Bonnie, Author at Startup One Stop

AI and the Easy Answer/Quick Fix Era

October 21, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

This week, a personal anecdote, with a lesson.

We were in LA last week for LA Tech Week, where we moderated our Investor Insights panel. Just before we left, we hurt the thumb of our dominant hand, and by ‘hurt,’ we mean broke the small bone at the tip of the digit. Which makes using a computer problematic and in attempting to maneuver everyday activities, we have a newfound empathy for those who are left-handed. Many tools are not made with them in mind.

Everyone we’d encountered dispensed advice: wrap it, splint it, take aspirin for the pain, ask AI. Or, see a doctor, which was the right advice and the way our life works, upon arrival at the hotel, our group assembled in the lobby. We were introduced to someone who was on the health panel that followed ours. We fist-bumped rather than shook hands, which roused his curiosity. We explained the issue. He asked if he could examine the finger and after identifying himself as being an orthopedic surgeon, yes, and what are the chances!!! He didn’t have an x-ray machine but had seen this injury often enough to know which bone was broken. He recommended naproxen over acetylsalicylic acid, and it would take about two months to fully heal. No splinting or wrapping it., as AI et al had recommended: that would inhibit the healing process and cause more damage than good. For the record, aspirin was counter-advised. It would take months to fully recover. Read More...

The Digital ID Issue No One Is Talking About

October 14, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

“Dozens of organizations had data stolen in Oracle-linked hacks,” TechCrunch reported. “Google said in a corresponding blog post that the hacking campaign targeting Oracle customers dates back to at least July 10, some three months before the hacks were first detected. Oracle conceded this week that the hackers behind the extortion campaign were still abusing its software to steal personal information about corporate executives and their companies. Days earlier, Oracle’s chief security officer claimed in the same post — since scrubbed — that the extortion campaign was linked to previously identified vulnerabilities that Oracle patched in July, suggesting the hacks were over.”

For the record, this hack “can be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.”

The Discord Hack Is Every Users Worse Nightmare. “Around 70,000 users’ personal data at risk. Hackers targeted a third-party company…in an effort to extort a ‘ransom,’ Discord said,” noted The Independent. Both users ID photos and data were stolen. Read More...

Is ROMO the New FOMO?

September 23, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Considering all the funding that has gone almost blindly – and we’re being generous here – to startups where the product and pitch deck are centered around AI, we’ve come to the conclusion that, at least in investors’ minds, AI is an acronym for ‘All In.’

AI Startups Are Failing at Alarming Rates: Why 90% of AI Ventures Die Within Their First Year, wrote VDWayne on Medium, and of course for the usual reason: no product/market fit, lack of market demand, and a new one, for those who still believe that AI is a do-all and end- all: overestimation of AI capabilities.

Another good read for founders and investors still chomping at the bit to cast their lot into the AI FOMO fever: I Analyzed 100 AI Startups That Failed in 2024 — Here’s What No One Tells You and noted Jeremy Merrell Williams in his piece, “2024 pulled the mask off the AI game. The hype was loud, the VC checks were fat, but the fall-off? Brutal. We’re talking 254 venture-backed startups filing for bankruptcy in just the first quarter. That’s a 60% jump from 2023 and over 7x the rate in 2019. And AI startups? They went down twice as fast as regular tech. Read More...

The Week in Digestion

September 16, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Provided by Schoklosters Castle and Unsplash

Last week was a difficult one between it having been the 24^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Rather than opine on the events, we will point out one thing to founders: the importance and power that’s in a name. If you name your company, say, Avalanche, which one did in the days of Web 1.0, whether as an act to defy fate or one of prescience, guess what happened? Yup, it all came tumbling down. The Bonfire Collective? Went up in smoke. Note to self: Charlie Kirk’s outlet was Turning Point and so far, from all indications, his assassination did appear to trigger something of a turning point. As always, time will tell.

In times of stress, people tend to turn to food for comfort, so let ‘s focus on food, speaking of turning points. Food and various ingredients have come under scrutiny of late. Seed oils, in particular. “For several decades, saturated fat was wrongly blamed for heart disease, while vegetable oils quietly caused a surge in obesity, inflammation, and chronic metabolic disorders. Newly appointed FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary is now leading efforts to revise outdated dietary guidelines that were built on cherry-picked data from Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study. There was just one problem with the research — Keys cherry-picked the data. He selectively chose the countries that fit his hypothesis while ignoring data from 16 other countries that went against his recommendations. Had he chosen a different set of countries, the data would have been the opposite — that increasing the percent of calories from fat actually reduces the number of deaths from coronary heart disease,” Mercola reported in The War on Saturated Fat is Finally Coming to an End.

Despite the methodological flaws in his data, the medical community accepted Keys’ study

FYI, “Seed oils, or “vegetable oils” are extracted from vegetable crops like soybeans, cottonseed, and corn,” HeartandSoil explained. “Seed oils were originally byproducts of manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. They weren’t initially intended for the dinner table. However, by the mid-1900s, seed oils had become a staple ingredient in packaged foods, reshaping the Western diet in ways that are raising new health concerns today. The food industry favors seed oils for their low cost and so-called “heart-healthy” reputation. Research suggests that seed oils pose significant health risks. Read More...

Life in the Age of Hyper-Novelty

September 9, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Summer is nearly over and talk about the coming Fall…“Over two thousand years ago, Plato described an illusion that shaped perception so completely that those trapped inside it mistook it for reality,” wrote The Art of Slow Down.

“He imagined a group of prisoners who had been confined in a cave since birth, chained in place, able to see only the wall in front of them. Behind them, a fire burned, and in front of the fire, unseen figures moved objects – casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. These flickering shapes became the prisoners’ entire world. They gave names to the shadows. They built meaning around them. The idea that something more existed beyond the cave was unthinkable.

Then, one day, a prisoner was set free. At first,… the light was overwhelming, his eyes unaccustomed to anything beyond the dim glow of the cave…But as his vision adjusted, he began to see clearly. He soon realised that what he had once believed to be reality was nothing more than distorted reflections, a shadow play designed to keep him in place. Read More...

The Human Side of the AI Discussion

August 26, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

At this point, we all know that AI is not a panacea, and while it is a great tool, we wonder if it should or even could take over every job on the planet, as is so widely reported.

Are humans truly categorically replaceable?

We’re told, for example, that AIs are a better predictor of medical conditions than are doctors, but as Mercola reminds us in his piece on How Medical Superintelligence Is Revolutionizing the Future of Healthcare, “AI models tend to reflect the positions of dominant institutions like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or World Health Organization (WHO). Be aware that they may emphasize conventional narratives regardless of evidence quality.” In the Covid era, Ivermectin was often demonized and referred to as a ‘horse de-wormer,’ which is how its started life. Now the medication is being effectively used to treat certain cancers and is part of the “WHO Model List of Essential Medicines.” Also keep in mind that while doctors are using AI to aid in their diagnoses, the results are only as good as the questions being asked and how they’re posed. Are physicians receiving training in effectively using LLMs? Read More...

Is This the Age of the DonkeyCorn?

August 12, 2025 Bonnie Comments 1 comment

And with all due respect to unicorns, mind you.

We came across an interesting podcast, with our bud Shira Lazar interviewing BarkBox co-founder cum Audos founder Henrik Werdelin. As USNN noted, “With the launch of Audos, Werdelin “envisions expanding the startup landscape from a few dozen ventures annually to potentially hundreds of thousands… by helping anyone—techie or not—build a million-dollar business using AI.”

This is not an endorsement of Werdelin’s new venture, but we agree with him – and have said it before ourselves – as he mentions in his soon-to-be published book, Me, My Customer and AI, which delves into the new frontier of entrepreneurship,” that “emotional connection and “relationship capital” are your moat in an age of automation.” Read More...

How to Take a SWOT at Your Own Company

August 5, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

It’s the so-called dog days. Many investors and key decision makers have ‘gone fishing,’ so to speak and while it may seem like there’s nothing going on but the rent on that front, don’t be fooled, founders: it’s SWOT season and we’re not talking about mosquitoes and sand flies, although they’re out there, too. We’re talking about that now is a good time to do a SWOT analysis, the acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Here are some excellent guidelines from Forbes, with a few tweaks:

Strengths. “Your Strengths are internal positives about your company that you can control and that often provide you with a competitive advantage. Some examples might be the quality of your product, the effectiveness of your processes, your access to physical or team assets or other competitive advantages.” Most importantly, what’s your superpower? What are you doing, short or long term, that will put you ahead of your competitors, or will possibly even be an industry game-changer? Read More...

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

July 29, 2025 Bonnie Comments 1 comment

Photo by Patrick Weissenberger on Unsplash

We have a place outside of the city, with fruit trees and a blueberry bush, which we purchased years ago, at the end of the season, when they were basically dead. We have a green thumb, so we went for it, and nursed it back to life. Our bush is now flourishing. The fruit come ripe in July, one by one, then all at once when it hits peak season. It’s behind a fence to protect it from the animals, but birds are a different story. Try as you might, birds always find a way to get to the fruit, and we do our best to scatter them.

We needed to go into the city for a few days for meetings, just as the blueberries were beginning to hit their prime. We expected that the birds would have a field day in our absence, but we were looking forward to enjoying at least a few berries.

We were wrong: the ripe berries had been picked clean. Read More...