A new year often starts with a simple question: How can we do better? For businesses, its a question that applies to almost everything, from product innovation to climate impactan area of increasing urgency for many.
The goal of achieving net-zero is now a staple of most businesses annual plans, however the journey there is often challenging. It can be fraught with hidden trade-offs, making it difficult for ESG leaders to know whether they are truly backing the right solutions in pursuit of their climate goals.
Take aviation, for example. As one of the world’s most difficult sectors to decarbonize, its 2.5% share of global CO2 emissions represents a major challenge for nearly every corporate climate plan. To solve this, the industry developed a solution called Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Unlike traditional jet fuel made from crude oil, SAF is produced from renewable sources like used cooking oil, agricultural waste, and other plant-based materials. Crucially, its designed to work with existing aircraft engines, allowing airlines to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint without having to build new planes.
While promising a dramatic reduction in air travels carbon footprint, the well-intentioned race to scale this green fuel has created a dangerous paradox, leading companies down a path that risks undermining the goals they are trying to achieve.
THE HIDDEN FLAW IN GREEN JET FUEL
SAF has quickly become the poster child for sustainable flight, as it cuts an aircrafts lifecycle emissions by up to 80%. However, the way we scale SAF matters just as much as the volumes we achieve. Many of todays biofuels rely on crops grown on arable land, creating direct competition with food production and increasing the risk of deforestation and biodiversity loss.
This is the hidden flaw in the first wave of green jet fuel. When the same land that could grow food or support forests is converted for use in jet fuel, claims of sustainability become less convincing. This approach risks incentivizing solutions that reduce carbon emissions on spreadsheets while increasing the social and environmental risks in reality.
At the same time, no one should underestimate the scale of aviations challenge. Industry roadmaps state that to align with net-zero targets by 2050, the sector will need hundreds of millions of tons of SAF per year, compared to only a few million tons produced per year today. We must choose the right path to close that gap over the next quarter-century.
The world generates an enormous amount of waste every year, from used cooking oil and animal fats to agricultural residues such as corn cobs, straw, and empty fruit bunches. Much of this material is mismanaged, leading to open burning, water contamination, and methane emissions as organic waste decomposes. Turning this waste into fuel tackles two problems at once: it avoids methane and pollution from unmanaged waste, and it displaces fossil fuels in sectors like aviation.
FROM PILOT TO SCALE: PROOF IN THE REAL WORLD
The key question for any sustainability solution is simple: Can it scale?
For waste-based SAF, the answer is increasingly yes. At EcoCeres, our first large-scale renewable fuels plant in Jiangsu, Chinawhich launched in 2021demonstrated that industrial-scale production of SAF from 100% waste oils is commercially viable, with a capacity of around 350,000 tons per year.
Now, that model is scaling. In January 2026, we officially opened our new production facility in Johor, Malaysia. With 420,000 tons of annual renewable fuel capacity, its one of the country’s first dedicated SAF facilities and it effectively doubles EcoCeres SAF production capability. The plant utilizes 100% waste-based feedstocks, supported by a strategy that secures used cooking oil and other residues across Asia. Its circular model is demonstrated by facilities certified under leading industry bodies like ISCC (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification) and CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation). It has moved beyond pilots and is now delivering at industrial scale, proving the viability of truly circular SAF.
SAF AS A GATEWAY TO CREDIBLE NET-ZERO FOR BUSINESS
For many global companies, business travel and air freight form a substantial share of their carbon emissions. Without a scalable, credible source of SAF, corporate net-zero pledges risk becoming aspirational rather than actionable.
Its clear that a more sophisticated standard for green fuel is needed. Three simple criteria can guide better decisions:
Feedstock integrity: Does the fuel rely on 100% waste and residue-based feedstocks that do not compete with food or high-value ecosystems?
Verified lifecycle impact: Does it achieve high lifecycle emissions reductions validated by robust, third-party certification schemes aligned with global standards?
Circular and local co-benefits: Does the solution tangibly reduce local pollution and create sustainable economic opportunities in the regions where waste is collected?
Applying these tests can differentiate between models that simply shift problems elsewhere and circular solutions that create compounded benefits.
CLOSE THE LOOP ON GLOBAL MOBILITY
The concept of a circular economy has successfully reshaped countless industries. For years, however, global aviation has remained a critical open loop. A truly circular, waste-based SAF model can help us finally close the loop on global mobility.
This is not a distant dream. As weve demonstrated, the technology is already proven and operating at scale. Global studies confirm that underutilized waste streams can support the production of hundreds of millions of tons of sustainable fuel, more than enough to bridge the current supply gap. As more of the worlds waste is brought into productive use, the idea of flying on circular fuel moves from promising pilot to practical reality.
For the business leaders and ESG teams asking, How can we do better? this presents a clear and actionable path. By championing a higher standard for the fuels they endorse, they can help transform one of the world’s most difficult climate challenges into a story of innovation and opportunity. If we can turn the worlds waste into the worlds jet fuel, then every business trip, shipment, and journey can be part of the solution, not the problem.
Matti Lievonen is CEO of EcoCeres.
Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi’s credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We’d found a startup with a disruptive payments platformone that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup’s codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers.
We built the entire partnership in a silo of supporters, treating resistance as something to avoid until absolutely necessary. Then came final deal approval day. The senior executives heading risk management, compliance, legal, finance, regulatory affairs, and profit and loss (P&L) weighed in: “The regulators won’t like this.” “Have we gotten corporate approvals?” “What’s the ROI?” “We’ve never done this kind of deal.”
Deal torpedoed. Within a few years, that startup was acquired for close to $1 billion.
The loss wasn’t just financial. It was a failure to recognize that resistance contains intelligence about reality that plans built-in echo chambers inevitably miss. Colleagues felt blindsidedasked to bless a final deal rather than shape an evolving strategy. The resistance wasn’t about the idea. It was about being excluded from the journey.
I’ve spent the two decades since distinguishing the signal from the noiseand teaching leaders how to avoid the expensive mistakes we made.
