10 Great Workplaces for Millennials
How do you keep 77 million people happy? These companies are winning the game of attracting fresh young talent.
A new study from Great Place To Work, Fortune’s partner for the 100 Best Companies to Work For
list, reveals which companies offer the best perks and benefits for
Millennials — the youngest generation of the U.S. workforce that boasts
77 million workers between the ages of 18 and 35. After sifting through
thousands of survey results and employee comments, the researchers at
Great Rated!, GPTW’s employer-review website, identified 10 companies
whose workplace cultures are a perfect fit for enterprising entry-level
workers. And what do Millennials value most? Fair pay, having a
say in decisions and being overseen by competent management top the
list. They’re also fans of socializing with coworkers, flexible
scheduling, a dedication to philanthropy and community, gym memberships,
and wellness programs. Here’s what they had to say.Visit the Great Rated! links for full workplace culture reviews.
Intuitive Research and Technology
Revenue: $187 million
Headquarters: Huntsville, Alabama
Number of employees: 266
Millennial headcount: 32%
Best Companies rank: 2 (Best Medium Companies to Work For)
Headquarters: Huntsville, Alabama
Number of employees: 266
Millennial headcount: 32%
Best Companies rank: 2 (Best Medium Companies to Work For)
Read more at Great Rated!
David Weekley Homes
Revenue: $1.1 billion
Headquarters: Houston
Number of employees: 1,082 (U.S)
Millennial headcount: 27%
Best Companies rank: 13
Headquarters: Houston
Number of employees: 1,082 (U.S)
Millennial headcount: 27%
Best Companies rank: 13
Millennials at this homebuilder take the company's motto "Building
Dreams, Enhancing Lives" to heart: 97 percent say they feel they make a
difference, and one employee said, "My work has special meaning. This is
not 'just a job.'" Founder and Chairman David Weekley inspires his
younger charges with a "servant leadership" ethos that stresses
integrity and giving back. One employee commented, "Mr. Weekley puts
such an emphasis on philanthropy that it is truly touching. I am in awe
at the steps he has taken to better our communities near and far."
Read more at Great Rated!
Read more at Great Rated!
Allied Wallet
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Number of employees: 1,032
Millennial headcount: 97%
Number of employees: 1,032
Millennial headcount: 97%
Says one Millennial employee: "The office happy hour is unreal. The people are all off-the-hook."
Read more at Great Rated!
Ultimate Software
Revenue: $332 million
Headquarters: Weston, Florida
Number of employees: 1,734
Millennial headcount: 25%
Best Companies rank:
Headquarters: Weston, Florida
Number of employees: 1,734
Millennial headcount: 25%
Best Companies rank:
This HR and payroll software developer finds reasons to celebrate
whenever possible and regularly sponsors cocktail hours and karaoke
contests, as well as monthly birthday celebrations. CEO Scott Scherr has
created a Silicon Valley culture in South Florida, in part through "48
Hours" events where employees can work on pet projects for a 48-hour
period as long as it's related to company goals.
Says one employee: "I feel at home when I come to work, where everyone is happy to see me, and ready to help. I have never had a bad day of work at Ultimate. My manager is so personable and fun, while also having a sense of authority and management. I feel comfortable around her knowing she treats me with respect, and also trusts me to get the job done."
Says one employee: "I feel at home when I come to work, where everyone is happy to see me, and ready to help. I have never had a bad day of work at Ultimate. My manager is so personable and fun, while also having a sense of authority and management. I feel comfortable around her knowing she treats me with respect, and also trusts me to get the job done."
Revenue: $50.1 billion
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Number of employees: 42,162
Best Companies rank:
Headquarters: Mountain View, California
Number of employees: 42,162
Best Companies rank:
Still among the coolest of companies for the younger set, with its
famous perks, do-no-evil mantra and world-changing power, Google's
workforce, unsurprisingly, is largely Millennial and Gen X. And yes, the
benefits are stellar (onsite cafes, wellness centers and services
ranging from dry cleaning to bike repair to oil changes), but
Millennials also groove to Google's
GOOG
smart leadership: 96 percent say the company has great leadership that welcomes innovative suggestions from employees.
Says one employee: "I am challenged to bring great ideas to the table, and those ideas are valued and encouraged. There is also a significant, dedicated initiative to ensuring employee well being. Access to gyms, relaxation classes, massages, and delicious organic food make Google incredible."
Says one employee: "I am challenged to bring great ideas to the table, and those ideas are valued and encouraged. There is also a significant, dedicated initiative to ensuring employee well being. Access to gyms, relaxation classes, massages, and delicious organic food make Google incredible."
DPR Construction
Gregg Mastorakos
Revenue: $2.54 billion
Headquarters: Redwood City, California
Number of employees: 1,356
Millennial headcount: 28%
Best Companies rank:
Headquarters: Redwood City, California
Number of employees: 1,356
Millennial headcount: 28%
Best Companies rank:
The company also ties construction jobs to bigger purposes. When workers reached a milestone on a project to expand a biotech manufacturing facility, it invited a cancer patient to speak to staff. One employee commented, "DPR continues to empower employees and remain true to the core values and mission that it 'Exist to Build Great Things,' and you really feel like you are making a difference alongside some amazing people."
Boston Consulting Group
Employees love the way this strategy consulting firm blends
high-impact work, high-integrity leadership, and high levels of
camaraderie. And despite a rigorous selection process for employees,
Millennials love its friendly culture. BCG gives a hand to those
starting out as homeowners; new consultant hires can borrow up to
$100,000 from the company at low interest rates to make a down payment
on the purchase of a home. Says one employee: "It doesn't feel like a
corporate setting. Everyone knows one another and is comfortable
chatting as such. It feels like everyone is just a big family. I can be
supporting the CEO and it would be just like chatting with a friend.
