• Sequoia partner Jess Lee shared some tips for evaluating partners and employees.
• Lee said her system measures someone’s emotional, intellectual, political, and judgmental ability.
• No one is good at all of them, she said, so it’s all about finding people who complement each other.

The world’s top leaders often say they can read people better than anyone else — a trait that has long intrigued psychologists and management experts.

Some call it an art, others say it’s a science.

Sequoia partner Jess Lee — a Silicon Valley veteran who previously worked at Google and Yahoo, and founded the e-commerce company Polyvore, which Yahoo acquired for $200 million in 2015 — shared some of her secrets on a recent episode of “The Library of Minds” podcast.

Lee said she now relies on a process to evaluate workers beyond quantifiable metrics, which she learned from her Sequoia colleague Shawn Maguire. He told her there are four components he uses to evaluate people’s capabilities.

“It’s this framework of EQ and IQ, which everyone knows, emotional intelligence and intellectual intelligence,” she said. “Then he added PQ, political quotient, and JQ, judgment quotient.”

EQ, or emotional quotient, measures how good someone is with people one-on-one, she said. It measures emotional intelligence, social skills, and empathy. IQ, or intellectual quotient, measures someone’s problem-solving skills and logic. These are both well-known metrics in business and other fields.

PQ, or political quotient, meanwhile, measures how good someone is at interacting with systems of people that govern things, she said. The judgment quotient measures an individual’s decision-making capabilities.

Lee said no one is good at all of these things. It’s possible to have a high EQ but a low PQ within a given organization, she said. A person can be technically competent but struggle to assess where to apply their skills to maximize their long-term success.

“I look for very spiky people who complement each other,” she said.

Some of what she learned about evaluating people came from her father, who worked for Li Ka-shing, a Hong Kong tycoon whose net worth tops $41 billion, according to Forbes.

Her father’s work stories always revolved around people, Lee said.

“He kind of taught me that all problems are people problems. All solutions are people problems,” she said.

Even now, the “primary lens” she uses to “view the world, to figure out teams, to invest” is through people, she said.

• After I gave birth, I weighed 80 pounds more than I did before I got pregnant.
• I quickly became fixated on exercising and the food I was eating.
• Looking back, I know my weight-loss goals distracted me from enjoying time with my newborn.

I gained exactly 100 pounds during my pregnancy. Between indulging in every craving, stress eating, and being on bed rest at the end, I didn’t stand a chance.

I was surprised by the amount of additional weight I still had on me after giving birth. During my pregnancy, I could tell I was gaining weight, but I really thought the majority of it was what they call “baby weight.” People told me to eat anything I wanted, and I did.

I ended up having 80 pounds left of baby weight after giving birth. I felt completely overwhelmed by that.

Before my pregnancy, I maintained the same weight for many years, never really fluctuating by more than ten pounds, give or take. If my pants started getting tight, I would exercise more and watch what I ate until my pants felt good again. Committing to losing 10 pounds is a lot different from wanting to lose 80, so my approach became an obsessive panic over losing the weight.

I started with walking and eating healthier, but I took it too far

Since I had a C-section, I was in a lot of pain, but the nurses told me the best thing I could do to recover was walk. So that’s what I did, and I really committed to it. I would take my son in his stroller and my dog for at least two to three long walks a day, covering about two miles each time, which is significant while you are still recovering.

At home, if I had to go up or down the stairs for something, I would walk up and down the stairs a few extra times to burn a few more calories. The more exasperated I became with my weight gain, the more I found ways to over-exercise.

I also became fixated on finding ways to eat fewer calories by eating mostly vegetables and lean protein. My favorite lunches at the time were tuna on crackers and black bean soup. For dinner, I often ate cabbage “steak” with Sriracha.

Looking back, I know now that I was putting an unnecessary amount of pressure on myself and rushing my weight loss in an emotionally and physically unhealthy way. At the time, I was in a rush to feel like myself again.

The pressure I put on myself was a distraction from my baby

I wish that I had been more solely focused on enjoying my son as an infant instead of putting so much effort into dieting and exercise. A more self-loving version of myself would have been forgiving in regard to the weight gain and just allowed the weight to come off in time.

