There are two basic ways for startup founders to respond when much larger competitors encroach on their realm. They can soldier on with heads down and voices low, in silent determination. Or they can do as the founders of Runway did when the likes of Google and OpenAI entered the AI video field ...
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Clint and Pam Legaspi tried to take a balanced approach when introducing their now-12-year-old daughter to technology. Her first device was an educational LeapPad tablet, not an iPad. Later, they ignored her requests for an iPhone and instead gave her an iPod Touch, but only after carefully ...
For decades, skiers and snowboarders have seen the techiest, most highly engineered synthetic fabrics as the pinnacle of alpine function and fashion—a sentiment held with particular vehemence by the hordes of snowsports enthusiasts who stream out of the Bay Area each weekend for places like ...
In between the Crypto Finance Conference and the World Economic Forum last month, a group of investors and founders enjoyed a busy few days in St. Moritz. They networked, and they enjoyed a fireside chat with venture capitalists Bill Tai and Daniel Gutenberg. For play, rather than ski, snowboard ...
There are companies that dislike each other. And then there’s Apple and Qualcomm. The world’s most powerful consumer electronics and wireless chip companies have long maintained one of the unhappiest marriages in tech. Over the past 15 years, the vast majority of iPhones have contained a ...
Nuclear isn’t the only source of carbon-free power that has energized the tech industry. For years, solar and wind have been mainstays for tech companies looking to reduce the greenhouse gases emitted by their data centers and other operations. The tech industry is also forming partnerships to ...
Around the timeJigar Shah became director of the loan programs office at the U.S. Department of Energy, his venture capitalist friends gave him an earful about the idea of investing in nuclear power startups. “Like, 20 of my best friends in 2021 told me, ‘Jigar, we will never, ever in a million ...
Over the past two years, the explosive growth of artificial intelligence has created a dilemma for tech behemoths: How can their data centers meet AI’s mind-boggling need for electricity without befouling the planet in the process? Amazon, for one, may have found an answer to that question 200 ...
My first ski helmet was ridiculous. Whenever I wore it, it looked like I had an upside-down fruit bowl on my head. I initially bought it back around 2002, a time when just a quarter of skiers wore helmets, according to the National Ski Areas Association’s annual survey. And no wonder: Back then, ...
In November, virologist Beata Halassy announced to the world that she had cured her own breast cancer using a treatment developed in a laboratory she runs. Many in the medical community celebrated her breakthrough, which she says has allowed her to live cancer-free for over four years. But some ...
When selecting the venue for next weekend’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, the NFL went with a traditional choice: New Orleans. It’ll be the 11th time the Big Easy has hosted the Big Game, tying it with Miami for hosting the most Super Bowls ever. Recently, ...
In 1862, from a hill in northern Virginia, troops under Confederate General Stonewall Jackson rained artillery fire upon a column of Union soldiers on a dirt road about a thousand feet away, in the opening shots of the Second Battle of Manassas. When I visited a farmhouse on the site on a frigid ...
The only thing coming at us faster these days than advances in artificial intelligence’s capabilities is the amount of industry jargon we’re all needing to decipher. Don’t know the difference between open weights and open source? Still trying to distill the meaning of AI distillation, the ...
Back in November, Awais Ahmed, dressed all in black from his glasses to his trousers, paused for a moment outside his startup’s Bangalore laboratory to peer through a glass window at a stout contraption: a 2.5-foot-tall satellite partially covered in gold foil. A giant eye stared back at him. ...
On the ground floor of a nondescript condo building in east Austin last month, the wife-and-husband co-founders of Poppi made good on a promise they made to me: that they would offer me a taste test of their beverage company’s in-the-works flavors. It wasn’t quite like getting access to the ...
In the streaming era’s current period, deducing the whereabouts—and fate—of a favorite series is often a more complex mystery than the ones that confront the fictional investigators and detectives in many of these shows. Some shows air weekly, while others get released in a single drop. Certain ...
On Thursday, about 200 founders and investors tucked into seared sea bass and key lime pie at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach private club. The mood was celebratory, and the attendees talked about their hopes for a deregulatory boom in the nuclear and space industries. Each attendee ...
When Unrivaled, a new professional women’s basketball league, tips off tonight on TNT, fans will be introduced to a version of the sport that Alex Bazzell, one of the league’s founders, described to me as “a Broadway show on steroids.” That spectacle will feature three-player teams rather than ...
In 2018—after I forgot to call my mom one too many times—a friend and I launched an app that nudges people to take life-enhancing steps such as connecting with family, exercising more and learning new skills. Today we have nearly 40,000 subscribers. Businesses and organizations across the ...
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos is the Super Bowl of schmoozing. And let’s face it, after a week of nonstop on-calendar panel discussions, off-calendar networking and late-night parties—Google and McKinsey & Co. are known for throwing some of the best ones!—even the most ...