Original author: Sramana Mitra

Original author: Sramana Mitra

James Damore, the software engineer fired by Google for circulating a 10-page manifesto inside the company that suggested women might be under-represented in tech generally and "leadership" inside the company because of their biology, has described the company as "almost like a cult" in an opinion column published the Wall Street Journal.

Damore is currently on tour of mostly conservative media outlets. In addition to the WSJ, he has given interviews to Bloomberg, spoken at length with two YouTube personalities popular with alt-right and right-wing audiences, Stefan Molyneux and Jordan B. Peterson, and he did a photoshoot with alt-right photographer Peter Duke.

For the WSJ he quoted the left-wing political scientist Noam Chomsky to make his point: 

For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

... In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment. 

Much of the op-ed focuses on Damore's claim that he was the victim of a corporate "shaming." The word, used four times in the manifesto, is a new favorite among American conservatives. It signifies their belief that liberals stifle free speech by humiliating right-wing voices. "Whether it’s in our homes, online or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform," Damore wrote.

You can read the whole thing here.

Get the latest Google stock price here.

Original author: Jim Edwards

Humans can generally trust what they see and hear — but that won't be the case for long. Advances in AI and CGI will soon make it possible for anyone to create photorealistic video and audio. Experts say it will transform information warfare, allowing the creation of sophisticated propaganda and misinformation. The tech's impact will be profound, turbocharging everything from fake news and hoaxes to revenge porn and DIY entertainment.

A woodcut from 1473 showing the apocryphal "Pope Joan" giving birth. Kladcat/Wikimedia Commons (CC)

Hoaxes and trickery are almost as old as human history.

When the Roman Republic first conquered the Italian peninsula between 500-200 BC, it was known to send fake refugees into enemy cities to "[subvert] the enemy from within." "Pope Joan" was believed to be a woman who allegedly tricked her way into become pope in the Middle Ages by pretending to be a man — but the entire story is now viewed as fake, a fictional yarn spun centuries after her purported reign.

"Vortigern and Rowena," a play that debuted in 1798, was initially touted as a lost work of William Shakespeare — but was in fact a forgery created by William Henry Ireland. And in the 1980s, the Soviet Union attempted to damage the United States' reputation and sow discord among its allies by spreading the myth that American scientists had created AIDS in a military laboratory, in an "active measures" disinformation campaign called "Operation INFEKTION."

Some fringe historians even believe that almost 300 years of medieval history were a hoax — invented retrospectively by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III for political purposes in 1,000 AD.

But humanity is now rapidly approaching the holy grail of hoaxes: Tools that will allow anyone to easily create fraudulent, photo-realistic video and audio.

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology, over the coming decade it will become trivial to produce fake media of public figures and ordinary people saying and doing whatever hoaxers can dream of — something that will have immense and worrying implications for society.

In a previous feature, Business Insider explored how the tech will make it far more difficult to verify news media — boosting "fake news" and exacerbating mistrust in the mainstream media. But experts now say that its effects will be felt far more broadly than just journalism. 

It will open up worrying new fronts in information warfare, as hostile governments weaponise the technology to sow falsehoods, propaganda, and mistrust in target populations. The tools will be a boon to malicious pranksters, giving them powerful new tools to bully and blackmail, and even produce synthetic "revenge porn" featuring their unwilling targets. And fraud schemes will become ever-more sophisticated and difficult to detect, creating uncertainty as to who is on the other end of any phone call or video-conference.

This may sound sensational, but it's not science fiction. This world is right around the corner — and humanity desperately needs to prepare itself.

The technology is basic — but not for long

Right now, the technology required to easily produce fake audio and video is in its infancy. It exists mainly in the form of tech demos, research projects, and apps that have yet to see a commercial release — but it hints at the world to come.

A few examples: In July, researchers at the University of Washington used AI to produce a fake video of President Barack Obama speaking, built by analysing tens of hours of footage of his past speeches. (The audio used also came from an old speech.)

The tech to do this live already exists. In 2016, "Face2face" researchers were able to take existing video footage of high-profile political figures including George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, and make their facial expressions mimic those of a human actor, all in real time.

