The high-tech fashion brand spent two years developing women's garments that promise to get you through a workday without the usual fails.

There are few items of clothing professional women love more than a well-draped silk shirt. They're the equivalent of men's well-tailored Oxford shirts: classic, elegant, and versatile enough to look appropriate in almost any business context. But they're also difficult to maintain: Silk wrinkles easily, doesn't absorb perspiration, and needs to be dry cleaned.

Boston-based fashion brand Ministry (formerly Ministry of Supply) has heard our lament. They conducted 70 in-depth interviews with women about their workwear needs and found this common complaint: Elegant blouses that actually withstand the rigors of the modern workday—which can sometimes last 16 hours—are near impossible find. An average day might involve running to catch a bus or a train, giving a presentation under glaring conference room lights, sitting at a desk till late at night, and going for an impromptu dinner date. At the end of all of that, most shirts are a crumpled, sweat-stained mess.

Ministry gathered all of this feedback and spent two years creating a high-performance women's work shirt as part of its debut womenswear collection, launching today. Until now, the five-year-old company has been focused on creating menswear made with cutting-edge new textiles, but cofounder Gihan Amarasiriwardena explains that when they were developing the womenswear collection, they didn't just remake their men's garments in women's sizes. Men, for instance, had no use for a silk shirt. "People told us, 'You already have all the fabrics for the men's collection, why not just cut them for women?'" he says. "But to be true to our design process, we decided we had to go back to the drawing board."

Their brand-new, aptly named Easier Than Silk Shirt looks and feels like silk, but is actually made from a Japanese technical fabric (i.e., a textile engineered to perform functions, like protecting the wearer from extremely high temperatures). It drapes nicely, wicks moisture, is wrinkle-resistant, and can be thrown in a regular washer and dryer. I tested the shirt on a typical Monday. This meant getting dressed at 7 a.m., taking my baby to a health checkup—where she proceeded to drool on me—wiping myself off for a lunch interview, then heading to a coffee shop to write for several hours before going to a book launch party. By the time I got home that evening and looked in the mirror, the shirt was somehow crease-free and there were no moisture blotches in sight.

When Ministry claims to "engineer a shirt," it does not mean this in a metaphorical sense. The by three MIT students, Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, and Kit Hickey; the former two were trained as engineers. Every aspect of Ministry's design process incorporates scientific thinking, from introducing NASA temperature-regulating textile technology into dress shirts to using equipment to test each garment before it hits the market. The Ministry headquarters in Boston is full of machines, including one that pulls at fabric to see how well it is able to recover from being stretched, and computer systems that offer 3D modeling of the human form.

But function wasn't the founders' one and only goal. They were also committed to creating outfits that looked sharp. To this end, in 2013, they hired Jarlath Mellett as design director. He previously held top roles at Theory and Brooks Brothers and has been central to designing the new womenswear line. "If we don't nail the fit and the style—if you don't look good—then all the technology we're using becomes irrelevant," says Advani.

Mellett has applied the approach he used at Theory—make a few simple, excellently tailored basics—to Ministry's introductory women's collection. There are just four pieces: a collared and collarless shirt for $85 each, and skinny and wide-leg pants for $140 each. The idea is to have a set of reliable staples that you can wear all year around and that you might accessorize with a scarf or jewelry.

There are other garments in the works, including a dress, but each product has a long lead time because each garment has to solve a particular problem. The pants, for instance, have 16-hour shape retention, which is important, because many slim-fitting women's dress pants often become saggy in the knees by lunchtime. (I test-drove the trousers for one day and can confirm they retained their shape, although I wish the material had felt more organic and less like nylon.) "We always talk about how it's easy to make something look good at 8 a.m., but it's much harder to make something look good at 9 p.m.," Amarasiriwardena says. "We don't just want to sell product: We want to be at the front of your closet and create pieces you want to put on every day."

Ministry has managed to find investors who are willing to be patient with the startup's slow approach to innovation. It has raised four rounds of funding to the tune of $8.5 million and will use this money to expand its brick-and-mortar footprint beyond its current stores in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Naturally, this will be a deliberate process. "This is such an emotional business: We get so excited about creating these products and getting them out into the world," Advani says. "But the engineering principles we adhere to force us to stay disciplined. You can't rush the process, you need to go through every step and be methodical."

"I receive hundreds of thank-you notes each year," says one recruiter. "Unfortunately, many are terrible."

My team and I interview hundreds of job candidates each year. And that means I receive hundreds of thank-you notes each year. Unfortunately, many are terrible.

The first thing to keep in mind any time you're writing to thank an interviewer for taking time to chat with you is that many other people are doing the same. You want to stand out, but for the right reasons. Hiring managers and recruiters are always looking for reasons to push one candidate toward the front of the pack and disqualify others—that's their job.

So that means that what you may think of as a simple convention of thank-you note writing is actually a blunder that your interviewer sees multiple times a day. That's bad. Here are six of the most common of those mistakes that you'll want to avoid.

1. Formatting Them Like Letters

The decision of whether or not to proceed with a candidate for a job search is often made within hours, not days, of an interview. So while a handwritten note may be classy, emails are simply the best way to go. They're more immediate than letters and more formal than texts.

But a thank-you email needs to look like an email, not a letter. Don't include your return physical address or the interviewer's physical address. And skip the overly stuffy, formal language—you want the reader to get excited about you, not want to take a nap.

2. Writing Big, Dense Paragraphs

Do you frequently read non-urgent emails that are more than a paragraph long? Do you do that on your smartphone? Exactly.

Long, dense emails get placed on the "I'll-read-this-when-I-have-more-time" back burner. If you want your thank-you note to be read quickly (or at all), make it easy for the interviewer to do so. Keep it short, concise, and to the point.

3. Rehashing A Failed Interview

The interviewer was there, too, and knows what was covered. You don't need to recap the entire conversation. If you didn't do well during the conversation, a very long, unpleasant-to-read, repetitive email isn't going to turn things around for you.

If you think you performed poorly (and it happens to the best candidates!), accept your losses, figure out what lessons you learned, and move on to the next opportunity.

4. Asking To Connect On LinkedIn—Or Worse, Facebook And Instagram

Wait at least until you're invited back to a second round or get some positive signals from the company before shooting out LinkedIn connection requests. Sending a LinkedIn request to an interviewer too early is like asking for a second date when the other person isn't into you. Facebook and Instagram are even more intimate—so avoid them until you're actually hired and have become real-life friends with the person who hired you (in other words, until much, much later).

5. Self-Plagiarizing

Sending the same message to everyone who interviewed you is both lazy and counterproductive. In many cases, hiring managers within the same company or recruiters within a firm will often share messages with each other and will think less of you for sending the same message to multiple parties. Besides, any reader can tell when an email is generic. Personalized, thoughtful messages will give you the greatest positive impact, and they don't have to be long, arduous things to write (see mistake No. 2 above).

6. Writing Merely For Etiquette's Sake

Etiquette, like all cultural norms, changes over time. In many ways, writing a thank-you note for an interview is an outdated practice in its own right. After all, both parties invested their time. The interviewer was just doing her job. No one was doing anyone any favors. So why say thanks at all?

The thing is, that isn't a thank-you note's main purpose. Instead of writing a generic thank-you because you feel protocol compels you to, craft a thoughtful follow-up note on a specific topic or even an article relating to something you discussed during the interview.

In other words, use it as an occasion to move forward the conversation you had in person. If it's really thoughtful, the interviewer will be inclined to continue it. And as a bonus, it'll just be more enjoyable for her to read. All of this serves your purpose better—and, hopefully, brings you one step closer to an offer.

Mathilde Pribula is a partner at the HR executive search firm Frederickson Pribula Li, where she leads the search practice for high-growth startup, tech unicorn, and Fortune 100 clients.

It took the Chromebook just five years to become the country's most popular education device. Here's how Google won the classroom.

A Mozart duet echoes through the dim auditorium of Philadelphia's String Theory high school, performed by a pair of plaid-skirted violinists reading music off their school-issued iPads. In other classes at the performing-arts-themed public charter school, students use their iPads to plot DNA data, design graphics, and make movies. At first glance, the school is a model Apple education customer, buying into both its hardware and iOS ecosystem.

A more complicated reality lies beneath the tablet glass. Teachers at String Theory distribute curriculum via Apple's iTunes U—but students use Google Docs and Google Drive to complete and submit assignments. "They get the full App Store experience, and they can also use all the functionality of Google," says Christine DiPaulo, the school's director of innovation. "It's the best of both worlds."

Apple may not share that perspective. Since the Apple IIe desktop computer found a home in California schools in the '80s, ushering in the era of the classroom PC, Apple and Microsoft have vied for the attention of American students. With the introduction of the iPad in 2010, Apple had a tool poised to displace the PC as an education essential, and the app-based software to go along with it. Within a few years, the company was selling millions of the touch-screen devices to schools, eclipsing Microsoft, which was marketing its own devices and free Office software to students. In 2013, Apple devices accounted for 50% of shipments to U.S. classrooms, according to research firm Futuresource Consulting. Microsoft, despite its lead globally, came in second at 29%.

It's an entirely different picture today: Google now dominates K–12 education in the United States, even in schools, like String Theory, that have formal relationships with Apple and Microsoft. Just five years after Google introduced its bare-bones Chromebook laptop—which runs a software suite that includes Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts, and more, and retails for as low as $150—the search giant has topped both Apple and Microsoft in U.S. education sales. It shipped more than 5 million devices to U.S. buyers in 2015, roughly twice the total of each of its rivals. In the first quarter of 2016, the Chrome operating system's share of shipments to U.S. classrooms hit 51%—a number that will continue to rise, according to Futuresource.

"This is a real battleground," says Mike Fisher, Futuresource's associate director of educational technology. At stake: the roughly $43 billion worldwide market for educational hardware and software, which is expected to double by 2020, even as the global PC market declines and tablet sales slow. And the significance extends beyond the classroom. If students develop familiarity with an operating system at an early age, or so the thinking goes, they will prefer it in their future professional lives. (That's certainly been Microsoft's strategy; the company, which still leads education sales outside of the U.S., emphasizes that proficiency with applications like Word and Excel is a critical workplace skill.) Caught on their heels in the U.S., and anxious that Google's Chromebooks will soon repeat their success overseas, Apple and Microsoft are fighting to regain momentum. First, they need to convince educators that in a world of rapidly changing technology they can give both students and teachers a competitive edge.

In a classic Google move, the company began infiltrating American schools not by selling products, but by giving something away for free. It started wooing teachers in 2006 with Google Apps for Education, a software suite that includes classroom-management tools, along with Gmail and Google Drive. By observing classes and incorporating teachers' ideas into the products, Google won millions of converts to its education tools. (Facebook began following Google's footsteps this fall, supporting California's nonprofit Summit Public Schools charter network in the rollout of learning-management software built with the social network's engineers.) Google's resource investment started paying off when the company introduced the Chromebook in 2011 and adopted an unorthodox early distribution strategy. Most education sales in the U.S. happen at the district level and involve months of needs assessment and negotiation before devices are, generally, shipped by the thousands. Google, impatient to gain traction, simply bundled 30 Chromebooks together with a charging cart and a printer and started pitching them to schools. While Apple and Microsoft were waiting for their multimillion-dollar contracts to come up for renewal, enterprising teachers were maneuvering to put the affordable, easy-to-share Chromebooks into students' hands. "We found teachers who were able to secure budget and go and buy those for their classroom," says Rajen Sheth, director of product management for Android and Chrome in business and education. "[Chromebooks] were flying off the shelves."

That initial flurry of interest in the devices turned into an avalanche in 2014 as state-mandated achievement tests moved online. Forced to adapt, districts around the country upgraded their Wi-Fi and snapped up no-frills Chromebooks by the tens of thousands. Today, more than 60 million students worldwide use school-issued education accounts for Google's standard productivity apps each month, from email to spreadsheets, while their teachers use Google Classroom to create class websites that serve as a central hub for assignments, notes, and more.

The Chromebook has its detractors. Some educators say that browser-focused laptops fail to engage students in the same way as touch-screen devices, like iPads and Surface tablets. Students perceive the iPad as a personalized device that enables creativity, says String Theory cofounder Jason Corosanite—a difference that, in his view, justifies the higher price tag, typically in the range of $400 or more. After Corosanite's school switched from laptops to iPads in 2011, he says, students' time spent on tasks, an indicator of learning in progress, "went through the roof."

Apple executives similarly argue that iPads, with their cameras, gyroscopes, and rich library of apps, are uniquely suited to encourage the kind of creative problem solving that American schools seek to nurture. They can be used for just about any kind of hands-on lesson. "iPad doesn't have to be left on a desk," says Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of product marketing and applications. "It's a microscope, it's a video camera." With the two-year-old iPad app Playground Physics, for example, students can film friends out on the swings, and then track and analyze their arc of motion. The app, developed by award-winning design studio Local Projects on behalf of the New York Hall of Science, is emblematic of the type of wow-worthy content that first drew educators into the Apple ecosystem.

Such apps still sell iPads. But today, there is good (if not great) educational content available for all the major operating systems. At the same time, teachers and administrators are increasingly interested in the kind of management tools that Google's Chromebooks are uniquely suited to deliver: setting up student accounts, updating software, grading homework, and more. And with classroom Wi-Fi improving, schools can take advantage of free access to Google's massive cloud servers, which store student data and sync updates to homework assignments. Plus, administrators can manage the Chromebook remotely—an enormous advantage for short-staffed district technology teams juggling thousands of student and teacher accounts.

In response, Apple has started rolling out its Classroom App, giving teachers the means to control all the devices in a classroom, and has introduced tools that make it easier for schools to generate and manage login IDs. Microsoft also now has a "Classroom" offering as part of its Office 365 Education suite, which provides teachers with a way to organize course materials and to communicate with students and includes the cloud-based collaborative software OneNote, a rival to Google Docs.

This new software may check the right boxes, but Adam Newman, founding partner at education advisory firm Tyton Partners, predicts that Google will retain its edge due to its strong bond with teachers—not to mention its price. He sees a place for Apple as a premium product, "but it will be as a lighthouse, not necessarily as a real share leader." Microsoft is better positioned, thanks to its global advantage. The challenge, says Newman, is that "there's a complexity to what Microsoft is offering, and in a lot of places that complexity can be overwhelming." Teachers just want tech that works, no hassle.

In June, however, Microsoft took a step toward charming teachers—and repositioning itself at the forefront of innovative learning—with the launch of Minecraft: Education Edition. The classroom-oriented version of the popular computer game, which teaches children computational thinking and other STEM building-block skills, is now available for between $1 and $5 per student. (Microsoft acquired the company that developed the game for $2.5 billion in 2014.) "There's really nothing like it among our competitors," says Tony Prophet, Microsoft's corporate vice president for education marketing, adding that the game has generated "huge excitement from educators around the world."

Google, meanwhile, is onto the next platform. Last year, it began using Google Cardboard to allow students to take virtual-reality "field trips" as part of their regular art, history, and science lessons. Already, more than 1 million students in 11 countries have taken one—and more are on their way.

The company's CEO talks about focusing on news, ramping up video, incorporating AI, balancing safety with freedom of speech, and more.

