Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Original author: Troy Wolverton

Major tech companies like Apple and Facebook are starting to send some employees back to the office.But public health experts warn that an office is an inherently risky environment for spreading COVID-19. especially as cases in much of the country, including in California, continue to rise.How a workplace will handle COVID-19 in its ranks is often left up to the company. There is little mandate from federal or state governments in how companies should deal with and communicate infections to employees, though there are guidelines.Federal and local health departments recommend employers notify workers who come in contact with an infected person and advise sick and potentially sick employees to stay home. There are no obligations to close offices or tell employees of a confirmed COVID-19 case among staff, should one happen.With so much of the response left up to businesses, the question becomes: What will your company do if someone gets sick?Melissa Perry, a public health researcher at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health, advises employers to be flexible about reopening and to do so on a trial basis. "It makes no sense to get entrenched in the decision to return no matter what, because that's putting people in greater risk," she told Business Insider.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When tech's long-dormant offices begin to reopen their doors to employees, life will look significantly different. Gone will be the heaping self-serve buffets, the on-site massages, and the access to gyms and sleep pods. In their place will be boxed lunches, spaced-out desks, and temperature checks. 

Some companies, like Apple and Facebook, have already begun sending a limited number of employees back, allowing the rest of their workforces to continue working at home.

But with people planning to return to office buildings — where the virus can much more easily spread from person to person — it raises the question: What happens if an employee gets sick?

Right now, guidelines vary slightly by region for what an office has to do. At the moment, there are no mandates for employers to shut down, or even to tell employees that there's been a confirmed COVID-19 case among their colleagues. But as offices begin to reopen in the coming months, it's a question that every business will have to grapple with.

'A very easy route of transmission'

Google's headquarters in New York City. Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

None of the major tech companies have plans to send all employees back to work right away — Twitter's Jack Dorsey has gone as far as to say that employees can work from home forever. Other companies have said workers won't be required back through the end of the year — in Facebook's case, Mark Zuckerberg recently told employees that eventually, as many as half of the company's total employees will likely work from home. Amazon isn't requiring workers return to the office until at least October. 

Still, many major tech companies have already made public their plans for reopening. At Salesforce, the company wrote a 21-page handbook of reopening guidance. CEO Marc Benioff told The New York Times that Salesforce's offices would be more "sterile" and "hospital-like" and that more light-hearted touches like trinkets on desks and "huge jars of gummy bears everywhere" would be eliminated. 

At Apple, which has been operating since May, the company is having employees work from the office only a few days per week and mandating temperature checks and providing optional COVID-19 tests. 

Almost across the board, tech firms are revamping their office designs, separating work stations and closing meeting rooms or other shared workspaces. While these changes mitigate the potential of spreading the coronavirus, they don't eliminate it.

Melissa Perry, a public health researcher at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health, points out that offices are inherently risky when it comes to spreading the virus.

"In the workplace, it only follows that if you're working in close proximity and handling objects and interacting closely with each other, it's a very easy route of transmission for germs, viruses, bacteria," Perry told Business Insider.

The decision to reopen those riskier spaces, Perry said, should be influenced by what's happening locally in terms of virus trends and transmission. In California, for example, the state has seen a recent surge in virus cases, particularly in Southern California. Last Tuesday, the state hit a record high of 9,500 recorded infections, the most on a single day since the start of the pandemic. On Monday, the governor said California would roll back reopening.

That surge in cases led Google, which had planned to start sending employees back July 6, to change its plans. Now, its US offices will stay closed until at least September 7. 

"If you're in a hotspot state, it really sends a strong message that [reopening] is not in the best interest of your workplace and in the best interest of the health of the population of the state," Perry said. 

Working in an office has already proven to be an easy way to spread the virus. In March, nearly half of all employees at a single call center in South Korea tested positive for COVID-19. A seating chart created by the South Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed just how easily the virus spread from person to person in the densely populated open-floor-plan office. 

That's not to mention situations like elevators, which are often unavoidable in high-rise office buildings in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, where many tech companies have headquarters. Elevators could easily spread the virus, especially "if they are crowded and people ride in them for a long time, like a minute or more, several times a day," Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech, recently told Business Insider's Hilary Brueck and Shira Feder.

"The virus needs people to transmit between," Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization's technical lead for COVID-19, said during a press conference in May. "If people are in close contact with one another and you have an infected person, it will transmit to another person through these respiratory droplets."

But with coronavirus cases surging in some states and companies still planning to reopen, the question stops becoming if offices will reopen, and starts to become: What will companies do when offices reopen and someone gets sick?

Representatives for Google and Apple did not respond to multiple requests for comment on their reopening plans. Facebook declined to comment.

An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the employees who can work from home can do so until at least October 2.

"We are working hard and investing significant funds to keep those who choose to come to the office safe through physical distancing, deep cleaning, temperature checks, and the availability of face coverings and hand sanitizer," the spokesperson said.

Guidelines vary by region, but if someone in your office gets sick, there's no mandate to shut down — or to notify employees 

People gather inside painted circles on the grass meant to encourage social distancing at Dolores Park in San Francisco. JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

If a worker contracts COVID-19 once they've returned to the office, employers have to decide how to manage the situation. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that employers alert anyone who may have come into contact with the infected person. But much of the responsibility of how to proceed lies with employers, who must determine who else to inform and how to tell them, what extra safety and cleaning measures to implement in the office, and whether they must shut down their offices completely — if at all.  

In places like the Bay Area, which was the first to issue stay-at-home orders in March, some office reopenings appear to be going forward as planned. Local officials have guidelines in place for offices, both in terms of changes to the physical spaces and how employers should communicate with the employees who return.

But even with these guidelines, a company's mandate for how to react isn't clear. Perry, the public health researcher, urges companies to be flexible with shutting down, but a lot of the decision is left up to company itself. 

Salesforce, for example, has come up with a response plan for what do if any employee tests positive for COVID-19. A company spokesperson told Business Insider that Salesforce would run a manual contact tracing program to determine who the infected person came in contact with, followed by a "hard closing": Every employee in the building will be notified of the positive case and either part or all of the office will be shut down. Salesforce won't allow any employees into the building until it cleans and disinfects the space. 

The spokesperson noted that even once the office reopens, employees will have to complete a daily wellness check in order to return to the office, and workers will still have the option to work remotely until the end of 2020. 

While Salesforce has opted to include an office shut-down in its plans, however, it's not required to by its local health department. In San Francisco, where Salesforce is based, the Department of Public Health has issued guidelines for what employers should do if an employee gets sick. The department advises employers to ask anyone who came into close contact with a person diagnosed with COVID-19 within 48 hours of symptoms developing to stay home for the two weeks following. Others working in the office should monitor themselves for symptoms and the office should be cleaned and disinfected, the department says. 

The department also created a one-page advisory sheet that can be distributed to workers at an office where an employee tests positive.

In New York City, where many Bay Area-based tech companies have offices, there is also no mandate for offices to shut down if an employee tests positive for the virus. The city's health department encourages employers to report a positive COVID-19 test to the city's Test and Trace Corps and to alert employees who came into contact with the infected person that they may have been exposed to the virus.

A quiet Times Square in New York City in July 2020. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

In King County, Washington, where Amazon is based, the health department also doesn't require a reopened office to shut down after a positive COVID-19 test.

"In most cases, you do not need to shut down your facility," the health department advises. "If it has been less than 7 days since the sick employee has been in the facility, close off any areas used for prolonged periods of time by the sick person."

While healthcare and social service businesses should report cases to local officials, other type of businesses don't need to unless they think the virus may be spreading through their workplace. In all cases, employers may not reveal the identity of the infected person under federal law. 

OSHA does not advise employers to close down if a worker becomes infected — instead, OSHA's COVID-19 guidance for workplaces urges isolating a person who shows symptoms of the virus from other employees in a room with closed doors until that worker can be safely removed from the building. Employers should also provide masks to sick employees to help contain the spread of the virus, per OSHA. 

The CDC offers similar guidance, urging employers to isolate sick employees until they can be moved home or to a healthcare provider, but advising that it's unnecessary to shut down. Workplaces should then try to increase air circulation by opening doors and windows and disinfect any areas the infected person might have used. 

Perry, the George Washington public health researcher, said she thinks the best course of action for employers is to reopen their offices on a trial basis, not a permanent one, because organizations need to be flexible about staying open in such a "rapidly evolving situation." 

"It makes no sense to get entrenched in the decision to return no matter what, because that's putting people in greater risk," she said. 

"I'm just hopeful that the workplaces and the business leaders are being as mindful about the things that companies need to do, seeing their role in contributing to preventing further outbreak and further spread," Perry said. "They have a real role to play here, as we all do."

Original author: Avery Hartmans

Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics during the 2008 recession — and sold it a decade later for $3.7 billion.He says the recession was good for AppDynamics, and give the startup focus during a tough economic period. Now Bansal is launching a new cybersecurity startup, Traceable, which searches applications' computer code for security issues.Bansal says persisting while rivals fade, bringing a product quickly to market, and improving the product with customers' is a winning formula.  Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics during the economic downturn of 2008. He thrived in the hard times, and got an offer many would have jumped at in a recession – to sell the company for $350 million. He turned the acquisition offer down, and in 2017 sold the company to Cisco for $3.7 billion (on the eve of AppDynamics' pending IPO, no less). 

Now he's launching a new startup – once again in the middle of a pandemic-besieged economy – with strategy for success in hard times that worked wonders before. 

This week Bansal is launching Traceable, a cybersecurity startup that focuses on apps and the code they use to connect with computer systems via application programming interfaces (APIs). The startup came out of stealth mode Tuesday with a $20 million Series A funding round from Unusual Ventures and BIG Labs, Bansal's own startup incubator. Bansal is joined by Sanjay Nagaraj, a former AppDynamics vice president, as chief technical officer and co-founder.

Why would a wealthy tech success story want to launch another startup during a challenging time? Because he says a recession can be the best thing for a startup — a lesson he learned in 2008.    

"We were a small startup with ten employees, zero revenue, and zero paying customers when  Lehman Brothers collapsed," he says of the failure of the investment banking giant, thought by many to have set off the 2008-2009 recession. The venture capital market froze and some of our competitors started running out of cash and shut down."

But that economic downturn helped his startup, Bansal says. "I actually feel that the recession was a great thing to happen to AppDynamics. It shaped who we were as a company."

Bansal's formula for launching a company at a tough time is to persist as competitors fade during hard times, focus on bringing a simple and effective product to market quickly, and work with customers to make sure the company is effective. Startups in downturns need to be "product-focused, scrappy, super-competitive and customer-obsessed," he says. 

"The primary lesson I have learned is to keep the organization focused on a few key things that matter. We are going to bring the same focused approach here at Traceable, recession or not."

He says his new company uses artificial intelligence to study how computer code is supposed to work in apps and APIs, where they connect to other programs. When a hacker tries to break into a system, Traceable notes the disruption in the code and alerts the company, suggesting a solution. 

"If you're on an online banking website, you don't care about the bank's computer network. You  care about that application that you're using, and whether it's secure," Bansal says. "That depends on the computer code, and it's a huge problem." 

The new startup counts Google's former head of security, Gerhard Eschelbeck, as an advisor. "The broad use of APIs in cloud-native applications has greatly expanded" security vulnerabilities, Eschelbeck says, and "until now, there hasn't been a solution."

What if Traceable blows up the way AppDynamics did? Will he finally take it easy? 

"Hey, I tried to retire," he says of the 2017 sale of AppDynamics. "My wife and I had a list of all the places we wanted to go. For six months we traveled. I got tired of beaches and started itching for a new challenge."  

Original author: Jeff Elder

Netflix, the global leader in streaming TV, is having a moment now that more people are staying home.But it still faces pressure to hold on to its standing as legacy-media and tech rivals pursue their own streaming plays.Business Insider spoke with current and former Netflix employees, as well as industry experts, to identify the 56 most powerful executives leading key growth areas at the company.They include influential execs such as Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos and new Chief Marketing Officer Bozoma Saint John, as well as some less familiar names, like Rochelle King, the vice president of creative production, and Ty Warren, the head of physical production.View Business Insider's exclusive interactive chart below.Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Netflix is having a moment now that more people are staying home.

The streaming-video service's global audience surged to 183 million paid subscribers in March. And Netflix's stock reached new heights in July as evidence from analysts and third-party data pointed to another strong quarter.

That was despite new rivals like Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Apple TV Plus, which dented Netflix's growth last year.

Netflix's past decade of unrivaled subscriber growth and an equally impressive stock climb forced legacy media to take streaming seriously or risk irrelevance and tech titans to vie for a piece of the streaming-TV pie.

By the end of 2020, Comcast, AT&T, and ViacomCBS will have unveiled new streaming strategies to challenge Netflix and keep up with the viewer shifts it spurred.

Business Insider spoke with current and former Netflix employees, as well as industry experts, to identify the 56 most powerful executives leading key growth areas at the company. Netflix has many leaders — not all of whom are included here — but this list gives an inside look at whom to watch in 2020.

Netflix declined to comment on this story.

At the top of the company is CEO Reed Hastings, who cofounded Netflix in 1997 as a hub for online movie rentals, oversaw its move into streaming video 10 years later, and drove the company to become the first truly global TV service.

Hastings' core leadership team includes influential execs like Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, who oversees the company's colossal content budget; Chief Product Officer Greg Peters, who is responsible for every aspect of the platform from its price to the option to turn off autoplay video; and Bozoma Saint John, Netflix's newly appointed chief marketing officer — and its third in the last year — who brings with her experience from Endeavor, Uber, and Apple Music.

There are also execs driving key initiatives within Netflix whose names might not be as familiar as those in its C-suite.

They include Ty Warren, Netflix's head of physical production who is adapting to TV- and film-production stoppages around the world; movie boss Scott Stuber, who is turning the company into a major player in Hollywood; top animation exec Melissa Cobb, who is helping Netflix compete with Disney Plus; creative production lead Rochelle King, who is managing one of the fastest-growing teams at Netflix this year; Vice President of Product Todd Yellin, who is pushing Netflix to evolve entertainment with new formats like "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch"; and Bela Bajaria, who is developing content for crucial international audiences.

Each leader plays their part to get people to spend more time with Netflix, which will be a key factor in keeping viewers around as new platforms launch.

