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purplesurveys · 6 years

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What’s your favorite nail polish that you own? I don’t use nail polish. I move my hands around too much and anything I put on my nails would get chipped in an instant. What’s your favorite play by Shakespeare? I never enjoyed taking up Shakespeare in high school. I guess I was most engaged when we studied Macbeth, though. That or Hamlet. What’s your favorite recipe that takes less than 15 minutes to prepare? Homemade pizza. We were taught how to do it in preschool–hotdogs, mayo, ketchup, cheese on white bread then pop it in the oven toaster. I haven’t had it in like a decade just because I’ve never had time to make them, but it’s the best thing that takes less than ten minutes. It’s such a preschool recipe but since I had it so many times as a kid, it’s comfort food to me. What is the smallest thing that made you embarrassed or anxious? Ordering in restaurants, asking for help at a store, talking on the phone, asking questions, people looking at me. Anything can make me anxious really, so long as I’m thrust in the spotlight. You’ve just written the most annoying computer virus ever made. What does it do? I used to have the world’s most annoying virus on my ancient laptop. It used to type down random Vietnamese texts on its own. Like I could be watching a YouTube video and it would make a group of Viet words show up on the search bar. If I had to wish something on my worst enemy it would be that.

Did you ever attend a wedding that was a complete disaster? Fortunately no. Filipino weddings aren’t as dramatic as the horror stories I’ve heard in other countries. What is something that you were surprised you were able to do? Dunno. Keeping a magna cum laude standing to this day is one of them though. What movie surprised you with how good it was? Wonder Woman. I never go to see blockbusters, much less superhero films. That one was a pleasant surprise. Is there anything you’re stressed out about? Yes, but I’m on Tumblr right now to de-stress so don’t remind me. Satan decides to make a new Hell for the lesser sinners where everything is mildly inconvenient. What would you expect to find there? Ads. Lots and lots of annoying, unskippable ads. Think the Fifteen Million Merits episode of Black Mirror. Which persistent myth/misconception annoys you the most? Can’t seem to think of any now... What’s the last video you watched on YouTube? I think it was a snippet from The Return of Superman, the Korean show with dads taking care of their kids. Do you have any extensions on your web browser? No, I don’t download third-party programs onto my Mac now since I want to keep it as clean as possible. What is the most bullshit sounding true fact that you know? The fact that mammoths were still alive when people were building up the pyramids. That or people before the 1800′s had no idea what dinosaurs were. If you were to create your own candle scent, what would it be? I don’t know. Cookie dough? I’m sure that’s been made already. Have you ever bought food online? I always have my food delivered online because I could never call them up. Are there any foods that you avoid eating? Yes. Any kind of fruit. What Oreo flavor is your favorite? Just the regular ones. What G-rated joke always cracks you up? They’re all in Filipino so nobody would understand anyway. If you won free food and drinks for a lifetime to a restaurant of your choice, which restaurant would you choose? Vikings. It’s this huuuuge buffet restaurant so I would always have a variety of choices. What comedic sound effect would completely ruin sex? All I could think of is Mario screaming “YAHOO!” so that. Do you think they should have made a sequel to Nightmare Before Christmas where they explored the other holidays? I’ve never seen that movie so I don’t know if it would be a good idea or not to extend it. But I know I wouldn’t want, say, Love Actually to be turned into a Halloween or a New Year’s movie, that’s for sure. What is your favorite holiday? Halloween even though it isn’t a holiday. Do you ever make playlists? Yeah, for certain moods. I have a playlist for when I drive my car with Gab in the middle of the night and a playlist for when I’m sad, to name a couple. Do you think you could create an entirely new font? No. I’m so not creative. Sour gummy worms or plain gummy worms? Errr I guess sour. I’ve never had a gummy anything that tasted plain. What songs have you been listening to a lot lately? Dua Lipa’s Homecoming is SOOOOO good. It’s a breath of fresh air from New Rules, which is becoming overplayed to an extent that I don’t particularly enjoy. What was something that looked easy but turned out to be hard? Being an adult. Ever been in a talent show? How many times? What did you do? No, because I have no talent that I could at least show off to an audience. :/ Ever try out for the talent show and not make it? Did you cry? Well not a talent show, but I did try out for the school newspaper. I got through the first cut, but not in the final one. I did cry; it had been my dream to be in that paper since I was in fourth grade (they only accept high school students.) I never tried out for it again and instead became part of the editorial board for the yearbook when I was a senior. When that was happening, the paper was begging me to pick them and work for them...too bad. What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever cried about? Nothing. That’s the stupidest thing I had ever cried about–I literally cried over nothing. Do you like peanut butter?: LOVE IT. Put it on/in my pancakes, my cookies, my cakes, my cupcakes, my chocolate bars, and on my kare-kare. Peanut butter is life. What about marshmallows?: I fucking hate marshmallows. How do you roast your marshmallows? I don’t even eat them. Do you eat s’mores?: Sometimes. That’s really the only time I get to enjoy marshmallows. What’s the best brand of chocolate? Reese’s, Twix, and Maltesers. Do you own a disco ball, or know anyone who does? No. Gabie sure deserves one, though. She’s stuck in the 70′s. Own a lava lamp? I don’t but I did want one when I was like 14. Own any sort of glow-in-the-dark room accessory? No. I have glow in the dark sticks and bracelets that I got from concerts, but they’ve long faded by now haha. Ever faked an orgasm?: Never. If I couldn’t have one I’ll just let my girlfriend know and snuggle instead? Done something illegal to your car?: No. The car wasn’t bought under my name, so if I did anything stupid it’ll be my dad who answers to that and I don’t want him to kill me. Own some type of work out machine? My mom owns one but I have no idea what it does. Ever pooped a weird color besides brown, green, or orange?: No. Are you quickly getting grossed out? Not at all. Think a drum player for a band is hot?: I don’t find them hot, but I always found anyone who could play drums cool. Do you tend to like male or female bands better? I like bands with music I could listen to better. What scars on your body do you have? One near my eye and another on my pinky toe. Ever did something sexual in public? Sure. Do you like the taste of squid or eel? Yep, we live on seafood down here. Ever date anybody in middle school?: I didn’t. No joke, as a grade schooler, I thought I wasn’t supposed to develop romantic feelings for anybody until I was at least 25. I just thought it was an adult thing. What was your first date like? I’ve never been on a getting-to-know-someone date...my ‘first date’ was literally the first date I had with Gab, since I went straight to asking her to be my girlfriend and never really courted her hahahaha. It was beautiful. We went to a museum and had a nice Italian dinner and had a sleepover in my house where we played video games (well she did) and had pizza delivered. It was the purest thing. What about your WORST date? Ugh. That Shakey’s date was THE WORST. It was our last date before we broke up and also my last resort to get through to her, after I realized that she was distancing herself. Everything was my treat and it was because her birthday was coming up...I felt like shit when I learned it wasn’t going to fix anything anymore. Share a really embarrassing moment? Driving out of the gas station and nearly entering the highway when I didn’t even wait for my change :(( The gas attendant had to run after my car, since I was basically driving away from around ₱400. That’s a week’s worth of lunches, and it would have sucked if I was able enter the highway immediately. Did you like to get dirty when you were little? Nah. My mom hated it and wanted me to stay clean, so it got passed on to me. Do you find the show Family Guy absolutely hilarious?: There are some scenes that are funny but ultimately, it’s not my humor. Most jokes just fly over my head since they’re too political or too pop culture-y for me to recognize them. Own anything that has to do with dragons or unicorns? I don’t think so. Believe in mermaids/mermen?: Nope. What piercings do you have/want?: None anymore. What tattoos do you have/want?: Also none anymore. Hate needles. Which is cooler - pink or purple?: Pink.

