Oct 20, 2021

How Netflix wants to get the next ‘Squid Game’ Netflix's latest earnings results show that its bet on global content production is paying off. 142 million Netflix subscribers watched "Squid Game" within the show's first four weeks. Image: Netflix October 19, 2021 Call it the "Squid Game" effect: Netflix posted better-than-expected earnings results Tuesday afternoon, adding nearly 4.4 million subscribers during Q3, and forecasting another 8.5 million additional members for the holiday quarter. This comes after Netflix added just 1.5 million members in Q2, a quarter during which the company had lost 430,000 subscribers in North America. In Q3, Netflix not only reversed that trend by adding 70,000 North American subscribers, it also posted massive gains overseas. Most notably, Netflix added almost 2.2 million members in the APAC region — the biggest gain there since early 2020. Some of the Q3 growth, and a good chunk of the Q4 forecast, may be attributable to "Squid Game," the South Korean horror drama that became Netflix's biggest global show to date soon after its launch in mid-September. Netflix told investors Tuesday that 142 million of its 214 million subscribers watched the show during its first four weeks on the service. "'Squid Game' is incredible," said Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings while donning a track suit similar to the ones worn by the show's characters. "Squid Game" isn't Netflix's only global success story: The newest season of Spanish hit show "La Casa de Papel" was watched by 69 million subscribers, while British "Sex Education" attracted 55 million viewers. "Great stories truly can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere," executives wrote in their letter to investors, which also highlighted that the company is now producing originals in 45 countries. "Stories can increasingly come from anywhere in the world," co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during the company's earnings call. "Storytellers ... from everywhere in the world will pave the way that TV and film is made in the future." This week's earnings were overshadowed by discontent among Netflix employees over the company's handling of its latest Dave Chappelle comedy special, which has been criticized for including transphobic remarks. Trans employees and their allies have planned to stage a walk-out Wednesday to demand disclaimers for transphobic content as well as more investments in content produced by trans creators and the hiring of trans executives. Executives didn't comment on the controversy at all during the call, but Sarandos had previously claimed that Chappelle's anti-trans jokes wouldn't translate to real-world harm — statements that were rejected by both current and former employees. (He later apologized .) Netflix further infuriated employees with the firing of one of the trans employees who had been vocal about the Chappelle special. The dismissal reportedly came after internal data about the special as well as "Squid Game" was leaked to the media. Thanks to that leak, we now know that Netflix paid $24.1 million for Dave Chappelle's latest special — more than what the company spent on all nine episodes of "Squid Game," as Bloomberg's Screentime newsletter reported this weekend. Chappelle's previous Netflix comedy special has reportedly been viewed by 24 million accounts — dwarfed by the audience of global hits like "Squid Game" or "La Casa de Papel," and perhaps driving home the point that global shows are a key part of the company's future. On Tuesday, Sarandos credited Netflix's technology and delivery infrastructure with turning these international shows into hits, but he also described the company's global content business as a kind of flywheel that benefits from each success story. "We can promise international creators the possibility of having a 'Squid Game' experience," he said. NOTE: Protocol has been acquired by Axel Springer, whose chairman and chief executive officer, Mathias Döpfner, is on the board of Netflix. Update: This post was updated Oct. 19 to include the fact that co-CEO Ted Sarandos later apologized for his statements. Janko Roettgers ( @jank0 ) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland. Facebook's David Marcus says it's still committed to Diem. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images October 19, 2021 Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron ) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com. October 19, 2021 Facebook no longer has to explain when it's rolling out its Novi cryptocurrency wallet. But the limited test it started Tuesday raises more questions than it answers. The pilot of the wallet, available as an app in most of the U.S. and Guatemala, is meant to test core features of the product, as well as customer care and compliance, Facebook's David Marcus said in a tweet . That's clear enough. Facebook's larger payments and crypto strategy remains opaque — especially because Diem, the stablecoin that stirred up so much controversy when Facebook first proposed it two years ago, isn't part of the pilot. How Novi works People