"The real measurement will be time," Hastings said at The New York Times' DealBook conference in November. "How do consumers vote with their evenings?"

This chart is interactive. Click on "core team" to get the full list of names.

This post was last updated on July 14, 2020.

Do you have tips about working at Netflix? Email this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Email for Signal number.

Original author: Ashley Rodriguez and Shayanne Gal

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Peacock is touting 15,000 hours of on-demand content at launch. Peacock NBCUniversal will launch it's new streaming service, Peacock, on July 15 with thousands of hours worth of TV shows, movies, original series, live sports, and news programs.While the basic version of Peacock is available for free, you'll need a Peacock Premium subscription to watch all of the platform's new exclusive shows and movies.Peacock Premium costs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year.Below, we've included a brief synopsis for every Peacock original series and movie you'll find once the service launches on July 15.

After months of anticipation and a three-month early access period, NBCUniversal's ad-supported streaming service, Peacock, is finally ready to launch nationwide. Peacock will be available on July 15 with free, premium, and ad-free subscription tiers. The platform will compete with a growing field of on-demand services that includes the likes of Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Max.

Peacock's catalog includes a mix of new and classic NBC shows, like "Saturday Night Live" and "Parks and Recreation," along with movies from Universal films and live events broadcast by NBC Sports. Premium subscribers will also have access to new shows that are exclusive to Peacock, including an adaptation of the classic novel "Brave New World," and the critically acclaimed British crime drama "The Capture."

How do I watch Peacock original shows and movies?

While a few of the originals will be available for free, you'll need a Peacock Premium subscription to watch the full selection of original series and movies.

Peacock Premium costs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year. People who pre-order a Peacock Premium subscription can get a 40% discount if they sign up for a full year, dropping the annual price to $29.99.

The pre-order discount is available through July 14. Meanwhile, if you already subscribe to Xfinity internet or cable you get Peacock Premium for free with your current subscription.

However, Peacock Premium still has commercials. If you want to watch Peacock Premium without ads, you need to upgrade to the Peacock Premium ad-free plan for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. If you pre-order an annual Peacock Premium ad-free subscription, you can receive a 20% discount on your first year, bringing the price down to $79.99. This promotion will be available through July 14.

Below, you can find every original show and movie available on Peacock:

Original author: Kevin Webb

The Trump administration recently said it's considering placing a ban on TikTok, the viral app with ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance.In the wake of the threatened ban, competing short-video apps — like Dubsmash, Byte, and Triller — have seen an uptick in their download numbers as TikTok users prepare to migrate to other platforms.The situation has also opened a window for tech companies, including YouTube and Instagram, to roll out new formats and features reminiscent of TikTok in the hopes they can eat into the app's dominance. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The imminent threat of TikTok disappearing from the US thanks to the Trump administration's suggestion of a ban has signaled panic among users, and tech companies are taking advantage of the chaos to lure the app's loyal following to their competing platforms.

In just the past week, up-and-coming platforms such as Byte — a product of Vine's cofounder — and Dubsmash, best known for housing the original "Renegade" dance, have risen to the top of app charts. And more established tech giants including Snapchat and YouTube have debuted new features — all which heavily borrow from TikTok's short-form video and scrolling format. 

The day President Trump threatened to ban TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, for what he said was punishment for the coronavirus, competing apps that have historically dwindled in TikTok's mainstream shadow saw their download numbers spike dramatically. Byte saw an 126% jump in downloads on July 8, and took No. 1 on the App Store's charts, after generating an average of 1,000 new downloads a day, according to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. Data provided to Reuters showed noticeable spikes in downloads for Dubsmash, Triller, and Likee. 

Established tech companies no longer see TikTok — with an estimated US userbase at as high as 80 million — as a rising startup, and instead recognize it as a worthy competitor. Big names like Facebook and Google had toyed with creating TikTok competitors in the past, but have only just recently started rolling out viable products. YouTube has started testing its in-app feature for short-form video with a "small group" of people, and developers have discovered Snapchat could be switching out its horizontal swiping motion for TikTok's signature vertical swipe.

Instagram, meanwhile, is currently testing a new TikTok-like format inside of Stories, called Reels, in select countries. Although Reels is not yet available in the US, Instagram told Business Insider it rolled out the feature last week in India — a country that makes up 30% of all TikTok downloads, and where the government recently banned new TikTok downloads amid a border dispute with China.

Although a ban on TikTok in the US may be nothing more than a threat, creators have formulated contingency plans, and are encouraging fans to follow them to other platforms. A timely glitch last week that briefly made video views and like counts reset to zero only added to the panic. 

Since TikTok came to the US in 2018, it's been a dominant force, outperforming US-based apps that have attracted younger audiences, like Snapchat and Instagram. The app has since faced scrutiny over how much access and influence the Chinese government is afforded over user data and content moderation. TikTok has been able to brush off lawmakers' calls for investigations and national security experts' warnings. In June, TikTok appointed a US-based CEO in June to try to distance itself from its Chinese roots.

Original author: Paige Leskin

Earlier this month, Palantir, the secretive data analytics startup confidentially filed for an IPO, which has surprised some outsiders.But Palantir employees are "really itching to go public," said one former employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because workers are sworn to secrecy about company operations when they sign the startup's stringent non-disclosure agreements.Here's why Palantir employees want the company to go public, and why the descent of the coronavirus pandemic might have helped accelerate the IPO time frame. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For 17 years, Palantir brushed off talk of going public, avoiding Silicon Valley's standard script for buzzy tech startups. Now with the coronavirus pandemic roiling the global economy, the company has decided the moment is right for a stock listing.

The timing may seem like a bit of a head scratcher. But according to recently departed employees that Business Insider spoke to, the pressure to go public from inside Palantir has become increasingly difficult for management to ignore — and the changes brought about by the pandemic may have even pushed the situation to the brink.

In company town halls, conducted over Zoom calls after the pandemic began, questions about the status of a potential initial public offering grew louder and more frequent, and there was a palpable sense that employees were growing restless, the sources said.

Employees "would ask a lot of questions about the IPO," and in response, the company said that it was moving the IPO "up kind of considerably," one of the Palantir alums said.

Staffers "are really itching to go public," the same source told Business Insider.

Like other tech companies, Palantir competes for the limited supply of elite engineers who can be snapped up by tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which have much greater resources. One of Palantir's longstanding lures, the former employees said, was extravagant office perks, including fully stocked kitchens, in-house chiropractors, and company happy hours.

Those perks no longer carry the same weight as the pandemic has forced employees to work from their own kitchens and bedrooms.

And Palantir's mystique of being a secretive company isn't as enticing a draw as it was in the company's early days, especially with the company facing protests for some of its work. 

"The whole secret-sexy-tech-company-in-the-shadows brand made people want to work for us for a long time," one of the former employees said. 

Cofounded by Peter Thiel in 2003, Palantir makes technology that crunches through huge and disparate pools of data to find patterns. The company's eager promotion of its data-mining services to government agencies like the Department of Defense and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made it an outsider among its Silicon Valley peers who tout progressive values. 

