fortune--2020-04-20--The Coronavirus Economy: A new CEO on transitioning to a remote workforce based in Italy and the U.S

The Coronavirus Economy: A new CEO on transitioning to a remote workforce based in Italy and the U.S.

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Previously the chief marketing officer at Kate Spade, Mary Beech joined the Sarah Flint team in February as a first-time CEO.
But within just a few weeks, the realities of the new coronavirus became devastatingly apparent in Italy, where Sarah Flint’s entire supply chain is based. Soon thereafter, as the outbreak proceeded to spread in the U.S., Beech had to transition the team at its headquarters in New York City to working remotely while staying focused on brand preservation and expanding business for the aspirational fashion brand founded eight years ago and which has since become popular with royals, Hollywood stars, and prominent businesswomen and activists.
Fortune spoke with Beech for a new series, The Coronavirus Economy, to ask about how the outbreak of COVID-19 has affected her team and her plans for the company, and to get a sense of how she has been handling this news, both emotionally and financially.
Mary Beech joined the Sarah Flint team in February as a first-time CEO. Stacie Flinner
Fortune: How does your business normally fare this time of year? What would an average day at the office look like?
Beech: We’re in the midst of our spring launches. Sarah Flint has several new styles debuting this season, and we were able to get the majority out of Italy and available to consumers on our site.
I had only been working at Sarah Flint for three weeks prior to work from home, so an “average” routine hadn’t quite fallen into place. Prior to COVID, I spent my days partnering with Sarah, our small (but amazing) team, and our investors on how to grow this brand to the next level. With COVID, it was an immediate focus shift to the health and safety of our employees and to business preservation actions.
When did you realize that COVID-19 would affect your business? How has it, so far?
In late February, my second week in the role, we realized Italy would shut down. Sarah Flint shoes are handmade in Italy, and most of the artisans we work with happen to be located in Lombardy, perhaps the hardest-hit area within Italy. While all eight of our factories have temporarily closed, we immediately began contingency planning and were able to air ship product (versus boating) to ensure we had newness for spring.
We didn’t feel the impact on the consumer side until Thursday, March 12. That’s when many offices in the U.S., including ours, began working from home, and the dangerous extent of the virus in our home city, New York, and across the U.S., became clear. Our biggest concern was our team and our partners in Italy. Thankfully everyone is well, healthy, and staying home. My main memory of those first few nights was this enormous surge of passion for our team and artisans, for Sarah, and for the brand, mixed with this clarity around the analytics of the business and where I needed to focus to ensure we could stay operational.
Have you and your employees continued working from home? What kinds of tools and strategies do you use to work and communicate remotely?
Yes, we are all working from home for the foreseeable future. Our team is phenomenal, committed, communicative, and passionate. We start each day with an all-team Zoom, and it is my favorite 20 minutes of the day. Two days a week, it’s a business update with financials and announcements. Clear, frequent, and transparent communication is key. We start those meetings reading a recent email from a customer to keep us grounded and inspired.
And three days a week, a few team members share how they are doing and answer a question such as, “What have you learned about yourself while working from home?” We’ve done an all-team virtual cocktail party and are big fans of Zoom background–themed calls! We also ask employees to send their manager a list of their day’s priorities each morning. Sarah and I do it with one another, too. It helps prevent the overloading of priorities and ensures we celebrate accomplishments.
How have sales fared since the outbreak commenced? What are your day-to-day operations like at the moment?
In 2017, Sarah had the judgment to move completely out of luxury retailers and go direct-to-consumer. As a result, while sales are down since the outbreak of COVID-19, we are far better off than we would be if we were still in wholesale. Clearly, women working from home without events, graduations, weddings, and parties on their calendars have an understandably diminished need for luxury footwear. However, we switched our marketing focus immediately away from heeled styles to focus on our great work-from-home-friendly flats, sandals, and slides.
But we also focused on what we could do as a tiny, 26-person team to help. We’ve donated 25% of all proceeds to hospitals in the region of Italy in which most of our artisans live. And recently we did a campaign called #standinsupport where our customers nominated women working on the front lines of COVID to receive a free pair of our shoes. We had 400-plus nominations. We were overwhelmed by the generosity of customers but not surprised.
If your business has suffered, have you been pushed to make any budget cuts or layoffs?
Any leader right now needs to be focused first and foremost on business preservation and that includes actions to preserve cash. We have cut expenses in a thoughtful and deliberate manner, and senior leadership have taken pay cuts, but we have not had to lay off any of our staff. Thankfully, we were a lean team to begin with, and when the danger of the virus recedes, we will be able to quickly bounce back and be ready to continue our growth trajectory.
Have you or will you be applying to the Paycheck Protection Program for assistance?
After thoroughly examining the details, we ultimately decided not to move forward with the PPP. Although our business is significantly impacted by changes in consumer behavior, we are fortunate to have a strong brand and a growing customer base, as well as experienced and committed investors, so we don’t feel we are in the same position as many small businesses.
Mary Beech (left) with founder Sarah Flint in New York City. Stacie Flinner
What are your plans for the business, short term and long term?
Short-term, we are focused on our employees and partners, enabling the longevity of our business, and providing empathy, moments of joy, and value to our customers.
Long term, we are focused on Sarah’s original vision: to be the next great luxury brand, but in a way that redefines luxury. Consumer expectations are dramatically altering, and we believe consumers will demand value alignment, transparency, quality, and actions for good from the brands they choose. I see this as a true opportunity.
On a personal note, how have you been faring amid all this?
My family and I are safe and well, and for that, I am incredibly grateful. I have enormous empathy for my teenage daughters, who are missing their friends, their after-school activities, and even milestones like eighth grade graduation. (An event I don’t even remember from my childhood, but is pretty important when you’re actually in eighth grade!)
But these are small sacrifices. I’m an optimist, so I’m trying to see the silver linings. I am connecting with friends and family far more often and sitting down to a lot more family meals. I used to travel extensively for work, as did my husband, so this is definitely the most consecutive time we have spent together in 20 years of marriage.
But more than anything, I just want the world to be well again. Our family has been able to take a few small actions to help others during this time, and it has truly fueled us. I am focusing on staying hopeful and trying to inspire and enable hopefulness in others.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
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—How hackers are exploiting the coronavirus—and how to protect yourself
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—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: The race is on to create a coronavirus antiviral drug and vaccine
Subscribe to Fortune’s Outbreak newsletter for a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus and its impact on global business.


fortune--2020-04-20--Facebook launches a Twitch and YouTube competitor

Who will pay for the coronavirus bailout ?
If you ’ re under 50 and working , you will

Facebook is picking a fight with Amazon and Google.
The social media giant plans to launch a mobile app called Facebook Gaming that will enable users to stream their own video game play as well as watch other players. That will put Facebook in direct competition with Amazon-owned Twitch and Google’s YouTube.
Game streaming has been on the rise for several years, but it has seen explosive growth as more and more people turn to video games as a way to combat boredom and stay in touch with friends during the extended lockdown. Traffic on Twitch jumped from 982 million hours in February to more than 1.1 billion hours in March.
The app, which has been available for testing in international markets for the past 18 months, will initially be available on the Google Play app store. An iOS version will follow later.
With Facebook Gaming, players will press a “Go Live” button to begin streaming game play from their mobile phones directly to Facebook. Fans will be able to tip players with “stars,” which will let people monetize their broadcasts.
Twitch is far and away the leader when it comes to game streaming, though Google has been making an effort to increase YouTube’s presence in the space, tying it in with the launch of the Stadia game service. Facebook, though, is a competitor worth watching, given its active user base of 2.5 billion people, as of the fourth quarter of 2019. The company says over 700 million users currently play games on the main Facebook app.
More must-read tech coverage from Fortune:
—How Fortune 500 companies are utilizing their resources and expertise during the pandemic
—Everything to know about Apple’s iPhone SE—a new $400 phone
—YouTube TV’s fight against big cable has gotten a big boost during the pandemic
—Should you fear government surveillance in the coronavirus era?
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro vs. the Sony WF-1000XM3
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-04-20--Fortune poll: As businesses adapt to remote work, tech isn’t their biggest problem

Most businesses were well prepared for their employees to work-from-home en masse, a new survey shows.
As states enacted stay-at-home orders and business closures to slow down the spread of the virus in mid-March, a Fortune-Adobe CIO Survey asked 200 chief information officers about this transition to remote working.
Turns out companies were confident in work-from-home from the start. A total of 84% of CIOs said their organization was already set up effectively for their employees to work remotely when the pandemic hit. And 71% of organizations expanded remote work access to more employees by March 16, finds the Fortune-Adobe CIO Survey.
One might think that large corporations with enterprise tech accounts would be leading in work-from-home practices, but it was actually smaller businesses who were best prepared for work-from-home. While 77% of CIOs at large firms thought their company was set up effectively for work-from-home, that number was 94% at small businesses. Decades ago, smaller businesses might have really struggled through something like this, but that was before the growth in free cloud services, like Google Drive, and telecommunication platforms like Zoom.
When we asked CIOs what proved to be the biggest challenge in their companies’ remote work, only 20% said hardware and 21% tech tools. The real issue: 53% said getting their employees to effectively communicate with one another is the biggest challenge of remote work. Communication is clearly something employers aim to improve upon as these stay-at-home orders drag on.
The Fortune-Adobe CIO Survey found 47% of CIOs said they expect the virus to slow hiring in their department. These tech bosses expect large investments in the areas of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and cloud. Since the survey was conducted in mid-March, the economy has set records for job losses—so it’s very likely those A.I. and cybersecurity investments will get pushed back.
*Methodology: The Fortune-Adobe CIO Survey was fielded between March 12 through March 16 and received 200 responses from CIOs. Participants had to be a CIO from U.S.-based companies with at least 100 employees. Participants were verified using publicly available information (e.g., LinkedIn profiles). Data collection was conducted by Advanis, a research firm and member of the Canadian Research Insights Council.
Disclosure: Adobe teamed up with Fortune to conduct this CIO survey. Adobe interacts regularly with CIOs through its Adobe Experience Platform, a portal which provides IT and tech leaders with real-time customer data.
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fortune--2020-04-20--Q&A: PayPal CEO Dan Schulman says coronavirus is giving his business ‘a tremendous surge’

In early April, Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, was at home in California, waging his own sort of coronavirus battle on two fronts: On the one hand, he was working closely with the Treasury Department on a way for PayPal to help distribute stimulus funds via loans to small businesses as well as direct electronic payments to individuals. On the other hand, he was guiding his global workforce through a “tremendous surge” in demand for his company’s digital payment services (PayPal as well as Venmo, a mobile app), a trend Schulman attributes directly to the way the pandemic has forced people to live their lives remotely and online.
In a Q&A with Fortune, Schulman explains how the coronavirus has spurred not just increases in online payments, but new financial behavior entirely—and Schulman thinks some of those trends will persist even after the virus subsides. “We’re not going to go backwards to what was,” he says. “We’re not going to be using cash nearly as much.” Read on for the full interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
I was hoping you could set the scene a bit. We have this unprecedented situation, much of the economy has ground to a standstill. One thing we’ve been intrigued by is how that’s affecting the financial system, and how Americans are interacting with their finances.
DS: The impacts of the virus are profound, people are sheltering at home, they’re not going out. And that’s changing the way that all of us work, and the way all of us live. So you’re seeing that with increased use of all things digital. I’m on the board of Verizon, and we’re seeing a tremendous increase in the use of wireless services and the use of the Internet in general. And along with that, people are using digital payments in ways that we really never imagined before. Not only is there a tremendous increase in the use of digital payments, but the way people are using them are also changing.
Dan Schulman, president and chief executive officer of PayPal Holdings Inc. Patrick T. Fallon—Getty Images
What are some examples of the increases you’re seeing?
Over the last couple of weeks the number of new customers that have signed on to PayPal or Venmo has increased dramatically. I mean, in some cases doubling. And in general we’re seeing different usage patterns emerge—people are spending a lot more online on the weekend. We’re seeing a tremendous increase in shopping in verticals like groceries, electronics, home and gardening. Gaming is exploding.
But what really intrigues me, and what we’re seeing in ways that we never have seen before, is this increase in spontaneous giving to people who need the money. Sometimes from friends and sometimes from strangers, over these peer-to-peer networks like Venmo or PayPal. That has skyrocketed. And we are now doing a hashtag called #Venmoitforward, where if we see somebody doing a random act of kindness, we’re giving them $20 into their Venmo account, and we’re saying to them, do even more. What I’m seeing are people really stepping up to the everyday heroes that are out there right now—cashiers who are at grocery stores or pharmacies, first responders, nurses, doctors. These are tens of millions of dollars that are flowing in terms of giving.
One interesting thing is that on Venmo, people use emojis to signal what they’re sending money for. And it used to be that the top emojis for us are a pizza emoji, that kind of thing. The emoji that’s trending the most is the medical mask emoji—we’ve seen a 375% increase in payments using that emoji. We’re also seeing a number of different celebrities start to step in and help their fans. Taylor Swift is giving money through PayPal to her fans who most need it. Ariana Grande is doing that. And I think this is a trend that’s not just emerging, but is really exploding.
When you think of where things stood in the last crisis, so say 10 years ago, are fintech and payments technologies set up to help people in a different way now than they were back then?
Well I think you’ve seen an explosion in mobile over those last 10 years. And so when you have a smartphone, you have all of the power of a bank branch in the palm of your hands. And at the same time you’ve had an explosion in the capabilities of digital payments. And as you think about it, as we’re sheltering at home, you also have people who are unbanked—almost 25% of Americans are underserved right now. They may not have a bank account. Traditionally they would have had to go to a check-cashing checking location, and now they’re sheltering at home. But they can do that right from their mobile phone, they can take a picture of a check, deposit it onto a platform like a PayPal or a Venmo or deposit it into a bank account. So what we’re seeing is a tremendous surge, both in PayPal core and Venmo. Many populations that may not have had PayPal or Venmo [in the past] now need to avail themselves of that. And so we’re making it as easy as possible to handle the surge in demand. The use of technology now is enabling, I think, these previously underserved populations to become part of this digital economy.
You’ve been working with the Treasury Department on ways PayPal could help distribute government stimulus money to Americans as well as small businesses. [Note: after this interview, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service made it possible for people eligible for stimulus payments to elect to receive the money electronically via direct deposit, including into a PayPal or Venmo account if they choose.]
Making sure that those checks get to those populations that most need them is something that we’re working with the government on. We have a lot of customers who don’t necessarily have bank accounts, but do have accounts with PayPal or Venmo. We need to be sure that there’s strong authentication, which we pride ourselves on, to make sure that those checks are going to the right people.
How new would that be for you, in terms of working in that capacity with the government?
Well we work with the different parts of government, whether they be state governments or municipalities around the world, to do the everyday civic things that people do—pay taxes, get tax refunds, pay parking tickets, utilities, that kind of thing. But doing something at this scale with the federal government would be something unprecedented. It’s not easy to go do that for the government. How we do it, and the best way to get that done as rapidly as possible is still evolving toward what I would consider to be a long-term solution. This is clearly not a moneymaking effort on the behalf of PayPal. This is a civic effort, and the right thing to do, for all digital platforms.
A portion of our customer base has gotten their tax refunds directly onto our platform. And those that have done that will be able to also receive those disbursement checks directly as well. Most of these things are not brand new, they’re just not at the scale that is being contemplated right now.
We’re hearing a lot of bad news and negative trends over the past few weeks. But do you think, with the ‘surge in demand’ you mentioned, is there any positive effect that you see coming out of this?
I do think, as we’re seeing a new era of digital payments, that we’re not going to go backwards to what was. We’re not going to be using cash nearly as much. I think we’re all going to be aware of hygiene going forward. I think the use of QR codes in store is going to continue to increase, as we’re seeing it increase right now. And I think the more we can move into a digital economy, the more inclusive that can be. And we need to be sure that happens, because I do think digital forms of payments can be much more time-efficient—you don’t have to wait in line at a cash-checking location, you don’t have to wait in line to pay your bills. And number two, it can be done much less expensively. Sometimes it can cost 2% to 5% to cash a check, and then you’ve got to pay another fee to pay a bill. If you can do it electronically I think we can save a tremendous amount of money for those populations who most need that savings. And so I’m hopeful that this is a tipping point in the way people think about managing and moving money, from the physical into digital, because I think that can really drive a tremendous number of benefits to those who most need it, and to our economy and society.
It sounds like you’re seeing a lot of beneficial business trends for PayPal, and meanwhile we’re hearing a lot of bad stories about business. Is it possible, do you think, that PayPal will buck the trend, and potentially have a very positive first quarter of this year when we’ve been dealing with this pandemic?
I think PayPal has the opportunity, when we come out of the pandemic, to be a much stronger company than it was coming into it because of all of these trends. But like every company, we’re impacted by it. Our customers are impacted by it. We support a number of travel companies, and different ticketing companies and event companies, and so we’re not immune from some of the trends that are happening, but we’re very fortunate in that we have a number of countertrends that are happening—the explosion of digital payments, the explosion of net new active [users].
So we’re doing a number of things right now to be helpful in this time of crisis. We also said we’re not going to lay off any employees because of COVID-19. But I think if you put your employees first and you put your customers first, then nobody forgets that, and you come out of this in a really strong position, because you know, people are always there in good times for you. It’s when they’re there in more difficult times that people remember.
I meet every single day with my team on video calls like this, and one of the things I’m telling them is, this is our time. This is our time to step up, to help.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:
—The coronavirus crisis is fintech’s biggest test yet—and greatest opportunity to go mainstream
—Stimulus checks are depositing: How people are spending the money
—Couldn’t track your stimulus check? Errors and long waits plague IRS portal rollout
—What the government bailout means for airline investors (and CEOs)
—How every sector of the S&P 500 has been impacted by the coronavirus selloff
—How Fortune 500 companies are utilizing their resources and expertise during the pandemic
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—VIDEO: 401(k) withdrawal penalties waived for anyone hurt by COVID-19
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-04-20--How T.J. Maxx and Ross will (eventually) come out of the coronavirus crisis even stronger

