Industry Leaders December 2021

EDITOR’S NOTE DECEMBER 2021

Welcome to the year-end issue of Industry Leaders! While we were putting together this issue, we were thinking of ways in which readers could get a glimpse of the lives of entrepreneurs who’ve made it in recent years. Our Cover Story, “Entrepreneurs Under 30” celebrates savvy entrepreneurs who have been breaking the barriers of starting up a business in North America.

In Green Revolution, we celebrate the success of Hanna Hennig, CIO at Siemens AG, who has successfully managed to lead sustainable business transformation.

How will you end the year? It’s natural - take some time off work and enjoy a holiday to remember. We’re bringing to you the global destinations where travel tech is hot.

We wish you a happy new year and lots of success.

Happy reading!

Like always, we welcome your comments (Facebook. com/ IndustryLeaders, @IndLeaders on Twitter). You may reach us at editor@indleaders.com or Editor – Industry Leaders Magazine, The Fastest Media, 3651 Lindell Road, Suite 320D, Las Vegas, NV 89103. www.industryleadersmagazine.com

EDITORIAL

TECHNOLOGY

Anna Domanska, Editor-in-Chief

John Hancock, Head-Web

Christy Gren, Editor

Department

Riana Petanjek, Sub-Editor Aubrey Chang, Sub-Editor Anna Verasai, Associate Editor

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Le Manh Coung, Sr. Software Coordinator

Julia Hunt, Magazine Production

DESIGN

Tony Raval, Project Director

Kevin Paul, Sr. Graphic

Jay Raol, Project Director

Designer

MARKETING Jason Miller, Sr. Project Director

FINANCE CONTROL R R Baratiya

ADVERTISING Richard Dean, Advertising Manager

Is Jamie Dimon Bitcoin’s Biggest Enemy?

Bitcoin has soared 7000% since Jamie Dimon began calling it worthless back in 2014.

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PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took another potshot at Bitcoin on Oct. 11 by calling the cryptocurrency “worthless,” likening trading BTC to smoking cigarettes.

“I personally think that Bitcoin is worthless,” Dimon said while speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Institute of International Finance. “But I

don’t want to be a spokesman for that, I don’t care. It makes no difference to me.”

“I don’t think you should smoke cigarettes either,” the CEO continued before acknowledging, “Our clients are adults. They disagree. If they want to have access to buy or sell bitcoin – we can’t custody it – but we can give

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them legitimate, as clean as possible access.”

The latest remarks echo Jamie Dimon’s comment on Bitcoin from May, when he compared the digital currency to the business of banking weed.

“My own personal advice to people is: stay away from it. That does not mean the clients don’t want it,” Dimon told Congress on May 27. “This goes back to how you have to run a business.

I don’t smoke marijuana but if you make it nationally legal, I’m not going to stop our people from banking it.”

Jamie Dimon has been a vocal opponent of Bitcoin, previously calling it “fool’s gold” and a “fraud worse than the tulip bulbs craze in the 17th century.”

The executive once made a statement saying that he would fire JPMorgan traders if they traded in Bitcoin.

Twitterati wasn’t chuffed about Dimon’s statement about

Bitcoin. Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts expressed dismay over the JPMorgan Chase CEO’s latest diatribe against Bitcoin while others posted the code for the executive to see.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted: “Yes, I read it. And then I wrote it (coding up our own Bitcoin node) to make sure I understand it.”

Shapeshift founder Erik Voorhees wrote: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” To be fair, Dimon and his managers have consistently said that blockchain, as well as cryptocurrencies that were regulated, hold promise.

The executive’s personal opinion’s aside, JPMorgan Chase announced in February 2019 that it would launch a digital currency called JPM Coin.

The price of Bitcoin surged to a five-month high above $62,000 on Oct. 18.

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Amazon, Facebook and Google to cough up a 15% minimum global tax rate

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ore than 130 nations agreed on Oct. 8 to set a new minimum tax rate for companies around the world.

The global corporate tax rate is an attempt to deter tax avoidance by multinational companies.

According to the OECD, the minimum tax rate would reap some $150 billion for governments.

“Agreement represents a oncein-a-generation accomplishment for economic diplomacy,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. She said it would end a “race to the bottom” in which countries outbid each other with lower tax rates.

Representatives of 136 countries agreed to enforce a global minimum tax rate of 15%, as well as a fairer system that requires companies to pay taxes in the countries where they do business. “Rather than competing on our ability to offer low corporate The deal was announced by rates,” she said, “America will the Paris-based Organization now compete on the skills of for Cooperation and Economic our workers and our capacity to Development (OECD), which innovate, which is a race we can hosted the talks that led to it. win.”

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The minimum tax rate would reap some $150 billion for governments, according to the oECD. The landmark deal goes beyond setting a global minimum tax rate.

It creates new rules for the digital era. Under the agreement, tech bigwigs like Amazon, Facebook and Google will be required to pay taxes in countries where their goods or services are sold, even if they have no physical presence there. The accord will reshape the way the world’s largest companies have been paying taxes for several decades. We’ll now see multinational companies pay more

taxes while also spreading taxable revenue more evenly to countries where those businesses earn sales.

The exact formula for working how much companies will owe across various jurisdictions still needs to be worked out.

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The chip shortage is a ‘short-term’ problem, says Elon Musk The CEo s outlook is far more optimistic than other automotive industry leaders who believe it may last up to 2023-24.

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esla, Inc. CEO Elon Musk disclosed on Sep. 25 that he’s confident the ongoing global chip crisis be solved in the short term. When asked how long he thought the global semiconductor shortage would affect the automotive industry, Musk said:

“short term I think.”

“There’s a lot of chip fabrication plants that are being built,” Musk said during a joint session with Stellantis and Ferrari Chairman John Elkann, at Italian Tech Week.

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“I think we will have good capacity for providing chips by next year,” he added.

The two industry leaders agreed on potential support coming from nuclear power to cover for the increasing global power demands.

“I am surprised by a recent move away of some countries form nuclear energy, which is safe,” Musk said.

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in an increased demand for commodities for electronics and cars that the supply chain couldn’t handle, especially the microchip industry.

This chip shortage resulted a domino effect that pummeled the automotive industry to the ground. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, a global semiconductor industry leader, recently said it would take another couple of years for the semiconductor industry to catch up to the growing demand.

The U.S.-based chipmaker is planning Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 16

to expand its use of external foundries to produce a range of products. The executive also said that Intel will significantly expand its manufacturing operations and create semiconductor chips for other companies.

Earlier this year, Musk said that the global chip crisis is affecting Tesla, although he believes it’s not a long-term issue.

When discussing the electric vehicle maker’s performance this quarter, Musk said that Tesla’s biggest challenge is resolving the supply chain conundrum.

“Our biggest challenge is supply chain, especially microcontroller chips. Never seen anything like it. Fear of running out is causing every company to overorder – like the toilet paper shortage, but at epic scale. That said, it’s obviously not a long-term issue.”

The CEO’s outlook is far more optimistic than other automotive industry leaders who believe it may last up to 2023-24.

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Supply chain crisis bad news automotive industry leaders

The world's biggest car companies are on track to lose production of 7.7 million vehicles in 2021.

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for s

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utomotive industry leaders lose $210 billion in revenue this year due to supply chain woes, according to consulting firm Alixpartners. This figure is nearly double a forecast earlier this year.

The semiconductor chip shortage is just a part of the problem, the report says. It attributes the impending losses to high prices and tight supplies of commodities such as steel and plastic resin which are driving up costs and forcing carmakers to curb production.

The world’s biggest car companies are on track to lose production of 7.7 million vehicles in 2021. The forecast advices automakers on supply chain and other issues.

In May, Alixpartners predicted that global automakers would lose $110 billion in revenue and fall 3.9 million vehicles short due to production woes later this year.

The gloomy forecast comes amid warnings from global automakers Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 19

that the ongoing chip crisis and commodity price increases are not easing anytime soon.

IHS Markit cut its global automotive industry production outlook for 2021 and 2022.

Vehicle sales in the U.S. has begun to drop due to inventories on dealer lots are lagging by more than two weeks, less than half the normal levels, says Dan Hearsch, a managing director in Alixpartners auto practice.

“We had originally assumed we would get back to normal and claw back volume” in the fourth quarter, Hearsch told Reuters.

“That is not going to happen.”

Global automakers will have to deal with tight inventories until late 2022 or early 2023, he said.

Major automakers across the world are shutting assembly lines due to hurdles in the delivery of semiconductors. The current shortage has affected Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co Ltd., Toyota Motor Corp., Volkswagen and other manufacturers.

Executives from several semiconductor foundries have

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agreed to provide priority to auto chips to meet demand.

But many are in a conundrum as this could slow deliveries of smartphone chips. Even while operating at full capacity these foundries will have to limit their ability to take on new orders.

The backlogs of supplies is now hampering efforts by automakers to import more commodities. In response, these companies are committing to longer contracts in a bid to lock in supplies with some buying as much as 40 to 50 weeks in advance.

An alternative being considered by all carmakers is to go local and source the same from within the country.

The shortage even led to Germany’s economy minister, Peter Altmaier, appealing to his Taiwanese counterpart Wang Mei-hua, to intervene on behalf of carmakers. Altmaier’s has also said that the government will invest more in homegrown chipmakers to avoid future

crises. Volvo Cars boss Hakan Samuelsson said it was ‘very difficult’ to predict what happens in the semiconductor supply chain beyond four weeks.”

However, Reinhard Ploss, chief executive of Germany’s Infineon, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world, said that while the industry would “need to think again” about auto supply chains, there was a limit to how long chips could be stored in a stockpile. Ploss said, “Semiconductors have an expiration date, and at some point we can’t continue to use them because of quality considerations”.

What is needed is moving beyond the fragile logistics systems on which the auto industry exists. The industry runs on siloed operations, some of which still rely heavily on technology and processes from the 1980s.

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Scammers dupe Apple fans with free bitcoin lure

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over wall wer off

r $69K was sent to the Bitcoin let showing that the scammers re highly successful in pulling the heist.

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here are three things in life that shouldn’t be trusted: free bitcoin, free bitcoin and free bitcoin. If only unsuspecting fans at Apple’s iPhone 13 event knew the maxim. Savvy scammers used a fake event stream, a fake Apple website, and the promise of free bitcoin to lure fans into opening up their wallets.

According to Zcaler’s report, the bitcoin scammer had created a website to mimic Apple’s website that they then embedded with old interviews of Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook. The website displayed a message saying that Apple was

giving away 1,000 free bitcoin and that in order to participate users had to send their own bitcoin.

The promise of free bitcoin on the fake Apple website was invitation enough for fans who were convinced it was legitimate. Over $69K was sent to the bitcoin wallet showing that the scammers were highly successful in pulling off the heist.

What’s worse is that the fake website also flaunted several flaws, from grammar problems to the .org URL. Those flaws, however, aren’t so easy to spot for most people who might

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have very little understanding of technology.

The scammers have currently pulled down the website. It will likely remain down, the Zscaler report said.

This isn’t the first bitcoin scam to happen in 2021, and it’s unlikely it’ll be the last one.

Similar scams have occurred on YouTube, with random channels being hacked to display ‘free bitcoin’ promotions. Apple founder Steve Wozniak recently went after YouTube for allowing scammers to use his name to promote fake bitcoin giveaway scams.

Bitcoin scams have become increasingly common these days. In mid-July, Twitter suffered a massive security breach that allowed a scammer to tweet from several verified accounts, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and even the official Apple twitter account. The tweet offered free bitcoin to users who sent bitcoin to a wallet address with the promise of doubling the amount.

Let’s just say one thing; it’s not the first time Apple’s name has been muddled in a bitcoin scam.

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MAKING THE F

By: Chris

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s part of our ‘Making the Future Now’ series, Industry Leaders speaks with Hanna Hennig, CIO at Siemens AG, to find out what we need to know today to create a better world tomorrow. We talked about different Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 26

FUTURE NOW

sty Gren

approaches in tackling challenges on the path towards digital transformation; the big streams of digital transformation, and most importantly, celebrated her success for leading a sustainable business transformation.

