In 2011, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharcyzk faced a difficult decision. The founders of AirBnB had spent the last four years building their business. After bootstrapping by selling election-themed breakfast cereal, they had won a place in Silicon Valley’s prestigious Y Combinator and had gradually settled on the company’s product, its service, and its standard. AirBnB had recently...
In November 2015 stock photographer Antonio Guillem posted a picture on Shutterstock. It showed a young man walking in a city street with his girlfriend. His head is turned back and he ogles a woman walking in the other direction. His girlfriend has a look of disgust. The picture was shot in Gerona, Spain, and it was one of a number of pictures that Guillem had made featuring the same three...
Employees engage in two kinds of work. There’s the work they do while sitting at their desks: writing lines of code, drawing designs, writing copy, closing deals. And then there’s the time spent talking about work: sitting in meetings, nodding at bosses, trying not to fall asleep, and thinking about lunch. That second type of “work” is growing. According to some studies, executives would spend...
In 2012, the Spanish government changed the way its citizens used time. It passed a new law allowing stores of more than 300 square meters to open for 25 percent longer each week. The aim was to boost consumer spending by encouraging stores to sell during the afternoon break between 2pm and 4pm. The government was trying to kill off the siesta. Four years later, it added the final blow, making...
In January this year, a man in China’s Bozhou city received a parking fine. He wasn’t happy about it. “Grandma’s legs!” he wrote on WeChat Moments, using a light Chinese curse. “I only parked for ten minutes to pick up my kid and it’s a 100 yuan fine.” The next day, the local police wrote their own post on Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter. The post reported that a man in Bozhou county had been...
Paulina Serrato and Joseph Orr met in New York at WeWork 222 Broadway in 2016. They now run a mobile nail salon together that sends manicurists to offices in the city. Jordan Rushie is a lawyer in Fishtown, Philadelphia. He’s written about the ethics of using a shared workspace to run a law firm. He’s also landed at least three clients he met through WeWork events. Krystal Ariel picked up a PR...
Vermont really isn’t a bad place to live. It’s green—except in fall when it’s incredibly colorful. You can ski. It’s filled with craft beers. And if you work remotely, the state will pay you up to $10,000 to move in. In May last year, Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott signed a bill to attract technology workers by helping to pay their relocation costs. The money could be used to pay for...
How Conglomerates Match Methods and Products to Local Markets When Ikea launched in the United States, the company might have expected an easy rollout. Sweden isn’t very different to America. The income levels are similar, as are the size of the families, the homes, and the lifestyles. The same products that sold well in Europe could be expected to sell well in the US. But when the company...
Imagine that you’re thinking of buying a new car. You open Chrome and check out the website of an automotive brand. You stop at the pages showing the specs and the galleries of a model you like. You open a new tab and Google for reviews. You read the reviews and watch some road test videos on YouTube, and then your partners opens Facebook and is presented with an ad from a rival company. It...
Some people are more creative than others. Some people are naturally left-brained, and others naturally right-brained. Some people are good at science and math; others are better at art and literature. Those are two different ways of thinking employed by two different kinds of people. Either you’re creative or you’re not. That’s often how people think of creativity. It’s a gift, like the ability...
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