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PHOTOGRAPHY: ON THE COVER: JUNO CALYPSO. THIS PAGE: RICK GUEST
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Marathons aren’t enough for the new breed of ultrarunning super-athletes like Tom Evans,
FURTHER, FASTER, ULTRA
who is pushing the limits of human endurance
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The edited ranks of a Glossier display at the beauty company’s pop-up experience in Covent Garden, London
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TRUMP IN TWEETS
STARTUP SPECIAL
SUPPLY/DEMAND
It’s not just “drain the swamp”
How Emily Weiss built Glossier, the
In Bali, “digital nomads” dream
and “fake news”: WIRED plots the
$1.2 billion cosmetics phenomenon,
of making it big in dropshipping
key catchphrases deployed by
plus insider knowledge from key
– but not every e-store selling
Donald Trump in his Twitter era
startup founders and investors
Chinese goods makes the grade
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p. 0 76 Fe at ure
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FUTURE SHOCK
MACHINE YEARNING
THE WILD THINGS
Sci-fi icon William Gibson is
WIRED takes a photographic
The Gorongosa National Park in
exploring the apocalypse
tour of the unintentional beauty of
Mozambique has become a lot more
across alternate timelines –
technology – from sex robots to
dangerous – but it’s all part of the
including one like our own
rooms that simulate outer space
plan to reintroduce apex predators
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LIFE IN COLOUR
INTO THE DEPTHS
GOOGLE X AT TEN
WIRED sets the tone for a hue you
Victor Vescovo wanted to be the
Is the tech giant’s secretive
with the best new products across
first to reach the deepest point of
moonshot factory a hub of
the spectrum, from Telecaster
all five oceans – but he needed
breakthrough innovation, or
guitars to McLaren supercars
to reinvent the submarine to do it
a Silicon Valley indulgence?
00 8
Editor Greg Williams Group creative director Andrew Diprose
Publishing director Nick Sargent Managing editor Mike Dent
Group head of revenue, digital and brand partnerships Rachel Reidy
Executive editor Jeremy White
Director of photography Dalia Nassimi
Associate director Silvia Weindling
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Deputy digital editor Matt Burgess
Acting art director Dina Koulla, Claude d’Avoine
Partnerships manager Jack Dobinson-Grange
Senior editor Amit Katwala
Digital art editor Kieran Walsh
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Senior editor Gian Volpicelli
Video producer Anna O’Donohue
Partnerships art editor Jeffrey Lee
Business editor Natasha Bernal
Contributing editors Dan Ariely, David Baker,
Partnerships designer Duarte Soares
Associate editor Sophie Charara
Rachel Botsman, Liat Clark, Russell M Davies,
Senior project manager Jessica Wolfe
Science editor Matt Reynolds
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Senior project manager Fiona Hill
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Acting senior project manager
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Business Manager Jake Pummintr
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WIRED Consulting
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010
THINGS ARE
REMOTE WORKING
Photographer Khoo Guo Jie met some of the “digital nomads” of Bali – the young entrepreneurs who run businesses from the beach and launch startups between surfing. But despite the image, it isn’t all easy money and the good life. “The initial impression is one of living glamorously, with the cash rolling in, but I wanted to show the real people behind the Mac screens,” says Khoo. “They live in rented villas; they only socialise with each other; it seems like a big gamble – with your fate as currency.”
Jen Guyton had a close photographic encounter with the wild beasts of Gorongosa National Park, including this young Bateleur eagle – fortunately being handled by Diolinda Mundoza Semente, a young Mozambican scientist. “Gorongosa is a conservation model for the future,” says Guyton of the park that’s reintroduced apex predators such as lions. “It shows that with proper care and support, ecosystems can return to their former glory.”
Chr is H as la m
Siri n Kale
S ab r in a We iss
Do not adjust your
Kale explores the
Apex predators and
eyeballs – this issue’s
phenomenon of
conservation don’t
dazzling Gear section
dropshipping, a career
sound like natural
has been specially
finding favour with
bedfellows, but
curated by Haslam
ambitious young
preserving the top
to bring a splash of
entrepreneurs. “These
of the food chain is
colour to the season.
‘digital nomads’ are
just as important
“I’m all about finding
educated, middle-
as the bottom, says
products that embrace
class kids who wash
Weiss, who visits
craftsmanship,
up in places like Bali,
Gorongosa National
smart design and
and, with an internet
Park in Mozambique,
inventiveness – a
connection, remotely
where they’ve restored
£5 spork can be as
sell products from China
lions and wild dogs.
impressive as a million-
to westerners,” says
“Farmers often object,
pound supercar, if it’s
Kale. “The one thing
claiming it endangers
done right.” he says.
they have in common
livestock, but it does
“That’s the secret to
is wanting to be really,
benefit communities
getting into WIRED.”
really rich. That said,
and the environment.”
only a few make it – and it’s a bubble that may already have burst.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: JEN GUYTON; KHOO GUO JIE. ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW GREEN
WHERE THE WILD
Big Tech’s smashand-grab prevents your data from being used for good Over the past decade, Big Tech platforms have productised our identities for their own gain. As we input our information into social media, transacted on e-commerce sites, applied for loans and swiped right, a picture of our behaviours – and our future intent – was constructed so that it could be commoditised and sold to third parties. We have a degree of agency: you can delete your social media, not shop online or refuse to hand over personal information – at the cost of being unable to function in a digital marketplace or workplace. (True story: WIRED abandoned using an online tool for our 2019 Secret Santa when it became clear that it was harvesting data by masquerading as a fun, elf-friendly service.) Whether we’re hovering over an item on a website, hailing a rideshare or organising seasonal tat-gifting, we’re compelled to hand over data in exchange for services. The purpose is singular: these organisations are incentivised to make money for themselves and their shareholders – see the ethical code of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, et al. Reminder: in 2019, Amazon announced that it paid taxes of £220m on £10.9bn in UK revenue. Facebook’s most recent UK tax return shows that it paid £28m on revenues of £1.65bn.
But what if data extraction was aligned with a wider set of values that offered citizens greater control while serving a social purpose? Take data sharing in healthcare – NHS England’s 100,000 Genomes project uses a “broad consent” model, meaning that participants agree that their data can be accessed by approved individuals. A 2019 paper from the innovation charity Nesta mapped out an “ecosystem of trust” based on data trusts – institutions “tailored to different conditions of consent, and different patterns of private and public value” – that would seek to impact areas such as education, employment, policing, mobility and healthcare. These public commons raise issues of ethics and governance which are crucial to protect
privacy, and these factors should spark a necessary conversation about how organisations – and particularly government – should integrate data analytics into day-to-day operations and share them with both public and private data trusts in order to provide richer samples and enable the development of products and services. Cities have a significant role to play in this aggregation of data for the public good – Barcelona and Amsterdam have both taken a lead in building models in which data that was previously privatised is aggregated in order to improve services such as mobility and sanitation. If individuals have a Personal Data Store – a repository of their data that they can then opt to make available to third parties – they may choose to, for instance, share their personal information with the city transport network, but not with an online retailer. A Nesta poll in 2018 suggested that 73 per cent of people would share personal data for public benefit if that data was subject to secure and ethical governance. Privacy by design, accountability and standards upheld by audited, licensed public and private trusts could help not only ensure that data is leveraged for the common good, but also rebuild public trust in institutions and private companies. Data sharing can be a powerful tool for everyone, not just to fund billionaires’ space programmes.
Greg Williams Editor
BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2019 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2018 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2018 • BSME Editor of the Year, Technology 2017 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2017 • BSME Art Team of the Year 2017 • BSME Print Writer of the Year 2017 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Cover of the Year 2015 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2015 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2014 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2013 • PPA Media Brand of the Year, Consumer 2013 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2012 • DMA Editor of the Year 2012 • BSME Editor of the Year, Special Interest 2012 • D&AD Award: Covers 2012 • DMA Editor of the Year 2011 • DMA Magazine of the Year 2011 • DMA Technology Magazine of the Year 2011 • BSME Art Director of the Year, Consumer 2011 • D&AD Award: Entire Magazine 2011 • D&AD Award: Covers 2010 • Maggies Technology Cover 2010 • PPA Designer of the Year, Consumer 2010 • BSME Launch of the Year 2009
ILLUSTRATION: GREGORI SAAVEDRA
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ED ITOR ’S ESSAY
E D I T E D B Y A M I T K AT W A L A & G I A N V O L P I C E L L I
Giving green power a lift
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The go-anywhere reach of the Saipem 7000 crane vessel is crucial for building offshore wind turbines
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As well as building new turbines, rigs and pipelines, Saipem 7000 also dismantles the old: over the last two decades, it has removed more than 200,000 tonnes of material, mostly
Hands on deck Saipem 7000 requires at least 28 maritime and technical personnel, plus 55 other crew. When working on a commission, the number of people on the vessel rises to an average of 180 for smaller jobs, or 400 for larger projects
At 197 metres long and 87 metres wide, Saipem 7000 is the third-largest crane vessel in the world. Currently owned by Italian energy contractor Saipem, the ship began cruising the seas in 1987 at the sluggish clip of 9.5 knots (17.5kph) to build and install offshore oil platforms. Its two cranes – jointly lifting up to 14,000 tonnes – hoist and lay down pre-assembled rigs, enabling the building and testing of structures on dry land, before being loaded whole on to the ship, transported to the site and positioned. In 1999, the ship was fitted with pipe-laying technology, which automatically welds hundreds of pipeline segments into one ribbon that is gradually eased into the sea as the ship ploughs forward. More recently, Saipem 7000 has pivoted to renewable energy. In 2016, it helped assemble and place the wind turbines of Hywind, the world’s first floating offshore wind farm, built off the coast of Scotland and operated by Norwegian multinational Equinor. “It took us six hours to install the first wind turbine generator, from lift-off from the quay to completion of the installation on to the floating unit,” recounts Nigel Swinnerton, Saipem’s head of assets and operations. “[Installing] the fifth and final wind turbine generator took three hours.” More green projects are in the pipeline, as Saipem tries to reduce the oil aspect of its business (as of September 2019, 70 per cent of the company’s work involved non-oil projects); the firm recently won contracts for the Neart na Gaoithe offshore wind park in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, and the Formosa 2 wind farm in Taiwan. GV saipem.com
PHOTOGRAPHY: MANUELA SCHIRRA AND FABRIZIO GIRALDI
from decommissioning obsolete platforms
15mg Organic Liposomal CBD + Adaptogens and Nootropics
MEDAHUMAN.COM
@medahuman #drinksmarter #bemedahuman
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PHOTOGRAPHY: DANIEL STIER
eston Blumenthal flips through a small notebook. Inside are sketches and handwritten notes in beautiful calligraphy. On one page, he stops and indicates a mesh of thick scribbles that slowly resolves into the shape of a human skull. “Twenty-three degrees,” he says. “The angle that the spinal column enters the cranium is the same as the tilt of the Earth on its axis.” Blumenthal is one of Britain’s most famous chefs – his scientific, multi-sensory approach has won six Michelin stars for The Fat Duck and The Hind’s Head in the Berkshire town of Bray, and Dinner in London. His signature is misdirection: a tangerine is shaped from chicken liver, playing cards melt into chocolate. He has a wide range of interests: over a couple of hours, conversation veers from toxoplasmosis – an infection caused by a cat-borne parasite that
can cause neurological problems in humans – to the politics of fear and irritating airline safety videos. His latest venture involves robotics. In October 2019, Blumenthal joined the board of Karakuri, a Londonbased startup that wants to bring robotic arms to restaurant kitchens. Co-founders Barney Wragg and Simon Watt worked at chip-maker ARM and music company Universal, and have backing from Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of lastminute.com and chair of Founders Forum. Karakuri has raised over £7m in funding, and has 20 employees based in a former bicycle factory near Hammersmith, in west London. In one demonstration, a robotic arm turns and twists to collect pick’n’mix sweets from automated dispensers. In another, a precise amount of yoghurt and granola are added to a cereal bowl. Eventually, Wragg says, the system will enable mass customisation of food at restaurants, cafés and sandwich shops. Pret could be about to get predictive. “People are much more sensitive about allergens and how their diet makes them feel,” says Wragg.
Dinnertime goes digital Heston Blumenthal is teaching robots to look after tossing the salads and slicing the sandwiches – freeing up chefs to concentrate on cooking
Right : Heston Blumenthal’s startup wants to ensure the customisation is always right
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Ocado has made a £6m investment and will test a robot arm in its kitchen
“That’s putting huge pressure on the day-to-day food industry because it requires a lot more configuration.” Karakuri’s technology is based around off-the-shelf robotic arms, normally found on factory assembly lines. Its key intellectual property will be in developing the infrastructure that goes around them, and building dispensers that can tackle the varying attributes of different foodstuffs: figuring out, for example, exactly how to squeeze a container of mayonnaise to get precisely ten grams, or how the viscosity of honey changes depending on the temperature it’s stored at. Food-delivery firm Ocado has made a £6m investment, and will soon install a robot arm in its test kitchen, where it could be used to prepare customised meals for home delivery. Right now though, Karakuri is focused on resolving a staffing problem at quickservice vendors – the kind of places where you might grab a sandwich on a lunch break. “Those restaurants, by their very nature, become very repetitive, very hard places to work,” says Wragg. “The move towards customisation actually makes those jobs more boring and more difficult, and people are making a decision with their feet not to take those types of jobs.” Chains and supermarkets have become experts at predicting what demand for a particular sandwich filling will be on a certain day, but they still get things wrong. “There’s a huge amount of wastage in the food chain,” says Wragg. Customisation will help improve
Above: Heston
efficiency, and Wragg says that robotics will help accelerate the adoption of big data by putting sensors on the frontline. “It’s about knowing where things are, what state they’re in, when they were grown,” he says. “A lot of the good that data is going to do will be around sustainability.” Blumenthal hopes that robotics and AI could have a wider impact. “We eat too much,” he says. “We do not appreciate food, and we throw food away. We need to change our relationship with food.” Connected sensors and robotics could enable a future where you track in real time how your gut microbes react to certain types of food: meals could be designed with your happiness in mind. But Blumenthal is adamant that this shouldn’t be about prescribing foods: “It’s not telling you to eat more spirulina, or not to eat sugar. All it’s doing is mirroring and giving you the opportunity to know more about yourself.” It’s not just sandwiches and salads. At Michelin-star level, Blumenthal says robotics will free up chefs to be more creative – to try things previously too difficult for humans to measure accurately or replicate consistently. “Unknowingly, I created the most consistently precise, linearly driven restaurant system that exists in the world,” says Blumenthal. “Let’s get robots to do the measurement stuff for us much better than we can do, and let’s allow human beings to be human.” Amit Katwala karakuri.com
WIRED
TIRED
EXPIRED
Quibi
Disney+
Netflix
Alive
Chlorinated
Fried
Instagram skulls
Contraband mammoth
Scrimshaw
Dark Mode
Dark ads
Dark kitchens
Cosmic Crisp
Golden Delicious
Granny Smith
Blumenthal believes he has created the “most consistently precise restaurant system that exists in the world”
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P E E D A N D E S O L U T I O N A K E A L L T H E I F F E R E N C E
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022
KEY
ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY 6/6/16
AT TACK! DEFENCE!
Tweet on repeat
SLOGAN! SAD!
TWEETS PER MONTH:
The hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency is his prolific use of Twitter – whether he’s smearing opponents, playing the victim or proclaiming his total innocence. WIRED adds up the adages
DRAIN THE SWAMP 14 TWEETS IN TOTAL
BUILD THE WALL 20
POCAHONTAS 22
KEEP AMERICA GREAT 24
PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT 30
US president Theodore Roosevelt called his office “The Bully Pulpit” – using the stature of the presidency to elevate whatever the president wants to draw attention to. A century on, Donald Trump has taken this power to heart. We broke down 45’s tweets since he joined Twitter in 2011 by type, plotting the frequency of many of his key catchphrases: take “Make America Great Again”, dating back to 2012, when Trump was
WITCHHUNT 64
thought to have been contemplating a run against Obama. “Sad!” is a perennial favourite. “No Collusion!” was, unsurprisingly, most repeated at the high point of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and after the publication of his report in April 2019. “Fake News!” first emerged in late 2016. “The standard way to combat accusations of ‘fake news’ wouldn’t be to embrace the term and flip it,” says professor Jack Grieve, a linguist at Birmingham University. Yet, that’s exactly what Trump did, morphing it from a definition of
disinformation into a catch-all slur for news outlets he dislikes. But why does Trump embrace catchphrases? “If there’s something that he’s trying to emulate, it’s worldwide wrestling,” says Simon Lancaster, a speechwriter for a wide range of politicians and public figures. “We’re in an attention economy: the skill that politicians need more than anything else is being able to grab people’s attention.” James O’Malley
20/12/12 China is robbing us blind in trade deficits and stealing our jobs, yet our leaders are claiming ‘progress’ http://t.co/2r9DHxHo SAD!
SAD 107
NO COLLUSION
Despite the upcoming election, the cover of paper-thin Time Magazine looks like an ad for the movie Lincoln--sad! 6/11/12
142
CROOKED HILL ARY 336
MAGA
(Make America Great Again)
3/1/12 My @foxandfriends interview discussing “Make America Great Again” Texas filing and the Iowa caucus http://t.co/HwnskYQT
410
FAKE NEWS 549
2011
2012
2013
2014
STAR T
NEW COLOUR BREAKDOWNS: YELLOW: 70Y/5K PINK: 50M/10Y IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS G R E E N : 3 0BEGIN C / 8 024/9/19 Y BLUE: 69C/26M (ACTUAL TWITTER BLUE)
INAUGURATION 20/11/16 ELECTION DAY WINS NOMINATION 22/7/16
8/11/16 STORMY DANIELS SCANDAL ERUPTS
31/1/18
THAT UKRAINE PHONE CALL 25/7/19
INFOGRAPHIC: SET RESET
MIDTERM ELECTIONS MUELLER PROBE ORDERED
17/5/17
TRUMP TWEETS COVFEFE
31/5/17
THE BLACK BACKGROUND NEEDS 6/11/18 BE: 40C/40M/40Y/100K (
TRUMP ANNOUNCES HE IS SEEKING RE-ELECTION 18/6/19 MUELLER REPORT PUBLISHED 18/4/19
Despite the constant negative press covfefe
24/1/17 Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!
4
10/6/16 Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice.
MOST TWEETS PER MONTH 4
29/8/18 Big Election Wins last night! The Republican Party will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Actually, it is happening faster than anybody thought possible! It is morphing into KEEP AMERICA GREAT!
7/2/19 PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT! It should never be allowed to happen again!
6
66 22/8/18 NO COLLUSION – RIGGED WITCH HUNT!
9
29
7/9/18 14 days for $28 MILLION – $2 MILLION a day, No Collusion. A great day for America!
29
Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)! 40
31/7/18
10/12/16 Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue – FAKE NEWS!
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ILLUSTRATION: RAYMOND BIESINGER
F ounded by two former Israeli navy intelligence of ficers in 2010, Tel Aviv-based Windward is a relentless ocean sleuth, tracking murky maritime activities ranging from attempts by Iran to defy oil sanctions to Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. Windward maps events across the world’s oceans via data such as a ship’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) identifier number, or its maximum deadweight (the difference between the displacement and the mass of an empty vessel), alongside satellite imagery from Planet.com, weather data from Meteomatics, and route information gleaned from the automatic identification system (AIS) that every ship must broadcast. These datasets are augmented with information provided by clients – which include the UN, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), and US agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Office of Naval Intelligence. “What is exclusive to us is our marriage of data science and maritime expertise,” Windward co-founder and CEO Ami Daniel says. “We take about 100 million data points a day to create a profile for each ship, and combine them to create their full path history,” adds senior data scientist Yonit Hoffman. Much information about vessels is limited to what they choose to disclose. For example, an Iranian oil tanker seeking to dodge sanctions could adopt a so-called flag of convenience, or simply switch off its transponder on its way to an importer’s port. AI enables Windward to build “operational profiles” of ships, based on actual activity. “A vessel can change its name, but it’s likely to continue behaving in the same way – it’s like an escaped convict changing his name, appearance and social security number, but still visiting his elderly mother,” says Hoffman.
By correlating information on a vessel’s current and past positions with data on navigation, weather, ports and trading patterns, Windward is able to assign it a unique fingerprint. Factoring in how a vessel is actually used, how much wear-and-tear its machinery has suffered, and the time it spends at sea in bad weather, lets Windward train its machine learning models to spot and predict signs of criminal activity. “Say you are a massive tanker registered in Panama, with owners in Singapore. At face value, there’s no ties to Iran,” explains Daniel. But certain behaviours will get it flagged as a potential sanctionsskirter. “According to our data, this tanker has not made a single port call in three years, which is very rare. It did, however, turn off its transmissions – our system can recognise this. It’s common behaviour for ships trying to evade sanctions.” By examining its deadweight and using satellite images to track its route, “we picked up on it and we found that it did go to Iran after all – even though when it went through Gibraltar, it never said it was Iranian”.
Using its own data and profiles allows Windward to monitor nefarious activity at a scale that was not previously possible. Whereas the standard IMO system includes about 70,000 registered ships, Windward tracks around 400,000 – including smaller fishing boats outside the IMO’s limits. This allows the company to expose, for example, Chinese intimidation of Vietnamese fishing boats in the disputed South China Sea waters. Windward’s latest focus is on sustainability and environmental regulations in the shipping industry. To help chart that course, it has recruited a new chairman: Lord Browne, a former CEO of British Petroleum and an advocate of action on climate change. But sanction surveillance is still by far its most lucrative business, earning Windward a growing list of state clients, and attracting investors such as the former CIA chief David Petraeus. “Regimes such as North Korea are becoming more sophisticated,” Daniel says. “Before, people were cocky and brazen, because no one was looking.” Omer Benjakob wnwd.com
Policing the seas using AI analysis An Israeli big-data firm is helping enforce ocean law, from sustainability rules to tackling sanction-busting vessels
STAR T
W
hen Fabian Bolin was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia at the age of 28, the investment banker turned actor was given a 60 to 70 per cent chance of recovery. “I felt like my life was ruined,” he says. “And I had a bunch of questions – not so much about the practicalities of the cancer itself, but more about life with cancer. What happens on a normal Tuesday? How should I eat or exercise to maximise the chance of survival?” Unsatisfied with doctors’ answers in London and his native Sweden after the diagnosis in May 2015, he turned to social media – his Facebook post was shared
Connect and survive When Fabian Bolin got cancer, he built a platform to harness the life-changing power of patients’ stories
more than 30,000 times. The mental side of cancer can be as tough as the physical symptoms: patients often feel lonely, fearful of overburdening friends and family. Bolin describes reading other people’s stories as a life-changing experience. “We thought, ‘What if we can replicate this experience that I’m having on a global level?’” In May 2016, Bolin and his friend Sebastian Hermelin launched War on Cancer, an app for everyone affected by cancer. It offers a safe space where sufferers can share stories that they may not want Facebook friends to see. And it could accelerate the search for a cure. “The industry has a big problem getting patient-reported data,” says Hermelin. “Data on how they’re doing and feeling, how they’re responding to treatment.” At the same time, 95 per cent of patients are willing to share that data, as long as they understand the purpose. War on Cancer will make money by building tools that can allow patients to share their data with researchers and pharmaceutical companies, and – crucially – keep the patients informed about the results of that research. “We’re trying to replicate the feedback that Fabian felt when he was sharing his story,” Hermelin explains. There are up to 40,000 active clinical trials at any one time, but Hermelin says that 60 per cent “fail miserably” – often because they can’t find enough patients with the specific cancer they’re aiming to treat. Someone in France could die while a clinical trial in Germany for that same disease fails due to a lack of participants. “Finding a clinical trial is, in many cases, the only option at surviving,” says Hermelin. He and Bolin are working on a feature that will pair patients with clinical trials, and cut the €500m annual recruitment spend. The company is also in talks with healthcare providers across Europe to get the app officially recognised, and to secure funding to research its benefits for patients’ mental health. “If we can validate that, it gets us further down the line to turning War on Cancer into a prescription,” says Bolin. “It’s something that should be prescribed by doctors, the day that you’re diagnosed.” Amit Katwala waroncancer.com
Above: Fabian Bolin (right) and Sebastian Hermelin in the Stockholm headquarters of their War on Cancer startup
PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDREAS JOHANSSON
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A Knowledge Quarter with no wrong side of the tracks King’s Cross has become London’s Silicon Valley, with the latter’s vast wealth and inequality. Are its new Big Tech residents offering opportunity to all?
ne bright morning in summer 2019, technology investor Saul Klein gave a presentation to a crowd, including several MPs, crammed into Phoenix Court – a coworking space of which Klein is a co-founder, and headquarters of his LocalGlobe VC organisation. The thrust of Klein’s talk was that the UK had its own Silicon Valley: King’s Cross. The north London area’s seediness had been displaced by the £3 billion King’s Cross Central redevelopment, and the arrival of the cream of global tech, science and culture. Current residents Facebook, DeepMind and Google are building sprawling new headquarters there; Expedia, Universal Music, a YouTube space for creators, Central Saint Martins art school, the British Library, the Francis Crick biomedical research institute and legions of startups have also moved in. King’s Cross, said Klein, was “a New Palo Alto”, the California home to many a tech titan. There’s a catch. Above Palo Alto is the lesser-known East Palo Alto. In the 1990s, as the Valley’s tech-fuelled bonanza blossomed, East Palo Alto was languishing in poverty and violence – in 1992 it had the highest murder rate per capita in the US. Things have improved, but for Klein, East Palo Alto remains a cautionary tale of how prosperity, innovation and opportunities can tragically fail to trickle down from prosperous areas.
