Larry Ellison’s leap into farming with his company, Sensei Farms, serves up a classic reminder: being a genius in one arena doesn’t mean success in another. As the WSJ reports, the Oracle co-founder set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012. Eight years and […]
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We’ve all been there. A favorite item is suddenly unavailable for purchase. Couldn’t the manufacturer have given you advance warning? Whether owing to low sales, changing habits, production costs, or even because something is a little wrong with your favorite product (shh), discontinued items are part of life. In a weekend piece, the New York […]
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Social media is often about scale, but Nextdoor bet long ago on something different: that it could grow a big business off smaller, local communities. For years, the plan worked. The 15-year-old company has long been a dominant platform for neighborhood-based conversations, connecting users for everything from lost pet alerts to local business recommendations. Then […]
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Motorsports have long been a pay-to-play arena, with young drivers spending thousands of dollars just to get started in karting. Four-time Formula One champion Max Verstappen knows this all too well, but he also sees a way to change it through sim racing, a virtual form of car racing that closely replicates real-world racing. It’s […]
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Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI employee, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26; on Friday, the city’s medical examiner ruled his death a suicide, countering suspicions by his family that had fueled widespread speculation online. Balaji made headlines in October when he accused OpenAI of illegally using copyrighted material to train […]
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Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI plans to continue using 15 gas turbines to power its “Colossus” supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, according to an operating permit with the Shelby County Health Department for non-stop turbine use from June 2025 to June 2030. Why does it matter? The Commercial Appeal, a news outlet that obtained the documents, […]
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DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is being hailed as a hero in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where he grew up and reportedly returned for the Lunar New Year, joined by bodyguards. Wenfeng — who, at 40, is already a billionaire due to his hedge fund, High-Flyer — is apparently even more beloved by locals […]
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Social media changed everything, from news consumption to shopping. Now, Dub thinks it can do the same for investing through an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the trades of top investors with a few taps. Think of it as TikTok meets Wall Street. Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang — a Harvard dropout who began […]
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Brendan Wallace has a lot on his mind lately. Wallace is the co-founder of Fifth Wall Ventures, a 9-year-old proptech venture firm with $3.2 billion in assets under management. He’s also a homeowner in L.A., which continues to battle raging wildfires. While his place remains intact, many of his friends haven’t been so lucky. Wallace […]
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Bankers are reportedly gearing up to offload debt used to fund Elon Musk’s social network, for which he paid $44 billion in 2022, including $13 billion in financing. Morgan Stanley is leading the charge, hoping to sell senior debt at between 90 and 95 cents on the dollar, reports the WSJ. As notes the outlet, […]
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An arena. A hype tunnel, the kind through which NBA players typically streak. A competitor dressed in a jersey patterned with a six-pack abs. In a new piece, The New York Times takes readers to an event that organizers call the Microsoft Excel World Championship, a 40-minute, Las Vegas-based competition featuring 12 contestants — all […]
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You can’t start a company without a healthy dose of daring, and that’s certainly the case with NeuroBionics. The MIT-spinout thinks it could one day improve the lives of millions of people who live with neurological conditions like depression, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease. Famed investor Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures says that if everything goes […]
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In April 2022, the CIA decided to swipe right on Nand Mulchandani, appointing him as its first-ever chief technology officer. It was a good look for the CIA. Mulchandani, who previously served as the CTO and acting director of the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, is something of a rare breed in Washington. Before […]
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CAPTCHA programs that are used to determine whether a site visitor is a person or a bot come in pretty standard formats. Think text distortion (where users type the characters they see in a box amid other squiggles); image recognition (you’re selecting, say, all the squares in a grid with a bicycle image); and checkbox […]
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Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has a lot to celebrate this holiday season. After a bumpy few years following Robinhood’s 2021 IPO — a period during which shares of the commission-free trading app plummeted by more than 90% after it abruptly restricted trading in some meme stocks — the 12-year-old company was just declared Yahoo Finance’s […]
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The chipmaking giant Nvidia is leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. More specifically, in the first half of the new year, confirms the Financial Times, Nvidia is launching a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor. The move, which was expected, is part of an evolving, years-long strategy. Nvidia doesn’t […]
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David Krane is in an enviable position. As the CEO of GV, the venture firm that is funded entirely by Google to the tune of $1 billion a year, his team of roughly 100 gets to make a lot of bets — with just a couple of notable restrictions. During a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event in […]
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The writing was on the wall, seemingly. Sequoia Capital partner Matt Miller announced on Wednesday that he’s leaving the powerhouse outfit after a 12-year career to build his own new firm focused on European founders. He added he will remain a venture partner with Sequoia and maintain his board seats while fleshing out the “specifics […]
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Andrew Ferguson, one of two Republican FTC commissioners appointed by U.S. President Joe Biden, will be the country’s next FTC chair, incoming president Donald Trump announced Tuesday on social media. The news is being met with relief in some circles. Current FTC Chair Lina Khan was blamed by many in Silicon Valley for a dearth […]
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Mitchell Green worked variously in investment banking, as an analyst with Bessemer Venture Partners, and for a hedge fund backed by Tiger Management before striking out on his own in 2011. Going it alone was seemingly the right move. Green now manages money for more than 700 individuals who have committed $5 billion to his […]
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