Tag: small business for sale

COVID-19 was a disaster for organ transplants. Here’s how they’re recovering

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Organ transplants in the United States have been increasing over the last several years. In 2019, transplants from deceased donors rose by 10% while living donors increased by 7%. The growing system combines education, technological advances, various research, and public policy work to save lives off the 100,000-person waitlist. While kidneys are the top organ in transplant numbers, other key organs transplanted in America include the liver, heart, and lungs. The transplant community has been working together for years to increase organ donations for those in need. Experts say that deceased donors alone will not resolve the waitlist. Organizations like the American Kidney Fund (AKF), among other things, work to get rid of kidney disease in the first place. They provide education and access to resources to help make it easier, and encourage living donors to save a life. As a kidney donor myself, I can confirm that multiple organizations work hard to make organ donation a safe and rewarding experience. Despite the progress in recent years, more living donors are necessary. Especially now. Beginning in late March of last year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the U.S., the country’s transplant system came to a screeching halt. Deceased donor donations dropped by 50% and living donor donations dropped by 90%. “The pandemic caught everybody off guard,” says Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at United Networks for Organ Sharing (UNOS). “Nobody really saw it coming. Transplant is really a collaborative process by nature.” In order for a surgery to be successful it requires both the transplant center and the donor hospital to be fully operational and functional, along with the organ procurement team for deceased donor organs; potential recipients and donors also have to have access to healthcare. Not only did COVID-19 affect all these groups individually, but it only takes one of them with a problem to disrupt the entire system. Waves of impact Once the pandemic hit, healthcare resources had to pivot Read More …

This is how inclusive Netflix’s original programming really is

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Last month, Netflix released its first-ever inclusion report detailing where the company stands with having a diverse and equitable workplace. Now Netflix is keeping that same energy in analyzing its original TV shows and films. Today, Netflix published a study conducted by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative that breaks down how Netflix’s original content from 2018 and 2019 performed across 22 inclusion indictors. While the streamer excelled in certain areas and showed growth over the year, it’s evident that there’s still a considerable amount of ground to cover toward parity in front of and behind the camera—particularly with more representation from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. “We’ve released this report in the interests of transparency,” said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix. “Because without this kind of information it’s very hard to judge whether we’re improving or not. And the report makes clear that while Netflix has made advances in representation year-over-year, we still have a long way to go.” Here’s a snapshot of some key statistics from the study: 52% of all leads/co-leads (TV and film) were women and girls 31.9% of all leads/co-leads (TV and film) were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups 23.1% of film directors were women 16.9% of film directors were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups 29.8% of show creators were women 12.2% of show creators were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups In addition to the study, which Netflix has committed to releasing every two years through 2026, the streamer also announced the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity, a $100 million endowment that will be distributed globally over five years in an effort to build talent pipelines for underrepresented communities. Read More …

This startup is building a modular, repairable laptop that actually looks good

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A new hardware startup is trying to make a name for itself by selling you fewer new devices. It’s called Framework , and its first product is a laptop that will let users replace or upgrade every component on their own, from the screen to the keyboard to the mainboard inside. That means customers won’t have to pay a premium for repairs when a part breaks, and won’t have to buy an entirely new laptop just to improve one particular component. Nirav Patel, Framework’s founder, says that the startup’s ultimate goal is to build an ecosystem of repairs and upgrades around its products so that users can easily breathe new life into their gadgets Read More …

The pandemic changed how we evaluate success. This is what to stick with

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As coronavirus was unleashed across the world in early 2020, Facebook did something unprecedented: It gave its employees a break. For the first half of the year, the tech giant granted each of its 45,000 full-time staffers an “exceeds expectations” performance review rating, ensuring they all got $1,000 bonuses . Google, for its part, skipped its midyear reviews altogether, and in the fall, promoted twice as many people as it usually does. The pandemic has changed fundamental parts of work. As people continue to juggle personal and job-related responsibilities at the same time—often from the same dining room chair—employers are having to rethink the way they evaluate performance . The usual rigid metrics for success have flown out the window, and for many companies, it’s less about how many targets you’ve hit, but how well you’re doing overall. “Empathy, caring, supporting people is really the theme,” Josh Bersin, a human resources analyst and consultant, tells the Wall Street Journal . He anticipates this grace period will last around two years.  When “the pandemic is history and we’re back to ‘go, go, go,’ we’ll probably go back to the way things were.” However, if we face this historic moment, , managers and teams can reevaluate some of our performance management tactics for the better. Here are a handful of recommendations. Keep goals fluid Goal-setting looks very different now than it did before the pandemic. Rather than trying to stick to fixed goals that are discussed at annual reviews and then forgotten, managers and teams should start thinking of goals as fluid, updating them on a weekly or even real-time basis. The workplace management team at Gallup emphasizes the importance of an “agile mindset,” which encourages teams not just to expect change, but anticipate it. Ben Wigert and Heather Barrett write “managers should be given the expectation, authority, and flexibility to tailor goal-setting to the team and the individual as their work changes.” Sticking to pre-pandemic expectations is setting employees up to fail. Rather than fixating on KPIs, look at how well your reports are doing with other, often overlooked intangibles: How well are they communicating, both with their managers and their team? Are they bringing clarity to complex situations? Are they contributing positively to morale? As the goal posts for “success” continue to shift, it’s important to adjust expectations accordingly. Read More …

If DoorDash wins, what do we lose?

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In the first-ever season of Sesame Street , in 1970, cast member Bob McGrath appeared in a memorable sketch where he receives a delivery from his local grocer, a grumpy blue muppet. “Did you get everything I ordered?” McGrath asks. “No,” comes the reply, but he’s helpfully supplemented the delivery with other fresh veggies. McGrath breaks into song, a version of the now iconic “People in Your Neighborhood,” to explain to kids the role a grocer plays in the community. The grocer is the bearer of sustenance. A few weeks ago, during Super Bowl LV, “People in Your Neighborhood” got remixed into an anthem for the app-based delivery platform DoorDash to signal to the world that it is expanding from restaurants to convenience and grocery. In a crisp 60 seconds, a tap dancing Daveed Diggs ( Hamilton )—directed by French auteur Michel Gondry ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind )—wanders through a hyperrealized Sesame Street urbanscape with Big Bird, Elmo, and Super Grover, pointing out all the great local businesses. His message: Your neighborhood is a bounty of bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants, and smoothie stalls. And in 2021, DoorDash is the bearer of sustenance. For DoorDash, its Super Bowl bet paid off. It informed tens of millions of viewers that DoorDash could bring them everything from both “big shops and mom and pops,” as Diggs crooned. It told investors that the company had a strategic plan to live up to and grow into its lofty valuation. Finally, it put a happy face on what’s a highly challenging, cutthroat business which has yet to produce a successful company built to last. The ad may have cost somewhere north of $10 million to produce and air, including a $1 million donation to Sesame Workshop, but DoorDash’s market cap increased by $10 billion, to more than $65 billion, in the 10 days after the ad debuted. For almost all of DoorDash’s seven-plus years, two things about the company have been true: It has aspired to be a logistics company that did more than restaurant delivery—one of the first articles ever written about the startup, in March 2014, was headlined ‘DoorDash enters food-delivery fray with much grander ambitions’—and it’s been controversial as it’s pursued those dreams. It has been accused of “ swiping “delivery driver tips, and restaurants have sued it for listing their eateries on its platform without their consent. DoorDash has also fielded complaints from the restaurants it aims to serve for taking too fat a slice of their revenues. Finally, it took part in a $200 million-plus campaign last year to convince Californians to legalize the use of contract labor in delivery, via ballot Proposition 22, thereby preventing workers from attaining the protections that come with employee status. So when DoorDash went public just over two months ago and stock-market investors bid the company’s shares up to 92% higher than its IPO price on its first day, the fervor, which valued the company almost four-times higher than its last private fundraising in June 2020, only further stoked the debate around DoorDash. Read More …