Self-proclaimed “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli has been convicted of securities fraud in federal court in Brooklyn. A jury found Shkreli guilty of two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and not guilty of five other charges, CNBC reports.
He faces up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors said he misled investors in two hedge funds he ran, losing money and investing some of their funds in a separate pharmaceutical company called Retrophin, even as he claimed to be making money. He then used money from the drug business to repay them, prosecutors said.
Shkreli also gained infamy for raising the price of Daraphim, an anti-parasite drug, more than 5,000% as the head of drug company Turing Pharmaceuticals, and has earned notoriety as an internet troll, including getting suspended from Twitter for harassing a journalist covering his businesses.
Shkreli’s attorney says he plans to appeal the verdict, theWashington Post reports. “This was a witch hunt of epic proportions,” Shkreli told the Post.
Earlier in the day, courtroom observers got a laugh when another defendant, also named Martin Shkreli, appeared in the same courtroom, to be arraigned on money-laundering-related charges related to alleged drug trafficking by a group that has also been accused of trafficking weapons from Kosovo. The two Shkrelis are unrelated, as are the cases, though both are of Albanian descent, CNBC reports.
If most job seekers use LinkedIn, it’s less useful if you’ve spent some or all of your adult life incarcerated and don’t have positions to list or colleagues to add. A new job platform is designed to help those with a criminal record find work–and because that group includes nearly one in three Americans, it’s also meant as a tool for employers to find new talent that they might have otherwise missed.
“The right thing to do is to give people second chances; I think most people can agree on that,” says Richard Bronson, founder of 70MillionJobs, the new platform, which is part of the current batch of startups at the tech incubator Y Combinator. “But our value proposition is less that, and more that there are six million jobs in this country that are unfilled at any time. Companies lose money when they can’t fill positions. We have applicants who are ready, willing, and eager to take on those positions.”
The startup’s name comes from the fact that an estimated 70 million Americans have a criminal record. That record, whether it’s an arrest without conviction or years or imprisonment, (and whether or not a conviction was for a minor crime like marijuana possession) often makes it much more difficult to find a job. One study found that white job applicants with a criminal record are about half as likely to be called back for an interview; black applicants are less likely to be called back in general, but those with a record are called back only a third as often as their peers. And, of course, many people with a record struggle to get to the interview stage at all.
“I had lots of the advantages that the folks I was in prison with had nothing like. They were mostly men of color, they probably didn’t finish high school, what chance would they have?” [Screenshot: courtesy 70MillionJobs]Bronson’s own past inspired him to create the site. In the 1980s, he worked on Wall Street at firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, becoming a partner at Stratton Oakmont, the firm featured in the film Wolf of Wall Street–and then founded his own firm, which eventually had 500 employees. Like other firms, “we were up to no good,” he says. He was eventually convicted of securities fraud; because he and his partner had repaid those who suffered losses, his sentence was a relatively lenient 22 months.
After time in federal prison, Bronson struggled. “I went from being very successful and wealthy and well-connected, and then, like most people who go through the criminal justice system, I came out essentially destitute,” he says. “I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that here I was, a white guy who went to a good college–I had lots of the advantages that the folks I was in prison with had nothing like. They were mostly men of color, they probably didn’t finish high school, what chance would they have?”
He worked with a nonprofit that helps train people with criminal histories to become entrepreneurs, but as he saw the challenges for re-entry nonprofits to help people at a national scale, he decided to start a business.
“There’s no denying that there’s still unnecessary stigma out in society.” [Image: chaluk/iStock]“Most of [the nonprofits] have very little in the way of technology that they employ,” he says. “The business gets done essentially the way it has for 100 years–they have a client, they call up a business they have a relationship with: ‘I have this guy, do you need someone for your warehouse? I’ll send him over.’ That’s fine for local businesses, but certainly, as it relates to national employers, the Walmarts of the world don’t hire that way.”
70MillionJobs is tailored, Bronson says, to work with the hiring processes that large companies already use. But job seekers with sparse or non-existent resumes can create video resumes, helping create a personal connection that makes them more appealing. Rather than viewing public profiles, employers log in for access.
Corporations are becoming more open to hiring those with criminal records. In 2016, several large companies, including Google and Starbucks, took the Obama Administration’s Fair Chance Business Pledge to reduce barriers to employment for those with a record (each took an individual pledge, but most said, for example, that they would “ban the box,” choosing not to ask about a criminal record on job applications. Companies also get a tax credit for hiring the formerly incarcerated.
“Often resources are thin, they’re very localized, and finding folks a job on a one-off basis is hard, labor-intensive work.” [Image: chaluk/iStock]“There’s no denying that there’s still unnecessary stigma out in society, and that we have to continue to educate employers about this talent pool, and provide them the tools to access it,” says Justin Vail, who led the pledge initiative under Obama and now serves as a consultant to 70MillionJobs. “But I think nationally we’re seeing a sea change of employers recognizing that these 70 million Americans are being inadvertently ignored during the hiring process, and they see a talent pool that they want to access.”
Governments also see the potential benefit of the site as a tool. The City of Los Angeles, which is investing heavily in re-entry programs, recognizes the strong social benefit of helping people find employment. “If we employ people, we see dramatic reductions in recidivism,” says Kimberley Guillemet, manager of the Mayor’s Office of Reentry. In Los Angeles, the rate of people returning to prison after release is 53%; if they get a job, that drops to 7%. If they get a job quickly after release, it drops to 3%.
The city recently completed a three-month pilot with 70MillionJobs, offering free listings on the site to local businesses. Guillemet also recognizes the advantages of the site connecting with larger, national employers. “When it comes to national employers, they don’t really have the bandwidth to do the boots-on-the-ground type of work,” she says.
“If we employ people, we see dramatic reductions in recidivism.” [Image: chaluk/iStock]While smaller, local organizations that focus on reentry do critical work, often supporting people who have been recently released with a range of services–everything from mental health care and substance abuse programs to help finding housing, along with employment–70MillionJobs hopes to supplement that.
“Often resources are thin, they’re very localized, and finding folks a job on a one-off basis is hard, labor-intensive work,” says Vail. “Anything we can do to scale that we see as a service both for applicants and employers.” The service could also be useful for people who served time in prison several years ago and still struggle to find work because of that; many local programs are focused on those who have been recently released.
The company is currently working with job applicants to make the technology as easy to use as possible, recognizing that most applicants don’t have a computer to work on. “A lot of these people were just working off their mobile phone, and I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t know how to upload my resume to a site using my phone,” says Bronson, who notes that as someone in his 60s who doesn’t know how to code, he’s an outlier at Y Combinator. “To expect that somebody who’s been behind bars for their adult life should know [how to do that] is ridiculous. We found that out soon enough, and we’re coming up with a new product–it’s a constant process of iteration–that should be a better fit.”
Though the site is new, it’s already beginning to help people find work. “If I get someone a job, that’s my bottom line,” he says.
You might think that when you strap on an Oculus Rift headset in the privacy of your garage to play a game in virtual reality, you’re anonymous enough to do whatever you want, with no worries about being judged.
That’s not always the case, says Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Facebook-owned Oculus, the maker of the high-end Rift VR system.