#survey #surveys

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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A food trend arrived two summers ago in the neighborhood of Toronto where I live that continues to beguile me for its endurance. In an area with several fantastic ice cream options, the longest and most consistent lineups are for a place specializing in charcoal-infused ice cream. It tasted no better than your average soft-serve, it looked like poop and stained your teeth black, and it required a half-hour wait just to get a cone.

The health benefits associated with charcoal-infused foods are dubious quackery at best, especially in ice cream, and yet every day there’d be dozens of people standing outside, taking selfies with their cones, which they took three licks of and promptly threw away.

The charcoal ice cream trend had nothing to do with taste, however. Like its recent cousins the unicorn latte, the rainbow sprinkle cake, or other viral sweets, it was consumption purely as visual entertainment, a food trend tailor-made for Instagram feeds. Similar to shopping for new shoes you don’t need, or buying trinkets on vacation, it is an act of commerce used to pass the time on a sunny Saturday. It also was an act of social bonding, between those standing in line, their friends who had already eaten there, and their followers online, heart-tapping those poop-colored cones from screens near and far.

Why do we buy the things we buy? This simple question forms the heart of a multitrillion-dollar riddle at the core of our culture of consumption. It is studied relentlessly by economists and sociologists, picked apart by sales departments and marketing firms, opined on by authors and experts, and agonized over by everyone working in the world of consumer goods, from local coffee shop owners to retail chain CEOs.

Trends seem to come out of nowhere, blindsiding us each season, in a way that feels unpredictable. That’s because these shifts in the collective appetite (for everything from music and food to clothes and even politics) are driven by a force bigger than we can see: human emotion.

As someone who has been looking at consumer trends and the forces that shape them over much of the past decade, when you step back and try to understand trends, you see that nearly all trends, and the buying that fuels them, are based in emotion.

A trend that personifies the centrality of emotion in consumer trends is the surprising growth of books over the past decade, especially in the United States, despite an avalanche of predictions to the contrary.

Just a few years ago, experts were nearly unanimous in their belief that books and bookstores were certain to disappear. Articles heralded the end of the independent bookstore as Amazon continued its explosive growth, Borders went bankrupt, and e-book sales gained ground. In a 2013 blog post, marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin predicted books were “dying” and bookstores “doomed” because of superior technological competition; digital is where we wanted to spend our dollars. Others, like the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, predicted brick-and-mortar retail would be finished.

Based on all measures of logic, their predictions were perfectly sensible. Faced with the growth of e-readers like Kindles and iPads, print books were an outdated and easily disrupted technology. Paper books cost more to produce and purchase, take up precious space in warehouses, stores, and homes, lose their value immediately, and are environmentally destructive (publishing is an industry based on arboreal genocide).

And bookstores? How could a brick-and-mortar space with limited selection and financial resources compete with Amazon, which sells every single book, for less than anyone else, anywhere, anytime — free shipping included? The economics simply made no sense. Just look at what happened with music and photography! There was just no reason for people to buy books.

But they did. According to the American Booksellers Association, as well as publishing industry figures, sales of books and the number of new independent bookstores opening across the country have been growing steadily, year by year, since 2009.

Meanwhile, e-book sales have plateaued (after peaking around 2014), and Amazon has entered the brick-and-mortar bookstore game, driven in no small part by the trend back toward books and bookstores it somehow missed. What changed? It wasn’t economics or any specific industry dynamic. It was the emotion of the consumer, which grew enough to support a trend that brought books back in favor.

Like most successful trends, these emotions were deeply felt, and linked to bigger forces in our culture. At a time when few of us dare to go anywhere without a smartphone, books tapped into a growing desire among many consumers for a sense of physicality and the measured pace it commands.

Like the other analog goods that have seen a resurgence in recent years, including vinyl records, board games, and even film cameras, books promised a slower, isolated experience, free from distractions, pop-up ads, dead batteries, Russians (unless you’re reading about them), and the other byproducts of digital innovation. In an age of noise, they offer the quiet many of us desperately desire. They also offered certain incalculable tangible pleasures for our senses: the oft-cited smell, feel, and sound of books, which book lovers relish with romance.

In a similar way, the bookstore offered the above, in addition to something even more desirable: community. By providing actual places in cities, town, and neighborhoods where readers and book lovers could walk in, hear author talks, get personalized recommendations from knowledgeable staff, and, most importantly, just be around books and other book lovers, they provided a physical space that delivered the one thing Amazon is incapable of: a sense of belonging.

Bookstores and the books they sell bring consumers into a family — a family where you share the same values, based on your buying habits. You see it with men like my father and their endless conversations about road bikes, with kids unboxing their Lego sets on YouTube, and with the kale-eating Prius driver who feels so compelled to tell other kale eaters who they are that they actually go to the trouble of putting a pro-kale bumper sticker on their Prius (as if the Prius itself doesn’t send that message).

We buy as much to belong as to own. And for readers, the value of showing off their Politics & Prose tote bag or proudly holding up their copy of Roxane Gay’s Hunger on the subway is as powerful a symbol you can send into the world that I am book people as any overt declaration on social media (though book-loving Instagrammers abound).

Last year, Harvard Business school professor Ryan Raffaelli decided to figure out why this was, interviewing dozens of independent bookstore owners across America, as well as publishers, authors, and industry experts. Raffaelli, who specializes in the adaption of legacy industries and previously studied the resurgence of Swiss watchmakers and pencil manufacturers, found that it boiled down to the 3 C’s: community, curation, and convening. Bookstores held events. They created safe and welcoming spaces. And they leveraged this into real, lasting relationships with their customers.

“Combined, these aspects … served as important bottom-up processes that reframed the mature independent bookselling industry as a legitimate and distinct form of brick-and-mortar bookselling,” Raffaelli wrote.

Donna Paz Kaufman, a publishing industry veteran whose consulting company Paz & Associates works with independent bookstores, and the people who own them, across America, agrees.

“What is tangible and lasting for independent bookstores is that they are the living room of the community,” Kaufman said. “A place where ideas are welcome, dialogue is interesting, and people can simply be and find other people/books/programs that make life a little bit better.”

Over the past few years, Kaufman’s business has been busier than ever, with more new clients coming to her every day, interested in opening a bookstore in their neighborhood and town. “It’s a little magnet for community, a place you can go and feel safe, encouraged, and feel prompted to learn something new, or you can just be,” she said.

Sure, there are some logical advantages to the trends that take off beyond mere fads. Kale has endured because it’s easy to plant, cheap, and can work in all sorts of dishes. Birkenstocks made a huge comeback because they’re damn comfortable. The publishing industry defended itself better than other media industries against digital disruption because books remain relatively profitable to make and sell, while independent bookstores benefited from the demise of Borders and a defanged Barnes & Noble. But the practical factors obscure the golden rule of consumer behavior, which is that the logic of emotion triumphs above all else.

