 |
|
|
|||||
In early 2022, the meal delivery company I founded, Tovala, went out to raise $100mm from venture capitalists. Our business could not have been hotter. Wed crossed $110mm of revenue, growing over 100% YoY. We had retention that was 34 times better than other meal delivery services. We had low awareness, lots of room for product innovation, and a seemingly clear path to an IPO. Then the war broke out in Ukraine, and capital markets started to get spooked. All of the sudden, fast-growing, unprofitable consumer businesses were out of vogue. We managed to raise $32mm, not a small sum, but it felt like a failure. It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to us. A new game That struggle made us realize the game had changed. Investors no longer wanted to fund unprofitable growth. In fact, they might never fund unprofitable growth in our category again. So we had to find a way to stretch that $32mm as far as possible. That was easier said than done. In 2021, we burned $26mm. We had to change how we operated Tovala. Fast. This was more than just cutting some costs. It meant a complete shift in mindset of every team member. For years we had been focused on scaling as quickly as possible. For example, for our operations team, that meant thinking about how we could safely fulfill an increasing number of meals every week and, in their spare time, figuring out how to improve our margins. We had to flip that mindset on its head. And instead of thinking about rapid scaling, think about where we could find efficiencies in the business. We started to repeatedly pound the drumbeat of profitability. We talked about it at every company all hands, and most importantly, we helped everyone understand why it mattered. We celebrated wins as small as a slight reduction in our AWS fees and as big as launching new product offerings. We got much more disciplined with hiring and performance management, pushed every team to identify margin wins, and we scrutinized our P&L for any waste. We found big levers on pricing and marketing spend and small levers in renegotiating many contracts. It all mattered. Focus, focus, focus What most surprised me during this period was not just our teams ability to execute. It was the value of focus. Wed built a company culture that was frugal and yet, when the team was tasked with finding waste and inefficiencies, it was everywhere. With the benefit of hindsight, its clear to me that it is not realistic to prioritize growth, (which the team had been doing for several years), while simultaneously having real rigor on minimizing all waste and inefficiency. We ultimately achieved our goal. We havent raised a single dollar since that $32mm fundraise. Weve been profitable for two years. And weve built a culture that can operate in the chapter were now in: one defined by growth and profitability.
Category:
E-Commerce
In a perfect world, my job wouldnt exist. I’m a consumer privacy advocate, which means I spend my days fighting for something that should be automatic: your right to control and protect your own personal information. Unfortunately, we dropped the ball. In the era of social media and hyper-targeted ads, we didnt build the right privacy infrastructure to protect ourselves. Instead, we let tech companies sell us the story that knowledge is power and data is the price. Yes, knowledge is power. But dataa dry, emotionless word for who and what we are as humansshould be our super power. It should be ours to control and use to improve our lives, not just something companies profit from while leaving us vulnerable to harm. Now, AI is making this dynamic worse. As we enter the AI Age, our datawho and what we arehas become more valuable, and more vulnerable, than ever. Weve got OpenAIs CEO dreaming of a day when every conversation youve ever had in your life, every book youve ever read, every email youve ever read, everything youve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context. Weve got tech companies building wearable devices to track our emotions claiming that the only way AI can be effective is if it can know how were feeling in real time. Were rapidly entering a future where wearing smart glasses on our faces capable of recording and having AI process everything around us will be normal. Weve got AI chatbots passing themselves off as real therapists to get people to share their deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings. Some of those people have died by suicide after long conversations, fed by deeply personal data, that spiraled out of control. In the AI Age, personal data isnt just a record of who we are. Its our actions, transactions, locations, conversations, preferences, inferences, and vulnerabilities. Its our identities, our intimate selves, our hopes, dreams, fears, and flaws. And in a future full of AI friends, AI therapists, and AI agents, this data wont just reflect who we are: it will help shape who we become. Leaving all that in the hands of companies with questionable ethics, or governments with shifting priorities, is a dangerous bet. We need better options. A deliberately oversimplified history of privacy Before we look ahead, it can be helpful to remember how we got here. In Biblical times, privacy was a nope. God was all-seeing, and surveillance was divine. Take Hebrews 4:13 for example: And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. The Middle Ages didnt offer much privacy either. People often lived on top of each other and were literally all up in each others most intimate business. The Renaissance rolled around and privacy burst onto the scene, thanks in large part to the printing press. Give people access to more books, and, it turns out, they tend to go off by themselves, silently read, and nurture internal private thoughts. The Age of Enlightenment saw the concept of personal privacy start trending. Private thoughts, notions of personal property rights, even the idea that your mail