The “attention economy” created by Silicon Valley is bankrupting usAnother week, another political crisis. We’ve had yet another few days of outrageous tweets from President Trump all designed, it seems, to monopolize the national conversation. It’s all so predictably unpredictable — and what Tristan Harris, the co-founder of the nonprofit group Time Well Spent,
calls a world dominated by the race for attention. According to Harris, an ex-design ethicist at Google who the Atlantic described as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, we all “live in a city called the attention economy.” That’s what is shaping everything about contemporary life, Harris says, particularly our increasingly surreal politics. A computer predicted the success of Etsy, Spotify, and other major startups 8 years ago — and it's just generated a new listIn 2009, Ira Sager of Businessweek magazine set a challenge for Quid AI's CEO Bob Goodson: programme a computer to pick 50 unheard of companies that are set to rock the world. The domain of picking "start-up winners" was — and largely still is — dominated by a belief held by the venture capital (VC) industry that machines do not play a role in the identification of winners. Ironically, the VC world, having fuelled the creation of computing, is one of the last areas of business to introduce computing to decision-making. [ Business Insider ] Shipping As A Competitive Advantage Our portfolio company Shippo is helping ecommerce companies compete with Amazon by making shipping easier and less expensive to offer. In this short(ish) video, Shippo’s founder and CEO, Laura Behrens Wu explains how they do that and why it is so important. Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials – With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders ConferenceMorgan DeBaun is the founder and CEO of Blavity. Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC. [ YC Blog ] Hypnotized by Elon Musk’s HyperloopThe notion of an everyday world transformed by grandiose ventures is not, of course, exclusive to the nineteen-thirties. It has exerted a perennial popular appeal. Even today, daydreams of mile-high skyscrapers, subterranean parks, and buses straddling entire highways are often treated as hard news. Though they are rarely realistic, as either engineering proposals or as political solutions to urban problems, they strike an imaginative chord. And justifiably so: compared with damming the Hudson, the idea of, say, fixing and maintaining Manhattan’s aging sewer system seems like the definition of tedium. For some people, the city of tomorrow must be a spectacle, or it won’t be the city of tomorrow at all. [ New Yorker ] Gigafund to Raise $100M Venture Capital Fund Gigafund, a Redwood City, CA-based newly formed venture capital firm, is seeking a $100m fund. Per an SEC regulatory filing, Gigafund 0-A, LP, has not raised funds yet. The document lists Oskoui Stephen and Luke Nosek as people related to the offering. Luke Nosek is a Polish-born American entrepreneur, co-founder of PayPal and a partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco, CA-based venture capital firm. Stephen Oskoui is a venture partner at Founders Fund and Founder and CEO at Smiley Media. Silicon Valley billionaires created AltSchoolSilicon Valley is working on ways to change the way that we drive, eat, live, and now thanks to a new type of school, the way our children learn. The school is called AltSchool, and it's the brainchild of a former Google executive, Max Ventilla. The school merges traditional education with the type of high-tech learning that you would expect from Silicon Valley. AltSchool has even funded itself like a startup, raising $170 million from investors like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Southeast Asia’s Most Active Tech Investors500 Startups invested in the highest number of Southeast Asian companies, followed closely by East Ventures. [ CB Insights ] A 32-year-old investor with ties to Elon Musk wants to upend America with his crazy, utopian plan for the futureIn a not-too-distant future city, superintelligent robots will carry out the majority of vital tasks. Driverless cars will ferry passengers to and from points of interest. Housing and healthcare will be affordable, if not free to all. Political leaders and technologists will speak the same language. And life is good. Sam Altman, the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, has laid out this utopian vision over the years, and most definitively in a job listing posted on YC's blog in June 2016. [ Business Insider ] How BuzzFeed’s Tasty Conquered Online FoodWe need to talk about overhead instructional videos of people making food. You know the ones I mean. Open up Facebook or Instagram and you’ll bump into one or two or a billion of them. Consider “Sliders 4 Ways,” in which a disembodied pair of hands moving at bullet speed turns dinner rolls and a variety of meats into a feast fit for a super-high king. [ NY Times ] |