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Tag: Start-Ups

  • Over the last decade, we’ve invested in over 20 unicorns. The machines will take millions of jobs—but they’ll never lead like a human can | Fortune

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    The World Economic Forum’s latest report produced news of 92 million jobs being eliminated due to AI by 2030. But in that same report was the prediction of an estimated 170 million new jobs, which will create a net gain of 78 million. As leaders who have invested in over 20 unicorns over the last decade and advised hundreds of companies on technological shifts and transformation for decades, we have seen that panic of job loss and skyrocketing unemployment dominate headlines and drive the news cycles, but the whole story always tells a different tale. 

    Yes, we will see disruption and job displacement — that’s inevitable. We’ve lived through the tech boom of the ’90s, the birth of the internet, cloud computing, and waves of automation over the past 35 years. Has any of this led to the predicted dystopia? Consider this: in 1991, the global unemployment rate was 5.1%. After three decades of technological revolution and exponential AI growth, the global unemployment rate in 2024 was 4.89%. If you believed only the headlines that followed every technological breakthrough of the past 35 years, you’d assume half the world would be unemployed by now. 

    The truth? Technology always creates more than it destroys. 

    Increased AI adoption across sectors

    That same report from the WEF shows that adoption of AI is growing rapidly, albeit unevenly, across sectors. This isn’t adoption for adoption’s sake. The labor market is being driven in this direction by four powerful forces. 

    ● AI automation: Almost 60% of firms (nearly 85% of large firms) implemented automation over the last 12 months. 

    ● Economic pressures: For companies to stay competitive, they are looking for efficiency in every aspect of their operation. The use of AI is the surest and fastest way to achieve measurable increases in efficiency. 

    ● Green transitions: The combination of changes in climate and energy demand is causing enterprises to lean more into green technologies to slow the amount of overhead they must commit to energy. 

    ● Demographics: Demographic shifts are driving the need for increased roles in the caregiving industry. Aging populations need humans to help them in ways no machine can. Plus, these new and increased roles require entirely new management approaches.

    These four forces are already affecting hiring pipelines, budgets, and boardroom strategy. 

    Where jobs are emerging

    Apart from the aforementioned care-giving sector, a historic employment boom is coming to IT and engineering. Unlike earlier tech booms, this surge is not about speculation and hype, but structural reinvention. The IDC projects AI spending will increase to $632 billion by 2028, signaling not a bubble but the emergence of sustainable growth. 

    AI-native product development will come more to the forefront as we see the growth of products being enabled by AI andcompletely designed around it. AI product managers, AI UX designers, and prompt engineers are already becoming fixtures, supported by platforms like Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, and Google Duet AI. These roles speak to the coming era of intelligent software. These are tools that learn, adapt, and anticipate. They will in turn, require builders who can manage and adapt to human needs with machine learning in real time.

    The infrastructure aspect of this new age is just as transformative. AI-driven Cloud and DevOps (collectively called AIOps) will change how enterprises manage scale. New categories such as MLOps engineers, AI Cloud architects, observability engineers, and incident prediction analysts are emerging and growing in demand. The humans in these positions must be able to design systems that can anticipate failures, self-optimize, and operate with resilience at levels far beyond human monitoring. This moves the cloud from being elastic to being predictive.

    There will be an increased risk associated with this growth. Cybersecurity and AI trust will be as integral to competitive advantage as innovation. As governments roll out the EU AI Act, National Institute of Standards and Technology standards, and similar regulations, companies will need AI cyber analysts, LLM red teamers, and AI risk officers to safeguard not only networks but the algorithms that drive them. Leaders whoexperience the most success now will be those who build trust into their products with as much thought and strategy as they build in features. They will understand that explainability and compliance are strategic assets.

    As the growth of AI infrastructure increases, data engineers and knowledge designers will become as central as application developers once were. Enterprise knowledge ecosystems from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to vector databases and knowledge graphs are poised to create new categories of work. Plus, in nearly every vertical (finance, healthcare, legal, HR), AI specializations will generate hybrid roles where you not only need to master the functions of that role, but you’ll also need to be an expert in how to leverage AI to augment your duties and increase your output and efficiency. These types of positions will be drivers of industry-specific disruption.

    Adaptation is non-negotiable. Software engineers must evolve into AI-assisted developers, DevOps professionals into AIOps specialists, and product managers into AI-native strategists. UX designers will focus on explainability and trust design, reshaping how people interact with intelligent systems. Those who move fastest will define the rules of the AI economy itself.

    Humans have to lead

    Hybrid Intelligence Operations demand executives who can create synergies between human creativity and machine execution that neither could achieve alone. AI cannot replace leadership, judgment, ethical decision-making, or vision. AI is a tool, perhaps the most powerful ever created, but it is useless without proper human oversight and leadership. 

    In the arena of AI Ethics and Governance, leaders will need to serve as directors of societal responsibility. They must decide what constitutes ethical AI deployment and have the courageand backbone to stop when profit optimization crosses the line into human cost. These decisions cannot be algorithmic. They demand judgment, empathy, and ethics.

    Cross-Functional Integration is becoming critical as we see traditional org charts becoming less and less relevant. Leaders have to be able to speak to and negotiate between technical, financial, regulatory, and human teams to foster solutions across age gaps, personality differences, and functional silos. 

    AI can forecast trends, but only leaders can paint compelling pictures of the future that inspire teams to embrace change rather than resist it. Creating a strategic vision and being able to emotionally sell it to the team via storytelling is something no AI will ever be able to do as well as a human. Machines can execute, but they’ll never lead; humans must combine AI scale with human leadership.

    How to win the future

    The age of a leader delegating tasks and managing workflows no longer exists in successful businesses, as AI can handle most operational tasks. Leaders must evolve or risk becoming as automated as the roles they once managed. To do this, focus on uniquely human capabilities in your employees and hone those skills. These will be the core assets of an AI-driven world.

    Begin redesigning your organization now around human skills and phase out traditional hierarchies. Drill down and find out what your people bring that is uniquely human. Double down on developing those attributes to their maximum potential. 