Thinking back, I often wonder if I had just embraced playing with my son all day, then that might have been enough activity to help me lose the weight. While it would have likely taken longer, I would have had a huge stressor removed from my life, which I imagine would have helped me out a lot as a new mom.

I simply should have taken better care of my body during my pregnancy

For a long time, I thought about having another baby and doing everything the right way the second time around, such as maintaining my normal healthy habits of daily movement and balanced meals during my pregnancy. If I could do it all over again, that’s what I would do.

Ultimately, the effect my pregnancy weight gain had on me negatively affected my early days of motherhood. On top of the normal emotions and exhaustion from life with a newborn, I was beating myself up for letting my body go, and then I punished myself with an aggressive approach to weight loss.

I should have been celebrating my body for giving me my son and focusing on soaking up every moment with him.

By the time my son was 2, I had lost most of the weight

I was mostly happy with my body and with myself for working so hard to lose the weight, but once I met my goal and wasn’t worrying so much about it, I started to see what I had missed out on. By the time I felt okay enough with my body, my son wasn’t a baby anymore. I took the realization as a lesson and began to run around more with my son more and make cupcakes and other baked treats with him on the weekends.

My relationship with exercise and food eventually returned to my pre-pregnancy levels again, and it gave me the time and energy to appreciate my son. He really did grow up so fast, and I’m sorry that I didn’t realize enjoying him as a baby was the most important thing at the time.

• Bruce Springsteen met Patti Scialfa at a New Jersey rock club, the Stone Pony, in the ’80s.
• Scialfa joined Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984, and the two got married in 1991.
• Here’s what we know about their relationship.

The new Bruce Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” portrays The Boss as a tortured genius and unreliable lover — and while that may have been true in the early ’80s, the real-life Springsteen has been happily married for over three decades.

Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, both grew up in New Jersey. The pair first spoke on the phone when he was 21 and she was 17, according to Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, “Born to Run.” She answered a newspaper ad seeking background singers for Springsteen’s band, but he told her there was too much traveling involved for a high schooler.

After a few more chance meetings over the years, in 1984, Springsteen saw Scialfa perform at the Stone Pony, a now-famous rock club in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She sang the Exciters’ hit “Tell Him,” and Springsteen said he “fell in love” with her voice.

“We found ourselves standing in a buzzing crowd at the back bar as I introduced myself to her,” he wrote, “and the rest was a long, winding semi-courtship.”

Scialfa joined Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984

After hearing her sing, Springsteen and Scialfa continued to meet up semi-regularly at the Stone Pony “for a cocktail and a dance,” he wrote.

While preparing for the “Born in the USA” tour, Springsteen invited Scialfa to join his live ensemble as a backing vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist.

Scialfa made her onstage debut with the E Street Band on June 29, 1984, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The tour’s namesake album, which quickly became a smash hit and was eventually certified diamond, had been released just a few weeks earlier.

“Through Patti’s addition, I wanted to accomplish two things. One, I wanted to improve our musicality,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography. “I wanted dependable, well-sung harmony vocals.”

“Two, I wanted my band to reflect my evolving audience, an audience that was becoming increasingly grown-up and whose lives were about men and women,” he added.

Scialfa remains an active member of the E Street Band to this day.

Springsteen met his first wife, Julianne Phillips, that same year

Springsteen and Phillips were reportedly introduced by their agents in October 1984. He was 35, and she was 24. “We hit it off and began seeing each other regularly,” Springsteen wrote.

Springsteen and Phillips had a whirlwind romance and married in 1985, in Phillips’ hometown of Lake Oswego, Oregon.

At the time, Phillips was a working model and aspiring actor, mostly appearing in music videos and made-for-TV movies.

Despite what Springsteen called a “press feeding frenzy,” the couple kept the details of their relationship relatively private. In his autobiography, Springsteen said he was plagued with fear that he couldn’t make it past two or three years with a partner, since he’d never done it before.

“Following our wedding I was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks,” he wrote. “I was scared, but I did not want to scare the wits out of my young bride. It was the wrong way to handle it and created a psychological distance at just the moment I was trying to let someone into my life.”

Springsteen and Scialfa fell in love while he was still married to Phillips

Springsteen’s bond with Scialfa grew stronger during the 1988 “Tunnel of Love Express” tour, performing songs he wrote about his ambivalent and fearful experience as a husband.

“Patti was a musician, was close to my age, had seen me on the road in all of my many guises and viewed me with a knowing eye,” Springsteen wrote in “Born to Run.” “She knew I was no white knight (perhaps a dark gray knight at best), and I never felt the need to pretend around her. Julie had never asked me to either; I just did.”

Their friendship turned into a romance when his wife was away filming on location, leaving him alone in New Jersey. He and Scialfa met up, as Springsteen said, “under my ostensible excuse of working on our ‘duets.'”

“There came a moment when I looked at Patti and saw something different, something new, something I’d missed and hadn’t experienced before,” he wrote. “In my life, Patti is a singularity. So, it started. At first, I told myself it was just ‘a thing.’ It wasn’t. It was the thing.”

Springsteen said he broke the news to Phillips as soon as he came to grips with the depth of his feelings for Scialfa, and they quietly separated. He added that he regretted how he handled their split.

“I placed her in a terribly difficult position for a young girl and I failed her as a husband and partner,” he wrote of Phillips.

Phillips filed for divorce in August 1988, citing irreconcilable differences.

Springsteen and Scialfa have been married since 1991 and share three children

Springsteen and Scialfa moved in together after finishing the “Tunnel of Love” tour in August 1988, eventually settling in California. At first, Springsteen struggled with avoidant habits and wrote that Scialfa was “patient… to a point.”

The couple fought often, and eventually, Scialfa “threw down the gauntlet and laid it out. Stay or go.”

Though he was tempted to retreat to solitude, Springsteen said he couldn’t bear to “throw away the best thing, the best woman, I’d ever known.”

“I stayed,” he wrote. “It was the sanest decision of my life.”

Springsteen and Scialfa welcomed their first child, Evan James, in 1990. They got married the following year at their estate in Beverly Hills.

Their only daughter, Jessica Rae, was born in December 1991. She would go on to become a professional equestrian, winning a silver medal in the team jumping competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 2021.

The couple welcomed their youngest child, Samuel Ryan, in January 1994. He works as a firefighter in New Jersey.

In 2022, Springsteen and Scialfa became first-time grandparents when Samuel welcomed a daughter with his partner.

Springsteen has also credited Scialfa with teaching him to be a more present parent, instead of prioritizing work.

“We created a life and a love fit for a couple of emotional outlaws,” Springsteen wrote of his wife. “That similarity bound and binds us very close.”

• As more employees return to the office, some are being met with limited space — and bedbugs.
• While open floorplans are now in style, people used to sit in small cubicles.
• Offices used to have typing pools with dozens of typewriters. In 2025, we all have laptops.

Thanks to the popularity of shows like “Mad Men” and “Masters of Sex,” people love to see what offices have looked like over the past century … often through dense clouds of cigarette smoke.

Before email, Teams calls, and Slack, messengers wearing roller skates passed notes between office workers, while laptops were preceded by typewriters, calculators, and stacks of paper.

And while some office complexes for major firms today — think Nvidia’s futuristic office in Santa Clara or Apple’s Cupertino headquarters — feature vast atriums filled with trees or outdoor amenities like swimming pools and volleyball courts, some 20th-century office workers were lucky if they got a window.

These vintage photos of offices reveal how far companies have come in regard to technology, interior design, and even safety.

See what your office might have looked like decades ago.

One glaring difference between offices now and in 1940? Cigarettes were everywhere.

When Gallup polled US adults in 1944, 41% said they smoked — compare that to around 11% of US adults who smoked in 2022, per the CDC.

As such, in the mid-20th century, smoking was common everywhere, from grocery stores to homes to workplaces.

Technically, there are still some states where it’s legal to smoke inside an office — the only federal bans on smoking are on planes or in federal buildings.

However, you’d be hard-pressed to find an office building that allows people to light up at their desks.

Pipes were common sights as well. Today, offices have designated places outside for smoking.

The popularity of the traditional tobacco pipe has been steadily decreasing since the ’90s, though they’re making a comeback with hipsters, The Times of London reported in 2024.

Before every desk had a computer, there was more space to spread materials out.

This image of a design office in 1935 is a far cry from the tech-heavy workplaces of 2025.

An open-plan office used to look a little different.

Now, an open-floor office typically has giant tables with multiple stations at it, not individual desks.

Before electronic stock tickers made it possible to see the stock market in real time, employees printed out the news on ticker tape to distribute.

The last ticker tape machine was released in 1960 — they were first invented by Thomas Edison in the late 1800s.

Ticker tape has two legacies that live on in 2018. First, the stock prices running along the bottom of your TV screen are still called stock tickers. And second, ticker tape was given a second life when New Yorkers discovered that ticker tape made great confetti.

Ticker-tape parades still happen, but shredded paper is used instead.

It was a lot harder to transcribe calls back then.

This secretary appears to be writing down a conversation she’s having with someone on the phone, which she is listening to using a proto-speakerphone device.

Today, there are apps that can record a phone conversation, and headphones mean you don’t need to broadcast the conversation to everyone around you.

That telephone amplifier is also obsolete — most phones now have built-in speakerphones.

As technology advanced, every desk became equipped with its own typewriter.

The typewriter was invented in 1867 but didn’t become popular until a couple of decades later, during the Industrial Revolution. It became people’s job to record facts and figures, and the typewriter was the easiest way to do that.

They stayed popular for over 100 years.

Bookkeepers used a combination of computers, typewriters, and calculators.

If you take a closer look, you might notice that all these bookkeepers are women, a trend that’s still prevalent.

In 2022, 86.7% of bookkeepers were women, according to Data USA, which cited US Census Bureau data, so maybe not everything has changed.

When typewriters became obsolete, offices implemented computers and cubicles, which gave people a little privacy.

Cubicles first entered our lives in 1968, when they were invented by Robert Propst, who wanted to improve upon the typical open bullpen office. He thought cubicles would increase productivity and give workers privacy.

At first, cubicles flopped. But when companies realized that using cubicles would increase the number of people that could be crammed into a space, they really took off. The ’80s and ’90s were a booming time for cubicles.

Now, many offices have abandoned them in favor of the original open office space — just take a look at the offices of Shopify, DropBox, or even Business Insider.

However, there has been a more recent push to bring cubicles back.

Before email and Slack, some offices communicated via messengers who were given roller skates to speed up the process.

Probably due to violating dozens of workplace safety protocols, and the advent of computers, roller skating in the office is a thing of the past.

This office had a designated “tea lady” who would walk around providing refreshments.

Some offices still offer amazing perks.

Now, everything is digital and located in the cloud. But for years, all important records had to have physical copies.

This machine handled 80 individual record cards a minute — now, data can be uploaded to the cloud in seconds.

Phone booths seem so old-fashioned today.

These transparent ones still look cool, to be clear.

So do typewriters.

Maybe they’ll come back, though. As Business Insider’s Hannah Towey pointed out in 2021, physical media objects like records, typewriters, and film cameras were all in high demand.

Note the ashtray, rotary phone, and old-fashioned radio — it’s a far cry from what your typical desk looks like now.

It’s impossible to overstate just how different our workspaces used to be just 30 years ago.

It makes you wonder: How different will they be 10, 15, or 30 years from now?

• Year-over-year inflation rose to 3.0% in September from 2.9%, just below the forecast.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t published other key data releases during the government shutdown.
• The Federal Reserve’s next rate decision, informed by data like inflation, is next week.

The year-over-year inflation rate heated up to 3.0% in September, back to where it stood in January.

Economists expected last month’s rate to be 3.1% after an uptick to 2.9% in August.

Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, also increased 3% over the year in September. It was also expected to be 3.1%, which would have matched rates in July and August.

Core CPI increased 0.2% over the month between August and September, short of the 0.3% forecast that would have matched July and August’s rates.

CPI increased 0.3% over the month between August and September, below the 0.4% forecast and the previous rate.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics was supposed to publish September’s consumer price index report on October 15, but the release was delayed when the government shut down on October 1. The shutdown, which is now the second-longest in US history, has affected the compensation and employment of many federal workers and some agencies’ operations.

“The delayed September CPI print showed slight stubbornness, primarily driven by goods inflation, with services inflation indicating signs of moderating,” Ryan Weldon, investment director and portfolio manager at IFM Investors, said.

BLS said the price of gas was the biggest factor in the monthly rise. That rose 4.1% over the month, way above the previous 1.9% increase. However, the gas index fell 0.5% over the year.

The food index rose 3.1% year over year. It rose 0.2% over the month, less than the previous 0.5% increase. Beef and veal prices rose 1.2% over the month but 14.7% over the year, the largest year-over-year rise since March 2022.

The BLS’s jobs report wasn’t published earlier this month due to the shutdown and hasn’t been rescheduled. The Fed is meeting on October 28 and October 29 to discuss rates, and given the lack of official data, they may use private data releases and previous jobs reports to understand how the labor market has been performing.

“In our view, the Fed is increasingly focused on supporting the labor market, especially as inflation risks appear transitory and tariff-driven,” a note from global financial services company Raymond James before the latest CPI report said.

Large companies and small businesses have been figuring out whether to increase prices, reduce head count, and make other business changes due to tariffs and economic uncertainty.

While the full picture of the job market remains murky, today’s CPI report at least gives Fed members some insight into prices. The Social Security Administration will also be able to use the fresh inflation figures to calculate and announce the annual cost-of-living adjustment for benefits.

The Fed cut rates for the first time this year in September, providing some relief to Americans’ wallets, and is expected to make another rate cut. CME FedWatch showed an overwhelming probability of a 25-basis-point cut next week and a slim chance that the range will be held steady.

With inflation ticking up less than expected and a soft job market, the Fed will likely cut rates again.

“This will be framed as an insurance cut, with hopes that by December the shutdown is over and the Fed has a clearer read on jobs,” Olu Sonola, the head of US economic research at Fitch Ratings, said.

Median inflation expectations for one year ahead increased for the third straight time in a New York Fed survey, rising from 3.2% in August to 3.4% in September.

• AI, AI, AI.
• Fried chicken, fried chicken, fried chicken.
• Which one matters more to you?

While the tech and finance world continues to debate whether we’re in an AI bubble, one thing is for sure: People love AI!

For proof, like no further than Apple’s App Store, where OpenAI’s ChatGPT app and its Sora video spinoff are atop the “free app” rankings, and …

Whoops? So maybe we love AI, but we love fried chicken more?

Answer: We love — or are at least interested in — both things. But the reason Dave’s Hot Chicken is currently at the top of App Store rankings — above Sora and ChatGPT — is really simple: This week, the fast food chain, which counted Drake as an early investor, gave away free sandwiches to anyone who used the app to order the sandwiches.

Cue lots of downloads, lots of press coverage, and funny scenes like this.

I’m not personally a big Dave’s fan. But at least one of my kids loves it, so I’ve been spending a lot of money on the hot chicken chain. I’m not saying that’s the reason the company was sold in a deal that valued it at $1 billion earlier this year. But it didn’t hurt?

But this is not a story about my discretionary spending. It’s really a story about how Apple’s App Store rankings work. Because while it’s reasonable to think that the rankings are measuring sheer popularity, that’s not the case: They are generally measuring recent velocity of downloads. (Apple doesn’t disclose its formula publicly, but developers have been making informed guesses about this for some time.)

So a hot new app that’s getting a flurry of downloads will rocket to the top — but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay there.

If you see a top app stay at the top of the app rankings over an extended period of time — like ChatGPT has — then you’re likely seeing an app that has a lot of new downloads and a lot of overall downloads. That is a truly popular app.

But it also means you should exercise caution when a buzzy new app comes out and rockets to the top of the charts, as Sora has done in recent weeks.

Maybe that indicates that lots of people are using Sora all the time. But it could also mean that a lot of people are hearing about Sora — which is still technically limited to users who have invites — and are checking it out.

Whether they’re sticking around is another matter, and we won’t know about that for a while.