Many people travel through Silicon Valley, either for work or personal reasons. There are hotels and motels to stay in, of course, but there are also more unusual and adventurous options. Airbnb helps you find these options by letting you filter for "unusual stays," such as tree houses, yurts, or tiny houses.

Tiny houses have become popular as a way to live more sustainably and use fewer resources, and also as a way to live more cheaply and save money for other things like travel. Maybe you're thinking about living in a tiny house someday, or maybe you just want to test one out for a night or two. Either way, these 9 Silicon Valley homes are a cool way to experience the area, and tiny living.

Here are 9 tiny houses near Silicon Valley to check out on Airbnb.

The San Francisco Bay area is home to some of the richest people in the world, and therefore, some extravagant real estate.

This home combines iconic design elements with modern amenities. Located in the Berkeley Hills, it was designed by architect Daniel Liebermann and built in 1980.

Liebermann was a protege of celebrity architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the home bears some of his trademarks. For example, the building was clearly inspired by Wright's concept of "organic architecture," meaning that it fits into the landscape and features natural elements that occur in the area, in this case, stone slate fireplaces and wood beams.

This style principle facilitates indoor/outdoor living, which this home has by way of sliding glass walls and cutouts for water features.

Sean Walsh with Compass has the listing.

Scroll through for more photos and details about this home.

Erik Fjellborg was flipping burgers at a McDonald's in Sweden when he saw the hassles a restaurant manager had to deal with managing schedules and shifts.

"Everytime someone wanted to book a shift or swap a shift, the manager had to go back to the back office with this huge telephone list and started to dial around for replacements, which could take hours," he told Business Insider.

Fjellborg was then a high school student with a passion for computers, and his McDonald's stint sparked an idea, software to help businesses manage a workplace better.

He was only 18 when he launched Quinyx in 2005. The startup offers AI-powered cloud software for scheduling, absence management and improving business operations, by analyzing all of its data. Quinyx has now raised $40 million from several venture capital investors, including Battery Ventures, Alfvén & Didrikson, and Zobito.

McDonald's Swedish subsidiary became one of its first customers, and Quinyx also has been embraced by the burger chain in other Nordic countries, Fjellborg said.

"McDonald's was a good starting point for the business," he said. "We still have them as a customer today, which is great."

Quinyx has not been embraced by McDonald's in the US where it based — but that could soon change, Fjellborg said. Last month, Quinyx, which now has 700 customers and 500,000 users mostly in Europe where it has a strong presence, launched its US operations, opening an office in Boston.

"We reached a certain scale in Europe, and it was a good time for us to make this move," he said.

Quinyx is competing in a growing market. The human capital management market is projected to grow from $16.4 billion to $17.9 billion this year, according to IDC.

Gartner's report on the vendors in the space cited Quinyx's focus on businesses in retail, hospitality, transportation, warehousing and health care. Its customers have between 1,000 and 10,000 employees, with its largest customer having more than 40,000.

Moving to the US was a logical next step for the company, Fjellborg said.

"We are setting up operations to take the market opportunity and grow in the most interesting and largest market in the world, he said. "We have an ambition to build a global company, so we have to be in the US market."

Here's the pitch deck Quinyx used to raise $40 million:

Jobs at tech companies are coveted

Career marketplace Hired asked 3,600 tech workers to share who which tech companies they want to work at the most for Hired's 2019 Brand Health Report.

Read more: The 10 most inspiring leaders in tech, according to thousands of tech workers

Here are the 30 tech companies that techies are most keen to work at:

Sea levels could rise more than 3 feet within 80 years. Most warm-water coral reefs are expected to die. The oceans are heating up twice as fast as they were in the early '90s.

These are just some of the worrisome findings detailed in a new report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Read More:Sea levels are projected to rise 3 feet within 80 years, according to a new UN report. Hundreds of millions of people could be displaced.

But two other new reports point out important ways the oceans can help us address the climate crisis.

That research suggests that ocean-based activities have the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 11 billion tons — that's 21% of the reductions needed to keep the planet's temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (the target set in the Paris climate agreement).

The data comes from the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (HLP) — a group of world leaders and scientists — as well as an accompanying paper in the journal Science.

"We outline a 'no-regrets to-do list' of ocean-based climate actions that could be set in motion today," the authors of the study wrote.

One of those actions has to do with our diet: Getting more protein from seafood and less from meat.

The case for eating more seafood

The ship Arctic Sunrise surrounded by ice floes in the ocean near Svalbard, Norway. Christian Aslund/Greenpeace

The IPCC assessment, compiled by more than 100 authors from 36 countries, focused on the state of the world's oceans and its cryosphere — the frozen parts of the planet. The findings revise projections for sea-level rise upwards: If Earth's temperature increases by more than 3 degrees Celsius, the authors found, water levels would be an average of 3 feet higher by the year 2100.

The report "paints a gloomy picture of the impacts of climate change on the ocean, ocean ecosystems and people, and an even more dismal portrayal of what is in store unless we get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions rapidly," Jane Lubchenco, a co-author of the Science study and an HLP advisor, said in a press release.

The solutions Lubchenco and her colleagues highlight fall into five broad categories: producing more ocean-based renewable energy, making the shipping and transport industries carbon-neutral, protecting and restoring ecosystems that sequester carbon dioxide, storing carbon under the seabed, and shifting diets to include more seafood.

"Earth's oceans are not simply a passive victim of climate change, but instead provide a previously unappreciated opportunity to provide solutions towards reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions," the HLP authors said in a press release.

Vendors sort fish and other seafood at a market in Bangkok, Thailand, March 31, 2016. Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

The reason to eat more seafood, according to the report, is that sources of protein from the ocean (like seafood, seaweed, and kelp) can have a substantially lower carbon footprint than meat from land animals. As two of the HLP members — Erna Solberg, the prime minister of Norway, and Tommy Remengesau Jr., the president of Palau — wrote in a CNN opinion piece, consuming more of those can both help make your diet more healthy and sustainable while easing emissions.

Approximately 3 billion people in the world already rely on wild-caught and farmed seafood as their primary source of protein, according to the World Wildlife Organization.

The fishing and aquaculture industries are not wholly carbon-neutral; however, cow, sheep, and poultry farming accounts for 18% of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to The Conversation. That's a larger chunk of emissions than those from ships, planes, trucks, and cars put together.

A study published last month calculated that if every American replaced all beef, chicken, and pork in their diet with a vegetarian option, that would save the equivalent of 280 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. That's roughly the same as taking about 60 million cars off the road.

The potential of ocean-based renewable energy

Power-generating wind turbines at the Amrumbank West offshore wind farm near the island of Amrum, Germany September 4, 2015.Morris Mac Matzen/REUTERS

Even more impactful than dietary changes, however, is harnessing the power of the wind and waves via tidal-energy systems and offshore wind farms, the HLP group said.

Lubchenco and her colleagues say more investment is needed for research and development efforts to increase the number of floating offshore wind farms that could be built farther from shore. They also suggest that countries set clear targets for increasing the use of ocean-based renewable energy by the years 2030 and 2050.

Solberg and Remengesau Jr. told CNN that increasing ocean-based renewable energy could cut nearly 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year by 2050. That's the equivalent of taking over 1 billion cars off the road for a year.

"To win the fight against climate change, we need all hands on deck — on land and sea," they wrote.

The race to the bottom for trading commissions could soon go through the floor.

A former high-frequency trading executive is betting his newly launched investment platform can take on discount brokers and zero-commission stock trading apps like Robinhood by offering a twist on how fees are structured and disclosed to customers. That includes getting paid to trade.

Alan Grujic, who was previously the chief executive of Infinium Securities, a high-frequency trading firm in California, founded San Francisco-based startup All of Us last year with the intention of offering an investment platform with a transparent pricing model that shares some of its overall revenue from non-commission sources with customers. He says it will fully launch in January and has around 100 people on a waitlist to use its product.

"If you did a very large trade with us, you get several dollars back. So you'd literally get money into your account," he told Business Insider.

All of Us wants to base its revenue stream on a maximum 50-basis-point fee on client assets held on the platform. Grujic said under his pricing model he needs to reach $2 billion in assets to reach what he considers scale. He does see a path to that milestone within the first year — although he admits it is an aggressive goal. In an effort to drum up attention, he said the first 10,000 customers will have zero fees whatsoever for the first year.

Grujic said the new platform is targeting users with an average account size of roughly $50,000. He said that potential pool reflects both larger clients from Robinhood and smaller customers from E-Trade and TD Ameritrade.

Read more: The inside story of how Robinhood, a $6 billion investing app for millennials, blew a huge launch so badly that Congress got involved

Grujic, along with chief technology officer Iain Clarke, demoed the project at Finovate, a fintech industry conference in New York this week. He supplied the first $2 million in funding for All of Us, then raised an additional $1 million on a convertible note offering led by Apex Clearing, which offers clearing and custody services for many robos and online brokerages. The platform hopes to raise an additional $1 million before the end of 2019.

The competitive nature of the business was on full display this week. The discount brokerage firm Interactive Brokers said on Thursday it would roll out a commission-free US offering starting in October for US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds. Interactive Brokers' announcement promptly sent shares of Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and E-Trade diving.

Charles Schwab offers clients opening an individual brokerage account 500 commission-free online stock and options trades within two years of signing up. TD Ameritrade offers 500 commission-free online stock, options, and exchange-traded fund trades when a new client deposits $3,000 or more.

And Business Insider reported that JPMorgan's You Invest retail trading platform housed on the Chase website and app has quietly started rolling out options trading to select customers. Options trading fees are $2.95, plus 75 cents per contract. Robinhood launched a zero-commission options trading product in 2017.

You Invest has offered users 100 free stock trades a year, which can also scale up based on account size and level of service they have with Chase.

Read more: JPMorgan is taking aim at apps like Robinhood by quietly rolling out options trading to select You Invest customers

Traditional discount brokers may earn a commission on trades they handle, although that is under pressure industry-wide with apps like Robinhood offering free trades. But brokers can also earn revenue from things like an interest spread on client cash accounts, lending client shares, and from channeling clients' orders through certain traders.

That income amounts to unquoted costs for the customer, Grujic said. And so instead, All of Us would set a maximum fee — 50 basis points — based on the size of a customer's portfolio that reflects all of those kinds of costs.

And All of Us will refund to customers anything that it takes in over that 50-basis-point benchmark. As an example, the fledgling firm says a member with a $100,000 account would generate a maximum of $500 annually for the company, inclusive of the various revenue streams.

"Those revenue streams are fine, but they're hard to understand," Grujic said. "The transaction isn't obvious. You don't pay that, so you don't know that is your revenue stream."

Alan Grujic is the chief executive of All of Us. All of Us

Read more: Meet the 8 key players leading the most innovative tech projects on Wall Street, from massive integrations to building new banks

In particular, selling customers' buy-and-sell orders to sophisticated high-frequency traders, a practice known as payment for order flow, has come into the spotlight. While the practice is completely legal and not uncommon in the space — E-Trade, Schwab and TD Ameritrade all do it — it is not something that is directly reflected in a commission price tag seen by the customer.

Robinhood, which charges no trading fees, in particular has drawn criticism for not fully explaining the practice to users. Payment for order flow was more than 40% of Robinhood's total revenue, Bloomberg has reported. Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev eventually addressed the topic directly via a blog post in October 2018, denying that the practice affects prices and saying Robinhood sells order flow to the firm that is most likely to give you the best execution quality.

Grujic said All of Us plans to reimburse a third of what it generates for selling its order flow directly back to customers, and potentially more later in the year as long as it covers its 50-basis-points fee.

"Everything is becoming free in trading because it actually is something that gets paid for by market-makers," Grujic said. "There is value to that order flow, and it's been monetized. The reason is it's coming down to zero is because there is actually money being made on it."

As firms have pushed to charge less, or nothing at all, they've been forced to lean more heavily on other revenue streams, or create new ones altogether.

"Forget about trying to explain it in detail. Let's post right on our platform how much we make in our customers in revenue," Grujic said.

Read more: 2 senior executives are now out at Charles Schwab as the discount broker prepares to cut 600 jobs

Discount brokers have been under even more pressure as US interest rates fall. Charles Schwab, which has also been making moves to expand advisory services and is set to close its acquisition of USAA next year, is cutting 600 jobs, and that comes on the heels of high-profile exec exits and restructuring first reported by Business Insider. Earlier this month, we reported some more exec departures in its retail arm as those job cuts take hold, as well as the exit of a prominent markets analyst.

TD Ameritrade and E-Trade have seen executive shakeups at the very top, with CEO departures announced within weeks of each other this summer.

Earlier this month, McDonald's concluded a review of its US marketing strategy by assigning lead creative duties to independent agency Wieden and Kennedy.

The move took many in the industry by surprise three years after the world's biggest fast-food brand consolidated work in its most important region with holding company giant Omnicom. But what did the move really mean for the market?

Was it yet another sign of weakness for the Big Six holding companies that control most of the world's ad spend? A strike against the industry narrative that places data over creative quality when determining the value of ad work? Or was McDonald's simply an outlier?

See what the winning agency had to say: Internal memo from McDonald's new ad agency reveals why the world's biggest fast-food chain bucked industry trends to reshape its marketing strategy

Wieden and Kennedy leadership told staff that the decision was a victory for traditional, back-to-basics storytelling. In the note, the agency's copresidents said incumbent We Are Unlimited "forgot the power of creativity (or arguably didn't have much to offer)" and all but dismissed the original pitch, which promised to place data "at the core of everything they did."

Read more about how Omnicom won the account three years ago: Internal documents reveal how ad-holding-company giant Omnicom won the $800 million McDonald's account and used its model to pitch other advertisers

Omnicom promoted its "agency of the future" model back in 2016 by hyping cross-agency integration and "embedded teams" from Google, Facebook, and Twitter along with its ability to turn insights gleaned from social media into promotional content. The holding company framed this approach as unique even though it was similar to offerings from other agencies.

The holding company will fold its once-dedicated division into parent company DDB: McDonald's demanded that Omnicom create an ad agency dedicated to its business. Now that unit will fold.

While the holding company retained the vast majority of its McDonald's business around the world, the loss was significant enough to spark a significant strategic shift. Sources confirmed to Business Insider that the dedicated agency We Are Unlimited, which was founded as a standalone business, will soon become part of parent company DDB.

Check out an insider's view of how the agency-client relationship broke down: McDonald's and its ad agency sparred over a bizarre campaign stunt involving an LP made entirely of bacon. The agency later lost the majority of the account.

Disagreements between agencies and their clients are a daily fact of life in the ad industry. But one particularly crazy instance for McDonald's and Omnicom involved a pitch for a record made entirely of bacon to promote the chain's new "bacon week" deal.

The move could signal a new approach to conflict management for big spenders: Advertisers have long avoided sharing agencies with competitors. McDonald's just abandoned that tradition, and other big brands could follow suit.

The most interesting aspect of the McDonald's shift, according to several industry analysts, is the fact that Wieden and Kennedy will now simultaneously work with rival KFC in a reversal of both chains' exclusivity politices. If this turns into a trend, it could be good news for brands and agencies alike.

For years, Wall Street has been trying to figure out which part of Alphabet's business — beyond Google Search ads — will emerge as its next big money maker.

There's the cloud computing division, gaining momentum, but still a distant third behind market leaders Microsoft and Amazon. And there's the Waymo self-driving car initiative, developing a robotaxi service that could change the way people travel.

But according to a recent note by RBC Capital analyst Mark Mahaney, the Alphabet asset with the most potential to become a revenue machine is Google Maps, the digital mapping product that has already become an essential part of more than one billion people's lives around the world.

Calling Maps one of the "greatest under/un-monetized" online platforms in the world, Mahaney recently flagged the app as his basis for boosting his price target for Alphabet's stock, projecting that Maps will deliver an additional $1.9 billion to $3.6 billion in revenue by 2021.

Although Google does not share its specific revenues from Maps today, Mahaney estimated that the navigation product — first released more than 14 years ago — would generate over $3.5 billion in revenue in 2019. The total revenue for Google's parent company, Alphabet, was over $130 billion in 2018.

The optimism about Google's trusty Maps product comes as newer initiatives face skepticism. Morgan Stanley slashed its estimated valuation of Alphabet's Waymo by 40% last week.

The investment firm said in a research note that it believed Alphabet's self-driving car business was now worth $105 billion, instead of $175 billion, because of Waymo'rs delays and complications launching a commercial business.

Google's 2 apps give it a massive mapping market share

Google Maps, on the other hand, doesn't have question marks surrounding its consumer viability. As Mahaney noted, navigation apps have become "something of a utility," with 77% of smartphone owners using them regularly, according to a study cited in the report.

That widespread usage is good news for Google, as the note also highlighted the company's massive, 80% market share of navigation apps today, which is split between Google Maps (representing 67% of the market, according to the report) and Waze (which represents 12%).

