Posts by Liam Redmond
Interest Rate Hike Pushes the Fed Range to 4 Percent
The Federal Reserve raised rates on Wednesday afternoon. The Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 to lift the target range by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4.00%, an interest rate hike that ends more than three years without one. The vote was unanimous, which is the detail worth holding onto. A divided committee leaves…
Read MoreTalent Acquisition Software Meets a 244-Applicant Flood
If hiring has felt heavier lately, the numbers back you up. Boomband launched across New England on Tuesday, a new piece of talent acquisition software from Jeff Taylor, the person who built Monster.com and put the help wanted ads online in the first place. Taylor is unusually direct about his role in the mess. He…
Read MoreHow Founders Lose Control of AI Spend When Every Team Picks Its Own Model
Working with artificial intelligence is empowering until the cloud bill arrives. As startups and scaling businesses scramble to implement generative technologies, founders suddenly find themselves dealing with a quiet killer of margins: model sprawl. The product team uses an OpenAI API key for customer support. The engineering team requests Anthropic keys to generate code. Marketing…
Read MoreNewsom creates panel on AI safety regulation, suggests possible ‘kill switch’
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered the formation of a panel to come up with safety regulations for the state’s artificial intelligence companies, including the development of a possible “kill switch” for AI programs that go rogue. Newsom issued an executive order to convene “a group of world-leading experts” to provide a “guide” for the…
Read MoreAI Startup Funding: 5 Lessons From $81M in Seeds
Two seed rounds landed this week at sizes that used to mean Series B. TypeSafe AI and Noetive each raised about $40 million on September 15 and 16, both at the first institutional stage, and together they move the entry price for AI startup funding. You may never pitch DCVC or Eclipse. It still matters,…
Read MoreForever Young highlights opening day at new-look Belmont Park
Good things come to those who wait. Well, horse racing fans, your patience has been rewarded. Belmont Park is back! It’s been a while. Three years, two months and nine days, to be exact. On Sunday, July 9, 2023, Bold Honor won the final race in front of and under the old gargantuan grandstand. It’s…
Read More20 Companies and Over 1 Billion Dollars Later
Brent Freeman was 23, fresh out of USC and carrying a quarter million dollars in student debt, when he closed a $10 million deal in Dubai. He celebrated that night and the next morning he woke up expecting to feel fulfilled. Instead, he felt empty. “Full stop. Money does not make you happier,” he told…
Read MoreSmall Business Cybersecurity Lags Your Team’s AI Habit
Six in 10 owners now report staff reaching for public chatbots and writing assistants on the job, according to research Nationwide published Tuesday covering small and mid-market companies. Written rules governing that habit exist at just 36% of them. Read that as a marketing problem and not only a security one. Your team is already…
Read MoreAI Regulation Fight Splits the Industry in Two Camps
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang speaking Tuesday at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce customer conference, argued that the industry needs no new laws governing artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg landed on the same side of the argument this week. Both were responding to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who published an essay days earlier calling for the…
Read MoreICHRA Growth Pushes Thatch to a $1 Billion Valuation
Thatch announced $108 million in new funding at a $1 billion valuation on Tuesday, and every dollar came from backers already on the cap table. Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Index Ventures and The General Partnership all wrote again. The company sells employers a way out of the single company-wide health plan, and more than 5,000…
Read MoreOpenAI Valuation Talks Reach $1.2 Trillion Before IPO
Large investors have been sounding out OpenAI on a raise priced near $1.2 trillion, the Financial Times reported Tuesday, attributing its account to people close to the discussions. The talks are early, the figure could move, and the company declined to comment. One detail stands out anyway: investors started these conversations, not OpenAI. I know…
Read MoreTreasury Yields Hit 5% and Reset Your Cost of Capital
The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.04% on Tuesday before settling at an even 5.00%, a level the bond market last touched in 2007. Oil did most of the pushing. The global benchmark crude price traded above $109 a barrel, having sat near $86 only two weeks earlier, and traders read that as inflation arriving through…
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