    Then, teach and show teams that AI is a human multiplier, not a human replacement. Prove to them that technology is a competitive advantage that helps them become the most powerful version of themselves at work. Your teams need to understand not just how AI works, but how it helps them while also helping the company. The more they understand, the less they fear, and the more they buy in. 

    The winning leaders of this decade will be those who recognize and show their teams that AI isn’t a threat to human jobs, it’s an augmentor of human capability. The leaders and companies that accomplish this will remember 2025-2030 not for jobs lost, but for becoming pioneers of the age of human-AI partnerships, reshaping entire industries.

    The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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    Navin Chaddha, Mark Minevich

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  • We studied America’s entrepreneurs and found too many of them were burned out, anxious and depressed. We need a well-being revolution | Fortune

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    It’s no secret that entrepreneurs invest heart and soul into starting, running, developing and growing a business. But building a company can come at a cost to personal well-being and therefore to venture success. Our new research reinforces the concept that well-being is more than just personally fulfilling—it actually drives entrepreneurial growth. 

    The potential adverse consequences to entrepreneurs when well-being is disregarded are well-documented. One survey revealed that 87% of founders reported experiencing either anxiety, depression or burnout—or all three. Another found that 30% of entrepreneurs acknowledged depression and 27% anxiety, rates well above the 7% prevalence in the overall U.S. population. Additional research shows that entrepreneurs with compromised well-being were less productive, innovative and persistent, leading to lower economic output. Entrepreneurial well-being is a multifaceted concept defined as the experiencing of satisfaction, positive affect, and psychological functioning.

    So what’s contributing to these high levels of compromised well-being? Granted, entrepreneurs work hard, sometimes too hard. Many entrepreneurs work 50 to 60 hours per week, often more during the startup phase, compared to the standard 40-hour week for most employees at corporate jobs. Entrepreneurs may also work without clearly defined work-life boundaries and days off—pulling all-nighters, skipping meals and sleep, or forgoing exercise in exchange for logging long hours. The top performers in entrepreneurship average only about six hours of sleep per night.

    But work hours alone don’t fully explain the problem. Entrepreneurs are, on the whole, inherently different from corporate employees. Being your own boss, after all, demands the managing of finances, operations, marketing, and human resources. By its very nature—especially its unpredictability, often in the face of limited resources—it risks breeding entrepreneurs who drive themselves too hard.

    At the same time, the very nature of entrepreneurship grants a level of freedom that corporate jobs often don’t. Research shows that entrepreneurs have more opportunity to direct their own work, operate with a high degree of autonomy, and draw deep meaning from what they do. But this flexibility can be a double-edged sword. Without clear boundaries, work can easily spill over into personal life. The fast pace, pressure to succeed, and ever-present risk of failure can make it difficult to step back, leading many founders to equate business success with personal success, and neglect to take time to catch a breath.   

    No wonder entrepreneurs are so vulnerable to suffering an emotional toll and strained relationships with family, friends and colleagues. The very factors that fuel their ambition can also create a sense of isolation. In some cases, the more successful entrepreneurs get, the lonelier they feel. Dissatisfaction and frustration may lead to burnout, hampering overall performance, notably decision-making.

    What we found

    In our current research, we conducted surveys, interviews and focus groups with 308 entrepreneurs from different fields and geographical locations globally. Led by Lehigh University in partnership with the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in Silicon Valley and TU Dortmund University in Germany, our preliminary sample found that higher well-being actually benefits founders not only personally but also professionally. Entrepreneurs who report higher well-being are more engaged in their businesses, thereby fueling their incentive to grow their ventures. 

    Further, our study shows that entrepreneurs who set work-life boundaries for themselves experience less burnout. Almost half of those who abided by boundaries (45%) reported low burnout, compared to 6% of those who struggled to do so. Non-boundary-setters were almost three times more likely to experience high burnout (67%) than boundary-setters (23%). Also vital was strong community support: entrepreneurs with access to mentors and emotional backing were 50% more likely to report higher resilience and better stress management. 

    These findings highlight the value of striking a balance between gung-ho overkill and long-term practicality—in the process, lending a strategic advantage to the quest for entrepreneurial success.

    We also identified some key stressors that undermine entrepreneurial well-being. Founders cited financial stress and income instability as major concerns, with 68% uncertain about meeting payroll or personal expenses, leading to exhaustion. Also at issue was work-life balance, with 74% indicating that the demands of business left them little room for self-care. Does any of this have to be so? Should we still see the stereotypical succeed-at-all-costs entrepreneur as a role model? Should we keep glorifying a hustle culture that might threaten health and wellbeing, and that could prevent ventures from surviving and flourishing? 

    No, no, no and no. It’s imperative to aggressively challenge the longstanding assumption that entrepreneurs should be willing to sacrifice well-being to achieve financial success. So what to do?

    Redefining entrepreneurial success

    To start, elevate entrepreneurial well-being to a much higher priority on our global agenda. We should no longer undervalue and overlook the well-being dilemma. Raise awareness of the special obstacles that entrepreneurs confront. Redefine entrepreneurial success as a balance between financial ambition and preference for autonomy with the pursuit of well-being, ideally without jeopardizing either. Implement tactics to build a more sustainable, more compassionate entrepreneurial culture.  

    To a certain extent this is already happening. Our research showed, for example, that venture capital firms are starting to recognize the value of investing hard-coded dollars in companies that prize wellbeing enough to retain wellness coaching services, hold wellness retreats and take other measures to promote overall health. Indeed, VC firms such as Balderton, Felicis and Starting Line now operate founder health and performance programs along with coaching and therapy sessions for founders. Early-stage venture fund 11 Tribes proactively invests in the well-being of entrepreneurs.

    On a small scale, entrepreneurs can enact measures to help themselves. They should take the time necessary to recharge and refocus to relieve the pressure they might feel. Founders should adopt well-being as a daily practice. Those who pause for breaks, meditate, do yoga, get enough sleep, build a support network and ask for help perform at a higher level.

