October 11, 2017

I was in Atlanta yesterday for Techstars Atlanta Demo Day. I’ll be here again today for Venture Atlanta and then I’m on to Kansas City for Techstars Kansas City Demo Day.

Rule #1: Don’t eat the bugs on the window of the 23rd floor of your hotel.

I’m being a lot more deliberate about my travel these days. I’m also being more careful about how I do it. I’m eating a lot smarter, not drinking at all, and making sure I get at least seven hours of sleep a night. While I hate shaking hands, I’ve given up trying to do fist bumps because I end up with numerous awkward semi-handshake-hand-grab moments. And I’ve stopped staying up late trying to get all my email from the day responded to like I did for 20 years.

I like Atlanta. I haven’t been here in a while but it’s pretty awesome to see how the startup community has grown in the past five years. While hot and humid today, it’s different from my norm so it’s an intriguing but easy adventure. While the bugs aren’t as big as the ones I grew up with in Dallas, they remind me of my childhood.

I had dinner with my brother Daniel and my cousin Kenny (who lives here) last night at the original Ted’s Montana’s Grill that’s on the corner of Luckie Street and Ted Turner Drive. We sat in the booth next to the one Ted frequents. The conversation was intense and wonderful. Something about all that made me smile just now.

Rule #2: Keep a sense of humor through all the absurdity. And, there’s a lot these days.

Also published on Medium.

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Original author: Brad Feld

BI Intelligence

This is a preview of a research report bundle from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn't a part of the future of technology. AI is the future of technology.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have even publicly debated whether or not that will turn out to be a good thing.

Voice assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa have become more and more prominent in our lives, and that will only increase as they learn more skills.

These voice assistants are set to explode as more devices powered by AI enter the market. Most of the major technology players have some sort of smart home hub, usually in the form of a smart speaker. These speakers, like the Amazon Echo or Apple HomePod, are capable of communicating with a majority of WiFi-enabled devices throughout the home.

While AI is having an enormous impact on individuals and the smart home, perhaps its largest impact can be felt in the e-commerce space. In the increasingly cluttered e-commerce space, personalization is one of the key differentiators retailers can turn towards to stand out to consumers. In fact, retailers that have implemented personalization strategies see sales gains of 6-10%, at a rate two to three times faster than other retailers, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group.

This can be accomplished by leveraging machine learning technology to sift through customer data to present the relevant information in front of that consumer as soon as they hit the page.

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AI in E-Commerce Report

BI Intelligence

One of retailers' top priorities is to figure out how to gain an edge over Amazon. To do this, many retailers are attempting to differentiate themselves by creating highly curated experiences that combine the personal feel of in-store shopping with the convenience of online portals.

These personalized online experiences are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). This is the technology that enables e-commerce websites to recommend products uniquely suited to shoppers, and enables people to search for products using conversational language, or just images, as though they were interacting with a person.

Using AI to personalize the customer journey could be a huge value-add to retailers. Retailers that have implemented personalization strategies see sales gains of 6-10%, a rate two to three times faster than other retailers, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It could also boost profitability rates 59% in the wholesale and retail industries by 2035, according to Accenture.

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The Smart Speaker Report

BI Intelligence

Smart speakers — Amazon's Echo, for example — are the latest device category poised to take a chunk of our increasingly digital lives. These devices are made primarily for the home and execute a user's voice commands via an integrated digital assistant. These digital assistants can play music, answer questions, and control other devices within a user's home, among other things.

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This report, which leverages BI Intelligence's proprietary data, analyzes the market potential of the Echo Look, Echo Show, and HomePod. Using exclusive survey data, we evaluate each device's potential for adoption based on four criteria: awareness, excitement, usefulness, and purchase intent. And we draw some inferences from our data about the direction the smart speaker market could take from here.

The Voice Assistant Landscape Report

BI IntelligenceAdvancements in a bevy of industries are helping intelligent digital voice assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa become more sophisticated and useful pieces of technology.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are allowing them to accurately understand more information, while upgrades to mobile networks are facilitating quick transfers of data to robust clouds, enabling fast response times. In addition, the swell of internet connected devices like smart thermostats and speakers is giving voice assistants more utility in a connected consumer's life.

