The passing of 2025 wasn’t just the end of another year: we wrapped up the a quarter century. Note that centuries tend not to define themselves until we’re roughly two or so decades in.
Looking back to the 1900s, Voices from History noted that “The 1920s…saw the birth of numerous inventions that transformed everyday life and laid the groundwork for future technological advancements… These innovations touched various aspects of society, from transportation to leisure activities.”
Kind of like, well, now, considering electric and self-driving cars, connected kitchen appliances and beds, et al.Read More...
What’s Eating the Medical Establishment. (That’s Not a Question.)
Every now and then, we turn our attention to food, which is especially timely as losing weight is a popular resolution on people’s lists new year’s list. And Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (RFKJ) just inverted one of the holiest of holies: the Food Pyramid.
“The new guidelines website states that every American should eat 1.2-1.6 grams of animal and/or plant protein per kilogram of body weight per day, along with “healthy fats” from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meat, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives and avocados,” The Defender reports.
“The guidelines …will become the default for what’s served to schoolchildren, the military, veterans, the elderly and low-income families that participate in federal programs like WIC and Head Start.”Read More...
We’re back after taking a holiday hiatus, kicking it off with a recap of 2025. Not with another Top 10 whatever list, which are out there, ad nauseam, but rather with a recap of those pivotal moments or items of the year that faded from the headlines like, well, yesterday’s news. So what are some of these things you missed or otherwise overlooked?
First, eyeballs matter. In the Web 1 days, startups didn’t have supporting business models, so the ‘New Economy’s’ stock in trade/measure of success was the number of eyeballs you could muster.
Dirty Little Secret: eyeballs still matter, and now they’re everywhere. Just ask Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and CPO Kristin Cabot, “who viva la vida’d a little too hard at a Coldplay and the internet noticed,” says Morning Brew, who singled out the episode as the ‘Viral Moment of the Year.’Read More...
It was 2021 when Master of the Universe and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided it was time to move beyond mere social media. Given his uncanny sense of prescience, he felt he’d found the killer app, going so far as to rename Facebook Meta, reflecting the company’s shift towards developing the metaverse, a virtual environment for social interaction and commerce. From Zuckerberg’s point of view, VR was the future.
Our friend and investor at ffvc, Katie Weiss, told a story in her weekly newsletter about her six-year-old daughter who had decided that the tooth fairy isn’t real, and how Katie used logic and Sora to “preserve the magic a little longer.”
“That whole exchange made me think about another type of “fairy tale”: projections. As a venture fund, we ask for them, fully aware that we’re often being handed a story only loosely tethered to reality. So why do we still value them? Why, like at home, do we try to keep the magic alive?
“Because the magic isn’t in the numbers, it’s in the mindset behind them. Hidden in those fictional spreadsheets are real signals: how a founder thinks, what they know, how they believe their business will evolve, and whether their vision holds up under pressure. If you know where to look, there’s a tremendous amount to learn from made-up numbers.”Read More...
It was just another Tuesday, until it wasn’t. 20% of the internet vanished in a heartbeat, all because Cloudflare, “which is supposed to protect the internet from attacks, accidentally “attacked” itself… when a routine configuration change (database permission update) triggered a hidden bug in its bot protection system, and in an instant, this “gatekeeper” locked everyone out,” Bitget reported.
It’s not the first major outage we’ve witnessed in the past few months. “Amazon’s AWS Goes Down, Takes Out “Half of the Internet,” said Futurism. “Apps and platforms relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing service, were in a jam… in a striking example of how infrastructure consolidation makes the modern internet vulnerable to a failure by a single major provider.”
And this keeps happening. Days after AWS went dark Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage. “Cisco’s network monitoring service has logged 12 major outages in 2025 so far, 23 in 2024 and 13 in 2023. Cloud service provider outages climbed from 17% to 27% of all outages in 2024, while ISP outages decreased from 83% to 73%,” the Times of India reported.Read More...
With AI advancing at breakneck speeds – 11% of the global population are using it – the real question is: is it fast approaching the point where we’re crossing the Rubicon and reaching the point of no return? Let’s be honest, we live in an age of limbic capitalism, greatly accelerated by the Age of Social, and now AI. Limbic capitalism, according to danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com “refers to a system where businesses exploit human psychology, particularly the limbic system, to encourage excessive consumption and addiction. This concept highlights how modern capitalism increasingly targets emotional and psychological aspects of human behavior to maximize consumer engagement and spending. This practice involves more than just creating addictive products; it involves engineering environments, behaviors, and economies that trap both consumers and employees in cycles of dependence and harm.” And isn’t this the apotheosis of AI, especially when it comes to LLMs?
Consider: says Futurism, “People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners. Case in point, new research published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans reveals the startling depths some users are plumbing in their relationships with AI chatbots.
“The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling, to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex, homeownership, and even pregnancies.Read More...
What Escapes People about Holiday Networking Events
The holiday season is fast approaching, a season of joy for some, and depression for others. One of the key problems: loneliness. Dating apps have evolved from merely swiping left/right. AI matchmaking elements have been added as product enhancements, and curious what the results will prove to be over time, as we’re not quite convinced that an algorithm is capable of understanding human emotions on a granular level, and isn’t love part of the equation when looking for a life mate? Yes, you can check all of the boxes, but what a person wants and what they need are often two quite different things, trust us.
We’ve introduced nearly two dozen couples over the years, who would never have met otherwise. In most cases, the parties rejected our choices after the first meeting, yet did indeed marry, in most cases due to in no small part to trickery on our part. We will also mention that none of the pairings ended in divorce. Superconnectors like Yours Truly assess things differently.
“In 2021, Random House published a book by software tycoon Bill Gates titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. The message was clear: The world is heading toward a climate catastrophe if humans keep using fossil fuels. Everyone in the world had been hearing that message loud and clear for the previous two decades, and Gates, who’s been moonlighting as a climate expert for just as long, was not only one of the loudest voices to broadcast it, but someone who had put piles of money where his mouth was,” The New American reports. Now Gates says that there’s no disaster on the horizon. “Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future,” Gates announced this week on his personal blog, GatesNotes.”
Common Core
Many were up in arms about the Microsoft founder’s seeming ‘Come to Jesus moment,’ but we will remind you that in retrospect, Gates is often wrong. Case in point: Common Core, another Gates- backed project that was going to revolutionize education and on which the government spent trillions to implement. Well, “The Results Are In: Common Core is An All-Around Failure,” says the National Association of Scholars (NAS). “It will leave students ignorant not only of literature and history, but even the ability to read, write, and sum. All the emphasis on ‘skills’ is useless without rigorous standards and challenging content matter. Our students will know every way to add two plus two, and they’ll come up with a different answer each time.”
In fact, NAS “tested the first three years of schoolchildren entirely educated by the Common Core—and their test scores have fallen steadily.” “Even Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure,” says The Federalist. At a cost of $4T to taxpayers, what to speak of the price students paid.Read More...
We are still struggling with a broken right thumb, or boo-boo, considering that Halloween is upon us. Scary that it’ll take a few more weeks to heal, and speaking of scary, we decided to consider what lessons Halloween might have for founders.
First, a bit of history. “Some say the festival has its origins in pre-Christian traditions that mark the changing of the seasons,” according to MSN. “The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, was also a pagan religious tradition that welcomed the end of summer harvest, and the changing of seasons… The Celts reportedly believed that around this time of the year, the veil between the living and the dead was thinner, and spirits could walk the earth. This is where the costumes came in, worn as disguises by festival-goers so they could “avoid being terrorized by all the evil spirits walking the Earth during Samhain.”
“Halloween just has that open world magic that you don’t get any other time of year. It’s this one day where everyone is encouraged to dress up as whatever wild thing they want, and go walking around town together while other groups of kids/teens do the same thing. It’s this wonderful, connected community that doesn’t exist for anything else,” a fan on Reddit commented.Read More...
