If you like buying special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) at $10 a share, you’ll love buying them at $6.67 a share. A Sober Look at SPACs was a study last year by Stanford and NYU that revealed “by the time the median SPAC merges with a target, it holds just $6.67 in cash for each […]
“Robots are stealing our jobs,” you’ll hear people say. This blanket statement fails to capture the nuances of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). If you take a shower after work, you’re probably going to be just fine. The two industries with the least amount of digitization right now are construction and agriculture. Ironically, both industries […]
After Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency (NSA) used backdoor channels to gain access to smartphones, webcams, and traffic cameras, people have become paranoid that the government is watching through our devices. The rise of sticky notes and cover slides attached to webcams is a testament to that fact. (Never mind the hackers […]
No matter how hard we try to follow best practices – diversify, don’t try to time the markets, use dollar cost averaging – we always find ourselves reverting back to bad habits. Of the 32 positions we’re holding right now, two of them we engaged in a bit of market timing on – Alteryx (AYX) […]
Drug development is complicated business. Medicinal chemists, many who have spent nearly a decade training in the halls of academia, are tasked with painstakingly synthesizing each and every molecule that could potentially have a therapeutic effect. These compounds need to then be screened in cells just to make sure they’re not just straight-up toxic, with […]
A reader recently dropped by to say that our content would get us on Howard Stern before it landed us a Ted talk. It’s compliments like that which keep us going and let us know our snark is set to an appropriate level. Sometimes saying things how they are is seen as being iconoclastic, and […]
While “Retail Apocalypse” would no doubt make a great sequel to the iconic movie “Apocalypse Now” – with Martin Sheen reprising his role as Capt. Willard, trying to navigate his way through the dangerous modern day Mekong of the American mall – the term actually refers to the collapse of brick-and-mortar stores. More than 100 […]
The way venture capitalists (VCs) look at business ventures depends on which stage they’re coming in at. American television show Shark Tank gives us a glimpse of what VCs look for in the earliest stages of a business – signs of traction, which usually comes in the form of revenues. “We did $700,000 in sales […]
Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created one of the first chatbots, which he named ELIZA. Weizenbaum modeled its conversational style after Carl Rogers, a psychotherapist who was known for parroting patients’ responses back at them. His hypothesis was that while chatbots could emulate human conversation superficially, they could […]
Technological advancement makes people uncomfortable, and artificial intelligence (AI) is no exception. It’s going to uncover things we don’t like, things we cannot explain, and things that truly impact mankind – maybe even all at the same time. How it can possibly add so much value may remain a mystery at times. For us to […]