(CNBC) Silicon Valley Bank has long been considered the lifeblood for tech startups, providing traditional banking services while funding projects and companies deemed too risky for traditional lenders. Billions of dollars in venture capital flow into and out of the bank’s coffers. But the 40-year-old firm’s intimate ties to technology leave it particularly sensitive to the…

(AP News) The online counseling service BetterHelp has agreed to return $7.8 million to customers to settle with the Federal Trade Commission for sharing health data it had promised to keep private — including information about mental health challenges — with companies including Facebook and Snapchat. The proposed FTC order announced Thursday also limits how the California-based…

(Reuters) A Republican bill to prevent pension fund managers from basing investment decisions on factors like climate change cleared Congress on Wednesday, setting up a confrontation with President Joe Biden, who is expected to veto the measure. The U.S. Senate voted 50-46 to adopt a resolution to overturn a Labor Department rule making it easier…

(NBC) Diversity, equity and inclusion leaders, who were hired in waves to help companies achieve an ethnically balanced workforce after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, are being phased out, surveys indicate, leaving experts in the field concerned that corporations’ talk of affecting change was just empty words. Read more here.

(The Economist) Venture capitalists are not known for humility. But many have been striking a humbler tone of late. In a recent letter to investors Tiger Global, a hedge fund and venture-capital (vc) investor, reportedly admitted that it had “underestimated” inflation and “overestimated” the boost from the covid-19 pandemic to the tech startups in its portfolio. In…

(NYT) The celebration that greeted Microsoft’s release of its A.I.-boosted search engine, Bing, to testers two weeks ago has lurched to alarm. Testers, including journalists, have found the bot can become aggressive, condescending, threatening, committed to political goals, clingy, creepy and a liar. It could be used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories at scale; lonely…

(TechCrunch) If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that VCs let their portfolio companies get away with a lot. No balance sheet? No problem; here’s a $32 billion valuation. No proven product-market fit and your last venture cost investors billions? Here’s a check worth more than all Black founders raised in 2021’s otherwise record-breaking year. Cut a check…

(FT) The chief executive of Vanguard has defended his decision to pull the world’s second largest asset manager out of an industry-wide alliance to tackle climate change, saying the group’s “voice was being drowned out”. In December, Vanguard resigned from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, a coalition of 301 asset managers committed to reducing…

(Financial Times) When Nestlé subsidiary Nespresso was awarded “B Corp” status in May 2022, the founders of tiny Glen Lyon Coffee Roasters could scarcely believe it. Their initial reaction was “dismay”, the Scottish firm said in a post on its website last summer. It had only just attained the same certification, which demonstrates enhanced commitments…

(Wired) During a trip home to Johannesburg, South Africa, while completing an engineering master’s program in Japan, Pelonomi Moiloa attended the largest machine learning community gathering she’d ever seen in Africa, just a few miles from where she grew up. In all, 600 people from 22 nations attended 2017’s Deep Learning Indaba, held at the University of…