3 Noticias economicas ingles

Startup compensation packages include equity—in the form of stock options—to give employees ownership in the company they’re building. It also creates an incentive to reward all for their hard work and align company growth objectives. If all goes well, the company thrives and employees experience a life-changing financial windfall as a result. 

But it’s not that simple and, unfortunately, startup employees don’t often reap the benefits they deserve. We believe companies have a responsibility to step up and educate their employees to help their team avoid common equity pitfalls. 

Equity gets more expensive over time

Employees join a startup out of their personal drive to build anew and make great impact through their work. In many cases, they take a salary cut in favor of receiving stock options in the form of company equity—an exciting moment with huge potential. But, in reality, they lean in, put in the hours, work hard, and lose sight of the fact that they need to take action regarding their equity. In other words, they need to “exercise their options.” This means they need to come out of pocket to buy their stock options. 

In the early days with low strike prices and company valuations, it may not make a huge financial dent. But many wait to exercise their options for two reasons: One, they don’t understand the economics behind how stock options work in that there are significant tax advantages that make stock options cheaper to exercise in the beginning, and two, they are not yet ready to bear the associated risks and costs with an early-stage company. 

Over time, the plot thickens. The company is growing, and its growth is being recognized through higher 409A valuations. There may even be talk about a future exit in the form of an IPO, acquisition, direct listing, or SPAC. And that prompts many questions from employees regarding the value and cost of their stock options. 

This is where the frustration for many startup employees really sets in. The more successful and valuable the company becomes, the more expensive it is to exercise options because of taxation. The taxes are determined by the difference of the strike price (the cost to exercise one stock option) and the 409A valuation (the appraisal of the value of a single company share) at the time of exercising. 

In 2020 alone, startup employees left behind $4.9 billion by not exercising their options before an IPO. The number one reason was because they couldn’t afford them. The cost to exercise is, on average, twice the annual income of an average employee at a late-stage startup. And it’s mostly due to taxes. In fact, 85% of exercise costs are taxes.

Many employees lose their equity when they leave the company

Employees decide to leave their job for many reasons—a new opportunity, a change in career paths, or even moving to a new location. But many are surprised to learn they have 90 days to exercise any vested options when they leave.

If they are still bullish on their company—which many leaving employees are—they suddenly find themselves scrambling to get as much cash as they can to take ownership of their shares. But there are many that, as hard as they try, will just never be able to come up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in 90 days.

Some also decide the short-term pain isn’t worth the long-term reward. Maybe they’re about to put a down payment on a house or are worried about losing all of their emergency savings. So, they let them expire and hope it wasn’t a mistake. At Snowflake, one of the most successful IPOs in recent years, more than $1.2 billion worth of stock options went unexercised. 

Some startups are combatting this latter issue with longer exercising windows. Instead of 90 days, employees can have 5, 7, or even 10 years to exercise. In a recent episode of the Founder’s Field Guide podcast, Spenser Skates, CEO of Amplitude, discussed how he personally got involved to extend their window to 10 years. 

But this workaround still comes with a 90-day deadline. That’s because, legally, incentive stock options (ISOs) automatically convert to nonqualified stock options (NSOs) after 90 days of leaving the company. Most employees are granted ISOs, which have a more favorable tax treatment than NSOs. So while it’s fantastic that more startups are extending the window, employees who take it will likely end up paying even more to exercise their options. 

Companies need to provide more equity education

 All this talk about cost, taxes, and planning illustrates just how complicated equity is. Most employees are left feeling lost and are not sure where, or to whom, to turn. The first place employees will likely go when they do have a question is their employer. In fact, 82% of employees want their company to help them understand their equity. 

Founders and executives do want employees to value their stock options. Many just don’t know how to help. Legally, companies can’t offer financial advice to employees, but they can offer helpful tools and resources. Being more proactive about educating and helping their employees with equity would also benefit the company.

First, it would foster a culture of transparency and openness. Culture is a big part of any successful company. Proactive communication about stock options can contribute to a positive culture. And that can help with any number of things, from recruiting and retainment to just overall employee satisfaction. It’s no secret that happy employees are often productive. 

Second, going public is not easy. It’s why companies bring in equity teams to help—it’s a lot of work. Getting ahead of employee questions can streamline that process so the executive team can focus on going public. Having a successful IPO will benefit everyone. The same goes for an acquisition. Getting ahead of employee concerns removes unnecessary work in the process.