Between Google Maps and Waze, Google owns around 80% of the navigation app market share. RBC

As Google looks to prove that there's diversity in its revenue potential beyond traditional search ads, Mahaney's note should provide a bit of relief to Wall Street. Instead of having to wait years for some of the tech giant's long term bets to start paying off, Mahaney shows that the company can make incremental changes to existing properties — like Maps — and create major upside to its bottom line.

Ads are the major revenue driver for Maps, but there's still room for more.

Today, Maps primarily makes money by selling advertisements to businesses, even though Google has repeatedly said that it doesn't want those ads to distract from its navigation features. Having to toe that line between maximizing profits while maintaining its user experience has forced the Maps team to be creative with its ad formats.

For instance, when a user opens up Maps and sees reference points for nearby businesses, some of those reference points — known internally as "Promoted Pins" — are paid for by businesses themselves.

Google also offers "Local Search Ads" in Maps. Say, for instance, a user wants a haircut and types "barber" into the search bar on Maps. When they do so, a list of nearby barbershops will appear and sometimes, the top result will be a paid ad.

Ads are in Maps, but sometimes can go unnoticed by the user. RBC

Still, Google doesn't seem to be as aggressive as it could be with ads within Maps.

In a study carried out by RBS, the firm found that Local Search Ads on Maps appeared in 48% of searches on desktop, while only 21% of the time on mobile. And since most of Google Maps' usage comes from mobile (90% of total traffic happens on a smartphone, the study claims), Mahaney said the product, "has a long way to further monetization."

Specifically, Mahaney said that if Google increased its Maps ad loads on mobile to levels closer to its desktop product, the company would increase revenues by over $3 billion within the next two years.

Allowing small to medium-sized businesses to advertise on Maps could unlock major revenue.

Mahaney also said beyond increasing the sheer number of ads on mobile, he's been impressed with Google's efforts to expand and diversify its ad offerings.

At this year's Marketing Live event — the company's annual conference for advertisers — Google said it would be opening up Local Search Ads to small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), a segment that Mahaney said "constitutes the majority of advertisers on Google," but previously couldn't advertise on Maps. Google did not say when this option would be available to SMBs beyond that it would be happening "soon," but Mahaney said his team was already starting to see smaller businesses advertising on Maps while conducting their research.

Read more: The Pixel watch that never was: An inside look at how Google's smartwatch efforts beat Apple to the punch, but then broke down and never recovered

Beyond opening up to SMBs, Google also said at Marking Live it would roll out new ad products on Maps. One such product — which Mahaney's team dubbed the "Suggested Stop Ad" — asks users, like the name implies, if they'd like to add a stop along their route for a business that paid for the suggestion.

"Suggested stops will be based on proximity to the route and Google's typical user data-driven recommendations," Mahaney said. "Google's Waze has been experimenting with similar (and more intrusive) navigation-based ad formats since at least early 2018 and this ad format has clearly taken some inspiration from the strategic asset."

"Suggested stops" are a new ad option on Google Maps. RBC

Interestingly, Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013 but kept as a separate app since then, has proven to extremely valuable to Google Maps, Mahaney said, especially when testing new ad formats.

With a smaller user base (90 million versus over one billion for Google Maps), Waze has the freedom to introduce new ad products on more of a whim. If they prove to be a success without distracting from the overall experience, those ad products can be moved over to the Maps mothership.

"In our view, Waze provides Google with a tool to test and iterate on monetizing Navigation without disrupting its much larger Google Maps asset," Mahaney said.

In what was more of a sidenote, Mahaney also touched on the alternative way that Google Maps makes money — allowing businesses to leverage its Maps service via the product's APIs.

Although only ad growth potential was considered in Mahaney's recent upgrade, the RBC director did allude to the growing importance of this particular revenue channel, especially for ridesharing companies. Uber, for instance, recently disclosed that it had paid Google over $50 million to integrate Maps into its apps for drivers and consumers, and Mahaney said he believes that number will only grow over the years.

"Though advertising revenue remains the primary near-term benefit of this asset, we believe the long-term importance of owning Navigation goes far beyond that," he said.

Alpha Medical co-founders Dr. J (left) and Gloria Lau.

What’s next for Peloton? International growth? Doubling down on original content? New hardware? Tell me what to write.

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) September 26, 2019

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Image via Twitter / Kate Clark / @KateClarkTweets