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Category: Advice

Zombie VCs: the Era of the Walking Dead Funds

Zombie VCs: the Era of the Walking Dead Funds

Image by Izzy Loney from Pixabay

VCs ask founders a lot of questions. It’s a big part of their job. They’re deploying other people’s money and just as founders have an obligation to make money for their investors, venture firms have an obligation to bring preferably significant returns to theirs.

Founders need to ask investors questions, too. The most important one (or two): are you still deploying funds/when was the last time you made an investment?

PitchBook recently reported that the number of VCs in US deals peaked at 18,504 in 2021 and fell to 9,966 last year. Read More...

The Report from the Trenches

The Report from the Trenches

 Before we moved into tech, we worked in the music business, for one of the major labels. One year, we were invited to attend the Music Hall of Fame Awards.

Once there, we were escorted to the wrong table. We made it clear to the usher that we worked at BMG, not BMI, but what do we know? So, we were seated among total strangers, all of whom ignored us. We introduced ourself to the little old man and his wife seated next to us, who were also being ignored.

His name was Hy Zaret, one of the evening’s inductees, who was being honored for a song he’d written. One single song. Must have been some song, we figured, so we asked him what the title was. Read More...

THIMK!

THIMK!

 That’s not a typo. It was a Mad magazine cover – Mad having been the Onion or Babylon Bee of its day – and according to dpgreatlife, “Thimk” was a poke at Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who was once at NCR and later IBM. Watson’s simple mantra was “Think.”

The Atlantic recently ran a piece entitled THE RISE OF TECHNO-AUTHORITARIANISM Silicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.

In the relatively early days of Web 2, we wrote an editorial warning that the age of social was creating companies with greater populations than have most countries on the planet. In fact, we called them as nation-states, and warned back then that they could  become more powerful than any government on the planet. It might have taken them 10+ years, but it seems at least the Atlantic seems to be catching on. Read More...

Is Software Trying to Take Too Big a Bite Out of the World?

Is Software Trying to Take Too Big a Bite Out of the World?

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Valentine’s Day just passed, and as we know, at least some humans always seem to go looking for love in all the wrong places. Thank heavens for AI hitting the love space, where people finally can meet someone literally tailor-made for them, but you know love: is anything really as it appears?

This just in:  Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show “The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than the typical app, Gizmodo reported. “According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfriends harvest shockingly personal information, and almost all of them sell or share the data they collect.

“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends,” said Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher. “Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.” Read More...

Investor Winter: Lessons from Nature

Investor Winter: Lessons from Nature

Ten months ago, a feral cat showed up in our backyard. He’s a young cat: Harry can’t be more than a few years old, doesn’t meow like felines who are raised by humans. A veterinarian member of the family told us it’s a sign that he’s been feral since birth.

We have no idea where Harry calls home. When we first spotted him in Spring, we started leaving him food. Despite the fact that he’s shown up almost daily since, he hasn’t warmed up to us at all. He shows up for food at least twice a day – very early morning and evening – but always keeps his distance.

And won’t eat any processed food, mind you: he knows better. And hisses at us if – heaven forfend! – we don’t bugger off and give him his space while he’s dining. Read More...

Tech’s New Blame Game

Tech’s New Blame Game

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Tech is fond of its mantras, especially in Silicon Valley, and the latest seems to be, ‘It’s You, Not Us.”

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached, TechCrunch reported. In December, 23andMe admitted that hackers had stolen the genetic and ancestry data of 6.9 million users, nearly half of all its customers.” Since users “had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature, an optional feature allows customers to automatically share some of their data with people who are considered their relatives on the platform,” the hackers were able to scrape personal data from another 6.9 million customers whose accounts were not directly hacked.

The original hack had been to some 14,000 accounts. Read More...