Earlier this month Palantir said it confidentially filed preliminary paperwork for a stock listing, though it did not specify whether it planned to go public through a traditional initial public offering, or through a direct listing, in which insiders can sell their shares on the open market but the company itself does not raise any money.

While Palantir has for years allowed its employees to sell their shares in the company to private investors, the scope and ease of sales, and the pricing, come with restrictions that employees would not be subject to if the shares were traded openly on the public markets.

Employees have reportedly struggled to sell their shares on secondary markets, according to BuzzFeed. More recently, the company has paid some employee bonuses in restricted stock units (RSUs), as Business Insider's Becky Peterson has reported. Current and former employees can sell their RSUs only after the company exits by going public or getting acquired.

Palantir was valued at $20 billion in a 2015 venture funding round, but the price of shares have decreased since then in private market sales. Earlier this year, secondary shares of the company regularly sold at a valuation between $8 billion and $12 billion, two investors told Business Insider in February.

Original author: Alexander Torres

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy laid out details about what the company looks for in the people it hires and what it expects from employees, during a speech at a recent conference. The company, he said, hires "builders," or people who are hungry to find problems and fix them.Jassy also referred to Amazon's No. 1 leadership principle — customer obsession — and indicated that AWS employees start with trying to imagine what the customer wants and work backward.He also said AWS wants people who take chances and work on new initiatives and that the company needs to be able to "tolerate failure" to help those people thrive.Are you a current or former Amazon Web Services employee? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon's multibillion-dollar cloud business, recently described the traits that make up an Amazon Web Services employees, including a hunger to find problems and fix them, a desire to take chances on new initiatives, and a focus on the customer.

While the coronavirus crisis has prompted cloud competitors such as Microsoft and Google to freeze hiring for certain parts of the business, AWS as recently as late April said it hadn't paused hiring for any roles — although the company hasn't provided an update since.

Speaking recently at an energy-industry conference called CERAWeek, which released a video of the talk on Tuesday, Jassy provided insight into what the company looks for in AWS employees. AWS has yet to respond to a request to provide more information.

Be a 'builder,' or someone who is hungry to find out what's wrong with the customer experience and fix it.

"If you hire people who are content moving slow and operating in an incumbent pace, you will move slow," Jassy said.

AWS wants to hire "builders," he said, explaining that AWS is looking for "those who like to invent, but also those who look at a customer experience and try to figure out what's wrong with it and then have this hunger to change that and to reinvent that."

Jassy has spoken about the idea of "builders" before. During the AWS Summit Online in May, Jassy described builders as people who realize the launch of a new product or services is just the beginning. "Nothing that we build that lasts forever — that's great — actually happens right at launch," he said in May.

Be prepared to think through a 'customer lens.'

Amazon is "unusually focused on customers," Jassy said. The company is well-known for its "customer obsession" mantra. It's No. 1 on the company's list of leadership principles, which it uses to make hiring decisions.

"Leaders start with the customer and work backwards," the principle says. "They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."

As the leadership principle suggests, Jassy said AWS approaches everything it builds by starting with the customer and moving backward. 

"If you sat in our product development meetings you would see that it's almost like the customer sitting at the table," Jassy said. "It's always with a customer lens on it. It's easy to talk about being customer focused and a lot harder to actually execute on that."

Don't be afraid to work on new, risky projects.

Amazon wants employees who take chances and work on new initiatives, Jassy said. It's up to the company to create an environment for that to happen, which he said starts with being able to "tolerate" failure.

"None of us like failure at Amazon," Jassy said. "But if you don't allow people to take chances and have an opportunity, if it doesn't work out, to be able to move on to something great, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: None of the good people work on the new things because it will be too risky."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message her on Twitter @ashannstew, or send her a secure message through Signal at 425-344-8242.

Original author: Ashley Stewart

The biotech Moderna developed a potential coronavirus vaccine in record time, zooming past Big Pharma competitors.Stephane Bancel, the company's CEO, sat down with Business Insider to discuss the technology platform that drove its speed and how the company hopes to pioneer a new way of developing vaccines. "The speed is one dimension, but the piece that excites me the most about this technology is we can do vaccines that cannot be done using traditional technology," Bancel said in an interview.In July, researchers published results from testing Moderna's experimental vaccine in 45 people. The study showed the vaccine generates an immune response that could protect people from the coronavirus, but more research is needed.Now, Moderna is gearing up to test the vaccine in a 30,000-person study that's scheduled to start in July.Here's the inside story of how Moderna went from waiting for the virus to be sequenced to shipping a vaccine in 42 days, available exclusively to BI Prime subscribers.

NORWOOD, Massachusetts — Stephane Bancel was vacationing in the south of France with his family when he first read about the virus.

It was early January when the biotech executive saw a Wall Street Journal article describing a "mystery virus outbreak" in central China. He sent an email about the story to Dr. Barney Graham, the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health. 

Graham said the agency didn't know what the virus was yet. A few days later it did: a novel coronavirus. Bancel asked the NIH leader to let him know when they had the virus' genetic sequence. His company, Moderna, was ready to get to work.

As the virus spread in January and February, about 100 employees at Moderna, about one-tenth of the company's workforce, worked around-the-clock to develop a coronavirus vaccine. The stakes couldn't be higher: the virus has proliferated around the globe, shuttering economies and killing 265,000 people. 

Moderna shipped the first batches of a vaccine to the NIH on February 24, just 42 days after it received the virus' genetic sequence. It will take at least 12 to 18 months to know if Moderna's vaccine — or any others — is safe and effective, though Moderna is working to compress that timeline as much as it can. The company has said the vaccine could be ready for emergency use by this fall.

In July, researchers published the first results from testing the vaccine in people. A small study of 45 healthy volunteers, focused on evaluating the safety of the vaccine, found that the vaccine generated an immune response in all of the participants. Now, Moderna is planning to start a 30,000-person trial to find out if the vaccine works to prevent the coronavirus.

The journey shows how, under the brightest possible spotlight, Moderna is challenging the lengthy and costly process of vaccine development. The company has never before brought a vaccine to market, and a victory would help establish its technology as a new medical innovation and save lives.

This article was published in March and has been updated. Lydia Ramsey contributed reporting.

Original author: Andrew Dunn

PowerPoint is an incredibly useful tool for giving presentations. With the click of a button, you can control how fast or slow you want the slides to progress, and when other extras like music or animation come in. 

However, if it is not your intention to give your presentation live and in person, this fact can be more of a hindrance than a help. If you intended, for example, to email it to your coworkers, or to post it online, it might be more helpful to simply have your PowerPoint be a video that people can press play on and simply sit back and watch.

Luckily, this is something that the Microsoft Office team has already thought of, and they make it just as easy to save your PowerPoint as a video as it is to save it regularly. 

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Microsoft Office (From $149.99 at Best Buy)

Microsoft Office 365 (From $69.99 at Best Buy)

How to save your PowerPoint as a video

1. First, save your presentation to be sure that all of your most recent work is reflected in the most current file for your presentation.

2. From the main menu, click "File," then click "Export" on the left hand side.

3. In the "Export" menu, select "Create a Video."

Original author: Melanie Weir

TikTok has more than doubled its employee headcount in the first five months of 2020, according to data compiled by LinkedIn.While the short-form video app has recently faced increased scrutiny from politicians in the US and abroad, its user base continues to grow rapidly. The company is staffing up its business development team this year, adding 483% more employees in business functions over the last 12 months, according to LinkedIn's analysis.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

TikTok has sparked controversy in recent weeks. The app was blocked in India and faces a potential ban in the US due to privacy and security concerns tied to its owner, China-based ByteDance.

But the app's primary user base doesn't seem to mind.

TikTok has continued to explode in popularity this year, setting a global downloads record in the first quarter. And based on data from a sample of Android users, the analytics firm SimilarWeb estimates the app's number of daily active users in the US is up 8.3% this month from June.

The company has also been accelerating its hiring — including poaching Disney's former head of streaming services Kevin Mayer — as it looks to make money off its fast-growing user base.

TikTok has more than doubled its global employee head count this year, according to data compiled on July 2 by LinkedIn. The company's headcount hit 4,413 employees in June 2020, up from 1,824 in December 2019. Its parent company ByteDance more than tripled its employee count in the US between June 2019 and June 2020, the company told Reuters.

Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

One area that the company is focusing on when adding employees is its global business solutions team, which focuses on roles that TikTok needs to earn revenue — namely sales and marketing jobs. The number of employees at TikTok focused on business development has jumped 483% over the past year, according to LinkedIn's analysis. Marketing was the company's second fastest-growing employee category, with marketing hires rising 143% over the past year. 

"We're growing really quickly," Kate Barney, the head of HR for TikTok America's global business solutions team, told Business Insider last month. "There's a ton to do, and we're looking for people who are going to dive in headfirst like the rest of us have."

The company has hundreds of current job openings for roles in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin, where it recently opened a new office.

"The center of this global business team is in New York, but we also hire in Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Toronto," Barney said.

One of the first things TikTok's recruiting team screens for is whether applicants have actually carefully read through a job description.

"I think as a tip for candidates, it's really to do their homework," she said. "We post the roles that are open, so read that role that you're applying to, and see if you can find anybody else on LinkedIn or anywhere who's doing that role now, and ask them about their experience."

Read more tips on how to get a job at TikTok from Business Insider's interview with Barney here:

A TikTok HR exec breaks down how to get a job at the tech company, from landing an interview to demonstrating 'ByteStyle'

Original author: Dan Whateley

"PSYC 240: Designing for the 2 Billion Leading Innovation in Mental Health" and its follow-up course "PSYC 242: Mental Health Innovation Studio: Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Policy" are the first university courses on mental health innovation. The courses, led by the Stanford Brainstorm Lab in the School of Medicine, were designed to empower students to tackle contemporary challenges related to the US mental health crisis with innovative solutions through curiosity, creativity, and strategy.Students and staff told Business Insider the course is a combination of studying the nuances of mental health, learning from innovators, CEOs, and practitioners in the space, and coming up with your own idea for a startup company or product.The classes have bred leaders like Ariela Safira — founder of women's mental health studio and digital platform Real, which raised $3.5 million in funding — and Max Savage, founder of Altas Mental Health, a wellness journaling app funded by Sequoia Capital Scouts and Kleiner Perkins.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Over 47 million adults in the United States reported having a mental illness between 2017 and 2018, and of that 47 million, about 11 million reported having serious mental disorders. 

In a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly half (45%) of adults reported that their mental health has been negatively influenced by stress and worry around the coronavirus. 

There's no doubt that the pandemic is catalyzing a mental health crisis — and low clinician-to-patient ratios, varying levels of stigma, late diagnoses, increased costs, and more prevent traditional healthcare systems from tackling this issue effectively. 

That's why the Stanford Brainstorm Lab at Stanford's School of Medicine created "PSYC 240: Designing for the 2 Billion Leading Innovation in Mental Health" and "PSYC 242: Mental Health Innovation Studio: Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Policy" in 2017 and 2020 respectively. The sister courses are designed to equip the next generation of entrepreneurs with the skills and strategies to create companies, tools, and technologies to improve mental healthcare. 

These are the first ever university courses on mental health innovation, covering the fundamentals of patient challenges and needs, the healthcare system, and human-centered product design.

The course is spearheaded by faculty from Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, the world's first academic laboratory dedicated to transforming mental health through innovation and entrepreneurship, and taught by four psychiatrists and experts of mental health technology and innovation: Dr. Nina Vasan, Dr. Gowri Aragam, Dr. Neha Chaudhary, and Dr. Steven Chan. 

Students brainstorming. Nina Vasan/Brainstorm Lab

In the course, faculty highlight that different communities need different levels of care, the diversity of biological, psychological, and social issues that people can face, and how to meet people where they are by personalizing treatment and delivery needs. At the end of the course, students have a final assessment where they have to pitch their company idea and business plan to a "Shark Tank"-style panel of industry leaders and course instructors.

"In speaking with students as well as startup CEOs, engineers, investors, and other stakeholders who were a part of early-stage ventures, we saw that there was a lot of passion to improve mental health, but most people did not have the exposure to mental healthcare to understand the nuances of the patient experience or the healthcare system. As a result, they were building products that were not addressing the right problem in the right way, and ultimately were not leading to changes in patient outcomes," Vasan, founder and executive director of Stanford Brainstorm, said.

The teachings of this course have driven student-led companies with over millions of dollars in funding, such as women's mental health studio and digital platform Real — which is funded by the Female Founders Fund — by Ariela Safira, class of 2017.

"As a clinician, Dr. Vasan validating me to start a mental healthcare company inspired me to think far bigger than an app or an Apple Watch feature," Safira told Business Insider. "I realized I could evolve mental healthcare by building in-person and virtual therapy clinics, hiring clinicians, and reinventing both training and therapy."

Who's eligible to take the course

Stanford students from all academic disciplines as well as entrepreneurs, engineers, and venture capitalists from the Bay Area are welcome to take this quarter-long course. Non-Stanford affiliates have to apply for a permit to attend and pay the Permit to Attend tuition fee, currently listed at $5,291 for this class.

Guest speaker Set Shakur, president of the Tupac Shakur Foundation. Steven Chan/Brainstorm Lab During the course, student teams are assigned a challenge or problem to solve, such as "How might we improve access and engagement to mental healthcare in racial/ethnic minority populations?" "How might we increase adoption of innovative mental health tech in hospital systems and among doctors?" "How might we detect, prevent, and protect against suicide in veterans?" and "How might we help women get perinatal mental health treatment while integrating back into the workforce?" The teams are then paired with Stanford faculty members who served as mentors and advisors for their project, and each team is required to have members from different graduate programs or undergraduate majors to facilitate the interdisciplinary thinking and problem solving that's the foundation for the Stanford Brainstorm framework. 

PSYC 240 handles the nuances of the mental healthcare industry 

Studying mental health requires looking outside the bounds of the traditional healthcare system, Aragam, course director and Stanford Brainstorm's director of education, said. 

"Unlike other fields of medicine where you can rely on lab values or purely objective data to define your targets, you can't see and feel mental health in the same way," Chaudhary, an instructor and Stanford Brainstorm's chief research officer, added. "Many mental health startups end up failing because of this lack of a clear understanding of the problem in mental health."

