#sequoia capital

[alanshemper]

[brunojordanposts]

Con la guerra de Gaza y el regreso de Trump, Silicon Valley acoge un renacimiento militar

Por Sophia Goodfriend  Antropóloga estudiosa de la guerra automatizada de Israel contra Palestina. En la primera Cumbre DefenseTech de Israel, líderes corporativos y funcionarios del ejército promocionaron abiertamente su asociación en la guerra y la vigilancia impulsadas por IA. Ponente en la Cumbre DefenseTech en la Universidad de Tel Aviv, 10 de diciembre de 2024 -DefenseTech Summit.   ��…

[prcg]

Kalshi obtiene decenas de millones en préstamos de capitalistas de riesgo y prevé una ronda de más de 50 millones de dólares en medio del auge de las apuestas electorales, dice una fuente

Los inversores se apresuran a invertir millones en una nueva startup llamada Kalshi en forma de préstamos o incluso como dinero en efectivo, algo inusual que ya veremos más adelante. Kalshi es un intercambio que permite a las personas apostar, como contratos oficiales de comercio de productos básicos, sobre los resultados de eventos culturales, desde los resultados de las elecciones hasta durante…

[elcorreografico]

Managed Global Securities Trade Ltd. ha anunciado planes para una oferta pública inicial por 7 mil millones de dólares

Managed Global Securities Trade Ltd. ha anunciado planes para una oferta pública inicial por 7 mil millones de dólares Managed Global Securities Trade Ltd. ha anunciado planes para una OPI (oferta pública inicial), por 7 mil millones de dólares, y se espera que cotice en la Bolsa de Valores de Nueva York.

La plataforma líder mundial de comercio de activos digitales, Managed Global Securities Trade Ltd. (en adelante, MGST), anunció recientemente que la compañía ha estado planificando durante varios meses y ha presentado gradualmente su solicitud para una oferta pública inicial (OPI). Se espera que cotice en la Bolsa de Valores de Nueva York (NYSE) en las próximas semanas, con el símbolo bursátil…

[peak-xv-15]

Mama Earth Talk is a podcast that takes a deep dive into the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, social and economic)

[deadrlngers]

i love kicking out from their homes families that have kids/infants on the sims, i'm like oh sorry go eat trash under the rain with your stupid baby i need this spot to build a coffee shop

[jupiterscythe]

Feeding each of my limbs into a slow meat grinder would be much more preferable than these malicious Temu ads every 2 fucking posts

[msclaritea]

Some Prominent Silicon Valley Investors Shift to the Right (SHOCKER!) 🙄

- The New York Times

Some Prominent Silicon Valley Investors Shift to the Right

Marc Andreessen, Chamath Palihapitiya and several other tech venture capitalists are increasingly criticizing President Biden and making their disaffection known in an election year.

Credit...Barbara Gibson

By Erin Griffith

May 23, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET

In 2021, David Sacks, a prominent venture capital investor and podcast host, said former President Donald J. Trump’s behavior around the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had disqualified him from being a future political candidate.

At a tech conference last week, Mr. Sacks said his view had changed.

“I have bigger disagreements with Biden than with Trump,” the investor said. Mr. Sacks said he and his podcast co-hosts were working on hosting a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump, which could include an interview for their “All In” show. They also extended an invitation to President Biden, he said, but the Trump camp was more open to it.

Such public support for Mr. Trump used to be taboo in Silicon Valley, which has long been seen as a liberal bastion. But frustration with Mr. Biden, Democrats and the state of the world has increasingly driven some of tech’s most prominent venture capitalists to the right.

Some investors, like Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital, backed Democrats in the past. (He is set to co-host the fund-raiser for Mr. Trump alongside Mr. Sacks.) Others, like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital, have criticized Mr. Biden without expressing support for Mr. Trump. Still others, like Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, are focusing their efforts on electing Republicans to Congress.

The activity may amount to more noise than formal support or personal donations for Mr. Trump’s campaign. And it is by no means everyone. Much of Silicon Valley, including prominent donors like the investors Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla, remains loyal to Democrats. Peter Thiel, the investor who backed Mr. Trump in the past, has said he is disillusioned with politics and plans to stay out of the 2024 race.

