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Author: Bonnie

The Three E’s of Entrepreneurship

The Three E’s of Entrepreneurship

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Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

We’ve said it before and given what’s going on with the forensics that DOGE is performing at the speed of tech, it bears repeating: investor money is not a founder piggy bank, meaning, use the funds as if it’s your hard-earned cash. There’s not necessarily an unlimited supply of it, and the waiter always comes around with the check.

For those of you attempting to sort out how much to raise, here’s Y-Combinator’s Guide to How Much to Raise.  As the author points out, “Raising too little can put you in survival mode—slowing down progress, increasing stress, and forcing you to fundraise again sooner than expected. On the flip side, raising too much too early can lead to unnecessary dilution and misaligned expectations. The ideal amount? Enough to reach profitability if possible.”

Which leads us to the three Es, once you’ve secured funding:
Execute, Execute, Execute. Read More...

All the News that’s Fit to Spin

All the News that’s Fit to Spin

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

The tech community was taken by storm last week by DeepSeek, which in our mind, we refer to as DeepSix, which seems much more accurate, all things considered: all the news that we see as fit to ‘print’ and bugger all to the rest. The technology has the same problems that all LLMs have: it scrapes/is trained on the information readily available on the web. And picks and chooses what you can see.

From a technical point of view: “What’s clever about what DeepSeek has done is that they’ve figured out a way to squeeze out more performance from Nvidia’s chips by going a level deeper and tinkering with how the chips work. In short, this is better engineering, and it has allowed them to overcome the constraints imposed on them due to US chip controls. In doing so, they have shown the world a new approach to building AI models much more cheaply,” wrote Om Malik in Crazy Stupid Tech.  “I think the hysteria is hugely overblown…If you read the original paper, two things are clear: DeepSeek has done something clever that will help lower the cost of the AI revolution for everyone, and they’ve shared how they’ve done it.”

Then there’s this: “OpenAI Furious – DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us,” 404 Media reported. “OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.” Read More...

Silicon Valley Goes to Washington…Why?

Silicon Valley Goes to Washington…Why?

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Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

News stories have a way of quickly becoming yesterday’s news. Which for the most part they are, but what if there’s more to the story?

Ever wonder why the tech C suite has suddenly turned its attention to participating in the G qua Government suite (their  armies of lobbyists aside, of course) – and backed the current administration? We were curious, and there’s a reason why you need to look outside of the mainstream media for answers or connect dots that might be a bit obscured.

“The Shocking Reason Marc Andreessen Had to Endorse Donald Trump,” the Independent Sentinel reported – and not reported in the mainstream media. According to Andreessen, said the Sentinel, “The Biden Administration planned to control AI and only allow three companies to create it. The administration would crush all competing companies and classify the physics needed to run AI models. “AI is a technology, basically, that the government is gonna completely control. — Don’t fund AI startups,” Andreessen was warned. “That’s not something that we’re gonna allow to happen…We’re gonna control them, um, and we’re gonna dictate what they do.” Read More...

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Whether the TikTok ban was short-lived or not, time will tell. It’s back for now, which is good news for the said 170M Americans who depend on the platform for income.

So, with all of the egregious behavior we’ve seen on the part of platforms like Google/Alpha with its globally recognized monopolistic practices and Facebook, which has how many lawsuits against them,  it was TikTok that suddenly went dark?

If you’re wondering why Congress moved so quickly and decisively against TikTok, you need to look no further than to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Read More...

The Week the World Changed

The Week the World Changed

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Image by Eduard Oertle from Pixabay

It was an odd week, between the devastating Los Angeles fires and Mark Zuckerberg burning the US government censorship apparatus to the ground. Or at least sent up a few smoke signals, and where there’s smoke…

We’re not going to get into the politics of the fire. There’s certainly enough on that out there. This is about tech. While it was reported that the reservoir and fire hydrants were empty, isn’t California the jewel in the crown of technology? And there is technology out there to combat water shortages and fires. Los Angeles is built on a desert. Before you put a major city in place, good idea to consider the water problem, which self-train civil engineer William Mulholland did back re Los Angeles in the day (think the movie Chinatown), but the city has since then greatly expanded and water shortages are not a rarity in Southern California. In Israel, which is also built on a desert, measures were put in place to ensure that water would get to where it was needed in order to support the population: How Israel’s Water Surplus Is TRANSFORMING the Middle East. It’s basic urban planning.

Cloud-seeding has brought rain to the otherwise parched Middle East, and while there is some debate about whether or not the science was responsible for the flooding in Dubai last year, well, that is the only incident of flooding/water manipulation in the desert, the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus aside, but that’s literally another story. Read More...

Out With the Old, In With the New

Out With the Old, In With the New

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Image by Guido Reimann from Pixabay

Just when you thought you’d seen the last of those Best Of/Worst Of lists, the good news is – you have. We’re not going there, since you know how it goes: the more things change, the more they – just seem to get changed up a bit. At least in tech. We felt it might be interesting – and informative – to look at tech and trends gone by, and what they’ve given way to, which may well continue to be part of in this new year. Without further ado, here’s our list of out with the old and in with the new:

OLD                                                                                                             NEW 1. Standing Desk Chair                                                             Chairwear: A wearable exoskeleton chair 2. UAPs/UFOs                                                                            Drones 3. Dating apps                                                                             AI-generated love interest 4. Fentanyl                                                                                   Kava 5. Rachel Maddow                                                                      Joe Rogan 6. Depends                                                                                   $75 Leather Mosh Pit Diapers 7. Man cave                                                                                  Boy Apartment 8. Cougar                                                                                      HAGmaxing 9. Self-driving taxi                                                                      Airtaxi 10. C-Suite                                                                                   G-Suite: tech formally enters the administration 11. DEI                                                                                          H1B 12. Online shopping                                                                   AI Shopping Agents 13. GenX – the Latchkey Generation                                      GenZ – the Lockdown Generation 14. Identity politics                                                                    Digital IDs 15. Breast implants                                                                    Neural implants And a bonus! In his 1961 Farewell Address as he exited the Presidency, Dwight D Eisenhower warned the nation about the military-industrial complex: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Speaking of the old and the new, this might come as news to you. He also warned us about the dangers of the tech-industrial complex: “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Just a heads’ up as we boldly go into this new year, always and forever, onward and forward.

Tech’s New Take on Fake It Till You Make It

Tech’s New Take on Fake It Till You Make It

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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Keeping it short as we wind down 2024, but we do want to leave you and the year with this: we noticed something of a tech story arc as we find ourselves heading into this age of fakes and bear with us. First, a few articles we need to share:

Om Malik’s brilliant summation/warning in his Musings on Media in the Age of AI.

The rise of Synthetic Humans: Digital Twins Living and Breathing Online, or as MIT put it, These creepy fake humans herald a new age in AI. Read More...

Talk About a Killer App…

Talk About a Killer App…

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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

The tech sector has a bad habit of releasing tech before it has been tested over time, sending it out into the wild, no matter the potential harm it may do. This is a warning we saw in the Age of Social, but tech is always about pushing the envelope, no matter that someone’s standing there in ready with a lit match. Case in point: Facebook contended that it was there to bring the world closer together. Remember Facebook’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day when whistleblower Frances Haugen went public about the platform’s manipulations and the damage it was doing to young people? To this day, the problems have not been eliminated.

And you do have to wonder how dangerous a platform truly is when it’s the whistleblower himself who is eliminated.

“A former researcher at OpenAI has come out against the company’s business model, writing, in a personal blog, that he believes the company is not complying with U.S. copyright law. That makes him one of a growing chorus of voices that sees the tech giant’s data-hoovering business as based on shaky (if not plainly illegitimate) legal ground…OpenAI is currently being sued by a broad variety of celebrities, artists, authors, and coders, all of whom claim to have had their work ripped off by the company’s data-hoovering algorithms. Other well-known folks/organizations who have sued OpenAI include Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nahisi Coates, George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, a variety of newspapers (including The Denver Post and the Chicago Tribune), and a variety of YouTubers, among others,” Gizmodo reported. Read More...

Who Moved the Cheese?

Who Moved the Cheese?

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Image by Jochen Tannemann from Pixabay

The reference is to a book called Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, MD, “an inspirational advice book on how people and businesses can respond to changing times and situations by learning how to adapt quickly and successfully.”

That’s what we hope we’re accomplishing at our Online Investor Insights, which we host every two weeks, with a different investor each time. We keep the group small so that everyone can participate.

This is not a plug for the event, which is free to attend, but to share – and give a flavor of – some of the advice our guests share. Read More...

The Great American Exodus

The Great American Exodus

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Image by John Howard from Pixabay

No full-on editorial due to the holiday weekend and hope you enjoyed yours!

Thanksgiving is the biggest travel weekend of the year. Then again, Americans seem to always be on the move.

It’s not just the country itself that people are leaving. For the curious or those whose for whom home was not where it was last Thanksgiving, here are The Top 5 States Americans Are Leaving, with California once again being the big winner. Or in this case, loser. Read More...