Lessons from pitching in China and speaking with local founders and investors. — A few weeks ago I flew to Chengdu, China to take part in a startup competition and regional tech conference. Chengdu is the fifth largest city in China and home of the giant panda. A historic city that played a key role in medieval China’s warring era, I decided to…

Meta joins the Generative AI game with a free offering and Microsoft’s supporting role could be its smartest move yet. — This story has been moved to my Substack newsletter. Follow this link to continue reading…

How do we avoid the next WeWork or FTX at this rate? — Before the dust has even settled on the spectacular FTX implosion, venture capitalists (VCs) are at it again. Crunchbase reports that AI is experiencing a “funding explosion”. “Once again, the week can be summed up in two words we’ve heard all year — artificial intelligence. …

Generative AI will mark the start of the Internet’s decline, unless Internet ‘Robocops’ are developed to enforce ‘dual citizenship’ labels. — Have you ever wondered when the Internet would stop growing and decline instead? The common wisdom has always been that a lot of people in the developing world do not yet have access to the Internet. So it has lots of room to grow… Contrary to popular belief, I think…

If these poll results are anything to go by, we should cut back the budget for the Olympics and ditch Meta stock. — The Olympics and World Cup are both global events that take place once every four years. They pit the world’s athletes against each other at a inter-country level. Only difference being, the Olympics hosts a variety of sports, whereas the World Cup does just one — soccer. Typically they do…

Contrary to his original intentions, cryptocurrencies and DeFi platforms are now more vulnerable to privacy breaches and hacking than traditional banking. — In his original bitcoin manifesto, creator Satoshi Nakamoto talked specifically about how the “traditional banking model” maintained privacy by “limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party”. Here, the weak link is the trusted third party, which is usually the financial institutions that control the…

It‘s the dream of every startup to have VCs begging to invest, but how these founders did it are important lessons to learn. — Parker Conrad is the founder of Rippling, a startup which is valued at US$11.25 billion. This is his 3rd attempt. When he started his first company back in 2006, it dragged out for what he called “seven years of slow, grinding failure”. In an interview with Garry Tan, he spoke…

A VC declared on Instagram that founders with active roles in several companies is a “MASSIVE” red flag for him, sparking off a big debate. — As a serial entrepreneur and occasional investor, I struggled with this question when I saw it in my Instagram feed. On the one hand, I do agree that trying to run more than one company concurrently is a massive effort that increases your odds of failure, especially in the critical…

A few good reasons why we should do away with this absurd piece of modern fashion. — Did you know that Peter Thiel said in his book “Zero to One” that at his fund, they have a rule of not investing in a “tech CEO that wears a suit”? “This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket…