• Palantir Technologies is reportedly adding a lockup period to its direct listing, limiting investors' ability to sell shares immediately after the company starts trading. 
• Through the plan, investors could sell about 20% of their shares immediately. 
• Spotify and Slack, the two companies that paved the way for direct listings, didn't have such a lockup period. 
• The lockup plan could limit insider trading, address investor expectations, and limit volatility, public offering experts said.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Palantir Technologies is planning to go public via a direct listing, the same method pioneered by Slack and Spotify, but it may do so with a twist that could help shore up confidence in the money-losing tech company. 

Palantir plans to adopt a so-called lockup provision in which its current investors will be able to sell up to 20% of their holdings in the direct listing, but would be barred from selling additional shares for 180 days, according to reports in The New York Times, The Information, and Tech Crunch.

The lock-up provision left some observers scratching their heads. Lockup periods are common in traditional IPOs. But neither Slack nor Spotify — the only two companies that have thus far used the direct listing method to go public in the US — included one in their offerings.

Unlike its two direct listing predecessors though, Palantir will enter the public markets amid great political and economic uncertainty if, as expected, its goes public in September. And because the secretive data analytics company is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink and opting for a novel path to the public markets, a lock-up could provide a critical measure of stability. 

Right now, experts told Business Insider, the direct listing is still an emerging alternative to the traditional IPO, with no set standards or commonly accepted terms — giving Palantir the freedom to call its own shots.

"It's just two" direct listings to date, said Reena Aggarwal, a finance professor and director of the Center for Financial Markets and Policy at Georgetown University. "That doesn't set a trend yet," she continued.

Lockups are common in traditional IPOs

In a traditional IPO, companies raise money by selling shares to institutional investors who then turn around and create a market for the stock by selling some of those shares on a stock exchange. While employees, executives, or early investors often sell shares in the IPO, such insiders are typically barred from selling after that, generally for a period of 180 days. Some companies have had provisions in their IPOs that allow them to lift the lockup period early if their shares trade above a certain price for a sustained period.

By contrast, in a direct listing, companies are currently barred from selling shares. Instead, insiders make a market for their firm's stock by selling some of their holdings directly to the public on a stock exchange. At least in the case of Slack and Spotify, employees, executives, and early investors could continue to sell in the days after the listing without any prohibitions. That allowed those insiders to cash in their stakes much earlier than they would have in a traditional IPO.

It's unclear exactly how Palantir's lockup period will work. The reports didn't state whether it could be lifted early or whether it will apply to rank-and-file employees as well as to executives and early investors. It's also not clear why Palantir planned to include a lock up with its offering.

The laws and regulations governing public offerings don't mandate lockup periods, but they're typically required by the investment banks that underwrite IPOs. 

See more:The IPO market is on fire after a short-lived drought — here are the hottest public debuts to keep an eye on, and which banks are eyeing big fees for pulling them off.

Lockups can prevent insider trading

The theory behind lockup periods is that they help prevent insiders who are aware of negative confidential information about the company from dumping their shares in the excitement following the IPO — and before that information becomes public, said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida who closely studies the IPO market. The side benefit of that is that they can lead to higher share prices, because investors don't have to apply a discount to the stock for the possibility that insiders are selling based on such negative news, he said.

"I'm not at all surprised that Palantir has agreed to a lockup," Ritter said.

Indeed, underwriters might add a lockup provision to the direct listing because investors expect them, said Greg Rodgers, a partner at Latham & Watkins who spoke generally about the thought process, not Palantir in particular. Rodgers represented Spotify on its 2018 listing and Slack's financial advisers in the 2019 direct listing.

He said companies that use lockups in a direct listing can direct them at large, new, or other notable shareholders, while allowing employees or other smaller or longer-term investors to sell. 

"In the direct listings seen to-date, they have not been used, largely I think due to the view that the larger the supply of shares, the truer the price set in the two-sided market place," Rodgers said. "However, if the company is concerned about the short-term impact of over-supply on the trading price of the stock, there is nothing to keep them from imposing the disciplined release that lock-ups might provide."

They may also limit volatility — or not

Palantir's desire to shore up its share price may well have played role in its decision to include a lockup provision, Aggarwal said. Spotify and Slack's shares traded down for weeks and months, respectively, following their direct listings.

If anything, the reception Palantir is likely to see from public investors is even more uncertain, given what's been going on the markets. While the major indices have all bounced back from their coronavirus lows this spring and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq are both at or near record levels, the markets have been highly volatile in recent months, Aggarwal said.

By including a lockup period in its offering, Palantir will likely be able to avoid some of that volatility, she said. Its stock would likely be subject to much more extreme swings if insiders were permitted to dump shares whenever they wanted in the days, weeks, and months after the listing, she said.

"I kind of think of a lockup as managing that volatility," Aggarwal said.

Benchmark partner Bill Gurley isn't so sure about that. Some research he's seen indicates that Slack and Spotify actually had less volatility following their listings than the typical IPO, said Gurley, one of the most prominent advocates of direct listings in Silicon Valley.

Lockup periods tend to delay the process of finding an equilibrium price for a stock, he said. Many institutional investors refrain from establishing full positions in companies until after the lockup period has ended and all the insiders who wanted to sell have unloaded their shares, he said.

"If anything, I think the lockup could cause more volatility," he said.

Bill Gurley's a fan of direct listings, lockups or no

Regardless, Gurley doesn't think the lockup provision, even if it's widely adopted, will halt the momentum behind direct listings or make them less preferable to IPOs. Even with such a provision, direct listings still address the two big failings he sees in traditional IPOs — the fact that humans set the initial price of the stock and determine who gets the shares. Those factors can lead to big rises in prices when the stock starts trading and those rises can effectively represent huge transfers of wealth from the companies to the institutional investors that buy shares in the IPO.

"A direct listing that has those two problems fixed, I love," Gurley said. "I kind of think of ... the lockup change as
was the car mauve or red. I don't care. That's not the variable that matters."

Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, has spent nearly two decades as a private, venture capital-backed company, but one that's been extraordinarily secretive about its operations and financial results. Those secrets are starting to come to light as it prepares to go public. The company announced last month that it had confidentially filed its draft offering paperwork.

On Friday, TechCrunch the New York Times reported leaked Palantir financial information, including that the company tallied about $742 million in revenue in 2019 while losing $580 million.  

A public filing from early July shows the company is in the process of raising $961 million in private capital. So far it has raised $550 million, mostly from the Japanese holding company Sompo Holdings. 

• Read more about Palantir and its plans to go public:
• Secretive data firm Palantir built its business on a cloak-and-dagger image. But as the company braces for an IPO, insiders say it's lost its mystique and is struggling to figure out a steady revenue model.
• These 11 people should grow from rich to richer if Palantir has a successful IPO
• Palantir's move to go public could ditch the standard IPO process. Here's why that move could pay off for the secretive $20 billion company.
• Palantir's latest controversy is on its board: a Wall Street Journal reporter who is friends with Peter Thiel and whose father is the novelist Tom Wolfe

SEE ALSO: Schmoozing is making a comeback in the midst of the pandemic: Here's a look at how Wall Street is entertaining clients, from golf games to lavish outdoor dinners.

Join the conversation about this story »

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• SpaceX has launched hundreds of internet-beaming Starlink satellites and recently started a private beta for the network.
• But the aerospace company, founded by Elon Musk, might try to defray some of its cost through Federal Communications Commission subsidies worth $20.4 billion.
• Starlink performance tests published on Speedtest suggest that SpaceX might be eligible for the program, called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.
• But industry experts say they doubt Starlink will get anything, because the fund strongly favors fiber-optic cables over satellite networks.
• Still, a loss in the program's $16 billion first phase might help SpaceX push for changes that allow it to better compete for a $4.4 billion second phase.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

SpaceX has a penchant for powering technological disruption with engineering savvy and federal assistance, most famously with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spaceship programs.

But its next big play to glean some government dollars — to power a network of internet-beaming satellites— is likely to fail, industry experts say.

On Tuesday, SpaceX launched a new batch of desk-size Starlink satellites to orbit, boosting its operational fleet to about 600. The goal of the project, currently backed by private money, is to provide affordable high-speed web service across America and the rest of the world.

The company's founder, Elon Musk (now the fourth-wealthiest person alive), told Business Insider in 2019 that it would take about 1,000 spacecraft to make the system "economically viable." But that's just the starting point: One day, as many as 42,000 Starlink satellites could simultaneously circle the planet.

SpaceX might have to make that happen almost entirely on its own. Industry experts told Business Insider the company will struggle to win a penny of a $20.4 billion subsidy program called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is managed by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC plans to award companies that money in exchange for building up as much broadband access in as many underserved areas as possible.

The rules of the program stack the deck against approaches that don't involve fiber-optic cables, and recentleaks of Starlink performance data from a private beta test almost certainly won't help SpaceX.

"My guess, looking at the numbers, is the satellites don't win anything," Blair Levin, a telecommunications policy analyst, nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former FCC chief of staff, told Business Insider.

Applications for the first batch of that money, totaling $16 billion, were due July 15, and it's unclear whether SpaceX submitted one. The company did not respond to a request for comment, and an FCC representative told Business Insider only that "the list of applicants has not yet been published."

Given the company's success in lobbying for the right to compete for these funds, SpaceX likely put itself in the running. And while a loss would sting, a rejection might become useful down the road.

"When you're playing the long game, you understand that you win some, you lose some," said Levin, who was a key figure in realizing the US National Broadband Plan (which got tens of millions of Americans online). "Every time you lose, you create an argument for why you should win the next one."

A $20.4 billion push to help close America's digital divide

Those who live in remote areas of America know the problem well: The internet access is crummy, if it's accessible at all.

"Without access to broadband, rural Americans cannot participate in the digital economy or take advantage of the opportunities broadband brings for better education, healthcare, and civic and social engagement," the FCC said in January. 

The agency reported in 2017 that about 21 million Americans didn't have access to broadband internet, a connection the commission defines as a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per second and upload speed of 3 Mbps. (The regulatory agency considers that fast enough to telecommute, do schoolwork, or stream 4K video, for example.) 

But as Business Insider's Tyler Sonnemaker reported in March, that number is a vast underestimation; it's more likely that 42 million to 162 million people in the US (as much as 50% of the population) don't have broadband.

Over the past decade, the FCC has fueled a lot of infrastructure development to change that. In January, it announced the details of its latest subsidy program, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, paid for by fees tacked on to phone bills.

Phase one of the program, detailed in June, puts $16 billion up for grabs in a multiple-round reverse auction on October 29. Providers that can offer the highest internet speeds, the quickest latency (that is, round-trip signal delay), and the lowest infrastructure cost are most likely to get subsidies. Phase two, whose auction date and rules haven't been determined, will offer another $4.4 billion to fill as many remaining gaps in rural internet service as possible.

SpaceX believes it can serve up affordable high-speed service to many of those Americans. The FCC appears to agree, since it has authorized thousands of Starlink satellites to launch through 2027.

"Satellite technology can help reach Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach," the commission's chairman, Ajit Pai, said in a statement in February 2018 ahead of the approval.

That SpaceX would chase these subsidies to defray the costs of Starlink, even as it privately raises $1 billion to $2 billion a year, makes sense: Building, launching, and operating thousands of satellites is not cheap. In May 2018, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's chief operating officer and president, said Starlink might be "the most challenging project we've undertaken" and could cost "about $10 billion or more to deploy." (Amazon also gave a $10 billion estimate for Kuiper, its planned and competing fleet of 3,236 internet satellites.)

"I think they can do what they want to without a penny of government money, and so therefore every penny of government money helps cushion their overall challenge," Ernesto Falcon, a senior legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on broadband access and competition policies, told Business Insider. "If the government's going to give you the ability to apply for free money, why wouldn't you just take it?"

Starlink and other low-Earth-orbit fleets seem tailor-made to claim the new subsidies, since their coverage would reach almost anywhere on Earth and far exceed the speeds of yesteryear's satellites.

But the FCC's program appears to have left them in a lurch — and by design.

The FCC holds 'serious doubts' about satellite networks

Within the paragraph that permits satellite providers to compete for the new funding — a change SpaceX fought for— the FCC said it had "serious doubts that any low earth orbit networks" would qualify to compete in the fund's most appealing category of subsidies, called the "gigabit" performance tier (meaning 1,000 Mbps).

"The purpose of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is to ensure that Americans have access to broadband, no matter where they live. It is not a technology incubator to fund untested technologies. And we will not allow taxpayer funding to be wasted," Pai said in a statement accompanying the release of the phase-one rules.

Pai added: "A new technology may sound good in theory and look great on paper. But this multi-billion-dollar broadband program will require 't's' to be crossed — not fingers. So any such application will be given very close scrutiny."

Notably, the final rules and Pai's statements came less than two weeks after SpaceX submitted confidential data to the commission regarding Starlink's "network latency testing and performance."

The public now has some sense of those metrics via Reddit, after Starlink beta users (likely violating their nondisclosure agreements with SpaceX) tested their connections with Speedtest, which publicly posts anonymized results. Speedtest, run by a company called Ookla, helps people gauge their download speed, upload speed, and ping (a rough measure of latency) by shuttling data sent to and from a nearby server.

The results showed download speeds ranging from 35-60 Mbps and upload speeds ranging from 5-18 Mbps.

"The tests you link to all appear to be legitimate," an Ookla representative, Adriane Blum, told Business Insider of the posted results. She added that Ookla had "robust" quality-assurance measures in place and vetted internet-service-provider names — in this case, SpaceX's Starlink network.

Shrihari Pandit, a photonics engineer and CEO of Stealth Communications, which provides internet access to New York City businesses and researches new internet infrastructure technologies, also said the results appeared valid.

"There's no way to really improve those tests locally," he told Business Insider. He said that while it was possible to make an internet connection on Speedtest look slower or laggier than it is, that seems unlikely in this case.

In its 2016 FCC application to launch Starlink, SpaceX said the network could eventually provide up to 1,000 Mbps of bandwidth to an individual subscriber after full deployment.

Pandit said it wasn't too surprising to see performance that's about 4% as fast, since SpaceX is still building out, testing, and adjusting its network, and has upgrades planned for it.

"It's kind of concerning that you're getting these data rates so early in the game, though," Pandit said. "I would suspect it should be a little higher than where it is, let's say a couple hundred megabits per second."

Still, at face value — and without knowing how many users are connecting to a satellite flying overhead at a given time — the results suggest SpaceX should qualify for phase one's lower performance tiers. Called "baseline" and "above baseline," these two levels dictate connections greater than 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload and greater than 50 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload, respectively.

Adding more Starlink satellites would open up more bandwidth to users, which would improve download and upload speeds — perhaps pushing Starlink into the program's third tier, called "above baseline," or connections better than 100 Mbps download/20 Mbps upload.

Pandit said SpaceX might also make speed improvements by updating software on satellites and user terminals, whose appearance Musk has described as a "UFO on a stick." Specifically, he said Starlink could be tuned to better account for issues like signal loss due to wireless data passing through Earth's atmosphere.

But SpaceX is, for now, shut out of the coveted "gigabit" tier, which calls for connections of 1,000 Mbps download/500 Mbps upload, and which the competition rules greatly favor in terms of making it easier to win bids. If there are many of those providers vying for subsidies across the US, as Levin expects there to be in the upcoming auction, little if any cash may be left over for SpaceX and other lower-tier competitors — if they're even deemed eligible to bid in the first place.

One additional issue Pandit said he saw in the presumable Starlink performance data was the ping. The FCC auction rules heavily penalize a company's bid if its service's latency is higher than 100 milliseconds. The Speedtest results suggested that Starlink's latency sits below that threshold, with pings reaching as high as 94 milliseconds. Yet Pandit noted the data appeared to come from relatively local connections, typically from rural Washington state (where SpaceX is beta-testing Starlink) to Los Angeles (where SpaceX is apparently basing network test servers).

A lot of Starlink user traffic would be served by local servers and should not, in theory, exceed 100 milliseconds. However, given a video call from rural Washington to New York City, Starlink in its current form — without satellites beaming data through space to each other via lasers, a planned feature — the latency would exceed 100 milliseconds, Pandit said. This is because the signal would have to hop onto a transcontinental fiber network, which might add about 60 milliseconds of delay.

"This would definitely create a problem for SpaceX," Pandit said. "In order for them to resolve it, they'll need to get additional satellites up in space."

Pandit also said adding more strategically positioned ground stations would help. So would implementing Starlink's planned laser-interlink technology, which would shuttle data at the speed of light through space (nearly twice as fast as light can travel through fiber-optic glass) from one satellite to another.

The test results are 'not good,' but they might not matter

Despite the nascency of Starlink, Falcon said it's hard to avoid comparing the Speedtest results, even for a beta test, to the marks SpaceX says it's supposed to achieve. "So much of the rhetoric around SpaceX in the early years was gigabit or fiber-like speeds," he added. "This is clearly not that." 

In the context of FCC politics and the prospects of bidding for these subsidies, he added "it's not good" to see such performance results.

Falcon said that "if you're already leery of anyone saying 'a satellite broadband option is great for you' and the first public reporting from the press is 'here are these pretty slow speeds,'" it wouldn't be hard to make the leap to wondering why the government would pay for satellites instead of fiber.

But any influence from the leaked performance results might matter less than the official rules. Levin said the application and bidding process appeared to favor the digging of fiber-optic cables, not the launching of satellites. He said that was in part because another satellite-internet provider earned $122.5 million of $1.488 billion in a similar FCC subsidy auction called the Connect America Fund Phase 2 in 2018.

For a program that seemed geared toward building out wired connections, the win shocked some, apparently including people in areas that were set to receive the subsidized internet access.

"In the first half of the auction, the satellite guys won a significant portion of the bids, and there was criticism, including from the communities, that they had been locked into a non-future-proof network," Levin said. "And so the FCC for the next auction adopted a formula that gives greater weight to the faster-speed, lower-latency networks."

Generally, the FCC's view is that while burying fiber-optic cables may be tedious and expensive, it is ultimately the most durable method of getting Americans online.

"Fiber has a lifespan of 20 to 30 years," Pandit said. Once cable conduits are laid, he said, replacing or upgrading them is fairly easy and inexpensive. Low-Earth-orbit satellites, by contrast, last just five to seven years. Musk has said as much, saying it's a chance to also upgrade the spacecraft. 

The satellites also have to be carefully monitored to avoid collisions in orbit and to prevent the creation of space debris. That's a problem ground cables don't have.

Fiber has the capacity to shuttle the extreme amounts of internet traffic that are anticipated in the future. Meanwhile, satellite constellations like Starlink have a lower ceiling for bandwidth than fiber, because of both wireless-spectrum allocation and the physics of interference.

"If you didn't put the fiber in the ground as the first step, you will have to do it later if all of the trends of internet applications and services continue," Falcon said. "They are always going to require more and more bandwidth."

That's not to say SpaceX won't win anything for Starlink through the FCC's rural-broadband program. Levin conceded that he could be "totally wrong" because of the mind-numbing complexity of the reverse auction process (which he said has made some game theorists into multimillionaires).

"It depends on who else shows up," he said. "You can say that the better baseball team will win, but sometimes they don't. That's why you've got to play the game."

Even if SpaceX doesn't score in the first few figurative innings, Levin thinks the company — especially as its network capacity and capabilities grow — could use its defeat to rally the phase-two rules in its favor. SpaceX might also defray some costs through US military programs. (The company already has a cooperative research agreement for Starlink with the Army.)

And subsidies or not, Starlink could still become a highly successful and useful business.

"In the US, we built this interstate highway system to allow passengers and trucks to do commerce and allow people to travel between state lines. But we haven't built an interstate highway system for fiber-optic cables, and that needs to happen," Pandit said. "And until we do that, we will rely on companies like SpaceX to deliver a service reliably and more effectively to a wider range of people, where fiber simply could take decades to get deployed."

SEE ALSO: Watch 57,000 planned satellites swarm Earth within 9 years in a stunning new animation

DON'T MISS: Elon Musk says the biggest challenge of SpaceX's Starlink internet project is not satellites, but rather 'UFO on a stick' devices users will need to get online

Join the conversation about this story »

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• "Teenage Bounty Hunters" and "The Legend of Korra" are popular on Netflix this week, but they couldn't dethrone "The Umbrella Academy."
• Netflix introduced daily top lists of the most popular titles on the streaming service in February.
• Streaming search engine Reelgood keeps track of the lists and provides Business Insider with a rundown of the week's most popular TV shows on Netflix.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

"Avatar: The Last Airbender" found new life on Netflix recently, nearly two decades after it first debuted on Nickelodeon. Now it's the sequel series "Legend of Korra's" turn.

Netflix introduced daily top 10 lists of its most viewed movies and TV shows in February (it counts a view if an account watches at least two minutes of a title).

Every week, the streaming search engine Reelgood compiles for Business Insider a list of which TV shows have been most prominent on Netflix's daily lists that week. 

"The Legend of Korra" and the Netflix original "Teenage Bounty Hunters" hooked audiences, but couldn't dethrone "The Umbrella Academy" this week. 

SEE ALSO: The top streaming TV shows on Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and others of the week

9. "Glow Up: The Next Makeup Star" (Netflix original, 2019-present)

Description: "In this competition show, aspiring makeup artists navigate colorful challenges to win a career-making opportunity in the beauty industry."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: N/A

8. "Selling Sunset" (Netflix original, 2019-present)

Description: "The elite agents at The Oppenheim Group sell the luxe life to affluent buyers in LA. Relationships are everything, and that often means major drama."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: "It's definitely ticking that big nonsense box that we all need at the moment, but it is not that original. It's a type of show that has been on TV for years." — BBC (season 3)

7. "World's Most Wanted" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Suspected of heinous crimes, they've avoided capture despite massive rewards and global investigations. A docuseries profiling the world's most wanted."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: N/A

6. "The Seven Deadly Sins" (Netflix original, 2014-present)

Description: "When a kingdom is taken over by tyrants, the deposed princess begins a quest to find a disbanded group of evil knights to help take back her realm."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: N/A

5. "Shameless" (Showtime, 2011-2020)

Description: "This dramedy based on a British series centers on siblings in a dysfunctional Chicago family who struggle while coping with their alcoholic father."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 85%

What critics said: "Shameless has become synonymous with Aimless." — AV Club (season 10)

4. "(Un)well" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "This docuseries takes a deep dive into the lucrative wellness industry, which touts health and healing. But do these wellness trends live up to their promises?"

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 83%

What critics said: "Overall, the show does a decent job of defining the line between Western and traditional use of new-to-us wellness trends like ayahuasca." — Slate (season 1)

3. "Teenage Bounty Hunters" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Twin sisters Sterling and Blair balance teen life at an elite Southern high school with an unlikely new career as butt-kicking bounty hunters."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 86%

What critics said: "Brisk and funny, warm and wonderfully oddball, Teenage Bounty Hunters is a binge everyone — except maybe Old Testament God — can get behind." — EW (season 1)

2. "The Legend of Korra" (Nickelodeon, 2012-2014)

Description: "An avatar who can control the elements fights to keep her city safe from the evil forces of both the physical and spiritual worlds."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 93%

What critics said: "While some characters were underutilized and several episodes dragged, the overarching story was solid, specifically in terms of theme and allegory." — IGN (season 4)

1. "The Umbrella Academy" (Netflix original, 2019-present)

Description: "Reunited by their father's death, estranged siblings with extraordinary powers uncover shocking family secrets — and a looming threat to humanity."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 82%

What critics said: "The Umbrella Academy does have some senses of style and humor, which help distract from the yawning chasm of nonsense lurking in its core. But nearly every aspect of the show would be stronger if any of its logical boundaries had any weight at all." — Vulture (season 2)

• Business Insider analyzed salary data that Salesforce has to disclose when it applies for visas on behalf of foreign workers to find how much it pays for jobs in engineering, data analytics, product management, sales, and more. 
• This list is not a comprehensive look at what Salesforce pays because it only contains salaries for foreign workers, but it gives rare insight into pay scales for some of the firm's most sought-after positions. 
• We analyzed the federal data for Salesforce's 1,294 active foreign-worker visas in 2020 to find salary ranges for the most common job titles and some of the highest paid roles, which often only had one or two hires. Roles are categorized based on information we found in job postings.
• Over half of Salesforce's active visas are in California, where Salesforce is headquartered. It also has large offices in Washington, Texas, Indiana, New York, and Massachusetts.
• Do you work at Salesforce? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. 
• Click here to read more BI Prime stories.

Salesforce has received numerous awards for being one of the best places to work and while compensation surely factors into how employees feel about the company, Salesforce doesn't share that information. Like many other firms, it doesn't reveal employee salary and compensation, except for its very top executives where it's required by federal regulations, like for CEO Marc Benioff.

However, federal data gives some insight into how much Salesforce paid its top talent. American companies have to disclose salaries when they apply for visas for current or prospective foreign workers. The Office of Foreign Labor Certification, which collects and processes those applications, publishes the salaries every year and Business Insider analyzed Salesforce's 1,294 active foreign-worker visas to find out how much it pays workers in areas like engineering, data analytics, product management, and sales. 

It's not a comprehensive look, because the data only includes salaries for foreign workers and the roles they were hired for, but it is a rare snapshot into what Salesforce is shelling out. The data also doesn't include bonuses or stock awards, so this is base salary versus total compensation.

We've included data for the most common roles, as well as some of the highest paid roles, which often only had one or two hires. Roles are categorized into business units like marketing, engineering, or security, based on information we found in job postings. Let us know if you think any titles are in the wrong category.

A few notes: If job titles have a salary range it means there were multiple hires with varied salaries, and if a job title only has one salary it means there was only one hire or all the hires had the same salary. If a job title has a state listed, it means the data only showed hires in that state, but if no state is listed, it means hires were across multiple states. Over half of Salesforce's active visas are in California — the $187 billion tech giant is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. It also has large offices in Washington, Texas, Indiana, New York, and Massachusetts. Over half of Salesforce's active visas are in California — the $187 billion tech giant is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. It also has large offices in Washington, Texas, Indiana, New York, and Massachusetts. 

Here's how much Salesforce paid employees in eight different departments within the company in 2020:

Sales and customer facing roles

As a company that sells customer relationship management software, Salesforce's own customer facing roles are among some of the most important within the company. Roles like account executives and customer success managers are focused on developing relationships with customers.

This list also includes roles that focus on go-to-market strategy and building relationships with partners and companies that help resell and integrate Salesforce software. With some exceptions, most of these roles paid less than $150,000. 

Account executive (New York): $80,142 to $130,893

Customer success engineer (California): $85,821 to $93,704

Customer success manager (Georgia): $57,803

High touch success manager - director (California): $194,251 to $205,650

Director, account partner (Texas): $154,565 to $159,973

Manager, AMER sales program (New York): $99,392 to $100,651

Senior analyst, sales strategy (California): $103,667 to $110,094

Partner program strategy, senior manager (California): $110,094

Manager, indirect partner strategy & operations (California): $116,792

Customer intelligence senior manager (California): $135,013

Customer success architect (Massachusetts): $107,598

Associate technical account manager (Indiana): $87,131

Marketing

Salesforce hires for marketing roles across all its departments. Product and events were two areas where the company hired foreign workers this year, including one of the highest paid positions in the data: a VP of technical product marketing who is reeling in $227,802. 

VP, technical product marketing (California):$227,802

Product marketing manager (California): $88,754 to $114,442

Product marketing manager, analytics & monitoring, MuleSoft (California): $108,347 to $148,512 

Sr. technical product marketing manager (California): $160,701

Senior analyst, marketing analytics (California): $113,797

Marketing manager, global government events (California): $68,432

Software engineering

Software engineers are critical to Salesforce and earn some of the company's highest salaries. Salesforce hires engineers to work on its core business applications like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, its platform technology, collaboration features within Salesforce's apps, and developer tools for its own team to use. 

AMTS stands for associate member of technical staff, and is often an entry level engineering or technical position. Similarly, MTS means member of technical staff, and LMTS means lead member of technical staff. These are some of the job titles that appeared most often, with some notably high paying roles. 

This category alos includes the highest paid hire in the data: a VP of software engineering who makes $241,696.

AMTS software engineer: $70,034 to $133,598 

Software engineer: $72,134 to $168,958

MTS software engineer: $76,586 to $144,040

Software engineering, LMTS: $101,982 to $168,958

Director, software engineering (California): $194,251 to $227,802

VP, software engineering (California): $194,251 to $241,696

SVP, software engineering (California): $227,802

Engineering manager: $164,694 to $136,490

Lead software engineer: $95,680 to $168,958

Senior engineering manager: $144,123 to $205,650

Manager, software engineering (California): $122,741 to $167,939

Senior full stack engineer: $101,691 to $137,259

Associate vulnerability management software engineer (California): $118,581

Lead DevOps software engineer (Massachusetts): $118,934

Product management

Product managers also command some of the highest salaries at Salesforce, according to the data. Product managers generally manage the process of rolling out a new product, including planning and troubleshooting, as well as figuring out the strategy for how to convince customers to buy it. 

Product manager: $81,806 to $194,521

Associate product manager: $74,984 to $128,440

Senior product manager: $92,498 to $194,251

Product management senior director: $168,459 to $194,251

Director, product management (California): $194,251 to $227,802

VP of product management (California): $192,608

Senior manager, revenue operations PMO (California): $110,094 to $140,254

Salesforce also had a number of hires for program management and program architect roles. Though similar to product managers, program managers take a more organization-wide approach and consider strategic initiatives that go into developing a product. A program architect has some of those responsibilities as well, but also serves as a liaison between Salesforce and its customers. 

Senior technical program manager: $132,080 to $194,251

Director, technical program management, prod. sec. assurance (California): $194,251

Services Program/Project Management, Senior Manager (New Jersey): $160,326

Senior program architect: $97,781 to $168,958

Program architect: $92,414 to $160,701

Security, reliability, and technical support

Given that Salesforce makes and sells cloud software, the company puts a lot of emphasis on making sure its products are reliable and accessible for customer at all time. That's become even more important during the coronavirus-related work-from-home mandates.

Salesforce even recently created a position called "chief availability officer," where the main responsibility is making sure that Salesforce products are always-on for customers.

The following roles are part of Salesforce's engineering department but focus specifically on security, reliability, and technical support across all of Salesforce's products. 

Lead infrastructure security engineer: $144,123 to $156,749

Lead cloud network security engineer (California): $139,776

Identity access management security engineer (California): $118,581

Technical support engineer (Washington): $55,744

Site reliability engineer: $87,131 to $144,040

Lead site reliability engineer (California): $156,749

Infrastructure operations engineer (Indiana): $87,131

Data, artificial intelligence, and research

Data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are key to how Salesforce continues to evolve its products. Its artificial intelligence software Einstein helps users automate mundane tasks, track trends about customers, and predict how customers will respond to various company outreach methods. 

It also has a large research arm that continues to look for ways AI can be incorporated into its products, though, notably, its chief scientist Richard Socher left earlier this year. 

These are some of Salesforce's hires for data and research roles:

Data scientist: $97,906 to $174,138

Data engineer: $80,246 to $122,824

Data analyst (Texas): $96,470

Research scientist: $124,280 to $168,002

Research engineer (California): $141,586 to $168,002

Senior data science engineer (California): $141,586 to $144,040

Lead engineer, data science (California): $194,397

Data engineering senior manager - marketing analytics (California): $160,701

Senior analyst, data quality & governance (Illinois): $120,474

Sr. analyst, GTM data operations & analytics (California): $88,754 to $110,094

Business operations and finance

Finance and business operations roles also garner some high salaries at Salesforce. Overall, these roles made up a small percentage of the data, and none of the titles showed up for multiple hires, so the following are a few of hires in finance and business operations that Salesforce made this year:

Director, AppExchange business operations and programs (California): $194,251

Legal ops senior manager - business system analyst (California): $160,701

Business Operations Senior Manager (Oregon): $101,213

Senior finance analyst (California): $102,606

Finance manager (California): $143,187

Design

Salesforce's design team plays a huge role in how customers interact and experience its products. One of its design execs, Justin Maguire, got a promotion to the C-suite earlier this year, becoming chief design officer in February. His goal is to make sure customers and partners interacting with Salesforce feel like they are dealing with one company, not separate teams. 

The foreign worker data didn't have many design hires, but here some of the ones that are included, with salary ranges for the roles that had multiple hires:

User interface/user experience lead (California): $168,958

Lead product designer, Customer 360 (California): $95,680 to $160,701

Senior product designer (California): $95,680 to $107,640

Product Designer (California): $95,680

Senior UX Designer (California): $72,030

User research, analytics (California): $140,670

The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a period of rapid change and uncertainty across the global economy.

Prolonged lockdowns, government stimulus, and accelerated digitization have fundamentally changed how businesses operate and how consumers are spending. Due to this disruption, our outlook for the rest of 2020 has changed significantly from when we made predictions for the upcoming year in December 2019.

Considering the impacts of the pandemic, Insider Intelligence has put together a list of 18 Big Tech Predictions for the Second Half of 2020 across Banking, Connectivity & Tech, Digital Media, Payments & Commerce, Fintech, and Digital Health.

This exclusive report can be yours for FREE today.

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• Google now has nine products with over one billion monthly active users.
• They range from the obvious big hitters like Search, to newer members such as Photos.
• Who could be next? We have a few hunches. (Hint: Google Assistant is a rising star)
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Just over a year ago, Google Photos became the company's ninth product to reach 1 billion monthly active users. 

Can you name the other eight?

Some of them – search, YouTube, Maps – won't surprise you, but a few of them might. Some were built by Google and some were acquired.

Here are all of Google's products that have made it over the billion-user line, based on data from Google and analysts.

Plus, read on for a few ideas of which products may be next to join the club.

Google Photos

Officially joined the billion-user club: July, 2019

Photos was originally part of the much less successful Google+, but in 2015 Google spun it out into its own product – and another huge hit was born.

Photos was immediately praised as a serious competitor to big rivals like Apple iCloud and Amazon Drive. Four years after its release, it reached the big billion. The company has since launched Photos Go, a lightweight alternative to help it chase the next billion.

Monetized? Google doesn't directly make money from photos, but the data you share helps feed the big Google brain, particularly for refining its machine learning computer vision processes.

Google Drive

Officially joined the billion-user club: July/August, 2018

We knew Google Drive was close to hitting 1 billion users at Google I/O 2017 when the company announced it was hovering at around the 800 million mark. A year later, it joined the big leagues.

You can thank Google's new head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, for a lot of the hard work making Drive into what it is today.

Monetized? Google charges for its G Suite service, which includes Drive, but the basic consumer version is free of charge. Of course, Google hopes you'll eventually pay for more storage.

Gmail

Officially joined the billion-user club: February, 2016

Gmail was the seventh Google product to hit 1 billion monthly users, and today that number stands at over 1.5 billion total. It seems strange to think Gmail began as one of Google's 20% project, with some executives even dismissing the idea of Google building its own email service.

Today, it's the most popular email provider in the world.

Monetized? Google used to actually scan emails to better target Gmail adverts, a practice it ended in 2017. But it still uses information about you scraped from Chrome, YouTube, etc to target the ads you get on Gmail. Google also said it still allows third-party apps to scan Gmail data as long as they get user consent.

Play Store

Officially joined the billion-user club: September, 2015.

Unlike the Apple iPhone, there are other ways to download apps on Google's Android platform without using its official store – but for most people the Play Store is the simplest way to do it. The Play Store had around 1.1 billion active monthly users as of the last check, according to Bernstein data published in January this year. 

But the number of overall downloads is a better check of the Play Store's health, and Google's not hurting there. According to Sensor Tower data, there were 84.3 billion downloads from the Play Store in 2019.

Monetized? You bet. In fact, the Play Store is one of the key ways Google makes money through Android. The company takes a 30% cut from all app sales, and the same amount from in-app purchases – a practice that has recently come under heavy fire.

Don't forget all of the Play Store services Google offers too, such as books and movies, which also nets it a healthy pay day.

Google Maps

Officially joined the billion-user club: First mentioned in 2015.

Google Maps is a mammoth product for Google, and continues to be the default map product for billions of people. That's partly thanks to Google's continued work to update Maps– and a surprisingly poor start for Apple's rival product. Until recently, Maps was led by Jen Fitzpatrick but is now run by Dane Glasgow and Liz Reid.

Monetized? Google makes money from Maps in several ways. It charges developers to use its Maps infrastructure for their own products; it places ads in Maps search results; and it lets advertisers drop promoted pins. 

Chrome

Officially joined the billion-user club: May, 2015

You probably know about Google's popular web browser, but did you know that Chrome was developed by Google's now-CEO Sundar Pichai? At Google's I/O conference in 2015, just a few months before he was given the most powerful job at Google, Pichai got to announce Chrome had hit 1 billion monthly active users.

Monetized? Not directly, but Chrome functions as a portal to Google's search product – and of course, its ads. It also became the basis of Google Chrome OS, Chromebooks and has become a hugely important part of the Google experience.

Android

Officially joined the billion-user club: June, 2014

It should be no surprise to see Android on this list. Google announced its smartphone platform hit 1 billion monthly active users at its I/O developer's conference in 2014. At last year's Google I/O, the company said there were 2.5 billion active Android devices.

Monetized? In several ways. The Play Store is a big one, but Google benefits by having Android owners use its array of apps. Plus, having Android also puts Google in a better bargaining position for staying as the default search engine on Apple's iPhone and iPad. Remember, a lot of Google's mobile search revenue comes from iPhones.

YouTube

Year it joined the billion-user club: March, 2013

"If YouTube were a country, we'd be the third largest in the world after China and India," said YouTube in a blog post in March 2013, announcing the video streaming service had hit the billions club. Last year, Google said that number had doubled. And to think Google once thought YouTube was only worth $50 million.

Monetized? Naturally. The lion's share of YouTube's revenues come from advertising, but it also makes money from its subscription offerings. Google has started breaking out its YouTube revenues in earnings, revealing that it raked in $3.81 billion in Q2 this year.

Search

Year it joined the billion-user club: May, 2011, according to Comscore.

Search and ads are the meat and potatoes of Google's business, and according to data from Bernstein research, there are more than 2.5 trillion Google searches made every year. 

Monetized? You bet. Search is Google's chief moneymaker, bringing in just under $100 billion in revenue for the company last year.

What's next?

Google doesn't break out a lot of its user numbers (except when it has reason to celebrate) and with no Google I/O this year we've missed our best opportunity to get insight into the products that are really taking off.

But we can speculate, and there are certainly a few clues as to what could be next. Mark Schmulik, an analyst at Bernstein, suggested looking at some of the other products inside Google's G Suite.

"A lot of the applications within G Suite may get there or are already there," he told Business Insider. If you take G Suite as a whole (which is sort of cheating), it's already an established member of the club, surpassing 2 billion users last year.

"We know a lot of that is Gmail," said Schmulik, but he suggested looking to products within, such as Google Docs and Calendar, as possible contenders.

In January, Google announced that its AI Google Assistant had hit more than 500 million monthly users, with that number made up of users across smart speakers, phones, smart displays, cars, and more. 

YouTube Music may also be worth keeping an eye on, said Schmulik. YouTube is already comfortably one of Google's most popular products, while Music and Premium have more than 20 million subscribers combined.

And Google is also in the process of shuttering its Play Music service and trying to shift users over to YouTube Music instead – which could give the service a healthy boost in users.

Google Meet is probably still a ways off joining the club, but a huge tailwind from the pandemic is pushing it along nicely. In April, Google said it was adding 3 million new Meet users a day and was seeing over 100 million daily Meet participants.

• TikTok confirmed Saturday that the company planned to sue the US government over President Donald Trump's executive orders targeting the popular app.
• A company spokesperson said TikTok experienced "a lack of due process as the administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses."
• TikTok, which has surged in popularity over the past year, was known as Musical.ly until it was purchased by the Chinese company ByteDance in 2017 and renamed.
• The president on August 6 and August 14 signed executive orders targeting TikTok. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

TikTok on Saturday announced it plans to sue the US government over President Donald Trump's executive orders pertaining to its ownership, arguing the company was deprived of its due process rights.

The president, who began targeting TikTok in July, issued an executive order August 6 making it illegal for American companies to do business with TikTok, giving ByteDance until September 15 to sell it. On August 14, Trump issued another executive order giving the company 90 days to divest its US assets and data the company had gathered in the US. 

"Even though we strongly disagree with the administration's concerns, for nearly a year we have sought to engage in good faith to provide a constructive solution," a TikTok spokesman told Business Insider and other media outlets in a statement. "What we encountered instead was a lack of due process as the administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses."

Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have reportedly expressed interest in purchasing TikTok from ByteDance. TikTok, which has skyrocketed in popularity over the past year, was known previously as Musical.ly until it was purchased by its current owners in 2017 and then renamed TikTok. 

"To ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and users are treated fairly, we have no choice but to challenge the Executive Order through the judicial system," the company said.

Trump, along with other lawmakers, has expressed concerns that TikTok and ByteDance were allowing the Chinese government to use the platform to spy on Americans, posing a risk to US national security. The company has repeatedly denied these accusations.

According to a report from CNBC, TikTok plans to file suit next week specifically in regard to Trump's August 6 order, arguing that the president's usage of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act deprived the company of due process. It also intends to challenge its classification as a threat to national security. 

According to the report, the lawsuit would not prevent the company from being forced to sell the app, because Trump's August 14 order is not subject to judicial review. As CNBC noted, it's unclear in what court the company will file its lawsuit.

Read more:

Alphabet reportedly wanted to buy a small stake in TikTok as part of a mystery group bid, but the talks fell apart

TikTok employees have started referring to Trump's deadline to ban the app as 'D-Day' over fears of catastrophic job losses

TikTok's marketing head says that brands need to create specific ads for the app

TikTok's exclusive creator ambassador program helps influencers land brand deals and grow their followings

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Inside London during COVID-19 lockdown

• European software startups, a bright spot in the bloc's still-nascent tech scene, could be crippled by a predicted slowdown in tech spending for 2020.
• Analyst house Forrester estimated best and worst-case scenarios for software and tech spend across the UK, France, and Germany over 2020.
• In the worst case scenario, software spend would drop 8% in France, 7% in Germany, and 3% in the UK, an average percentage of 6%.
• Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels said smaller enterprise software providers lacked the financial reserves of giants like SAP to see them through a downturn.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

European technology spend could fall by nearly a tenth in 2020, as businesses rein in their spending and the bloc's three biggest economies move into recession — and even the burgeoning enterprise software sector will take a beating.

That's according to a Forrester report published in July, which estimates that overall technology spend in France, the UK, and Germany could fall by 9% in 2020 in a worst-case scenario for the economy, with little growth in 2021. The worst-case scenario is one where recessions last into 2021.

A best-case scenario would see the countries recovering from recession through the fourth quarter, and pegs the spending drop at a 7%, with some recovery in 2021.

The news is worrying for Europe's burgeoning enterprise software sector, which attracted $7.5 billion in venture capital in 2019, according to data from VC firm Atomico.

According to Forrester's forecast, software spend in a worst-case economic scenario would drop 8% in France, 7% in Germany, and 3% in the UK — an average percentage of 6%.

"Blood bath" for enterprise software revenue

Enterprise software firms are generally a reliable bet for startup investors, who bank on the predictability of revenue from monthly subscriptions or annual licenses. But several UK-based venture capitalists have expressed nervousness in recent months that revenues at smaller software startups could crater as enterprise clients slash budgets in a tougher economic environment.

One told Business Insider, preferring to stay anonymous, that the fourth quarter would be a "blood bath" for enterprise software revenue, with the expectation that larger clients would not renew contracts.

Sitar Teli, a partner at Connect Ventures, said one route for struggling startups was to offer a free period to customers in order to retain them through a recession.

She told Business Insider: "One of the more interesting calls I had was with someone who had been through two of the previous crises, so 2008 and 2001. They said the advice they were giving to all their software companies, which I find very compelling, was, 'Look, anyone that calls you and says they're thinking about cancelling ... or don't even wait for them to call you, call them up and just give them a year free. You've lost the revenue anyway, but this way you get to keep them as a customer.'"

Teli continued: "In enterprise, you might sign two- or three-year contracts. So sign the next three-year contract, but the next 12 months are free. And you can scale that up and down."

Some software startups will be more reslient

It's possible that the three big European economies could recover, according to Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels, though he is pessimistic for the UK.

He added that larger incumbents, such as German software giant SAP, were better positioned to weather a recession than fast-growing smaller players. SAP reported a 55% boost to its operating profit in the second quarter, to 1.28 billion euros ($1.55 billion).

"Small vendors are vulnerable because a large vendor like SAP has reserves that allow it to run through a downturn where profits go negative," he said. "A small vendor may not have that cushion."

He added that companies which raised sufficient funding in 2019 to counter their losses in 2020 would survive.

There are also nuances that may permit some software vendors to survive, especially if they cater to customers who are having to adapt to digital more quickly.

"It kind of depends from a demand perspective," Bartels continued. "They may see clients who are saying, 'Look, we need your solution because we need the customer experience [online].' If a vendor is in those categories, it's a good chance to get more sales."

Like Teli, Bartels said there may be situations where customers ring up software firms and ask for a stay on paying bills.

"The worst may be coming come Q4 if you have 20% of clients, or they can't pay and need a break, and that new deal may be breaking down because people thought the economy would pick back up and it hasn't," he said. "For [software] vendors in particular, the worst may well be ahead."

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NOW WATCH: Why electric planes haven't taken off yet

• Google's product inclusion team works on making the company's products better for more users, but it was born from one of Google's 20% projects.
• Annie Jean-Baptiste, Google's head of product inclusion, explains how the group came about in a new book.
• The group has worked on Google products including Pixel smartphones and virtual reality headsets.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Earlier this year, Google announced it had more than 2,000 employees across the company working on inclusion and diversity in its products.

This group of "inclusion champions" was set up to think inclusively about things like gender, age, ethnicity, and disabilities as products are designed.

But the group's origin story was born from one of Google's once-ubiquitous "20% projects," where employees dedicate 20% of their time to building something outside of their usual focus.

Annie Jean-Baptiste, Google's head of product inclusion, has written about how the project came to be in an upcoming book, "Building For Everyone."

In it, she explains how a group of Googlers got together to think about how they could better integrate inclusion in the product design process.

"A few of us Googlers decided that the diversity and inclusion conversation could make for an interesting 20 percent project," she wrote. "At the time, when we talked about diversity and inclusion, we were usually discussing culture and representation; we were not discussing these topics in the context of product or business development."

The breakthrough moment happened when an engineer named Peter Sherman approached her team. Sherman was working on a camera and a proximity sensor for one of Google's Pixel smartphone cameras, "both of which needed to work well for all users, regardless of skin tone," he wrote in a sidebar in the book.

"The development team was very small though, and we had difficulty figuring out how to get the broad coverage we needed to make appropriate tuning decisions and subsequent validation testing," added Sherman.

Jean-Baptiste took Sherman's challenge to a diversity summit run by Googlers in 2015, where the problem was discussed.

"During that summit, many of the participants voiced first-hand experience with cameras failing to produce pleasing images as a function of skin-tone, but few knew the history of bias in the development of color photography and that we can really improve the experience is we think and develop inclusively," wrote Sherman.

"These early discussions with different teams started to spark ideas and light a fire for our team," wrote Jean-Baptiste.

Gradually, this evolved into a product inclusion team that would work across all of Google's products.

For example, Jean-Baptiste explains how the team helped create Google's Daydream virtual reality headset – a process that involved going beyond thinking about different head sizes and glasses wearers, to factors such as sex and different hair textures.

"We began to realize that this idea around intersectional inclusion in products could make a huge impact, so we embarked on a journey to figure it out," she wrote. "Our 20 percent group ultimately evolved into what is now known as product inclusion."

SEE ALSO: Google cut more than a dozen jobs in 'people operations' as the company slows hiring, but Google says it's due to 'organizational changes'

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NOW WATCH: July 15 is Tax Day — here's what it's like to do your own taxes for the very first time

• Samsung released the Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition phone.
• It's a military smartphone designed for special operations. 
• It uses an Android operating system and can integrate with radios, drone feeds, and GPS.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Samsung released its design for the Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition, a smartphone for Department of Defense operators and the federal government. Every aspect of the phone was designed for maximum practicality, from extra encryption to drone feed integration and off-grid communication.

The S20 was based on the earlier S9 tactical phone, and Samsung says it is a "massive leap forward in tactical mobility." Samsung says it was tested in the field, and touts it as the"only end user device you'll need for mission planning, training, operations and daily use."

The Galaxy S20 is only available in the US through specific vendors. Check out some of the features here. 

SEE ALSO: Panasonic is selling a tiny $835 cubicle that can customized and fit in a living room — take a closer look

The Galaxy S20 is not available for general sale; it can only be purchased through specific channels for the Department of Defense and federal government.

Out of the box, it can connect to tactical radios to keep communication open.

There are a variety of durable cases and hubs to fit in any tactical kit.

It can support drone feeds and laser range finders for an overview of the mission.

The Galaxy S20 is a handheld device, but it can also easily connect to a monitor for planning purposes.

The smart battery optimizes app power to conserve energy.

A special button on the side can quick-launch mission applications.

The touch screen is also sensitive enough to work even with gloved hands.

The phone is also enabled for classified communication by the NSA.

Two layers of encryption keep data safe even when the phone is turned off.

The Galaxy S20 also has a secure telemedicine platform, where medics can monitor patients' vitals remotely and arrange a medical evacuation.

"We worked diligently with the industry's most trusted companies to ensure best-in-class software, services, and hardware solutions perform with our devices," Samsung Electronics America VP of sales Chris Balcik said.

• Alexandr Wang is living the classic Silicon Valley success story.
• At just 23 he's the CEO of Scale AI, a four-year-old company valued at $1 billion that he founded at age 19, dropping out of MIT to do so.
• His company is building tools for AI developers trying to do for AI tech what cloud computing did for software development, building the infrastructure that makes it easier.
• And it's attracted a Silicon Valley who's who of angel and venture investors.
• But Wang didn't even have the idea for this company when he got in to the Spring 2016 YCombinator cohort, he told Business Insider, and he didn't really know what he was going to build.
• Wang explained how he came up with the idea by the time YCombinator ended and how he convinced Silicon Valley's big players to financially back him, raising his first $4.5 million in months.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Alexandr Wang is living the classic Silicon Valley success story. At just 23 he's the CEO of a Scale AI, a four-year-old company he founded at age 19, dropping out of MIT to do so.

It hit unicorn status a year ago, when it had only been in business for three years. In those first three years, his company raised $123 million and reached a $1 billion valuation from a list of Silicon Valley's who's who. Angel investors include GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman; Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Justin Kan; Quora cofounder and CEO Adam D'Angelo, Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston. His VCs backers include Peter Thiel at Founder's Fund, Mike Volpi at Index Ventures, Dan Levine at Accel, and the list goes on.

Today, a year after raising $100 million at the billion-dollar valuation, he now employs about 180 people, he tells Business Insider and counts companies like Airbnb, SAP, Pinterest, Samsung, Doordash, Lyft and Toyota as customers, among others. 

But the most interesting thing about Wang's fast success is that he never originally planned to build this product, or this company. All he knew as a precocious teen coder was that he wanted to build something.

"I was 19 when I started Scale and it was a lot of learning by doing," Wang told Business Insider.

In those early days, he had imagined that big tech companies became that way because they had "some kind of  master plan" but as he met successful founders he learned that it never happens like that.

"You have a good idea and then you work on it and then you refine it over time," he said.

At that tender age, and through a careful process, he uncovered a profound engineering problem: artificial intelligence  is only as smart as its training and it often needs a human to help verify that it is being trained correctly. 

So he built a platform that trains algorithms using the data collected by customers, with training accuracy verified by humans.

For instance, if the customer is building an algorithm to help a self-driving car identify all cars, pedestrians and cyclists on the road with it, Scale AI will take the hours of images and videos collected by the cars from their test drives and verify if they correctly identified those items. Last month, he launched a new service that helps developers debug problems if their algorithm isn't performing as expected.

Finding the breakthrough idea

But Wang didn't have the idea for Scale when he got into the spring 2016 YCombinator cohort, the highly competitive startup incubator and seed investor founded by Paul Graham.

"Even at that point I had a jillion other ideas, like, maybe we should help people get doctors," he laughs.

One of the YC advisors told him to find a "hair on fire" kind of situation, meaning a problem that lots of people are struggling with and would pay to make go away. He also read Paul Graham's famous 2012 essay on how to get startup ideas that advised him to "Live in the future, then build what's missing." 

He saw a future filled with AI. When AI worked, to the user, it seemed "magical" he said. But when he was at MIT studying it and he had tried a few just-for-fun projects, like putting a camera in his fridge that could tell him when to buy groceries, building such projects turned out to be really hard to do. There was no easy way to train the algorithm to tell it to do this and not do that.

So instead of building a specific AI product that he imagined people will be using in the future, he knew that someone was going to have to build the infrastructure for making AI products easier to build.

And the idea for Scale was born.

Teen wiz and angels

His next step was "to hustle" as he described it, and find people to angel invest. Wang had a leg up, thanks to his years as a teenage coding star.

Born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the shadow of the Los Alamos National lab, where "everybody's parent is some sort of scientist," (including his own) he started winning high school math and coding contests. That's how he caught the attention of tech recruiters. He moved to the Valley straight from high school for an internship at Addepar and then landed a full-time job at Quora. Quora cofounder CEO Adam D'Angelo would later become one of his angel investors.

Scale AI's angels came from a combination of random connections and straight out asking. For instance Accel's Levine introduced Wang to Nat Friedman, CEO of Microsoft's GitHub and a famous Valley programmer.

Wang landed OpenAI's Brockman because he had met him years earlier by introducing himself after a talk he gave and regularly emailed him ever since. "When I started the company, I was just like, 'Hey, do you want to invest?'" And he did.

In 10 months, Wang and his early team raised $4.5 million and built an early product, focusing first on machine vision, which led them into nabbing self-driving cars and drones as their first customers.

And that brought VC Mike Volpi at Index Ventures to them. He had been looking for autonomous companies to back and several of them mentioned using Scale. Volpi led a Series B funding round, joined by Accel, Dropbox's Houston and Instagram founder Kan. And a year later, the big $100 million, billion-dollar valuation deal came together led by Thiel's Founder Fund, with lots more investors and angels in the mix. 

Wang became known in the Valley as "the next Zuckerberg."

But from Wang's point of view this rocketship was built by trial and error.

"It's funny, but back then when we would pitch people, we weren't that good at pitching," he says. Most investors "just didn't quite get it" and turned him down until he found the few who had experienced the problem directly.

So the best advice he has for anyone is to focus on building a product and showing it to the people whose lives it will improve. "You have to set a goal for yourself, like: 'In two weeks, I'm going to have five users for this.' And then everything you do is to get that goal," he says, adding."Focus on building the business and then the rest will kind of take care of itself."

• Now read:
• A Stanford economics professor who was once an Uber driver says Uber and Lyft are not 'exploiting' drivers, so California's new AB5 law creates more problems than it solves
• How 3 first-time founders launched their startup in a weekend during lockdown and scored $2.1 million in pre-seed cash the next month
• Venture capital is in a 'surprisingly rabid' phase despite tech layoffs and previously dire warnings that it would dry up, a VC says

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Amazon's dominant cloud computing business Amazon Web Services pays as much as $185,000 in base pay, before bonuses and stock awards.
• That's according to data the company disclosed when applying for H-1B visas on behalf of foreign workers.
• We analyzed the data to find the highest-paying jobs within AWS and used job postings to find out more about the positions, including key responsibilities and how many years of experience they require.
• Do you work at Microsoft? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email (astewart@businessinsider.com).
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Employees within Amazon's massive cloud computing business can make as much as $185,000 before stock awards and bonuses with as little as one year of experience, according to a Business Insider analysis of Amazon Web Services salary disclosures and job postings.

American companies have to disclose salaries when they apply for H-1B visas on behalf of current or prospective foreign workers. The Office of Foreign Labor Certification publishes the salaries every year. We analyzed the data to find the highest-paying jobs within AWS and used job postings to find out more about the positions, including key responsibilities and how many years of experience they require.

While AWS base salaries don't seem to be as high as at Amazon overall — which listed salaries as high as $1.6 million for employees in Seattle— it's worth noting that the data doesn't include stock and bonuses, which as best as we can tell are a big part of compensation within AWS.

Levels.fyi, a website where engineers submit their pay and total compensation in their jobs, shows stock and bonuses can make up a majority of annual compensation for AWS engineers, especially at the higher levels.

The website lists the average salary for a principal software development engineer, for example, as $162,000, but average total compensation as $552,000 including $333,000 in stock per year and a $57,000 bonus.

We analyzed the cloud division's nearly 700 active foreign-worker visas in 2020 to find the titles with the highest salaries and provided a salary range for each role. Of course, it's not a comprehensive look at salaries because it only includes foreign workers, but it provides a rare window into how much the cloud giant pays employees.

Here are 10 Amazon Web Services jobs that pay $185,000 at the high end of their salary ranges, and what it takes to get them:

Software development engineer III

Salaries: $146,300 to $185,000

Top responsibility: Software development engineer III is one of the highest engineering levels within AWS, below only "principal software development engineer." There was one $160,000 salary listed for a principal software development engineer in the federal data, but it's likely the position fetches a lot more in annual compensation through stocks awards and bonuses. 

Years of experience required: At least four years software development experience.

Salaries and required experience for other engineering levels:

• Software development engineer I: $93,184 to $160,000 salary. Entry-level, but experience with at least one modern programming language.
• Software development engineer II: $114,800 to $182,000 salary. At least two years of non-internship software development experience.
• Principal software engineer: $160,000 (only one salary listed in federal data). At least 10 years of engineering experience.

Manager III, software development

Salary: $142,300 to $185,000

Top responsibility: "You will be responsible for leading a multi functional team to design, development, test, and deploy new features and products. You will also be responsible hiring and developing the best, and create the strategic vision for the team."

Years of experience required: At least 10 years in professional software development and engineering management.

Senior manager, enterprise account engineer

Salary: $185,000 (only one salary listed in federal data)

Similar job posting:Enterprise account engineer III.

Top responsibility: "Design, develop and support global and enterprise companies running cloud-based mission-critical applications, systems, services and features."

Years of experience required: Varies based on degree.

Principal, solutions architect

Salary: $185,000 (only one salary listed in federal data)

Top responsibility: "Build deep relationships with customers to become a trusted advisor for their most critical workloads that support their digital transformation and journey to the cloud."

Years of experience required: At least 10 years in a technical solutions architect role.

Solutions architect III: $185,000

Pay: $137,259 to $185,000

Top responsibility: "Act as a technical liaison between customers, AWS Sales and other AWS teams to craft highly scalable, flexible and resilient cloud architectures that address customer business problems and accelerate the adoption of AWS services."

Years of experience required: Varies based on degree.

Applied scientist II

Pay: $144,300 to $185,000

Top responsibility: "Design, implement, test, deploy and maintain innovative data and deep learning solutions to further the customer experience."

Years of experience required: "At least three years of practical machine learning experience and at least two years of hands-on programming, on top of a PhD in computer science or a related field."

Senior marketing and field enablement operations manager

Pay: $185,000 (only one salary listed in federal data)

Similar job posting:Senior program manager, field enablement

Top responsibility: "Identify, define, develop and maintain field engagement program plans, identify resource needs, and manage project schedule. Deliver high quality field engagement workshops."

Years of experience required: At least eight years of program management experience, preferably in marketing.

Principal tech business developer

Pay: $185,000 (only one salary listed in federal data)

Similar job posting:Principal, technology business development, emerging devices

Top responsibility: "Lead the identification, evaluation, negotiation and execution of strategic partnerships and marketing deals that drive competitive advantage and customer delight, and support strategic objectives on a global basis."

Years of experience required: A least 10 to 12 years, depending on business development experience.

Principal enterprise account engineer

Pay: $185,000 (only one salary listed in federal data)

Top responsibility: "Develop and execute on an operational support strategy that helps our customers continue to grow and be successful on the AWS platform."

Years of experience required: At least nine years technical engineering experience and at least three years "customer facing experience leading IT transformation."

Senior manager, solutions architecture: $185,000

Pay: $185,000 (only one salary listed in federal data)

Top responsibility: "As a key member of the business development and sales management teams, ensure success in building and migrating applications, software and services onto the AWS platform."

Years of experience required: At least 10 in a variety technical, customer-facing roles.

• In July, the $37 billion cloud communications company Twilio appointed Michelle Grover as its first CIO to help scale the company's IT systems and tech services.
• Previously, Grover worked as a senior vice president of software development at SAP Concur.
• Throughout her career, Grover has worked to help bring more women and other underrepresented groups into the tech industry. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In July, the $37 billion cloud communications company Twilio appointed its first CIO, hiring former SAP executive Michelle Grover to manage its IT systems and lead its engineers in scaling up.

Grover previously worked as the senior vice president of software development at SAP Concur, where she focused on travel app TripIt and Concur's mobile app. After working there for six years, she began looking outside to find the next step in her career. Grover started talking to Twilio about a chief product officer role, but when the leadership team told her it was also looking for a "nontraditional CIO," her interest was piqued.

"They were not looking for someone that will get vendors for IT but someone who wants to build things," Grover told Business Insider. "The DNA of Twilio is building."

Because of her background as an engineer, Grover fits that mold well. 

As CIO, she leads the IT and tech services team, including by making sure developers can release code efficiently. 

Grover is passionate about supporting women in technology

Grover says her biggest career highlights have centered around bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the technology field. Outside of work, she's on the board of Techtonica, a nonprofit that works to provide pathways for women and non-binary people into the tech industry, and she volunteers with Black Girls Code.

Grover says she wants to debunk the myth that "you must be a brilliant, special kind of person to walk into technology."

Grover recalls that once, after she spoke on a panel about women in leadership in technology, a young woman approached her and they got coffee together. The woman was having a difficult time in the tech industry and Grover offered her support. Then, about a year later, that woman invited Grover to the very first panel that she had ever participated in.

"The fact that I talked to her about staying in technology, figuring out what was important for her, she just needed to reach out and bounce ideas," Grover said. "It actually made her stay the course."

Grover hopes that in her new position at Twilio, she can continue to inspire other women and people of color, including by making herself available to help solve problems and answer questions. 

"The fact that there is a C-level person of color that is a woman that is absolutely qualified to do the job makes people feel good about it," Grover said. "Just coming into the organization, people are so happy, people ask questions, and people are comfortable enough to open up and ask questions to me."

Helping Twilio scale

When Grover started off at TripIt, it was a small organization with only 25 engineers. Eventually, she helped lead the company in getting integrated with SAP and supporting large business customers. 

Now, as Twilio employees onboard remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, her goal is to make sure the company's IT systems can scale up. The rise of remote work has created "the perfect storm" for more people wanting to use Twilio's email and communications platforms, Grover says. 

"My biggest goal is to make sure we can scale," Grover said. "What we did a long time ago is nice. Now as we get more load on the system and get a lot bigger customers, we need to be able to scale. We're hiring like crazy, and now everyone is remote. Now you have to get the systems over to people. You've got to do this a lot quicker."

Grover herself also had to onboard remotely, although she says this wasn't too difficult because in her previous job, she frequently had to travel.

Read more:The pandemic is changing how companies like Amazon Web Services and Twilio hire software developers, as Silicon Valley rethinks the interview process

"You learn how to build those types of relationships whether you're in an office or not," Grover said. "It's definitely nice to be in an office surrounded by people. I'm also pretty used to not having that ability to do that since I've had to work with so many folks in other countries."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at rmchan@businessinsider.com, Signal at 646.376.6106, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request.

SEE ALSO: An exec explains why Google Cloud is making a 'massive investment' in its partners and aims to have them involved in 100% of its new deals as it takes on Microsoft and Amazon

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• Amazon, Walmart, and Target are thriving while dozens of other retailers are closing stores and filing for bankruptcy.
• All three companies have benefitted from the closures of "non-essential" stores, as well as spikes in consumer spending on groceries and household goods. 
• Amazon, Walmart, and Target have also been well positioned to capture a surge in spending online, following years of massive investments in their e-commerce operations.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The pandemic is fueling record growth at Amazon, Walmart, and Target, and solidifying their reign over America's retail landscape for years to come.

All three retailers reported blowout sales in the second quarter. Walmart's digital sales nearly doubled from a year earlier and Target's nearly tripled. The companies' same-store sales climbed 9% and 10.9%, respectively. Amazon's overall sales grew 40% in the quarter.

The companies' strong performance comes against a backdrop of widespread pain and unprecedented upheaval in the US retail industry.

More than a dozen major retailers have filed for bankruptcy so far in 2020, including J. Crew, Neiman Marcus, JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, and Tailored Brands, which owns Men's Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank. Retailers have also announced plans to close more than 6,300 stores this year.

Many of the retailers that are feeling the most pain right now were already struggling before the pandemic. The virus has only quickened their demise by carrying forward years of projected declines.

Meanwhile, America's big-box titans are thriving amid the global health crisis.

As thousands of stores shut down across the country at the start of the pandemic, Amazon, Walmart, and Target were among the retailers deemed "essential" and therefore able to continue operating. This means they benefitted from several weeks of big stock-up trips, as consumers stockpiled paper goods, food, cleaning products, and more.

Even as "non-essential" stores reopened, big-box retailers continued to dominate. 

At this point, shoppers continued to stock up on food because they were still eating more meals at home. They also started spending on goods for entertaining and working at home, such as bicycles, puzzles, home-office supplies, patio furniture, and other household items.

A record share of consumer spending shifted online, as well, as people tried to avoid going into stores at all.

Moody's Analytics REIS, a commercial real estate-focused arm of Moody's Analytics, estimates that the share of e-commerce spending relative to total retail sales increased from 11.4% at the end of 2019 to a historic 16.4% in the months of March and April alone.

Amazon, Walmart, and Target were all best positioned to reap the benefits of this shift.

These companies have been focused for years on building out massive e-commerce networks capable of shipping hundreds of thousands of products to consumers quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. 

All three companies also had established curbside pickup from stores, which has become massively popular during the pandemic. 

Target, for example, said in-store pickup of online orders grew 60% in the second quarter, and drive-up pickup — in which Target employees deliver orders to customers' cars in a store parking lot — surged more than 700%. 

When consumers have chosen to visit stores, they appear to be consolidating their trips to reduce risk of exposure to the virus. This has made big-box stores — which carry groceries along with a huge selection of general merchandise — highly convenient.

Amid all this, many consumers recently received government stimulus funds and some had extra money from canceled vacations, which boosted retail spending overall, according to the chief executives of Walmart and Target. 

Taken together, these factors have helped make America's biggest retailers more powerful than ever, and poised to win the future of retail in the US.

SEE ALSO: Demand for warehouse space is surging as historic online spending exposes a major weakness

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Cybersecurity has faced a shortage of tech talent for years, making its jobs market especially attractive. 
• Last year, Silicon Valley's Palo Alto Networks was named the highest-paying company, setting a standard for security companies. 
• Even non-tech roles in cybersecurity, such as marketing, can offer salaries of up to $300,000, data shows.  
• Here's a sampling of what Palo Alto Networks, Okta, FireEye, Trend Micro, McAfee, Netskope, CrowdStrike, and Cloudflare pay new hires, based on disclosure data for permanent and temporary workers filed with the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification in 2019.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

There are 350,000 cybersecurity job listings on LinkedIn, according to a recent study. And in a country with 10% unemployment, the Commerce Department has launched a project not to create cybersecurity jobs, but to fill them.

Simple supply and demand would then suggest that the pay for cybersecurity professionals would be pretty good. And recent statistics from the federal government back that up.

Business Insider analyzed the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification's 2020 disclosure data for permanent and temporary foreign workers to find out what eight major players in cybersecurity — Palo Alto Networks, Okta, FireEye, Trend Micro, McAfee, Netskope, CrowdStrike, and Cloudflare — pay tech talent in key roles including engineers, developers and data scientists.

Companies are required to disclose information, such as salary (or, sometimes salary range), when they hire foreign workers under the H1-B visa program, giving insight into what these major companies are willing to shell out for talent.

Palo Alto Networks, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm of around 7,000, was named the best-paying company among all industries in a ranking last year, and that sets the standard for cybersecurity.

One interesting thing to note in this sampling of salaries – especially as remote work continues – is the fluctuation in pay for similar roles in different states. An engineer in Georgia could make up to $100,000 less than one in California, according to the data reviewed by Business Insider – a savings companies are increasingly investigating. 

All companies named in this story declined to comment, with the exception of CrowdStrike. You can read CrowdStrike’s statement below.

Here's how much these top cybersecurity technology companies paid employees hired in 2020:

Palo Alto Networks hired a VP of Americas field marketing for $300,000.

Named the best-paying company in a Glassdoor ranking last year, Palo Alto Networks specializes in creating security systems for companies and organizations to prevent cyberattacks. Palo Alto Networks earned the top spot in that ranking with a median total salary of $170,929.

The company bills itself as "the world's largest cybersecurity company," with 70,000 customers and revenue in fiscal year 2019 of $2.9 billion. At the time of writing, its market cap is at about $26 billion.

Here are some recent Palo Alto Networks hires based on 120 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Vice president, Americas field marketing (California): $300,000

Director of product marketing (California): $213,200

Principal software engineer: $200,000

Senior software engineer: $180,000

Data scientist (California): $125,000

Technical support engineer (Texas): $87,250 

Okta hired a chief security officer with a salary range of $241,696 to $350,000.

Okta, a $26 billion San Francisco identity and access management company, has seen its stock double during the COVID-19 pandemic as the identity-security sector booms during remote work. The company applies its multi-factor authentication tools to help the IT department make sure that the right employees have access to the right applications and data.

Cofounder Frederic Kerrest recently told Business Insider his strategy for hiring during the economic downturn: "Keep your eyes open for strong talent hit by hard circumstances. Anyone who's worked at a company that's gone through COVID-19-related layoffs knows even your hardest-working or smartest employees can't always stay with the business in a tough economic climate."

"While this is unfortunate, it means more talented people are looking for jobs right now and if you're building a team, you can offer them an entrepreneurial opportunity." 

Here are some recent Okta hires based on 75 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Chief security officer (California): $241,696-$350,000

Software engineer (California): $196,300-$239,900

Manager, quality assurance: $165,027-$200,100

Salesforce engineer (Georgia): $121,077-$127,900

Software engineer (Washington): $107,100-$130,900

McAfee hired a director of security operations with a salary between $186,493 and $255,500.

McAfee is one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity companies remaining, as big multi-faceted companies like Microsoft and smaller startups begin to dominate the industry. McAfee splits its roughly 7,000 employees mostly between two main locations – one in Silicon Valley, and the other in Texas. Chief People Officer Chatelle Lynch believes the many openings in cybersecurity make it a hot job market even for candidates who lack training, and McAfee currently has 200 job openings. 

Here are some recent McAfee hires based on 27 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Director of security operations (Texas): $186,493-$255,500

Manager of software engineering (California): $154,669-$256,000

Manager of marketing communications (California): $126,568-$199,000

Application developer (California): $108,784-$193,500

Software engineer (California): $97,302-$168,500 

Netskope hired a software engineer, level IV with a salary between $185,000 and $215,000.

$3 billion Netskope, which helps companies monitor and secure how their employees are using cloud software, joined three publicly traded companies in a "cloud security alliance" in June – in what amounted to a challenge of the biggest firms, including Microsoft. That should give some kind of signal on Netskope's ambitions in the cybersecurity space.

Records show the company is investing in engineering talent, with pay for its top engineering job at around $200,000.

Here are some recent Netskope hires based on 32 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Software engineer IV (California): $185,000-$215,000

Software engineer III (California): $135,000-$170,000

Software engineer II (California): $108,784-$135,000

IT project manager II (California): $98,961-$115,000

Business operations technical analyst II (California): $72,280-$95,000

Cloudflare hired a customer success engineer at a salary range between $100,000 and $110,000.

Cloudflare has boomed during the hybrid work movement, which it met with a coworking project to help struggling businesses. The 1,200-person company, which focuses on security and internet performance,  has "been building up those ideas together – performance and security. And now, all of that is coming together," analyst Jonathan Penn told Business Insider earlier this year.

Cloudflare stock has more than doubled this year, giving it a valuation of $12 billion, and the company's success is resulting in growth. The company has around 200 open jobs on its careers site, and doubled its intern class this year.  

Here are some recent Cloudflare hires based on 12 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Systems reliability engineer (California): $155,000-$175,000

Systems engineer (Illinois): $130,000-$150,000

Solutions engineer (New York): $120,000-$130,000

Customer success engineer (California): $100,000-$110,000

Market research analyst (California): $90,000-$110,000

CrowdStrike hired a senior software engineer with a salary of $200,000.

CrowdStrike turned a profit for the first time in Q1, and the threat-hunting company – which proactively looks for issues on networks and employees' computers – has seen its stock double this year. The Silicon Valley firm lists more than 200 job openings on its careers site in more than a dozen countries. Records show it has hired mostly engineers.

Asked about the $200,000 salary for an engineer shown in the records, JC Herrera, chief human resources officer at CrowdStrike, said: "Yes, we definitely see pay for engineers in cybersecurity reach that level, especially for more senior roles and especially in the [San Francisco] Bay Area and other tech hot spots. In our experience, good engineers will always see healthy salaries. For us, we've had a record number of accepted offers, and applications have been up during COVID-19. We are continuing to hire."

Here are some recent CrowdStrike hires based on 13 approved visa applications, and how much they're paid:

Senior software engineer (California): $200,000

Engineering manager (Washington): $185,000 

Data integration architect (California): $170,000

Director of corporate events (New York): $146,000

FireEye hired a director of engineering at a salary range of between $212,000 and $316,100.

Famous for its investigations of nation-state hacking, Silicon Valley company FireEye has grown quickly since its 2004 founding to around 3,400 employees. FireEye sells cybersecurity products for enterprise networks, email and endpoints, such as laptops and mobile devices. It also provides consulting services and threat intelligence – both of which are labor-intensive.

Here are some recent FireEye hires based on 31 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Director of engineering (California): $212,000-$316,100

Principal engineer (California): $166,700-$271,600

Senior business analyst (California): $140,900-$200,700

Staff systems engineer (Virginia): $129,000-$178,000

Financial planning analyst (California): $92,000-$109,600

Trend Micro hired a business process analyst for a salary range of between $72,000 and $97,324.

Trend Micro has over 6,700 employees in 65 countries, and has expanded its global reach over its 30-year history. It has a broad array of products, from enterprise products for large companies and government organizations to cloud computing security to research of cyberattacks, and consumer products.

That "cross-generational blend of threat-defense techniques," as the company describes its products and services, means a need for lots of tech talent. 

Here are some recent Trend Micro hires based on 23 approved visa applications and how much they're paid:

Manager, business development (New York): $150,000 

Senior software engineer (Texas): $110,000-$130,000

Customer service manager (Texas): $96,470-$100,000

Customer service engineer (Texas): $79,560-$81,600

Business process analyst (Texas): $72,000-$97,324

Hello everyone! Welcome to this weekly roundup of Business Insider stories from executive editor Matt Turner. Please subscribe to Business Insider here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Sunday. 

Hello!

There's often a large degree of secrecy over salaries.

To shed a little light on who pays what, our reporters have been analyzing disclosure data for permanent and temporary foreign workers released by the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification to gauge how much companies offered to pay foreign staffers they sought to hire in the US through work visas.

As I've noted in the past, the data only reveals what companies pay foreign workers in roles for which they hired immigrant workers in fiscal year 2019. And the database also does not appear to include equity grants. 

But the data is still valuable. Want to get a sense of how much the PR industry pays? Here you go. Or if you're thinking of making a move, you can get a sense of how much you can earn in the tech industry based in Seattle or Texas.

Below are a range of titles at 10 different companies. Click on the link to see salaries for other roles at that company and at others like it.

• Accenture — Data science manager: $151,500
• IBM — Government cloud field marketing leader (New York): $172,000
• Microsoft — Senior software engineer lead: $182,575
• Nike — Innovation director, digital innovation: $205,510
• PwC — Advisory principal: $804,751
• Salesforce — SVP, software engineering (California): $227,802
• Spotify — Machine learning engineer: $230,000
• TikTok — Principal Research Scientist: $300,000
• Walmart — iOS engineer: $167,500
• WPP — Chief creative officer: $830,000 to $880,000

You can also check out this interactive database from Rob Price, Skye Gould, and William Stevens breaking down how much Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and 10 other tech giants pay their workers, from engineers to salespeople.

Amazon's new No.2

Eugene Kim reports:

Amazon is turning to a 20-year company veteran with deep logistics chops for its new retail CEO position, a highly influential job that is widely considered the second most powerful after company founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Amazon announced that Dave Clark, SVP of worldwide operations, will become CEO of worldwide consumer when Jeff Wilke, who has been seen as Bezos's right-hand man, steps down from the position early next year. The job oversees everything from Amazon's core retail business to its massive shipping and logistics arm, as well as its growing physical stores segment, including Whole Foods.

You can read more on Clark's elevation here:

• Amazon just promoted Dave Clark, a former warehouse manager with a music degree, to be its new retail CEO after having 'tested' him for years

Eugene, Rachel Premack, and Hayley Peterson profiled Clark back in May, focusing on his role in charge of shaping Amazon's COVID-19 response, including changes in the supply-chain network and warehouse safety policies. You can read that story here:

• How Dave Clark, the mastermind behind Amazon's coronavirus response, became one of the most powerful executives in America

Amazon also added three new executives to the company's "S-team," a group of 25 top leaders who work on the company's most important issues, Eugene reported. Most notably, it added Alicia Boler Davis, VP of global delivery services, to the S-team, making her the first woman of color to join the group. Here's the full list:

• Amazon's big shakeup: Jeff Bezos's No. 2 leaves, and the top leadership circle adds its first Black woman — here's the full list of Bezos's 'S-team'

Operation Warp Speed

Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, the US government's program to deliver a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine as soon as possible, talked to Andy Dunn in a rare interview. Here are some of the highlights: 

• Slaoui shared his best timeline on the race for a COVID-19 vaccine and predicts a return to normal in the 2nd half of 2021.
• He explained how Operation Warp Speed decided which 6 candidates to back with massive multibillion-dollar deals.
• Slaoui said some biotechs 'misled their shareholders' and 'frustrated the hell' out of him by playing up connections to the secretive government program.

You can read the full transcript here:

• We spoke to Trump's coronavirus vaccine czar about when he anticipates getting a coronavirus vaccine, the secrecy around Operation Warp Speed, and his typical day that starts at 2:30 a.m.

Below are headlines on some of the stories you might have missed from the past week.

— Matt

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• Email startup Superhuman is also looking to reinvent the calendar, starting with a new feature that allows users to create calendar events directly within the app, using just keyboard shortcuts.
• Rahul Vohra, CEO and founder of Superman, said it's just the start of the company's plans to reinvent how people use their calendars 
• Vohra says one-third of all emailing is related to scheduling, so in order to truly make email more efficient the company has to rethink how calendars integrate with email.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Superhuman, the hot startup that's aiming to reinvent email, is now looking to transform the calendar, too.

The company announced a new feature earlier this week that allows users to create calendar events directly within the app, using keyboard shortcuts. That quick, all-in-one-program process is faster than the options offered by rivals like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. 

This is something Superhuman's customers have wanted for years, said CEO Rahul Vohra, who founded Superman in 2014. It's just the start of the company's plan to reinvent how people use calendars, he added. 

Superhuman's goal is to provide a better, faster email experience, and its $30-per-month product already has a cult-like following among founders and investors. To date, it has raised $56 million in venture capital funding from firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and has a valuation of $260 million, according to PitchBook. 

The company is trying to tackle all the different ways that it can make email more efficient. One-third of all emailing is related to scheduling, Vohra said, so the company has been trying to find ways to integrate calendars better.

"So far, we've made people twice as fast at getting through their email in general and we want to keep doing that," Vohra told Business Insider. "The way that we do that is, we start to take on the different aspects of what emailing is. Emailing is everything from scheduling to delegation, to receiving tasks to sharing files, to collaborating on documents. Scheduling is one of the biggest." 

The key to all this is pre-programmed and customizable keyboard shortcuts, which is what makes Superhuman's email experience faster than competitors, Vohra said. 

In addition to the new scheduling feature, users can already hover over a time in an email and see their calendar for that day. While Superhuman doesn't yet have a separate tab or page to see your calendar in its entirety, Vohra said that's something his team is considering adding. However, the focus is on looking at what parts of scheduling are cumbersome and coming up with features to fix those. 

That might include things like scheduling assistance, so when you're replying to someone, Superhuman would automatically suggest times that you're available, and put a hold on those times until one is picked. Long term, that might even include Superhuman intelligently deciding a time by looking at two people's calendars and seeing what works best, without the user having to do any work. 

Vohra also sees the potential for Superhuman to remember your favorite meeting locations or preferred meeting room with certain contacts and suggest that new meetings happen there — for when people are back in offices. He also thinks the company might add features to automatically add a Zoom or Google Meet link to a calendar invite.

Superhuman wants to compress the scheduling work to as little time as possible, "so that people can then choose to do more stuff. That might actually be more emailing, but maybe it's more outbounding, it's responding to emails. It's more real work," Vohra said. 

Superhuman's philosophy is that efficiency — with enjoyment! — is everything, Vohra said:

"We always believe let's start with that layer, let's make the fundamental work that people are trying to do fun and fast before we add the bells and whistles that typically a Google or Microsoft can do."

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• Twitter on Sunday placed a "public interest notice" on a tweet President Donald Trump sent earlier in the day in the latest example of the platform fact-checking his tweets.
• Just after 7 a.m. on Saturday, Trump tweeted unsubstantiated claims about ballot drop off boxes, which have been implemented by states to allow residents to drop off mail-in ballots without relying on the postal service.
• "We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our Civic Integrity Policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting," Twitter said.
• After Twitter began to flag some of Trump's tweets in May, he joined other conservatives in calling social-media platforms biased against conservatives, and he signed an executive order to regulate Twitter and similar companies.
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Twitter on Sunday placed a "public interest notice" on a tweet sent by President Donald Trump earlier in the day that claimed without evidence that "Mail Drop Boxes" for ballots would lead to voter fraud and carry a risk of coronavirus transmission.

"So now the Democrats are using Mail Drop Boxes, which are a voter security disaster," President Donald Trump tweeted just after 7 a.m. Sunday. "Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times.

"Also, who controls them, are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas?' he continued. "They are not Covid sanitized. A big fraud!"

The president has been a staunch opponent of state efforts to expand vote-by-mail to encourage voters to cast a ballot without needing to vote in-person due to the coronavirus pandemic. To assuage voters' concerns about voting by mail amid the ongoing public crisis facing the postal service, states have expanded locations that allow voters to drop off their ballots rather than sending them via USPS.

"This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity, the warning that now appears over Trump's tweet read. "However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible."

The White House declined to comment on Saturday.

"We placed a public interest interstitial on this Tweet for violating our Civic Integrity Policy, for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider. "We've taken action given the Tweet violates our Rules, but have kept the Tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance."

While users will be able to share the tweet by using the "Retweet with Comment" feature, users will no longer be able to retweet, like, or reply to the tweet, which Twitter said was standard for the notice it placed on the president's tweet.

There is little evidence to suggest that there is a heightened risk of voter fraud relating to mail-in ballots. According to a report from Reuters, one in four voters voted by mail in the 2016 election. Trump and over 20 people in his administration or who are otherwise close to him have voted or tried to vote by mail in recent elections, Business Insider previously reported.

In June, Trump's campaign for reelection filed a lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania to stop it from implementing drop-off locations, arguing state officials had "sacrificed the sanctity of in-person voting at the altar of unmonitored mail-in voting and have exponentially enhanced the threat that fraudulent or otherwise ineligible ballots will be cast and counted in the forthcoming general election," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

In May, Twitter began to place notices over some of Trump's tweets after years of criticism that the platform did not do enough to combat the president's misinformation or tweets that otherwise violated Twitter rules. The president and other Republicans have claimed that social media companies, like Twitter, are biased against conservatives.

Days after Twitter began to offer the sporadic fact-checking of his tweets, Trump signed an executive order that empowered federal regulators to amend a statute giving social-media companies, like Twitter and Facebook, the broad authority to moderate speech on their platforms, Business Insider previously reported. First Amendment experts questioned Trump's authority to regulate or shut down social-media companies that he disagreed with.  

SEE ALSO: Facebook is laying the groundwork to stop Trump from using its platform to delegitimize the 2020 election results

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• In mid August, the wildly popular game "Fortnite" got an update on Apple and Android smartphones that allowed players to bypass app store digital payment systems: Instead of going through Apple and Google, payments went directly to "Fortnite" creator Epic Games.
• Apple and Google subsequently pulled "Fortnite" from their digital storefronts and cited the update as a terms-of-service violation. Apple also booted Epic from the Apple Developer Program, a move that Epic said would force it to discontinue iOS and Mac support for its popular game development software Unreal Engine.
• Epic sued both companies, and filed for a temporary restraining order against Apple to keep it from "removing, de-listing, refusing to list or otherwise making unavailable the app 'Fortnite,' including any update thereof." The order would also enable Epic to continue supporting Unreal Engine on Apple devices.
• In a surprise twist, Microsoft is backing Epic in the ongoing legal spat. Microsoft general manager of gaming developer experiences Kevin Gammill officially submitted a letter to the court in support of Epic on Sunday. 
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In the ongoing legal spat between Apple and "Fortnite" maker Epic Games, the latter just got an unexpected ally.

Microsoft general manager of gaming developer experiences Kevin Gammill officially submitted a letter to the court in support of Epic on Sunday. He wasn't writing because he's upset about "Fortnite" being pulled from the App Store, but because of the ripple effects of this particular legal battle between Apple and Epic.

Gammill works with game developers on behalf of Microsoft's Xbox, and he's concerned that Apple's move to cut development ties with Epic "will harm game creators and gamers."

That's because, beyond "Fortnite," Epic also makes the Unreal Engine software suite – a set of software that's used to create games, including the smartphone versions of "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" and, of particular note here, Microsoft-published smartphone racer "Forza Street."

When Apple yanked "Fortnite" from the App Store, the company also canceled Epic's Developer Program contracts effective August 28. Without access to Apple's developer technology, Epic says that it would be unable to issue updates to the Unreal Engine on iOS or Mac, which would in turn mean that any developer using the software would be unable to update their own games to support the new versions of iOS and Mac OS coming this year.

In short: A variety of games on Apple's App Store could be affected by Epic losing access to Apple's developer program.

"Apple's discontinuation of Epic's ability to develop and support Unreal Engine for iOS or macOS will harm game creators and gamers," Gammill said in the letter submitted to the court. He described Unreal Engine as "critical technology for numerous game creators including Microsoft," and said the move to revoke Epic's access could, "harm already-launched iOS and macOS games built on Unreal Engine." 

Though Gammill's statement was not issued by Microsoft, Xbox leader Phil Spencer characterized Gammill's statement as on behalf of the company.

"Fortnite" was pulled from Apple's App Store and the Google Play store on August 13 following an update issued by Epic that gave users the option to bypass the companies' digital payment systems.

Instead of buying in-game virtual money ("V-bucks") through Apple or Google, players could buy it directly from Epic — at a 20% discount, no less. Apple and Google said the update was a terms-of-service violation for any developer with an app on the App Store or Google Play store.

In response, the two main smartphone conglomerates pulled "Fortnite" from their respective digital storefronts. Epic Games, anticipating as much, filed suits against each company – the first public shots in an ongoing campaign from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to change how Apple's App Store operates.

Apple said in a statement last week that it "won't make an exception for Epic" to App Store policy, which forces every app publisher to use Apple's payment systems, "because we don't think it's right to put their business interests ahead of the guidelines that protect our customers."

Apple is contesting Epic's filing for a temporary restraining order, and the first hearing is set for Monday, August 24.

SEE ALSO: Epic's CEO sent Apple a 2 a.m. declaration of war over 'Fortnite': 'Epic will no longer adhere to Apple's payment processing restrictions'

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• Tesla's postponed annual meeting and "battery day" presentation is set for September 22. 
• Both events will be livestreamed online, with a select few investors being chosen to attend in-person. 
• Shareholders can apply to be picked at random in order to attend. 
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Tesla investors hoping to see Elon Musk's annual shareholder presentation and the coinciding "battery day" events on September 22 will have to try their luck in a lottery thanks to pandemic restrictions on large events in California.

Both events will be live-streamed to the public, Tesla said, but the company "believes that the best stockholder experience is a fully in-person annual meeting open to all stockholders," it said in an updated regulatory filing Monday. "Continuing public health and travel-related requirements and advisories have necessitated a unique format for the 2020 Annual Meeting."

Tesla did not say how many people will be chosen to attend in-person from the random drawing. The Centers for Disease Control does not have specific capacity guidance on event attendance. Alameda County, with which Musk sparred over Tesla's factory closure in May, currently advises for "no public or private gathering of individuals who are not members of the same household."

Tesla says the meeting will have "robust health control measures," including "screening protocols to protect our attendees and personnel."

At the shareholder meeting portion of the event, investors will vote on up to seven proposals. Most importantly, they'll vote on whether to re-elect or confirm three directors to the company's board: Musk, chairwoman Robyn Denholm, and Hiromichi Mizuno, the newest appointed member. Shareholders will also vote to approve Musk's executive pay package and Tesla's audit accounting firm, standard fodder for publicly traded companies.

Four other proposals, including a push for Tesla to buy more traditional advertising, may also be voted on by investors, but aren't supported by the company.

The battery presentation is where any new developments will likely come. There's been little info from Musk about what to expect, and analysts expect new technology developments related to Tesla's energy storage and vehicle powertrain products.

"The real limitation on Tesla growth is cell production at an affordable price," Musk told investors on a July call. "That's the real limit. So that's why we're going to talk about a lot more about this on Battery Day because this is a fundamental scaling constraint … We expect to expand our business with Panasonic, with CATL, with LG, possibly with others. And there's a lot more to say on that front on Battery Day."

With Tesla's stock price continuing to soar to record highs, analysts expect the event to be yet another catalyst for even more gains.

"In our opinion this battery technology will be very advanced, potentially last for decades, withstand all types of weather/terrain, and be another major milestone for the Tesla ecosystem," Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, told clients Sunday.

"In theory this battery will support an electric vehicle for 1 million miles and be a major step forward when competing vs. traditional gasoline powered automotive competitors from both an ROI and environmental perspective," he continued. 

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