Search Results for: startup

‘We Value Experience’: Can a Secret Society Become a Business?

Absolute Discretion
Photo by Bill Gies

Rick Paulas | Longreads | September 2015 | 31 minutes (7,584 words)

 

The bespectacled man with short-cropped hair stood up.

“Can I ask a question!” the man shouted, vocal cords straining. The audience turned. They were all members of The Latitude, a secret society based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more…

Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

Longreads Pick

In 2006, Condé Nast bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit. Then they more or less ignored the site, letting it evolve into one of the least manageable media properties on the Internet.

Published: Aug 6, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,327 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Cashing In On Tech’s Spiritual Awakening

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that many tech workers in San Francisco turn to psychics for a glimpse of the future. Or that psychics, in turn, are rebranding themselves as spiritual therapists, executive coaches, and corporate counselors. The trend is common enough to be spoofed on HBO’s Silicon Valley, where the show’s fictional tech CEO confers with a spiritual guru. Meanwhile, real-life tech execs are increasingly candid about their spiritual hygiene: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff endorses yoga; LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner advocates mindful meditation; and the late Steve Jobs, a student of Buddhism, was mentored by a Zen priest.

The San Francisco Yellow Pages list 128 psychics and mediums in the city; there are 141 listings for astrologers (with some overlap between the categories). In the Bay Area at large, psychics are keen to cash in on tech’s spiritual awakening.

Jeremy Lybarger writing in San Francisco Weekly about the astrologers and mystics who minister to Silicon Valley’s elite.

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The Battery Breakthrough That Could Juice U.S. Manufacturing

In a new report, McKinsey describes a broad new age of manufacturing that it calls Industry 4.0. The consulting firm says the changes under way are affecting most businesses. They are probably not “another industrial revolution,” it says, but together, there is “strong potential to change the way factories work.”

For decades, the US has watched its bedrock manufacturing industries wither away, as they’ve instead grown thick in Japan, in South Korea, in China, Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the US lost about 5 million manufacturing jobs just from 1997 to 2014. This includes the production of lithium-ion batteries, which, though invented by Americans, were commercialized in Japan and later South Korea and China.

So Chiang’s innovation could be a poster-child for a new strain of thinking in the US. This says that, while such industries are not likely to return from Asia, the US can possibly reinvent how they manufacture. The country wouldn’t take back nearly as many jobs as it has lost. But there could be large profits, as the country once again moves a step ahead in crucial areas of technology.

To be clear, this is not Chiang’s goal. He is a professed universalist, divorced from scientific realpolitik. But should he succeed, as he plans to, then in addition to helping to decode the perplexing problem of batteries, he might contribute to continuing America’s political and economic dominance.

—Steve LeVine, Washington correspondent for Quartz and author of The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the Worldexplains how Yet-Ming Chiang’s startup 24M is reinventing lithium-ion battery manufacturing, potentially making the devices able to compete on cost with gasoline.

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Cultural Heritage and the Family Dinner Table

Photo by Pixabay

What is lost when families are not involved in selecting the dishes they cook? For one thing, it means that they are not sharing food drawn from their own store of recipes, their heritage, or even regional specialties. I was born to an Indian father and a Chinese mother, but spent my childhood around the world because of my father’s job in the airline industry. The only time I really felt connected to my culture was at dinner every night, eating rice with chicken curry, fried noodles, vegetables in soy sauce, or coconut chutney with dosa (a kind of Indian crepe). My husband, for his part, felt a link to his Jewish heritage when he was eating his grandmother’s matzo ball soup, brisket, or Saturday-morning bagels and lox. If the two of us don’t move past the meal kits, there is a distinct possibility that many of our family’s food traditions will end with us and instead will be decided by a well-meaning executive chef in an industrial kitchen.

Krishnendu Ray, of NYU’s food studies program, points out that this transmission of food culture has been shifting slowly over the last century. “Knowledge about food was once conveyed in close proximity from mother to daughter or grandmother to grandchild,” he says. “Now we have to learn this from a company or the mass media. But we shouldn’t over-sentimentalize the past: American women have been learning about food from companies since the industrial revolution. For two generations, women have been learning recipes from the back of food packaging—think about the popularity of Jell-O molds or chocolate pound cake.” So I’m mourning a loss of culture and tradition that has already begun eroding.

Elizabeth Segran writing for Fast Company about the boxed-meal phenomenon, and how meal-kit startups like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Plated could change the way we eat. 

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The $5 Billion Battle For The American Dinner Plate

Longreads Pick

Will the boxed-meal phenomenon—led by startups like Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Plated—change the way we eat?

Source: Fast Company
Published: Jun 8, 2015
Length: 21 minutes (5,380 words)

VCs Take the Media

Longreads Pick

How media startups went searching for venture capital funding normally reserved for tech companies.

Source: The Baffler
Published: May 19, 2015
Length: 18 minutes (4,677 words)

How Many Gigs Does It Take to Make It in NYC?

The gig economy (“a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy”) is inescapable. AirBNB (now in Cuba) and Uber flood your feeds regularly. Chipotle recently announced its partnership with delivery startup Postmates—burritos at your doorstep are imminent (Quality? Price? Questionable). These companies seem successful, but what about the individuals who carry out their mission statements—the couriers, the hosts, the drivers? Is there genuine money to be made in the gig economy? Is it an economically—and emotionally—viable means of support? For one month, Sarah Kessler attempted to employ herself using TaskRabbit, Fiverr, Skillshare and other “sharing”-centric companies. It didn’t go well.

When I come across the task, “Proposal Flash Mob in Central Park,” I know immediately that I am exactly the wrong person for the job. The training video opens in a mirrored dance studio, with a man in a tight-fitting black t-shirt. “Please make sure you are familiar with this choreography before you commit to that rehearsal so we don’t have to waste any time,” he explains in a high-pitched voice before counting out about three minutes of what looks to me like complex choreography. During slow claps at baseball games, I’m the fan who claps on the wrong beat. A real rabbit might have a better chance of learning this dance.

But the job pays $20, and because it involves a two-hour rehearsal beginning at 8 a.m., it could help me finally achieve an elusive goal I had been working toward for weeks: a full day of micro-entrepreneurship employment. I had already lined up a personal assistant gig for mid-afternoon, and I had bids out on a handful of odd jobs in the evening. Experience has taught me not to count on any of these, but still, here was the morning timeslot that could lead me to an eight-hour workday. I accept the offer.

And then I immediately panic.

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Will Technology Eventually Replace Marc Andreessen?

Photo by JD Lasica.

One challenge for Andreessen is whether venture itself has a skills problem. If software is truly eating the world, wouldn’t venture capital be on the menu? The AngelList platform now allows investors to fund startups online. Its co-founder Naval Ravikant said that “future companies will require more two-hundred-thousand-dollar checks and way fewer guys on Sand Hill Road.” Jeff Fagnan, of Atlas Venture, which is the largest investor in AngelList, said, “Software is already squeezing out other intermediaries—travel agents, financial advisers—and, at the end of the day, V.C.s are intermediaries. We’re all just selling cash.”

Andreessen sometimes wonders if Ravikant is onto something. He’s asked Horowitz, “What if we’re the most evolved dinosaur, and Naval is a bird?” Already, more than half the tech companies that reached a billion-dollar valuation in the past decade were based outside Silicon Valley. And as Andreessen himself wrote in 2007, before he became a V.C., “Odds are, nothing your V.C. does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure.”

Tad Friend, in The New Yorker, on Netscape cofounder and Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

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