And the 2023 Word of the Year Is…

And the 2023 Word of the Year Is…

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

We’re under the weather this week. This is not a reference to the cold spell sweeping across the US: we’re literally down with a stomach flu, and the perfect opportunity to report American Dialect’s 2023 Word of the Year – “Enshittification,” as we feel like, well, need we spell it out?

The word “became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.”

The good news is, re this stomach bug, we will recover. What about those platforms?  “Gen Z is crazy about a handful of online platforms including Twitch, Reddit, TikTok, Imgur, Unfold, Brat, NTWRK, and Lomotif,” according to Business Insider, while Later reports that YouTube is their online entertainment channel of choice, “and TikTok (68%) and Snapchat (67%) aren’t too far behind. Interestingly, the platform that has really skyrocketed in this group is BeReal, as according to zdnet, “On BeReal you cannot have followers. Similar to the earliest forms of social networking sites (remember AIM), on the app you have friends instead of followers and only these select groups of people can see your posts. This takes away the pressure of wanting to curate a perfect public image and brings back the fun of sharing content only with your friends.” Read More...

Is It Time to Pivot?

Is It Time to Pivot?

Image by Marcin from Pixabay

Almost all startups pivot at some point. This we know. Since many people consider a new year a new/clean slate as well and a good time to reflect on where you’ve been/where you’re going, we decided it’s a good time to talk about the pivot.

We recently hosted an investor at one of our Online Insights who mentioned a unicorn exit from one of their portfolio companies. We  knew the founder. Very sharp guy who had majorly pivoted not long after said investor’s fund had invested in them. One of the partners had spoken at our Insights not long after the pivot and was livid: this was not what he had invested in.

Well, how often do investors mention that the ‘team’ is one of their top considerations when it comes to deciding to whom to write the check? Just a few short years following the pivot, the company had a serious unicorn exit. The founder also happened to be something of a subject matter expert, rethought the approach, did a major change of direction – and did we mention the company had a serious unicorn exit? Apologies, but we have learned from experience that one of the major always unnamed problems when it comes to why startups fail is that founders don’t listen. Read More...

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay

Remember all the dumb things you did when you were 23 and thought you knew everything? No, the year wasn’t all bad. Then again, when you were 23, you had your moments, too…

We’ve made our list and checked it twice, so without further ado, the people and peccadillos of the year that’s coming to an end, but the real question is, in many cases, when – and where – does it stop?

  1. Sam Bankman-Fried. He held our attention for quite a spell, as tales of his exploits were revealed: defrauding investors left and right and spending money like it grew on trees. Which it did for him: shake the tree and there were even more funds in the FTX coffers. The one-time crypto king believed that his true strength was in his hair and that those carefully unkempt locks made all the difference in his meteoric rise. Maybe they did for a spell, but speaking of locks, fraud is fraud and the former wunderkind is heading to prison for an even longer spell.
  2. The new cryminal class. SBF tops long list of crypto hot shots facing legal reckoning. “His case was far from the first — or last — time that crypto founders and executives found themselves in legal hot water related to their digital-asset activities,” the Toronto Sun pointed out. There was also Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon; Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of Celsius Network; Su Zhu, co-founder of the bankrupt Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and Thomas Smith, Kyle Nagy, and Braden Karony — the people behind the crypto token SafeMoon, who were accused by federal prosecutors of using millions in investors’ funds to buy luxury homes and McClaren sports cars. When you can live that large is so short an amount of time, chances are there’s a small cell in your future.

Biometrics collection is certainly growing. Read More...

Venture Winter & Other Storm Warnings

Venture Winter & Other Storm Warnings

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

It’s that time of year. Holiday season and no matter how many tree lightings there are to see or gift lists to address, before we break out the eggnog, time for a reality check.

We know that ‘get funded’ is on every founder’s holiday wish list. It’s not impossible, but having worked in retail advertising, we will tell you that the holiday catalogs are compiled and put to bed in August.

Which is when you should have started, if you wanted to at least have had a shot at Santa checking that one off his list. Read More...