Ladies and gentlemen, I present the real winner of the @ETHSanFrancisco hackathon! https://t.co/kfA6NVV71J

— Ameen Soleimani (@ameensol) October 11, 2018

Coord will get you there one way or another with its new APIs

While we aren’t LPs in Eniac Ventures, we are big fans of the team. So, it was my pleasure to be interviewed by Hadley Harris as part of their Seed to Scale Podcast.

The interview ended up being two episodes and, while listening to it in the car, I felt like it was one of the better recent interviews that I’ve done. Hadley and I talked for about an hour and then he edited the discussion down into two ten minute podcasts, so he pulled out the good stuff and left all the garbage on the cutting room floor.

Episode 1 includes advice I’d give to a much younger me and discusses why I think it is important to build long-term fund strategies with conviction and consistency.

Episode 2 covers what makes an excellent board member, the biggest reasons startups fail, and the three machines that must work together in order for a company to scale.

Enjoy!

Also published on Medium.

Brian Amerige, the Facebook engineer who sparked a firestorm at Facebook with his criticism of what he called a "political monoculture" that is "intolerant" of conservatism, is leaving the company.

In a lengthy, 1,026-word internal memo to fellow Facebook employees, Amerige, the engineering manager of product accessibility, explained his decision to leave, decrying the company's political "monoculture" and PR strategy of "appeasement," while professing his love for Facebook's "mission."

In a year during which the internet industry has been rocked by problems ranging from privacy scandals to the spread of misinformation, and as the politically fractured state of society has spread into even the most profitable tech companies, Amerige's farewell letter encapsulates the frustrations and challenges that Facebook is contending with.

While it criticises Facebook's "culture" and leadership, it also discusses less politicised issues Facebook is facing, from the decline in sharing in Facebook's main app to team structure.

"My departure isn't because I think these issues are intractable. These problems can be solved — just not by me, nor anymore, at least," Amerige wrote. "I care too deeply about our role in supporting free expression and intellectual diversity to even whole-heartedly attempt the product stuff anymore, and that's how I know it's time to go."

I'm leaving Facebook

I'm sad to say that Friday, October 12th will be my last day at Facebook.

This was a difficult decision to make because I love so much about this company, our mission, and our leaders. But I've been thinking about this for almost a year and though a certain leak delayed me a bit, I know it's time for me to move on.

There's a lot to say about why, and this post certainly won't cover it all. Unlike many others who've been here for a while, I"m not leaving because "it's time for something new." I believe that it takes a long time to o good work, and novelty isn't my kind of thing: change is good when it's change for the better. I've changed teams once in my 6.5 years at Facebook.

Why

I'm leaving because I'm burnt out on Facebook, our strategy and our culture.

Strategically, we've taken a stance on how to balance offensive and hateful speech with free expression. We've accepted the inevitability of government regulation. And we've refused to defend ourselves in the press. Our policy strategy is pragmatism — not clear, implementable long-term principles — and our PR strategy is appeasement — not morally earned pride and self defense.

Culturally, it's difficult to have meaningful conversations about any of this because we're a political monoculture, and these are political issues. And while we've made some progress in FB'ers for Political Diversity (which is approaching 750 members now), and while I'm pleased to say that senior company leadership does take this seriously (as you will hopefully soon see), we have a very long way to go.

To that end, while I remain as in love as ever with our mission and my colleague's nearly-always good intentions, I disagree too strongly with we're we're heading on these issues to watch what happens next. These issues hang over my head each morning, and I don't want to spend all of my time fighting about them.

Our product is also at a crossroads (and has been for years) as sharing in the Facebook app continues to dwindle. The pivot to Stories will hopefully help, but I'm disappointed by how reactive our future appears to be. Ultimately, I've spent the bulk of my time at Facebook trying to build a stronger product culture. From tech leading Paper, to starting and leading the team that built our UI foundation (FIG, now FDS), I wanted Facebook to be a place where people with great product sense, focus, intuition and a little obsessiveness about quality were attracted, belonged, and were rewarded. I think we made progress, but the headwinds have been and continue to be strong, and it shows in our future-looking product strategy and the relative rarity of strong product thinkers at Facebook.