with the Novi wallet can convert dollars or other fiat currency into USDP stablecoins, send those to other wallets, take money back out of the wallet in local currencies and even withdraw cash at certain locations or transfer it to a bank account, depending on where the user lives. The plan is for the Novi wallet to interoperate with other digital wallets. The USDP stablecoin is issued by Paxos Trust Company, which is backed 1-to-1 by U.S. dollars, and regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Coinbase is providing custody for storage of customers' funds. This initial version of the Novi wallet has a limited but not insignificant market: people sending remittances between Guatemala and the U.S. Marcus noted that remittances make up 14% of Guatemala's GDP, the vast majority of which is from the U.S. The World Bank estimates that the average remittance cost out of the U.S. in 2020 was 5.1%. Novi won't be available in Alaska, Nevada, New York or the U.S. Virgin Islands. It wasn't clear what regulatory hurdles remained in those territories. Customer service Novi offers customer service via chat in Spanish and English. Facebook said it is "encrypting sensitive financial information" and has "built-in protections against fraud." One differentiator may be Novi's ability to undo transactions, which is different from how cryptocurrency transactions typically work. Coinbase, for example, says that transactions can't be "cancelled or altered" once they're initiated . It's unclear if the money in question would be sent back for unauthorized transactions or if Facebook is in some way covering the cost of undoing transactions. Facebook isn't the first to conceive of reversible crypto transactions. Crypto firm Kirbo has a crypto "undo button" for several tokens including its own kiro token. In traditional payments, chargeback and fraud costs are part of what's paid for by the interchange fees charged to merchants. Business model Facebook's wallet is designed for payments, with merchants paying lower-than-usual fees to accept Novi. As with traditional credit and debit cards, those fees fund the payments system. "On the Novi side, it's basically to create the best possible digital wallet that will enable anyone, no matter where you are, to have access to the financial system and move money around for free," Marcus previously told Protocol's David Pierce. But building out a payments network, as Marcus knows from his PayPal days, is not simple. It has to convince merchants, which have a wide range of options for payments processing, to use Novi. Facebook plans to monetize Novi by providing "merchant services" with "low rates for merchants to accept payments," Marcus told David Pierce, noting that merchants pay high rates in the U.S. Facebook's plan is to offer cheaper rates, undercutting other providers. It's unclear how Facebook will manage fraud and customer service costs while keeping its fees cheaper. If it expands Novi beyond the current limited pilot, Facebook could push its massive user base of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users to try out Novi. But Facebook has a problem: It has long offered payments and free money-transfer services within Messenger, which Marcus previously ran. Those services have a not insignificant number of users. But they lack the cultural cachet of apps like PayPal's Venmo. Square's Cash App even became a popular hip hop namecheck . If no one's saying "Messenger me," is anyone going to say "Novi me"? The crypto competition Just as merchants have a number of payment processing options, consumers have a range of options for sending money. Remittances have historically been expensive, but World Bank data shows the cost of sending money out of the U.S. falling steadily over the past decade. There is no mainstream crypto-based product for sending money overseas, at least in the U.S., but there are a number of consumer payment options with more on the way, many using technology to reduce costs. If individuals want a crypto wallet, there are offerings from Coinbase and others that convert fiat to crypto and back and support a range of different cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. Some of these wallets or other services are used to send remittances internationally. Guatemala's neighbor El Salvador, for example, offers a Chivo wallet from crypto firm Bitso that is designed to enable bitcoin transfers to and from the U.S. El Salvador is attempting to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, in part to reduce remittance costs. "There are many better ways to transfer money or crypto than Facebook — Coinbase for one, so if as a user I know Coinbase is the custodian, I'm just going to use Coinbase," said Melody Brue, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. Carpe Diem? The Novi wallet will go without Diem for now — even though that was a major reason for its existence at the outset. And that makes the questions around the future of the Diem stablecoin more urgent. Diem was once known as Libra, and the Novi wallet was originally called Calibra. Though originally conceived by Facebook, Diem is