The animated ads inject a bit of whimsy into the harsh reality of puppy mills.

Nine out of 10 people who buy a puppy from a store or online are getting one whose earliest days were spent in a puppy mill. They might not know that, though—the puppy they get will be cute, and happy to see them, and it might come with a fake certificate or a deceptive photo of the dog frolicking in the grass. Beyond that, drawing attention to the real issue of puppy mills—where puppies are bred in intensive, inhumane conditions—can be a challenge, just because it's so depressing. Dogs are our best friends. Who wants to spend too much time thinking about the conditions under which they're often bred?

The new campaign from the Humane Society of the United States has a novel take on that, though. Working with the agency Rokkan, the nonprofit organization launched a new campaign today called "Don't Buy Into Puppy Mills." But rather than drive home how rough puppy mills can be by showing you repeated images of those conditions, the campaign instead asked kids where they think puppies come from—and animated the results.

Rokkan CEO John Noe saw the challenge inherent in overcoming the paralyzing effect of highlighting something as grim as puppy mills as the agency developed the campaign. "The big fight is how pervasive puppy mills are, and how that becomes a shock to the system when people realize that," he says. "So our big task is shedding light on these staggering statistics in a way that helps people react not with guilt and shock, but with compassion."

To get there, they created a two-and-a-half minute short that lets a cute group of little kids imagine where puppies come from—New York City (duh), where they live in a puppy condo together, or a planet full of puppies—and illustrates those musings in a breezy, whimsical style. And in the full-length video, it spends time letting the viewer enjoy that childlike speculation before getting real.

"That [challenge] led us to the idea of working with kids to imagine where puppies actually come from," Rokkan chief creative officer Brian Carley says. "The reality of it is so absurd and horrible that it pales in comparison to the ridiculous theories that these kids came up with. We wanted to contrast those two, because a lot of people don't know the reality of what happens. That's where the genesis of the idea comes from."

The campaign does an interesting job of highlighting that absurdity—it's not a far stretch to go from animating a bunch of puppies playing together in a condo to animating puppies caged in close-cramped quarters in a puppy mill, and the fact that one is tragically real and one is whimsically imaginative doesn't make the shared weirdness of puppies coming from these very un-puppy-like places any less apparent.

A lot of what the Humane Society does is promote pet adoption, and work legislatively, by sharing the stories of puppies and dogs who've been saved by their work. Those campaigns can be heartwarming (or tear-jerking) and they're very effective at inspiring people to find ways to help take care of an animal who might need it. But when it comes to actually drawing attention directly to a problem, and encouraging people to make the consumer choices necessary to specifically address it—namely, don't buy a dog from a store or online, adopt instead—it presents a unique opportunity for a campaign.

"The work we do with the Humane Society is to try to get them away from doing things that show images of sad puppies, or guilt people into feeling bad about it," Carley says. "We want to add a little context and a moment of levity with all of this, and use some uplifting stories to show that we can change the story for dogs. We're not going to make them come from a crazy planet or live in a doggy condo in New York City, but people can have an effect, and that's awesome."

As black market businesses become mainstream, it's clear that mastering illicit activities can help develop a lot of business acumen.

Moonshine. Camel milk. Cannabis. Once only products of the gray and black market economies, decriminalization is bringing a new wave of underground goods to consumers across the U.S. In Gatlinburg, Tennessee, I met with Matt O'Daniel, 26, known to his friends as ODamnit. O'Daniel had been brewing do-it-yourself black market moonshine in the Ozark Mountains before he found a job at Sugarlands as a distiller. Sugarlands was founded in 2014 in a 10,000-square-foot barn in the Smoky Mountains to cater to the growing demand for legal moonshine.

O'Daniel tells me how his shift into the legal moonshine trade from bootlegging was a step-up. "Making backwoods moonshine, you can only work with the grain you have available. And the quality is inconsistent. Plus, you constantly have to move to avoid detection." O'Daniel used to sell jars of moonshine for $40 a piece, but he only sold them to people he knew, to keep his risk down. He would often trade moonshine for other products like tobacco, meat, and other liquors. Once, when his car broke down, he paid for a 20-mile tow using moonshine. "In the Ozarks, it was like a second currency," O'Daniel says.

But O'Daniel says he prefers working on the legal side, because he gets to work with better ingredients and the distilling process is more robust, so the resulting moonshine is better quality. Backwoods moonshine is only distilled twice, while a commercial product is distilled about six times to remove all the imperfections.

But while the quality may be better, the commercial recipes are still very much inspired by the bootleg generation. Sugarlands prides itself on working with old-school Appalachian moonshine legends. Sugarlands' owner and CEO Ned Vickers says he was seduced by moonshine because of its historic outlaw reputation: At his first meeting with old-timey moonshiners, they had him drinking home brew from a bear's claw.

"Going back 100 years ago, roads in Appalachia were terrible. By the time you rented a wagon and took your corn to market you could barely break even. So people made moonshine instead," Vickers says. Today, Vickers works with young and old moonshiners to learn their methods and recipes and create a modern-quality product for national export. Sugarlands is now distributing moonshine in over 21 states.

States legalizing informal businesses—cannabis being the most obvious example—are finding new revenue opportunities. And once struggling informal entrepreneurs are finding new pathways into mainstream business. Since Tennessee legalized moonshine, its wholesale alcohol beverage tax revenue has grown substantially.

Consider camel milk, which was also recently legalized in the U.S. The milk, which is rich in nutrients and vitamins, used to be mainly a hobbyist product produced by Amish farmers and sold illegally through buyer's clubs around the U.S. But the milk is now finding a market in health-conscious consumers.

Desert Farms, a company, set up by Walid Abdul-Wahab, is available to Californians, where it is stocked by Whole Foods. But Abdul-Wahab has plans to scale nationally. The milk—as well as a camel milk product line including face creams and soaps—can be purchased from Desert Farms for home delivery.

Ex-con and former drug addict and smuggler David Victorson, who famously smuggled 37 tons of marijuana from Colombia to Seattle shows that entrepreneurial hustle can easily translate to mainstream business. After getting out of prison, Victorson helped create a rehab company—he was VP of marketing—and the company sold for $96 million in 2007.

These types of pivots from underground street hustler to venture capital-backed entrepreneur are still a rarity. The challenges and stigmas facing ex-cons are enormous. It's hard to convert a criminal life into a strong CV. One savvy NGO started by former private equity investor Cat Hoke is trying to change just that. Her organization Defy Ventures works with ex-cons across the U.S. where they are put through a rigorous incubator program and matched with venture capitalists and mentors to develop entrepreneurial business models.

I've met with Defy graduates and taken part in mentoring and pitch sessions where participants are encouraged to see some of the strengths in their criminal pasts. Jose Vasquez, a Defy grad, illustrated this beautifully. Vasquez use to run a successful heroin business. He's not proud of it, but he made good money and he told me how through his criminal training he learned some invaluable skills in the art of hustle: how to attract a customer base, manage product quality, recruit employees, and build a brand. He admits that perhaps he was less adept at risk management, otherwise he might not have ended up in prison.

With over 2 million adults in the U.S. incarcerated and many more working in the black market and informal economy, we may have to find more ways of turning to our ex-cons and informal entrepreneurs for new startup ideas. Known for being resourceful and frugal, they may have something to offer mainstream business.

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The line between paying homage to a design classic and outright piracy is fuzzy.

Recently, the furniture giant West Elm and the L.A.–based design studio Commune released a collection of furniture and accessories with a midcentury-inspired sensibility. But as some bloggers were quick to point out, the "midcentury-inspired" looked more like a midcentury rip-off. The ensuing debate has raised pertinent questions about design plagiarism: Where do you draw the line between paying homage to a design classic and copying it? How close is too close?

On August 6, the design gallerist Patrick Parrish published comparisons between the new items from West Elm alongside furniture classics by icons like George Nelson, Hans Wegner, and Charlotte Perriand on his blog; many of the new pieces are dead ringers for the older works. As Parrish—who is a design expert and possesses more knowledge about furniture than the average consumer—pointed out, the Commune Low Cushion Ottoman shares the same inverted pyramid legs as a Bruce Goff c. 1957 ottoman. The Commune Tufted Ottoman looks eerily like Danish designer Kaare Klint's c. 1933 ottoman. Parrish then made six more comparisons—and the likeness is uncanny in all of 'em. Mere coincidence?

"Some people felt that [our designs] were too close to the real thing to the original," says Roman Alonso, one of Commune's cofounders. "I think that's something people need to be careful with [saying] because [the furniture pieces referenced] are part of design history. We all look at the past and we look at our heroes and whatever we love. Hopefully we're bringing newness through that knowledge and experience."

Alonso acknowledges that the collection treads into derivative territory, though he believes that Commune was acting more from a point of honoring the innovations that historic designers contributed to the canon. "Maybe we did get a little too close to those people, and now I look back and I'm a little uncomfortable by it," he says. "I really don't feel like there was anything done with any other intention than to bring really great things and design at a more accessible price to bring into their homes."

Tracing their design process, and how ideas are molded into finished consumer products, offers some insight into how the project veered into questionable territory.

Alonso explains that when West Elm invited Commune to design a collection, the only directive was for the team to create pieces that the studio's designers would like to have in their own homes. It was an opportunity to create affordable items that have the same eclectic, California-modern aesthetic Commune instills in its residential interiors—typically commissioned by wealthy clients. "We've never been snobs about design and recognize that good design comes at all price points and sometimes from the most unexpected sources," Alonso says.

The 1.5-year-long design process began with inspiration boards that featured pinups of their favorite things; works from the Eameses, Perriand, Jean Prouve, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Frank Lloyd Wright made cameos. "There might be between 5 and 20 references to create one piece of furniture," Alonso says. "But the first thing is always function—how it's used and how it may fit into an environment. Then we look at the design, how it's put together, and how it's built."

For the Commune Leather Sling chair, Alonso says he and his team mined a number of influences. The overall idea originated in the classic Mexican Butaque chair—a form that Alonso recalled from his childhood growing up in Latin America. He also admired the work of Clara Porset—a Cuban-born designer who worked with Luis Barragan but is little known. That reference, and particularly the stitching she used, made it into the final piece.

The inspiration board also included images of the Kangaroo chair Pierre Jeanneret designed for Chandigarh. Meanwhile, to inform the Commune Storage Bench, the designers looked at the Eames Storage Unit, and Perriand's modular Nuage shelving for Cassina.

The iterating that occurs when the realities of mass production come into play also influenced the final pieces. After Commune made its preliminary sketches, the fabricators weighed in on whether or not they were structurally sound and mass producible at the price point West Elm wanted. Materials changed, silhouettes were simplified, and entire products got nixed. Eventually, the 100 or so designs that Commune sent to West Elm were whittled down to the 30 or so objects that are on sale.

The conversations between Commune and the fabricators, West Elm and the fabricators, and West Elm and Commune made it difficult to keep track of the distance between inspiration and finished pieces. "In the effort of making [the design] better, it becomes close to where you started, and you don't remember how you got there . . . [The design] becomes yours during the process, but you've had the heroes in mind, so the inspiration goes through so many filters that then it becomes yours by process but is shared with them through history," Alonso says. "And we've been up front about that. We credit these people."

It's true that Commune lists a few of the design heroes that influenced the collection on its Tumblr, but none of these references and credits made it into the final West Elm materials. Alonso says he provided a "narrative" of each piece to West Elm. "Unfortunately control over their marketing material is not in our hands," he says. "They choose the message for their channels."

We asked West Elm about its policy of reviewing designs for potential copycats. A company representative issued the following written statement: "We believe in the value and impact of design collaborations. We chose to work with Commune based on their signature Southern California expression and casual living style. We also believe in design integrity in everything we do, whether we design the product, as is the case with nearly 90% of our assortment, or in collaborations like we did with Commune where they led the design process."

Plagiarism is reprehensible, but the market supports it, unfortunately. Corporations have copied artists for a long time. Yet this year, design theft by large corporations has become a major issue, and rightly so.

For example, a group of independent artist have mobilized against Zara, which is accused of stealing designs from over 20 artists; in response, one illustrator even launched a website where people can buy the originals. Last fall, Ikea famously lifted from midcentury designers, too, in the name of low-cost furniture. Meanwhile, earlier this month over 100 designers issued a statement in support of Apple in its suit against Samsung for the Korean company's use of its patented design features. Their argument? Design is directly linked to a product's success—and it needs to be protected.

Another challenge with protecting the intellectual property of older pieces is that design patents expire after 14 years and utility patents after 20, so it's open season on borrowing some details. Some countries, like the United Kingdom, are taking steps to ban replicas of design classics. With Commune and West Elm, the differences are enough that nothing could be considered a replica.

It's one thing for a small-scale designer to make a couple of custom pieces that reference classics, but when a multimillion-dollar business gets involved, the motivation seems less about paying tribute to an icon than pure profiteering, regardless of the original intent. The contradiction here is that West Elm prides itself as a champion of original, independent design.

We'll probably never know who's to blame in this debacle, but it raises many questions about the state of design and authorship today. Is borrowing from the masters a way to raise awareness of their enduring genius—an "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" move? Or is it a savvy business strategy? Are the fans who call out these similarities simply being overzealous? Intellectual property as it relates to design is becoming more nuanced, and the debates more sophisticated. I suspect that there are many precedent-setting cases to come in the near future.