My departure isn't because I think these issues are intractable. These problems can be solved — just not by me, nor anymore, at least. I care too deeply about our role in supporting free expression and intellectual diversity to even whole-heartedly attempt the product stuff anymore, and that's how I know it's time to go.

Be Proud

Still, this company gets so much right, and you all have a lot to be proud of. The density of talent at Facebook has always been one of my favorite parts of working here, and there are simply too many incredibly people I've had the pleasure of getting to know and building something with for me to list. My teams have always felt like family to me, and I"m going to miss them terribly.

Beyond the people, I would be remiss if I didn't emphasize two aspects of our culture that are especially good: our scrappiness, and how we think about individual contributor roles.

Be Scrappy. I've always understood "move fast" to really mean "be scrappy," and what a pleasure it's been to watch how +28,000 employees haven't substantially changed that. I don't think "move fast" applies to product direction, design standards, or engineering quality. It's about process. As the company continues to grow, you will increasingly find that most people in any given room are new and don't necessarily know that it's ok to say "sorry, I don't understand any of what you just said" or that they're supposed to ask "Do we really need to wait for the monthly review?" These kinds of questions are our secret weapon against becoming a bureaucracy where innovative people don't want to work. So keep asking "why?" about everything related to how we work.

Roles and Responsibility. The way we think about team roles is better than anywhere else I've seen. We let ICs truly lead, we incentivize transitions to and from management for the right reasons, and we let teams figure out who does what with deference to strengths instead of functional titles. We could still do better (particularly around how senior ICs integrate with director+ level decisions), but this way of thinking is the industry leading and has made Facebook a very special place for me, as something of a hybrid between engineering, product and design.

What's Next

My professional purpose has always been to "amplify human capability and raise standards," and while I'm proud to say I've done a little of both at Facebook, I"m excited to focus more intensely on this going forward. I'm starting a company with a good friend of mine, Alex Epstein, at the intersection of applied philosophy (epistemology, specifically) and technology.

I don't know if leaving Facebook affords me one parting word of advice, but I have one for you anyway: I want to encourage you all to believe in yourselves more. In the value your products create for the world. In your own product sense and instinct when they contradict the data (which we're often too confident in). In your ability to create something people love. And in your perspective when no one else agrees…especially when you're afraid to share it. The truth does not emerge from averages, but your ability to reason lets you glimpse it — stand by it, defend it, and be proud of it. Everything else will take care of itself.

Do you work at Facebook? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Everyone's talking about artificial intelligence - but big US investment funds aren't yet keen to try it out, according to a new study.

About 71% of US-based firms are not currently testing or considering how AI and advanced analytics can be applied to their investments, said a Fidelity survey of over 900 institutional investors published on Thursday. However, a similar percentage of US investors agreed that AI and technological advances will augment humans' traditional investment roles by 2025.

The results show that even though artificial intelligence is touted for its potential to transform the workplace, many big US firms are slow to embrace the technology in their day-to-day.

Complacency with the status-quo could be one reason, said Jeff Mitchell, chief investment officer of Fidelity's institutional asset management arm.

"What people are saying is in the Americas, they still haven't found a way to understand how it'll come into the process, but they're confident it will be part of the enhancement of what we deliver going forward," he said.

Mitchell noted a gap between investors' internal use of AI and their high expectations for AI's promises. Globally, 69% of funds expect to use AI for asset allocation in the future, while nearly the same number plan to use it for performance and risk evaluations, the Fidelity research said.

Mitchell added that he was "shocked" by how US investors lag their international counterparts. While more than three-quarters of domestic investors aren't considering AI use, only one-third of institutions globally are not.

Fidelity counts itself among the asset managers embracing AI. The firm is using the technology to simply its investment processes and communications, he said.

Others include AB, which built an artificial-intelligence-powered virtual assistant for fixed-income trading and other responsibilities at the $500 billion money manager. The bot, which launched in early 2018, runs on Symphony. The financial workflow application also hosts a program called APOLLO.ai, which uses AI to sift through data sources to show custom content and analytics.

For the past seven years, 24-year-old Laura Deming has been in the Bay Area on the hunt for scientists and entrepreneurs working to keep us living healthier and longer.

Deming's Longevity Fund manages $37 million, and to date the investments she's made have since gone on to raise a combined $500 million. One of her investments, Unity Biotechnology, went public in 2018 and entered human trials in June.