People are also working to spoof human speech. Voice-mimicking software called Lyrebird can take audio of someone speaking and use it to synthesise a digital version of that person's voice — something it showed off to disconcerting effect with demos of Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Trump promoting it. It's in development, and Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, is also developing similar tools under the name Project Voco.

The next generation of information warfare

In early August 2016, the US had an international crisis on its hands, and Americans were beginning to panic. As many as 10,000 armed police had surrounded the US Incirlik airbase in Turkey, and Twitter users were worrying that the situation could rapidly escalate — perhaps even with the nuclear weapons on the base falling into the hands of the demonstrators.

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Thomson Reuters

Except, it didn't really happen like this. As The Daily Beast reported, the reality was a peaceful protest of around 1,000 people. Russian state propaganda outlets Russia Today and Sputnik pushed the false narrative, aided by thousands of English-language tweets sent from accounts identified as bots controlled by the Russian government, Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow Clint Watts told the US Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017.

This is an example of Russia's longstanding policy of "active measures" — spreading misinformation for propaganda purposes or to help it achieve its strategic objectives. Gregory C. Allen, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, argues that these efforts from Russia — and others like them — will receive a powerful shot in the arm from developments in CGI and AI.

"We have seen foreign governments be more than willing to rely on ... propaganda in the text real and in the fabricated imagery realm," he told Business Insider. "They have demonstrated their willingness to sprint as fast as they can in this exact direction, and making use of every tool that is available to them."

The future could see authoritarian states using forged media to help generate dissent in the populations of rival countries, much like what happened at Incirlik — and to discredit and damage political opposition at home.

Allen also discussed the national security implications of artificial intelligence in a recent paper, warning: "We will struggle to know what to trust. Using cryptography and secure communication channels, it may still be possible to, in some circumstances, prove the authenticity of evidence. But, the 'seeing is believing' aspect of evidence that dominates today — one where the human eye or ear is almost always good enough — will be compromised."

The tech is a bonanza for fraudsters

A popular technique employed by modern scammers is "CEO fraud" — an email sent to a company employee, masquerading as from the CEO or another executive, asking them to make a payment to an account or take another action.

These kinds of attacks will soon have a whole new line of attack: Voice.

Imagine your boss calls you up, and asks you to make a transaction, or send over a password or a confidential document. It's clearly her voice, she knows who you are, and you might even make some small talk. Today, no-one would think anything was amiss.

This is because, Allen says, you "are currently using voice as an authentication technology, but [you] don't think of it as an authentication technology because it's just a background of human life that you can trust."

But in five or so years, that trust may have evaporated — replaced by a mistrust of what you hear on the phone and even see with your own eyes in a video-conference: "In the very near future it's not going to be something that you can rely on. Likewise, a video forgery techniques get further along, the same will be true if you were to have a video chat with someone."

Old people and those are less tech-literate will be particularly vulnerable, Francis Tseng, a copublisher of The New Inquiry (who curates a project tracking how technology can distort reality) suggested: "Many people deal with their parents or grandparents falling prey to phone scams ... And an easy rule of thumb to tell them is 'don't give out private information to anyone you don't know!'. With these voice synthesis technologies, someone could easily forge a phone call from you or another relative."

It will turbo-charge fake news

We're already living in an era of "fake news." US President Donald Trump frequently lashes out online at the "phony" news media. Hoax news outlets have been created by Macedonian teenagers to make a quick buck from ad revenue, their stories spreading easily through platforms like Facebook. Public trust in the professional news media has fallen to an all-time low.

When anyone can throw together a video of a politician or celebrity saying whatever they want, it seems likely to engender further mistrust — and allow hoaxes to spread more easily than ever before.

A still from a YouTube demo of 'Synthesizing Obama.' Supasorn Suwajanakorn/YouTube

And there's a flipside to this: It will also cast some doubts on even legitimate footage. If a politician or celebrity is caught saying or doing something untoward, there will be an increasing chance that the person could dismiss the video as being fabricated.

In October, Trump's presidential campaign was rocked by the "Access Hollywood" tape — audio of his discussing groping women in vulgar terms. What if he could have semi-credibly claimed the entire thing was just an AI-powered forgery?

It will transform cyberbullying

This technology won't just be misused to pursue political and strategic objectives, or to defraud businesses: It will be a weapon for bullies, capable of inflicting arbitrary cruelty.

In the hands of children, it seems likely to be misused to hijack the image of victims', and to animate it for malicious purposes. A child's digital avatar might be made to confess their love for another, embarrassing them — or their voice could confess to a misdemeanour, landing them in trouble with school authorities.

Justin Thies, who helped develop Face2face, predicted it would "lift cyberbullying to a whole new level."

A spokesperson for child protection charity NSPCC acknowledged the danger: "Emerging technologies, such as AI and CGI, pose both potential risks and opportunities to young people and we must make sure they do not leave children and young people exposed to danger and harassment online.

"We know that cyber-bullying can be particularly devastating to young people as it doesn't stop in the playground and follows them home so they feel they cannot escape."

It will create a new category of sexual crimes

Jennifer Lawrence. Reuters Images

In August 2014, hundreds of intimate photos of dozens of celebrities were released online — causing a media frenzy, and the creation of huge online communities dedicated to sharing the images. That the photos were stolen and being shared without the consent of the subjects did little to dampen many sharers' enthusiasm — even as Jennifer Lawrence, one of the victims, described it as a "sex crime" and a "sexual violation."

The episode indicates there is likely to be significant interest in on-demand pornography produced using these technologies in the years ahead, regardless of whether the subjects of these CGI films give permission.

"Revenge porn" websites already exist dedicated to cataloguing and sharing the intimate photos and videos of non-celebrities, and it seems likely that media-editing technology will be used to produce material featuring "ordinary" people, as well as the rich and famous — bringing with it the widespread risk of shame and blackmail.

A whole new world of entertainment awaits

The next "Jurassic Park" might be synthesised in a teenager's bedroom. Universal Pictures

Not every use case of this tech will be negative, however. The internet is already home to a vibrant remix culture — just look at the Reddit community "Photoshop Battles" — and photorealistic video-editing tools may well spark a huge wave of DIY creativity.

"There could be a lot of interesting IP cases if amateur filmmakers start synthesizing films using the likenesses of celebrities and start profiting off that. I can imagine a whole culture of bootleg films produced in this way," Tseng said.

The tech that powers face-modifying filters in apps like Snapchat is "primitive compared to the Hollywood CGI or today, but it's actually significantly more advanced than the Hollywood CGI of the Eighties," Allen said. "So what we're seeing is the state-of-the-art capabilities slowly come down in price and availability such that amateurs have access to ultimately what are rather impressive capabilities."

The tech likely to be used by the established entertainment industry as well as amateurs, Tseng suggested: "We've also seen movies adapt their scripts for certain markets (e.g. the 'Red Dawn' remake changing the villains from China to North Korea). There is already a practice of filming scenes to be slightly different for different markets but this technology could lead to it on a much larger scale, where even individuals experience a version of a film totally personalized for them."

Just look at "Star Wars: Rogue One" for an example of how this tech will be employed by Hollywood studios in years to come. Peter Cushing reprised his role as Grand Moff Tarkin — even though he had been dead for 22 years. His image was reconstructed using CGI overlaid on a real actor.

Left: The real Peter Cushing. Right: A digital reconstruction, two decades after his death. Lucasfilm/Disney

This is all right around the corner

This is all currently theoretical. But it won't be long until it becomes a reality.

"I think we are one to two years away from these sorts of forgeries, especially in audio where progress is a little bit easier," Allen said. "One to two years away from forgeries being able to fool the untrained ear and somewhere between five to 10 years away from them being able to evade certain types of forensic analysis."

So how do we prepare? Journalists and organisations will have to rely increasingly on cryptography to "sign" media, so it can be verified when required. Big platforms like Facebook will have a roll to play in policing for fraudulent material, Face2face's Justus Thies argues: "Social-media companies as well as the classical media companies have the responsibility to develop and setup fraud detection systems to prevent spreading / shearing of misinformation." And it will force ordinary people to be far more skeptical about the media they consume.

