22 years.
Sadly, Irene’s punchline was: “I hope it doesn’t take another 22 years for another female to win this award.”

I’ve been trying to educate myself on the disparity of women in leadership roles in business and tech, but holy Google that is eye-opening!
Let’s do the math. 1/22 is 4.5%.

I was shocked. There’s no way this could be normal.

Women make up just 28 CEOs out of the Fortune 500(which is up from 21 a year ago). You can find the list here. And that’s 5.6%, not all that different from 4.5% — so this isn’t just an isolated case, but just another marker of how unbalanced the C-Suite is.

If you don’t think that’s a problem (and not just a math problem), I don’t know what is.

Let’s start by doing what we can in our own lives to be aware of how unbalanced the workplace hierarchy is.

Check out the Inspirational Women Series (hat-tip to Megan for creating this!)

And check this out/use it at your next meeting: Are Men Talking Too Much?

If you have any resources or stories to share, please let me know in the comments below — would love to see, hear, and read more about this issue.

22 Years — Why more still needs to be done to increase equality in the workplace was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Enjoy my friends!

Uber Gives 50% off next 10 Rides (Pool or X) was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I enjoyed the images posted by my friends with nice DSLRs. I enjoyed playing with the filters, just to see if I could produce something that was worth looking at. Much like Medium, Instagram built itself as a community of quality content, and the rest simply… followed [checkmark] (pun intended).

Sidebar: This past spring, I applied to work at Instagram, and being an over-committed student during the school year, I failed to recognize that the application deadline was actually 11:59AM PST, not PM. I finished at 3:15PM Central, an hour and change too late for a dream to float. I sent a couple emails out, messaged on Facebook, but to no avail. I’ll share the piece I wrote in a future article, but Instagram, if you’re reading this, always happy to talk :)

I use Instagram like an obsessive person checking the fridge, except it somehow gets restocked every couple of hours with content I care about. I binge-watch more basketball highlight videos and bad memes on Instagram than the average millennial spends on Netflix. It got to a point during the school year that I had to delete the app, or hide the shortcut from my home page — a virtual restraining order.

Instagram, you tricked me today. I navigated through my self-set hurdles, dove into the app, clicked on a story, and became engrossed in what was happening in the last 24 hrs of my friends’ lives. And by the time I scrolled through a few dozen stories, I asked myself — I thought I deleted Snapchat off my phone??

And that was when I knew that Facebook and Instagram had won.

Enough of my friends have moved, that if I were to put something up that was just temporary, it certainly would end up going to Facebook Messenger and Instagram. It’s like carving out more airspace. If I post something on LinkedIn, or on Instagram Live, I actually get nice exposure and air time; Facebook wants to notify all my friends when I make my first post in a while. Instagram wants everyone to know I’m (a)live.

Nobody cares if you’re the copycat, but if you live to tell the story.
Or in Facebook and Instagram’s case: post the story.

Instagram Tricked Me, and You was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Online-to-offline is a trend that parallels the IOT (Internet of Things trend) — bringing networks and smartness to things that previously weren’t connected to the internet or even electronic. The online solution is easily scalable to take advantage of limited physical resources, allowing for “online showrooming” and offline purchase/pickup, leaving the customer with a complete shopping experience with lower overhead cost for the company. The phrase and concept, which is much more commonly used in China/Asia, hasn’t caught on like other acronyms. However, this deal may make that change.

Today, automated solutions can help very tangible, everyday things, and so the O2O trends combine the strengths of both worlds.
With this move, Amazon now has even more locations for people to pick up their groceries or other orders, integrating the in-person end stop of the online purchase, taking Amazon’s online inventory and pairing it with physical storefronts. Amazon Lockers hasn’t taken off as much as Prime Now and other on-demand services, but it provides infrastructure for more and more ways for you to get the items you want, the way you want it. And that is a win-win for sellers and consumers alike.

This move is one of the first of plenty to come, reversing the offline-to-online trend of purchases like Walmart of Jet.com, etc. that help automate the shopping experience. However, with Amazon making this kind of move, it flips the power of who is taking over what, slowly turning the tide to online to offline.
In this case, combining supply chains and delivery systems can bring synergies could lower costs for everyone, but the whole O2O trends may bring further marriages of online and offline giants to create a new purchasing landscape. Now that the precedent has been set, plenty more strategic moves may follow.

With Amazon-Whole Foods deal, US gets feet wet in O2O & Click-and-Mortar stores was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No, let’s actually talk about the national debt. The US National debt is sitting just a tick below $20 trillion, $19.93 trillion to be exact. This eclipses even the United States’ own GDP, which currently stands at roughly $19 trillion. But $19 trillion is too large of a number to properly process, so let’s break it down into more imaginable numbers. Divided by the US population, the debt per person is roughly $61,300, or $165,835 per tax-payer. Nothing like an extra mortgage, right?

Now, having a debt-to-GDP ratio over 1 is not the end of the world by itself. Japan has steadily held a 2.5 debt-to-GDP ratio, but there’s a lot to be said about the structure of debt, interest rate environments, etc. that go into this. Japan is an ultra-low interest rate environment, with bank interest rates in the negative. It is also a place where people sink money into as a safehaven. The bigger issue is that the US government’s revenue, which comes from taxes, come mainly from just businesses and individual taxpayers, so when someday people have to pay up, it will be the regular Joe that has to take on this growing obligation. With student debts rising along with tuition costs, personal debt from other large purchases like home and car ownership, the American people are already under plenty of individual private debt, so having to swallow the public debt at some point would be a tough pill to swallow at the same time.

Because of this general saturation of debt in the domestic market, most of this near-$20 trillion is owned by foreign stakeholders. Japan is the largest lender to the US. However, this $20 trillion is quite literally just the tip of the iceberg. This number excludes unfunded obligations like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.; programs where people aren’t eligible to collect yet, but that eventually will be owed to people once they reach a certain age threshold. It is estimated that these programs, in addition to federal and state pensions, push the total amount of obligations to be over $100 trillion, with 76 trillion coming from the Social Security, Medicare, & Medicaid programs alone — the three programs that currently already take up over 70 percent of the federal budget. The only way to cut down this obligation is to keep raising the retirement age, forcing people to work longer in order to pick up these checks. However, as more and more of the population gets closer to that age, more and more people will be upset, much like the widely-perceived public resistance to taxes.

The interest on this whopping debt is reportedly costing over $220 billion per year, further exacerbating the situation as every minute of inaction passes. As a result, it is imperative that we, as American citizens, push for bipartisan legislation that at least gets the ball rolling on chipping away at this massive debt hole. It’s not just about which party spends more, or which party brings in more revenue by charging higher taxes, but ensuring that what money is spent is as efficient as possible to best help the end recipient — the tax-payer. Otherwise, this is all for naught.

Finding ways to increase governmental revenues from specific taxes is never popular, but it might take increases in taxes and decreases in spending to attack our nation’s debt problem from two sides. It could be too costly not to try, at least.

For more information on what we can do, check out some of the resources over at Up To Us!

US to Reach $20 Trillion Debt Ceiling was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wait Calvin, you’re telling me you lied in the title to get clicks? That’s shameful.

Hold on there, maybe I am 20 under 20 — that is, 20 days under the age of 20.

And this is where the greatness begins.

My last teen year has been full of all kinds of cool experiences (cue the 40-year old marketing choir chirping, “millennials love experiences!”).

I was able to use my deal-hunting prowess to find $80 roundtrip tickets from O’Hare to LAX with an airline-that-shall-not-be-named, and was lucky enough to spend 0 dollars for accommodations by finding awesome friends and family (thank you all!) that offered me an air-mattress to crash on.

I’ve had the chance to work on a really meaningful project in MycroChange with some awesome people, and learn about what (not) to do in the business world and “real world”.

I’ve also learned that adults think differently than kids, because we become distanced from what we love — I cried a little when I watched the Little Prince movie, because Antoine de Saint-Exupéry saw these problems nearly a century ago, and yet people are still crawling into the rat race of investment-banking consulting, etc. Sigh.

I’ve had to chance to work at a really interesting start-up in the music industry for two summers, which has really shaped how I look at spaces and products now from both the end-user side and the company side.

I’ve already failed at my commit-everyday challenge on Github, but I haven’t done too poorly — I had a rough January and April but February and March were fantastic. It’s really helped me gain a lot of perspective from the building side of things, constructing things for optimized usage, understanding how a slider or other component actually works on the web. I’ve built stuff! Seeing the fruits of your own labor really drives you to push for more.

I’ve had the chance to finish the economics major an elite institution, and what I learned from the material is that I can’t sit still while there are problems in the real world to think about and fix, and that the development of the relationships with my peers will be more valuable than anything else I do, learn, or create in a classroom.

We are told by people that education, internships, jobs, etc. are what we need, but in reality you have to find the most self-fulfilling path for you. For too long, we look at what other people have done before, not what other people can do after us. This prevents *innovation* (buzzword count: too many).

Wisdom doesn’t come from the amount of self-help books you’ve read. The more you sit and just read something because somebody famous wrote it, the more you follow the incomplete trajectory of someone else, not your own trajectory of what you can become.

Wisdom isn’t determined by the amount of degrees you have; a thermometer has a lot of degrees, but it can’t control the thing that makes it useful — the weather.

Wisdom comes from exposure, not age. Repetition and practice are what makes people good, so even if you’ve spent 5 years doing one thing once, you’ve still only done that thing once… If every day you push yourself to get out of your comfort zone and talk to people, sell products that aren’t even yours, interact with new spaces, and learn to adopt and apply new strategies for everything you do, your effective experience is so much greater. When was the last time a game like Farmville or Pokémon treated it where if you spend xxxxxx hours (which you end up doing anyways) you win? You’d just leave the browser on/app open and waste a lot of energy in the process while getting nothing out of it. But if you engage in an app with an experience (déjà vu: millennials and their experiences!) point system, you get reward per action and interaction until you figure out what’s the best strategy moving forward.

I’ve learned that I don’t need to sit through anything that just looks good on a resumé. GPA is about as useful as a paperweight, or as CB Insights refers to it, a Juicero. I dropped a Nobel Prize-winning economist’s class to take another economics course I thought I’d actually enjoy. It’s not all about the name, because at the end of the day, nobody will remember whether or not you were on the roster, or the 20 for 20 list.

I realized that I’ve been an economist and entrepreDOeur forever. You start out paying attention in school because you value learning, then you move on to optimizing happiness at recess and getting the most of favorite snacks at the supermarket for your budget. You start collecting sports cards because hey, paper is worth something — it governs the decision of every one of you when you spend and earn. You start selling chocolate bars in high school to fundraise for the overly-ambitious amount of clubs you did, and still do, remembering every regular customer’s favorite flavor. You start selling your sports cards, because you, like ever trader ever, believes that you know the market better than others.

But it’s not easy to just flip on a switch and say, oh yeah, this is what I want to do, this is exactly what I’m interested in. It grows and grows until you realize from process of elimination (hey, standardized testing actually taught us something?) that nothing else really makes sense.

Remember when some adult asked you what you wanted to be when you grow up? How did you know? You either said something enthusiastically, or just shrugged and said: I don’t know! (or plot twist, you still don’t). BUt you know what you love to do, I hope; you love certain things where time disappears as you do it. If work is like a playdate where other people have to drag you away from your friends and your fun, then you’re doing something right.

What’s stopping you from doing something you enjoy?
What’s stopping you from putting your time, energy, and resources towards the things you genuinely care about?

At MycroChange, we’re trying to make it possible for anyone and everyone to save and invest in the non-profits, social enterprises, and local businesses that align with the causes you support. We want people to make the maximum impact with their money and resources, an extension of exactly what we want for the individual — to chase your dreams and do the things you want, even if society has told you time and time again that isn’t possible.

Instead, you should be working on it, where you can feel comfortable saying, it’s not possible, yet.

Don’t just sit there and read this,

Be an entrepreDOeur.

20 under 20: A social entrepreneurial prospective was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Losing is not just a loss, but also a lack of a win. That’s really double the loss. I like to think of it like a basketball analogy of a bad turnover leading to a basket for the other team. Not only did you give up two points, you lost the opportunity on that play to score for yourself. It’s a swing of potential outcomes twice as large as the observed impact. A +2 (or 3) vs. -2 (or 3) differs by 4 (or 6).

But sometimes, the reward payoffs of an outcome aren’t all bad.

Such is the case when you lose for a good cause.

Tab for a Cause is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox (sorry Internet Explorer or Safari users) that allows individuals to raise money for charity simply by opening tabs on their computer. On each tab opened, the Tab for a Cause page reveals an ad or two on the bottom right of the screen, as well as the ability to customize the page with shortcuts to favorites, a sticky note, a clock widget, etc.

The ad revenue goes to the charity of your choice; I personally typically support water.org with my “hearts”, the XP that you earn for opening up tabs and inviting friends.

The founding group of Tab for a Cause, Gladly, also runs a competition called March Gladness, a charitable spin on the college basketball postseason, pitting Tabbers from universities across North America in matchups to see who can accrue the most points.

And we lost. It was a close matchup until ITESM pulled away — way to represent as the only Mexican school in the bracket!

I went around, messaging everyone I could to invite them to join, but it was all for naught in terms of the competition. However cheesy as it may be, we were in actuality all winners, effortlessly supporting causes we love.

The mobilization of forces by making small steps count towards big, accumulated impact, is a concept that I hope to delve deeper into. If you are able to care about the little things life, you can refine your approach in the big things in life. And in this case, winning isn’t everything — it’s just the mechanism to encourage sustained impact.

Do you do anything cool that allows you to easily make an impact? Let me know in the comments below! I’ll be sharing more ways to do good with minimal effort, too!

Losing for a Good Cause was originally published in What’s The Deal Calvin? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.