Browsed by
Category: Advice

Fake It Till You… Meh – Scratch That

Fake It Till You… Meh – Scratch That

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Elisa from Pixabay

Fake it till you make it has been the credo of the tech industry since the very earliest days of the industry. Make big promises and bold statements and no matter that the product may end up as shovelware of vaporware, founders were inventing the future and no matter that investors who bought into the hype were expecting big payoffs that often didn’t happen. You pay your money, you take your chances. So it goes.

Erin Griffin wrote an excellent piece in The New York Times recently entitled The End of Faking It in Silicon Valley and it’s must-read. “Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley…Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the past year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far… the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences.”

Gee, who’d have thought? Considering that California was basically founded on the Gold Rush, and the tech space was essentially the state’s second Gold Rush, didn’t investors realize that during that first Gold Rush, many were taken in by Fool’s Gold? History does have a way of repeating itself, and if it worked the first time… Read More...

How to Fail Spectacularly

How to Fail Spectacularly

Comments 0 Comment
Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

There is a place called The Museum of Failure and as the Failure Report noted, “The Museum of Failure is a collection of failed products from the United States and worldwide. They have exhibited everywhere from Sweden to Shanghai. Most products and startups fail, unfortunately, and the museum showcases these failures to provide “a fascinating learning experience.” Every item gives a unique insight into the risky business of innovation. The goal of this kitschy museum is to stimulate productive discussion about failure and consider the possibility of risk.”

The exhibit is making the rounds globally and is in New York until May.

Crystal Pepsi, anyone? Pass. Read More...

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ChatGPT

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ChatGPT

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The reference is to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

We were a bit under the weather this past week, and unable to do our usual research due to the raging headache associated with this flu. So, it was suggested that why didn’t we use some iteration of ChatGPT to compose this week’s editorial?

Well, we did keep up with some articles, and here are just a few re Generative AIs: Read More...

Lessons from the Silicon Valley Bank Demise

Lessons from the Silicon Valley Bank Demise

Comments 0 Comment
Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

This begins with a tale of one of our readers who had customer support problems with three different platforms:

A payments platform – wrong bank account#, contact email, plus phone# attached to a different account.

A hosting service – the reader had a new phone and was setting up the email account. Read More...

How to Prioritizing in the New Normal

How to Prioritizing in the New Normal

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay

Haven’t heard that term in a while, eh, and not like we all have it all figured out.

We had a conversation with a successful serial entrepreneur recently, who began by filling us in on his history:

Started and built his first business: sold it. Started and built another business: acquired. Was about to undertake his next startup when his wife told him that he was going to be a dad for the first time – and not to a singleton. Read More...

Charge!

Charge!

Comments 0 Comment
Image by mohamed_hassan from Pixabay

We recall back in the day when Facebook hit the zeitgeist in a huge way, it was suggested that the company charge a nominal fee for the service, and we believe it was a dollar a month. Easily affordable in most countries, and why not to bring family and friends closer. Of course, there are countries where a dollar a month is quite steep, and the company opted for eyeballs uber payment and they’d make their money via tracking you and offering up adverts.

As a note to self and a cautionary tale to founders: best to bake in the revenue model/premium services early in the game, as did, say, LinkedIn, who, when they hit a tipping point long ago – a year or two after funding – the company did maintain a free version, but also introduced a premium model and people were willing to ante up. It seems to have worked. We do believe that the company is still around. And with multiple revenue spokes. Also a good idea.

Re Facebook. Well, times change, as has Apple’s advertising policies: the company’s anti-tracking protections cost Facebook, now Meta, some $10B in ad revenue last year. Read More...

The Product Point that Every Single Founder Overlooks

The Product Point that Every Single Founder Overlooks

Comments 1 comment
Image by Silvia from Pixabay

Every two weeks, we host an online breakfast with a single investor, and a small, self-selecting group of entrepreneurs. Other investors – angels and VCs – sometimes attend as well. We keep them small to make sure everyone has a chance to participate, ask questions, and learn. You’d be amazed at how many founders have found investment – just by showing up and participating.

And hearing first-hand, precisely what investors are looking for – and we don’t simply mean the verticals in which they invest – but what they look for in a pitch deck, and how they read it.

We know you’ve heard it all before. As we’ve said over and over, in our opinion, the #1 reason why startups fail is that founders don’t listen. Read More...

Web 2 Oh, It’s Not Over Yet: The Era of the Fakes

Web 2 Oh, It’s Not Over Yet: The Era of the Fakes

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Despite all of the discussion about Web 3, it has been eclipsed of late by Generative AIs such as ChatGPT, which, according to many an article we’ve seen, is going to make a lot of white-collar workers redundant, as the Brits say. Artificial Intelligence Passes MBA Exam (given by a Wharton professor, FYI) and New ‘Robot’ Lawyer to Represent Defendant in US Court. ChatGPT even passed the US Medical Licensing exam. As we know, it’s also being used to write news articles, tweets and who know what else in startup land, giving new meaning to the term, ‘fake it till you make it.’

When we first got wind of the Generative AI, knowing that it was scraping the internet and well aware of the rampant censorship that has been and is being practiced by the social networks, all of whom have had a stranglehold on the conversation for quite some time, including the pre-Musk Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, we knew this would be a problem. And lest we forget, the programs tend to be written by programmers who have a certain bias, or whose C-Level has a certain bias, and in case you missed it:  The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable. The AIs will always have human biases, because it’s humans who are creating it.

Generative AI isn’t the only thing that’s faking it. Getting more sophisticated and no doubt soon to hit that same tipping point are the Deepfakes, both visual and audio. For how many years has Big Tech been capturing your face and voice?  “With no barriers to creating AI-synthesized text, audio and video, the potential for misuse in identity theft, financial fraud and tarnish reputations has sparked global alarm,” the Japan Times reported. Read More...

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Those of us who work in technology – which is most of us here – can’t help but glom onto or at least test the shiny new thing that comes along. It’s in our DNA. The problem is that tech tends to jump in feet first without realizing the possible consequences, dystopian side, or even fully examining the product.

Apologies if we sound a bit repetitive here, but read on. We do have a point to make, that no one else seems to be considering.

BuzzFeed To Use ChatGPT’s AI For Content Creation, Stock Up 200%+ (forbes.com). Okay, it’s ‘BuzzFeed’ which is ‘clickbait’ by any other name.  As Forbes further reported, “Investigative reports on The Byte shared that media website CNET was using AI technology, under articles penned by the anonymous “CNET Money Staff”. The AI was created by CNET resources, and only used for a very small number of posts before human oversight detected significant misstatements of facts, errors and plagiarized content, according to multiple news sources.” The result: CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy. Read More...