Posts by lucidcapitalism

(The New York Times) “Climate and sustainability is going to be the new computer science,” Mr. Doerr, who made his estimated $11.3 billion fortune investing in technology companies such as Slack, Google and Amazon, said in an interview. “This is what the young people want to work on with their lives, for all the right…

(Protocol) Salesforce just became the latest tech giant to commit to limiting the scope of its non-disclosure agreements, freeing workers up to talk about instances of harassment or discrimination they experience on the job. Salesforce and all California employers are already required to make these changes for workers in the state under California’s Silenced No…

(Forbes) Assets managed by diverse-owned firms have only increased by a tenth of a percentage point to 1.4% of the $82.2 trillion US asset management industry since 2011 despite extensive investor commitments to increase the diversity of their investment portfolios. Clear research on the performance, risk and financial diversification benefits of diverse managers is necessary…

(The New York Times) The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of dollars in fines. Tech companies would be compelled to set up new policies and procedures to remove flagged hate speech,…

(Friends of the Earth) A new scorecard released today by Avaaz, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace USA shows that social media companies are leaving the public in the dark about how they’re curbing the spread of climate change dis/misinformation on their platforms. The report comes as the UN’s latest climate report named climate disinformation…

(Vox) Let’s play a little game. Imagine that you’re a computer scientist. Your company wants you to design a search engine that will show users a bunch of pictures corresponding to their keywords — something akin to Google Images. On a technical level, that’s a piece of cake. You’re a great computer scientist, and this…

(Crunchbase News) Now, the sums going into climate software aren’t huge as a portion of venture capital investment overall. Rounds for the 27 companies on our list, for instance, account for less than a quarter of a percent of total venture funding. What stands out, however, is how quickly this smallish space has been scaling…

(Crunchbase News) Reflecting on all the achievements of Black investors, I am encouraged by our progress. However, I also believe venture capital needs to set the example on how to continue this positive momentum and to evolve the approach toward increasing diversity in investment management. In the old model, VCs went to the same schools,…

(The New York Times) The debate took less than four minutes. In the Florida House last month, legislators swiftly gave final approval to a bill that makes it easier to buy and sell cryptocurrency, eliminating a threat from a law intended to curb money laundering. One of the few pauses in the action came when…

(Time) Decades ago, the state of California tried to strike a major blow against climate change, and failed. The state passed an ambitious rule in 1990 mandating car companies slowly begin replacing their offerings with electric vehicles (EVs). But in 2002, the state backed off the policy. Part of the reason was political—car companies, aided…