17 October, 2024
Those 'Founder mode' memes keep coming
If you spend time on X or Threads, where snarky memes rise and fall, you’ve probably seen posts referencing “founder mode” over the last few days, like this:
https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/C_eaQAxyIcV
Or maybe this:
kanye actually invented founder mode pic.twitter.com/zKmHM9jk8P
— Jared Palmer (@jaredpalmer) September 3, 2024
You may even have seen this parody about “goblin mode.”
The chatter ties to a recent blog post that Y Combinator founder and dispenser of startup wisdom Paul Graham wrote about how founders like Airbnb’s Brian Chesky often ignore conventional wisdom regarding running a company at scale. That conventional wisdom — hire great people and let them do their thing — actually often turns into “hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground,” Graham says.
Of course, he can’t say exactly what founder mode looks like because every founder does it differently, but he hopes that it will someday be as widely taught as manager mode. In the meantime, the hot takes on his hot take continue.
it’s called “founder mode” it’s about how to run your company as a founder and how that often goes against traditional management practices. it’s basically what i already do but paul graham created a cool name for it in his latest essay. you know who paul graham is? y combinator? pic.twitter.com/rMKo9iGk6P
— sophie (@netcapgirl) September 2, 2024
As a Founder, I'm too busy to find out what Founder Mode is https://t.co/gIlvdNvUuN
— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (@pegobry_en) September 4, 2024
A new startup from Figure’s founder is licensing NASA tech in a bid to curb school shootings
In 2013, there were 26 reported school shootings in the U.S. That figure rose to 82 a decade later. America has a school shooting problem, this much we can agree on. The cause of — and solution to — the issue, on the other hand, is where things start to fall apart. It has become one of the most polarizing topics for a very polarized country. Solutions range from far stricter gun enforcement and more robust mental health investments to locking doors and arming teachers.
The dramatic uptick in instances has create a cottage industry of tech startups hoping to address the problem. There’s ZeroEyes, which uses AI imaging monitored by law enforcement, panic alert system Centegix and scanner-maker Evolv Technology, among others. Studies conducted by research institutes like Johns Hopkins have, however, called their efficacy into question.
Cover, a new startup from Archer and Figure AI founder Brett Adcock, thinks it has cracked the code. At its core, the company’s approach isn’t wholly dissimilar from existing methods like metal detectors and scanners, in that it monitors a school’s entryway. A pair of the objects seen above are mounted on a doorway, scanning those who walk through.
Cover says what sets it apart is the underlying technology it employs, which has been exclusively licensed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In fact, the startup is headquartered in Pasadena, California, as several employees at the nearby JPL facility have joined on.
Adcock compares the underlying technology to full-body scanners that supplement metal detectors at many airports. “Our system is very similar to that, but it’s, like, 10x more powerful and accurate,” he told TechCrunch. “So, we can basically do very long-distance scanning. Ten to 15 feet away, we can scan somebody, instead of having them sit here for a couple of seconds in line.”
The comparison to TSA scanners, however, points to what could well prove a major hurdle for the technology’s wide-scale adoption. The topic has been a minefield of privacy advocate pushback, owing to their ability to effectively see under clothing. In 2019, the TSA announced that it would require full-body scanners to add a layer of privacy protection. Such concerns will likely be exacerbated by the fact that the technology will largely be scanning minors in a school setting.
Adcock explains that the system will be monitored by AI, rather than humans, while only looking for a “finite” number of weapons, including guns, knives and explosives. “That’s all we’ll be looking for,” he said. “We’re not going to surface uncompressed files out of the system. We won’t have a place to store them, we won’t need them. We’re just using an onboard neural net to look for weapons. There will be no [issue with] how we protect people’s faces, because we won’t even log it or store it.”
Once a threat is identified, a cropped image of the object will be made available to administration.
How opt-in this system will ultimately be and what alternatives will be in place falls at the feet of the schools and districts that choose to implement the technology. The system will identify potential risks based on factors including size, shape and material. The latter, for instance, should help tell the difference of a handgun from a squirt gun.
“People should not be bringing squirt guns into school during this level of security risk,” Adcock said. “I would say if people are bringing in a squirt gun, we’d really want to detect it. Now, I do think we’ll actually be able to detect the difference between a squirt gun and a [hand]gun, because metal and water are very different. I think the image will be very helpful here in figuring out whether it’s a false positive.”
