The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson isn’t a book that lauds ecoterrorists. In fact, it mostly manages to avoid the subject across its many pages. Yet, at the center of its speculative account about the eponymous ministry and its leadership over the next few decades, the dark side is the linchpin for […]
How culturally deranged is our climate today?
Climate change has been the deepest, most challenging cognitive puzzle for humans to untangle these past years. It’s systems on top of systems, with emergent properties that can easily turn intuitive notions into catastrophic dead ends. Every action has a reaction or ten, and improving one part of the system almost invariably leads to weaknesses […]
The future of China’s work culture
In a late-August ruling, China’s supreme court declared one of the country’s most infamous work practices illegal. Known as “996,” the term is shorthand for a work schedule spanning from 9AM to 9PM, six days per week. Though popularized by the country’s soaring tech firms, often evoking images of hip urban startup employees with stock […]
As Apple messes with attribution, what does growth marketing look like in 2021?
Measuring growth is complex and challenging — and it’s only getting tougher. Changes to attribution in iOS 14 have forced growth marketers to rethink how they define their growth analytics engines.
How technology is transforming organ procurement
Every year, more than 100,000 people in the United States wait for an organ donation. More than a dozen people will die each day still waiting. Such is the brutal math and the necessary optimism required to work in the organ procurement world. For the past several decades, a private network of now 57 organ […]
The casualties of China’s education crackdown
Once the darlings of Wall Street and venture capital as recently as the beginning of this year, China’s edtech firms are now wondering if they will be able to remain solvent long enough to see the beginning of the next. In a series of sweeping regulations, the central government has taken a wrecking ball to […]
Submit your pitch deck now for live feedback at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 next week
The art of pitching is perhaps the most important art that a founder learns on their journey to unicorn status and beyond. And like any art, it helps to get some critical feedback along the way from the judges on the other side of the table. That’s why every Disrupt, we host Pitch Deck Teardown, […]
With sales momentum, Bookshop.org looks to future in its fight with Amazon
If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be a very busy angel investor. With book sales booming during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the humble written word has suddenly drawn the limelight from VCs and founders. We’ve seen a whole cavalcade of new products and fundings, including algorithmic recommendation engine BingeBooks, book club startups like Literati […]
Should we care about the lives of our kids’ kids’ kids’ kids’…
We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel that frisson of action. It’s a compulsion: we’re enraptured by the dangers that are terrorizing whole segments of the planet. Just this past month, we […]
What’s happening in venture law in 2021?
The venture world is growing faster than ever, with more funding rounds, bigger funding rounds, and higher valuations than pretty much any point in history. That’s led to an exponential growth in the number of unicorns walking around, and has also forced regulators and venture law researchers to confront a slew of challenging problems. The […]