Shopify is letting merchants use NFTs for their customers to unlock special products, perks and experiences.
The idea is that NFTs are a kind of loyalty card that a brand’s top fans can use to access exclusive items.
Despite the crypto crash, Shopify is betting that NFTs will change the way people shop online and in person. The ecommerce giant has a new service to enable customers to use NFTs to unlock special perks, products and real-world experiences with merchants.
Last year Shopify added the ability for merchants to sell NFTs using Shopify so customers don’t have to go to another site to buy them. With this new product, Shopify is taking that a step further through what’s known as “token-gated commerce.” The NFTs can come from anywhere the merchants want.
The idea is that NFTs are a kind of loyalty card — in the form of a cryptographic key — that a brand’s top fans can use to access exclusive items.
The current crash in the crypto markets has hit NFTs as well. But Alex Danco, head of blockchain at Shopify, says he is excited about the current market because it removes distraction and is good for focusing on actual ways NFTs can be used to help merchants and decreases the interest in pure speculation.
As a result, merchants aren’t shying away from NFTs, Danco said. “If anything, it’s the opposite, right? The fact that this is very clearly not about ‘double your money in the next week or whatever by NFTs.’ The fact that it’s not that anymore is actually a great sign for real businesses and real brands.”
Some retailers are dubious, but Danco believes crypto wallets and NFTs will be a big benefit for merchants, once he persuades them to “wander into something that is so drowned out by noise of all of the speculative mania.”
The biggest benefit of crypto and NFTs is crypto wallets, he said. “Everybody sort of jokes about ‘This is a big bubble and it left behind no infrastructure.’ It left one very, very important piece of infrastructure: Everybody has a wallet now.”
The NFT can also be used in person. Shopify tried out the product with Doodles, a popular NFT project, at this year’s South by Southwest. Doodles NFT holders could buy exclusive merchandise or access a Doodles experience at the show. At the NFT.NYC conference this week, NFT project Cool Cats is using Shopify to offer access to special products for token holders.
One other use of NFTs is collaborations between brands, especially between Web3 and non-Web3 companies, Danco said. Superplastic, a toy company, partnered with Bored Ape Yacht Club to create toys for ape holders. Gucci also recently collaborated with Superplastic.
Danco sees this as akin to an old, famous band and a new, popular band playing a show together and sharing fans. NFTs enable that kind of experience, he argues. ”The funny thing is, it’s very hard to authentically do these kinds of exclusive collabs online where people invite each other in. But what people are seeing as token gating is actually just perfect for this.”
He believes companies will move beyond simply using an NFT to buy a product, but that is the easiest way for companies to get started. Danco also sees app developers that build on Shopify adding many more uses for NFTs. “I have an inside view of what some of these app developers are doing in the pipeline, and it’s gonna be nuts,” he said.
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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.
Kurian tapped his enterprise experience from 22 years at Oracle to reshape Google Cloud as an open, hybrid and multicloud player. What comes next?
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian spoke with Protocol.
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
When Thomas Kurian landed the CEO role at Google Cloud, he was welcomed as a respected technologist and executive bringing 22 years of needed enterprise chops from Oracle for a substantial undertaking: turning an underdog into a heavyweight contender for meeting major corporations’ cloud needs.
At the Google Cloud Next conference in early 2019, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced Kurian, then about three months into his tenure, as a “tremendous leader with a powerful vision” who already had met with hundreds of customers and partners and whose “personal productivity is testing the limits of G Suite and Calendar.”
Before leaving Oracle, Kurian had been its product development president since 2008, reporting directly to founder and chairman Larry Ellison. In early 2018, it was Kurian who unveiled Oracle’s ambitious plan to build up its own cloud capabilities with a massive buildout of its data center footprint and services using machine learning to automate routine operations. Growing differences with Ellison over Oracle’s cloud direction — including Kurian’s desire for a multicloud approach — reportedly led to his departure.
Three and a half years into his tenure at Google Cloud, the bet on multicloud has been a key foundation of Kurian’s reshaping of the No. 3 cloud provider around infrastructure, data analytics, cybersecurity, collaboration and communication, and industry-specific products and services. In his view, the next decade of cloud computing is likely to look very different from the first 16 years of its evolution.