Completely comfortable and inclusive."
Acuity
Revenue: $983 million
Headquarters: Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Number of employees: 912
Millennial headcount: 25%
Best Companies rank: 1 (Best Medium Companies to Work For)
Headquarters: Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Number of employees: 912
Millennial headcount: 25%
Best Companies rank: 1 (Best Medium Companies to Work For)
This insurance firm is a blast: 97% say it's a fun place to work,
thanks to wacky events like a chocolate fair, a circus, lunch-time
performances from stand-up comedians, game shows and a talent contest.
One Millennial commented, "I have never worked for a company that has an
upper management team that is so forthcoming and approachable. They are
always praising us and you can tell we actually are making a difference
in the organization. I love coming to work and doing my job. It's just
an added bonus that we often get special treats like food and gifts as
well as parties to celebrate our success as a company."
Quicken Loans
Ray Rushing Quicken Loans
And according to one employee: "There is no 'boss' or 'manager' — we have leaders who are willing to help all of our team members. It's 100% open door for any person in the company. You are provided with the atmosphere and materials to be successful here. I'm blessed to have been given this opportunity!"
World Wide Technology
Photo: Tara Wujcik
Revenue: $5 billion
Headquarters: St. Louis
Number of employees: 2,060
Millennial headcount: 35%
Best Companies rank: 34
Headquarters: St. Louis
Number of employees: 2,060
Millennial headcount: 35%
Best Companies rank: 34
According to an employee, "I genuinely feel that many of the people care about me and what is going on in my life. They have also allowed me to progress rapidly and at such a young age, not questioning if I can handle it because I'm young. I came in as an intern and they allowed me to hire on full time and become a supervisor. Very few organizations would allow such a young person to progress so quickly through the ranks, recognizing that merit can be proven at any age."
How to avoid another Wall Street tsunami
As U.S. states raise the minimum wage, too big to fail banks threaten to erase these gains in pay.
As the chair of the board of the Ben & Jerry’s corporation
(but writing as an individual), I can speak firsthand to the benefits of
paying workers a living wage, a policy we have had in place for more
than 20 years. Currently in Vermont that starting wage is in excess of
$16.00 per hour, plus health insurance and other benefits. Our
experience has proven that fair wages are good for business and good for
communities.And so I’m encouraged to see that 10 states and the District of Columbia have enacted minimum wage increases this year. But as we learned during the financial crisis in 2008, high-road business practices are not enough to protect workers and communities from the destructive capacity of a reckless financial sector. A decent paycheck can only stretch so far when friends, family and neighbors lose their homes and livelihoods.
More than five years after crash of the U.S. housing market, a big share of financial activity still threatens our economic security. The “too big to fail” banks are bigger today than they were before the crisis. Computer-driven high-frequency trading with no connection to the real economy is taking profits from traditional investors and undermining market stability.
And so while I support raising the minimum wage, I’m also hoping policymakers will do much more to tackle the Wall Street threats that could wash away these wage gains.
One tool that would help steer us in the right direction is a financial transaction tax. Through a fee of a fraction of a percent on each trade of stocks, bonds, and derivatives, we could encourage longer-term, productive investment.
More than 30 countries currently have such taxes on particular financial instruments. These include many fast-growing financial markets, such as the United Kingdom, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and India.
Europe is now moving ahead to adopt the first regional financial transaction tax. In a historic agreement, 10 European Union member governments, led by Germany and France, have announced plans to introduce the tax in stages, starting with taxes on trades of shares and some derivatives, with revenue beginning to roll in by January 1, 2016 at the latest.
While discouraging purely speculative short-term trading, such taxes would also generate significant revenue that could be used to make us economically more secure, for example through investments in infrastructure, climate, and health programs.
While the details of the European tax still need to be worked out, a European Commission proposal for a tax of 0.1% on stock and bond trades and 0.01% on derivatives could be expected to generate about 31 billion euros (or $42 billion) per year. In the United States, the Joint Committee on Taxation projects that a tax of 0.03% on stock, bond and derivative trades could raise $350 billion over 10 years. Other bills with higher rates could generate even more revenue.
This wouldn’t be the first financial transaction tax in this country. From 1914 to 1966, the United States levied a 0.04% tax on stock trades.
Of course some in the business community will argue against this tax (as they always do), claiming that the extra cost would hurt economic growth and destroy jobs. But a careful study by the European Commission concluded that their proposed tax is likely to be a job creator, especially if revenues are reinvested wisely.
In the 1970s, I helped Ben & Jerry’s get their first loan to start a small business that now operates in over 30 countries. Today, while the stock market is surging, small businesses face significant obstacles in getting access to credit. The lure of Wall Street gambling jackpots – no matter the potential cost to the investor or to the world – overpowers the attraction of patient Main Street investments.
A financial transaction tax would not solve all the problems with the financial industry. But as we work to build high-road business practices, we should see it as a bit of insurance against future Wall Street tsunamis.
Jeff Furman serves as Chair of the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors. Views here are his own and not a reflection of the company.
Q&A: An African leader on why the continent could be the next great growth story
As
the White House kicks off a three-day African summit, Ghana’s president
explains what it will take to finally unlock his continent’s potential.
More than 40 African heads of state are convening in Washington today for a three-day White House leaders’ summit
about the continent—the first one ever. It’s been a long time coming.
China and the European Union have both hosted top-level Africa confabs
for years, angling to lock up lucrative contracts and cement their
relationships in markets where the average growth rate is about 6%. U.S.
investment and know-how is sorely needed.Nowhere is that true more than in Ghana, which Barack Obama made his first African stop as president in 2009. The country has been hit hard economically, with a high fiscal deficit and oversized public sector. Fortune‘s Vivienne Walt recently sat down with Ghana’s president John Dramani Mahama in his vast office. Atop Flagstaff House, the executive building, with its bird’s eye view of the capital Accra, Mahama offered a preview of the issues that will be discussed at the summit and outlined what Africa needs to prosper.
Fortune: When Obama made his big Africa speech to Ghana’s parliament in 2009 he said this country was the “Africa that is too often overlooked,” democratic and peaceful. And yet it didn’t follow with American investment jumping in. So how do you change the perception among Americans that Africa is just too risky and unstable to invest in?
Mahama: A lot of the misperception in the West is that Africa is one monolithic country. Most people don’t realize it’s made up of 54 sovereign nations. So if you hear there’s a war in Central African Republic it means all of Africa is aflame. We keep trying to influence the reporting on Africa, to change the narrative to the perspective of Africans. Europe has been engaged in Africa for a long time. Recently a lot of Chinese, Malaysians, etc., are pumping in money, setting up industries here. Most of the investments from America are in the form of oil and gas. Those are areas where America has a comparative advantage, so we’re seeing those investments from the U.S.
Fortune: What’s your pitch to American companies about why they should invest in Africa?
Mahama: Money. What’s business about if not about making a profit? Africa currently has the highest rate of return on investment in the world. So that in itself is an attraction to business. Africa has the fastest growing middle class in the world and disposable incomes are increasing, There’s demand for housing, demand for lifestyle products. I believe those who have invested will be our best ambassadors—not only for Ghana, there are several other countries doing as well as Ghana. If people can overcome their wrong perceptions about Africa and put their money here I think they will find they have made a very good decision.
Fortune: It seems what you really need is people to come in here and build factories. And you have launched a new “Made in Ghana” initiative. Is this the next wave of investment here?
Mahama: We have a fast growing youthful population and we need to begin creating jobs to avoid social tensions. We’ve seen the Arab spring. African leaders need to respond quickly to avoid getting caught in some sort of social explosion as a result of youth bulge that does not have meaningful employment. Some of the processing that is done outside the continent we must bring back home. Ghana is the second-leading exporter of cocoa beans in the world. We must bring the secondary and tertiary processing back to Ghana. We are one of the top 10 gold exporters in the world, yet we export it in raw form. We must produce sugar: We’re importing $270 million worth of sugar a year. There are so many things: Poultry, fish products, soya beans.
Fortune: Yes, but there are other problems, surely—the lack of paved roads, the lack of power, the lack of trade with your neighbors. Where do you begin?
Mahama: There’s a link between all of this, as you say. One big issue about producing things ourselves if that once the farmer produces it how does he get it to market? It’s difficult. It increases the unit cost of food. I just visited a poultry facility. The farmer produces thousands of eggs a day and the road is so bad that by the time the trucks have taken the eggs to the market he has breakages. So he has a problem.
Fortune: Scrambled eggs.
Mahama: Hah, yes! I’m just giving you one example. It’s not just good roads, but also bridges, railway lines, power, water, irrigation. Energy is becoming the most critical constraint to Africa’s economic growth: The lack of adequate power. That is one sector we have prioritized. We have set a target to improve installed power to 5,000 megawatts by 2016. Currently we are just under 3,000 megawatts. The Ghana natural-gas processing plant should be finished this year, and if that’s finished we can fee up to 150 million cubic feet of gas a day. Beaching our own gas and being able to distribute it is critical to stabilizing power supply. We have an agreement with the U.S., which I’m hoping President Obama and I can initial at the U.S. African leaders summit.
Fortune: How important is this summit in Washington in August? The U.S. has been glaring in its absence in hosting Africa summits.
Mahama: Yes, we’ve had them with Japan, China, India, several countries. So it’s a good signal that there appears to be a new interest and engagement. We felt a strong collaboration during President Clinton’s time when he pushed through AGOA [Africa Growth and Opportunities Act in 2000, which opened U.S. markets to African producers]. We also had a strong feeling of cooperation under President Bush. Ghana is one of the countries that benefited from the compact [U.S. investment agreements with African governments, under the U.S. agency Millennium Challenge Corporation, which Bush introduced in 2004], and now we’re moving on to a second compact.
Fortune: I remember being in Africa right after Obama’s election in 2008, and there was this huge expectation with Obama being half-Africa, that there was going to be much bigger involvement. But it didn’t turn out that way.
Mahama: No, it didn’t turn out that way. We don’t hold that against him. I think President Obama in his first term had been quite preoccupied with fixing the U.S. economy and the fight against terrorism. But in his second term he’s reengaging with Africa and this summit in Washington will refocus some U.S. attention on Africa. I think it’s a good thing for our relations.
Fortune: Ghana’s economy is in bad shape and your currency has sunk against the dollar this year. How confident are you about turning it around and how long is it going to take?
Mahama: It takes multiple years to deal with the deficit. Our deficit rose from 2012 as a result of transition to a new wage system, which led to wage overrun and pressure on the budgets. And then it rose as a result of lack of fast action to reduce subsidies on petroleum. So by 2013 we were running a deficit at almost 12%. We’ve clawed back on subsidies on petroleum products, and on utilities. We’ve moderating wages and compensation rewards. So gradually we’re beginning to see wage pressures come down from as high as 76% of tax revenues it came down to 65% and currently it is at 57%.
Fortune: So much of investment is about perceptions, and when you ask Americans about Africa, they say ‘corruption.’
Mahama: It’s an enduring misperception: That if one place is corrupt the whole of Africa is corrupt. The problem is fixing institutions to prevent corruption. In Africa we’re still building and strengthening institutions. We are implementing a whistleblower’s bill. We’ve authorized the Attorney General to sanction anyone found to misappropriate government finances. It’s a battle we need to fight on an everyday basis.
Reporting for disaster duty—cockroaches?
Go
ahead, make the nuclear war survival joke. Remote-controlled roaches
powered by video game technology might just save the day in a disaster.
Scientists at North Carolina State University are using Microsoft’s
MSFT
Kinect camera for something very different than video games.
The insects, which seem able to withstand anything, may one day soon be
helping emergency first responders navigate disaster wreckage. Because
the bugs are so small, they can get through nooks and crannies that
neither rescue dogs nor people can navigate. Researchers have been using
Kinect, the same camera technology in Xbox 360 and PCs, to create a
remote control that will enable people to guide the insects like a
remote-controlled car. The cockroaches can be equipped with miniature
cameras and can be sent in before dogs and humans, which allows
emergency personnel to get a first look at the situation.“For years, roboticists have been trying to mimic insects when building centimeter-scale robots,” said Dr. Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. “We came up with the idea of building a partnership with insects rather than trying to mimic them, similar to riding horses before our motorcycles and cars took over the streets. Roaches were the most easily accessible insects and are very robust walkers.”
The interface that controls the roach is wired to the roach’s antennae and cerci. The cerci are sensory organs on the roach’s abdomen, which are normally used to detect movement in the air that could indicate a predator is approaching – causing the roach to scurry away. But the researchers use the wires attached to the cerci to spur the insect into motion. The wires attached to the antennae send small charges that trick the roach into thinking the antennae are in contact with a barrier and steering them in the opposite direction.
Bozkurt’s team wanted to build an automated test platform where they could objectively assess whether they could turn an insect into an insect biobot. One criterion was to run the experiments in the dark, so they started to use a Kinect camera’s depth sensor to find the insect without any ambient light.
“The Kinect camera knows the path that needs to be followed by the insect,” said Bozkurt. “Then it divides this route into multiple waypoints and moves the insect from one waypoint to another. It detects the insect from its specific shape and it sends necessary waveforms to the backpack the insect is wearing. This backpack applies microvolts of impulses to the insect’s sensory organs, which helps us to steer the insect. It’s similar to riding a horse with reins.”
The program also uses Kinect to collect data on how the roaches respond to the electrical impulses from the remote-control interface. This data will help the researchers fine-tune steering to control the roaches more precisely. The team will employ Microsoft’s new Kinect 2.0, which debuted with Xbox One, to further push this experiment forward.
“The advanced audio processing on the sensor could also lead to some interesting scenarios when we try to make the insects move toward a sound source,” said Bozkurt.
Having performed very successful demonstrations in the laboratory environment, the team (which includes NC State professors Edgar Lobaton and Mihail Sichitiu) has received funding from the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical Systems program to bring this technology into real-life scenarios. The goal is to accomplish this within three to four years.
“We are hoping that the swarm of insect biobots will be able to sweep the rubble from one end to another in a very short amount of time, while letting first responders hear any calls for help coming from the victims buried under the rubble, or let them know about the potential hazards such as gas leakages,” said Bozkurt.
According to Bozkurt, one of the most efficient methods in engineering has been “biomimetics,” where researchers have looked at nature, learned from the existing biosystems and applied different engineering principles to mimic these when solving real-life problems. Despite several inventions and explorations, humans are still limited in their understanding and ability to mimic the relatively more complicated properties of biological machines.
“As engineers performing research on biological organisms, we are often fascinated by the complexity and operational efficiency of these systems and demonstrate this appreciation through an amplified respectful attitude towards these organisms,” said Bozkurt.
One day soon, the sight of cockroaches will be a relief to disaster victims thanks to video game technology. And we may think twice before trying to stomp out cockroaches the next time we cross paths. After all, they were deigned to live through just about anything that mankind can throw at them.
What only Apple's billions can buy: Independence
“I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” — Steve Jobs, 2004
There’s a thread that connects two recent reports about Apple — Jean-Louis Gassée’s MacIntel: The End Is Nigh and Dan Rayburn’s Apple’s CDN Now Live — and it’s the Steve Jobs quote above from a 2004 BusinessWeek interview about owning and controlling the underlying technology in everything Apple does.
Gassée, who took over Macintosh development after Jobs was
ousted in 1985, once dismissed speculation that Apple’s A-series chips
would someday power not just the iPhone and iPad, but the Mac as well.
In his current Monday Note,
Gassée has come around. He now buys the argument put forward in 2011 by
a precocious 16-year-old named Matt Richman that Apple would, within
the next three years or so, wean itself from Intel’s x86 chips and
switch to Apple’s home-grown ARM-based chip designs. (See Apple and ARM, sitting in a tree.)
“Apple’s drive to own ‘all layers of the stack,'” writes Gassée, “continues unabated years after Steve’s passing.”
Rayburn, an expert in the distributed content delivery
networks (CDNs) that do most of the Internet’s heavy lifting, reported
Thursday that the CDN Apple has been working went live last week and is
now delivering some of its own content directly to end users.
This is no small thing.
“From ISPs I have spoken with,” Rayburn writes on his StreamingMediaBlog, “they tell me Apple has put a massive amount of capacity in place, with many saying that Apple has more than 10x the capacity they are using today, all ready to go.”
By building its own CDN, Apple frees itself from dependence on companies like Akamai
AKAM
and Level 3
LVLT
although it may still contract with them in other, less mission-critical capacities.
By switching to ARM, Apple laptops and desktop machines
might no longer be held hostage by the kind of production problems that
have delayed Intel’s Broadwell processors.
Owning all layers of the stack includes, as Gassée points out, Swift — the new programming language Apple introduced in June.
There’s one more dependency that’s in Apple interest to
move away from — as quickly as possible — and that’s on Samsung. Apple’s
bitter enemy in patent court is also the chief supplier of those
A-series chips. Matt Richman, now a 19-year-old student at Temple
University, thinks he’s got the perfect company to replace Samsung:
Intel.
“Apple, due to the sheer volume of processors it purchases, will always be at the mercy of its suppliers,” he wrote in an April blog post titled Apple, Samsung, and Intel. “But if Apple were to contract the manufacturing of its A-series chips to Intel, no longer would the company be at the mercy of Samsung, a supplier who stands to gain a lot if the iPhone were to suffer from a component shortage. Rather, it would be at the mercy of Intel, a company that has nothing to gain and everything to lose by not producing enough SoCs [systems on a chip].”
Richman is in a good position to know. Having been turned
down for the summer internship he really wanted in Cupertino with Apple,
he took one in Portland with Intel
INTC
.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple
AAPL
0.55%
coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
Meet Fortune's 2014 Big Data All-Stars
Big
data is about more than big numbers. Meet Fortune’s first class of Big
Data All-Stars: 20 extraordinary people who we think are the best at
connecting the dots, digging deep, and discovering the information that
will transform the way businesses operate.
Andrea Burbank, Data Scientist, Pinterest
At the image-focused social network Pinterest, data
scientist Andrea Burbank leads A/B testing, evaluating how changes in
the look or functionality of its website, mobile application, or
communications impact the behavior of its roughly 60 million users
worldwide. When a small module convinces you to invite a friend to the
service, or a recommendation email induces you to follow more boards,
it’s likely that Burbank and her team have their invisible hands on it.
“I’ve watched hundreds of experiments go by on millions of users for a
combination of billions of user days,” she said at an industry event in
March. The testing extends to the company’s own processes, too. One of
Burbank’s big wins was democratizing the ability for other Pinterest
employees to run experiments. “Before, there was a single point of
failure, but also a single point of knowledge,” she said. Not anymore. —Andrew Nusca
Arno Candel, Physicist and Hacker, 0xdata
Arno Candel caught the science bug early. He grew up in
Untersiggenthal, Switzerland, a small village wedged between a
top particle accelerator lab at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH
Zürich, continental Europe’s most prestigious technical university.
Studying particle physics and supercomputing, Candel coded models of the
universe on computers. After moving to California to work at the SLAC
National Accelerator Laboratory, he moved to the startup world, joining
Skytree as a founding engineer and designing high-performance machine
learning algorithms. At 0xdata he is a core developer on the data
science platform known as h2o, which has been ranked the number one
open-source Java machine learning project by members of the coding
community GitHub. The platform enables deep learning and is compatible
with the popular statistical programming language R. His title at the
company? “Physicist & Hacker,” of course. —Robert Hackett
Arun Murthy, Co-founder, Hortonworks
Arun Murthy started off at Yahoo
YHOO
when Hadoop, the open-source storage and processing software
that powers much of the web’s big data, was an early prototype. His
team’s mission was to scale it for Yahoo’s web search. Murthy helped
develop a resource and workload management system called YARN that acts
as a sort of operating system for Hadoop. “Hadoop ‘One’ looked like
Microsoft Windows with notepad,” Murthy says. “What you really want is
Windows with PowerPoint, Word, Excel and so on.” That’s what YARN
enabled: It let users plug many applications into Hadoop to store all
sorts of data. “I have two kids at home,” Murthy says. “YARN is sort of
my third.” —Robert Hackett
Barry Morris, Chief Executive Officer, NuoDB
Many technology companies promise to spark a revolution, but
very few have the backing of the leaders of the previous one.
Cambridge, Mass.-based NuoDB counts three of the four horsemen of the
previous database wave—former Ingres Corp. CEO Gary Morgenthaler, former
Sybase Inc. CEO Mitchell Kertzman, and former Informix Software CEO
Roger Sippl, with only a certain Oracle chief executive abstaining—as
investors. Why? Because NuoDB’s technology solves a problem that many
industry veterans long considered to be the Holy Grail: run a database
on multiple servers. “It’s about more machines, not bigger machines,”
CEO Barry Morris says. “That problem, simple as it sounds, was as yet
unsolved.” First funded in 2010, Morris’ company recently landed a
massive customer—Dassault Systèmes, the second-largest software vendor
in Europe—and is hurtling toward what Morris calls “a new convergence
point.” He’s convinced NuoDB will be at the center of it. “It’s not
about size or speed of the data. It’s about being data-driven,” he says.
