The line between being a rapper and being a superhero is thinner than you might think. You take on a new name selected largely because it sounds cool, reveal a power to the world that no one suspected you had, and–if you’re lucky–go on bold, globe-spanning adventures.
Perhaps that’s why there’s such a history of cross-pollination between hip-hop and comic books. Marvel’s ongoing project of tapping artists to recreate classic rap album covers has been well-documented, but it’s not where the effort started–or where it ends. Kid ‘n Play even starred in a series of their own back in 1992. The latest group to add their name to the superheroic ranks are Southern duo Rae Sremmurd. As Billboard announced on Monday, the two are co-starring in a new mini-series from Valiant Comics, pairing them up with the musically-inclined New Orleans superhero Shadowman in Shadowman/Rae Sremmurd #1 out this fall.
The group’s Slim Jxmmi told Billboard that he’s especially excited to team with the Valiant hero. “Shadowman is crazy,” he told the magazine. “It has a lot of twists and turns. It keeps me involved and interested. I can’t even take my eyes off of Shadowman when I read it. I have to finish the book.”
Valiant, for its part, has been ambitious in pursuing partnership and collaboration opportunities outside of comics. Last year, the company launched an initiative with breast cancer awareness organization Keep A Breast and the Vans Warped Tour starring their character Faith. That’s been a successful initiative, but it doesn’t lend itself to the same sort of visuals you get from seeing Rae Sremmurd perform alongside a giant Shadowman.
“Embarrassing Period Story” is a three-minute animated cartoon told from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl named Oishani, who relates the shock, embarrassment, and anger she experienced when a boy she once liked discovered that she was on her period during a long school trip.
“He starts scavenging through my bag and picks up my pads and he’s like, ‘What’s this?'” Oishani narrates, as the boy on screen holds a handful of maxi-pads aloft for others to notice. “I snatch it from him, I feel like slapping it on him,” she adds. And then, because this is Cartoon Land, that leads to a funny re-imagining of what such a make-believe scene might have actually looked like.
In the end, a teacher busts the miscreant and the Oishani moves on with her life. But what makes this different from traditional kid-friendly fodder is that Oishani is actually a real person. She uploaded her story in her own words semi-anonymously via audio file to a new kind of online cartoon network, Storybooth, which allows kids to share their first name, age, and whatever sort of serious, embarrassing or funny experience they’ve had to heal and help others relate.
Many of the results become cartoons, a stylization that not only lets the company add some visual humor or metaphorical exaggeration when things get heavy, but also helps protect the identity of the storyteller.
Whatever the outcome, people are watching. Since being posted on YouTube a little over a year ago, Oishani’s video has been viewed more than 2.1 million times, drawing 2,900 mostly supportive comments. The site, which launched last May, features about 70 tales with over 70 million total views. These run the gamut from how it feels be bullied for wearing a hijab (Ammaarah, age 16), to coping with parental pressure (Andrea, age 18). Other episodes talk about battling things like smoking, an eating disorder, and the fear and anxiety of coming out.
Growing up has always been tough; it’s arguable more so when the popularity contests or bullying can extend online. In many ways, Storybooth, offers a way to address all that. “The networks weren’t really keeping up with where [young people] were going in terms of how they consume digital content, and they weren’t really covering the issues that are relevant to kids in a meaningful way,” says Marcy Sinel, who cofounded the company with her husband Josh.
The Sinels learned that firsthand: They spent nearly two decades running an interactive agency that either built or managed some of the biggest kid-related communities online, including offerings from AOL, MTV, Noggin, and Nickelodeon. “Because YouTube is so authentic we didn’t want to script something,” she says of their new process. “We wanted to actually create a space where [these] voices were the platform. And we simply would take these stories and just elevate them through the animation.”
By launching online and crowdsourcing content, Storybooth not only stays relevant, but makes episodes (all are free) available on-demand to those who may need them. Many short cartoons are crossposted on YouTube directly to be found more easily. That could lead to some trolling, so the platform has its own curated comments section—users must log-in to share thoughts—for viewers to interact, offering camaraderie and support.
In general, every episode clocks in at around three minutes. Initially, the confessionals can be any length, but Storybooth edits keep thing moving and ensure they fit that attention-keeping timeframe. The group gives very little other advice or direction: Why complicate the honest process of unburdening? Before production and animation begins the site has a backchannel process to reach parents and secure a release form.
The team is coy about what exactly gets chosen and why but isn’t against covering a topic more than once—everyone’s story turns out a little different—or posting episodes that are counterintuitive. “Instagram Bullies Busted,” for instance, is from the perspective a teen who did the bullying and had to deal with the fallout. The team has an in-house producer, director, and lead animator control main themes and storyboarding, and contracts with a separate studio for more support.
For storytellers, the entire process works like a symbolic act. Despite what everyone else may be saying at school, within their social circle or elsewhere online, Storybooth is a portal to transform that negative into a positive. “Even with anonymity, for the young audience that idea of being creators… there’s some draw in that,” adds Josh, who notes that the diversity of voices and non-scripted honesty lends the whole venture a sort of authentic and expansive cast of characters, something traditional cable networks often struggle with as series drag on.
That many of the themes are obviously universal, which has kept traffic to older videos flowing steadily. Storybooth’s overall viewership is growing at a rate of 5% to 7% weekly, a feat the Sinels aided by enlisting over a half dozen different teen-centric YouTube stars to spin their own yarns as guest narrators.
The site’s audience is about 70% female. If the top-viewed videos are any indication, it’s quickly becoming a new way to tackle extremely sensitive issues. Among the five most watched episodes, “Embarrassing Period Story” ranks the highest, followed by stories about sexual abuse, mean mothering, and suicide. It’s not all dark: A recounting of the Bloody Mary seance is up there.
Storybooth monitors its discussion forums and will refer anyone who appears in need to a full spectrum mental health service like the Crisis Text Line, which has counselors ready to deal with most major issues in a way the mimics the immediacy and anonymity of message boards.
While the company won’t disclose financials, they’re backed by billionaire mutual fund manager Charles Royce. As with all social media platforms, the Sinels say they want to build audience and engagement first, and then decide how best to monetize through things like sponsorships or brand integrations. What’s on YouTube generates some money though front-reel ads, and at least one gaming company has sponsored content for a brought-to-you-by style name check.
So far, more than 38,000 people have bared their souls for potential cartoon treatment. Not everyone will get animated, but the Storybooth guarantees they’re all being listened to and hopes that just sharing provides some catharsis.
The Sinels aren’t totally surprised by all the buzz. Early on, their teenage daughter volunteered to share her own encounter with bullying and body-shaming. As they showed the cartoon to friends, people of all ages began talking about other experiences, too. “We knew then that we had something relatable,” Marcy says.
Apple last month launched what could soon end up being the largest augmented reality (AR) platform in the world, and its rivals may have a tough time answering in kind. Apple, it turns out, is probably the only company that could launch an AR platform with the kind of performance and broad consumer reach of its offering, ARKit. That’s because it controls so many parts of the software and hardware involved–just like Jobs envisioned.
While Google has spent years working on its own AR platform, Tango, having it opened it up to developers back in 2014, Apple now seems poised to swoop in and carry AR into the mainstream, leaving the kids from Mountain View in the dust.
The AR apps developers create for ARKit will immediately work on many millions of iPhones out in the wild. No special 3D sensors required, just the iPhone’s camera, and an A9 or A10 chip inside.
Tango AR, meanwhile, works only on a couple of phones–Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro and Asus’s ZenFone AR. Tango may be more accurate at mapping objects and rooms because it requires the host device to have active 3D sensors to measure the precise locations of surfaces and objects within the frame. The device also has to have a large battery to power the 3D lasers.
“Google must realize they dramatically overshot with Tango,” says IDC analyst Tom Mainelli, referring to the platform’s rigorous hardware requirements.
ARKit, on the other hand, relies on no special 3D sensors on the back of the iPhone. ARKit apps can place digital objects in mid-air, and on horizontal surfaces. What ARKit can’t yet do is attach content to real-world objects in the frame. Nor can it make digital content interact with more complex surfaces (it can’t make a virtual car race across the floor and bounce off a piece of furniture, for example).
Despite those limitations, the quality of the AR we’ve seen developed on ARKit is surprisingly good.
[Photo: courtesy of Apple]
Why ARKit Works
The secret sauce isn’t much of a secret. ARKit experiences look compelling because they are supported by several key components of the phone–the camera, the processors, and the phone’s various inertia sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, etc.)–all working in tight concert together. They’re tuned and optimized to precisely determine the position of the iPhone relative to the environment, as the user moves it around. Apple can can do this because all the components are made by the same company, Apple.
Apple can bring a lot of processing power to bear, too. ARKit processing happens on the A9 or A10 system-on-a-chip (SOC) within the iPhone. The dual-core application processor on the SOC works with both the M9 motion processing chip (which processes data coming in from the motion sensors) and with an image signal processing chip (which processes image data coming in from the camera). This all happens extremely quickly and in a way that doesn’t rapidly drain the battery or overheat the phone, explains Jay Wright, president of PTC’s Vuforia AR platform.
Apple says millions of computer vision computations are already happening during ARKit experiences on the iPhone. Right now, however, “computer vision” software can only understand the rough outlines of objects in AR settings. “This is because it is not yet capable of determining an accurate 3D position or the accurate contours of an object,” Wright explains. “Both are required for the more interesting AR use cases.”
Right now the image signal processor (ISP) does much of the computer vision processing needed to recognize imagery seen through the camera lens. Apple is said to be working on a dedicated AI processor, which might take over the bulk of the image recognition duties for AR. Other reports have said Apple is working on its own graphics processing unit (GPU), the kind of chip most commonly used for heavy-duty computation and AI algorithms.
A Sea Of Androids
Google can’t orchestrate the under-the-hood workings as Apple can because it enjoys far less control over Android devices. Google, naturally, decides what components go into its own Nexus and Pixel phones, but for the most part, Android phone makers like Samsung decide what chips, cameras, and sensors to put in their own phones.
Google may have been able to optimize the Tango experience to the Lenovo and Asus phones because it worked closely with the OEM to choose and optimize the components. Typically, however, Google can’t reasonably tell phone OEMs what camera would work best for its AR platform, because consumers use the camera mainly for photos and video, and the phone maker naturally wants to put the best camera it can afford into the phone. It’s a point of differentiation, and something to brag about in marketing materials.
So there are hundreds of different Android phones out there, all with different innards. The combinations of components are endless. So much for carefully optimizing a set of specific components to work together. Add to that the fact that those phones run a number of different versions of Android.
As a result, there’s no practical way to design an AR platform that can optimize the components in any one of those phones to create a comparable AR experience.
What Can Google Do?
To defend against the Apple tide, Google might start by building an AR software platform–a sort of “Tango Lite”– that doesn’t require the host device to have any special 3D sensors or processors. The platform would work to calibrate whatever sensors, cameras, and chips it found on the host device to create the best AR experience possible. It might do better on some devices than others, depending on sensors and processing power. That’s not so different from what Vuforia and Wikitude have been offering AR developers for a long time via their software development kits (SDKs), and it could also help to further democratize AR beyond Apple’s walled garden.