Google Cloud’s success can be seen in its financial results — revenue has increased some 230% since Kurian joined Google Cloud, and is on track to exceed $23 billion this year — and customer adoption from the likes of Deutsche Bank, Ford Motor Company, Mayo Clinic, Univision and the U.S. Air Force, Kurian told Protocol in a recent interview.
“There’s always more to be done at all times, but clearly we’ve had a lot of success these last three years,” he said.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Read our other story on the evolution of Google Cloud here.
Is Google Cloud enterprise-ready or is it still a work in progress, and what are the indicators of that?
It’s the customers who indicate that. And given the number of very large customers — from stock exchanges, to large telecommunications companies, to big banks, to hospital systems, manufacturing companies that are running large systems and using our cloud to run the core parts of their business — I would say, yes, the answer is yes. We’ve really, really transformed, and most of our largest customers have been super successful in adopting and using cloud through the work they’ve done with us. So we definitely feel very confident we’re doing that.
Where do we have more work to do? Obviously, we have a certain size and scale. We want to expand to more countries, to more industries, and there’s a lot of work going on to expand both our data center footprint around the world, as well as our sales, distribution and service organizations around the world. So there is more expansion that we want to do globally to bring our technology to more countries, more places.
Where do you see the most opportunity to expand globally?
We’ve expanded significantly overseas in Europe. We are growing very quickly in Latin America. We’re expanding in Asia to many more markets. We are quite strong in the big markets, which is India, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, greater China and ASEAN, but there’s always more places in Asia, whether that’s in Thailand, Vietnam, etc. Similarly, in Latin America, there’s a lot of potential for growth. There’s more that we want to grow in Japan. We are expanding our presence in Africa. So there’s a lot more other geographies that we want to go to in addition to expanding in our core geos, whether that’s the U.K., France, Germany, United States, Canada, etc.
How market-share-oriented is Alphabet when it comes to Google Cloud? And if not market share, what is it using as a metric for success?
Despite the growth that people have seen so far, the market is very early in its transition, and so we see the market potential in three different ways. First of all, many customers have not yet transitioned [to the cloud]. Secondly … if you look at surveys from Gartner, IDC, the analyst firms, they will tell you that almost all large customers plan to use multiple cloud providers, which was not true a few years ago.
So when you look at the market, whether that’s new solutions like analytics or cybersecurity, these are all new segments that are opening up for cloud. We think the market is in its early stages. So we’re investing for growth and investing in terms of both our investments in capital, data centers and our global network, in products and in go to market. And we’re doing it in a thoughtful way. I think you’ve seen our financial results, and both the growth and the improvement of profitability because of the growth speaks for itself.
Sundar Pichai and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat have said that Alphabet is in it for the long term with Google Cloud. Is there any timeframe under which you have to meet a certain measure?
No, when we say long term, five to 10 years. If you look at the cloud market data today versus five years ago, it’s vastly different.
Five years ago, if you talked to customers, there was a lot of anxiety that if you go to the cloud, will it be less secure, as an example. Today, cybersecurity tools that we offer in our cloud are being used by large retailers, large financial institutions, large telecommunications companies. A market segment that did not exist in the cloud five years ago — cybersecurity tools — is now being created in the cloud as a new opportunity for people to go after. So in our view, we are looking at growing our business, diversifying the product portfolio in a thoughtful way. And how the market looks in five years or 10 years will be quite different than the way it looks like today.
Is Google Cloud’s embrace of multicloud a big selling point, and what are customers with a multicloud strategy coming to Google Cloud for?
If you went back and looked at our announcement in April 2019, where we said we are going to enable multicloud — and what we mean by that is you can build applications that can co-exist across clouds, you can do analytics that spans data that sits across clouds, you can use our machine-learning tools to access information and get better insights from data and inference across clouds — that was not possible before then. It’s become almost a norm now in large companies, where they want to use the best of the best from different cloud providers.
People come to us for our infrastructure. Many people come to us for our analytics and large-scale data processing and databases. Others come to us to protect their systems with cybersecurity. It really depends on the customer and which part of the journey they’re on. Infrastructure, analytics and data, and cybersecurity are typically the top three that people choose us for.
Do you see any holes in your technology or areas that you want to beef up?
We’re always looking at where we have areas for potential growth and where the market itself is changing, and then either we organically build new capability or we acquire.
As an example, if you look at our rationale for Mandiant [a detection-and-response cybersecurity company that Google Cloud announced it was buying for $5.4 billion in March]. There are two primary challenges we see that organizations have with cybersecurity.
First of all, very few organizations, if any, know whether they’re truly secure. Almost every cyber breach for most organizations are “black swan” events. They thought they were secure prior to it; after it occurred, they realized they were not secure.
Infrastructure, analytics and data, and cybersecurity are typically the top three that people choose us for.
The second is people want a platform. Today, the challenge most organizations have is they don’t have the capability to understand what occurred to cause a cyber breach, [to] analyze which of your systems have been compromised, [to] remediate that through workflow and then test whether you, in fact, are secure. We have two of the pieces. We have the “analyze whether you’re being compromised” [piece] and then “remediate the breach through workflow.”
We realized in the front, we needed really great threat detection and response capability. Mandiant brought us that. And then at the end, after you’ve gone through all of this, you have to actually be able to test whether you are secure from the breach if it were to happen again. Mandiant also has the capability to do that. So recognizing that combination would complement what we had, we chose in this particular instance to say, “Let’s acquire a company that will complement our products and fill it out.”
We wanted customers to have a very high-end, relational database transaction-processing platform based on an open platform. [In May,] we announced a new product at [Google] I/O called AlloyDB. It’s designed to allow people who are running large-scale transaction systems, but to use a much [more] open platform database to process large-scale transactions with great performance and reliability.
The second thing we saw was people really love our BigQuery [serverless data warehouse] technology. They like the fact not only is it a very scalable, analytical platform, but it also allows them to access and analyze data across clouds, meaning you could have your data in another cloud, and you can still analyze that using BigQuery. You don’t have to move all your data to our cloud for the purpose of analysis. We then felt that you would want the equivalent capability for something called a data lake, and so we announced a product called BigLake, an evolution of our analytic platform to support the notion of a large-scale, very scalable data lake that can run across data stored in multiple environments.
So these are all areas where we look at the needs of customers, we look at what we can help them solve. In the case of Mandiant, we chose to acquire because we think they’re an exceptional team, and they have exceptional technology and exceptional expertise. In the case of these other two products … we’ve chosen to build out ourselves.
Which vertical industries are getting the most traction for Google Cloud?
We have traction in many industries. If you look at financial services, we have a lot of traction with our data platform, analytics, machine-learning tools and AI. If you look at retail, we are a huge part of the ecommerce infrastructure as well as the retail store transformations that are going on. If you look at health care, many pharmaceutical and biomedical companies use our platforms for molecular modeling, genetic analysis of all kinds, etc. — what’s sometimes called high-performance computing. If you look at public-sector agencies, many state governments, for example, in the United States are using us to transform health and human services, transformation of their mobility and transportation departments, etc.
Telecommunications is another one. We have a lot of capability in media, given our expertise in streaming and other things from the work we’ve done historically with YouTube and how we’re bringing that to customers. A lot of people during the pandemic spent a lot of time gaming, and our platforms have helped some of the largest games in the world.
What’s behind Google Cloud’s recent reorganization of its sales and customer success teams? Was the previous setup built in 2019 under former global sales president Rob Enslin not working? And when you reorganize these teams again, are you worried about the signal it’s sending the customers?
We’ve talked to many customers and partners. I’ve talked to over 100 of them in the last week alone, and over 200 in the last two weeks. Customers’ and partners’ feedback are the rationale for [why] the changes make sense.
When we started in 2019, we were largely focused on acquiring customers. When I say acquiring customers [I mean] winning new customers, because we had very few. As we have ramped our business, increasingly, the sales organization that’s working with the customer to identify new opportunities in the account, and the customer success team that ensures the projects are going well, and the team that works with partners like Accenture, Deloitte, etc., all need to come together, because the salesperson is identifying the opportunity, the customer success coordinates the engagement with the partners, etc. So they all need to work in one coherent fashion, right at the point of client engagement.
We integrated the two organizations in each geography so that they could be much more effective working with customers. The feedback internally from our own teams and the feedback from customers and partners has been, “we really like what you’ve done.” So we’re very confident in the quality of our leadership, in what the changes have been, how the changes have been made. And we remain committed to making sure that this change will help our customers grow and mature their relationships with us.
What are top customer complaints or challenges that you’re trying to address?
Our biggest challenge right now is expanding globally. There’s demand in many countries where we don’t have presence. There are lots of places we’d like to take it to, and building an organization to support those expansions is obviously something that we spend a lot of time on.
Are any of your enterprise customers asking for more help to cut costs given inflationary pressures, and what are you doing to address that?
We have a team from our professional services that works with customers and our technical account managers to do what’s called cost optimization. Cost optimization is, you’re running your workload on our cloud, you have a certain pattern of usage, [and] we observe the pattern of usage after you’ve got to some steady state and then we teach you how best to modify the way in which you’re using the cloud to be much more efficient in cost. We have tools that show people how to do that. It’s a methodology that we offer, and it’s also something we make available through our services teams to support customers. It’s something that’s been ongoing for the last two years, and certainly for an ongoing basis.
Throughout the pandemic as well as now, [customers have] come to us saying, “Hey, I’d like to have you help me reduce my costs in this area or that area,” and we work with them. It’s part of getting them to be efficient in using our cloud. We think the more effective we can be at teaching them how to optimize, the more they will use in the future.
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
Nathan Coutinho leads Logitech’s global conferencing business strategy and analyst relations. A Swiss company focused on innovation and quality, Logitech designs products and experiences that have an everyday place in people’s lives.Coutinho leads strategy and execution of Logitech’s video conferencing solutions, from personal solutions to highly-scalable conference rooms.Coutinho has more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry with various roles in executive leadership, consulting, engineering, marketing and technical sales.
Now that most organizations are returning to the office, there are varying extremes – some leaders demand that employees return to the office, with some employees revolting and some rejoicing to be together again. On the other hand, some companies have closed physical offices and made remote work permanent; creating a sigh of relief for some employees and creating frustration for others.
Most of us are somewhere in between, trying our best to take a measured approach at building the right hybrid strategy tailored to company culture. Some seemingly have begun to crack the code, while the majority are grappling with the when, how, why, and who of this new hybrid work reality.
Hybrid work success looks different depending on who you ask. Your company is made up of a cast of players, each with a role critical to a competitive and thriving business, and with an eye on their North Star: employee happiness. How do you appease all those stakeholders so we can all just move on and do our jobs without getting bogged down with the mechanics of it all?
IT: The technology behind hybrid success
Let’s first consider IT, which is the team most bogged down in the mechanics of it all. Heroically having kept workforces running with ad hoc setups during the pandemic, this team is now focused on standardizing technology for the varied mix of remote and in-office employees.
However, employee expectations are completely different than they were pre-pandemic. Technology that was once a nice-to-have is now table stakes not only in conference rooms, but for any space — whether that’s a private office, hot desk, or remote desk.
As a result the IT team is now thinking holistically about how to outfit their hybrid workforces so that each employee has equal access to the highest-quality hardware, software, and solutions. The setups also have to play well in an ecosystem where employees routinely toggle between Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and a number of other web-based platforms for video meetings.
Facilities: Configuring “anywhere” spaces
Since the pandemic, facilities teams have redesigned, closed, shrunk, expanded, rebuilt, moved, and retrofitted offices to accommodate the dynamics of an evolving workforce. Whether they’re creating hot desks, huddle rooms, or traditional conference rooms, this team has the difficult task of space-planning for employees who may or may not even come into the physical office on any given day.
Rightsizing, where each meeting space is outfitted for a specific purpose, is top of mind for facilities pros. Reconfiguring rooms to support new hybrid work schedules enables personalization and a safe return to the office. Understanding how employees will use spaces as they come back, and enabling them to easily find and use these spaces will be critical for success.
Human Resources: It’s all about the employee experience
Keeping the Great Resignation at bay is just the start for this team. HR professionals are trying to build and retain a healthy, productive workforce, in all its facets and complications.
Having distributed locations, while sometimes seen as a tremendous benefit, can also bring drawbacks from the lack of face-to-face communication, onboarding, and mentoring. HR leaders are also keenly aware of the lack of equitable experiences some remote employees face when meeting with in-office colleagues.
