Nov 19 2022
Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks

Recently departed Twitter staff have told MIT Technology Review they worry that the platform has weeks to live judging from current staffing levels, mass resignations overnight, and the morale of those few who remain. 

With some within Twitter estimating that 75% of those remaining plan to quit after Elon Musk sent an email informing them that they “will need to be extremely hardcore” and must click “Yes” on a Google form to remain employed, the company is likely to be sorely short of key staff in the days to come. Last night, Twitter told its staff that all offices were locked and access suspended after it became clear how few were willing to remain on those terms. In a tweet last night, Musk said that “the best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”

For those who escaped the madness earlier, either through layoffs or after being fired for insubordination, it’s a troubling development. “You’re seeing you can only push the workers so far before they’re going to revolt,” says Melissa Ingle, a senior data scientist contractor who was laid off by Musk this weekend. “These people have options. They’re successful in their careers. They don’t want to be put through this.”

Ingle worries that the wide-scale revolt—triggered by Musk’s “hardcore” ultimatum—will signal the end of Twitter without drastic changes. “There’s just not enough technical expertise anymore to keep the site running,” she says. “He’s afraid of his own people. Unless major changes are made, I don’t see how it lasts the month.”

She’s not alone in that assessment. One former Twitter engineer, who was fired by Musk as part of a crackdown on those who escaped his initial layoffs but were outspoken in their criticism of him, says the end “could be minutes, could be weeks.”

“It’s the unanticipated problems that’ll break things badly,” says the engineer, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “There’s a good amount of resilience built into the infrastructure, but big problems at this scale are never what one could ever expect.”

The former employee is unsurprised that so many others have said they’ve had enough. “It was an easy choice, given the way he’s been treating people,” he says. Those who remain, he believes, are likely those who must remain employed for an H1-B immigration visa, or for private insurance purposes. But they’re few and far between. Just to ensure basic functionality, Ingle believes, “many more engineers will need to be hired.”

MIT Technology Review has previously reported how one Twitter insider believes the company’s systems will degrade over time. Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer reported overnight that many employees who maintained Twitter’s critical infrastructure have also resigned in the last 24 hours. The fact that Twitter offices are now closed could mean it would be more difficult for staff to triage and fix any infrastructure issues that arise before the office’s planned reopening on November 21. 

Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Twitter’s own communications team has been massively reduced in the recent layoffs.

“There will need to be major changes,” says Ingle. Already, we’re seeing Musk rowing back on some of his more draconian measures. After saying in an all-staff email on November 9 that “remote work is no longer allowed, unless you have an exception,” he is now saying that staff need to have in-person meetings with their colleagues monthly at a minimum.

“He’s going to need to get more people back in who know this system, who are able to ramp up in a hurry—otherwise we’re going to start to see major outages,” says Ingle. That will leave those who have recently departed—or intend to leave—in a quandary. Many current and former Twitter employees tell MIT Technology Review that although they are deeply unhappy at the way the company is presently being run, they are also conscious that Twitter has an outsize role in our society and is a living historical record of our lives.

That conflict is something Ingle is seeing in her group chats with those colleagues who currently remain. “People are just kind of trying to hang on by a thread,” she says. “There’s a sense of loyalty, but morale was already lower than I’d ever seen it in my career. People don’t feel respect. They don’t feel like their work is respected. And it’s just hard to keep people motivated in that kind of environment.”

“Look, I’m an optimist,” says Ingle. “I think there’s a possibility he’ll turn it around, but it’s very slim.” Even with that glimmer of optimism, she and her unnamed engineering colleague aren’t confident that the platform will last long shorn of so much staff. “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system,” she says, “and very soon.”

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 19 2022
I found out my biological age—and was annoyed by the result

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.

You’re only as old as you feel, so they say. Now biological clocks attempt to put a number on it. 
 
These tools analyze proteins in your blood, chemical markers on your DNA, or even the makeup of your gut bacteria to essentially predict how close you are to death. It’s an appealing idea. So when a company offered me the chance to find out my own biological age, I took it. 
 
