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One day in late June, a panel of investors entertained business ideas from around the country. A kitschy advent calendar. A fancy mini-fridge for drinks. A flashlight that emits beams from multiple angles. A machine that grows mushrooms. Bendable cups. Pet plants (for you, not your cat). This was the Los Angeles set of “Shark […] More
SARATOGA, Calif. — A silver Winnebago pulled up to a self storage warehouse on the outskirts of a Silicon Valley suburb and three renegade climate entrepreneurs piled out, all mohawks, mustaches and camouflage shorts.Working swiftly, the men unlocked a storage unit crammed with drones and canisters of pressurized gas. Using a dolly, they wheeled out four tanks containing sulfur dioxide and helium, and stacked them on the floor of the camper van. Then, almost as quickly as they arrived, they were on the road, headed for the golden hills near the Pacific Ocean.With their jury-rigged equipment and the confidence that comes with having raised more than $1 million in venture capital, they were executing a plan to release pollutants into the sky, all in the name of combating global warming.“We’re stealth,” said Luke Iseman, one of the co-founders of Make Sunsets, delighting in their anonymity as he rode in the back. “This looks like just another R.V.”Make Sunsets is one of the most unusual start-ups in a region brimming with wild ideas. Iseman, 41, and his co-founder, Andrew Song, 38, claim that by releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, they can reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space, thereby cooling the planet.It’s a gutsy undertaking, yet it has at least a partial grounding in science. For 50 years, climate scientists have suggested that releasing aerosols into the stratosphere could act as a buffer and reduce the heat from the sun. Volcanic eruptions have temporarily cooled the planet this way in the past, but no one has attempted to intentionally replicate the effect at scale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
For women starting new businesses, early funding from venture capital firms led by other women is vital. But few are large enough to lead subsequent rounds of financing.When Oriana Papin-Zoghbi was looking for venture capital funding to develop a new type of test for ovarian cancer, she found her pitch did best with women investors. “They were able to resonate with the problem we are trying to solve,” she said.Avestria Ventures, a fund focused on women-founded start-ups, led an early investment of $5 million in Ms. Papin-Zoghbi’s company, AOA Dx. And two years later, Good Growth Capital, a firm founded by women, led an additional $17 million investment.Ms. Papin-Zoghbi expects raising the next round of funding to be more difficult. Medical devices are expensive to develop, and AOA Dx is looking for an additional $30 million to bring its first product to market. “Most women-led funds cannot lead a round that size,” she said.More than 100 women-led venture capital funds, many specifically focused on investing in companies started by women, have been founded in the last decade, a trend that has contributed to a gain in fund-raising by women who are just starting their businesses. Female-founded start-ups received 7 percent of pre-seed and seed funding, the earliest funding a start-up raises, in 2023, up from 5 percent in 2015, according to the data platform Crunchbase.But women-led funds tend to be small, limiting their influence to early funding rounds. More mature companies led by women have not seen the same increase in funding. For women-founded businesses seeking investments past a Series B round, typically the third funding round, the share of venture capital dollars contracted to 1 percent from 2 percent over the same period, according to Crunchbase.Founders like Ms. Papin-Zoghbi are hitting — or fear hitting — a funding wall, an obstacle they say has been heightened by a rollback in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a general downturn in start-up investing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
In a livestream, Mr. Trump formally introduced World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture led by a pair of digital currency enthusiasts with little experience running high-profile businesses.A day after an apparent assassination attempt against Donald J. Trump, the former president appeared on a livestream on X on Monday to champion his latest business venture: cryptocurrencies.“Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” Mr. Trump said. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”Beside him were his collaborators, including a family friend, some of Mr. Trump’s sons and a pair of little-known crypto enthusiasts with no experience running a high-profile business. Together, they were rolling out World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that has raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s conflicts of interest and alarmed some of his most vocal supporters in the industry.Mr. Trump has promoted the project since August, but its exact purpose remains unclear. On the livestream, he did not address the business directly, deferring to his partners. One of them has described himself as “the dirtbag of the internet,” while another used to teach classes on how to seduce women.It’s unusual for a presidential candidate to embark on a new business just weeks before Election Day. But throughout his political career, Mr. Trump has engaged in business dealings that government ethics experts have flagged as problematic. He is the majority owner of Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded parent company of his social media platform Truth Social, which accounts for some $2 billion of his personal wealth.Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said that if Mr. Trump is elected, his involvement in the crypto venture would create serious conflicts of interest. The Securities and Exchange Commission has argued that virtually all cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities and ought to be regulated like stocks traded on Wall Street.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