In a tech industry full of executives prone to loudly proclaiming their intention to transform the world in multiple ways all at once, Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey stands out for his understated approach, which involves picking a few things that matter and then obsessing over them. Our October cover story chronicles the focus that he's chosen for Twitter: making it the best place to follow live news and events, including even NFL games and other sports playing right inside the app. That's how the company hopes to defy its skeptics—who, more than ever, arelegion—and get the world thinking of it as something other than a social network that will never catch up with Facebook in terms of sheer scale.

Herewith, an edited transcript of my interview with Dorsey, which I conducted in late July at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

Fast Company: It's pretty obvious you've been really busy. Almost every day, there's at least one and sometimes several announcements of new features, partnerships, and developments. But can we start by talking about the high-level picture of where Twitter is going?

Jack Dorsey: We're seeing a whole lot more momentum, and showing that as well, which has been fantastic to witness, and really energizing for the team. It all comes back to the role we serve in the world, and what people use us for. The clearest use case that is really strong for Twitter is around real-time use. And we've described that as "live."

It's something we've seen around the platform for close to 10 years. People see an event unfold in the world, and we ask a simple question: "What's happening?" And they comment on it. It's not just being able to deliver that news in real time and to do it with speed, faster than anyone else out there. But also to provide this really interesting social commentary around it, so that anyone can comment on what's happening and give their own opinion. And sometimes conversations emerge from that.

Those are the two strengths we're really focused on. I meant to find the tweet from this reporter that I thought was really interesting. He captured it really well, and I'll find it for you. He tweeted, "When something is happening in the world, Twitter saves me time. And when nothing is happening, Twitter wastes my time."

We're really good at delivering news faster than anyone else, and doing it with an individual voice. And that's where a lot of our focus has been. Everything you see around what we're doing with the product, to all of the livestream deals that we're making, is really consistent with who we've been for two years. We notice that people are tweeting about football games, people are tweeting about the Democratic National Convention (DNC), people are tweeting about the Republican National Convention (RNC). What if we could actually bring that into one experience, so you didn't have to find a television, you didn't have to find where the stream was, but actually you could just open up Twitter, you could watch it right there, and then you could comment on it?

That opens the potential for some really cool experiences that we're excited to bring to people. News that really shapes culture. And to do so in a very personalized way that enables anyone to be a newsmaker or provide commentary or report on what's happening.

Venturing Into Video

Was the need for video an epiphany, or was it something that gradually became clear to you?

I think it's just that the technology can now support it. We now have cameras everywhere. We have more bandwidth to enable livestreaming. We invested in some technology that removes the barrier around the type of device and the network it's on. This Magic Pony acquisition we made, where the livestream can actually be digitally re-created in real time, takes the constraint of device or network away completely. So we can actually increase the audience that could watch the DNC, for instance, or the RNC. And you can do it while you're traveling home on the train, where you might have a spotty network, you can still see something with a look and feel that's HD-like.

I think the technology available today has made video more possible. But it really doesn't matter what medium people use. What matters to us is our speed. How simple, how quick, can we make the interaction. How quick can we show people what's happening, in every medium. And video is a big expectation that people have around how they consume things today.

How will that impact the product in terms of the user experience? I watched the political conventions and saw video and tweets in one place, and I got the potential.

That experience is great. We're doing the thing that people have been doing for close to 10 years, which is they watch a screen, and they tweet about it. We're bringing that into the same screen, and most importantly, we're making that mobile, so you can watch it anywhere.

You can dive even deeper into the video and that experience, especially with all of these technologies we're building around deep learning and computer vision, which this acquisition was a big part of. It's about making the video smarter and more interactive, and there's certainly a lot to explore there. But what we're focused on right now is making sure that we provide the most live and the highest-quality watching experience for these events, and that the tweets you see are relevant. They continue to make the event more interesting, or more entertaining. Or in the case of the conventions, more focused on fact checking, and just showing people a different point of view based on what you're seeing on the screen.

There's definitely a lot there. And then, also, how do we integrate things like Periscope, to provide a more inidividual perspective on the same event? We're simulcasting CBS's feed for the conventions, but there are people in the audience Periscoping. And having their own Q&As and going around the scenes of the conventions, maybe to the protests outside, for instance. That's interesting, and that could be integrated within that experience. These are all the things we're curious about and we're looking at.

How far down the road are you of doing the deals, creating the technology, and so forth?

Every day we announce more and more. It's super early. We started with Wimbledon and went straight to the RNC and learned a lot with both of those, and are applying those learnings to the DNC, for instance. People really appreciate the quality of the stream. Where we can be better is making it easier to find and to share. But that's next. Right now is making sure that we get the quality right. So when you're actually there and when people get that experience, they see something that's really meaningful and valuable. Next is really broadening the audience, utilizing everything we have to bear as a network. We are completely open, so that anywhere a tweet can be seen, that stream can be watched. Which is awesome to see.

You've already signed a bunch of streaming deals, especially for sports. Will you continue to fill in other holes?

We're focused on news, sports, and entertainment. There's a lot there. Bloomberg was a big one. Anything that can bring to bear a bigger audience, because the audience is moving to mobile, and watching more of these sorts of events and content on their phones, when they're traveling or commuting.

We think we have a really great experience, because we can bring tweets to it. We can bring the commentary on top of it. We'll be doing a lot more with sports, we'll be doing a lot more with news and politics. And a lot more with entertainment as well.

An Infusion Of AI

Can you talk about the work of your Cortex team? Artificial intelligence, in the past, was not something people generally associated with Twitter.

Where I'm really focused and fascinated is around deep learning. It's a new field, really manifested in a tangible way in 2010. It's pretty early. But it enables a lot of different experiences, and Cortex is a strength we've been building internally for a bit.

One of the areas they're working on right now is the Highlights feature of Periscope. We realize that not everyone is going to be able to catch something live. I get notifications that someone's gone live on Periscope all the time, all day. But I'm in a meeting or doing whatever, and I just can't watch it. With this technology, we can actually determine what matters most within that broadcast, in real time, and show people the highlights of what happened. That fits perfectly with what Twitter is, because Twitter has short-form content bursts of information and entertainment, where you can quickly digest what's happening.

With text, that's really easy, because you can quickly read the 140 characters. With video, it's a little harder, because you have to watch everything. And with what Cortex has done with Highlights, you don't. You can just see where the action was, and what matters. And then you get to make the choice: "I want to watch the whole thing."

But more importantly, from those Highlights, you can have a conversation about them on Twitter, provide some commentary about it. So it continues to create new conversation pieces for people. And that's really the goal of the team. But in the past, we haven't had a lot of this discipline within the company. And now we do, and we're really building upon it. Hence the acquisition of Magic Pony. And we'll continue to find and hire great teams to strengthen this, because it's a technology we can leverage everywhere.

The AI in features like Highlights is pretty transparent to the user. Do you expect there to be any things down the road that blow people away?

We have machine learning and deep learning folks all over the company. Where we have probably the most strength right now is within the timeline team. We've been enhancing the timeline this year and making sure that when people come back to Twitter, they see what matters most and what's important, and they can quickly get back to recency in everything, and live. What will blow people away is, I'll be able to open up Twitter in the morning and see exactly what I need to see. And it's not just what I like, it's what's important. I think that's our role. It's really showing what's important in the world. What's important around the topics you care about. And what's happening around you, locally.

That's really hard to do. In the release of enhancing the timeline, we've seen every sort of activity on Twitter go up. Retweets, which you'd expect. But even people tweeting has improved, since we've really worked and focused on making the timeline better and showing more of the important things. Because when people see a tweet they want to talk about it. They want to get into the conversation, they want to provide their own commentary.

Watch the timeline. We have an opportunity to be—and I've said this before—as easy to use as looking out the window and figuring out what's happening. It should feel like that. Right now, it doesn't. Right now, it feels like a lot of work, and you have to do a lot of work up front to build a great timeline. And then you have to do a lot of work to dig through it, to find the most meaningful stuff.

We think we can help there. And that's consistent with what Highlights does. You don't have to do any work to scrub, or to fast-forward, or rewind. It just does it for you.

Telling Twitter's Story

Your new ads try to explain Twitter to someone who maybe doesn't understand it all that well. As you aim for growth, is that a tricky thing, going beyond the people who already love it?

Over the last 10 years, we've had hundreds of use cases on Twitter. And we need to really make sure we have a point of view on where we have a lot of strength. And that's around what's happening. It's around news. It's around social commentary. The goal of that campaign—and this is just a start—is to clearly define Twitter. You may have come in here assuming you're going to see baby pictures from your friends. What you're going to see is what's happening in sports and politics and the world around you.

You might find baby pictures from your friends on it, but that's not the overwhelming majority use case. We're not a social network as people think about it. I do think we are a news network, and we're a unique one, because we aggregate all the news media brands into one place, all of the individual voices into one place. And we allow anyone to comment on it in real time. And that's fundamentally new, and something the world really hasn't seen before.

That really enables us to show importance, the people that are shaping culture, and how some of the most important dialogues, conversations, and events in the world are on us. And for folks to discover it on us, faster than anywhere else.

That was the goal, but as a start. It's step one, and there's many steps to come in telling that story. But we just need to get a lot better about . . . Twitter has been used for hundreds of things that are all extremely different, but we are going to focus on one to speak about. And to really put our strength behind that, as a way to get in, to understand what it might be for, and why I might use it personally.

Twitter as an agent for social change, such as with Black Lives Matter, has been important to you for a long time. As you move to this new era beyond 140 characters, do you see it being even more powerful?

Definitely. We've definitely seen our usage steer toward a lot of activism, a lot of people raising their voices to power, to question what needs to change and how things need to evolve. And technologies like Periscope bring that even farther into the fold.

It's an entirely new manifestation of what I believe Twitter is really good at: just showing the world. When you can see what's actually happening on the ground in Iran, with real people, unmediated, raw, unfiltered, you get a better sense of empathy for what they're going through, but also the world feels a whole lot smaller. And that's really important.

I think that continues to be something that shines on our platform. It continues to strengthen what we stand for as a company to the people who use us.

The Question Of Safety

Safety issues on Twitter are on people's minds. You've always been careful to say you're not where you need to be. Can you talk about what you've been doing, and if you can someday get to the point where you can say, "We're handling this perfectly"?

We'll never handle this perfectly—just to set the expectation—because the world is messy. And there's always going to be a new consideration.

It goes back to what we stand for. We stand for freedom of expression. We stand for speaking truth to power. We stand for empowering dialogue. And it's not any one of those alone. Sometimes people only focus on one, instead of all three together. And I think all three together are really important.

You can only express yourself if you feel safe to do so. In order to do that, you need a sense of dialogue and conversation that's empowering, not diminishing. Recently, we've seen a trend—not just on Twitter, but on the internet, more broadly, and in the world—of really targeted harassment and abuse.

Our hope is that we can be a platform that encourages more civil discourse. Even though people may have views that are at different ends of the spectrum, that they can have a conversation to figure out what the ends of that spectrum are, and if there's a balancing point.

From society's standpoint, that's what's really important about our technology. It all goes back to the openness of our network. This is always a fine balance, but we want to make sure that people do feel safe to express themselves freely, and for us that means that we're providing really crisp and clear tools so that people can report, and people can mute, and people can block. But at the same time, if people want to, they can see everything. And they can see what people really think and what they're saying without the filter.

I think that's important, to find the balance. You need to be able to see the extreme stuff to find what's in the middle.

We're not there yet, and we've certainly made a lot of mistakes along the way. But what I can commit to is that we'll be transparent about what those mistakes are, and that we'll learn from them and that we'll share those learnings. It's hard to do in time, but I think it's important for us to do to continue to build trust around utilizing our platform.

To what degree can technological solutions help you moderate?

Technology can help show, first and foremost, where there are things that might impede on your ability to feel safe and really speak your mind, and for you to, in the moment, just turn that off when you want that openness, and to turn it on when you want to see everything. It's just bringing more awareness to what's out there.

The only reason we make technologies is to save people time. The role of technology in safety is to make sure that if there's an action you want to take, you can take it faster. And you have to do less work in order to do that.

There's a really fine balance between control of the experience and moderation. We'd rather be on the side of more controls. But as you provide more controls, you're also making people do more work. Technology can take some of that work away, as we give people the option of tuning those dials and providing more control.

The most important thing on that spectrum, though, is that we're super transparent about what people are and aren't going to see. And that we're not changing the rules underneath them, midstream. We need to make sure that we're seeing really clear expectations of how the thing's going to work, and that we actually meet those expectations. And we've certainly learned a lot over our 10 years about how to do that right and how to do that poorly.

We did a story after the Nice truck attack about ISIS propaganda on Twitter, and referenced some experts who said you did a great job of quashing it quickly. Have you been taking a new approach to dealing with that sort of stuff, or are you just getting better at it as time goes on?

A bit of both. It's amazing, also, what you do when you simply say something is a priority. Safety is one of our priorities for this year. When you say that to the company, they really dig in on, "Okay, what does this mean? What does safety mean, what does it look like, what does it feel like from an experience standpoint, and what are we doing differently?" Just by putting emphasis on that as important to us, people do the right things.

We've benefitted from that focus. We have five areas that we're focused on this year. One is really refining what we have around real-time news and live video and integrating that into everything that we do. Creators, safety, and developers. And because we've said those were important, the company has made them important, and really considered what that means.

We know our approaches in the past have been not as cohesive in terms of our thinking. You can't take it in isolation, it has to be cohesive throughout the product. What does a product experience actually feel like end-to-end when you want to feel safe when you express yourself? I think we're making a lot of the right decisions.

Team Twitter

You've talked about the Golden State Warriors as a model for your team. Is that still true?

The thing that's most inspiring to me about the Warriors is that it's not just one individual, it's about the team dynamic. And you saw it throughout this past season, where there were significantly talented players out for weeks, yet the team still rose to win. That's number one.

Number two is the humility expressed on the team, as expressed and manifested through the passing game. It's not just about, "Take the ball and let me go make a basket. It's, "I'm going to pass it to my teammate, and he's going to make the basket." That's not something in the past that a lot of companies in our industry have valued a lot. We have a hero mentality rather than a team mentality, so we look for the single individual rather than how the team works together.

We're certainly not perfect. But we're making stronger strides. And I would extend that out even deeper than our internal team to the people on our platform. I think a big part of my role, and our role, is to help people find their voice and empower their voice without tools. It's more important what they're saying than what we're saying.

We've seen that throughout our history. The @ symbol, the hashtag, the retweet—those were all invented by the people using our platform, not by us. We made it easier. We brought technology so that they would have to do less work when they did that. But we had nothing in terms of the voice around it.

That is the biggest lesson: It's not about us, it's about who we're serving. And we're putting them first. You even see that expressed in the Warriors. The humility they have around the role of the fans is unlike anything I've seen on any other team. And what the fans have for them is emboldening. There's this interesting relationship between the two that we can learn from in how we develop and how we treat our customers and how our customers treat us.

As you've built your team, is it possible to know if they have the instinct to be part of a team in the way you've been talking about?

The first question I ask is, "Why Twitter?" And if they don't have a passion for what our purpose is, that's a definite indicator that they shouldn't be with us. And if they do, you really get into what they're bringing to the team dynamic and how they're adding or distracting from it, and clarifying it or defocusing it.

You get that in conversation, but what matters to me most when we talk with new people about coming into the company is, "Why would you want to work here?" And if I hear passion for the purpose, that's awesome, because everything else can be taught. Everything else you can learn, and you can build upon, and you can strengthen. But if you don't have passion and there's no match, we're wasting each other's time.

