From a16z’s Frank Chen, a refreshing perspective on AI. “So the counter-narrative I want to offer to the mainstream, front page accounts [of doom] is that with careful, thoughtful, empathic design, we can enable ourselves to live longer, safer lives. We can create jobs where we are doing more creative work. We can understand each other better.” | learn more
Amazon Alexa and the search for the one perfect answer.
“Voice computing seeks to deliver a single correct response to any query. That’s why it’s going to upend our relationship with information.” | learn more
Watch the original Stanford presentation that launched Juul.
This company elicits a lot of strong feelings these days – from its clearly addictive nicotine product to its $38B valuation and recent investment from cigarette maker Altria. | learn more
Check out the teams competing for 2019 New Venture Challenge.
“The NVC is the University of Chicago’s nationally ranked accelerator program that has graduated more than 230 startup companies still in operation today.” | learn more
Learnings from a 6x angel investment portfolio.
Investor Elizabeth Yin from Hustle Fund shares 12 things she’s learned from her experience writing angel checks. | learn more
How to get a job in venture capital.
Brad Feld summarizes his partner’s longer post about how to get one of the few coveted jobs in this field. |learn more
Zillow wants to flip your house.
“A new breed of high-tech real estate flippers is using algorithms (and a healthy dose of Silicon Valley venture capital) to buy at massive scale.” | learn more
How Sam Yagan bounced back from a startup failure to a $400M IPO.
This Forbes piece doesn’t cover recent news, but it is a neat profile of one Chicago’s entrepreneurship heroes. The author interviewed Sam Yagan to learn about his history founding SparkNotes (went well), eDonkey (ended badly), and OKCupid (eventually acquired to Match.com, where Sam became CEO of and took public). | learn more
On digital media companies vs networks.
Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks, discusses how the internet has fundamentally changed business models for media. Specifically, she’s saying that audiences are out and networks are in. I think she makes a great point! | learn more
Deepfakes go bigger with machine-generated copy.
Axios reports on the new technology from OpenAI that enables machines to write human-sounding prose. Combined with Deepfake technology to create artificial video and audio, “It could be used to influence people one-on-one on a massive scale, rather than distributing a small number of forgeries widely.” | learn more