Many major U.S. retailers are entering their sixth week of mass store closures with no relief in sight.
For the likes of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls’ parent TJX, Ross Stores, or Burlington Stores, the fast-growing off-price retailers, the pain is compounded by not having e-commerce to fall back on.
Yet despite this brutal time, with sales essentially down 100% until stores reopen, industry experts expect the off-price giants, beloved by shoppers for the treasure hunt component and frequent merchandise turnaround with brand-name products at discount prices, to bounce back even stronger.
As hard as this crisis is for T.J. Maxx and its peers, it’s downright life-threatening to department stores like Macy’s and J.C. Penney and specialty clothing chains, the very rivals from whom discount retailers have poached billions of dollars in market share in the past decade.
That will make TJX, Ross, and Burlington, with their strong finances, even more attractive to brands at a time department stores are canceling orders en masse to stay solvent. Add to that economic turmoil—some 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past month—and shoppers will be even hungrier for the bargains.
“Their business models have been built for these very times,” PwC consumer markets leader Steve Barr tells Fortune.
That business model has long been centered on being nimbler when buying inventory from popular brands such as Ralph Lauren, Under Armour, Michael Kors, Calvin Klein, Adidas, Speedo, and countless others (including, if you’re lucky, Prada) and selling it for 20% to 70% cheaper.
TJX, Ross, and Burlington, which for now have reportedly stopped placing orders, get much of their merchandise from other retailers’ order cancellations, manufacturer overruns, and closeouts. But unlike department stores, which order products six to nine months ahead of time and tend to buy an item in its full assortment of sizes and colors, the off-price giants make purchases much closer to when the items will hit shelves and don’t need to have every size of something to buy it. And they are constantly bringing in new items: Ross, for instance, gets fresh merchandise delivered three to six times a week. That explains why you can’t find that perfect dress shirt you saw on a Marshalls’ rack in your size, but that you’ll still find something you weren’t looking for.
The unpredictability of store inventory is the very key to the treasure hunt that is their secret sauce: Take a pass on that dress today, and it probably won’t be there next week. That also makes e-commerce very difficult for them: TJX gets 2% of sales online, while Ross and Burlington do no e-commerce. But it keeps shoppers coming in droves.
American consumers have voted with their feet: TJX, which also owns Home Goods as well as businesses in Canada and Europe, eclipsed Macy’s by sales in 2014. By 2019, TJX’s revenue of $41.7 billion made it 70% larger than its department store rival.
The business model of moving inventory quickly will be crucial when business regains some semblance of normalcy. However much many brands piously pledge to become less reliant on off-price chains, and lament the harm to their brand “halo” of being sold in a discount store (hello, Michael Kors and Under Armour!), being paid by retailers that can move product fast will be even more paramount.
“They can recover their costs quickly if they put it in the off-price channel,” says Barr.
TJX declined to comment, and Ross and Burlington did not respond to a request for comment.
After the storm
To protect their cash reserves while stores are closed, the department stores and clothing chains like Gap Inc., which compete albeit indirectly with the off-price players, have canceled orders on an unprecedented scale.
But they already have a lot of inventory built up for spring and summer that they will have to clear out for fall merchandise and eventually the holiday season. A lot of that will have to be done via deep discounting. That will create a temporary surfeit of merchandise on the market that depresses prices and increases competition for the off-price crowd.
After that headwind, this storm will ultimately reinforce the trends that have made T.J. Maxx, Ross, Marshalls, and company the big winners in apparel retail.
“They’ll absolutely be in the driver’s seat in terms of the available merchandise and pick the best of the best to put in their stores,” says Instinet retail analyst Michael Baker. That, in turn, will keep shoppers interested and perpetuate their long defection away from department stores.
But taking advantage of the turmoil requires strong finances. And the off-price players have a massive edge.
RapidRatings, a firm that analyses corporations’ financial health, recently conducted a stress test assuming 15% revenue declines this year, assessing risk of default on a scale of 0 to 100. TJX and Ross’s quotients barely budged, while Macy’s, Kohl’s, and Nordstrom plunged. Meanwhile, Cowen & Co said last week Burlington has enough liquidity to get through a yearlong sales drought.
“If you’re not in a strong place as this crisis hits, you’re screwed,” says Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the Wharton School.
One way this matters is that the off-price chains can better afford making opportunistic buys whenever they find merchandise for cheap, even if they have to store it many months, perhaps even a year, ahead of when it hits stores, a retail industry practice called “packaway.” About 46% of Ross Stores’ inventory at fiscal year end was “packaway” merchandise.
The department stores, meanwhile, will struggle to ensure basic upkeep, let alone wanting to incur the extra storage costs.
Still, even off-price retail could get badly dinged by this crisis. No one knows when stores will reopen, how quickly and how widely. What will shopper mood and purchasing power be? Will they be comfortable shopping in off-price stores that often look like bazaars? Will they want to rifle through a rack that countless other shoppers have gone through before them?
Certainly the downturn works in these retailers’ favor. The 2008–09 recession turned millions of Americans on to shopping at T.J. Maxx, Ross Dress for Less, Burlington, and Marshalls, and they never looked back.
So if anyone can outlast rivals in the storm and emerge as bigger winners, the off-price retailers have some of the best odds.
“People will be price sensitive, and they’re trained to go to T.J. Maxx anyway,” quips Kahn.
More must-read retail coverage from Fortune:
—”Ugly March” leads into “hideous April” for retail as sales slip the most they ever have
—How the on-demand liquor delivery business changed overnight
—These robot-powered warehouses could save grocers
—How Fortune 500 companies are stepping up during the pandemic
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: The greatest designs of modern times
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-04-20--File your taxes, get a free case of Natty Light

Filing taxes is never a lot of fun, but Anheuser-Busch and online tax filing service TaxAct are looking to make it a little less painful this year.
The companies have struck up a partnership that will let anyone (over the age of 21, of course) receive a free 24-pack of Natural Light when they file their taxes with TaxAct by July 15.
The promotion is largely aimed at millennials, who make up the sweet spot for the beer’s fan base, but there’s no upper age limit on who is eligible.
“No one looks forward to doing their taxes, especially those people who are just starting out in the world,” said Daniel Blake, vice president of U.S. value brands at Anheuser-Busch, in a statement. “Teaming up with TaxAct was a great way to give a refreshing distraction around a stressful experience that our drinkers all go through.”
The “free case” will come in the form of a rebate. Once you’ve filed and bought the beer, just send a copy of the receipt and a filing confirmation from TaxAct, and the brewing giant will send you a check. (A 24-pack of Natty Light typically goes for between $15 and $20.)
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic had resulted in overall higher sales of alcohol, but smaller craft brewers are struggling terribly in the current economy. In South Carolina, 80% of the breweries surveyed by the state brewers guild said they would be unable to remain open after three months.
More personal finance coverage from Fortune:
—What to do if you can’t pay your bills this month
—Stimulus checks are depositing: How people are spending the money
—Couldn’t track your stimulus check? Errors and long waits plague IRS portal rollout
—What you should know about mortgage forbearance and skipping payments
—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—Freelancers and independent contractors can now apply for SBA Paycheck Protection Program loans. What you need to know
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—VIDEO: 401(k) withdrawal penalties waived for anyone hurt by COVID-19
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-04-20--American companies laid off 22 million in the past month. Europe chose a different path

