In the world of the long-running kids show Cyberchase, Motherboard, a sort of digital queen and literal technocrat, is the beneficent but impaired leader of all of cyberspace. She iswe are to understanda legitimate ruler, yet faces constant attacks from the odious Hacker, a green-skinned android who dresses like a vampire and whose only goal is to sow chaos and eventually take control of Motherboards realm, which we might describe as something akin to a metaverse, or ever-expanding digital world.
Luckily, a trio of human kids named Inez, Mattie, and Jackiea squadvisit cyberspace frequently, where they embark on missions to help protect the ever-embattled Motherboard from her nemesis. Theyre frequently assisted by Digit, a robotic cybird that guides them through various missions.
Cyberchase is a publicly funded STEM-themed program created by the public television channel WNET Thirteen. Its been airing on PBS Kids since 2002. As such, every challenge the squad takes on can be answered with numbers, or at least some kind of mathematical concept. Sometimes, an episode involves a mission with subtraction, fractions, or even negative numbers! The whole point of the squads trials and tribulations is to teach children basic science, technology, engineering, and math concepts through adventures.
Sandra Sheppard, who created the show and now serves as executive producer, says its writers keep a close eye on how well U.S. students are doing with math concepts, especially as general math performance in the country continues to decline: Incoming freshmen at the University of San Diego increasingly need remedial math education, according to placement test performance, and national U.S. high school math performance has been sinking for years, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress. Parents report that social media continues to be a major distraction for kids.
In response, Cyberchase has adapted its content for the social media age, producing shorts that create snippets of its larger math lessons as well as online gaming content. For its upcoming season, slated to premiere in spring 2026, it has released its first seven-minute episodes, which are intended to find a midpoint between a full episode and short-form content.
Fast Company chatted with Sheppard about public television in the age of streaming and TikTok, the value of the PBS Kids brand, and how shes adapting a beloved shows math content to meet American kids where they are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
[Image: Thirteen]
I have a very particular memory of learning about negative numbers before everyone else, and then revealing this secret knowledge that I had learned through Cyberchase. But I didn’t have a smartphone or a computer with the internet until high school. How can you possibly get kids to the show when youre competing with smartphones, chatbots, and TikTok?
Over the last decade, if not more, the approach to reaching kids is really very multi-platform, because we know kids are using multiple devices and watching in a myriad of ways. I think our partners at PBS Kids have been great in developing products and tools so that kids can really watch anywhere. Cyberchase is on the PBS Kids Video app and it streams everywhere, including YouTube. We also offer games, and that continues to be a really important part of the learning.
Thinking about getting our content where kids are watching is constantly on our mind, as is developing content for those platforms and experimenting on those platforms. That includes shorter-form content, vertical shorts, and different kinds of compilations.
Have you had more success with some platforms rather than others?
Probably most children watch our content on streaming. That being said, there still is a dedicated audience for linear broadcast. And it’s a very diverse audience. Across the platforms, full episodes continue to be the driver of engagement. That’s not to say short-form content isn’t popular, or compilations aren’t popular, but we find that kids are still really driven by story. A full episode is 22 minutes. We’ve been experimenting this coming season with seven-minute stories, a little more bite-sizeas long as they’re a full narrative, so kids can have that kind of rich experience of watching a full story.
Can you talk a little bit more about the seven-minute episodes?
They’ll be coming out in March. It allows us to focus on math concepts a little bit more simply in bite-size stories, and really focus on some of the characters that we know our audience loves. There are Buzz and Delete, our bumbling henchmen who are buddies and semi-lovable in their own right. We’ve got a whole series of shorts that feature them in these kind of friendship-oriented adventures.
We can, in a short time, focus on a single strategy of subtraction, or focus on how to estimate using weight and why that’s an important tool. That’s not to say we’re moving away from long form, but it’s fun to experiment in that space. Those will be released digitally on all the PBS Kids platforms and YouTube.
How do you compete with the whole of the internet using algorithm-driven engagement when trying to get kids to your math-based content?
The PBS Kids brand is a very safe and trusted brand. For young children, parents, and families, we still guide many of their viewing experiences. And I think they see us as a trusted source of content. That’s not to say that there’s not lots out there and that it hasn’t become more fragmented. There are loads of choices.
[Image: Thirteen]
How do you measure the sort of uptake of the idas for kids? Is that something you study to make sure that they’re understanding math? How does that work?
We do a lot of initial developmental research, where we put ideas in front of focus groups of kids and families and test them out as early scripts. That gives us the opportunity to tweak up front. But we’ve also done a number of studies with external evaluators to really look at: Are kids learning the specific content in the shows? The good news is that we are really kind of a proven research model in that kids do learn from the series.
Something I’ve heard anecdotally from people I know who teach math is that kids seem to really be struggling. Especially after the pandemic, it seems like American students are really doing poorly in math. Whats the role of Cyberchase in that?
There certainly have been some national reports from the National Center for Education Statistics and the American Education Panel that have shown some real concerns in terms of math knowledge and gaps. Post-COVID, there have been some widening gaps.
Interestingly, in this season we made kind of a renewed commitment to focusing on topics like subtraction, which can be a complex topic for young children. For some, addition comes more readily. Subtraction, especially as a kind of mental map exercise, can be challenging. We are embracing topics that could use some extra support.
We live in a world that is changing. We’re all inundated with data, some of it AI-driven, some of it not. We’ve also focused in the last couple of seasons on data science, not only collecting and representing data, but looking at it and making sense of it reasonably.
Another topic that we’re tackling this season is fractions. I think that’s a topic that for a lot of kids takes a lot of reinforcement. Patterns are a foundational topic in math and a foundational topic in programming. Giving kids more exposure to patterns, all kinds of patterns, too.
I’ll say one other theme that I’m really excited about is connecting math to civics and the community. Certainly some of that involves data, but we have a very special show that’s going to be released called Every Flipper Counts. Its set in this wonderful cyber site of Penguia where the penguins have to pick a new team captain for their belly bowll, and the squad comes in and they introduce voting as a fair way to decide. There’s a lot of math and figuring out how to set up a fair vote.
How have the cuts to public media impacted you?
As a station, were always looking at ways to be more relevant, more sustainable. We have some wonderful funders of Cyberchase who are very supportive. For decades, Cyberchase did receive funding from the National Science Foundation. And for the moment, that’s not happening. It’s a complicated time and we have to navigate a path forward and find new ways to be smart, be cost effective, and bring in new supporters.
Final question: Is Cyberchase the metaverse?
It is an imaginary cyber world. The metaverse term came later. It’s a whimsical, vast landscape of these wonderfully rich, imaginary cyber sites. Its given us, as writers, an unbelievable place to go.
December 15, 2025the deadline for enrolling in a marketplace plan through the Affordable Care Act for 2026came and went without an agreement on the federal subsidies that kept ACA plans more affordable for many Americans. Despite a last-ditch attempt in the House to extend ACA subsidies, with Congress adjourning for the year on December 19, its looking almost certain that Americans relying on ACA subsidies will face a steep increase in healthcare costs in 2026.
