The average email inbox is inundated with clutter. 

For many of us, inboxes are so overstuffed with junk that we hardly have the time to open — much less unsubscribe to — all of the extraneous dispatches. 

But rather than wade through the weeds of unopened emails, you can swiftly mark them all as read, wiping the slate clean of unread emails. 

Here are four simple steps to mark read for all your emails on your iPhone:

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Best Buy)

How to mark all emails as read on an iPhone

1. Open your iPhone's Mail app.

2. Tap "Edit" in the top right corner. 

3. "Select All" will appear in the top left where the word "Mailboxes" previously was. Tap it.

4. Tap "Mark" in the bottom left, then "Mark as Read."

You're all set — although depending on how extensively your inbox needs to be pruned, you may have to do some more legwork to mark older emails as read.

Ask any investor where the next big startup will come from, and odds are they won't say San Francisco.

The high costs of living, and the accompanying costs of labor, have pushed many investors to look elsewhere to stretch their venture dollars further. On top of that list is Austin, Texas — where Business Insider recently spent a week talking with investors and founders to get the pulse of its fast-growing tech scene. 

The capital of the Lone Star State is commonly referred to as the "Silicon Hills," a reference to the hills just over the highway bordering the city to the north. With a top-ranked university, desirable downtown housing, and thriving outdoor leisure scene, Austin is drawing more attention to itself as an incubator for some of tech's hottest up and coming startups. 

"We've always been called out as being a second-tier startup environment," investor and Osano founder Arlo Gilbert told Business Insider. "There was San Francisco, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and then Austin was like, five. And I think that most of us here have felt like that wasn't fair."

Read More: As Big Tech doubles down on Austin, startups are moving to its cooler neighbor. Take a look at how one startup is bringing Silicon Valley style to East Austin.

But with the arrival of Silicon Valley giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, tech industry notables have been forced to acknowledge Austin's thriving startup scene. One investor told Business Insider that when he moved from California to Texas, his colleagues in the Bay Area threw him a "Texas, not taxes," themed party.

And with its venture capital renaissance, Austin feels poised to give Silicon Valley a run for its investor money in 2020. So we asked them — which companies are armed and ready to take on Silicon Valley's red hot startup economy? 

 

Real estate is often a family business, and for Adam Neumann, founding WeWork was no exception.

He hired family members and friends with little experience and brought his rabbi in to lead executive meetings and help do deals, Business Insider found in multiple investigations.

Neumann envisioned WeWork as a multigenerational family dynasty that would keep close control of the company for hundreds of years. He explained his vision to staff at WeWork's Global Summit, an all-hands meeting in Los Angeles in January, according to a video clip reviewed by Business Insider.

See more: The Kabbalah Connection: Insiders say a celebrity-centered religious sect deeply influenced how Adam Neumann ran WeWork before its spectacular collapse

The source who provided the video is not authorized to speak to the media but said the remarks were so standard for the unconventional founder that staff did not react.

In the video, Neumann appears to respond to a question about WeWork's investors.

"WeWork is a controlled company. People don't know that," he tells the audience. "I, Adam, and my family control the company 100% — very rare when you have investors. It's not the truth of any company in the world. Google still has it a little bit. Facebook and Mark [Zuckerberg] already lost it. No other company else has it."

The Neumanns made some plans that hinted at how they would keep this control. WeWork's original August filing to go public said Adam Neumann received 20 votes per share of his stock, an unusual structure even by Silicon Valley standards.

And if something were to happen to him, his wife, Rebekah Neumann, would play a major role in succession planning. If Adam were permanently disabled or died in the decade following the initial public offering, Rebekah would be one of a two- or three-member committee to select the new CEO. If both Rebekah and Adam were unable to participate in the selection, the trustee of their estate would step into Rebekah's shoes.

In subsequent filings, WeWork reduced Adam Neumann's voting power and barred Neumann family members from the board. A representative for Neumann couldn't be reached for comment.

In the January video, Adam Neumann highlights his long-term plan for the company. He and Rebekah Neumann have five young children, whose involvement at WeWork included attending WeGrow, the school that's closing at the end of the academic year, and flying on WeWork's private jet.

"We're not just controlled — we're generationally controlled," Adam Neumann said.

See more: Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked it

He said he didn't expect his children to be future WeWork CEOs, as he was before his ouster last month. Neumann added that he worried that his children wouldn't "earn" leadership and that he would prefer a leader who "grew from the bottom."

Even if the Neumann children didn't lead the company, he still thought they would be involved.

"They don't have to run the company, but they do have to stay the moral compass of the company," he said. "If we do this right, over the years different CEOs will come, but we will keep an eye on these basic values and basic moral standards and not allow them to shift."

Neumann intended this plan to work for the long term.

"It's important that one day, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 300 years, a great-great-granddaughter of mine will walk into that room and say, 'Hey, you don't know me; I actually control the place. The way you're acting is not how we built it,'" he said.

Adam Neumann was replaced last month with two co-CEOs after a tumultuous lead-up to an IPO that was ultimately shelved. Investors cited several concerns with his leadership, including conflicts of interest with his family. Rebekah Neumann, who was credited as a cofounder and led WeGrow, also stepped back from her roles.

Got a tip? Contact Meghan Morris on Signal at (646) 768-1627 using a nonwork phone, Twitter DM @MeghanEMorris, or email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. (PR pitches by email only, please.) 

It's tricky business estimating the value of SpaceX, the fast-moving rocket company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002. The same goes for the capital costs of its ambitious projects, like Starlink: a plan to bathe Earth in high-speed internet access using a fleet of thousands of satellites.

Despite the challenges, Morgan Stanley Research took an earnest whack at SpaceX's valuation in mid-September with an eye toward the inception of Starlink.

If the new project claims just a few percent of the global telecommunications industry and earns $30 to $50 billion a year, as Musk has said it might, the analysts figured SpaceX could grow to a $52 billion company. Or maybe anywhere between $5 billion and $120 billion, depending on the degree of its failure or success with Starlink.

Key to that estimate, though, is the cost to build and launch Starlink satellites. As Space News reported this week, SpaceX has changed plans: The company aims to nearly triple its maximum of about 12,000 satellites to 42,000 spacecraft.

This threw a wrench into the valuation calculus, so Morgan Stanley Research on Friday emailed reporters a short update that attempts to reckon the cost of 30,000 additional Starlink satellites.

Read more: SpaceX wants to launch 5 times more spacecraft over the next decade than have ever flown in human history

Analysts now figure the capital cost associated with this change could swell to $60 billion — and that's not including the price tag of launching the other 12,000 satellites. The figure also ignores the cost to replace all Starlink satellites every five years (something Musk told Business Insider in May during a call with reporters). Swapping satellites may add as much as $12 billion per year in capital investments, Morgan Stanley Research said.

