I was going to do today in all dimensions of my life?
2. What did I actually do today?
3. What am I proud of?
4. What am I not proud of?
5. How did I lead people?
6. How did I follow people?
7. If I lived today over again, what would I have done differently?
8. Based on what I learned today, what will I do tomorrow in all dimensions of my life?

This exercise enables you to distinguish your “must haves” from your “nice to haves.” From there, you can delegate nonessentials to coworkers and strike a healthier work-life balance.

Excuse Three: You Don’t Have a Deadline

Because they lack accountability to other people, creative entrepreneurs executing projects under self-imposed deadlines–like a novel or a new company–are especially prone to procrastination. Author Phyllis Korki, in a New York Times article, attributes this mostly to the uniquely visceral fear of failure accompanying any deeply personal creative pursuit.

To overcome insecurity-driven procrastination, Korki recommends that creatives impose a false sense of accountability on themselves. Set a due date–even if it’s a fake one.

Create a coworking group. A fake date might not work, though. You’ll need encouragement to push through. For that, reach out to other creatives in networking groups–on social media or in person–and organize a weekly or monthly meeting to discuss your progress on your various projects.

Besides giving yourself a checkpoint, these sessions provide a space to bounce ideas off others. And connecting with other creatives who are likely struggling with the same self-doubt as you can help you accept your fears as normal, natural parts of the creative process.

Excuse Four: You’re Afraid Of Discomfort

Procrastination often stems from our tendency to avoid things that make us feel physically or psychologically uncomfortable, according to a Psychology Today article by Dr. Pamela Garcy.

Intellectually, you probably realize that putting off those projects doesn’t permanently relieve your discomfort–it just delays it. But through many more pleasurable activities, you can practice coping with discomfort before it impedes your performance on a huge project.

Try improv. For anyone who shuts down in awkward work situations, or stresses about every deviation to plan, improv classes for professionals provides a low-pressure, supportive, and more palatable opportunity to step outside their comfort zones.

During classes, performers role play various situations but don’t know they what will do or say onstage until they’re on stage. They start each scene with a prompt from their audience and need to make up the story as they go along. The one rule? Say “yes, and” to every situation that arises during the scene.

Saying “yes” forces performers to accept and adapt to their partner’s actions and contribute their own words and actions to the scene. This cultivates the kind of adaptability and open-mindedness that helps professionals overcome discomfort in the workplace, says Tim Yorton, the CEO of Second City Communications who operates the famed theater’s improv class for business executives.

Excuse Five: Procrastination Is Your Standard Operating Procedure

Like any other bad habit, our procrastination follows a pattern. We enter a project with the best intentions. Then . . . we encounter a roadblock. As the deadline draws closer, we continue making excuses and avoiding our work until the final hour, when we throw together some random thoughts, send it into the ether, and hope it works.

Though it takes between 18 and 254 days to create a lasting behavioral pattern, you can remotivate yourself in time for today’s big meeting with one last tip: Watching a sports movie.

Everyone loves the underdog stories in sports movies. We can apply that same narrative to our work. When we think we’re working to overcome a challenge outside of ourselves, we’re more motivated to put in the effort, according to author Nir Eyal.

So after watching your favorite underdog conquer their opponent, create your own imaginary opponent, which Eyal calls a “scapegoat.” Think of your own insecurities and doubts and assign them to that invisible, imaginary enemy. Are they telling you that you’re incompetent? By accomplishing your goals, you’ll prove your competence to that enemy–and yourself.

Your big project can–and probably should–wait until tomorrow. But don’t procrastinate on putting these tips to the test. Jot down your tasks before you take that next coffee break–or perhaps, watch a quick sports win on YouTube. It just might give you the willpower to fight on.

A version of this article originally appeared on Zapier and is adapted with permission. 

President Donald Trump is obsessed with returning America to its coal mining past—but scientists and entreprenurs have far more ambitious plans. As the planet’s precious metal reserves tap out, big business and NASA are looking to the skies. The race to mine asteroids swirling around the solar system is on.

Space mining may sound like science fiction, but it’s real, and big developments are on tap in the next decade.

Asteroids are essentially massive rocks that orbit the sun, and many are thought to consist of platinum, gold, iron, and more. A single 500-meter-wide asteroid can contain almost 175 times Earth’s annual platinum mining output, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology research.

The metal, worth about $930 per ounce, is used in jewelry and is a byword for luxury—think platinum credit cards—but it’s also used in the catalytic converters installed in every modern car, in industrial chemical processes, and in many electronics.

Space Mining Economics

Conventional wisdom may be that going to space to bring back what is needed on terra firma is economically nuts. Not so, analysts insist.

“While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower,” says a recent report prepared on the subject by Goldman Sachs.

Proponents say that before long, robots could be traveling to asteroids to extract platinum and other valuable minerals to haul back to Earth or even one day to use in space-based manufacturing plants.

A 2012 Caltech study found that it could cost just $2.6 billion to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit near Earth, making human exploration and robotic mining that much easier. “We expect that systems could be built for less than that given trends in the cost of manufacturing spacecraft and improvements in technology,” the Goldman report says.

It also predicts the eventual result would be far lower costs: “Successful asteroid mining would likely crater the global price of platinum” by dramatically increasing the supply.

“The market is a big unknown because of things like platinum,” says Jay McMahon, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Center for Astrodynamics Research. “You don’t know what’s going to happen if you bring back a big haul of platinum, what that would do to the market on Earth or how much demand there is.”

Pioneering Missions

Last year, NASA launched a seven-year mission to a carbonaceous asteroid called Bennu. The Osiris REx spacecraft will map the asteroid for more than a year and then move in close to allow a robotic arm to extract several ounces of material to return to Earth for analysis.

The space agency plans to launch a separate pair of robotic missions, dubbed Lucy and Psyche, within a decade, sending the devices to explore asteroids near Mars and Jupiter.

One day those prospecting missions may be remembered as major milestones in humankind’s exploitation of outer space resources. Scientists and business titans envision future missions could include construction of major manufacturing enterprises on asteroids that will help maintain and upgrade space vehicles without a costly return to the surface.

But before humans and robots can really tap into the riches in any real volume, the most important discovery must be water—or, more accurately, the ability to extract water from the flying boulders.

Besides providing refreshment to thirsty astronauts, the hope is to one day perfect technology to cheaply convert water to its atomic components—the H2 and the O. The H, or hydrogen, is key to rocket fuel, and could be used to keep space vehicles humming.

Space mining startup Planetary Resources has announced plans to launch an initial prospecting mission by 2020 and is focusing on water.

“We’ve explored a number of possibilities, and we are focused on being the resource provider for people and products in space and see asteroids and the water that’s on them as the immediate next step,” says Chris Lewicki, president and CEO.

Lewicki thinks solar energy will be the key to powering the tech that will melt water trapped in asteroids and then separate its elements.

“My expectation is that the first commercial extraction of water on an asteroid will happen by the middle of the 2020s, less than 10 years from now,” Lewicki says.

Turning Water Into Fuel

“It’s little molecules of water stuck inside rocks, so the concept is you superheat it, the rock kind of melts, and the water comes out as steam, and you capture the steam,” says McMahon.

“You use solar power to separate it again and then you have to cool it to make it liquid, both the hydrogen and the oxygen, and then you can refill the tanks of any rocket that passes by,” says Martin Elvis, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The grand vision is that, one day, fuel could be stored at Earth-orbiting depots with places for ships to dock—the space equivalent of gas stations—or delivered by fueling craft to other vehicles and satellites, similar to how some military planes can now be refueled in midair.

Asteroid mining companies, like Planetary Resources and rival Deep Space Industries, are betting that water extraction is key to the success of space mining.

Mining Tech’s Worldly Benefits

Among the sticky questions in all this: Who owns the asteroids? A 2015 federal law, designed to spur development of the U.S. space industry, makes clear that U.S. citizens have the right to what’s obtained from asteroids.

But until mining operations start churning out water or minerals for sale, the companies developing the mining systems still must pay the bills. That’s had them looking at other ways to utilize the technology they’re developing for mining here on Earth.

Planetary Resources, based in Redmond, Washington, and backed in part by Google cofounder Larry Page, announced a $21.1 million round of funding last year aimed at using its Arkyd spacecraft and sensor systems, which it plans to one day use to locate asteroids suitable for mining, to study economically important systems on Earth.

The technology will be able to help monitor crops and pipelines, identify mineral resources below the planet’s surface, and even track toxic algae blooms and spot wildfires as they start, the company has said.

The company last year scrapped a plan for a public access Arkyd, complete with space selfies, that had raised $1.5 million in Kickstarter funding, and returned the pledged funds to backers, citing a lack of outside support to make the project financially worthwhile.

The latest generation of the spacecraft, known as Arkyd 6, is slated for launch this year.

“One of the things that we’re interested to explore with the launch of our satellite this year is, when we aim it down to Earth, we’re making [available] new data sets that have been previously been unavailable,” says Lewicki.

Deep Space Industries has announced plans for what it calls Prospector-1, a mission to investigate an asteroid’s potential for resource mining. The company has developed its own electrothermal thruster system, called  Comet, that uses water as propellant. Again, that puts a premium on getting the frozen water from a rock.

“Once you can do that, you can then travel around space much more freely because you don’t have to deploy everything from Earth,” says Peter Stibrany, the company’s chief business developer and strategist. “You can at least re-propel yourself and refuel yourself from space.”

In the meantime, it’s been selling versions of the system to use to drive small satellites, with a first flight system shipping in April, says Stibrany.

“That’s helping us pay the rent and continue development of our propulsion technologies,” he says. And the company is also the prime contractor providing satellites for startup HawkEye 360’s PathFinder system, designed to monitor radio frequency use from space for safety and other purposes.

Deep Space Industries plans to launch its Prospector-1 mission by the end of the decade, Stibrany says, with an eye toward future missions to extract water from asteroids.

“You’ve got to do this one step at a time,” he says. “We need to do prospecting first, and then get to extraction and utilization after that.”

Andrew Carnegie is probably best known for being a 19th Century steel baron. But in 1901, he sold that business to J.P. Morgan for $480 million—the equivalent of about $310 billion today—to fund another kind of venture: giving his enormous wealth away to improve society.

As in business, Carnegie believed it was important to fund solutions that could scale. He shared all that and more in an 1889 essay entitled “The Gospel of Wealth,” which suggested that the rich had the personal responsibility to help those less fortunate, but in a way that created lasting change, strategizing beyond just “indiscriminate almsgiving.”

The 2017 honorees, which were just announced, include nine medal recipients from eight different initiatives (one is being worked on by a couple). To earn the honor, medalists must have a Carnegie-like vision for change (i.e. bold, broad, permanent), a sustainable track record of giving, and have made “a significant impact on a particular field, nation or group of people.”

To date, more than 50 recipients have been chosen, including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg. This year’s class includes an equal representation of women and men scattered internationally, with members in the U.S., China, India, and Australia. You can read more about the winners below. Click here for more information.

Mei Hing Chak (China): Chak heads HeungKong Group Limited, a $14.5 billion conglomerate with businesses covering everything from financial investing to resources and energy, and property management. In 2005, her company founded the first private corporate philanthropy group in China, the HeungKong Charitable Foundation, which works to improve education, alleviate poverty, and provide rescue and disaster relief.

Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest (U.S.): In 2000, former cable television company owner Gerry Lenfest sold Lenfest Communications to Comcast for $6.7 billion. Since then, he and his wife, Marguerite, a former elementary school teacher, have committed all of their money to charitable work, primarily through the Lenfest Foundation, which works on education reform. They also founded the Lenfest Institute for Journalism to support local news.

Azim Premji (India): Premji runs Wipro Limited, a former hydrogenated cooking fat company that, over the last several decades, transitioned into an $8.5 billion international IT, consulting, and outsourcing group. In 2001, he founded the Azim Premji Foundation to improve India’s impoverished public schools system. In 2011, he endowed Azim Premji University, which focuses on grooming more teachers and social workers.

Julian Robertson (U.S.): Robertson, a former hedge fund founder and investor, has an estimated net worth of $3.4 billion. In 1996, he and his wife, Jose, founded the Robertson Foundation, which makes impact-driven grants in education, the environment, and medical advancements. He’s helped reform New York schools, fight climate change, and fund stem cell research.

Jeff Skoll (U.S.): Skoll is an investor and social entrepreneur (and the former president at eBay). He runs the Jeff Skoll Group, which has invested various companies and foundations to battle inequality, boost economic opportunity, and protect the environment. That includes the Skoll Foundation for social entrepreneurship; Participant Media, which produces documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth; the Skoll Global Threats Fund against water scarcity, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and other destabilizing societal forces; and Capricorn Investment Group to build more social good companies.

Kristine McDivitt Tompkins (U.S.): Tompkins, the former CEO of Patagonia, founded Tompkins Conservation alongside her late husband Douglas, who was the founder of The North Face and passed away in 2015. Together, they acquired millions of acres for protected parks in Chile and Argentina. She’s part of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which makes grants does research around environmental sustainability practices.

Shelby White (U.S.): White is the wife of late investor and mutual fund manager Leon Levy. After her husband died in 2003, she formed the Leon Levy Foundation, which supports a variety of historic preservation, arts and science, and Jewish culture projects. She’s funded the Institute for Study of the Ancient World, Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve in the Bahamas to save and study indigenous plants, and a neuroscience fellowship program

Sir James Wolfensohn (U.S. and Australia): Wolfensohn runs his own private equity firm but is better known as the former president of the World Bank. He headed the international development fund, which aims to reduce poverty, for a decade starting in the mid-90s and has also contributed heavily to humanities, science, and arts and culture institutions including Carnegie Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

I have an Alexa Echo in my kitchen, but I’ve found it to be of limited use because it’s non-visual–it can hear and make sounds, but it can’t see and display images.

Amazon’s new Echo Show device (see our full review here) gives the Alexa brain both audio and visual senses. The device, which goes on sale for $230 Wednesday, does pretty much everything an Echo does, skills-wise—but for $50 more adds a camera and a 7-inch display.

While Amazon envisions the Show being used in your bedroom and living room, make no mistake: it’s optimized for your kitchen counter, where that 7-inch display is likely to be a crucial assistant in helping prepare meals and stock your fridge and cupboards.

“Say you use your voice to set a timer; now you can see how much time is left,” says GlobalData analyst Avi Greengart. “You might ask Alexa how many cups are in a gallon; now you can reference it (on the screen) a few seconds later, after you’ve forgotten the answer.”

Many of us have turned to online videos to learn how to make new things in the kitchen, and the Show will be perfect for that, especially if there’s a skill that lets you back up or pause the video using voice commands. Right now the Show is mainly a front end for Amazon’s Prime video, but the video selection will grow as third parties create new skills.

Many people have a TV in the kitchen because they like to watch the news while they cook. The Show might eventually make the TV unnecessary, Greengart points out. Echo owners are used to requesting news briefings, based on news outlets they select in the Alexa app. Those flash briefings might now become video playlists instead of just audio clips.

Amazon is set to release new developer tools to video doorbell companies so that the image caught by the front door cam can display on the Show in the kitchen.

The Show will work well for family communications that are better seen than heard—things like notes, to-do lists, shopping lists, or the family “chore wheel.”

Although this isn’t available yet, the Show’s screen might be easier to use than voice for controlling connected home devices, too, Greengart says. That’s because the verbal commands for controlling Alexa-connected devices can get to be a mouthful, like “Alexa, turn on light number 7B in the living room north wall.” It might be simpler to just tap a button on the Show’s screen.

The Show’s camera both detects people in the room (and wakes up) and is used for video chat with people on cellphones using the Alexa app. It can also be used as a sort of home intercom system, Amazon says, communicating with other Echos and Echo Shows around the house.

The kitchen is crucial—it’s where people tend to spend a lot of time and make plenty of purchasing decisions. Greengart says PC makers and others have for years tried to win a spot on the kitchen counter with various kinds of devices, without much success. Those devices had screens but didn’t have the Echo’s and Echo Show’s capability of hearing and understanding a voice command from across the room. That may set the Show apart.

Providing a kitchen counter device might be a good role for Amazon, Greengart points out, as opposed to one of the big platform players like Microsoft, Google, or Apple. Each of those companies is competing to get consumers to adopt their productivity services (calendar, email, etc.), so each may be less inclined to integrate of the other. Amazon, on the other hand, isn’t a platform play in that sense, so it might be more inclined to integrate with all of them.

There’s still a lot of things the Show can’t do. Right now the visual presentation of skills that have long been audio-only is limited. But expect Amazon and third-party developers to enhance the aesthetic quality and usefulness of the visual content.

And, of course, Amazon will make sure the Show offers many ways of purchasing products from Amazon.com. The Show, for example, is perfectly positioned as the front part of a system that lets consumers order groceries as needed at the kitchen counter to have it later delivered to the front door.

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered [to] use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

“I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” he said.

—The Harvard Crimson, “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Web Site,” February 9, 2004

From almost the moment that a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launched a site designed to help his classmates find each other, one of the most notable facts about Facebook has been that it just keeps getting larger. Just as the Crimson marveled at the service approaching 900 users after less than a week, it was a news-making mindbender when the service hit 100 million users in 2008, 500 million in 2010, and a billion in 2012.

And today, less than half a decade after reaching one billion monthly active users, Facebook is announcing that it has two billion of them. The fact that it’s still finding new members at such a rapid clip–more than thirteen years after its founding, and long after it ran out of easy pickings–startles even the company’s VP of growth, Javier Olivan.

“I would have thought that the fastest growth would have been at the time where we were launching so many languages and making it available for so many people in different countries,” he told me recently when I visited Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. “But it turns out we’re actually at peak growth now, a few years later.”

Even if Olivan didn’t anticipate Facebook’s enduring success at expanding its ranks around the world, he’s one of the people who can claim credit for it. A decade ago, he was a founding member of the company’s first team officially dedicated to scaling up its membership base. He’s been at it ever since. So have three other members of that original eight-person growth team: VP of social good Naomi Gleit; director of core data science Danny Ferrante; and VP of growth marketing, analytics and internationalization Alex Schultz. Their work has been widely envied and imitated throughout the tech industry, and the in-house expertise they’ve shared helps explain why Facebook’s other big services–Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger–are growth phenoms themselves.

By thinking about growth the way Facebook thought about every other aspect of its experience, the team redefined how internet companies go about scaling themselves up. “We were one of the first teams to really have a data-driven, product-driven approach to growth, which was historically more of a business function,” says Gleit, who joined Facebook in 2005 after writing about the tiny startup for her Stanford senior thesis, and is now the company’s second longest-tenured staffer after Mark Zuckerberg himself. “PR and marketing were supposed to drive news.”

But as fabulously effective as these staffers and others who have joined them in subsequent years have been, they’ve never obsessively restricted their mission to the nuts and bolts of recruiting new members. Facebook’s efforts to bring internet connectivity to more of the world through means such as solar-powered drones, for instance, were sparked by the realization that the service could only keep growing if the number of people who were online did. The Safety Check feature that lets members mark themselves as safe in the event of crises such as natural disasters also spun out of the growth team’s work. So did the recent GoFundMe-like tools for personal charitable fundraising. Facebook is even applying the growth team’s learnings to the measures it takes to suppress fake accounts and objectionable content. And when the company decided to shear Messenger off from the main Facebook service into an app of its own, it asked the growth team to supervise the divvying process.

If all of these disparate projects have anything in common, it’s that their success is contingent on the company combining data science with an empathetic understanding of what people want out of Facebook, an approach that the growth team developed early on and continues to apply to new initiatives as they pop up.

“Sometimes I think of us like a SWAT unit or like a ninja team,” says Gleit. “We don’t have to work on just growth, we can take on new problems and then hire people that are smarter than us to take them to the next level.”

The 70-Million User Ceiling

From Facebook’s earliest years, it grew–but not because it had already turned growth into a science or developed unique expertise about the subject. Even in 2007, it was still worrying about basic stuff like search-engine optimization. (That seems odd today, given that the social network has long been a walled kingdom that doesn’t let Google inside to index its posts–but at the time, people still found Facebook by Googling for it.) The company recruited Alex Schultz from eBay to help with such matters. “It wasn’t like it was particularly tough work, but Facebook had nobody who did online marketing and my background was online marketing, my entire career,” he remembers.

Soon after Schultz arrived, Facebook faced a stark challenge: It began to look like the site might have peaked. “Everyone had been on this kick of, ‘We’re going to have billions of users, we’re going to get everyone in the world on this thing,’ and then we stopped at like 70 million,” he says. “Then everyone started panicking about whether or not we could even get to 100 million active users.”

It was then that Zuckerberg charged a Facebook executive named Chamath Palihapitiya with forming a group devoted to expanding Facebook’s membership, a holistic mission that encompassed not only marketing but technology, design, and other domains. Palihapitiya left the company in 2011 for venture capital–and is now an owner of the Golden State Warriors–but the growth engine he built has been remarkably durable.

As his team strategized how to get Facebook to 100 million users, international growth was an obvious opportunity, but one that was contingent on the service being available in more languages. Instead of methodically checking off other widely used tongues–like MySpace, which followed up English with French, Italian, German, and Spanish—the company built functionality that allowed Facebook members themselves to implement new languages. That approach made the service available even in obscure dialects, assuring that nobody would be denied access to Facebook solely because of a language barrier. And it turned out that the volunteer translators understood their work in ways that paid experts might not have.

“The translations were really good, better than when you use professionals, because the community understood the product really well, and there are concepts on Facebook that are kind of hard, like tagging someone,” Olivan says. “How you translate that? Or poking someone, or writing on someone’s wall?” Facebook users answered those questions in the process of translating the service into over 100 languages to date.

In the early days, Facebook’s sign-up process was a click away from the home page and involved five screens’ worth of fields. The company ground that down to seven fields embedded directly in the home page, making it impossible to miss and a breeze to complete. Once signed up, new users only found value in Facebook if they could locate their friends. So the home page also got a link to a contact importer developed by Blake Ross, the co-creator of Firefox, who was a member of the growth team at the time.

None of these steps were strokes of genius on their own, but in aggregate, they had a powerful effect: “It was massive best practices,” says Schultz. Thanks in part to them, Facebook got growing again and announced it had signed up its hundred millionth user in August 2008.

By early 2009, many of the most straightforward tweaks had already been put into effect, so the growth team turned its attention to data. It began to track the flow of techniques it used to find, sign up, and engage new users, allowing it to judge their effectiveness on a granular level.

“It was really obvious stuff like how many emails did we try to send?,” Schultz explains. “Did we send them? Did they arrive? Were they opened? Were they clicked? Did the people actually come to our site? And did they convert?” Working with data expert Danny Ferrante, team members created a system of “growth accounting” that broke their work down into components–new signups, the churn of members who became inactive–and helped them understand the effect of changes they made.

By paying attention to such matters, Schultz says, a bunch of Facebook employees in Silicon Valley learned to tell whether what they had built resonated with specific groups of people around the world. (His example user: a farmer in rural Punjab, India, who’s using the internet, including Facebook, for the first time.) “In the Valley, there is this myth that you optimize for metrics or users, and as the head of analytics for Facebook, arguably the biggest big data company in the world, I think that is fundamentally flawed,” he argues. “At its heart, data gives you empathy.”

Growth Goes Mobile

At the same time that the growth team was ramping up, the mobile age of computing was dawning–a transformation that had a profound impact on the growth group’s work. “We saw that a lot of the people that were joining the product at that time and now, are not like us, using high-end Androids or iPhones with 4G connectivity,” says Olivan. “They were actually people in really bad networks with very low-end devices. And our products were not necessarily working well in those type of devices.”

In 2011, the growth team instigated Facebook’s acquisition of Snaptu, an Israeli startup that, on its own, had created a stripped-down version of Facebook designed to run on basic “feature phones.” That technology, which requires neither a cutting-edge smartphone nor a high-speed data network, eventually morphed into Facebook Lite, a minimalist version that is a vital component of the company’s growth strategy. In February, Mark Zuckerberg reported that it has 200 million users in countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Nigeria.

But the challenge of making Facebook make sense in emerging markets is only partially a technical one. Getting new members up and running on Facebook is a wildly different challenge than it was in the days when a typical newbie to the service was a computer-literate person who’d grown up in the era of desktop PCs. Today, a newcomer to Facebook is more likely to use it on a phone, and may still be early in the process of figuring out the internet, period. That changes everything about the design decisions that go into the initial sign-up steps, the process of logging in, and other aspects of the service that Facebook long-timers never even stop to think about.

“We have email accounts,” says head of design Luke Woods, who joined Facebook in 2011. “We know what an account is. We have a conceptual model of what Wi-Fi is and that you might be able to get it here, but not get it there. Things like that. We find that we really have to check a lot of these basic core assumptions.”

If you’re reading this article, chances are that you signed up for Facebook eons ago on a PC, don’t remember the details of the experience, and are unaware of what a new user encounters in 2017. But the company continues to refine the process. The home screen that once used a utilitarian blue wall now features some imagery of people sharing stuff to convey Facebook’s purpose. It replaces “Sign Up For Facebook” with the more straightforward “Create New Facebook Account.” And it gives you a “Forgot Password?” link without making you type in an incorrect password first.

Another assumption about phones that Facebook had to discard: the notion that they’re always personal devices. In some of the service’s fastest-growing markets, it’s common for multiple people to share one phone, as the members of an American family might do with a desktop PC. So the company built an account switcher that makes it possible for two or more people to share the Facebook app without having to manually log in and out.

Will the growth team ever see another sea change as significant as that of the transition from the PC to mobile devices? Maybe–as a company, Facebook is certainly betting big on VR—but for now, the important point is that the mobile shift is still a work in progress rather than a mission accomplished. “I think that people might be too quick though to think of mobile as the past or to be anticipating what the next thing might be,” says Woods. “So many people are coming online for the first time on their mobile phones.”

From Sign-Ups To Safety Check And Beyond

Facebook’s Safety Check feature sprung out of the growth effort in a way the company could never have planned. In 2011, it sent a team to Japan to research the needs of consumers in that country, where people used unique local models of phones that made it a special use-case scenario. “One week later, literally, the whole Fukushima tsunami disaster happened, so we had to evacuate our engineers,” says Olivan. “It was like, some 23-year-old guys lost in Tokyo … so we evacuated them to south of Japan. They were there in Fukuoka just stranded in a hotel.”

At a safe remove from the danger, the employees realized that Facebook would be a useful way for people in similar situations to alert friends and family. “They basically hacked together Safety Check, which was the first version of the product that we now deploy,” Olivan says.

The influence of Facebook’s growth team is felt in the fact that Gleit’s social-good projects have metrics attached to them, rather than simply being fuzzy and aspirational. “At a high level, we want to drive real world actions, and real world actions are things that actually have some sort of impact in the real world,” she says. For the fundraiser feature, for example, the benchmark is the number of dollars that get raised for charity.

Going about its work in such a practical fashion–and sticking with it until the desired results fall into place–is what has made the growth team so instrumental to the Facebook story. “I don’t actually think our killer feature as a team is that we’re smart,” says Schultz. “I think our killer feature is that we’re good at executing.”

But Olivan brings up another killer feature that helps explain the growth team’s success: the fact that vast numbers of people care about what Facebook offers. “No growth team in the world can grow something that has no value,” he says. “Indeed, you see all these viral schemes that just implode on themselves because there’s no retention, no product-market fit.” The fact that Facebook coupled a service with near-universal appeal with such diligent steps to broaden its user base is what got it across the two-billion user line–a lesson, both sobering and inspiring, for any startup that dreams of joining it there someday.

A year after completing a 156-mile, six-day race in the Sahara Desert for charity, Joseph Thompson wondered what had happened to the money he raised from his supporters. Naturally he thought his $122,000–and 52 and a half hours of sweaty effort–would pay for a lot of good. But when he checked with the charity in Ethiopia he had decided on donating to, one that was supposed to be funding surgery for kids, he was told the money had been transferred to a “sister charity.” That organization was said to be building a school for doctors. But, as far as he could tell, no building had begun. Today, Thompson–a bearded and ebullient Irishman–suspects the donation simply disappeared, destination unknown. The experience “drove me insane for a while,” he says, like someone had robbed him in the middle of the Moroccan sand.

It’s this sort of problem–a lack of traceability in aid–that encouraged Thompson to develop a system to transfer and track international development payments. AID:Tech is one of several startups working with blockchain technology, trying to ensure more funds go where they’re supposed to go. “Transparency is really needed in aid and welfare payments because there’s not a functioning system that works globally,” he says.

Achieving Transparency

Through a mixture of banking inefficiency and opacity, managerial incompetence and outright fraud, huge amounts of aid currently never go where donors intend. Former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has estimated that 30% of all development assistance doesn’t reach its rightful destination, primarily because of graft. It’s understandable, says Thompson, that “humans make mistakes” in tracking where resources go. But in many cases the mistakes are more willful–where a lack of transparency allows aid payments to become government-issue Mercedes, or stylish villas high on the hillside outside town.

“Without transparency, we know that a significant volume of funds are lost to mismanagement and misappropriations, like fraud and corruption tangled with corporates and governments,” says Ben Joakim, founder of a second blockchain aid startup, Disberse, also in London. “That means that less money is available for its intended purpose, and the impact is reduced for those who need it.”

Blockchains are distributed databases with no central authority. They were conceived as transaction logs for bitcoin, after Satoshi Nakamoto, sketched a plan for the cryptocurrrency network in 2008. Blockchains have since been adopted for all kinds of uses, particularly in financial services, and more recently in energy, health care, and even the arts. Because of their distributed nature, and because they promote trust among users, blockchains could be particularly useful in international development, where the need for greater data integrity is particularly acute.

On the blockchain, transactions are recorded in what are called blocks, with each successive block referring back to previous blocks, thus creating chains of blocks. It’s this permanent and inviolable record of work that gives certainty to all parties. Each time aid changes hands–say, from a government, to a charity, to an on-the-ground partner, to a local government, to final recipients–it’s recorded permanently as a block across multiple computers. Everyone can be sure that what’s just happened has happened: in this case that aid has been disbursed through a chain of recipients. If anyone tries to alter the chain of blocks, there’s a record on all the other computers.

Creating A Digital Identity

The startups are using blockchains in different ways. AID:Tech works with aid groups like the Irish Red Cross and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, one of Ireland’s most venerable charities. First, its clients go on the platform and create digital identities for beneficiaries. Then they assign assets (e.g. food or money) in the blockchain record and generate plastic vouchers with QR codes, which they distribute to recipients. Once scanned with a phone, these vouchers entitle the person to whatever is in their blockchain account, and the charity can see when the entitlement has been transferred (say, when the user buys something at a designated store). Based on how much users buy at that store, the aid group can settle the account with the merchant. Crucially, no cash is generated in the transaction, reducing opportunities for waste or theft.

“As money goes down through the supply chain, our clients are hoping it gets to the beneficiary, but they can’t measure it, and you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” says Thompson.

Blockchains can also help reduce what Joakim calls “transactional inefficiencies.” Disberse recently finished a pilot with a U.K. charity called Positive Women, which works in Swaziland. The British arm of the charity sent about $19,000 to its unit in southern Africa, converting pounds-sterling into tokens (“digital pounds”) then converting them back into local currency with the help of an in-country foreign exchange partner. In this way, traditional money never crosses the border and the charity avoids banking fees. Joakim says it saved about 2.5%, or enough money to send three Swazi girls to school for a year. As with AID:Tech, the money can then be distributed through vouchers or mobile payments.

“As a small charity in the U.K., how do you monitor where the funds go? This gives them tangible evidence with which they can go back to their donors and say exactly where the money is going and incentivizing to give more in the future,” Joakim says.

Disberse’s model is a little like TransferWise, which cuts the cost of cross-border payments by matching up people sending money in different directions (so, again, actual currency never crosses a border). Joakim wants to work with multinational corporations that send money through their subsidiaries every day and that could stand up the opposite side of aid transfers.

Making It Easier To Give Cash

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has also been experimenting with blockchain. It ran a small pilot in Pakistan earlier this year and it’s now disbursing funds through a blockchain-based system it set up for a large refugee camp in Jordan (they’re not naming the camp to protect the identity of the recipients).

Over the last five years, WFP has been switching from distributing primarily food to distributing about 25% of its aid in the form of cash-based transfers (CBT). This offers more autonomy for recipients, who are now free to spend the money as they like. But according to Houman Haddad, a regional CBT adviser in the Middle East & North Africa, it can create high bank transfer fees and put the privacy of recipients at risk. Normally, the WFP would send lists of recipients to its banking partner, who in turn would send the individual payments.

The WFP’s new blockchain system, currently used by a few thousand people, turns the model around. WFP registers anonymous recipients on its blockchain, enters their entitlements, and then links the record to an iris scan network already in place in the camp. Recipients can therefore go to a supermarket within the camp, collect up items to buy, then pay for them simply by looking into a register-side iris scanner. Later, WFP can then pay the supermarket for its entire bill, settling everything with one transfer.

“By doing the blockchain version, we don’t have any costs with the banks other than the transfer fee to the supermarket. We’re not sharing beneficiary data, and we’re not advancing money to anyone,” Haddad says in an interview. “The cost is normally high for us. Every 0.1% we can save is significant.” The WFP has a annual budget of about $6 billion and feeds 80 million people a year.

In time, the blockchain has potential to disintermediate several parts of the aid chain, including banks, government agencies, and charities. Donors in one country could direct payments to recipients in another, knowing the money has been received and seeing how it is spent. Or using “smart contracts”–self-executing contractual protocols–they could place conditions on tokens only being redeemed for certain purposes (like paying school fees or doctor’s bills). Moreover, the blockchain also creates opportunities for aid recipients to create and control “self sovereign” identities, instead of being dependent on a government or agency to issue them. Establishing identity is crucial for building wealth, for example by getting a bank account and applying for a loan.

“We think in three or five years time when there satellite internet everywhere and everyone has a smartphone, we can do so much more,” Haddad says. “Ideally, all information would lie with the beneficiaries themselves. There won’t be a central master system, and the users will have full control over their lives.”

If you rent a bike from the Bay Area’s newly relaunched bike share program, you’ll notice a new logo: Ford. Now known as Ford GoBike, the system–which is expanding ten-fold from 700 to 7,000 bicycles–is part of the car company’s effort to remake itself as a mobility company (technically, they’re calling themselves an “auto and mobility company).

“Ford has offered a mobility solution for over 100 years, and it’s looked like an automobile,” says Jessica Robinson, director of Ford City Solutions, a team that focuses on new urban transportation options. “But we know that trend can’t continue.”

In 2015, the company launched a series of 25 “mobility experiments,” only some of which involved cars. In India, Ford worked with a partner to test car sharing among small groups of coworkers or apartment dwellers. In London and New York, it tested an on-demand shuttle. In Palo Alto, it tested sensor kits that attach to bicycles to track speed and other data that could potentially help in transportation planning.

“If you talk to mayors out there, like we do, what they’ll tell you is that the systems we have in place today in cities are broken,” she says. “They’re faced with operating bus systems in ways that they’ve done for 50 years. They plan the roads using data that’s taken every five or 10 years. There’s this real craving not just for new modes and new solutions, but also the coordination and the insight that comes from looking at how those work together.”

Ford GoBike will be owned and operated by Motivate, the bike share company that previously ran Bay Area Bike Share (Motivate also runs CitiBike in New York City, Capital Bikeshare in DC, Divvy in Chicago, Biketown in Portland, Oregon, and four other systems). Motivate has contracts both with the regional transportation planning authority and the five Bay Area cities where the system will operate. Ford’s investment will help the system expand. For Ford, the bikes serve as advertising, but involvement with the program is primarily a way for it to better understand urban transportation and use that knowledge to inform its work helping other cities plan for the future. The City Solutions team has been conducting user behavior studies for a variety of mobility solutions, and will likely do the same thing with GoBike. The company will also work with Motivate to help it better understand and improve the user experience.

The relaunched system will help better link transit and bike share. The Clipper card, a smart card that Bay Area commuters use on public transit, can now also unlock bikes for members. A new app helps riders find bikes and get a notification when they’ve successfully locked their bike at the end of a ride. (A separate app, which Ford already offers to its drivers, will now also feature the bikes, in an attempt to make it easier for people to switch from cars to bikes; in the future, that app may also include Chariot and other mobility options).

Ford plans to study how the system works in different areas. “It really gives us a special chance to dig in deep in the city and focus on what that place’s specific mobility needs are, because certainly there are universal things, like congestion and air quality, but it’s different in every city,” Robinson says.

“We’re really trying to understand how people want to get around in cities not just today, but in the future.”

A little more than a year ago, near closing time in the early morning hours of Sunday, June 12, 2016, a 29-year-old gunman named Omar Mateen opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub, a gay bar in Orlando. In total, 49 people were shot to death and over 60 wounded in what’s since become known as the nation’s deadliest mass shooting and hate crime. Before being shot to death after a standoff with police, Mateen claimed affiliation with the terrorist group ISIS.

That event was tragic, insane, and devastating to the victims, their families, and Orlando’s LGBTQ community. The world’s subsequent actions, however, were largely swift and generous: Within hours “Victims of Pulse Shooting,” a GoFundMe campaign to support victims sped past its initial fundraising goals. (It would go on to break records for the speed and total contributed through the site.) One day later, Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer set up the OneOrlando Fund, a city-sponsored fund that drew millions from companies like Disney, NBC, Darden, Wells Fargo, and Jet Blue, among others.

Those two pools of money represented the main deposits for what eventually became a $31.7 million pot. Which, as Fast Company reported, left some indelicate questions: How exactly does victim compensation get allocated?

Turns out, having two groups controlling money can be divisive. Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, had started the GoFundMe campaign and partnered with the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC), which manages the National Compassion Fund, a program trying to formalize how money in such situations is collected and redistributed. Both groups stated that everything should go directly to victims, who could figure out for themselves what their needs might be.

First, some groups may misspend it, limiting their impact. Second, not everyone has the same post-trauma wants or needs. Within days, the city backtracked. “We had the best of intentions early on, but as we gathered more information and learned what our options were, we agreed . . . that we wanted to do this directly for victims,” says City of Orlando CFO Chris McCullion.

Instead, they called in Kenneth Feinberg. Over the last two decades, Feinberg has earned a sad but necessary reputation as the country’s most trustworthy mass casualty or terror-related support fund administrator, working the aftermaths of 9/11, BP’s Deep Water Horizon explosion, and the Boston Marathon bombing. “A lot of people think some of this money should go for community purposes, but we’re always of the view that it’s the individuals who were harmed and injured that should get the benefit of the nation’s generosity,” says Camille Biros, the business manager at Feinberg’s law firm, Feinberg Rozen.

Feinberg is also on NCVC’s advisory board, so both camps agreed that all donations should be pooled, centralizing the logic, mechanics, and ability to make lump sum deliveries. Ultimately, Equality Florida’s GoFundMe had over 1,200 contributors, reaching $9.5 million (about one-third of all money collected). OneOrlando generated much of the rest, while NCVC’s separately operated Compassion Fund added another $1.4 million, and the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida added $500,000.

But because of their experiences with previous tragedies, Feinberg and NCVC had already established the admittedly cold basic math for extremely devastating scenarios. “It’s rough justice, but speed and efficiency are key,” Feinberg tells Fast Company.

Simply put, each person’s life has equal value, regardless of age, class, social status, or earning potential. From there, allocations are made on a sliding scale based on how that life was altered, with the stipulation that the dead always receive both the largest individual sums and majority share of any total available. For the wounded, hospital stay becomes a proxy for severity of injury, and payouts are graded accordingly.

The catch is that all of this depends on what’s available and how far it must be shared. Boston’s One Fund, for instance, collected $61 million after the bombing in 2013, nearly twice what was raised in Orlando. There was also less death and carnage—five people died, while two more became double amputees—so each could be allocated $2.2 million. Two years later, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, five armed service members died in another shooting spree that only brought in about a half million. Each grieving family received less than $70,000.

In previous situations, it hasn’t been uncommon for bystanders who are traumatized but have no physical injuries to receive no compensation. That happened after the Aurora mass shooting in 2012, for instance, despite the fact that everyone in the theater was certainly emotionally scarred.

In Orlando, especially after a series of town halls, financial adjudicators felt differently: In addition to being a hate crime, Mateen had taken hostages inside the club for three hours, many of whom watched others bleed out in front of them. “I can tell you from having spoken with dozens and dozens of [victims] that no one who was in that building got out okay,” says Jeff Dion, the deputy executive director of NCVC.

In the end, 305 people submitted legitimate claims of bodily or psychological harm.  When OneOrlando began distributions in late September, 59% of all money went to the 49 who had died; that’s about $350,000 per person. Thirty-six others received between $60,000 and $300,000, depending on length of hospitalization. Among outpatients, 29 people received $35,000, while another 186 who were present but uninjured were paid $25,000 each. The FBI’s on-scene investigative unit verified witness claims.

That it took roughly three months to actually start cutting checks is about a standard time frame. The same thing happened in Boston, although early payments worked more like stopgaps because so much more would be donated over time. In Orlando, the bulk of what was collected went out at once, in part because donations came in so quickly over the internet.

In April, OneOrlando split another $2.1 million among everyone at the same ratio, and then suggested donors redirect toward two long-term recovery funds that also emerged shortly after the shooting. Both were already relatively well endowed, having gathered unsolicited funding from various corporations, foundations, and individual givers who knew what behind-the-scenes organizations were best equipped to kick-start the push for sustainable services.

The Better Together Fund is a $1.1 million grant maker associated with the Central Florida Foundation, a regional community group that manages and invests funds. Contributors include the corporate charity arms of Universal Orlando, Nationwide Insurance, Delta, and Coca-Cola, along with other regional companies, and even community foundations located in major cities that weren’t affected. The organization formed immediately after the crisis, channeling money to Heart of Florida United Way to help with victims’ basic needs, and has also offered gap funding to mental health providers and trauma experts.

These funds generally spend down within two to three years, says CFF spokesperson Rachel Calderon, but the goal is ultimately “to make a lasting difference that affects root issues.” To do so, Better Together has backed a statewide school safety and acceptance program by Equality Florida and group coalition effort called the OneOrlando Alliance.

The second is Contigo Fund (Spanish for “With You”), a $1.4 million division of Our Fund, a South Florida-based LGBTQ nonprofit that received an outpouring of support from social justice foundations like Arcus, Ford, Open Society, and W.K. Kellogg. Contigo’s goal is to encourage existing and emerging grassroots groups within the LGBTQ and Latinx communities.

In the months after Pulse, Contigo issued two rapid response grants to support a free LGBTQ and Spanish-friendly mental health group and develop a new racial, social, and gender justice organization. Other grants encourage things like wider acceptance visibility and acceptance within farm worker groups and Muslim communities.

To avoid mission creep, these agencies meet often with members of the community they’re trying to help, and invite some of them to weigh in on how their funds should be allocated. Contigo program director Marco Antonio Quiroga call this “participatory” grant making. As he puts it, “We want to be driven by the community most impacted.”

Equality Florida, which received none of the money it helped fundraise though the Pulse GoFundMe, hopes to use crowdfunding in a similar way now. To coincide with the anniversary of the shooting, the group started the “Honor Them with Action Fund,” an ongoing campaign that’s already beaten projections, raising $264,000 so far. The money will go toward supporting Equality Florida’s in-school equality and inclusion work, including their “safe and healthy schools” plan to formally measure tolerance within Florida’s 67 school districts and institute policies and procedures to stop bullying, discrimination, or social isolation.

That’s associated with a broader push that’s spawned its own hashtag—#HonorThemWithAction—featuring 49 days of collective actions to combat hatred. It just got a shoutout from Bono. “Our work has always been dedicated to securing full equality for Florida’s LGBTQ community, but specifically after the Pulse massacre our focus turned toward uprooting all forms of hatred and bigotry at their source,” says Hannah Willard, the group’s public policy director.

When viewed collectively, many of these efforts are about boosting pride, and diffusing trouble. That’s not necessarily a hedge against the next random act of violence, but it could be transformational for society at large, which is more the point.

At the same time, NCVC executive director Mai Fernandez encourages cities of all sizes to create their own philanthropic-preparedness plans. “It’s just like having a first responders plan,” she says. “It’s just so much easier if you can flip a switch and say, ‘Yeah, we have a protocol. We know what we’re doing. This is how we’re doing it.'”