As a gerontologist who studies the U.S. healthcare system, Im aware that disagreements about healthcare in America have a long history. The main bone of contention is whether providing healthcare is the responsibility of the government or of individuals or their employers.
The ACA, passed in 2010 as the countrys first major piece of health legislation since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, represents one more chapter in that long-standing debate. That debate explains why the health law has fueled so much political divisivenessincluding a standoff that spurred a record-breaking 43-day-long government shutdown, which began on October 1, 2025.
In my view, regardless of how Congress resolves, or doesnt resolve, the current dispute over ACA subsidies, a durable U.S. healthcare policy will remain out of reach until lawmakers address the core question of who should shoulder the cost of healthcare.
The ACAs roots
In the years before the ACAs passage, some 49 million Americans15% of the populationlacked health insurance. This number had been rising in the wake of the 2008 recession. Thats because the majority of Americans ages 18 to 64 with health insurance receive their health benefits through their employer. In the 2008 downturn, people who lost their jobs basically lost their healthcare coverage.
For those who believed government had a primary role in providing health insurance for its citizens, the growing number of people lacking coverage hit a crisis point that required an intervention. Those who place responsibility on individuals and employers saw the ACA as a perversion of the governments purpose. The political parties could find no common groundand this challenge continues.
The major goal of the ACA was to reduce the number of uninsured Americans by about 30 million people, or to about 3% of the U.S. population. It got about halfway there: Today, about 26 million Americans, or 8%, are uninsured, though this number fluctuates based on changes in the economy and federal and state policy.
Health insurance for all?
The ACA implemented an array of strategies to accomplish this goal. Some were popular, such as allowing parents to keep their kids on their family insurance until age 26. Some were unpopular, such as the mandate that everyone must have insurance.
But two strategies in particular had the biggest impact on the number of uninsured. One was expanding the Medicaid program to include workers whose income was below 138% of the poverty line. The other was providing subsidies to people with low and moderate incomes that could help them buy health insurance through the ACA marketplace, a state or federal health exchange through which consumers could choose health insurance plans.
Medicaid expansion was controversial from the start. Originally, the ACA mandated it for all states, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled that it was up to each state, not the federal government, to decide whether to do so. As of December 2025, 40 states and the District of Columbia have implemented Medicaid expansion, insuring about 20 million Americans.
Meanwhile, the marketplace subsidies, which were designed to help people who were working but could not access an employer-based health plan, were not especially contentious early on. Everyone receiving a subsidy was required to contribute to their insurance plans monthly premium. People earning $18,000 or less annually, which in 2010 was 115% of the income threshold set by the federal government as poverty level, contributed 2.1% of their plans cost, and those earning $60,240, which was 400% of the federal poverty level, contributed 10%. People making more than that were not eligible for subsidies at all.
In 2021, legislation passed by the Biden administration to stave off the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic increased the subsidy that people could receive. The law eliminated premiums entirely for the lowest income people and reduced the cost for those earning more. And, unlike before, people making more than 400% of the federal poverty levelabout 10% of marketplace enrolleescould also get a subsidy.
These pandemic-era subsidies are set to expire at the end of 2025.
Cost versus coverage
If the COVID-19-era subsidies expire, healthcare costs would increase substantially for most consumers, as ACA subsidies return to their original levels. So someone making $45,000 annually will now need to pay $360 a month for health insurance, increasing their payment by 74%, or $153 monthly. Whats more, these changes come on top of price hikes to insurance plans themselves, which are estimated to increase by about 18% in 2026.
With these two factors combined, many ACA marketplace users could see their health insurance costs rise more than 100%. Some proponents of extending COVID-19-era subsidies contend that the rollback will result in an estimated 6 million to 7 million people leaving the ACA marketplace and that some 5 million of these Americans could become uninsured in 2026.
Congressional gridlock over a healthcare bill continues.
Policies in the tax and spending package signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025 are amplifying the challenge of keeping Americans insured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the Medicaid cuts alone, stipulated in the package, may result in more than 7 million people becoming uninsured. Combined with other policy changes outlined in the law and the rollback of the ACA subsidies, that number could hit 16 million by 2034essentially wiping out the majority of gains in health insurance coverage that the ACA achieved since 2010.
Subsidy downsides
These enhanced ACA subsidies are so divisive now in part because they have dramatically driven up the federal governments healthcare bill. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of people receiving subsidies doubledresulting in many more people having health insurance, but also increasing federal ACA expenditures.
In 2025, almost 22 million Americans who purchased a marketplace plan received a federal subsidy to help with the costs, up from 9.2 million in 2020a 137% increase.
Those who oppose the extension counter that the subsidies cost the government too much and fund high earners who dont need government supportand that temporary emergencies, even ones as serious as a pandemic, should not result in permanent changes.
Another critique is that employers are using the ACA to reduce their responsibility for employee coverage. Under the ACA, employers with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance, but for companies with fewer employers, that requirement is optional.
In 2010, 92% of employers with 25 to 49 workers offered health insurance, but by 2025, that proportion had dropped to 64%, suggesting that companies of this size are allowing the ACA to cover their employees.
Diverging solutions
The U.S. has the most expensive healthcare system in the world by far. The projected increase in the number of uninsured people over the next 10 years could result in even higher costs, as fewer people get preventive care and delayed healthcare interventions, ultimately leading to more complex medical care
Federal policy clearly shapes health insurance coverage, but state-level policies play a role too. Nationally, about 8% of people under age 65 were uninsured in 2023, yet that rate varied widelyfrom 3% in Massachusetts to 18.6% in Texas. States under Republican leadership on average have a higher percentage of uninsured people than do those under Democratic leadership, mirroring the political differences driving the national debate over who is responsible for shouldering the costs of healthcare.
With dueling ideologies come dueling solutions. For those who believe that the government is responsible for the health of its citizens, expanding health insurance coverage and financing this expansion through taxes presents a clear approach. For those who say the burden should fall on individuals, reliance on the free market drives the fixon the premise that competition between health insurers and providers offers a more effective way to solve the cost challenges than a government intervention.
Without finding resolution on this core issue, the U.S. will likely still be embroiled in this same debate for years, if not decades, to come.
Robert Applebaum is a senior research scholar in gerontology at Miami University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
By the end of October, David, who works at a roughly 2,000-person finance firm in New York, already knew hed be working during the holiday season this year. Usually at the office, he learned hed at least get to work remotely between December 26 and January 1with the way the financial calendar fell, it was inevitable that he couldnt just disappear for clients (like institutional investors and family offices) during that time.
He says the schedule doesnt really bother him.
I’m not in a trench in the middle of a battlefield here. I’m not laying bricks, he says. Its not terribly unrealistic work that they’re asking us to do. Mainly, hes expected to respond to emails and move forward client processes already in the works.
David (who, like other employees Fast Company spoke with, is using his first name only to avoid professional repercussions) is one of many office workers who stay on the clock during winter holidays.