In some cases, "it may be possible to come up with a video format that simply rejects editing," Allen suggested. "But this will still be a suboptimal solution compared to what we have now ... in the best case scenario, this results in there [being] trained experts who can discern the most likely version of the truth, and that is just so far away from where we are today which is amateurs can rely upon their own eyes to discern the truth."

We don't realise just how lucky we've been

These advances mean that humanity is rapidly approaching the end of a unique period in human history. We "live in an amazing time where the tech for documenting the truth is significantly more advanced than the tech for fabricating the truth. This was not always the case. If you think back to the invention of the printing press, and early newspapers, it was just as easy to lie in a newspaper as it was to tell the truth," Allen said.

"And with the invention of the photograph and the phonograph, or recorded audio, we now live in a new technological equilibrium where — provided you have the right instruments there — you can prove something occurred ... we thought that was a permanent technological outcome, and it is now clear that is a temporary technological outcome. And that we cannot rely on this technological balance of truth favouring truth forever."

Original author: Rob Price

Original author: Leon Siciliano

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Getty Images

Elon Musk tweeted some warnings about artificial intelligence on Friday night.

"If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea," Musk tweeted after his $1 billion startup, OpenAI, made a surprise appearance at a $24 million video game tournament Friday night, beating the world's best players in the video game, "Dota 2."

Musk claimed OpenAI's bot was the first to beat the world's best players in competitive eSports, but quickly warned that increasingly powerful artificial intelligence like OpenAI's bot — which learned by playing a "thousand lifetimes" of matches against itself — would eventually need to be reined in for our own safety.

"Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too," Musk said in another tweet on Friday night.

Musk has previously expressed a healthy mistrust of artificial intelligence. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO warned in 2016 that, if artificial intelligence is left unregulated, humans could devolve into the equivalent of "house cats" next to increasingly powerful supercomputers. He made that comparison while hypothesizing about the need for a digital layer of intelligence he called a "neural lace" for the human brain.

"I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer," Musk said. "A third, digital layer that could work well and symbiotically" with the rest of your body," Musk said during Vox Media's 2016 Code Conference in Southern California.

Nanotechnologists have already been working on this concept.

Musk said at the time: "If we can create a high-bandwidth neural interface with your digital self, then you’re no longer a house cat.”

Jillian D'Onfro contributed to this report.

Original author: Bryan Logan

Andrés Nieto Porras/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Perseid meteor shower occurs each year in late summer. This year, the astronomical event peaks on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. A bright moon will make seeing the meteors more challenging, but NASA says stargazers can expect to see one every couple of minutes.

Right now, Earth is plowing through a cloud of tiny bits of comet dust, turning the rice-grain-size debris into what many call shooting stars.

Known as the Perseid meteor shower, this recurring astronomical event is easily the most watched — and beautiful — shower every year.

The Perseids in 2017 is from July 13 until August 26, and it will peak in the late evening and early morning on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, according to EarthSky.org.

Some websites have claimed that there will be more visible meteors per minute this year than at any other time in nearly a century, but experts say this is hogwash.

"This year, we are expecting enhanced rates of about 150 per hour or so, but the increased number will be cancelled out by the bright moon, the light of which will wash out the fainter Perseids," Bill Cooke, who leads NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "A meteor every couple of minutes is good, and certainly worth going outside to look, but it is hardly the 'brightest shower in human history.'"

How to watch

This year's conditions will be challenging for two reasons.

First, there'll be a waning gibbous moon — the full moon will have just ended, but it will still be full and bright.

Second, the moon will rise in the evening and set near dawn. Normally the best time to watch for meteors is after the moon sets. TimeAndDate.com has a convenient moonrise and moonset tool to find out when that will happen in your location. In New York, for example, the moon will set at around 6:44 a.m. on Tuesday. In London, the moon will be visible most of the night.

Kartik Ramanathan on Flickr

Given this year's conditions, the best time to head outside is between midnight and dawn. The closer to dawn the better — though twilight begins to eat up the dark sky a couple of hours before the sun rises.