In the end, while Commune says it wasn't trying to outright replicate the work of famous midcentury designers, the references are close enough to cry copycat. For customers looking for easy-to-find, relatively affordable furniture that nods to their favorite classics, the price cut comes at the expense of ethics.

[All Photos (unless otherwise noted): via Commune]

In a summer of Suicide Squad and Ben-Hur, it can feel like big-budget popcorn flicks have never been more awful. They have.

To hear the curmudgeons and film snobs tell it, the summer of 2016 has churned out some of the most soul-crushingly awful Hollywood blockbusters in recent memory—from the superhero anti-epic Suicide Squad to the dead-on-arrival sequel to Independence Day. By the time the laughable Ben-Hur limped into multiplexes last weekend, the narrative had been solidified: The latest summer blockbuster season has been an exceptionally terrible one.

Except it hasn't—at least, not any more terrible than usual. In fact, we crunched some numbers to see if critical consensus was particularly low for this year's top-grossing films. While it was lower than last year, when crowd-pleasers like Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Pixar's Inside Out ruled the charts, the average review ratings for the top 10 domestic grossing movies for 2016 was pretty much par for the course: 72%, according to Rotten Tomatoes. That's about dead even with 2014, when lukewarm entries like Disney's Maleficent and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies cracked the top 10.

Moreover, critics who are bemoaning the notably lousy summer of 2016 seem to be forgetting about the much lousier summer of 2011. That was the year, you may recall, that cringeworthy sequels like Cars 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, and The Hangover Part II all slithered their way into the top 10, bringing down the average review rating for that year to 56.6%, the lowest of the last six years.

Fast Company looked at data for the top 10 domestic grossing movies over the last six years and compared their percentages on Rotten Tomatoes' "Tomatometer," an aggregate of critical reviews. (A snapshot of the rankings was taken on Tuesday and is likely to change as the year progresses.) There are some important qualifiers here. We only looked at movies in the top 10, per Box Office Mojo, so some of the really awful ones weren't included. The aforementioned Independence Day: Resurgence, for example, is currently No. 17 on the domestic charts. Still, the numbers paint an interesting picture. Bad blockbusters have been around for a while now.

One of the reasons that 2016 doesn't look much different than years past is because the cream still rises to the top. While Ben-Hur might be dominating headlines for all the wrong reasons this week, moviegoers still had plenty of well-received offerings to choose from, including Finding Dory, which had a rating of 94% and also made the most money in the U.S. In fact, the highest-rated movie on our entire list came out this year: Disney's Zootopia, which had a rating of 98% as of Tuesday. With a March release date, it barely qualifies as a summer movie, except in Hollywood where it does. More important, it will likely stay in the top 10.

The list is notable for its low-rated outliers, too. The lowest on the list was 2014's Transformers: Age of Extinction, which had a rating of just 18%. Sure, memory is selective, but traumatic experiences tend to stick with you.

Unless Aunt Brenda is a professional career coach, you should take her advice with a grain of salt.

For most of us, our first experience with career advice comes from one source: our parents. As we go through life, the people who have the most interest in the direction we take with our careers continue to be those who are closest to us, like our significant others, friends, mentors, and professors.

Yet, in my experience as a career coach, I can tell you that the tips (and yes, pressure) that come from loved ones can be some of the worst, particularly when it comes to that big-picture question of, "What should I be doing with my life?" Here are two big reasons why.

1. They Project Their Experiences

My mom switched from teaching to accounting about a decade into her professional life. It was a wonderful move for her, and she has had a high level of satisfaction and success with this second career path. Based on this experience, my well-intentioned parents pointed me toward accounting, with the idea that it would also be a great fit for me. (It wasn't.)

I've seen too many people experience something similar—someone they love keeps pouring on suggestions that have absolutely nothing to do with what they want for their careers:

Why would you want to go back to work after having kids when you don't have to?

You'll get bored of that subject matter after a year!

Working so many hours always leads to burnout!

In each case, the guidance had more to do with the person providing it than the person receiving it. Just ask that new mom who truly wanted to get back to a job she loved, the social media marketer who still finds the work really compelling, or the individual who thrives on long hours at this point in his career.

The truth is: People are different. Maybe your parent or mentor or would personally hate whatever choice you're making—but that doesn't mean you will. If someone keeps questioning your choice or hammering his or her advice, it's okay to say, "I really appreciate you taking the time to share your personal experience with me. I've carefully considered my options, and I'm really excited about this choice. I'd love to hear more about [change the subject]."

Related:How To Deal With Unsolicited Career Advice From Your Family

2. They're Biased Toward "Safe" Career Paths

Most people have a natural desire to protect the people they love. This instinct is highly beneficial around small children, who, if left to their own devices, could walk into traffic without looking or play with matches. But you're not a small child; you're an adult who is putting himself or herself out there.

Developing a well-fitting career path often involves putting some skin in the game, being willing to face rejection or failure, making mistakes, and learning along the way. In other words, a great career path will mean getting hurt at times, so that you can learn important lesson. Advice that stems from an attempt to protect you from this natural (and sometimes painful) progression of career development is well-meaning, but ultimately flawed. It can wind up doing more harm than good.

For example, one of my clients was instructed to pursue government work solely on the basis of the perceived stability of the positions. But she was someone who thrived on creativity and wilted at the idea of bureaucracy, so this was not the culture for her.

One way to deal with this kind of advice is to thank your nearest and dearest for caring so deeply, and then remind him or her that no job is 100% safe. Moreover, if you work in a field you really have no interest in, you're less likely to want to put in the time and effort necessary to advance. Finally, remind him or her that even if you work somewhere that isn't right for you, you'll still benefit from the experience.

It's natural for those closest to us to have opinions about our career decisions. Just remember that at the end of the day it's your life. You're the one who actually deals with the consequences and benefits of any given career choice. With that in mind, your opinion is the one that matters most.

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

Apple Music is betting on smart curation, big names & hip partners to make us forget the U2 album debacle.

September 9, 2014 was a pivotal day for Apple. On stage at the Flint Center in Cupertino, the company's executives proudly revealed sleek, media-ready renderings of new gadgets, marking Apple's biggest product lineup refresh in years: two new and bigger iPhones, a long-rumored smart watch, and Apple Pay, the company's first foray into wireless mobile payments. As the two-hour flurry of announcements wound down, Apple CEO Tim Cook borrowed his predecessor's "one more thing" schtick, albeit without uttering those exact words.

As the stage lights dimmed into a wash of blue and red, four figures appeared: U2, the ultra-famous Irish rock band who had forged a promotional relationship with Apple a decade earlier, took the stage to debut a new, never-before-heard song. After the performance, Cook engaged the band in a painfully scripted exchange leading to one more big reveal: Songs of Innocence, the band's new album, would instantly and exclusively appear in the iTunes libraries of millions of Apple customers for free. "I can't think of anyone they would like to have music from more," Cook declared before closing out the event.

Although 33 million people reportedly accessed the album during its first week, not everyone shared Cook's enthusiasm. Rather than making it available via the usual search-and-download delivery method, Apple made the album magically appear on people's devices, whether they had asked for it or not. Suddenly, "the biggest release in the history of music," as Cook described it onstage, became one of the most controversial.

Fellow artists chided U2 for seeming to validate the "music is free" mentality that makes the business so challenging for up-and-coming musicians. But most loudly of all, Apple customers complained about having music thrust upon them without their consent. The Washington Post referred to it as "rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail" while Wireddismissed the strategy as "nothing more than spam with forced downloads" that "should be remembered as a monumental blunder of the tech industry." Eventually, Apple caved and was forced to offer customers a special, one-click process for removing Songs of Innocence from their music libraries.

Underlying the raucous deluge of tweets criticizing the move was an unmistakable air of snobbery: U2, however legit and decorated their career may be, had evolved into a fairly uncool band who—especially to the ears of younger listeners—peddled generic-sounding "dad rock." Or, as the Daily Dot termed it in a retrospective mapping the band's fall from coolness, U2 had become "the new Nickelback"—harsh, if slightly unfair (was Nickelback ever cool?), shorthand for a popular band that has grown easier to mock than to admire.

It was, without a doubt, a low point for Apple's street cred among the music savvy. But perhaps unbeknownst to the vocally disgruntled, Cupertino was busy plotting its comeback via a new music service with roots woven deep inside the music industry and an aim toward injecting the Apple brand back into the cultural conversation around music—this time without the Nickelback references.

How Apple Lost Its Cool

Once upon a time, Apple was practically synonymous with music. Four years after Steve Jobs returned as CEO—and after the colorful iMac failed to wow consumers hooked on cheaper Windows PCs—the company finally succeeded in grabbing mainstream attention. The iPod, a comparatively sleek and compact alternative to clunky MP3 players, was unveiled in 2001 and quickly started reeling consumers toward the Apple brand. By 2003, the iTunes Store offered an industry-approved alternative to illegal file-sharing and gave music fans an easy way to load those white rectangular devices with thousands of songs.

An ad campaign starring faceless silhouettes listening to artists like The Vines, Feist, Daft Punk, and yes, U2, helped cement the iPod's little white earbuds as a cultural status symbol. The transition from compact discs to digital downloads was not only official and sanctioned by the music industry, but it was neatly packaged in minimalist design and accompanied by trendy tunes that spanned genres and demographic groups. Seemingly out of nowhere, the iPod became a must-have device.

Then Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld in 2007, wowing the crowd with a device that was actually, as Jobs spun it, three in one: a phone, an internet-browsing gadget, and an iPod. This combination, later augmented with infinite features by the advent of the App Store, would go on to propel Apple to previously unthinkable levels of success and historic profits. And the bonkers success of the iPhone had another, less obvious effect: It broadened Apple's strategic and marketing focus, shifting it away from being so centered around music.

As the iOS ecosystem—and Apple's insane profits—continued to grow, the fact that iPhones and iPads featured a native music app became an afterthought, if not forgotten entirely by those who started downloading all-you-can-stream music subscription apps like Rdio, Rhapsody, and Spotify. Ten years after the launch of the iPod, the device had morphed into a lower-power clone of the iPhone called the iPod Touch, with the classic, click-wheel iPod slowly fading from Apple's product lineup. Meanwhile, iTunes bloated with features (ranging from its Genius playlist generator to movie rentals) and the software started feeling like a necessary evil—an unwieldy desktop application that, for whatever reason, was required for one to sync and manage their iOS devices.

As the music streaming revolution began, Apple focused its digital music strategy in odd places. In 2010, rather than preempting the U.S. launch of Spotify a year later with a streaming service of its own—something it could have easily done thanks to its 2009 acquisition of music streaming site Lala—Apple decided to launch a social network within iTunes called Ping, yet another bolt-on to its desktop Frankenstein. The feature was so underwhelming that it quickly became a textbook example of the rare Apple product flop—Cupertino's Google Wave, if you will—and was later discontinued.

And in a move that now seems to foreshadow the U2 gaffe four years later, Jobs closed out Apple's "very special" 2010 iPad launch event (guest starring Ping) by inviting Coldplay's Chris Martin to grace the crowd with an intimate solo performance. Like U2, Martin was a hugely successful artist by all accounts, but one that the Telegraphcalled the "simpering windbag frontman" of "The World's Most Boring Band," whose presence at Apple's launch event amounted to a decidedly unhip stain on the Apple brand. Ouch.

If you're measuring purely with traditional music industry yardsticks—millions of albums sold, Grammys won, and so forth—bands like U2 and Coldplay are perfectly sensible additions to the product launch stage. But being a household name isn't the same as being cool, especially in the eyes of music snobs or among that ever-coveted demographic of 18-24-year-old consumers. Toss these less-than-totally-hip artists onto a stage dominated by middle-aged white men (with or without their shirts fully tucked in) peddling computers and phones and, while you might have still have a recipe for selling millions of devices, you're anything but cool.

Regardless of how one feels about U2, the 2014 album giveaway revealed a certain clumsiness about music distribution on Apple's part. While Spotify was quickly becoming a household name and streaming was catching up with rapidly declining downloads, the company that legitimized digital music in the first place was enthusiastically shoving 11 songs onto the devices of millions of people who never asked for them. This strategy would likely have elicited a backlash about any artist, no matter how popular they were.

Apple Music: An Investment In Cultural Relevance

By mid-2015, Apple seemed to have learned some new lessons about how to reach young music fans. Even as U2 took the stage in September 2014, Apple was busy absorbing the talent and technology from its latest acquisition. Four months earlier, it dropped $3 billion on Beats Music and Beats Electronics, eliminating doubt that Apple saw a future in the all-you-can-stream music subscription model.

When it was finally ready to unveil its Apple Music subscription service last summer, it sandwiched Eddy Cue and his untucked button-down shirt between two new faces: Jimmy Iovine and the rapper Drake. Iovine, a newly minted Apple executive thanks to the Beats deal, brought with him decades of music industry cred, from his work engineering albums by John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen in the 1970s to the cofounding of Interscope Records and later Beats Electronics with hip-hop legend Dr. Dre (who also joined Apple). It soon became clear that Apple's multi-billion-dollar investment was as much about people and relationships as it was about the mechanics of streaming songs to millions of listeners. With deep roots in the music industry—not to mention a massive pile of cash—Apple could launch a Spotify clone several years late, but with the help of very familiar faces. Faces like Drake's.