shouldn’t be read by strangers started becoming normal. The Industrial Age brought more than factories, trains, and booming cities. Personal privacy rights started getting written into law. The US Bill of Rights gave people the right to be protected from unreasonable search. British Common Law gave us protections against harms like defamation (privacy for your reputation) and trespass (private property). In 1890, the right to privacy was born. In an essay of the same name, lawyers Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis argued that people have the right to be let alone. It wasnt just peoples property that should be protected from intrusion, they wrote, but also their thoughts and emotions. Privacy as a civil liberty starts to take shape. Then the Technology Age comes along, and things get complicated. Telephones mean wiretapping. Cameras mean surveillance. World Wars I and II saw the rise of government intelligence agencies. The Cold War brought with it many spy vs spy vs spy games. Governments learned to love snooping. George Orwell wrote 1984. Privacy gets kicked in the teeth. In response, people decided they needed laws to better protect them from government surveillance. Germany adopted the worlds first data protection law in 1970. The US passed the Privacy Act of 1974 The Internet Age clicks on and things go downhill for privacy real fast. Social media, targeted advertising, cookies tracking us all around the web, phones pinging our locations everywhere we go, the rise of big data: privacy begins to enter a death spiral. The definition of privacy swings from the right to be let alone to something called contextual integrity. This is the idea that our personal information will be collected, but will only be shared with those we choose, and only when we want it shared, based on context and consent. But his definition of privacy fails miserably because it turns out that our personal information is quite valuable. Over time, it became the norm for companies to bury consent in terrible privacy policies and behind Click to Agree links. There are some legal data rights, if you live somewhere lucky enough to have them. Laws like Europes GDPR or Californias CCPA give you the right to know whats collected about you, to delete it, or opt out of having it sold. But even with those protections, todays most stringent privacy rules and systems are struggling to kep up with the social media age, let alone whats coming next. Now were entering the AI Age and the Grim Reaper is standing right there, glaring at privacy, ready to usher it to the eternal hereafter. AI could doom privacy or it could save it These days, its not just what were watching or buying that is being surveilled. Its every single aspect of our existence: our facial expressions, the thoughts in our language. The potential abuse of this technology for privacy is staggering. And were helping. Performing real time facial recognition on the missed connection on the train so you know where they live? Check. Granting access to our email, our calendar, our credit card info, our hopes and dreams to an AI agent to help order groceries, book flights, or make our lives a little easier? Check. Pouring our hearts out to our AI therapist or girlfriend because were feeling lonely or too shy to share these thoughts with a real person? Check. (The top self-reported use case for AI in 2025 is therapy and companionship.) What does privacy mean in an era of AI therapists and companions and agents that work in ways no one quite understands? We dont know how these AI models work, yet were being told to give them all our very intimate, personal information so they can work better for us? The idea of privacy in the AI Age feels like its come full circle, like were returning to those Biblical times dominated by some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing entity. But even if some people are becoming convinced it is, AI isnt God. AI is a mix of code and algorithms and human decisions, often with the goal of building power and making profits. But theres some good news. AI could help save privacy too. Its time for the next printing press To reclaim privacy in the AI Age, wed be wise to borrow a page from the past. Six hundred years ago, the printing press cracked the world open. It turned knowledge from something hoarded into something accessible. People could now carry ideas into the forest, read them in private, and come back changed. That one invention would later help spark the Enlightenment, a revolution in how people thought about power, truth, and freedom. People could read in private. Think in private. And eventually, demand the right to live in private. The printing press helped transform thinking and innovation, because it gave birth to the very idea of individual privacy. Today, we need a new printing press: a system that gives us control over the story of our livesour dataand, perhaps, sparks our next advances. Let me introduce you to a scrappy, overlooked right called data portability. At its core, this dry-sounding term means something radical: that you can easily and securely move your data where you want, when you want, and actually use it to serve you, not just companies. But theres a big gap between that vision and our reality. Too often, data portability tools are buried and convoluted, or completely nonexistent. Ever tried downloading your data and ended up with a giant, unreadable zip file youre not sure what to do with? Thats not empowerment; thats a digital paperweight. Data portability is the underdog of privacy rights. Barely known, rarely prioritized. But if developed and backed with intention, it could reshape the future. Imagine a world where your data isnt trapped in distant data centers. Instead, its close to homein a secure data wallet or pod, under your control. Now imagine pairing that with a loyal personal AI assistant, a private, local tool that lives with you, learns from you (with your permission), and acts on your behalf. Your AI. Not theirs. Heres a simple example: period tracking. It doesnt get much more intimate than that. And in places with abortion bans or restricted healthcare, it doesnt get much more dangerous, either. Right now, millions share that info with apps owned by companies that can sell it or hand it over to law enforcement under subpoena. But imagine if that data lived only in your data pod, controlled only by your AI, to predict symptoms, suggest care, flag concerns, or automatically order chocolate and Advil. With data portability, you can take your data, transfer it to your AI, and use it to benefit you. Thats the difference between being surveilled and being served. And thats just the beginning. Local, controlled AI plus portable, personal data could potentially help us address huge problems like healthcare, climate change, job loss, financial precarity, and unlock services we havent even dreamed of yet. Will it be easy? Nope. The technical and regulatory infrastructure to do this doesnt existyet. Some people, including the founder of the World Wide Web, are working on solutions that could lead there. The incentives to do this the right way arent obvious to everyoneyet. The companies that could help build this infrastructure dont want to prioritize thisyet. But neither did the wealthy and powerful want the printing press. Were at a turning point. If we dont push for systems that give people control over their data, well sleepwalk into a future far more dystopian than divine. But if we doif we build the next printing press for the AI Agewe just might write ourselves into a better story. Control your data, and you control your destiny. Yes, that sounds grand. But once so did the idea of ordinary people owning books. And look what came next. Jen Caltrider is Director of Research and Engagement at the Data Transfer Initiative and formerly led Mozillas Privacy NotIncluded initiative.
Category:
E-Commerce
After more than 70 years, the Ford Motor Co. finally has an architectural centerpiece. The automaker’s new global headquarters has officially opened in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit and within eyeshot of some of the main facilities that have sustained the company for more than a century. Covering 2.1 million square feet and designed by the architecture and design firm Snhetta, the new building sprawls across four circuitous stories. Getting from one side to another is a trek. During a two-hour walking tour of the building, a week ahead of its official opening, I traversed at most a quarter of the overall space. This immense size is the building’s strength, as it allows the company to bring much of its executive, engineering, design, and fabrication teams under one (very large) roof for the first time. About 2,000 Ford employees work there now, with around 4,500 expected by 2027. Jim Dobleske, CEO of Ford Land, the company’s real estate arm, says the headquarters was designed to enable collaboration and a more flexible approach to office worktwo post-pandemic prerequisites. More importantly, the building is meant to streamline how different arms of the company work together, using proximity, shared resources, and the simplicity of a single building to break down historic silos. “It’s not just a building,” Dobleske says, walking through its airy front lobby. “It’s a tool.” The Ford of 2025 is a different company than its mid-20th-century self, then still heavily influenced by the top-down approach of founder Henry Ford, even years after his death. Still, there are strands of the corporate DNA that have carried through over the company’s 122-year history. Ford has historically been a deeply stratified corporation, with a longstanding emphasis on command and control. Today, its evolving architecture is a reflection of a company that’s reconsidering its approach and priming itself for a particularly dynamic era in the history of automaking. [Photo: Ford] The new building sits 2 miles away from Ford’s former headquarters, a 12-story modernist box known as the “Glass House,” which has been the buttoned-up main office for 2,000 of the corporation’s higher-ups since it opened in 1956. Located on the other side of a highway cloverleaf and moated by a wide belt of lawn and parking lots, the building was emblematic of Ford’s corporate architectural sensibility, as well as its corporate structure. The “Glass House,” Ford’s former headquarters. [Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images] The new building is designed as the new hub of an increasingly concentrated campus of Ford buildings, situated within walking distance to an estimated 14,000 Ford employees, each of whom can use the building’s common spaces, bookable meeting rooms, and 1,000-seat food court. That includes staff at the product development center, engineers from the recently renovated Ford Engineering Lab across the street, and researchers in its components laboratory. “It’s the most horizontally and vertically integrated building I know of,” says Craig Dykers, cofounder of Snhetta and architect of the building. His firm also created the campus master plan that has reshaped the corporate landscape of Ford. During the tour, Dykers stood near a window and pointed out the buildings and facilities in the area that are all part of the Ford machine. “We took a lot of facilities that were spread all over and pushed them together,” he says. [Photo: Ford] [Photo: Ford] Inside the HQ A few finishing touches remain before the project is officially complete in 2027including parking garages that will be tucked beneath additional performative landscape that’s able to divert and clean stormwater and building runoffbut the building is already humming with activity. From the outside, Ford’s new headquarters is a gleaming spaceship of a building, with scalloped edges covered by flat and subtly shaded glass. The building’s plan, seen from overhead, is of three hexagons arranged into a kind of triangle, with spaces cu out from their centers to create large internal courtyards. [Photo: Ford] Walking through the building, its sheer size is hard to fully grasp, and parts can feel disorienting. But there are even more places where a corner is turned, or a stairway is climbed, to reveal a view down a corridor that resets the internal map. Glimpses can often be seen of the four accessible courtyard spaces, each of which has been designed by Snhetta to reflect a different regional habitat. The largest courtyard, inspired by the Great Lakes, features cascades of stone, two bookable meeting canopies, and large sliding doors that connect to seating in the building’s dining area. [Photo: Ford] This area is accessible to any Ford employee, even those not working within the headquarters building. Jennifer Kolstad, global design and brand director at Ford Land, says it’s part of the company’s effort to rethink its global real estate portfolio and make more spaces more accessible for different types of work, be it a lunch meeting or a heads-down cram session in a private booth. It’s a far cry from the culture of desks that long reigned at Ford, she says. [Photo: Ford] The design, informed by Kolstad’s deep experience in interior architecture and hospitality design, is intended to create a human scale. “The challenge of this is 2.1 million square feet at human scale,” she says. Working closely with the architects at Snhetta, Ford’s design team integrated hotel lobby-style seating across the building, as well as grand staircases that double as seating for informal meetings or large gatherings. [Photo: Ford] The right amount of transparency With so many parts of the company situated in this one building, including highly sensitive operations like the development of new car designs, there was a challenge in making the building accessible without completely blowing the doors open. One solution has been the creation of 14 “arrival areas” outside the secured doors of specific business functions. These are café-like seating areas and meeting spaces where people can gather for coffee or a meeting without having to navigate through secured parts of the building. [Photos: Ford] This attempt at openness extends to the architecture itself. Walking through the straight spine that runs between the three hexagons of the building, Dykers points up at a narrow atrium that runs through the top three floors of the building. A skylight pours light down, and people on each floor can get glimpses of what’s happening elsewhere, even if they don’t have the badge to get them through the door. [Photo: Ford] There are four different levels of security in the building, according to Ford Land’s Dobleske, including one for the top floor where there are several design studios that often move full-scale car models and properties across the building’s 22-inch-thick concrete floors. A corporate spy’s dream, these concepts and nascent designs are cleverly obscured behind frosted glass and partitions, while still allowing the skylight and atrium to spread light and views to the floors below. “We still want people to be able to see people and properties moving through the building,” Dobleske says. [Photo: Ford] But there’s a limit to that spirit of transparency, especially when it comes to product development. The design studios are located on the building’s two top floors, including spaces along window-lined edges of the building that could potentially offer views to prying eyes outside. [Photo: Ford] To allow light in while maintaining privacy, the glass that wraps the entire building has been treated with a specially designed frit patterning that obscures the view. In a nod to Ford’s famous logo, the frit is made up of millions of tiny ovalsblack on the interior side of the window and white on the exteriorto help manage heat inside while also preventing design secrets from spilling out. “It took us over a year to develop that,” Dykers says. [Photo: Ford] The design studios are also directly connected to an even more useful space: a large exterior courtyard where scale models and concepts can be given a good look in natural daylight. Elisangela Previte, global business operations manager for Ford Design, says the space makes it much faster for designers to vet their design choices, moving a model out of the controlled environment of the modern design studio and into the harsh glare of the sun. Though there are minor concerns about the potential for drone surveillance, the bigger concern is the geese that are trying to use the courtyard for their nest. Previte says they’re still trying to figure out the right way to keep the geese out. [Photo: Ford] A quick ride in a freight elevator can bring a new model down to the building’s other prize space, a large domed showroom equipped with 10 in-floor turntables to slowly rotate cars, a large overhead light that can emulate light from any time of day, and a large conference room for executive meetings and new car reveals. The showroom also connects to its own courtyard, allowing those formal car design reviews to occur under natural light, and with the benefit of view lines that can stretch 180 feet. It’s the kind of space where the final approval for a new car model can come through or an emerging concept can be doomed to the archives. Each stepfrom a design concept to a full-scale model to a new car approved for productioncan feasibly all happen within this new headquarters building. It’s a radical concentration of abilities for Ford, marking a new approach for a company that can feel steeped in its own history, both for good and for bad. Given the pace of automaking, it will take time for consumers to see what impact all of this has on the cars that Ford produces. But for now, the building itself is a big indication of how the company sees itself evolving in the near term.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||