Amazon is a $178 billion disruptor in the retail sector. Its sheer scale has marked it out as a target for US President Donald Trump, who reportedly obsesses over the company's impact on the US Postal Office, the amount of tax it pays, and the potential harm it is causing other retailers.

"Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost!" Trump tweeted in August last year.

But don't expect Amazon to start worrying about its impact anytime soon.

In an interview with The Sunday Times , Russell Grandinetti, Amazon's senior vice president of international consumer, said his job is to focus on growth — and it's for others to figure out how to deal with the ripples Amazon creates in the marketplace.

"Companies have often invented technologies that have then required us to figure out how to reinvest the productivity improvements in new jobs and new ways," he said. "That's an important societal thing to do, an important governmental thing to do. I don't think it's our job to do anything but try to be really good at what we do."

The Sunday Times said investors will "cheer" his relentless focus on revenue, but critics will worry "he is turning a blind eye to the disruption Amazon causes."

Grandinetti did, however, address concerns that Amazon is destroying jobs, by pointing to those it creates. He said: "We create lots of jobs not only in the company — 100,000 in the US last year alone, 5,000 in Britain — but also in the suppliers we serve."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said a number of times that the company is ready for a debate about regulation.

"If you look at the big tech companies, they have gotten large enough that they are going to be inspected. It's not personal," he said at an event in Germany in April.

The Amazon CEO said policing the power of online companies is "one of the great questions of our age" because as the internet has reached a level of maturity over the past decade "we haven't learned as a civilization, as a human species, how to operate it yet."

Being successful in the digital age doesn't just require knowing the latest buzzwords; it means identifying the transformational trends - and where they're heading - before they ever heat up.

BI Intelligence Take the Internet of Things (IoT), for example, which now receives not only daily tech news coverage with each new device launch, but also hefty investments from global organizations ushering in worldwide adoption. By 2023, consumers, companies, and governments will install more than 40 billion IoT devices globally. And it's not just the ones you hear about all the time, like smart speakers and connected cars.

To successfully navigate this changing landscape, individuals and organizations must understand the full extent and functionality of the "Things" included in this network, the key drivers of each market segment, and how it all relates to the work they do every day.

Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has forecasted the start of the IoT's global proliferation in The IoT Forecast Book 2018 — and the next five years will be transformational for consumers, enterprises, and governments.

Want to Learn More?

People, companies, and organizations all over the world are racing to adopt the latest IoT solutions and prevent growing pains amidst a technological transformation. The IoT Forecast Book 2018 from Business Insider Intelligence is a detailed three-part slide deck outlining the most important trends impacting consumer, enterprise, and government IoT — and the key drivers propelling each segment forward.

Representing thousands of hours of exhaustive research, our multipart forecast books are considered must-reads by thousands of highly successful business professionals. These informative slide decks are packed with charts and statistics outlining the most influential trends on the leading edge of your industry. Keep them for reference or drop the most valuable data into your own presentations to share with your teams.

Whether you're newly interested in a topic or you already consider yourself a subject matter expert, The IoT Forecast Book 2018 can provide you with the actionable insights you need to make better decisions.

Most of us spend a majority of our waking hours at work, so it's only natural that we want to enjoy our time in the office as much as we can. And perks help with that — a lot.

According to career site Glassdoor , more than half (57%) of all workers say perks and benefits are among the top things they consider when deciding whether to accept a job, and almost 80% of employees say they would prefer new benefits over a pay raise.

That's why some employers are raising the bar and going beyond standard vacation days, health insurance benefits, and 401k matching to attract top talent.

Companies like Airbnb and Google offer unique and surprising perks like travel stipends and death benefits, Glassdoor reports , while Facebook and Netflix have upped the ante for companies wanting to support new parents.

"Benefits and perks matter because they're an added piece of the total compensation puzzle," Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor's career trends analyst, told Business Insider. "Job seekers should understand what benefits and perks an employer may be offering, and do their research ahead of time to find companies that offer benefits that matter most to them."

Employees rated some of their favorite employee benefits on Glassdoor. The following perks are not only unique, but they also received a rating of at least 4.0 out of 5.0 on Glassdoor.

