Women have had to do more with less to get their companies off the ground. Startups with female CEOs get 2.7% of all venture funding, compared to 97% of white men. And the stats are even more discouraging for women of color; for example, black women lead less than 1% of the women-led tech startups in the U.S., receive only 0.2% of venture funding, and have funding rounds averaging $36,000. Compare that to white men’s average raise of $1.3 million.

Related: The Tech Industry’s Missed Opportunity: Funding Black Women Founders 

Increasingly women of color are creating their own innovative and creative funding routes and their own networks, circumventing landmines of sexism, sexual harassment, and prejudice when seeking fundraise.

Many of these programs often do double or triple duty by training women on how to properly pitch and awarding funding for their businesses, while also teaching women to how to be investors and set themselves up to serve on boards (Per Catalyst, women of color currently make up 3% of board seats).

Here are some of the ways black women are creating their own funding opportunities.

Thanks @jen_bonnett & #ATDC for hosting the 2016 #Atlanta #PipelineAngels #Pitch #Summit! #mondaymotivation #motivationmonday #latergram #entrepreneurs #women #socent #womeninvestinginwomen #woc #entrepreneurship

A post shared by Pipeline Angels (@pipelineangels) on Apr 18, 2016 at 8:58am PDT

Crowdfunding For Social Impact For-Profit Businesses

Pipeline Angels is training both investors and inventors. The brainchild of Natalia Oberti Noguera, she aspired to change the face of angel investing and challenge stereotypes around women and money. The company started as a reverse market research project–to build a network of women social entrepreneurs in New York City, and it got to over 1,200 members. The goal is, “To do well while doing good.”

Oberti Noguera, a 2005 graduate of Yale with a BA in comparative literature and economics, had an “a-ha moment” that was the impetus for starting the program when she noticed the growing proliferation of for-profit social venture companies like Honest Tea and Tom’s Shoes. The tipping point was her attendance, and hearing a white male VC at a conference say that he looks for “People like me and people who remind me of me” when deciding whether to invest in a company.

Founders (all women or non-gender conforming people of color) of for-profit social companies pitch to an investor cohort, each investor contributes $5,000, and they decide as a collective which company wins the pitch competition and the funding.

One entrepreneur with successful results is Tanya Van Court, the founder of iSow, formerly GoalSetter. iSow is a platform that gets kids to sign up for goals for holidays, birthdays, and special occasions where gifts are given, save for things that are meaningful while eschewing smaller things, and encourages more mindful purchases. It empowers kids and allows them to use their agency to set a goal and teaches delayed gratification.

Van Court is a veteran in the digital platform space with stints at ESPN3, where she launched their digital platform and online video service; HBO where she launched HBO Now; and Nickelodeon, where she ran the digital preschool business. She also holds two engineering degrees from Stanford, in addition to her years of expertise, but when it came to raise funds for her business, she consistently came up short.

After one unsuccessful pitch too many, and repeatedly hearing some variation of, “When you have more customers, more press, or more traction,” Van Court decided to focus on funding from female-backed funding sources. Applying to three Pipeline Angels cities, and pitching while seven months pregnant, Van Court raised $200,000 for iSow through the program, on her way to securing a total of $850,000 in funding. The majority of funding has come from women and women of color, with only one white male investor. Van Court says “[Pipeline Angels] is a game-changer, and you wish there were more programs out there, because there are great companies that just don’t have a chance to get off the ground, because of lack of early seed capital that they need. Good, beneficial technology is left on the table.”

Happy to have an amazing #EnrichHER event!

A post shared by Dr. Roshawnna Novellus ???????? (@roshawnnanovellus) on Apr 28, 2017 at 1:09pm PDT

Luring Investors Who Understand The Market

The ability to learn, invest, and support women’s ventures in a safe space lures new investors to the tech industry, too. Roshell Rosemond Rinkins, a first-generation Haitian-American and tech industry procurement professional, came to Pipeline Angels with no previous experience and no knowledge of what angel investing entailed. Through working in tech, she was exposed to various founders and opportunities, but didn’t know where to start. Rinkins came to Pipeline Angels with a desire to learn and to help game-changing companies.

Rinkins and her cohort participated in the program’s three learning modules–educational training, mentoring, and practical application. Her cohort funded the innovative feminine products company Saathi, which manufactures a pad that is made of disposable absorbent biodegradable materials. Because Rosemond Rinkins previously worked in procurement at Proctor & Gamble, she was familiar with these products and how they are usually made. “I could grasp the Saathi story and what they were doing, because I was connected to that world, particularly having a mother that was from rural Haiti. I know how transformative these products could be, particularly to impoverished and rural areas in developing and emerging markets.”

EnrichHER provides a way to turn that model on its head to help a company get capital, and also help investors make small donations often more aligned with their budget. Because it will be registered to allow for non-accredited investors to participate, one with as little as $100 can invest. This also makes the investor class accessible to women and people of color. To finish and scale EnrichHER, Novellus is seeking funding to complete SEC compliance work, which is a barrier to entry to platforms of this kind.

These programs don’t only provide funding for black women founders. They also offer support, and the opportunity to grow networks. And because the investor class is often looked to for board seats, the more women of color involved in investing the better the chances for improving board diversity numbers, too. According to the Alliance of Board Diversity, the largest source of board diversity is black men and white women, with a prevalence of recycling the same people for board seats. This is effectively erasure for black women, as they fit in neither of those desired “diverse” profiles.

Training women how to effectively pool their resources, bankroll businesses, and make wise, discerning choices will not only transform their individual financial future, those they fund, and corporate boards, but could change the course of the industry, without any influence from the larger established firms.

Bärí A. Williams (@bariawilliams) is head of business operations, North America, at StubHub. She previously served as lead counsel for Facebook and created their supplier diversity program.

In Ghana, just 15% of the population has access to decent sanitation. In the city of Kumasi, for example, around 40% of the population relies on public toilets, yet there’s just one such toilet for every 1,000 people. Human waste is often left out in the open or funneled into the ocean, where it contaminates the water supply–leading to nearly 20,000 deaths each year due to diarrheal diseases.

Sanitation might be “the dirty industry,” but to Cheryl Hicks, CEO of the Toilet Board Coalition (TBC)–an alliance of companies like Kimberly-Clark and Unilever, and nonprofits like The World Bank and WaterAid, dedicated to providing sanitation worldwide by 2030–it’s “the business opportunity of the decade,” Hicks tells Fast Company. The TBC was founded in 2014, and in January 2016, it launched The Toilet Accelerator as a way to provide business support to emerging sanitation entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The first year of the accelerator focused on the toilets themselves–TBC brought together a small cohort of businesses like Svadha in India, which were working to manufacture toilets at scale. Under the guidance of executives from Kimberly-Clark and Unilever, Svadha was, for instance, able to grow its sales by 200%, but as those toilet manufacturing companies scaled, they hit a bit of a wall: They still didn’t know what to do with the waste itself.

“They were becoming more and more successful at selling toilets, but they had customers coming to them and saying they still had an issue with the waste,” Hicks says.

So for the cohort launched at the beginning of this year, TBC is supporting businesses that are tackling waste in the developing world by employing circular economy principles. In the field of sanitation, a circular economy necessitates thinking of human waste as “resources” that can be recycled and effectively reused.

Van den Beukel, who had a background in small business entrepreneurship, came on board to direct the initiative that would become Safi Sana soon after. He traveled to Accra in 2010 to launch a small pilot, the idea being that they could collect fecal waste from toilets, mix it with organic waste from agricultural operations and food markets, and use an anaerobic digester to convert the waste into biogas that fuels electricity generators; the remaining waste can be turned into compost.

“By partnering with Safi Sana, we’re testing how upcycling of waste can happen in the microcosm of a factory site,” Hicks says. Implementing this model at scale in Ghana, she adds, essentially leapfrogs the waste-management issues currently plaguing more developed countries. If sanitation models can be built out in the developing world with circular economy initiatives already in place, countries like Ghana will be set on a more sustainable path.

Given that the TBC has already supported toilet manufacturing companies in the developing world, and is halfway through setting companies like BioCycle and Safi Sana on their way to scalability, the coalition is already looking ahead to next year’s cohort. The focus then, Hicks says, will likely be on businesses cropping up to fill in critical links of the sanitation supply chain–namely, the collection and transport of the waste itself. It’s one thing to build the toilets and the waste-treatment facilities, but quite another to ensure that the “resources” make the journey between the two. “Our idea is that if we can link all these business models together, they can begin to solve problems for each other and scale even faster,” Hicks says.

Last week, in response to numerous reports of sexual harassment of female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, actor and Sound Ventures investor Ashton Kutcher took to LinkedIn to start a conversation about gender equality in the workplace. He kicked off with a list of questions ranging from, “What are the Rules for dating in the work place? Flirting?” to, “Are there known mentorship programs for female entrepreneurs?”

The backlash was swift and sharp, prompting Kutcher to post a series of tweets (not an apology, per se) in response to statements he’d intended as a prelude to a Facebook Live session. “Hope we can find space to be wrong in the pursuit of getting it right,” he said.

As promised, Kutcher appeared on Facebook Live yesterday with Effie Epstein, a partner and the COO of Sound Ventures, to get that conversation under way. Although Kutcher admitted immediately that he was “genuinely terrified” to be hosting the discussion, he also confessed that writing that LinkedIn post “took all of about a minute and a half to compose” and that his question about dating and flirting in the workplace was the wrong place to start.

What followed wasn’t dramatically better. While Kutcher and Epstein touched on many important issues, their discussion could’ve benefited from Kutcher being less of a charming apologist and both of them doing more homework before broadcasting to over 300,000 people. Here’s a look at what they discussed—or should have, but didn’t.

How Inequality Affects Everyone

To be a responsible venture capital firm, Kutcher pointed out that “if we aren’t addressing [inequality] personally and internally, we are screwing ourselves and a lot of people who don’t deserve to be screwed over.” He’s right. 

According to a study by First Round Capital, having a women on a founding team meant startups outperformed those led by all men by 63%. However, female CEOs get only 2.7% of all venture funding, while women of color get virtually none: 0.2%.

But Kutcher and Epstein lost their focus a bit when it came to talking solutions. By remarking that “80% of this problem is men and can be solved by men,” Kutcher seemed to suggest that the disproportionately male leadership in the business world is on the hook for workplace gender issues, but the truth is that correcting them will take everybody—all genders, races, ages, etc.—working together.

Related:EBay’s First Diversity Chief On How To Make Inclusion Matter To Everyone

Access To Funding

Kutcher claimed that his LinkedIn post’s most controversial question—”Should investors invest in ideas that they believe to have less merit so as to create equality across a portfolio?”—was just meant to be “pseudo-provocative,” as a jumping-off point to get feedback. (He admitted he did a “really shitty job” with that one.) But Kutcher didn’t seem to have much insight on the issue of female founders’ access to funding, suggesting at one point that they aren’t sending enough cold pitches. “Buck up and send an email,” he said, only to concede moments later that a warm, personal introduction is the better way to reach out.

For her part, Epstein pinned some of the problem on the storytelling and visioning skills women use when they pitch investors. She suggested better mentors who could coach female founders to project outward for the next few years–like the guys do–rather than focus on what their businesses can achieve in the next few months. Epstein also encouraged more women VCs to give feedback to female entrepreneurs. “It would be great if male VCs jumped in as well,” she added.

It isn’t clear, however, that these are the main obstacles women face while seeking funding. Black women founders, for example, are the fastest growing and most educated group of entrepreneurs in the nation. But lack of access to networks, accelerator programs, and the like prevent them from getting that critical funding. Perhaps it’s time for Kutcher and company to send a few cold-email introductions of their own to black-owned VC funds and other underrepresented minority firms that have recently opened.

Unconscious Bias

On unconscious bias, Kutcher said, “I would love to hear and understand from this audience how to unearth it.” He mentioned Harvard’s bias test, which anyone can take to discover what they’re biased against. The closest Kutcher got to acknowledging his own unconscious biases was in recounting how the women at his company came to him to explain what abuse looks like. Prior to that, given the preponderance of women who worked for him and were in executive roles, Kutcher said it was easy for him to imagine the problem wasn’t as pervasive.

He did muse briefly that the name on somebody’s resume could contribute to unconscious bias in hiring. But smart recruiters and hiring managers are already tapping a wealth of AI-driven solutions that remove qualifying information (including names and gender), mask voices, use chatbots to navigate the application process, and even offer analytics dashboards to show recruiters how diverse the candidate pool is.

Media Representation

Kutcher later asked participants to name a film where a heterosexual man and woman worked together as friends on a shared goal. When few movie titles cropped up, he pointed out that popular media doesn’t really model this type of relationship. “Story architecture hasn’t historically supported that,” even though friendships are the “organic compost” for building new businesses, Kutcher said. “We don’t even support the storytelling that says these relationships are valuable.”

It’s a fair point; storytellers of all stripes have traditionally relied on tension between genders to push a narrative. But it probably isn’t one of the top causes of sexual harassment or gender discrimination in the workplace, which isn’t likely to vanish with better movie plot lines. It’s going to take a lot more dedicated effort.

Related:This Is How We Fix Silicon Valley’s Sexual Harassment Problem

Communication In The Office

Epstein acknowledged that the way people communicate in the workplace makes a difference, and mentioned the importance of reinforcing women’s ideas during meetings and giving them due credit. She was right to bring this up, since it’s something women deal with on a routine basis. Kutcher chimed in to say this goes for conversations on social platforms as well: “Find ways to highlight across gender, ethnicity. It actually means something, white dudes! I am going to make a conscious effort to do it more.”

Work-Life Balance

Epstein noted that women’s networking events tend to fixate on work-life balance issues rather than concentrating on business, while Kutcher took a wider view. “We need to have a serious discussion in the U.S. about government-supported childcare,” in order to keep women on the career track longer, he said.

Many working moms would agree, but so would working dads. We know that the astronomical cost of childcare is causing some women to leave their jobs, as Kutcher pointed out. Yet while he said he’s “lucky” to be able to share childcare responsibilities equally with his wife, the actress Mila Kunis, all fathers need more paid family leave–and a workplace culture that encourages them to use it–so that Kutcher doesn’t have to be among the privileged few.

“Female Brains”

Before the Facebook Live chat ended, Kunis made a brief appearance to point out that her husband, like other men, have good intentions. She suggested that women tend to miss that by focusing too much on semantics. This prompted Kutcher to plug the controversial books The Female Brain and The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine, a researcher who has been criticized for dividing the genders along cognitive lines that aren’t always well supported by science.

Ultimately, brain science probably isn’t the best place to look for solutions to the discrimination and disparities women face in the working world every day. But to be fair to Kutcher, Epstein, and Kunis, solving these issues all in one go wasn’t the idea. “The goal is collective learning and to create a safe forum for that,” said Epstein, “we are not going to solve [gender imbalance] with a one-hour stream.” By the close of this one, that couldn’t have been clearer.

WHAT: A new video that pays tribute to the under-praised talents of costume designers.

WHO: Movie-obsessed video essayists, Now You See It.

WHY WE CARE: Sometimes it is easy to forget that every single detail in a movie is completely intentional. All those amazing songs slotted seamlessly into Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? They didn’t just end up there by accident or some kind of payola scandal, they were heavily fussed over by John Hughes and his music supervisor. The same thing goes for Ferris’ weird leopard print vest. We take it for granted that this is what he’s wearing on his notorious 10th day off of the school year, but why? What does that vest communicate without viewers dwelling on it too much? A new video goes through all the considerations a costume designer must make when putting possibly iconic outfits together–and it’s a more complex exercise than many might have gathered. These outfits have to take into account not only style, but class, background, time period, geography, and personal grooming habits. That’s a tall order! Watch below for specific examples of people putting way more thought into outfits than you did when choosing yours this morning.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival kicked off on the Friday before what turned out to be an ominous Inauguration Day. One of the directors at the festival spent his weekend in a frenzy, furiously editing in footage of Sean Spicer going nuclear on reporters over the size of the crowds at the event. (He incorrectly insisted it was the largest inauguration crowd ever.) It was about as much of Trump’s presidency as Brian Knappenbeger had time to fit into his film before its premiere later that week, and it was an unsettling bellwether for the war on media to come–culminating, for now, in the recent video Trump shared of himself body slamming a (photoshopped) representative of CNN.

The film, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, initially had very little to do with the then-presidential candidate. Instead, it was centered around another person who has also been featured in a wrestling video or two: Hulk Hogan. Knappenberger intended Nobody Speak to explore how the wrestler, whose given name is Terry Bollea, ended up killing the Gawker media empire, with the vengeance-fueled help of venture capitalist Peter Thiel. At the same time, the director also wanted to cover casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper, which he saw as of a piece with the trend of big money influencing journalism. By the time he started filming, however, Knappenberger realized the significance of the threat Donald Trump posed to free press, and the scope of his film broadened further.

Knappenberger had long been fascinated by the Hulk v Gawker case. On the one hand, it was salacious and tabloid-grabbing, and on the other, there were some serious, big-picture First Amendment and privacy issues at stake. It was the end of the trial that really made it click for him, though. The $140 million verdict, combined with the requirement for Gawker to put up $15 million right away, sounded the death knell of an important adversarial media brand. Then there was the grand finale: the revelation that Peter Thiel was funding Bolleo’s case. At that point, it became a very different story; one the filmmaker wanted to track more closely.

There is a historical precedent for billionaires leveraging media for the sake of power. Extremely wealthy individuals have owned newspapers before. (One of them, William Randolph Hearst, is famously the inspiration for Citizen Kane.) Litigation financing isn’t new either, both for financial reasons and political reasons. (The ACLU, for instance, will occasionally take a case and come down on one side of it to make a point.) What is different in the case of Sheldon Adelsen and Peter Thiel, however, is the secrecy of it all.

“That’s the part that probably bothers me the most,” Knappenberger says. “Usually, when wealthy individuals have bought newspapers in the past, it’s been a point of civic pride. You knew who they were so you could make your own judgments about their motivations and where they’re coming from. So the secrecy of the Adelson purchase or Peter Thiel’s involvement in the Hulk case is egregious.”

One of the reasons the free press is so vulnerable, however, is simply the changing of the times. Newspapers and magazines have lost a lot of their financial underpinnings and advertisement to the internet, leaving them leaner than ever. At the same time, the press is also seen as being too cozy with power, trading softball stories for access to politicians and celebrities, leaving many readers turned off. The credibility and financial standing of journalism was in just the right place for a figure like Trump to come along and exploit it.

“We’re experiencing a daily barrage of insults from the executive branch, encouraging of a hatred of the press from the President of the United States,” Knappenberger says. “We’ve never had a figure like this before. I think we’re in uncharted territory.”

Considering that the director wrapped his film just at the dawn of the Trump presidency, so much has happened since that makes Nobody Speak feel more timely by the day. Hostility toward the press appears to be at an all time high at every level. A reporter got arrested for asking questions of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tom Price. Another reporter got pinned against the wall at the FCC for asking his question. GOP congressional candidate Greg Gianforte famously body slammed a Guardian reporter, and still won the special election in Montana. At a time when the free press is being encroached upon by many forces, one gets the sense that if The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN were all shuttered tomorrow, millions would cheer.

“The idea of freedom of speech and an adversarial press has been with us from the very beginning. It’s one of the few jobs mentioned in the constitution,” Knappenberger says. “Right from the beginning, the idea of the fourth estate as being another check on power was always a part of the American system. So it’s important to have a press that stands up for the truth and questions power. I think that’s what makes for a healthy participatory democracy. Without that, how does the public know how to govern themselves?”

If the U.S. did somehow lose its free press, though, it wouldn’t happen all at once. There is no single moment that would signal we’d slipped into the realm of VGTRK, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. Instead, we will more likely simmer like frogs in the slowly boiling water, as the dialogue is degraded, one utterance of “Fake News” at a time.

“We’re reaching a point where we have to ask the question: will journalism survive in any meaningful way past this?” Knappenberger says. “I hope it does.”

We’ve all had to work with those colleagues who never pull their own weight. Instead, they seem to skate by with the bare minimum–all the while relying on their team members to carry them over the finish line. While the rest of your team is working away, this person seems content to just coast.

Those sorts of coworkers are undeniably frustrating (and here are some tips for dealing with them). But, have you ever stopped to think that you might be one of them?

Gasp! It can’t be! Or–can it? Here are five easy-to-miss signs that you’re that lazy, exasperating, noncontributing person.

1. You’re Never Asked For Help

No matter how much you rack your brain, you can’t remember the last time one of your colleagues approached you to ask for your assistance with a project, problem, or a task.

“They’ve just got it all under control,” you tell yourself. However (cue the horror movie soundtrack), that might not be the case.

Related:Four Myths Most Bosses Believe About Employee Engagement 

Instead, your coworkers might not feel comfortable leaning on you in times of need, as they don’t feel confident that they can trust you to actually get the job done. You haven’t proven to be dependable and on top of things in the past. So, when they find themselves in need of a helping hand, they’ll go elsewhere.

2. You’re Always Asked For Help

The converse of the above point can also be true. If you feel like you’re constantly being asked to pitch in, this could be an indicator that you’re not contributing enough on your own.

Asking you to lend a hand could be your team members’ subtle way of telling you that you need to chip in and take some initiative. Or, they could be approaching you for help simply because you obviously have plenty of spare time.

Either way, the point remains the same: If you’re always being prompted to help out, you might need to step your game up–without being asked.

3. You’re On The Receiving End Of Passive-Aggressive Comments

As you make your way out of the office at 4 p.m., you pass by a colleague and offer him a friendly smile. He waves, says he’ll see you tomorrow, and then tacks on a comment like, “It must be nice to leave early every day.”

Is this passive-aggressive? You bet. But, if your peers don’t feel comfortable approaching you about your supposed lack of effort, these sorts of comments might be some of your best clues into how you’re being perceived.

Constantly hearing things from your coworkers about how they wish their to-do lists were as short or their inboxes were as empty as yours might make you think they’re just trying to be condescending or snarky. But, these muttered statements can actually be symptomatic of something deeper going on.

4. You’re Being Micromanaged

For quite some time, you were in control over your own workload. But, lately you’ve noticed that your boss seems to be stepping in more and more. In fact, she’s quickly edging her way into micromanagement territory.

Related:4 Ways You’re Unknowingly Stressing Out Your Coworkers 

Before you blame your snoopy manager, consider this: Your colleagues could’ve complained about the fact that you were slowing things down or failing to contribute your fair share. Or–since your boss is probably far smarter and more aware than you’d like to think–she may have noticed your decreased motivation herself.

While micromanagement can also be a sign of a bad boss, it’s worth considering whether or not you did something to warrant that level of observation.

5. You Find Out About Projects Way Later

You’re in a team meeting when someone mentions the branding revamp that was wrapped up a few weeks ago. You miraculously keep your jaw from hitting the floor–you had no idea anything like that was even going on.

In fact, when you think back on it, you often find out about projects weeks or months after they’ve been completed–and, you were certainly never asked to assist with them.

Think about it this way: If you’ve developed a reputation as someone who is a bit of a loafer, your team members won’t be in a huge hurry to work with you. As a result, you’ll likely be totally left out of the loop on a frequent basis.

You know how frustrating a noncontributing coworker can be. So, needless to say, you don’t want to be one yourself.

It can be tough to be self-aware in the office. But, if you have suspicions that your colleagues might be growing frustrated with you, keep your eyes peeled for these signs.

What do you do if you discover that you’re not chipping in enough to be considered a great team member? The solution is simple: Step your game up. And, take things one step further by approaching your coworkers and asking if there’s anything you can help with.

You won’t be able to change your reputation overnight. But, being proactive and taking that initiative will show that you’re serious about turning a new leaf and pulling your own weight.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission. 

More From The Muse:

• Hard To Believe, But Being Lazy Could Actually Be A Sign Of Intelligence 
• The Only Question Lazy People Need To Ask Themselves Today 
• Your 3-Step Plan For Dealing With A Lazy Co-Worker Who’s Dragging You Down 

The poster image for the second season of Stranger Things was revealed this morning, and it’s a stunning, immediately resonant image: the four kids from season one (minus Eleven, who will presumably be showing up later), on their familiar bicycles, on the outskirts of their town as they watch a violent red sky that may be haunted by something spectral and spooky. The new season doesn’t hit Netflix for three more months, but this tantalizing image only makes us want October 27 to get here sooner.

However, the poster doesn’t just conjure our love of the first season of Stranger Things and those characters. It also draws on our familiarity with similar images. If season one looked like the cover of a Stephen King novel, this poster looks more like R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps crossed with—well, crossed with a lot of horror movie posters, both classic and contemporary. The image perhaps most clearly recalls 1985’s Fright Night, with a contrast between suburban ordinariness and the monsters in the sky; it also suggests the Korean poster for 2015’s Ghostbusters remake, with four figures staring at something emerging from a swirl of clouds. Similar imagery also popped up on the posters for A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

It’s also imagery that’s been referred back to by other recent posters—in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 film The Happening and 2015’s The Hallow, and it’s not a million miles away from the art for 1995’s Twister, either.

All of which is to say that part of the joy of the first season of Stranger Things was the fact that it was full of imagery and ideas that referred back to similarly-themed work from the past, while also feeling like it was building something new and contemporary off of those images. If the first poster for season two is any indication, that’s something they’ve kept at the heart of the concept going forward.

In the years since the world first started considering climate change as a major existential threat, it’s tended to focus on what governments can do about the problem. Through big meetings in Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Paris, governments have negotiated what they can do to quell greenhouse gas emissions and their impact on the environment. Arguably, however, companies have had more impact than officialdom; it’s the decisions taken in boardrooms, and by investors, that matter more to whether we burn fossil fossils, or not.

This point is brought home by a new report that puts the responsibility for climate change squarely with the corporate sector. It finds that, when you discount emissions from agriculture and the built environment, 100 oil, gas and coal companies account for 71% of manmade greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere in the last 30 years. Just 25 companies are responsible for more than half of industrial emissions since 1988, the year the United Nations set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to study the impact of global warming.

The numbers include direct emissions from corporate operations as well as indirect emissions, such as when someone drives from Detroit to Ann Arbor (unlucky for them, corporates get lumbered with their customers’ emissions). The report, published by the CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, is based on data from the Climate Accountability Institute, a research group based in Colorado.

Pedro Faria, CDP’s technical director, says the aim is to reframe the climate debate away from the policies of the Trump or other administration towards companies and the stakeholders that influence them.

The report “offers insight into responsibility from the perspective of the producers of hydrocarbons–those companies that have made astonishing returns over decades through the extraction and production of greenhouse gas emitting products,” he says in an introduction. “Climate action is no longer confined to the direction given by policymakers; it is now a social movement, commanded by both economic and ethical imperatives and supported by growing amounts of data.”

WHO: Video essayist Thomas Flight

WHAT: “OK Soda – Advertising’s Awkward Relationship with Postmodernism”

WHY WE CARE: In 1993, then Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta pulled what many thought was a peculiar business move: He rehired Sergio Zyman to be chief of marketing for all Coca-Cola beverages. Keep in mind that Zyman was the man behind the launch of 1985’s infamous flop New Coke. Zyman used his second chance to create OK Soda, a citrusy cola that became more known for its subversive marketing campaign than its flavor–and that only lasted seven months after a limited release.

Zyman based OK Soda on research that found “Coca-Cola” was the second most well-known term in the world, right behind the word “OK.” What followed was what can now be seen as a case study in postmodern advertising–and one that video essayist Thomas Flight documents well in his new highly-informative deep dive.

Flight’s thesis of “can you effectively brand disillusionment?” is the tipping point to a rabbit hole of other pertinent questions like “was OK Soda’s marketing campaign just ahead of its time?” and “where’s the balance between subverting traditional marketing to grab attention and torpedoing your own product?”

If you’re brainstorming ideas for your next “quirky” marketing campaign to reach Gens Y and Z, Flight’s video essay is required viewing.

