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Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates, has a low-key terrifying question she throws at those interviewing for a role at her startup. The 23-year-old recently raised a $35 million Series A for Phia, the AI shopping agent she cofounded in April 2025 with her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni. The startup, which has since garnered more than 1 million users and grown revenue elevenfold, is currently valued at around $185 million. Gates recently joined Brian Sozzi, Yahoo Finance executive editor, on the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast and revealed her go-to interview question for prospective candidates. I stole this from another founder, she said. How much do you think California state spends on healthcare? And do a bottoms-up approach for how you would build that out. She told Sozzi, Ill ask that for every single role. Ill ask that for sales, Ill ask that for marketing, Ill ask that for engineering. Its not because she expects candidates to know the answer off the top of their head. Instead, she said it highlights how someone goes through a logical approach to solving that question. Curveball interview questions, designed to surprise candidates and test problem-solving ability or performance under pressure, are famously beloved by founders. Microsoft apparently posed the question “Why are manhole covers round?” to interviewees. Elon Musk asked, “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk 1 mile south, 1 mile west, and 1 mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?” Many will relate to the panicked feeling that arises upon being asked to sell a pen or divulge their greatest weakness. As entry-level roles become scarcer and the competition for top talent grows fiercer, hiring managers are increasingly getting creative to single out the cream of the crop. Still, researchers have questioned the usefulness of trick questions against other evidence-based assessments. As Phia continues to grow, its not the only question Gates has up her sleeve. When it comes to hiring salespeople, she asks candidates the craziest thing theyve done to close a deal. That teaches you a lot about how far theyll go, how dedicated they are to do something, she said. While Phia has accepted no money from Gatess parentsI have a chip on my shoulder, she admitted on the podcastshe did share one of the most important lessons shes learned from her parents about entrepreneurship. “From my dad, I’ve really learned that your team is the core of what you’re building, she said. You can’t do anything without an incredible team.”
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In a time when hiring has slowed dramatically, layoffs have become the norm, and AI has flattened early differentiation, even job titles have blurred. The problem is that capable, experienced people increasingly describe feeling stalled, unseen, or interchangeable in todays workforce. Consider the current landscape of advice to understand the dilemma. People are encouraged to stand out, but without guidance on how to do so. Theyre told to pick a lane and niche down, while careers are becoming more nonlinear. Whats missing is a true strategy that reflects how work actually functions today. Thats where optimal distinctiveness becomes an advantage. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer introduced optimal distinctiveness theory to explain a fundamental human need: to belong and be ourselves at the same time. People do their best when they feel included, safe, and distinctly valuable. When either side of that equation is neglected, performance and well-being suffer, along with employability. Excessive sameness leads to conformity, disengagement, and muted creativity. Excessive difference leads to isolation, friction, or marginalization. In the middle is optimal distinctiveness: where individuality strengthens the group, rather than competing with it. And its a career strategy that meets this moment. Why the Old Career Playbook No Longer Fits the Market The labor market has shifted, but traditional career strategies havent. Job growth is uneven and cautious. Early-career workers are being hit hardest, while senior leaders face roles that are broader, less defined, and more fluid than before. In a 2025 Chief x Harris Poll of women leaders, 83% reported that the career success playbook they were handed early in their careers no longer applies to them. Nearly all described making career moves that defied traditional ideas of safety and linear progression. Across levels, the same concern keeps surfacing in different forms. Early-career professionals wonder how to break through. Mid-career professionals worry about staying relevant. Senior leaders ask how to evolve without losing themselves in the process. Beneath these questions is a shared dilemma: People either generalize themselves so much that they become forgettable, or they describe their work in ways so complex that others cant place them. Neither approach helps in a job market that increasingly rewards clarity and recognizability. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Virgil Abloh, and Staying Distinctive A widely recognized example of optimal distinctiveness in action is Lin-Manuel Miranda. He didnt succeed by blending into Broadway norms or rejecting them outright. Instead, he fused hip-hop, history, and musical theater in a way that was legible to the industry yet unmistakably his own. His work was distinct without being alienatingand that balance is what made it resonate so widely. A less obvious but equally instructive example is Virgil Abloh. Trained as an architect, Abloh moved fluidly between streetwear, luxury fashion, art, and design. Rather than positioning himself as a traditional designeror an outsider disrupting fashion from the marginshe articulated a clear intersectional identity. His work was understandable within established systems yet distinguished by his integration of disciplines that rarely spoke to one another. That clarity made him not only recognizable but also referable. People knew when to call him in, and why his perspective mattered. Together, these examples point to the same lesson: Career advantage today doesnt come from fitting neatly into existing boxes or standing so far outside them that others dont know what to do with you. It comes from being distinct in a way others can recognize, remember, and place. Optimal Distinctiveness as a Career Strategy At work, optimal distinctiveness means being recognizable enough to be relatable and differentiated enough to be memorable. And it matters more as AI accelerates sameness. Human decisionswhether someone is hired, referred, trusted, or rememberedstill hinge on whether someone is easy to understand and clearly valuable. Optimal distinctiveness means using language that’s clear and specific, and often at the intersection of multiple roles or domains. Sarabeth describes herself as a creative disruptor. The phrase is familiar enough to feel accessible, yet specific enough to signal how she works. It gives people an intuitive sense of when and why to engage with her. She sees similar shifts with clients who initially describe themselves through job titles and role-based summaries. One of Sarabeths clients was a senior professional with experience spanning strategy, operations, and organizational development. On paper, her profile looked impressive but interchangeable. But when she reframed her work around the intersection of those domains, her positioning became clearer and more distinct. Instead of being experienced in many things, she became known as an opportunity-spotter who creates sustainable human systems. Once that intersection was articulated, conversations changed, referrals became easier, and the work itself felt more energizing because the language finally reflected how she experienced her contribution. Connecting Identity to Impact This is where optimal distinctiveness aligns closely with my illumination process. Across leadership development and career transitions, the same pattern shows up repeatedly. People create more impact when they reclaim what makes them distinct, clarify which aspects of that distinctiveness matter now, and express it in service of the collective rather than at odds with it. One of my clients, a senior leader at a global life sciences company, approached me about feeling invisible despite a strong track record. She had been rewarded for reliability and execution, but over time had muted the part of herself that excelled at talent development. Through our work, she reframed her role around that strength and intentionally redesigned how she showed up in meetings and strategic conversations. She didnt change jobs, but she changed how she was understood, and her influence expanded almost immediately. Innovation doesnt come from blending in completely, nor from separating yourself entirely. It emerges when people feel secure enough to belong and confident enough to contribute something uniquely their own. Finding Your Optimal Distinctiveness Optimal distinctiveness rarely arises from credential stacking or clever titles. It tends to surface at the intersection of a few core professional identities that you consistently draw on. When people map those identities and ask who they are at the overlap, a form of hybrid expertise often becomes visiblesomething that doesnt fit neatly into a single category but feels accurate and grounding. Naming that expertise usually starts with a core noun that reflects how you operate at workarchitect, builder, connector, translator, catalystfollowed by language that adds precision rather than complexity. The strngest signals narrow understanding instead of expanding it. Pressure-testing that language in conversation is essential. When it fits, people lean in with curiosity rather than confusion. When it doesnt, the awkwardness is usually immediate. In a labor market defined by uncertainty, clarity becomes a form of agency. Optimal distinctiveness gives people a way to shape how theyre understood without contorting themselves to meet outdated expectations. The future of work is unlikely to reward those who conform most smoothly or perform uniqueness most loudly. It will favor those who can articulate who they are, how they create value, and why that combination matters now. If multidimensionality is the reality of modern careers, optimal distinctiveness is a practical way to navigate itstaying visible, relevant, and human in systems that increasingly struggle to see people clearly.
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After a fairly significant hardware upgrade in 2025, its sounding like things will be quieter for the iPhone this year. Bloombergs Mark Gurman reported in his newsletter this week that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will represent minor tweaks from their predecessors and wont be a big update. Much of the attention in fall 2026 is expected to be on Apples first folding phone. Gurman did, however, note that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will have a new camera system with a variable aperture, which caught my eye as a phone camera obsessive. There have been rumors about this for years, but I wasnt expecting it to be perhaps the key feature of what are likely to be this years most popular iPhone models. Thats because variable aperture is an idea thats come and gone in smartphones several times in the past. Does Apple have a truly new take on the concept, or is it just late to the party? {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Multicore\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It\u0027s written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/\u0022\u003Emulticore.blog\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454027,"imageMobileId":91454030,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Aperture 101 Aperture refers to the size of the opening that a lens allows to hit a sensor, or film back in the day. The setting is expressed in whats called f-stops, for example f/1.4 or f/2.0; smaller numbers represent bigger apertures. The larger the aperture, the greater the amount of light, which means the photographer can use a faster shutter speed for a given amount of brightness. Larger apertures also produce a shallower depth of field, allowing the photographer to isolate their subject by blurring the background. Thats not to say that a larger aperture is always desirable. On a manually controlled camera, sometimes its necessary to stop down the lens to a smaller aperture to avoid overexposing the photo in bright conditions. Lenses also generally perform better at medium apertures in terms of sharpness, so its not advisable to shoot wide open at all times unless you know what youre doing. Aperture is an essential parameter for enthusiast photography on dedicated cameras, but it tends to be less of an issue on smartphones. The smaller sensors in use mean that its difficult to get significantly shallow depth of field, while the fully electronic shutters are capable of far faster speeds than any mechanical camera, which virtually eliminates the risk of overexposure. As a result, the vast majority of smartphones have their apertures fixed as wide as possible, since the light-gathering benefits usually outweigh all else. Prior efforts That hasnt stopped smartphone makers trying to make variable aperture a selling point. The Nokia N86 in 2009 was among the firstthough somewhat cropped by todays standards, its 28mm-equivalent f/2.4 lens was considered unusually wide-angle for the time, and automatically stopped down to f/3.2 or f/4.8 depending on the ambient lighting. The N86 also had a mechanical shutter, so the variable aperture did have something of a raison detre. In the era of modern smartphones, Samsung was first to try something similar with the Galaxy S9 in 2018. The aperture was an unusually bright f/1.5 wide-open, while it could also stop down to f/2.4. In practice there was very little difference between the two settings, and the feature was jettisoned two years later for the Galaxy S10. Chinese phone makers soon took the idea to the next level. Huaweis 2022 Mate 50 Pro went all the way from f/1.4 to f/4, letting you dial in ten steps across the range. Xiaomi, meanwhile, had a two-step f/1.4 and f/4 system in the 13 Ultra in 2023, and the following years 14 Ultra featured a stepless f/1.63-f/4 lens that could be set to any aperture you liked. Xiaomis last two flagship phones, howeverthe 15 Ultra and the particularly excellent 17 Ultra by Leicahave abandoned this kind of lens design. If I had to guess, I imagine that the decision was linked to those phones huge telephoto modules; at smartphone scale, variable aperture lenses are a mechanically complicated design that take up a lot of space. But I dont think it will have been a particularly difficult call for Xiaomi to make. In practice, the feature just wasnt that useful. I shot a lot with the 13 Ultra and 14 Ultra, and even though they had biggest-in-class 1 sensors, they would almost always default to larger aperture settings. It would occasionally be useful to be able to stop down to f/4 when taking close-up pictures of food, for example, to render more of the dish in sharper focus, but even then the difference wasnt dramatic. Why Apple? So why might Apple be targeting its own version of a feature that many rivals have attempted and abandoned? Honestly, Im not sure. Perhaps Apple will use a bigger sensor or larger maximum aperture and wants to mitigate the impact on depth of field in edge cases. Maybe it plans to go softer on its heavy-handed image sharpening and lean into traditional optical quality. Or the plan might just be to market the iPhone 18 Pro as the ultimate foodie camera. Im unconvinced itll be the right tradeoff, but Im intrigued to learn more about the implementation. Apple is often known for putting a compelling new spin on existing technology. Just remember, if youre watching the iPhone launch event in September and a section on variable aperture comes up, that this is an idea that much of the industry has already tried and decided wasnt worth pursuing. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/multicore-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Multicore\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It\u0027s written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/\u0022\u003Emulticore.blog\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454027,"imageMobileId":91454030,"shareable":fale,"slug":""}}
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