With “multiplayer gaming in VR, you get some of the social anxiety you get in real life,” Rubin told me last month during a demo event for the forthcoming Marvel Powers United VR. “If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like social interaction, [with multiplayer VR titles like] Echo Arena, you’re staring someone in the eye, or waving at them, and we notice that people who are shy get that shyness feeling.”
Echo Arena [Still: courtesy of Oculus]On the other hand, lots of people have no social awkwardness, and love interacting with others in real life, or in a virtual world. And that’s why it’s vital for the future of VR, and for the potential of big franchises like the Echo series or Marvel Powers United VR, that players be able to choose whether they strike out alone, or in a group.
Given those kinds of numbers, one might ask why a company like Marvel, who Rubin says has some of “the best intellectual property on the planet,” would want to put its name on a high-profile game.
The short answer: To get in early, and iron out the problems now, when relatively few people are watching.
“If you own an IP, whether it’s Star Wars or the Avengers . . . or James Bond, or any one of these unlimited-value, giant universes of characters, what’s important to you is two things,” Rubin began.
First, you wouldn’t want to release something terrible with your name on it. The other is that you start to generate ongoing interest in your IP, and do things to move that IP forward over time.
That’s especially true when it comes to a nascent consumer technology like VR.
“I think if you asked a lot of these IP holders, they would say something along the lines of, ‘We think this is the first step in what’s going to be a very long road of bringing our IP, putting people in our IP, putting people in the universe of our IP,'” Rubin said. “‘If this only reaches hundreds of thousands of people . . . that’s okay, because a few years from now, we’ll reach millions, a few years after that, we’ll reach tens of millions . . . We believe that this is an important way that our IP can move forward, and therefore what we want to do is we want to learn [now], so we’re not learning when everybody else knows what to do, and we’re trying to shoehorn our IP in when everybody else has worked out the kinks.'”
For Oculus, having a Marvel title in its library was on the wish list from the very beginning. And while the two companies began to talk quite some time ago about what was possible, it was a hard sell.
“They were somewhat unconvinced at the beginning,” Rubin recalls. “You know, VR is new, is this something they want to do? They’re very precious about their IP.”
Still, Oculus kept asking, and kept hearing no. Until, that is, the developers at Sanzaru Games took it upon themselves to put together, on spec and on their own dime, a playable demo of a game featuring Marvel’s characters.
“We went to Marvel, and they went, ‘You keep asking, we’re just not sure,'” Rubin said, adding that Oculus then showed Marvel the Sanzaru demo, prompting an enthusiastic reply: “‘Oh, yeah, we’re building this.’ And that’s literally how it went.”
Why? Rubin points to the amount of people dressed as Marvel characters like the Hulk, or Rocket Raccoon, or Deadpool, at events like Comic-Con, and the way that VR can let you embody someone like the Hulk in a way that’s impossible with any other medium. “People love these characters,” he said. “Cosplay aside, you don’t really get to be that character in a world. This is a first. This is something no other medium can give you.”
And what, exactly, is it that VR offers that’s unique–especially when it comes to playing a game based on Marvel’s characters?
I had just finished running through the demo version of Marvel Powers United VR, making it through an intense few minutes fighting bad guys alongside the Hulk and Rocket Raccoon. I was Captain Marvel.
I had been human-sized, and the Hulk had towered above me. It was inescapable. “When you play as Rocket Racoon,” Rubin enthused, “and you look up at the Hulk, you feel like an ant. You feel tiny.”
Similarly, he said, comparing playing a VR game to a standard, console game, “when you’re sitting doing this, very passively [with a console game], you’re not moving much. But when you slash a sword with Deadpool [in VR], you slash a sword. It’s an entirely different feeling, and I think Marvel reacted to that, and thought that this is something that their fanbase would like.”
Oculus’s Role
Despite its July unveiling, Marvel Powers United VR won’t be available until next year. Until then, Oculus will play the role of producer, stepping in when necessary, but mainly taking a backseat as Marvel and Sanzaru work closely on the game’s development.
Marvel’s heavy involvement in production is mainly due to how much it cares about its characters being properly represented.
And in that sense, the production of Marvel Powers United VR is quite different than that of other games for the Rift, Rubin explained.
With the Echo franchise–Lone Echo and Echo Arena–Oculus’s role is much more hands-on, working with the game’s developer, Ready at Dawn Studios. In addition to funding the games, Rubin said, Oculus is talking to the developers daily, bringing them best practices and helping out when needed.
“There’s times, not with that team, but with other teams, where we’ve said, ‘Okay, you’re going astray,’ and we’ve pushed them back in,” Rubin said. “We have a very active production role, in the same way a producer produces a movie. The director is ultimately responsible for what you see on the screen, but there are many times when the director or the production go off track, and it’s the producer . . . who comes in and pulls it back onto the schedule.”
And, of course, there’s another production model. An example is Ubisoft’s Star Trek Bridge Crew. “We had no hand in building that product,” Rubin said. “We were aware of it. We helped them with technical issues . . . But that was Ubisoft and the [Star Trek] rights holder working on their own.”
Added Rubin, “That game has been an incredible success story for our platform.”
Reassuring Consumers
Regardless of who makes a Rift title, or what the production model is, it’s essential to the platform that there is as much quality content as possible.
There’s also, of course, a bit of a chicken-and-egg dynamic. Modest Rift ownership means developers are somewhat wary of building for the platform. Users may, in turn, be somewhat wary of buying a Rift because they’re unsure there’s enough to keep them entertained.
That dynamic, in part, led to Oculus’s so-called Summer of Rift, during which much of the 500 Rift titles have been on sale, and more importantly, the price of the hardware itself was slashed.
And while Oculus and its partners are already in development on games that will boost the platform’s content roster in both 2018 and 2019, that doesn’t matter to consumers, Rubin acknowledged.
That’s why it’s so important to the company that people know about a high-profile title like Marvel Powers United VR.
“For consumers, they say, ‘What product? What are you talking about? I want to know because I’m putting my own hard-earned cash into buying this hardware,'” Rubin said. “So by saying something along the lines of, It’s Marvel Powers, it’s coming in ’18, it’s real, you give somebody the ability to say, ‘Okay, I get it now. Here are all the things I know are coming . . . I’m looking into the future, and I’m saying at $399, at $499, this is a deal worth it to me, because, over the next two years, I’m going to get the value added.’ That’s how consumers think.”
Research firm IDC has released a forecast saying augmented and virtual reality gear and apps will surge in the next few years. That’s the latest evidence that the smartphone won’t be the center of our computing universe forever–in fact, not even for very much longer. Our focus will begin moving from the smartphone to devices fitted to our bodies, including augmented reality (AR) devices.
Smartphones have been important for so long that we often don’t think about how clumsy it can be to handle that slippery square of glass and metal. It’s especially cumbersome in the age of personal assistants and augmented reality, which require close interplay between the tech and our ears and eyes.
For Apple, the Apple Watch was the first evolutionary step away from the smartphone. That device shows us, in quick glances on the wrist, communications and notifications that would normally call our attention back to the smartphone. But instead of reaching for the smartphone, a Watch wearer can either ignore it or send a quick reply from the wrist. The phone can stay in a pocket or purse with the ringer off.
The second major hint came with the AirPods, which put things like the Siri assistant and driving directions in our ear. Again, the phone acts as the base station for the experience, but it can stay out of sight.