A small but vocal group is forming new funds and taking new approaches to counter the swell of money into venture capital in recent years.After nearly 10 years running his own venture capital firm, Nick Chirls decided to call it quits this year.His firm, Notation Capital, had raised three funds and invested in more than 100 companies. But Mr. Chirls said he had become disillusioned as venture capital grew from a collection of small partnerships into an industry dominated by firms that managed enormous sums.The focus on accumulating and deploying as much money as possible “completely dehumanized the entire business,” he said.Instead, Mr. Chirls is starting a new kind of firm. From the outside, the endeavor, Asylum Ventures, looks like his old firm, with a $55 million venture fund that will invest in very young tech companies. But the approach is set to be very different, making fewer investments over a longer period in companies that will not need to raise increasingly large funding rounds, he said.Mr. Chirls and his partners, Jonathan Wu and Mackenzie Regent, are part of a small but vocal group of start-up investors who are pushing back against venture capital’s changing scope and priorities. Venture capital investing has traditionally involved small groups of financiers who backed very young, very risky companies that couldn’t obtain traditional loans. The sums invested were often small.But that changed in recent years as investors poured billions of dollars into unproven start-ups with little diligence and investment firms expanded rapidly into new strategies and geographies. Last year, venture capital managed $1.1 trillion, up from $297 billion in 2013, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have made deals with A.I. start-ups for their technology and top employees, but have shied from owning the firms. Here’s why.In 2022, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left their jobs developing artificial intelligence at Google. They said the tech giant moved too slowly. So they created Character.AI, a chatbot start-up, and raised nearly $200 million.Last week, Mr. Shazeer and Mr. De Freitas announced that they were returning to Google. They had struck a deal to rejoin its A.I. research arm, along with roughly 20 percent of Character.AI’s employees, and provide their start-up’s technology, they said.But even though Google was getting all that, it was not buying Character.AI.Instead, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license the technology, two people with knowledge of the deal said. About $2.5 billion of that sum will then be used to buy out Character.AI’s shareholders, including Mr. Shazeer, who owns 30 percent to 40 percent of the company and stands to net $750 million to $1 billion, the people said. What remains of Character.AI will continue operating without its founders and investors.The deal was one of several unusual transactions that have recently emerged in Silicon Valley. While big tech companies typically buy start-ups outright, they have turned to a more complicated deal structure for young A.I. companies. It involves licensing the technology and hiring the top employees — effectively swallowing the start-up and its main assets — without becoming the owner of the firm.These transactions are being driven by the big tech companies’ desire to sidestep regulatory scrutiny while trying to get ahead in A.I., said three people who have been involved in such agreements. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft are under a magnifying glass from agencies like the Federal Trade Commission over whether they are squashing competition, including by buying start-ups.“Large tech firms may clearly be trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny by not directly acquiring the targeted firms,” said Justin Johnson, a business economist who focuses on antitrust at Cornell University. But “these deals do indeed start to look a lot like regular acquisitions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Tyrese Haspil, 25, was convicted of murdering his former boss, the entrepreneur Fahim Saleh, and dismembering his body in 2020.Just days after the body of Fahim Saleh, a successful tech entrepreneur, was found dismembered in his luxury condominium in Manhattan in July 2020, his former personal assistant, Tyrese Haspil, made a series of unsettling web searches.“Fahim Saleh.” “Murder of tech C.E.O. in New York.” “Dismembered body.”The search queries were just some of the chilling details that emerged during Mr. Haspil’s murder trial this month in Manhattan Criminal Court. And on Monday jurors convicted him of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Saleh — and then killing him and cutting up his body in an effort to conceal what he had done.Mr. Haspil, 25, of Brooklyn is expected to be sentenced on Sept. 10.“Tyrese Haspil tragically cut Mr. Saleh’s life short — a man who came from a close-knit immigrant family and followed his passions to become a successful entrepreneur,” said Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in a statement announcing the conviction on Monday. “I hope the accountability delivered by today’s verdict can provide a measure of comfort to Mr. Saleh’s loved ones as they continue to mourn his loss.”Mr. Saleh, 33, was born in Saudi Arabia to Bangladeshi parents and grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was the founder of two motorcycle ride-sharing companies, based in Bangladesh and Nigeria, the latter of which raised millions in venture capital. After his death, he was remembered as an innovative businessman and a generous friend.Sam Roberts, Mr. Haspil’s lawyer, said on Monday that he was disappointed by the verdict. He acknowledged that Mr. Haspil had committed the crime and said the killer felt remorse. “We fully believe that Tyrese Haspil is not solely and only the worst thing that he’s done in his life,” he said. “We hope that the court will understand that there are mitigating factors here.”Mr. Haspil’s ill-fated scheme began in the fall of 2018, when he was working as Mr. Saleh’s entrepreneurial assistant and began stealing money from his companies to purchase lavish gifts for his new girlfriend.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Amira Yahyaoui, a human rights activist, promoted the success of her student aid start-up, Mos. Some of her statements do not add up, according to internal data and people familiar with the company.As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years.Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background helped her stand out among entrepreneurs when she moved in 2018 to San Francisco, where she founded a student aid start-up called Mos. The app hit the top of Apple’s App Store and Ms. Yahyaoui raised $56 million from high-profile investors, including Sequoia Capital, John Doerr and Steph Curry, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Mos was valued at $400 million.In podcasts, TV interviews and other media, Ms. Yahyaoui, 39, frequently discussed Mos’s success.Among other things, she said the start-up had helped 400,000 students get financial aid. But internal company data viewed by The New York Times showed that as of early last year, only about 30,000 customers had paid for Mos’s student aid services. The rest of the 400,000 users included anyone who had signed up for a free account and may have gotten an email about applying for student aid, two people familiar with the situation said.After Mos expanded into online banking in September 2021, Ms. Yahyaoui told publications such as TechCrunch that the company had more than 100,000 bank accounts. But those accounts had very small amounts of money in them, according to the internal data. Less than 10 percent of Mos’s roughly 153,000 bank users had put their own money into their accounts, the data showed.Some employees tried to speak up about Ms. Yahyaoui’s claims, said Emi Tabb, who worked at Mos in operations and had roles such as head of financial aid before resigning in late 2022. But Ms. Yahyaoui dismissed and sometimes disparaged employees who tried pushing back against her public comments, five people who witnessed the incidents said.“She created a culture of fear,” Mx. Tabb said.Mos is among a class of tech start-ups that rose during the fast money era of the late 2010s and early in the pandemic, when young companies landed millions of dollars in funding with little more than promises. Now as the money has dried up and many tech start-ups grapple with a downturn, investors are pickier, customers are warier of bold claims and employees are more suspicious of founder pronouncements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The president has brought innovation, jobs and growth. Still, resentments fester on the eve of the presidential election.PARIS — In full Steve Jobs mode, President Emmanuel Macron of France donned a black turtleneck in January and took to Twitter to celebrate the creation in France of 25 “unicorn” start-ups — companies with a market value of over 1 billion euros, or almost $1.1 billion.He declared that France’s start-up economy was “changing the lives of French people” and “strengthening our sovereignty.” It was also helping to create jobs: Unemployment has fallen to 7.4 percent, the lowest level in a decade.The start-up boom was a milestone for a young president elected five years ago as a restless disrupter, promising to pry open the economy and make it competitive in the 21st century.To some extent, Mr. Macron has succeeded, luring billions of euros in foreign investments and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in tech start-ups, in a country whose resistance to change is stubborn. But disruption is just that, and the president has at the same time left many French feeling unsettled and unhappy, left behind or ignored.As Mr. Macron seeks re-election starting on Sunday, it is two countries that will vote — a mainly urban France that sees the need for change to meet the era’s sweeping technological and economic challenges, and a France of the “periphery,” wary of innovation, struggling to get by, alarmed by immigration and resentful of a leader seen as embodying the arrogance of the privileged.Which France shows up at voting booths in greater numbers will determine the outcome.Campaign posters on display this month in the northeastern French town of Stiring-Wendel.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIn many Western societies, the simultaneous spread of technology and inequality has posed acute problems, stirring social tensions, and France has proved no exception. If the disenchanted France prevails, Marine Le Pen, the perennial candidate of the nationalist right, will most likely prevail, too.Worried that he may have lost the left by favoring start-up entrepreneurship and market reforms, Mr. Macron has in the past week been multiplying appeals to the left, resorting to phrases like “our lives are worth more than their profits” to suggest his perceived rightward lurch was not the whole story.He told France Inter radio that “fraternity” was the most important word in the French national motto, and said during a visit to Brittany that “solidarity” and “equality of opportunity” would be the central themes of an eventual second term.