Drake's appearance at WWDC was symbolic of how serious Apple is about its renewed focus on music, but it was really just the beginning of a relationship that runs much deeper than a product endorsement. For a reported $19 million, Apple signed a deal with the much-hipper-than-U2 Drake that put his songs in Apple ads, his voice on Beats 1 Radio, and led to the successful (if somewhat controversial) Apple-exclusive release of Views, the Canadian rapper's fourth studio album.

And it doesn't stop with Drake. Other huge names are jumping on this exclusivity bandwagon, presumably for hard-to-resist sums of cash: Kanye West, most famously (and controversially) of all, dropped Life of Pablo exclusively on Jay-Z's streaming service Tidal in February, before releasing it more broadly. Rihanna did the same with Anti. Just this weekend, Frank Ocean's long and desperately awaited new album Blonde landed on Apple Music and iTunes and—unless you lived near one of the singer's four pop-up shops erected to sell the album—wasn't (legally) available anywhere else. In the days leading up to the release of Blonde, a Twitter search for "Apple Music" revealed results dominated by Frank Ocean—and vice versa. After the success of Ocean's 2012 album Channel Orange, this was a conversation people were going to be having no matter what. Smartly, Apple managed to inject its brand right into the heart of it.

Increasingly, platform-exclusive releases like this serve as a competitive weapon wielded by services against one another in the so-called streaming wars. Thanks to the involvement of people like Iovine, Dre, and former Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor (all of whom have been involved with Beats since its pre-Apple days), the Cupertino tech giant is exceptionally well positioned to fight this particular battle. And it better be—its competitors are taking the same tack. Tidal relies heavily on music industry relationships and exclusive deals to lure subscribers. Spotify has responded to the trend by hiring people like artist manager Troy Carter and bolstering its own artist relations efforts.

Even so, at first glance, Apple Music might not seem to offer much to coax anyone who has already invested their subscription dollars in another service like Spotify. These days, there's only so much excitement you can drum up with yet another library of tens of millions of on-demand songs, even if you nab exclusives from top-selling artists. But as you dig into the Apple Music app, it becomes clear Apple has been investing heavily in music curation and media partnerships designed to not only set itself apart from other streaming services, but give it what the company hopes is unparalleled credibility among music fans of all stripes.

It's off to a decent start. Apple Music employs a small army of music programmers, eschewing Pandora-style algorithms in favor of playlists hand-built by people who truly know what they're doing. These curators are tasked with building playlists as broad as an intro to David Bowie and as hyper-specific as Krautrock deep cuts and songs inspired by The Beach Boys. Apple Music playlists span artists and genres both universal and obscure, manually mapping relationships between songs and musicians and sequencing tracks as thoughtfully as a record store clerk who moonlights as a DJ. In short, they're very good. It's the sort of undertaking we've come to expect from machines, but instead this technology giant has thrown its resources at doing things the old-fashioned way.

Apple's old-school strategy extends into Beats 1, the FM-style radio station headed by veteran BBC DJ Zane Lowe where listeners can hear shows hosted by musicians like Pharrell, Mike D, Dr Dre, Q-Tip, St. Vincent and, yes, Drake. Even Sir Elton John gets to play radio DJ, interviewing other artists, telling stories, and spinning songs he loves. Woven throughout Apple's star-studded Internet radio programming are exclusive interviews and, increasingly, new music from some of the biggest names in the industry, especially hip-hop and R&B. Apple Music has also partnered with reputable music publishers like Pitchfork, The Fader, and Vice's Noisey, relationships that offer more editorial credibility to Apple's music programming and a promotional bonus: Naturally, music journalists and their employers are going to relentlessly hype their shows on the network, sending more new listeners to Beats 1 and Apple Music.

Apple may be showing up to the streaming party very late, but it's rolling in with the coolest kids in town and enough cash to spring for the good stuff. Don't expect to see Bono back on that stage in Cupertino anytime soon.

Read more stories from inside Tim Cook's Apple:

• Playing The Long Game Inside Tim Cook's Apple
• 9 Ways Tim Cook Has Transformed Apple
• Apple Music's Bozoma Saint John: It's About Passion, Not Algorithms
• Tim Cook On Apple's Values, Mistakes, And Seeing Around Corners
• Why Cory Doctorow Thinks Apple's Disappearing Headphone Jack Should Scare You
• The iPhone 7 Is Coming: Here's Everything We've Heard So Far
• What I Learned Working With Jony Ive's Team On The Apple Watch
• Four Reasons Why Betting Against Apple Is A Fool's Game
• The Apple Watch 2: Everything We Know So Far

The newly added pen functions are interesting, but overall the pen seems to be searching for clear use cases.

This is the third in a three-part series reviewing Samsung's important new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. The first part concerned the device's design. The second concerned the device's new iris scanner.

The thing that makes a Note a Note is the included pen stylus. But while the rest of the device has consistently improved over the various versions, the pen-related functions have seemed like a work in progress.

So I approached the pen functions in the new Galaxy Note 7 with some skepticism. And while I wasn't blown away by the new functions that were added, they may cause some people to pull out the pen more often.

Off-Screen Notes

The most immediately useful trick of the pen is probably the simplest—the ability to write a note or list on the display without even having to turn on or unlock the device. You just remove the pen and start writing, then save. Actually this function was available on the last Note, the Note 5, and it still works fine on the Note 7. What's new with the 7, Samsung says, is the ability to pin these notes to your home screen. I don't see this as a major bump in utility. You still have to unlock your phone to get to the note you created. The ability to access the note from the "always on" screen without having to unlock the phone would be more useful.

Writing notes feels a little better on the Note 7 than on the Note 5. The Note 7's pen has a more natural-feeling interplay with the screen. Its tip is smaller at 0.7 millimeters, and the pressure sensitivity of the stylus has been improved to create a ballpoint pen-like experience.

Samsung has also added a number of new pen types and shading options, for people who look at notes in a less utilitarian and more artistic way. I'm not an artist, so the addition of airbrush settings and pressure-sensitive shading aren't a big deal to me. If I want to create art, I'd more likely do it on a tablet running Procreate with a larger, weighted stylus. I wouldn't do it on a large smartphone. But to each his own.

GIF Capture

Perhaps the pen's flashiest new trick is its ability to instantly capture and create a GIF from a piece of video, or from pretty much anything moving on the screen. It takes some tapping to get the job done, but it works. When you see some video you want to make a GIF from, you tap open the "Air Command" pen menu and choose "smart select." You then tap the "GIF animation" icon at the top of the screen, which brings up what looks like a cropping square that you position and adjust around the video. When you reach the point of the video you want to grab, you toggle on, then off, the record button at the bottom of the square.

I found it a little difficult to capture just the right portion of the video for the GIF. I had to keep backing up the video to take practice runs. There was no editing functionality readily available to make post-grab adjustments. Actually, you can edit your GIF, but you have to locate your GIF in the image gallery app to do it. Once there you can edit the GIF for length, adjust the shape, add stickers, etc.

I also found it odd that Twitter isn't listed in the "share" modes. I might post my GIF to Facebook or Instagram, which are listed as share options, but others like "AT&T Locker" (why is this on a T-Mobile phone??), Google+, and Pen.Up are sharing site options I'd never use.

Hover Over To Translate

With the help of Google Translate, the pen's translate function reads 35 different languages and can translate into 71.

In a settings box that pops up over the text, you can tell the software what language you're looking at (the source language), and what language you'd like it translated into (the "target" language). You hover the tip of the pen over the word you'd like translated, then a small box pops up with the original word and the translation.

The translated word looks correct in the examples and languages I tried. I noticed, however, that sometimes the pen sometimes selected only half the word I wanted to translate.

The software also provides an audio pronunciation of the word you're hovering over. So, for example, if you're on a German-language web page and you hover over a word, the results box will show you the German word with a small "speaker" icon next to it. Press it and you'll hear the correct German pronunciation.

Overall, I had some trouble imagining the use case for a spot-translate feature. I suppose it might be useful for someone reading a web page in a foreign language they know well enough to read, but not well enough to know every word. I can also see the pronunciation tool being useful—knowing what a word means and knowing how to say it are two different things. That could apply, occasionally, to words read in one's native tongue, too.

When Would I Use That?

Many of the pen's functions I would just never use. I don't recall ever feeling the need to take a screen grab, write some notes on it, and then share it on a social network or directly with a friend. I understand that some people might need to do that, maybe even for work purposes. I would probably never think to pull out the pen and click a few times to hover over and magnify something. I would just use a "spread" gesture to enlarge the content on the screen. I have no idea why anybody would need to take an oval-shaped grab of a web page, "extract text," and then save it the home screen.

Truly, many of the pen-related functions seem like things that were included because they were technically easy to accomplish in the software, not because somebody thought they would actually be useful.

The first Note launched in 2011 and the device has indeed come a long way. The design and general functionality of the device have improved a lot. But the pen, even in the new Note 7, still seems to be of limited utility.

In future Notes, Samsung may zero in on the really useful pen features and improve them by increasing their intuitiveness and removing friction points. And hopefully, as it's done in the past, it will be willing to let some of the not-so-useful features go.

Back in June, complaints were filed with the FEC over such fundraising emails. But they're still being sent to non-U.S. lawmakers.

The emails signed by Donald J. Trump or his children come at all hours. Sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, Sir Roger Gale looks down at his iPhone and sees that he's been invited to dinner as an "honorary guest" if he makes a contribution. Other times, he's just asked to give money to "make America great again." And some mornings Gale is asked to sign a petition to "send Hillary and her corrupt Clinton Foundation packing for good!"

Sounds like the typically overheated requests for money flooding the inboxes of many Americans during this tense presidential race. Except that Gale is a member of the British Parliament who can't vote in an American election or contribute money to a U.S. candidate. In fact, it's strictly illegal for American politicians to solicit or accept donations from foreigners.

And the Trump campaign was warned by the Federal Election Commission back in June, when reports first surfaced that lawmakers in the U.K. and Australia were receiving solicitations from the Republican candidate, that such emails are illegal. And several good government groups, including Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, filed a criminal complaint with the FEC at the end of June, citing the emails to Gale and other non-U.S. politicians. Gale even talked about the emails on the floor of Parliament, asking the body's digital service to take action to prevent them from clogging the inboxes of his fellow lawmakers.

Yet the emails continue. As recently as Wednesday, August 24, Gale was getting an email from Trump with the subject line, "Dinner on Me, Friend," and asking him to give $5 so that "you and a friend could win a trip to have dinner with me at one of our fundraisers as honorary guests." Gale is a conservative member of the House of Commons, but the emails are driving him crazy with outrage. He calls them "drivel" and "rubbish," telling Fast Company that "I can only say personally that a Campaign Organisation that is so inept as to be unable to delete an email address following a question on the floor of the House of Commons speaks volumes about their candidate. People, however, tend to get the politicians that they deserve!"

Others politicians, including Australian MPs Tim Watts and Gai Brodtmann, also say they've continued to receive solicitations from the Trump campaign. "Since requesting her address be removed from the campaign's mailing list on July 12, 2016, I can confirm she has nonetheless received further correspondence," an advisor to Brodtmann told Fast Company. "They have been deleted on receipt."

The illegal outreach also extends to lawmakers in Denmark and Finland who told Fast Company that they continue to receive such solicitations.

"I find it odd and a little bit desperate," says Danish member of parliament Ida Auken. "Especially since I know it is not legal for them to receive money from abroad."

It's more than odd—it's almost unprecedented in recent political history, say campaign observers. Brendan Fischer, associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said he is not aware of the Clinton campaign or other presidential campaigns engaging in such activity. "Not only were these foreign politicians receiving these fundraising solicitations from the Trump campaign, but receiving them on their official government email addresses, clearly indicating that these recipients are overseas."

But don't hold your breath waiting for the FEC to respond. Within 5 days of the original June 29 complaint, the agency forwarded the complaint to the Trump campaign, which then had 15 days to reply. And then lawyers at the FEC consider the case and make a recommendation to the six commissioners, who are split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. "It could take years," says Fischer, with a sigh in his voice.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Per agency policy, the FEC declined comment.

Exclusive albums are an increasingly potent weapon in the streaming wars. But are they good for artists and fans?

This weekend, I had a brief, uniquely modern conversation with somebody as we both stared into our phones together.

"The new Frank Ocean is out."

"Oh damn, really? Let me pull it up."

"It's only on Apple Music."

"No, look, here it is on YouTube."

*Pitch-shifted audio of Frank Ocean singing like a chipmunk*

"Oh. Weird. I guess I should sign up for Apple Music."

"Yeah, there's a free trial. Or you could just torrent it."

For those of us who follow technology news and the constantly evolving music industry, the exclusive arrival of Ocean's Blonde on Apple Music on Saturday came as no surprise. After Rihanna's Anti, Beyonce's Lemonade, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, and Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, we've come to expect big names to drop new albums with restrictions: This one's only on Tidal. That one's only on Apple Music. Want to buy the album in a record store? Fat chance. This is 2016. If you're lucky, there might be a pop-up shop, though.