AR glasses will be the next major step. Apple already began to set the stage when it unveiled its powerful AR app developer tools in June. Developers have gotten busy creating experiences where digital objects are placed in the real world as seen through the camera and screen of the smartphone.
But Apple design chief Jony Ive surely understands that mainstream users aren’t going to want to hold their smartphone up in front of their face Pokémon Go style. In order to fulfill the vast potential of AR, the experience will have to be hands-free and immersive as only glasses can enable.
Glassed Out
Google saw this coming a long time ago with its ill-fated Google Glass. But the components weren’t quite ready–in fact, they probably still aren’t–which hindered the sleekness of the design and the attractiveness and usefulness of the interface shown in the lenses. In the end, Glass was seen as a science project–something worn by ubergeeks but not regular folks.
Apple will fare better. It can learn from Google’s experience with Glass. And Apple has always fared better than Google at understanding the melding of hardware and software design, and matching gadget feature sets to real consumer needs.
Then there’s the important realization that glasses are not just a tech product. Like the smartwatch, they are a tricky hybrid of tech device and fashion accessory. Above Avalon analyst Neil Cybart points out that Apple learned a lot about the fashion world and applying fashion sense to technology since entering the smartwatch market. “Apple Watch has taught Apple much about how to get people to wear personal technology,” Cybart writes in a recent newsletter. The company will need to draw on that experience in a big way for its AR glasses.
Getting The Green Light
Many, many products have been prototyped at Apple but never became an actual product. It’s a very high bar to cross at the company. Still, Cybart lists off a number of things that practically assure Apple’s glasses a place in the product lineup.
Glasses are a good place to tightly integrate and control the hardware and the software (“The sum is greater than the parts,” Cybart says). Apple can apply the manufacturing experience it’s gained from making the Watch and AirPods to building glasses. Apple Stores are natural showrooms for such eyeware, and they’re everywhere. Glasses are a chance to make technology more intimate and personal, as Apple has long stressed.
Cybart makes another point. The holy grail in selling personal tech is creating something that the user doesn’t want to leave home without. Augmented reality glasses, by themselves, might not meet that threshold (at least in the early days), but what if the glasses also sported corrective lenses?
“There aren’t too many gadgets or devices that would be selected over a smartphone in terms of its importance in our lives,” Cybart writes. “However, corrective lenses would certainly be at the top of the list for many people.”
Adding a second layer of (digital) utility to prescription glasses people already wear seems like a smart way to bring AR into the mainstream. How big is that market? The Vision Council of America says approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction, and for about 64% of them, that means eyeglasses.
I don’t claim to know when Apple will bring the glasses to market. I hear differing opinions from the analysts and supply chain people I know. It depends on a lot of things, including the availability of potent-but-tiny processors and a battery that’s big enough to supply adequate power, but small enough not to ruin the hardware design.
What I am saying is that the promise of AR is just too big for Apple to let pass forever.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Scott Moritz, and Ian King have quite a scoop: They report that Apple plans to release a version of its Apple Watch sporting a built-in LTE wireless connection by the end of 2017, using a modem chip supplied by Intel. That would allow the smart watch to connect directly to the internet–for song downloading, notifications, and other purposes–rather than requiring an iPhone to be in close proximity to serve as middleman.
It’s been obvious all along that the Apple Watch getting LTE would be an important step toward it becoming a truly independent computing device rather than a mere iPhone accessory. Companies such as Samsung have already introduced LTE-ready smart watches, but the challenge of implementing the technology in a compact package with decent battery life are such that I would have guessed an LTE Apple Watch was a couple of years off. I will be delighted if Apple’s fall announcements prove me wrong.
Shooting a video of yourself with a hologram tiger, seeing how a new BMW will look parked in your driveway, and going on a field trip to the moon–all this and more will soon be available on your smartphone, thanks to Google’s augmented-reality (AR) computing platform, Tango, and its virtual reality (VR) platform, Daydream. The first phone to include both, the Asus ZenFone AR, will finally be available later this month and is available now for preorder starting at $648.
So, what can you actually do with an “AR smartphone?” Turns out, a lot.
Asus recently set up a gallery space in San Francisco to show off some of the features of the new handset. I checked it out and took a few of the ideas out for a spin. While many of the features are currently limited to the ZenFone, you can expect them to work with other Tango and Daydream-enabled smartphones in the future as well.
Tango is the real star on the device. With it, the phone is able to perceive things like height and depth in a space, and then place virtual items in the room that you can see on the phone’s display as if they were physical. For instance, buying furniture can be a pain, even more so when you’re shopping online and aren’t quite sure whether that table or chair will blend with what you already have in your living room–or even fit. With the ZenFone, online merchant Wayfair is launching an app that lets you choose from a wide number of items in its digital catalog, and then virtually position them in your home.
[Photo: Emily Price]In a statement, Steve Conine, cofounder and co-chairman of Wayfair, said the company put a dedicated, in-house research and development team together more than a year ago to work on the app. He sees the ability to see a chandelier hanging from your ceiling, hang a digital picture, or unbox a new sofa in your living room as the future of shopping.
As someone who has a lot of anxiety when it comes to purchasing the perfect table or bookcase, I think he’s right. I can see the feature, which is already available in a slightly different form through the company’s app Wayfair View, being exceptionally useful. Being able to see things like how a chandelier that looks small online will totally overpower your dining room, or that a chair might look out of place in your living room, even though it fits, can save you a lot of headaches and moving expenses, not to mention time with a tape measure.
And Wayfair isn’t alone. Lowes, iStaging, and Measure also have apps for the device, enabling similar features, including digital measuring tape.
[Photo: Emily Price]
You And The Holograms
More party trick than life-changing feature, the phone’s AR capabilities also allow you to place a virtual hologram–like a tiger or Spider-Man–beside you in a room and shoot a video or take a picture. It’s definitely a neat effect, although something that would lose its novelty over time.
BMW has a similar app that’s slightly more useful. It allows you to virtually place one of its vehicles into your parking space or driveway, or even your living room. On a basic level, it can help you see how tight of a parking job it would be in your tiny garage if you buy a BMW. Even better, you can walk around the digital model to get a feel for the size of the car, and even step inside and see the interior. Buttons within the app also allow you to customize the color of the car and its interior.
Virtual Field Trips
Google is also working on creating Tango-powered virtual field trips for classrooms through its Expeditions program. With the feature, a class of students would use phones to explore things like the solar system or a historical landmark that has been digitally placed in their classroom. A teacher can control a planet, for instance, and add arrows to the digital model to help explain different aspects. Google will offer kits to schools that will include phones for everyone in the class to use.
And all this is just the beginning. More Tango-powered smartphones are on the way, and AR capabilities are also coming to the iPhone and iPad as well. Apple’s answer to Tango, ARKit, arrives this fall with iOS 11.
You don’t need to be told why it matters to be transparent and honest at work–that much is a given. So is the overall usefulness of expressing yourself clearly, confidently, and with as few filler words as possible. But in the effort to do that, many of us fall back on common expressions that might sound totally fine in social situations but can do some quiet damage in the workplace. One of them is “I’m sorry.” Another is “to be honest.”
The latter turn of phrase–and versions of it, like “honestly,” “frankly,” “if I can be honest with you,” or “let me be frank”–is easy to resort to when you want to cut through the crap, come clean, or offer your unvarnished opinion. But these expressions also tend to attach themselves to–and subtly encourage–certain messages that are either better left unsaid or ought to be rephrased. Here are times when “to be honest” can make you sound less authoritative around the office.