This makes the cash cow that Starlink is supposed to be look considerably less attractive, given its hefty and ongoing projected price tag.

But this analysis assumes SpaceX would use its existing and partly reusable Falcon 9 rocket system to launch all Starlink satellites. It merely glosses over and doesn't even name a coming and radical variable change: Starship, which is the company' planned 387-foot-tall mega-rocket.

Financial analysts like to hedge their bets using as many reliable, real-world factors as possible. So it's understandable they'd skip over Starship — the system may not exist for years, or at all if can't escape the development phase.

Still, the potential cost savings with Starship are well worth considering. 

'We'd certainly like to transition to Starship'

If Starship comes to pass as Musk has envisioned it over the years, the two-part steel launch system would be fully reusable and capable of launching several times a day. That is in stark contrast to current rockets, which can take months or years to prepare for launch and only get used once, trashing untold millions' worth of hardware per flight.

Starship may upend the traditional launch industry by not having to be replaced every launch. It'd only cost SpaceX fuel, launch support staffing, minor refurbishment, and other fairly negligible needs to lift off.

Read more: A stirring new SpaceX animation of Starship launching shows how the rocket company plans to turn Texas into Earth's interplanetary transport hub

Morgan Stanley Research assumes Starlink would get off the ground 60 satellites at a time, as SpaceX demonstrated in May, at a cost of about $50 million per Falcon 9 launch. The estimate also assumes each Starlink satellite's cost is about $1 million, or on par with the satellites of competitor OneWeb.

By this math, the satellites cost about $30 billion and the launch costs amount to about $25 billion (another $5 billion is likely tied to ground support).

While the update does invoke Starship, it does so obliquely and without naming it — only noting its projected cost per launch.

"This [estimate] also does not assume cost improvements to build & launch satellites, with SpaceX targeting to reduce launch costs further, to ~$5M," the document states.

"Starship isn't required for this system, but we'd certainly like to transition to Starship," Musk previously told Business Insider. "Starship, which would be a fully reusable system, and with much lower propellant costs and at a much larger scale, would dramatically improve launch costs, probably by a factor of 10 or something like that."  

But that's a per-rocket-launch cost comparison. It's equally important to consider how many more Starlink satellites Starship might be able to ferry into space at once.

Starship could launch more satellites for a fraction of the cost

Each of SpaceX's 60 satellites launched in May weighed about 500 pounds (227 kilograms), making their total mass about 30,000 pounds (13,620 kilograms) minus any deployment mechanism. According to a new website for Starship, the vehicle could heave about 220,000 pounds (99,800 kilograms) into orbit at once, or more than seven times the first Starlink payload.

Assuming SpaceX scales up the number of Starlink satellites accordingly — and they all fit inside the nosecone of Starship — perhaps as many as 300 or 400 could launch at once. This would cut launch costs for Starlink by additional billions. (This may not be the plan, though, since Starlink satellites would be deployed to many different orbits, or planes, around Earth to ensure proper internet coverage.)

The per-satellite cost estimate may also be lower than $1 million, too. Musk said in May that "the cost of launch per satellite is already more than the cost of the satellite," hinting mass-manufacturing costs are projected be in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite (not $1 million).

In any case, SpaceX is eager to have Starship — which Musk recently said could start flying within one or two years — start launching and deploying Starlink satellites.

"It's a heck of a lot of launches. We'll hopefully have Starship active if we're anywhere near 12,000 satellites," Musk said in May. "For the system to be economically viable, it's really on the order of 1,000 satellites. If we're putting a lot more satellites than that in orbit, that's actually a very good thing, it means there's a lot of demand for the system."

SpaceX did not acknowledge several requests for information and comment from Business Insider.

Correction: A previous version of this story did not account for the estimated cost of satellites. We regret the error and its comical irony.

Mark Hurd rose suddenly as a major figure in the world of tech when he was tapped to lead one of Silicon Valley's most iconic companies during a time of crisis.

Oracle announced on Friday that Hurd had passed away, not long after announcing that he was going on medical leave from his role as co-CEO. His death capped what many remember as a brilliant career, but one marred by controversy and even scandal.

In 2005, Hurd was on his 25th year as the little-known CEO of NCR, the Ohio-based maker of ATMs, when he became the surprise choice to lead Hewlett-Packard after the sudden departure of ousted chief exec Carly Fiorina. It thrust him into the spotlight for the first time in his career. 

"The opportunity to lead a company like HP doesn't come along every day," he told reporters when he was introduced. 

"I'm only concerned about the future," he said, when asked about the turbulent tenure of his predecessor. But in what appeared to be an indirect criticism of Fiorina's glitzy and high-profile leadership style, Hurd also said: "Don't expect to see a lot of me."

Mixed record at HP

But Hurd's tenure at HP and in Silicon Valley turned out to be a dizzying rollercoaster ride. 

Hurd will be remembered as an operational and sales genius who streamlined HP's operations, in moves cheered by Wall Street. But he will also be known for a turbulent reign at HP which was marred by severe cost-cutting, a corporate spying scandal, and another that included allegations of sexual harassment that ultimately forced him out and led him to a new role at Oracle.

"Mark Hurd is like a tragic hero in an ancient Greek play," analyst Steve Allen of S2C partners told Business Insider. "He was a brilliant leader of large organizations, but his legacy will always be tainted by scandals."

Other analysts focused on Hurd's achievements as a business strategist.

Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies called Hurd "one of the smartest CEO's I ever met."

"He helped turn around HP and their stock doubled during his five years at the company. At Oracle he brought strong leadership and great strategic thinking that helped Oracle continue to grow. I was always impressed with his leadership skills as he was a brilliant tactician. This is a big loss for Oracle and the entire tech world."

IDC President Crawford Del Prete described Hurd as a brilliant executive who helped two tech behemoths navigate a rapidly changing industry.

"He was an incredible guy," Del Prete told Business Insider. "He had an unbelievable ability to sell, and to grasp and quantify complex topics."

But looking back on his stint at HP, Del Prete acknowledged, "The things he did were painful for Hewlett-Packard."

Shortly after Hurd took over, HP announced it was cutting 14,500 jobs. It was the second major round of cuts following HP's merger with PC manufacturer Compaq, which led to the elimination of 17,000 positions.

Hurd became known for aggressive cost-cutting. It was good for HP's bottom line and its stock price, but it wrecked morale within a company which had been known for its employee-friendly culture, inspired by its founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

But Del Prete also said the streamlining Hurd spearheaded also helped HP. "That was the stage that HP needed to go through" to become more competitive and more nimble player in a fast changing market, he said.

Another analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates had a less generous assessment.

"Hurd was financially driven and improved metrics at HP, but damaged the wellspring of HP's prosperity by defunding R&D and interfering with the science-oriented culture of the labs," he told Business Insider. "HP is far less influential than it was in Silicon Valley, and his pivot had a lot to do with that."

A series of scandals

Then came the spying scandal.

A year after Hurd took over, HP was accused of launching what turned out to be a fumbled internal campaign to find out who was leaking confidential information. The campaign involved unethical and questionable tactics aimed at reporters and employees.

Hurd and other board members, including chairwoman Patricia Dunn, had to appear before a Congressional committee to explain what happened.

"With the benefit of hindsight, I would not do it again," Hurd testified. "I agree there is a difference between legal and ethical."

In 2010, Hurd faced his biggest scandal at HP, one that eventually ended his reign. He was accused of sexually harassing a contractor who served as an adviser to Hurd. The board subsequently found that there was no harassment, but they did find irregularities in his expense account reporting.

Hurd stepped down. One of the notable public reactions to his departure came from Larry Ellison, who called the HP board's decision to force Hurd out "the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago."

Just a few weeks after Hurd left HP, Oracle announced that it had hired him to serve as co-president with Catz. They were promoted to co-CEOs in 2014 when Ellison stepped down, although he remained as chief technology officer.

At Oracle, Hurd became known as the skilled sales leader and strategist, while Catz focused on operations, with Ellison serving as the visionary CTO and chairman providing guidance. Hurd played a critical role in Oracle bid to establish a stronger presence in cloud computing, where the company lags stronger rivals like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

A better fit at Oracle

In a way, Hurd turned out to be a better fit at Oracle.

"Larry Ellison saw his capabilities as a sales executive and someone who can drive the software business forward," Del Prete said. "Mark's passion and aggressiveness was really a great fit within Oracle."

Allen of S2C Partners said Hurd's comeback after his fall at HP was impressive, although he and Oracle faced serious challenges in the future. 

"He was able to rise from the HP ashes and go on to do battle for Oracle, much to his credit," he said. "In the end, the world has changed, and new leadership at, say Microsoft, has made all the difference. Mark Hurd was likely to be less successful in the future, than he was in the past. But his early death is tragic, nonetheless."

When he was introduced as a major Silicon Valley figure nearly 15 years ago, Hurd appeared to foreshadow how his career as one of tech's most famous executives would unfold.

"You'll find that companies that have much history have tremendous assets in their legacy," he said. "They also come with some baggage."

Got a tip about Oracle or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

There was a dull mark on Netflix's third quarter, which otherwise helped reassure Wall Street it could defend its streaming empire from soon-to-be rivals like Disney and Apple: Subscribers in the US were still canceling the service in higher numbers than before.

Netflix added about 280,000 fewer paid subscribers in the US during the third quarter than forecast after losing paid subscribers in the country the prior period. The company blamed its latest misfire on churn, or the rate of cancellations, which rose slightly after Netflix hiked prices in the US earlier this year.

The streaming giant squeezed in one last big price hike in 2019 before forthcoming streaming services like Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, HBO Max, Peacock, and Quibi try to eat its lunch. It announced rate increases of $1 to $2 in January across its US plans, which were still rolling out to existing subscribers through the second quarter.

Netflix's struggles since, in its largest single market, has Wall Street analysts and investors questioning how much the service can continue growing domestically and what the limits are to its pricing power.

Read more: Netflix could be forced to rethink its pricing strategy as new competitors like Disney Plus and HBO Max launch

"It basically says they have some limits on their pricing power, at least for now," James Wang, an analyst at investment manager ARK Invest, which runs two exchange-traded funds that include Netflix, told Business Insider. "That's what caught me on the more cautious side," he said, adding that the report was quite strong overall.

Netflix's frequent price hikes may evoke the worst of cable TV for some customers

Netflix's pricing power will be tested more during the fourth quarter and into 2020, when its new competitors take hold.

So far, none are positioning themselves as direct threats. Disney, Apple, and WarnerMedia are all tiptoeing around "800-pound gorilla in OTT," Brett Sappington at the entertainment-research firm Parks Associates said. "Those other services have content that's unique and are seen as an add-ons," he said.

Disney Plus, for example, will be more family oriented. Apple TV Plus is launching with nine original series and no licensed or library content.

Netflix, meanwhile, is still trying to be the home for nearly everything. It wants to make your favorite show, be it a  guilty pleasure or prestige drama, and movie, from indies to blockbusters, and have your beloved TV repeats like "Seinfeld." In that sense, Netflix has become the equivalent of broadcast or cable TV to some cord cutters.

It's also the only major streaming service that is profiting entirely from subscriptions. Amazon, Apple, and the Disney-controlled Hulu can afford to undercut Netflix on price because their streaming services are backed by other profitable businesses, such as Apple's iPhones and Disney's movies and parks.

As such, Netflix has had to raise prices in the US more regularly than most of its peers — about every two years or less. Hulu, by contrast, lowered the price of its cheapest plan this year, right after Netflix raised rates. And HBO Now, which charges more than Netflix does for its standard plan, hasn't raised prices since its 2015 launch.

But people in the US, scared by the constantly rising rates of cable TV, worry about being tied to services with ever-rising rates. Netflix's pricing power may be limited not by its actual prices but the frequency with which it's raising them.

"I don't think the price itself is the issue," Eric Haggstrom, the forecasting analyst at eMarketer, said. "It's purely psychological. The main reason people cut the cord in the first place is the consistent price increases they're subject to ... Netflix is the one streaming service that has been consistently raising prices so far."

The streaming giant is hoping higher-caliber films and other new content will make its service more valuable

Many industry watchers still agree Netflix is a good value at $13 per month for its standard plan. But the company is also looking at other ways to round out its content lineup and make itself indispensable to streaming users. Netflix has been spending heavily on animated originals, ostensibly to replace some of the movies and shows it is losing as Disney shifts its library to its own streaming service. 

Netflix has also been investing in big-budget movies, the kind you'd expect to watch in theaters or ignite Oscar buzz. The company called out during earnings movies such as Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman"; "Marriage Story" with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson; and Michael Bay's "6 Underground" that will hit the service later this year.

"What we have to do is just give it a pause and really focus on the value," Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, said in the third-quarter earnings interview when asked about pricing and churn. "If you think about it, we haven't had many big movies in the past, and movies are very valuable. People are used to paying for a lot of that."

Introducing a greater caliber and breadth of movies on top of the indies and so-called TV movies on Netflix now may also help replace some of the content from outside studios that the streaming company can no longer rely on licensing year after year.

But it's harder to tell how films, a newer endeavor for Netflix, will drive or retain subscribers. Netflix lowered its subscriber forecast for the upcoming fourth quarter, in part because of new releases that are harder to predict the audience for than returning seasons of existing series.

Whether Netflix will be able to match the hit ratio of movie studios that have been releasing films for decades also remains to be seen. 

"If you think about how long Disney has been doing this compared to Netflix as a studio, Netflix is a startup," Jeff Galak, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, said. "They're still figuring out the right formula."

Mark Hurd, one of Oracle's two CEOs, died on Friday at age 62.

Hurd led the database giant with Safra Catz since 2014, though he had announced a medical leave of absence in September. He and Catz had been hired by then-CEO Larry Ellison as copresidents of Oracle in 2010, before taking over as joint CEOs when Ellison stepped aside.

Read More: Oracle employees and tech workers mourn CEO Mark Hurd, who died at the age of 62

Hurd spent most of his career at NCR Corp., an enterprise technology company specializing in point-of-sale systems and ATM machines. After 25 years, Hurd had risen to the chief executive role before moving over to run computing giant Hewlett-Packard. He was widely credited with making HP into the dominant player in hardware computing during his tenure, a trait that Ellison highly valued when deciding to recruit Hurd to Oracle in 2010.

At Oracle, he was known for spearheading its push into the cloud, playing a major role in its growth.

Here's a look at the life and career of Mark Hurd:

Welcome to Cultivated, our weekly newsletter where we're bringing you an inside look at the deals, trends, and personalities driving the multibillion-dollar global cannabis boom. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Happy Friday,

Never a dull week when it comes to cannabis. Thursday marked year one of Canada's legalization experiment, and while the country (my homeland) is to be lauded for sticking its neck out and becoming the first G7 country to legalize, the results have been mixed at best for consumers, investors, concerned citizens, and anyone else affected by such a monumental shift in social policy. It's worth revisiting this story I published last year on Canada's rocky legalization rollout. 

Let's go to the market:

All eyes were on Aphria's earnings this week as the Canadian cannabis company posted its second straight quarter of profitability after facing off with short-sellers in December of last year.

Analysts and industry watchers considered Aphria to be something of a bellwether stock for the Canadian cannabis sector one year into legalization as many companies have seen their share prices crater this year — the Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences Index ETF has fallen 55% — amid lower-than-expected retail sales and other industry headwinds.

My colleagues over at Markets Insider have the scoop on what else went on in the sector this week, including CannTrust destroying $77 million worth of marijuana to get back onside with regulators, Cronos Group being named the new "King in the North" (miss you Kawhi), and some weird moves in the market. 

In New York, Gov. Cuomo held a meeting with the leaders of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — which is also now weighing a legalization bill — to come up with a regional plan to legalize cannabis and set standards around vaping.

Cuomo called the issue "one of the most challenging" he's had to address in his time as governor. 

-Jeremy 

Here's what we wrote about this week:

Here's how the largest and most powerful Wall Street banks are cautiously opening their doors to the potentially $80 billion US cannabis industry

As cannabis reform becomes one of the most hotly-debated topics in Congress, some of the largest Wall Street banks are slowly dipping their toes into the industry.

The chief psychoactive component of cannabis, THC, is illegal under US federal law despite being legalized in some form in 33 states. Most federally chartered US investment banks won't raise money or advise on deals for companies that are actively violating federal law, no matter how attractive the growth prospects of the industry are.

Still, the banks are starting to figure out how to serve cannabis companies and develop relationships within the nascent but expanding industry, in a bid for first-mover advantage if or when the market opens up thanks to changes in federal law.

A VC best known for organic-food investments just made its first foray into CBD. A top partner at BIGR Ventures told us why.

BIGR Ventures, a Colorado-based fund that focuses on the food industry, made its first foray into the hemp and CBD space. The firm led a $3 million Series A investment round into RE Botanicals, a CBD tincture, oil, and oral capsule startup.

BIGR partner Carole Buyers explained why the firm decided to invest in an interview on Thursday. 

We've been researching the CBD industry for over a year," Buyers, one of BIGR's partners, said. "It was the passage of the Farm Bill in 2018 that really gave us the green light to go ahead and invest."

Capital raises, M&A activity, partnerships, and launches

Executive moves

Chart of the week

It's worth revisiting this chart, which we published in July, in light of the one year anniversary of cannabis legalization in Canada. 

After a number of scandals involving publicly traded Canadian cannabis companies, Canadians have a dim view of operators in the industry: 

Stories from around the web

Investors hope psychedelics are the new cannabis. Are they high? (The Economist)

CBD or THC? Common drug test can't tell the difference (The New York Times)

The Ebbu files (WeedWeek)

Cannabis 2.0 is upon us, but are retailers ready for the influx of new products? (Financial Post)

Nevada cracking down on marijuana businesses (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Frustration and pride in Canada after a year of legal pot (The Associated Press)

Aphria profit didn't come from selling marijuana (MarketWatch)

Did I miss anything? Have a tip? Just want to chat? Send me a note at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or find me on twitter @jfberke.   

Jennifer Aniston publicly joined Instagram this week, but the "Friends" star revealed she's been lurking on the platform for a while now, thanks to a secret account she created.

Aniston appeared on Wednesday night on Jimmy Kimmel's late-night talk show, where she admitted that she has long had a "stalker account" on Instagram.

"When I was thinking about doing [Instagram], I figured it was time to understand the world and dip my toe into the social-media pool," Aniston told Kimmel.

 

Read more: Jennifer Aniston joined Instagram, broke it, and set a Guinness World Record — all in less than 6 hours

But Aniston isn't the first celebrity who has admitted to using a secret social-media account not for posting content but solely for keeping an eye on what's happening there.

Jennifer Lawrence revealed in an interview last year that while she doesn't have publicly facing social-media accounts, she is online as a "voyeur": "I watch, I don't speak," Lawrence told InStyle.

It's not clear how many celebrities beyond Lawrence and Aniston use social media this way. It's sort of like a "finsta": a portmanteau for "fake Instagram," a secondary, sometimes-private account where people post photos they don't want to put on their main accounts. There's a whole sect of celebrities who have finsta accounts — including Sophie Turner, Ariana Grande , and Justin Bieber — but they're known to the public.

But the secret accounts belonging to Lawrence and Aniston are completely unknown and not used for posting photos unworthy of their main accounts. I personally have a second Instagram account I use strictly for following influencers and creators that doesn't post or even have a profile photo.

