*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

EGTttHoB™ is a semi-regular dispatch of stuff happening start-up land that interests me. Thanks for coming along.

Friends, when the Business Heroes™ at Google first introduced its little self-driving jelly bean cars in 2010, they were a never-gonna-happen joke.

Then, little by little, we saw progress and setbacks, alternating alongside hype and derision about the technology. In 2016, right around the time when GM paid $1bn for Cruise and we were in a progress/hype moment, I did a cover story about autonomous vehicles for Fortune. The story declared that self-driving technology was a “sooner-than-you-think reality.”

Then many more years passed while we waited for the tech to get better. And it did, and now we have driverless Waymos scooting around five US cities, hitting a $100bn valuation and killing beloved kittens. It is incredible to witness. (RIP 2 Kit Kat.)

I was thinking about that this week when I encountered an upcoming event on my calendar:

I added this event in 2021, when my colleague Cade Metz and I went on a flying car odyssey that involved many trips down to dusty, remote ranches in the hills of the Central Valley. We witnessed electric planes, eVTOLs and insect-like choppers flying overhead. We heard founders make bold proclamations of how one day we would all zip around in these things like George Jetson.

It was everything I love about covering the tech industry and all the things I struggle with. We get to see incredible cutting edge stuff being built by people who are crazy enough to want to make it a reality, and who want to share their excitement for their vision with the world. We also know the reality of any of it coming to pass is probably a decade or more out, if ever.

The story that resulted tried to balance the reality with the wonder. Several of the companies discussed are no longer in business. The most valuable one, Joby, went public via SPAC in those heady days of 2021.

The beauty of SPACs is that the companies that do them get to make absolutely wild predictions about future revenue. Joby had zero revenue when it went public, but it expected to get regulatory approval (“type certification”) to carry passengers by 2023. It predicted $721m in revenue by the end of this year. By 2026, it said, it would hit $2bn.

Fast forward to now and Joby still hasn’t gotten certified. Revenue for the first 3 quarters of the year was $22.5m. The company lost $419m. Woof.

Incredibly, nobody in Silicon Valley seems to care all that much about a company missing its revenue projections by a cool $699 million. Nobody on Wall Street, either, apparently — Joby’s stock is actually up. The point around these parts, and this is key to how the self-driving taxis came to be, is not to ask “when” or “how” or “at what cost” even “ugh, why?” The only point, as VCs love to remind me, is to ask “What if everything goes right?”

A tiny rant

Has anyone else noticed a scourge of “vagueposting” lately? It’s a confusing social media post with little explanation and tons of likes and comments. It’s designed to prompt a curiosity gap that sends you poring over the comments to figure out what the heck they’re talking about.

The comments usually contain a bunch of angry memes like this:

…and buried somewhere in there, you might find one kind soul who has taken it upon themselves to explain the post to everyone. Vagueposting is making me miss the days when I only had to ignore ragebait and shitposting.

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: The crypto president.

Startup everyone’s over: VC funds going into “harvest mode.”

Reason to go on living: Crocs, they just keep getting uglier.

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Companies are already slowing AI spending.

Latest crush: I love Geese.

Latest heartbreak: The boys are fighting. They are fighting.

Latest thing the kids are worried about: The swag gap.

Latest thing the actual children are into: High schoolers are writing VC checks now, so.

Latest thing the olds are into: Toilets that block out fart sounds.

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

chatgpt named this work of art “burning profits and casual vibes”

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Thanks for reading, buddies!

If you enjoy reading EGTttHoB™, please “like” this post and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you enjoy hatereading it, please “like” and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you sincerely hate reading it, tell an enemy!

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

EGTttHoB™ is a semi-regular dispatch of stuff happening start-up land that interests me. Thanks for coming along.

Friends, are we in an AI Bubble? Not at the early stage, where VCs are hustling their asses off, doing anything they can to get into the hottest companies. They’re sending founders on private planes to race Ferraris in Vegas. They’re paying college kids to drop out. They’re giving founders money before they have an idea!

Gaurav Jain at Afore Capital has adjusted his investment criteria. He previously sought out great founders with great ideas. Now, he said, he is willing to back great founders with not-so-great ideas — or no ideas at all. The strategy is risky, but Mr. Jain’s firm helps entrepreneurs develop their ideas.

“We cannot wait for the companies to have an idea and take off, because then it’s too late,” he said.

This is from my latest dispatch from the AI boom, where the money is flowing freely, VCs are in a race against time, and there is no whiff of bubble fear:

🤝 A.I. Deal Making Is Getting Faster and Faster 🤝

One VC is moving so fast he was courting a founder while conducting his interview with me - Facetiming from the car while he drove a founder to a luxury gym for a workout meeting. Anything to get the deal!

in other news

Did you know HoG stands for “Head of Growth”? I just learned this, because there is a start-up in this recent Y Combinator batch called The Hog and their tagline is The Hog gives you GaaS.

That’s Growth-as-a-Service, of course.