We often use the expression “to be honest” as a tip-off that we’re sharing confidential information. Suppose your boss is speaking to a team member and says, “To be honest, we’re going to have to let Jim go next quarter.” The first three words alert the listener to the fact that sensitive intel is on its way.
Likewise, a recruiter might tell a candidate, “To be honest, there are 10 other applicants the client is considering.” Or the head of a department might say, “To be honest with you, management has started discussing the possibility of layoffs.”
There are times when you and your boss or colleagues really do need to talk about something confidentially together. But those conversations shouldn’t need to be prefaced this way. If you really want someone to keep a discussion under wraps, come right out and say so: “I’d prefer you keep this to yourself because . . .”–and always give a reason. This way the other person understands why you’re asking them to keep quiet about the subject and consciously choose whether to agree to that.
But prefacing something you’re about to say with “to be honest” sweeps away any prospect of mutually agreeing to discuss sensitive information–because watch out, here it comes! Leaders, effective managers, and people you can actually trust around the office are more discreet than this. They aren’t gossips. They are truthful as a matter of habit, not just for certain behind-the-scenes moments when they unilaterally choose to divulge secretive intel. That aboveboard mentality is what gives them their authority, after all.
Another reason not to use “to be honest” is that it’s frequently a tip-off that you’re about to attack someone. The same way you might unthinkingly use the expression to make illicit information licit, there’s a risk you’ll resort to it in order to clear the way for criticism you probably shouldn’t share. You’ve likely experienced this. When someone says “to be honest,” they often lower their voice, lean in closer, and tell it like it is.
A colleague might remark, “To be honest, Jessica kind of sucks at her job and we usually have to pick up the pieces for her.” Or a project team member may say, “Honestly, we have enough people on the project team right now–we really don’t need another person.” Or a boss might state, “Can I be frank? Your presentation to the client didn’t really work. That’s why we didn’t get the business.”
Sometimes negative feedback is useful and necessary, but this is one of the worst ways to deliver it; you first need to prepare somebody to receive constructive criticism. This way you can have a productive conversation about how you want them to improve. But beginning with “to be honest” is like a slap in the face, and what follows is likely to feel abrupt and hurtful rather than constructive.
It Can Undercut What You’ve Already Said
A third (and possibly the main) reason to avoid this expression is because it usually just diminishes the importance of whatever you’ve said already. It’s an instant cheapener.
You may toss in “to be honest” to buy time while you’re thinking, just like any other filler word or expression like, “um” or “you know.” Or maybe you believe it adds sincerity or warmth to your conversation. But there’s an unmistakable undertow to it: as soon as you hear somebody say, “to be honest,” your mind flashes back to what was just said. You sit up, take notice, and half-consciously wonder whether their preceding statements were less than honest–should you discount or ignore them?
Maybe your manager is critiquing a slide deck you’ve put together. “I like what you’ve done to improve your presentation,” she says. “You’ve reduced the number of slides and sharpened the messaging. But to be honest, you need to bring more focus to your central point.” Right away, her “to be honest” gives more weight to the criticism that follows and reduces the power of the compliments that precede it. It saps her own words of their authority!
If she’d just left that phrase out, her comments would be positive on balance, and you’d already be thinking about how to improve that central point–not wondering whether your boss meant what she said, or even whether you can take her at her word next time.
On a typically drizzly Seattle night this past May, a crowd shuffled through metal detectors to pack the plaza outside CenturyLink Field, the downtown stadium where the Seahawks play football. Beneath a small white party tent sat Paul Allen—music nerd, lead guitarist of blues-based rockers The Underthinkers, philanthropic Renaissance Man, and a Microsoft cofounder. It’s not unusual to see him at the stadium during football games (he owns the team, along with the Portland Trailblazers), but tonight he was there to watch the first headline show at Seattle’s newest music event, the Upstream Music Festival and Summit, which he also founded.
As a cloud of vape vapor descended over the audience, Allen and his companion reclined in lounge chairs and the producer DJ and MC Flying Lotus (real name Steven Ellison) took the stage. Ellison often performs in a special contraption: a traditional DJ booth surrounded by projection screens, placing him inside a 3D world of cartoon characters, floating text, jellyfish, viruses, and high-speed Escher-like recursive patterns. It’s hypnotic, intoxicating, eye-popping, possibly seizure-inducing, simultaneously retro and futuristic. Imagine watching a Win 95 screensaver through a giant Hololens while tripping on acid.
A few minutes into his set, the beats went quiet, the plaintive synths of the Twin Peaks theme drifted in, and a new trap-style rhythm emerged. It was a deft nod to the locale (the real town of Twin Peaks is a thirty-minute drive away) and the crowd was his. Angelo Badalamenti’s flagrantly nostalgic tune, fast-forwarded through Flying Lotus’s electronica, sounded like an appropriate motif song for the festival and its lofty goal: to foster the city’s famed local music scene, even as rents rise faster than the pulsating lights inside the holographic DJ booth.
It’s a dissonant, stomach-rattling, though not necessarily unpleasant, sound, one that reflects the inherent conflict between the influx of Seattle’s growing Big Tech gentrifiers—including Amazon and Microsoft—and the scrappy artists who increasingly struggle to call Seattle home. Allen’s festival rests on a seeming contradiction, sponsored as it is by the same tech money that’s fueling growth and rising living costs in Seattle. It’s not a new tension. His investment company Vulcan Inc. is known locally for its massive real estate holdings, but it also invests in a wide range of projects throughout the Pacific Northwest that exemplify his scientific, social, environmental, and cultural priorities. Aside from space, AI, and energy, a Vulcan pamphlet notes, a “thriving arts and culture scene are essential for strong and diverse communities.”
But Seattle’s rapid and shiny buildup (it’s the national capital of construction cranes, and has a faster-growing population than any big American city) hasn’t been easy on its legendary music communities. As its homeless population lags behind only New York and Los Angeles, record-breaking housing prices—growing at the fastest rate in the country and driven by a persistent wave of wealthy new tech workers—threaten not only reasonable rents but the house shows and DIY spaces that are the lifeblood of the city’s music scene. Increasingly, these spaces are fading out or getting pushed to the suburbs, a geographic shift that is fragmenting Seattle’s strong, neighborhood-based creative communities.
“The artist/musician class in Seattle—the one that Vulcan intends to support and invest in—is being economically displaced at a growing pace,” read a local petition posted to Change.org a month before the festival. The petitioners called on Allen “to set an exciting new precedent for equitable development” by funding more affordable housing, artist studios, and rehearsal spaces, with a particular focus on the historically black Central District, where Vulcan is starting two major housing and retail redevelopment projects on a $53 million, 10-acre parcel.
“We have reached out and are hoping to meet with the artists behind the letter,” said a Vulcan spokesperson. “This conversation requires many stakeholders, including developers.” Allen, who would not comment for this story, made a $30 million pledge in April toward a permanent housing facility for as many as 100 low-income and homeless families—one of a number of similar recent commitments by him and other corporate titans.
Thunderpussy [Photo: Sunny Martini]Meanwhile, Vulcan faced eyerolls from a community that isn’t exactly starved for music festivals. Seattle already hosts Bumbershoot, Sasquatch, the Capitol Hill Block Party, and an assortment of smaller fests. Previous attempts to start a “North by Northwest” haven’t succeeded.
