Saudi Arabia is investing another $45 billion in SoftBank's second Vision Fund, Bloomberg reports.

Mohammed bin Salman, chairman of the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia told Bloomberg that the fund wants to be a key investor in the next $100 billion fund that Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son plans to raise — bringing the PIF's investment in the two funds to a total of $90 billion.

Bin Salman told Bloomberg that the PIF's first investment had paid off. "We have a huge benefit from the first one," he said. "We would not put, as PIF, another $45 billion if we didn't see huge income in the first year with the first $45 billion."

The Crown Prince told Bloomberg that the PIF's assets have risen to just under $400 billion. "Our target in 2020 is around $600 billion. I believe we will surpass that target in 2020," he said.

Son and Bin Salman were the powerhouses behind setting up the first SoftBank Vision Fund in 2016. At the time, Son said he wanted it to become "the biggest investor in the technology sector." He also said in September of this year that he plans to spend around $50 billion a year on startup investment.

Softbank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son. Koki Nagahama/Getty Images

The PIF also has a history of investing heavily in tech companies, including the likes of Uber, Tesla, and Magic Leap.

Retail is changing faster than ever.

Though there has been a lot of talk about how online shopping is changing the retail landscape, forcing traditional shopping centers like malls to close, it's only now that the future of the industry is truly coming into focus.

And yes, it's digital, just as we were promised.

Amazon and, more recently, Nike, have debuted store concepts that put their digital smarts front-and-center as they offer new experiences to customers.

Nike lives out loud

Nike is using data pulled from online purchases to inform the products stocked in its new store, which opened in July.

It's the first Nike Live concept store, which seeks to maximize speed and convenience by combining digital offerings with a 4,000-square-foot physical retail location.

Called Nike by Melrose, the store is a representation of favorites of customers in the area — in this case, the West Hollywood part of Los Angeles. Much of this information was gleaned from customers using Nike's online services, whether they were shopping on Nike.com or were members of Nike Plus.

The exterior of Nike by Melrose. Nike

For example, Los Angeles-based customers buy a lot of the Nike Cortez, a retro-styled, low-cut sneaker. Nike knows that from observing their shopping habits, and so it can then stock more of the shoe in more colors and feature it prominently.

The store is stocked with products in categories like lifestyle and running, which are two of Nike's most popular, and it is predominantly focused on serving customers who care about both style and fitness. The store stocks both men's and women's products but allows for variation based on each gender's preferred styles.

That marriage of digital prowess and physical store experience is the hallmark of Nike Live stores.

"This much more represents how consumers are thinking about shopping. They don't put the wall up between physical and digital," Heidi O'Neill, president of Nike's direct-to-consumer business, said to Business Insider during a visit to the new store shortly after its opening.

Customers can also use the Nike retail app to scan products' barcodes and find out more information about them, including the sizes and colors the store has in stock.

Nike is also adding convenience-oriented features like curbside pickup and digital reservations in lockers that customers can open with their phones.

With Nike Live, the company will have what you want, where you want it — and it will help you get it with as little friction as possible.

Future Nike stores, like the flagship stores currently slated to open this fall in both New York City and Shanghai, will incorporate some elements of Nike Live, CEO Mark Parker said in the company's earnings call this week.

Amazon Go creates a 'magical' new experience

Amazon opened its first cashierless Go store in late January.

The store features Amazon's "just walk out" technology, which uses sensors and cameras to track what customers take off shelves and out of the store. Located in Seattle, near Amazon's campus, it's seen by many as the future of brick-and-mortar retail, with complicated technology that's designed to make in-store shopping as seamless and easy as shopping on Amazon.com.

With no lines or checkout process, the store uses cameras and sensors to track what you put in your basket. It then charges you through your Amazon account.

The store opened to the public on January 22 after a lengthy beta period. The opening of the store brought a lot of interest from locals, and lines soon formed on opening day.

There are no cashiers at Amazon Go. AP/Elaine Thompson

In a letter to investors, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke with pride about hearing customers call the experience of shopping in the new store "magical."

Amazon has since expanded its Go footprint to four locations, three in Seattle and one in Chicago, with more on the way in cities like New York and San Francisco.