Per a 2023 CalendarLabs survey of more than 1,000 full-time U.S. employees, 24% reported planning to work on Christmas Eve, 12% on Christmas Day, and 27% on New Years Eve. Exclusive data from 2024 and 2025 shared with Fast Company by Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom show that these figures tend to be higher for remote workers, 13.3% of whom work on Christmas Day compared to just 1.9% of those who work in person, while nearly 39% of remote employees work the day after Christmas, versus 16% who work in-office.
Many employers dont explicitly require office workers to clock in during this Christmas through New Years period, at least not in a typical 9-to-5 fashion. But a few main factors drive people to do it anyway: They have time-sensitive tasks, their higher-ups continue to work so they feel the need to mirror that behavior, and, during this precarious economic time, they fear not showing up could lead to a layoff.
The pattern I see in organizations is consistent, says Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Coverage needs do not stop, and many knowledge workers stay online in some capacity because of deadlines, client expectations, end-of-year closeor simply because they feel they will fall behind if they disconnect.
Theres always an expectation that you have some level of availability
While its obvious why those working in retail or delivery dont quit from late December through the new year, some knowledge workers still have time-sensitive tasks during the season.
In litigation, things come up and you have to deal with them, says Thomas, an attorney working at a law firm in New Jersey. Last December, he had a hearing scheduled for the day after Christmas and had to prepare on short notice. Other times, lawyers will work through the end of the year to meet billable hour requirements. Software engineers, meanwhile, may find themselves suddenly on call to put out code-based fires, and marketing professionals could face unexpected publicity nightmares.
David, because he works with high-net-worth clients who tend to retreat to second (or third, or fourth) homes during the holidays, had been told early in his career that work gets quieter when this happens. But hes found that the opposite plays out.
[Thats] when people have the most questions, because that’s when they actually read their mail or their statements, he says. There’s always an expectation that you have some level of availability.
Though these time-sensitive needs are reasonable drivers for clocking in, Robert Kovach, a work psychologist whos long advised senior executives, says working during this season is often less about the work that needs to be done . . . it’s about [the workers] identity. Working at this time of year almost becomes a proxy for commitment, ambition, indispensability, he says. People do it to signal that theyre reliable and valuable.
Responsiveness rewarded
Again, this usually doesnt come down to formal office policies. The strongest drivers for people to work during holidays tend to be culture signals and incentive structures, says Tsipursky.
Leaders reward responsiveness, for example, by publicly praising those who reply quickly during holidays and using phrases like We can count on you during performance reviews. That responsiveness can look like anything from hourly Slack check-ins to responding same day to emails.
Typically, says Kovach, bosses dont mandate this, they model it, like by sending emails at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
Per Ryan, a software engineering manager in New York, no one is asked to work during this time of year at his company, but people feel committed to their outcomes and delivery. And even though tech companies, in his experience, rarely set schedules for the holidays . . . outside of on-call support, many employees still work in the competitive industry.
The real standard becomes Do not disappear, even if no one says that out loud, Tsipurksy says. That can lead to anxiety-fueled holiday working, often compounded by fears of layoffs that happen all too frequently this time of year.
After the efficiency layoff trend that started with Twitter and Elon [Musk] and continued to wipe the industry, roles are scarce and competition has naturally increased, says Ryan. Expectations in his industry, he adds, are high among both peers and management, and people tend to meet them by working harder and more.
Plus, theres the added fear of AI taking white-collar jobs, says Kovach. In the economic climate we’re in right now, fear is a big [driver for wanting] to be seen as being productive. This could help explain why remote workers work more this time of yearand during holidays and weekends in general, as Blooms research revealed, during which remote workers office activity can exceed those working in person by up to 41.5 percentage points. Since theyre not literally seen by higher-ups, they spend more time making themselves seen via emails time-stamped on January 1, or slack messages that role in on December 24.
Some people enjoy holiday working: Future You appreciates Present You
Required or not, plenty of people like heading into the office during holidays. A friend of mine who works at a health insurance company calls it a chill time to come in. In the past, it even paved the way for her to get unique, one-on-one time with a very high up superiorshe got to give them a solo presentation while everyone else was off.
Then there are people who dont enjoy the holiday season. They may not have much family or they may get depressed at this time of year, so work offers a positive distraction.
Of course, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and they may prefer saving vacation days for other occasions. Younger workers told Fast Company that they plan to have kids in the future but dont yet, so they figured theyd put in their time during the holidays now, build up goodwill, ad take vacation when their situations change down the line.
When I take days off, I don’t know what to do with myself, says David, so he finds himself checking his phone for office-related notifications. One of his big pros for working during holidays is that afterward, you don’t come back to a giant hornet’s nest of things you need to do, he says. Future You appreciates Present You for keeping the machine moving.
However, these pros are easier to come by in office cultures that arent fueled by passive-aggressive pressure. When leaders do things like schedule optional meetings between Christmas and New Years Day, set immediate post-holiday deadlines, or repeatedly send follow-ups to unanswered messages, it sends a clear messagethat silence has consequences, Tsipursky says.
In healthier office environments, companies set explicit expectations, plan coverage rotations, and protect true time off, Tsipursky says. Just as leaders can model working too much over the holidays, so can they set a positive example for stepping away. If a senior person disconnects visibly, everyone else gets permission, Kovach says.
Ultimately, superiors can confuse being available with being valuable. Taking time off during holiday periods is often the mental reset people need to work more productively when they return.
What [leaders] have to be really careful about, Kovach says, is they’re not unconsciously equating responsiveness, or being on, with performance.
How should leaders prepare for AIs accelerating impact on work and everyday life? AI scientist, entrepreneur, and Pioneers of AI podcast host Rana el Kaliouby shares her predictions for the year aheadfrom physical AI entering the real world to what it means to onboard AI into your org chart. El Kaliouby cuts through todays biggest AI headlines, bringing to light the insights that will matter most in the months to come.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
Let’s look ahead to 2026. You sent me some fascinating thoughts about AI’s next-phase impact on business, and I’d love to take you through them. The first one was the rise of what you called relationship intelligent AI.
So everybody’s worried that AI is going to make us less human and take away our human-to-human connections. There is definitely a risk of that. But I think the thing I’m most excited about for 2026 is how AI can actually help us build deeper human connections and more meaningful human experiences. And the way this happens is through AI that can really help you organize your relationships and your network and surface connections that you need and maybe make warm introductions to you. I love connecting with people, but my relationship data is a mess. It’s all in my brain. Some of it is in LinkedIn, some are on WhatsApp. I take a lot of notes when I meet new people and I use an AI note taker. It’s just a mess. It’s very disparate data sources.
And I always think of this scene in, do you know The Devil Wears Prada? Have you seen?
Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. The character is kind of whispering in your ear.
Exactly. It was Anne Hathaway [as Andy], and she was with Meryl Streep [as Miranda] at this gala. And this guy and his partner were moving toward Miranda and she [didnt rememeber their names]. And Andy whispers in Miranda’s ear: “He’s the ambassador and his new wife.” And I was like, “That’s exactly what I need. I need an AI version of Anne Hathaway.” And it’s now doable with LLMs because it’s all this unstructured, messy data that an AI can take all of that, contextualize it, and hopefully be that AI chief of staff for you.
