Startup One Stop

As 37 Angels founder Angela Lee pointed out when she spoke at a recent SOS Investor Breakfast, it takes 10 years to build a company. We know that that seems like a lifetime to many young founders for whom 10 years is nearly half of their lives to date, and it’s tough to be patient when you hear about companies becoming unicorns seemingly overnight (although let’s not forget that many have been downgraded and the unicorpse count seems to be growing (Total Number of Downrounds Since 2015: 56 – and CBInsights now has a Down Round Tracker. Sign of the times). It’s all well and good to want to move fast and break things (Facebook) or to ask forgiveness, not permission (general tech mantra), but here’s Why Zenefits and Other Tech Upstarts are Getting Their Comeuppance. In other words, playing fast and loose with regulations and regulators doesn’t always work.And speaking of Zenefits, once you’ve broken one rule, what’s a few more? No, having sex and drinking and smoking in the stairwells are still all pretty generally not a great corporate policy and not quite what people mean by that work/life balance thing. Certain behaviors that one generally conduct as part of one’s personal life are best conducted outside of the office – which includes stairwell, too.

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook defied a federal court order to implement a backdoor into the company’s software, which would allow government investigators to secretly listen in on encrypted data from users’ various communications platforms on the phone. This was in the name of national security, of course, in order to crack the iPhone of the San Bernardino shoooter Syed Farook for the purposes of information-gathering. Never mind that the government doesn’t do its job – defend the borders – so that suspected terrorists don’t enter this country in the first place – which in this case, at least one did. Did they look at the Facebook page of his wife/accomplice Tashfeen Malik – the red flags were there, and while we don’t sanction racial or religious profiling, we’re talking about vetting people who want to enter this country permanently, which has, historically, always been policy.By the way, Farook’s phone was government-issued and the password was reset by the  agency that employed him after it was in FBI custody. In fact, according to the AP, “The county government that owned the iPhone…paid for but never installed a feature that would have allowed the FBI to easily and immediately unlock the phone… The service costs $4 per month per phone." Your – and California’s – tax dollars at work.

The line comes from the poem, “Ozymandias,” fyi, and for some reason, we could bot get it out of our head.

Last week, Marc Andreessen tweeted, “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”

In one tweet, Andreessen revealed the perhaps hitherto unspoken agenda of the Silicon Valley oligarchs, which The Atlantic summed up most eloquently: Facebook and the New Colonialism Today’s empires are born on the web, and exert tremendous power in the material world. Read More...

Ever notice that Facebook doesn’t have a ‘dislike’ button? You can ‘unlike’ something, once you’ve liked it, but you’re not allowed to ‘dislike’ a post. Dissing is evidently verboten. Bret Easton Ellis recently posted a piece on Living in the Cult of Likability and, let’s face it, your posts are defining your ‘brand,’ lest we forget that you are the product, after all. “Instead of embracing the true contradictory nature of human beings, with all of their biases and imperfections, we continue to transform ourselves into virtuous robots. This in turn has led to the awful idea — and booming business — of reputation management, where a firm is hired to help shape a more likable, relatable You. Reputation management is about gaming the system. It’s a form of deception, an attempt to erase subjectivity and evaluation through intuition, for a price,” says Ellis.

We know what’s in the water in Flint, MI, but not always so sure about Silicon Valley. It also may well be something that they’re smoking.

This isn’t about valuations or the expanding graveyard of unicorpses. It’s about the possible end of this iteration of technology, and it’s not necessarily due to collapsing world economies ( The Shipping News Says the World Economy Is Toast - Bloomberg). FastCompany published a piece this week about Silicon Valley's Problem-Solving Bubble: The insanity of gas-delivery startups and what they say about inconvenience inflation. They were referencing WeFuel, a California-based startup that eliminates the need to stop for gas, which is somehow ‘a major impediment to life. "We all lead busy lives, running to and from appointments and trying to balance time with work and family," explains a video from WeFuel competitor Filld. "Something always gets in the way: the gas station."’

There was just a near-record blizzard here in New York City - for the record, we happen to love snow (maybe not quite as much as this guy) - so we decided to have a bit of fun with snow – and snow jobs.

Net Neutrality. We won! Or so they say. We’ve said it before and for those who didn’t hear the first few times – careful before you do a victory lap and in case you missed it, FCC accused of power grab on broadband According to the article, 'The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote next week on an annual report about the state of high-speed Internet deployment around the country. A proposed draft of the congressionally mandated report finds that advanced telecommunications capability isn’t being deployed in a “reasonable and timely fashion” to all Americans. According to a fact sheet released by the agency, 34 million Americans do not have access to wired internet service that meets the FCC’s definition of broadband — download speeds of 25 Mbps and upload speeds of 3 Mbps…Critics say the report isn’t just a compendium of statistics, but a way for the FCC to expand its authority and place arbitrary standards on Internet service providers.” In fact, the standards are so arbitrary that the FCC hasn't even defined what constitutes 'broadband.' (The agency has now included wireless in their broadband definition, without defining speeds.) We’ve already witnessed how government has gutted out privacy. Heaven (and the FCC) knows what's next.

David Bowie passed a week or so ago, but this is not about that. Yes, those are lyrics from A Space Oddity and good advice, but this is about buckling up and holding on tight. We’re in for a bumpy ride, all things considered. Just this past week for example:

Dow slides 391; oil and China drops rattle investors

Market crash robs $2.3 trillion from investors Read More...

New years typically kick off with What to Watch lists, People to Watch lists and the like, and 2016 is certainly no exception, especially considering that the Consumer Electronics Show kicks off each year with a slew of new gadgets and gear and predictions/observations (The companies that rule mobile are taking over the smart home, too). But the mood is markedly different in these early days of this new year: the party’s over, and we’re not talking New Year’s Eve. As Ari Levy (CNBC, Silicon Valley's cash party is coming to an end) put it most succinctly, “2016 is shaping up to be a year of reckoning for scores of technology start-ups that have yet to prove out their business models and equally challenging for those that raised money at unjustifiably high prices.”

Imagine almost anything, and chances are, there’s an app for that. Apple announced not all that long ago that for Apple TV, the future was in apps. Considering that apps have been a major focus in tech for the past few years, not surprising and not exactly a groundbreaking announcement, but then, Apple hasn’t exactly had its most stellar year (This has been the worst year for Apple shares since 2008), but apps were built for platforms, so it was only a matter of time and a good move on Apple's part.

We are taking this opportunity to wish you all a fabulous New Year and a wonderful 2016. Since it is the end of the year, we would also like to take this time to look back and remember those we lost this past year. We know that it is by no means complete, but here is our list of 10 companies that are no longer with us:

Grooveshark, the free online music streaming service that allowed users to upload their own songs, $1.1M in funding lost

Zirtual, the virtual assistant service that raised $2M in funding, and suddenly vanished. Investors included Jason Calacanis, Tony Hsieh and Melo7 Tech Partners Read More...