#really the big question mark is finding a partner who will enable and support a balance of work/life as best as possible
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We’re exploding onto Twitch in a big way, as Travis Legge runs an Trinity Continuum: Aberrant RPG for five players this coming week! The name is Collateral Damage and can be found on this channel at these dates and times https://www.twitch.tv/theonyxpath/:
Session Zero on Tuesday the 23rd at 6pm CST/7pm EST
Session One on Thursday the 25th at 6pm CST/7pm EST
Session Two on Tuesday the 30th at 6pm CST/7pm EST
Players will be:
Dixie Cochran (Onyx Path Internal)
Ashley May (Onyx Path freelancer on Legendlore, DMs Guild creator)
TheConri (GM for Scarred Lands: Pirates of Bloodwater on the Devil’s Luck Gaming channel)
Kassandra Leigh (Player on Scarred Lands: Pirates of Bloodwater)
James Perry (Player on Scarred Lands: Gauntlet of Spiragos on the Roll the Role channel)
As you can read further about down in the Onyx Path Media section below, we aren’t focusing just on Trinity Continuum: Aberrant on Twitch, but on all of our game lines!
Please check it out, subscribe, and share! This is an exciting time for us!
V5 Chicago By Night art by Mark Kelly
As for Trinity Continuum: Aberrant itself – we’re headed into the last week for its Kickstarter, and as our experienced KS backers know: that’s when things get hot!
So far, it has been great seeing people’s passion for the original get rekindled by our Trinity Continuum edition. That’s one of the most satisfying moments our team can get – so thanks to all of you who’ve posted about loving what we’re doing!
It really does mean a lot to all of us to recreate a classic game line while still hitting those touch-points that made the first edition a classic.
Trinity Continuum: Aberrant art by Hive Studios
Kind of along the same line, since we announced that we won’t be having a booth at GenCon 2019 we’ve received more than a few worried messages from folks who, we guess, haven’t read this blog since the beginning of the year.
That’s when I first started talking about how this year is one where the initiatives we’ve been undertaking will start to take off. It’s a year where the company’s ongoing and continual evolution will start to be more overt, with us not necessarily doing things the way we have been since 2012, or even further back when a bunch of us were part of White Wolf.
Not having a booth at GenCon 2019 is part of that evolution. Does it still make sense for us to exert soooo much effort, to bring so many people, to spend so much money, versus taking those amounts of effort, personnel, and cash, and dividing them up through the entire year at different venues?
Especially with our good sales partners at Indie Press Revolution and Studio2 having booths where folks can buy our stuff. With us still having panels where we can chat with attendees face to face. And with our online media allowing us to talk with more and more people every week.
We won’t know until we do it, so we’re doing it. We’ll let you know how it turns out!
The convention starts, for us, next Wednesday, so I’ll be posting this blog next Monday with a few more Gen Con thoughts and info, and then the week after we’ll have a guest blogger in to cover for me.
So. If, after all that, you still haven’t heard:
WE’RE NOT HAVING A BOOTH AT GEN CON 2019 AND WE’RE HAPPY ABOUT IT!
Here again, the map of the exhibit hall showing where our books can be obtained should you feel the urge:
Finally, there are two giant sales going on of our various projects: PDFs at the Christmas in July Sale on DTRPG, and the Dog Days of Summer Sale at Indie Press Revolution where our lots of our Deluxe editions are 50% off!
More info below in the Blurbs section, as we once again give folks an affordable way to explore our many…
Many Worlds, One Path!
BLURBS!
Kickstarter!
The Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter is moving into its last week! We’ve already passed Stretch Goals that are enabling us to recreate missing first edition books, a compilation of the web comic, three sections of a book statting out the characters, digital wallpaper and dice, a backer-only T-Shirt, a jumpstart adventure, a novella, and:
N!WE N!TERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT – A new PDF product discussing the N!WE, the performers and industry personnel, and various elements of professional wrestling in the world of Aberrant!
At $98,000 and climbing, we’ve got many more fantastic Stretch Goal rewards to come, so come check it out! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/trinity-continuum-aberrant
ONYX PATH MEDIA
Onyx Pathcast art by Michael Gaydos
This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features a Deep Dive into Scion 2e with special guest Neall Raemonn Price: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/
And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:
BIG NEWS! With Travis Legge’s hand firmly on the tiller, Onyx Path are embarking on an exciting Twitch adventure in the weeks to come! Please subscribe to our channel here: https://www.twitch.tv/theonyxpath/
Travis is arranging a multitude of actual plays and other livestreams, and will be starting up with an Trinity Continuum:Aberrant actual play very very soon! Please subscribe now so you don’t miss it, and keep an eye open for familiar faces showing up on the channel. We’re very excited about this and hope you will be too.
Meanwhile…
The Onyx Path News is live tonight here! https://www.youtube.com/user/TheOnyxPath
Last week Matthew Dawkins hosted a live Q&A with Ian A. A. Watson regarding the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant RPG and it went spectacularly well. Catch up with it here: https://youtu.be/udT6GEsZ6DI
Matthew also asked three questions to the Onyx Path audience regarding the World of Darkness, in what has proved to be a very popular video: https://youtu.be/06G7gnd5UDs
And we have some new arrivals, including the Hermetic Hipster‘s guide to Mage: The Ascension character creation here: https://youtu.be/_uMiYfvhZMU
Patrick and friends over at http://307rpg.com continue with their rundown of the Vampire: The Masquerade clans! Their show is always worth checking out.
Travis – the man himself – has a Twitch channel you should be subscribing to for all kinds of good content! Give him your support: https://www.twitch.tv/plasticageplays
And here’s Devil’s Luck Gaming, among the premiere actual players out there: https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING
Caffeinated Conquests embark upon The Sacrifice, our Chicago by Night chronicle, but with a big difference: they’re using V20 and one of the characters is a Gargoyle! Check them out here: https://youtu.be/qhKbWicTAt8
The Story Told Podcast continue their epic Dragon-Blooded chronicle with the Fall of Jiara: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/fall-of-jiara-episode-10
Occultists Anonymous, the superb Mage:The Awakening actual play, continues with Episode 29: Soul-O Session – Songbird delves deeper into his soul, exploring his Virtue of Selflessness and works to learn more about himself. https://youtu.be/Cmz6OkxY9Hg
Drop Matthew a message via the contact button on matthewdawkins.com if you have actual plays, reviews, or game overviews you want us to profile on the blog!
Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!
ELECTRONIC GAMING
As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)
ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:
You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).
If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!
Our selection includes these fiction books:
OUR SALES PARTNERS:
We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire
We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game
Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost
Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!:
https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands
Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online
Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/
And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!
Running RIGHT NOW until August 11 is the Dog Days Of Summer Sale! 50% many of our Deluxe Editions!
It’s time for the Christmas In July Sale! Wild savings on PDFs all across DTRPG, including ours! Check it out – it runs until July 31st!
On Sale This Week!
This Wednesday, we are offering both A Light Extinguished, the Scion 2e Jumpstart and Blood Sea: The Crimson Abyss in PDF and physical book PoD versions on DTRPG!
CONVENTIONS!
Gen Con: August 1st – 4th VERY SOON NOW!
Save Against Fear: October 12th – 14th
GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd
We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year!
And now, the new project status updates!
DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):
First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)
M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)
Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)
Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)
Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)
Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)
Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)
W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)
W20 Art Book (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)
Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)
Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)
Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)
Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)
Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)
Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Redlines
Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)
Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)
Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)
Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)
One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)
Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)
Second Draft
Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)
Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)
Development
Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)
M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)
Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)
Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)
Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)
Legendlore core book (Legendlore)
City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)
TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)
Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)
Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)
Manuscript Approval
Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)
Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)
Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)
Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)
Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)
WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)
Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)
Editing
Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)
Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)
DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)
DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)
Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)
TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)
Post-Editing Development
M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)
V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)
V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)
CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)
Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)
Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)
Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)
Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)
Indexing
ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE!
In Art Direction
Contagion Chronicle
VtR Spilled Blood – All the art that is in is approved. Felipe is working on stuff.
Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds
Trinity Continuum Aberrant
Hunter: The Vigil 2e
Ex3 Lunars
They Came From Beneath the Sea
TCFBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers
Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed
Ex3 Monthly Stuff
DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties
DR:E Jumpstart
Deviant for KS
In Layout
M20 Book of the Fallen – Files with Josh
CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel
Dark Eras 2 – Files with Aileen
Proofing
Shunned By the Moon – Errata gathering.
Aeon Aexpansion
C20 Cup of Dreams – This week.
V5: Chicago – Ready for backers pending WW OK.
Geist 2e – Inputting Page XXs, then Indexing.
Signs of Sorcery – Awaiting Errata.
At Press
Dragon Blooded – Deluxe at Studio2.
Dragon-Blooded Cloth Map – At Studio2.
Dragon-Blooded Screen – Shipped to Studio2.
Trinity Core Screen – At Studio2.
TC Aeon Screen – At Studio2.
Book of Oblivion – PoD proofs ordered.
Trinity: In Media Res – PoD proofs ordered.
Scion Jumpstart – PDF and PoD versions on sale this Wednesday!
Scion Ready-Made Characters – PoD proofs ordered.
Blood Sea – PDF and PoD versions on sale this Wednesday!
Trinity Core – Files uploaded to printer.
Trinity Aeon – Files uploaded to printer.
DR: E – final PDF off for approval
Today’s Reason to Celebrate!
Born this day in 1940. Who is Alex Trebek, Canadian-American game show host and producer?
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“People Are Rewarded by Close Looking” – Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press on the Enduring Excitement of Printmaking
By Sarah Evers • May, 2019
Photo by Laurie Fraenkel.
Crown Point Press is not your typical gallery; not often do you find an entire printing operation in the same venue as a dynamic exhibition space. Kathan Brown, a pioneer of printmaking in the San Francisco Bay Area, started Crown Point Press in 1962 in a storefront in Richmond, California. Moving to Berkeley and then Oakland in the early years, and settling in San Francisco in 1986, Crown Point began by printing and publishing Bay Area artists including Richard Diebenkorn, Beth Van Hoesen, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Bechtle. From 1971 through 1976, Brown and her printers also produced artist projects for New York publisher Parasol Press, which sent Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne, and other East Coast artists to work at Crown Point.
What began as a studio focusing on the production of etchings has now expanded to the Crown Point Press of today: a renowned etching studio that is also an authority on printmaking and an important presence in San Francisco’s expanding gallery scene. Crown Point's location around the corner from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one reason why visitors to the gallery come from around the world, but the reputations of its artists and the importance of the books it publishes are a stronger factor. A passion for teaching others about the etching process is an essential component of Crown Point's operations and makes the press stand out from a traditional gallery model.
The underlying message behind all Crown Point's operations is the importance of printmaking, especially etching, along with a passion for keeping the art form alive. Its how-to books on hand-printing processes enable artists anywhere to have successful access. Videos of artists working at the press are available online, so anyone can witness the intricacies of the work. Crown Point Press also hosts summer workshops in which people across a spectrum of experiences can try their hands at etching.
We spoke to Brown about opening her own business, her relationships with local artists, the expansion of the workshop into a gallery, and more.
When did you first become interested in visual art?
I come from an art family. My mother went to the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a practicing artist all her life. She never stopped doing watercolors and drawings, even though it was not easy during the Depression when she was working full-time. My father was a professional photographer and we had a darkroom in our house. I made drawings and paintings with my mother and helped my father develop photographs in our basement. Art was all around me when I was young.
How did you originally become interested in etching?
I studied at Antioch College, which was not known as an art school but had a very good liberal education and was experimental back in the days when most colleges weren’t. When I told my art professor I was going to take a year off to study in London, he offered to get me into the Central School of Art. I said, “I’m not an art major,” and he said, “You should be.” He was persuasive. After a year abroad, I came back to graduate from Antioch with a major in art, and after graduation I returned to London for a second year at Central.
At the end of my second year in London I visited Edinburgh and discovered a dismantled etching press in the backyard of the rooming house where I was staying. The landlady said that students had brought it there to save it from being melted down for scrap during the war. “If you want it, you can take it,” she said. I had a plane ticket to return home, and I turned it in, got a ticket on a freighter, and took the press with me. That press is here at Crown Point now, though we have others we use more.
The press from Scotland in the Crown Point studio.
How did Crown Point Press begin?
In 1959, soon after I finished my schooling, I married Jeryl Parker, an artist whom I had met in London. We installed my press in the studio of an artist-friend, John Ihle, and lived in an apartment across the street. Our son Kevin was born in 1961. In 1962 Jeryl and I rented a storefront space in Richmond, an industrial town next to Berkeley, and lived in a little apartment in the back. We set up an etching workshop in the storefront; that year I got a business license for Crown Point Press. Jeryl was teaching at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and I ran the shop. I didn't publish at the time; a few local artists paid an hourly fee to work in the studio and have technical advice from me. I was also working as a typist for a company that supplied temporary services to banks and insurance companies.
In 1964, Jeryl and I separated and my grandmother helped me buy a house in Berkeley; it had a big basement for the press, and I could look after Kevin while I worked. I was able to hold classes in my basement studio for the University of California at Berkeley's extension program, and I invited artists to do projects that I printed and Crown Point Press published. I also worked on my own art in the studio, and in 1964 published a bound book of my etchings accompanied by poetry by Judson Jerome, whom I had met in my college years.
Kathan in the Berkeley studio with her son, Kevin, 1965.
A friend suggested that Richard Diebenkorn might be interested in trying out the etching process. She said he liked using different kinds of mark making, and recommended me to him. He took plates to his studio, and when a painting would get “stuck,” as he said, he would copy the image onto a plate. It would be simplified and print backwards, and this was useful to him. He thought of etching as “a way of drawing.” Diebenkorn was the first artist (besides myself) that Crown Point published. Wayne Thiebaud, who at the time was showing in the San Francisco gallery that showed my own work, was the second.
Richard Diebenkorn, #19, from 41 Etchings Drypoints, 1963, drypoint. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
How did your business grow over the years, from the single press in your home to the current size of Crown Point Press?
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, in addition to holding workshops and publishing and printing artists from California (Diebenkorn, Thiebaud, and Van Hoesen at first, then Bechtle, Tom Marioni, William T. Wiley, Robert Hudson, Chris Burden, Terry Fox), from Europe (Daniel Buren), and New York (John Cage, Joan Jonas, Pat Steir, Robert Barry, Hans Haacke). I also did quite a lot of printing for Parasol Press. Parasol sent New York artists to me: Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Mel Bochner, Dorothea Rockburne, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Robert Mangold. The owner of Parasol Press, Bob Feldman, was very supportive and showed me that it was possible to operate this kind of business.
Wayne Thiebaud, Banana Splits, from Delights, 1964. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
What is the structure of the summer workshops at Crown Point?
