Author: Björn Jeffery

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A Hong Kong VC fund has just appointed an algorithm to its board. Deep Knowledge Ventures, a firm that focuses on age-related disease drugs and regenerative medicine projects, says the program, called VITAL, can make investment recommendations about life sciences firms by poring over large amounts of data. Just like other members of the board, the algorithm gets to vote on whether the firm makes an investment in a specific company or not. The program […]

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Naspers’ astonishing progress is in stark relief to the plight of the New York Times, laid out in turgid, repetitive detail in the leaked 97-page memo, apparently six months in the making, that concludes with the breakthrough idea that the organization should “consider a task force to explore what it will take to become a digital first newsroom.” Naspers is so overlooked as a media company. If it was in the US then every single […]

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Just sit in a cafe — any cafe in San Francisco — and you hear stuff that makes you want to poke your eyes out. Founders, instead of trying to forge relationships, are getting into a pattern of expecting funding without much effort. After all, if it doesn’t work out, no harm done and there is an acqui-hire around the corner. There is an expectation that even if they don’t build an interesting product, they […]

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Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, […]