You might say that Chrissy Jilek hit the sweet spot between passion and enthusiasm when she landed a job as associate product development scientist at Wrigley North America three years ago. You know: Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, Lifesavers–that Wrigley. What’s more is that by the end of this year, two new kinds of old favorite candies “Sweet Heat” Skittles and Starburst will make their debut thanks directly to the 26-year old’s work.

“I didn’t even think that could be a job,” Jilek admits when recalling the beginning of her journey.

To be fair, when most of us think of making candy, it’s hard not to conjure the colorful world of Willy Wonka and his magical manufacturing facility. But many don’t have an inkling of how a product comes to be, much less how it gets made. Jilek was no different.

“Like every other kid, I loved candy and I loved food,” she says with a laugh, adding, “I also loved science.” An astute family member clued in to her twin interests and suggested that she pursue food science in college. Once at University of Wisconsin Madison, Jilek landed summer internships, first at a dairy plant, and then at Wrigley.

Jilek also built up an extensive industry network by getting involved with Institute of Food Technologists Student Association (IFTSA), American Association of Candy Technologists (AACT) and Professional Manufacturing Confectioners Association (PMCA). “I participated in product development competitions with IFTSA and received a scholarship from AACT,” she points out.

By the time she graduated, Jilek had a job offer from the venerable 126-year old confectioner. That’s due in part to the internship program, which  has students working on actual projects alongside regular employees. “You get assigned a project that you will have a clear deliverable for by the end of your 12 weeks,” she explains. Jilek’s was in research and development.

That means she (and others) donned the hair nets, lab coats, and steel-toed shoes and dove right in to “play with the formulas, play with the products, and create a detailed report that gets utilized by the rest of the company.” Jilek points out that one of the other interns in her cohort was able to contribute to the creation of a new kind of gum.

“From the younger product developers to senior leaders, people were excited to share their professional experience and advice,” Jilek says. “The office was open, collaborative and fun,” she continues, “the community setting encourages connection.”

And that community is a huge one. Wrigley alone employs approximately 15,000 associates globally across 50 countries. Its distribution spans about 765 products in more than 180 countries and operates as a subsidiary of the larger chocolate (and pet care, food, beverage, and other products) company, Mars, Inc. that logged net sales of more than $35 billion. Because the company is privately held–and food science is such a secretive business– there are plenty of subjects Jilek has to skim to retain confidentiality.

What Jilek does share is that after just wrapping up her time in Wrigley’s R&D rotational program, the manager on her confections team approached her about creating a new product. “Sweet Heat (Skittles) had been in the works before I came on,” Jilek explains, as there had been some consumer testing and concept building. But now Wrigley was ready to “knock it out the door and be the leaders in a spicy and sweet confection,” she says.

And no wonder. Even if you’re not in the food industry, you’ve certainly noticed the preponderance of spicy foods populating grocery store shelves and restaurant menus. More than three-quarters (78%) of consumers say they enjoy at least moderately spicy foods, and more than half (55%) typically crave spicy food flavors, according to the most recent Techomic’s food trend report. From Hot Cheetos to Ghost Pepper Burgers, to a growing number of varieties of hot sauce–itself a $1 billion market which has been dubbed the “go-to condiment” for millennials—  it’s not hard to see why Wrigley was motivated to appeal to a younger, heat-seeking consumer, albeit with a twist.

“From flavors like honey sriracha to mango chipotle, confectioners and snack manufacturers both are increasingly turning to sweet to balance out hot, spicy, or tangy flavors,” said Susan Whiteside, vice president of public relations and marketing communications for the National Confectioners Association at a recent industry conference. “We’ve certainly seen some of that in the candy industry before with Red Hots and Atomic Fireball, but this is taking those flavors to the next level and really experimenting with different heat sources as well as different sweet sources.”

Who better than a millennial to lead the charge? So even though it was her first week on the job, Jilek rolled up her sleeves and readied her palate and got ready to “play with spice.” That meant formulated testing and tasting a variety of flavor combinations and degrees of intensity internally before trotting it out to pilot groups of consumers.

“Heat is personal,” Jilek underscores, admitting she herself doesn’t seek out spicy foods. But that isn’t necessarily a problem for two reasons. “In product development it doesn’t matter what you like,” she explains. “I have the luxury of trying but it’s never just for me,” Jilek says. However she did learn how to tolerate the burn pretty quickly during the development process and points out that a candy like Skittles is perfect for sampling and adjusting heat. “You can have just one or a handful,” says Jilek.

The other is that she was working on a team of 10-15 people to launch Sweet Heat. The team was made up of people serving many different functions across R&D, marketing, finance, and more across the company. Additionally, one of her team members, product development scientist Andy Renaud, stepped up to serve as Jilek’s mentor to help guide the process. “Because it was my first time leading the development of a product from start to finish, he supported me–offering advice, sharing experience, and always making himself available to answer questions,” she explains. “He also started his journey [a few years before me] with Wrigley in the R&D rotational program.”

The trials and tests resulted in the final group of flavors that include Sweet Heat Skittles Fiery Watermelon, Blazin’ Mango, Flamin’ Orange, Sizzlin’ Strawberry and Lemon Spark and the Starburst versions in Fiery Watermelon, Strawberry Mango, Flamin’ Orange, and Pipin’ Pineapple. (Her favorite so far is Fiery Watermelon.)

All told, the process took about a year until Jilek saw the first fruits of her labor roll off the factory belt. Sweet Heat Skittles and Starburst made their first appearance at the Sweets & Snacks Expo in late May in Chicago, but won’t actually hit store shelves until winter.

As for Jilek, she’ll be watching to see how well they perform, but she’s already working on other projects. “My journey has come full circle,” she observes, “This summer, I’m serving as a mentor for our summer interns. It feels like just yesterday I was in their shoes–or steel-toe shoes to be exact.”

Your boss should be an inspiring leader, someone who’s sensitive, supportive, and motivational—but she just isn’t. Maybe your boss takes credit for your ideas, micromanages, or gets angry when things go wrong. Or perhaps his massive ego just constantly steamrolls your whole team.

It’s tough luck, but the fact is that every manager has flaws. Your boss may be downright bad at managing—or handling some other big, important part of the role—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should cut and run. After all, most bosses aren’t complete nightmares; it’s usually a mixed bag. In fact, there’s a lot to be said for putting up with a crappy one until you find a new opportunity.

Here’s when (and why) you might want to tough it out—at least for the short term.

Related:Five Steps For Coping With A Horrible Boss

1. When You Can Learn A Lot, Despite Bad Management

The nicest bosses aren’t necessarily the ones who teach you the most. Some bosses—the more difficult ones—will intentionally turn up the pressure in order to get you to think harder, perform better, or change your work habits. You won’t exactly welcome all of that with open arms, but it can train you in the art of taking negative feedback or input you disagree with—a valuable skill in any workplace.

My first boss was relentless in his demands, and he was almost never satisfied. At times he reduced me to tears. There’s no excuse for that, of course, but he pushed me nevertheless to achieve higher goals. In fact, If I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit I learned more from that boss than I did from any other manager over my whole career. Some difficult bosses are hard to work for and don’t treat you as well as they should while you’re their direct report. But later on they prove to be fabulous mentors.

2. When You Could Use A Confidence Boost

This one’s counterintuitive, but hear me out. Difficult bosses don’t applaud your every move. Ineffective managers don’t know how to give feedback of any kind—good, bad or in between. They may never show you much appreciation, and you may dislike them for that. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If there’s nobody who can reliably put your performance into perspective for you, you’ve got to do it yourself. Bad bosses can inadvertently give you an opportunity to develop your own inner self-confidence.

Maybe your boss looks at your draft presentation and says, “This is terrible!” That’s it—no other constructive feedback. It’s annoying, sure, but you can either feel grumpy or sorry for yourself or you can summon the inner confidence to explain why you chose the approach you did. Every time you do this, you’ll grow a thicker skin and a more confident attitude.

Of course, you don’t always want to dig your heels in and totally ignore your boss’s opinion. If you’re more open to your boss’s ideas instead of feeling threatened by them, you can go back to the drawing board and revise your presentation—and that, too, can give you more confidence when it’s time to get up and speak.

Your boss might also build your self-confidence by being stingy with her praise. When she does compliment your work, you will genuinely feel proud—sky-high proud. I’ve had bosses who were so exacting that when I finally got commended it stuck with me far more than the constant praise handed out by less demanding bosses.

Related:My Boss Freaked Out Even Though I Quit Responsibly, But Here’s What That Taught Me

3. When You’re Gunning For Higher-Level Positions

The higher you go in your career, the more you’ll need your people skills to propel you forward. And if you’ve earned a reputation as someone who can endure a tough boss, you might be respected not only by your own boss but also by other senior folks in your industry. Why? Because for good or ill, difficult bosses tend to earn notoriety while effective bosses might fly under the radar.

To many, Steve Jobs was an opinionated, imperious, micromanaging boss. Yet Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, didn’t see him that way. “Steve cared,” Cook told Fast Company‘s Rick Tetzeli in 2015. “He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him. A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance.”

It can be hard to see the good in a boss who frustrates you or just hasn’t grasped the finer points of management. But Follow Cook’s lead and look for those upsides where others might only see the bad. Yes, this can take a serious effort of will—but it also takes empathy, and that’s never a bad thing to work on. If you see these sides of your boss’s personality in a different light, you’re more likely to be recognized for your diplomacy and savvy people skills.

4. When You’re Prepping For Your Next Job Interview

Finally, you’ll be much better positioned to sell yourself in your next job interview if you currently have a job. So don’t quit before you land a good offer if you can avoid it.

What employer would want to hire you if you say, “I quit because I didn’t like my boss”? Even if you don’t admit it flat-out, you’ll have to make up some flimsy excuse like, “my job didn’t offer me any more challenges, so I realized it was time to move on.” No one wants to hire someone who’s washed out somewhere else.

Think of it this way: If you quit, you’re letting your boss call the shots. Even though your superior might not realize it, your move out the door was precipitated by their bad management. Unless you’ve got a genuine HR issue on your hands (and maybe you do, in which case act accordingly!), why give a crappy boss that much power?

Stay strong and stay put—then tell a hiring manager all about how skillfully you’re managing to do that. She’ll be impressed, and before long, you’ll be free.

When Facebook announced yesterday that it had passed 2 billion active users, it was a watershed moment for the world’s largest social network. With a global population of 7.51 billion people, that means 26.6% of all humans are regular Facebook users.

That is a whole lot of users. And when all the energy used to serve those people plus Facebook’s own internal usage is added together, the company accounted for a carbon footprint of 718,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2016.

But break it down to a per-user level, Facebook says, and the annual carbon footprint is just 299 grams of carbon dioxide, less than the 340 grams it takes to make a medium latte, or the 355 grams required to boil a pot of tea. And those numbers have been steady since at least 2011, according to Bill Weihl, Facebook’s director of sustainability.

In other words, while the total carbon footprint of the Facebook user base is substantial, we individual users don’t consume a lot of energy.

“In terms of what people’s daily lives are like,” says Weihl, “we are a very carbon-efficient service.”

That’s true, especially when compared to enterprise companies, says Jonathan Koomey, a lecturer at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences. “Typically, Facebook [is] much more efficient than the traditional enterprise computing data centers,” he says. “Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, they all tend to have solved, or are well on the way to solving, the high inefficiencies that exist in the data center.”