This year's string of high profile, platform-exclusive online album releases is beginning to condition everyday consumers to this new reality, but for many, the concept remains confusing, if not frustrating. You mean I have to sign up for a $10 per month subscription just to hear this new album? Why? This is a bit like telling N'Sync fans in 2002: Sorry kids, this one is only available at Tower Records. You might live near a Best Buy or prefer Sam Goody, but it doesn't matter. For now, this music you and millions of others have been waiting for is a Tower Records exclusive.

"Why?" is a valid question. After all, the big-name artist streaming exclusive is a new feature of the music economy that has cropped up as the relationship between artists and their fans is once again being renegotiated. Consumers have a right to wonder why their dollars are being lured in new directions, especially now that the internet has spoiled us into expecting to call the shots and, for better or worse, access our culture at little to no financial cost.

Fortunately, the question has an answer: You can only stream Frank Ocean's new album on Apple Music (for now) because Apple said so. More to the point, it's because the company has enough cash in its reserves—and deep music industry relationships, thanks to its absorption of the Beats Music leadership—to get early, exclusive rights to albums like Blonde and Chance The Rapper's mixtape Coloring Book. It's the same reason Tidal had the latest records from Kanye, Rihanna, and Beyonce before anybody else did. And even though major labels are reportedly having second thoughts about the platform exclusivity strategy, Blonde certainly won't be the last one.

As streaming becomes the dominant way we listen to music and the competition in the subscription market heats up, these short-term exclusives are one of the few ways that music services can truly compete against one another. In effect, rich men are using access to culture as a competitive weapon against one another in the battle over the future of how the music business works.

The exclusive access strategy is good for those wield the sword each time and bad for those standing at the other end of the blade. Imagine the anguish at Spotify, for instance, every time they see massive spikes in searches for "Frank Ocean," "Kanye West," or "Radiohead" and are forced to show listeners that painful blurb of copy in the UI: "Frank Ocean's new music is not available on Spotify yet. We are working on it, and hope to have it soon."

Exclusive releases are undoubtedly good for Apple. They tie the company's brand to coveted works by beloved musicians and presumably lure many people to its new subscription service, helping (along with its three-month free trial) Apple Music amass 15 million users in just over a year. But if Apple succeeds in the streaming-music market with strategies like this—and by reportedly offering higher payouts to the major labels—it's succeeding less by innovating and more by virtue of its size and willingness to throw its economic weight around.

For streaming companies, the pros and cons of exclusives are clear. But tech companies are hardly the only stakeholders here. What about artists? What about fans?

For musicians, the impact of exclusives is debatable. Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book became the first record to chart on Billboard's top ten based entirely on streams. But while the temporary exclusivity of Chance's mixtape didn't prevent it from charting, the question is begged: If it was also available to Spotify's 100 million listeners for those first two weeks, could it have hit number one?

This question may be one reason that big labels are already rumored to be rethinking the exclusive release strategy altogether—but it's also because of real-life scenarios like Universal apparently being snubbed by Ocean, who released the brief visual album Endless at the end very end of his label contract and then, days later, when his contract was expired, dropped Blonde on his own. In the long run, Ocean's move may be seen as a liberating moment for artists eager for freedom from the tyranny of record labels. But for now, most artists still need labels for incubation and marketing muscle. And let's not forget: Labels still own the rights to the expansive music catalogs the streaming services need to survive.

Former Apple employee Sean Glass argues that exclusives are good for artists because Apple invests heavily in them and even collaborates creatively on things like videos, often supporting artists in a way that labels are increasingly unable. Still, as Glass points out, the exclusive release approach overlooks indie labels and smaller artists. Such a strategy may well work out for massively popular artists deemed worthy of such partnerships, but the scheme—designed to drive hordes of people toward the streaming platform's "subscribe" button—likely wouldn't work with smaller artists. If there happens to be a trickle-down effect from blockbuster exclusive releases for middle class artists (more users on the platform mean more potential ears for smaller artists), it's too early to tell.

So far, these exclusive deals are having at least one consistent effect: They're sending people who don't want to sign up for a second streaming subscription scurrying back to torrent sites, threatening to counteract the promise of streaming music to thwart piracy. For Kanye West, limiting Life of Pablo to Tidal (which has vastly fewer subscribers than Spotify or Apple Music) led to a surge in illegal downloads of the album. Unsurprisingly, Frank Ocean's new album (along with the mini "visual album" that preceded it just days earlier) quickly found its way to file lockers, Reddit threads, Google Drive links and torrent sites as frenzied fans scrambled to finally hear it.

For fans, it's nearly impossible to argue that the exclusivity wars have any benefit. It's not like springing for both Hulu and Netflix, as DJ Skee argues in a recent op-ed, because unlike those video platforms, the overwhelming majority of the content on music services is exactly the same. If you pay $10 a month for Spotify but want all the latest releases from the likes of Drake and Rihanna as soon as they're available, you're looking at doubling (or potentially tripling) your monthly investment in music while only gaining a tiny fraction of additional content, however beloved much of it may be. For listeners, this equation makes no sense. And as the exclusivity war rages on, no single service is going to have a comprehensive offering of new music. Increasingly, new releases are fractured across services. And as the music industry knows all too well, a free torrent is still just a few clicks away.

This new reality differs from the one we were promised. Back in 2005, academics David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard envisioned an almost utopian world in which we would access "music like water," essentially paying for access to music just like another monthly utility bill. At the time, their book, The Future of Music: Manifesto For The Digital Music Revolution, may have sounded radical, coming as it did two years before Spotify or even the iPhone. But indeed, the rise of streaming services has put tens of millions of songs into the pockets of listeners for a monthly fee. And while no streaming service will be completely comprehensive (SoundCloud and Bandcamp are excellent, essentially freemium ways to augment the libraries of Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music with newer, more under-the-radar artists), fans have a reasonable expectation to be able to conveniently access new, popular music without jumping through hurdles or switching between services. The problem is that it's one thing to sign up for Tidal because it offers the back catalogs of Prince and Neil Young. It's another to regret the decision because Apple scored the exclusive rights to the next Drake album. It's a bit like if one phone company let you call everyone except your best friend, while another let you call everyone except your mother. That's not how utility companies work.

With Blonde, Frank Ocean fans are at least able to buy a download of the album for $9.99. But that's little consolation to consumers who are weaning themselves off of downloads and know that for the same price, they can access millions of albums for a month. Or perhaps they're already signed up for another service, gritting their teeth and wondering where the next hot new release will land.

Related Reading

• Can Apple Outgrow Its "Lame Dad" Vibe?

Women's Equality Day celebrates the 19th Amendment, but we still have a long way to go to achieve a true balance.

Ninety-six years ago today, the United States adopted the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. In 1972, August 26 was declared "Women's Equality Day" in order to mark that anniversary.

Nearly a half-century later, with a woman at the top of the Democratic Party's presidential ticket, Susan Adams, a professor of management at Bentley University, asks, "How long will it be before the gender of a presidential candidate is a non-issue?"

It's clear the country has come a long way on gender equality. But it's equally clear that we still have a way to go to realize it fully. Here are a few less recognized reasons why.

1. The Home Front Is Still Seen As "Feminine"

Over the past 50 years, American dads have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend on childcare (to seven hours a week, up from two and a half), according to a report published in June by MenCare. But the chores they're picking up aren't necessarily lightening their female partners' loads; Pew researchers recently discovered that women are spending more time on both childcare and housework than they used to.

Unsurprisingly, researchers have found that these imbalances have a lot to do with ingrained ideas about gender roles in American society. In a study released this week, sociologists at Indiana University and the University of Maryland find that nearly three-quarters of American adults believe "that the female partners in heterosexual couples should be responsible for cooking, doing laundry, cleaning the house, and buying groceries."

That means there are quite a lot of women out there who believe domestic duties belong first and foremost to themselves. And on the flip side, the researchers write, "nearly 90% of our respondents thought that heterosexual men should be responsible for automobile maintenance and outdoor chores."

So entrenched are these gendered notions, in fact, that even the researchers seem to have succumbed to them. In the study, which included a nationally representative sample of more than 1,000 adults, the (consequently overwhelmingly heterosexual) participants were given descriptions of same-sex couples, one of whom was more stereotypically "masculine" and the other more "feminine."

While two-thirds said they thought the "feminine" partner should take on more housework, all of the subjects were primed through this exercise to assume (incorrectly) that LGBT couples mime straight gender roles. In other words, the scientists wound up indulging in the same pattern of thinking they were hoping to study—pointing up just how deep-seated these gendered beliefs seem to be.

Adams, who's published research on female leadership, sees the spillover of these long-held stereotypes in the workplace. She notes how they've come through this election cycle, where Clinton's "stamina" and "strength" have been questioned alongside her pantsuits and her voice. "But this is true for women in any position of leadership," says Adams. "By societal norms, women can't be too assertive or brash, though both can be great tools for delivering results."

2. Women Aren't Filing Nearly As Many Patents

A much-less reported aspect of the well-documentedgender pay gap are the relative rates at which men and women file patents. As Lydia Dishman recently reported for Fast Company, female inventors filed just 7.7% of new U.S. patents in 2010, the latest year for which there's data. That's five times the percentage who did so in 1977, but it's still a pretty slender slice of the pie.

There are a number of likely factors behind the disparity, a large one is the gender gap in STEM fields. According to a study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), the comparatively few women who are inventors tend to file patents in female-dominated fields like jewelry (26.7% of all patents) and apparel (25.3%). It's typically when women belong to a group of inventors, the report found, that they're better represented in other fields, like chemistry and pharmaceuticals.

Limited access to funding and smaller professional networks may be holding more women back from patenting, IWPR's analysis suggests. Since venture capitalists prefer to put money behind patented products, fewer women patent-holders may mean less financial backing. And the relative shortage of female VCs at the top of the entrepreneurial food chain may mean fewer influential relationships for female inventors to leverage.

3. 11% Of U.S. Employees Don't Believe In Equal Pay

In a report published last March, Glassdoor found that 89% of U.S. workers believe men and women deserve to be paid equally for the same job. But that means that a not-inconsiderable 11% don't.

One reason why it may be worth paying just as much attention to this minority is because of the sizable majority, detailed above, who see household chores and child care as "women's work." In other words, these two findings unavoidably coexist on the spectrum of Americans' attitudes about gender and the relative values of certain kinds of work.

That's sometimes easy to miss in the ways equal pay is covered in the press and championed by businesses and advocacy groups. This week Glassdoor highlighted nine U.S. companies that have publicly committed, through various means, to closing the gender pay gap within their ranks—all of which earned high satisfaction marks from their employees on Glassdoor. In no particular order, they include:

• Salesforce
• Delta Air Lines
• Apple
• Spotify
• Johnson & Johnson
• Dropbox
• Facebook
• Care.com
• Boston Consulting Group

(Here's where you can find Glassdoor's take on why these employers made the cut.)

For its own part, the Obama Administration has promoted an "Equal Pay Pledge," inviting private-sector employers to do their own part to narrow the pay gap.

In the meantime, though, advocates may not want to lose sight of the people and businesses they still haven't won over. Just last year, for instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued 10 oil companies operating in a dozen states on gender-based pay discrimination. And according to a joint congressional report published by Democratic legislators in April, the gender pay gap varies dramatically by geography, from a roughly 10% low in the District of Columbia to a 35% high in Louisiana. On average, the report found that earnings disparities yawn widest in the states with the weakest gender anti-discrimination laws.

All of which is to say that the gender pay gap, like gender equality writ large, remains as much a political issue in 2016 as a cultural one. Our compensation laws, our patenting system, and our approaches to housework and childcare certainly influence how Americans understand gender. That's why Adams says effective change should begin with children. "We need to set expectations when children are young that anyone—boys and girls of any race and background—can be leaders, and as they grow up, we need to support their advancement equally," she suggests.

But these findings, taken together, hint that the reverse is likely true, too: that the progress that's still left to be made is an accurate reflection of our evolving and sometimes contradictory ideas about gender—and that what we haven't achieved is just as good a measure of where we are as what we have. The day that American society—all of it—genuinely believes in gender equality, it will already have achieved it.

Says Adams: "As a society, we will be much better off and closer to gender equality when men can be kind and supportive, women can be more directive in executing leadership, and girls around the country can visualize themselves as president."

As you narrow down your top candidates, it's likely to come down to temperament over hard skills.

The best job applicants have qualifications that are more than skills-deep, but it isn't always easy uncovering them. As hiring managers identify their top candidates, the challenge becomes finding out the less-obvious qualities that may put one ahead.

Here at Kabbage, we've created a series of questions that we save for our final panel interview, which are designed to help us understand how job candidates think about themselves, others, and the toughest types of problems they're likely to face on the inside. Here are five of them.

1. Name Three Negative Qualities Someone Close To You Would Say You Possess

This question can tell you a lot about a candidate's self-awareness, and it's useful for any company that really prizes transparency. By asking this, we're looking for candidates who not only understand what their true negatives are, but also those that are willing to admit them.

So there are actually a number of unacceptable answers here. We don't allow answers like, "I'm a perfectionist" or "workaholic" or other positives-disguised-as-negatives. In fact, when we get answers like that, we actually buzz candidates using actual (harmless) buzzers! Then we ask them to try again. If they have trouble coming up with three personal drawbacks on their own, there have even been occasions where we've had candidates "phone a friend."

2. Add These Two Fractions

We might ask, for instance, "What's three-quarters plus one-half?"