On Wednesday, your favorite websites and apps may look a little different. That’s because Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, OKCupid, and many others are teaming up for “Net Neutrality Day of Action” and will feature pop-up windows, GIFs, and in-app messages intended to mobilize their billions of users to fight the Trump administration’s reversal of rules that governed internet access.

In 2015, after years of political and legal battles, a Democratic-led Federal Communications Commission approved the Open Internet Report and Order, which imposed strict rules preventing landline and wireless internet service providers (ISPs) from favoring or hindering the types of online content they deliver to customers. One of two dissenters on the five-member commission was Ajit Pai, who is now chairman of the FCC under President Trump. In April, Pai proposed to roll back the order, which classified ISPs as something akin to public utilities under what’s called Title II of the U.S. Communications Act.

Undoing the Obama-era policy begins with a public input process that will stretch on for months before the FCC can take a vote. As they did the last time around, activists are organizing supporters of net neutrality regulations—including major tech companies, public advocacy groups, and citizens—to flood the FCC with comments before the July 17 deadline. The campaign launches on July 12 with an online awareness efforts that include point-and-click widgets for contacting the FCC and Congress, which oversees the FCC budget and legal authority. Some of the other huge internet companies who will participate are Cloudflare (with its own web site protest app), Etsy, Kickstarter, Mozilla, Netflix, PornHub, Reddit, and Vimeo.

Fast Company spoke with the organizer of both this effort and the previous campaigns, Evan Greer of the group Fight For The Future. We asked her about the state of net neutrality and the prospects for resisting Trump and Pai’s policy effort. (This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Fast Company: What’s the state of net neutrality right now?

FC: If Title II designation is taken away, are there no other regulations on the books that would have any effect on net neutrality?

EG: Without these Title II protections, there’s absolutely nothing to stop internet service providers from censoring sites that they don’t like, from slowing down or throttling content from sites unless they pay up, or from charging users extra fees or requiring them to upgrade their internet packages if they are going to access the content that they’re used to being able to access for free.

Related: The Main Argument For Rolling Back Net Neutrality Is Pretty Shaky

FC: If the FCC made policy a few years ago classifying these providers under Title II, why can’t it just make another policy changing that?

EG: When they want to make a change in their policies they have to open what’s called an NPRM, a notice of proposed rulemaking. That opens up a public comment period, where members of the public, companies, public interest groups, anyone who has a stake in this, can make their voice heard. This can’t come to a vote until this public comment period ends [on July 17], and then there’s another period called a reply period [which ends on August 17].

FC: In addition to being a day of awareness, are you going to point people toward ways that they can take action?

EG: Absolutely. We’ve built these widgets that sites can very easily put up that allow people to submit a comment to the FCC and Congress without ever leaving the page. We also have a page called battleforthenet.com, which is a one-stop action spot where people can easily submit comments to the FCC, email their members of Congress, and make a phone call with just a few clicks. Lots of sites are using the widgets that we’re providing that show [things] like, what it would be like if a site were stuck in a slow lane, what it would be like if a site were blocked or censored outright, what it would be like to be asked to pay extra fees for content that you’re used to accessing. Folks that are running apps are sending push notifications.

FC: Are you concerned that, given that there was such a big campaign just a few years ago, people may be getting issue-weary?

EG: I’ve never seen this level of palpable energy when organizing one of these big online mobilizations. For this early in the campaign to have the largest websites on Earth, so many internet users, lining up, creating content, volunteering to be part of this, I think it’s actually the opposite. People are outraged that the FCC is trying to take away the tools that we all fought so hard for.

FC: Is there a way to quantify or qualify how you’ve gotten more support this time around?

EG: There are a number of other players this time [including Facebook and Google] that did not participate last time. I can tell you anecdotally from being behind the scenes on this, it’s just easier going in terms of getting people rallied and ready to go, I think a) because everyone is so pissed, and b) because we’re actually building an online movement here. These aren’t just individual protests that happen as a flash in the pan.

FC: Will there be any physical gatherings as well?

EG: We’re creating a simple template where people can print out a sign or turn their phone or computer into a sign, using a little app that we made called protestsign.org and just show up at their closest member of Congress’s office, take a selfie of themselves, and tweet it at their member of Congress at the end of the day, at 6 o’clock.

FC: Beyond the day of action, is there an ongoing way that the campaign will continue?

EG: This is just the beginning. Even if the FCC moves ahead as quickly as possible, we’re not talking about a vote on this until at least the fall. And I think a lot of this will pivot to Congress. The FCC makes the decision on this specific proposal, but they answer to Congress, and every lawmaker should be paying attention to the fact that this is incredibly unpopular with constituents. [Polls by both Mozilla and by the telecom industry itself show public support for net neutrality regulations.]

FC: If the FCC does take away Title II designation, is the next move up to Congress?

EG: After that, it would go to the courts. The FCC will have a tall order to prove in court that they have any good reason to do this. But I’m optimistic that we will never get there, because I do think this is going to be a tremendous mobilization on July 12th, that it’s going to change the conversation in a big way.

FC: If it does go to court, is there any evidence from the time that the order has been in effect that backs up the notion that folks would be harmed?

EG: Absolutely, there’s a log history of cable companies abusing their political power. Free Press has a great listing of noted net neutrality violations in the past that have affected internet users in a wide variety of ways. But there’s a long history of these companies abusing their power, slowing down, throttling content, blocking material, and that’s exactly why people have fought so hard for these rules and why we need to protect them.

Before the superhero boom of the ’00s led to the superhero glut of the ’10s, there was The Tick. The character, created by cartoonist Ben Edlund to promote a small chain of Boston-based comic book stores, found a comfy home bringing weirdness to afternoon viewers of Fox Kids’ animation block in the mid-’90s, giving fans a dose of absurdism to their tales of costumed adventurers. Armed with his rallying cry (“Spoon!”) and allies like Batmanuel, Die Fledermaus, and trusty sidekick Arthur, The Tick nominally protected his city as its greatest hero.

The Tick ran on Fox for three years, and was rebooted as a live-action series in the early ’00s for nine brief episodes that failed to find an audience. And the following decade-and-a-half have been relatively quiet for the character. However, Amazon debuted a pilot for a reboot in 2016, and it quickly ascended through the company’s online voting system to earn a series order. That series hits the streaming service in August, and to remind viewers of the good works that the character is known for, they partnered with crowdsourced video studio Tongal to launch a campaign called #TickSaveMyCity.

The campaign asked Tongal users and Tick fans to create videos explaining a problem in their city—serious or silly, it’s all the same to The Tick—and asking the hero to intervene. Finalists were revealed this week, and all of them touch on things that could clearly use a guy in blue tights to address them.

“The Tick is always willing to help citizens in distress,” explains Mike Benson, U.S. Head of Marketing for Amazon Studios. “There is no problem that is too big or too small for him to handle.” To that end, the three finalists run the gamut: from illegal dumping in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to the needs of a community center that serves refugee children in Charlotte, North Carolina, to the tendency of people in Waldwick, New Jersey to leave dog poo in some guy’s yard.

Some of the suggestions get into areas that are a little weightier than The Tick tends to deal with—refugee resettlement isn’t an issue anyone might expect Sewer Urchin and American Maid to address—but Benson says that the reboot of The Tick“is a show [that] touches on deeper issues,” and the idea that a guy in blue tights couldn’t help out with refugee kids is disproven by that video’s creator, Caleb Van Voorhis, who does the entire thing wearing a homemade Tick costume.

“Most superheroes wear tights, which is pretty silly to begin with, but there are real-world things that people aren’t paying attention to that The Tick can help out with,” Tongal co-founder James DeJulio says. “It’s a smart way to get attention for bigger issues without making light of them—except for the light ones like the dog poop in New Jersey. If you look at the video, the tone does feel right.”

Fans will vote for whichever issue they feel The Tick should step in to address over the next few weeks—then, of course, he’ll actually do something to help, although those details are vague for the time being. (“My hope is that someone on the YouTube comments comes up with a  great idea,” DeJulio says, though he adds that Amazon and Tongal have ideas of their own if the YouTube comments end up going the way YouTube comment sections all too often do.) “It’s a lighthearted, fun thing, and hopefully people will have fun watching the videos,” he says. “And then watching these ideas that are spawned digitally cross over to the real world, to do some good in an analog space.”

Forget about a future robot uprising that looks likes The Terminator. The takeover is already happening as machines replace factory workers, and AI systems increasingly take over office tasks like legal research.

Now, robots are coming for highly skilled service positions in factories and power plants, too. Except according to German industrial giant Siemens, the shift to AI in this segment of the workforce would actually be a good thing. Why? Because it’s getting harder to find humans who want to or can do those kinds of jobs, says Jagannath Rao, the company’s SVP for data services at its campus outside Atlanta.

“I remember the days, 30 years ago, when [if] we had a problem with a transformer in a plant . . . these guys would actually listen to the sound coming out of [it] and tell you what was wrong,” Rao says. “Those people are gone, and nobody is taking those jobs anymore.”

Rao and his colleagues blame it on changing tastes: The salty mechanic in blue overalls with dirty hands isn’t a persona that appeals to students considering career options, they claim. “We’ve gone through a period of time when many people were steered away from traditional trades, apprenticeships, college-level education for some of these practical trades, in favor of going to university,” says Jeff Bonnell, a VP at Coresystems in Vancouver, which provides software for diagnosing problems with industrial machinery.

Coresystems uses Siemens’s MindSphere service, which gathers data from machines for tasks like predicting breakdowns, something that was once done by humans. It joins a growing list of manufacturers offering data collection and analytics services as an upsell for their industrial clients. GE, for instance, introduced such a system, called Predix, in 2015. Other rivals include Hitachi Lumada, Microsoft Azure IoT (Internet of Things) Suite, and SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service.

