That Was The Week That Was The Week

A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week includes a collection of my selected readings on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I selected the articles because they are of interest to me. The selections often include things I entirely disagree with. But they express common opinions, or they provoke me to think. The articles are sometimes long snippets to convey why they are of interest. Click on the headline, contents link or the ‘More’ link at the bottom of each piece to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video below.
Congratulations to this week’s chosen creators: @TechCrunch, @Apple, @emroth08, @coryweinberg, @mariogabriele, @peterwalker99, @KevinDowd, @jessicaAhamlin, @stephistacey, @ttunguz, @annatonger, @markstenberg3, @EllisItems, @TaraCopp, @ingridlunden, @Jack, @karissabe, @psawers, @Haje, @mikebutcher, @tim_cook
Contents
* Editorial: Hating the Future
* Essays of the Week
* Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting
* Apple apologizes for iPad ‘Crush’ ad that ‘missed the mark’
* Milken’s New Power Players
* Ho Nam on VC’s Power Law
* State of Private Markets: Q1 2024
* The weight of the emerging manager
* Pandemic-era winners suffer $1.5tn fall in market value
* Video of the Week
* Apples iPad Video
* AI of the Week
* The Fastest Growing Category of Venture Investment in 2024
* Meet My A.I. Friends
* OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say
* Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships
* A Revolutionary Model.
* An AI-controlled fighter jet took the Air Force leader for a historic ride. What that means for war
* Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is
* News Of the Week
* Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter
* FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interest
* Apple’s Final Cut Camera lets filmmakers connect four cameras at once
* Startup of the Week
* Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall on the autonomous future for cars and robots
* X of the Week
* Tim Cook
Editorial: Hating the Future
An Ad and its Detractors
bet a lot of money that the TechCrunch writing and editorial team have had an interesting 72 hours.
After Apple announced its new iPad on Tuesday, the ad that supported it was initially widely slammed for its cruelty to obsolete tools for creativity, including a piano, guitar, and paint. This week’s Video of The Week has it if you don’t know what I am talking about.
A sizeable crushing machine compresses the items with colossal force, and in the end, an iPad can incorporate the functions of traditional items.
It's not the most amazing ad ever, certainly not as bold as Steve Jobs's 1984 ad, but it's in the same genre. The past must be crushed to release new freedom and creativity for a fraction of the price and, often, the power and flexibility.
Oh, and it’s thin, very thin.
I was not offended. Devin at TechCrunch was. He leads this week’s essay of the week with his “Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting” and does not mince words:
What we all understand, though — because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world — is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror.This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently to many others, as well.
He also makes the incorrect point that:
A virtual guitar can’t replace a real guitar; that’s like thinking a book can replace its author.
It’s more like a digital book replacing a paper book than the author being replaced. Oh wait… that has happened.
That said, a virtual guitar can replace a real guitar, and an AI guitar can even replace a virtual guitar—and be better. That is not to say there are no more actual traditional guitars. They will be a choice, not a necessity, especial

Contents
* Editorial: 
* Essays of the Week
* Video of the Week
* AI of the Week
* News Of the Week
* Startup of the Week
* X of the Week



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thatwastheweek.com/subscribe

Contents
* Editorial: 
* Essays of the Week
* Video of the Week
* AI of the Week
* News Of the Week
* Startup of the Week
* X of the Week
Editorial



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thatwastheweek.com/subscribe

Contents
Editorial: When is a Bubble not a Bubble?
Essays of the Week
The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
The Day the Music Lied
Weapons of Mass Production
China’s future economy
This Message Will Self-Destruct in 33 Seconds
1 in 6 People Will Be Aged 65+ by 2050
Venture Investing This Week
Global Venture Funding In Q1 2024 Shows Startup Investors Remain Cautious
First Cut - State of Private Markets: Q4 2023
The Investments Where I’m Going to Lose All My Money
Quant VC and What it Means for Startup Investing
Video of the Week
New Apple Vision Pro Personas
AI of the Week
Meet the YC Winter 2024 Batch
The 18 most interesting startups from YC’s Demo Day show we’re in an AI bubble
YCombinator's AI boom is still going strong (W24)
Bubble Trouble
Big Tech companies form new consortium to allay fears of AI job takeovers
News Of the Week
Apple Vision Pro’s Persona feature gets collaborative
Jon Stewart Plunges the Knife into Apple
Startup of the Week
Rubrik’s IPO filing hints at thawing public markets for tech companies
X of the Week
Mike Maples on Y Combinator
Editorial
I’ve taken to writing this on Friday morning. I put the curated content together Thursday evening, which gives me overnight to reflect. Usually, the title comes first and is somehow correlated to the content below.
This week, there is a lot about AI. The Y Combinator story in AI of the week is the story that the “bubble” will be challenged due to a lack of training data. In contrast, the story is that AI will remove so many jobs that the larger companies have formed a consortium to allay fears.
I also created a new section separating out Venture Capital. This is the week of quarterly updates from Q1. They suggest there is no bubble at all. Only Amazon’s multi-billion dollar investment in Anthropic stands out.
But for me, the question posed in the title is - When is a Bubble not a Bubble? - is not triggered by the AI stories. The Economist’s Simon Cox writes about China and its future in a newsletter and the linked article. He frames it well:
In 2006, for example, China’s leaders declared the need to “rely more than ever on scientific and technological progress and innovation to drive a qualitative leap in productivity”. Science and technology, they added, are “the concentrated embodiment…of advanced productive forces”. That ambition, and indeed that diction, sound very similar to the slogans emanating from Beijing today. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has, for example, urged provincial governments to cultivate “new productive forces”, based on science and technology. In this week’s issue I explore what those words might mean.
As Simon points out, “productive forces” is a formulation derived from Hegel and Marx. It combines technology and human beings into a duality that expresses how we produce things. Indeed, there is no pure “technology” separate from human beings and the division of labor. Productivity is the expression of both and the measurable thing.
In the Western enlightenment tradition, we use the word progress to mean the same thing.
All progress requires humans to invent time-saving methods to reduce the effort involved in making and doing things.
China’s discussion (especially if you remove the word China) is about building the future through innovation. It stands in contrast to the dominant discussions here in the US - Regulation, the dangers of Social Media, Immigration, Women’s Right to Choose, Guns, and even Climate. And a lot of pessimism around technology and science.
That is except for in the startup ecosystem. The dominant Silicon Valley belief system is similar to Simon Cox’s description of China’s goals.
Accelerated Innovation dominates the set of assumptions in the Bay Area. Why? Because AI, Nuclear Fusion, Decentralized Networks, Global Ambition, and the skills and money they require all live here. And their potential is real. And the

