"We need ‘spiky’ people inside Sequoia,” said managing partner Roelof Botha when asked about why the venture capital firm is standing by partner Shaun Maguire. In a July post on X, Maguire called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani an "Islamist" who "comes from a culture that lies about everything." There was a sizeable online backlash, culminating in Sequoia's chief operating officer Sumaiya Balbale, who is Muslim, quitting over the firm's decision not to discipline Maguire. Here's more from @Techcrunch.
Yeah, I knew some lovely people who worked at Twitter too. And did you know they once had unfettered API access and anyone could create their own client? Some of us loved that so much we built things that helped legitimise them as an open platform. And then one day they just switched that off.
Legitimacy is gold to venture-capital-funded startups. They need people with it to convince everyday folks that this latest iteration of the same old rug pull is different. Until they’ve grown so much that they don’t need it anymore, that is. I guess we haven’t learned that much after all.
You want to understand Bluesky? Imagine if Google had invented email and scaled Gmail before allowing others to set up their own email servers, knowing that maybe a handful would and that they were large enough to make the rules ad infinitum. That’s Bluesky.
Don’t fall for the latest venture-capital funded Silicon Valley social network no matter who tells you it’s fine and no matter how many words they use to do so. Especially when we’ve had a noncommercial and noncorporate alternative for close to a decade now in the form of the fediverse.
I know it’s a low bar but can we please at least get it through our thick heads that venture capital funded Silicon Valley Big Tech does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
This is the Silicon Valley “startup” model. Startups are not long-term sustainable businesses or small businesses. A startup is a temporary business designed to either grow exponentially and exit (sell) or to fail fast.
It’s clear from this that Ireland should be stripped of the authority to enforce GDPR and, really, people farmers – and the business model of people farming in general – should be banned in the EU.
When trying to find “European alternatives” to US products – to avoid looking like a 🤡 – ensure that your “alternative” is not funded by US venture capital.
How did we end up in technofascism? Watch this talk I gave over a decade ago warning of the dangers of Silicon Valley and Big Tech and urging us to embrace alternatives.
An excellent article by
@AnnPettifor on how private equity has taken advantage of the modern state where she says capitalism now bears uncomfortable semblance to the Soviet economic system.
Save Social Media From Billionaire Capture: freeourfeeds.com?
"But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app."
I see the executive director and president of Mozilla Foundation as their technical advisors, no surprise. But it surprises me to have the executive director of the Social Web Foundation (Social Web Foundation) there.
Funny how, a decade ago, they called us “tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists” for suggesting such things and we were shunned by “respectable” folks in the web community afraid to lose their favoured status as Big Tech’s bottom feeders.
Did you know IBM helped Hitler carry out the Holocaust? Is it in any way surprising that we can’t do anything about Big Tech and toxic oligarchs like Elon Musk when even those who helped carry out one of the worst tragedies in human history remain unpunished? Should it come as a shock that the very same bastards are funding and pining for fascism today?
Folks, I know… I use Duck Duck Go also but remember they have venture capital. Enjoy it while it lasts (or let’s fund and build alternatives differently that aren’t temporary businesses with profit motives and exits but commons-owned institutions working for the common good).