So why launch another festival? Ask Jeff Vetting, Upstream’s genial executive director and a veteran of local radio powerhouse KEXP, and he’ll talk about the importance of shining a light on emerging Pacific Northwest artists. Indeed, a majority of the first Upstream’s 300-plus artists—booked by curator Melissa Darby with input from a committee of 46 local music gurus and 46 guest curators—were local.
Darby’s and Vetting’s efforts paid off. During the inaugural Upstream festival, a parade of bands in a slew of bars in nearby Pioneer Square created an urban playlist you could walk through without ever repeating genres. On Saturday night alone, I traipsed from a mind-bending performance by local avant-garde hip-hop heroes Shabazz Palaces to the K Records crooner Karl Blau to the ethereal experimentalism of NAAVI, from the embellishments of Seattle funk 8-piece The Polyrhythmics to an underground comedy club bouncing with the furious and baroque percussive footwork of Jlin.
The audiences appeared to be happy, friendly, and refreshingly diverse in age. Musicians reported being satisfied with their fees. Some attendees grumbled about the admission price ($60 per day) and others were thankful the organizers had kept the corporate logos to a minimum, recruiting as major sponsors only two companies—Amazon Music and Amazon Web Services.
Even the app was interesting. You could not only look at a map and a schedule but also listen to nearly every band’s music, check capacity at venues, connect with other festivalgoers through “Braindates” and even—brilliantly—tip needy artists.
Signal Boosting
Like South by Soutwest, its distant relative in Austin, Upstream isn’t just about seeing shows but bolstering the region’s music economy—think of what places like New York, Nashville, and Los Angeles mean to the music business, but with a tech twist. During the festival’s two days, an event space at the stadium hosted Seattle-linked keynote speakers—Macklemore, Quincy Jones, Kill Rock Stars president Portia Sabin, film composer Ron Jones, Mike McCready of Pearl Jam—while a slew of panels featured entrepreneurs, technologists, and musicians talking about everything from data analytics to video game composition. Part of the aim was to underscore existing untapped networking opportunities for Seattle’s artists and techies. “Hopefully we can start creating those relationships and really start building our music economy,” says Vetting.
JLIN [Photo: Sunny Martini]Upstream is also about re-instilling in Seattle a strong sense of pride over its musical bounty. “There’s nothing more upsetting than seeing a local band on a festival poster listed as New York or L.A.,” Vetting laments, referring to Seattle bands that feel they have to move away to a city with a bigger music industry in order to succeed. “Why are they listed as Nashville?”
The effects of that phenomenon sting Seattle’s economy. When musical talent and business goes elsewhere, the local ecosystem reaps none of the rewards that would exist if they had stayed. Seattle is “a really great place for the music,” says Ayron Jones, leader of his own rock band. “But because of a lack of resources—I call it the Seattle cycle—it’s hard to get out” and be noticed by a larger audience.
“We’re the city of music,” he adds. “We push that as the forefront of our cultural heritage. We have a beautiful music community here. But not necessarily the strongest business sector or a business economy. You hear about the ‘business centers of music’–L.A., New York, Atlanta, London,” he says, noting that he sometimes gets asked, “‘why don’t you go somewhere else to make this your career?'”
“I think that’s scary,” says Andrew Joslyn, a Seattle-native composer and violinist. “I think it’s scary that we’re losing really good artists to other communities. I think the great thing about the summit and this festival is we’re really finally trying to take a stand and show the world, ‘hey, we’re really trying to be taken seriously as a music center.’ Actually emphasizing that.”
“In the near future, Seattle will be seen as the best scene in the world,” Vetting prophesizes. “And in my eyes it already is. I hope we get that recognition nationally.”
Adam Farish, CEO of remix app 8Stem, with producer and vocalist Sassyblack and remix artist RAC [Photo by Alex Pasternack]Bruce Pavitt remembers they heyday of Seattle’s music scene. As cofounder of the seminal Seattle label Sub Pop, he released the first Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney albums, and he’s still a fixture in the local music economy. Upstream “was a successful first event,” he says, one that helped “both refocus the Seattle music scene, and reactivate the Pioneer Square neighborhood as a cultural hub.” (Pioneer Square, the city’s first official neighborhood, and a zone subject to ongoing revitalization, is also home to Vulcan’s headquarters, and some of its land holdings.)
Another sign of how much has changed since the angsty days of grunge: Pavitt is now an app entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and creative director of 8Stem, a tool that allows fans and budding DJs to make remixes of their songs. For Pavitt, Upstream was a chance to see bands–but, just as importantly, he was there “to network and educate both scenesters and baller tech nerds” about his startup.
Will Upstream Happen To Seattle Or With Seattle?
Upstream connects with Paul Allen’s vision of business and philanthropy: experimental, data-driven, and hopefully sustainable. Allen is building the world’s largest airplane to send rockets to space, invests heavily in AI through his Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and is hard at work on a nuclear fusion project via a secretive startup. He has committed $100 million to scientific endeavors at the “frontiers of bioscience.” In 2014 he joined a lawsuit to force the Interior Department to better account for the environmental impact of coal mining on public lands.
Among its “Arts and Culture” portfolio, Vulcan touts the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project (recently rebranded as the Museum Of Pop), founded with about $6 million of Allen’s money, as well as the Living Computers museum, the Flying Heritage Collection, and the Seattle Art Fair–the third installment of which is taking place this weekend to strong reviews.
These aren’t philanthropic projects in the traditional sense. They’re meant to be sustainable businesses, with follow-on effects for the region and its economy. But while Upstream’s publicist offers a pile of metrics (30,000 attendees, more than 70% of whom downloaded the app), he would not disclose any details about the festival’s finances, including how much it cost, what Allen spent, and how close it came to making a profit.
“It’s challenging to launch the first year of any festival—let alone a festival of the size, scale, and ambition of Upstream,” says Vetting. “There was a good deal of learning and problem-solving along the way that I wouldn’t trade.”
Upstream’s urban setting—crucial to its identity and its multidisciplinary format—may work to its advantage. While long-running American camp-out festivals like Sasquatch and Bonnaroo saw their attendance numbers dip significantly last year, city festivals like Montreal’s Osheaga, Toronto’s Field Trip, and Governors Ball in New York are finding more success, according to some observers. Urban festivals benefit from a potential customer base that already lives in the area. Because these audiences can skew slightly older, they are likely to have more disposable income.
Of course, not all of Allen’s art projects have panned out. Famously, Allen stopped funding a handful of Seattle arts groups just a few months before he launched the Seattle Art Fair. Then there was “The Commons,” a failed effort to create a massive public arts space near Lake Union.
Those failures don’t negate the contributions Allen has made to the region. “Perhaps no one has done more for Northwest arts than Allen,” Jen Graves wrote in The Stranger in 2015. “A look at the tax records of his foundation is a tour of the greatest hits of Northwest art and culture of the last 20 years.”
But regardless of the resources that Upstream can provide for local artists, fostering collaboration between the music and business communities—and maybe a detente between the arts scene and the fast-moving economy—is a separate challenge, acknowledges Vetting.
