fortune--2020-10-27--Pfizer’s high-tech plan to track every dose of its experimental COVID vaccine

COVID vaccine development is complicated, especially in the truncated timeline that the moment calls for. Creating a successful and long-lasting vaccine is hard enough as it is. But then logistics come into play, forcing drug makers to innovate at multiple steps in the supply chain.
That was the message from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Clifton Leaf at the Fortune Global Forum virtual conference on Tuesday.
The type of vaccine that Pfizer is working on with partner BioNTech is a so-called mRNA vaccine. These biological materials have to be stored at stunningly low temperatures, at about negative 80 degrees Celsius or negative 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
That necessitated some creative logistics wrangling by Pfizer, including a specialized high-tech case meant to ensure its COVID vaccine’s integrity.
“You have a carrying case, a storage case that goes with the vaccine, that has GPS-enabled, thermal-enabled technology,” pointed out Leaf. This would allow them to track the vaccine doses precisely and also keep tabs on the therapy’s temperature.
“The logistics of medicines and distribution of medicines are always very complicated, because there are always storage conditions,” said Bourla. “And we knew that we had to move very fast. So we wanted to make sure that we can distribute by plane, we can distribute by any type of vehicle without needing refrigeration individually.”
The specialized case can preserve the sub-100 degree temperature for 10 days, meaning distribution to other countries and across the United States is much more feasible.
Pfizer is hopeful that it will be able to apply for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency authorization of its coronavirus vaccine by the end of November.


fortune--2020-10-27--No, offices aren’t going away—but they won’t be the same

For years J.P. Morgan was skeptical of Bitcoin .
Now the bank ’ s analysts say its value could triple @ @ @

The pandemic has led countless companies to introduce broad work-from-home policies, leading many to wonder if this will become a permanent arrangement. Why, after all, do companies even need physical spaces when technology like Zoom can bring workers together, and allow them to save on leases and office furnishings?
It turns out that predictions about the demise of the office are likely overstated. Two experts on the topics—Diane Hoskins, CEO of design firm Gensler, and Christian Ulbrich who leads the commercial real estate firm JJL—explained why during Fortune’s virtual Global Forum event on Tuesday.
According to Hoskins and Ulbrich, the office will remain a fixture of corporate life, in large part because many employees find a shared workspace to be energizing and a place they perform their best work. But that doesn’t mean the office will be the same when workers return.
The pandemic, as it has in so many other areas of life, has accelerated trends already underway. One of these involves rethinking how we build and design the places we work—especially in regard to the trend of open offices.
“There’s a real backlash against open work environments where there’s unassigned seating,” says Hoskins, who adds that complaints about noise have also been increasing during recent surveys of worker satisfaction.
The pandemic has already forced companies that have reopened to space desks farther apart to promote social distancing. But Hoskins says these firms should use this moment to recognize that, in the future, many workers will expect to keep the flexibility to work from home—but that some will do so much more than others. She notes that a good portion of workers will come in every day, while others will only do so a few days a week. Others, meanwhile, are likely to come in only a few days a month when they need to collaborate.
In response, Hoskins says firms should pay special attention to creating private, quiet spaces for those who need to do “focus work,” which Gensler surveys say accounts for 47% of people’s work week. Meanwhile, managers should also recognize that occasional office goers won’t need dedicated spaces in the same way as those who come in every day.
Ulbrich of JLL noted that technology has made dividing space much easier, pointing to apps that let employees reserve everything from desks to rooms to parking spaces. He added that the pandemic (and the risk of future ones) is forcing firms to pay more attention to ensuring fresh air and water in buildings—something that is already a preoccupation among companies in Asia, where pollution is more prevalent.
Both Ulbrich and Gensler also said worries about a collapse in commercial real estate are overblown. The reason, they say, is that fewer companies may be obtaining leases but their departures will be offset by other companies embracing “de-densification”—using more space for the same number of employees.
Ulbrich also rejected speculation that the pandemic could deal a blow to the vitality of cities, saying city centers have long been an essential place for collaboration and exchange of information—and will continue to be so. He also disputed the idea that companies will move their headquarters to the suburbs.
“The suburb concept is flawed because you don’t have all employees living in the same suburb. So what suburb do you want to use?” he asked.


fortune--2020-10-27--How Dow has kept innovation humming during the pandemic

Innovation has suffered for many corporations during the coronavirus pandemic, as they’ve struggled to replicate the creativity that flows from collaboration in a physical office space.
But Dow CEO Jim Fitterling doesn’t think the company has lost that innovative spark, and he has seen positive signs at his company despite the difficulties remote work presents.
“We’re looking at this as an opportunity to take advantage of digitalization,” he told Fortune CEO Alan Murray on Tuesday during the Fortune Global Forum.
To demonstrate, Fitterling spoke about how the company has continued to run pilots this year by live-streaming experiments to customers—normally those customers would observe in person. As a result of this continued innovation, the company won five R&D 100 Awards this year, the most of any company in the industry.
Fitterling acknowledged the downsides of COVID-19, highlighting the challenge of not being able to see customers face-to-face and read body language. But that hasn’t dampened his optimism.
“I’ve seen a lot of good things happen in innovation,” he said, pointing to 187 webinars the company held with customers during the second and third quarters, which drove traffic to the Dow website.
Fitterling also discussed another welcome by-product of the pandemic: It has brought company management a lot closer to its people.
“All of our leaders have a better sense of what our employees at the front line are dealing with on a day-to-day basis,” he said, referencing changes the company is making regarding work practices, flexibility, and mental-health care and childcare options.
Fitterling believes this sort of empathy will continue after the crisis ends.
“I just don’t sense that [we’re] going to move back to the old way of doing things,” he said. “I think we’re going to a new normal.”


fortune--2020-10-27--‘Biden’ stocks are outperforming ‘Trump’ stocks by 66% as Election Day nears

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
Is the stock market betting on Biden?
That would be one conclusion from a recent J.P. Morgan analyst note looking at the recent performance of two baskets of stocks—one filled with names that would do well under a Biden administration, and the other populated by stocks that would thrive under a second Trump term.
According to the analysis, which looked at performance going back to December 2019, the “Biden basket” is outperforming the Trump basket by 66%.
J.P. Morgan US Equity Strategy & Global Quantitative Research
And when they drilled down to individual themes each candidate has stressed on the campaign trail, the performance was “even more bifurcated.” As they wrote, “Alternative Energy/Green Tech stocks (key beneficiaries under Biden basket) are outperforming Traditional Energy/Fossil Fuels (beneficiaries under Trump basket) by ~84% since June.”
A few of the best performing “Biden” stocks? Tesla (up 405% year to date), infrastructure names like Jacobs Engineering (up 9%), and Caterpillar (up 13%), as well as what the analysts call “minimum wage beneficiaries” such as Whirlpool (up 33%), Dollar General (up 41%), and Lowe’s (up 46%).
Though a recent Goldman Sachs report found that Democratic wins in the White House and Congress would improve the prospects for the U.S. and global economies, the J.P. Morgan analysts conclude that an “orderly” Trump victory would be the “most favorable outcome for equities” with an upside on the S&P 500 to around 3,900. “We also view gridlock outcomes as a net positive with market volatility likely subsiding and driving mechanical re-leveraging within equities. A ‘Blue Sweep’ scenario is expected to be mostly neutral in the short term as it would likely be accompanied by some immediate positive catalysts (i.e. larger fiscal stimulus/infrastructure) but also negative catalysts (i.e. rising corporate taxes).”
Interestingly, in a recent poll of investors by Fortune and Survey Monkey, a majority of respondents felt that Trump would do a better job growing the stock market. As Fortune’s Lance Lambert wrote, “By a +12 percentage point margin, investors think Trump (54%) would do a better job growing the stock market than Biden (42%).”
That’s despite the fact that in recent history Democratic Presidents have actually seen higher stock market returns than Republicans. As Lambert wrote, “In Trump’s first term the S&P 500 index grew 11.6% on an annualized basis. That’s higher than the annualized return of the past three Republican Presidents: Ronald Reagan (10.2%), George H.W. Bush (10.9%), and George W. Bush (-12%). But it’s below the levels seen under Bill Clinton (15.2%) and Barack Obama (13.8%).”


fortune--2020-10-27--Zuckerberg, Dorsey to defend Section 230 protections in Congress

Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will defend legal protections granted to technology companies on Wednesday when they testify before a congressional committee about social media’s role in moderating speech online.
Dorsey, who will appear before the Senate Commerce Committee virtually, will call Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act “the internet’s most important law for free speech and safety,” and argue that repealing the law will lead to more policing of content, not less.
“We should also be mindful that undermining Section 230 will result in far more removal of online speech and impose severe limitations on our collective ability to address harmful content and protect people online,” Dorsey plans to say, according to his prepared remarks.
Zuckerberg will make a similar argument. “Platforms would likely censor more content to avoid legal risk and would be less likely to invest in technologies that enable people to express themselves in new ways,” a copy of his testimony reads.
The Facebook CEO appears open to changing the law, however. “I believe Congress should update the law to make sure it’s working as intended,” he plans to say.
The two executives will appear before the Senate panel at 10 a.m. in Washington alongside Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc.
Dorsey will also argue that repealing Section 230, which grants online platforms some legal immunity from the content its users post, will hurt startups that won’t have the resources to moderate content at scale the way big tech companies can. “Eroding the foundation of Section 230 could collapse how we communicate on the internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies,” he says in the prepared testimony.
He’ll also call on tech companies like Twitter to offer users a choice between different algorithms that will determine what they see in their feed.