Increasingly sophisticated voice assistants and the growing potential use cases they can assist in are driving consumers to adopt them in greater droves — 65% of US smartphone owners were employing voice assistants in 2015, up significantly from 30% just two years prior. Consumers are also eagerly adopting speaker-based voice assistants, with shipments of Google Home and Amazon Echo speakers expected to climb more than threefold to 24.5 million in 2017, according to a report from VoiceLabs.

However, there are still numerous barriers that need to be overcome before this product platform will see mass adoption, as both technological challenges and societal hurdles persist.

This report explains what's driving the recent upsurge in adoption of digital voice assistants. It explores the recent technology advancements that have catalyzed this growth, while presenting the technological shortcomings preventing voice assistants from hitting their true potential. This report also examines the voice assistant landscape, and discusses the leading voice assistants and the devices through which consumers interact with them. Finally, it identifies the major barriers to mass adoption, and the impact voice assistants could have in numerous industries once they cross that threshold.

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Original author: BI Intelligence

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Courtesy Menlo Ventures

Menlo Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm, just hired a partner to lead its investments in biotech and life sciences. 

The firm, which has $5 billion under management, hired Greg Yap, a life science veteran who has spent 20 years in the industry. 

Yap will help Menlo find companies to invest in that are "at the intersection of biology and computer science," Yap told Business Insider. 

As part of its push back into biotech, the firm will be devoting 15% of its latest $450 million fund to companies in that space. 

Founded in 1976, Menlo has in the past invested in life sciences companies including Gilead Sciences — a biotech that now has a $107 billion market cap — but has over the past few decades focused its investments into tech companies, including Uber, Betterment, and Warby Parker. 

Menlo partner Mark Siegel told Business Insider that the firm originally got out of biotech investing in the 90s because the timeline of bringing a drug from discovery to approval was too long for returns, especially compared to the growing IT industry. Siegel said that's not the case now, especially in the main areas Menlo will be investing in.

Specifically, the plan will be to invest in companies that are in diagnostics, genomics, digital health, synthetic biology, and have a data-driven platforms for drug discovery. So far, Menlo has invested in Synthego, Cofactor Genomics, Clear Labs, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, and 3T Biosciences, a startup also reportedly backed by Peter Thiel and Sean Parker. 

Yap spent his career working at companies such as Illumina Ventures, Roche, and Affymetrix. Joining the Menlo team, he'll be bringing along his experience working as both an entrepreneur and in the day-to-day operations of the companies navigating regulatory processes and other things traditional technology companies might not encounter.

Yap said he's looking to invest in "iconic entrepreneurs," though they don't necessarily have to be based in Silicon Valley. 

Original author: Lydia Ramsey

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Original author: David Choi

This is how things looked the last time stocks in the S&P 500 were trading so independently of macro factors. AP

Stocks are operating with a mind of their own to an extent not seen since the dotcom bubble.

Normally tossed and turned by geopolitical events and macroeconomic developments, stocks are exhibiting a historically high degree of independence at a time when price swings remain locked near all-time lows.

As of earlier this month, 65% of the risk associated with the average S&P 500 stock was inexplainable by a set of six macro risk factors maintained by Morgan Stanley over the past 63 days. That's the highest since the financial crisis, the firm wrote in a client note.

And if you extend the period of comparison to 252 days, the measure of stock-specific risk is the highest since 2001, the age of the dotcom bubble, Morgan Stanley data show.

Through early October, stock-specific risk was at its post-crisis high. Morgan Stanley

These types of market conditions are ideal for stock pickers, who make their living analyzing company fundamentals and betting on single stocks.

About 54% of large-cap mutual-fund managers are beating their benchmarks in 2017, the highest-ever success rate at this time of year, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch data going back to 2009. If they keep up the pace through the end of the quarter, it would be the first year since 2007 — right around the time of the financial crisis — that more than half of them outperformed benchmarks, according to the data.

At the root of the resilience has been the average pair-wise correlation of stocks in major indexes — which measures the degree to which they trade in tandem. For the benchmark S&P 500, the measure sits at its lowest since the tech bubble, while companies in the Russell 2000 gauge of small-cap stocks are trading the most independently since 2003, according to BAML data.

Stocks won't trade this independently of macro factors, nor other companies, forever. So, more than anything, it's important for active managers to strike while the iron is hot.

Original author: Joe Ciolli

Google rushed out a fix to a glitch in its latest smart speaker last week that caused the device to surreptitiously record the conversations of its early testers without their knowledge or consent.

