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Category: List Archive

An Archive of the SOS Email Lists.

Zombie VCs: the Era of the Walking Dead Funds

Zombie VCs: the Era of the Walking Dead Funds

Image by Izzy Loney from Pixabay

VCs ask founders a lot of questions. It’s a big part of their job. They’re deploying other people’s money and just as founders have an obligation to make money for their investors, venture firms have an obligation to bring preferably significant returns to theirs.

Founders need to ask investors questions, too. The most important one (or two): are you still deploying funds/when was the last time you made an investment?

PitchBook recently reported that the number of VCs in US deals peaked at 18,504 in 2021 and fell to 9,966 last year. Read More...

The Report from the Trenches

The Report from the Trenches

 Before we moved into tech, we worked in the music business, for one of the major labels. One year, we were invited to attend the Music Hall of Fame Awards.

Once there, we were escorted to the wrong table. We made it clear to the usher that we worked at BMG, not BMI, but what do we know? So, we were seated among total strangers, all of whom ignored us. We introduced ourself to the little old man and his wife seated next to us, who were also being ignored.

His name was Hy Zaret, one of the evening’s inductees, who was being honored for a song he’d written. One single song. Must have been some song, we figured, so we asked him what the title was. Read More...

THIMK!

THIMK!

 That’s not a typo. It was a Mad magazine cover – Mad having been the Onion or Babylon Bee of its day – and according to dpgreatlife, “Thimk” was a poke at Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who was once at NCR and later IBM. Watson’s simple mantra was “Think.”

The Atlantic recently ran a piece entitled THE RISE OF TECHNO-AUTHORITARIANISM Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.

In the relatively early days of Web 2, we wrote an editorial warning that the age of social was creating companies with greater populations than have most countries on the planet. In fact, we called them as nation-states, and warned back then that they could  become more powerful than any government on the planet. It might have taken them 10+ years, but it seems at least the Atlantic seems to be catching on. Read More...

Is Software Trying to Take Too Big a Bite Out of the World?

Is Software Trying to Take Too Big a Bite Out of the World?

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Valentine’s Day just passed, and as we know, at least some humans always seem to go looking for love in all the wrong places. Thank heavens for AI hitting the love space, where people finally can meet someone literally tailor-made for them, but you know love: is anything really as it appears?

This just in:  Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show “The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than the typical app, Gizmodo reported. “According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfriends harvest shockingly personal information, and almost all of them sell or share the data they collect.

“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends,” said Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher. “Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.” Read More...

Investor Winter: Lessons from Nature

Investor Winter: Lessons from Nature

Ten months ago, a feral cat showed up in our backyard. He’s a young cat: Harry can’t be more than a few years old, doesn’t meow like felines who are raised by humans. A veterinarian member of the family told us it’s a sign that he’s been feral since birth.

We have no idea where Harry calls home. When we first spotted him in Spring, we started leaving him food. Despite the fact that he’s shown up almost daily since, he hasn’t warmed up to us at all. He shows up for food at least twice a day – very early morning and evening – but always keeps his distance.

And won’t eat any processed food, mind you: he knows better. And hisses at us if – heaven forfend! – we don’t bugger off and give him his space while he’s dining. Read More...

Tech’s New Blame Game

Tech’s New Blame Game

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Tech is fond of its mantras, especially in Silicon Valley, and the latest seems to be, ‘It’s You, Not Us.”

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached, TechCrunch reported. In December, 23andMe admitted that hackers had stolen the genetic and ancestry data of 6.9 million users, nearly half of all its customers.” Since users “had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature, an optional feature allows customers to automatically share some of their data with people who are considered their relatives on the platform,” the hackers were able to scrape personal data from another 6.9 million customers whose accounts were not directly hacked.

The original hack had been to some 14,000 accounts. Read More...

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

It was Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures who coined the term ‘unicorn.’ Now she has taken a fresh look: Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later. A lot changes in ten years, especially in tech.

As Lee observed, ten years ago, the majority of unicorns were consumer focused. Now, the pendulum has swung hard to enterprise, and the herd is about to be thinned – for now -, as many a so-called unicorn is a ‘papercorn.’ Capital efficiency has dropped precipitously, Silicon Valley is no longer the unicorn hub (“The Bay Area is still the largest unicorn pasture, but lost a lot of ground”). She also predicts that AI will be a superunicorn.

Facebook was the standout beast in 2013, but our question is, how good is a unicorn’s eyesight? One would think or at least hope that unicorns are visionaries in some way (preferably in a good way), but the two terms are hardly interchangeable. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs certainly was that square peg in the round hole who was crazy enough to think that he could change the world – in a good way – and he did. The iPod, the iPhone. The NeXt cube, that changed computers forever. Jobs was no doubt a visionary, and a design genius. Read More...

23 Memorable People and Peccadillos of Tech in ’23 – Part Two

23 Memorable People and Peccadillos of Tech in ’23 – Part Two

Photo by alexandru vicol on Unsplash

As we were saying last week, with the year drawing to a close, here are our final dozen picks for the people and peccadillos in a very odd year.

While not everything mentioned in these points might not necessarily have started this year, it was a year when they’ve certainly been ramped up and time to take a closer look. In no particular order:

Climate change. Fact: the climate has been changing since long before mankind came along and started exploiting fossil fuels, but never underestimate hubris. Or (dare we say it?) possible manipulation. Read More...

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay

Remember all the dumb things you did when you were 23 and thought you knew everything? No, the year wasn’t all bad. Then again, when you were 23, you had your moments, too…

We’ve made our list and checked it twice, so without further ado, the people and peccadillos of the year that’s coming to an end, but the real question is, in many cases, when – and where – does it stop?

  1. Sam Bankman-Fried. He held our attention for quite a spell, as tales of his exploits were revealed: defrauding investors left and right and spending money like it grew on trees. Which it did for him: shake the tree and there were even more funds in the FTX coffers. The one-time crypto king believed that his true strength was in his hair and that those carefully unkempt locks made all the difference in his meteoric rise. Maybe they did for a spell, but speaking of locks, fraud is fraud and the former wunderkind is heading to prison for an even longer spell.
  2. The new cryminal class. SBF tops long list of crypto hot shots facing legal reckoning. “His case was far from the first — or last — time that crypto founders and executives found themselves in legal hot water related to their digital-asset activities,” the Toronto Sun pointed out. There was also Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon; Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of Celsius Network; Su Zhu, co-founder of the bankrupt Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and Thomas Smith, Kyle Nagy, and Braden Karony — the people behind the crypto token SafeMoon, who were accused by federal prosecutors of using millions in investors’ funds to buy luxury homes and McClaren sports cars. When you can live that large is so short an amount of time, chances are there’s a small cell in your future.

Biometrics collection is certainly growing. Read More...

The Current Climate and Other Changes

The Current Climate and Other Changes

We sometimes like to look at various parts of tech and do the math. We know that climate change and reducing the carbon footprint is a high priority for the planet, because Al Gore warned us in 2009 that “the North Pole will be ice-free in the summer by 2013 because of man-made global warming.” According to life-long politician/non-scientist Gore, carbon emissions are the culprit and note to self: that didn’t happen. Which may have contributed to the president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber’s, claim that “there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C,” as The Guardian reported.

There isn’t even a consensus among scientists that carbon emissions/fossil fuels are a problem (Putting the ‘con’ in consensus; Not only is there no 97 per cent consensus among climate scientists, many misunderstand core issues).

If the billionaires who flew to the Cop28 are so concerned about carbon emissions and the seas rising, why did they all fly to the summit on private jets and own beachfront properties? In fact, “Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht Generates 447 Times the Yearly Carbon Emissions of Average US Household,” said Gulf Insider. And “the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged (in 2007, just after he won the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, his documentary about the coming climate ‘disaster’) that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president’s 20-room home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours,” ABC News reported. Read More...