Google could also buy. “One way they [Google] could be competitive with ARKit sooner rather than later would be to throw support behind—or buy and integrate directly into Android—an existing AR platform,” Mainelli says, pointing to Vuforia and Wikitude as two possible candidates.
Vuforia–currently the largest AR development platform (by number of apps)–was born and raised inside Qualcomm before being sold off to PTC. The platform lets developers create AR apps for iOS, Android, and the Universal Windows Platform. Wikitude allows developers to make apps for iOS, Android, and JavaScript.
Vuforia has worked with Google to make its platform compatible with Tango, but Wright says he hasn’t talked to Google about the possibility of an acquisition. Nor do we know of any such talks going on between Google and Wikitude.
Whether it’s one of those options, or something completely different, don’t be surprised to see Google make some sort of strategic move in the direction of widening the appeal of its own flavor of AR.
The way things look right now, Apple’s ARKit may end up being the second big inflection point for consumer augmented reality. The first was last summer’s obsession with Pokémon Go (a project that grew out of a Google startup, Niantic). If Apple manages to bring another wave of attention back to AR, and if AR becomes a bigger, more sustainable part of the smartphone experience, Google might find itself trailing Apple in a way that becomes increasingly painful.
The last thing almost anyone wants to see is for SoundCloud to sink. From the artists and podcasters who use it, to the listeners who hit “play”–and even many employees who were recently stunned by mass layoffs at the struggling music service–are all cringing at the suddenly feasible-seeming possibility that SoundCloud may end up in the graveyard of failed startups.
Before we pour one out for those little orange waveforms, it’s important to remember that SoundCloud is not necessarily doomed. Late last week, CEO Alex Ljung vowed in a blog post that the service is “here to stay” (echoing a vague promise tweeted by Chance the Rapper for as-yet-unknown reasons) despite the recent cutbacks. The company still hopes to secure a fresh round of investment, and rumors continue to swirl that someone else (most recently, Deezer) may finally acquire it.
Indeed, many people close to the company speculate that this month’s very abrupt downsizing—10-year-anniversary staff parties planned for just days after the layoffs were reportedly canceled at the last possible minute—was carried out to meet the demands of a potential investor or a buyer. But if neither savior comes galloping through, there is a very real threat that SoundCloud could run out of cash and go the way of Vine. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen.
Its staggering business challenges aside, SoundCloud deserves a fair bit of credit both as a product and as a cultural force. When cofounders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss started it in 2007, nothing like SoundCloud existed: a do-it-yourself, user-generated audio site that aimed to do for DJs and musicians what YouTube had just begun doing for video creators. What SoundCloud subsequently became is just as unique: A massive repository of 135 million songs, podcasts, and other audio clips, a huge chunk of which don’t exist on any other streaming service.
Even if, in the event Soundcloud goes away, this motherlode of music (and data) could be preserved, there’d be other lasting losses.
SoundCloud has morphed into a unique conduit of culture, helping nudge along the careers of artists like Kehlani and Future, while giving stars like Drake and Chance the Rapper a new way to interact with fans and push new material out into the world. One of the summer’s biggest hits, Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Life 1.5,” originated on SoundCloud. Soulection, Joe Kay’s popular Beats 1 show, began there too, and per his arrangement with Apple, continues to be posted on the service.
The Deafening Silence Of 135 Million Tracks Going Dark
Over the years, artists and record labels have set up shop on SoundCloud, often using it to preview new music for fans before it lands anywhere else. Somehow, SoundCloud had become an indispensable tool for amateur bedroom songwriters and chart-topping megastars alike. And 175 million listeners ate it all up.
If SoundCloud were to go under, it would be felt first and most palpably by the people who hit the play button. Suddenly, 135 million tracks would disappear, not just from SoundCloud’s own apps and website, but from countless embeds woven throughout the web. More than any other music service (except perhaps YouTube), SoundCloud has long prioritized shareability, making its tracks easy to embed anywhere, rather than walling them off inside its own app. By contrast, Spotify and Apple Music offer limited, embeddable song widgets for websites, but they both push you back to each service’s respective app. SoundCloud turns any browser tab into a full-fledged listening session. If anything happens to SoundCloud, its millions of embedded tracks would go silent across music blogs, major publications and various other websites.
One of the most unique (and valuable) things about SoundCloud is just how much of its content doesn’t exist anywhere else. Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music could disappear tomorrow, and we’d still be able to rebuild our music collections and playlists on a competing service; the on-demand subscription streamers all license more or less the same catalog of albums from the labels. That’s not the case with SoundCloud. The service is brimming with remixes, DJ sets, demos, and otherwise unreleased songs that can’t be found elsewhere. There’s a lot of total garbage on there (welcome to the internet), but there’s also a lot of great stuff, much of which was uploaded by the artists who made it. Last year, when revered electronic music producer Aphex Twin pried open his personal archive to share unreleased tracks with the world, he uploaded them to SoundCloud.
SoundCloud Is The DIY Music Platform Budding Artists Need
SoundCloud’s theoretical demise would also be a loss for artists. For all the uncertainty and anxiety generated by music’s transition to an online-first medium, SoundCloud has always enjoyed the rare admiration of artists. It’s slightly counterintuitive, considering SoundCloud was never a substantial source of revenue for musicians. Instead, it gave them something few other platforms could: control and a sense of community. Other than YouTube and perhaps Bandcamp, there’s no easier way to quickly get music out into the world than by uploading it to SoundCloud. And the platform’s deeply social nature—based around following artists, labels, and curators, liking and resharing tracks, and adding comments at specific times within a song’s waveform—makes SoundCloud feel more personal and interactive than other streaming services. Even Apple has repeatedly struggled to build a social network around music. SoundCloud is a social network, both for artists and fans.
SoundCloud is especially valuable for smaller, less established artists. Together with Bandcamp and YouTube, it’s one of the few ways to distribute music to a wide audience without having to pay for it. If you’re an unsigned band without much of an audience, getting your work onto Spotify and other subscription services requires you to pay for a service like CD Baby or Tunecore (usually between $30 and $50 per album). If an artist does not rack up enough streams to generate meaningful royalties, they could actually lose money in the quest for exposure. That’s not the case with SoundCloud.
For many artists, SoundCloud is a more than just a distribution platform; it’s part of the creative process. For all the jabs SoundCloud gets for being loaded with lower-quality content like amateur demos, this is actually an important part of what the service provides for budding artists: a way to get feedback on new creative work from listeners, even before it’s totally polished. One can also share tracks privately for collaborative purposes. When I used to play in a band, we recorded our practices and jam sessions and uploaded them privately to SoundCloud, where we could discuss them and critique our own playing by leaving comments at specific intervals. Similarly, songwriters can use the platform to share demos with collaborators in a format that’s more useful than a Dropbox link or an email attachment.
What Does This Mean For Music Tech And Innovation?
Zoom out, and there are implications for the future of technology, too. There’s something disheartening about an original, innovative idea with a unique offering being flushed down the toilet while a handful of Spotify copycat services continue to thrive, thanks to their giant parent companies’ cash reserves. What sort of chilling effect might SoundCloud’s loss have on young entrepreneurs experimenting with new ideas for the ways we make and consume music?
Artists, just like listeners, would of course, begrudgingly or not, find a new home for music in the (again, hypothetical) event that SoundCloud disappears. But that kind of disruption wouldn’t be easy, and its impact would be felt beyond the company’s remaining 250 employees. If SoundCloud goes quiet, artists, fans, and technologists will, at least temporarily, find the silence deafening.
This story reflects the views of this author but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
There’s a way of being in the world that’s “all things to all people.” When a person is said to be that way, it’s not typically a flattering analysis. But many—maybe most—companies adopt that way of being. Just as Michael Jordan reportedly said, “Republicans buy shoes, too,” many companies studiously avoid making a stand that could alienate any potential customers. The 4A’s, the advertising industry’s association, recently released a report that encouraged brands not to take political or social stances, saying “there’s more risk than benefit.”
New research my company Enso, a mission-driven creative company, has published demonstrates how some companies that have taken stands on polarizing issues have alienated some potential customers, but those stands have been rewarded by loyalty from others. For example, Starbucks’ stand on hiring immigrants draws admiration from some, and scorn from others. So should brands take stands on controversial issues? Is the risk worth the reward?
The research we conduct in partnership with Quadrant Strategies, a research firm, asks a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population which brands align with their values, and which brands they would be willing to publicly, actively support in service of the brands’ missions.
Some brands, like Goodwill, Amazon, and Google rank consistently well across different types of people—across political persuasions, age, income levels, and attitudes.
Starbucks’ stand on hiring immigrants draws admiration from some, and scorn from others. [Image: courtesy Enso]
But Some Brands Are Polarizing
NPR, NBC, and Vice score disproportionately well with people that lean Democrat. Wells Fargo, Coors, and Pfizer score disproportional well with people that lean Republican. Trader Joe’s, Uber, and Ben & Jerry’s rank particularly well with people that say experiencing other cultures is important to them. McDonald’s, Chevrolet, and Marlboro rank particularly well with the Americans that say experiencing other cultures is not important to them.
In other words, many brands represent a set of values that means they align with groups of people who share those values.
Learning From Starbucks’ Experience
Starbucks ranks 75th overall in our index of 150 brands. But when we look at how Democrat-leaning people rank brands, Starbucks moves up 57 places to rank 18th. This is the largest upward movement of any brand for people who lean Democrat.
Starbucks’ official mission statement is: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”
When we asked people to define Starbucks’ mission in their own words, some are clearly offended by Starbucks’ actions: “prefer refugees over Americans,” “to divide people,” and “very liberal agenda.” It’s very possible that Starbucks has lost business from people with these views. Among people who lean Republican, Starbucks declines by 28 places to rank 103rd out of 150. People over 55 years old rank Starbucks 36 places lower than the general population.
Starbucks aligns with the values of the people that act on their values. [Image: courtesy enso]
How can this be a good thing?
Other people we asked were able to recite the mission almost exactly, while many others reflected the values-oriented practices: “to employ veterans and serve lattes,” “lead the way in many activism events,” “fair trade as much as possible,” “to empower people,” and “help employees go to college.”
Among people who take action in support of issues they care about (which could be online, like signing a petition, or offline, like attending a protest), Starbucks moves up 60 places to rank 15th. In other words, Starbucks aligns with the values of the people that act on their values.
When we look just at moms, Starbucks moves up 34 places. When we look at those who are higher income and higher educated, Starbucks moves up 47 places. For any brand, these are very important, and influential, audiences to resonate with.
Similarly, looking at people who say that experiencing other cultures is important to them, Starbucks rises 46 places to rank 29th. Again, Starbucks moves up more places than any other brand when we look just at people with this sensibility.
Consider this: While 64% of those over 55 years of age say that experiencing other cultures is important to them, 77% of millennials do; Starbucks scores well with people of this mind-set. Millennials are about twice as likely as those over 55 to have participated in activism or protest; Starbucks scores well with those people. Women control a significant majority of purchase decisions and a fast-growing portion of GDP; Starbucks scores well with women. People who are under 34 and active on social media (posting, not just watching) are disproportionately influential in culture, and they score Starbucks much more highly than older and less socially active people.