One way those companies have achieved that is through the economies of scale that their large user bases afford them. Another, Koomey says, is to figure out ways to reduce the energy overhead of cooling, energy distribution, and other functions. In fact, he adds, large cloud-based internet services like Facebook and its major competitors can be up to eight times more efficient than their enterprise counterparts–in part due to substantially higher utilization of the computing systems, and the resulting reduction in overhead.

Increasingly green since 2009

Facebook has been working to be energy-efficient since at least 2009, Weihl says, explaining that since then, the company has been designing its own data centers, as well as its own servers. The result, he says, is that the “entire stack”—from the company’s data center buildings, to the cooling systems, to the battery backups, the server racks, and the storage devices—were all designed to be energy- and water-efficient.

That, along with the Open Compute Project, a 200-plus-member organization started by Facebook that collaborates on the design of efficient, sustainable computing infrastructure, is meant to help the internet industry as a whole create as little a carbon footprint as possible. OCP members include Google, Microsoft, Apple, AT&T, Nvidia, and others.

Working together on the development of data center servers has helped drive the entire internet industry, Weihl argues, and has made every company more efficient, and more sustainable. “We can move much faster and further,” he says, “working with others than we can ourselves.”

A big element of Facebook’s efforts has been working toward the use of 100% sustainable energy across its data center network. Each new facility is meant to be entirely green, and that’s been true for the last seven to come online, Weihl says.

All told, the company hit 43% renewable energy usage in 2016, and is aiming for 50% by next year.

But even as Facebook brings more 100% green-energy data centers online, that doesn’t necessarily mean the per-user carbon footprint will go down. That’s because multiple existing facilities are still using non-renewables, even as the data demands of users uploading and downloading huge numbers of high-resolution photos, videos, and, increasingly, 360-degree content rises.

“The energy footprint per user may go up as we add more complexity and as we add more complicated services,” Weihl explains, “but the carbon footprint per user should not, and should [eventually] start to come down.”

It’s good business

While Koomey isn’t familiar with Facebook’s emissions metrics, he notes that Weihl’s “really a top-notch fellow and he knows his stuff. [Facebook has] made serious efforts to reduce their emissions all through their supply chain. Them and other companies.”

Koomey also says there are two main business cases for companies like Facebook to reduce emissions. One, of course, is that it’s cheaper to lock in long-term contracts with renewable energy producers than it is to face the vagaries of the fossil fuel-based power market.

That’s exactly the raison d’être of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, a consortium of more than 100 companies, including Facebook, that is seeking to “knock down [the] obstacles” to cheaper renewable energy, Weihl explains.

The other big reason for going green is for PR purposes, Koomey suggests.

“They’re doing this so they can put the environmental issues behind them,” Koomey says. “If a customer comes to them and says, ‘I’m concerned about all this electricity usage,’ number one, [they can say] it’s not that big, and number two,” a lot of it is renewable.

“They can put the issue behind them and not get bogged down in the carbon problem,” adds Koomey. “It’s a good business risk reduction strategy.”

There are few industries more paradoxical than streaming music. On the one hand, it’s exploding: The boom in paid subscriptions is driving the music industry’s first real growth in over a decade–in fact, streaming now makes up more than half of its revenue. At the same time, streaming music is an incredibly challenging, tight-margined business. For all the industry excitement around streaming, a critical question remains: Is this a viable business?

The year 2017 is shaping up to be when we find out.

Just look at the landscape. This week, Pandora CEO and cofounder Tim Westergren decided to step down after 15 months as the struggling internet radio pioneer’s chief executive. Earlier this year, Tidal lost its third CEO in two years when Jeff Toig left the company. Both music companies had recently taken investments from other firms (Sirius XM and Sprint, respectively) that injected cash, but fell short of the all-out acquisitions most people expected, and that many believe would be necessary to keep these money-losing services from drowning.

Other independent players like SoundCloud and Rhapsody/Napster continue to lose money. as well. Deezer canceled its IPO in 2015, opting to raise more funding and bide its time on going public. Even iHeartMedia, whose streaming business is bolted onto a well-established legacy radio business, is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to slowing revenue growth and mounting debt. Virtually none of the stand-alone streaming music services are profitable, with the apparent exception of China’s Tencent-owned QQ Music, which benefits from its scale and unique negotiating muscle with music companies.

So what’s the problem? At its heart, streaming music—whether monetized via advertising, subscription fees, or something else—is not a great business. Companies like Pandora and Spotify are making billions of dollars in revenue. In 2016, Spotify brought in $2 billion, while Pandora earned $1.39 billion. But profits are elusive–both companies lost more than $300 million apiece last year–primarily because the cost of licensing the music itself is so incredibly high.

In the last quarter of 2016, as an example, Pandora spent $38.3 million on product development—in a year when the company was busy launching a major overhaul to its core product by adding an on-demand subscription tier to keep up with Apple Music and Spotify. It spent $133.5 million on marketing and sales–it’s hard to scale a latecomer product in a competitive market by word of mouth, after all–and another $46 million on administrative costs. But at the same time, it spent a whopping $212 million on music licensing and royalties—for any streaming music company, this line item is always far and away the biggest cost on its balance sheet. And Pandora only made $392.6 million in revenue that quarter. The math doesn’t leave much room for profits.

Related: 7 Ways Streaming Music Will Change In 2017

It’s not all bad news, of course. Spotify and Apple are both growing their subscribers at healthy clips. Spotify, which boasts 140 million listeners overall, has about 50 million paying subscribers. Apple Music has 27 million paying subscribers. Amazon–which has at least made a dent in the music hardware business with its Echo device–is presumably doing okay, but it’s hard to tell, because the company will never, ever (no matter how many times I ask) share subscriber numbers.

The overall growth in music subscriptions means good news for record companies, who are collectively seeing their first double-digit revenue growth in nearly two decades, thanks to streaming. But questions continue to linger about how the streaming revolution will pan out for artists, to whom these growing music royalties don’t always trickle down. And without a shift in the basic economics of licensing and streaming music, or inventive new sources of revenue, the streaming companies themselves are mostly losing money.

Not even Spotify, the market leader, is profitable. It’s certainly hoping to get there as it readies itself for a public listing on the stock market later this year. Once Spotify goes public, we’ll get to learn much more about the inner workings of the music streaming business, thanks to public filings. But for now, suffice it to say: It’s a tough business.

That leaves Apple—a company with an $800 billion market cap that could afford to run its music service at a loss for the next century. And many of its competitors—Amazon Music, YouTube, Google Play, and whatever music-related product Facebook is clearly cooking up—are, likewise, music services run inside tech giants that make their profits selling phones, consumer eyeballs and, in the case of Amazon, literally everything else. If music services from these technology goliaths ever do turn a profit, we may never know; such companies are free to lump their streaming businesses in with other revenue sources in their quarterly financial reports.

But again, any of these giants could get away with never turning a profit on music. Whatever this means for listeners—do you really want to rent all your music from a company that has a thousand other departments and priorities?—it certainly doesn’t bode well for the independent music streamers out there. If the competition is able to sling money around with little regard for profitability and outspend your cash-strapped startup, why bother innovating and coming up with the next smart business built around music?

But just because people care about music doesn’t make it a good business. That’s a lesson that almost everyone in the space is learning right now, to varying degrees. One or two of them may be gone—or under new ownership–by this time next year. We might have some kind of Facebook-branded music service. Spotify will likely be publicly traded. Either way, the landscape will look different. By then, we’ll be a lot closer to answering that big question: Is streaming music a viable business, or are these people slightly out of their minds?

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Sometime around 2011 or 2012, it suddenly became very easy to predict what people would be doing in public places: Most would be looking down at their phones.

For years, mobile phones weren’t much to look at. The screens were small, and users needed to press the same key several times to type a single letter in a text. Then, 10 years ago—on June 29, 2007—Apple released the first iPhone. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” former Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during the iPhone’s introductory news conference.

Within six years, the majority of Americans owned a smartphone—embracing the new technology perhaps faster than any other previous technology had been adopted.

Today, smartphones seem indispensable. They connect us to the internet, give us directions, allow us to quickly fire off texts and—as I discovered one day in spring 2009—can even help you find the last hotel room in Phoenix when your plane is grounded by a dust storm.

Yet research has shown that this convenience may be coming at a cost. We seem to be addicted to our phones; as a psychology researcher, I have read study after study concluding that our mental health and relationships may be suffering. Meanwhile, the first generation of kids to grow up with smartphones is now reaching adulthood, and we’re only beginning to see the adverse effects.

Sucked In

In the beginning, sociologist Sherry Turkle explained, smartphone users would huddle together, sharing what was on their phones.

“As time has gone on, there’s been less of that and more of what I call the alone together phenomenon. It has turned out to be an isolating technology,” she said in the 2015 documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. “It’s a dream machine and you become fascinated by the world you can find on these screens.”

This is the new normal: Instead of calling someone, you text them. Instead of getting together for dinner with friends to tell them about your recent vacation, you post the pictures to Facebook. It’s convenient, but it cuts out some of the face-to-face interactions that, as social animals, we crave.

More and more studies suggest that electronic communication—unlike the face-to-face interaction it may replace—has negative consequences for mental health. One study asked college students to report on their mood five times a day. The more they had used Facebook, the less happy they were. However, feeling unhappy didn’t lead to more Facebook use, which suggests that Facebook was causing unhappiness, not vice versa.

Another study examined the impact of smartphones on relationships. People whose partners were more frequently distracted by their phones were less satisfied with their relationships, and—perhaps as a result—were more likely to feel depressed.

Nevertheless, we can’t stop staring at our phones. In his book Irresistible, marketing professor Adam Alter makes a convincing case that social media and electronic communication are addictive, involving the same brain pathways as drug addiction. In one study, frequent smartphone users asked to put their phones face down on the table grew increasingly anxious the more time passed. They couldn’t stand not looking at their phones for just a few minutes.

iGen: The smartphone generation

The rapid market saturation of smartphones produced a noticeable generational break between those born in the 1980s and early 1990s (called millennials) and those born in 1995 and later (called iGen or gen Z). iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones.

Although iGen displays many positive characteristics such as lower alcohol use and more limited teen sexuality, the trends in their mental health are more concerning. In the American Freshman Survey, the percentage of entering college students who said they “felt depressed” in the last year doubled between 2009 and 2016. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a sharp increase in the teen suicide rate over the same time period when smartphones became common. The pattern is certainly suspicious, but at the moment it’s difficult to tell whether these trends are caused by smartphones or something else. (It’s a question I’m trying to answer with my current research.)

Many also wonder if staring at screens will negatively impact adolescents’ budding social skills. At least one study suggests it will. Sixth graders who attended a screen-free camp for just five days improved their skills at reading emotions on others’ faces significantly more than those who spent those five days with their normal high level of screen use. Like anything else, social skills get better with practice. If iGen gets less practice, their social skills may suffer.

Smartphones are a tool, and like most tools, they can be used in positive ways or negative ones. In moderation, smartphones are a convenient—even crucial—technology. Yet a different picture has also emerged over the past decade: Interacting with people face-to-face usually makes us happy. Electronic communication often doesn’t.

Jean Twenge is professor of psychology at San Diego State University. A version of this story first appeared at The Conversation. 

Fast Company welcomes your manuscripts of 750-900 words (see some tips here from our Leadership section), as well as your letters, tips, materials, questions, or thoughts about the world—email us at ideas at fastcompany dot com.

A full 67% of American women are size 14 or larger, yet they only represent 18% of all apparel purchases. It’s not because plus-size women aren’t interested in buying clothes, but rather because there’s a shortage of good options. The majority of plus-size women—81% according to one survey—say they would spend more money on clothing if they had more choices of clothes that fit them. It’s slim pickings out there.