    But on a macro level, organizations and entrepreneurial communities should commit to systemic reform. Although early-stage ventures often lack the resources for full-scale HR teams, founders can take low-cost, high-impact steps, such as fostering psychological safety, implementing workload management, and tracking well-being metrics. Startups that integrate well-being into leadership practices and company policies can lower stress, boost engagement, and ensure that well-being is not an afterthought, but, rather, top of mind.

    Just imagine working in an entrepreneurial environment where well-being is valued—where, for example, peers, mentors and investors routinely take a moment to ask a question all too rarely asked: “How are you today?”

    The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

    Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.

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    Samantha Dewalt, Willy Das, Daniela Gimenez-Jimenez

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  • This 29-year-old from one of London’s poorest neighborhoods became a millionaire after selling his influencer marketing firm

    This 29-year-old from one of London’s poorest neighborhoods became a millionaire after selling his influencer marketing firm

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    Timothy Armoo, co-founder and former CEO of Fanbytes.

    Timothy Armoo

    Timothy Armoo is a 29-year-old millionaire who became rich by selling his influencer marketing firm for eight-figures, but the young, Black entrepreneur had to beat the odds to find success.

    Armoo, the co-founder and former CEO of Fanbytes, hails from what was one of the most impoverished areas in south London and as a teenager lived with his dad on a fourth floor council estate — public housing — on Old Kent Road in the borough of Southwark.

    “It was the poorest place,” Armoo told CNBC Make It in an interview. “It was at the peak of when Peckham, Brixton and Old Kent Road were having their beef [British slang for conflict] so it was in the middle of the gang warfare. Between 2005 and 2012 was the peak of the South London gangs.”

    Trust for London names Southwark as one of 19 boroughs that have “significantly” higher levels of poverty compared to England as a whole.

    Armoo knew he was poor, but he had a keen entrepreneurial spirit and managed to cobble together some money by starting his own tutoring business at 14-years-old.

    He taught fellow students math and as more students approached him for help with other subjects, he started connecting them with tutors he knew and took a cut of the fee.

    “I remember very specifically the first time I connected these two people,” he said. “Jane needed some help with chemistry, and I connected her to Harry, and Harry helped her, and I got £5 (around $6.6) in commission for connecting them, because [the business] charged £15 an hour.”

    It was only when Armoo received a scholarship to go to a private boarding school when he was just 16-years-old to complete his A-Levels — equivalent to the Advanced Placement program in the U.S. — that his entire view of wealth changed.

    “I remember one day this kid got picked up in a helicopter,” he recalled. “It opened up my eyes that there is a way to build wealth and you don’t have to be Richard Branson. There’s a whole world of people in between there.”

    He started to realize that “money was a tool” to change his life and the fastest way to escape poverty was to start his own business.

    “When I was growing up on that fourth floor council estate, I would always say to myself ‘This is temporary. This is temporary. This is temporary,’” he said. “I didn’t get to choose the circumstances I was in at 10 years old … but at least I got to decide what ends up happening.”  

    Here’s how Armoo went from living in a council estate to starting his own business and then becoming a millionaire before the age of 30.

    Your first business doesn’t need to be a ‘billion dollar idea’

    Armoo was 17-years-old and still completing his A-Levels when he sold his first business, an online blog called Entrepreneur Express, for £110,000, after only 11 months of running it.

    “Everyone’s aspiration was to go to Oxbridge [The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge] and mine was just ‘I want to make money and I want to get out of my s—ty situation,’” Armoo said.

    The 29-year-old interviewed high-profile figures for Entrepreneur Express from the likes of Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson, the face of the British TV show “The Apprentice” Alan Sugar and actor James Caan, but making the blog profitable was a challenge.

    Initially he had a print version of the blog ready to be taken in by university society groups but as the deadline drew closer, he realized he didn’t have enough advertising to sustain the print publication.

    The young entrepreneur then turned his attention to placing advertisements on the online blog. “This is where I had my success,” he said.

    He said his “hack” was the distribution of content from the blog via viral social media accounts on Instagram and Facebook such as meme pages and feel-good quote pages.

    Armoo would package the articles into social media posts with a hook like “10 quotes to…” and this would drive people from the post to his site.

    “The way that we made money was by two things: one was programmatic advertising — so just banner ads, but I would also then sell sponsored slots to tax firms, law firms, and accountancy firms so they could get a direct ROI [return on investment.]”

    Armoo said your first business doesn’t need to be “a billion dollar idea.” Instead “your first business should just get you on the first money ladder.”

    He echoed the advice of the late investment guru Charlie Munger who said that making the first $100,000 is the hardest “but you gotta do it.”

    Armoo agreed saying: “If you optimize for that first £100,000 … you slog, and you go crazy for it, life just becomes easier, because then you know a bit of the playbook… now, at the very least, you have a financial cushion to make choices which are not as risky.”

    “You build wealth by selling the business”

    Armoo co-founded Fanbytes with Ambrose Cooke and Mitchell Fasanya in 2017.

    Tim Armoo

    Armoo considers himself an early pioneer in the burgeoning creator economy industry because he co-founded the influencer marketing firm Fanbytes in 2017 with Ambrose Cooke and Mitchell Fasanya.

    Fanbytes’ goal was to connect brands with influencers to create advertising campaigns — a popular marketing strategy at the time as companies transitioned from traditional advertising to using influencers on social media to sell products.

    Their strategy worked as Fanbytes amassed a notable roster of clients from Nike, Samsung, Amazon and ITV, Armoo said.

    One 2016 study by TapInfluence found that social media influencer marketing was 11 times more effective than banner ads on a website, which is why brands were flocking to influencers, according to CNBC reporting.

    “I saw the rise of influencer marketing in the U.S.,” Armoo said and he decided to replicate the idea in the U.K.

    You don’t always need to invent something new as an entrepreneur, instead you can “service existing demand,” Armoo advised.  

    The company was “raising dribs and drabs,” across different stages before ultimately raising £2 million in funding.

    “First ever bit of investment was like 15 grand, then 40 grand, and then 120 grand, and then 300 grand, and then 600 grand,” Armoo said.

    His work with Fanbytes landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021, and soon after in October that year, offers started rolling in from people wanting to purchase Fanbytes.

    He then appointed a bank to coordinate deals for the company which went on to find six companies interested in acquiring Fanbytes.

    Armoo, who was 27-years-old at the time, and his co-founders sold Fanbytes to Brainlabs, a global digital marketing agency, in an eight-figure deal in May 2022, which made them all multi-millionaires.

    “The aim was always to build something that could be sold,” Armoo said. “I spoke to this guy once when I was pretty early on in my journey, and he said that you can make money while running a business, but you build wealth by selling the business.”

    Armoo always knew that he didn’t want to run Fanbytes for the rest of his life.

    “Fanbytes could have been selling shoelaces to frogs and I still would have been passionate if I thought this is a business we are building and it has the end goal of being something that can achieve financial security,” he said.

    ‘I never saw myself as a Black entrepreneur’

    Armoo and his co-founders sold Fanbytes to Brainlabs in May 2022.

    Timothy Armoo

    Black founders often struggle to raise capital. In fact, Black-founded startups in the U.S. only raised 0.48% of all venture dollars allocated in 2023, per Crunchbase data previously reported by CNBC.

    This follows a decline in funding being given to Black-owned businesses since 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the social justice movement that followed his death.

    Meanwhile, 87% of non-white founders said they faced more barriers to fundraising compared with 79% of white founders, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech Report 2023.

    Armoo says it was all about perspective and believed that being Black didn’t hold him back.

    “Everyone remembered the bearded Black guy in a room full of white people. Everyone remembers that and so for me, it increases how memorable you are,” he said about his experience of going to events to meet investors.

    He explained that you can either walk into a room and feel insecure because there aren’t that many people that look like you, or you can believe that that factor will help you standout.

    “I never saw myself as a Black entrepreneur. I always just saw myself as an entrepreneur,” he said.

    “I think maybe I’m too logical for my own good. I was like ‘investors want to make money. This business is going to make them money. I’m going to show them how it makes them money.’ That’s it. I didn’t really think they cared if it was coming from the mouth of a white guy or a Black guy.”

    Now, as a 29-year-old millionaire, Armoo is confident that this world view has “served him well.”

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  • Conflict Resolution: 4 Principles Behind Constructive and Peaceful Negotiation

    Conflict Resolution: 4 Principles Behind Constructive and Peaceful Negotiation

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    In a world filled with conflict and hostility, one of the most important skills we can learn in life is conflict resolution and our ability to negotiate peacefully and effectively.


    This content is for Monthly, Yearly, and Lifetime members only.
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    Steven Handel

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  • Inside the Very Tough Business of Trying to Disrupt Media

    Inside the Very Tough Business of Trying to Disrupt Media

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    On Monday, Grid News, a one-year-old online news start-up, went dark; its articles and teal branding disappeared, and its web address redirected to a navy blue page with bright yellow text that read: “Grid has been acquired by The Messenger.”

    It all happened suddenly. Last Wednesday, Grid staff got on a Zoom meeting for what some expected to be an announcement of new hires. Perhaps executives from IMI, the Abu Dhabi–based majority investor, had found a new chairman to replace Grid CEO and cofounder Mark Bauman, who departed back in November. Instead, they would learn, IMI had found a new owner: the yet-to-be launched news site by media entrepreneur Jimmy Finkelstein.

    Finkelstein joined the meeting, as did his politics editor Marty Kady, but they didn’t take questions. IMI would make a minority investment in The Messenger, which is set to launch in May, as part of the deal. The acquisition came as a surprise to Grid staffers, who said they had been told their start-up, which had roughly 50 employees, had a two- to three-year runway. One staffer I spoke to hadn’t yet heard of The Messenger, the latest media start-up pitching itself as a nonpartisan alternative to what’s currently out there in a glowing announcement in The New York Times. The Gray Lady gave Grid a similar treatment when it launched last January, when the cofounders said they wanted to give readers a “fuller” picture of the news than mainstream media offered. 

    By the time staffers signed off the Zoom, the acquisition had already been announced to the public; Semafor’s Max Tani tweeted the press release of the deal minutes into the 10 a.m. staff call. Thus commenced roughly 72 hours of chaos: Some in the Grid newsroom left the meeting unclear whether they’d have jobs at The Messenger, or when to stop publishing, or why the acquisition was happening. Grid cofounder and executive editor Laura McGann was on the Wednesday call, but she didn’t say anything, according to two staffers. She made no public statements after the announcement, either—no one from Grid’s management did—raising some eyebrows in the industry. “My priority is figuring this out for the staff,” McGann told me. “I am not up to speed on every detail of this merger, and certainly wasn’t when it was announced, and I’m not going to put myself out there as an authoritative voice when I don’t have all the answers. Certainly the business side was taking the lead.”

    Finkelstein and Kady came to Grid’s DC offices the following day to take questions; Grid staff said new leadership emphasized that their idea of a successful news model was one that’s scoopy and fast—neither of which, staffers noted, were consistent with Grid’s focus and intended mission. Some writers spent Friday downloading their articles, not knowing when they’d become inaccessible. By this week, some Grid staffers were still unclear on what they should be doing, with little to no communication from leadership at The Messenger. 

    Come Monday, the weekend’s episode of Succession—in which the Roy kids plan to launch a “high-visibility, execution-dependent disrupter news brand” and “bespoke information hub” called The Hundred, only to promptly abandon their start-up at the opportunity to buy a legacy media brand—felt all too poignant. (You’ve probably heard Kendall’s description by now: “Substack meets MasterClass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.”) Grid’s end feels like a critical point in today’s venture capital–funded media landscape. There’s no shortage of media start-ups claiming to shake up the industry, getting tens of millions in funding, and building full-fledged teams. Now, the snake is starting to eat itself; left unclear is what happens to the journalism, and the writers who produce it. 

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • SVB’s failure will have a ripple effect across technology ‘for years to come’

    SVB’s failure will have a ripple effect across technology ‘for years to come’

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    Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse could have ramifications for the technology landscape over the coming years, analysts and investors said.

    Nikolas Liepins | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

    Silicon Valley Bank was the backbone of many startups and venture capital funds around the world. The effects of its collapse, the biggest banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis, is likely to be felt across the technology landscape globally over the coming years.

    “With SVB in essence the Godfather of the Silicon Valley banking ecosystem for the past few decades in the tech world, we believe the negative ripple impact of this historical collapse will have a myriad of implications for the tech world going forward,” Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note on Tuesday.

    SVB’s collapse began last week when it said it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. Venture capital firms told their portfolio companies to withdraw money from the bank and other clients looked to get their cash before it became unobtainable. This effectively led to a bank run.

    The bank had to sell assets, mainly bonds, at a massive loss.

    U.S. regulators shut down SVB on Friday and took control of its deposits. Regulators then said Sunday that depositors at SVB would have access to their money, in a move aimed at stopping further contagion.

    But the episode has the potential to impact the technology world in several ways, from making it harder for startups to raise funds to forcing firms to change their business model, according to investors and analysts who spoke to CNBC.

    ‘Last thing we needed’

    SVB was critical to the growth of the technology industry, not just in the U.S. but in places like Europe and even China.

    The 40-year old institution had an intimate link to the technology world offering traditional banking services as well as funding companies that were deemed too risky for traditional lenders. SVB also provided other services like credit lines and lines to startups.

    When times were good, SVB thrived. But over the past year, the U.S. Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates, hurting the once high-flying technology sector. The funding environment has got harder for startups in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

    SVB’s collapse has come at an already difficult time for startup investors.

    “This whole Silicon Valley Bank thing is the last thing we needed and was completely unexpected,” Ben Harburg, managing partner of Beijing, China-based venture capital fund MSA Capital, told CNBC.

    Startups have had to tighten their belt while technology giants have axed tens of thousands of workers in a bid to cut costs.

    In such an environment, SVB played a key role in providing credit lines or other instruments that allowed startups to pay their employees or ride out hard times.

    “Silicon Valley Bank was very paternalistic to this sector, they not only provided payroll services, loans to founders against their illiquid credit, but lines of credit as well. And a lot of these companies were having trouble already raising equity and they were counting on those lines to extend their runway, to push out the cash burn beyond the recession we all expect.” Matt Higgins, CEO of RSE Ventures, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Tuesday.

    “That evaporated overnight and there’s not another lender that’s going to be stepping in to fill those shoes.”

    Paul Brody, global blockchain leader at EY, told CNBC Monday that a crypto firm called POAP, which is run by his friend, has half of the company’s money tied up in SVB and can’t get it out. The amount at SVB is “more than payroll can cover,” suggesting it might be hard to pay employees. A spokesperson for the company wasn’t immediately available for comment, and CNBC was unable to independently verify Brody’s comments.

    ‘Reboot’

    The SVB collapse will also likely put the focus on startups to pivot to profitability and be more disciplined with their spending.

    “Companies will have to reboot the way they think about their business,” Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola, told CNBC’s “Last Call” on Monday.

    Why haven't we heard from the VCs who were so close to this bank? asks Herb Greenberg

    Hussein Kanji, co-founder of London-based Hoxton Ventures, said that over the next three years there will be more restructurings at companies, though some are holding off.

    “I’m seeing a lot of ‘kick the can down the road’ behavior which isn’t that helpful. Do the hard things and don’t delay or procrastinate unless there is very good reason to. Things don’t often get easier in the future simply because you wish for them to,” Kanji told CNBC via email.

    Wedbush’s Ives said that there could also be more collapses, adding that early stage tech startups with weaker hands could be forced to sell or shut down.

    “The impact from this past week will have major ripple impacts across the tech landscape and Silicon Valley for years to come in our opinion,” Ives said in a note Sunday.

    —CNBC’s Rohan Goswami and Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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  • Unlikely any other bank can provide services equivalent to Silicon Valley Bank’s, says venture capital firm

    Unlikely any other bank can provide services equivalent to Silicon Valley Bank’s, says venture capital firm

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    Lu Zhang of Fusion Fund says Silicon Valley Bank had products that could uniquely meet the needs of venture capitalists and startup founders.

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  • How Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler Took on Hollywood

    How Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler Took on Hollywood

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    Netflix is far from a death spiral, but one of the biggest media stories of 2022 turned out to be the company’s stunning subscriber stumble. The streamer lost almost half its stock value and came to be seen as a potential acquisition target. I asked Rushfield if he felt vindicated. “I wanna jump up and down,” he said, “and yell ‘I told you so’ every day.”

    Rushfield, 54, grew up in Pacific Palisades and attended Santa Monica’s prestigious Crossroads School, where he overlapped with future hotshots like Matthew Greenfield, Jay Sures, Brett Morgen, Jason Blumenthal, Maya Rudolph, and Jack Black. Rushfield’s younger sister, the TV writer Alexandra Rushfield, was friends at Crossroads with Jenni Konner, who went on to showrun HBO’s Girls with Lena Dunham. At Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts, Rushfield frequented punk shows—X, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Henry Rollins (he saw Black Flag in high school)—and wrote a decidedly gothy senior thesis about Jacques-Louis David’s paintings from the French Revolution (Marat bleeding to death in a bathtub, etc.). After graduating, he followed the grunge-era playbook of loafing around without a plan. Then he landed an entry-level gig with the ’92 Clinton campaign, sharing a small cigarette-smoke-filled office with Noah Shachtman, now editor in chief of Rolling Stone. “Even when we were kids, he was a figure from a different era,” Shachtman recalls. “I felt like he had stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel.”

