I had surgery recently and a few friends, including Chris Moody and Sarah Ahn, gave me some books as gifts. They knew I’d be spending a lot of time on the couch either napping or reading, so my pile of infinite books to read became more abundant with a few good ones including The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates.

While I’ve met Melinda’s husband Bill a few times, but I’ve never spent any time with Melinda. I know plenty of people who know her or work for her and have overlapped with a few organizations that we both support. However, after reading The Moment of Lift, I feel like I now know her. And, she is awesome.

The book is a combination of a memoir, a manifesto, a case study, and a roadmap. While it uses the backdrop of empowering women as the framework, it genuinely addresses how empowering women can change the world.

In the current entrepreneurial climate of “changing the world” and “making a dent in the universe”, this is the first book that I’ve read in a while that really hit home on these issues. I’ve felt discouraged recently by the tenor of the entrepreneurial discussion, where phrases like “changing the world” have become cliches and are really an entrepreneurial proxy for “making a lot of money.” While I don’t object to that, I get tired of the optimistic language as a shield, rationalization, or misdirection for the real underlying motivation.

Melinda turns this on its head in The Moment of Lift. The examples she gives are real examples of changing the world through foundational activities for women, mostly led by women, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She devotes a chapter to each of the following topics:

Buried in the middle of the book is an intensely personal chapter about Melinda’s own journey. Her level of self-awareness, humility, and discovery reinforced her awesomeness, and created my own moment of lift while reading the book.

Melinda, both personally, and through her work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation inspire me. It was a perfect book to read while healing. Thanks Chris and Sarah for the gift.

Accel is, perhaps, not a household name but it has backed some of the most famous and successful entrepreneurs in the world.

It has ploughed money into global successes like Facebook, Supercell, and Spotify over the years. Now, its European arm has just raised a huge new fund of $575 million to hand out to European entrepreneurs across the continent. The new fund will focus on automation, financial technology, and healthcare. Accel aims to be the first institutional investor in startups.

Sonali de Rycker, partner at Accel, has led investments into some of the company's most high-profile partners. She will have heard pitches from celebrity entrepreneurs such as Spotify's Daniel Ek.

She told Business Insider the company prides itself on picking out the "crème de la crème" of startups. That's evidenced by earlier big-name successes, plus rising stars such as UiPath, which is now the most valuable AI company in the world, and UK banking startup Monzo, a beloved challenger to the high street bank. The fund also invested in Deliveroo, the UK food delivery company that just raised funding from Amazon.

De Rycker said Accel takes about 3,000 initial calls or meetings with startups every year, and that whittles down into about 1,000 second calls or meetings. The team then narrows that down further to 50 to 75 companies, and finally chooses to invest in 10 or 15 companies a year. In other words, an entrepreneur who makes initial contact with Accel has a 0.3% chance of being funded.

De Rycker talked to Business Insider about the three qualities that makes entrepreneurs stand out in pitch meetings.

The ability to create a market where there was none

"We like entrepreneurs who can join the dots in a different way, they can see around corners," said De Rycker.

As an example, she points to Spotify, the streaming company which rivals Apple Music and went public last year. Spotify had a radically different view on music consumption and piracy, billing themselves as a competitor to piracy rather than a competitor to physical records.

CEO and cofounder Daniel Ek pushed this narrative hard in the face of criticism that he was undercutting musicians. It's better, he reasoned, that people pay something for Spotify and Spotify pays artists, than people paying nothing at all for pirated, low-quality music. His goal was to make it easier to stream music from a reliable platform than to pirate music and, largely, it worked. Piracy fell thanks to streaming services.

"It's building a company that no one through they needed, the ability to create a market," added De Rycker. "How do you know that? It's just about the way they talk about the industry. You feel, 'Wow, that's so compelling.'"

Maintain humility

De Rycker said Accel also backs entrepreneurs who are capable of leaving their own egos at the door and outsourcing critical decisions to their team.

"The reason I think humility [is important] is it's a foundation for building a company that has a shot at leaving a legacy," she said. "It's about durability. It's important because it's not all about them, it's really about the stakeholders, the team, the culture. How they think about investors and customers, and the way they do it not being about them and their profile."

De Rycker said founders from Nordic startups had a strong culture of humility, where "everyone is accountable to everyone."

She points to Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of gaming company Supercell. Supercell is probably best known for its casual game "Clash of Clans," and the company is an oft-cited example of European tech success.