now run by a nonprofit which has a number of companies involved, Facebook among them. Now, Diem is waiting for regulatory approval to launch in the U.S. It reportedly has switched from seeking a license in Switzerland to moving operations to the U.S. , and partnered with crypto-focused bank Silvergate to launch a dollar-backed token. But the regulatory path for any stablecoin, let alone Diem with its history, is unclear. Lawmakers summoned Marcus to testify before Congress about Libra in 2019. On Tuesday, five Democratic senators, including Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, called on Facebook to shut down Novi and "not bring Diem to market," noting that Facebook committed to not launch a digital currency without regulatory approval. "Despite these assurances, Facebook is once again pursuing digital currency plans on an aggressive timeline and has already launched a pilot for a payments infrastructure network, though these plans are incompatible with the actual financial regulatory landscape — not only for Diem specifically, but also for stablecoins in general," they wrote. Regulators have concerns, too. The Federal Reserve is expected to release a much anticipated report on stablecoins, which financial officials increasingly view as a risk to the stability of the financial system: If investors start questioning the reserves behind a coin, that could prompt a run on that coin or stablecoins in general, forcing a sell-off of reserve assets which could in turn jeopardize the broader markets. Facebook says it still supports Diem. However, since Facebook is now only one of a group of companies backing the project, it's less clear what the relationship between Novi and Diem really is and why it matters. "I do want to be clear that our support for Diem hasn't changed and we intend to launch Novi with Diem once it receives regulatory approval and goes live. We care about interoperability and we want to do it right," Marcus said in a tweet. Keep ReadingShow less Kate Silver is an award-winning reporter and editor with 15-plus years of journalism experience. Based in Chicago, she specializes in feature and business reporting. Kate's reporting has appeared in the Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic's CityLab, Atlas Obscura, The Telegraph and many other outlets. September 21, 2021 The way we work has fundamentally changed. COVID-19 upended business dealings and office work processes, putting into hyperdrive a move towards digital collaboration platforms that allow teams to streamline processes and communicate from anywhere. According to the International Data Corporation , the revenue for worldwide collaboration applications increased 32.9 percent from 2019 to 2020, reaching $22.6 billion; it's expected to become a $50.7 billion industry by 2025. "While consumers and early adopter businesses had widely embraced collaborative applications prior to the pandemic, the market saw five years' worth of new users in the first six months of 2020," said Wayne Kurtzman, research director of social and collaboration at IDC. "This has cemented collaboration, at least to some extent, for every business, large and small." Businesses using these applications before the pandemic may have had a smoother transition to remote work. That was the case for British footwear brand Dr. Martens , which had been using the Asana platform to streamline work and communications for its global marketing team. Asana allows businesses of all sizes to organize strategic initiatives; monitor timelines, status and workloads across team projects; provide feedback on documents; request approvals on work; automate work processes and more. When COVID-19 caused offices to close, Stacey Kemp, who is the creative services manager at Dr. Martens, says Asana helped them adapt. "With 2020 forcing us to drastically change our way of working, our 'facetime' initially went up and productivity within work hours plummeted. To combat this, we had to get much better at giving clear instructions, feedback, and having discussions via written word. Asana helped us bring everyone's thought process into one centralized place," she says. This fall, as enterprises everywhere decide whether to return to the office, continue working remotely or establish a hybrid working model, collaborative technology platforms will be more important than ever, says Anne Raimondi, chief operating officer of Asana. "As we continue in uncertain times, a platform that allows for well coordinated and distributed work is a must-have for any nimble organization. It allows work to continue in-person or remotely, with consistency, reliability and maximum flexibility." "When organizations are able to forge ahead with the core tenets of teamwork — clarity, transparency and accountability — then they're able to continue their mission with passion and empowerment, whether their team is at the office or at home," says Anne Raimondi, chief operating officer of Asana Raimondi shared the following advice with business leaders as they overcome COVID-19 survival mode and move into the next productive work phase, whatever shape that may take. 