Dear Reader,

We know it's frustrating when a job posting doesn't include the name of the person in charge of the hiring process.

We also know that's not an excuse to slap any salutation on your cover letter and send your application off.

According to Amanda Augustine, career advice expert for TopResume , you should always do some research to figure out who exactly the person reading your letter will be.

You can even play it safe by writing at the beginning of your cover letter: "I noticed you're working in [whatever department] at [whatever company]," so you show that based on your research, it looks like they're involved in the hiring process.

In the case that you absolutely, positively can't find a person's name, Augustine said certain ways of addressing your cover letter are more off-putting than others.

For example, "Dear Hiring Manager" and "Dear Recruiter" aren't great openings, but they're the best of many bad options.

Here's the full list of cover-letter openings, ranked in reverse order of egregiousness.

Sincerely, Business Insider staff

P.S. This advice doesn't apply in the case of an anonymous job posting, when a company is deliberately keeping their name and the names of their employees confidential.

Repeatedly responding to suggestions with a pessimistic or contrary attitude can be construed as being uncooperative, Randall said. Phrases like "That won't work," "That sounds too hard," or, "I wouldn't know how to start," should be avoided.

Similarly, complaining too much puts you in a bad light.

"While there may be times when everyone feels the desire to complain about the boss, a coworker, or a task, voicing it will only make you look unprofessional," Randall said. "It's even worse if you complain every day, all day, from the moment you walk into work. Before long, people will go out of their way to avoid you."

"There's nothing as energy-draining as having to deal with a pessimistic coworker," Rosemary Haefner, the former chief human resources officer for CareerBuilder , told Business Insider. "Things do go wrong, but even when they do, focus your energy towards what you've learned from a bad situation."

She pointed to a recent CareerBuilder survey , which shows that a majority of employers — 62% — say they are less likely to promote employees who have a negative or pessimistic attitude.

"Fortnite: Battle Royale," the free video game mode that took the world by storm last Fall, is a billion dollar business. That's according to a new report by SuperData, which estimates that the game has generated more than $1 billion in revenue across all platforms.

For some perspective, this means that Fortnite has now made more money than several of last year's highest worldwide-grossing blockbuster films, including "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," Marvel Studios' "Spider-Man: Homecoming," and "Wonder Woman;" and more than double the gross worldwide earnings of the latest Star Wars flick, "Solo."

The report points out that the revenue comes entirely from in-game purchases, which — in Fortnite's case — offer no competitive advantage to the game. In the game, an entirely optional $10 Battle Pass allows players to earn and collect in-game currency called V-bucks, which they can spend on costumes, accessories and dance moves for their playable character. But if you don't want to play the game enough to unlock these perks, you can also purchase more V-bucks with real bucks, at a rate of 1,000 V-bucks for $9.99.

The most expensive character outfits — called "skins" in the gaming world — go for 2,000 V-bucks, or $20.

Fortnite was not the first game to bring the battle royale genre the to the masses. Games like DayZ, H1Z1, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds popularized the "Hunger Games"-style formula, in which a hundred players are dropped onto a shrinking play area, and must scavenge for weapons and supplies in an effort to be the last man standing.

At launch, the game was available for PC and PlayStation 4. Today, it can be played for free on PCs, any gaming console, and on mobile iOS devices.

Fortnite: Battle Royale was first introduced as a free-to-play, early access mode of the original "Fortnite" title, a $60 zombie survival game that creators at Epic Games had been developing for more than five years.

The "Battle Royale" mode has now become vastly more popular than the original game — so much so that it is widely referred to with the full game's shorter title — thanks in large part to attention from celebrities and a large group of prominent video game streamers, like Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who play the game on live streaming platforms like Twitch or YouTube Gaming for millions of fans to watch.

Fortnite has, in turn, helped Blevins, a former professional esports athlete, become a celebrity in his own right, complete with multi-million-dollar sponsorships, official merchandise, and an invitation to the 2018 ESPY Awards.

Since Fortnite has skyrocketed the battle royale genre to worldwide popularity, several other video game series have sought to emulate their success, and they're right to do so. SuperData predicts that games which feature a battle royale mode will earn 12 percent of all gaming revenue in 2018. Most notably, the upcoming installment of "Call of Duty: Black Ops" will feature the franchise's first take on battle royale.

The data shows that Fortnite saw its largest spike in players early this year, and at the time, many speculated that the free game was simply experiencing a fleeting moment of hype that would quickly dissipate.

Today, ten months after its launch in 2017, Fortnite is still the most-streamed and most-watched game on Twitch, an this impressive benchmark has placed the game among the most popular video games of all time, and signals that Fortnite is going to continue to be very profitable for a very long time.

Dave Munichiello has a word of advice to hungry entrepreneurs: be real.

In his five years as general partner at GV, formerly Google Ventures, Munichiello has taken a lot of meetings with founders hoping that the firm will invest a few million dollars to give their startup legs.

The best founders, he told Business Insider, are open and vulnerable about their work, and empathetic to other people's points of view. The worst are, well, the opposite.

"Sometimes when entrepreneurs come in and pitch us, they can appear bulletproof," Munichiello told Business Insider. "They can say, 'I'm the smartest person in this space. I've never made a mistake. And we're gonna be huge and you're about to miss out on this big opportunity.'"

"It feels egotistical — it feels out of touch. And as somebody who's seen all of the challenges of startup world, and all of the risks and that every day is either a huge high or a huge low, it just doesn't feel real," he said, adding that it's a bad sign if a founder walks out of the room and Munichiello feels like he doesn't have a sense of who they are.

Once upon a time, Munichiello was on the other side of the table. After five years in the military, he joined the robotics company Kiva Systems as a senior director and worked there through its $775 million acquisition by Amazon. He packed up soon after the change of ownership and took his Harvard MBA to GV in 2013.

Since then, Munichiello has invested and advised a cohort of enterprise tech companies with a focus on technical startups in the data and developer space, including GitLab and Lattice.

Outside of that specialty, Munichiello already saw a big exit on Jet.com, which Walmart acquired for $3.3 billion in 2016. He also invested in Slack, which is now valued at $5 billion.

Munichiello isn't looking at much code. GV has a team of infrastructure engineers and data scientists — and according to Axios, something called The Machine — to help with due diligence.

Instead, what he's most concerned with is the people and personalities behind the founding teams.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield left a good impression when pitching investors. Now his startup is worth $5 billion. Cindy Ord/Stringer One founder who passed the litmus test with flying colors was Stewart Butterfield, founder and CEO of Slack. GV invested in Slack in 2014 as part of a $120 million round which valued the company at $1.12 billion.

"Stewart's conversation with me wasn't about all of the reasons why Slack was awesome," Munichiello said. "It was, 'Here's how I think about the business. And you may think about it in a different way.' And 'Here are the metrics that I use to measure the business. How do you think about the business?'"

At that time, Slack didn't have a lot of revenue, which was a big issue for investors. But when Butterfield addressed their concerns, Munichiello said, he didn't try to convince them that it didn't matter. Instead, he acknowledged that it was a weak spot and committed to fixing it.

Munichiello said that he especially appreciates when investors treat their startup as a set of hypotheses which a round of funding will give them the chance to experiment with.

"The reason we're investing isn't some arbitrage where we think we can make a lot of money based on something we know that nobody else knows," he said. "The reason we're investing is because we're also curious about those tests and we want to see what the results of those tests are."

"Sometimes we invest in a company and those tests all come back negative and our hypotheses were wrong. But really good entrepreneurs are able to see that ahead of time and have that conversation in a vulnerable way," he added.

Sony and Microsoft offer nearly identical services, which serve as a means of accessing online multiplayer gaming as well as offering "free" games (as long as you remain a paying subscriber).

In Sony's case, the service is PlayStation Network; in Microsoft's case, it's Xbox Live. They cost about the same amount of money ($60 a year) and offer access to online gaming on their respective platforms. Both dole out a handful of free games to paying subscribers every month, yours to play as long as you continue to subscribe.

PlayStation Network and Xbox Live are industry-standard services at this point. What makes each console stand out in the services department is its Netflix-like gaming services: PlayStation Now and Xbox Game Pass.

With PlayStation Now, users can stream more than 650 playable PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4 games on a PlayStation 4 or a PC. The games are running elsewhere — you just start playing. It costs $20 a month, or $100 a year.

With Game Pass, users can download and play more than 100 original Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One games on the Xbox One. It costs $10 a month. Better yet: Any games Microsoft publishes show up on Game Pass at launch, including the next major "Halo" and "Forza" games. It's one of the best deals available in gaming for this alone.

Xbox Game Pass is a strong argument for owning an Xbox One and offers a glimpse into the future of video game consoles. Instead of dropping $60 a game, for $10 a month you have access to a massive library that includes new, major games. That's huge .

Christine Tsai has a lot of experience working with startups, and that has given her some pretty good insights into what makes entrepreneurs successful.

Tsai is the cofounder of 500 Startups, the famed Silicon Valley venture firm and startup accelerator. Since last August, she's also been its CEO, following the departure of Dave McClure, her fellow cofounder who left amid accusations of sexual harassment — accusations she has declined to discuss in much detail.

Launched in 2010, 500 Startups has helped incubate hundreds of companies and invested in more than 2,000 total, including Twilio, which went public in 2016. In that time, Tsai has gotten a close-up look at lots of startup founders and seen what works and what doesn't, as well as what it's like to be an entrepreneur.

Successful founders, she told Business Insider in an interview this week, tend to have two key traits: They're coachable, and they move fast.

Listening is one of the keys to success

Among the startup teams Tsai, right, has worked with is one from Bombfell, an online clothing retailer. 500 Startups Tsai said people have this image of the successful entrepreneur as someone like the former Apple CEO Steve Jobs — the "don't listen to anybody, I'm always right" type of founder.

But those types of founders usually aren't successful, she said.

"I feel like those people who are like that, they succeeded despite being that way, not because they were that way," she said.

That doesn't mean successful entrepreneurs need to be ultra-congenial or acquiesce to every suggestion, Tsai said. But they do need to be open to suggestions.

"They do listen," she said. "They do take the feedback from customers, from employees, from investors."

Moving fast is also crucial

Successful startup founders also move quickly, Tsai said, whether it's launching new products or putting new strategies in place — or learning from mistakes.

500 Startups meets frequently with the founders of companies in its portfolio to check in about how their companies are doing and how things like fundraising are going, she said.

"It's always a bad sign if they say they're going to do something and then a week later, two weeks later, they still haven't done it," she said.

Successful entrepreneurs have to be careful not to be rash or reckless, she said. But they also have to avoid stalling and overthinking things.

"It's a very fine balance, of course," Tsai said.

But founders who succeed have a very acute understanding that they have to move as quickly as possible.

"You have a very limited runway either in terms of time or cash," she said.

It's important to be clear-eyed about the task ahead

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson in 2016 at the New York Stock Exchange on his company's first day of trading. Twilio is one of the most prominent companies to have been backed by 500 Startups. Reuters/Brendan McDermid Tsai also offered some advice for prospective entrepreneurs: understand what you're getting into.

TV shows and news reports tend to romanticize the life of startup founders, particularly the super-successful ones. But founding and running a startup is usually anything but glamorous, she said.

Most startups fail. Many entrepreneurs are trading a stable, high-paying job for an uncertain, lonely, and stressful existence.

And the payoff — if there is any — usually comes only after years and years of hard work.

"It's really sucky ... It's really hard," she said. "I definitely do warn [entrepreneurs] about that."

Apple's Siri correctly answered more questions that Amazon's Alexa or Microsoft Cortana in a recent test done by analyst Gene Munster's investment firm Loup Ventures.

However, the digital assistant with the best record in the test was Google Assistant, which answered 86% of 800 questions correctly.

Here are the Loup Ventures' findings:

Loup Ventures

In general, the Loup Ventures team found that all of the assistants are getting better over time. It's also worth noting that all four digital assistants now understand the vast majority of people's questions — it's just an issue of having the right answer.

"Both the voice recognition and natural language processing of digital assistants across the board has improved to the point where, within reason, they will understand everything you say to them," the analysts wrote.

The Loup Ventures investors and analysts also noted that what gives the assistants the most trouble is proper nouns, like the name of a town or restaurant.

The tests were conducted on smartphones. Both Cortana and Amazon Alexa were tested through their apps on an iPhone, Siri was tested on an iPhone too, and Google's assistant was tested on a Pixel XL.

The bottom line from the study is that the assistants are improving quickly, especially Google's and Apple's, which improved their percentage of correct answers by 11 percentage points and 13 percentage points, respectively.

You can check out the rest of the details from the study over at Loup Ventures .

For decades, the tried and true station wagon was the preferred method of family transportation in the US. But the in the '90s and 2000s, its position in the automotive kingdom was usurped by the minivan. And over the past decade, the minivan's reign was ended by the crossover SUV .

Even as America's love affair with the wagon faded, it remained a mainstay for families in Europe. As a result, the Continent's automakers have continued to produce world-class wagons.

And now it looks like wagons are making a comeback of sorts in the US. Will it once again dominate America's highways and byways? Probably not. But there is a slew of hot new wagons on the market that will tempt you into rejoining the club.

Since the vast majority of crossovers, probably a figure north of 95%, will never see terrain any more rugged than a grassy field, an all-wheel-drive wagon more than makes sense. (Those who do enjoy a spot of off-roading are probably better off in a truck or truck-based SUV and not a crossover.)

One of the hottest new contenders is the Jaguar XF Sportbrake S AWD wagon. Based on the mid-size second generation XF sedan, the Sportbrake is all-new for 2018.

Recently, Business Insider spent a week behind the wheel of a stunning Jaguar XF Sportbrake S AWD clad in a fiery Firenze red paint job.

In the US, the XF Sportbrake is only available in the option-laden S and First Edition trim levels. As a result, our 2018 Jaguar XF Sportbrake S AWD starts at $70,450. With a $995 destination fee tacked on, our car came with an as-test price of $71,445.

So, is the 2018 Jaguar XF Sportbrake S AWD good enough for you to ditch the crossover and return to the wonderful world of wagons? Let's find out.

In the tech world, IBM senior vice president Bridget van Kralingen is known for creating and leading IBM's blockchain business. Because of van Kralingen, IBM is considered a leader in all things crypto among the major tech companies.

But long before she became one of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's top leaders and was credited with helping Rometty execute IBM's massive, multi-year turnaround , van Kralingen was an industrial psychologist and researcher back in her home country of South Africa.

In a fun interview with The Wall Street Journal , van Kralingen offered a few interesting nuggets of advice about being a manager. The Journal asked her, based on her background as a psychologist, "what's the one thing every boss should know about human behavior?"

Her answer: People "love affirmation."

In other words, employees want to know when they're doing things right. Seems simple enough, but research shows that this concept almost can't be overstated in the workplace. "Employees overwhelmingly choose receiving words of affirmation as the primary way they like to be shown appreciation in the workplace," writes psychologist Dr. Paul White, based on research from 100,000 employees. White has published several books on workplace motivation.

In the WSJ interview, van Kralingen also offered another, related bit of managerial advice. The best way to run a meeting is to "start with the goals and objectives and to make sure that everyone knows that they are interdependent to get those goals and objectives met."

Here's the whole interview.

In April, Suhail Doshi dropped a bomb on his employees: He was stepping down as CEO of Mixpanel, the company he had cofounded, and handing over the reins to Amir Movafaghi, who had been chief operating officer.

As Doshi told CNBC at the time , he was exhausted. He had founded Mixpanel in 2009, at 20 years old, and led it to an $865 million valuation. Over time, though, the waters got a little murky, and by 2016 Mixpanel experienced layoffs amid a strategy shift, even as it brought on new executive talent to try to bring the company back on track for an initial public offering.

At that meeting, the incoming CEO received a compliment from Doshi that he's come to cherish, Movafaghi tells Business Insider.

"The truth about Amir is, he gets me more excited about Mixpanel," Doshi told employees, as Movafaghi now recalls. Movafaghi calls Doshi's comments "humbling" — while Doshi is staying on as chairman of the board (after some time off ), he was basically saying it was up to Movafaghi to take his vision for Mixpanel to the next level.

Now, Movafaghi says that things are moving in the right direction. The company will come close to $100 million in annual revenue this year, Movafaghi says, even as Mixpanel has blown away its internal financial targets for three quarters running.

Mixpanel's investors include the well-known Silicon Valley firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, with $77 million in funding so far — most recently, a $65 million round in 2014. Movafaghi says the company is "really well-capitalized" and doesn't have to raise money anytime soon, though it still could.

"Our velocity is very encouraging for where we're heading," Movafaghi says.

And where Mixpanel is heading could well involve an IPO — but not for the reasons you may think.

Mixpanel helps companies track customers

Mixpanel is meant to help companies track the way customers use their websites and apps. That data can be used to squash bugs, guide customers toward new features, or eliminate common frustrations.

"What your customers do on the website, how they navigate, matters greatly," Movafaghi says. He says the company's business is split pretty evenly between smaller developers and large customers like Ticketmaster and IBM.

There are no shortage of competitors in that space, including Google and Adobe. What sets Mixpanel apart, Movafaghi says, is a focus on individual customers. Most other app-analytics software takes a bunch of data and presents it in aggregate, Movafaghi says.

Mixpanel gives more visibility into demographics and user habits, Movafaghi says. Everything is viewed through the lens of the user, including how many times a user accesses certain features or how often the user clicks on ads that are presented in certain ways.

Mixpanel. Mixpanel

The next big thing for Mixpanel, Movafaghi says, is putting that data to new uses by partnering with other companies. For instance, Mixpanel on Wednesday is announcing a partnership with the help-desk company Zendesk to combine their powers.

If a customer uses Zendesk to get in touch with customer support, the agent can use Mixpanel to see exactly what the person was doing in the app before encountering the problem. By that same token, if a lot of customers are reporting the same problem, it can be escalated back to the app developers for a potential fix.

"There's an evolution of how you maniacally focus on your customer," Movafaghi says.

With Google and Adobe nipping at Mixpanel's heels, Movafaghi believes that rallying allies like Zendesk is the key to the company's continued viability. Mixpanel doesn't need to vanquish Google, Movafaghi says — it just needs to establish its niche before the market settles out and it's too late.

"If you invest, build the right ecosystem, you'll have a competitive advantage," Movafaghi says. "When the dust settles, there are going to be standards."

That push will include signing more partners, expanding further into the European and Asia-Pacific regions, and hiring beyond its current 300 employees, Movafaghi says.

A nontraditional reason to IPO

Notably, Movafaghi hadn't been with Mixpanel for very long before being named CEO, having joined in 2017. Before that, Movafaghi was at the IT management software company Spiceworks as chief financial officer.

But Movafaghi is best known for his five years at Twitter, where he ultimately served as vice president of global business operations. Following Twitter's IPO in 2013, Movafaghi was tasked by the company's CEO at the time, Dick Costolo, to come up with a way to pay down the operating debt incurred by its years of "fast and furious" growth, he says.

Now, Movafaghi tells Business Insider that while Mixpanel isn't necessarily looking for the kind of money you'd get from an IPO — he says he's "philosophically opposed" to the idea of raising money for the sake of raising money — he does miss some aspects of being at a publicly traded company.

The Mixpanel cofounder Suhail Doshi. Mixpanel

Mostly, being a public company requires you to have "discipline," Movafaghi says. Startups often prioritize Twitter-like growth over any kind of financial game plan — behavior that is incentivized by the fact that venture capitalists are willing to overlook a lot if a startup is growing like crazy.

"You become pretty loose," Movafaghi says.

As a public company, however, Movafaghi says the proof is in the pudding. If your financials aren't good, there's no hiding it. Mixpanel might not IPO in the foreseeable future, Movafaghi says, but it's that kind of discipline that he'd like the company to continue adopting.

"If you can't demonstrate that the foundation is strong," Movafaghi says, "you're building a very fragile business."

Business Insider

MoviePass’ war against traditional movie theaters is still in its infancy, the chief executive of its parent company, Helios & Matheson, told a specially-convened group of roughly 30 shareholders on Monday.

From the 67th floor of New York's iconic Empire State Building, CEO Ted Farnsworth declared to a packed conference room of investors that MoviePass, the subscription service of which his company owns a 92% stake, plans to use its enthusiastic subscriber base as an infantry in its fight against major Hollywood theatre chains.

"Make no bones about it, it is a full blow war going on, especially with AMC," Farnsworth told the room of investors, who were largely optimistic, despite shares plunging more than 99% from their October highs.

"The theaters don't like us because we're too powerful too quick," he said. "We know with all the independent research that's out there, if we ask somebody to go to a Regal instead of an AMC, 50% of the time they'll go to Regal. They realize that at the end of the day we're gaining all this power with the consumer base. That was always the play, having leverage over the theaters."

Still, MoviePass and its owner HMNY have a long way to go before they can declare victory. Last month, the company received notice from Nasdaq that it would be delisted if it fails to maintain a stock price above $1 and a minimum market cap of $50 million, per the stock exchange's requirements.

Shortly after, it called the special meeting with two proposals designed to help its struggling shares.

Stockholders approved both measures at the meeting on Monday. The first allows the company to issue 4.5 billion new shares of stock, increasing the total number of shares outstanding to 5 billion from 500 million. The second gives the company the ability to perform a so-called reverse stock split. Management can now increase the stock's price by consolidating shares by a ratio of between 2-for-1 to 250-for-1, at its discretion. Executives did not say when or by how much they would utilize each of their new options.

Despite the approvals, some investors weren't happy with the company's response to the stock's drastic fall from a high of $38.52 last year.

"As the stock price has plummeted, I’ve been concerned about the lack of communication from the company explaining what’s going on or assuring investors," one shareholder told Farnsworth and other executives. "There’s never been any sort of formal communication to the shareholders explaining what you think is going on, what the problem is with the stock going down so much, and what steps you’re going to take to fight that battle."

Other investors voiced concerns that their holdings would only be diluted further by the potential stock offerings.

"Nobody gets diluted more than I do during all this dilution," Farnsworth, who owns 2.14% of the company, said. "We are obviously in a place where this company has grown so quick so fast that it continues to need money, especially for MoviePass."

Farnsworth also addressed concerns that MoviePass may never become profitable, saying the company is on track to post a profit when it hits 5 million subscribers, though he did not provide an update on current subscriber numbers.

"What people really don't realize, is it's not about making money on the subscribers," he continued, touting investments by MoviePass in movies like Gotti and American Animals, both of which have posted solid box-office numbers since their release.

"It's a fastest-growing paid subscription ever in the history of the internet — period," Farnsworth said. "So you're not going to go through that without headaches."

Markets Insider

Customers can do only two things at Amazon pickup locations: pick up packages, and return them. That's all they're built for.

But for Amazon, being the online-shopping powerhouse it is, those are two very important purposes.

The locations function a lot like a post office, but just for Amazon packages. Get them sent to the building's address, and they'll be there when you're ready to pick them up. Packages can be kept there for up to two weeks.

Need to return an item? The service is free, since it doesn't actually need to go through the mail.

The pickup locations work a lot like the Amazon Locker system, which offers a place in convenience and grocery stores for customers to pick up packages. But by setting a time limit, the pickup location solves the problem of customers forgetting or neglecting to pick up their packages, something that can render the lockers unusable until some space is freed.

Amazon won't say exactly how many of these locations exist in the United States, but the number is at least 30 and growing. It just opened its first in the company's hometown of Seattle, to a surprising bit of fanfare for such a utilitarian device.

I visited the pickup location in Westwood, Los Angeles, a stone's throw from UCLA, to see what they're like to use. True to Amazon's ethos, it's simple and basic, but it works extremely efficiently.

It's perfect for a college student without a permanent address, or a tourist like me. One benefit for Prime members is that they can order some items for same-day or next-day pickup.

Here's what it's like to use an Amazon pickup location: