Forget ad optimization: This VC wants to invest in startups working on real problems

The U.S. will face some very serious challenges in the coming decades, including arresting damage to the environment, rebuilding our infrastructure, reinventing education, defending against new geopolitical threats, and venturing to Mars. Traditionally, we look to the federal government to tackle these problems—but that tradition may be over. The technical talent needed to confront our biggest problems now works in the private sector, because that’s where the money is. And too many of those talented people are spending their days working on trivial problems like ad-tech algorithms and photo-sharing apps. Katherine Boyle [Photo: courtesy of General Catalyst] To lure tech workers into focusing on important problems with fresh ideas, Katherine Boyle at the venture capital firm General Catalyst is starting a new investment sector within the fund: She will invest in civic-tech startups targeting aerospace and defense, public safety, education, transportation, and infrastructure. “A big part of our thesis is that innovative companies can fill in where existing government agencies have fallen short,” Boyle tells Fast Company . Boyle will work the sector from her new home in Miami. She believes she might have a clearer view of the field of civic tech startups from a vantage point far away from tech industry hubs such as the Bay Area and Austin. Boyle and General Catalyst have already made some bets on companies that could be called “civic tech.” Crunchbase shows that General Catalyst participated in three funding rounds for Anduril Industries , the Palmer Luckey -founded defense startup that produces autonomous drone surveillance systems. ‌ Boyle’s investment thesis recognizes that engineers and designers and programmers and data scientists aren’t likely to take a pay cut and move from San Francisco to Washington to work for a government agency. Innovation happens in the private sector. Her new fund is part of a growing awareness that the government should lean harder on private-sector startups—civic tech startups—to find new approaches to the massive challenges we face as a society. Where the talent is Boyle says that there was a time in America when entering civil service professions within the government were a source of social cachet and a respectable salary. This attitude among professionals was influenced by President John F. Kennedy’s famous words, “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” That maxim came in the midst of the Cold War (and the Space Race), when, regardless of their political party, Americans felt the presence of a common enemy in the Soviet Union. How times have changed. We live in a deeply polarized society with great distrust of the government, and as a result, working within it is no longer as popular. Read More …

Inside YouTube’s 5-year program to help creators that you’re just now hearing about

For the past five years, there’s been a cadre of YouTubers working closely with the company to shape the tools and features creators are using. And it’s not until now that YouTube is pulling back the curtain on its findings and on the program itself. YouTube’s Creator in Residence launched in 2016 as a way for a select group of creators to stress test new additions to the platform and give feedback on the user experience directly to engineers, designers, and product managers. Ten creators are handpicked by the Creator in Residence team for six-month terms that include weekly meetings and, at times, team members visiting creators in their homes and studios to see how being a YouTuber affects their lives on and off camera. Renato Verdugo, a user experience researcher at YouTube an co-lead of Creator in Residence, says typical UX research stops after a week or two with a specific focus on workshopping a product, website, or app. “The more time we started spending with creators without a product agenda, the more we learned [about] their everyday life in a way that allows us to better understand the role that the platform plays in a specific creator’s success, in a specific creator’s business,” Verdugo says. “The residency came from the spirit of, how do we spend time with creators beyond one research session? ” Part of the reason the Creator in Residence program stayed under wraps for five years was to ensure that time with creators was as unfiltered as possible. Renato Verdugo [Photo: courtesy of YouTube] “For this to be effective, the creator needs to know that they’re not here to be a spokesperson, that they’re here to be honest and raw,” Verdugo says. “Giving time to work without the public spotlight and [creators not having] people put pressure on them like, ‘You’re talking to YouTube? Can you also raise this other thing?’ It just creates space to breathe.” Verdugo and his team select creators based on who they deem are doing something “unique or cool” and “really creative” with their channels, regardless of the size of their following Read More …

Inside YouTube’s 5-year program to help creators that you’re just now hearing about

For the past five years, there’s been a cadre of YouTubers working closely with the company to shape the tools and features creators are using. And it’s not until now that YouTube is pulling back the curtain on its findings and on the program itself. YouTube’s Creator in Residence launched in 2016 as a way for a select group of creators to stress test new additions to the platform and give feedback on the user experience directly to engineers, designers, and product managers. Ten creators are handpicked by the Creator in Residence team for six-month terms that include weekly meetings and, at times, team members visiting creators in their homes and studios to see how being a YouTuber affects their lives on and off camera. Renato Verdugo, a user experience researcher at YouTube an co-lead of Creator in Residence, says typical UX research stops after a week or two with a specific focus on workshopping a product, website, or app. “The more time we started spending with creators without a product agenda, the more we learned [about] their everyday life in a way that allows us to better understand the role that the platform plays in a specific creator’s success, in a specific creator’s business,” Verdugo says. “The residency came from the spirit of, how do we spend time with creators beyond one research session? ” Part of the reason the Creator in Residence program stayed under wraps for five years was to ensure that time with creators was as unfiltered as possible. Renato Verdugo [Photo: courtesy of YouTube] “For this to be effective, the creator needs to know that they’re not here to be a spokesperson, that they’re here to be honest and raw,” Verdugo says. “Giving time to work without the public spotlight and [creators not having] people put pressure on them like, ‘You’re talking to YouTube? Can you also raise this other thing?’ It just creates space to breathe.” Verdugo and his team select creators based on who they deem are doing something “unique or cool” and “really creative” with their channels, regardless of the size of their following. “We have no hard requirements,” he says. “We’ve reached out to people who have a couple hundred thousand all the way to the well into the millions. It’s much more about doing interesting things on the platform.” For example, Anisha Dixit, a creator based in Mumbai whose aim is empowering women, particularly in India, in approachable and comedic ways. “She talks about things that could be considered taboo, like menstruation,” Verdugo says. “She mixes her own experience of growing up as a woman in India with the experience that her younger audience is going through.” To get a better sense of Dixit’s workflow and life, Verdugo spent a week in Mumbai shadowing her creating content, doing press, and so forth. “That ethnographic research is really not necessarily about any specific feature of the platform. I don’t show up with like a suitcase full of prototypes like, let’s try new things,” Verdugo says. “It’s an opportunity to open that window into what is everyday life. What is it like to wake up in the morning and be a YouTube creator and go to bed and still be a YouTube creator?” That said, there are occasions where Verdugo gives creators the opportunity to test, and ultimately shape, new features on the platform, such as the revamped YouTube Studio, the hub for creators to manage their accounts; and YouTube Stories, which originally launched as Reels in 2017 but not without some necessary guidance from creators in the program who were flown to New York City to participate in a scavenger hunt as a fun way to test the feature Read More …

The makers of the Instant Pot are now selling another pandemic must-have

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, air purifiers have become a ubiquitous presence in homes, businesses, and schools. Now, everyone’s favorite kitchen gadget company is launching one, too. That’s right: Instant Pot is selling an air purifier. The decision to get into the air purifying business was entirely inspired by the pandemic. “We felt a deep responsibility to help solve for a major concern facing our customers as the pandemic surged,” said Ben Gadbois, Instant Brands CEO, in a press release. “We knew that a new normal was going to emerge where air quality would matter more than ever. So, over the past year, our teams engineered a revolutionary innovation to improve air quality while still offering an affordable solution for homes, work spaces, dorm rooms, or wherever our Instant families need us.” The Instant purifier comes in two sizes, small and large, and boasts medical-grade HEPA-13 filters and the ability to “remove 99.9% of the virus that causes COVID-19.” The claim is based on testing the purifier against SARS-COV-2 in a 13-cubic-foot laboratory chamber, where the air inside the space passed through the device 10 times. The company does not claim to prevent COVID-19 transmission. The Association of Household Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) independently checked the Instant air purifier’s ability to clean the air: The $130 small air purifier can handle 126 square feet, and the $240 large air purifier can filter up to 388 square feet of space. [Photo: courtesy of Instant Brands] Last year, government agencies suggested indoor air filtration systems could be a good supplement to mask wearing, social distancing, and handwashing against COVID-19. Researchers seem to agree that HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filters can do a lot to remove small particles from the air, including viruses. Read More …

How Amazon became an engine for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories

Search for “vaccines” on Amazon’s bookstore, and a banner encourages shoppers to “learn more” about COVID-19, with a link to the Centers for Disease Control. But the text almost vanishes amid the eye-catching book covers spreading out below, many of which carry Amazon’s orange “bestseller” badge. One top-ranked book that promises “the other side of the story” of vaccine science is #1 on Amazon’s list for “Health Policy.” Next to it, smiling infants grace the cover of the top-selling book in “Teen Health,” co-authored by an Oregon pediatrician whose license was suspended last year over an approach to vaccinations that placed “many of his patients at serious risk of harm.” Anyone Who Tells You That Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying , by a prominent English conspiracy theorist, promises “the facts about vaccination — so that you can make up your own mind.” There are no warning notices or fact checks—studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, for instance—but there are over 1,700 five-star ratings and a badge: the book is #1 on Amazon’s list for “Children’s Vaccination & Immunization.” Offered by small publishers or self-published through Amazon’s platform, the books rehearse the falsehoods and conspiracy theories that fuel vaccine opposition, steepening the impact of the pandemic and slowing a global recovery. They also illustrate how the world’s biggest store has become a megaphone for anti-vaccine activists, medical misinformers, and conspiracy theorists, pushing dangerous falsehoods in a medium that carries more apparent legitimacy than just a tweet. “Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation, and the world leader in pushing fake anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy books,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. For years, journalists and researchers have warned of the ways fraudsters, extremists, and conspiracy theorists use Amazon to earn cash and attention. To Hotez, who has devoted much of his career to educating the public about vaccines, the real-world consequences aren’t academic. In the US and elsewhere, he says, vaccination efforts are now up against a growing ecosystem of activist groups, foreign manipulators, and digital influencers who “peddle fake books on Amazon.” Anti-vaccine titles dominate search results for “vaccines”; the first autocomplete suggestion is “vaccines are dangerous” (Amazon) Letting the truth loose The Seattle giant is known for a relatively minimalist approach to policing content. The goal, founder Jeff Bezos said in 1998, was “to make every book available—the good, the bad and the ugly.” Customer reviews would “let truth loose.” Amazon’s algorithms and recommendation boxes would make it a place where, as it says on its website, “customers can find everything they need and want.” These days, they can publish everything they want, too: Amazon’s self-publishing platforms allow authors to make paper books, audio books, or e-books. The latter, Amazon says , “takes less than five minutes and your book appears on Kindle stores worldwide within 24–48 hours.” Gradually, Amazon has taken a tougher approach to content moderation, and to a seemingly ceaseless onslaught of counterfeits, fraud, defective products, and toxic speech. The company says its automated and human reviewers now evaluate thousands of products a day to ensure they abide by its offensive content policies . For books, its prohibitions are brief and vague: material “that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.” Sometimes that includes health misinformation. In 2019, the company removed a number of titles that connected autism to vaccines after Rep. Adam Schiff wrote to Bezos to say he was concerned Amazon was “surfacing and recommending products and content that discourage parents from vaccinating their children,” citing “strong evidence” that vaccine misinformation had helped fuel a deadly measles epidemic in Washington that year. After the start of the pandemic, Amazon removed over one million fraudulent products related to COVID-19, including “cures” like herbal treatments, prayer healing, and vitamin supplements. It also pulled an unknown number of books that pushed pandemic conspiracy theories, and added banners linking customers to credible information for some search terms. January 6 led to another purge across Big Tech, and Amazon also pulled alt-right and QAnon merchandise for breaking its rules on hate speech. Later that month, it removed dozens of books promoting Holocaust denial, and finally removed the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries . It even banned Parler from its cloud service, citing the right-wing social network’s lax content moderation. Despite its sweeps, however, Amazon is still flooded with misinformation, and helping amplify it too: A series of recent studies and a review by Fast Company show the bookstore is boosting misinformation around health-related terms like “autism” or “covid,” and nudging customers toward a universe of other conspiracy theory books. Read More …