Like most British firms, Volcano Coffee Works watched, stunned, as business collapsed at the beginning of March, just as the country started social-distancing measures.
“We saw a 91% drop in our orders literally within a week,” recounts Emma Loisel, chair of the specialty coffee business. Volcano Coffee Works runs two coffee roasting sites and a café, and had, at the time of the outbreak, a fast-growing wholesale business supplying hotels, restaurants and cafes around the country. It has 31 people on payroll.
“I feel very responsible for those people,” Loisel tells Fortune. “We’re a real family-run business where everyone has worked really hard to build what we have. And to lose that, would be a real tragedy.”
Tragedy was averted.
That’s because the government, as of today, will step in to pay most of Loisel’s wage bill. Under a U.K. government rescue plan, 80% of wages, or up to 2,500 pounds ($3,100) a month per employee, are covered for coronavirus-hit businesses in one of the most generous aid packages anywhere in the developed world.
The Brits call the measure a furlough plan. Unlike in the United States, the furloughed workers in Britain still get paid.
The hope is to keep unemployment from sky-rocketing, as is the case in the United States where a record 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past month, pushing the real unemployment rate in the U.S. to 17.9%, a level not seen since the Great Depression.
Without that lifeline, Loisel says, “we would have had to do mass redundancies”—lay-offs—“immediately.”
Guaranteeing payrolls
European job markets are also showing the strain of the coronavirus crisis that’s confined hundreds of millions of people to their homes and brought large sectors of the economy grinding to a halt.
But some economists say that the leap in unemployment is likely to be less severe and less prolonged in much of Europe. There’s one simple reason for that: most European governments are paying all or part of the wages of millions of private-sector workers who might otherwise have been laid off because of the slump.
The International Monetary Fund forecast last week that U.S. unemployment would rise from the 2019 rate of 3.7%—which was considerably lower than the euro zone—to 10.4% in 2020, on a par with the 19 countries using the euro currency. In 2021, it projects the U.S. will have a higher unemployment rate than the euro zone.
How bad the U.S. unemployment rate will get is still an open debate. An economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Miguel Faria-e-Castro calculated in a “back-of-the-envelope” estimate that 47 million Americans could be laid off, sending unemployment soaring to 32% in the second quarter.
Faria-e-Castro did not take into account the effects of the various government bailout measures to mitigate job losses, but when you see the steady flow of job-cuts headlines from the airlines, retailers like Macy’s and hotel and casino operators, Marriott and MGM, it becomes hard to call a floor on the number of Americans soon to be out of a job.
In much of Europe, the aim has been to keep staff on payrolls as long as possible, even if ultimately governments—in essence, taxpayers—pick up the tab. Economists at Germany’s Berenberg bank say that by encouraging firms to hang on to their workers during the crisis, Europe is making it more likely that business can quickly get back to normal once the restrictions are lifted, and factories, offices, schools and restaurants re-open. The European approach also limits the risk of high unemployment turning a short-term shock into a longer slump, they say.
“In many ways, the U.S., with its entrepreneurial spirit and rough and tumble dynamic markets, is a role model for the less flexible parts of Europe. But on the specific problem of containing mass dismissals during a crisis, the U.S. could take a leaf out of Europe’s book,” Berenberg economists wrote in a recent investor note.
The German word for jobs subsidies
The prototype for the European schemes is Germany’s “kurzarbeit” subsidy for reduced working hours. This tool was credited with cushioning the impact of the 2008-09 financial crisis in Germany. Back then, Berenberg notes, Europe’s biggest economy lost proportionally far fewer jobs than the United States and employment recovered to pre-crisis levels in Germany several years before it did so in the United States.
This time around, many European countries have adopted similar schemes to the German model, including France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain and Denmark.
An employee wearing a protective face mask removes a cordon next to an Opel Astra at a showroom in Ruesselsheim, Germany, on Monday, April 20, 2020. Germany shut businesses and factories over the past month, but a government scheme to pay a portion of wages kept layoffs to a minimum. Wire photography: Alex Kraus—Bloomberg via Getty Images Alex Kraus—Bloomberg/Getty Images
The details vary from country to country. In Germany, the government will pay employers affected by the crisis up to 67% of workers’ net salaries. In France, the state will pay 84% of net salary, with 100% for those on the minimum wage, while under Italy’s Cassa integrazione guadagni scheme, the state will pay 80% of wages for up to nine weeks.
Short-time working schemes, as they’re called, allow firms to hang on to skilled workers, avoiding the costs and delays of retraining new ones when business picks up. But the float-all-boats policy has its foes.
A good investment?
The biggest criticism is that it can create economic distortions by keeping inefficient firms on life support or by retaining workers in a declining sector, such as bricks-and-mortar retail, when resources might better be shifted to more dynamic industries.
Having government step in to pick up the pay checks of private-sector workers seems to conflict with U.S. free market ethos of flexible labor markets, which tend to shed jobs quickly in a downturn and strongly increase them in a boom.
But other economists say that the differences between the U.S. and European approaches to labor shocks during coronavirus are not as great as they seem.
“I guess the general narrative is that the U.S. is doing a lot less in terms of trying to keep people in jobs and that’s been reinforced by the unprecedented wave of jobless claims we’ve had over the past few weeks. I think in reality though, the general picture is the U.S. is still doing quite a lot. It’s just that it is targeted in a different way to a lot of these European countries,” Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, told Fortune.
The U.S. approach
The U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, which provides $350 billion of small business loans, forgivable if firms keep workers on the payroll, is “essentially pretty similar” to the European schemes although the steps firms had to go through were slightly more complicated, he said.
“The other key aspect of the U.S. response is the big expansion of unemployment insurance,” he said, noting that the $2.2 trillion CARES Act offers more generous unemployment benefits, and to more portions of the labor market—including part-time and gig economy workers.
Nicholas Economides, economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said when it comes to policies directed at the labor market, size matters.
In the U.S., the stimulus package was about 10% of GDP and there was a discussion about increasing it “while in the euro zone they’ve talked about 500 billion euros which is less than 5% of the GDP of the euro zone. I think that would be totally inadequate,” he told Fortune.
In the best-case scenario, many Americans claiming unemployment benefits would go back to their former jobs, or find new ones, when the lockdown ends. But that depends on how long they are unemployed, says Economides.
“If we are talking about a month, two months or two-and-a-half months, I think it is very likely that the vast majority are going to go back to their work … but if we are talking about three months or longer, we don’t know,” he said. “I think it will take time for employment to come back to previous levels.”
Strong take-up
So far, take-up of the European short-time working schemes has been strong, Capital Economics said, noting that 4 million workers were covered by the scheme in France, while an estimated 620,000 companies covering almost 3 million workers have already applied for the Spanish scheme.
But its success comes at a cost. Highly indebted European governments will have difficulty extending the programs should the downturn last several months. For that reason, fiscal hawks are paying close attention to who applies. Liverpool F.C., the European champions, backed out of the program after the move drew strong criticism from fans.
The U.K. government’s furlough payment went live on Monday, a relief for Loisel, of Volcano Coffee Works. A delay of even a few days would have meant the company covering another payroll cycle.
“It’s not that we don’t think it’s coming,” she said last week before the government confirmed the start date. “It’s just the reality of timing of cashflow that this is making it much harder for small and medium businesses to plan, and to manage their way through this.”
For anyone who’s had to deal with payroll, the task can be daunting. Try doing it for an entire country.
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fortune--2020-04-20--Focusing on fevers: Thermal-imaging tech is on the rise. Can it help fight the coronavirus?

Samsung took an unusual precaution when it held a splashy event in San Francisco during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, before the city issued a “shelter in place” order. The tech giant hired a startup to install a sci-fi-inspired system to scan conference attendees for fevers.
Hundreds of people going to the event had to walk past a high-resolution thermal camera that is supposed to detect body temperatures with an accuracy of within one-half a degree Fahrenheit. A laptop running software interpreted the data and alerted a technician when anyone had an above-average temperature, a potential symptom of a COVID-19 infection, so the person could be pulled aside for additional screening.
The company that supplied the technology, CrowdRx, declined to say whether it had identified anyone at the event with a possible fever. But what’s clear is that the coronavirus epidemic has put a spotlight on thermal-imaging technology as a potentially important tool in combating pandemics and protecting the global economy.
Long a fixture in airports and rail stations in Asia, a result of the previous SARS and H1N1 epidemics there, thermal imaging is increasingly being installed worldwide. Casino giant Wynn Resorts, Brazilian miner Vale, and airports in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are just a few of the customers that have recently started using the equipment.
Thermal-imaging cameras identify people who have unusually high temperatures, a possible sign of infection. Courtesy of Flir
“The silver lining of this outbreak is that in the future, more advanced infectious screening will be done at all mass gatherings,” says Matt Friedman, CrowdRx’s medical director and associate medical director at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Demand for thermal-imaging equipment from FLIR Systems, a leading manufacturer, has grown exponentially during the coronavirus epidemic, says Jim Cannon, the company’s CEO. The privately owned firm, based in Oregon, charges $5,000 to $7,000 for entry-level cameras that are suitable for medical screening.
FLIR’s thermal cameras aren’t just for medical uses. Energy companies install them to spot leaky pipelines; factories use them to detect worn parts in machinery; and the military uses them to spot enemy fighters in the dark, including from a drone that weighs just 30 grams.
Still, Cannon is careful when discussing what his gear can do in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic. The cameras detect “elevated body temperature,” not necessarily fevers or infection. “They can’t diagnose anything,” he explains.
And that’s a growing concern for medical professionals tasked with slowing the spread of COVID-19. Even if a thermal camera accurately determines a person’s temperature, that doesn’t mean it can accurately detect whether he or she is carrying the virus. Some people have naturally higher body temperatures, or they may have raised their temperature through physical exertion. Moreover, wearing glasses can interfere with the technology taking accurate readings because it needs a clear view of a subject’s eyes.
And, far worse for the virus fighters, a person infected with COVID-19 can be contagious to others for several days before showing any symptoms. Other infected people may be using medication to lower their temperature, allowing them to slip past thermal cameras without being flagged.
A recent study by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control concluded that thermal scans of travelers from China, followed by additional screening including questions about symptoms like coughing and difficulty breathing, failed to identify three-quarters of those infected with the coronavirus.
Even more damning, in March, the influential U.S. nonprofit medical research group ECRI published an analysis of previous studies on the effectiveness of using thermal screening to fight outbreaks including COVID-19. It found that the technology, used alone or in conjunction with questionnaires, is “ineffective for detecting infected persons” and that it “could provide a false sense of safety.”
The review came after a large U.S. health care system asked ECRI whether it should install thermal cameras to screen people entering hospitals, explains Andrew Furman, ECRI’s executive director. “Even under a best-case scenario, you’re going to miss more than half of the infected population,” Furman says. “The evidence is telling us that this is not going to help.”
CrowdRx’s Friedman, who has also served as the lead in-house physician for Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and the U.S. Open tennis tournament, agrees that the thermal-imaging tech is imperfect. But he cites some other studies that found the technology successfully identified fevers more than 90% of the time. And people with fevers are more contagious than asymptomatic carriers, he says.
“By no means does its sensitivity approach 100% at capturing all infected persons,” Friedman says. But still, he adds, when it comes to large gatherings, either at workplaces or major events, using the technology “should be the minimum bar.”
Pandemic-fighting tools of the future
A number of far-out ideas are being developed to combat the next epidemic.
Germ-resistant clothing
An Israeli company is infusing fabric with copper to trap germs and bacteria so that it can be used in protective gear. Meanwhile, researchers in the U.K. have developed face masks manufactured with a protein coating on the fabric that they say protects against 96% of airborne virus cells.
Mapping mammals
Researchers mapped all 55 of the viruses found in a particular species of bat as a “proof of concept” for a multibillion-dollar initiative to identify and analyze all viruses in mammals. During the project’s first 10 years, orga-
nizers say they could map an estimated 320,000 viruses, which may give health officials a head start in combating future pandemics caused by viruses jumping from animals to humans.
Virus-killing robots
Chinese and Danish companies have developed robots that can disinfect hospitals and offices by emitting concentrated ultraviolet light as they maneuver around. Some countries have also tried using drones to spray disinfectant on potentially infected areas.
Meet-ups in virtual reality
As seen all too often, people like to congregate even when they’ve been or-
dered not to. Better virtual reality technology that provides more realistic and immersive experiences could provide a safer way to socialize in the future.
A cacophony of coughing
The sound of people coughing and sneezing may one day provide an early
warning about impending pandemics. University of Massachusetts researchers have created a device hooked up to microphones that monitors waiting rooms in doctors’ offices and hospitals. If software detects a rise in throat clearing and wheezing, it can, in theory, raise a red flag. In a trial in one clinic last year, the device predicted illness rates that matched the results from lab tests on patients.
A version of this article appears in the May 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Focusing on fevers.”
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—How Fortune 500 companies are stepping up during the pandemic
—When will stimulus checks be deposited or mailed? Ensure yours isn’t delayed
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fortune--2020-04-20--Controversy around privacy splits Europe’s push to build COVID-19 contact-tracing apps