The company could have an even more ambitious plan to expand Amazon Go. It wants to have at least 10 stores open by the end of this year, then 50 in 2019, then possibly a rapid expansion to about 3,000 by 2021, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Brick-and-mortar stores are changing forever

Taken together, Nike Live and Amazon Go chart a new course for retail that is unconstrained by what came before, and they offer new opportunities to get products to customers more efficiently than ever.

The advent of tech-focused physical stores proves that brick-and-mortar retail isn't going anywhere soon.

"Physical retail is clearly not dead," retail consultant Steve Dennis writes in a contributor post on Forbes. "Far from it, in fact. But, to be sure, boring, undifferentiated, irrelevant, and unremarkable stores are most definitely dead."

In fact, what's happening now is what Deloitte calls a "retail renaissance," fueled by new technology and data-centric insights into customers' habits and characteristics.

"A sea change is clearly taking place in the retail market — but it is not the retail apocalypse. In our view, it is instead a renaissance — driven by huge shifts in economics, competition, and consumer access to options, all fueled by exponential advancement in technology," Deloitte wrote in a March 2018 research report. "And in this renaissance, the winners appear to be those retailers that can capitalize on consumers' experiences of their economic well-being — or lack thereof — to offer a value proposition that aligns with consumer needs."

If there's a hot, highly valued unicorn in Silicon Valley, chances are Baillie Gifford has invested in it.

The 110-year-old Scottish investment firm counts Lyft, Airbnb, and Dropbox among its holdings. It also owns stock in recently public household names like Spotify. And that's just scratching the surface.

The prescience involved in picking such high-upside investments is one of the reasons the firm's flagship close-ended fund — the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, which is in the FTSE 100 Index — has dominated benchmarks over the past decade.

But selecting companies is just half of the battle. Once a private target is identified, a firm must find a way to invest, since shares aren't available on the open market.

To that end, Baillie Gifford has made a serious effort to get acquainted with the Silicon Valley venture pipeline. At this point, the firm has developed such a strong reputation as a supportive long-term shareholder that unicorn investing opportunities are coming increasingly available.

But Baillie Gifford doesn't deal exclusively in unicorns. The firm also got in early on many of the most dominant names in the stock market, including Facebook, Alphabet, Netflix, and Alibaba.

And then there's Tesla, the holding for which Baillie Gifford is perhaps best known, since it owns a bigger chunk than any other institution. The company may be going through a turbulent time right now, but its stock is still up 24% since the start of 2017.

With all of that in mind, the $255 billion firm's recent investment success is undeniable. So how did it get to this point?

To find out, Business Insider conducted an exclusive interview with Tom Slater, the firm's head of US equities, who also comanages the SMIT and serves as a decision-maker for its long-term global growth strategy.

He's so invested in Baillie Gifford's early-stage pipeline that he relocated his family to Silicon Valley on multiple occasions to learn about the region's ecosystem.

Slater sums up the firm's investment thesis as follows: "We ask if there's a reasonable central case for a business. Could this turn out to be something spectacular? Is there a big enough opportunity? Is there something special about the culture of this business that will allow them to take advantage of that opportunity when others can't?"

Slater continued: "It's never been where we or anyone else thinks it'll end up this year. It's more — is there a broader opportunity? What are the most attractive companies? We'll own those in size, regardless of sector."

Going beyond that overarching principle, Slater also identified three distinct wrinkles that Baillie Gifford looks for when assessing which fledgling companies should be investment targets. All quotes in the sections below are attributable to him.

Corporate culture

"If you're going to own a stock for 10 years, you're interested in a totally different set of things compared to someone who's only going to own it for 10 months. First and foremost is corporate culture. Culture is not going to influence the outcome of a share price over the next year. I would argue that over 10 years, it's almost all that matters."

"If you go back to 2004, we bought Amazon and eBay around the same time. In all honesty, we thought eBay was probably more excited. If you do a retrospective looking at why Amazon has done so much better, you don't need to look further than Bezos, and his influence as the founder, setting the tone, which is: We will invest in these long-term opportunities, and we will forgo short-run profits to do it."

Imagining how great businesses can be

"So much of fund management is about critiquing ideas, finding the risks, thinking about downside. And it's really easy to sound smart criticizing someone else's idea. What we work hard to do is look at what could go right. If this company is able to achieve what they want to achieve, what are the consequences of that? How big could it be? What's the mission of this company, and what happens if they fulfill it? We're critical of companies, but always within the context of the upside."

"Most companies really don't matter to long-run stock market outcomes. There's just a small number that matter a huge amount. Our process is oriented around finding companies that could be those outliers. In order to do that, they've got to have a really big opportunity, they've got to have something unique about their ability to go after those opportunities, and it's got to be underappreciated by the market. Those are fairly rare things."

"You go after fairly rare companies, and you get it wrong most of the time. But if you can just find one or two, then it can absolutely transform the outcome for your portfolio."

The involvement of company founders

"I don't think it's a prerequisite, but you can't escape the fact that some of the most successful companies of the past decade have been run by their founders. It's telling you something."

"What's important to me is that, despite their scale, some of these business are still quite young. You can still have a founder present. It allows these companies to behave like private companies, despite being in the public markets."

"How can Amazon not make profits and invest in these long-term opportunities? It's partly Bezos, and it's partly because they've built a core of long-term shareholders who believe in that vision and accept how it's going to be."

"Zuckerberg isn't beholden to markets during quarterly earnings. You saw it in a fairly visceral way last quarter — he'll prioritize long-term decisions. Being a founder with a controlling stake facilitates that type of decision-making."

"It's particularly important in the case of these fast-moving consumer internet businesses, because product is absolutely critical there. Consumer attention can move quite quickly. Having a product-led chief executive who's really close to that, and will make decisions accordingly, is really valuable. If you don't, you can miss big shifts."

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When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a company whose culture was known for hostility, infighting, and backstabbing among its top executives.

To turn the company around, he made the members of his senior leadership team read the 2003 book "Nonviolent Communication" by the psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg. Nadella handed out copies at his first executive meeting.

It was a sign Nadella planned to run Microsoft differently from his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.

In "Nonviolent Communication," Rosenberg preaches compassion and empathy as cornerstones of effective communication.

I took a look at "Nonviolent Communication" and found that the lessons apply well beyond the Microsoft boardroom. Here are the three biggest takeaways.

1. Effective communication has 4 components.

According to the book, there are four components of effective communication:

An example from the book of all four components would be a mother telling her teenage son: "Felix, when I see two balls of soiled socks under the coffee table and another three next to the TV, I feel irritated because I am needing more order in the rooms that we share in common. Would you be willing to put your socks in your room or in the washing machine?"

2. Our observations are often clouded by evaluations.

Rosenberg says good communicators are able to separate their observations of a situation from their evaluations or judgments of it.

For example, the sentence "Janice works too much" contains an evaluation — working too much is subjective, and if Janice heard that, she may take it as criticism and become defensive. On the other hand, saying "Janice spent more than 60 hours at the office this week" is an observation without any judgments attached.

Rosenberg said he once heard that "observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence" and was initially dismissive of the idea.

"When I first read this statement, the thought 'What nonsense!' shot through my mind before I realized that I had just made an evaluation," he wrote. "For most of us, it is difficult to make observations, especially of people and their behavior, that are free of judgment, criticism, or other forms of analysis."

3. We need to strengthen our vocabulary for feelings.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is a section on learning to identify and express your feelings.

Rosenberg writes that when you're expressing your feelings, it's better to use words that refer to specific emotions rather than words that are vague and general. Don't say you feel "good" when words like happy, excited, relieved, or anything else could describe how you feel more precisely.

"Words such as 'good' and 'bad' prevent the listener from connecting easily with what we might actually be feeling," he said.

On top of that, Rosenberg says it's helpful to distinguish between words that describe our actual feelings and words that describe what we think others are doing. For example, saying "I feel unimportant to the people I work with" may sound as if you're expressing your feelings, but you're really describing how you think other people are evaluating you. The underlying feeling might be sadness, discouragement, or something else.

Similarly, saying "I feel ignored" is less an expression of your own feelings and more an interpretation of how other people are acting toward you. And the same goes for sentiments like neglected, cheated, taken for granted, and used.

"By developing a vocabulary of feelings that allows us to clearly and specifically name or identify our emotions, we can connect more easily with one another," Rosenberg wrote.

Before going to great lengths to capture that one-of-a-kind selfie, you might want to think hard about how much you'd risk for it.

More than 250 deaths between October 2011 and November 2017 can be linked to selfies, a recent study has found.

The deadliest place to take a selfie?