1. Reduce "work about work." Some call it busy work, some call it a threat to productivity. The Asana team calls it "work about work," and says it applies to communicating about work, searching for information, switching between apps, managing changing priorities, following up on the status of projects and other tasks involving work coordination rather than making headway on the skilled work itself. According to Asana's " Anatomy of Work Index 2021: Overcoming Disruption in a Distributed World ," 60% of workers' time is spent on this kind of work, while 40% of time is spent on the skilled job a person was hired to do. In order to increase productivity and create room for meaningful work, businesses must first identify the areas that are detracting from that work. "When work about work happens, skilled work doesn't. To solve for this, consider reducing the number of unnecessary meetings, blocking time for focused work and streamlining workflows across teams using a collaborative platform," says Raimondi. "When you empower your team to do the work they were literally hired to do, you'll see your employees — and your organization — flourish." 2. Banish burnout. The pandemic has tested us all physically, mentally and emotionally. Businesses everywhere are starting to see that toll on their teams in the form of burnout, which the World Health Organization defines as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." According to Asana 71% of workers experienced burnout in the last year. Almost half (46%) of respondents said they were overworked, while 32% said they were unable to switch off or disconnect and 29% cited a lack of clarity on tasks and roles. "Employees have spoken, and they're not ok," says Raimondi. "Leaders must take the reins here and work to understand, address and eliminate the root causes of burnout." Across the country, corporations are finding ways to tackle burnout, such as camera-free days , or time off for mental health purposes. Asana has had a long-standing "No Meeting Wednesday" policy, which will evolve as employees return to the office and allow for the hybrid options of "Work from Home Wednesdays" and "Flexible Fridays" to allow for options and time to focus on creative or strategic work. 3. Be ready to adapt. According to Asana's research , 65% of employees believe that the skills needed for their job will evolve. Raimondi says that flexibility, today, can best be supported by technology, like Asana, that helps workers carry out their jobs, regardless of what is happening in the world around them. "When organizations are able to forge ahead with the core tenets of teamwork — clarity, transparency and accountability — then they're able to continue their mission with passion and empowerment, whether their team is at the office or at home," she says. That's been the case at GoodRx , says Tori Marsh, who is the company's director of research. "Before COVID-19, Asana was our bible for the team. Now, it's even more so. Rather than talking to my coworkers on the other side of the table, we're communicating in Asana comments. We're still able to track everything that's going on without being there in person." As business leaders set their expectations and goals for the new office environment — hybrid or otherwise — it's certain that flexibility and adaptability will be key. Organizations of all sizes may benefit from a reliable work management system that allows for order, consistency and clarity, so that employees working from anywhere can focus on the work they were hired to do, and not the extraneous tasks that can detract from their goals and their organization's purpose. To learn more about Asana, visit Asana.com Keep ReadingShow less Zeyi Yang is a reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick. October 19, 2021 Yuanxin Technology doesn't hide its ambition. In the first line of its prospectus , the company says its mission is to be the "first choice for patients' healthcare and medication needs in China." But the road to winning the crowded China health tech race is a long one for this Tencent- and Sequoia-backed startup, even with a recent valuation of $4 billion, according to Chinese publication Lieyunwang . Here's everything you need to know about Yuanxin Technology's forthcoming IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. What does Yuanxin do? There are many ways startups can crack open the health care market in China, and Yuanxin has focused on one: prescription drugs. According to its prospectus, sales of prescription drugs outside hospitals account for only 23% of the total healthcare market in China, whereas that number is 70.2% in the United States. Yuanxin started with physical stores. Since 2015, it has opened 217 pharmacies immediately outside Chinese hospitals. "A pharmacy has to be on the main road where a patient exits the hospital. It needs to be highly accessible," Yuanxin founder He Tao told Chinese media in August. Then, patients are encouraged to refill their prescriptions on Yuanxin's online platforms and to follow up with telehealth services instead of returning to a hospital. From there, Yuanxin has built a large product portfolio that offers online doctor visits, pharmacies and private insurance plans. It also works with enterprise clients, designing office automation and prescription management systems for hospitals and selling digital ads for big pharma. Yuanxin's Financials Yuanxin's annual revenues have been steadily growing from $127 million in 2018 to $365 million in 2019 and $561 million in 2020. In each of those three years, over 97% of revenue came from "out-of-hospital comprehensive patient services," which include the company's physical pharmacies and telehealth services. More specifically, approximately 83% of its retail sales derived from prescription drugs. But the company hasn't made a profit. Yuanxin's annual losses grew from $17 million in 2018 to $26 million in 2019 and $48 million in 2020. The losses are moderate considering the ever-growing revenues, but cast doubt on whether the company can become profitable any time soon. Apart from the cost of drug supplies, the biggest spend is marketing and sales. What's next for Yuanxin There are still abundant opportunities in the prescription drug market. In 2020, China's National Medical Products Administration started to explore lifting the ban on selling prescription drugs online. Although it's unclear when the change will take place, it looks like more purely-online platforms will be able to write prescriptions in the future. With its established market presence, Yuanxin is likely one of the players that can benefit greatly from such a policy change. The enterprise and health insurance businesses of Yuanxin are still fairly small (accounting for less than 3% of annual revenue), but this is where the company sees an opportunity for future growth. Yuanxin is particularly hoping to power its growth with data and artificial intelligence. It boasts a database of 14 million prescriptions accumulated over years, and the company says the data can be used in many ways: designing private insurance plans, training doctors and offering chronic disease management services. The company says it currently employs 509 people on its R&D team, including 437 software engineers and 22 data engineers and scientists. What Could Go Wrong? The COVID-19 pandemic has helped sell the story of digital health care, but Yuanxin isn't the only company benefiting from this opportunity. 2020 has seen a slew of Chinese health tech companies rise. They either completed their IPO process before Yuanxin (like JD, Alibaba and Ping An's healthcare subsidiaries) or are close to it (WeDoctor and DXY). In this crowded sector, Yuanxin faces competition from both companies with Big Tech parent companies behind them and startups that have their own specialized advantages. Like each of its competitors, Yuanxin needs to be careful with how it processes patient data — some of the most sensitive personal data online. Recent Chinese legislation around personal data has made it clear that it will be increasingly difficult to monetize user data. In the prospectus, Yuanxin elaborately explained how it anonymizes data and prevents data from being leaked or hacked, but it also admitted that it cannot foresee what future policies will be introduced. Who Gets Rich Yuanxin's founder and CEO He Tao and SVP He Weizhuang own 29.82% of the company's shares through a jointly controlled company. (It's unclear whether He Tao and He Weizhuang are related.) Tencent owns 19.55% of the shares. Sequoia owns 16.21% of the shares. Other major investors include Qiming, Starquest Capital and Kunling, which respectively own 7.12%, 6.51% and 5.32% of the shares. What People Are Saying "The demands of patients, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies are all different. How to meet each individual demand and find a core profit model is the key to Yuanxin Technology's future growth." — Xu Yuchen, insurance industry analyst and member of China Association of Actuaries, in Chinese publication Lanjinger . "The window of opportunity caused by the pandemic, as well as the high valuations of those companies that have gone public, brings hope to other medical services companies…[But] the window of opportunity is closing and the potential of Internet healthcare is yet to be explored with new ideas. Therefore, traditional, asset-heavy healthcare companies need to take this opportunity and go public as soon as possible." —Wang Hang, founder and CEO of online healthcare platform Haodf, in state media China.com . October 19, 2021 It's your new employee's first day of remote work, but their laptop hasn't shown up yet. Not a good look. This very 2021 persistent problem is part of why Hofy, a remote workplace management tool, recently raised $15.2 million to help companies deploy laptops, chairs, desks and other physical equipment to their remote employees. The idea for Hofy, which is launching out of stealth today, emerged in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — before lockdowns went into effect in the U.S. and the U.K. Hofy's co-founders, Sami Bouremoum and Michael Ginzo, had a feeling that COVID-19 would have a long-term effect on society. "We bet in