#Entrepreneurs Archives - Startup One Stop

No Is an Acronym

March 31, 2026 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

With the spring holidays upon us, we decided to take a break from the usual tech distortion and hyperbole and since this is pitching season – and speaking of the holidays, next up is summer when investors kick back a bit to spend time with their families and/or take some vacation time, so we’re resurrecting an earlier column as a reminder, and we’ll get to why in a bit.

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,’ provided that you’d figured out the code. In some cases, 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. They 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. Or they may suggest that they might be open to coming in next round, once you’ve proved your concept a bit. It’s that FOMO thing, in case they might have missed something the first time around, so they keep you warm and keep their options open. Read More...

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

March 3, 2026 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.

Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.

“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.” Read More...

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

February 17, 2026 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” Read More...

A Tech Issue that’s Getting Old Fast

February 10, 2026 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

With all the focus on AI these days, we tend to forget about that other tech obsession: youth.

Never mind the plastic surgeries or as The Wall Street Journal reports, “To combat fears of aging out of the workforce, men in tech are splurging on face-lifts, neck lifts and eyelid lifts, say plastic surgeons…Tech is a young person’s game.”

Unless you look at the fact: Read More...

The Games People (in Big Tech) Play

January 27, 2026 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Re the headline/lead-in, in the case of Microsoft, it’s a word game. Work with us here. The CEO of Microsoft “Suddenly not sounding too confident about AI not being a bubble,” Futurism reported. “Speaking at the World Economic Forum, (Satya) Nadella pontificated about what would constitute such a speculative bubble, and said that the long-term success of AI tech hinges on it being used across a broad range of industries — as well as seeing an uptick in adoption in the developing world where it’s not as popular, the Financial Times reports. If AI fails, in other words, it’s everyone else’s fault for not using it.”

“He also begged the public to stop using the term “slop,” the rapidly accepted new lingo for describing the shoddy text, images, and videos churned out by AI models. Nadella’s thesis seemed to be that we should stop being mean about AI as it refines its “jagged edges” — which could take a while, by his own admission.”

Fine. We’ll wait. Remember, a huge number of first-to-market Web 1 companies disappeared when the bubble burst. The internet didn’t go away then, either. Read More...

What’s Eating the Medical Establishment. (That’s Not a Question.)

January 13, 2026 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

Picture by Schoklosters Castle at Unsplash

Every now and then, we turn our attention to food, which is especially timely as losing weight is a popular resolution on people’s lists new year’s list. And Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (RFKJ) just inverted one of the holiest of holies: the Food Pyramid.

“The new guidelines website states that every American should eat 1.2-1.6 grams of animal and/or plant protein per kilogram of body weight per day, along with “healthy fats” from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meat, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives and avocados,” The Defender reports.

“The guidelines …will become the default for what’s served to schoolchildren, the military, veterans, the elderly and low-income families that participate in federal programs like WIC and Head Start.” Read More...

OpenAI and the Tooth Fairy

December 9, 2025 Bonnie Comments 1 comment

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...

The Internet’s Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day.

November 25, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

It was just another Tuesday, until it wasn’t. 20% of the internet vanished in a heartbeat, all because Cloudflare, “which is supposed to protect the internet from attacks, accidentally “attacked” itself… when a routine configuration change (database permission update) triggered a hidden bug in its bot protection system, and in an instant, this “gatekeeper” locked everyone out,” Bitget reported.

It’s not the first major outage we’ve witnessed in the past few months. “Amazon’s AWS Goes Down, Takes Out “Half of the Internet,” said Futurism. “Apps and platforms relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing service, were in a jam… in a striking example of how infrastructure consolidation makes the modern internet vulnerable to a failure by a single major provider.”

And this keeps happening. Days after AWS went dark Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage. “Cisco’s network monitoring service has logged 12 major outages in 2025 so far, 23 in 2024 and 13 in 2023. Cloud service provider outages climbed from 17% to 27% of all outages in 2024, while ISP outages decreased from 83% to 73%,” the Times of India reported. Read More...

Life in the Age of Hyper-Novelty

September 9, 2025 Bonnie Comments 0 Comment

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...

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