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7 votes
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The startup offering free toilets and coffee for delivery workers — in exchange for their data
25 votes -
Startups want to geoengineer a cooler planet. With few rules, experts see big risks.
15 votes -
Finnish startup hopes solein, protein grown with CO2 and electricity, will cut environmental impact of farming
10 votes -
Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its bills for rented cloudy GPUs
28 votes -
Terraform Industries converts electricity and air into synthetic natural gas for the first time
25 votes -
How to start Google
27 votes -
First Light fusion startup breaks pressure record using giant ‘gun’ machine for projectile fusion attempts
13 votes -
UCLA and Equatic to build world’s largest ocean-based plant for carbon removal
13 votes -
Abolishing inheritance tax sent Stockholm's startup ecosystem soaring – tax cut could revive Britain's flagging economy
9 votes -
The business of winding down startups is booming
15 votes -
How Kharkiv’s tech start-ups became the ultimate test of business resilience
5 votes -
World's longest-distance drone delivery – Norwegian start-up Aviant has expanded its drone delivery service in Lillehammer
3 votes -
A start-up secret: Executives' '11th-hour' pay bumps
4 votes -
Blood, guns, and broken scooters: Inside the chaotic rise and fall of Bird
15 votes -
Food scientists at Finnish startup SuperGround have found a way to make chicken nuggets and fish cakes out of otherwise discarded bones and hard tissues
28 votes -
Sweden's Modvion inaugurates world's tallest wooden wind turbine – 105m tower's strength comes from 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber that make its thick walls
12 votes -
Startup Channel 1 creates news service presented by AI
10 votes -
How Norway's EV rising star Easee fell foul of Swedish regulators, which took it to the brink of bankruptcy
8 votes -
In Canada’s battle with Big Tech, smaller publishers and independent outlets struggle to survive
15 votes -
Scientists are researching a device that can induce lucid dreams on demand
33 votes -
Meet Dot, an AI companion designed by an Apple alum, here to help you live your best life
22 votes -
Even in femtech [technology companies designing products specifically for women], it still pays to be a male founder
11 votes -
Universal Music sues Anthropic [AI startup] over AI-generated lyrics
10 votes -
A Washington state based startup called Aquagga has successfully deployed a PFAS destruction unit nicknamed “Eleanor”
31 votes -
The wallet event: Crypto startup company tells bankruptcy judge it has lost the password to a 38.9 million dollar physical crypto wallet
17 votes -
OpenAI's Altman launching a cryptocurrency with an eye-scanner gimmick. Does this impact how you feel about AI?
23 votes -
Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof declared bankrupt
21 votes -
Funding dramatically slows for India's startup sector
9 votes -
Inside the white-hot center of AI doomerism: Anthropic
8 votes -
Inflection AI develops supercomputer equipped with 22,000 NVIDIA H100 AI GPUs
7 votes -
Are we stuck on a innovation plateau - and did startups burn through fifteen years of venture capital with nothing to show for?
The theses I would like to discuss goes as follows (and I'm paraphrasing): during the last 15 years, low interest rates made billions of dollars easily available to startups. Unfortunately, this...
The theses I would like to discuss goes as follows (and I'm paraphrasing): during the last 15 years, low interest rates made billions of dollars easily available to startups. Unfortunately, this huge influx of venture capital has led to no perceivable innovation.
Put cynically, the innovation startups have brought us across the last 15 years can be summarized as (paraphrasing again):
- An illegal hotel chain destroying our cities
- An illegal taxi company exploiting the poor
- Fake money for criminals
- A plagiarism machine/fancy auto-complete
Everything else is either derivative or has failed.
I personally think spaceX has made phenomenal progress and would have probably failed somewhere along the way without cheap loans. There's also some biotech startups (like the mRNA vaccines that won the race to market during covid) doing great things, but often that's just the fruits of 20 years of research coming to fruition.
Every other recent innovation I can think of came from a big player that would have invested in the tech regardless, and almost all of it is "just" incremental improvements on several decades old ideas (I know, that's what progress looks like most of the time).
What do you think? Do you have any counterexamples? Can you think of any big tech disruptions after quantitative easing made money almost free in 2008?
And if you, like me, feel like we're stuck on a plateau - why do you think that is?
83 votes -
Touchlab has launched a first-of-its-kind robot which gives clinicians the ability to 'feel' patients remotely as part of a Finnish hospital pilot
8 votes -
Meet Kelpy, the deep tech startup swapping single-use plastics for seaweed
25 votes -
Hubble Network wants to connect a billion devices with space-based Bluetooth network
12 votes -
Swedish electric self-driving truck company Einride has partnered with Scandinavia's leading postal service PostNord in Norway
7 votes -
How Urban Company built an empire of female Indian gig workers
4 votes -
Malmö start-up Enjay believes its patented product is the first in the world to offer profitable energy recovery from polluted kitchen exhaust air
6 votes -
AT&T, AST SpaceMobile claim first smartphone-to-satellite phone call
3 votes -
With the new visual input capability, Danish startup Be My Eyes has begun developing a GPT-4 powered Virtual Volunteer for people who are blind or have low vision
10 votes -
The incredible tantrum venture capitalists threw over Silicon Valley Bank
5 votes -
Can a booming start-up scene help Norway turn its back on oil's poisoned pill? The oil-rich nation's green surge is not as big as it should be
4 votes -
Elizabeth Holmes gets more than eleven years for Theranos scam
8 votes -
Edinburgh-based Skyrora got its suborbital Skylark L rocket successfully off an Icelandic launch pad – but the booster didn't go far, falling into the Norwegian Sea
4 votes -
Infinited Fiber has invested heavily in a technology which can transform textiles that would otherwise be burned or sent to landfills into a new clothing fibre
3 votes -
An AI program voiced Darth Vader in ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ so James Earl Jones could finally retire
8 votes -
Podimo, the Denmark-based subscription service for podcasts and audiobooks, secures €58.6 million in funding
3 votes -
Adobe in final talks to acquire Figma for $20B USD
17 votes -
Erik Prince wants to sell you a “secure” smartphone that’s too good to be true
12 votes -
Axios agrees to sell to Cox for $525 million in cash
11 votes