fortune--2020-10-27--Don’t expect a quick COVID recovery for the global economy

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
The global economy is in for a long and painful haul when it comes to recovering from the ongoing pandemic—a longer haul than many currently appreciate, warned World Bank economist Carmen Reinhart, speaking at the Fortune Global Forum on Tuesday morning.
“The output collapses, the employment losses, the impact on certain sectors of the economy, notably services and entertainment—the combination of events leaves real scars on balance sheets,” she said, adding that many households and businesses are up against insolvency.
“Those vulnerabilities in the balance sheets, they’re under cover,” Reinhart said, noting that for good reason many banks, at the encouragement of governments, have implemented forbearance to buy time for households and firms financially impacted by the pandemic.
But a full reckoning with the economic fallout of COVID-19 will be due in time, said Reinhart. “There’s a difference between a near-term masking of the problem and there not being a problem,” she said.
Historically, output declines this acute and lasting leave real damage to balance sheets, she said, adding that banks, as a consequence of higher exposure to nonperforming assets, tend to tighten lending standards, which will likely compound things further: “The last thing one needs to recover is a credit crunch.”
She also noted that the pandemic’s blows have landed hardest on the poorest and most vulnerable in the global economy. “This crisis is particularly regressive—it’s regressive within countries, with the poorest segments of the population being hit. And it’s also regressive across countries, because it’s the poorest countries that will be facing the biggest spikes in poverty rates and the biggest challenges to almost any social marker, ranging from health to education,” said Reinhart.
What to do about that? In the short term, Reinhart said the strategy has been quickly administered emergency lending, to help governments with limited resources respond to the health crisis and maintain livelihoods.
To ease a credit crunch, efforts like the World Bank’s debt suspension initiative—allowing 70-some countries to use money that would have gone toward debt servicing for COVID response efforts—and on the corporate side, fast restructuring and de-leveraging of balance sheets, will be key, Reinhart said.


fortune--2020-10-27--Bitcoin can’t help the unbanked, Mastercard CEO says

Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga is trying to get 1 billion people worldwide connected to the banking system, but he doesn’t see much use for current digital currencies like Bitcoin in that push for greater financial inclusion.
The reason, he says, is volatility. The value of Bitcoin and most other digital currencies fluctuates by large amounts. Just this year, one unit of the cryptocurrency has swung in value from less than $5,000 in March to nearly $14,000 this week.
“Bitcoin per se is volatile in its valuation,” Banga said at the Fortune Global Forum conference on Tuesday. “Can you imagine someone who is financially excluded trading in a way to get included through a currency that could cost the equivalent of two Coca-Cola bottles today and 21 tomorrow? That’s not a way to get them [included]. That’s a way to make them scared of the financial system.”
People without bank accounts lack access to credit and pay much higher fees for financial transactions through payday lenders and the like. Five years ago, the Mastercard CEO committed to help 500 million people gain access to the financial system, and this year he upped the goal to 1 billion people. That has led to programs like partnering with Save the Children Yemen and World Vision on voucher-based payments programs in Africa and Asia.
Many cryptocurrency supporters argue that the lower cost of using digital currencies to buy and sell could also be useful in getting more people into the financial system. In an essay earlier this year, CoinDCX CEO Sumit Gupta proposed using digital currencies as a “panacea for the unbanked,” giving people access to funds and transactions without a banking infrastructure.
Still, Mastercard hasn’t ignored digital currencies altogether. Banga says the development of more stable cryptocurrencies by central banks could be an improvement. Such currencies, which are under discussion, would be backed by each country’s existing currencies, known as fiat currencies.
“Fiat currencies, if they were to go digital, would they be helpful in cross-border trade flows and improving the efficiency of those—yes for sure,” Banga says.
Last month, Mastercard created a testing environment for helping central banks develop digital currencies.


fortune--2020-10-27--Lay off the layoffs, experts say. To transform effectively, focus on retraining instead

“We see many companies today laying off, restructuring, and at the same time hiring new people,” says Adecco Group CEO Alain Dehaze. “It’s quite strange.”
Such aggressive workforce churn within companies was a rising norm well before the coronavirus pandemic, as the rapid pace of technological and market change made agility a top priority. Dramatic shifts driven by COVID-19—such as downturns at airlines and restaurants, and surging demand for digital services—have only accelerated the trend.
But Dehaze, whose company provides job placement and temporary staffing services worldwide, says there’s a much better option as organizations’ needs continue to shift: retraining existing employees.
“It is much cheaper, much more socially responsible, much more effective [and] productive, to look at your own workforce,” Dehaze said during Fortune’s virtual Global Forum on Tuesday.
The social costs of the long-term trend toward increased job instability include growing political extremism. But even for the most pragmatic and mercenary executives, the cost advantage of retraining over outside hiring is attention-grabbing. According to Dehaze, the cost of a new hire can run to $100,000, while retraining an existing employee costs closer to $35,000.
And the possibilities for retraining are much broader than conventional wisdom might hold, particularly when it comes to older employees. “We found that many people who were very long tenured made a very easy switch” to new skill sets, said panelist Deanna Mulligan, board chair and former CEO of Guardian Life Insurance. Mulligan saw the flexibility of experienced and older workers firsthand when Guardian Life retrained employees on new cloud data tools, and other survey and research data support the point.
There’s an even bigger reason to cultivate skills internally: There may simply be no other option. Recent research estimates that talent shortages—including for digital skills and roles relying on emotional intelligence—could lead to 85 million unfilled jobs around the world by 2030, stifling growth. To get ahead of that chilling trend, “organizations need to commit to reskilling as a competency,” said panelist Liz Hilton Segel of consulting firm McKinsey.
Of course, a talent shortage at that scale can’t be addressed entirely within organizations. Dehaze described regulatory and management innovations that could make retraining and flexibility easier, such as frameworks for temporary employee transfers between companies. Adding new workers is key as well, with Mulligan highlighting a new partnership between Guardian Life and the City University of New York to offer digital skills training—with several trainees already in internships at Guardian.


fortune--2020-10-27--Why Africa is primed for economic investment

Africa is on the move. Six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are located on the continent, and 22% of its sizable working-age population are starting businesses. That makes for the highest entrepreneurship rate in the world, and the trend seems poised to continue, according to James Mwangi, group managing director and CEO of Equity Group Holdings, a major banking group based in Kenya.
“Africa provides the world with the best opportunities for investment,” Mwangi said Tuesday during a panel on Fortune’s Virtual Global Forum. “If we accept that investments are geared to addressing opportunities that are created by solving challenges for society, then those opportunities in Africa are significant.”
The continent, Mwangi noted, “is endowed with significant resources and a very strong labor force.” Much of that labor force is quite young—Africa’s median age is roughly 19 years old. “That means that population is a digital generation. That can be used to leapfrog legacy technologies and Africa can avoid the trap of legacy systems, and hence can provide significant returns to investors because of modern technology.”
Not only is Africa’s population young, it’s also rapidly growing. The region is expected to have the highest population growth of any region in the world over the next 80 years, according to a 2019 report from the Pew Research Center.
“That [growth] constantly continues to increase in terms of consumption capability, or consumption power,” Mwangi said. “So, essentially the market will be a growing market for the foreseeable future. We anticipate the African population will have doubled by the year 2050. That shows the scale to which investments can grow.”
Africa still faces challenges when it comes to fighting poverty, or widely distributing a vaccine for the novel coronavirus pandemic. Mwangi said Equity Group and others in the private sector can play a role in helping end COVID-19 outbreaks in the region.
“It is true that there’s a risk of disruption of proper supply chains. But the private sector in Africa has chosen to champion the cause of saving lives,” he said, noting Equity Group’s efforts to invest in personal protective equipment for dozens of hospitals in Kenya.
“That capability of the private sector,” Mwangi said, “will be brought to bear when it comes to getting the vaccine distributed when it’s available for public use.”


fortune--2020-10-27--Fareed Zakaria: COVID-19 lockdowns are a sign of failure

Lockdowns are a sign of policy failure, according to political commentator and author Fareed Zakaria.
“Lockdowns are a sign you have failed,” the CNN host and Washington Post columnist said. “You are using a big blunt instrument, and you are crushing the economy.”
Zakaria was discussing his newly published book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, with Fortune editor-in-chief Clifton Leaf at the Fortune Global Forum on Tuesday.
Zakaria praised the policies followed by Taiwan, which despite being located next door to China, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, and welcoming millions of Chinese tourists annually, implemented a highly effective test and trace system early in the pandemic. It also isolated anyone infected in designated quarantine centers.
“They acted early, aggressively, and intelligently,” he said. As a result, he noted, Taiwan had experienced just seven COVID-19 deaths so far. “And, by the way, they are an open democracy, very transparent. And, to add to this, they spend one-third as much on health care as the United States.” He said that several other Asian countries, including South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam, had followed similar policies and also had experienced few infections and deaths, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of their populations.
Zakaria said that the pandemic presented an opportunity for both countries and companies to rebuild economies and businesses with greater resilience, so that they are better able to weather the next crisis.
“We will not know what the next crisis is,” he said. “But we will be able to say we built a company, country, or even ourselves with a certain internal resilience.”
To that end, Zakaria urged company leaders to focus on “the little things,” that can create a cascade of failures, as well as the most obvious threats. He noted that governments often failed to do this. Before 9/11, for example, the U.S. government spent most of its time worried about great powers, like Russia and China, as well as rogue states, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the concern that he would acquire weapons of mass destruction: “And here you had 19 people, 19 men, with box cutters—that is a military weapon invented in the Bronze Age—but who created the most devastating geopolitical circumstances in a generation.”
Similarly, Zakaria noted that before the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. government worried more about the potential impact of China no longer supporting the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt, and not about the credit default swaps that eventually wreaked havoc on the economy. This time, with the pandemic, there was more concern about highly exotic and deadly viruses, like Ebola, than about a simple coronavirus, quietly incubating inside a bat.
He said that society as a whole, and businesses in particular, could remain open, transparent, dynamic, and fast-moving, but that societies needed guardrails and insurance policies to prevent future catastrophes. More coronavirus coverage from Fortune : How a funeral inspired the pandemic’s hottest hardware
U.S. states are turning to a private Irish company to help stop the spread of COVID
“A tale of two Americas”: How the pandemic is widening the financial health gap
Procter & Gamble shows that increasing spending during a recession is worth it
Can COVID-19 cause diabetes? Here’s what we know


fortune--2020-10-27--Stimulus update: As Senate adjourns, hopes for a pre-election stimulus agreement evaporate

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
As the Senate adjourned Monday for a pre-election break, senators left the Capitol—very likely taking any hopes of an imminent stimulus agreement with them.
Hopes of the two sides reaching a deal had dimmed in recent weeks. Though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have continued to talk regularly, they have remained stuck on the overall size of a stimulus package, with the White House at $1.9 trillion, and the Democrats aiming for at least $2.2 trillion. Other sticking points include the amount of funding for state and local governments and liability protection.
On Monday, Speaker Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff Drew Hammill tweeted that the Speaker and Secretary Mnuchin spoke for 52 minutes, and “it is clear that our progress depends on Leader [Mitch] McConnell agreeing to bipartisan comprehensive legislation.”
However, Republican senators including Senate Majority Leader McConnell have long opposed a larger deal, instead proposing their own smaller $500 billion deal last week that was blocked by Democrats. Leader McConnell also reportedly told the White House last week not to accept a deal before the election, though President Trump has appeared motivated in recent weeks to push for an even larger bill.
It is now unclear when a package could pass. According to Bloomberg, Senate Appropriations chairman Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, said, “We’ll come back in November. The question might be, Will there be something then?”
Investors have been eagerly awaiting a stimulus bill, and stocks traded moderately lower on Tuesday after Monday’s selloff—with the S&P 500 trading down roughly 0.1% in midday trading, while the Dow fell over 0.5%.
While many on Wall Street have predicted that a “Blue Wave” would be on balance good for the stock market, J.P. Morgan analysts wrote last week: “We see an ‘orderly’ Trump victory as the most favorable outcome for equities (upside to ~3,900). We also view gridlock outcomes as a net positive with market volatility likely subsiding and driving mechanical re-leveraging within equities. A ‘Blue Sweep’ scenario is expected to be mostly neutral in the short term as it would likely be accompanied by some immediate positive catalysts (i.e., larger fiscal stimulus/infrastructure) but also negative catalysts (i.e., rising corporate taxes).”


fortune--2020-10-27--We need a G.I. Bill for frontline workers, the heroes of COVID-19

COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc, as the disease has infected more than 8.6 million Americans, 225,000 of whom have died. It has also elevated a set of real heroes: the frontline workers who risk their lives every day to make our lives possible.
These heroes include medical workers such as doctors, nurses, and medical technicians, as well as schoolteachers, checkout clerks, bus drivers, shelf stockers, pharmacy employees, restaurant workers, and trash collectors who are in direct contact with the public. Unlike office workers, computer programmers, and analysts, they don’t have the option of working from home via Zoom. As a result, frontline workers are much more likely to contract the virus than white-collar workers. In addition to disproportionately bearing health risks, they have also faced greater economic impact, as frontline workers are more vulnerable to unemployment caused by COVID-19.
Five million fewer Americans have jobs than they did four years ago, with more layoffs in process. Last spring’s financial stimulus deferred many layoffs with financial incentives, but many employers now face the reality that consumer demand will be slow to return, forcing them to address reduced revenues, lost profits and even financial solvency.
In 1944 Congress passed the G.I. Bill, which provided returning World War II veterans with education, financial assistance and health care. To overcome the consequences of COVID-19, America needs a similarly bold initiative to help frontline employees.
Here are five proposals to support these workers and value them the way they deserve to be valued.
Reskill the workforce
As technology accelerates the transformation of many job functions, the skills required for frontline workers are changing dramatically. Without new skills, they risk becoming obsolete and being laid off and replaced by skilled younger workers. To avoid this unattractive outcome, companies, government organizations, educational institutions, and philanthropic organizations need to join forces to reskill American workers, focusing on digital and computer capabilities. As they gain greater skills, workers can create more value, securing greater salaries and advancement on more lucrative career paths.
Create new jobs
Instead of cash payments, the next government stimulus should focus on creating new jobs through an infrastructure bill and incentives for conversion to renewable energy. It is well known that America’s infrastructure is crumbling and not competitive globally, but past administrations have failed to deliver on their promises. Now is the perfect time for a multiyear infrastructure program. In addition, the best way to accelerate the change to renewable energy is by placing a tax on carbon emissions while incentivizing renewable sources. These changes will create millions of new jobs for frontline workers and address the climate crisis.
Institute living wages
Can anyone live on $7.25 per hour, or $15,000 per year? No wonder so many minimum-wage workers hold two or three jobs or engage in the gig economy as Uber drivers. Many of these jobs do not offer health care benefits, leaving millions who cannot afford health insurance. Since Congress last raised the minimum wage, cumulative inflation has reduced its buying power by 20%.
Increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour, as many municipalities and companies like Amazon and Costco have done, will begin to address America’s growing income inequality. Small-business owners will complain these increases could put them out of business just as they are trying to recover. Yet if every company must pay the same, those companies will still be on par competitively.
Reconceptualize organizations and culture
Why do organization charts show executives on top and frontline workers on the bottom? After all, frontline employees are directly serving customers, the most important constituency. The issue here goes deeper than the orientation of organization charts. Many corporate staff people and middle managers mistakenly believe their job is to control frontline people through rules and numbers. If we flip the organization on its head, their roles become supporting the front line, making it easier for them to do their jobs with sound numbers, information systems, and training. As a practical step, CEOs and their executive teams should spend at least two days per quarter doing frontline tasks side by side with workers, gaining empathy and insight into how they work.
Remove layers from organizations
Today’s large corporations have far too many layers between the CEO and frontline workers, which isolates executives from the marketplace and their employees. A recent Harvard Business School study showed that CEOs spend only 3% of their time with customers. Rather than being in the marketplace and hearing directly from customers, many executives spend time in meetings listening to middle managers interpret what is going on in the marketplace from data analysis. They create bureaucracy with complex approval systems that remove authority from the front line, in favor of inflexible rules-based systems that are not customer-friendly. Instead, they should put decision-making at the point of impact, enabling people with the greatest customer contact to make decisions in real time.
The economic crisis caused by COVID-19 provides the opportunity for organizations to rethink the role of their frontline workers and the organization structure on top of them. Companies should use this moment to invest in their frontline workers and restructure their organizations to empower them. Increasing compensation, training, and benefits has real upside: It will improve customer satisfaction, reduce costly turnover, provide long-term career tracks for the most valuable employees, reduce income inequality, and make decision-making more streamlined and flexible to respond to changing customer needs.
The time to act is now.
Bill George is senior fellow at Harvard Business School and former chair and CEO of Medtronic. He is the author of Discover Your True North.