Like Figure AI, Cover is being bootstrapped by Adcock, who has thus far put around $2 million into the young startup.
Smashing, from Goodreads' co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations
Goodreads‘ co-founder Otis Chandler is back to build the next big app community. But this time, his focus isn’t on books; it’s on the content you can find online, including news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts and more. With Smashing, an AI and community-powered content recommendation app, now launching into an invite-only beta, the goal is to help connect users to their interests by surfacing the internet’s hidden gems.
The launch comes at a time when many news consumers are still lamenting the loss of Artifact, the AI news reader from Instagram’s co-founder that recently sold to TechCrunch parent Yahoo.
At the same time, the media ecosystem is becoming more fragmented than ever with journalists establishing their own newsletters and Substacks. Twitter, once a hot spot for finding the latest breaking news, has morphed into a more right-leaning app “X,” whose existence has prompted a host of new competitors. In addition, changes at Google and Meta have resulted in a sizable drop in traffic to online publishers, leading to widespread media layoffs. And with AI, the situation looks like it may worsen, as apps and Google begin offering AI summaries of news, potentially losing publishers even more clicks.
Chandler believes Smashing can address many of these problems by not only surfacing the articles and posts that are worth people’s time but also encouraging users to visit the publishers’ sites to read more.
“I named Goodreads ‘Goodreads’ and not ‘Goodbooks’ because I one day hoped to add articles,” Chandler said. As it turned out, “books” was a large enough category on its own to sustain the app, which sold to Amazon in 2013. Chandler continued to work there until five years ago.
The Smashing CEO says he always had an “itch to scratch around the rest of the content on the web, which is not just articles.” It’s podcasts, blogs, news articles, tweets, social media posts and YouTube videos, he says. “Any interesting content.”
What prompted him to start building Smashing, however, was an experience he had during his sabbatical from work following his departure from Amazon. After a month or two of downtime, Chandler decided to challenge himself by entering a Half Ironman triathlon.
“That led me down a journey of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to learn about training and bicycling, and how to stay in shape and not burn my legs out, and how to eat right for nutrition, how to, therefore, cook better, because I didn’t know how to cook before that,” he said. But, when trying to use a traditional search engine, it was hard to find the best content. “If you just Google, ‘how to train for a Half Ironman Triathlon’ or ‘how to eat healthy,’ you get a lot of content. But it’s not the content you’re really looking for. It’s a lot of SEO-optimized, ad-stuffed pages.”
To try to find the content he wanted, Chandler tried news aggregators, like Apple News and Google News, Reddit, Twitter, social media and other smaller and medium-sized apps.
“I tried everything I could find, and I was really dissatisfied with the answers I got. I couldn’t find anything I could dial to give me just good, interesting, accurate content. And that led me to the thesis for Smashing,” Chandler said.
He then teamed up in 2022 with a former co-worker, Greg Veen, now a Smashing co-founder, whose tech background includes founding Measure Map, which sold to Google, and Typekit, which exited to Adobe.
From user research, they found that people generally had five or six main interests they’d follow online, including a few related to work and a few that were personal interests. They would follow sources that ranged from niche newsletters to social media influencers to publications and more. But they reported feeling overwhelmed.
Built over the last year, following a seed round, Smashing’s iOS app lets users follow their interests in a way that’s reminiscent of another AI news app, Artifact, but with a broader focus. Users can submit their own content and thumbs up and down the app’s AI-powered recommendations of content shared by others and aggregated from the web. However, it’s not only limited to news: Anything with a URL can be submitted.
Similar to Digg, a news aggregator from the Web 2.0 era, users can vote up the content they think is interesting and deserves attention. But users will only get 30 votes per day, which they can spend all on one amazing article, or distribute across a wider number of links, depending on their preference.
As with Artifact, users can like, save and comment on articles, too, which further helps surface the best content.
AI technology in Smashing offers summaries of the news, key excepts and interesting pull quotes. AI also helps to identify topics and threads of interest to individual users, but the real “magic happens,” Chandler says, by creating a community that works in conjunction with the AI.
But despite its use of AI, Chandler argues that Smashing should drive traffic to online publishers, not lessen it. “We really designed Smashing to be something that helps you curate interesting, long-form content and drives readers to it. We’re not trying to be an aggregated replacement for reading it. I know a lot of people are playing with that kind of model,” he said. “But, no surprise to you, having done Goodreads, I’m a believer in long-form, interesting content. There’s a narrative out there that the internet is increasingly full of junk. And I think the internet is increasingly full of gems that have to be unearthed.”
Smashing is launching into an invite-only private beta, starting Tuesday.
The startup, also co-founded by Mike Mraz (Condé Nast, Cool Hunting, Hearst), and Dan Barrett (software architect with LLM expertise), has $3.4 million in seed funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital and Power of N Ventures, as well as angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, James Currier (NFX), Stan Chudnovsky (Facebook), Chad Byers (Susa Ventures), Gil Elbaz (Factual, AdSense), Abe Burns (Slow Rush Ventures), Adam Jackson (Braintrust), Bryan Goldberg (Bustle) and Ben Rattray (Change.org).
All VCs say they are founder friendly; Detroit’s Ludlow Ventures takes that to another level
VCs Jonathon Triest and Brett deMarrais see their ability to read people and create longstanding relationships with founders as the primary reason their Detroit-based venture firm, Ludlow Ventures, is celebrating its 15th year in business.
It sounds silly, attributing their longevity to what’s sometimes called “Midwestern nice.” But is it crazy? Maybe not. Before Ludlow, neither Triest nor deMarrais had much operating experience. They also had no investing experience. Triest was fresh out of school when he first stood up the firm in 2009. When deMarrais joined him three years later, it was after winding down his first job, which was running a wedding videography outfit.
Fast-forward and Ludlow today has $250 million in assets under management, including a new $50 million fifth fund that the duo just closed in recent weeks with commitments from billionaire Dan Gilbert; the financial services company Northern Trust, the Israel-based venture firm Vintage Investments; and the fund of funds outfit StepStone, which anchored the new vehicle.
It’s certainly hard to know what else Ludlow offered at the start other than a lot of heart and good instincts about people. In 2012, for example, while on a trip to Los Angeles, Triest and deMarrais met with entrepreneurs Ryan Hudson and George Ruan about a Chrome extension that helped customers score deals. The young investors had trouble getting excited about what the founders were building. But “George and Ryan were so good,” Triest tells me during a phone conversation while he’s at a networking event in Detroit, an announcer’s voice booming in the background.
Ludlow wrote the very first check to Hudson and Ruan, who soon went more public with their shopping and rewards platform, called Honey. In 2020, when Honey sold to PayPal for $4 billion in a mostly cash deal, that payout returned six times the $15 million Ludlow fund from which that investment was made.
“I see my peers ‘out diligence’ themselves, when in reality you can only look at the people,” says Triest. “Our biggest miscalculations have come when we invested in verticals or ideas that we loved but the people were not exceptional.”
It’s not novel, of course, to invest in people. Most VCs claim to do the same. There was also a bit of luck at the start of Ludlow Ventures. Triest kicked off its $15 million inaugural fund with a $1 million loan from friends and family. Not everyone can access that kind of getting-going money.
But even luck doesn’t sustain a business this long — and certainly not through a market that’s become comparatively harsh as institutional investors run out of patience with newer outfits in particular. While General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins and other heavyweight venture firms are locking down billions in capital commitments, newer firms are increasingly pulling the plug right now owing to a lack of investor interest.
Indeed, when Triest talks about relationships, he convincingly argues that he means business. Ludlow has maintained such a strong bond with Hudson that earlier this year, the venture firm wrote a $3 million check into a $5 million round for Hudson’s newest, still-stealth startup, even though Hudson “could have had anyone lead that round — it was so stacked” with top VCs, says Triest.
(Triest also notes that Hudson is married to another founder who Ludlow has backed, Lumi founder Jesse Genet. He admits, too, that he can’t take credit for the match; they surprised him after they began dating.)
As for other differentiators, Triest eschews them. The firm doesn’t have a geographic focus. It doesn’t have a sector focus. As for its marketing, it largely relied on a video series called “Carpool VC” that Triest and deMarrais once posted irregularly on YouTube, wherein the two shared silly unscripted banter while beaming in another, better-known VC via the car’s speakerphone.