In other words, while Starbucks alienates some people with its values, it wins strong emotional connections with some of the most powerful segments of society, who by virtue of age and influence, will become even more significant over time.
Matt Ryan, global chief strategy officer of Starbucks, has said: “We’re able to see a very distinct market improvement in the store’s comp performance [same-store sales], controlling for all other variables, when partners [employees] believe we’re doing the right thing, values-wise. That’s pretty amazing.” So in addition to winning deeper loyalty from important segments of society, leading with values has a direct impact on employees, which drives financial performance.
Of course, there are approaches to leading with values that are not strongly polarizing. Dove has championed the Real Beauty Campaign for over 10 years; it ranked No. 9 overall in the World Value Index. Moms ranked it as the No. 3 brand, and it was in the top 10 brands for both Democrats and Republicans. It is remarkable that a soap brand, a pure utility product, can have won such significant affection with people such that they are prepared to publicly and actively support its mission, above almost any other brand.
Being divisive for the sake of being divisive is clearly not an admirable quality, or great business strategy. But in these polarized times—when there’s a debate about the foundational principles of our future, there’s a role for principled business leaders. Our research indicates that 79% of Americans believe business can be a force for good, but only 41% trust business leaders to do what is right. Closing that gap is critical to brands’ long-term relationships with people. In contrast to the advertising industry association’s position, our research indicates that communicating and acting according with values actually creates value.
When Colin Angle visited Bermuda in 2015 and first saw lionfish–an invasive species that has decimated local fish populations with its ravenous appetite–it wasn’t the first time he had heard about the problem. But it was the first time that Angle, who is the cofounder of iRobot, the tech company that makes the Roomba, started to think that he might be able to help solve it.
“The dive operator challenged me when I came out of the water and said, ‘You build robots–why don’t you create a robot that can go and help control the lionfish problem?'” Angle tells Fast Company. “Rather than dismiss that as ‘Yeah, whatever,’ it was, ‘Okay, would that work?'”
“There’s a demand for lionfish, and if you can catch them, people will pay you.” [Photo: courtesy Robots for the Environment]Within a year, he and his wife, Erika Ebbel Angle, founder of a biotech startup and the director of the education nonprofit Science from Scientists, had launched a nonprofit called Robots in Service of the Environment–and a team started to develop a robot called Guardian, designed to drive up to a lionfish, stun it, and suck it inside the robot, which can collect multiple fish before returning to the surface. The fish can then be sold to restaurants.
It’s one among many attempts to control an out-of-control population. The fish, which is originally from the Indo-Pacific, has no native predators in the Atlantic, where it started to appear–possibly released by people who had bought the fish as pets–in the 1980s. The fish eats other fish voraciously; within half an hour, it can consume 20 other fish. In five weeks, one lionfish can reduce the population of fish on a reef by 80%. A single lionfish can live up to three decades, and spawn as many as 2 million eggs in a year. In some locations, there may be as many as 1,000 lionfish per acre.
In Florida, Whole Foods stores now carry the fish–which tastes a little like a cross between grouper and mahi mahi–to try to encourage more fishing, and fishing tournaments have tried to encourage it more. But lionfish don’t respond to bait, and can’t easily be caught with nets. Spearfishing works, but only in shallower waters, and the fish are often found in caves deeper than humans can dive.
“There’s a demand for lionfish, and if you can catch them, people will pay you,” says Angle. “Our challenge is that down in deeper water or in areas that aren’t commonly accessible to people, we can’t [catch them]. And that’s what happens with areas where they are proliferating at the greatest rates. So a robot that could go down two, three, 400 feet would be an incredibly powerful tool.”
“It’s actually less about the technology and more about the business model.” [Photo: courtesy Robots for the Environment]One challenge was developing a robot that could catch the fish affordably. “You’re not going to go change a population by capturing one lionfish with a half-a-million-dollar robot,” he says. He realized that he could apply manufacturing expertise from iRobot–making low-cost robots like Roomba–to the new robot. The nonprofit is aiming for a cost of $1,000 or less. “The fully capitalized operating cost of running that type of robot is so low that you could make money at this.”
After considering a range of designs, the team moved forward with a prototype that drives directly up to the fish (the lionfish, as a top predator, has no fear and won’t swim away; other fish, with a normal amount of fear, aren’t captured by the system). Two arms stun the fish, and then the robot sucks the fish inside a tube. The current prototype can catch up to 10 fish before returning to the surface to deliver its catch.
“A robot that could go down two, three, 400 feet would be an incredibly powerful tool.” [Photo: courtesy Robots for the Environment]The robot is controlled remotely by an operator at the surface who watches the action via a camera. Unlike another robot designed to kill starfish (also an invasive species), the Guardian can’t hunt down fish by itself. But that makes sense economically, Angle says.
“It’s actually less about the technology and more about the business model,” he says. For the project to work and control the species, it had to work at scale, and that means collecting the fish for sale; the starfish robot is designed to simply kill starfish. If someone is on site to collect the fish anyway, they can control the robot, making the design simpler and less expensive.
“Part of the funding model and scalability of the project could be tied to the gamification of the operation of the robot.” [Photo: courtesy Robots for the Environment]After a successful Kickstarter campaign, the nonprofit is currently working on the next generation of the design, with simpler operation. This version will work with a laptop, a single tether, and some batteries, and will be easier to ship and possible to operate with less training. As a prototype, it’s still expensive, but the team plans to use it to demonstrate that it’s possible to reliably capture a certain number of fish each hour. Next, the engineers will work on reducing cost, focusing on making the most expensive part–eight thrusters that drive the robot through the water–less expensive.
Ultimately, when the robots hit their target cost, the nonprofit hopes to sell them for sport fishing along with commercial fishing. People may even operate the robots remotely. “Part of the funding model and scalability of the project could be tied to the gamification of the operation of the robot–you could pay to operate a lionfish from your iPad, sitting in your office wanting to do good,” Angle says.
The lionfish robot is the first of several robots the nonprofit hopes to develop to tackle environmental problems; others might include robots that fight poaching, or collect ocean plastic. “We believe that low-cost robotics is a technology that enables a variety of innovative solutions that have not heretofore been feasible or viable,” he says. “The lionfish is step one.”
Last spring, Dena Haritos Tsamitis left a work meeting to discover she was unable to get a signal on her cellphone. Even after rebooting the device, she couldn’t get service, leaving her unable to contact her college student daughter, who usually communicated with her throughout the day.
“She was frantic, worrying about me, because she had tried to reach me several times,” Tsamitis says she learned when she got home. “She said she called her friend to pick her up to look for me, because she was worried about me.”
Tsamitis called her phone company for help with the issue, only to discover she had been the victim of fraud.
“The customer service representative said, you purchased new phones earlier this afternoon, and therefore we cut the service from the old phone,” says Tsamitis. “And I said, no, I didn’t, I’ve been in meetings this afternoon.”
When it comes to digital security, Tsamitis is about far as from an amateur as could be: She’s a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, director of the school’s Information Networking Institute, and a founding director of CMU’s CyLab security and privacy institute. Yet it was still easy for criminals armed with fake IDs to purchase new devices and charge them to her account, a problem that wasn’t resolved until she spent hours on the phone with her carrier and even visited one of the company’s retail stores.
“It’s just very frustrating, and the carrier didn’t really have an appropriate response or guidance as to steps I can take,” she says. “I was just overwhelmed and frustrated at the number of hours it took to deal with this.”
And while the fraudsters who targeted Tsamitis may have simply been looking to steal hardware, other victims of similar crimes have seen attackers also hijack other logins linked to their phone numbers. Criminals who can trick or hack phone companies into letting them access legitimate customers’ accounts can use text-message-based password reset tools to gain access to private emails, social media, and even financial accounts.
“I was hacked today: my Twitter account, two email addresses, & my phone,” wrote Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson on Twitter last June. “It was not due to passwords, they hacked my phone account itself.”
By calling @verizon and successfully changing my phone’s SIM, the hacker bypassed two-factor verification which I have on all accounts.
Calling his phone company, hackers were able to impersonate McKesson, have his phone number assigned to a new SIM card under their control and use that to reset his Twitter password through text-based authentication, he wrote. They then posted a number of tweets to his account, including one endorsing Donald Trump for president.
He isn’t the only prominent victim of such an attack: the popular YouTube host known as Boogie2988, known for his viral video rants under the name “Francis,” wrote on Medium last fall that a teenage hacker used a similar technique. The hacker tricked a Verizon employee into rerouting Boogie2988’s phone number to the hacker’s phone, which allowed the hacker to take control of Boogie2988’s email, YouTube, social media, and even PayPal accounts.
“PayPal had been raided but luckily they managed to freeze the assets when they realized something was wrong,” he wrote. “I had been locked out of my own account though and it took hours on the phone to regain access.”
Other accounts took weeks to recover, wrote the YouTube star, who didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. And while he and Tsamitis were hacked by criminals who tricked individual phone company workers, other criminals have pulled off similar feats by exploiting security holes in phone company networks. Earlier this year, hackers reportedly drained German bank accounts by intercepting login confirmation codes sent via text, directing phone company computers to route the texts to their own systems.
Meet Signaling System 7, A Hacker’s Best Friend
The attack, and others like it, relied on an esoteric worldwide computer network known as Signaling System 7. It’s essentially a decades-old parallel internet used by telephone companies to route calls and texts between their systems, and experts say it was built with little attention to security, since historically phone companies assumed they could trust one another.
“In the 1980s, this is AT&T, they’re making an interconnect agreement with British Telecom in the U.K.,” says Dawood Ghalaieny, CEO of Dublin telecom security company Cellusys. “They don’t have any reason for BT to defraud them.”
But in the cellphone age, the number of companies with access to the global phone network has exploded, and not all telephone companies have the same level of security.
Many of those phone companies have systems connected both to the traditional internet and the phone signaling system. And like all internet-connected systems, they can be compromised by hackers who spot security flaws like out-of-date software with vulnerabilities or fire off targeted phishing attacks to employee inboxes.
Through such hacks, or if an unscrupulous employee allows them access, fraudsters can send messages through the phone signaling network, impersonating the hacked company. They contact the victim’s carrier, falsely claiming that the victim is traveling and using their phone on the hacked company’s network. Then, the victim’s phone company will route the victim’s incoming calls and texts to the hacked network. There, instead of being delivered to the victim’s phone, they’re passed on to the hackers. Since phone signaling systems are designed to make roaming across networks easy, and were built without this kind of fraud in mind, hackers are able to steal messages from even some of the most digitally secure phone companies by hacking into a weaker carrier elsewhere in the world.
And while theoretical attacks on the SS7 system have been discussed at computer security conferences for years–computer security experts even worked with Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democratic Congressman from California, to demonstrate the technique last year on 60 Minutes–phone companies have had difficulty fixing the problem.
[Photo: Flickr user Eric Kim]“Security was never supposed to be a part of this, so applying security on top of all of this is a bit of a hack,” says Ghalaieny. Phone companies are gradually adding tools similar to internet firewalls that can filter out suspicious requests. For instance, they can notice if a phone is suddenly claimed to be connected to a network halfway around the world from where it was recently operating, and then alert security teams or block the request as clearly fraudulent, he says. And carriers and their security contractors can look for unusual patterns of requests that could indicate fraud, just as in other areas of digital security.
“You look for signatures, if you’re seeing certain patterns you proactively either stop them or you notify [security officials] so they’re not happening again,” says Pardeep Kohli, CEO of Dallas-area telecom software company Mavenir.
How Safe Is 2-Factor Authentication In The Age Of Phone Hacking?
To keep data safe from phone company hacks and fraud, many experts advise moving away from SMS-based authentication whenever possible. Ordinary text messages have recently gained popularity as part of two-factor authentication, where users log in to systems using two proofs of identity, like knowledge of a password and possession of a physical item. ATMs, which require both a card and a PIN to withdraw money, are a classic example. These days, many online services require users to enter a password and also a pin number texted to their mobile device before they log on to an internet-based service. But the National Institute of Standards and Technology last year stopped recommending SMS for the two-factor practice, thanks to the risk of phone hackers getting access to those texts.
Some companies now offer alternative approaches, including tools like Google’s Authenticator that use secure algorithms to generate codes on a user’s phone rather than sending them over the airwaves, and apps that send login codes over encrypted connections so that attackers can’t read them even if they intercept them.
“Systems like what we have at Duo are a lot safer because essentially what they do is verify who they’re talking to, and they actually validate they’re talking to the right device,” says Steve Manzuik, director of security research at two-factor authentication provider Duo Security. Duo’s app, like Google Authenticator and some other apps, uses a secret digital key that’s only stored on your phone to generate onetime login codes that Duo servers can verify came from your device, without needing to send text messages back and forth.
Similar systems are increasingly used by financial institutions to verify banking app users beyond just checking their passwords, he says.
But while there’s no doubt that text-based verification can be vulnerable to hacks and scams, Manzuik argues that in cases where it’s all that providers offer, it’s still better than simply using passwords.
“It definitely is risky, but it also depends on your personal threat model,” he says. “For the average person, I think having SMS is a lot better than having nothing at all.
When you’re just launching a business, every waking hour can feel like a hustle. Your days are spent pitching your idea to anyone who will listen, trying to lock down funding, getting leaders in your industry to talk to you about how they made it, and figuring out how to get people to follow you on social media.
More than ever, Instagram is eager to play a role in that quest. On August 14, the social photo giant is partnering with the luxury apron company Hedley & Bennett to throw a day-long educational summit for small business owners and entrepreneurs called the Instasummer School of Hustle. The event, which will be held at Hedley & Bennett’s L.A. headquarters, will be entirely free for its 200 participants, who will be hand-selected through an application process (The application, which is due July 28, can be found here.) Finalists will be notified on August 3.
“We’re thinking of it as something like a college application,” says Ellen Bennett, Hedley & Bennett’s founder and CEO, who came up with the idea for the event and pitched it to Instagram. “We’re looking for people who are dreaming big and have really inspiring visions for the world. Each of the people we select will get a scholarship to attend the event for free.” (A major part of the application, naturally: tag @HedleyAndBennett and @InstagramForBusiness in an Instagram photo or video post that explains “why you should be chosen.”)
[Photo: courtesy of Hedley & Bennett]Several speakers have already signed up including Alli Webb, founder of Drybar; Janet Hayes, president of Williams-Sonoma; Jaclyn Johnson, CEO of Create & Cultivate; and Erik Oberholtzer, Chef, CEO and co-founder of Tender Greens. Others will be announced soon.
Bennett wants the panels to focus on the real struggles that entrepreneurs tackle every day. “When I was first starting out, I remember being so frustrated going to conferences where they wouldn’t address the really important stuff that I was dealing with every day,” Bennett recalls. “Like how to close the deal when it comes to landing funding.”
Some of the panels already in the works include: “The Awkwardness of the True Hustle;” “Boss Evolution: The Stages of Building Your Business;” “Social Media Community Online and Off;” and “A New Approach to Retail: Mixed Media IRL.” There will also be a “Speed Hustlin'” event, which will pair attendees with experts in retail, marketing, and HR, to ask their burning questions. There will be a scavenger hunt to teach people how to create engaging content on Instagram Stories that can help drive business.
[Photo: courtesy of Hedley & Bennett]But the day is going to be about more than just hearing from seasoned entrepreneurs and business leaders. It will also be a massive community party to celebrate Hedley & Bennett’s five-year anniversary. The event will be summer camp-themed, complete with canoes, teepees, relay races, and life-size Jenga as part of the backdrop. Hadley & Bennett’s apron factory is the right place for an event like this. As I described in a recent profile, the 17,000-square-foot downtown L.A. space already has a full-sized indoor tree house built into it and regularly hosts community parties.
Bennett had the idea for the event several months ago. “We work closely with the restaurant community, so we know how to throw a party,” she says. “But we wanted to do more than just have good food and streamers. We wanted to give a gift to the startup community, since so much of our own journey has been about navigating the hustle.”
Bennett, who has used Instagram from the very start to build a following (now clocking in at 75,000), reached out to Instagram, and eventually connected with Morgan Cornelius, the company’s community programs lead on small and mid-sized businesses. She is one of a number of staffers at the company charged with helping grow its “Instagram for Business” platform, which connects with young entrepreneurs and businesses to help them better understand how to use the app as a brand-building and sales tool.
“We’re going all over the world, throwing events similar to this one for the startup community,” says Cornelius. “Telling your story on Instagram can be a valuable way for a business to connect with customers, so we want to be a resource.”
What did you eat for breakfast this morning? It matters more than you might think.
Anyone whose job depends on their body—like an Olympic athlete, builder, or ballet dancer—needs a diet to match; they might start the day with a slow-release carbohydrate to give them longer-lasting energy. But few people with “thinking” jobs sit down first thing in the morning and consider which foods and drinks will help them make good decisions that day, improve their focus, and reduce stress. And that’s a mistake.
What we put into our bodies has a powerful impact on our brains, which only weigh 2–3% of our body weight but use up 25–30% of the energy that’s found in what we eat. Our brains need to be properly cared for in order to make sure we perform at our best. You’d never jump in your car and set off without filling up the tank or checking the oil. If you tried to, you wouldn’t expect to get very far. Our brains are similar: They need to be properly fueled and hydrated in order to run smoothly, and we shouldn’t expect optimal performance when they’re not.
Here’s what your brain needs more and less of in order to work at its best.
Drinking enough water should be, well, a no-brainer—except that many people don’t do that. Our brains require about 500 milliliters of water for every 30 or so pounds of body weight. (So for the average 165-pound American adult, that’s about 2.75 liters of water each day.) This is the minimum level of hydration needed to avoid denting your memory, concentration, and decision-making. But there’s a real risk to missing that threshold even by a little. In fact, researchers have found that even a 1–3% shortfall in adequate hydration can substantially affect these functions. Water aids the free flow of chemical and electrical signals between cells, which is required for effective brain functioning.
Less Alcohol
If a glass of water can boost your brain, a glass of Chianti can slow it down. Drinking alcohol leads to increased levels of the hormone cortisol as the body reacts to the intake of a toxin. Cortisol is a natural part of the body’s response to stress, but chronic stress can lead to excess cortisol, which can have a host of negative effects on the body—like weight gain—as well as the brain, including anxiety and depression, particularly when coupled with a diet high in caffeine and sugar. So having a glass of wine every evening to unwind, as many people do, may have the opposite effect.
Foods rich in magnesium can suppress the release of cortisol, but when we’re stressed we deplete our bodies’ magnesium stores more rapidly. Whole grains, beans, and leafy greens are good magnesium sources, as are nuts and seeds—which can also be great alternatives to sweet snacks. Unfortunately, these natural sources aren’t always enough to replenish our magnesium supplies during high-stress periods, so supplements, which are often available as tablets or even body salts and bath products, can help make up the difference.
Less Tuna, More Mackerel
Salmon and oily fish like mackerel are great for the brain because of their Omega-3 essential fatty acids, vitamin B12, and protein. These nutrients assist in brain-cell growth and can prevent cognitive decline. On the other hand, smoked fish and fish that are typically high in mercury (like tuna and swordfish) can increase levels of pro-oxidants in the body and actively damage brain cells. Your choice in seafood one day doesn’t just impact your brain in the near-term, it also has an effect on your future brain power.
More Rest, Less Thirst And Hunger
Speaking of brain power, there’s one factor we tend to grasp much better when we think about sleep than about diet: quantity. It’s not just about what you eat and drink, it’s how much you do. Being over-tired can lead to behaviors many of us are all too familiar with—from our attitude toward others to how we make decisions—plus a few we aren’t aware of, like the extent to which our choices are affected by our unconscious biases.
Much as it does when you aren’t well rested, when you’re hungry or thirsty, your brain reverts to “survival mode.” It draws blood away from the rational cortex toward the part of the brain that controls basic functions you depend on to get through the day. So while you might have not much trouble getting dressed, commuting, or doing routine tasks when you’re underfed or dehydrated, your brain will struggle with higher “executive functions,” like complex problem-solving, thinking flexibly and creatively, regulating emotions, and overriding biases.
When they’re underpowered, our brains revert to well-trod neural shortcuts that require less cognitive energy. One well-publicized study even found a pattern of judges granting more parole after mealtimes, with their sentences getting harsher in the subsequent hours. The implications for reading resumes, interviewing job candidates, and making other important decisions when you haven’t eaten are clear—and worrying.
It might feel overwhelming to totally change your diet, but sticking with even one behavior change to boost your brain health can make a real difference. So start small—swap that bag of chips today for a bag of nuts. Your brain will be grateful.
Dr. Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, leadership coach, author, and medical doctor. Follow her on Twitter at @TaraSwart.
What’s the point of networking if not to get other people to like you? Sure, you need new contacts to see you as interesting, competent, professional, and potentially valuable to them—but if they don’t also find you likable, nobody will feel motivated to reach out later and work with you.
The reason why all comes down to emotional intelligence, the set of skills and qualities that allow people to form deeper, closer relationships with others. Likability is a key ingredient in that, and its career benefits are pretty obvious. For instance, being likable—and liking your coworkers in return—can increase your chances of getting promoted.
But when it comes to first impressions, you don’t always have much time to get people to like you. So here are a few straightforward things that the most emotionally intelligent people do to cement their likability from the get-go:
1. Show Genuine Enthusiasm For Meeting
Especially in business contexts, some people’s demeanors while making introductions are terse and serious. That might feel formal and “appropriate,” but it’s not always the most emotionally intelligent thing to do. Neither is laying it on thick with a forced grin and over-the-top proclamations about how absolutely wonderful it is to meet.
Just be natural. Pretend you’re meeting a sibling’s new significant other at a social occasion. Give your best, authentic smile. Open up your posture so your legs are at a wide stance but you’re relaxed. Make eye contact, offer a firm handshake. It’s that easy.
If you notice something about the person you’ve just met that you can compliment them about, do it right away. Maybe there’s a recent accomplishment you’re aware of that you could mention. If not, ask a question or two that can lead to information you can later compliment them on.