Congratulations to this week’s creators: @aatilley, @kimmackrael, @gruber, @mgsiegler, @cookie, @AndrewYNg, @sequoia, @mikebutcher, @marketsentiment, @datadrivenvc, @AndreRetterath, @rzhou186, @blockchained000, @lauramandaro, @rideember, @psawers, @affinitybyserif, @canva
Contents
* Editorial: 
* Essays of the Week
* Apple Turns to Longtime Steve Jobs Disciple to Defend Its ‘Walled Garden’
* The EU’s Share of Apple’s Global Revenue
* Apple EU Fine is Bonkers
* Marissa Mayer’s startup just rolled out photo sharing and event planning apps, and the internet isn’t sure what to think
* Video of the Week
* Andrew Ng at Sequoia Capital AI Day
* AI of the Week
* New study of unicorn founders finds most are ‘underdogs,’ and female founders are rising
* Do Hedge Funds beat the market?
* How to Automate Startup Screening?
* The Data-Driven Investor Of Today And Tomorrow
* How to Use ChatGPT to Learn Data Driven Investing?
* News Of the Week
* Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison
* Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment
* BlackRock CEO ’very bullish’ on Bitcoin as its ETF crosses $17B
* FTX Founder Bankman-Fried Sentenced To 25 Years For Fraud, Conspiracy
* Secondary Market Seeing Rebound After Slowdown
* Why Fewer Than 20% of Startup Unicorns Are Likely to Go Public Soon
* Startup of the Week
* How Ember is building an all-electric intercity bus network in the UK
* X of the Week
* Affinity Acquired by Canva



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thatwastheweek.com/subscribe

Lawmakers Ignoring The Law
In her influential 2017 Yale Law Journal article, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Lina Khan argues that the current antitrust framework, which primarily focuses on consumer welfare and price effects, fails to capture the full range of anticompetitive practices employed by digital platforms like Amazon. She suggests that the Sherman Act and other antitrust laws may need to be reinterpreted or updated to address these companies' specific challenges from an anti-trust point of view.
Khan writes,
"The current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy."
She argues that focusing primarily on price effects overlooks other ways digital platforms can harm competition, such as by leveraging their dominance across multiple markets or using their control over data to create barriers to entry.
While Khan does not explicitly state that the Sherman Act is inadequate, her arguments suggest that the current interpretation and application of antitrust laws, including the Sherman Act, may not be sufficient to address the challenges posed by Big Tech. Her work has contributed to a broader discussion about updating antitrust enforcement for the digital age. But the harsh truth is - she cannot use current Law because her targets are not breaking it.
The DOJ complaint that Apple is a monopoly (not a crime) and abusing its monopoly power fails if the Sherman Act is relied upon to judge criminality. Although the FTC is not bringing the case—it is run by Lina Khan—the DOJ is clearly on the same page as she is in bringing it. In July 2023, I argued, “Khan and Gensler Should be Fired.” The case for that is now even more convincing.
As Jason Snell from Six Colors argues:
Defining a “monopoly.” Before we get to some of the details of Apple’s specific anti-competitive behavior, it’s worth noting that this suit is charging Apple with violations of the Sherman antitrust act, which is meant to specifically regulate monopolies. Things that are legal for regular companies to do become illegal when monopolies do them.Part of this document, then, has to establish that Apple holds monopoly power over a specific market. Given that Apple’s share of the U.S. smartphone market is about 60 percent, how can it be called a monopoly? The DoJ attempts to square this circle in a few different ways: It uses revenue instead of unit sales, pointing out that Apple and Samsung combined hold 90 percent of the U.S. smartphone market by revenue. It creates a new sub-market, the “Performance Smartphone,” which pushes Apple up to about 70 percent of the market in terms of unit sales. It accuses Apple of attempting to create a monopoly through its various business tactics, which is also illegal.Questions I would ask about this approach: Can you add in Samsung, find a number starting in ninety, and declare something a monopoly? Is revenue share how monopolies are defined? Can you draw borders on a product category in a beneficial way in order to declare it a new market?Apple’s position in the U.S. market is certainly strong, but regardless of how you view its behavior, it will be interesting to see if the DoJ can make a convincing case that Apple is actually a monopoly, given the presence of Samsung and Google in the market. Jason Snell, six colors
Because the law does not provide a solid case against Apple, the DOJ is attempting to redefine the meaning of words to allow its case. This alone should be sufficient evidence that the complaint is a political, not a criminal, decision. The case will fail before a judge and jury, and Apple’s response indicates it plans to fight.
Renowned former journalist Walt Mossberg had this to say on Threads:
https://www.threads.net/@mossbergwalt/post/C41RaBuvrC0
And Steven Sinofsky - his article is below - gives a damning appraisal of the DOJs