The shows, mostly recorded in 2015 and 2016, now make their kids cringe, says Triest, whose oldest child is 15. They also served their purpose, he adds, saying he’s still surprised by the “number of times that people get on a call with us, and they feel like they know us a little bit,” In fact, he adds, “Plenty of people have opted out, saying they don’t want to work with clowns like us. But plenty of people opt in.”
Clearly. Ludlow, which invests in around 25 companies with each fund, has funded hundreds of startups over time, some of which have gone to zero, while others have been marked up considerably since the firm funded them.
Among these is Flex, a flexible payments platform that currently promises to break one’s monthly rent into smaller installments and has plans for other verticals.
Ludlow is also an investor in the workplace analytics company Density, which was valued at $1 billion when it last raised a round in 2021; Captions, a video editing app that raised $25 million in Series B funding last year; Notarize, an online notary network valued at $760 million by investors last year; and Backbone, a startup that turns iPhones into gaming devices and which raised $40 million in Series A funding in 2022.
Asked about unifying threads amid the wide-ranging companies, Triest again turns to squishy stuff. “The thread throughout our portfolio is that the people who founded them are people who we want to spend time with, who make us want to quit Ludlow so we can go to work with them. We have to believe that what they are working on is viable, but it doesn’t have to be the thing.”
Don’t all VCs say some variation of the same? “I hate all this ‘founder-friendly’ chat” that other VCs espouse, answers Triest. “There is no genuineness behind it.”
At Ludlow, he says, “if we are not standing up in [a founder’s] wedding, we’ve failed.”
France formally charges Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, over organized crime on messaging app
After spending four days in police custody, the founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was put under formal investigation in France on Thursday for a wide range of criminal charges.
He was also released from custody on the condition that he does not leave French territory during the investigation. Bail was set at €5 million (around $5.6 million) and he must check in at a police station twice a week.
On Tuesday, the court in charge of the investigation — the Paris criminal court — shared a list of charges that led to Durov’s arrest on August 24 after he stepped off his private jet at France’s Le Bourget Airport.
The main charges are accusations of running a company that has been complicit in storing and distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), facilitating drug trafficking and facilitating organized fraud and other illegal transactions. He’s also facing charges concerning registration of Telegram’s cryptographic features, among other criminal complaints.
In a statement, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau confirmed all the charges and said the investigation is moving forward. The fact of Durov being placed under formal investigation means he is formally suspected of what he’s been accused of.
In the French judicial system being placed under formal investigation is a necessary procedural step in order to take a case to trial. However it does not mean a trial is certain. If authorities decide they don’t have a strong enough case the investigation could be shelved before it gets to court. But the step means there’s a substantial reason to pursue a probe.
The prosecutor’s statement (which we’ve translated from French) summarizes why Durov ended up in police custody, with Beccuau writing that Telegram “appears in multiple cases involving various offenses (child pornography, trafficking, online hate speech)”.
“Telegram’s almost total failure to respond to judicial requests was brought to the attention of the cybercrime section (J3) of the organized crime national court (JUNALCO) within the Paris public prosecutor’s office, in particular by the national office for minors (OFMIN),” she also wrote.
“When consulted, other French investigation departments and public prosecutors’ offices, as well as various Eurojust partners, notably Belgian, shared the same observation. This led JUNALCO to open an investigation into the possible criminal responsibility of the executives of this messaging service in these offenses,” Beccuau added.
Subsequent to this — back in February 2024 — the Paris court opened a preliminary investigation and put OFMIN in charge of the probe. The Centre for the Fight against Cybercrime (C3N) and the Anti-Fraud National Office (ONAF) later took over the investigation.
This account appears to confirm reporting by Politico that said Durov’s problems started with a separate investigation focused on child sex abuse. According to Politico reporters, who were able to consult documents from that investigation, a suspect told investigators they used Telegram to lure underaged girls into sending “self-produced child pornography.” They then threatened to release the CSAM on social media.
It also reported that as part of this case French authorities sent a request to Telegram to identify the suspect. But the company ignored the request — leading to a preliminary investigation into its unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement on a criminal matter.
Telegram did not respond to a request for comment about Durov’s arrest and the charges he’s facing.
Lack of content moderation
While the case against Telegram was sparked by a CSAM investigation it became more substantial during the preliminary investigation as French authorities started looking into the messaging app’s activities more broadly.
Telegram currently has 950 million monthly active users and few moderation tools and processes. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Durov claimed only 30 engineers work on the social app. So, in addition to the company’s unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement authorities, the Paris court is essentially claiming Telegram’s (lack of) moderation enables the sharing of CSAM, drug trafficking and fraudulent activities to take place on the platform.
“It is completely absurd to claim that the head of a social platform could be responsible for criminal acts that don’t involve him, either directly or indirectly,” David-Olivier Kaminski, a lawyer working for Durov, told reporters on Wednesday night local time, per Le Monde.
But that line of defense doesn’t explain why Telegram ignored the law enforcement request in the first place.
Moreover, Durov is also being charged with money laundering. This could be related to Telegram’s cryptocurrency-related features and failing to follow “Know Your Customer” requirements.
Telegram has a digital currency called Stars that can be used to buy digital content from other users. Stars can also be converted to Toncoin, a cryptocurrency backed by Telegram which can be traded on various crypto exchanges and transferred to a bank account.
As this is a wide-ranging case, the investigation is likely to last several months at least. It could even take more than a year. Durov will be expected to remain in France for the duration.
Andy Dunn talks founder mental health at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
Hustle culture is embedded into the Silicon Valley startup ethos, but the expectation to grind all the time can be detrimental to a founder’s mental health. We’re pleased to welcome Bonobos co-founder and former CEO Andy Dunn to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 for a fireside chat to discuss how founders can live up to the VC ecosystem’s expectations without compromising their mental health.
Dunn knows the subject matter well. In college, he was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder, a diagnosis he hid from his business life, as he grew DTC clothing brand Bonobos. In 2019, he decided to put it all out there and did a TED Talk and wrote a book, “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind,” about his struggles with his mental illness while he was building a company, including a psychotic break in 2016 that landed him in the hospital — and in jail for 12 hours — the year before he sold Bonobos to Walmart.
He co-founded Bonobos in June 2007 as an early pioneer in the direct-to-consumer sector. The company started with a focus on men’s pants, khakis in particular, and expanded into a full suite of men’s apparel. Bonobos raised more than $127 million in venture capital before being acquired by Walmart for $310 million in 2017. Dunn also launched Red Swan Ventures, a VC fund, and is the founder of Pie.
Tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 are still available and can be purchased here. The conference will run from October 28-30 in San Francisco. Join more than 10,000 startup leaders and VC industry players for three days of content surrounding the hottest topics in startup land, from AI to SaaS to space.
Bluesky adds Techdirt founder Mike Masnick to its board
Decentralized X competitor Bluesky, a startup offering a social network where users can choose their own algorithm and moderation services, announced on Monday the addition of a new board member, Mike Masnick. Best known as the founder of tech blog Techdirt, Masnick is also credited with inspiring the Bluesky project through his paper titled “Protocols, not Platforms.“
According to a company blog post, the team was already leaning on Masnick for advice, so adding him to the board is a “natural next step” in formalizing their relationship.
Originally incubated within Twitter under founder Jack Dorsey’s leadership, Bluesky later spun out of Twitter (now rebranded as X under Elon Musk) and has charted its own path as an independent company. That includes raising a seed round last year and rolling out its first paid service for helping people set up custom domains on the decentralized platform.
Though Bluesky had the support of Dorsey in its earlier days, the former Twitter CEO later came to publicly criticize the startup for making the same mistakes he and others made at Twitter, especially in terms of how it handled some of its earlier moderation issues.
In May, Dorsey left his position on Bluesky’s board, and he now devotes more of his energy to Nostr, another decentralized network popular with Bitcoin proponents like himself.
With the addition of Masnick, Bluesky fills its board opening as the now 6-million-user-strong social network continues to develop its platform and policies, as well as the technology that powers its efforts, the AT Protocol.
The company says it will tap into Masnick’s expertise as a reporter, editor and publisher, in addition to gaining insights from his familiarity with policy, technology and legal issues it may face as it grows.
“Mike’s work has been an inspiration to us from the start,” said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in a statement. “Having him join our board feels like a natural progression of our shared vision for a more open internet. His perspective will help ensure we’re building something that truly serves users as we continue to evolve Bluesky and the AT Protocol.”
“I’m excited to join the Bluesky board and to support its vision of building an open social network,” Masnick said. “Over the last few years, I’ve been thrilled to see how the Bluesky team has turned these ideas into reality, and I look forward to helping the company continue to build a better internet.”