fortune--2020-10-27--Why teaching A.I. to read is a lifelong endeavor

It’s not just tech giants that are using artificial intelligence to understand human language, so that products like digital assistants can respond to basic questions.
More conventional businesses are also increasingly using a subset of A.I. called natural language processing (NLP) to create more powerful software to help answer basic customer call center queries or create summaries of long, complicated documents.
LexisNexis, for instance, has been using NLP to improve the legal research software that lawyers, journalists, and analysts use to find relevant court documents. It’s light years ahead of the user unfriendly Boolean search system that I regularly used over a decade ago as a cub reporter.
With A.I., LexisNexis’ search interface is more intuitive. That’s partly because the company used Google’s free, open-source language model BERT as the foundation. The BERT model, trained on a vast amount of web data including Wikipedia pages, helps software better understand how some words mean different things depending on the context in which they appear.
But LexisNexis can’t use BERT for all of its language needs because the company deals with information that is specific to the legal industry. This particular data can’t be found on the open web, which means the information doesn’t come baked into BERT.
Min Chen, vice president and chief technology officer for the Lexis Nexis Asia-Pacific and global search team, said that BERT “provides a good base model to start with.” But the company must fine-tune the technology with additional legal data so that it understands legal linguistics.
This fine-tuning is increasingly common for many companies operating in areas like finance or healthcare. Every industry has its own lingo that makes no sense in another context.
Chen said it took LexisNexis 12 months to train a version of BERT that understands case citations and even Latin. If someone wants to find a document showing that a case has been adjudicated, or closed, the technology knows to look for documents with the Latin term res judicata (claim preclusion, or a matter decided).
As Amanda Stent, an NLP expert for financial news and information service Bloomberg, explained, technologies like BERT are important because they remove a lot of the grunt work required to train a language model from scratch. For a 10-word sentence, Stent said, “the combinations [of words] are astronomical,” and having a powerful language model like BERT as a starting point is very helpful.
But as other A.I. researchers have pointed out, because language models are typically trained on Internet data, they sometimes parrot back the offensive text they’ve scanned. You’ll be happy to know that companies can take precautions to make this less likely.
Stent and her colleagues recently published a best practices that companies can follow when training A.I.-powered language models and other machine learning systems. They recommended using human subject-matter experts to help annotate and label the text used for training (to ensure data is labelled accurately) and ensuring that product managers and engineers coordinate on big projects (to help ensure that problems don’t slip through the cracks).
The goal is to eliminate any problems before companies introduce new products. After all, no user wants to be bombarded with vile language.
One thing companies should be prepared for is that data training projects are never done. There’s always room for improvement.
Said Stent, “It never stops.”
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Speaking of NLP. Eye on A.I.’s Jeremy Kahn takes a look at AI21 Labs, a NLP-focused startup founded by prominent machine learning researchers that aims “to fundamentally transform how we read and write." As opposed to other language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3, Kahn writes that the startup’s “system is a fusion between neural network-based language models and an older form of artificial intelligence that seeks to represent human knowledge, like vocabulary and the meaning of words, in a graph structure.”
Enter the A.I. Threat Matrix. The non-profit and security focused MITRE Corporation, Microsoft, IBM, Nvidia, Bosch and a host of other companies teamed up to release the Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, which VentureBeat described as “an industry-focused open framework designed to help security analysts to detect, respond to, and remediate threats against machine learning systems.” The goal is to help companies better secure their machine learning systems by thoroughly understanding all of the ways hackers can crack modern A.I. software. The authors of the threat matrix said via GitHub, “Data can be weaponized in new ways which requires an extension of how we model cyber adversary behavior, to reflect emerging threat vectors and the rapidly evolving adversarial machine learning attack lifecycle.
How to bring “dead languages” back to life. MIT researchers are using machine learning to “automatically decipher lost languages that can no longer be understood,” technology publication CNET reported. The researchers created an algorithm that analyzes the patterns of how languages develop over time to help uncover the forgotten languages. From the report: “Going forward, the team hopes to expand its work to identify the semantic meaning of words, even if they're not readable yet. It ultimately hopes to be able to resurrect lost languages using just a few thousand words.”
The FDA sounds the A.I. bias alarms. Bakul Patel, the director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s new Digital Health Center of Excellence, explained during an online meeting how biased and unclean data could cause machine learning software to misfire and “negatively impact patient care,” industry publication MedTech Dive reported. “We don't want to set up a system and we would not want to figure out after the product is out in the market that it is missing a certain type of population or demographic or other aspects that we would have accidentally not realized," Patel said.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Censiahas picked Deborah Leff to join the enterprise software startup’s board. Leff was previously the global leader and industry chief technology officer for data science and A.I. at IBM.
Nautilus hired Garry Wiseman to be the fitness company’s senior vice president and chief digital officer. Wiseman was previously the senior vice president of digital customer experience for Dell Technologies.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
When auditing A.I. research, look at the conferences. Technology analysis website TechTalks looks into a recent research paper describing the review process that researchers face when attempting to submit their papers to The International Conference on Learning Representations. The authors of the research paper, who are currently anonymous, claim that they have found some problems with the submission process, including “evidence for a gender gap, with female authors receiving lower scores, lower acceptance rates, and fewer citations per paper than their male counterparts.”
As TechTalk notes, the research paper notes several instances of bias, including the conference organizers showing “significant preference for Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Cornell universities.” Researchers who published their papers on the popular arXiv preprint server prior to submission also did better, especially if they came from those top-tier universities.
From TechTalk:
Interestingly, their research did not find a significant bias toward large tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, which house reputable AI researchers. At first glance, this is a positive finding, because big tech already has a vast influence over commercial AI and, by extension, on AI research.
But as other authors have pointed out, the same academic institutions that are very well represented at AI conferences serve as talent pools for big tech companies and receive much of their funding from those same organizations. So this just creates a feedback loop of a narrow group of people promoting each other’s work and hiring each other at the expense of others.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Former Facebook employee’s new book exposes Big Tech’s dirty secrets—By Danielle Abril
Startup cofounded by A.I. heavy hitters debuts editing tool it hopes will ‘transform writing’—By Jeremy Kahn
Is it time for a new agency to oversee Big Tech? Many say yes—By Jeff John Roberts
Here’s what Amazon’s new Echo speakers are like—By Jonathan Vanian
How Lyft became the company with nine lives—By Beth Kowitt
A possible semiconductor shortage looms over Huawei’s new smartphone launch—By Naomi Xu Elegant
BRAIN FOOD
A.I. takes to space. Researchers have found machine learning technology to be an excellent tool for analyzing space data. In 2017, for instance, NASA and Google used neural networks to comb through imagery data captured from the Keplar space telescope, and uncovered a couple of planets far outside of our solar system. More recently, researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have used machine learning to identify recently formed craters on the surface of Mars. Space.com reports:
Scientists have fed the algorithm more than 112,000 images taken by the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The program is designed to scan the photos for changes to Martian surface features that are indicative of new craters. In the case of the algorithm's first batch of finds, scientists think these craters formed from a meteor impact between March 2010 and May 2012.


fortune--2020-10-27--When it comes to climate change, says Mark Carney, this financial crisis is different—and maybe bett

When it comes to climate change, says Mark Carney, this financial crisis is different—and maybe better

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe earlier this year, Mark Carney admits he was worried it would simply be 2008 all over again—when, in the rush to secure companies’ survival, progress on climate change essentially got left behind.
“When this began, I wondered that exact question,” he says. “Would there be a repeat?”
Instead, momentum seems to have only grown.
Carney, now the UN’s special envoy on climate action and finance and an adviser to the British government, stepped down in March after nearly seven years as the governor of the Bank of England. Before that, he had been governor of the Bank of Canada, which he had led through the last financial crisis.
“I became a G7 central banker in crisis, the global financial crisis, and I left in crisis,” Carney said Tuesday, speaking at Fortune’s Global Forum, by video link from quarantine at his home in London.
Indeed, in March, he had warned that for governments, battling COVID-19 would require winning a war—while addressing climate change would be “winning the peace.” It wouldn’t be easy, he said.
“Because the costs of fighting the pandemic will diminish the capacity of governments, businesses, and financial institutions to tackle the next crisis—and we should acknowledge that,” Carney said.
Despite such concerns, commitments to cutting carbon emissions to net zero, largely by 2050, have in fact grown, from both countries and companies, including legacy oil and gas giants like BP and Shell. Last week, Japan said it would target net zero by 2050, and in September China, the world’s largest emitter, said it would target net zero by 2060. The EU, a forerunner on climate policy, has pledged to make the bloc’s economic recovery “green.”
Unlike in 2008, “the shift is there,” says Carney.
“One of the things is we’re 10 years more into the climate challenge, the climate crisis. So time is that much shorter,” he said. “There’s a much broader understanding I think in society, including in the younger generation, of the scale of the issue and the dynamics of the issue.”
The pandemic has also brought home some of the risks of not paying attention to the environment, he said.
“It’s not a perfect parallel with what’s happening with COVID—but obviously we had undervalued resilience,” he said. “Obviously, listening to scientists sometimes makes sense,” he added, tongue in cheek.
The former central banker also pointed out that the economics behind a transition to a low-carbon economy have changed, and that while not all the economical technology is in place for net-zero emissions yet, “we can get a long way,” with what exists now. “I’m confident that the market will figure out ways to finish this off.”
One example is that although a carbon tax is not in place worldwide, clear demands from the public and government have created a “shadow price” on carbon in the market, Carney said, which is now built into carbon-intensive projects. He said that that tax ranged from $40 to $80 a ton—often far higher than legally mandated carbon prices. (In Canada, for example, the government passed a law that established a carbon tax of $20 a ton in 2019, and rises $10 per ton every year to 2022.)
Carney also flagged some of the medium- and long-term risks for economic recovery as the world struggles with new waves of infections, adding that trends toward de-globalization, and geopolitical tension, have accelerated amid the crisis.
“That could be exacerbated by what happens over the course of the next 18 months as a number of countries are facing bigger difficulties in terms of their debt burdens and their growth, and how does the system—or lack of system—address that,” Carney says.
A significant factor is whether households and individuals are “scarred” by “the experience of realizing that they didn’t have much of a cushion going into this, in terms of a financial cushion, and potentially a cushion in terms of access to basic necessities, including health care.”
Those long-term factors are going to vary hugely, Carney warned.
“Some countries have dealt with this better than others.”


fortune--2020-10-27--The Fortune 500 gains female CEO as Coach owner Tapestry gives its interim chief the top job

Tapestry said Tuesday it had appointed its interim chief executive, Joanne Crevoiserat, to the top job three months after her predecessor left the company amid misconduct allegations, destabilizing the company just as the pandemic sent its business into a tailspin.
Crevoiserat had previously served as the finance chief of the company, whose portfolio includes the steady Coach brand, along with the struggling Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman. She joined Tapestry in August 2019.
The appointment of the Crevoiserat, who has worked at retailers such Kohl’s, Walmart, and Abercrombie & Fitch before joining Tapestry, keeps the number of women CEOs in the Fortune 500 at 37, but she is the rare woman in that cohort to lead a fashion company.
“Since taking on the role of interim CEO in July, Joanne has led with a customer-centric, data-driven approach, an understanding of the unique needs and advantages of our house of brands and a focus on execution and growth,” said Susan Kropf, Tapestry’s chair in a statement.
Crevoiserat, a well-regarded executive known for, among other things, laying the groundwork for Abercrombie’s improved performance, will have her hands full at Tapestry. For one thing, she is the third CEO in three years: Jide Zeitlin, her predecessor and one of the handful of Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, left after less than a year.
In 2017, Tapestry, which had been known for decades by the name of its Coach flagship brand, decided under Zeitlin’s predecessor to become a portfolio of high-end brands in the mold of European conglomerates. It later added Kate Spade, which, along with Stuart Weitzman, proved difficult to turn around and have dragged down the company’s performance.
In December, Crevoiserat took the Kate Spade brand CEO job on an interim basis. That, coupled with her operations experience at Abercrombie—also a portfolio company that owns the Hollister brand—and finance chops, made her an obvious candidate for the top job at Tapestry.
Coach and Stuart Weitzman have also seen changes at the top over the past year, creating a lot of instability at a company that is in the midst of a sales decline, a situation worsened by the COVID-19 outbreak. There were signs of improvement this summer, however: in August, Tapestry reported a smaller-than-expected quarterly loss for its fiscal fourth quarter, despite total sales falling 53% to $715 million. The company also said sales had returned to growth in China, a key market.
Tapestry will announce its first quarter report for fiscal 2021 on Thursday.


fortune--2020-10-27--Contactless payments and e-commerce got a big boost from the pandemic, says Visa’s Europe CEO

The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the shift to contactless payments and e-commerce, according to Visa Europe CEO Charlotte Hogg.
Speaking on the second day of this year’s Fortune Global Forum—which has itself been forced from the physical world into the virtual—Hogg said the shift was even apparent in markets where cash is seen as king, such as Europe.
The coronavirus “hasn’t killed cash, but there has been a real shift to digital,” Hogg said in an interview with Fortune‘s Jen Wieczner. “You can see real evidence of changes in behavior.”
Hogg said that during the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns, ecommerce activity surged by a quarter in 20 countries around Europe. “There has been a real shift and adoption of digital and embracing of technology that perhaps we haven’t seen before,” she said.
In Belgium, she noted, Visa has seen 40% of its cards that had never previously been used for ecommerce, being used to buy goods and services online for the first time.
As for contactless payments, Hogg said European businesses were “embracing” the new technology as they aimed to minimize opportunities for virus transmission. “If you’re on a till in a supermarket, you’re quite pleased when you don’t have to handle something in this climate,” she said.
The European Banking Authority urged the use of contactless payments back in March, in the early stages of the pandemic’s European spread. The regulator said at the time that payment firms should increase their contactless-payment limits, which have traditionally been quite low in Europe due to fraud fears.
Hogg said the subsequent raising of those limits had not seen those fears justified, and pointed out that Visa processed half a billion additional contactless payments as a result of the increase. The company said a week ago that more than three-quarters of in-store Visa payments are now contactless.
This is, of course, not just a European phenomenon. Research released in August by the U.S. National Retail Federation and Forrester indicated a 69% rise in contactless payments since January.
Sebastián Kanovich, co-founder and CEO of the Uruguayan payments technology firm dLocal (the South American country’s first “unicorn”) joined Hogg on the virtual panel, and backed up her observations about the acceleration of digitalization during the pandemic.
“It should be easy for anyone to accept payments online,” Kanovich said. “Obviously the pandemic has been a huge help.”
Kanovich said the speed of the change—digital payments adoption that was expected to take years instead happening “in a matter of weeks”—had given his company some of its most challenging times, but “also some of the most exciting.”


fortune--2020-10-27--When we’ll likely know the results of the 2020 election

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
The Nov. 3rd presidential election is the most important of our lifetimes—or at least that’s what voters have been repeatedly told by pundits, candidates, surrogates, advocates, and scholars.
They’re likely correct in the sense that every presidential election is technically the most important election of its time. But we won’t really know the significance or implications of Biden vs. Trump for years to come, when we can put the events of 2020 into historical context.
Here’s what we do know: This is going to be the strangest-looking election we’ve ever seen. Voting in the middle of a raging pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 Americans and infected nearly 9 million will do that.
Americans are used to relative electoral efficiency. We like to cast our votes and get our results in a single day. Typically, we go to bed on Tuesday evening or early Wednesday with acceptance and concession speeches under our belts. There have, of course, been some famous exceptions (like in 2000 between former Vice President Al Gore and President George W. Bush), but even then, voting was standardized and looked familiar. That’s not happening this time around.
More voters than ever before have submitted ballots by mail because of expanded efforts by states to allow those quarantining or sheltering in place to remain safe and avoid large crowds. This year, 198 million Americans who are eligible to vote will be able to cast their ballot by mail, and by the end of September, requests for those ballots surpassed 2016 levels in nearly every state.
Nine states will hold their elections primarily by mail this year, meaning every registered voter automatically receives a ballot, and 36 states will allow voters to request a ballot to vote by mail for any reason. In Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas, voters can use mail-in ballots if they have acceptable cause.
Voters have already requested nearly 88 million mail-in ballots in reporting states, according to the University of Florida’s Michael McDonald, an election expert who is tracking numbers. Those numbers are expected to increase as more states tally their totals. In the 2016 presidential election, about 33,000,000 ballots were cast by postal vote in total. Approximately 80% percent of absentee ballots that were transmitted to voters were returned and successfully processed, so that would amount to around 41,250,000 requested ballots in total during the last presidential election.
The Bipartisan Policy Center predicts that absentee voting rates for the 2020 election will range from 50% to 70% nationwide, at least doubling and perhaps tripling what we saw in 2016.
The increase in mail-in ballots and counting will certainly be a burden for understaffed and overworked local election offices, which received inadequate federal funding to account for new COVID-19-related voting protocols like mail-in-ballot processing, early voting, and personal protective equipment for poll workers. It will also be burdensome for the United States Postal Service, which under new postmaster general Louis DeJoy, had initially decreased mailbox availability and the use of sorting machines, leading to long delays in delivery. In August, the USPS warned 46 states and Washington, D.C., that they may not be able to deliver all ballots cast by mail on time, potentially disenfranchising some voters.
Wisconsin, in response, asked the Supreme Court to allow the battleground state to count mail ballots that arrived up to six days after the election, so long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3. The court denied that request on Monday. Last week, however, the court decided that Pennsylvania, another swing state, could keep counting ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 for three days after the election ends. That means that if the race in Pennsylvania is close, results may not be in for a few days after the election.
Each state has its own set of rules around processing and counting absentee ballots, and the vast majority of them can begin counting votes as they trickle in or at least before the election, giving them extra time to have results ready on or around Nov. 3. But three key battleground states—states that the election often hinges on—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, are not allowed to begin counting the ballots that come in until or just before Election Day.
In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—each of which has already received more than 1 million mail-in ballots with more expected to come—ballots cannot be processed until the morning of Nov. 3. In Michigan, some larger cities will be allowed to begin processing their ballots the day before the general election, but officials say they won’t expect any final tallies until at least Friday, Nov. 6. Trump won the state by just half a point in 2016.
If the electoral college is close, the election could certainly be undetermined until at least Friday, Nov. 6, if not longer. Processing mail-in ballots typically takes more time than processing in-person voting: Eligibility must be verified, and in some states, signatures must match what’s on file. Some voters will have to be notified if their ballots are disqualified and given the chance to fix them. Even the act of opening each envelope and preparing the ballot for tallying takes time. In Pennsylvania, it took six days to tally vote-by-mail ballots and call the Democratic presidential primary.
Election results are never official when called on the night of the vote; they’re usually reported based on projections and certified weeks later when final tallies are in. But a lack of ballots completed could make those projections very difficult and potentially inaccurate. President Trump, for example, will likely take an early lead as Democrats are more likely to use mail-in ballots and avoid voting in person than Republicans. The President, perhaps in response to this, has repeatedly said that no votes should be processed after Election Day and has made false claims about voter fraud.
Experts fear that these claims and a lack of results could put the election’s legitimacy into question. “In a highly polarized year like 2020, delays in results or wild swings in vote totals (as more votes get tallied) will incentivize candidates to claim misconduct on the part of election officials,” wrote Matthew Weil, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project. “Even scarier, we can imagine cases where a candidate claims a victory they have not yet earned and then calls for an end to the vote counting, well ahead of statutorily allowed deadlines.”
It’s quite likely that results of this presidential election and down ballot races will be unknown on Election Night, and early numbers that trickle in should not be taken as the final results.
We’ll likely have a good idea of who will be taking the seat in the Oval Office by the end of election week. But until then, it will be up to already overburdened local elections offices and politicians to communicate disparities effectively to the press and American people, and they’ll potentially be speaking up against the wishes and voices of the well-oiled White House press shop. An uphill battle indeed.


fortune--2020-10-27--The danger of ‘digital apartheid’

The danger of ‘digital apartheid’

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.
I recently bought an Apple Watch SE—the edition co-branded with Nike, in case you were wondering—as a 30th birthday gift to myself. (Thank you, dear readers, for your input; I ultimately chose the cheaper option.)
While setting up the watch this weekend, I was startled to discover an impediment. To enable cellular service, a feature for which I paid extra, one must first establish a connection to one’s carrier network through an existing phone plan. I attempted to connect the accessory through my work iPhone only to discover that the watch cannot be set up using a business account. Oy vey.
That was frustrating (as was learning that my preferred app for library loans is incompatible). But these are minor irritations compared to the connectivity issues facing much of the world. I was reminded of this during our virtual Fortune Global Forum event on Monday, where I moderated two sessions on Internet access.
My panelists put things into perspective for me. Here’s a smattering of what they said.
On a year of reckoning in the U.S.: “In the last six months, we’ve learned about the many gaps we have in our country, whether it’s the digital divide or systemic racism.” —Enrique Lores, CEO, HP
On the significance of Internet access: “Not only do we already have a digital divide, but we also can see through the pandemic how critical access to technology is for so many people around the world to stay connected from online learning health to health and wellness.” —Suzanne Fallender, head of corporate responsibility, Intel
On the pandemic’s impact: “The new reality is that COVID has accelerated and increased the digital divide. We are in a new kind of apartheid, a digital apartheid. It’s more than a divide. People are excluded and don’t have access in Brazil, in Latin America, in Africa.” —Rodrigo Baggio, president, Recode
On cultural gender differences: “There are concerns around safety and online harassment that will lead some families to not want to give their girls access to smartphone devices for school and for remote learning. There are stereotypes that technology is for boys. Social norms keep girls away. They don’t see STEM role models in many of these places around the world. That widens the sense of digital divide.” —Suzanne Ehlers, CEO, Malala Fund
On corporate initiatives: “We’re trying to reach 500 million people in the next four years…. We’re trying to concentrate on making digital technologies affordable in developing areas, creating digital ecosystems, helping developers and working with local governments and communities to improve their digital skill sets.” —Andy Purdy, chief security officer, Huawei Technologies USA
On wiring up Africa: “We’re making the best out of a bad situation. Let me give you an example. We have countries that have never been connected before. We completed South Sudan about four months ago. The biggest barrier was the landmines that were there on the border with Uganda.” —Sam Nkusi, CEO, One Africa Network and Liquid Telecom
Lastly, but certainly not leastly, Beth Ford, CEO of the farmer cooperative Land O’ Lakes, has advocated more vocally for broadband access in rural America than perhaps any other executive in corporate America. She put it best: “We’re sitting here saying, Our cell phones aren’t working, I’m untethered. But there is very basic wiring that is missing in these communities.”
My Apple Watch snag is nothing compared to the disadvantages so many people face merely because of geography.
***
Another episode of Fortune’s Reinvent podcast is out featuring John Zimmer, co-founder and president of Lyft. COVID-19 dealt the ride-hailing company (and Uber arch-nemesis) a punishing blow. At the pandemic’s peak, rides were down as much as 75%, and Lyft was forced to lay off 17% of its workforce. Yet Zimmer remains positive about the future and his vision of “transportation as a service.”
Hosts Adam Lashinsky and Beth Kowitt discuss the challenges ahead for Lyft, including efforts at diversifying revenue streams, and California’s Prop 22 ballot initiative. Listen to the episode here.
Robert Hackett
Twitter: @rhhackett
robert.hackett@fortune.com
THREATS
Making Alps out of anthills. China's Ant Financial held the biggest IPO of all time: a $34 billion bonanza on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. The unprecedented market debut vaulted Alibaba founder Jack Ma, already the richest man this side of the Yangtze, up the canonical rich list, putting him ahead of Walmart's heirs.
Chip on your shoulder. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices has agreed to buy tech firm Xilinx for $35 billion in an all-stock deal. Xilinx makes components for data centers, giving AMD another way to take on arch-rival Intel.
Zoom, enhance, zoom, enhance. Work-from-home darling Zoom rolled out an end-to-end encryption offering across its teleconferencing service on Monday. The debut—this is considered a "phase one" of the privacy-preserving technology and is not turned on by default—has some limitations, however. As Fortune's David Z. Morris explains, the tech prevents cloud video recording, live audio transcription, certain chats, and more. Phase two, which may address at least some of these issues, is slated for next year.
Who will censor the censors?
ACCESS GRANTED
Russian disinformation is a fact of life, sure. But just how effective is it? Not as much as everyone would like you to believe, argues Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, in a shrewd piece for national security blog Lawfare. People give the Kremlin's information operations more credit than they deserve, thereby playing right into Putin's hands.
Let’s get one issue off the table: The evidence that there are Russian information operations aimed at the United States is overwhelming, and whatever debates there can be about the operations should be only about whether they merit the attention given to them, not whether they exist.
That said, there is no publicly available evidence that establishes that these operations have made any difference worth caring about.
FORTUNE RECON
When COVID cases rise, Trump’s odds of winning the election drop by Shawn Tully
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on Zoom, growth, and the changing nature of work by Jonathan Vanian
Those ‘accept cookies’ banners on websites undermine your privacy—but they can be fixed by Todd McKinnon
Land O’ Lakes CEO calls for big federal spending on rural broadband by David Z. Morris
Larry Culp: We’re in the second or third inning of GE’s turnaround by Daniel Bentley
‘Success of everyone’: Chobani and PayPal are paying workers more—and rethinking capitalism by Maria Aspan
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access.Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
ONE MORE THING
Against the better judgment of longtime Bitcoin foe and J.P. Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, analysts at the investment bank are extolling the cryptocurrency's virtues. The authors of a recent research note say the price of so-called digital gold could experience a "doubling or tripling" over the long-term, since many Millennials dig it.
As if to placate the bossman—who once said he would fire any trader "stupid" enough to be caught trading the "fraud" that is Bitcoin—the JPMorgan analysts added caveat: “For the near term, Bitcoin looks rather overbought and vulnerable to profit taking we think.”
And so they live to trade another day...


fortune--2020-10-27--Why hasn’t Lyft moved into food delivery?

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
The rivalry between Lyft and Uber is an epic one, as far as the ride-hailing market goes. But the two businesses are also starkly different: While Uber has expanded into a whole roster of other businesses including food delivery and trucking, Lyft largely has stuck with one thing: Moving people.
So why has Lyft remained on the sidelines of the food delivery business?
When asked during a Fortune Reinvent podcast if Lyft ever would compete with the DoorDashes and UberEats (which is slated to acquire rival Postmates) of the world, Lyft cofounder and president John Zimmer explained the thinking: “We don’t think the world needs another one of those,” Zimmer says. “It’s also not our specialty. Our focus is on transportation—on going deep on personal transportation.”
That’s not to say Lyft won’t enter the delivery business—but the model it may choose to take on could be quite different, at least based on what Zimmer suggests in the podcast. The Lyft cofounder says he has sought to address longstanding criticism that food-delivery companies charge restaurants so high a fee that some mom-and-pop shops find it difficult to survive.
“What we’ve heard directly from retailers and restaurants is that they don’t want to pay the 20 or 30% being charged by something like UberEats—they are coming to us and saying how can we help them with delivery to their customers,” he says. “That is the conversation we are having, and that is something we may continue to lean into over the next few months.”
The question is, will Lyft stay in delivery in the long run? Early in the pandemic, Lyft launched a pilot program for drivers to make “Essential Deliveries” of goods such as medical supplies and groceries to partner organizations. The move was aimed at giving drivers a new stream of income at a time when ride-hailing had ground to a halt. A few weeks ago, the company also added free GrubHub food delivery as a perk for subscription-based Lyft customers.
Undoubtedly, starting a food delivery business may have been lower on the list of priorities in past years as Lyft went up against its much better funded competitor, Uber. When Uber raised more than $3 billion in 2016 from Saudi Arabia, “everyone said … we could not compete. Someone even thought we should return money to our investors at that point.”
Meanwhile, across the pond, another ride-hailing startup, Grab, says it is partnering with Microsoft to reskill its drivers for the digital economy. That comes as the Southeast Asian company has become a super-app akin to Tencent’s WeChat, complete with food delivery, financial services, and even health care.
THE LARGEST IPO IS NOT IN THE U.S.: Ant Financial, the Chinese financial technology giant that is listing in both Shanghai and Hong Kong, is set to raise $34.5 billion—making it the world’s largest-ever initial public offering, beating out oil titan Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion raise in January.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- PT Tokopedia, an Indonesia-based e-commerce marketplace, is set to raise $350 million in funding from Google and Temasek Holdings, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- Caris Life Sciences, an Irving, Texas-based precision medicine company, raised $235 million in funding. Highland Capital Management and Coatue led the round and were joined by investors including T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., OrbiMed, Millennium Management, Neuberger Berman, ClearBridge Investments, First Light Asset Management, and Sixth Street.
- FreshToHome, a Bangalore-based online brand in fresh fish and meat e-commerce, raised $121 million in Series C funding.. Investment Corporation of Dubai led the round and was joined by investors including Ascent Capital, DFC, the Allana Group, and Iron Pillar.
- SimilarWeb, an Israeli-based startup for tracking site traffic, raised $120 million. ION Crossover Partners and Viola Growth co-led the round. Read more.
- Ordermark, a Los Angeles-based online ordering management platform for restaurants and virtual kitchens, raised $120 million in Series C funding. Softbank Vision Fund 2 led the round.
- VSPN a Shanghai-based esports events platform, raised over $100 million in Series B funding. Tencent led the round and was joined by investors including Tiantu Capital, SIG, and Kuaishou. Read more.
- Cognite, a Norway-based industrial software company, raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding valuing it at $550 million. Accel led the round.
- DriveWealth, a digital trading startup, raised $56.7 million in funding. Point72 Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Raptor Group, SBI Holdings, Route 66 Ventures, Mouro Capital and Fidelity International Strategic Ventures.
- Grayshift, an Atlanta-based provider of mobile device digital forensics, raised $47 million in Series A funding. PeakEquity Partners led the round.
- Rockset, a San Mateo, Calif.-based analytics company, raised $40 Million in Series B funding. Sequoia led the round and was joined by investors including Greylock.
- Toka, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company, raised $25 million in Series B funding. Eclipse Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Dell Technologies Capital, and Entrée Capital.
- GoodCell, a Waltham, Mass.-based DNA testing company, raised $17.9 million in funding. Investors included Prairie Fire Capital and Intellectual Digital.
- Theta Lake, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based cybersecurity and compliance solutions for video conferencing software, raised $12.7 million in Series A funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Cisco Investments, Neotribe Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, and WestWave Capital.
- Linktree, an Australian marketing tech company, raised $10.7 million in Series A funding. Insight Partners led the round and was joined by investors including AirTree Ventures, Harry Stebbings (Twenty Minute VC), Sam Yam (CTO of Patreon), and Doug English (CTO of Culture Amp).
- Stackhawk, a Denver-based application security startup, raised a $10 million in Series A funding. Sapphire Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Foundry Group, Costanoa Ventures, Flybridge Capital, and Matchstick Ventures.
- Strider Technologies, a Washington, D.C.-based maker of software for identifying economic risk from nation-states, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Koch Disruptive Technologies led the round and was joined by investors including One9 Ventures and DataTribe.
- Deci, a Tel Aviv-based deep learning company, raised $9.1 million in seed funding. Emerge led the round and was joined by investors including Square Peg.
- Rune Labs, a San Francisco-based developer of software that enables the development and delivery of neuroscience therapeutics, raised $5 million in seed funding. DigiTx Partners led the round and was joined by investors including TruVenturo, Moment Ventures, Loup Ventures and Sabbatical Ventures.
- GetVantage, a Mumbai-based revenue-based financing platform for online businesses, raised 5 million in seed funding. Chiratae Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Dream Incubators.
- Hubilo, a San Francisco-based global virtual events platform, raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Lightspeed led the round and was joined by investors including Girish Mathrubootham (CEO Freshworks), Nishant Rao (ex-CEO LinkedIn India), Jonathan Boutelle (Co-founder, Slideshare), and Abinash Tripathy (CEO Helpshift).
- 3Commas.io, an Estonia-based non-custodial order management system, raised $3 million in a Series A funding. Alameda Research led the round.
- ShearShare, a Dallas-based marketplace hair salons, raised $2.3 million in seed funding. Investors included Precursor Ventures, the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, and Structure Capital. Read more.
- Moxie, an online fitness studio, raised $2.1 million. Investors weren’t disclosed.
- ZeroEyes, a Philadelphia-based maker of an A.I.-based weapons detection platform, raised $1.5 million in funding. Grateful Investments led the round and was joined by investors including Legion Capital, Backswing Ventures, and Natoma Group.
- Sēkr, a San Diego, Calif.-based-based company creator of The Vanlife App—an app for outdoor travel resources, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Backstage Capital and Gaingels.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Newlight Partners acquired Pondurance, a cybersecurity firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- PatientPoint, a Cincinatti, Oh.-based healthcare advertising company backed by L Catterton, is in talks to combine with rival Outcome Health, backed by Littlejohn & Co. A deal could value the duo at $600 million, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- Auxo Investment Partners acquired GC Dies, an Elmhurst, Ill.-based steel rule die manufacturer. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Atwater Capital agreed to acquire a minority stake in Freepik Company, a Spain-based provider of digital visual content. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- New Mountain Capital agreed to acquire Natrol, a Los Angeles-based vitamins, mineral and supplements brand. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Lion Equity Partners acquired TY Group, a provider of linens, from Bed Bath & Beyond. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
EXITS
- Procore Technologies acquired Esticom, an Austin-based cloud-based preconstruction tech maker. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Stone Point Capital acquired a stake in Lone Wolf Technologies, a Ontario and Dallas-based provider of residential real estate software, from Vista Equity Partners. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
Breakups and bankruptcies
- Rubio’s Restaurants, a restaurant chain backed by Mill Road Capital, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday.
IPO
- Databricks, a San Francisco-based data analytics company, is preparing for an IPO that could come in the first half of 2021, per Bloomberg. Databricks has raised from investors including a16z, Coatue, NEA, Tiger Global Management, and BlackRock. Read more.
- Sotera Health, a Broadview Heights, Oh.-based provider of lab services, filed to raise up to $100 million in an IPO. It posted revenue of $778 million in 2019 and losses of $20.9 million. Warburg Pincus and GTCR back the firm. Read more.
OTHER
- AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) agreed to acquire Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX), a competing chipmaker, for $35 billion in stock.
- B&G Foods (NYSE: BGS) agreed to acquire Crisco, the oils and shortening brand, from The J.M. Smucker Co. for approximately $550 million in cash.
- Las Vegas Sands is exploring a sale of its flagship casinos in Las Vegas in a deal that could raise $6 billion, per Bloomberg. Read more.
IPOs
- Caixa Economica Federal, Brazil’s state-owned lender, is planning an initial public offering of its Caixa Tem unit in the U.S. as soon as next year, per Reuters. Read more.
- Root, a Columbus, Oh.-based auto insurer, now plans to raise $578 million in an offering of 24.6 million shares (11% insider sold) priced between $22 to $25 as more insiders seek to sell their shares. It also plans to raise $500 million via a concurrent private placement from Dragoneer Investment Group and Silver Lake.
- Mavenir, a Richardson, Texas-based provider of software applications, says it plans to $275 million in an offering of 12.5 million shares priced between $20 to $24. Read more.
SPAC
- Health Assurance Acquisition Corp., a healthtech-focused blank check company from General Catalyst, is aiming to raise $500 million. Read more.
- Lux Health Tech Acquisition Corp., the health focused SPAC founded by Lux Capital, raised $300 million in IPO.
- Genius Sports Group, a London-based provider of data to sports betting firm, is nearing a deal to go public via merger with a SPAC, DMY Technology Group Inc. II. The deal could value the company at $1.5 billion, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- Bolder Industries, a rubber ingredient maker, plans to merge with GigCapital2, a SPAC. The deal will value the company at $900 million including debt, per Reuters citing sources. Read more.
F+FS
- Blackstone Group’s private equity business raised $8 billion for its second core fund. Read more.
- Scale Venture Partners is looking to raise $500 million for its seventh fund, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
- NTTVC, a venture capital firm founded by Van Goel, raised $500 million in capital commitments.
- The Engine, the VC firm spun out of MIT, raised $230 million toward its second fund.
- North Branch Capital raised $132 million for its first fund.
- Intuitive (Nasdaq: ISRG), a company focused on robotics assisted surgery, launched Intuitive Ventures with an $100 million fund.
PEOPLE
- J.F. Lehman & Company named William P. Brown and Bridget A. Harding as associates.


fortune--2020-10-27--How one company is ‘pulling the plug’ on the ‘bathtub’ of climate change

Our mission to help you navigate the new normal is fueled by subscribers. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
If the Earth’s atmosphere is a bathtub, it’s getting close to full. The analogy is one that Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, uses to explain what he believes are the best strategies to fight climate change.
A bathtub, Oldham explains, can only hold so much water before it overflows—and it’s too late to turn off the faucets all the way. But if you slow the stream of water and, at the same time, open the bathtub’s drain, you can still stop the tub from reaching its limit.
“The bathtub is going to continue to fill,” Oldham said at the Fortune Global Forum on Monday. “If we had the ability to pull the plug at the same time as we turn down the taps, the water level in the bathtub—the CO2 in the atmosphere—would drain much faster.”
That is Carbon Engineering’s mission: a “direct air capture” technology that aims to extract carbon dioxide from air before returning the rest of it to the environment—like a form of tech-enabled photosynthesis.
Oldham spoke alongside Roberto Marques, executive chairman and group CEO of the personal care business Natura & Co. At Natura, which is behind the brands Natura, The Body Shop, and Aesop, Marques is taking a more common approach to climate change—what Oldham, in his analogy, would call slowing or turning off the faucet. The company has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Protecting the Amazon rainforest is a big piece of the Brazil-based company’s sustainability pledge. Its 2030 net-zero commitment is two decades more ambitious than the UN’s own net-zero emissions by 2050 pledge.


fortune--2020-10-27--Startup cofounded by A.I. heavy hitters debuts editing tool it hopes will ‘transform writing’

Today, editing is a manual, human process. Spelling and grammar checking software, such as the one built into Microsoft Word or the grammar checker Grammarly, can suggest when a word is incorrectly used or a comma misplaced. But it can’t recommend an entirely different way of writing a sentence to convey the same idea.
Now AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup cofounded by two well-known machine learning researchers and several veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit, has debuted an A.I.-enabled editing tool that does exactly that. It can suggest variations of different lengths and tones, as well as help users find the best word to use in a particular circumstance.
“We are developing a true writing companion, a cowriter as opposed to a copy editor,” Ori Goshen, one of AI21’s cofounders, said.
Take the infamously inarticulate statement from President Trump, uttered when he was still a candidate during the 2016 presidential election campaign: “I know words. I have the best words.” The software AI21 Labs has created can suggest a range of ways to rewrite the sentence to capture the same intent, but using words that don’t even appear in the original. These include the more formal, “I am a master wordsmith and possess an impressive vocabulary,” as well as a version that’s simpler but still more articulate than the original, “I have a wonderfully rich vocabulary.” It can also suggest a more verbose phrasing: “I have an extensive vocabulary, and am skilled at choosing the most appropriate term to express myself in a given situation.”
The product, called Wordtune, is a free Google Chrome browser extension that can edit sentences in programs like Google Docs, Gmail, and Sheets, as well as within social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Wordtune does not yet work with Microsoft Word, but the company hopes to integrate it with the well-known word-processing software sometime soon.
Goshen is a serial entrepreneur as well as a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200, the main signals intelligence division of the Israeli military. Several other veterans of the unit also work for the company, he said.
He cofounded AI21 Labs in 2017 with two of Israel’s best known A.I. experts: Yoav Shoham, a former Stanford University artificial intelligence researcher who sold two previous startups to Google and worked for the search giant for two years, and Amnon Shashua, a computer scientist at Hebrew University who is also the chief executive at Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel that makes artificial intelligence software for self-driving cars and the automotive industry. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, another well-known Israeli machine learning researcher at Hebrew University, also does work for the company.
Shoham said that the company’s lofty goal is to use A.I. “to fundamentally transform how we read and write.”
Wordtune is an example of the rapid advances in natural language processing—a kind of A.I. that can manipulate and to some extent “understand” language—that have occurred in the past two years. These advances have been driven by two developments: a new kind of design for a neural network, a kind of machine learning loosely based on the brain, called a Transformer, and the advent of massive language models that take in tens of billions of variables and are trained on colossal amounts of text.
AI21 Labs is launching Wordtune into an increasingly crowded field of competing writing tools that can automatically compose or rephrase text. A competing system called Quillbot, built by a Chicago startup, suggests paraphrasing and can rewrite whole paragraphs. Google is increasingly incorporating more sophisticated auto-complete functions into its products, including Gmail. Microsoft has launched a feature in Microsoft Word that uses A.I. to suggest alternate ways to phrase a sentence. OpenAI, which has created one of the largest language models, called GPT-3, has licensed the system to a startup called OthersideAI, which uses the software to automatically generate emails from a few bullet points.
Unlike GPT-3, AI21 Labs’s system is a fusion between neural network–based language models and an older form of artificial intelligence that seeks to represent human knowledge, like vocabulary and the meaning of words, in a graph structure, Shoham said. This fusion is part of what enables Wordtune to have a much better understanding of the concepts being expressed in a piece of writing than some of the pure statistical approaches based on ultra-large language models.
The company has also made some fundamental research breakthroughs in the way large language models work. One, which it published earlier this year, is an improvement on a large language model invented by Google called BERT. BERT is based on hiding random words in a large text and then asking an A.I. system to predict the hidden words. AI21 Labs refined this system, creating an A.I. language model called SenseBERT, in which the masking is not completely random but is weighted toward the parts of the sentence that are most important for conveying meaning. “This allows it to capture the true sense of a sentence,” Shoham said.
As a research project, the company also built a system, which it calls Haimke, that can, like the system built by OthersideAI, turn bullet points into prose. Another system, called Haim, works a bit like GPT-3, composing long coherent passages from a few sentences of human writing. Haim differs from GPT-3, though, in that the human using it can help guide the text the A.I. creates by writing a series of “waypoint” sentences. The software fills in the gaps between these waypoints with novel prose, but the waypoints serve as logical guideposts, so the software is less likely to “run off the rails” and generate nonsensical prose, Shoham said. Neither system has yet been turned into a commercial product.


fortune--2020-10-27--Sonia Syngal is trying to build The Gap into a bolder brand

This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Venture capital reaches a milestone, we check in with Gap Inc. CEO Sonia Syngal, and Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed. Have a thoughtful Tuesday.
– Building a bolder brand. Sonia Syngal took over as CEO of Gap Inc. in March, right as the COVID-19 crisis caused mass lockdowns in the U.S. It was a tough task for any CEO, let alone one new to the top job.
But if Gap’s share price is any indication, Syngal has met the moment; it’s tripled since the spring. That’s due in part to Syngal facilitating bold decisions at The Gap, the company’s storied flagship brand that has under-performed siblings Old Navy and Athleta in recent years. (The parent company also owns Banana Republic.) The Gap brand launched a new teen line this spring, it struck a collaboration deal with with Kanye West’s Yeezy brand in June, and its parent last week announced the closure of hundreds of Gap and Banana Republic stores in North America by 2023.
A Wall Street Journal story published yesterday morning recapped Syngal’s CEO tenure thus far, and Syngal spoke to Fortune‘s Phil Wahba at the Fortune Global Forum yesterday afternoon.
“The Gap brand is a lot bigger than the way we were monetizing the brand,” she said, pointing to some of the recent moves. She said clarity of vision, relevance, and “releasing trapped energy” would be among the company’s priorities in coming years. A corporate value that she calls “inclusivity by design” is also high on her list. So far, the principle is behind company initiatives that pay workers to staff election polls stations and donate apparel to people in need.
Also yesterday, Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, which seemed all but inevitable soon after death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, became official. She clinched her seat with a Senate vote that was along party lines, except for Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine), who, facing a tough reelection bid, voted with Democrats against the appointment. Barrett is now the country’s fifth female justice.
Republicans have claimed that Barrett is not as hardline conservative, not as big a threat to women’s reproductive rights as her judicial and personal history suggests. But the sprint to confirm her—a process that shattered norms and betrayed principles Republicans said they held dear—undercuts the argument. Barrett, for her part, will start putting speculation about her judicial tendencies to rest rather quickly; she could weigh in on election disputes that are pending before the Supreme Court in coming days and could consider her first abortion case as a justice by the end of this week.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- What it feels like to be a 'first.' What are the privileges—and pressures—of being a "first?" A dozen women who earned the designation in politics, from Sen. Kamala Harris to Sen. Tammy Duckworth to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, reflect on the often bittersweet milestone. Harper's Bazaar
- New frontier in venture. At Upfront Ventures, Kara Nortman is now co-managing partner. It's likely the first time a woman has been promoted to the powerful role at any of Silicon Valley's largest venture capital firms. (Most other powerful women in venture struck out on their own to launch firms rather than being promoted within existing ones.) TechCrunch
- Raimondo's RI. At Fortune's CEO Initiative gathering yesterday, we heard from Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo. She discussed her program Back to Work RI, which matches out-of-work Rhode Islanders with relevant open positions. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: The Visa Foundation hired Calvert Impact Capital's Najada Kumbuli as head of investments. Zuora hired Procore Technologies' Valerie Jackson as chief diversity officer. AU10TIX promoted president and COO Carey O’Connor Kolaja to CEO. Rhonda White joins the board of Accellion. TIBCO Software named Rani Johnson chief information officer.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- CEOs say. Also at Fortune's CEO Initiative, chief executives reflected on some of the most pressing issues facing their businesses. A conversation on how to address the various crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring Adtalem Global Education CEO Lisa Wardell, Bank of the West CEO Nandita Bakhshi, and other leaders honed in on the issue of food insecurity. Fortune
- An unusual upset. Last month, the mayor of Povalikhino, Russia needed an opposing candidate in his reelection race; with elections usually rigged, he was looking for an opponent in name only. Marina Udgodskaya, who had a job cleaning city hall, agreed to be listed on the ballot—and won. New York Times
- Childcare crisis. In a Fortune op-ed, Catalyst president and CEO Lorraine Hariton comes up with five ways employers can lead on solving the U.S. childcare crisis, from helping employees build better home offices to adopting flextime. Fortune
- Bad flight. Women on a Qatar Airways flight heading to Sydney say they were strip-searched and "given invasive medical exams to see if they had recently given birth" after a newborn was found abandoned in an airport bathroom. The incident has threatened diplomatic relations between Australia and Qatar. Experts say these exams could be considered sexual assault; the airline did not respond to request for comment. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
The vicious cycle of never-ending laundry Vox
Honoring her wish: In conversation with RBG's granddaughter, Clara Spera New York Magazine
The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment The Atlantic
PARTING WORDS
"More than 100 years later, we have the opportunity to revolutionize society again."
-GM CEO Mary Barra on the origins of the automotive industry and the company's current work on electric vehicles