“A big topic that came up time and time again is how Seattle can retain its position as a city that along with all of the business development remains supportive of local artists,” Vetting says. “Seattle is going to continue to thrive, and we recognize that there are complex issues that come with that development, which require many voices and resources at the table.”
Among those voices is a rapper and poet named Geneiva Arunga, who performs as Dadabassed and hails from the Central District, where Vulcan is developing housing and retail projects. “If the singers, DJs, writers, rappers, and artists cannot live in this city, this city will no longer have anything to do,” she told theSeattle Weekly in May. “You can’t just push us out of Seattle and then call us up when you need Upstream and need us to participate in this local showcase. It’s like, hold up—a lot of these artists don’t live here anymore.”
Still, if Allen’s fortunes can help stem some of the side effects of the city’s boom, and if he provides time and space to building community, it seems that many local musicians and activists are willing to work with him rather than against him.
“In Seattle, there’s so much wealth, and I feel like there should be more of a push to help foster creativity,” Madeline Franks, an electronic musician who performs under the name Lilac, told another Seattle Weekly reporter recently. “It doesn’t really feel like that right now, but I don’t want to give up on it.”
Version 1.0 of Upstream was a good reason for more of that optimism, a basic template for what a(nother) new festival might actually add to a city like Seattle. It’s an open question as to whether Allen, Vetting, and the rest of Vulcan can get Upstream to live up to its lofty ambitions. Like a local artist or business, a festival is more interesting and more resilient when it doesn’t just happen to a city, but becomes a part of it.
Shonda Rhimes is an American television producer behind some of primetime’s most successful shows. Here are some of the most unforgettable scenes from her ABC hits, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away With Murder.
Inspired by the messages of goodwill carried on Voyager’s Golden Record, the space agency wants to add one more message on Voyager 1. That’s why it’s asking social media users on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ or Tumblr to compose an uplifting #MessageToVoyager. The message can be anything you want but must be a maximum of 60 characters (including spaces).
Post your messages publicly on any of the social media services mentioned above with the tag #MessageToVoyager by August 15th. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, and the Voyager team will then select a shortlist of messages to be voted on by the public between August 23rd and 29th. The winning message will be beamed into space towards Voyager 1 on September 5th, where it is expected to take a day to arrive in interstellar space in Voyager’s location.
The Japanese tech giant, which just invested a quarter of a billion dollars in U.S. fintech startup Cabbage, has set its sight on ride-hailing services as its next investment, reports Reuters. Speaking to reporters after SoftBank’s quarterly results announcement on Monday SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son said, “We are interested in discussing with Uber, we are also interested in discussing with Lyft, we have not decided which way.” But the CEO they played coy, adding “Whether we decide to partner and invest into Uber or Lyft, I don’t know what will be the end result.”
The latest stats come from We Are Social’s and HootSuite’s Global Digital Statshot (via TNW). It reveals that out of the earth’s total population of 7.524 billion, 3.028 billion, or 40%, of those people are social media users–thats up 4%, or 121 million people, since April 2017. That 40% include social media users across mobile and desktop. Other interesting stats from the report:
51%, or 3.819 billion people, are now internet users.
67%, or 5.052 billion people, are now mobile users.
37%, 2.78 billion people, are active social media users on mobile
With a net worth of $86 billion, Jeff Bezos certainly has enough money to change the world. What he’s lacked, apparently, was some direction for how to spend it. In mid-June, the Amazon founder tweeted a “request for ideas” worth philanthropically investing in that would help society, both short-term–“here and now”–and in the long run, as he put it: “at the “intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.”
That question generated more than 46,000 responses on Twitter, leaving Bezos with another issue. How to sort and weigh all that feedback? Louis Rosenberg, the founder of Silicon Valley-based Unanimous AI had an answer, and decided to show it off using Bezos’s responses. Rosenberg and his company specialize in a form of advanced decision making called swarm intelligence, basically a computer-enhanced way to get humans to communicate like honeybees do in nature, by tapping into the experiences of large groups of individuals to make the most complete community decision possible.
In the name of social progress–and certainly some self-promotion–Rosenberg turned his tech on Bezos’s information-overload problem. It took some tricky methodology and lots of processing power inside a customized platform, but the result was rather surprising. Turns out, Americans feel most strongly about things like cancer treatment assistance, cheaper medicine, and mobile health clinics.
Some of those things might be personally driven: It seems like everyone knows someone whose life has been touched by cancer, and huge swaths of America don’t have affordable access to healthcare or decent nearby services. Ultimately, however Rosenberg’s simulated swarm unanimously picked a basic and fundamental issues for Bezos to focus on: universal access to clean drinking water.
It’s the universality of that issue that Rosenberg finds interesting. While concerns about water safety continue to grow in the U.S. (lead contamination likely goes far beyond Flint, Michigan), access to safe, readily available water remains a critical issue in the developing world, as well.
“A swarm by their very nature encourages a group to find the places where they agree,” says Rosenberg. “And as a result they tend to find the solutions that are best for the greater good as opposed to forming factions that are defending their own interests.” More data shows that nearly everyone ended up happy and confident in that answer.
THE BUZZ ABOUT SWARMING
Most artificial intelligence systems set out to mimic and improve neurological intelligence, using sets of algorithms and machine learning to solve challenges with more processing power at greater speeds than humans are capable. That’s prompted fears (and a well-known movie franchise) about sentient beings becoming self-aware.
Despite its sci-fi sounding name, though, an artificial hive mind keeps humans at the center of each transaction. “Instead of just being a system of neurons where intelligence emerges,” says Rosenberg, “swarm intelligence is a system of organisms where super intelligence emerges.”
Take bees, for instance. Individually, they aren’t very smart. But bees don’t think on their own when it comes to important decisions. Instead, each bee shares what information it has about a certain scenario through vibrations with the group, allowing the swarm to decide, in real time, based on lots of feedback, what action might be best for collective survival.
Same goes for birds that flock, fish that school, and ants that assemble into colonies. “They’re smarter together,” Rosenberg says. “It’s about enabling groups of organisms to be connected in real time with feedback loops so that they can converge on optimal solutions and they can basically amplify their intelligence.”
Unanimous’s technology mimics that process, using a platform called Unu, an online community managed by the company that works a lot like a virtual Ouija board. It generally asks one question, with six answers arranged at different points around a hexagonal ring. In the center of the ring there is a translucent, circular puck, which online participants on the company’s platform can tug with their cursor toward whatever answer they deem the best.
Those people may be located all over the U.S., but each cursor is represented on a shared screen by a tiny magnet icon, so that as the puck moves toward one answer or another, those within the swarm can see where the decision might be headed, and where others are trying to pull it. If there’s another solution they might prefer to the pending outcome that seems to also have a lot of support, they can shift their alliance, tugging the puck in that direction.
Since it was launched in 2015, Unanimous AI has used its “wisdom of crowds” process most for easily quantifiable problem solving: In 2016, its “Swarm AI” process predicted far more Oscar winners (11 of 15 categories) than polled moviegoers or even top critics. It has also beaten legions of traditional gamblers when placing Vegas-style bets on the Super Bowl (68% of all prop bets paid off). In fact, one month before Bezos’s charity advice tweet, Unanimous AI correctly called the top four finishers in the Kentucky Derby for an extremely rare superfecta, turning Rosenberg’s promotional $20 bet into about $11,000.
