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The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

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Image by Rudi Arlt from Pixabay

Disclosure: this is not a new product promotion but rather a study in how to potentially disrupt a very crowded vertical.

“A new American electric vehicle startup called Slate Auto has made its debut, and it’s about as anti-Tesla as it gets,” TechCrunch reported, once again missing the forest through the trees, and proving yet again that the tech media loves to get their digs in, whether it’s appropriate or not.

While there are current Tesla owner who are experiencing buyer’s remorse, or as the New York Times wrote, “In Marin County, There’s Trouble in Teslaville,” is the main selling point of the Slate the fact that it isn’t a Tesla? Or maybe the fact that “It’s affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog. It has manual windows, and it doesn’t come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn’t even painted. It can also  transform from a two-seater pickup to a five-seater SUV,” as TechCrunch pointed out. Read More...

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

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Image by Dušan from Pixabay

Easter is coming and speaking of resurrections, dire wolves, made famous by HBO’s Game of Thrones, have been extinct for around 12,500 years, but “thanks to genetic engineers at biotech company Colossal Biosciences, these majestic predators are back,” Live Science reported. The pups were even named after the dire wolves from the HBO series: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

“The company claims to have achieved this by extracting DNA from dire wolf fossils in 2021, isolating and growing gray wolf cells, and “tinkering” with the genes. They then transferred that DNA into empty canine eggs and transplanted those into fertile dogs,” Daily Dot explained.

As for this being a resurrection event, “Colossal’s critics have pointed out that, out of thousands of genetic differences that distinguish dire wolves from gray wolves, the company made only a handful of edits focused on recapitulating obvious physical traits such as fur color and texture,” Science.org reported. “Many researchers were also quick to note that according to a 2021 genetic analysis published in Nature, the dire wolf might not even be a wolf at all, belonging instead to a North American lineage of dogs that diverged from the ancestors of gray wolves more than 5 million years ago. As that study’s lead author Angela Perri told Science in 2021, the dire wolf was more closely related to the African jackal than the gray wolf and may have resembled “a giant, reddish coyote.” Read More...

The Case for 360 Degree Thinking

The Case for 360 Degree Thinking

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New York City has a composting mandate that’s been in effect since October, but now the powers that be are getting serious about implementing it, meaning, they’re levying fines on buildings/landlords who don’t comply and separate organic material from other detritus.

“But despite the mandate, the participation rate is abysmal: Public data indicates less than 5% of the city’s organic waste is actually being composted,” Gothamist reported.

Meanwhile, NYC landlords fume over new composting fines turning them into dumpster divers: ‘Detached from reality, wrote the New York Post. Read More...

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

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Image by Victoria from Pixabay

Variations on a theme and in case you missed it, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Privacy, “leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy,” as 404 Media et al reported.

“Once valued at $6 billion, executives have yet to find a bidder for the $50 million gene testing company that has never turned a profit,” Reddit noted, but that’s a whole other story.

“This strategic shift coincides with the resignation of its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who stepped down to spearhead an independent bid to acquire the company after facing repeated rejections from its board,” said Reclaim the Net. “For the millions who entrusted their DNA to 23andMe, the assumption might have been that such intimate data enjoys the ironclad protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law designed to shield sensitive health information from unauthorized disclosure. Yet, 23andMe operates outside HIPAA’s reach, leaving it tethered only to its own privacy policies — rules it can rewrite at will.” Read More...

Covid at Five: Following the New Science

Covid at Five: Following the New Science

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photo by testalize-me at unsplash

This month marked the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, and we thought it might be interesting and instructive to go over some of the developments since that time.

During the Covid Era, we were instructed to follow the science, and now that the novel mRNA vaccines have been out in the population for a while – in other words, studied over at least some time, which historically has been done before new vaccines are released to hundreds of millions of people, here are the results, and we’re just reporting, so don’t shoot the messenger: The Largest COVID-19 “Vaccine” Safety Study Ever Conducted, on 99 Million Individuals, Confirms the Injections Are NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN USE. We do realize that there was a pandemic afoot and lives at stake and the vaccine was rolled out for emergency use, but as Dr. Peter McCullough reported, In fact, 100-Year-Old BCG Vaccine Outperforms Novel mRNA Injections Against COVID-19.

““We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” says the headline on a New York Times piece that looks back at one of the deceptions promoted by government health officials during the Covid panic of 2020. The story appears in the opinion section but also notes that New York Times news reporting was subject to spin from what we might call the medical branch of the Beltway swamp,” said the Wall Street Journal. Read More...