“Continuous improvement—that’s the revolution.” —Andrew Nusca
Brian Rogosky, Director of Big Data Engineering, Beats Music
It should be no surprise that Brian Rogosky was largely
unable to discuss in detail his work at Beats Music, which was recently
acquired by ultra-secretive Apple
AAPL
0.55%
. (The deal, announced in May, closed on Friday.) But he was
happy to talk shop all the same. Companies are interested in getting
closer and closer to real-time analysis and processing of data, he says,
and they are interested in making those data more shareable within
their respective organizations. What's more, companies want to use those
data to power increasingly personalized experiences within
applications. How might Rogosky approach these trends at Beats? You'll
have to connect the dots yourself. “I can’t say too much about that in
my current role," he says. "Let’s just say general trends for now.” —Robert Hackett
Daniele Quercia, Researcher, Yahoo! Labs
As a child Daniele Quercia wanted to be a police
officer, and had a toy motorbike to prove it. Today at Yahoo Labs, he
knows cities inside and out—but on a digital level. With a Ph.D in
computer science in hand and post-doctoral research at MIT’s school of
Urban Studies on his C.V., Quercia focuses on urban studies on a large
scale. To wit: he created a game that asks people which cityscapes they
prefer, then shares the scores on Facebook in an effort to go
viral. Quercia analyzes the results to learn what people like and don’t
like in an effort to ultimately design better and more appealing cities.
“Computer science is all about building tools," he says. "I wanted to
do something new, something that would make an impact. More than half of
the world’s population lives in cities.” —Shalene Gupta
Drew Purves, Head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group, Microsoft Research
When Stephen Emmott, head of computational science at
Microsoft Research’s Cambridge Labs, pitched the idea of having the lab
sponsor an internal ecology group at one of the company’s “Bill
Reviews”—where employees present in front of founder and chairman Bill
Gates—“it was a “famously bad meeting,” says Drew Purves, then a
Princeton University ecologist. “He thought it was the most ridiculous
thing.” But Gates ended up changing his mind, and soon Microsoft
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hired Purves to lead a group tasked with building predictive
models of Earth’s systems. Since landing in Microsoft’s blue skies
research division, Purves has helped develop “The Madingley Model,” a
simulation of all life on Earth. The project is ambitious—quixotic,
even—but it may eventually generate practical applications. “Everything
that happens within the economy fits within an environmental context,”
Purves says, rattling off some of the world’s most daunting challenges,
including aging populations, cancer, food security, climate change and
alternative sources of energy. Of ecology and biology, he added, “these
things will be the key driver of 21st century economy.” —Robert Hackett
Florian Pinel, Senior Software Engineer, IBM's Watson & Cognitive Cooking group
After IBM’s "intelligent" computer system Watson trounced its opponents on Jeopardy!,
the company wanted to see how else it could push the boundaries of
cognitive computing. Since Watson withstood the pressure so
well—it brought plenty of its own heat on its human competition—IBM
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decided to bring the system into the kitchen. (Literally.) A
professional chef by training, Florian Pinel is a member of the
“Cognitive Cooking” team unleashing Watson’s creative potential. “We
focused on food because its something everyone cares about and we could
easily create prototype,” Pinel says. “I was extremely pleasantly
surprised to combine both my passion for food and computer science.” The
team begins with a set of fundamental ingredients and compounds, but
their combinations grow exponentially into vast numbers of potentially
tasty recipes. At an IBM food truck at the SxSW conference in Austin,
Texas this year, Chef Watson invented an Austrian chocolate burrito that
contained chocolate, ground beef, edamame, and apricot. Sounds awful,
and yet: “It worked. It was really good.” Pinel says. “We’re here to
inspire users and to help them discover combinations they would never
have thought of.” —Robert Hackett
Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist, Cloudera; Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Mt. Sinai Hospital
Jeff Hammerbacher didn't need a Ph.D to land an assistant
professorship in genetics and genomic sciences at Mount Sinai Hospital,
but he had plenty of experience to justify the academic appointment. One
of Facebook’s
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first data scientists, Hammerbacher ditched the ad-soaked
world of social networking to become the chief scientist at Cloudera,
the Apache Hadoop-based enterprise software powerhouse. Now he’s
working with Eric Schadt, Mount Sinai's chair of genetics and genomic
sciences, to bring big data analytics to bear on healthcare. “He’s
defining a field they’ll give Ph.Ds in,” Schadt says. “There were no
programs to train him in what he did.” Hammerbacher is working to
construct the right infrastructure to manage and compute health data to
create better predictive models in medicine. “Now is the right time for
healthcare and medical centers to turn themselves into big data analytic
engines,” Schadt says. “That we’re able to embrace a guy like Jeff just
speaks volumes about where medicine is going to go in the future.” —Robert Hackett
Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder, CloudFlare
If the Internet had its own Central Intelligence
Agency, it would probably be CloudFlare, a San Francisco company
that sees 5% of the world’s Internet traffic. Co-founder Michelle Zatlyn
met her partners Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway at Harvard Business
School and started the company in 2009. It acts as a buffer between
websites and malicious users: if CloudFlare identifies a user as
friendly, it speeds up their service. If it determines that user to be a
spammer or a bot, it slows their service or introduces a CAPTCHA has a
hurdle. Zatlyn focuses on making CloudFlare accessible and is working to
expand its reach. “Ten years ago, I knew I wanted to be part of a team
that was big and important," she says. "I didn’t know what that meant,
but I feel really lucky that I found CloudFlare. I can’t imagine doing
anything better than helping customers run their business better." —Shalene Gupta
Monica Rogati, Vice President of Data, Jawbone
At Jawbone, Monica Rogati has two jobs. First, make sense of
the data created by Up, the San Francisco accessory company’s wearable,
sensor-laden wristband. Second, build new things that use that data in
smart ways. “We uncover all sorts of interesting things about how we
sleep, move, and eat that you weren’t able to find before,” she says.
