It was 2021 when Master of the Universe and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided it was time to move beyond mere social media. Given his uncanny sense of prescience, he felt he’d found the killer app, going so far as to rename Facebook Meta, reflecting the company’s shift towards developing the metaverse, a virtual environment for social interaction and commerce. From Zuckerberg’s point of view, VR was the future.
Our friend and investor at ffvc, Katie Weiss, told a story in her weekly newsletter about her six-year-old daughter who had decided that the tooth fairy isn’t real, and how Katie used logic and Sora to “preserve the magic a little longer.”
“That whole exchange made me think about another type of “fairy tale”: projections. As a venture fund, we ask for them, fully aware that we’re often being handed a story only loosely tethered to reality. So why do we still value them? Why, like at home, do we try to keep the magic alive?
“Because the magic isn’t in the numbers, it’s in the mindset behind them. Hidden in those fictional spreadsheets are real signals: how a founder thinks, what they know, how they believe their business will evolve, and whether their vision holds up under pressure. If you know where to look, there’s a tremendous amount to learn from made-up numbers.”Read More...
What Escapes People about Holiday Networking Events
The holiday season is fast approaching, a season of joy for some, and depression for others. One of the key problems: loneliness. Dating apps have evolved from merely swiping left/right. AI matchmaking elements have been added as product enhancements, and curious what the results will prove to be over time, as we’re not quite convinced that an algorithm is capable of understanding human emotions on a granular level, and isn’t love part of the equation when looking for a life mate? Yes, you can check all of the boxes, but what a person wants and what they need are often two quite different things, trust us.
We’ve introduced nearly two dozen couples over the years, who would never have met otherwise. In most cases, the parties rejected our choices after the first meeting, yet did indeed marry, in most cases due to in no small part to trickery on our part. We will also mention that none of the pairings ended in divorce. Superconnectors like Yours Truly assess things differently.
“In 2021, Random House published a book by software tycoon Bill Gates titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. The message was clear: The world is heading toward a climate catastrophe if humans keep using fossil fuels. Everyone in the world had been hearing that message loud and clear for the previous two decades, and Gates, who’s been moonlighting as a climate expert for just as long, was not only one of the loudest voices to broadcast it, but someone who had put piles of money where his mouth was,” The New American reports. Now Gates says that there’s no disaster on the horizon. “Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future,” Gates announced this week on his personal blog, GatesNotes.”
Common Core
Many were up in arms about the Microsoft founder’s seeming ‘Come to Jesus moment,’ but we will remind you that in retrospect, Gates is often wrong. Case in point: Common Core, another Gates- backed project that was going to revolutionize education and on which the government spent trillions to implement. Well, “The Results Are In: Common Core is An All-Around Failure,” says the National Association of Scholars (NAS). “It will leave students ignorant not only of literature and history, but even the ability to read, write, and sum. All the emphasis on ‘skills’ is useless without rigorous standards and challenging content matter. Our students will know every way to add two plus two, and they’ll come up with a different answer each time.”
In fact, NAS “tested the first three years of schoolchildren entirely educated by the Common Core—and their test scores have fallen steadily.” “Even Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure,” says The Federalist. At a cost of $4T to taxpayers, what to speak of the price students paid.Read More...
We are still struggling with a broken right thumb, or boo-boo, considering that Halloween is upon us. Scary that it’ll take a few more weeks to heal, and speaking of scary, we decided to consider what lessons Halloween might have for founders.
First, a bit of history. “Some say the festival has its origins in pre-Christian traditions that mark the changing of the seasons,” according to MSN. “The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, was also a pagan religious tradition that welcomed the end of summer harvest, and the changing of seasons… The Celts reportedly believed that around this time of the year, the veil between the living and the dead was thinner, and spirits could walk the earth. This is where the costumes came in, worn as disguises by festival-goers so they could “avoid being terrorized by all the evil spirits walking the Earth during Samhain.”
“Halloween just has that open world magic that you don’t get any other time of year. It’s this one day where everyone is encouraged to dress up as whatever wild thing they want, and go walking around town together while other groups of kids/teens do the same thing. It’s this wonderful, connected community that doesn’t exist for anything else,” a fan on Reddit commented.Read More...
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...
“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.”
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...
Last week was a difficult one between it having been the 24th 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...
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...