How do you manage your own mental bandwidth and time—and I'm thinking specifically of your Twitter time? Do you have particular philosophies about how you contribute?

I like having a lot of repetition in my schedule, because it allows us to see how we're actually growing, rather than randomness, which hides that.

We kick off the week every Monday with a leadership meeting, to talk about what we're committing to this week and what we learned last week. And we have check-ins on Wednesdays and Fridays for 30 minutes, to unblock during the week and the week's work. And then I just trust people to do the right things based on the information they have.

If I have to make a lot of decisions, it points to an area we can improve in the organization. Something's not working if time and time again I have to make every single decision because—for whatever reason—we don't have the right framework, or the right team dynamic, or the right people to make a decision themselves. Who are actually much, much closer to the customer than me.

My role is threefold. One, making sure that we have a great team dynamic, and we have the right people who are additive to the team. Number two is that we're making decisions in the context of the customer and where the technology is going, and what new technologies exists, and the trends and what our competitors and peers are doing. And then three is that we're raising the bar on what we're doing. That we're being better every time, and we're doing something that we didn't think was possible six months ago.

That's what I'm focused on. And that's just a function of the people and the company, and that they're really strong and aligned with what we're trying to get done. It's taken some work to get there, but I think the clarity we have around what's important and what role we want to serve in the world and what sets us apart from everyone else has never been stronger. I feel really great about that, and it's showing not only in a faster shipping cadence, but also the quality of our work is improving as well.

You have a reputation for being really smart about the small details of a product. Do you want to be involved in the fit and finish of the Twitter app?

I'm really good at QA [quality assurance testing]. I'm usually the first one to find any bugs, ones that other people aren't seeing. And that's a big part of the details that matters a lot.

I really like getting down to the essence of something. Do we actually need this entire paragraph to describe what we could probably do in one sentence? I really appreciate the words we use and don't use, because it sets a tone for how we make decisions as well.

It all comes back to how we feel when we use this thing. Does it feel empowering or diminishing? Really simple. I want to build tools that empower people. And if we make people do a lot of work, we're actually taking time away instead of making time for them. We're then doing the wrong things, and we're disempowering them. That to me is what I should be giving feedback on.

Do you expect this cadence you're on to continue indefinitely? Or will you reach a point where it's not quite so important to be quite so busy, because you've gotten some of the major things solved?

I don't think we'll ever have all the major things solved. [Laughs] I want to continue to build on that cadence. What really matters now is the depth and the quality of our experiences. We could be a whole lot more cohesive in what Twitter feels like. At times it feels very random to people who come in. It shouldn't feel like that. It should feel like, I open it up and I see what matters. And then, I want to engage in this, I want to comment on this, and you can just do it, immediately. And when I'm done with that, and I don't have anything else in front of me, what else has happened in the world? And that should be easy.

And when I'm out of the app, it should be that little bird that told me, "Hey, something's happening that you would care about." And when I open that notification, it's meaningful and right. "Yeah, I do care about this. I care what was just said at the DNC. I care that there's a protest down on Market Street. Or there's a new finding within deep learning that is monumental." And once I get that notification, I don't just see one thing, but I actually see why it's relevant. The context.

The Value Of Focus

How much time do you spend thinking about the future, beyond the actual to-do list you have, and what Twitter might be like if the world is quite different someday?

The present is so much more interesting. There are certain desires we have for how to make the present moment a lot less work to get to. And that's what we're focused on. Really, what's happening now and how do I get caught up and how do we show the richness.

You seem really focused, as opposed to companies that are building drones, or whatever.

What companies are building drones? [Laughs]

I can think of at least a couple. Is it a pleasure to fairly narrowly define what you're doing?

It feels good. When you focus on something you can see it grow and strengthen. That's why I like that repetition. And if you're focused on too many things, it's hard to keep track of it. What's growing, what's not growing, what's improving, what's not improving.

We have multiple things going on, of course. Focusing on why people think we matter and what they use us for has really been emboldening. Because you can now see it: It's here, and now it's here, and now it's here. And it's getting better and better every single day.

It's kind of like working out. You can go to a gym and do 12 different exercises every day. And then you don't really get a sense of, am I going deeper into this or not? I do the same exercise every single day. And I know when I've hit my boundary, and more importantly, when I go beyond it.

I think that matters a lot. And most importantly, it scales. The whole company can see it.

Being @Jack

One of the things I've always found interesting on Twitter is watching you use it. The little things you do but also when it's news, like with Leslie Jones. Do you think of yourself as just being a Twitter user, the way you like to use it, versus it being a responsibility as CEO of the company?

This one is a hard line to walk. I'm finding it challenging, certainly. But I want to be someone who shows a lot of the best use case uses of Twitter. I think I am on the consumption side. I can show more of that on the tweeting side.

I want to make sure that we're building a platform where anyone feels free to have a conversation with me, or with anyone else. That in real time, we can actually respond, and we can enter into it. There's a lot that I want to continue to fix around the experience to make that even better and more comfortable for everyone involved, including me.

I love reading both the positive and the negative around how people think about our service. Most of that, even when there's something negative about us, they're saying it on Twitter. And that shows me a lot of passion, and the importance of why we exist and continue to thrive.

That's not new. In our first year, when we were going down, we had people sending us pizzas to work all night to get it back up. And they were angry at us—but they fed us. [Laughs] I just take it with that mind-set. Even though it's negative, the intent behind it is that this really matters to people. It's really important for it to be there for them. And keep that in mind when you're reading something negative, and when you're engaging people as well. It manifests as negativity, but behind that, what matters most is they care.

As you use Twitter, are you still able to just follow the things you're interested in, in the way every Twitter user does, as opposed to the people you feel you should be following?

Oh, yeah. I follow a lot—over 2,000. I have notifications turned on for probably 30 or 40 people, and they're always pretty good.

I love music, and we have some amazing musicians that use Twitter in really creative ways. My favorite artist right now is Kendrick Lamar. I think he has such a unique and powerful voice, and one that's really balanced. He's always going out there wearing a red and blue bandana, to really unite his hometown of Compton.

I spend a lot of time checking trends as well. I think what trends in the world is really interesting to watch. Just the trend lines of how things are moving.

One of the the things I do when I wake up is, I open Twitter, and I open our trends page. It's kind of like a weather report. Beyoncé's number one. Why? She just released an album. Guess what? I'll be talking about Beyoncé today. My coworkers are going to bring it up. My family's probably going to bring it up. Someone's going to be talking with me about Beyoncé. And Twitter enabled me to be informed about why they're bringing it up. And that to me is like looking out the window and saying, "Yup, it's going to rain. I need an umbrella. Beyonce just released something, here's what it sounds like." It's empowering. Our ability to keep people informed about what's happening in the world and give them fodder for discussion is really important.

Text, still images, and GIFs are now part of the mix that the service gives creators to keep their fans engaged.

Last March, half a dozen people met for breakfast at Hugo's, a restaurant in Los Angeles. Two of them were John and Hank Green, the brothers who are among YouTube's most popular content creators as well as the founders of VidCon, the annual festival that brings together fans, creators, and industry types for a celebration of online video.

The other four diners were employees of YouTube itself, there to pick two of the most influential brains on their service. "They said, 'We want to show you this new thing we're working on,'" John Green remembers.

"This new thing" really was strikingly new. YouTube was hatching a set of features designed to let its creators communicate with their followers by creating a feed of text posts, still photos, animated GIFs, and—oh yeah!—videos. Fans could comment on any individual item and give it a thumbs up (or a thumbs down). It was an incarnation of YouTube, in other words, that didn't revolve entirely around watching one video at a time.

Nobody from YouTube had to explain to the brothers why the concept of giving them more ways to communicate was intriguing. "It solves a long-standing problem we've had, which is YouTube can't be the hub of our channels' community if videos are the only hub," says John Green, when I chat with him and his brother via a three-way Google Hangout. Adds Hank, by way of example: "Something as simple as, 'I'm going to be playing a show in San Francisco.' I can't make a video about that. I can tweet about it and put it out on Facebook, but I can't reach my YouTube audience."

Giving creators tools that let them do their thing on YouTube rather than somewhere else is good for YouTube. And after plenty of feedback from the Greens and other leading YouTube broadcasters, the company is is ready to start rolling out the new features, which VentureBeat's Harrison Weber got wind of last month. Officially still a beta, the offering is called Community and is debuting as part of the YouTube presences of just 12 creators, including the Green brothers, the gonzo do-it-yourselfers of ThreadBanger, music parodists the Key of Awesome, acapella singer Peter Hollens, and others.

That's not as small scale a test as it may sound: Between them, these dozen creators have more than 40 million subscribers. In the months to come, YouTube plans to turn Community on for additional creators. Eventually, it intends to offer it to all users who upload videos to the service, no matter how dinky their presence.

"We know it's a big change, but we think it's a very natural change," says director of product management Shimrit Ben-Yair. "Our creators are—as they're called—creative people. When they're thinking about being creative, they're not limiting themselves to video. And neither should we."

Ultimately, It's Still YouTube

The internal dialog at YouTube that led to Community began around a year and a half ago, and the new features have been in active development for a little less than a year. It's tempting to view their introduction as an epoch-shifting move—the first step in a metamorphosis from video portal into a general-purpose social network more directly competitive with Facebook and Twitter. YouTube, after all, has been synonymous with one type of content for the entire dozen years of its existence, in a way that's atypical for a service of its epic scale. (Even the famously minimalist Instagram started with still images, added video, beefed up its messaging capabilities, and has lately cloned features straight from Snapchat.)

But if you interpret Community as a radical departure, you're getting way, way ahead of what YouTube has actually built. It lives inside one tabbed section of a YouTube that otherwise looks . . . well, exactly like YouTube. (Channel subscribers can also see Community posts in their subscription feeds and get smartphone notifications about them.) The new types of content that creators can publish are designed to supplement video rather than rival it; if they were a stand-alone service, it would be too basic to attract anyone's attention.

"I don't view this as a move away from video at all," says Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer, as I chat with him in his office at the company's headquarters in San Bruno, California, with stacks of Variety on his desk and YouTube-icon pillows on the couch. "Video is an element of this. I view it as really leaning into the essence of YouTube, which is that connection between our creators and fans."

Until now, oddly enough, the most inspiring reflection of the bonding of YouTube creators and fans—beyond the videos themselves—wasn't happening on YouTube. It was the face time that they got at events such as VidCon. "When we actually see them interact in real life with each other, we see that there's something very magical and very authentic about that connection," says Ben-Yair. "We thought we could do a better job of reflecting that in our online products."

In the past, YouTube's community infrastructure didn't consist of much more than the ability to comment on videos. And rather than feeling like community, those comments were notorious for reading like they had been scrawled on walls by transient junior high school boys. In 2014, BuzzFeed's Mark Slutsky declared that "the YouTube comment section has long been considered the worst place on the internet." Even if that statement is subject to debate, it's not something anyone wants to hear about their community.

Now, YouTube comments have been known to belie their skeevy reputation, especially in the case of video creators with loyal audiences, and the service's crud-suppressing algorithms have recently improved. "I think the quality of conversation in comments can be terrible," says John Green. "We all know that. But it can also be excellent." Even in a best-case scenario, however, they weren't well suited to the sort of community-building the company wanted to encourage.

For one thing, comments are attached to specific videos rather than people, and therefore aren't an ongoing dialog. They also don't do much to cater to dedicated followers rather than random passersby. "Anyone can comment on a video and say something stupid or not very valuable to the conversation," says Corinne Leigh, who, along with Rob Czar, hosts ThreadBanger, where the videos have titles such as "DIY Rainbow Grilled Cheese,""DIY Lava Lamp," and "Hack Job: Shoe Wine Bottle Opener."

From conception, the new features were designed to appeal to users who care about the people whose videos they watch, and are therefore most likely to be solid citizens—the sort of folks who want to receive a notification on their smartphone the moment a new post goes up. On the other hand, they can also choose to switch those notifications off and remove non-video posts from their feed, which means that nobody should feel that Community, like the infamous Google+ integration of a few years ago, is being shoved down anyone's throat. (During the beta period, YouTube plans to experiment with whether subscription feeds will show non-video content by default or not.)

Besides letting creators post a stream of text, photos, GIFs, and uploaded YouTube videos of the conventional sort—polls are also in the works, though they won't be ready at launch—the Community features will permit the broadcasting of live video on the fly from the YouTube mobile app, a feat which, amazingly, still isn't a standard capability available to everyone. (YouTube added its first version of live video a half-decade ago, but now finds itself playing catchup with Facebook Live Video and Twitter's Periscope.) Live broadcasting could make sense as part of Community, since the new features will be by nature more ephemeral than most YouTube channels, which often emphasize the sort of videos that have a shot at continuing to rack up views for years.

Unlike the wild, sometimes alarming scrum of Twitter, YouTube's Community is designed to be a safe space, not a free speech zone. Only creators can post items on their pages; users can comment on those posts, but can't comment on each other's comments, and their feedback is subject to moderation. That gives creators the ability to steer the conversation and prevent anyone with trollish tendencies from hijacking it. "You can't create this infinite stream of argument," says Hank Green.

Users will be able to thumbs-up or thumbs-down any item, but those interactions don't amount to Reddit-style up-voting and down-voting: Community will show everything in reverse chronological order. As Ben-Yair explains, "We heard from creators that that helps keep it conversational, and keeps the context of the conversation."

Community has something of a no-frills feel, but in a way, that helps it complement the rest of YouTube, which is no longer all that off-the-cuff a domain, at least for many popular creators. Once upon a time, the archetypal YouTube video was pretty rudimentary: crudely edited footage of someone talking directly into a fuzzy webcam, à la Lonelygirl15. There's still plenty of material of that ilk, but much of the most popular YouTube video is slick, ambitious, and in no way amateurish. "It's hard to just produce two videos a week," says ThreadBanger's Leigh. "You talk to a lot of YouTubers that are on this crazy deadline of making videos every day."

"So much of what we do on our channels is very format driven and heavily scripted," adds Matthew "MatPat" Patrick, whose YouTube channel the Game Theorists is dedicated, in its own words, to overanalyzing video games. "There's a lot of production to everything we upload."

"In the digital age, relevancy is kind of of fleeting," muses Jake Roper, whose Vsauce3 mashes up science and popculture in videos such as "What If Captain America's Shield Hit You?" "If you don't post every day, people forget about you. 'Do I still exist?' I have that fear." Roper doesn't even post videos every week: Vsauce3 has added only 15 of them in past 12 months. But by hanging out with fans in Community, he can strengthen his ties with viewers without ramping up his pace of production or taking up too much additional time.

Designed by Creators (and a Handful of Fans)

At YouTube as at other tech companies, the creation of new apps, services, and features can be an insular experience. "Traditionally, [product managers] work with designers, and you put together this product and then roll it out and see how it does," says YouTube product manager Kiley McEvoy.

In the case of the features that became Community, however, the company got about 30 of its video stars involved from early on, with a level of collaboration that went beyond the breakfast get-together with the Green brothers and included confabs in Los Angeles and New York as well as at YouTube headquarters.

"As we started, we did daylong sessions with creators with whiteboards, sticky notes, everything," McEvoy recounts. "We asked them to design the features that they felt were missing from their experience on YouTube. And many of these features came out of those sessions. A lot of the work since then has just been iterating and iterating."