Emotionally intelligent people are great listeners right from the moment they make acquaintances. They know that most people love to talk about themselves and will like and appreciate anybody who’ll earnestly listen. The problem is that most of the time—especially in the moment or two after meeting someone—we’re too busy thinking about our own responses and can’t wait for the next opportunity to jump in. This tendency is natural, and it sometimes gets worse when we’re nervous.
So treat the first five minutes after meeting somebody as a silent quiz session: Pretend you’re being tested to see how much you can find out about the new acquaintance—that when five minutes are up, you’ll have to write an essay about everything you’ve just learned, and the more information you include, the higher your score.
3. Ask At Least Two Open-Ended Questions
Conversations often die quickly or turn into monologues when they aren’t propelled forward by good questions. When someone starts talking about something they enjoy, use that as an opening to ask more: “How did you get into that?” “What do you like most about it?” Since it’s something they’re clearly dying to talk about it, don’t just ask yes/no or simple factual questions that might cut off their chance to really dig into it.
Aim for at least two open-ended questions within the first few minutes of striking up a chat with somebody you’ve just met. That should be enough to get a good, in-depth conversation going. On a subconscious level, you’ll quickly become somebody they remember liking and will want to be around.
Have you ever spoken with someone and found them distracted, glancing around the room or maybe maybe fiddling with their phone while you were speaking? If you did, there’s a slim chance you came away really liking them afterward. In order to make someone feel like they’re getting your full attention, you obviously need to focus on them exclusively. But you also have to find an interest or belief you both share.
The most emotionally intelligent people know that it’s easiest to connect with people they’ve found something in common with. These commonalities might not always be obvious, though; you have to look for them. For example, there’s a really experienced runner who works out at my gym, and we often have a chance to chat. Since I personally have zero interest in running, there wouldn’t seem to be common ground for a meaningful conversation beyond, “Good to see you again, how’s your week going?” But since most people like food, I once asked him what he eats before a major long-distance run. It gave us something in common to talk about.
These conversational openings are really simple but not always obvious right away just after meeting someone. Pay attention to what makes somebody light up, become more animated, and sit up straight. These little cues are easy to catch early on in your conversation, and they can make for great opportunities to quickly find commonalities, passions, and ideas to talk about in those crucial few minutes while we’re forming first impressions.
5. Say Their Name Before You Leave, And Commit Key Facts To Memory
Everybody loves the sound of their own name. Say it when you first meet someone; then sprinkle it throughout the conversation whenever you get the chance. At a minimum, make sure to say their name when you’re about to leave: “Really great meeting you, Shareen.” “Thanks for chatting, Kyle, let’s be in touch.”
Finally, emotionally intelligent people reinforce the likability they’ve banked during first impressions by remembering a few key details later on. The names of a new acquaintance’s partner, kids, even the pets they have or that vacation recommendation they shared—that’s all useful information to refer back to the next time you see them. It’ll help you stand out in their memory, and make them look forward to connecting with you again—because for some reason or other, they find that they just like you.
In the race for eyeballs, Netflix is continuing its world domination. The company said Monday that it added over 5 million new subscribers during the second quarter of 2017, boosting its grand tally to 104 million worldwide and easily beating market expectations. The leap helps Netflix maintain its decided edge over video streaming competitors like Amazon and Hulu.
Driving those new signups were the usual suspects: the new seasons of Netflix’s two flagship series, House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, as well as other new content offerings that the company has been plowing money into. But international growth is increasingly key to Netflix’s success—for the first time, more than half of its subscribers are based outside the United States.
That milestone was apparent during an earnings call on Monday when a special shout-out was given to Okja, the South Korean film directed by director Bong Joon-ho, which centers on the relationship between a girl and a giant mutant pig. Netflix head of content Ted Sarandos credited the genre-mixing indie for not only “making a ton of noise” at the Cannes Film Festival, but for being “a brand halo to Netflix” and attracting new subscribers in Europe and pockets of Asia.
“We saw big signups in Korea,” Sarandos said. “For most people, they learned about Netflix for the first time when Okja was coming out in Korea. So it was a great introduction to Netflix for a lot of the world.”
Okja is a prime example of how Netflix is “trying to curate some of the world’s best content and share it with the world versus the moniker of being a disruptive tech company,” CEO Reed Hastings said on the call.
By appealing to specialized demographics and tastes around the world, Netflix is fulfilling its ambition of being a “super network,” Sarandos said, that literally has content for everyone. “We talk about addressing content needs and desires across the board,” Sarandos went on, noting that Netflix’s 91 Emmy nominations this year include a slew of categories including best comedy, drama, documentary, and film. “So we are doing across-the-board programming. We’re not programming for one niche, which networks tend to do.”
The remark is notable considering that when Netflix first got into the original programming game, it wanted to be HBO. Now it wants to be television.
Okja underscores the importance of Netflix’s international push, and how the company is placing most of its efforts into increasing subscribers abroad, where there is the most growth potential. Only one-fifth of the company’s new subscribers were in the U.S., lending credence to the suspicion that Netflix is nearing its saturation point here.
Okja [Photo: Courtesy of Netflix]
The Next Frontier
Asia, in particular, is a focus. Although Netflix operates in 190 countries around the world, China remains an untapped market, due to regulatory issues, and the service has faced hurdles in India, where internet speeds are an issue and there is competition from rivals like Amazon. “With Asia, we’ve got a lot more to learn,” Hastings said. “We’re really expanding a lot in India and Japan. We’re figuring it out market by market. But Asia’s very unique and very large, so we see a huge opportunity for us over the next couple of years. All of us will be spending more time there and investing more.”
“Matching the program to local tastes is really the key,” Sarandos added. “As we look to Asia, we have to get better and better at matching those tastes. And those tastes are not as easily aligned with Western tastes.”
Making programming for a global audience costs money, of course, and this year Netflix is plowing $6 billion into content. The only company spending more is ESPN, which is allocating $7 billion to programming. In addition to TV shows, Netflix is going full throttle on the feature-film side. The company engaged in a two-week bidding war and coughed up $90 million to land the Will Smith cop procedural Bright, due out in December. And it spent north of $100 million on the Martin Scorsese film The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Joe Pesci.
What, Us Worry?
When asked whether he was “comfortable” with Netflix’s spending and the $603 million negative cash flow it’s created, Hastings said: “Look, when we produce an amazing show like Stranger Things. That’s a lot of capital up front, and then you get a payout over it over many years. And seeing the positive returns on that for a business as a whole is what makes us comfortable that we should continue to invest and integrate to basically self-develop as many properties as Ted can find.”
“That combination that it’s well spent and we can raise it, makes us very excited,” he added.
As for the fact that more new players, like Apple and Facebook, which are both ramping up their original programming efforts, will drive up costs even more, Sarandos was unfazed.
“Internet TV is an enormous space,” he said. “There’s going to be lots of competition. And as they come in, if they’re going to bid up the cost of the best stuff, that’s great. It’s great for consumers, because more things get made. And it’s great for creators, because there are more bidders at the table. So we expect the cost to go up on the top, premium things. But I think that’s a good result for everybody.”
Still, the company has been exercising more restraint lately, suggesting that there are, in fact, limits, even at Netflix. Baz Luhrmann’s pricey series The Get Down was cancelled after one season, as was Girlboss. The Wachowskis’ Sense8 also recently got the ax.
“The more shows we add, the more likelihood in absolute numbers that you’ll see more cancellations, of course,” said Sarandos. “But that’s only novel on Netflix. And it’s still novel, because on network TV about one-third of the content gets cut in the first season versus our content, which is mostly renewed. It’s not because we’re less careful about it, it’s because we can more efficiently build it.”
But the overall tenor of the day was buoyant. Subscriber growth plus increased operating revenue—$2.79 billion, up from $2.11 billion during the same period last year—sent Netflix’s stock soaring nearly 10% in after-hours trading to $175.45 a share.
Hastings was relaxed and chipper, wearing a dress shirt with no tie. When he was asked about the future, he smiled and said he hoped for, “More watching, less sleep.”
Walking into Artsy’s New York headquarters, 26 floors above Chinatown, feels like encountering a monumental blank canvas in a light-drenched artist’s studio. The walls are white. The furniture is white. On a bright spring morning, shadows slide across the desks of 140 employees as the sun traces Canal Street from east to west.
And then, in an all-white conference room, a tall figure appears: CEO Carter Cleveland, a Franz Kline-esque vertical stroke dressed in head-to-toe black, with sharply angled dirty-blond hair and a silver bracelet on his wrist. Cleveland started building Artsy in 2009, while he was a Princeton senior studying computer science. Today, he’s announcing $50 million in Series D financing, bringing Artsy’s total dollars raised to over $100 million. The funding is a clear sign of validation for a startup whose list of investors reads like the seating chart for a society-pages dinner party: Wendi Murdoch, famed gallerist Larry Gagosian, and members of the Rockefeller family, to name just a few. Avenir Growth Capital, a New York-based firm, led the round.
Artsy president and COO Sebastian Cwilich, left, and founder and CEO Carter Cleveland.
“People don’t want to download one app for every gallery, one app for every art fair, one app for every museum, one app for every auction house,” Cleveland says. Instead, they can use Artsy, a central platform that contains works from 1,800 galleries and 25 auction houses. From the buyer’s perspective, Artsy combines those primary and secondary markets into one digital experience as intuitive as Instagram. The galleries pay a subscription fee for access to Artsy leads; the auction houses, on the secondary side, use Artsy as a bidding channel for online sales. Over 2 million unique visitors explore the site and its 800,000 artworks each month.
“Traffic is what allows us to scale,” Cleveland says. “You expand the market by making all this inventory accessible to a much broader audience—make it easy to discover, to learn about, and ultimately to buy.”
It’s a remarkably democratic mission for a company that got its break by winning over the likes of Murdoch, who sits on the board, and her Art Basel-set friends. But after years of gradually building out the Artsy platform and its massive art database, piece by piece, Cleveland appears poised to achieve it. Not coincidentally, many of his competitors have recently gone bust. In the last year, there have been mass layoffs at Artlist, Artspace, and Paddle8, which merged with Berlin-based Auctionata only to find itself embroiled in the German equivalent of bankruptcy proceedings. Paddle8 further “gutted” its staff in February. Artsy, in contrast, is hiring for over a dozen roles.
The difference in outcomes boils down to a fundamental difference in strategy. While rivals tried to challenge the art-world establishment head on, Artsy chose to partner. “We always intuitively thought those other vertical models weren’t going to be as scalable, but it’s scary at the time to see another competitor going up really fast in revenue when you’re not,” Cleveland says. “To be a partnership model, to aggregate everything into one place, means we had to wait a little bit longer until we started seeing those transactions. Now the roles have switched.”
Painting The Town
Online art sales represent a small but growing segment of the market overall, rising 15% to hit $3.75 billion in 2016, according to a report published by insurance broker Hiscox. Critically for Artsy, four of the top 10 online art platforms last year, in terms of sales, were traditional players with digital offerings—suggesting “that the power balance might be shifting back to the incumbent art market players,” Hiscox wrote. Artsy stands to benefit from that dynamic if the company can continue to deliver customers that incumbents would otherwise fail to capture.
Sebastian Cwilich, Artsy’s president and chief operating officer, likens the company’s role to “bringing more people to the party.” A former Christie’s executive, he has successfully pitched Artsy to his former peers at Phillips and Sotheby’s. “You are putting all this work into acquiring this incredible inventory and you’re marketing it and you’re writing about it and you’re pricing it and you’re authenticating it—and then what we can do, for a third of those works, we are going to raise the prices at which they sell,” he says. “You ask any auction executive, even one more bidder in the room can be the difference, a giant difference in how much money they make.”
This year the company is on track to quadruple the number of auctions it hosts. For Megan Newcome, director of digital strategy for Phillips, it was a compelling offer. Her team started experimenting with Artsy’s online auction integration earlier this year, with promising results. For example in May, at Phillips’s 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design evening sale, a George Condo painting sold to an Artsy bidder for HK$2,480,000 ($317,841), beating the estimate.
“Artsy built a sophisticated infrastructure to better support what auction houses and galleries and art fairs are already doing, and widen the communities that they engage,” Newcome says. “Using data to be able to predict and recommend what people would be interested in—that’s really the future. The short game is to reinvent the auction house online. The long game is where Artsy is at, and it’s around this data-driven approach to something that’s a very passionate and emotional thing.”
Cleveland founded the company with a thesis around the importance of data, and a complementary appreciation of art’s intangibles. He had grown up in a home filled with art (his father is an art writer) and set out to build the art equivalent of Netflix or Pandora, companies that live and die by their inventory and recommendations. Early press hailed his “Art Genome Project,” a reference to Pandora’s approach. But as Pandora similarly realized, data science alone is not a selling point. Users simply want to find music and art that they enjoy. Over time, the Art Genome Project has shifted to the background, where it still generates suggestions but with less fanfare. Now Artsy’s search engine-friendly editorial content serves as a user hook, with blockbuster posts like an analysis of Italian sculptor Bernini’s erotic works helping to attract newsletter subscribers and social media fans. On Instagram, Artsy has over 500,000 followers.
That is not to say that Cleveland has given up on data. Earlier this year he and Cwilich, an applied mathematician by training, acquired ArtAdvisor, an analytics startup focused on the art market, and installed its cofounder, Hugo Liu, as chief scientist.
“He brings a whole new level of sophistication where it’s not just about recommending other artworks that you might like based on your interests, it’s actually now understanding more the context of why is this art valuable,” Cleveland says of Liu. “We think that’s a really important part of expanding the art market—creating a broader awareness and education that art is something, like a home, that can be a hold of value.”
Pricing intelligence could be equally valuable for Artsy’s partners. “Even though a gallery might understand an artist very well, what we have a really good sense for is that whole, broader context,” Cleveland says. “Being able to provide the gallery with guidance on the best price ranges for their artwork we think will be very helpful.”
In the early days of online art, sellers were focused on proving out that buyers would pay for original works, sight unseen. As recently as 2015, Cwilich told the New York Times that buyers were most comfortable with price points under $5,000. Today, he says, the average price point is more than double that, and rising. And the bigger the ticket, the higher the stakes.
It will take some convincing to get galleries on board with the idea of setting estimates with help from an algorithm. They take pride in their knowledge of the market, and continue to see value in a high-touch sales process. “With a lot of the art-sale sites, the common pitfall is this idea that you can just throw a bunch of art online with a ‘buy it now’ button and expect something to happen. That’s not how art is sold in galleries,” says Austin Kennedy, design director at Pace Prints, which represents artists including Chuck Close and Sol LeWitt. “The way that galleries show and sell art is a touchy-feely process, it’s a very personal process. Quality over quantity is always key.”
Kennedy credits Artsy with helping expand the audience for Pace Prints, and gives high marks to the inquiry system that the company developed for managing leads. But he is hesitant regarding Artsy’s data ambitions. “Art is not a consumer product. It’s a very individual thing. It only takes one person to have an interest or a passion for something.”
That is certainly true of Cleveland’s own preferences. One of his most beloved pieces is a work by ’60s-era sculptor Wendell Dayton, purchased on Artsy. “I love his style and feel a strong personal connection to the artist through his son, Sky Dayton, who’s been an Artsy board member for several years,” Cleveland says. “I love discovering art with a strong personal connection and am inspired when artists, like Wendell, who’ve been developing their practice for decades, experience a renaissance later in their careers.”
For Cleveland, that love had a price. For Artsy, the future depends on being able to quantify exactly how much.
Ah, to-do lists. The bane of our existence, the source of our stress and occasionally the symbol of our triumph. OK, I’m being a little dramatic–but those of us who’ve abided by this method of task-organization have probably felt that sinking feeling when we realize we’ve barely made a dent in our list, and it’s the end of the work day. And on rare days where we do manage to complete everything, we feel like we’re on fire.
If your list has got you feeling more stressed than triumphant lately, it might be time to modify your approach. Here are some ideas how:
1. Limit It To Six Things A Day
I remember hearing about this 100 year old “Ivy Lee” method back in college, and I’ve adopted it ever since. As James Clear previously wrote, the idea isn’t that six is some sort of magic number, it’s that by imposing a limit on the amount of tasks on your to-do list, you’re forced to make tough decisions about what’s important and what’s not. Also, the idea of tackling a to-do list of six is a lot less overwhelming than a to-do list of 20–which means you’ll be less likely to procrastinate.
2. Divide It Into Sections
There are certain tasks that are just easy to do one after another, and others require a complete switch in thinking. If we’re interrupted by a phone call when we’re heads down writing a report, it’ll probably take us awhile to get back “in the zone” after that phone call, and as a result we take much longer to complete our task because we need to allow time for brain transition. This is why lumping similar tasks together make sense; you’ll get more done in less time that way.
Fast Company writer Michael Grothaus recently tried this method. He divided his tasks between “digital quickies” (like emailing someone or making dinner reservations), “work” (writing, reporting, and pitching stories) and “real world” (personal errands like laundry or grocery shopping). Before trying this approach, Grothaus struggled to complete his to-do list. After dividing his to-do lists, he found himself crossing off every single task.
3. Try Time Blocking
Maybe you’re just not a list person, or you find it difficult to break down “making progress on that big project” to smaller to-dos. You could try abandoning lists altogether, and instead dedicate chunks of time for certain work instead.
According to Kruse, when we have the expectation of completing a task and we don’t, we tend to stress about them. “However, when we have all of our tasks placed into a specific date, time, and duration, we sleep more soundly knowing everything that needs to get done is in its place.”
4. Distinguish Which Tasks Are Truly Important, And Which Tasks Are Not
If you’re the type of person who just needs to write down everything you need to get done–regardless of how important or urgent they are–you can at least make assessments on their importance. If you don’t get everything done, you would have at least made headway on the things that are important.
“A” tasks, according to Tracy, is something that we must do–if we don’t, there will be “serious consequences.” Things like meeting a deadline or preparing for an important meeting fall into this category.
“B” and “C” tasks are items we should do, but not doing them will only have minor (or no consequences).
“D” are tasks that we can delegate, and “E” are tasks that aren’t that necessary and we can therefore eliminate from our list. And speaking of elimination….
5. Make Sure It Includes Things We Want To Do
We’re more likely to be motivated to tackle our to-do list when it contains tasks that we’re excited to work on. Yes, there are certain “shoulds” that we just need to bite the bullet and do, but there are probably many “shoulds” that aren’t going to affect our quality of life or career if we don’t do them. By getting rid of those from our list, we create room to do more things that actually makes us happy. In the long term that is.
Psychologist Art Markman previously wrote for Fast Company, “If you confront yourself each day with reminders of only the least enjoyable parts of your job, it’ll probably wind up sapping your motivation to come to work.”
It’s important to note that Markman isn’t saying that we should all stop doing part of our jobs that we hate; rather, he’s encouraging us to allocate some time each week to big-picture projects that contribute to our long-term career or life goals. Perhaps it’s learning a new skill that can get you on the promotion track faster or spending more time getting coffee with colleagues in your workplace in order to deepen your industry knowledge.
Markman ends by saying that we might start feeling better about our to-do list–even when it has plenty of tedious tasks–when it includes the things we want to do. These tasks “help put the more boring tasks into perspective” and remind us that our job “is more than just a sequence of small, boring, urgent duties to execute–because [we’ve] planned it to be.”
It’s also no wonder why Amazon is one of the hottest companies on the planet for people looking for internships. The sheer variety of the industries the company covers means that Amazon most likely offers a career in your chosen field—no matter what that is. For Lucia Magot, a final year business and management student in the U.K., her field is project management, and she managed to snag a coveted internship at Amazon doing just that. Here’s what her experience was like.
On Her Internship Role At Amazon
I was a recruitment intern within the Operations team and I was located in the London office. I was later informed I was one of the youngest hires within Amazon Europe.
As part of my 4-year undergraduate program in the U.K., I was required to complete a “placement year” (internship year) in my third year of studies; which I started in London followed by Miami, Singapore, and Lima. My last and fifth internship of this placement year was with Amazon, which I undertook at the age of 21. My internship started in the summer of 2016.
On How She Found Out About The Amazon Internship
From a young age, I have always been passionate about business and technology. I have stayed up to date about where to find internship opportunities within leading tech companies before I started college. I would often check the job boards of these companies, and make spreadsheets of the best opportunities I found suited for my professional goals.
I found the recruitment position opening on the Amazon Job portal in 2015. My main experiences within business and tech lies in product management, marketing and consulting. However, I applied to this specific role because I wanted to learn how a top company like Amazon hires the best talent in today’s global marketplace.
On The Interview Process With Amazon
The process for applying for internships at Amazon consists of the following steps:
Upload CV and cover letters to the role of your interest
Complete the online numerical and reasoning-assessment test Amazon will send you via email. It will take you about an hour to complete (if successful, applicants will be contacted for a first phone interview)
First HR phone interview (around 30 minutes)
Second phone interview with members of your team (around 30 minutes)
In-person assessment center
Email confirmation if successful
I would suggest all applicants prepare by carefully reviewing the role, responsibilities and what qualities they have demonstrated in previous professional experiences that can back up or show that they can get the job done. I made over 40 flashcards with that information and practiced my answers with friends.
On The Qualities That Helped Her Score An Amazon Internship
Amazon is looking to hire professionals who exemplify the 14 leadership principles that the organization is based upon. During one of my weekly one-to-one meetings with my manager, he told me he knew he wanted to work with me from the moment we concluded our first phone interview. I think my enthusiasm for the company, which he could detect from the energy in my voice and the unique questions I had for him, were key factors on his decision.
A lot of the questions I was asked were based around examples from my professional and academic life that demonstrated that I was a doer and that I had strong business judgment and a sensibility for ensuring customer satisfaction.
During my internship, I discovered that all Amazonians share certain traits such as being data driven, big thinkers, and proven leaders. Innovation is a key component within the Amazon culture so staying curious about how things work and how they can be improved are qualities they look for in new hires.
