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Tag: #Founders

The Bad Boys of Tech, Part 2

The Bad Boys of Tech, Part 2

 Unless you’ve been cut off from all worldly communications, you’ve heard that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was very unceremoniously booted from OpenAI – and was informed in a Google Meet, despite Microsoft being a major OpenAI investor and partner.

No one seems to know the precise reason why he was terminated. Malfeasance? Was it his reported lack of transparency with the board, which now consists of three independent directors holding no equity, and its Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever? A coup?

Or something quite different transpiring behind the curtain… Read More...

How to Prioritizing in the New Normal

How to Prioritizing in the New Normal

Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay

Haven’t heard that term in a while, eh, and not like we all have it all figured out.

We had a conversation with a successful serial entrepreneur recently, who began by filling us in on his history:

Started and built his first business: sold it. Started and built another business: acquired. Was about to undertake his next startup when his wife told him that he was going to be a dad for the first time – and not to a singleton. Read More...

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Those of us who work in technology – which is most of us here – can’t help but glom onto or at least test the shiny new thing that comes along. It’s in our DNA. The problem is that tech tends to jump in feet first without realizing the possible consequences, dystopian side, or even fully examining the product.

Apologies if we sound a bit repetitive here, but read on. We do have a point to make, that no one else seems to be considering.

BuzzFeed To Use ChatGPT’s AI For Content Creation, Stock Up 200%+ (forbes.com). Okay, it’s ‘BuzzFeed’ which is ‘clickbait’ by any other name.  As Forbes further reported, “Investigative reports on The Byte shared that media website CNET was using AI technology, under articles penned by the anonymous “CNET Money Staff”. The AI was created by CNET resources, and only used for a very small number of posts before human oversight detected significant misstatements of factserrors and plagiarized content, according to multiple news sources.” The result: CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy. Read More...

What Founders Can Learn from Drug Dealers

What Founders Can Learn from Drug Dealers

Disclaimer: we are in no way intimating or outright suggesting that you become purveyors of drugs, legal or otherwise.

We’ve long known that tech can be addictive. When was the last time you left home without your cellphone? Or voluntarily spent a day or more without checking email et al? Read More...

Is Diversity the New Lean-In Movement?

Is Diversity the New Lean-In Movement?

 Diversity/inclusion is definitely the catchphrase of the day and having been in the industry since the Web 1.0 days, when we’d attend conferences and would never find a queue at the women’s loo ever, while at the men’s loo, the line would snake around corners. Not so much when Web 2.0 hit and cheers to that, despite the wait we then encountered: the industry was becoming more gender-inclusive at some levels and there’s a start, anyway, even though not all companies seemed to have gotten the memo, or the message, or didn’t quite understand that it’s not all about numbers alone: Black former employees sue Google for racial discrimination.

 

The pendulum does have a way of swinging from one extreme to the other before righting itself at the midway point, or so one would hope, and so it seems to be going  with diversity and inclusion, Hollywood/the movie industry being an extreme example (Are the Oscars Over?). Viewership of the Academy Awards has been way down in recent years, and despite the fact that many entertainers accepting their awards or presenting use the moment as a way to air their pollical views, the Academy has somehow decided that it’s all about diversity/inclusion, or the lack thereof. Read More...

The Sili-CON Game

The Sili-CON Game

image by Leuchtturm81 at Pixabay

What captured the attention of the Twitterverse of late was the thread from Bolt founder Ryan Breslow (@theryanking) who called out the Silicon Valley Mob. We quote: “two forces have the most power in Silicon Valley. And like… tenfold more than anyone else. Their names: Stripe and YCombinator. The kicker → Their power is in how they work together. Stripe is the darling child of Silicon Valley. Early to YC (YCombinator), Stripe made payment processing APIs easy and signed up all their YC batchmates to use their product. The “official payment processor for YC”, Stripe became a HOT company. Sequoia, the most powerful VC firm in the world, went all-in. Their position today is upwards of $20-$30B in Stripe stock.

 

By the Numbers

“Three forces combined quickly: 1/ The most powerful VC firm in the world. 2/ The most powerful startup accelerator in the world. 3/ The most powerful startup in the world, with the help of #1 and #2.” Read More...

Subject Matter Experts and Entrepreneurship

Subject Matter Experts and Entrepreneurship

This week, we thought we’d look at subject matter experts, taken from the lens of carbon emissions with lessons for both entrepreneurs, and investors.

The good news about the lockdown: carbon emissions, which we’ve been told are a danger and will wipe us all out in X amount of years, are decreasing, given that fewer factories are fully operational, and there are fewer commuters on the roads. On the other side of the coin, although COVID-19 Cuts Car Crashes — But What About Crash Rates? According to StreetsBlog (and underreported in mainstream news), “both car crashes and crash fatalities have more than doubled in the North Star State (Minnesota) since the virus began to accelerate in the state.” In New York City, more motorists died in the period between March 2 and April 8 — even though there are so few cars on the road, as Streetsblog NYC reported.” Read More...