In the same interview where she talked about having a "voyeur" social-media presence, Lawrence also voiced her distaste for the internet, saying that it breeds "backlash" and has "scorned" her in the past. Despite her objections, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Lawrence publicly joining social media in the future. Long before joining Instagram, Aniston frequently made comments about staying off of social media. She told Vogue in 2017 that she hadn't made any social-media accounts in order to maintain her "sanity."

"Now you have social media and you've added this extra pressure of seeing if someone likes or doesn't like something you did," Aniston told Vogue. "We're creating these man-made challenges and it's a such a drag."

With all that buildup, it's no surprise Aniston's Instagram debut on Tuesday was monumental. Her first post was a selfie of herself alongside her "Friends" costars. Almost immediately, news of Aniston's Instagram debut led to an influx of followers, likes, and comments — which spurred technical problems and made it difficult for some users to follow Aniston's account.

Additionally, Aniston's popularity even broke a world record: Guinness World Records said on Wednesday that Aniston had broken the record for the fastest time for an Instagram account to reach 1 million followers, reaching the milestone in just five hours and 16 minutes.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd died on October 18, 2019, after taking a leave of absence for health reasons in September. Earlier this year, Business Insider had a chance to sit down with him for an episode of our podcast, "This Is Success." We used the opportunity to discuss his career, with a focus on how his time at Oracle was marked by transformation during a time of upheaval in the IT industry. He explained how he knew it was the right decision to stick to his plan, even in the face of pushback. The following is our story, originally published on April 5.

When Mark Hurd started at Oracle in 2010, he turned the place upside down. Hurd was anticipating a big shift in the industry, and he wanted to change how Oracle built and sold its software.

The changes he made were dramatic. Hundreds of Oracle sales staff members left the company in his first few years on the job, and Hurd was criticized by industry analysts.

But he stuck to his plan. After about six years, the public's perception of that plan started to shift, as hiring and sales ramped up. The company still has a ways to go, as it struggles to catch up to rivals in the cloud software business. But Hurd saw that Oracle, an established company, had to reinvent itself to stay competitive, even when this seemed like a terrible idea.

We spoke with Hurd earlier this year for an episode of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success" and took a closer look at his first years at Oracle. Hurd explained what it was like initiating a massive culture shift at the company and how his plan continues to unfurl.

In the episode, you'll hear from Hurd about how he's approaching the challenges of developing his cloud business and onboarding waves of new talent — and how his success at Oracle started with a career comeback.

The podcast and a lightly edited transcript are below.

Listen to the full episode, which was produced by Sarah Wyman and Jennifer Sigl, here: 

Subscribe to "This is Success" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

Hurd got the job at Oracle weeks after leaving Hewlett-Packard, where he'd been CEO for five years. The 2010 departure was difficult for him. Even today, it's not something he feels comfortable talking about. Hurd was forced to resign after a public dispute with HP's board over his expense account and a personal relationship. He stepped down that August.

Richard Feloni: How did you feel at the time, given the circumstances, of the departure at HP? Were you angry at all with the situation?

Mark Hurd: No. I liked HP. I liked the company, I liked the people of the company, etc. I had a disagreement with a couple of board members, but that's not HP. If you looked at our financial performance at the time, it was quite positive.

Larry Ellison, who built Oracle and had led it since 1977, came to Hurd's defense. He and Hurd had worked closely while Hurd led HP, and Ellison thought the company made a huge mistake in letting him go. Ellison didn't wait for the situation to blow over, hiring Hurd as Oracle's president a month after Hurd was ousted from HP.

Feloni: So when did he approach you for the Oracle job?

Hurd: We had several meetings about it face-to-face and talked about the industry, the role that Oracle could play within it, the role that I could do in helping Oracle from a strategic perspective. And so we had all of those dialogues as we talked about it.

Oracle makes software that companies around the world use for everyday operations. When Hurd joined the company, the industry was in the early days of shifting to "the cloud." All that means is that the software your head of human resources would use, for example, could be accessed online, from anywhere, rather than installed on a single computer. It's simple in practice but requires major shifts in operations.

Hurd: Well, of course, at the time it was really just the beginnings of all this movement to the cloud, and the implication on Oracle was that we had to change many of the things we were doing, both in R&D and in the go-to-market part of our business. Part of the attraction, of course, is the complexity of all that.

It's one thing when you go to a company that's struggling, and you say, "We've got to change." Most everybody acknowledges that and says, "Gee, I see the results, I see the performance. We have to do something different." It's a very other thing when you go to a company that's winning. And here's a company in Oracle that's winning, that's got tremendous market presence, tremendous brand, and then you say, in the middle of all that, "We've got to change."

The first question that comes up from a lot of people is, well, why would that be? And so then when you have to describe that there's a coming change in the industry it's probably — not probably: I think it's the most difficult leadership challenge that you have is to take a group of people winning and then convince them it's necessary to change. Because there's resistance more than you're typically used to.

Feloni: So this idea of "let's transform even though we're winning and people are comfortable doing things these ways," did that stem from Larry, or was that how you read the situation?

Hurd: We spent a lot of time talking about the industry, because this change was coming, but it was at its very infancy at the time. I think one of the blessings you have with somebody like Larry — and when I say "somebody like," there's not many to compare, frankly, if any, certainly in the enterprise space — is that you have somebody who is a big owner in the company, the biggest owner of the company, that thinks a bit more generationally, certainly than quarterly.

I think if we didn't mutually agree on the need for change, it would never work. It's not like we agree on everything, but the great thing about Larry, amongst many, is that you have a lot of debate. I can't tell you how many times he said, "Yeah, you're right, let's do what you said." And, by the way, the same way for me. We compare notes a lot, talk about a lot, and agree on certainly materially more than we don't. But if it wasn't mutual, it wouldn't work.

Feloni: Your first day as president, your first several days, what did you see at the company that made you think, OK, we're going to have to completely transform the way sales are done here?

Hurd: I think Oracle historically has been thought of as perhaps the greatest sales force in the IT industry, and I wouldn't try to persuade you differently.

Now, all that said, our industry, holistically, had matured into a bad space, in my opinion.

Thirty years ago, when Hurd was starting out in the IT industry, companies would hire entry-level employees and groom them to succeed at the company.

Hurd: You would come out of college, and you would go to work at a company, and you would actually get trained by the company. You'd have trainers, enablers, people that would help you, teach you about how to sell, how to listen, how to communicate — all sorts of great skills that frankly I still use today. Training was looked at as an investment, not as an expense, and what happened over the years is that training again became viewed as an expense as opposed to an investment.

And what began happening was all of this mercenary hiring. You'd go to work for this company, and then you'd go to another company, another company, another company, and it was a bit like all the companies putting their bad salespeople in the middle of the table and we'd just swap bad salespeople, with a strategy that your bad salesperson would be great once they came to our place.

Feloni: So you wanted to kind of bring it back to the world that you had started up in?

Hurd: Yeah, and maybe hopefully a little better than that. Because of the nature of the cloud, what now was a technology that could only be bought by the biggest companies would now be available to every company, no matter what scale. You didn't need to have an IT staff. You didn't need to have a data center. You could just now get all of this great intellectual property basically over the internet.

As a result of that, the need to grow our sales force became very important.

Feloni: Was this essentially for Oracle to survive in this new setting?

Hurd: I'd actually say to thrive. And so it wasn't like we had a problem, you know, if we dial all the way back to 2010, that we had a cash flow problem or we weren't about to make payroll or anything. Again, we were a very successful company saying, in the middle of that success, let's change —

Feloni: You were looking ahead of it.

Hurd: Yeah. So how's this market going to work five years from now?

The cloud was about to revolutionize how the IT industry did business. The product was changing. The customers were changing. And that meant the salespeople had to change too.

Hurd: I would say my view's always been that the more focused you can make a salesperson — meaning the more I can get them to do the same thing every day — the better chance they have of winning. My view has always been to focus them on knowing their product, knowing their buyer, knowing their industry, and, frankly, knowing their competitor.

So the fact that we can bring people to market that are expert at all of these issues raises their chance of success. Now, if you believe that, and I do, then how you then build a sales force becomes important based on those building blocks.

So for us, for example, if we're selling an application like HR, it would become important, if you were a salesperson, that you knew how to communicate to a head of HR. It would be important that you would know your competitor. It would be important that you could describe that discussion in terms of HR in the context of retail or financial services or one of those industries. So that's how we built our sales force, building block by building block, and then we build them appropriately for the markets, all the way from the biggest customer to the smallest customer. That's how we built it.

While Hurd was starting to roll out cloud software, he was still pushing Oracle's core business technology — the stuff the company had been selling for years. And his goals for those sales were ambitious. To encourage his sales force to meet them, he made their paychecks more dependent on their performance. Skeptical employees complained that it created a more complex and stressful work environment.

Hurd: Building incentives are always important, but frankly, if you're building an org, running a company as a CEO, you work on three core things: strategy, operations, and then people. The incentives piece aligned to the operations piece, and the key to operations is to execute the strategy. So in our case, our strategy was to really move the market to this next generation of applications. And then we wanted to incent our sales force properly to move to these next sets of modern applications, which is what we did.

Feloni: You were saying that you have a team that's winning and you want them to change the way they're doing things, you're going to face some resistance.

Hurd: "Some" might be an understatement.

Hundreds of salespeople left the company during Hurd's first few years, including some of the team's top performers. Hurd insists this did not upset his plan.

Hurd: You know, when you have 35,000 or 40,000 people in your sales org, you will have people that move. But I do think we moved from really a products-offered strategy — which is basically we would sell you a product, you would then implement it, sometimes by yourself or with a systems integrator or something like that — we moved to selling a service. So we're really selling a different thing than we had before.

Now we basically said, "No, you're going to have to sell to the functional buyer. You're going to have to sell to that head of HR or to that CFO." Now you're saying to people, "We're going to change what you sell, and we're going to change who you sell it to." And so a lot of people said, "I just don't want to do that." My view is that that's OK. We need to have people that are excited and passionate. I don't want to make it sound like I was for a lot of dynamism in the sales force, but I wasn't against it either.

Feloni: Do you think that you would have felt as confident making huge changes at the company had you not had that specific relationship with Larry?

Hurd: Oh, assuredly not. Assuredly not. I would have had the same belief structure, but when you have the ability to talk through issues with a) people that are extremely smart, b) people that really care, c) people that have a breadth of experience — this is what most CEOs don't have.

Hurd started hiring new people to help carry out his business plan. He didn't want to poach salespeople from his competitors, as was standard in the industry. Instead, he wanted to hire people new to IT — recent college grads — and get them on board with his new vision for the business.

Hurd: We really moved into this very aggressive college hiring program, because what I really thought made sense was us to hire our own. We went back and, of course, we found there were very few IT companies recruiting on campus, believe it or not. Over 85% of the people we offer a job accept that job. The problem we had back then, though, was that we had no machinery.

Feloni: There's no process for it.

Hurd: Yeah. It's like, well, OK, who's going to do that? OK, well, let's get some people that can go do that.

And we figured out where the schools were. We figured out how to recruit. We figured out how to cut an offer letter. But then when we brought them on board, we had to actually train them. So we had to build a strategy to go get, in the US, the best young people in this country, frankly, to put them in the best facilities, which we didn't have, give them the best tools, which we didn't have, give them the best management, which was new because a lot of this was new management mentoring some of these great young people, and give them the best training.

So when you start saying "best, best, best, best, best," and you start with "I've got nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," the whole process over the last few years has been get each one of those pillars I described to being the best at what we do and build our sales force from the ground up.

But some Oracle veterans weren't on board with the new training program. Not only did they essentially have to learn how to do a new job, but they had to mentor some kids straight out of college. A former Oracle employee told Business Insider in 2013 that the company was getting a bad reputation among experienced salespeople in the industry. Hurd says it was just a painful but necessary byproduct of change.

Hurd: At the end of the day, I take complete accountability for the strategy that I described. I believe that it was best for our customers and best for Oracle, for us, to make this change. And no question it was dynamic. No question that when you're part of a dynamic change, anytime you make decisions, you get opinions. There are going to be people that say, "I really liked it the way it was," and, listen, I wish that history was a perfect predictor of the future, but it's not. The world we're in, IT, is dynamic, and it changes. It changes every day. And for us, we needed to stay ahead of this, and there's no question the implication of "staying ahead of this" has some element of pain to it.

Feloni: Did you ever question your strategy?

Hurd: No.

Feloni: No.

Hurd: No.

Feloni: What were conversations with Larry like at this point when there was some turmoil?

Hurd: Probably his biggest quotes would be things like "Can you go faster?"

Feloni: So as a leader, how do you know when to take resistance and be like "OK, let me reconsider," or to think that "OK, this is just the pain of change. I don't have to really dwell on this." How do you differentiate that?

Hurd: I think it's hard. I think nobody likes criticism, resistance, no matter what anybody tells you.

That said, I think you have to rely on your experience, your instincts as to where you think the market's headed and what changes are necessary. I've always believed it was the company first.

I believe to the core that a) we had to expand our salesforce, and b) we couldn't do it through the traditional mechanisms in our industry. We simultaneously moved to the mid-market, we moved to college hiring, we built an in-house training program — we did all of these things simultaneously.

And to add to it, when you ask managers who have historically managed very experienced people, and you say, "Hey, I have an idea. We're going to bring some kids right off the college campus. I'd really appreciate if you'd spent some time mentoring them and developing them," it's amazing that they'd say, "I'd rather not do that." It's counter-instinctive to you, but if you had a sales manager and two people working for you — let's pretend your objectives for the year were $10 million, and you had one salesperson who had a $10 million quota and a second salesperson who had just come out of college — who do you think the sales manager spends all their time with? The person with a $10 million quota.

So we had the issues also from a mores perspective, of just mores of the company, of was it important to really develop and mentor these people —

Feloni: Mentorship would be as important.

Hurd: The company I grew up in, it was just an unspoken value in the company that if you could sit around and brag about all the great people you developed in the company who are now in senior positions, this was a merit badge. This was something you wore on your sleeve. There was no stock option for it — it was just a source of pride and a belief this was the way things were to get done. We needed that inside of our company as well. And we still work on it today.

In 2014, Ellison stepped down as head of Oracle and appointed Hurd and Safra Catz as co-CEOs. As far as Hurd was concerned, the new title didn't change anything. His plan was the same.

Feloni: Did that put a new pressure on you, being given this new title?

Hurd: I don't think I would say it changed. I think we felt the pressure to move the company along, to accelerate the company, to add velocity to the execution of the company, and do that in a way where we can deliver today and build for tomorrow. Because remember, that's our challenge, is that we have a very large customer base that expects us to deliver on products in some cases that we built years and years and years ago. And we have to do that. That's our commitment to them.

Hurd spent years defending his plan to his employees, investors, and industry analysts. And by 2017, the skeptics were coming around to his way of thinking. Even veteran salespeople who had been critical of the big changes Hurd was making at Oracle could see that his plan was paying off. One told The Wall Street Journal that his initial response to Hurd's plan had been "What the hell is this?" but that when he saw how much money the new hires made the company, he changed his mind.

When I read Hurd this quote, he brushed it off, just like the criticisms I'd run past him earlier. Of course his plan worked. That … was the plan.

Hurd: I wouldn't give too much credence to the early anecdote you brought up or to any other anecdote, because I think you can find a lot of these as you dig through a large organization. I think the key is that strategically this was right for us. I believe you will see more people actually imitate that strategy. Because it just makes sense.

Feloni: It sounds like you're not concerned about the media coverage picking different anecdotes for what your plan would say, but would it be different if one of your colleagues approached you, or one of your shareholders approached you, whether it was either skepticism in the first place years ago or saying, like, "I'm really happy with how this is playing out"? Would you consider that differently?

Hurd: Well let me be clear: Of course I'd consider it. I remember one investor saying, "You know, I had bought the stock thinking that you were smart," meaning me, the implication being that they'd flipped their point of view based on the rise in our expense structure. The point that I would make is that in this case we had to invest in order to gain productivity.

Feloni: There's something that I think was interesting. A moment at an Oracle convention in 2016, you had polled the audience about three big industry predictions, which would happen fastest. Forty-two percent said that none of these will ever happen. You joked about it, but is that, like, a recurring thing — where, like, you're met maybe with some skepticism from employees at first and then you have to convince them along the way?

Hurd: What I do frequently at our user conference is I make predictions about the industry. I do them for a couple purposes. One, they're funny, and people have various reactions to them. Second, I try to explain to customers why we're investing the way we are — in particular, products and R&D — because of the secular trends that we see occurring in the industry. For example, we see data centers, corporate data centers, really going away. We see applications that are traditionally on-premise all moving to the cloud.

So we typically make these predictions, and then also we use them internally to show why we're making the adjustments we're making in the various things we do, strategically and operationally. So yeah, I would usually test my predictions on our own workforce, and then you get various reactions like "This is crazy," or "Really, is this going to happen?" It opens up debate, and it's fun.

Feloni: We've been talking about an example where you took something that was really ambitious and it met with some resistance, people even leaving the company — would this be something that you would be willing to do all over again with a new plan?

Hurd: If necessary, yeah. I think that we feel good about strategically where Oracle sits today. We feel good about the changes we've made. I'm not here to tell you that everything we've done we've done perfectly, but I am here to tell you that we feel very good about the decisions we've made, the investments we've made. We've continued to make changes where necessary, maybe at a lesser scale, within the context of a product or a solution or various other parts of the company. We would always be dynamic in that nature.

Feloni: And looking at it, do you think that maybe there could have been a different way to communicate that to staff to maybe keep some of those veteran hires from leaving?

Hurd: I'm not sure that's the approach you would want to take. I think that a leader's job is to describe: "This is where we're headed. This is where we are. This is the journey to get from here to there. These are now the resources we're going to apply to get from here to there."

I tried to do some explaining of things like training and changes in our compensation, our incentives, our management, etc. There are people who say, "Listen, I'm just not up for that." You're talking about things that are going to require work and change. Some people are up for it, and some people are not. I think if you don't have passion and you're not excited about the task at hand, the likelihood that you'd have as much success as you're having is very unlikely.

You know, I think we want people that are excited about the mission, and I don't really enjoy saying this, but some of that is necessary to get from here to there.

Feloni: So if you have an ambitious plan and some people aren't signed on to it, that's OK?

Hurd: You know, you hate to say it that way, because it feels like it's a non-empathetic answer, but the answer is yes. When you say, "Listen, we're going move from here to there," not everybody is going to like it, and as a result, if somebody wants to opt out because they don't like it, in the end, I do think that's OK.

Feloni: Looking at the last eight years or so at Oracle, how would you say that your leadership style has changed over that time, if it has?

Hurd: I don't change my view. You need to lead from in front. And to me, for us, that's with our customers and with our people. And so that's still my primary view, that communicating to our customers, communicating to our people, is important.

I still believe the role of leading these companies is about strategy. It is about aligning the operations to the execution of the strategy and then really surrounding the company with the best possible people.

You know, we're all faced with, in any of these jobs, making hundreds and thousands of decisions every day — doesn't mean that you're going to get them all right. I have confidence enough though in the process that if I make a decision, I'm willing to listen if I've made a bad decision. Let's review it and do it again.

You asked a simple question to begin with: Do I feel confident in the strategy of Oracle? I do.

Feloni: Well, thank you, Mark.

Hurd: Thank you.

Whenever I generalize about Tesla and the Model 3, I often point out that although the vehicle is in many ways revolutionary, if you boil it down to its automotive essence — and take out the battery pack and electric drivetrain! — it's a Toyota Corolla.