Why We Keep Making the Same Mistake
Leaders faced with pushback default to a familiar playbook: build innovation in a protected silo, surround yourself with enthusiasts, keep resistors at arm’s length. The logic seems soundprotect the new thing from the “antibodies” of legacy thinking.
But here’s what we discovered the hard way: unfamiliarity, fear of the unknown, turf protectionthese weren’t just emotional reactions. They were signals. Risk and compliance leaders felt threatened because no one had involved them early enough to anticipate possible regulatory concerns. P&L managers pushed back because the project diverted resources from their quarterly targets. The resistance contained intelligence about implementation realities that an enthusiast-only team couldn’t see.
When 70% of change initiatives fail despite massive investment, the problem isn’t that people don’t understand the plan. It’s that the plan doesn’t account for what people understand about reality.
Learning to Translate Resistance Into Intelligence
The shift starts with listening differently. When someone says, “We tried this before and it didn’t work,” leaders typically hear obstruction and respond: “This time is differentwe have better technology.”
But what if you asked instead: “What specifically failed last time, and how does this approach account for those lessons?” Suddenly you’re mining history for intelligence about why elegant pilots don’t scale.
When a stakeholder says, “Our customers won’t understand this,” the dismissive response is “Of course they willwe have market research showing they favor this concept.” The intelligence-gathering response: “That’s an important observation. Where do you see the greatest failure points that we should account for?”
Or consider: “This conflicts with our other priorities.” Many leaders hear bureaucratic gatekeeping and respond by promising to “make the case” at prioritization meetings. But that’s still trying to convince. The intelligence approach: “We have a full load of urgent priorities, you’re right. Where do you see the biggest stress points this project might create?”
These aren’t just nicer ways of saying the same thing. They’re diagnostic questions that surface constraints the plan hasn’t addressed. When you ask, “Where do you see the biggest stress points?” instead of selling your solution, something shifts. You’re signaling genuine understanding, not persuasion. That act of listeningwhat former hostage negotiator Chris Voss calls “tactical empathy”builds the trust that determines whether your initiative scales or stalls.
Why This Matters More Now
AI experimentation is amplifying every dysfunction in how organizations handle resistance. Consider a common pattern: A team builds an AI assistant for customer service reps. The tech enthusiasts love it at pilot stageimpressive accuracy, clean demo, excited exec sponsors.
But they never involved actual service reps. So, they didn’t discover until scale that the assistant couldn’t handle the 20% of calls requiring human judgment, created more work documenting exceptions than it saved, and made reps feel surveilled rather than supported. Adoption stalled. The pilot became another “AI experiment that didn’t work.”
The same dynamic plays out with creative teams resisting generative AI. The pattern sounds familiar: Our brand spends millions to sound like itself. The moment we start prompting a model trained on every competitor’s campaign, we’re paying to erase what makes us different.
Beneath the pushback is stewardship of hard-won brand equity, not necessarily technophobia. The intelligence-gathering response: “What if we approach AI as rough-draft only? How might we develop explicit guardrails for tone and references to preserve what makes us distinctive?”
From Stakeholder Management to Coalition Building
Traditional stakeholder management maps who supports and who resists, then tries to convert resistors through better communication. Coalition building does something different: it engages across the spectrum from the start to build trustthe foundation that determines whether change scales.
I’ve seen this work. When innovation leaders don’t own a P&L, they face scrutiny from business unit managers who question whether “the innovation people” truly care about quarterly targets. One way through: explicitly align early experiments to P&L managers’ top prioritiesnot to convince them your idea is right, but to demonstrate you’re invested in making them successful. Shared values become the bridge when you disagree on tactics.
The Questions That Change the Conversation
In my workshops with senior leaders across financial services and other sectors, I consistently hear the same story. As one CTO told me: “We built our gen AI strategy with only the innovation team. Now we’re stuck because compliance wasn’t engaged early.”
Here’s where to start:
“What do you see that we might be missing?” Assumes intelligence in the perspective, not obstruction.
“What would need to be true for this to work in your world?” Surfaces constraints before they become deal-killers.
“What shared outcomes mattermost to both of us?” Finds the values bridge when tactics diverge.
The fundamental shift: from “How do I overcome resistance?” to “What intelligence am I missing if I don’t engage this perspective early?”
Twenty years later, companies are still building partnerships, AI pilots, and transformation initiatives in silos of supportersthe same mistake my Citi team made. Still treating resistance as friction to manage rather than intelligence to integrate: The billion-dollar missed opportunities keep piling up.
What changes when you treat resistance as the intelligence it actually contains? You build coalitions instead of echo chambers. You gain insights that improve your plan and trust that enables scale. And you stop repeating the expensive mistakes we learned from the hard way.
As an operative researcher for luxury retail companies, I spent my career grabbing onto one corporate contract after the next, like a tree-swinging retainer monkey. But in a tariff-distressed industry, those contract branches grew further and further apart until I was left hanging. Then a colleague experiencing a similar work gap said, Well, I guess were retired.
Ive been called a lot of things in my life, but nothing prepared me for the word retired. I’m a freelancer, so no one is coming to my house with a gold watch as a reward for loyal service; I have no desire to move south; and I dont play golf. My equally self-employed friend Roland had a suggestion: Why not consider myself situationally retiredthat is, retired until the phone rings.
Its funny how one word can make or break your spirit. I was crushed by retired because the concept is foreign and frightening. But adding situational made it comfortingly familiar. After all, for us freelancers every corporate contract is situational; you might even say that situational is my superpower.
A friend whos spent decades in a grueling C-suite position still cant bring himself to retire, despite vested stock and a strong financial footing. Happy or not, he remains in the grip of his job, unable to let go of a role he believes defines (and so ultimately confines) him.
Ive been an outside observer of corporate America long enough to understand his struggle, although it is not my own.
Redirecting your energy
As an independent contractor working for different companies, each with its own ecosystem, I constantly adapted my work persona to fit each unique corporate culture. Fluidity is what stabilized my career and so the loss of a fixed identity was not my retirement problem. My issue was displaced energy.
Whether writing a history of plaid for a fashion CEO or helping the VP of design at a boutique hotel chain find just the right urban neighborhoods for expansion, every project required a tremendous amount of advance work.
From sleuthing out relevant reference resources to searching for subject-specific experts, my research work was as fascinating as it was fun. I rarely left my desk yet built a national network of specialists and accumulated wide-ranging knowledge that often dovetailed, making every project a little easier. When the work slowedand then stoppedmy detective skills had nowhere to go.
I cant remember how long I was in that uncomfortable standstill until Rolands use of the word situational got me moving. To kick off Project Retirement, I went on my usual research prowl.
Every day, about 11,400 Americans turn 65the traditional retirement milestonefueling a busy and lucrative media market spanning content, publishing, and podcasts. But the most valuable operative research is not about finding the most information. It requires you to find the right informationinformation that is directional, that you can build upon, that can help steer your project to a successful conclusion.
Redefining retirement
For me, the initial guiding principles came from the YouTube channel Small Retired Life and Raina Vitanovs practical yet inspirational attitude. Her conversation about being rebellious enough to redefine and rebrand retirement broadened my understanding and freed me to choose my own norms and values. But the most significant contribution was her observation that in retirement, Productivity is not the conversation. Using the Roland method, I added a word and had a revelation: Transactional productivity is no longer my conversation.
The time between contracts used to feel borrowed; now I own it. And all that research joie de vivre that I enjoyed over my corporate years is mine to use as I like. Sit next to me if you want to talk about the architecture of Shaker communities, art in ’80s New York, or the difference between Ivy style and preppy fashion.
I also started a side gig in a small boutique where I once shopped whenever I needed to outfit myself for a rare visit into corporate America. Because Ive never had a structured straight job, I find the work to be fresh and interesting. Its also rewarding because I get to use decades of style research on real live women, many playing out their own life-shifting issues through the lens of their wardrobes.
Although Im not sure I can pull off being an introvert cosplaying as an extrovert for more than my customary two workdays a week, I might give it a shot. Because now that Ive got the hang of it, situational retirement can be whatever I want it to be.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos brings together an incongruous mix of celebrities (this year included Matt Damon, David Beckham, and Katy Perry, who was accompanying ex-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), world leaders (President Donald Trump), and nonprofit leaders. The event also reliably assembles an unrivaled group of global CEOs who offer a window into where business is heading.
Some CEOs see sunny skies ahead
This year, though, I found the window very foggyand I wasnt alone. According toPwCs 29th Global CEO Survey, released at the start of the meeting, only about a third of CEOs (30%) say they are confident about revenue growth in the next 12 months, down from 38% in 2025 and 56% in 2022. Yet Paul Griggs, CEO of PwC U.S., says the American CEOs he spoke with in Davos are feeling much more optimistic than the survey would suggest. While they acknowledge that theyre dealing with high levels of uncertainty, theyre also more prepared to deal with complexity through new workflows and processes to keep them agile. I met with 10 CEOs today, and it was a day of optimism, Griggs says.
Sharon Marcil, who leads Boston Consulting Group in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, is also seeing bright spots. A new report, BCG AI Radar 2026, finds that four out of five CEOs say they are more optimistic about the returns on their AI investments than they were a year ago. I do think 2026 is going to be a growth year, she says.
Whos feeling blue? Most consultants I spoke with say European and U.K. CEOs are less confident than their U.S.- and Asia-based counterparts.
AIs impact beyond the hype
The impact of AI on jobs was also hotly debated at Davos. While most CEOs and executives continue to insist that AI will make work better by reducing mundane tasks, a few CEOs have started to talkpublicly and privatelyabout the roles AI will eliminate and the need to prepare workers for changes.
Were focused on being completely honest with our workforce, says Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen Technologies, a digital network services provider. Johnson says the company is committed to training employees for new roles in the organization but adds, We have to reimagine what the world will look like in the future, and [employees] need to imagine a world where their current job may not exist.
Conversations about AI have also shifted away from applications (think OpenAIs ChatGPT) and agents (software that can make decisions and complete tasks) to infrastructure. Throughout the week, executives shared insights on the energy and networking capacity needed as data centers built specifically to support AI crop up.
The big question now has gone from the potential to operational reality, says Aamir Paul, president of North America Operations at energy technology company Schneider Electric. (Fast Company partnered with Schneider Electric on a series of videos in Davos.) How do we make it happen . . . getting data centers built, getting energy access, getting it in a way that it doesnt affect retail costs and consumers dont have to take the burden, and doing it in a way where were still meeting our sustainability goals?
These are daunting challenges that will require investment and inventiveness to solve. Luckily, one of BCGs recent business surveys saw a 14% uptick in mentions of innovation versus a year ago. Perhaps thats another reason for optimism in 2026.
Your views on 2026
How are you feeling about the year ahead? Do you agree with the prevailing sentiment at Davos, or are you less optimistic about whats coming? Id like to hear your thoughts and why you feel that way. Please send them to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I may use your comments in a future newsletter.
Read and watch more:
Fast Companys Brendan Vaughan offers his take on Davos
CEO insularity threatens dialogue goal at Davos
CEOs at Davos are buying the agentic AI hype
Im always amazed at how easily we give our time to others without thinking, and then are mad later when it was wasted. What exactly did we think was going to happen? That everyone was going to be prepared, productive, and appreciative?
Time has become the ultimate luxurywe never have enough of it, and are jealous of those that have it. For too many of us, endless meetings, back-to-back emails, and constant interruptions leave little room for focused, meaningful work. Additionally, in our effort to be nice or generous, we offer our time even when were running on empty.
But what if I told you that much of this time theft could be prevented with a little more mindfulness, intent, and discipline? Warren Buffett is a great example: He once shared his calendar with Bill Gates, and it was practically empty, which Gates found shocking. But Buffett was making a pointthat one of the key reasons for his success is that he fiercely guards his time, knowing that people will take your time if you let them.
Time is a nonrenewable resource, and we should be stingier with it. You can lose money and get it back, but you can never get it back lost time. Yet every day, unnecessary meetings and unproductive engagements hijack our calendars, diminishing both our productivity and morale. So why do we let it happen? Its time to rethink how we treat time: not just our own, but the time of our teams and colleagues.
Time as a Strategic Resource
Let me introduce you to the concept of time crime that is emerging in workplaces today. Time is now considered an asset, and too many people are wasting it. Its misused through poorly planned meetings, rambling conversations, and vague scheduling. This has an impact not just on productivity but missed opportunity, and as a result orgs have made bold moves to create strict policies on things like meetings. Theyve made it part of their culture change to treat time with respect, with scheduling a meeting becoming a last resort.
The idea is about mutually respecting timeyours, and others. In 2023, Shopify ruthlessly cut all recurring meetings with more than two people, resulting in 322,000 fewer hours spent in meetings in one year. Can you imagine that impact? What would you do with all that found time? For Shopify, it meant more focus and more time for deep work.
Alan Rankin, chief procurement officer at Moderna, shared an aha moment he had around time management, and it changed how he operates: I was invited to a monthly operations meeting where many senior leaders in the company attended. I was really struggling to make a meaningful contribution to the meeting. I started to put myself under pressure to contribute more and say intelligent things. Then I had the lightbulb moment: Is this what is best for the company or is this all about me? I decided to stop attending and see if anything in my universe changed. And guess what? Nothing did. And now I have more time.
Revelations like this are impactfuland essential. While there are many ways time gets stolen, meetings are usually the biggest culprit. NBCUniversal, for example, has learned that fewer participants in meetings often lead to more productive discussions. For many business units, meetings include only the minimum number of people necessary to achieve the objectives, resulting in faster decisions and more meaningful input from all attendees.
The Power of Less: Fewer People = More Productivity
The power of “less” applies to emails, reports, committees, and most certainly, to meetings. Ive never heard an organization tell me they wished their teams had more of any of these. Have you? Less equals focus, especially during meetings. When too many people are involved, important voices get drowned out. By keeping meetings lean and mean, you create an environment where only people that can contribute meaningfully attend, resulting in less distractions and more deep work.
Atlassian lets employees question the necessity of every meeting. To decrease meetings, they use tools like Slack to handle simple status updates, letting teams focus more on high-value work. The message is to use your time with intention, and to only hold meetings when absolutely necessary. Stealing time is unacceptable. When meetings are held less often, they become a valuable commodity, where teams become more focused and disciplined with peoples time.
Even Google has developed guidelines to make meetings productive and purposeful. Because innovation depends on it. Their meetings are short, focused, and to-the-point, with strict rules about minimizing unnecessary participants. The goal is to protect employees’ time by stopping lengthy, irrelevant discussions that take away from deep work. These guidelines help teams be mindful of how they spend their time, as well as how they use the time of others.
Respecting Time Equals Respecting People
Employees who feel their time is valued are more likely to be committed to their work. Time is, after all, one of the most tangible forms of respect you can show someone. At my own company, FutureThink, we regularly “uninvite” people to meetings, emphasizing that they dont need to attend the meeting and can use their time for more urgent work. People love being uninvited because it feels like a giftand our culture emphasizes that you need to use your time wisely; if you waste it on the unnecessarythats on you. The goal is for people to understand that time is something worth protecting.
Guard Time Like Its Your Most Valuable Asset
Stop letting your calendar be overrun with things you do need to really do, and start using your time with intent. The next time someone asks for your time, ask yourself: Is this meeting truly necessary? Is this the best use of my time, and their time? Doing this will not only protect your own productivity but also foster a culture where everyones time is treated as the invaluable resource it truly is.
Remember how much fun it was to shop on the internet a decade ago?
If you visited the Goop website, Gwyneth Paltrow might introduce you to her favorite $75 candle or $95 vibrator. If you were looking for a lasagne recipe, you could find a good one on Food52along with recommendations for a baking dish hand-selected by former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser. Watch-lovers flocked to Hodinkee to see what founder Benjamin Clymer thought of the cool new Longines or Omega timepiece (with a handy link to buy it, in case you really liked it).
At their peak, around five years ago, all of these media companies landed millions of dollars in venture capital and had valuations well into the nine figures. Legacy media ranging from the New Yorker to Vogue took a page from their book, too, linking to products you could buy directly from the pieces published on their websites.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Kerry Washington speak during a live recording of the Goop podcast, September 19, 2019 [Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Goop]
But over the last two years, this generation of content-to-commerce pioneers has fizzled out. Goop has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs and its website is a shell of what it used to be. In 2024, Hodinkee was sold at a fraction of its former valuation. And last month, Food52 declared bankruptcy and is headed towards a fire sale.
It’s worth asking what happened to these startupsand what comes next, as AI transforms the way we shop online.
The rise and fall of Food52
The rise and fall of Food52 offers insight into what went wrong with the content-to-commerce model. Founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs had come from the traditional food media. They saw a gap between legacy magazines like Bon Appétit and Food & Wine, which prioritized the perspectives of elite chefs, and amateur food blogs, which were flooding the internet. With Food52, they invited home cooks to submit recipes, which their team would test. The best ones would be featured on the site, alongside beautiful photography. The concept resonated and site traffic grew quickly.
Initially, the company generated revenue from advertising and brand partnerships. But in 2013, the site launched a shop that sold kitchenware and artisanal ingredients that Food52 staffers recommended. This approach made sense says Dan Frommer, founder of The New Consumer. One of the biggest problems with shopping online is the overwhelming volume of products available. First generation content-to-commerce startups offered expertise and a point of view, which gave them the authority to recommend products. “They were offering curation, which was a valuable service at the time,” he says.
No-Bake Granola Bars from the Food52 Vegan’s cookbook by Gena Hamshaw, ca. 2015. [Photo: Melissa Renwick/Toronto Star/Getty Images]
Goop and Hodinkee followed similar trajectories. They began as blogs centered around a particular perspective and aspirational lifestyle, driven by their well-known founders. Over time, they built up enough trust with their readers to sell them products. (Food52 declined to comment on the story. We reached out to Goop and Hodinkee, but neither got back to us by the time of publication.)
In 2019 and 2020, investors still believed this might be the future of retail. They pumped millions into their startups to grow their audiences, start new revenue streams like events, and start their own product lines. Food52, for instance, was valued at $300 million in 2021, after an $80 million investment from TCG (which also invested in Hodinkee).
But this funding may have inadvertently led to their decline. With the influx of cash, these startups had a mandate to scale, but they all struggled to grow sustainably. By the start of this year, Food52 had declared bankruptcy. America’s Test Kitchen has reportedly agreed to buy it for $6.5 million, of which $3.42 million is Chapter 11 financing.
Frommer argues that there were many idiosyncratic reasons why each of these companies failed. Food52, for instance, appeared to have bitten off more than it could chew. In 2019, it launched its own in-house kitchenware line; it also acquired two entirely new companies, the Danish cookware brand Dansk and the lighting brand Schoolhouse. “There was a lot wrong with the business,” Frommer says. “There were failures in strategy and execution.”
But taking a step back, it’s clear that there were also broader issues with the content-to-commerce model that affected all of these businesses.
What Didn’t Workand What Did
Theseearly content-to-commerce platforms accurately identified that consumers were overwhelmed with the avalanche of products available on the internetand they also knew that taste could be monetized. Still, there were flaws with their model.
For one thing, consumers often didn’t come to these websites with the intent to shop. They were there to take in the content: the recipes, listicles of clean beauty products, or a conversation with Ed Sheeran about his favorite watches. Only a small proportion of consumers would feel compelled to buy a product. Often, when a publication’s famous founder recommended a product, it would sell better; but over time, as the sites grew to have teams of writers, the sites no longer conveyed the distinct sensibilities of Paltrow, Hesser, or Clymer.
Then there were the economics. It is hard to make money by marketing other brand’s products. These sites generated small amounts of revenue by selling products at a markup on their online stores or by making a commission by driving the customer to another brand’s website. All of these companies realized that a more profitable route was to make their own products, which they all did, from Goop’s beauty and fashion lines to Hodinkee’s watch straps and limited edition collaborations with brands like Longines. But this meant building out teams with expertise in designing and sourcing products, which was also a major investment.
Finally, there was all the competition. Other media sites quickly realized they, too, could create a new revenue stream by linking to products. And some began doing it much more effectively. In 2016, for instance, the New York Times acquired Wirecutter for $30 million. Unlike Food52, Goop, and Hodinkee, Wirecutter was designed to help consumers at the moment when they were ready to buy a product. New York Magazine built its own product recommendation site called The Strategist, which has a similar model.
“Content that really drives commerce is not just ambient recommendations around fun articles,” says Frommer. “It’s really purpose-driven content designed to help the consumer solve a problem. The majority of traffic to Wirecutter and The Strategist happens at the moment of needthey promote their humidifier recommendations when the winter air is dry.”
The content-to-commerce model hasn’t disappeared; it has shape shifted. There are now massive players like Wirecutter that dominate the landscape. And at the other end of the spectrum, there are armies of individual content creators who recommend products to their followers on Substack, Instagram, or TikTok. It’s just the middle of the market that has collapsed.
But as with everything on the internet, change is constant. And everything we know about how to shop online is about to get transformed by AI, which is already where many people begin their shopping journey. In many ways, AI agents are the ultimate blending of content and commerce: They offers product recommendations, personalized to the user, presented within a conversation. But what’s missing from AI is a unique point of view or sensibilitywhich is what the early content-to-commerce players excelled in.
In an AI-driven shopping future, the winners wont be the smartest algorithms. It’ll be the ones that blend data with something that feels like taste.
When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen (The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses.
The reason for this unusual social interaction is called An Ark, which bills itself as the first play to be created in mixed-reality. Using Magic Leap glasses, the play blends the physical world with the digital realm, creating an unusually intimate theater experience. Opening January 21 at The Shedthe arts center in Manhattans Hudson YardsAn Ark tells a story of humanity through the perspective of four unnamed characters speaking to you from the afterlife.
The charactersplayed by McKellen, Golda Rosheuvel of Bridgerton fame, Rosie Sheehy (a Welsh stage and screen actor, known for her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company,) and Arinzé Kene (a British actor and playwright who originated the lead role of Bob Marley in the West End musical Get Up, Stand Up!)appear to sit in a semi-circle that you, a member of the audience, are part of. From the second they appear on stage, their eyes peer straight into your soul as they talk directly to you for the length of the play, which lasts 47 minutes.
The illusion, which some might find disconcerting, is that each member of the audience is the center of the attention. In a purely physical world, this conceit would be impossible to realize unless the play were performed privately, one audience member at a time. But with the help of technology, it was convincing enough to elicit an unconscious smile from meuntil my brain caught up to the trickery and the magic spell broke.
[Photo: Marc J. Franklin/courtesy The Shed]
The making of a mixed-reality play
An Ark was written by British playwright Simon Stephens, who is perhaps most famous for his stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and directed by Sarah Frankcom, a British director known for her work at the Royal Exchange and National Theatre. The mastermind is Todd Eckert, who both conceived of and produced the play.
[Photo: Marc J. Franklin/courtesy The Shed]
Eckert built a decades-long career in music journalism, film, and dance before embracing technology for its ability to liberate storytelling. In 2012, he joined Magic Leap as director of content development, where he helped pioneer mixed-reality hardware. Four years later, in 2016, he founded a mixed-reality studio called Tin Drum, bought 400 Magic Leap headsets, which he owns to this day, and set out to change what theater could be.
First came The Life, a mixed-reality project with his long-time partner, the artist Marina Abramoviæ. Then came Kagami, an ethereal, mixed-reality concert by the Japanese composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who collaborated with Eckert to create the show before he passed away.
Kagami, which first premiered at The Shed in 2023, and has since toured globally, was so dazzling that I wept when I attended a performance in Manhattan. Eckert is immensely proud of the work, but he says An Ark was even more ambitious. Nobody had ever captured four people simultaneously, he says of the underlying technology.
[Photo: Tin Drum]
The team gathered in London, where they rehearsed An Ark like you would rehearse a traditional play, from beginning to end, with no interruption. Then, they flew to Grenoble, in southeastern France, where 4DViews, the company that designed the volumetric video system that can capture all four actors in full 3D, is headquartered.