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

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Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay

Startups are often put under the microscope when they go belly-up. The press is quick to do the forensics on what went wrong. What about the investors who put in the money? Where’s the scrutiny there? We’ve seen the bar raised for founders, but what about that other side of the table?

“Here’s the problem: this entire system optimizes for investor survival, not startup success,” said Paul O’Brien in a LinkedIn post. “A 90% startup failure rate? That’s not an inevitability…But no one in venture has an incentive to change. The funds get raised, the 2% management fees roll in, and the game continues. If investors actually cared about optimizing startup success, they’d be applying First Principles thinking, not just playing the same old VC lottery. They’d be using frameworks like the Bell Mason Diagnostic, which systematically assesses startups based on real, stage-appropriate criteria, rather than some partner’s gut feeling on whether the founder has “the right energy.”

“But most firms don’t do this because, why fix a system that already benefits them? Read More...

Pharm to Table – and That’s Not a Typo

Pharm to Table – and That’s Not a Typo

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Image by Dee from Pixabay

Newly minted HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr stated that he will immediately focus on soil  restoration/agriculture. Pay attention, founders: with fewer dollars, both VC and governmental, going to climate change, it may be time to focus on a different shade of green, and if it makes you feel any better, Latest Arctic Ice Data Shows 26% Larger Than 2012 . As for global warming/climate change, a Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records, so it looks like we all won’t be dead by 2016, as Al Gore had predicted. Since many inconvenient truths seem to be surfacing of late, here are 10 times ‘experts’ predicted the world would end by now. And as many a failed founder will tell you, it’s hard to fix a problem that may not be as critical as we were led to believe, so focus.

Here’s one that is: Big Ag Treats Us Like Dirt: Why Kennedy Believes Regenerative Agriculture Can Make Americans Healthy Again.

Who exactly is Big Ag? “Four companies (Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva) dominate the agricultural market, with Bayer controlling 18.2% of global agrochemicals and, together with Corteva, over half of U.S. retail seed sales for major crops, Mercola reported. Read More...

All the News that’s Fit to Spin

All the News that’s Fit to Spin

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

The tech community was taken by storm last week by DeepSeek, which in our mind, we refer to as DeepSix, which seems much more accurate, all things considered: all the news that we see as fit to ‘print’ and bugger all to the rest. The technology has the same problems that all LLMs have: it scrapes/is trained on the information readily available on the web. And picks and chooses what you can see.

From a technical point of view: “What’s clever about what DeepSeek has done is that they’ve figured out a way to squeeze out more performance from Nvidia’s chips by going a level deeper and tinkering with how the chips work. In short, this is better engineering, and it has allowed them to overcome the constraints imposed on them due to US chip controls. In doing so, they have shown the world a new approach to building AI models much more cheaply,” wrote Om Malik in Crazy Stupid Tech.  “I think the hysteria is hugely overblown…If you read the original paper, two things are clear: DeepSeek has done something clever that will help lower the cost of the AI revolution for everyone, and they’ve shared how they’ve done it.”

Then there’s this: “OpenAI Furious – DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us,” 404 Media reported. “OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.” Read More...

Silicon Valley Goes to Washington…Why?

Silicon Valley Goes to Washington…Why?

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Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

News stories have a way of quickly becoming yesterday’s news. Which for the most part they are, but what if there’s more to the story?

Ever wonder why the tech C suite has suddenly turned its attention to participating in the G qua Government suite (their  armies of lobbyists aside, of course) – and backed the current administration? We were curious, and there’s a reason why you need to look outside of the mainstream media for answers or connect dots that might be a bit obscured.

“The Shocking Reason Marc Andreessen Had to Endorse Donald Trump,” the Independent Sentinel reported – and not reported in the mainstream media. According to Andreessen, said the Sentinel, “The Biden Administration planned to control AI and only allow three companies to create it. The administration would crush all competing companies and classify the physics needed to run AI models. “AI is a technology, basically, that the government is gonna completely control. — Don’t fund AI startups,” Andreessen was warned. “That’s not something that we’re gonna allow to happen…We’re gonna control them, um, and we’re gonna dictate what they do.” Read More...

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

Exactly Who Was Behind that TikTok Ban?

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Whether the TikTok ban was short-lived or not, time will tell. It’s back for now, which is good news for the said 170M Americans who depend on the platform for income.

So, with all of the egregious behavior we’ve seen on the part of platforms like Google/Alpha with its globally recognized monopolistic practices and Facebook, which has how many lawsuits against them,  it was TikTok that suddenly went dark?

If you’re wondering why Congress moved so quickly and decisively against TikTok, you need to look no further than to Mark Zuckerberg himself. Read More...