Take it from Alexandra Waldman, who cofounded the plus-size clothing brand Universal Standard nearly two years ago out of sheer desperation. “I’m a size 20,” she explains. “Shopping is really tough: You’re constantly in the position of choosing the best of the worst. You wear what is available, creating a hodgepodge look, without the ability to express your own style.”

How to rock the Archer Top | @francetajohnson | get yours via link in bio

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Universal Standard–which Waldman cofounded with former investment banker Polina Veksler–creates sleek, minimalistic clothing for women sizes 10 to 24. The looks are inspired by sophisticated urban brands like Theory, Helmut Lang, and Rag & Bone, and are made from high-quality materials like Peruvian jerseys and alpacas, French satin and terry, and denims and cashmeres. “I’ve spent my life buying plus-size clothes that, if you walk a little too fast, you could light yourself on fire because they are made of such poor-quality synthetic materials,” says Waldman.

Her own experiences as a consumer allow her to preempt the needs of the plus-size shopper. For instance, many women who find themselves at a size 16 or 24 one day don’t believe they will stay at this weight for very long. They’re worried about investing in expensive clothing because they might be planning to lose the weight. Or conversely, since they don’t know why they gained the weight in the first place, they’re afraid they might keep getting heavier.

To address this concern, the brand has launched a program called Universal Fit Liberty, which allows women to exchange pieces from the brand’s core collection for a different size at no additional cost at any point during the first year of purchase. Universal Standard goes on to donate clothes that are returned to local charities. “Women were disassociating from themselves because they didn’t want to accept what they were seeing in the mirror,” Waldman says. “So they bought cheap clothes that they felt would be temporary, or they bought clothes that were too small. We wanted to find a solution that would put an end to this vicious cycle.”

The startup just received a $1.5 million seed investment led by Red Sea Ventures, an early-stage VC firm that has helped launch successful fashion brands like Outdoor Voices, Allbirds, and Tracksmith. Scott Birnbaum, the founder of Red Sea Ventures, is betting that Universal Standard will be able to offer women a high-end approach to plus-size clothing that simply doesn’t exist on the market right now. “The prevailing belief in the fashion industry is that plus-size women will only spend money on discount clothing,” he says. “The implication here is that plus-size women either don’t have money or they don’t want to spend their money on clothing. I just don’t think this is true.”

Show off • THE ELBE SHIRT

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Until recently, the 700-store fast-fashion retailer Lane Bryant dominated the plus-size market, but it could barely scratch the surface of consumer demand. (It only has three stores on the entire island of Manhattan, for instance.) A smattering of mainstream brands like Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, and Eileen Fisher put out small collections of plus-size outfits. But the choices generally aren’t great.

The good news for American women is that the tide is turning. The fashion industry seems to be recognizing that plus-size women are the norm, not the exception. This year, a record-breaking 27 plus-size models walked in New York Fashion Week, compared to only 12 last season, and four the season before that. Designers have been creating looks for larger women. Prabal Gurung just designed a collection with Lane Bryant, Victoria Beckham’s upcoming Target collaboration goes up to 24, and Melissa McCarthy recently launched her own fashion line that comes in a wide range of sizes.

Birnbaum is betting that plus-size women are looking for high-quality clothing that fits them, even if it comes at a higher price point. Universal Standard dresses cost between $120 and $150, while jeans go for $90, on par with other premium brands. Since launching in September 2015, the brand has tripled sales every quarter.

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He was also impressed by the brand’s designs, which received a seal of approval from Tom and Ruth Chapman, founders of the influential luxury e-commerce brand Matches Fashion. Universal Standard has a modern, minimalistic take on fashion and favors a neutral palette of blacks, whites, grays, and tans. “Many plus-size brands create clothes that look like you are perpetually going to a baby shower in Long Island,” Waldman says, describing the flowery, pastel-hued dresses that many of her competitors churn out. “I’ve never understood why they always go for those colors.”

For all brands specializing in plus-size garments, fit is crucial to success. According to research conducted by Modcloth, 77% of plus-size women can’t find clothing that fits well and 73% say sizing is inconsistent across brands. Part of the problem is that most fashion brands generally use one fit model–typically in a size six–to create each piece of clothing, then proportionally scale up or down. But this creates serious problems when you’re scaling all the way up to size 24. “That’s not how bodies grow and expand,” Birnbaum says. “If you scale up from a size 6 to a size 24, the arm length will be enormous.”

With this new infusion of seed funding, Universal Standard will be working to pump out more clothes to meet the demand from their growing customer base. It is also about to partner with Nordstrom to bring their collection to a wider audience. Throughout this expansion, Waldman wants the brand to continue delivering on the high-quality and elegant design that customers are looking for. “Finding something that fits shouldn’t be a special experience,” Waldman says. “In order to start to equalize the playing field, we’ve got to stop patting ourselves on the back every time you find a frock that you can wear.”

It’s summer internship season, but, beyond gathering a few project credentials, work examples, or industry-related experience, interns should be working on learning other essential skills that will help them in their professional lives.

“People hire for competence and fire for character,” says Todd Davis, chief people officer, FranklinCovey, and author of the upcoming Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work. In other words, job skills are great, but they can also be taught. What really makes a difference to companies is that you’re able to navigate the office culture, be coachable, and understand how to get things done, he says. So, when you’re immersed in your internship, here are six skills you should be adding to your repertoire in addition to job-related skills.

Skill #1: How To Identify (And Learn From) Influencers

Davis says one of the first things interns should do is to observe how others around them interact. Look for the “go-to” people. Who are the folks others are always asking for advice or opinions? Who do they want on their committees? “Often, there are the official, titled leaders, then there are the real influencers. Those who tend to have the most credibility,” he says.

These people wield real power in an organization and can often help you with trustworthy insights and wise counsel. If you observe and listen closely, you’ll soon hear their names again and again. Learning how to spot influencers is a skill that will serve you well in any position you hold throughout your career, he says.

Skill #2: What Makes A Useful Meeting

Some meetings are brief periods of important breakthroughs and productivity—and some are utter wastes of time. As you participate in meetings during your internship, take note of the characteristics of each type of meeting, says Bill Driscoll, district president for Accountemps. What do effective meeting leaders do? They are typically organized, focused, and hold participants to a time period and agenda.

In addition, pay attention the content of the meetings, which reveals the nitty-gritty of what these jobs entail every day, he says. “My advice to interns is always to survey what, in fact, is going on and what does working at that company really look like?” he says. “Often, interns enter the workforce or a company with preconceived notions: This is what I want to do. This is the industry I absolutely want to do it in. As we all know, once you get behind closed doors, and you’re actually working someplace, it can be a very different experience.”

Skill #3: How To Talk To People In Different Roles

As an intern, you’re likely going to be working closely with a particular person or team. However, you’ll likely also have opportunities to reach out to people in senior roles or in various departments. Get comfortable doing so, says Lauren Berger, the “Intern Queen,” and author of Welcome to the Real World: Finding Your Place, Perfecting Your Work, and Turning Your Job into Your Dream Career. Meet as many people as you can throughout the organization.

In addition you’ll need to be able to ask for clearer direction when you need it, which can be tough for interns who are trying to prove themselves and make a good impression, she says. But it’s better to ask what might feel like “dumb questions” than it is to waste a day working with incorrect or unclear instructions, she says. When her employees give direction to interns, they ask the intern to repeat it so that everyone is clear that the direction was communicated well and received.

Skill #4: How To Ask For Feedback You Can Use

Davis says that working in an office gives you an opportunity to get input on your work skills and style. But if you put someone on the spot immediately after a meeting, you’re likely going to get pat responses like, “Oh, you did great,” he says. Instead, observe how your supervisor gives feedback. Is it best to sit down with them and ask how you can get better? Does the person give direction while you’re working on the task? Different feedback styles require different kinds of interaction. And you’ll also get good experience receiving and applying feedback, too, he says.

Skill #5: How To Figure Out What Work To Prioritize

Inevitably, you will have days where two or three people are asking you for something at the same time, Berger says. You want to be effective and make a great impression, but you’ve also got to be able to prioritize your work to get everything done well. Work on asking your supervisor to help you prioritize your work when you’re overwhelmed. Sometimes, deadlines are flexible or you were over-assigned because someone didn’t realize how much you had on your plate, she says.

Skill #6: What It’s Like To Be An Employee

Overall, your internship can teach you a great deal about being an employee, Driscoll says. Work on your network and build relationships with other people in the office, including your supervisor and coworkers. Work on being a team player and immersing yourself in the role as much as possible. Learn how to work well with others and make connections and you’ve taken away some very valuable skills. Before you leave the internship, find out how your contacts would like to keep in touch, such as connecting on LinkedIn or through an occasional email, etc.

“Obviously, the goal of many of these internships is number one, to determine do you like the industry and to grow your skill set, but number two, it’s to get a job subsequently,” he says.

Service Year Alliance (SYA), the national organization that aims to give young Americans a shot at advancing their careers by doing a year of paid, full-time service, is offering a new way for 100 young people working in participating organizations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco to take their professional development to the next level.

Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Starbucks are partnering with SYA for “Service Year 100” to give participants special incentives to boost their career trajectories and assist with their service challenges. That means access to hiring teams, speakers’ series, and local events at each of the companies, as well as extra perks. 

Each of the 100 program participants will be issued special challenges throughout their year of service that will help build their leadership skills, promote relationship building, and teach collaboration.

LinkedIn is giving participants premium accounts and challenging them to use it to advance their careers by learning new skills and finding ways to leverage their networks. Starbucks is giving participants gift cards with the idea that they can use the free coffee as “conversation starters” to help them create new relationships.

The 100 participants will be chosen from a larger pool of service workers who are already enrolled in a service year in one of the five Service Year 100 cities. The SYA takes on over 65,000 young workers annually either before, during, or after college. They apply for and get job opportunities at nonprofit organizations or other agencies like CityYear, Habitat for Humanity, Playworks, and Food Corps, among others, that are working to impact a community through revitalization efforts, education and development for children at risk, and other initiatives.

There is no guarantee that they will be hired by any of the three partner companies, but having access to hiring teams will give them an advantage over someone applying without having completed the service year.

But the benefits are meant to outweigh a single job offer. As Joe Gebbia, cofounder and chief product officer of Airbnb puts it: “Service Year 100 allows us to help support their journey as they build trust with strangers and learn to belong anywhere.”

WHAT: A Pedigree commercial that tells the Revolutionary War story about that time when George Washington returned a lost British dog to its rightful owner.

WHO: Pedigree, BBDO New York

WHY WE CARE: Plenty in America has changed over the last 240 years. Representative government from coast to coast, the automobile and interstate highway system, indoor plumbing, the Internet, the Kardashians. But one thing that hasn’t is our love of dogs and a good story. And those two things put together are downright irresistible.

Here Pedigree continues its “Feed the Good” campaign, and celebrates July 4th, with a dramatic retelling of the obscurely sweet story of that time General George Washington politely returned British General Howe’s dog after the 1777 Battle of Germantown. Seriously, there’s a whole book about it.

While the canine soft spot may come as a surprise to some in the midst of battle, Washington was a renowned dog lover. The man had dogs of every variety, with names like Sweetlips, Madame Moose, and Vulcan. Of course, he returned the pooch to General Howe.

