Summer isn’t known to be the season for high productivity. Unplanned absences spike, especially on Mondays and Fridays and before holidays. These days off reduce productivity by 36.6%, according to a survey in the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
But that doesn’t mean your company needs to suffer. Whether you’re fighting the urge to take a day off or picking up the slack from a missing team member, it’s a good idea to create a summer productivity plan. We spoke to six productivity experts who shared their best advice for getting work done during the summer.
“If you’re leaning lazy during the summer, you’ll need a plan,” says Peggy Duncan, personal productivity expert and author of The Time Management Memory Jogger. “One of the best things you can do is make lists.”
Do a brain dump and make a list of the things you need and want to do, she suggests. “For work-related tasks, focus on which ones are closest to the money,” says Duncan. “If you’re in business, that’s easy to figure out. If you have a job, that’s the thing in your job description that determines raises and promotions.”
For things you want to do, prioritize based on which ones will bring you the most joy. “You’ll need this combination to keep you motivated,” says Duncan.
Working from this list, start charting out your summer on your calendar, including milestones and deadlines, says Duncan. “If it’ll help, enlist an accountability partner who might need that extra push also,” she says.
“Work super hard for several days and accomplish a Herculean amount, then take several days off and enjoy the sun and surf,” he says. “Work hard, rest well. The hard work will keep you from being distracted by the temptations of summer, while the days off will help you enjoy those temptations.”
3. Let The Weather Guide Tasks
Take advantage of longer days and your location, doing tasks outdoors when the weather is nice or indoors when the weather is not, suggests professional organizer Andrew Mellen, author of Unstuff Your Life.
“No point in doing paperwork on a beautiful sunny day unless you can do it on your back porch, rooftop, or patio,” he says. “Even in the glorious hot days of summer, there will be rain. Save the indoor tasks for those days.”
4. Pare Down Your To-Do List
During the summer, skip the crazy long to-do lists, says Mellen. “Chunk things up into easily bite-sized pieces of no longer than 15 to 30 minutes at a time and make sure they are highly actionable,” he suggests.
If you need to brainstorm, for example, make a session just about thinking. Then schedule a different appointment with yourself to take action as a result of the brainstorm. If you combine a simple task with a clear action needed and give it a specific quantity of time, you’ll be more likely to do it, says Mellen.
5. Use Downtime To Tackle Projects That Get Put Off
With people on vacation and the office running at a little slower pace, tackle important-but-not-urgent projects, says productivity and business coach Lorie Marrero, author of The Home Office Handbook. For example, take care of computer updates and upgrades, or organizing files and desks. Then plan to donate old computers, monitors, and other technology equipment.
You can also have a big purge-and-shred day. “Order pizza for the whole team, have everyone show up in jeans or shorts,” says Marrero. “Organize your workspaces and files with a shred truck and large dump bin on hand to handle the volume. Give prizes for the oldest paper found, the funniest object to donate or toss, and the most money found—gift cards, cash, and checks are often uncovered.”
6. Plan A Vacation
Even if it’s just for a few days, plan a vacation, says Lisa Zaslow, founder of the New York-based organizing firm Gotham Organizers. “Knowing that you’re going to have time off creates real deadlines that will spur you to work effectively,” she says.
If you can’t get away for an extended period, schedule fun activities that feel like mini-vacations, adds productivity coach Carson Tate, author of Work Simply. “For example, I might schedule a long lunch with a friend that includes lunch and a pedicure, or schedule three hours off on Friday afternoon to take my daughter to a waterpark,” she says.
Just like wrapping up work before you leave, having less time to complete your work generates just enough adrenaline to help you focus, and the scheduled breaks ensure that you feel like you’re enjoying summer, says Tate.
Whenever I open Instagram these days, it feels like I’m being watched. The minute I follow a new person or double tap a landscape or cat pic, the photo-sharing app—to which I’ve long been addicted—picks up on it and starts showing me remarkably similar images. It’s almost creepy.
As it turns out, Instagram’s algorithms are indeed keeping an eye on me, busily drawing a complex map of my likes, follows, and other in-app behavior, and that of the people I follow as well. As the app learns, its Explore tab gets better at recommending photos and videos to me. I can’t help but take the bait. Next thing you know, I’m barreling down some new visual rabbit hole and following six more people.
The Explore tab is essentially one giant recommendation engine. But the ever-evolving methodology Instagram uses to sort through one of the world’s largest networks of photographs, comments, and likes is far more complex than your standard, “If you like that, you’ll like this” logic. And, surprisingly, Instagram says that despite the image recognition capabilities of parent company Facebook, there’s no machine vision involved.
Explore, the section of Instagram designated by a little magnifying glass, is where the app suggests images and videos you might appreciate, and allows you to search for more by tag, username, or place. This infinite and constantly refreshing grid of imagery does its best to reflect your interests. Mine shows a blend of musical instruments like drums and synthesizers, various animals, hazy film photography, tattoos, weird psychedelic art, food, beach scenery, and the occasional meme. You might see political rallies, yoga poses, makeup tutorials, shirtless Justin Bieber pics, corgis, vintage cars, and whatever it is you happen to be into—even if you didn’t know that you were.
For either of us, a few of the suggestions may seem oddly off-base. But for the most part, they’re increasingly likely to draw us in. And a week or two from now—depending on how much you swipe and tap your way through Instagram—this page could look totally different. With tens of millions of images being shared on Instagram in a typical day, how does the Explore tab figure out what to show us?
The process is twofold. First, the algorithms embark on a content quest known within the company as “sourcing.” To machete its way through Instagram’s massive jungle of image uploads, the system uses a blend of your own behavior—which pictures you’ve liked, who you follow, what kinds of images you share with others, and data about the people you follow, including what types of posts they like, for example—to narrow millions of images down to just a few hundred. It even analyzes the activity of people who follow the same accounts you do. Aided by Instagram’s machine-learning prowess, the process gradually gets more sophisticated and, for many users, eerily spot-on.
“You base [the predictions] off an action, and then you do stuff around that action,” says Layla Amjadi, a product manager at Instagram who works on Explore. “Following is an explicit action. Liking is another explicit action. You have all these different permutations of what you can look at.”
For example, if you and I both happen to follow six of the same people, perhaps you’ll like a photo posted by a seventh account that I follow, but that you’ve never heard of. Instagram’s algorithm will test this theory by slipping one of their posts into your Explore page. This is why if you scroll through Explore enough, you may occasionally see a familiar face—say, a friend of a friend, or somebody you recognize from around town. Instagram is mining the complex, multilayered social web between users and trying to learn from how those people interact with one another.
Photo by John Paul Titlow
Instagram can also leverage the mountains of data and social links its users generate on Facebook to suggest photos, people, and ads. Remarkably, however, the Explore algorithm does not use Facebook’s image recognition technology to understand the contents of images. Instead, the recommendation algorithms take clues from things like hashtags, captions, and the overarching theme of the account itself (which it gleans from the account description and user behavior around it). An Instagram account dedicated to food, cats, or guitars, for instance, is going to be filled with photos of those particular things.
The system then tries to rank the images in terms of how likely they are to be relevant to you—and thus, how likely you are to take a new action, such as liking the photo or following the account. These predictions are made using yet another analysis of your past behavior on Instagram—and then used to assign a numerical score to each image so the system can prioritize which images to show you. By this point, Instagram’s sea of millions of videos and photos is narrowed down to just a few dozen and personalized just for you. The app also makes an effort to declutter things further by blocking certain content; Instagram recently started “shadowbanning” overly spammy accounts, preventing their photos from appearing on the Explore tab.
One of the challenges of the Explore tab is striking a balance between personalization and serendipity.
“You may want a good amount of cat content, but don’t want the entire experience to be cats,” Amjadi says. “It’s not just replaying the same stuff to people, but also helping them broaden their horizons in a way that they might find interesting, too.”
Since Instagram’s 700 million users are spread out across the globe, the Explore page often surfaces things that may appeal to you, but also offers a peek into another culture elsewhere. Maybe you’re into garage rock, but you’ve never heard of this up-and-coming band from Australia that just played a gig in Sydney last night. Check them out. Or maybe you’re into makeup how-to’s, but have never seen eyeliner done quite the way that this teenager in São Paulo did it on her Instagram feed this morning.
The Explore tab has come a long way since Instagram first launched in 2010. Originally called Popular, this part of the app began as a showcase of the network’s most popular images at any given time. Not surprisingly, the experience got boring pretty fast. So the company started to try to personalize it in 2014, two years after Facebook purchased it. Explore, as it was now called, worked: In one early A/B experiment, the addition of personalization showed a 400% increase in engagement. The following year, the company added videos and trending tags, improved the search functionality, and put more of an emphasis on viewing images by location. Since then, they’ve swapped various features and tweaked details, all the while trying to improve the personalization quietly in the background.
“It’s always iterative,” says Amjadi. “People’s behavior changes. The ecosystem changes. The content being produced changes. Everything is changing, so you can’t just do this and let it sit.”
The summer internship: It’s a rite of passage into the adult world, that transitional phase when one goes from being a student to a professional. Internships now have very little to do with grunt work and coffee-fetching. Now they can be the stepping-stone to a dream post-college job offer. Some internships even pay better than many entry-level jobs.
Yet there’s also the assumption that in order to get a great internship you need to live in a big city—or be willing to move to one. Sadly, there is some truth to that—but just some. It is true that according to the most recent Glassdoor data (from 2015) the sheer number of internship openings were higher in larger cities, with New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. ranked as the top places, by far, that had the most available internships.