On The Average Workday Of An Amazon Intern
Amazon’s fast-paced environment and culture is unique and no day is ever the same. It requires employees that adapt to change, work well under pressure and who are malleable. I constantly heard employees saying “it’s only Day 1 at Amazon”, which creates an indescribable energy in the work environment. You believe the best is yet to come and that you can contribute to the company’s future success.
Throughout my internship, I was responsible for a continuous improvement project related to how Amazon hired new engineers and IT professionals. Therefore, my days consisted of setting up meetings with the teams responsible for acquiring new talent and analyzing their recruitment process while creating suggestions on how they could improve it.
Additionally, I analyzed data from surveys completed by previous hires and other sources in order to understand the specific areas of improvement within my department. Apart from this, my days also revolved around research, scouting technology tools that could make the processes more efficient, and creating meetings with different teams in order to foment synergies in the future.
At the end of my internship, I had to present my project findings and recommendations to senior-level executives. Amazonians across the board were incredibly supportive and accessible throughout my project advancement. From start to finish, I knew I could count on them to answer questions, no matter how trivial they seemed to me. Before my final presentation, my mentor and colleagues from different teams volunteered to listen to my presentation and offered me insightful feedback.
Although the typical schedule was from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. I often found myself staying later not because I was told to, but because I wanted to benefit from the multiple online training courses available to Amazonians. Other perks that employees and interns can benefit from include yoga classes during lunch and social and professional development opportunities organized by Amazonians like speed networking, women’s lunch, and Amazon fashion tours.
On Some Of Her Best Experiences As An Amazon Intern
One of my main objectives as an intern was to learn how I could make connections between different teams in order to make our work more efficient. I scheduled meetings with at least five employees each week from different areas of the company to learn about their roles and how they got there. These meetings provided me with insights into how Amazon operated as an institution and was pivotal to my understanding of the company’s vision.
One of the most memorable anecdotes occurred during a professional development event, where I was able to meet and talk to Mr. Douglas Gurr, U.K. Country Manager at Amazon. The fact that an intern could ask him questions and have him willingly stay after to answer is a testament of the type of organization Amazon is. No question is a bad question and everyone’s comments are welcomed in their open environment. None of this would have been possible without the support from my Manager, who enthusiastically empowered me to go after my networking goals.
On Whether Amazon Could Improve Its Internship Experience
This internship has been one of the most enriching experiences in my life and I wouldn’t have changed anything. At Amazon, I was involved in meaningful work and my initiatives were treated as valuable contributions to the company. Amazon has instilled in me certain principles that I will take wherever I go. For example, I have learned the method of working backward, which puts the customer needs above anything else. This method must be shown in every discussion, paper or presentation put forward.
On my last day, my team presented me with a jumbo-size present filled with hand-selected gifts and handwritten cards signed by all my colleagues. Afterward, I was treated to a wonderful farewell party. My time at Amazon showed me that within a top tech company you can find warmth and a wealth of gratitude, too.
On The Lasting Benefits Of An Amazon Internship
Amazon allowed me to build a set of skills such as data analysis, report writing and presentation skills; which I took forward into my final year of University. Thanks to my enhanced skills and work ethic, I have received multiple job offers from top tech firms and consulting companies.
My time at Amazon allowed me to develop and cultivate relationships with an army of mentors within the tech sector, who I remain in contact with today. I got the opportunity to see firsthand that there was a vacuum of talent in the tech sector and therefore I am now working on a project that will share with university students in the UK and Latin America the multiple opportunities that exist within this field.
Amazon taught me that to build a new and better business you must welcome and celebrate experimentation.
On What Others Could Do To Land An Internship At Amazon
Read Jeff Bezos’s letters to shareholders letters since 1997 to get a glimpse of the culture and if you are a right fit for the company. Know your worth and where you can add value.
Learn the 14 leadership principles and recollect anecdotes from your academic and professional experience to support each of these.
Be proud of your diversity. I am a Peruvian woman and when I considered applying, many told me I was being too ambitious and I think if you never try, you will never know. At Amazon, I met people from all walks of life and I’ve concluded that the company celebrates and looks for authenticity and diversity within applicants. Don’t be afraid to fail and apply.
As an entrepreneur and founder, I’ve been building teams and companies for more than 10 years, leading everything from operations and strategy to community development and fundraising.
Most recently, I cofounded the shared office space startup Alley, an entrepreneurial hub that brings together diverse teams and businesses so that they can reach their next stage of growth. Through my journey of growing Alley from an idea to a venture-backed startup, I’ve learned a handful of lessons about being a successful manager. Whether you’re starting out and managing up, leading a small team, or growing a workforce of your own, I suspect that they will prove useful to your career.
1. Working Well With Strong Personalities Takes Time And Effort
It can be hard to get strong personalities to align with decisions with which they don’t entirely agree. But having every team member opt in and back a decision is key. It’s on you, as the manager, to create a scenario where everyone can get on the same wavelength before you move forward with a plan. It all comes down to communicating in a way that makes it easier for others to say yes, even if you think you don’t have the time. Putting in this effort up front will pay off in the end, and the trust you build will carry on into the next decision, and the next, and the next.
2. Having A Supportive Network Who Can Help You Is Extremely Crucial
Even if you’re the boss, you still need mentors and advisers who can help you navigate the conditions of your management career. Mentors are work/life’s cheat codes. Managing people is as much about managing yourself as it is about managing those around you, and I know that mentors have pushed me out of my own way. They’ve helped me wrestle down my ego, even when I thought I was being judgment-free. They’ve acted as sounding boards as I encountered challenges and roadblocks.
I also recommend reading High Output Management by Andy Grove. This book has served as great guidance as to where and how to allocate my time as a manager, and I come back to it time and again to remind myself how to build a self-sustaining, mature organization.
3. Learning To Listen Is More Important Than Knowing Everything
It’s impossible to learn something you think you already know. Managing is not about knowing everything (or even knowing anything); it’s about listening to understand, making a clear decision once you’re equipped to do so, and rallying full support from your team.
This openness and flexibility allows you to make the right decision in the context of your objectives. And shutting up and listening is a fantastic way to show you’re vested in your employees’ success. Make the time for one-on-one meetings and the follow-up. Be transparent about why things are happening, and where each employee fits in that context. This makes it much easier to manage your team. (Disclaimer: This is assuming you’ve hired well to begin with!)
4. Your Goals Should Be Clear And Simple
And repeat those goals often–to yourself, to your team, and to your bosses. Something said isn’t always something heard. I find that the more complex the business, the more distracted one can become by things that don’t matter. It’s helpful to be mindful of what does, and track projects and decisions back to those goals. These may be goals for the week, the month, the quarter, or the year.
It’s up to you to decide on what kind of horizon you’d like to set a goal, but the simpler and clearer the goal, the easier it is for your team to get behind it.
The most rewarding part of managing people is observing growth, progress, and wins on both the individual and organizational level. As managers, we’re personally vested in the success of our people. If you are great, we will be great. Period. As I move into my next venture, I’m constantly thinking: How do we best create an organization that inspires personal growth, and growth in our local communities? How can good business impact communities in the best way and make those communities healthier? Good businesses make employees better, and as a result, both the company and employees make communities better.
A version of this article originally appeared on theWell, Jopwell’s digital magazine, and is adapted with permission. Jopwell is the career advancement platform for black, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American students and professionals.
Steve Berra doesn’t like talking about himself–primarily out of modesty but the fact that his credentials run at an exhaustive length probably has something to do with it as well.
The TL;DR version of Berra’s life is that he rose from abject poverty to the upper echelons of professional skateboarding, due in no small part to the Berrics–the massively popular indoor skatepark in Los Angeles Berra founded alongside fellow skateboarding legend Eric Koston. For the past 10 years, The Berrics–a portmanteau of “Berra” and “Eric”–has become a staple in the skateboarding community both as a physical destination for premiere events like Battle at the Berrics (the annual skateboard competition akin to a game of H.O.R.S.E. in basketball) as well as digitally, with magazine-style profiles and a deep library of videos of tricks and shenanigans from inside the Berrics featured on the company’s website.
However, Berra’s ascension to becoming one of the most recognized names in skateboarding was far from linear. Although skateboarding has always been his primary focus, Berra’s creative aptitude splits into a staggering list of hyphenates including film director, screenwriter, actor, content creator, and brand consultant for the likes of Nike, Gatorade, Unilever, and more. It may seem obvious with a resume that random that there hasn’t necessarily been a fixed blueprint for Berra’s career. For the better part of his early years, Berra operated from a state of emergency, feeling that his skateboarding days were numbered. Yet, over time, he’s learned how to harness that impetuosity into a certain kind of fearlessness that has allowed him to permeate across multiple industries, fortifying his personal and professional brands as multifaceted and creatively nimble.
Steve Berra
Growing up between Missouri and Nebraska, Berra actually started out playing soccer and showed a natural gift for the sport that led to more than 100 first-place trophies. What could have easily been a soccer prodigy story was derailed in the eighth grade when Berra’s friend took up skateboarding.
“I took to the counterculture spirit of skateboarding–it kind of just bit me. It was the perfect blend of athleticism and artistry,” Berra says. “More than anything, it was a challenge because I really feel like every day you conquer a little bit more of the physical universe. You spend most of your time not landing tricks until you can land them on every try. The feeling of skateboarding is just something that I hadn’t really experienced.”
At 16, Berra made it out to California, landed his first sponsorship with skateboarding shop Blockhead, went pro two years later, and then moved into Tony Hawk’s home where he was one of the four original members of Hawk’s company Birdhouse.
“He had like two houses, two cars, two cats, two dogs, and a wife–I thought he was set,” Berra says. “I remember being in my room and he and his wife were talking and she was a little stressed, like ‘look, we have $3,500 left in the bank.’ And I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh, my god–they’re rich!’ I came to California with 40 bucks in my pocket and a backpack and a skateboard.”
Relative wealth aside, Hawk was indeed in dire financial straits, which led him to give Berra formative, if somewhat myopic, advice.
“Tony had gone from being this massive icon in the ’80s, and in ’90s there’s a shift in skateboarding from the way that Tony skated to street skating, plus everyone just seemed to stop skating. So he went from making millions of dollars to having $3,500 in the bank,” Berra says. “He gave me this piece of advice–and I think he truly believed this time, which is funny because he ended up becoming worth millions of dollars eight years later–he said you’ve got to look at skateboarding as a passion, not as a career.”
[Cover Photo: Mike O’Meally, courtesy of Steve Berra]Berra only skated for Hawk for about a year before another of his idols poached him for his skateboarding company that wound up going out of business shortly thereafter. On top of that, at just 19 years old, Berra got his 17-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Berra made ends meet by taking a job offer from the editor-in-chief of TransWorld SKATEboarding magazine, writing articles and fact-checking the names of tricks.
“Here I was one of the best guys with no sponsor, no money, and a pregnant girlfriend, and this guy saved my life by giving me a job,” Berra says. “And then skateboarding started to pick up and everyone started doing better. But, at the time, it still wasn’t a lot of money.”
However, Hawk’s advice was still ringing in Berra’s mind. Whatever income he was making he felt he needed to have a backup plan, and that panic forced him out of the comfort of skateboarding toward trying his hand at something that, until that point, had been a distant passion: acting. Berra studied acting for years while continuing to skate, landing a few commercials before his first major role on the short-lived drama 413 Hope St.
