Posts by Cecilia Young

(TechCrunch) Last month, one of the Bay Area’s better-known early-stage venture capital firms, Uncork Capital, marked its 20th anniversary with a party in a renovated church in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, where 420 guests showed up to help the firm celebrate, trade tips and share war stories. Read more here.

(Verge) For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.  Read more here.

(WSJ) Blackstone wants rank-and-file employees at the companies it buys to own a piece of their business. Read more here.

(MarketWatch) As many as half the venture-capital firms will fade or fail, says a prominent player in that space. Josh Wolfe, the co-founder of New York VC firm Lux Capital, says the contraction will be driven by both fractured partnerships as well as what he calls “feckless” strategies that are too weak to fix. He…

(Axios) Dealmakers aren’t sweating this year’s presidential election, even if it’s the most important of our lifetimes. Read more here.

(WSJ) The real-estate mogul said he is organizing a bid to acquire platform, saying he will put users and data security at the center of its design and purpose. Read more here.

(Bloomberg) Attorneys for parents say publishers are addicting users and causing health issues like ADHD and depression. Read more here.

(FT) First-quarter operating profit sharply misses analysts’ expectations after payouts related to driver lawsuits Read more here.

(Venture Capital Journal) City of San Jose Police and Fire Department Retirement Plan increased its target to venture capital by 0.5 percent, seeing a chance to benefit from a depressed VC marketplace. Read more here.

(Reuters) Prominent computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is building a startup that uses human-like processing of visual data to make artificial intelligence (AI) capable of advanced reasoning, six sources told Reuters, in what would be a leap forward for the technology. Read more here.