Dr. Vasan and Dr. Aragam work with students. Steven Chan/Brainstorm Lab

Chaudhary emphasized the importance of learning from other innovator's mistakes as they designed this part of the course.

"Many innovators start by targeting the wrong customer," Chaudhary said. "Here, the end user is not always the customer. We've seen interventions for kids that may not be used or bought by healthcare providers or even parents, but that may be bought by schools or even health plans who are invested in early intervention to keep later costs down and improve outcomes."

After extensive internal market research and experience consulting for mental health startups, the Brainstorm team saw that mental health products created by actual clinicians themselves may be backed by scientific rigor, but lack understanding of effective product design and delivery and have unsustainable business models. Meanwhile, business and tech innovators that create mental health products generally have compelling designs that attract and engage consumers, but lack scientific rigor and an understanding of the problems that need to be solved.

"We wanted to make sure our students knew the nuts, bolts, and nuances of what it means to be mentally and emotionally healthy straight from the perspective of psychiatrists — before they started to build," Chaudhary said. "We walked them through what the mental health system looks like, who the stakeholders are, and what the illnesses and their solutions look like clinically. We then illustrated how this information could be applied beyond the healthcare system, especially using innovative tools."

Max Savage, class of 2017, took the course, which provided him a foundation for his mental health startup, Altas Mental Health, a wellness journaling app funded by Sequoia Capital Scouts, Kleiner Perkins, Reach Capital, UP2398, and a number of others. Since publicly launching the app this March, they've been able to support over 75 schools across the country for free through their Stand with Schools Initiative, as millions of teens are struggling to adjust to school closures and the uncertainty of COVID-19.

"At the time, mental health tech was like the Wild West, an open frontier that offered the chance to provide real social impact in a space of great need. To this day, it's still a tricky space," said Savage. He added, "PSYC 240 helped 21-year-old me see a lot of things that worked and a lot of things that didn't work, which helped us better position our company to play in a space that maximizes social impact and financial viability."

And combines that with tech innovation

PSYC 240 brings in industry experts so that students can learn about the successes of other initiatives while designing their product. Guest lecturers have included Tom Insel, founder and president of Mindstrong Health, Set Shakur, president of the Tupac Shakur Foundation, Antigone Davis, global head of user safety at Facebook, and Dennis Boyle, health lead at IDEO. 

Guest speaker Tom Insel with students. Steven Chan/Brainstorm Lab

Anika Sinha, a junior at Stanford University, said that Dennis Boyle was her favorite guest speaker and introduced her to the concept of design thinking. Boyle led the class through a five-minute brainstorming sessions where, in groups, they wrote ideas on a sticky note to solve a particular mental health issue and then shared what they came up with as a team.

Dennis Boyle with students. Nina Vasan/Brainstorm Lab

Anika Sinha's group proposed to change the algorithm of the "explore" page on Instagram to not be so tailored to an individual's searches or hashtags. If these images promote poor body image, they can create a negative feedback loop for a user who may suffer from or be at risk of developing an eating disorder. 

So, her team suggested that there can be more body-positive posts promoted to counteract the harmful searches someone with an eating disorder might engage in. Her proposed product later entailed the The Healthy Student Body Initiative, a program that enhances students' access to scientifically-valid educational information on eating disorders and available resources and reduces the friction involved in accessing the appropriate level of care. 

"Design thinking helped us design our project because it pushed us to think of the missing links in eating disorder apps," she said. "We wanted to create something geared toward college students, given the much higher rates of eating disorders within adolescents and athletes."

Anika Sinha (right wearing black) brainstorming with group and Dennis Boyle. Steven Chan/Brainstorm Lab

Faculty of the course believe that technology has the potential to disrupt the current healthcare system and more effectively tackle the modern mental health crisis.

"If you look at the current mental health system, much of it was built in pieces based on a variety of things like the year's legislation, local preferences, and available humanpower," said Chan, a course instructor of PSYC 240 and faculty affiliate of Stanford Brainstorm.  "And a big criticism of the field of behavioral health is the difficulty in navigating this 'system.' Harnessing engineering talent and connected technologies would ease access and approachability issues for mental health."

Original author: Anika Nayak

Amazon is launching 20 healthcare clinics in five US cities as part of a pilot program for warehouse workers and their families.The first is now open in Dallas-Fort Worth, and the rest will roll out in Phoenix, Louisville, Detroit, and California's San Bernardino-Moreno Valley area in the few months, according to the company.The clinics were in the works before the pandemic and will not offer testing or care related to COVID-19, a company spokesperson told Business Insider.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Amazon is rolling out 20 healthcare clinics for the company's warehouse workers and their families in five US cities, according to a blog post published Tuesday.

As CNBC reports, the clinics' services will include preventive primary care, prescription medications, and vaccinations. They will be operated by Crossover Health, a startup that has run onsite clinics for the likes of Apple, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The company announced that the pilot program will launch its first clinic in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, where more than 20,000 Amazon employees reside. Of those, 11,000 are operation employees, according to the company. The rest of the pilot clinics will be established in Phoenix, Louisville, Detroit, and California's San Bernardino-Moreno Valley area in the next few months.

The program has been in the works since before the pandemic, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. The clinics will not offer testing or care related to the coronavirus disease.

If the clinics — which will be situated close to fulfillment centers and operations facilities — are successful, the company will look into a wider rollout in 2021.

The new program comes after the e-commerce giant last October launched a pilot program called Amazon Care, which included video and text visits with clinicians, as well as in-home care, for employees in Seattle. 

Employees have called Amazon's warehouses a "breeding ground" for the coronavirus disease as social distancing proves difficult in such environments, according to a Business Insider report in April. The employees also said that Amazon was not doing enough to help prevent COVID-19 from infecting them and the communities they serve.

In early June, CNBC reported the company was aiming to test the majority of its warehouse workers for the disease every other week. Amazon has said it expects to spend $1 billion in employee testing in 2020.

Original author: Katie Canales

An Egyptian mechanical engineer created a robot that can test patients for COVID-19.The robot is remote-controlled by a health professional, reducing the risk of transmission.Robots have been used in fighting the coronavirus around the world.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A robot that looks straight out of the uncanny valley is performing coronavirus tests in Egypt.

Twenty-six-year-old mechanical engineer Mahmoud El Komy created  remote-controlled robot is being used in Cairo, Egypt to collect samples for testing.

Measures like this robot could reduce the risk of transmission for medical providers, who have to get very close to people who potentially have infectious diseases.

Robots have increasingly been put to use since COVID-19 spread around the world. A team of doctors and researchers in Korea recently developed a remote-controlled robot that can take nasal swabs for COVID-19 tests.

In Boston, Spot robots were used to screen patients remotely, using iPads so doctors could talk to and visually assess them. In India and other countries, robots have been tasked with screening patients using thermal temperature guns, picking out people with fevers as potential COVID-19 patients.

Original author: Mary Meisenzahl

NOW WATCH:

Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton

In March, Google announced it would move its summer internship online in response to the pandemic. It's since confirmed it's doing the same for its fall program.That's meant a lot of logistical headaches for the company. Kyle Ewing, Google's head of talent, told Business Insider how Google adapted to the new virtual format.From algorithm-based coffee chats to open-source programs, here are some of the ways Google has tried to adapt its internship for 2020.Its fall internship will still go ahead remotely, but with a reduction in numbers.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In March, when Google responded to the pandemic by moving its workforce remote, it wasn't just employees who had concerns. Thousands of students from around the world had landed spots on Google's coveted summer internship program, and were planning to descend on its Mountain View headquarters – and other offices – in a matter of weeks.

There was suddenly a big question mark over whether Google's intern program, which had been running since 1999, would go ahead at all.

But in late March, Business Insider first reported that Google's summer internship, which runs from May until August, was moving to an entirely online format.

Then it had to figure out how it would actually work.

"Even though hindsight is 20-20, it was definitely the right call," said Kyle Ewing, Google's head of talent, who oversees Google's intern onboarding each year. 

These problems went beyond logistical headaches like shipping thousands of laptops across the world or ensuring mentors were matched with interns on the same time zone.

It also meant ensuring everyone got the same exposure to company culture, access to other employees, and the chance to put their stamp on Google products.

"Historically one of the more valuable aspects of being an intern is physically being located next to your mentor and your host and your colleagues," said Ewing. "We knew immediately it would be quite difficult, and we couldn't replicate that."

Replacing the "micro moments"

So Google tried to adapt. For example, it built a new platform for connecting interns with hosts for "coffee chats" so they could connect with Google employees.

"We used this algorithm that would help match interns with Googlers they would have otherwise not have interacted with throughout the summer," said Ewing. The program factors in "anything from your professional interests, your technical interests, or your hiking interest interests" to match interns to likeminded Googlers, said Ewing.

"You do miss the benefit of standing in the lunch line and talking with someone. You miss those micro moments."

It also made its mentor program – where interns are paired with Googlers who aren't their hosts or managers to gain insight into the company – mandatory. "It was historically more of an opt-in type program, which not everyone took advantage of, and this year everyone is matched with a mentor," said Ewing.

And in another first for Google, it shifted many of its technical internship roles to open-source projects. Several interns who spoke to Business Insider said they had been moved into these open-source programs, which meant Google didn't have to cancel those programs entirely – and reduced some of the associated risks of granting thousands of people access to the company's corporate programs.

"It was a really important part of the dialogue when pivoting to virtual that students will continue to work on the real things that have real impact, and that can help us assess if they're someone who's interested in being at Google," said Ewing.

And, naturally, interns still got the signature Google hat. Just this time, it came in the mail.

'We decided we would run a smaller fall internship'

But the process hasn't been entirely smooth. Some interns who had been accepted on Google's UX programs told Business Insider their offers were rescinded after the pandemic hit.

And in April, international interns who would have been traveling to Mountain View were told that their compensation was being cut by as much as 50% to bring it in line with their local currencies.

Ewing wouldn't say how many interns Google has brought aboard this summer, but said it was in the "thousands" with interns from across 43 countries. Last year, the company said it received more than 125,000 applications for the summer program.

She also confirmed that, although Google has moved its fall internship online too, it has reduced the number of interns. 

"We decided we would run a smaller fall internship" said Ewing, who added there would "probably a couple of hundred" fewer interns than usual.

"It will be a little smaller because we're just being a bit more cautious," she said.

Are you a Google insider with insight to share? You can contact this reporter securely using encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 628-228-1836) or encrypted email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

Original author: Hugh Langley

Hello everyone! Welcome to this weekly roundup of Business Insider stories from executive editor Matt Turner. Please subscribe to Business Insider here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Sunday.

Index Ventures; Fast; Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Hello!

One-click checkout startup Fast raised $20 million from investors including Index Ventures and fintech Stripe in May. On Tuesday Fast's cofounder and CEO Domm Holland, and Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Ventures, will chat with Shannen Balogh about how to build a pitch deck, and what it takes to win over investors. Sign up for the digital event here:

SIGN UP NOW: On Tuesday we're talking to Fast CEO Domm Holland about how he crafted the perfect pitch to raise $20 million from top investors

Separately:

You can now get the top healthcare stories delivered daily to your inbox. Sign up here. Starting this week, you can get the top stories in advertising and media delivered daily to your inbox. Sign up here. 

Read on for more on Jeffrey Epstein's little black book, Gen Z day traders, an energy CEO who may face charges for pulling a gun, and the top stories you might have missed.

Jeffrey Epstein's little black book

Samir Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images; Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images; Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images; Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images; Robin Marchant/WireImage; Bennett Raglin/WireImage; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images; Alexander Koerner/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider

There are more than 1,500 people listed in Jeffrey Epstein's infamous little black book, Angela Wang reported this week. Now you can search them all. From her story:

Among them are royalty and nobility, celebrities and academics, art collectors and hedge funders, politicians and heads of state: a motley compendium of global high society.

Business Insider has transcribed and tabulated the black book in its entirety, making the entries in the late sex offender's notorious Rolodex fully searchable for the first time.

You can search Business Insider's database right here:

There are 1,510 people in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book. Now you can search them all for the first time.

Angela also compiled a dataset of every known flight made by Jeffrey Epstein's private jets. Per her story, the sex offender owned a Gulfstream IV, a Gulfstream GV-SP, and a Boeing 727 nicknamed the "Lolita Express." 

We compiled every known flight made by Jeffrey Epstein's fleet of private planes. Search them all for the first time.

Gen Z day traders

Original author: Matt Turner

Signalwire, which makes APIs and open source software for online communication, is releasing a new video conferencing platform that's meant to replicate an office environment in a virtual setting. Cantina runs in a browser and gives users the option to end-to-end encrypt meetings. It also has standing meeting rooms people can pop into to recreate the feeling of being in an office. Signalwire cofounders Anthony Minessale and Sean Heiney originally built it as an internal tool and released it publicly because of the coronavirus pandemic.Click here for more BI Prime stories. 

Anthony Minessale and Sean Heiney have been working together to create better video communication tools for the last decade. After meeting through Minessale's open-source communication project FreeSWITCH, they cofounded a video API startup, SignalWire, which is now launching a new video conferencing platform that they say works better than competitors like Zoom.

The app, called Cantina, is meant to replicate an office environment in a virtual setting and has the ability to host calls that are end-to-end encrypted, a technology feature that few video communications tools currently have. 

It started as a tool for internal use: Signalwire built it because, as a fully remote company, it wasn't satisfied with other options on the market. When team-members would use it for sales calls, they would always get questions from customers about where to get the tool. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Minessale and Heiney realized that the now-remote world needed a video communication system that could better mimic real-life, and decided to launch it publicly. 

"We basically just mandated that we would get a prototype done as fast as possible to demonstrate all the functionality that SignalWire has to offer," Minessale told Business Insider. 

With Cantina, users can host video calls and webinars for thousands of people, similar to Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, it has a unique overall philosophy for its users: More than solving the technical problems of communication tools, Cantina aims to solve some of the social problems that occur when everyone is working remotely, Heiney said. 

Companies can set up static virtual rooms that employees can drop in and out of to replicate the feeling of a shared office space, and it's all run out of a "command center" that all employees can see. The app runs in a web browser on desktop or mobile, no downloads needed.

"There's certain things that are lost in that office environment and we've done things to mitigate some of that, like the informal water cooler chatter is valuable sometimes," Heiney said. "We've worked through a lot of that over the last couple of years with some real features and functions around that, that make this a real remote work environment replacement." 

Signalwire's Cantina tool has a "command center" so employees can walk into preset meetings rooms at any time, as they would in an office. Signalwire

What led Minessale and Heiney to Cantina  

The process started in 2005 when Minessale created an open source project called FreeSWITCH which was a platform for online communications. Many well known companies, including Netflix, Amazon, and Vonage, used its open source code to build various communications systems like customer service or internal chat tools, Signalwire COO Heiney said. 

"It's literally been at the heart of the communications revolution of the digital era," he said. "Billions of dollars of value has been built upon it." 

Eventually, Minessale realized that he could build a formal business around the technology he had created. Companies that were using the code often came to him to ask for new features, or because they had run into issues when trying to scale it to meet the needs of a massive organization. That's when Minessale and Heiney created Signalwire, to sell application programming interfaces — APIs — for voice, video, and text communication, alongside FreeSWITCH's open source platform. 

Signalwire raised $11.5 million in Series A funding in 2019, and its backers include Storm Ventures, Samsung NEXT and Sequoia Capital and executives like Eric Yuan from Zoom and Jerry Yang from Yahoo. 

Signalwire's cofounders (L to R) Sean Heiney, Anthony Minessale, and Evan McGee SignalWire

How Signalwire will sell Cantina

Signalwire has 250 customers trying out the new video conferencing service, and will soon start selling it outright. It just hired a new VP of business development and global channels — former Barracude exec Ezra Hookano — to help with its sales strategy of selling through IT reseller partners.

The company is still deciding pricing for Cantina but Heiney said it will give customers a 30 day free trial, and then charge based on the total number of users, versus on a per user basis. 

Beyond replicating aspects of in-office interaction, Cantina has a security-first mindset and flexibility that will differentiate it from competitors, he said. 

"We were always designed with data privacy in mind from inception," Heiney said. "So we're not subject to the same kind of problems historically faced with some of the other vendors."

Signalwire runs its APIs and software in almost every available public cloud, and can adapt quickly to the specific needs of companies. For example, a customer in Bahrain requires all its data to stay within the country at all times, so for that customer Signalwire runs only in data centers in Bahrain. 

Cantina also gives users the open to end-to-end encrypt their calls. However, if they want a call recorded or transcribed then it can't be encrypted, Minessale said, because there's a third party involved. Calls between individuals can be end-to-end encrypted though.

This is similar to the model Zoom settled on for its encryption plans. Zoom was originally criticized for marketing itself as fully encrypted when it wasn't, and then faced an additional backlash for its initial plans to only give encryption to paid users.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Signal at 925-364-4258. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Original author: Paayal Zaveri

Secondary passports are in high demand as the coronavirus pandemic causes travel restrictions around the world.In the Caribbean, some nations are offering steep discounts to bring in extra revenue amid a cash crunch. Passport buying has shifted from simple vacations to riding out the virus, experts say. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Caribbean island countries have long offered passports to wealthy foreigners in exchange for a — sometimes steep — monetary investment, but facing a cash crunch and a surge in interest, there are deals to be had.

Through December 1, the island nation Saint Kitts and Nevis is selling a four-person family package for $150,000 — down from $190,000, in exchange for a minimum real-estate purchase of $200,000 that must be held for at least seven years.

The Caribbean country's passport ranks roughly in line with Mexico's, according to the world Passport Index. And, perhaps more intriguing for Americans currently barred from Europe, the passport's good for visa-less travel to the European Union and the UK, among others.

"In these days of Covid, when tourism is not happening, we have to find ways to create revenue to sustain our economy," Les Khan, CEO of Saint Kitts and Nevis Citizenship Investment Unit, told Bloomberg News.

Other island nations in the region — including Saint Lucia, Antigua & Barbuda, Grenada, and Dominica — all offer similar programs, some at a new discount, as they hope to cash in on the increased interest ,too. According to Henley & Partners, a London-based passport broker and "identity management" firm, there's been a 42% uptick in citizenship applications. What's more, the US currently has a 1.5 million-passport backlog in its processing queue because of the pandemic. 

Anyone hoping for easier travel to the United States, however, can expect to pay a lot more. Malta, whose passport power ranks just under Italy, Canada, and Norway in terms of travel, will sell you citizenship that includes EU and US travel — though there are more strings attached. The Mediterranean island nation has long been a hotspot for the world's ultra wealthy.

Still, the more expensive option may be a better choice as people shift passport strategies from vacationing to riding out a global pandemic that some countries have been far more successful in mitigating than others.

"'Investment migration' has shifted from being about living the life you want in terms of holidays and business travel to a more holistic vision that includes healthcare and safety," Dr. Christian Kalin,an executive at Henley & Partners, told Robb Report.

This year's discounts might not last forever.

"In the past there has been a tendency toward lowering prices, but the current cuts seem to be temporary and Covid-19 related," Beatrice Gatti, a legal manager at CS Partners, which helps ultra-wealthy clients find second-citizenship, told Bloomberg.

Original author: Graham Rapier

While many tech startups have reeled from the coronavirus crisis, some of them are still attractive to investors.A Silicon Valley company called EquityBee, which lets startup employees connect with investors who can help them exercise their stock options, said that 10 hot startups stand out based on data from its platform.EquityBee calls the financiers on its platform "hidden investors" who bet on startups they believe will do well when they are sold or when they go public. Investors and employees remain anonymous on the platform."We've seen a very strong increase for fintech companies, for cloud-based companies and for developer tools," EquityBee cofounder and CEO Oren Barzilai told Business Insider. Click here for more BI Prime stories.

While many tech startups have taken huge hits from the coronavirus crisis, some continue to attract interest from investors.

Startups such as cloud platforms Vercel and Better Cloud have managed to raise venture capital during the pandemic while data analytics company Palantir filed to go public (and cloud insurance firm Lemonade even made its market debut). 

Silicon Valley company EquityBee, which connects startup employees with investors who can help them exercise their stock options, has seen a boost in investor interest on its platform, too. EquityBee calls the financiers on its platform "hidden investors," that buy vested equity options from employees, essentially betting on startups that they believe will do well when they are sold or when they go public. Both investors and employees remain anonymous on the platform.

The company said it has roughly 3,000 investors who are able to make the minimum investment of $10,000 to participate in the platform. One of the largest investments by an individual was a few hundred thousand dollars into one startup, according to EquityBee.

The coronavirus crisis has sparked a flurry of activity on the platform. 

"We've seen a very strong increase for fintech companies, for cloud-based companies, and for developer tools," EquityBee cofounder and CEO Oren Barzilai told Business Insider. 

EquityBee has also seen "a very significant drop" in investor interest in travel-tech startups, such as TripActions.  There is one exception, though, Barzilai said: "Investors are still very interested in Airbnb."

Barzilai said EquityBee had seen a spike in interest early on — about three months ago — from employees who were worried about losing their jobs and who began exploring ways to exercise their options when the coronavirus crisis began to escalate.

But it has become clearer over the last few months which startups are valuable in the eyes of EquityBee investors.

Here are the top 10 startups that are hot to the "hidden investors" on the Equity Bee platform:

Original author: Benjamin Pimentel