Paananen, De Rycker said, trusted his team so much that they killed a game that Supercell had worked on for months. "It was so close to meeting their metrics for launching games, but they killed it without calling him," she said. They then came up with "Hay Day," another of its more popular casual mobile games.

Come up with the grand narrative for your startup

Investors really love the grand narrative. When Uber pitched investors, its tagline wasn't just "Order a taxi on demand."

Its original pitchdeck tagline was: "Make transportation as reliable as running water." By the time of its IPO, that had changed to "Igniting opportunity by setting the world in motion."

The grand narratives can sometimes feel overblown — or even untrue in the worst cases — but venture capitalists want to see global ambition in founders. It's that sales pitch which ultimately wins you the funding and the talent you need to grow a successful business, according to De Rycker.

"It's great to be humble, but if you can't get money and great people...you need the ability to tell a good story which is a combination of vision, passion, commitment, all those attributes," she said. "Founders have to do the impossible in every area of the business, from hiring to customers, and to be a phenomenal storyteller."

TikTok is the most downloaded social media app on the planet, surpassing Instagram in 2018 in volume of downloads, according to App Annie.

The company hit one billion downloads last year, charming users with its injection of pure, often surreal entertainment in a social media market beset by humblebragging, polarisation, and misinformation.

The app is similar to Vine, the now-defunct looping video service. TikTok opens into an infinite feed of short videos, usually showing people dancing, lip-syncing, or doing some other choreographed action to music. There is no introduction or explanation, and the videos often border on the extremely weird.

That weirdness seems to have fostered a sense of creative freedom in its users, with videos showing everything from American teens showing off cheerleader-style moves in their bathrooms to wholesome videos showing four generations of moms and dads, to a quirky viral video showing a gummy bear Adele singing "Someone Like You" to a big gummy bear crowd.

TikTok's parent company is a Chinese firm called Bytedance, one of the most valuable private companies in the world. It gained a bigger reach in the West when it acquired another short-form video app, Musical.ly, in 2017.

The app has created a whole new generation of influencers, and they're quite different from the pranksters on YouTube or the highly polished Instagram influencer. They're also highly savvy about the money-making potential on the platform — and they come a lot cheaper than YouTubers.

"It just kept spiking, I was going viral all the time"

Amardeep Singh Dhanjal, aka Magic Singh, is a British magician who has found fame on TikTok with short, entertaining videos showing his capabilities. Each video regularly gets tens of thousands of likes, and his most popular was liked 2.1 million times.

He's almost exclusively famous on TikTok. Though he now has 27,000 subscribers on YouTube, he only experienced an explosion in subscribers six months after joining TikTok, according to SocialBlade analytics.

For the most part, Dhanjal uses social media like any other business — to persuade more people to book him for shows, birthday parties, or other events.

"Perhaps in the last five years I started taking social media a bit more seriously," Dhanjal told Business Insider in an interview. "Facebook, then YouTube, then Instagram, I was just popping up videos for promotion really to get more work. And it was working.

"Then at the beginning of 2019, when TikTok was still called Musical.ly, they got in touch with me via Instagram. I thought it was spam and ignored it — but they got in touch again and asked me to sign up for an account, which I did."

Read more: This futuristic flying taxi startup took a giant leap towards making $70 rides a reality within 6 years

Dhanjal found that interest in his videos spiked. He liked the platform's simplicity, and its focus on setting videos to music. "It just kept spiking, and I was going viral all the time," he said. "It felt like it was the new Vine. Except that it utilises the whole frame of your phone, which is nice, there's music, titles, stickers, lots of fun things. And you can edit videos on the app as well which is cool. There's just more available."

Dhanjal says he is increasingly recognised as "that guy on TikTok," even getting clocked by a Deliveroo rider dropping off a takeaway.

His TikTok channel is a marketing tool, a way for him to drive real-world bookings. As yet, it's not a moneymaker in and of itself. He says he did earn some money when TikTok flew him to Spain as part of a marketing campaign for Sony. He's open to other brand deals if big advertisers come knocking. "I've been focusing on my live shows but definitely, if someone does approach me, I'm up for doing it."

Dhanjal's wife Pavan also happens to be a TikTok star, and equally alive to the commercial opportunities it offers.