In swarming, the options always max out at six to avoid confusion known as “choice overload.” Twitter didn’t cough up six ideas though–it offered tens of thousands.
Getting Bezos An Answer
To vet the submissions, Unanimous created a simple language filter, grouping repetitive ideas that shared similar themes into a smaller set of 200 different suggestions. Next, the group asked 300 volunteers to grade each idea on a scale of 1 to 10, based on Bezos’s critera. Proposals with a cumulative average of at least 7 or higher moved on for final consideration leaving a field of 25 potential solutions.
From there, Unanimous began a process of elimination game inside their platform. They asked 100 users on Unu to review the 25 remaining ideas in batches of 6, tugging the puck toward whichever the community thought would be least helpful. The system deleted the loser, reshuffled the five survivors, and began the process of elimination again, until, eventually, the pool was reduce to six finalists: cancer treatment assistance, universal access to clean drinking water, mobile health clinics, free medicine for the poor, essential equipment for rural hospitals, and health clinics for the poor.
Once the six finalists were chosen, Unu offered a direct question to the swarm: “Which should we recommend Bezos focus his philanthropy?” The swarm took about 10 seconds to tug the puck toward their decision: universal access to clean drinking water.
Getting To Clean Water
As you can see in the animation below, water equality wasn’t necessarily everyone’s first choice, but as the puck began to move, it became far favorable than some others on the board, which lead to an acceptable group decision.
Afterward, Unanimous generated a factional analysis to highlight how allegiances shifted during the tug of war. Nearly everyone appears to have quickly reconciled that clean water was important. Based on some internal math that accounts the zigs-and-zags, Unanimous estimates that the swarm is 85% confident in its answer.
To ensure that the decision met all of Bezos’s criteria, Rosenberg rephrased that question and ran other swarms, focusing specifically on which solution might be the most urgent, have lasting impact, and affect the most people. Each time, though, drinking water topped out.
The swarm’s decision for Bezos to tackle water rights, perhaps against its own immediate self-interest for cheaper meds or a cancer breakthrough, parallels research that shows how swarms often perform far better than disconnected individuals in “tragedy of the commons” scenarios, which tempt people to take more than a fair share of some potential community windfall, with the risk that if too many people get greedy everyone might get nothing.
In second place is health clinics for the poor, followed by free medicine for the poor, and then cancer treatment assistance. Further down, concepts like a free online university, providing glasses to poor children, legal help for domestic abuse victims, purchasing drug patents to lower costs, and “earn while learning” jobs programs all made the list.
Whether Bezos is actually taking the responses to his tweet to heart remains to be seen, but if it was an attempt at coming to some sort of democratic decisions about his future philanthropy, he now has his answer.
The electric car company has said it intends to raise about $1.5 billion in a bond offering, reports Reuters. The funds raised would be used to proceed with mass production of its Model 3 sedan. Hey, Tesla, maybe you should talk to Mr. Son?
The U.K.’s digital minister, Matt Hancock, announced on Monday that citizens there will soon be able to ask Facebook and other tech companies to completely erase any history of their actions online, Reuters reports. The new rules will go into effect by the time the U.K. leaves the EU and are meant to match the EU’s “right to be forgotten” general data protection regulation (GDPR), which goes into law in 2018. The new laws will also mean that online companies will have to explicitly ask people for their permission to collect their online data instead of just asking them to check a box that they agree to the site’s terms.
If you’re looking for some gadgets to grab before you go back to school you may want to head over to the Google store, where you can get a Pixel smartphone for a whopping $200 off, plus grab that free Daydream View VR headset with it.
We make hundreds of big and small decisions every day. Many of these decisions are opportunities that can change your life, yet many of us don’t know how to assess a decision to yield a good outcome, says Mike Whitaker, author of The Decision Makeover: An Intentional Approach To Living The Life You Want.
“Decisions are forks in the road,” he says. “Life doesn’t happen to us; we are an active participant. We get out of life what we choose.”
More than just a choice in the moment, good decision-making takes discipline, says Whitaker. “Most of us go about it the hard way, learning what not to do and creating wisdom going forward,” he says. “Successful people, however, approach decisions differently; they have a methodical way of looking at choices.”
When you have a few tools, you can confidently navigate the right option each time, says Whitaker.
Know That All Decisions Are Not Created Equal
Successful people recognize that there are small, medium, and big decisions. “Small decisions impact you for a day, such as what you wear and what you eat,” says Whitaker. “Medium decisions impact your life for a year or so, such as deciding to go back to school or take on a roommate. They affect your life, but they aren’t crash-and-burn moments.”
Successful people don’t spend a lot of mind share on small decisions. “They have fun with them,” says Whitaker. “You’ll make 150 small decisions a day. There is room to play with the consequences because they’re low.”
Bigger decisions are made once or twice a year, and successful people use their goals to navigate to the right choice. Knowing your goals is key, and Whitaker says successful people have four strategies that help them clearly define what they want.
They keep five prime goals and stay focused on them.
They identify the top priority and give it favorable treatment when making decisions.
They look for goal and decision overlap, treating this decision with more care.
They appreciate momentum, identifying the benefits of continuing to move in the right direction.
Deal With Bad Decisions
We all make bad decisions, but successful people course correct more quickly, says Whitaker. “Most people don’t act; it’s painful,” he says. “When successful people have enough evidence that they’ve made a bad decision, they don’t look for more. They’re willing to shut down a business, for example, and go in a different direction. They fail fast, move on, and then they don’t talk about it again.”
They also fix fast. “They’ll significantly change a deal,” says Whitaker. “This isn’t a matter of trying harder—that’s a good intention trap, but it’s always more of the same. You’re already trying hard.”
They key is to always revert back to your goals. “I call it the big reset,” says Whitaker. “Everyone is walking with mistakes they’ve made, and almost everyone has made a poor decision on big category. You don’t want to get to mid-career and think, ‘This is not where I thought I would be.’ Nothing is more deflating. What do you do about it?”
The worst reaction is what Whitaker calls “goal grooming,” adjusting your goals downward to fit your current circumstances. “We do it to avoid feeling bad about the missing mark,” he says. “We say, ‘Well I didn’t want that job anyway.’ Goal grooming is a bad thing to do for the future. Successful people keep goals solid and reverent, and then continue to make decision purposefully around them.”
Avoid Pitfalls
It’s also important to recognize when your ability to make good decisions is vulnerable, such as when you’re in a hurry, prideful, angry, lonely, rejected, inebriated, or tired, says Whitaker. “Successful people know when they’re not in a good place to make a decision, and they say, ‘Let me sleep on that,’ or ‘Let me think about that. I’ll get back to you,'” he says. “They’re okay with not giving answers. They defer until they know their mind’s right.”
Making a decision when you’re not in the right frame of mind leads to consequences. “Consequences pile up and turn into regret,” says Whitaker. “Regret has a big impact, and you carry it around like luggage all due to bad decision-making. When successful people review regrets, they learn from them and then they’re done with them; they put them away.”
Successful people are not willing to let others take control. “People often give up control to things like fate and luck,” says Whitaker. “There is no such thing. If we own our decisions, we get what we choose. Good things come to those who decide.”
Ask any business owner, and they’ll tell you how hard monetization can be. You’ll often need a longer runway than you think. Since breaking into the world of entrepreneurship, I’ve been dabbling in setting up “passive income” streams, not only to help fund my startup but also to indulge my creative side.