In Grenoble, they filmed the play under the scrutiny of 48 cameras, including a cluster of two cameras that stood in for the eventual audience members. We ultimately got three full takes, Eckert recalls of the shoot, which took place in an entirely green room he’s previously likened to Kermit land.
After three months of data processing, the play was ready for opening night.
[Photo: Marc J. Franklin/courtesy The Shed]
What’s next for theater?
Theater is becoming an increasingly endangered art form. Since the pandemic, audiences have been slower to return to in-person performances, production costs have climbed, and public funding has shrunk. Across the country, regional theaters have been cutting back seasons and are still struggling to recover, while Broadway budgets now routinely reach into the tens of millions. As a result, ticket prices have risen, often putting live theater out of reach for younger audiences and first-time attendees.
There is an entire community of people who feel art is not being made for them, says Daniel Sherman, a San Francisco-based artist who has been producing theater since 2010, and who also recently finished a play in mixed-reality (though it hasn’t been staged yet.) If we can add a tech component, and meet people where they are, maybe this could be the thing that brings in younger audiences, he says.
One of the obvious promises of the mixed-reality technology is it could make theater more accessible. With no actors to tour, no sets to build or transport, and far fewer recurring labor and logistics costs tied to global touring, a mixed-reality play should be a lot more affordable than a traditional production. (A ticket for An Ark costs around $45.)
There are other benefits, too. As producers around the world continue to rethink the genre, technology is increasingly being used not as a cost-cutting tool, but as a way to stretch what theater can do. In the Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, director Kip Williams used live video capture to allow a single performer (Sarah Snook) to inhabit multiple characters at once in ways that would be difficult to achieve through traditional staging alone. And in Briar & Rose, an augmented-reality childrens play that ran across Europe, Glitch studio combined physical performance with augmented reality technology, placing audiences inside a layered narrative space rather than in front of a fixed stage.
[Photo: Marc J. Franklin/courtesy The Shed]
Still, some have been skeptical of technologys potential for years. Sarah Frankcom, An Ark‘s very own director, used to be one of them. In fact, when Eckert first approached her, she refused the job, arguing, as Eckert recalls, that she was not interested in technology; she was interested in humans in a room.
What made her change her mind? She experienced Kagami through the glasses. I was intrigued by how it put an audience in a different relationship to a live experience and the possibilities of its intimacy, she told me in an email. I was excited by the way it could summon up a communal experience.
Frankcom says that working with this particular technology has reframed her ideas of what theater could be. This feels like the beginning of a new form, she wrote. And whilst there is no live acting in a traditional sense, Ive been very struck by how much an audience interact with the actors and how they laugh, cry and reach to hold their hands.
[Photo: Marc J. Franklin/courtesy The Shed]
What do we gain and what do we lose with technology?
Is a play still a play if there are no live actors on stage? Perhaps that’s a matter of semantics. Or perhaps it helps to consider a definition of theater that doesn’t focus on the physicality of the experience, but rather the emotions that it conjures up.
The technology promises cinematic realism, and it mostly delivers. While some glitches made the actors’ arms and feet flicker and stretch into their surroundings (glitches Eckert says he could fix if he had unlimited funds) their faces looked as real as they could through a pair of eyeglasses. The team also fine-tuned the distance between the actors and audience members so the experience feels as intimate as it would in real life. (You can’t ever see all four actors at the same time, forcing you to turn your head to stay engaged.) But there is only so much realism to conjure when all it takes to break the spell is to peek underneath the glasses and see a room full of bespectacled people staring into nothing.
[Photo: Marc J. Franklin/courtesy The Shed]
I like to think I would have felt the story in my bones if only the actors had delivered it to me in real life. But I will never be able to put my theory to the test because this exact play, in this exact configuration, could never be performed without technology.
What can we do that’s not possible in any other way? Eckert first wondered when brainstorming what the play could be with Simmons. The idea, he says, was never to supplant traditional theater but rather to broaden its potential and having actors of such great caliber address audience members in such an intimate setting accomplishes just that.
Art, I think, is ultimately a way of making sense of things that don’t make sense, Eckert told me after the show. If Ian McKellen ushered me off stage to guide me into the afterlife, it would not make sense without a strong sense of suspended disbelief. But here, in the hazy world that only mixed-reality can afford, it does.
A lot of people chase bigger paychecks and fancier titles, convinced that their next role will finally make them happy. I know I did.
Thats why I spent years stuck in a job that, on paper, many would consider glamorous. But deep down inside, I knew it was toxic. I took on more and more responsibilities, kept a chaotic schedule, and bent over backwards to please my demanding boss. All because I thought thats what it took to be successful.
Then I would get home and push myself more, scrolling job boards, tweaking my résumé, and submitting applications. I was working around the clock, and rest wasnt an option. All because I was convinced that a new role would change everything.
But my job was never the real problem. And, chances are, it isnt yours either.
Burnout is the real culprit
The real issue? You work too hard, stress too much, and rest too little. Of course youre struggling.
As a certified health coach, Ive learned that most people misunderstand what burnout actually is. They think theyre just tired and in need of a good sleep or a long weekend. But really, its chronic stress and exhaustion, and that doesnt magically disappear after a few days off. Take Headways recent survey, 24% of people returned from the festive break feeling like they hadnt rested at all.
In the early stages, burnout causes low energy and constant fatigue. Then brain fog creeps in. Your concentration drops, you become forgetful, and your brain slows. So you work harder to compensate, yet get less done, and your workload piles up. You push through anyway, because you dont want to fail, but that only makes things worse.
And that little voice in the back of your head telling you to quit? Thats another clear sign. Burnout breeds cynicism, which fuels disillusionment and distrust towards your employer. When everything is awful, even your dream role can start to feel unbearable.
But chances are, the grass wont be any greener if you dont first change the way you work.
Why quitting your job wont fix everything
Headways recent survey found that 24% of people are looking for a new job or considering an entirely different career path. But handing in your resignation isnt always the fix that you hope it to be.
