Tech News for MBAs with Paul Canetti

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the 3 different parts of generative AI tools like ChatGPT: inputs, outputs, and training data. There are many new applications that will be built using 1, 2, or 3 of these parts.

It's important for us to understand what is possible. The whole internet is about to change...

– PC

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FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried have imploded, sending ripple effects through crypto and well beyond. But is this really an example of web3? Or is this just a classic case of fraud?

Technically, no, this is not web3. But do the semantics matter? The damage is done. 

I usually edit my rants down to < 20 min but I couldn't do it this week. SBF has betrayed us.

Is it possible to create a system where we are truly no longer vulnerable to these sorts of con artists?

– PC 

Wait 'til I get my money right

Then you can't tell me nothing, right?

– Kanye West

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The metaverse will not built in a year.

But it has been one year since Facebook rebranded to Meta and stated its intention to build the next phase of the internet. Let's talk about where they are now, and why so many people keep hating on them.

– PC

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It turns out that creative tasks are *not* immune to the robot takeover. Meta AI researchers have created a new AI that can generate video content on the fly from a simple text prompt. Basically, you send a text of what you want, and it creates a video of that exact thing. Film students everywhere, beware. 

– PC

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Welcome to Season 4! It was a big week in the world of crypto with the success of The Merge, in which Ethereum transitioned to a proof-of-stake network. As if that wasn't enough, Helium Mobile was announced– the world's first decentralized cellular network.

Buckle up, web3 is upon us!

– PC

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We end Season 3 in the same place we started: Meta's latest earnings report. Spoiler– it's not looking good.

Why is this happening? Is it general market conditions? The maturation of social? Apple's "bullying"? All of the above?!

"Oh hi lol"

Why? Because he had just bought 9% of Twitter's stock. Is this good or bad for Twitter? For its users? For society??

We shall discuss.

– PC

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This week I talk about two seemingly unrelated stories: a paralyzed man who is able to communicate using only his thoughts and the first ever basketball game captured through a new technology called volumetric video. 

What do they have in common? Both have to do with how we perceive and communicate our reality, and both represent a way to essentially bypass our normal five senses.

As I like to say, the future is gonna be weird.

– PC

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Substack announced its new iOS app that looks a lot like... every other news app. I thought this was a tool for writers to sell email newsletter subscriptions?

There are a lot of great business lessons embedded in their strategy, which is perhaps the hardest kind there is: B2B2C.

Also, I briefly touch on Apple's new product releases and the Biden administration's latest executive order on crypto.

– PC

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The war in Ukraine is an atrocity, and it has been a long time since there was a military invasion in Europe. There are a lot of interesting ways that internet technology is playing an outsized role in this modern age. Live images and video on social media, propaganda campaigns, and as we will discuss in this episode– the benefits of decentralized tech are being put into practice in this conflict.

Ukraine is soliciting donations in cryptocurrency, SpaceX is delivering internet connectivity via a distributed satellite network. And it has only been a week.

I have also launched an NFT project to raise money for Ukraine and a guide for donating crypto. Please consider giving. Links below.

– PC

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Super Bowl LVI was chock-full of ads for cryptocurrency exchanges, reaching over 100 million people who were all wondering the same thing: "Should I be buying crypto? And also, what is crypto?"

I thought this would be a good excuse to do a cryptocurrency 101 episode. What is a blockchain? What are cryptocurrencies? What is Bitcoin? What is Ethereum? Spoiler– I spend a lot of time on Ethereum. First, because it's awesome. But also, because it's a good example of how cryptocurrencies are often associated with a rich underlying project or business. (Bitcoin isn't, which actually seems to be the exception, not the rule.)

I recorded even more but ended up cutting out a bunch. It's just too much info for one ep! I am positive this will not be the last crypto/web3 related episode of this season, so hopefully this will give you enough of a baseline to have some deeper conversations as we go.

– PC

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To kick off Season 3 we did our first ever live recording, in front of the classroom of my Intro to Product Management class at Columbia Business School. We just set up a mic and went for it! Now everybody can have a taste of the classroom experience. 

I have to say, it was way more fun to record with a live audience of 80 students, in a big beautiful room at our new Manhattanville campus, instead of by myself, in a small office. 

We talked about Meta's record stock drop, Amazon's record gain, Apple's intense defending of its fully integrated stack, and how all three companies are trying to achieve verticalization, at scale.

Thank you to the students who helped to make this a successful experiment. Season 3 is off with a bang!

– PC

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Netflix, Venmo, and Roomba were all down for hours on Tuesday. Why? Because they all use Amazon Web Services. We are incredibly reliant on just a small handful of solutions to power our entire society. Is that a smart idea? What if the web3/decentralized crowd have a point... 

+ Some thoughts on Instagram's Senate hearing.

– PC

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We are going deep down the web3 rabbithole this week with a bizarre tale of anonymous strangers raising almost $50 million to buy a physical copy of the US Constitution, only to be outbid by an internet villain, and then in the end lots of people make a lot of money, completely accidentally.

I'll tell you the whole story through my own experience, where in the last few weeks I made a 50x return in crypto without even knowing I was investing in the first place. 🤔💸

– PC

How the times have changed! It used to be you couldn't raise a seed round without some traction– now you can go public. Rivian, the company creating "electric adventure vehicles", just had one of the biggest public offerings in history. We will dive into how a company that doesn't even have a business yet could be valued at over $100 billion, electric vehicles generally, and the macro trends around speculative trading.

– PC

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Oh Twitter, my beloved Twitter. User growth has almost stalled, but revenue growth is still going strong– and now, for the first time, a major social network has a SaaS subscription product available to its users. Twitter Blue is $2.99/mo and represents not only a new revenue channel for Twitter, but perhaps a new model for social products altogether.

Also, we'll kick things off with a bunch of metaverse-related announcements from this week.

– PC

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My favorite shoe brand IPOed this week to much fanfare, and its success says a lot about the state of enabling technology platforms like Shopify, which Allbirds is built upon.

We also breeze through a couple of other headlines about the new laser eyed major of NYC and Airbnb's blowout quarter. And, I couldn't help myself, so I had a couple more things to say about Meta.

– PC 

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There is no Facebook, only... Meta. 

Mark Zuckerberg has laid out a longterm vision for his company in a way that most public CEOs wouldn't dare– and if he pulls it off, Meta has the potential to be much bigger and even more influential than Facebook ever was.

We'll dig in on what was announced and what it means for the future of the internet.

– PC

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The fall semester is in session, and we're back for Season 2! 

I talk a bit about what to expect this season, what I've been up to over the summer (spoiler: a lot), and we will take a tour through the headlines from this week that set the stage thematically for where tech is going.

Welcome back to Tech News for MBAs.

– PC

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Tim Cook gave a rare and revealing interview on Kara Swisher's Sway podcast responding to Mark Zuckerberg's assertion that Apple is one of Facebook's biggest competitors. (Spoiler: Cook says they're not.) But what if their competition isn't set for the present, but for the future? Professor Paul Canetti goes deep on his theory about how Apple's defensive moves against Facebook are less about advertising and privacy and more about handicapping a future challenger for the next paradigm shift in tech: augmented reality.

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We do a deep dive on a popular but difficult to execute tech strategy that manages to connect the dots between many disparate customers into a massive (and valuable!) network, exemplified by new features from Slack and Stripe that were announced this week.

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A deep dive on Stripe, now worth almost $100 billion, Facebook’s moves into emerging markets, TikTok’s monetization strategy, and Uber faces new regulatory changes in the UK. Plus a new Random Startup You’ve Never Heard Of.

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Pandemics are the worst… unless you’re talking about tech. Reflections on a horrible year in physical reality that was great for software, the Roblox IPO (no pandemics inside virtual worlds is a plus!), Facebook moves deeper into the creator economy, Russia is pumping the brakes on Twitter, and Random Startup You’ve Never Heard Of.

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JAY-Z and TIDAL join Square, new privacy laws and the death of third party cookies, Netflix launches a TikTok killer, Instagram tests out life without likes, and a random startup you’ve never heard of.

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Special guest Seyi Taylor helps explain what NFTs are and why it matters, Twitter wants you to pay for certain tweets, Spotify launches a new ad network, Random Startup You’ve Never Heard Of, and more!

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Australia tries to bully big tech and Facebook fights back, Bumble goes public, robots take selfies on Mars, and Shopify challenges Amazon. Plus our new segment “Random startup you’ve never heard of”

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This week we got hit with the news that Jeff Bezos is resigning as CEO of Amazon, Apple promoted an executive to work on a topic secret project, and we go through an overview of earnings reports from Amazon and Google.

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A busy week of tech, and it’s still only January. Subreddits > hedge funds. Newsletters > tweets. Audio > video. Apple > everyone.

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This week we discuss two major funding events in the new class of car companies, how people are worried about WhatsApp's new terms, the latest on Parler, Nancy Pelosi's stolen laptop, and changes to the way you will shop at the airport (and in general).

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This week we discuss the fallout across the Internet as a result of the siege on the Capitol including the removal of President Trump from many major platforms, its implications, and what it says about how ingrained technology is in our society. Other headlines include OpenAI's DALL-E, Apple's car initiative, and the failed acquisition of fintech startup Plaid by Visa.

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