Related:Watch A GE Engineer Chat With A Robotic Power Plant

These networks collect the data that machine learning AI can munch on to learn the early signs of an impending breakdown—replacing those old techs who could diagnose a machine by placing an ear up to it. “This whole front-end process . . . is what machine learning and AI do today,” says Rao. “[They] bring it to the point of deciding what the problem is. It’s nice to have an expert around, but I would say I don’t care where the intelligence is generated, as long as it’s made available.”

Siemens’s description of unwanted factory positions doesn’t exactly square with the outcry over blue-collar job losses that fueled Brexit and Donald Trump’s campaign. The problem, according to Rao, is that new recruits looking for industrial jobs don’t have the expertise. In theory—and, so far, it’s only a theory—AI could perform the diagnosis and walk technicians through the maintenance process, using technologies like augmented reality to highlight the parts of the machine on which they need to work. “That enables a lot of lower-skilled people to use [MindSphere] and do things, and that keeps their job secure,” says Rao. “If they do that for a while, they also get savvy with it.”

There aren’t any MindSphere apps yet that are actually doing the work of sophisticated techs, nor ones that guide less-skilled workers to do the job. It’s an appealing image, though, as tech companies try to convince the public that they won’t put people out of work.

I ask Rao if Siemens’s promise supports President Trump’s stated goal to “Make America Great Again.” “Irrespective of that, the need is there,” he says. “And therefore it would happen irrespective of the political situation. Does it facilitate that vision? I guess it does.”

June was a tense month for the engineers and designers on Apple’s iPhone team with “a sense of panic in the air,” a source with knowledge of the situation tells me.

The company has been working feverishly to fix software problems in its hotly anticipated 10th-anniversary iPhone that could ultimately cause production and delivery delays, the source says. If the software problems aren’t resolved quickly, the new flagship iPhone could even launch with major features disabled.

The all-new iPhone, which some speculate could start at $1,200, is expected to debut at a press event this fall, and may be called the iPhone 8, iPhone Pro, or iPhone X. It’s expected to pack several new technologies that have never before been built into iPhones, and some of them are tricky to implement.

One of those is wireless charging. The iPhone 8–let’s call it that for now–will reportedly use a type of inductive charging, where the phone sits directly on a separate charging device. (Our source believes Apple is using the Qi wireless charging standard, or a variant of it.) The wireless charging components, which are provided by chipmaker Broadcom Ltd., are not the key issue, the source said; it’s the software that’s not ready for prime time.

If the company can’t get the technology to work smoothly in time, my source said, it might ship the first phones with inoperable wireless charging hardware, then enable the feature later on. There’s precedent for this approach: Over the years, Apple has sometimes shipped hardware but activated it later. The last example of this was Portrait Mode in the iPhone 7 Plus: The sensors and chips were built into the phone from the start, but the feature was activated only later on after the software was perfected.

Apple faces similar problems with the new 3D sensor. A recent Bloomberg report says that sensor is front facing and will be used to recognize the user’s face to unlock the phone. The report even suggests Apple may rely on the 3D sensor for authentication in lieu of the familiar Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Especially in light of the fact that Touch ID plays an integral role in the security of Apple Pay, it seems farfetched that Apple would suddenly abandon it for a brand-new, untested technology.

Without confirming that’s what the front-facing 3D sensor is for, my source says Apple has been struggling to get the sensor to work reliably. Again, the sensor hardware is not the problem, but rather the accompanying software.

The source believes Apple will likely have the 3D software working in time. But if not, the company could include the sensor in the phone anyway, and turn it on later on with a software update.

Apple declined to comment.

Screens And Sensors

The marquee feature of the new phone may be its new super-bright OLED display. That too has been a worry for Apple, and a potential cause of delays–not because of the quality of the hardware, but because of a scarcity of OLED manufacturing facilities around the world. Apple, which has never built a phone with an OLED display before, is reportedly getting the bulk of the screens from rival Samsung.

Earlier reports said that Apple was struggling to find a good place for the Touch ID fingerprint reader, now that almost the entire front of the phone will be taken up by display. One report today says Apple is still finalizing plans on the location of Touch ID, after months of trying different solutions, including embedding the sensor below the OLED display.

My source says the report is plausible, even at this late stage, and adds that in all likelihood, the fingerprint sensor will be embedded under the display.

The software problems are amplified by the enormous pressure to deliver the new phone on time, shortly after its likely announcement this fall; by the usual huge expectations for a new Apple product; and by the fact that the company is building technologies into the device that have never appeared in iPhones before. And by all accounts, it’s late in the game for Apple to be wrestling with problems as big as those described above.

The “iPhone 8” will be one of three new iPhones announced by Apple in the fall. The other two will be the successors to the current iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and will likely be called the iPhone 7S and 7S Plus.

As usual, my source stresses that the new iPhones’ features can remain fluid until deep in the summer before a launch.

As the indoor farming industry has taken off in the last several years–over the next 10 years, indoor farming is expected to account for 50% of leafy green production, and grow to a $42 billion industry–it’s become apparent that it’s as much about technology as it is about agriculture. Bowery, a new startup operating out of an old warehouse building in Kearney, New Jersey, developed a sensor-based proprietary technology, called FarmOS, specifically to support the venture by determining necessary nutrient levels, as well as when crops are ready for harvesting. And in South San Francisco, Plenty is growing produce via a tech-supported vertical farming model that has already received $26 million from tech investors like Bezos Expeditions and Innovation Endeavors.

For FreshBox Farms, an indoor farm operational since 2015 at an old factory site in Millis, Massachusetts, around 30 miles outside of Boston, the technology is important–it is, after all, what enables the greens to grow–but it’s not sacred. “We’re equipment agnostic,” Sonia Lo, the CEO of Crop One Holdings, FreshBox’s parent company, tells Fast Company. “There are people out there doing great work to perfect lights, trays, control systems, nutrient dosing systems–we focus on growing as much as possible.” This almost brusque approach, Lo says, has enabled FreshBox Farms to become one of just two commercial indoor farming ventures in the U.S. that is gross-margin positive. The other is the Newark, New Jersey-based AeroFarms, which grows up to 2 million pounds of produce per year.

Earlier this year, Matt Barnard, CEO of Plenty, told Fast Company that “small-scale growing in 2017 is not a profitable enterprise.” He was referring to the fact that indoor farming startups, which, since the boom began within the last five years, have a track record of failure. FarmedHere, a Chicago-based venture, intended to expand nationally but instead went bankrupt earlier this year, citing the difficulty of maintaining financial equilibrium. PodPonics and LocalGarden, ventures based respectively in Atlanta and Vancouver, similarly failed; the business tensions derived from the high cost of technology, and the relatively small return on investment from output and distribution. Given the hefty price tag of developing proprietary growing technologies, not to mention renting pricey urban land, underwhelming harvests (which are common among startups still tinkering with their growing systems) can be financially devastating.

The FreshBox model centers around shipping containers (hence the name of the farm). At the farm in Massachusetts, which currently serves 37 supermarkets in the Boston region, each of FreshBox’s 12 commercial products, whether it be kale, arugula, or chard, is grown with hydroponics in its own shipping container; the farm currently houses 15, along with one “Mod”–a modular unit equivalent to nine containers. Conditions inside each container are optimized for each product, but the network as a whole is governed and monitored by the same technology system. By growing crops in separate containers, Lo says, FreshBox can focus on optimizing yield for each product.

The current FreshBox Farm configuration in Massachusetts produces a quarter ton of produce per day, but Lo emphasizes that as the company continues to iterate on the technology it uses and the size of the containers themselves, that number will likely increase. Currently, FreshBox is growing the equivalent of as much as 19 acres of produce in 320 square feet; as FreshBox verticalizes further, that efficiency will grow. “Real estate is a square-foot venture,” Lo says, “But we’re dealing in cubic feet.” Meaning that once FreshBox secures a plot of land on which to operate, they can continue stacking shipping containers higher and higher, and maximizing output. The containers on the farm are not yet stacked, but that’s a next step, Lo says.

Over the next five years, FreshBox is aiming to reach 25 farms across the U.S., each of which will produce between one and three tons of produce per day. The company will continue to iterate and switch out technology as it grows, and as more efficient systems become available. “I don’t think you should be in this industry unless you’re planning to be big,” Lo says.

The iconic human evolution chart may need to be revised. Most of us no longer walk fully upright.

“Naturally aligned human beings have become the minority in our population, a true rarity,” states the American Posture Institute, which estimates that 80% of the population suffers from posture-induced back pain. Collective treatment surpasses $1 billion a year.

It’s not surprising: Over 86% of U.S. workers sit for the entire workday, while the average time spent daily on a mobile device hovers at five hours. In total, Americans spend almost 11 hours a day on a screen, according to a recent Nielsen report. That means hunched shoulders and curved, forward-leaning “text necks.”

In the long term, this equates to a medley of potential health hazards, including fatigue, muscle tension, difficulty breathing, hampered immune functions, chronic back pain, osteoporosis, dowager humps, even depression.

“This is serious stuff,” says Dr. Paula Moore, creator of Posturevideos.com.“I’ve seen all of this … and it leads to people on a cocktail of drugs.”

It’s already severely affecting the workforce. The NIH estimates that 54% of Americans who experience lower back pain spend the majority of their workday sitting.

