Invisible Forces

The global pandemic has made many of us think differently about the cities we live in. While lockdowns closed many of the amenities that make cities desirable, work-from-home orders showed us we can really work from anywhere. Hosts Shannon Murphy and Erin Shea are joined by equity researcher Jon Matuszewski, whose research shows that many city-dwellers are considering leaving for the suburbs – but will they really move?

In this episode, we explore the future of our cities, and how the push-pull of urbanization will shake out over the coming years. What does the pandemic spell for the future of urban transportation? How can we safely return to the office – and what will the post-COVID office even look like? How can we take the lessons we’re learning from this crisis to build greener, healthier, more liveable urban settings? 

Featuring Nadia Batchelor, Managing Director and Global Head of Jefferies Corporate Access Team, Jefferies' Equity Researcher Jon Matuszewski, and Jefferies’ Global Head of Mobility Technology Storm Duncan. 

Also featuring: 

• Taco Carlier is the co-founder of Dutch e-bike company Van Moof. 
• Cindy Coleman is the Work Strategy Leader and Design Director at architecture and design firm Gensler. 
• Bob Wislow is the Chairman and CEO of Parkside Realty.
   

From the ads we see, to what we buy, and even how we're treated when we get sick, the world is getting more bespoke and personalized every day. For consumers, personalization offers the promise of a better, more intimate shopping experience and of products that are more finely tuned to their exact needs and interests. For businesses, personalization can be an effective way to boost sales, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, all while minimizing costs and overhead. In this episode, hosts Erin Shea and Shannon Murphy look at how the shift towards hyper-personalized goods and services is revolutionizing retail and completely transforming the consumer and healthcare landscape.  

Featuring Cameron Lester, Co-Head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Jefferies, and Jefferies' Healthcare Strategist Jared Holz. 

Also featuring:

• Nick Green is the co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market.
• Chris Merkle is the co-founder of the personalized cosmetics start-up MIME.
• Dr. William Li is a physician and the author of the bestselling book Eat to Beat Disease.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has exposed major weaknesses in our global supply chain. Governments, manufacturers, retailers, small businesses, individual consumers — all have been hit hard by the shutting down of international borders and travel stoppage. For some, supply has been the problem — how do you secure access to the products you need when shipping routes are closed and much of the world is on lockdown? For others, it’s been the opposite problem — how do you offload stockpiles of inventory when demand for your product has suddenly vanished?

In the season two premiere of Invisible Forces, hosts Erin Shea and Shannon Murphy look at how everything from vital medical equipment to fresh produce to jigsaw puzzles are being made and transported differently in the wake of COVID-19 — and how the pandemic is rapidly transforming the $10 trillion global supply chain and fuelling a push towards localization in the process. 

Featuring Jefferies’ Chief Financial Economist Aneta Markowska and Jefferies’ Global Head of Mobility Technology Storm Duncan. 

Also featuring: 

• Nagendra Raina is the CEO of Buffalo Games, the largest puzzle manufacturer in North America.
• Anne Williams is a puzzle historian and the author of The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History.
• Jack Vessey is a fourth generation lettuce farmer in California.
• Evan Wiig is the Director of Communications and Membership at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers.
• Sharad Agarwal is the senior vice president of EasyMile.

In our season finale, we take a step back and explore one invisible force that has underpinned every episode in the season so far: the brilliant entrepreneurs, thinkers, and founders behind groundbreaking and culture-shifting companies. We talk to three successful founders about the entrepreneurial spirit that drives their work: Aaron Rasmussen, who just launched Outlier.org and co-founded MasterClass, Angela Lee of 37 Angels, and Transfix CEO Drew McElroy. They share candid insights about what it takes to bring an idea to scale and tell their personal stories about what shaped their own interest and pursuit of entrepreneurship.

In this episode, we’re going inside an industry boom to understand what leads to value creation and sustained growth in today’s world — which is shaped increasingly by social media influence, e-commerce, and digitally native companies. We’re talking about the beauty industry. Jefferies analyst Steph Wissink will walk us through what’s been happening in this sector over the past decade. It’s an industry that just underwent a long boom period. But as Steph explains, the lifecycle of booms in the beauty industry is shortening, and this trend could replicate itself across industries well beyond beauty. Conor Begley, co-founder of Tribe Dynamics, shares why “Earned Media Value” is one of the most powerful metrics for companies in search of their “next big thing.”

Artificial intelligence is helping move the financial services sector into a new era of operation. We’ll learn about the invisible forces shaping how AI and other technologies could reinvent the industry in the coming years. Our hosts are joined by Jefferies Managing Director and technology lead Vaughn Harvey and Jesse McWaters, financial innovation lead for the World Economic Forum. We’ll also hear from Betterment CEO Jon Stein and IEX CEO Brad Katsuyama, two entrepreneurs already relying on AI to disrupt different areas of the financial space – from online financial advising to building better exchanges for the next decade. 

Consumers today have a very different relationship with the products they buy. Jefferies analyst Randy Konik explains that there are forces propelling consumer value beyond price points. More than ever, individuals’ core beliefs are coming into play when making purchasing decisions. And in response, brands are adjusting their products and their messages. We’ll get a look at how these shifts are playing out, from the diamond industry to sporting goods.

Our hosts sit down with Jefferies analyst Mike Yee and strategist Jared Holz to uncover the invisible forces driving change in a sector that affects us all: healthcare. We’ll learn about why biotech is on the precipice of an explosion of new drugs and treatments. We’ll meet a family whose life has already changed thanks to one of these advancements, and also hear from one of the doctors behind it.

The mobility sector makes up one of the world’s largest economies and the forces driving changes within it could result in trillions of dollars of value creation — or loss — in the future. Storm Duncan, Jefferies’ Global Head of Tech-Enabled Mobility, joins our hosts to explain the factors at work. We’ll also hear from two entrepreneurs disrupting different areas of mobility: Lime CEO Brad Bao and Drew McElroy, the CEO of Transfix. They weigh in with their personal experiences of how technology can continue to help improve efficiency.