Author: Editor

Bus stop advertising for Chinese fashion company Shein in London, England, May 4, 2025.Mike Kemp | In Pictures | Getty ImagesDiscount retailer Shein had long argued trade law loopholes weren’t the reason for its success. But now that those exemptions are gone, its once meteoric growth has stalled in the U.S. and Europe, posing a threat ahead of its Hong Kong initial public offering. In documents released in connection with its upcoming IPO, Shein blamed a slowdown in U.S. sales on its decision to raise prices to offset the cost of new tariffs as it warned a similar dynamic could come…

Dropbox is “virtual-first” and that’s not changing anytime soon, according to its new co-CEO.While many companies continue to enforce return-to-office mandates, Ashraf Alkarmi said that when he takes over as Dropbox’s sole CEO, he plans to maintain the company’s remote-first structure.Alkarmi previously held leadership roles at Vimeo and Meta and joined Dropbox as senior vice president and general manager of its core products in 2024. He became co-CEO in May, alongside Dropbox founder Drew Houston.Alkarmi said the cloud storage company’s virtual-first structure is an “incredible model” and he continues to believe in it. Dropbox officially implemented the policy in 2021…

Saving more than half your income doesn’t have to mean living in your parents’ basement and subsisting on ramen.”A lot of the old FIRE content is focused on hyper-frugality: Sell your car and bike 20 miles in a snowstorm to work. Live in a storage unit,” Cody Berman, the author of “Retire by 30,” told Business Insider. “I don’t think you have to do any of that. You just have to live slightly differently from your peers.”So slightly, in fact, that your peers might not even notice.That’s what Berman and his wife, Lauren, found when they began saving more than…

Amir Elaguizy has books about neural networks from the ’60s.The 42-year-old serial entrepreneur doesn’t believe that being younger means you’re more AI-native. Elaguizy emailed with Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” before Hinton started working at Google. He’s been learning about AI’s roots for decades.”For me, AI is a continuum,” he said. “I watched it the whole time. It’s not like it came online for me in 2022.”For Elaguizy, his age is a perk. It’s a sign to investors that he’s serious and knows how to build a business. (Elaguizy sold his first company to Zynga in 2011.) It also…

Someone needs to teach all the businesses out there how to use AI. Enter the so-called forward-deployed engineer.Matt Ward, Cursor’s head of talent, said on a recent episode of the “People by WTF” podcast that companies are racing to hire forward-deployed engineers to help companies and their clients adopt and personalize AI.”You’re deeply technical yourself,” Ward said, describing the type of person who is a good fit for the job. “But you can also walk into a room with executives and leaders.”The role, popularized by Palantir, sits somewhere between software engineering, consulting, and product. Forward-deployed engineers typically integrate with customers,…

After their own mediocre RV rental experience, Carrie and Brian Smith saw a business opportunity: offer travelers a more polished version of RV living.The Dallas-based couple, both full-time airline pilots, had already been exploring side-hustle ideas as they approached the industry’s mandatory retirement age of 65. At the end of 2023, they purchased seven RVs for about $782,000, putting down about $127,000 and financing the rest.They spent another $23,000 outfitting the fleet with sheets, towels, kitchen supplies, toiletries, first-aid kits, and other amenities and started listing their rentals in early 2024.How the RV rental business generates revenueThe Smiths compare their…

How far we get in our careers, we tend to believe, depends on us: our intelligence, our temperament, our hustle. But where we work and the support we get there matter immensely too. Does your company promote from within, or does it hire senior people from elsewhere? Does it spend real money on training and mentoring? Is it somewhere you’d want to stay for the long haul?The age-old problem for job seekers is that, from the outside, it’s hard to know. Even if you land at a business with a great reputation, it might turn out that jobs in your…

The dollar could eventually lose its status as the world’s reserve currency if the US fails to maintain its economic and military dominance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said.”If we’re not the strongest military in 25 years and the strongest economy, we won’t be the reserve currency either,” Dimon said on PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” which aired over the weekend. “The world will be fragmented, and it’ll be very dangerous for us,” Dimon added.The dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency, accounting for about 57% of global foreign-exchange reserves, down from around 70% at the turn of the…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daisuke Fujii, the cofounder of Farm & Firm Company, a Japanese consulting firm that helps farmers and rural communities generate new income through agritourism, hospitality, and business development. It’s been edited for length and clarity.I grew up in Saitama, about 20 miles north of Tokyo. In elementary school, I discovered a love for all things space- and engineering-related, like planes and satellites.At 14, I decided I wanted to be an engineer, but as one of five children, my parents couldn’t afford to pay for college. I had to make it happen…

In the fight for elite AI talent, the salary is the easy part.At Cursor, the $60 billion company behind a suite of popular coding tools recently acquired by SpaceX, hiring a candidate is a bit like trying to win over someone who’s completely out of your league.”Closing is a team sport,” Matt Ward, Cursor’s head of talent, said on a recent episode of the “People by WTF” podcast. For some high-profile candidates, he said, “there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we’re doing to get them to yes.”The company has also created private Slack channels dedicated to…