For instance, YouTube initially thought that Community's text posts would offer Tweet-like quick hits. "Actually, the feedback we got was, 'no, this is actually a great deep-thoughts tool,'" says Ben-Yair. After experimenting with a variety of character limits, the company decided not to impose one at all.

Creators also gave Community, which was code-named "Backstage," its name. "Initially, this concept was supposed to be the backstage of a concert—the place that only the most hardcore of fans would be," Ben-Yair says. "But as we were building this and as we got feedback from creators, they said, 'No, YouTube is our public platform where we want to be talking to all of our fans. And the word that kept coming up in conversations with them was the word 'community.'"

For YouTube, this input was practical; for the creators, it was exhilirating. "You put something out there, and the next iteration has that change," says ThreadBanger's Czar. "It's awesome. I feel like a superhero. I'm shaping the internet. Something I said resonated with YouTube."

Of course, even if creators are smitten with the features they helped shape, Community won't go anywhere unless it resonates with the teeming masses of folks who love their work. During the development process, most of the people who have been playing the role of fans have been YouTube and Google employees. But a smattering of actual fans of the Green brothers also got a chance to see the new features while they were still a work in progress.

"It was definitely humbling," says Ben-Yair. "We were in the original group of Googlers and YouTubers testing the product. And then the real fans came in. Some of us don't know Hank and John so well, so occasionally I'd ask a question like, 'Oh, what happened here?' And I'd immediately get bombarded: 'Watch their videos! Watch this, watch that.' It became very evident that there is such a passion and such a following and such a dedication that maybe someone who's a more lightweight user would not understand."

A Billion-Plus People to Engage

Keeping superfans like those know-it-all followers of the Green brothers happy is vital to YouTube's success as a business enterprise, and the company thinks Community can help even though it isn't taking any immediate steps to directly monetize it. "If you're an advertiser, what you're looking for first and foremost is a very engaged, enthusiastic audience," says product chief Mohan. "The beauty of YouTube is that through products like Community, that's what we offer in spades, to the scale of a billion-plus users a month."

Executives at tech companies never frame their new features as responses to what someone else is doing, but Community should also fortify YouTube's appeal to creators during a period when both Facebook and Twitter are writing checks and otherwise wooing the sort of video stars who have usually made their home base on YouTube. "YouTube is where I found the bulk of my audience," says the Game Theorists' Patrick. "At end of it, I want to stay on the platform where they're most likely to engage with me and it's easiest for them to engage regularly."

As for tomorrow? Well, Mark Zuckerberg likes to confidently predict that Facebook will be mostly video within a half-decade. Still, "YouTube's core thing is so safe and so protected," contends Hank Green. "Nobody's going to watch a 10-minute video in their Twitter stream. On Facebook, you don't come back and watch stuff from that same creator."

And then his brother John chimes in with a cheerful disclaimer: "I just want to interject that I don't know two people worse at predicting the future than Hank and me."

But then John continues: "YouTube channels are not something you just watch. They're something you're part of. That feeling seems very unique to me. It's what makes YouTube special, and makes me love it." The new Community features don't have to tamper too much with that formula to prove their worth. All they have to do is make people like the Greens—and fans like their fans—love YouTube even a little more than they already do.

Some companies are starting to question their reimbursement policies for working mothers.

In most jobs, your everyday living expenses are your own responsibility. Commuting, lunch, and childcare are funded out of your salary for a normal workweek. But at a number of companies, if you stay late, or travel, you can submit some extra expenses for reimbursement. Which expenses are reimbursable, however, has traditionally been decided through the mind-set that someone should be at home looking after any dependents you have without money exchanging hands. Or as Dawn Bovasso wrote in a recent commentary for Fortune:

"You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn't there to cook you dinner) or $30 for scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can't get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids)."

Bovasso, a single mom in the advertising field, recounted a celebration dinner that a former employer had arranged. To attend, she'd be on the hook for extra babysitting from 6 p.m. to midnight, plus car fare home for her sitter. She decided the dinner was important enough that she went, but once there, she found out that several of her male coworkers were staying in the adjacent hotel so they wouldn't have to drive home after drinking.

"As someone sensitive to how the workplace is biased toward men, I couldn't help but wonder if they would get to expense their hotel stay—meanwhile, their wives were at home taking care of their kids (for free, obviously)." It didn't make sense to her that their barriers to attending were covered, but not hers. So she asked to be reimbursed. After much discussion, she was, but as one of the few female creative directors in the advertising industry, she had leverage. "Many women aren't in the position to ask for, much less get, this kind of approval."

The take-away: Expense policies are yet another way that the business world keeps women from reaching the top.

Personal Choices Versus Work Necessities

Of course, that's not a cut-and-dried conclusion. Expense policies are often closely tied to what businesses can deduct. The IRS states, "Generally, you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses."

There's also a slippery slope question of what is a necessary expense incurred in the course of doing extra work, and what is the result of personal choices that are none of an employer's business. Bovasso's male coworkers could have argued that the $200 she got toward the evening was an extra perk for her, and one they'd like to pocket as well. Having a stay-at-home partner may be helpful for an employee's career in the short run, but over the long haul, it represents a lot of foregone income for the family itself.

However, as companies take the broader view of how to keep women moving up the ranks, some are addressing this same dilemma that Bovasso faced. According to Krista Carothers, senior research editor at the Working Mother Research Institute, of the organizations on the 2015 Working Mother 100 Best Companies list, 35% offer business travel childcare reimbursement, and 23% offer overtime childcare reimbursement.

A Changing Dynamic

"These are the companies that really value moms, and parents as a whole, including dads, and they are doing everything they can to make sure that moms are valued, feel valued, feel supported, and are able to keep moving in their careers, despite these traditional things that hold us back," says Carothers.

The danger these policies are trying to head off is that a single mother might decide the cost of an evening's childcare is too high, and so she elects not to attend a celebration dinner. Because she is not there, she doesn't bond with the higher-ups who are there to toast everyone's success. Because she doesn't get this face time with management, she's not in the front of their minds as they're figuring out promotions.

"It's always been that women were home, and dads were the ones not worrying about childcare when working late or going on business trips," says Carothers. "These companies recognize that this dynamic isn't in place anymore." Plenty of parents are single parents, and two couple families may be two career families, with each partner having their own overtime and travel complications.

To be sure, these company-wide policies reimbursing extra childcare are relatively rare—even among the companies recognized by Working Mother magazine. Carothers reports that these policies have not become more prevalent in recent years, either. In plenty of organizations, much comes down to the situation Bovasso experienced: individuals negotiating with their managers about what resources they need to do their jobs.

The idea that a $200 babysitting bill is a personal expense, but a $200 bottle of wine is just part of business is based on a certain mind-set. Says Carothers: "It's hard to get away from that mind-set completely because it's so ingrained in us all."

A high school focused on design thinking has teamed up with the Oracle Education Foundation to take 21st century learning to the next level.

When the founding freshman class arrived at d.tech, a public design thinking-focused charter high school in Silicon Valley, in fall 2014, the students discovered that their classrooms had been left unfinished—on purpose. Their first assignment: Design the learning spaces. By the second week of school, after taking a field trip and conducting behavioral research, they were buying furniture.

"Why would you solve a problem without knowing what people really need? It's so intuitive," says founder and executive director Ken Montgomery, a former high school English teacher with a policy analysis PhD from Stanford. "That's one of the reasons that design thinking has resonated in education."

The students didn't know it at the time, but they would soon revisit that first assignment on a much grander scale. Back in May 2014, Montgomery and his team had impressed leaders at the Oracle Education Foundation, one of the technology giant's philanthropic arms, during a daylong workshop organized by the foundation and led by a Stanford d.school facilitator.

"They blew us away," foundation director Colleen Cassity says of the d.tech educators, who participated alongside educators from other Bay Area high schools. "They were so committed to the [design thinking] process, and they spoke so much the same language that we did."

Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz shared Cassity's enthusiasm. At the foundation's annual holiday dinner in late 2013, held at the Rosewood Hotel's Madera restaurant, Catz had surprised her board members by initiating a three-hour discussion about Oracle's role in education. Cassity recalls Catz saying, "'Everyone [in Washington, D.C.] talks about education, but I don't see anybody doing anything. I want us to do something, and I want for our people to be involved.'"

Do something—but what? In the months that followed, the foundation team narrowed its focus to high school-level opportunities that would engage Oracle employees and their technology expertise. Catz and Cassity met in July to consider their options. "You know, I think we own that," Catz mused, as she stood at the window of her office and pointed toward an undeveloped parcel of land at Oracle headquarters in Redwood City. Why not, she and Cassity wondered, turn the lot into a permanent home for d.tech, which had been sharing space with Mills High School in nearby Millbrae?

That vision is now coming to life. Oracle broke ground on d.tech's new 64,000-square foot campus last month, after months of design and development in partnership with employees, parents, students, and teachers. By next fall, the completed building will be ready to house 550 students and 30 faculty.

As with d.tech's first location, students played a central role in the process. "We wanted open spaces where you'd be able to focus but also collaborate," says Whitney Wisnom, 16. She and the other students involved in the planning also emphasized the importance of modular spaces and brightly colored walls, an echo of the bold paint (orange, turquoise) that d.tech's teachers had added to their original classrooms.

DES Architects + Engineers, which led the project, won over Wisnom and her peers by practicing the same design thinking principles that they had been taught. Step one: Empathize. "They saw us first, as opposed to the physical building," she says.

The final design groups classrooms into neighborhoods, each one opening off of a long hallway that will serve as the school's main traffic corridor and connecting thread. It also incorporates free-form spaces, outfitted with sofas, which encourage students to work comfortably on their own. In a two-story "garage," students will have access to prototyping tools like 3D printers and laser cutters, as well as graphic design and video production equipment.

Hands-on lessons in the garage will complement the personalized learning pathways that d.tech students follow in their core subjects, using online modules. Students move through the digital lessons at their own pace, with coaching from teachers and verification that they're grasping the concepts.

Design thinking, the heart of the school's ethos and methodology, reappears in the regular group projects that students complete. The d.tech version of the process is in keeping with classic design thinking, with one notable exception. At the d.school, instructors have to spend time helping the grown-up participants turn off their internal "editors," the voices saying that an idea isn't practical, or economical. At d.tech, Montgomery says, teachers have to do the reverse. "With kids, you have to almost do the opposite, and wrap [the challenge] a little more in reality," he says. "We focus more on the implementation, whereas the d.school has to focus on bringing out the wild ideas."

D.tech is the first example of a technology company sharing real estate with a U.S. high school, but it is far from the only example of business involvement in K-12 education. IBM, for example, has worked in partnership with educators to develop an innovative model called P-TECH that offers students a high school diploma and an associate's degree, plus the option for high performers to move straight into entry-level technology jobs at partner corporations. There are now over three dozen high schools following in the footsteps of the original P-TECH (which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School), located in Brooklyn.

Critics question whether employers and education should be so tightly intertwined. But in the near term it's hard to argue with efforts to improve an educational system that is in many cases failing to turn out high school graduates at all, let alone train them for relevant 21st-century careers.

"We have wonderful jobs here at Oracle and not enough people graduating here in the United States to fill them," Cassity says. "Employers are hungry for young people with creative confidence and technical acumen."

Montgomery stands by the partnership. "Oracle made it clear from the start they're not opening a school, they're not running a school," he says. "They're nurturing and housing the school, obviously, but we still have full autonomy."

Oracle, d.tech's largest philanthropic backer, is not the school's only source of funds. Other supporters include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, via the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative.

Oracle employees, who have already contributed over 3,300 volunteer hours at d.tech in its current location, will have even more opportunities to mentor and help develop curriculum when the new campus opens. In particular, Cassity hopes to expand on and formalize the design thinking workshops that volunteers have contributed to; one challenge, for example, involves designing a new wearable technology.

Cassity has high hopes for d.tech and is considering the possibility of expanding the model of colocated school and office to other Oracle campuses. She has already identified five communities that would meet the foundation's criteria, which includes employees who have the skill sets to serve as volunteers and lead technology-oriented workshops.

"One of the primary goals is demystifying technology for young people. But not only that—to enable them to become the future innovators," she says. "We want to promote this kind of thinking more broadly."

For students like Wisnom, d.tech has already had an impact. "I was used to the bell ringing, going to class," she says of her middle school experience. Design thinking required an entirely different mindset, pushing her to embrace new challenges like conducting user interviews. "I'd never done anything like it," she says. "It was hard for me to adjust and be open. I was really shy."

Now, the high school junior is speaking up in meetings with senior architects, serving as a coach in d.tech workshops, and aiming for a career as an engineer.

"We all cared so much and wanted it to be a cool school for the incoming d.tech students, not just ourselves," she says. And she plans to savor the moment: "I can't wait to spend my senior year there and be in a school that I designed."

Research shows money (in the form of a paycheck) can buy happiness. Experts craft a game plan to double your salary.

The best things in life may be free, but a study out of Case Western Reserve University found that money does indeed buy happiness. Increasing income—to the tune of an annual salary of $80,000— also relieves negative emotions and reduces the incidence of serious mental illness, according to the research. This makes sense, but how exactly do you go about doubling your income or even getting a raise?

1. Create A Plan

Start by creating a plan, says Jessica Jaffe, senior manager of corporate affairs for Glassdoor. "Do the math of how much of a raise you need this year, the next, and so on to get to the point where your salary would double," she says. "Then decide how many years you want to give yourself to get there."

For example, if your salary is currently $35,000 and you want to make $70,000 in five years, you'll need an average increase of $7,000 a year, or a promotion or two over the next five years.

2. Know The Market

One of the most powerful tools to use to double your salary is information, specifically to know what other professionals in your industry earn. Sites like Glassdoor and PayScale allow you to research rates by position, industry, experience, and region.

"Check in regularly to find where you fall because there are market shifts for in-demand jobs and fields," says Lydia Frank, senior director of editorial and marketing at PayScale. "This is also important if something about [your skill set] has changed or if your industry is heating up," she says. "Understanding where you fall helps you proceed with much more confidence."

3. Ask For A Raise

If your research reveals that your salary is less than what it should be, use this information to ask for a raise. Be sure to have real numbers for what others in your role, city, and, if possible, your company make, says Jaffe.

"Compile the data to build a strong argument about your own compensation," she says, adding that you can ask for a larger base salary or new bonus structure. "If you don't ask, you most definitely won't get it," Jaffe says.

If you've been with your employer for a while, mention any new skills that you have brought to the table over time, adds Frank. "Employers often don't recognize internal talent as much as they could," she says. "Companies want to retain their best and brightest. If market pay is shifting, you need to at least start a conversation on compensation."

4. Consider A New Role

If your current salary range is within the market range, taking a new role at your company could provide an opportunity for increasing your income. Research other positions and collect information about salary levels. Then put yourself in line for a promotion by improving and supporting what matters most to your company's overall business goals, says Jaffe.

"If your company is looking to grow its e-commerce business, for example, you should focus on that and try to quantify your contribution," she says.

Frank suggests having honest conversations with your employer about your goals. "It's perfectly valid to say, 'Hey, I want to move up in this organization and here's what my aspirations are. Can you help me get there?'" she says. "It's unlikely that you will stay doing what you're doing and double your salary."

If getting a higher salary means moving into a new role be sure you're interested in doing the things that come along with it, says Frank. "You'll likely have more responsibility, manage people, or change departments," she says. "Are you interested in that work? And are you capable of doing the job?"

5. Change Careers Or Industries

If your current career path doesn't offer the kind of salary you wish to have, you may have to change your industry, says Frank. "Software developers are in demand," she says, "but nonprofit or education-focused companies will often pay them less than tech companies do."

If an industry change won't make a big difference, it might be time to think about a new career path, says Frank. "Are you willing to make a radical shift?" she asks. "It's common to hear about someone who used to be an elementary school teacher and then transitions into coding by going to a coding boot camp," Frank explains. Accelerated programs and academies can facilitate such major career pivots.

6. Acquire New Skills

Another way to double your income is to boost your skill set and marketability. "Are there degrees or skills you can gain?" asks Frank. "This can make you more valuable." You can ask your employer about training opportunities within the company that will improve what you can offer.

7. Be Willing To Move

Some regions, such as San Francisco, New York, and Seattle offer higher paying jobs than others, but be sure to research the cost of living in these areas because it's likely to be more, too. You could take advantage of regional rates by finding companies that allow you to work remotely, suggests Frank.

"You will increase your pay if the employer is in one of those cities but you won't increase your spending by having to live there, too," she says.

8. Change Companies

While money isn't always the main reason people change jobs, 74% who do switch receive larger compensation packages, according to LinkedIn.

If there isn't a clear career path in your company that will help you double your salary, "It may be time to move on, and the sooner, in that case, the better," says Jaffe. "It is true that it's often easier to negotiate more salary as you are going into a new job," she points out, "negotiation is expected when you are provided with a job offer."

It can also help to pay attention to company size, adds Frank. "If you're looking to increase your take-home pay, working for a large organization that has bigger budget can help," she says. "But a startup may be willing to give you other benefits and perks that pay off in the long run like equity," Frank adds.

While a nice paycheck is important, remember that money isn't everything, says Jaffe. "Our research also shows that salary is not among the leading factors tied to long-term employee satisfaction," she says. "In contrast, culture and values, career opportunities, and trust in senior leadership are the biggest drivers."

To counteract a declining cool factor and recent mixed performance, the German company is updating its lineup.

1. Pure Boost X

Adidas used motion-tracking technology to study the movement of the female foot and designed the Pure Boost X to match it. The sneaker features a floating arch for extra support, as well as material engineered for a flexible fit.

2. Wanderlust Partnership

In addition to collaborating on events, Adidas and Wanderlust are building an influencer program in which Wanderlust participants will lead running and yoga classes. There's also an apparel collection in the works.

3. Avenue A

In February, Adidas launched its first subscription-box service. The boxes, which are distributed four times a year, feature a celebrity-curated selection of athletic gear, including a full exercise outfit with sneakers and accessories, such as the MiCoach Fit smartwatch.

4. MiCoach Train & Run App

Because data showed that women are motivated by community, Adidas updated its app to include a social feed that allows users to share workout stats with friends.

5. Wearables

Adidas's smart bra, introduced in 2012, is outfitted with sensors that measure calories burned, heart rate, and other performance indicators. It pairs with the MiCoach smartwatch and the Train & Run app, allowing users to adjust their effort based on real-time feedback.

6. "Here to Create" Campaign

Adidas brought in advertising firm 72andSunny to create the series of ads that present a fuller picture of a woman's life, from athletic pursuits to family-centric moments. It garnered nearly half a billion impressions.

Extreme races and constant travel keep Hotwire's president Henrik Kjellberg engaged at the office.

Henrik Kjellberg's average day starts before dawn with a 16-mile bike ride from his Tiburon, California, home into his San Francisco office, where he takes a shower and starts work at 7:50 a.m. After a full day in his role as president of Hotwire and CarRentals.com, he leaves as the sun goes down and bikes the 16 miles back. "And then the next day, instead of biking, I might go for a nine-mile run and take public transit into the city," he says. "I try to mix it up."

Mixing it up—fitness-wise—is a relatively new thing for Kjellberg. A poor athlete in high school and most of his 20s, he adopted a regular exercise regimen about eight years ago when he moved to Hong Kong (one of nine countries he's lived in) and was invited on a run by a group of colleagues. "I said I didn't run," he remembers. "And they said, 'Yes you do.'" He gave it a try and got hooked, soon signing up for his first Ironman.

Kjellberg spent six months training, completed the Ironman (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, 26.2-mile run) in 2009 and has since completed additional ones. In June, he did his first multiday ultra marathon—a 62-mile race through the Gobi Desert in China.

The result of all these physical challenges? "I was better at work and a better father and husband," he says. "It balanced me, and I realized that I needed to stay physically active." Indeed, while Kjellberg explains that Hotwire and CarRentals.com's parent company Expedia doesn't break out numbers or growth rates of its individual business units, he asserts, "I have overseen many high-growth units over the course of my long-term career at Expedia and Hotwire." Here's what else Kjellberg tells Fast Company about how his active life impacts his work.

I'm a believer in work/leisure balance. I think life can contain both. Everyone says work/life, but that implies that work isn't part of life, which is strange because I love my work. The more senior you get, the more stress comes with your job. You need to be in a good mental space, and for me, that means working out. I exercise without headphones and get great ideas when I exercise. Even on a four-hour bike ride or a three-hour run, I never get bored.

Once I'm finished, even if I'm in a tough spot at work, I come in calm and balanced, ready to make good decisions. Almost no senior leader I admire comes to work stressed. They are all calm and collected—that comes from the mechanisms they have to deal with stress.

The ideas that surface during my workouts are both personal and professional. One that was especially pertinent to my job was when I got the idea to aggressively launch our hotels on the retail section of Hotwire, rather than just under the "Hot Rate" tab. Now Hot Rate surfaces first in the search, but it is followed by our retail options.

Working out has helped me deal with a variety of sticky situations at work. We had a big reorganization a few years back; it impacted a lot of our employees and caused tension within the team. Exercising made it easier for me to deal with people in a fairly stressful and delicate situation.

I get inspired when I'm out doing things, like the run through the Gobi Desert. When you do those things, you meet people who are even crazier than you are and do races that you would have never dreamed of.

Being in remote places also gives me inspiration. When I was running up Mauna Kea (a 13,802-foot dormant volcano on Hawaii's Big Island), I came up with the idea to further improve our packages product to make it easier for people to save money who want to book both a flight and a hotel.

I also find inspiration by reading fiction. Right now I'm reading Underworld: A Novel, by Don DeLillo. I like it, but it is tough—800 pages with something like 45 characters. It is mentally challenging to keep it all together.

I travel constantly, so it is important for me to get my workouts in no matter what. I target a specific number of miles for the week, so if I skip a day, I know I'll need to make it up on another day. I prefer to work out in the mornings. I'll go for a run no matter what city I'm in, regardless of the season. Running in New York in the winter, for example, can be beautiful.

What gets me really excited is discovering something new about a place and about myself. When I was in Mongolia a few months ago, I got to drink horse's milk—something I didn't even know existed. I realized that it wasn't my thing, but I'm glad I dared to do it. I like pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

A few years ago, I took my wife and kids on a camping trip north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. It was summer and we had to drink water from the streams and carry our own food for nine days. We were completely off the grid, no guide, and it was beautiful. There wasn't any cell service, so I didn't have a choice but to be disconnected, which was great. Of course, I can't disconnect on every trip, but I love it when I can, and find that I'm much more rejuvenated and productive when I return to the office.

Katie Morell is a San Francisco-based business writer. Read more of her work at www.katiemorell.com

DNA services are revealing relationships that once were cloaked in anonymity. And the world is still figuring out how to deal with that.

When she was 22, Jordon Goulder lost her dad to the neurodegenerative disease called ALS. That same year, she discovered that he wasn't her biological father.

Goulder, who is now 26 and works in public relations, learned from her mother that her parents had experienced fertility troubles before she was born. A fertility specialist recommended that they try an anonymous sperm donor. Her parents agreed to keep this quiet until her father passed away.

Goulder was curious about her biological father from the outset: Was he alive and healthy? Did he have children or share her features? Her mother didn't have much information aside from a few biographical details and the name of the facility, which had subsequently shut down. When Jordon tried calling the hospital next door, the operator laughed at her request and muttered something about patient privacy before hanging up. "I was emotional at the time, so I don't remember the conversation verbatim," she remembers. "It was enough to stop me from looking for him for quite a while, and caused me to harbor some anger that I may never have access to information about my genes."

But Goulder didn't give up for good. She sent in samples of her saliva to various consumer-genetics services, which connect users with their family members. On two of these sites, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA, she was connected to one of her biological father's cousins. But Ancestry revealed a direct match to a man who chose to publish his name, as well as other relatives with the same last name. She quickly found his profile on Facebook, and noted that they shared the same thick, dark eyebrows. From there, she was able to track down a daughter who happened to live nearby in Portland, Oregon. "I know what she looks like so I look for her all the time, but also fear that I'll run into her," she says.

Goulder is far from alone in using these services to find a biological parent. Due to a lack of record keeping, it's far from clear how many children each year are conceived via a sperm or egg donor, although some estimate that it ranges between 30,000 and 60,000 a year in the U.S. Sites such as Donor Sibling Registry have popped up to offer advice and a community to donors and donor-conceived people, including guiding them to DNA databases with more than 50,000 members where they can be matched with relatives.

"As the database grows, the probability that a user will find a close genetic relative increases," says Ken Chahine, executive vice president at Ancestry. "But it wasn't designed for that purpose."

Goulder attempted to get in touch with her donor via Facebook and Ancestry's messaging services, but she doesn't know if he received her message. He hasn't logged in for a while. It's possible that he doesn't want to know her, has pushed the whole thing out of his mind, or simply doesn't know she's trying to contact him.

Not So Anonymous

In an age of consumer DNA testing, some bioethicists say that it's time to revisit the notion of anonymous sperm donation. Is it really possible in this day and age to keep a donor's identity anonymous? And should the sperm banks do more to warn potential donors that they might be found if they or a relative submits their DNA to a genealogical service?

"When these sperm banks were set up, there were often confidentiality agreements in which a prospective father would say that he never wanted to be contacted, or that he'd be open to it when the child is 18," says Katye Spector-Bagdady, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Bioethics & Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan. "But services like 23andMe have created an additional opportunity that supersedes these previous arrangements, where children created by egg or sperm donors can figure it out."

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki says that one of the three major reasons that people sign up is to find family members: "The adoptive community and sperm donor community are really active."

At a minimum, Spector-Bagdaddy recommends that sperm banks disclose this to their potential donors. Others have gone a step further in calling for lawmakers to ban anonymity altogether, arguing that donor offspring like Goulder should have the right to know the identity of their biological parents.

"If a donor doesn't want to be found, they simply shouldn't donate," says Wendy Kramer, director of Donor Sibling Registry, which is a not-for-profit organization. "Yet the sperm banks don't tell prospective donors that because they'll make less money." Kramer says her son was one of the earliest users of these sites, and figured out the identity of his donor back in 2005.

One sperm donor I spoke to, who requested anonymity, said he had his own reservations about DNA-testing services, but he didn't discuss this with the sperm bank. Moreover, as far as he could tell, the facility didn't ask for references or verify anything he told them about his Ivy League education or health history.

He had donated sperm on a whim after graduating with a mountain of college debt ("My thinking at the time was that if I got $100 every time I masturbated, that's a good deal"). He put the experience to the back of his mind until our conversation, in which he shared myriad concerns. "They seemed to want people with attractive qualities, but those people might be sensitive to requests to speak to their mother or their college," he said. "It was a balancing act of attracting donors, while reducing friction."

According to Kramer, the root of the problem is the lack of rules or regulation when it comes to buying and selling sperm. For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires that donors get tested for some communicable diseases, but there is no federal requirement that sperm banks screen for genetic diseases. As a result, testing practices vary wildly among different facilities.

In recent years, cases have hit the headlines where a donor unknowingly has hundreds of children, or wasn't properly tested for various genetic diseases. One family was told that a donor had a clean bill of health, but their child was born with cystic fibrosis. Both the mother and the donor were carriers of the disease.

Kramer adds that sperm banks are also inconsistent in how they mediate relationships between donors and their offspring. She says that many will send an ambiguous letter in the mail, and then call it a day. Cases have reached the courts where sperm banks failed to notify a family when a donor gets sick or has a history of disease, or didn't amend their donor's medical profile as new medical information came to light.

Of a handful of sperm banks contacted by Fast Company, only California Cryobank responded to a request for comment. Company spokesman Scott Brown stressed that the team will facilitate contact when the child is 18, if the donor is open to it. He says many donors who requested anonymity are willing.

Brown agrees that the rise of commercial DNA testing companies has been transformative, but he doesn't agree that all anonymity should be waved. "It would be unreasonable for a sperm donor today to believe they'll never be contacted," he says. In light of this, he urges donor offspring to wait until they're 18 and initiate contact through the sperm bank rather than through 23andMe, Facebook, and the like. "That sets up a difficult and devastating situation for both parties," he says. "If you're going to show up on the guy's doorstep, it could affect his life and jeopardize things for all other offspring that might be waiting the proper amount of time."

Brown says the company will screen potential candidates to check if they're a carrier for a variety of genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy.

Ethical Implications

Ancestry's team has researched the implications of customers using the service to connect with donor or adoptive parents. Their core mission is to help people understand their origins. Several years ago, the company invited a group of bioethicists into their offices to figure out what to do. "They were in favor of giving the right information to people, rather than trying to hide it," says Chahine. But all those who register for the site can request anonymity so their identity wouldn't be revealed to a donor offspring, for instance.

23andMe's Wojcicki says the team has thought about ways to adequately educate users about surprising results. Users have learned through the site that they were adopted or donor-conceived, before a parent told them the truth. Research from 2005 found that cases of paternity discrepancy, when a child is identified as being biologically fathered by someone other than the man who believes he is the father, occurs between .8% to 30% in the population.

The company's terms and conditions make it explicitly clear: "This information may evoke strong emotions and has the potential to alter your life and worldview. You may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change."

Experts are divided on whether these sites should be doing more to educate and inform their users. Spector-Bagdaddy commends 23andMe for its explicit language, but is concerned that few people read the terms of service. She has argued in the past that this information is inherently medical, as it relates to family medical histories, and that direct-to-consumer companies have enhanced obligations to return these results more like clinicians than for-profit businesses. It's unclear how they would do that, as these sites don't know ahead of time whether they're delivering surprising results. "From an ethical perspective, it's still very much up for debate," she says.

All told, those I spoke to who connected with donor parents or half-siblings relayed mostly positive experiences. One 23andMe user in her mid-forties, who goes by the pseudonym Marcia, has bonded with her eight new brothers and sisters. None of them never met their biological father, who passed away at a fairly young age. "This has been a huge and unexpected blessing," she says. "You'll find many people who are angry or feel a loss of identity, but this struck us differently."

Jordon Goulder's wedding is coming up in a few weeks. For the time being, she's hit the pause button on her search for her biological father. She's considering a certified letter at some point, so at least she'll know if he's received it. Her friends are confident that he submitted DNA to Ancestry, so he must be curious. She's keeping her hopes up. "I think it will happen eventually."

Hundreds of major brands will hire thousands of candidates online to celebrate World Hiring Day.

Today is World Hiring Day, and hundreds of marquee employers are celebrating with a massive online hiring blitz.

The holiday, which was created by video recruiting and training platform HireVue, will put thousands of job candidates in front of their webcams in the hopes that they'll land their next job digitally. On the other end, recruiters and hiring managers from major brands, including Netflix, Delta, Hilton Worldwide, Jet.com, Chipotle, Carnival Cruise Lines, and others will watch, rate, and share these videos in an effort to fill thousands of open positions.

"World Hiring Day is about injecting positivity into the process by giving both companies and candidates the opportunity to discover great fits—all from their mobile devices, all on their own time," Mark Newman, the founder and chief customer officer for HireVue, said in a statement.

The Benefits Of Video Interviews

Boston Consulting Group and Recruit Works Institute surveyed 13,000 individuals from 13 countries and found that 35% of job seekers used a smartphone to look for jobs. As resumes and cover letters are increasingly considered antiquated and ineffective, and there's increased competition for employers in certain sectors, more hiring managers are turning to video interviews as an alternative. While it has helped streamline the hiring process, it can leave many, and particularly those unfamiliar with video interviews, at a disadvantage.

"We're seeing a dramatic increase in first-round video interviews, even over a year ago," Adam Robinson, cofounder and CEO of Chicago-based Hireology, a hiring management software platform, told Fast Company.

When Jim Oddo was tasked with hiring 1,000 new employees at Frontier, he championed a "video-first" approach as the company's vice president of HR, according to a previous report in Fast Company. This approach enabled the company to reach out to candidates that were often left out from traditional hiring practices, such as veterans. After incorporating digital interviewing, Frontier's veteran hiring grew from 7% to 10.4%.

"Being comfortable with these tools and presenting a concise picture of your profile is going to be just as important as time spent on resume building," Chris Brown, vice president of human resources at West Corporation, InterCall's parent company told Fast Company, adding, "Candidates who are able to master the video interview process are going to be ahead of the curve in the hiring process."

How To Nail A Video Interview

While many of the tactics are similar to in-person interviews, there are some additional considerations candidates should make before conducting a video interview.

Robinson suggests test driving the technology before the interview begins, and be connected to both a power adapter and broadband internet. Having a back-up device can also be a lifesaver in case of technical difficulties.

"It shows that you're forward thinking about problems, and it will also ensure that you can at least finish out the interview by phone," he says, adding that candidates should also set up their devices in a distraction-free environment. "If you're doing the interview and you have kids running around and a dog barking, not only is it going to be distracting and make it hard for you to focus," he explains, "but it's going to affect the hiring manager's opinion of you."

Robinson also suggests making eye contact, even through a web cam, and being conscious of body language. Most importantly, however, is to remember to wear pants, which he says can provide a psychological advantage while eliminating the possibility of seeming unprofessional if there is a need to stand up during the interview.

Different kinds of work require different types of motivation. Here's how and when to use these three psychological principles.

I tend to wake up early and do my best work while the sun is coming up. Whenever I try to work late at night, I find I'm less focused and I have trouble thinking creatively.

But there is one thing that I've noticed that I have more of at night: motivation. Something about the end of the day makes me want to get a lot more done and complete more tasks—but by the time I wake up the next morning, all that motivation is gone.

Maybe you're the opposite. Maybe you jump out of bed full of enthusiasm to attack the day, only to find you taper off at around lunchtime, and crawl through the afternoon trying to look busy.

And we've all gone through phases where we're just not in the mood to work. Whenever you struggle most, if motivation is your challenge, I've got some good news. Researchers find it interesting to figure out what motivates us. That's good for us, because we can use their findings about the general population to figure out what we, personally, respond to best.

Let's take a look at some of the major findings on motivation from science, and how we can translate those into practical actions to help us get more done with less friction.

1. Use Intrinsic Motivation To Do Creative Work

There are two types of motivation: "extrinsic" (or external) and "intrinsic" (or internal). If you've ever been extremely motivated to clean your house when you know you're about to have visitors, that's extrinsic motivation. If you spend time on your days off working to get better at a hobby simply because you want to, that's intrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation is often used in a work context with "if, then" rewards. When your boss tells you, if you hit this deadline, then you'll get a bonus, that's an "if, then" reward. It's providing you with an external incentive to work hard.

This can work well to increase how hard you work—but only in particular contexts. That is, tasks that are simple and require mostly physical effort or time to get done. Anything repetitive that doesn't require creative thinking is a perfect candidate for this type of motivation.

But this approach breaks down when we look at tasks that require innovation and creative thinking. In those cases, researchers have found "if, then" rewards lead to worse performance. And in some cases, the higher the reward, the worse the participants performed on their tasks!

So extrinsic motivation isn't our best bet when we're working on something creative. It narrows our thinking by focusing us on getting the task done so we can earn the reward. But in creative work, that's the opposite of what we want. We need broad thinking, so we can come up with innovative ideas and see new connections.

Put this into practice: Focus on the three elements of intrinsic motivation. If you're working on a simple, mechanical task, try using "if, then" rewards to increase your motivation. Save a fun task to do later as a reward, or promise yourself a break, a snack, or a short time playing a game or watching videos. Apps like Habitica offer in-game virtual rewards with an aim to motivate you to complete tasks and goals on your list.

But when you're doing creative work—whether it's writing an article or trying to come up with a name for your new business—try not to use "if, then" rewards. You'll probably find it hard to do your best work if you're using extrinsic motivation. Instead, focus on what author Dan Pink says are the three elements required for intrinsic motivation:

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

Autonomy is all about choice. As Scott Geller, director of the Center for Applied Behavior Systems in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech, says in a talk at TEDx Virginia Tech, when you believe you have a choice, you're more motivated. If you're working on something you chose to do, you'll be intrinsically motivated to get it done.

So finding as many ways as you can to increase your autonomy in your work can improve how much natural motivation you have. Maybe you were given an assignment by your boss but aren't too thrilled about it. See if you can negotiate the terms of the due date, the project specs, or anything else that would help you feel more in control.

Mastery, says Pink, is about wanting to get better at something that matters. If you love what you do and enjoy improving your skills, you'll be more motivated to learn and use those skills in your work. If you believe you have worthwhile skills, you'll appreciate opportunities to use them more. If you don't feel this now, try looking for ways to augment your work by picking up a new, related skill that interests you.

Finally, focus on purpose. That comes from believing you're working on something that's bigger than yourself. If you're thinking about your customers, how your business is impacting the world, or the innovations that will come from what your team is working on, you'll be more motivated to do your part.

These three factors—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—are all also critical for job satisfaction. When you have all three in your line of work, consider yourself lucky.

2. Know How Your Work Helps Others

When we know that our work will make a difference to someone else, it makes us work harder. One example of this was found in a study of a fundraising call center at the University of Michigan. Students who'd benefited from the center's sponsorship fundraising talked to the call center workers for 10 minutes. One month later, those workers were spending 142% more time on the phones, and revenue had increased by 171%.

Despite these stark changes, the call center team members denied their work was affected by the students visiting them. So it may be that we draw intrinsic motivation subconsciously from evidence that our work is useful to others.

Put this into practice: Talk to the people who benefit from your work. Try seeking out the people your work impacts directly. That's probably not your boss or your colleagues. They're your final customers or even their customers. They might not be people you come in contact with every day, but making the effort to get in touch with these people could boost your motivation to work hard. You might occasionally ask customers to fill out a satisfaction survey or informally request feedback directly.

If you're curious about whether it will work for you, try tracking your work results before and after speaking to people, since you might not notice the effects yourself.

3. Give Yourself Something To Lose

There are two parts to this finding that relate to motivation. The first is a cognitive bias called "loss aversion." For example, if you found $20 on the ground, you'd be pretty happy. But if you had $20 in your wallet and lost it, you'd be really unhappy. Loss aversion refers to the fact that we feel stronger emotions about losing something than we do about gaining the same thing.

The second related finding is about ownership. The "endowment effect" states that we rate things as having higher value if we own them. This was illustrated in a study of students at Duke University by behavioral economist Dan Ariely and marketing professor Ziv Carmon. Ariely and Carmon asked students who'd won Final Four basketball tickets in a lottery at what amount they'd sell their tickets. The average answer was $1,400.

They then asked disappointed students who hadn't won tickets in the lottery how much they'd pay if they could purchase the tickets outright. Their average answer was $170. It's quite a big difference!

This is because the owners of the tickets believe they're far more valuable than those who don't own them, due to the endowment effect. They also have to ask a price high enough to offset their loss aversion—they'll feel a lot more strongly about "losing" the tickets than those who buy them will feel about their gain. Knowing it will hurt to part with something they own, the sellers ask for high prices to offset that pain.

Vassilis Dalakas, professor of marketing at California State University San Marcos, tested how loss aversion affects our motivation with his consumer behavior class. He had two classes learning the same material and gave each class optional pop quizzes throughout the semester. Each quiz was worth one point if answered correctly, and would cost the student one point if answered incorrectly.

For the first class, Dalakas told his students they had to take a final exam unless they earned five points through the pop quizzes. Those five points would earn them the chance to skip the exam. Forty-three percent of students in this class collected the full five points. In the second class, Dalakas told his students the final exam was optional unless they didn't earn five points through the pop quizzes. If students opted to not take the quizzes or didn't pass enough to get their five points, they were required to take the final exam.

In the second class, 82% of students earned five points. Can you guess why?

In the second class, students believed they owned the right to opt out of the final exam. The exam started off as being optional, but they could lose that right to sit it out by not taking the quizzes. The thought of losing the right to skip the exam was a powerful driver.

The first class, however, was told their exam was required from the start. They could earn the right to sit it out, but they weren't having anything taken away from them. Earning something new wasn't enticing enough for even half the students to earn the required points.

Put this into practice: Motivate yourself externally using loss aversion. You can use this psychological principle by putting something at stake when you feel unmotivated. It could be money, which is how apps like Beeminder and stickK work. You put up the money initially but only lose it to an individual you specify, a charity (or worse, anti-charity—an organization you strongly oppose) if you fail to complete your commitment.

Whether it's money, a right to something, or a physical object, make sure you choose something you feel ownership of and a way to hold yourself accountable, such as a friend or colleague. If you feel like it's not yours in the first place, you won't feel as much pain to part with it, and its power to motivate you will be diminished. And remember, this is an external motivation mechanism, so it'll work best for simple, mechanical tasks rather than creative work.

There are plenty of things I'd like more of: self-discipline, willpower, persistence, and spatial awareness to name a few. But motivation is certainly at the top of my list. Without motivation, it's hard to hit deadlines and even harder to do your best work.

These approaches aren't foolproof and won't necessarily work for everyone. But the best way to find out what motivates you most is to try different approaches and measure your performance. Just remember to match the type of motivation to the task at hand.

This article originally appeared on Zapier and is reprinted with permission.

The actress and activist talks about being a transgender role model, election-season scapegoating, and how an alien transvestite helped her find her voice.

This month, you're starring in the TV remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. What drew you to the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the "sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania," which Tim Curry memorably played in the original?

I became obsessed with Rocky Horror when I was in college. I connected deeply to the message of the film; the song "Don't Dream It, Be It" became a personal mantra. And Tim Curry's iconic performance just transformed me. At the time, I was gender-nonconforming: I had a shaved head, and I wore false eyelashes and makeup, but I didn't identify as female yet. So this movie and its gender fluidity were everything to me.

There's a lot of singing in this role. How did you prepare for it?

I really started working on my [lower-range] chest voice again. For a long time, after I first discovered that I could sing really high, I exclusively sang in my head voice. I've met other trans singers who struggled with finding their voices during and after transition. Being comfortable with our voices is a really big deal. It wasn't until about a year ago that I started accepting that I have a deep voice, too. And once I was ready to deal with that, the universe brought me something really spectacular: the role of Frank-N-Furter. Now I can sing a full octave range, and you get a taste of that in the movie.

When the legal drama Doubt airs next year on CBS, your character will be the first series regular on broadcast TV who is trans—and is actually played by a trans actor. Why has it taken so long for trans actors to break through?

For years, a lot of people in this industry didn't think trans actors existed or had the talent to deliver when roles came along. There's a business part, too. Sometimes you need a name just to get funding. And we have not until recently had any famous trans actors. But if you don't cast trans people to play trans—or to play any role—then we don't get the opportunity to become stars and amass the clout to carry a movie. It becomes a circle where we don't get opportunities. I just wanted to get in the room, to have them see what I could do.

After the Civil Rights Movement, a lot of TV shows debuted—Julia, with Diahann Carroll, The Cosby Show—that helped challenge viewers' stereotypes of African-Americans. Do you think your work has a similar effect?

I hope so. Frank-N-Furter is an alien from another planet [laughs], so Frank-N-Furter is not really reflective of the day-to-day realities of transgender people. With Doubt, my character is an attorney who is a black transgender woman and is fighting for the rights of others. Hopefully, it'll encourage the public to see me in a new light, and maybe see trans people in a different light as well.

You are so symbolically important to people. When you're making career choices, do you feel that you have to keep the trans community in mind?

I think about that, but I have to grow as an artist and push myself. So when it comes to decisions about playing a particular part, I really think about the challenge. I think about the humanity of the character, and who I might be working with on it. I try to keep artistic decisions out of the realm of the political. Though, certainly, it's all political.

And you're not shy about using your platform to fight for causes. You've drawn attention to transgender murders and taken a stand against LGBT–unfriendly laws. What motivates your activism?

I remember having a conversation years ago with my brother about this. I'm political anyway, so the question was: Do I speak up, do I speak out? [There had never been] a conversation in the mainstream media that challenged the ways in which trans stories were told. I wanted to change that, to create space for myself as a full, multi-dimensional human being, and hopefully give other trans people space to do that as well. A lot of it is just about seeing a need and speaking out, 'cause somebody's gotta do it. It's a civic responsibility.

You have been a vocal opponent of North Carolina's HB2, the so-called Bathroom Bill, which forces individuals to use restrooms that match the gender on their birth certificate. We've recently seen large organizations like Target, PayPal, and the NBA join activists in protesting it. What does that signal to you?

I was very excited when I heard that the NBA was pulling the All-Star game from North Carolina. When people discriminate, there need to be consequences. There are over 100 anti-trans bills that have been introduced in the past year. One hundred. It's really about scapegoating trans people during an election year to turn out a particular party electorate. It's important that we push our own narratives, instead of all of the misinformation about trans people that folks want to try to perpetuate.

Free CeCe, a documentary you executive produced about a trans woman who spends a lot of time in solitary confinement in a men's prison, had its world premiere in June. On the most recent season of Orange Is the New Black, your character spends a significant amount of time in solitary. Did you help develop that story line?

That was the writers. They had done the research, and when I got the script, I was like, Oh wow, here we go. My hope is that through Orange Is the New Black and Free CeCe, we can begin to have conversations about solitary confinement in this country. It's cruel and unusual punishment and needs to be banned. Solitary can result in psychological and emotional effects for the rest of someone's life—paranoia, hallucinations. Often people who have been in solitary are suicidal. Kalief Browder is a person I can't help but think about. Do you know that story? [As a teenager, Browder spent years in solitary while awaiting trial at New York's Rikers Island. He committed suicide two years after his case was dismissed.]

I do.

It's so sad. When he got out after being in solitary for years, he lost the will to live.

Your character, Sophia, goes to a dark place while in solitary, really stripped-down physically and emotionally. How did you evoke that?

Obviously, I'd had conversations with CeCe over the years about her experience. It's a scary place to go, because it has to be real for me—so that it's real for the audience. You are stripping someone of something fundamentally human when they are not able to have human contact.

You've been open about a past suicide attempt.

Yeah, I've talked about that, yes.

Did you draw on that experience as well?

There have been times in my life when I certainly have wanted to end it, so yeah. As an actor, you shouldn't tell all your secrets to the public. You have to have something for yourself to draw on. I tried to go into those places in my own history when I felt very isolated, and then worked to amplify those sensations, those states of mind.

What was it like for you growing up in Alabama?

It was a mixed bag. It's important to note that the black community that I grew up in, in Mobile, was supportive of me as a good student who was talented. I studied dance, I did public speaking, I won a lot of talent shows. But I had to suppress my gender stuff and my femininity. I was bullied a lot, and I internalized a lot of shame around that. But I survived it. And everything that I went through has made me who I am today.

What inspires you?

I love excellence. Leontyne Price, who is an opera singer, is my idol. Her voice is so brilliant, but so is her work ethic, her discipline. On Facebook, I've been sharing videos of [1990s gymnasts] Dominique Dawes and Kerri Strug—that amazing Olympic moment when [Strug] vaulted and landed on one foot. You know the hours of work that went into that. It's a grind, but there's no substitute for just doing the work. There is something inspiring about that.

30-second bio: Laverne Cox

Hometown: Mobile, Alabama

Major acting credits:Orange Is the New Black (Sophia Burset), Grandma (Deathy), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Dr. Frank-N-Furter), Doubt (Cameron Wirth), Freak Show (Felicia Watts)

First openly transgender person to: Play a trans regular character on a broadcast TV show, receive an Emmy nomination in an acting category, appear on the cover of Time magazine, or receive a wax figure at Madame Tussauds

On politics and the LGBT community: "We need to vote not only this year, but also in the midterm elections and particularly in 2020 when gerrymandered districts will be redrawn."

Disruptive new email apps are targeting businesses and power users, rather than the mass market.

It's hard to believe that people once lined up to try a new email app, but a few years ago, mobile email was so inefficient that more than 1 million people joined a waitlist for an alternative called Mailbox. With features like swipe-to-delete and "snooze" for responses, Mailbox proved that email could be better, and it inspired a wave of similar apps.

The boom didn't last: Mass-market email apps proved unsustainable on their own, while big tech firms like Google and Microsoft snatched up some of the more innovative startups, only to rebrand them or roll them into existing products. Mailbox itself got acquired by Dropbox, which decided to shut down the app last year due to a lack of consumer interest. You don't hear much about innovative new email apps for consumers anymore, because there's no money in it.

That doesn't mean email innovation has gone away. But instead of targeting the masses, email app-makers are narrowing their focus to businesses, marketers, and power users who might actually pay to have their pain points taken away.

Selling Super Powers

Last year, CloudMagic realized that its attempt at a mass-market email app wasn't working. A subscription plan with broad consumer features went nowhere, and data-mining people's emails for profit seemed wrong. Display ads would have been an instant death sentence. So as CloudMagic continued to bleed cash, CEO Rohit Nadhani came up with a new plan: Sell premium features that might appeal to businesses and marketing people.

Today, CloudMagic is putting that plan into action with a rebranded app called "Newton." (The name, Nadhani says, is a nod to the physicist, Apple's attempt at a PDA, and geeks who would appreciate those things.) While the basic app remains free, a $50-per-year subscription adds features that are unlikely to show up in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Apple's Mail app. With a couple of taps from the compose window, you can get notified when recipients read your email, get a reminder if they don't, or schedule an email to send later. The app also includes an Undo Send function—a longtime godsend on Gmail's desktop website—and lets you pull in information from third-party services such as Trello and Pocket.

The key difference from CloudMagic's previous subscription attempt, Nadhani says, is that the company isn't trying to monetize commodity features such as multiple accounts and Exchange access. "We are feature-complete as a commodity email app, so now is a great time to build a layer of features that you don't expect from commodity email, features that people are used to paying for."

As part of the subscription push, CloudMagic is also making its Mac app free. Nadhani had hoped that mobile CloudMagic users would be willing to spend $20 for a desktop app, but that assumption proved wrong. Newton will now be free across all platforms (a Windows version is in early development), with subscriptions driving the revenue. "That's a lesson we learned the hard way," Nadhani says.

The new subscription plan doesn't guarantee sustainability. Because Newton stores emails on its own servers for speedy delivery, search, and push notifications, each user brings significant recurring costs. The new subscription features raise costs even more. Nadhani says Newton needs 2% to 5% of its users to subscribe in the next year or so for the app to survive.

"All of us are not going to be driving sports cars, but at least the company's going to sustain, and then grow from there," Nadhani says. But what happens if the app doesn't hit those goals? "I don't even want to think about it, seriously," he adds.

Targeting Teams

Newton isn't the only email app that hopes to charge a premium for business features. Readdle has similar plans for its Spark email app, but instead of targeting individual users, it wants to sell collaboration features, taking a page from team-based services like Slack and Front.

For instance, users might be able to select a portion of an email thread to share with a team member, without the sloppiness of forwarding or copy and paste. Coworkers might also be able to open a chat window around a particular email, or group edit responses before sending them.

"When you start to think about team mechanics that arise when you work with several other people, there are some things that could be done to make your work easier, and that could be monetized," says Alex Tyagulsky, Readdle's cofounder and head of product. "And also, that probably would not be commoditized by the Mail app from Apple, from Yahoo, or the regular version of Outlook."

Tyagulsky admits that collaboration features weren't always on the roadmap. When Readdle started working on Spark in 2013, the company hoped to reinvent email for the masses. But over the past couple years, the mass-market opportunities to revamp email vanished. Mailbox got acquired by Dropbox, Acompli got acquired by Microsoft, and Readdle realized the masses weren't really interested in yet another email app.

"When we started to market Spark, we were pretty surprised at how hard is to convince somebody to switch from their email client to Spark," Tyagulsky says. People get set in their ways with email, and not supporting a particular feature, such as swipe-based actions, can be a dealbreaker. The reasons to switch must be numerous, and immediately apparent.

"Even if that second app has a ton of something you might need, you have a habit, and habit is a really strong thing," he says.

With the new plan, Tyagulsky isn't shy about citing Slack as an inspiration. He notes that chat room software had been around for a long time before Slack arrived, but the company managed to build a business off what seemed like a commodity.

"IRC was free," Tyagulsky says. "Why would you pay for something that was pretty similar to IRC to some extent? But they did it. I think it's possible, in some way, for email too."

Small-Scale Improvements

Not all email apps are just now pivoting away from a mass-market strategy. Airmail, for instance, has been concentrating on a subset of power users since its first Mac app launched in 2013, and has continued that strategy with its iOS app, which launched earlier this year.

Instead of building an app that appeals to a mass audience, Airmail is unashamedly geeky. Its Mac app supports complex multitouch gestures, FTP uploads, and Markdown composition, while the iOS version includes PDF creation, multiple signatures, and while the iOS version supports complex tasks such as FTP attachments, Markdown composition, and full label creation and editing.

Airmail doesn't rely on subscription revenue, but rather charges up front for each of its apps (currently $10 for Mac and $5 for iOS). Leonardo Chiantini, one of Airmail's two core developers, says this model has been sustainable because they've kept costs down. Beyond just having a small team, Airmail has made a point of minimizing server costs. Rather than storing entire messages, as Newton does (and as Mailbox did), Airmail only uses servers to deliver push notifications.

"We don't really believe that proxy messages are a sustainable business," Chiantini says. "That kind of solution—Mailbox proved that it's not really easy to convert a free user to something that you can really monetize."

Airmail's approach does bring trade-offs. Without servers to do the heavy lifting, the app needs a lot of on-device processing power and storage to parse messages and index search results. The developers started with a Mac app to sidestep those issues on phones, and when they did finally develop an iOS version, it took a lot of extra work to minimize the amount of processing time. Updating the app is also more of a hassle, because there's little the developers can fix through server-side updates. Even the smallest tweaks require an update through the App Store, whose submission process can slow things down.

"In some ways, this solution is quite cheap for recurring costs, but it also more difficult to develop," Chiantini says. "If you connect to just your own server, it's much easier."

The Next Big Thing

While it's nice that email apps are figuring out how to adapt without mass adoption, the risk is that consumers may get shut out from future innovations. What happens if major tech players lose interest in transforming mobile email, and no one's trying to build a new mass-market phenomenon to shake things up like Mailbox did?

Alex Moore, CEO and cofounder of the Gmail scheduling and reminder extension Boomerang, is optimistic. He says he's especially excited about artificial intelligence and its potential to make us even more efficient at sending and managing emails. (Incidentally, Boomerang recently launched a service called Respondable that analyzes email for its likelihood of getting a response, drawing on data from millions of messages.)

"I think that innovation in email is nowhere near done," Moore says. "I think it's going to keep going for as long as we have email, which I hope is forever."

As for whether that innovation will take shape in a mass-market product, Moore says Boomerang is "working on some stuff" to that end. Boomerang already missed out on app-store fame once, having launched in 2010 as a Gmail extension that reminds people to respond to important emails. The concept was years ahead of Mailbox, but at the time Boomerang didn't have the resources to offer a mobile app. (It now has an Android app for paid subscribers, and an iOS version is in development.)

"I really had to take my hat off and say, 'Hey you guys did a great job,'" Moore says. "But at the same time I was kind of like, 'I knew this would happen, and I'm sad it wasn't us.'"

Boomerang has since released an Android app, and an iOS version is on the way. But Moore still believes there's room for another Mailbox-scale hit. It just has to be different enough from what's already out there.

"If somebody makes a differentiated thing, it will be successful again," Moore says. "I hope this time it'll be somebody profitable so it won't just get bought and immediately assimilated."

Forget "solitary genius," says author Jeff Goins. Creativity needs fuel from three types of collaborative interaction.

"My only anxiety," a young Vincent van Gogh wrote in desperation, "is how can I be of use in the world?"

From the despair of a failed missionary outpost, he was pleading for direction from his older brother Theo, the person he always went to with his problems. Once again at his wit's end and on the verge of failure, Van Gogh was struggling to make sense of his life.

Vincent's parents, along with just about everyone else in his life, were wondering when he was going to make something of himself. He may have been wondering that, too. And here was Theo, writing back and enclosing some money—bailing him out once again.

What happened next changed the history of art. The young Van Gogh didn't quit. Starting with drawing, then moving to painting, Vincent dedicated the next decade of his life to art. From roughly this point forward, he pushed forward at an incredible pace, averaging at least a painting a day, churning out thousands of artworks—a lifetime's worth of achievements in a fraction of the time. And he did it with the support of his brother.

Contrary to popular belief, Vincent van Gogh did sell more than a single painting in his lifetime. He just sold most of them to Theo, his de facto patron. Their partnership made the spread of Vincent's work possible. Sure, Theo was his brother, but, more important, he was a well-connected art dealer who believed in a promising painter.

One thing many of us tend to forget today is that we don't often get a Vincent van Gogh without a Theo van Gogh.

It was Theo who prompted Vincent to move to Paris and introduced him to a group of misfit painters called "Impressionists." And it was Theo who supported his brother's work when no one else understood it, along with Theo's wife Johanna, who would champion it long after both Van Gogh brothers were dead and gone.

Putting Our Heads Together

We all want to believe that if our work is good enough, we'll be recognized for our creative genius. Whether as artists, entrepreneurs, or employees, we believe success is mostly a meritocracy. It isn't. Who you know matters, and without the right connections, even the best work won't get noticed.

But this isn't just about the importance of networking—it goes straight to the heart of the creative process. We're often led to believe that creative minds toil alone in a cabin in the woods or stuffed away in some laboratory, too busy to be bothered.

"You might wonder," creativity expert Keith Sawyer wrote in his book Group Genius, "Isn't the individual mind the ultimate source of creativity? Doesn't each creative spark come from a single person?"

Not exactly, says Sawyer. Creativity is always the result of collaboration, whether it's intentional or not. In my study of successful creatives today, I've identified three kinds of collaboration that every creative person needs in order for their work to succeed and influence others.

1. A Scene

Where we live and do our work matters. We understand intuitively that some places have greater concentrations of a certain kind of person than others. A huge number of musicians move to my hometown, Nashville, every year in hopes of making it big in the music industry. Same goes for actors moving to Hollywood and artists relocating to Brooklyn.

The work of urban studies theorist Richard Florida underscores this phenomenon. "The most important factor in the success of your career," he tells me, "is where you decide to live." According to Florida, who has indexed the most creative cities in America and regularly measures where the "creative classes" call home, not all places are created equal.

Each locale has a personality that can be instrumental in the success or failure of a person's work; you need to find the right fit for what you do. Certain scenes can be hotbeds for certain kinds of creative output, as Silicon Valley is for computer programmers or 1850s Paris was for visual artists.

The scenes we join (or fail to) unavoidably affect the success of our work. And sometimes the best career move is to physically move. Go someplace where something's happening that relates to your creative passion, even if you do that on a small scale at first—like by attending a conference or even just moving across the room to engage in a scene that's already taking place.

2. A Network

Everyone needs a network, and creatives are no exception to this rule. In fact, the "it's who you know" rule seems to apply even more so to artists. Since art—or any creative craft, really—is inherently subjective, the opinions of a handful of important people can be hugely important.

"You really only need one or two good friends," New York–based artist Hank Willis Thomas told me, "because it's really about having someone who's going to advocate for you. That's the formula for success."

What is a network, exactly, and how is building one different from joining a scene? A network is a little bit looser and more relational—it's an informal group of people who come together for the purpose of connecting with each other. Networks tend to stretch beyond the borders of a given scene; members may not all know one another personally, but they're each influential to the success of the network itself.

Networks don't just happen, though. You often have to look for them, making use of the people already around you, and constantly curating your relationships in hopes of strengthening the network. Success doesn't take an army, but it does take a small group of people who can help your work get the attention it deserves.

This isn't about getting your big break, though; it's just about being good enough to make it and knowing the right people who can help you get there. Every thriving artist understands the power of networks, whereas every starving artist continues to try and make it on their own.

3. A Community

"There was a group of them, 19 men, and they got together once or twice a week for about 17 years. And in those meetings there was a special kind of magic that happened," Diana Glyer, author and English professor at Azusa Pacific University, explained to me recently. Glyer is an expert on the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others.

"They read their works-in-progress to one another, and they stayed up late into the night giving each other critiques," Glyer says. "And it is in this forge of friendship and engagement that some of the great works that we love were created"—including The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.

These works, Glyer has found, didn't result from any single act of genius, but rather creative collaboration—and of a very specific kind. The Inklings got together to collaborate intentionally, spurring each other on and even challenging one another to do better.

We all need groups of people not just to connect with, but with whom we can share our work—people Glyer calls "resonators," those who affirm when you're on the right track and guide you back when you're not. This type of collaborative interaction is arguably the hardest to secure. It's more deliberate and tighter-knit than either a scene or a network, but it's no less crucial. And we often build creative communities out of people we meet in those other two.