Some emotions, of course, are more powerful than others. The emotions that draw us to books are strong enough to transform an entire industry. The emotions that draw us to Instagrammable charcoal ice cream, however, seem to be more fleeting.

I remember sitting on a trends prediction panel several years ago at the annual Fancy Food Show with industry trend forecasters, former Food Network stars, and other food journalists, with the goal of zeroing in on the next big thing. As we discussed the green shoots of food trends we’d observed while walking thousands of trade show booths and eating more samples than a human body can handle, activated charcoal foods came up a few times. “Oh, they’ve been saying charcoal foods will be the next big thing for years,” one woman said dismissively. Everyone nodded in agreement.

Even though that charcoal ice cream parlor still has a lineup, the overall trend is limited to a few shops in a few cities; you’re unlikely to see a tub of charcoal vanilla ice cream at Safeway anytime soon.

In the end, we’ll try anything for emotion. But if it doesn’t taste better than Häagen-Dazs, we’ll be backing eating good old vanilla the next hot day.

David Sax is a journalist and the author of several books, including The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. He is currently writing a book on the meaning of entrepreneurship today.

Original Source -> Why we buy the things we buy

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newssplashy · 6 years

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Entertainment: Beauty is in the eye of these beholders

LOS ANGELES — Thousands of cat-eyed, contoured-cheeked, glitter-doused women — and more than a few painted men.

Nearly all the bathrooms at the convention center had been converted to gender-neutral. Staff throughout the floor wore T-shirts with a welcome list on the back that read:

“All races, all genders, all ages, all countries of origin, all sexual orientations, all religions” as well as “all glamazons, all natural beauties, all unicorns.”

Clad in crop tops, Janelle Tejan and Phoenix Alden, both 22 and models from Colorado, were jittery with excitement an hour into the first day.

“I held Laura Lee’s hand, she told me she loved my look,” gushed Tejan, of Colorado Springs, delighted that Lee, a makeup artist with nearly 5 million YouTube subscribers, had taken the time to speak briefly to her. Tejan stroked her ombre gray bobbed wig.

She beamed when asked about the silver stars around her eyes, affixed with tweezers and eyelash glue. “I want to be a successful YouTuber some day,” she said.

“I came for Drew Barrymore,” interjected Alden, of Denver, her eyes ringed in pink and orange, the only pop of color standing out against her black suspenders holding up her black miniskirt, a black fedora perched on her head. Alden, who is in the Air Force, had just taken a selfie with the actress on her way to the booth for Barrymore’s 6-year-old Flower Beauty brand. Tejan nodded in agreement: “My grandmother loves Drew Barrymore.”

As she participated in a meet-and-greet with fans, Barrymore said events like this were a particularly useful way to reach out to beauty shoppers. These consumers demand a personal touch — often literally, in the form of a hug or selfie. The question, she said, is: “How are you paying attention to me as a loud, confident individual?”

A record 23,300 of those loud, confident individuals attended Beautycon LA, an event that is equal parts competitive shopping scene, feel-good festival and marketing bonanza. Described as Sephora meets Coachella, Beautycon is not unlike a theme park, with hourslong lines, expensive food and the occasional chance to scream. Tickets range from $50 for a single-day pass to $1,000 for two days of skip-the-lines VIP treatment.

Beauty brands spend anywhere from $5,000 to more than $1 million on their Beautycon build-outs. From these temporary havens, companies test and sell products, hand out samples, gather email addresses and host appearances with digital influencers.

“Consumers are now discovering and experiencing brands in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago,” said Gustavo Andriani, senior vice president and general manager at MAC North America, a division of Estée Lauder Cos. An ad in a magazine or a presence on social media is not enough, he added. “We need to physically be where they are.”

Both brands and attendees come with a #picsoritdidnthappen mentality. Shoppers are after social media bragging rights and companies see those same posts as a chance to spread their marketing dollars beyond the convention center’s walls. Dressed-up corporate photo bait filled the hall, including a dozen pink carpets, complete with flattering lighting and a Beautycon backdrop. Swings at Target, Aveda and Rimmel London and shirtless men almost everywhere — wielding lipstick-tipped power drills at MAC, covered in metallic body paint at Masque Bar — were the quick pic gimmicks du jour.

‘The Next Gen of QVC’

“You don’t need lipstick. Lipstick needs you,” one of Beautycon’s hallmark sayings, was stripped in pink block text across the wall behind a pink sofa in the pink-carpeted enclave of Moj Mahdara, chief executive officer of Beautycon. Clad in a black T-shirt and Nike Air Max 1/97 sneakers, Mahdara slipped into this relatively quiet space backstage, her 4-month-old son, Neev, leaning against her shoulder.

A 40-year-old, gay Persian-American, Mahdara was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. She moved to Orange County, California, in 1998, then to Los Angeles two years laterin search of a way into the music industry. Instead, she found a more viable path as a digital strategist, helping consumer and entertainment brands develop online campaigns with celebrities like Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani. She built and sold a digital agency, and worked with a number of large, consumer-facing brands, including HTC and Lacoste.

After briefly toying with the idea of getting an MBA, Mahdara decided instead to take that money and invest it in direct-to-consumer brands like Outdoor Voices and Harry’s razors. In 2013, as she was growing her new digital consulting agency, Mahdara’s lawyer told her about an upcoming gathering of beauty YouTubers, a group of digital personalities gathering in Los Angeles (IRL, as the kids would say). Although she says, “I’m not a beauty person” — she does not wear makeup — Mahdara was then looking to start her own digital influencer management company, on the hunt for what she said was “the next gen of QVC.”

Mahdara, who had given a somewhat rambling TEDx Talk that year titled “Everyone is a Media Company,” saw the potential to open the YouTuber meet-up to the fans. Six weeks later, she helped put together the first Beautycon to be open to the public, investing roughly $250,000 of her own money. Brands like NYX Professional Makeup and bareMinerals signed on and 6,000 people showed up to the free event, forming a line around a block in Hollywood. By the next year, Mahdara had bought out the majority of the shares of the event’s original organizer and became Beautycon’s CEO.

Mahdara envisioned a new experiential retail model. “There’s a lot of stuff for music and a lot of stuff for gaming and a lot of stuff for sports,” Mahdara said. “What became abundantly clear to me is that there was nothing for young women and people in general who were interested in beauty but not sure how they fit into that world.” Her goal was not just an offline experience but a marketplace, one that would translate into sales for participating beauty companies.

In 2014, Beautycon added New York to its lineup; by 2015, Dallas and London joined the list. (London is still in the mix; Dallas is not.) In 2016, the Los Angeles event was big enough to move into the convention center and last year it expanded from one day to two. This year has been a tipping point of sorts, starting with the two-day New York show warranting space in the sprawling Javits Center, and big brands like MAC and Target coming on board.

Traditional celebrities signed on, too, and their appearances on the main stage have drawn headlines and more publicity for Beautycon. The keynote by “Black-ish” actress Tracee Ellis Ross in Los Angeles last year about expanding the definition of beauty — “I’m inviting you to let your ‘you’ flag fly,” she said — became fodder for a later appearance on Conan O’Brien.

“Moj and her team recognize that beauty is about more than just slick advertising,” Debra Perelman, chief executive of Revlon, said in an email. They “realized early that in the digital age you can’t just talk to women, but instead need to build a deep, personal relationship with them.”

