fortune--2020-12-09--Why are artists and companies selling off their music catalogs?

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.
For some reason, music catalogs have been trading hands heavily in recent weeks.
Former Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks reportedly sold an 80% stake in her roster of music for about $100 million in December. Shamrock Capital Advisors, meanwhile, acquired Taylor Swift’s early recording catalog for about $300 million. Then, Bob Dylan’s song catalog was sold to Universal Music Group for an estimated $300 million.
So what gives? My colleague, Geoff Colvin, has the fascinating answer. In part, owning the music rights themselves has become increasingly important due to the explosion of music-streaming services like Spotify. The values of such catalogs have also soared as music has turned into a recession-proof bet, making it a good time to sell. Then, there’s the big T-word. No, not Taylor Swift. Taxes.
President-elect Joe Biden has proposed taxing capital gains for those with over $400,000 in income at a far higher rate. If Democrats were to win both Senate seats in Georgia, such a tax change could be plausible. Which means potentially, way higher taxes for deals with artists like Dylan and Nicks and for M&A deals in general.
“Bottom line: The tax on a deal like Dylan’s could almost double if it doesn’t get done by New Year’s Eve. ‘I have a number of clients who were trying to do deals before the first of the year because they had fear of the new administration pushing its tax agenda,’ says Josh Escovedo, a lawyer whose specialties at the Weintraub Tobin law firm include copyright and trademark issues. ‘It’s quite possible” that those considerations could have influenced Dylan’s deal, he notes.'” Read more.
A LAWN CARE STARTUP GETS FUNDING: Love them or hate them, there’s a lot of lawns in America (so many in fact that there are many, many meta pieces examining the historical, psychological, and socio-economic dynamics of the country’s love of lawns). Sunday, a subscription-based startup selling environmentally-friendly lawn-care products raised $19 million in Series-B funding led by Sequoia Capital and with participation from Tusk Ventures and Forerunner Ventures. This caught my eye for a few reasons: First, the company says it is growing much faster than expected in part due to the pandemic accelerating a move from cities to suburbs. And while many direct-to-consumer brands have focused on targeting city-based consumers, Boulder, Colo.-based Sunday is, by virtue of its business, targeting suburbs with customers concentrated in Middle America. Also, Sunday says Americans put down more pesticides in their own yards each year than industrial farms. Read more.
BETTING ON THE RISE OF MALE GROOMING: While Sunday emphasizes the massive size of its potential market (all lawns in the country), Iconiq, the multifamily firm with clients including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, has led a $60 million Series-C funding round in Squire Technologies, a company with payments and booking software specifically aimed at barbershops. The logic is that by targeting the very specific needs of the currently cash-heavy barbering industry, the company can tap into some deeply loyal customers and expand further—say into customer relationship software or even insurance—so that in the end, by expanding just product and features, “we’ll need fewer customers to build a really massive business,” Squire CEO Songe LaRon told me. Read the full story here.
AND DON’T FORGET: The U.S.’s largest food delivery company, DoorDash, is set to list on the New York Stock Exchange after boosting selling shares at a higher valuation than the company previously said it expected. The company sold shares at $102 apiece, valuing the company at about $32.4 billion, or about $38.7 billion on a fully-diluted basis.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Wiz, a Tel Aviv and Palo Alto-based cloud security company, raised $100 million in Series A funding. Investors included Index Ventures, Sequoia, Insight Partners, and Cyberstarts.
- Isar Aerospace, a German builder of a micro-satellite launcher, raised €75 million ($91 million) in Series B funding. Lakestar led the round and was joined by investors including Earlybird and Vsquared Ventures. Read more.
- SingleStore, a San Francisco-based database management system formerly known as MemSQL, raised $80 million in Series E funding. Insight Partners led the round and were joined by investors including Dell Technologies Capital, Hercules Capital, Accel, Anchorage, Glynn Capital, GV and Rev IV.
- DataRobot, a Boston-based A.I. platform, raised $50 million in additional Series F funding valuing the company at $2.8 billion. Snowflake, Salesforce Venture, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise invested in the company.
- Weaveworks, a London-based Kubernetes platform provider, raised $36.7 million in Series C funding. Investors included Amazon Web Services, Ericsson, Orange Ventures, SonaeIM and Telekom Investment Pool, and follow-ons from Accel, GV, and Redline Capital.
- Brightflag, a New York-based legal spend management platform, raised $28 million in growth equity. One Peak led the round and was joined by investors including Sands Capital Ventures and Frontline Ventures.
- Skyflow, a Palo Alto-based data privacy focused business, raised $17.5 million in Series A funding. Canvas Ventures led the round.
- WorkRamp, a San Francisco-based enterprise learning platform, raised $17 million in Series B funding. OMERS Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Bow Capital.
- Arthur, a New York-based business focused on A.I. monitoring and management, raised $15 million in Series A funding. Index Ventures led the round and were joined by Acrew and Plexo Capital.
- Synctera, a San Francisco-based company seeking to help banks scale, raised $12.4 million in seed funding. Lightspeed Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Diagram
Ventures, Zachary Perret (CEO of Plaid); Max Levchin, (founder of SciFi VC); Alexa Von Tobel, (founder of Inspired Capital); and Henry Ward (CEO at Carta).
- battleface, a Columbus, Oh.-based travel insurance startup, raised $12 million in Series A funding. Drive Capital led the round.
- Branch Technology, a Chattanooga, Tenn.-based construction-scale 3D printing company, raised $11 million in funding. EquipmentShare led the round and was joined by investors including Brick & Mortar Ventures and Chattanooga Renaissance Fund.
- Akasha Imaging, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based pioneer deep imaging technology startup, raised that $10.8 million in Series A funding. Khosla Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Sierra Ventures and Promus Ventures.
- OfficeTogether, a scheduling software provider, raised $2.2 million in seed funding. Defy Partners' Brian Rothenberg led the round and was joined by investors including Neo, MGV and January Ventures.
- FLEx Lighting, a Chicago-based maker of ultrathin LCD displays, raised $9 million in funding. Anzu Partners led the round.
- Sunlight, a Cambridge, U.K.-based developer of virtualisation technology for data-intensive applications, raised $6 million in Series A funding. OpenOcean led the round and was joined by investors including Robert Bosch Venture Capital.
- Einblick, a Cambridge, Mass.-based visual data computing company, raised $6 million in seed funding. Amplify Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Flybridge and Samsung Next.
- Voodle, a Seattle-based maker of a short video platform for remote teams, raised $6 million in funding. Madrona Venture Group and Vulcan Capital led the round and was joined by investors including M12, Cisco Investments, and Hearst Ventures.
- Upvest, a Berlin-based startup offering an API, raised an additional €5 million ($6.1 million) in funding. Earlybird led the round.
- Reface, a Ukraine-based maker of an A.I. app for placing selfies in GIFs and videos, raised $5.5 million in seed funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Read more.
- Smartvid.io, a Cambridge, Mass.-basedconstruction safety platform, raised $5 million in funding. Sony Innovation Fund and IA Capital Group led the round and were joined by investors including Building Ventures, Companyon Ventures and Converge.
- Simple, a Limassol, Cyprus-based maker of an app for intermittent fasting, raised $5 million in Series A funding valuing it at $42 million. Target Global and Palta co-led the round and were joined by S16 Angel Fund and Supernova.
- myInterview, a Tel Aviv and Sydney-based smart video interview platform, raised $5 million in seed funding. Aleph led the round and was joined by investors including Entrée Capital and SeedIL Ventures.
- Aglet, a Los Angeles-based developer of a sneakers-focused app, raised $4.5 million in additional seed funding. Sapphire Sport led the round and was joined by investors including Lakestar Ventures and Forecast Ventures.
- Smartlook, a Czech Republic-based behavioral analytics company, raised $3.6 million in Series A funding. Airbridge Equity Partners led the round.
- Blueprint, a Chicago-based software company for mental health clinicians, raised $3.4 million in seed funding. Bonfire Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Lightbank.
- Metafy, a Pittsburgh-based platform for one-on-one coaching from champion-level gamers, raised $3 million in seed funding. Forerunner Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Tekton Ventures and M25.
- Pair Team, a San Francisco-based operations platform for primary care providers and patients, raised $2.7 million in seed funding. Investors included Kleiner Perkins, Craft Ventures, and YCombinator.
- Richpanel, a San Francisco-based customer service platform for the e-commerce industry, raised an undisclosed amount of funding. Sequoia Capital invested.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Riverwood Capital invested $32 million in intelipost, a Brazil-based e-commerce and omnichannel logistics technology company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- 3Pillar Global, backed by CIP Capital, acquired Tiempo Development, an Arizona-based software company.
- ARES Security Corporation, backed by Corbel Capital Partners, acquired certain assets and contracts of Vidsys, Vienna, Va.-based cybersecurity software firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Bregal Partners invested in The Mochi Ice Cream Co., a New York-based maker of mochi ice cream backed by Lakeview Capital. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- By Light Professional IT Services, backed by Sagewind Capital, acquired Raydon Corporation, a Port Orange, Fla.-based provider of virtual military training technology. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Dubilier & Company and Hoffman & Company recapitalized Carter & Clark, a Duluth, Ga.-based land surveying firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- geoLOGIC systems, a portfolio company of BV Investment Partners, acquired SubsurfaceIO, a Houston-based oil-and-gas mapping and analytics solution. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Harvey Performance Company, backed by Summit Partners, invested in Titan USA, a West Springfield, Mass.-based maker of steel and cobalt cutting tools. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- The Halifax Group invested in PJU Holdings, a Birmingham, Ala.-based franchisee of Papa John's Pizza. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- JMI Equity invested in Swiftly, a San Francisco-based analysis platform for public transit. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- PSG invested in NoFraud, a New York-based provider of fraud prevention software. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Searchlight Partners invested in Sightline Payments, a Las Vegas-based payments business. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Service Champions, a portfolio company of CenterOak Partners, acquired ProSkill Services and Jet Plumbing Heating & Drain Services, two home services brands serving the Phoenix, Ariz. and Reno, N.V. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Sovos, backed by Hg, acquired LTtax, a New York-based provider of payroll withholding and unemployment tax software. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Vander-Bend Manufacturing, a portfolio company of Aterian Investment Partners, acquired Swiss Precision Machining, a Wheeling, Ill.-based precision manufacturer of consumable instrument components utilized in robotic surgery. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Wilson Electronics, backed by Sorenson Capital, acquired SignalTeQ, a French cellular site survey firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- WilliamsMarston, an Align Capital portfolio company, acquired BA Major Associates, a provider of corporate tax advisory services focused on the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device, healthcare, renewable energy and technology sectors. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
EXITS
- MTG acquired Hutch Games, a British developer and publisher of mobile racing games, for $275 million. Hutch was backed by Backed VC, Index Ventures, and Initial Capital.
- Thumbtack acquired Setter, a Toronto-based home management platform backed investors including Sequoia and NFX. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Ro acquired Workpath, a Richmond, Va.-based software platform for healthcare companies to offer on-demand, in-home care and diagnostic services. Workpath was backed by Heritage Group and Inevitable Ventures. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Partners Group agreed to acquire Wedgewood Pharmacy, a U.S.-based animal-health compounding pharmacy business, from New Harbor Capital. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHER
- Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) agreed to acquire IMImobile (LON: IMO), a U.K.-based customer service firm, for about 543 million pounds ($721 million).
- Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER) invested $75 million in Joby Aviation, a Santa Cruz, Calif.-based transportation company developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, while Joby will acquire Uber Elevate, Uber’s flying taxi unit.
- United States Steel Corporation (NYSE: X) agreed to exercise its call option to acquire the remaining stake in Big River Steel, a steelmaker, for about $774 million.
- Allied Universal will acquire G4S, a London-based security group, for 3.8 billion pounds ($5.1 billion).
- Baxter International has offered to acquire Omnicell, a Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of medication management software, for over $5 billion, per Reuters citing sources. Read more.
IPOs
- Robinhood Markets, the stock trading app, picked Goldman Sachs to lead an IPO in 2021 that could value it at more than $20 billion. Read more.
- Relx Technology, a Chinese e-cigarette company, is seeking to raise as much as $1 billion in a 2021 U.S. IPO, per Bloomberg. Sequoia Capital backs the firm. Read more.
- Blue Moon Group Holdings, a Chinese detergent maker backed by Hillhouse Capital, will raise $1.27 billion in its Hong Kong IPO.
- Rede D’or, Brazil’s biggest hospital chain, was valued at 112.5 billion reais ($22 billion) in its IPO. Carlyle backs the firm. Read more.
- C3.ai, a Redwood City, Calif.-based company developing ways to deploy AI applications, raised $651 million by offering 15.5 million shares priced at $42 a share, above its range. Existing investor BlackRock and new investor Capital Research Global Investors plan to buy 20% of the shares in the IPO while Koch Industries and Microsoft plan to buy $150 million worth of shares in a private placement. TPG and Baker Hughes back the firm. Read more.
SPAC
- HumanCo Acquisition, an Austin-based SPAC formed by CAVU Ventures targeting the U.S. health and wellness industry, raised $250 million.
- The HydraFacial Company, a Long Beach, Calif.-based beauty company, will go public via merger with Vesper Healthcare Acquisition Corp., a SPAC led by Allergan executive Brent Saunders. The deal values the business at about $1.1 billion.
FFS
- Forbion, a European life science venture capital firm, raised €460 million ($558 mllion) for its fifth fund.
- Ada Ventures, a U.K. and Europe-focused VC focused on diverse founders, raised $50 million for its first fund. Read more.
PEOPLE
- Unusual Ventures hired Sandhya Hegde as a partner focused on early-stage enterprise SaaS startups.
- REMUS, an early-stage venture capital firm, named TikTok influencer Josh Richards as a venture partner.
- Crestview Partners, a private equity firm focused on the middle market, named Brian Cassidy and Alex Rose as co-presidents.


