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“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”This timeless insight from renowned 20th-century Austrian-America management consultant Peter Drucker is especially relevant for startup leaders who aim to build something that stands the test of time. In todays digital economy, global expansion has never been easieryet many tech founders are still focused on an initial geographical market. While starting with that thinking may seem practical, failing to embed a global mindset from the get-go can limit long-term potential. The reality is, startups that delay international thinking face tougher roadblocks laterscaling infrastructure, product-market fit, cultural nuances, and competition become bigger hurdles than necessary. The best startups anticipate these challenges early, positioning for global impact before opening a second office. Ive seen this firsthandsetting out to empower the world with your companys tools shouldnt just be a tagline; it should shape every product decision, hire, and expansion effort. For founders unsure where to start, heres what Ive learned about building global-first from day one. Establishing a clear vision A strong vision serves as a guiding light through the thousands of decisions a company must make. Startups that scale successfully have a clear and ambitious purpose that informs their strategy from day one. For example, at Canva, weve aimed to make our product accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. And while this seemed massively aspirational at our founding, it’s helped us avoid complacency, and feels more realistic as you focus on hitting incremental milestones. In the early days, you wont be able to build a solution for every conceivable challenge. Focusing on your most obvious core audience, or, finding a niche that isnt too restrictivetools for real estate, e-commerce, marketing, etc.can ensure the foundation to support future expansion. Balancing ambition with practicality isnt just a challengeits a necessity. Those who master it pave the way for sustainable, scalable global success. Solve a problem that transcends borders Startups often face resource constraints, making it tempting to prioritize short-term gains over long-term scalability. However, founders must resist the urge to build products solely for their initial market. Instead, they should develop solutions with modularity and adaptability in mind. I believe in focusing on solving a fundamental problemsimplifying graphic design was our strategic focuswhile ensuring that a platform can evolve for different industries, languages, and cultures. As your startup grows, maintaining flexibility becomes even more important. More than 10 years in, my company is still adapting to changing markets, shifting consumer expectations, and emerging trends. Balance focus and flexibility If you are an American startup founder, remember that 95.7% of the worlds population lives outside of the U.S., and many of them may fall into your target customer demographic. Therefore, the ability to refine strategies based on global opportunities is a crucial trait of long-term success. This goes far beyond just translating the interface. It involves integrating local payment methods, content, templates, SEO strategies, and much more. At Canva we refer to a helpful metaphor of cupcakes and icing. The cupcake is our core offering of design and workplace software. The icing is the way we build on top to suit different countries, languages, and industries. The most important thing is that the cupcake is made in a way that it can expand and serve all of these different needs. The power of passion and storytelling A founders passion is contagious. When a team believes in the companys mission, theyll go the extra mile to execute it. But passion alone isnt enoughit must be communicated effectively and proven in actions. Founders should meaningfully lift the hood on their own motivations as often as is appropriate, whether it’s the inspiration behind the product, the obstacles overcome, or the impact their product has had on customers worldwide. I know from experience that this can be extremely successful in uniting a workforce around a shared mission. This becomes even more critical as a company scales across borders and languages. Consistently telling and refining your story ensures alignment and momentum, especially as new markets open up. A globally resonant narrative makes it easier to expand into different regions while maintaining a strong brand identityand it starts at the top! Integrating emerging technologies Startups that embrace new technologies early gain a competitive edge. Staying ahead means keeping a pulse on industry shifts, making judgement calls as to whether a new technology aligns with your goals, and taking calculated risks. It also means building to adapt, and minimizing reliance on any single model or partner. Find ways to be pluggable with other tools and technologies so you can evolve your tech stack without starting from scratch. In Q3 2024, AI startups accounted for 31% of global venture funding, signaling an industry-wide shift toward automation and intelligent systems. AI is offering an unprecedented opportunity to grow efficiently, without adding costs. Companies that delay integrating these advancements risk falling behind. Regardless of a startups stage, a forward-thinking approach to technology is key to long-term success. Building internationally and for decades to come The most successful startups arent those that expand internationally just because they need to continue to grow sales; theyre the ones that embed a global mindset into their culture, strategy, and vision from the get-go. Founders must recognize that the world is their market, not just their home country. From my native Australia to America and everywhere in between, each market might benefit from a product in different ways. Wise founders will commit to exploring and embracing those differences by building adaptable prducts, crafting a resonant brand story, hiring teams with diverse perspectives, and leveraging technology to stay ahead. In the end, the startups that think globally from the beginning are the ones that dont just react to the futurethey create it, just as Drucker envisioned.
Category:
E-Commerce
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have just answered a question thats probably occurred to Lego fans for decades: What if I could instantly turn any idea into a Lego set?In a paper titled Generating Physically Stable and Buildable LEGO Designs from Text, published last week, six coauthors lay out an invention theyre calling LegoGPT. This generative AI model can take a text-based prompt, like an acoustic guitar with an hourglass shape, and determine all of the necessary Lego pieces needed to build that structure and how to assemble them. The LegoGPT demo and code is publicly available through the study, meaning that Lego hobbyists are free to try it out at home. Although outputs are currently limited to around 20 categories (including basic items like chairs, guitars, boats, trains, and cars), the researchers are working to expand the models capabilities into more complicated categories. Ultimately, they think a LegoGPT-type tool might serve as the basis for a variety of real-world tasks in architecture and product design.[Image: CMU]How LegoGPT predicts its next blockLegoGPT is a fine-tuned version of Metas LLaMA-3.2-Instruct-1B language learning model, which you can think of as an open source ChatGPT. To teach the model how to make Lego structures, researchers trained it using a database of 47,000 Lego structures and 28,000 unique 3D shapes, each with their own descriptive captions. Based on that vast swath of designs, LegoGPT is able to predict how to build a hypothetical object using only a text prompt.To do that, LegoGPT uses something called an autoregressive model, which is common among the most popular generative AI platforms.[Image: CMU]ChatGPT and Llama are autoregressive models because, given the string of words that theyve already outputted, they want to predict the next word, explains Ava Pun, one of the studys coauthors and a PhD student at CMU. So if you ask, What is the weather, and it predicts The weather today is, then it will try to predict the next word: sunny, rainy, and so on. With Lego GPT, instead of predicting the next word, it wants to predict the next brick.Once LegoGPT has created a 3D model it thinks will work, the LLM needs a way to make sure that the structure will actually be stable. According to Pun, that proved tricky, considering that existing simulators arent trained to understand the physics of a Lego brick. So, the CMU team built their own physics algorithm for LegoGPT to check its work.We developed a customized physics reasoning algorithm that accounts for all the physical forces that the bricks experience: for example, the downward force due to gravity, friction forces, and contact forces from the other bricks that theyre touching, Pun says. The algorithm constructs a force model for the structure and then evaluates the forces over the entire structure. If these physical forces sum to zero, that means the structure will not move around. LegoGPT automatically uses this algorithm to ensure that its found a viable solution. If any of the block its chosen is causing the model to turn out wobbly, the model will continue iterating until it lands on a new version that passes the test.[Image: CMU]A future real-world applicationSo far, researchers have used LegoGPT to create a range of structures, including vintage cars, steamships, and an electric guitar. Currently, the model only works on a 20x20x20 voxel grid, though Pun says the team is already planning on adding more brick types to the models database and expanding the grid resolution.For Lego fans who want to play around at home, the studys demo, available through a public portal, can turn simple prompts into a buildable 3D Lego model and a list of necessary parts. Because LegoGPT isnt made to be Lego-builder-facing, it doesnt produce step-by-step instructions, meaning the main challenge will be figuring out how to arrange the component parts in the right order. Pun says her team used Lego brick assembly to test AIs 3D-building capabilities because of the blocks accessibility. Eventually, though, they believe this concept could be applied to real-world scenarios, like helping architects draft buildings or designing custom furniture from a predefined set of parts. Todays generative AIs cant offer thatyou can generate a cool image or video of a chair, but the model doesnt know how these things can be made in the real world, Pun says. We wanted to address this challenge by integrating physical laws and assembly constraints into generative models and creating objects that function in reality.