While some of the HR team’s concerns about employee experiences can be solved with technology (like using easy, intuitive tech to connect teams), the HR team’s challenges stretch into areas that are hard to measure. Cultivating creativity and building unified cultures within hybrid work are massive undertakings with no one-size-fits-all solution.
Finance team: Investment decisions
Finance teams are looking at the not-so-insignificant impact of hybrid work costs. One of the challenges is hybrid work’s coordination problem, as highlighted by Microsoft in its 2022 Work Trends Index Report. Because most organizations have yet to take a data-driven approach to hybrid work, they are continuing to incur the cost of maintaining their campuses while also shelling out work-from-home stipends to a growing virtual workplace.
Thinking smart about hybrid
Our focus at Logitech is helping the industry solve many of these problems.
Making hybrid work successful for everyone requires much more than AI-based innovations. We’ve built solutions that help make the virtual meeting experience more equitable for all, provide analytics and insights into meeting room usage, while bringing simplicity with one touch.
But that’s just the beginning. Listening to all stakeholders — and seeing their challenges through the lens of their role — is the smartest possible start to make this hybrid work actually work. And we’re on it.
Learn more about how Logitech Video Collaboration is making hybrid work for global brands.
Nathan Coutinho leads Logitech’s global conferencing business strategy and analyst relations. A Swiss company focused on innovation and quality, Logitech designs products and experiences that have an everyday place in people’s lives.Coutinho leads strategy and execution of Logitech’s video conferencing solutions, from personal solutions to highly-scalable conference rooms.Coutinho has more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry with various roles in executive leadership, consulting, engineering, marketing and technical sales.
Such is the reality of today’s corporate environment.
There was hope this report would be the catalyst to institute more systemic change within both ProServe and the whole of AWS.
Joe Williams is a writer-at-large at Protocol. He previously covered enterprise software for Protocol, Bloomberg and Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JoeWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
It’s a tale as old as, well, the last few years. And this month, it’s AWS that got to live it.
The company recently outlined to employees the findings of an external probe conducted by Oppenheimer Investigations Group into a troubled division of the sprawling cloud giant. Known shorthand as ProServe, it’s the unit that helps customers make the most of AWS products.
It’s a vital touch point to get those users to spend more money with the company, which means it’s an important and very visible division within AWS. ProServe is also subject to a chorus of workplace complaints and at least five lawsuits alleging an atmosphere of bullying, discrimination and harassment.
The Oppenheimer investigation, along with a simultaneous but separate probe by AWS, found no evidence to substantiate such claims.
Such is the reality of today’s corporate environment. No matter how appalling the allegations, no matter how many voices chime in to echo them, no matter the magnitude of the actions that workers take to draw attention to the issues, when businesses investigate themselves — or hire someone else to — everything is perfect. It’s like going to fix your broken iPhone only for it to work the second it falls into the technician’s hands.
But details of the Oppenheimer probe are telling. Investigators talked to 92 current and former ProServe employees, according to an email sent to employees. Overall, the division has thousands of workers.
It’s evident that Amazon is a tough place to work regardless of the division, but AWS stands out for the stream of accusations leveled against it. And those are just the ones the public knows about; they don’t include many others raised privately, according to current and former employees.
As is usually the case with Amazon, there’s more to the story. Amazon said “all AWS ProServe employees were invited and encouraged to participate in the Oppenheimer investigation.”
Still, this is Amazon’s victory. Facing legal and reputational challenges, the company can now point to a report from a law firm led by Amy Oppenheimer, an experienced employment attorney, declaring that nothing is amiss.
For Amazon, there’s an important reason why this is such a big deal: Andy Jassy. The man who led the cloud division for 18 years is now the new Jeff Bezos. In other words, he’s a powerful man.
Now, as head of the entire company, Jassy has “championed” diversity. But that effort has already hit a major roadblock with the departure of two of its top Black leaders. And when it came time for Jassy to appoint top lieutenants, the positions (surprise!) went to white men.
There was hope this report would be the catalyst to institute more systemic change within both ProServe and the whole of AWS. Instead it may have just validated the despicable behavior that workers allege has festered openly within the company for years.
