SBF, Localyze, Smart Bras, Mother Country Radicals
I'm Calling Bullsh*t, Women in Tech, A Hyping Hand + Unplug from Tech
🔥Enough to be Dangerous
Talk tech, don’t code it, so you can talk about all kinds of other stuff.
Stay Savvy
Curated links and commentary at the intersection of tech, business, and culture.
I’m Calling Bullsh*t!
Do You Expect to Go to Prison?: An Interview With SBF from The Journal
We see purportedly “smart” people doing dumb, greedy, detestable stuff all the time. As a society, we need to stop propping up finance backgrounds, funding from Sequoia, an Ivy League degree, and/or “ex-[insert Fortune 100 company here]” LinkedIn profile titles as unwavering stamps of legitimacy and markers of genius.
This interview is old news now that SBF’s house of cards have entirely crumbled, but I’m including it to mark a bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear a master manipulator feign transparency while truly taking zero accountability for his actions.
One thing I kept reading over again and again when this story first broke was “SBF was a modern day JP Morgan, but now he’s looking like the next Bernie Madoff!” To me, I read JP Morgan = Good, Madoff = Bad. And I’m like wait, the robber baron?
Upon further investigation, the SBF/Morgan comparison stems from Morgan twice bailing out the Fed at the turn of the century, as SBF was doing in crypto before being exposed for fraud. So it was not a nod to his so-called altruism or Morgan’s lack thereof, as Morgan was still a ruthless monopolist who used exploitative practices to amass unimaginable wealth. So I suppose I read the comparisons wrong … or it just highlights the fact that SBF was never god’s gift to humankind however you cut it.
If you are in the dark about the SBF/FTX catastrophe, How Crypto Giant FTX Suddenly Imploded does a solid recap. And now that Gawker is back in action, you can read them talk way more sh*t than I have time to!
Women in Tech
Localyze, a SaaS for staff relocation, gets $35M as it gears up for US launch from TechCrunch
Localyze is a female founded and led SaaS company for employee global relocations and hiring across borders. I definitely saw that Series A money manifest itself into many an advert lining European airports last summer!
CEO Hanna Asmussen relocated to China with work a few years ago, and almost got into trouble not knowing she was required to register with the police upon arrival! Later, she recruited former HR leader Lisa Dahlke and economist Franzi Löw to start the company. Their SaaS for employee relocation helps streamline global mobility admin like visa applications, work and residence permits, and housing and banking assistance. Housing and banking when you arrive in a new country are a total chicken-before-the-egg situation, so amen to that!
What workers often don’t realize is that while they can technically open up their laptops from anywhere, there are legal and tax implications for working out of various locations that companies need to account for. Localyze aims to make this simpler to manage for companies and their employees.
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A Hyping Hand
The smart bra for detecting breast cancer from Techpoint Africa
Kemisola Bolarinwa is founder of Nextwear Technologies, Nigeria’s first wearable fashion brand. She’s also a trained robotics and embedded systems engineer who has developed a prototype for a Smart Bra Device that will help women detect breast cancer. The smart bra uses an ultrasound system that bounces high-frequency sound waves off the body to detect abnormalities like lumps and clots. IoT components and APIs translate the readings into actionable insights on a connected mobile app.
Bolarinwa says there is much work to be done before her prototype can be commercialized, and challenges range from importing materials to accessing adequate research facilities to funding. While fintech is largely having a positive impact across the African content, and Nigeria in particular has become a fintech hotspot, in 2021, 62% of the $4 billion African startups raised went to fintech software, while just 8% went to biotech.
I try my best to remember to do a “monthly feel”, but I certainly welcome a day in the future where I can do this more scientifically from the comfort of my own home. Til then, check out the Mayo Clinic’s guide to a self-breast exam.
Unplug From Tech
Mother Country Radicals from Crooked Media
The media snippets for this podcast focus on how it’s written and narrated by the son of Weather Underground leaders, and how he “grew up underground.” To me that is one of the lesser interesting things about this podcast.
In my schooling we always blew through the entire half century following WWII as if it were a blip on the radar, rather than informing the major events of my adolescence including 9/11, unresolved US racial and social realities, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. From this podcast I think learned more than I ever have about 1960s counterculture beyond bell bottoms and acid, and gained a better understanding of the predominantly white Weather Underground group, the Black Panthers, and the Black Liberation Army and all that they fought for and came up against.
What they got right, what they got wrong, and what we are still grappling with to this day.
In Case You Missed It
Last week’s Technical Underbelly: Pixels
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Up next week, it’s Stay Savvy - curated links and commentary at the intersection of tech, business, and culture.
Alice Egan, Founder & Educator, SaaS Savvy.
I teach B2B SaaS salespeople the technical SaaS + cloud concepts they need to sell SaaS smarter + talk tech with confidence. Learn about my online course.