Hidden in the code of a SpaceX website are the first official pictures of satellite dishes that will connect future subscribers to Starlink — a fleet of low-flying, internet-beaming satellites.

What's more, a review of the site's code by Business Insider turned up numerous credible details about how an upcoming beta test of Starlink might work.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has previously described the satellite dishes, or user terminals, as looking like a "UFO on a stick." Though the company has yet to formally share images of the terminals, fans have hunted down Starlink test sites listed in US regulatory documents and taken pictures of prototype antennas. 

In this case, Vivien Hantusch, a student at the Peter Behrens School of Arts (who often interacts with Musk on Twitter), found links to official pictures in the public source code of Starlink's website.

"UFO on a stick aka Starlink user terminal looks beautiful," Hantusch tweeted on Tuesday evening, sharing two crops of the images.

Her posts led Business Insider to carry out a wider review of the site code, which contained what appear to be in-depth details of the Starlink beta program.

Musk replied to the tweet with details he's shared before about the terminals. 

"Starlink terminal has motors to self-orient for optimal view angle. No expert installer required. Just plug in & give it a clear view of the sky," Musk said. "Can be in garden, on roof, table, pretty much anywhere, so long as it has a wide view of the sky."

SpaceX is gearing up to launch a private beta for Starlink this summer and a more public user test program later this year. To that end, the company sent emails overnight on Monday to Starlink beta applicants requesting addresses for where they'd like service.

A review by Business Insider of Starlink.com's public source code suggests that SpaceX is very close to finishing a website for beta testers. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Being a Starlink beta tester may cost $1 a month

During our code review, Business Insider discovered a JavaScript file that appears to power a future page for beta invitees.

The code gives a picture of how the page would probably work, but could change before launch.

The file includes a link to another apparent user terminal image, above. It also has programming for would-be users to enter a non-transferable participation code and create an account.

More importantly, there are roughly 2,000 words in the file that appear to lay out a privacy policy, terms of service, and the fee to participate in "Starlink Beta" — $1 a month.

(Text farther down in the file specifies a $3 initial charge, followed by $2 per month charge thereafter.)

The Starlink website file says: "These charges are not a fee for the Starlink hardware or services, but are being requested exclusively to allow for the testing of our ordering and billing systems as part of this beta program."

 "SpaceX is temporarily loaning you the hardware and providing the internet services free of charge. The $1 will be charged 30 days after your hardware is shipped."

Also in the file is text that appears to explain the rationale for the test program:

"Starlink Beta is an opportunity to be an early user of the SpaceX's satellite internet system. The purpose of Starlink Beta is to gather feedback that will help us make decisions on how best to implement the system for Starlink's official launch.

"By design, the beta experience will be imperfect. Our goal is to incorporate feedback from a variety of users to ensure we build the best satellite broadband internet system possible."

Following that is an FAQ that expands on how the beta program might actually work.

An answer to a "who can participate" question says "Starlink Beta will begin in the Northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington state area." Being in those locations won't ensure participation, though, as SpaceX is also considering how many participants are in a given area.

Importantly, would-be beta testers will also need a clear view of the northern sky:

"Why do I need a clear view of the northern sky to be a beta tester? The Starlink system is currently made up of nearly 600 satellites orbiting the Earth that can provide internet service in a very specific range — between 44 and 52 degrees north latitude.

"Your Starlink dish requires a clear view of the Northern sky in order to communicate with the Starlink satellites. Without the clear view, the Starlink dish cannot make a good connection and your service will be extremely poor."

Participants shouldn't expect a seamless web connection, the file states, since SpaceX's work to improve the satellite network may cause intermittent disruptions.

"When connected, your service quality will be high, but your connection will not be consistent," the file says. "This means it may support streaming video with some buffering, but likely is not suitable for gaming or work purposes."

Users who complete the sign-up process will be permitted to order a "Starlink Kit" and, once they do, will be greeted with an order confirmation page, according to the code.

"Your Starlink Kit will arrive via FedEx pre-assembled with a Starlink dish, router, power supply and mount depending on your dwelling type," the file says.

Near the end of the FAQ is more detail about SpaceX's technical argument for creating Starlink internet service:

"How does Starlink internet work? Starlink will deliver high-speed broadband internet across the globe with a large, low-Earth constellation of relatively small but advanced satellites. Satellite internet works by sending information through the vacuum of space, where it travels nearly 50% faster than in fiber-optic cable.

