Category: Technology

What if you’re in an emergency and you have no cell phone service?  Well, Apple has solved this by finally releasing its much-anticipated new feature for iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro devices – Emergency SOS via satellite.  The company has partnered with satellite communications company Globalstar to create the feature and uses satellite connectivity to put people in touch with local emergency dispatch centers if they are in an area with no cellular Wi-Fi coverage.

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How does Emergency SOS work?

If you find yourself in an emergency, your Apple 14 or Apple 14 Pro device will automatically ping one of Globalstar’s 24 low-orbit satellites. Once the satellite gets the signal, it sends information to one of its ground stations, which then routes the call to a local dispatch center or relay center. The relay centers have third-party and highly trained specialists from Apple who have been trained in emergency protocol to contact police dispatchers and relay information back and forth.

How do I activate Emergency SOS on my device?

The Emergency SOS feature is only to be activated when one is in an actual emergency in order to not alert local police of a false incident. However, there is a demo feature for users to familiarize themselves with the process when they’re not in an emergency.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOUR IPHONE IS LISTENING TO YOU

To try out the demo, make sure you are outside and go to Settings > Emergency SOS > Demo Mode.

If you are in a real emergency and have no cellular Wi-Fi, the feature will automatically pop up on your screen when you try to dial 911.  It appears as a green feature on the bottom right-hand corner, and it will read Emergency Text via Satellite. You’ll also notice a satellite icon and SOS text in the top right-hand corner of your screen next to your battery.

Once you click the green button, and short questionnaire will appear on your screen for you to answer so that the feature can best understand what kind of help you need.

Your answers are then quickly transmitted to dispatchers so that they can find out your situation and location and send help immediately. The questions are as follows.

Once you have answered all the questions, your iPhone will go to a follow-up screen which asks you to point your phone in the direction of one of the Globalstar satellites. It will guide you in the proper direction, and once your device has located one of the satellites, all your information from the questionnaire is transmitted to the local dispatcher along with your location, altitude, iPhone battery level, and Medical ID if you have that enabled on your phone already.

4 SIMPLE AND POWERFUL TIPS FOR MASTERING YOUR IPHONE CALCULATOR

Once the information has been sent, users also have the option of keeping in contact with Emergency SOS via text message. Users can both send and receive messages in as little as 15 seconds. Apple also developed a text compression algorithm to shorten your texts by 3x so that the process can move as quickly as possible.

Can I share my location if I’m not in an emergency?

Yes, Emergency SOS has also made a feature for those who want to go off the grid but are not stuck in an emergency. Here’s how:

• Go to your Find My app
• Select the “Me” tab
• Swipe up to see My Location via Satellite
• Tap Send My Location.

APPLE’S REPLACEMENT FOR THE PASSWORD

For more of my iPhone tips, head over to CyberGuy.com and search “Apple” and be sure to sign up for my free newsletter at CyberGuy.com/Newsletter.

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Chicago — Cellphones are a popular gift during the holiday season, but the debate remains: What’s the best age for your child’s first phone? 

Craighton and Emily Berman are considering getting their 12-year-old son, Henry, a cellphone. He’s only allowed one hour of recreational screen time per day on the computer. 

“My wife and I have been kind of struggling with it,” Craighton Berman said. “Because there’s a lot packed into that phone. We all know digital technology and social media kind of destroys us. So I’m just trying to figure out how to destroy him a little less.” 

According to Common Sense Media, 42% of kids have a smartphone at 10 years old. By the time they’re 14, 91% have phones. 

Catherine Pearlman, the author of “First Phone: A Child’s Guide to Digital Responsibility, Safety and Etiquette,” says parents should use a phone that allows them to limit features and add access to new features over time. 

“It’s developing habit sooner,” she said. “But it’s also learning a little bit at a time, rather than getting your first phone at 13-14 [years old] fully loaded and then trying to learn everything all at once.” 

Devorah Heitner, who runs workshops on kids and phones, and wrote “Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in their Digital World,” says parents need to ask themselves some questions. 

