As we bid farewell to January, we present a snapshot of our prowl on our "Virtual Route 66" this week courtesy INc. & the Information as we look forward to the privilege to serve:
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| | A Survivor’s Guide to Braving the Crypto Winter | By Margaux MacColl | There’s a cold front in the metaverse. Stoked by investor fears of rising interest rates and dried up liquidity, the price of cryptocurrencies plummeted this week, with the market shedding a trillion dollars from bitcoin’s all-time high in November. The swoon is giving crypto diehards flashbacks to 2018. That was the last time the industry entered a “crypto winter,” informally defined as a sharp decline in cryptocurrency prices, followed by a prolonged decrease in trading. This time around, many crypto watchers see a short-term market correction—not a harbinger of a yearslong freefall. But even so, it may be time to zip up those parkas and hope that a spring awakening awaits on the other side. The good news? “NFTs were born out of a crypto winter,” said OhhShiny, an influencer and investor in non-fungible tokens. “Dapper Labs came from that, Axie Infinity came from that.” In other words, a sustained downturn could be a blessing in disguise for the crypto ecosystem—a time for more innovation and less Grimacecoin. |
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| | Amazon Pauses ‘Pay to Quit’ Offers for Warehouse Workers | By Paris Martineau and Mark Di Stefano | Faced with an increasingly tight labor market, Amazon has quietly paused a longstanding program through which it paid warehouse workers up to $5,000 to quit their jobs after the busy peak season, The Information has learned. Amazon instituted the program—known inside the company as Pay to Quit or simply The Offer—in 2014 to help the company quickly trim the size of its workforce, which expands significantly during the holiday season to keep up with a flood of online shopping. Amazon has offered the one-time payments once a year to warehouse workers and other full- and part-time hourly employees who agree to leave their jobs and never work for Amazon again. While paying employees to leave may seem counterintuitive, the internet retailer viewed it as a way to ease out workers who weren’t happy at the company. | |
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Good morning.
As ever more companies commit to a “net zero” transition by 2050, it’s worth asking: How much is that transition going to cost?
An army of McKinsey researchers have come up with a plausible estimate that they are releasing today. It’s a big number: $275 trillion in capital spending on physical assets by 2050, or $9.2 trillion a year. Of course, a lot of that investment is already happening. But McKinsey says the increase in investment needed would be $3.5 trillion a year.
That’s a lot of money. To put it in perspective, it’s roughly one half of all global corporate profits, one quarter of all tax revenue, or 7% of household spending. The McKinsey report is silent on who picks up the tab.
In addition to all that spending on physical assets, the climate transition also will lead to human disruption: an estimated loss of 185 million jobs by 2050, offset by a gain of 200 million new jobs. That means no shortage of jobs, but a challenge to provide “needed support, training and reskilling” during the transition.
Now you may look at those numbers and be tempted to say: “Whoa, let’s not do it, and save the cash.” But there’s a cost there, too. First movers will benefit by reaping profits from the transition, while latecomers will pay an added price. A separate study out this morning from Deloitte concludes insufficient action on climate “could cost the U.S. economy $14.5 trillion in the next fifty years,” and the loss of nearly a million jobs. “We have a narrow window of time—the next decade—to make the bold decisions needed to change our climate trajectory and reach a turning point,” said Alicia Rose, deputy CEO for Deloitte U.S. “The decisions made by governments, businesses and communities would reinforce our early progress and could unlock extraordinary economic possibilities for the U.S.”
Separately, check out this week’s Leadership Next podcast—an interview with Steve Case, CEO of Revolution, an investment fund dedicated to building start-ups in places other than San Francisco and Austin. Case, who made a fortune running AOL, says the pandemic has “broken the lock” that Silicon Valley and a few other places had on new tech investment, allowing talented people “to think about work and life in a different way.”
Case makes the case for my hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn., as one of his proof points. “Chattanooga is actually proving to be an interesting startup city,” he said, thanks to an early investment in high-speed broadband and a heavy concentration of trucking and logistic companies. “It’s the best place to launch a start-up focused on trucking.”
| From side hustle to $2 billion brand |
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Good morning,
When Tim Brown retired from professional soccer, he found himself searching for his next meaningful endeavor. He started making shoes as a side hustle. During his playing days, Brown said during a recent Inc. streaming event, he had enjoyed the free gear that brands sent to professional athletes, but he also wondered about ways to produce it without synthetic materials. He'd go on in 2015 to co-found Allbirds, a San Francisco Bay Area sustainable footwear and apparel company.
Allbirds, which is a B Corp, went public in November with a valuation of more than $2 billion in an important precedent for environmental, social, and governance companies. Check out the full story of how Allbirds went from Brown’s side hustle to a $2 billion sustainable brand.
And check out more of our Allbirds coverage:We conclude with a tribute to Thich Nhat Hanh who passed away this month:
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