This simple arithmetic question elicits some of the best responses. The point is to determine how a candidate handles being put on the spot unexpectedly. This isn't really about math skills, of course—we're fine with them grabbing their phone to use the calculator or just Googling the answer.

But if the typical workday at your company is pretty unpredictable, it's worth finding out how a prospective hire deals with curveballs. Do they panic? Blurt out a lot of wrong answers? Do they freeze and get stuck? Do they give up? You want to hire someone who's resourceful, capable of thinking outside of the box, and quick on their feet.

3. How Would You Rate Your Abilities On A Scale Of 1–10?

It's sometimes worth seeing how candidates believe they stack up once you define "10" as the absolute best in the world at their current role, and then finding out what they think separates them from it.

Like the first question, this also helps suss out a candidate's self-awareness, but it also leads to discussions about growth and ambition. Promising hires may not rate themselves as 10s across the board—there's nothing wrong with humble confidence—but that's not the point: You want to know why and what they're doing to get there.

4. Finish This Sentence: "Most People I Meet Are _______."

We want employees who care deeply about their work, its impact, and other people, so this is one way to see how they relate to others. The only answer that's off limits is "interesting," because it really doesn't say anything. At worst, "interesting" may be a codeword for something negative in disguise, and at best, it's just too vague a way to characterize other people.

5. Could You Share The First Name Of Someone You Work With Closely?

This, too, ties into caring deeply. If a candidate answers this question quickly and can easily handle several follow-ups about that working relationship, it's probably a safe bet that they're good at building and maintaining them. This question can also help you understand whether they'll be committed to your community.

You want to hire people who can take ownership—not only of the products you create and offer, but also the environment and culture in which they work. And that's all about genuine, interpersonal connections around the office. If a job candidate has trouble talking specifically about those, it may be a red flag.

You may meet with plenty of candidates in the earlier rounds of your hiring process who've got the skills and qualifications you're looking for, but only a few will be the right fit in the end. So as you narrow down the top contenders throughout the interview process, zero in on your company's values and focus on finding the personality types who seem most likely to share and thrive under them. To do that, it's sometimes the curveball questions that work the best.

Amy Zimmerman is head of global people operations, and Jen Richard is the head of learning and development, both at Kabbage, an Atlanta, Georgia–based financial services data and technology platform.

Are you sending mixed signals to diverse job candidates? Here are the pitfalls to avoid.

Whether the goal is to be more representative of the population at large, or to acknowledge the increasing body of evidence that diverse companies outperform those that are homogeneous, diversity is a hot topic at many companies. But the issue of diversity is complex—as layered as the business case to support it—and the time, effort, and resources being poured into diversity initiatives can be undermined by oversights or missteps.

It's a common issue, says Audra Jenkins, senior director of diversity and compliance at human resources consulting firm Randstad Sourceright. Sometimes, companies aren't even clear on what they're overlooking or doing wrong. Sociologists recently revealed how more traditional approaches to diversify have failed to attract and retain more women and people of color. The good news is that when leaders become aware of the issues, they can fix them. Here are six areas to review.

Ignoring Channels To Diversity

If you're not actively cultivating connections to varied organizations and prospective hires, you're probably not attracting the richest possible pool of candidates, says David Livermore, PhD, who heads the Cultural Intelligence Center, a business consultancy that focuses on culture, and author of Driven by Difference: How Great Companies Fuel Innovation Through Diversity. Reaching out to groups that can connect you to prospective employees who identify as various races and ethnicities, religions, ages, genders, sexual orientations, etc., can help you attract candidates of various viewpoints and life experiences.

Groups, institutions, universities, and organizations that represent the people you'd like to see in your candidate pool should be notified when your company has openings, Livermore suggests. Make it clear in your job advertising and to your recruiters that you welcome diverse candidates. When you actively cultivate varied candidates, you begin to gain a reputation as a company that values diversity, Livermore says.

Disconnecting From Business Goals

At commercial insurance company Zurich North America, Anuradha Hebbar, head of diversity and inclusion, says that companies need to connect their efforts to overall business goals, or their efforts to cultivate a more diverse workforce will likely fail. She says they need to be clear about how diversity will make the company stronger and more competitive. When organizations can tie diversity and inclusion to goals and positive outcomes, there is typically a stronger commitment to making them work.

Ensuring Your Processes Are Unbiased

Livermore says that companies may have inadvertent bias in their ads or interview questions. He says one useful tool highlights whether a job posting is biased toward a particular gender, based on research based on the language it uses.

Use a consistent set of questions with each candidate after they've been vetted by a diverse internal team, he says. "Insist on everyone holding off on making commentary about the candidates before you do a thorough process, otherwise the dominant cultures typically shape [who gets hired]," he says.

Failing To Tap Internal Resources

Your current employees can be an important channel to cultivating greater diversity and the benefits it can bestow, Jenkins says. Ask for feedback on products, services, and culture. Gather feedback and integrate reasonable suggestions. When you make employees feel valued, they're more likely to share their opinions.

Zurich, like AT&T and other large organizations, has employee resource groups (ERGs) for women leaders, millennials, and other groups of employees. By tapping the insights of these groups, she says the company can capture viewpoints from different life experiences. Hebbar, who previously worked with McDonald's, says when the company's coffee sales were slumping, the African-American ERG came up with the idea for mocha coffee, which actually grew market share for the company, she says.

Overlooking Pathways To Promotion

While some companies focus resources on recruiting diverse candidates, fewer pay attention to ensuring that their diversity efforts continue through the development process, Jenkins says. Despite a $300 million investment in diversity, Intel fell short on its ability to retain the diverse talent it added to its ranks.

Devoting resources to mentoring and training programs, and ensuring that diverse candidates are developed and promoted from within are signals that the company cares about diversity. Part of this effort includes devoting a budget to diversity efforts and ensuring that your organization is adequately investing in the people it wants to develop, she says. "When you have allocation of resources and financial resources, it correlates to your level of commitment to diversity. It's the difference between lip service and action," she says.

Researchers from Stanford and Tulane found that referrals that came from company insiders who mentored or trained African-American employees boosted their chances of getting a promotion.

Ignoring Inclusion

Inclusive cultures are necessary for diversity initiatives to thrive, says Vernon Wall, a cofounding faculty member of the Social Justice Training Institute, which helps develop diversity trainers and practitioners. If inclusion is an element of your culture, it creates an environment where different people feel welcome and valued. When companies recruit diverse candidates and pay no attention to ensuring the workplace welcomes them, those candidates won't contribute to the best of their ability, he says.

"You have to listen to employees and not get defensive when you get feedback you don't like," he says. Remember that you're asking for their input to make the environment better for everyone.

Jenkins also recommends assessing your organization's cultural-competence level, working with a third party, if necessary. Doing so can help build trust because employees see that you're interested in understanding what you don't know, she says.

"Employees tend to be more honest in that assessment, because it's not asking the employee their views on diversity," she points out. "It's asking employees' opinion about the organization's view on the diversity, so it takes the pressure off of them feeling like they have to respond in a certain way," she says.

Most of all, it's critical that companies have top-down leadership on diversity, Livermore adds. If you're working on diversity without the support of leadership, he says, you're not going to get the resources or commitment you need to truly make a difference.

This week's top stories may help you reprioritize your work and avoid overestimating your abilities like you're prone to do.

This week we picked up some old-timey productivity methods that still pack a punch, and learned why the brain may be hardwired to make us overconfident.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of August 22.

1. This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Hack Works Like A Charm

Long before that nifty task-management app on your smartphone, an industrialist paid a hefty sum for this stupidly simple productivity method. A century later, it's still as useful as ever. Here's why and how it works.

2. This Is Your Brain's Default Setting—Here's How And When To Change It

Is overconfidence always a bad thing? Scientifically speaking, it depends. There may be more than one psychological source of overconfidence, which researchers suspect may be our brains' way of saving us mental energy. This week we learned how to hack that system when we need to.

3. Do Female Athletes Get Stiffed By The Sports Industry?

The Rio Olympics offered a brief moment of equality for women's athletics, which on average draw far less coverage and, subsequently, fewer fans and sponsorship dollars than men's teams do. Here's a look at the vicious industry circle in which the world's top female athletes are caught.

4. Three Surprising, Science-Backed Ways To Improve Your Decision Making

Want to make bolder and better choices? Who doesn't? This week we took a quick tour through some of the more outlandish research on the psychology of decision making, and found how how dimming the lights and waiting to pee may influence how we assess our options.

5. How To Tell If You'll Fit Into A Company's Culture Before You Take The Job

"As the new employee," one expert explains, "you have to adapt to the culture rather than the culture adapting to you." So for all the talk of employers hiring for "culture fit," job seekers still have a responsibility to make that assessment from their side of the table, too. But the trouble is that a job interview isn't always the best setting to do to that. So here's what to do instead.

Focus-group moderators patiently draw out respondents' attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and reactions. Managers should, too.

I recently dusted off my focus-group–moderator shoes in order to run a few sessions on behalf of a big client. As I was preparing, I found myself jotting down a quick script with ground rules to help things go smoothly—things like:

Be honest—you won't hurt my feelings. I want to hear from everyone. You can't all talk at the same time. If you dominate the conversation, I might ask you to take a cookie break.

I also sketched out a second list of guidelines for myself, widely practiced moderating techniques that would help make sure I left with valuable, actionable feedback from the participants.

Reviewing these notes, it struck me that these moderating techniques also double as effective management tactics. A successful focus group is all about building rapport, getting feedback, and capturing a deep understanding of how the group feels and thinks. Managers likewise need to build strong relationships with their teams, and should care about uncovering their underlying thoughts and motivations.

With these shared objectives in mind, here's a look at five things effective managers can learn from a well-run focus group.

1. Don't Skip The Warm-Up

Good focus groups usually start with an icebreaker to let members learn more about one another. The activities and topics involved are safe, and they're meant to knock down some of the barriers between people. To improve their own team dynamics, managers should also invest in helping their teams get to know each other better. Even for teams that have worked together a lot, a quick warm-up at the start of a meeting might be a smart idea.

In their book The Happy Employee, Julia McGovern and Susan Shelly advocate not only making an effort to learn about employees' personal lives, but also—as focus-group moderators do—using that knowledge to show you care about them and are interested in what they can contribute.

2. Let Them Do The Talking

You'll never know what your team members think unless you give them a chance to tell you. Moderators listen during focus groups a good 90% of the time, asking broad questions to guide the conversation and probing questions to clarify details that are unclear. Managers should likewise listen more than they speak—it's the most powerful way to understand what's really on employees' minds.

3. Ask, Don't Tell

Good moderators avoid stating ideas directly—"You said that the new call center process was confusing"—or "leading the witness": "I'm going to show you this amazingly awesome new call center process." Instead, they ask participants to state things in their own words. And when asked a question, moderators often answer, "What do you think?"

In her book Smart Tribes, Christine Comaford explains how managers often inhibit their employees' development by giving away solutions instead of letting them find their own ways of resolving challenges. Managers should instead meet their employees' requests for help with questions to guide them toward their own alternatives. Eventually, they'll learn to anticipate those questions and, rather then presenting managers with problems, will start showing up with their proposed solutions already in hand.

4. Hear From Everybody

There's always one overzealous focus-group participant who will dominate the entire conversation if left unchecked. Moderators always need to make sure to get feedback from everyone in the room, not just the loudest person.

Similarly, managers have to be careful that they're actively interacting with everyone on their teams. Not everyone is at ease with being outspoken, but their opinions are equally important. Since you can't give your most vocal employees "cookie breaks," though, managers should simply seek out other opportunities (even if they aren't in a full-group setting) to solicit feedback from everybody—including those who usually hang back.

5. Keep Everyone Honest

Successful moderators genuinely want to hear it all—the good and the bad—so they simply listen without judgment. Too often, managers aren't comfortable hearing less-sunny observations. Indeed, negative feedback is often as uncomfortable to share as it is to hear, so it's a manager's obligation to create a safe environment for honest discourse.

As a manager, this means keeping your emotions in check. But it's about more than just avoiding defensiveness when receiving negative feedback. You also need to cultivate an environment that encourages all types of sharing. Employees should feel welcome to toss around ideas and ask questions about the team's direction and their place within it.

Focus-group moderators aim to patiently draw out respondents' attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and reactions. This feedback is typically used to improve a product, service, or experience. But the same techniques and principles can help boost a team's performance, productivity, and engagement, too.

Brooke Niemiec is chief marketing officer at Elicit, where she leads a team of researchers and marketing strategists to evolve the company's actionable intelligence platform.

Immigration may well be the issue that defines this election, so we're breaking down the extreme contrasts in the candidates' positions.

At this point, after over 14 months of relentless campaign coverage, what is left to say about Donald Trump's immigration platform, arguably the cornerstone of his campaign? Plenty, actually, judging by the candidate's multiple stances on the issue this week and the criticism of his views by Hillary Clinton.

Immigration is one of the few issues Donald Trump addressed head-on early in the election cycle, with his infamous vow last June to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. During the same speech—in which Trump declared he was running for president—he dubbed Mexican immigrants "rapists" and "drug peddlers." Since then, Trump has gone on to propose a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S." and endorsed mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

But this week, Trump wavered, suggesting that he was open to "softening" his bloviated assertions on immigration—a move that could cost him loyal supporters. Be that as it may, Hillary Clinton has taken an approach that is almost diametrically opposite to the intolerance that Trump has trafficked in for the past 15 months, seeking to shield immigrants from deportation and empower them with a path to citizenship.