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WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES SIEMENS HAS FACED ALONG THE WAY? Siemens is a leading technology company in the fields of industry, infrastructure, mobility and healthcare. By combining the real and digital worlds, we enable our customers to transform their industries and markets and create real value. In doing so, we improve the everyday for billions of people and help meet the challenges of environmental protection, decarbonization, health and safety.

The main challenges that Siemens has faced along the way, include …

Understanding the customer needs.

Moving away from pure play technology, focus on what the pain points are and how to resolve these with the right technology and contracts – Capex vs. Opex.

Understanding the differences between OT and IT products, their life cycles, their security demands and implementation needs.

Understanding that there is a lot of Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 28

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legacy/brownfield out there which has to be considered and integrated into digital solutions.

Understanding what the components are that allow for scaling a solution to multiple customers and environments.

Moving away from being a “Champion of POCs” and deliver plug & play.

Understanding how to empower people to deliver all above.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO COMPANIES IN THE THROES OF A COMPLEX TRANSFORMATION? Acting from a position of strength: approaching transformation when things are going well and you have the reins of action in your own hands - as Siemens did. Not just when circumstances force

you to do so: Siemens set out on this visionary path with great foresight 10 years ago. Today, Siemens is the clear number 1 in automation + industrial digitalization.

See digital transformation not as a necessary evil, but as a great opportunity: Digitalization and the Internet of Things are changing our world massively and in a short time. How we live and work, how we manufacture products or do business globally - there are many new opportunities and great potential for growth.

Companies that master the physical and digital worlds simultaneously will emerge as winners from this period of upheaval.

IN 2021, SIEMENS WAS RANKED ONE OF THE MOST SUSTAINABLE COMPANIES IN THE

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WORLD OUT OF 8,000 COMPANIES ASSESSED

BY CORPORATE KNIGHTS. DRIVING EFFICIENCIES AND CUTTING EMISSIONS IN THE MIDST OF AN EVOLUTIONARY DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS NOT A SMALL FEAT. WHAT DID SIEMENS DO DIFFERENTLY AND BETTER THAN OTHER COMPANIES? I think the point is not to determine what we have done differently or better than others.

In the race for saving the earth, it is not 1st place that is decisive, but that everyone reaches the finish line. The question of “what makes Siemens different and better than others” does not get us anywhere here.

Our approach is rather to move things forward together in order to contribute to saving the planet at the end of the day. That’s why we are driving this mindset in major partnerships such as WEF, UN Global Compact, industrial associations or sustainability

focused initiatives like Climate Pledge,SBTi (EV100, EP100, RE100).

In doing so, we always give our best and continue to develop according to our and our customers’ ambitions. We have the biggest impact when we help our customers to become more sustainable. Our technology helps to produce more with less ; saving resources, providing long life solutions with excellent quality and minimal carbon footprint where possible.

See digital transformation not as a necessary evil, but as a great opportunity: Digitalization and the Internet of Things are changing our world massively and in a short time.

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DO YOU STILL SEE ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT IN SUSTAINABILITY AT SIEMENS? Setting a pathway towards a fully decarbonized business operation and supply chain is a big transformation, for each one

of us, also for global companies like Siemens. For example to fulfill scope 1&2: Net zero operations by 2030 in line with SBTi pathway. That’s a huge commitment, considering we have more than 200 (or 140) production sites around the world and more than 40,000

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vehicles in our fleet. Or scope 3, the upstream goal: that means net zero supply chain by 2050 and 20% emissions reduction by 2030.This will have a big impact, given the fact that we have more than 65,000 suppliers around the world. Even though Siemens is

already doing a lot in the area of sustainability, there is always room for improvement. Therefore it is important to accelerate the transformation. But in order to accelerate our sustainability efforts and make a lasting impact, sustainability needs to be part of our everyday mindset.

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By Anna Domanska

Stravito is a Swedish startup working to democratize access to marke research and insights. Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and co-founder, reflects on the company’s history, their plans for growth and what makes Stravito the “Netflix” for enterprise market research.

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STRAVITO CEO THOR OLOF PHILOGENE LOOKS BACK ON HIS JOURNEY SO FAR

et

We believe there is no point in being feature-rich if your user experience is poor.

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AS THE CEO OF ONE OF THE TOP 100 SAAS COMPANIES IN EUROPE AND ISRAEL, WHAT CHALLENGES HAVE YOU COME ACROSS IN PREVIOUS YEARS? HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO OVERCOME THEM? Over the past four years, we’ve worked hard to build an AI-powered knowledge management platform that enables employees in Forbes Global 2000 companies to quickly discover insights that drive better business decision making.

What sets us apart is our platform’s ability to provide employees with a consumerlike experience. We offer a level of simplicity, usability and searchability that’s similar to Spotify, Google, and Netflix.

Usually, this doesn’t exist in traditional enterprise software, which means explaining the demand can be a challenge.

Particularly as a great user experience is not a feature that is visible in a feature comparison

chart. But, we believe there is no point in being featurerich if your user experience is poor, especially as investing in software for your company is only worth it if employees log in and use it frequently.

Our customers agree, and Stravito now powers insights for many of the world’s largest organizations, including: Comcast, Electrolux, Danone, Carlsberg and Edwards Lifesciences.

YOU HAVE HELD DIFFERENT LEADERSHIP POSITIONS IN THE PAST. WHAT WAS YOUR BEST SKILL HELPING YOU PROGRESS? Before Stravito, I worked in a range of leadership roles, my most prominent being Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Growth at iZettle, which has since been acquired by PayPal. There, I scaled the growth department from scratch to a team of 200 across 12 markets globally.

Being part of a high-growth scale-up taught me many skills that I apply to Stravito today -

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from executing ambitious growth plans, to expanding into new markets, to hiring and fostering a talented team.

Deliberately choosing to allocate a lot of time to both hiring and culture has been a priority at Stravito. Clear directions and a great culture make it possible for autonomous teams to thrive.

The latter being particularly important as great people expect autonomy.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF MACHINE LEARNING IN THE NEXT DECADE ACCORDING TO YOU? I believe that Machine Learning in the vast majority of software products will be as standardized as backend components, web and mobile applications. Major advancements of machine learning technology will be made available through the cloud offerings of major technology players. Microsoft, for example, is already working to apply this by making GPT-3 available

through Azure. Hence, general purpose Machine Learning will become a commodity.

Applied Machine Learning, however, will become more and more application specific and advancements will be made on applying general models to specific use-cases, similar to how “web development” is currently applied to solve a specific usecase. Therefore, great products powered by Machine Learning will be just great products, where Machine Learning is a component.

HOW IS STRAVITO PLANNING TO ADVANCE ML IN THE CONSECUTIVE YEARS? Machine Learning is a core technology in how we enable the world’s leading brands to categorize and find insights amongst their market knowledge.

Stravito continues to apply advancements in state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to power product features such

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as personalization and content categorization.

organizational belonging and more.

For example, during 2021 we launched our (machine learningdriven) recommendation engine that provides personalized and relevant insights to employees across global organizations. Just like Netflix, the feature works to predict and present insights that the user may be interested in based on their previous activity, geographic location,

We’ve also released an intuitive search-as-you-type feature to help individuals quickly find specific reports they know are available on the platform. And, we’ve made updates to our custom search algorithms to ensure individuals discover more relevant information that they can use to better understand their consumers. Looking to the

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future, we will continue to evolve our application of state-of-theart technology in information retrieval, recommendations and categorization to power deeply personalized experiences around working with market knowledge for professionals at the world’s leading brands.

WHAT’S NEXT STRAVITO?

FOR

We just received $14.6million USD in Series A funding taking our total funding to date to $23.7million USD.

The calibre of your people determine the company that you can build yet spending a lot of time in finding the right people to bring onboard can be something that’s not prioritized enough.

We’re now laser focused on building out the team and working together with our investors and customers to execute ambitious product development whilst expanding in our core markets, and in particular the US. We’ve just onboarded a number of new clients into exciting new verticals, and look forward to working with them to simplify knowledge discovery for many more employees in enterprises around the world.

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Better, Faster, Stronger By: Christy Gren

Industry Leaders takes an in-depth look at the most comprehensive self-driving car tests taking place across North America, and offer insights on which vehicle is going to be a rainmaker for automakers.

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“You’re in a Johnny Cab!” If you’re never seen Total Recall, you should! As far as autonomous vehicles are concerned, this 1990 classic got it right.

The Johnny Cab is a seeminglyubiquitous autonomous taxi that has an animatronic torso ‘Johhny’ sitting in the driver’s seat which is meant to serve as a simulacrum of everything that we have come to expect from a chatty, friendly taxi driver. The movie did a good job of predicting the future.

If you think about it, so did other sci-fi movies, such as The Fifth Element and Minority Report, which have inspired today’s legacy automakers.

But the idea of self-driving vehicles inches back much further than Hollywood’s ingenious imagination.

As a matter of fact, the concept of a fully autonomous car dates back to Futurama, an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair where General Motors unveiled its vision of what the world would look like in 20 years. This utopian vision included an automated highway system that would guide Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 44

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self-driving cars. While a world filled with self-driving cars isn’t yet a reality, cars today do have many autonomous features, such as braking systems and assisted parking. Meanwhile, companies like Waymo, Tesla and Uber are working on fullyfledged autonomous vehicles, with the goal of making driving a car far safer and simpler in the coming years.

Driver negligence is the reason for the crash in 90% of car accidents. It’s hard not to see why legacy automakers, mobility services, and tech giants are all racing to be the first to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale. In the not-so-distant future, we’ll soon be able to share the road with fellow riders reading the newspaper, texting or putting on makeup – or in other words, all the things that people do now, without the danger of them causing a road collision at 80 miles an hour. The autonomous car market is predicted to grow

to $36 million by 2025 when we’ll finally see robotaxis on U.S. roads. By 2023, it’s estimated that there will be 4.5 million self-driving cars made available to the public. Yet we know of only one company – Waymo – that has successfully launched a robotaxi service in San Francisco. And we know of one other company – Nuro – that has flooded the streets of California with its driverless delivery service. One would expect more companies to capitalize on the nascent market by expanding rapidly, but none of the legacy automakers seem to be doing that.

This doesn’t mean that the industry is short of players.

Several startups, including Cruise and Mobileye, are planning to launch large-scale commercial driverless vehicles service by 2023. Simultaneously, plenty of automakers have blown past their launch deadlines in recently. It’s pretty clear that the next couple of

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years is going to be challenging for companies that have been pouring billions of dollars into self-driving technology for years.

As Apple CEO Time Cook put it, the challenge of building selfdriving cars is “the mother of all AI projects.” Major companies are looking to Larry Burns, a former General Motors executive and co-author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car, likens the self-driving car race to a marathon. “A cliff may be a better analogy,” he once said.

“The strongest runners are still going to get over it. It will take them longer, but there’s a chance they may be able to accelerate on the other side.”

EXPLAINED: LEVELS OF AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

Industry Leaders takes an in-depth look at some of the strongest players in the self-driving car race hungrily vying to get a piece of the self-driving car market. Before we begin, let’s first take a look at the various levels of autonomous driving.

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01 WAYMo

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aymo, the Google spinoff, has been the first to reach many milestones along the journey that started as a “self-driving car project” in secret in 2009.

The company believes that fully autonomous vehicles will improve mobility for everyone, be safer and free up time for people living in crowded cities to do other things than spending

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time behind the wheel.

self-driving capabilities.

By 2021, Waymo has logged over 5 million miles on U.S. roads.

There is no other company that has come close to matching this number. Moreover, Waymo’s driverless cars drove 97% of all the miles driven by autonomous test cars in California in 2016. It has more than 2,100 patents in its kitty for self-driving technologies, more than any legacy automaker or startup working in the space in the US.

Waymo announced an agreement with Lyft to make its self-driving minivans available for customers in Phoenix, Arizona. It is in the process of expanding the service to more crowded, urban areas. The company is also relying on Intelbased technologies for sensor processing, general computation and connectivity used in its autonomous vehicles.

Waymo is also the first to test self-driving vehicles without a driver behind the steering wheel.

The company has won several partnerships it can leverage once its fleet is ready for commercial deployment on public roads. It has also inked a partnership with Fiat-Chrysler, which is supplying specially designed Pacifica minivans that Waymo decks with its sensors, cameras, and software to give vehicles Level 4

The company is also leading in terms of avoiding major selfdriving scandals such as Uber and Tesla’s fatal accidents.

Waymo is still far from becoming profitable. In 2020, it had an operating cost of $4.48 billion, against $657 million in revenue.

Its valuation has also seen a massive drop, going from roughly $200 billion in 2018 to $30 billion in 2020.

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02 General Motors

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ruise Automation is at the core of General Motors’ self-driving efforts. What started as a startup that the legacy automaker purchased in March 2016 is now a full-fledged self-driving subsidiary of General Motors. Cruise is currently working on both software and

hardware that will support GM’s vehicles to allow them to drive autonomously.

In 2019, GM petitioned the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for permission to test its cars with no steering wheels on the public

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streets. Additionally, GM plans to expand its other tests to new, more difficult terrains in the US in the coming months.

If this lofty goal is achieved, GM will be one of the first few companies to do so. Not so long

ago, the company acquired Strobe, a startup that sells LiDAR sensors, which help create a visual map of the world around a self-driving car. GM is holding onto several patents for LiDAR sensor units that can be mass produced at an affordable cost.

ForD

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he legacy automaker plans to outfit advanced technologies onto its cars to give them self-driving capabilities. It also explores the idea of operating its own autonomous ride-hailing and delivery service. In February 2018, Ford Motor Co. conducted self-driving testing in Arizona, California, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Ford’s future self-driving vehicles include Giger-mode LiDAR sensors developed by Princeton Lightwave, a company acquired

by Argo AI, in which Ford has an

03

investment. Argo AI is confident that these offerings will help Ford in accelerating the efforts required for Level 4 autonomous driving.

Ford Motor Co. also boasts a set of mobility services that it plans to monetize using its self-driving technologies. Chariot, a shutterbased mobility service that allows consumers to book a seat is growing popular in Austin, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

It plans to launch in more cities including Columbus, London and Ohio in the near future.

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04 uber U

ber is currently conducting one of the most comprehensive tests of selfdriving taxis on U.S. public roads.

The ride-hailing company wants to design its own self-driving technologies to outfit onto cars it

purchases from carmakers.

Uber recently signed an agreement with Volvo to order more than 24,000 of the same XC90 SUVs it’s currently using, which it will outfit with its self-

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driving technologies sometime around 2022. The company’s self-driving car projects is most significant in the market, although it has also been mired in quite a few controversies. In 2018, Waymo sued Uber, accusing it of stealing trade secrets to develop its autonomous driving technology in 2016. The courtroom battle was settled with Uber agreeing not to use Waymo technology and pay 0.34 percent equity stake, for $245 million.

Lyft

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nlike other players here, Lyft operates on a more collaborative approach. It allows any car company working on autonomous technologies to pick up customers who request rides. This model also allows Lyft to leverage the latest self-driving technologies to potentially deploy an autonomous cars in its fleet before Uber. The platform

Additionally, Uber moved its selfdriving car testing from California to Arizona in 2017 after a dispute with the California DMV, which resulted in DMV revoking Uber’s self-driving car permit.

The company had to move back to California in 2018. So far, Uber’s test cars have driven over 1 million miles in Arizona, California and Pittsburgh, making it one of the strongest players in the self-driving car space outside of Waymo.

05

has attracted some of the biggest automakers in the self-driving space to its ride-hailing platform.

It also boasts of more partners than any of its rivals.

In addition to the company’s relationship with Waymo, it is currently working with GM’s Cruise as part of its $500 million investment in the unit in 2016. Lyft

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has made similar agreements with Jaguar Land Rover and Ford Motor Company. It also created a separate unit that’s working on developing selfdriving hardware and software.

The unit currently employs about 30 employees and is based in a new research facility in Palo

Alto, California.

Lyft was recently granted approval by the California DMV to test cars on the state’s roads.

There’s also a partnership with technology startup Drive.ai to test its semi-autonomous features.

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Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation By: Anna Domanska We are taught from an early age that the path to success is straightforward. You finish school, go to Harvard or Yale, graduate, and then find a well-paid job on the Wall Street.

If you look at the entrepreneurial journey of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, you’ll realize that a lot of successful men and women rose from humble beginning. This Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 56

goes to show that one can be successful despite not checking all of the boxes above.

Our Cover Story is rooted in this reality. We interviewed successful entrepreneurs who achieved their goals without walking on this straightforward journey.

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BUILDING THE BRIGHTEST SUSTAINABLE ENERGY FUTURE ALEXIA COOPER CEO/PARTNER BELL SOLAR

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lexia Cooper, CEO of Bell Solar, speaks about the energy industry’s impressive response to the employee-owned company, and analyzes the potential impact of the company in the “industry by revolutionizing power availability and the construction industry as a whole.”

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HOW FAR DO YOU THINK BELL SOLAR HAS BEEN ABLE TO REACH ITS GOAL AS OF NOW? During 2020, Bell Solar was able to grow 416% compared to 2019. We expanded to all parts of Nevada, including the more remote areas, to help more homeowners join the sustainable energy revolution. Our next milestone is our donation goal

of $100,000 to GivePower. We have pledged to donate $80 per install towards GivePower’s mission “to install solar energy technologies that enable essential services critical for community health and vitality.”

Once we reach that goal, we will be going on a trek to Nepal to install a solar system to provide electricity to a remote village.

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WHAT WERE SOME KEY CHALLENGES YOU FACED WHILE GOING ALL-IN FOR SUSTAINABILITY? With all of the growth that the solar industry has experienced over the past few years, one of the key challenges we faced when going all-in for sustainability was finding likeminded organizations that share our common goals and core values. We pride ourselves on our integrity. We will continue to hold to our values and create a lasting impact on this industry.

AS A WOMAN, WAS IT MORE COMPLEX FOR YOU TO BE A PART OF THIS HUGE INDUSTRY? CAN YOU SHARE SOME EXPERIENCES WITH US? As a woman in a male-dominated industry, the question about my journey frequently comes up for me. There have only been a handful of times where I feel that being a woman has negatively

or positively impacted my experience in the industry. I look at any challenges as an opportunity to grow and create better solutions; I refer to myself as a solution finder. I believe my drive, determination, and focus have allowed me to push past the common misconceptions of my gender in this industry.

WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR BELL SOLAR? At Bell Solar and Electrical Systems, our mission is to rewire the world to build a sustainable future. We plan to make a lasting impact in the industry by revolutionizing power availability and the construction industry as a whole. Our focus is to provide sustainable options for our many customers to come while simultaneously offering life-changing careers for our team. We believe in putting our people first, which includes each customer and team member.

When anyone joins the Bell Solar family, they become one of

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us, and we continue to provide for them in any way possible. By challenging the status quo and focusing on the individual, we will create a lasting impact that will outlive us.

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CREATING HIGH-GROWTH CULTURES Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 62

AREVA MARTIN AUTHOR & AWARD-WINNING CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY

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reva Martin outlines the critical importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and puts the spotlight on her fourth groundbreaking book ‘Awakening: Ladies, Leadership and Lies We’ve Been Told,’ which examines and analyzes the barriers in life, society, and career in general that hold women back in the modern workplace.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE YOUR TOP SKILLS THAT EVERY WOMEN SHOULD HAVE TO SUCCEED AS AN ENTREPRENEUR? Successful entrepreneurs have to have a combination of soft and hard skills. The soft skills include: perseverance, diligence, empathy, confidence, emotional intelligence, determination, risk-

taker, leadership and strong people schools.

The concrete technical skills include: marketing, networking, public speaking, strategic thinking, analytical, basic accounting, and business savvy (understand profits, losses, revenues, expenses).

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WHAT WOMEN RIGHTS ACCORDING TO YOU CAN BE AMENDED OR ADDED TO BRING MORE SINCERE RESULTS FOR WORKING WOMEN? For women to achieve greater results in the work place and in their careers, they need the right to high quality health care, health insurance, child care, paid family leave to care for kids and aging parents, equal pay, access to business loans and business lines of credit.

CAN WE GET A SNEAK PEAK ON YOUR FOURTH GROUNDBREAKING BOOK ‘AWAKENING: LADIES, LEADERSHIP AND LIES WE’VE BEEN TOLD’?

Women have been lied to about what it will take to get the lives they want.

They’re told they’ll be judged by their talent and work product, not their makeup or clothing

choices. But the not-so-subtle looks they get say different.

They’re told hard work pays off, so they work twice as hard as anyone. Then when they’re passed over for a raise or promotion, they’re told, Just work harder. In Awakening, I, as an — entrepreneur, media personality, television host, award-winning civil rights attorney and founder of one of the largest femaleowned African American law practices in LA — expose the five dangerous lies that society tells women to keep them from succeeding.

Whether you are a business owner, a corporate executive, an emerging author or a community leader, this book is a manifesto for the moment. From confronting microaggressions in the workplace to finding a mentor who can change the course of your career, I lay out practical, empowering advice to move you past the lies. I

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illuminate these ideas with candor, wit, and a willingness to share my own personal journey. Drawing on strategies from similar movements, like the effort to dismantle structural racism, my fresh approach goes beyond the immediate problem to shine a light on the larger structures designed to keep women – particularly Black women and women of color – “in their place.”

your teams and hold people accountable

How have the lies shaped and limited your career and personal choices? And what can you do to change things today?

e. Find the good and praise it—compliment productive and high performing staff

This well-written, engaging, and often brutally honest book will leave you wanting to tear down the system. I have made the point that such change is not only possible, it is essential.

WHAT ARE SOME TAKEHOME TIPS FOR WOMEN IN THE INDUSTRIES TO LEAD A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT? a. Set clear objectives for

b. Address implicit biases and microaggressions c. Embrace family friendly policies such as paid leave, child care, access to exercise and wellness programs d. Create mentoring sponsorship programs

and

HOW DO YOU THINK WE CAN GIVE MORE TO PROMOTE INCLUSION, DIVERSITY & EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE ESPECIALLY FOR WOMEN? We can promote inclusion and diversity by first acknowledging that more diverse work forces are good for the bottom line.

Often there is a misconception that more diversity—specifically having more people of color and

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more women in the workplace are bad for business or will negatively impact the bottom line. The opposite is true. Study after study has established that workplaces with more women and more diverse voices are more productive and more efficient.

In addition to educating your staff on the monetary value of a more diverse work force, set up incentives for diversity. Reward managers and supervisors who hire more women and more people of color. And beyond hiring them, reward those who set up programs to mentor and support women in the workplace.

other channels. Hold managers and supervisors accountable who refuse to embrace diversity.

Diversity has to be more that something that is talked about in the workplace. It has to be an active part of the philosophy of the organization and it has to be practiced by every manager and results have to be measured.

Diversity has to be an active part of the philosophy of the organization and it has to be practiced by every manager and results have to be measured.

Publicly acknowledge diverse teams and strategies designed to increase diversity. Promote your diversity through social media, internal newsletters and

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FIGHTING THE GENDER STEREOTYPE CATHERINE DIYAKONOV FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT GIRLS WILL STAY

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ven a speck of gender bias could lead to dramatic underrepresentation of women in STEM and leadership roles. Catherine Diyakonov, Founder and President of Girls Will Stay, talks about taking the lead in breaking gender barriers in the world.

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YOU MANAGED TO WORK FOR WOMEN THROUGH ‘GIRLS WILL STAY’ AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE. WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO STOP GENDER STEREOTYPES? I have noticed gender stereotypes evolving from as early as a little girl. In stores, I started to notice that many toys targeted towards girls were ones to do with dolls

and making bracelets, whereas the toys targeted towards boys were science-related, such as making volcanoes and conducting experiments. In elementary school. I think back to a time we dissected frogs in science class. I was so keen to start, as the whole process was fascinating. However, I noticed my friend was shying

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away from the frog. When I looked around, I found that many of the girls looked simply disgusted. However, the boys were fascinated by the frog’s digestive juices! This moment didn’t resonate with me for a couple of months, but I soon started noticing that I was the only girl in various math olympiads.

When I attended lectures with guest speakers, I noticed that the guest panellists were often maledominated. When I noticed these stereotypes evolving from such an early age, I knew I had to make a difference.

CAN YOU NAME A FEW GOOD OR BAD OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE SOCIETY WHILE REPRESENTING WOMEN IN THE STEM FIELD? Representing women in STEM has made me realize how supportive many individuals are in our endeavours. It is incredible to hear how many people resonate with our mission, as well as how many young girls are impacted by seeing women

in STEM-related fields. On the other hand, I have realized that society can certainly be judgmental of women in STEM. Some people become visibly confused when a woman loves both fashion and STEM. However, these stereotypes are something I am determined to break.

WHAT POSSIBLE OUTCOMES DO YOU FEEL CAN BE ACHIEVED IF WOMEN KEPT FIGHTING BACK AGAINST STEREOTYPES? Fighting against the stereotypes women face in any setting will lead to gender equality! Not only will women be greater represented in leadership positions and break the gender pay gap, but they will also be role models to young girls who aren’t quite sure what they want to do in the future. Fighting back against gender stereotypes will inspire the next generation of girls to pursue any career they wish to go into, without thinking twice.

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YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS ARE ALREADY IMPRINTING HOPES ON THE INDUSTRY. WHAT DO YOU THINK CAN BE DONE MORE TO ADD TO YOUR SUCCESS AND SOCIAL NEEDS THROUGH ‘GIRLS WILL STAY?’ I definitely hope to spread the mission of Girls Will Stay to communities across the globe, as well as encourage students to open Girls Will Stay chapters at

their own schools! Talking about what we should do to achieve gender equality is a critical first step, but gathering a group of like-minded individuals to act upon these issues is even more important. Being a part of the Girls Will Stay Initiative will ensure that a visible difference is made for each and every girl struggling with staying healthy, being educated, having shelter, or fighting back against gender stereotypes.

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THE SWIMSUIT LIBERATION MOVEMENT Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 72

DENISE CESARE FOUNDER AND CEO T SUIT/MOMENTS

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enise Cesare, CEO of T Suit /MOMENTS, sells swimsuits that don’t make you hate your body. Her mantra is to make the modern women look and feel amazing in a swimsuit. She tells the special story of T Suit /MOMENTS, and explains how the body positivity movement has transformed the sector.

DO YOU THINK (T SUIT / MOMENTS) ARE ACHIEVING THEIR GOALS AS PLANNED? WHAT ARE YOUR NEXT PLANS TO TAKE (T SUIT/ MOMENTS) FORWARD IN THE INDUSTRY? I believe we are achieving our goals, but it is important that we continue developing new goals for ourselves. These next steps come from building strong

relationships and giving back to the community. Our current initiative is called the Love Ambassadors. For both T SUIT and Moments, we want to share our ideals of empowerment and mindfulness through those we directly impact. We have recently partnered with organizations, like EDEN 2, in a buy one, give one donation campaign to support our community with our valuable message.

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HOW DOES SOCIETY PLAY A ROLE IN MAKING WOMEN FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE ABOUT THEIR BODIES? HOW IS T SUIT TRYING TO OVERCOME IT? Society still does not truly embrace all body types, which can cause negative feelings about one’s self-image. Women especially feel self-conscious about their size and body image through the limited expectations set by the fashion and modeling industry. Because of this, many women end up disliking the experience of shopping for swimwear. T SUIT is all about body positivity. It’s not about your size; it’s the fit that matters!

WHAT ACCORDING TO YOU ARE THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF WOMEN THAT MAKE IT EASY/HARD FOR THEM TO WORK IN THE INDUSTRY? Women tend to be looked at as “emotional.” That may

be considered a weakness to some, but I believe in running a business driven by emotion.

You can connect with people through heart and integrity.

It is our super power, just like Wonder Woman, to lead with LOVE. WHAT CREATIVE APPROACHES USED IN (T SUIT/MOMENTS) ARE BRINGING A SUDDEN CHANGE IN THE INDUSTRY? For T SUIT, I created exclusive designs and selected fabulous fabric that really emphasizes the importance of the fit. My swimmable T SUIT Tops and Dresses solve the issue of covering up. It is a beautiful addition that enhances a swimsuit with confidence, from one-pieces to bikini tops. Love helping women feel beautiful and sexy in my swimwear! I also developed my own line of organic travel essentials to

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compliment my swimwear line.

These include a delicate hand wash detergent called Clean — the perfect way to wash your T SUIT. The tagline for T SUIT is Moments in Motion with Love, which has now become the title of my new children’s book. Moments in Motion with Love illustrates the beauty of every moment, celebrates our children, and

brings forth their significant connection to our planet. It is a book to start a conversation with parents and educators for healing, understanding, and mindfulness by taking time to just be!

As an Entrepreneur, Author and Educator, I believe that my amazing journey has come full circle at this Moment!

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FROM SURVIVING TO THRIVING INGRID DEON OWNER WORD-CRAFT

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e were fortunate to interview Ingrid Deon, a young and successful entrepreneur, CEO and Founder of Word-Craft. Here she talks about her professional achievements, experiences, dreams and aspirations, and of course, the key to success!

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WHAT ARE SOME OF THE STRENGTHS THAT YOU FEEL YOU COULD SEE IN YOURSELF AFTER YOU BECAME AN INDEPENDENT MUM? I’ve always been a pretty headstrong and independent person, but I’ve never worked as hard as I did when I became a single Mum. Having a threeyear-old son who was completely

dependent on me to survive gave me a new-found boost of determination that I didn’t have before. It was as though I couldn’t work hard enough and I had to take on as many jobs as possible. I had no down time and I didn’t even mind because I was so determined to work hard.

I still carry that work ethic today, now that my son is 11 years old and I have an amazing partner who lives with us.

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HOW DO YOU THINK WORD-CRAFT HAS GIVEN WAYS FOR WOMEN TO SEEK INTEREST IN A BETTER USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA? I’m proud to say that I have only hired women to work at wordcraft. I’m not saying that I’d never hire a man — I would certainly hire a qualified, progressive man! But it’s important for me to give opportunities to women who may not have the chance to work on social media accounts for really cool brands. I’m also trying to seek out opportunities to provide social media training for women. I’ve spoken at a women in business event and I’ll be giving a workshop to our local Centre for Women in Business next year.

FROM A BASIC WRITING JOB TO YOUR OWN MARKETING AGENCY, WHAT POSSIBLE LIFE LESSONS HAVE YOU LEARNT AND USED TO MAINTAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORK? It’s really amazing what you can

do when you work hard. I was never someone who wanted to run her own business. In fact, I remember saying, “I never want to run my own business.” But running my own business has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It’s what I was meant to do. I truly believe that you can do anything if you put in the work. I’m not sure who said, “Work smarter not harder” but I subscribe to that as well.

It’s important to channel your hard work in the right direction.

I get most of my clients through referrals and word-of-mouth, so I’ve decided to meet with anyone who wants to chat. That way, I increase the number of referrals that I’m getting, which in turn increases the number of clients I work with.

I’d encourage anyone who wants to start their own business to start. It doesn’t matter whether you think you’re ready yet.

You’re never going to be ready.

No one is ever ready. Just start.

Take that first step.

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My biggest tip for reaching and influencing the right people is to always keep your ideal customer in mind when creating content for social media.

DO YOU THINK SOCIAL MEDIA IS BRINGING A MAJOR INFLUENCE ON PEOPLE? WHAT FACTORS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA ADD A KEY ROLE IN CHANGING THE PERSPECTIVES OF PEOPLE? I’m obviously a huge proponent of social media. People are on social media for several hours every day, so it’s a guaranteed way of reaching and influencing

people. Plus, it’s a cheap way of advertising. You can literally advertise for free on social media or, of course, you can spend as much as you want to.

My biggest tip for reaching and influencing the right people is to always keep your ideal customer in mind when creating content for social media. Research where your ideal customer spends most of their time online. If they’re more likely to spend their time on Instagram, there’s no point putting all your resources into your Twitter presence. Channel your social media efforts into the platform that’s most likely to reach your ideal customer. Also, think about your ideal customer’s needs and wants — what kind of content do they need from you? What do they want to see from you?

Put yourself in their shoes and craft posts that you think they’ll find interesting, educational, valuable, fascinating, useful and entertaining.

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WHAT MAJOR CHANGES DO YOU THINK SOCIAL MEDIA CAN BRING IN THE LATER YEARS FOR WORD-CRAFT? We’re pivoting to create more video content for our clients. All of the social media platforms are prioritizing video over still images, so we’ve started visiting our clients and taking behind the scenes videos and filming tutorials and howto videos. We’re finding that these videos are outperforming still photography by a huge margin, and that’s all thanks to the social media algorithms that are more likely to show videos to our clients’ audiences. I’d strongly encourage everyone to start experimenting with video on social media!

It doesn’t matter whether you think you’re ready yet.

You’re never going to be ready. No one is ever ready.

Just start. Take that first step.

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RAISING A TOAST TO SWEET SUCCESS! Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 82

IVETTE NARANJO OWNER CAFÉINA WYNWOOD LOUNGE

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n an exclusive interview with Industry Leaders, Ivette Naranjo, Owner of Cafeina Wynwood, talks about breaking the stereotypes as well as her hospitality venture.

WHAT WAS ON YOUR MIND WHEN YOU BECAME A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR AT THE AGE OF 16?

I, as an immigrant from Colombia arrived in Chicago at the age of 3 and moved to Tampa, Fl and at the age of 16 started my entrepreneur journey for reasons different than most.

What really kicked off my passion for business was a spring break trip

that I wanted to go on to Daytona Beach. To pay for the trip, I had to find a job quickly that paid well. This led me to joining a carpet cleaning business, and my eyes were opened to the flooring world.

After this job, I realized that I wanted to move forward with a similar business model. Me and my mother packed up and

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made the move to Miami where I opened my very own flooring company, which gave me a taste for business ownership. My mother manages the flooring business and continues the work with strictly government organizations, like airports and schools.

After a few years, I purchased a warehouse in the Wynwood Art District. The original plan was to use it for an expansion of my flooring businesses, but I found a great opportunity that I couldn’t pass up — I was able to turn that warehouse into the first bar / gallery in the district.

This led me to open Cafeina Wynwood Lounge, which is still up and running in the district today.

My entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t stop there! After seeking out new business opportunities, I landed on 1-800 WATER DAMAGE, a property restoration business.

I realized that this was a great fit for someone with my background, and bounced on the opportunity. I currently own and operate 1-800 WATER DAMAGE of Metro Miami, where I help local residents who experience water and/or fire damage to their home, and am even given the opportunity to travel to towns that have faced natural disasters to help with their cleanup efforts.

CAN YOU EMPHASIZE ON SOME STRATEGIES THAT YOU USED TO EXCEL AS AN ENTREPRENEUR IN THE INDUSTRY? I have many tricks up my sleeve when it comes to excelling as an entrepreneur. One of the most important strategy I use is having a high focus on organization and efficiency. I realize that to have a successful business, no matter what the industry is, you need to have all of the simple details worked out before moving forward. Even things like

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knowing where your pens are so you can know exactly where you need to go to take quick notes after a call will dramatically impact your efficiency as an entrepreneur and make big changes in your work ethic.

I realize that to produce the product or service you promise your clients, you need to know where all of your tools are and where your business stands.

I also realize that to be successful, you need to perfect your listening skills. I found great advice and strategies from listening to entrepreneurs and business professionals, seeing what they were doing, and using that information to guide my actions. If you listen to the people around you, you can absorb what is happening and use that to improve your business and work ethic. It is not always about reinventing the wheel, but perfecting what is already there.

I also had to quickly learn how to adapt. When I started my first business, ways of communication were extremely different. Now, with the influx of technology surrounding us, I had to transition my businesses to fit the new standards of an online presence and communication. I am great at adapting, though, which has led to my continued success. I now understand strategic communication and how to promote my businesses on social media.

WHAT WERE SOME MAJOR ROADBLOCKS FOR YOU WHILE WORKING AS AN ENTREPRENEUR? The biggest ‘roadblock’ that I have faced while working as an entrepreneur is being able to constantly stay up to date with new industry standards and norms. Although I am a quick learner and prioritize adapting, it can still be a long transition

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period to change the way you work based on new standards.

When I started my first business to install and restore flooring, it was a completely different field. The restoration industry in today’s day and age is based completely on a science, from the tools you use to the amount of drying equipment you have in a room. This change, although not unanticipated took a lot of learning to be utilized correctly.

DO YOU HAVE ANY HIGHEND CHALLENGES IN MIND THAT TURNED-OUT TO BE EASY TRICKS FOR YOU? One of my main challenges was actually one of my very own business ventures! I found that after working so long in the blue collar field for most of my life, starting Cafeina Wynwood Lounge was a whole new world of business. I had to learn how to switch my brain from government flooring and restoration thinking

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to working with consumers and staff members at the lounge. I shared that the “hard hat to high heels” lifestyle just wasn’t for me, even if the new experience was exciting to have. I liked being able to work with a variety of people, but realized that my calling was to stick with what I know - hard manual labor.

DID YOU EVER HAD TO MAKE COMPROMISES WITH YOUR IDEAS TO GET THE DEAL DONE AS AN ENTREPRENEUR? I am a firm believer that when you have a goal, you need to stick with it no matter what roadblocks are in your way.

This was proven through my journey with the lounge — after I realized that the business was not what I had anticipated and did not align with my goals, I had someone else step in to help manage and run the business so I can focus on ventures where my heart and soul were fully aligned. I realized that I

It is not always about reinventing the wheel, but perfecting what is already there.

thoroughly enjoyed working with government professionals and in the blue collar line of work, and stuck to it rather than making a compromise.

I compared my view on compromising with my ideals like changing lanes — you just have to go for it if it is what you want to do, when you stop to think about your moves and question if you should make a different decision, you can crash. The best advice I can give is to stay in your lane and keep your goals intact.

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RETHINKING MEETINGS EVA NIEWIADOMSKI RANCH CZARINA CATALYST RANCH

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va Niewiadomski joins Industry Leaders to discuss the changing face of the hospitality industry. She also sheds light on her entrepreneurial venture, Catalyst Ranch, which has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.

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WHAT KEY SKILLS, ACCORDING TO YOU MADE YOU SUCCESSFUL IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY? Hospitality in its essence is about making everyone feel welcome.

For us that starts with our décor, which is warm, colorful, nostalgic and multi-cultural. It’s homey.

It doesn’t look or feel like your office. From the very beginning I’ve recognized how crucial

picking the right staff would be to create a culture of true hospitality. Because, in the end, it’s always about the people and how they make you feel. You can have the most beautiful space in the world, but if you don’t like the staff or don’t feel they are being authentic or helpful, you won’t come back. There are a lot of other choices out there.

Most of my staff over the years

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haven’t come from traditional hospitality backgrounds. Many have been artists – actors, musicians, painters, poets, writers. They’re all friendly, helpful, problem solvers and truly want all our clients to have a great experience. We spend a lot of time teaching them how to handle different client concerns. We try to help them understand what our clients are concerned about, what can derail a meeting, what might make a client cranky, irritable, impatient. Most of them have never attended an all-day offsite meeting. That’s why we spend so much time explaining the different types of meetings our clients host in our spaces, what they are trying to accomplish, teach them the terminology.

Over the years I have received multitudes of compliments on my staff and how amazing they are.

They truly are problem solvers and feel empowered to make decisions, which our clients appreciate immensely. And if

they don’t know the answer, they will get one from a colleague or a manager.

HOW IS CATALYST RANCH PLAYING A PART IN KEEPING CREATIVE MINDS OPEN AT WORKPLACES? A key pillar of Catalyst Ranch’s mission is to encourage diverse voices to be expressed and heard. We believe that everyone is creative but that not all organizational cultures encourage those voices to safely share ideas. The design of our spaces is purposeful. We try to include art and furnishings from as many cultures as possible. We juxtapose them in such a way so that they work in harmony and each unusual grouping forms a unique and beautiful whole.

This sends the subtle message that all cultures are valued and they can be in conversation with each other, enhancing each other. By placing items together that traditionally don’t go together, we also help shift

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A key pillar of Catalyst Ranch’s mission is to encourage diverse voices to be expressed and heard.

people’s perceptions and disrupt their preconceived notions. This in turn opens their minds to new ideas. By showing that all cultures and ideas are equally valid, we help open up minds in the workplace. We also add in nostalgic touches that remind people of their childhoods, when everyone was creative and imaginative. It’s each individual’s life experiences that determine how much of that creativity and imagination they retain. Our

purpose is to tap into that well and let it gush forward again.

Once our meeting attendees get a taste during their time within our walls, we know that they will be changed and that it will have an impact on how they function in their workplace in the future.

Their colleagues will have seen parts of them they hadn’t seen before and hear ideas that previously had not been voiced.

DO YOU FEEL CATALYST RANCH CAN ACHIEVE ITS GOALS AND EXPECTATIONS? We’ve now been in business 19 years, so I can safely say that Catalyst Ranch has achieved its initial goals and surpassed my expectations. When I started the business back in late 2002, I was a pioneer. There were no creative meeting venues and no one even knew what that meant.

So, we had a double task of explaining what we were offering (establishing an industry) and then showing people why

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they needed our services. The premise for our offering was theoretical, based on my own corporate experiences and work in innovation. I had been trained as a facilitator for Ideation/ Brainstorming Sessions and one of the first things we were told is to take people offsite, out of their traditional office settings, if we wanted them to think differently. This was easier said than done as back then there really weren’t any turnkey options, ready for plug and play. I took the same premise regarding creative thinking for the purposes of new product development and extrapolated it to all meetings. After all, taking any group away from their dayto-day work in order to work on a specific objective was an expensive endeavor just in terms of labor cost. And shouldn’t we try to make every meeting more productive? At its simplest, I judge productivity in terms of the quality of the ideas that are

generated and what we do with those ideas after the meeting concludes. Too many people don’t think about the physical environment as a key lever they can use to improve the quality of their meeting. This is what I was endeavoring to do by opening Catalyst Ranch. Make it something people carefully considered and valued for how it improved their meetings with the extra bonus of energizing

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Company Retreats and Team Building. Ideation Sessions come in at #5. In actuality, the range of the types of meetings that we’ve held within our walls has been vast.

CATALYST RANCH HAS HAD SO MANY ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE MOMENTS FROM YOUR PATH TO SUCCESS?

their teams. When groups first started booking with us, we did a lot of brainstorming sessions.

That was the natural channel for how to utilize our spaces.

We got a lot of push back from more conservative individuals who felt that our spaces weren’t appropriate for certain “serious” types of meetings. But over time, that thinking shifted. Now our #1 type of meeting are Strategic Planning Meetings, followed by

As you can imagine, you pile up a lot of experiences over 19 years. Some of my personal favorites that stand out: We created an event called NuptEquality where we held a wedding fashion showcase for same sex couples with designs from three fashion designers.

This was followed by an event called Under A New Moon where we held the very first legal wedding ceremonies for Same Sex Couples in Illinois.

We partnered with a subset of our special event vendors and provided 6 couples with a wedding ceremony and

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reception for up to 20 guests each. The ceremony took place at midnight and it was one of the most touching and emotional events I have ever experienced.

We partnered with the Art Institute of Chicago to create a program called Art-Work.

We took a corporate meeting facilitator and paired them with an art educator from the AIC. Together, they provide corporate training in Creativity & Innovation, Leadership, Communication Skills or Diversity + Inclusion. Groups started the morning at AIC, within the galleries before they were open to the public, going through a series of exercises that helped them see in a different way. Then they came to Catalyst Ranch for the afternoon and spent their time in a different creative environment. These programs were truly innovative and amazing. The launch party for the program was truly ambitious.

We recreated a portion of the

theatrical production of “Sunday in the Park with George” with full costuming and our staff taking on all the roles. The iconic image for Art-Work was the famous AIC painting, “A Sunday on La Grand Jatte” by Georges Seurat and the play is about Georges Seurat and his creation of that very painting. We supplemented the entertainment with acrobats from the Actors Gymnasium who were dressed in costumes from the same time period. We

I judge productivity in terms of the quality of the ideas that are generated and what we do with those ideas after the meeting concludes.

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had stiltwalkers, fire breathers (out in front of course) and ball balancers among others. And of course, mini workshop taster sessions with all the facilitators.

We’ve held some amazing anniversary parties but one that pops to mind was our 5th Anniversary Party. We wanted each year’s party to be more than just a party, supporting a social/ community cause. Most years we had people bring food for The Chicago Food Depository. That year, we decided to partner with the Inspiration Corporation in Uptown. They provide homeless individuals with free meals, a community space for hanging out and services to help them get off the street that includes providing hospitality training in their café. As we know how important it is to have a home, we asked our guests to help create either a placemat for the café or an artwork for the walls of the community center.

We provided piles and piles of

supplies and crafting materials, some simple guidelines and introduced them to their fellow guests to work together on these projects. Everyone had so much fun! We had 24 placemats and 25-30 art pieces at the end of the night. And their creativity was inspirational.

OUR READERS WOULD LIKE TO KNOW SOME OF YOUR OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HOW RUNNING A CREATIVE CONFERENCE SPACE IS GOING SO FAR? Catalyst Ranch started with three rooms and 9,000 sq. ft. of space.

Within 3 years we were running out of space, so we added another floor of 6,000 sq. ft. with an additional three rooms and some offices for my staff on yet another floor. Adding a floor added complexity. It took about 25-27 staff to keep us running smoothly, especially as we were also hosting social events on the weekends. Since our spaces are

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naturally festive and homey, we do a lot of weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, milestone birthday celebrations, baby and wedding showers. At the start of 2020 we were looking at an incredible year, our best yet. And then the pandemic hit. We were effectively shut down for most of 2020 and into early 2021 with only small windows of time when we were allowed to operate.

We had to make some difficult

decisions, including giving up our original 9,000 sq. ft. space, our offices and reducing our staff down to 5. We were able to move into a new space a couple doors down from our original building (owned by the same landlord) and set up a new 3,000 sq. ft. room called The Samba Room. We sold 3,000 sq. ft. of vintage furniture and are storing the rest. We believe that at some point in the

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IT’S EACH INDIVIDUAL’S LIFE EXPERIENCES THAT DETERMINE HOW MUCH OF THAT CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION THEY RETAIN.

future, when people are ready to be in-person again in greater numbers, we’ll be able to add on additional meeting rooms as the need for creative conference space will be greater than ever.

Especially if people are working remotely exclusively or for large parts of their workweeks. We’ve already seen a fair number of clients return. They’re so excited to know that we’re still open and have managed to survive. The

meetings are still on the small side but we’re hopeful that that will improve over the coming months so that we can return to profitability.

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LEADING THE AI INDUSTRY Industry Leaders Magazine - December ‘21 - 98

ELISSA MOSES MANAGING PARTNER, HARK CONNECT CEO, BRAINGROUP GLOBAL

I

ndustry Leaders had the pleasure of interviewing Elissa Moses, the brains behind BrainGroup Global, a company that combines the best of neuroscience understanding and methods in the service of big-name clients.

HOW DOES HARK CONNECT AND BRAINGROUP GLOBAL HELP FEMALES LEAD THE FIELD OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY? The best way to lead is to start by showcasing role models. At HARK Connect we help connect females in the field of science and technology first by being leaders in the field. Important members of our team including myself

as Managing Partner of HARK Connect, our COO of parent company MediaScience, the heads of our HARK Technicians Group and the head of our HARK Sales Team are all women in tech who lead by example and by mentoring others. We also make a practice of frequently hiring female interns.

At BrainGroup Global we have

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a great track record hiring female designers, copywriters, semiologists, researchers and academic partners. We also are in perpetual motion as thought leaders writing articles, book chapters, serving on panels and giving speeches to have a visible seat at one of the most important tables, which is the table of ideas.

During Covid, I collaborated with two professors from Dartmouth and Columbia and wrote a chapter on tech and the future of advertising (“The Future of Advertising: Influencing and Predicting Response Through Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neuroscience”, IGI Global 2021). Yesterday I participated in an ARF Roundtable on AI and ML. I am on the advisory board of the AI Council for the data analytics trade association I-Com and a member of the Tech Council for C200 which is a group of female CEOs and Entrepreneurs

who advise women to grow as leaders. I also teach AI/ML at Columbia. It is important for those of us who are in the field as influencers to keep a high profile, proselytize, mentor and coach whenever we can.

WHAT ARE THE KEY STRATEGIES FOLLOWED

BY YOU AS A MANAGING PARTNER OF HARK CONNECT AND CEO OF BRAINGROUP GLOBAL TO HELP THE TECH AGENCIES REACH THEIR GOALS? Our key strategies are to: 1. Stay agile 2. Be fearless and 3. Dream big So much of being in tech and science is about being a fearless adventurer. You must be able to adapt to change instantly without notice, find new solutions and dream big by imaging what may be possible and devising a plan to get there. And this is

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You must be able to adapt to change instantly without notice, find new solutions and dream big by imaging what may be possible and devising a plan to get there.

despite others telling you it can’t be done or your meeting with obstacles on the first few tries.

Often great innovation comes from crisis. In January of 2019, a couple months before Covid, HARK Connect launched its first QualTech platform to enable video streaming from focus group facilities with numerous breakthrough features such as AI translations and transcripts.

Then Covid hit the next month and literally overnight, almost

every focus group facility in the world closed its doors. Many have yet to reopen.

HARK Connect sprang to action.

We designed new software to enable online qualitative sessions by meeting with our developers literally every day over that Spring and Summer. Finally we were ready to launch what is now a vastly superior software platform that can service both in person and remote (online) qualitative research or any type of meetings or discussions. At BrainGroup Global we put the emphasis on dreaming, which I know sounds funny, but is legitimate work. We are stirring a movement to create better advertising and branding though technology and scientific knowledge. And we are challenging the status quo that “creative cannot be a formula” (not all but maybe part of it can be algorithmically optimized) or that half of advertising is

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wasted, but we will never know which half.

There is so much we know now through AI and ML about what makes great advertising. Why not take advantage of it going in? There are tons we’ve learned about the power of emotion and how to use neurometrics to measure consumer response and better predict ad success.

There is a huge body of work, some of it spearheaded by my HARK partner and founder Duane Varan at MediaScience with respect to how ads get wasted or on the flip side can be vastly improved. Why not make consideration of this advancement in knowledge fueled by science and technology the starting point as a standard? It is time for the industry to progress and leverage all the learning to enhance probabilities of successful marketing of all kinds every time. That is the future of advertising, and it comes from dreaming big.

WHAT BASIC LESSONS CAN OUR READERS LEARN ABOUT THE HARK CONNECT AI RESEARCH ASSISTANT FOR AUTOMATIC TAGGING AND TRANSLATION? Imagine that important job tasks that used to take hours or days to accomplish and required your keen attention, often with significant added charges of thousands of dollars,

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are now done for you in real time with no added cost. That’s what HARK Connect’s AI enabled features for things like automated tagging, transcripts and translations provides. It is as if you had the budget to hire a multi-lingual assistant who is keenly listening to your research sessions and tagging key words and phrases, typing

up the transcripts at superhuman speed after the sessions and also translating as you observe in over 65 languages so that you get to see closed captions in the languages of your choice and your colleagues do as well.

Hence, the French can watch in French, the Chinese can observe in Mandarin or Cantonese, etc.

If you hired someone to do all

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of these tasks it would raise your project budget considerably.

And if you hired a highly skilled assistant, the added budget required would be prohibitive.

And yet, with technology doing these highly important tasks, it is as if you have a team supporting you and freeing you up to do the more important job of information analysis and strategic thinking to help your clients or brands.

Some people fear that AI and ML will ultimately replace their jobs.

What they don’t understand is that in most cases it will make their jobs so much better, eliminating the rote, dull and tedious parts of the day- to-day functions with effortless precision so that they can better apply their human expertise with less tension and frustration. AI and ML free us up to speed more time on the more important parts of our jobs with a clearer head and less distractions of other tasks to be done.

It is time for the industry to progress and leverage all the learning to enhance probabilities of successful marketing of all kinds every time.

We consider all the functionality that our AI/ML provide the equivalent of a personal system who we call Ava. Soon Ava will also have the capabilities of a Psychology or Neuroscience PhD assistant being able to provide text analytics, facial coding evaluation, etc.

Too many people who do not understand technology, especially AI/ML have the

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automatic response of thinking “how can this hurt me?” instead of the far more realistic scenario to contemplate “how can this help me?” Over time we will see technology greatly enhance the ease, productivity and efficiency of our professional lives the same way refrigerators and washing machines redefined a far better modern life at home in the 1950’s.

WHAT POSSIBLE ADDITIONS CAN YOUTHINKOFTOGROW THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF WOMEN IN TECH? Women are making rapid strides in STEM, but it is not without the continuing undertow of prejudice and obstacles faced by so many ambitious females, no matter their chosen field. It just so happens that the biases are often more exacerbated in tech and science.

A midwestern sophomore in high school recently told me that in her computer class, girls are expected to perform at the bottom

and that for the competitions, they are partitioned to a separate team from the boys.

So the first thing women in tech need is support, encouragement and role models at the very beginning while still in school when their interests are developing. It is also the norm, I’ve been told, for high school guest speakers to “always be men unless it’s about emotions or feelings.”

Girls and women in STEM require exposure to female role models in classrooms, in the press, in social media and through organizations.

Personally, I am active in a number of organizations which try to teach, mentor and give opportunities to women in STEM such as C200, i-Com and the NMSBA. Encouraging women in STEM to support one another and to mentor whenever possible will go a long way in creating a tipping point for critical mass.

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BUILDING A 21ST CENTURY BEVERAGE EMPIRE JESSICA LIPTON FOUNDER ELEVATE-DELTA 8

J

essica Lipton, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Elevate Delta 8, is here to reflect on her entrepreneurial journey and the lessons she learned along the way.

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YOU HAVE FACED A LOT OF CHALLENGES IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE WHILE SUCCEEDING AS A BUSINESS OWNER. WHAT KEPT YOU GOING? This may sound cliché but what really helped me keep going was seeing the impact that my products have had on customers.

They frequently reached out to me and told me about the

breakthroughs that they have had with my product or how it helped them overcome certain obstacles relating to anxiety or stress. This made me remember the passion that I had for what I love which was actually helping people overcome challenges related to mental health. This gave me enough motivation and courage to remain resilient in the face of discrimination and bias.

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WHAT OUTCOMES ACCORDING TO YOU TURN OUT THE BEST WHEN FEMALE MINDS TAKE OVER IN THE INDUSTRY? I believe women are very well suited to handling crises which is an extremely important skill to have as we saw amidst the pandemic. A lot of women are tasked with professional as well as domestic responsibilities where they have to deal with

competing priorities. This gives women the ability to be adaptive and flexible which is important when a business intends on pivoting.

WHAT POSSIBLE DIFFERENCES DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE ALTERED IN ELEVATE DELTA AS COMPARED TO OTHER INDUSTRY LEADERS? One of the most significant

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differences that I have made within my organization is that I have instilled enough confidence and have empowered workers enough that they are able to speak up about biases and gender discrimination. The decision-making process was made more transparent which reduced the likely hood of my organization being affected by conscious and unconscious biases. So if my employees spot a decision that was influenced by bias, they are no longer afraid to speak up in an attempt to set things right.

HOW IS ELEVATE DELTA HELPING FEMALE EMPLOYEES TO WORK IN A SAFE, PRODUCTIVE, AND GROWING ENVIRONMENT? At Elevate Delta 8, I have modernized our approach to hiring. When I’m setting up a job description, I choose my words carefully to avoid discouraging more women from applying and so that we’re able to attract a

wider pool of workers. I also practice “blind hiring”. This process entails hiring based exclusively on merit and avoiding any kind of focus on names and gender until the decision to call someone for an interview has been made.

Moreover, at Elevate Delta 8, we use gender-neutral pronouns when giving examples. This encourages the use of language that eliminates unconscious bias. We have transitioned from having a traditional organizational culture to one that promotes equity and widens our horizons by stringently discouraging gender stereotypes while encouraging and acknowledging anyone that speaks up against bias or discrimination.

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By Anna Domanska

S

ilicon Valley may be the cradle of tech legends such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Elong Musk, and LarryEllison, but the city is losing its luster somewhat with alternative tech destinations popping up all over the world.

Around the world, tech hubs modeled after Silicon Valley are emerging.

The Californian city has almost out-priced itself for most tech aspirants. Talent, real estate, and venture capitalists et al. are finding the place too expensive, and people are willing to look beyond and far. Along with this shift in interest, the COVID-19 has added another dimension.

Work from home and remote offices are now the accepted norm. The number of people permanently working from home is expected to more than

double in 2021, according to research by Enterprise Technology Research (ETR).

Across the developed world, the percentage of advertised roles that can be done remotely has increased, particularly in service sector-heavy economies such as the UK and Spain, according to the latest State of European Tech report published by Atomico. Also, new areas have emerged in the competition to earlier tech hubs such as San Francisco, London, and Paris.

The new cities offer startups an affordable and attractive alternative to crowded traditional tech hubs with the same benefits. With the cost of renting prime office space in London and Paris around three times the price in the next most expensive city, according to the Atomico report, it is no

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Talent, real estate, and venture capitalists et al. are finding the place too expensive, and people are willing to look beyond and far.

surprise that companies are looking to cut costs by setting up base elsewhere.

The new places attracting attention are Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa, Kenya, Singapore, Israel, etc. Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands have all been identified by accountancy firm BDO as the next generation of European tech hubs, thanks to their strong venture capital and government support networks.

“The rebound in the digital economy is

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fueling a race for the top tech talent, with cities around the world vying to become the future tech hubs that will lead the global economic recovery,” says Tony Spillett, partner and national head of technology and media at BDO. “Strong infrastructure, attractive government incentives and ready access to capital are all key determining factors,” he says. “[But] the primary driver is access to talent, whether that is high-calibre local graduates or an immigration system that allows the brightest and the best to relocate.”

One policy innovation that has worked wonders is the “digital nomad visa,” which grants independent knowledge workers temporary residency while they work of companies in another country.

Estonia was the first to start the trend in 2018, which was quickly adopted by others.

In the UK, a Global Talent Visa was launched in 2018, allowing skilled workers from outside the EU to work in the country for five years without needing a company sponsorship. Over the past year, demand has increased 48%, according to Tech Nation, and this is expected to go up once Brexit is fully in place.

“In the UK, as everywhere else in the world, we’ve seen a huge race for global tech talent really heating up,” says George Windsor, head of insights at Tech Nation. “Lots of countries are trying to make their pitch to be the place for global tech talent.”

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Irel In Ireland, Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway are the cities that are attracting a lot of attention. Dublin is a close third to London and Paris in terms of a seething tech hub.

The Tech Cities of the Future rankings, which have been

compiled by the Financial Times’s FDI Intelligence, place it third for its success in creating outward foreign direct investment (FDI) jobs.

More than 6,500 such roles were created by startup companies based in the capital between 2016 and 2020, the second-highest

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land of all European cities bar London.

investing $56.6 million in 125 new firms.

The state agency Enterprise Ireland’s funding of earlystage entrepreneurs has pushed this growth. Investors in startups globally doubled the funding provided to companies last year,

Mastercard is planning a new campus in Ireland that will create 1,500 roles, and Microsoft is building a $31 million engineering hub here.

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Ber There is an influx of startups in Berlin. The German city has the advantage of ready access to a highly educated talent. According to a news report, creative industries account for 40,000 companies in the German capital, employing more than 350,000 workers and producing an annual turnover of over 35 billion euros.

Compared to some other European countries, Berlin’s cost of living is

cheaper. There is ready access to real estate, investment, and rents.

“It’s the entire culture that Berlin possesses which entices people,” said Thomas Holl, co-founder and CTO of Babbel, a subscriptionbased language learning app and e-learning platform. “The city is also very arty, creative, and gentrified. It attracts a lot of creatives and intellectuals.

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rlin “From a startup perspective, it’s not just the amount of international input that’s available – it’s the types of skills and mindsets that are being attracted that suit so perfectly.”

Another advantage of Berlin is that it has attracted many people from all over the world, the diversity of talent it offers is immense. “Berlin is now a beacon of all the exciting, young, fresh, open-minded ways

of thinking that drive startup companies to success. As such, these values are now altering wider stereotypes of how other countries perceive Germany.

“The growth of this diversity, creativity and social agility, has brought a completely different angle of Germany to the table,” said David Armstrong, CEO of Berlin-incepted travel company and app, HolidayPirates.

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Amste Amsterdam is a thriving tech and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) hub. Amsterdam boasts of an impressive digital infrastructure – the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), one of the world’s largest data transport hubs.

Amsterdam is where people like

to meet to discuss tech too. It is the conference city of the world.

The city policy makers have worked hard to host many accelerators and incubator programs for startups. Amsterdam has many homegrown unicorns (in the making): Booking.com, Adyen, Catawiki (fastest growing scale-up in Europe), PICNIC

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erdam (100 Million series B – among the highest series B rounds in Europe), TomTom, and Elastic.

Amsterdam is home to Europe’s biggest startup incubator and co-working space: B.Amsterdam (40,000 square meters and three buildings in total).

Amsterdam has become the key tech hub for life sciences & health, FinTech, enterprise software, and travel/tourism industries.

450+ multinationals, including Tesla, Uber, and Netflix, have their European headquarters in Amsterdam.

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Tel Aviv is a comparatively small city of 430,000 inhabitants, but at one time it boasted it had more companies listed on the Nasdaq than New York.

Many successful companies have relationships with

Israeli close Silicon

Valley. By some estimates, there could be more than 100,000 Israelis living in Silicon Valley, many of them working in tech.

The Azrieli Centre in Tel Aviv is famed for housing the country’s tech companies.

The three-tower complex is

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home to insurance software giant Sapiens and the AI processor company Habana Labs, recently acquired by Intel for $2 billion. Amazon and Facebook have office spaces in the complex, too, and there are rumors that both intend to expand their presence in the city.

Web development service Wix, Taboola and Waze are all Israeli success stories.

Israel’s cybersecurity sector — in the form of both companies and trained engineers — is a leader in the world.

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Sing In Asia, Singapore can easily be counted as the happening tech place. According to an Accenture study, investments in fintech (financial technology) reached $861 million in 2019 in Singapore, more than twice the amount raised during the previous year. Successful tech startups have also emerged in Singapore across a broad range of industries, from advanced manufacturing to healthcare.

The ongoing trade war between US and China has seen Singapore as a viable neutral place for emerging companies in the region seeking a base.

It has also benefited from a low tax regime and highly favorable business conditions—it was ranked second globally in the World Bank’s 2019 “ease of doing business” index. With Hong Kong, the nearest rival embroiled in political turmoil,

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gapore Singapore has managed to pull ahead as a viable destination for tech companies.

According to the city state’s Economic Development Board, Singapore is home to 59 percent of Asia’s regional headquarters for multinational tech companies, including social media giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google.

The Singapore government has some business-friendly policies in place, such as tax exemptions, grants and incubator opportunities.

According to government figures, investment in Singapore grew from $2.39 billion in 2017 to $8 billion just two years later. The total investment in deep-tech startups increased from $160 million to $580 million during the same period.

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Ken One of the most promising stories of tech progress is Kenya, which has been dubbed “Silicon Savannah” in recent times.

According to a report by techinvestment platform Partech, Kenya is a popular destination for agritech (agricultural technology), with a 79 percent of equity funding for this vertical flowing into the country as well

as off-grid tech through which Kenya receives almost 40 percent of the continent’s total funding.

The country is home to startups using artificial intelligence (AI) to support “precision farming” methods, which involve deep analysis of satellite imagery data to project rainfall and drought patterns.

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nya Kenya has a healthy internet and mobile phone penetration— amongst the highest in Africa— which has helped it attract investments in its foray into tech startups. High mobile usage has facilitated access to various services, including financial inclusion throughout the country, which is stimulating further growth of Kenya’s dynamic

fintech scene.

Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has said that Nairobi might emerge as Africa’s prime tech destination. Google and other major multinational tech corporations, including Microsoft, Intel, IBM and Cisco Systems, all have offices in the capital city.

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BY: ANNA DOMANSKA The 26th United Nations’ Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), scheduled to be held in Glasgow between October 31 and November 12 saw participating countries renew their Paris Agreement pledge to become carbon neutral by 2050. The agreement aims to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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CARBON OFFSET One popular and controversial measure adopted by companies and countries to bring down the carbon levels in the atmosphere is the carbon offset method. This means investing in projects that reduce the levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon offsetting schemes occur at all levels, from individual to companies to countries.

Countries can become carbon neutral by limiting the amount of greenhouse gases they produce and by compensating the emissions that can’t be cut.

The compensation is done by activities like planting trees and restoring peatlands that help in reducing atmospheric carbon. Private companies and nonprofits and governments develop such projects, evaluate the level of

carbon reduction and issue credits equivalent to one metric ton of emissions.

Many platforms - such as the UN Carbon offset platform or myclimate allow people to calculate their carbon footprint and choose to donate to reforestation or renewable energy projects.

Power stations and companies with high greenhouse gas emissions receive or buy emission allowances, and they can trade them with one another. For example, Switzerland has signed deals with Peru, Ghana, Senegal, Georgia, Dominica and Vanuatu to offset its carbon emissions. Investments will finance biogas plants, solar panels and geothermic energy, as well as programs aimed at increasing energy efficiency in buildings and electrifying public transport.

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There are regulated mandatory carbon markets in Europe and California, where heavy-emitting industries like steel are allocated allowances to emit carbon, which can be bought and sold.

According to Ecosystem Marketplace, a data provider, the carbon-offset market is pegged at $1 billion for 2021. The most active buyer of offsets this year is the energy sector, followed by consumer goods, finance and insurance, it said.

Critics say these kinds of schemes sanction the continual release of gases in the atmosphere without a fundamental change in behavior. Do such schemes achieve what they promise?

The different projects and

range of approaches in determining the quality of carbon offset make for a complex and sometimes confusing marketplace. There is no global standard for setting the value of carbon offsets against carbon footprinting.

For example, a newly planted tree takes 20 years to grow and capture the promised amount of carbon.

“You have people saying some of these things are rubbish, and other people say no, they’re really important,” said Thomas Lingard, Unilever PLC’s sustainability director. “It’s super confusing to people, and that can’t be the desired state for a world that is rapidly trying to deal with the climate crisis.”

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THE UN EFFORT TO REDUCE CARBON FOOTPRINTS The first global scheme to reduce carbon emissions dates back to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on climate change, adopted in 1997. The actual scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) came into operation in 2006. Under the CDM, richer countries could reduce their emissions by paying for the development of carbonlowering projects in poorer nations and count these reductions as part of their own targets.

The Kyoto Protocol adopted the cap and trade scheme where a cap was put on the emissions allowed on energy-

intensive companies such as shipping and energy. The European Union created the world’s first emissions trading system based on the cap and trade principle in 2005.

According to a 2020 study, the system reduced carbon emissions by more than one billion tonnes between 2008 and 2016. However, the CDM was not successful in bringing down emissions.

There were corruption and human rights issues. Eightyfive percent of offset projects used by the European Union under the CDM failed to reduce emissions, a 2017 study by the European Commission found.

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But environmentalists and climate crusades are hopeful that the COP26 would help find a viable way to use the carbon offset method to reduce emissions. According to the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, Offset projects could channel much needed funds to poorer countries and yield enormous benefits for climate adaptation, providing them with financial incentives to restore their forests and other biodiverse ecosystems.

The European Union created the world’s first emissions trading system based on the cap and trade principle in 2005.

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THE ACTUAL BENEFITS OF CARBON OFFSETTING The carbon offset program on paper seems a simple exchange of credits for meeting emission norms, but in actual reality, very rarely the maths comes through, says Grayson Badgley, a fellow in forest ecology at Columbia University in the US. “The math has to be perfect, [but] there are instances where it doesn’t all add up,” says Badgley.

California’s offsetting program, for example, has generated between 20 million and 39 million carbon credits that have not achieved real

carbon savings, according to analysis by CarbonPlan, a non-profit in San Francisco that analyses the scientific integrity of carbon offsetting schemes.

Many conservation societies have participated in offsetting themes with corporates where no actual benefits have been seen or the existing nature reserve or conservatory was already doing the work of carbon sequestering.

Hence, it becomes more a commercial transaction. The corporates are given a free pass to continue their emission activities and gain credits

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with no actual offsetting of carbon emissions happening on the ground.

Badgley notes. “What would have happened if there wasn’t the exchange of money for the carbon offset?” he says.

“Was the forest really under threat?”

The current system “allows landowners who were already managing their land well to receive credits for what they were doing anyway, “ says Barbara Haya, the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project director at the University of California.

Others argue that such schemes have brought benefits too. There are situations when forest conservation can use carbon credits fairly, such as when the funds are used to improve forest management, resulting in greater carbon sequestration. A case in point is the reduction of timber

harvesting done for the pulp and paper manufacturing in Maine’s St John River Forest in exchange for carbon credits.

“Since 1998, timber harvesting has been The Nature Conservancy’s primary source of funds for taxes and stewardship of the Upper St John River Forest. By enrolling it in the forest carbon project, TNC made a longterm commitment to change its active harvesting practices and maintain a higher level of carbon on the property,” the TNC spokesperson says.

“Done right, carbon revenue, especially when derived from forever-wild conservation, is a useful tool to help keep the carbon in our forests locked up and enables the forests to grow and continue to sequester and store even more carbon for centuries to come.”

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WHAT NEEDS TO be DONE Also, companies buy carbon offsets voluntarily, unlike in the regulated mandatory carbon markets in Europe and some parts of the US. “Voluntary markets have created many options in respect of what kinds of credits you can buy,” said David Antonioli, chief executive of Verra, a nonprofit that certifies offset projects.

It is hoped that governments will work to chalk out a framework and guidelines for the global carbon market at the COP26.

Microsoft has developed its due diligence process and is looking for proposals for

carbon removal projects it could fund. This year, the company has helped remove 1.3 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere this year, mostly through forestry projects.

“The market needs clearer definitions and standards,” Microsoft said in its 2021 carbon-removal report. Shell invests in project developers that help in carbon emission removal in various countries.

The same is then verified by a third-party certifying bodies that then grant appropriate credits to the company. Nestlé is another country that is collecting credits by funding environmental projects done by growers and suppliers of its various raw materials

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(like coffee growers) in its supply chain. Benjamin Ware, Nestlé’s head of responsible sourcing. “It’s a very big opportunity for any food and agriculture-based company,” he said.

However, Ware said Nestlé’s overall net-zero pledge doesn’t rely on offsets.

“Carbon credits cannot be the strategy to mitigate the temperature rise on the planet. Otherwise, we’ll just keep business as it is,” he said.

Also, campaigners say it is critical that all forms of cheating and corruption are eliminated. There is some disagreement over allowing some countries to carry surplus credits from the old CDM system into a new carbon market, and double counting. Double counting

refers to a situation where two parties claim the same carbon removal or emission reduction. For example, Brazil allows a company to take credit for establishing a forestry project to offset the mass cutting of timber. Brazil and the forestry project company both claim credit for it.

Unless the loopholes are straightened out and the rules become much more stringent, there isn’t much point in having a global carbon market flooded with cheap, ineffective offsets, says Haya. Additionally, countries cannot rely on carbon offsetting alone to help them achieve their ambitious climate goals; instead, they need to adopt domestic and regional policies aimed at slashing emissions.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic effect on the supply chain dynamics of many industries. Be it computers, digital games, smartphones or automobiles. The reason being the component supplier of the world, a.k.a. China, is going through a crisis of raw material and delayed manufacturing datelines due to the pandemic shutdowns.

Adding to this is the shipping crisis. The cost of ferrying goods has gone up five-fold, which in

turn has led to delayed deliveries and a sudden spike in prices.

This crisis has affected the board game sellers in a big way.

Board games saw a spike in sales during the pandemic shutdowns. The board games market registered 20% growth in 2020, riding on the desire for “digital detox” and a break from tumultuous times. With people sequestered at home to avoid the Covid pandemic, board games were a good way to spend family time and keep boredom at bay.

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BOArD GAME MArKET Current trends show that the global board game segment is worth around $15 billion (€12.4 billion), growing more than the toy market as a whole.

Figures suggest that, with the exception of the educational segment, games for children did not perform particularly well in 2020. Similarly, board games for multiple players did not keep up with the positive trends. The gamers’ demographics are contributing to this change.

“In the past, it was mainly complex strategy games, also in English, that were in high demand. Today, it is more family games and games for

two. We are now seeing clients who normally would not play,” Josef Anders, owner of a store selling board games, told DW. The traditional games have picked up such as puzzles and classic board games. ”Games in highest demand were what we would call evergreens — games that have an existing familiarity and history,” Samuel Susz, director of Global Marketing at Toronto-based Spin Master. The Canadian toy and entertainment company had “an incredibly productive year,” with retail sales in the US registering 25% growth year on year.

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SuppLY CHAIN This unexpected boom in demand for board games has affected supply chains. Nearly 80% of these games are produced in China due to lesser production costs. Cardboard, plastic, and packaging, all that goes in the making of board games, are sourced from China.

In 2020, companies with production facilities abroad had to wait longer than usual for deliveries.

Although consumers are buying games, there’s no way for publishers to get products to their customers, says Maggie Clayton, the director of sales and marketing for Greater Than Games.

According shipments remained the end of containers

to industry experts, from China have problematic since 2020 and prices for have quadrupled

compared with the same period in 2019, 2020. The pinch is felt more by the US and online board game suppliers, as EU countries are not so dependent on China. A lot of the board games are manufactured in the European countries themselves.

“We have factories mainly in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

But here, too, we are running into logistic problems,” said a board game manufacturer. But booming demand for specific categories increased supply chain complexities in Europe, too.

Throughout the winter months of 2020, many board games, including the family-made game “Corona,” have been largely out of stock. US blockbuster “Cards against Humanity” was almost impossible to find in stores in the US or Europe.

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THE SHIppING CrISIS Ports in China were shut down due to COVID. Even if products were being created in the factories, they could not ship for distribution, as the ports drastically cut the number of available ships by closing for safety. This cutback also created the first delays in shipping that slowed the export of raw material too.

“We’ve taken pre-orders for it so all of that product is technically sold—except for the fact that we don’t have the games or the money yet. So we’re in this weird situation where there’s high demand for our products because of the increase in people playing games during the pandemic, but we just can’t get the product over here.”

As the number of ships leaving docks decreased, there was another crisis looming—that of a shortage of hands. Port workers were cut down, and most were not reporting to work due to the pandemic.

A 20-foot container cost about $5,000 or so before the pandemic hit. This was also higher than the $3,000 in recent years.

“We were fortunate enough to get one 20-foot container out at $9,000. Then our next two were $21,000 apiece… I’ve heard about some people paying $35,000 or even $40,000 for a 20-foot container. It’s just such a crapshoot,” said CEO Anne-Marie De Witt of Fireside Games.

Prices skyrocketed for both shipping containers and space.

“We’ve had a container of our most popular game sitting in China since May of this year,” Maggie Clayton told TIME.

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Added to that are storage and warehousing costs before and after the production. If we break down the costs a little—it is a $2400 shipping increase and another $4000 or so in storage fees before and after production — in addition to not being able to guarantee any sort of delivery date. Earlier, it cost around $600 to fill a container. For a company to suddenly absorb somewhere around $5,500 in unexpected fees for every container they attempt to ship, the situation became rapidly unreasonable.

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LABOr SHOrTAGE It is the smaller companies that are bearing the brunt of the delays. Even if the shipments reach the US shores, they get stuck at ports due to a paucity of labor.

Most are turning to the difficult decision of raising the retail prices or face shutdowns.

Some game publishers are looking at innovative ways to turn around the problem Seeing shipping container quotes equaling five to 10 times the cost of manufacturing games, one publisher has formed a collective of 11

other game publishers to try to negotiate lower manufacturing costs. Molly Zeff, publisher of Wing It, says that she contacted over 30 manufacturers in 17 countries to ask about pricing.

Molly Zeff, publisher of Wing It, says that she contacted over 30 manufacturers in 17 countries to ask about pricing.

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KICKSTArTEr SuppLIErS Board game creators and publishers have increasingly used the Kickstarter crowdfunding route to finance their ventures. They now face the reality of supplying games they already owe to backers into their finances. This had created even more issues for publishers whose backers decided to fund their project before supply chain hangups were ever an issue.

“There are over 50,000 units of different games, expansions and accessories that we’ve been trying to move for three months,” says one such publisher and creator.

Gamers and publishers in the board game industry have reportedly raised over $146 million through the Kickstarter platform in the first half of 2021 alone. More than 1,800

tabletop games have reportedly been funded in 2021 so far, with 28 of these games raising more than $1 million, reports Time.

But with the shipping crisis, backers of Kickstarted boardgames and even individual customers who have pre-ordered will have to wait, along with having to dish out extra for the rising costs of getting the game to the players.

“Because we’re a smaller business, sometimes it feels more personal when we make a decision like increasing the retail price of a product or not having a product available in certain lines of distribution because some of our fans know us really well,” says Zeff. “It’s a business decision—and not even one that we want to be making. It seems

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like a big, far off thing when you say global shipping crisis, but all industries are being affected by this in some way, shape, or form.”

along with the delays. Some companies have adopted an educational and information drive to keep their customers abreast of the delays.

The big companies can absorb the rise in costs; it is the small ones that must either increase the prices or face the spectre of closure.

But how far this will work is uncertain. Moreover, the festive season is approaching, and publishers must stock up on supplies to meet the spike in demand. Will the crisis be over by then?

And here we come to the customers. Most are unaware of the reasons for a sudden rise of almost 50 percent in retail costs

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An apple a day might keep the doctor away, but for diehard Apple fans, the giant tech company’s products lineup, updates, etc. are what keep their hearts ticking.

Generally, Apple’s year-long calendar contains 4 major events: The Spring event, held in March; the Worldwide Developers Conference held in the summer in June; a September event that’s focused on iPhone and Apple Watch; and sometimes an October event if new iPads or Macs expected in the fall.

Here is a look at what the Apple calendar for 2021 looked like. And also a peek at what is to come in 2022.

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April In April of this year, Apple introduced AirTags, new iMac models, an updated Apple TV 4K, and refreshed versions of the 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

WWDC-June In June, Apple held the Worldwide Developers Conference where it debuted iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, tvOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey.

California Streaming Event; September 14 Apple held its annual iPhonecentric event on September 14.

At the “California Streaming” event, Apple unveiled the iPhone 13, iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPhone 13 Pro Max, all of which launched on September 24.

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Apple also introduced the iPad mini 6 and the ninth-generation iPad with a September 24 release date.

The Apple Watch Series 7 too was introduced at the September event, but its launch was postponed to mid-October due to a delay in components.

October Event A second event was held on October 18 called” Unleashed”.

It focused on two new highend MacBook Pro models and third-generation AirPods, as well as some new colors for the HomePod mini. Apple also introduced a lower-cost “Voice Plan” for Apple Music.

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The Apple 2022 Products Lineup MacBook Air Apple is planning to launch a thinner and lighter version of its MacBook Air with an M1 chip The machine will feature a miniLED display, MagSafe charging technology and USB-C ports for connecting external devices, but it won’t have an HDMI port or an SD card slot.

The new Apple silicon chip will support better graphics with nine or 10 GPU cores instead of the seven or eight in the current M1 MacBook Air. The MacBook Air could see a launch in mid-2022.

Mac mini Apple is developing a high-end version of the Mac mini, which will feature additional ports and a more powerful Apple silicon M1 chip with a 10-core CPU that has eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores, plus 16-core or 32-core GPU options.

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AirPods Pro Apple is working on a newer version of the AirPods Pro with a wireless chip and better design than the present one. The new Airpods will not have the short stem sticking out and will be more compact and rounded.

iPhone SE Apple is rumored to be developing a new version of the iPhone SE with 5G and an upgraded processor, with a release date in the first half of 2022.

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More products for the future Mac Pros Apple is working on two versions of the Mac Pro with new chassis designs and high-end silicon chips with 20 or 40 computing cores.

AR/VR Headset This headset is expected to be launched sometime in 2022 or 2023. The headset will feature a dedicated display, built-in processor, and an “rOS” or reality operating system. Input will be via touch panels, voice activation, and head gestures.

It will probably cost around $2000.

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Foldable iPhone The ultimate style statement— a foldable iPhone is planned by Apple for some time in 2023, and it will be between 7.5- and 8-inches.

Apple organizes several events a year to showcase its product launches and new services.

Besides these events, it also holds the Worldwide in June. Before that, in March, it has a Spring event. Then another major event takes place in October, along with some awards and such announcements in the course of the years. All these events are used to announce the latest versions of iOS and macOS and a few hardware products.

Apple is a very secretive company, and the leaks and rumors about its products are often wrong. The company’s portfolio is becoming heavier with many new products and iteration. It is only at its officially held events that a clear picture of its newest releases—be it services or products becomes clear.

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Spring 2022 iMac, iPads, and iPhone SE?: Apple has held an event in the spring for five of the last seven years. The spring event typically takes place in March, but in 2021 the spring event was in April. There are rumors of an updated iPhone SE model in 2022.

Speculations are that the new iPhone SE will resemble the current model, updated with an A15 processor and 5G capabilities.

Apple has a lineup of new Macs as it transitions from Intel chips to its in-house Silicon M1 chips. Rumors of a new 27-inch iMac and M1Pro or M1 Max are in the offing, along with an updated Mac mini.

June 2022: WWDC Apple’s week-long developers’ conference is held in June second week. Apple always reveals its new operating systems at WWDC, which means: iOS 16, iPad 16, macOS 13, watchOS 9, and tvOS 16.

The Mac Pro desktop could An iPad Pro update may make an appearance, as could be expected with an “M2” the Mac mini with an external processor. monitor.

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September 2022: iPhones and Apple Watch As everybody that follows Apple knows, September is the month when Apple announces new iPhones and a new Apple Watch. In 2022, it is expected that the company will announce an iPhone 14 with a new design and better performance and cameras.

The end of the year may see a new AirPod Pro update, Apple TV, a new MacBook Air, and of course, a new version of the iPad mini.

A new Apple TV+, and some other major improvements in Fitness+, iCloud+, Music, and News. As mentioned elsewhere, a new AR/VR headset is in the offing too.

Awards and honors For the first time, Apple held a ceremony to honor and award its app contest winners in 2019.

An Apple Music award was also held for the first time.

In 2020, an actual physical award ceremony could not be held due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though the awards were announced as usual.

Maybe all things going well, 2022 will see a second live ceremony.

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