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.On the Scene: A Times reporter attended a rally held by Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate. Here is what he saw.Challenges to Re-election: A troubled factory in President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown shows his struggle in winning the confidence of French workers.A Late Surge: After recently rising in voter surveys, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could become the first left-wing candidate since 2012 to reach the second round of the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.The pledges looked like signs of growing anxiety about the election’s outcome. After several months in which Mr. Macron’s re-election had appeared virtually assured, the gap between him and Ms. Le Pen has closed. The leading two candidates in Sunday’s vote will go through to a runoff on April 24.The election will be largely decided by perceptions of the economy. In Mr. Macron’s favor, the country has bounced back faster than expected from coronavirus lockdowns, with economic growth reaching 7 percent after a devastating pandemic-induced recession.Marine Le Pen speaking this month in Stiring-Wendel.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesThe most significant cultural transformation has come in the area of tech, where Mr. Macron’s determination to create a start-up culture centered around new technology has brought changes the government considers essential to the future of France.Cédric O, the secretary of state for the digital sector, wearing jeans and a white dress shirt, no tie, admits to being obsessed. Day after long day, he plots the future of “la French tech” from his spacious office at the Finance Ministry.Five years ago, that may have seemed quixotic, but something has stirred. “It’s vital to be obsessed because the risk France and Europe are facing is to be kicked out of history,” Mr. O, 39, said, borrowing a line often used by Mr. Macron. “We have to get back into the international technological race.”Toward that end, Mr. Macron opened Station F, a mammoth incubator project in Paris representing France’s start-up ambitions, and earmarked nearly €10 billion in tax credits and other inducements to lure research activity and artificial intelligence business. A new bank was created to help finance start-ups.The president wined and dined multinational chief executives, creating an annual gathering at Versailles called “Choose France.”Since 2019, France has become the leading destination for foreign investment in Europe, and more than 70 investment projects worth €12 billion have been pledged by foreign multinationals at the Versailles gatherings, said Franck Riester, France’s foreign trade minister.In the past four years, IBM, SAP of Germany and DeepMind, the London-based machine learning company owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet, have increased investment in France and created thousands of jobs.Station F, a mammoth project in Paris that represents France’s start-up ambitions.Roberto Frankenberg for The New York TimesFacebook and Google have also bolstered their French presence and their artificial intelligence teams in Paris. Salesforce, the American cloud computing company, is moving ahead with over €2 billion in pledged investments.“Macron brought a culture shift where France was suddenly open to the world of funders,” said Thomas Clozel, a doctor by training and the founder in 2016 of Owkin, a start-up that uses Artificial Intelligence to personalize and improve medical treatment. “He made everything easy for start-up entrepreneurs and so changed the view of France as an anticapitalist society.”François Hollande, Mr. Macron’s Socialist Party predecessor, had famously declared in 2012: “My enemy is the world of finance.” As a result, Mr. Clozel said, securing funds as a French start-up was so problematic that he chose to incorporate in the United States.No longer.“Today, I am thinking of reincorporating in France,” he said. “The ease of dealing with the government, the consortium of start-ups helping one another, and the new French tech pride are compelling.”Among the start-ups that have had a significant effect on French life are Doctolib, a website that allows patients to arrange for medical appointments and tests online, and Backmarket, an online market for reconditioned tech gadgets that just became France’s most valuable start-up, at $5.7 billion.They began life before Mr. Macron took office, but have grown exponentially in the past five years.“I have made 56 investments in the last two years, and 53 of them are in France,” said Jonathan Benhamou, a French entrepreneur who founded PeopleDoc, a company that simplifies access to information for human resources departments.Now funding new ventures and focusing on a new start-up called Resilience in the field of personalized cancer care, Mr. Benhamou credits Mr. Macron with “giving investors confidence in stability and creating a virtuous cycle.”Talented engineers no longer go elsewhere because there is an “ecosystem” for them in France, Mr. O said.Yellow Vest protesters blocking a road in Caen, in France’s Normandy region, in November 2018.Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Macron has insisted that opening the economy is consistent with maintaining protections for French workers and that the arrival of la French tech does not mean the embrace of the no-holds-barred capitalism behind the churn of American creativity.Despite the president’s overhauls, France remains one of the most expensive countries for payroll taxes, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with hourly labor costs of nearly €38, close to levels seen in Sweden, Norway and other northern European countries.“We know that we have to go further,” Mr. Riester, the foreign trade minister, said in a recent interview. “We still have some brakes that could be taken off the economy, and we have to cut some red tape in the future.”Who Is Running for President of France?Card 1 of 6The campaign begins. 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