Here's a rundown of what a Clinton or Trump presidency could mean for immigrants who reside in the U.S. and those who wish to come here:

Border Security

One thing Clinton and Trump seemed to agree on historically was the importance of secure borders. But Trump's campaign rhetoric has been singular in its ambition and xenophobia. During this election, Clinton has opted to veer away from discussions of border security, preferring instead to focus on other immigration issues. As Clinton wrote of her immigration reform plan: "It will treat every person with dignity, fix the family visa backlog, uphold the rule of law, protect our borders and national security, and bring millions of hardworking people into the formal economy."

Trump, on the other hand, wants to "compel Mexico to pay for the wall" by barring undocumented immigrants from making wire transfers to Mexico. "It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-$10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year," Trump writes on his site. But here's the thing: Of the $24 billion that Trump says is wired to Mexico annually (a number PolitiFact has backed up), it's unclear what percentage comes from illegal immigrants.

It sounds implausible but Trump says the wall would be constructed with concrete and steel and reach up to 65 feet in height. (This number has inched up over the past year, first starting at 30 feet during a speech last August and ricocheting its way to 65 feet.) Initially, Trump argued the wall should span the entire 2,000-mile border, but he has since demurred and said just half that length could be enough.

According to the New York Times, the $10 billion Trump has cited is far lower than what a wall with those specifications would actually cost, which experts say is at least $26 billion, and that doesn't include the maintenance costs that will follow. The workers hired to build the wall would need housing for the entirety of the project, and the wall would have to be erected in such a way that major waterways like the Rio Grande and Colorado River are not disrupted—while still ensuring the wall's efficacy in keeping people out of the U.S. That's a tall order.

Deportation Of Illegal Immigrants

Clinton is in support of selective deportation—as her platform reads, "detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety"—but she is not in favor of rampant deportation of illegal immigrants. Her proposed immigration plan is more lenient than that of the Obama administration, which drew criticism for returning thousands of women and children back to violent regions of Central America.

In a June ruling, the Supreme Court blocked Obama's redemption plan to shield five million undocumented immigrants from deportation, by upholding the decision of a lower court that it was unlawful. Still, Clinton has resolved to continue pushing for the programs that were struck down: DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents) and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). If Clinton were to get elected, it is also possible the case may be appealed and sent to the Supreme Court again, following her appointment of Justice Scalia's replacement.

Trump has built his platform on the claim that he would send all 11 million illegal immigrants back to where they hailed from—up until this week, that is. In an interview on Tuesday, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked if Trump might think twice about deporting illegal immigrants who "contribute to society, have been law-abiding, have kids here."

"There certainly can be a softening, because we're not looking to hurt people," Trump said in response. "We want people—we have some great people in this country." He then took this a step further, saying that while he would "get the bad ones out," he may allow other immigrants to remain if they paid "back taxes."

Perhaps Trump realized the proposal he set forth early in his campaign was not supported by tangible, realistic steps. He said the process of removing illegal immigrants would take about two years—but deportations in recent years have not exceeded more than about 400,000 annually, which means the government would have to significantly increase its current roster of immigration officials and judges to carry out Trump's plan.

Police officers would have to randomly stop people and ask to see their papers to try and track down illegal immigrants; once found, they would have to be detained, and the U.S. government would also have to foot the bill to fly out immigrants who are not from Mexico. According to the American Action Forum, the entire project would run $400 billion to $600 billion even if it were spread out across 20 years. And what, exactly, would be the economic impact of losing 11 million people, when almost 62% of them are employed in the U.S.?

H-1B Visas

Clinton has not talked much about H-1B visas, and her immigration reform plan does not touch on the subject. But in an interview with Vox last month, Clinton said comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship was an issue separate from the concerns of tech companies wishing to keep poaching foreign workers. From Vox:

But I don't want to mix that with other kinds of changes in visas and other concerns that particularly high-value technical companies have. In fact, I think keeping the pressure on them helps us resolve the bigger problem, and then we can look to see what else, if anything, can and should be done.

But I would also add one of the biggest complaints I hear around the country is how callous and insensitive American corporations have become to American workers who have skills that are ones that should make them employable. The many stories of people training their replacements from some foreign country are heartbreaking, and it is obviously a cost-cutting measure to be able to pay people less than you would pay an American worker.

That said, in keeping with her support of DAPA and DACA, Clinton endorses giving work permits to immigrants who qualify under either program.

In Trump's immigration plan, he pooh-poohed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for hiring too many workers holding H-1B visas. His reform plan proposed raising wages for H-1B visas to strong-arm companies into offering those jobs to domestic workers instead.

Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program.

But in a debate last fall, he was singing a different tune: "As far as the visas are concerned, if we need people, it's fine. They have to come into this country legally." In March, Trump responded to a question about whether he had moved away from the proposal on his website—to which he said he was "softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country." But immediately after the debate, he put out a statement repudiating what he had said, arguing that H-1B visas did not constitute "highly-skilled immigration." At a debate the following week,Trump noted that he exploited the H-1B as a businessman and should not have been allowed to.

Trump's stance on the H-1B program aligns with the opinion held by people who think it takes jobs away from American citizens. In his March statement, Trump added that he would "end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program."

Path To Citizenship

This is a key piece of Clinton's platform: If elected, she has promised "a pathway to full and equal citizenship within her first 100 days in office." Clinton does not go into detail about how exactly she plans to do this, though she backs the aforementioned DACA and DAPA programs. Also on the chopping block if Clinton takes office: the three- and 10-year bars that keep immigrants who leave to get a green card out of the country for three or 10 years if they have previously been in the U.S. illegally.

Clinton has also been vocal in her opposition to one of Trump's proposals—denying automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. "This remains the biggest magnet for illegal immigration," Trump wrote on his website.

This is not a position held by many of the Republicans who ran against Trump—Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, for example—but it should come as little surprise given Trump's feelings about even legal immigration. "When I'm elected I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there's a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats," Trump said during a speech soon after the Orlando shooting.

As with other controversial policy proposals set forth by Trump, many Republicans are split on the issue of birthright citizenship, since a change to the current policy would involve tweaking the Constitution itself.

A tech VC explains why you only need to send 10 or 12 slides to early-stage investors (and what to cover in them).

My venture capital fund sees more than 50 slide decks each week. Some come in cold (our email addresses are on the website), some are forwarded from friends and co-investors who think a company's a good fit, and others are follow-ups from meetings I've had throughout the week.

If a company operates in a space I understand well, I'll spend no more than five minutes on a quick read-through of the deck before deciding whether or not to dig in further. Many other investors do the same. In some ways, a startup's pitch deck is like a college admission essay, condensing down your life story and mission into a few words to get your message across beautifully and briefly.

Start with the problem you're solving, why you're the right team to solve it, why now is the right time to solve it, and what you need to solve it. You should be able to do this in 10–12 slides. It's fine to have a longer version of the same deck on hand featuring appendix slides, too, but every startup needs to have a shorter, five-minute version to give prospective investors a first look. Here are the slides it should include.

Your Market

In certain industries, market slides all start to look the same: bar charts going up and to the right to demonstrate a growing market; competitor landscape matrices with the pitching company in the upper right quadrant; the same estimates for market size, total addressable market, blah blah blah.

There was a time—around three or four years ago—when everybody would come in quoting the same stats about mobile app revenues and the growth of mobile devices around the world in order to justify their addressable market. It was terribly boring.

For businesses that are post-revenue, the unit economics slide is the new "up-and-to-the-right" growth slide and I care more about this than high level, general market data. And a better alternative to the standard 2x2 competitive landscape matrix could involve a more pointed differentiation scale, focusing specifically on differences between your company and its competitors.

Market slides are usually a good place to talk about the problem you're trying to solve: What's wrong with this market you describe, and why is now the right time for its disruption?

Your Team

At the seed stage, where my firm does most of our deals, you're betting on your team above all else. It's all you really have to go on. In today's market, folks getting funded often have computer science PhDs, Stanford MBAs, and previous venture-backed exits on the team slide. Logos of colleges and tech companies noting experience at Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft adorn many a slide deck like medals of honor.

That stuff is all impressive and can help convey relevant educational and work experience efficiently. But it doesn't always help uncover a first-time entrepreneur who dropped out of college to build her first company—and investors are very interested in backing those people, too.

It's important to look for strong, technical-minded founders (or cofounders) who have a clear passion for building something that can make a real impact. These founders yearn to tear down something stale and apply a fresh perspective to doing it better, and you sometimes need to look beyond credentials to find signs of that.

Your Distribution Plan

The App Store is crowded—no revelations there. It's harder to get your app noticed now than it was five years ago. So instead, VCs need to see evidence of how you'll get your product into users' hands. Are you going to do paid marketing on Facebook? Event sponsorships? Influencer-driven marketing campaigns? Whatever it may be, understand that distribution is an important concern for any business today, so be sure to clearly explain how you'll get the word out.

The Funding You're After

How much capital has been raised previously and from whom? How much do you need at this stage of your company's growth? How many months of runway will this get you before your next funding round?

Financial projections are somewhat fabricated, particularly around top-line revenue forecasts. But cost and operating expense projections should be pretty well understood. Typically, entrepreneurs will show a roadmap that incorporates product development, launch plans, and other milestones, alongside their funding requirements along the way.

That can get cumbersome quickly. You need to have a financial model that can back up your "uses of funds" claims, but there's no need to put this in the initial pitch deck. Excerpts should instead go in the appendix alongside your financial projections.

How (Not) To Send Your Slides

A final piece of advice: While this could be a personal quirk, it's smart to use a system like DocSend when emailing out your pitch deck. You should only put into your deck whatever you're comfortable sharing, because you should assume it's going to get forwarded around.

PDFs can just bounce around from person to person without the original sender ever knowing who's had their eyeballs on them. But with Docsend, you can at least know who it's been forwarded along to and how long each reader spends on particular slides. That's valuable information—especially since most investors may only bank a few minutes.

Sunny Dhillon is a partner at Signia Venture Partners, an early-stage fund focused on seed- and series-A investment across consumer and enterprise software startups. Follow Sunny on Twitter at @SunDhillon.

Not sure what to say? Keep these rules in mind and you'll nail it.

You're at an awards dinner. Or maybe it's a grand opening, or even a retirement party. You're asked to say a few words, but you aren't sure how to do it. How do you find the right level of mush—not too mushy, but just mushy enough? It's a special occasion, so you want to give your audience a warm feeling, but you don't want to get too corny and make them cringe. Here are five simple tips to bear in mind for your next toast.

1. Start With The Obvious

When you gather together for a celebration, you share the same physical space with your audience. You all experience the same setting—the decor and so on. Yet inside, each of you still inhabits your own little world—noting the buzz of your smartphone, the thoughts in your head about the food or the people you're seated next to. So the first challenge any master of ceremonies or toast-maker faces is simply connecting with their audience by sharing the same mental space as well.

The easiest way to create that connection, of course, is simply to talk about what's in common with everyone: Why are you here together in the first place? When you begin with the obvious, it's like listening to the first notes of a familiar tune—everyone gets into the same groove.

For example, if you're celebrating a retirement, you could begin by saying something like, "We're here today to celebrate a transition—from ending to beginning, from the familiar to the unknown, from one challenge to another challenge." This may not sound especially original to you, but it's an effective way to quickly set the tone. By giving voice to the common experience, you bring the audience together, forging a feeling of unity.

2. Share Something About Yourself

From there, it's time to move away from anything potentially trite. Now that you have your audience thinking about the same thing, you want to instill a common feeling about it while also consolidating their focus on you. The easiest way to do that is by telling them a quick story about yourself that's relevant to the situation.

Don't worry—you aren't stealing the spotlight. Here's an example I might use from my own experience:

I remember the day in Montreal when I received a letter from the Quebec government. I had applied for a scholarship to achieve my dream of doing to graduate school. Would I be one of two people in the province to win the scholarship? My hands were shaking as I opened the letter. I was selected! That letter changed my life. Today, you too have opened a new envelope, achieved a new opportunity, forged a new beginning—and reached a new level of achievement.

By revealing personal moments like these, you establish a measure of trust that helps your audience feel open positively and open to what you have to say.

3. Stick With Short Sentences.

Nothing kills attention faster than somebody who drones on and on. The best remedy for that is to speak in short sentences. The shorter the sentence, the greater the punch.

For example, instead of saying, "David is a great asset to our company because he is a hard worker, he never complains, and nobody deals with customers better than he does," you could phrase it this way: "David is a great asset to our company. He's a hard worker. He never complains. Nobody deals with customers better." It doesn't mean cutting content, just breaking it into more digestible units.

4. Dare To Be Different

Recently I was at a wedding where the best man stood up, looked at the bride and groom, and began singing "Let It Go" from the movie Frozen (with a few special lyrics of his own). Now, singing a capella at a wedding may be a stretch for most of us, but he did get a standing ovation.

Don't hesitate to capitalize on your unique talents. Most toasts send pretty formulaic, so if there's something that only you can do that seems tasteful and appropriate to the situation, go for it! How you decide to make the occasion memorable is up to you, but make sure you find a way to stand out.

