Elon and Zuck duke it out, big Ripple win, AI in fashion at VC parties, Web2 titans huddle in Sun Valley, Gen Z rots in bed, sex robot brothels, living in the Anthropocene, and more fun here...
Comuna 13, the hillside barrio in Medellin, Colombia, was once a lawless battlefield considered the most dangerous neighborhood in the world. Today, this community lives in peace and has become a major tourist attraction.
Let's end the War on Drugs and bring peace to the addicted
In the States, we all get high. We LOVE sugar, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, weed, opioids, inhalants, coke, and smack—In that order. The best hope is that no one hurts anyone other than themselves.
Driving that train, high on crack cocaine
Back in the day, we could hop on a train in Menlo Park when we were twelve, without our parents knowing, and spend the day in San Francisco. Our primary mission was to procure bottle rockets, firecrackers, cherry bombs, and any other cool fireworks we could discover. We would negotiate for our wares on the backstreets of Chinatown in a warehouse behind a popular Chinese Restaurant. San Francisco also offered a ton of other fun, like hanging from the cable cars, watching street entertainers, and eating sourdough bread with fresh clam chowder on the Wharf. Never once on these journeys from the train, across South of Market, through downtown, North Beach, the Marina, anywhere, did we have a bad experience or cross paths with a drug addict. We would see an occasional 'bum' down on his luck but felt more compassion and humility than annoyance or fear.
If my same posse of 12-year-olds from back in the day were transported to the streets of San Francisco in 2023, while we might be impressed by the ubiquitous Star Trek phones, we would be scared shitless. It would be like walking into the Apocalypse. What happened between then and now is complicated, but in many ways may be summed up in one word—drugs. It all started in the 1980s and the early 1990s when drug entrepreneurs invented crack because it is cheaper, more intense than regular coke, and highly addictive. Sadly, this product plan was a very effective way to create a customer base to the severe detriment of the local community. As soon as crack cocaine hit the scene, East Palo Alto, in our own backyard, became the murder capital of the US due primarily to crack-related homicide.
Ripple’s XRP token soars 70% and surpasses BNB in value as Coinbase and Kraken re-list the altcoin
Fresh from Ripple’s legal victory over the SEC, their affiliated token, XRP, moves past Binance (BNB) and now has the fourth highest market cap behind BTC, ETH, and USDT.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse tells Bloomberg TV the SEC is 'a bully.'
XRP, the controversial digital token associated with Ripple, witnessed a 73% surge, overtaking Binance Coin (BNB) and boosting its market cap to $43.9 billion. The price jump followed a re-listing of XRP on Coinbase and Kraken, two of the highest-volume cryptocurrency exchanges. Coinbase had previously delisted XRP in January 2021 due to the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple.
Ripple scored a partial victory in its fight with the SEC in a court ruling that brought a modicum of regulatory clarity to the cryptocurrency industry. The U.S. District Court of New York ruled last week that the sale of Ripple’s XRP tokens on exchanges and through algorithms did not constitute investment contracts and therefore are not securities; however, the institutional sale of their tokens did violate federal securities laws.
“As a matter of law, the law of the land right now is that XRP is not a security. Until there is an opportunity for the SEC to file an appeal, which would take years, frankly, we are very optimistic.”
—Brad Garlinghouse, CEO, Ripple
Under Chairman Gary Gensler, the SEC has contended XRP is a security and thus requires issuers to go through a lengthy and expensive registration process before selling them to the public and exchanges, and to register as broker-dealers before listing them.
In an interview with Bloomberg on July 15, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse emphasized that this is the first time the SEC has lost a “crypto case.“ He called out the SEC for being “a bully” and going after players in the crypto industry who couldn’t “mount a proper defense.”
Did you know?
(Overheard on the streets of the global Silicon Valley—Got any hot tips?)
VC Whispers
While the crypto token market consolidates to a few hundred coins with viable tokenomic value, the ever-so-fashion-conscious VCs continue to stuff money into AI companies. “AI offers so many more use cases than blockchain.” is the new catchphrase at VC cocktail parties this summer.
AI company funding stays strong in the depressed VC funding market. Source: Pitchbook
So fashionable is AI that VC funds are letting the world know exactly how much bank they are willing to put on the table. Recently, Bessemer Ventures said it would funnel $1 billion into AI startups; Salesforce said it was doubling down to $500 million, and Sapphire said it has a cool billion ready to go.
Sound.xyz raises $20 million from a16z crypto, with Coinbase and Snoop Dogg throwing in some coin. Sound empowers musicians to skip the streamers and release songs directly to music collectors. Sound generated $5.5 million in sales for a select group in 2022 but is now open to all artists.
Keeping up the Founders brand. One of Founders Fund's most successful portfolio company founders, Ryan Petersen of Flexport, joined the firm as a partner. Mr. Petersen will continue as executive chair at Flexport, an $8 billion-valuation logistics startup he founded in 2013.
Meet Harmony 2.0. from RealDoll, who will tell you jokes and quote Shakespeare and be "the girl you have always dreamed about."
Do AI sex robots require consent too? Roughly 56,000 sex robots are sold yearly, robot brothels are popping up worldwide, and the industry is worth approximately $200 million.
The generative AI companies the Silicon Valley I-bankers say are in the IPO batter’s box (and their top backers): Anthropic (Google), Scale AI (Microsoft, Meta), H2O.AI (Microsoft, Nvidia), and SambaNova Systems (Google Ventures). Is this just air in the AI private company funding bubble?
Inflection AI raises $1.3 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia. The company was founded a year ago by Mustafe Suleyman, the cofounder of Google DeepMind, and Reid Hoffman, and joins generative AI competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Amazon’s Bedrock, and Microsoft’s BingAI.
As Cryptonite has been predicting, ChatGBT ain't going to be the winnerin the AI chatbot race. In June, traffic dropped 10%, unique visitors dropped 5.7%, and average time visitors spent slipped 8.5%. OpenAI must drop the auto-generated preachy sermons they tack on to queries no one asks for.
Foreshadowing the future: Suumit Shah, CEO of Bangalore-based Dukaan, that sets-up online merchants, says he replaced 90% of his support staff with an AI chatbot. “Our response times went from 2 minutes to INSTANT, and queries that took 2 hours to solve, take the chatbots 3 minutes to fix,” he says.
The British bank Standard Chartered predicts Bitcoin will reach $120Kbefore 2025 because miners will soon begin hoarding their coins and choking off available market supply. “Increased miner profitability per BTC mined means they can sell less, reduce supply, and push BTC prices higher.”
The be first to get your fitting and pick up your $3,500 Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles when available in early 2024, you must stop into one of the San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, or Los Angeles locations. The Vision Pro is Apple’s first new product line in 10 years since the Apple Watch.
Soaring greenhouse gases, ubiquitous microplastics, "forever chemicals," the global upheaval of animals, old mobile phones, and chicken bones have been all put forward as evidence that the world entered the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, where the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.
The Incredible Shrinking Web2
Disney’s CEO Bob Iger sees the writing on the wall: “Our TV assets [e.g., ABC, ESPN) 'may not be core to the future of the company. There’s clearly valuable creativity and content at the core of Disney, but the distribution model that has delivered great profits over the years is definitely broken.”
To add pain to Disney’s financial woes, the wait times for rides at Walt Disney World and Disneyland are down, a sign that visitors are put off by the exorbitant ticket prices, according to experts. The pandemic hit in 2022, saw the wait time shrink to 31 minutes, and shrunk further this year to 27 minutes.
According to a Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans have confidence in colleges and universities, representing a staggering 21-point drop since 2015. 50% of students from a third of American colleges make less than high school graduates, and master's programs have the worst debt-to-earnings ratio.
Among those who are married or in a relationship, meeting through friends or family is the most popular way to have met their partner.
He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who sparked outrage in 2018 for creating the first gene-edited child and was later sentenced to 3 years in a China prison for "illegal medical practices.” Now he proposes to modify human embryos to aid the "aging population. Detractors say his practices are unethical and dangerous, and could impact human DNA across generations.
“You don’t need VC to develop a consumer tech product,” so says Nord Security cofounder Tom Okman who believes in bootstrapping and ‘doubling down’ on matching your product features with your customer needs, as ‘your attention to detail will become a competitive advantage in time.’
Comedian Sarah Silverman is suing Facebook and OpenAIfor copyright infringement after leaked information about the company’s AI business shows her work and content were used without permission to train artificial intelligence language models.
The Millennials' girl-boss hustle culture has shifted tothe Lazy Girl Job trend thanks to Gen Z. Millennials were obsessed with titles, status, skinny jeans, and racing to the top in high heels. Lazy Girls? 'I get paid a bomb salary to talk to no one,' is how they think. It's called 'life-work balance.'
Is ‘bed rotting’ a form of self-care?The new TikTok trend is chilling out in bed all day until your problems go away. Gen Zs complain they feel more stressed than any generation. So laying around all day not doing shit except scrolling TikTok for affirmation of their lazy ass ways is the remedy?
Suleiman Hassan, a Palestinian from the West Bank, was airlifted to Hadassah Hospital’s trauma unit in Ein Kerem.
Peace in the Middle East: Israeli doctors reattached the head of a 12-year-old Palestinianafter he was hit by a car riding his bike. All neurological, sensory, and motor skills are now normal. His skull detached from the top vertebrae of his spine and was considered an ‘internal decapitation.’
Flashback Interview
Jim Clark, with Marc Andreessen in tow, announces the Internet is the ‘information highway’
In 1993, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen bet all their marbles on the Internet by building the first commercial Web browse called Netscape.
1993, when Marc Andreessen still had hair.
Stanford University GSB In January of 1993, Jim Clark resigned as chairman of the multibillion-dollar visual computing company he built to start an interactive software company for the Internet, Mosaic Communications, which could represent an even bigger opportunity than he had with Silicon Graphics. "The Internet is more exciting than 3D graphics," he told the Stanford audience. Mr. Clark is the sole investor ("Venture capital is good for the raw entrepreneur"), and his startup team includes Mark Andreeson, the 22-year-old whiz kid, and his development team from the University of Illinois, who created the Mosaic interface software, which has been responsible for the soaring popularity of the Internet. "I've learned everything I know about the Internet over the last three months, have become convinced that the Internet is the information superhighway and that Mark Andreeson's vision is right on," Mr. Clark said. He explained that the Internet currently has 25 million users, which would double by the first quarter of 1995. "By mid-1995, there will be more Internet users than cable TV subscribers," he prophesied.
'"America has had the best cards ever dealt of any country on this planet—ever! Americans don't fully appreciate this. We have peaceful, wonderful neighbors in Canada and Mexico and two of the biggest military barriers ever built—the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We have all the food, water, and energy we will ever need. We have the best military in the world and will for as long as we have the best economy.
JPMorgan’s top dog Jamie Dimon.
The Chinese would love to have our economy. We have the best universities—there are great ones elsewhere—but we educate most people who start businesses worldwide. We have an exceptional rule of law. If you don't think so, ask people in Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, China, or India. We have a magnificent work ethic, and innovation is at the core of our bones. We have the most productive and skilled assistants, factory workers, technicians, and workers in the trades. We have the widest and deepest financial markets the world has ever seen. Yes, we are problems, but if you get an airplane and travel around the globe, you will understand exactly what I am saying."
—Jamie Dimon, Chairman & CEO, JPMorgan Chase.
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