Jacob Helberg, Vinod Khosla and Senator Todd Young are seated in blue armchairs on a stage, with U.S. flags behind them.

Jacob Helberg, left, an adviser to Palantir, spoke with the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, center, and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, at a forum in Washington. Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

But the tech investors who are leaning right are influential, with enormous followings on social media and lots of money — and they are becoming more politically engaged. That reflects how the start-up industry has grown — soaring eightfold between 2012 and 2022 to $344 billion, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups — with more of the industry’s issues turning political in nature.

“When I started, everybody cared about tax issues and immigration issues,” said Bobby Franklin, who has led the National Venture Capital Association, a trade group, since 2013. “Now it is so much more complex.”

Delian Asparouhov, an investor at Founders Fund, the investment firm founded by Mr. Thiel, recently marveled at how much the political winds had shifted. This month, Mr. Trump made a virtual appearance at a venture capital conference in Washington. There, he thanked attendees for “keeping your chin up” and said he looked forward to meeting them.

“Four years ago you had to issue an apology if you voted for him,” Mr. Asparouhov wrote on X.

Delian Asparouhov, an investor at Founders Fund, recently marveled at how much the political winds had shifted in tech.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Mr. Sacks, Mr. Palihapitiya and Founders Fund did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia Capital declined to comment.

The comments and activity by the group of tech investors are particularly noticeable given Silicon Valley’s blue background. The circle of Republican donors in the nation’s tech capital has long been limited to a few tech executives such as Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay; Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital.

But mostly, the tech industry cultivated close ties with Democrats. Al Gore, the former Democratic vice president, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2007. Over the next decade, tech companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber and Apple eagerly hired former members of the Obama administration.

Mr. Thiel’s loud and enthusiastic support for Mr. Trump in 2016, which included a $1.25 million donation and a speech at the Republican National Convention, came as a shock. Even more surprising to some in the industry was the way that, after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who is a Democrat.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

That feeling has hardened under President Biden. Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments..."

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED. THEY'RE WORRIED... ABOUT THEIR MONEY; ABOUT THEIR BILLIONS. America has been under relentless assault from SILICON VALLEY since it's inception. You saw the reports from Keri Kukral an SV whistleblower. The place was teeming with criminal behavior. Foreign money flowing in from foreign adversaries like China Russia India, etc. There were prostitution rings and access run rampant, as Main Street kept having everything stolen from it. Practically every Cryptocurrency company was engaged in illegal activities.

Perhaps Mr Thiel (who is very much NOT out of politics. He's a backer of NYC Eric Adams) should not have tried to crash our Banks and the Stock Market and allow me to find the article where some of these 'former liberals' including Thiel, used to wax on about wanting a Monarchy; about wanting to 'REPLACE GOVERNMENT ' With THEY'RE OWN VERSION. He is also close to the Fascist wing of the Catholic Church They're all full of shit. And I don't know how impressive Al Gore is with that WEF leash. Tech is/was working with the World Economic Forum to gain more control.

#VoteBlue #BidenHarris2024 because our country desperately needs to get some of these billionaires under control or they will NEVER leave us alone. I'll admit to not being happy about everything right now, but I'm smart and adult enough to know that right now, it's not about me. It's about saving this country from Silicon Valley.

#SanFrancisco #KhoslaVentures #SequoiaCapital #ToddYoung #JacobHelberg #Palantir #ScottMcNealy #SunMicrosystems; #MegWhitman #Ebay #CarlyFiorina #hewlettpackard #larryellison #Oracle #dougleone #airbnb #GooglePlay #uber #apple #Obama #LinaKhan #garygensler

[rebeccadumaurier]

it's always the evilest companies with the best-looking websites...

[peterbordes]

AI powered developer tools beyond Copilot, where else will AI change how software is made?

Generative AI stands to change how work happens in one industry after another. But software engineering’s transformation isn’t done yet.

There are many opportunities here. Some founders are iterating on the in-editor, get-help-while-you’re-coding experience Copilot popularized, trying different interaction patterns or different models. Think of Replit’s Ghostwriter, Soucegraph’s Cody, TabNine and others.

[probablyasocialecologist]

This is it. Generative AI, as a commercial tech phenomenon, has reached its apex. The hype is evaporating. The tech is too unreliable, too often. The vibes are terrible. The air is escaping from the bubble. To me, the question is more about whether the air will rush out all at once, sending the tech sector careening downward like a balloon that someone blew up, failed to tie off properly, and let go—or more slowly, shrinking down to size in gradual sputters, while emitting embarrassing fart sounds, like a balloon being deliberately pinched around the opening by a smirking teenager. But come on. The jig is up. The technology that was at this time last year being somberly touted as so powerful that it posed an existential threat to humanity is now worrying investors because it is apparently incapable of generating passable marketing emails reliably enough. We’ve had at least a year of companies shelling out for business-grade generative AI, and the results—painted as shinily as possible from a banking and investment sector that would love nothing more than a new technology that can automate office work and creative labor—are one big “meh.” As a Bloomberg story put it last week, “Big Tech Fails to Convince Wall Street That AI Is Paying Off.” From the piece: Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. had one job heading into this earnings season: show that the billions of dollars they’ve each sunk into the infrastructure propelling the artificial intelligence boom is translating into real sales. In the eyes of Wall Street, they disappointed. Shares in Google owner Alphabet have fallen 7.4% since it reported last week. Microsoft’s stock price has declined in the three days since the company’s own results. Shares of Amazon — the latest to drop its earnings on Thursday — plunged by the most since October 2022 on Friday. Silicon Valley hailed 2024 as the year that companies would begin to deploy generative AI, the type of technology that can create text, images and videos from simple prompts. This mass adoption is meant to finally bring about meaningful profits from the likes of Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The fact that those returns have yet to meaningfully materialize is stoking broader concerns about how worthwhile AI will really prove to be. Meanwhile, Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that soared to an absurd $3 trillion valuation, is losing that value with every passing day—26% over the last month or so, and some analysts believe that’s just the beginning. These declines are the result of less-than-stellar early results from corporations who’ve embraced enterprise-tier generative AI, the distinct lack of killer commercial products 18 months into the AI boom, and scathing financial analyses from Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, and Elliot Management, each of whom concluded that there was “too much spend, too little benefit” from generative AI, in the words of Goldman, and that it was “overhyped” and a “bubble” per Elliot. As CNN put it in its report on growing fears of an AI bubble, Some investors had even anticipated that this would be the quarter that tech giants would start to signal that they were backing off their AI infrastructure investments since “AI is not delivering the returns that they were expecting,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told CNN. The opposite happened — Google, Microsoft and Meta all signaled that they plan to spend even more as they lay the groundwork for what they hope is an AI future. This can, perhaps, explain some of the investor revolt. The tech giants have responded to mounting concerns by doubling, even tripling down, and planning on spending tens of billions of dollars on researching, developing, and deploying generative AI for the foreseeable future. All this as high profile clients are canceling their contracts. As surveys show that overwhelming majorities of workers say generative AI makes them less productive. As MIT economist and automation scholar Daron Acemoglu warns, “Don’t believe the AI hype.”

6 August 2024

[prcg]

Stripe en conversaciones para adquirir Bridge por mil millones de dólares

Stripe está en conversaciones para adquirir la plataforma de moneda estable Bridge por la friolera de mil millones de dólares, según Forbes. Según los informes, las conversaciones se encuentran en etapas avanzadas, aunque no se ha cerrado nada. Bridge, cofundada por los ex alumnos de Coinbase Zach Abrams y Sean Yu, ha creado una API que ayuda a las empresas a aceptar monedas estables. La pareja…

[mariacallous]

Next year will be Big Tech’s finale. Critique of Big Tech is now common sense, voiced by a motley spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even tech titans such as the VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which is singing in harmony with giants like a16z in proclaiming fealty to “little tech” against the centralized power of incumbents.

Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period.

Another reason Big Tech is set to falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market, on which Big Tech bet big, is beginning to lose its fizz. Major money, like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, is worried. They went public recently with their concerns about the disconnect between the billions required to create and use large-scale AI, and the weak market fit and tepid returns where the rubber meets the AI business-model road.

It doesn’t help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI’s reliance on, and generation of, sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher—as evidenced, for one, by Signal’s persistent user growth. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I kid you not, screenshot everything you do on your device so an AI system could give you “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn-watching?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images—which would not exist otherwise—in order to work.

Happily, these factors aren’t just liquefying the ground below Big Tech’s dominance. They’re also powering bold visions for alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopoly tech paradigm, and work to design and build actually democratic, independent, open, and transparent tech. Imagine!

For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring independent core tech infrastructure, with convenings of open source developers, scholars of governance, and experts on the political economy of the tech industry.

And just as the money people are joining in critique, they’re also exploring investments in new paradigms. A crop of tech investors are developing models of funding for mission alignment, focusing on tech that rejects surveillance, social control, and all the bullshit. One exciting model I’ve been discussing with some of these investors would combine traditional VC incentives (fund that one unicorn > scale > acquisition > get rich) with a commitment to resource tech’s open, nonprofit critical infrastructure with a percent of their fund. Not as investment, but as a contribution to maintaining the bedrock on which a healthy tech ecosystem can exist (and maybe get them and their limited partners a tax break).

Such support could—and I believe should—be supplemented by state capital. The amount of money needed is simply too vast if we’re going to do this properly. To give an example closer to home, developing and maintaining Signal costs around $50 million a year, which is very lean for tech. Projects such as the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany point a path forward—they are a vehicle to distribute state funds to core open source infrastructures, but they are governed wholly independently, and create a buffer between the efforts they fund and the state.

Just as composting makes nutrients from necrosis, in 2025, Big Tech’s end will be the beginning of a new and vibrant ecosystem. The smart, actually cool, genuinely interested people will once again have their moment, getting the resources and clearance to design and (re)build a tech ecosystem that is actually innovative and built for benefit, not just profit and control. MAY IT BE EVER THUS!

[aromantictendi]

Lower Decks s5e1-2 thoughts:

The parallel universe storyline was good and gave us a lot to dig into but I really liked Targalus IX story too. Just watching all those throwing off capitalism celebrations thinking man, I wish that were me.

Dear Trek, please keep giving me Orion lore. Though I agree with what I've seen others say that Tendi should be more savvy about Orion culture than this. But maybe another sign that this just isn't a world she fits into anymore. I appreciated how supportive her family was though.

I love that T'lyn added herself to the buddies doodle on the Sequoia.

First Sequoia scene in episode 2:

Next scene after she's fixed it up:

[darkeagleruins]

Come on journalists! Do better! You all know Kamala Harris is a sacrificial lamb, being fed to the wolves.

Why aren’t you reporting all of the comings and goings at Michelle’s War Room since Thursday?

Literally dozens and dozens of Democrat billionaire donors (Fred Eychaner, Reid Hoffman, James and Marilyn Simons, Michael Mortiz (Sequoia Capital and the Chinese Communist Party) Elizabeth Heising, Wayne Jordan, Jeffrey Skill, Patty Quillin, etc., etc.) K Street and Washington, D.C. royalty have been taking turns kissing Barack Hussein Obama II’s ring.

Anyone that doesn’t admit Barack is in charge is either ignorant or lying. His silence and then refusing to endorse Kamala Harris should tell you all you need to know.

I said previously, Barack Obama is the most powerful man in the Democratic Party. Period. End of story. He is going to do whatever it takes to be President a 4th term by proxy, using Michelle.

Michelle Obama’s War Room: 2446 Belmont Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008.

After Harris is slaughtered by Americans, Washington, DC and the media, Michelle Obama will step up, telling the country, ‘after much reflection and soul searching, talking endlessly with Barack and our girls, I have come to the conclusion that my country needs me’, she will be the chosen one at the Chicago Democrat National Convention in August. As close to a coronation as you can get.

The Obama’s and DNC have opposition research that will put any chance of a viable Kamala Harris campaign but they need her to languish on the vine for the next 4-5 weeks.

Michelle wants the honeymoon to extend right to the election. She isn’t even interested in a debate with President Trump.