On Wednesday, her first class of companies out of the Age1 accelerator is graduating. The six companies include one focused on hibernation and how humans could tap into animals' "superpowers" and a spin-out from a regenerative medicine lab that's focused on reversing arthritis. Others, like Spring Discovery are aiming to speed up the process of discovering new aging therapies.

The field of aging research is wide, and there's any number of ways to tackle both the causes and effects of getting old.

So when looking for investments, Deming told Business Insider that there's one key criterion she's interested in: Who's working on aging research that's possible to do today, thanks to a new technology or scientific breakthrough that wouldn't have been possible a year ago?

For example, gene therapy, one-time treatments that are designed to modify diseases, still seemed like a far-off future about a decade ago. Now, there's an FDA-approved gene therapy available to treat a hereditary form of blindness.

"That opens a whole new world of different ways to go after aging-related diseases," Deming said.

That's played out in one of the Age1 accelerator companies, Fauna Bio. Fauna is looking at animals that hibernate — bears, even hamsters — looking at their genomes to determine what aspects of the animals' biology allows them to lower their body temperatures and sleep for months at a time and still be able to hit the ground running the day they wake up. If the same could be mimicked in humans — possibly from medication that already exists — that could be useful in emergency situations, like a heart attack, to preserve the body until the patient gets to the hospital.

Much further down the line, harnessing hibernation could be a way to help us in space travel, preserving astronauts while they travel to space on their way to, say, Mars.

The ability to sequence the genomes of animals quicker and at a lower cost has only been possible in the past few years as the price of sequencing has dropped dramatically.

It could be key in helping people heal after heart attacks, and maybe even travel through space so they come out the other end healthy.

"We should expect to find the most exciting things and the most novel things, in that subsection," Deming said.

Brian Amerige, the Facebook engineer who sparked a firestorm at Facebook with his criticism of what he called a "political monoculture" that is "intolerant" of conservatism, is leaving the company.

In an internal message to fellow employees on Wednesday, Amerige wrote: "These problems can be solved — just not by me, not any more, at least. I care too deeply about our role in supporting free expression and intellectual diversity to even whole-heartedly attempt the product stuff anymore, and that's how I know it's time to go."

In the message, seen by Business Insider, he said he is starting a company with his friend "at the intersection of applied philosophy epistemology, specifically) and technology."

Silicon Valley, the heart of the American tech industry, is largely liberal, and has been fraught with allegations of bias in Trump's America.

In July 2017, Google found itself at the center of a political firestorm after engineer James Damore wrote an internal post decrying what he characterised as "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," in which he attacked the company's diversity efforts. (Amerige has been described as "Facebook's aspiring James Damore.") Some conservatives also allege that social media firms are deliberately silencing and censoring nonliberal voices on their platforms.

'A political monoculture that's intolerant of different views'

In August 2018, Amerige, who identifies politically as objectivist, wrote an internal memo decrying what he described as the Silicon Valley's company's "intolerant" culture. "We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views ... we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology," we wrote.

His writing subsequently sparked an internal group, "FB'ers for Political Diversity," where hundreds of conservative employees protested the company's practices. Posters promoting the group and attacking the "outrage mob" appeared around campus, and debates among employees have broken out across Facebook Workplace over the company's approach to politics.

There have also previously been some incidents in which Facebook employees have refused to work with or talk to certain colleagues because of their political beliefs, an employee previously told Business Insider.

Amerige's last day will be on Friday, he wrote in his message. "I've been thinking about this for almost a year, and though a certain leak delayed me a bit, I know it's time for me to move on," he wrote. "I'm not leaving because 'it's time for something new.'"

'Our PR strategy is appeasement — not morally earned pride and self-defence'

He wrote: "I'm leaving because I'm burnt out on Facebook, our strategy, our culture, and our product.

"Strategically, we've taken a stance on how to balance offensive and hateful speech with free expression. We've accepted the inevitability of government regulation. And we've refused to defend ourselves in the press. Our policy strategy is pragmatism — not clear, implementable long-term principles — and our PR strategy is appeasement — not morally earned pride and self-defense."

He added: "While I remain as in love as ever with our mission and my colleague's nearly-always good intentions, I disagree too strongly with where we're heading on these issues to watch what happens next. These issues hang over my head each morning, and I don't want to spend all of my time fighting about them."

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Do you work at Facebook? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Y ou can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Elon Musk has denied a report that James Murdoch is the top choice to be the next chairman of Tesla.

On Wednesday, The Financial Times reported that the 21st Century Fox CEO and son of Rupert Murdoch would take the role being vacated by the electric vehicle entrepreneur following a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

But Musk shot back on Twitter, tweeting "this is incorrect" in response to their headline. It's unclear whether he meant it was incorrect that Murdoch was the "lead candidate" as The FT reported, or that it was incorrect that Murdoch was in consideration at all. The CEO did not immediately respond to a request for clarification via Twitter.

Musk agreed to step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of a settlement with the SEC, which brought charges against Musk in late August for his now-infamous "funding secured" tweet, though he will remain CEO. Musk was also fined $20 million and Tesla must appoint two more independent board members as part of the settlement. He was given 45 days to step down as chairman.

There had already been speculation that Murdoch, who has served on Tesla's board as a nonexecutive director since last year, was the leading contender for the chairman position. But Murdoch has also faced blowback from shareholders in the past, with critics citing his lack of relevant experience. And as an incumbent director on Tesla's much-maligned board, Murdoch would likely face criticism for his role on a board viewed by many being far too cozy with Musk.

Earlier this year, the proxy advisor Glass Lewis and the pension fund CtW Investment Group pushed for shareholders not to reelect Murdoch to the board. CtW also asked for shareholders to vote against reelecting Antonio Gracias, a private-equity investor, and Kimbal Musk, Musk's cousin.

Others who have been floated as possible chairman candidates include Al Gore, Warren Buffett, and Alan Mulally.

The stock market took a big bite out of the FAANGs on Wednesday.

Collectively, the Big Five tech firms — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google — lost $172 billion in value over the span of a few hours on Wednesday, amid a broad slump in the market. That's about the same amount as Toyota's entire market capitalization — and it's equivalent to the dollar value of the entire gross domestic product of Algeria. In terms of value lost, Amazon was the big loser of the group. Its shares fell 6% on Wednesday, vaporizing $56 billion of its market capitalization. Apple was next; it lost nearly $51 billion on a 4.6% fall — an amount $6 billion greater than the entire value of General Motors.

But Netflix was the biggest loser on a percentage basis. It's shares declined by 8%, shedding about $13 billion in the process.

Facebook, which has had its share of troubles recently, fell 4% and lost $15.7 billion in market value. And Google's 4.6% slide left its market cap $36.7 billion lighter.

The decline came amid a big selloff in the market. The S&P 500 fell 3.3%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 3.2%, and and the tech-heavy Nasdaq declined 4.1%. The Dow's drop was its largest since February, while the Nasdaq's was its biggest in more than two years.

In just the last week (i.e., since October 3), the FAANG stocks have lost $303.7 billion in market valuation.

Wednesday's selloff appeared to be sparked by concerns about global growth and conflicts over trade.

Tesla drafted new confidentiality agreements after the contents of internal emails from CEO Elon Musk to employees were included in 2016 articles by Bloomberg and CNN, Bloomberg reports.

According to the publication, Tesla legal vice president Jonathan Chang testified on Wednesday in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing that the automaker's general counsel told him to write new confidentiality agreement for employees in order to "have them renew their vows."

Tesla did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The ongoing NLRB hearing concerns allegations from a regional director of the agency that Tesla's confidentiality policy violates its workers' rights, and that it has retaliated against employees who support a union and interfered with their efforts to advocate for a union.

Tesla has denied all of those claims, Bloomberg reports.

Chang reportedly said leaks of internal information to the media can result in customers holding off on purchases to wait for new features, disrupt the company's ability to announce new features, and create "significant SEC concerns" about the release of company information. But, Chang reportedly said, Tesla is rarely able to determine which employees are responsible for the leaks.

Tesla filed a lawsuit against former employee Martin Tripp in June, alleging that he hacked confidential company information and gave it to parties outside the company. Tripp filed a countersuit in August denying Tesla's allegations and accusing the company of defamation. Tripp later published on Twitter photos that he claimed supported the allegations he has made.

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