The bug affected a small number of the Google Home Mini devices that the company handed out to reporters at its press event last week, according to the Google. The company rolled out a software update over the weekend to address the issue on those devices and is exploring a long-term fix. 

"We learned of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Mini devices that could cause the touch mechanism to behave incorrectly," the company said in a statement, adding, "If you're still having issues, please feel free to contact Google support." 

Google unveiled the $50 Mini, which goes on sale on October 19, at its event on Wednesday. Soon after, Android Police's Artem Russakovskii, who was one of the reporters who received a test unit, discovered that his device was turning on by itself, recording his conversations, and uploading them to Google. 

Normally, there are two ways to interact with Google's smart speakers, including the Mini. You can say the words "OK Google," followed by a command such as "play 'Bohemian Rhapsody.'" Alternatively, you can press the button located on the top of the devices instead of saying "OK Google." 

But Russakovskii discovered that his Mini was listening in on him even when he hadn't pressed the device's button or said, "OK Google." When he checked his personal activity page on Google, the site that shows users' interactions with the search giant's services and the data it collects on users, he found sound files that had been uploaded to Google's servers from the Mini without his consent.

Google blamed the glitch on a faulty button in some of the units. The buttons on those Minis were detecting touches even when there was no touch to detect. Russakovskii apparently got one of the defective devices.  

On October 7th, three days after it handed out the Mini review units, Google rolled out a software update that disables the button. The change affects every Mini it's handed out, even those that weren't malfunctioning. Meanwhile, the company says it's deleted all the data recorded from alleged button pushes on the Mini review units — whether they were actual button pushes or not — from the time it handed out the devices to reviewers until it issued the update. 

Ultimately, the problem appears to be a simple error, not a malicious act of spying. And the company is looking for a long-term solution.

But the glitch is one that Google would certainly have liked to have avoided for multiple reasons, as The Verge notes.

The bug could not only help undermine sales of the Mini but hamper Google's broader effort to turn itself into a top-tier hardware maker. Smart speakers like the Mini rely on customers' trust; it's an act of faith for consumers to let Amazon or Google place a microphone in their houses. They generally expect the companies to only record them when they're aware of it.

Worse, the nature of the glitch is likely to play into consumers' worst fears about the search giant. Lots of people are already sensitive to the fact that Google is collecting tons of data on its customers. And the company has previously been taken to task for collecting data without consumers' consent. Back in 2010, Google admitted its Google Maps Street View cars had been sucking up e-mails and passwords from unencrypted WiFi networks as the cars mapped neighborhoods around the country and world.

Get the latest Google stock price here.

Original author: Matt Weinberger

Corporate America thinks if 10% of its leaders are women, that's good enough, according to new research from Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In organization. Sandberg says that too many male leaders are blind to disrespectful treatment of women, too. Sandberg hasn't fully solved the diversity problem at Facebook, where she is COO, either.

Sheryl Sandberg Getty Images

Too many corporate leaders think that sprinkling a few women into the ranks here and there is all they need to do have a diverse workforce, Sheryl Sandberg says.

"Nearly 50% of men think that when just 1 in 10 senior leaders in their company is a woman, that’s sufficient. And remarkably, a third of women agree. When so many people see a leadership team that’s only 10% women—who, let’s remember, are half the population—and think, 'That’s good enough,' it’s a sign that we’re too comfortable with the status quo," Sandberg wrote in an Op Ed for the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

She was remarking on a finding of the new 2017 Women in the Workplace report, a joint study by Sandberg's Lean In's organization and McKinsey & Co. released on Tuesday.

Sandberg is known as the tech industry's most visible feminist, having launched her Lean In organization by way of a best-selling book back in 2013.

Beyond the scant number of women in leadership roles, Sandberg also railed against the lack of people of color in leadership roles, particularly Black women, but also Asians and Latinas.

Sandberg quoted one Black woman from the workplace report who said: “We can have the same degree, the same years of work…[but] we are not tapped on our shoulders as often as other folks are. And we’re not getting feedback on why.”

Doctor, heal thyself?

We can't help pointing out that there's some irony to Sandberg's opinions. While she's doing great work to bring high-level attention to the lack of workforce equality, she's also the chief operating officer at Facebook. That means operating tasks like hiring fall in her domain.

VC Peter Thiel is one of the board members on Facebook's mostly male board. AGON Limited

And Facebook's own track record here isn't exactly role model material. In August the company released its annual diversity report. While Facebook is among the most diverse work force in the tech industry, that's not saying much.