TikTok stars Magic Singh and Pavan Henna. Pavan Dhanjal/Amardeep Singh Dhanjal

Pavan Dhanjal, posting on TikTok as PavanHenna, runs henna bars offering henna art services in the style of a brow bar. Her quickfire videos show henna artists painting patterns on people's hands, neck, and even pregnant bellies.

Her main bar is in Selfridges, the upmarket London department store, and she says she often sees TikTok fans visiting the store. What makes TikTok users stand out is that they are younger than the average Selfridges customer.

"The first time was last summer," Pavan Dhanjal told Business Insider. "I had a young girl come to the henna bar, she was 14 and came with her parents. She had henna done — and said that she followed me on TikTok. And I just thought that was amazing, just to be able to drive customers into the henna bar."

TikTok stars don't earn very much yet, but the company is cultivating them carefully

As its popularity in Western markets has grown, TikTok has started playing with pre-roll ads. Scroll past the videos of miming schoolgirls, and ads for casual games and phone wallpapers pop up.

Nico Cary, who runs an influencer agency called Influentially, said it's pretty early days and that it's clear TikTok is slowly developing its ad product.

For now, he said, TikTok influencers come cheaper than YouTube stars, earning around $2,000 to appear at a brand event and to create content around it.

Individual posts come in at about £500. An established YouTuber can earn ten times as much, Cary said. The most influential Instagram stars, celebrities like Kylie Jenner, can earn as much as $1 million per post.

"There isn't much money in the ecosystem," Cary said. "We have done brand deals with companies that can't command too much budget."

Part of the reason is that TikTok is yet to develop sophisticated analytics, which are available to advertisers and influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. "You can see the high-level engagement of likes, but you want to know the demographics of who's seeing posts," added Cary.

He says TikTok cultivates its influencers carefully, not only handpicking them from other platforms but continually talking to them. "They have group chats with influencers," Cary said. "It's different to the other platforms, they're quite involved."

TikTok's London office has a team dedicated to keeping on top of pop culture trends and keeping an eye out for new, potentially popular influencers, as well as keeping the current crop of influencers happy.

As yet, Business Insider understands there are no immediate plans to offer a YouTube-style partner programme where creators can make money from ads.

"We are still a relatively young business, we have launched in the UK in August 2018. At the moment we are focused on building the best possible experience for our users," a spokeswoman told Business Insider.

Why go to the grocery store when you could just go to your computer? Proving, once again, that it really can be your one stop shop for every need you may have is Amazon's Prime Pantry.

It may just be the easiest way to get your kitchen and grocery necessities — particularly those of the boxed variety like cereals, peanut butter, bread, and other packaged goods. As Amazon notes, the service is perfect for getting "snacks, breakfast foods, beverages, beauty and personal care items, and household products."

While there are plenty of other grocery delivery services these days, few have the geographic reach or selection that Amazon can provide, and of course, few are quite as affordable.

If you're considering treating yourself to Prime Pantry in advance (or in honor) of Amazon Prime Day, here's what you'll need to know about using the service.

In order to use Prime Pantry, you'll have to be a Prime member. Signing up is easy — just click this link. You'll get 30 days for free, and if you're hooked by the two-day free shipping, access to Prime Video, and of course, access to Prime Pantry, you'll have to pay $119 per year to continue this membership (or $12.99 per month).

Just head over to the Prime Pantry homepage, where you'll be prompted to try out the service for free for 30 days. After that, you'll be billed $4.99 a month for continued access.

3. Set your delivery zip code.

While Prime Pantry is widely available across the United States, actual items available for purchase vary by location. Be sure to set your delivery location to ensure that the items you want are in stock near you.

4. Start shopping.

After activating your membership, you can start your grocery shopping spree. You'll be able to identify eligible Pantry items, as they're all marked with the Prime Pantry logo beneath their prices. Prime Pantry members are also eligible for special deals, coupons, and promotions not available to other Prime members.

5. Proceed to Checkout.

When you're ready to go, just click "Proceed to Checkout." You'll receive free shipping on any orders over $10 (which is quite easy to reach). If you don't hit this threshold, you'll have to pay a flat $5.99 shipping fee.

If you're interrupted mid-shop, never fear! You can easily save the contents of your order by clicking "Save all Prime Pantry items for later." You'll be able to return to your box whenever you're ready to proceed.

