Quietly recruited top tech talent from the Google and Facebook. Obama want them to reboot how government works.

But why are they branded Obama’s startup? Will they last past this President?

Peaks:

1. “What we realized was, this could be a recipe for something larger,” the president explains. If the tech team succeeds, it could transform Americans’ attitudes about government.”
2. “I’m having personal conversations with folks, meeting with them, or groups of them, and pitching them,” Obama says. “And my pitch is that the tech community is more creative, more innovative, more collaborative and open to new ideas than any sector on earth. But sometimes what’s missing is purpose. To what end are we doing this?” As the president explains, he asks potential recruits, “Is there a way for us to harness this incredible set of tools you’re developing for more than just cooler games or a quicker way for my teenage daughters to send pictures to each other?” For the time being, at least, there seems to be.

#Apple #Google

Peaks:

1. Bitcode will free the company up to be far more flexible when it wants to make a drastic change, or at least implement a major new feature in one of its processors. It could mean developers get no warning before the next big shift, allowing Apple to keep it under a shroud of secrecy until the new device is already in stores.

Peaks:

1. The whole point of ANY device I have is that I can set it up with precisely the software I need, nothing more and nothing less and I can have it do whatever I ask it to and have it NOT do anything that I didn’t ask it to do. Apparently this makes me an extreme outlier as an electronics consumer. It’s a shame that more people don’t realize that they’re being sold a bill of goods.

#VC

Peaks:

• I know that most other VCs feel the same about this, so if you want to raise money, spending time on producing a great pitch deck is time well spent. I also think that creating a deck is a great exercise because it helps you think through each area of your business systematically.
• Don’t send your pitch deck to dozens of VCs. Do your research to find out which 5–10 firms look like the best fit for you and start with those.
• You don’t have to include everything in your “teaser” deck. I would recommend to include KPIs in the deck, since these are crucial for the investor to determine if you’re at the right stage, but it’s perfectly fine to leave out sensitive information like details on your product roadmap.

#Startup

Peaks:

1. “Every time I hear people talking about unicorns, I think “all hat, no cattle” or “another person living in the land of style over substance.” I’ve found myself blurting out, “F$&@ Unicorns!”* twice recently, including when I was on a panel at Stanford School of Engineering on Entrepreneurship from Diverse Perspective. (Yes, I get the irony.)”
2. “people don’t talk about what they’re making. all anyone talks about is raising money”

#Environment

Peaks:

1. The reasons that the poor living at low latitudes will bear the heaviest burdens of climate change are meteorological, economically, and geopolitically complex, but they all arise from an inescapable statistical fact: normal temperature ranges in the tropics fall within a narrower range than those in more northern climes, and so any deviation is likely to have more significant effects.
2. Summers in much of the tropics are already becoming systematically hotter than they used to be, affecting food supplies and contributing to heatstroke and death like we saw in India just this year.
3. A world in which the rich will emit while the poor will suffer is not one many people would want.