You won't need any telescopes or fancy equipment to see the meteors — just clear skies, your eyes, and a bit of patience. Find a dark, remote spot away from the light pollution of nearby towns and cities, make yourself comfortable, and set aside a good chunk of time to enjoy the show.

"Give yourself at least an hour of viewing time for watching any meteor shower," EarthSky.org advises. "Meteors tend to come in spurts that are interspersed by lulls. Also, it can take as long as 20 minutes for your eyes to adapt to the dark."

Perseid meteors are bright and fast, and they often leave persistent trains, or the bright streaks that linger in the sky. They are best seen from the Northern Hemisphere, and they travel at the mind-numbing speed of 132,000 mph — 500 times as fast as the fastest car in the world.

What causes a meteor shower?

When a comet swings too close to the sun, the sun's light boils its icy surface, releasing particles of ice and dust.

This debris coming off the comet forms a tail that points away from the sun. As Earth crosses the orbit of this comet, it passes through the tail.

An interactive animation by Ian Webster at meteorshowers.org illustrates how this works:

The gravity of our planet attracts the dust and ice that the comet leaves in its wake. When that debris is pulled into our atmosphere, it rubs up against air molecules, causing it to burn up and streak through the sky.

That process results in the glowing trails of light that we see as meteors, or "shooting stars."

The comet producing the meteors in the Perseids is Swift-Tuttle, a 16-mile-wide hunk of space rock that takes 133 years to orbit the sun. It's the largest object in our solar system that makes repeated close approaches to Earth.

The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, but if you trace their paths back, they all appear to come from the same point, called the radiant. That's because the meteors are all approaching us at the same angle.

Meteor showers are all named after their radiant. The radiant for the Perseids is the constellation Perseus, the Greek mythological hero.

Ali Sundermier wrote a previous version of this story.

Original author: Dave Mosher

Snapchat announced that its audience grew to 173 million daily users in Q2. That's a nice improvement from the 143 million users it had one year ago, but it was 2 million users shy of the level Wall Street expected.

Snapchat's stronghold continues to be in North America, as we can see in this chart from Statista. While Europe is also a big market for Snapchat, the company is not adding users as quickly in that region. Snapchat's growth in the rest of the world continues to lag, perhaps owing to the longrunning challenges it has had with the version of its app for Android — the more popular smartphone operating system outside the US. 

During Snap's Q2 conference call on Thursday, CEO Evan Spiegel said the company had made improvements with its Android app, but that certain issues required more significant structural changes that could drag into 2018.

 

 

Mike Nudelman/Business Insider

Get the latest Snap stock price here.

Original author: Caroline Cakebread

Dendi (far left) and OpenAI's Greg Brockman (right) talk it out ahead of the first match. Screenshot/YouTube

Computers have already beaten the world's best humans at classic games like chess and Go.

Now one has beaten one of the world's best players of the smash-hit video game "Dota 2."

Live on stage at The International, developer Valve's flagship $24 million tournament, a bot from Open AI defeated professional gamer Danylo "Dendi" Ishutin in a surprise, previously unannounced one-on-one exhibition matchup. The bot from OpenAI, the $1 billion artificial-intelligence research nonprofit cochaired by Tesla Motors CEO Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman, beat Dendi in the first match in about ten minutes; Dendi resigned from the second match, and declined to play a third.

Watch the match here:

 

"Please, stop bullying me," Dendi, who's estimated to have earned $735,449.40 in winnings in his career, said to the bot during the match.

Elon Musk himself took to Twitter to praise OpenAI for its achievement, saying its bot was the "first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive eSports."

In a video ahead of the matchup, OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman explained that the company's special bot was trained by playing a "thousand lifetimes" of matches against itself, with "coaching" from the company. Brockman also boasted that the bot had already bested several pro "Dota 2" players.

"Over the past week, our bot was undefeated against many top professionals including SumaiL (top 1v1 player in the world) and Arteezy (top overall player in the world)," wrote Brockman in a blog entry discussing the bot.

