investing

01 Jul

How to Get Rich From Peeping Inside People’s Fridges

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsbook excerpt, economics, food and drink, investing, longreads, refrigeration

“People make fun of me about the fridges,” said Tassos Stassopoulos. “I am fridge-obsessed.” As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights.By the time of his refrigeration revelation in 2009, Stassopoulos had already gained a reputation for his maverick process: Where other investors typically relied on market data and forecasts from big consumer-products companies to deduce what people in, say, India might start purchasing in the future, Stassopoulos spent days traveling around the…

05 Jun

Marc Andreessen Called Online Safety Teams an Enemy. He Still Wants Walled Gardens for His Kid

stp2y0 CommentsAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, investing, silicon valley, social media, startups, twitter, vcs

In his polarizing “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were “tech ethics” and “trust and safety,” a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to “a mass demoralization campaign” against new technologies such as artificial intelligence.Andreessen’s declaration drew both public and quiet criticism from people working in those fields—including at Meta, where Andreessen is a board member. Critics saw his screed as misrepresenting their work to keep internet services safer.On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes…