Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

In 1985, Intel was in trouble. Japanese competitors were dominating the memory chip market that Intel had helped invent. Inside the company, leadership debated what to do. During one conversation, Andy Grove, then Intel’s president and COO, asked CEO Gordon Moore a deceptively simple question: “If we were replaced tomorrow, what would a new CEO do?” Moore didn’t hesitate. “He would get us out of the memory business.” The two men looked at each other and realized something uncomfortable. They already knew the answer; they just hadn’t acted on it. Intel exited the market that had defined its identity and doubled down on microprocessors, a decision that reshaped the comp…

Fifteen years ago, tech investor Marc Andreessen published his famous essay, “Why Software Is Eating the World.” He predicted at the time that technology companies were tremendously undervalued, and that low startup costs and almost infinite scalability would lead software-based companies to dominate every industry. You can see what he means. Today, the “Mag 7” stocks dominate the S&P 500 with market capitalizations in the trillions. Even startups like Anthropic and OpenAI are valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, massive investment in data centers is reshaping industries from construction to energy. But not so fast. While recent advances in ma…

Your four-year-old needs a bike. The cheap ones from a big box store will work, sure—but they’ll be heavy, clunky, and harder for them to learn on. The premium Woom bike weighs half as much—but it costs $400. You want the best for your kid, but do you want to drop that much for something they’ll use for a few months? With a bit of internet sleuthing, you might come across an alternative. There’s a 50,000-person Facebook group devoted entirely to buying, selling, and trading used Woom bikes across the United States. And the brand noticed this group bubbling up. But Facebook Marketplace has limitations—transactions aren’t always secure, and buyers can’t easily searc…

Imagine walking into your elementary school library and finding it transformed overnight into a forest at dusk. Mossy green canopies arch over the bookshelves. Glowing mushrooms create a path between display cases. Twinkle lights flicker through the leaves like fireflies. This is the Everglow Forest, one of the recent book fair themes produced by Literati, a startup that currently runs about 4,000 book fairs a year. At some schools, librarians and PTA volunteers build it out into something approaching an art installation, creating a hand-crafted world that children want to wander through for hours. Wikipedia For a seven-year-old, clutching a crumpled twenty-dollar bill…

The internet has repeatedly changed how people travel. First came the browser, then smartphones. Each shift promised to flatten the industry further, cutting friction, shrinking the role of middlemen, and pushing more of the experience into software. But AI introduces a different possibility entirely: What happens when people stop visiting travel websites at all? Few companies have lived through every phase of that evolution quite like Expedia Group. The company survived the rise of Google, the collapse of desktop computing, the mobile revolution, platform monopolies, and a pandemic that temporarily froze global travel. For decades, Expedia controlled nearly the e…

“Quality” is hard to define, but it’s always personal. In purchasing decisions large and small, consumers constantly weigh cost and value, and make trade-offs based on their individual needs, budget, preferences, and priorities. This explains why ratings for the same product or service can be all over the map, and why price alone doesn’t always correlate with quality. For some people, three-star restaurants will always be the “best” (though they can certainly fall short on experience). For others—even those who can afford pricier options—the local hole-in-the-wall or fast-food chain can be just what the doctor ordered. Warren Buffett famously eats breakfast at McDonald’s…

Harry Styles, the British pop singer known for his eclectic style and boy band roots, is finally back on stage after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus. But eager fans who scored tickets for his return are finding that, despite the elevated price tag, the tour is not “As It Was.” Night one of the 67-date “Together, Together” tour kicked off in Amsterdam before a crowd of 50,000 fans, bringing his new album Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally to life. While critics called the evening a “triumphant comeback,” some fans in attendance were less than impressed, raising concerns over a short setlist, underwhelming production, and an obstructive stage design. “Harry, ple…

