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While estimates of the percentage of neurodivergent people globally typically range from 1520%, new survey results from neurodiversity advocacy and support nonprofit Understood suggest that the true percentage of neurodivergent adults may be higher. For one, more people are being diagnosed with ADHD and autism and other conditions that fall under the umbrella of neurodivergence. But more people may also be self-identifying as neurodivergentespecially in younger generations. Deloittes 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey showed that 53% of Gen Z self-identify as neurodivergent. The people who identify or have symptoms of [neurodivergence], will far exceed the most conservative estimate of those who have been actually diagnosed, says Nathan Friedman, copresident and chief marketing officer of Understood. He suggests that barriers such as high psychiatry costs and the misdiagnosis of neurodivergent women might prevent individuals from pursuing (or acquiring) a formal diagnosis. In April, Understood conducted a weighted survey of over 2000 U.S. adults, 659 of whom identify as neurodivergent. Thirty-one percent of respondents had at least wondered if they were neurodivergent although only 11% had received an official diagnosis. Stigma around requesting accommodations In a recent ResumeGenius poll of 1000 hiring managers, 86% claim that disclosing neurodivergence in an application would have either a positive or neutral effect on their hiring decision. But Understoods research suggests that neurodivergent workers have real concerns. In the survey, 64% of employed U.S. adults agree that people speak about their neurodivergence at work more openly now, but 70% agree theres a stigma around asking for workplace accommodations. Thats a 10% increase from their results last year. Among those workers who have requested accommodations, only 56% received ones that actually improved their work experience. One in four got accommodations that werent helpful, one in five were outright denied, and nearly one in five later regretted asking. Asking for accommodations doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unable to perform or you’re unable to achieve the results of what’s expected, says Friedman. The accommodations that workers typically ask for are simple to implement, he says. Accommodations could be anything from a flexible work environment to changing desks . . . [These] are pretty simple things that can help somebody improve how they work, the output of their work, and their feeling about how they work. Despite this, 15% of respondents said they had lost a job, were demoted, or lost a job opportunity after asking for accommodations. Part of this increase in perceived stigma may be connected with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI in the workplace. In fact, the survey results show that 64% of U.S. adults believe DEI program rollbacks will make it more difficult for people to access workplace accommodations. Difference right now is not seen as a good thingregardless of where you’re at, says Friedman. What can be done Reducing stigma and improving the efficacy of workplace accommodations starts with proper education about neurodivergence in the workplace. We hear so many stories about individuals who don’t have the right accommodations and are let go because they don’t have what’s needed to do their job, says Friedman. So providing the education, providing the pathway to get an accommodation, and delivering the accommodations are all required. This is especially crucial as Gen Z now outnumbers boomers in the workplace. Over 50% of Gen Z believes they are neurodivergent, says Friedman. If you’re a company of 10,000 people, that’s upwards of 5,000 people that you could get a better work product from. . . . So [offering accommodations] is a win for everyone.
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E-Commerce
Youve made it past the recruiter and the first round of interviews. Now youre meeting with the hiring manager. They’ll likely ask you a series of behavioral questions to evaluate whether youre a good cultural fit for the team. They’ll also assess whether they believe you are up to the managerial and leadership challenges facing the role. Preparing for behavioral interviews can be nerve-wracking. The stakes are high, and its easy to feel overwhelmed by all the possible scenarios they could throw at you. I’ve spent over a dozen plus years of preparing folks for interviews and talking to people on the hiring side. As a result, Ive developed an approach to behavioral questions that will help you shine in the behavioral interview. Its all about ensuring that you start strong. The STAR framework and why it doesnt quite work Many people use the STAR framework to structure interview responses. This method helps candidates describe their experiences to illustrate desired competencies. Start with S the Situation they faced, T their Task, A what Action they took, and R the Result they achieved. Now, this framework does help you organize your thoughts and distill a story to illustrate your experience and competencies. Unfortunately, this approach fails rhetorically because it lacks a strong start. When you lead with situations or context before getting to the task, the interviewer has to wait too long for the payoff. You risk losing the interviewer before you get to the action and results. An interview is like any presentation, you have somewhere around 30 seconds to hook your audience. Starting strong means a clear, concise statement of value that captures what kind of leader or manager you are. It also provides the interviewer a blueprint of what to listen for in your response. How behavioral interviews work Behavioral interviews are based on the premise that past experience is a predictor of future performance. The questions are generally less about getting the right answer. It’s more about helping the interviewer understand your approach, how you think, how you relate to others, and your values. As one hiring manager told me, When a candidate explains how he or she thinks about solving a problem, I get a lot more insight into what it would be like to have them on my team than I do from them reciting the solution. In my view, the STAR formula focuses too much on the story and not enough on the meaning. To borrow language from Simon Sineks Golden Circle model for organizations, interview candidates who strictly adhere to the STAR approach focus too much on the what and not enough on the how or the why. When you start your answer by naming the principles or values that guided your action, you get to the heart of the matter quickly. You also cue the interviewer on what to listen for as the story unfolds. How to prepare for behavioral interviews The STAR method is a good start to help you distill the narratives that illustrate your experience and competence. But to ensure that you have a strong start for each STAR story. Reflect on the foundational values that guided your actions. That might be empathy, accountability, collaboration, customer focus, data-driven decision-making, fairness, relationships, trust, or transparency. Articulating these principles will help establish what kind of leader, manager, or contributor you are. Examples of strong answers Once you’ve identified a set of 58 principles or values, you can use them to frame almost any answer. For example: Behavioral question #1 Tell me about a time when you had to influence without authority. Influencing without authority was a key part of my role at ABC Company. There were three things I always tried to keep in mind: empathy for my cross-functional stakeholders, transparent communication, and relentless customer focus. On xyz project, as the product manager (situation) I needed to influence my engineering counterpart to commit to an aggressive timeline (task). I knew that her team was under a lot of pressure. I had a series of 1:1 conversations with her about the requirements. I made sure to listen with empathy so that I understood all her constraints (action). I also shared the potential customer impact of the feature. It turned out that her team had been expressing frustration about not feeling valued. So it was key that she could motivate her team to work on a more visible feature (action). We found some compromises and were able to land on a timeline that would be a stretch for her team but that she was excited about (result). Here are some other examples of strong starts: Behavioral question #2 What was a time when you failed? First, let me start by saying that in order for a goal to be meaningful, it needs to be beyond what youve done before, and so there is always a risk of falling short. The key is to communicate to stakeholders as soon as I know we are going to miss, take ownership of the failure, and use it as an opportunity for learning. An example of this is when I led a team in product marketing at xyz . . . Behavioral question #3 How have you managed conflict within your organization? Well, conflict is inevitable, and in my view, if it is handled with empathy for both participants while maintaining accountability for results, it can be an opportunity to learn more about each other and build trust and improve collaboration. The conflict I want to talk about was between someone who reported to me and someone on another team and was related to overlapping roles and responsibilities . . . The importance of principles Once you have a strong list of principles, you can plug them into almost any behavioral question and nail the response. And if your interview is on video, you can write each of your values on a post and attach them to your monitor. This will act as a reminder to cue you during the interview. Then you can kick off any response with an articulation of your values and priorities. This will ensure that your interviewer gets a true sense not just of what youve done, but of how you approach problem-solving and what you stand for.
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E-Commerce
SpaceX owns 98% of global rocket launches, a monopoly with virtually no competition. Only China is competing with Elon Musk at this point in number of launches and, while the country is getting closer to mass-producing reusable rockets, it appears far from making that happen. The world needs to scramble. We cant let a single company dominate the future of humanityand much less one that is owned by Musk. If you copy SpaceX, itll take you 10 years to get where they are today, Lin Kayser, cofounder of Dubai-based engineering AI firm Leap 71, tells me in a video interview. But in 10 years, SpaceX wont be where they are today. The game will be over. Startups and nations need to catch up to Musk, but that means solving a brutal equation: designing engines with comparable thrust (measured in kilonewtons, or kN) and efficiency, but without the decade-long development cycles. And to beat SpaceX, you also need to be able to mass-produce the rockets. [Photo: Leap 71] This is now more important than ever because the stakes are even higher than just five years ago. Satellite constellations like Starlink, which may soon enable direct-to-phone internet, threaten to sideline telecom operators and centralize control of earths critical communication infrastructure on top of controlling the space economy. Every region needs sovereign launch capability, Kayser contends. Otherwise, youll pay 10 times what SpaceX pays to access spaceif they let you. His company may have a solution to fix that conundrum. Leap 71 developed artificial intelligence called Noyron that, so far, has successfully designed two rocket engines. Kayser believes that his company, legacy rocket makers, and startups will be able to leverage this synthetic rocket engineer to create a cheaper match to the SpaceX Raptorand beat Musk at his own game. The 10-foot-high Raptorwhich powers the Starshipis arguably the most advanced Western rocket engine in production. Its latest iteration produces 280 tonnes of thrust at sea level, surpassing competing engines like Blue Origins BE-4. It uses methalox, an efficient fuel that can be manufactured in places like Mars, which makes it key for deep-space exploration. But the Raptors importance lies in the fact that it is the first operational full-flow staged combustion (FFSC) engine in history. This means that it optimizes efficiency and thrust while minimizing thermal stress, so you can reuse it many times, the key for cheap, sustainable space exploration. Only two other FFSC engines have been tested, but they’ve never flown. Leap 71 now wants to achieve the same spaces but better, with fewer 3D-printed pieces, which will make it less expensive than Musk’s engine. [Photo: Leap 71] Computational blueprint Leap 71 describes its Noyron computational model as an engineer brain in a box. Unlike generative AI tools that require human oversight because they are just guessing what could work, Noyron encodes physics, material science, and manufacturing rules to autonomously design rocket engines. It generates not just shapes but also functional hardware ready for 3D printing. Traditional parametric CAD is geometry-driven. Ours is physics-driven, Kayser explains. Calling it parametric CAD would be like saying ChatGPT is autocomplete. The systems first breakthrough came in 2024 with a 5 kN rocket engine. The compact, high-efficiency rocket was fully designed by AI and 3D printed in one go as a single-piece copper engine with intricate internal cooling channels. During trials in an old World War II bunker in the U.K., the engine fired flawlessly, validating Noyrons ability to predict thermal stresses and fluid dynamics. Then, in January 2025, Leap 71 really pushed the envelope by designing one of the most challenging and elusive rocket engines in the aerospace industry: a cryogenic aerospike thruster, an engine capable of working at every altitude to eliminate the need for multiple rocket stages, minimizing elements and costs in the process. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LEAP 71 (@leap.71) Now the company wants to scale up this approach to engines 400 times larger. The new road map includes two reference designs: the 200 kN XRA-2E5 aerospike and the 2,000 kN XRB-2E6 bell-nozzle engine, equivalent to SpaceXs Raptor. The first, he says, is slated for testing within 18 months of April 2025 (placing it around late 2026). The second is targeted for readiness by 2029. From left: A rocket injector head designed by Leap 71 in 2024; the new, much larger injector head designed for a 2 meganewton engine [Photo: Leap 71] For rocket engine developmentwith design and testing cycles measured in decadesthis is incredibly ambitious. But the timeline is achievable because of how Noyron works, Kayser says. Instead of manually iterating prototypes, Noyron treats all engines as variations of a unified DNA. And instead of having to be programmed, its edge lies in its ability to absorb decades of engineering knowledgeeven from obscure sources. For its new model, Leap 71 has not only incorporated learnings from its past tests (like data on cooling efficiency and material strain), but also vast amounts of new information, including digitized Soviet-era rocket manuals. We plug these into Noyron to refine our thermal models, Kayser says. The AI also learns from every test, creating a feedback loop that collapses design cycles and speeds up the development process. Noyron is not generative AI, but a computational model capable of producing deterministic results that are consistent every time. They are accurate according to the actual physical world and data. It understands. It doesnt just guess. Input the same specs, and it generates identical designs (try that with ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, or Sora). This is critical for aerospace reliability. Human engineers can see the rationale behind evey decision, Kayser says. Its not a black box. The challenges While Noyron can design a rocket engine in minutes, proving it works in the physical world is the real test. The companys ambitions collide with a stark reality: Even the most advanced AI cannot shortcut the laws of physics and bureaucracy. Securing test facilities for large engines is another hurdle. While smaller subsystems (like the 28 kN turbopump it wants to test this year) fit on existing stands, the 2,000 kN engines sheer size demands specialized infrastructure. The critical path here is test-stand availability, says Kayser. Current options are scarce and scattered around the world. Shipping engines abroad triggers export controls and delaysa problem compounded by geopolitical tensions. Moving a small engine from Germany to the U.K. already takes two to three weeks, Kayser tells me. Thats why Leap 71 is in talks with governments in Dubai, Singapore, and New Zealand to co-locate manufacturing and testing. Omans planned spaceport and New Zealands remote Twhaki facility, with its vast sound-dampening landscapes, are leading candidates. You cant just put a loud rocket engine next to a city, Kayser says. [Photo: Leap 71] The other challengethe actual production of the enginehas only just become possible, with Chinas new 3D-printing behemoths capable of producing parts that are 6.56-by-6.56-by-3.60 feet. In fact, this is what led Kayser and his partner, Leap 71 cofounder Josefine Lissner, to believe that making a Raptor-class engine was even possible. Called the EP-M2050 (and manufactured by Eplus3D), this colossal 3D printer uses 36 lasers to turn metallic powders into all the parts needed for next-gen rocket engines, including the nozzles, which will be much taller than your average human. [Image: Eplus3D] The printers are so new that quality assurance is still a question mark. Surface roughness, inherent to layered metal printing, disrupts fluid dynamics in cooling channels. Rough walls increase friction, altering fuel flow and thermal stability. Post-printing, parts undergo rigorous cleaning to remove residual metal powder, a task that until now has been handled by German firm Solukon because any impurities could cause an explosion, Kayser says. Material uniformity is another gamble. While printers handle alloys like copper-chromium-zirconium, ensuring consistent strength in massive componentsespecially under the violent vibrations and thermal swings of a firing engineremains unproven at this scale. The turbopump, which forces fuel into the combustion chamber at extreme pressures, epitomizes this challenge. Leap 71s 28 kN test rig validates principles for larger designs, but scaling amplifies risks. Turbines spin at supersonic speeds, generating centrifugal forces that warp metal. Rapid temperature shiftslike the -297°F cryogenic oxygen flow meeting 5,430°F exhaustthreaten cracks. Sealing, material fatigue, and transient conditions during start-up and shutdown are critical, Kayser explains. These are not just design problemsthey demand practical testing. Thats why the most unnerving hurdle of rocket development with this method is blind testing. Leap 71s aerospike engine, printed as a single copper block with internal cooling channels, could not be inspected internally before firing. We had to test blind, Kayser says. During trials, imperfect oxygen flow led to higher-than-expected temperatures. Although it all worked, it forced an early shutdown. Instead of risking additional runs, we cut the engine in half to analyze it, Kayser adds. Each failure feeds back into Noyrons models, but iteration consumes time and capital. For now, Leap 71s strategy hinges on incremental validationtesting subsystems like injectors and turbopumps individuallywhile lobbying governments to fund dedicated test facilities. The road ahead While these are big challenges, they are not insurmountable. The space industry knows it and, according to Kayser, wants a piece of the action. Everyone is looking for a way to leapfrog several years and catch up toor surpassMusk. Right now, Leap 71 collaborates with about 15 rocket startups. Kayser cant disclose their names under confidentiality agreements except for the Exploration Co., which is developing a European Moon lander. These partners lack SpaceXs vertical integration but want tailored engines without decade-long R&D. The engine is the most expensive and complicated part, Kayser emphasizes. Everyone else just buys them. But theres no supply. L3Harriswhich now owns the legendary rocket engine maker Aerojet Rocketdyne, makers of the Apollo engineswants to sell them, but it doesnt have anything comparable to the Raptor. Blue Origin makes and sells engines for the United Launch Alliance (ULA), but nobody else. The Russian NPO Energomash once dominated the global rocket engine market, supplying the RD-180 that powered ULA’s Atlas V rocket for decades. But RD-180s are now considered relicsand are under sanctions because of the Ukraine war, anyway. [Current design processes] are actually a problem for many of the micro launcher companies right now, Kayser says. So they have relatively small engines. And if they now want to play in the higher leagues, they basically have to embark on a completely new project, create a completely new rocket. The main differentiation between sizes is the engine, because the rest of the rocket is scalable. It’s harder to scale up the engine because it has completely different specifications and requirements. By using Noyron, Kayser says customers will be able t fine-tune to their own needs and input thrust, fuel type, and size to receive bespoke engine designs for every need. A startup might tweak an aerospike for methane fuel, while another firm could optimize for cost. Some engines will be small and some could be Raptor-class. We will know if it all works in just a couple of years, so we wont have to wait long: Kayser tells me that he and Lissner expect the first hot firing of the 200 kN XRA-2E5 aerospike engine in October 2026. Full-scale testing of the large 2,000 kN Raptor-class engine is tentatively planned to begin in 2028, with qualification for flight readiness stretching into 2029. If Leap 71 can pull it off, it will be phenomenal for humanity. A new process for rocket development will challenge Elon Musk at his own game and democratize the means to reach orbit for every country on the planet. Plus, if it happens, the dream of having Tony Starks J.A.R.V.I.S.-like AI to aid humans to build the future will be real. Kayser certainly believes in it: Were building a world where anyone can engineer complex machines.
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E-Commerce
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