"Most satellite internet services today come from single geostationary satellites that orbit the planet at about 35,000km, covering a fixed region of the Earth. Starlink, on the other hand, is a constellation of multiple satellites that orbit the planet much lower at about 550km, and cover the entire globe.

"Because the satellites are in a low orbit, the round-trip data time between the user and the satellite — also known as latency — is much lower than with satellites in geostationary orbit. This enables Starlink to deliver services like online gaming that are usually not possible on other satellite broadband systems."

Finally, text in the file says, beta testers who want to cancel can do so "at any time."

But the first rule of the Starlink Beta is you do not talk about Starlink Beta

However, the terms and conditions laid out in the text make clear the program isn't one you can tell anyone about, since every tester will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

"You are being provided early access to the Starlink Services. The Starlink Services and details like internet speeds, uptime, coverage, and other performance specifications are confidential and proprietary to SpaceX," the file says.

"You may NOT discuss your participation in the Beta Program online or with those outside of your household, unless they are SpaceX employees."

The file goes on to add: "You must not share anything on social media about the Starlink Services or the Beta Program. This applies not only to public forums, but also to private accounts and restricted groups.

"Do not provide access or information about Starlink Services to the media or allow third-parties to take pictures of any part of the Starlink Kit."

Over the course of 8 weeks, the file says, testers may be expected to "dedicate an average of 30 minutes to 1 hour per day testing the Starlink Services and providing feedback on a periodic basis," including surveys, emails, and calls with SpaceX employees.

Further, SpaceX also seems to want testers to install their own kits. This may be to test the ease of mounting an advanced satellite dish to a roof or wall, but perhaps also to protect trade secrets from curious local handymen (who might post photos or descriptions of the tech).

"You are responsible for installing the Starlink Kit. Do not allow third-parties, or those not associated with SpaceX, to access or install the Starlink Kit unless you obtain approval form [sic] SpaceX," the file's text says.

Doing anything illegal with a Starlink web connection won't be tolerated, according to SpaceX's file, and those users who don't return the equipment within 30 days of SpaceX's request will apparently be charged an "equipment fee."

Though that fee is unspecified, it could be significant: The phased-array antenna inside each user terminal may cost more than $1,000 to make, according to some industry analysts.

Jake Swearingen and Samir Yahyazade contributed to this story.

Have a story or inside information to share about the spaceflight industry? Send Dave Mosher an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or a Twitter direct message at @davemosher. More secure communication options are listed here.

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Financial crime and money laundering is a thorn in the side of financial institutions. Compliance is often costly and manual.

A 2018 report by data provider Refinitiv suggested that $1.45 trillion had been lost by businesses as a result of financial crime.

Cloud-based Icelandic anti-money laundering fintech startup Lucinity has just raised $6.1 million in fresh funding to help alleviate the problem.

"Banks are trying their hardest to combat money laundering, but the tools to prevent it are limited," Lucinity founder and CEO Gudmundur Kristjansson (better known as GK). "That's why we set out to 'make money good' using our AI to help banks ensure that the money that flows through them comes from clean sources."

The anti-money laundering company uses a cloud-based integration to help financial institutions better understand transaction data. 

The new round was co-led by Karma Ventures and ByFounders, bringing the startup's total funding to $9 million. Previous investors Crowberry Capital and Preceptor Capital also participated in the company's seed round in June last year.

Lucinity was already planning for its next raise when it closed that earlier seed round, Kristjansson said. The round started off in March and was officially closed at the start of July.

"We were planning our Series A for this year and saw an opportunity in Covid. We foresaw a rapid increase in digitization and remote working that speaks perfectly to our value proposition," GK added. "We are in a position to leverage whatever situation comes out of Covid, and the fundraising showed us that many investors agree."

Lucinity's product focuses on what it calls "Human AI," effectively a feedback loop which provides charts and explanations of data, which Kristjansson calls the "secret sauce" which has been missing from many previous anti-financial crime products.

Funding will be used to continue scaling the Lucinity team as it looks to deploy its services within financial institutions in Europe and the US. 

Check out Lucinity's pitch deck below:

VidMob raises $25M for its video advertising tools

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'

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 

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.

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."

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."  

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.

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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:

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.

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.

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."

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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.

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."

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.

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'

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. 

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.

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."

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. 

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.

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."

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."