The AI in PsAI-Op

The AI in PsAI-Op

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Image by BrianPenny from Pixabay

We’ve been going through some serious health issues lately – hence the long absence -so bear with us…

Relax. Data Centers are not going to drain all the water in communities, and gobble up all available electricity, unless you listen to the mainstream press, who’ve whipped us into a frenzy, and who takes money from China, who has – um – no skin in the game. Much.

More clickbait: “AI researcher Jacob Coxon (who) publicly (resigned) from Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI, saying “neither company is acting responsibly” and both are “gambling with our lives.” This alarming statement was followed by Anthropic alignment science lead Evan Hubinger saying that he personally estimated a greater than 10% chance of AI causing human extinction within the next decade. Days later, Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei posted a public essay calling for inter-lab and international cooperation to “pace” the AI frontier by including more outside observers, while articulating AI could potentially take over the entire internet in 6-12 months,” wrote Venture Beat. Read More...

No Is an Acronym

No Is an Acronym

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

With the spring holidays upon us, we decided to take a break from the usual tech distortion and hyperbole and since this is pitching season – and speaking of the holidays, next up is summer when investors kick back a bit to spend time with their families and/or take some vacation time, so we’re resurrecting an earlier column as a reminder, and we’ll get to why in a bit.

When you were a kid how many times did your parents say No! N-O, NO! More than once, we’d wager. How many times did they say, Yes, Y-E-S, YES!’ Bet I can count the number of times on one hand – zero. Never happened.

We did notice this at a fairly young age – long before we knew that there was such a word – that NO is an acronym. It was parent-code for ‘keep trying’ or ‘change the talking points,’ provided that you’d figured out the code. In some cases, we found that if we changed our approach or arguments, we could get a yes. Persistence pays. And the same can be said of investors. Investors hate to miss opportunities, so they don’t really like to say no. They like to hedge their bets and keep their options open. Sometimes they will give you a hard and fast No and mean it. Still, that said, things change, so one never knows if it truly is a hard no. Or they may suggest that they might be open to coming in next round, once you’ve proved your concept a bit. It’s that FOMO thing, in case they might have missed something the first time around, so they keep you warm and keep their options open. Read More...

The AI Gold Rush and the Erosion of the Founder/Investor Relationship

The AI Gold Rush and the Erosion of the Founder/Investor Relationship

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Jake Crowley of Crowley-Capital spoke at our Online Investor Insights last week and focused, in part, on how transactional the investment process has become. It wasn’t all that long ago that, when  when he was our investor guest at the event, David Arcara of Laconia Capital , asked, “How often do you hear that getting into bed with an investor is like a marriage? It’s not. If a marriage goes south, you can get a divorce. When you get into bed with an investor, there is no divorce. You are stuck with that investor for the life of your company.” He advised that founders get to know the investors before signing on the dotted line, and to do due diligence on them as well.

”When you meet a founder for the first time and they tell you they want a term sheet by Friday, I always respond with, “Really? Aren’t you at least mildly curious if I’m a complete A-hole or not?” commented Tom Lazay in a LinkedIn piece.

Times have changed and on the heels of Jake’s remarks, Micah Rosenbloom of Founder Collective made the same observation and offered his insights in LinkedIn post, commenting that “VC used to be a marriage between an investor and a founder. Now, for some, it’s a series of one-night stands;-) Read More...

BuzzFeed and the AI Buzz Kill Coming Soon?

BuzzFeed and the AI Buzz Kill Coming Soon?

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Here’s a cautionary tale for you.

Before Mark Zuckerberg became the darling of the age of social, there was young (inexperienced) BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, the Sam Altman of his day. When BuzzFeed launched two decades ago, it was the darling of the digital publishing world, “building its audience through listicles before expanding into a newsroom to challenge stalwarts like the New York Times,” noted MSN. Peretti was the genius who, as MarketWatch put it, “had seemingly cracked the code for social-media virality, and would soon become one of the first digital-media startups to achieve unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion.”

“Fast forward to 2026 and, for many, the result couldn’t have turned out worse. Gawker was forced to shut down under the weight of lawsuits, Vice Media filed for bankruptcy and is a shadow of itself, and BuzzFeed now warns it could go out of business entirely this year.” Read More...

Skating to Where the Puck Is Going, in the Age of AI

Skating to Where the Puck Is Going, in the Age of AI

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We were reading some funding newsletters and noticed that AI-based startups were raising millions and tens of millions, even when they were barely out of the gate. It’s those AI pheromones.

Those are the FOMA investor (and founders) who succumb to their limbic brains – think impulse and addictive behavior, meaning that behavior, for example, that drives you to obsessively check your email or social media. Or launch an AI-based startup, start vibe-coding, and you’re off to the races! It’s that dopamine hit. You’ve learned a lot about AI, how it works. After all, you have been training it – to take your job.

In case you missed it: AMAZON PRIME VIDEO BLOODBATH, @Tech Layoff Tracker reports. “2,847 employees got the email at 6:47 AM PST “Your role has been eliminated effective immediately” Badges dead by 7:15 AM. Slack access revoked mid-sentence Senior engineers who built the entire streaming infrastructure. Gone The team that shipped 40% faster last quarter using Claude for code generation. Eliminated Read More...

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.

Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.

“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.” Read More...

The Tech Bros and Dick Moves

The Tech Bros and Dick Moves

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Illustration courtesy of Pixabay

“About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party… and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same,” Jebmo posted some eight years ago in blog about Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side.

The bacchanals for all we know are ongoing and still consensual.

“…they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Read More...

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

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Image by NVD from Pixabay

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is  a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” Read More...

A Tech Issue that’s Getting Old Fast

A Tech Issue that’s Getting Old Fast

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Bill Gates

With all the focus on AI these days, we tend to forget about that other tech obsession: youth.

Never mind the plastic surgeries or as The Wall Street Journal reports, “To combat fears of aging out of the workforce, men in tech are splurging on face-lifts, neck lifts and eyelid lifts, say plastic surgeons…Tech is a young person’s game.”

Unless you look at the fact: Read More...

The Real Startup Danger: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.

The Real Startup Danger: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.

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Image by Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay

You’ve heard it a million times, but with the various AI assistants now available, has that changed?  It’s now much easier and affordable to found a startup, that’s for sure. Thanks to vibe coding and the like, you don’t even need a tech team or a team at all, or so it would seem.

Partner differences is one of the big reasons why startups fail. The new trend in the founding team? Having your AI as your co-founder.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham gave an excellent masterclass a while back on why most startups quietly fail. While the tech landscape has changed considerably since he gave the talk, the basic advice hasn’t. Read More...