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While flying to Asia and lamenting how much meat is being consumed around the world, I had an idea… One way to promote vegetarianism is to make it a personal challenge. People love challenging themselves. The reward comes in the form of that feeling of accomplishment we all crave.
Personal Motivation:
Every startup needs a solid legal foundation. The Startup Legal Garage at UC Hastings Law School is now accepting applications from early-stage companies to be part of its Spring 2020 cohort.
Their program matches select law students with attorneys from top-flight Bay Area law firms to provide free legal services to qualified startups, including incorporation, equity splits, terms of service, vendor, customer, and employment contracts, basic funding work, and more.
Startups in the program pay no legal fees or equity. The Startup Legal Garage estimates that most of their startups save between $15,000-$30,000 in legal fees using the program. Their attorney partners and mentors oversee the student teams to make sure the work is done right, and the accepted startups can focus on building their product instead of on legal bills.
“The Bleeding Edge” shows how medical device companies are treating human beings as guinea pigs when testing out their new devices. Not all innovation is good, especially when it’s being done at the cost of patient safety. This film has changed how I view the healthcare system and medical device startups. Something needs to be done about the lax regulation and cronyism before more lives are destroyed.
A group from South Korea came to Founders Space today. We talked about how AI is going to impact education. It’s my belief that teachers and even universities won’t be necessary in the future.
Right now, we use universities to filter people. If you went to MIT or Harvard, everyone assumes you’re brilliant and companies line up to hire you. But all it really means is that you are great at taking tests.
Yes, you’re probably smart, but not necessarily brilliant. Intelligence is much more complex than being good at exams. AI will be able to much more accurately measure someone’s intelligence, creativity, emotional IQ, street smarts, and other capabilities.
Steven Hoffman, CEO of Founders Space and a leading incubator in Silicon Valley, predicted some trends in AI.
“Everything is connected and personalized with autonomous AI and integrated devices,” he said.
Captain Hoff explains how to get your big idea off the ground and make it fly…
Startups that succeed are those that succeed in creating value. And the value that we seek is the betterment of our human processes. We join accelerators to speed up the adventure, but entrepreneurs discover obstacles, and it’s the overcoming of those blocks that help us uncover the value of our endeavors. Here’s Chooch’s own example. (Blog post written & contributed by Chooch.ai)
When Chooch AI joined Founders Space, we thought we were doing Visual Search, providing a way to search for products in videos and images. We thought we were creating an advertising platform with some simple machine learning that would result in a way to serve ads, among other things, because we could identify things and then add tags to images. We noticed, though, that training an AI to learn had bottlenecks, many bottlenecks. In fact, solving one bottleneck after another was the key to unlocking our Computer Vision + AI solution we call Visual AI As A Service or simply, Visual AI. Chooch AI can now handle any visual task.
How can you demo the #imagerecognition #technology from Chooch? Easy. Install our IC2 app on your #iPhone and direct it to an object – like a melon. We combine #computervision with #MachineLearning to offer #objectrecognition, #facialauthentication and more via the Chooch #API. pic.twitter.com/CidVOdEFYv
Here are three simple rules for investing in public companies:
1) Make sure the companies have a sustainable competitive advantage. If they don’t, they can’t win.
2) Never confuse a growth company with a profitable one. Short-term profits don’t matter as much as long-term growth.
There was a man who fished two hours a day, caught enough fish to feed his family and make a small profit, then enjoyed his free time playing his guitar, dancing with his wife, and chatting with his friends until late into the night.
Then a VC came along and told the man to spend more time at sea, catch as many fish as possible, invest the profits in more boats, then build a cannery, launch a global distribution network, dominate the seafood markets, and change the world!
“By the time you are ready to retire,” said the VC, “You will have made a fortune!”
I liked Airbnb from the very beginning, and I can tell you exactly why.
First of all, Airbnb is a marketplace that connects guests with landlords. This is a very difficult type of marketplace to make successful, but once you achieve a critical mass of users, it’s incredibly hard to replicate. This is because people looking for places to stay will always gravitate towards the largest selection of spaces, and landlords with space to rent will always post their properties where there are the largest number of potential buyers. The first company to achieve this combination creates an enormous barrier to entry for their competitors. This allows them to monetize the site deeply without fear of losing their customers. Airbnb was a first-mover in opening up a new source of real estate that was untapped by competitors. This gave them a big first-mover advantage.
Airbnb is at a much later stage now, but they enjoy the benefits of the largest marketplace of its type in the world. No one can compete head-on with them. The sheer number of renters and landlords on their platform makes them more attractive than anyone else. Even if competitors offer more features at a lower price, it doesn’t matter. The marketplace itself is the most valuable feature, and Airbnb owns it.
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