Going public is something to celebrate, but financial conversations are not easy to have. So, most people don’t have them, especially at work. Even for the most seasoned CPA, stock options can be complex territory. Yet employees are being asked to figure out one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives on their own. 

If more startups can help provide the tools and resources for employees to make an informed decision about their equity, it can create much more value for everyone in the company. Quite literally.

Frederik Mijnhardt is the CEO of Secfi, a pre-wealth management platform helping startup employees navigate financial decisions from offer to IPO.

Glencore-backed CNG adds to pressure on consumer energy market already reeling from failures

Instant grocery delivery start-up sues EML after allegedly finding adverts for its rivals rather than its own on the side of London taxis

IEA report shows current pledges fall short — and points to free lunches

President removes two deputy governors in new round of dismissals sending currency down 1%

SPACs have lost some luster in America, but stock exchanges in Singapore and Hong Kong are betting the vehicles will boost their allure to global investors and startups in the region.

When the federal moratorium expired in August, many worried hundreds of thousands of tenants would be forced out. More than six weeks later, rental aid and state and local policies have fended off the worst.

Pearson joined Jupiter in 2001 as an investment manager and became chief investment officer in 2015.

Let me introduce you to an employee who recently joined a new employer. As her previous job, Reema was a top performer at a fast-growing organization where she contributed plenty of ideas. Everyone knew of her incredible leadership skills. Her insights determined most decisions. Hers was the voice everyone stopped to listen to in meetings—everyone except for Jared, the founder of the company.

Last week, Reema gave notice that she accepted a job at another company. She would have better pay, more visibility, and more autonomy. She wrote a LinkedIn post about how grateful she was for the incredible experience at Jared’s company. Jared sang her praises in the company-wide Slack channel. No hard feelings. It’s just business. People move on.

It seemed all was right with the world—besides the fact that this entire process did not need to happen. Yes, Reema left because she found a better opportunity, but Reema also left because she felt stifled and undervalued by Jared. And Shamika before her experienced a similar situation . . . and Nuranne before them. Notably, the HR department didn’t blink twice at these departures because the numbers were all in the range of healthy turnover.

It’s the classic line from politicians that they are stepping down from office to “spend more time with family.” This may be true. But what are they not saying?

Opportunity for learning and growth hides in the perspectives we don’t want to hear. The perspectives that confuse, infuriate, and challenge us. The perspectives we don’t typically hear until someone leaves the organization, if ever. So how as a leader can you better meet, and embrace, inconvenient truths? I provide a few ideas.

Normalize opposition

From time to time, it can help to have someone on the team who never agrees. This devil’s advocate individual can help turn the tables in a beneficial way and broaden your discussion. Team members should take turns taking on this role so the responsibility doesn’t fall to people who are naturally outspoken or see things differently because of their backgrounds. Taking turns also reduces the likelihood any person is stigmatized for slowing down the conversation or being the proverbial “stick in the mud.”

The implicit power imbalance between leader and team members makes asking people to share what’s missing feel risky. Instead, bake the same simple questions into evaluating any idea. To begin with, ask yourself what are the upsides, as well as the downsides? Use whatever language suits your culture. It can be a pro or a con. Alternatively, you can use plusses and minuses when doing your analysis. The key is to create predictable spaces where others can share different perspectives.

Interrogate your own reaction 

Inconvenient truths are by definition inconvenient. They take time and energy (we don’t have) to engage with. They mess with the comfortable narratives we have about who we are (typically, good, well-meaning, capable people). If you’re upset when a colleague or someone who is providing you feedback points out a mistake or an example of bad leadership—that’s okay. It’s normal to be upset. But don’t let that be the end of the conversation, where you shut off and storm out.

Instead, consider what behaviors, mindsets, actions have led your conversation partner to feel this way. Further, consider what would it mean if it were true? What might you learn from this exchange, down the line.

Consider what you’re losing

What are the costs of you denying or not wrestling with their perspective? Further, ask yourself what learning and growth are you missing out on by ignoring inconvenient truths? In addition to turnover, consider the impact of your unwillingness to engage with the topic on work culture, productivity, innovation, and trust.

Refusing to engage with others’ perspectives often means making others uneasy to preserve your own comfort. This sort of one-sided burden is too often taken up by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) employees.

These days, adopting “a growth mindset” is a popular phrase. Many companies even name “having a growth mindset” as a core value. In a nutshell, it means going beyond the things which are easy and palatable, to embracing the things you don’t want to hear and someone has likely taken risk to share with you. It can look like the team isn’t going to hit the sales targets for the quarter, that you’ve created a toxic work culture, or that they are really leaving the company because they felt you didn’t value their contributions.

While incredibly important, it’s not just about retaining the Reemas and other valuable employees of the world or about creating work cultures in which everyone can thrive; it’s also about getting out of your own way, as a leader. Don’t stop at the convenient truth, seek out, embrace, and engage the inconvenient. It can be key to supercharging your own learning and capabilities.

Elaine Lin Hering is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a managing partner of Triad Consulting Group, where she has worked with leaders from across the globe and across multiple industries to develop skills necessary to work better, together. 

The creator economy’s explosive growth has largely outstripped the means to support the creators fueling it.

The market size of the creator economy is estimated to be more than $104 billion, yet 78% of creators who consider themselves full-time only make $23,500 annually, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. It’s not just that creators are struggling to patch together a livable wage from ad revenue, merch sales, creator funds, tips, and so forth. They’re also challenged by not having sufficient capital on hand to grow their businesses.

Historically, traditional banks have been wary of lending to creators, which has paved a path from venture capitalists and fintech startups to close the gap.

One of the latest companies aiming to support creators financially is Spotter.

Spotter, which soft-launched in 2019, provides YouTube creators with lump-sum capital in exchange for acquiring the rights to their back catalog of videos for a limited time. (Creators retain control and monetization of future uploads.)

Using a proprietary prediction engine, Spotter is able to value and underwrite video content for anywhere from $50,000 to more than $30 million. The company reports to have pumped more than $200 million into the creator economy, striking deals with the likes of Dude Perfect, MrBeast, Donut Media, and more.

Spotter creators: Aphmau, Daym Drops, Deestroying, Donut Media, Dude Perfect, Gloom, MrBeast, preston, Vlad and Nikita [Image: Siberia]“Creators really don’t have access to capital. They’re not going to take on equity partners and give up their business, nor do they want to take on loans or debt,” says Nic Paul, Spotter’s chief operating officer. “That’s really where fueling the growth of creators while allowing them to remain independent and in control of their destiny was really a huge part of the company.”

Spotting potential in market

Spotter is the brainchild of Aaron DeBevoise, cofounder and the former executive vice president of network programming of the YouTube multichannel network Machinima. One of DeBevoise’s primary tasks was researching if YouTube creators’ revenue could be predictable enough to provide them financing to grow their businesses. That idea started to become a reality when YouTube made engagement the primary metric for driving viewership.

Aaron DeBevoise [Photo: Alex Freiman]“We started to see that the creators who were hyper-focused on specific categories—not all gaming, but Minecraft, and not all of cooking, but baking cupcakes—those creators were being rewarded by consistently creating the same type of content on a high-volume basis,” says DeBevoise, who serves as Spotter’s CEO.

DeBevoise says Spotter is meant for YouTube creators in all content categories with the only caveat being consistent performance and proof of monetization for at least a year. Once the value of a creator’s back catalog is assessed, they’re offered what Paul calls “life-altering capital.”

“This is not capital like they would get from a brand deal or anywhere else,” Paul says. “The reason why we wanted the back catalog is because it doesn’t interfere with any of their initiatives, strategies, or growth. They can have new uploads that are generating more revenue than the back catalog, and we can still allow them to unlock a lot of meaningful capital.”

Reed Duchscher, founder and CEO of the digital talent management company Night, was one of the first people DeBevoise called, because Duchscher works with such YouTube powerhouses as Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast), and Preston Arsement (aka PrestonPlayz).

“Initially it was something we were a little hesitant on not knowing the numbers. It’s hard to project future earnings for YouTube,” Duchscher says. “There’s just so many unknowns: What’s an RPM [revenue per mille, i.e., total revenue per 1,000 video views] going to be? Is there going to be a new adpocalypse?”

Duchscher worked with Spotter’s team to crunch the numbers around a back catalog’s worth, and eventually felt comfortable enough to broker deals with several of his clients, most notably MrBeast, who has more than 124 million subscribers across his YouTube channels.

While an exact figure wasn’t disclosed, Duchscher says Spotter’s deal for some of MrBeast’s old videos is for three years. The capital they raised is going toward building infrastructure around MrBeast’s higher-budget video ideas and expanding his team.

“When I met [Donaldson], it was just him and an editor. Now it’s a massive team around multiple channels. It’s just incredibly expensive,” says Duchscher of MrBeast, who’s also known to have massive cash giveaways. “There actually aren’t a lot of places for creators to go get capital to fund their business right now. Almost every bank that we’ve spoken with over the last two years has not been willing to give creator loans.”

Duchscher also underscores that Spotter’s appeal lies in part with the fact that it doesn’t ask more of a creator in exchange for being a source of capital. “The business model was not for them to get intertwined in these businesses,” Duchscher says. “There’s no hand-holding. They’re not trying to change someone’s content style. They’re not giving feedback on videos. It’s a pretty straightforward deal.”

Cody Jones, one-fifth of the group Dude Perfect, says their Spotter deal has allowed them to invest in several businesses, as well as expand their own, with plans to create a headquarters in Texas that would double as an experiential location for fans.

“It’s been one of those deals where we’d love to have the cash on hand now to get our money working,” Jones says, “versus in the past, we were like, ‘let’s just wait until the ad revenue rolls in and keep running the business that way.'”

A spot for all?

It’s fair to wonder why top creators such as MrBeast and Dude Perfect would need capital in the first place. These are some of the highest earners across AdSense, brand deals, merch, and other successful ventures that generate considerable revenue that they could pump back into their businesses.

Influencer Marketing Hub’s report found that only 46% of creators who’ve been building an audience for four or more years earn a little over $20,000 annually across their channels. “It’s not really a living wage. That is just the reality of it right now,” says Werner Geyser, founder of Influencer Marketing Hub. “It’s really the influencers at the top and then everyone else.”

Nic Paul [Photo: Alex Freiman]DeBevoise and Paul note that they went after YouTube’s bigger names at first in hopes to have a trickle-down effect with other creators. “We have been focusing on the highest viewership creators on the platform so that we can deploy as much capital as possible to prove out the model,” DeBevoise says. “But now that the model has been proven, because we’ve been doing this for two years, we’re going out to as many creators as possible.”

“We need to go out and educate the marketplace, meaning creators, that this is an opportunity for them, but more importantly, we need to educate them on why this is a good opportunity for them,” Paul adds. “If we can do those larger deals, it allows the market to get educated.”

DeBevoise argues that Spotter’s predictive engine actually keeps their human intuition in check. “One of our first deals was a channel that was all about travel in Las Vegas. That was not something that we would, from a high level, [have chosen]. But it ended up being a great channel for us to work with from a predictive perspective and from a data-centric perspective,” DeBevoise says. “We really value our predictive engine in helping us source the entire ecosystem rather than just do what’s in plain sight.”

Markian Benhamou, creator of the YouTube comedy group Smile Squad, is one of the more up-and-coming creators that Spotter has worked with.

The company acquired the back catalog of Smile Squad’s main channel (1.6 million subscribers) for $1 million for five years.

“The main thing was understanding what’s in it for [Spotter]. Like, what am I missing that they know that they’re willing to pay this much? It sounds too good to be true,” Benhamou says. “But once I understood that they’ll pay for 80% of what they expect us to make and that they seem like they’re taking a fair guess based on math and algorithms, I decided to take it.”

DeBevoise’s ultimate goal with Spotter is to create a robust portfolio of YouTube talent. “We’re not a venture capital firm saying, ‘hey, let’s go out and make a 10x on one deal,'” he says. “The more deals we do, the more we can pay, because the more likely we are to hit singles and doubles. We’ve already spent $200 million investing in these types of deals across over 115 channels, and, ultimately, we want to grow that by two times or more over the coming years.”

US comptroller of the currency nominee Omarova has faced attacks over Soviet upbringing

Rising wages and equipment delays help lift Texas crude above $80 a barrel

Rising wages and equipment delays help lift Texas crude above $80 a barrel

US comptroller of the currency nominee Omarova has faced attacks over Soviet upbringing

The FTSE 100 was unperturbed, as was Wall Street, at the US Federal Reserve's plan to start tapering as early as next month.

And even if Americans were willing to pay, it’d have little impact on rising temperatures.

United Airlines has announced what it says is its largest transatlantic expansion in its history. The airline will launch five new destinations and 10 new routes by spring 2022. United says the destinations are not served by any other carrier in North America.

Here’s the full list of totally new destinations that you can hop to on a United flight to come next year. These will begin in spring 2022:

• Amman, Jordan
• Bergen, Norway
• Azores, Portugal
• Palma de Mallorca, Spain
• Tenerife, Spanish Canary Islands

And here’s the list of new routes United is adding come next spring from select U.S. cities:

• Berlin
• Dublin
• Frankfurt
• Milan
• Munich
• Nice, France
• Rome
• Zurich
• Bangalore, India
• Tokyo

United’s expansion in transatlantic flights shows a healthy dose of optimism that international travel will pick up next year after being destroyed in 2020 by the pandemic and seeing relatively sparse activity compared to historical trends in 2021.

Announcing the transatlantic expansion, Patrick Quayle, senior vice president of international network and alliances at United, said, “given our big expectations for a rebound in travel to Europe for summer, this is the right time to leverage our leading global network in new, exciting ways. Our expansion offers the widest range of destinations to discover—introducing new, trendy locales that our customers will love, as well as adding more flights to iconic, popular cities.”

Each of its carbon-sucking units is the size of a shipping container, yet the world’s largest direct air capture machine—the Orca plant in Iceland—captures and stores only about 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year. That’s about three seconds’ worth of global emissions.

Still, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that technologies that remove CO₂ from the air like this will be needed alongside deep cuts in emissions to reduce global warming. In fact, climate scientists modeling pathways for stabilizing warming at 1.5°C (the goal of the Paris agreement) assume that a carbon removal industry based around one method may need to be around 40% the size of the current fossil fuel industry.

There are several ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. One is called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or Beccs. Here, vast acres of fast-growing plants are grown and then harvested and burned to generate electricity or make biofuel for vehicles. Beccs can even use waste from farms or timber plantations. The carbon normally released during the burning or fermentation stage is instead captured and pumped underground in old oil and gas wells or deep rock formations called saline aquifers. These storage sites can be beneath land (which is common in the U.S.) or the seabed. There are more than 20 years of experience in storing CO₂ under the Norwegian North Sea, for instance.

Attempts to calculate how much carbon removal is possible often address how much it will cost, or how much carbon can realistically be extracted from the atmosphere. This can be done by assessing the land area available to produce biomass crops, or the size of underground reservoirs for storing the gas.

But what scientists often overlook when predicting the future capacity of these technologies is how society will need to change to accommodate them. For instance, what will a sudden change to how land is used mean for communities and livelihoods? How can increasing demand for land to grow food or restore habitat be reconciled with the need to produce lots of biomass for Beccs? And who should even be able to make these decisions for them to be considered fair and ethical?

If world leaders at the UN climate summit in Glasgow fail to address these questions, they run the risk of making overly optimistic judgments about how much CO₂ it’s possible to remove. If it transpires that the international community cannot rely on these technologies as much as climate modeling suggests we need to, then society will need to decarbonize even faster to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Social and political issues matter

There is only one demonstration Beccs project operating in the world today, in Illinois. Alongside other researchers, we talked to experts working in sectors like forestry and energy to understand what’s needed to bring this new industry to life.

These experts are aware of large-scale bioenergy projects, such as those cultivating sugar cane ethanol in Brazil, which have deprived local people of land and destroyed native habitat. Many of them worry that a global Beccs industry that developed from these practices would exacerbate inequality by, for example, reducing access to food and ultimately fail to remove carbon from the atmosphere by actually increasing deforestation. The U.K.’s largest power plant for generating energy from biomass, Drax, mostly imports wood chips from North America, while U.K. farmers grow grass for use in a handful of smaller-scale power plants. But as the U.K. develops a Beccs industry, rising demand for bioenergy could mean the cheapest and most exploitative sources win out.

The experts were also unsure about whether there is even enough free land to accommodate expanding bioenergy crops. Many voiced concerns about the consequences for the rights of people living in and working on land that is earmarked for Beccs.

Some experts doubted there was sufficient political support—capable of transcending short-term electoral cycles—to pull off the necessary innovation to build carbon capture and storage capacity in the U.K. This technology is needed not just for Beccs but also to decarbonize heavy industry, including steel manufacturing and chemicals.

We found that these social and political obstacles were rarely represented, if at all, in models of the global potential for carbon removal. Of course, some of these things can’t be modeled. Models aren’t usually designed to incorporate the nuances of decision-making at national, regional, and local levels, or the importance of cultural and spiritual values that people endow landscapes.

World leaders need a more complete picture of the complexity we know exists in the real world before embarking on the construction of a global carbon removal industry. Making this happen is as much a question of who pays to remove the carbon and who has a say in how the land is managed, as details about technology. If the political and social limitations are not better understood, then it is hard to imagine how these carbon removal pipe dreams will get off the ground.

Johanna Forster is a lecturer in environment and international development at the University of East Anglia. Naomi Vaughan is a senior lecturer in climate change at the University of East Anglia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Facebook says it’s designing a pair of augmented reality glasses that can add digital content to the world in front of us. They might be years away from shipping. And to be useful to us—to walk us through a pizza recipe or help us find the car keys—they need to offer a built-in assistant with some serious AI smarts. The challenge is getting enough video footage—shot from the perspective of the user—to train the assistant to make inferences about the world as seen through the lenses of the glasses.

That kind of first-person training video is scarce. So Facebook partnered with 13 universities to create a large new data set of “egocentric” training video called Ego4D. The universities recruited a total of 855 people in nine countries to strap on GoPro cameras to collect the video. In all, participants captured 3,025 hours of first-person video from their everyday lives.

The new data set will help Facebook researchers begin the process of creating and training an AI assistant to understand how users interact with other people, objects, and the environment around them. The AI, Facebook says, will be trained to recall things a user has seen or heard in the past to help with present activities, and to anticipate things the user might need in the future.

Facebook has boiled those general concepts down into five more-specific AI tasks, which hint at how the company sees its future AR glasses being useful. Facebook’s lead researcher on the Ego4D project, Kristen Grauman, told me the tasks were chosen based on how well they “span the fundamentals needed to build any or many applications.”

[Image: courtesy of Facebook]“Episodic memory” simply allows an assistant to recall something recorded by the glasses in the past. For instance, the AI assistant might recall and display the location of a lost item such as a set of keys. It might even display within the glasses the actual footage of the user placing the item in a certain location.

[Image: courtesy of Facebook]“Forecasting” analyzes a present activity and then suggests what the user might or should do next. It might suggest the next step in a recipe, for example.

[Image: courtesy of Facebook]“Object manipulation” might analyze how a user is handling an object, and make suggestions on how to do it better. For instance, the AI assistant might teach a percussion student how to hold drumsticks properly.

“Audio-visual conversation transcription” listens to social conversations the user has, and records them or transcribes them into text that could be recalled later. If you’re following a recipe, you might call up something your grandmother said in the past about a secret cooking tip, for example.

“Social interaction” adds a layer onto the audio-visual conversation transcription task, Grauman says, by detecting “who is looking at me and when, who’s paying attention to me, and who’s talking to me.”

Grauman says that the data set created by Facebook and its university partners contains anywhere from 50 to 800 hours of video footage for each of the use cases. Figuring out what it showed involved plenty of human labor: “Someone watched the video and every time something happened, [they] paused and wrote a sentence about it,” she says. The process yielded about 13 sentences per minute.

In all, the annotation job took a quarter of a million hours of work by professional labelers. But these annotations are vital for teaching the AI models to make inferences and recall things. “It’s really cool because it gives us the language-vision connection and it gives us a way to index the data from the get-go,” Grauman says.

The data set will lay the groundwork from which researchers can push the AI to understand a variety of everyday tasks the user might need help with. But training an AI model to classify and predict the universe of things, people, and situations a user might encounter during their day is a very big challenge, and Facebook has a long way to go toward producing a helpful and versatile assistant.

“The first real barrier is the data, so we’re taking a good crack at that through this contribution,” Grauman says. “But even with the data, now the fun begins in earnest as far as the core research challenges.”

The latest tech IPO of 2021 is GitLab, which begins trading today. Its initial public offering will be highly watched by those interested in cloud computing platforms. Here’s what you need to know:

• What is GitLab? It’s a cloud-based depository of software. The platform allows developers to share and contribute to each other’s work. In this way, GitLab competes most directly with Microsoft’s GitHub.
• What exchange will GitLab trade on? GitLab will trade on the Nasdaq, beginning today, October 14, 2021.
• What is GitLab’s stock ticker symbol? GitLab will trade under the ticker “GTLB”
• How many GTLB shares are available? 10,400,000 shares of Class A common stock will be up for purchase, per a company press release.
• How much will GTLB shares cost? The IPO price of one GTLB share is $77.
• How much is GitLab worth? As Bloomberg notes, at $77 per share, GitLab has a market cap of $11 billion. What its market cap will be by the end of today depends on if the shares rise or fall.
• Anything else to know about GitLab? As Fast Company’s Julia Herbst reports, GitLab is one of the few companies in the world with no physical headquarters. The 1,300-strong company is completely remote.