But the Oppenheimer report will in no way close the door on this issue for Amazon. If anything, it could spur more people to speak out. Even the most powerful companies can only keep a lid on internal scandals of a certain magnitude for so long. And Amazon is already a hot pot waiting to explode.
Joe Williams is a writer-at-large at Protocol. He previously covered enterprise software for Protocol, Bloomberg and Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JoeWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Sealed offers homeowners the chance to save money and help protect the planet.
Sealed is convincing homeowners to look at their HVAC systems and insulation in order to save energy and money.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Shiny silver panels hug the walls of Andy Frank’s attic; they vaguely remind me of a child’s robot Halloween costume. A sticky-looking foam lines both the gaps in the attic’s floorboards and the roof, plugging up holes where squirrels could have once taken shelter.
The space is positively sweat-inducing, even for the mere minute I have my head poking above the trapdoor.
I duck my head out and let the door close, so that I’m fully back on the second floor of the Connecticut home. The sweaty June feeling evaporates instantly on the pleasant — even cool! — landing. Frank assures me this was not always the case: Hot summers and cold winters used to be a fact of life in certain rooms, even with his HVAC system running at maximum power. This is his home post-Sealed.
Frank is the president and co-founder of the home decarbonization company, which he launched in 2012 alongside CEO and co-founder Lauren Salz. While Sealed is a decade old, it has found its footing in recent years. The pandemic, in particular, gave rise to a set of circumstances that Sealed was inadvertently positioned to address. As Salz put it, the pandemic “just brought forward the future in a lot of different ways.”
When it comes to home electrification, that future can’t come soon enough. Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. There are about 80 million owner-occupied homes in the U.S., most of which have not been weatherized. That means they leak heat in the winter and cold air in the summer. Stopping this waste at the source has the potential to be a huge opportunity for decarbonization and making people’s lives more comfortable. It’s also daunting; no two homes are alike, creating a near-infinite suite of solutions.
Spray foam lines the home’s joists in Andy Frank’s basement.Photo: Lisa Martine Jenkins/Protocol
But Sealed is doing the improbable: convincing homeowners to take a long, hard look at their oft-ignored HVAC systems and insulation in order to save both energy and money.
The company’s central premise is that it will cut a home’s energy bill through a combination of installing insulation, a heat pump and other upgrades like air sealing (the sticky-looking foam in Frank’s attic, for example) and LED bulbs. If those upgrades fail to save energy, Sealed will eat the cost of retrofits. Assuming they do, the price of the upgrades are amortized over time, a setup that Sealed customer Michael Latchmansingh said is “fantastic.”
After purchasing his Eastchester, New York, home in 2019, Latchmansingh and his family endured a chilly winter that made it clear his upstairs rooms weren’t sufficiently insulated. At the recommendation of his dad, he reached out to Sealed about an upgrade.
The Sealed process, crucially, starts with an analysis of a home’s energy use, both current and future. It combines information like a home’s age, location, layout and energy usage history with data from third-party sources like Zillow and Google Maps to present its customers with personalized proposals on how to save energy.
These first steps are all done remotely; then, the company partners with local installers that have been vetted and trained in energy efficiency to come do the physical work. Sealed currently operates in the Northeast, which is an ideal location for its services given the warm-to-hot summers and cold winters. But it has expanded to Chicago — another place with extreme seasons — thanks to a recent $29.5 million funding round.
“We need to make sure that the installation happens in a quality way, because the truth of the matter is, in most cases, the quality of the installation actually matters more than the equipment itself,” said Frank, noting that the market for home efficiency-specific contractors is growing from a relatively small base.
Some customers (like Latchmansingh) elect to upgrade just their insulation or invest in air sealing, whereas others elect to go whole-hog and overhaul everything. Frank’s first home, purchased in 2020’s pandemic rush, serves as a laboratory of sorts for the Sealed process.
There are marks where the boiler once stood in the basement, next to the new heat pump hot water heater. Photo: Lisa Martine Jenkins/Protocol
For Frank, the upgrades couldn’t come soon enough. After a winter in which he and his wife went to sleep wrapped in sweaters and avoided their primary bathroom — it sits over a drafty garage, which made it tundra-like — Frank installed eight heat pumps across his home’s three levels. One of these heat pumps whispers contentedly behind his desk, right above a framed vintage heat pump advertisement. (Yes, he really likes heat pumps that much.)
The house is now reliably comfortable in the sticky New England summer. (How it handles the winter remains to be seen, since the upgrades are fairly recent.) Signs of the old HVAC system can be found throughout the home: There are marks where the boiler once stood in the basement and on certain walls where ducts have been removed. The mammoth air conditioner that once cooled Frank’s house now sits in the garage, waiting to be carted away. The kitchen still has a gas range for cooking, though an induction stove is on the way, meaning Frank will be able to cap his gas main in short order.
It’s homes like Frank’s that form a major part of the electrification challenge: older, with heating systems that rely on fossil fuels. Most homeowners don’t think about their HVAC systems until they need to be replaced, which happens roughly once a decade. It’s a timeline that is slower than addressing climate change demands, said Panama Bartholomy, executive director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition.
“Existing buildings are the real challenge” when it comes to moving away from the use of methane gas in the home, Bartholomy said. While there has been a surge of cities banning gas hookups, those bans have only focused on new buildings.
“We need to be putting in place structures in order to be able to really get contractors and building owners to start making these transitions,” Bartholomy added.
Even if more legislation that favors electrified appliances over gas ones and promotes weatherization is a ways off, the fact that companies like Sealed are finding success is a sign of at least some progress. Heat pumps in particular have proven to be a sleeper hit, with sales hitting an all-time high in the last two years, per the Building Decarbonization Coalition’s manufacturing members, Bartholomy said.
This is a trend that both Bartholomy and Salz attribute to the pandemic. As people spend most of their time in their homes, investing in comfort has become a priority. That means not just a more nappable couch, but also heating, cooling and general home efficiency. Interest has also coincided with rising concerns about how piping methane gas into homes can worsen indoor air quality and also be a public safety concern, given the risk of explosions.
The vintage ad that Frank has hanging in his office.Image: GE
“The only way to really drive mass adoption of these types of technologies is … a really strong customer value proposition that isn’t about either saving money or saving the planet,” Salz said, because regardless of the potential benefits, “it’s still a home renovation.”
For Latchmansingh, it’s one he would go through again. The first installation of insulation took a few days (though the contractors did have to pause for a day when the heat in the attic at the height of summer became unbearable) and generally speaking was “as easy as could be.”
Latchmansingh said he would return to Sealed when the time comes to replace his HVAC system. In retrospect, he wishes he had done so last summer, before the war in Ukraine sent gas prices through the roof. And in the meantime, he is spreading the Sealed gospel to friends and family who might qualify.
That “seeing is believing” evangelism and education are core parts of Sealed’s vision. The team is putting new emphasis on teaching customers about the merits of decarbonization and the technologies available to do so. The good news, Frank said, is that heat pumps can address many issues people have with their home, from comfort to sustainability to health. The bad? The majority of people don’t know they exist. But happy customers and more outreach could flip that script.
“Most of the people we encounter in the market don’t know a lot about heat pumps, but it’s better than it was a couple of years ago,” Frank said. “It’s really a matter of first educating them … and then making it easy and affordable for them to be able to install those technologies.”
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
HR experts said companies need to be proactive about protections for contraception, privacy and LGBTQ+ rights.
Experts say tech leaders need to start thinking about future Supreme Court rulings.
Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school’s independent newspaper. She’s based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com.
Sarah (Sarahroach_) writes for Source Code at Protocol. She’s a recent graduate of The George Washington University, where she studied journalism and criminal justice. She served for two years as editor-in-chief of GW’s independent newspaper, The GW Hatchet. Sarah is based in New York, and can be reached at sroach@protocol.com
Tech companies are still trying to prepare for a post-Roe world. But it might already be time to think about what the Supreme Court is planning next.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade Friday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that the court should also reconsider rulings protecting contraception and same-sex relationships, citing Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell. If those decisions were ever overruled, it would have massive implications for everyone, but especially for employees living in states where same-sex marriage is at risk of becoming illegal without a federal shield.
Dozens of tech companies have announced policies to protect workers seeking abortions over the past month, and many of the logistics of those plans are unclear or still being decided. But given that the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion might be followed by more rulings down the line, HR experts said companies need to be proactive about protections for contraception, privacy and LGBTQ+ rights.