fortune--2020-12-09--How the pandemic led PepsiCo to create Cheetos Mac ’n Cheese

Stimulus update : Everything to know about the bipartisan $ 300 unemployment benefit plan

Eight years ago, PepsiCo thought design mostly applied to highly engineered products, not consumer packaged goods.
But then the food and beverage giant hired Mauro Porcini, the company’s first chief design officer. “It was an educational experience for us to have somebody like Mauro explain what design can do,” says PepsiCo global chief commercial officer Ram Krishnan, speaking Tuesday at a Fortune virtual event called “Resilience by Design: Driving Business Transformation.” IBM and Salesforce co-presented the talk.
Porcini’s rise at PepsiCo is part of a broader recognition in corporate America of the value of design, resulting in the elevation of chief design officers to C-suite roles.
Porcini says that it’s the role of designers to behave almost like anthropologists and look at what’s going on the world in order to identify opportunities out of frustrations, desires, and dreams.
When the pandemic hit, he says, “We needed to be out there really understanding what was happening.” The problem, he adds, was the level of uncertainty about the short, medium, and long term.
PepsiCo used typical methodologies of design thinking in trying to understand people’s response to the pandemic; it considered how it should react within the context of its portfolio and industry and then came up with prototype solutions.
As examples, Porcini points to the launch of Cheetos Mac ’n Cheese—what he calls a “celebration of comfort food”—and Driftwell, which is meant to help consumers unwind.
In the past year, PepsiCo has developed a new corporate structure that integrates all of its commercial functions—design as well as marketing, sales, e-commerce, and research and development—under one team that reports to Krishnan in a newly created role.
“That has accelerated the role of design within PepsiCo, moving from just looking at aesthetics to looking at genuine consumer experience,” he says. The new structure has also seen new products brought to market 30% faster, he notes.
The way PepsiCo has come to embrace design throughout the company is exemplified in how it now thinks about budgeting, which, Krishnan says, is one of the biggest fundamental shifts. Rather than Porcini having to ask for funding, “it’s now every function wanting to fund design because they see the impact designers have,” says Krishnan.
Porcini says that since 2014 the company has been measuring the return on investment of design: “It has been a major enabler to show that we should create a design function in-house because it can move with higher agility and better quality at a lower cost.”


fortune--2020-12-09--A cybersecurity agenda for the Biden administration

Cybersecurity has never been a partisan issue. However, the recent, unwarranted firings of senior cybersecurity officials in the Trump administration, and the related concern over a smooth transition of knowledge on these issues, highlight the need and urgency for the Biden administration to prioritize the cybersecurity agenda. These firings have created unnecessary gaps in leadership and are irresponsible.
Now more than ever, cybersecurity impacts the national, economic, and health security of our country. As we prepared for the 2020 presidential election, we observed how nation-states were attempting to both interfere with and influence our democratic process. Nation-states were engaging in malicious cyber activity to shut down election infrastructure, as well as using social media to sow discord, to create the perception that the integrity of the elections would be compromised, and to undermine our faith in our democracy.
In 2016, we served as vice chair and executive director, respectively, on President Obama’s independent, bipartisan Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. The goal of this commission was to provide a transition document to the incoming administration on cyber policy and the digital economy.
As we look to the next four years, we propose the following priorities for President-elect Biden’s cybersecurity agenda.
Identify the successes of the previous administration, and strengthen them
Because of the collaboration between former Obama officials and incoming Trump administration officials, President Trump’s May 2017 cybersecurity executive order built on the achievements and the foundation of the previous eight years to identify a new set of cybersecurity priorities. Looking ahead to the next four years, the Pentagon’s Defend Forward/Persistent Engagement strategy should continue to evolve. The success of these efforts was most clearly seen through the work of U.S. Cyber Command, in collaboration with the private sector, to block nation-state cyber activity during the 2020 presidential election.
Acknowledge that we are at war in cyberspace
Low-intensity conflict in cyberspace will, at times, become high-intensity. The administration must provide additional tools and information to better arm the private sector to defend itself. Where the threat is too great, it must provide direct assistance, including access to government capabilities, to protect critical infrastructure from nation-state attacks. We must facilitate increased and cross-sector public-private collaboration, through pre-event planning and coordination. This collaboration will ensure all relevant information and intelligence from government and industry is strategically accessed and applied to this ongoing conflict over the next four years, and beyond.
Examine the organization of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
In 2001 and 2002, Kiersten helped draft the legislation to create DHS. She knows the psychological mission with which the Senate and government was tasked: to make sure an event like 9/11 would never happen again. As we review the past 18 years since the passage of DHS, almost to the day, we recognize that it needs a serious revision—similar to the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. We must examine DHS, as it exists today, and its mission, and determine which of the entities within the agency should return to their pre-9/11 home, either as independent entities or under the umbrella of their previous federal agencies.
Consider making the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) a stand-alone agency with increased budget and personnel resources
Bolstering CISA includes a sustained investment in our critical infrastructure, which now includes our election process, and increased facilitation of cross-sector collaboration. Technology has also expanded our critical infrastructure, which now includes the cloud and social media companies. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all played significant roles in our election security, without government oversight. We need to work with these companies to identify what it means to be critical infrastructure—not by imitating the past, but by innovating government’s approach for the future. The definition of critical infrastructure must evolve to represent the current reality.
The Biden administration must also build on the success of the election-security integrity effort and identify specific actions to help the nation’s 10,000 voting jurisdictions harden their infrastructure and ensure they are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. The time to start preparing for a safe, secure, and verifiable 2022 midterm election begins as soon as the 2020 presidential vote is certified across our nation.
Create a bipartisan commission to revise and improve Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act
We propose a six-month bipartisan commission to develop recommendations for how to revise and improve Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act to reflect the world of 2020. It should maintain protections for small businesses but ensure large businesses (e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter), after years of exponential growth, are responsible and held accountable for the role they now play in our society. Section 230’s valuable role in fostering innovation must continue, but it must be updated to reflect the changes we have seen in technology since its passage 24 years ago. We need to bring industry and government leaders together to address the relevant regulatory, data privacy, security, and safety concerns.
Engage with a coalition of like-minded nations to ensure the global digital infrastructure is as safe and secure as possible
As part of the Biden administration’s efforts to repair international relationships, the administration needs to work with other countries to strengthen our global digital infrastructure. One element to be considered is the creation of a Marshall Plan–like initiative to help emerging nations build their digital infrastructure with U.S.- and allied-made components. We need to ensure that the global infrastructure grows in a secure and stable way and is not vulnerable to unfair economic practices. All nations should make every effort to root out cybercriminal activity from within their borders. But when nations are either unwilling or unable to cooperate, when they create safe havens for cybercriminals, we must hold them accountable and bring international pressure to bear against them.
Build a diverse cybersecurity workforce
This action has never been more urgent. The new and compelling voices that have emerged in cybersecurity belong to individuals who should be appointed as leaders in the Biden administration. Diversity of voices, which includes racial, gender, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity, is critical to the innovation required for cybersecurity progress.
The private sector and the U.S. government must continue to develop a strong cybersecurity foundation. Despite all the challenges we face in cyberspace right now, there is an opportunity to make significant strides forward in the next four years. Building on the successes of the past and on an awareness of our vulnerabilities and challenges in the present, the Biden administration can create a resilient, safe, secure infrastructure for the future, not just in the United States, but worldwide.
Samuel J. Palmisano is the retired CEO of IBM and the current chairman of the Center for Global Enterprise. Kiersten E. Todt is the managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute. In 2016, Palmisano and Todt served as vice chair and executive director, respectively, of President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.


fortune--2020-12-09--How physical spaces can be designed to foster peacemaking in the criminal justice system

Interior design is a concept not often associated with the criminal justice system, but a growing number of architects and designers believe it could play a vital role in addressing mass incarceration and inequity.
Architecture and real estate firms like the Oakland-based Designing Justice + Designing Spaces are working to replace the sterile environment of courtrooms with warmer, more hospitable spaces that can be used to practice “peacemaking” and restorative justice.
The nonprofit Project for Public Spaces notes that conflict theorists “define peacemaking as a process of forging a settlement between disputing parties—either through direct negotiations between the two disputants or through a third-party mediator who assists with process and communication problems.” This contrasts with the more traditional criminal justice approach of retribution, and firms like Designing Justice believe physical design can increase the effectiveness of this alternative approach.
Designing Justice has developed prototypes of “restorative justice centers” that adhere to this thinking. “What we’ve learned is that spaces for peacemaking must be on neutral territory,” said Deanna Van Buren, the firm’s executive director, during a Fortune Brainstorm Design panel discussion on Tuesday. IBM and Salesforce co-presented the event.
“It is decentralized; it is not downtown. We need to use biophilic design and integrate the natural world into the architectural interior and outdoor spaces,” she said. “So coming in through a garden or a courtyard, integrating those natural design features into the space.”
Van Buren said multiple entrances into the facility and “cool-off rooms” can help with managing the anxiety of the peacemaking process. “We need to be able to support their fight, flight, and freeze responses that we have when we go into a high-stress situation,” she explained. “I often do an exercise like: Imagine you have to have someone who deeply harmed you. What kind of an environment would you need for that?”
Gone would be the minimalist, modernist architecture that was dominant throughout the mid–20th century. “Those do not support people with trauma. We need to be able to have textures we can touch, things we can look at,” Van Buren said. “We need to be able to feel protected when we’re in that space, so looking at different layers and skins and walls that slide and move that allow light through, but you can’t see through them. Always having views to nature if possible.”
The firm’s design for its restorative justice center even included a kitchen. Breaking bread over negotiations, Van Buren said, is a powerful tool for reducing conflict.
“The justice system we have mirrors a very specific set of values. We think about peacemaking, restorative justice spaces—they sometimes just look like your home,” she added. “Imagine if justice looked like that? Like coming home.”


fortune--2020-12-09--Investment firm with clients including Mark Zuckerberg bets on the rise of male grooming

Our mission to make business better is fueled by readers like you. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today.
A payments company seeking to challenge Square for small-business customers has just raised new funding.
But New York–based Squire Technologies isn’t looking to take over the massive trillion-dollar payments market in its entirety. Instead, the now four-year-old business is betting that it can take a sliver of the market by offering bookings and payments to barbershops, which, Squire says, are largely lagging in taking their businesses online.
On Wednesday, Iconiq Capital, a multifamily office who invests on behalf of high-profile tech executives including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, led a $60 million Series C funding round in the company at a roughly $250 million valuation.
Part of the rationale behind the investment, says Yoonkee Sull, a principal for Iconiq who led the deal, hinges on the rise in male grooming in recent years.
“Barbering and men’s grooming as a men’s industry has grown very robustly…from an interest perspective, which has been a boon to the barbershop industry,” he says.
Barbershops were among the most heavily impacted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, Squire, too, saw revenues drop dramatically. But as barbershops reopened as essential businesses and sought to control the number of customers in their stores, Squire’s revenue grew more than expected, by about 400% from May to December, say Squire cofounders Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant.
The surge came even though Squire waived its $30 to $250 monthly subscription fee for businesses during the pandemic. But the company also takes a fee off each customer booking, which has made up for the shortfall, because men visit the barber more often than women go to salons—with bookings accounting for about 80% of Squire’s revenue in 2020.
The duo decline to give a specific dollar amount.
But Squire’s funding also comes at a time when more startups are offering software to a specific industry. While many startups emphasize the huge size of their potential market by targeting a broad industry (mattress seller Casper Sleep, for example, said it wanted to take over the “sleep economy”), Squire is more focused. The logic is that by targeting the very specific needs of the currently cash-focused barbering industry, the company can tap into some deeply loyal customers and expand further—say into customer relationship software or even insurance—so that in the end, by expanding just product and features, “we’ll need fewer customers to build a really massive business,” explains Squire CEO LaRon.
Having started a barbershop themselves in 2015, after stints in corporate law (LaRon) and business school (Salvant), the founders say there are industry realities that make Square imperfect for hairdressers.
“Often these businesses have to adapt their business to a generic software like Square that doesn’t take into consideration that barbers want to be tipped every day rather than the end of the day,” says Salvant. “And look, 80% of software is the same, but it’s that 20% that makes these guys’ lives a lot better. That 20% is our critical advantage.”
Squire and its investors are not alone in this trend of looking for ways to focus on specific parts of the overall pie. One example is Shopify, which instead of seeking to take over all of e-commerce, is focused on small and medium-size businesses. It has since become a company with a $132 billion valuation.
Others more comparable to Squire include Boulevard, which helps salons with bookings and payments and which recently raised $27 million. Additionally, Mindbody, which started out selling to fitness and yoga studios before adding salons, was acquired for $1.9 billion by Vista Equity in early 2019.
The plan to keep Squire in the barber market, however, brings up the unavoidable question: By focusing on barbershops alone, doesn’t the company still limit its growth potential? LaRon and Salvant for their part say that they believe the market is far larger than most think—a sentiment that Sull agrees with.
When asked how big he believes the total market for Squire could be, Sull declines to give a number. When asked if he believes the investment could be a moderate success or a runaway hit, like Shopify, he notes: “Shopify is a big bar…But I think there is a bigger business here than most people think there is.”
News of Squire’s Series C round comes just six months after the company raised $34 million for its Series B round.


fortune--2020-12-09--Biden lays out his top three priorities for quelling COVID in his first 100 days

