No full-on editorial due to the holiday weekend and hope you enjoyed yours!
Thanksgiving is the biggest travel weekend of the year. Then again, Americans seem to always be on the move.
It’s not just the country itself that people are leaving. For the curious or those whose for whom home was not where it was last Thanksgiving, here are The Top 5 States Americans Are Leaving, with California once again being the big winner. Or in this case, loser.
Thanksgiving is upon us in the US, and personally, it’s our favorite holiday. Get together with family and/or friends and eat. What could be better!
As a result of the recent Presidential election here in this country, many people are leaving or threatening to leave the country. Which is Why the Cotswolds is bracing itself for an American invasion. “From Ellen DeGeneres to Barbra Streisand, Trump’s victory has prompted the rich and famous to threaten self-imposed exile,” The Telegraph reported.
Things to keep in mind, if you’re considering that route, or anywhere in Great Britain: taxes are considerably higher and Britain now has the highest industrial energy prices in the world. The dollar is stronger against the pound, true, although do keep in mind that power outages are not a rare occurrence there across the pond. But if it’s socialism you want, it’s socialism you will get. Nor will you have the same freedoms. Of speech, for example and “Think before you post”: The U.K. is now jailing people for social media comments.
The headline is courtesy of a little poem by Ogden Nash
“A flea and a fly in a flu
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”
Not the usual tech-focused editorial this week, as we’ve been under the weather with a very debilitating bug that’s going around, and a particularly virulent one, according to one of the medical practitioners in my family. Two, actually.
Then again, it’s flu season, and symptoms at the onset may vary: headache, sneezing, congestion, coughing, fever, sore throat, stomach/intestinal pain, loss of appetite and then the general aches and pains that come with the malady.
From what we’ve been hearing from the investors whom we know personally, the funding purse strings are opening up again, and mergers are moving forward.
We hosted Jonathan Hakakian of SoundBoard VC at last week’s Online Insights, and part of the discussion centered around changes on how VCs vet startups. Yes, they’re still vetting decks, doing their due diligence and all that, but many meetings are still held over Zoom or some other such platform. Which means that funds have eased the requirements in terms of geolocation. Many VC/Angel firms don’t even feel the need to have a dedicated office. Some use co-working spaces to have somewhere to hold meetings from time to time, and for conference room access. Offices, for both investors and founders, are no longer necessary, at least, in some cases, not until you’ve reached a certain stage.
Jonathan has returned to taking in-person meetings, circumstances permitting, meaning, when it’s geographically possible for him and the founder/founding team. And there are times when they’ll keep it casual, meeting at a diner or restaurant. There is a different dynamic at in-person meetings, but still important to mind your Ps and Qs – and your table manners.
It’s election day here in the US, with two major party candidates vying for the spot of President of the United States. So, let’s have some fun.
John Galt is the hero of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Set in a dystopian world where the government, which is on the brink of collapse, has taken control of businesses, and regulatory overreach is choking innovation. Galt is a shadowy figure of almost mythic proportion – and the force behind a sweeping strike on the part of innovators, which promises to bring the government to its knees.
In this age of technology, who would be a likely John Galt candidate, Galt being a brilliant inventor who, for our purposes here, while he may not necessarily be mankind’s salvation, is at least helping to tip the scales a bit? We nominate two potential candidates, both of whom, like Rand’s Galt himself, have been both glorified and vilified: Bill Gates and Elon Musk. It being Election Day, you decide:
The weather in parts of the country and the world has been extreme lately, to put it mildly, and the sector – tech – that brought you such breakthroughs as emojis and planet-saving lab-grown meats, are turning their focus to the weather itself, although note to self re lab-grown meats, “The claim that the process reduced CO2 emissions over conventional livestock farming has been comprehensively demolished: one estimate is that it increases emissions by between four times and 25 times as much as reared meat. The animal, of course, can perform its own exercise by itself, for free, while the nutrients it requires are either free or cheap. It also enhances the land on which it grazes. Producing the product requires far more energy than leaving, say, a bovine in the field to produce the same all-natural result,” MSN reported. “The alternative proteins bubble has burst.”
So next up: the weather and this just in: “A growing number of Silicon Valley founders and investors are backing research into blocking the sun by spraying reflective particles high in the atmosphere or making clouds brighter. The goal is to quickly cool the planet,” Bloomberg reported…”Reflecting sunlight to cool the planet — known as solar radiation management (SRM) — could come with dangerous consequences such as shifting rainfall patterns and changing the prevalence of diseases like malaria, to say nothing of the potential geopolitical chaos. Those risks have scientists urging caution and governments slowly working to build policies. But the tech world has rarely shied away from testing a new product and figuring out the bugs later, and prominent philanthropists are dedicating more money than ever to these radical ideas.”
“Flubbed climate test won’t deter rich donors from altering the sky,” Politico chimed in. “They funded a failed experiment to block the sun. They plan to try again.”
There’s no doubt that AI has changed the world, and we’re still basically at the beginning of this cycle in tech. New to the zeitgeist, at least. The idea of human-like thinking machines was first posited at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. This year, ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel even though he’s now scared of AI. Is anyone paying attention?
“Hinton shares his Nobel with John J. Hopfield of Princeton University. Hinton’s work built upon Hopfield’s breakthrough work where he created a network system that could save and recreate patterns. Combined, their work led to future breakthroughs in Machine Learning (systems that can learn and improve data without programming) and the concept of artificial neural networks, which is often at the core of modern AI,” said Tech Radar.
Hinton left “Google’s DeepMind where he and his team helped lay the groundwork for today’s chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. However, when Hinton left in 2023, he sounded the alarm, worrying that Google was no longer, as he told The New York Times, “a proper steward” for AI.”
Gen Z, aka the Zoomers, that generation born between roughly 1997-2012, are hitting the workforce and it seems that it’s not going well at all. “Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them—here’s what they say needs to change,” Fortune reported.
“Employers’ gripe with young people today is their lack of motivation or initiative—50% of the leaders surveyed cited that as the reason why things didn’t work out with their new hire.
“Bosses also pointed to Gen Z being unprofessional, unorganized and having poor communication skills as their top reasons for having to sack grads. Leaders say they have struggled with the latest generation’s tangible challenges, including being late to work and meetings often, not wearing office-appropriate clothing, and using language (in)appropriate for the workspace.”
Seriously and this is what concerns us about GenerativeAIs and AIs in general. What begins as a tool does have a tendency of going down the slippery slope in not too long a time, and you can’t help but wonder why. Why are there no safeguards in place?
This is creepy: “iPhone users baffled by ‘scary’ feature that suggests they check in with ex-lovers and dead relatives,” the Daily Mail reported. “’Messages introduces Check In, an important feature for when a user wants to notify a family member or friend that they have made it to their destination safely,’ Apple explained.”
All well and good, and exactly why would that matter to a deceased relative?
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!