There’s more venture capital money sloshing around than ever, but it’s the hardest time in years to raise a startup’s seed round. Anand Sanwal, the founder of business intelligence firm CB Insights, said the number of first-time startup financing rounds has fallen 20% since 2015.
Seattle doesn’t want to grow up to be Silicon Valley. It’s happy just to grab companies with good prospects that are unwilling, or unable, to pay the high price of expanding in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
In the 1850s, America was full of self-proclaimed doctors peddling patent medicines that, if they didn’t kill you, rarely cured you. It took doctors and regulators decades to extinguish fraud and ban toxic products. Now, claims Dr. James Madara, head of the American Medical Association (AMA), we are entering a similar era, a “digital dystopia” of direct-to-consumer digital health products, apps, and ineffective electronic health records.
The Swiss just voted down a proposal to give every citizen a guaranteed minimum payment known as a universal basic income (UBI), but around the world, the debate is only getting started.
US agriculture has reached a tipping point: It’s now possible to buy greens grown indoors for the same price as those farmed in California fields thanks to the falling price of LEDs.
Nobody wants a power plant in the backyard. But New Yorkers, at least, may put one on the roof.
We need batteries that can power millions of homes, deliver excellent efficiency, and cost little to operate. It turns out we’ve had the technology since 1890. We just need to build a lot more of them.
The world’s technology giants are sitting on an unprecedented mountain of cash. And with Microsoft embarking on one of the largest technology acquisitions in history, there’s new evidence that they’re willing to spend it.
Apple asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday (June 6) for permission to sell its surplus renewable energy at retail prices. Its move into energy markets seems to be one more step for the company to own, and ultimately profit, from its own power supply.
NASA has been tasked with landing humans on Mars by the 2030s. The nonprofit Mars One foundation claims it’s preparing to blast off hardware for human habitation of the Red Planet by 2024. And Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has made it his mission to turn Mars into humanity’s second home to save our species from possible extinction.
Don’t worry too much about how you look. Spend more time thinking about what you’ll say and how you’ll say it. But even so, put on some pants, perhaps.
New gestures emerge when the way we use the web changes. Clicks followed the mouse. Pinch-and-zoom and swipe accompanied mobile touchscreens. Now, as objects go online and APIs make sharing data standard across the web, Narendra Rocherolle is hoping the peck could be next.
There are bad investments, and then there is JSG Capital.
Intel’s CEO just wanted to throw a fundraiser for the Republican party’s presumptive presidential nominee. In any other election, that would not raise an eyebrow. This is not any other election cycle.
Politicians in Ireland plan to make fast, affordable broadband a legal right for every citizen.
Ever since his days of smoking pot and lifting weights in his parent’s garage at 18, Jim McAlpine has imagined a gym that married athleticism with the salutary benefits of cannabis. McAlpine is finally getting his wish. The entrepreneur is teaming up with the Heisman Trophy winner and former NFL running back Ricky Williams to open Power Plant Fitness, a gym in San Francisco, this November.
Hold the presses—or at least the lowercase i’s.
Tesla is going hard after a new customer: the power grid.
America is obsessed with entrepreneurship. HBO’s hit Silicon Valley has spread words like “pivot” and “growth hacking” through the American lexicon. Mattel offers a pink “entrepreneurial Barbie,” complete with iPhone and high heels. And for 7 million Americans, the height of this cultural narrative is every Friday on ABC’s Shark Tank.
Universal basic income is a growing obsession in Silicon Valley. Wherever founders and venture capitalists gather or TED talks are given, there is likely to be speculation about an automated future where technology takes over most occupations (except theirs of course), and the jobless forever outnumber the jobs.
Tesla’s customers are also test drivers amassing an unprecedented dataset that the company hopes to use to design its self-driving cars. And it hopes to do this before other car companies test their own self-driving technology with paying customers. So far, the strategy seems to be working.
We accept that to err is human. Not so with machines. When our electronic counterparts fail us—whether its baggage screening software or the latest artificial intelligence—we are quick to shun their advice in the future. That has big implications as machines infiltrate the workplace, offering services once provided by human colleagues.
It’s no secret that Silicon Valley investors back products, such as private jet shares, for the 1%. Now they’re funding companies selling to people just trying to make ends meet. That, unfortunately, is a growing market.
We’re supposedly living in the age of startups when people can create new businesses, enrich themselves, and employ their fellow Americans. That narrative, like much economic optimism these days, is now mostly a tale for coastal cities, and a tenuous one at best.
