California's Stealth Campaign to Kneecap AIOct 29
gavin newsom just signed eight bills that effectively turn ai into the most heavily regulated nascent consumer technology in modern history
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Antitrust Crackdowns Are Nuking Startup Exits
12 years in m&a at google and slack taught me that while partial acquisitions like windsurf's aren't ideal, they're often the only option in a hostile regulatory environment
Jordan Thibodeau
Jul 28, 2025
Monday, we published Dawn of the Shell-qui-hire, in which Railway founder Jake Cooper argues against the partial acquisitions trending in Silicon Valley right now (see: Windsurf, Scale, Character AI) — and asks founders and VCs to publicly declare "all or none" (if their companies are acquired, it's everyone or no one).
Today, Jordan Thibodeau, an M&A veteran (Google, Slack) and host of the SVIC podcast, pens a rebuttal: partial acquisitions like the Windsurf and Scale deals aren’t ideal, but under today’s FTC/DOJ pressure, they’re often the only option. These edge-case deals reflect tough calls in distressed situations, not founder betrayal. Before pointing fingers, we should let the facts settle, understand the constraints, and push regulators to stop suffocating startup exits.
California's Stealth Campaign to Kneecap AI
AI: White Lives Don't MatterOct 24
when prompted with thousands of hypotheticals, most models massively prefer white men (and ice agents) to suffer more than other groups, and only one model was truly egalitarian
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Wikipedia Declares Trump an AuthoritarianOct 10
a single editor repeatedly inserted the same "authoritarian" framing into multiple wikipedia articles, creating an illusion of consensus and shaping the record that now informs chatgpt and google
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