“We used to have sleep studies with 100 people; now we can study 100,000
people.” Which means Rogati and her team can see what people literally
lose sleep over—for Washington, D.C. residents, a presidential
inauguration; for Istanbul residents, ongoing protests in the Middle
East; for ultra-Catholic Providence, Rhode Island, the Pope’s
resignation in February 2013—then feed that knowledge back into the Up
to nudge wearers into adjusting their behavior. “We’re taking all kinds
of insights in the data and using those to encourage people to be at
their best,” she says. —Andrew Nusca
Onno Zoeter, Research Scientist, Xerox Research Centre Europe
As a child, Onno Zoeter wanted to be a Lego
designer. Then he got his first computer at the age of 8. It
sparked an interest in artificial intelligence. Today Zoeter works at
Xerox Labs Europe
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, where he focuses on reducing traffic congestion in Los
Angeles. “We know very little about parking because it takes a lot of
time to observe,” Zoeter says. Zoeter’s team installed sensors in
parking spaces across the sprawling city in an effort to bridge that
knowledge gap. The data feed into a smartphone app that drivers can use
to determine in real time which spaces are full and which ones are
empty. Even better? With that data, the city is able to change the price
of those parking spaces to reduce traffic in highly congested areas.
Since the project went live in 2012, congestion in Los Angeles has
dropped by 10%. —Shalene Gupta
Patrick Poels, Vice President of Engineering, Eventbrite
Patrick Poels left the tech industry for five
years to be a professional poker player. The poker market dried up in
2010, though, and he decided to the return to technology. He doesn't
regret it. “Analyzing data is a lot like poker," he says. "You play
thousands of hands, you learn about people, you process data, you look
for things that stick out. The same things are applicable.” At the
online ticketing company Eventbrite, Poels and his team created a
recommendation system that suggests events to users based on what other
people also read. It's working: A million people a week buy tickets on
Eventbrite, and nearly half of them are return buyers. His next project?
Figuring out best practices for reserved seating events. —Shalene Gupta
Silvanus Lee, Lead Scientist, Dropbox
Wunderkind Silvanus Lee graduated from Stanford
University in only two-and-a-half years with a double major in computer
science and mathematics. He went straight to the financial industry
after graduation, but the allure of the tech industry was too strong,
and he joined Dropbox in 2012. There, he used his business background
and technical know-how to start a team dedicated to data science. One of
his projects is called Project Harmony, communication software to let
Dropbox users discuss changes to documents as they work on them. Another
marketing-related project is focused on figuring out if users from the
same company are on Dropbox so that the company can offer them a premium
package. “He has an incredible background that spans the technical,
math and real world context,” his boss ChenLi Wang says. “It sets his
data science apart.” —Shalene Gupta
Surabhi Gupta, Software Engineer, Airbnb
Surabhi Gupta has always loved to travel, and
regularly plans trips for her friends and family. As a graduate student
in computer science at Stanford University, she became fascinated by the
art of summarization: extracting meaning from text without actually
reading the text. Gupta was working at Google when she started
researching a trip using Airbnb, the room rental service. Fascinated by
the possibilities their data offered, she contacted them and landed a
job. Four months later, she had overhauled and improved their search
engines. Today, she's working on condensing all of Airbnb’s listings to
create summaries so users can quickly understand different cities’
vibes. “The overall goal," she says, "is: how do we get people to come
to Airbnb when they travel? And how do we get them information when they
want to travel?" —Shalene Gupta
Swatee Singh, Vice President of GMS IM Platforms & Big Data Capabilities, American Express
Swatee Singh’s technical background is
impeccable, and includes a doctorate in Machine Learning from Duke
University. But she’s all about making business personal. She’s the
brains behind American Express MyOffers, which aims to give AmEx
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members what they want when they need it. If it’s noon and
you have a taste for Mexican food, AmEx can present you with a coupon to
a nearby burrito place. She’s also responsible for a tool that allows
merchants to compare their annual performance. “She’s very energetic,
and a visionary, she’ll go places,” says her boss Sastry Durvasula. “She
has a strong technical background but she can also speak to leaders
like a leader. When we talk about data she’s there.” —Shalene Gupta
Tamara Gaffney, Principal Analyst, Adobe Digital Index
Tamara Gaffney uses data to see the future. At Adobe Digital Systems
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she leads a team that mines data from the companies that use
Adobe’s cloud to make predictions about who will win an Academy Award,
which summer blockbusters will be profitable, and how much people will
spend online during the winter holiday season. She's on the mark: during
the last holiday buying rush, her team's predictions were off by only
1%. “Her unique blend of understanding technology and her interest in
why people do things makes her a stand out,” says her manager Julie
McEntee. “She’s curious, she loves determining patterns from data,
chasing down leads, and hypothesizing why things might be.” For her next
project, Gaffney is working on putting together a prediction
about mobile shopping applications. —Shalene Gupta
Vijay Subramanian, Chief Analytics Officer, Rent the Runway
At first glance, it might look like Vijay Subramanian has a
less-than-glamorous job at a decidedly high-wattage company. But as Rent
the Runway’s chief analytics officer, no one is plugged into women’s
style trends quite like he is. Not long after he joined in 2010,
Subramanian built a model to estimate missed demand, product longevity,
and occasion usage for the company’s inventory—a huge cost-saver for a
company that buys truckloads of dresses and accessories from fashion
designers every season to rent to customers. “If you bring the three
data sources together, you can create a framework for how you’re
buying,” he says. “It tells us what kind of styles to look for that give
us the highest probability of being a star”—and which combinations to
avoid, of course. His next mission? Incorporate new types of data from
Unlimited, the company’s major new expansion into everyday wear. “Our
classic model is all driven by the event you’re going to. You may have
an edgy streak, but if you’re going to a black tie wedding, it doesn’t
matter what your true style is. It matters within context,” he says.
“Unlimited is the beginning of understanding the user’s style DNA.” —Andrew Nusca
Yan Qu, Vice President of Data Science, ShareThis
It may be hard to believe, but Yan Qu’s work
impacts 95% of American readers. At the social web company ShareThis,
she developed a Social Quality Index that measures the social activity
around online content and helps advertisers and publishers target the
right audiences. “The technical side isn’t hard,” she says. “What’s hard
is identifying a business problem to apply the technical side to.” Qu
is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she received her
doctorate in natural language processing. Before ShareThis, she led the
Advance Research team at AOL’s Advertising.com. Today, she's excited
about tackling challenges presented by mobile phones, which don’t allow
sites to plant cookies to identify repeat visitors. It's all part of an
effort to collect—you guessed it—more data. —Shalene Gupta
Zachary Bogue, Co-Managing Partner, Data Collective
It was certainly unusual for Zack Bogue and Matt Ocko to
launch Data Collective, a San Francisco Bay Area venture capital fund
focused on big data companies, in 2011. But the pair has been riding a
surging wave ever since. “Cost curves are rapidly being crossed
everywhere,” Bogue says. “Plunging costs are enabling all of these brand
new ways to attack these old line industries.” This year, the firm
launched its third fund, bringing its total raised to nearly a quarter
of a billion dollars. It’s making bets on companies like LendUp, a
nimble payday lending startup, and MemSQL, an in-memory database that is
“orders of magnitude” cheaper and fast than what’s on the market. “It’s
a little bit of a Cambrian explosion,” Bogue says. “It’s opening up
massive markets or industries for investment that previously weren’t
available. One of our theses is that every single vertical, industry,
SIC code will be fundamentally disrupted by technology. It’s really
exciting.” —Andrew Nusca
The handbag faceoff and factory data — five things to watch for in the week ahead
Coach, Michael Kors and Kate Spade are battling to gain an advantage in the luxury handbag market.
Hello, friends and Fortune readers.The IPO market hit an almost 14-year high last week as 25 companies were scheduled to go public. Of the companies that followed through on their public offerings over the course of five days, the two biggest–biotech firm Catalent and Synchrony Financial, General Electric’s now former consumer credit arm–raised a combined $3.75 billion.
Public listings are taking a breather this coming week. Also this week, the earnings wave continues. Keep your eyes out for Disney’s numbers on Tuesday to see the residual effects of its hit movie Frozen, as well as how the theme parks have faired since a recent price increase.
Here’s what else you need to know for your week ahead.
1. The handbag faceoff.
Coach, Michael Kors and Kate Spade have been battling it out to gain an advantage in the luxury handbag market. Kors, which started in 2002, has made fast progress with nearly 89% consumer name recognition. It is the first to report earnings on Monday and is expected to bring in $851 million in sales with earnings of 81 cents a share.
Coach, the 800-pound gorilla in the market, has struggled this quarter, laying off workers and telling analysts that this year may be slower than expected. Still, the company is expecting to notch $1.1 billion in sales and earnings-per-share of 51 cents when it reports Tuesday.
Kate Spade, a much smaller player in the market, will report on Friday. Analysts estimate earnings-per-share losses of 1 cent on $237 million in sales.
2. All about manufacturing.
This week’s economic announcements are all about manufacturing and wholesale. After stellar 4% second-quarter GDP growth, economists will be looking to see how U.S. manufacturing is fairing and if the booming economic growth will continue throughout the year.
First up is the ISM report on Tuesday: Analysts expect a reading of 56 (any number above 50 represents expansion in the industry). Also on Tuesday, watch out for Factory orders, which are estimated to grow by 0.6% ahead of the valuable holiday shopping season. The week will end with reports on productivity and wholesale orders on Friday morning.
3. Samsung Galaxy Alpha announcement.
It looks like Samsung may be taking the tech spotlight on Monday as it finally unveils its new Galaxy Alpha phone, according to reports by insider-rag SamMobile.
Much has been leaked about the phone, which is supposed to forsake the traditional plastic body for a sleeker metallic construction. The phone is Samsung’s mid-range model and will feature a 4.8-inch 720p display, a fingerprint scanner and 32 gigabytes of storage.
AllAboutSamsung notes that the announcement, the date of which has been top secret, could be pushed out to Aug. 13.
4. Playing for profits.
Gaming companies Activision Blizzard and Zynga will reveal their second-quarter performance this week in the wake of mediocre results from Nintendo, which has struggled to kindle interest in its Wii U console.
Activision, maker of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, is expected to bring in 22 cents a share profit on $607.6 million in sales when it reports Tuesday. The quarter looks less rosy for mobile-game maker Zynga, set to report on Thursday, which is estimated to lose 7 cents a share on $161 million in sales.
5. Nothing spells profits quite like Andy Warhol.
While other sectors of the economy have struggled to pick up steam, the auction market has notched a decent year so far. Exactly how good will be seen on Friday when Sotheby’s announces its earnings. Profits are estimated to be $1.31 a share on $345.7 million in sales. The premier auction house brought in more than $200 million in a June sale of works by Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and others.
Sotheby’s has also unveiled a new pact with eBay this month to start hosting live New York auctions together, giving Sotheby’s access to the online retailers 145 million active buyers. The companies are giving the partnership another go after a failed 2003 effort and say, this time, the timing is right.
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