Have you ever felt like your brain was one of those viral egg experiments, cracked open and sizzling on a bare sidewalk that was truly, much too hot? You may have been experiencing signs of burnout (and dehydration). As an introverted professional, Ive been there as well, many times in my career. Over the years, Ive developed healthy reflective coping methods to recharge my batteries and prevent (or at least combat) that intense feeling of overwhelm.
As a LinkedIn Top Voice and a very public keynote speaker whos learned to grow in the spotlight on my own terms, Im not the best at pretending to be an extrovert for any extended period of timeits too tiring! Instead, Ive found success by setting clear boundaries both online and offline, especially with growing my personal brand. Its how I stay true to my brand and avoid the dreaded burnout. And guess what? You can do the same. Youve probably tried a few personal branding tips that didnt work as well for you as an introvert, because they possibly felt too extroverted for your style.
Here are my real-life strategies grounded in my own experience and ones that I feature in my new book Personal Branding for Introverts. These are the ideas that let me recharge properly while building a real, lasting brand.
Overcoming Overwhelm With Boundaries
As an introvert, youre likely to think more deeply and be more overwhelmed during events, big meetings or conferences, and that takes a lot of energy. Performing personal branding steps like making content, networking, or being active online can be really tiring for you (and me).
Setting boundaries is the ultimate learned superpower for an introvert to combat the drowning feeling of being overwhelmed both in your daily life and at big events like conferences. It allows you to decide when and how you interact with others, which helps keep your mental health in check and allows you to show up as the best version of yourself at work. When you allow the people and activities that give you energy into your sphere and avoid the ones that take it away, you can create a brand that is easier to maintain in the long run. Lets go over four ways to think about boundaries as an introvert.
1. Establish Clear Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life
While organizing my own work week, I think of this quote by Stephen Covey: The key is not to prioritize whats on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. Focus on what is the most important work task for your week and use an energy-first approach to encourage your own balance and focus. Consider the following strategies:
Match Work Hours with Your Energy: Prioritize the times of day when your energy and focus are highest. For example, if you are wide awake and alert in the morning, try scheduling meetings between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. rather than later in the day. These morning (or afternoon) hours are your core focus times and should be protected.
Designate Time for Focused Work: Save specific blocks of time for your best uninterrupted, quiet work. Lessen the general distractions around you by limiting your email inbox and message time.
Create A Habit For Your Work Day End: Start an ongoing ritual or task that marks the end of your work hours. This might include taking a comforting walk, writing in your journal or blog, or simply turning off your social or Slack notifications for a bit. These cues help reinforce the boundary between work and personal time, allowing your mind to transition and recharge.
2. Rethink your Endless Meetings
Ever hear of the office saying This could have been an email? Not every meeting needs an in-person chat. If youre able (and allowed to) express your thoughts in an email or message, do that. Fewer live meetings means more energy for focused work. Group similar meetings together on the same day or days if possible so theres less distractions. That way, the rest of your schedule stays more open and quiet.
Also, leave time between meetings. At least 15 minutes and a quick walk outside or inside the office will help you reset. Back-to-back calls can wear you down quickly and harm your focus.
3. Strategically Manage Your Digital Energy
Ive watched many introverted professionals experience burnout from attempting to maintain a constant presence across multiple platforms. Focusing your energy on one or two channels leads to being able to deep-dive more into those spaces, and introverts excel in being thorough thinkers.
Try these energy-saving tactics:
Pick One Platform: Focus your energy on one or two social media platforms where your target audience is active. This platform should also be where you feel comfortable and capable of maintaining a presence that wont fizzle out in a month.
Batch Content Creation: Create a bank of posts by setting aside dedicated time once a week or month to write, record, or design your content.This method lowers the pressure to be constantly working on new ideas and allows you breathing room for more thoughtful, consistent content creation.
Determine Your Response Times: Find and segment out specific time blocks for responding to all of your messages or comments across social media platforms, such as 30 minutes every Tuesday at 11am. Its helpful to do this so youre less distracted by a ton of notifications at work. As your audience grows over time, this method will help you maintain balance and sustainability.
4. Prioritize Rest and Recharging
Throughout the day, I intentionally give myself short breaks. A walk to feel the sunlight and get some vitamin D. A few deep breaths away from sitting in front of my screens. These pauses allow me to reset mentally and clear my head.. I treat alone time as part of my daily rhythm. Reading. Writing. Walking. Or just sitting quietly. These deliberate time pauses replenishes my energy while keeping me grounded.
Persistent fatigue, lessened focus or the need to hide from everyone (social anxiety, anyone?) can be a clear and early indicator of burnout at work. Instead of ignoring these signals, consider them thoughtful invitations from your body to begin to slow down and rest before you fully burn out.
Establishing and maintaining boundaries is crucial to growing a personal brand as an introvert and will stop overwhelm and burnout before they spiral out of control. Boundaries are wonderful tools that enable your brand to grow consistently and in a healthy way. You do not need to be everywhere online or offline or constantly available. Instead, focus your energy and attention on being present during specific blocks of time that you choose. Your audience will recognize the intentionalityand so will you.
Adapted from Personal Branding for Introverts. Copyright 2025 by Goldie Chan. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
When Steve Jobs wanted to motivate his Mac team at Apple, he didn’t give them corporate pep talks or send them to management retreats. Instead, he told them they were “pirates” fighting against the “navy.” The message was clear: stay scrappy, stay rebellious, and don’t let the corporate machine slow you down.
That pirate mentality worked. The Mac team moved fast, took risks, and delivered something revolutionary. But here’s the irony: Apple was itself the navy they were once fighting against. Today, with over 160,000 employees and a market cap exceeding $3 trillion, Apple faces the same challenge that confronts every successful companyhow do you stay pirates when you’ve become the fleet?
The challenge as you grow, is not just survival but scaling the pirate playbook itself. Having built products at Pixar, YouTube, and Google, I’ve learned that startup DNA is not a luxury; it is an essential mechanism to continue to thrive as you grow. Ive identified five ways to do this, but first, you have to realize this is about more than thinking like a startup.
The Glacier vs. Snowball Dilemma: The Stakes Have Risen
The difference between a small and a large company is not just size, but physics. Small companies are snowballsfast, gaining unstoppable momentum down the mountain. Big companies are like glaciersmassive, powerful, but moving at a glacial pace. This is the innovation paradox: the big guys have the resources, but the small guys have the speed.
Today, with the rise of AI, the stakes have been dramatically raised. A single, AI-empowered nano-startup (a tiny “snowball”) can now deliver an impact that previously required hundreds of engineers. The trick is to stay as nimble as a snowball while deploying the resources of a glacier.
So how do you solve this dilemma? You don’t just mimic a startup; you design an internal ecosystem for relentless piracy. Here are five learnings for moving at breakneck speed, even at scale.
1. Headline with a Deadline: The North Star That Cuts Through Noise
At Pixar, when we were creating Toy Story, everyone from the animators to the accountants understood our mission. We were making the world’s first full-length computer-animated film, and we were going to prove that this technology could tell stories that would move audiences to tears and laughter. That clarity kept us focused. Trust me, there is nothing like a press release and booked theaters to keep you focussed on delivery.
But mission clarity becomes harder as you scale. With thousands of employees working on hundreds of projects, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. This is where the “headline with a deadline” mentality becomes crucial.
Every team, no matter how large the company, should be able to articulate their work as a newspaper headline with a specific deadline. Not “improve user engagement metrics” but “Launch AI-powered personalization that increases daily active users by 30% by Q2.” Not “enhance platform capabilities” but “Enable creators to monetize live streams within 90 days.”
Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has guided everything from search algorithms to YouTube’s creator ecosystem. When we were building Google TV, that mission clarity helped us see that television wasn’t dyingit was just another way to organize and deliver information to users. That north star kept our small team focused, even as we launched the first GoogleTV streamer during Covid!
2. Flatten the Pyramid: Management That Enables (No Dilbert Syndrome)
The biggest enemy of startup speed isn’t bureaucracyit’s the Dilbert manager. You know the type: they think their job is to manage people rather than enable great work. They attend meetings about meetings, create processes that solve yesterday’s problems, and somehow always seem to be the bottleneck in getting things done.
At Google, I learned that the best managers don’t just understand what their team is buildingthey understand why it matters and how it connects to other teams’ work. They can see the 1+1=3 opportunities where collaboration creates exponential value rather than additive effort. They are close to the work and heck, many times roll up their sleeves and do the work themselves.
The key is keeping management layers lean and purposeful. Every additional layer doesn’t just slow communicationit slows decision-making exponentially. When I worked on YouTube’s creator tools with just three people, we could make product decisions in a hallway conversation. As the team grew, we had to work deliberately to preserve those short communication paths.
The solution isn’t to eliminate management, but to ensure every manager is deeply involved in the product and technology decisions. They need to be translators and connectors, not just people-processors.
3. The Reverse Hierarchy: Bottom-Up Innovation in the AI Era
Plot twist: Your best AI innovations aren’t coming from the C-suite. They’re coming from individual contributors who understand their workflows intimately and can see exactly how AI can improve them.
These innovations bubble up organically because the people closest to the work have the clearest vision of how to improve it. This is the bottom-up innovation that Google’s famous 20% time was designed to capture. While that specific program has evolved, the principle remains vital: the best ideas often come from unexpected places, and big companies need formal mechanisms to surface and scale them.
The challenge is creating systems that can recognize these grassroots innovations and turn them into company-wide capabilities without crushing the entrepreneurial spirit that created them.
4. Permission to Fail: The Failure Budget is Your Growth Capital
Startups take risks because they have tosurvival depends on finding something that works. Big companies often become risk-averse because they have a fleet to protect. But without intelligent risk-taking, you lose the very innovation that made you successful.
