Fred Wilson: Startups Are Staying Private Too Long And That's Bad For Society

Surprise: Despite the ByteDance app’s bad day, its competitors aren’t rallying like you might expect. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed the TikTok ban into law, finally giving owner ByteDance its Choose Your Own American Adventure: It must either sell the immensely popular video-sharing platform or see it get banned in the U.

The social media company said it had a ‘good start to the year,’ but investors seem to think it wasn’t good enough. Meta announced its first-quarter earnings after the closing bell on Wednesday. The company’s stock plunged 12% in after-hours trading, due to the company’s increased expenses and mediocre revenue projections.

Techno-optimism pervades governments and nongovernmental organizations, and influences the thinking of billionaires. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen penned a 5,000-word manifesto in 2023 that gave a full-throated call for unrestricted technological progress to boost markets, broaden energy production, improve education and strengthen liberal democracy.

AI-generated images draw in users—and Facebook’s recommendation algorithm may be organically promoting these posts. If you’ve spent time on Facebook over the past six months, you may have noticed photorealistic images that are too good to be true: children holding paintings that look like the work of professional artists, or majestic log cabin interiors that are the stuff of Airbnb dreams.

Remember, anything can happen with summer movies. “Barbenheimer” is a hard act to follow. But as Hollywood enters another summer movie season, armed with fewer superheroes and a landscape vastly altered by the strikes, it’s worth remembering the classic William Goldman quote about what works: “Nobody knows anything.”

A year into the job, the rideshare CEO shares how he turned the company cash-flow positive and why he may pull out from Minneapolis. When Lyft CEO David Risher took the helm of the rideshare company from cofounders Logan Green and John Zimmer a year ago, his mandate was clear: create a sustainable business by getting the perennial second-place rideshare company to stop bleeding money.