    After working as a field organizer for several other Democratic campaigns, Rushfield pursued a writing career. His first byline, a front-of-book item for Los Angeles magazine, highlighted a stand-up comedy show featuring rising stars like David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, Margaret Cho, and Janeane Garofalo. (He became friends with a lot of these folks.) “I think it ran two sentences and I got $25,” Rushfield recalls. In 1998, he and his friend Adam Leff conceived a Spy-inspired trend-forecasting charticle, “The Intelligence Report,” which caught the eye of Graydon Carter. He gave them a contract with this magazine, where the column appeared several times a year until 2010. (Rushfield has also written a few features for Vanity Fair.) By the mid-2000s, Rushfield was working as a web editor at the Los Angeles Times, where a print higher-up once told him the only reason people wanted the online versions of articles was so they could print them out to read in the bathtub. He embraced the web, where he ended up spending the majority of his professional life. In 2009, Rushfield left the Times to become West Coast editor of Gawker. He then wrote a book about American Idol and did tours of BuzzFeed, Yahoo, and, finally, HitFix, where he was editor in chief before the site was acquired in 2016. “The second half of my career was working on every website, essentially,” he told me.

    The Ankler almost didn’t happen. After HitFix, Rushfield was accepted to the USC Rossier School of Education to pursue a graduate degree in teaching. Around the same time, inspired by the success of The Information, Jessica Lessin’s subscription-powered tech-news publication, he started sending an email digest to a small group of friends, who started showing it to their friends, who then forwarded it to their friends. Before he knew it, he had an impressive distribution list. “It started getting passed around very quickly to the executive class,” Rushfield told me. He decided against USC Rossier and put his eggs in The Ankler instead. “It took me time to get up the guts to put down a paywall, but I made that leap.”

    Rushfield first met Min at the Golden Globes about a decade ago, “stuck at the kids’ table in the back,” Min joked. A former People and InStyle reporter and editor who became a mid-aughts media star as the editor in chief of Us Weekly, Min was in the midst of her celebrated reinvention of The Hollywood Reporter, which she ran until 2017. In 2021, as Min recovered from a brief stint at the train wreck that was Quibi, she and Rushfield started talking. “The Ankler had come to my attention because people were forwarding it to me, pretty senior people in the industry,” she recalls. “My thoughts were that entertainment was undergoing these crazy upheavals, both culturally and in the business model, and nobody was really owning that conversation.” They made it official with a New York Times piece shortly before Christmas and entered the Y Combinator program several months later. “In Silicon Valley terms,” Min said, “Richard would be ‘the product.’ ”

    The Ankler is no stranger to courtship. Penske Media, whose near-monopoly on major entertainment titles includes THR, Variety, Deadline, Billboard, and Rolling Stone, made a number of overtures up until several weeks before Rushfield and Min announced their business relationship. (Variety put an offer on the table in 2019 to add The Ankler to its newsletter lineup; later, Penske Media boss Jay Penske pursued an acquisition.) Additionally, Puck had conversations with Rushfield prior to its own launch. Min and Rushfield later explored partnerships with Axios and Lessin, an early Ankler booster who’d welcomed Rushfield into The Information’s inaugural accelerator program. Ankler Media’s decision to remain independent—albeit with investors—and to continue publishing on Substack, where they’re part of a growing crop of full-fledged publications, reflected a desire to “control our own destiny,” as Min put it.

    What does The Ankler’s destiny look like? Min envisions “a universe of bundled subscriptions” and a push into international markets. “The story of streaming is that it hit the ceiling in the United States before it was supposed to,” she said. “So everyone’s saying, ‘Let’s try to make money somewhere else,’ aggressively looking toward markets like Japan, India, Latin America, and that’s a great story.” When I asked for a pie-in-the-sky target of paid subscribers, she didn’t flinch: “a hundred thousand.” If they manage to get there—that’s a lot of paying subscribers!—it won’t have been easy. “I think they’re off to a tremendous start, but the road ahead is hard,” said Lessin, one of Ankler Media’s investors. “It’s a really difficult, long path.”

    In early 2018, Lessin hosted Rushfield and the other members of The Information’s first accelerator class at her home in San Francisco. Over dinner, she asked her guests to describe their five-year aspirations. When it was Rushfield’s turn, he said, “What drew me to newsletters was the chance to really write something meaningful and to be able to do your best work. If, five years from now, I could be doing that on a stable basis, I’ll be thrilled.”

    Here we are, five years later. I called Rushfield late one night while wrapping up this piece and read back his quote from Lessin’s soiree. “I couldn’t believe I was getting away with speaking so honestly and freely about this industry back then,” he said. “I still can’t believe I’m getting away with it.”

    HAIR, CHECHEL JOSON (MIN); MAKEUP, TAYLOR BABAIAN; GROOMING, STACY SKINNER; TAILOR, HASMIK KOURINIAN. SET DESIGN, BETTE ADAMS. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PRODUCTION SQUAD. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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  • Live Q&A: The Producers of ‘Start Up’ Explain How to Get Your Business on TV

    Live Q&A: The Producers of ‘Start Up’ Explain How to Get Your Business on TV

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    EntrepreneurTV docuseries Start Up tells the inspiring stories of entrepreneurs who dared to go their own way, overcame obstacles, and launched their dream businesses.

    In this live Q&A, the Emmy-nominated host and writer of the show, Gary Bredow, and award-winning producer Jenny Feterovich will discuss what they look for when searching for people and businesses to feature on the series, as well as give tips to anyone hoping to make their own documentary series or feature. Whether you are hoping to be in front of the camera or behind it, this is not to be missed!

    Where can I watch?

    Watch and stream: YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter

    You can watch on your phone, tablet or computer.

    What time does it start?

    Time: Friday, 2/10 at 1:30p ET

    Why should I watch?

    The Emmy-nominated creators will be sharing incredible insights for anyone who dreams of having their business featured on TV, or anyone who dreams about making powerful films and videos. None of this is easy, and these battle-tested creators will share the ups and downs they’ve personally experienced to help you on your journey.

    Related: Watch Co-Founder of Netflix Marc Randolph’s Latest Success Webinar

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    Entrepreneur Staff

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  • This millennial took a gamble during the pandemic. Now her startup has raised over $225 million

    This millennial took a gamble during the pandemic. Now her startup has raised over $225 million

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    When the Covid pandemic was raging in 2020, much of the world was in lockdown and more turned to online shopping.

    But Chrisanti Indiana did the unexpected: she expanded her e-commerce business — offline.

    Her beauty and personal care e-commerce startup, Sociolla, had just two brick-and-mortar stores in Indonesia in 2019. By the end of 2021, that number grew “10 times” more, she said.

    “A lot of people actually told us that it’s a very bold move to actually open an offline presence, while everybody was closing their offline stores [during the pandemic],” she added. 

    But that was a “well-calculated” move for Social Bella, which operates Sociolla. 

    We know that this is the time for us to actually prepare … to make sure that after the pandemic, we can serve more and more consumers.

    Chrisanti Indiana

    Co-founder and CMO, Sociolla

    “We know that this is the time for us to actually prepare … to make sure that after the pandemic, we can serve more and more consumers,” she added. 

    Looking far ahead turned out to be the right move for the 31-year-old. Her online and offline approach transformed her e-commerce startup into a multimillion-dollar beauty conglomerate.  

    Since 2018, it has raised around $225 million, and drawn an impressive list of investors that include East Ventures, Jungle Ventures, Temasek and Pavilion Capital.  

    Indiana, the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Social Bella, tells CNBC Make It how she took her Jakarta-based startup to the next level.

    Tackling counterfeits  

    The idea for Sociolla came about in 2015, when Indiana returned home to Jakarta, after studying in Australia.  

    The makeup junkie realized that in Australia, she had easy access to a wide range of beauty products from international brands. That was a stark contrast to Indonesia.

    “There was lot of options for me, but then I came back and there’s basically none,” said Indiana. 

    “There wasn’t a platform that had it all — I had to find specific sellers on social media, ask friends who can help purchase the product for you [when they are] overseas.”

    What made matters worse for her was the online proliferation of counterfeit makeup products that were sometimes selling at “a fraction” of the original’s price. 

    I still remember vividly in my mind that there’s a lot of like sellers online, especially on social media, that claim their products are 99% authentic. What does that mean, 99% authentic?

    Chrisanti Indiana

    Co-founder and CMO, Sociolla

    “I still remember vividly in my mind that there’s a lot of like sellers online, especially on social media, that claim their products are 99% authentic. What does that mean, 99% authentic?” 

    Indeed, locally made counterfeits in Indonesia are rife, thanks to cheap labor costs and materials. According to a local report, Indonesian authorities seized illegal cosmetic products worth $9 million in 2018 — twice the previous year’s amount. 

    Seeing friends buying these products left Indiana perplexed. 

    “It’s skincare, it’s makeup. It’s something that you put on your skin. It’s just bizarre for me,” she said. 

    Sociolla has expanded into brick-and-mortar shops. It now has 47 stores in Indonesia and 16 in Vietnam.

    Social Bella

    Determined to build a space where consumers can get products that are safe and authentic, Indiana teamed up with her brother and friend to launch Social Bella, with a starting capital of $13,000.

    “Since we started, we ensure that we only work with authorized distributors or brand owners,” Indiana said. 

    Building an ‘ecosystem’

    Sociolla may have started off as an e-commerce platform, but the trio had bigger dreams. 

    Social Bella has since gone beyond offline shops — it’s also a distributor for beauty and personal care manufacturers worldwide.  

    “We become an associate partner for a lot of global brands in Indonesia. We help them not only to distribute their products to Indonesia, but we also help them understand the market,” said Indiana.

    On top of that, the business also operates Soco, which Social Bella says is Indonesia’s largest online review service for beauty products. Soco has amassed more than 2.5 million reviews for around 36,000 products, the company added. 

    Social Bella was founded in 2015 by Chrisanti Indiana, her brother and president Christopher Madiam (left) and CEO John Rasjid (right).

    Social Bella

    The “beauty journey” for customers goes beyond putting something in their shopping carts and checking out, said Indiana. 

    “We realized that there’s a lot of touch points that are really important … finding the right products for yourself is not just about going to the store and picking it up. You will make sure that you read the reviews, talk to your friends, or Google first,” she added. 

    “Soco makes sure that they can access tons of product reviews before they purchase products.”

    On top of that, Social Bella also runs Beauty Journal — a lifestyle website, and Lilla, an online retailer for mothers and babies.

    That’s all part of building the business “ecosystem,” as Indiana calls it.

    We want to make sure that we are scaling up and reaching more and more consumers. If Social Bella becomes a unicorn, it’s a bonus.

    “We want to … to serve more and more women, not only in beauty and personal care, but also in other industries.”

    The startup appears to be on the right track — it now boasts more than 30 million users across all its business units, said Social Bella, selling an inventory of 12,000 products from 400 brands worldwide.

    Indonesia’s next unicorn? 

    Over the last two years, Social Bella expanded aggressively, growing from just three Sociolla stores in Indonesia in 2020, to 47 stores there and 16 stores in Vietnam today.

    While much of the expansion took place during the pandemic, Indiana said that had always been part of the plan for the e-commerce platform, lockdowns or not.

    “It’s actually to create a seamless omnichannel experience … because we believe that we are serving the same customer whether she shops offline or online,” the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia honoree said.

    “They can choose to do click-and-collect or … she can also deliver the purchases to her home. It’s making sure that she can shop the way she likes.” 

    Social Bella aims to serve more female customers.

    Social Bella

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  • 4-day work week firms are seeing a surge in job applications

    4-day work week firms are seeing a surge in job applications

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    Job applications have soared at companies taking part in the trial for a four-day work week.

    Westend61 via Getty Images

    Trying to attract and retain workers? Forget pizza parties and nap pods. Companies in the U.K. are looking at a more promising solution: the four-day work week.

    “Visits to our recruitment page have gone up by 60% and enquiries to the company have gone up by 534%,” Helen Brittain, human resources director at environmental consultancy Tyler Grange, told CNBC’s Make It.

    The company is among those taking part in the U.K.’s trial for a four-day work week. Since implementing a shorter working week, the firm has noticed a huge difference when it comes to recruitment and retainment of employees.

    “The interest that people are showing in the company is amazing,” Brittain said.

    Tyler Grange isn’t the only company that has noticed a difference. Gaming-focused communications consultancy The Story Mob is another one, according to its founder and co-CEO Anna Rozwandowicz.

    “We have definitely seen an increase in interest from job seekers,” she said, adding that shortly after shifting to the four-day work week, the team was able to fill a position that had been vacant for a long time.

    Britain’s four-day work week trial is the largest of its kind so far, and has had widely positive reactions from employees and companies taking part. The idea behind it is simple: Workers aim for the same levels of productivity and output in 20% less time, for 100% of their pay.

    The 4 Day Week Global campaign has also started a trial in Australia and New Zealand and is planning to expand in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa throughout 2022 and 2023.

    Recruiting in an employee’s market

    For education technology firm Bedrock Learning, making recruitment and retention easier was a key driver for shifting to a four-day work week.

    “Being brutally honest, it is a retention and recruitment piece,” its CEO and founder Aaron Leary told CNBC’s Make It. “It has been very much an employee’s market through the pandemic and there’s been a lot of movement, a lot of changing and Bedrock was also sort of susceptible to that,” he added.

    Our retention of staff went up from 80% to 98%.

    Mark Haslam

    Managing Director, Loud Mouth Media

    Like many other companies, Bedrock Learning struggled with the Great Resignation and the shift to flexible working, which made maintaining a company culture more difficult while making it easier to switch jobs. In early 2022, job vacancies also hit an all-time high in the U.K., according to the country’s Office for National Statistics, increasing competition for workers and therefore making recruitment harder.

    Marketing agency Loud Mouth Media, also part of the four-day work week trial, was also affected. “That’s why we got involved,” said Managing Director Mark Haslam.

    “During Covid our guys were just getting tapped up, left, right and centre,” he says, adding that competition for talent also intensified as companies started adding new perks for employees.

    The shift to the four-day work week has been game changing for both companies.

    “I would say things have completely sort of stabilised compared to what they were in terms of like retention,” Bedrock Learning’s Leary said, adding that only one employee has resigned since June, when the trial began.  

    According to companies trialing a four-day work week that CNBC Make It spoke to, employee recruitment has improved. However, the surge in applications doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to find the right candidate, said one managing director.

    Westend61 via Getty Images

    Over at Loud Mouth Media, Haslam also noticed major changes in both recruitment and retention.

    “I would say our applications have doubled. We get a lot more ad hoc applications,” he said. “Our retention of staff went up from 80% to 98%.”

    More applications = better candidates?

    However, the surge in applications doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to find the right candidate, Haslam said.

    “If somebody comes to me and says I want to work for you because you do a four-day week, we don’t entertain them remotely. Because it’s not a genuine driver for somebody and that just means somebody wants to work less, you know, it makes you kind of question their ethics,” he says.

    Haslam said he wants to hire candidates who are aligned with the company’s values and goals, and that goes beyond the four-day week.

    Tyler Grange has had similar experiences.

    “We get an awful lot of people apply because we’re a four-day week trial company and not because they’ve got the right skill that we would actually be looking for in our business,” said Human Resources Director Brittain.

    The firm’s managing director Simon Ursell agrees. “There aren’t that many applicants that are applying specifically for the roles we want,” he said. Even with the four-day work week, it remains difficult to fill some roles and find suitable candidates as the job market remains tough, he added.

    “So, it’s not the panacea.”

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  • International Startup Competition Sparks Innovation in Language Technology

    International Startup Competition Sparks Innovation in Language Technology

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    Online challenge offers platform for innovative startups that seek to revolutionize language learning

    Press Release
    –

    Mar 2, 2022


    HONOLULU, March 2, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Four first-time entrepreneurs are vying to create the best new product to fill a need in world language education. The competition is hosted by The Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center (Tech Center) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

    The 2022 virtual event on March 5, 3-4:15 p.m. EST, will be emceed by Nicole Naditz, a nationally recognized language educator and language learning technologist.

    The four startup companies are based in the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, and the United States. During the competition, the finalists will pitch their innovation. A panel of experienced professionals from a wide variety of fields will provide feedback, and select the winner. Audience members will cast their votes for a People’s Choice award.

    All finalists will receive exposure and access to thousands of language educators, successful companies and The Language Flagship international network.

    “The upcoming competition reflects a fascinating juxtaposition of diverse approaches from media, language pedagogy, and data-centered viewpoints,” said Richard Medina, project lead and Faculty Specialist at the Tech Center.

    Finalists:

    • Charlala (Illinois)—Charlala has two core tools: a simulated conversation tool and a digital whiteboard tool. Educators use the platform to assess speaking proficiency and practice conversation activities. The platform also converts any device into a digital canvas to engage students in authentic conversations through activities, including card talks, weekend chats, and storytelling.
    • JinbuPal (South Carolina)—JinbuPal is a web-based mobile app designed to help learners jumpstart their Mandarin skills. JinbuPal’s card-based system features character and word cards, similar to digital flashcards. JinbuPal confronts users with all the characters and words they will need to reach 90% recognition when engaging with real-world content. 
    • Lirica (United Kingdom)—Lirica is a mobile application that teaches all the building blocks of the language through music. The app intelligently matches up core language components with the lyrics of different pieces of popular music, fitting them to difficulty levels, so that beginners and more experienced learners can succeed. 
    • Worddio (Bulgaria)—Worddio is a vocabulary and pronunciation app which uses audio flashcards and is targeted primarily at non-native English speakers. With more than 270,000 words in 34 languages, Worddio is the ideal companion for those who wish to grow and enrich their language learning. 

    Tech Center Director Julio C. Rodriguez said that the products created by the 2022 LaunchPad finalists are examples of creativity and innovation in the design of technologies that support the learning and teaching of languages. 

    “The LaunchPad offers our private sector colleagues a unique opportunity to garner valuable feedback from experts in the field and the Tech Center community at large. We hope that LaunchPad finalists will use this feedback, which is offered at an early stage of their product’s development, to improve the fit between their products and the needs of world language professionals,” Rodriguez said.

    Register for free on the Tech Center website.

    Source: The Language Flagship Technology Innovation Center

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