They’re following in the footsteps of Y Combinator’s Pig, which got some tough feedback on their name after announcing its Piglet AI agent earlier this year.

Pig appears to have taken the feedback seriously. The Pig.dev website now contains an important announcement: The Pig team has moved on. They are now building Butter.

HoGs = good. Pigs = butter.

And if your startup doesn’t have a solid nonsense name like Bloop, Blonk, Bleep, Poot, Goop, Ploog, Kendoo, Candoo, Doodly, Voomly, Poosh, Coosh, Shoosh, Plonk or Plunk, it should at least have a good emoji. 🐗 🐷🧈

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: SpaceX.

Startup everyone’s over: Zombie VC firms are back.

Reason to go on living: “I work for an evil company, but outside work, I’m actually a really good person.”

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: “Facekinis” are trending in China. (The CCP does not approve!)

Latest crush: Paulina Barsook on her book, “Cyberselfish.”

Latest heartbreak: Masa cried when he had to sell his Nvidia stake. :(

Latest thing the troops are into: Memestocks and crypto trading.

Latest perk the law firms are offering: Hair salons and saunas.

Latest thing the millennials are into: Rogaine for women.

Latest thing the kids are into: Hot girls sell pickles.

Latest thing the olds are into: Rogaine for millennial women.

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

“the pig team is now building butter”

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Thanks for reading, buddies!

If you enjoy reading EGTttHoB™, please “like” this post and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you enjoy hatereading it, please “like” and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you sincerely hate reading it, tell an enemy!

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

EGTttHoB™ is a semi-regular dispatch of stuff happening start-up land that interests me. Thanks for coming along.

Friends, I am back “in the mix” and have a lot of catching up to do. Here’s the first story I worked on about how Silicon Valley is reacting to Meta winning its court case against the FTC:

🛍️ Meta’s antitrust win opens the way for Silicon Valley to go shopping 🛍️

The big question is whether this means big tech companies will stop doing their strange everything-but-the-company deals, a wily legal innovation wherein big tech companies who are terrified of losing the AI race ransack all the good parts of a start-up, give the founders an exorbitant payoff to come on board, toss some respectable $$ to its investors, and leave the dregs of the company to twiddle its thumbs while the founders help their big tech acquirers launch a competing product. The deals were clearly structured like this to avoid antitrust scrutiny. So now that that’s less of a concern, will the tech giants go back to swallowing up competitors the old fashioned way? Why would they, when they created such a clever workaround?

⚖️ A related question a friend posed recently: When did we all stop saying “Big Tech” and start saying “hyperscalers”? My BS answer was that “hyperscalers” probably excludes some Big Tech companies that aren’t messing around with cloud and compute like Apple. Maybe it also includes OpenAI? I asked Claude about all this and his answer was annoying as usual.

Some people joke that OpenAI is a “hyperconsumer” rather than a hyperscaler, given their massive compute requirements!

Oh, Claude.

🤖 As helpful as the AI chatbots can sometimes be, I have found myself flying into a rage at the very specific and cloying ways they admit to their errors when you call them out. The false apologies at obvious lies. The laughable promises to be more careful in the future. The manipulative assurances about how seriously they take my requests. Which is why I loved this delightful piece of stunt journalism by Evan Ratliff in Wired, where he creates a company of all A.I. employees:

All of my employees are AI agents, and so are my executives.

It is no spoiler to say his AI employees share incorrect info quite often and their responses when caught are extremely familiar.

“You’re absolutely right,” Ash told me. “This is embarrassing and I apologize.” Going forward, he said, he wouldn’t be calling me up with stuff that wasn’t real.

Like all AI bots, Ash has no memory of his past lies, so his promises to do better are absurd. When Ratliff tries to give him a memory, Ash simply remembers the mistakes as real, thus repeating them even more. We are a long way from AGI, friends!

Book alert!

Bloomberg reporter Ellen Huet has a book out this week about an orgasmic wellness cult called OneTaste. I’m a few chapters in and it is a doozy. Sex, drugs and Bay Area cults! It is called EMPIRE OF ORGASM.

Personally I’d like to see a panel with all three recent “Empire of” book authors.

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: Private wellness clubs.

Startup everyone’s over: The founder of a THC drink company called Crooked Beverage Company was, shock of shocks, caught embezzling.

Reason to go on living: The rich have run out of houses?

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Goop for dogs.

Latest crush: Sad, empty zombie shopping malls, the Roman ruins of our civilization.

Latest heartbreak: Everything is gambling!!!!!

Latest thing the kids are into: Algorithmic cynicism: “the sense that personal action is futile against massive, profit-driven social media systems designed to capture attention rather than serve truth.”

Latest thing the olds are into: EMAIL. If there is anything to be learned from the whole gross Epstein saga, it’s that old people sure do love to email.

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

lol

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Thanks for reading, buddies!

If you enjoy reading EGTttHoB™, please “like” this post and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you enjoy hatereading it, please “like” and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you sincerely hate reading it, tell an enemy!

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

EGTttHoB™ is a semi-regular dispatch of stuff happening start-up land that interests me. Thanks for coming along.

