It’s weird that there aren’t more hundred-billion-dollar companies, because it doesn’t seem that hard to do, Max Rhodes caught himself thinking one day in 2021. He was sure making it look easy. The company he’d cofounded, called Faire, had gone from stumbling startup to galloping unicorn. Fueled by a steady diet of VC money, its...
Leah Solivan was an IBM engineer, working on business collaboration tools like Lotus Notes, when she found her million-dollar startup idea: an online marketplace connecting customers with “taskers” who could run errands or do household chores for them at a price. The idea arose from Solivan running out of dog food one night and asking...
Microsoft’s Tuesday annual report slipped in a new detail — it briefly mentioned OpenAI as a competitor in AI, search, and news advertising, despite Microsoft’s $13 billion, years-long commitment to the ChatGPT maker. Microsoft is OpenAI’s largest investor. Microsoft’s previous annual report only mentioned OpenAI as a partner, not a competitor. The 2023 report stated...
Even though there’s a .00006% chance that a startup will reach a $1 billion valuation, Silicon Valley investor Mike Maples Jr. has placed early bets on more than one startup that beat the odds. Across his nearly two-decade investing career, Maples found that startups he invested in early that are now worth over a billion...
Austin Russell is a Stanford University dropout who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2020 at the age of 25 when his startup Luminar went public. Luminar creates sensing technology to help cars navigate their surroundings; Volvo, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz use the sensors. Russell, now 29, spoke on the Masters of Scale podcast with...
Serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway, who sold his second company, L2, for $158 million in 2017, says that entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone — and that certain traits define successful founders. In a recent episode of The Diary of A CEO, host Steven Bartlett asked Galloway, a bestselling author and NYU Stern MBA professor, if anyone can...
Most startups won’t be able to afford to sign up for the AI race, the CEO of $18 billion Anthropic admits. In a recent “In Good Company” podcast interview with Norges Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went into the nuts and bolts of AI development — including how much it takes to...
Multi-billion dollar AI community startup Hugging Face announced its fourth acquisition to date on Thursday, a $10 million buy of a small AI collaboration platform called Argilla. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue now says he’s getting acquisition requests from many more startups — at least 10 a week. “This year, in particular, it has increased...
More people are starting businesses now than ever before — and the reason could be that the opportunity cost, or what they have to give up in exchange for entrepreneurship, is lower than ever. Data that the U.S. Census Bureau released earlier this month shows that the total number of applications to start businesses hit...
Today, Joshua Britton is the founder and CEO of Debut, a biotechnology company delivering “high-performing” cosmetic bioactive ingredients “at unprecedented speed.” But before the startup began to innovate in the biotech space, it was just an idea, one that stemmed from “some academic research,” “a lucky Uber ride” and a “vision for the beauty industry,”...