“Anybody who’s thinking about what’s going on in this country generally has to think about this,” said Janet Stovall, global head of DEI at the NeuroLeadership Institute.
When the decision to overturn the Supreme Court ruling on abortion was first leaked last month, some companies responded immediately with benefits. Others stood on the sidelines.
Companies including Bumble, Microsoft and Tesla announced almost immediately that they would cover abortion-related travel costs, while others said they’d offer relocation assistance for those living in states where abortion is heavily restricted (dozens of tech companies are based in states where abortion could become illegal or restricted). Some tech leaders were more quiet at the time of the leaked ruling. Meta, for example, told workers not to discuss abortion on its internal messaging platform. PlayStation told workers to “respect differences of opinion.”
Now that the ruling is official, companies are much more outspoken. Meta and Apple joined the chorus of tech companies publicly announcing their abortion-related travel coverage, although the exact steps companies are taking to implement the policy without exposing employee data aren’t entirely clear. “We are in the process of assessing how best to do so given the legal complexities involved,” a Meta spokesperson told Protocol. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
When it comes to future rulings, though, companies are once again choosing silence for now. Protocol asked 22 companies providing abortion-related travel coverage if they are preparing for a world in which same-sex marriage and same-sex relationships are not federally protected, given Thomas’ opinion. The companies that responded — including Indeed, Meta, Yelp, Match Group, Citigroup, DoorDash and Microsoft — reiterated their abortion coverage plans but did not say whether they are preparing for future Supreme Court rulings. DoorDash said it couldn’t speculate on future court decisions.
Yuvay Ferguson, a marketing professor at Howard University, said now is the time for companies to expand their actions beyond covering abortion-related travel. Ferguson said Justice Thomas’ opinion should serve as an alarm for everyone to act, including tech companies.
“Companies need to make sure they have a stance of supporting reproductive rights, not necessarily singularly focusing on abortion,” Ferguson said.
Contraception falls under that umbrella, but rights to same-sex relationships and marriage may come under fire as well. Tech companies will feel more pressure to go beyond rainbow-colored websites and declarations and stand up for LGBTQ+ folks internally and externally. Staying silent on bills like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law may no longer fly.
“How are you supporting people internally who don’t have the same resources as the people at the top, writing these PR statements?” said Madison Butler, chief people officer at cannabis company Grav. “It all comes down to inward accountability.”
Stovall said companies should first take care of people internally and be sure to communicate the gravity of the situation. Next, look at the legal landscape and figure out the actions you could even take against a harmful law. Lastly, carefully consider if you want to take a stand on the issue externally because if you do, you have to follow through. You don’t want to be perceived as picking and choosing certain issues, Stovall said.
“Is what you’re saying deliberate?” Stovall said. “Is it educated, is it purposeful, is it tailored to who you are and is it habitual? You need to be sure that it’s something that you’re gonna support going forward.”
Butler said the first and most important action is to have honest conversations with your marginalized employees. In other words, the employees whose rights would be most impacted by the reversal of these rulings. What do they need in order to feel supported? Maybe it’s an immediate need, like relocation. Maybe they want more concrete anti-discrimination policies or active advocation against harmful legislation. Butler emphasized that this messaging should come from the top, not just from employee activists or ERGs.
“All of these conversations should live in the C-suite,” Butler said. “We should absolutely be expecting this work and emotional labor from the people who are taking home millions every year.”
Salaried tech workers are not the people who will struggle most to get an abortion or contraception. Ferguson said she hopes tech companies, with all their power and money, don’t forget about the hourly workers who are most harmed by the rollback of rights. Tech leaders may start to think about preemptively advocating against these decisions, or their role in protecting user data from being weaponized. Stovall said companies should think about their locations in states that especially limit rights. “How do we have equity when we operate in inequitable spaces?” she said.
In the immediate wake of the Roe reversal, and in potential future decisions to come, Butler recommended giving employees space to feel a complex bundle of emotions.
“This is not just some brushstroke news article,” Butler said. “It’s not an op-ed. This is people’s lives.”
Lizzy Lawrence ( @LizzyLaw_) is a reporter at Protocol, covering tools and productivity in the workplace. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school’s independent newspaper. She’s based in D.C., and can be reached at llawrence@protocol.com.
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