Water.

According to the study, there have been at least 70 selfie fatalities due to drowning during the 6-year period. The deadly incidents include people getting swept away by waves, ignoring safety warnings on beaches, and being on boats that have capsized.

Water-borne selfie deaths are especially deadly as they often involve multiple people. The 70 deaths stemmed from 32 incidents, according to the study.

Perhaps just as dangerous, or even more so, are selfies taken from elevated places.

The study cites 48 deaths from "falling" that resulted from 41 incidents — that's a higher number of fatal incidents involving selfies than drowning, even if the overall death toll is lower.

Here's a full list of the causes of selfie death:

NCBI

The study was conducted by a group of researchers out of India, which is home to more selfie-related deaths than any other country. It's important to note that researchers based their findings off English news outlets' existing coverage of selfie-related deaths, meaning there may be other deaths that occurred within the study's six-year period that either weren't reported or occurred in a non-English speaking country.

A couple of other interesting findings:

Almost three-quarters of the selfie-related deaths were men. Even though studies have found that women take more selfies than men, men more likely to engage in risky behavior to capture the perfect picture.

The majority of the 51 people whose deaths involved a mode of transportation were killed in selfie-related incidents involved moving trains.

Most of the selfie deaths involving firearms occurred in the US.

To reduce the number of selfie-related deaths, researchers suggest that cities and other public entities designate certain places as "no-selfie zones" This idea has already been implemented in Mumbai, where authorities have marked 16 places in India's largest city as off-limits that they deem to be most risky for selfie shots.

Other countries have taken similar steps to ensure safe selfie-taking — Russia ran a public safety campaign in 2015 centered around safe picture-taking practices. Rangers in New York's Catskill Mountains enacted a number of safety measures near several waterfalls and cliff edges, and can ticket visitors for putting themselves in risky situations in the name of selfies.

But it's hard to say whether the fervor to capture the best selfie will diminish anytime soon. Businesses have found innovative ways to profit off the craze, including pop-up museums in several cities who are attracting visitors by providing backdrops for Instagam-worthy pictures.

Poppy Gustafsson and Nicole Eagan's cybersecurity startup joined the unicorn club earlier this year after hitting a valuation of nearly $1.3 billion. Following a new $50 million raise last week, it is now worth $1.65 billion.

Backed by Autonomy billionaire Mike Lynch, Darktrace uses artificial intelligence to fight cybercrime against corporations. Darktrace calls it an "enterprise immune system," taking inspiration from the way the human body fights off disease.

The startup is headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge. Its investors include KKR, Talis Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Summit Partners, SoftBank, TenEleven, Samsung Ventures, Invoke Capital, and Insight Venture Partners.

Total amount raised: $230 million (£175 million)Headcount: 750 Twitter:@PoppyGustafsson

Business Insider

Poppy Gustafsson may have just helped her cybersecurity company Darktrace achieve unicorn status, but she still admits to making mistakes all the time.

"I'm trying to cut down my mistakes from every day to every week," she told Business Insider after being named among the 100 most influential people in the UK tech industry.

On the surface at least, it looks as though Darktrace is doing very little wrong. The company raised another $50 million last week, bolstering its value to $1.65 billion, and it now employs more than 800 people across 33 offices worldwide, including in San Francisco, India, and Hong Kong.

It's come a long way since Gustafsson spent £15 to incorporate Darktrace five years ago. Not that she is particularly bothered by achieving unicorn status. "It's not something, if I'm honest, that we really benchmark ourselves against internally," she said.

Darktrace, which uses artificial intelligence to fight cybercrime for its clients, traces its roots back to British tech billionaire Mike Lynch. Both Gustafsson and her co-chief executive Nicole Eagan worked at Lynch's $11 billion software company and later his venture capital firm Invoke Capital.

Mike Lynch is a director and early investor at Darktrace. Ben Gurr/WPA Pool/ Getty Images

Darktrace was essentially spun out of a piece of Cambridge University maths research, with& mathematicians working alongside cyber intelligence experts in the US and the UK to develop the technology. While neither Gustafsson and Eagan are listed among the original directors, they helped set the company up through Invoke.

Darktrace's big idea was that instead of doing cybersecurity like a medieval fortress by erecting a big wall to keep people out, it's better to do it like espionage — track people who break in to find out what they're after, who they are, and how they got in.