Without a community, our best work will stay stuck inside us. We need peer groups and circles of influence to make our work better. This is true in art, but it's also true in business. Any work that requires you to make something the world hasn't seen before is work that often has to be done collaboratively.

This is ultimately good news. If you have a powerful idea, you aren't solely on the hook for pulling it off all by yourself. If you're feeling stuck, it may be that your creativity simply needs fuel and support from your relationships. It might be time to stop trying to force the creative process and instead start going out there and interacting with people—locating the right scene, growing your network, and building a community.

When you're hitting a wall creatively, ask yourself:

• Am I part of a powerful scene that connects me to others who can help me grow and succeed?
• Have I established lasting connections with people who can help me and whom I can help?
• Is there a group that I meet with regularly that challenges me and calls out the best in me?

This is how great creative work gets made—not in isolation, but through everyday collaboration. It was true for Vincent van Gogh, and it's true for us today.

Jeff Goins is a writer who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his family. He is the author of the national best sellerThe Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffGoins.

International Photographer of the Year Brooks Kraft says new lens improvements and better image resolution represent a great leap forward.

The new dual-lens camera of the new iPhone 7 Plus is possibly the most significant upgrade to an iPhone camera ever.

The iPhone 7 camera's 28mm wide angle lens now has an aperture of f1.8, which allows 50% more light to reach the sensor. And the additional 56mm lens, Apple says, will have a number of implications for photo quality.

The improved aperture and the new lens, taken together, make the iPhone 7 Plus camera a far more capable tool for both amateur and pro photographers. But they also make it a more complex one. So we went to photographer Brooks Kraft for help testing the performance of the camera's new features. Kraft covered the White House for Time from 2001-2011 (spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations) and was named International Photographer of the Year in 2013.

Kraft was one of a handful of professional photographers who got an iPhone 7 Plus from Apple to test in advance of the smartphone's release on September 16. He came away believing iPhone 7 Plus camera represents a major leap forward in iPhone photography and in smartphone photography in general. He was impressed with the optical zoom, color accuracy, and low-light performance of the dual camera. However, Kraft is less convinced of Apple's claim that the iPhone 7 Plus's longer zoom capability (which, once you get past 2X, is digital, not optical) is really dramatically better than the digital zoom on earlier iPhones.

To demonstrate the specific differences in the new dual-lens camera versus those in the last few generations of iPhones, Kraft shot a series of photos in his home town of Washington, D.C., with both the iPhone 7 Plus and the iPhone 6 Plus. He chose shots that would best demonstrate the quality differences in specific aspects of the phone's cameras.

Optical Zoom Still Beats Digital Zoom

In the slideshow above, you'll see a number of photos that Kraft took within the newly remodeled U.S. Capitol building's rotunda. He shot straight upwards at the intricately painted mural on the ceiling at the top of the dome. The subject provided a perfect test image because of the nuances of its textures, the fine details of the paint, and the effects of the sunlight entering through the sides of the structure.

Kraft demonstrates clearly the iPhone 7 Plus's improvement over the iPhone 6 Plus in shooting 2X zoom images. That's because the iPhone 7 Plus's additional 56mm lens uses real optical zoom at 2X, while the iPhone 6 Plus must rely on a digital process to create a 2X zoom. "So essentially what they're doing in the iPhone 6 is just blowing pixels up," Kraft told me.

By contrast, photos shot with the iPhone 7 Plus at 2X offer a degree of clarity and detail we're not used to seeing in smartphone photos. For many users, this improvement alone may justify paying the $100 premium to get the more expensive iPhone 7 Plus with its dual-lens camera. (Analysts estimate that the dual-lens camera adds an additional $30-$40 to Apple's component costs for the Plus.)

These images are small pieces cut from both the iPhone 6 Plus and the iPhone 7 Plus shots of the Capitol Dome interior. They're blown up to 200% to show the differences in image quality caused by optical versus digital zoom:

The new 10X zoom on the iPhone 7 Plus—the iPhone 6s Plus went only to 5X—doesn't manage to do away with all the limitations of digital zoom technology. "Once you go beyond the 2X offered optically with the new lens, image quality deteriorates," Kraft says. But he adds that the improved 7 Plus camera does take better pictures at long zoom ranges than the iPhone 6s Plus. "The iPhone 7 Plus is better than the iPhone 6 Plus at 5X zoom, but then the 7 Plus is better all around, so it's hard to say if the actual zoom effect is improved."

Overall, Kraft advises users to stick with the iPhone 7 Plus's 1X and 2X optical zooms when image quality counts. "There are incremental improvements in zoom due largely to overall image improvements I believe, but [longer] zoom should be used only when image quality is not important," Kraft said. "I do not recommend using it indoors or in low light."

Low-Light Shots Are A Highlight

The new lens in the iPhone 7 Plus has an improved aperture of f/1.8, which means it lets in 50% more light than previous models in the iPhone 5 and 6 series, which used a f.2.2 aperture. This significantly improves the iPhone 7 Plus camera's performance in low-light situations, Kraft says. As a result, it's now easier to take photos without flash indoors, as well as photos shot outside at dusk and even near-dark (see examples in slides #7 and #8, and #11 and #12).

The optical image stabilization (OIS) system used in the iPhone 6s Plus is now built into both the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus cameras. The feature is meant to address the problem of shaky hands, which can create blurred images, especially in low light. For many people using the smaller 4.7-inch iPhone 7, the OIS will create obvious improvement in shot quality. However, Kraft believes that the image stabilization system in the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus is similar to that in the iPhone 6s Plus. And it's only available with the 1X lens, not when you zoom in further.

Some of the image quality improvements in the iPhone 7 Plus camera result from improvements in the image processing software. "iPhones continue to excel at providing excellent color in a variety of lighting environments, in many cases better than high end DSLRs," Kraft said.

The improved image signal processor is built into the A10 Fusion chip that powers the iPhone 7 Plus, Apple says. The company explains that when you take a photo or video, the ISP conducts "over a 100 billion operations" and uses machine learning to analyze the subject and adjust the camera settings for best results.

You can see noticeable improvements in detail, color rendering, and pixel structure over the iPhone 6 Plus, owing to the new image signal processor in the new camera, Kraft said. He says the improved software helps create the improved detail in the shadows of pictures shot in low light. You can see the improved low-light detail in image #7 in the slideshow: the details of the man's clothing are more apparent in the shot taken using the iPhone 7 Plus camera versus the iPhone 6 Plus camera, Kraft points out.

Apple built a whole new method of analyzing and reproducing colors in the iPhone 7 Plus, and it can easily be seen in the results. "Apple's new Wide Color Capture color space renders noticeably better color than in the 6 series," Kraft said.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Apple's engineers, Kraft believes, are far from done working on the iPhone's camera. As a working photographer he has definite ideas about how the dual-lens camera could and should be improved in future iPhones. Here are the big ones:

Kraft said he hopes Apple will make the dual-lens camera available in all phone models, not just the Plus version. "I'm a person who likes the smaller phone size; it's just easier to carry," Kraft said. "But I want the two lenses." (Of course, the 7 Plus's larger case provides more space for Apple to cram in two lenses.)

He would like a little bit more width in the iPhone's 28mm wide angle lens. "I would like to see Apple take the 28mm lens to 24mm," Kraft said. "For shooting landscapes and environments, it would make a big difference," he said. (In camera lenses the millimeter sizes refer to the focal length, or the distance between where the light rays cross each other inside the camera and where they meet the sensor. Wider lens angles create shorter focal lengths, and vice versa. Find a more detailed explanation here.)

Kraft says he would like to see Apple add some manual control settings for aperture and shutter speed, as well as continue to make significant improvements in image resolution. (Third-party camera apps such as VSCO do offer more manual settings, including shutter-speed control.)

Overall, though, he gives the new iPhone 7 Plus camera high marks: "On balance, the iPhone 7 camera is the biggest improvement in recent generations, and the benefits are likely to be noticed by consumers and professionals alike," Kraft said. "If the camera is an important element of your mobile experience, there is definite incentive to upgrade."

Though it is often misunderstood, good design can help a company thrive.

Several weeks ago my sister, Judy, introduced me to a podcast called Presidential, and I've become addicted to it. It's a week-by-week exploration of each American president, with a playful spirit and provocative leadership insights. The most recent episode I listened to focused on FDR's relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote a book called Tomorrow Is Now. What could be more modern than that?

There's much discussion in the current election season about what makes America great. A less-discussed corollary: What makes American business great? For several months, our editors have been poring over thousands of submissions for our Innovation by Design Awards, which, in aggregate, reveal what animates economic success today. Whether it's the intuitive ease of Airbnb's new app or the clever underwater server farms of Microsoft's Project Natick, the drive for change is palpable. What unifies these efforts has little to do with billionaires and CEOs. Instead, there is an optimistic and hopeful embrace of disruption, anchored by creative problem solving.

The discipline of design ties all of this together. Design is so frequently misunderstood, yet it is critical in a world that is constantly in flux, and where each new challenge requires a uniquely tailored solution. Combining hard-science arenas like computing with the more intuitive realms of art and psychology can be tricky, but that melding is where the magic happens. Even things that may not seem like design—Google's and Apple's exciting advances in the ed-tech market (see "Getting Schooled") or beer maker Samuel Adams's quest for new tastes in the face of rising craft breweries (see "Honing Her Craft")—have design principles at their core.

Design requires us to focus on what really matters most. Architect David Adjaye's vision for the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (see "A Bold Monument to the Black Experience") in Washington, D.C., uses physical space to evoke emotion and deliver information, all in service of a larger, empathetic goal. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is tapping his design roots in trying to reenergize the promise of a platform still avidly used by millions of the world's most influential people (see "Live From Twitter HQ").

Eleanor Roosevelt was not trained as a designer, and she would not have recognized that label as a description of her efforts. But as each change came, she adapted, through the Great Depression, World War II, and beyond. And each adaptation revealed new, richer elements of her potential, just as the competitive stresses of today are unleashing the best of what American business can be.

Companies including IBM, GE, and Hilton Worldwide are using algorithms to screen, test, and hire new talent.

Making a good impression with a prospective employer often requires little more than a great résumé and congenial personality. But how do you impress an algorithm? That's the question facing applicants of Facebook, IBM, and a spate of other companies that are starting to incorporate artificial intelligence into their hiring practices. They're using machines to scan work samples, parse social media posts, and analyze facial expressions on behalf of HR managers. Such practices raise questions about accuracy and privacy, but proponents argue that harnessing AI for hiring could lead to more diverse, empathetic, and dynamic workplaces.

Though traditional personality-assessment techniques, such as the Myers–Briggs test, are designed for objectivity, somewhere along the way "managers still inject personal bias," says Mark Newman, founder and CEO of HireVue, a recruiting-technology company. That's where machines can act as a check. HireVue records and analyzes interviews, noting things such as facial expressions and word choice to provide its clients (including Hilton Worldwide and GE) with feedback on a candidate's levels of engagement, motivation, and empathy. Koru, another human resources software developer, also gauges personal attributes, using a written test to evaluate "impact skills," such as grit, curiosity, and polish. Koru compares candidates' results to those of a client's top staff performers to identify those most likely to excel at the company.

But recruitment isn't just about discovering the best people—it's about eliminating the worst. Fama, founded in 2015, uses natural-language processing to conduct automated web searches on a candidate, scanning news coverage, blogs, and even a person's public social media history for signs of bigotry, violence, sexual content, and illegal drug use. It can also look for indicators of positive attributes, such as volunteering.

Artificial intelligence can even be used to check for skills specific to certain jobs. The year-old company Interviewed, which has worked with clients such as Instacart and IBM, administers "blind auditions" in which applicants for customer-service jobs field chats or calls from bots that represent consumers. It's now beginning to automate the assessment of what cofounder Chris Bakke describes as "softer skills," by using computerized analysis to identify speech patterns among, for example, empathetic individuals. An algorithm's ability to understand something like empathy, Bakke says, points to a new hiring technique—one in which machines assess, but humans make the final call.

Survios' Raw Data is said to be the first VR game to hit $1 million in sales in a month.

Sean Parker may have famously said of Facebook's early years that only a billion dollars is cool, but for the maker of the hit virtual reality game Raw Data, a million dollars is a damn good start.

According to Culver City, California-based Survios, Raw Data, available only for HTC's high-end Vive, has become the first consumer VR game to hit $1 million in sales in a month. In addition, the company said, at least 20% of all Vive owners have purchased the $40 first-person shooter, and it became the first-ever VR game to top the charts at Steam, a leading game platform and ranking site.

Raw Data has earned rave reviews—such as Tom's Guide's best VR game award at this year's Game Developers Conference—thanks to high-fidelity graphics, Active VR technology that gives players an immersive, free-moving, shared-space experience, and a high-quality gaming experience.

Another way of putting it is that Raw Data feels expensive, and that's exactly what Survios was going for, CEO Nathan Burba told Fast Company.

"We saw a need in the market for a AAA title," Burba said, referencing full-price games for consoles like the Xbox. "It's more expensive than anything for the Vive, and more people wanted that…. By putting more money in [and] having a higher price point, we're signaling to users that this is a AAA title."

In fact, Burba added, people who bought high-end VR headsets like the Vive—which costs $799 and requires an expensive PC—are expecting Halo-like games that offer hours of play and the promise of ongoing expansion.

The idea that a more expensive VR title will attract more customers isn't all that far-fetched, especially if it's from a company that got into the game early.

"One of the curious things that happened in the launch of a new platform, like VR, is that the early developer adopters, like Survios and the like, are going to be the early winners," said Brian Blau, a media analyst at Gartner. "It's great news, making $1 million. Everybody's going to love that. For a new platform, it's a fine showing, and proves the point that the CEO says, that if the quality is good, people will pay for it."

Blau did note that it's too early to conclude that Raw Data's success will last, or even not soon be trumped by other titles, especially given that high-end systems like the Vive and the Oculus Rift have only been available since last spring and that the holidays may well be fruitful for other titles.

Still, Survios' foresight in being among the first to develop and release high-quality VR content is nothing to sneeze at, Blau said.

"If you look back at the launch of other new platforms, whether it's iOS or Android," he said, "you could see that in the early months, users gravitated to the obvious, popular titles, and Survios is one that can say they've done that."

Burba argued that Survios has "cracked the code" when it comes to making successful VR games. And while he said that the company plans on doubling down on what it's learned as it expands Raw Data, it is also already developing other titles.

He wouldn't say what those titles are, but did suggest they will be in different categories.

That could be a smart move if Survios wants to succeed over the long haul. Blau said that on most platforms games are the early winners but other types of content eventually also do well. With virtual reality, that could mean other forms of entertainment or 360-degree video content.

While Survios couldn't say how many people have purchased Vives—and HTC did not respond to a Fast Company request for sales numbers—the company did conclude based on data from SteamSpy that at least 20% of all Vive owners have purchased Raw Data.

That would be particularly impressive given that the game costs $40 and that some of the previous biggest hits for the platform, such as Valve's The Lab, are free.

For his part, Burba thinks Raw Data's sales success offers hints for how investors can make a lot of money with virtual reality in a nascent market where there's still a dearth of high-quality, rich content.

"There's an opportunity to own a significant part of the marketplace," Burba said, "if you're willing to spend capital up front…. There haven't been too many big swings [at high-quality content]. I'd love to see another venture capitalist...take a big swing or two."