Nikola Motors is worth $23 billion despite zero sales or revenue. Founder and chairman Trevor Milton told CNBC that's because investors "don't care." Instead, they care about reducing emissions and the promise of Nikola's technology. While Tesla has its eyes on a battery powered semi-truck, Nikola is eyeing hydrogen fuel cells. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Nikola Motors, an electric truck maker that wants to eventually go after both Tesla and the freight market, is still months away from delivering its first products.

Unphased investors have nevertheless piled into the stock this month, sending the company's valuation soaring to well above $20 billion in just three months on public exchanges. CEO Trevor Milton says the new stockholders "don't care" and neither does he.

"They care more about the environmental impact of what you're doing," Milton told CNBC in an interview Monday evening. "'Oh, you're six months or eight months from revenue?' They don't care. They're like, 'you know what? You're changing the world. You're going to reduce emissions more than anyone else we're invested into you.'"

Nikola's most recent surge was fueled by the announcement that it will begin taking reservations on June 29 for its Badger truck, a full-size F-150 and Tesla Cybertruck.

But it's the semi truck — another segment Elon Musk has lofty plans for — where Nikola plans to really make money. However, there's one major powertrain difference: hydrogen.

"Nicola's main revenue stream is the semi-trucks," Milton said. "We can make about $750,000 or more in revenue per truck we sell, which is almost five times what our competitors make per truck.  That's because we actually include all the fuel with it that we own, and we manufacture the hydrogen fuel. That's the way we make all the money."

Hydrogen fuel cells have been an industry choice for heavy trucks, especially on off-highway uses where batteries can be quickly depleted. CNH Industrial, a maker of heavy-duty trucks and farm equipment with a similar stance on hydrogen versus pure batteries, previously invested $100 million in Nikola before exiting the stake during the reverse-public offering in March. 

That's where Milton thinks Nikola can get an edge on Tesla's charging network.

"It does take more energy to produce hydrogen than it does to charge a battery electric truck," Milton said, "but the advantage you get with hydrogen is building all your hydrogen stations on the interstate freeways, where you're able to source your energy directly and pay under 4 cents a kilowatt hour for energy."

In California, for example, Nikola charging could be as low as 30 cents per kilowatt hour, roughly in line with Tesla, and can help trucks work multiple shifts in a day with recharging. Orders are already backlogged to the tune of $10 billion with customers including Anheuser-Busch.

"If you look at cost comparison of a battery electric versus hydrogen battery would be cheaper if you were paying the same rate on energy, but you don't because the battery electric truck you're paying the utility for energy, the hydrogen, we actually control the energy through the, through the federal transmission lines so we can get energy really cheap," Milton said.

But despite all the optimism, there are plenty of people betting against Nikola and its soaring stock price. The company might be one of the top names on Robinhood, where investors are buying more shares of it than General Motors or Netflix, but it's also climbed to the sixth most shorted stock in the US, according to data from S3 Partners.

"I don't think they'll ever get a mass produced car," famed short-seller Andrew Left told Business Insider this week, dismissing the company as a "wannabe Tesla."

And with Tesla's "battery day" on the horizon for this month if plans hold, the race is on.

Original author: Graham Rapier

YouTube is rebranding FameBit, the influencer-marketing platform that it acquired in 2016, as YouTube BrandConnect.The in-house influencer-marketing service also has a new global head of business, Lori Sobel, who comes to BrandConnect after 16 years of working across various teams within Google. Unlike FameBit, which offered a self-service tool for creators and brands to connect for sponsored content deals, all YouTube BrandConnect deals will be initiated by the company's in-house team.Sobel told Business Insider that the company will be tapping into Google's pool of proprietary data to play matchmaker for brands and creators. Subscribe to Business Insider's influencer newsletter: Influencer Dashboard.

Four years after acquiring the influencer-marketing startup FameBit, YouTube is doubling down in its role as matchmaker for brands and creators and tapping into Google's vast pool of data to try and gain an edge.

The company recently announced that it's eliminating self-service deal-making from its in-house influencer-marketing tool, and as of today, the company is sunsetting the FameBit name and rebranding as YouTube BrandConnect.

The team has a new leader as well: Lori Sobel, who's taking charge of BrandConnect after spending 16 years working across a variety of teams at Google. 

"We've seen increased interest in influencer marketing over the last few years, and I anticipate that continuing to rise," Sobel told Business Insider. "Our team actually proactively matches creators with brands and provides that end-to-end campaign management and delivery. This was in contrast to our original self-service product which was a website that allowed creators to independently find brands to work with."

Lori Sobel is the new global head of business for YouTube BrandConnect. YouTube.

One of the main benefits of shifting away from a self-service model is having the ability to tap into Google's proprietary data to make more audience-based influencer-marketing deals rather than relying on a creator's content vertical, Sobel said.

"Instead of saying, 'Oh this is a beauty brand, they should only connect with beauty creators,' what we do is say, 'Okay this beauty brand is looking to reach this audience and then we come back with a list of more creators that they might not have even thought of that would be great for their brand," she said. 

YouTube acquired FameBit in 2016 with the hope that FameBit's "democratized marketplace" would allow creators "of all sizes to directly connect with brands," it said in a blog post at the time. The company has since discovered that creator-negotiated influencer deals are far less lucrative than campaigns set up by FameBit's in-house team. Sobel said that self-service deals represented less than 4% of total creator payouts on YouTube, and that its influencers earn on average 30 times more from full-service deals than self-service campaigns.

With the rollout of its full-service-only platform, BrandConnect, YouTube will act as a middle party for all negotiations between brands and creators, similar to an influencer-marketing agency model (though the company rejects the comparison). YouTube will continue to set a 25,000-subscriber minimum threshold for creators to participate in its branded content program.

The company said brands pay an upfront fee for each influencer campaign and in return YouTube guarantees a certain number of organic views. YouTube takes a percentage of the fee paid by the brand and creators who are part of the campaign get paid a pre-negotiated rate, which is also covered by the upfront fee.

"We're working with the brands to come up with what makes sense for them from a financial perspective, and then we're also working with the creators to do that as well," Sobel said. "We're not really an agency, I can't really get into all the details, but the goal is that we want to make it favorable for both sides, but everything we do is in-house."

The BrandConnect team's pitch is built around offering custom features (that it calls "shelfs") to make YouTube branded content more actionable, including a shopping carousel, an artificial-reality makeup try-on feature, and two new features that enable creators to feature apps and movie and TV shows they're discussing in their videos. Those features are exclusive to BrandConnect.

The company also offers a slate of measurement products for campaigns built on proprietary Google data to help brands identify increases in searches on Google.com and YouTube.com, purchase intent and brand recall shifts through surveys, and conversions, whether that's a website visit or product purchase.  

FameBit is not the only YouTube advertising program that's had a touch-up in recent weeks.

The company announced last month that its Google Preferred ad program is being overhauled and rebranded as YouTube Select with an eye to monetizing a wider swath of content on its platform. 

For more on the business of influencers, according to YouTube creators, check out these Business Insider Prime posts: 

How much money do YouTubers make a month? A minimalist influencer with 77,000 subscribers shares exactly what she earns and spends: The minimalist influencer Kyra Ann, who has 77,000 subscribers, shared how much money YouTube paid her in February.

8 YouTube stars explain which videos made them the most money, including one that earned $97,000: We spoke to eight creators with vastly different channels, and they shared the most amount of money YouTube paid them for a single video.

A YouTube creator explains why personal-finance videos can make much more money than many other types: Marko Zlatic runs a YouTube channel with 298,000 subscribers, and he posts videos about personal finance, stocks, and real-estate investing.

Original author: Dan Whateley

The theft of highly classified cyberweapons from the CIA in 2016 resulted from the agency's elite hacking unit's failure to secure its own systems from intruders, according to an internal report obtained by The Washington Post.The CIA discovered the breach when the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks published the information in a release dubbed "Vault 7." US officials say the breach was the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in CIA history.Security protocol within the hacking unit that developed the cyberweapons, housed within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, was "woefully lax," the report found.Moreover, the CIA may never have discovered the breach in the first place if WikiLeaks hadn't published the documents or if a hostile foreign power had gotten a hold of the information first, according to the report.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Central Intelligence Agency's elite hacking team "prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems," according to an internal agency report prepared for then-CIA director Mike Pompeo and his deputy, Gina Haspel, who is now the agency's director.

The Washington Post first reported on the document, which said the hacking unit's failure to secure the CIA's systems resulted in the theft of highly classified cyberweapons in 2016.

In March 2017, US officials discovered the breach when the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks published troves of documents detailing the CIA's electronic surveillance and cyberwarfare capabilities. WikiLeaks dubbed the series of documents "Vault 7," and officials say it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the agency's history.

The internal report was introduced in criminal proceedings against former CIA employee Joshua Schulte, who was charged with swiping the hacking tools and handing them over to WikiLeaks.

The government brought in witnesses who prosecutors said showed, through forensic analysis, that Schulte's work computer accessed an old file that matched some of the documents WikiLeaks posted. 

Schulte's lawyers, meanwhile, pointed to the internal report as proof that the CIA's internal network was so insecure that any employee or contractor could have accessed the information Schulte is accused of stealing.

A New York jury failed to reach a verdict in the case in March after the jurors told Judge Paul Crotty that they were "extremely deadlocked" on many of the most serious charges, though he was convicted on two counts of contempt of court and making false statements to the FBI.

Crotty subsequently declared a mistrial, and prosecutors said they intended to try Schulte again later this year.

The report was compiled in October 2017 by the CIA's WikiLeaks Task Force, and it found that security protocol within the hacking unit that developed the cyberweapons, housed within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, was "woefully lax," according to the Post.

The outlet reported that the CIA may never have discovered the breach in the first place if WikiLeaks hadn't published the documents or if a hostile foreign power had gotten a hold of the information first.

"Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss," the internal report said.

It also faulted the CIA for moving "too slowly" to implement safety measures "that we knew were necessary given successive breaches to other U.S. Government agencies." Moreover, most of the CIA's sensitive cyberweapons "were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media [thumb drive] controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely," the report said.

The Center for Cyber Intelligence also did not monitor who used its network, so the task force could not determine the size of the breach. However, it determined that the employee who accessed the intelligence stole about 2.2 billion pages — or 34 terabytes — of information, the Post reported.

Original author: Sonam Sheth

An Enel X charger. Facebook/Enel X

Overall score: 78.5

Strategy: 84

Execution: 72.8

Highlights from Guidehouse's analysis:

"As of March 2020, the company has installed more than 60,000 charging points...The company's portfolio includes hardware for home, commercial markets, and retail charging service providers, and software tools for network management and connectivity, as well as an EV driver app...Enel X has multiple notable business developments within 2019. These include plans to develop national networks in Italy, Spain, and Romania, network development tenders in Russia, contracts to support electric bus deployments in South America, and a string of partnerships with US utilities to supply residential and commercial customers...Enel X is well positioned to tap emerging markets in Latin America, and, using its formidable expertise in demand response and VGI, expand market share in residential and fleet markets. From a portfolio perspective, Enel X is hitting all the major applications but lacks a 150 kW+ solution that is increasingly popular in public charging networks. To move into the lead position on the grid, Enel X would need to catch up with ChargePoint in sales."

Original author: Mark Matousek

As the influencer industry has grown, with new creator-led startups and content production companies emerging, so has the need for capital from investors. Business Insider is recognizing 14 venture capital and investment players who are fueling startups that are shaping the creator economy.These investors are innovating and driving growth in the industry in 2020. Send your influencer industry tips to the authors at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..Subscribe to Business Insider's influencer newsletter: Influencer Dashboard.

As the influencer business grows with new creator-led startups and other companies that help with content production, so has both the interest and need for capital from investors. 

Both traditional and upstart investors are making bets on the creator category, where influencer marketing alone is expected to grow into a $15 billion industry by 2022. 

Many successful social-media stars work with a variety of third-party companies to support content and partnership growth. 

"I'm a big believer in that the biggest consumer companies in the future will be built around creators because they have so much distribution," said Blake Robbins, a partner at Ludlow Ventures, a Detroit-based venture firm that has invested in the gaming organization and lifestyle brand 100 Thieves. "There are some really interesting opportunities within consumer, whether that's software or physical goods. There's going to be a lot of interesting companies that emerge here, and I also think there's this rising middle class where even if you're not making millions of dollars a year as a content creator there's still opportunity to make a real living."

In this new list, Business Insider is putting a spotlight on venture capital and investment professionals innovating and driving growth in the creator industry.

These power players are helping influencers and content creators build larger businesses in 2020, and tapping into direct-to-consumer opportunities that have emerged as digital creators have shown they can drive product sales through their personality-based brands.

Whether adapting existing business services used by legacy TV or print media to the specific needs of a digital creator, or inventing new business lines that are unique to the social-media landscape, a slew of companies in the creator space are popping up to meet the needs of a new generation of digital stars.

This list was determined by Business Insider based on our reporting and factors like the success of the companies they've invested in and their impact on the influencer business as a whole.

Here are the 14 investors and firms, listed in alphabetical order: 

For more on the business of influencers, check out these power lists on Business Insider Prime:

Original author: Amanda Perelli and Dan Whateley

Original author: Maureen Kelly

Shortly after George Floyd was murdered, I started calling Black VC and entrepreneur friends asking them “what are two things you are involved in that I can immediately support with time and money.” 

Arlan Hamilton was my first call. In addition to asking me to spend more time with Backstage Capital portfolio companies and founders, she told me about a non-profit called Cover that she created in 2016 with Bryan Landers and Dianne Cherrez.

Arlan decided to give away copies of startup and investing books to help more people gain access to content that could change their career path.

Venture Deals was one of the books that Arlan gave away and she has occasionally talked about how impactful the book was to her own journey to learn about and become a VC.

I love to read. Arlan loves to read. And Arlan appreciates the power of books to help people learn. And, it’s even fun to see how people get Arlan’s attention using Backstage Capital and Venture Deals together.

Cover 1.0 was giving away books. Cover 2.0 started with the following tweet and shifted to gifting $500 to recipients to help them reach their goals. 

With this new approach, Cover allowed access to knowledge (books, courses…), networks (introductions, memberships…), and opportunities (events, job applications…) to those who are working hard to achieve great things.

For Cover 3.0, Arlan is including the Covid crisis in the mix to include Covid-related help. For example, PPE–especially for high-risk, low-resourced places like prisons and other non-profits, higher education and experiences for Black women, and resources for displaced Black students.

In addition to financially supporting Cover 3.0 at a level to support 100 gifts, I’m going to donate 100 copies of Venture Deals to Cover 3.0 to give away to each recipient.

If you want to support Cover 3.0, please Donate any amount. I’m confident that Arlan and team will put it to good use. 

Arlan – you inspire me and so many others. Thank you.

Original author: Brad Feld

As I begin to work my way through the NY Times Antiracist Reading List (by Ibram X. Kendi), I thought I’d start with The Blacker The Berry by Wallace Thurman.

I started with the Wikipedia page for Wallace Thurman.

Langston Hughes described Thurman as “…a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read.” Thurman’s dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community’s preference for its lighter-skinned members

I didn’t know the phrase colorism nor had I ever thought about bias around it. Over the weekend, Lucy Sanders pointed me at an NCWIT article on Colorism Bias in the Tech Industry. I then went down a rabbit hole on colorism, which caused me to realize how oblivious and ignorant I was to this type of discrimination.

Emma Lou Morgan, the protagonist of The Blacker The Berry, geographically follows Thurman’s life, from Boise, the USC, to Harlem. The book is beautifully written and deeply engrossing as Emma’s story unfolds. Some of it is a coming of age story, but also a continual struggle, from a Black woman’s perspective, on dealing with discrimination from all sides, since she is darkly colored and subject to endless colorism.

The book was written in 1929. It was Thurman’s first novel. Per Wikipedia:

The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored.

Thurman died in 1934 at age 32 of tuberculosis. He only wrote two other books: Infants of the Spring and The Interne. I just purchased Infants of the Spring but couldn’t find The Interne.

Next up – Rodney Sampson’s Kingonomics: Twelve Innovative Currencies for Transforming Your Business and Life Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Original author: Brad Feld

Original author: Sramana Mitra

Original author: Sramana_Mitra

Original author: Sramana Mitra

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Getty

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.

Facebook has rejected a proposed code of conduct from an Australian watchdog that would make it pay for news links, the Guardian reports. Facebook said there would be no "significant" effect on its business model if it stopped sharing newslinks.US states appear to be backing off using contact tracing apps to monitor the spread of COVID-19, NBC reports. The states that have rolled them out have not had great success in getting significant portions of the population to download them.Germany is launching its own COVID-19 contact tracing app this week, Engadget reports. Originally the country said it would make its app without Google and Apple's specialized API, but it later reversed its position.Sources told the Wall Street Journal that short video streaming app Quibi is on track to sign up 2 million subscribers by the end of this year, far less than original target of 7.4 million. Daily downloads have not topped 379,000 since its launch day on April 6.SoftBank has invested roughly $500 million in Credit Suisse funds that invest in some of its own startups, The Financial Times reports. The funds have latterly increased their exposure to several startups in SoftBank's portfolio.SpaceX launched 58 of its Starlink satellites on Saturday, leaving a rainbow-colored cloud in the Florida sky. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the mission to orbit lifted off just before dawn from Cape Canaveral, Florida.A US antitrust probe into big tech wants the CEOs of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook to testify before the House in July, Axios reports. Letters were reportedly sent to the CEOs requesting their attendance last week, and suggested subpoenas could be used to compel them.Google apologized after search results failed to automatically bring up an image of Winston Churchill. Google said this was the result of a technical glitch, not a conscious decision to remove the image of the former British prime minister.Facebook released a trove of 100,000 deepfake videos as a resource to help train algorithms to spot them better, MIT Tech Review reports. The faces of 3,426 actors were used to build the dataset.Tesla is adding wireless phone chargers and USB-C ports to some of its US Model 3s, Elektrek reports. The upgrade is coming to cars made in its Fremont, California factory after appearing in its Shanghai factory.

Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.

You can also subscribe to this newsletter here — just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know.

Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton

Original author: jyotsna popuri

British quantum computing startup Universal Quantum has emerged from stealth to announce a £3.6 million seed round.The startup wants to build a quantum computer with chips comprising one million qubits. For context, today's quantum computers have 20 to 50 qubits and the technology is difficult to scale up.Others competing in the field include Google and IBM, with quantum computing promising major breakthroughs in climate change, drug discovery, and other scientific fields.Read on for an exclusive look at Universal Quantum's pitch deck.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

British startup Universal Quantum has raised £3.6 million ($4.5 million) in new funding to try and beat IBM and Google to the moonshot of building a functioning quantum computer.

The University of Sussex spinout has emerged from stealth to announce its ambition to build a 1-million qubit quantum computer and test whether the tech might solve some of humanity's biggest challenges.

Quantum computing is at the very edge of physics and computer science, but the race to build a true super computer is heating up with Palo Alto's PsiQuantum raising $215 million in April, and Finland's IQM announcing a €15 million raise on Thursday.

The promise of quantum computing is that it could be considerably more powerful than traditional computing, enabling humanity to solve major challenges around climate change, drug discovery, and areas we haven't thought of. The trouble is, quantum computers are extremely difficult to run and, depending on who you talk to, none have really managed to outstrip classical computers.

A two-module quantum computer prototype Universal Quantum

In traditional computing, information is encoded in bits that are only one of two values at any one time, usually represented as 0 or 1, on or off. Quantum computing operates in the realm of quantum mechanics, a mysterious branch of physics that famously no one understands. And it doesn't rely on bits, but a unit called a qubit which can be in two states simultaneously.

"What quantum computers do is make use of a number of very cool effects you see in the quantum world and one of them, for example, is that something can be in two places at the same time," said Dr Sebastian Weidt, CEO and cofounder of Universal Quantum, adding: "In a conventional computer, bits are represented as a one or a zero. And because we now live in the quantum world, we can represent ones and zeroes at the same time. That's where a lot of the computational power comes in."

Different players working on this technology are taking different approaches to try and exhibit "quantum effects", Weidt said.

IBM and other firms use superconducting qubits which are fabricated onto a chip, which is then cooled down to absolute zero or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. That technology literally requires something like a giant refrigerator which is, for obvious reasons, quite difficult to scale up.

Universal Quantum says it has developed tech based on trapped ions. "You use individual charged atoms and you encode information inside of them, so each atom becomes a qubit," said Weidt, adding that the qubits are in a vacuum system with cool technology and there is no need for giant refrigerators.

Weidt argues this will be easier to scale up to build a true quantum computer. "It's not enough to be at tens of qubits, and that's where we're currently at .... we need to be at the millions of qubits.

"We didn't care too much about doing stuff with five qubits, 10 qubits to get a great Nature paper," he added. "We asked ourselves: 'Okay, what would it take to build a 1-million qubit computer, what's stopping us right now?'"

Universal Quantum's new backers include Village Global — a fund that offers connections to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Other backers include Hoxton Ventures, Propagator VC, Luminous VC, and 7 Percent.

Read Universal Quantum's (redacted) pitch deck below:

Original author: Shona Ghosh

The PlayStation 5 is coming this holiday season, according to Sony, and a ton of new games for the new console were just revealed.From a new "Spider-Man" game to this year's "NBA 2K" entry, the PlayStation 5 is getting a ton of new games. Whether you're looking for huge new sequels, like "Horizon Forbidden West," major new entries in long-established franchises, like "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart," or this year's "NBA 2K" game, the PlayStation 5 has something for you.These are the biggest games that were revealed during Sony's big event last week!Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The PlayStation 5 is just months away, and this past week we got our first real look at games running on Sony's next-generation game console.

Great news: Not only do those games look stunning, but Sony revealed a plethora of unknown titles and hotly anticipated sequels during its big PS5 reveal event. 

From the new "Spider-Man" game to this year's "NBA 2K" entry, these are the 15 most exciting new PS5 games we saw this week:

Original author: Ben Gilbert

2020 Aston Martin DB11 V8. Matthew DeBord/Insider

If cars like the V12 version of the DB11 and the Ferrari 812 Superfast are rolling anachronisms at best and, at worst, on the automotive endangered-species list, then the DB11 V8 is an effort to stave off the inevitable. Personally, I'd rather have four more cylinders under the hood, but the virtues of the DB11 V8 are considerable, even if the machine has endured something of a soul-ectomy. (Interestingly, what's saddening in the DB11 V8 is utterly exhilarating in its stablemate, the glorious Vantage, more on that in a subsequent review).

What's good about the DB11 is indeed very good, and unlike many, many other 21st-century asphalt-obliterating beast-mobiles — all-wheel-driven and suspension-managed and rather generally sanded off the rough edge — the DB11 is rather a wild thing. The car is a tail-happy gunslinger, and you don't even have to try that hard to unstick the meaty Bridgestones from the road; a mere burst of throttle when executing a routine left or right turn will have you micro-drifting through the 'burbs, gleefully. The equation is simple: much horsepower and torque piped to the rear wheels, plus snappy steering, yields a giddy dose of oversteer. Cue giddy grin.

When that gets old, which it never does, you can always aim the DB11 at an unveering expanse of highway and savor the perfectly calibrated roar and rumble that the V8 produces. No, it ain't the majestic basso of the V12. But it'll do.

And when that gets old, which it also never does, you can just park the DB11 and look at it. Holy schmokes, does Aston Martin know how to sculpt sheetmetal! No Aston is as beautiful as the DB9, but the current lineup is ... well, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and declare inarguably the most gorgeous slate of vehicles money can buy.

A lot of money, of course, and let's face it, Astons depreciate faster than cannonballs tossed from ravine bridges. But who cares? Toyota Corollas lose value, too. I'd rather be carping about how much moolah I'm blowing while I'm behind the wheel of a sumptuous, made-in-England grand tourer: financial agony should at least be exquisite.

The general idea behind the V8 variant of the DB11 is that by decreasing the size and bulk of the motor, the driving dynamics become lighter and sportier — less grand-tourer than sorta-kinda sports car. Indeed, the DB11 V8 is more sprightly than the V12, and perhaps even a tad wilder. I clocked the 0-60 mph time at a spirited four seconds flat, but the DB11 is supposed to be faster than that, so chalk the discrepancy up to my cowardice. Somehow, the car allegedly manages just south of 20 mpg in combined fuel economy, and doggone if I didn't have a hard time incinerating high-octane petrol during my time with the DB11.

I wouldn't opt for the yellow paint job, but it sure pops in photos. So influencers, consider the choice. As with all Aston paint jobs I've experienced up close and personal, it's hypnotic.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I'm a sucker for Astons. The number-one plaything on my to-do list, should I unexpectedly make bank, is a DB9. I have a hard time reviewing the things objectively because I consider my wardrobe unworthy (paging Brioni) and because I'm weak-in-the-knees and fuzzy-in-love the whole time. Aston Martins are weapons of objectivity destruction in my world. They have me at VROOM!

They also don't play nice. I recently sampled both a Porsche Turbo S and a Mercedes-AMG GT R (which shares a lot of bits and pieces with the DB11) and durned if I struggle to unsettle those cars. The Porsche can't be ruffled by mere mortals, and the Merc is so loud and aggressive that it actively encourages you to be careful.

The DB11 V8, meanwhile, starts off mellow and mannered and then progressively unleashed hell. Before you know it, you're hanging on for dear life — but asking for more. And it's not obvious you can handle it. I fret not about throwing a 911 into a corner. And in, say, a Ferrari 812, I'm going so fast in a straight line that I don't want to tempt fate. But the DB11 V8 whispers in your ear about the limits of grip and urges you to hit that corner with an abundance of foolish energy. Beware.

In the weird world of true GTs, the DB11 is something special: a car with so much soul that it effortlessly crossed the mind-body barrier. After a few minutes behind the wheel, you feel alive in ways that only a machine this utterly and unapologetically alive can make you feel.

Worth way over $200,000? Well, if you have to ask ...

Original author: Matthew DeBord

A Las Vegas house with an attached 15,000-square-foot underground bunker is for sale.The house and bunker are listed for $18 million. Inside, the house's bunker is covered in murals of landscapes at different times of the day.Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Only about two miles from the Las Vegas strip, an ordinary-looking house sits on top of a 15,000-square-foot bomb shelter. The massive doomsday bunker is listed for $18 million, including a 5,000-square-foot home furnished in full 1970s style, plus murals throughout.

Realtor Stephan LaForge told Business Insider that the real draw of the listing is the massive underground property, though the I-beams and underground features are harder to represent in photos than the house's interior. LaForge told Realtor.com that the price reflects the impossibility of creating a structure like this today. It last sold for $1.15 million in 2015.

The house itself is a unique draw and has become somewhat famous. It has five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a pool, plus a small guesthouse that sits aboveground. It was built in 1978 as a bomb shelter, although it isn't actually protective against a nuclear disaster. Current owners, the Society for the Preservation of Near Extinct Species, added period-appropriate furniture and other improvements that might make the house more livable to potential buyers.

3970 Spencer Street is listed with Stephan LaForge with Berkshire Hathaway Nevada Properties.

Take a look inside. 

Original author: Mary Meisenzahl

Four years after being acquired by Salesforce, Quip has evolved from a standalone productivity and collaboration tool to a product that is embedded directly into Salesforce's customer focused tools. Quip is best known for its co-founder Bret Taylor, who is now Salesforce's COO, but the product itself has become core to Salesforce's mission of giving organizations a "360 degree" view of their customers. It's meant to make Salesforce easier to use.Quip is now run by Ryan Aytay, who focuses on the customer facing and business side, and original co-founder Kevin Gibbs, who focuses on engineering and product. Both are co-CEOs of Quip.Quip is seeing a big uptick in usage during this remote work era, according to a recent report and Salesforce internal figures.Click here to read more BI Prime stories.

When the University of San Francisco asked Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to help source personal protective equipment for its medical workers in early March, he turned to one of his senior executives, Ryan Aytay, to help organize the effort.

Within days, Aytay pulled together a team of employees from within Salesforce to put aside their day-to-day jobs and focus on a task that included working with partners like Alibaba to find trusted PPE vendors. Their efforts were a success: Salesforce bought over $25 million-worth of PPE — more than 50 million pieces — to send to hospitals and agencies in need. To organize that effort, from sourcing to shipping, Aytay used Quip — a productivity tool Salesforce acquired in 2016 for $750 million.

Quip is best known because of the rapid rise through the ranks of co-founder Bret Taylor, who is now Salesforce's chief operating officer, while less is known about where the product stands now. Four years post-acquisition, Quip has evolved from a standalone productivity and collaboration tool with built-in office suite functionality to a product that is embedded directly into Salesforce's customer focused tools and a core part of the company's business. 

"We make it easier for anyone that uses Salesforce to know everything about a customer, everything that drives whatever they're doing, whether it's closing a deal or a service ticket or any process they want to do," Quip co-founder and co-CEO Kevin Gibbs told Business Insider. "We can make all of the users of Salesforce products more productive because we're getting all of that customer information at their fingertips."

Quip is now jointly run by Aytay, who focuses on the customer facing and business side, and original co-founder Gibbs, who focuses on engineering and product. In addition to running Quip, both have dual roles within Salesforce. Aytay also oversees strategic partnerships and key projects for Benioff and was recently promoted to Salesforce's chief business officer, and Gibbs also runs engineering and strategy for Salesforce's mobile apps. 

Evolving from a standalone productivity app to integrating with Salesforce

Quip has undergone a significant transformation in recent years under the leadership of Aytay and Gibbs. In its original form it was a collaboration app that let users create, annotate, and chat about documents or spreadsheets in real-time, competing against Google Drive, Microsoft Office, and even Slack. 

While it still exists as a standalone productivity app that costs between $10 and $25 per user per month, Salesforce primarily pushes it as part of its larger "Customer 360" set of products. That means that it's now deeply integrated into Salesforce's existing tools and meant to help make them easier to use, allowing people to collaborate and share information directly within Salesforce in new ways.

"We are about making Salesforce better," Aytay said. "It's about connecting the productivity component and the CRM context."

Here's what using Quip through Salesforce might look like:

A salesperson trying to close a deal with a new customer would ordinarily have to send that prospect an email with details to close a deal. With Quip, however, they could instead send a document that automatically pulls relevant data from their Salesforce database (to edit the document the customer would have to sign up for a Quip account, but just to read it they wouldn't have to). Then, when a deal gets approved through Quip, it's automatically recorded in a salesperson's Salesforce database.

Aytay calls it "extending" the capabilities of Salesforce via Quip and says that the product isn't trying to compete with the likes of Google Drive or Microsoft anymore. Instead, it's trying to partner with those apps. Quip allows users to embed a Google document or spreadsheet in the tool and integrates with Slack as well.

Ultimately, Aytay and Gibbs believes that Quip allows Salesforce users to be more productive: Instead of needing to switch between a bunch of different apps, they can access all the information they need in once place. 

"You're eliminating the need for someone to swivel-chair through email or swivel-chair to some spreadsheet or some other messaging application," Aytay said, "Because it's now all encapsulated inside of Salesforce."

Existing Salesforce customers pay an add-on fee for Quip integration, though prices differ between customers and there is no one set price. 

Quip in the remote work era

Like most productivity software, Quip is seeing a big uptick in usage right now during the coronavirus-related remote work era. Quip usage increased 15% between February and March, according to a report from security company Okta about the most popular workplace apps during remote work. 

Salesforce doesn't break out individual user numbers for its products, but confirmed that more businesses are signing up for Quip during the coronavirus crisis. Quip signed up 62% more customers per week between mid-March and mid-April than it signed up between mid-December and mid-March, Salesforce said. Users are also sending 20% more messages in Quip during the remote work era.

Though it declined to share Quip's revenue growth, Salesforce includes it in its "Salesforce Platform and Other" category in its quarterly earnings, along with several others businesses like Tableau and Trailhead. That category grew 62% year-over-year as of its last report.

Salesforce employees are using the product more too, including to share information with customers, he said. Salesforce is reimagining how it operates, its sales people are working from home, using video calls, and collaborating in Quip. That's also allowing them to easily share information with customers because "we're not able to go out and shake their hands and each and every day," he added.

Although Quip wasn't built specifically for remote work, the fact that it allows easy collaboration and access to information in the CRM system means that the product is especially useful right now, Gibbs said. He wants Quip to be the place where sales people, service agents, developers, and anyone else who uses Saleforce's customer facing tools can get work done. 

As a result of the pandemic, every business now has to rethink how it operates — from how it sells products to how it's providing customer service.

The effort that Quip's engineering and product teams have put into integrating the product over the last few years means its "very relevant" right now, Aytay said: "The things you did every single day before are different now."

Fitting into Salesforce without losing Quip's company culture 

As Quip has evolved, Gibbs' team has made user needs and experiences a priority, trying to figure out where Quip can help improve productivity for their specific jobs. The goal is to make sure the product design reflects the ways people are actually using it. Gibbs said he is still learning about how industries like healthcare and finance can best utilize Quip's capabilities. 

Quip customers that used the app before the acquisition are new customer prospects for Salesforce's core customer-focused software, and it tries to show them the value of integrating productivity and sales tools. Salesforce declined to name specific customers.

While Quip's product has been deeply integrated with Salesforce, Quip's workforce and company structure has largely stayed separate and intact. Many of Quip's employees have stayed with the company since it joined Salesforce, and even risen up through the ranks. Gibbs said that was a quality that appealed to him during the acquisition process.

"What I think Salesforce does an amazing job of is not mandating how people integrate and work together but, instead, talking about values," Gibbs said. "I didn't have to sort of contort myself to a new way of being, as being part of Salesforce."

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