One might know Palmer Luckey as the 33-year-old CEO of Anduril, the defense tech company with close ties to the U.S. government, or as the prodigy who sold Oculus VR to Facebook at just 21. Luckey’s entrepreneurial journey began even earlier—with ModRetro, a venture he launched as a teenager in Long Beach that has grown from…
As companies race to embed A.I. into their operations, the governance debate has stalled in the wrong place. Regulators deliberate over mandates, policymakers debate guardrails and developers argue over technical controls. These questions are important, but they overlook the most immediate driver of responsible A.I. governance: the people using these systems every day. Without investing…
In Pickle’s early days, founders Brian McMahon and Julia O’Mara racked up more than 4,000 subway rides across New York City, hand-delivering rented clothes to early users of their peer-to-peer fashion app. The grind paid off. Today, Pickle says one in four female Manhattan residents aged 18 to 25 has used the platform, which has…
For over a decade, every crypto exchange moved dollars the same way. Funds went through a partner bank that sat between the platform and the actual payment system. That bank charged fees for the privilege, introduced settlement delays and could exit the relationship whenever regulatory pressure mounted. The arrangement worked well enough during bull markets….
Eddy Cue oversees businesses like Apple TV, Apple Music and Apple Podcasts as one of Apple’s top executives. But as a child growing up in Miami, Cue had a different passion: Formula 1 racing. Cue first fell in love with the sport after reading about it in a magazine at a local library and has…
Think about your favorite song, movie or musical. Then consider how you enjoy, watch, listen or engage with that content. The answer? Copyright. Copyright has not disappeared in the age of A.I., but it is being stress-tested in novel ways. Take music, for example. Digital service providers (DSPs) now report tens of thousands of A.I.-generated…
Sure, Sam Altman managed to secure an agreement between OpenAI and the U.S. Department of War amid Anthropic’s public battles with the agency. But in doing so, he may have forfeited something more valuable: public goodwill. The OpenAI CEO acknowledged as much in a social media post, conceding that the deal was rushed. “We shouldn’t…
Like many others with time on their hands and disposable income during the pandemic, Quaid Walker, a Google designer turned entrepreneur, tried to break into watch collecting. He quickly ran into a familiar problem: wait lists. After repeated attempts to purchase coveted luxury timepieces, Walker found himself shut out. That frustration became the impetus for…
When Jack Dorsey announced last week that Block—the parent company of Square, Cash App and Afterpay—would cut its workforce by 40 percent, axing more than 4,000 jobs and reducing its headcount to less than 6,000, the reaction of capital markets was immediate and brutal in its clarity: Block’s stock had surged more than 22 percent…
Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s announcement of an A.I.-driven 40 percent reduction in the company’s workforce—followed by other major firms justifying their own workforce reductions as A.I.-related—triggered immediate speculation about A.I.’s impact on white-collar employment. While the news also prompted an immediate spike of more than 20 percent in Block’s stock price, the more consequential issue…
