Tech

Trader: Silicon Valley Bank broke. Silicon Valley is broken

Published

5 days ago

March 12, 2023

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There were many Silicon Valley accounts at recent days – Falling from grace of the mighty founders, the The collapse of the crypto industry And mass layoffs across the tech sector, For example but not limited to. But the stunning failure of Silicon Valley Bank, the region’s longstanding regular and one of the largest in the country, should finally force us to reconsider — and fix — how our tech industry works.

There seem to be at least two main reasons for being a “startup bank”. to fail. First, huge deposits were credited to their books in low interest securities, And they came from venture capital-backed companies burn money faster than expected, Just as VC financing in general has slowed. Second, the company and many of its start-up clients were beholden to a relatively small cadre of venture capitalists, and so SVB was uniquely vulnerable to running on the bank if those venture capitalists decided to withdraw their money at the same time.

This is it What appears to have happened.

Rising interest rates eroded the bank’s balance sheet, it did not have enough to guarantee a withdrawal of funds, and the attempt to raise capital failed – so prominent venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel and his founding fund advised their companies to exit. Word spread, and soon everyone was doing the same thing, fittingly enough $42 billion in withdrawal attempts.

As many have pointed out, the Bank likely had trouble brewing with the Fed raising interest rates and made its intent to continue to do so clear. And the bank should have conveyed its strategy to the account holders after the crisis seemed imminent, and so on. But even looking beyond the recent sequence of events, it should be clear that The “backbone” of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem It has long been broken.

If SVB is vulnerable to rapidly rising interest rates, it is because it caters to an industry where dumping cash on uncertain companies is a norm, and venture capitalists competing among themselves to see who can make the rains harder. It is an inherently random system, one that generates recklessness at its core. It’s a little surprising, in fact, that it took this long for it to collapse under the weight of all that hard-to-deploy capital.

“Build first, ask questions later” philosophy, “move fast and break things” spirit; Your mandate to grow your platform at any cost then try to figure out ways to manage it, long after the Nazis have moved in; the unicorn or bankruptcy mentality that says nothing is worthwhile if the market cannot fit into world domination; These are all by-products of a system starting with a venture capital-led model of technology development.

Venture capitalists make their money by betting on a lot of companies in the hope that one of them will become the next billion dollar hit – with investments of this size, nothing else is worth their time. So you have thousands of companies with young founders who suddenly have more money than kings, charged with turning that into more money than God.

Often, they park their new load at the SVB. As such, the vast majority of funds held by SVB are not FDIC-secured, because each deposit is insured at a maximum of $250,000—only 3% to 6% of a bank’s deposit is small, by some counts. The typical startup has millions tied up in there.

It is not clear if they will see it again. SVB assets are being marketed, and while some are optimistic that a buyer will be found and depositors will become full, this is far from certain. If he comes up short, it would be a nice indictment of what Silicon Valley financiers really value.

Remember, all Elon Musk needed to do was snap his fingers and call some venture capitalists and JPMorgan, and he had a deal to buy Twitter at an inflated $44 billion price. SVB is the economic foundation for countless startups and technology companies in the region. according to New York times, As of 2015, it “serves 65 percent of all current startups and many of the most prominent venture capital firms”. If you can’t find a buyer, whether in a larger bank or regional investors, or a conglomerate thereof, you’d rather tell us where the priorities lie.

Because if SVB goes up, it’s the aspiring founders and tech workers who will be hurt the most. Banking companies with SVB are Missing payroll due to collapse. People who aren’t venture capitalists don’t get paid for their work, and people who work around the clock towards a dream they believe in (even if they also think it might make them more money than God) lose their companies.

As for venture capitalists? Sorry, they’ll have to do it quick – they’re in Aspen, almost to the top of the ski lift.

Now, imagine a model where an investor who wanted to invest money in a tech company evaluated the risks of doing so, or where the founders were made to prove their technologies were marketable before they got a Series A of $100 million or whatever. Imagine a world in which there were few men no Able to decide among themselves whether an idea is suddenly worth the GDP of a small nation-state, killing an entire industry without a sustainable alternative – or panicking each other into bringing down a major financial institution. Utopia, I know!

It’s time to find ways to constrain these massive and reckless flows of capital, or at least tax them proportionately, to get the tech sector back on the ground.

Because the alternative is obvious – tech products developed and launched recklessly, with a constant risk of total collapse affecting everyone whose address is not on Sand Hill Road.

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Tech

Santa Clara County Quits Twitter, Citing Extremist Posts

Published

35 mins ago

March 17, 2023

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The Santa Clara District Attorney announced that he is leaving Twitter due to the rise in extremist posts yet Buy a social media company Written by Billionaire Elon Musk.

Jeff Rosen, who runs Northern California’s largest district attorney’s office, announce this Monday in his office Twitter account.

“As Americans, we have the freedom to vocally express our political views and strongly disagree with one another,” he wrote in the statement. “However, when this rhetoric crosses the line into hate, racism, and anti-Semitism, all of our precious and hard-won freedoms are undermined, and our democracy weakened. Every American has a moral obligation to fight hate speech. There are many ways to do this, big and small. Here’s one. : Quit Twitter. My office—Northern California’s largest district attorney’s office—is leaving Twitter.”

Rosen said he’s noticed an uptick in fanatical posts in the app.

“Many of these handles have been banned before by Twitter,” he wrote. “Now they’re back. This isn’t freedom of speech. It’s a cynical marketing strategy.”

musk Recover multiple banned Twitter accounts last month after polling users on whether accounts should be reinstated if they don’t “break the law or engage in egregious spam”.

many users He chose to leave Twitter After this decision, with some moving to the Mastodon app.

Rosen called on other district attorneys to follow in his footsteps and get off Twitter.

“We don’t need 280 billionaire characters or an app to say, ‘Blind extremism has no home in the land of the free and the home of the brave,’” he said.

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Tech

This stunning crypto character home is for sale

Published

2 hours ago

March 17, 2023

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Her first foray into the rental market was to advertise her landlord’s properties on Airbnb. She decided to make the cannabis rental themed, decorating it with ganja leaves and providing visitors with free joints upon arrival.

But she said, “He was kind of a brawler.” Visitors from out of town were being robbed in the neighborhood, and there were parties with strippers that annoyed the locals. In the end, I decided to close it.

Levi got into crypto in 2017, after a teenage acquaintance advised her to buy bitcoin. “I’m like, ‘You’re 17.’ Like what the hell, you know? And he’s like, ‘Download Coinbase! Buy bitcoin!’”

“I wanted it to be a bit extravagant and tacky, but in a good way,” she said. “You know, like, crypto overload.” She added that the neighbors weren’t happy with the influx of hard-line cryptocurrency, which was another reason she eventually decided to sell the place. (She said the city council contacted her about the complaints.)

As for her next project? It’s a pancake delivery company called boffins, which launched smoothly. The selling point is that the pastries are delivered by huge men in branded tank tops.

She said, “You know, delivering flowers on Mother’s Day is great, but imagine a hot guy bringing you a cake. That would be fun!”

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Tech

Amazon unveils a large virtual production stage in Culver City

Published

3 hours ago

March 17, 2023

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Monday night, the filmmakers, directors, and special effects artists ate shrimp and miso salmon cocktails as they strolled around Amazon Studios’ new 34,000-square-foot virtual production stage in Culver City.

Among them was director Reggie Hudlin, whose comedy “Candy Cane Lane” starring Eddie Murphy will be the first to be shot theatrically. He cut a red ribbon with oversized scissors to officially open the studio on Monday.

Stage 15, built in 1940 and once home to movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “RoboCop,” has been transformed into the largest virtual production stage in Los Angeles.

The renovated stage has a wall of more than 3,000 LED panels and motion capture cameras that recreate the outside world inside and allow the actors to interact with the environment rather than posing in front of a green screen.

stage Connected to the Amazon Web Services cloud ecosystem, so creative teams can access footage shot there in real time in multiple locations.