The idea of "self-playing" is key to the advances that OpenAI is pushing for, Brockman told Business Insider following the match. It's a useful way for an AI system to learn even the most complex tasks. It doesn't learn anything if it goes up against either a weaker player or a far stronger one. By playing itself, it always has a worthy opponent, he said. 

"You kind of see this AI go from total randomness" into the game-winning system we saw here, Brockman said.

You can watch OpenAI's introductory video here:

Artificial intelligence companies have a history of using video games to test their technology: Google's DeepMind has tackled "StarCraft 2," while a Microsoft AI team recently claimed to attain the high score in Ms. Pac-Man.

OpenAI isn't just walking away after its victory. The organization hopes to have its bot ready to play in a proper five-on-five match next year.

"'Dota' is not solved," Brockman told Business Insider. 

Still, he expects OpenAI will explore using the same bot to play other games. The same "self-playing" principles it uses can be applied almost anywhere, he said. And OpenAI is excited to see what it can learn under a variety of circumstances.

"At OpenAI, we're not just about publishing a paper," Brockman said. "It's really about building working systems and doing something that would have been impossible before."

Original author: Matt Weinberger

1776 cofounder Donna Harris 1776

Donna Harris is cofounder of 1776, a global startup incubator and seed fund headquartered in Washington, D.C. She can be reached via Twitter @dharrisindc.

In the aftermath of “the Google memo” I had to read Eric Weinstein’s tweet multiple times to be sure I’d read it correctly….

https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/894773217272905728

Like Eric, I too am a venture capitalist and a techie. Long ago, I started my career as a Systems Engineer. I’ve worked for big companies like Oracle and run several startups of my own. Some failed; some soared and produced nice exits. I’ve raised tens of millions of dollars, run a VC fund and run incubators around the world.

You could say that, over my 25 successful years in tech, I’ve been around the block a few times. And, I can tell you, most of those blocks were littered with rampant sexism, mansplaining, unconscious bias and some downright ugly discrimination.

Yet I didn’t complain to HR.

I didn’t complain to HR when the president of [our unit in] Korea took me to a brothel and bought me a prostitute. Or when that same president sent his managing director to my hotel room in the middle of the night to threaten me if I did complain. Or when he withheld my plane ticket (back in the days when you needed old fashioned paper to board a plane) so I was, in essence, hostage in a foreign country.

I didn’t complain to HR when the male sales reps I worked alongside took their clients to strip clubs. Or when my boss joined them. Or when they all came to work hung over the next day and recounted their adventures loudly for all to hear.

I didn’t complain to HR when coworker after coworker assumed traveling for business gave him a free pass to come on to me. Or when they commented on my cleavage.

I didn’t complain to HR when I was pursued by one of my investors doggedly trying to get me to sleep with him. Or when my other investors told me they invested because I reminded them of their daughters.

I didn’t complain to HR when I was asked to step out of a photo so my male CO-founder and CO-CEO could be featured in a cover story solo. Or when I was repeatedly mistaken for his assistant when copied on emails.

I didn’t complain to HR when my boss took my idea for a new business line and handed it to his buddy to run, telling me the business would “do better if led by a man with gray hair.”

I didn’t complain to HR the 8,000 times I was interrupted, mansplained, dismissed, ignored, or not invited. Or when I was told I was too bossy or called intimidating. Or all the times I was told to stop talking so much about diversity problems or sexism in tech.

I didn’t complain to HR because, like nearly every woman on the planet, I was doing was I was taught my whole life to do. Be nice.

Have you ever been too nice and ended up in a situation that could have been avoided if you just would've been an a--h-le?

My neighbor, Amy, shared this quote a few weeks ago, and my response was “So. Much. This.” I spent much of my career being nice. Making others feel comfortable. Not rustling any feathers. Because, God forbid, my confidence, dignity, power, and assertiveness might be labeled as bitchiness.

So, Eric, as I reflected on your tweet, I just want to say thanks…

Thanks for helping me reflect on all the times I didn’t complain to HR. It reminded me of all the times I was too nice, when I should have been an asshole and called out the bad behavior behavior around me. It solidified for me that, despite the passing of 25 years (!!!!!), not much has changed — the bros’ of the Valley, tech, and venture are not going lead the way to changing a very sexist system.

Thanks for reminding me that, despite the continuous stream of disgusting frat boy behavior all around me, I managed to succeed in ways most men only dream of. Which reminded me of all the evidence that shows women actually get higher returns on capital when they do get venture capital. Which re-motivated me to find ways to help women succeed. So we can make voices like yours irrelevant.

Or, as my mom used to say “kill them with kindness.”

she is kind but strong, and that is where so many mistake her. they interpret her kindness for weakness and force her to show her strength.

I know I’m not alone in having these sorts of stories. Share yours and encourage others to do the same, with the hashtag #didntcomplaintoHR.

Original author: Donna Harris

Reuters/ Steve Marcus

Dan Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund, which manages roughly $17.5 billion in assets, has sold its entire stake in Snap Inc., according to regulatory filings released late Friday.

Third Point had originally purchased 2.25 million shares of Snapchat's parent company during the first quarter of 2017, filings show.

Despite Snap's steep losses, leaving the company's shares down 30% since its IPO in March, Third Point managed to earn a 4.6% return on its Offshore Fund, bringing its total returns for the year to 10.7%, Reuters reported.

In addition to Snap, Third Point also sold its shares of Salesforce and Qualcomm. Salesforce stock is up roughly 29% since the beginning of the year, while Qualcomm is relatively flat for the same period.

Snap stock closed at $11.75 Friday in New York, after taking a major hit on Thursday after a disappointing earnings statement in which the company announced an adjusted loss of $0.16 a share.

Markets Insider

Original author: Graham Rapier

REUTERS/Phil McCarten

Daniel Loeb's hedge fund, Third Point, took a large stake in Alibaba in the second quarter, according to SEC filings.

The fund bought 4.5 million shares of the Chinese e-commerce giant which are worth about $634.1 million. Loeb also bought a large $654.7 million stake in BlackRock in the period. 

Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, came to the US in June and told Detroit business owners that his e-commerce platform could be a way for small, US businesses to access the large Chinese market. The company is also offering Chinese customers easier access to the global economy with a partnership with Marriott. The strategy seems to be popular with investors, as Alibaba is up 70.99% this year and popped after the Marriott deal. 

The SEC filings represent second quarter holdings by Third Point, so the firm's positions could have changed since the end of the quarter. The firm's largest holdings disclosed in the filing were in Baxter International and Dow Chemical. BlackRock, a position the firm took in the second quarter, is the third largest holding.

Markets Insider

Original author: Seth Archer

The Game Getty Images/David Livingston

The Game is promoting the initial coin offering, a blockchain-based fundraising method, of a tech company looking to transform the cannabis industry. The market for ICOs has exploded to $1.8 billion, and a lot of people are calling it a bubble.

The Game, a hip-hop artist, is promoting a tech company that says it is going to use blockchain technology to revolutionize the weed industry.

Tech company Paragon is set to release information about itself and its planned initial coin offering, a red-hot cryptocurrency-based fundraising method, on August 15, according to a video tweeted by The Game on Thursday.

Standing alongside Paragon CEO, Jessica Versteeg, a former model and Miss Iowa 2014, the rapper said the firm was preparing to "revolutionize cannabis and the world." Here's a tweet of the video:

Initial coin offerings are a new funding vehicle using blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin. The market for so-called ICOs is exploding, with over $1.86 billion raised via the method since the beginning of the year, according to data from Autonomous NEXT, a financial technology analytics provider. The massive growth of the ICO market has many people in the space thinking it's a bubble with many firms using the method as a way to raise vasts amount of money without offering an actual product. 

To raise money through an ICO, a company issues a new digital currency that can either be spent within its ecosystem, a bit like Disneyland dollars, or used to power part of the business, like the fuel you put in your car.

Jessica VerSteeg with Larry King. Twitter

At this point, it isn't exactly clear to the public what Paragon will do, but Versteeg will hold a Facebook Live Q&A next week to give folks "a behind the scenes look at Paragon and how [they're] disrupting the cryptocurrency space."

Paragon's website has no additional information aside from a mailing list sign-up form and links to their social media sites. 

Justin Bailey, CEO of Fig and noted ICO enthusiast, told Business Insider that Paragon is likely keeping things under-wraps to build momentum behind what is likely, in his view, a viable business. 

"There is typically a lot of promotion behind ICOs," Bailey said."It's important to balance hype and promotion with the proper disclosure to investors."

ICOs have raised about $1.8 billion this year. Autonomous NEXT

This isn't the first time a celebrity has helped market an initial coin offering. Boxing champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. took to Instagram last month to promote an ICO for Stox.com, a blockchain startup. It ended up raising $33 million worth of Ethereum, according to a press representative for the firm. 

To be sure, the rapid growth of initial coin offerings has worried some Wall Streeters. 

Business Insider reached out to Schwark Satyavolu, a general partner at Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm, to get his impression of Paragon and their plans to launch an ICO.  

"It made me smile," he said. "The lack of information and visibility is quite minimal and stereotypical of these ICOs."

He thinks an ICO is practically the only way a company could raise money with such limited information. 

"Fundamentally, it is because you have investors who feel like they are missing out on the next bitcoin," Satyavolu said. "That's getting people to jump in."

Satyavolu thinks the ICO market could be a bubble akin to the mortgage bubble that ushered in the 2008 financial crisis.

"If investments continue at the current rate, this could become the next mortgage crisis with people – including institutional investors – losing hundreds of millions of dollars when (not if) many of these companies go out of business," Satyavolu said. 

To be sure, Satyavolu doesn't think ICOs are all scams. As an investor, he is skeptical of ICOs.

"These companies running ICOs  could have the best intentions, but they might also have no idea what they're doing," he said. "And in many cases, you just don't have the proper information to make an informed decision."

As for Paragon, Versteeg told Business Insider that the firm is addressing "real problems in the cannabis industry" and that all the necessary information will be out for folks to examine next week.

"This isn't another Potcoin," she said referring to an other weed-focused cryptocurrency. "People will be pleasantly surprised with what we are doing."

Original author: Frank Chaparro

Original author: Dave Mosher

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

A group of Uber shareholders is calling for venture-capital firm Benchmark Capital to be removed from Uber's board. 

According to Axios' Dan Primack, Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Capital, Ron Burkle of Yucaipa Companies, and Adam Leber of Maverick sent a petition Friday morning to other Uber investors and Uber's board of directors calling for Benchmark to step aside.

The petition also asks that Benchmark divest enough of its shares so it no longer has board appointment rights, according to Axios.

The request comes one day after Benchmark filed a lawsuit against former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick over allegations of fraud. Benchmark claimed in its suit that it would never have approved a 2016 expansion of Uber's board that allowed Kalanick to fill a board seat had it been aware of the controversy surrounding Kalanick and of Uber's cultural problems. The suit accuses the former CEO of mismanagement and packing the board with supporters.

The investors' email, which was obtained by Axios, requests Benchmark remove itself from the board in order to allow Uber to "realize its full potential by allowing the necessary work to be done in the Board Room rather than Courtroom." 

While the investors say they agree there are issues within Uber, they call Benchmark's tactics "ethically dubious and, critically, value-destructive rather than value enhancing."

Josh Mohrer, the former general manager of Uber's New York City office who left Uber in May, tweeted about his distate for Benchmark's actions after the investor email was published Friday: 

Later on Friday, five of Uber's directors decried the infighting in a statement given to the New York Times.

The board "is disappointed that a disagreement between shareholders has resulted in litigation," directors Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Ryan Graves, Ariana Huffington, Wan Ling Martello and David Trujillo said in the statement. "The Board has urged both sides to resolve the matter cooperatively and quickly, and the Board is taking steps to facilitate the process."

In the meantime, the directors added, the board is focusing on trying to find a new CEO. It already has "several outstanding candidates," they said.  

 

You can read the full email from the shareholders to Benchmark over at Axios. 

Original author: Avery Hartmans

Original author: Nathaniel Lee