Start-ups

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      James Ledbetter, Media Critic and Business Journalist, Dies at 60

      by

      He wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice, held top jobs at Inc. magazine and Slate, and wrote a book about how the startup magazine The Industry Standard fizzled.James Ledbetter, a former media critic who wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice in the 1990s, led Inc. magazine as its editor in chief and started an online financial technology newsletter, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.His sister Kathleen Ledbetter Rishel confirmed the death but declined to specify the cause.At The Village Voice, where Alexander Cockburn had originated Press Clips, Mr. Ledbetter was a keen observer of local and national news media.“Week after week, perhaps no one tops James Ledbetter’s razor-sharp dissection of the nation’s print media,” Seth Rogovoy of The Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts wrote in 1995.Michael Tomasky, the editor The New Republic and a friend, said Mr. Ledbetter “was a voracious reader of the tabloids, all four of them at the same time,” adding, “He wrote Press Clips at a time when media criticism exploded into an industry.”In a column about The New York Post in 1998, Mr. Ledbetter castigated New York State for approving a $12.9-million economic development grant to the newspaper to keep it from moving to New Jersey.“Why, taxpayers want to know, should part of our hard-earned paychecks pamper the pockets of the paper that’s always complaining about everyone else’s welfare check?” he wrote. “Especially since that paper is owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch?”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

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      In Silicon Valley, a Rogue Plan to Alter the Climate

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Women Entrepreneurs Are Hitting a Funding Wall

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Start-Up Investors Push Back Against Venture Capital’s Bigger-Is-Better Mantra

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      AI Companies Have Pitched US Political Campaigns. The Campaigns Are Wary.

      by

      More than 30 tech companies have pitched A.I. tools to political campaigns for November’s election. The campaigns have been wary.Sam WoodMatthew Diemer, a Democrat running for election in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, was approached by the artificial intelligence company Civox in January with a pitch: A.I.-backed voice technology that could make tens of thousands of personalized phone calls to voters using Mr. Diemer’s talking points and sense of humor.His campaign agreed to try out the technology. But it turned out that the only thing voters hated more than a robocall was an A.I.-backed one.While Civox’s A.I. program made almost 1,000 calls to voters in five minutes, nearly all of them hung up in the first few seconds when they heard a voice that described itself as an A.I. volunteer, Mr. Diemer said.“People just didn’t want to be on the phone, and they especially didn’t want to be on the phone when they heard they were talking to an A.I. program,” said the entrepreneur, who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for the same seat he is seeking now. “Maybe people weren’t ready yet for this type of technology.”This was supposed to be the year of the A.I. election. Fueled by a proliferation of A.I. tools like chatbots and image generators, more than 30 tech companies have offered A.I. products to national, state and local U.S. political campaigns in recent months. The companies — mostly smaller firms such as BHuman, VoterVoice and Poll the People — make products that reorganize voter rolls and campaign emails, expand robocalls and create A.I.-generated likenesses of candidates that can meet and greet constituents virtually.But campaigns are largely not biting — and when they have, the technology has fallen flat. Only a handful of candidates are using A.I., and even fewer are willing to admit it, according to interviews with 23 tech companies and seven political campaigns. Three of the companies said campaigns agreed to buy their tech only if they could ensure that the public would never find out they had used A.I.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

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      My First Robot Massage

      by

      In many ways, the room looked familiar. As with past massages I had received, the lights were dim, the air smelled vaguely of aromatherapy and there was an inviting bed in the center of the space.But one thing was different: Attached to the bed were two large, white robotic arms, which were about to work on my body for a half-hour.The hulking machine was developed by Aescape, a start-up based in New York that claims to have created “the world’s most advanced massage.” The contraption includes infrared sensors, which scan the body to create a detailed map of its muscle structure. Using machine learning, it then analyzes the information and creates a personalized massage plan. The robot is currently available at a hotel and massage studio in New York City, and Aescape says it will be on offer at 10 Equinox locations this month.The company is betting that the parts of a traditional massage some people don’t enjoy — the oils, the nudity, the small talk — can be solved using artificial intelligence and robotics.I was at the Aescape offices in Manhattan to test the theory.Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesI changed into an outfit provided by the company (leggings and a tight, long-sleeved shirt). Once on the bed, I lay face down with my head in a doughnut pillow and my arms resting comfortably overhead on a bolster. On the other side of the pillow was a touch screen. I tapped a button to begin.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Why Google, Microsoft and Amazon Shy Away From Buying A.I. Start-Ups

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Google Close to Its Biggest Acquisition Ever, Despite Antitrust Scrutiny

      by

      The search giant’s negotiations to buy Wiz, a cybersecurity start-up, for $23 billion, come as the Biden administration has taken a hard line against consolidation in tech and other industries.Google, which became one of the world’s the most valuable companies through its search engine and other consumer internet services, is nearing its largest-ever acquisition to improve what it can offer to business customers.Google is in talks to buy Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity start-up, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to discuss them. Wiz was last valued at $12 billion.The companies have valued the deal at roughly $23 billion, said one of the people, easily making it Google’s most expensive acquisition and nearly double what the company paid for Motorola Mobility in 2012.While a deal looks likely, talks could still fall apart, the people said.Google and Wiz did not respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the companies were discussing a deal.Google has moved forward with negotiations despite the possibility that regulators might try to block the deal. But the company may be willing to fight to beef up its cloud-computing division, which lags behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.Google was sued by the Justice Department in two separate antitrust cases, one targeting its ubiquitous search engine and another seeking to break up its digital advertising-technology business. A verdict in the search case is expected this summer.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