We should note that there is a 45-pound limit to your Prime Pantry box. After all, the service is meant for smaller, more convenient orders. Moreover, given the size and weight of these boxes, Amazon utilizes ground shipping, which means that they could take anywhere from one to four days to arrive. And alas, Prime Pantry does not deliver to dorms.

Ten years ago, a company called UberCab made a splash in San Francisco by letting you hail a car with your smartphone. Since then, the company — now known just as Uber — has spread like wildfire across the globe.

But the road hasn't been easy.

While its valuation continued to climb over the years, Uber has also fought rivals and regulators as it has transformed from a black-car service into a sprawling empire going after the markets for both food delivery and self-driving cars. It has confronted threats from the taxi industry, endured backlash from its drivers and users both, and weathered internal strife and scandal, including the ouster of controversial former CEO Travis Kalanick.

Now, in the wake of Uber's IPO, we take a look at how we got here.

This is an update to a story originally published in 2016.

San Francisco has long dealt with a homelessness crisis, exacerbated in part by the region's technology boom and housing shortage, but a new street count of the city's homeless shows just how bad it's gotten.

An early summary of a one-night tally taken in January cast San Francisco's homeless population at 8,011 — up 17% from two years ago, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A key cause of the increase is a 45% rise in people living out of vehicles in the last two years.

But even the 8,011 count may not tell the whole story.

Federal guidelines are used to calculate these preliminary totals, not city guidelines, which include more nuanced classifications of homelessness, according to the Chronicle. So the actual count will likely be higher — like it was in 2017 when a preliminary street count of 6,858 preceded a more complete total of 7,499.

There were, however, a few positive changes in the preliminary report — the number of homeless veterans decreased by 14% and the number of homeless youths went down by 10%.

Nevertheless, the data is a grim reminder that San Francisco's homelessness problem is not improving, especially at a time when another wave of wealth is expected to soon wash over the city. Multiple tech companies, including ride-sharing giant Uber, are gearing up for their 2019 IPOs, which could potentially result in a widened existing income inequity gap.

San Francisco has drummed up a number of solutions in recent years to battle its homelessness crisis. A bill passed in November, Proposition C, is expected to raise $300 million for homeless programs by raising taxes on tech companies. And plans for a 200-bed homeless shelter is in talks to go up along the city's Embarcadero, angering some nearby neighbors who are protesting its construction.

The state of California as a whole is also grappling with a homelessness problem — 24% of the total homeless population in the US lives in California.

Since being named CEO of Apple in 2011, Tim Cook has made it a point to ensure that Apple leaves its mark on the world in ways that stretch far beyond the company's business practices. Under his leadership, for example, Apple has boosted its sustainability efforts and now runs on 100% renewable energy.

When addressing graduates at Tulane University on Saturday, Cook encouraged students to similarly tackle big-picture problems and consider "what we owe" to one another.

"In a world where we obsessively document our own lives, most of us don't pay nearly enough attention to what we owe one another," Cook said. "It's about recognizing that human civilization began when we realized that we could do more together."

Cook stressed the importance of listening to others and being open to seeing the world in a different way. In what could have been a reference to Facebook, which has been under scrutiny in recent years over how it chooses the information displayed in its News Feed, the Apple CEO urged students to open their eyes.

"Today, certain algorithms pull you toward the things you already know, believe, or like, and they push away everything else," he said. "Push back. It shouldn't be this way. But in 2019 opening your eyes and seeing things in a new way can be a revolutionary act."

Facebook has been criticized for being an echo chamber in the past, especially when the company changed its algorithm in 2016 to focus more closely on updates from friends. That lends itself to the argument that Facebook creates a "filter bubble" in which users are only exposed to the content and ideas that align with their own beliefs.

Apple has notably pursued human curation for its Apple News app.

Cook has been vocal about his stance on the importance of climate change, and he touched on this topic again in his commencement speech, urging graduates to "look for those who have the most to lose" when solving problems.

"When you do that, the political noise dies down and you can feel your feet firmly planted on solid ground," he said. "After all, we don't build monuments to trolls, and we're not going to start now."

Cook admitted that this is something his generation needs to get better at.

"In some important ways, my generation has failed you in this regard," he said. "We spend too much time debating. We've been too focused on the fight and not focused enough on progress."

Watch the video of Cook's full speech below.

When Ivan Mrvoš founded Include in 2014, he had an idea — and not a whole lot else.

The Croatian-born entrepreneur thought there was a market for taking the kind of benches you find in bus stops and city parks and making them "smart" by adding charging stations for tech products and other features. But he was young, with no experience and little money.

"When I started at 19, I didn't know anything about business," Mrvoš, founder and CEO of the Croatian-based manufacturing startup, told Business Insider in a recent interview.

He ended up getting a loan from his grandmother and sold his electric guitar and used the money to produce his first smart bench. He and his nascent company started by making ones with cell phone chargers. The product soon became a hit in Europe. Five years later, Mrvoš and his team at Include, which now has more than 30 employees, has sold more than 1,000 smart benches across 260 cities worldwide.

Include has been upgrading the benches since Mrvoš, now 23, made the first one. Over the years, it's added Wi-Fi hotspots, electric bike chargers, and security cameras that can be used by customers such as city governments and shopping malls. The latest Include benches feature display screens for advertisements.

Include’s latest smart bench, called Monna, comes equipped with a Wi-Fi hub, street light, and a charging station for an electric bike. Include

Include makes money from selling the benches. In the future, it plans to expand its lineup to include bus stops and trash cans that will also be able to display ads. It eventually hopes to make money from selling advertisements and from offering companies access to the software it's built to run and manage ads on its products' displays. Mrvoš envisions creating an advertising network in the physical world that has the reach that Facebook or Google has online today.

He and the Include team recently raised 2 million euros to pursue that goal. The funds came from a combination of private and venture-capital investment, and a crowdfunding campaign on the equity investing platform, Funderbeam. Mrvoš hopes to raise another 2 million euros to close out Include's Series A round.

Read more: Here are the pitch decks that helped hot startups raise millions

Mrvoš said it's critical for founders to show investors their dedication to their projects.

"If you show to investors that you're only in it for easy and really fast money, they're not going to invest," he said. "If you don't invest all of your time, your money, your willingness, everything — if you don't show that you're ready almost to die for this project, then no one is going to invest in it."

Here's the pitch deck that helped Include recently raise 2 million euros:

150 years ago this month, the United States completed one of the most impressive engineering feats of the time (and to this day): a single railroad, connecting sea to shining sea.

In the decades following, American trains — carrying both freight and passengers — would flourish. Railroads shuttled passengers between thriving urban centers, and streetcars criss-crossed towns around the country. By 1916, 98% of all intercity travel took place on rail, according to US Census Bureau statistics.

But by the 1940s, American's insatiable appetite for automobiles had begun to take shape.

Railroads' share of the travel market began to shrink drastically as the government began to incentivize road building and airport investments. And by 1970, the last year that America's rail network was privately controlled in its entirety, the total miles traveled on trains had fallen to less than 100,000.

That's when the federal government stepped in to create what would become known as Amtrak. Here's the history of America's passenger railroad, which has managed to lose money in every single one of the 48 years since its inception.

Lee Edwards, a partner at early-stage venture firm Root Ventures, tweeted Thursday "The 3 B's of venture deals: Barry's, The Battery, and Burning Man."

The mockery was swift, but according to the replies to Edwards' tweet, there was a grain of truth to the first B, which refers to Barry's Bootcamp.

The intense bootcamp-style fitness program was started in Los Angeles in 1998 by fitness trainer Barry Jay, according to the studio's website, because Jay wanted an all-in-one workout that included cardio and weight lifting. Now, Barry's is available in 17 cities across 10 states plus Washington, D.C. The studio also has 10 international locations from Dubai to Stockholm to Melbourne, and has commanded a global following as one of the toughest workouts around.

Barry's studios are also known for the exorbitant cost of classes and branded camouflage gear, its club-like atmosphere, and instructors whose foul-mouthed commands would make a Marine blush.

On its face, Barry's Bootcamp is the Patagonia vest of workouts: it doesn't make a ton of sense to those deemed "outsiders," but for those in the know it's a symbol of rugged toughness and status.

Scroll through Instagram's various Barry's geotags and hashtags and you'll notice that in addition to the expected "fit-fluencer" posts, the page is dotted with tech founders and their teams and other Bay Area notables.

"Data has shown that Founders that opt for double floor tend to focus on short term exits vs. longer term growth, and investors come to take notice" one startup exec joked to Business Insider, referring to the famous "double floor" strength routine at Barry's.