“I really enjoyed it in the beginning because it was new. But I also realized I’m this guy they’re giving lines to–I felt like I could be doing more,” Berra says. “So I started writing–and I wrote a lot of really bad stuff.”
During the late ’90s, Berra’s high-wire act had him balancing screenwriting, skateboarding, and picking up acting gigs here and there–most notably his arc as Todd Mulcahy on Felicity. It was around this time that Berra was hit with something of an epiphany–not unlike the bus that mowed him down after declaring his undying affection for Keri Russell: This is the end of his skateboarding career.
Call it a quarter-life crisis, but during his mid-20s, Berra began hearing the ticking clock on his skateboarding days grow to a deafening pitch. Back with Hawk at Birdhouse, Berra created one of the top skateboarding videos of all time, The End, a grisly ode to the seemingly transient nature of the sport.
“My partner Eric [Koston] and I always thought our skateboarding career was only going to be a couple of years because when we turned pro as teenagers, the guys that we pushed out were only 22, 23 years old,” Berra says “We called it The End because we thought that after this, we’re not going to have careers–this has got to be it. We’re 25 right now and there’s no way we can keep doing this.”
That sense of urgency had the dual effect of trying to make the most of the sport while he could but also setting up his future beyond it. With the money from his best-selling shoe line (the Berra 3 and Berra 4) and a re-writing job on a script, Berra was able to buy the building that would become the Berrics. This was also when met with a producer at Warner Bros. who got him the money he needed for writing and directing his first major feature, The Good Life. Starring Bill Paxton and Zooey Deschanel, The Good Life was an official selection at Sundance in 2007, and Berra thought the film had potential for a major release. The producers, however, decided to cut 17 minutes and sell it to a DVD company.
“I was crushed. I basically put my whole life on the line. I put my skating career on the line,” Berra says. “I came back after Sundance and I look at my next royalty check and I sold 50,000 pairs of shoes, not a million like I did at the height of my career. I had bought a house and gutted and designed it, so I had spent all my cash–I was kind of broke.”
Berra’s managers at Anonymous Content approached him to see if he had any idea what he’d like to pursue next. Berra’s vision proved to be an amalgamation of his past experiences. The Berrics has always been more than just a skatepark. Berra’s intention has been to supplement a physical safe haven for young skaters where they could practice tricks without getting harassed by cops on the street, with media involving the skateboarding community, whether that was highlighting must-have gear or profiles on skateboarders.
[Photo: Yoon Sul]“I used to go to movie websites every day looking at movie news and I was like, why doesn’t this exist in skateboarding? So Eric and I sat down and started creating all these things that we could do for the site, and after we launched [in 2007], it just caught on like wildfire,” Berra says. “At the beginning, all the companies were like, ‘we only advertise in magazines.’ They thought we were a joke. And then two years later everyone is trying to figure out how to advertise with us and do stuff with us.”
The Wall Street Journalreported in 2009 that the Berrics’s website “had more unique visitors than sites for all of the major skateboarding magazines, and ESPN.com’s action sports page.”
Steve Berra skating [Photo: Dave Swift]“We wanted to create [the Berrics] to show the world that skateboarders are not just a bunch of dudes hanging out with a 24-pack [of beer] and smoking weed. There’s a whole sophistication behind [skateboarding], and there’s a lot of really artistic and intelligent people,” Berra says. “As the Berrics got bigger, we were been able to do more stuff outside of what happened just inside our little training facility.”
Berra and his team have created a variety of content for brands including Target, Gatorade, Unilever, Mountain Dew, Nike, Adidas, and Converse. And the Berrics’s empire continues to grow: They’ve expanded to a 36,000 square-foot building in downtown L.A. And in 2014, Berra bought The Skateboard Mag, the media company started by the former editor-in-chief of TransWorld SKATEboarding–the same guy who gave Berra a job in his time of need. Like everything Berra takes on, he’s poured his all into the Berrics–even to the point of forgoing a salary for nearly 10 years.
“I literally just started paying myself like a month ago because I wanted to hire more people to create more jobs,” Berra says. “I’m going to do this no matter what, so whether I do it for free or my company pays me, it’s going to get done. And if I am going to do it anyway, why don’t I hire a couple of more people and give them a job and and get closer to the vision of what I really think this should be?”
That vision includes doing more documentaries (the company has shot three so far: One Day in Skateboarding, The L.A. Boys, and Push), creating Berrics spaces across the world to set a standard for how skateparks should look, and expanding their agency work and e-commerce platform. In order to get there, Berra has realized that operating under the emotional immediacy of thinking “this is the end” can provide some agile decision-making where overthinking things could be a detriment. But ultimately, it’s a feeling he’s had to keep in check.
“I made some decisions that I’m thankful that I made, but sometimes I threw a little bit too much at the wall trying to get to this place faster than what the actual universe would allow it to get there,” Berra says. “I had to shake it because this is a marathon and not a sprint. Now it’s about how do we keep going? When I first started, I had a 15-year vision of what the Berrics can be. Here we are 10 into it and we’re getting there every day.”
WHAT: The Disaster Artist teaser trailer, which gives a hint of how a movie about a bad movie might end up very good.
WHO: Director and star James Franco, along with a cavalcade of comedians and actors discussed below.
WHY WE CARE: The Room has secured a reputation as the best worst movie of all time. While some may cling to their Plans 9 From Outer Space, Tommy Wiseau’s master POS still steadily packs midnight screenings with fans of its staggering ineptitude. The consensus on The Room is that everyone involved, at every moment, made the exact wrong decision–the cinematic equivalent of pitching a no-hitter, but the opposite of that. The circumstances behind this majestic monstrosity were chronicled in the book, The Disaster Artist, which been in the process of adaptation for years.
The first trailer for the James Franco-helmed magnum opus dropped today, and should give assure anyone on the fence that they’re in for a treat. Fans of The Room and newbies alike will get a sense of just how Tommy Wiseau ended up delivering one of the most stunningly flat performances ever. (Apparently, he spent so many takes trying to nail his lines that when he finally did get the right words in the right order, the take was deemed acceptable no matter how bad the delivery.) However, the trailer holds back one detail from the film that might pique fan interest even further: the sprawling breadth of its impressive cast.
Franco bros James and Dave topline the film, along with frequent collaborator Seth Rogen. These three have been on board since day one, but between then and now, seemingly everyone who has ever worked with the trio has signed on to appear as well. The co-stars and cameos in The Disaster Artist form a galaxy of stars so vast it could fuel a year’s supply of podcast guests. (Directors Judd Apatow and J.J. Abrams also make appearances.) Have a look below at this promising roster and get further stoked for the December 8 release date.
WHAT: Ads in Copenhagen that wrap city buses in graphics that look like a full-size tank.
WHO: Amnesty International
WHY WE CARE: These are striking ads at a glance, putting the image of a camo-painted tank right in Denmark’s capital city. The message on the ad, “This is everyday life in Aleppo,” drives home why we’re struck: It’s novel to glance at the street and think that you’ve just seen a tank rolling past Christiansborg Palace. But remembering that in other cities there’s nothing novel in seeing tanks roll by is sobering. It’s also very much in line with Amnesty International’s mission of helping those of us who are lucky to live in places where that kind of violence and destruction has not come home realize that the people who see tanks in their streets are just like us–they’ve just had the misfortune of watching their buses be replaced by tanks and all that it implies.
On a field in Zambia last December, farmers and villagers spent five days tilling the land not for food but to share a message with the rest of the world: we need to invest more in agriculture in Africa.
“When connected to markets, smallholder farmers can generate an income and create a multiplier effect.” [Photo: courtesy IFAD]A series of graphs in the soil, called the Field Report, share key data. Even though Africa has a quarter of the world’s arable land, it only produces 10% of the world’s food. More young people are moving away from rural communities at the same time that the population–and the demand for food–is growing. A giant “11” makes the point that growth in agriculture is 11 times more effective at reducing extreme poverty than other sectors.
“The Field Report makes the case for investment in agricultural development in the very land that needs it the most,” says Gilbert Houngbo, president of IFAD, the UN’s agricultural arm, which is behind the project. “We were inspired by the sheer power and potential land holds to reduce poverty and hunger, contribute to vibrant, self-sustaining communities and dramatically increase agricultural outputs capable of feeding a growing population.”
Four-fifths of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods; if production and access to markets can improve, that can help families increase their incomes at the same time as it meets a need for more food. “Rising prices and demand hold tremendous promise for the people who work the world’s 500 million small farms to grow and sell more food, lifting themselves out of poverty and food insecurity,” he says. “When connected to markets, smallholder farmers can generate an income and create a multiplier effect–sending their children to school and stimulating the economy in order to help lift their community out of poverty for the long term.”
If agriculture can be an opportunity, it’s only because the system is functioning well–and right now, young rural Africans are increasingly likely to leave for cities, hoping for better jobs. That’s happening even as the demand for food increases; as a continent, Africa spends $35 billion importing food rather than growing all of the food it needs locally.
If agriculture can be an opportunity, it’s only because the system is functioning well. [Photo: courtesy IFAD]To convince young people that working in agriculture makes sense, IFAD argues that investment is needed to improve productivity and connect young farmers with technology that can connect them with experts and the information needed to best grow food. Networks and cooperatives for young farmers need support. And most young farmers in Africa say that what they need most is access to finance.
“To foster to foster a generation of ‘agripreneurs,’ we need to listen to young people about what they want,” says Houngbo.
Peter Rive, the cofounder of SolarCity and cousin of Elon Musk, is leaving Tesla just under eight months after the automaker acquired the struggling solar company in a deal valued at $2.6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The news of his exit comes just two months after Lyndon Rive, Peter’s brother and SolarCity cofounder, announced his departure, a move that raised more questions around the already-controversial 2016 merger, which some critics saw as a bailout of SolarCity.
As detailed in our new cover story on Tesla’s solar ambitions, SolarCity, which Peter and Lyndon launched with a $10 million investment from Musk, had grown into a solar industry juggernaut before running into significant business challenges in recent years. Musk, who was SolarCity’s chairman and largest shareholder, proposed a merger last year, and the deal completed in November.
In an emailed statement, a Tesla spokesperson confirmed Peter’s departure, writing, “Pete Rive will be leaving the company to explore new opportunities. As cofounder and CTO of SolarCity, Pete has played an instrumental role in expanding access to solar to hundreds of thousands of people across the country, helping to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
The departure is significant because Peter, who served as VP of solar products at Tesla after the merger, has been a driving force behind a number of the company’s most important solar initiatives, including its solar Gigafactory, based in Buffalo, New York, as well as the company’s new Solar Roof product. In May, when Lyndon told me he was leaving the company, he made a point of indicating that Peter would remain at Tesla. “He’s the primary lead on Solar Roof and he’s focused on Solar Roof,” Lyndon told me. (Musk also told me around that time that “Pete is really working his ass off” to bring the Solar Roof product to market.)
The Tesla spokesperson now says that Pete’s responsibilities, “including work on Solar Roof, will be distributed among Tesla’s existing engineering teams.”