Category:
E-Commerce
As summer nears and states like Texas are already facing extreme heat, tariffs are about to make cooling your home a lot more expensiveand experts dont expect prices to come down any time soon. The U.S. heating and cooling industry is highly dependent on overseas manufacturers, both for fully assembled units like air conditioners, heat pumps, and HVACs, and for the component parts used to build them. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, the U.S. imported more than $15 billion in AC units last year, mainly from Mexico and China. But according to Aydin Mehr, general manager of the HVAC contractor UniColorado, overseas manufacturers essentially halted production on new units when President Trump announced his tariff plans back in early April, leaving U.S. distributors with an extremely limited supply of heating and cooling appliances. Last week, the Trump administration paused its 145% tariff on China and replaced it with a 30% tariff in the meantime. Now, contractors are reeling from the whiplash of an uncertain manufacturing outlook and dealing with higher expenses across the board. Mehr says consumers can expect to face both delays and substantially higher prices on AC units and heat pumps this summer. The news comes as a record-breaking heatwave has already hit Texas and some parts of the Southwest, leaving the rest of the nation gearing up for a summer of extreme heat. Why is my AC getting more expensive? From a supply chain perspective, Mehr says, there are a few reasons why the heating and cooling industry has been hit particularly hard by the Trump tariffs. First, he says, around 60% to 70% of completed AC, HVAC, and heat pumps are imported to the U.S. Second, while there are a few manufacturers that do assemble AC units in the U.S., Mehr explains those plants still overwhelmingly rely on component parts shipped from China. And third, he describes the industry as very similar to car manufacturers, because instead of stockpiling units, distributors anticipate demand based on the season and build their inventories around that. In the case of an unexpected situation like new tariffs, there are no warehouses full of appliances that can be ready to ship. When the 145% [tariffs on China] first hit in April, manufacturers stopped producing and distributors stopped importing, Mehr says. No one was importing anything from China. No one was really trying to bypass it. Everyone just stopped to see what would happen. So because of that, there’s less units. Tariffs on Chinese imports may have dropped, but the 30% tariff still represents a major markup in an industry that relies heavily on Chinese goods, on top of the fact that distributors are working with a majorly diminished supply. Today, Mehr says, essentially all of the components that go into building an AC unit are more expensive, including steel, sheet metal, and refrigerant. He predicts that, in order to avoid excessive sticker shock, American distributors will slowly increase their prices to offset higher expenses, so that, by the hotter summer months, the full weight of the tariffs will be borne by the end customer. My expectation is that prices between now and the end of September will increase at least 10% to 15% at a minimum, on everything, Mehr says. So, if a repair costs 300 bucks today, it will probably cost 320 by then. In addition to increased prices on both cooling appliances and associated repairs, Mehr says, there will likely be fewer options for customers to choose from. Maybe you could pick from five things today, but probably in a month and a half, you can pick from two or three, Mehr says. He adds that its possible the situation might improve by the late summer, when demand dies down, but in the meantime, most distributors dont have much stock to offer. It’s not a great situation, because the industry isn’t really made to have tariffs announced on Twitter: One day on, one day off, one day 145%, the next day 30%it’s not really built to overcome that at all. Bad news for a hot summer This isnt the first time that the heating and cooling industry has been impacted by tariffs. Back in 2019, President Trump imposed a 10% to 25% tariff on Chinese imports, which had a similar ripple effect across the supply chaina situation that was only exacerbated by the pandemic. Since then, though, prices have only continued to rise rather than returning to pre-2019 levels. Mehr expects the hikes brought on by this most recent round of tariffs to become the new normal for distributors. If someone has had an upgrade or major repair in mind, they should act on it soon, because even if tariffs are eased, all of these existing price increases are not going away, Mehr says. Being in this industry, I have never seen prices of anything go back down. When manufacturers raise it, it rises forever. The price jumps come as climate change continues to drive extreme summer temperatures. Last summer, people around the world experienced 41 extra days of dangerous heat due to climate change, a trend that was both dangerous and expensive, given the mounting electricity bills needed to stay cool. And now, Texas is already experiencing a heat wave that has seen temperatures rise above 100 degrees in mid-May, causing electricity use to surge to a new May record of over 78,000 megawatts, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Per a recent study from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, residential electricity costs are forecast to average $784 this summer, up 6.2% since last year. Paired with rising appliance costs and maintenance fees, that means AC could become prohibitively expensive for many Americans. And this isn’t just uncomfortable: It can be deadly. Heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S., killing more people than hurricanes, floods, and tornados. It can also exacerbate health conditions, impact people’s sleep, and contribute to cognitive issues.
Category:
E-Commerce
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