“Is your kid impulsive? Are they going to blow up their life with a few angry texts?” Heitner said. “Is your kid able to be honest with you and accountable?” 

In the months before giving a kid their first phone, Heitner says, discuss boundaries with your child and role play to teach them good phone manners. 

“What would you do if you were on a group text and everyone was saying, ‘Let’s restart the group text without Mary?’” Heitner said of a possible scenario. “Because then you’ll have a sense of what their discernment is.” 

Emily Berman said their son, Henry, is a “very responsible young man.” 

“Given the extra responsibility of helping by walking his brother home from school, it just seemed — I didn’t really think about the age. It was just the right time,” she said of their decision to give him a phone. 

Henry said he’s “a little bit excited and nervous.” 

Bradley Tusk — who spent his early career in Democratic politics and later became a consultant and lobbyist for private companies battling regulators — spends much of his time these days as a venture capitalist. But while Tusk is a generalist, he insists he isn’t interested in just any startup; his expertise, he says, is at the intersection of tech and regulation, and his firm adds the most value to startups in sectors where changing regulations are bound to alter the scale of the opportunity they are chasing.

As a service to Tusk Ventures’s current portfolio — and a kind of calling card for potential founders — Tusk every year puts together some thoughts about the changes he sees coming over the next 12-month period. Because he’s often proven right in retrospect, we hopped on a call with him late last week to discuss some of his many 2023 predictions, and these three stood out to us in particular, so we thought we’d share them here.

1) Major CPG brands start selling cannabis products, wiping out a lot of cannabis startups that were operating in the relative shadows. Here Tusk is, discussing why:

Big brands [sell] alcohol all of the time and cannabis, many people would argue, is a less harmful substance than alcohol. We’ve got this real disconnect between the close to two-thirds of the states and the federal government, where cannabis is legal recreationally and medicinally. Yet it’s on Schedule 1 at the DEA [along with] heroin and meth and cocaine . . . which really doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially as states keep legalizing it entirely.

President Biden has said, ‘Let’s remove this from Schedule 1.’ Once that happens all of a sudden all kinds of interstate commerce that so far has not been allowed will open up. So you’ll be able to have real banking, trucking of [plants] across state lines, advertising . . . All the things that a normal, really big company — a Kraft or Unilever and Anheuser-Busch or Philip Morris — might engage in, they can’t really do under the current system, but once the federal restrictions are loosened, then all of a sudden it opens up for them.

One [question I’ve asked cannabis founders over the years is] how are they going to compete with Unilever? Why would Unilever choose to buy them as opposed to just burying them? And most of the time, the answer is they can’t [compete]. They’re really just racing against the clock, hoping the federal government doesn’t actually do the right thing. But I think once cannabis goes off Schedule 1, and I don’t know if it happens in six months or two years, big companies will get into the game [because] there’s money to be made. And a lot of cannabis startups that were highly valued or overvalued or that traded at really high multiples on the Canadian stock exchange are going to feel a lot of pain.

2) Instead of drive further crypto regulation, Sam Bankman-Fried and the abrupt implosion of FTX actually winds up playing a minor role in any new regulations that get enacted (though Tusk does think we’ll see more regulation at the state and federal level in the next 12 months). Here’s Tusk:

When the FTX thing blow-up started happening, my take was, ‘Okay, this is going to lead to a lot of very harsh crypto regulation that will be bad for the sector, because SEC chief Gary Gensler has been pushing for this for a long time and it hasn’t happened yet because crypto is very popular among a lot of actual real people.’ I thought FTX would give him the cover to move very aggressively against the industry as a whole.

In a weird way since then, as the story gets crazier and crazier and just more and more like Sam Bankman-Fried was just a criminal mastermind who was defrauding people out of tens of billions of dollars and [that this debacle] is not something specifically related to crypto per se, it actually shifts the argument again. It [shifts from], ‘This whole industry is out of control’ to ‘this person was out of control.’ It’s almost gotten so extreme that it’s actually helping [tamp down talk of overregulation].

3) Twitter ends up costing Musk far more than the $44 billion he and his investors paid for it . . .