President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday called for urgent action on the coronavirus pandemic as he introduced a health care team that will be tested at every turn while striving to restore the nation to normalcy.
Biden laid out three COVID-19 priorities for his first 100 days in office: a call for all Americans to voluntarily mask up during those 100 days, a commitment to administer 100 million vaccines and a pledge to try to reopen a majority of the nation’s schools.
“I know that out of our collective pain, we will find our collective purpose: to control the pandemic, to save lives, and to heal as a nation,” Biden said.
The president-elect also said he would use the power of the federal government to require people to wear masks in federal buildings and when traveling from state to state on planes, trains and buses.
Mostly that would codify policies already in place. But Biden said he would urge governors and mayors to impose similar requirements.
Topping the roster of Biden’s picks was health secretary nominee Xavier Becerra, a Latino politician who rose from humble beginnings to serve in Congress and as California’s attorney general. Others include a businessman renowned for his crisis management skills and a quartet of medical doctors, among them Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease specialist.
The usual feel-good affirmations that accompany such unveilings were overshadowed by urgency, with new cases of COVID-19 averaging more than 200,000 a day and deaths averaging above 2,200 daily as the nation struggles with uncontrolled spread.
Vaccines are expected soon. Scientific advisers to the government meet Thursday to make a recommendation on the first one, a Pfizer shot already being administered in the United Kingdom. Indeed, President Donald Trump held his own event Tuesday, to take credit for his administration’s work to speed vaccine development.
But having an approved vaccine is one thing, and getting it into the arms of 330 million Americans something else altogether. Biden will be judged on how well his administration carries out the gargantuan task.
On Tuesday, the president-elect warned that his team’s preliminary review of Trump administration plans for vaccinations has found shortcomings. And he called on Congress to pass legislation to finance administration of vaccines as they become more widely available next year. That would effectively close the loop, from lab to patient.
The rest of Biden’s extensive health care agenda, from expanding insurance coverage to negotiating prices for prescription drugs, will likely hinge on how his administration performs in this first test of competence and credibility.
Becerra, Biden’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, will be backed in the White House by businessman Jeff Zients, who will assume the role of coronavirus response coordinator. Running complex, high-risk operations is his specialty.
Alongside Fauci, the other medical doctors selected include infectious-disease specialist Rochelle Walensky to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vivek Murthy as surgeon general and Yale epidemiologist Marcella Nunez-Smith to head a working group to ensure fair and equitable distribution of vaccines and treatments.
Participating by video, Fauci called Biden’s 100-day plan “bold but doable, and essential to help the public avoid unnecessary risks and help us save lives.”
Ever the straight talker, he admonished: “The road ahead will not be easy. We have got a lot of hard and demanding work ahead.”
HHS is a $1 trillion-plus agency with 80,000 employees and a portfolio that includes drugs and vaccines, leading-edge medical research and health insurance programs covering more than 130 million Americans.
In choosing Becerra to be his health secretary, Biden tapped a prominent defender of the Affordable Care Act. But Becerra, 62, will face questions in his Senate confirmation about whether he possesses sufficient health care and management experience.
Becerra as a congressman played an insider role helping steer “Obamacare” to passage, and as California attorney general he leads a coalition of Democratic states trying to block the Trump administration’s latest attempt to overturn it. He has been less involved in the day-to-day work of combating the coronavirus.
Becerra would be the first Latino to serve as U.S. health secretary. In announcing his pick Tuesday, Biden initially stumbled on the Spanish pronunciation of Becerra’s name.
But Biden was drawn to Becerra’s working-class roots, his longtime effort to increase access to health care and his willingness to work with Republicans to solve problems like getting patients access to COVID-19 treatments.
Accepting his nomination via video link, Becerra called it a “breathtaking opportunity” to help shape the future of health care.
“I share the president-elect and vice-president-elect’s determination to rebuild unity and civility in America,” he added.
Biden is under pressure from fellow Democrats to ensure that his Cabinet is diverse.
Then-California Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Becerra as California’s top prosecutor in late 2016. Becerra instantly struck a combative tone toward the incoming Trump administration.
Defending California’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act was a key priority, but he also focused on protecting young immigrants from deportation and defending California’s climate change laws.
As HHS secretary, Becerra would be responsible for overseeing the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. illegally. Becerra has helped lead a coalition of fellow state attorneys general who sued over the Trump administration’s child separation policies.
Republicans immediately made clear their attack lines. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas argued that Becerra was unqualified because he lacked ties to the health care or pharmaceutical industries. Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana blasted his support for “Medicare for All,” which is not Biden’s policy. Abortion opponents have called Becerra “unacceptable.”
The HHS secretary’s job requires political connections, communications skills, managerial savvy, a willingness to learn about complex medical issues and a creative legal mind to use vast regulatory powers without winding up on the losing end of lawsuits.
Becerra will need to establish ties with governors who will play outsize roles in distributing the coronavirus vaccine.


fortune--2020-12-09--5 ways the post-pandemic office will look very different

Vaccines are being distributed and offices are beginning to open. So can we go back to our cubicles yet?
Not so fast.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. workers toiling remotely during the pandemic would like to keep doing so, according to a Gallup poll. And for those who do return to the office, even if infrequently in months to come, the notion of “return” needs to be rethought.
There’s no going back to what was. The last nine months have forced a drastic reset of work, home and all points in between. The upheaval in commercial real estate allows companies to be pickier about their needs, from open windows to lower employee-to-bathroom ratios. An uncertain pandemic economy means expansion for some sectors and downsizing for others. And studies show that more than one-fifth of adults moved due to COVID or know someone who did; how this affects their desire or ability to commute remains another unknown.
And yet the office is not entirely going away. In fact, it might be more needed than ever as companies pivot to new realities and forge bonds among a workforce that, in very few cases, looks identical to the so-called before times.
“The future of the office market is productivity. The location of the office space may not change much,” said Carmen Perkins, executive vice president of Civitas Commercial Real Estate Services LLC, based in Washington, D.C. “It’s the utilization of that space that changes.”
Creating a work culture
Post-pandemic offices will focus more singularly on creating and representing the culture of a company. That mission will drive physical spaces with more breakout rooms and gathering spots. It will dictate who comes to the office and why. Reasons to convene: onboarding, training, meetings, team-building and collaboration.
“We are the quintessential tech company. We have the most flexible work schedule, ambitious paternity and maternity programs, unlimited vacation,” rattled off Nick Romito, the founder and CEO of VTS, a commercial real-estate technology platform. “Even as liberal as we are to give people their flexibility, it’s still really hard. You invest all this time in building a really good team, those teams want to be together. Pushing ideas out of each other is really hard to do when you’re staring at a screen all day.”
Still, despite concerns over Zoom fatigue, the democratized nature of gathering virtually is something managers want to preserve.
“Larger companies that are more geographically dispersed have gotten really thoughtful around engineering Zoom conversations. CEOs have been able to interface with cross-functional teams in more productive and democratic ways,” said Perkins. “Space becomes about maintaining and building culture. Continuing the cross contamination of ideas is very important. They want to preserve that.”
WFH is here to stay
Pre-pandemic, commutes were growing longer; the average American commute hit a record-high 27 minutes one way in 2018, according to the U.S. Census.
Families have made major life decisions in this pandemic to better balance home and work—moving closer to family, buying second homes on lakefronts or in the woods, renovating or creating offices in the guest bedroom or basement. Areas once considered remote or exurban are more affordable, offer more space and perks such as hiking trails and shorter lines at Costco.
Based on data in the third quarter of 2020, while rents in the country’s top downtown office markets have softened, companies are renewing leases at a higher rate than in 2019, said Dennis Perkins, founder and president of Civitas and Carmen’s husband. That “tells us that during a downturn, companies have opted to stay put and maintain a consistent urban presence.” However, while businesses are staying downtown, he says their workers are moving toward the suburbs.
“You are seeing the growth across the region,” said Dennis Perkins. “You see interest in cities like Baltimore where you can still work in D.C. but have a less expensive lifestyle, especially if technology and changing office uses enable you to commute less often”
The office of the future is a much more flexible place
Even before COVID, companies were loath to sign long-term leases in order to maintain flexibility in hiring and firing. This will continue or increase.
Civitas, a commercial real estate brokerage and advisory firm, has a client that asked its architect to develop transitional spaces and install modular movable walls.
VTS, the real-estate platform, has hired 75 people since the beginning of the pandemic, and will return to the office a much different company now (staff of 325) versus then (staff of 250).
“That’s a lot of people you’ve never met in person,” Romito said. “When you invest in culture and people, you can’t overnight take all that and translate that to a remote environment.”
Design and ventilation really matter
Even after vaccines, real-estate experts predict a transition to close quarters after months, even years, of social distancing. This has kept the desire for office space—13,000 square feet being the average size sought, according to VTS—about the same; fewer people will be coming into the office or stagger schedules but they want to maintain safe distances apart.
“People need to feel healthy and safe, that the environment is clean, and that these are environmentally healthy and not just energy efficient green buildings,” said Dennis Perkins. That includes, he says, cleaning protocols, upgraded air filters and filtration systems, occupancy maximums on elevators and directional signage within common areas and office spaces.
Homes must better evolve to support work—and women
Remember how office parks turned into mini-cities with game rooms, bowling alleys, daycare centers, dry cleaners and post offices? Now picture all those services closer to home, maybe even within your apartment complex. Carmen Perkins cites the pandemic’s disproportionate burden on women and the need for housing to better support families.
“Women have shouldered much more of the homeschooling and schedule management, not to mention being short-order cooks,” she said, laughing. “We have seen new multifamily developments respond to work-life balance. The interesting, attractive buildings going up in DC have coworking spaces built into them and flexible family-friendly amenities like playrooms. It’s not the workspace picking up the slack there.”


fortune--2020-12-09--Why betting against Tesla was the ‘widow-maker trade of 2020’

“There is nothing new in Wall Street,” the famed 1920s investor Jesse Livermore wrote. “There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”
The original “Wolf of Wall Street,” Livermore’s most famous bet was shorting stocks ahead of the crash of 1929. He made a fortune, as did more modern stock shorters like Jim Chanos, who tabbed Enron as a fraud, and Bill Ackman, who saw Lehman Brothers for the house of cards it was. But shorting stocks isn’t for the faint of heart. Most of the time, most stocks along with the broader market go up.
So it takes a certain kind of investor personality to bet against a hot stock and stick with it. Lately, there have been some questionable high flyers, particularly in tech, and my Fortune colleague Bernard Warner spent some time talking with a couple of the investors who decided to go short (and go public) against the grain. His profile of the shorters includes Muddy Waters chief investment officer Carson Block, who took down Luckin Coffee, and Fraser Perring, founder of Viceroy Research, who scored on Wirecard. And don’t forget Hindenburg Research founder Nathan Anderson. He’s the guy who figured out that Nikola had rolled that truck downhill.
“I think fraud is more pervasive than at any time I’ve been in the market, certainly,” Anderson told Bernard. Despite the accurate takedown of Nikola, however, short sellers still aren’t popular on Wall Street. “We get more angry emails, or death threats to murder me and my entire family.”
And not every short seller target collapses in a heap of fraud and scandals. Among the largest short positions today you’ll find many of the year’s hot tech stocks, including Snap, Beyond Meat, and Peloton.
The inflating bubble in electric vehicle stocks has also drawn attention and the biggest target of short sellers over the past few years has been Elon Musk’s electric car maker, Tesla. It hasn’t worked yet. Short sellers, including Enron-conquerer Jim Chanos, have lost so much money betting that Tesla’s stock price would collapse (it’s up almost eightfold this year) that Institutional Investor dubbed it the “widow-maker trade of 2020.” By this month, the cumulative loss of shorters on Tesla exceeded $35 billion. Yikes.
Chanos hasn’t given up though he’s said to have scaled back the size of his bet. “However you might want to dream about autonomous taxis, spaceflight, tunnels underground, whatever—they are a car company, and they are an unprofitable car company,” he told a Barron’s conference this week. Time will tell whether Tesla’s stock price can stay aloft or whether, somehow, this time is different.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
Don't forget the tip. You can't short it quite yet, but DoorDash priced its initial public offering last night at $102 per share, much higher than anticipated and giving the money-losing food delivery service a stock market value of almost $40 billion. It also nabbed the cool stock symbol DASH. Artificial intelligence experts at C3.AI also went public at a higher price than expected and nabbed the cool symbol AI. Expect Airbnb's pricing real soon now. But the symbol ABNB? Terrible.
You had one job. Cybersecurity firm FireEye said it was the victim of a major hacking attack and the crooks made off with some of the tools it uses to uncover security vulnerabilities. The FBI says the methods of the attack "show an actor with a high level of sophistication consistent with a nation state.”
Pricey cans. On the Apple beat, the company announced that its $10-per-month fitness class service, dubbed Fitness+, will debut on December 14. Apple also unveiled long-rumored over-the-ear headphones called the AirPods Max priced at $550. The price surprised some Apple fans, but the company already sells headphones under its Beats brand for up to $400. Apple rival Samsung will unveil its newest phones a little sooner than expected. The Galaxy S21 arrives January 14, according to Android Police.
Violin concerto number 230. The Republican-controlled Senate moved quickly to add a Republican to the Federal Communications Commission, an unusual move during a lame duck period. Attorney Nathan Simington was largely a financial securitization expert (and a trained violinist) before joining the Commerce Department in June of this year, where he helped push to strip protections for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Expect that fight to continue at the FCC. In other D.C. news, expect an antitrust case to be filed against Facebook any minute as well.
All her nights have gone sad and shady. A day after Uber announced it was getting out of the self-driving car business, the ride sharing giant dumped its flying car effort too. Startup Joby Aviation will take over the Uber Elevate unit in return for a $75 million investment from Uber. “I know there are questions about whether Uber has any ‘big, bold’ bets left,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in an email to employees. “I understand that question, but I think it misses the big, bold bets right in front of us: to become the undisputed global leaders in both Mobility and Delivery.”
The Botticelli black boy with the fuchsias in his hair. Speaking of aiming high, Google opened its new operating system program, Fuchsia OS (boy, that is a hard word to spell), to outside developers for the first time. We're still not sure exactly what Google intends for the OS, which it says is not intended to replace Chrome OS or Android OS but is "a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system," the company says.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I wrote a story this week about the progress at QuantumScape, the startup backed by Bill Gates, in developing better batteries for electric vehicles. It's a solid advance as far as it goes but there's a long way until those batteries are actually on the road. Wall Street Journal reporters Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Katherine Blunt have a cautionary tale about an earlier high-profile green energy startup called Bloom Energy founded by NASA scientist KR Sridhar.
Mr. Sridhar’s proposition to disrupt the energy market came as the world was trying to figure out how to wean off fossil fuels. Instead, the energy industry has disrupted Mr. Sridhar’s strategy, turning to wind and solar power, which have lower costs and deliver cleaner energy than Bloom’s cells, which emit carbon dioxide. Grid power is still less expensive than Bloom’s in most places.
Along the way, Bloom ran into supply issues, its cells remained expensive and it fell short of its projections for how many customers it would win, according to former executives and employees, board materials and public filings.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
How AOC showed politicians the power of live-streaming By Fernando Pizarro
Was Bob Dylan’s sale of his massive music catalog a tax maneuver? By Geoff Colvin
The best A.I. movies and TV shows By Jeff John Roberts
Revenue isn’t back yet, but Airbnb’s valuation may well be By Lucinda Shen
Indiegogo founder launches Vincent, a site to discover alternative investments By Jeff John Roberts
A depleted workforce and no end in sight: An inside look at America’s ailing health care industry By Erika Fry
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Bill Gates published his annual list of book recommendations on Tuesday, this year headlined "5 good books for a lousy year." They're all non-fiction works, which is a little disappointing. But I think I'll pick up The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre. The story of FBI turncoat Aldrich Ames is so crazy it should match the twists and turns of anything by Le Carre.


fortune--2020-12-09--The ‘triumph’ of dismantling Harvey Weinstein’s old company office

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! Women are leading global economic organizations, the FTC blocks P&G’s Billie acquisition, and Harvey Weinstein’s walls come tumbling down. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
– Demo day. The dismantling of Harvey Weinstein’s empire has taken years, and a small piece of it, a Weinstein Company office in Tribeca, got an overhaul last month. The demolition was handled—rather fittingly—by a woman-led team.
Emma has a new story out this morning about Barbara Kavovit (yes, of Real Housewives of New York fame) who runs Evergreen Construction, the firm that handled the job. Kavovit says she won the job by promising that women would work on the project. And she followed through, hiring women-led contractors from Mikoma Electric and Alba Demolition as she worked with Keri Mate of architecture firm Design Republic.
Together, the team stripped the office, which used to house the disgraced movie producer and convicted rapist‘s production company, removing its private rooms and turning it into an open space with natural light.
For Kavovit, who’s an anomaly in the overwhelmingly-male construction field, the work held extra meaning. She says she’s “had a lot of Harveys” in her life.
“I felt a feeling of triumph, of closure, and rebuilding to make it better. It was a shift to me that as a woman-owned business we got hired to take down Harvey Weinstein’s offices,” she said. “I had a permanent smile on my face as I watched each wall come down. I took a sledgehammer and started bashing in the walls.”
That’s one symbolic way to smash the patriarchy.
You can read Emma’s full story here.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Global economy. Global economic organizations are seeing significant progress this year in the representation of women among their leadership. If Janet Yellen takes over the U.S. Treasury, she and Chrystia Freeland as Canada's new finance minister will join the ranks. The World Trade Organization and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development are also set to contribute new female leaders to the international stage. Bloomberg
- Close shave. The Federal Trade Commission is suing to block the acquisition of razor startup Billie, cofounded by Georgina Gooley, by Procter & Gamble. The FTC warns that consumers could face higher prices, and P&G says it is disappointed in the FTC decision—which could have implications for future startup acquisitions. CNN
- On defense. President-elect Biden's choice of Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III for Defense Secretary—he will be the first Black person to hold the role—also means that he passed over Michele Flournoy, who was a candidate for the cabinet position. A large swath of women in national security had lobbied for and hoped for Flournoy to fill the role, and are now expressing their disappointment. New York Times
- Down to the wire. As the U.K. approaches a potential no-deal Brexit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson to try to achieve a last-minute agreement. Both leaders have said that the conditions for a deal are so far "not there." BBC
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: President-elect Biden will reportedly choose Rep. Marcia Fudge as his nominee for secretary of housing and urban development. Lynne Doughtie, former chairman and CEO of KPMG U.S., joins the board of NovaSignal. Sandhya Hegde joins Unusual Ventures as partner. Indigo Agriculture hired Maria Belousova, former Grubhub chief technology officer, as chief digital officer and Elizabeth Graham, former president of Notarize, as COO. Americares promoted director of Latin America and Caribbean programs Gabriela Salvador to SVP of global operations.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- 'Lost year.' Many women, between canceled IVF treatments, lost jobs, and a slowdown on the dating scene, feel that 2020 has stolen their chance of motherhood. Women, married and single, discuss their emotional year here: Guardian
- Watching the watchdog. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been friendly to banks throughout the Trump administration. Republican Kathy Kraninger's term at the helm of the bureau won't be over when President-elect Biden takes office, but a recent Supreme Court decision will allow him to fire her and install a leader more likely to serve as an aggressive watchdog. Bloomberg
- Tough call. One corner of sports that's especially male-dominated is men's college basketball. Only two women out of hundreds of officials serve as referees for the sport, compared to four out of 70 in the NBA. Crystal Hogan reflects on being the first and only—and having the number of female refs double, to two, this year. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
Santa is a mom The Cut
The athlete's guide to menopause Outside
When will the rural mother rise up? Gen
PARTING WORDS
"If I expect them to show up and take care of our patients, then I cannot stay at home."
-Dr. Jasmin Moshirpur, the 82-year-old regional medical officer for NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst/Queens, on going to work throughout the pandemic alongside her team


fortune--2020-12-10--Facebook’s big fat lawsuit

Facebook’s big fat lawsuit

Facebook was slapped with a big antitrust lawsuit on Wednesday detailing the company’s aggressive behavior that squashed competition.
The Federal Trade Commission and 46 states say that for years the company engaged in anticompetitive behaviors to obtain and retain monopoly power, according to the lawsuit filed in a federal court on Wednesday. Facebook allegedly tried to neutralize potential future threats when it snapped up Instagram and WhatsApp and failed to buy Twitter and Snapchat, the lawsuit claims. The company, not surprisingly, pushed back hard and said it violated no laws.
Included in the lawsuit’s remedies is a call to break up Facebook. While analysts think anything is possible, they suspect that Facebook will more likely be forced to change some its behaviors rather than divest Instagram and WhatsApp (and Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts agrees) .
Ron Josey, an analyst at investment banking firm JMP Securities, says a forced divestiture would set an “interesting” precedent for other Big Tech companies. And Brent Thill, an analyst at investment banking firm Jefferies, called the lawsuit a “witch hunt.”
“It’s going to be a giant stink fest on the sidelines,” Thill said. “The game is going to go on, and nothing is going to change.”
But for argument sake, let’s say antitrust regulators succeed in their push for a breakup. What would Facebook look like without Instagram and WhatsApp?
“What you’re left with is a business that has 2.7 billion monthly active users and 1.8 billion daily active users,” Josey said. “So it’s not small.”
But losing Instagram would mean losing the engine responsible for most of Facebook’s recent growth in both users and revenue. Digital marketing research firm eMarketer estimates that Instagram will generate $22.5 billion in revenue in 2020, a year-over-year increase of 38%. By comparison, Facebook’s core app is expected to grow 22% to $33.4 billion this year, according to eMarketer.
And analysts suspect that Instagram is likely responsible for a large portion of the monthly active users on Facebook’s family of apps, which in the third quarter grew by 14% year-over-year (monthly active users on Facebook’s main app only grew by 12%).
“There’s no question Instagram is a massive engine” for the company, Thill said.
Losing WhatsApp is a little less of a concern for Facebook, Josey said, as the service is still in its early days of figuring out how to make money. But WhatsApp does represent another massive set of users—more than 2 billion worldwide. The service has also been beefing up its e-commerce offerings, most recently adding the ability for people to fill a digital cart and send the order to a participating business.
Bottom line: Facebook would be fine, but it would lose its shiny toys that help it grow.
Danielle Abril
@DanielleDigest
danielle.abril@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
COVID misinformation. While we’re on the topic of Facebook, the social network removed at least nine pages that were pushing misinformation about the coronavirus, the flu vaccine, and other health topics to their millions of followers, according to The Washington Post. Facebook made the move following a flag from researchers at the public policy think tank German Marshall Fund.
Ethical dilemma. Google plans to investigate the ousting of one of its top A.I. researchers, Timnit Gebru, according to Axios. Last week, Gebru said she was fired for criticizing the company for its failure to commit to diversity. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, sent out an internal memo on Wednesday apologizing for how the company handled Gebru and announcing the investigation.
Political policy changes. Google and YouTube both announced new policies related to political content on the services. Google plans to lift its political ad ban on Thursday, according to several media reports. The company implemented the ban on Nov. 3, after which it paused more than 5 million political ads. Meanwhile, YouTube is cracking down on videos, uploaded Wednesday and beyond, that claim widespread fraud or errors impacted the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Better late than never!
Play nice, gamers. Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming service popular among gamers, announced new rules for hateful conduct and sexual harassment on Wednesday. Users won’t be allowed to repeatedly comment on a person’s perceived attractiveness if it is unwelcome, for example. They also can’t make lewd or explicit comments about a person’s sexuality or physical appearance nor send unsolicited links to nudes. Attacks on people based on their caste, color, and immigration status will no longer be allowed. And Twitch prohibited the display of the Confederate flag. Changes will take effect Jan. 22.
Big Brother was watching. Apple and Google are banning data broker X-Mode Social after learning that the company provided data of unsuspecting app users to U.S. government contractors. The companies notified app developers about the ban and told them they have to remove X-Mode’s data tracking software from their apps or risk being banned themselves.
Things that go boom. Elon Musk had warned there was only a one-in-three chance that everything would go as planned in the highest flight test yet of SpaceX's shiny Starship rocket prototype. The rocket successfully took off and flew to a height of eight miles. But the landing was a RUD, or "rapid unscheduled disassembly,” Musk noted in a Tweet. That's aeronautics talk for a fiery crash.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Harvard professor Marco Iansiti penned an opinion piece for Wired on Wednesday in which they suggest the tech industry needs to unite around a common cause: Democratizing tech tools and knowledge for “citizen developers,” or innovators outside the tech industry. The authors go as far as to say the tech industry will have “failed” if companies are the only beneficiaries of tech at the end of the decade.
“Success in this moment of unprecedented turbulence will require us to think boldly and move beyond traditional approaches. The current crisis demands innovation across both public and private sectors, and across every geographic and social community. This calls not only for developing individual skills, but also for providing an architecture to ensure that the necessary tools, data, and technology are broadly accessible and made available across traditionally isolated groups and geographies. The importance of technology and innovation is hardly a new idea. But it is people’s widespread and intense use of tech and tools that is the crucial ingredient,” Nadella and Iansiti write.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Airbnb’s IPO: 6 key things to know By Danielle Abril
Google’s ouster of a top A.I. researcher may have come down to this By Jeremy Kahn
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on the company’s long-awaited IPO By Danielle Abril
The hacker ‘ceasefire’ with hospitals is over—and that should terrify us By Peter J. Beshar and Jane Holl Lute
DoorDash shares soar 80% after IPO By Danielle Abril
Lessons from HBO Max’s streaming surprise By Geoff Colvin
A cybersecurity agenda for the Biden administration By Samuel J. Palmisano and Kiersten E. Todt
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
In case you missed the oddball news this week, I’d like to turn your attention to an unlikely pairing: KFC and Lifetime. Oh, and UberEats also is in on the affair.
Lifetime and KFC are promoting what they’re calling a “steamy” holiday 15-minute mini-movie called A Recipe For Seduction. The film, which premieres on Lifetime at noon E.T. on Sunday, stars Mario Lopez as Colonel Harland Sanders and comes complete with an exclusive offer from UberEats. KFC lovers who order at least $20 of food on the app will get six free extra crispy tenders Sunday through Saturday.
The year 2020 is truly strange. But if you need a distraction from the chaos, Mario Lopez and some fried chicken isn’t too shabby, methinks.


fortune--2020-12-10--How one of the best elder care companies has found opportunity in the COVID crisis

Executives at Trilogy Health Services have a term for the way they like to lead: “rounding.”
It’s a riff off the “rounds” that doctors make to check on patients, and it captures the way leaders at Trilogy regularly visit front line employees and residents of their skilled nursing facilities.
The COVID pandemic has forced Trilogy CEO Leigh Ann Barney and her lieutenants to change their rounding rituals. But despite safety protocols to remain physically distant, they still found a way to get around. Barney and others have hosted barbecues at Trilogy’s 117 locations throughout several midwestern states. You’ll find her cooking for 30 or so people, giving out retention bonuses and offering encouraging words during a very difficult year in senior care.
“I can be at the grill with steak and chicken,” Barney says. “We’re socially distanced, but people can come and chat with me.”
Barney serving up food is a fitting metaphor for the way Trilogy leaders have navigated the challenges of 2020 from a foundation of servant leadership. They have sought to match the hard work and sacrifice of their employees, and to respond as best they could to a disease that has taken the lives of a number of Trilogy employees and residents.
Pre-COVID, a Trilogy Health Services resident and employee participate in the company’s annual “Independence from Hunger” campaign. Trilogy Health Services
Remarkably, Trilogy’s employees have continued to rate the company highly, with 8 in 10 calling it a great place to work this year.
If anything, Trilogy’s leaders see the COVID crisis as an opportunity. Not just to elevate the culture and performance of their company, but to aid the elder care industry as a whole. The pandemic—which ravaged many nursing homes and killed many older Americans—may have given the aging services industry a black eye. But it also opened eyes to the heroic, caring, meaningful work people in the field do day in and day out. Not to mention the way leading organizations in the industry combine clinical expertise with high-quality hospitality and lifestyle services, Barney says.
“Nursing homes and long-term care haven’t been thought of in this way,” she says. But perhaps the attention provided by the pandemic “will be a way to bring this forward and to advocate for our industry and our employees.”
With a deep culture of service and visionary leadership, it’s no wonder that Trilogy Health Services has earned a spot on the third annual Best Workplaces for Aging Services list. Activated Insights, the senior care affiliate of Great Place to Work, just announced this year’s ranking in partnership with Fortune.
A ‘Great Place to Work For All‘
Over the past year, Great Place to Work and Activated Insights surveyed 189,159 employees across nearly all 50 states to measure the workplace experience in areas such as respect, fairness, and leadership competence. Our methodology also captures how consistent an organization’s culture is across demographic groups and job levels.
Addressing workplace culture within the aging services field is critical. The pandemic’s toll has exacerbated workforce shortages and employee turnover in the sector. At the same time, our research shows that better cultures translate into lower employee turnover, and studies in health care have shown that a more stable workforce leads to better care outcomes.
In this year of economic turmoil, a great workplace culture experienced by all also is better for business. Great Place to Work research following the Great Recession found that the most inclusive high-trust workplaces outperformed peers before, during and after the 2007-2009 downturn.
Elder care’s struggles
Getting mislabeled is a challenge elder care providers face. Even when a family has financial resources to pay privately, many people, including journalists, seem to sweep all of senior living into the largely government-funded facilities called “nursing homes.” Of course, it did not help that the elder care industry resorted to a set of confusing names to describe a wide array of services and housing options. In reality, many of these options look like lush apartment complexes with hotel-like amenities, where COVID-19 has been as well controlled as in multi-family apartment settings.
Elder care providers also face economic pressures from all sides. With a lack of information that distinctly shows which retirement home is better, families will often select an option based on price. Meanwhile, with downward spiraling of government budgets and the public demanding more controls, the nursing home side of the industry has been collapsing for decades. Given that staff pay comprises two-thirds of an operating budget for most homes, these pricing pressures have compressed pay and workplace investments, further increasing employee turnover. In 2019, employee turnover in seniors housing and care averaged a whopping 65% per year. In 2020, the average has increased.
Contrast these industry norms with a culture that invests in its people. By putting its employees first, Trilogy has nearly 50 percent lower employee turnover than the industry average.
Sticking to its people-first approach has required some business heroics. This year, in spite of falling revenues and profits, Trilogy spent millions of dollars delivering wage increases to direct-care staff. In addition, the company provided more than 2,000 employees with Walmart gift cards to pay for food, and staff with children whose schools shut down in the spring received childcare assistance.
Trilogy also doubled down on its investment to upskill and educate those who want to advance. These dollars not only improve Trilogy’s customer service and clinical care, but also help its people overcome economic and racial disadvantages. Nearly half of Trilogy employees are furthering their skills through a structured apprenticeship program which can result in a certification and more pay every few months. And, one in fifteen employees are studying for a free online college degree despite it being the first full year of partnership between Trilogy and Purdue Global, a program of Purdue University. Given the digital divide born from racial and economic inequities, Trilogy worked to get laptops, internet access, and other resources to employees who did not have them to study.
COVID strikes
When the COVID pandemic hit the United States in force in March, Trilogy leaders tried to keep their 9,000 residents and 12,000 employees safe. Barney organized daily meetings with staffers to create new safety procedures, gather personal protective equipment and share the latest information. For a few weeks, Trilogy avoided serious trouble. But the company and its people did not emerge unscathed from what experts in elder care have described as “the perfect killing machine.”
In late March, a Trilogy facility in Indiana had an outbreak. Numerous residents experience respiratory difficulties.
“They’d come from the hospital, and there was no testing at the time,” Barney recalls. Trilogy at that point was dependent on local health department testing. Results required waits of several days.
“For a week period of time I remember being on telephone at office, at home, outside on patio—talking constantly,” Barney says.
Unfortunately, several residents died. In the course of the year, across Trilogy’s entire operations, three employees also died of COVID.
Although Barney believes the company did all it could at the time to prevent COVID-related casualties, Trilogy nonetheless aimed to learn from the tragedies.
It beefed up safety procedures, including creating its own weekly testing system for residents and employees. Trilogy’s charitable foundation supported the families of the victims. And the company launched a chaplain service to supplement the counseling available through its Employee Assistance Program.
Although Trilogy and its people have been buffeted by 2020, the company and its culture are proving to be resilient. Employee scores on the Great Place to Work Trust Index survey have dipped just 3 percentage points from 2019, with 80 percent of Trilogy staffers calling the company a great place to work. Similar skilled nursing facilities have seen their employee Trust Index scores fall more than 7 percentage points.
The opportunity ahead
In fact, with the U.S. population aging at unprecedented rates, Trilogy’s leaders believe that dark times in 2020 have pointed to two bright opportunities ahead.
One involves the relative status of the elder care industry. “For a long time, we’ve been the stepchild of health care,” Barney says. “With the spotlight on aging services during the pandemic, we’ve shown how central our services are.” She goes on to note that that elder care has arrived “at the forefront in people’s minds and has found a natural stage.”
In other words, the opportunity now exists to transform the narrative of aging services from clinical backwater to pioneer showing the way to blend customer service and hospitality with health care, starting with service to our elders. In this way, the industry and leading workplaces in aging services can overcome the trials of this year and continue to blossom as businesses.
Trilogy’s Chief Human Resources Officer Priscila Mattingly takes it a step further. She highlights the opportunity of attracting more and better talent to the workforce. “One of the best things about COVID and the challenges of this year is that if you care to make an impact, you can see that you can make as big an impact here in senior living as you can in pediatrics.”
These opportunities require work on the part of industry leaders. At Trilogy, the work of leaders includes investing in employees’ growth and continuing the “rounding” that has long kept executives close to what’s happening at the front lines.
This holiday season, Barney will be out at Trilogy facilities. Physically distancing and wearing a mask but still connecting with residents and employees.
One of her favorite stories is a visit during a prior December to Trilogy’s Wellbrooke of Carmel campus in central Indiana. She chatted with a company chef, pointing to the four stars on the chef’s coat. The stars signified that the employee had completed all four chef apprenticeship courses, elevating her cooking skills and enabling her to earn a $3,000 annual wage increase.
The chef responded that she had four children, and this was the first holiday season where she did not have to worry about paying for Christmas.
“This is what we strive for,” Barney says, “to let our employees know that we care about you, we invest in you, and we want to make your life better.”
See all 50 Best Workplaces in Aging Services
Dr. Jacquelyn Kung is CEO of Activated Insights, an elder tech company and Great Place to Work affiliate. Ed Frauenheim is senior director of content at Great Place to Work and co-author of A Great Place to Work For All.


fortune--2020-12-10--Why business must help end ‘period poverty’ for women in America

Scotland made history last month when its parliament passed a law that gives women a legal right to sufficient sanitary supplies. Because women have a human right to stay clean and feel their inherent dignity, public institutions will provide necessary supplies for women who request them.
Scotland’s innovation is great and will hopefully motivate other countries to follow suit. But we shouldn’t discount the potential of private sector businesses to solve the problem of menstrual equity.
The U.S. is almost as bad as a third-world country when it comes to “period poverty”—the collective term used to describe the inability to afford or procure sanitary supplies. It’s an alluring term for movement-building and capitalizing on people’s outrage, but it makes it seem like the issue of free supplies will benefit only the women who live and exist in poverty themselves.
But that’s not always what period poverty is about. Much of it is about not having what you need when you need it.
A full 86% of women’s periods start in public, when they don’t have a tampon or a pad, according to the Free the Tampons movement. Almost all of them—79%—fashion a makeshift tampon or maxi pad out of toilet paper. In lieu of—or maybe in addition to—that, 62% left wherever they were to go to a store and buy one and 34% went home to get one.
No one has quantified the loss of productivity from this, but it’s significant and enduring. It happens to many women once a month. Considering that 71% of nonfarm payroll employees work for private companies, unlimited tampons in public places may not always help.
This isn’t limited just to adults. During good times, one in five American girls miss school because of menstrual complications, like not feeling confident that they won’t stain their clothes. School closings during the pandemic have curtailed access to needed supplies.
Of course, period poverty also encompasses people who can’t afford these products, a significant population itself. In a 2019 study of low-income women, almost two-thirds of respondents reported not being able to afford the products they needed in the last year. Also, the researchers admitted that they only studied women already receiving services, so this is probably an underestimation of need.
Businesses provide soap, paper towels, water, and toilet paper to customers and employees who use their restrooms without charge—and without second thought. Yet the same isn’t true for tampons and pads, even though they’re just as necessary for cleanliness.
Any cost could easily slide into existing budgets for bathroom supplies, and free distribution would hardly break the bank. It costs between $5 and $7 per person for a company to provide tampons. There’s a one-time cost for boxes or other dispensing devices, but even those aren’t necessary. A cardboard box of supplies would suffice in many places.
Not only is the cost of the supplies far from prohibitive, but when considered in light of the productivity protections they provide, free supplies actually benefit bottom lines. In 2015, the University of Iowa decided to distribute free supplies—rather than charging for them through vending machines in bathrooms—when the school realized it would spend $29,000 less every year in administrative costs.
Private businesses may need to lead on this issue. In the U.S., we see this as a public function, but many of the government efforts to reduce period poverty haven’t been as effective as hoped.
For instance, some blame menstrual inequity on the tampon tax—the fact that state and local governments consider tampons and pads to be luxury items and therefore taxable. But that’s a red herring. Eliminating the tax would be wise and fair, but it wouldn’t make the products affordable enough to solve the problem of period poverty.
Twelve states and the federal Bureau of Prisons have agreed to supply incarcerated women with sufficient tampons and pads for free; a bill is pending in two more states. The federal rule came from the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act—a bill Vice President-elect Kamala Harris cosponsored in the Senate. That bill didn’t pass on its own, but the provisions for free supplies for women in federal prisons was woven into the First Step Act, which became law in 2018. The problem is that guards and other gatekeepers frustrate these policies with their insistence on maintaining the power imbalances that a lack of pads or tampons creates.
Even if the U.S. were to pass a law like Scotland’s—which is doubtful, given that New York Rep. Grace Meng has put forward proposals for real change, including the Menstrual Equity for All Act, but her proposed bills haven’t left committee to be considered by the entire Congress—Scotland’s solution has its wrinkles, like lack of clarity on which locations will make these products available for free. The law specifies “schools, colleges, universities, and all other public buildings,” but it’s not clear if one could leave work, walk into a government building, and ask for Tampax.
That’s not to say that nothing can be done; Congress took a step toward rectifying the vagaries around menstruation supplies this year. The CARES Act classifies menstrual products as medical expenses, allowing consumers to use Health Savings Accounts to pay for them. It is progress in that it identifies tampons and pads as medical necessities. But the provision does little to solve the issue of sudden lack of access to supplies, which is the core of period poverty.
Ultimately, period politics are about power. The reason Scotland’s new law might work is that it gives power to menstruators.
But the responsibility of getting pads and tampons into women’s and girls’ hands will often land in the laps of private businesses. It’s not a duty they should shirk. Supplying free tampons and pads will benefit them—and everyone else.
Chandra Bozelko is a syndicated columnist, a facilitator at the OpEd Project, and a contributor to the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstrual Studies.


fortune--2020-12-10--EU antitrust chief Vestager gives thumbs up to U.S. crackdown on Facebook

Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s antitrust chief and scourge of tech giants, gave her seal of approval to U.S. antitrust action against Facebook Inc.
She told lawmakers in Brussels that the U.S. lawsuit shows how technology superpowers are increasingly facing tougher scrutiny around the world. Minutes after she spoke Thursday, German regulators started a fresh antitrust probe into Facebook’s Oculus virtual-reality headsets.
“It’s a sign that the debate on tech dominance has been shifting over the last couple of years,” Vestager said of the U.S. antitrust move in an online meeting with EU lawmakers. “You see that in almost every jurisdiction. You see it in Canada and Australia” as well as the recent U.S. case against Google.
The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority this week even proposed a specialist tech regulator with enhanced power to block deals.
European regulators are planning tougher rules on so-called internet gatekeepers next week that “will enable us to be so much quicker” in moving against companies that violate potential new rules for how they treat smaller rivals, she said.
Vestager, who has slapped Alphabet Inc.’s Google with huge fines, said the complaints filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general took a different approach from the EU. She said her probes into advertising are “not as advanced.”
Germany’s antitrust authority, known as the Bundeskartellamt, opened an investigation Thursday into Facebook because using Oculus’ latest virtual-reality Quest 2 glasses requires a Facebook account. Oculus was previously operated separately from Facebook, it said, and existing Oculus accounts can no longer be used for the new hardware.
“We intend to examine whether and to what extent this tying arrangement will affect competition,” the authority’s president Andreas Mundt said in an emailed press release.
Oculus devices are not currently sold in Germany, a Facebook spokesperson said. The company “will cooperate fully with the Bundeskartellamt and are confident we can demonstrate there is no basis to the investigation.”


fortune--2020-12-10--Facebook has gone from tech darling to Darth Vader

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
Give Facebook credit. It has managed to do the one thing no one else could—bring Republican and Democratic politicians together. The Federal Trade Commission and 46 states yesterday sued for a breakup of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, and an amazingly bipartisan chorus of political voices shouted support for the move. This case may be the only smooth hand-off that happens from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.
And let’s be clear: the case is hardly a slam dunk. Facebook was quick to make the strongest argument against it, which is this: the agency signed off on both acquisitions when they happened in 2012 and 2014. Have the facts changed? If it was okay then, why not now?
What’s changed, of course, is the political environment. Facebook itself has gone from tech darling to Darth Vader—accused by Republicans and Democrats alike of destroying democracy. In its efforts to fix the problem, the company has only further angered Republicans—who feel the left coast company has it in for them. But a Democratic administration could prove to be an even bigger existential threat, as Democrats have been flirting for several years with a new, more expansive approach to antitrust policy. They now have their test case.
If it succeeds, the case will be the biggest deal in antitrust since the breakup of AT&T. Even if it fails, it will be one hell of a show. I oversaw the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Microsoft antitrust case in the 1990s and can vouch for the fireworks that result when so much money and corporate power is at stake. A lot of lawyers and lobbyists will earn their retirements from this one.
More news below. And check out our coverage of the other big event of the day—the IPO of profitless DoorDash, which jumped 85% after it started trading to a reported valuation of around $72 billion. (The price jump, of course, was portrayed by investment bankers as a good thing, rather than a pricing failure.) Tomorrow, Airbnb, priced at $68 for a valuation of $47 billion, is no doubt hoping for a similar bump. Who knew so much money could be made in the midst of a global pandemic.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Privacy fines
France's data-protection regulator has fined Google and Amazon a total of $163 million for privacy violations, namely depositing tracking cookies in users' browsers without prior consent, and not telling them clearly that the cookies are for delivering personalized advertising. Both companies have now stopped the dropping-cookies-without-consent part, but the watchdog is threating to levy further fines if they don't start being clear about why they track people. Fortune
Vaccine hack
Pfizer and BioNTech say hackers stole documents relating to the development of their COVID-19 vaccine. The cyber-heist occurred in an attack on the European Medicines Agency, which is evaluating their vaccine. The companies said they don't think the personal data of vaccine-trial participants were compromised. (Also read this Fortune comment piece on hospitals' vulnerability to cyberattacks.) Al Jazeera
SpaceXplosion
A SpaceX experimental rocket exploded on landing yesterday, but no worries—according to CEO Elon Musk, it only had a one-in-three chance of making it down in one piece anyway. This was a prototype of the Starship, um, starship that SpaceX intends to one day use for ferrying people to Mars, and between Earthbound cities. SN8 was not the first Starship prototype to be destroyed in testing. CNN
Chinese sanctions
Following the imposition of U.S. sanctions on some Chinese officials over the Hong Kong crackdown, China will hit back with its own sanctions on U.S. lawmakers. Beijing also says it will place new travel restrictions on American diplomats. As yet, though, names have not been named. Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Trade deal
Singapore has become the latest country to sign a trade deal with the U.K., though the deal really just replicates its existing deal with the EU, which the U.K. effectively departs at the end of the month. More than 20 such deals have now been rolled over, to start after the Brexit transition period ends. The EU has around 40 trade deals with over 70 countries. BBC
Brexit talks
Apologies for reporting earlier this week that the moment of truth had arrived for the U.K. and EU's own post-Brexit-trade-deal talks. Although the road ought to run out tomorrow with this year's final meeting of EU heads of state, who after all need to unanimously approve any deal, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have somehow agreed to kick the can further down. Sunday's the new deadline. Don't hold your breath. Guardian
After Harvey
Fortune's Emma Hinchliffe has a fascinating interview with Barbara Kavovit, the construction-business owner whose firm (Evergreen Construction) got to demolish the former offices of the Weinstein Company. "I had a permanent smile on my face as I watched each wall come down. I took a sledgehammer and started bashing in the walls," Kavovit said. "I felt a feeling of triumph, of closure, and rebuilding to make it better. It was a shift to me that as a woman-owned business we got hired to take down Harvey Weinstein's offices." Fortune
Biden's USPS
Although the Trump administration's treatment saw the American public rally to the defense of the U.S. Postal Service, things may not get much better under the incoming Biden administration. As Fortune's Nicole Goodkind writes, President-elect Biden won't be able to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy; that's up to the largely Republican USPS Board of Governors. Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.