These frightening statistics have inspired a new cottage industry the posture-fixers.

There are dozens of wearable devices that buzz (or shock) a user upon slouching, complicated exercise systems to lengthen your spine, “get up and move” alarm apps, even clothing meant to strengthen upper-back muscles. On the wackier side there are anti-gravity chairs, “smart bras,” neck movement trackers, and something called a “massage hoodie” . For kids, there are games, pillows, and a head wearable that prevents “Gameboy Disease” (a cuter term for tech-neck) by shutting down a connected iPad if a slouch is detected.

But do any of these things actually work? And how realistic is it that we will incorporate them into our lives? To find out, I tried several gadgets in hopes of jump-starting my own posture recovery.

Here’s what I found.

This two-inch seat pillow monitors your sitting posture and slightly buzzes each time it perceives you to be slouching and leaning too far to either side. The patented fiber optical sensor technology senses vibrations and syncs with an app that delivers alerts like “You’ve been sitting on the left side. Try to center yourself on the cushion.” There’s also some positive reinforcement in the form of “Good job standing!”

The Darma cushion sounds like one of the more effortless and non-invasive trackers, in that you don’t have to reapply any gadget daily—it waits for you at your desk. But unfortunately, it’s all too easy to cheat with this one. I was able to repeatedly droop my neck and slouch forward without ever moving my hip or bottom. In fact, at one point I realized I had been reclining forward for over an hour. The pricey sitting accessory sure is comfortable—and the app does remind you to stretch and move—but a posture perfecter it is not. The butt, it seems, does not know what the back does.

AlignMed president and founder Bill Schultz pursued his startup a decade ago after prolonged hours at the computer left him with painful herniated discs. He tried various physical therapies, pharmaceuticals, and exercises before venturing on his own mission to “simplify” the process. A wearable fitness garment, he says, works and stretches under-used muscles, strengthening the upper body—all without constant readjustment by the wearer. His products have attracted an enthusiastic following (Peyton Manning is a fan).

The AlignMed apparel is perhaps the most difficult to put on, yet delivers the most promising results of all the products I tried—for exactly that inconvenient reason. Made with an anatomic matrix of bands, panels and seams, the tops are tight to the point that you need an extra minute to get into them. That also means the idea of taking them off seems like, well, a pain. That works to its credit in that if the garments begin to constrict the wearer, he or she cannot easily rip it off, unlike its gadget competitors.

AlignMed tops are meant to retrain—not compress—muscles to improve tone and straighten backs. These are not braces. The shirts feel like a more snugly fitting rash guard, while the bras look like nursing bras, but fit like a sturdy, Olympic athlete-level sports bra. The company recommends at least two to four hours of wear, up to 12 hours. You’ll start feeling your upper body ache a little after several hours (it’s muscle fatigue, says AlignMed), but it’s in no way intolerable. Your posture will improve as the dense fabric structure makes it difficult to slouch, but don’t expect full posture perfection within the first few days. Although, after the first week, you might feel your back aching for its “corset.”

The Upright Pro is a weightless activity tracker the size of a large thumb. With a sleek white silicon mold, it looks like something out of a dystopian future—or as my husband said, “an adorable dildo for robots.” Its compact size is a big selling point, until you see its other accessories. That includes alcohol pads to clean your back and adhesives to secure it at the base of your spine. While it only takes two minutes to apply the Upright Pro, it’s still two minutes too long. It’s hard to imagine having the patience to do it every day—or each time it moves out of place.

As for its ability to detect slouching, the Upright Pro produces a near perfect score. The motion detector sends slight vibrations when it senses your upper half relaxing, can tell when you lean in an unhealthy direction, and the connected app records the amount of time you spend upright (a gold medal signifies you’re doing a good job) and suggests stretching videos. The device even managed to tell if I wasn’t standing tall when walking.

Overall, the application is a wee bit time-consuming, but if you are someone unbothered by free-floating body appendages, this one might be right for you. You start with five minutes a day and train your way to a full day’s worth of picture-perfect posture.

Active Posture Neck, Back and Total Body Exercise System by Core Prodigy ($39.95, Coreprodigy.com)

This contraption looks like a medieval torture system designed for misbehaving children. Despite its brightly colored resistance bands, the head harness resembles a masochistic posture tool. Once you overcome its peculiar setup, you realize it functions along the lines of an at-home pilates springboard. The system includes five resistance bands, two handles, and two ankle straps connected to a head harness (with two door anchors). Together, they help strengthen postural muscles and body alignment through light resistance training. A company rep suggests 10-15 minutes of use at least one to four times a week, depending on the user’s condition.

The workouts are likely the best bet to strengthen muscles and core, but the likelihood of using this system on a regular basis seems doubtful. Not to mention that the user must be properly trained as to how to use the resistance bands to full capacity and to avoid injury. Unless you plan on hiring an instructor to set up shop in your home, you’re better off just signing off for a Pilates class.

The Lumo Lift Posture Activity Tracker is a peanut-size posture coach that attaches to your clothing just below the your collarbone via a magnetic clasp. The activity tracker, in conjunction with an iOS and Android app, sends a vibration each time you slouch.

Lumo Bodytech CEO and cofounder Monisha Perkash founded in the company in 2011 after discovering that back pain was the second most common reason Americans visit the doctor (second to the common cold). She says the majority of her customers report better breathing and “a better sense of energy.”

From the very start, Lumo Lift seems to be the more tech-tailored experience. Via a two-inch tracker and connected app, it gathers information on your goals, size, and posture issues. You can set alerts to whatever time periods you want, but the recommended dosage is every 15 seconds. The idea is to train yourself to reach an hourly goal of 30 minutes of good posture and a daily goal of 10,000 steps.

On average, it detected my slouches and uneven alignments at about 80%, which is pretty high. It wasn’t as easy to “cheat” with this one. Lumo Lift is small, but it feels more intrusive than the other trackers if only for that fact that it’s placed on on the front of your shirt, and the magnetic clasp is noticeable to others. The idea of wearing such a device every day in public seems unlikely, especially when its competitors have found less noticeable areas to pin their gizmos. Word to the wise: don’t set it to go off every 15 seconds unless you want to find yourself silencing the app after a few hours of use.

The Verdict

I didn’t end up wanting to keep using any of these. They were mostly burdensome to set up, irritating after several hours, and not terribly exciting after Day One. It’s not that gadgets aren’t helpful, but that it’s all too easy to shut them off once they start annoying you.

The only item I wore with gusto were the AlignMed products, specifically the bra, which felt the most supportive in realigning my back. The shirts were as Bill Schultz had intended: Simple. Schultz says AlignMed’s sales have doubled in the last year, with 2018 predicted to reach $35 million.

What Will Really Fix Our Bad Posture

Dr. Paula Moore, a Toronto-based chiropractor and author of The Art and Science of Healthy Posture, says that posture is directly connected to a host of other health and appearance issues.

“There’s no quick fix for good posture,” says Moore, “because good posture is a habit.” On this Schultz agrees. “Very few people take an active role in their fitness,” he says.  To Schultz, posture is as important as nutrition. “(Good posture) has to be habitual,” he stresses, “otherwise it’s not going to do anything.”

To that end there are sadly no quick fixes. Moore recommends repetitive daily exercises with a motto of a “little and often.” This means one to two stretches for five minutes every day or taking a break from screens every 20 minutes to rest your eyes. She very rarely suggests tech-based solutions to her clients. “They are what I find to be gimmicks,” she explains. “They don’t address the underlying issue.”

The underlying issue is that people need to learn good posture habits. Sitting up straight for 10 seconds is not enough to undo years worth of poor sitting, explains Dr. Guy Bahar, aka “The Posture Doc.”

“That’s the biggest misconception of them all, because posture is a very intricate coordinated evolved human feature that involves messages from the brain, your balance and awareness, coordinated messages through your nerves etc.,” Bahar says. “It’s meant to be [automatic], something that you don’t think about.”

Bahar, a practicing chiropractor for 25 years, does not put much faith in the plethora of gadgets that nudge one into noticing posture deficiencies. It’s a temporary awareness, he explains, which “doesn’t do anything to correct the problem—the problem is you’re not conditioned to be straight… all the signaling in the world is not going to fix that.”

So while you might be able to hold an upright position for a minute, you will eventually return to a sloping position—much in the same way as if someone told you to perform a ballet move you never learned. “Having a reminder cue is not enough,” Bahar stresses. One must first build the upper body strength to support a properly aligned back.

There’s also the “novelty factor.” People buy gadgets and their awareness does indeed get triggered. But after further exposure, the novelty wears off and within several weeks, it ends up in a kitchen drawer, says Bahar. For correct long-haul posture, the most important aspect is consistency. He strongly recommends Pilates or using a roller to relax joints for just five minutes a day.

“There are no shortcuts,” says Bahar. “It’s a process and it’s going to take time.”

There’s a simple reason why human relationships are inherently unstable: People all want different things. That doesn’t mean we’re doomed though. In stable relationships, people want many of the same things and just compromise on the rest. Taken together, how different your wants are and your willingness to compromise make for a pretty good indicator of how the relationship will go.

That’s a principle no entrepreneur can afford to forget—particularly when customers get upset about something. Here’s why.

Everything You Haven’t Thought Of

Relationships between businesses and their customers are just another form of human interaction, except rather than being governed by unspoken norms, there are things called contracts and terms of service. As startup founders, we try to write those up in a way that covers every imaginable scenario, but because we’re dealing with people, we inevitably fail to cover everything—as I was recently reminded.

My company UserMuse lets experienced tech professionals post their hourly rates for providing expert feedback to companies developing business software. The goal is to connect product managers and user researchers with the right people to give them high-quality product feedback, and we charge a flat fee for every introduction we make. We recently partnered with a few consulting firms that specialize in user research, which was (and is) an exciting opportunity for us because they need lots of people.

We had just finished our first project for a big firm, and I was on a high thinking about all the future business we could get from this new partnership. Then I got an email from one of the users we’d placed on the project, which snapped me right out of it:

“My hourly rate was $65, not $49 . . .”

Oh, shit. I didn’t have to read the rest to guess what happened. We told our users that the consulting firm would pay their respective hourly rates. But the feedback sessions ran only 45 minutes, so they prorated all of the users’ payments, which meant paying them each 75% of what they’d expected to be getting.

Reasonable? Totally. But the firm hadn’t warned me, and I hadn’t anticipated a snafu like this, so our users were unpleasantly surprised. They weren’t happy—in their very first experience with UserMuse, no less.

Related:This Is Why Your Startup Will Fail

Why People Get Upset

I knew I needed to tread carefully; how startups respond in these early interactions with customers couldn’t be more crucial. After my animal-brain rage subsided, I reasoned we had three options:

1. Apologize to our users, explain the situation, and hope they understand.
2. Lean on our new partner to pay our users what they and we expected.
3. Pay our users the remainder of their respective hourly rates out of our own pocket.

In situations like these, you tend to realize pretty quickly that the old adage to just “do what’s best for the customer” is too simplistic. Our users understandably wanted more money—but technically they wanted it for 15 minutes of services they hadn’t provided. Our partner had no motive, logically or otherwise, to pay them more. And we’d lose a good chunk of our profit on the project if we paid out the difference. None of our options seemed that great.

The answer I landed on came back to a piece of advice I remembered hearing from a former boss of mine: “You end up in court when you violate the spirit rather than the letter of an agreement.”

Technically, all of our users had been paid properly for the value they’d delivered. And technically it was our partner who short-changed them and mismanaged expectations, not us. But it was our relationships that were at stake with our users, not to mention with this new partner with which we still hoped to do a lot more business.

So within 20 minutes of receiving that email, we paid them all out ourselves, via PayPal.

Related:How Most Startups Totally Ruin Their First Interactions With Customers

Be Pragmatic, Not Dogmatic

I want to point out that it we didn’t do it because it was the “right” thing to do. We simply thought it was the best option. The loss of profit on the project was less threatening than a bunch of people having a bad service experience with the company. We hoped instead that they’d now share this great experience with their own networks.

When you’re dealing with people, you can’t be 100% prepared for every possible scenario. People and organizations are endlessly creative when it comes to finding edge cases that aren’t covered by your terms of service. And while extensive terms of use and user agreements are vital business protections from a legal standpoint, they have no bearing on how your customers and partners might feel about your business. Those feelings matter.

When you’re in a position where you have to choose between your customers’ interests and your own, you need to be pragmatic as opposed to dogmatic. It’s not enough to ask what people are owed; you have to ask what they think they’re owed and whether it’s reasonable.

If it’s not, then it’s up to you to weigh the costs and benefits of keeping the peace versus sticking to your guns. Like a relationship, in other words.

Christian Bonilla is the founder of UserMuse, which curates market research panels for enterprise software companies. He posts frequently on UserMuse’s blog. Follow Christian on Twitter at @smartlikehow.

As any student of cinema history already knows, the blockbuster era came about by scaring viewers senseless.

Jaws hit theaters like a tidal wave in the summer of ’75, and nothing was the same again. For one thing, not one person in the world went back to the beach for the rest of the year. More importantly, though, summer suddenly became the season for big-tent crowdpleasers. That objective would eventually usher in Will Smithian fare and all the Marvel offerings. During that first summer, however, it was all about the fear of jagged, Ginsu-sharp teeth flossing with your torso-skin.

Steven Spielberg’s beloved shark thriller may be a marvel of craft and storytelling, but it also shares some DNA with horror movies. Perhaps that’s why “Summer Horror Movies” remains a genre unto itself to this day. Have a look below at Fast Company‘s breakdown of the five kinds of SHMs and which ones will have you gripping your seatmate’s triceps this year.

Blockbuster

Blockbusters are studio horror movies with a lot of money behind them and some kind of built-in event element. Think 2013’s The Conjuring, which unearthed every classic scare tactic–from evil toy to exorcism–to reap in high grosses and spawn its own cinematic universe.

This year’s primary would-be Blockbuster is the late-summer entry It. The Stephen King adaptation–a remake if you count the terrifying 1990 TV movie–had a troubled production that saw filmmaker Cary Fukunaga come and go. A tantalizingly dark first trailer, however, has fans’ hopes high.

Franchise

The Franchise is what nearly every Summer Horror Movie aspires to be; well, except for those that kill off their entire casts, and even then sometimes the sequels keep coming. Although horror franchises like Saw and Paranormal Activity are often saved for Halloween, summertime scary movies like The Purge or Insidious keep viewers coming back.

Alien: Covenant already came and went this year, but the spinoff spawn of the aforementioned Conjuring series, Annabelle: Creation, is out this Friday, from director David F. Sandberg of last summer’s surprise horror hit, Lights Out.

Arthouse

Arthouse horror movies are those with high style, low body count, all the atmosphere you can handle, and a pronounced, proud lack of jump scares. Usually, these movies tend to come out earlier in the year, like recent entries The Witch, It Follows, Under the Skin, and Only Lovers Left Alive. This summer, however, has seen the releases of the French cannibal thriller, Raw, Trey Edward Shultz’s post-apocalyptic It Comes At Night, and the just-released, unstuck-in-time mood-piece, A Ghost Story, starring Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck.

Schlock

Look, we all work hard. Life is tough. Sometimes you just want to walk into a movie theater and see some garbage where a bunch of idiots die in dumb ways. That’s the essence of Schlock. It’s not great, it’s the best kind of terrible, and it gets the job done. Think the Chernobyl Diaries or Unfriended or pretty much any found footage horror movie. Open Water 3 is technically Schlock and a Franchise movie, but it’s going straight to VOD on August 11, so it doesn’t quite count. This year’s other Jaws descendant, 47 Meters Down, already came out, but still to come is July 14’s Wish Upon, featuring a mysterious, wish-granting music box that will almost certainly not cause the deaths of any teenagers.

Dark Horse

Finally, there’s the Dark Horse. These are the ones you don’t see coming, and then–kablammy–it’s the best horror movie of the season. Last year, for example, few would have thought that Don’t Breathe and The Shallows would prove way more fun than The Conjuring 2 and all the other summer offerings. Sure enough, that’s the way it played out. Now, Fast Company is not officially endorsing Polaroid as an official Dark Horse release of 2017, but its The Ring-meets-a camera premise certainly has us intrigued.

There was a time when Nike truly dominated the women’s sportswear market. Ten years ago, if you needed a new sports bra, you’d likely end up with one from Nike or just a handful of its competitors–Adidas perhaps, or Lululemon.

But these days, Nike is struggling to hold down its turf. While it is still a giant in the industry, generating $32.4 billion in global revenue last year, it appears to be losing market share to other big players in the market like Under Armour and Reebok. It’s also competing with a host of startups–like Outdoor Voices, Alala, and Ultracor–that have mushroomed in the wake of the cultural phenomenon known as “athleisure,” in which women are wearing trendy, designer yoga pants, and running tights out of the gym and into everyday life.

For Nike, this has spelled bad news: For the first time in eight years, it’s stock has been in decline. “We’re definitely seeing a lot of competition from big brands to small brands, all trying to connect with consumers in this space,” Amy Montagne, the general manager of Nike Women’s, tells Fast Company.

But Montagne has a plan. The way she sees it, Nike has two areas of competitive advantage: It has the resources to come up with the most technologically advanced products, and it has access to a vast network of focus groups that allow it to better understand what female consumers are looking for. “The thing that continues to ground us–and the thing we keep coming back to–is to deliver on high-performance innovation and knowing female athletes better than anyone,” Montagne says.

Under her leadership, over the last three years, Nike has been working on developing new products that carefully address very specific needs in the market. This week, for instance, Nike launches it’s most innovative sports bra to date, the FE/NOM Flyknit bra, which took two years of intense testing to produce.

When she arrived at Nike, there was talk of a new material that had the potential to change the game in the sports bra world: Flyknit. This material had been digitally engineered by Nike’s scientists about seven years ago. It’s a yarn made out of a very strong but extremely lightweight synthetic fiber. It was originally used in the Flyknit Racer shoe that was launched–to much fanfare–at the London Olympics in 2012. “We kept hearing athletes saying that they wished they could wear a sock to play their sport,” says Andy Caine, VP of footwear design, who oversaw the development of the Flyknit shoe. “Our dream was to create a shoe that sort of disappears on your foot but also cater to any needs your foot requires.”

The Flyknit shoe was an unmitigated success, causing Nike’s net income to spike by 40% in the three months after it was released. Two years ago, designers in the women’s division began tinkering with the Flyknit material to see whether it could solve some of the key problems women reported when it came to high-support bras. Through years of focus groups, Nike had discovered that women complained about chafing, constriction, and sweatiness.

This is partly due to the origins of sports bra design. Rendone, who studied this history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, explains that the first bras were focused on keeping the breasts tightly compressed, then over time designers developed cups to encapsulate each breast. But most women still find this too restrictive. “In high-support bras, you’ll often find wires, stabilizers, thick straps, seam bindings,” Rendone says. “All these things need to be sewn on, which adds distracting bulk and chafing. But with Flyknit, we’re able to knit in this shaping, encapsulation, and compression in a single layer.”