"Furthermore, investors go there looking for signal in the noise of treadmill speed. Early indications show that there is an inverse relationship between treadmill speed and company cash runway," the exec said.

Members of the cult of Barry like to be uncomfortable and to reward themselves with niceties not available at an ordinary CrossFit gym. After a 50-minute burst of activity, many bootcampers report to the "Fuel Bar" for one of the famous $10 protein shakes.

"Exercising at Barry's is very SF - it's super intense and you have a love / hate relationship with it since it's exhausting, but it brings you to a better state and energizes you," said Masha Drokova, founder and general partner at Day One Ventures.

Drokova however prefers something more calm to establish a rapport with founders she works with.

"I haven't taken any meetings at Barry's but I've on occasion brought founders I work with to do yoga with me at Love Story Yoga," she told Business Insider. "It's so fantastic for the body and to clear your mind, and this shared experience brings you closer together since you see each other in vulnerable sweaty environment."

One famous Barry's disciple is Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was spotted working out at San Francisco Barry's the morning before an Aprile court appearance.

Multiple sources suggested to Business Insider that Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive who is now a general partner at VC firm Founders Fund, was the inspiration for Edwards' tweet about Barry's importance in the venture scene. When reached for comment, Rabois responded to Business Insider that "this is a quite ludicrous idea for a post," though he declined to comment on Barry's.

I had to see just how ludicrous Barry's was for myself. So I suited up with San Francisco's finest for Barry's signature Full Body workout, and left with less funding and self-doubt than I started with. Here's what it was like:

Swipe to the left of the home screen on a Pixel phone, and you'll see the Discover page, a collection of news articles and updates tailored to fit your interests. During my time using the Pixel, I was pleasantly suprised at how accurate and specific Google's choices were.

The feed included a mix of everything from technology news about the companies and products I follow the most, to updates on my favorite video games and movies, to local news about my neighborhood. Of course, you can tell Google what kinds of updates you'd like to see in Discover, which helps it surface more accurate results.

Plus, the company has the benefit of leveraging the data stored in your Google account to help it pick personalized content.

Because of all of this, I found myself adding Google's Discover feed to the list of apps and services I check first thing when reaching for my phone in the morning.

Google's Discover is also available on the iPhone and other Android devices through the company's main search app. But having it built into the operating system on the Pixel puts it front and center, making it much more useful.

The iPhone has a somewhat comparable offering — when swiping to the left of the home screen you'll find a customizable stream of widgets that includes your next calendar appointment, suggested apps, news stories, and other updates of your choosing.

While they're similar features, they served different purposes for me. I definitely spent much more time scrolling through Google's Discover panel to get up to speed on the topics I'm most interested in, whereas I'd sometimes glance at Apple's feed to see the weather or how long it would take to get home from work.

California hasn't experienced a major, ground-rupturing earthquake in more than a century.

In 1989, the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake killed 63 people in northern California. In August 2014, a magnitude 6 temblor struck Napa, causing $1 billion in damages. But neither of those quakes split the earth — a seismic litmus test for major earthquakes.

The last time the ground split in California was during a magnitude 6.5 quake in 1918 on the San Jacinto fault. According to a recent study, that's an unprecedented hiatus.

The study, published by the US Geological Survey (USGS) last month, says the earthquake interlude in California over the last 100 years has not occurred at any other time in the last millennium.

"It's certainly kept the system holding its breath," Glenn Biasi, a co-author of the new study, told Business Insider.

This hiatus is unlikely to last much longer, according to scientists. They're just not sure when it will end, and keeping tabs on California's mess of faults is challenging.

The San Andreas Fault runs the length of California. Google Maps/Business Insider

"It's like a game of Russian roulette, except the gun has 100 chambers rather than six, and several dozen guns instead of just one," Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist who was not involved in the study, told Business Insider.

California has an errant history of big quakes

Earthquakes most often occur at the junction of two tectonic plates; those boundaries are called faults.

California sits on multiple faults. There's the San Andreas fault of 1906 San Francisco earthquake fame, the Hayward fault that bisects Oakland, and the San Jacinto fault in eastern LA. As a group, these three faults are responsible for most earthquakes that occur on the boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates.

According to the recent USGS study, between these three faults, there should be three or four ground-rupturing quakes — magnitude 6.5 or greater — every century or so.

Yet the period between 1919 and 2018 has been the only 100-year stretch in the last 1,000 years without any major ground-rupturing earthquakes on those three faults. By contrast, in the period from 1800 to 1918, each of the three big faults experienced an average of one major quake every 16 years.

The study authors even calculated the chance of the current hiatus occurring: just 0.3%.

Read More: Scientists discovered a strange movement under the San Andreas fault — and they warn that the 'Big One' quake is long overdue

According to the LA Times, the Bay Area has only experienced three earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater since San Francisco's 1906 quake (which had a magnitude of 7.8). In the 75 years before that, by contrast, there were 14 seismic events of magnitude 6 or greater. Overall, California has experienced 11 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher since 1995, but the state experienced 32 quakes above that threshold during the 25 years prior to that.

In the Hollywood blockbuster "San Andreas," the ground swallows cars whole. In reality, such earthquake-caused cracks rarely exceed 6 feet in width. Warner Bros / San Andreas

Clearly, something is amiss — but scientists aren't sure what it is.

Scientists can't explain California's earthquake hiatus

The ground-rupturing aspect of quakes is critical for seismologists because when the Earth's surface cracks along a fault, that relieves pressure for the tectonic plates. In the 1906 earthquake, the ground split by almost 18 feet in Marin County, the LA Times reported.

"We know these big faults have to carry most of the [tectonic] motion in California, and sooner or later they have to slip," Biasi said in a press release. "The only questions are how they're going to let go and when."

San Francisco's Marina district after an earthquake struck during game three of the World Series between the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants on October 17, 1989. Otto Greule Jr /Getty

One explanation, Biasi suggested, is that the flurry of earthquakes between 1800 and 1918 just relieved all the pressure along the plate boundary.

"It's possible that among them, they just wrung out — in the sense of wringing out a dishrag — a tremendous amount of energy out the system," he said in the release.

Goldfinger suggested another hypothesis (a more disturbing one): Perhaps the three faults have synced up, so their ruptures and hiatus periods all happen synchronously. Biasi agreed that the faults could very well be acting in concert, since it's "unlikely that each fault experiences a gap at the same time independently," he told Business Insider.

Regardless of the reason for the hiatus, the researchers noted, Californians should be ready for a flurry of ground-shattering earthquakes in the near future.

"If our work is correct, the next century isn't going to be like the last one, but could be more like the century that ended in 1918," Biasi said in the press release.

The East Bay will likely experience an earthquake first

According to Goldfinger, the Hayward fault — which runs along the East Bay — is considered to be long overdue for movement.

"Most earthquake geologists rarely use that language about 'being overdue,' but we all agree," he said.

A 2016 USGS report noted that there's a 30% chance that the Hayward fault will experience a magnitude 6.7 or greater quake within 30 years.

"It has built up all the energy it needs for a future event, so it could happen today, but it could also still wait another couple decades and then just have a somewhat larger event because it took longer," Roland Burgmann, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told KQED last year.

California fire department Urban Search & Rescue teams participate in a mobilization exercise to prepare for earthquakes. Lucy Nicholson

The USGS modeled what would happen if a magnitude 7 earthquake were to occur on the Hayward Fault, with an epicenter just east of Oakland; they call this the "HayWired scenario." The simulation is meant to inform scientists and first responders about potential damages to infrastructure and the challenges of hypothetical search, rescue, and evacuation efforts in the area.

The scenario suggests that East Bay cities like Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, and Hayward would be hardest hit. An estimated 800 deaths and 18,000 nonfatal injuries would result from damage to buildings and structures in the greater Bay Area. The scenario also suggests that 2,500 people would need rescue from collapsed buildings, and more than 22,000 may require rescue from stalled elevators.

In such a situation, estimates of property damages suggest a total of $82 billion, given that the Hayward Fault runs beneath the foundations of more than 300 buildings and other structures.

Both Goldfinger and Biasi agree that California has taken a lot of good steps to prepare for an earthquake. But Goldfinger takes issue with the fact that Californian cities are often left to make plans and decisions about preparedness individually.

"It's probably not a good strategy for something as pervasive as an earthquake to be a local solution and not a state-wide one," he said.

Plus, given the unpredictable nature of California's faults, the next big quake might not even occur along the Hayward Fault at all, Goldfinger added.

"We might have one big earthquake from Mexico to North California," he said. "It's not very likely, but the possibility is there because no one can prove it never happened in the past."