When I joined the Google TV team, television was considered antiquated technology. But we believed that TV wasn’t dying; it was transforming. We created a vision for how television could embrace the future of streaming and on-demand content. Today, Google TV is recognized as a leading streaming platform. That success required maintaining a startup-like tolerance for risk even within a company where failure could affect thousands of jobs, and we continue to take risk by bringing TVs (and the company) into the AI era.
The solution is the “failure budget”an explicit acknowledgment that a certain percentage of initiatives must fail. It’s not just acceptable; it’s a necessary investment in your next breakthrough. When your teams know they have te permission to fail intelligently, they are free to take the bold, calculated risks that lead to platform-defining success.
5. The Pirate Code: Direct Lines, Bold Moves
Speed is irrelevant if you cant integrate the results into the main fleet. This is the final paradox:
How do you move fast on innovation while maintaining stability in your core products?
The challenge is that a scrappy pirate crew can move fast, but if their efforts are not designed to integrate with the enterprise architecture, the snowball melts before it can cause an avalanche. Users become accustomed to process and resist change, requiring a delicate balance.
The modern pirate must be an intrapreneursomeone who looks for opportunities where their disruptor mindset can expand existing structures rather than competing with them. This requires building deliberate bridges between the startup-mode teams and the enterprise operations.
Maintaining startup DNA at scale requires deliberate choices about structure, culture, and leadership. Pirates need direct communication channelsat Google, we continue to maintain TGIFa forum where everyone in the company is invited to hear what is on executives’ minds and to directly ask questions. Leaders need to think like founders, taking personal ownership of outcomes and making decisions quickly. And successful intrapreneurs learn to pick their fights carefully, looking for opportunities where their disruptor mindset can expand existing structures rather than competing with them.
Choosing to Stay Pirates
The choice to maintain Startup DNA is not about company size; it is a deliberate design choice about mindset, systems, culture, and leadership practices.
The companies that will dominate the next decade won’t be the ones that perfected the corporate playbook. Theyll be the ones that figured out how to scale the pirate playbook. They will be the ones that cracked the code on how to be pirates at navy scale.
In a world where change is moving at startup speed, corporate thinking gets left in the wake. Only the modern pirates will keep up.
Office work is officially back from the deadif New York is any indication, that is. In Manhattan, businesses are leasing more office space than they have in close to a decade, in a sign that the return-to-office movement is likely to stick around.
According to real estate investor CBRE, during the first nine months of 2025, Manhattan businesses leased 23.2 million square feet of office space, the most since 2006. Leasing has already surpassed last year’s total, with 143 leases at more than $100 per square foot. However, as the epicenter of business, New York City is an outlier: Nationally, leasing is still around 11% below the pre-COVID average.
Unsurprisingly, financial firms, as well as tech, media, and advertising companies, are driving the surge with major deals. In April, Deloitte signed a lease with Hudson Yards for 800,000 square feet of a 717-foot tower still under construction. Amazon is expanding its NYC office presence, too. In 2020, the tech giant bought the historic Lord & Taylor building. This year, the company bought a building at 522 Fifth Ave. A month earlier, the company leased 330,000 square feet of office space from Israel-based Property & Building Corp. at Bryant Park.
The leasing boom is so pronounced that developers have announced more than six new projects to meet the growing demand. This includes a new office building in Grand Central with Ikea as a ground-floor tenant, and JPMorgan Chases $3 billion tower at 270 Park Ave.
With all the extra office space, New Yorkers are going to be expected to occupy itparticularly given the rise in return-to-office initiatives. Case in point: Last year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy mandated that nearly all Amazon employees work in the office five days a week, pressing that on-site presence fuels productivity and creativity.
When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant, Jassy wrote in a memo. “Its easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.
In July 2025, New York office visits were 1.3% higher than they were six years ago. But nationally, return-to-office policies have been trending upward, too. A recent Kastle Systems report found that in Class A+ buildings (new, high-quality buildings usually occupied by major companies), office attendance was around 76.3% in the 10 largest U.S. metro areas. The overall average for the same cities was 54.1%.
In January 2025, Los Angeles suffered an unspeakable wildfire tragedy, destroying at least 17,000 structures, and with tens of thousands of people forced out of their homes. Almost immediately, government officials declared a state of emergency and laid out a path to rebuild like for like. However, in the aftermath of such disasters when rebuilding from the ground up, is like for like the best way to proceed? These disasters provide an opportunity to future-proof our neighborhoods for the next generation of environmental challenges. In face of seemingly endless, floods, fires, rising temperatures, and energy crises, we must take the time to rethink our way forward.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
In L.A. alone, just over quarter of a million homes are located in hillside high-fire hazard zones. The allure of views and exclusivity often comes with increased risk as most flames, especially wind-driven ones, spread much faster uphill. Any upslope overhanging structures, such as wooden decks, provide perfect fuel for upslope fires and once ignited, the flames easily transfer to any connected structure.
So, how does one capitalize on the hillside views but simultaneously manage the danger? Having a fuel modification zonea clear area of land around structures that essentially removes fuel for wildfiresis a definite first step. The use of noncombustible materials should be encouraged including wood composites, standing seam metal roofs, and noncombustible claddinglike plaster, or Hardie panelsmade from a combination of cement, sand, cellulose fibers, and other additives. These remain intact for several hours before beginning to break down, even when exposed to high heat.
For a recent project in a risk-prone canyon, we also designed a perforated metal fire shield, separated from the house by a couple of feet. It provides a layer of protection against the sun but also repels flying embers. A fire shield is also a straightforward modification for existing homes, and a consideration for new construction. We can build additional safety nets through landscaping by using water-retaining plants like cacti and other succulents strategically around the property. Drought-tolerant planting is both environmentally sound and practical, as these plants retain water to provide another barrier of protection between the outside and the home.
A FLOOD OF QUESTIONS
With increasingly frequent hurricanes and flooding, home design needs to finally begin to respond to these recurring events. Mies van der Rohes Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois is located in a flood zone but designed so that the living quarters were raised above flood levels at that time. This resulted in one of the most iconic home designs of the 20th century, essentially proving that great design can be achieved while solving for extreme environments.
In addition, all essential infrastructure should be raised above flood levels. Construct permanent barriers around the home, especially if adapting existing buildings to respond to environmental pressure. Sites should be graded to slope away from the structure. Use concrete piers for foundations or, better still, permeable foundations to relieve hydrostatic pressure. Install sewer backflow valves to prevent sewage flow into the home in the event of flooding.
People looking to insulate existing homes against environmental stressors, like frequent flooding, who cant fully modify an older property can introduce an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) designed to be entirely flood proof, providing a safe place to land if the original propertys defenses are breached by water. These ADUs can be constructed to be entirely off grid and raised above flood level, using nontraditional materials like concrete to insulate against fire and wind events.
RECHARGE YOUR BATTERIES
During the Palisades and Eaton fires in L.A., due to power shut offs plus damages from wind and fire, nearly half a million residents lost power. In a time when many jurisdictions are aggressively moving toward exclusively electric power, hardships are compounded by loss of power as people are left unable to heat their homes or cook their meals even if they have not been directly impacted. It is imperative that homes can weather a crisis by having enough independent energy to power their essential services.
Electric power, especially when obtained from renewable sources like solar panels, is a more economical and environmentally responsible option. If this is coupled with adequate battery storage to power the homes essential services, it is easier to weather a crisis. Rolling power shut offs are also becoming increasingly common in response to scorching temperatures around the country, so energy independence should become a priority for homeowners to insure themselves against an outage that is a direct result of environmental stress.
BETTER, STRONGER, SMARTER
After the January wildfires, the City of Los Angeles released an emergency declaration to clear the way to rebuild homes as they were and allow rebuilding like for like. While well intentioned and sweeping in its reach, this declaration should be strongly resisted. We must oppose the temptation to recreate exactly what was lost and instead focus on creating a model for development that minimizes the chance of destruction occurring again.
With climate change and extreme weather events happening with increased frequency, we need to adjust to this new reality by hardening our homes, both existing and new, and embracing the opportunity to rebuild better, stronger, and smarter for future generations.
Nerin Kadribegovic is founder and principal at Kadre Architects.
We are fully committed to AI adoption, the CEO told me, proud of the companys recent employee training initiatives.
But is AI just another tool in their toolbox, or a new way of working? I asked.
Silence.
Your number one enemy is the lack of an answer to this question, I continued. Your employees are hearing doomsday predictions about how AI will soon eliminate their jobs, so they resist and reject these technologies. Most importantly, they have no idea who they will become after AI is adopted, I concluded.
This isnt the first time Ive witnessed this overly enthusiastic, roll-the-dice approach to AI. Once again, technologists are scaring business leaders into embracing the latest technologywithout any business context or strategy. The results are always the same: high resistance, early failures, disappointment, and no real return on investment. Gartner has rightfully crowned this as the hype cycle.
The AI world is now divided into fans and foes. The fans cite endless statistics, insisting that adopting AI is absolutely criticalotherwise, extinction looms. (Case in point: the CEO who famously fired 80% of his staff for failing to embrace AI. A masterclass in fearmongering.) The foes, meanwhile, wave a recent MIT study as proof that the benefits of this technology are overstated. That study found only 5% of task-specific AI tools were successfully deployed in organizationsclear evidence of the challenge in specialized AI rollout. In contrast, 40% of generic generative AI tools (LLMs) succeeded, often driven by employee initiative rather than top-down directives. The foes refrain: Leave us alone. Well get there when we get there.