“All of these tech breakthroughs just allow for different kinds of storytelling that you couldn’t do before, maybe you couldn’t afford to go to this site, or maybe it was technically impossible. But now you can do it,” Hudlin said in an interview. And it looks and feels real.” “Candy Cane Lane” starts filming next week and is expected to be on stage in February or March. “Being able to work at home and having the world here in the studio means a lot. I can go anywhere in the world or to other planets.”

With Phase 15, Amazon is marrying its technology and entertainment businesses and expanding its economic footprint in Southern California.

Supported by the latest game technology, these stages allow filmmakers to cut costs by reducing the need to rebuild stages and give them the flexibility to shoot from anywhere with continuous daylight – no matter what time of day it is.

“All of this investment that we’re making is consistent with who Amazon is,” Albert Cheng, vice president of Prime Video US, said in an interview. “We’re investing in new technology and trying to figure out how to innovate around production with new technology.”

Amazon declined to disclose how much it spent on the theatre, which is run by a 20-person production team.

Planning for the project began in the summer of 2020, as Hollywood was grappling with production halts due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The short-term challenge was how to shoot and create content safely with limited travel rather than wanting to shoot in multiple locations,” he said.
Chris Del Conte, Global Head of VFX at Amazon Studios. “A long-standing challenge has been how does Amazon’s sound effects division support our filmmakers and equip them with the most innovative technology to create a world within shows that goes beyond the traditional post-green screen process? Virtual production set boxes for each of these challenges and we’re starting to tap into them.”

The studio began using virtual technologies for productions such as the science fiction series “Solos” starring Helen Mirren; and Chris Pine’s “All the Old Knives,” where most of the filming centered around a sunset dinner.

Virtual production technology uses developments in game software and goes beyond the use of green screens. Instead of performing against a static, blank screen, the cast and crew in a virtual production can interact in real time within a 3D environment projected on LED screens.

Walt Disney’s tale of intergalactic bounty-hunger, “The Mandalorian,” is one of the most popular and expansive uses of virtual production. About half of the first season of the Disney+ series was filmed against a 20-foot-tall, 270-degree semicircular LED video wall at Manhattan Beach Studios.

The ability to cut location costs and recreate scenes from anywhere has increased the popularity of the technology among filmmakers.

Streaming services have also helped increase virtual production as they seek to increase their content libraries, especially as adventure, action, sci-fi and fantasy are popular with viewers, according to Deloitte report.

Last year, the Vancouver visual effects company was bought by Netflix Scanline visual effects. Netflix shows that have used virtual productions include the drama “1899” in Berlin and the sci-fi film “The Midnight Sky” in the UK. The broadcaster also used the virtual production in Los Angeles for some of the driving sequences in “Blonde”.

Amazon’s virtual platform is also deepening its ties to Southern California.

since Advertisement based transfer To Culver City in 2017, Amazon Studios has expanded its footprint domestically, with nearly 630,000 square feet in the city, according to CoStar, which tracks real estate data. Amazon has also diversified the type of content it distributes, becoming home to “Thursday Night Footballand making big bets on original shows like “Lord of the Rings: Rings of PowerIn an effort to encourage consumers to purchase Prime membership.

Earlier this year, Amazon shut down a A deal worth $8.5 billion To purchase MGM, including the library of movie contents including the James Bond franchise.

There are more than 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide, and more of its customers are signing up because of the video content, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said at the DealBook Summit in the New York Times last week.

“I think over time we have opportunities to make our Prime Video business a standalone business that has very attractive economics,” said Jassy.

Amazon Studios’ success could also benefit Culver City, where it is one of its largest employers, with nearly 2,700 employees, according to the city.

“More content, more investment, benefits the city in the long run,” said Mayor Daniel Lee.

“Amazon’s investment in virtual production is promising if it takes off and Amazon becomes an industry leader,” said Ryan Patap, senior director of market analytics at CoStar Group. If successful, he added, “it will likely attract more businesses to Culver City.”

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