ipos

The Companies That Can Say What They Are
The clearest signal that a company is in trouble is not falling revenue or a bad quarter. It is the moment its founders can no longer tell you, in one flat sentence, what the business does. They will tell you what they believe. They will tell you what they are passionate about. They will tell…

The Map Runs Out Where the Work Begins
Give a person the chance to spend most of the workday on what they are already good at, and the odds they show up fully engaged jump roughly sixfold. The finding is old, replicated, and quietly ignored by nearly every organization that has read it. We nod at it in a slide deck, then go…

The Grown-Ups We Hire After the Fact
Ben Bernanke steered the Federal Reserve through the 2008 crisis. This week he joined the independent oversight trust that governs Anthropic, one of the handful of companies training the models that a growing share of the economy now runs on. A man who spent his career deciding how much trust to put into a system…

The Enthusiasm Is Not the Product
Every genuinely new technology arrives with the same small, loud crowd out front. First the innovators, then the early adopters — a thin early market flush with enthusiasm, willing to forgive the rough edges because they can already see where the thing is headed before it gets there. They buy the 1.0. They tolerate the…

The Machine Learns to Make Small Talk
The newest change to ChatGPT has almost nothing to do with intelligence. It is about timing. The update tunes the model to be quicker with a joke, lighter on its feet, better at reading the temperature of a conversation and matching it. In the release notes it sounds like a small thing — a personality…

The Agent Can Buy. It Cannot Yet Be Held To It.
A machine can now hold a card, choose a vendor, and settle the bill without a human hand on the transaction. Not in a lab. In production. The rails went live quietly over the last year — Visa and Mastercard each shipped a way for an autonomous agent to carry a credential and spend against…