This new product was, in many ways, a response to direct feedback from the Nike’s consumers. Montagne and her team are constantly gathering data from customers. And she means this literally. “We have teams placed in cities all across the world that are engaging with consumers,” Montagne says. “I also travel around to these key markets to get feedback firsthand. We’re talking to women every single day.”

Nike has representatives planted in athletic teams ranging from professionals to high school teams. They’re also gathering insights from women who work out at gyms and attend studio classes. Nike also gets plenty of valuable feedback from its large contingent of sponsored athletes, who are invited to come to Nike’s facilities to be studied by researchers. Nike uses these sessions to develop products that will help this individual athlete perform to her best ability, but designers also take these findings into account as they create products for the mass market.

Until recently Nike had made only a few key styles and colors in extra-large sizing, but starting last holiday season, it expanded its plus-size offerings and by the spring, more than 200 items were available from 1X to 3X. It also featured plus size model Paloma Elsesser wearing a sports bra in an advertising campaign. Of course, Nike’s focus on inclusivity dovetails with larger cultural movement: Designers have been including more diverse models on the runway and ads.

From interactions with women in the Middle East, Nike discovered that there was a pressing need for an athletic hijab. Many women felt hindered by their long draped head coverings as they worked out–others didn’t do sports at all because they felt it would be impossible with a hijab. So, with the help of several pro athletes, Nike began conceptualizing a moisture-wicking, fitted hijab that would not be a distraction during physical activity.

Montagne believes that the key to ensuring that Nike stays relevant to female consumers is to keep churning out products that they really need. And unlike smaller brands, Nike has better access to customer feedback and has the ability to create brand-new products from scratch in a short amount of time. But will this be enough to keep Nike on top?

It’s unclear. The activewear industry has changed for good. Startups are popping up every day, making the market busier and more crowded than ever. Giants like Nike are unlikely to be able to dominate as they once did. Montagne believes that it is a fool’s errand to try to compete with all of these new players. Instead, she urges her team to focus on the few areas in which Nike already excels. “It’s not to say that we don’t understand the competition is there,” she says. “It’s that we need to focus on our own potential.”

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

When it comes to the conversation about women in tech, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that the grand illusion of a Silicon Valley meritocracy has been called out. By this point, most of us are willing to admit that hard work and bright ideas aren’t always enough to rise above the double standards that plague every aspect of society. Though the disbelievers linger stubbornly in our peripheries (men are three times more likely to believe tech is a meritocracy), the numbers at least stand unwaveringly against them.

• Only 7% of U.S. Venture Capital decision-makers are women.
• The average woman developer makes almost 30% less than her male counterpart.
• Only 20% of the 2016 Fortune 100 CIOs were women.

These stats–along with the recent rash of sexual harassment allegations–paint a picture of an industry that unwittingly treats women as second-class citizens.

Yet despite being aware of tech’s gender problem, we haven’t found a solution. Despite the visibility of diversity-oriented initiatives at big companies, the gender gap and sexual harassment remains a deeply pervasive, systemic problem. And while women like Susan Wu, Cheryl Sew Hoy, Ellen Pao, and Sheryl Sandberg have paved the way in speaking out, the backlash they face is both disheartening and dissuasive for other women.

On the one hand we’re very much inspired by these brave women, but on the other, their experiences embed a sense of fear in us about the real repercussions of taking a stand. Future hire-ability issues, shaming, and name-calling are just a few of the things that women have to face when they call out anything from preferential treatment to unequal pay to unwanted sexual attention.

Analysis around this issue has revealed one of the major links between tech and the rest of the world. Investors fuel the tech industry and have concentrated power over the industry. Historically, those with the power to invest have mostly been white men. According to the Forbes 2016 Midas List, women make up 8% of investment teams. Black and Latino individuals come in at a staggering 1%. Add to this the inherent in-group favoritism—the idea that people favor those who are similar to them—and you have a recipe for self-perpetuating hegemony in which anyone who is not white or male has a harder chance of tapping into circles of real power.

In order to make a difference and disrupt the industry, women in tech need both power and money. The only way to accomplish this? We need to unionize.

The idea of unions in tech is by no means a new one, though with varying outcomes. Atari workers attempted to do so in both 1982 and 1983. Tesla factory employees are trying it. Apple retail employees tried and failed, though they managed to win some wage concessions in the process. Alliance@IBM, possibly one of the oldest tech unions, represents IBM employees.

Historically speaking, the idea of unionizing in the tech world has been considered nothing short of insane. Intel’s Robert Noyce famously said that “remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies. If we had the work rules that unionized companies have, we’d all go out of business.”

More recently, however, the tech world is opening up to the notion, and interest has been ramping up in response to the current political environment. The tides are turning, and unionizing no longer seems like the crazy idea it once might have been. “If workers can get organized somewhere in Silicon Valley, they can bring a legitimate view to the table and claim political power,” said Stan Sorscher, physicist and former Boeing engineer. “The most thrilling thing an organizer can do is get people out in the street, and then convert that into real power.” Sorscher represents 22,650 professionals in the aerospace union SPEEA.

The technology industry is, in the larger scope of American business, a very young industry in comparison to oil, steel, health, and insurance, which are decades or centuries older. With this in mind, the history of these industries shows the only thing that enacted major change for the workers was when they unionized. The American labor movement was first started by the Lowell Mill girls in 1843.

Even though their strikes and organizing actions were crushed by management, they made an indelible impact on American culture. As one of the workers said about their efforts, “They have at last learnt the lesson which a bitter experience teaches, not to those who style themselves their ‘natural protectors’ are they to look for the needful help, but to the strong and resolute of their own sex.” Today, approximately half of all union workers today are women and have spearheaded issues like paid family leave and child care.

The Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903 and dissolved in 1950, unionized women of all levels in many different industries to fight against sweatshop conditions and broadened its mission to fight against discrimination through strikes and legislative reform. The working conditions were so horrific at the time for so many that the only way to make a difference was to speak in one voice, regularly, and have a large body able to sway the industry with major bargaining power.

While we have admirable organizations like Girls in Tech and Girls Who Code ushering in the next generation of tech women–the problems the industry faces now cannot be addressed through only education. We need bold, strong, women to rise up and awaken a solution.

Women in tech currently have no real collective organization to air grievances and then in turn fight against injustices together. Instead of gawking at the current state of affairs and nodding in solidarity–we need a movement. Without a union, without an organized body to speak as one and say “enough is enough”–the status quo will continue. We have all the elements to start, and we must start now.

The change we need can only happen if it is controlled by the working women of tech. We owe it to ourselves and future tech workers to ensure the future for women in tech is fair and free from the many hurdles we face on a daily basis. We need a union.

Jessica Hasson is a serial entrepreneur and founder of PulpPR based in Los Angeles. 

If there’s one thing we’ve been reminded of over the past few months in Silicon Valley, it is that chipping away at sexism depends on addressing the issue of diversity. What women entrepreneurs really need is more female investors—not a proliferation of tepid apologies on Medium.

Enter XFactor Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage fund launching today that seeks to invest $3 million into 30 female-led companies over the next couple of years. The Boston-based VC firm Flybridge Capital Partners is sponsoring XFactor and has invested 20% of the fund’s capital.

This is by no means the first investment fund catering to early-stage startups helmed by women: Organizations like Female Founders Fund and BBG Ventures also offer early-stage funding exclusively to companies with at least one female founder; other firms like Forerunner Ventures and Rivet Ventures are female-run, and the latter focuses on investing in startups for female consumers.

What sets XFactor apart is that its investment team is itself comprised of women who are already VC-funded entrepreneurs in their own right. And as such, the fund is moving the needle with respect to female representation on both the investor side and founder side.

“The biggest differentiation for XFactor is the fact that the investment team is all sitting CEOs or founders looking to bring all their skills and expertise to the companies that we get involved with,” Chip Hazard, Flybridge general partner and XFactor investing partner, tells Fast Company. “Regardless of gender, I can’t name a single fund that has nine existing operators as the investment team.”

That team, which includes The Muse CEO Kathryn Minshew and Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill, is spread out across New York, San Francisco, and Boston and is fairly diverse in terms of industry and background. In total, the nine entrepreneurs managing XFactor have cumulatively raised more than $150 million in capital for their respective startups. (The other two investing partners are Hazard and Flybridge marketing partner Kate Castle.)

Unlike the scout program at Sequoia Capital, which quietly doles out money to individual entrepreneurs to invest as they wish, XFactor requires far more collaboration and agreement among the team, according to Hazard. “While each individual partner has the power to be able to invest behind their conviction . . . they also have to report back to their peers as to why they think that’s an interesting investment opportunity, and articulate what gets them excited about a particular company and founder,” he says.

Of course a major goal is to “generate phenomenal returns,” as Hazard says—in part to prove that XFactor need not reduce expectations when funding women.

“I think the whole fund is really passionate about the idea that gender-diverse teams, specifically, can outperform the rest,” says Bow & Drape CEO Aubrie Pagano, one of the entrepreneurs on XFactor’s team.

And that applies to investors, too. “One of my first meetings with [fellow XFactor team member] Anna Palmer and Chip, we were laughing because we were saying one of the great things about this fund is that no potential company is going to have to hear from us, ‘Let me talk to my wife about your idea,'” says Pagano.