We get it, finding a mentor can be difficult and time-consuming. But when you do find one (or two), they can save you from making costly mistakes that can set you back in your career. Simply put, having a mentor will improve the quality of your decisions and provide opportunities that won’t be available to you otherwise.

There’s this idea that that mentors are older people with established careers and well-honed skill sets who provide guidance to younger mentees, but this isn’t always the case. The key to success is selecting the mentor who best suits your needs at any given stage of your career: entry level, middle management level, or executive level. If you’re an entrepreneur or creative person, you can think of these stages as early career, mid-career, and advanced career.

Things To Consider

Regardless of where you are in your career, it’s important to bear in mind that there are two aspects of working with someone else–essence and form. Essence is all about sharing heart-to-heart and finding common values. Form is about structure–how you will work together.

Once you’ve identified a potential mentor, meet with them first to find out if that person is a good match in terms of essence. Do your values align? Do your personalities click? Does the conversation flow?

Related:Mentorship And The Art Of Cold Email 

If you and your potential mentor have passed the essence test, you can move on to the form aspect of working together–what you intend to accomplish, how you intend to achieve your mission, when you’ll communicate, and where you’ll work together.

Early Or Entry Level

If you have recently started a job, you can expect to receive on-the-job training. If you’re lucky, your new employer might have a new hire mentoring program. Take this opportunity if you have it, because that person will not only understand the basics of the job, but they’ll be in a good place to tell you how to chart your career path.

Remember that entry level doesn’t necessarily mean youth. In today’s workplace, more and more baby boomers are beginning second careers. This trend was dramatized in the 2015 film, “The Intern,” where a 70-year-old widower (Robert De Niro), hoping to update his skills, accepts a job as an intern for an online retailer and becomes the mentee of its 30-something founder and CEO, Jules (Anne Hathaway). The film not only highlights a classic case of reverse mentoring, but also shows how mutually beneficial entry-level mentoring can be.

Mid-Career Or Management Level

Once you’ve settled in and learned the basics of your job, the emphasis will shift from technical skills to people and relationship skills. Your best mentor at this middle stage may be a peer–someone at your same skill and career level–because these people will be familiar with the kinds of challenges you face each day. To avoid conflicts of interest, it may be wise to seek a mentor in the same field but work for a different organization.

This strategy is advocated by Eileen Carey, the CEO of Glassbreakers, a Tinder-like online platform that matches female product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and other tech professionals with peer mentors.

Related:The Case For Co-Mentoring

“We’ve found that peer mentorship was more helpful to women that we spoke with than mentorship from women 5 to 10 years above you. People your age understand your context better and can help you move forward,” says Carey.

Executive Or Master Level

If you’ve reached the C suite or have attained a secure spot at the top of your chosen profession, it’s time to start thinking about becoming a mentor. This is an excellent way to experience the truth of the old adage, “It is better to give than to receive.” The rewards of passing along knowledge and wisdom may not be measured by promotions and increased earnings, but you’ll be enriched by a deep sense of purpose and joy.

Again, the executive or master stage is defined more by competence than age. You’ll know you’ve reached this stage when you have valuable wisdom and experience that can benefit others. For example, you may be a 28-year-old tech master, ready to mentor middle-aged but less experienced people in your field. The point is that you’ve become a leader and now it’s your turn to cultivate future leaders.

Being an executive or master mentor means that you are a role model, which means you will be guiding your mentee as much by what you do as by what you say. In fact, the best senior-level mentors employ top-notch listening and questioning skills, to draw out the concerns and aspirations of their mentees. When you do speak, be candid. Let your mentee learn from your failures, so they don’t have to make the same mistakes.

As we point out in our book One Minute Mentoring, behind even the most independent achiever is a person or group of people who helped that person succeed. So whether you’re at the early, middle, or advanced stage of your career, get into a mentoring relationship. It’s a proven path to reaching your goals, increasing your influence, and finding meaning.

Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz are co-authors of One Minute Mentoring (William Morrow). 

The first iPhone wasn’t really unprecedented, but rather an elegant mix of lots of existing technologies. It was the way those things were mixed together inside an compact, elegant design that made the iPhone the culture-changing product it turned out to be.

The iPhone, which went on sale a decade ago this Thursday, was originally promoted as a phone-slash-music player that also happened to be an internet device. But it was the pocket-sized internet device aspect of the iPhone that ended up sending sales through the roof (and wireless networks reeling).

But the tech folks and journalists reacting to the first iPhone back in 2007, of course, had no way of knowing any of that. Most took the device at face value, focusing on what it could and couldn’t do versus other smartphones on the market at the time. Few had the foresight to sense the iPhone’s real implications. That’s why it’s interesting, and in some cases amusing, to read the first takes from 2007. Here are some of my faves.

Tech Porn 2007

Brian Lam from Gizmodoloved the first iPhone despite its faults:

“Look, I’m not saying wait for version 2.0. You don’t need new hardware to love the phone; version 1.1 should do it. Wait until Apple updates the software. That was a hard to write, since I’m thumbing through my own iPhone like a teenager with his first Playboy.”

Still, Lam had some solid points about the limitations of the first device, which were significant.

“The real elephant in the room is the fact that I just spent $600 on my iPhone and it can’t do some crucial functions that even $50 handsets can. I’m talking about MMS. Video recording. Custom ringtones. Mass storage. Fully functioning Bluetooth with stereo audio streaming . . .”

Blame AT&T

Wired‘s Scott Gilbertson was far from impressed:

“On one hand it’s a truly remarkable device — easy to navigate and use — but at the same time it has some serious shortcomings. I’ve made a number of calls and the sound quality has varied immensely — ranging from something like a echo sealed in a bottle ten years ago and reopened in your ear to perfectly crisp sound.”

AT&T (which had an exclusive on the iPhone) was probably at least partially to blame for that.

Goodbye Moto

When the iPhone appeared in 2007, Motorola was the second-largest cellphone maker in the world, behind Nokia. Motorola’s CTO at the time, Padmasree Warrior, wrote a blog post after the announcement of the iPhone in which he demonstrated a thorough understanding of the trees but a near-total misunderstanding of the forest.

“There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry – Motorola, Nokia and Samsung. So, what appears to be the initial pricing at $499 and $599 with a minimum 2 year service agreement seems a stretch.”

Warrior left Motorola after the company’s R&D labs, which she oversaw, failed to come up with a big hit to follow the Razr.

Magic Touch

Apple considered one of the iPhone’s biggest technical achievements to be its ability to smoothly scroll through content at the touch of the user’s finger. When Apple got this working internally, many of those who saw it became convinced that a touchscreen phone with no physical keyboard could actually work.

For many users, it did work. Here’s Daring Fireball’s John Gruber after using the touchscreen for the first time:

“The high resolution screen is gorgeous. Helvetica has never, ever looked so good on screen. Everything is very fast, very responsive. When you drag something — whether it’s the slider button to unlock the phone, a zoomed-in photograph, or a web page — the drag keeps up with your finger. I haven’t found a single element of the iPhone UI that doesn’t feel super-snappy. The whole thing feels very realistic.”

All Thumbs

MacWorld‘s Jason Snell also touched on the touchscreen in his 2007 review:

“Within a few hours with the iPhone, my finger was flying over the keyboard, and I’m sure my fingertip was only getting roughly close to the correct letter most of the time. But the iPhone’s software, with remarkable consistency, knew what I had meant to type. I assume that with some practice, two-thumb typing would be even faster, but with my index finger I managed to type faster than I ever have on a tiny device, physical keyboard or not.”

Local Man Says

Not everybody agreed with Gruber and Snell. Not even everybody at Apple. According to Brian Merchant’s new “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” book on the making of the first iPhone, Apple marketing VP Phil Schiller fought tooth and nail to put a physical keyboard on the iPhone. After all, it launched in the middle of the Blackberry craze, and a big reason people liked that device (AKA “Crackberry”) was its physical keyboard.

After the launch of the iPhone, consumers continued to argue about whether Apple made a mistake by making the device’s keyboard a virtual one. Here’s one contrarian take in the comments under a 2007 Engadget story:

“Im not impressed with the iPhone. As a PDA user and a Windows Mobile user, this thing has nothing on my phone… No thanks Apple. Make a real PDA please.”

(The user might as well have added: “You kids, get offa my lawn!!”)

Techcrunched

Several Techcrunch writers flew off the handle in their first reactions to the iPhone, and one of them, columnist Seth Porges, also seized on the touchscreen as a major shortcoming.

“That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone. Don’t be surprised if a sizable contingent of iPhone buyers express some remorse at ditching their BlackBerry when they spend an extra hour each day pumping out emails on the road.”

To his credit, Porges added at the end of the piece: “Here’s hoping my dire predictions come to naught.” They did.

The Wisdom of Steve Ballmer

You can’t write a piece like this and not include Steve Ballmer. Just wouldn’t be right. Here’s the former Microsoft CEO getting it all wrong on the iPhone back in the day:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidised item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 per cent or 70 per cent or 80 per cent of them, than I would to have 2 per cent or 3 per cent, which is what Apple might get.”

Much later Ballmer thought better of his initial reaction, telling Bloomberg:

“I wish I’d thought about the model of subsidizing phones through the operators,” he said. “You know, people like to point to this quote where I said iPhones will never sell because the price at $600 or $700 was too high. And there was business model innovation by Apple to get it essentially built into the monthly cell phone bill.”

No Hype Like iHype

Here’s David Pogue leading off his January 7, 2007 article “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype“:

“Talk about hype. In the last six months, Apple’s iPhone has been the subject of 11,000 print articles, and it turns up about 69 million hits on Google. Cultists are camping out in front of Apple stores; bloggers call it the ‘Jesus phone.’ All of this before a single consumer has even touched the thing.”

Down at the end of the piece Pogue writes: “But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.”

The Long View

Really good tech journalists look at a new gadget up close, then back way out and talk about what it all means. Walt Mossberg was great at that. And, here, so was Lev Grossman writing for Time.

“Look at the iPods of five years ago. That monochrome interface! That clunky moving touchwheel! They look like something a caveman whittled out of a piece of flint using another piece of flint. Now imagine something that’s going to make the iPhone look like that. You’ll have one in a few years, and it’ll be cheaper, too. If you’re not ready to think different, then think ahead.”

Since these first takes were written, the iPhone has, for many people, become the center of their personal computing universe. It’ll be fun to see whether the iPhone can stay in that spot as the world changes around it during the next 10 years. I personally won’t wager a guess for fear of being quoted in one of these “look-how-clueless-they-were” articles in a decade or so.

The nations of the world are chomping at the bit over the unfolding space economy, from ever-more satellite launches to tourism and mining. And it’s not just the major powers, like the U.S., Russia, and China—smaller countries like Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates also want their piece of the pie in the sky.

Space programs run by private companies in the smaller locales are not only a source of national prestige but a way to attract skilled, multinational employers with potential global-changing futures.

“We’re talking about what will be the foundational business of the future of the earth economy in space—something that can literally scale to astronomical levels,” says Chris Lewicki, CEO of space mining startup Planetary Resources.

The company received a 25 million euro grant and investment package from the Luxembourg government and a state-owned bank last year. A major rival, Deep Space Industries, also has plans to work with the country on harnessing natural resources from space.

“Both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have established subsidiaries in Luxembourg and will start contributing to the promotion of the local space industry by developing several key activities exclusively in Luxembourg,” a spokesperson for the government writes in an email to Fast Company.

The mining investments, linked to the 570,000-resident country’s SpaceResources.lu initiative, follow state support dating back to the 1980s for SES, the largest communication satellite operator in the world, the spokesperson notes.

For space-centric companies, the benefits to doing business in a friendly jurisdiction go beyond subsidies and investment dollars: Luxembourg has announced its intention to be the first EU member to adapt formal legal frameworks around commercially harnessing minerals and other resources in space—the United States set up rules of its own formally legalizing commercial space mining with 2015’s Space Act.

Even the tiny Isle of Man, home to just 85,000, has a space-friendly government. Mann, as it is also known, is a semi-autonomous British crown dependency in the middle of the Irish Sea that long cultivated satellite operators looking to secure international rights to the broadcast spectrum they need to operate over. A company called ManSat has since 1998 shepherded spectrum applications through the International Telecommunications Union, the international organization that handles such matters, under an exclusive license from the island’s telecom regulator.

“It’s the most powerful international organization that (Da Vinci Code author) Dan Brown hasn’t written about yet,” quips ManSat CEO Christopher Stott of the ITU.

And while technically satellite companies can apply through dozens of different jurisdictions around the world, working with one that handles many such applications—and fewer other telecom filings compared to large regulators like the U.S. Federal Communications Commission—can help make the process smoother and faster, says Stott.

“The spectrum is the same—it’s how you get to the spectrum,” he says. “Do you go through Grand Central station and push and shove to get on a really crowded train, or do you take the equivalent of a private jet to get somewhere a little bit faster?”

Mann also offers a 0% tax rate on satellite and other businesses, and financial assistance for high tech concerns just setting up shop. It also gives space businesses of all stripes the advantage of the rule of law and stable government. “Our parliament this year is at 1,038 years of uninterrupted parliamentary rule,” Stott says—an attractive feature for companies whose satellites or other spacecraft can easily cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, take years to build, and deliver decades of operation.

“When you’re putting $500 million or more into a satellite project, you want it in a very safe place,” says Stott.

The United Arab Emirates, too, is seeking to build a space sector as part of a push for economic diversification. The country of 9 million “has already financed activities and projects to the tune of some five billion dollars,” writes UAE Space Agency Director General Mohammed Nasser Al Ahbabi in an email to Fast Company. It’s part of a wave of diversification in the oil-rich country that’s also seen Dubai, one of seven emirates that make up the UAE, promoted as an international business and tourism destination. Experiencing rapid growth is the country’s aviation sector, with the rise of the Emirates airline, and aerospace manufacturing operations that Al Ahbabi says produce parts for Airbus and Boeing.

“They see the end of the oil coming,” says P.J. Blount, an adjunct professor of the University of Mississippi’s air and space law program and a staff editor of the Journal of Space Law. “They know they can only ride that wave so long.”

The UAE Space Agency was founded in 2014 and plans to launch an unmanned mission to Mars in 2020, aiming to arrive at the planet in 2021, in time for the 50th anniversary of the country’s founding. The agency also announced plans earlier this year to build a human settlement on Mars by 2117.

“While this seems like a very distant goal, in fact it involves a range of short- and mid-term projects that will develop specific skillsets, expertise and technologies in the UAE, including plans for the first Emirati astronauts,” writes Al Ahbabi. The UAE is also in the midst of putting together its own Space Law to govern the use of space resources, he writes.

Still, while businesses seeking favorable laws may flock to jurisdictions offering the right legal incentives, those with ties to larger countries like the United States will likely still face some regulation at home. That’s because countries face potentially unlimited liability for damage caused by their activities in space under the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty, and nations are naturally afraid of ceding jurisdiction if there’s a chance that responsibility still remains.

Foreign “states are a bit more aggressive in asserting jurisdiction over their own actors and won’t retract that jurisdiction until another state has really picked it up and said, we’re going to be responsible from that launch,” says Blount.

And, in practice, space businesses often need to operate in multiple countries: While they might incorporate and acquire spectrum rights in one country, they may have manufacturing elsewhere. And launch capabilities might be in another country close to the equator, where spacecraft can grab a speed boost from the Earth’s rotation; and communications facilities in a third that’s particularly suited to connecting with the device in orbit.

“Now in this phase of globalization we’re finding it’s not one jurisdiction versus another, it’s how you pair them together—like fine wines,” says Stott.

The good news: Most jobseekers vastly underestimate how much power their resume has in shaping the hiring process. How you’re perceived, how difficult of an interview process you have, and yes, how big of an initial offer you get are hugely dependent on what information you provide to an employer, and how accurately you address their pain points.

The bad news: Most have no idea how to pull the right levers on the resume to make this happen. But you will.

Here are the big warning signs hiring managers pick up on, and what to do instead:

1. Does Not Speak To Job Requirements

The job posting is the question. Your resume needs to be the answer. Here are some quick tips:

• Skip the general “Objective” section in favor of a few bullet points that directly play to the challenges listed on the job posting. For example, if a company is looking for a Marketing Manager with a strong background in live and digital brand experiences, and you’ve spent the past few years working in this domain, call it out right at the start. Don’t make employers hunt for fit with the job–make it obvious from the very first lines.
• Break down the job posting into 5-6 “core skills” that are essential to success, and create accomplishments within your work history that highlight them. For example, let’s say you wish to highlight Consumer Engagement. Here’s an example of an accomplishment:

Consumer Engagement: Achieved a 15% increase in engagement through the development of new subscription-based products with integrated feedback channels, and guiding the development and execution of 5 customized consumer events throughout the Northeast and Southeast USA.

Related:How To Appear Reliable With A Job-Hopper Resume

2. Too Many “Red Flag” Qualifiers

Be very careful about trying to make up for a lack of experience by using qualifiers such as “with knowledge of” or “gained exposure to”. Hiring managers are trained to pick up on these terms, and treat them as potential vulnerabilities. If you have some knowledge of an area or skill (but don’t have substantial work experience with it) you can add them to your “Education” section under an “Advanced Training” sub-heading.

3. Inconsistent Dates

You need to be absolutely ruthless about making sure your timeline is correct, and completely accounted for. Zero excuses here!

Related:Exactly What Recruiters Are Thinking While Reading Your Resume 

Stick to the same date format. If you’re using Month/Year keep it as-is throughout your entire work history. Don’t try to hide gaps by listing dates that are year only-hiring managers are trained to spot this.

Address any gaps by inserting a “Career Note” such as: Career Note: Completed advanced AutoCAD training at XYZ University and took on freelance graphic design projects for upstate NY tech startups (3/15-8/15).

Explain any overlapping dates.

4. Seniority Regression

Why would someone who’s reached the Director/VP level suddenly take on a manager position? This can give hiring managers pause.

If you switched industries (a common reason for seniority-level regression) make this change clear.

Some companies have strange job title naming conventions that don’t jibe with industry standards. In these types of situations ask yourself: can I credibly substitute a more accurate job title? A good rule of thumb: if your former boss would balk at your being called the revised title, don’t do it.

5. Online Presence Doesn’t Support the Resume

A big part of establishing trust these days boils down to having a clear and consistent presence across all platforms, be it the resume, your LinkedIn profile, or anything else an employer would be exposed to.

Related:Recruiters Explain What The Worst LinkedIn Profiles Have In Common

Double-check to make sure who you are comes through effectively online (especially LinkedIn), and pay special attention to possible conflicts with the resume or “off-brand” information.

6. Wrong Tone

The “tone” of a resume refers to the level you need to come in at. A chief financial officer is going to frame the ideas and accomplishments in his resume from a different POV than a finance manager. A great CFO has to function well from a vision and strategy side, often having to find answers in opaque situations. But the parameters of success for a finance manager are different, more “in the trenches” operations and execution-driven. A CFO who comes in at a finance manager level will raise flags, as will a finance manager who solely highlights the vision and strategy side of things. Wrong tone.

Here’s a good test of tone: Ask a colleague, trusted friend, or hiring expert who understands the role you’re after, show them your resume, and ask if they’d consider you to be a strong candidate. What’s off? This will give you some good clues as to whether you’re striking the right tone.

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

Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Agreement continues to galvanize states and cities to take climate action for themselves. Earlier this month, hundreds of governors and mayors signed on to pledges to keep cutting carbon emissions, as if the United States was still part of the international consensus on global warming. And, this week, many mayors made a more specific commitment: to fulfill all their cities’ energy needs from renewable sources.

At a meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors in Miami–which represents 1,481 cities–mayors of both parties agreed to a broad “community-wide target of powering their communities with 100% clean, renewable energy by 2035,” though this doesn’t include specific commitments to hit the goal.  At the same time, 100 cities went a tiny bit further by endorsing a separate “Mayors for 100% Clean Energy” pledge, which says the transition “is good for my community” and strengthens the economy (again without formally committing to action). They all join the 36 cities that have made full, actionable commitments. This last group is already working with utilities and other stakeholders to derive all city-wide power from solar, wind and other non-fossil fuel resources and generally have earlier completion dates than 2035.

“I think that Trump accelerated a wave of leadership that was already happening, but that is now happening with greatly increased speed and intensity,” says Jodie Van Horn, director of the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign, which encourages cities to turn to clean power. “Mayors know they need to fill the void and be at the leading edge of progress on climate and clean energy.”

The Sierra Club estimates that if all 1,481 cities got their power from renewables, it would equate to bigger emissions cuts than the Paris Agreement outlined for the entire U.S. The cities account for about 42% of U.S. power demand, and the potential reductions could amount to all the electricity-related carbon emissions of Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Florida, and Ohio combined.

The vanguard 36 cities include big Democrat-run places like San Jose, California, which has a target date of 2022, and much smaller Republican-run cities like Georgetown, Texas, and Abita Springs, Louisiana (home of the famous brewing company). The 100-city “Mayors For 100% Clean Energy” group comes from across the country, from Pittsburgh to Emeryville, California.

Pueblo, Colorado (population: 108,000) which is part of the 36 city group, wants to reduce prices for its residents who currently pay some of the highest prices in the state. Its investor-owned utility, Black Hills Energy, is accused of passing on the costs of a new gas-fired power plant, cutting off many low-income residents who are behind on their bills, and charging reconnection fees of $400 a time.

“The campaign to move to 100% renewables in Pueblo was not driven by climate change,” Van Horn says. “It was driven by a necessity to deliver cheaper and affordable energy to the people and long-standing crisis that they had experienced because of the practices of their investor-owned utility.”

The level of commitment and actual leverage over electricity sources varies widely. Some cities issue fixed-term franchises to utilities, so when they renew those agreements they can call for more action on renewables. Salt Lake City, part of the 36 city group, did just that with Rocky Mountain Power last September. Other cities have municipal utilities, making the transition more straightforward. Nine states, including California and New York, have community choice aggregation laws where local customers can combine their purchasing power to strike renewables deals with utilities. In others, clean power commitments are more hopeful and symbolic, depending on pressure from officials, residents, and businesses for utilities to shift.

But Van Horn is in no doubt cities are going to make up for a lack of climate policy at the federal level. “The powerful thing that comes out of the conference is that mayors are saying, ‘This is our vision and we’re going to work with our utilities, residents, businesses, and state policymakers to drive a national conversation about renewable energy,'” she says.

A report from PwC predicts that 38% of American jobs will be automated by 2030. Analysis from The Washington Post puts the number of millennials who will be competing with robots for jobs in their lifetime at 50%. While these numbers matter (including to me personally, as a working millennial), it is important to put them in perspective and understand how bots–and artificial intelligence–will work alongside humans in the offices of the future. And how companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Slack and Facebook who are already scripting and powering workplace applications of AI can ethically create new integrations and innovations.

Let me explain.

I built Pegg, an autonomous chatbot that helps people manage their money, with ethics and accountability in mind, because both are important to me in my own work life. In the process, my team at Sage and I saw a clear demand among industry peers for a set of working-level principles that every company building AI should consider. While they could complement the visionary Asilomar Principles backed by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and other innovation giants–which are designed to instill caution into the AI-creation process–they should be crafted specifically for businesses developing AI, and their customers, who will be the end-users of this emerging tech.

Here’s what I believe needs to happen to drive the ethical development of corporate AI over the next few decades, and, in the process, make humans working with the AI more accountable, as well.

1: AI Needs To Reflect The Diversity Of The Users It Serves

In building and deploying bot technology, businesses and builders need to create diverse AI. The technology should be built by diverse teams of people, using diverse data sets and diverse design approaches. Why? Well, the business world is constantly at risk of repeating a pattern of systematic inequality produced–sometimes as an unforeseen byproduct–by previous revolutionary workplace innovations. AI technology should be built to recognize diverse inputs, be able to place feedback into context without deviating toward bias and should not perpetuate gender stereotypes under any circumstances.

2: AI Must Be Held Accountable–And So Must Its Users

We don’t accept unsavory or unethical behavior from people in the workplace, so why should technology be the exception? My team and I believe that holding technology accountable actually boosts its potential. In fact, we think accountability is core to building the workplace of the future.

From our own experience building Pegg, we learned quickly that users build a relationship with enterprise AI and start to trust it after the first few meaningful interactions. Therefore, AI needs to be held accountable for its actions and responsible for its decisions, just like humans. As builders of bots and AI, engineers need to solve for traceability and auditability. And we also need to ensure that AI does not reward undesirable human behavior – like a manager screaming profanity at a staff member or a user making sexist comments.

3: AI should be rewarded for successful work–and workplace behavior

AI and robots must be trained to swiftly make correct decisions in a countless number of workplace situations. Builders should create a rewards-based learning system that motivates robots and AI to achieve high levels of productivity. Under the current “reinforcement learning” system deployed today, a single AI or bot receives positive or negative feedback depending on the outcome generated when it takes a certain action. Productivity and performance will skyrocket if builders can build on this concept to include rewarding how a task is completed and scale all rewards programming to outfit an entire AI workforce. Ultimately, it’s not just about AI achieving the best objective results, but also doing it for the right reasons and in the right way.

4: AI should level the playing field

The inherent scalability of AI provides new opportunities to democratize access to technology. Voice technology and social media-savvy robots provide new accessible solutions that effectively reach consumers in their comfort zones. AI also breaks down barriers to access for people with sight issues, dyslexia, limited mobility and other conditions. AI’s ability to connect with more people also broadens talent pools for tech-minded companies across industries.

Indeed, AI’s greatest value is that it can process, analyze and act on various contextual data sets, including those generated by connected devices and the Internet of Things, to provide a seamless flow of voice-driven information that makes sense to more people.

5: AI will replace, but it must also create

I will be honest here. Automation will lead to job replacement. But it will also lead to the creation of brand new jobs and the evolution of others. The first disciplines to be automated will be customer support, administrative workflows, and rules-based processes. The reason: AI learns faster than humans and is very good at repetitive, mundane tasks. In the long term, deploying AI will be cheaper than employing humans. Consequently, we need to retrain humans for current and future opportunities that will serve to manage, maintain and complement AI. Similar to how job descriptions changed in fields impacted by heavy automation, including shipping, telecom, and automobile manufacturing.

The extent to which robots will push the business world to reinvent how people work is not yet known. However, one thing is certain: the enterprise’s approach to building and deploying the AI technology needs to focus squarely on ethics and accountability. In the process, businesses building AI technology and supporting applications need to fundamentally incorporate ethics and responsibility into its engineering. As workplace AI becomes more human, the technology itself will need to be held as accountable–if not more than–its human colleagues. Why not start now?

Kriti Sharma is the vice president of bots and AI at Sage Group. She was recently named to Forbes‘ ’30 Under 30’ list.

In June 2007, Twitter was 15 months old, and not yet a mainstream phenomenon. It was, however, developing a booming audience among the technorati. So when the first iPhone arrived at Apple Stores–still maybe the most-hyped moment in the history of consumer technology–it’s no shocker that it kind of took over Twitter.

Thanks to Twitter’s advanced search feature, I was able to revisit the iPhone tweets that got posted on that day, and the memories came flooding back. (Of iPhone launch day, not Twitter–I had an account, but it was dormant at the time, and I didn’t really figure out Twitter until 2008.)

Among the chatter, I found a few folks live-tweeting their experiences buying an iPhone, something that would become a lot more common with later models. (I did it myself a year later.) Here’s a sampling of Tim Brunelle’s iPhone-buying tweets:

wonder if the Easy Spirit and Gap are getting any residual biz today.

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

employees are walking the line, not answering the important question: how many in the store?

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

still…why are there 20 odd people standing here watching us stand in line? to shop? all hail consumer culture!

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

huh. there's a big bucket where you can chuck your old phone after you're done shopping.

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

some guy is in line with a 17" macbook and he seems to be tracking iPhone news, data, etc. people are crowding around. shuffling.

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

the Abercrombie & Fitch employees seem genuinely mystified. $600 phone?! we have $600 pants!

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

the Abercrombie & Fitch employees seem genuinely mystified. $600 phone?! we have $600 pants!

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

And here are … well, just some random 6/29/07 iPhone tweets that struck my fancy. Note that they’re all purely text-based–skimming them reminded me that Twitter was a far less rich experience before it began embedding photos, videos, polls, and previews in article links.

Unsubscribe iPhone. Remove iPhone. Cancel iPhone. Go Away iPhone. Don't care iPhone. Hate iPhone.

— Peter Shankman (@petershankman) June 29, 2007

Topping off the charge on my camera battery for unboxing photos of the iPhone.

— (▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿) (@MitchWagner) June 29, 2007

iPhone line and back home within an hour…feel bad for the people who waited all day

— Brad Chmielewski (@beerad) June 29, 2007

Iphone bought! Total time: less than 10min. Got cheered by staff. Heard rock music and smiled the whole time. Total reverse of those buyi

— leland rechis (@leland) June 29, 2007

iPhone's missing features: voice dialing, instant messaging, extra ring tones beyond the 35 included, and video recording.

— VitaminJeff™ (@vitaminjeff) June 29, 2007

iPhone in hand. Way cool. They stamp your hand with a little iPhone thank you stamp

— Paul Camarata (@pcamarata) June 29, 2007

Micro-capitalism has begun in the iPhone line. Barter for pole-position and bribeing the 1-phone only buyers. I love America!

— Frederick V. Johnson (@frederickvan) June 29, 2007

The iPhone is definitely cool, but not worth the price or the carrier.

— David Rathbun (@starvedfool) June 29, 2007

the guy who was first in line here just walked past holding his iPhone bag aloft. people cheered. i didn't.

— Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle) June 29, 2007

Folks will be frustrated by this iPhone authentication process

— Bill Bessette (@BillBessette) June 29, 2007

I totally got the fifth iPhone sold in Cincinnati.

— Chris Ainsworth (@chrisainsworth) June 29, 2007

For everyone still waiting for an iPhone it is worth every single second.It's a beautiful display,videos are awesome, iPod rocks its awesome

— Nick Starr-Street (@NickStarr) June 29, 2007

iPhone: it's AWESOMEAWESOMEAWESOME gonna sell like hotcakes. Typing is *easy*. Videos gorgeous. All demos are true, it works as advertised.

— Suzi ???? (@SuziFoo) June 29, 2007

I'm going to explode. I'm going to explode. If I don't get an iPhone I'm going to explode.

— Robert Andersen (@rsa) June 29, 2007

Ok… so the iphone is cool, but in a few months there will be at least 3 knock-offs that cost 1/3rd the price and WON'T require AT&T

— Twila Marie (@twila_zoned) June 29, 2007

fun watching the iphone war spread across twitter to different people

— C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman) June 29, 2007

While everyone's freaking over the iPhone, I'm cheering that my discounted Nokia 770 has just been shipped. Hooray cheap 1-year-old tech!

— Noah Mittman (@noahmittman) June 29, 2007

I now believe iPhone line waiting is all part of our inner desire to just be part of something big. Like Hands Across America or Twitter.

— MarkYoshimotoNemcoff (@MYN) June 29, 2007

iPhone madness … apparently the Apple stores on the East Coast are full of them. No supply shortage, it seems …

— Chaz (@chaz) June 29, 2007

I am so completely uninterested in the iPhone. I mean, I would like one, but not if it means having to deal with Cingular. A deal-breaker.

— (((RIP America))) (@Flyswatter) June 29, 2007

I can't fathom the iPhone nonsense: locked handset, AT&T, crap internets. The more I hear about it, the more I lurve the BlkBry.

— Aaron K Kraus (@doubleadoublek) June 29, 2007

waiting for twitter to go down when thousands of giddy iPhone owners send out their first tweets simultaneously

— Dave Lowe (@davelowe) June 29, 2007

I feel bad for all you jerks on the West Coast, who'll have to wait in line while I twitter from my IPHONE in an hour.

— John Gruber (@gruber) June 29, 2007

in line for the iPhone at the apple store in downtown SF. about 300 people in line ahead of me. I got here just before 1pm, on sale at 6pm

— Glen Lubbert (@glenlubbert) June 29, 2007

Tonight i'm going to watch Terminator 2 and mentally replace all references to "SkyNet" with "iPHONE."

— James (@SoylentJames) June 29, 2007

Woz is in line for an iPhone? http://tinyurl.com/yqohx6 Guess he can't wait for his free one as an apple employee

— Daniel Morrison (@danielmorrison) June 29, 2007

Would like to thank Bill Gates for using his weather machine to punish the iPhone line waiters in Seattle as my tomatoes need the rain

— Jim Ray (@jimray) June 29, 2007

The lady next to me is knitting an iPhone sock while waiting.

— Steven Frank (@stevenf) June 29, 2007

Totally jealous of the iPhone early-adopters, but just can't justify it at the moment. I'm in for the second generation.

— Kelly Sue DeConnick (@kellysue) June 29, 2007

@drustar an iPhone is an overpriced 8GB mp3 player with limited capabilities and a contemporary web2.0 looking interface. Buy an N95.

— Enrique Gutierrez (@nrek) June 29, 2007

…remember back in '07 and those…what was it, yes "bloggers" and 'vloggers" and "print media" … oh, and other people, got the iPhone?

— Chris Judson (@vergil66) June 29, 2007

my understanding is that v2 of iphone, due out in q4 will be the one to get. kinks will be worked out, just like the original newton.

— Vinnie Vrotny (@vvrotny) June 29, 2007

Pretty sure the people waiting in line for an iPhone are the same people who waited in line for Star Wars. Wait, I waited in line for SW.

— Jen G. (@onenjen) June 29, 2007

Dear iPhone, Never forget that today's crowd of adoring fans can turn to a sea of cold shoulders in the blink of an eye. -Yours, Furby.

— Prescott, probably (@prescottesque) June 29, 2007

I’m grateful for the fancy Twitter search options that let me find these tweets, but they’re not that easy to use, and I sometimes wonder if I’m the only person who cares about them. (When I try to use them on my iPad, they not only don’t work, but I get a spurious error message about a nonexistent @search-advanced account.) In the years, decades, and even centuries to come, tweets will be an invaluable record of what the world thought about significant events as they happened; it would be great if that real-time historical record got easier to find and share.