The company, Elysium, was cofounded by Leonard Guarente, a scientist at MIT who has been studying the biology of aging since the 1980s. Today, Elysium is one of many companies selling tests for biological age, as well as several supplements that aim to target aging.

The test that I took is based on some of the first biological clocks developed by academics. Back in 2011, Steve Horvath, then at the University of California, Los Angeles, was analyzing saliva samples for epigenetic markers—chemical groups that attach to our DNA to control how genes make proteins. Some attachments might turn genes on or off, for example.

Horvath noticed that the patterns of epigenetic markers seemed to align with age. In fact, they aligned so well that he was able to train an algorithm to predict a person’s age. In 2018, Morgan Levine, then at Yale University, and her colleagues took a similar approach with blood samples, but they incorporated health data as well as age. Levine’s resulting PhenoAge clock is thought to give a good idea of a person’s remaining health span—the years someone can expect to spend in good health.

Guarente and his colleagues at Elysium based their own clock on the work of Horvath and Levine, although they say they have modified theirs, and use spit samples rather than blood. The idea is that the clock should tell you how physiologically old you are, giving a sense of how much healthy life is left in you.
 
Given all that, I was hoping the test would put my biological age below my chronological age—that is, the number of birthdays I’ve had. Guarente, who is 70 years old, tells me his biological age is six years below his chronological age. So I spat into a tiny tube, sent my sample off to the company’s lab in the US, and crossed my fingers.
 
I’ve always thought—or at least hoped—that I look young for my age. That should bode well—studies suggest that your biological age is linked to how old you look. A team that developed an aging “speedometer” found that people who are aging faster look older, even when they are in their 30s.
 
But the last few years have taken a physical toll, as they have for many others. I’m not the only one to have found the pandemic extremely stressful, and research by Horvath and his colleagues suggests that stress can increase your biological age, at least temporarily.

I’ve also had two children in the last five years. A few studies suggest that there’s something about pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding that might influence the way we age. One study I covered back in 2018 found that giving birth was “equivalent to around 11 years of accelerated cellular aging,” according to the scientist behind the work.
 
And then there’s the sleep deprivation familiar to all parents and caregivers of very young children. While science is still getting to grips with what happens to our brains and bodies while we sleep, it’s obvious that it’s something vitally important. Anyone who has been kept awake for nights on end won’t be surprised to hear that a lack of sleep has been linked to a shortened life span.

It’s also harder to eat well and get enough exercise when you’re balancing a full-time job with parenting. As I was adoringly brushing my four-year-old’s hair the other day, she commented: “Mummy, you’ve got loads of lines on your face.” Thanks, sweetie.

My test result arrived a few weeks ago. Apparently, my biological age is 35—the same as my chronological age when I took the test. In theory, this means that I’m aging at a typical rate—no better or worse than the other 35-year-olds we have data for, on average. I couldn’t help feeling a bit annoyed. Yes, I have two small children and am chronically sleep deprived, but I also eat a largely plant-based diet and do yoga three times a week. Surely that should put me at least a little above average?

I’m clinging on to the fact that there’s only so much any of us can take away from a biological clock score, no matter how alluring it might be. Despite lots of promising studies, we still don’t really know how accurate these tools are, or how much they can tell us about our health and longevity. Plenty of scientists are trying to figure this out, and working to develop clocks that better reflect what’s going on inside our bodies.

“It [comes across as] a one true number for your health, and people really want that,” says Martin Borch Jensen, chief science officer at Gordian Biotechnology, a company that aims to discover new treatments for age-related diseases. “We need to keep doing the work to find out if we actually have that or if it’s just a mirage.”

Read more:

I covered aging clocks in more detail in this piece, published in April. And Karen Weintraub has explored how insurance companies and hospitals might make use of them.
 
At the end of September, I attended a super-fancy longevity conference for the mega-rich in the Swiss Alps—and discovered a fascinating world of hope, hype, and self-experimentation.
 
Both Morgan Levine and Steve Horvath have now joined Altos Labs, a company exploring ways to rejuvenate cells that my colleague Antonio Regalado described as “Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever.”
 
Antonio covered the technology, known as cellular reprogramming, in more detail in this recent feature.
 
There are loads of fantastic stories about aging, life, and death in the latest issue of our magazine, which is all about mortality.

From around the web

Lab-grown meat has been given its first stamp of approval by the US Food and Drug Administration. Upside Foods should soon be able to start selling cultivated chicken in the US, once a couple more small regulatory hurdles are cleared. (Wired) ​​

We don’t really know what’s in tampons—and how chemicals from them might affect our bodies. (Undark) 

Video footage reveals just how stringent China’s zero-covid policy is, as evidence surfaces of children being locked into boarding schools and others being denied medical care. (New York Times)

Flu season started early this year in the US, and we don’t really know why. (Scientific American)

A new tick-borne disease is killing cattle in the US—and the tick responsible is predicted to spread across the country in the coming years. (MIT Technology Review)

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 19 2022
These three charts show who is most to blame for climate change

Leaders at the annual UN climate conference are still in the thick of negotiations, working to plan a path forward to cut emissions, as well as to address climate impacts that are already occurring. 

Part of this second goal includes discussions about establishing funding for “loss and damage” caused by climate change, which richer countries would pay to help poorer and more vulnerable nations. Developing countries have long urged such funding, but the issue was finally added to the official agenda for the first time this year at COP27 in Egypt. 

Central to these negotiations is a question: Who is responsible for climate change? The issue is complicated, but a few pieces of data about current and past emissions can begin to answer it. 

Greenhouse-gas emissions reached their highest-ever level in 2021, with global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels topping 36 billion metric tons. China is currently the highest emitter, followed by the US. Combined emissions from the European Union are the next largest, with India and Russia following.

!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r<t.length;r++){if(t[r].contentWindow===e.source)t[r].style.height=e.data["datawrapper-height"][a]+"px"}}}))}();

Data on current emissions doesn’t tell the whole story on climate responsibility, though. “Countries are massively unequal in terms of the extent to which they’ve caused climate change,” says Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow in the global climate program at the World Resources Institute, a research nonprofit. 

Climate change is the result of the total concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas driving climate change, stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. 

So researchers also look at historical emissions: the sum of a country’s contributions over time. The US is by far the largest historical emitter, responsible for over 20% of all emissions, and the EU is close behind. China falls to third when climate pollution is tallied this way, with about half the US’s total contribution.  

!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r<t.length;r++){if(t[r].contentWindow===e.source)t[r].style.height=e.data["datawrapper-height"][a]+"px"}}}))}();

The US and EU’s long history with fossil fuels is what puts those regions at the heart of discussions about loss and damages, especially because burning fossil fuels helped them grow. “Economies that have been strong for many years tend to be strong because they benefited from those early greenhouse-gas emissions,” Fransen says. It’s clear that the richest countries in the world had, and continue to have, an outsize climate impact, she says.

Future responsibility

Total emissions can help inform decisions about who should pay what for climate damages. But addressing climate pollution in developing nations where emissions are rising fast even though they have ben low historically will also be key to slowing global warming. “We cannot solve climate change without China and India and every other major emitter dramatically reducing their emissions,” Fransen says. Some nations might need more time to reach net-zero emissions, but they’ll eventually need to get there to meet global climate goals. 

It’s also important to consider per capita emissions, Fransen says. For example, it’s clear that India, while one of the world’s top emitters, is still responsible for far less per person than other emissions leaders. 

!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r<t.length;r++){if(t[r].contentWindow===e.source)t[r].style.height=e.data["datawrapper-height"][a]+"px"}}}))}();

In a globalized world, assigning blame to individual countries for climate change isn’t always straightforward. International transportation, for example, isn’t typically included in any one country’s emissions total.

This issue also arises for manufacturing hubs like China, says Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway. Under international definitions, countries are generally assigned responsibility for emissions within their borders, even if they’re making products that will get used elsewhere, Andrew says. 

Understanding where emissions are coming from, and how that’s changed over time, can give us a clearer picture of how to cut emissions and deal with the effects of climate change. But any one piece of data will likely fall short of representing the urgent, messy reality of the task ahead. Put simply, Andrew says, “there’s no easy answer.” 

Notes on data methodology: 

  • Emissions data is from the Global Carbon Project, which estimates carbon emissions based on energy use.
  • Data from the European Union is the sum of its current 27 member states. The bloc is represented together because the EU generally negotiates together on the international stage. 
  • This comparison takes into account emissions from energy and some industrial activity like cement production but doesn’t include land use emissions from agriculture and forestry, which can be a significant contributor but is more difficult to estimate. 
Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 19 2022
Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

On November 15 Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, designed to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. Yesterday the company took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out.

Meta’s misstep—and its hubris—show once again that Big Tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models. There is a large body of research that highlights the flaws of this technology, including its tendencies to reproduce prejudice and assert falsehoods as facts. 

However, Meta and other companies working on large language models, including Google, have failed to take it seriously.

Galactica is a large language model for science, trained on 48 million examples of scientific articles, websites, textbooks, lecture notes, and encyclopedias. Meta promoted its model as a shortcut for researchers and students. In the company’s words, Galactica “can summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.”

But the shiny veneer wore through fast. Like all language models, Galactica is a mindless bot that cannot tell fact from fiction. Within hours, scientists were sharing its biased and incorrect results on social media. 

“I am both astounded and unsurprised by this new effort,” says Chirag Shah at the University of Washington, who studies search technologies. “When it comes to demoing these things, they look so fantastic, magical, and intelligent. But people still don’t seem to grasp that in principle such things can’t work the way we hype them up to.”

Asked for a statement on why it had removed the demo, Meta pointed MIT Technology Review to a tweet that says: “Thank you everyone for trying the Galactica model demo. We appreciate the feedback we have received so far from the community, and have paused the demo for now. Our models are available for researchers who want to learn more about the work and reproduce results in the paper.”

A fundamental problem with Galactica is that it is not able to distinguish truth from falsehood, a basic requirement for a language model designed to generate scientific text. People found that it made up fake papers (sometimes attributing them to real authors), and generated wiki articles about the history of bears in space as readily as ones about protein complexes and the speed of light. It’s easy to spot fiction when it involves space bears, but harder with a subject users may not know much about.

Many scientists pushed back hard. Michael Black, director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, who works on deep learning, tweeted: “In all cases, it was wrong or biased but sounded right and authoritative. I think it’s dangerous.”

Even more positive opinions came with clear caveats: “Excited to see where this is headed!” tweeted Miles Cranmer, an astrophysicist at Princeton. “You should never keep the output verbatim or trust it. Basically, treat it like an advanced Google search of (sketchy) secondary sources!”

Galactica also has problematic gaps in what it can handle. When asked to generate text on certain topics, such as “racism” and “AIDS,” the model responded with: “Sorry, your query didn’t pass our content filters. Try again and keep in mind this is a scientific language model.”

The Meta team behind Galactica argues that language models are better than search engines. “We believe this will be the next interface for how humans access scientific knowledge,” the researchers write.

This is because language models can “potentially store, combine, and reason about” information. But that “potentially” is crucial. It’s a coded admission that language models cannot yet do all these things. And they may never be able to.

“Language models are not really knowledgeable beyond their ability to capture patterns of strings of words and spit them out in a probabilistic manner,” says Shah. “It gives a false sense of intelligence.”

Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at New York University and a vocal critic of deep learning, gave his view in a Substack post titled “A Few Words About Bullshit,” saying that the ability of large language models to mimic human-written text is nothing more than “a superlative feat of statistics.”

And yet Meta is not the only company championing the idea that language models could replace search engines. For the last couple of years, Google has been promoting its language model PaLM as a way to look up information.

It’s a tantalizing idea. But suggesting that the human-like text such models generate will always contain trustworthy information, as Meta appeared to do in its promotion of Galactica, is reckless and irresponsible. It was an unforced error.

And it wasn’t just the fault of Meta’s marketing team. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and Meta’s chief scientist, defended Galactica to the end. On the day the model was released, LeCun tweeted: “Type a text and Galactica will generate a paper with relevant references, formulas, and everything.” Three days later, he tweeted: “Galactica demo is off line for now. It’s no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy?”

It’s not quite Meta’s Tay moment. Recall that in 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot called Tay on Twitter—then shut it down 16 hours later when Twitter users turned it into a racist, homophobic sexbot. But Meta’s handling of Galactica smacks of the same naivete.

“Big tech companies keep doing this—and mark my words, they will not stop—because they can,” says Shah. “And they feel like they must—otherwise someone else might. They think that this is the future of information access, even if nobody asked for that future.”

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 19 2022
The Download: Twitter may only last weeks, and Meta’s unforced AI error

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks

Recently-departed Twitter staff have told MIT Technology Review they worry that the platform has weeks to live based on current staffing levels, mass resignations overnight, and the morale of the few who remain.

The company’s former employees estimate that 75% of its remaining workers plan to quit after Elon Musk gave them an ultimatum of adopting “extremely hardcore” working practices or to accept three months severance, a widescale revolt which looks like it will leave Twitter sorely short of key staff in the days to come.

For those who escaped the madness earlier, either through layoffs or being fired for insubordination, it’s a troubling development. They’re concerned that there’s just not enough technical expertise to keep the site running, and that unless drastic changes are made, and soon, Musk’s actions will signal the end of Twitter. Read the full story.

—Chris Stokel-Walker

Why Meta’s latest large language model only survived three days online

On 15 November Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, intended to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. Yesterday it took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out.

Meta’s mis-step—and hubris—shows once again that big tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models.There is a large body of research that highlights the flaws of this technology, including its tendency to reproduce prejudice and assert falsehoods as facts. 

However, Meta and other companies working on large language models, including Google, have failed to take it seriously. Read the full story. 

—Will Douglas Heaven

Who’s responsible for climate change? Three charts explain

Leaders at the annual UN climate conference are still in the thick of negotiations, working to find a path forward to cut emissions, as well as to address climate impacts that are already occurring.

Central to these negotiations is a question: who is responsible for climate change? The issue is complicated, but our charts might help to illuminate some of the answers.

—Casey Crownhart

I found out my biological age—and was annoyed by the result

You’re only as old as you feel, or so they say. But now, you can put a precise number on your physical age, thanks to biological clocks. These tools analyze proteins in your blood, chemical markers on your DNA, or even the makeup of your gut bacteria to essentially predict how close you are to death.

It’s a tantalizing idea. So when a company offered Jessica Hamzelou, our senior biotech reporter, the chance to find out her own biological age, she took it. But, as she found out, a vegetarian diet and regular yoga practice haven’t turned the clock back for her as much as she hoped. Read the full story.

Jessica’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech and biomedicine. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Elon Musk’s demands for loyalty triggered an exodus of Twitter workers
Hundreds of employees chose to quit instead of signing up to his vision of “hardcore Twitter.” (WP $)
+ The soccer World Cup will be a major stress test for what remains of the platform. (The Atlantic $)
+ Musk’s management style is high risk, low reward. (WSJ $)
+ He’s undermined Twitter’s integrity and safety, senators say. (FT $)
+ Here’s how you can find your feet on rival Mastodon. (Wired $)
+ Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks. (MIT Technology Review)

2 How covid bolstered antimicrobial resistance
It made an existing problem significantly worse. (Scientific American $)
+ The next pandemic is already here. Covid can teach us how to fight it. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Big Tech’s glory days are numbered
Which leaves a whole lot of smart people with time on their hands. (Vox)
+ You could say the industry is having a midlife crisis. (The Atlantic $)
+ It’s not just about growth at any cost anymore. (Slate $)

4 The hunt for a non-opioid treatment for pain
Marrying safety and efficacy is hard to do, but scientists aren’t giving up. (Neo.Life)
+ Tens of millions of people in the US are living with chronic pain. (New Scientist $)

5 Taylor Swift’s impassioned fans are going after Ticketmaster
The site botched sales for her new tour, and furious fans want to break its monopoly. (Slate $)
+ Ticketmaster sold nearly all the tickets in siloed presales. (Motherboard)

6 US broadband is seriously awful
It’s expensive, slow, and contains loads of hidden charges. (The Verge)
+ Here’s a list of the worst offenders when it comes to raising your bills. (WP $)
+ Temperature rises are likely to spark more global internet outages. (CNET)

7 Don’t fall for the stories we tell about the internet
A healthy dose of critical thinking can cut through the spin. (The Atlantic $)

8 AI has a trust problem
Some experts believe that demonstrating how systems learn is the solution. (WSJ $)
+ AI-generated deepfakes could actually help protect privacy. (New Scientist $)
+ We need to design distrust into AI systems to make them safer. (MIT Technology Review)

9 China’s TikTok sellers want to entice western shoppers 🛍
They’re setting their sights firmly on the US market. (Rest of World)
+ China wants to control how its famous livestreamers act, speak, and even dress. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Silicon Valley loves an e-bike 🚲
It’s the coolest way to flex your eco-credentials these days. (The Information $)

Quote of the day

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.”

—John Ray, the new boss of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, doesn’t hold back in condemning the company’s former leadership in a recent court filing, the Guardian reports.

The big story

Behind the painstaking process of creating Chinese computer fonts

Bruce Rosenblum switched on his Apple II. A green grid appeared, 16 units wide and 16 units tall. This was “Gridmaster,” a program Bruce had cooked up to build one of the world’s first Chinese digital fonts. He was developing the font for an experimental machine which was among the first personal computers to handle the Chinese language.

He had a long list of tasks ahead of him. At the time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were no personal computers being built in China. So to make a “Chinese” PC, Rosenblum’s team was reprogramming an Apple II to operate in Chinese, which required programming both an operating system and a Chinese word processor.

While the machine was never commercially released, the painstaking work that went into its development was central to a complex global effort to solve a vexing engineering puzzle: how to equip a computer to handle Chinese, and in the process, eventually make the internet accessible to one-sixth of the global population. Read the full story.

—Tom Mullaney

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Beware the over-friendly octopus!
+ Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is…something I’d never heard of before.
+ Henry Cavill, aka Superman and Geralt of Rivia, just wants to talk about Warhammer, guys.
+ Brussels Sprouts are tastier than ever—here’s how you should be cooking them.
+ It may sound counterintuitive, but a second job can sometimes prove the perfect remedy to burnout.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 19 2022
Investment Banker Shifts to Male Sexual Wellness

Jordan Elist grew up hearing his dad, a urologist, discuss sexual health. So it’s fitting that Elist’s direct-to-consumer supplement business, Mate, focuses on that topic.

Elist launched Mate in 2020 after a career in investment banking. The company has produced two supplements to date, with more in development. All address men’s sexual health.

In our recent conversion, Elist explained the challenges of destigmatizing sexual healthcare, science-based formulation, marketing challenges, and more. The entire audio of the interview is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Bandholz: Tell us about Mate.

Jordan Elist: Mate is a men’s sexual wellness brand. I founded the company in December 2020. We offer natural supplements to combat erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation.

Companies such as Hims and Roman have helped remove the stigma around discussing men’s sexual health. I give those companies a lot of credit. They have approached the topic with humor and education. It’s a delicate balance. A guy wants to know the science behind the product to know it’s going to work.

Bandholz: How do you engage prospective customers?

Elist: I look at what others have done with similar businesses. Jon Shanahan over at Stryx, which sells make-up for men, has done an incredible job addressing a slightly stigmatized topic. He’s appeared on this podcast twice.

He has approached it by speaking directly to prospects on TikTok mostly.

TikTok organic has been one of Mate’s best customer acquisition channels, too. We can speak directly to the pain points that men deal with. We can see what they’re looking for from a product and even implement changes from their suggestions. For example, our packaging used to have the word “Mate” outside the box, but we realized that discreteness and confidentiality are of utmost importance to customers. So our outer packaging is now entirely discrete — no outside branding or wording.

We developed a second product based on customer feedback. Our first product, Endurance, addresses premature ejaculation. Little did we know that the opposite — delayed ejaculation — is an issue for many guys, often caused by taking anti-depressants. We saw that many folks were commenting on our TikTok videos about it. We turned to our formulation team for a science-backed approach to addressing that issue. The product is now in the pipeline. It’s called Ignite. They’re both once-daily supplements.

Bandholz: Tell us more about your science-backed approach.

Elist: I’m the son of a urologist. I grew up learning about men’s sexual health. On the premature ejaculation side, patients use two prominent solutions. One is numbing sprays, which just desensitize the area. The other is Sertraline, which doctors sometimes prescribe for off-label use, meaning that the FDA does not approve them to treat premature ejaculation, but it is a side effect of those drugs. So I asked my dad, “There’s a better way of doing this in a more natural science-based approach. What can we do?”

Given his 30-plus years of practicing medicine, he had a good sense of what systems in the human body help prolong sexual stamina. It came down to increasing Serotonin production. And from there, he worked with a team of pharmacologists and other urologists to determine the necessary ingredients. It’s a mix of L-Tryptophan and 5-Hydroxytryptophan. These are listed on our supplement fact panel. We took it a step further and did clinical studies to ensure that the product’s ingredient combination would be as effective as we were looking for. And fortunately, it was. And only then did we bring the product to market.

Bandholz: How have you funded the project?

Elist: We haven’t had to raise outside money. We’re bootstrapped. I started my career in investment banking. I saved a good amount from my regular salary and an end-of-year bonus. That allowed me to fund the initial inventory purchase and the website design and development.

Once I realized that organic TikTok, influencer collaborations, and Google Ads could generate revenue at scale, we did not need outside capital. I am competing with large brands that have raised lots of venture capital, but often they’re not profitable.

Bandholz: Isn’t organic growth slower than paid?

Elist: I operate a lean model with no employees, only freelancers. I have minimal fixed costs. So I can give it some time to see how the organic performs.

Bandholz: You mentioned you’re doing influencer collaborations. Walk me through that process.

Elist: There are excellent physicians on TikTok — urologists and sex education specialists — that have established significant followings to share helpful content. I often stumble across their profiles on my For You page. If someone would be a good brand ambassador and be able to explain the advantages of our product, I reach out.

If that person is equally interested, we’ll negotiate the fee — whether upfront, based on the number of views, or by how many times their promo code gets used. From there, we try to create a long-term partnership, not a one-off campaign. We want evangelists who understand where we’re coming from as a brand and our value proposition.

Typically, a creator wants a guaranteed payment regardless of how the video performs. They’re not as invested in the success as the brand owner. We offer all three options to see if they would work on a performance model. That often ends up costing more if the video performs exceptionally well. Still, we see it as an opportunity to show the content creator the upside potential and strengthen the relationship for future collaborations.

Bandholz: What about new products?

Elist: The next cohort of products will continue our focus on the supplement space. We’ll have one for libido testosterone support, one for prostate health, and one for delayed ejaculation. We should have five supplements by the first half of 2023 and seven by the end of 2023. From there, we’ll lean on our customers’ feedback to understand their preferences.

Bandholz: Where can people buy your products or learn more about what you’re building?

Elist: Our website is GoodNightMate.com. Our TikTok handle is @goodnight_mate, and you can find me on Twitter @JordanElist.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments