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Category: Advice

The Perks of Being a Founder

The Perks of Being a Founder

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 Every now and then we like to focus on the founders’ journey, and we’ve included this graphic for comic relief. The process is not an easy one. In fact, there’s no shortage of lists that go into the top reasons as to why startups fail. May be time to flip the focus: when the authors of this CNBC article interviewed 18 Harvard startup founders, they found that “Here’s the No. 1 trait that made them successful.”

Resilience.

It’s a well-known fact that 20% of startups fail within their first year, no matter how carefully the founder/team plans. ‘Uncontrollables’ always crop up and derail the best laid plans, and this includes acts of God. Example: we know of a founder who launched an app that allowed users to make us of any gym, any time, anywhere in the world. It was an immediate hit – with no freemium version available – so much so, they didn’t even need investment money. Fantastic! Read More...

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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...

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

LLMs and the Way Back Machine*

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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...

Data Collection 2.0 aka Defcon 3

Data Collection 2.0 aka Defcon 3

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 Said the Wall Street Journal, “More companies and government agencies out in the wild want to read our body parts. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, started scanning passengers’ faces instead of checking IDs. These groups say the biometric processes are meant to eliminate friction, save time and reduce lines.”

Why is that always the party line? To make our lives easier? To save us time? Does it? Ask anyone who has been a victim of identity theft, and remember “the huge Facebook data breach, in which upwards of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had personal data leaked online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates — you name it,” The Verge reported. Not that Facebook even bothered to tell users.

Yes, your phone has your fingerprint or faceprint. Fine, that’s native to your phone – or so they say. What about once the info is sent to the cloud? Cybersecurity is not top of mind for many tech companies, as we well know by the number of hacks reported and that continue to be reported and FYI, Ransomware Attacks Reach Record Highs: Demands and Payments Continue to Soar – and are we even informed about what data of ours might have been compromised? Read More...

X Marked the Spot

X Marked the Spot

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Before you get your backs up, this is not about politics, and sung to the tune of ‘Let’s Talk About Sex:’ It’s about tech, baby, it’s about you and me, it’s about all the good things and the bad things that can be, It’s about tech. Let’s talk about tech.

At the dawn of the Age of Social, it was widely proclaimed that we, the users, were the product. Is a shift underway at a tectonic level?

Two men engaged in a conversation on X’s Spaces last week and the audience numbers were off the charts. Live, watched later, or simulcast over various sites, it was reported that between a quarter billion to a billion people tuned in. Read More...

The Science Unintended Consequences

The Science Unintended Consequences

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Image by nugroho dwi hartawan from Pixabay

There’s an old German proverb that says that all things have an end, except for a sausage, which has two. Well, all things have a beginning, too,  including environmental issues. Especially since it seems everyone’s concerned with solving the problems, but that perhaps we’re quickly offered solutions that aren’t.

PFAs

Example: plastic straws were outlawed/removed from many fast-food establishments as they tended to end up in the oceans, endangering marine life. Enter paper straws, but as xatakaon  reported, “Paper Straws Are Often Touted as a Great Alternative to Plastic, But There’s a Small Problem: They’re Toxic… After analyzing 39 brands of straws made of various materials such as plastic, paper, glass, stainless steel, and bamboo, a team (of scientists) found that paper straws contain the most perfluoroalkylated and polyfluoroalkylated substances, also known as PFAS. These synthetic substances are considered harmful to humans, animals, and the environment.”

PFAs are ‘forever chemicals’ that “can lead to health problems such as liver damage, thyroid disease, obesity, fertility issues and cancer,” according to the European Environmental Agency, and they’re also found in packaged foods, fabrics, paints, electronics, and pizza boxes, to name just a very few. Read More...

A Look at the Once-Respected Media

A Look at the Once-Respected Media

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It’s August, a time when our part of the world kicks back to enjoy the last gasps of summer and the warm weather. The crickets are chirping, the mosquitoes are drawing blood, and make sure to check yourself for ticks, if you’re spending time in the great outdoors. The last thing you want is Lyme Disease – take it from someone who’s been there, done that.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot going on in tech, from what we’re seeing reported, but since it’s August, it’s a good time to kick back a bit and take a look at reporting itself.

We know about disinformation/misinformation. Old news. What we’re talking about is the media’s focus on non-news and even obfuscation, or as we like to call it, to take a page from a once-venerated news organization: all the news that we feel is fit to print. Read More...

A Much-Needed Perspective on Investors

A Much-Needed Perspective on Investors

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Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay

We were in an online webinar recently, with a young investor as the guest speaker on the virtual dais. He is a former founder with several failures and one success under his belt. Given the fact that he has sat on both sides of the table, we were particularly curious about his investment approach, especially since he is a partner in a quite large fund.

While he is new to the investment side of the table, he has already developed his philosophy: if he is predisposed to investing in a company, he advises the founder to get some traction – meaning paying customers – and check back with him in a few months, whether the founder had achieved this or not. After said time, provided the founder is in the same position monetarily, he advises a pivot.

He does position himself as a very early-stage investor. Maybe not back-of-the-napkin, but fairly close. Read More...

The Odd Timing of the CrowdStrike ‘Error’

The Odd Timing of the CrowdStrike ‘Error’

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

“In what will go down as the most spectacular IT failure the world has ever seen, a botched software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. crashed countless Microsoft Windows computer systems around the world on Friday,” Yahoo!finance (and all other publications on the planet) reported. “The catastrophic failure underscores an increasingly dire threat to global supply chains: The IT systems of some of the world’s biggest and most critical industries have grown heavily dependent on a handful of relatively obscure software vendors, which are now emerging as single points of failure.

Total recovery from CloudStrike failure ‘could take weeks’ amid more flight delays, said The Independent.

Those are the facts. And then there’s CrowdStrike itself, emerging again as a problem in yet another election year, and if ever there was a company appropriately named… Read More...

The Importance of Transparency

The Importance of Transparency

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

We’ve found that in tech, founders/the tech press, etc, in many cases, have a bad habit of stretching the truth, let’s call it, or at least of altering a narrative to suit their purposes. It’s top-down and the members of the tech cabal do it constantly – often with the willing assistance of the tech media, who let’s say tend to shy away from presenting the full picture.

Last week, “Microsoft and Apple (gave) up their OpenAI board seats,” MSN reported. “Microsoft reportedly told OpenAI that it’s confident in the direction the company is taking, so its seat on the board is no longer necessary.”

That’s the snapshot, which is often as far as many readers get, and let’s not forget that MSN, or Microsoft News, is a Microsoft property. Read More...