In Klein’s analogy, the London community that plays the role of East Palo Alto is Somers Town – where Phoenix Court is located. Just across the railway tracks from King’s Cross Central, and once frequented by Charles Dickens and Mary Wollstonecraft, Somers Town is the most deprived ward in the borough of Camden; according to a 2017 study, 45.9 per cent of children lived in poverty, and female life expectancy was 4.2 years lower than Camden’s average. The pizzazz
and optimism that have transformed King’s Cross have barely been felt here. “You can have physical proximity, but if you don’t have mental proximity, it doesn’t really matter,” Klein says as we walk through the ward, some days after his presentation. He thinks that the tech giants and cultural institutions in the area have a responsibility to the people of Somers Town. “Shouldn’t innovation and technology have as widespread a social impact as possible – shouldn’t they lower the barriers for opportunity?”.
The rejuvenated Coal Drops Yard (above); its prosperity has not spread to Somers Town (right)
PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON PHIPPS
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Quarter’s members engage in some form of school outreach; the Crick Institute has re-purposed part of its building into a community centre offering health and wellbeing services – its entry door opens on one of Somers Town’s main streets. But creating opportunities will necessarily mean something more than that – it will mean jobs. “I’m talking about careers – so meaningful employment that is careerdriven, not necessarily in cleaning, security or catering,” Eastwood says. “What we’re interested in is: how can we take people from Somers Town – or kids who are growing up in Somers Town – and give them careers in the Crick, in Google, in the British Library?” The first step on that road, she says, might be simply “to demystify” entry-level job descriptions, which sometimes use hyper-technical or jargonised language. She recounts a Crick Institute’s job listing looking for a “laboratory glass-washing technician” – that is: someone to wash and sterilise lab equipment. “It sounds technical: if you saw that in an advert, you wouldn’t necessarily think that you could do that.” Tweaking similarly hermetic ads has allowed the Crick Institute to start hiring people locally, she explains. As for the technology giants, Eastwood says that while Google has been a supporter of the Knowledge Quarter’s outreach, Facebook has been “less so”, and has not joined the group. Google declined to answer WIRED’s questions about how many of its employees are hired locally; Facebook did not reply to a request for comment.
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According to Samata Khatoon, a Camden councillor and Somers Town resident, the cultural ferment in the area may be exciting for young people, but the impression among residents of the ward is that the people and companies who work across the tracks just “don’t care about this area, or who lives here”. More than 80 of these organisations – including Google, the British Library and the Crick – have formed the Knowledge Quarter, a consortium whose declared aim is “advancing and disseminating
knowledge”. CEO Jodie Eastwood says that engaging with the local community is one of the key missions of the group. “Somers Town is absolutely fascinating,” she says. “These are long-term projects that will inevitably have an impact on their lives. We need to offset that by providing opportunities to engage with these organisations.” Partly, it is about showing Somers Town residents something less forbidding than towering glass-andsteel façades. Many of the Knowledge
‘How can we give kids growing up here careers in the Crick Institute, or in Google?’
‘You might be a global company, but you’re also a neighbour, part of a community’
For their part, local government institutions – in particular Camden Council – have been pressuring the tech giants, demanding that they do more. “My thinking is: you have an obligation by being in this place,” says council leader Georgia Gould. “You might be a global company, but you’re also locally based. You’re a neighbour. And you have to be part of the community that you’re in.” Gould has been championing initiatives to foster local people’s skills in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and arts subjects. The council has earmarked £5 million for an employment and skills programme, and it has asked the organisations based in the borough to hold courses in schools or help with apprenticeship schemes. “We’re a planning authority. So we have power, when somebody wants to come into the place, to ask that certain obligations [are met],” the council leader says. While she acknowledges that some of the technology companies based in the area have been helpful, Gould believes that they are not doing enough. “We’re still pushing some of them,” she says. “We’re saying to those companies: ‘We want you to change your recruitment practices. And we want you to think differently about how you bring people into your company.’” Right now, most of the residents of Somers Town – and the other low-income areas bordering the gilded citadel of King’s Cross – only see the negatives of the redevelopment project: the displacement of people, the noise, the spike in drug dealing under the construction sites’ hoardings. Ideally, Gould says, tech giants such as Google or Facebook should not only work to mitigate those issues, but tackle other, more complicated ones. She recommends, for instance, that Google put its computing power to use to help monitor air quality in the area. Or that it should play an active role in minimising youth violence – which has sometimes been stoked by call-out videos uploaded on Google-owned YouTube. “My aspiration is that by 2025, residents in Somers Town will be able to understand what this development has brought for them to improve their lives,” Gould says. “That’s why I think that these companies need to step up their efforts.” Gian Volpicelli
Above: the Francis Crick Institute. Right: social housing in Somers Town
PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON PHIPPS
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March 25, 2020. Kings Place, London, UK.
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2020 Speakers Robert Hariri. The CEO of Celularity, which develops stem cell technology to treat cancer and delay ageing. Heidi Larson. The director of the WHOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vaccine Confidence Project tackling the anti-vax movement. Edward Chang. The UC San Francisco neurosurgeon who has found a way to translate brain activity into speech. Mei Mei Hu. The co-founder of United Neuroscience developing a vaccine for Alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.
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March 25-26, 2020 WIRED is delighted to announce science journalist, broadcaster and author Angela Saini as a keynote speaker for WIRED Health, the conference dedicated to mapping the future of health. She joins the surgeon, biomedical scientist, pilot and Celularity CEO Bob Hariri; and Indra Joshi, the director of AI at NHSX, driving the largest digital health and social care transformation programme in the world. Join us for a day of editorially curated keynotes, the annual WIRED Health Startup Showcase, and a Test Lab full of care-enhancing technology.
WIRED PULSE: VIENNA Vienna, Austria
wired.uk/events May 15, 2020 The inaugural WIRED Pulse conference is part of the city’s Vienna UP’20 Festival. WIRED Pulse offers an editorially curated programme designed to give attendees a topline overview of the future of technology and how it is changing our world. Tickets open to the public (ages 16+). Levi’s x Cooperative Porto Alegre recycled denim
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Part of an eye socket custom-printed to fit a scan of a patient’s skull
s a nurse in Denmark, Casper Slots got used to seeing the pain that ill-fitting artificial bone implants caused in patients. Some were left in permanent discomfort, or had their faces disfigured by “one size fits all” prostheses available to hospitals. In 2012, he enrolled in a masters course in medical engineering and welfare, where he met Martin B Jensen. They began work on a better solution to off-the-shelf implants and, in 2017, founded Particle3D, a startup with a single mission: printing bone. Currently, customised medical implants generally use non-degradable materials such as polymer or titanium that don’t behave like organic matter. In their research, Slots and Jensen found a substance that would not only replace damaged bone, but encourage new bone to grow back. “I would like to help patients and push for not using foreign materials anymore,” says Slots. “We’re using something that could be part of the patient.” At their laboratory in Odense, the company has a 3D printer with a nozzle specially crafted for the job. It uses “bio-ink” made from tricalcium phosphate (TCP) – a material that has been used in reconstruction for 30 years, but normally comes in blocks that surgeons have to manually carve into implants for patients. Particle3D’s method is far more accurate: surgeons use computer
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PHOTOGRAPHY: ALASTAIR PHILIP WIPER
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Bones get bespoke What’s the key to skeleton repairs? A tricalcium phosphate 3D printer…
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models to design a customised implant for each individual, which is then printed at the Particle3D lab. The finished product is sent back to the hospital, ready for surgery. Combining TCP with 3D printing means that the implants are far less dense than usual – so they not only function to replace bone, but actually fuse with it. They are designed to degrade, allowing new bone to grow. During trials on pigs and mice, new bone marrow and blood vessels developed in the implants after eight
Above: a jawbone with 3D-printed repairs in tricalcium phosphate bio ink. Right: Particle3D CCO Casper Slots checks a printer in his startup’s Odense laboratory
NEED A BINGE-WATCHING BUDDY? COUCH POTATOES COLLABORATE WITH KAST Spending time with loved ones watching TV or playing video games is a simple pleasure – but what if health issues or geography conspire to keep you apart? Kast is a desktop and iOS streaming app that allows people to watch the same thing simultaneously, regardless of distance – be it a Netflix show or an esports livestream – while chatting live, by video or text. Experiences can be shared with as few or as many people as you like – hosting a “watch party” for hundreds of others is worth it just for the stream of comments, and can be a source of new friendships. Members can advertise that they’re hosting a broadcast based on their interests (say, celebrity chefs), or shared characteristics – the Chronic Loaf group, for example, has more than 1,300 members who are housebound due to health issues. “Lots of good causes have popped up on the platform,” says Kast co-founder Justin Weissberg. A former professional gamer, he originally planned Kast to be an esports experience, but is very happy with how the platform has evolved since its launch in 2015. “To give the ability to connect and have that intimacy – it’s awesome.” MM kast.gg
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALASTAIR PHILIP WIPER ILLUSTRATION: ALEXIS BRUCHON
‘We’re using a material that could be part of the patient’
weeks. “We are just making a scaffold that uses the unique power of the human body to regenerate itself,” says Slots. “Maybe within a couple of years you will have your full bone back.” In order to prevent infection, some companies coat their polymer and titanium implants with antibiotics, but these are active for only a few days after surgery. Because Particle3D’s implants degrade like real bone, medicines can be stored within the fatty acids of the material, allowing a slower, prolonged release. CEO Thea Wulff Olesen says she hopes to see the product being used in humans from 2022. At first, the implants are likely to be used to fill in gaps where the stability of the surrounding bone is not affected, for example, in reconstructing areas of the face and jaw. As David Hamilton, a research fellow in orthopaedics at the University of Edinburgh, says: “If you’re dealing with issues in the lower limbs, then the loading tolerances become really important.” Load tests show that the material’s compressive strength is only one twentieth of the average human thigh bone, so not a suitable replacement. To ensure stability in such a load-bearing bone, Slots suspects that titanium plates would need to be added. Researchers are currently looking at “scaffold plates” printed from Particle3D bio-ink to test how they react with human cells. Olesen hopes that approval from the US and European regulators will follow. Maria Mellor particle3d.com
Emotional storytelling Karen Palmer’s experiments in immersive film-making expose uncomfortable truths about AI, surveillance tech – and ourselves
Higher perception: film-maker Karen Palmer by the Thames in Canada Water, London
Karen Palmer makes the ultimate reaction videos. In her latest work, Perception iO, you take the viewpoint of a police officer confronting a “suspect” who may be black or white. A screen-mounted camera tracks your expressions and eye movement as you react to the volatile situation. Your responses determine whether you call for help, go for an arrest, or even shoot – allowing you to examine your own implicit bias on race, gender and mental health. In collaboration with the research lab ThoughtWorks, Palmer has created a machine learning tool that can distinguish between anger, fear, surprise and calmness. The technology is not dissimilar to what Amazon has been selling to police forces and businesses. The US pharmacy chain Walgreens is already eye-tracking in its stores. And the EU is funding a system called iBorderCtrl, aimed at detecting whether someone is lying at immigration. Palmer, a Londoner who describes herself as “a storyteller from the future”, wants to challenge corporate secrecy over the technology and make people aware of the privacy and human rights concerns. As part of this, her team has made the source code of EmoPy, their emotion detection toolkit, freely available. They are also looking at voice detection and multiplayer VR gaming. Perception iO – now on display at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York – is a test run for what Palmer plans for the final iteration of her Democratise AI project. In Consensus Gentium (due for release at the end of 2019) protesters demonstrating against AI flood the streets and clash with riot cops. The film will bring together all the detection experiments Palmer has been conducting. As well as human rights and AI, it will explore immersive entertainment as viewers “move from observers to participants”. Sabrina Weiss karenpalmer.uk
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PHOTOGRAPHY: HANNAH STARKEY
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As with all WIRED Pulse events, this special edition in Vienna will feature a programme of eight curated stories that highlight some of the most important themes and trends shaping the future of our world. Along with specially selected demos and exhibitions, this exciting new event will take place during the first-ever Vienna UPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;20 event, and will showcase startups and influencers from across health, gaming, retail, design, technology and more.
May 15, 2020. Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria Wired.UK/Pulse-Vienna WIRED Pulse: Tickets are available to the public, for ages 16+
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ILLUSTRATION: ROB DOBI
Games take on domestic violence
That is why, when the domestic violence law was changed, they began to work on a video game. Where Can Couplehood Lead?, due for release in March 2020 for both Android and iOS devices, gives advice to women who are experiencing domestic violence, stalking and cyberbullying. Players navigate plots which have been designed to help them recognise abuse, build personal A Russian nonprofit is using digital tools to help boundaries, and learn about legal and protect victims of abuse, and prevent new ones psychological defence tools and support centres. “Our goal is to make an exciting game that will increase public awareness of the problem, both among girls and In February 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin among young people,” says Igor Dorfman, chief technology decriminalised “moderate” violence that doesn’t cause serious officer of the gaming project. “We want to show which actions injury. As a result, beatings that leave bruises, scratches or and behaviours work to counter the aggressor.” bleeding – but which don’t cause broken bones or concussion Helping victims to recognise domestic violence is perhaps – are now not considered to be a criminal offence in Russia. the game’s core value. Victim-blaming and misconceptions This means that, in many cases of domestic violence, police that violence is a family matter are rife in Russia. The age-old are no longer obliged to start an investigation. proverb “If he beats you, it means he loves you” is persistent, In a country where domestic abuse is endemic, “a bad and often abetted by the Kremlin. The result of this, says situation has only become worse”, says Yulia Gorbunova, a Gorbunova, is that “Families shield abusers.” senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. It is estimated This is Team 29’s second foray into gaming. Gebnya – a that more than 600 women are killed in their own homes each Russian slang term for secret police such as the KGB – was month in Russia, and only around three per cent of domestic launched in 2017, building on the group’s experience in violence cases make it to court. “Russia’s law enforcement, challenging police abuse. The aim, Ovchinnikov says, was judiciary or social systems more often than not completely to bridge the “enormous gap” between young people and fail to protect victims of domestic violence,” Gorbunova says. knowledge of the law. The game (available in English) guides Civil society initiatives are turning to digital tools to limit players through three scenarios – a house search, interrogation, the damage. Team 29 is an association of St Petersburg-based and arrest in a pre-trial detention centre – with multiplejournalists and lawyers set up to defend people accused of choice responses to each. To date, Gebnya has been downloaded espionage or treason, often on evidence fabricated by the state. from the Google Play Store more than 100,000 times. It created online tools to educate Russians on legal abuses “Young people don’t know their rights and tend to see carried out by the authorities – but found the material was human rights as an alien world,” Ovchinnikov says. Yet this not reaching people below the age of 24, particularly women. demographic is also the most willing to take part in protests “It was clear that traditional methods weren’t working,” – and place themselves at risk of state harassment. The says Nikolay Ovchinnikov, Team 29’s gaming manager. mass demonstrations in Moscow in July and August 2019, triggered by the government’s refusal to let opposition candidates stand in municipal elections, were largely led by students. More than a thousand protesters were arrested, and dozens are now facing several years in jail on rioting charges. “They were not allowed access to lawyers, they were not given water and food, and they were forcibly fingerprinted,” Team 29 reported. None of this was lawful. One hour spent gaming in a simulated human rights infraction might mean the difference between going home and unjustly spending time in jail. Madeline Roache team29.org
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If you can’t pick one future, try all of them Sci-fi icon William Gibson is exploring the apocalypse across alternate timelines – including one like our own
In The Peripheral, iconic sci-fi author William Gibson introduced the “Jackpot”, a cascade of global catastrophes that wipes out much of the human race, along with an ingenious take on time travel that allows digital communication – including telepresence – across alternate timelines. Its main character, Wilf, lives in post-Jackpot London: he becomes entangled in the aftermath of a murder whose only witness lives in an alternate, run-down America. Gibson’s new book, Agency, returns to the same fictional setting – but in this instalment, one of the timelines is ours. Well, nearly. In the “stub” inhabited by Agency’s protagonist, user-testing guru Verity, Americans didn’t vote Trump into office and Brits didn’t vote for Brexit. It’s not without its troubles, though: nuclear tensions in the Middle East are threatening to set off a global conflagration. Stopping that falls unexpectedly to Verity, Wilf, a superintelligent AI called
Eunice and a motley crew of plutocrats, spooks and gig-economy contractors operating across three timelines. Agency comes six years after The Peripheral. In 2016, Gibson was writing a book set in the very near future, but the present caught up with him. “I woke up after the presidential election and realised the world I had set the book in no longer existed,” he says. Fearing he would have to abandon his draft completely, Gibson tried to introduce characters from earlier stories. That didn’t work (fan-favourite Hubertus Bigend “wouldn’t even speak to me”, Gibson says), but as Trump’s presidency lurched from one fiasco to another, he began to feel as if the real world had itself strayed from the way things “ought” to be: as it if it was one of his fictional stubs. “That caused me to glimpse the book I had been writing as a stub of the 22nd century London of The Peripheral,” he explains. In other words, the real world many of us had been expecting at the start of 2016 had ended up as a fictional alternate reality in Agency. What’s more, Agency’s other major timeline – the post-Jackpot future – seems more like the actual future we’re headed towards: an oligarch world depopulated and devastated by disease and disaster. Grim though that might sound, it’s not a wholly unattractive future. The climate is mostly under control, with nanobots keeping things comfy for the surviving bourgeoisie – although Gibson points out that their comfort is possible only because everyone else is dead. So should we just accept that as our fate? Cyberpunk, the genre Gibson is credited with pioneering with his 1984 novel Neuromancer, has been criticised for fetishizing consumerism and techno-capitalism rather than presenting potential alternatives. “It was basically saying finance always wins. All you can do is go on to the mean streets, find your corner, pretend you’re in a film noir and give up,” said Kim Stanley Robinson, whose own books strike a more progressive tone. Agency walks a fine line between glamorizing the Silicon Valley mentality – with the protagonists’ needs met via a succession of price-no-object, just-in-time solutions – and satirising it. Despite his reputation as a seer, Gibson’s fiction has always been more about presenting the sheen and shape of the future than making credible predictions. “I’ve never been in it to promote
solutions or possible directions,” he says. Instead, he sees his job as interrogating the present under the guise of imagining the future – the only thing, he contends, that science fiction is really good for – and that he hasn’t yet fully processed everything he channelled into Agency. But he was sceptical of Valley utopianism right from the start, he says, when the success of Neuromancer saw him fêted by the then-emerging digital industry: “I could never understand where their optimism came from, when people started to speak to me of disruption with what looked like delight. I don’t think it was the guile of greed. There was just faith that it would be okay… and they hadn’t seemed to notice that the world of Neuromancer was fairly problematic.” Now, thirty-five years later, with “problematic” having been upgraded to “apocalyptic”, he does think one predictive element of his most recent books is worth noting. “It posits an apocalypse that takes centuries,” he says. “We don’t seem to have any cultural wherewithal to deal with that. We think of the apocalypse as if it’s the ultimate bad day.” Sumit Paul-Choudhury Gibson’s latest book, Agency, is out now (Viking)
‘I’ve never been in it to promote solutions or directions’
Right: William Gibson has been credited with pioneering the cyberpunk sci-fi genre, and with co-creating steampunk
PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY/FRANCOIS BERTHLER
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WIRED PARTNERSHIP | TUMI
The TUMI flagship store on London’s Regent Street
Broadening mindful travel A partnership between American luggage specialist TUMI and non-profit organisation Waves For Water means explorers have more sustainable options when packing for their next trip
Even though it’s possible to get lost in the white noise of the sustainability conversation, taking actual steps to be more sustainable is something TUMI is serious about. Initiatives such as the Recycled capsule collection, where fabrics used to make the luggage were sourced from post-industrial recycled nylon and post-consumer recycled PET bottles, meant that 169,000 bottles were diverted from landfill. Not only that, but it’s communicating a message to consumers that durable, high-quality luggage and sustainable source materials aren’t mutually exclusive. TUMI also joined the global organisation 1% for the Planet, committing to donate one per cent of all profits from the Recycled collection to Waves For Water’s efforts to reduce the risk of waterborne illnesses including Cholera, Salmonella and Typhoid. Between 2016-2019, TUMI and Waves For Water have worked on more than ten projects, implementing 10,443 water filtration systems, 28 rain catchment systems and 12 wells –
Alpha Bravo Nathan Backpack Made from recycled nylon, it fits 15in laptops £375 uk.tumi.com
impacting an estimated 500,000 people around the world. The TUMI Crew project also saw a select group of social-media influencers visit Nepal and Langrug in South Africa to deploy over 100 filtration systems in vulnerable communities. Having conversations about our ecological footprints helps disseminate the idea of a new normal – it’s sustainability borne not just out of obligation, but a sincere desire to see change. While there’s a way to go, TUMI’s efforts help to set a precedent. The ecological challenges we face are obvious, but these initiatives also allow us to see the very real solutions in 2020 vision.
PHOTOGRAPHY: THOMAS JACKSON
From the Extinction Rebellion protests to individual champions – such as WIRED cover-star Greta Thunberg – to sustainable initiatives launched by international brands, environmentalism was top of the agenda in 2019. In December 2019, WIRED teamed up with premium American luggage brand TUMI and Waves For Water, a guerilla humanitarian organisation dedicated to providing clean water, to host a reader event at TUMI’s Regent Street store in London. With an expert panel including Damien Mignot (TUMI’s Europe General Manager), Jenica Dizon (Waves For Water’s Philippines Operations Director), Gwilym Pugh (influencer, activist and adventurer) and WIRED’s Executive Editor Jeremy White, discussions were centered on sustainability, the future of travel and how brands such as TUMI can be more socially responsible.
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echnology companies are the quickest beasts on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, the government is often viewed as the slowest. Paradoxically, the latter is much quicker at reacting to the court of public opinion. The two opposite beasts are going to need to work together over the next decade, like the crocodile opening its jaws so the plover bird can hop in and pick its teeth. I worked in Downing Street as special adviser on business relations for three years, engaging with every major US and foreign technology investor. At every meeting, their two primary concerns were the economic policies of a possible Corbyn government, and the uncertainty created by Brexit. The result of the December 12 election means that there is increased clarity on those issues for the foreseeable future. Now the technology sector has an unprecedented opening to be influential in the next decade of policy-making, as long as it can understand the political challenges the country faces. Johnson won on a promise of “getting Brexit done”, and the basis that the country could then move on to other challenges. But it is not quite as straightforward as that: everything the country does for the next decade will be seen by the media and politicians through the prism of Brexit. This provides more of an opportunity than many in tech perceive. The digital community was not supportive of Brexit. From a practical point of view, hiring top-level talent from
Rules Britannia: the UK’s new role The election dust has settled, so WIRED asked a former No. 10 insider how the government could boost a post-Brexit tech economy. The answer? By becoming a global regulations hub
the EU was an unadulterated benefit. More broadly, from an ideological viewpoint, technologists largely agree with the political aims of the project of a borderless union for finance, workers, goods, services and data. If the UK is going to succeed, it is going to need a thriving technology sector. This gives the tech industry an unrivalled opportunity to lobby for what it wants, particularly if it is smart enough to synchronise with the government’s aims. The three major areas of focus are: regulatory innovation, access to skills, and increase in financial capital. Regulatory innovation The man sitting at the most powerful desk in government is senior adviser Dominic Cummings: a technology, science and innovation obsessive. Far from a caricature Malcolm Tucker bawler, he is open to new ideas: on his first day in Downing Street, he wore a T-shirt featuring the logo of Elon Musk-backed
OpenAI. He has written extensively about how the government should listen more to scientists and tech founders. The UK government believes the stand-out opportunity is to become the home of regulatory innovation. Britain sits geographically between the US and the EU, and will also broadly position itself on the regulatory framework between the US’s current laissez faire approach to regulation and the EU’s top-down approach. The EU is not known as a fleet-footed institution: its decisional process is lengthy and drawn out, and new measures can be suddenly
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ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON
T
Jimmy McLoughlin is former Business Director at No. 10 Downing Street and was adviser to Theresa May
STAR T
044
‘Heading creative regulation helped the UK become a fintech leader’ A good example of how this could play out is artificial intelligence. In this sector, the UK will not be able to compete with the US’s abundance of capital, or China’s market size. But if it stays near the forefront of development, it will be able to guide regulatory frameworks. When we set up the Data Ethics Framework in 2018, No. 10 staff made sure it included the word “innovation” in The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation’s title, to broaden its remit.
Upskilling the workforce The startup and technology sector will want continued access to skilled talent, and the Conservative Party renewed its commitment to a startup visa in its 2019 manifesto. The challenge will be around friction and access to talent: while the UK has promised to keep the door open to the brightest and the best, it won’t be possible to offer someone in Berlin a job on the Friday and have them start work in London on Monday, as has been possible over the last 20 years. The Home Office is aiming for a process of just ten to 15 days, and good progress has been made on setting this up. There is, however, a chronic shortage of long-term technology skills in the UK. According to estimates from TechUK and the Edge Foundation, there are currently 600,000 digital vacancies in the UK, and this figure could double in the next few years. That amount cannot be covered solely by immigration: the government and technology firms must work together to train UK students for the skills of the future. A good example is the Dyson campus – powered by the University of Warwick – which allows students to study and work at the same time (and therefore leave with no debt). This will be the model of the future, and the government must use its power to encourage this kind of hybrid learning. If you are an 18-year-old from Blyth Valley, Workington or Bishop Auckland, it can be difficult to envisage how or what a technology career looks like. That is why the government should continue
E A R LY A D O P T E R S
to explore how it can support the establishment of “tech cathedrals”: central locations where youngsters can learn more about the jobs of the future – an idea on which industry heavyweights such as Brent Hoberman are working. Opening up finance The longest-term challenge to the UK technology sector, and the root of its inability to compete with American scale-ups, often comes down to finance. While great work has been done by the British Business Bank and the British Growth Fund, if Britain is to fund Series C, D and E rounds, it will need a step change – for instance, allowing pension funds to invest in venture capital. The Treasury is arguably one of the least innovation-ready departments, but this simple tweak would allow everyone to have a stake in Britain’s exciting technology revolution. The challenges are vast. There will be those in government who see the opportunity for short-term gain by “eating the plover bird” – trying to pad the state coffers by taxing tech companies, or simply ignoring the industry’s needs. But there are smarter ways to benefit from technology firms. The two could not be more different, but like the crocodile and the plover, they could and should work more closely in the 2020s: their success is far more linked than both realise.
WIRED asks three entrepreneurs for their assistance recommendations
“Dewo is a personal
“I’ve cancelled my
“I love the podcast
gym membership
Feel Better, Live
assistant app
because I’m saving
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that tries to give
money by using
quality information,
people more time
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simply delivered.
to be productive.
Hjalmar
Chris Hemsworth.
Will Williams
There are expert
Marie Mostad
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Ståhlberg
I’m really
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impressed with the
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in 30 minutes, so
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body interact –
inzpire.me
it organises your
and CEO,
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make empowered
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quite successfully
choices to
by meetings or
in my own case.”
assist ourselves.”
notifications.” MM
day in a way that
ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW GREEN
stopped if influential member states get cold feet – imagine trying to get 27 countries to agree on how to regulate fast-moving technologies such as blockchain. That is why regulatory innovation for the technology industry should be at the top of the digital secretary’s in-tray. It has worked before: over the last decade, creative regulation had a substantial role in helping the UK become a leader in fintech.
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L IF E IN C OL O UR
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WIRED sets the tone with the best new products from across the spectrum
Patek Philippe Aquanaut 5167A Singapore Grand Exhibition This classic 40mm steel
Snow Peak BBQ Rod
Aquanaut is elevated
A novelty item, perhaps – but like so many of
by a vivid red rubber
Snow Peak’s products, there’s ingenuity and
strap and minute track
engineering a-plenty on show. Load up the hooks
– the hue is a nod to
with marshmallows, hot dogs, or even an actual fish,
the signature colour
dangle over the fire and, when the time is right, give
of Singapore, the city
the line a gentle tug and the end will flip, helping to
in which this watch
ensure perfectly cooked results – and not a crudely
debuted – and it’s
whittled stick in sight. £34.95 snowpeak.com
limited to 500 examples. If you can’t snag this highly sought-after piece, unlimited editions in white gold with blue and green dials were announced at Basel.
£poa patek.com
r
Lampuga Air Inflatable Jetboard A blessing for all the hatchback-owning electric surfboard obsessives out there, Lampuga has managed to engineer an inflatable, fully functional ride that can go anywhere your car can. We’re talking a
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM; JEREMY WHITE
14hp, 50kph, doubleSegway Villain 1000SH
layer PVC hull jetboard
Segway’s fierce-looking hybrid ATV delivers up to
that folds down into the
181bhp and a hulking 259Nm of torque channelled
most meagre of boots,
through the rear wheels. Dual A-arm suspension
thanks to the detachable
in the front and a multi-link trailing arm in the
3.7kWh Li-ion battery
rear, plus three cooling systems and both a
that, once the body has
downhill braking system and four-wheel hydraulic
been fully inflated, slots
brakes make for an impressive off-road offering.
seamlessly in the centre.
$tbc powersports.segway.com
£tbc lampuga.com
G EAR
MET A L G EA R S O LI D
Apple Mac Pro >>>>>
G-Shock GMW-B5000-1ER
Redesigned for the first time in six years, Apple has truly
A revamped classic, this stainless steel, 200m water-
divided opinion with the Mac Pro’s cheese-grater looks,
resistant version of G-Shock’s original 1983 5000 series
but has won fans by making it easier to upgrade – the
release maintains the iconic square face and LCD digital
aluminium case lifts clean off to expose the guts. The
display – with LED light for night time – but has been
£5,499 entry level is a 3.5GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon W beast
tweaked with Bluetooth connectivity and smartphone
with eight PCIe slots and 32GB of RAM – but max out the
compatibility, multi-language display, radio-controlled
upgrades and you’ll clip £50,000… From £5,499 apple.com
world time and solar power. £450 g-shock.co.uk
Audi E-tron Sportback 55 Audi’s second electric car is all about squeezing out every last metre of range – its revised aerodynamics, for example, add an extra 10km to your available distance per charge. It’s also the first mass-produced car to feature digital matrix LED headlights. These can project a beam of light or pattern on to the road ahead, and warn you of any pedestrians close by. From £70,000 audi.com
s
Quip Toothbrush Created as an antidote to the expensive appcontrolled brushes from the big brands, Quip’s subscription-based brush – new batteries and bristle heads are sent out every three months – has been designed to simply clean your teeth well, look good and travel easily. The result is a basic toothbrush that has one mode and a two-minute timer with 30-second interval vibrations. It’s a especially in the all-metal
Leatherman Free T4
design, with soft bristles
At just 9.3cm long, this Leatherman still packs in 12 tools including a
and silicone edges for
420HC stainless steel blade and scissors, pry tool, package opener
gentle gum-cleaning.
– an essential in mail-order Britain – bottle opener, file, tweezers and
From $25, brush heads
screwdrivers. Its new magnetic locking system means you can open it
from $5 getquip.com
easily and safely using only one hand. £74.95 leatherman.co.uk
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM; JEREMY WHITE
beautifully executed idea,
L I FE I N C O LO U R
049
2 C/0 M/ 0Y/ 20K
G EAR
1 00 C /70 M/2 5Y /60K
BLU E B L AZ E S
L I F E I N C OL O UR
051
Filson Duffle Pack A perennial favourite with Gear editor Jeremy White, Filson’s heritage heavy duffle, typically made from tough tin cloth and bridle leather, has had a thoroughly modern makeover. Maintaining the bombproof design, but now in 600 denier, all-weather, tear-resistant nylon, this multipurpose
American Ultra Telecaster
pack is light and rugged, with
It looks like a classic
reinforced zips and padded laptop
Telecaster, but this Cobra
sleeves. You can tout it as a duffle or a
Blue beauty is part of
compact rucksack. £240 filson.com
Fender’s most advanced range to date, featuring Ultra Noiseless pickups for vintage sound without the hum, and the new Modern D neck, with its compoundradius fingerboard and rolled edges. Fender has re-shaped the back, so players can noodle for hours in greater comfort, while the electronics have also had a tweak, and now use a treble-bleed circuit to preserve high-end response, whatever the volume. £1,859 fender.com
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM; JEREMY WHITE
b
Nanoleaf Canvas
Snow Peak x New Balance R_C4
When Nanoleaf’s modular lightshow-
Our pick of the Snow Peak x Tokyo Design Studio New Balance collab,
cum-artwork offering first appeared,
the R_C4 is brimming with outdoor tech, including a waterproof
we thought it was a bit of a smart-home
but breathable Gore-Tex membrane with Cordura rip-stop upper,
gimmick. But after a few upgrades and
a magnetic Fidlock buckle, and New Balance’s Encap Reveal and
some great innovations, we’re sold on
Abzorb midsole and cushioning. A Vibram outsole makes mincemeat
the design’s inventiveness and flexibility.
of icy pavements and off-road hikes alike. £269 snowpeak.com
Plug-and-play right from the box, you can design your dream light wall that can be
<<<<< IWC Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Edition Blue Angels
activated using voice control (HomeKit/
Designed in collaboration with the US Navy’s Blue Angels flight
Alexa/Google) and touch to change
demo squadron – they’re like our Red Arrows – the deep blue
colours and patterns (there are 16.4 million
dial with outer minute ring and inner hour ring is inspired by
hues available for all you CMYK fans).
early military observer’s watches. A 44.5mm black ceramic
Party animals can even have it pulse in
case houses a caliber 89361 flyback chronograph with 68 hours
time with their music. £179.99 nanoleaf.me
of power reserve and anti-magnetic protection. £10,090 iwc.com
GEA R
T A NGE RI N E D RE AM
JBL L100 When launched in 1970, the 64cm-tall L100 became the best-selling speaker in JBL’s history – it even appeared in the famous “sofa hurricane” Maxell cassette advert. This reissue has been updated with a one-inch titanium dome tweeter, a five-inch pure-pulp midrange driver, and a 12-inch woofer with a bass-reflex enclosure for startling sound quality. £3,999 jbl.com
Floyd Cabin in Sunset Orange >>>>> This hard-shell suitcase blends a cheery 70’s skateboarding vibe with superlight carry-on compatibility. A 42-litre polycarbonate case, its polyurethane, ball-bearing wheels ensure a wobble-free ride through Duty Free, while a separate laptop sleeve minimises the need for carrying an extra bag. €380 floyd.one Lacie Rugged SSD Since its 2005 launch, more than six million Neil Poulton-designed Lacie Rugged Drives have been sold. The latest iterations have USB-C connectivity, IP67 water resistance, threemetre-drop and crush resistance – and, if you spec high enough, the ability to transfer and edit RAW 4K video. 500GB from £189.99 lacie.com
Active Watch Band for Apple Watch If you aren’t feeling any of the standard-issue Apple straps, consider one that’s definitely made to be noticed (for stealthier types, it also comes in all-black and dark grey camo). Constructed from a high-strength nylon weave and stainless-steel custom-cast hardware, this rugged strap will survive generations of Apple Watch updates, and is available to fit both the 44/42mm and 40/38mm size devices. Your smartwatch might object to being scraped along rough surfaces, but this band will stay firm whatever the activity. £43 urbanarmorgear.com
Sony WH-H910N h.ear on 3 Wireless Headphones While these aren’t truly flagship, they still boast dual noisecancelling mics, a 35-hour battery life, 25mm drivers and the Digital Sound Enhancement Engine HX, which fills in the detail left out by your music streaming files. £250 sony.co.uk
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM; JEREMY WHITE
o
LI F E I N CO L O UR
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6 0M /95 Y/ 0 K
GEA R
BAC K IN B L AC K
C 2 0/ 0M /0 Y/ 1 00 K
McLaren Elva Roadster The Elva, McLaren’s lightest road car, may lack a windscreen, but we’ll handle a few bugs in our teeth to get to experience the four-litre twin-turbo V8 and 804 horsepower on offer – it manages 100kph in under three seconds and 200kph in 6.7. Designed to reflect the flowing 60’s-style open-cockpit cars from iconic British race car designer Elva, there will be 399 vehicles available. And of course, we were joking about the bugs – the aerodynamics create a low pressure area around the driver and passenger, so no screen is required. £1.4 million mclaren.com
LI FE IN CO LO UR
05 5
Tudor Black Bay Chrono Dark
Steel Transparent Speaker
Produced as a limited edition with the New
This limited-edition Bluetooth speaker
Zealand All Blacks, this is a classic steel
has been designed by Stockholm-
Black Bay Chrono sporting a matte black PVD
based Transparent Sound and forged
treatment. The 41mm case holds Tudor’s
by blacksmith Jonas Majors in his
caliber MT5813, a movement with a 70-hour
workshop on the Swedish island of Mörkö.
power reserve that was created in partnership
Admittedly, this version is the opposite
with Breitling. £4,570 tudorwatch.com
of see-through, but we love the clean lines and raw textured metal that will age gracefully over the years. As for sonic performance, you get an 80W Class-D amplifier powering two three-inch drivers and a beefy 6.5-inch woofer.
£2,000 transparentspeaker.com
k
GoPro Max 360 This 6k 360-degree action camera records everything through twin
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM; JEREMY WHITE
lenses and enables three-dimensional editing in its app for some impressively immersive action sequences. You can
IKEA TILLAGD 24-piece cutlery set
also shoot single-lens-style video with
WIRED continues to be bowled over by IKEA’s ability
image stabilisation and horizon levelling
to offer considered, forward-looking design that’s
in a choice of four digital lenses, from
affordable to all. In the case of this matte black cutlery
close-cropped 22mm to epic 13mm
set, they tasked London-based designer Aaron Probyn,
Max SuperView. £479.99 (with 64Gb
who’s created modern masterpieces for Tom Dixon,
MicroSD) gopro.com
West Elm and Normann Copenhagen. £40 ikea.com
K E E P
M E
C LO S E
BRITISH LEATHER GOODS
MODEL DESIGN: KEI YOSHINO. PHOTOGRAPHY: MARCUS SCHAEFER. THE FORMS WERE HANDCRAFTED FROM CLAY TO CREATE A MYSTERIOUS, SURREALIST-INSPIRED VISTA, WHICH WAS PHOTOGRAPHED TO CREATE A SUSPENSEFUL INTERPLAY BETWEEN SHADOW AND LIGHT
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“Just because something’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s better.” Emily Weiss, founder of Glossier p60
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When Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss first had the idea of launching a beauty startup, she began with a simple question: how could you make a beauty brand whose sweatshirt people would want to wear? As founder of beauty blog Into the Gloss, which she started in 2010, Weiss had worked with household name beauty conglomerates on advertising and sponsorship deals, and found that many were struggling to engage with the new generation of millennial consumers. “I went through this exercise of looking across 20 or ten beauty brands, thinking about whether or not I would buy that sweatshirt, wear that sweatshirt… I just kept coming up with ‘no’,” she says. We meet on a Thursday in December 2019, in a circular meeting room at Glossier’s headquarters in the SoHo district of New York. The office interior reflects the company’s broader design aesthetic, with trimmings all in white or pale pink. In the reception area, glass display cabinets hold installations crafted out of Glossier products: an artful scattering of eyeliner pencils, a sculpture made of lip-plumping
creams. Next to conference rooms and an open-plan workspace is a small lab area where new products are tested. Slouching on a cream sofa, Weiss wears a sporty hoodie and leggings accessorised with pointed CELINE stiletto boots, epitomising the effortless “cool girl” image that has become associated with the Glossier brand. As she speaks, I spot an unbranded white tube on a shelf behind her with a makeshift printed label reading “Glossier hand cream”. Weiss talks about the disconnect she observed between companies and consumers, which she puts down to a “seismic shift in power dynamic” within the beauty industry. By the time she launched Into the Gloss, she says, people were becoming increasingly interested in the idea of personal style, and using clothing and makeup as a means of creative expression. They no longer wanted to be told by a brand or expert how to pull off a full look; they wanted to see other people mix things up. In fashion, this gave rise to the growing trend of bloggers and street style photography; in beauty, too, consumers began looking to their peers for inspiration. Brands no longer had the final say. When Instagram took off, the trend only grew stronger, yet Weiss recalls beauty companies telling her they weren’t planning to hire a social media editor at all. She pauses, incredulous: “Can you imagine?” Rather than continue to play interpreter between old brands and new audiences, she decided the time was right to build a beauty company that would lean into this changing dynamic. It would be digital-first, operate a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model, and emphasise communication with its customers, even involving them in the creation of its products. After raising an initial $2 million (£1.5 million) in seed funding, Weiss launched Glossier (pronounced, as if French, “gloss-ee-ay”) in 2014 with four products: a moisturiser, a face mist, a skin tint and a lip balm. The company now employs more than 200 people and has over three million customers. Products such as Boy Brow, its best selling eyebrow pomade, have become cult favourites among the hip and well-groomed; in 2018, the company claimed to have sold the equivalent of one Boy Brow every 32 seconds. In March 2019, Glossier closed a $100 million series D funding round – led by Sequoia Capital, it resulted in a company valuation of $1.2 billion.
At launch, Glossier made a grey sweatshirt; model Karlie Kloss was photographed wearing one. When the company announced it would sell a second sweatshirt – a pale pink hoodie with the Glossier name across the chest – as part of its new GlossiWEAR merchandise line in 2019, 10,000 people joined a waiting list to buy it.
Walk up the red staircase at Glossier’s flagship shop on Lafayette Street, a short walk from its SoHo HQ, and it’s like putting on rose-tinted glasses. The walls, display tables – even the jumpsuits worn by the showroom’s sales assistants (officially titled “offline editors”) – are a soft baby pink. Glossier products are laid out on tables with the precision of the most carefully arranged Instagram shot. Each one is a tester, ready for visitors to try out. (Sharing pictures of product swatches – samples applied to the skin to show the colour – is popular on online beauty forums.) As Glossier principally sells online, its offline presence is concerned more with creating a memorable experience than pushing sales. An anteroom at the flagship contains a mirror on one side and a feature wall with giant tubes of Cloud Paint – Glossier’s cream blush, which comes in what looks like a mini paint tube – protruding out of the other. The writing on the giant tubes is backwards – all the better to use as a backdrop for a mirror selfie. There is no cash register; to buy a product, I speak to a jumpsuited assistant who places my order and takes payment using an iPad. My purchase appears in one of Glossier’s instantly recognisable pink bubble wrap pouches, lowered from the floor above via a pulley system not unlike a vertical sushi belt. Another assistant reads out my name and I collect the package.
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A key part of Glossier’s brand identity is simplicity. By January 2020, it had a total of 36 different products across skincare, makeup and fragrance – a minimalist offering by beauty brand standards. Weiss says this is because Glossier aims to produce “hero” or “best in kind” products that are easy to use and become timeless essentials. While another makeup counter may offer dozens of mascaras that all claim different benefits, Glossier just makes one: Lash Slick, available only in black. Around the time Glossier launched, its pared-back “skin first, makeup second” approach tapped into a trend, concurrent with a new wave of popular online feminism focused on female empowerment, that saw people move away from the idea of using makeup to cover up perceived imperfections and towards a fresher, cleaner finish.
The go-to Glossier aesthetic is one of effortless natural beauty, the coveted “no-makeup makeup” look that should not be confused with actually not wearing any makeup. The adjective to aim for is “dewy” – an effect that Glossier tried literally to bottle in its Futuredew product released in 2019, an “oil serum hybrid” designed to give skin that elusive glowy-but-not-greasy sheen. In beauty circles today, “Glossier skin” has become something of a catch-all term to describe a healthy, radiant look, whether achieved using Glossier products or not. Andrew Stephen, L’Oréal professor of marketing at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, says Glossier is very much born in the age of the influencer, and has differentiated itself from incumbents that traditionally focus on aspirational images of luxury and glamour by, for example, featuring
Qualitative feedback can help to illuminate what’s going on behind the quantitative data, says Ali Weiss, Glossier SVP of marketing: “An anecdote can come from one singular situation, but sometimes they speak about what’s truly happening vs what the data says.”
Glossier aims to foster what it calls “C2C” (customer to customer) as well as “G2C” (Glossier to customer) connections. It does this by running a referral programme, sharing fans’ social media posts, and keeping its physical stores open-plan so shoppers can see each other.
CEO Emily Weiss says startups often prioritise growth over building an enduring brand, but playing too fast and loose early on can backfire. “One of the things that I’m most proud of as a company has been our discipline,” she says.
regular people in its ads. “It has a much more youthful look and feel than if you compared it to, say, a L’Oréal Paris or a Lancôme or a MAC, even, or an Estée Lauder,” he says. “It looks fresher, it looks more modern.” (Although L’Oréal helped fund Stephen’s academic post, it has no involvement with his work.) Pricewise, Glossier products are more expensive than many pharmacy brands, but not at the level of a premium name; mascara and lipstick retail for £14 each. Weiss says she wants to challenge the idea that luxury products should have an element of exclusivity. She references the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts’ character is made to feel unwelcome in a high-end store. “I thought, that should never happen for anyone,” she says. “One of the things that we’ve always been really excited about was decoupling this notion of price and quality, where just because something’s more expensive doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily better.” From the start, Glossier has operated as a direct-to-consumer brand, meaning you can’t buy its products elsewhere. Aside from a few limited experiments, such as a temporary fragrance shop in some outlets of the US chain Nordstrom, it does not have a presence in department stores or beauty retailers, and online sales are conducted through its own e-commerce site at Glossier.com. Weiss explains that this decision was taken so that Glossier can stay in complete control of its relationship with customers, with no third-party intermediaries. Stephen points out that the direct-toconsumer model also gives companies the advantage of access to first-party customer data, which they can use in marketing and advertising campaigns, and to keep tabs on emerging trends. “In beauty, it’s really important to look at the products that are used together,”
he says. “The bundles that are used to put a look together become vital for consumer insights, and a DTC model tells you that right off the bat.” W h e n We i ss wa s s ta r t i n g t h e company, some doubted that online sales could work for the beauty sector. Weiss compares this to scepticism in the early days of Amazon that people would buy books on the internet. “We face a very similar frontier, which is, ‘Is anyone going to buy beauty products online?’,” she says. “I mean, that’s what every venture capitalist asked me when I was raising our seed round – and the answer seems to be yes.” She believes the world is ready for a “third wave” of channel innovation in beauty commerce. First came the beauty counter, where individual brands would sell their own product through their own representatives – which she characterises as a “teacher-student” interaction. Then came shops like LVMH-owned multinational Sephora, which put hundreds of brands in one place, with the same salesperson selling them all. Now, she says, people want to put their trust in people like themselves, whether that’s reading online reviews before making a purchase, buying a lipstick on the recommendation of a YouTube influencer, or just messaging a friend to ask if they think something’s a good idea. “We’re in an era where people want to choose who they listen to,” she says. “We’re in an era where people are predominantly looking to peer-to-peer connection and community to make beauty purchasing decisions.” Glossier talks a lot about the idea of community and the importance of fostering a two-way conversation with its customers, whom it calls “Generation G” (also the name of its lipstick). Thanks largely to its Into the Gloss
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Emily Weiss starts her beauty blog, Into the Gloss. Glossier launches with its four first products: a moisturiser, a face mist, a skin tint and a lip balm.
Boy Brow is released, becoming its best selling product. Glossier begins shipping to the UK. The NYC flagship opens.
The Glossier Play line is launched. The same month, a $100 million series D funding round gives Glossier a valuation of $1.2 billion
ancestry, Glossier had more than 15,000 followers on Instagram before it had launched a single product; today it has 2.5 million. Into the Gloss is still run out of the Glossier office, and features mainly interviews about people’s beauty routines and non-Glossier reviews (although Glossier products do appear). Glossier SVP of Marketing Ali Weiss (no relation to Emily) says the team is constantly reading customer feedback in the form of Instagram comments, tweets, emails, product reviews on Glossier.com, comments beneath Into the Gloss articles or in the 17,000member Into the Gloss Facebook group, and posts on the independent r/glossier subreddit. A few years ago, the company started a Slack channel for around 1,000 of its most engaged community members to chat directly with each other and the team. “You can
have people on the Glossier team who are part of that Slack channel actually in there, listening, and saying ‘OK, the most requested product was a cream blush, so that’s what we’re going to do’ or ‘Here was the opinion on what the cleanser landscape is,’” she says. The Slack channel is now defunct, but Ali Weiss says that the team uses feedback across all of its digital media to inform decisions, including “co-creating” new products with its customers. When Glossier was developing a cleanser, Emily Weiss posted on Into the Gloss and her Instagram account, asking customers what made their ideal face wash. What would it look like? Smell like? Feel like? Who would play it in a film? The result was Glossier’s Milky Jelly Cleanser, named for its texture. Different products require different strategies, Ali Weiss says. “If you rinse
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and repeat, it stops feeling authentic.” Glossier’s Solution exfoliator, launched in 2018, came out of a less overt collaboration: the Glossier team had noticed that chemical exfoliators – a more niche product category than a face wash – were popular among its fans, and started a conversation thread on the topic on Into the Gloss. They involved customers in the launch by giving 60 people the product in advance and using their stories and feedback in the marketing campaign. Consumer feedback has also informed decisions beyond product development. Glossier products are shipped in pink bubble wrap pouches inspired by electronics packaging that can be re-used as cosmetics bags – but some customers said that getting a new bag with every order was wasteful. In 2019, Glossier introduced a “less packaging” option that ships without the pouch. While being selective about which products to release has become a key part of Glossier’s brand, Emily Weiss says that the one thing she constantly hears from customers is that they want more. “They want more makeup. They want more merch. They want things we had never considered that we should even have any business making,” she says. In 2019, the company pushed the boat out into more colourful waters with its first sister line, Glossier Play, which includes makeup products such as coloured eyeliners and glitter gels for a more dramatic look. People have also asked for non-beauty products: Glossier candles, Glossier lingerie, a Glossierdesigned apartment. Weiss once wrote a post on her Instagram Story asking her 500,000 personal followers what they thought the company should make next. “Someone asked us if we could make Milky Jelly lube,” she says. “And I was like, that’s actually a really good idea.”
As Glossier expands, it will need to grapple with how to grow its customer base without losing the cool factor that comes with a cult-like following, and to scale its technology to deal with a larger customer base. Ali Weiss says that the company already uses social media listening tools to glean data and insights from customer feedback, but that it will need to build new systems to deal with greater volume. “Technology is the key to building one-to-one relationships at scale,” she says. In September 2019, Glossier hired COO Melissa Eamer to help focus on growth. Eamer had spent 19 years at Amazon, most recently as VP of sales and marketing for Amazon devices, and says she was attracted to the beauty company because of its customer obsession and brand. “I also loved Emily’s vision, because in the years at Amazon, Jeff [Bezos]’s ability to say ‘Hey, this is where I’m leading the organisation’ was really important when we had a lot of naysayers and doubters,” she says. Eamer sees Glossier’s potential as a direct-to-consumer brand to create a new kind of digital retail experience. “I think because we own that relationship with our customer, we really have the opportunity to reinvent how consumers, and beauty consumers in particular, think about e-commerce,” she says. “It’s kind of the e-commerce v2, if you will, where it’s less about making a transaction easier and more about having a relationship with that company.” She is not yet sure exactly what that will look like, but says it will be something of a “mash-up” between Glossier ’s website, social media channels, Into the Gloss blog and offline experiences. “I think it becomes a hybrid,” she says. “It’s not really a social networking site, it’s not really an e-commerce site, it is a beauty site that you go to to have beauty conversations, buy beauty products, learn about routines – it’s combining those concepts together in a way that feels very organic to our community, versus sort of forced.” In the past year, Glossier has also hired a new CTO, CFO, chief people officer and head of supply chain to expand its leadership team. In terms of growing its reach, Ali Weiss says the company’s primary aim for now is to become “more Glossier to more people”, reaching new customers in the US and globally. Glossier currently ships to the US, Puerto Rico, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and France, and has a bricks-and-mortar
store in LA as well as its New York flagship. It has held pop-up experiences in various locations, including London’s Covent Garden. Even in existing geographies, she says, there is plenty of opportunity. “Our brand awareness is still relatively low compared with Estée Lauder or L’Oréal, or, outside of the beauty industry, a Nike or an Apple.” Danny Rimer, a partner at VC firm Index Ventures who has invested in Glossier since 2016, says the company’s challenge moving forward will be one of execution. “Clearly product-market fit has been validated; now it’s a question of how you build a global, world-class company on the back of that,” he says. In the beauty sector, it is common for companies to be acquired by one of the incumbent multinationals. Rimer says that, though acquisition offers are flattering, Index does not invest in entrepreneurs who plan to build a company that will be acquired. “We want to back entrepreneurs who are creating companies that are going to define an era in the respective sector they’re going after, and we think Glossier and Emily are a great example of that,” he says. Emily Weiss would not be drawn on whether Glossier is currently profitable, nor if or when the company is planning an IPO, saying only that “we’re thinking about building a very big, long-term, enduring business and company”. While she insists that beauty is Glossier’s business for the foreseeable future, she says that she could see the company going beyond this category. “I mean, we’re already making sweatshirts.” � Victoria Turk wrote about restoring Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in 01.20
Wearing a Monzo logo T-shirt and casual blue jeans, Tom Blomfield, the chief executive of the challenger bank, paced up and down the main stage of the WIRED Smarter conference on a crisp afternoon in October 2019. He sounded like he was having an existential crisis. “Why do companies even exist? What are we here for?” he asked the crowd. “We have to be profitable and sustainable. But you also need to think about our impact on society and the environment. If we don’t do that, we make a bunch of profit and screw everything else up.” Blomfield has a reason for this soul searching. His company disrupted the traditional banking sector in the UK, and now needs to replicate its formula in the US. Monzo’s meteoric rise from Shoreditch status symbol to Grandiose statements like £2 billion startup juggernaut “Do No Evil” or “Move Fast and was fuelled in large part by Break Things” don’t actually an almost cult-like customer mean anything in practice, says following. Its growth to over Blomfield. It is better to opt for 3.5 million users in the UK a less catchy phrase that sums has led traditional banks to up your business to connect with scramble to revamp their customers in the long term. consumer banking services around user experiences that appeal to customers under 35. Its success is also thanks to Do not assume that new people its team involving customers joining the business will already in growing the business know your company culture. As from the start – something your business grows, keep the bits unheard of in banking. of your culture that make sense. Monzo’s team raised capital “We’re now 1,400 people and have through crowdfunding, asked three million customers around customers to trial their beta the UK,” Blomfield says. “Which products, and even re-named parts of our culture worked when the business based on 10,000 we were just 15 people in a startup suggestions from its own servicing hipsters in Shoreditch, users (it had to change its and which parts now don’t?” original name from Mondo after a trademark dispute). Its own customers became “A year ago, we did not have invested in the business, millions and millions of pounds [for and promoted it through ad campaigns],” Blomfield says. So word of mouth as if it were an the company used transparency exclusive club – handing out instead. “You can say, ‘Look, here’s “golden tickets” to skip the our decision making process. queue and open an account. Here’s what we did. And it goes But this collaborative wrong’. And explaining that to approach with Monzo’s .” customer base could have gone badly wrong. After all, when the team started working together five years ago, they talked about culture a lot, but never wrote anything down. “We somehow weirdly thought it was gonna be a process of osmosis, you know? They [new employees] come in the door and suddenly magically absorb all of this sort of
history that we all had lived. And that – surprise – did not happen.” The biggest problem was, ironically, Monzo’s closeness to its customer base. It hasn’t helped it become profitable – “We’ve still not cracked that one,” Blomfield admits – and it led to misunderstandings about making them pay for anything. Blomfield says that him “banging on” about traditional banks only caring about their profits created a perception internally that making any sort of profit is evil. “That’s not what I meant,” he says. “Genuinely, people thought that whenever we were charging for anything, that must be fundamentally wrong. But that was part of the culture we really fought to transform.” To evolve, Monzo needs to find ways of making revenue that are a fair and transparent exchange of value, Blomfield explains. “I think the best businesses find something that’s really positive for society and the environment and individual customers, and generates a really healthy, sustainable profit.” Monzo, now facing competition from traditional banks and other challengers, may be running out of time to prove that it can build that sustainable profit. But culture, once again, may be the key to its success. After all, Blomfield’s dream is to make Monzo work for literally anyone, including “people that don’t have a passport, people who are homeless, and people who have just been released from prison”. NB
Diverse teams lead to better company performance, and setting the right company culture is crucial – “I think [startups] should be making sure that they are talking about it all the time – and building a culture in which people can voice if they feel like they’re not being included, or they’re not being heard.” VC firms can also have a disproportionate impact on diversity in the startup ecosystem – “It’s a tiny industry, but the companies that they fund – they’re going to become the new Googles and Facebooks of the next ten and 20 years, and they’ll be employing thousands.” AL
PHOTOGRAPHY: SANDRO BAEBLER. ILLUSTRATION: MARK LONG
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Wellness has become a hot category for startups over the past five years, with customers willing to spend more money on fitness, diet and mental health tools, but lifestyle startups need to be on platforms where their customers are – “A lot of change is driven by the younger generation, who see the world through a digital-first experience compared to the previous generations.” Innovation in the next decade will rely on making things easy for users who want quick fixes in more areas of their lives – “What’s happening at the moment – this was unthinkable ten years ago.” MM
In the summer of 2013, 19-year-old Markus Villig (above) walked to every taxi rank in his home city of Tallinn, Estonia, trying to convince drivers to sign up to an on-demand app service that he created in his bedroom. Five years later, his company, Bolt, is valued at £1bn and is competing against Uber in more than 100 cities globally. Getting people to take him seriously was the first battle. Most of the taxi drivers had been doing the same job “since the Soviet era”, Villig laughs. The majority told him not waste their time. “But I think the persistence of doing it was the reason it became a success,” he says. After hundreds of these meetings, eventually he found 30 drivers who were interested enough to be the starting point for the company. With €5,000 from his parents, he hired a developer to help him launch
the business, then called mTakso. After six months, his startup took off – but the lack of available funding in Estonia for his creation, due to low levels of investor interest in the transport market, meant that Villig’s extremely young team had to find small markets in Europe (such as Latvia and Lithuania) and replicate the process by starting all over again for each. If Villig had listened to some of the investors that he met with, Bolt would have never happened. Many were only interested in a first-mover advantage – which was incompatible with Bolt’s plan to take on Uber in many of its more profitable markets. “It’s very hard to change their mindset,” Villig says. “Sure, you can be the biggest player in the US, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to win Europe. A lot of investors were not even able to think about this.” Seven years later, Villig’s company is operating in more than 150 cities in Europe, Africa, West Asia, North America and Australia, and counts Japanese conglomerate SoftBank among its investors. It has rebranded twice – first to Taxify, and in 2018 to Bolt – and is recovering from a major setback in London that saw it ejected from the city for over a year. In 2017, Transport for London banned Taxify after just three days over safety concerns, stating that the company lacked the proper private hire licences to operate in the city. It had bought minicab company City
Drive Services and thought that it could use the same licence to operate in London to avoid the application process entirely. It was bad legal advice, Villig claims. “We just didn’t have the proper investment of people and safety and product.” This experience changed Bolt’s approach to safety, governance and co-operation entirely – Taxify had never before encountered problems moving into markets. Its race to gain market share as quickly as possible had set it back months and handed Uber a year-long advantage. But it also taught Villig a valuable lesson. “We were moving too fast in some cities,” Villig admits. Taxify initially dedicated only two (rather inexperienced) people to head up the launch, which he concedes was a crucial mistake. Now, there are 40. “It doesn’t matter whether we’re a few months late in one city or another. What matters is who’s going to be the best in ten years. What kind of value can you provide to customers and drivers? The one who offers the best value is going to win.” Villig believes that Bolt can win against Uber because it offers a better deal to drivers. “If we provide low commissions and good earnings, then they’re happy to stick with us. Back then [when the company started], we were using this strategy against taxi companies. Nowadays, we’re doing that versus Uber.” NB
Throughout his 11-year tenure at Spotify, Gustav Söderström has been VP of products, chief product officer – and now head of R&D, leading more than 1,500 people across product, design, data, technology and engineering, reporting directly to CEO Daniel Ek. This, plus his experience as an investor and adviser, means Söderstrom has plenty of opinions on successful product development.
When you’re thinking about growing a business, you should constantly question whether your business model makes sense, Villig says. “When we started off, we were very clear that we should only do something if we can bring some unique value to people. And if not, then what’s the point?”
PHOTOGRAPHY: CARL BERGMAN. ILLUSTRATION: MARK LONG
In just six years, mTakso turned into Taxify, and then into Bolt. This could be seen as a confusing and risky move for a consumer-facing business. But both changes made sense, Villig maintains. The first rebrand was to make the name more linked to the taxi service; the second, to reflect the expansion into food delivery and mobility.
It was only after Transport for London banned the ride-hailing app from the biggest taxi market in Europe that Villig realised the company was trying to grow too big, too quickly. This move lost them around a year in London, but caused them to overhaul the way they structured future launches in new jurisdictions. NB
How can a product stand out? With so many demands on people’s attention, figuring out how to reach a consumer audience is as important as building an amazing product. When Spotify recently turned its focus to podcasting, it decided not to make a separate app, even though that would have made for a better user experience. Instead, it integrated podcasts into its music app – ”which meant we got the podcast quoteunquote ‘app’ to the existing 200 million-plus users,” Söderström says. For startups that don’t have an existing user base, he suggests partnerships: “You need to be strategic about distribution, not just product.” VT
How do you tell if an idea is good? Söderström uses modelling tools to simplify messy problems, and frameworks such as Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers to assess ideas. He also works with the notion of Socratic debate: his team thoroughly probe one another’s proposals, battle-testing them on a theoretical level before moving forward. “I think “Resilience. There are bumps on it’s remarkably effective the road at every stage. We love to versus actually writing code be the first goal for good and bad and shipping products, news once we have created trust, which is a very expensive because not everything is going endeavour,” he says. to go the right way.” When should you release a product into the wild? Do you release a bare-bones minimum viable product (MVP), or hold off until it’s perfect? Söderström says he often veers towards perfectionism, which can result in investing too much into a product and then feeling pressure to protect sunk costs, “But it’s also easy to misinterpret a good idea because of poor execution.” He also says people are now much less willing to download a new app, “so if you’re going to ask for someone’s attention, I don’t know if the super-crappy MVP approach is going to work.” He suggests testing an MVP internally before going out to customers.
“There is bigger opportunity, because there is now broadband just about everywhere. So from anywhere you can have a voice and build a global business.”
“Revolut in the UK, which we decided not to do because we’re not looking at fintech; and in the US, Glossier, which is a great example of what we are interested in.”
“Sometimes people are just pitching things they are misinformed on, but we’re always very respectful of entrepreneurs and their journey. Even if it’s a bad pitch, we try to give feedback so that they can learn from it.” MM
“One thing I wish I’d done is hire a head of people or a VP of HR earlier,” Adelman says. She thinks this support becomes necessary at around 70 people – otherwise, your time as a founder will get taken up by people issues.
WhiteHat has a weekly all-hands meeting where people share “wins, focuses and metrics”, and fortnightly email updates from team leads to the whole company. The team uses Slack and collaborative Google docs, but Adelman says she’s still a big fan of picking up the phone. Every startup dreams of scaling quickly, but it brings challenges When you believe your idea could that force founders to adapt be truly transformative, you’ll feel and deal with the growing pressure to push for that change pains of an expanding team. – but don’t sacrifice quality to get “I’ll tell you the biggest issue: there faster. WhiteHat is Ofstedmeeting room space,” says regulated, and Adelman says a Sophie Adelman, co-founder of dip in quality would be the biggest London-based apprenticeships threat to the business. startup WhiteHat. “Physical space is an under-appreciated problem.” Adelman and Euan Blair (above) launched WhiteHat in 2016 to “democratise access to the best careers”, offering an alternative to university by recruiting and training young people as apprentices for roles in businesses including BP, Facebook, Google and Warner Music. WhiteHat’s approach has three aspects: a digital marketplace that matches candidates’ profiles with potential opportunities; access to coaching and educational resources; and a community similar to a university alumni network.
In 2019, WhiteHat doubled the number of apprentices on its scheme to 1,000 and received tens of thousands more applications within the same period. It wants to take on 10,000 apprentices by 2023 – “which will make us look like a university in terms of size and scale”, Adelman says. This growth is fuelled in part by the apprenticeship levy introduced by the UK government in 2017, collected from employers and made available to fund apprentices’ training. WhiteHat has doubled its staff to 110 people, and has raised $16 million (£12 million) in a series A funding round in July 2019, led by Index Ventures. Aside from having to constantly upsize office space, recruiting talent at pace is an issue. “The challenge is maintaining the quality bar,” Adelman says. “You are only as good as the calibre of the people that you hire.” The temptation when you have seats to fill, she says, is to rush recruitment, but it’s always
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PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON. ILLUSTRATION: MARK LONG
Deep tech ideas can spend years in development before germinating into companies, and investors may work with startups for a long period of time before deciding to fund them – “Over the year we do three to four deep-dive processes, where we decide whether we want to pursue such investments. It’s tough, but early feedback is better than spending years of your life pursuing the wrong thing.” MM
better to be patient. “A bad hire costs far more than waiting for a good hire.” One particularly difficult task that comes hand in hand with growth is having to hire people who are more experienced than you are. In 2019, WhiteHat hired Steve McCluskey as vice-president of sales. He has experience with multiple previous startups, most recently at AppDynamics. The trick to hiring for such a senior role, Adelman says, is spending time on the interview process to make sure the person aligns with your company values, and then onboarding them properly. After that, it’s a matter of giving new recruits enough information, but also enough freedom to do their job: you’re hiring them for their expertise, so give them space to apply that knowledge. Adelman is a fan of the concept of “giving away your LEGO”, coined by startup founder and former Facebook and Google employee Molly Graham to describe dealing with a scaling team. In Graham’s metaphor, the growing business consists of LEGO towers that its employees are constantly building. As more people are hired, existing team members may feel anxious or threatened and not want to share their LEGO bricks for fear of losing control over their tower’s design. The answer is not to hoard bricks, but to find a bigger tower to work on instead. As a co-founder, Adelman has had to flex her own managing style to suit people at different levels in the company: individual contributors, first-time managers, managers of managers, and now senior executives. “It’s less doing, and it’s more coaching and guiding, setting strategy and making the difficult decisions.” VT
When London healthtech startup BenevolentAI secured a $90 million (£68 million) cash injection from Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek in September 2019, the deal valued the business at $1 billion. Not too shabby for a six-year-old company whose ambition to dramatically change the way drugs are discovered and developed remains largely unrealised. In reality, the $1 billion valuation was a come-down for BenevolentAI, which in April 2018 had been valued at twice that sum, after raising $115 million from a number of undisclosed US investors. The problem was that one-time star investor Neil Woodford was an early backer of BenevolentAI. He was forced to wind up his Woodford Equity Income fund following a long period
of underperformance. As the largest unquoted company in the portfolio and the biggest holding in Woodford’s Patient Capital Trust, BenevolentAI’s value was impacted by the fire sale. BenevolentAI’s chief executive Joanna Shields (below) is philosophical. In the world of startups, she says, these things happen, and argues that the Woodford situation – and its potential inflation of BenevolentAI’s valuation – is moot, given that the business has been going through a process of reinvention since she joined its board in May 2018. “When I arrived, we’d just closed our funding round at $2 billion and were more of a traditional drug-discovery company,” she says. “We looked at the tech and decided to shift strategy. That pivot [affected the valuation].” The business, which in the year to December 2018 made a pre-tax loss of £33 million on turnover of £6.8 million, also expects that change to enable it to start making some significant returns. Having bought in pharmaceutical capabilities at the beginning of 2018, the firm no longer uses machine learning just to identify new ways of treating diseases, but to develop its own drugs. It has formed partnerships with pharma giants AstraZeneca and Novartis, but creating medicines in its own right is what will drive revenue. For US-born Shields, who was made a life peer in the House of Lords in 2014, all this is a far cry from her years running early-stage operations for Google, Bebo and Facebook, and she admits that when she joined BenevolentAI “people were speaking a language I didn’t understand”. But she says the lessons she has learned in bringing numerous businesses from the startup to the IPO stage remain, regardless of the sector she works in. “The most valuable lesson is that building an organisation is based on human beings,” she says. “We have a tendency to simplify things and put them into charts, but organisations are organic and fluid; you have to build them around the people within them.” That means listening to people and giving them the tools – whether tech driven or otherwise – they need to succeed. Margaret Taylor
OakNorth founder Rishi Khosla jumps off his treadmill desk and barrels into a meeting room to talk with WIRED. He applies this same attitude to business: extreme energy and zero time-wasting. Khosla, 44 (above), met co-founder Joel Perlman as students at the London School of Economics in the late 90s, founded challenger bank OakNorth in 2015, and has grown it into the UK’s most valuable fintech, worth $2.8 billion, in less than four years. But what’s most remarkable in an industry obsessed with scaling is that OakNorth made a profit within six months of launching.
They followed a very simple mantra: don’t spend money you can’t get back. “Some people just say, ‘I’ve raised X, therefore I’ve got X to spend’. Our whole approach was different,” Khosla explains. Both entrepreneurs, who had successfully grown a research company called Copal Amba together previously, used some of the millions they gained from the sale to launch OakNorth – agreeing to avoid relying on bumper funding rounds entirely. Khosla, drawing the company’s trajectory on a piece of paper, says he prefers a continuous straight line of
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PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON. ILLUSTRATION: MARK LONG
Reinemann, a partner at venture capital firm Propel, says a good fintech founder creates a business to solve a problem, not to make money: for example, preventing customers incurring overdraft fees – “They’ll have found something that they’re super-passionate about, and it drives them to try to understand the problem better than anybody else, or see it in a new way.” MM
growth from revenue, rather than “artificial funding steps”. “It was important to keep on reinforcing the cost discipline requirement, don’t waste, spend where it’s going to make an impact, get work done you can do yourself,” Khosla says. Step one was to build a team who could complete their expertise and force them to justify outsourcing work to external people over in-house. But in February 2019, Khosla broke his own rule. OakNorth raised $440 million in a funding round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. The money went into doubling headcount in the technology and product side of the business, he says. But why did he take it? “The SoftBank money was really a call to see if we did raise this additional amount, could we go faster anywhere – and also, how much of a buffer would be nice to have,” he says. “If I replayed it, I would still take the money. I probably would have been undisciplined with a smaller amount. We’ve got immense value by taking that step. You’ve had a sprint, you’re catching your breath to take stock and make sure you have everything in line before you keep running the marathon.” NB
When Caroline Roche joined Bumble in 2014, the dating startup had just a handful of staff compared to almost 150 employees globally today. As chief of staff, she works closely with a six-strong People and Culture team. “As a team grows, it’s inevitable that company culture needs to grow and scale with it,” Roche says. Central to achieving this is keeping the company’s mission – which for Bumble is helping people “create empowering connections in love, life and work” – squarely at the centre of all decisions.
“We knew what competencies we wanted,” says Khosla. “Neither Joel nor I have experience in commercial banking or lending. We haven’t built a technology business before. So we went out to try to supplement the team with individuals that have technology experience, the individuals who had regulatory experience.”
Very few high-growth businesses measure their cash burn on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, Khosla says. If they did, they would reconsider what they spend their money on. “It’s just feeling the pain of money going out.”
One of the biggest problems building a successful business is revenue burning a hole in your pocket and sabotaging any chance of profitability, Khosla explains. You should push your business to the limit before you start to bring in costs – and always justify them. “It’s a mindset aspect, that actually you’re not here to throw away money, you’re not here to build an undisciplined organisation.”
How do you attract talent? Roche says that a strong mission that resonates with people should help with recruitment, especially for a consumer brand, adding that Bumble’s location in Austin, Texas, offers tech workers a change of pace from San Francisco or New York. The first paragraph on Bumble’s careers page encourages people of colour, LGBTQI people and individuals with disabilities to apply, and suggests candidates share their preferred pronouns in their application. “We want to create an environment and a company culture where anyone could walk through the door and feel comfortable,” Roche says. How do you make a good hire? Hire for values, not just for skills. A Bumble job interview references the company’s core values. For “kindness”, a candidate may give examples of how they have shown consideration to their colleagues. For “equality”, one question could be “How would you handle a situation in which someone made a sexist, racist, homophobic or prejudiced remark?” Spending this time at the interview process is crucial to making sure culture doesn’t get swept to the side as the team grows, Roche says. “As badly as we want to recruit quickly, we really have to take a step back.” How do you deal with conflict? Bumble found that its teams often struggled with giving good feedback. It now gives employees training which covers how to both give and receive criticism. “It’s something that makes people uncomfortable, but it’s so necessary in order to really grow as an individual,” Roche says. Additionally, the company encourages teams to make eye contact by video-chatting one another, instead of making voice calls or communicating by email. VT �
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within 600 metres of a station.
sound from the loudspeaker at a precision of one millimetre and one degree of rotation.
<< Previous spread
v Below
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Vestforbrænding is the
Opened in 2019 in the
ITER (the International
This second ITER image
largest municipal-owned
Technical University of
Thermonuclear Experimental
shows the Tokamak Assembly
waste company in Denmark
Denmark, the Poul la Cour
Reactor, and Latin for “the
Building, where an 800-tonne
– its incineration plant in
Wind Tunnel is one of the
way”) is a nuclear fusion
tool will pre-assemble some
Glostrup, near Copenhagen,
biggest university-owned
research and engineering
of the largest components,
is its biggest. Every day,
tunnels in the world, allowing
megaproject in Provence,
before a crane lifts them
lorries drop off 1,500 tonnes of
turbine parts to be tested at
southern France. It aims to
into the machine well. The
waste – 20 per cent becomes
wind speeds of up to 378kph
establish the feasibility of
tool’s three columns, arranged
power for the national grid; 80
– three times the strength
fusion as a large-scale and
in a triangle, are shown on
per cent is used to generate
of a typical hurricane.
carbon-free energy source,
the right side of the image. �
hot water for heating, which is
based on the principle that
pumped around Copenhagen
powers the Sun and other
Unintended Beauty is
and the surrounding area.
stars. The EU, US, Russia,
published by Hatje Cantz
China, India, Japan and South Korea are all members. Construction of the facility is expected to finish in 2021, to be followed by commissioning of the reactor, and the first plasma experiments in 2025. The first ITER image here is of the diagnostics building.
WORDS: WILL BEDINGFIELD AND ALASTAIR PHILIP WIPER
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For a growing group of super-athletes, marathons are not tough enough, so a fresh challenge has emerged: ultramarathons. And these hyperspecialised competitions are pushing human physical and mental endurance to new limits
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As he rounded the last corner, the finish line within touching distance, he broke into a wide grin, raising his arms above his head and – as a captain in the British Army – saluted as he crossed the finish line. He had run the perfect race. “That was the first point in the race where I relaxed,” Evans recalls six months later at his training base in the Leicestershire town of Loughborough. Seconds after finishing, he ran back down the track, slapping the hands of everyone watching the end of his 161km journey, which had started at 5am that morning. Most years, a time of 14:59:44 would be enough to win Western States – but this time it wasn’t: Evans came in third in the world’s oldest 100-mile trail race, the two men ahead of him both beating
elite athletes who specialise in running unfathomable distances at incomprehensible speeds. Evans’ finish time means his average pace was 5:35 minutes per kilometre – for all 161km. Analysis of race results from across the UK shows the average pace for a 5km run is 6:47 minutes per kilometre. Despite gruelling physical and psychological demands, ultrarunning is booming. Any run longer than a conventional 42.195km (26.2-mile) marathon
the course record. Evans still entered the record books as the fastest non-American to run the gruelling course, and for the fifth fastest time in the race’s history. Remarkably, it was his first attempt at running 100 miles. Before June 29, 2019, the longest single run Evans had completed was 100km. Placing on the podium at Western States cemented him as one of the world’s top ultramarathoners and part of a growing subset of
can be considered an ultramarathon, but events are diverse, ranging from road and mountain races to multiple days of running through deserts. There has been a 1,000 per cent increase in the number of races taking place in the last decade and overall participation has skyrocketed. With this growth comes increased professionalisation. Ten years ago it wouldn’t have been easy to find an elite ultrarunner with an agent; now it’s common.
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Evans was closing in on the running track at Placer High School in Auburn, California, and the last thing he wanted to do was sprint. For the last 99 miles, the British athlete had run over mountains, through rivers and along narrow tracks lined with poison oak and ivy. All the way, he was aware of the clock. And now time was running out. As he entered the school’s track, wearing a white vest with hand-cut holes to regulate his body temperature and the number 12 pinned to his shorts, the rugged asphalt surface turned into a softer rubber, providing some respite to his near-exhausted legs. There were only 300 metres left. Across the stadium he glimpsed the official race time: as the Sun started to set, the red LED numbers on the finish gantry of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run reset to 14 hours and 59 minutes, exactly. Evans had just 60 seconds to travel two-thirds of the way around the track and achieve his goal of running 100 miles (161km) in under 15 hours. “Work hard for another 30 seconds; you’ve got another 30 seconds of hard running,” Evans told himself as he increased his pace one last time.
Above: Tom Evans says that recovery is as important as training. Right : the trail shoe Evans is developing with adidas
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“The globalisation of the sport is amazing,” says Nadeem Khan, the US-based president of the International Association of Ultrarunners (IAU). The number of countries and athletes participating in the IAU’s world championship events hit record highs in 2019. Runners using the sports app Strava also logged more ultramarathons compared with 2018: UK users showed a 3.9 per cent increase, those in the US 8.8 per cent, and Japan 23.8 per cent. Around the world, people want to run further and for longer. “Professional marathoners around here are being asked ‘Would you ever run an ultramarathon?’” Evans says. “It’s the next thing. Doing a regular marathon is now no longer enough to get kudos from your mates.”
sional athlete, you are training to perform your best when you’re feeling your best,” he says. “In the army, you are taught to perform your best when you are feeling your worst.” Evans has always been sporty, running in national school competitions as a teenager and later playing rugby. (When we meet in Loughborough University’s Elite Athlete Centre, he is starstruck by the presence of Welsh international rugby player Jamie Roberts having lunch
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London marathon: 26.2 miles / 42km Western States 100: 100 miles / 160km Marathon des Sables: 156 miles /251km
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at the next table.) In 2015, a ten-month army posting in Kenya brought his focus back to running. He spent time training in the country of some of the world’s greatest marathoners and rekindled his love for the sport. In 2017, he was a relative unknown in the world of ultrarunning. Aside from competing in (and winning) smaller ultramarathons in the UK, he hadn’t made a mark on the more competitive
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international races. The Marathon des Sables changed that. The six-day, multi-stage race based in the Sahara desert in southern Morocco is notorious for its challenging conditions and difficulty. To finish, runners must complete a 251km course (an equivalent of five-and-a-half regular marathons) over rocks and sand dunes, in temperatures that reach above 40 degrees Celsius. The longest day covers more than 80km; participants must carry food, clothing, medical supplies and a sleeping bag for the entire event. Evans says he entered the Marathon des Sables for a bet – friends who finished in the top 300 challenged him to do better. After 19 hours and 49 minutes, he finished third and became the highest British
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finisher since the event started in 1986. He has since clocked up an impressive roster of results: first place in the UltraTrail du Mont-Blanc’s (UTMB) 101km CCC event; first at the multi-day 235km Coastal Challenge Costa Rica; and third place in the Trail World Championships. He has also represented England at the Granollers Half Marathon in Spain. Sponsorship deals from adidas Terrex, Garmin and Red Bull now pay his wages.
be found on the US course and provide near-perfect conditions for longdistance runners to hone their bodies. Although rarely the domain of ultrarunners, east Africa is the home of the world’s best marathoners, and Evans joined a group for some of his workouts. He was the slowest. A combination of the group’s speed, high altitude (which means less oxygen), and unfamiliar conditions saw him drop out of one of his first group runs halfway through. But at the peak of his training he completed a run no marathoner would attempt: eight hours through the Ethiopian countryside. His running watch recommended two weeks of rest at its conclusion. He took three days. Ethiopia proved perfect training for one of the hardest parts of ultramarathon running: mental strength. Evans spent a lot of his time training alone. While he ran, people threw stones at him, he was hit by a car and someone pulled a knife on him (he ran faster at this point). “When it rains, you’ve got to run on the treadmill,” he says of the torrential weather. “And then there are power cuts, so you can’t run on the treadmill.” As soon as he won a place at Western States, he started to obsess over the route. “In running and in daily life, there are controllable factors and there are uncontrollable factors,” he says. “Being able
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His team has a coach, a nutritionist, a physiotherapist and an agent. “I leave no stone unturned,” he says. Each week, Evans spends up to 30 hours training, covering 160-190km at peak volume. He is coached by Sussex-based Allison Benton, who describes the schedule as high-volume marathon training. Evans’ running training is designed to increase three physiological measures: VO2 max, the amount of oxygen the body can process; running economy, how efficiently he moves; and the lactate turn point, where muscles begin to accumulate too much lactic acid, which stops them working at their best. Once a week, he will run at a fast pace that’s designed to improve his lactate turn point, and will also do tempo sessions that simulate the pace he is aiming to run in the next race. “This is not typical of what most ultrarunners do,” Benton says. He also completes comparatively easy runs designed to build up weekly mileage and aid recovery. Aside from running, he lifts weights, cross-trains (swimming or cycling), works with a biomechanist to improve his form, and does intensive mobility work. “Ultrarunning is problem solving,” he says. “Problem solving on your feet, when you’re tired.” When running extreme distances, everything can be a problem: not taking in enough calories, failing to keep properly hydrated, needing the toilet, running at an incorrect pace, taking a wrong turn, or encountering an unexpectedly steep hill can all end any runner’s race – especially if you’re aiming to win. Evans took special steps ahead of Western States. The event is one of the world’s most revered ultramarathons and fills its 369 spots with the sport’s top performers plus an army of recreational runners. Participants begin in near freezing temperatures in Salt Lake City, Utah, and run through the blistering daytime heat of Nevada’s Great Basin desert, before travelling over the Sierra Nevada to Sacramento, California. They can encounter bears and snakes. The course requires 5,514 metres of climbing (almost two-thirds the height of Everest) and punishes runners’ quadriceps with a devilish 7,001 metres of descent. Before the race, Evans moved to Ethiopia for a two-month training camp. The country’s high altitude, dirt tracks and hilly terrain are similar to what can
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to know the course in an ultramarathon is a controllable factor.” He watched YouTube videos, installed course maps on his running watch, and read blog posts reviewing the race. The wallpaper of his laptop became an image of the route. Evans never pictures a run where everything goes right and he crosses the line first (that’s too easy), but instead imagines every scenario where things could go wrong, then creates a plan for what to do. During the complex, rocky sections of Western States, for instance, he chose to wear a running vest with deep pockets that could hold his water bottles, while flatter parts saw him use handheld bottles. His preparation paid off with eight kilometres of the Western States remaining. It was here that Evans realised his sub-15-hour target was “possible, not probable”. Before the race began, he had programmed the course into his GPS running watch in four 40km chunks, to make the entire endeavour not seem so daunting. The finish predictor for the final section said his arrival time at the Placer High School track would be 5am – just minutes outside of target. But Evans knew what was coming. He knew there was one downhill and one uphill to go, and that the remaining section up to the track would take 35 minutes at an easy pace. By the time he reached the asphalt roads of Auburn, the chances of hitting his goal had increased: “I’d done this last bit a lot,” he says. While he was anxious about the time, there were no surprises around the corner. “I knew I was going to be knackered. I wanted to be able to completely switch off and just run the course.”
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Left: Evans used to train in the South Downs, but now runs regularly near Loughborough, in the Peak District
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women can be diminished. Stamina and mental endurance can play a larger part, allowing the top-performing women to compete on a more equal footing. Gender diversity is, however, still a glaring problem in ultramarathons. Race start lines are often overwhelmingly male, and the percentage of women competing, while rising, tends to be low. Unlike Evans, Dauwalter doesn’t have a strict training plan. She runs between 160km and 190km per week on the trails near her Colorado home, based on how her body feels, rather than a strict regime. “It’s easygoing in that I’m not attached to numbers and data,” she says. Runners have more data available than at any point in the history of sport. GPS watches and apps such as Strava let any
Ultramarathons that push the boundaries of what’s humanly possible are Dauwalter’s big interest, although she has run – and won – big name races such as Western States and UTMB. A key race she’s targeting in 2020 is Big’s Backyard Ultra, where she previously finished second. The race is organised by Gary Cantrell, known in running circles as Lazarus Lake, who founded the Barkley Marathons ultramarathon, popularised by the Netflix documentary The Race That
runner track their distance and pace. Heart-rate monitors assess the body’s effort, gait analysis tracks the number of steps per minute, and precision measurements can even work out how much the torso moves vertically with each step. It’s easy to get subsumed in the data. “Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty good internal computer,” Dauwalter says. “I’m pretty good at gauging effort and pace just based off of how I’m feeling.”
Eats Its Young. In many years, nobody finishes: only 15 people have completed the course since it started in 1986. But Big’s Backyard Ultra is another form of torture. There is no finish distance, time, or set end to the race. Instead, runners get one hour to complete a 6.7km loop. How fast they run it is up to them, but one hour after the loop starts, the next one begins. If runners finish a loop in 28 minutes, they get 32 minutes
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all professional ultrarunners have the same approach. This is part of the sport’s beauty: what works for one athlete won’t necessarily have the same results for another. In 2017, American Courtney Dauwalter quit her teaching job after six years to pursue ultrarunning full-time. “I just wanted to know what would happen if I went all in,” she says. “I didn’t want to get 50 years down the line and be sitting here wondering what could have been, or what I could have done if I had really invested myself in it.” During the same year, she won the first Moab 240. The race is 386km long and consists of a huge loop in Utah that sees runners climb and descend cumulative heights equal to the world’s tallest mountain. Dauwalter won in 57 hours and 55 minutes, beating the man in second place by over ten hours and 32km. In ultramarathons, particularly those over extreme distances, men’s general strength and power advantages over
Tom Evans average pace for 161km (100 miles): 5:35 minutes per kilometre (overall time: 14:59:44) UK average pace for 5km: 6:47 minutes per kilometre (overall time: 33:54) UK average pace for marathon (42km): 6:34 minutes per kilometre (overall time: 4:37:09)
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to take on extra food, nap or just sit down. Then they run again. The race continues until only one person is left running. It may be one of the most brutal forms of running that exists anywhere. In 2018, Dauwalter covered 449km in 54 hours and 37 minutes of running (total race time: 67 hours). But she wants to go further. To do this, she believes she may need to look at techniques to help her quickly nap in the seven to ten minutes she plans to leave for recovery each lap. “The last-person-standing race format is a total head game,” she says. “I want to get 300 miles [483km], but I think 400 miles [644km] is doable, which would be four days of running four miles every hour. I think you’ve mentally got to be set on five days of running.”
Ultra long-distance endurance running has its roots in human evolutionary history – our earliest ancestors used to run to hunt and survive. As a sport, walking races during the late 1800s – often two people would compete over 80.5km – eventually gave way to competitive running. South Africa’s Comrades Marathon, an 89km road race between Durban and Pietermaritzburg in the KwaZulu-Natal province, started in 1921 and is now the world’s largest ultramarathon with 25,000 runners. “Ultrarunning has been around for ever, but people don’t recognise especially what it is,” says the IAU’s Nadeem Khan. “It’s a little bit off from mainstream athletics, where track and field or the marathon takes the centre
process, both the US women’s and men’s teams took the overall titles. Individually, Herron ran 270.116km to set a new women’s world distance record for 24 hours at a 5:19 minutes per km pace. Herron regularly takes on races that can involve running around a 400m track for hours at a time. As well as the women’s 24-hour record, she holds records for 100 miles (12:42:40) and 12 hours (149.130km), and has set nine US records, ranging from 50 miles to 200km.
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PHOTOGRAPHY: RED BULL; GETTY
H E Shortly after 9am on October 27, 2019, Dauwalter walked over to Camille Herron, who was part-sat, part-slumped in a canvas camping chair in the middle of a French running track. The two new world champions talked about how they hurt. For the previous 24 hours, the runners, both in blue Team USA vests, had been looping the same repetitive 1,500m course as part of the IAU World Championships. At the end of the mind-numbing
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Like Evans, Herron works to an extended marathon training programme, which means that she typically runs between 160-190km per week. While setting the 24-hour world record, Herron finished sixth out of a total 352 runners. “There’s nothing easy in running multiple loops for 24-hours,” she says. “Ultrarunning is this unique sport where the further we go, the closer the gap is on beating the men”.
Clockwise from top left: Evans in the Wings For Life World Run 2019; Courtney Dauwalter wins the 2019 UTMB; the six-day, 251km Marathon des Sables; Jim Walmsley (in hat), holder of the 50-mile record, and mountain runner Kilian Journet (vest)
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stage.” As a result of this, the majority of ultra athletes are amateurs with day jobs. The last half-decade has experienced a surge in the number of ultramarathons being held around the world, including trail events and mountain running courses (although these can sometimes be shorter than a marathon). Steve Diederich, who runs the website RunUltra, which he founded in 2014, and organises UK entries for the Marathon Des Sables, estimates there are up to 3,000 ultramarathons around the world, with the amount of people running ultras hitting 611,098 in 2018. In contrast, analysis has found that around one million participants took part in a marathon in that same
year. “About 90 per cent of races are trail runs,” Diederich says, adding that he is seeing the greatest amount of growth in Asia and Russia, which have historically had a low number of races. The sport’s showpiece is arguably the series of UTMB races. Across multiple events during a week-long festival, 10,000 participants tackle rocky tracks through the Alps and cross borders in France, Italy and Switzerland before finishing in the storybook town of
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money for their travel. He says there is a reluctance from some runners to participate in races where the main prize is prestige. “When they come to ultrarunning, they’re like, ‘Where’s the prize money?’” Finn says. “What I would like to see is the races inviting runners, particularly from places where they’re not being sponsored. I can’t see how races can get away with collecting all this money off the masses and not sharing it with the athletes themselves.”
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lottery is more difficult and challenging than putting on the race,” he says. Look at pictures of almost any of the world’s largest ultra races and one difference from regular marathons held in London, New York, Boston and Tokyo is apparent. The vast majority of competitors, particularly among the professionals at the front, are white. Few runners from Kenya or Ethiopia – countries that have dominated men’s and women’s marathons for decades – run in ultramarathons. While running can be seen as a way to escape poverty in east African countries, with the world’s biggest marathons offering huge prize pots, few ultramarathons give cash prizes. South Africa’s Comrades Marathon offers some of the
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Chamonix. Races range from 40km to 300km and attract the sports’ top competitors. UTMB completely takes over Chamonix for its duration, and thousands of spectators line the streets to catch a glimpse of the athletes. To earn their place at any of the UTMB events, prospective runners are required to complete qualifying races, earning points based on difficulty, and enter a randomly drawn lottery. Slots at the world’s top ultramarathons, which can cost thousands of pounds, are so coveted that lotteries are common. Western States’ race director Craig Thornley received a record number of applications for the 2020 edition of the race: 6,666, for just 369 spaces. “Conducting the
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biggest prize money: male and female winners get around £27,000 each (with similar bonuses for breaking course records). In the US, the winners in Colorado’s 100-mile Run Rabbit Run race get a minimum of $15,000 (around £11,500) each, and often more. These are outliers: UTMB only started offering prize money for the first time in 2019. The winners received just €2,000 (£1,700) each, and its race organisers have previously said they are against “professionalisation of the sport with money, as this would increase the risk of doping”. Aranahad Finn, a journalist and author of The Rise of the Ultra Runners, has tried to help runners from Africa participate in ultra events by raising
This may be set to change as the sport grows, bringing with it new business opportunities. On May 4, 2019, cult French sports brand Hoka One One held an ultrarunning event called Project Carbon X in Folsom, California. The aim was to set new 50-mile and 100km world records in one race – but the attempt also coincided with the launch of Hoka’s Carbon X racing shoe. Every athlete was wearing a pair.
Above: Evans also runs cross-country in the European Championships – and plans to take ultrarunning to the Olympics
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Hoka’s race signals a wider trend of sports brands ploughing money into non-traditional running formats. “Most running shops now will have as many trail shoes as they do road shoes,” RunUltra’s Diederich says. Pro runners can be seen on Instagram and Twitter building up their following by exploiting the rolling hills and snowy peaks they run through. The more followers a runner has, the more likely they’re going to be sponsored by a big company. Recent years have also seen the emergence of more professional ultrarunning race series. The Ultra Trail World Tour includes some of the world’s most popular races over 100km and lets any runner claim points for finishing to create unofficial world rankings.
Ironman owns two ultrarunning events: in May 2018, it snapped up Ultra-Trail Australia, a multi-race event with distances up to 100km. In January 2019, it bought New Zealand’s largest trail event, the 2,000-person Tarawera Ultra Marathon, which has runs from 20km to 161km. Unlike ultrarunning’s grass roots origins, the Ironman series – a 3.86km swim, 180.25km bicycle ride and 42.20km run – is a business. The brand name is owned by the World
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The Golden Trail Series, which consists of mountain running over shorter than ultra distances, is sponsored by Salomon. The brand puts thousands into slickly produced YouTube videos recapping each race’s highlights – everything from mountain falls to runners getting lost. American runner Jim Walmsley – who set the new 50-mile world record at Hoka’s event (4:50:07; averaging 3:35 per km) and is the course record holder for the Western States 100 – says the sport is set to increase in popularity in the future, as events begin to live-stream races and make it easier for fans to engage. “I see trail running where the Ironman triathlon was five years ago,” Evans adds. “It is on the verge of really kicking off.”
Triathlon Corporation, which itself was purchased by Chinese conglomerate Wanda for $650 million (£500 million) in 2015. Separately, Europe’s UTMB has also franchised its brand and now runs events in Argentina, Oman and China. 2021 may be ultrarunning’s watershed moment. For the first time, the official governing bodies of ultra, mountain and trail running are working with World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations) to produce a combined world championships, giving ultrarunning disciplines official World Athletics branding. Ultramarathoners will get more prominence on a world stage, opening the door to greater recognition – and funding.
turning professional, Tom Evans’ life has changed. He is now able to focus solely on running. As well as ultrarunning, at the start of December 2019, he qualified for the Great Britain men’s cross-country team in the European Championships. The move was a success – Evans’ six-person GB squad won the gold medal in the men’s team event. “I get a lot of recognition in the UK for doing ‘normal athletics’, the recognised distances where people like quantifiable things,” he says. But ultra is what drives him. Evans has mapped out his next five years: in his sights are the British- and world-best times for the 100km. He also dreams of being an Olympian, most likely in the traditional marathon (if he can sufficiently improve his speed), as ultrarunning isn’t an Olympic sport – yet. “Whatever ultra event ends up in the Olympics – road, trail or track – it would be a victory for all runners, elite and non-elite, that have participated in ultras,” says Khan. Evans agrees: “Probably not Paris 2024, but after that. And for me, that’s really exciting. I definitely want to go to the Olympics.” � Matt Burgess wrote about the Roborace AI supercar in issue 03.18
BY TOM WARD PHOTOGRAPHY: REEVE JOLLIFFE & ENRICO SACCHETTI
CONQUERING THE WORLD’S HIGHEST PEAKS AND TWO POLES WAS NOT ENOUGH FOR VICTOR VESCOVO. HE WANTED TO BE THE FIRST PERSON TO REACH THE DEEPEST POINTS OF ALL FIVE OCEANS. BUT FIRST HE HAD TO BUILD A SUB THAT WAS UP TO IT – A FOUR-YEAR ADVENTURE OF ITS OWN
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operates a private equity firm when he isn’t venturing to the Earth’s most remote places. The success of the project depends on this final dive. Vescovo has a three-day window before a storm is set to arrive over the Molloy, bringing with it three-metre waves and 40-knot winds. Miss this opportunity, and he will have to wait another year. Today, dive day, the wind chill factor contributes to an air temperature of -8oC, and the water temperature is just 0.4oC. ictor Vescovo is ready to make history. It’s 12.37pm on It is, as a crew member remarks, “as cold as Saturday, August 24, 2019, and the 53-year-old Texan water gets before it freezes”. Before Vescovo is about to attempt to pilot his bespoke submersible to even begins his descent to the bottom of the the bottom of the Molloy Deep, a nodal basin (one that is ocean, the pressure is immense. unaffected by tidal movements) 5,550 metres in depth. Limiting Factor – a titanium machine that The basin is located in the Fram Strait, between the Arctic Ocean and the Norwegian and Greenland Seas. resembles more a squashed milk carton To arrive here, 48 crew members and passengers on the with two eye-like portals than a traditional research vessel DSSV Pressure Drop have sailed 17 hours from cylindrical submarine – has been manoeuvred the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard into the open expanse into position by a huge metal A-frame launcher, of the Arctic Ocean. By diving down to the seabed, Vescovo and it is now suspended securely over the back hopes to become the first person in history not only to touch of the vessel, awaiting its lone passenger. With down on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, but to have explored the safety and systems checks completed, the deepest point of all five of the Earth’s oceans. Vescovo emerges on to the aft main deck, The Five Deeps expedition got under way in December 2018, dressed in blue overalls with a cream cardigan when Vescovo took his submersible, called Limiting Factor, to visible at the neck. A patch on his chest reads the 8,376m depths of the Atlantic Ocean’s Puerto Rico Trench. “Vescovo”; the Texas flag is one of a series on Since then he has made contact with the Antarctic Ocean’s his right arm. His metallic blonde hair is tucked 7,433m South Sandwich Trench, the Indian Ocean’s 7,192m beneath a black beanie, and his grey beard Java Trench, and the Pacific Ocean’s 10,925m Mariana Trench, is split by a sharp-toothed smile. He moves en route to his last stop at the top of the world. around the deck, shaking hands. “Last one,” This final Five Deeps dive is the culmination of over four he repeats to each crew member. It is easy to years of planning. It is an odyssey that has seen Pressure picture Vescovo, in a parallel life, preparing to Drop cover 46,262 nautical miles, employing hundreds of blast off into the far reaches of space. research scientists, expedition staff, engineers and ship’s crew Vescovo’s submersible is the first to be at a cost of millions of dollars – a bill footed by Vescovo, who designed for repeat visits to such depths. In the darkness of the ocean floor, this 11.7-tonne vessel, 4.5 metres long, will be his single link with the world above. Should anything go wrong, there will be no escape. Previous spread: Victor More than 5,000 metres below the surface, there are no footsteps to follow, no Vescovo eases Limiting safety ropes for guidance. This final dive must be undertaken alone. Factor into the ocean With the submersible ready to launch, Vescovo clambers on board. Before he depths. Right: the climbs inside, he holds up an index finger – “one”, representing the last dive standing submersible, in October between him and history. He disappears inside the shiny white hull. Hatch secured, 2020, being refitted in a Limiting Factor is lowered into the rust-green ocean, a current buffeting its sides. dry dock in Barcelona A swimmer, encased in a thick, Arctic-proof wetsuit, balances on top of the vehicle, disconnecting safety lines before diving into the ocean and making for a waiting Zodiac boat. With all eyes watching, the submersible begins to sink beneath the swell, its hull disappearing, an orange flag waving above the surface to indicate its position. Soon there is only a brief patch of oxidised teal ocean where the sub once was. Then that too washes away, as submersible and pilot sink into the depths.
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Vescovo operated his first vehicle in 1969, when he was just three years old. Stealing away from his parents at the family home in Dallas, Texas, he climbed into the front seat of their car, put it into neutral, and rolled on to a nearby highway. What happened next was, he says, “a really bad accident”. Miraculously, no one else was hurt, but the three-year-old Vescovo was crushed inside the car. He spent six weeks in intensive care, his skull was fractured in three places, and he required 100 stitches. Although he slowly recovered, he still does not have any feeling in the side of his right hand. “My dad said the Lord saved me,” he says. “But I just thought I’d been lucky. I realised then that we were all living on borrowed time.” We’re talking inside Vescovo’s generous cabin on board Pressure Drop. On the walls are half a dozen photographs of waves by French photographer Pierre Carreau. The bookshelves hold a selection of sci-fi titles; both Pressure Drop and Limiting Factor take their names from sentient spaceships in Iain M Banks’s Culture series of sci-fi novels. Growing up, a sci-fi obsessed Vescovo had hoped to graduate from purloined cars to fighter jets. A failed eye test put the brakes on that plan, so he made a detour into aerospace design at Stanford University. But it wasn’t for him. “I could do it, but I wasn’t that good at it,” Vescovo shrugs. He switched to a double major in economics and political sciences, and has continued detouring ever since. He has worked in finance on Wall Street and in Saudi Arabia, management consultancy in Dallas, and at a dotcom era startup in San Francisco. He served as a reserve intelligence officer in the US Navy from 1993 to 2013, supporting combat operations in Serbia from the Nato HQ in Naples, Italy, as well as rear-area headquarters in South Korea and the Persian Gulf. In 2002, he finally settled in private equity, amassing enough money to fund a climbing hobby in which he conquered the Seven Summits – the highest mountains of each continent. He followed this with expeditions to both poles. Having thus completed the “Adventurer’s Grand Slam”, Vescovo alighted on the idea of diving to the ocean depths thanks to the influence of another affluent businessman with a thirst for adventure. Richard Branson had been talking about his plans for Virgin Oceanic and its DeepFlight Challenger craft – a commercial project designed to take customers to the deepest parts of the five oceans – since 2009; he described it as “the last great challenge for humans”. Although the
Above: the viewport windows are designed to shift inwards to deal with the immense deep-sea pressure. Right: an orange flag marks the Molloy Deep dive site
Virgin project was quietly mothballed in 2014 due to difficulties in developing the necessary technology, Vescovo knew that he had found his next mission. “Branson chose a technology that was going to be based on carbon fibre. It was a little out there,” Vescovo says. “But I couldn’t believe no one had ever tried it – that no person had ever been to the bottom of four of our oceans. It was obviously possible, because James Cameron did it in the Mariana Trench in 2012. I thought, how hard could that be?” Initially, Vescovo thought that he would just buy Cameron’s submersible, refurbish it, and dive in it to the bottom of the oceans. But he judged Cameron’s tech to be out of date, requiring too many costly upgrades. Deciding that what he really needed was his own craft, he reached out to Patrick Lahey, president of Florida-based Triton Submarines. Born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1962, Lahey has been diving since 1975 and has almost 40 years of commercial underwater experience. He co-founded Triton in 2008. When Vescovo got in touch about building a deep-sea vehicle that could reach the bottom-most point of the five oceans, Lahey saw it as an opportunity to realise a long-held ambition. “It’s something that we always wanted to do,” he says. Their first meeting took place in May 2015, when Vescovo flew to the Bahamas to attend a dive with Lahey and Triton’s principal design engineer, John Ramsay. Vescovo outlined his desire for a submersible that could simply go down and come back up again; anything else was superfluous. “I said: ‘The design needs to be the AK-47 principle. It needs to be functional and reliable, and work. Don’t go off the reservation with bells and whistles. Make it simple and reliable,’” Vescovo says. As far as Triton was concerned, this initial brief was a little too simple. “His original concept was a steel sphere with no windows,” Lahey says. “We weren’t
interested in building that.” For Triton, the submersible (which is officially designated the Triton 36,000/2) needed to have commercial applications so that further models might be sold after Vescovo had finished the Five Deeps project. For this to happen, the submersible would need two seats (to accommodate a pilot and a scientist), a manipulator arm and, crucially, windows – instead of the system of external cameras and internal screens Vescovo initially proposed. “The whole point of a human-manned submersible is that it’s a visual tool,” Lahey says. “There’s no way you can duplicate our sense of sight. When you’re down there looking out that window, it’s like you’re hardwired to your eyeballs. You drink in information in a different way. There’s an immediacy to it, and an effectiveness.” Eventually Vescovo agreed, and signed Triton up to design his one-of-a-kind machine.
amsay, a 39-year-old from north Lincolnshire, had the job of bringing Vescovo’s vision to life. And for the Triton designer there was only one starting point: the windows. Every submersible contains a pressure hull in which the pilot is encased. In this instance, the most protective shape was a spherical control centre, with the wiring, mechanics and foam buoyancy aids stored outside in the main body of the vessel. The difficulty Ramsay and his team faced was that, if you punch a hole in this sphere for windows, you create an uneven shape, which is at risk of buckling under oceanic pressure. And at 11,000 metres, Vescovo’s deepest dive, that could be fatal. “Windows are a monstrous design exercise,” Ramsay says. “Making sure they don’t pop the viewports out, or collapse in, is a literal balancing act of stresses.” He opted for a unique solution: three 200mmthick conical windows made from acrylic. To accommodate the immense 110.3 megapascal pressures acting on the window surface at 11,000 metres, the windows taper, with a degree of empty space between them and the sides of the window casing. This means that, by a depth of 6,000m, the windows have been forced inward 7mm due to outside pressure. Without this ability to move, stress would collect at certain points, potentially causing fractures that would compromise the sub’s integrity. Another consideration was the shape of the submersible. Most are organised lengthways, with a narrow viewing portal and the pilot’s sphere at the front of a long tube, but this limits the vehicle’s movement to left and right. On commercial or oil industry dives, this doesn’t matter so much, but in the mostly un-plunged depths of the five oceans, it was important that Vescovo’s sub had as much manoeuvrability as possible, both to aid navigation around uncharted terrain and to offer the best viewing
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opportunities of sea-floor flora and fauna. To that end, Ramsay searched for shapes Previous spread: the that were streamlined in both directions, eventually taking inspiration from rugby mothership Pressure balls and bullet trains. “We spun the sub 90 degrees and had it totally symmetDrop makes its way rical,” he says. “That means you can get amazing manoeuvrability and maintain back to Svalbard after that elliptical shape. When you’re on a vertical dive site, it’s easy to shift side to side the Molloy Deep dive and up and down, as it’s streamlined in those directions.” Triton outfitted Limiting Factor with ten thrusters, allowing it to move up and down, to port and starboard, of replicating full oceanic pressure – in early 2018. In forward and back. But the thrusters presented a new the facility’s DK-1000 hydraulic pressure test tank, challenge. “The biggest fear of any submersible pilot is the hull was exposed to pressure in the region of nets or ropes getting sucked into the thrusters,” Ramsay 60,000 tonnes – 1.2 times what it would be at the explains. “Usually, you’d have a rescue sub that could get maximum possible diving depth of the Mariana down with a manipulator arm and cut you free; with the Trench. “During testing, the pressure hull was filled Limiting Factor that’s impossible. By the time you’re past with water, with a pipe allowing water to come out 6,000 metres, no one is going to rescue you. Get tangled on as they increased the pressure,” explains Ramsay. a bit of net hooked on some rocks and you have no chance.” “They do this because if the sub hull imploded The solution was simple but elegant. The submersible during testing, the amount of energy released would already had external battery packs that could be separated be enough to destroy the entire facility.” from the body by an explosive bolt, in case it needed to The submersible was given a pressure rating shed weight quickly to return to the surface. The thrusters of 116.7 megapascals, essentially certifying an would be attached by the same type of bolt. Should the unlimited diving capacity. (A commercial sub might sub become entangled, all Vescovo would need to do is have a rating of 17 megapascals.) After almost four activate the eject mechanism, and the thrusters would years of work, Limiting Factor was ready to go. separate and float away, casting the vessel free. As for the interior components, designers can usually borrow off-the-shelf parts from the oil and gas industry. But their subs rarely dive deeper than 6,000 metres, meaning Ramsay and Triton’s principal electrical design engineer, Tom Blades, had to look further. When it came to one particular element needed for the pressure-tolerant controllers that control the speed and torque of the sub’s motor, Blades and his team had to test each component manually. They found that the quality differed even in parts from the same manufacturer, depending on the factory they came from. “The manufacturer had no way of differentiating them,” he says. “We could tell a slight difference in the shade of green. We had to buy twice as many, manually look at the colour, then put them all though individual testing before we built the circuit boards.” Another niggle was background noise interrupting communications. At a depth of 11,000 metres, an audio signal takes seven seconds to travel one way, meaning Vescovo was frequently waiting upwards of 15 seconds for a reply – without interference. To demonstrate the problem, Blades plays a recording. Heard loud and clear, instead of Vescovo’s messages, is the hunting sonar of a school of whales. The solution? Install a filtering circuit, or try again when the oceanic traffic has died down. “[Designing subs] is great, because there aren’t many people doing it,” Ramsay says. “Think how many generations cars have been through. You sit in a car – any car – and you know where the steering wheel is going to be, you know where the three pedals are going to be, where the gear stick and door handles are going to be. You don’t have to look. A sub is totally different; there are no set rules.” The last hurdle was testing at depth. To do this, the team travelled to the Krylov State Research Centre in St Petersburg, Russia – the only facility in the world capable
Before the Molloy dive, Vescovo gives a tour of the finished sub. The pilot’s sphere measures 1.76 cubic metres. There are two seats, with the viewing portals located at knee height. At chest height, a row of ten spun-carbon-fibre oxygen tanks allows for four days’ oxygen for two people, should the worst happen. The craft is controlled via a joystick, not unlike a helicopter. Behind us are switches for everything from lights to comms to air temperature. Vescovo got to grips with the controls on a simulator in his garage in Dallas. His first action on a descent is to use ballast pumps to make the sub negatively buoyant. Depending on the depth of the dive, he may then spend up to three hours sinking to the ocean floor. On one dive, he watched the Netflix film Outlaw King on his phone, alongside the usual system checks and radio updates with Pressure Drop every 15 minutes. Around 200 metres from the bottom, Vescovo ejects a series of 5kg weights to become neutrally buoyant and so control the final stage of his descent. With Limiting Factor safely on the bottom, Vescovo will spend the next two to four hours using the manip-
ulator arm to take rock samples, then travel around the ocean floor, videoing as much biological, geological and cartographical information as he can. To return to the surface, he ejects a series of 10kg weights. Despite his dives lasting up to 12 hours, Vescovo says he never gets claustrophobic: “I like diving solo.” On the Mariana Trench dive, he followed James Cameron’s advice. “I got my tunafish sandwich, sat back in my chair with my feet up, drinking my Coke, and just looked out the portal,” Vescovo says. “I was just drifting at the bottom of the ocean, thinking ‘This is so cool’.” To Vescovo’s surprise, the depths of the ocean were far from empty, eerie deserts. “The Southern Ocean was a darn grocery store,” he says, describing seeing krill, microshrimps, jellyfish and plankton; and, on the Mariana Trench dive, human contamination in the form of a scrap of either plastic or fabric with a printed “S” on it – not, as widely reported, a carrier bag floating around at 11,000 metres. Over the course of the expedition, Vescovo has become increasingly interested in science, occasionally carrying out subsequent explorations alongside Alan Jamieson, a marine ecologist at Newcastle University, and Heather Stewart, a marine geologist at the British Geological Survey. They have found multiple new species of fish, analysed in the wet and dry labs on Pressure Drop. Vescovo says that invisible micro-plastics are “the real, pernicious danger to humankind – the micro- and nano-plastics that will get into the very smallest bases of the food chain”. The mission hasn’t always been plain sailing. The two most dangerous things that can happen at depth are a leak or a fire. On an early test dive in the Bahamas, cruising at about 5,000 metres, Vescovo and Lahey smelled smoke. They were two hours from the surface. “We’d just powered up the manipulator and it must have burned out some insulation in one of the circuit boards,” Vescovo says. “Patrick and I just looked at each other, both thinking, ‘What do we do?’ We turned off the offending circuit, and thankfully the problem went away.” “All hell broke loose [in the Pressure Drop control room],” says Rob McCallum, founding partner of EYOS Expeditions, and the man responsible for the Five Deeps logistics. “It became apparent that it was just a popped fuse. For a submersible, a fire inside is the worst scenario. Even a popped fuse in an oxygen-rich environment can be a real problem; Left: inside the 1.76 just look at the Space cubic metre pilot Shuttle Challenger.” sphere, where Vescovo T o Ve s c o v o , t h i s is immersed for up to 12 i n c i d e n t h a m m e re d hours on the deepest home that, despite the dives. He controls the most rigorous testing, sub with a joystick
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Back in the Arctic Ocean, at 3.34pm – three hours after Vescovo started his descent – word arrives from Limiting Factor that submersible and pilot have safely touched down on the bottom of the Molloy Deep. Vescovo and his team have made history. However, there is still the small matter of returning to the surface. Just before 8.40pm, Limiting Factor surfaces 150 metres away from Pressure Drop. The ship adjusts its course, launching the Zodiac and a 28ft protector RHIB boat as all hands make ready to receive the submersible, a flat white shape buffeted by the waves. The swimmer climbs aboard and attaches the safety lines, and Limiting Factor is winched out of the water to the mothership’s aft main deck, in a fluid reverse of the launch eight hours earlier. The cockpit opens, and Vescovo’s hand emerges, five fingers splayed: five dives completed. He may be one of 416 people to have completed the Seven Summits and one of 12 Americans to have climbed the Summits and skied to the two poles – but he has just become there is no room for error. “You know the maths, but you the only person in the world to have dived to do have it in the back of your mind: ‘What if it’s wrong?’” he the bottom of the five oceans. The Zodiac lets ponders. “Even though we tested it, what if there’s something off flares while the ship blows its horn. Vescovo different in the real ocean? You just don’t know. You’re hugs the crew members one by one. watching the depth tick down 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 metres, Later, he sits alone in the ship’s galley with and you know how much pressure is out there. You’re just a large plate of spaghetti and a Diet Coke. On hoping you don’t spring a leak or something.” the walls are vintage film posters for Mystery Submarine and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Vescovo is in a reflective mood. Each dive has presented its own unique problems. The “I don’t know why I want to do this. Why second voyage, to the Antarctic’s South Sandwich Trench, did Shackleton have a compulsion to go the required a gruelling 30-day journey from Montevideo, South Pole? Some people want to go to the Uruguay, to Cape Town, South Africa, with a few days blank spaces on the map, it’s just something allowance for the dive in the middle. Despite an extra deep inside of us. I remember reading Jules level of caution around icebergs, the dive was successful. Verne’s The Mysterious Island when I was a But the first dive, into the Atlantic’s Puerto Rico Trench, was kid. I kept going back and looking at the map. undoubtedly the most difficult “The first dive was different, The scenes of exploration sang to me. As I grew because it was the final step in a gruelling series of sea trials,” up I never lost that. I’m still that kid that always says McCallum. As the team was preparing for the first dive, loved looking at maps and going there.” � the submersible experienced systems failure three days in a row. “It was our first real test out of a trial situation, and it was Tom Ward wrote about the Undiagnosed ugly. It got to the point where Victor sat in my office and said: Diseases Network in 11.19 ‘Either it works tomorrow or I’m scrapping the whole thing.’” On the fourth day, McCallum briefed the team. “I said: ‘We don’t want miracles, we’re not going to give you a big rah-rah, Above: a swimmer deals yay team speech. But we’ve had four months of practising, with the safety cables as you all know what to do, so go out there and do it. No more, Limiting Factor surfaces no less.’ And they did.” There was applause, cheers, hugs and from the Mariana Trench. tears when Vescovo radioed to say he had finally made it to the Right: Vescovo hails the bottom of his first ocean. “He came up at sunset, you had this success of the final dive big orange sky, and he surfaced right on dusk with the lights of the Five Deeps mission on under the water,” McCallum says. “It was a magic day.” Ahead of his final Five Deeps dive into the Molloy Deep, Vescovo is positive. “One can never be complacent diving 5,000-plus metres, but by this point we have refined our launch and recovery procedures, diving protocols and emergency procedures, and are confident that things will go smoothly.”
The clicking of keyboards in the Balinese town’s co-working spaces is drowned out only by the roar of mopeds. Over smoothie bowls and lattes, western immigrants – expats, as they prefer to be known – talk about themselves, loudly. A local woman will massage your body, silently, for the equivalent of a few pounds. Everyone is very good-looking. Everything is very cheap. The town, once a stop-off for backpackers en route to Ubud’s yoga studios and hippy scene, has become a hub for self-described “digital nomads”. In Canggu’s cafés, barefoot westerners run companies from MacBook Pros. When not talking Facebook ads or cost-per-click, they socialise exclusively with each other. “The thing is, not many Indonesians are on a level with bule [an Indonesian term for foreigners],” explains one digital nomad over the burble of hot-tub jets in Amo, a luxury spa. Around us, statuesque men wander in and out of steam rooms (CrossFit is big here), talking loudly about e-commerce and intermittent fasting. Inside the city’s co-working spaces (Dojo is the oldest in Canggu, Outpost the new challenger), people are building business empires selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met. Welcome to the world of dropshipping. Dropshipping is a “fulfilment” method. At one end of the supply chain, an entrepreneur identifies a product – usually through Chinese e-commerce platform AliExpress – which they think they can sell to European or American consumers. They create a website using Shopify, and target buyers, typically using Facebook ads, although you will find dropshippers on Instagram, Depop, Wayfair and more. When an order is received, the dropshipper purchases the item through AliExpress and has it shipped directly to the buyer, pocketing their mark-up minus marketing spend. At no point does a dropshipper hold stock: they are simply the middleman in a globalised supply chain. Successful dropshippers often solve so-called “pain points”. Perhaps you like to go running with your dog, but find holding the lead a chore: a dropshipper finds a hands-free running leash on AliExpress, and targets it via Facebook to dog-loving runners. They’ll create a video showcasing its benefits (videos outperform imagery), and then haunt you with that video until you purchase. At this point, you’ll wait up to a month for delivery – lengthy order processing times are a dropshipping tell – because the item is shipped from China. Although there is a strong dropshipping scene in other places, notably the mountainous city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, Canggu has become a popular destination, with its affordable cost of living, vibrant café culture and great surf.
Agung Suryawan Wiranatha, director of the Centre of Excellence in Tourism at Udayana University in Denpasar, the Balinese capital, says the digital nomads arrived in Canggu about four years ago. Michael Craig, founder of coworking space Dojo, identifies the moment that well-known dropshipper Johnny FD moved to the area, in March 2017, as a turning point; Outpost sprang up in 2018 to meet the community’s growing demand for workspaces. Israeli-born Yakir Starosta and Americans Rob Whitaker and Phil Louden are dropshipping partners based in a glass-walled office in Outpost. In another era, these ambitious young men might have gone to Wall Street , but the internet has made it possible for anyone with Wi-Fi and some seed capital to make serious money, without the 9-to-5 or suit-and-tie. “I’ve never had strong ambitions to have a lot of money,” says Whitaker. “But I think if you’re poor or middle-class, you’re going to get fucked in the next 20 years. It’s going to get really bad.” Dropshipping offered a way to accrue wealth outside of the stultifying confines of corporate culture, and without formal qualifications – many dropshippers I meet are college dropouts. Louden talks me through their strategy in a nearby coffee shop. The best dropshippers will run “funnels”: repeatedly targeting the same consumers over a period of time in order to coax them through the various stages of purchase – add to cart, enter card details, check out. “We run funnels to let the Facebook algorithm figure everything out,” he says. “We may burn through a few thousand dollars before we get consistent sales.” Louden and his partners have five Shopify stores, selling clothing, gadgets and household products. They also have a team of five in the Philippines who handle customer service, as well as a project manager in India. Louden, who is 28, has the affable, languid demeanour of the well-mannered Virginia boy he is. He washed up in Asia three years ago, after working in Australia as a farmhand. In Chiang Mai, he met a
Right: Inside Dojo, the oldest coworking space in Canggu, and a favoured hub for “digital nomads” of all stripes. Clockwise
from top left: “Ellie”, an entrepreneur and former dropshipper from the UK; John Lee Quigley, a cryptocurrency journalist from Ireland; Khunapong Khunaraksa, a water consultant from Australia; Sabri Goldberg, a graphic designer from Germany
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be honest, we did it because we spotted a trend.” Her instinct was correct: in the run-up to Christmas 2018, Ellie and her partners were shifting $10,000 of plastic-free homeware a day – but their Chinese supplier couldn’t cope, and stopped shipping the orders. Their inbox filled up with furious emails from customers, accusing them of running a scam; when the products did arrive, they were poor quality – and wrapped in plastic. One customer was so enraged, she emailed them a photograph of their products in the bin. They started issuing refunds but weren’t able to pay back all their customers, because they’d spent the money on Facebook marketing. “I didn’t eat for two weeks,” Ellie says. “I was so stressed.” Eventually, her co-partner loaned the business $16,000 to process the refunds, ship the remaining stock, and get them out of the mess. Ellie still runs an e-commerce business selling plastic-free goods, but now holds her own stock in a warehouse. She says she can’t imagine working for a company, but she wouldn’t do dropshipping again. “The customer gets a shit experience.” dropshipper who introduced him to remote working. Louden worked for free for other dropshippers to learn the ropes. He paired up with Starosta in 2018, before bringing in Whitaker as a junior partner in early 2019. “I had this target that I wanted to make $1 million in profit in a year,” he says over smoothies and matcha cookies. “I didn’t do it. I beat myself down really well, I had to book into a ten-day meditation retreat.” This year, his Shopify records show he’ll clear about $90,000 (£69,000) in personal profit. He describes dropshipping as a “real-life video game”, albeit one he doesn’t seem to enjoy. “It’s like going to the casino and pressing the slot machine, and based off what happens, that’s how your emotions are going to be,” he says. Plenty of people never make it. You need money to start an online store and invest in marketing, and it’s easy to burn through cash while trying to figure out what sells. At a restaurant near Canggu’s Echo Beach, 29-year-old former dropshipper “Ellie” (who requested anonymity so she could speak candidly about her experience) explains how her dropshipping business selling eco-friendly, plastic-free homeware almost ended in disaster. But isn’t dropshipping about the least eco-friendly way of buying and selling? “Obviously to the outside world” – Ellie lowers her voice – “I was interested in it, I wanted to make a difference. But to
Above: a lightbox shows the Wi-Fi network and password for visitors to dropshipper Mike Vestil’s villa.
Right: Vestil in his office, which also doubles as his YouTube show set
Behind a blue door in the heart of Canggu, 25-year-old Filipino-American Mike Vestil is teaching his dog Cinta [Indonesian for “love”] to roll in the garden of his luxury villa. “Cinta! Cinta!” exhorts Vestil, who is dressed in flowing white trousers and a peach T-shirt with a complicated neckline. Cinta rolls towards Vestil, and he rewards her with chicken from the outdoor kitchen facing the swimming pool. After an uncomfortable interlude in which Vestil berates his Balinese cleaner for leaving the villa door open, we head to his plant-filled office. A wooden bench is covered with recording equipment. A lettered lightbox spells out the Wi-Fi network (SIT ON MY FACE) and the password (YOLOYOLOYOLO). Vestil catches me looking. “Um, someone is coming around to change that later today.” A self-described “entrepreneur, author and YouTuber”, Vestil has 230,000 YouTube followers and 56,000 Instagram followers. In videos with titles like “How To Make $1000 PER DAY From ANYWHERE In The World!!” Vestil encourages his followers, whom he calls “freedom fighters”, to live their best lives by becoming fabulously rich. He is often topless in these videos. In real life, Vestil is less obnoxious, albeit grandiose and prone to speaking in a mixture of pop psychology, corporate jargon and quasi-Buddhist philosophy. At one point, he talks about seminal 1937 self-help book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. “There’s this thing called sexual transmutation,” he says, explaining Chapter 11 of Hill’s book. “Instead of spilling your seed, you transmute it into creativity, into passion, into liveliness, into charisma.” My eyes flick back to the lightbox. Before Vestil became a barefoot muscle man rattling around an oversized villa in Canggu, he was the child of hard-working immigrants – his mother
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is a nurse, his father an engineer – whose parents wanted him to go to dentist school. The Chicago native describes the experience of watching his parents scrimp to put him through private school as traumatic. “I didn’t want the $250k in debt that would have happened if I’d continued with dentistry. My parents were so stressed. I literally saw them get older, right before my eyes, with the stress. I felt like this guilt, all the trauma, like I was to blame. My sister almost went to community college because we spent all the money on me.” According to Vestil, he achieved $1.5 million of sales on Shopify in just 12 months, selling grill mats and T-shirts in the halcyon days of dropshipping: 2015, the year Facebook Ads Manager was launched, but before dropshipping got big. “In 2015, you could throw anything up and make money,” Vestil says. As the business took off – he initially sourced stock through eBay, before finding a local supplier – he started a travel vlog. He shows me a video of himself backflipping off a boat at a full Moon party. Vestil, who moved to Canggu in 2018, claims to have made “around $400k, I guess” in his dropshipping career. (When asked to provide evidence, he told me that he didn’t keep records.)
After a stint selling courses on getting into dropshipping, he is now focusing on podcasting, and has vague plans to launch a collective of high-net-worth individuals and influencers. “If something crazy happened, for example a tsunami in the Philippines… We would literally go over there, and make the most epic videos, and share exactly what’s going on, and get more attention to the world to the things that actually matter,” he says. “To find a way to solve these problems with epic people, and be like, damn, like, fuck! We did something epic with our lives, you know? Almost like the Avengers.” Vestil no longer sells courses, and is evasive when asked about it. “The thing that I didn’t like about dealing with this specific audience, and why I don’t sell any courses, and why I’d work with existing entrepreneurs, is that it’s coming from a frame of scarcity, and they want to succeed but they don’t want to grow into the person that would deserve it… They wanted immediate results, and I didn’t resonate with that,” he says. He ends the interview shortly afterwards. Later, he texts asking if I know how he can get verified on Instagram. “They claim to be making money,” says Michael Craig as we sit in the reception area of Dojo. He’s roiling against the so-called “dropshipping gurus” who promise to share their secret with those willing to pay. Around us, would-be entrepreneurs tap on laptops. “But you cannot prove how much money they’re making. It’s all bullshit.’” A gruff Australian, Craig, 41, has banned the selling of dropshipping courses from Dojo. “My main gripe is that you’re selling a course for $6,000 to a person from middle America who’s put all their funds into this, and you’re teaching them to sell avocado slicers online with 40 other people who are also selling avocado slicers,” he says. Craig’s comments remind me of something that Starosta had said back in Outpost, as an army of freelancers tapped away on keyboards beneath us. “The thing with these gurus is that they make money and then they start selling courses, and they’re posing in front of a Lambo [Lamborghini]. So people are like, shit, how did he afford the Lambo? But they just rent the Lambo out for the day. That’s the problem.” E-commerce guru Tai Lopez has received more than 69 million views on his YouTube video bragging about the Lamborghini that he keeps in his garage, with the comments an equal measure of derision and admiration.
Craig is also scathing about the broader digitalnomad community, despite the fact that many are Dojo customers. “There’s an immaturity,” he says. “It’s two times removed. Digital means you’re connected to this thing that is removed from yourself, and nomad means you’re not really connected to the place you’re at.” He ejects digital nomads from Dojo if he feels they are acting entitled or rudely. “I kick them out. Because that MacBook is two years salary for the guy at the front desk. You don’t think that guy wants his MacBook?” There is a sense among many in the Canggu scene that the glory days of dropshipping may be coming to an end. There’s a stigma around dropshipping, as if the banknotes you earn are unusually smeared with grubby fingermarks. The most important decision a dropshipper can make, perhaps, is knowing when to get out. I am bone-tired when I arrive at Bukabuka island, in Central Sulawesi: three flights, over the course of one night, through airports that grow progressively smaller. At Palu airport, where I am the only bule, smiling immigration officers question me more out of curiosity than suspicion. I then board the prop plane to the administrative centre of Ampana, before embarking on the final bit of the journey: a white motorboat that skims across water that is clear, turquoise and warm. Thirty minutes later, we’re pulling up at Bukabuka. On a wooden pier that juts out from a dazzling sandy beach, a white hammock swings in the breeze. When you’re done with dropshipping, where do you go? In Thomas Despin’s case, you leave it all for a place that’s so remote it’s basically inaccessible (a week after I leave, the daily flight from Palu to Ampana is axed due to lack of demand). After closing his dropshipping store in September 2017, Despin purchased 1.38 hectares of Bukabuka island, and moved there in October 2018. He plans to open a sustainable retreat called Reconnect here in 2020. The resort is only half-built when I arrive.
Above: Michael Craig by the pool at Dojo Bali, the coworking space he founded in Canggu.
Right: Thomas Despin, the dropshipping folk hero who quit after becoming disillusioned.
Top right : typical dropshipper fare includes bamboo toothbrushes, dog leads and microwave cleaners
The 28-year-old Frenchman lives alone in a hut that serves as the island’s official base. On the porch are jerry cans full of water, a gas hob, cooking equipment and sacks of rice. Inside, a bed, a fridge, a plastic table and chairs, and an electrical converter. Outside his hut is the island’s only bathroom: a cold-water bucket shower and toilet that is manually flushed using sea water. Despin takes me on a tour, past wooden homes that house extended families: grandparents, parents and children living in one-room structures without running water or electricity. Before Despin arrived, the 20 people living on Bukabuka scratched a living selling dried coconut meat, copra, which they cured on open pyres in the jungle. But the market for copra is saturated, and prices are low. Almost everyone on Bukabuka is now in his employ. He stops to chat in Indonesian with one worker, who is building a fence to protect Despin’s allotment from the island’s marauding goats. Despin has the air of a man determined to reinvent himself whenever the mood strikes. A failed medical student, he studied for a psychology degree while working as a student party promoter. After university, he criss-crossed Europe and the US by bicycle, earning money as a freelance web designer. Arriving in Bali in May 2016, he was broke. He heard about dropshipping, and partnered with a friend back home in France, who gave him €3,000 (£2,540) initial capital to get started. In darkness (the electricity is out), Despin reminisces about those early days. “I think we were
the dumbest dropshippers ever,” he snorts. “We literally tried everything and we were terrible. I mean it! We were really, really bad.” Outside, his housekeeper, Tya, is shredding vegetables on the porch. The thud of the blade is the only sound we can hear. “Our first strategy – it wasn’t a strategy – our first waste of money was to sell as many products as possible in as many countries as possible. And our extraordinarily dumb theory behind it was, well, look at Amazon.” Eventually, Despin hit upon a winning idea: selling shapewear to French women. He shows me the video – which they stole from another online store – that he and his partner used to advertise the product. “The video is awful,” he says, shaking his head. But it worked: $750,000 of sales, and around $100,000 of profit for Despin, in just 11 months. To this day, he has never seen or touched the product. Despin is something of a legend in the dropshipping scene, having gained attention with a Medium essay he wrote announcing the closing of his business, headlined “11 months & $750,000 later, I decided to close my drop shipping business. Here’s why”. “I’m the opposite of what dropshippers like to say, because they like to see themselves as good entrepreneurs because they made money,” he says. “I’m completely fine with saying that I made a lot of money, six figures, and still I think I was dumb. I didn’t know what I was doing.” Despin shuttered his dropshipping store while it was still profitable – effectively reaching into the belly of an ATM that was belching notes, and switching it off. Why? Firstly, he hated his clients. “French people like to complain a lot,” he says. “Fuck! So we were basically targeting older, fat Frenchwomen – you’re talking to people who complain the most, ever.” Then Despin’s partner quit, and suddenly the enterprise stopped being fun. “I don’t regret it,” he says. “I’m very happy that I did it. I’m also very happy that I stopped doing it. A lot of people don’t understand that. They think that if you’re doing something and it works, you should keep doing it. Which is nonsense.” After stopping dropshipping, Despin wanted to see what it felt like to be rich. He flew first class and stayed in fancy hotels. It was a good experience, but he realised he didn’t care about making money as much as he used to. “I see money as a tool, and making more money is like putting more tools in a big garage, and you don’t even use the tools to create anything. It’s just meaningless.” Despite Despin’s efforts to leave dropshipping behind, people keep trying to pull him back in. They wangle his number somehow and text him, or send him pleading emails. He reads one out to me: “I want to do dropshipping, but I do not know where to start. How to create your own online store? What goods should I fill it with so that it does not burn out? I will be very grateful for your advice – I’m your fan.” Despin refuses all these requests; he has no desire to be a dropshipping guru.
All of the dropshippers I spoke with for this story feel that they are living on borrowed time. They tell me that Facebook is becoming hostile to dropshippers, and ad spend is going up. “So many scammy people have come through, and Facebook wants people to stay online and trust the advertisements,” Louden says. (Facebook would not comment specifically on dropshipping, saying only that products sold on the platform must comply with its policies.) Francisco J Sánchez-Vellvé, a lecturer at CES Cardenal Cisneros in Madrid, says that dropshipping is full of drawbacks: it’s hard to get good SEO positioning on Google if your main marketing channel is Facebook; margins are too narrow for comfort; and high product returns make it tough to make money. As dropshipping becomes less profitable, so the competition becomes ruthless: unscrupulous dropshippers will steal product, copy videos and clone stores. Some dropshippers are shuttering their stores, and shipping out. Louden is one of them – despite the fact that he’s earning executive-level pay while wearing boardshorts. He’s aware that even the most successful dropshipping store will eventually run out of steam: when the cost of Facebook advertising increases beyond your marketing spend, it’s over. “At the end of this year, we’re probably done with dropshipping,” he says. “I want to build brands – actual ones – that provide value to people.” I’m reminded of a comment one of the statue-men made amid the ice baths and steam rooms of Amo Spa. I’d asked him if he was a dropshipper, and he’d laughed and said that he wasn’t any more: “I’m doing something ethical.” Meanwhile, kids keep washing up in Canggu with dollar signs in their eyes and dreams of making it big. They’re prospecting for gold among the melon ballers and avocado slicers of AliExpress – throwing junk at the internet, hoping some of it sticks. �
Sirin Kale is a London-based journalist. She wrote about anti-cyberbullying insurance in 09.19
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After a devastating civil war, a complex restoration project in Mozambique is allowing scientists to study the rise and fall of predators and prey By Sabrina Weiss Photography: Jen Guyton The shuddering 4x4 pushes through the bush in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Baboons watch curiously as field guide Samuel Mitha Caringuene pulls up alongside a severed warthog leg. He is on the right track. At 4am, the cries of the unfortunate hog had broken the silence over Chitengo Camp and startled Caringuene from sleep: a lioness with two cubs in tow had snatched the warthog right beneath his bedroom. Lions rarely enter the staff area, but these ambush predators must have had an instinct that their next meal was snoozing, laid out like a buffet under the house. The time is 6.45am, but Caringuene is convinced the lions are still in the area. Once lions subdue their prey, the matriarch rips open the abdomen to get at the organs – the most nutritious part. She will then work her way up to the head, in a process that can take several hours. From a nearby tree, a baboon lets out a guttural howl to warn of predators; a hornbill follows suit. All at once, the trees are alive with sound. “Here!” whispers Caringuene excitedly. He plunges the 4x4 down a slope, dodging branches before bringing the vehicle to a halt. Barely ten metres ahead, a collared lioness called Rosa lies in the tall grass, gnawing at the bones of her breakfast and lazily rolling bloody
sinew and gristle in her huge jaws. The male cubs keep a respectful distance, waiting their turn to eat. Carnivores are making a comeback in Gorongosa, more than two decades after a 16-year civil war brutally decimated their numbers. As rebel groups took refuge in the park, hundreds of lions, leopards and wild dogs fled, starved or died in animal snares used to catch bushmeat. By 1996, the park was barren. But the government has since teamed up with a philanthropic US tech entrepreneur and an international team of scientists to restore the ecosystem, from the bottom of the food chain to the top. In a watershed experiment, they are rebuilding the park’s fauna: first, the herbivores – elephant, zebra, wildebeest – and, more recently, carnivores, such as lions and wild dogs. Because they cover large areas in search of food and mates (and easily wander into areas inhabited by humans), only a few carnivore reintroductions have previously been attempted anywhere. As a result, naturalists from around the world have been attracted to what is in effect a living laboratory at the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. One topic scientists are exploring is the “landscape of fear”: the theory that the absence (or presence) of predators changes animal behaviour. In Gorongosa, small forest antelopes such as bushbuck can browse freely in open areas, where they would once have been at risk. As the carnivores return, scientists hope to find out what happens when apex predators are unleashed in an environment that has adapted to life without them.
Named after a mountain bordering the park – “Place of Danger” in the Mwani language – Gorongosa was, in the 1960s and 70s, the jewel in Mozambique’s wildlife crown and a destination for Hollywood stars such as John Wayne and Joan Crawford. But the end of Portuguese rule in 1975 sparked a civil war in which at least a million people died and the park became a battlefield. Anti-communist Renamo militants, backed by Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa, made Mount Gorongosa their base. There was bloody fighting with government forces across savanna and floodplain. Throughout the conflict, thousands of elephants were slaughtered for ivory to buy weapons, while eland (a large antelope) and zebra were hunted as bushmeat to feed fighters. Lions, leopards and hyenas were killed simply for being in the way. After the 1992 ceasefire, the 200,000 people living in the buffer zone on the edge of the park, along with professional hunters, picked off what little game remained. While the populations of small and medium-size antelope began to bounce back in post-conflict Gorongosa, the large grazers and predators struggled. In 2008, the Greg Carr Foundation – a nonprofit set up by a tech entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist from Idaho – reached an agreement with the government, pledging $40 million (£31 million) over 30 years to revive the park
as a source of income for local people through employment opportunities and tourism. The team started by restocking the larger herbivores: six bull elephants and five hippos were brought in from South Africa that year, with 99 buffalo, 35 eland and 15 zebra following later. “The reintroductions have been very important, but, for most of the species, that’s not what drove the recovery,” Marc Stalmans, Gorongosa’s director of scientific services, says. Of the 100,000 large animals in the park today, fewer than 500 were brought in. The biggest plant-eating species, such as elephant, hippo, buffalo and zebra – dominant in the past – are now easily outnumbered by smaller antelope, whose populations exploded in the absence of competitors and predators. In their most recent aerial estimate, Stalmans and his colleagues counted at least 55,000 waterbuck roaming the floodplains. “For all the [smaller] species, it has been a natural recovery from viable nuclei,” he says. “Once you apply good protection, they start coming back quickly.” The park has seen a 95 per cent recovery of herbivores, but that is not true for carnivores. When South African ecologist Paola Bouley arrived in 2012, she found a struggling population of lions; despite an ample food supply, fewer than 50 of the pre-war population of 200 were left. In southern Mozambique lions are hunted for their teeth and claws, but Gorongosa’s lions were being killed by bushmeat snares. Putting her ecological research on the back burner, Bouley started working more closely with the park rangers, most of whom grew up in communities around the park, to launch an anti-poaching patrol and a veterinary unit in 2013. “In the early days, all we did was respond to snares,” she says. “We were like a medical unit. It was traumatising, to say the least.” Since August 2019, the team has been using EarthRanger, a tech platform developed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s company Vulcan, to pull together data from GPS collars, trackers on radios and vehicles, and camera-trap photos for a bird’s-eye view of the lions’ movements – and to identify poaching hotspots. In a park with no fences, these efforts have real impact: there are now at least 146 lions. But other apex predators – wild dogs (also known as painted wolves), leopards and hyenas – were still missing. To bring these carnivores back, Bouley is taking a more direct approach.
A group of sedated wild dogs were transported in a single-engine turboprop plane from South Africa to Gorongosa on 16 April 2018 – a two-hour flight instead of a two-day drive. The eight males and six females stemmed from two reserves managed by the Endangered Wildlife Trust, so the team at Gorongosa had to construct a boma, a Swahili term for an open-air enclosure where the new arrivals would be kept for eight weeks, to grow familiar with each other and establish a hierarchy before release into the wild. Upon arrival, the EWT and Gorongosa teams rubbed the sleeping dogs against each other to aid the acclimaPrevious (co-created with Piotr Naskrecki): a composite of wildlife visiting a water hole in one dawn-to-dusk period. Left: guide Samuel Mitha Caringuene. Above: wild dogs from the first reintroduced pack eat a bushbuck. Right: ecologist Paola Bouley
tisation process. Wild dogs use scent glands around the anus and genitals to communicate and tighten pack bonds; as with their domesticated cousins, the scents left by known individuals reveal their gender, age and status. “Before you open those gates, you want to be sure that the pack stays together,” Bouley says. The newly formed pack, led by alpha female Beira, stayed together for nearly a year, when three males and one female split off. Bouley knew that Beira was pregnant in the boma, but her pups didn’t make it. The only explanation in Beira’s abandoned den was a giant African rock python – the continent’s largest species of snake. Wild dogs breed once a year, so the scientists had to wait until the
alpha female was ready again in April 2019. To their surprise, the beta female, Nhamagaia, was also pregnant, and gave birth nine weeks after Beira. The two now share the parenting of 18 pups. “It’s a pile of puppies,” says Bouley, laughing, as her team returns from a
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Above: Marc Stalmans, the director of scientific services at Gorongosa, holds a lion skull. Right: a lioness plays with her cubs (two from the previous year) on the floodplain
daily den visit. In a few weeks, when the pups are about three months old, they will start running with the pack and learning to hunt. Until then, an adult wild dog will always stay on guard in the underground den while the rest of the pack sets off in the early mornings and late afternoons to hunt – co-operatively and ferociously. Bushbuck, impala and waterbuck are all on the menu. Locating the dens would be difficult if it weren’t for the GPS collars attached to the adult dogs. On their field trips, wildlife veterinarians Mércia Angela and António Paulo study the pups to understand diet and development. “In the early stage of their lives, we generally don’t intervene, because if we touch them, the mother might reject the pups,” Angela says. To avoid getting too close, camera traps pick up what the team might miss. While the survival rates are generally quite high for lion cubs, only a few pups in a wild dog litter will make it to adulthood. Even if their dens are kept safe, they are vulnerable to infectious diseases such as canine distemper and rabies, as well as attacks from larger predators. Human persecution has been a major factor in reducing the entire African population to 6,600 wild dogs, with just 1,400 adults. This iconic species is one of the continent’s most at-risk carnivores, and is listed as “critically endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which keeps the “red lists” of Earth’s threatened animals, plants and fungi. But Gorongosa’s wild dog comeback hasn’t ended there. After witnessing the raising of pups, some of the lowerranking female dogs are also starting to look for a mate. “We already have a female dispersing. She’s looking for a pack, but there’s no one to mate with,” Bouley says. Since only alpha and (sometimes) beta pairs mate in wild dog communities, lone females have to find their own pack. To this end, another cargo of 15 wild dogs was translocated from the Kalahari desert in South Africa in November 2019, bringing the total count to 52. Bouley says that “because we are trying to jump-start a population, we want to get the ecology going”. This genetic mixing is vital.
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he landscape of fear model theorizes that, when apex predators disappear, plant eaters start to occupy new habitats where they can graze in peace. But verifying this is no simple task. Perhaps the best-known example of restoring a carnivore population is the reintroduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park in the US in 1995. By the end of the 1920s, almost all of America’s native wolves had been killed off, primarily by ranchers protecting livestock. In Yellowstone, the subsequent loss of aspen trees was attributed to a soaring number of elk and
other ungulates, grazing on shoots with little fear of wolf attack. In an ecological phenomenon called the trophic cascade, the loss of trees and shrubs led to stream erosion, decline in beaver dams and collapsing food webs affecting birds, insects, fish, other animals and plants. When wolves were re-introduced, some scientists hypothesised, so was a landscape of fear – causing elk to avoid places where they could be easily attacked: perhaps predators could affect ecosystems by not only eating prey populations, but by scaring them into changing their behaviour. The concept that prey species shift their feeding grounds to avoid predators has been studied extensively. However, the opposite – a “landscape of fearlessness” following a dramatic decline in predator populations – is what makes Gorongosa a unique case study. Robert Pringle, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, has been visiting Gorongosa since 2012 to study how food availability influences the movement patterns of antelope. He noticed quickly that the animals here behaved differently to those he had observed in places like the Serengeti in Tanzania. Even the shy, forest-dwelling bushbuck had brazenly expanded into this habitat, grazing on a type of waterwort called Bergia mossambicensis and an invasive shrub, Mimosa pigra. At the time, lions were the only predator, but they don’t tend to hunt in
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open terrain, so the ecologist suspected the bushbuck’s behaviour could be explained by a lack of fear of their main predators, leopards and wild dogs. To test this idea, Pringle and PhD student Justine Atkins fitted seven floodplain bushbuck and five woodland individuals with GPS tags that pinged the animals’ location every 15 minutes. They then played leopard calls over a speaker and placed artificial carnivore urine and scat (pellets soaked in real lion dung that gardeners use to deter domestic cats) to mimic the presence of predators. Bushbuck in the open plains retreated to the dense woodland within 48 hours after the cues were placed. The woodland individuals avoided the cues but didn’t change their behaviour. “If you play the sounds long enough, the animals will eventually figure out what’s going on,” says Pringle, acknowledging the limitations of the study, published in the journal Science in 2019. Still, the researchers concluded that fear of predation may affect bushbuck behaviour – and reintroducing predators to the park could have a similar effect. Further work is needed to test the hypothesis, because a living laboratory is influenced by many factors. “If something changes from year one to year two, you don’t know if it’s because predators were introduced, because there was a cyclone, or because it was hot,” says Pringle. In March 2019, cyclone Idai passed through Gorongosa, felling trees and forcing many animals to migrate to higher, drier grounds. Wild dogs are prodigious killers: a pack might make three kills a day, often
slower prey (young, old, pregnant or injured animals), which means that they have the potential to impact the structure of antelope populations over time. The most dramatic confirmation of a returning “landscape of fear” would be smaller grazers moving to another habitat in the next few years. Those movements can now be tracked in near real time, combining GPS data from antelope and wild dogs. The vets continue to monitor the wild dogs’ hunting and breeding, and Pringle’s team is using dietary analysis and DNA barcoding to glean a greater insight into the predator-prey relationship. Not all scientists are convinced of the “landscape of fear” effect. Dan MacNulty, an ecologist at Utah State University, tracked elk and wolves across four Yellowstone winters between 2012 and 2016, and found that elk generally didn’t avoid sites where wolves roamed or elks had previously been killed. “One of the main predators often neglected in discussions is the human being,” MacNulty says. In autumn and winter, elk migrate out of the park where they are hunted by people. “We can’t talk about the ecological consequences of wolf reintroduction without putting it in the context of the entire predator community, which includes human beings.” MacNulty thinks this human angle may affect Gorongosa. Anti-poaching efforts have drastically reduced the hunting of all animals. “How much of this response that we’re seeing in Gorongosa is due to the fact that they’re not hunted as much as they were during and after the civil war?”
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ith three thriving wild dog packs, the first carnivore reintroduction in Gorongosa has been a success, but the dogs and lions alone cannot handle the swelling numbers of prey. The park will need a more diverse troop of predators if it is to return to how it was before the war. The conservation team hopes to bring in spotted hyenas, common in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, in the next couple of years. Leopards were thought to have been wiped out completely, but in March 2018, a Mozambican guide driving with tourists at night spied a male leopard. The territory of this solitary and primarily nocturnal feline can vary from tens to hundreds of square kilometres, meaning that the male may have been a visitor – possibly from the corridor between Gorongosa and Coutada 12, a former hunting area 200km north-east of Chitengo Camp. Bouley thinks that translocating a few female leopards to the park might lure males in pursuit of a mate. “The idea is if we bring in females and they stick around, they are going to bring in [male] leopards from that corridor and the exterior area,” she says. “It will be an incentive for them to stick around.” The team hopes to bring in leopards from fenced reserves in South Africa where they are no longer wanted, although these efforts have proved legislatively challenging. The international trade in this threatened species has been banned, and South Africa has shut down exports, even for restoration purposes. “We were ready and had a plane. The leopards were ready to fly, but we just
couldn’t get the permits,” Bouley says. If they succeed, the leopards will be kept in a boma at both sides of the border for a few weeks to be screened for diseases, and to break the homing instinct of a highly mobile species. Bouley remains hopeful that leopards would quickly set up a territory within the park. “Our rationale is that they don’t really have to go far,” she says. “There’s very little competition and a ton of food. This is a good place for them.” Pending the arrival of the big cats, Gorongosa’s baboons – a popular item on the leopard menu – continue to breed and devour everything they can get their opportunistic fingers on. Not even fake rubber snakes on top of rubbish bins and around the reception area of the park’s guest lodge deter an uninhibited baboon from rifling through waste for a morsel. Indeed, Gorongosa may have the largest population of baboons on the continent, with more than 200 troops of between 30 and 80 individuals. The primates have caught the attention of University of Oxford researchers because they appear to be more active after dusk, when there is normally a high level of predation. In July 2019, an interdisciplinary team led by prima tologist and palaeoanthropologist Susana Carvalho fitted four females from two different troops with GPS collars and accelerometers, to track their movements and sleeping sites and Previous (co-created with Piotr Naskrecki): two marabou storks follow white-backed vultures on to a waterbuck carcass. Left: a collared bushbuck. Above: vet Mércia Angela with Bugli, a pangolin rescued from poachers. Right: a mother and baby baboon
contrast them with baboon behaviour in areas outside the park, where leopards are present. “[Gorongosa] baboons are displaying a number of behaviours, such as potentially sleeping on the ground, that baboons normally don’t do, and we think they can partially be explained by the lack of these threats,” Carvalho says. By following baboons on foot from morning to night, the researchers hope the primates will accept their human observers and allow them to get much closer. “Collaring these individuals is going to give us the first data on what happens during the wet season, which
is something that has been impossible for us to gather,” Carvalho says. It may never be possible to restore Gorongosa to its prewar state, but the changing nature of its habitats will continue to offer scientists a unique opportunity to study how different species shape an ecosystem, and how the presence and absence of predators affect the behaviour of their prey. “The massive advantage of Gorongosa as an experimental system is that the scale is enormous,” Pringle says. “This is a 4,000 square kilometre ecosystem that has been effectively manipulated in the process of being restored, so we have the opportunity to scale up what we know from smallscale experiments and theoretical models to see how well they actually predict what happens in a real ecosystem with big animals.” Beyond Gorongosa, information from experiments in the park could help to inform the restoration of ecosystems elsewhere. “We have stripped the Earth of the big mammals that used to exist basically everywhere,” Pringle says. Where these large mammals still exist, they remain under threat. “For a lot of us, the big motivating idea is that by better understanding how this works in Gorongosa, we’ll be in a better position to apply the Gorongosa model in other places that have lost all their wildlife.” � Sabrina Weiss is a journalist based in London
Right: Eric “Astro” Teller, X’s Captain of Moonshots, on the rollerblades that save him eight minutes every working day
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It’s morning in the cafeteria at X – formerly Google X – and Astro Teller, X’s Captain of Moonshots, glides over dressed in coarse grey robes and a pointed hat, carrying porridge. Jedi stroll past to their desks, gripping coffee. Star Fleet officers queue for breakfast. This, it should be said, is unusual – it’s Halloween. But X is a surreal place. Outside, self-driving cars loop around the block. Sections of stratospheric balloons, designed to broadcast internet to remote places, hang in the Left: X, “a creativity organisation, not a tech organisation”, is based in a former shopping mall in Mountain View, California
lobby. Robots wheel around, sorting the recycling. Teller likens X to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory; it seems only fitting that there be costumes. Even standing inside X – a former mall in Mountain View, California – it’s hard to articulate exactly what X is. Within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, it is grouped alongside DeepMind in “Other Bets”, though in that metaphor, X is more like the gambler. Its aim is to pursue “moonshots” – to solve our great problems by inventing radical new technologies. Besides the self-driving cars (now a standalone company, Waymo) and internet balloons (Loon), X has built delivery drones (Wing), contact lenses that measure glucose in tears (Verily), and technology to store electricity using molten salt (Malta). It has abandoned attempts to create carbon neutral fuel from seawater, and electricity from a copper ring round the North Pole. Every day you almost certainly use something developed at X. Google Brain, the deep-learning division that now informs everything from Google Search to Translate, began at X. So did camera software GCam, used in Google Pixel phones; indoor mapping in Google Maps; and Wear OS, Android’s operating system for wearable devices. But those are beside the point. “Google Brain, the cars, Verily, everything else – those are symptoms. Side effects of trying weird things, things that are unlikely to work,” Teller says. “We are a creativity organisation, not a technology organisation.” (The rollerblades save him eight minutes a day.) X, he explains, is a method of pursuing breakthroughs by taking crazy ideas seriously. X’s job is not new Google products, but to produce the inventions that might form the next Google. X was once seen as a punchline in Silicon Valley (and on Silicon Valley). Today, its self-driving cars have logged millions of kilometres on public roads, and operate an autonomous ride-sharing service in Arizona. Loon’s balloons, under the guidance of flight operations manager Paul Kohli, provide internet access to rural Peru and Kenya. Wing, X’s drone delivery effort, is carrying food and medicines to customers in Australia. Still, as Alphabet continues to be buffeted by employee protests and leadership changes – in December 2019, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down, handing the company to Google CEO Sundar Pichai – X is facing renewed scrutiny to prove that its moonshots are more than just an indulgence. X celebrates its tenth birthday in 2020. When are its bets going to pay off?
Below : Loon’s flight operations manager Nick Kohli – his first job was travelling the world collecting downed balloons
Alphabet is not the first company to set up a moonshot laboratory. In 1925, AT&T and Western Electric founded Bell Labs, which assembled scientists and engineers to advance the field of telecommunications. Bell Labs invented the transistor, the first lasers and photovoltaic cells, winning nine Nobel prizes in the process. Ever since, corporate research labs – from Xerox PARC to Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and DuPont’s Experimental Station – have played a central role in breakthrough inventions. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon all have corporate research labs. Google has several, including Google AI (formerly Google Research), Robotics at Google, and Advanced Technologies and Projects, which works on things like AR and smart fabrics. But corporate research labs can be flawed. Big companies, chasing q u a r te r l y re s u l ts, o f te n i g n o re transformative ideas – even from their own organisations. Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface, but we don’t sit at Xerox laptops. As startups grow into corporations, their capacity to think creatively wanes. “Companies tend to move from experimentation to process,” offers Teller. “Process is an attempt to get surprise all the way down to zero. Experimentation is the
complete, constant bathing in surprise. And you cannot have both.” X does not call itself a corporate research lab (it uses the term “Moonshot Factory”), but when it was founded in 2010, its remit wasn’t entirely clear. X grew out of Chauffeur, Google’s self-driving car project, then spearheaded by the Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun. Page and Brin admired Thrun for his work on Street View and turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps, and at X they offered him free reign to pursue similarly offbeat ideas. “Initially, the title was called ‘Director of Other’,” Thrun says. “We wanted to push technologies in many different directions, including self-driving cars.” For at least a year, X’s existence was a closely guarded secret. Other Google employees were denied keycard access. Even within Google, where bottom-up management is a founding principle and employees are allowed to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own ideas, X had an intellectually anarchic style. Engineers from Project Chauffeur worked alongside those from Google Brain, Loon and a handful of other equally audacious projects. “I wanted to get no bureaucracy, no PowerPoints, no financial reporting, no oversight, so that the people in charge could focus entirely on the challenge,” Thrun says. Most of the early project ideas came from Page and Brin themselves, who eventually moved into X’s building. (Teller once described X as Brin’s “batcave”.) When Thrun left X in 2012 for Coursera, his online education company, Teller took over. He was, in many ways, the natural choice. His paternal grandfather is Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, and the co-founder of the US’s LawrenceLivermore National Laboratory. His maternal grandfather was a Nobel prizewinning economist. “I grew up as the dumb one in my family,” says Teller. “My family believed that being smart was the only thing that mattered. I wasn’t going to win on those terms. It forced me to explore other ways to be successful.” Before joining X, Astro (a nickname; his real name is Eric) founded an AI hedge fund, and sold a wearable sensors company. He has finished two novels and co-written a book of relationship advice. At school, to compensate for mild dyslexia, he would do every problem twice, employing different methods. “Then if I came up with the same answer, it was the right answer,” he says. The experience gave him an early lesson in the value of experimental thinking – “to just try things fast, to approximate at the
beginning, and to come at the problem from many different angles”. When Teller took over at X, it had little structure. “I would describe it as like the Wild West. We just started projects when we were interested in things. There was almost no process whatsoever,” says Obi Felten, who joined X from Google in 2012. Teller hired Felten, who then worked in Google’s product marketing department, to formalise the moonshot process. While the engineers pushed the frontiers of artificial neural networks and highaltitude ballooning, Felten says that she dealt with “literally everything that wasn’t the tech. Legal policy, marketing, PR, partnerships. They’d never had a business plan for any of the projects before.” Her job title was “Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact With the Real World”. Not all X projects survived first contact. One of the first was Google Glass, a wearable computer inside a pair of spectacles. Brin loved the idea, and pushed X hard to turn prototypes into a consumer product. When it eventually launched in 2013, skydivers wearing Glass parachuted on to the roof of its annual developers’ conference. Models wore them on the runway at New York Fashion Week. They were featured on The Simpsons and in Vogue. But in the real world, Glass faced poor reviews, mockery (“Glassholes”) and outrage at the potential for invasions of privacy. “The real failure that we had with Glass was when we were trying to talk about it as a learning platform, the public started responding to it as if it were a product,” Teller explains. “What was worse is that we fell into the trap of talking about it in that way ourselves. And that was terrible, because it was not a finished product.” Glass was discontinued as a consumer product in 2015. It still exists, but as an enterprise tool that is mostly used in manufacturing and other manual industries. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work, the technology’s not ready, and we have to stop doing it, pause it, slow it down,” Teller observes. He still believes that a Glass-like device will catch on eventually. (Apple is reportedly working on AR glasses for debut in 2022.) “There’s no way to take moonshots and never be too early. By the definition of what we’re doing, we’re erring on the side of being too early, rather than being too late.” Right: material used in the Loon project is examined under a polarising lens, part of a scanning exercise to digitise balloon flaws
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or so, X’s smartest minds gather to systematically kill each other’s craziest ideas. To be considered a moonshot, an idea must fulfil three criteria: it must address a significant global problem, involve breakthrough technology, and result in a radical outcome – at least “10X” better than what exists today. Jetpacks and hoverboards might be fun, but don’t serve a common good. Similarly, distributing vaccinations is a worthy goal, but “if most or all of the audacity is just in the scale, that is not what we’re interested in”, says Teller. Whatever the problem, no solution is too outlandish. “Someone said in a brainstorming session: what if guns actually
shot some kind of lethal poison, but there was an antidote in all the jails in the country?” Teller grins. “First of all, that’s a gorgeous idea – I mean, it’s a terrible idea. But in terms of creativity, that person will think of other really weird ideas that are awesome for society.” After a moonshot is proposed, X’s Rapid Evaluation team begin what is known as a pre-mortem. Ninety per cent of ideas fail at this stage: some for obvious reasons – too expensive, too difficult; others break the laws of physics. If an idea can’t be killed easily, it becomes an investigation, and successful investigations become projects, with a name, budget and full-time staff. One of the foundational tenets at X is “monkey first”: to teach a monkey to stand on a pedestal and recite Shakespeare, you should resist starting with the simplest task (building the pedestal) and start with the hardest (teaching a monkey to speak). Teams are encouraged to set “kill targets” – thresholds that, if missed, will automatically end the project. For example, Project Foghorn, X’s attempt to turn seawater into fuel, succeeded in producing fuel but not cheaply enough. X killed the project, published its findings as a scientific paper, and gave the team a bonus. One afternoon, I follow Kathryn Zealand, of the Rapid Evaluation team, to see an investigation at work. The idea is to build a pair of assistive trousers that
might help the elderly and immobile to walk. Code-named Smarty Pants, they are inspired both by recent advances in soft robotics and Zealand’s 92-year-old grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s. “If you help them do that one thing, they take 30 per cent more steps over the course of the day. And the longer people stay walking, the fewer other health issues they’ll have,” Zealand says. She is wearing what looks like 3D-printed armour on one leg, wired with sensors, which collect data on her gait as we walk. Early on in any investigation, X begins prototyping. X’s Design Kitchen houses virtually anything required to conduct experiments in numerous fields: a wet lab, milling machines, laser scanners, 3D printers. “We say, OK, what is the quickest experiment we can do that will get us to a yes/no?” Zealand says. We arrive in a large, airy atrium. Zealand, an Australian, has enrolled her mother, who happens to be visiting, as a test subject. “She struggles with stairs,” Zealand explains. The Smarty Pants prototype is rough: actuators on each knee joint, connected to fabric panels around the wearer’s legs. The outer seams are laced, corset-style, giving them a Victorian steampunk vibe. The motors are controlled by a Raspberry Pi housed in a pearlescent bumbag.
Zealand’s team – including a deep learning specialist, a clothing designer and a world expert in biomechanical exoskeletons – fit her mother into the trousers, then monitor her as she climbs up several flights of stairs. “It’s amazing,” she says, stepping down, delighted. “Normally I’d be out of breath by the time that I got up there.” Zealand asks me if I want to try them. After a brief fitting, I tread gingerly on the first step, and immediately feel myself being pulled upwards, as if by an additional set of muscles. Climbing is noticeably easier. By using the sensor data and machine learning, Zealand explains, the trousers are learning to “see” the stairs, knowing exactly when they should apply force. She hopes that, eventually, soft robotics and material advances might enable a lightweight product a fraction of the weight, with a flexible frame, that could aid a range of mobility issues. “That’s probably ten years out,” she says. Still, it’s early days. Fewer than half of X’s investigations become projects. By the time this story is published it will probably have been killed.
on such long-term problems is X’s great advantage: the patience of research, without a startup’s financial pressures. “There are some technologies that, because of safety, you have to have several ‘nines’ of reliability before you can even start,” says Teller. A software glitch in an app is unlikely to be fatal, but one in a self-driving car might be. The thought lingers that afternoon, as a driverless Waymo pulls up outside the X campus. Waymo has now logged more than 16 million autonomous
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kilometres on public roads. For the last year, it has operated Waymo as a ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona, and is currently working with Jaguar on its next generation of vehicles. Morgan Stanley recently valued the company at $105 billion (£80 billion). “Waymo’s goal is to build the world’s most experienced driver,” says Andrew Chatham, a Waymo software engineer. We pull away. A safety driver, Rick, is sitting in the front seat, but the wheel turns itself. Inside the car, a white Chrysler Pacifica, headrest displays show a live view of what the roof-mounted sensors “see”: Other than some slight hesitations – even now the cars struggle to predict drivers’ intentions at junctions – the drive is uneventful. Even so, mass adoption of self-driving cars is still a long way off. During the early years, X employees could happily work on technologies that might be decades away, knowing that advertising revenue was flooding into Google. Thrun recalls asking former Google CEO and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt for $30 million to fund a project. Schmidt gave him $150 million. “Eric said to me, ‘If I give you $30 million, you’re going to come back next month and ask for another $30 million.’” Then, one morning in 2015, Brin and Page announced that Google was restructuring, to become Alphabet. The news came as a shock inside the
company. There were widespread reports of budgets being tightened. But at X, being spun out clarified the team’s essential purpose: “[It] became even more clear that the goal of X is to produce new Alphabet companies,” Felten says. When projects reach a certain scale, they “graduate” from X to become standalone companies. The transition is not always easy. Since Alphabetisation, the original leaders of several X projects, including Waymo, Loon and Wing, have either left or been replaced. “If you’re trying to accelerate something to grow ambitious and large, the chances that the original person that invented it can take [it through] every stage is pretty hard,” says Wendy Tan White, a vicepresident at X who oversees growthstage projects. “They would have to grow very fast themselves.” Alphabet has faced controversies. In 2018, the company was rocked by sexual misconduct allegations; 20,000 employees, including many at X, staged a global walkout in protest. One of the executives named by the New York Times was Richard DeVaul, then head of Rapid Evaluation at X. (DeVaul resigned, reportedly without an exit package.) Teller has publicly expressed his regret, and admiration, for those who walked out. Above: Kathryn Zealand, of X’s Rapid Evaluation team, wearing sensors for the Smarty Pants assistive trousers project
“It made me believe more. [It’s] awesome that employees should say, ‘This is our company, and that needs to reflect us.’” There has also been widespread upset at Google’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon AI project, and Project Dragonfly, a plan to launch a censored search engine in China (both reportedly shelved). These events have re-ignited debates about the responsibility that Alphabet has, in Google’s famous phrase, to not be evil. Teller says he thinks deeply about ethics. His grandfather, after all, worked on the Manhattan Project. “There definitely have been things people brought up [at X] that are like, ‘Nope, that’s evil,’” he says. But other issues are less clear-cut – for example, projects that may cause jobs to be lost to automation. One current X project is to create all-purpose “everyday robots” that might automate menial tasks. “New technologies tend to create concentrated harm and diffuse benefits,” Teller says. “We owe it to those people who have experienced those concentrated problems – and it is a policy matter – to make sure we take care of them.”
After its flurry of early successes, X’s recent moonshots have struggled to strike the popular imagination – or financial success. Of its energy startups, only Malta has built a commercial project. And while the drones developed by André Prager and Martin Shannon at Wing may end up transforming the logistics industry, it’s hard to paint delivering burritos as a genuine moonshot. Recently, X has increased its efforts on tackling problems that might threaten humanity. One of the most advanced focuses on agriculture, which “has the largest carbon footprint of any major industry”, Teller points out. This is a typical X moonshot: take a huge problem and apply Alphabet’s massive advantage in computing power, expertise and finance – creating a global business in the process. “We take the challenges that I think few other players would have the courage to take,” says Benoit Schillings, a Belgian in charge of several moonshots. But it’s possible to see moonshots as a cynical attempt to dominate industries that don’t yet exist. It’s hard not to picture Waymo as the operating system in every car, Wing as the air traffic
Below : André Prager and Trevor Shannon, the Wing engineers who hope their drones will transform the logistics industry
control for every package. Google, after all, started as a kind of moonshot, to map systematically all human knowledge. For all X’s rhetoric about changing the world, it exists to produce new enterprises – and profit – for Alphabet.
its tenth birthday. The day I visit, senior executives have been in meetings, trying to map out what the next decade might look like. Fields that X once pioneered, such as self-driving cars, are now cottage industries. Massive venture capital funds, such as SoftBank’s Vision Fund, are enabling startups to take moonshotsized risks of their own. X’s true impact may not be clear for another decade, or more. It has created sizeable returns for Alphabet – Teller has said the value of Google Brain alone paid for several years of X’s entire budget – but there’s still no telling if its graduated companies will survive, let alone become the next Google. In 2018, Alphabet’s “Other Bets” lost $3.36 billion . Sitting in front of Teller-as-Gandalf, it’s hard not to think of an even earlier moonshot factory: the labs of Thomas Edison, the “wizard of Menlo Park”. The self-driving car, or one of X’s many other moonshots, could end up transforming society in ways we can’t foresee. It might save the world, or just help Alphabet grow ever richer and more powerful. “The real test is 15 to 20 years from now, and we look backwards. Then how are we doing?” Teller says. Until then, there will always be more crazy ideas worth chasing. “The world’s got more than enough problems, sadly.”� Oliver Franklin-Wallis wrote about Stella McCartney in 01.19
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JOSH FANO Josh Fano aims to mediate poetry between contemporary architectural movements and postmodern design. The Studio Collection takes design influence from the Bridge of Aspiration at the Royal Ballet School in London. Every frame is meticulously handcrafted by artisans in the rural area of Sabae, Japan; a historic community with the mastery of titanium eyewear craftsmanship. Visit joshfano.com
JENNIFER BLIX Jennifer Blix is an expressionism artist from the US. Her new collection, which includes “The Gear” shown here, is entitled “Dominating Modes of Behaviour.” It depicts archetypes of people whose forceful behaviours take control of others; indeed these paintings are inspired by those whose behaviour goes too far. For more, visit jblix.com and follow on IG: @j.blix
THE PERFUMIST After over 300 years of making perfumes and colognes strictly and privately for kings and royalties in the Middle East, The Perfumist decided to offer their work to the public. Everything they offer is 100% limited, natural, and extremely rare. Visit theperfumist.com or follow on IG: @the.perfumist
TRIBE ALL “Tribe All” is a new street art apparel brand by artist Angela Thouless, offering unisex urban wear at a price that is affordable to all. All images are based on original paintings inspired by her love of street art, culture, tribal gods and ritual masks. The non-naturalistic, highly stylised forms create powerful, highly expressive imagery and aims to represent all tribes. What’s your Tribe? Visit angelathouless.com
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TH E W IR ED I ND EX
The percentage of former WeWork employees in November 2019 who were worried about having WeWork on their CV, according to Blind, an anonymous professional network
How much of the weight of a two-year-old pillow that’s made up of dead dust mites and their droppings. A used mattress will contain on average 100,000 to ten million dust mites
Kilometres cycled by Strava users across the globe in 2019. Cyclists in the UK accounted for 937.2 million of those
The citizen-to-CCTV-camera ratio in Britain and Ireland as of 2018. By 2021, it’s expected there will be over 1bn cameras
Length of the world’s longest egg noodle, cooked up by Japanese chef Hiroshi Kuroda in September 2019
Average amount of time a person in the UK spent daily on social media in 2019 – four minutes less than in 2018. Eighty per cent of internet users reported using YouTube
The number of new battery-powered electric cars which were registered in the UK during the last four years
Percentage of the UK’s tech investors who are women, according to a Diversity VC report. Women hold just 13 per cent of senior positions in venture capital
The number of SUVs sold in the UK in the last four years
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The percentage of European startups claiming to be AI firms while not actually using AI, according to MMC Ventures
The number to call if you are in South Korea and need to report a domestic spy; call 118 to inform on cyber terrorism
ILLUSTRATION: GIACOMO GAMBINERI. WORDS: ALEX LEE. SOURCES: BLOG.STRAVA.COM; UKERC.AC.UK; MMCVENTURES.COM; TECHNOLOGY.IHS.COM; WEARESOCIAL.COM; EHSO.COM; BUSINESSINSIDER.COM; GUINNESSWORLDRECORDS.COM; DIVERSITY.VC; LIFEINKOREA.COM; ONS.GOV.UK
The percentage of the gender pay gap in the UK in 2019. In 2018 it was 17.8 per cent – an improvement of just 0.5
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