Is that like a product? Is that something that you would have to do to turn your chatbot, whatever, your Claude or your ChatGPT into that? Or is it a new product that you think is going to come out that will make that easy for you?
There are already a number of new companies that are starting in this space. So one company’s called VIA.AI, it’s a Boston-based company. They do this for sales professionals and BD professionals who have to do this for their work. There’s a company called Goodword that I’m very excited about. They’re doing this for just the average person. Like you and I, we have very strong networks, but how can we organize it? So I’m excited about that one. There’s a company called Boardy that does this for investors and founders. So it’s becoming a thing, and I’m excited to see how these companies take off in 2026. They’re all fairly new, so it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve.
Yeah, and whether they can stay ahead of some of the bigger chatbots that may just try to integrate some of this capability into the products they already have. That’s always the case in this kind of evolution of technology: What’s a feature and what’s a company, right? What’s an independent service?
Absolutely. When I’m looking at these companies and I’m diligencing them, that’s a key question that I ask. Is this something that the next version of ChatGPT or Gemini is just going to implement? And if the answer is yes, then that’s obviously not a defensible company. But a lot of times there’s this additional moat of data and algorithms that you need to sit on top of these LLMs. And I believe in this relationship intelligence space, I don’t think this is something that just a kind of an off-the-shelf LLM can do. It really needs to know you. It needs to know your data, it needs to know your relationships.
And you have to trust it enough to share all that data with it, right?
Absolutely.
That’s your proprietary data, whether it’s about your business or about you individually.
Exactly. And I don’t want this to all go up to OpenAI’s cloud. I want to trust that I have control over these really private relations. If you and I have a conversation about our kids, I don’t necessarily want that to now sit in a general OpenAI cloud and be used to train the next ChatGPT. So that safety and security, appreciating the privacy and the importance of this data, is really key.
Another business change you expect in 2026 is the insertion of AI into the org chart. This is about who manages AI, like performance reviews and team culture impacts?
Yeah, so this goes back to the thesis that there’s this shift in how AI is creating value, and it’s not a tool anymore. Well, it is a tool. It’ll always be a tool, but it’s not a tool that helps you get work done faster. It could actually take an end-to-end task and get it done for you. And I’ll give a few examples.
So I’m an investor in a company called Synthpop, and instead of building a tool that helps healthcare administrators accelerate or really become efficient in how they do patient intake, it just takes the task of patient intake. It does the thing end to end. And so if you then imagine what that means for a hospital or a clinic, it will have a combination of human workers collaborating and working closely with AI coworkers.
And so then the question becomes, well, who manages these hybrid teams? Sometimes it’s a human manager, sometimes it’s an AI manager. I’m also an investor in a company called Tough Day, and they sell you AI managers. And then how do you do performance reviews for these hybrid teams? How do you build a culture? Like at Affectiva, my company, culture was our superpower. How do you build a culture when some of your team members are AI and some of your team members are humans?
So I think that is going to spur a lot of conversation around how do you build organizations that are combinations of digital agents and human employees?
As you talk about this merging of AI agents and humans in work, it brings up that looming question about the impact of AI on jobs and employment. And some numbers are coming out now that make it seem like, “Oh, it’s bad for jobs.” There are other numbers coming out that are like, “Oh, we’re actually hirng more people because of it.” Do you have a prediction about what is going to happen with that in 2026? Is AI going to take over roles that have been done by humans that quickly?
We had a really fascinating roundtable discussion at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference and the headline was like, “Is AI killing entry-level jobs?” And actually, a lot of the Fortune companies and also AI companies that were around the table were basically saying, “No, we’re hiring more entry-level jobs. They’re just not the same jobs that we were traditionally seeing.” And also the career ladders have changed.
So my prediction is we’re going to see an entirely different organization where I think if you are able to come in an entry-level position, for example, but work very closely with AI and be AI-native and be AI fluent and be able to wear multiple hats, I think that’s going to go a long way. As opposed to this very siloed job trajectory where you come in, this is your little task, and then you do more of it, and then you go up the career ladder. I think that’s going to change. I think young people are looking for different ways of working, and I think AI is changing all of that anyway.
Will there be jobs that will go away? I think so. I can’t remember who said this line, but it’s now very popular: It’s not AI that’s going to take your job. It’s going to be somebody who knows how to use AI. And I believe that to be true.
People and institutions are grappling with the consequences of AI-written text. Teachers want to know whether students work reflects their own understanding; consumers want to know whether an advertisement was written by a human or a machine.
Writing rules to govern the use of AI-generated content is relatively easy. Enforcing them depends on something much harder: reliably detecting whether a piece of text was generated by artificial intelligence.
Some studies have investigated whether humans can detect AI-generated text. For example, people who themselves use AI writing tools heavily have been shown to accurately detect AI-written text. A panel of human evaluators can even outperform automated tools in a controlled setting. However, such expertise is not widespread, and individual judgment can be inconsistent. Institutions that need consistency at a large scale therefore turn to automated AI text detectors.
The problem of AI text detection
The basic workflow behind AI text detection is easy to describe. Start with a piece of text whose origin you want to determine. Then apply a detection tool, often an AI system itself, that analyzes the text and produces a score, usually expressed as a probability, indicating how likely the text is to have been AI-generated. Use the score to inform downstream decisions, such as whether to impose a penalty for violating a rule.
This simple description, however, hides a great deal of complexity. It glosses over a number of background assumptions that need to be made explicit. Do you know which AI tools might have plausibly been used to generate the text? What kind of access do you have to these tools? Can you run them yourself, or inspect their inner workings? How much text do you have? Do you have a single text or a collection of writings gathered over time? What AI detection tools can and cannot tell you depends critically on the answers to questions like these.
There is one additional detail that is especially important: Did the AI system that generated the text deliberately embed markers to make later detection easier?
These indicators are known as watermarks. Watermarked text looks like ordinary text, but the markers are embedded in subtle ways that do not reveal themselves to casual inspection. Someone with the right key can later check for the presence of these markers and verify that the text came from a watermarked AI-generated source. This approach, however, relies on cooperation from AI vendors and is not always available.
How AI text detection tools work
One obvious approach is to use AI itself to detect AI-written text. The idea is straightforward. Start by collecting a large corpus, meaning collection of writing, of examples labeled as human-written or AI-generated, then train a model to distinguish between the two. In effect, AI text detection is treated as a standard classification problem, similar in spirit to spam filtering. Once trained, the detector examines new text and predicts whether it more closely resembles the AI-generated examples or the human-written ones it has seen before.
The learned-detector approach can work even if you know little about which AI tools might have generated the text. The main requirement is that the training corpus be diverse enough to include outputs from a wide range of AI systems.
But if you do have access to the AI tools you are concerned about, a different approach becomes possible. This second strategy does not rely on collecting large labeled datasets or training a separate detector. Instead, it looks for statistical signals in the text, often in relation to how specific AI models generate language, to assess whether the text is likely to be AI-generated. For example, some methods examine the probability that an AI model assigns to a piece of text. If the model assigns an unusually high probability to the exact sequence of words, this can be a signal that the text was, in fact, generated by that model.
Finally, in the case of text that is generated by an AI system that embeds a watermark, the problem shifts from detection to verification. Using a secret key provided by the AI vendor, a verification tool can assess whether the text is consistent with having been generated by a watermarked system. This approach relies on information that is not available from the text alone, rather than on inferences drawn from the text itself.
AI engineer Tom Dekan demonstrates how easily commercial AI text detectors can be defeated.
Limitations of detection tools
Each family of tools comes with its own limitations, making it difficult to declare a clear winner. Learning-based detectors, for example, are sensitive to how closely new text resembles the data they were trained on. Their accuracy drops when the text differs substantially from the training corpus, which can quickly become outdated as new AI models are released. Continually curating fresh data and retraining detectors is costly, and detectors inevitably lag behind the systems they are meant to identify.
Statistical tests face a different set of constraints. Many rely on assumptions about how specific AI models generate text, or on access to those models probability distributions. When models are proprietary, frequently updated or simply unknown, these assumptions break down. As a result, methods that work well in controlled settings can become unreliable or inapplicable in the real world.
Watermarking shifts the problem from detection to verification, but it introduces its own dependencies. It relies on cooperation from AI vendors and applies only to text generated with watermarking enabled.
More broadly, AI text detection is part of an escalating arms race. Detection tools must be publicly available to be useful, but that same transparency enables evasion. As AI text generators grow more capable and evasion techniques more sophisticated, detectors are unlikely to gain a lasting upper hand.
Hard reality
The problem of AI text detection is simple to state but hard to solve reliably. Institutions with rules governing the use of AI-written text cannot rely on detection tools alone for enforcement.
As society adapts to generative AI, we are likely to refine norms around acceptable use of AI-generated text and improve detection techniques. But ultimately, well have to learn to live with the fact that such tools will never be perfect.
Ambuj Tewari is a professor of statistics a the University of Michigan.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Below, Nicholas Thompson shares five key insights from his new book, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports.
Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic. In his time as CEO, the company has seen record subscriber growth. Before this role, he was editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. He is also a former contributor for CBS News and has previously served as editor. As a runner, he set the American record for men ages 45-plus in the 50K race.
Whats the big idea?
Running has the capacity to show us what were made of and help us grow beyond our limitsboth as we race ahead on the track and in life. Struggle, aging, and even trauma can become engines of transformation if we learn how best to keep moving forward.
1. You dont stop running because you get old.
You get old because you stop running. I used to think that you would just get better and better with age until youre about 28, and then you would get worse and worse. But as Ive gotten older, Ive learned that isnt true. In fact, I ran my fastest marathon at age 44.
Of course, there are certain things that decline in a runners life, as they do for everyone. Over the years, your bone density deteriorates, your VO2 max goes down, and youre more likely to get a little injured here or there. But while that happens, there are things that get better. We gain mitochondrial efficiency, for example, and most importantly, we get wiser.
We have learned more about training. We have learned more about our limits. And not only that, but we can also pick up new habits to do things differently. In some ways, aging is like youre on a moving sidewalk that is going backwards, but youre picking up things that allow you to go forward. If you can go the same speed forwards as youre going backwards, then you run the same time year after yearwhich is what I did in my thirties. But sometimes, you can actually get better by going forward faster on that sidewalk than its pushing you backwardand thats what I did in my mid-forties.
This applies beyond running. I had this conversation with my mother recently: Shes in her mid-seventies, and she said, Nick, my reflexes are just getting worse and worse with age. I said, There are things that are going to make your reflexes worse or worse with age, but what if we tried to go the other direction? Then I got her out on our front porch and I started tossing her tennis balls, and she started catching them. I tossed them a little more to the side, and it turned out that her reflexes could get better.
Yes, aging is real. Unquestionably. There are many forces that slow us down, but what slows us down the most is when we give in and say, I dont want to do it today. When that happens, thats when you really start to slow down. Thats when you start to age. What you should do is push back as best you can.
2. Most pain is just a prediction.
When I was a young runner, I believed that pain was purely physiological. I would exercise, my body would produce lactic acid, and the lactic acid would somehow trigger fatigue or your muscles would micro-tear and that would trigger pain signals. But as I got older, I read more studies, thought more, read the work of people like Alex Hutchinson and Tim Noakes, and realized that pain is something quite different when you run a race.
Pain is weird. It moves all over the body. Maybe Ill feel it in my calf and then my quad, and then Ill feel like I have an upset stomach or Im nauseous, or dizzy, or experience general malaise. Maybe my shoulder will hurt. Whats going on?
Its not that theres actually something wrong in my quad and then my knees and then my stomach. This is my brain having a conversation with the rest of my body. The brain is worried about losing homeostasis. It doesnt think that I can run this speed for this long. Maybe it doesnt think I can run 26.2 miles on this hot day, at this particular speed, and so its trying to slow me down because it doesnt want to enter a state where it could be at risk. During a race, pain is the brain trying to convince the body to slow down.
If thats true, what does that mean about training? First, you should try to reset your brains expectations so that it doesnt get so scared. When Im in a marathon training cycle, I know that I cant run every day as hard as Im going to run on race day. But I try to stress each system in the body more on one day during the training cycle than I plan to on race day. Maybe that means using a single training day to run more than 26.2 miles. Maybe I run 20 miles while dehydrated. Maybe I will run 15 miles down a mountain to put extra stress on the quads. Its a way of getting the brain to understand that those levels of pain do not put me at risk.
There are other things you can do, too. What resets the brains expectations when its hot? I like to rub ice on my wrist. This makes me feel a little cooler and a little better, but its also a way of resetting my brains expectations of what the temperature risks are. The great runner Eliud Kipchoge smiles when he starts to hurt. Its his way of trying to trick himself into feeling like hes okay and not worrying so much, and then the pain in the rest of his body can disappear.
When running a 100K recently, I banged my toe against a root. My toenail split and stuck upthat hurt. That was real pain. That was physiological pain born of shouting nerve signals. I started to run, and I got really worried that maybe I couldnt travel the remaining distance. I think it was seven miles maybe, and I told myself I just couldnt do that.
Thats when I started to hurt all over my whole body. Everything felt wrong. But then I got to an aid station, took off my shoe, took off my sock, taped down the bloody toenail, and I realized that my toenail would be fine. Once Id realized this, my whole body felt better. I didnt have to worry that something was going to go horribly wrong.
This is a good lesson for life. Its a good reminder that, lots of times, what slows us down is in our own heads. Sometimes you must set an uncomfortable pace. Sometimes you must stress yourself. Whatever it is that you want to be really successful at, you have to go harder than you think you can. You have to use one part of your brain to trick another part of your brain. I call it playing hide and seek with your mind.
3. We all contain hidden versions of ourselves.
I started running in high school and joined the indoor track team winter of my sophomore year. Went out and raced the 2-mile a bunch of times, ran 11 minutes and 45 seconds, then 11 minutes and 40 seconds, and at the end of the year, I was still locked in at that pace. At that point, I thought the best I could do would be 11 minutes and 30 seconds for two miles, 5 minutes and 45 seconds each.
I knew the splits around the blue track at my high school, but the final race was the New England Championships, and it was hosted at a different school. The track there was a bit different, so when the race began, I didnt know exactly how fast I was running. I couldnt make sense of the splits.
When I went through a mile, somebody called out 5:25. I thought they were joking, or something was wrong. I didnt believe I could run 5:25 for a mile . . . but then I finished the race and had run 10:48. Id taken my time down by 45 seconds. I was able to run what I thought was an unrealistic goal for myself because of the fact I didnt know how fast I was running. If I had known, I wouldnt have been able to go that fast./p>
The same process happened 25 years later. When I was 30, in 2005, I ran a marathon at 2 hours and 43 minutes. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I went through a terrifying treatment period. I knew I would survive. It wasnt the worst kind of cancer, but it was still scary, especially at 30 years old.
Afterwards, I felt like I needed to run another marathon. So, two years later I ran the New York City Marathon again in exactly 2 hours and 43 minutes. For the next 11 years, I continued to run marathons at almost exactly 2 hours and 43 minutes. In fact, I had the nickname Mr. 2-4-3. But then in my mid-forties, I started training differently. I had a coach who had me train faster, do shorter workouts, do sprints, eat a little differently, and I ended up running at 2 hours and 29 minutes. This was a completely different level of success.
Why was I able to run these marathons in 2 hours and 29 minutes in my mid mid-forties, but my personal best was 2 hours and 43 minutes in my late twenties? One day, I was running across the Brooklyn Bridge and realized that I hadnt gone faster than 2 hours and 43 minutes in my thirties because thats not what I had wanted. All I had wanted to do was to go as fast as I had run before I got sick. I needed someone to reframe my expectations, to tell me that there was a faster Nick inside of me to help me. That push from my coach helped me understand that I could actually be more than I had been before I was sick. This got me to believe in myself at some deep level, and then I could run it.
Sometimes our limits are in our heads. We only think we can go so far. We truly believe that limit, but we have to unlock it to go further. Maybe we can unlock it ourselves. Maybe somebody else unlocks it. Theres a different version locked inside of you who can be found.
4. You can reach transcendence through restraints.
Ive always wanted to reach a level of transcendenceto step outside of the body I live in during the day, to break outside of the Nick whose mind is wired to his desk and to-do list focused. I wanted to feel like Ive reached a new spiritual plane and a deeper understanding of the world. To feel more at one with the universe, I run up mountains: as the sun comes up, deep in the forest, even losing track of where I am. Its a beautiful, glorious experience. But as I worked on the book, I realized that there are runners who are reach transcendence in almost the opposite way.
I spent a lot of time with an amazing runner named Suprabha Beckjord, who won the 3,100-mile race in Queens, New York, for nine consecutive years. The way that race works is you run around a single block all day, every day. We run clockwise one day, counterclockwise the other. You start at six in the morning with a minute of meditation, and then have to be done by midnight. You go home and sleep until start time the next morning. You return to the track and do it over and over again. The race starts in August and ends in October. One person said, Its not a real race unless you have to get your hair cut in it. One year, somebody had their visa expire in the middle of the race.
Suprabha taught me an important lesson. When running around the same block over and over, if you start thinking about your surroundings and what youre doing, youll go crazy. So, you learn mental practices. You learn to imagine that you are a child running in the woods. You learn to escape the boundaries of where you are. You learn to think at a much deeper level. You learn to meditate as you run.
I also spent time writing about a runner named Michael Westphal. He lived on Great Cranberry Island, Maine, which has a population of about 40 people. Of that tiny population, six of their people became sub-three-hour marathoners. They ran on the same beautiful two-mile road, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Because of the tiny island, because of the tiny community, because of the restraints on what could be done there, they were able to reach a level of excellence.
Westphal also taught me by a different kind of constraint. Later in his life, he was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease. First, he wanted to hide it, found it embarrassing, but then he realized that he loved to run, and he was going to run despite having Parkinsons. He figured out a way to run with his illness by tying his hands behind his back with string. He learned a whole new way of running. It was a different kind of restraint. It taught him humility and a sense of connection with other runners. He said something beautiful to me: Theres more to running than just beating people. You can reach transcendence through restraints.
5. Post-traumatic growth can be a subtle but serious competitive advantage.
Not long ago, I was with Arthur Brooks. He writes about happiness for The Atlantic. Hes a real scholar of the field, and I asked him, Arthur, whats the number one thing that can make someone happy and content in life? He said, Well, its a weird one and you cant really force it. I said, Okay, what is it? And he said, Get cancer and survive it.
When he said that, a light bulb went off. In my twenties, my running and my work was kind of a mess. As a runner, I was trying to break three hours in the marathon. That had been my fathers goal. He had come close, but not achieved it. I didnt come close at all. I ran marathon after marathon, sometimes dropping out or walking the second half.
As for work, I got fired from my first job in less than an hour. My second job, I was almost fired before I started. I struggled and struggled, then had one brief period of success at a place called The Washington Monthly. But after that, I couldnt get freelance gigs. I applied for hundreds of jobs in my late twenties. I was making more money as a street musician playing guitar on the L Train than I was as a journalist.
In my thirties and forties, everything got better on both those fronts. I ran much faster. My work got much better: great job at Wired, great job with The New Yorker, wonderful job right now helping run The Atlantic. In between, there was when I got thyroid cancer and faced death for the first time in my life. What Arthur Brooks said and what the studies show is that if you stand at the precipice of death and walk away, you take life more seriously afterward.
To me, I think what happened was somewhat paradoxical. After my cancer experience, my goals narrowed in some ways. Instead of constantly shooting for the moon and thinking I should have everything all at once, I became more methodical about just doing what I could every day. This is the trick to running successfully, too. Yes, you do absolutely have to push yourself if you want to get better, but the most important part is learning to run every day. No matter what the weather is, no matter how you feel, no matter how much time you haveyou just go out and do it. I took that attitude toward running and work. I began asking myself, What is the best thing that I can do today? How can I do my job better today than I did it yesterday?
That attitude change came partly from my thyroid cancer journey, but there are different ways people can go through an experience like that. Not just cancer, but medical scares or personal scares. When you come out the other side, you can make choices that lead to more success in whatever you set your mind to.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Fintech firm Mercury recently dropped some data that made me smile. It ranked the top five coffee shops powering founders in San Francisco based on actual transaction data: Sightglass, CoffeeShop, Equator, Saint Frank, Ritual. I’ve built Octolane with my cofounder, Rafi, from every single one of them.
But here’s what the data doesn’t show: the $500,000 investment term sheet I negotiated over a cortado at Cafe Réveille. The $800,000 deal I closed while sitting next to a grad student cramming for finals. The three customers who became friends, then advocates, then our biggest champions, all because we met first over coffee, not Zoom.