Starting a new role is a major life change, and 87% experience the “new job jitters.” You want to impress, and you’re terrified of failing, so you work harder than ever. You tell yourself youll rest once youve proven yourself. Then the thrill of quitting wears off, and you somehow feel just as drained (if you’re lucky). Feeling worse off, 30% end up wishing they had never left their old role.
The thing is, the job was never the issue. As human beings, were just not meant to juggle everything and never switch off. Many of us try to do so anyway, and that is a recipe for burnout.
If youre thinking of jumping roles or changing careers, try going easier on yourself first. Give yourself time to recover, and you might just realize that your workplace isnt toxic. You do, however, probably need to change how youre working.
More effort isnt the answer
And that doesnt mean putting in more effort. What you really need is capacity, and you cant magically increase your brains bandwidth by demanding more from yourself. That just drains your capacity further.
This means working smarter with what you have. Start by setting boundaries and building healthier working habits. Log off at 5 p.m., take your whole lunch break, and stop trying to prove your worth through overworking.
Saying “yes” to everything and taking on tasks that arent your responsibility doesnt help anyone. It only wastes energy, and as a result, you don’t have as much energy for the work that you really need to do (and makes the most impact).
Prioritizing yourself and setting boundaries doesnt mean you care any less. It means you understand that you cant work well unless you feel well.
Research shows that burnout causes the hippocampus to shrink and damages the brains neuroplasticity. It literally reduces our mental capacity, harming everything from memory to focus, and impulse control to executive function. But once you stop overworking, you should feel your brain clear, and your mental capacity should grow.
Dont leave burnout in charge of your career
Burnout has a way of convincing us that everything is awful and that only drastic measures, whether moving to Bali or changing careers, will help. But thats just your stress response. After fighting for so long, its easy to see why flight feels like the only option. But youve been fighting the wrong thing.
To do it, its important to address the cause and give your mind time to recover. Only then can you decide with any real clarity whether a career change will actually solve your problems.
Federal immigration agents stationed in Minneapolis need not read polls or confront protesters to know how the city feels about their presence. Walking around just about any neighborhood in the area lately should provide a glimpse into the vast sprawl of graffiti and homemade yard signs expressing residents bone-deep aversion to ICE. One poster in particular, though, has been increasingly decorating the storefront windows of local restaurants, coffee shops, yarn stores, pubs, and bowling alleys, urging in no uncertain terms: ICE out of Minneapolis.
This sign seems to have struck a chord within the community, not just because of its blunt message but the form its riffing on: a familiar red municipal sign highlighting snow emergency routes, already strewn throughout streets in the Twin Cities. While the original evokes the grill of a snowplow truck clearing out roads in the wake of a blizzard, the anti-ICE version includes helmets, rifles and handcuffs in the slushy waste. The new signs growing popularity suggests its tapping into residents regional identity as much as it is their love of creative protest art.
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Reimagining a local icon
Burlesque of North America, a local design studio specializing in graphic arts and screenprinting, created the sign as a response to ICEs incursion into Minneapolis. Owners Mike Davis and Wes Winship had previously created an anti-ICE enamel pin back in November when they first got the eerie sense something like Operation Metro Surge lay on the horizon.
After their friends who run the nearby restaurant Hola Arepa were targeted by ICE in early December, the Burlesque team began playing with ideas for a protest poster. It didn’t take long for them to arrive at a concept rooted in the transportation departments snow emergency sign.
[Photo: Elizabeth W. Kearley/Getty Images]
We’ve been figuring out how to handle literal ice here for centuries, Winship says. And weve got this sign that’s pre-built, alerting people: There’s an emergency and we need to remove frozen precipitation from the streets.
It was clean, crisp iconography, on which to project a message of resistance. On top of that, it was instantly recognizable.
For the locals, everyone knows the sign. Everyone’s been living with it and responding to it, says Davis. But even people from out of town who don’t know the reference, they can still tell what it means and connect with it.
After working on a mockup, the two paused on the project as the holidays kicked into high gear. It remained set aside until January 7, the day an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. That drastic escalation spurred the pair back into action on their poster. By the following night, Davis and Winship had completed all the design elements. The next day, theyd screenprinted the first of what would become over 5,000 copies to distribute around Minneapolis. They also offered free PDFs on their website, an open-source touch allowing out-of-towners to print signs and shirts of their own.
[Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images]
The power of posters
Although projects like concert posters are Burlesques bread and butter, the team has been rooted in socially conscious art for ages. Amid the Syrian refugee crisis, for instance, they created a Refugees Welcome image that went viral in 2015 when the Walker Art Center featured it and several news outlets ultimately wrote about it. After George Floyd was killed in 2020, Davis and Winship printed out several artists protest graphics for free and handed out copies from their delivery truck at the intersection quickly dubbed George Floyd Square.
Its in that very area where the citys love of protest art is most evidentmade manifest by the iconic raised fist of steel in Floyds memory, designed by artist Jerome Powell-Karis.
The Burlesque team have now seen, once again, how much that love still radiates throughout the city during moments of upheaval. As they handed out their anti-ICE posters, restaurant and shop owners lit up at the sight of it. Davis brought 600 copies to a protest in Powderhorn Park the weekend after Good was killed, and his supply was picked clean within 15 minutes. When the team later asked for donations to cover their ink and paper costs, they hit their goal in three days. Meanwhile, the response on Instagram was unlike anything the pair had ever experienced.
We’re still being contacted almost hourly by someone who either wants one or wants an entire stack to give away at their bike shop or trivia night, Davis says.
The signs seem especially resonant at restaurants, where some owners are now opting to keep their doors locked during daytime hours to prevent ICE from entering. Local service workers seem haunted by recent reports of ICE agents eating at a restaurant in a town outside of Minneapolis, only to detain several employees afterward. The anti-ICE signs add some extra oomph to the locked doors, and let prospective diners know where the establishment stands. (Many restaurants without this particular sign have homemade anti-ICE signage of their own.)
Although the snow emergency poster has started gaining a lot of traction, it feels perfectly at home among all the other protest art on display throughout the citywhether its the signs featuring Minnesota state bird, the loon, melting ice with laser eyes, an image with roots in local lore; all the inventive DIY anti-ICE entries at last weekends Art Sled Rally; or the ubiquitous stickers depicting melted ice. The Twin Cities community has clearly come together around its resistance to the current siege and Burlesque is happy to have helped play some small part in it.
I’m not going to be out there with a gas mask at the Federal Building, catching rubber bullets, Davis says. So, it feels good that I have something to contribute to the cause. Like, I’m a graphic designer. This is what I can do.
Apple will turn its Siri assistant into a full-fledged chatbot by next year. The company is working on a personal AI device to compete with the one OpenAI is building with Jony Ive. And Apple is putting control over its AI strategy into new hands within the company. So say a flurry of new reports, all advancing the larger story that Apple is doing what it can to get itself back in the AI race.
And its doing it in a way that may allow it, in classic Apple fashion, to lead from behind. That is, it may hang back and benefit from the hard lessons learned by others marketing a new technology, then arrive fashionably late with a more polished product.
Apple and Google announced on January 12 that the (notoriously slow) Siri assistant will be powered, at least in part, by Gemini models developed by Googles DeepMind division. Apple has in the past voiced concern about the privacy implications of sending user data to AI models outside its own infrastructure. Apple has said it plans to run its AI models either within a secure Apple cloud, or, even better, on chips inside Apple devices.
Bringing in Gemini
But that may be changing. Bloombergs Mark Gurman reports that Apple is now in talks with Google to run the Gemini models powering Siri and Apple Intelligence features within the Google Cloud. Previous reports said Apple could be paying Google as much as $1 billion per year for access to the Gemini models.
The new Siri is expected to show up with iOS 26.4 in March or April, the report states. The assistant will reportedly gain a better contextual understanding of the user by accessing some types of personal data stored on the users device. It may also have an awareness of what the user is viewing or working on on their screen, as well as better internet search. These are the same Apple Intelligence” features the company promised to deliver in 2024, but later postponed, explaining that it wasnt happy with the performance and reliability of the AI.
Then, in 2027, another upgrade will make Siri feel more like a real chatbot, meaning that users will be able to have extended back-and-forth exchanges with the assistant (including via their voice), as is common with OpenAIs ChatGPT and Googles Gemini chatbots. Apple also plans to integrate the smarter Siri deeper into the operating system, which could make it a more functional intermediary between the user and the capabilities of the device.
The Information reports that Apple is also in the early stages of developing a small personal AI deviceabout the size of an AirTagthat can clip to a lapel and contains two cameras, three microphones, a little speaker, a battery, and inductive charging tech. (A patent search yielded no Apple designs fitting this description.) OpenAI attracted a lot of attention last year after announcing that it was developing a personal AI device in collaboration with Apples former design guru Jony Ive. Its worth noting, however, that other companies have tried selling such a product, notably Humane (founded by some ex-Applers), and none have found much success.
A new AI leader inside Apple
The Google Gemini deal and the AI device reports come in the wake of a pretty major power shift at Apple regarding the companys AI strategy. Apple struggled for years to build its own AI models under the leadership of ex-Google AI chief John Giannandrea (while balancing its historical concern for data privacy), and failed to deliver models that performed like those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Now Apple has reportedly put its consumer AI problems in the lap of software chief Craig Fedherighi, who is known for his tall hair and utilitarian (and somewhat skeptical) views on the new technology. Fedherighi has viewed AI as an enabling technology that should work behind the scenes to make phone features work better. Hes also expressed concern over the predictability and reliability of the technology.
Fedherighi is taking the reins at a pivotal moment. Apple is in a tough spot with AI. It fears the appearance of falling further behind OpenAI (and the punishment it might take from Wall Street), but its also traditionally hesitant to rush into an emerging technology that isnt yet totally proven and reliable (AI chatbots still make mistakes and consumers dont fully trust them). Apple is most comfortable taking a mature technology (like cell phones) and reinventing it for the mainstream with simplicity, utility, and artful design.
So partnering with Google, talking about plans for new Gemini-powered features in the future, and preparing a personal AI device might be just the right moves for Apple right now. The deal with Google buys Apple time while its own researchers find ways to balance the twin needs of data privacy and high-performing models. (It might also shift some of the responsibility onto Google if the new Siri doesnt work as promised.)
Being late has worked out before
Theres precedent for this. Apple relied on Intel processors in its computers while it built up the expertise and experience to make its own. Apple used Intel processors in its Mac computers for 15 years, before switching its lineup to Apple-designed chips. But planning the features of future Macs was difficult because it all depended on Intels roadmap for releasing new chips. Apple became acutely aware of the speed and efficiency gains to be had from designing custom chips that could be deeply integrated with its Mac operating system. Those improvements were first realised in the companys first M-series Macs in late 2020.
Apple also relied entirely on Qualcomm cellular modem chips for the iPhone before it was able to build its own. The first Apple-designed modem, the C1, shipped inside the iPhone 16e in 2025. While Qualcomm says it will continue to supply modems for iPhones in 2026, Apples intent is to build its own modem into the integrated silicon system-on-a-chip processor that powers iPhones, which could yield faster and more reliable cellular connections.
However, in other cases, like internet search, Apple has been content to rely on Google as a partner. Who knows, Apple may believe generative AI will become a commodity in the future (models are indeed getting more efficient and cheaper to access), something it would rather buy than build.
he news of an Apple AI device doesnt hurt either. It shows an Apple that still has the appetite to mold emergent technologies into its own image and bring them to the mainstream, even without Ives.
Apples relationship with generative AI is seen as rocky and mainly unsuccessful so far. That narrative may have seeped through the shell of Apples spaceship in Cupertino and caused a rush to ship a technology that wasnt quite baked. The hype around generative AI is so thick now that were quick to judge any technology company that isnt betting the farm on it.
But its part of Apples culture to take the long view on new technology waves (notice that it didnt change the company name when the metaverse was having its moment). Its hesitation, intentional or not, may give it more time to judge the real scale of the AI revolution, and more time to understand what it all should mean to Apple and its customers.