But it’s also true that you can find internships in virtually every midsize and small city in America. And there are some internships where it doesn’t matter where you are located as long as you have access to a computer and the internet. In 2017, where you are located matters less than ever in regards to getting a great internship. So if you’re from a small town, remember the four things below before despairing that your location will hold you back from getting that perfect summer internship.
Think Outside The Obvious Big Cities
Yes, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C. are the leaders in the best places to find the largest amount of internships. However, there are a few drawbacks to applying for internships in these cities. First, internships in big cities are much more likely to attract the highest number of applicants, increasing the number of people you’ll be fighting against to get that one spot. Second, bigger cities are more expensive to live in—and if the company doesn’t cover moving or living expenses for their interns, getting the internship could put you into debt.
By no means let those factors stop you from applying for big-city internships, but also know that America is a huge place, and despite the draw to the major economies of those cities, businesses are located all over the country—and they all need interns. The big benefit for applying for internships in smaller cities is that there are likely several close to where you live and even if there aren’t, moving and living expenses in these small-to-midsize cities are much cheaper than living in the top five.
So which cities might you want to explore outside of the top five? WalletHub has put together an excellent list of the top 150 cities that are best for summer internships based on a number of factors, including employment outlook, affordability, and downtime-friendliness. Orlando, Florida, Scottsdale, Arizona, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida lead the list of great alternatives.
Virtual Internships Are Really A Thing
One of the biggest benefits technology has brought to the modern workforce is the ability to work remotely. There are plenty of jobs (mine, for instance) that allow you to work from anywhere provided you have a laptop and an internet connection. Some of these jobs include journalism, graphic design, project management, coding, and dozens of others. Given that so many professionals in these fields can work remotely, is it any surprise that companies are now offering “virtual” internships? Such internships are a terrific choice for those who don’t want to—or don’t have the means of moving to another city for a summer internship.
“Several companies post ‘virtual’ or ‘online’ internships–these are internships that you can do from your college dorm, small town, or from your parent’s house,” says Lauren Berger, founder of InternQueen and author of Welcome to the Real World. While they are a great choice for many—and do accurately reflect how many professionals increasingly work today—Berger says there are a few things to keep in mind if you go down the virtual-internship route. “Some of these internships are fantastic but I recommend making a very clear schedule for yourself to properly manage expectations and having a planned daily or weekly check-in call with your employer. You want to make sure that even though you aren’t in the office you are still building a professional connection and getting constant feedback.”
Sometimes Interning At A Small, Local Company Is Actually The Best Choice
But what if you can’t move to a midsize city and a virtual internship doesn’t work out? Don’t think you’re stuck because of where you live. “People who live in smaller cities aren’t necessarily limited when it comes to internships,” says Berger. “In fact, some of my favorite internships were at smaller companies in smaller towns where I had a great hands-on experience.”
Smaller, local companies often have fewer hierarchical bottlenecks—and fewer employees in general, which means they can divert more resources and attention to their interns, delegating tasks to them that they would give normal employees. This real-world experience, in turn, can make the intern more appealing to future employers. Plus, you never know where the people who you worked with at the small company will end up, says Berger. “I also found that several of the people I worked for at these smaller companies went out to work for big agencies in big cities over time.” If you made a good impression on these people, they are likely to recommend you to their new company if you end up seeking a job there.
Know Your Location Has Very Little Relevance To A Company When Choosing An Intern
In the end, Berger says where you are from has almost no bearing on getting a great internship—no matter if you are looking for one in a big city, a smaller one, your hometown, or remotely. “As long as you can sell yourself to an employer and explain why you are the right person for the job or internship, you shouldn’t be limited by where you are from,” she says. Companies care more about a complete and updated resume with a personalized cover letter and your initiative to follow up than your home address.
“Honestly, it’s a mind-set–the mind-set of ‘I can’t do this’–turn your ‘I can’t’ into an ‘I can’,” says Berger. “You can get amazing internships just like the rest of them. It takes focus, preparation, planning, and solid follow-up skills.”
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
My dad’s first job when my family moved to the United States was as an electrical engineer earning around $24,000 a year. I thought of him back in February, when thousands of people–many of them working even tougher jobs–took to the streets of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other cities in the “Day Without Immigrants,” a demonstration meant to illustrate immigrants’ impact on the American economy and workforce.
But as an immigrant myself, the son of immigrants, and an employer of immigrants, I know firsthand that our impact is even bigger than that–and our potential is bigger still. Some talk about immigrants’ contributions to the technology industry by pointing to the demand for hard skills, and they’re not wrong to. After all, the U.S. ranks a lowly 30th in math and 19th in science among the 35 member countries of the OECD. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The future of American innovation depends on immigrants. And no matter how much more controversial immigration issues become in the months and years ahead, I’ve never been more certain of that. Here’s why.
We Have More To Lose
For years after emigrating, my father worked for a horrendous boss who routinely clocked in at 5 a.m. and downed two pots of coffee before 6. My dad would get to work by 4 a.m. to make his boss’s coffee because he was so terrified of making a mistake and the possible repercussions. Like many immigrants, he did things others wouldn’t do because he was scared about losing it all. And it paid off. When his company announced mass layoffs in his department, he was the only one they kept on board.
Immigrant employees should never be motivated to work out of fear, and workplaces that exploit those anxieties are unconscionable. But the fact remains that people who’ve moved overseas and crossed borders for a shot at a better life are naturally driven to succeed—the stakes are just that high.
As a startup founder, I’ve learned that the people you hire can make or break your company’s future success. And I’ve experienced the work ethic that immigrants bring to our jobs, not to mention the diversity of thought we can contribute as employees.
We Can Adjust To Change Quickly
I was 8 years old when my parents uprooted our family from inner-city London and moved us to Florida. Our journey to the U.S. was far from straightforward, though: We spent a few months in Canada before landing in Florida, where we stayed for a few years, then moved to Arizona, followed by a short stint in Los Angeles and then finally settled in Illinois, where I went to high school.
I was a kid with an accent whose world revolved around chess and cricket–the NBA and tetherball were foreign concepts to me. I went from a Catholic convent school where we prayed twice a day to an Orlando public school. Like so many immigrants before and after me, I endured an extended cultural adjustment, but looking back, it proved to be a crucial exercise in character-building.
For successful entrepreneurs and workers alike, being quick to adapt is a crucial skill to sharpen. And immigrants, by the nature of our experience, are forced to do this from the moment we leave home. Dealing with the ups and downs of the journey is great training for the roller-coaster ride of the modern workplace in its many forms.
We Pay It Forward
Witnessing my dad’s unwavering commitment to hard work, and seeing the opportunities that created for me, has left me with a sense of responsibility to pay that good fortune forward—and I’m willing to bet that most other immigrants feel similarly. In some ways, that duty is what attracted me to startups in the first place.
It’s why when I started HighGround, I intentionally hired a diverse team. Today we have team members from India, China, Egypt, France, Greece, Russia, Mexico, Vietnam, Ukraine, and the Philippines. More often than not, immigrants come to the U.S. for a shot at something better than what they had before. Those who are lucky enough to make it here don’t take that for granted–and are usually some of the first to share the wealth and opportunities they create for themselves.
For the tech industry to stay on its upward trajectory, we need people who are hungry, humble, and driven to help others. Continuing to welcome immigrants into our community is one of the simplest ways to ensure we all succeed. In fact, research shows that diverse teams are more creative, innovative, and profitable than those that aren’t. Immigration may be politically controversial, but from a business point of view, it really shouldn’t be.
Vip Sandhir is the CEO and founder of HighGround, an employee engagement and performance management platform.
This story was produced by MapLight, a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics.
A lobbyist with extensive ties to secretive nonprofit organizations served as the “quarterback” for the successful nomination of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, according to records reviewed by MapLight.
Rob Collins, a Washington lobbyist and Republican strategist, claims on his professional biography at the S-3 Group that he worked with more than a half-dozen White House offices, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Senate, and more than 20 advocacy organizations to ensure Gorsuch’s confirmation.
The disclosure reveals that the Trump administration is taking advantage of a loophole in U.S. campaign finance law that allows elected officials to coordinate their agendas with nonprofit organizations that aren’t required to disclose their donors to the public. All told, five major “dark money” organizations spent more than $14 million boosting Gorsuch’s nomination.
“By many indications, some of these dark money groups are acting as an arm of the White House,” said Brendan Fischer, an associate counsel at the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog. “We’re seeing money flow into politics in ways we’ve hardly seen before, and it’s continuing to flood the very swamp that Trump promised to drain.”
Although campaign finance legislation prohibits coordination among elected officials, candidates, and dark money organizations, the laws only apply during federal elections. Coordination to support or oppose cabinet nominees, judicial nominees, or specific policy measures are not covered by the regulations.
“The reason campaign finance law doesn’t cover this is because it’s written to govern campaigns,” Fischer said. “But there’s little reason to think that a six- or seven-figure expenditure to advance the president’s agenda is going to be any less valuable than a big expenditure to support his reelection.”
Collins was a director of 45Committee, a dark money organization that spent more than $21 million supporting Trump’s presidential campaign, as recently as January, when he last appeared on the organization’s FCC filings. The Herndon, Virginia-based committee’s ads made it the third highest-spending dark money organization in the election cycle.
Since the election, the organization has supported Trump’s agenda, launching campaigns to help confirm cabinet picks including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The 45Committee paid for a round of ads touting Gorsuch’s qualifications that ran nationally on networks including Fox, MSNBC, and CNN.
Attempts to confirm whether Collins is still working with 45Committee—which lists its address as a post office box in a distant Washington suburb—were unsuccessful. Collins did not respond to repeated requests for comment by MapLight.
America First Policies, a dark money organization created by former Trump aides to boost his agenda, also supported Gorsuch’s nomination. The organization has strong ties to 45Committee; Brian Walsh, 45Committee’s former president, was hired in April as the president of America First Policies. The organization released a video asking senators to confirm Gorsuch.
In the wake of the Gorsuch confirmation battle, America First Policies has continued to support the Trump agenda, spending $1 million to pay for advertisements scolding Sen. Dean Heller, R-NV, for his reluctance to support legislation that would gut the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The ads “had the blessing of the White House” according to the New York Times.
Both Collins and Walsh also have ties to the American Action Network (AAN), a leading dark money organization supporting Republican policies. Since 2010, the organization has spent at least $56 million on ads and donations to influence elections. Collins was AAN’s president from its formation in 2009 until 2011; Walsh led the organization from 2011 to 2015. The network has spent more than $5.6 million this year to support Republican health care policies.
The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a nonprofit that advocates for the appointment of conservative judges in state and national courts, spent at least $10 million on the Gorsuch confirmation. The network shares a top donor with the 45Committee, the Wellspring Committee, which has distributed more than $24 million in grants to conservative nonprofits since 2008. Wellspring has given roughly$13.9 millionto JCN, and also provided $750,000 to the 45Committee—a third of the money the organization reported raising between April 2015 and March 2016.
Other dark money organizations that spent heavily to support Gorsuch included the Great America Alliance, a pro-Trump spin-off of a super PAC, which spent $3.5 million on the court fight, and the National Rifle Association, which spent at least $1 million.
Gorsuch’s Campaign Finance Views
Partisan political nonprofits like 45Committee, American Action Network, the Judicial Crisis Network, and the Great America Alliance have proliferated since a series of Supreme Court decisions loosened campaign finance regulations.
During the March confirmation hearings, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, asked Gorsuch about the spending by dark money organizations to aid his confirmation, and the $3 million spent to oppose former President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, whose nomination was blocked by Republicans last year.
“I’m trying to figure out what they see in you that makes that $17 million. . . worth their spending,” he said.
“You’d have to ask them,” Gorsuch replied.
“I can’t,” Whitehouse said. “I don’t know who they are.”
When asked about his views on dark money and disclosure, Gorsuch would only say that he would examine the issues on a case-by-case basis.
WHAT: Canadian prepaid wireless company Public Mobile tightened its budget in impressive ways for its new “Less for Less” campaign.
WHO: Public Mobile, Cossette
WHY WE CARE: The amount of money some companies spend on marketing campaigns that extol how much money the one can save with their services or products can be comically ironic. And Public Mobile has leveraged that discrepancy in its latest campaign “Less for Less.”
Created by agency Cossette, “Less for Less” incorporates the theme on the most literal level by featuring just one billboard in downtown Toronto (see above) and a series of commercial spots that are the audition tapes instead of a fully produced spot.
Baking the idea for a campaign within the execution is a savvy play that’s not only attention-grabbing but downright frugal. Check out all of the spots below.
This week, we learned what emotionally intelligent people do to recharge on vacation, why MailChimp puts its new hires through a week of onboarding before letting them do any actual work, and where in the U.S. people tend to take the least time off.
1. This Is How Emotionally Intelligent People Vacation
Self-improvement might not be at the top of your agenda as you head off on your summer vacation, but it’s easier to practice than you think. After all, there are some things you automatically do on vacation that might boost your emotional intelligence without even realizing it, like tuning into your surroundings and reflecting on your goals and priorities. You might as well make it count—here’s how.
2. Why MailChimp Doesn’t Let New Hires Work For Their First Week On The Job
5. Networking Sucks, But You Can Make It Bearable—Here’s How
Some people find networking enjoyable. Others dread it and hyperventilate at the thought of having to make awkward conversations with strangers over alcoholic beverages. But there are ways to make it less painful, from not setting unrealistic expectations to choosing environments that put you at ease. And there’s always practice: If it works for big presentations, why not try it for networking?
A few weeks ago, my Fast Company coworker Ruth Reader posited that the time was ripe for a mass unmasking of the kind of workplace sexism that has been habitually swept under the rug. With the recent ousting of Fox News founder Roger Ailes and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, perhaps we were finally seeing signs that allegations of harassment and sexism in the workplace are being taken seriously—that companies would no longer ignore the problem, look the other way, or try to silence women who come forward.
The fallout from the harassment allegations lobbed at Justin Caldbeck would, at first glance, seem to lend credence to that theory. A cofounder at VC firm Binary Capital, Caldbeck was first exposed by The Information two weeks ago, in a report that documented allegations from six women. By the next day, he had taken a leave of absence and issued a heavy-handed apology. He ended up resigning two days later.
And it wasn’t just Caldbeck who was dealt swift justice. With tales of his misdeeds snowballing, Katie Benner of the New York Timespublished a story last week detailing several more incidents of harassment in the Valley, some of which involved prominent investors like Chris Sacca and Dave McClure. (Benner spoke with 24 women in tech who recounted similar experiences.) Once again, the dominos fell quickly. McClure, a partner and founder at the incubator 500 Startups, apologized in a post titled “I’m a creep. I’m sorry.” and later stepped down. Sacca disputed the account, but preemptively penned an apology on Medium.
It’s encouraging to see VC firms take swift action, even if the intent might be more to mitigate bad press than to hold executives accountable. But larger questions loom over each of these situations: Why is there so little legal recourse for female entrepreneurs who are harassed and mistreated by the people in power who can make or break their businesses? How can we hope for lasting change—change that will endure beyond the news cycle—when businesswomen enjoy so few workplace-style protections when they are seeking to fund the companies they founded?
These questions aren’t being asked in a vacuum: As LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman wrote recently, the dynamic between VC and founder should not, in theory, be any different from that of a manager and employee, or professor and student. The VC-founder relationship may not be strictly defined and regulated in the same way as an employer-employee relationship, but legal experts say they are no less dependent on the uneven power dynamic that is so familiar in other professional settings.
“If you think about it, in many of these startup companies, they are supposed to be working together; it’s supposed to be a collaboration,” Miriam Cherry, a law professor at Saint Louis University and director of its center for employment law, told me. “[Investors] are there as advisors and to look out for their investment, but they’re also working together really closely with the management of the company they’re investing in.”
And yet, from a legal standpoint, the VC-founder relationship is not afforded the protections outlined by employment law. Title VII of the Civil Right Act of 1964 granted employees protection from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, or nationality, as enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; after a ruling by the Supreme Court in 1986, that definition was expanded to include sexual harassment. But all that only covers the traditional employee-employer relationship. It’s also worth noting that Title VII only applies to companies with 15 employees or more, leaving many smaller startups out of the mix entirely.
“Employment discrimination law has not caught up with evolving work relationships in many respects,” says Vicki Schultz, a Ford Foundation professor of Law and Social Science at Yale Law School. “Consider the turn toward casual or freelance, contract relationships instead of traditional employment relationships. The law should be changed to cover these relationships, too, when the contractees function the same way as employees.”
Protecting The Powerful
In fact, the laws that do address the VC-founder relationship tend to protect the investor and his or her investment in a company. This means the only option for a founder being harassed by a VC is to sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress—a broad claim that can be levied at even a random person with whom you have no relationship, working or otherwise. But the legal bar is higher in those situations, and such cases are typically harder to win.
“There is this dynamic that is a weird relationship of dependence, and yet there’s not a lot of protection there for the founder,” Cherry says.
In an industry that is overwhelmingly male, that dynamic is egregiously skewed toward the investor. It’s further compounded by the fact that female-led companies struggle to get funding in the first place: According to Fortune, 5% of VC deals last year involved women-led startups—and only 2% of overall VC funding was awarded to female founders. So while VCs invested $58.2 billion in companies with all-male founders, they spent just $1.46 billion on startups led by women. No wonder women are cowed into silence.
One viable option for regulating the VC-founder relationship might be at the state level. Perhaps the industry could take a cue from the state law in California that protects unpaid interns from workplace harassment and discrimination. Unpaid interns are not considered employees unless they receive “significant remuneration,” and even paid interns are not automatically considered employees. In 2013, a New York City judge dismissed a sexual harassment claim by an unpaid intern, ruling that she did not qualify as an employee. New York and a handful of other states have since introduced laws shielding interns from harassment, but the majority of states still don’t offer any such protection.
Cherry says it’s unlikely anything would be done on the national level to address the gray area of a relationship such as the one between VC and founder. But if lawmakers in California took up the cause, they could effect change on a state level, or even by municipality. In some states, Cherry says, extending protection to interns was as simple as tweaking the wording of existing laws to say “employees and interns” rather than just “employees.” It’s possible to apply that to the VC-founder relationship too, according to Cherry.
“Maybe there’s enough interest in a place like Silicon Valley that there would be a push toward doing something like that—to expanding that protection,” she says.
A Lesson In NDAs
After the Caldbeck story broke, we soon found out that his behavior was something of an open secret in Silicon Valley, stretching all the way back to his time at another VC firm, Lightspeed Ventures Partners. There, he harassed Stitch Fix founder and CEO Katrina Lake, who was coerced into signing a non-disparagement agreement that barred her from discussing Caldbeck’s misconduct. Niniane Wang, one of the women who spoke to The Information, claimed she had tried to expose Caldbeck for seven years and that he “kept threatening reporters.”
One approach to regulating the VC-founder relationship might be found in state laws aimed at non-disparagement agreements: California law bars employers from requiring employees to sign NDAs that prohibit them from talking about their working conditions. Of course, as with Title VII, this excludes the VC-founder relationship, which likely explains why someone like Katrina Lake had few options when presented with one by Lightspeed.
But Schultz believes that making changes to state law alone isn’t enough. “Federal solutions are needed so that VC firms and founders will be subject to uniform regulations throughout the country,” she says. Schultz claims that VC firms could sometimes be treated as an employment agency under Title VII. She points to Niniane Wang’s allegation against Caldbeck: According to The Information, Caldbeck tried to sleep with Wang “while informally trying to recruit her for a tech company job.”
This would, however, only apply to select cases. A broader solution, Schultz says, would be to amend a statute that “prohibits racial discrimination in the making, enforcement performance, modification, and termination of contracts.” Expanding that to include sex discrimination would “reach not only the VC firms, but also potentially impose personal liability on the founders or other supervisors who participate in harassment,” she says.
Tweaking the law could also be a preventive measure—perhaps investors would think twice about acting inappropriately with female entrepreneurs, or at the very least, they might not enjoy impunity. Still, while changes to the law are significant, they likely won’t be as effective without a sweeping change in mind-set. Harassment is often less about sexual desire and more about making women feel like they don’t belong in that space. “I think harassment has often been used to exclude people,” Cherry says.
Many employers sidestep the protections in Title VII, for example, by forcing employees to sign a non-disparagement agreement in exchange for a generous severance package. Non-disparagement agreements are “commonplace in the settlement of employment discrimination and harassment cases,” according to FIU Law professor Kerri Stone. “Even when there are protective laws that an employee can make use of, employees often settle cases and agree to these clauses in the settlement agreements,” she says.
And even if states rewrite harassment laws to protect the VC-founder relationship, it’s impossible to regulate every such interaction. The women who spoke to The Information about Caldbeck had approached him for advice and funding, but ultimately had decided against working with him. Their interactions with him had taken place over drinks, presumably without any formal agreement between the two parties. Talking shop over drinks isn’t uncommon in tech—or in many other industries—which raises the question: How can the law protect female entrepreneurs when so many work-related conversations happen outside the walls of an office?
Here’s something the tech industry can start doing today, regardless of whether the law catches up: Hire more women and invest in more women. Tip the power dynamic, and chances are male VCs won’t feel as entitled to using Silicon Valley’s female entrepreneurs as their own personal dating pool.
Creative life has always been tough for an ambitious young band without much money, but it’s definitely gotten easier in recent years.
These days, if you’re a group of musicians just out of your teens determined to shoot a music video and show the world what you’re capable of, you’re in pretty good shape—every member of your band probably has a fairly sophisticated video camera and editing suite in their pocket. If it’s 1988 and you’re Kurt Cobain, a month shy of your 21st birthday, and you’ve just recorded your very first demo with your bandmates Krist Novoselic and Dale Crover (Dave Grohl wouldn’t enter the picture for another two years), you maybe had to go to a RadioShack to get access to the equipment (and enough visually-interesting background scenery) to film anything.
We know this, because earlier this week archivist Mike Ziegler uploaded never-before-seen footage of the band shooting their music video in an Aberdeen, Washington RadioShack. The band charmingly practice their stage moves in the footage—Cobain repeatedly dives into the frame from the right-hand side of the screen, the lanky 6’7″ Novoselic towers over his bandmates with his bass slung low, and Cobain’s vocals bleed into the microphone from behind a wall of hair—all while footage of the band’s gig at the Community World Theater in Tacoma the previous night (also shared to YouTube by Ziegler) plays on the televisions in the background.
The video isn’t really a look at Nirvana as musicians. The music playing isn’t live, it’s taken from the demo. But as a chance to see the band’s creative processes, and a behind-the-scenes look at how they wanted to introduce themselves to the world years before anyone would have any inkling that they were about to change the music industry forever, it’s a fascinating document of Nirvana as a baby band using whatever resources they had available to them to make their statement to the world. A year later, the band’s debut album Bleach would be released, and two years after that, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Nevermind would ensure that nothing would ever be the same for any of them (even after Crover left the band, his next project, The Melvins, would ride the alt-rock wave that Nirvana set in motion). Just six years and three months would pass between the time when the 20-year-old Cobain went into a RadioShack after-hours to shoot a video and when he left a note to the world explaining that “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”—and seeing footage like this helps put the sudden, overwhelming rush of those years into a fascinating perspective.
WHAT: “Meet the Social Media Influencer Family,” a depressingly accurate video about a family that constantly exploits itself.
WHO: Long-running satirical CBC show, This Is That.
WHY WE CARE: Earlier this year, Fast Company highlighted a funny and poignant short film about a father who tears his family apart with his quest to become a social media celebrity. (The film had extra gravitas because it was made by comedian-turned-Vine-star Will Sasso.) Now, a video from Canada’s beloved CBC Radio shows what would happen if the entire family were in on the quest as well.
“Meet the Social Media Influencer Family” gives viewers a peek inside the Anderson home, whose residents have a collective 7 million followers. There are many staged photos, like the kind taken by your friends who are liars, and cross-channel collaboration takes the place of actual bonding. Perhaps most sad and true to life, however, is what happens when the iPhones (briefly!) stop filming: the family sits together silently checking the engagement levels on everything they’ve just posted. Their rare moments of non-performative living are restricted to checking how the performance went over with the audience. Of course, that’s nothing like your life, though. Imagine if you were obsessed with how well your tweets went over…
Your job hunt’s moving along, and to prepare for your upcoming meeting with the hiring manager, you’re practicing your answers to all of the most common interview questions.
But, there’s one that you’re feeling a little stuck on–what are you going to say when the tables turn and you’re asked: “Do you have any questions for me?”
While it’s a great opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation with the interviewer–and yes, show off–it can be scary to take the wheel.
I’m not trying to make you even more nervous, but I really believe this is an important part to nail. You want to end strong, and it’s an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the other candidates. While most people who interview will be qualified, you can stand out by asking thoughtful questions that the person sitting across from you will actually remember.
Here are four different types you can ask (so you’re sure to have at least one option that seems like the perfect fit!):
1. Ask About What Makes Their Job Hard
What’s a challenge you currently are facing in your role?
How is the company helping you tackle this challenge?
Everyone faces challenges in their job–that’s a given. So, it’s not going to bring the conversation to a dead halt.
With that said, interviewers often focus on the positives about the company.
These questions will give you insight into organizational structures and resources that are in place to help employees perform and execute work. So asking this will help you identify any red flags during the interview stage.
2. Ask About A High Point
What’s a great day like for you?
What achievement here you are most proud of?
This question complements the one above. Just like you may want to learn more about the obstacles that exist, it’s also great to learn what excites your prospective colleagues. It’ll show you a range of what to expect if you were to take this role.
Additionally, since most people like talking their successes, it’ll keep the conversation going in a positive direction–which is always a good thing in an interview.
3. Ask About Their Personal Connection To The Work
What drew you to your role at [company]?
How do you feel your role furthers the mission?
Every company has some form of overarching mission and vision. In fact, you’re probably preparing to discuss it in your own words.
But this question gets into how this specific employee interprets it and how it impacts their work on a daily basis. It tells you how they help the organization achieve its goals and objectives–and gives you a peek into how engaged and impactful employees feel.
4. Ask About the People They Work With
Who is someone you admire in your company, and why?
What are some things the team does together?
Many of us want mentors–or at the very least role models to look up to and emulate. This question will give you a sense of the types of leaders who exist at the company, as well as the skills, experiences, or competencies that others see as valuable.
The second one gives you a glimpse into company culture. Does the interviewer discuss stand-ups and team projects, and leave it there? Or do they mention team lunches or even a company softball league? You’re going to be spending a lot of time with your new co-workers, so it’s good to know how they interact.
If these haven’t quite touched on what you’d like to ask, we have 51 interview questions you can bring up, so you’re sure to have options you feel good about.
No matter what you choose to discuss, remember it’s about more than gathering information on the company, people, and role. Beyond that you want to show off your thoughtfulness. What you say gives the interviewer a glimpse into the topics that you think are worth learning more about. So, ask questions you genuinely want to know the answer to–and you’ll also get points for being sincere.
Fifteen years from now, a paramedic arriving at the scene of a distress call will walk in with full knowledge of the patient’s medical history: Advanced data-sharing platforms will brief the emergency response team on the patient’s current circumstances while a self-driving ambulance pilots them to the scene. Firefighters will be able to access structural data on the building they’re about to enter via a hands-free headset, so they’ll know what staircases to avoid; police officers will use drone technology to pin down a suspect’s exact location and reduce the need for potentially dangerous chases.
All of these concepts are part of The Future of First Response, a collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the design firm Continuum. The initiative gathers key players from the first-response industry, government, and technology and design companies to draw up concepts for how the industry could integrate tech advancements–from the availability of biometric data to self-driving vehicles–into their work.
DHS Science & Technology hosts several working groups dedicated to first responders–understanding their needs, providing technical assistance, and developing new technologies and strategies. But one thing they’ve heard constantly from first responders participating in these groups, says Kristen Heist, product experience director at Continuum, was frustration over the fact that all of the new tools and technologies were being developed separately from each other. “First responders were constantly telling us that that they felt like Christmas trees or charm bracelets, dangling all of these one-off solutions that didn’t necessarily work together,” Heist tells Fast Company.
“What we’re trying to do with The Future of First Response–why we set it up as a vision project–is to create a real blueprint for how an ecosystem of solutions could work together,” Heist says. “Once that vision is designed, separate companies could go and work on pieces of that vision.” The collaboration of government, tech development (through PNNL) and user-centered design (from Continuum) will be the key to rolling out the visions for police, fire departments, and paramedics, which were conceived over a year of workshops from 2015 to 2016; the products and strategies will be released over the next 15 or so years.
The innovations packaged into The Future of First Response range from technical to more data-driven. For police, for instance, a base-layer shirt acts as a protective layer, but also contains sensors that track the health and whereabouts of the officer wearing it. “What DHS and PNNL wanted to do to get this vision off the ground was to bring in industry partners that were working in analogous categories,” Heist says. So to bring the base-layer shirts to market, they’ll be partnering with athletic gear companies already playing with tracking technology and looking to get into more protective gear. For the augmented reality glasses, designed to give police hands-free access to information about their environment, the Future of First Response teams are looking into partnering with manufacturers developing similar devices for oil industry workers.
One innovation that’s already rolling out to police forces came about from a collaboration with someone who attended one of the workshops and had experience running a series of companies that did background research. He developed FirstTwo, a software platform and app that pulls up data on the neighborhood and residents that officers are about to encounter, once they enter their destination address. “So now, they know a little more going in, whereas before, they often didn’t know what they were going to walk into,” Heist says.
But given how personal-data heavy many of the innovations in The Future of First Response vision are–from suspect bracelets that officers slap on arrestees to track their health signs and any movements, to a body camera embedded in police badges, to cuffs that paramedics wear to record all calls and interactions–the players involved in developing the first-response ecosystems have had to toe a careful line. “There’s been obvious public concern about things like body cameras,” Heist says. The use of recording devices in policing has long been a concern–while law enforcement departments maintain that they’re used to keep police accountable, the unevenness with which footage is either withheld or released has given rise to the perception that officers are using cameras for their own benefit, not for the good of the public. Developing a more transparent and consistent system for handling the footage and data collected by these devices will be a crucial part of rolling out these more tech-driven first-responder systems.
Ultimately, the innovative ecosystems envisioned as The Future of First Response should help police, firefighters, and paramedics better do their jobs. While police officers were skeptical about integrating self-driving vehicles into their work, doubting automatic cars’ ability to respond to sudden commands in the same way as a human driver, paramedics immediately saw the value, understanding that if they didn’t have to drive, they prepare more thoroughly to assist the patient en route. “So instead of having to focus on steering around other cars, they can focus on who is the patient they’re about to see, what kind of devices they need to bring onto the scene, and how to prepare themselves,” Heist says.
“In order for first responders to be successful, they need to be human,” she adds. “The idea behind the Future of First Response is to help make them better at their craft by using technology to remove all the barriers–like driving, or using multiple devices to field data and calls–that make it harder for them to do their jobs.”
This probably isn’t what Alexander Ljung had in mind for his company’s 10-year anniversary. But when Ljung, the company’s CEO, and cofounder Eric Walforss launched SoundCloud in 2007, the world was a very different place. The traditional music industry was only in mid-collapse, the iPhone had just been born, and streaming music was still an academic pipe dream. Venture capital flowed freely—often in obscene gobs—to the best ideas in tech. And Ljung and Walforrs’s idea—a user-generated social audio platform for musicians and DJs—was undeniably good. Its popularity (not to mention its cultural cache) exploded accordingly.
Fast-forward a decade and it’s hard not to wince. On Thursday afternoon, as news of massive layoffs ricocheted around the world, SoundCloud employees in London mourned together at a nearby pub. In San Francisco, workers reportedly found out the news online before an official announcement could be made: Both the London and San Francisco offices of SoundCloud will be shuttered, leaving only its Berlin and New York offices. Altogether, the company laid off a staggering 40% of its staff, with 173 employees let go across multiple departments.
The dramatic downsizing comes after an especially challenging two years for SoundCloud. Since launching in 2007, the company has become a major force in the online music ecosystem—it’s often the default player for music publications hyping new songs and high-profile artists like Chance the Rapper and Kanye West have long maintained an active presence on the platform (although neither artist has posted anything in a few months). By mid-2015, SoundCloud hit a total of 4.9 billion streams for the first half of that year (an 88% percent increase over the same period in 2014). The company hasn’t shared streaming volume data since then, but last year it claimed to have 175 million monthly listeners. By comparison, Spotify boasts 140 million active listeners.
Despite its popularity and street cred among creatives, SoundCloud has struggled to turn itself into an actual business. Its monetization efforts, which take the form of advertising, premium tools for artists and, most recently, a paid subscription service, were all slow to come to fruition. And by the time its SoundCloud Go subscription tier launched early last year, the music subscription market—led by Spotify and Apple—was already exploding and growing more competitive by the quarter.
SoundCloud has apparently struggled to attract subscribers (the company doesn’t share numbers), judging from how quickly it started offering promotional discounts on its $10-per-month tier—and then proceeded to announce a $5-per-month medium tier with fewer features.
The streaming music business operates on razor-thin margins and is extremely challenging, but SoundCloud finds itself in a particularly tricky position. In recent years, the money-losing company reportedly held acquisition talks with Twitter and Spotify, both of which fell through. In the meantime, its financial struggles have continued. Earlier this year, it posted a $52 million loss for the year 2015, but vowed to turn things around with revenue from its new subscription tiers. In January, Ljung projected 137% growth in revenue this year.
Yesterday, he wrote in a blog post that the company has more than doubled its revenue in the last year. The company raised a $70 million debt round in in March to stay afloat while it sought a reported $100 million in additional investment. It has yet to secure that investment and is once again rumored to be looking for a buyer. This time, French music service Deezer is rumored to be interested.
In addition to the London and San Francisco layoffs, SoundCloud also reportedly made deep cuts at its New York office. According to former employee Patrick Ellis on Twitter, “all of New York engineering” was let go, along with “the entire payments and subscription team.” Further details about which departments were hit the hardest are still emerging. A company spokesman confirmed that the cuts affect “all levels and teams,” but wouldn’t clarify further. A multi-city 10-year anniversary staff party that SoundCloud was supposed to host this week has been abruptly canceled, including parties scheduled for today in Berlin and London, multiple sources tell Fast Company.
Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody
So what does this consolidation mean for SoundCloud? In the short term, it obviously makes it even harder for the company to operate, build out its product, and compete. And even though Ljung’s blog post frames the cuts as a way to accelerate the company’s “path to profitability and [stay] in control of SoundCloud’s independent future,” it’s hard to imagine that an acquisition is not on the horizon.
As drastic as the cost savings of laying off 173 people may be, streaming music is still an incredibly difficult business for almost any company. And if Ellis’s claims about departures on the monetization side are true, it’s difficult to envision any dramatic growth in subscription revenue for SoundCloud. Even if subscriptions did grow, profits are still difficult to achieve thanks to the enormous cost of licensing music from all the major labels. Not even more established players like Spotify or Pandora have managed to turn an enduring profit.
The most likely scenario, as many in the industry have long assumed, still seems to be an acquisition. Indeed, deep cuts—especially on the monetization side—would make a lot more sense if a more established organization was poised to take over the company. Still, this type of consolidation tends to come after an acquisition, suggesting that something more desperate and urgent may be at play. The downsizing may have been necessary to secure an investment, court a buyer, or simply stave off financial catastrophe. Either way, it was abrupt.
Whatever’s on the horizon for SoundCloud, don’t expect the news cycle to stay quiet for long. The clock, perhaps now more than ever, is ticking.
Welcome back for installment number eight! Just a reminder about what this is: My colleagues and I have taken it upon ourselves to curate the best new tracks that dropped this week–the point being to save you time scrolling through Apple Music or Spotify for fresh music, and to make you more productive. Just a heads up I will be out next week, so there will be no playlist updated until I am back! See you in two weeks, playlisters.
Track 1. Haim – “Kept Me Crying”
Today we are championing the sibling trio of musicians–no, not Hanson, or the Bee Gees or the Jonas Brothers! We’re talking about Haim. The Haim sisters have released their sophomore album Something To Tell You, which has this booming feel throughout that can only be described as that arena sound we all know and love from the early years of rock, complete with exploding drum beats and guitar solos. Example: “Kept Me Crying.”
Track 2. 21 Savage – “Dead People”
Atlanta rapper 21 Savage has been known for his style of trap music and hi slurred-sounding flow, i.e. “mumble rap.” On this new record Issa Album, 21 Savage has stepped outside his comfort zone with some singing. Albeit rap-singing, it still has a decent melody. The track “Dead People” is what I’m recommending to bridge between the older songs in Mr. Savage’s catalog and this newer, lighter pop sound he’s packaged on this record.
Track 3. Leikeli47 – “Miss Me”
Want to know the secret to the perfect work/life balance? A Mask. Masked musicians tend to be more dramatic in separating their stage personas from their personal lives. These artists want you to judge the music and nothing more. In the same vein of Slipknot, Pussy Riot, Lighting Bolt, Daft Punk, and MF Doom, I want you to start thinking of this masked musician as well. Rapper Leikeli47 has delivered her new jam “Miss Me,” and it’s a real gift for the playlist. Need proof? Check out these lyrics:
Charged up like a Tesla
Out here mad stuck like a Mexican wrestler
This a gift from God, baby, I’m just a messenger
Track 4. Mura Masa & Bonzai – “Nuggets”
WARNING: Love is addictive–as is this new song from producer Mura Masa and vocalist Bonzai. The track leads with a PSA of sorts detailing the chemical reactions love can create and the algorithms we’ve created to achieve it. Welcome to summer, aka “Swipe Right Season.”
Track 5. Joywave – “Going To A Place”
Rock outfit Joywave’s upcoming album Content is due at the end of July, but they’ve been releasing singles over the past couple of weeks. Today, they’ve debuted “Going To A Place,” a nice, subtle indie rock track that’s the perfect ending to this week’s playlist. The main thing I always love about Joywave’s songs is the programming and keys they layer on top of their tracks. I recommend checking out Joywave’s 2016 album SWISH for a fun 30-minute “layered” track.
Bonus Track. Jay Z & Blue Ivy – “Blue’s Freestyle/We Family”
This morning, Jay Z put out his Tidal exclusive 4:44 on Apple Music, and with that move came bonus tracks–one of which being a freestyle by his daughter Blue Ivy. There’s no official stream of the item at the time of this posting, but the track features the young rapper just mumbling gibberish over a beat, and it is adorable.
This was one of my favorite reactions on Twitter last night.
Few in the tech world understand the concerns of the hearing impaired as well as KR Liu. For two decades, she’s worked in sales and marketing for consumer electronics companies including Speck, Pebble, and now the San Francisco-based wireless earbud maker Doppler Labs. She also has severe hearing loss, has worn hearing aids for nearly four decades, and serves as an advocate for organizations like the Hearing Loss Association of America and World Wide Hearing.
Liu combines both passions in her latest effort: advising U.S. lawmakers on new legislation that would, for the first time, open up the hearing aid market to companies such as Doppler Labs. The Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017, which is expected to pass both houses of the U.S. Congress by the end of July, would allow any consumer electronics company to sell hearing aids without prescriptions and with only minimal regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.
KR Liu [Photo: courtesy of Doppler Labs]For a Congress embroiled in a bitter battle over health care reform, the legislation is a refreshing bipartisan effort, led by Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Republican Chuck Grassley in the Senate and Democrat Joseph Kennedy and Republican Marsha Blackburn in the House. (Though the bipartisanship of their efforts has recently come under attack from the conservative nonprofit Frontiers of Freedom.) Their goal: encourage new competition and innovation in a market that has been dominated by a handful of specialized companies. Their efforts could catalyze a sea change in the cost and design of devices for people with mild and moderate hearing loss.
At $10,000, Liu’s high-end hearing aids, made by Minnesota’s Starkey Hearing Technologies, are an extreme example of how expensive such devices can get. But even the average price for hearing aids in the U.S.—$4,700 a pair—is overwhelming in a country where very few private or public health insurance programs cover the devices. “People shouldn’t have to suffer because of cost or how [their device] looks,” says Liu. By easing access and encouraging innovation, Liu looks forward to a day when hearing aids are more accepted, even fashionable. “I want [hearing aids] to be as cool as glasses. I want people to have 20 pairs,” she says. “I want Alexander McQueen to make one.”
There’s a long way to go—in terms of technology and attitudes—before hearing aids get the runway treatment, but the process will likely start soon. The U.S. House and Senate have attached their bills to must-pass FDA funding legislation that could clear Congress by the end of July. And consumer electronics companies are ready to rush in. Liu and representatives from audio makers such as Bose, Etymotic Research, RCA, and Sennheiser have lobbied and in some cases consulted with lawmakers on the bill’s language. “We have a broad number of companies large and small that have been very interested in the development of [over-the-counter hearing aids],” says Tiffany Moore, VP of government affairs for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the tech industry group that puts on the CES show every January.
It’s no wonder: 48 million Americans (or 20% of the population) have hearing loss in at least one ear, but just 14% of them have hearing aids—leaving a potentially huge untapped market. The battle for it has already begun.
Doppler Labs’ Here One buds in white
Opening The Floodgates
One of the first over-the-counter products to hit the market will likely be a twist on Doppler’s $300 Here One buds, which launched in February. The combination wireless earbuds and smart device is able to take in ambient sound through microphones, then filter out background noises and enhance speech—doing essentially what a hearing aid does. Liu joined the company in 2015 with a goal of bringing this kind of technology to people with hearing impairment. “We really believe that accessibility and reaching those consumers is important,” she says, “but we haven’t been able to [reach them] due to regulation.”
Doppler aims to mainstream hearing assistance with wireless earbud capabilities and hip marketing.
Under existing laws, hearing-aid manufacturers have to be certified by the FDA as medical device makers. After that, they can avoid the hassle of getting FDA approval for individual devices as long as their products are “substantially equivalent to other hearing aids out there in the market,” says Dianne Van Tassel, an audiologist and senior scientist at Bose who also consulted with Congress on the new legislation. It’s a requirement that doesn’t exactly encourage innovation.
Gadgets such as Doppler’s Here One and Bose’s similarly audio-enhancing Hearphones, meanwhile, are classified as personal sound amplification products, or PSAPs, which prohibits them from being marketed as helpful to people with hearing impairments. It’s a distinction that many advocates view as arbitrary. “Even the FDA acknowledges that you could have two identical devices,” says Van Tassel, one called a hearing aid and the other a PSAP. Some companies have dubbed their products with the slightly less awkward moniker “hearables”—a riff on fitness trackers’ “wearables.” (German startup Bragi includes fitness-tracking sensors in its wireless earbuds.)
Even under these restrictions, PSAPs are growing quickly. According to a new report from the CTA, some $225 million worth of PSAP devices will be sold in 2017—a 40% increase from last year. And CTA expects the category to grow another 50% in 2018, due to greater awareness that comes with the new legislation.
Not every PSAP makes for an appropriate hearing aid—yet. Traditional aids feature specialized technology foreign to most consumer electronics companies, especially in power efficiency. The Starkey Halo 2 aids that Liu wears, for instance, are designed to run for a week at 16 hours a day, including three hours of wireless audio streaming from a smartphone. During that time, they monitor 24 audio frequency ranges every six milliseconds, selecting the right algorithm to apply to each. Doppler’s Here One buds currently last just two to three hours before they need a recharge. “What we’re doing is giving people who need help in certain situations access to technology that can help them,” says Liu. “That’s the first step.”
The situation is similar with Doppler’s smaller competitor, Australian company Nuheara. Its $300 IQbuds, which do essentially the same thing as Here One, run four to eight hours per charge. “Does that mean [people with hearing loss are] going to want to wear IQbuds all the time like they wear a hearing aid?” asks Nuheara’s cofounder David Cannington, who’s stationed in the Bay Area. “Probably not.” But Cannington believes there’s a market for entry-level hearing aids that provide part-time help in challenging situations.
Nuheara’s IQbuds are similar to Doppler’s product, though perhaps not as fashionable.
With its size and name recognition, the Massachusetts-based Bose is in the best position to make hearing aids a mainstream consumer product. The company’s $500 Hearphones, which quietly launched last year, also help users reduce sounds and amplify conversations. (Doppler is suing Bose for trademark infringement, claiming “Hearphones” sounds too much like Doppler’s Here One buds.) The device is oddly conspicuous, though, consisting of a neckband that holds the electronics and two wired earbuds. Given how often Van Tassel mentions wireless earbuds in our conversation, it seems likely that Bose will progress to more compact products aimed at the over-the-counter market. Also telling: Van Tassel spent six years as director of advanced research at Starkey.
And then there’s Apple. The company’s wireless AirPods have already made it acceptable to have something sticking out of your ears (despite jokes about how easy they are to lose). Apple hasn’t said anything about adding hearing assistance, but the company prides itself on offering accessibility technology to users. If tastemaker Apple were to add speech enhancement to future AirPods, the stigma of hearing aids might go away instantly.
Starkey’s Halo 2 hearing technology [Photo: courtesy of Starkey]
The Battle For Moderates
If you’re over 40 years old, there’s a good chance you have mild hearing loss, or difficulty making out conversations in crowded places. And if you go to a lot of rock concerts, shoot guns, or work around noisy machinery, you may get the condition a decade or more earlier. “I played drums for 20 years. I got my hearing tested. It was far from perfect,” says Doppler’s 30-year-old CEO Noah Kraft.
At 46, I have borderline mild hearing loss for high frequencies (sounds like the letters “f,” “k,” and “th”), according to a test administered by Kyle Acker, an audiologist and director of regional sales for Starkey. “With this type of loss, are you noticing it? Probably not,” says Acker. “Maybe in noise you have a little bit of challenge.” He fitted me with the same Halo 2 model that Doppler’s Liu wears. It was shocking at first to pick up high-pitched sounds I’d forgotten exist, such as the clicking of my keyboard, the sound of my hand brushing over a couch pillow, and the crispness in people’s voices (especially in bars and restaurants).
Starkey’s Halo 2 hearing aids, costing up to $10,000.
The downsides include a slightly unnatural sound in other frequencies, the funky feeling of having the earpiece portion shoved down my ear canal, and frankly, my apprehension of being perceived as an old geezer. (Although, with all but a thin, clear tube tucked behind my ears, no one noticed the devices.) Had I severe hearing loss like Liu, I’d consider the Halos a godsend, but I still might not be able to scrape the money together for a pair. It’s no wonder that most people with mild hearing loss don’t get, or even think about, hearing aids.
Doppler and Nuheara (and likely Bose) are betting that people with mild impairments will spring for much cheaper consumer electronics devices—ones that announce their presence as accessories. (Consider how giant, colorful headphones have become a fashion statement.) In my tests, I found both Here One buds and IQbuds helpful—especially for enhancing conversations. Were it not for the crummy battery life, I would have bought the Here One, whose design I prefer.
Starkey president Brandon Sawalich—the current chairman of the board of the Hearing Industries Association, which includes the major hearing aid makers—is willing to go along with this idea, to an extent. “Our position at HIA is [that over-the- counter devices should] focus on the mild hearing loss,” he says. “You have over 40 million people with hearing loss. Three-fourths of hearing loss is in the mild category, and it has less than 10% market penetration.”
He draws the line, though, at selling OTC devices to individuals with moderate hearing loss—people who have trouble making out conversations in normal environments, not just places like crowded bars. They are the main target of this new legislation, however. “If you didn’t include moderate hearing loss, then it would negate the benefit for senior consumers,” says the CTA’s Moore. “Almost half of them wouldn’t be able to benefit from the new category of over-the-counter devices.”
The Bose Hearphones are far from subtle looking.
At the heart of this debate is the question of whether a hearing aid can be a plug-and-play device. “A hearing aid is a tiny computer that is customized to you because each ear is different [and] every hearing loss is different,” Sawalich explains. To customize a hearing aid—a process called fitting—an audiologist traditionally tests a person’s ability to hear different frequencies, at different volumes, in each ear. The audiologist uses the resulting audiogram (the aural equivalent of an eyeglasses prescription) to tune each aid to a patient’s ear. That typically means you can’t get a hearing aid from any of the big manufacturers without a bundled service program—and it’s nearly impossible to tell how much you’re paying for the device versus the doctor.
Advocates for over-the-counter hearing aids say the new legislation could substantially bring down costs by encouraging a DIY approach to fitting. “The over-the-counter hearing aid has to, by definition in the bill, include tools, tests, or software that allow the user to control it and customize it to their own needs,” says Van Tassel.
Hearing aid maker Sound World Solutions already sells its devices directly to consumers online, no professional audiogram or fitting needed (something the FDA recently made easier to do). Its hearing aid costs $449 each, or $735 per pair. Instead of an audiologist, SWS relies on a smartphone app to help users adjust their hearing aids. “Our devices are handled by consumers directly,” says Shawn Stahmer, the company’s VP of business development, “and they are doing just fine.”
SWS sells a pair of hearing aids for $735.
Over-the-counter devices would rely on similar methods for customization. Doppler already has an app that personalizes its Here One buds using a simplified version of the hearing test Starkey gave me. The Nuheara and Bose apps lack a hearing test but do allow manual adjustments. “There is so much opportunity for innovation,” says Van Tassel. “[A customization app] can run all the way from several different presets that people choose from . . . to a couple of simple little controls that under the hood are very complex, that gets them quickly to the settings that are appropriate for their hearing.”
Sawalich is skeptical of this approach. “Somebody’s going to buy [a device] over-the-counter and stick it in their ear, and they’re going to be happy?” he asks. “When you’re asking the hearing impaired to self-diagnose and self-treat without any proper studies or science behind this, this is not what’s best for the patient,” he says. If the new legislation passes, as it likely will, there could soon be lots of case studies showing whether or not DIY fittings work.
Blurred Lines
By setting their sights on users with both mild and moderate hearing loss, Doppler, Bose, and other companies are inexorably blurring the line between professional-grade devices and lifestyle products. Even Kyle Acker of Starkey acknowledges that hearing aids are converging with earbuds and headphones. The new Dash Pro wireless earbuds that his company helped develop with Bragi have both fitness-tracking capabilities and a “clear audio” function that allows users to either block or let through outside sounds. Acker says he imagines a day when customers can say, “I have a hearable and I have hearing loss. So I’m going to take my hearable to my audiologist, and maybe they can make it amplify.” If and when that happens, “hearing aid” may well become simply one of the many features built into mainstream earbuds or headphones.
Liu has a slightly more personal vision of the future. She says that one day she hopes to look around a cafe and realize that “you’re wearing a pair, you’re wearing a pair, you’re wearing a pair. And no one cares if I have hearing issues!”
For something that’s become so incredibly efficient, online dating can still be arduous: All that swiping, the mismatches, figuring out what to say, dodging weirdos—not to mention the awkwardness of an underwhelming first date. What if you could just cruise through the massive sea of randos and head straight to the people that look like your biggest celebrity crushes?
Well, now you can. Badoo, a U.K.-based dating app with 60 million global users, recently launched a “lookalike” feature that lets you search for people based on who they happen to resemble. That includes celebrities (there are over 600 alleged Ryan Gosling lookalikes on Badoo), your office crush, or whoever else; the app lets you upload photos of whoever you want in order to find lookalikes. Then, using image recognition technology, Badoo will do its best to show you similar-looking faces.
Badoo’s image-matching tech identifies 160 different facial features like chin size, eye brows, hair color, and the distance between one’s eyes, extracting those details and assigning a unique combination of numbers to each face. The system then uses these numbers to find the best matches among the many millions of images on Badoo.
The site comes preloaded with several recognizable faces to choose from. You can search for people who look like Justin Bieber or Jessica Alba, if that’s what suits your fancy. Or you can curiously scroll through a grid of people who have the unfortunate distinction of kind of resembling Donald Trump, which is an option for some reason.
In addition to letting you upload photos of anyone, Badoo also connects to your Facebook account so you can find people who look like your friends, colleagues, family members, and those random people from high school who sometimes post inspirational quotes.
Depending on your perspective, this is either a cool innovation or incredibly creepy. But considering all the weird, unpleasant crap that goes on in dating apps every day, how bad could it be? At the same time, I’d hate to meet my future wife on a dating site because she uploaded a picture of her high school sweetheart and decided I was the next best thing.
After Travis Kalanick’s departure from Uber last month, the ride-hailing company has been moving fast to overhaul its culture. It won’t be easy, and among all those efforts, perhaps the most challenging will be replacing its CEO. Uber’s HR chief Liane Hornsey told Fast Company last week that while there’s already a shortlist, “we’d rather get the very, very best person who can move Uber to its next phase rather than be fast.”
The company seems to understand that it needs a leader with a dramatically different style and skill set than Kalanick’s, but so far hasn’t dropped many clues as to what that might include. In the meantime, decades of personality science might be able to point Uber’s search team in the right direction.
As years of research and hundreds of studies show, who you are determines how you lead. And while people with antisocial, nonconformist, and impulsive tendencies make for both great delinquents and great entrepreneurs (from a personality perspective, these types are rather similar), they often lack the emotional intelligence (EQ), empathy, and cool-headedness to lead with stability and order.
Unsurprisingly, most entrepreneurs are fairly unemployable by traditional standards, which is why they resort to starting their own businesses. But the tiny proportion who succeed in launching innovative companies are often better off when they let more experienced, corporate, and boring types run them.
That said, Uber’s board should remember that everybody has a “dark side,” the undesirable or counterproductive personality traits that derail leaders and can only be managed, never eliminated. Kalanick, however talented, is no exception to that rule, and nor will his replacement be.
Still, given the company’s issues, Uber needs a CEO whose personality tilts in the opposite direction from Kalanick’s. Mother Theresa is dead and the Dalai Lama is probably too busy, but whoever Uber considers should be closer to them than Kalanick in terms of EQ, empathy, and altruism.
Emotional Intelligence
EQ has been defined in many ways, but it essentially just signals good people skills—something Uber’s next CEO will need in spades. Not only do leaders with high EQ have reputations for being rewarding to deal with, they also inject stability and harmony into their teams and organizations. This might mean finding someone more managerial- than entrepreneurial-minded to fill Kalanick’s shoes. Self-made billionaires aren’t known for being highly emotionally intelligent.
Empathy
Empathy is the ability to consider other people’s perspectives and feel their suffering. Leaders with a higher capacity for empathy are more Other-oriented and more likely to build inclusive and engaged cultures in their organizations—which typically means more transparency and less infighting. Empathetic leaders are also more likely to treat others well, and not just in public.
Altruism is a very interesting trait among disruptive entrepreneurs. On the one hand, most innovators are motivated by the desire to improve the status quo and bring progress to the world. Ideally, entrepreneurship is about bridging the gap between demand and supply—and in the process, delivering something of real value that improves peoples’ lives (and not at the expense of others’). That said, among serial entrepreneurs, this desire often coexists with narcissistic and antisocial tendencies—which contributes to some founders’ self-centered reputations.
In looking for a new CEO, Uber doesn’t need to hire someone who sees themselves strictly as a do-gooder, though; altruistic business leaders persuade both employees and the public that their organizations can be forces for good. (Google’s former mantra, “Don’t be evil,” reflects an attempt to do that.)
The good news for Uber is that it should actually be pretty easy to work out whether its next CEO fits this profile: The company’s search team could just inspect his or her Uber ratings.
After the notorious video of Kalanick sparring with an Uber driver surfaced earlier this year, it’s not hard to guess his own rating would be quite low. By comparison, anyone with a score of 4.9 or above might be safely expected to be gentle, polite, and considerate. After all, what Uber needs most right now is a smooth, uneventful ride.
I was watching a private-equity exec speak, but it wasn’t easy—imagine following a ping-pong ball with your eyes as it bounced back and forth for three minutes straight.
When he finally stopped, I asked him, “Why do you pace?”
“Pacing helps me control my anxiety,” he said. “And it really works! As long as I keep moving, I feel good.”
While feeling good is important, if you’re a constant (or even occasional) pacer, you might be undercutting the impact of your talk. It’s true that moving around can add some energy to your presentation and make things feel looser and more dynamic. But moving and gesturing strategically isn’t the same as just pacing back and forth. Here are four downsides to that habit that you’ll want to avoid.
You Lose The Power Of The Pause
When you pace too much, you’ll lose out on the opportunity to use your movement to punctuate what you’re saying. In writing, you use spacing to separate paragraphs on a page, and punctuation to build pauses into a sentence. Movement can do the same thing when you speak.
For example, suppose you said, “We have to move in new directions. We have to innovate.” If you stood still and delivered those two lines non-stop, they’d land with little impact. If added a short pause between the sentences yet remained still the whole time, you’d have a bit more impact. But if you paused and also moved between delivering the first line and the second, you’d have the most impact.
In other words, movement really amplifies the power of the pause. But if you’re constantly pacing, you’re letting your anxiety override these opportunities.
Your Audience Focuses On Your Body, Not Your Message
Keeping the audience’s attention is a top challenge for any speaker. You may not relish that spotlight feeling, and pacing might relieve some of that stress. By striding back and forth, you can tune out a bit so you feel a little less under the microscope.
However, this approach usually backfires. You might feel a little less anxious, but your audience will begin tuning into you even more, but not for the right reasons. They’ll begin diverting their attention away from your message and start focusing on your physical presence. Why? Because our brains are wired to focus our eyesight on movement.
I once worked with a client who was originally from what was once called Rhodesia (the state became modern-day Zimbabwe in 1979). He told me that when he was younger, his father would give him a single arrow and send him off to hunt. He went on to become a military sniper. When I asked his secret to success, he told me, “Whether you are a hunter or a sniper, the key is to be absolutely still. Movement is a giveaway that could cost you your dinner—or worse, your life.”
So while you shouldn’t stand stock-still when you speak, it’s important to remember that wherever you move, your audience’s eyes will follow you. They can’t help it! Move too much, and they’ll focus on watching you, rather than listening to what you’re saying.
You Flatten Your Delivery
When you were in kindergarten, you might’ve played some version of a game where you all held hands and sang “Ring Around the Roses” or “London Bridges” (here in Canada it was “Frère Jacques”). Everyone sang in sync with each other and moved around the room in a way that matched your singing cadence.
You’ve come a long way since kindergarten, but you’ve likely held onto that habit of connecting your speaking rhythm to your stepping rhythm. So when you pace, you’re letting your movement dictate your speaking patterns. You may not get into a singsong rhythm, but you’ll probably adopt a redundant tone and inflections. Pacing reduces your delivery bandwidth.
You Might Be Creating Sight-Line Issues
Finally, as a practical matter, pacing often causes line-of-sight issues for certain audience members. While that will depend on the shape of the room, the last thing you want to do is move around so much that some people need to lean over or crane their necks to see you—or just can’t see you at all. In general, the rule is, “If you can’t see me, I can’t see you.” So before you start your presentation, make a mental note of the sight lines in the space, and decide how and whether you’ll want to move around.
Whether you’re trying to relieve your anxiety or make a statement, pacing is the wrong strategy to deploy. That doesn’t mean standing in one spot the whole time, of course, but it does mean moving and gesturing a little more thoughtfully—and possibly just less altogether.
Now, as part of a seasonal sale on VR content–the “Summer of Rift“–Oculus is once again bidding to boost the size of its user base by dropping the cost of a Rift/Touch combo to $398, $100 lower than a less-powerful Sony PlayStation VR, and $400 less than HTC’s Vive. The sale officially lasts for six weeks, starting today, though in a new interview, Rubin wouldn’t definitively confirm to Fast Company whether the price would go back up at the end of the promotion.
It’s an open question whether the price drop will indeed attract hordes of new users.
“The summertime is a traditional slow season for a lot of retailers, so I’m not surprised to see sales and promotions this time of year,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau, “to make sure people have an opportunity to get a good deal” on something they may have been wanting to buy.
Adds Blau, “Does it change the situation for VR overall? I don’t think so. I think it’s just a sale.”
But to Rubin, the idea is to leverage the maturity of the Rift content library, which now has 500 total titles, 200 of which are geared for the Touch. It’s at “the point where there’s something for everybody, and multiple things for everybody,” he says.
In short, Rubin is saying, while high-end VR systems like the Rift, the Vive, and the PlayStation VR have seen modest growth since hitting the market last year, a big part of that has been the dearth of content. “In the first year, people said, you don’t have millions of units, [so] isn’t that a failure?” Rubin says. “The opposite is true. If millions had bought the hardware, the content library wouldn’t have been there, and the [machines] would have ended up in closets.”
Earlier this year, a report from SuperData Research suggested that Oculus had sold around 300,000 Rifts, while HTC had moved around half a million Vives. Yet data last month from VRFLG.net found that only about 1% of Vive owners were using their systems. There isn’t much to suggest that usage among Rift owners is significantly higher, though Rubin argued that “usage numbers are very strong for us.” Still, it’s likely that many VR systems, including Rifts, have ended up closets, despite growing libraries.
By selling the Rift and Touch for $398, Oculus is clearly hoping to bring in a slew of new users–and, of course, sell them lots of content in the coming months and years. While it’s not known how much it costs to produce the Rift, it’s likely that at $398, the Rift/Touch bundle is seen internally as a loss leader. Asked about that, Rubin says that making money on hardware has never been the goal of Oculus, and by extension, Facebook.
“The goal is the ecosystem,” Rubin says, “and we have to make investment to get there. I can say that this is fully in line with our goals and our long-term strategy.”
That, of course, makes sense for Facebook, which makes most of its money from advertising, and whose business is built almost entirely on software.
In the meantime, even as Oculus has returned to the idea that by lowering the cost of the Rift it can kickstart its ecosystem, Blau noted that the company has frequently tried to caution observers about the growth of VR. “Zuckerberg and Oculus have said repeatedly that it’s going to take years to build the ecosystem,” Blau says, “and they continue to repeat that theme.”
Even with the new price drop, Oculus certainly isn’t expecting millions of people to suddenly buy Rifts. But it thinks that those who do take one home will be pleased with all they can do with their new system. That’s why Oculus is pushing the growth of its library, and Rubin argued that it’s now big enough that it has both the kind of high-quality games that can attract, and keep, hard-core VR enthusiasts, as well as the kinds of more niche titles that will appeal to casual users.
The hope is that by bringing in a significant number of new users this summer, Oculus can boost the size of the content-buying user base, and give developers even more motivation to build new VR content for the Rift. Already, Rubin argued, anecdotal evidence suggests that users are more excited about titles coming out for the Rift than for other platforms–and as a result, “higher quality content comes out more frequently.”
To Blau, though, it’s about the need for quality titles. “It’s not about the number of titles,” he says. “It’s about the number of great titles,” not to mention the fact that the often hefty cost of Rift-compatible PCs and the need for a room with lots of open space can be impediments to adoption of high-end VR.
For his part, Rubin characterized the temporary $200 price drop as “experimenting, and seeing what happens, and we’ll have to decide what to do going forward. Our goal is to bring a large group of new users into the ecosystem” and see if the broad content library keeps them around.
Asked if he was saying that the price might stay at $398 after six weeks, Rubin demurred. “I’m not ruling anything out,” he says. “But I don’t want to encourage people to think it won’t go [back] up.”
When United Nations member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) two years ago, they were setting down a consensus view on the future of nations. The SDGs represent humanity’s best aspirations for national improvement, from curbing hunger and disease to reducing inequality and responding to climate change. And, in their completeness and breadth, the SDGs suggest that countries find a more harmonious balance between industry and economy on one side of the ledger, and environment and social factors on the other.
By that difficult-to-reach yardstick, nowhere is perfect (including the U.S.). Even the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark)–so often at the top of quality-of-life ranking exercises–fall down in some areas of the SDGs, according to a new report. By traditional development measures–including poverty and life expectancy–they do very well. But, judged by their impacts on the environment and other countries, their negatives are significant as well: These societies consume high amounts of resources and produce high amounts of harmful waste, like electronic by-products.
The report, now in its second year (we wrote about the first report here), ranks countries by their progress on the goals. It comes from the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which supports the implementation of the goals, and Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German foundation. Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned development economist, oversaw the research. Sachs is one of several academics looking to expand understanding of national performance beyond GDP and other economic measures to include data on well-being, lifestyle, and social services.
This year, SDSN added a new element to its scoring. As well as ranking 157 countries on their within-borders performance (e.g., on education, infrastructure, and clean water standards), it also measures what it calls “spillover effects,” which make up 9 of the 99 indicators, or 10% of the overall score. That includes a country’s pollution, financial secrecy, and weapons sales–all of which affect the world at large–and aren’t necessarily captured by national statistics.
The SDG and spillover lenses puts the U.S. in a particularly lowly spot: 42nd place. Among the world’s most prosperous countries, only Chile, Israel, Mexico, and Turkey are behind us in the rankings. On a dashboard of the 17 SDGs, we have eight red marks (representing significant “challenges”), along with the likes of India, Mexico, and Turkey.
“The U.S. does well on the economy, of course,” Guido Schmidt-Traub, SDSN’s executive director, tells Fast Company, “but it faces major social challenges, with high inequality, high racial violence, gun violence, and a higher prison population. It also has significant spillover effects on the environment.”
“Development in the U.S. has been imbalanced,” Schmidt-Traub says. “It’s been heavily focused on the economy, but it’s lagging in the social and environmental dimensions. The U.S., based on this data, is not a good model for other countries, although many countries are looking to the U.S. as a model.”
Interestingly, high-income countries, with good overall scores, often do worst on the “spillover effects”–where the actions of one country negatively impact others. “The bottom 20 performers on spillover effects are rich countries, which generally do better than poor countries in the overall ranking,” according to the report. “This suggests that good SDG outcomes are often associated with negative spillover effects.”
For example, Switzerland, ranked eighth overall, scores well for traditional development measures like life expectancy and poverty. But it’s marked down for financial secrecy (it has the world’s worst ranking) and for its consumption-waste patterns. Switzerland has little of its own manufacturing (and associated pollution), but it imports a lot of goods that embody CO2 and nitrogen dioxide.
SDSN wants to incorporate more spillover data in next year’s analysis, potentially adding indicators on financial flows and trade relations, fishery health, and clean water availability–big development issues that also aren’t necessarily captured by national statistics. Schmidt-Traub points to the Panama Papers as an example of how financial secrecy “can have significant adverse impact.” The 11.5 million leaked documents offered a glimpse of offshore wheeling and dealing among the powerful and famous, with dozens of national leaders avoiding taxes, or hiding corrupt money. “These are massive issues and important to developing countries,” he says.