We usually have ten people in one workshop with three printers. I start out with an introduction, basically outlining the concepts behind the process. Some of the people who attend have experience in the field, but some have never done etching before. Some are laymen in the art world; others are professional artists. Some teach printmaking. In the workshop everyone has a working space and people begin by getting a plate and starting to work. When they run into something they can’t figure out, they go to a printer, and the printer says “You need to use more of this, less of that,” or maybe they demonstrate: “Copy my gesture for wiping the plate.” That’s the way the workshops are run; they are very individual.
I generally poke around in the workshop, talk to people. I don’t actually do any work in the studio anymore, although I did everything there for a long time, and I understand what goes on there. All our Crown Point printers are really good, and they’ve got it figured out; they know exactly how to handle it all.
The workshops are only in summer, but all year long we have tours, lots of school tours and groups from out-of-town museums, so people can get a sense of what’s going on here. We also sell books about printmaking and art in general. We publish some of the books ourselves, usually when we think they wouldn’t exist otherwise.
The studio during a summer etching workshop, 2018. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
Have there been any developments in printmaking technology that you’ve used in your workshops?
We pretty much do it the same way Rembrandt and Goya did, except with more color. Not much has changed from back when they did it; I think that’s one of the interesting parts. A lot of the process involves using materials and techniques an artist may not use regularly, such as drawing on copper plates using tar, wax, salt, and sugar syrup. It’s all hand done and the materials are so tactile and beautiful.
Tom Marioni creating the etching, The Sun’s Reception, Sausalito, CA, 1974. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
How have you balanced the workshops with the operation of the gallery business?
In 1988, I moved Crown Point Press from Oakland to San Francisco, and Valerie Wade joined us. Her title now is Director/Partner. She handles the gallery side of the business, attending art fairs and developing our network as well as planning and hanging our shows. She and I also discuss which artists to invite to create prints here.
How do you choose the artists you invite?
That is the single most-asked question I get at Crown Point, and I am still unsure how to answer it. Valerie and I are glad to have recommendations from artists who have already worked here, and she is in touch with the art world in general through her attendance at art fairs and her day-to-day networking. In our publishing program, we can only accommodate three, maybe four, artist projects in a year because the printing process is so time-consuming; if we are to stay in business, our published artists must already have developed markets. But, don't forget, we also have summer workshops that anyone can join.
Which artists have worked with you recently, and who are you excited about now?
We’re always excited about the artists who work here, and we always have a great time with them. Charline von Heyl has been here fairly recently, and I like her, and her work, a lot. We had a wonderful show of new (and older) work by Darren Almond, who came from England, last fall. Mary Heilmann is very good. We showed her new color etchings last year. And we have a new project scheduled with Laura Owens, who is from Los Angeles and has worked with us before. Also, I'm hoping we might have a new project this year with Wayne Thiebaud, who was one of the first artists I worked with back in the 1960s; we have published his prints regularly over the years.
Charline von Heyl in the Crown Point studio, 2014. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
Can you tell us about the current show in the gallery?
The 2019 springtime exhibition at Crown Point Press focuses on a set of four recent etchings by Los Angeles artist Mary Weatherford. She is known for attaching lighted neon tubes to the surfaces of her paintings; the prints, without neon, have a strong interior light. “Gesture,” the accompanying group exhibition, reaches back into Crown Point's history to Brice Marden’s “Five Plates” of 1973, and includes later work by Pat Steir, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries, and John Zurier. In June and July we're featuring a bound book of etchings about California by Fred Martin titled “Beulah Land.” Crown Point published it in 1968; this show is part of a citywide celebration of The Dilexi Gallery, which was an important influence in San Francisco's art history.
Installation view of “Mary Weatherford,” 2019. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
Do you have any advice for collectors who want to learn more about print as a medium?
I think people are rewarded by close looking. These prints have dimension; it might seem, at first, like they’re printed on a flat sheet of paper, but they are actually embossed into it. This is the only print process that does that; in lithography, woodcut, silkscreen, the ink sits on top.
Etchings have a special energy when you look at them closely. I think that when people are able to see this, a light comes on inside and they think, “oh, this is really something different.” And then the door is open to a real appreciation of the process. We aren't just making a drawing on a plate, putting some ink on it, and printing it. It’s much more complex, and although the artist has technical help from our printers, everything is in the artist's control completely.
If you can visit us in San Francisco, you will be welcome; we give tours that include the studio. (If an artist is working in there, we have a secondary studio you can see.) Some of the people who take our summer workshops are collectors. Some are artists, but we also get people who come in and say, “I’m not an artist, or a collector, but I want to find out how it’s done.” This curiosity is always rewarded. No matter how the drawing starts out, when it’s printed, it looks purposeful, because the printing, in itself, provides a kind of presence.
Installation view of “Green by Richard Diebenkorn: The Story of a Print,” 2017. Courtesy Crown Point Press, San Francisco.
Do you have some advice for somebody thinking of opening a gallery right now?
It’s important to establish a close connection to the artists in your network. We learn about interesting artists through word of mouth from the artists we already work with. You also should be ready to pounce on something new as soon as you can. My partnership with Valerie Wade has been essential, as she’s really out in the world and can get a sense of what's going on and which artists might be ready for a project with us.
Looking back, I’m astonished by some of the things Crown Point Press has done. We've printed and published a lot of great art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco both have archives of our work. We are lucky to have had a lot of goodwill over the years. Some of the workshop people and printers who have worked here have opened their own workshops. The artists who work with us generally become engaged with what we are doing and often return for another project. We publish books on the etching processes so everyone can learn, and we hope more artists and more printers will become interested in using this medium. The technology is very old, and I think people appreciate the fact that we’re helping to keep it alive.
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RFA + minor trio... MC with anorexia? I'm sorry if this bothers you, you don't have to answer, I'm just going through a rough patch and it would help. Thank you.
***I am not bothered, although, I am very concerned about you anon, please make sure that you eat and if you are having trouble, there are many anonymous hotlines you can call for help. Take care of yourself please T_TAlso, reminder, it is always best to seek professional help, the RFA characters are just normal people at the ebd of the day though and I have to work with *their* personalities not necessarily what is best for you. They are not perfect, but they try really really hard. ~Let’s Connect! FFC***
Characterbreakdown: Good ending canon characters, Secret ending 02 Saeran, V from theoriginal routes with no operation, my version ofVanderwood as seen in my VanderwoodBackstory Fanfiction
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Jumin:
His first indication that something was wrong was that you wouldn’t eat dinner with him
The one time you had eaten dinner with him, he’d questioned you time after time as to why you only picked at your food rather than truly eating. He’d noticed how you shrunk into yourself when he asked, but he wasn’t sure
As time went on, he saw how thin you were getting, the way you seemed to be so wispy and weak
Jumin immediately began researching all of your symptoms, at first coming to the conclusion you had cancer, thanks WebDoc, but upon actually confronting you, the truth came out
His face had a total change. “MC. You should have told me much sooner.”
He was somewhat business like, getting you the best of doctors and therapists, but whenever you were alone he was so gentle, offering you small portions of snacks that he even had made himself instead of calling for the cooks
Every step of the way, Jumin was there with a gentle or a tough love manner as needed, reminding you just how beautiful and loved you were, especially when healthy
-
Seven:
With his own eating habits and sleeping schedule, it takes him a long time to notice that you were eating like a rabbit, very little and not nutritiously whatsoever, but what was he supposed to say that wouldn’t make him hypocritical?
He figured that you were just like he was, an irregular lifestyle that still kept you healthy, right up until he rolled over to pull you close and he felt just how thin you’d gotten
Seven recoiled from you, staring at you open mouthed for a while and you kept asking him what was wrong and what had gone wrong, but he played it off as everything was fine
The next morning, for some reason, Vanderwood was there cooking small snacks and marking them
Seven came up to you and pulled you into his arms, all pretense of joking gone as he told you that everything was okay, and you were both going to do better from here on out
He would tell you how amazing you looked with every pound you gained, making a nifty little scale that would count downwards the amount of pounds you needed to gain rather than showing a scale that went upwards so as to help your psyche handle it
You were both able to eat healthier, and the small meals with an actual schedule really helped Thanks to Vanderwood’s cooking.
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Jaehee:
She was constantly trying to offer you more food when you would just pick at your lunch at the cafe’
Jaehee, being the person she is, simply just let it be, thinking you must have just been one of those people who ate very little for lunch and more for breakfast and dinner
It became more concerning as you began to collapse during your shift from fatigue and general lack of energy
“MC, this is it. We’re going to see a doctor.” Not only was not being able to complete your shift inappropriate, but she was also really worried about her partner
Once it became apparent that you were anorexic and had become intensely underweight, cue momma Jaehee mode
It was almost like having your own personal assistant as she took charge of your needs and vetted the proper therapist/nutritionist for you
Even though it was an added expense: “It’s best to leave this to the professionals.”
She would reward you with Zen movie marathons when you made healthy choices, and who’s going to turn that down?
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Zen:
He notices almost immediately that you’re losing weight. Not that he’s constantly looking at you or anything
Zen continues to try to get you to be honest about why you were losing so much weight, but it wasn’t until he found the size 0 ‘Goal pants’ in your closet along with a number of women’s magazines all based on the ideal body type that he understood
Once he confronted you, you revealed that you felt inadequate next to him, even more so when people were criticizing your appearance online
Cue Zen taking cooking classes just so he could make you healthier meals, becoming your personal trainer to teach you how to properly work on your body, and praising you constantly, even more than he ever had before, my beautiful Babe~
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Yoosung:
This boy was making you food constantly for your dates, but you always seemed to not have much of an appetite, and it made him think you hated his cooking so he just tried harder!
It wasn’t long before he noticed the way his hoodie seemed to swallow you up when you’d wear it at his place, and…snuggling you seemed to not be as cozy anymore
As a vet medicine student, he confronted you and demanded you see a doctor because he was afraid you were ill. Your refusal and eventual breakdown that you were just anorexic made his violet eyes go wide
“But MC, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen…” His astonishment quickly turned to determination. “My precious girl won’t be allowed to suffer any longer!”
Along with his vet homework, Yoosung takes it upon himself to study how to help people with eating disorders and even goes to group meetings with you to make sure you’re comfortable and feel safe
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V:
Thanks to his loss of vision, he can’t see much of you to begin with, so he doesn’t notice the weight loss or really how little you eat until the two of you start to get physical with each other
It’s only all too apparent to him that you’re severely underweight, and he asks for Jumin’s help in getting you appointments with the best doctors in town
He knows all too well at this point that he can’t expect to heal your problems with love and pretty words, so he makes sure to enter a program for enablers as well so that he can be of most help to you
His insistence on checking your waist line all the time is somewhat unnerving at first, but you soon find it to be a comforting part of your relationship and sweet how he is checking on your progress
Expect many compliments once you’re at a healthy weight
-
Saeran:
It’s not like he was the proper weight when he got out of the hospital, but his wasn’t because of an eating disorder
He simply couldn’t understand why you would turn down food when he’d grown up being denied of food
Eventually, he couldn’t help but snap at you over it, causing a big mess of tears as you told him the truth
Saeran felt so horrible after the truth came out, wanting to lock himself up in his room for hurting you so badly, and he did there for a little while, which only made you eat less. It wasn’t until Seven came to check on you and found you passed out and impossible to wake that you were taken to the hospital
Your boyfriend just felt even worse now, but Seven was able to shake some sense into him that the reason it had gone so badly wasn’t because he had hurt you but was because you needed his support and him by your side, which helped to get him to break out of his own insecurity that you hated him for snapping at you
It was very touch and go, but the two of you learned to be more patient with each other through the entire ordeal
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Vanderwood:
Your refusal to eat the portion he’d made for you was immediately met with irritation. “This is the right portion size for a woman of your age and height.”
He was smart enough to realize that once you mentioned eating less because ‘I’m so fat’, despite being quite small, that you had an eating disorder
Vanderwood started to make smaller meals more often during the day, tricking you at first into eating properly until you had a breakdown on the scale because you’d gained weight
After that, he simply disposed of the scale, convincing you that you had a problem and needed to see a doctor not long after
He worked tirelessly to make sure you were getting proper activity and meals, letting your doctor take care of the emotional aspects associated with your disorder
The way he saw it, you’d helped him through his problems, so to make you happy like you made him, he would do whatever it took
-
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Good Wedding Planners in Kolkata
Importance of hiring a Wedding Planner:
A wedding planner should be a liaison between the vendors and the bride/groom, who can take care of your each and every minute detail and plan your event according to your preference, also can give you better ideas and suggest you the details within your budget line. It seems a simple question to everyone’s mind that what does a wedding planner do?
So let’s get right down to it! There are the following answers and the summary of the primary duties and skills that wedding planners are responsible for. From engagement to honeymoon, a planner can set all the things in order. And it all starts with a simple conversation.
Initial Consultation
This initial stage of consultation always starts from client’s perspective. The planner and the clients serves to set the groundwork as what the client is expecting from the planner and what the client is planning to do. The client may be the bride, the groom or the parents of bride and groom or any other combination of relation. Now it is entirely up to the wedding planner to figure out who are your true clients and whose opinion is most important above all others. In most cases the most important opinion comes from a bride. On the day of wedding, coordination is most important for a wedding planner who takes care of all the logistics and necessities for the wedding itself.
A full planning of wedding involves everything included a day of coordination and lots more such as fixing budgets, venues, managing vendors, and all that nitty-gritty details that suits to plan a wedding.
Day of Coordination
Most girls have dreamed of their wedding day since they were little and most of them wanted to plan it by themselves according to their needs and many of them refuse to let anyone else plan their wedding. Some bride has been recognized that their wedding should be about enjoyment and bliss, not getting involve to any details and let others involve to make happen it properly.
So if they have already been taken care of all the pre-wedding preparations and all, they might need a help or an expert advice on the day of their wedding, what they will be looking for their D-day. And of course being the business-savvy wedding planner, you can offer this coordination service to your lucky brides!
Wedding Day
On the wedding Day, the planner should arrive in time as early enough with the checklist that the arrangements to be done and supervise with all the vendors like venues, decoration, DJ team, sounds and lights operators and answer all the questions that may arise. All they need to do is to fix one in-charge who can take care of the entire event and with whom the client and their families can coordinate. Planners should also ensure and should give a brief about the event to the in-charge along with the details of vendors, which are all informed in advance of each event.
After the ceremony is completed the wedding planner should ensure that the guest quickly usher themselves and get ready for the reception place where bride and groom can start their photo-shoot after getting married and wedding parties are all appropriate place for photos to begin. Most importantly a wedding planner should possess the ability to make itself perfect by moving slow or fast according to the timeline of event.
Wrapping up
Now the job is not done yet! Even everyone clears out, planners should make sure all of the client’s property, and wedding gifts are properly packed and secured in a vehicle or in a storage room. If there are lot of more unpack gifts then it’s better to hire client’s volunteers to be taken care of that stuffs.
As said before that a Wedding Planner is a liaison between the clients and vendors, so this will enable the bride or groom to enjoy their event to the fullest, instead of having to chase after vendors. After all this is the main reason to hire a wedding planner. It’s all about the vision of a wedding planner to ensure the client’s vision and implement the plan accordingly. Sometimes it’s not enough for a wedding planner to stand all day along with all these responsibilities, so what they can do is to divide all the duties among the team members and the duties turned up to them who will be present for the entire day.
What points to keep in mind while hiring a Wedding Planner:
Your Wedding day is an extremely personal event for you. After all it’s all about celebrating you and your partner’s love. So things have to be properly arranged and maintained and it makes sense that you are in need of hiring an event or wedding planner or a professional one of your like. To make the process easier, here are some key points written below which you should ask a wedding planner before hiring. It’s important to thoroughly vet them to ensure that they are the right fit for you and your partner.
1. Be sure whether they are available for your date or not.When it comes to questions to ask a wedding planner, this should be your first. You don't want to waste your time if they're not free on the chosen date. If your wedding date is still flexible and you'd be willing to wait to work with someone you really love, ask for a few options so you can take them into consideration when you're finalizing your timeline.
2. Next up on the list of important topics to cover: Money. This question is great because it also opens up the discussion about potential services they provide you in your budget. For example, if you really love the planner but can't afford their full-time services, ask if they'd be willing to do part-time planning or month-of coordinating for a smaller fee instead.
3. It's not always clear from their website what their services are, so it's good to ask for a thorough explanation of the types of ways they can help you with your wedding planning. This information will make it easier to decide what type of planner would be best for you. For example, if you're super-organized and have time to follow up with pros yourself, then you may only need someone for a coordination role. But if you're planning a destination wedding, it may be best to work with a full-time planner who can manage the logistics for you.
4. You'll get help with budgeting and scheduling. Most couples have a strict wedding budget and timeline they need to adhere to. Your wedding planner will be able to help you get the most for your money and will crunch numbers and score discounts, getting you the best deals. Plus, they'll keep you on schedule, ensuring you cross every to-do off your list in a timely manner.
5.They have tons of insider knowledge.A wedding planner regularly communicates with florists, caterers, DJs, stationery designers, hair stylists, and photographers. She can recommend the best vendors for your particular celebration, meaning you don't need to spend hours sifting through Google search results. What's more, the wedding planner can potentially negotiate deals you wouldn't get otherwise since they have an ongoing relationship with most local vendors.
Now let’s talk about few good wedding planners in Kolkata:
Asparagus Event and Wedding Planner:
Asparagus Event and Wedding Planner, a wedding planning service designed especially to help wedding planning couples to through affordable services. Founded in 2010, Asparagus Event and Wedding Planner continues to create magical occasions for wedding couples. In fact they are considered one of the most profound and renowned Event Management Groups in Kolkata. Basically they are expertise to host modern contemporary traditional weddings and poised to create your ideal wedding celebrations. This professional Kolkata Wedding Planner has experience in creating bespoke modern luxury weddings throughout Kolkata and suburbs. Let go of your wedding planning stress and trust this team to execute your dream wedding with flawless attention with every detail. While ensuring your wedding budget remains on track, Asparagus Event and Wedding Planner is a certified wedding planning company based in Kolkata. For a seamless service that caters to all the finer details of your big day. You can best assured that your ceremony will be in safe hands. Their planning starts from finding a proper venue according to the event combined with decoration, catering service and other miscellaneous service preferred by their clients. Mainly they got engaged in Bengali weddings but they also do work for other weddings too.
Wedlock Events:
Planning a wedding is everyone’s dream journey especially for a bride. From childhood to teenage, every single lady fascinates her wedding day in her mind and a dedicated wedding planner gives a shape to every story. Here I am going to share a story about the team who is not only successful but also left a mark creating their milestone in wedding planning industry. Wedlock events deliver refined, effortless and impeccably planned weddings throughout the Kolkata for couples from around the world. As your wedding planner, they give you the shape to laugh and love, to feel inspired, to reveal in the possibilities and to fully experience each of your exquisite moment. They are really generous with their time, schedule, and regular meetings and connect you like-minded suppliers. They work closely together in the lead up to your wedding. On your day you will surely find them alongside each other, as a cohesive team, one step ahead of every detail. They have an extremely experienced and talented team, who are dedicated in creating and providing a wedding like no other. Their service is quite frankly, the best way to guarantee both a stress-free planning experience and a wedding that surpasses all expectation. You will be updated at every stage of their planning, with mails and support. Just some of the details you won’t have to worry about: apportioning your budget, managing schedules, creating and delivering a design concept, sourcing the perfect suppliers, everything flows effortlessly on the day itself. So if anyone is looking for a good wedding planner, you can surely get in touch with the team.
Wedding Sutra:
Planning your wedding should be fun and a time that you thoroughly enjoy as a couple. Yet, with such an abundance of inspiration, a multitude decisions to make and often a shortage of time to fit it all in, navigating your way through the planning process can often feel overwhelming. Wedding Sutra is just like India’s most famous leading media brand of Wedding Planning Service. It provides plenty information about weddings to reach a target audience of highly sophisticated and standard couples. They understand the complexity of planning such a momentous occasion and the importance of creating an event that is not only flawlessly executed, but fully represents you as a couple. With meticulous organization skills the brand has developed a large number of national brands lifestyle, luxury and beauty firms to target out their audience for marketing programs. Whether you are imagining a spectacular, large-scale event or a more intimate celebration, they would love to hear a word from you.
Bengal Event Planning Service:
Bengali Event Planning Services, a wedding planning company producing weddings with style and substance across the Kolkata and beyond. They are specializing in design celebrations usually held in different venues, mostly in outdoors. Perhaps if you are planning a wedding at home and have no idea from where to begin, perhaps you have guests travelling from all over the world for a celebration, for which you definitely require professional support. They have the expertise team, contacts and creative flair to transform your venue and managed an impeccably executed event theme. With their full planning service, they will be with you from the early days of scheming and dreaming right through to the wedding day itself. They also cover individual services too. You can arrange everything on by your own but sometimes you also need an expert advice and so they are, always beside your needs, taken care by them.
Marvelous Events:
When you have a clear objective and a vision towards work, you need to give it a medium. Their team really works solely for the goal of making an event breathe life with love and creativity. They bring equal style and detail to every event – consulting, designing and co-coordinating, everything from the invitation to good-bye. Partial work for only styling projects for any kind of home or formal events are also catered by them. Marvelous Events work closely with you and your families to develop an event that is uniquely yours, reflecting your personality and individual taste. Whether you wish for a small intimate affair, a large scale anniversary celebration or an exotic island wedding, they will make your event more special and worth remembering your-day-your-way! They take pride in their ability to create the perfect experience, blending Indian traditions with all your distinctive personal styles. Their main goal is to ensure that the key essence to an Indian wedding isn’t lost. They merge the colors, richness of our culture and music to create something uniquely personal for each client to give them a big fat Indian wedding. They know their clients inside out and design specifics such as decoration ambiance, invitation and the taste of their clients.
SWASTIK EVENTS:
Swastik Events is always the most trustworthy and creative planners. Their every motto is to give a flawless and creative touch to every wedding. Swastik Events generate a unique atmosphere and beautiful details illustrating the beauty of your day. They have large group of clients in the different part of cities and they are very dedicated for offering their best service. Their unit comprises of experiences and such talented team members who puts forth to make everything possible in delivering of quality along with innovative work videos, photos as well as appealing venues design to the clients. Basically they are best in the segments of outdoor decoration tents at wedding events. These types of weddings are extremely grand and unique from other wedding venues. As described earlier, they have wide range of services starting with decoration to catering and miscellaneous service which includes every aspect of wedding planning and of course the day of co-ordination. They lead more efficiency, creativity refinement & tailoring. They have a reliable network of venues and vendors are the greatest asset. They have another best tool to create a flawless wedding of your dream which might captivate your guests.
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Rihanna Covers VOGUE Dripping In Fenty! Talks Turning Down Super Bowl In Support Of Colin Kaepernick – ‘I Couldn’t Be A Sellout’ (And Babies)
Rihanna lands her sixth VOGUE cover and it's historic. Inside, she talks about turning down the Super Bowl, pregnancy rumors, her new album, Trump and more. Get it all inside…
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So proud to be on another cover of @voguemagazine wearing my own designs from @fenty !!! On stands October 16th! Photographer : @ethanjamesgreen Fashion Editor: @tonnegood Hair: @yusefhairnyc Makeup: Kanako Takase
A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Oct 9, 2019 at 6:34am PDT
Yep, another one!
Rihanna graces the cover of VOGUE magazine’s November 2019 issue, marking her SIXTH cover for the fashion publication. And she made history.
The Bajan beauty now has the most solo American VOGUE covers of any black woman in history. Woot! The Grammy winner has graced VOGUE covers in April 2011, November 2012, March 2014, April 2016 and June 2018.
For her newest pictorial, the “Work” singer decided she would put her own clothing collection on full display. Photographed by Ethan James, she slayed the cover in a FENTY tulle coat with a hood.
And Ri wouldn't be Ri if she didn't talk her ish too.
Last year, there were rumors that RiRi turned down the Super Bowl Halftime performance in support of former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who launched a peaceful protest against police brutality which ultimately cost him his job in the NFL.
rihanna - vogue (2019). pic.twitter.com/I8vwNSJJjx
— jeff (@gaypixar) October 9, 2019
In her cover story, Rih confirmed she turned down what would have been an iconic performance in support of Kaepernick.
"Absolutely," she responded when asked if she turned down the mega gig. "I couldn't dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn't be a sellout. I couldn't be an enabler. There's things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way."
Travis Scott and Big Boi ended up joining Maroon 5 to perform during last year's Super Bowl Halftime.
Travis - who Rihanna previously dated - caught some heat from some of the black community and those supporting the boycott, but clearly got a lot of love too from...others. And his fans. He was fully aware of the repercussions of performing, and hinted in his new Netflix documentary that he wasn't about to turn down this once in a lifetime chance for a black artist. Rihanna, on the other hand, did.
By the way, this interview took place before it was announced that Jay-Z had partnered with the NFL. A source told The Blast, the singer’s VOGUE interview went down in August, days before Hov inked anything with the NFL and she had "no idea" negotiations were even taking place.
Our fave Bad Gal is no stranger to speaking her mind on issues she believes, much like Kapernick. After Trump called the mass shooting in El Paso “an act of cowardice” and said both (the El Paso and Dayton shootings) were the result of a “mental illness problem,” Rihanna responded publicly, “Um . . . Donald, you spelled terrorism wrong!” She was asked how she felt after the back-to-back shootings.
“It is devastating,” she shared. “People are being murdered by war weapons that they legally purchase. This is just not normal. That should never, ever be normal. And the fact that it’s classified as something different because of the color of their skin? It’s a slap in the face. It’s completely racist.” She goes on: “Put an Arab man with that same weapon in that same Walmart and there is no way that Trump would sit there and address it publicly as a mental health problem. The most mentally ill human being in America right now seems to be the president.”
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Our November cover star @badgalriri has left her mark on music, design, beauty, lingerie—and now she’s upending fashion at the highest levels. Tap the link in our bio to read her full cover story. Photographed by @ethanjamesgreen, styled by @tonnegood, written by @abbyaguirre, Vogue, November 2019.
A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Oct 9, 2019 at 10:20am PDT
The night before the interview, Rihanna enjoyed an intimate dinner with her boyfriend Hassan Jameel, her mother and her brothers. They dined at Mason restaurant in Santa Monica. The Fenty honcho and the Saudi businessman’s relationship is still going strong and Rih is hella happy.
“Yeah, I’m dating,” she says. “I’m actually in an exclusive relationship for quite some time, and it’s going really well, so I’m happy.” (Yes, she wants kids. “Without a doubt.”)
Rih also responded to the constant pregnancy rumors and whether she wants a baby soon:
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In a special edition of #GoAskAnna, November cover star @badgalriri sits down for a one-on-one with Anna Wintour. Tap the link in our bio to watch the full video. Director and Illustrator @theselby Producer @camillaferenczi @tvetan Animator @michelsgh DP @colevelev AC Lola Banks Gaffer Gautam Kadian Sound @thesoundcoop @philshipmansound Producer @dj____mike Production Assistant @lilyhmccann
A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Oct 9, 2019 at 7:15am PDT
The worldwide superstar mainly lives in London, but splits her time in Paris and L.A. as well
"I don't feel outside the fray," she told Vogue. "When I see something happen to any woman, a woman of any minority, kids, black men being murdered in the streets—I can't remove myself from that."
She continued, "I feel like the darkness has actually forced people to find this light within them where they want to do better," she said. "It's easy when you think everything is going really well and perfect. When everything is flowers and butterflies and you're in your own bubble and your own world. But to see it, to know it's happening – it pushes you to want to be the light in the world."
Being so busy with FENTY Beauty, her new FENTY luxury line and her Savage x Fenty lingerie line, chick hasn’t been able to get in the studio to crank out her R9 album and fans are pissed about it.
“I have been trying to get back into the studio,” she says, sounding as close to sheepish as Rihanna is capable of sounding. “It’s not like I can lock myself in for an extended amount of time, like I had the luxury of doing before. I know I have some very unhappy fans who don’t understand the inside bits of how it works.”
Last month, she spilled some luke warm tea about the upcoming album, basically letting her NAVY know – It’s coming! Now, we know what the vibe is going to be. She said it will be dancehall and reggae filled, but not exactly how we would expect it to be.
She says she's already in the “discovery stage” for her 10th album.
“We always went into the music this time around saying that we were going to do two different pieces of art,” she said. “One was gonna be inspired by the music that I grew up listening to. And one was gonna be the evolution of where I’m going next with music.”
Nice! You can read her full interview here.
Peep her full Q&A with VOGUE editor-in-chief Anna Wintour below:
youtube
Oh, and we'll just leave this here...
Some day I'll have the confidence to turn up to interview Rihanna for Vogue without a list of questions and then to admit it publicly. Today is not that day. pic.twitter.com/m8o8Z2WauA
— YellowGlassDragon (@karishmau) October 10, 2019
Chile. Mainstream publications and white writers who cover black artists will continue to do these type of things if black stars continue to run to them more than they run to their own. Just a thought.
Photo: Getty
[Read More ...]
source http://theybf.com/2019/10/10/rihanna-covers-vogue-in-fenty-talks-turning-down-super-bowl-in-support-of-colin-kaepernic
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@dionian-gayce asked me to ramble about world building and i can't save answers as drafts and tumblr ate my last (very long but not as long as this) attempt to answer. and while it's probably for the better that you'll get a more coherent answer I'm also very frustrated that I put a lot of time into an answer that I didn't get a choice in throwing out. That's not your fault though
Thanks for asking! I'm sure you made that post offering to ask people questions thinking of the (if your blog traffic is anything like mine) 3-10 other blogs that regularly interact with your original posts, and instead it had something like 350 notes by the time i saw it, so I'm impressed you're still following through.
world building is one of my favorite things to be honest. I write mostly fanfiction anymore and very few of them are canon compliant because I love pushing boundaries and exploring "if I make xyz change to that universe, how does that affect how the characters behave?" (tl;dr like 70% of my fic-writing is answering those world building questions, and the rest is when i have specific ideas about how certain characters will interact, and then I will write the rest of the fic to set them up for interacting)
the most visible example(s) I have of this is my surprising variety of soulmate AUs. I'll describe some of the thought that went into the published parts of Sphygmoid and Stripes of Fate, and end with some spoilery bits about the process of world building for The One I've Been Looking For (which was originally titled Colors and I'm going to call it that for the remainder of this post because that's a shorter title without having to abbreviate to The One or an acronym my phone won't recognize as a word)
I think of soulmate AUs as the easiest example of world building because there's something big and obvious and visible differentiating that universe from ours or canon. and while it's possible to write a soulmate AU with no thought as to "why" people are soulmates with each other, just for the fluff factor, or to get the OTP to think of each other romantically sooner than canon or ever, I usually prefer to explore all the interesting questions that brings up. like "how does the prevalence of soulmates affect social norms?" and "what does it really mean when people are soulmates?" alongside "what do people think it means to be soulmates, and how accurate are they?" I also generally have a preference for soulmate AUs that connect you to more than one person, like 'strings of fate' AUs that connect you to your inevitable best friends and long term partners and sometimes even mortal enemies, though I haven't written one of those yet.
so, going from least world building to most, in Stripes of Fate, the premise is that everyone has a patch of skin on the inside of their wrist that is the exact color of their soulmate's hair, and changes whenever they dye it. Saguru (the main character) speculates (and eventually his soulmate confirms) that if one of them changes the color of only part of their hair, the other's mark changes to a matching pattern. as I mentioned, this is probably the soulmate AU I've put the least thought into (they're soulmates because i like the ship and one of them, in fanon at least, changes his own and his classmates' hair colors often, if not regularly so there's something interesting to bring them together. and I haven't specified anyone else's soulmates) but even so I worked in some fun world building: how do societal norms change because of the prevalence of soulmates? well one country's norm is to wear the mark visibly and for young adults to change their hair color frequently as a way of identifying themselves to their soulmates. another country's norm is to keep them covered and private. but I left other questions unanswered, like since soulmates are rarely the exact same age, does the older one have a mark from birth? what about people who won't live long enough to meet a soulmate, do they have a mark at all? what about the soulmates of people who don't have hair at all, for any reason besides shaving? those answers aren't relevant to the story as written, but if I were writing any more in the same universe, I'd want to decide those answers, just in case.
Then there's Sphygmoid. Sphygmoid is more the style of soulmate AU I like to read (and write, obviously), because the prompt specifies that people have marks from many of the important people in their lives, not just their soulmates (who get a different color). I really enjoyed exploring the mechanics of these soulmarks, and unlike many soulmark AUs, which feature marks or strings which are either there from birth or appear all at once, these vary in brightness based on the state of the relationship. (Ran had a childhood friend who she had a mark from but after that friend moved away and they grew apart, the mark faded back to almost nothing). it's also interesting: the original prompt specified that people have marks from their soulmate and from people they love, but I initially misread it as "from people who love them". and even after i realized my mistake, I decided to keep it that way because I liked the mental image of children being born with several bright marks already because their parents and grandparents and older siblings loved them even before they were born. For the most part, the difference between "you love them" and "they love you" is negligible because in most cases, the care and affection are reciprocal, but given that the main character of the anime gets adopted into his best friend's home under a fake identity, using the "they love you" metric makes it interesting because I'll get to explore the questions of can Shinichi distinguish between Ran's love for him vs her love for Conan just from his mark(s) from her? does it matter that she thinks they're two separate people? how does that compare to his marks from his parents once they know the truth? likewise (and also a reader commented to ask and I was thrilled that someone else cared about the same sort of thing) what does Ran think when she doesn't get a new mark from Conan after they take him in and he's been in their family for a while? I've got partially solidified ideas of how to answer these, but aside from his parents finding out the truth and immediately loving their son in every form, love grows slowly over time, so I've got a while to decide and build up to those answers. in the meantime I'm stuck on chapter two which I want to be mainly from the pov of a character that I don't have a good handle on her voice, let alone her internal narration. But overall, yes the entire focus of this fic is to explore how soulmarks grow and change as the characters do.
And then there's Colors, which I'm probably most proud of the world building in. it's ironic that this is the fic I've thought the most about because I decided one night "hey I've got tomorrow off, someone prompt me and I'll write at least (minimum length) on the topic," and by 11pm the following night, I had picked someone, been prompted with a pairing and a style of soulmate identification (you see in grayscale until you meet your soulmate, and after that everything is in color), and then worked out a majority of these world building details and wrote a one shot that became the first chapter.
spoilers ahead for things hinted at but mostly not revealed (yet)
did that work as a readmore?
I can't actually tell
So the prompt was Harry/Ginny, and when I asked for preferences, suggesting i make other canon ships each other's soulmates, the requestor agreed. But for this one, I really sat down to think: what makes a soulmate a soulmate? now I'm ace and arospec so I wasn't particularly interested in the classic "the one perfect romantic partner for you" interpretation, though I saved that for the answer to "what does society think soulmates are?" because otherwise why are they called soulmates instead of something else? Instead, I decided that soulmates (of which any one person typically has many potential matches, people just don't notice a change from color vision to... more color? when they meet subsequent possible soulmates.) are people who, by adulthood, will support you and enable you to become your best self. For many people this is an ideal romantic partner too, but that's only the case when both people expect their soulmate to be a romantic partner (which is most people, given society's assumptions about soulmates, it kind of turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy that a majority of soulmates are also "the" perfect romantic partner for each other) but arospec people and others for whom romantic compatibility isn't a priority, don't tend have soulmates who are destined to be romantic partners.
So with all that decided, I had to decide (a) why are people's canon endgame partners the first potential soulmate they'll meet, especially for people like Bill and Fleur who met as adults, when many people, especially within a small community like the British Wizarding World, meet a match in their school years? and (b) why don't more people notice "one-sided" soulmate situations when someone's potential soulmate thinks they already know the one soulmate they should have. The latter was easy: power of suggestion again. when people assume they will only have one soulmate, and they know who that one person will be, they are hostile to people who claim to be their soulmate, and assume they're liars. that makes them not as supportive to the potential match as they could otherwise be, so mostly they just don't match. which of course reinforces the misunderstanding that there's exactly one soulmate per person. however, particularly selfless people will find themselves a match to nearly anyone who is reasonably supportive in return.
for Bill and Fleur, and why neither of them met a potential soulmate before each other, Fleur was easy: she's part Veela, and too many people judge her for her heritage rather than on her own merits as a person, so they're not supportive enough. for Bill, I decided he has too much wanderlust, and the British Wizarding community, small and insular as it is, doesn't tend to inspire much of a desire to travel for longer than a week of vacation so none of Bill's Hogwarts peers would have been up for traveling with him and encouraging and supporting him in that long term.
then of course I had to decide whether every canon couple was soulmates, and obviously I decided not. Charlie, being the most popular aroace headcanon, obviously wouldn't be surprising to not meet a soulmate at Hogwarts where everyone assumes they'll marry their soulmate, so it's okay to have him not have a soulmate or meet one (someone with similar priorities of dragons!) at the Reserve
on the topic of the Weasleys though, you can't have nonromantic soulmates and not make Fred and George each other's soulmates. you just can't. they're so in sync and so thrilled to do everything together, and you know they'll support each other perfectly for their entire lives. even Harry and most of the fandom (and Molly, facing a boggart), think of George and Fred as a unit. however, given the usual assumption all the characters make, that soulmates must be romantic, means that sibling soulmate bonds are treated as scandals that families hush up. (thus not publicly contradicting society's narrative that soulmates are guaranteed romantic. I decided that, while this doesn't happen for every set of twins, it still occurs in many families. they just never find each other because shame keeps them silent on the matter.) however, given that multiple soulmates are a thing, most sibling-soulmates are identified by non-family soulmates, and even if they don't believe their other soulmate's claim, they usually accept the "convenient misunderstanding" and marry their newly-met soulmate. This is exactly what happened with George and Lee, and Fred and Angelina. the twins assume their friends are mistaken, and the rest of the Weasleys assume Lee and Angelina are soulmates and are covering for the twins because they know they're "actually" each other's soulmates.
after the most recent chapter, (in which Harry asks the twins if they've met their soulmate it was Lee who answered for them, despite how willing the twins otherwise are to talk about themselves. because Lee knows he's not lying or mistaken, but all the Weasleys in the room hold onto a sliver of doubt and hate to "take advantage" of their friend by "falsely" making claims about his soulmate.) someone commented on how they were sure I was setting up to reveal the twins as each other's soulmates and Angelina and Lee were a curveball. and I kinda was leading up to that. but even if soulmates were unique in this universe, what stops Lee from lying to protect his friends, like the Weasleys mostly assume he is doing? characters don't always tell the truth! anyway that comment made me feel good, somewhat, about my foreshadowing skills, but also made me realize if I want people to know these details, I have to give them a reason to "naturally" come up. Like, Charlie is going to come pick up Norbert, still, and that'll be a way to bring up non-romantic soulmates (Charlie comments on the color of Norbert's flame as an indicator of health, and then demands the others not tell Ron, because Ron can't keep a secret from Molly, who's overbearing about insisting all her kids find their perfectly respectable soulmates and get married and produce lots of grandbabies, and Charlie's really not interested in most of that and his partner (name and gender tbd) agrees.
In Molly's defense, as far as she knows, of her eldest five children, the oldest two haven't met soulmates by an age most purebloods have, one is fine, and the other two are each other's soulmates which is absolutely scandalous. she's worried that Percy is going to be the only one with a real soulmate, and that'll not only draw negative attention to the family, but to her children as individuals, with further attention drawn because of the pattern of a "lack of soulmates", and none of them deserve society's judgment.
anyway back on topic, I had to decide if canon endgame ships were going to be each other's first soulmates in all cases, and tbh I decided "not always". because I love the idea of Sirius and Remus being soulmates even if Tonks and Remus get together after Sirius' death, and they obviously met before Tonks was born.
so from there I decided to keep canon ships and decide if they're soulmates on a case by case basis and justify it if not. Voldemort/Bellatrix is plausible (she'll definitely support him in his endeavors and he clearly respects and trusts her enough to bear his child.) on the other hand she's also soulmates with her husband but the Lestranges are just open-minded enough for Bellatrix to accept the status boost of his claim and Rodolphus to support her whether or not they believe him, so they don't question it publicly or privately. obviously their version of supporting each other isn't something the rest of the world particularly appreciates but I like it. alternately (though these aren't mutually exclusive options) I think it's likely voldie had another soulmate he met young but he rejected her due to his biases at the time and never gave her a chance. I'm not sure either option will ever be plot-relevant on a Hinny story so it almost doesn't matter (except it does because I hate JKR's "he's so evil because he can't love, and he's incapable of love because he was conceived under a love potion" and all the unfortunately implications of both those statements. I prefer to think he ignored or rejected the resources and chances for growth that could have made him a less evil person. regardless he has a soulmate or several to just not get into demonizing people for not being "able to" love.) The other notable canon relationship I've specifically decided on is Vernon and Petunia. and honestly, I can't remember a single instance in the books that he did a thing to support her. at most he didn't fight harder to kick Harry out at various times, when her decision not to was reluctantly made based on letters from Dumbledore. and to be honest, I can't imagine him being a supportive partner to anyone. he holds Dudley to high standards, and praises him whether he meets those standards or not, but that's not the same as a mutually supportive/healthy adult relationships. so Vernon is the only person who specifically hasn't and won't meet his soulmate ever in the course of the fic. but if I'm saying that then what about Petunia? given how I've focused soulmates on potential to support each other, I've made the arbitrary decision that Petunia and Peter Pettigrew are soulmates. if they'd given each other a chance they would have initially bonded over their feelings of inferiority next to Lily and James, but they would have seen the best in each other's abilities and encouraged each other out of that bitter spiral. Petunia of course admires and envies everything about magic, which encourages Peter who's used to being seen as the tagalong who isn't quite as good as James and Sirius. and in return he admires her for not letting having no magic at all stop her from accomplishing her other goals, and for her homesteading skills that he never mastered, with or without magic. I acknowledge it's an odd pair, but in terms of potential, it's there. as for why they didn't talk it out and give each other a chance when they realized they were soulmates, that's probably a short I'll eventually write, from both of their perspectives.
anyway i count most of this as world building instead of character development because it's rarely if ever going to show up in the fic (as if Petunia would admit to Harry that she's soulmates with one of James' buddies - she isn't even sure which one) but it informs characters' behavior and background events (Harry would still notice that she always insisted on doing the laundry and flawlessly matches socks to each other for Dudley and Vernon, and her outfits are always color-coordinated and she'll often find an "unrelated" excuse to correct Vernon's outfit when his has particularly uncomplimentary colors)
anyway alongside all that character-focused development, I also thought about what changes that makes scientifically and to society. obviously, since most kids won't see colors yet, the color names won't be taught in classes in younger years. they'll give everyone a take-home reference to study on their own time for after they do meet a soulmate. (Harry wishes for this and remembers Vernon binned his and Dudley's copies, saying it was propaganda). muggles get little reference books with all the basic colors and references to books with more colors, wizards have a magic magnifying glass shaped thing that will overlay color names of whatever is visible through the lens (Harry borrows Ron's on the train). since there's a strong chance that a large subset of the population can't see color, traffic lights are all different shapes, in addition to being different colors, and house/sports team colors have other designs worked in, so that they can be recognized by shape too (Harry observes something like this in the house banners at Hogwarts). scientifically, one of the few details I've come up with is that all color vision is magically granted, which means that even peripheral vision has color (which it doesn't in the real world due to the relative density of rods and cones in our eyes). and accordingly the usual variety of "colorblindness" that exists in our world doesn't exist in this fic, color is just all-or-nothing. (people frequently comment on how true grayscale vision "isn't" a type of colorblindness in the real world but I know someone in person who has that exact form of colorblindness it's just rare in our world, especially in comparison to other forms)
and I was going somewhere else with this, but it's been over a week and when I read this draft to remember what not to repeat I keep getting distracted by the character-backgrounds stuff so I think I'm just going to post this as-is. I feel like it's more than sufficient as an example and attempted explanation of my thought processes.
#world building#thanks for the ask#this kind of devolved#long post#as far as i can tell on mobile the readmore didn't work but i also can't find the post on my dash so it's hard to tell#muggle's rambles
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Small but proud: how DuckDuckGo is standing against the advertising monsters
Maintaining anonymity was one of the key principles of the initially free Internet, which, however, for more than 20 years has been constantly trampled by the largest giants of the Internet technology market: search engines, social networks and trading platforms. Nonetheless, some "islands of freedom" are still present in this world of mass surveillance and control, and we would like to introduce you to one of them in this review.
Meet DuckDuckGo, a search engine that is fundamentally different in its operating principle from the list of "Big Five" search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and Yandex). The main difference between DuckDuckGo and its competitors is that it respects the principles of confidentiality and anonymity on the Internet and does not collect any information about its users.
How DuckDuckGo emerged
The founder of this fast-growing search engine is Gabriel Weinberg. Weinberg, who had already founded several start-upswith varying degrees of success (spreading from Learnection, a school social network where parents and teachers could communicate, which was ahead of its time, but did not succeed in becoming popular, to the more successful project NamesDatabase, the predecessor of Facebook), suddenly discovered that Google does not deliver the most relevant results for their user requests, and decided to improve it.
The first version of DuckDuckGo went live in 2008 and it was programmed to collect information from alternativesources and to filter the results in a way that the search outcomes contained the links that were as relevant as possible at the very beginning. It already had the search engine schtick to be so loved by those who do not want to allow commercial technologies to step into their personal lives: the system did not take the interests of users and their personal data (gender, age or nationality) into account. And it still doesn't: DuckDuckGo today is a system that is not constrained by anyborders, has no resources blocked by any local laws and no user tracking.
From convenience to privacy
Interestingly enough, privacy of users' information was not the main priority for Weinberg at the beginning: he ranked search engine convenience first. However, after a number of unsuccessful attempts to promote the search engine, the developer came up with the idea of focusing the advertising on the privacy of DuckDuckGo, which lacked any tools for tracking users from the very beginning. It turned out that the strict privacy policy, which was incomparable to the ones from Google, Yahoo and other bosses of the IT industry, ended up to be one of the main selling points that helped to boost the popularity of DuckDuckGo. In the user's eyes it quickly turned from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan.
In 2011, Weinberg`s project was funded by a major investor who provided $3 million for promotion and further development. At the same time, the owner of Union Square Ventures (the investor company) later admitted that he helped the project due to his belief in the need for privacy and did not even dream that DuckDuckGo would ever suppressGoogle. He had quite different a target in his mind: to enable every user to search for information on the Internet safely and anonymously, without of the fear of surveillance from advertising companies and government authorities.
How does DuckDuckGo differ from Google?
The main goal of DuckDuckGo is the real, non-fictitious depersonalization of user information. Majority of search engines track users' personal information and preferences and then transmit it to the advertising companies. According to Google`s representatives, they do it in the "impersonal" form, i.e. without of any actual reference to a particular account and person. However, it is unlikely that anyone can prevent search engines from personalizing such information upon request, and as a result of that, not just the advertising services, but also law enforcement agencies will know everything about you: which websites do you visit, where do you live[NA1] , who do you communicate with, etc.
How does DuckDuckGo help you to maintain your online privacy?
DuckDuckGo widely supports privacy software. For example, the search engine is fully compatible with the Tor browser and is even built into it as the default search engine (Firefox and Chrome have also allowed you to set DuckDuckGo as the default search engine).[NA2] Last year DuckDuckGo allocated $600 000 to services, that help to protect the securityrights of the world wide web users, and a large fraction of this money went to the developers of "Tor" browser.
DuckDuckGo does not care about national restrictions either: the search engine does not block any links to the resources that seem shady in terms of a particular country's legislation, so you can be sure that you will be able to find the exact information that you are looking for. Is it convenient? Absolutely! We all know how certain websites might become blocked completely undeservedly.
Literally, on March 5, 2020, DuckDuckGo shocked the Internet audience by publishing a list of thousands of web trackers who spy on users without their consent. The leader in the number of spy trackers on the Internet was Google: the “tentacles” of this search giant were seen on 85% of the analysed sites. The second place in this dubious rating with a significant lag is occupied by the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, whose trackers were found at 36% of the examined websites. Zuckerberg stated at a security conference held in Munich in February 2020, there was a need to create the measures, that would intervene in the user’s activity in order to remove content that is dangerous. In his opiniontrackers were designated to care about the user and to filter exclusively safe content.
So, what do these trackers do? They are programmed to collect all of the information about you: your gender, age, location, type of your computer or mobile device. And even finding out your name is a piece of cake to some of them. In return, you get a candy bar in the form of "personalized search results" for your virtual account. However, why do you need virtual accounts and personalized search results if the search engine can handle your requests without them? That's right: they are needed to make it easier to track you and to present you the content that the search engine believes should be most relevant to you. But their usefulness is questionable, not to mention that many people are simply annoyed by the pile of additional (usually advertising) information offered by trackers for your requests. DuckDuckGo also has a free app and a web browser extension that helps you to protect yourself from spyware trackers.
So, do you still wish to provide detailed information about yourself to Internet companies that will then sell it to any interested third party? We don't want to either, so we opted for DuckDuckGo a long time ago. And we are not alone: many famous Internet pioneers also are on the "duck side". For example, the Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, has recently confessed his love for DuckDuckGo search engine.
What does DuckDuckGo make money on?
The service only tolerates few ways of fair income, like earning from advertising. " Do they still track us?"- the frightened user will think. We hasten to reassure you: no, they do not, because this ad is simply designed to match the user`s query and is automatically selected by the service. For example, if you type "Shoes on sale in London", the search engine will give you an advertising banner from the appropriate partner within the desired area. And this is the only "tracking" script that DuckDuckGo has. Moreover, we did not put surveillance in quotation marks in vain: the search engine will not receive any information about you, except for the actual request. Besides, your search history is also not stored anywhere, every time you log in to DuckDuckGo your search begins from scratch.
Another way for a company to generate revenue is commission for clicks on links from partner sites. Everything is fair here too: you do not know that a particular site is a partner of DuckDuckGo, and the partner will not get any data about you from the search engine.
Fame is growing
Gabriel Weinberg himself was the only person to handle the project until 2011. Currently, more than 80 employees are working at DuckDuckGo Inc. The search engine's revenue from partner sites in 2015 was estimated at $1 million per year, 3 years later, in 2018, it increased 25x times. It stands to reason that the growth in revenue reflects famousness: if in 2014 the number of search requests made through DuckDuckGo barely reached 2 billion, by 2016 it doubled (4 billion requests per year); in 2018 it exceeded 9 billion, and last year it soared to a record number of 15 billion requests per year.
DuckDuckGo appeared next to the top five search engines for the first time only last year, taking a stand-in sixth place at the end of 2019 with 0.38% of the world`s requests. It would seem like a tiny share, but if you consider that Google holds92.04% of the market, then the second place looks quite achievable for DuckDuckGo in the foreseeable future (currentlyit's Yahoo with 2.67%). The search engine is definitely still a niche, as the trend for privacy is not so widespread amongst the majority of Internet users nowadays. However, considering the trend for increasing control over the Internet in many countries of the world today, the potential for growth seems huge, as more and more people find themselves thinking: why should they allow their personal life to be traded? By closing Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines stuffed with trackers, people who really value anonymity are now switching to DuckDuckGo.
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IBM Didn’t Break Blockchain – It Took It to the Next Level
After a long week in Las Vegas, I finally headed home to reflect on all the new releases and information inundating CES. Press conferences, demonstrations, exhibit meetings, and so many simultaneously running conference tracks and meetups were happening that it quickly gets overwhelming.
As I walked through aisles of robots who could dance, recognize and play with pets, race, record, and play ping pong, I was in awe at how anybody could possibly stand out in the world’s biggest, most technologically advanced marketplace.
But something really stood out as I stood outside the Sands Expo on day 3, smoking a cigarette and hitting a cannabis vape pen with a friend.
There was a curious lack of cryptocurrency mining.
Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
Cryptocurrency certainly had a presence in Las Vegas. From Ledger’s massive ad push to Pundi X’s innovative network, networking events at Mike Tyson’s old house, round table conferences with crypto A-listers like Brock Pierce, and more could be found. In fact, Pundi X’s Zac Cheah started my journey into the real blockchain innovations at CES.
But I didn’t see Bitmain, Bitfury, Canaan, Obelisk, or any of the ASIC miner manufacturers at all. It’s as though the billion-dollar industry was completely in hiding.
ASIC mining manufacturers disrupted the entire video card market in Q4 2017 through Q2 2018. It eventually tapered off, but mining hasn’t gone anywhere, and neither are many of these companies.
Yet neither AMD nor Nvidia or Intel gave much thought to cryptocurrency mining in their press conferences. Video gaming and enterprise were the targets. Buzzwords were thrown around, but cryptocurrency and blockchain weren’t among them.
Check out Nvidia’s latest G-Sync and Freesync-enabled RTX2080TI graphics card.
It’s a great GPU for gaming, but nobody would tell me how well it could perform in cryptocurrency mining. Nor could they tell me if they’re doing anything to stop crypto-mining on Nvidia equipment.
That vibe reverberated on the show floor. Hardware component manufacturers like Gigabyte, ASUS, and Intel mostly stared at me blankly when I brought up mining and blockchain applications of their equipment.
Although how cool, both literally and figuratively, is this 3M liquid-cooled Gigabyte server?
And they weren’t the only ones who seemed ignorant of crypto.
Everyone was confused about blockchain and crypto, and my lunch meeting with Pete Camarillo, Business Wire’s media relations specialist, confirmed that.
As the only knowledgeable blockchain journalist there, I felt a lot of weight on my shoulders to dig through the trenches and find some exciting information to share with our readers.
Those waters ran dry for several days, and a lot of my pre-planned meetings were failing to sustain the enthusiasm I had coming in.
Walking the CES Digital Money Marketplace
One of the CES events I was most excited to see was the CES Digital Money Forum, but it ended up being a decentralized circle jerk.
We can do better than showing off our lambos during a frat party at Mike Tyson’s old mansion, crypto community.
The presence of crypto on the CES show floor was honestly abysmal, and it showed more about the industry’s lack of maturity than its innovation.
Devv.io promised a blockchain with 8 million TPS. It’s aimed at enterprise users and is more of a cloud-as-a-service model than a true blockchain.
They were at CES looking for enterprise partners, but nobody was biting, despite a very prominent location at the entrance to the Sands Digital Money Marketplace.
The founder’s video game tech was more impressive than the “blockchain” he proposed.
Next up was CelPay, the mobile crypto loan app from Celsius Network, which offers expensive crypto-backed loans. It’s a great idea with some money behind it, but despite pouring money into marketing, it struggles to find users.
We already discussed SecuX’s hardware wallet selection in this article, which is who we talked to chronologically after CelPay. After that, we saw Vault Logic’s multi-currency ATM, which supports cryptocurrencies. Bill pay, crypto trading and cash outs, fiat transactions, and more are supported in this machine.
It would be more impressive if Las Vegas wasn’t already filled with bitcoin BTMs and other cryptocurrency machines galore. In fact, here’s one at the off-strip liquor store we stopped at Sunday night after CES Unveiled.
Last we had WIZBL, a South Korean blockchain once again promising enterprise users fast transactions.
The problem with many of these solutions isn’t necessarily the tech. It’s that everyone already has solutions in place, and they need market share and customers and usage and engagement to be interesting.
A lot of these projects are just too small and new to make a big enough impact yet, and they were lost in a huge show.
Just because you build it, doesn’t mean people will come. The only company that brought something impressive to the blockchain industry at CES was IBM.
The Dawn of Quantum Computing
Despite what you may have heard in Forbes and blockchain media that wasn’t at CES, IBM didn’t break the blockchain. What IBM did was showcase its massive, 9ft by 9ft square quantum computer, dubbed the Q System One.
It’s a breakthrough, not just in blockchain, but in technology itself. So let’s discuss what the IBM Q System One is and isn’t. I’ll do my best not to get too wonky on you and keep it on a high level for now.
We’ll start with this video from our discussion with Pundi X CEO Zac Cheah at CES Unveiled. Notice that when we use the term “psuedo-random,” Zac says “mmhmm” at the 0:20 second mark with the tone that he finally understood he was talking to people who understand cryptography and blockchain. Pay close attention to the smirk of my engineer friend asking the question.
Zac immediately knew what he was about to be asked, as did everyone but the marketing people behind him, who suddenly zoned out.
https://cryptobriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Pundi-X-CES-Unveiled-Once-More.mp4
It was ironically at that point that we established exactly where our trust level with Cheah was.
The long story short is that nothing in a computer is ever actually random. No matter how advanced they get, the basics of computing haven’t changed.
Computers can only do what they’re programmed to do, so they’re not “random” in the same way nature is “random,” and even that is a misnomer.
If mathematical philosophy is interesting to you, I’m happy to get more technical, but you’ll have to let us know on Twitter or Telegram. For now we’ll move on, because the average person hates math.
But do you know who loves math? Computers.
And do you know who loves both computers and blockchain? IBM.
Why Blockchain Will Survive IBM
Quantum computers, like ASIC mining rigs, can be engineered to perform very advanced calculations very fast. The problem is they need to be run in very precisely controlled environments to work.
The idea that quantum computing can “beat” blockchain is based on the indisputable fact that modern cryptography standards will need to advance once quantum computing becomes readily available to the masses.
Analysts claiming IBM killed blockchain not only don’t understand blockchain, but they don’t understand cryptography. Quantum computing isn’t going to destroy the fundamentals of math – it’s going to advance them far beyond what we can even imagine right now, and it’s going to do that at a very advanced pace.
Of course, the idea that you’ll own a quantum computer at home is a bit ridiculous at the moment.
The IBM Q System One is only about 5 ft by 2 ft of that giant box. The rest of the case is designed to create the controlled environment needed to run it, which is a lot different than your home PC case.
Quantum Computers Can’t Kill Blockchain
If you think anyone but enterprise users are going to effectively run a quantum computer, I point you to the cannabis extraction industry as an example.
Home extraction users building kits in their garages used open-loop cannabis extraction systems made from PVC pipes. Because they were open-looped, they were often contaminated and exploded.
It made the news a lot, and people blamed butane for the stupidity of human individuals, and BHO cannabis extracts got a lot of bad press.
In professional environments, closed loop systems made of metal pipes are used for cannabis extraction. Because it’s a controlled, closed environment, nothing gets in or out, and the resulting product is more pure. Explosion risk is limited entirely to human error, and if it does occur, the metal pipes won’t splinter and kill everyone in the room.
A home quantum computer isn’t going to explode in your room, but by the time it’s miniaturized and made safe enough to be used under those conditions, enterprise technology will have advanced so much that it won’t matter.
IBM’s quantum computer didn’t kill blockchain. Blockchain companies have long been working with IBM, and blockchain companies will one day buy their own Q System One to stand alongside the ASIC mining rigs in controlling blockchain networks.
I didn’t see the end of blockchain at CES like I feared that I would after dredging through the deserted Sands. The idea that a quantum computer will kill blockchain is as absurd as the idea that the PC killed the internet.
I witnessed no murder. I saw the dawn of a new age of blockchain computing moving into 2020.
The author is invested in digital assets, including Bitcoin which is mentioned in this article.
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The post IBM Didn’t Break Blockchain – It Took It to the Next Level appeared first on Crypto Briefing.
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TL, DR: The 14 Key Lessons From Juro’s Legal Operations eBook
TL, DR: The 14 Key Lessons From Our Legal Operations eBook
By Juro, the end-to-end contract management platform*
The quest for an efficient, effective, modern legal department, run like a business – better known as legal operations – is a defining issue for our customers.
That’s why we wrote an eBook, ‘Legal operations: how to do it and why it matters’ – 13 chapters, 20,000 words, and countless actionable insights for any legal team. It features 14 experts with lessons learned at companies like Microsoft, Monzo and M&S, and it’s free – download it here.
But not everyone has the time for 70 pages of practical insight. Time spent even doing something like hiring another lawyer is hard to justify – that’s one of Monzo GC Dean Nash’s insights from the book. And after all, it’s millennials who’ll change the legal industry beyond all recognition – a demographic not famed for its attention span. So if you don’t have time to read the book, here are the killer lessons from each of our handpicked thought-leaders:
Financial management: Jameson Monteiro, Head of Legal Operations, Assurant
‘If you pull data for a report and provide numbers to your CLO, who then presents to the CFO, only to find that his or her numbers don’t match, there are few ways to burn legal’s reputation faster. Getting that reconciliation right, on an ongoing basis, is crucial to being seen as a trusted business partner who adds value.’
Vendor management: Denise Nurse, CEO & Founder, Halebury
‘Each new, disruptive provider makes it harder and harder to explain why you aren’t taking advantage of technology, or ALSP resources, or both, to address low-value high-volume tasks at a sensible price, rather than throwing the same instructions to the same firms for a price that only ever increases.’
Cross-functional alignment: Mike Russell, Lean Leader, Legal Operations, Ingersoll-Rand
‘For your company’s IT department to dedicate time to legal necessarily means another department is taking a back seat. You need friends in IT who know what you need and why, and why it matters to the business that your project takes precedence – for example, the business impact of a faster contract closing cycle.’
Technology & process support: Dean Nash, GC & CRO, Monzo
‘It makes sense to align our way of working with the product engineers behind Monzo’s success. They work in small teams, conducting small-scale tests, iterating, prototyping, picking winners and quickly discarding what doesn’t work. Development cycles of one to two months are the norm. To support, enable and react to what they create, we need to work in the same way.’
Service delivery: Max Hübner, GC & Executive Director of Legal Operations, DPA Professionals
‘Following the legal technology explosion to a software solution that promises efficiency and effectiveness, without taking a hard look at where your legal service map should take you, is amongst the worst mistakes a GC can make. Software alone won’t help you – not without a strategy and a roadmap to guide you.’
To download the full eBook, ‘Legal operations – how to do it and why it matters’ – click here.
Organisational design: Natalie Salunke, VP Head of Legal, Europe, Fleetcor
Agile working is a step forward for a profession that’s often been too desk-based, but remote ways of working can lead to isolation and disconnection. Even moving to video from voice calls can make a big difference. Those moments of human contact create goodwill that ripples out through your work.’
Communications: Jason Macarthur, Senior Consultant, Legal Operations and Transformation
‘The key to imparting bad news is to make sure you share pertinent information as early as possible, and as clearly as possible, focusing on facts and their implications. While legal operations is helping lawyers to add value in so many new ways, it’s important not to lose sight of one of the oldest roles a lawyer can play – being the bad cop.’
Data analytics: Lucy Endel Bassli, Founder, InnoLegal Services
‘Key indicators like contract volume, headcount touched by legal matters, turnaround times – these are headline figures your GC needs to know. It’s important to arm your GC with hard stats for the tough conversations she or he has to have at their level – it’s likely the CFO is grilling them for information, and historically legal hasn’t always been able to provide it.’
Litigation support: Glenn O’Brien, Former Director of e-Discovery, Liberty Mutual
‘The nature of the data with which we’re concerned has moved on, and it’s no longer good enough to take 21st Century technology, like smart review and data clustering, and dumb it down to give us a paper output to pass around.’
IP management: Faye Moran, Senior Legal Operations Manager, Marks & Spencer
‘Where could we expand? Where are we vulnerable? Which opportunities to exploit IP might we be missing? IP is one area where legal can directly influence revenue – for example, by protecting IP and facilitating new licensing opportunities. These are the strategic value-adds that could empower lawyers to get a seat at the table, but only if we can find enough efficiency to be able to focus on them.’
Knowledge management: Leif Frykman, Founder and Chairman, LegalWorks Nordic
‘When you begin to set up your KM system, it’s important to address the structure before rushing into the content. If your department is big enough – and lucky enough – to get a dedicated technical resource, like a web manager, to manage your solution, then you need to think about structure before worrying about content.’
Information governance: Rohan Paramesh, VP Head of Legal, Habito
‘If we find ourselves running into a funding round, and all our records are immediately accessible, consistent, up-to-date and compliant with internal policy, then a pressing due diligence need can be met with agility and speed. If not, the risk for a startup is obvious – and a small and growing team can’t afford to divert crucial time and resource for a month to fix messy records.’
Strategic planning: Mick Sheehy, Regional Leader, CLOC Australia
‘In a ‘more with less’ environment, it’s really easy to focus narrowly on productivity. But there’s an obvious question after saving 40,000 hours: what did you do with them? Simply taking them out of the business as headcount reduction would have been a mistake and a terrible disincentive. Instead, by proving our ability to add value, and gaining champions at board level, we had the freedom to take that time and use it wisely: to give a better work/life balance to our team, and to reinvest it in more innovation.’
Making real change happen in legal operations: Bjarne Tellmann, GC and CLO, Pearson
‘To achieve change and prove success in-house, first, focus on the ‘hardware’: the measurable, identifiable core risks you need to address, and the specialists you need to cover them. Then address the ‘software’; the elements that are harder to measure, like culture, leadership skills, and generational differences. Finally, formulate and roll out your strategy: establish a clear framework that explains the legal department’s purpose and points to where it is headed and how it will manage the change process to get there.’
Of course, if you do have time, download the full eBook here. And if you like what you see, join our legal operations webinar on the 9th of November to find out how to get started at your company – sign up here.
[ * Artificial Lawyer is proud to bring you this Sponsored Thought Leadership article by Juro, the end-to-end contract management platform. ]
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Source: https://bloghyped.com/tl-dr-the-14-key-lessons-from-juros-legal-operations-ebook/
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Trump reprised his role as a cheerleader for Brexit and complained that everyone was taking advantage of the US. Negotiating with Putin would be easier than dealing with allies, he said. It was all transactional, about price tags and deals. Values found little airtime.
At almost every step, in tweet after tweet, he sneered at the liberal international order built from the ashes of World War II, underwritten through institutions like NATO and the UN and protected under the US nuclear umbrella, an order that has given much of the world unrivaled peace and prosperity.
Former US Vice President Joe Biden said last week that Trump was (wittingly or otherwise) helping with Putin’s agenda, which is above all to break the liberal international order that faced down the Soviet Union and stands for everything the Russian leader despises.
But is that order really in danger, and if so what might replace it? Some hark back to the 1930s, when the aftermath of economic crisis, protectionism, hostility to minorities, the collapse of international institutions and a sense that democracy had failed, allowed fascism to take root.
This parallel can be overdone of course: we live in an age of relatively full employment. We appear not to be on the brink of war, with fascist powers re-arming. Paramilitary groups don’t stalk the streets, most nation-states are stronger than they were in the 1930s, and the concept of human rights is now entrenched in democratic societies.
But when in doubt, quote Mark Twain, who is reputed to have said that “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
And if some echoes of the 1930s are faint today, there are many contemporary trends that are equally alarming.
Trade wars
The most obvious parallel is a resurgent economic nationalism. Trump called the Trans Pacific Partnership a fraud, attacked the North American Free Trade Agreement as the worst deal in American history and imposed tariffs on imports from China, Europe and elsewhere — with more promised.
He said the US would remain in the World Trade Organization, whose mission is to advance a free and fair trading system, but added: “We’ve been treated very badly … It’s an unfair situation.” WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo warned that if the U.S. were to leave the organization, the law of the jungle would prevail.
It’s hardly surprising historians recall the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 which imposed steep tariffs on America’s trading partners. The arguments of the act’s supporters — that American industry and agriculture needed protection from unfair competition — are similar to those used by Trump today. In each case, US action prompted retaliatory tariffs.
As yet unknown: whether today’s trade wars will have the same disastrous consequences as Smoot-Hawley, which only deepened the Great Depression, or whether at some point, after all the brinkmanship there will be a “deal.” It all depends on whom Trump listens to.
Related: Trump’s Fast And Loose Trade Policy Endangers American Jobs
In any case, today’s interdependent markets and technologies coupled to a global economy in good health (the IMF expects global growth of 3.9% this year and next) are in stark contrast to the rampant unemployment and inflation of the inter-war period. German unemployment stands at 3.4%; in 1932, 30% of the country’s workforce was unemployed. The following year, 25% of Americans were out of work. And the working wage then was much closer to the poverty line than now; far fewer people had savings.
Economic crisis and political disarray fueled the rise of paramilitary groups. Almost every European country had their own versions of the Nazis’ Sturmabteilung — the Brown Shirts — in the 1930s. It is hard to see how the peripheral fascist groups of today could challenge sophisticated states, even if another Great Recession came calling. All the same, it’s little wonder that a fringe of far-right groups feel enabled — especially with nationalist, anti-EU parties either in power or on the brink of it across Europe.
Amid the confrontations at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year, Trump said there were “fine people” on both sides. Far-right attacks injured 560 migrants in Germany in 2016. The British government’s latest counter-terrorism strategy contends that “the threat from the extreme right wing has evolved in recent years and is growing.”
Millennial challenges
We may not be facing a return to the 1930s, but our age has fault-lines of its own. The rise of populism didn’t start with Brexit or Trump. To Trump’s ideological mentor, Steve Bannon (and he’s not alone), it began with the financial crisis of 2008, the failure of what he calls crony capitalism. In the long slog of recovery, traditional “good-paying jobs” have vanished in the US rust-belt towns that voted heavily for Trump.
The National Employment Law Project found in 2012 that 58% of the jobs regained in the US since the recession were in low-wage occupations, paying less than $14 an hour. Millions of mid-wage jobs had disappeared. In Britain, unemployment is low but again, the jobs that have come back are largely semi-skilled and poorly paid.
Inequality has widened dramatically in the past generation: in the US the richest 1% held 20% of the national income by 2016, while the lower 50% had just 13%. The trend, while less dramatic, is similar in Europe. And most research shows it’s the poorest workers whose wages and job prospects are hurt by an influx of migrants.
One of the themes of the pro-Brexit campaign was that migrants from eastern Europe were depressing wages and stretching social services. The same dynamic is playing out in Italy, where two populist parties won elections in March.
Related: Brexit’s Broken Promises: Health Care, Immigration And The Economy
If the events of 2016 marked the Revenge of the Forgotten, their resentment is no less today. Populist politicians — Donald Trump, Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini — have expertly exploited that. (“I love the poorly educated,” Trump declared in 2016.) They say ordinary people have been forgotten by the “liberal elites,” including pampered international bureaucrats, crony capitalists and the “fake news” media — what Hitler called the lugenpresse, or the lying press.
But Hitler also wrote in Mein Kampf that, “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility.”
Rather than jack-booted paramilitaries, the peril today seems more insidious: a growing animosity towards “others” expressed in inflammatory language and through outright falsehoods. His critics say Trump turbocharged this: by describing some countries as “shitholes” and saying his opponents want illegal immigrants from central America “no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country.”
This extends beyond the US. Trump derided Germany (and Chancellor Angela Merkel) for “allowing in millions of people who have so strongly and violently changed their culture.” He asserted, falsely, that crime was way up in Germany.
But the message resonates among a growing minority in Europe. So Salvini refuses to allow boats carrying migrants to dock at Italian ports and wants a census of Roma people. The Hungarian government has made it a crime for people to offer help to illegal migrants.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, recently elected to a third term, has spoken approvingly of societies that “are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet are making nations successful.” Steve Bannon says Orban was “Trump before Trump.”
French President Emmanuel Macron lamented this trend a few weeks ago: “They [the populists] are saying the most provocative things and no-one, no-one, is outraged. We’re getting used to all kinds of extremism from countries that a few years ago were just as pro-European as we are.”
Related: Hungary Is A Beacon To Europe’s Populist Strongmen
Despite nearly a decade of recovery from the Great Recession, intolerance and racism has flourished. How the mood may further sour when (not if) the next economic crisis comes along, especially if those good-paying jobs that were promised don’t materialize. And who will be the scapegoats?
As the old certainties crumble, Merkel has declared that immigration is Europe’s existential issue and “we Europeans must fight for our own future and destiny.” She told a rally in May: “The era in which we could fully rely on others is over to some extent.”
Related: Migration ‘Make Or Break’ Issue For Europe, Warns Germany’s Merkel
The trouble is, in the midst of Brexit and badly split over immigration, Europe looks ill equipped to sort out its own destiny, especially as Russia seems so intent on meddling in European politics on the side of the populists.
On multiple fronts, the international liberal order is being challenged because it has lost the confidence of people who feel left behind and “swamped” by immigration, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it 40 years ago. Trump, Orban, Salvini, Marine Le Pen of the Mouvement National in France, have become their champions.
As Martin Wolf asks in the Financial Times, “Should we expect the old America back? Not until someone finds a more politically successful way of meeting the needs and anxieties of ordinary people.”
The same question might be asked of Europe.
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Banking on Startup Success: DOs, DON’Ts and Strategies for Financing Your StartupTo increase your startup’s chances at success, you need to plan strategically, execute carefully, and cultivate strong relationships that help you along your path. In particular, a strong banking relationship can be a crucial component in your startup’s success story.Why? Every startup needs to source capital, and every successful human needs to be smart about managing his or her money. And while investors are often a key component in sourcing startup capital, your banking relationship can be essential. Your bank can help you set up the right accounts, financial instruments, loans, and future plans to help you source the capital you need – not only for your business, but for your life. A good bank helps you make the big-picture financial choices to best support your long-term interests personally and professionally.To demystify the process of securing the right banking relationship for you and your startup, Distillery sat down for a Q&A with Rob Freelen, Los Angeles Market Manager and Managing Director of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Founded 35 years ago, SVB today banks 50% of all venture-capital-backed tech and life science companies in the US and 50% of the US VC-backed companies that completed an initial public offering (IPO) in 2017.Freelen focuses specifically on working with technology clients in the LA area. We couldn’t think of a better person to help us sort out the DOs and DON’Ts for setting up strong finances – and a strong banking relationship – for your startup. Freelen also shares related thoughts and observations about the present and future state of the LA startup ecosystem.What's the single most important piece of advice you can give to a startup hoping to secure financing?Says Freelen, “My #1 piece of advice is that, as you are soliciting advice from people, seek out those advisors and partners (banks, attorneys, etc.) whose primary and sole business is working with startups. For those people, if they make a mistake, their entire business suffers and goes away. In order to transform an idea into an enterprise, you and your partners must be 100% committed to success.”DO:In financing your startup, carefully consider your options.As you’re establishing your business, you want to maintain as much control – and freedom – as possible in your choices. Using your own money, of course, means more ownership and fewer constraints for you. But most startups don’t have that luxury. In addition, when it’s time to scale, they may miss out on gaining critical insights and access to VC, bank, and corporate venture expertise and resources.Freelen advises that, when evaluating whether to accept outside investments in your business, you should ask yourself, “What value is the investor bringing? Just capital, or is this someone who wants to be involved at a deep personal level, and more importantly, do they have experience with companies like mine? ‘Experienced money’ comes with great insight that often far exceeds the value of the monetary investment.”Tap into expertise that you are missing.Freelen explains, “When I talk to people who have yet to quit their day jobs and simply have an idea, I always remind them to plan their startup launch with the expectation that they either already are, or need to become, a world expert in the business they plan to launch.” Bottom line, he says, “The companies that grow very, very quickly are the ones that are familiar with startup challenges and have tremendous expertise on the industry side.”For an illustrative example, Freelen shares the story of one of his clients, The Bouqs Company. Its Founder and CEO John Tabis had an idea for an online flower delivery business that would be a worthy competitor in a crowded field. As a former Bain consultant, Disney strategy executive, and LA startup entrepreneur, Tabis brought tremendous management and execution acumen. But he didn’t know the flower industry. However, his friend – and later co-founder – Juan Pablo Montúfar did. Far more than just a college buddy, Montúfar was a microbiology research scientist and flower-industry expert who’d grown up on a multigenerational flower farm in Ecuador. Together, Tabis and Montúfar bring complementary management and industry expertise that gives their company a significantly higher chance of success.DON’T:Underestimate the time it will take for your business to succeed.“It always takes longer and costs more than startups expect,” says Freelen. With than in mind, almost every banker or advisor who looks at your business plan will add a margin for error. Explains Freelen, “That’s the first rule of startups.”Wait too long to establish a banking relationship.If you’re bootstrapping your new startup, have yet to establish a banking relationship, and walk in asking for a loan, most banks will either decline your application or let you know that your loan requires a personal guarantee from an individual with means to repay the loan personally. However, if you have an existing borrowing relationship and a solid record, the bank is far more likely to give you that loan.In addition, banks gain confidence when they’ve played a hands-on role in helping you set up your business. Freelen explains, “Our fundamental business premise is that we want – and expect – to bank companies at their very earliest stage. We want to meet founders before they incorporate.” SVB’s ideal startup client, he says, is “a seasoned team, and we’re meeting them prior to incorporation so that we can help them get all their infrastructure set up right the first time – things like payroll, HR, and financing.”Get advice from people without any knowledge of the startup ecosystem.As entrepreneurs refine their ideas and hone their pitches, they should seek out third-party advice to help them improve their business and finances. How much will a business improve if they’re getting advice from people who don’t understand the dynamics at play, value proposition, and return on investment that bankers and investors require from startups? “It’s the mistake most people make – getting advice from people who are not in the startup ecosystem,” says Freelen. He continues, “I always tell people to be really, really focused on who you’re getting advice from. Find someone who understands startups.”Can you help me understand the basics of capital needs relative to my company’s growth?As Freelen explains, for most startups, capital needs tend to follow a path based on company stage. That stage is defined by the company’s size, product development status, and revenue generation. He continues, “I love it when entrepreneurs understand where they are on that path, and are very thoughtful about fundraising relative to where they are.” By way of illustration:During the very early stages, there’s often a friends-and-family round of fundraising to the tune of $50k to $500k. However, founders tend to give away the largest percentages of their companies per dollars invested at this stage. (For example, at this stage, a $100k investment in a company valued at $1M buys you 10% of the company.) As a startup moves into the next stages of growth – approaching a valuation of $1M to $3M – it requires more capital. Perhaps Series A yields $5M to $10M and Series B yields $10M to $30M. Eventually, if the startup thrives, Series C might yield a whopping $100M. In general, Series B and C may mark the highest point of the fundraising path. In the Series D, E, and F rounds, however, companies typically need to raise less capital. By definition, they’ve evolved into healthy companies and are likely generating revenue. For example, a company may have the ability to take a higher-risk mezzanine debt round that enables them to raise small amounts of capital while reducing the need to relinquish equity in the company. If the company elects to go public, it may be able to raise capital relative to the valuation of its IPO. At this stage, it may break even on cash flow and choose to return equity and distributions back to investors.When I first meet with a bank, what information should I bring?On your first meeting, says Freelen, the needs are fairly minimal. “Come with two things: information around who has put money into your company, and the tax ID number for your business.” With those two things, a bank can set up a basic business account and get you on your way to depositing your first check. As Freelen explains, the investor information is a necessary part of any bank’s due diligence process. He says, “We have to do our duty to know our clients, and to vet them for financial soundness to assess the risk to SVB and the US banking system.”You’ll also want to come ready to answer some initial questions. What kind of business do you want to set up, and why? Which financial services will be most helpful to you? Which services will you qualify for during your first six months (e.g., a deposit account, credit card for travel and expenses, bill pay)?What kind of banking relationship can I expect?“Banking relationships take lots of different forms,” says Freelen. Yours will be determined by your startup’s financial situation, your investors, the changing needs of your business, and your personal finances. As with any healthy relationship, Freelen says you should expect it to evolve.Freelen describes a typical illustrative example: “A founding team comes to us, sets up an account, spends a little money, does A/B testing on their product, and raises capital.” While their needs are simple at first, they engage with the bank more meaningfully over time. “Maybe they go into a debt facility with us, doing foreign exchange (FX), or establishing a letter of credit underlying the lease with their landlord. Maybe we help them with strategic payments integration with one of SVB’s API products. Maybe – in year five, six, seven, or eight – we help the founders buy a home through SVB’s private bank services. Or set up an accounts receivable (AR) line of credit to help them scale their business more effectively. Then, in years seven, eight, nine, or ten – once they’ve had tremendous success – through one of our partners (e.g., Founders Circle Capital), we may help them access some liquidity in the secondary market, selling some of their shares so they can secure their long-term financial future.” (To read stories of SVB clients, check out SVB’s website. They’ve put together a compelling video series that features the stories of several LA-area clients.)What characteristics should I look for in my bank?Freelen advises startups to partner with a bank that has:Experience serving entrepreneurs, early-stage, and VC-backed startups.If a bank doesn’t have a good understanding of startups’ needs and goals, how can they provide proactive advice and ideas focused on helping you think several steps ahead? In addition, you want to make certain the bank can apprise you of developing market trends in the startup and VC community. Freelen says that SVB takes great pride in sharing the knowledge, insights, and perspective gained from the bank’s 35 years of experience in the innovation ecosystem. Today, SVB banks 50% of all venture-capital-backed tech and life science companies in the US. He attributes the success in large part to cultivating long-term relationships that may extend through several different financial services. He says, “We want to work with an individual in their first startup, their last, and everything in between. Often we work with serial entrepreneurs who serve as an inspiration for the entire industry.”Alignment with your industry.If a bank has a demonstrated commitment to your industry, you have a better chance they’re interested in being more than a fair-weather friend.As the most experienced financial institution focused on technology and life science innovation, SVB takes their industry commitment a step further. Says Freelen, “Technology companies are the entirety of our business. If a downturn comes, we’re still committed to this space. We’re not going to abandon it. We are 100% committed, just like you’re going to have to be to your enterprise in order to make it successful.”Some analysts say the LA early-stage scene is much more active than more established growth-stage ecosystems. What have you seen?Explains Freelen, “In terms of its growth since inception in the past five years, LA’s tech ecosystem has grown dramatically. The acceleration in new company formation has been nothing short of extraordinary. Inherently, the early-stage scene is much more established than the growth-stage scene.” Accordingly, the data shows that while LA is not seeing a lot of IPOs, it is seeing the closing of a great many Series A rounds. Freelen continues, “Companies are in stealth mode. For example, there were over 100 companies in just 2015 and 2016 – that we know about – that raised significant capital. In that same period, there was one IPO.” SVB expects that to change over the next two years. He says, “There are four to seven companies that could very legitimately go public, and that’s just in LA.”Other measures testify to the significant growth in the LA startup scene. For example, according to LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office, funding for startups in Los Angeles increased five-fold between 2011 and 2017, helping to create America’s fastest-growing startup ecosystem.As Freelen explains, “Los Angeles has some of the most significant elements needed for becoming the next big startup city.” He points to LA’s ability to handle a wealth of company formation and its proximity to the Bay Area startup community.Freelen also calls out the “tremendous amount of engineering talent resident in Southern California.” Garcetti’s office reports that the LA region graduates nearly 11,000 master’s level engineering students every year, has more engineers than any other US metropolitan area, and annually enrolls the highest number of graduate students in computer science programs.SVB and its leaders are committed to doing their part to help the LA startup ecosystem grow and thrive. Freelen’s own presence in LA is a direct result of that commitment. At the end of 2014, SVB’s leadership asked Freelen to move to LA to “supersize” the LA technology team in an effort to mature and expand SVB’s capabilities to serve the region. Since 2015, Freelen has doubled the size of the team and more than doubled its market share.In addition, SVB is an active player in region-wide development efforts. SVB CEO Greg Becker is a member of the Alliance for Southern California Innovation, an organization of universities and business leaders focused on nurturing and accelerating the growth of SoCal as a technology epicenter. The alliance works on creating the infrastructure and resources to help SoCal entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground faster.How can LA’s startup ecosystem evolve and grow?Freelen says, “LA needs more exits. You have to give those people the freedom to start their own projects. It’s like the dispersion of the seeds of the dandelion.” He points to the Bay Area, in which networks of creative, visionary professionals have created business after business. He explains the phenomena as follows: “Great companies attracted great people. When those companies are acquired or go public, it gives them the financial capital and freedom to go off and start their own enterprises, and find more great people to work with.”Freelen references Jamie Siminoff, the founder of a video security company that was acquired in April by Amazon for $1B. “Incredibly successful companies give people the experience, credibility, and capital to start their own companies. It’s like a supernova,” says Freelen. With IPOs, companies and their networks “blow apart and create an even bigger ecosystem.”If you have any additional questions for Freelen about securing the right banking relationship for your startup, you can email him at [email protected]. Want to learn more about Distillery’s big-picture focus on helping our startup and enterprise clients succeed? Let us know! And check out some of our other interview-based blogs focused on securing office space, selling your startup, accelerator programs, marketing for app launch, and explainer videos for apps.
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TALENT MANAGEMENT
Dual-Career Couples Are Forcing Firms to Rethink Talent Management
MAY 15, 2018
Jennifer Petriglieri, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, asks company leaders to consider whether they really need to relocate their high-potential employees or make them travel so much. She says moving around is particularly hard on dual-career couples. And if workers can’t set boundaries around mobility and flexibility, she argues, firms lose out on talent. Petriglieri is the author of the HBR article “Talent Management and the Dual-Career Couple.”
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SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
To me, it seems ridiculous to tell someone they need to move across the country or to a new country in just a month. I mean, you might have kids in school, a spouse who needs to find a job, a house you need to sell, and new housing you need to find. Who are these people expect us to drop everything and jump for a new role?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: And so, I think those people are us, Sarah, quite frankly, and I think it comes from two sources.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s our guest, Jennifer Petriglieri.
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: So, one is really ingrained expectations — we might call them unconscious expectations — of what we as sociologists call the ideal worker, always available, can move at the drop of a hat, is 100% dedicated, and has the support crew at home who can take care of everything.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: She says the other expectation is the fact that sometimes someone very suddenly leaves a role; and because business must go on, someone else needs to suddenly fill it. Making this kind of move so quickly would be tough for anyone, but if you have a spouse who has their own demanding career, it can be near impossible.
Jen is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, and she’s the author of the HBR article “Talent Management and the Dual-Career Couple.”
She’s here to talk about why companies shouldn’t make employees choose between their careers and their spouses.
Well, Jen, thank you so much for talking with us today.
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, let’s just start with the overarching problem with traditional talent strategies. How do they fall short here?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Well, really the core of the problem is the logic they’re based on. So, the design logic of today’s time management programs were set in place 20, 30 years ago in an era of what I call “unbounded talent.” Now, what I mean by this is in those days, talent tended to have spouses who were what we might refer to as “trailing spouses.” So, they had people who took up all of the family commitments for them so they could dedicate themselves pretty much 100% to work. They could travel at the drop of a hat, they could move and relocate to relatively frequently, and they were essentially almost primarily committed to work.
At the same time, if we think back to that era, there was no technology than to support remote working or flexible working. That logic has completely changed, but the design of talent management is still rooted in that original logic. So, now if we think about most talent is what I call “bounded talent.” You know, very few of us have that support crew at home backing us up. Many of us are in dual-career couples where we’re managing logistics and challenges between us, and at the same time we have these amazing enabling technologies that could help us not need to be onsite all the time 24/7.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Tell me a little bit more about that challenge of the sort of — the demands of a physical location, like having to be in a particular place at a particular time.
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Yeah, so a lot of organizations are still based on this idea of facetime, how we show a commitment and show our dedication is by showing up physically in the office and also showing up physically in different offices. So, if I need to do a piece of work, the assumption is I probably have to go to that location to do it. So, there’s this real idea of physical presence, even though we know, and I know you’ve had podcasts about this before, that if we work remotely, we are often actually more productive. So, it flies in the face of the evidence, and yet that logic of physical presence is still very much underpinning most of our talent management strategies.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, in your work you have, you’ve kind of distinguished between two kinds of challenges. One is the mobility challenge; one is the flexibility challenge. Tell me a little bit about how you came to think of it as two separate challenges.
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Yeah, so really the thinking came from two places. One is talking to many HR leaders and leaders of talent management programs and looking at the challenges they face, managing talent. And the other is talking to the talented people themselves and looking at the personal challenges they face. And really there’s a mirroring between them.
So, if we look at the mobility challenge first, more and more HR leaders are coming to me and saying, you know, well, we have these great opportunities to move locations, to do secondments, to spend some time abroad. People just aren’t as willing to take them anymore or they have more challenges in taking them. They can’t just go at the drop of a hat. And I heard time and time again organizations who would offer one of their talented people what looked like a plum role only to have it knocked back and say, well, the time’s not right for me now, or, I can’t leave tomorrow to that great opportunity.
At the same time when I spoke to talented people themselves in dual career couples, they would say, we want to move. It’s not that I want to be stuck in one location, and I realize that to become a senior leader, I must be mobile, but I cannot just be mobile at the whim of the organization. It needs to be a more planful move, particularly when we’re trying to manage two careers between us. It is possible to both find relocations and do them together or both gone secondments, etc. But it just requires more planning. And what’s very interesting if you look at the data is that when there is more planning behind it and when both people get good moves together, those relocations are more likely to work. So, it’s not just a constraint that we need more time. We know that they’re more successful when we give them more time. So, that’s the mobility side.
The flexibility side is a little bit more different. So, if we think of mobility, that is maybe once every six months, once a year, even once every three years for big rotation or travel. Flexibility is more of a day-to-day issue. And it’s really this issue that if both partners in a couple are working, there are still a lot of household tasks that needs to get done. You know, if the kids are sick, who takes them? If there’s some elder care that needs to be handled, who does that? There are things that happen in our daily lives in the week that need to get handled, and the question is, who has responsibility for those now? Now, in an ideal world, if organizations were using all the tools we have available for flex working, for telecommuting, that wouldn’t be so much of an issue; but right now what I heard time and time again from HR leaders and the talent themselves was, we have these policies, but if you make use of them, you’re stigmatized and you’re seen as not committed to the organization, not dedicated to your career, and therefore you’re punished for using them. So, it’s not that organizations don’t have the solutions. It’s that in curtailing people from using them, they’re creating this flexibility challenge, which quite frankly doesn’t need to be there.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, tell us about a couple you talked to who found themselves in that situation. How did they handle it?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: So, the first example I want to give you is a couple who were actually based in Boston, where you are Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh!
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Yeah. And he was in tech, and she was in pharmaceutical sales, actually. If you know the pharmaceutical sales world, it’s, it’s fairly fast moving, and opportunities come up relatively frequently, and people really trying to climb the ladder quite quickly. And she was offered a golden opportunity down in Florida, OK? And it was exactly one of those situations: You’re your high potential. We know you’re raising up the ladder quickly. You know, someone’s gone to a competitor. This amazing opportunity to lead one of the bigger sales teams. Can you take it?And, of course, the way it’s sold is all in the benefits: This is because we believe in you. You’re going to be great in this role. We really trust you. It’s a fantastic opportunity to move into senior management, you know, but by the way, please pack up and leave in the next month.
You know, of course, in that situation, like any of us, it’s a little bit of a rabbit-in-the-headlights situation. On the one hand, it is a great opportunity; let’s not deny it. And you can also see that by not taking it, this is going to be a black mark against you. At the same time, her husband’s working in tech. His company has no outpost there. Florida is not really known for the tech industry either. And so, when they went back and talked about it, you know, on the one hand, it was extremely difficult because she has this great opportunity, but he really can’t match it.
But what it did do interestingly for the couple was start them thinking about mobility and thinking about, OK, well, maybe this option might not be very good, but what else is there out there? And so, what it did in the couple of spot they’re thinking. And what actually happened in that couple is they did move but not for that option. And so, what they actually ended up doing was moving to the west coast, and she got a similar option at a competitor, you know, and the, the job offer she’d gotten in her organization gave her the confidence that wow, I am ready for this role, so I’m going to apply to a competitor. And that was for him back to the head office of his organization. And so, of course, what her organization did by giving her that now-or-never opportunity was lose a key talent and lose one to the competitor and not to a parallel role, but to a more senior role. And I think this story shows that it’s not that they weren’t mobile, right, and it’s not that she wasn’t ambitious; it was that by giving her that really tight deadline, and it’s kind of Florida do or die, they lost a key talent.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, that’s interesting to me because you had some other examples, too, in the article of people where this sort of opportunity comes up, and what ends up happening is that eventually the talented person leaves and joins a competitor. Is that a common reaction to this kind of thing?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: It is actually quite common for many organizations. Of course, there are some organizations who are a little bit more savvy about this, and oftentimes what might happen is that same situation and the person says, OK, you know, I just really cannot take that now; I’m not interested. Now, organizations at that point, they’re one of three ways. Either one strike and you’re out, and the person very often leaves, and they lose the talented. And then there are two of ways organizations go. Some organizations try to find a workaround, and this is great, and so there’s lots of different ways for this, depending on the type of roles. It might be a commuter-leader role where you spend two or three days on that site and the other two or three days on the home site. It might be some kind of combination of job swap or secondments or some way to sort of manage that transition. It might also be the third way: OK, we realize this isn’t, this opportunity isn’t right for you, but we, we still really want to keep you and value your talent, so what might be the right option? And at that point sit down and really try and map out the other mobility options. So, those tend to be the three paths.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes. So, let’s talk a little bit more than about what companies might do better because I doubt that they want to be sort of shooing their best people away to the competition, right? So, I’m wondering how common is it to have a kind of two-way conversation between the talented person we’re talking about, the kind of protagonist, their manager, or maybe a three-way conversation that brings in HR. Do you see companies where there is this kind of transparent dialogue going on?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Yeah, and I also think is quite idiosyncratic. So, it’s not true to say X company does it and Y company doesn’t. It tends to be very dependent on the relationship between the talented person and the manager and also quite frankly, how much HR is willing to get involved. And I think this is really from both sides. I think for the talented people, especially if they’ve seen peers face this one-or-two-strikes-and-you’re-out, it can be quite frightening to have those conversations in organizations and to really set those expectations and say, you know, I’m committed to my career. I want to be mobile. That these are my boundaries. And it’s particularly difficult for talent who are, who are a little bit younger. Because if you think of our career cycles, when we start our career, we are relatively unbounded. Most of us have pretty much no commitments at home.
We can travel at the drop of a hat. We are willing to make those moves. And then there comes a day when that changes for whatever reason. Maybe it’s, you know, we partner with someone who also has a career, and we’re committed to living in the same city. Maybe we have a child and we we have more commitments there, or maybe it’s different commitments, elder commitments, etc. And not transition from being unbounded to bounded talent can feel quite frightening because up until now I’ve pretty much said yes to my manager, and suddenly I need to start saying no, and that can be very frightening to have those conversations.
So, I think part of it is from the talent person, and I think part of it is from the manager, HR. And here we see different problems. Sometimes for some managers who were of the older generation who were unbounded talent, who maybe had a stay-at-home partner, part of it is it’s hard for them to just get it, right. They’ve never been in that situation themselves, so it’s hard for them to put themselves in the shoes and understand there might be constraints. So, why would they start those conversations? And I think then from HR, there can be some reticence around approaching too many personal aspects and asking them about personal things. So, I think the issues can come from all angles.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It sounds like one of the challenges here is that managers and HR are reluctant to ask about people’s personal lives. Um, in some cases they might even feel like it’s not even legal to like ask about those kinds of plans, right? So, how can people have these difficult conversations that are so awkward and kind of have them in a way that’s ultimately helpful and not kind of a creepy, like poking around like, so, what does your spouse do?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Yeah, it’s hard, and I think we have thought impression of these conversations if we look at these relationships in a very decontextualized way. You know, if you don’t know your manager at all, that is a creepy conversation to have. But most people have a decent relationship with their manager. I think then the starting point for the conversation is from the, the area of, you know, hopes and aspirations and constraints. And it’s that very few of us now can go anywhere and do anything. So, you know, what are the kinds of constraints you have? Are there places you would love to go and work in? Are there others that are totally off the map for you? Is there some ways we can engage in more flexible working and what is helpful for you?
So, very recently, um, I was actually talking to an, an alumnus of INSEAD, and they were trying to increase flexible working in their organizations and really take away the stigma and start to talk to people about what they need. And the way they did it was to target, um, high- profile men who were popular and recognized as, as very good in business and start working with them and encouraging them to use flexible working. And then it kind of cascaded out. And it was like, OK, this guy’s doing it who’s very popular, well respected in the organization. Then it’s OK for me to have that conversation with my manager, etc. So, I think part of it is about the norms, but I think part of it is not approaching it from what does your spouse do but more approaching it from, what are the kinds of constraints, what would make your life easier to work with, and are there any places you want to go because I think the danger is we think of this issue as one of constraints, and but it’s not just about constraints; there are some real opportunities in having people with partners and spouses who are also talent and that is from this location aspect, as I said before, the main reason relocations fail is because the spouse or partner is unhappy.
Now, if you’ve got two people relocating together with great jobs, the likelihood for your organization, yours goes well, is extremely high, so there’s an opportunity you just don’t get with people who have a trailing spouse. That’s a huge advantage for the organization. Equally with flexible working. Now, it’s healthy, might be helpful for some people to go home at a reasonable hour, spend a few hours with their family, and then log back in and make some calls later in the evening. That may actually be a helpful thing for the organization. So, I also think we need to get out of this thinking that it’s a bad thing we need to manage, um, and thinking how can this thing play in our favor in organizations?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And let’s talk a little bit then about what the company should be doing for the spouse, because it seems like if that’s the person who really can make or break an overseas assignment, for example, what is the appropriate role for a company to take with a employee’s spouse?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: So, let’s just talk about what organizations do now to start with. So, organizations range, and one of the talented people I spoke to summed this up brilliantly when she said her organization, which was a big multinational, there was a lot of resources but very little support. And I thought that was a fantastic way of summing it up because many organizations think, and in some ways do offer a lot. They offer relocation programs, connections to people. But when she said there’s a lack of support, what she was meaning was there was very little thought into her couple’s personal situation. And for her, her husband was also an executive who needed relocating. And of course, the resources offered were tailored to a stay-at-home spouse. And so, they were all around cultural integration and finding a place in the community and maybe volunteer roles, which were totally inappropriate for what his needs were.
So, I think a part of it is, is getting more personalized in that support. And a part of it, again, is just changing the assumption that the support is not necessarily for a trailing spouse; in many cases now, the support is for an equally talented and in some cases even more high-potential person than you know, the employee that you’re dealing with.
And so, there are some novel ways that organizations are dealing with this. Particularly when we look at those hub locations where there’s lots of organizations based like Dubai, like Boston, like San Francisco, like Geneva, like London — these places where there’s lots of organizations based, organizations or clubbing together and looking at how they can fill their own vacancies locally on the ground with people who are moving and following a spouse’s career. And this is a great solution for organizations because they can almost sort of trade the CVs of spouses and see how together as a group they can solve this issue.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m also wondering, like, what’s on the flip side, what is realistic in terms of setting boundaries? So, is it realistic to say, you know, I really like living in the city I live in. I really don’t ever want to move. I have roots here. I have family here. Can you still have a very successful career setting that kind of limit or saying, you know, I, maybe it’s not mobility. Maybe it’s flexibility, maybe it’s, you know, I never want to travel at the drop of a hat. I just don’t want to do it or don’t want to travel at all. Can you do that and still get ahead, or is that just unrealistic?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: I think having some boundaries, it’s realistic, but I think having very rigid boundaries honestly is unrealistic. For example, let’s say you join a big multinational. To say that you want to get to the top that you never want to leave your city, it’s just not going to happen. I mean, you know, let’s be honest. OK, maybe you happen to live in the city of the headquarters, but even then you would be expected to at least some time, you know, in the field if you like, on other locations. Likewise, with flexibility. We may have a, you know, a general rule, you know, I just can’t travel at the drop of the hat, but if something enormous crisis came up and you didn’t travel at the drop of a hat for that one occasion, of course it would not look good. There’s this idea of having flexible boundaries, OK.
Let’s imagine you’re a Bostonian. You always want to live in Boston in your life, but there may be a time in your life were doing a short secondment somewhere else or a job swap or being a community leader for a period is OK; it’s bearable. I think you will need to do something like that to get to the top. Now, of course, if your business is, is a more local business or regional business, that may be less of an issue, but if you’re working for a larger organization, even if it’s just a national organization, you know, there’ll be lots of locations. It will be very hard to reach a very senior level without some flexibility on this.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, I’m imagining that there are some people nonetheless who are listening and thinking, you know, this is all about millennials wanting to have everything; in my day we just sucked it up and did it. Do you ever sort of hear pushback from managers that this is like, you know, part of like going through this process, everyone has been through this. It is painful, but it’s what you have to do to get ahead?
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: All the time. And what I would do say to them is they are missing out on talent. So, there is a very interesting trend in organizations now where the managers — see the managers who was saying that are people, I can guarantee who have a stay-at-home spouse or who have a spouse who very much has the trailing role, I can guarantee it. But this a very strong trend in organizations now where managers who get this issue and are really supporting it are doing what I call talent hoarding. And so, when I talked to talented people, especially in big organizations who, you know, sometimes there’s a choice between roles, there’s an informal network which where people communicate, oh, this person is great, he or she really gets it. They’re super supportive. This person, don’t go and work for them if it’s the last choice in the organization. And so, what is happening in organizations is those, there’s, of course, it’s not just a war for talent between organizations. There’s a war for talent within organizations. And if you’re a manager who has that attitude that people should just suck it up and do what I did, I can guarantee you are going to lose the internal war for talent. And we can see this very strongly because those people winning that internal war for talent are people who may themselves have had stay-at-home spouses or come from this unbounded talent, but they’re people who have taken the time to really understand the issue and try and accommodate it.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Now, the people that you talked to and interviewed for this, you talked to couples, you talked to people in HR. I’m wondering — managers — I’m wondering if there is someone you talked to who had kind of been on both sides of this. They were part of a couple who dealt with this, but then now they’re also managing other couples who are dealing with this, too.
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Many. Many, many. And I think this is what is actually the hope for organizations, is that what’s happening increasingly is the wave of people who are getting into middle and more senior management now have faced these issues themselves, and so it’s easier to manage. And so yeah, this is an increasing trend is that the people who are doing the managing and making the decisions have face this themselves, and that’s where we see this issue starting to ease.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well Jen, I’m glad to know that it’s getting better.
JENNIFER PETRIGLIERI: Thank you. I know; me too.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Jennifer Petriglieri. She’s an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. And she’s the author of the article “Talent Management and the Dual-Career Couple.” Read it in the May–June 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review or on HBR.org.
Our show’s produced by Amanda Kersey and Curt Nickisch. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. And we get technical and production help from Rob Eckhardt.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
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