When I was in high school, I cleaned offices at night, empty offices with ergonomic chairs and standing desks and those motivational posters about “innovation.” Meanwhile, I’m building an AI company worth millions from a wobbly table at a coffee shop, and somehow this feels more real, more honest than any corner office ever could.
The distributed office isn’t dead, it just moved to cafés.
I wake up at 5 a.m. here in San Francisco, because those three hours before the city stirs are mine. I review what our AI models learned overnight. I write. I think. Then I head to whichever coffee shop matches my energy that day.
Saint Frank when I need to focus, since it’s quieter, more intimate. Sightglass when I want that productive hum of energy around me. Equator when I’m meeting someone for the first time and want them to feel comfortable, not intimidated.
Rafi, my cofounder and CTO, moved internationally to build this with me. One of our engineers handles the front end from one continent, another tackles the back end from another. So why would I pay $8,000 a month for an office in SoMa (the neighborhood South of Market Street) when I can spend $200 a month on lattes and have the entire city of San Francisco as my workspace?
What I’ve Learned Building in Public (Literally)
The serendipity factor is real. Last month, I was debugging a particularly nasty prompt engineering issue, trying to get our AI to detect deals in Gmail without false positives. I was muttering to myself (yes, I’m that guy) when someone at the next table leaned over: “Are you working on LLM classification?” Turns out hes an AI researcher at Anthropic. Twenty minutes later, I had a completely new approach that cut our error rate in half.
You can’t engineer that in a conference room.
Practical wisdom. Keep your screen visible enough that interesting work attracts curious people, but angle it so you’re not broadcasting sensitive customer data. The sweet spot is showing code or product UIs, technical enough to spark conversations with the right people, general enough to protect privacy.
Investors are humans too. The $500,000 investment I mentioned? It happened because I was at Réveille at 3 p.m., and so was he. We were the only two people there. We chatted and he learned more about what I was working on. I showed him our productnot a deck, not a demo, just the actual thing, running, solving a real problem. He saw me working, grinding, building. The next day, the term sheet came through.
Later he told me: “I invested because youre willing to be different and bold to stand out.” What he didn’t say, but I know mattered: Other founders had already told him about the guy who’s always at Réveille, laptop open, building. And when he left that day, I was still there.
Midnight founder cafés are a thing now: late-night coffee shop takeovers where founders and engineers gather to build, network, and fuel up on free caffeine, and big AI companies are leaning into it. Cursor’s been running “Café Cursor” pop-ups across San Francisco, New York, Stanford, even Guadalajara, taking over coffee shops for a day, giving out free coffee and those coveted keychains, merch thats shaped like the tab keyboard key (a nod to the keystroke that accepts Cursor’s AI suggestions).
Anthropic did a weeklong Claude Café pop-up in New York City’s West Village that drew more than 5,000 people, with their “thinking” hats becoming so viral that people claimed they flew across the country just to get one.
These aren’t permanent cafés, they’re pop-up experiences. But that’s exactly the point. They’re recognizing what we already know: The best AI work happens in liminal spaces. Not quite work, not quite social. Somewhere in between. That’s where the guard comes down: You’re not pitching, you’re just talking. And the person debugging next to you might casually mention the fix you’ve been stuck on for a week.
And it goes deeper than corporate activations. There’s a founder in the Mission District of San Francisco who literally opened his house as a café after midnight. Just for founders. No tourists, no meetings, just people building. I’ve been there twice. Both times, I left with ideas I couldn’t have found anywhere else.
The only AI company that’s actually opened a permanent café? Perplexity, in Seoul. But even they get it! They put a podcast studio and a single computer running their search engine in the basement. The coffee shop isn’t the product. The community is.
The Practical Reality (Because Romance Only Gets You So Far)
Here’s what they don’t tell you about the coffee shop life:
You need three spots minimum. One for deep work (quiet, consistent Wi-Fi, you know the outlet situation). One for meetings (good acoustics, professional-ish vibe, not too loud). One for when the first two are full or you just need a change.
Noise-canceling headphones are nonnegotiable. But here’s the thing: I don’t always use them. Sometimes I want to hear the ambient noise, the conversations, the espresso machine. It reminds me that I’m building something for real people, not just for the AI models or the pitch deck.
Your burn rate matters. Every dollar matters. An office in San Francisco costs $5,000 to $10,000 minimum. That’s a month of runway. That’s an engineer. That’s 100-plus customer acquisition attempts. So yeah, I’ll take the $5 latte.
Time-of-day strategy is everything. I’ve mapped it out.
Early morning: Saint Frank or home (deep work, model review, writing)
8 a.m. to noon: Sightglass or Equator (customer calls, team syncs)
Noon to 3 p.m.: Avoid peak lunch chaos, take meetings walking or find a quieter spot
3 to 6 p.m.: Ritual or CoffeeShop (energy picks back up, good for creative work)
After 6 p.m.: Usually home, but the midnight café if I need the founder energy
What Building from Coffee Shops Taught Me About AI
There’s a parallel here that keeps itting me: AI works best when it has context. Every engineer here is building on the idea that AI should understand the full context of your communication, not just isolated data points.
Coffee shops give me context. I see how people actually work. I hear what founders are struggling with. I feel the energy when someone closes a deal or the deflation when funding falls through. You can’t get that from a dashboard or a user interview. You have to be there, in it, living it.
When I’m prompt engineering at 9 a.m. at Saint Frank, watching the barista dial in the espresso, I’m thinking about patterns. About how humans and machines both learn through repetition, through feedback, through context. The best prompts I’ve written came from coffee shops. The best features we’ve built came from problems I overheard someone complaining about two tables over.
The deeper insight is that building in isolation makes you optimize for the wrong things. You optimize for elegance, for technical beauty, for what impresses other engineers. Building in public, literally surrounded by your users, keeps you grounded in what actually matters: Does this solve a real problem for a real person?
Building from coffee shops keeps me honest. I can’t hide behind the performance of “founder working in office.” I can’t pretend to be productive when I’m not. If I’m stuck, I’m stuck in public. If I’m building, I’m building where people can see the mess, the mistakes, the reality.
We’re trying to replace Salesforce with Octolane. That’s aggressive, maybe delusional. But I’ll tell you this: I’d rather chase it from a coffee shop in the Mission, surrounded by other founders equally delusional and equally committed, than from a sterile office where everyone pretends to have it figured out.
How to Actually Make This Work
If you’re thinking about ditching the office, here’s what I wish someone had told me:
Map your energy to your spaces. Don’t just pick a coffee shop because it’s close. Figure out what work you do best where. I write best at quieter spots. I sell best in energetic spaces. I code best with moderate ambient noise.
Become a regular somewhere. Not everywhere, somewhere. One spot where they know your order, where you have your table, where you’re part of the ecosystem. For me, it’s Réveille. That consistency matters when everything else is chaos.
Respect the space. Buy something every two to three hours. Tip well. Don’t monopolize tables during peak times. The coffee shop isn’t your free office, it’s a business that’s subsidizing your dream. Honor that.
Build relationships, not just networks. That Anthropic engineer? We’re friends now. The investor? We get coffee every few weeks. The other founders? We text each other when we’re heading to a spot. This only works if you’re actually present, actually human, actually building relationships.
Know when to go home. Sometimes you need silence. Sometimes you need privacy. Sometimes you need to take a call that can’t happen in public. Don’t force it. The coffee shop is a tool, not a religion.
The Launch Is Coming
I’ll probably launch our product from a coffee shop. Maybe Saint Frank, maybe Réveille, maybe that midnight café in the Mission. My team will be distributed across the country, asleep in some time zones, working in others. And somehow, we’ll pull it off.
Because the best work doesn’t happen in offices. It happens where life happens. Where the coffee is strong, the Wi-Fi is reliable enough, and the person next to you might just have the insight that changes everything.
Mercury’s data showed the top five coffee shops powering SF founders. What it didn’t show is why. It’s not the coffee. It’s not even the Wi-Fi.
It’s the reminder that you don’t need permission to build something great. You just need conviction, a laptop, and a table.
See you at the café.
Gen Zers, who were practically born with smartphones and iPads in their hands, have grown up completely immersed in the information highway. Therefore, it should come as no big surprise that those born as digital nativesdeeply connected to culture, trends, politics, and businesshave different ideas about what their contributions to the world should look like. They deeply value work-life balance and they need to feel like the work they do has meaning.
Globally, they are the generation most concerned about issues like corruption and inequality. They’re striving to create changeand they’re committed.
Still, Gen Zers often get called out for being entitled, lazy, or simply not being driven. However, according to a recent conversation between executive Garry Ridge, former CEO of WD-40, and Simon Sinek, author and thought leader, it’s not a lack of commitment or drive that sets Gen Z apart in the workplace. It’s a well-earned lack of trust in leadership.
On his podcast, A Bit of Optimism, Sinek posed a question to his guest about why Gen Z seems to work backward when compared to past generations. Contrary to the old playbook, where employees were expected to work hard and showcase their commitment before getting a raise, a promotion, or other payout, Gen Z needs to see the reward up front.
“That could be interpreted as entitlement,” Sinek said. “I understand it as they grew up in a world where there’s no loyalty from the company.”
Basically, if a company doesn’t have an employee’s back, should the employee really be expected to hustle for said company? Gen Z doesn’t think so. In his conversation with Sinke, Ridge agreed, noting that the logic is completely understandable, given the generation’s deep distrust of big business.
Ridge asserted that companies shouldn’t dismiss these young employees as lazy or unmotivated. Rather, they should work with them to build that essential trust, providing more frequent and clear-cut steps to move up the ladder.
“Once upon a time you had these reviews where you were actually looking backward. Well, maybe now the way to go is having steps along the way so you can recognize performance, Ridge said, using the example of giving employees the opportunity to earn accolades by having check-ins every couple of months to assess performance.
Further, Ridge and Sinek agreed that year-end reviews aren’t a great stepping stone, either. And, from that lens, maybe Gen Z is spot-on when it comes to phasing out the old system.
“I don’t want to wait 364 days for you to tell me what I should’ve done better or how good I’ve done,” Ridge explained of the Gen Z mindset. “What I want to do is be coached along the way.”
Call them lazy and entitled all you want, but Gen Zers, many of them having watched their parents work hard their whole lives with little to show for it financially in their later years, don’t want to hustle without a clear payout.
Honestly, who could blame them?
December is here, and another year has blown by. Chances are, youre going to get some time off for the holidays. If so, you may have a week(-ish) to recharge before you have to ramp back up in January.
In order to get the most out of your time off, it would be ideal if you could unplug from work completely to give your mind a rest and to focus on family, friends, and yourself. There are a few things you can do to prepare now that will help a lot and will also make your transition back to the office go smoothly.
Close as many tasks as possible
Research going back almost 100 years finds that when you have a task to complete, you are highly motivated to finish it. It stays active in your memory, and you seek opportunities to get it done.
That tendency is normally a good one. But on a break, it is a factor that will drive your mind back to the workplaceeven when youre supposed to be relaxing. To give yourself the best chance to chill, see if you can close out key tasks before you leave. At a minimum, reach a good stopping place on tasks so that you dont feel like you have left them incomplete.
You should also avoid starting any big new projects that will hang over the break. Instead, focus on polishing off as many unfinished things as possible.
Comment your work
If you take an introductory programming class, the instructors will drill into your head that you should “comment your code” as you go along. The aim is to write down a glossary of key variable names, the purpose of sections of code, and any other information about critical data structures, functions, or procedures that will remind you what the code was about. The idea is that the whole structure seems obvious while youre writing it, but if you have to return to that code weeks, months, or even years later, you will have no recollection of what you did. So, leaving comments will enable you to reconstruct the purpose of that section of code.
The same holds true for many of the elements on your current to-do list. When youre in the office daily, you can recall from one day to the next the purpose of various meetings, the status of key projects, and the reasons for decisions that were made about ongoing work.
Even after a week off, some of those details may get fuzzy. Before you head out for vacation, take some time to make notes on the core elements of ongoing projects. Include little reminders of why things are being done the way they are. Make sure you have good notes to remind you of meetings the first week or two you’re back from break. It takes extra time to add these notes (particularly if youre not used to doing so), but youll thank yourself later.
Also, the AI systems powering many email systems are now trying to add relevant documents and notes to meetings on your calendar. That is great, but take the time to see whether the documents and other information included in the meetings on your calendar are actually relevant to what you need to work on. If not, add some information yourself to make sure youre ready after you get back.
Check in with your team
If you really want to be able to relax, check in with all of your team members the week before you head out. You probably arent in complete control of every project youre working on.
When you talk with your team, find out if there are any major crises brewing that youll need to address when you get back. If there is anything you can do to help with those before the vacation, prioritize that. In addition, get early warning about any last-minute tasks you may be asked to do before heading out. You dont want to feel pressure to finish something on your way out the door to start your break. Most people dont do their best work in such a rushed situation.
If you have any direct reports, encourage them to relax, recharge, and renew during the break. The people who work for you probably want you to have a good impression of their work, and some of them may feel like youll appreciate them doing additional work over the holidays. Everyone needs downtime. A word from youassuring them that the best thing they can do during the holiday break is to put their work asidewill go a long way toward helping your team come back feeling refreshed.
Dont forget your vacation message
You should do your best to avoid checking email over the break. It can be tempting to find out what has come in, but once you start checking, you run the risk of going down a rabbit hole that can eat up several hours of your precious relaxation time.
Instead, before you head out the door, take advantage of the tools in your email system to leave an out-of-office message. Lots of people do that routinelybut if you have resisted so far, it is time to give in. If people know youre not going to be responding to messages until the new year, youre not under any pressure to get them a response faster.
Of course, if youre in a business in which emergencies can arise, make sure key individuals and clients have a way to reach you should something serious go wrong. But otherwise, structure your communication channels so that there is no need to look at anything until after you get back.