Concerns are growing over the privacy implications of a major scheme to develop COVID-19 contact-tracing apps in Europe and beyond.
The program in question—called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT)—provides technology that governments can use to build national coronavirus contact-tracing apps. Backed by a number of prominent European research institutions and academics, PEPP-PT is inspired by similar efforts in countries such as Singapore, and has a strong focus on the values Europe holds dear, particularly privacy.
Instead of recording people’s locations, the idea is to harness the Bluetooth functionality in smartphones to establish whether the user has come into contact with someone who subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus. The user can then be warned, so they can go into quarantine, without exposing their identity or movements to the government or companies.
In theory, the widespread use of such apps could replace the broad, indiscriminate lockdowns that are laying waste to economies around the world, while still respecting privacy rights. PEPP-PT claims to have seven governments already signed up to use its technology, with 40 more waiting in the wings.
But many technologists doubt PEPP-PT’s technology will be as privacy-preserving as the name suggests.
High-profile cybersecurity experts have in recent days walked away from the project, including those from respected European institutions such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.
I am personally disassociating from PEPP-PT. While I do believe strongly in the core ideas (international, privacy-preserving), I can't stand behind something I don't know what it stands for. Right now, PEPP-PT is not open enough, and it is not transparent enough. 1/3 — Marcel Salathé (@marcelsalathe) April 17, 2020
They, and around 300 more global experts in their field, on Monday issued a joint statement saying the Bluetooth-based approach to contact-tracing was, from a privacy standpoint, vastly preferable to tracking people’s location through technologies such as GPS—but some versions of the approach could still enable “a form of government or private sector surveillance that would catastrophically hamper trust in and acceptance of such an application by society at large.”
The letter did not name PEPP-PT by name—it is one of several contact-tracing app development efforts that are underway around the world—but the identities of some signatories made it clear that PEPP-PT was a target.
The core debate here is one of centralization versus decentralization. Will there be a centrally controlled database recording each occasion where the app’s users come into proximity with one another, and centralized servers pushing out notifications to the phones of those who may be at risk? Or will all the matching be done within the app on the users’ phones, with the central server acting only as a blind conduit between the devices?
Those who are turning against PEPP-PT heavily favor the latter, decentralized approach—as, for that matter, do Apple and Google, which earlier this month announced deep iOS and Android operating-system access for those building contact-tracing apps.
“It is vital that, in coming out of the current crisis, we do not create a tool that enables large-scale data collection on the population, either now or at a later time,” Monday’s joint letter read. “Thus, solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about the population should be rejected without further discussion.”
Michael Veale, a digital rights lecturer at University College London, is one of those who have in the past week been loudly criticizing PEPP-PT over its management of anonymity and the fact that it has not opened up its code for inspection by others. Like others who have walked away from PEPP-PT, he is helping build a system called Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T).
#DP3T entered as a candidate to so-called PEPP-PT in good faith, but it is now clear that powerful actors pushing centralised databases of Bluetooth contact tracing do not, and will not, act in good faith. PEPP-PT is a Trojan horse. — Michael Veale (@mikarv) April 16, 2020
“The centralized PEPP-PT allows a huge scope of function creep,” Veale told Fortune Monday. “The central server provides individuals’ identities, so there is no guarantee they are, and continue to be, random. Different groups can be ‘tagged’ to emit signals that they cannot spot, but third parties, such as law enforcement, might. In PEPP-PT, they assume that the central database only has fundamental rights at its heart. This is, frankly, a huge and technologically unnecessary risk for democratic societies and liberties.”
DP-3T was not originally intended to be a rival to PEPP-PT—indeed, the PEPP-PT team maintains that DP-3T and its decentralized approach remain a technical option for governments that are implementing PEPP-PT in their contact-tracing apps.
“We still like the DP-3T protocol,” said Hans-Christian Boos, CEO of German A.I. firm Arago and the founder of the PEPP-PT project, at a Friday virtual press conference that was partly aimed at addressing the emerging schism. “We also like a semi-centralized version. Our opinion is that countries need to be able to choose.”
According to Veale, two or three governments—he declined to specify which—are now on track to use DP-3T rather than PEPP-PT in their contact-tracing apps.
“The vision of PEPP-PT initially was as a forum to discuss shared issues, to ensure that systems can work across borders, and to challenge each other’s cryptographic ideas,” Veale said. “But it became what looks more like a vehicle for a narrow set of dogmatic interests, and there is a danger of an entity like DP-3T being attached to that, when we don’t know what we’re being attached to.”
At Friday’s press conference, PEPP-PT member Christophe Fraser—the senior group leader in pathogen dynamics at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute—said that for contact-tracing apps to work as intended, they need to be installed by at least 60% of the populace.
So, could the divergence in efforts hinder that level of uptake? Veale said it would not be a problem, as it was a matter of governments choosing which approach to take in their apps—not to have competing apps within any given country.
“The only way to get 60% voluntarily is if people have maximal trust in the system,” he said.
This is far from an obscure debate, because—as everyone involved seems to agree—viable contact-tracing apps will be a necessity. “There aren’t that many choices,” Fraser said Friday. “In front of a resurgent epidemic, the only other way out really is repeated and economically devastating lockdowns.”
But people would do well to keep an eye on what kind of contact-tracing system their governments are deploying.
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fortune--2020-04-20--AMD CEO Lisa Su on supercomputing and leading a global company during the coronavirus

In this in-depth interview, AMD chief Lisa Su talks supercomputing, executing a turnaround, and running a global company in the midst of a pandemic.
This edited Q&A has been condensed for space and clarity.
Engineering a new AMD
When you took the reins in October 2014, AMD’s revenue was down almost 40%; your market share had been cut in half—your stock even dropped below $2. But your strategy for revamping the business by focusing on higher-performance chips has been a success. Your stock is up,¹ and reviewers have gone crazy over your latest Ryzen chip lineup; this year 100 new laptops are coming to market with AMD chips. You once described the turnaround process to me as “fighting your set of wars.” How does it feel to have won some battles?
Su: It’s been very exciting, rewarding—all of those things. The past couple of years have certainly helped build that confidence that, hey, when we set out to do something, we can actually get it done. And when we began, there was a lot of convincing to do. But there’s a lot more to do, and in our world it’s always about what’s next and what’s the next big thing.
Now the expectations are high. It’s interesting, because life, as well as product road maps, is all about making choices. And the choices don’t actually get easier as you do better. The choices are exactly the same, if not harder, frankly.
Your product road map over the past five years included whole new designs for CPUs and GPUs.² GPUs used to be just for video gaming, but now they’re also being used in data centers to help compute big-data analysis. What comes next?
We’re making large investments in graphics and what we’re doing around optimizing graphics for both gaming as well as computing. That’s a new vector where we’re putting a lot of emphasis.
If you think about what differentiates AMD, it’s the idea that we can put the best processors together for each of the workloads. This idea of bringing CPUs and GPUs together in different combinations and with different interconnections really goes toward where accelerated computing is going in the future.
It’s kind of funny that the same kinds of GPU chips that video gamers needed also turned out to be the thing that’s running A.I. and machine-learning apps in cloud data centers at Google and Amazon. Why are those kinds of GPU chips, which can run lots of simple tasks very quickly, so in demand in data centers?
It’s the idea that computers can get smarter and smarter. And the way they get smarter is they get better at recognizing patterns and matching patterns and then using that information to become a little bit smarter in the future. And that’s the whole concept of machine-learning and artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
This part of computing is actually moving faster than anything else because we have this tremendous amount of data that we’re generating, which we don’t really know what to do with. Each of us is generating so much information. Our companies are generating a ton of information. The Internet is generating a ton of information, and we need to figure out what to do with it all.³
How do you bend the performance curve? In technology, if you plot the performance gains made by our industry over a five- or 10-year period, it often looks like a straight line. You can draw a straight line through it, and our goal in life is to change that line. We want to be above the line, bending the curve.
All about the exaflop
AMD just won two government bids to build some of the fastest supercomputers ever.⁴ How is your technology being used in that context?
If you think about the problems that you’re solving in science at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which does medical science and weather science, or Lawrence Livermore, which does more of the national security–type things around simulating our nuclear stockpile, all of them do better when you can take larger data sets and do many more calculations.
That’s what we’re doing in building these large supercomputers. But we’re going above what normal scaling would allow you to do by adding this combination of CPUs and GPUs and high-performance interconnect. And that’s kind of fun because you can see that, yes, it’s the same technology that goes into game consoles—albeit much, much, much bigger. But it’s used in a different way, and it’s used in really tough applications that will change the world going forward.
The supercomputers you’re building will reach exaflop speeds,⁵ five times as fast as the fastest current supercomputer. How can you make such a huge leap forward?
It’s not any one thing in particular, Aaron. I think it’s a combination of things. But the most important is the idea that these components are smarter because they have smart interconnects that allow them to share data and share operations much more efficiently than what has been done in the past.
My new laptop isn’t five times as fast as my old laptop, not even close. Do you envision that consumer devices are going to see huge leaps like that again?
The technology that we’re putting into supercomputers today will absolutely show up in consumer devices. It might take five more years for that to be the case, but it’s always been the case that you use these big applications to drive the barriers of innovation.
Let’s solve the big problems, then, over the next five to 10 years, you trickle that to consumers once the cost point gets there and once the manufacturing technology gets there.
Your typical word processor probably doesn’t need a much faster CPU. But there are some applications that I do think are going to hit consumers. A lot of this machine-learning technology, for example, is really useful in things like speech recognition, right? And if you think about your speech-to-type conversion right now, it’s okay, but it’s still not that good.
The new normal
The world is now facing a crisis from the coronavirus pandemic. On March 5, you told analysts that the outbreak was having a modest impact on your financials so far. But given your global supply chain, what are your longer-term worries?
The COVID-19 crisis is truly unprecedented and touches all of us. Our priority is protecting the health and safety of our employees, partners, and communities. It’s amazing to see a company of more than 10,000 people transition to work from home on a dime. We’ve also figured out how to do some things differently, including some very sophisticated engineering work remotely. At the same time, we’re supporting our customers as their priorities change. We have a complex supply chain where our products go through multiple countries to get manufactured. Although there were some early disruptions, we’ve been able to navigate it.
Does that mean having more redundancy geographically?
That’s exactly right. It’s having redundancy in your supply chain. It’s having redundancy in your engineering teams. It’s building the notion of, hey, you have your contingency plans as things change. And, in some sense, it’s building a company that can withstand lots of different things related to the environment we’re operating in.
It’s amazing to see a company of more than 10,000 people transition to work from home on a dime. Lisa Su
Part of your strategy for reviving the company was to get into the
business of making custom chips for gaming consoles. Now I’m seeing
all kinds of cloud gaming services everywhere, no special device needed. Is console gaming still a good business?
Gaming is a great business. I think the last number, there were over 2 billion gamers if you look at from mobile to PC to console to cloud.⁶ This is a big year for gaming, with both Microsoft and Sony launching their next-generation consoles. They are some of the most anticipated consumer products of 2020. And again, we like gaming because it uses technology very, very well. And we’re able to reach a lot of households, and it will continue to be an important part of our portfolio. I do think cloud gaming has opportunities, but it’s still many years out.
You’re one of just 35 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 right now. What do we need to do to have more women leaders in tech?
One piece is about just the pipeline and having enough people start in the field. And then the other piece is making sure that women have good opportunities. Give good people good opportunities—they will shine.
We are definitely very focused on ensuring that as we look at leadership, particularly in the technical ranks.⁷ That being said, these roles are very competitive, and at the end of the day it’s always about, Let’s get the best person in the job.
Between the lines
1. AMD stock performance
Oct. 8, 2014: $3.28
April 9, 2020: $48.38
Source: Bloomberg
2. Know your chips
The CPU, or central processing unit, is commonly used as the main computing chip in PCs and servers. The GPU, or graphics processing unit, started out helping speed up video games but is also used for A.I. and big- data apps now too.
3. Global Internet users
2001: 495 million (8% of total population)
2019: 4.1 billion (54% of total population)
Source: ITU
4. Super deals
In March, the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory picked AMD to supply processors for El Capitan, its $600 million supercomputer. In 2019, AMD won a similar deal to supply a new supercomputer called Frontier for
the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
5. Big, big numbers
An exaflop requires computing 1 quintillion floating point calculations per
second—or a 1 followed by 18 zeros. Apple says the A13 processor in the iPhone 11 can reach one teraflop, so it would take 1 million iPhones to equal an exaflop.
6. Play on, players
An estimated 2.5 billion people played video games last year, spending $152 billion, says research firm Newzoo. About 45% of the spending is on mobile games, about one-third on consoles, and the rest on PC gaming.
7. Still a long way to go
Women held 24% of all jobs and 18% of engineering jobs at AMD in 2018, according to the most recent data available. For context: Women held 26% of computer and math-related jobs nationwide last year.
A version of this article appears in the May 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “The Conversation: Lisa Su.”
More on the most powerful women in business from Fortune:
—How Global 500 companies are responding to the coronavirus
—Virtual school is hard enough. It’s even more chaotic for a family of 9
—Female founders race to respond to the coronavirus pandemic
—During the coronavirus crisis, equal pay is more important than ever
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
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fortune--2020-04-20--Who should get PPP funding?

Who should get PPP funding?

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Who actually deserves the PPP loans? It’s a question shooting across all industries, including in venture capital.
Even if a company is technically eligible under current guidelines, the ensuing risk—of being “that company” that took much-needed cash away from the smallest of businesses even though it had a sizable cash runway or could have raised other capital—is no small matter.
Case in point: Restaurant chains including Potbelly Sandwich Shop, Fiesta Restaurant Group, and Shake Shack are now under fire for taking some $10 million in PPP loans each. Despite being larger companies, they received aid thanks to PPP rules stipulating that any one restaurant location with under 500 employees is eligible.
Shake Shack has since said that it will return the $10 million—and that it launched an offering to raise up to $75 million via equity sales. The company also has some $112 in cash in marketable securities.
This kind of information is, after all, public. Such headlines will only be the start.
Chinese takeovers: They’re becoming a greater concern than before as coronavirus sinks valuations around the world. Some analysts believe China’s draconian measures to tackle the outbreak may have put the country on a faster track to financial recovery compared to Western nations.
Executive vice president of the European Commission Margrethe Vestager recently suggested that European countries should buy stakes in companies to ward off Chinese takeovers. India, whose startups have received billions in funding from China, has erected new rules that curb firms in neighboring countries from buying into local companies—a move that appears to largely impact China. And while Australia’s economy is heavily reliant on the middle kingdom, it has tightened rules of foreign takeovers following concerns that “foreign state-owned enterprises” could pounce on distressed businesses.
Startups get a break in the U.K.: Since France and Germany offered aid to startups in their countries, the U.K. has announced £1.25 billion ($1.6 billion) specifically aimed to help tech startups. Previous programs had shut off funds to small businesses without proven profits—AKA most companies in the venture capital space. The country has revealed an initial £250 million matching loan scheme (the other £250 million to be matched by investors) and another £750 million (via loans and grants) for small and medium-sized firms focused on research and development.
VENTURE DEALS
- Alan, a French health insurance startup, raised $54.4 million (€50 million) in Series C funding. Temasek led the round, and Index Ventures.
- FaZe Clan, a Los Angeles-based esports organization, raised $40 million in Series A funding. Jimmy Iovine and NTWRK led the round.
- BibliU, a London, U.K.-based digital learning platform, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Nesta Impact Investments led the round, and was joined by investors including Guinness Asset Management.
- Edited, a London-based startup helping retailers track product trends and pricing, raised $29 million in funding. Wavecrest Growth Partners and Beringea UK led the round. Read more.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- KKR is considering a sale of its controlling stake in Ramky Enviro Engineers, an Indian environmental services provider, roughly a year after its acquisition, Bloomberg reports citing sources. KKR acquired a 60% stake of Ramky Enviro for about $510 million. Read more.
- Aceto, a portfolio company of New Mountain Capital, acquired Syntor Fine Chemicals, a U.K.-based maker of fine chemicals for pharmaceutical and other life sciences. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Republic acquired Fig, a crowdfunding platform for games. Read more.
- Eros International, a Indian entertainment company and STX Filmworks, a Burbank, Calif.-based media company, will combine in a stock-for-stock merger. The funding will include $125 million of incremental equity from new and existing STX Entertainment investors TPG, Hony Capital, and Liberty Global and a $350 million JP Morgan-led credit facility. The combined company will be called Eros STX Global Corporation, and will trade on the “NYSE.” Read more.
F+FS
- Francisco Partners plans to raise roughly $8 billion across two private equity funds. The Francisco Partners VI is targeting the $6.6 billion and the Francisco Partners Agility II plans to raise $1.4 billion. Read more.
- Great Hill Partners raised $150 million for its GHEP VII Coinvest fund. Read more.
PEOPLE
- 17Capital appointed Greg Hardiman as a Senior Associate in its North America team.


