Advice | Startup One Stop

Out With the Old, In With the New

January 7, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

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

December 24, 2024 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

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…

December 17, 2024 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

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...

The French Fries Test

November 12, 2024 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

From what we’ve been hearing from the investors whom we know personally, the funding purse strings are opening up again, and mergers are moving forward.

We hosted Jonathan Hakakian of SoundBoard VC at last week’s Online Insights, and part of the discussion centered around changes on how VCs vet startups. Yes, they’re still vetting decks, doing their due diligence and all that, but many meetings are still held over Zoom or some other such platform. Which means that funds have eased the requirements in terms of geolocation. Many VC/Angel firms don’t even feel the need to have a dedicated office. Some use co-working spaces to have somewhere to hold meetings from time to time, and for conference room access. Offices, for both investors and founders, are no longer necessary, at least, in some cases, not until you’ve reached a certain stage.

Jonathan has returned to taking in-person meetings, circumstances permitting, meaning, when it’s geographically possible for him and the founder/founding team. And there are times when they’ll keep it casual, meeting at a diner or restaurant. There is a different dynamic at in-person meetings, but still important to mind your Ps and Qs – and your table manners. Read More...

Who Is John Galt?

November 5, 2024 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

It’s election day here in the US, with two major party candidates vying for the spot of President of the United States. So, let’s have some fun.

John Galt is the hero of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Set in a dystopian world where the government, which is on the brink of collapse, has taken control of businesses, and regulatory overreach is choking innovation. Galt is a shadowy figure of almost mythic proportion – and the force behind a sweeping strike on the part of innovators, which promises to bring the government to its knees.

In this age of technology, who would be a likely John Galt candidate, Galt being a brilliant inventor who, for our purposes here, while he may not necessarily be mankind’s salvation, is at least helping to tip the scales a bit? We nominate two potential candidates, both of whom, like Rand’s Galt himself, have been both glorified and vilified: Bill Gates and Elon Musk. It being Election Day, you decide: Read More...

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

September 17, 2024 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway. Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.

These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.

Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst. Read More...

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