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What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time

What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time

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Photo by TheDigitalArtist @Pixabay

The world was up in arms when Russia says it’s blocking Facebook in alarming new censorship push. Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg then tweeted in response to the move, saying “Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information…and silenced from speaking out,” The Verge reported. Yet, how long has the tech cabal been censoring people and posts that are not in lockstep with what they deem appropriate, or do not conform to their agendas?

 

Meanwhile, we’re witnessing The creeping authoritarianism of facial recognition that’s being adopted more and more. “The same technology that Russia uses to keep its people in line has come to America,” Spectator World reported. Of course, it’s all in the name of  lowering crime rates, but note to self, More States Than Ever Passing Laws For No Cash Bail and Pretrial Detention, including New York, where the NYPD provide(d) hard proof that no-bail law is causing a crime spike. Said the New York Post, “Since Jan. 1, 482 suspects busted for serious felonies were released without bail only to commit another 846 new crimes. Over a third were arrested for one of the seven most serious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto.” Read More...

Tech and Lessons from the Ukraine Invasion

Tech and Lessons from the Ukraine Invasion

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It’s been a stressful week in a stressful couple of years to the point where one barely knows where the road forward is anymore since the landscape is shifting so rapidly.

Given its global footprint, the tech sector is not immune from disruptive global events:

First, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Urges Apple’s CEO to take action and stop selling products and services in the Russian Federation. Read More...

How to Make Money in Tech Without Starting a Company

How to Make Money in Tech Without Starting a Company

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Elon Musk is now worth $230 billion—as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, and he has even surpassed Jeff Bezos. But, hey, a billion here, a billion there, why quibble? What was not mentioned in the CNBC piece is Elon Musk’s secret? Taxpayer money. His two companies that helped him to achieve that status – Tesla and SpaceX – “together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support (subsidies),” according to the LA Times.

 

Considering that it’s lawmakers who decide who gets what, many of them have coincidentally done quite well picking stocks, even though we know that insider trading is illegal – at least for the rest of us. Still, congress is required to disclose their stock transactions. According to NPR, the “STOCK Act is a law that was passed and signed in 2012, (that) requires more disclosures by federal lawmakers when they trade, they purchase, they sell stocks. It also criminalizes trading on inside information.” Read More...

Why We Need to Stop Calling NewCos Startups

Why We Need to Stop Calling NewCos Startups

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In case you haven’t notice, the lockdowns have led to an uptick in entrepreneurship and as many newly-minted founders are discovering, starting a business is easy. Building one, not so much. Instead of ‘startups,’ we prefer to call them ‘newcos,’ as you’re building a new company, and a company is about doing business. Startup? You start up a car, you’re off to the races. Or to the grocery store or wherever, provided that you’ve maintained the car, it’s charged or filled with gas, etc. Eventually you will have to get it serviced, and if something goes wrong, you call in a specialist. In tech, they’re called mentors/advisors/consultants. Like the mechanic, they do expect to be compensated for their time and expertise. Like a mechanic, they may do a free assessment. But if you need some work done, well, you have to pay them. Otherwise your vehicle won’t…startup.

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Where Founder Pitches Go Wrong

Where Founder Pitches Go Wrong

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Heads up! This is a great time to start a company. According to NPR, there’s an Unexpected Boom In Startups. “Most of these new businesses are seizing opportunities created by the weird coronavirus economy — an economy where people don’t really want to do stuff face-to-face anymore… Economists have a term for this…”creative destruction.”… Harvard University economist Joseph Schumpeter… described it as a process of “industrial mutation … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” He placed it at the center of capitalism, arguing that it was a force that made capitalism much more innovative than socialism.”

We know that many of you are working on newcos. We hear this from you all the time and our online investor breakfasts are certainly proof of it: everyone briefly pitches and everyone has a newco. We receive your decks and executive summaries and, since we do investor breakfasts semi-monthly, we must know all of the investors (we do know literally hundreds of them), so we’re often asked can we please send out your enclosed deck to the investors for whom we feel it might be appropriate? Happy to! But we get paid for our time. Read More...

No Is an Acronym, Revisited

No Is an Acronym, Revisited

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When you were a kid how many times did your parents say No! N-O, NO! More than once, we’d wager. How many times did they say, Yes, Y-E-S, YES!’ Bet I can count the number of times on one hand – zero. Never happened.

We did notice this at a fairly young age – long before we knew that there was such a word – that NO is an acronym. It was parent-code for ‘keep trying’ or ‘change the talking points.’ In some cases, and we found that if we changed our approach or arguments, we could get a yes. Persistence pays. And the same can be said of investors. Investors hate to miss opportunities, so they don’t really like to say No. Investors like to hedge their bets and keep their options open. Sometimes they will give you a hard and fast No and mean it. Still, that said, things change, so one never knows if it truly is a hard No. Read More...