What Musk did is consistent with things that we’re seeing across the cultural zeitgeist right now, which is in this world with 24/7 media coverage and social media activity, the people who really need attention and can’t get enough of it just have to keep doing more and more outrageous things to try to get it right. We saw that with Donald Trump. We saw that with Kanye West. And the main reason why Musk bought Twitter is so that people would be talking about him, just as we are right now. From that standpoint, I suspect he’s achieved his goal.

What worries me for him is when you look at the market cap of Tesla, for example, it is significantly higher than Toyota or General Motors, companies that sell a lot more cars. Tesla makes a great car and they’re growing and it’s okay for them to lean into the future. But the differential between what [Tesla] probably should be valued at and where it is valued is that Elon Musk hype and pixie dust. He managed to create such an image of being so far in the future and so much better than everyone else that really drives retail investment in the stock. The same is true of SpaceX. While that’s still a private company, I saw a piece yesterday saying that it’s now valued at $140 billion, [yet] there’s no way SpaceX could be [worth] $140 billion given its revenue. So his genius in some ways is that he manages to create this perception that what he’s doing is so innovative and so unique, and that only he can do it; it drives tremendous amounts of value and investment toward his companies.

The really big risk with Twitter is that every time he does something really high profile and public, he puts that reputation on the line. He has taken over Twitter, which no one has really ever figured out how to make it a successful business, and now it’s in his hands. And so far, the ideas that he’s put out there don’t sound that new or interesting to me; they feel like variations of things that people have already done before in different ways. And if he does not succeed with Twitter, the question is, does it puncture the balloon for Tesla, and SpaceX and all his other projects? He may have paid $44 billion for Twitter, but ultimately, this could cost him $100 billion or more if there’s a risk that Tesla and SpaceX and other companies that he owns lose value because he’s exposed as being a mere mortal.

 . . . and no, it doesn’t create great opportunities for startups looking to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter, per Tusk. More here:

There’s just not a great revenue model for all of this to begin with. To make matters worse for them, I still think that there’s a risk eventually that Section 230 of the Telecommunications Decency Act does get changed or repealed. Right now, it exempts platforms from liability from content posted by the user, so I can defame you on Twitter, and you could sue me personally but you couldn’t sue Twitter. And as a result, Twitter, Facebook, all the platforms, their real economic incentive is to move toward negative and toxic content, because as much as we hate it, that drives eyeballs and drives clicks and thus drives advertising rates and revenue. So effectively, the lack of liability by the platforms is creating a world where the internet has to be as toxic and awful as possible.

But if [we repeal] Section 230, it’ll be a lot like what happened with the tobacco companies beginning in the 1980s, where all of a sudden they were vulnerable to litigation and started receiving these multibillion-dollar judgments, and as a result, they felt real economic pain and had to finally get a hold of their [marketing practices] because it was costing them more money than otherwise. Right now Facebook will pay the little fines that it gets from the FCC, because ultimately, they make so much money driven by negative content. Repealing Section 230 would change that.

Nothing is worse than waking up in the morning feeling groggy and lethargic because you didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We need our sleep to feel energized and ready to take on our busy lives each day. That’s where your Apple Watch can step in to help.

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How can my Apple Watch help me sleep?

The Apple Watch device comes with a unique feature called the Sleep app. This app allows you to create sleep schedules so that you can meet your bedtime goals every single night. As long as you wear your watch on your wrist when you go to bed, the Sleep app will track your sleeping patterns throughout the night and tell you how long you remained in each sleeping stage (REM, core and deep).

This feature is available on all watches with the OS7 update, including the Apple Watch Series 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.

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What features are available on the Sleep app?

The Sleep app has all kinds of useful features to make sure you get the best sleep possible. You can create multiple schedules for different days of the week, depending on what you want to achieve for that night. Some great features include:

• Setting a sleep goal (how many hours of sleep you want to get)
• Setting what time you want to go to bed and wake up
• An alarm to wake you up in the morning
• When to turn on Sleep Focus, which limits distractions before you go to bed and protects you once you’re in bed
• Sleep tracking, which uses your motion to detect sleep
• If your watch is at 30% battery or less, it can alert you to charge it before you put it on to go to sleep

How to set up the Sleep app on the Apple Watch

• Open the Sleep app on your Apple Watch (the blue app that looks like a bed)
• Follow the on-screen instructions to set up

Once your Sleep app is set up on your device, you can adjust all its features to what you want them to be in order to get the best results possible.

How to change or turn off your alarm

• Open the Sleep app
• Tap your current bedtime
• If you don’t want to be woken up in the morning, select Turn Off Alarm
• If you want to change your wake-up time, tap Wake-Up Time and turn the Digital Crown to set a new time.
• Press the checkmark icon when done

How to change or add a sleep schedule

• Open the Sleep app
• Tap Full Schedule
• To change a sleep schedule, tap Current Schedule and change the days, wake time and bedtime
• To add a sleep schedule, tap Add Schedule
• To change your sleep goal, tap Sleep Goal and set the amount of time you want to sleep
• To change your wind-down time, tap Wind Down and set the amount of time you want Sleep Focus to be active before bedtime
• To remove or cancel a schedule, tap Current Schedule and scroll to the bottom, Select Delete Schedule

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How to change sleep options

• Open your Settings app
• Tap Sleep and adjust the settings (Turn on at Wind Down, Sleep Screen, Show Time)
• Turn Sleep Tracking and Charging reminders on or off

How to view your recent sleep history

• Open your Sleep app
• Scroll down to the bottom to see your sleep stats from the night before, including the amount of sleep you got, the time you spent in each sleep stage, and your sleep average over the last 14 days.

How to view your sleeping respiratory rate

After you wear your Apple Watch to bed, you can then see how your breathing was throughout the night while you slept by checking the Health app on your iPhone.

• Open the Health app on your iPhone
• Select Browse
• Select Respiratory
• Select Respiratory Rate
• Select Show More Respiratory Rate Data

What are the latest Apple Watches I should consider? 

This fall, Apple released a slew of new products, including three new smartwatches that will track your health, last all day, and save your life. I was at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, alongside Tim Cook as he debuted the Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch SE, and the all-new Apple Watch Ultra.

Be sure to read my reviews of these Apple Watches by heading over to CyberGuy.com and search “Apple Watch.”

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Many would agree that the fact that nearly all smartphones come with GPS services installed is one of their many benefits.  For one thing, while traveling to or in a city you might be unfamiliar with, you have an instant map at your fingertips, making getting lost nearly impossible. 

Then too, thanks to apps such as “Find My Phone“, the built-in GPS service could save you the trouble of turning your home inside out while looking for your missing phone. 

With all this in mind, however, the GPS software which can help you from getting lost might also help others pinpoint your location.  

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“Find my” apps could save your life

Of course, the Find My Phone app and other GPS software were not designed to put iPhone or Android users in danger. Quite the contrary, the iPhone 14 comes with an Emergency SOS service, free for the first two years of usage. 

When SOS is accessed, no matter where you are in the world, it will contact emergency services via satellite in locations where there is no Wi-Fi or cellular service. Of course, in areas covered by foliage or without other elements blocking the sky, reaching a satellite might not be possible.

But with a clear shot of the sky, the SOS service does indeed have lifesaving potential, as evidenced to be the first-ever rescue mission as a result of this service, recently reported by the Alaska Department of Public Safety, when a man traveling via snowmobile became stranded. 

Thanks to the SOS service, he was able to contact the Apple Emergency Response center via satellite, which in turn could provide the Alaska state troopers with the man’s GPS coordinates. 

The man was saved and free of harm, all thanks to the miracle of technology.

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Police can help find your phone…for better or worse

Another recent example of law enforcement using the “find my” app resulted in a much less happy ending, as revealed by a recent lawsuit (use link: https://www.aclu-co.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/complaint_and_jury_demand_12-01-2022_redacted.pdf ) filed in county court claims in Colorado a couple of weeks ago. 

The Denver Police Department was on the hunt for a stolen truck, which was carrying $4,000 in cash, multiple guns, and two drones, as well as the truck driver’s iPhone. Understandably, the police had the intuition to use the “Find My” app to locate the phone and hopefully the perpetrators. 

They were able to find a location, which turned out to be the home of retired postal worker Ruby Johnson, who was temporarily apprehended while the police searched her home for the missing phone.

While the missing phone was never located, a screenshot from the Find My app showed that the iPhone was in the general vicinity of Johnson’s home, not her exact address. Alas, the phone, not to mention the stolen truck and ammunition were never found, and Johnson, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, is suing the detective in the Denver Police Department for unspecified damages.

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Use caution when downloading new apps

It’s hardly the first time the location services on someone’s phone might have gotten someone in a precarious, if not downright dangerous position. Namely, because people tend to approve all apps to know your location at the simple click of a button. 

While we should always do just that for navigational apps, we might want to think twice about allowing our location for others, as spyware software intentionally designed to track and follow you around is on the rise.

Even allowing our location to be available at all times on social media might be a mistake, as it opens the potential to allow just about anyone to track you down. 

There are a few simple steps people with an iPhone can take to make sure that your location won’t be readily available for all to see.

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How to adjust which iPhone apps track you?

Follow These Steps

• Click on Settings
• Click on Privacy & Security
• Click on Location services.

It is here where you will see all the apps you are currently sharing your location with and are greeted with a few options when it comes to tracking which are:

• Always
• While Using
• Ask Next Time
• Never.

Which apps should I allow to track my location?

This is of course a matter of personal opinion, but generally speaking, the only apps where your location being known is necessary are:

• Find My Apps
• Navigational Apps
• Ride Share Apps
• Food Delivery Apps.

And even so, probably wise only to have location services on “while using”.

Apps to avoid allowing location

HOW TO CHECK IF SOMEONE IS STEALING YOUR WI-FI AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

You can never be too sure who may be watching you.

One can never be too sure exactly who is on the receiving end of your current location while using an app, as evidenced by a “precise location” warning from Twitter and Instagram. While the situation proved not to be as serious as suggested, it was still a sobering reminder of how frighteningly easy it is for hackers to find your precise location through just about any app or that we may have downloaded a fraudulent app filled with stalking malware.

However, one shouldn’t let that, or Ms. Johnson’s admittedly scary experience, deter you from ever using a navigational app again. For sometimes, when you need it the most, it can save you from being lost, or in extreme circumstances, help you get found.

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Copyright 2023 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. CyberGuy.com articles and content may contain affiliate links that earn a commission when purchases are made.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Monday morning it will charge Epic Games with a $520 million settlement over charges related to children’s privacy. Epic Games, which makes popular all-ages games like “Fortnite” and “Fall Guys,” allegedly violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by deploying “design tricks, known as dark patterns, to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases,” the FTC said in a press release.

The $520 million payment is divided into two settlements: the COPPA fine amounts to $275 million, which is the largest ever penalty for violating an FTC rule. The FTC also proposed that Epic should pay $245 million to refund customers for what it calls “dark patterns and billing practices.” If Epic Games pays that fine, it will be the FTC’s largest eve refund amount in a gaming case.

In addition to making it too easy for children to make online purchases, the FTC also took issue with Epic’s live text and voice communication features, which were set to be turned on by default. The FTC claims that children were exposed to harassment and abuse because of these features, especially since Epic had no way of making sure that children and adults would not be matched together in online play. According to the FTC’s press release, children have been exposed to bullying, threats, harassment and “psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide” while playing the game.

In the last two years, Epic has raised over $3 billion in venture capital, most recently at a $31.5 billion valuation. Along with Lego, whose parent company invested $1 billion, Epic Games is working on building a kid-friendly metaverse.

Epic Games has also been embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple, accusing the tech giant of anti-competitive behavior. The video game company challenged Apple’s policy that it can remove products from the iOS App Store if the app reroutes customers around paying within the app, which gives Apple a 30% cut.

Take a moment to learn the newest ways to get Alexa to speak the way you want. It will dramatically improve how you are currently using Alexa forever.

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Change Alexa’s speed

You can change Alexa’s volume directly on most devices or by using your voice, but did you know you can change Alexa’s speed at which the device talks to you?

Say “Alexa, speak faster” or “Alexa, speak slower” either once, or a few times to get the device speaking at the rate you’d like. If you end up wanting Alexa to go back to the original speed, just say “Alexa, speak at your default rate” and the settings will reset.

 4 COMMON THINGS ALEXA CAN DO BETTER THAN YOU

4 SIMPLE AND POWERFUL TIPS FOR MASTERING YOUR IPHONE CALCULATOR

Use Alexa’s brief mode

Speaking of needing Alexa to speed up, sometimes the device just says too many phrases. You may just be wanting a quick response about the temperature or package delivery, and Alexa will give a whole spiel about other settings you can change.

Turn on Brief mode on your Alexa devices to receive just the basic answers Alexa will provide.

• Open your Alexa app
• Tap More (the three horizontal lines on the bottom right)
• Tap Voice responses
• Toggle on Brief Mode so Alexa will speak less or opt for a short sound instead of a wordy response

In Voice responses, you can also select Whisper Mode, which means Alexa will whisper back if you whisper to the device, or Adaptive volume, which means your device will increase volume automatically if your environment is louder.

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HOW TO CHECK IF SOMEONE IS STEALING YOUR WI-FI AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Change or turn off Alexa’s wake word

At this point, the name Alexa has been changed forever. You can’t even watch a video where someone says the name without setting off your devices and getting voices coming from everywhere. If you want to change that, you can opt for a different “wake word” to get your Alexa’s attention. You can also stop Alexa from listening to you entirely.

How to change Alexa’s wake word

• Open your Alexa app
• Tap Devices
• Tap Echo & Alexa
• Tap the device you want to change the wake word for (if you want to do it for all of your Alexa devices, just do this individually for each one)
• Tap the Settings icon in the top-right corner
• Scroll down and tap Wake word
• Select from the options

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You can also change Alexa’s voice to someone like Samuel L. Jackson or Melissa McCarthy by saying, “Alexa, change your voice.”

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How to stop Alexa from listening to you

If you just need a pause from Alexa altogether and none of the wake words work for you, you can mute Alexa. Most newer Alexa devices have a mute button, which is a circle with a slash through it. Simply tap that, and you’ll see a red light indicating your Alexa’s in mute mode.

For more of my Alexa tips, head over to CyberGuy.com and search “Alexa” and be sure to sign up for my free newsletter.

Copyright 2023 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. CyberGuy.com articles and content may contain affiliate links that earn a commission when purchases are made.

For a rapid valuation climb, think, ‘What’s the highest risk right now, and how do I remove it?’

You’ve likely heard of pre-seed, seed, Series A, Series B and so on and so forth. These labels often aren’t super helpful because they aren’t clearly defined — we’ve seen very small Series A rounds and enormous pre-seed rounds. The defining characteristic of each round isn’t as much about how much money is changing hands as it is about how much risk is in the company.

On your startup’s journey, there are two dynamics at play at once. By deeply understanding them — and the connection between them — you’ll be able to make a lot more sense of your fundraising journey and how to think about each part of your startup pathway as you evolve and develop.

In general, in broad lines, the funding rounds tend to go as follows:

• The 4 Fs: Founders, Friends, Family, Fools: This is the first money going into the company, usually just enough to start proving out some of the core tech or business dynamics. Here, the company is trying to build an MVP. In these rounds, you’ll often find angel investors of various degrees of sophistication.
• Pre-seed: Confusingly, this is often the same as the above, except done by an institutional investor (i.e., a family office or a VC firm focusing on the earliest stages of companies). This is usually not a “priced round” — the company doesn’t have a formal valuation, but the money raised is on a convertible or SAFE note. At this stage, companies are typically not yet generating revenue.
• Seed: This is usually institutional investors investing larger amounts of money into a company that has started proving some of its dynamics. The startup will have some aspect of its business up and running and may have some test customers, a beta product, a concierge MVP, etc. It won’t have a growth engine (in other words, it won’t yet have a repeatable way of attracting and retaining customers). The company is working on active product development and looking for product-market fit. Sometimes this round is priced (i.e., investors negotiate a valuation of the company), or it may be unpriced.
• Series A: This is the first “growth round” a company raises. It will usually have a product in the market delivering value to customers and is on its way to having a reliable, predictable way of pouring money into customer acquisition. The company may be about to enter new markets, broaden its product offering or go after a new customer segment. A Series A round is almost always “priced,” giving the company a formal valuation.
• Series B and beyond: At Series B, a company is usually off to the races in earnest. It has customers, revenue and a stable product or two. From Series B onward, you have Series C, D, E, etc. The rounds and the company get bigger. The final rounds are typically preparing a company for going into the black (being profitable), going public through an IPO or both.

For each of the rounds, a company becomes more and more valuable partially because it is getting an increasingly mature product and more revenue as it figures out its growth mechanics and business model. Along the way, the company evolves in another way, as well: The risk goes down.

That final piece is crucial in how you think about your fundraising journey. Your risk doesn’t go down as your company becomes more valuable. The company becomes more valuable as it reduces its risk. You can use this to your advantage by designing your fundraising rounds to explicitly de-risk the “scariest” things about your company.

Let’s take a closer look at where risk appears in a startup and what you can do as a founder to remove as much risk as possible at each stage of your company’s existence.

Where is the risk in your company?

Risk comes in many shapes and forms. When your company is at the idea stage, you may get together with some co-founders who have excellent founder-market fit. You have identified that there is a problem in the market. Your early potential customer interviews all agree that this is a problem worth solving and that someone is — in theory — willing to pay money to have this problem solved. The first question is: Is it even possible to solve this problem?

(Update December 19, 2022, 8:40 AM IST): Twitter has deleted the tweets announcing the policy that prohibited people from posting handles and links to other social networks. The company has also silently removed the policy page that detailed these rules. Meanwhile, the Twitter Safety account started a poll asking users if the company should form a policy on accounts used just to promote other social networks.

After Twitter made the policy change, it received a lot of criticism. In a reply to a user, Musk specified that the policy will be adjusted to suspend accounts whose only purpose is to promote other social networks. However, Twitter hasn’t made any official announcements related to this. 

The original story follows

While people around the globe were watching a thrilling FIFA World Cup final, Twitter decided to drop a bombshell and banned links promoting other social networks. The list currently includes Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. Plus, link-in-bio tools like Linktree and Lnk.Bio are also banned — these services are commonly used by both creators and businesses. Essentially, you can’t post links to your other social profiles or even type out your handle in a tweet.

The Elon Musk-owned company “no longer allows free promotion of certain social media platforms” on Twitter. The company said that it is removing all accounts “created solely for the purpose of promoting other social networks.” It also plans to remove links to content from above mentioned social platforms.

“We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter,” the social platform said on its policy page.

Twitter will ask you to delete tweets if you link out your handles and multiple violations of this policy will result in a temporary account lock. The company said if you have links to any of these platforms in your bio, it will temporarily suspend your account and ask you to change your bio.

What’s interesting here is that the Musk-led company will let you post your handle if you pay for the tweet’s promotion.

On Saturday night, Twitter suspended the account of Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz had recently deleted all of her tweets and only had three posts on her account: two promoting her other social media accounts, and one asking Musk for comment on a story she is working on with Drew Harwell, a fellow Post writer. Harwell, along with reporters like the New York Times’ Ryan Mac and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, was temporarily suspended after posting about how Mastodon’s Twitter was banned for linking to the Elon Jet Mastodon account. He and other journalists were reinstated after Musk posted a poll for users to vote on the journalists’ fate.

When Lorenz posted her other social media handles and was suspended, this policy did not yet exist. At the time of publication, her account appears to have been reinstated.