In other words, it's a compact family sedan. The Model 3 and the Corolla are almost exactly the same size, while the Model 3 is significantly heavier thanks to its fairly large battery. They each have four doors, six windows, and four wheels. (The Model 3, of course, has a panoramic glass roof.)

The fastback Model 3 and the more traditional deck-lidded Corolla are also kin when it comes to the trunk. Because the panoramic glass roof can't move, the Model 3 isn't a true hatchback.

Obviously, we have gas versus electrons here. But the cheapest Corolla comes in at under $20,000. The least expensive Model 3, as listed on Tesla's configurator at the time of this writing, is just under $40,000.

I've driven several Model 3 variants, but the one I officially reviewed was the rear-wheel-drive, single-motor, long-range Premium example, then priced at $57,500.

More recently, I reviewed a $29,189 2020 Toyota Corolla XSE. And an opportunity knocked: Why don't I test my compulsive comparison of the Corolla and Model 3 to determine if I actually have a point?

A quick note before we get started: YES, I KNOW THESE ARE VERY DIFFERENT CARS CONCEPTUALLY. But formally, they aren't so divergent. You could electrify the Corolla or gasify the Model 3 and have something of an interchangeable experience.

Read on to see how it went down.

There were two momentous events recently in my household.

The Yankees have been knocking on the door of their first World Series in a decade, holding my wife hostage from her usual TV binging. 

Also, "Fortnite" shut down completely for a day, only to return with a much awaited reboot — "Chapter 2."

You can guess which event my three sons were buzzing about at school and talking about incessantly at home. Which got me thinking: You have the Major League Baseball playoffs, supposedly featuring one of its marquee teams, pulling in about 5 million live viewers a night on the obscure FS1 — and most of those viewers are not young.

And then you have "Fortnite Chapter 2," a veritable Super Bowl of gaming, being served up to potentially 250 million players across the globe. The incredibly popular game, which lets players try and survive a "Hunger Games"-esque battle on a storm-ridden island, literally shut down on Monday for a day and a half. After staring at a black hole on the screen for hours, players were suddenly invited to "Fortnite Chapter 2," essentially a whole new version of the game.

It's hard to ignore 'Fortnite's' potential audience of 250 million

Did all 250 million registered "Fortnite" players jump in on day one? Surely not. But the audience for the rollout this week has undoubtedly been enormous.

Of course, these two "events" are incredibly different in myriad ways. A big one stands out: The MLB games were loaded with ads. "Fortnite" had none.

It's fair to ask, 'So?' Gaming and live televised sports are completely different animals. In this case, it's not apples and oranges, it's apple pie and virtual hand grenades.

And, of course, as big as "Fortnite" is, live sports still generate outrageous rights fees from media companies, along with a still incredibly healthy ad business. You might even say that sports — particularly the NFL — are propping up the network TV model. All is true.

But in watching these MLB games religiously, I thought about how I'd be worried if I were a big ad executive. I can barely beg my three sons to watch five minutes of these Yankees-Astros games. All they want to do is steal my phone and start shooting and flossing.

'Fortnite' is well-suited to young people's short attention spans. Baseball, not so much.

To be fair, my kids are fairly young and may very well grow into Yankee obsessives. But I'm less certain than ever. The games are typified by dozens of pitching changes and strikeouts and mound visits and endless ad breaks. Game 2 of the Yankees-Astros series was super dramatic — and also ended at 1 a.m. on a weekday.

"There is a reason that sports leagues are embracing gambling and fantasy," Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed Partners, said. "It's hard to ask a young person to sit for three or four hours and just watch."

I get it. Baseball is something you grow into. My kids are young. No gambling just yet. 

And other sports are doing fine on TV. Still, if I were a marketer relying on this audience, I would be seeing younger people getting only more distracted.

Which brings me back to "Fortnite." Fans of the game are not the least bit distracted when they play. They're fixated. It's that kind of concentrated obsession brands will kill 99 people on an island to obtain.

And remember, unlike, say, a new "Grand Theft Auto" or "Call of Duty" release, "Fortnite" is free to play. You can buy loads of stuff — the company pulled in $2.5 billion last year in virtual goods and currency, according to Nielsen's SuperData tracking arm. But millions just play for hours and spend no money.

What kind of cash could "Fortnite" maker Epic Games have pulled in if it had run just one or two preroll ads before the "Fortnite Chapter 2" release? What kind of "rating" would that have translated to? It's hard to gauge how big the day-one audience was, since it's nonlinear and non-Nielsen-rated (though the Twitch traffic alone is eye-opening).

Trying just a few ads would be a unique opportunity to help train these freeloading gamers that a few video ads are now part of the deal.

For brands, they'd be building a new high-reach vehicle overnight.

To be sure, there's real risk in any ad overture to gamers, who are a vocal bunch known for their love of ad blockers. A bunch of in-game ad companies came and went about a decade ago, in part because they couldn't get their models right.

The media veteran Patrick Keane, the CEO of the Action Network, said that in-game advertising "feels untapped" but requires caution for gaming companies.

"The battle for consumer attention at any age is getting unrelenting," he said. "Advertisers must determine how to creatively message users in video games, full stop. But they have to ask, 'How can it be noninterruptive and add value to the games?'"

It would be interesting to find out just how interruptive a brand could be. Or could Coke or Pepsi or McDonald's just give every "Fortnite" player a new outfit or weapon just for watching a 15-second ad?

Given what is happening with formerly old reliables, like broadcast networks and traditional sports, marketers need some way to generate big reach.

"It's not just about sports," Greenfield said. "Every brand is having this existential crisis: 'How do I reach my consumers?' The most compelling content is increasingly cut off."

BOTS Act punishing online scalpers passes Senate, moves on to the House

One of the many great things about the Governor of Colorado is that he’s an entrepreneur, having started multiple successful technology companies, including BlueMountainArts.com (acquired by Excite for $800m) and Provide Commerce (IPO, then acquired by Liberty Media for $500m). He’s also a co-founder of Techstars with me, David Cohen, and David Brown.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of Jared Polis’ relatively early new initiatives as Governor is the Colorado Digitial Service.

The founding team includes several entrepreneurial friends along with extremely capable technologists around Colorado. The idea is to do “civic service tours of duty” to rapidly improve a number of citizen-facing applications that millions of Coloradian’s use on a regular basis.

I much prefer this approach, with a highly functional agile team of experts, rather than yet another $100 million contract with a large consulting firm, government contractor, or legacy technology company that will result in a three-year build and deployment of a system that never actually sees the light of day.

If you have deep technical, designer, or application development skills and are interested in a civic tour of duty helping improve the software that Coloradian’s use to interact with our state government, go apply to help out.