‘This is the Future of Beauty’

Beautycon is a festival, yes, but it’s also a data-gathering machine. Two hundred beacons sprinkled throughout the floor in Los Angeles allowed organizers to heat-map the crowds, showing where the largest groups of attendees were congregating. Beautycon held eight focus groups each day that weekend, talking to 320 consumers about their shopping habits and attitudes on health and wellness. Each wristband was equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, allowing the organizers to monitor the path people took, how long they lingered, and if they visited a booth multiple times.

Coupled with registration information, Beautycon can paint a detailed picture of these shoppers. “We know what she wants, we know what she’s missing, we know what she needs,” said Richelieu Dennis, founder of SheaMoisture products, owner of Essence magazine and a Beautycon investor.

Beautycon’s connection to customers, paired with the combination of content and commerce, has helped Mahdara raise $20 million from investors. The most recent round of financing raised $6 million, led by the New Voices Fund, a $100 million fund that invests in businesses owned or managed by women of color and run by Dennis. “This is the future of beauty — this is the future of business,” he said of Beautycon.

In Los Angeles, about 60 percent of brands offered attendees a chance to shop on site, either at full price or a discount. Companies at Beautycon also keep close tabs on the e-commerce lift afterward, using special discount codes and tracking conversion rates from follow-up emails. The festival’s implied revenue per square foot, meaning both the dollars spent on site and the resulting online sales, was $4,288 last year, Mahdara said. (Apple, for comparison, saw sales per square foot upward of $5,100 last year in its average store, according to eMarketer.) At this point, Beautycon does not take a cut of on-site sales, but organizers say they may revisit that option in the future.

Beautycon is expanding, both in the brands it attracts (B-Well, its push toward health and wellness, drew the likes of Kind snacks, Quip toothbrushes and West Elm furniture) and its locations (international dates and cities, beyond London, are in the works).

Mahdara was tight-lipped on a new “experiential commerce” concept coming this fall, which she said was a “really exciting new format both digitally and experientially.”

The secrecy is tied, in no small part, to the new competition Beautycon now faces. Beauty retail behemoth Sephora, owned by LVMH, is starting its own festival in downtown Los Angeles this fall, dubbed Sephoria. Tickets range from $99 to $449; each level includes a bag of giveaways (Beautycon attendees needed to spend $199 for the “Hauler” package to receive such a thing). The overlap in participating brands is minimal. Sephora appears to be using its considerable clout in the industry to attract some of the most popular prestige names, ones that were not at Beautycon in Los Angeles, such as Pat McGrath Labs and Fenty Beauty by Rihanna (Fenty is produced by Kendo, another division of LVMH).

Mahdara says Beautycon had been in talks with Sephora for a year, presenting a similar idea, and that she was surprised at their decision to stage such an event themselves. “Our audience knows that beauty is not just about products,” Mahdara says. “They can throw a party as they wish.”

A Sephora spokeswoman described its relationship with Beautycon as “complementary” and said “the concept for Sephoria was developed internally long before we shared anything with potential partners.” Beautycon was part of the proposal process, she added, but Sephora “decided to go with a different partner.”

Instagram-Ready Experiences

Instead of singing for their supper, Beautycon-goers selfie for their samples. At the recent gathering, staffers in the CoverGirl booth scanned phone after phone to make sure attendees who waited in line to take a photo in front of its branded backdrop (with its new slogan, “I am what I makeup,” in neon lights) also followed the brand on Instagram before they would hand over a full-size mascara sample.

The exchange was surprising to watch, if only for how normal it appeared to be for both sides. This younger generation of shoppers knows that to get something, you have to give something.

An email address is the bare minimum. Amorepacific, a South Korean beauty conglomerate of 28 brands, wove attendees through a multistationed testing tour, with a representative explaining the benefits of products at each brand stop. At the end, shoppers received a tote bag with five single-use samples. Those who shared their emails were given an additional travel-size sample.

The goal of the booth, which cost “multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to Jessica Hanson, president of Amorepacific US, was to introduce its family of brands to more shoppers. To that end, perhaps more popular than the samples were the headbands Amorepacific gave away: white, flashing branded crowns, which attendees then wore, voluntarily and enthusiastically, throughout the convention hall as a kind of walking advertisement for the company.

On its maiden Beautycon voyage, Aveda, a division of Estée Lauder, lured attendees to its booth with a towering paper cherry tree next to a swing for photographs. The prop was a popular gathering spot over the weekend, providing ample backdrop for a logo and solving the eternal what-do-I-do-with-my-hands posing question.

As people waited in line, Aveda staffers chatted with them about the Cherry Almond collection, which the company introduced the week of Beautycon, handing out scent sticks and samples. The collection was designed to appeal to women with long hair — 73 percent of millennials have hair that is shoulder length or longer, the brand says — with promises of “touchably soft” tresses. It comes in bright-pink packaging and has a sweet scent.

Aveda also handed out coupons for 15 percent off a shopper’s first online order if placed by the end of the month and offered 20 percent off all purchases on site, a rarity for the brand. “We don’t discount very often at all,” said Cydney Strommen, director of marketing communications for Aveda-North America. Unlike the fashion world, which has been plagued by pricing pressure and rampant discounting, beauty brands very rarely go on sale.

Nearly three-quarters of Beautycon’s target audience — Gen Z-ers and younger millennials that Mahdara calls “pivotals” — say they are influenced more by “content creators” than traditional celebrities, according to Beautycon’s research. Many of the digital stars that were the original draw have catapulted into massive, and massively profitable, operations, some boasting major sponsorship packages with five-figure appearance deals.

“For regular people, you are like, ‘Who are these people?'” said Ukonwa Ojo, chief marketing officer for consumer beauty at Coty, which had booths for CoverGirl, Rimmel London and Sally Hansen at Beautycon in New York and Los Angeles this year. But beauty junkies “know them and they love them,” she said.

Coty sees Beautycon as a rare chance for consumers to experiment with its products. The three showcased at Beautycon are primarily sold in drugstores and big box chains without a testing option. “For a lot of people it’s the first time they ever been to a place where they could try all of our products before,” Ojo said.

These beauty-obsessed consumers are particularly valuable resources for companies, she added, as they are more open to fashion-forward looks and willing to experiment with new products that have yet to go to a wide market.

In Los Angeles, Rimmel London introduced 14 new shades of its Stay Matte Liquid Lip Colour, as well as the Wonder’Fully Real Mascara. “If they love it, you’ve won an advocate,” Ojo said. And winning an advocate, she added, means that shopper will share it with his or her followers, who may then want to try it themselves. Every one, after all, is an influencer.

‘I Feel So Amazing Here’

From his perch in a hall conference room, one floor up and overlooking the mazelike scene below, Beautycon’s executive vice president, Tripp Mahan, smiled. He considers himself the event’s “conductor,” with the stated goal of “curated chaos.”

“It has to be a very amped-up atmosphere,” he said.

How does one turn a light-filled, cement-floored, 347,000-square-foot hall into a party before noon? With a thumping DJ booth at the entrance and a series of choreographed mobs. Instead of escorting the talent to the booths quickly and discreetly in a golf cart, Mahan prefers to parade them through the show floor with security detail.