The iPhone wasn’t the first so-called smartphone when it launched in 2007, but it was arguably the first to capture the popular imagination, and it certainly shaped the evolution of smartphones after that. The iPhone and other smartphones are such a central part of life that it’s easy to forget what the world was like before they showed up. It was a world of Blackberries, pen styluses, and a few poorly functioning touch screens. And Facebook was just a baby.

To refresh our memories of the context and to better understand how the iPhone changed the computing world, we talked to internet historian Brian McCullough. He runs the popular Internet History Podcast and a new book based on the conversations during those podcasts will be coming out on Liverlight/W.W. Norton in Spring 2018.

Fast Company: 50 years from now, how will historians like you describe the effect of the iPhone on the internet?

Brian McCullough: In 2007 we were still thinking, “Why would I want the internet in my pocket when I’m walking around? If I want to get on the internet I’ll sit down in front of my computer.” So 50 years from now, we’ll look back and see the iPhone as the demarcation point between when the web was growing, and the era when the web was ubiquitous and something where everybody, even your grandmother, is using it–not only daily, but on an hourly basis.

And 2007 is around the same time that Facebook was discovered by everybody. I think it’s really the combination of the iPhone/smartphone and the rise of social media that really leads to the internet as we understand it today. I’m looking out on the street in Manhattan right now, and seven out of 10 people walking by are looking down at their screen.

[The smartphone is the most quickly adopted piece of technology in recent history, says Pew Research, with about three-quarters of U.S. adults (77%) owning a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011.]

FC: The iPhone definitely impacted mobile internet usage, but do you think it also increased internet usage in general, including on the desktop?

BM: The iPhone–because it was so dead simple to use–was a device where you didn’t have to dial up and log in; you could just tap it on and start swiping. This led to the internet becoming this thing everybody did on a regular basis.

I’m sure if you look at desktop usage it goes down because more people are using mobile over desktop, but I bet if you looked at the overall usage of the internet, it goes up, and the inflection point is the smartphone, the iPhone.

FC: In terms of personal computing, describe the context in which the iPhone showed up.

BM: I call it the Golden Age of the gadget because you had things like the iPod selling hundreds of millions of units. People forget that things like the Palm Pilot were huge in the late ’90s. But “huge” then meant maybe 3 million units [sold in a year], which were mostly used by business people or power users who used things like the Blackberry. So there was this groundswell of these devices being able to do more and more and more, like adding cameras. The iPhone put that all together: GPS, the touch screen, and getting rid of the keyboard.

And a big thing was that it was the real internet. Since the late ’90s, if you had a phone that was internet capable, your browser would browse to the WAP version of a website, which took out most of the graphics and left just the text and the links and stuff like that.

At the time the iPhone was announced in 2007, the thing that blew everybody away was that, “Holy shit this is the real web.” During the keynote, Steve Jobs [used the iPhone to] browse the New York Times webpage, and it was the actual New York Times home page. In 2007, that would have been the thing that wowed everybody.

FC: And yet the iPhone wasn’t an immediate hit in 2007.

BM: And everybody forgets that it launched without the app store. The sales that first year were good for what Apple was intending the iPhone to be, but they didn’t sell 50 million units in the first year. The thing that really made it mainstream was when the app store opened up.

[The App Store launched on July 10, 2008, with 552 apps–135 of them free and most of the rest ranging from between $1 and $10.]

Then not only could you use Google Maps to get around, but you could have a run-tracking app to chart your jogging route and calculate your pace. I think that’s overlooked. The phone that was introduced 10 years ago is not the iPhone we think of today.

FC: How did the iPhone change telecommunications? How did it change things for AT&T and Verizon?

BM: The infrastructure companies, the cell-phone companies, their biggest fear is something they’ve just been unable to stave off–that they’re just dumb pipes and all we care about is the reliability of those pipes and ubiquity of those pipes. But there’s nothing else we need from them except for the data [service].

FC: And they didn’t even do the dumb pipes part very well. I remember a couple of years there where the broadband service was painfully slow.

BM: Cingular [owned by AT&T, which was the exclusive carrier of the iPhone] was saying, “You’re going to launch this device that’s going to suck down a firehose of data, and we don’t have infrastructure for it.” Part of the reason Apple launched the iPhone on Edge service [a slower 2.5G service, when 3G networks were already available] was they were trying to be nice to AT&T, not out of altruism, but because it was going to lead to a poor user experience, a poor browsing experience.

But also it turned out that the components weren’t there yet, either. I read that it would have been too much of a suck on the iPhone’s battery life if they would have gone with a 3G chip at that point. That’s part of why they launched it a little bit neutered. But then of course, like everything Apple does, that just gives them this wonderful new feature that they can launch next year.

FC: Do you think Jobs understood that the iPhone would become this huge internet device?

BM: I don’t think so, because based on the people I’ve talked to and the research I’ve done, the iPhone was originally meant to be an iPod with calling capability. They were trying to disrupt themselves before someone else could do it [with a cell phone that offered a great music experience].

If they’d been able to just add calling to the iPod with the click wheel, they would have done that. But the [iPod’s] click wheel didn’t work very well for sending SMS messages. And it was just an accident of history that they had this skunk works project that was creating a tablet device, and they shrunk that down and made the first iPhone. The fact that it became this great internet machine was just a bonus, because they went with that big screen.

So now, when we look back at the iPhone, we see it as this great leap forward in computing, it’s this great internet device. But I don’t think, while they were doing it, that they had any idea that it would be the most revolutionary aspect of it.

Old school watches are back in vogue and millennials are leading the way—as both consumers and makers.

Everybody assumed gadgets like our smartphones and the Apple Watch would doom sales, but the opposite is true: Analog watch sales have been gradually rising since 2009. But the buzz around them (remember the Swatch craze?) certainly died down, as did our love affair with the luxury watches, like Rolex and Patek Philippe pieces.

In recent years, there’s been an explosion of affordable watch startups founded by millennials; these brands have brought the buzz back and are churning out cheaper Chinese-made quartz timepieces priced between $100 and $300 a pop, on par with Fossil.

One of the first brands to strike it big was Daniel Wellington. Founded in 2011 in Sweden by a 24-year old, the brand created a line of expensive-looking, minimalistic watches inspired by Rolex and Piaget timepieces, but priced under $200. By marketing through a network of Instagram influencers, the brand managed to rake in $200 million in revenue by 2016, selling over a million watches a year. This past February, Inc. named Daniel Wellington the fastest growing company in Europe. “It’s become the poster child of the online watch brand movement,” says Jennifer Chong, cofounder of Linjer, a Barcelona-based design studio that recently launched a watch on Kickstarter that generated $1 million in preorders.

Then there’s Rosefield, Oak & Oscar, and a spate of European watch brands that sound like Ikea furniture: Cluse, Klarf, and Aevig. You get the general idea. The question is, why this boom in watch brands? And why now?

The Analog Advantage

Artjem Weissbeck, the founder and CEO of Kapten & Son, launched his brand around the same time the Apple Watch came out. At first, it was unclear whether smart watches would squelch the analog watch market. They didn’t.

He’s noticed that while some consumers are looking for accessories that keep them more plugged in, others are looking for relief from the constant barrage of technology. “I think a lot about why millennials are buying watches,” Weissbeck says. “The core of the answer has to do with their psychology. Many of us are feeling that we’re not consuming technology anymore: technology is consuming us.”

Weissbeck points out that generation Z, who are now between 5 and 25, don’t remember a time before smartphones and may never have needed to wear an old-fashioned timepiece. But millennials have distinct memories wearing watches while they were growing up. There was a time when a watch was a necessity, rather than a lifestyle choice. At school, you needed a watch to time yourself during an exam or to be sure you weren’t late to your next class.

Many millennials have a nostalgic association with analog watches. They’re looking for timepieces that look more sophisticated than the plastic Swatch or Casio Baby G watches they wore when they were children, but don’t want to shell out thousands for a high-end luxury watch. “I think it’s just pleasant to feel that something simple–that you’ve had in your life for decades–still makes you happy,” he says.

They believed–given the glut in new watch brands–that other millennials also felt the same way. So, they decided to create an extremely minimalistic watch inspired by the Oslo Opera House and its clean lines. The idea is to make the experience of glancing at the watch straightforward؅— get the time and right back to your task. “As designers, a watch is a dream project for us to work on,” Chong says. “It’s a small canvas, but they are such complex machines, under the surface.”

Form Over Function

While Weissbeck and Chong focus on function, the folks at MVMT are obsessed with form. “It’s one of the few accessories that allow men to express themselves,” founder Jake Kassan says. “We saw that as an opportunity. As watch-makers we no longer need to think about functionality–and obsess over components–but we can build a lifestyle brand.”

Designing a watch to be a fashion accessory comes with some advantages. Many luxury brands are still focused on creating watches that are as complex and accurate as possible, with features like an indicator that tells you what phase the moon is in. MVMT, on the other hand, focuses entirely on aesthetics. Many MVMT watches don’t even have minute or hour markers on them so that the face can be as clean and minimalistic as possible. “It’s not that easy to tell the time on some of our watches,” Kassan says. “My thesis was that consumers don’t really care about the components of a watch or how precise it is because they tell time with their phones.”

They might be right. Over the last three years the brand has been in business, they’ve gone from making $300,000 on an Indiegogo campaign to selling more than a million watches. Kassan and his cofounder, Kramer LaPlante, have spent years crafting MVMT’s image, largely through social media. Taking a page from the Daniel Wellington playbook, the brand works with carefully selected influencers who photograph how the watches fit into a busy, fashionable life. The brand’s Instagram feed features 20- and 30-somethings in cities around the world, surrounded by skyscrapers and brick walls; or in some exotic vacation destination in Thailand or Brazil. The watches are styled to match slick suits or a wrist full of bracelets.

For consumers, treating a watch as a fashion item also changes their buying behavior. In the past, if you weren’t a watch collector, you’d generally buy one or two watches to wear everyday. MVMT’s customers sometimes buy many watches to match different looks. The brand also sells interchangeable straps, so a customer might buy one watch, but change the color of the strap to match their outfit. “We’re seeing customers buy several of the same watch with different color faces, just because our watches are so affordable,” he says.

Transparent Prices

Most of these new fashion watch brands haven’t focused on quality. All the watches I’ve described in this story manufacture their watches in China using inexpensive parts, rather than in Switzerland, where high-end watchmakers continue to craft luxury products. Part of this has to do with the fact that millennials tend to have less disposable income to spend on high-end watches. But millennials also have a different approach to luxury than baby boomers. Research shows that millennials don’t want to pay inflated prices for fancy brand names. They aren’t necessarily going to buy a Rolex or a Patek Philippe watch just because they saw an ad for it in a glossy magazine.

But as the market for $100 to $300 watches continues to grow, some brands are trying to differentiate themselves from the competition by emphasizing the quality of their products. Take Linjer. The brand focuses on creating products using the best possible materials, but charges fair prices thanks to a direct-to-consumer approach that avoids middleman markups. In 2016, when they launched their $249 watch inspired by the Oslo Opera House, they focused on sourcing high quality components: the movement is made by a Swiss quartz company called Ronda, the glass is made of sapphire crystal, and the strap is made from Italian vegetable- tanned leather. The whole timepiece is then assembled in China.

Linjer’s founders quickly discovered that there was a market for high-quality watches that weren’t overpriced. A year ago, their initial Kickstarter campaign generated $1 million in preorders, and the brand has continued to grow in watch sales. Khan believes that Linjer’s customers are more focused on design and craftsmanship than those drawn to brands like MVMT or Kapten & Son, who tend to be more fashion-forward. “Our customers love our watches as a design object,” he says. “They like our products because they are built to last and not go out of style.”

Torp spent two years exploring the watch industry, with the help of the watchmaker in the shop next door to him, to better understand the difference between cheap and expensive watches. He discovered that there is a lot of price inflation in the watch industry. The components in a $1,000 watch tend to be high quality, but they are not that expensive. He believed he could take those same components and create a watch of equivalent quality, without the markup. And to take his approach a step further, Torp would offer transparent pricing in the same vein as Everlane. On each product page, it lists out how much the components cost. For instance, the $159 watch uses a Swiss Ronda movement that costs $10, whereas the $359 watch uses a $55 automatic Miyota movement.

Ultimately, Torp believes that selling high-quality watches will insulate his company from changes in fashion trends or advancements in smartwatch technology. “People are seeing that the next generation of smartwatches has come out, rendering the previous generation obsolete,” Torp says. “That will never happen with an analog watch. If you buy a good watch, made of excellent parts, you can wear it forever.”

Donald Trump’s great, tremendous border wall might not have been built yet, but about 650 miles worth of “wall,” already exists, a vestige of border-control projects from earlier administrations. But instead of being simply a symbol of isolation, the wall has been altered by its environment: It’s become a home for many people who have washed up against it.

A new series from Tokyo-based photographer James Whitlow Delano captures this challenging reality. What you’ll see is as much a story about poverty as it is one of perseverance, a testament to the hardships of the human condition, and evidence of our resilience.

In 2016, he was in Mexico photographing the border, trying to answer the question of what it’s like to have a neighbor (with whom you are at peace) erecting a barrier between you. “In the process of making that story,” he tells Fast Company, “I happened upon several families whose houses or shelters were actually backed up against the wall itself, but I did not have time to explore their lives further. So I said, ‘I’m going to do the story I should have done in the first place,’ then went back and sought out these people.”

Along the wall, Delano met a woman who had lived in the U.S. for 20 years with her Cuban husband. She ran a taco stand and wouldn’t let Delano pay for his meal. He met a homeless man 1,600 miles from his previous life in the state of Michoacán, near Mexico City. Delano also ran into a surprising number of Haitians who were stuck in Tijuana, trying to scrape together a living with limited Spanish. Just about everyone living along the wall does so without plumbing, and electricity is ripped from the power grid illegally.

For others in town, like two young boys Delano snapped, the view of the border wall, and the United States in the distance, is all they’ve ever known. They are very much at home there, and the wall they were perched on was just another part of their playground. The boys’ family, three generations and six kids in all, is there for the long haul.

They live in a ramshackle house that sits atop a mound of dirt and stone.

The son-in-law, Jesús, repairs cars during the day. He still has family in the United States, near Seattle, which explains the Seahawks tattoo on his forearm, but now has Canada in his dreams. Jesús was deported for felony domestic abuse. Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S., according to 40 years or research.

Since Trump signed two executive orders on immigration and border security, not only have arrests of suspected undocumented workers jumped 38%, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection has caught 47% fewer people trying to cross into America without documentation.

“I wanted this to be a human story. I want people in the U.S. or Europe to understand the kinds of pressures people are under–financial pressures, family pressures,” the photographer tells Fast Company. “I want people to understand that we’re dealing with decent people who, just by fate of birth, have this pressure on them that we most of us don’t have.

“What I don’t want is to encourage anybody to build the wall, because that’s ridiculous.”

All Photos Copyright © 2017 by James Whitlow Delano. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Baby food isn’t as simple as mashed bananas.

That’s what private equity firm director Angela Sutherland discovered while pregnant with her first child in 2013. When she wasn’t working 10-hour days, she was researching what a baby should consume during the first 1,000 days. Proper nutrition at the start of a child’s life, she had read, is fundamental to health and development.

Sutherland recalls how the baby nutrition category seemed, to her, inefficient and overwhelming. If she tried to learn everything about baby nutrition to feed her child, where would she find the time for all that peeling, cutting, steaming, and puréeing? Her options were either spending hours each week in the kitchen or grabbing a jar off the supermarket shelf that, as she describes, “was sometimes older than my baby.”

Or, in some cases, loaded with sugar, additives, and preservatives. Roughly 90% of America’s babies are fed mass-produced food, according to food historian Amy Bentley, author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet. And most options from major brands, including Gerber’s, are not even meant to be daily meal staples, but rather supplements. The University of Glasgow concluded that supermarket baby brands contain fewer nutrients than homemade meals and that babies would need to eat twice as much of the processed food to get the same energy and protein as home-cooked meals. The World Health Organization found that babies who eat homemade meals may learn to appreciate a wider variety of food types and be leaner than infants who eat store-bought products. And, as if all that weren’t scary enough, the Environmental Defense Fund recently announced that detectable levels of lead were found in 20% of 2,164 baby food samples.

There’s plenty there to cause parents concern. So where are the healthy, full-fledged meals for babies? And in this age of hyper convenience, why aren’t they being delivered to people’s doors?

Those were the questions Sutherland hoped to answer when, in late 2015, she teamed up with former Wall Street Journal journalist Evelyn Rusli to found Yumi, a meal delivery program for infants and toddlers that attempts to ensure a proper balance of nutrients.

It’s not the only service of its kind. In the last two years, nearly a dozen new companies have sprung up that present themselves as a healthy, convenient alternative to big brands like Gerber’s, which owns 61% of the market. With weekly prices for these services averaging about $45, the startups cater to affluent, health-conscious young parents who are familiar with services like Blue Apron and want an alternative to the standard jarred food model. Some of these companies specialize in fresh meals, some in frozen, and they vary in how they prepare and ship their products. But all are founded on the premise that there are no simple, healthy alternatives on market.

“The average supermarket-shelf baby food has about 12 grams of sugar, so if a baby is eating that three times a day, that’s equivalent to a can of Coke or more,” says Michelle Davenport, a registered dietician and cofounder of one of the new companies in this sector, Raised Real.

The bottom line, Yumi’s Sutherland says, is that feeding your child “shouldn’t be this onerous process. So our goal is: How do we make the parent worry-free?”

Baby Steps To Better Nutrition

In an era when even organic dog food has its own delivery startup, it’s no surprise baby food has received the Silicon Valley treatment. Mainstream attention to health and wellness has crept into nearly every product category, demographic, and age range.

Yumi cofounder Rusli says the well-heeled millennial moms she and Sutherland encounter, many of them in Los Angeles and New York, consider health their chief concern. As a recent Goldman Sachs report found, millennials, more than other generation, are increasingly opting for healthier food options. Just as traditional fast-food chains lost market share to slightly more nutritious establishments like Panera Bread, the pattern could make its way to toddler menus.

Jill Castle, a pediatric nutritionist and the author of Fearless Feeding: How to Raise Healthy Eaters from High Chair to High School, says that baby nutrition is as important as all these startups stress. It’s not just a helicopter mom’s anxiety. “It is one of the most important stages in a child’s life, in terms of setting the foundation for growth and development–not just body growth, but brain development,” she says.

Gerber’s does have an organic baby food line. For $1.29, parents can purchase a pouch of fruits and veggies made with no preservatives, artificial sweeteners, or artificial flavors. An average serving has 4g of sugar, on par with its organic competitors and about 3-8g less than a similar product from the company’s only slightly cheaper conventional line. But even the organic pouch isn’t meant to be consumed three to five times a day, says Gerber CMO Aileen Stocks.

Yumi, on the other hand, is meant to be a comprehensive meal plan for babies—and a de-stresser for anxious new parents. The company’s “holistic approach,” Rusli says, provides all of a child’s nutritional needs for each week. If one meal is high in iron, the other might be rich in Vitamin C. To create menus, the cofounders partnered with several registered physicians and nutrition experts, including Dr. Nicole Avena, author of the upcoming What to Feed Your Baby.

Another company, Thistle, was born of similar intentions. Three months ago, Shiri Avnery and her husband, Ashwin Cheriyan, launched a startup that, for $45 a week, delivers 21 flash-frozen, organic plant-based baby-food meal kits to parents in California and Nevada. Avnery says each meal is crafted with herbs, spices, and superfoods to “develop babies’ palates” for healthier food. “Little Green Machine” is made of broccoli, asparagus, green beans, pears, and tarragon—all peeled, chopped, measured, and ready to steam and purée.

Another April arrival, Little Spoon, considers itself a response to the trend of pouch-packaging, which some nutritionists deem detrimental to babies developing proper chewing and biting skills. Each plastic meal cup of puréed organic fruits and veggies comes with a kid-friendly spoon.

A Healthy Market For Healthy Baby Food?

While investors have thrown their support behind these startups—the multibillion-dollar Schwan Food Company invested $1 million in Raised Real, for instance—that doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies will scale successfully. The on-demand food startup sector is marked by plenty of struggling newcomers that fail to profit off the industry’s small margins. Sprig, SpoonRocket, and Maple are just a few meal delivery services that ceased operations of late.

Currently, the meal kit sector is “a very small market,” says Darren Seifer, food and beverage industry analyst for market research company The NPD Group. Only 5% of of adults say that they have tried one, and of those who haven’t, 20% said they are interested, reports the group. Most leave the service for cost reasons, Seifer says.

But are affluent millennials enough to keep these companies afloat? While Yumi and others do offer free recipes and nutrition information on their websites, that’s about as close as lower-income parents will likely every get to the luxury of delivered gourmet baby meals. And these are the very people who need fresh, nutritious food the most, since poorer neighborhoods tend to lack full grocery stores that stock a variety of fruits and vegetables. In these “food deserts,” cash-strapped families depend on convenience stores with limited produce, according to the nonprofit Food Resource and Action Center. And when there are decent supermarkets, healthier products are almost always more expensive than processed ones.

Little Spoon cofounder and CMO Lisa Barnett says that, in the long run, she doesn’t intend for her company to only cater to the one percent in coastal cities. She says her company plans to go national in the coming year and is creating a supply chain that can “just as easily ship to Kentucky as it can ship to New York.” Cost-wise, these startups hope that once they secure more customers, they can lower prices. Just how low, however, is unclear.

Of course, there’s also the question of just how useful these services are. Is it really that difficult to prepare fresh produce to be steamed and puréed? How much time are these services actually saving parents? The handful of mothers I spoke had mixed responses.

Halie Geller, on the other hand, doesn’t see the point. “I don’t see why it’s so difficult to take a fork and mash up a sweet potato or banana,” says Geller, an attorney from Huntington, New York. “My toddler is a picky eater, so the idea of paying a small fortune for her to spit out or throw her organically grown, freshly prepared, mashed-up food seems ridiculous.”

Allegra Marino Shmulevsky, an adjunct lecturer at New York’s Pratt Institute, is also unlikely to sign up for any of the services anytime soon. When it’s time for her son to eat, she simply purées a portion of whatever is on the menu for the entire family. It’s called child-led weaning and it’s what her pediatrician recommended. “I give [my baby] soft things to eat and he sort of figures it out himself,” she says. “Part of my hesitance to do purées made just for him, rather than just blending what we were eating, is that that sounds really time-consuming.”

And she sees another promising sign: parents who have grown so fond of the meal packets that they use them for their own use—in a morning smoothie, for instance. “Hopefully by the time Little Spoon is national,” Barnett says, “it will no longer be, ‘I’m not trying the baby food, but ‘Hey, I hope there’s some left over for me.”