5. Make Sure You Don't Embarrass Anyone

If you're celebrating someone's achievement or toasting a friend at a wedding, it can be tempting to include an embarrassing story to get a laugh out of an audience. While this may work in certain circumstances, it's a risky proposition.

You may be confident in the other person's sense of humor, but that special moment might not be the right time for having a laugh at their expense. And even if they enjoy it, you might make the rest of the crowd uncomfortable. So unless you're absolutely sure you have a winner of a story, keep it positive.

Toasts can be nerve-wracking because it's only on rare occasions that we actually have to stand up and give them. But keep these basic pointers in mind and you'll leave your listeners with something memorable—for the right reasons.

Don't panic—or sign anything.

One of the most shocking conversations you will ever have in your job is when your boss tells you that you're done working for the company. Maybe it's a layoff that completely blindsides you. Maybe it's a performance-related issue that you were aware of.

No matter the cause, the actual event can be a total shocker. While getting fired and getting laid off may involve different things, it's important to handle the situation professionally either way. And one way to do that is to prepare for it before it happens. So if you're concerned at all about losing your job in the near future, this is well worth a read.

Because as challenging as it may be to stay focused and present in the conversation, that's your goal. It might be difficult to think of it as such, but this is an important business discussion. Think negotiating your severance or termination package.

Here are seven tips on how to handle yourself, and what to say when you're at a loss for words.

1. Stay Present And Manage Your Emotions

I once heard a colleague rant that she wanted to get laid off in the next round of workforce reductions. She was vocal about how she would welcome the chance to get away from her team, her boss, her job. In the next round, as luck would have it, she got laid off.

But she didn't run around and high five everyone declaring her happiness. She freaked out. She yelled. She told everyone how unfair the system was. She loudly declared she was not going to help transition her work to someone else. There was a tacit understanding among the managers that, "Yep, we made a good decision on that one."

You don't want to be that person.

Even if you hate your job and are pining for a layoff notice, a job loss can knock the wind right out of you. The choice to leave is no longer yours; someone has made the decision for you, and that can be hard to swallow.

Instead of ranting like my former colleague, take a long, slow exhale and ask for a minute to process the news. When you manage your emotions by pausing like this, you help yourself stay calm, and you give yourself a chance to be present for the rest of the inevitable conversation. And by not allowing yourself to react immediately, you preserve your hard-earned reputation.

2. Keep Your Dignity

A former employee was on a last-chance performance agreement. Basically, if he screwed up one more time, he'd be fired, and he knew it. Well, it wasn't long before he screwed up. When I delivered the news of his termination, I could see the layers of shock, regret, and remorse on his face. He might've cried. He promised to change his behavior. He begged me to change the decision. (I didn't.) It was cringe-worthy, and I was embarrassed for him.

When managers are preparing for layoffs and termination, the process is well on its way by the time you get the message. The organization's new head count has been calculated, the separation package prepared, and workspace charts changed. Begging for your job will almost never change the manager's mind. So keep your dignity intact and focus on the rest of your conversation.

3. Get Your Stories Straight

Ask how the company plans to represent your separation from the company. When you seek your next gig, your employer and you want to be singing the same karaoke lyrics, if you know what I mean.

You can help inform this. A simple request will do it: "I want to be sure that when you reference how I departed the company, it doesn't hurt my chances for my next job. Can we talk a bit about what you will say when others ask?" Ask for this in writing, so you have an official document that says you were laid off and not fired. If you've been fired, your employer might agree not to mention the termination and instead simply verify the dates you were employed by the organization.

4. Inquire About Getting Assistance In Finding A New Role

Many companies hire consultants to help employees find new gigs. Ask what kind of support, if any, the organization plans to provide. Determine how long that support will last, and what kind of career coaching you're eligible for. And again, get it in writing if you can.

5. Ask If You're Allowed To Apply For Other Positions Internally

Company policy may dictate this. Some places will let you do so right away. Others may impose a waiting period before rehiring or allowing you to freelance for the company in the future. If you were fired for performance-related issues, you probably don't want to ask, and your employer probably hopes you won't. But, if you're being let go because of team restructuring, it's worth asking what other opportunities may be available to you.

6. Take Care Of You

Get the details on severance, health insurance, when you can expect your final paycheck to arrive, how you will be compensated for unused vacation time, unused sick or personal time, when you'll be reimbursed for travel expenses, and how you're expected to get all of your things home. Some offices will offer to ship items to you so that you don't have to deal with the incredibly awkward and uncomfortable packing up your area while your employees work beside you.

If you have stock options, bonuses, sales commissions, tuition reimbursements, or other extras attached to your position, ask about those as well.

In a layoff, ask if you're going to be expected to help transition the work, what the expectations are, and how long that period will last. And if you're getting terminated, get clear on whether you're expected to leave the building ASAP or if you can take a few hours to clean up your computer and head out at the end of the day.

Once you've got a handle on these details, you can step away for a day or two, and test the areas where you'd like to negotiate. Perhaps you want more severance, a longer period in transition counseling, or a retention bonus for doing a super-great job transitioning your work. Be prepared to justify any requests and outline a specific proposal for what you'd like to see.

7. Don't Sign Anything

You're going to come up with more questions over time. Let your manager know you'll review all the information that's provided. Let her know you'll revert with any questions or clarification you need.

Until all the details are hashed out, don't sign anything. Most employers want you to sign a general release that says you'll bring no legal action against them. Your final payouts are contingent upon you signing the documents. If there was ever a good time to have an attorney read over a document before you sign it, this is it!

Unexpected moments like layoffs or terminations can feel like a devastating personal attack. And there's no doubt, they can be difficult to process. When you're able to step back and ask for what you need, however, you'll find a small sense of empowerment that might surprise you. No matter how hard the news is, stay cool, be a pro, and start thinking about your next move. And remember to take a couple of days before you hastily (and dramatically) post a major update on your social media channels.

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

If you want to retain your star employees, says Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, help them try out new roles inside the company.

A new analysis of LinkedIn data confirms what HR managers have long suspected: Millennials change jobs—a lot. Workers in the job force's youngest demographic switch employers an average of once every 2.5 years during their first decade out of college, twice the rate of their gen X predecessors. And these days, candidates aren't just switching jobs, they're often switching entire industries.

The verdict is still out on exactly why all this is happening, from a lingering post-recession hangover to youthful wanderlust or some other, more nuanced explanation that's harder to make. In the meantime, companies are struggling to manage the expense of high turnover—mine included. Though Hootsuite is well ranked by employees in our annual satisfaction survey, we still see a sizeable chunk of our staff turn over each year.

This has always bothered me. If people love the company, I've had to wonder, why are they leaving? The more employees I spoke with, the more I realized it wasn't about compensation (or, at least, just about compensation). Nor was it problems with bosses or coworkers. People were leaving because they wanted to try something new, to be challenged with a different role and a new set of responsibilities.

The challenge for me was suddenly clear: how to offer that in here, so our top talent wouldn't go searching for it out there.

"You Can Do That Here, Too"

For starters, creating "stretch" opportunities doesn't mean just helping them level up their existing skill sets. It means being able to explore and internalize different skills entirely.

I can relate. As a serial entrepreneur, I know the allure and excitement of moving from one venture to another. But that dynamic doesn't always work within a company, where people are hired for discrete roles and expected to excel within clear boundaries. If one of our developers decides she's bored with coding and wants to pursue a love of blogging for a living instead, she probably needs to find a new place to work.

Or maybe not.

It's a pretty universal hiring truth that great employees are great employees. It's not a particular skill set that sets them apart as much as their intrinsic attitude, focus, and dedication. All of these things can transfer readily from role to role, the question is how to actually make that happen.

Luckily, I had Google to turn to for inspiration. I learned from a member of my HR team that, for some time, Google has operated a unique rotation program. The idea is that Googlers get to step into another department in the company for a finite period of time, then return to their original role. They're allowed to test drive another position for up to six months, and the company keeps their original position secure the whole time. The idea is to let employees cross-train for other jobs without leaving the company.

I wondered if we could develop our own version of this. The goal was straightforward, but the mechanics proved a bit tricky: Which employees would be eligible? What about the hole left when they leave their current roles? How do we make sure real learning is going on and it's not just a waste of everyone's time?

We ultimately settled on some ground rules for a "stretch program" of our own. First, participants need to be performing at or above expectations already, based on performance reviews—success in one role is a powerful predictor of success elsewhere, after all—and to have been with the company for at least a year. Assignments to other divisions are capped at three months, giving participants up to a full quarter to test the waters.

To avoid disruption, "stretch" employees spend roughly one day a week on their adopted team during this 90-day period and the remaining time in their official role. Their existing manager needs to sign off on the move and be okay with the reduction in job duties. And importantly, participants are required to draft "learning plans" in advance and get approval from both their current and rotational manager.

At the conclusion of the trial, if the new role is truly working for everyone—and if the new manager has a need and the resources to bring on a new staffer—then that employee can make the jump full-time, once his or her old role has been backfilled. If things don't work out, no harm done—they're free to return full-time to the original role or try on a new assignment.

The Payoffs

Here at Hootsuite, this program is still in pilot stage. We kicked it off earlier this summer with roughly a half-dozen participants, but we're already seeing some positive results.

A leading salesperson originally focused on large, enterprise-level companies has stretched over to an assignment in our product management group. He's now working alongside our VP of operations to come up with ways of standardizing the life cycle for our products. He spends about 10 hours a week in this role and will wrap up his rotation at the end of September.

A social-media marketing specialist with experience using Facebook and Twitter as promotional tools has jumped over to our corporate development team. He's taking that tactical, hands-on knowledge of social media and is now evaluating how to incorporate newly acquired products into our larger business strategy. He dedicates about 15 hours a week to this rotation, which concludes in September.

Whether these individuals end up transitioning full time to their new roles or deciding to return to their home teams, the program still represents a win-win in many respects. It gives employees a chance to try out a new calling without ever leaving the company (which is a whole lot easier than hunting for a new job, only to find out it wasn't what you were looking for). Plus, they get a chance to build a professional network beyond their team and pick up new skills. In the best-case scenario, they actually find a brand-new career.

And for the company, it means we get to retain smart, passionate employees who want to grow and evolve. We can break down corporate silos and help our employees gain insight—and empathy—into other areas of the business, which they can help improve in the process. If you've never worked in sales, for instance, you might emerge with a newfound appreciation for the hustlers who keep revenue coming in the door—and maybe even come up with a fresh approach to the hustle.

In its third season, the show takes on the Silicon Valley of the '80s—and gets the details right, from plot points to on-set clutter.

Tech executive John Bosworth is ready to take my questions. As I fire up a note-taking app on my iPad, he leans back behind a desk at his San Francisco-based startup, Mutiny, surrounded by computers and other tools of his trade.

For a business reporter, this would be just another typical day on the beat. Except that we're not really in a San Francisco office but a painstaking replica of one constructed on a soundstage in Atlanta. And the computers it contains aren't sleek iMacs or ThinkPads: They're chunky, beige, floppy drive-equipped Commodore 64s.

Oh, and if you want to get technical, the guy I'm interviewing is not Bosworth but the actor who plays him, Toby Huss, who has opted to sink into the set's cushy office chair rather than perch on the folding studio chair that a PR handler has fetched.

Bosworth—I mean Huss—and I are chatting on the set of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC's drama about tech startups in the 1980s. For the show's third season, now airing on Tuesdays—the first two episodes are available for free streaming—the characters uproot themselves from Dallas and relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area en masse. He's explaining to me that on some level, it doesn't matter that the show takes place in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in 1986.

"It could be set anywhere," he argues. "It just happens to be in technology. But you're watching these people start something."

He's right. And yet Halt and Catch Fire takes its setting as seriously as any TV series I've ever seen. Much of the time, Hollywood is so disinterested in portraying technology accurately that it can't even be bothered to show a computer display that looks like a computer display. The creators of this show, by contrast, are obsessive about getting the details right.

It's not just that the scripts are crunchy with allusions, from PETSCII (a variant of ASCII code used by Commodore computers) to "Sandy" (Lerner, cofounder of Cisco), that are integrated so seamlessly that they enrich the experience if you get them and don't detract if they sail past your head. Like Mad Men, another prestige period piece that this one would bring to mind even if they weren't both AMC shows, Halt and Catch Fire is in part about how we got from the past to the present. During season three, the show's underdog entrepreneurs figure out how to accept online payments of the sort we'd eventually take for granted; establish themselves as an intermediary for peer-to-peer commerce, presaging what eBay did a decade later; blithely violate their customers' privacy in ways reminiscent of what a modern-day unicorn or two has been known to do; and devise the business model we now call "freemium." The details are made up, but the arc of history is real.

"Our characters don't know what happens after," says Scoot McNairy, who plays nerdy engineer Gordon Clark, as we commandeer the plush living room of Diane Gould, a venture capitalist played by Annabeth Gish in the new season, for an interview. But we 2016 TV watchers know how Halt and Catch Fire not only captures 1986 but hints at what was to come in 1996, 2006, and 2016. And the fact that the show is so deeply informed about its topic makes it one of the best pieces of filmed entertainment ever done about technology.

"The best compliment we can get," says Christopher Cantwell, who created the show with Christopher C. Rogers, "is when somebody says, 'I lived through it, and that's exactly what it felt like.'"

Go West, Young Companies

When the show debuted in 2014, it was set in 1983 in Dallas, at a time when Texas's "Silicon Prairie" rivaled Silicon Valley in importance to the burgeoning PC industry. Its main characters were Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) and McNairy's Gordon Clark and its plot involved the race to build clones of the IBM PC by reverse-engineering its BIOS code—an effort that was very much inspired by reality, but so obscure and nerdy that I did a double-take when I heard that someone was building a TV show around it.

By the second season, the storyline had shifted to focus on Mutiny, an online gaming company founded by Gordon's wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), and engineer Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis). In that season's last episode, the Clarks, Howe, and Bosworth decide to move Mutiny to San Francisco while MacMillan simultaneously relocates there to start MacMillan Utility, a PC software company.

Why the move? It felt inevitable, Cantwell says: "Our characters were becoming too big for that Silicon Prairie pond. They were ambitious enough and we wanted to see what happened when they made the move to the big leagues."

"There's an immediate impact on the story," says his co-creator Rogers. "We wanted to feel a dramatic increase in scope, entering a larger arena and competing not with upstarts but established companies with a lot of sway. Venture capitalists enter in a major way. Major empires will be built over the course of a number of months."

"Many people don't know much about the history of personal technology beyond "first came Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and then after that the World Wide Web and then Pokémon Go," Rogers adds. "We wanted to explore the lesser-known histories of the companies that had huge roles and were ahead of their time."

Both of the show's startups are engaged in businesses that were bleeding-edge in 1986 and eventually became huge. The new season centers on Mutiny's expansion beyond gaming into communications and commerce, reminiscent of the early development of proprietary online services such as America Online, which was known as Quantum Link at the time. Meanwhile, MacMillan is founding MacMillan Utility just as PC security starts to matter. In the real world, the first widespread IBM PC virus hit in 1986 and John McAfee released the first version of his VirusScan software the next year.

At Halt and Catch Fire's replica of 1980s San Francisco on its Atlanta soundstage, the Mutiny office is a set so sprawling that you could squeeze a decent-sized actual 2016 early-stage startup into it. As I take a self-guided tour of the brick-walled quarters, I see rows of desks equipped with Commodore 64 PCs; 5 1/4" floppy disks of multiple makes, including Memorex, 3M, and BASF FlexyDisk; a manual for Frogger for the Atari 2600; a copy of a spreadsheet program known as MicroPro CalcStar; technical books such as Structured Systems Programming; and countless other little pieces of history. The whole space is so dense with evocative artifacts that I wish I could channel Scrooge McDuck and burrow through them like a gopher.

Downstairs from Mutiny's office—which is really on an adjoining set, not another floor—is the second-hand mainframe computer that powers Mutiny's online service, an IBM 3033 in a rust-orange metal case equipped with add-ons such as IBM 3480 tape units. Also nearby is the headquarters of MacMillan Utility, a comparatively tidy, corporate space outfitted with gear such as a Mac Plus and a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 PC.

Even the house where the Clarks and Cameron live is appropriately decked out with tech. Anyone who watches attentively may notice that the TV set in the living room is not just any 1980s TV set, but a J.C. Penney one. Which seems like the perfect choice.

As much as the Halt and Catch Fire's creators and writers, it's production designer Craig Stearns, property master Jason Davis, and all the other people responsible for how the show looks who are responsible for bringing its world to life. "For most of the time we were sitting in Studio City in this conference room talking to a bunch of writers and dreaming up ten episodes," says Mark Lafferty, the author of "Yerba Buena," the third season's fifth episode, which was in production the day I visited the set. "It all feels very abstract even if you've done it before. To walk onto the Mutiny set … It's so vast and capacious and lovely to look at. And I can sit at a desk and look at a 5 1/4" floppy or a Byte magazine or Atari instruction manual I recognize from my youth. It's a head trip and really wonderful."

Starting with season two, the show worked with the historians at Seattle's Living Computer Museum, started by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, to outfit the Mutiny office and other sets with computers and related paraphernalia. Even if you're aware that Commodore 64s remain readily available from eBay and other sources, it's dazzling to see so many in one place—all in good condition and all outfitted with the correct floppy-disk drives, monitors, and dial-up modems.

Vintage IBM mainframes are a bit harder to come by than Commodores, not to mention more difficult to transport. So unlike most of the tech depicted on the show, the single most important computer on Halt and Catch Fire, the IBM mainframe, is a replica, not a relic. It's a full-scale model built for the set, based on the original plans from IBM's archives and reconstructed in consultation with the Living Computer Museum. It's so ambitious a piece of fakery that when I saw it in person, I wasn't sure if it was the real deal or not, and had to ask.

Keeping It Real

I'm on the Halt and Catch Fire set eavesdropping on a conversation between producer/writer Lafferty and costar Bishé, who's filming a scene with a mention of a Bay Area bedroom community:

Lafferty: Kerry, one pronunciation thing—take it or leave it.

Bishé, gasping: Am I mispronouncing a word?

Lafferty: You're not mispronouncing it. You're saying it correctly, Los Gatos. I'm from Los Gatos. If you're a local, you say "Las Gaddis"

Bishé: Las—what is it?

Lafferty: "Las Gaddis"

Bishé, incredulous: "Las Gaddis!?!"

Lafferty: Like it's totally Americanized.

Bishé: Ooooooh, that sounds so bad.

Lafferty and Bishé go on to ruminate that Bishé's character, Donna Clark, went to school in Berkeley and might know that the people who live in Los Gatos don't know how to say "Los Gatos." For the record: In the show as broadcast, she pronounces it as if she were saying "the cats" in Spanish, as someone who'd recently relocated from Texas might well do. But the fact that this debate happened at all is a sign of the care that goes into making Halt and Catch Fire feel authentic.

For most of Halt and Catch Fire's principal actors, the program's setting is less nostalgic than novel. After all, at the beginning of 1986, McNairy, Pace, Bishé, were eight years old, six, and one, respectively, and Davis had not yet been born. "I love the world that we're exploring and I learn too much every day, because it's a world that I'm really not personally familiar with, outside of the show," Davis says.

Only Huss, at 19, was more or less an adult during the show's era. But even he doesn't claim to be an expert on its era's technology. When he first saw the basement set's IBM mainframe-which occupies multiple giant cabinets—he wasn't sure what it was. "I asked Mackenzie and Kerry, 'What are these called?,'" he says, recreating the conversation. "And Mackenzie went 'Oh, these are the big computers.' And I went, 'Those aren't computers.' She said, 'No, they're filled with computers.' I went, 'What do you mean, they're filled with computers?' She said, 'I don't know what they are!' And Kerry went, 'I think they're the mainframes.'

They may not be tech historians, but the cast members like knowing that plot points and the tech detritus on the set are period-accurate. That allows them to focus on the people they portray rather than the setting. And it's the Silicon Valley ethos that they find interesting, more than the accoutrements.

"That's what's intriguing about the characters. All they want to do is create and build and change the world," says McNairy. "They don't care about anything other than that. I love that they just throw money around, or give it away. They don't care about the money, they care about the work."

"The writers do their homework so well, and I do a different kind of homework," says Bishé. "I tried to understand the computer stuff, until I realized that my job isn't to try to understand the computer stuff. My job is to understand the people who understand the computer stuff."

The writers do indeed do their homework, pretty much literally. When writing began on season three, with an all-new staff, creators Cantwell and Rogers kicked things off by providing a detailed overview of what was going on in the technology business, pop culture, and the world at large in 1986. Then the writers dived into works of history that provided useful context, such as Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, Po Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift, and David A. Kaplan's The Silicon Boys.

Of course, the writers weren't telling the stories of any of the companies mentioned in these books. For a work of fiction like For Halt and Catch Fire, accuracy is less about sticking to the precise facts than it is about retaining a basic level of plausibility. "Mutiny is not just PlayNet or Q-Link or the Source or CompuServe or anything," says Rogers. "But the tech they're chasing should feel viable and like what people were doing in 1986." (The show both references real companies and borrows bits of them for its imaginary startups: For instance, Mutiny's avatar-based chat certainly seems to derive aesthetic inspiration from Lucasfilm's Habitat, which was offered on Quantum Link, later to be known as America Online, in real-world 1986.)

As the authors of Halt and Catch Fire episodes crammed their work with tech references, they called on writers' assistant Katie Edgerton for research help. "She's supernatural," Lafferty says.

Since the show's beginning, its creators and writers have also been aided in their quest for accuracy by technical consultant Carl Ledbetter. Currently a venture capitalist, he has a decades-long résumé including experience at tech companies from AT&T to Sun Microsystems to Prime Computer.

Ledbetter was introduced to Cantwell and Rogers as they were creating the show, and helped them ground their fictional tale of the PC industry in reality. During the period depicted in the first season, he was an executive at IBM, albeit not in its PC division: "I was just far enough removed to have a neutral view, but close enough to have seen it," he says.

After briefing the the show's creators on the early days of the PC business, he found glimmers of actual history showing up in their storyline. It's not a coincidence, he says, that the names Gordon Clark and Donna Clark sound vaguely like those of Gary Kildall and Dorothy Kildall, the husband and wife who started Digital Research, once Microsoft's archrival among PC software companies—even though the Clarks are not otherwise modeled on the Kildalls in any specific fashion.

Over three seasons, the questions Ledbetter has fielded as technical consultant include "What did an IBM mainframe cost?," "What were venture-backed valuations in 1982?," and "How did you actually recover data of a disk?" Some of the answers are permanently lodged in his brain; others are in reference materials he has on hand; and in some cases they involve far-flung research. He even writes code from scratch so that if an engineer is shown at work, the lines of programming shown on the PC monitor are real and appropriate.

If you bother to fact-check the show's dialog, as I did while watching the third season's first five episodes, you get a sense of how much care has gone into the little details that make 1986 feel like 1986. Even Mad Men got in trouble for minor violations of reality such as showing IBM Selectric typewriters a year before they were available. But when Gordon mentioned having been obsessed with CompuServe's CB Simulator chat service a few years earlier, I was confident that he could have been. (Turns out the service launched in 1980.)

Almost everything checks out so well that on the rare occasion that I spot anything that's even arguably off, it feels like a little victory—like when Joe makes a reference to Coleco being in the video game business, an industry it abandoned in late 1985. But you know what? I'll bet that even in the real world, people still thought of Coleco as a video game company in 1986.

Sometimes Ledbetter's contributions go beyond mere verification of facts and help shape the story. Case in point: During one scene I witnessed being filmed, Donna and Cameron have an intense debate about whether their service should accept credit cards or not. As I watched, I realized I couldn't remember offhand what the state of online credit-card acceptance was in 1986. Ledbetter told me he was similarly foggy on the details when the script was in the works: "I had the exact same issue, even though I lived through that era."

As Ledbetter helped make sure that plot point was accurate, the discussion stretched to dozens of emails; in the end, he advised that "it was just barely doable in the era of 1986, when that occurred." But he also pointed out that at the time, Mutiny could have used SWIFT numbers to accept payment via electronic bank withdrawals, a period-appropriate touch that made it into the final episode.

As I watched Bishé and Davis perform take after take of Donna and Cameron's heated argument over whether the online world should be sullied with credit-card transactions, it felt real even though the long-term upshot was obvious. That's a tightrope walk the show frequently has to walk: "Nobody wants to see a show where it's a foregone conclusion and someone's arguing for the Betamax when everyone knows it loses,' Rogers says.

History, One Season At A Time

At the end of season two's final episode, "Heaven is a Place," Halt and Catch Fire teed up the current episodes by showing the Mutiny staff on a plane to California. "We write every season like it can be a satisfying, fully fledged story with a beginning, a middle, and an end," says Cantwell. "But we do like to leave some things hanging."

For a while, it looked like they might leave things hanging forever. Though generally well-reviewed by critics and beloved by its fans, the show has been far from a smash ratingswise. AMC didn't announce that it was renewing the series until October 2015, a couple of months after TV watchers learned the characters were on their way to San Francisco. Its fate after the first season had been similarly suspenseful: When TV critic James Poniewozik praised it in August 2014, he wrote about it in the past tense.

"After the first season I went 'Well, that was fun. I don't know if they're going to pick this up again,'" recalls Huss. "And they did, and we got season two. We all thought, 'That was fun, that was a great time. I'm going to miss those guys.' And they picked it up. It's always a surprise. A nice one."

"I'm sure the network would prefer for it to be another way, but there's this thing about the show that I love so much," says Davis. "It's like acting camp for us in the spring, and then it comes out. And the people who know about it really care about it. It feels cool. It feels like this thing that you have to choose to find."

Whatever happens to Halt and Catch Fire after this season, it's nowhere near running out of history to mine. Some of the richest material of all would come in the next few years after 1986, as the migration began from proprietary online networks like Mutiny's service to the open, commercialized internet. (Season three's final episode, airing in October, is titled "NeXT"—a tantalizing reference to Steve Jobs's second startup, which bridged the gap between his first and second eras at Apple.)

In a way, Halt and Catch Fire is a startup about startups. AMC produces the show as well as airing it; if the company can create a sustainable business model, the series can continue on as long as its creators have tales left to tell. The network, says Cantwell, "has been a wonderful partner. They believe in the show, they believe in us, and they believe in the story. They too want to know what's next."