The resulting swarm leads to what Beautycon calls “fandomonium.” Kardashian West was a notable exception; the Beautycon team went to great lengths to remove people from the backstage area where she entered.

“If Meryl Streep walked up to you and me, we would just act cool and move on,” Mahan said. But the fan-influencer relationship is much more intimate and intense. “Stars are just obligated to do a selfie,” Mahan said.

Michael David Magaraci, a 20-year-old from Long Island who trekked to Beautycon by himself, walked into the hall and straight to the main stage, where he snagged a seat in the front row and waited for hours to see Kardashian West, who was promoting her KKW Beauty line.

“Growing up, I was always taught, ‘You don’t wear makeup, you’re a boy,'” he said. He was wearing no fewer than six of Kardashian West’s products on his face, including lip gloss and concealer, his thick brows groomed and filled in, and KKW’s blue eye shadow artfully swiped across his lids. “Beautycon is celebrating diversity, and through that diversity comes confidence,” he added. “I feel so amazing here.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/entertainment-beauty-is-in-eye-of-these_29.html

#News

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luanabat-blog1 · 6 years

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CRAYOLA CRAYONS MAKEUP REVIEW

New Post has been published on https://parfumage.com/crayola-crayons-makeup-review/

CRAYOLA CRAYONS MAKEUP REVIEW

my sister’s James Charles here and welcome back it’s my youtube channel first today’s the day we’re doing something that I actually have not done in a very very very long time and that is a review and it fills you guys who have been watching me for a while you know that I don’t really like doing reviews but mostly because of one they’re boring – I don’t release which up my beauty routine that often and three the general public is convinced that beauty gurus are literally spawns of Satan and were sent down to earth to literally fool everybody and lied to them into buying copy products a few days ago I was doing some sisters shopping the play stylist online to pick up some really cute summer clothes and I was on ASOS which if you don’t know what that is it is a really really cute online clothing retailer how I can not sponsored by shag should be and I actually came across the beauty section on their website and found out something that had me shook to the core and that was that Crayola the crayon company that we all used to draw with when we were kids came out with a full-on makeup line at first sitting there I was very much sister stumped on why the heck and our supplies company would release a makeup line but then I remembered it’s kind of within the same realm and you guys just saw me do my full face using only art supplies a few weeks ago and clearly the actual products worked out pretty well so it might not be that strange of a business move for them but regardless I bought the entire collection today I’m very very very excited to see how these products actually test out will they be good or will they literally be like crayons on my face we’re gonna find out so without further ado let’s jump right into the video [Music] so lonely isotopes that made to search the Crayola and it looks at that they launched 57 different items at the collection which is actually like very very large I deftly picked up a lot of different things today that I’m excited to try out and there are things on this website ranging from brushes to eyeshadow palettes to mascaras to highlighters to face crayons which I’m have no idea what that a is but I guess we’re going to find out so starting off I picked up two different eyeshadow palettes that they launched right off the bat I’m gonna say packaging absolutely beautiful this rainbow moment is so so so cute and I got the nude eyeshadow palette and the mermaid eyeshadow palette France if you’re watching this please stop releasing mermaid and unicorn themed items we are all over it this has been a PSA the palette sweet offer $29 and they come with ten shadows and each kit meaning each shadow is $2.90 Wow I love being at the queen of math and they’re actually both cruelty free and vegan which is really really great I also picked up the Crayola face palette which once again retails for at $29 and contains 10 different oh this is the face palette I really thought this is going to contain a contouring color I grabbed their customizable lip palette which is $35 and once again contains 10 different sheets perfect for mixing I am very very excited to try to sell it later on I don’t know if any you guys know this or if ever tried it but honestly Beverly Hills actually has a really really great formula for their customisable lip palette so I’m gonna be very interested to see how this performs and comparison to that one I grab the highlighter crayon and the shade shimmering blush and this one was $17.50 which looks like this interesting I’m a little bit scared to put this over top of my foundation but we’re gonna make it work hopefully I grab two different mascaras in black and navy blue and these retail for sixteen dollars but the years of the collection for me what a little bit sister sell good Laura I picked up some of the Crayola face crayons and I grabbed a yellow a block a white a mango color of blue of red and a nude color just to try out different eye looks today now these look great on the website they retail for $14.50 now to me if this price hike seems a little bit high bring their you’re only getting point 0 7 ounces of product for $14.50 and I know for a fact that milk sells their jumbo eye pencils for like $6 which is literally like the same exact product hello I literally spent 101 dollars and 50 cents on all seven of these eye pencils and what I find even more ridiculous is that you can literally go to the craft store and buy a 96 packet of crayons which are probably let’s be honest the exact same thing was this for nine dollars I got 96 crayons for nine dollars and I got seven i crayons for a hundred and $1.50 something does not add up here if you ask me and finally my last purchase of this collection is probably the worst of all them being this Crayola Beauty make up a brush set in case now when I saw this brush out online originally I was like wow is so cute look at this brush keys are you kidding me at holographic Crayola Gorge and then I bought it for $40 and I opened it up to find this for eyeshadow brushes for Quattro I don’t think so before we go ahead and actually start my look today I thought we should do some sister swatches of the different eye crayons because these are really what I’m most excited to see how the heck of these perform so let’s start off with the shade white oh okay so it’s definitely a very very creamy formula thank God it doesn’t feel like an actual crayon on my arm we have the shade dandelion so cute that these are actually matching to the real names of the Crayola pencils putting these on they actually feel kind of like oily to apply I really thought that are gonna be a lot more like hard I definitely interested to see if these are going to try down because they definitely do it transfer as you can see it kind of feels like you’re playing a lip stick to your arm whereas I felt like they’re gonna be a lot more dry next we have the shade at Mango Tango okay I guess this one is a little bit sparkly that’s kind of pretty I doesn’t want to try to use that one as a blush next we have the shade of red oh wow that you’re kidding that was with literally zero pressure yeah these are a really sister soft this is like a lipstick wow that did not last long this is a mess alright next I picked up the shade and navy blue this one also has a little bit of sparkle to it as well that’s a really pretty color not gonna lie I wanna use on the lower lash line I also picked up the shade desert sand which is like a little nudie color I would got this for out the waterline and this is really really pretty and then finally of course I got why but I think the worst block that I’ve ever swatch in my entire life what is that you’d think of all the colors the block would be like the best one if anything okay I’m a little bit sister spooked after these swatches but you know what I want to see how this is gonna turn out let’s just jump right in I’m gonna first grab the base palette because I’m looking a little bit flat right now and I’m literally scared and I’m going to attempt to contour somehow I’m first gonna grab the blush brush from this collection and grab I think this shade or right over here and try to contour this let’s see luckily there’s a mirror in here which is actually really helpful it’s not like bad it’s just like not there I was definitely right in the beginning when I said that this palette deftly does not have a contour option which is hello it’s a face palette I’m gonna grab my Calvin D shade of light palette and just contour them I’m gonna go back to that in 30 seconds for blush and highlight and the full shebang okay we’re back with our regularly scheduled programming did you miss me I know you did I’m gonna grab the blush brush once again I’m gonna dip into this kind of metallic e coral copper shade down here it actually look very very sunny I want to try to use this for at blush today so once again it’s not showing up can you see that what’s going on why is it not showing up with my face oh there it is okay it’s their shoes that are shaking into the party oh I love that okay I feel like this blush shade is like absolutely perfect for a really beautiful bronze look for the summer time to kind of transition your bronzer to your highlight I really actually like to shade a lot oh my god Wow okay cool great love that you guys might like to do highlighter earlier on as well so I’m gonna go back into the shade in a short second I want to lay down this highlighter stick as a base first this is in the shade shimmering blushed and once again I think this was $17.50 these kind of remind me of like the milk sticks and there it’s barely there come on Crayola this is like the texture of what I thought the face creams were gonna be like like this has that waxy kind of more dry texture that I was expecting and that does not look good it’s actually picking up the foundation underneath which is definitely not good do it does not look good that is canceled a million percent and sad what I’m gonna do is get my face a white spritz of fix+ just like I always do before I apply my highlighter and I’m gonna get my morphe 501 brush and I’m gonna dip into this shade right here in the face palette which actually looks like a really really pretty highlighter and let’s try out this instead okay not at that see that looks good great love that the true test here is can it snatch a sister schnoz let’s see that is the face all complete we are chiseled out we added a little bit of color and now we aren’t glowing from with Ana I’m actually really really loving how this is looking so far but I’m gonna bake my face and set it in place and I’ll be right back a little bit closer up to start off the eyes okay literally about a sword in the eyeshadow I’m literally luck the pocket it’s literally flying apart oh you’re kidding okay this is just getting worse and worse and worse for the second we’re gonna pretend like that shadow didn’t just fall out of the entire package good lord I’m scared okay let’s freakin do this thing at this point I’m gonna start off with the nude eyeshadow palette which is literally falling apart at its seams I think I really want to keep with the theme that I have going on it’s officially summer time I know some of you guys are graduating at congratulations by the way so before I even talking to the eyeshadow palette i actually the yellow face cran and I think I want to pop this in the inner corners like a little fun a pop of color and see how it actually it turns out it’s actually showing up on the skin surprisingly I guess I’m just gonna grab like a blending brush and see if I can buff that out I hear they do blend thank God oh wait no they don’t what the heck okay so the cranes actually do blend out but it definitely loses like almost all of its pigmentation when you blend it and it doesn’t dry like it’s still tacky feeling this is not going well I’m gonna put a little bit more on to bring some of that color back similar to the highlighter – it’s actually taking off the foundation from underneath the crayon it still looks fine oh my god you guys can’t even oh wow hashtag for Cyril problems when you buy too expensive hood camera and it still looks good so looking at the news power R or matte shades and then six different shimmer shades which is a very very bad ratio there should never be more shimmer shades in math sheets in a palette I wanna grab that red crayon that literally melts it off when it was touching my hand and see if one I can create an orange in the middle of this eye look and also kind of wing this out on oh my god why is this right doing this let’s grab the one eyeshadow brush in the entire brush kit and try to blend this out the sad thing is I’m like actually really trying here like I don’t want to lost you from Crayola but I know you can feel it coming okay that’s not that horrible what if I grab like a regular morphe brush okay that’s not horrible it’s like bad but like not the worst me look at everything am i I wonder if I grab a blending brush and like a little bit of this oh okay that actually works okay what’s actually really annoying is that blending the red and the yellow together like didn’t make orange I wonder if I put this mango shade in here what that will do nothing it’s gonna do absolutely nothing apparently why can I make orange like red plus yellow wow look at me being an artiste oh we we welcome to Patti maybe these are supposed to be like use when you’re like not wearing makeup it’s like not like it just over like a eye thing or like you like just put it on the cheek like as like a light on the go type of thing this is just not good I think is the conclusion that I’m coming to here okay I wanna figure out to somehow finish this I look and I want to do a house quickly so I can check out some of the shimmer shades in here because they are so you look really really stunning and I love the highlighter in the face palette that we use beforehand so I’m gonna grab my shape tip concealer I’m gonna cut out the crease but I’m actually really nervous to do this being that these shadows are and are not drying down in the slightest bit so this might all get mixed together and we’re gonna find out in a few short seconds I’m gonna grab my morphe I’m 2 to 4 brush and start off with this kind of light gold shader right here at the bottom and I’m gonna pack that on the lid hello what the heck what like this swatch so nicely where is this on the arm hello I do not see that do you I feel like I need to treat you all I children right now because we’re doing a Crayola makeup tutorial what is going on now that the crease is all kind of caught I’m gonna grab this like a metallic kind of ready orange shade right here on a fluffy brush and I want to use this to blend out the outer edge into that red shadow that we have going on I’m just gonna pop this right here oh that’s a good shot oh okay not mad about it i doesn’t want to deepen up that outer V a little bit too and add some more dimension so I’m just gonna grab a Smith 235 brush and dip it it’s this kind of like muted grey tone up in this corner I’m not sure how this is gonna turn out let’s just try those so be one of the worst eye looks I’ve ever done and I’m literally not even being dramatic yes I am but I never want to use as much of the colors as possible so we did get a black crayon and I want to try to do a winged liner with this which I know I’m going to regret like you know what you don’t know unless you try why is this black so sheer why would you ever want a block that looks like this oh my god this is also a cream so it’s literally not gonna dry down either yeah what’s the worse all right so that is the upper lashline all complete and it looks not good but let’s move on to the lower lash line I think I want to add a pop of color because I really am dying to try out this mermaid palette I first wanted one of the crayon in the shade navy blue first of all this is like cherlene that color that we all loved not dark blue I want to pop this right up here for a fun pop of color and see how this works see that’s actually really pretty like that I can get behind we love great and then I’m gonna go a mix of these two shades right up and here with my morphe I’m at 149 brush and use that to epochal right over top to actually set in the shade because cream eyeshadow is whether or not Crayola knows they are supposed to be set with something with that same brush I want to dip into this darker purple shade right up in here and give Dada spreads a fix+ as well and pack that on the outer corner because purples are so pretty and I feel like it’s very very rare that you see like a metallic purple and an eyeshadow palette so I really want to test this out okay you know what as much as I was making fun of it the remain I showed up how a hundred percent outperform the nude palette this actually is really pretty I just can’t get over the fact that this black eyeliner is literally like not block who does that how would you ever do that okay so I got this nude shade desert sand to pop in the lash line so we’re gonna pop it in the lash line I feel like that did like very I guess it kind of worked okay should I try white instead oh okay that’s actually a bomb white liner kind of all right that is enough of the eyeshadows I bought mascaras these were 16 dollars each I’m gonna start off with the black one on the upper lashes and see how this mascara actually it performs I like this wand a lot actually Wow as if following this video literally could not get any worse I am out of lash glue a very BA 20 minutes later all right finally huh that is what I look all completes looking in the mirror I actually don’t hate how this turned out I feel like we had a mission to go on and although we may have failed I like the direction that this is going in and I really want to recreate this look sometime soon with like a really good working a product that being said this eyelid literally took me 45 minutes to do and I still don’t feel like it’s up to par the blending is not great these cream shadows still are not dried down which is very very strange and it’s just not as bright and pigmented as those like them to be that being said I’m gonna go and do the other eye off-camera really quickly and hopefully try to do it a little bit faster and I’ll be right back to finish off the rest of this Crayola all right hello i am back and those are both eyes complete thank god i’m gonna finish up my look today with a lip so let’s go ahead and grab the custom lip palette i think i want to do probably just like a nude lip I did a rainbow I look so I think I need to like balance out a little bit something you thought I want to mix in this sheet together right here with a pink to make a slightly lighter nude um let’s see how this actually works under go this mouth shape my down here mix it on my arm I guess and then a little bit of this white shade well okay they definitely are really creamy that’s for sure which is great I want to add a slight bit of yellow as well and make it a little bit more peachy tone let’s try this what the heck that is not what I wanted okay it kind of tastes like like not good I’ll ease lip color ever for this look it’s like a bright Barbie baby pink like no that is not what I wanted I wanted like a dark nude how do I make that maybe like shad Brown I would love to tell you how I got to this color but I don’t even know myself all right guys I’m calling it quits for this video today this review has been something else Crayola sweetie love you the most you made my childhood pretty iconic but I think we need to stick to our 96 crayons for ten dollars because all this is not working out overall this collection is not absolutely the worst but I definitely not recommend you guys to go and run and spend your money on it these face crayons I would have to say by far the worst thing in this entire collection they’re way too waxy they’re not that pigmented they do not blend out very well they don’t dry down and they are way way a way to overprice the next several pencils are a much better alternative the eyeshadow palettes however were actually not that bad specifically the face when I actually really really like this one this highlighter shade right here looked absolutely stunning on the cheeks and this metallic coral blush I am literally in love with I want to reach for this all the time this summer and the mermaid palette as such as I was actually making fun of it in the beginning was actually a pretty bomb as well and I love how it looks on the lower lash line the lip palette although I was having a really hard time finding a decent shade at first I think I was actually able to mix together a really beautiful nude and the formula feels really really really nice but I would definitely recommend buying a lipstick instead because I know most you guys don’t want to sit there I was saying good morning and mixed together a lipstick I know I certainly don’t the mascaras were okay they definitely like did their job of coating and lash and giving them a little bit of a lift but they’re definitely not something I would recommend or say that you needed in your life and the brush collection is an absolute no please never spend $40 on four brushes ever I actually really really do love the look that I came up with today but it just took me way too much time way too much ever and way too much packing and Blandings we ought to really get good Ilyich going on I’m actually really disappointed because you guys know I say all the time or difficult for the are and you guys might grew up drawing painting and coloring and Pirela actually did have a huge huge part in my life and it got me through a lot of really really tough times as a kid but it really sucks to say that I will not be recommending this election to you guys and it will definitely not be a part of my future makeup routine that being said I really hope you guys enjoyed this video today and if you did please don’t forget to give it a big thumbs up down below and subscribe if you have not already I’d love to have you join the sister this is a pretty lit time because I got Bala I can’t see if we notified every time I upload a brand new video if you like to follow me on my makeup journey you can follow me on Instagram or Twitter they’re both the same Charles and my snapchat for more behind the scenes lights up his senior Charles and extra ass after Charles this videos sister shadow goes to sister Ethan thank you so much we employ stalling in supporting two I love you so so so much and if you like to be the next videos sister shadow don’t forget to always a retweet video links they go live on Twitter all right sisters that is all I have for this video is tonight thank you for watching this crazy crazy review I love you and I will see you in the next one bye

#beauty #beauty tips #brutally honest #coverboy #covergirl #crayola #crayola makeup #crayon makeup #crayons #easy makeup #full face of makeup using only art supplies #funny videos #honest review #how to #makeup artist #manny mua

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brucebai · 7 years

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The Uber Dilemma

The Uber Dilemma http://ift.tt/2w6g9f3

By far the most well-known “game” in game theory is the Prisoners’ Dilemma. Albert Tucker, who formalized the game and gave it its name in 1950, described it as such:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa)

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

The dilemma is normally presented in a payoff matrix like the following:

What makes the Prisoners’ Dilemma so fascinating is that the result of both prisoners behaving rationally — that is betraying the other, which always leads to a better outcome for the individual — is a worse outcome overall: two years in prison instead of only one (had both prisoners behaved irrationally and stayed silent). To put it in more technical terms, mutual betrayal is the only Nash equilibrium: once both prisoners realize that betrayal is the optimal individual strategy, there is no gain to unilaterally changing it.

TIT FOR TAT

What, though, if you played the game multiple times in a row, with full memory of what had occurred previously (this is known as an iterated game)? To test what would happen, Robert Axelrod set up a tournament and invited fourteen game theorists to submit computer programs with the algorithm of their choice; Axelrod described the winner in The Evolution of Cooperation:

TIT FOR TAT, submitted by Professor Anatol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, won the tournament. This was the simplest of all submitted programs and it turned out to be the best! TIT FOR TAT, of course, starts with a cooperative choice, and thereafter does what the other player did on the previous move…

Analysis of the results showed that neither the discipline of the author, the brevity of the program—nor its length—accounts for a rule’s relative success…Surprisingly, there is a single property which distinguishes the relatively high-scoring entries from the relatively low-scoring entries. This is the property of being nice, which is to say never being the first to defect.

This is the exact opposite outcome of a single-shot Prisoners’ Dilemma, where the rational strategy is to be mean; when you’re playing for the long run it is better to be nice — you’ll make up any short-term losses with long-term gains.

Silicon Valley’s Iterated Game

What happens in Silicon Valley is far more complex than what can be described in a simple game of Prisoners’ Dilemma: instead of two actors, there are millions, and “games” are witnessed by even more. That, though, accentuates the degree to which Silicon Valley as a whole is an iterated game writ large: sure, short-term outcomes matter, but long-term outcomes matter most of all.

That, for example, is why few folks are willing to criticize their colleagues or former companies:1 today’s former co-worker or former manager is tomorrow’s angel investor or job reference, and memories are long and reputations longer.2 That holds particularly true for venture capitalists: as Marc Andreessen told Barry Ritholtz on a recent podcast, “We make our money on the [startups] that work and we make our reputation on the ones that don’t.”

Note the use of plurals: a venture capitalist will invest in tens if not hundreds of companies over their career, while most founders will only ever start one company; that means that for the venture capitalist investing is an iterated game. Sure, there may be short-term gain in screwing over a founder or bailing on a floundering company, but it simply is not worth it in the long-run: word will spread, and a venture capitalists’ deal flow is only as good as their reputation.

The most famous example of this is cemented in Valley lore. From The Facebook Effect:

Facebook’s success was beginning to make waves. And in Silicon Valley, success attracts money. More and more investors were calling. Zuckerberg was uninterested. One of the supplicants was Sequoia Capital. Among the bluest of blue chip VCs, Sequoia had funded a string of giants—Apple, Cisco, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Yahoo, and YouTube, among many others. The firm is known in the Valley for a certain humorlessness and a willingness to play hardball. Sequoia eminence grise and consummate power player Michael Moritz had been on Plaxo’s board and was well acquainted with Sean Parker. It was not a mutual admiration society. Parker saw Moritz as having contributed to his downfall. [Parker was fired from the company he founded by the board, including Moritz] “There was no way we were ever going to take money from Sequoia, given what they’d done to me,” says Parker.

Plaxo raised a total of $19.3 million in the rounds in which Sequoia participated; was whatever percentage of that $19.3 million Sequoia put in worth missing out on the chance to invest in one of the greatest grand slams in the history of venture investing?