January and February [2020] that, irrespective of what all the public policy bodies were saying, this was going to be one to two years of disruption where people wouldn't be able to congregate in large groups," Bouremoum told Protocol. "So how can we help businesses in a very tactical way transition from five days a week in the office to five days a week from home in the most painless way possible?" Hofy soft-launched the first week of March in the U.K. to help support local companies in the shift to remote work. Within three months, the company began to think about how to help companies democratize the remote employee experience around the world. "What's pretty clear, in the past, is remote employees used to be the really low-level call center employees and they were being treated by their employers like second-class citizens from a benefits, experience, pay and compliance perspective," Bouremoum said. "But now that all the more senior people within the company are also remote, it's no longer OK to do that." In an interview with Protocol, Bouremoum discussed the problem Hofy solves for companies, the company's plans for expansion and his thoughts on what the future of work entails. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. What's the main value that Hofy provides to companies? The product is a combination of two things. The first is a SaaS platform that integrates with most of the HR services in the market. And then you can go into the Hofy platform and define an equipment policy. You can say for engineers, they get a certain level of equipment, sales reps get a better headset or marketing people get a tablet, whatever that may be. And then employees can browse the products that you've pre-approved for their function. And then we fulfill those products on a monthly subscription. We'll deliver it, we'll install it, we'll maintain it and then we will recover it from the employee's home. The reason it's a subscription is that there are actually a lot of issues around financials and health and safety compliance with those products. Let's take Facebook as an example. So Facebook decides they're going to give each of their employees a Herman Miller chair. Well, the first question they need to ask themselves is who owns the chair. Does Facebook own the chair or does the employee own the chair? If Facebook owns the chair, there's a whole host of financial implications around them owning a product that's in the employee's home. How does insurance work? There's also a depreciation risk. But if they say the employee owns the chair, the IRS is going to be like, "Hold on a minute, you've just given all your employees a $1,000 cash equivalent gift, and someone needs to pay taxes on that." Whereas, if it's a subscription or rental, we basically say it's just a business expense in order to meet the health and safety obligations as an employer. So that's what the subscription solves. OK, so companies rent the equipment from Hofy and Hofy ultimately owns the equipment. Does Hofy warehouse the equipment or purchase equipment as orders come in? So we are unique in this space in that we are actually stockholders. And the reason we are stockholders is that the vast majority of the use cases where companies use Hofy is onboarding new hires. And we need to choreograph that experience really well. And one of the super important things is that things arrive on time. And what we learned the hard way is that if we didn't hold stock, we wouldn't be able to deliver the 98.5% on-time rate that we deliver, which is much, much higher than any other IT or furniture vendor. In Europe, we have four warehouses. We're in the process of setting one up in the U.S. and in our non-core geographies, we have partners who hold stock on our behalf. And we've already deployed equipment into 55 countries. Companies have been delivering great first days in the office for a long time, but doing that at home is really hard. And it matters because first impressions matter. And if people don't have a great first impression in their business, it's a poor experience. How big of a problem would you say Hofy is solving? This is one where it's not a "nice to have." This is a must-have. And it can be done, but it's incredibly painful. People were managing to do this before Hofy, but what we do is make it 100 times simpler, and the best illustration of how much simpler it is is actually with the amount of time saved. On average, it used to take companies about 3.5 hours to onboard someone. With Hofy, it's 15 seconds because you're clicking one button. Hofy recently raised $15.2 million in funding. How do you plan to use the funding? We're obviously going to be spending the money on U.S. expansion. We have a whole list of customers who want us to support them there. And I think we need to invest appropriately. We don't think it's possible to deliver the level of service that we need to without being physically on the ground, so my co-founder Michael is actually moving to the U.S. in January because he's going to be setting up the warehouse there. And then we'll start hiring a sales team in the U.S., and once we start