Today’s Top Stories
TV Is Still Not Dead: Americans are still spending an inordinate amount of time around the big screen.
Read MoreTag: Newco Daily
Can American Malls Be Saved?
Today’s Top Stories
The Malls of the Future: Companies reimagine what we can do with all that space.
Read MoreTransparent Talk About a Tough Layoff
Today’s Top Stories
— Telling the Truth About a Layoff: Buffer’s CEO bites the bullet and shares the whole story.
— Airbnb Needs a Policy Update to Fight Racism: The company’s class-action waiver may make it harder for customers to get justice.
— New York Legislators 1. Airbnb 0: It’s what happens when your business model is against the law.
— A Cryptoheist Has Big Repercussions: A pair of virtual currencies go tumbling.
— Why Young Americans Are Losing Faith in Capitalism: It’s how it’s practiced.
Telling the Truth About a Layoff
No one enjoys being part of a layoff. It’s hard to soften the pain of being let go, but it’s welcome and still reasonably novel when a company is open and straightforward about what’s going on. Buffer founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne has published Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward, a long and wrenching blog post detailing the overall problem (Buffer grew too big too fast), what decisions led to the problem, how executives decided who would be let go, and the specific financial and organizational steps they’re taking to dig out of their mess. Cynics may point out that despite all the humility and self-lacerations, Gascoigne still has his job. But if these moves lead to a turnaround, Buffer will serve as a model of how to handle the news when things are bad.
General Electric: A BigCo Goes NewCo
Today’s Top Stories
— General Electric: Ancient But Open to the New. The 124-year-old company is making profound changes in what it expects of its people.
— Young People Are Frustrated and Angry. DoSomething Helps Them Make An Impact. Find out more in our latest video spotlight.
— Diversity Helps Even in Places Where It’s Not Designed To: More women in the boardroom may mean more attention to climate issues.
— Sugar Taxes Aren’t About the Sugar: They’re about the money.
— A Requiem for My Inbox: in which our founder and CEO gives up to the inevitable.
General Electric: A BigCo Goes NewCo
It’s not rare to hear a BigCo argue that its top people are those willing to take risks, test new ideas with customers, and make mistakes. It is rare, though, when a BigCo puts in practices to support that behavior. General Electric, 124 years old, under CEO Jeff Immelt, is reengineering its performance reviews and pay policies based on the behaviors they say they want (Wall Street Journal). The idea is to encourage risk, reduce uncertainty, and replace the annual high-stakes performance review with a more regular series of less dramatic feedback opportunities. “It’s not realistic to expect perfection anymore,” says GE HR exec Janice Semper, evidencing a new company culture Jack Welch would have some trouble recognizing.
The Rise of the Startup Neighborhood
Today’s Top Stories
— Venture Capital Investment Heads Downtown: Firms are investing more in cities, not suburbs.
— The Human Company Design Manifesto: Sara Holoubek introduces a management approach that creates value by investing in people.
— Not Enough People or Not Enough Skills? A new jobs report makes some wonder where the bottleneck to growth is.
— Cities, Serendipity, and Other “Spaces for Innovation”: Greg Lindsay on how to engineer for serendipity
— The Special Sauce at McDonald’s: Community
— A City-Based Visualization of Funding Flows: An analysis of 14 years of city-specific funding data
Venture Capital Investment Heads Downtown
When you think of where venture capital firms invest, you might imagine suburban office parks. Don’t. New research from Richard Florida and Karen King finds that investment firms and the startups they fund are increasingly of the city (CityLab). In particular, they find more than half of all startup companies and VC investments located in urban zip codes. These “startup neighborhoods” tend to be more walkable and bikeable than the norm; one-third of all venture-capital investment, they find, goes into neighborhoods with more than 30 percent of workers who walk, bike, or use mass transit when commuting. Suburban “nerdistans” still exist, but there’s a clear shift to dense urban neighborhoods.
What Kind of Company Is Uber, Really?
Today’s Top Stories
— Uber Hits More Detours On Its Journey to Maturity: It can’t keep treating its drivers and customers this way.
— The Digital Divide and the Diabetes Divide: What broadband really brings to underserved communities
— This Company Might Make Apple and Google Irrelevant: Viv is way more than an supercharged Siri.
— The Dots Has a Platform to Remake Creative Hiring: Our latest Video Spotlight showcases a new kind of talent firm.
— Housing Is the New Software: We don’t have enough homes for millennials. That’s a good thing.
— When Is the Best Day and Time To Hold a Meeting? We save you a click.
Uber Hits More Detours On Its Journey to Maturity
Those who want to believe Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s promises that the ride-hailing bellwether is maturing must be shaking their heads at news that the company’s car-leasing program for drivers is right out of the payday-loan playbook (Quartz labels it “modern-day sharecropping”). Uber’s strategic decision to slash fares has made it harder for lessees to meet their weekly payments. (Lyft, by the way, is about to do something similar with General Motors as its partner.) Also, the company’s head of global customer support has departed after leaked documents revealed what recode calls shaky internal practices, among them a speedy offshoring of support that led to “a drop-off in quality of support that at times led to serious incidents being mishandled.” It’s going to be hard for Uber to live up to its mission — “transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone” — if this is how it treats its drivers and customers.
Tesla’s Factory Goes Beyond Car Batteries
Today’s Top Stories
— Tesla’s Gigafactory Is About More Than Electric Cars: How high do Elon Musk’s ambitions go?
— Your Street Belongs to Waze: The navigation app gives the fastest route. Not everyone’s happy about that.
— BuzzFeed Cancels Seven-Figure Ad Deal, Blames Trump Policies: Like it or not, the company walks its talk.
— Supreme Court Grants Suit Against Google Class-Action Status: Another legal case against the search giant moves forward.
— Would You Like an AK-47 With That T-Shirt? Kalashnikov rebrands.
Tesla’s Gigafactory Is About More Than Electric Cars
Whether he’s thinking about colonizing Mars or slicing two years off his deadline to deliver half a million electric cars, Tesla’s Elon Musk doesn’t think small. So as Tesla prepares to open the “Gigafactory” for Tesla batteries in Nevada later this year, it’s easy to wonder whether his ambitions go beyond merely dominating the next generation of transportation (Fortune). When completed, the factory will double the world’s lithium-ion battery production. Tesla’s CTO JB Straubel says the purpose of the factory is “to reinvent battery manufacturing” and not only for electric cars, but also for Tesla’s grid battery initiative for homes. There’s more power, Musk says, in building “the machine that builds the machine.” Five hundred thousand electric cars by 2018 is as big, hairy, and audacious a goal as most people can imagine; seems like that’s just the beginning of what Musk hopes to build in Nevada.
Paris’s Bold Plan To Fight Air Pollution
Today’s Top Stories
— Europe Takes the Lead on Clean Driving: Paris and Norway ready rules to lessen air pollution.
— The Idea That’s Killing Mission-Driven Companies: What neoliberalism is doing to businesses that want to do more than make a profit.
— Swiss Voters Reject Universal Basic Income: Pilot programs remain, but the first full-country referendum is a crushing loss.
— Cadillac Dealerships Go Virtual: GM’s luxury brand looks for a way to differentiate.
— Even the Biggest Tech Companies Have To Appease Governments: Who holds more power, American tech giants or the countries that regulate them?
Paris’s Bold Plan To Fight Air Pollution
Driving an old junker? If you’re traveling to Paris, leave it at home. Starting next month, only vehicles manufactured after 1997 will be allowed in the city limits (Quartz) on weekdays between 8am and 8pm. It’s part of the city’s continuing crackdown on air pollution. Paris has company in such a move: Norway plans to ban the sale of all gasoline-powered cars by 2025 (Independent).
City Patterns Endure — Even When They Shouldn’t
Today’s Top Stories
— Our Cities Do What We Design Them To Do: Laws change, and that’s a good thing, but patterns last much longer.
— This Nutritional Research Has Been Brought To You By Butterfingers: Guess who’s funding those candy studies?
— Walmart Sends in the Drones: Yes, workers might be impacted.
— Solar in Chile Is Free — But There’s a Catch: The infrastructure needs to catch up.
— In Vancouver, It’s Land Over Work: The value of property exceeds the value of labor.
Our Cities Do What We Design Them To Do
City planning matters. You can see that in these drone images of Cape Town in South Africa (Quartz), which show how the “architecture of apartheid” is still there. South African cities were designed to “give white people access to the central businesses districts and homes in the leafy suburbs. Black people had to live far outside of the city.” Yet that method of organization persists, despite two decades of majority rule. Changing laws is important, of course, but literally changing the facts on the ground is necessary to combat persistent inequality.
Have We Hit Peak Facebook?
Today’s Top Stories
— Peak Facebook? Internet growth is flattening. But it’s not all about growth.
— Chasing the Grail: A bold attempt to do nothing less than cure cancer.
— Saudi Arabia Fuels Uber’s Global Expansion: Drivers with bad credit fuel Uber’s expansion, too
-Airbnb’s Three Billionaire Cofounders Give Most of It Away and Kick Out a Racist: This company is walking the talk.
— Yahoo’s National Security Reveal: The company sets an important precedent.
— You’ve Got Funding! Here’s a pitch for working at AOL. In 2016
Peak Facebook?
Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker delivered her annual internet trends report at a recode conference yesterday. The 213-slide deck includes her usual findings — mobile is eating the world, newspapers are getting eaten — but the key two new points this year are that the shift to voice search is happening faster than expected and global internet growth is flattening. Her figures dovetail with a blog post that’s getting a lot of attention: Portfolio manager Conor Sen isn’t so sure that the post-recession world truly scales. He looks at the scaling challenges facing many of today’s key players, from Tesla to the San Francisco Bay Area itself, and opines that things might be as big as they’re going to get. Even Uber and Facebook, he argues, are finding their ceilings. He concludes “It’s time to find new leaders who can build the world of the 2020s.” And that means finding leaders who are aren’t obsessed with growth as the sole goal.