Some people are into the red carpet spectacles at self-congratulatory award shows where underfed actresses showcase costumes that we last saw in the 1960s movie Barbarella. We get our celebrity fix when Forbes publishes its annual list of the 400 richest Americans. It doesn’t hurt to dream, right? The methodology that goes into putting together […]
In our previous piece, The Global Impact of Cheap Satellites and Launches, we talked about how there are very few trillion-dollar industries in this world. When you’re an entrepreneur, a trillion-dollar industry is pretty exciting because all you need to do is capture 0.01% of it and you’ll have $1 billion. Take the $1.7 trillion U.S. […]
Last fall we sent one of our MBAs over to the Caucasus for a month to scout interesting technology startups, one of which was Krisp. We spoke with co-founder Davit Baghdasaryan who previously served time in Silicon Valley before deciding to address an extremely difficult problem that nobody has solved yet – the ability to remove all forms […]
Commercialized blockchain solutions are like high school sex. Everyone claims they’re doing it, for the few that are, it’s not as great as they say it is, and it’s only the teachers who actually know what they’re doing. One impediment for blockchain technology was the ICO debacle which fleeced more suckers than you can shake a stick […]
Unless you work in finance, you may not be aware of a fundamental shift that’s underway at the moment in the industry. On Tuesday, October 1st, 2019, Charles Schwab rocked brokerage firms around the globe with their announcement to drop all commissions for stocks, ETFs, and options on U.S. and Canadian exchanges – permanently. Within a day, Ameritrade and E*Trade […]
Developing a media brand takes a long time, especially if you’re bootstrapping it while everyone works a day job. When you finally start getting some momentum and brand recognition, that’s when all the emails start flooding in. Some are painful, like public relations people wanting you to drop what you’re doing and write about their […]
In the same way that Google knows you better than anyone, the way you spend money telegraphs the type of person you are. You can’t just have one drink, you only buy products that are on sale, you’re an impulse buyer, you’re thrifty when it comes to renting hotel rooms, all these insights can be […]
Based on some cursory demographic analysis of our reader base, most of you won’t remember when optical character recognition (OCR) first made its debut. That would have been in 1976 when Kurzweil Computer Products developed the first OCR program that could recognize any style of print. Called The Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), the device used flat-bed scanners, and text-to-speech synthesis […]
In the past year, we’ve looked at various ways alternative data can be used for investing, from satellite imagery that forecasts metal prices to predicting geopolitical risk between the world’s countries. If you’re a large company of any kind, it’s likely that you have your own valuable alternative data laying around. A company called Eagle Alpha […]
Warren Buffet’s success can largely be attributed to the insurance industry, the engine that consistently propelled the expansion of Berkshire Hathaway since 1967. The premise is quite simple. People pay insurance premiums which then get set aside into a pool of money called a “float” that insurance companies can then invest. That float is a free loan […]
Fintech doesn’t have to be boring