hiring the sales team then I'll move there as well. The other thing we'll be spending the money on is hiring. In order to get to where we need to be, we're going to be at about 110 people in the next nine months. And then the next thing is continuing to make sure we build processes that help us maintain that 98.5% or 99% on-time delivery because we are a premium service. And one of the things we're really proud of is we haven't churned a single customer to date. How many customers does Hofy have? We have about 35 paying customers. Customers can commit to a contract of anywhere between six and 36 months. Obviously, the longer they commit, the cheaper the monthly rate. And at the end of 36 months, they have three options. The first is they can continue renting. The second is that we can refresh their equipment and the third thing is we can sell the equipment either to the employee or the employer. That's one of the cool things that we do. If you work at Protocol and then you decide to move on, you know, it's a bit of a crappy experience for you as an employee if you have to return all the stuff, including your desk, which Protocol would have to demand from you for tax reasons. What Hofy can do is say, "Hey, let us deal with it," and then we can just send you a Stripe payment link for 15 cents of the dollar of the value of the products and you get to keep it as kind of a better outcome for everyone. It's also a better outcome for us because we're not moving very big pieces of equipment all around the world and producing more emissions, which we don't want to do. How do you see the hybrid work landscape evolving over the years, and how do you envision your company adapting to it? One of the things I definitely don't think is going to happen is 90% of the world working five days a week from home. But similarly, I don't believe that you'll have 90% of the world going five days a week into the office again. And I think it will vary significantly across demographics as well as age, location and so on. But I think the future of work is going to be a combination of four things. The first is working in the office, which is what we've known for a long time, working from home, which is what we've gotten used to over the last 24 months. The next one is working near home, like working in a WeWork downtown instead or a cafe. And the fourth is digital nomads, which is where you basically decide you're going to Hawaii for two months and work from there just because you can. What I think is going to happen, though, is we're going to see a democratization of pay across different cities. People have realized that they can get the same results from an employee based in the Midwest and one in San Francisco, or they could be in Brazil. So I think one of the really cool things that is going to happen, very slowly over the next two to three decades is that you're going to see an emergence of a wealthier middle class in rural areas in Western countries but also in developing countries because you won't need to bring that developer from India anymore, and that's going to create a flywheel because the person who's making money in India is going to want to spend that money in India. I think in 20 to 30 years, people all around the world will be able to afford expensive products and that will create a whole set of problems around the global physical distribution of goods because that still hasn't been solved. And I think that's a really exciting opportunity in terms of democratization of pay but also how do we distribute physical goods at a global level more effectively. From Your Site Articles "They're authorized to work, but their authorization has an expiration date." Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images October 19, 2021 Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky ) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. October 19, 2021 Late last month, Amazon, Facebook and Uber joined dozens of other companies in publicly committing to hire and train some of the 95,000 Afghan refugees who are expected to be resettled in the United States over the next year, about half of whom are already here. But nearly two months since U.S. evacuations from Kabul ended and one month since the companies' public commitments, efforts to follow through with those promised jobs remain stalled. That, experts say, is partly to do with the fact that the vast majority of Afghan arrivals are still being held at military bases, partly to do with their legal classification and partly to do with a refugee resettlement system that was systematically dismantled by the Trump administration. "The Trump administration made significant cuts to the number of refugees who were allowed to resettle in the United States, which had a pretty devastating impact on the refugee resettlement system and infrastructure here in the United States," said Yaron Schwartz, associate director of the Tent Partnership for Refugees, a nonprofit that helps companies hire refugees and coordinated the recent round of commitments. "The Biden administration, even before the Afghan crisis, has really been in the process of rebuilding that refugee resettlement system." U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services directed Protocol to The Department of Homeland Security for comment. DHS did not respond. Technically speaking, the vast majority of people who were evacuated from Afghanistan and are currently being vetted at military bases are not refugees, but "humanitarian parolees." This special designation was required in order to relocate tens of thousands of Afghans in such a short amount of time, but it also comes with complications when it comes to the hiring process. Parolees need special work authorization before they can get a job, a process that can take weeks. But even once they're authorized, Afghan parolees currently have no pathway to permanent residence. "They're authorized to work, but their authorization has an expiration date," said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for World Relief, one of nine refugee resettlement agencies in the country. "There are other categories of immigrants in our country who have temporary status, especially in the tech sector, but it is a barrier in some ways for employers." World Relief is currently advocating for Congress to create a pathway to permanent legal status, similar to the pathway that exists for Cubans in the U.S. For now, though, Afghan parolees' primary options are to apply for asylum or, for those who worked for the U.S., to wait for their special immigrant visas to be approved. But, Soerens noted, both processes are time intensive and require extensive documentation from a population of people who have just left everything behind. "You might not have the documented evidence that allows you to file a case," he said. "People may have literally destroyed the evidence that shows why they were afraid of persecution because they couldn't get caught with it by the Taliban." This problem, of course, pre-dates the Trump administration, said Xiao Wang, CEO of Boundless Immigration, a company that helps people apply for visas and citizenship. "There was no steady or guaranteed timeline on how long getting approved as a refugee — outside the U.S. — or as an asylee — inside the U.S. — would take, though it's in the order of years," Wang said. "This creates a huge amount of uncertainty for employers ... who have no way of knowing when the person they have hired will actually be approved and able to begin work." The Trump years also created new challenges, as the administration drastically reduced the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. per year from around 85,000 in 2016 to around 12,000 the last two years. At the same time, the administration cut funding to refugee resettlement agencies. According to Soerens, World Relief was forced to close eight of its field offices and reduce its U.S. staff by a third. "Basically, the floor fell out from underneath us," Soerens said. In addition to the tens of thousands of Afghan parolees, the Biden administration has lifted the ceiling for people who are actually designated as refugees to 125,000. But keeping pace with demand, after years of constriction, is a struggle for refugee resettlement agencies. "We want to do everything we can to welcome Afghans," Soerens said. "But we're expected to resettle as many people in the next three months as the last three years. We can't multiply our staff and geographic footprint by 12 in the next three months." Despite these obstacles, both Soerens and Schwartz said finding employers who actually want to hire Afghan people is the easy part. The current labor shortage coupled with the fact that Afghans tend to have higher levels of education and more English proficiency than other refugee populations means World Relief can be a little pickier when directing Afghans to job opportunities. "After the recession in 2008 and 2009 it was hard to find refugees jobs," Soerens said. "That's not the case now. There are so many jobs available. We can be selective." Some companies that made the recent pledge, like Amazon, already have lots of experience hiring refugees and will be well-positioned to hire them once the bureaucratic red tape has cleared. "We're committed to providing employment support for Afghan refugees and have been heavily engaged with NGOs and refugee resettlement agencies," an Amazon spokesperson said. Others, like Facebook, have a steeper path to full-time employment and are focusing their efforts on offering digital skills training, in hopes of helping Afghan refugees to land jobs later on, Schwartz said. Facebook didn't respond to Protocol's request for comment. Meanwhile the Tent Partnership, which is also working with corporate giants in other sectors including logistics, retail, hospitality and food, is working on getting corporate HR departments ready to onboard Afghans once their work authorizations are ready. "We're offering training for their HR teams on what it will look like to hire Afghan talent and make sure they have the resources and support to do that effectively," Schwartz said. For now, though, these companies — and the people they hope to hire — are mostly just waiting. From Your Site Articles