fortune--2020-04-20--5 veteran investors on how to approach the coronavirus stock market

We asked five market veterans how investors should approach the selloff in stocks—and where they’re finding opportunities now.
Catherine Wood
CEO, ARK Invest
No one can accuse Catherine Wood of being a by-the-numbers investor. Wood, whose tech-focused firm has more than $10 billion under management, is famous for being the biggest Tesla bull on the Street. Now she’s taking her focus on “disruptive innovation,” applying a long-term view to the coronavirus-ravaged stock market, and betting on some beaten-down shares.
The Tesla bull is loading up on “names that have been crushed.”
Wood notes that high-fliers like Netflix, a high-conviction holding for ARK, have held up well in the market plunge. But they don’t offer the kinds of returns she’s seeing from “names that have been crushed.” That’s why Wood is selling some Netflix and moving into companies that are going to “gain more traction because [they’re] solving a lot of problems” illuminated by the coronavirus. One stock Wood picked up on sale is 2U, an online education technology company catering to homebound students. Another is online real estate marketplace Zillow, which she believes will benefit from “an acceleration toward online real estate shopping.” —Anne Sraders
Liz Ann Sonders
Chief Investment Strategist, Charles Schwab
Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab Christopher Goodney—Getty Images
The stock market isn’t always the best bellwether of what’s to come in the economy. Though stocks rallied powerfully in early April, Schwab’s Liz Ann Sonders isn’t bullish yet. “I think we’ve just scratched the surface in terms of the hit to the labor market,” she says. “I’m very confident that the hit to the economy, at its maximum, is still ahead of us, not behind us.”
The hit to the economy … is still ahead of us.
That’s why Sonders is watching unemployment data, both initial and continuing claims, as well as temporary staffing and electricity output (tracked by the New York Fed’s newly launched Weekly Economic Index)—“stuff that really picks up the weakness we’re seeing and we’ll continue to see.” Among stocks, she’s avoiding small-cap companies (with their shaky balance sheets) in favor of large-cap stalwarts. She also favors the health care sector—and while that call predates the pandemic, it’s “reinforced to some degree by the virus.” —Jen Wieczner
Mohamed El-Erian
Chief Economic Adviser, Allianz
Mohamed El-Erian, Chief Economic Adviser at Allianz Scott McIntyre—Getty Images
Allianz’s chief economic adviser Mohamed El-Erian gets asked lots of questions these days: Where will the market bottom? When should investors put their money to work? But as investors keep searching for that bottom—and signs that the coronavirus crisis may be abating—El-Erian suggests, instead, they ask themselves three questions:
Investors need to answer ‘yes’ to three questions before the all-clear.
“One: Do you as an individual feel that if you catch the virus, you will be treated well [and with enough equipment] in a hospital or not? Two: Can you identify with some confidence who has the disease and who doesn’t, and what is the risk of that disease spreading? Third: How comfortable are you about your immunity?”
Until investors can answer those questions, El-Erian tells Fortune, “we’re not going to be able to really have certainty that we’ve turned the corner”—and investors won’t be able to be optimistic in a decisive way about their portfolios. —A.S.
Lori Keith
Portfolio Manager, Parnassus
Liz Keith, Portfolio Manager at Parnassus Photograph by Reed Young
When the market is in free fall, visualizing long-term gains can be difficult. But Lori Keith, who manages Parnassus’s $4.7 billion Mid Cap Fund, is applying a disciplined approach even as stocks swing wildly. She’s “looking for those companies that are going to be winners of tomorrow”—with wide competitive moats and strong balance sheets that are poised to gain significant share from all the dislocation that’s occurring right now. “That’s where investors should really be thinking as you look out on the back half of this recovery.”
Find companies poised to win in the “back half of this recovery.”
One name that checks her boxes? Clorox. Keith believes the disinfectant-wipe maker will prosper as people stay focused on sanitation and infection control. Another is Digital Realty, a real estate investment trust specializing in data centers. Keith sees it benefiting as more people work from home and companies shift systems to the cloud.
—A.S.
Teresa Barger
CEO and Cofounder, Cartica
Teresa Barger, CEO and Co-founder of Cartica Courtesy of Cartica
As the manager of a $1.2 billion hedge fund investing exclusively in small- and medium-size companies in emerging markets, Teresa Barger views the coronavirus from a specific point of view. She has divided her investing world into three “waves”—where the coronavirus was (Asia), where it is (Europe), and where it has yet to really spread (Africa and Latin America). Accordingly, she’s taking a wait-and-see approach to the Southern Hemisphere where “there’s not enough data.”
Asian markets are “definitely past the worst.”
For now, Barger is “really focused on north Asia, where we know what their capacity is to deal with it if there is another outbreak,” she says, noting the region’s relatively ample medical supplies and strong public-health infrastructure. “I think they’re definitely past the worst.” That includes Korea and Taiwan, where she’s fond of tech companies whose businesses track semiconductor demand—and which she prefers over Chinese companies, whose stock prices have already bounced back significantly.
—J.W.
A version of this article appears in the May 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “What’s the smart money doing?“
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—How Fortune 500 companies are utilizing their resources and expertise during the pandemic
—Inside the surreal “Mask Economy”: Price-gouging, bidding wars, and armed guards
—The IRS just launched “Get My Payment” portal for tracking your stimulus check status
—Should you fear government surveillance in the coronavirus era?
—If you’ve been a little busy lately, here’s what’s going on with the 2020 election
—The coronavirus crisis is fintech’s biggest test yet—and greatest opportunity to go mainstream
—There are 32 authorized coronavirus tests so far—here’s how they differ
—PODCAST: COVID-19 might have upended the concept of the best companies of the year
—VIDEO: 401(k) withdrawal penalties waived for anyone hurt by COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-04-20--More surveillance and less privacy will be the new normal after the coronavirus pandemic