In a major salvo in the AI race, Google announced on Tuesday a slew of new and updated products at its I/O developer conference. These ranged from tools that deploy personal AI agents to code generators to search tools to a new “world model” for generating physically accurate video. Taken together, the releases paint a picture of Google’s current strategy for bringing AI to consumers and businesses. It’s a strategy that effectively leverages the company’s vast information infrastructure, built up through search, in ways that give it clear advantages over newer AI companies. New models Google DeepMind’s newest models are bigger and smarter, deeply multimodal, and tuned f…

The U.S. currently sources a large portion of its critical minerals supply from foreign entities— a dependency that puts national security, economic competitiveness, and energy transition at risk. To build a stronger, more resilient domestic battery industry, we must understand what’s driving demand for critical minerals, how to diversify supply chains, the role of policy, and how innovation is reshaping the landscape. To put this into perspective, for 19 out of 20 strategic critical minerals, China is the leading refiner, with an average market share of approximately 70%. Demand for critical minerals doesn’t start in the ground; it starts with consumer trends that ar…

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has officially launched the TSA Gold+ program. While it sounds like a luxury program for travelers, it’s actually a major shift toward privatizing airport security. The TSA announced the move in an internal memo sent to employees on May 14. According to the TSA, the program is “the future of aviation security.” The site explains that the program is a “new public-private partnership aimed at modernizing aviation security at select airports across the United States” and says it will allow airports to opt-in to a “tailored security screening service unique to each airport’s needs and space configuration.” Those airports will …

The Onion is developing a documentary for America’s 250th anniversary, called Birth of a Nation, a project CEO Ben Collins says reflects the company’s growing focus beyond satire articles and headlines. “For the 250th anniversary of America, we’re making a documentary called ‘Birth of a Nation,’ which is great,” Collins said onstage at the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit, in a conversation with Jill Bernstein. The documentary is one of several projects underway at The Onion, following its acquisition by Collins and a group of investors in 2024. Before buying the publication, Collins spent years at NBC News covering extremism and misinformation on…

It’s graduation week, which means the emissaries of the nation’s elite are now descending onto college campuses to deliver the much-discussed and, they hope, indelibly quotable college commencement address. These speeches are their own sort of literary genre. The celebrities, politicians, and titans of industry invited to give these keynotes must seem intelligent enough, but not bore—or worse, antagonize—their audience. Typically, this involves a speaker integrating a clever life story, select nuggets of eternal wisdom, a few trite asides to campus lore, and well-placed references to current affairs into one propulsive and affecting speech. The problem this year, howeve…

AI wears many hats at work, whether it’s a brainstorm partner, mentor, or doing the actual work itself. However, it’s time to add a new one to the list: spy. In a recent episode of the “All-In” podcast, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, said he was using AI to analyze employee slack messages to understand what they’re complaining about. (Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021.) “Because you run your company on Slack, all your DMs, all your channels, we’re reading that now through the AI and we can tell you more about your business than you know,” Benioff explained. “Slackbot is reading stuff that, you know, nobody knew what was happening. I’m using that myself.” Benioff says, b…

In February, April Watson hit her head while stowing products at an Amazon warehouse outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The injury gave her a concussion, and she was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace than was typically expected of her. Despite having paperwork from the doctor that clearly stated that she had to work more slowly, however, it took Watson over a month to get the necessary accommodations on the job—all because she couldn’t get the correct medical form from Amazon’s internal AI assistant or easily connect with an HR employee. In the meantime, Watson was flagged for making errors on the job, and had to si…

Like much of Facebook nowadays, the “California Life” Facebook page is full of AI slop. There are generated images of highway patrol officers holding up a groundhog and lengthy road signs detailing California quirks. And in between those are posts that admonish AI data centers. “It’s not worth giving up an inch of this for a data center,” reads one image, in which the words look carved into a field of crops. “Not a single square inch of California is worth giving up for an AI Data Center,” reads another posted the very next day, the text floating above a generated image of the California coast, the state flag in the foreground. A third post shows that…

Last week, I whooshed into a Luckin coffee shop in Lower Manhattan, snatched my mobile order off the counter, and was back on the street within eight seconds—as if I’d run upstairs to grab my keys. The fact that this required zero human interaction barely registered, especially because I was too giddy about the deal I’d scored on the app. My iced coconut latte cost a mere $1.99—a full 69% off the regular price, after I used one of the six active coupons that appeared on the screen. I had officially gotten myself swept up in America’s latest fast-food trend: cheap, flavorful drinks ready in an instant, sold by Chinese chains on apps where the coupons give hourly countdow…

The Eva Longoria Foundation announced a $1 million investment in UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) to support long-term, data-driven solutions that integrate leadership development and narrative change within Latino communities. “This grant is going to fund a lot of the economic research and policy work for Latina entrepreneurs, because we need to know what our economic power is,” Longoria said at the Inc. Founders House Los Angeles. Through this partnership, the foundation will fund a three-year initiative aimed at advancing Latina economic mobility by generating data on Latina entrepreneurs and workers and the barriers they face to building weal…

We need to have a blunt conversation about the word empowerment. In the majority of companies, the lie behind the word “empowerment” becomes apparent in familiar ways: job descriptions that promise autonomy, leaders who proudly talk about their empowered teams, and meetings that end with “you’ve got this.” Reality though strips away the veneer of this lie: that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs, and second-guessing. The language suggests freedom. The system reinforces control. The result is not empowerment. It is dependence with better branding. In our work at Amazon helping Fortune 500 leaders understand how to dismantle their rigid bure…

Canva just pulled off a clean sweep in the AI design world that’s about to make AI-generated branding a lot more common. On May 19, the company announced that it’s partnering with Google Gemini to bring its Canva Design platform directly to Gemini users. Once Gemini users enable Canva in their app settings, they’ll be able to search their Canva content from within the chatbot, generate designs based on the context of their chat history, and easily take designs into Canva to edit them. The move means that Canva has successfully integrated its design tools with every major AI player in the game: Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and, now, Gemini. Canva’s aggressive integr…

Firefox is the browser that, statistically speaking, more people remember using than use today. Its market share in most countries is now just a sliver of what it once was. In 2011, it held more than a quarter of the U.S. desktop market. That many former users still remember it fondly may be a point of pride for the San Francisco-based nonprofit foundation behind the browser that broke Internet Explorer’s mediocre monopoly. But nostalgia alone doesn’t pay for the continued development of Firefox’s in-house Gecko rendering engine, along with versions of the browser for every major desktop and mobile operating system. “Anyone who was using the internet 15 years ago was pr…

A tough economy, rising grocery bills, high gas prices, credit card bills, fears of layoffs: A 2025 survey of 2,000 adults from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine revealed that 78% of adults lose sleep to financial stress. That double whammy of financial stress and bad sleep can lead to a slew of health problems—as well as declining performance at work, which in turn could lead to actual (or even worse) money problems. Insufficient or disrupted sleep affects every major physiological system, not just daytime energy levels, says Jennifer L. Martin, professor at Florida International University in Miami who specializes in sleep science. “Individuals facing money…

We are at an inflection point for AI. The question is no longer whether your organization is adopting it. It’s whether your people are actually capable of using it. Most aren’t. This isn’t a technology failure. The tools work. The problem is simpler, yet harder to fix now. Companies deployed AI before they built the people capable of using it. At Docebo, we help enterprises build workforces that can actually use AI. We surveyed 2,000 people to find out where adoption breaks down, and the bottleneck shows up in an unexpected place. The challenge with AI adoption isn’t one problem. It’s a compounding series of them, each one making the next harder to solve. The numbers b…

Raishelle Everett was thrilled when she became pregnant with her first child after undergoing IVF in 2022. The first thing she and her husband did was get on the wait list for Siemens Child Development Center (CDC), the popular and highly regarded on-site childcare center on the sprawling 53-acre Oregon campus of Siemens. The center, which serves as on-site childcare for Siemens employees as well the local community, cares for about 70 children from infant to pre-K and was built in 1992 to serve employees of Mentor Graphics (which was acquired by Siemens in 2017). The high curriculum standards and low student-to-teacher ratio meant that even though Everett’s husband wa…