I started off selling coffee mugs featuring a few digital designs. (Side note: I’m not a designer myself, but I didn’t let that stop me. See step #2 here for some details on getting original designs created for you that you can go on to sell in various ways.) Once my mugs started selling, I wondered where else I’d be able to utilize the same designs. As it turned out, lots of places!
Over the last eight months, I’ve been able to monetize my work on other platforms and diversify my revenue streams more widely than I’d anticipated. While many business ideas take exorbitant capital to come to life, earning a passive income doesn’t (which, by the way, is the whole point)–and that’s particularly true using print-on-demand and other online services to design and sell a wide range of merchandise across multiple platforms.
In rough chronological, not best-to-worst order (I’m a sample of one, so my experience using these platforms shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement), here’s how I’ve managed to take just a single idea–namely, a purple-haired unicorn–and sell it 13 different ways.
Teelaunch lets you easily place your graphics on mugs, totes, blankets, and more. As a print-on-demand platform, the site handles the heavy-lifting tasks like fulfilling and shipping orders. Upload your design, fill in your customer’s details, and the order will be sent on your behalf. Teelaunch is made for Shopify, so it’s a quick and easy add-on to any existing e-commerce storefront you might already be working on. I’ve been able to use it to ship hundreds of products ranging from shower curtains to fleece blankets.
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2. iMessage, Kakao, And Line
Then I made stickers.
You can sell digital products, too (without being an app developer), like “stickers.” They’re either a still image or an animated graphic, kind of like a souped-up emoji, that lets mobile users express their thoughts and feelings (or just be silly). Stickers are very popular among users of messaging apps like Kakao, Line, and iMessage. Consumers pay anywhere from 99 cents to $5 or more for stickers sets.
So I just took the existing character sets I’d been selling on mugs, added a few more variations, and listed them on both Line and iMessage, creating a new monthly revenue channel.
Amazon, as you surely know, is the 800-pound gorilla of the e-commerce world. In the U.S. alone, 183 million visitors frequent Amazon’s network of sites (Walmart comes in second among retailers, with 87 million monthly visitors). Just the sheer size of the customer pool makes it worth considering Amazon. On Merch by Amazon, designers upload their creations to be printed on T-shirts, and Amazon handles the production and fulfillment. The platform also takes care of shipping and returns, which means less hassle for you.
4. Cimpress Open
Hoodies, mugs, and totes.
In my experience using it, Cimpress Open excels at on-demand printing, and its services are easy to set up. Production is handled on demand, so shop owners don’t have to worry about inventory problems, like having too much or too little on hand. With the Shopify plugin, you can take one design and turn it into countless products, ranging from drinkware to hoodies and tote bags. After integrating Cimpress Open with my Shopify store, I easily created new tote designs in just a few minutes.
5. Printful
With summertime coming, it was on to beach towels.
It was late spring by the time I’d finished turning my unicorn designs into Line stickers, so my mind went at that point toward summer swag. No problem! I quickly modified many of my designs to sell on beach towels–and later on, pillows.
Towels are a great seasonal item that can put some extra cash into your pocket. If your design is upbeat and has an overall “sunny” feel, it could be a winner for summertime success. Printful is one service where it’s easy to make fluffy beach towels and pillows. Its app also integrates with Shopify, and as designer June Bui points out, it “[sends] my customers an automatic notification once the product is shipped, so I don’t have to do anything. It’s been very convenient.”
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6. Redbubble
Exploring less-common merch, like clocks and wall art.
Redbubble has a strong indie artist vibe and offers a wide range of products to print on. Some of them, like clocks, stickers, and wall art, are hard to find through other print-on-demand sites. I’ve found Redbubble lets me sell items that tend to be harder to find elsewhere in the print-on-demand space.
7. ArtsAdd
Guess I’m a sneaker-designer now.
Yes, you can design sneakers, too. They can be especially great if you have a kid-friendly design, because kids grow up fast and need several pairs of shoes within a short amount of time. Higher turnover can mean more sales for you.
ArtsAdd sells more than just sneakers, though. Using the platform, I took the unicorn design that I’d previously used for yoga mats and stickers and turned it into sleeping masks.
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8. Society6
Almost forgot about T-shirts–oh, and have I mentioned design royalties?
You won’t be surprised to learn that if you have an existing design, it’s easy to modify it to fit a T-shirt. Society6 lets designers monetize their artwork, with artists setting the margins for original art prints. For other products like phone cases, bath mats, laptop sleeves, and more, the platform pays up to $15.90 per sale in royalties. “I decided to sell my designs on sites that pay royalties to gain more visibility and extra income,” Eduardo Ely, a graphic designer, explains. “The more designs I put on [these] sites, the greater my income in the future. It’s a long-term investment.”
9. Threadless
More shower curtains . . . and self-set pricing.
Threadless has lots of great tools to customize your digital storefront, which is useful for establishing your brand, especially if you don’t have your own website yet. You can post your content for free and set your own prices. Setting prices gives you a lot of freedom, but remember that freedom comes with the need for market research.
Make sure you check the site for similar products to get a feel for prices before posting your own. Threadless handles inventory, manufacturing, shipping, and customer care, so it takes a lot off your plate. There are no minimum orders or shipping fees, which is convenient when you’re just starting out.
10. Design By Humans
IRL stickers.
Design by Humans is a great place to go if your digital designs will suit physical stickers. Like most of these print-on-demand services, you can focus on the design and let them handle the rest. This is a great platform for targeting the gamer community and dedicated YouTubers, since Design by Humans caters to those customer demographics.
11. Zazzle
Pet beds and bumper stickers.
Zazzle takes a different approach to pricing. All you do is set your desired profit margin, and the platform takes care of the calculations. It’s a great way to make a specific amount of money per sale and simplify your budget–which comes in handy when you’ve got product lines set up on literally 10 other marketplaces!
12. Cafepress
Adding (way) more product types and social-media updates.
Cafepress offers easy-to-use website tools and gets your design onto over 400 different products. It can automatically push social media updates for you as well. Cafepress might not be the best place to go when you’re just starting to build passive-income streams, but I’m really glad I found it after hitting my stride. It’s a great option for entrepreneurs who have some sales under their belt and are ready to take their graphic distribution game to the next level.
13. Etsy
For getting crafty.
Once you have a design, turning it into handmade items can help you reach yet another market on Etsy. As you’re probably familiar, the e-commerce site lets you easily set up a store and market to its hundreds of thousands of users who typically like products with a crafty, homemade edge. “I sell state-by-state seasonal food-guide prints, and so far my experience with Etsy has been great,” says graphic designer Jessica Haas. “My products have done well at Etsy since the platform predominantly caters to a younger female audience who support handcrafted items.”
The point is, there are lots of different ways to sell a single design. You just have to learn the ropes of the wide range of platforms that are out there, then decide which ones your target customer is most likely to visit. My recommendation? Start with just one to get your feet wet, then move on to two or three when you’re ready. The goal is to establish multiple product lines based on the same design, otherwise you may quickly find yourself in over your head (remember, the whole point of pursuing passive income is to earn it passively).
Once you’ve had success, you can always add a few more designs, or just keep your first one and find more outlets. But whatever you learn on one print-on-demand outlet, you’ll be able to apply to the next–the main thing is just to get started. Good luck!
