Fortune

Planning your will could make or break your family after your death, warns?Berkshire Hathaway?CEO and legendary investor Warren Buffett. “Father time always wins. But he can be fickle,” the 94-year-old billionaire?noted?in an unusually candid letter. Conversations addressing one’s own death can be a difficult subject to broach. The logistics of what happens to our money and belongings after can be an equally dreaded task. But ahead of the $84 trillion?Great Wealth Transfer, Buffett asserts that there’s no sense in delaying the uncomfortable and risking future conflicts down the line. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e_rF2HqB

Legal tech startup Robin AI has raised $61.5 million to date. The company was founded in 2019 by Richard Robinson, a former lawyer, and James Clough, a former machine learning researcher. Robin doesn’t just sell companies a particular piece of technology. Instead, it sells legal services to large corporations—with some of those services delivered automatically through AI software, and some of those services delivered by human lawyers and paralegals on Robin’s payroll, who are assisted by technology, including AI, that Robin has developed. “It’s a combination of doing things that the models are currently capable of, but also investing in what is just out of reach today, and then using humans in the loop to bridge the capability gap,” Robinson tells Fortune. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gQdqGD2z

Long before he was an NFL star and a three-time Super Bowl champion, Julian Edelman was a middle-schooler who got in trouble with his dad for bringing home a bad report card.?https://lnkd.in/eeRBvhqp When Edelman was about 13, he got a C on his report card. To whip him into shape, Edelman’s father took him to see John Arrillaga, the Bay Area real estate mogul who made a fortune developing the farmland surrounding Silicon Valley into office space. Arrillaga gave the young Edelman a talking-to and asked him an unexpected question. “[W]e went into this big old office, [of] this very intimidating, large man who owns the world in the Bay Area. And he goes, ‘Do you make your bed?’” Edelman told?Fortune?in an exclusive interview. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/eeRBvhqp

Sharon Mandell’s full-time role is chief information officer at Juniper Networks. But she says the hardest job she’s ever had is her side hustle: teaching. For the past three years, Mandell has taught a graduate class in information systems at the University of San Francisco for people who work as individual contributors in IT departments but aspire to management roles, including CIO. Mandell teaches students that successful tech leaders must also think strategically. Key questions they need to ask themselves and navigate include: How can an IT leader work with business partners to develop technology? What’s needed from a budgeting perspective? What kind of projects get approved? And once approved, in what order should the various elements of the work be done? Read more: https://lnkd.in/emWqQNYR

Consumers have moved from shopping exclusively in brick-and-mortar stores, to online, and more recently to spending billions annually through mobile apps. Now, consumers are changing their shopping habits again. Walmart calls the new reality “adaptive retail,” which is more about personalized shopping, an expectation that retailers will anticipate what consumers want before they decide themselves, and shoppers buying specific products based on what they see influencers pitching on social media. This evolution of consumer thinking has led Walmart to invest in newer technologies, including generative artificial intelligence. “Shopping is not just a blend of core retail and e-commerce,” says Hari Vasudev, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Walmart U.S. “It’s really a much more fluid experience.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eEWDJ5d8

Fortune #BrainstormDesign is excited to welcome Teman Evans, Global Chief of Design at General Mills, to our conference on Dec. 5. See our full list of speakers here ?? https://lnkd.in/dpgHXh5P

Yang Lu’s initial interest in technology began when she emigrated to the U.S. from China at the age of 12 and didn’t speak a single word of English. “Technology was a big equalizer for me,” she says. “When I walked into a computer science and programming course in high school, nobody knew the language.” It gave Lu an opportunity to learn something new along with her peers. She joined luxury giant Tapestry eight years ago, partly to steer a technology transformation the company was undergoing as a result of a string of acquisitions, including the 2015 purchase of Stuart Weitzman, and that of Kate Spade two years later. Tapestry worked quickly to consolidate and harmonize all technology, across all brands, and for nearly all geographies, excluding China. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eH5cq_tm

During the pandemic, an exodus of professionals left their urban jungle flats for sprawling suburban homes in more scenic rural areas—and now, despite cities bouncing back and offices reopening, they’d rather commute for hours on end on a train (or plane) than give up their newfound life on the outskirts. Recent research by Trainline shows that the number of people in the U.K. spending more than three hours getting to work and back—otherwise known as “super-commuting”—has doubled since before the pandemic. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ea9w8_FP

The Offseason, a docuseries—made by National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) forward Midge Purce and Alexis Ohanian Sr.’s VC firm Seven Seven Six 7??7??6??—follows a Miami house full of NWSL players in their offseason.?https://lnkd.in/esQHrx7J Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six backed The Offseason, the final episode of which just dropped last week. “The world of sports media has been by and for men, for 100 years anyway,” said Ohanian. “This was a chance to put on display stars from this league, and tell a story that’s never been told before.” Ohanian, the founding principal owner of NWSL expansion team Angel City FC and still an investor in the club, believes women’s sports can kick back venture-scale returns, in part because of just how under-invested in the space is. There’s a chance to build new infrastructure, he says. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/esQHrx7J

Fortune #BrainstormAI is excited to welcome Elizabeth Reid, VP of search at Google to our conference on Dec. 9–10. See our full list of speakers here ?? https://lnkd.in/dHAADaPV