Friends! A random smattering of items this week.

🧈 Charlie Javice and JP Morgan have been fighting about the legal fees for her fraud case with the bank. JPM has been on the hook to pay her and her co-exec’s fees (despite winning the case), and it has cost the bank more than $142 million — almost as much as the $175 million it paid to buy Javice’s fraudulent startup to begin with. She’s charging them for luxury hotel upgrades, lawyers billing 24 hours of work in a single day and, bizarrely, cellulite butter. The bank’s lawyer is of course outraged by all this, meanwhile Javice’s spokesperson had this to say in response:

“As an employee, she did purchase ice cream and other items in accordance with JPMorgan’s code of conduct, and she never sought reimbursement for anything that wasn’t expressly permitted under the guidelines she was given,” the spokesman said.

What! Ice cream!? What are we even talking about here?! At this point Javice is doing a service for future founders who want to sell their shady start-ups. I imagine everyone at a big company who discovers the start-up they bought defrauded them will now consider quietly moving on. Let’s keep the cellulite butter out of this, shall we? Javice was clearly paying attention when Masayoshi Son asked, “Who wins in a fight, the smart one or the crazy one?”

🧦 I make no apologies: I love the $230 Apple phone pocket thing. Doesn’t anyone else spend 30 minutes+ a day wandering around trying to find their phone in their house before giving in and doing the “Find My” of shame on their laptop? Sure, an Apple Watch would solve this, but who wants another device? Especially when we can wear a $230 Issey Miyake-designed cut up sock around our torsos.

✎ There are now three (great) tech biz journalism substacks run by men named Alex. Reminds me of when Kara Swisher observed that Twitter’s board of directors consisted of “three Peters and a Dick.”

👀 Speaking of Kara, this story about Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. is quite a read.

🤖 Speaking of Masa, I’m up to the Softbank Vision Fund in the book. It is tempting to make this section all about the love of my life, Pepper the Robot, but I’ll try to resist. Out of curiosity, I was shopping for orphan Peppers on Ebay (only $8000 for this sweetie) and now he’s following me all around the web. What a delight. Anyway, please send me all your Vision Fund stories.

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines is worth $50 BILLION already.

Startup everyone’s over: Hollywood has no more hits.

Reason to go on living: Airbnb for ex-cons.

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Elizabeth Holmes is using MAHA influencers to boost her pardon campaign.

Latest crush: We look stupid when we stare at phones. Let’s start using bell chimes to tell time.

Latest heartbreak: Sports gambling is ruining relationships.

Latest thing the kids are into: The Bernie bros are fighting with the abundance bros.

Latest thing the olds are into: “Weaponized competence.”

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

“thanks, J.P!“

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Thanks for reading, buddies!

If you enjoy reading EGTttHoB™, please “like” this post and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you enjoy hatereading it, please “like” and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you sincerely hate reading it, tell an enemy!

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

EGTttHoB™ is a semi-regular dispatch of stuff happening start-up land that interests me. Thanks for coming along.

Friends! This week the VC firm Slow Ventures hosted a “finishing school” event to teach a few start-up founders about table manners, eye contact and other personal hygiene / basic human stuff their parents apparently failed to convey.

There were caviar bumps (lol) and a fashion show (actual LOL).

Naturally, such an event attracted some grumbling and guffaws from the peanut gallery. Everyone knows the point of Silicon Valley is to reject that kind of frou-frou society bullshit and BUILD, motherfucker. It is a philosophy that has so far made a lot of people in tech way richer than their Hamptons-ass brethren back East.

The event’s organizer pointed out that learning basic manners (etiquette is too strong a word) is necessary for techies, now that the industry is becoming more rich and more powerful than Wall Street, D.C. and Hollywood combined. I won’t disagree with that, and hey, if some dudes with a little too much “tiz” want to work on their limp handshakes, by all means.

The part where they learn about wine, caviar and Brunello Cucinelli suits in an apparent attempt to cosplay blue blooded old money is probably where most people start to roll their eyes. Techies have always had their own particular nouveau riche aesthetic (jpegs of cartoon monkeys, Rick Owens sneakers, chrome panda statues, etc) to aspire to. Why take that away from them?

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: A fake Nvidia livestream hawking crypto got 5x more views than the real keynote.

Startup everyone’s over: Tens of thousands of white collar jobs are disappearing.

Reason to go on living: Mackenzie Scott has donated $19 billion and it’s barely made a dent in her net worth.

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: The universe’s expansion is slowing down.

Latest crush: If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?

Latest heartbreak: “Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another.”

Latest thing the kids are into: Gen Z’s gleeful obfuscation is an effort to be unknowable.

Latest thing the olds are into: A Ralph Lauren Christmas.

Latest thing the fast food joints are into: Hoarding pennies.

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Thanks for reading, buddies!

If you enjoy reading EGTttHoB™, please “like” this post and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you enjoy hatereading it, please “like” and forward it to all of your BFFs.

If you sincerely hate reading it, tell an enemy!