See every minute of Apple’s visit to a Chicago school — and the products that were announced along with it.
Source: CNET
As self-driving tech changes life on the street, expect lots of cities and states to write their own rules. They’ve done it before.
Source: Wired
There’s currently a shortage of Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia’s CEO pointed to Ethereum distributed ledgers as the cause. Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference he spoke to a group of journalists following his keynote address and addressed the shortage.
Huang simply stated that Nvidia is not in the business of cryptocurrency or distributed ledgers. As such, he stated he preferred if his company’s GPUs were used the areas Nvidia is targeting though explained why Nvidia’s products are used for crypto mining.
“[Cryptocurrency] is not our business,” he said. “Gaming is growing and workstation is growing because of ray tracing.” He noted that Nvidia’s high performance business is also growing and these are the areas he wished Nvidia could allocate units for.
Huang explained why crypto miners are using Nvidia’s products echoing what he told me in an interview last week.
“We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it’s a real challenge keeping [graphic cards] in the marketplace for games,” he said, adding “At the highest level the way to think about that is because of the philosophy of cryptocurrency — which is really about taking advantage of distributed high-performance computing — there are supercomputers in the hands of almost everybody in the world so that no singular force or entity that can control the currency.”
So what is he going to do about it? “We have to build a whole lot more,” he told TechCrunch last week. “The video supply chain is working really hard, and you know all of our partners are working around the clock. We’ve got to come closer to the demand of the market. And right now, we’re not anywhere near close to that and so we’re just going to have to keep running.”
Source: TechCrunch
Just a day after General Catalyst, the 18-year-old venture firm, revealed plans in an SEC filing to raise a record $1.375 billion in capital to shower on startups, another firm that we’d said was likely to file any second has done just that.
According to a fresh SEC filing, Lightspeed Venture Partners, also 18 years old at this point, is raising a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments from its investors, just two years after raising what was then a record for the firm: $1.2 billion in funding across two funds (one early stage and the other for “select” companies in its portfolio that had garnered traction).
Still on our watch list: news of bigger-and-better-than-ever funds from other firms that announced their latest funds roughly two years ago, including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Accel Partners.
The supersizing of venture firms isn’t a shock, as we wrote yesterday — though it’s also not necessarily good for returns, as we also noted. Right now, venture firms are reacting in part to the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, which SoftBank has hinted is merely the first of more gigantic funds it plans to raise, including from investors in the Middle East who’d like to plug more money into Silicon Valley than they’ve been able to do historically.
The game, as ever, has also changed, these firms could argue. For one thing, the size of rounds has soared in recent years, making it easy for venture firms to convince themselves that to “stay in the game,” they need to have more cash at their disposal.
Further, so-called limited partners from universities, pension funds and elsewhere, want to plug more money into venture capital, given the lackluster performance some other asset classes have produced.
When they want to write bigger checks to the funds in which they are already investors, the funds often try accommodating them out of loyalty. (We’re guessing the greater management fees they receive, which are tied to the amount of assets they manage, are also persuasive.)
What’s neglected in this race is the fact that the biggest outcomes can usually be traced to the earlier rounds in which VCs participate. Look at Sequoia’s early investment in Dropbox, for example, or Lightspeed’s early check to Snapchat. No matter the outcome of these companies, short of total failure, both venture firms will have made a mint, unlike later investors that might not be able to say the same.
There is also ample evidence that it’s far harder to produce meaningful returns to investors when managing a giant fund. (This Kaufmann study from 2012 is among the mostly highly cited, if you’re curious.)
Whether raising so much will prove wise for Lightspeed is an open question. What is not in doubt: Lightspeed is right now among the best-performing venture firms in Silicon Valley.
In addition to being the first institutional investor in now publicly traded Snap, the company wrote early checks to MuleSoft, which staged a successful IPO in 2018; in StitchFix, which staged a successful IPO in 2018; in AppDynamics, which sold to Cisco for $3.7 billion last year. It was an early investor in Nimble Storage, which sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for just north of $1 billion in cash last March. And just two weeks ago, another of its portfolio companies, Zscaler, also staged a successful IPO.
At a StrictlyVC event hosted last year by this editor, firm cofounders Ravi Mhatre and Barry Eggers talked about their very long “overnight” success story, and about the importance of funding companies early to help them set up durable businesses.
It will be interesting to see whether this new capital is invested in more early-stage deals, or the firm sees growing opportunity to compete at the growth stage. Probably both? Stay tuned.
Pictured, left to right: investors Semil Shah, Ravi Mhatre, and Barry Eggers.
Source: TechCrunch
Sara Gilbert’s Darlene wasn’t gay, but she became an icon to the LGBTQ community.
Source: Wired
Facebook CEO is expected to answer questions about the company’s privacy practices and the use of its data.
Source: Wired
Apple refreshed its lowest cost iPad, adding Pencil support and other software features designed for use in schools.
Source: Wired
After declining a summons from a UK parliamentary committee that’s investigating how social media data is being used this morning, it appears that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may end up finally going before Congress to testify amid a wave of privacy debacles, according to a report by CNN.
The initial wave of this scandal began last week when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired information on more than 50 million Facebook users via an app that accessed that information through the Facebook platform several years ago. While Facebook is not unfamiliar with privacy snafus, this appeared to be one of the final straws, forcing Facebook CEO to issue a sort of non-apology-ish apology — as well as take out full page (in wildly not-very-engaging full text form, weirdly enough) ads in several major newspapers.
CNN reports that Zuckerberg has come to terms with the fact that he will have to testify, and that the testimony may come within a matter of weeks amid pressure from lawmakers, the media, and the public.
Zuckerberg in particular has been a face absent in front of Congress, but it appears the pressure from this incident may be too much for the company to handle without getting his face out there in order to neutralize the fallout. Facebook offered CTO Mike Schroepfer and chief product officer Chris Cox to meet with the committee, but Zuckerberg again was absent here. Indeed, it was several days following the reports that Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made a formal appearance, as well as a number of interviews with various media outlets to try to explain themselves out of the situation
Last week, Zuckerberg said in one of those interviews that, “if it ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.” Clearly, it appears that Congress wants the chief executive officer of the formerly-$500 billion advertising-driven business to be the one to do the explaining amid the increased fallout over the Cambridge Analytica debacle.
We reached out to Facebook for a comment and will update the post when we hear back.
Source: TechCrunch
The company made a point of raising privacy with regards to its new educational apps at its Chicago event on Tuesday.
Source: CNET
At its education event in Chicago on Tuesday, Apple showed off a new iPad to help get ahead in the classroom.
Source: CNET