An abstract painting by the German artist Gerhard Richter has sold for £21.3m, setting a new record for the price paid at auction for the work of a living artist.

Abstraktes Bild (809-4), which was owned by the rock guitarist Eric Clapton, sold at Sotheby's auction house in London to an anonymous buyer after five minutes of bidding. Pre-sale estimates valued the painting at between £9m and £12m.

The sale broke the previous auction record for a living artist of £17.8m paid for Jasper Johns' Flag at Christie's auction house in New York in 2010.

The price for the 1994 oil on canvas also beat Richter's previous record, set in May when Abstraktes Bild (7938-3) sold for £13.5m.

Sotheby's described the painting as a "masterpiece of calculated chaos" and a "paradigm of Gerhard Richter's mature artistic and philosophical achievement".

"The combination of outstanding provenance and gold-standard quality in this sublime work by this blue-chip artist made for an historic auction moment," said Alex Branczik, the senior director at the auction house and head of the sale. "Gerhard Richter's international appeal as one of the hottest contemporary artists was once again confirmed this evening."

The total value of Richter's works sold at auction in 2011 topped £124.5m ($200m), according to the auction tracker Artnet – more than those of any other living artist and more than auction totals in the same year for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko combined.

Richter, 80, who lives in Cologne, was born in Dresden and grew up in communist East Germany. His work includes both abstract and figurative paintings as well as photographs.

A retrospective, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London last year and at the Popmidou Centre in Paris and the Staatlichen Museum in Berlin this year.

The top end of the art market has performed strongly in recent years despite the downturn in the global economy. The sale comes as the art world flocked to London for Frieze Art Week, the most important contemporary art fair in Britain, with exhibits by hundreds of galleries from around the world.

Clapton, 67, known for his work with Cream and the Yardbirds as well as a solo artist, has an extensive art collection.

Summary: German artist's Abstraktes Bild (809-4), part of Eric Clapton's art collection, sold by Sotheby's in London for £21.3m


Devon and Leah Still at her flower-girl dress consultation

ends up looking a lot like a pink version of Elsa's gown from Disney's

It's her favorite movie, Elsa is her favorite character and well, she just loves pink.

"I want my dress to look like this," the spunky five-year-old told PEOPLE as she held up a sketch at a recent consultation with

at her New York City headquarters.

"Lots and lots of glitter!" she giggles, then adds with a shrug. "I'm a glitter girl."

Not only is her father,

, Leah is getting to design her dream flower girl dress with Paige.

Her father couldn't be happier.

"I knew pink was going to be involved," he says with a smile. "She loves princess stuff."

It's hard to tell that the spunky, self-described "girly-girl" sitting in a boutique Manhattan bridal shop designing her own tiny, sparkling hot-pink flower girl frock was battling life-threatening stage 4 neuroblastoma cancer just weeks ago – but doting dad Devon Still says that's just his daughter's personality, resilient and consistently positive.

"She's just had the best attitude of fight and then move forward with life," Devon, 26, tells PEOPLE of his daughter. "And look where we are now. I'm getting married to my love and Leah gets to be a part of this wedding. We overcame tragedy and are becoming a family. It's like a fairy tale."

Leah's drawing of her dream flower girl dress

Joseph Lin Photography / The Knot

Nearly two years ago, the recently signed Houston Texans defensive tackle and his fiancÃ© Asha Joyce put their wedding plans on hold after Leah was diagnosed with the deadly disease. Doctors gave her a 50-50 chance of survival.

Her diagnosis made headlines across the world in September 2014 after the Cincinnati Bengals cut Devon from their roster but

so he could keep his health insurance to help pay for Leah's cancer treatments.

Devon publically documented his daughter's two-year battle on

, and officially announced that she "beat cancer," in January.

Devon and Leah at Leah's flower-girl dress design meeting

Joseph Lin Photography / The Knot

The couple, who will be married in spring 2016, was selected by

, as the recipients of this year's

The site is helping Devon and Joyce put on their special day – including coordinating with Leah to make her a custom-designed flower girl dress. The site is also helping the couple carry out another dream – raising money for other families facing pediatric cancers – by setting up a

Starting March 16, America is invited to vote on each detail of the day – from Joyce's dress to the flowers and the honeymoon.

up for discussion. Everyone wanted to make sure Leah got exactly what she wanted for the big day.

"I'm excited for the wedding," Leah says while coloring in dress sketches with a blush-tinted crayon. "I've never been to one!"

It's clear she truly is Daddy's little girl.

"I love you dad," she whispers as she colors.

Designer Hayley Paige and Leah

Joseph Lin Photography / The Knot

Devon says it brought him great joy to see his daughter working with Paige to create the dress, reminding him that every moment he sees his daughter happy is "precious."

"When you sit back and look at everything and hover above, it's important to remember to cherish every moment you have with your child," he says. "My daughter was almost taken away from me, and I've learned that you can't waste time.

"I only get 24 hours in a day to spend with Leah and my goal is to see her smile as much as I can," he says. "We hang out and have fun and are silly."

Devon and Leah at his tux fitting

Joseph Lin Photography / The Knot

The daddy-daughter duo, who plan to "wing it" for their dance but have a special (surprise!) duet performance planned, have learned the importance of relying on family and love during difficult times.

"We aren't quite at our happy ending right now, but we are getting there, and this journey has brought us so much closer," says Devon of Leah. "We've been through so much in the past two years and things are finally starting to turn around. Hopefully people see that you can go from the lowest of lows and with strength and the right attitude can reach a beautiful high."

Summary: "We overcame tragedy and are becoming a family," says Devon Still of his daughter, Leah, 5. "It's like a fairy tale."


03/09/2016 AT 10:20 PM EST

Austin Russell – better known as Chumlee on

Russell, 33, was taken into custody on 19 gun and drug charges Wednesday and held on at the Clark County Detention Center on $62,000 bail, according to arrest records.

He was arrested following a police raid, the

, Russell was arrested as officers served a search warrant in connection with a sexual assault investigation when they found meth, marijuana and firearms.

The report adds that Russell was not charged in the sexual assault case.

Summary: Chumlee was arrested after officers found meth, marijuana and weapons during their search


If the specter of a default has spooked corporate America, you wouldn’t know it by watching their hired guns in Washington over the last several weeks.

Aside from sending a handful of letters urging Congress to act, the big business lobby has mostly hugged the sidelines as the partisan standoff over the debt limit crisis intensified. That appears poised to change, now that there are only five days to go until the Treasury Department says it will run out of money to pay all the federal government’s bills.

With Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) set to put his plan for a debt ceiling hike to a vote in the House today, the heaviest-hitting trade associations are finally piping up and urging their member companies to rally behind the proposal. On Wednesday evening, a broad collective of those groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, and the National Association of Home Builders — cosigned a letter to Members of Congress endorsing the plan. And officials with those groups said this time, they will be following up with an aggressive, coordinated lobbying effort to try to muscle the package through a jumpy House Republican conference.

But considering the stakes — business types in Washington agree a default would be calamitous — the failure of the business lobby to engage more forcefully earlier has even some veteran K Street hands scratching their heads. “If you look at the totality of the communications and the lobbying efforts, this has been uncharacteristically quiet,” says one. “It’s been a minimalist approach, and I’d have expected the business community to be much more vocal.”

Representatives of the groups are quick to dispel that point. The Chamber, for example, has spent months organizing lobbying visits to skeptical lawmakers to explain the gravity of the threat. And NAM has been “talking about this issue for almost a year,” says Dorothy Coleman, the group’s vice president of tax and domestic economic policy. But the commitment barely registers against the eight-figure sums the groups regularly dole out for more parochial causes.

There have been at least a few factors at work keeping big business groups from mounting a concerted campaign to sound the alarm.

For the most part, they’ve rested on the assumption that Congress would figure out on its own how to extend the federal government’s borrowing authority without seriously flirting with default. Ken Bentsen, a former Democratic Congressman from Texas now lobbying for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said his group only started asking member companies to focus on the issue last week. “It’s unthinkable you’d really default, and our members are just coming to grips with the fact that if we don’t act, this could really happen,” he says.

There was a similar dynamic three years ago, when the stunning failure in the House of the first attempt to pass the Wall Street bailout sent a relatively complacent business lobby into what one banking lobbyist called a “no-huddle hyper-drive blitzkrieg.”

“We all expected that to pass, too, and when it didn’t, we lit it up,” this lobbyist said. The Chamber, NAM, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the BRT, which represents top CEOs, all got in on the act, launching a cooperative push with the Bush administration and Congressional leaders to round up votes, in part by generating constituent pressure on wobbly lawmakers. “The effort was extraordinary,” says Joanna Schneider, of the BRT. “We talked to Secretary Paulson every day, we had CEO conference calls with the Secretary every day, and we made a massive effort for all the CEOs, particularly where they had large employment centers, to make calls.”

Lobbyists for the major trade groups point to other reasons they’ve taken a largely hands-off approach so far. Several noted that until this week, there was no specific, credible proposal for them to help push. Presumably, the lack of legislative text wouldn’t prevent the groups from bankrolling, say, a major advertising campaign to educate voters about the stakes. Those types of campaigns are hardly uncommon.

But the argument points to what has been perhaps the most powerful motivator in keeping big business mum: fear of what could end up in whatever package makes it into law. As long as tax hikes remained on the table as a means of trimming the deficit, industries that could see their bottom lines bitten wanted to reserve the right to object.

Indeed, it’s not that there’s been no active lobbying on the debt ceiling by corporate interests. From April through June, more than 140 outfits reported lobbying work on the issue, according to a review of disclosure reports by the Sunlight Foundation. The vast majority appears to have engaged to protect narrow tax privileges, or even seek new breaks. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Oracle ORCL , Exxon Mobil XOM , Pfizer PFE , Devon Energy DVN , Northrop Grumman NOC , and Wal-Mart WMT all reported at least monitoring the talks. Some no doubt felt more threatened than others. With President Obama making a refrain of the charge that Republicans want to protect a tax break for corporate jet owners at the expense of seniors and middle-income earners, the National Business Aviation Association launched an effort to defend the provision as a job-creator.

“They’re all for shared sacrifice as long as they’re not the ones sharing,” says Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation.

Or, as one Republican lobbyist describes the investment by K Street’s power-players: “They couldn’t have done less if they tried, spent zero dollars and no cents. And it’s because they’re gutless. They’ve not done anything because they don’t want to pop their heads above ground and get their heads taken off.”

With any direct changes to entitlement programs and the tax code likely to be left out of the package, the coast is now clear for the big business groups to jump in. And there’s nothing like an impending economic Armageddon to marshal their focus. But when this scare subsides, and the big business lobbies go back to pressing for specialized treatment under the guise it serves a greater economic good, it will be worth remembering where these special interests stood when that cause was imperiled.

Summary: The business lobby has entered the debt ceiling debate at the 11th hour with only a whimper, considering the stakes of a default for corporations.


Four consecutive sixes from Carlos Braithwaite has helped West Indies best England in a thrilling World Twenty20 final.

Marlon Samuels top scored with 85 off 66 as the West Indies posted 6-161 in reply to England's 9-155 at Eden Gardens on Sunday - but it was Brathwaite's extraordinary final over heroics which carried them across the line.

With the Windies needing 19 from the final six balls, Brathwaite (34 off 10) blasted four consecutive sixes off England's Ben Stokes to seal a remarkable comeback.

Samuels was awarded man of the match and cheekily dedicated the Windies' historic second World Twenty20 title to Australian spin legend Shane Warne, who has clashed him on a number of occasions.

West Indies Carlos Brathwaite, right, celebrates with teammate Marlon Samuels. (AAP)

They had an infamous run-in during Australia's Big Bash League in 2013, and Warne rekindled the feud when he criticised Samuels following his dismissal against India in Thursday's WT20 semi-final.

"I woke up this morning with one thing on my mind," Samuels said.

"Shane Warne has been talking continuously and all I want to say is this is for Shane Warne."

Samuels made just eight in the Windies' seven-wicket victory over India in the last-four, but his monumental innings on Sunday was reminiscent of his contribution in the final four years ago.

The West Indies won their first World T20 title in 2012, when Samuels scored 78 against Sri Lanka in the final.

"I don't worry about semi-finals because when it comes to finals I always turn up for the team," he said.

Meanwhile, Carlos Brathwaite played down his historic six-hitting blitz which led the Windies to the World Twenty20 title on Sunday, preferring to pay tribute to man-of-the-match Marlon Samuels. Brathwaite, a 27-year-old Barbadian all-rounder, made light of the Windies needing 19 off the final over to smash Ben Stokes for four successive sixes. The four-wicket win gave the Caribbean side a second World Twenty20 title but as headline star Chris Gayle flopped, Brathwaite emerged from the shadows to finish on an undefeated 34 off 10 balls. He had earlier taken 3-23 as England made 155-9. With bat and ball, they were his career best figures in the game's shortest form in just his eighth game. "Today Marlon Samuels took responsibility right away and played a fantastic knock," he said. "He did it in 2012 and I knew as long as he was there at the end he would bring us home again in 2016." Captain Darren Sammy saluted his unlikely hero who came in with his team on 107-6 in the 16th over. "In every game, somebody stepped up and took responsibility and to see Carlos play like that in his debut World, it's just tremendous," he said. Brathwaite has yet to truly establish himself as an international star. He made his Test debut against Australia last year and has played just two matches, taking one wicket and making 130 runs -- 59 on debut in Melbourne and then a 69 in Sydney. He has played seven one-day internationals since 2011, making only 71 runs and claiming three wickets.

Brathwaite will play next month for the Delhi Daredevils in the money-spinning Indian Premier League.

Summary: Four consecutive sixes from Carlos Braithwaite has helped West Indies best England in a thrilling World T20 final.


By Aili Nahas and Char Adams

05/09/2016 AT 10:50 AM EDT

will always support her little brother.

The 31-year-old reality star has long been

to the 29-year-old and offering the

help to no avail. But a source says it hasn't been easy for Kardashian to come to terms with her brother's

"Khloé loves and supports Rob and always has. She's always been his biggest supporter and has been trying to get him on the right track for years," a source tells PEOPLE.

"So, naturally, it was a little harder for her to accept the fact that all of a sudden Blac Chyna was the one who got him into the land of the living again."

in recent months. The star is

to Chyna, and the two are

Kardashian has been vocal about her support of Rob, who lived with her as he battled

. He left her home and returned to the public eye as his relationship with Chyna, 27,

Although she is happy about her brother's improvement, the source says Kardashian can't help but wish she had been the one to get her brother back on the right track.

"Rob and Khloé had some tough times, like he

. She didn't understand why Rob didn't appreciate her and the rest of his siblings," the source says.

"But the bottom line is he's her little brother. She'll never turn her back on him."

Khloé Kardashian and Rob Kardashian

Despite having her reservations about the whirlwind relationship, Kardashian and Rob appear to

Last month, Kardashian shared a heartwarming Snapchat photo of her and Rob holding hands.

airs Sundays (9 p.m. ET) on E!

Summary: A source says Khloé Kardashian didn't understand why Rob "didn't appreciate her"


Even for the de facto head of one of the world’s largest family-controlled business empires, Jay Y. Lee, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics SSNLF , has had a lot on his plate lately. On the same Thursday morning in early June that he breakfasted in Seoul with J.P. Morgan JPM CEO Jamie Dimon, for instance, Lee learned that the $26 billion New York hedge fund Elliott Management had launched a surprise attack against him. Elliott wanted to stop Lee from merging two publicly traded pieces of his family’s network of companies, potentially foiling Lee’s plan to consolidate control.

A few weeks later, on the day he turned 47, Lee gave his first-ever nationally televised speech in South Korea to offer an apology—including a symbolic bow—because the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul had failed to contain an outbreak of the deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome virus known as MERS. Not long after, the scion of the family that runs Korea’s mightiest conglomerate led a team of executives on a fact-finding mission to Silicon Valley. An avid golfer, Lee found time to pop down to Pebble Beach for a members-and-guests-only tournament at the exclusive Cypress Point Golf Course with his pal and host Jerry Yang, the Yahoo YHOO co-founder. Days later, after returning to Korea, he jetted back to the U.S. to hobnob with other global tech leaders at the annual Allen & Co. gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho. In mid-July, Lee found out that he had prevailed in his heated six-week battle with Elliott, and that shareholders had voted to approve the merger.

A veritable prince of the realm in Korea and supremely well connected among the global elite, Lee, who has a net worth of around $8 billion, nevertheless is not widely known outside his native land. At home, Lee’s life as a single dad and the next-generation leader of Samsung makes him a boldface name. Even in Korea, however, it isn’t well understood exactly what he does. That’s partly because he has long been overshadowed by his larger-than-life father, Lee Kun-hee, chairman of the Samsung Group.

The younger Lee’s profile is about to grow dramatically. In recent months he has made himself more visible, implicitly acknowledging that he is now the leader of the Lee clan and its business interests. The elder Lee, age 73 and Samsung’s chief for nearly 30 years, suffered a heart attack 14 months ago. He has been hospitalized ever since—at the same Samsung-owned facility where the MERS crisis began—and his condition is believed to be so grave that he cannot communicate and isn’t expected to recover. In other words, the man who built Samsung into a global powerhouse in everything from semiconductors to TVs to mobile phones has all but left the scene. And he has been succeeded—in actions, if not yet in title—by his relatively untested only son.

Jay Y. Lee, Samsung’s debonair, globe-trotting heir apparent, is determined to transform the world’s biggest technology company into its most innovative. Can he dethrone Apple?Photo illustration by Anthony Verducci. Based on photo by Lee Young Ho/SIPA—AP

So just who is Lee Jae-yong, known to his Western friends as Jay Y. Lee? Simply speaking, he is everything Samsung wants to be—but isn’t yet. One of three vice chairmen of Samsung Electronics, the conglomerate’s largest company, Lee runs no single business yet holds great sway over all of them. (He has two younger sisters who run businesses within the group; a third sister committed suicide in 2005.) He is the most international Samsung executive—he speaks fluent Japanese and English, and travels widely—yet is thoroughly a product of his Korean heritage. Just as Lee glides between Asian and Western worlds, his goal is to move Samsung beyond its Korean roots without losing the attributes that led to its success.

The generational transition comes at a critical time for Samsung. Its cash-gushing smartphone business is tops in the world by market share but has recently found itself squeezed by the vastly more profitable Apple on the high end and a bevy of price-slashing Chinese competitors below. As well, membership in the privileged club of Korean conglomerates, known (in both singular and plural) as chaebol, isn’t quite what it used to be, what with a new era of shareholder activism and public revulsion at the behavior of elites.

Lee doesn’t grant on-the-record interviews to the media, and he and Samsung’s top executives are exceedingly sensitive about upstaging the ailing patriarch, in keeping with the Confucian tradition of respect for elders. At the same time, Samsung is a notably image-conscious company, and it is well aware of the intensifying scrutiny of its all-but-anointed leader. With that in mind, Samsung recently gave Fortune unusually deep access to various corners of its domain. The company also made available the CEOs of two key companies in the Samsung Group. Both executives spoke openly about Jay Y. Lee’s leadership and the challenges he faces.

Among Lee’s priorities, these executives and others say, are to simplify a dizzyingly complex corporate structure, to prod Samsung’s leadership to be creative as well as relentless, and to globalize what has stubbornly remained an essentially Korean company that just happens to sell products around the world. Lee and his coterie of powerful executives know there will be plenty of resistance to these changes. After all, Samsung has successfully employed its traditional “me-too” approach for decades—jumping into new lines of business and out-executing the competition until it becomes the market leader. In the process Samsung has grown into one of the world’s biggest and richest corporate kingdoms. With $195.8 billion in revenue last year, Samsung Electronics ranks No. 13 on this year’s Global 500—the largest tech company on the list and two spots ahead of Apple AAPL . Construction and trading business Samsung C&T (No. 441) and Samsung Life Insurance (No. 456) are also ranked in the Global 500. Together, the Samsung Group has more than $320 billion in sales from dozens of separate companies.

But the fear inside Samsung’s executive suite is that its success, especially in the realm of technology, could be fleeting. Leadership in tech markets tends not to last, as Samsung’s recent dip in smartphones shows. A sense of healthy paranoia pervades Samsung that an insular mentality and a reliance on commodity products won’t serve it as well in the future as they have in the past. Samsung executives frequently reference the downfall of once-powerful Japanese electronics rivals such as Sony and Sharp.

Curved, ultra-high definition Samsung TV’s on display in New York City in April 2015. Samsung is the No. 1 manufacturer of TV’s globally, ahead of Korean rival LG.Photograph by Diane Bondareff—AP

To avoid such a fate, Samsung today is hyperfocused on innovation—with an emphasis on game-changing advances. The company has long pushed the envelope in everything from semiconductors to smartphones to televisions. For example, its smartphone chips are considered superior to Intel’s INTC . What it has not achieved is the creation of new industries, à la Apple. To increase the chances of a major breakthrough, Samsung Electronics spent nearly $14 billion on research and development last year—or easily more than twice the $6 billion that Apple devoted to R&D in 2014.

Money alone won’t achieve what Lee wants, however. To keep Samsung growing and to challenge Apple in the eyes of customers, Lee and his key advisers believe, the company must be willing to embrace both new ideas and new leaders from outside Korea. “The biggest challenge that we have is that there are a lot of people still, the old-timers of Samsung, who don’t really understand what ‘global’ means,” says Choi Chi-hun, CEO of Samsung C&T. “Jay is a very global person. He understands this.” Understanding is one thing, of course. Changing an organization with nearly half-a-million employees is another thing altogether.

At the beginning of 2015 a group of senior executives in Samsung Electronics’ TV manufacturing division, which is No. 1 in market share with more than 20% of global sales, held a meeting attended by Jay Y. Lee. The vice chairman, as he is typically referred to by Samsung’s more formal officials, made some mildly critical comments about the division’s marketing efforts, according to a version of the meeting that has made the rounds of Samsung’s top managers. Thirty-year veteran Park Gwang-gi, an executive vice president and the unit’s head of strategic marketing, was said to be so rattled by Lee’s criticism that he immediately resigned his position.

The anecdote is notable because it helps illustrate the power that Samsung’s founding family wields despite the complicated chain of ownership and command inside the conglomerate. For starters, operating authority resides in individual business units, not headquarters. What’s more, the Lee family holds a relatively small stake in Samsung Electronics and even smaller positions in other Samsung affiliates. Further confusing things, it can be a challenge to define just what Samsung is—or isn’t. Consider a disclaimer Samsung posts on a corporate website: “Each company within the Samsung Group is an independent legal entity. Samsung Group is not a legal entity. Samsung Group is a term to conveniently refer to a group of companies that are tied together by their corporate history.”

That corporate history dates back some eight decades, to when Jay Y. Lee’s grandfather, Lee Byung-chul, started a food trading business in 1938. Today the chaebol comprises 67 distinct businesses whose product lines range from apparel and amusement parks to shipbuilding, washing machines, and financial services. Because of its market-leading positions in three massive industries—smartphones, memory chips, and TVs—Samsung Electronics is by far the most important part of the conglomerate, accounting for two-thirds of group revenues and an even greater portion of its profits.

Samsung owes its rise from middling chaebol to global powerhouse to the achievements of the current chairman Lee. He urged his executives to invest aggressively in order to gain scale and market share—regardless of short-term profits. “Our chairman consistently made the decision to invest regardless of the business environment,” says Kwon Oh-hyun, a Samsung Electronics vice chairman and head of its semiconductor business. Kwon, who earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford before joining Samsung in 1985, says there was a widespread belief back then that the elder Lee “was crazy and would bankrupt the company” with his investment in memory chips. “But he succeeded and became legendary.”

The company followed the same invest-for-scale model in each of its major businesses, displacing Sony in TVs and Nokia in mobile phones. Along the way it developed a reputation for brute-force tactics against competitors and a win-at-all-costs ethos among its overworked employees. Today Samsung Electronics is a behemoth with 307,000 workers. It’s so big, in fact, that it builds whole mini-metropolises to accommodate the growth. Its Samsung Digital City in Suwon, outside Seoul, has the look and feel of a Silicon Valley corporate campus, with 500 different bus routes ferrying its 34,000 employees to and from Seoul and other parts of South Korea.

This hyperplanned environment is in keeping with Samsung’s penchant for controlling every step of its production. Building its own factories gives the company a speed advantage, says Choi, the Samsung C&T executive. Samsung originally intended to release its Galaxy S6 line of smartphones in the fall of this year, says Choi, but decided to move up production by six months. “We were building that plant for them,” he says of his construction business in an interview at Samsung’s main headquarters in the posh Gangnam district in central Seoul. “Working together we were able to come up with a way of getting those phones to be produced that I don’t think anyone else could have done.”

The best and worst of the Samsung fast-follower model can be seen in both the soaring success and relative decline of late in its biggest business: smartphones. Samsung Electronics plunged full force into the market after the debut of the iPhone in 2007. And after a decision in 2009 to use Google’s low-cost Android operating system across its product line—as a way of quickly and cheaply countering Apple’s proprietary operating system, iOS—Samsung raced to the top of the heap in 2011 with its Galaxy S II phone. Its profits then skyrocketed, especially when its large-size screens proved popular and Apple was slow to respond. Then last year Apple rolled out its larger-screen iPhone 6 devices, and Samsung’s growth hit a wall. Samsung Electronics recently previewed second-quarter financial results, suggesting that profits will be $6.1 billion, down 4% from the year-earlier period and the seventh consecutive quarterly profit decline. All things—including screen size—being equal, consumers appear willing to pay a premium for the innovation coming out of Apple.

The view inside Samsung is that the margins and growth in smartphones during 2012 and 2013 were abnormal, and that even the current depressed level of profitability is an achievement. Shaun Cochran, Korea country head of brokerage CLSA, finds merit in the argument. “There are two companies in the world that have a profitable position in smartphones, and they’re one of them,” he says. “The margins are no longer supermargins. But really, supermargins are temporary by nature. Only Apple gets them now.”

People familiar with Jay Y. Lee’s thinking about the slowdown describe him as disappointed but not ready to back down. He acknowledges that Samsung isn’t No. 1 in smartphones yet. “It is Apple by revenue, profit, and mindshare of customers,” one of them related Lee as having said. “That said, we’ve been benchmarking Sony, Philips, and Nokia for years. Now we have fewer companies to benchmark.”

Yang Yuanqing, the CEO of Lenovo LNVGY , first met Jay Y. Lee at the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. Samsung and Lenovo both were sponsors of the games, and, says Yang, “Our private booths were next to each other.” Despite being a competitor across multiple product lines, Lenovo is one of Samsung’s biggest customers, annually buying more than $2 billion worth of various kinds of semiconductors and LCDs for its computers. The two struck up a friendship. Yang praises Lee for his attention to detail and was particularly touched by a gift the Samsung leader brought on a visit to Beijing: “He found out my birth year and gave me a bottle of wine that was produced that year.”

The gesture is vintage Lee, who is known for his impeccable manners and cosmopolitan demeanor. Indeed, Lee in many ways was raised for the role of global ambassador for Samsung. He studied history at Seoul National University, Korea’s top school. Like his father and grandfather before him, he studied in Japan, earning an MBA from Keio University. He later completed doctoral coursework at Harvard Business School, though he left without a degree. After presiding over a failed business unit called e-Samsung during the Internet bubble of the early 2000s, Lee took on the role he’d been born for: learning beside his father for the day he’d take his place.

Part of that role has been representing Samsung with its most important customers—some of whom, like Lenovo, are equally bitter competitors. Lee, for example, is said to have personally negotiated with Steve Jobs over Apple’s critical purchase of flash memory for the iPod Nano. The deal was a watershed because it required a significant commitment of manufacturing capacity by Samsung for an Apple product that wasn’t yet proven in the marketplace.

To this day Lee is a linchpin of the complicated Apple-Samsung relationship, and he keeps in touch with CEO Tim Cook as well as Jeff Williams, Cook’s successor as head of Apple’s global procurement and supply-chain management. “I’ve heard them talk about Jay fondly,” says a U.S.-based executive who has interacted with both sides. Says Lee Keon-hyok, a former IMF economist who is Lee’s chief spokesman: “I compare it to Romeo and Juliet. The families go on feuding, but they agree to the marriage.” (Fond of Lee or not, neither Cook nor Williams agreed to be interviewed about him; in 2012, Apple, which still buys Samsung chips and displays, won a $1 billion patent-infringement judgment against Samsung in a U.S. court over disputed smartphone designs.)

A man in Seoul walks by an ad for the Galaxy S6. Samsung hopes the new smartphone, which went on sale in April, will win back straying customers.Photograph by Kim Hong-Ji—Reuters

Samsung’s might and Lee’s charm have cemented other important tie-ups for Samsung. John Elkann, the Agnelli family scion who is Lee’s equivalent in the Fiat empire, invited Lee to join the board of Exor, the publicly traded company that manages the Agnelli family’s stakes. He praises Lee for having advised Exor on its ongoing efforts to simplify its corporate structure and enter the insurance business.

A common refrain about Lee is how relatively normal he is. “He’s surprisingly casual and accessible and a nice guy and non-hierarchical, given who he is,” says a former Samsung executive who interacted with Lee occasionally. “He travels by himself, with no entourage. He dresses casually. He says, ‘Hi, I’m Jay, nice to meet you.’ ” Lee has instructed the guards at Samsung’s headquarters not to bow 90 degrees to him. He displays his own ID when he walks around the building. And he delights in taking visiting dignitaries to see the on-site day-care center his father built to help retain women at Samsung.

Lee may also be the most eligible bachelor in Korea. A father of a school-age son and daughter, he was divorced from their mother in 2009. He lives in what visitors describe as a relatively modest home built on land his family has owned for decades in an upscale Seoul neighborhood. His dining room is steps from the exquisite Leeum art museum—the name is a mashup of “Lee” and “museum”—which holds a priceless collection, begun by his grandfather, of ancient Korean and contemporary international art. Lee is said to be particularly proud of the solar panels he had installed on the roof of his home.

The son apparently intends to be a more visible chairman of Samsung than his father, who visited the head office infrequently, preferring to work from home and maintain an air of mystery. To the extent that the younger Lee already has made his mark, it is with an ongoing effort to streamline Samsung. In recent years Samsung has sold off businesses with interests in disk drives, defense, and petrochemicals.

Outside executives see savvy analysis behind that strategy. Steve Luczo, CEO of disk-drive maker Seagate, praises Lee for the insight and decisiveness that led Seagate to buy out Samsung’s drive business in 2011. The moment competitors Western Digital and Hitachi agreed to combine their businesses, says Luczo, Lee recognized that Samsung’s operation would be better off in the hands of Seagate, which had significantly larger market scale. “He started asking all the right questions,” says Luczo. “And they were detailed operating questions.”

Doubts linger about Lee closer to home, however, partly because of his privileged background. “Chairman Lee gathered a couple thousand people and said, ‘I’ll give you any resource. I want 50% share of mobile handsets,’ ” recounts a Korean executive who knows the Lee family well. “I’m not sure Jay has that. He was raised to be a king, not an entrepreneur.”

But according to those who know him, Lee doesn’t intend to become a headliner on behalf of Samsung’s companies, even when he assumes the chairman’s role. His father allowed operating executives to be the faces of their businesses, and so will he. Still, Lee has told people he understands the downside of being an enigma. He has said he understands the need to demystify the role of the founding family.

Far from Samsung’s headquarters, on the other side of Seoul, lies a newly developed section of town called Digital Media City that has become a hub for young television and gaming companies. (Not to be confused with Samsung Digital City; Korea is extremely “digital.”) On the set of a studio there on a sunny June afternoon, the boy band EXO is rehearsing a performance of its hit single “Love Me Right.” Two hundred adolescent girls wait impatiently to enter the studio to see their teenage idols. The band’s host is the entertainment division of film production and consumer-goods conglomerate CJ Group, sponsor of a popular TV show that will feature EXO later that day.

CJ has little in common with Samsung, which is as buttoned-up a company as they come, but for one fact: The entertainment group is run by a cousin of Jay Y. Lee’s named Miky Lee. She is known for having made an early and lucrative investment in DreamWorks Animation. The “C” in CJ stands for Cheil, the original name of the Lee family holding company that exists to this day as Cheil Industries.

As the No. 1 operator of Korean movie theaters and also the franchisee for multiple retail outlets, foreign and domestic, CJ is just one example of the vast reach of the family behind Samsung. One of Jay Y. Lee’s sisters, Lee Boo-jin, runs Hotel Shilla, a high-end hotel company that has expanded into the duty-free business. His other sister, Lee Seo-hyun, heads up the fashion business of Cheil Industries. Cheil Worldwide is the largest advertising agency in Korea. Relatives of Lee’s run the Shinsegae department store and the leading daily newspaper, JoongAng Ilbo, which was started by the patriarch in the 1960s and is considered friendly to Samsung, though it’s not owned by it.

Chairman Lee Kun-hee built Samsung into South Korea’s most important chaebol but is believed to be gravely ill. Daughters Boo-jin (right) and Lee Seo-hyun each run parts of the family business empire.Photograph by Steve Marcus—Reuters

In short, the Lee family touches almost every aspect of Korean life. Young people simultaneously blame Samsung (and other chaebol like Hyundai and LG) for sucking the air out of what other-wise could be an entrepreneurial climate and want to work for it. The 18 listed companies in the Samsung network are widely perceived to trade at a discount to their true market value based on the perception that the family runs the companies for its own goals rather than for shareholders.

This is precisely what attracted the attention of Elliott Management, which amassed a 7% stake in Samsung C&T, when it unveiled plans to be bought by Cheil Industries, which is 23% owned by Jay Y. Lee. Elliott argued that Samsung C&T was undervalued and that Cheil was unfairly acquiring it for its 4% stake in Samsung Electronics. The Lee family previously held a less than 5% stake in the electronics company, and the merger, Elliott contended, would give Jay Y. Lee and his two sisters a windfall gain they will need to pay the inheritance tax they will owe when their father dies.

If the assault by Elliott caught Samsung by surprise, it was prepared for the fight nevertheless. Samsung carried the day in Korean courts against two injunctions brought by Elliott. And shareholders in Samsung C&T, led by a large block of Korean pension funds, approved the merger in a much-watched shareholder vote on July 17. It was the first time the Samsung empire had encountered such an attack by foreign investors, but likely will not be the last.

In the western city of Inchon, the port town on the Yellow Sea where Douglas MacArthur landed and turned the tide of the Korean War, lies a glimpse into Samsung’s future. Here, in just four years, the conglomerate has built a vast new business called Samsung Biologics, which manufactures biopharmaceuticals for global drug companies, including Roche Genentech and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The business is said to be a favorite project of Lee’s, and it has all the hallmarks of a Samsung endeavor: massive scale, billions in investments, and the application of manufacturing expertise to a promising new business.

On the surface, at least, it appears to be another example of fast-following. Samsung Biologics makes tough-to-produce drugs for the owners of the formula the same way Foxconn builds phones and computers for name-brand designers like Apple and Dell. Biopharmaceuticals are proteins, which means they’re more difficult to sterilize than traditional drugs, which are made from stable chemicals. In the Inchon facility, Samsung has built 30,000 liters of production capacity in a sprawling plant filled with large metal vats. It already is at work on its second plant, a so-called 10-pack, or 10 15,000-liter tanks. “No one else in the industry has a 10-pack,” says Jenifer Wheat, vice president of global business development and one of more than 60 expatriate veterans of Western pharmaceutical companies Samsung has hired to jump-start the biologics business.

The Samsung Biologics investment will take years to pay off, but already Samsung is finding ways to cash in on it. A 90%-owned unit called Samsung Bioepis makes “biosimilar” drugs—the generics of biotech—and recently said it plans to go public on the Nasdaq market in the U.S. Published reports have valued the generics unit at $7 billion. And the health care initiatives, Samsung says, are but part of a broader strategy of finding ways to marry medical markets with information technology. “There are a lot of maybe-not-so-obvious synergies between the two businesses,” says Wheat. The implication is that one of these synergies could even produce a new business built on real innovation someday.

Samsung has a pronounced preference for building its businesses rather than buying them. In part, this is because the South Korean government rewarded it and other chaebol for years for reinvesting their profits in R&D, the better to build the domestic economy. The company also carries the scars of a two-decades-old M&A fiasco, the mid-1990s acquisition of a Southern California computer maker called AST Research. Samsung spent nearly $1 billion on the purchase and then proceeded to lose billions more. The failure haunts Samsung strategists and is a frequently repeated discussion point for why Samsung avoids M&A.

Revenues: $195.8 billion Profit: $21.9 billion Employees: 307,000 Five-year annualized return to shareholders: 11.8%

The company has become more acquisitive of late, but in small ways relative to its size. A U.S.-based venture arm recently bought a software company called SmartThings that addresses the so-called Internet of things market. And earlier this year Samsung’s mobile division paid $250 million to buy LoopPay, a mobile-payments startup the company hopes will be its answer to competing offerings from Apple, Google GOOG , and others.

One place where Samsung comes up far short in comparison with Apple is in the development of its own mobile ecosystem. As its Galaxy line of smartphones took off, the company decided it needed to have mobile services to match Apple’s and Google’s. So it formed a Seoul-based outfit called the Media Solutions Center, funded by its mobile division but operating independently. The media-services group annoyed partners like Google and, worse, produced few hits.

Late last year Samsung quietly dissolved the unit, which had amassed a worldwide staff of 2,000, and reassigned its personnel. Curiously, Samsung left intact the Silicon Valley arm of the media-services unit and hired former Disney DIS executive John Pleasants to run it. Insiders say the hunt for a mobile-services strategy continues. Says venture capitalist Jay Y. Eum, a California-based former Samsung employee: “Samsung is the hardest-working technology company in the world. They will not stop until they’ve figured it out.”

At the beginning of the 1990s, Jay Y. Lee’s father realized that Samsung’s culture was too inward-looking. So he created a program to each year send 100 of Samsung’s most promising middle managers out to visit countries around the world on yearlong sabbaticals to soak up the local culture and return to Korea with new perspectives. It’s a tradition that continues. Today, at its headquarters in Seoul, it also employs several hundred non-Koreans with MBAs to work on global strategy, on the assumption that foreigners bring fresh thinking. Samsung has long been a yearning, searching company. And under the next chairman Lee it will attempt to complete the transformation from studying the rest of the world’s best practices to internalizing them.

Come December, when Samsung typically announces annual organizational changes, it is quite possible that Jay Y. Lee will be named chairman, whatever his father’s health status. In one fell swoop Samsung officially will have a leader whose experience screams out fresh perspectives. Putting them into action will be Jay Y. Lee’s challenge for the decades ahead.

To see the full Fortune Global 500 list, visit fortune.com/global500.

A version of this article appears in the August 1, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline “The uncrowned king of tech.”

Summary: Heir apparent Jay Y. Lee wants to transform the world's biggest tech company into its most innovative.


I'm a firm believer in having confidence, and there aren't many people that have the right to be cocky. Unfortunately, Adrian Peterson is one of them.

Recently, the 30 year-old Minnesota Vikings' running back told the Star Tribune that if today he were to hang up his cleats, he would be in the Football Hall of Fame at this moment.

"I'm going to be blunt and honest with you," Peterson said. "I feel like if I didn't play another snap in my life, I got the opportunity to go in the Hall of Fame right now."

AP not only came back from an ACL surgery in nine months, but the former MVP award winner has six Pro Bowls under his belt, holds numerous records, and despite some difficult off-the-field instances, is still believed to be the number one overall pick in fantasy leagues for the 2015 fantasy football season.

Needless to say his attitude about the Hall of Fame can be backed up with numbers. He even calls himself the "greatest player."

"Not just the greatest running back,"says Peterson. "The greatest player."

Before we let this go to his head, Peterson was brought back down to Earth with a compliment to Deion and Barry Sanders.

"It's Deion and probably Barry Sanders at the top," Peterson said. "I say Deion because he played offense, defense and special teams. And he was great at everything he did. Well, maybe not so much at receiver."

Those are some tough cleats to fill, Adrian, but if you're going to be competing as the best, you have to defeat the best. MORE ON AOL.COM Revealing sports' 'Fantastic Four' 5 NFL coaches who are on the hot seat

Summary: Editor's Note: Turn your fantasy football knowledge into real cash! We're hosting a one-week $1 million league on FanDuel in Week 1. It's only $5 to enter, first place win


Before you go, we thought you'd like these...

Hair loss isn't just a men's issue. It actually affects one in four women too! As you age, hair thins, and while it's one thing if you started with super-thick hair, but it can be a major problem if (like so many of us) you need all the volume you can get.

Luckily, there's a solution. The

is luxurious, Vogue-approved and (most important of all) it actually works.

Summary: Hair lo  isn't just a men's i ue. It actually affects one in four women too! As you age, hair thins, and while it's one thing if you started with


We knew Salesforce and Amazon Web Services were getting cozy, ever since Salesforce’s recent earnings call when its chief executive, Marc Benioff, effusively praised Amazon’s cloud unit. Now we know just how cozy.

The public statements sent out by both companies say that Amazon amzn Web Services is now officially Salesforce’s crm “preferred public cloud infrastructure provider.”

That’s pretty fluffy. More newsworthy is that Salesforce will spend $400 million on AWS services over the next four years. That tidbit was found on Salesforce’s 10Q statement, although the name of the “third-party provider” was not mentioned. Sources close to both companies confirmed that the the provider is AWS.

A public cloud or public cloud infrastructure a la AWS or Microsoft Azure is a massive set of computing, storage and networking resources that are rented out to customers who don’t want to expand or run their own data centers.

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The deal, agreed to last month is for Salesforce calls for that company to pay $70 million for AWS in fiscal 2017, $96 million the following year, then $108 million and $126 million.

This does not mean that Salesforce is moving all of its computing jobs off of its own data center infrastructure just yet.

One source said this is Salesforce “dipping its toe,” albeit a very large toe, in the public cloud. Salesforce’s current Heroku software development business acquired a few years back already runs entirely on Amazon infrastructure. The benefit of moving to Amazon could be more flexibility and the fact that Amazon runs data centers around the world, an important consideration given that many countries have strong data sovereignty laws that mandate that customer data be kept in the country of origin.

The deal with AWS is not necessarily indicate that Salesforce is ending its long dependency on Oracle databases and other software. Oracle software can run on corporate data centers but also can run on AWS. But Salesforce, as reported, is seriously weighing a move away from Oracle, as Fortune reported earlier this month.

Salesforce and Amazon get Awfully Chummy

From the Salesforce statement sent Wednesday afternoon:

For the first time, we’ll be able to deliver our core services—including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and more—for our international infrastructure expansion. This will enable us to bring new infrastructure online more quickly and efficiently in select international markets.

The deal could prove a plus for both companies.

“It’s a big deal for AWS as it is the first time it snatches major enterprise software workload since it got Infor a few years ago,” said Holger Mueller, analyst with Constellation Research. Infor is a business software company that migrated to AWS a few years ago.

The move could help Salesforce cut capital spending and funnel that money into research and development. Mueller agreed that this is bad news for Oracle, which would no doubt would have loved to claim Salesforce as a big customer for its nascent public cloud. But Salesforce and Oracle compete tooth and nail in the business applications arena.

“It does not make sense for Salesforce to operate two cloud infrastructures,” Mueller noted. It’s likely this deal means “Salesforce will move off its own Oracle-based architecture.”

So this is big news for AWS which leads the market in public cloud infrastructure but faces growing competition from Microsoft msft and Google goog Cloud Platform.

Note: This story was updated at 6:12 p.m. EDT with analyst comment.

Summary: This is more than marketing.


heard around the Web is back to work. Just not at the kind of position he might have hoped.

, 24, was fired in late April after saying the words, ""F---ing sh-t," on live television. It was his first day at work at NBC affiliate KFYR in Bismarck, N.D. Now he's reportedly found a job -- as a $2.23-an-hour

Not quite the television break he was hoping for. And neither is it really a new job. He's returned to the bartending gig that he had before getting the anchor slot; he's tending bar at the Table and Taproom in Dewey Beach, Del., located 45 miles south of Dover. He's working hard for tips, too. The bar is promoting his semi-celebrity status with a sign, "A.J. Clemente/Straight From Letterman/Tonight Behind The Bar."

"I definitely need to make money for bills," he told the celebrity entertainment news site,

That's quite the comedown for a man who enjoyed media coverage that might make even the Kardashians envious. Since getting fired, he has been on the "

," among other venues, to discuss the incident. And since being posted to

, the clip of his on-air mishap has garnered more than 1.7 million views.

In speaking to David Letterman, Clemente said "nobody knew" the cameras were rolling when he dropped the f-bomb. He was even surprised about it when he was finally notified by the show's producers. "By the third [commercial] break my news director walks in, and says you need to apologize. I say, 'For what?' "

But even though he, as he recalled it, "went home, crawled in bed and called [his] parents" after getting fired, he has no hard feelings, he says. "I fully expected they would fire me," he told the "Today" show. "I even called my news director after and apologized again." There was "no animosity at all," he added.

More: Ex-Convict Goes Job Hunting: The Hardest Career Turnaround

Clemente has also turned into a trendsetter of sorts. Since his on-air slip a handful of reporters have found themselves in similar situations. Chicago television reporter

earlier this month after she mistakenly referred to the Chicago Blackhawks' "tremendous sex" -- she meant "success." (Her bosses said that they fired her due to "unrelated" circumstances.)

And last week, BBC radio presenter

by her producers after a listener sent a text message to her producers questioning whether she was drunk. It was her last day hosting the Friday afternoon segment, and she could be heard slurring remarks like, "It's a P-A-R-T-Y because I said sooooooo." She's admitted to having had a few drinks, but denies being drunk. The BBC has yet to decide on her fate. But White was immediately taken off air for performing "under par," according to the BBC.

Clemente, for his part, wants to get back in the game. At one point during their interview, Letterman asked Clemente if he would take his old job back in North Dakota if an offer came. "I've thought about it," he said. Then added, "But if ESPN comes knocking ...," suggesting that he might be thinking bigger this time.

Looking for a job? Click here to get started.

Summary: The news anchor who dropped the expletives heard around the Web is back to work. Just not at the kind of position he might have hoped. A.J. Clemente, 24, was fired in late April after saying the word


HBO’s online store has everything for the diehard Game of Thrones fan, from house sigil shot glasses to Lannister hoodies to a Dothraki language guide to figurines of Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen. One thing it doesn’t have? A working toilet replica of the Iron Throne. Fans who wanted to swap their porcelain throne for an Iron one were out of luck. Until now.

Some ingenious Game of Thrones fans requested a working replica of the Iron Throne as a toilet and the creative minds at YouTube channel Awe Me delivered. The video and possible how-to-guide shows the industrious crafters, sculptors and prop masters behind Super Fan Builds creating the Iron Throne out of parts like wood, epoxy resin, urethane, neoprene foam and, naturally, a toilet.

If the Iron Throne sits in the only bathroom in the house, there’s no doubt the game of thrones will be quite intense.

Summary: One throne to rule them all


A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Anna Clendening grew up writing and performing for her friends, school and church. But her desire to sing was sidelined after being diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Anna has always been an outgoing and active person, and she turned to writing and performing music online as a way of coping with the severity of her condition. Within just a few months, her posted videos gained a loyal following, and Anna found her voice again. She now spends a great deal of her time working to raise awareness of youth depression and anxiety, and sharing the stories of fans with similar experiences. It is her goal on America's Got Talent to show people that no matter what condition you may be facing, it's possible to realize your dreams.

Summary: Meet Anna Clendening on NBC.com.


Even if you have never played the board game Catan, odds are you have probably heard of it.

Catan – formerly known as “The Settlers of Catan”—has sold over 25 million copies in more than 30 languages, and it has created a cult of rabid fans around the world.

While kids for generations learned about real estate and capitalism by playing Monopoly, these days they are just as likely to be learning financial lessons from Catan.

Reuters talked to a few devoted Catan fans about the key lessons of the game and what parents can pass along to their kids when sitting down to play:

Players are basically playing the role of settlers, trying to build their communities and maximize their resources (wool, wood, brick, ore, and wheat). As a result, “it’s all about where you start out,” says Vinny Bonta of Columbus, Ohio, who represented the U.S. at the world championships in Berlin in 2014 (placing 13th overall).

“If you really want a resource like lumber, for instance, you have to place your settlement onto a lumber-producing location in order to get that. So location is everything,” Bonta says.

2. Relationships are a valuable commodity

There is a fair amount of trading that goes on in Catan, as players swap resource cards depending on what they need to progress. So the game is not just about luck and rolls of the dice – it is also about who is willing to make deals with you.

“That is the biggest point that people miss,” says Bonta. “If you are friendly with someone, they are way more willing to trade with you. So socially, I am always talking and trying to build connections with people.”

When it comes to trading, do not just think about what you are getting; think about the particular needs of the other player, as well. Memorize their cards if you can, so you know exactly which cards they are holding.

“Different people all have different resources, so each player is going to value those resources differently,” says Stuart Ritter, senior financial planner and VP at Baltimore-based money managers T. Rowe Price, who regularly gets clobbered at Catan by his 9-year-old son. “I might have a ton of wood, but need something else. That gives you the opportunity to create a win-win trade for both players.”

Winning in Catan is not about a lightning strike, like a chess checkmate in a few moves. Just like investing for retirement, it is about having a long-term strategy that may take time to come to fruition. (One popular shirt in Catan’s online shop: “The Fastest Way to Victory is Taking the Longest Road.”)

“Achieving a goal is not something you accomplish in one or two turns,” says Ritter. “So you really need to be patient in acquiring resources and building the things you want to build, and not going for immediate gratification.”

Bet big on one or two resources, and it might work – or it might fail miserably, just as if you bet your retirement portfolio on a single stock.

In the same fashion, try not to get stuck with a single resource. If you do, you may find yourself desperate for others – to construct roads, for instance, you need brick and lumber, while building cities requires ore and wheat. If you are not diversified, you could end up as the victim of some very lopsided trades.

“Build on a variety of numbers, where you can gather a variety of resources,” says financial planner Steven Starnes of Grand Rapids, Michigan. “You just can’t predict for sure what will perform better, so it is important to thoughtfully diversify investments.”

You may develop a brilliant path to victory, but the board gets set up differently every game play, and every single move by your opponents can alter the dynamics of the game.

As a result, you need to be prepared to scrap your preconceived notions, and stay nimble enough to change direction when needed. “It is vital to react to what is in front of you and adapt to what is happening, and not get stuck where you were,” says Bonta. (Editing by Beth Pinsker and Cynthia Osterman)

Summary: Six lessons from the popular strategy game.


After selling the beleaguered flash sales site Gilt to Saks Fifth Avenue-owner Hudson’s Bay Company hbayf in Feb., Michelle Peluso is announcing her next step. The former Gilt CEO is jumping back into the investment world, joining late-stage venture capital and investment firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV).

TCV invests in both public and private technology companies. For instance, the firm invested in Netflix nflx in 1998, prior to the company’s IPO, and still has a significant stake in the streaming video giant.

Peluso joined Gilt in 2013 from Citigroup, where she was the chief marketing and internet officer. She was also the CEO of Travelocity for six years prior to Citigroup c . Also serving on the board of Nike nke , Peluso will be joining TCV as a venture partner, where she will take on a part-time role advising the firm’s portfolio, investing in new companies, and more.

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Under Peluso, Gilt had a tumultuous ride to its exit. Valued at $1 billion at one point, the luxury discount e-tailer was one of the leaders in the pack of flash sales sites, including HauteLook, Rue La La, and others. The company even had hopes of an IPO. But in the past few years, reality set in, and it became clear Gilt and others couldn’t compete in an e-commerce world dominated by Amazon.

Gilt isn’t the only flash sales site to lose steam. Shares in Zulily, a Gilt rival, plunged over 60% following its initial public offering in 2014. Earlier this year, Zulily sold itself to the parent of home shopping channel QVC for $2.4 billion. Ideeli, which had raised over $100 million from investors, was sold to Groupon in 2014 in a fire-sale. Like Gilt, Fab.com was also valued at $1 billion, but sold for $15 million in 2014.

Target Sets Its Eyes on E-Commerce and Classy Stores

As for what advice Peluso would give startups in the e-commerce world, she said that considering the relative “choppy waters” in the current economy, entrepreneurs should be paying serious attention to their unit economics, or how much money they are making on each customer and or order. She’s also interested in how to bring digital experiences into stores to make the experience better than in the traditional brick and mortar environment.

Peluso is especially passionate about helping foster more women entrepreneurs and leaders, and will be continuing that effort while working at TCV.

Summary: Michelle Peluso is joining Technology Crossover Ventures as a venture partner.


Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia has announced that he will give his entire personal fortune to charity, the BBC reports.

The entire sum, $32 billion, will be made over to his own foundation, Alwaleed Philanthropies, to which he has already given $3.5 billion.

Alwaleed, who is ranked 34th on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people, says his philanthropy is “an intrinsic part” of his Islamic faith and that he was inspired by Bill and Melinda Gates’ work with their Gates Foundation.

He hopes the money will be used to “empower women, enable youth, provide vital disaster relief and create a more tolerant and accepting world,” the BBC reports, although the Prince did not specify which programs or initiatives it would directly support.

Summary: He wants the money to help "create a more tolerant and accepting world."


Theranos, the controversial blood-testing startup that has been valued at $9 billion by private investors, recently decided to raise upwards of $200 million in new funding, according to regulatory filings the company made in Delaware (which were first noticed by VCExperts.com).

The new “Series C-3” stock authorization filing came just three days before a Wall Street Journal report questioned the efficacy of Theranos’s technology, and even suggested that the Silicon Valley company had tried to cheat on its lab proficiency tests. It had been approved by the company’s board of directors nearly one month earlier, on Sept. 19.

It is important to note that authorized shares have not necessarily been issued or sold. For example, other filings show that Theranos authorized the sale of 11.7 million “Series C-2” shares at $17 a piece back in February 2014. It then increased that amount this past January to a whopping 58.8 million shares at the same $17 per share price. But shortly thereafter, Theranos said in a different filing that it only had issued a total of 32.2 million of the authorized Series C-2 stock.

Theranos does not comment on its fundraising, so it is unclear exactly how much the company has raised to date. That said, the company did share some information for a Fortune cover story published in June 2014, at which time we reported that the company had raised around $400 million in total funding (at the $9 billion valuation). If we assume that it already had sold the first piece of that Series C-2 round, then the extra shares sold this past spring would put its total capital raised at around $750 million. And that’s before anything it raises from the new share authorization.

The company also keeps the identifies of its shareholders close to the vest, having previously identified just a small handful like Draper Fisher Jurvetson (which only committed $500,000 in a seed round), ATA Ventures, Tako Ventures, former board member Don Lucas and Oracle ORCL founder Larry Ellison.

Fortune has since learned, however, of several more investors that have never been otherwise disclosed. They include: BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Continental Properties Co., Esoom Enterprise (Taiwan), Jupiter Partners, Palmieri Trust, Partner Fund Management, Dixon Doll, Ray Bingham and B.J. Cassin.

None of the investors Fortune managed to contact confirmed their involvement on the record, but two we spoke with on background said that they receive relatively little financial information from the company.

We also have heard from multiple sources that certain existing Theranos shareholders have been seeking to sell some stock via secondary exchanges, although have been unable to learn the identities of those holders.

A Theranos spokeswoman did not return requests for comment.

Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes is scheduled to be interviewed next week at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco.

Summary: Just days before being lambasted by the Wall Street Journal, Theranos planned to sell a lot of new stock.


Geopolitics can be child’s play—literally. How else would you describe the did-not! did-too! brawl that can result when one country crosses another country’s invisible line in the playroom that is the South China Sea? How else would you describe the G-8 canceling its playdate in Sochi after Russia climbed over the fence to Ukraine’s yard?

Something similar is true of the International Space Station (ISS), the biggest, coolest, most excellent tree house there ever was. Principally built and operated by the U.S., the ISS has welcomed aboard astronauts from 15 different countries, including such space newbies as South Africa, Brazil, The Netherlands and Malaysia. But China? Nuh-uh. Never has happened, never gonna’ happen.

China has been barred from the ISS since 2011, when Congress passed a law prohibiting official American contact with the Chinese space program due to concerns about national security. “National security,” of course, is the lingua franca excuse for any country to do anything it jolly well wants to do even if it has nothing to do with, you know, the security of the nation. But never mind.

Few people in the U.S. paid much attention to the no-Chinese law, but it’s at last taking deserved heat, thanks to a CNN interview with the three Chinese astronauts—or taikonauts—who flew China’s Shenzhou 10 mission in 2013. The network’s visit to China’s usually closed Space City, which will air on May 30, is a reporting coup, especially because of the entirely familiar, entirely un-scary world it reveals: serious taikonauts doing serious work with serious mission planners—every bit what you see behind the scenes at NASA or Russia’s Roscosmos.

And similar to the nature of those other space agencies too is the professed wish of the Chinese crews to work across national borders. “As an astronaut, I have a strong desire to fly with astronauts from other countries,” said Nie Haisheng, the Shenzhou 10 commander. “I also look forward to going to the International Space Station. Space is a family affair; many countries are developing their space programs and China, as a big country, should make our own contributions in this field.”

But that contribution can’t happen aboard the ISS. The 2011 law draws a sort of ex post facto justification from a study that was released in 2012 by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, warning that China’s policymakers “view space power as one aspect of a broad international competition in comprehensive national strength and science and technology.” More darkly, there is the 2015 report prepared by the University of California, San Diego’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, ominously titled “China Dream, Space Dream“, which concludes: “China’s efforts to use its space program to transform itself into a military, economic, and technological power may come at the expense of U.S. leadership and has serious implications for U.S. interests.”

OK, deep, cleansing breaths please. On the surface, the studies make a kind of nervous, reflexive sense. China is big, China is assertive, China has made clear its intentions to project its military power in ways it never has before—including to the high ground of space.

But if that sounds familiar it’s because it’s an echo of the Cold War hysteria that greeted the launch the Soviet Union’s Sputnik. The world’s first satellite, Sputnik was a terrifying, beach ball sized object that orbited the Earth from Oct. 1957 to January 1958, presenting the clear and present danger that at some point it might beep at us as it flew overhead. Every Soviet space feat that followed was one more log on the Cold War fire, one more reason to conclude that we were in a mortal arms and technology race and woe betide us if the guys on the other side got so much as a peek at what we were doing.

That argument failed for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the Soviets hardly needed a peek at our tech since they were the ones who were winning. When you’re in first place in your division you don’t to steal ideas from the guys in last. Something similar is true of the Chinese now.

After launching their first solo astronaut in 2003, they have followed in rapid succession with two-person and then three-person crews, and have mastered both spacewalking and orbital docking. They have orbited a core module for their own eventual space station, have sent multiple spacecraft to the moon and are planning a Mars rover. They didn’t do all that by filching American tech.

The doubters are unappeased, however. Both these reports warn that all of China’s technological know-how, no matter how they acquired it, has multiple uses, and can be put to either good or nefarious ends, a fact that is pretty much true of every, single technological innovation from fire through the Apple Watch.

Even if all of the fears were well-founded—even if a Chinese Death Star were under construction at this moment in a mountain lair in Xinjiang—forbidding the kind of international handshaking and cooperating that is made possible by a facility like the ISS is precisely the wrong way to to go about reducing the threat. The joint Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975 achieved little of technological significance, but it was part of a broader thaw between Moscow and Washington. That mattered, in the same way ping pong diplomacy between the U.S. and China in 1971 was about nothing more than a game—until it was suddenly about much more.

Well before the ISS was built and occupied, the shuttle was already flying American crews to Russia’s Mir space station. Russia later became America’s leading partner in operating and building the ISS—a shrewd American move that both offloaded some of the cost of the station and provided work for Russian missile engineers who found themselves idle after the Berlin Wall fell and could easily have sold their services to nuclear nasties like North Korea or Iran.

The technology aboard the ISS is not the kind that a Chinese astronaut with ill will would want to or need to steal. And more to the point, if there’s one thing the men and women who fly in space will tell you, it’s that once they get there, terrestrial politics mean nothing at all—the sandbox silliness of politicians who are not relying on the cooperation of a few close crewmates to keep them alive and safe as they race through low Earth orbit. From space, as astronauts like to say, you can’t see borders. It’s a perspective the lawmakers in Washington could use.

Summary: Childish politics getting in the way of international cooperation


People hate it when someone blabs about a key plot twist before they can see it for themselves. The makers of a popular TV show, though, just took this gripe to a new level.

According to a fan group called The Spoiling Dead, lawyers for the The Walking Dead say they will sue if the group keeps writing about upcoming plot twists.

“AMC is aware that The Spoiling Dead Fans site is promoting your claim that you have received copyright protected, trade secret information about the most critical plot information in the unreleased next season of The Walking Dead,” the letter states.

The “most critical” plot info in question reportedly concerns the identity of a person who a character named Negan killed with a barbed-wire covered baseball bat, according to Torrent Freak. (And I thought the whole point of the show was killing undead “walkers.”)

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Is AMC’s AMCX claim legitimate? On one hand, the studio may worry that some people might not tune if they already know what becomes of Negan and his bat.

But on the other hand, it seems those who care about spoilers would make a point not to find out. For instance, they could avoid reading the fan site’s page in the first place—or not looking for the answer in the graphic novels on which the show is based.

More importantly, the studio’s legal case seems far-fetched. Anyone with a passing knowledge of copyright law knows that you can protect original expression, but not basic facts. The answer to the mystery of Negan and his bat is just that: a fact.

Imagine if the makers of Star Wars wanted to stop me from telling everyone the identify of Luke Skywalker’s father. They certainly could ask, but there’s not way they would persuade a judge to stop me.

AMC’s lawyers try to bolster their silly claim by citing a case called Twin Peaks v. Publications Int’l in which a court sided with the makers of Twin Peaks, who had brought a copyright claim over an unauthorized book about the show. But that case is very different—it involved publishing large amounts of information and undermining the market for authorized Twin Peaks books.

Alas for the fan site, having the law on your side is not enough to win. You also have to pay for attorneys and all those court filing charges to defend yourselves, which means it can be more practical to just give in. And that appears to be what the site has decided to do.

Summary: Copyright is more scary than zombies


An emergency bushfire warning has been issued for the town of Waroona, south of Perth. Some people have been advised it is too late to leave.

Related: When a bushfire destroyed our home we had moments to react but needed years to recover | Ashleigh Davis

The alert was issued late on Wednesday night and applies to residents in Waroona, Alcoa minesite and properties in the Shire of Waroona.

“You are in danger and need to act immediately to survive,” a statement from the Parks and Wildlife Department said. “There is a threat to lives and homes.”

The fast-moving fire, which was sparked by a lightning strike in Lane Poole Reserve and has already burnt 2800 hectares, is “out of control and unpredictable”.

“For people east of South Western Highway, it is too late to leave, leaving now would be deadly,” the statement said. “You need to take shelter in your home and actively defend it.”

An evacuation centre has been set up at Murray Leisure Centre in Pinjarra.

Summary: Alert applies to residents in Waroona, Alcoa minesite and properties in the Shire of Waroona at risk from an out of control and unpredictable fire


50 Cent needs to pass some of his pimp juice to a producer who says "P.I.M.P." was jacked from him ... and he's looking for compensation.

Brandon Parrott says he sent 10 tracks to Dr. Dre in 2001 ... in hopes one of Dre's artists -- like Eminem -- would record his music. Cut to 2003, when Parrott says he got a call from a producer for Dre's company, Aftermath Entertainment.

He says the producer admitted Parrott's track, "BAMBA" was used in "P.I.M.P." -- and was included on 50's huge debut album, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'". Parrott says the producer pleaded ignorance -- that he had no idea "BAMBA" was going to end up on the final edit.

In other words: It was an honest mistake.

Parrott says he signed a settlement deal based on that story -- but he's recently heard interviews where it's now clear to him it was no mistake. He feels 50 and Aftermath took advantage of him.

Parrott's going after both parties for a cut of that "P.I.M.P." dough.

Summary: 50 Cent needs to pass some of his pimp juice to a producer who says "P.I.M.P." was jacked from him ... and he's looking for compensation. Brandon…


Last Updated Jun 29, 2011 10:20 AM EDT

Give us $2,500, and we'll get you a six-figure job. That's the promise made by the new

. And if it sounds too good to be true, well, there's a saying about that. Unless you have $2,500 to burn (actually, $2,495), you'll want to be very careful before taking them up on their offer.

The Ladders is a job board that specializes in positions paying $100,000 or more. Now it's claiming that its $2,495, six-month coaching service will get you a job offer worth at least $100,000-or your money back. But what if it's for a job you don't want or couldn't take?

Every successful coach, of course, requires a motivated trainee. If you're not motivated, The Ladders has a bunch of stipulations to make sure you at least act as if you are. To be eligible for the guarantee, you have to attend seven sessions with a career coach, complete an evaluation, and, after the first 60 days, apply to six 'well-fitted' positions a month. If you still don't get at least one offer for at least $100,000, The Ladders will refund your money.

Here's the first catch: What, exactly, is a "well-fitted" job? To qualify as well-fitted, The Ladders says a job has meet your goals in three of these five criteria:

So, as I read it, if you're living in Atlanta, and a job in your industry, using your skill set, comes to you through a contact in Anchorage, you're expected to interview for it, and, if successful, pack up and go (or forfeit your $2,495).

Some people, especially those who have been out of work for a long time, may be perfectly willing to do that. It seems they're also the ones least likely to be able to front the money for this program. That being said, I once interviewed an HR manager who was trying to find jobs for about 200 people who had been laid-off from her company's New York offices. Any of them were welcome to keep their jobs if they moved to the company's Midwestern headquarters. If they moved, they could keep their New York salaries. I lived near New York at the time, I knew roughly how much this woman made, and I saw pictures of her house. To me, it seemed like you could live like a king on a New York salary in this part of the country. And out of nearly 200 laid-off people, how many applied for jobs at headquarters? Last I heard, exactly two.

Still, if you're willing to move to-or from-Peoria, consider what

, has to say about Signature before you fork over your money:

Then there's the fact that when Adams asked to interview a successful participant in Signature, her arrangement for an exclusive about the new service was hastily cancelled. Make of that what you will. Or better yet, read

about the service, and the rather pointed comments from job-seekers.

Do you think $2,500--up front--for a good-paying job is a fair deal, even if that job's in another city? Or is it too risky and expensive for someone without a job?

© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Summary: For $2,495, TheLadders.com says its career coaches and resume tweakers can get you a six-figure job--or your money back. Really?


Apple Inc. has revolutionized music and phones. Now it is aiming at a much bigger target: automobiles.

The Cupertino, Calif., company has several hundred employees working secretly toward creating an Apple-branded electric vehicle, according to people familiar with the matter. The project, code-named “Titan,” initially is working on the design of a vehicle that resembles a minivan, one of the people said.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Apple ultimately could decide not to proceed with a car. In addition, many technologies used in an electric car, such as advanced batteries and in-car electronics, could be useful to other Apple products, including the iPhone and iPad.

Apple often investigates technologies and potential products, going as far as building multiple prototypes for some things that it won’t ever sell. Any car would take several years to complete and obtain safety certifications.

But the size of the project team and the senior people involved indicate that the company is serious, these people said. Apple executives have flown to Austria to meet with contract manufacturers for high-end cars including the Magna Steyr unit of Canadian auto supplier Magna International Inc. A Magna spokeswoman declined to comment.

Apple’s industrial design team is staffed with several people who have experience at European auto makers. Last year, Apple hired Marc Newson, a famous industrial designer and close friend of the company’s design guru, Jony Ive. In the past, Mr. Newson created a concept car for Ford Motor Co.

Apple hopes to put its stamp on the electric vehicle market in the same way it did the smartphone with its iPhone, said a person familiar with its work. Even though Apple defied expectations of slowing growth with a 30% rise in revenue in the quarter ended December, the company is under constant scrutiny of where its next breakthrough product will come from.

Earlier this week, Mr. Cook said at an investor conference that he does not believe that companies naturally start to slow as their revenue grows. He said this was “dogma” and that Apple didn’t believe in putting limits on what it was capable of.

A side benefit of the project, according to one of the people, is that it has persuaded many Apple employees who were thinking of leaving the company to stay and work on an exciting new endeavor without the pressure of churning new products every year.

Other Silicon Valley giants are looking at autos. Google Inc. has been working on a self-driving car for years. The head of Google’s autonomous vehicle project said last year that the company aims to forge a partnership with auto makers to build a self-driving car within the next few years. A self-driving car is not part of Apple’s current plan, one of the people familiar with the project said.

“There are products that we’re working on that no one knows about,” Chief Executive Tim Cook told interviewer Charlie Rose in September. “That haven’t been rumored about yet.”

Building cars is capital intensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars for design, tools and production and certifications. Auto makers also must help ramp up a supply network for the thousands of components that go into a vehicle.

Battery-powered cars add another dimension. Tesla Motors Inc., for instance, has seen losses widen amid rising expenses to build an electric sport-utility vehicle. It expects to spend $1.5 billion on capital expenditures and R&D this year.

Mr. Cook approved the car project almost a year ago and assigned veteran product design Vice President Steve Zadesky to lead the group, the people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Zadesky is a former Ford engineer who helped lead the Apple teams that created the iPod and iPhone.

Mr. Zadesky was given permission to create a 1,000-person team and poach employees from different parts of the company, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Working from a private location a few miles from Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, the team is researching different types of robotics, metals and materials consistent with automobile manufacturing, the people said.

In September, Apple hired Johann Jungwirth, who had been the president and chief executive of Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America, which has operations in Sunnyvale, Calif., near Apple’s campus, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The Financial Times reported earlier that dozens of Apple employees are researching automotive products, citing people familiar with the company.

Over the past 15 years, Apple has built a track record of upending industries. Its iPod music players and iTunes service accelerated the shift to digital music. The iPhone established the smartphone market and changed the notion of mobile computing. Apple plans to introduce its Apple Watch in April, which the company hopes will create a market for wearable devices.

Manufacturing a car is enormously expensive. A single plant usually costs well over $1 billion and requires a massive supply chain to produce the more than 10,000 components in a car. Elon Musk, chief executive of electric-car maker Tesla, complained last fall that it is “really hard” to make a car amid the company’s struggle to ramp up production of its Model S sedan.

The expense is a barrier to entry to many potential competitors, but would be less of a hurdle for Apple, which reported holding $178 billion in cash as of Dec. 27, 2014.

Tesla was able to ramp up its manufacturing quickly and relatively cheaply by buying a former Toyota Motor Corp. factory in Fremont, Calif., for $42 million in 2010. Tesla has since invested hundreds of millions of dollars to tool up the factory and still only produced 35,000 vehicles in 2014.

Auto makers tend to operate their own factories. For years, Apple has relied on contract manufacturers to build its products. That has helped Apple keep a lean supply chain and reduce inventory exposure.

Apple has been working with auto makers on bringing its software expertise into the car. More than two dozen auto makers plan to use its CarPlay service, which allows a driver to access Apple services like iTunes music, maps and Siri through the vehicle’s dashboard information system.

Write to Daisuke Wakabayashi at Daisuke.Wakabayashi@wsj.com and Mike Ramsey at michael.ramsey@wsj.com

Summary: The maker of iPhones has hundreds of staff working on an Apple-branded electric vehicle, according to people familiar with the matter who said its “Titan” project is designing a vehicle that resembles a minivan.


Last year at Austin’s annual South by Southwest tech festival, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sat on stage and talked about how his supposed third act, a funky question-and-answers app named Jelly, had failed and how his company was abandoning the project. But things didn’t go quite as planned.

Stone, instead, is pushing for a second time to make Jelly a success. Jelly 2.0, as Stone refers to the revamped version, which invites users to query others about virtually any topic, is now publicly available for free to users on iOS and the web, the company said on Thursday.

“Our thing is really about helping you get through your day,” Stone said in an interview at Jelly’s office. Ideally, people will ask questions like, “Who is great real estate agent in San Francisco?” or “What’s a good snack for my kid at school?”

The revamped Jelly has a few noticeable changes to folks who used the first version. Asking questions can now be done anonymously and it does not require creating an account because, as Jelly’s team realized, people are more apprehensive to ask questions when their identity is known. “Imagine if a Google search was a tweet—you’d not search for 99% of the things you do,” Stone said last month during a return visit to South By Southwest.

The Jelly team also tossed out its initial thought that users could find answers from others in their social media networks. As Stone explains, while that might work in some cases, fielding questions to people with expertise in a topic is much more efficient, so that’s how the new Jelly works.

“We should start from scratch and build what we should have built from the beginning,” Stone told his fellow Jelly co-founder, Ben Finkel, when the two sat in their office’s conference room to discuss Jelly’s fate. The conversation was supposed to be about how to completely kill off Jelly and fully commit to their new app, Super, which lets users create and share colorful collages that include a superlative like “My favorite animal is the pug.” But as the discussion continued, they decided they couldn’t give up on Jelly just yet.

“Ben, this is gonna be really awkward, we’re gonna have to tell the team that we’re going back to Jelly after we said it would over,” Stone told his co-founder.

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To make light of the situation, Stone says he came up with the idea of calling it an “un-pivot,” a joking take on the popular Silicon Valley term of “pivoting,” or drastically shifting a company’s focus after an initial product flops. Soon enough, the press was having fun with it too. BuzzFeed published a list of “History’s 8 Most Important Un-Pivots,” featuring Prohibition and Michael Jordan’s return to basketball after a brief stint in minor league baseball.

Surprisingly, the story of how Stone came up with the idea for Jelly isn’t all that riveting. As he tells it, the idea occurred to him while taking a walk with Finkel, a close friend of his from Twitter. Finkel, who Stone describes as one of the smartest people around and a talented engineer, soon quit his job at Twitter, and the two started working on Jelly.

“We think the future of search in general is no results. You ask a question, you get the answer,” said Stone. On the conference room table next to him was an Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated gadget for shopping, playing music, or other tasks. Though Jelly was founded before Amazon released the Echo, it’s become a good proxy for how Stone envisions the next phase of search engines. Sure, the Echo can’t answer any and all questions at the moment, but it also doesn’t provide its owner with pages and pages of results to wade through.

For now, getting an answer through Jelly takes anywhere between a few seconds to 10 to 15 minutes, but as the company adds more and more users, Stone hopes it will provide a quicker turnaround. Since every startup needs some sort of vanity metric, “average time to first answer” is Jelly’s.

Right now, all answers are submitted by users in response to individual questions. Although it sounds crazy that people will voluntary spend their time answering strangers’ questions, Stone claims that it’s in fact something people want to do. “People love answering the questions, especially when they know the answer” because it’s a topic they know well, he said. Users can select topics they’re experts in, and the app will route relevant questions to them.

Eventually, Jelly will also start to recycle answers for similar questions and even further down the line, it could also pull information from certain websites and serve up quick answers, similarly to Google’s “Featured Snippets,” though he wouldn’t say more about this.

Jelly is of course not the first attempt at human-powered answers—there’s already Yahoo Answers, which gained decent traction after it debuted in late 2005, but was then overwhelmed by spammy and low quality responses. Quora, a seven year-old service that is popular with Silicon Valley insiders and has maintained a relatively high quality, is another example.

But perhaps what’s most interesting about Stone, is that he seems quite comfortable with the unknown, including whether Jelly will work out at all this second time around.

Stone is quite aware that the idea seems ridiculous to some folks and that he hasn’t “invented water,” as one critic has said to him. But he also believes there could be space for an alternative to Google. “There’s a huge percentage of queries that are better answered by a person,” he said, adding that technically, even Google results were written by humans because most things on websites were put there by people.

Asked if he thinks Jelly will be as big as Google, he said he doesn’t know. “That would be great,” he added casually, though he didn’t seem to delude himself too much about this.

Jelly also got “lucky,” as Stone says, when it came to the undisclosed amount of funding he has raised after personally getting the company off the ground. Not too long after raising its first round of institutional funding in 2013, Greylock Partners’ Josh Elman approached Stone and asked to participate in his next round, and though Jelly hadn’t even begun to spend its first round of venture capital money, Stone accepted.

“I grew up on welfare and was in debt until I was 37, so I took the money,” Stone laughed, adding that “in retrospect, it looked like I was a genius.”

Summary: But does the world need anything beyond Google?