Are MBAs going to become more or less useful in the tech and startup industry in the next ten years? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Adam Enbar, Co-Founder & CEO, Flatiron School, on Quora.
MBA skills are becoming increasingly more important, but getting an actual MBA may not be the best way to get those skills anymore.
There are actually two things that I want to address:
How important are the skills you learn in an MBA?
Is an MBA the best way to acquire those skills?
How important are the skills you learn in an MBA for the tech and startup industry?
As a startup founder myself, I strongly believe that the type of skills you're expected to gain through an MBA (sales, marketing, strategy, leadership) remain critically important to the tech and startup industry. In fact, these skills may be more important than ever. Today, most tech startups are no longer successful because of pure technological innovation, with the exception of outliers like TESLA or Oculus. They are successful because of the way they leverage technology to upend business models. Just look at Airbnb or Dollar Shave Club or Warby Parker: they are disrupting their respective industries by using existing technology in a smart and innovative way to solve a specific need for their customers.
The tech industry needs more business leaders who not only understand technology (even if they're not technologists themselves), but can also spot opportunities to apply that technology in new ways to improve business models. Then comes the really hard part of developing sales and marketing programs: acquiring new users and customers. Even with the greatest engineering team in the world, if a company doesn't have enough customers or can't differentiate their product among competitors who are all offering the same thing, it will have a hard time staying afloat.
Is an MBA the best way to acquire those skills?
Like many degree programs, an MBA has (or should have) two main benefits:
Skills that will help you to be successful on the job in the future (which I touched on above)
Access to the school's network and brand
The second benefit only really applies to a subset of elite MBA programs, though I'd argue that pedigree is generally becoming less of a differentiating factor in the workplace. Plus, the Internet now enables so many new and powerful ways to network in business, such as accelerator programs like Y Combinator, which arguably rival the networks of some of the best MBA programs.
Having worked with hundreds of hiring partners at Flatiron School, I know that what really matters to employers is whether you have the skills to succeed in a role - regardless of whether those skills are acquired on the job, through traditional higher education or via an accelerated type of education like a bootcamp.
The challenge then becomes assessing those skills. For technical roles, such as the ones we prepare students for at Flatiron School, they're fairly straightforward to evaluate (although there's still room for improvement in the hiring process for developers). We know our Full Stack Web Developer program prepares grads to be operational as junior developers on day one. But for roles in sales or marketing, it's much harder to assess someone's skills, and that's why some employers still rely on a degree or credential to demonstrate that a candidate has, at the very least, completed coursework that's relevant to the job.
But is that a good enough reason for you to invest a lot of time and money into an MBA? Is it the most efficient way to acquire relevant business skills? I'm not sure. In fact, based on my experience running Flatiron School and helping hundreds of grads find jobs, my gut tells me no, it's not.
That's not to say an MBA is not the right option for some people (I went into a huge amount of debt for my MBA and can confidently say it was more than worth it). Where we go wrong in education is assuming that there's only one path to success. In my experience, a one-size-fits-all approach in education is rarely the answer. I imagine new types of business training programs will begin to emerge (if they haven't already) that will give people more options when deciding where to invest their time and money.
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Sell everything. That's what famed investors such as George Soros, Carl Icahn, Jeff Gundlach, Bill Gross and Stan Druckenmiller have been preaching about equities since May, noted Barrons this August--at the same time CBOE's Volatility Index fell to its lowest level in two years.
Despite the fact that the 2016 S&P 500 is up 5.9 percent on a price basis in the face of uncertain times (think Brexit, the U.S. elections, the record low yields of the U.S. 10-Year Treasury Note and more), the stock market can't and won't go up forever. Bad news drives interest rates lower, and lower rates support loftier valuations, said Barrons.
Bonds are equally risky. In a weak business climate, the fixed yields of bonds look more attractive as stock prices fall. But that traditionally inverse relationship between stocks and bonds has broken down in the last two decades, noted The Wall Street Journal.
A 2016 McKinsey Global Institute report suggests the combination of higher interest rates, lower economic growth and weak corporate profits is here to stay - and a portfolio made up only of stocks and bonds will generate lower returns for years to come.
Commercial real estate has the potential to offer long-term returns that are both healthy and stable. Most significantly, when added to a traditional portfolio of stocks and bonds, this asset class can decrease volatility and increase returns. But it's important to understand the different types of real estate investments you can make, and each one's potential impact on your portfolio.
For instance, an investor recently asked us why buy into our Fund III at Origin Investments instead of a successful publicly traded REIT such as Realty Income Corp. (O-NYSE)? Both products boast similar target returns, and the REIT has a lot going for it. This includes:
A proven long-term record of 14 percent returns (compared to Origin's Fund III's targeted return of 17-19 percent), with a current dividend yield of 3.76 percent;
Dividends that have increased over time; and
Liquidity, since the REIT is traded on an exchange and can be sold like any other stock.
In truth, when it comes to deciding between a publicly traded REIT and a private equity real estate fund, it isn't an "either-or" proposition but rather an "and" proposition; you don't necessarily have to choose between the two. Here's why, along with four other compelling reasons to invest in private equity real estate funds:
1.Unlike REITs, private equity real estate isn't tied to stock market fluctuations. While public real estate products can be lucrative investments, they are highly correlated to the stock market. That means they rise and fall based on what's happening in the economy, and their values can be impacted by events that have nothing to do with real estate fundamentals. Because of this, adding publicly traded REITs alone will not necessarily improve your portfolio's risk-adjusted returns.
2.Public equity real estate funds achieve different investing goals. When evaluating a potential investment, it important to look at alpha and beta. Beta measures the volatility of a fund relative to the market by gauging how much the fund's returns move up or down given the gains or losses of its benchmark market index. Alpha is the difference between a fund's expected returns based on its beta and its actual returns, and it is sometimes interpreted as the value that a portfolio manager adds, notes Morningstar.
Public REITs are a good example of the difference between alpha and beta.
With pubic REITs you are essentially buying beta, while a private equity real estate fund seeks to achieve alpha--and does with strategic business plans for properties and skilled asset managers. Origin's goal is to outperform the market on a risk-adjusted basis and achieve returns well above the index. We focus on finding high quality, underperforming commercial real estate properties that can be turned around. Our philosophy is that this is the best way to protect the downside while maximizing the upside of each deal. 3. REITs are a volatile asset class. When the economy tanks, REITs can get hit hard. "In 2007 and 2008, REITs lost 15.7 percent and 37.7 percent, respectively," the Wall Street Journal noted recently. Also, since 2000, REITs "are second only to emerging-market stocks as the most volatile asset class. And with interest rates likely to rise, the next few years could be tough," especially for investors buying REITs now, concluded the WSJ.
4. Funds minimize risk exposure. Our private equity funds are one of the most effective options for investors because they are a diversified investment. At Origin, each of the properties in a fund are run as a separate businesses. So if one underperforms it doesn't impact the others. A deal by deal investment strategy does not offer this same benefit.
To better gauge how well a fund will perform, it also helps to look at a company's other products. In our case, our earlier Funds I and II had projected returns of 17-19 percent, however Fund I is on track to generate a 28 percent net return and Fund II is on track to deliver a 26 percent return. Preqin, an industry leader that tracks performance of private equity fund managers, ranked these two funds in the top quartile as of June 2016. 5. Consider the manager's alignment of interests. According to Towers Watson, a leading global advisory company, co-investment is the most effective way to align the interests of a manager and investors. We started Origin to invest our own capital, and maximizing investment performance remains our primary goal. We continue to keep our skin in the game with Fund III by committing $10 million of our personal resources.
If private equity real estate isn't part of your portfolio, it needs to be; asset allocation is a large determinant of investment success. Private real estate has low correlation to other asset classes, high expected returns and low volatility. That makes it a trifecta, since most asset classes only have one or two of these qualities.
As reported by Reuters, "Swiss bank UBS is leading a team of four of the world's biggest banks developing a system to enable financial markets to make payments and settle transactions quickly using blockchain technology.
UBS has developed a "Utility Settlement Coin" (USC), which is a digital cash equivalent of each of the major currencies backed by central banks, such as the dollar or euro, rather than a decentralized new digital currency such as bitcoin.
The USC would be convertible at parity with a bank deposit in the corresponding currency, making it fully backed by cash assets at a central bank. Spending a USC would be the same as spending the real currency it is paired with, UBS said."
Other banks involved in the project are BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, and Banco Santander, as well as a brokerage.
Watch our interview with Santander's blockchain chief John Whelan below. Mr. Whelan explained that even though the project uses Ethereum technology, it is not exposed to the public Ethereum blockchain. London-based blockchain lab Clearmatics, involved with the settlement coin concept, started with a flavor of Ethereum but this project is likely to end up being rather proprietary in nature.
Disclosure: Not financial advice. At time of publication, I hold some bitcoin, ether, gold, and U.S. dollars in my long term portfolio.
Starbucks said Thursday it will accelerate plans to give all its stores’ unsold ready-to-eat meals to food banks.
The chain launched a pilot program six months ago for select Starbucks stores to donate extra food at the end of each day and said it would expand the effort over the next five years across its 7,600 company-operated locations. Now, it says the rollout of the Starbucks FoodShare program will be complete by 2019, two years ahead of schedule.
Since March, the $84 billion company has contributed 300,000 meals to charity. The chain partnered with nonprofits Feeding America and Food Donation Connection to scale FoodShare nationally.
Restaurants are among the biggest sources of food waste in the United States, where up to 40 percent of food goes uneaten. Much of that food ends up in landfills, where it rots and spews about 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. At the same time, nearly 15.3 million children in the U.S. lack regular access to nutritious meals.
While some chains, such as Pret-A-Manger and Whole Foods, bake donations into their business models, other food companies have been slow to catch on, due in part to concerns about liability if someone gets sick eating their food.
Starbucks credited its staff ― “partners” in its corporate lingo ― for pushing the company to widen the FoodShare program’s reach more quickly.
“Partners take great pride in being the catalyst for this program, they know food that couldn’t be sold in our stores the next day, yet was still safe to consume, could serve a higher purpose,” Alyssa Edelen, a Starbucks district manager in San Diego, California, said in a press release. “They are reminded of their impact every time they work a closing shift and put salads and sandwiches in the refrigerator instead of the trash for people who are hungry.”
Staffers working those closing shifts may need more co-workers just to manage end-of-day donations, however. For months, Starbucks employees across the country have complained that apparent cutbacks in hours have left stores understaffed. Workers say the situation is responsible for long lines at many locations.
Starbucks vowed two years ago to overhaul its scheduling policies in hopes of easing the burden on workers struggling to balance their lives with the chain’s erratic hours and shifts. Labor advocates at the time told The Huffington Post the change was insufficient, noting that workers needed enough hours to guarantee a livable income, too.
The company denied slashing the number of hours its staff work, but a two-month-old petition arguing otherwise had garnered more than 17,000 signatures by Friday morning.
“The labor situation has gone from tight to infuriating,” Jaime Prater, the employee who started the petition, wrote on its Coworker.org page. “Labor has been cut so much in corporate stores, that one call-off (an employee calling in sick) impacts the entire day, as managers are directed to cut shifts to save on labor costs.”
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Social media has been the game changer in almost everything that surrounds us. With the birth of social platforms, custom targeting of prospective customers is easier than ever. One of the greatest innovations of technology is social media, not just in our ability to communicate but in our ability to market directly to those we want to reach.
At my company, we are so specific with whom we target that we even identify our prospect by the books they are reading, the movies they are watching, and the industry experts they are a fan of. We guide our clients on how to significantly expand their reach to those that best match their customer profile. One of the best features social media marketing has for businesses today is its low barrier to entry. Gone are the days where a business is required to spend thousands of dollars on advertising to reach its prospect. You can now reach your audience spending as little as five dollars per week!
But which platforms are the best for businesses to use? In order to create a successful social strategy, you have to be familiar with how they work. We've provided a list of our favorite platforms for marketing our business and acquiring new clients.
1. Facebook
With more than 1.59 billion users, Facebook comprises of the largest blend of demographics of any social platform. It provides an extraordinary medium for your business to connect with your prospective customers all around the world. And from an advertising perspective, it's the easiest to manage and allows for the best possible targeting. We use Facebook Ads to match our current buyers with over two million similar prospects who possess similar characteristics. We then push them to an opt-in page where we can capture their name and email.
2. Twitter
Twitter's value lies in its ability for your posts to go viral: the more people share your posts and "retweet" your content, the more followers you will attain. We post recent news, updates and articles we have in major media. Hashtags make a big difference in building momentum for your posts, so pay attention to what is trending today and include relevant hashtags. We also retweet people who have many followers to increase the likelihood of them following us back.
3. LinkedIn
If you are working in a B2B field, this is the social media network for you to focus on. Connecting with business professionals in any industry is easiest with LinkedIn as it allows you to target them by industry, job title, etc. As with all social media, LinkedIn prioritizes relationship building more than any other. Don't lead with a sales pitch; start by building a connection. One of the best features for businesses are LinkedIn Groups. Businesses should establish Groups in your target niche or industry and invite others in your target market to join.
At my company, we focus on building new relationships with key prospects whose professional titles we've identified. For example, we'll search "CEO Speaker" to find people who are the heads of their companies and who also are active speakers.
4. Instagram
We use this popular photo-sharing platform at events and tradeshows. Whenever we're hosting events, we always have an incentive for the attendees to post photos to Instagram using our event hashtag. We'll also offer a free giveaway or raffle for those who participate.
5. Pinterest
Only use this channel if you have great images to share. Quality images are likely to go viral on this site due to its visual nature. If your image is pinned by a highly-followed member, it has the potential to be viewed by millions. It's also great for promoting products. We post photos of book covers and images with quotes accredited to our authors to promote their books. Adding the Amazon link to their books also helps boost sales.
6. YouTube
Aside from being the second largest search engine, YouTube is owned by Google. So when it comes to search engine optimization, videos are more likely to appear in search results than other websites. With Google's acquisition of YouTube, we use Google Hangouts On Air to do interviews with our authors and industry leaders. Then our interview is automatically posted to YouTube under our account for added visibility.
7. Yelp
Yelp is critical for businesses today. If you don't have an active strategy to build reviews on Yelp, your customers may do it for you soon enough. All it takes is one poor review to harm your abilities to build your social platform. Asking your customers to review your business on Yelp prevents any negative review from standing out. We hold campaigns to get our authors to post reviews about us on Yelp in return for a reward. For example, if they post a review, we'll offer them 10 percent off their next order or give them an added service.
It's up to you which among these platforms will likely be a marketing paradise for your business. Just remember that it is not just the social media site that you have to check, but the compatibility it has for your business.
Justin Sachs is a highly-sought-after business and marketing expert and CEO of Motivational Press, an industry-leading book publishing company.
Ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] lost at least $1.27 billion before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the first six months of 2016, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The subsidies Uber grants its drivers was the main reason for the loss, finance head Gautam Gupta told investors in a quarterly conference call, Bloomberg said, citing sources. (bloom.bg/2bDGGI4)
Uber, whose investors include Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The company lost about $520 million in the first quarter of the year and another $750 million in the second quarter, Bloomberg said.
Uber, which is now valued at roughly $69 billion, lost at least $2 billion in 2015, the report said.
The company’s net revenue increased to about $1.1 billion in the second quarter from $960 million in the first quarter, while bookings rose to more than $5 billion from more than $3.8 billion in the prior quarter, Bloomberg said.
Blondes. They’re stereotypically portrayed as ditzy. They famously have “more fun.” But here’s the head-turning part: women with blonde hair disproportionately hold positions of power in the U.S.
A stunning 48 percent of female chief executives at S&P 500 companies and 35 percent of female senators are blonde, according to findings presented by two business school researchers earlier this month at an Academy of Management annual meeting in Anaheim, California.
The first women to get a major party nomination for president? Blonde. First woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court? Blonde. First women president of Harvard. You guessed it.
Blond male leaders are far less common. (Sorry, Donald Trump.) Just 2.2 percent of male CEOs had blond hair, a 2005 study found. That’s more in line with the hair color’s natural occurrence. Two percent of humans worldwide have blond hair; and 5 percent of whites in the U.S., according to the researchers.
Stephen Lam/ReutersYahoo CEO Marissa Mayer -- 48 percent of female CEOs on the S&P 500 sport blonde locks.
If you include women and men who dye their hair, certainly, the blond population rises, but probably not anywhere near 50 percent, Jennifer Berdahl, who coauthored the presentation, told The Huffington Post. “If women are choosing to dye their hair blonde, there’s something strategic about the choice,” Berdahl said.
The prevalence of blonde female CEOs doesn’t contradict the stereotype of the dumb blonde ― it plays into it ― Berdahl and her coauthor Natalya Alonso, of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, explain in their presentation.
In addition to incompetence, light-colored hair is also associated with youth, attractiveness, dependence and warmth. All of these traits counter-balance the more aggressive, dominant ― and stereotypically male ― characteristics required to run a large organization, the researchers explain.
Andy Katz/Pacific Press via Getty ImagesSen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) -- 38 percent of women in the Senate are blonde.
“If the package is feminine, disarming and childlike,” Berdahl told The Huffington Post. “You can get away with more assertive, independent and [stereotypically] masculine behavior.”
The researchers didn’t consider TV news anchors, but it seems anecdotally true that Fox News ― a conservative network with somewhat antsy views on the role of women ― employs an awful lot of blonde anchors. Consider Megyn Kelly and, until recently, Gretchen Carlson, who certainly played up a “dumb blonde” image to counterbalance her background as a Stanford educated violinist.
Berdahl and Alonso don’t claim that women are consciously going blonde to disarm their overwhelmingly male colleagues. But their work, which includes three studies where men were asked various questions about photos of the same woman, with either brown or blonde hair, shows this disarming factor is very much at play for women leaders.
Researchers from Northwestern University school of business discovered a parallel phenomenon with black male leaders, who are more likely to have a roundish “baby-face” than their white counterparts. In studies, black leaders were also rated as warmer and less threatening. While it’s fairly acceptable for white male leaders to get angry (see: Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump.) Black men are judged harshly for displaying that kind of emotion.
Berdahl and Alonso also found that male CEOs are more likely to be married to blondes: 43 percent of the highest-paid male CEOs have a blonde spouse.
The blonde thing is likely a natural reaction to the racist and sexist notions that underpin the dominant conception of what a “leader” looks like. White. Male. Conduct a Google image search for CEO, you’ll get a lot of pictures of caucasian dudes. Or just look at the faces of the CEOs on the Fortune 500.
Very few women make it to the CEOs office and those who do are overwhelmingly white. After Ursula Burns steps down from her perch at Xerox later this year, there will be no black women CEOs in the S&P 500. It’s worth noting that blonde hair is a caucasian trait. It’s also more common in children.
For their presentation, Berdahl and Alonso conducted three studies, using about 100 male participants, to see how they felt about women CEOs who were blonde and brunette. The first two studies confirmed stereotypes: Respondents rated blondes and brunettes equally attractive, but blondes were found to be less competent and independent.
Bloomberg via Getty ImagesIBM chief executive Virginia 'Ginni' Rometty. Nearly half of the (very few) women on the S&P 500 have blonde hair.
Then, participants were shown a picture of the same woman ― with blonde and brown hair and asked who they’d recommend for a CEO or Senate position. The majority of participants voted for the brunette because she is “intelligent, professional and serious,” the presentation quotes a respondent saying.
The third study is where “the blonde paradox” lies: Men were asked to rate female leaders who displayed a dominant leadership style ― they read a quote where the CEO says “I don’t want there to be any ambiguity about who’s in charge,” and “My staff knows who the boss is.” When this came out of the brown-haired woman’s mouth, she was rated very harshly on warmth and attractiveness.
The blonde did much better.
“The same woman changes her hair color from blonde to brunette, and she’s seen as a bitch,” Berdahl said.
David Giesbrecht/NetflixClaire Underwood, played by Robin Wright, didn't stay brunette for long on "House of Cards."
Fans of Netflix’s “House of Cards” may recall that the first lady on that series, the ruthless “ice queen” Claire Underwood, dyed her hair back to its natural brown during Season 3 of the show in a fit of rebelliousness.
It didn’t play well and her handlers were soon urging her to go back to blonde: “Iowa voters love the blonde,” she’s told by an advisor.
Of course they do.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified Natalya Alonso’s surname as Alfonso.
NEW YORK ― Last month, Elon Musk laid out his “master plan” to transform Tesla into a clean energy giant. In a 1,483-word blog post, he outlined plans to meld his automobile company with SolarCity, the country’s largest solar installer, to create a one-stop shop for electric cars, batteries and solar-panel roofing.
He’s not the only Musk with a grand vision. For the last 14 years, Kimbal Musk, Elon’s younger brother, has been quietly waging his own battle against industrialized food. While Elon built a tech empire in California, the younger Musk moved to Colorado and founded The Kitchen, an ambitious family of restaurants committed to bringing sustainably grown, locally sourced, healthfully prepared food to the American heartland. His empire of eateries ― whose fare includes homemade kale chips, quinoa grown in Colorado and lamb sourced from Boulder’s Crego Livestock farm ― stretches from Boulder and Denver in Colorado, to Chicago. By the end of August, it will include a new location in Memphis, Tennessee.
The younger Musk sits on the board of Chipotle, whose fresh ingredients have forced McDonald’s to rethink the grub it sells. With his own restaurants ― he’ll have 11 by the end of the year ― he aims to do the same to the Applebee’s and TGI Friday’s of the world ― establishing a vast empire of farm-to-table restaurants across the parts of the country sometimes mocked as “flyover states.”
In his next move, he plans to take on agriculture, too.
On Tuesday, Musk announced the launch of Square Roots, a new company that will invest in startups growing fresh fruit and vegetables in cities. The so-called accelerator aims to provide mentorship and resources to bootstrapped urban farmers, who will operate out of Square Roots’ specially designed shipping containers equipped with hydroponic growing towers. The firm, formed under The Kitchen LLC umbrella, is slated to open its first location in Brooklyn sometime this fall.
“The Kitchen’s mission is to strengthen communities by bringing local, real food to everyone,” Musk, 43, wrote in a Medium post published Tuesday. “Our goal [with Square Roots] is to enable a whole new generation of real food entrepreneurs, ready to build thriving, responsible businesses. The opportunities in front of them will be endless.”
The KitchenLeafy greens grow in one of the freight containers Square Roots plans to use at its "campuses."
Urban farming seems ready to take off. Roughly 800 million people worldwide raise vegetables, fruits or animals in cities and produce about 15 percent of the world’s food, according to a recent United Nations report. But people are increasingly concentrating in urban areas; an anticipated 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. And all those people need to eat.
In developing countries, urban farmers grow food for subsistence. In the U.S., the urban agriculture landscape looks more like a movement than an industry. Cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., have started programs encouraging people to grow produce on vacant lots and rooftops. Michelle Obama, who made healthy eating and exercise a cornerstone of her legacy as First Lady, has touted community farming as a do-it-yourself answer in blighted urban communities where fresh produce is hard to find.
Kimbal Musk envisions a network of his companies in major cities across the U.S., particularly in the South and Midwest, where industrial farming and fast-food chains have the strongest grip on mainstream diets.
The Kitchen, for its part, has been dipping its toes in these waters for some time now. The company’s nonprofit arm, The Kitchen Community, operates about 300 “learning gardens” in more than 50 towns and cities, where an estimated 150,000 schoolchildren tend crops and, ideally, forge deeper connections with their food. Even skeptics who debate urban farms’ environmental benefits and potential to produce enough calories to feed whole cities agree that they imbue people with a greater appreciation for food.
“We want our communities to know what real food is. We want kids in communities to know real food, and we want them to have a choice between real food and industrial food,” Kimbal Musk told The Huffington Post in an interview last month, on the day after his brother released Tesla’s updated “master plan.” “Right now, for many of them, it’s industrial food, fast food or nothing. We want to bring education back so kids know they have options.”
Around the world, a growing number of tech-minded startups are tinkering with agriculture. A supermarket in Berlin installed a small indoor farm earlier this year, growing fresh greens in the middle of the store. In Japan ― where the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster piqued paranoia about irradiated produce ― the world’s largest operating indoor farm yields 10,000 heads of lettuce per day in an abandoned Sony factory. And in the U.S., there are companies like Aerofarms, which is growing kale, arugula and other leafy greens out of an old paintball arena in a run-down neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey.
The KitchenA beet burger served at one of The Kitchen's Next Door locations.
Square Roots marks Musk’s entrance into this emerging industry. Conceived of as a startup accelerator ― Silicon Valley-ese for a firm that provides space and resources to entrepreneurs ― the company injects The Kitchen’s restaurant line with a dose of the tech-industry mindset the Musks are known for. (Kimbal Musk serves on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX ― Elon is CEO of both ― and is his brother’s trustee for the two companies.)
Both Musks, who are originally from South Africa, have a storied history in tech. They cofounded Zip2, a startup that helped newspapers build online city guides, in 1995. They sold the company to Compaq for $300 million in 1999. Elon Musk used that money to found the online payments startup PayPal and invest in Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX.
The younger Musk used his payout to indulge his passion for cooking. He moved to New York and began taking classes at International Culinary Center, where he studied French cooking. His has said his philosophy on food began to take shape after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when he volunteered to feed the firefighters pulling bodies from the gnarled rubble of the World Trade Center. Musk said he had an epiphany while driving an ATV loaded with a cooler of poached salmon to the gymnasium of a school near ground zero.
“You see these giant piles of still-molten metal in front of you and you see these firefighters coming out of the most traumatic environment you can possibly imagine to sit down in these gymnasiums and eat what we cooked for them,” Musk told HuffPost last month. “That sense of community that I felt was just profound to me. It was an absolute epiphany, but it was actually like a blow to the head. It was so intense. I left that experience saying, ‘I just have to open a restaurant.’”
He spent the next year roadtripping across the U.S. with his (now former) wife, and eventually settled in Boulder. There, seemingly by fate, he met Hugo Matheson, an English chef. As Steven Levy wrote in a deeply reported 2015 profile of Musk in Backchannel:
A week after arriving, Musk’s dog slipped off the leash and nuzzled a man enjoying coffee at a local shop. This was Hugo Matheson, himself a recent arrival from England, who was about to take a job as executive chef in a local restaurant. Matheson invited Musk and his wife to a dinner, one that Musk would never forget. The fare was simple and honest: grilled fish with eggplant, the skin charred to a crisp but the inside moist and buttery. The meal was topped off by a straightforward panna cotta.
“It was completely different than what I learned in New York, where you’d spend six hours preparing and cooking something,” says Musk. “Hugo probably started thirty minutes before we ate. It was a more casual, simple way of cooking, with incredible-quality ingredients and a very simple but intense technique for cooking.” Musk begged Matheson for a job in his restaurant, and for the next year he worked there as a line cook — ten dollars an hour — absorbing that attitude and technique.
In March 2004, Matheson and the Musks [Kimbal and his wife] opened their own restaurant in that style. The name reflected its lack of pretention: The Kitchen.
The pair opened another restaurant, The Kitchen Upstairs, which applied the same culinary philosophy to a cocktail lounge concept. But a year later, Musk grew restless. Restaurants don’t quite scale the way software companies do, and it made him feel listless and frustrated. He left Matheson to the run the shop and took a job as chief executive of a social networking startup, OneRiot.
It was familiar ground for him, and he toiled away there for five years as they attempted to carve out a niche in the social mapping space. He lost interest, but stayed on out of loyalty to the company’s investors. He missed the food scene.
“If you’ve ever done something you love and go do something you like,” Musk mused, “it’s like chewing on sawdust.”
Fred Prouser / ReutersElon Musk (L) and his brother Kimbal Musk (R), co-founder of The Kitchen Community, appear on a panel with interviewer Jeff Skoll, chairman of Participant Media and the Skoll Foundation.
A near-death experience shook him from his funk. On Valentine’s Day 2010, he broke his neck tubing down a ski slope on a family vacation in Jackson Hole. He was paralyzed for three days, and braved a risky surgery to install a section of metal spine in his neck. He spent two months healing. He enlisted his friend Tobias Peggs ― who is now the co-founder and chief executive of Square Roots ― to take over OneRiot so he could return to The Kitchen.
Musk came back with a clearer, more focused mission for his company: to build communities through food. They launched a new concept, Next Door, to bring The Kitchen’s fresh food to the masses with pub-like restaurants that serve burgers and other classic American fare. That has now grown to five locations in Colorado. Another Next Door is scheduled to open in Memphis next January. Musk wants to keep expanding the chain throughout the country, targeting the shopping malls where casual-dining eateries like TGI Friday’s and Chili’s reign supreme.
“People still have to sit down at TGI Friday’s because that’s all they’ve got,” Musk said. “We’re hoping to come in and provide a solution to landlords that’ll complete the picture, where you’ll have a Next Door, a Chipotle and a Whole Foods right next to each other. Or a Next Door, a Chipotle and a Walmart that has a ton of fresh food in it.”
In many ways, he sees Next Door as his version of Tesla’s Model 3, the auto company’s $35,000 electric car that made history when it notched nearly half a million pre-orders earlier this year. When Elon Musk first outlined his long-term plan for Tesla a decade ago, he envisioned whetting the public’s palate for an electric car with a flashy luxury sedan, the Model S, before rolling out a model for the masses. In following through with that plan, he effectively revived the long-dead electric car, and prompted virtually every major automaker to scramble to create competitors.
“People wanted the electric car for at least two decades, then Tesla came along and showed them how it’s done,” Kimbal Musk said. “The Kitchen is doing that for real food.”
If Elon Musk is building a clean energy empire, then Kimbal Musk is building the sustainable food empire to match.
Asked on Monday whether The Kitchen would consider buying one of the startups that go through Square Roots’ accelerator program, the younger Musk said the firm is “always looking for new ways to expand its impact and further its mission.” In other words: Maybe!
Of course, there are barriers to overhauling the restaurant industry with a chain of farm-to-table restaurants. TGI Friday’s has 1,100 restaurants and Applebee’s has 2,033, to name a few.
And Tesla, too, continues to come up against hurdles, facing two federal probes and repeatedly missing delivery targets. But as investors have learned time and time again, it’s rarely smart to bet against a Musk.
“There are some restaurants already doing this, and the idea is catching on faster than I would have thought,” Dickson Despommier, an emeritus professor of microbiology at Columbia University who hosts a podcast on indoor farming, told HuffPost. “But the Musks of the world, thank God, they’re able to cobble together enough money to make a difference.”
A global advertising buy worth millions of dollars has spread across screens from Brazil to Guatemala, Indonesia to South Korea.
Combining the world's anthems into one song for the Rio Olympics, Samsung has unwittingly shown their true corporate colours.
From global athletes, sporting heroes, weekend athletes and schoolchildren, each line of a national anthem weaves seamlessly together to create a song of global unity.
Behind this feel-good advert is a sinister message of the power of companies over governments, the power of corporations over nations.
Fifty of the world's biggest multinationals have a hidden workforce of over a million workers, and 25 companies have a combined wealth of US$1.9 trillion - that could buy a country the size of South Korea or Canada. Corporate power is out of check.
When a woman in Honduras gets up at 2:00 a.m. to travel to work in the melon plantations in Honduras where each day she faces violence and disrespect; where each day she will be harassed and bullied; where she is often forced to work hours of overtime for no additional money despite poverty wages on which she cannot live and without even the dignity of sanitation, something is wrong.
When a banana worker in Guatemala is forced to drag multiple banana stems each weighing up 50 kilos with a rope attached to his back, something is wrong.
And when workers standing up for fundamental labour rights, students calling for democratic rights and freedoms or indigenous people defending their lands from corporate takeover are shot with impunity in these countries, something is very wrong.
Workers know first-hand how corporate capture of government is undermining their rights and freedoms as citizens.
Disproportionate corporate power over governments is giving license to the greed that denies workers even minimum living wages. It is also seemingly a license to allow the sheer brutality of treatment of working people at the base of the supply chains.
When workers in the supply chains of multinational companies in the UK are on zero-hours contracts; in the US have below minimum-wage jobs; in Panama face the daily uncertainty of short-term contracts; and in Indonesia face hazardous working conditions, then the global model of trade is broken.
Panama, the gateway to Central America, is lively with construction from the canal to the city centre, but below the signs of prosperity and more than eight percent growth, the minimum wage is merely US$400 a month for retail workers with a maximum $534 a month in any sector despite a living wage being calculated at more than $1,000.
Informal working arrangements afflict the majority of people, and thus the majority of the population have no social protection. Even workers in the Canal Zone who are not on the ships are struggling to raise their families, and yet ships can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to pass through and ply their trade.
In Guatemala, workers have lost faith in a government that for many years has promised improved minimum wages and social protection, where indigenous people are still in extreme poverty and where trade union leaders or community activists can simply be shot with impunity. Some employers are even increasingly vocal against municipalities seeking to exempt themselves from even the low minimum wages paid today and the violence and corruption that is crippling a nation.
When minimum wages are at best US$332 a month and many rural workers and women earn less than US$200 while the government's own figures show that a living wage is around US$800, the dignity of families is damaged but so too is economic growth and sustainability.
And in Honduras, where a melon worker travelled many hours to tell me of the exploitation and forced overtime - with tears in his eyes when he described the treatment of women - we all have a responsibility to act.
He asks why a multinational company that earns tens of millions in profits won't even pay the minimum wage. Why indeed does the world watch a broken model of global trade - our supply chains - grow off the misery of people denied rights, minimum living wages, social protection and a rule of law they can trust?
These humble questions and gross symbols of corporate greed are too big to ignore.
The millions of hidden workers for whom companies take no responsibility, using forced labour or paying below the minimum wage, is compounded by the practice of companies changing their names leaving workers with no record of who their employers are and who is responsible for their wages and social protection payments.
Then there are the tax havens where corporate assets keep the wealth of the one percent.
The corporate capture of government is not an illusion when a former Shell executive is in the Minstry of Energy, and a former JP Morgan Director sits in a Finance Ministry in Argentina.
And when Samsung, a multinational that has built its business on a global supply chain of low-wage workers, takes over national anthems with the promise of a world without borders, their sinister wish is for a world without rights.
The answer is to reinstate responsibility - for responsible governments to mandate due diligence that ensures transparency and rights through their supply chains with the rule of law that allows responsible companies to operate with respect for human rights and others to be exposed.