It was mere months ago that data privacy was one of those wonky policy topics that gradually was becoming more clearly defined in corridors of power from Brussels to Washington to Sacramento. In Europe, tough new rules were setting the pace for the rest of the world. In the United States, Congress was slowly coalescing around national guidelines, encouraged by big tech companies seeking clarity (and a say in the legislative process).
Now, as the novel coronavirus crisis grips the globe, that consensus is being replaced with a new reality: Less data privacy, not more, may be what’s best for public health.
Successful efforts in several Asian countries already have shown that absent a vaccine or effective treatment, the best way to fight COVID-19 is to aggressively “track and trace” infected individuals. Using tools from location tracking to smartphone apps, governments have been able to monitor shifting patterns of movement to indicate how best to impose or lift restrictions. They’ve also been able to alert individuals whose infection might need to be communicated to those who have recently crossed their path.
Such surveillance techniques would have been anathema to privacy advocates before the crisis. Now the question isn’t if governments and their corporate partners should be able to monitor the health of individuals, but rather how much, in what manner, and under what regulatory restrictions. Even digital rights advocates who railed against snooping tricks by the likes of Facebook and their clients reckon such data collection is necessary. “We need a massive surveillance program,” screamed the headline of a late-March essay by the prominent Silicon Valley privacy evangelist Maciej Cegłowski. “I am a privacy activist, typing this through gritted teeth, but I am also a human being like you, watching global calamity unfold around us.”
Some of the best hopes for pandemic fighting come from the same smartphone-enabled applications used by tech behemoths to sell online advertising. In April, Apple and Google announced a joint effort that will enable the Bluetooth chips in their respective smartphones to be used for contact tracing in a similar way to how retailers can already track a user’s location within a store. It follows the lead of Singapore, where a state-sanctioned app called TraceTogether uses Bluetooth signals to establish past proximity between COVID-19 sufferers and those around them. Only this time it’s baked into the operating system.
Before the crisis, regulators were increasingly clamping down on the ad-tech industry’s ability to closely track users. In the U.S., a legislative effort was beginning to pick up speed. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect in January. The law borrows liberally from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gives consumers the right to block the collection and sharing of their personal data. A New York State law called the Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security (SHIELD) Act began imposing new responsibilities on companies in March.
Less data privacy, not more, may be what’s best for public health.
The tech industry, hoping to avoid a potentially misaligned patchwork of state data-protection laws, has in recent years joined privacy advocates in pushing for the development of a federal law. Both sides in the Senate had bills under consideration before the pandemic struck. Between a presidential election and the focus on disaster relief, it’s unlikely legislators will return to the topic this year.
“It’s unfortunate,” says Cameron Kerry, formerly general counsel of the U.S. Commerce Department and now a scholar of privacy and information technology with the Brookings Institution and MIT Media Lab. “Before things shut down, it looked like there could be some room in the legislative calendar this summer to reach agreement on the content of the bill. Now I think it is quite likely at this point that we’re looking at something for next year.”
Battle lines already are being redrawn in Washington, with industry sensing opportunity and some privacy advocates worrying about overreach. “The lack of a national consumer privacy framework and fragmented state rules may create uncertainty for developing data-driven tools to help health officials respond to the ongoing public health crisis,” complains Keir Lamont, policy counsel for the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Jeff Chester, executive director of the privacy-focused Center for Digital Democracy, counters that “the digital marketing industry wants to claim its failure to protect privacy is now a benefit for the public health.” He calls for “guardrail policies” to limit how these companies can use the information they collect as part of any crisis response.
Once again, Europe is leading the way. European Union privacy regulators maintain it is possible to use privacy-invasive tracking methods in the pandemic, while still respecting the rights set out in the GDPR. In early April, they began working on guidance for how to achieve this. Key questions include how long the authorities will be able to hang on to personal information, and whether people will still be able to demand the erasure of their data after the crisis ends.
In China, privacy has a whole different meaning. The country began developing a legal framework for data protection about a decade ago, but it was focused more on companies than individuals. As data-privacy lawyer Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay concluded in a recent article, there is a striking “difference between the strengthening of protection against private entities and the parallel increase of government’s access to personal data, as there is still no significant privacy protection against government intrusion.”
The COVID-19 outbreak has seen a massive increase in state surveillance in China, in partnership with the private sector (for more, see “When red is unlucky” from this issue). Few expect Beijing to roll back such programs when the crisis passes. On the contrary, the success of its public health measures may be seen as a powerful validation of Beijing’s approach.
It’s safe to say more surveillance, not less, will be the new normal in a forever changed world.
Additional reporting by Clay Chandler
A version of this article appears in the May 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Privacy in a pandemic.”
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—How Fortune 500 companies are utilizing their resources and expertise during the pandemic
—Inside the surreal “Mask Economy”: Price-gouging, bidding wars, and armed guards
—The IRS just launched “Get My Payment” portal for tracking your stimulus check status
—Should you fear government surveillance in the coronavirus era?
—If you’ve been a little busy lately, here’s what’s going on with the 2020 election
—The coronavirus crisis is fintech’s biggest test yet—and greatest opportunity to go mainstream
—There are 32 authorized coronavirus tests so far—here’s how they differ
—PODCAST: COVID-19 might have upended the concept of the best companies of the year
—VIDEO: 401(k) withdrawal penalties waived for anyone hurt by COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-04-20--More surveillance, not less, will be the new normal in a forever changed world

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Just over a year ago it looked like polarized politicians and terrified tech companies could agree on one U.S. policy issue: the need for national privacy regulations. Tech behemoths didn’t really want stricter rules, of course. But they recognized that, faced with clampdowns in Europe and one powerful state, California, a coordinated effort would be better. Populists of various hues were happy to come down on the side of more data protection for consumers.
As David Meyer argues persuasively in the new issue of Fortune, the pandemic has upended the world’s thinking on privacy just as thoroughly as it has disrupted so many aspects of our lives. Meyer writes that even committed privacy activists recognize that fighting the nasty virus will require clever surveillance and that various smartphone technologies and other techniques will be the best way to do this.
Surveillance-aided “contact tracing” already seems to be effective in one authoritarian regime, China, and at least two Asian democracies, Singapore and South Korea, all of which have attitudes toward civil liberties that are different from the West’s.
The fact of the matter is that the West has moved beyond the simple phase of the “techlash” of the last couple of years. Now many of us understand that technology gadgets and their digital platforms offer the best chances of fighting the pandemic quickly and efficiently, at least before a vaccine is available.
You can see the privacy-invasive solutions forming in real time. The New York Times wrote late last week about how France, which fears surveillance more than most, has done a 180 and plans to mimic Singapore’s approach. Also in The Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr., in an important article that looks at the two-year pandemic outlook, points to the adult-film industry of all things for its use of an app that verifies actors are H.I.V negative.
As Meyer concludes in Fortune: “It’s safe to say more surveillance, not less, will be the new normal in a forever changed world.”
***
San Francisco and Seattle have fought two of the most effective battles against the novel coronavirus among U.S. cities. As a resident of the former city, I’m grateful and more than a little surprised. After all, it was just in February that I chronicled the city’s many shortcomings. As of Sunday, there has been a cumulative total of 20 deaths in San Francisco attributed to COVID-19. (All is not perfect, and Heather Knight explained this weekend in The San Francisco Chronicle about the deteriorating situation in the Tenderloin.) As for Seattle, Fortune’s Erika Fry has published an account of how the business community rallied to help fight the pandemic. It is an important read.
On Wednesday, Fry and I are going to discuss her story and the state of affairs in the tech industry’s two top cities. I’ll have more information tomorrow about how to sign up to watch that conversation.
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam.lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Connecting the dots. Carnegie Mellon unveiled a new effort to track and forecast the spread of COVID-19 by using survey responses about symptoms collected by Google and Facebook. In initial tests, 1 million Facebook users a week and 600,000 Google users per day were self-reporting whether they had symptoms such as fever and cough. Combined with other data, researchers at the university think they will be able to use the responses to forecast the number of hospitalizations and ICU admissions on a county level weeks in advance.
Sports is human life in microcosm. One trend definitely on the rise during the pandemic is not just playing video games, but watching other people play video games. Amazon's Twitch has the lead as as a viewing service. Now Facebook is getting into the market with a game-watching app for iOS and Android.
Someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie. Sales of the humble Raspberry Pi computer have skyrocketed lately as everyone from ventilator innovators to work-at-home designers looks for a cheap way to compute. The foundation that makes the simple, low-cost machines says it sold 640,000 in March, its second-best month ever.
Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba wants to make sure it's not falling behind its local or U.S. rivals in cloud offerings. The company said Monday it will invest $28 billion, equal to half its annual revenue, in expanding cloud data centers over the next three years.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. In the latest effort to pressure Internet giants to prop up media companies, Australia's competition watchdog is ordering rules to force Google and Facebook to share more revenue with journalism producers. Among the planned rules, the Internet companies also will have to favor original sources in search results and disclose changes to algorithms that could affect content rankings.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The coronavirus pandemic is already inspiring deeper thinking about our priorities as a society. VC legend Marc Andreessen published a bit of a rant (in the best possible sense) about how we should focus much more of our effort and resources on creating "new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward."
Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard? Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build? Solve the climate crisis by building — energy experts say that all carbon-based electrical power generation on the planet could be replaced by a few thousand new zero-emission nuclear reactors, so let’s build those. Maybe we can start with 10 new reactors? Then 100? Then the rest?
In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The retailers that are smartest about shopping tech will finish on top after the coronavirus By Phil Wahba
The SBA gave some fintech companies the green light too late, leaving the smallest of businesses without PPP loans By Jen Wieczner
When red is unlucky: What we can learn from China’s color-coded apps for tracking the coronavirus outbreak By Naomi Xu and Clay Chandler
COVID-19 will change the entire notion of offices: Companies eye rental savings after working from home By Vivienne Walt
Buying time: How watches are finding new homes online By Daniel Bentley
What refunds are due to you? Here’s how industries are handling things By Chris Morris
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a 50% discount for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
While baseball, basketball, and most other sports leagues are on hiatus due to the pandemic, one sport is doing just fine, having adapted to online play years ago: chess. And there was quite the upset in the world of chess in the final of the Banter Blitz Cup. Longtime world champion Magnus Carlsen lost to a 16-year-old from Iran named Alireza Firouzja. How did the kid do it? "You should be a little lucky," Firouzja said after the match. A rematch could happen soon, as the Magnus Carlsen Invitational tournament starts today with a $250,000 prize.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com