The company is still nowhere near achieving the kind of diversity balance she's pushing the whole corporate world to achieve.

For instance, just under one-third of Facebook's new hires for engineering jobs are women. In a world where women often make up around 17% of the tech roles at tech companies, that's a move in the right direction. But it also means that two-thirds of new engineering hires are still men. That's not exactly 50/50, even in new hiring. Overall, women still make up only 19% of Facebook's tech roles. 

At the same time, 72% of the company's senior leaders are men. Only one out of five of its executive leaders is a woman (Sandberg herself). Only two out of eight of its board members are women.

Facebook has increased its Black employees, as well as Hispanic employees, by 1% each and that brings Facebook's Black population to 3% and its Hispanic population to 5%. Just to compare to the general US population, Black people make up about 15% and Hispanics about 16%.

Look at the 'blind spots'

Her answer as to why corporate America can't seem to become an equal opportunity employer despite its efforts: "Blind spots are getting in our way," she writes.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Getty

She says that "men look right past" the lack of diversity and are more likely to believe that their companies are already doing what it takes to hire a more diverse workforce. Men, who still hold most of the leadership roles, are also more likely to believe that disrespectful behavior toward women is being quickly addressed, the workplace study found.

Sandberg's solution is two fold: 1) make the economic case for why a better represented workforce is a good thing. 2) make sure managers know, and will be rewarded, for building diverse teams themselves. 

But, as important as her words are, they would carry even more weight if she achieved those diversity numbers at Facebook, too.

Original author: Julie Bort

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Get the latest Snap stock price here.

Original author: Alex Heath

Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu have fundamentally changed the way many people watch TV. Instead of waiting an entire week for the next episode of a favorite show, many sit down and watch an entire season — or a significant portion of it — all at once. Indeed, the practice has become so commonplace that Merriam-Webster added "binge-watch" to its dictionary earlier this year.

But not everyone is in on binging. A recent survey from YouGov found that older Americans still generally prefer the traditional method of watching TV. As you can see in this chart from Statista, the portion of US TV watchers 55 and older who prefer it when episodes are released all at once rather than week-by-week is less than half the portion of those 18 to 34 who prefer the binge-watching model. 

You can chalk up the difference to the impatience of youth. Some 59% of US adults say the reason they binge-watch is because they want to see the whole story at once, according to a separate YouGov survey.

 Mike Nudelman/Business Insider

Original author: Caroline Cakebread

Flickr/Jane Rahman

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and it can kill. But scientists know surprisingly little about it. Even with awareness programs like World Mental Health Day, which happens every year on October 10, our knowledge of the condition is extremely limited.

We do know, however, that talking seems to help — especially under the guidance of a licensed mental health professional. But therapy is expensive, inconvenient, and often hard to approach. A recent estimate suggests that of the roughly one in five Americans who have a mental illness, close to two-thirds have gone at least a year without treatment.

Several Silicon Valley-style approaches to the problem have emerged: There are apps that replace the traditional psychiatry office with texting, and chat rooms where you can discuss your problems anonymously online.

The newest of these tech-based treatments is Woebot, an artificially intelligent chatbot designed using cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, one of the most heavily researched clinical approaches to treating depression.

Before you dismiss Woebot as a half-baked startup idea, know that it was designed by Alison Darcy, a clinical psychologist at Stanford, who tested a version of the technology on a small sample of real people with depression and anxiety long before launching it.

"The data blew us away," Darcy told Business Insider. "We were like, this is it."

The results of the trial were published Tuesday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Mental Health.

For the test, Darcy recruited 70 students who said they experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety and split them into two groups. One group spent two weeks chatting with Woebot; the other was directed to a National Institute of Mental Health e-book about depression. Over two weeks, people in the Woebot group reported not only chatting with the bot almost every day, but seeing a significant reduction in their depressive symptoms.

That's a promising result for a type of treatment whose results have so far been tough to quantify — we don't have a lot of research comparing bot-to-human therapy with traditional human-to-human therapy.

Woebot uses CBT to talk to patients, and several studies suggest the approach lends itself to being administered online. A review of studies published recently in the journal World Psychiatry compared people who received CBT online with people who received it in person and found that the online setting was just as effective.

Alison Darcy. Alison Darcy / Woebot Labs

One reason for this, according to Darcy, is that CBT focuses on discussing things that are happening in your life now as opposed to things that happened to you as a child. As a result, instead of talking to Woebot about your relationship with your mom, you might chat about a recent conflict at work or an argument you had with a friend.

"A premise of CBT is it's not the things that happen to us — it's how we react to them," Darcy said.

Woebot uses that methodology to point out areas where a person might be engaging in what's called negative self-talk, which can mean they see the environment around them in a distorted way and feel bad about it.

For example, if a friend forgot about your birthday, you might tell Woebot something like, "No one ever remembers me," or "I don't have any real friends." Woebot might respond by saying you're engaging in a type of negative self-talk called all-or-nothing thinking, which is a distortion of reality. In reality, you do have friends, and people do remember you. One of those friends simply forgot your birthday.

"Self-talk is a part of being human," Darcy said. "But the kinds of thoughts that we have actually map onto the kinds of emotions we're feeling."

Darcy is quick to point out that Woebot is not a replacement for traditional therapy, but an addition to the toolkit of approaches to mental health.

"I tend to not think of this as a better way to do therapy. I think of this as an alternative option," Darcy said. "What we haven't done a good job of in the field is give people an array of options. What about the people who aren't ready to talk to another person?"

Original author: Erin Brodwin

Do you constantly pluck hairs from your head or your face when stressed? You might have a disorder called trichotillomania. We spoke with Dena Rabinowitz, PhD, founder of Cognitive Behavioral Psychology of NY, to find out what the disorder involves and how it's typically treated. Following is a transcript of the video.

Dena Rabinowitz, PhD: Trichotillomania is compulsive hair pulling. Where people pull out their hair either from their head, their face, or anywhere on their body in response to either a habitual need to pull, a compulsive feeling, or anxiety.

When people with trichotillomania pull their hair, they're often looking for different things. Some people look for the sensation. Some people like to see the hair. And some people actually will nibble off the end, the follicle.

The most common places that people pick their hair from in trichotillomania is their head. But we also see a lot of eyebrows and eyelashes. We can see arm hair, leg hair, and sometimes even pubic hair.

Most people aren't born with trichotillomania. It's something that can develop in childhood and adolescence, and it's usually in response to some sort of trigger of anxiety or stress.

Trichotillomania isn't dangerous, but it has some social consequences in that the more you pull your hair, the more bald patches and absence of hair you have, which can lead to social ostracization or criticism.

Treating trichotillomania involves a couple things. The first is we want to look at what is the pattern that people engage in this habit. Where do they pull the most? What causes it?

We often try to give people stress management, anxiety management tools, so that they're less triggered to pull. And then we work on something called competing response and habit reversal. Which is a way of teaching people alternate behaviors that are more adaptive to help them relieve their stress instead of pulling their hair out.

There a lot of body-focused behaviors that can be compulsive. What makes something often maladaptive or more normative is the percent of people who do it and the amount of interference it causes.

So lots of people will bite their nails, pick at a scab, pick at their cuticles. It doesn't mean it's a problem. But when you do it at a frequency that it causes interference in your daily life and causes distress, either because you're causing damage to the nail beds or you're doing it so much that it causes social interference, then it really is a problem. And it's similar to trichotillomania in that way.

Original author: Chris Snyder

Google has purchased podcast app 60db, which will shut down on November 10, Business Insider has learned. 

"We are thrilled to be joining the team at Google. We can’t talk (yet) about what we are going to be up to, but we are are really excited and eager to tell you more soon," cofounder Steve Henn said in a note sent to contacts. 

Henn confirmed the acquisition to Business Insider, but declined to comment further. A Google representative confirmed the acquisition and referred us to the startup's farewell Medium post. The price couldn't immediately be learned. 

60dB launched last fall with a focus on personalizing short-form audio for individual listeners. Personalization is a major focus for Google Play Music, the company's music subscription. 

One of the defining features of the app is a section called "Quick Hits," which is a feed of shorter audio stories. Although Google may have the ambition to be a major hub for podcast listeners, The New York Times reported last year that 65% of podcasts are listened to through Apple's built-in iPhone app. 

In his goodbye note to contacts, Henn said that active 60db users were listening more than an hour per day. 

60db had raised seed funding from companies including Kholsa Ventures, TechCrunch reported. Henn founded the company with two longtime Netflix executives, Steve McLendon and John Ciancutti, according to TechCrunch. 

Here's what the app looked like on Tuesday: 

Get the latest Google stock price here.

Original author: Kif Leswing