The entire point of venture investing is to hit grand slams, and that calls for more swings of the bat. After all, the most a venture capitalist might lose on a deal — beyond time and opportunity cost, of course — is however much they invested; the downside is capped. Potential returns, though, can be many multiples of that investment. That is why, particularly as capital has flooded the Valley over the last decade, preserving the chance to make grand slam investments has been paramount. No venture capitalist wants to repeat Sequoia’s mistake: better to be “nice”, or, as they say in the Valley, “founder friendly.”

Benchmark Sues Kalanick

This is why what happened last week was so shocking: the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital filed suit against former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for fraud, break of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty. From Axios:

The suit revolves around the June 2016 decision to expand the size of Uber’s board of voting directors from eight to 11, with Kalanick having the sole right to designate those seats. Kalanick would later name himself to one of those seats following his resignation, since his prior board seat was reserved for the company’s CEO. The other two seats remain unfilled. Benchmark argues that it never would have granted Kalanick those three extra seats had it known about his “gross mismanagement and other misconduct at Uber” — which Benchmark claims included “pervasive gender discrimination and sexual harassment,” and the existence of confidential findings (a.k.a. The Stroz Report) that recently-acquired self-driving startup Otto had “allegedly harbored trade secrets stolen from a competitor.” Benchmark argues that this alleged nondisclosure of material information invalidates Benchmark’s vote to enlarge the board.

Moreover, Benchmark alleges that Kalanick pledged in writing — as part of his resignation agreement — that the two empty board seats would be independent and subject to approval by the entire board (something Benchmark says was the reason it didn’t sue for fraud at the time). But, according to the complaint, Kalanick has not been willing to codify those changes via an amended voting agreement.

Giving three extra seats on the board to the CEO was certainly founder friendly; that the expansion happened at the same time Uber accepted a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which came with a board seat, suggests Benchmark viewed the board expansion as a way to protect its own interests and influence as well. After all, longtime Benchmark general partner and Uber board member Bill Gurley had been pursuing ride-sharing years before Uber came along, and the investor had penned multiple essays on his widely-read blog defending and extolling Kalanick and company.

Then again, by June 2016, when the board was expanded and the Saudi investment was announced, Gurley’s posts had taken a much sterner tone: specifically, in February 2015 Gurley warned that late-stage financing was very different than an IPO, and that it had “perverse effects on a company’s operating discipline.” A year later, in April 2016, Gurley said that the “Unicorn financing market just became dangerous…for all involved”, and that included Benchmark:

For the most part, early investors in Unicorns are in the same position as founders and employees. This is because these companies have raised so much capital that the early investor is no longer a substantial portion of the voting rights or the liquidation preference stack. As a result, most of their interests are aligned with the common, and key decisions about return and liquidity are the same as for the founder. This investor will also be wary of the dirty term sheet which has the ability to wrestle away control of the entire company. This investor will also have sufficient angst about the difference between paper return and real return, and the lack of overall liquidity in the market. Or at least they should.

I suspect this, more than anything, explains this unprecedented lawsuit.

The Uber Outlier

Benchmark is one of those most successful venture firms ever. Founded in 1995 with a commitment to early stage funding, the firm has, going by this chart from CB Insights been an investor in 14 IPOs, 11 in the last five years (the chart shows 13 and 10; I added Snapchat, which IPO’d earlier this year).

The company’s investments include Twitter, Dropbox, Instagram, Zendesk, Hortonworks, New Relic, WeWork, Grubhub, OpenTable, and many more; according to CB Insight, since 2007, the companies Benchmark has invested in have exited (via IPO or acquisition) for a combined $75.96 billion.3

That, though, simply highlights what an outlier Uber is, at least on paper. Uber’s most recent valuation of $68.5 billion nearly matches the worth of every successful Benchmark-funded startup since 2007. Sure, it might make sense to treat company X and founder Y with deference; after all, there are other fish in the pond. Uber, though, is not another fish: it is the catch of a lifetime.

That almost assuredly changed Benchmark’s internal calculus when it came to filing this lawsuit. Does it give the firm a bad reputation, potentially keeping it out of the next Facebook? Unquestionably. The sheer size of Uber though, and the potential return it represents, means that Benchmark is no longer playing an iterated game. The point now is not to get access to the next Facebook: it is to ensure the firm captures its share of the current one.

This, I would note, is a lesson founders should learn: Kalanick was resolutely opposed to an IPO, claiming he would wait “as long as humanly possible”; his delay, though, completely flipped the incentives of Kalanick and his early investors. While in most companies the venture capitalists have to worry about their reputation along with their capital, in the case of Uber there is simply too much money at stake: transforming a $68 billion paper return to a real return (and guaranteeing a per partner return in the nine figures) is worth whatever reputational damage is incurred along the way.

In other words, an iterated game is good for founders: it ensures venture capitalists are nice. Single move games, though, which Uber has become, often end badly for everyone, particularly founders.

Diminished Uber

Understanding that Benchmark is focused on achieving liquidity on its all-time greatest investment suggests two potential outcomes:

The most straightforward is that Benchmark hopes to push Uber to an IPO sooner-rather-than-later; clearly Kalanick was an obstacle as CEO, and according to reports, has sought to reestablish control of the company via his control of the board, driving away Meg Whitman, who was reportedly Benchmark’s choice for CEO.4 This also explains the urgency of this suit: Benchmark is trying to prevent Kalanick from naming two more members to the board, further complicating the CEO selection process.

The other potential outcome is that Benchmark is looking for an exit. Softbank, which is looking to dominate car-sharing globally, has reportedly had discussions with Benchmark and other investors about buying their shares; reports have been mixed as to who wants to make a deal — Kalanick or Benchmark — but if it is the latter a lawsuit is an excellent way of getting the former to agree to a sale.

There is a third possibility: that Uber broadly and Kalanick specifically are in big trouble when it comes to Waymo’s lawsuit against the company, and that Benchmark is making clear that it is not culpable. A full six pages of Benchmark’s lawsuit were dedicated to describing Kalanick’s role in the Otto acquisition and Benchmark’s obliviousness to alleged wrongdoing; I noted when the lawsuit was filed that it, more than any of Uber’s scandals, had the potential to be Kalanick’s doom, and apparently Benchmark agrees (although, of course, one should question why Gurley, then an Uber board member, apparently declined to do more digging on a $680 million acquisition).

What is without question, though, is that whatever outcome results from this mess will be a suboptimal one; most Uber critics still fail to appreciate that the ride-sharing market is demand driven, which meant Uber really did have a chance to be the transportation behemoth of much of the world. Now the company is retreating throughout Asia, is on the regulatory run in Europe, and stuck in a fight it should have never drawn out with Lyft in the United States. Perhaps Benchmark will get its all-time great return, reputations be damned. It seems unlikely its return will be what it once might have been.

Above and beyond problematic arbitration agreements [↩]

This isn’t always a good thing: one reason serious issues like sexual harassment by venture capitalists go underreported is that the harassed worry about the long-term effect on their reputation — will future investors simply see them as trouble? [↩]

According to CB Insight, IPO valuation is based on first day closing price; acquisition valuation is based on public pronouncements or whisper valuations [↩]

Whitman is most famous for her stewardship of eBay, Benchmark’s first big breakthrough investment [↩]

BruceFav Bloggers via Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com August 14, 2017 at 10:38PM

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