URGENCY WITHOUT STRATEGY
Both camps wield data devoid of context or direction. They pursue technology for technologys sake, forgetting that organizations do not exist simply to use the latest tools. Tools are just thattools. Its strategy that should be steering the companys investments and efforts. But what if we dont have the answers yet? What if we are navigating uncharted territory, still assembling the puzzle? Sometimes, the unknowns far outweigh the newly discovered. Welcome to the world of real strategy.
Strategy, by definition, is not an insurance policy. It comes with no guarantees. A real strategy embraces riskthe possibility of failure from both external changes and internal missteps. Competence in strategy means being able to say, I dont know, and still move forward. Strategies do not need all the answers up front; they need built-in flexibility to adapt as the unknown becomes known, and to guide the organization toward its goals. Absent a strategy, AI becomes a patchwork of experiments with no clear success metrics. With strategy, every effort is framed by the possibilityand definitionof success.
BEYOND CORPORATE STRATEGY: PERSONAL STRATEGY
Given the fear AI stirs among workers, organizations must consider an additional layer: personal strategy.
The World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, 39% of workers core skills will be different. The most importantand fastestgrowing skills include:
AI and big data
Analytical thinking
Creative thinking
Resilience, flexibility, and agility
Technological literacy
Leadership and social influence
Curiosity and lifelong learning
Systems thinking
Talent management
Motivation and self-awareness
Networks and cybersecurity
With so much reskilling ahead, employees need their own personal strategy, a thoughtful approach to letting go of outdated skills and embracing new ones. They need to design their roles in the context of these new capabilities and chart a path to their next career milestone. Just as companies challenge employees to automate tasks with AI, they should also challenge them to envision how they will evolve, and what new talents they must develop.
THE 3 PERSONALITIES
While technology changes rapidly, the human response to change remains remarkably consistent. I am not referring to resistance, but to the varied ways people adopt change. Looking back at past transformations, we can identify three distinct personalities of change adoption:
The efficient adopter: Do less, betterThis employee leverages new technology to reduce routine workload, focusing on accuracy and quality. They use technology to deepen their organizational competence.
The effective adopter: Do more, fasterBy embracing automation, this employee increases both capacity and output, positioning themselves as creators of greater value.
The evolving adopter: Do differentlyThis employee uses the technology not just to improve, but to redefine their role completely. They explore new responsibilities and avenues previously unavailable.
The technology may be identical, but employees will utilize it according to their comfort and strategy, each seeking a different outcome. All three types enhance performance and contribution, but through individually tailored strategic approaches.
Giving employees a choice reduces fear, fosters control, and allows progress at their own pacewithin the companys broader AI adoption journey.
FROM PERSONALITIES TO A JOURNEY
In my experience, empowering people to select their personal path accelerates adoption. Often, these three personalities become a sequence of milestones. Employees may start as efficient adopters, progress to effective adopters as confidence grows, and ultimately become evolving adopters. Freedom from fearmongering about job loss fosters a human-centric, resilient approach to technologyand to change more broadly. In Next Is Now!, I argued that the true measure of competitiveness is not in skills or products, but in the speed and scope of adapting to change. Recent World Economic Forum reports reinforce these as essential skills for thriving in our new realitycapabilities that transcend AI and will remain relevant through future upheavals.
When steel-based construction emerged in 1890, cities like London and Paris limited building heights to 10 stories, clinging to the old world of concrete-based construction. New York City, on the other hand, had the visionand the strategyto embrace skyscrapers, accelerating technology adoption and surpassing its European rivals.
The fear of change, and the hype surrounding new technologies, is nothing new. The lesson: Provide strategic context and human compassion; skip the unnecessary fights and harvest the benefits faster.
Lior Arussy, author of Dare to Author! and chairman of ImprintCX.
Its been a long, hot summer for Americas universities. Columbia, accused by the Trump administration of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, settled with the federal government for a whopping $200 million, while Harvard is struggling to defend itself against allegations that it unduly favored some students based on ethnicity, in violation of the prohibition to consider race in college applications. Similar cases abound, making it seem as if our institutions of higher education are little more than heated ideological battlegrounds, offering students an uncertain future and therefore, considering the ever-rising price of tuition, a risky bet.
Apologies, then, for spoiling a perfectly good bout of alarmism. Im afraid I have a bit of good news: The kids are all right.
First, more of them will be heading over to the quad in the next few weeks than at any other time in recent memory. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center[DA1] , freshman enrollment rose by 5.5% in fall 2024 and total enrollment rose 4.5%, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
What explains this optimism and commitment to higher education, even as so much of the news coming from colleges these days is grim? Simple: Contrary to what some pundits would have us believe, young Americans arent heated partisans looking for an unending string of political kerfuffles, nor are they spoiled brats who feel entitled to lifes fineries. They are, in fact, hardworking, tough minded, and practical.
I know this because my company, Scion owns and operates apartment housing for college studentsmore than 94,000 apartments in 82 colleges and universities across 35 stateswhich means we have about a decades worth of hard data about college students and the choices they make, providing far more valuable insights than talk radio hyperbole or politically motivated op-eds.
WHAT THE DATA SHOWS
What, then, does the data tell us about our young?
Lets start with the most fundamental question, namely what is it that college students actually value? To hear many in the mainstream press tell it, the members of Generation Z are a gaggle of divas in training, chasing, as one recent headline breathlessly put it, amenities, aesthetics, and their own mini universe. Unless an apartment building comes with its own organic vegetable garden or a soy latte station, it wont pass muster with the young and the restless.
The numbers, thankfully, tell a very different story. Everywhere you look, college students across the country from all socioeconomic backgrounds are a much more sober and serious-minded bunch. Our data shows that their ideal property is a rental going for somewhere around $850 to $925 a month, typically at or slightly above the average local rent. Proximity to their school is valued; extravagant amenities are not. That is, with a few caveats: As our numbers [DA2] show, 14.8% of the decision to choose one residential accommodation over another is predicated on access to study rooms and fitness centers, two perks that are emblematic of a focused, healthy lifestyle. Safety, too, is a major concern, with students prioritizing buildings that take safety and security seriously.
Swing suites, rock climbing walls, and other lavish treats account for about 3% of the decision, proving that young Americans, so often maligned as failing toas the slang term goes”adult, are actually much more adept at making sensible, well-rounded decisions than we give them credit for.
The same insight emerges when we analyze our most active and in-demand student rental markets. Sure, there are a few glittery campuses in Cambridge, Massachusetts or New Haven, Connecticut that still attract much more than their share of coverage and attention, but American students are overall uninterested in this hullaballoo. For the most part, they still see college as precisely the platform it was always designed to be: a place to gain an education that will catapult them to a better, more lucrative future. This makes universities like Texas A&M, that offer students a good and practical education at a reasonable price, much more attractive than youd think if you simply read the mainstream press and shared its obsession with the Ivies.
RETHINK THE APPROACH
Im sharing these statistics not only as a general cultural panacea, but also as an invitation to rethink our approach to a growing and often misunderstood marketplace. This year, college enrollment in the U.S. across undergraduate and graduate levels surpassed pre-pandemic rates for the first time, rising by 4.5%, or 817,000 students. All signs suggest that the number will continue to grow.
Which leaves us with a critical question: Will we continue to treat young American adults as a generation oscillating between ideological inflammations and self-involved consumption? Or will we recognize them as what they actually are, a much more astute, responsible, and practical bunch than we graybeards sometimes like to admit?
The answer is crucial for anyone interested in marketing anything to Generation Z, from a college degree to an apartment. We have the technology we need to help us offer products and services based on real, actionable insights, and cater to a new generation of Americans coming into its own. And we can easily fix a lot of whats ailing college students. But that would require focusing on housing, not hype, and on products instead of prejudices. Its time we listened to the data and welcomed a new cadre of eager men and women into the fold as equal partners in the never-ending and miraculous project that is growing the American economy.
Rob Bronstein is the CEO of The Scion Group.
Grindrs days as a public company could be numbered.
The hookup and dating app, which went public via a SPAC merger in fall 2021, announced Tuesday that its largest shareholders, Raymond Zage and James Luwho led the companys go-public effortswere exploring the possibility of acquiring Grindrs outstanding stock, which would take the company private again.
The confirmation of Lu and Zages goal of taking the company private followed reporting on Monday from Semafor, which outlined that a recent Grindr stock slide led a lender to seize shares that at least one of the men had used to back a personal loan.
Semafor reported that the two were in talks with Fortress Investment Group to take on debt that would allow them to buy Grindr out at $15 a share. Grinder stock (NYSE: GRIND) closed at $12.72 a share on Wednesday.
Grindr declined to comment on the buyout effort beyond a statement it released Tuesday. Fortress Investment Group declined to comment.
Collectively, Zagethe Singapore-based CEO of investment firm Tiga Investmentsand Lu, a former Amazon and Baidu executive, collectively control more than 60% of the companys shares. Because Lu is Grindrs board chair and Zage sits on the board, the company said it had established a committee of independent directors that will evaluate any potential future offer.
Highs and lows
This year has been a mixed bag for the companys stock price.
In June, it hit its highest price since the IPO, rising to $24.73. Since then, it has been on the downswing, dropping 12%. Since early September, the stock has dropped 3% in value.
It also saw a drop in early September after Ningi Researchwhich bills itself as doing “investigative reporting on public companies”revealed a short position on Grindr. (Ningi Research has also released reports this year on coconut water company Vita Coco and financial services company Marex alongside short positions in both companies.)
Ningi’s report outlined allegations that the company is manipulating its user numbers due to a change in how it counts paid users. Other claims in the report include allegations that the apps core experience is being diluted by its efforts to broaden its offering into a global gayborhood in your pocket.
Grindr also declined to comment on the Ningi report.
In its latest earnings report in August, Grindr posted a 27% year-over-year increase in revenue for its second quarter. Alongside Grindr’s Q2 earnings, CEO George Arison debuted his plan to start adding more AI-powered features for the apps highest-paying users, rebuilding the app around gAI (pronounced gay I).
Also this year, Grindr has been undertaking its first foray into telehealth. In May, the company unveiled Woodwork, a direct-to-consumer service for erectile dysfunction medications.
As Arison told Fast Company in May, he has viewed Grindr’s success as a public company as a way to push for more acceptance of the LGBTQIA+ community more broadly. “Part of our mission has to be we do super well as a business and we force everybody to change,” he said.
If you have ever welcomed a new baby into the world, you know the mix of hope and uncertainty that comes with those first days. For decades, newborn screening has been a quiet triumph of public health, catching rare but serious conditions before symptoms appear and giving families a head start on care. Now, genomic newborn screening, which includes whole genome sequencing, is poised to take this life-saving work further by screening for hundreds of genetic conditions at birth and changing the standard of care.
FROM RESEARCH TO REAL-WORLD IMPACT
The GUARDIAN study is pioneering genomic newborn screening in New York City. As the largest genomic newborn screening program of its kind in the U.S., GUARDIAN has shown how many more conditions can be diagnosed with early genomic screening. Researchers at Boston Childrens Hospital, the New York State public health laboratory, Columbia University, and New York-Presbyterian have screened more than 15,000 newborns. Research published last fall from the first 4,000 newborns found that more than 3% of those babies received an actionable diagnosis. This unlocked opportunities for treatment and care long before symptoms would appear.
The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted this work to end the diagnostic odyssey, including the story of Lili Hasse and her daughter Margot, from the GUARDIAN study. Diagnosed through GUARDIAN as an infant with CDKL5 deficiency disordera condition that causes seizures and developmental delaysMargot was able to see a specialist right away and connect with a support group. While many families face years before receiving an answer, Margots early diagnosis meant timely treatment. Today, thanks to medications, supplements, diet, and therapy, she has near complete seizure control, and emerging gene therapies may offer even more hope.
The difference is striking: Conditions we typically diagnose on average seven to 11 years later were identified close to birth. That means faster answers, less uncertainty, and more intervention opportunities. Beyond the data, weve seen the power of early testing to help doctors make better decisions, connect families with clinical trials, and ensure equity so that every baby, no matter their background, can benefit.
STATE AND FEDERAL PROGRESS: A TURNING POINT
In a time when so many issues divide us, genomic newborn screening offers common ground. Leaders from across the political spectrum are taking action to ensure children can have the healthiest possible start, with bills being introduced at the state and federal level. This shared commitment is fueling progress across states, health systems, research institutions, and our nation.
This summer, Florida passed the Sunshine Genetics Act, establishing the nations first state-run genomic newborn screening program. By expanding access, investing in education, and ensuring that genomic screening reaches every community, Florida is sending a clear message: The future of newborn screening is here. And with New York continuing to lead in research through GUARDIAN, were seeing proof that genomic newborn screening is both scalable and impactful.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced a $14.4 million grant from the Common Fund Venture Program for BEACONS (Building Evidence and Collaboration for GenOmics in Nationwide Newborn Screening), which will be the is the first multi-state initiative in the U.S. to integrate whole genome sequencing into public health newborn screening. The program will enroll up to 30,000 newborns across as many as 10 states, further building upon the momentum of GUARDIAN, Sunshine Genetics, and other research that is showcasing the power of an actionable genetic diagnosis at birth.
LOOKING AHEAD
A diagnosis in the first days of life can mean access to targeted treatments, better care planning, and peace of mind for families. It can save years of uncertainty and transform lives. I see the benefits of early diagnosis every day in my work at GeneDx. Every child that is tested using this technology strengthens our knowledge base, helping us provide even more precise answers for the next child and family.
September was Newborn Screening Awareness Month, serving as a reminder of whats possible when science, policy, the private sector, and patient advocacy come together. The tools are here. The evidence is clear. And with collaboration across stakeholders, genomic newborn screening can become the standard of care for every newborn in America.
Britt Johnson, PhD, FACMG, is head of medical affairs at GeneDx.
We dont fully understand human biology. Not proteins, or cells or tissuesand certainly not how they all interact in the dynamic systems that make up our body.
I believe AI is the answer to that problem. It offers the promise of a step-change in data analysis and eventually will understand our bodies processes at a fundamental level. It will solve biology.
But it cant be done by generalist large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Were going to need domain-specific agentic software that plans, acts, and adapts. The sort of AI that can support us across messy, multimodal workflows inherent to biological research. This is how we unlock the medicines and treatments that society needs to tackle the most urgent diseases on our doorstep.
But how much does the pharmaceutical industry agree with this? How do they see agentic AI?
We commissioned a report, uncovering what 202 members of the pharmaceutical industry, chosen from various roles across the U.S. and Europe, expect from agentic AI.
The data is clear, and sometimes surprising: When it comes to agentic AI, the industry is convinced, but cautious. Success will hinge on fixing data fundamentals, building trust, and meeting people where they work.
WHAT IS AGENTIC AI GOOD FOR?
Here are the two most important areas we identified where pharma believes agentic AI can add value.
First is in handling data. The unsexy stuff: harmonizing, cleaning, and stitching data across different data modalities. If an agent can make siloed patient data analysis-ready in a secure manner, thats the bedrock for further advances.
The second is in early target discovery. Agentic AI can autonomously scan literature and datasets to form hypotheses on its own, then test them in robotic lab settings. This will speed up drug pipelines and improve the probability of success of clinical trials.
But theres a divide in enthusiasm for agentic AI. Executives love it (79.4% of C-level executives and vice presidents rated it very important or top priority). But on the front lines, scientists and analysts are more reserved.
I read this as a demand signal. AI agents must deliver measurable gains for enthusiasm at the top to become adopted at the bench. Its a classic pattern for when a new platform hits enterprise: Vision sells the first pilot, but only reductions in timetoinsight and insight quality improvements scale it.
And of course pharmas appetite will depend on the cost of the meal. Perhaps surprisingly, we found a meaningful slice of enterprises allocating eightfigure budgets to agentic AI implementation. But others havent even named a line item yet.
I think that will give us a twospeed market: Fast movers with a budget to match will standardize on an agentic backbone; cautious adopters will pilot targeted use cases with clear ROI. Agentic AI providers offering onramps, i.e. start small, scale to enterprise, will win.
TRUST NEEDS TO BE EARNED
But none of this matters if users cant trust what their AI is telling them. And there is still work to do to convince industry users. Only half of the respondents would trust an AI to give them consistently correct answers. And that drops to 40% for making decisions about a drug pipeline, or even protecting intellectual property.
There are different ways to read this. ChatGPT has a reputation for hallucinating responses. Biotech has so far failed to bring a completely novel, AI-discovered target to market. Perhaps the technology is just not mature enough to be trusted with the big decisions? Even if that is true now, the AI industry is like a French cheeseit matures quickly. For example, standard large language models (the basis of agentic systems) fail at complex biological reasoning. But recent research shows they can be dramatically improved through specific reinforcement training.
My take is that agentic has a communication issue rather than a technical one. Agentic AI has moved so quickly that the details of what it can and cant do can appear fuzzy. Pharmaceutical executives are masters of decision making based on data analysis. There simply isnt enough well-articulated information out there for them to make a firm decision on agentic AI yet. Even the enthusiastic early adopters may flinch at being asked to trust an unproven, poorly understood, agentic system with their crown jewels.
WALK THE WALK, THEN TALK ABOUT IT
What our report says to me is that we need to put more work into explaining and demonstrating what agentic AI can do, and what it cant do (yet). We need to show clear proof points, minus the hypebut that must be in the real world, not confined to academic publications.
For pharmaceutical companies to truly buy into what we believe, the products need to speak for themselves. Were on the cusp of a great shift in the way the pharmaceutical industry works. Those that can show that agentic technology works will reap the rewards.
Thomas Clozel is cofounder and CEO of Owkin.
Walmart will be putting millions of sensors on its pallets across its supply chain chain, in a move that technology partner Wiliot is calling “the first large-scale deployment of ambient Internet of Things (IoT)” sensors in the retail industry.
The technology is currently deployed in 500 Walmart locations, and the retail giant plans to expand nationwide in 2026.
The ambient IoT sensors are battery-free and operate by harvesting energy from sources such as radio waves, light, motion, and heat, according to CNBC.
The wide rollout will cover 4,600 Walmart Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets, and over 40 distribution centers, generating high-resolution supply chain data that feeds into Walmart’s AI systems. The retail giant has one of the biggest supply chain networks in the U.S.
“We’re not only optimizing our supply chain to make faster, smarter inventory decisions, but we’re also tackling one of the hardest problems in retailknowing exactly what we own and where it is at any given moment,” Greg Cathey, Walmart senior vice president of transformation and innovation, said in a statement. “This enhanced visibility helps us deliver the consistent value, quality, and experience our customers expect.”
With this move, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant is aiming to improve its supply chain efficiency, accuracy about its inventory, and cold chain compliance, with real-time insights on what merchandise is owned and where it is at any moment.
Walmart financials
Shares of Walmart (WMT) were up over 1% by the close of the market on Wednesday.
The retail giant’s fiscal second quarter earnings report for 2026 included $116.9 billion in revenue, an increase of $2.7 billion, or 2.3%, over last year. Consolidated net income was $4.1 billion, up 1.3%, and diluted earnings per share (EPS) was $1.24, a 5.1% increase compared to $1.18 last year.
