Instacart IPO Is an Expensive Lesson for Venture Firms

September 17, 2023

(WSJ) When Instacart lists in the coming week, it will leave many of its later investors with significant paper losses—a sign of the pain venture capitalists are facing after years of fast-and-loose spending.  The grocery-delivery firm is targeting a valuation of as much as $10 billion—sharply lower than the $39 billion valuation it reached at the…

TikTok Fined $370 Million for Mishandling Child Data

September 15, 2023

(NYT) TikTok was fined roughly $370 million on Friday by European Union regulators for having weak safeguards to protect the personal information of children using the platform, a sign of increased scrutiny facing the social media service. TikTok’s default setting did not adequately protect children’s privacy, nor was the company transparent in explaining what it…

California passed a first-of-its-kind bill mandating pollution disclosures, including supply chain emissions

September 12, 2023

(Verge) California legislators passed a bill Monday night that would force big companies doing business in the state to disclose how much planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution they create. It will be the first mandate of its kind in the nation if it’s signed into law and comes as the SEC drags its heels on a similar federal…

California’s Gavin Newsom Signs New Executive Order on AI Risks

September 6, 2023

(Bloomberg) The state of California has entered the frenzied and at times confusing race among governments around the world to both regulate and harness the technology known as generative artificial intelligence. On Wednesday morning, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-12-23, a 2,500-word directive that instructs state agencies to examine how AI might threaten the…

AI Startup Buzz Is Facing a Reality Check

August 30, 2023

(WSJ) Founders and venture capitalists who flocked to artificial-intelligence startups are learning that turning the chatbot buzz into successful businesses is harder than it seems. Almost a year into the boom ignited by the November launch of ChatGPT, some startups that epitomized the zeal for so-called generative AI are now navigating layoffs and reduced user interest. Investors are…

Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’

August 28, 2023

(Washington Post) In a coastal city in the southern Philippines, thousands of young workers log online every day to support the booming business of artificial intelligence. In dingy internet cafes, jampacked office spaces or at home, they annotate the masses of data that American companies need to train their artificial intelligence models. The workers differentiate…

How the EU Digital Services Act affects Facebook, Google and others

August 25, 2023

(The Guardian) Unprecedented regulation forcing more than 40 online giants including Facebook, X, Google and TikTok to better police the content they deliver within the EU is due to come into force on 25 August. So what is the legislation and how will regulators enforce it? Digital Services Act (DSA) The DSA is a groundbreaking law…

New SEC Rules Could Hurt VC’s Newcomers

August 24, 2023

(The Information) The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved new rules for private funds Wednesday meant to give limited partners—the individuals and institutions that invest in these funds—more transparency. The ramifications for the much larger private equity industry have drawn most of the attention, but venture capital funds will also need to bend to the new rules.…

The Internet’s Next Great Power Suck

August 23, 2023

(The Atlantic) In Facebook’s youth, most of the website was powered out of a single building in Prineville, Oregon. That data center, holding row upon row of refrigerator-size racks of servers filled with rows of silicon chips, consumed huge amounts of electricity, outstripping the yearly power usage of more than 6,000 American homes. One day in the summer of 2011,…

Conservative activist sues 2 major law firms over diversity fellowships

August 23, 2023

(Washington Post) The conservative activist behind the Supreme Court’s upending of affirmative action in college admissions is suing two corporate law firms for their fellowships aimed at bolsteringdiversity, an escalation of a broader campaign to dismantle diversity initiatives in the private sector. The American Alliance for Equal Rights filed lawsuitsTuesdayagainst Perkins Coie in U.S. District…