Darktrace now uses the human body as a metaphor for its technology. The company calls its tech the "enterprise immune system," taking inspiration from the way the humans fight off disease. It is officially named Antigena.

Gustafsson's partnership with Eagan is the engine room of Darktrace's growth. Eagan's background is in marketing, whereas Gustafsson is an accountant by training. "We tend to say that anything with words in is Nicole, anything with numbers in is me, and it works well," she said, adding that Eagan was instrumental in honing Antigena to make it able to respond to threats, rather than just detect them.

She's also straightforward about Lynch's role in the company. "Mike is a brilliant mind, he's got incredible experience at growing organisations from nothing to something very significant," she said.

He is embroiled in a legal wrangle after selling Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for more than $11 billion in 2011. HP filed a lawsuit in 2015 alleging that Autonomy fraudulently inflated its earnings ahead of the sale. Lynch launched a countersuit, saying HP invented the fraud claim to hide its own incompetence.

The trial will take place in March 2019, but it does not appear to be clouding Darktrace's horizons.

Danger lurks in the internet of things

Antigena has made a name for itself by spotting strange hacks and scams. Earlier this year, Eagan told a conference in London that Darktrace found a hack which targeted a casino via the internet-connected thermometer in its aquarium.

Gustafsson, who was also named in Management Today's list of influential business women in July, said the internet of things is increasingly being used as a point of entry for hackers.

"The internet of things is this huge maze of interconnectivity between us and our environments and the devices that occupy them. And it could be something like a fish tank, it can be your internet-connected coffee machine, but these things are here to stay," she continued.

"As individuals, we rely on them all, and business is nothing but a collection of individuals. And so, therefore, it was inevitable that businesses were going to get swept up."

Darktrace detected hackers had used an internet-connected thermometer in a fish tank to gain access to a casino's systems. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty

Darktrace's size has exploded recently — its workforce has grown by 60% in the past 12 months to just under 800 employees and it has an unusual hiring strategy for a tech company.

Darktrace's unusual hiring strategy

Firstly, it employs more salespeople than engineers. Gustafsson said this is because its development team has already built a tried-and-tested product, and so now the company needs more people in sales to meet demand.

"This next stage of growth, our focus is very much we need to be able to hit the market demand as it's hitting us, so that tends to be sales and marketing that we're hiring in to meet that demand," she said.

"We are absolutely hiring in the technical skills as well, so we continue to expand our dev team, but that real acceleration of growth is going to be in the sales and marketing function."

Darktrace also has a reputation for hiring young graduates, which according to Gustafsson is plugging a hole in the cybersecurity jobs market.

Nicole Eagan, Gustafsson's co-CEO at Darktrace. Darktrace

"There's a massive skills deficit in cybersecurity. Organisations internally are really battling with the fact that they just don't have enough threat analysts out there to keep on top of the problem," she explained.

"It's very important for us instead that we create those cyber specialists. So what we do is we bring in bright graduates from a range of disciplines and we train them up very quickly into the particular area that they're interested in, whether it's a technical pre-sales role or a sales role, or marketing. So hopefully we're helping to contribute to some of that resource deficit as well in the long term."

Gustafsson also said a creative approach to recruitment has been key to training up specialists. "Some of our brilliant cyber writers that we have are linguists by background," she said.

What Darktrace would do differently

For all of Darktrace's growth, there are a few things Gustafsson says she would do differently if she could turn back time.

"It's tempting to want to go and sell [your product] to the big banks and all the high-end value names," she said. "But these big organisations, they're a massive time-sink and you can get very easily distracted by trying to slay one of the big banks or something very early on in your lifecycle. So my advice would be: Just go out there and sell it in a way that's repeatable and practical."

As a female CEO in the predominantly male cybersecurity industry, Gustafsson also had a few words for women who want to get into the field. "My advice would be: Change is afoot, the future is what you make of it, just don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't do it."

And as Gustafsson has shown, making mistakes is not necessarily a bad thing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai paid a visit last week to the Pentagon and met with officials an attempt to "smooth over tensions," according to a report Friday in The Washington Post.

Pichai traveled to Washington DC to meet with GOP lawmakers about a host of issues, including accusations from President Donald Trump that the company biases its search engine against politically conservative voices.

Apparently, the 46-year-old technologist took the opportunity to try and shore up the company's ties to the military.

Google saw itself divided this year when word leaked the company was participating in Project Maven, an effort to use artificial intelligence to help the US Department of Defense analyze drone video footage. More than 4,000 Google employees signed a petition demanding managers put an end to the relationship and promise to never help build AI-enhanced weapons.

Pichai agreed to do exactly that when he released a set of principles that would govern Google's work with AI. But when it came to working with the military on non-lethal activities, Pichai made his position clear.

"We want to be clear that while we are not developing AI for use in weapons," Pichai wrote, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas."

Since then, Google has signaled that it wants to maintain strong ties to the defense sector.

Last month, Google Cloud Platform hired Andrew Moore as the new chief of Google Cloud AI. Moore, the former dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, is co-chairman of an AI task force created by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank closely aligned to the US military.

Moore's co-chair on the task force is Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, who the New York Times has called "the driving force behind the creation of Project Maven," the US military's effort to analyze data, such as drone footage, using AI.

As has been pointed out, there's a lot of work that Google could do for the government and defense sector that has nothing to do with weapons, such as email, data storage and other cloud services. Google is obviously very interested in vying for that kind of business.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla said on Friday that the latest version of its vehicle software had begun rolling out to customers. The automaker's CEO, Elon Musk, had previously said the update would produce "significant" advancements for Autopilot, the company's semi-autonomous driver assistance system, though in a post on its website Tesla said the Autopilot updates will arrive "in the coming months."

Here are the highlights of Tesla's new software update that are currently available:

Tesla also described some of the forthcoming Autopilot features, like the ability to recommend lane changes, navigate transitions between highways, and take exits, with driver supervision. In its current iteration, Autopilot can keep a car in its lane and adjust its speed based on surrounding traffic, among other features.

Recent accidents involving the feature have raised questions about whether drivers place too much trust in it and fail to pay attention to the road. Tesla has repeatedly said Autopilot is meant to be used with an attentive driver whose hands are on the wheel, but the most visible accidents involving Autopilot have included reports of distracted drivers.

On Thursday, Consumer Reports released its rankings of four semi-autonomous driver assistance systems. The publication ranked Autopilot second, behind Cadillac's Super Cruise. Autopilot received the highest rating for capability and performance and ease of use but received the lowest rating for keeping drivers engaged.

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Facebook has held a company "town hall" meeting with employees to try and quell outrage after a senior executive attended the recent Senate hearing of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were both in attendance.

Last week Joel Kaplan, the company's policy chief, was visibly seated behind Kavanaugh, Trump's embattled nominee for the US Supreme Court, as the judge angrily defended himself against allegations of sexual misconduct by multiple women.

Kaplan and Kavanaugh are friends, having worked together in the Bush administration, and he was there in a personal capacity — but his appearance has enraged employees, and company leadership screwed up its initial response.

On Friday, the company called a meeting in which =Zuckerberg, =Sandberg, and Kaplan all spoke in an effort to diffuse the internal tension.

According to a report from Axios, Zuckerberg stressed that the importance of supporting people with diverse viewpoints at Facebook. The company has recently been criticised by conservative employees who feel they are unable to speak out about their political beliefs.

Kaplan reportedly said he felt he had an obligation to Kavanaugh, and he acknowledged he should've cleared his attendance with senior leadership before going. He had previously apologized over the uproar while defending his actions, writing to colleagues: "I want to apologize. I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one — internally and externally ... I believe in standing by your friends, especially when times are tough for them."

Some Facebook employees have argued that Kaplan's appearance made them uncomfortable or was "inappropriate." "There is absolutely no such thing as personal capacity when you're a high level manage/executive at the company ... I might feel uncomfortable sharing the workplace with this person now," one employee wrote in a message before Friday's town hall seen by Business Insider.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the record.

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Minutes after Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine announced her decision to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a site raising money for Collins' eventual opponent in her 2020 reelection bid crashed.

Collins was one of the undecided votes in the judge's controversial nomination. In an effort to convince Collins that there would be consequences if she voted to support him, a group of people from Maine launched a crowdfunding campaign on a site called Crowdpac.

The campaign asked people to pledge money to back the person who will challenge Collins in 2020 if she voted to confirm Kavanaugh. If she doesn't vote for Kavanaugh, the pledges would be void.

The site was so overwhelmed with people rushing to donate to the campaign that its internet connection couldn't take the traffic, pushing it offline, Crowdpac confirmed to Business Insider.

Business Insider verified that the site was down. Crowdpac didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

As of September 12, when The Washington Post reported on the fundraising effort, it had raised more than $1 million from 37,000 pledges. Some had questioned whether the campaign violated federal bribery statutes, which prohibit giving or offering anything of value to government officials in exchange for any acts or votes.

A Twitter user named Marty Loughlin said that he donated to the campaign right before the site crashed on Friday and that it had raised $2 million in pledges.

Another page that vows to support Collins' eventual Democratic challenger was up and accepting donations on Friday afternoon, though it wasn't clear how many donations it had racked up.

A representative for Collins told The Post last month that the senator wouldn't be swayed by any fundraising tactic.

"Senator Collins will make up her mind based on the merits of the nomination," the representative said. "Threats or other attempts to bully her will not play a factor in her decision making whatsoever."

Amazon will reportedly open 3,000 physical stores within three years. Some stores will carry a small number of groceries and others will carry prepared foods. Amazon has the advantage of being able to draw on the vast amount of data they collect from customers to determine what items to stock. Following is a transcript of the video.

Dennis Green: If you're the operator of a local convenience store or corner shop or bodega and an Amazon Go opens up just around the corner, you might wanna look over your shoulder.

Amazon first announced its Amazon Go project in 2016. The first store didn't open until 2018, January. There are now four Amazon Go stores in operation. Three of them are in Seattle and one of them is in Chicago. Reportedly they want to open at least 3,000 stores in three years. That seems a little optimistic when it took so long for them to open the first one. They're pretty small stores to start out with. They're only a couple thousand square feet which is kind of closer to a convenience store than a full-fledged grocery store.

Amazon Go stores are the famous thing that Amazon likes to say is it has just walk out technology where you can go in, scan your app, you can take whatever you want off the shelf and then you just walk outside and then it charges you for whatever you took. It uses sensors and cameras to kind of tell what customers are taking in order to charge them correctly. There's two kinds of Amazon Go stores. There's a more grocery-oriented where you can go in and get some light groceries. And there's another format that's more oriented towards prepared food that's kind of like a lunchtime spot. You can just go in and grab a sandwich or a salad. So this isn't stuff that you really wanna wait for. It's maybe like a candy bar that you just wanna grab. Something that you're gonna go and kind of consume immediately or a grocery item that you need for a recipe that you wanna cook that night.

They also sell their Amazon meal kits in these stores which are refrigerated kits with a bunch of different ingredients that you can cook.

Ninety percent of all retail sales are offline. It's kind of staggering when you think about it. You think about the fast growth of online is still only amounts to ten percent even in 2018 so there's kind of like a lot of room to run there. Most estimates peg Amazon as taking up basically half of all e-commerce. There's some room for them to grow and estimates by analysts show that they will grow but they're looking for other avenues of growth to maintain the velocity that they have. And the one that they've pegged right now is bricks and mortar.

When Amazon moves into a market they kind of operate with this low margin mentality where profitability doesn't really matter until they kind of achieve mass scale and then they can kind of tinker with the levers. As far as Amazon making money off of these stores, that's kind of TBD. There's a report that the technology that went into the first one cost a million dollars to install. That adds a big additional cost to opening the store in the first place. As far as the break-even point, we don't really know what the economics of these stores even are, so it's hard to say if they're making money, or they're not making money.

Amazon uses what customers are already buying online to guess what customers wanna buy in their Amazon Go stores. So that's kind of like a reminder of what they have on you. It's a reminder of what they know that you already like to kind of entice you to buy it again in a store. So if they know that a specific neighborhood or city likes a certain kind of seltzer they're gonna stock more of the seltzer and they're gonna have more flavors of the seltzer. Whether or not that's a good thing, I mean, it's serving customers, right? It's what customers want. It's putting it in front of them in a new way. But it might make some customers uncomfortable.

Other retailers are trying to come up with things that compete with Amazon. A lot of them have new pick up options where they can order online and then pick up in store or can deliver right to customers some even with autonomous vehicles. But no grocery stores have that kind of data to draw from like a big e-commerce giant like Amazon has.