Sam hits the road

Last Friday I gave up my San Francisco apartment and left California with my wife and dog to find a new place to live. I’m staying in Airbnbs in suburban areas for 4-ish weeks at a time until I find somewhere I love.

This week I’m staying at Ryan Begelman’s house in Eden, Utah.

I met Ryan in our Trends community. He’s a 37-year-old entrepreneur who started conferences for industry leaders called Summit Series. The first happened in 2008. A few years in, Ryan and his partners wanted a permanent location. 

So they convinced dozens of attendees to invest $1m each in exchange for a plot of land in their nonexistent new town. With that money, they bought Powder Mountain.

I read about Ryan in 2013. At the time, I thought it was stupid. A bunch of elite techies secluding themselves. After yesterday’s tour I realized I was wrong (here’s video). 

The boldness of a few 20-somethings building a new city… it’s intoxicating. They had to build everything… fire hydrants, roads, streetlights. Everything. From scratch. 

“We studied the best communities and took from the best,” Ryan told me. “Like Serenbe, Georgia, which has mailbox hubs for each 20 houses so people meet one another. And regular talks, wellness classes, group runs to create shared experiences.” 

It expanded my perspective of what’s possible with some grit and luck. You can read more about them here.

I’ll send an update next week about my trip. 

— Sam, Founder & CEO of The Hustle

P.S. I’m reading Tribe, a book on finding community and what makes communities great. What else should I read? Tell me here.

Has your friend suddenly started to look a bit like Drew Barrymore? She might be outsmarting facial recognition. 

Researchers from the University of Chicago have invented a new way to fool face-detection tech. Basically, their software — called Fawkes — will Frankenstein someone else’s face over yours.

The human eye can’t always notice the results. Your friend still looks like your friend, even if, on the pixel level, Drew Barrymore’s face is on top of hers.

Clowns already beat the system 

The best defense against facial recognition used to be juggalo makeup. 

But the business of “cloaking” — hiding your face from snoopers — is booming.

• The startup D-ID blurs the pixels on your face.
• As we reported on Trends, wearing a pixelated T-shirt or a pair of these yellow glasses might trip up face readers. 
• And there’s a market for them: 41% of people don’t want their employers tracking faces, and 54% don’t want advertisers to do the same. 

Fawkes is only available to the coder set right now, but the researchers are turning it into a free app for the masses. 

Their mission: Poison the data well 

If enough people cloak their photos, the researchers say, facial recognition systems can’t do their jobs. 

But they might be too late. Clearview AI has already copied billions of photos off the internet. And its CEO says Fawkes could improve Clearview’s tech.

Translation: You can try Fawkes, but unless you’re a social-media ghost, your Insta posts might haunt you.

You might think 50 listens on a podcast is a massive flop. But to Artifact, that’s a blockbuster.

The audio startup isn’t chasing big audiences — it makes podcasts that only you, your weird uncle, and maybe a few others would ever enjoy.

Thought you’d heard the last of that Woodstock story? 

Think again: Artifact is the perfect place for your uncle to keep pretending he was cool back in ’69. 

You can buy a podcast to capture a piece of family history — or celebrate a colleague. Artifact’s team of pro interviewers will talk to you and your coworker’s friends, then edit the clips into a slickly made episode.

One episode costs $175, and the company claims its sound quality is 80% to 90% as good as a pro podcast.

Not that anyone will notice

The average Artifact pod snags only ~30 listeners. 

It’s a new spin on a major media trend: From The Athletic to The Information, people are ponying up for niche content. 

And what could be more niche than your uncle’s tall tale about his run-in with Jimi Hendrix?

Google wants to keep your nest safe: It’s investing $450m in the home-security company ADT.

The idea? Turn Google’s Nest devices into the “cornerstone” of ADT’s smart-home lineup.

If the market’s reaction is any barometer, the deal is very good news for ADT and a baaaad sign for the competition.

Here’s a 5-day view of ADT’s stock — it was up 56+% (closing at $13.48) by the end of Monday’s trading day:

And here’s a 5-day look at Alarm.com Holdings Inc. — another home-security company. Its stock tanked by as much as 20% — the most in intraday trading in nearly 5 years, according to Bloomberg. It ended the day down 16+% (closing at $58.28).

Very bad day aside, don’t sound the alarm for Alarm.com just yet: Its share price is still up ~34% since the start of the year.

How a tool to text customers turned into one of Forbes’ next billion dollar businesses

Podium’s story is just like any other: 

• Company has problem
• Company creates product to solve problem
• Product works so well that company wins awards, scores loads of customers, and lands the company in all kinds of big articles and lists about the future of tech

Wait… what?

Okay, so Podium’s story isn’t exactly normal. Then again, neither is their platform. 90% of customers want to text companies, but only 50% of businesses have the capabilities to do so. Texts get opened 99% of the time, email does not.

Get a free Podium account right here and claim a free textable business number for your business, instantly improving your ability to communicate with your customers.