Game Changers Silicon Valley

All entrepreneurs need an exit plan, an opportunity to see their company, generally through an acquisition with an established corporation. The difficult question is knowing when to sell, the terms of the sale and finding the right acquisition partner. This podcast challenges that assumption. It’s actually the buyer who is controlling the decision to acquire and the terms of the transaction.

Part 1 of this podcast explores the sequence of events for a Founder and CEO to take his venture-backed company to an exit. We start with a board meeting, where Ken, the Founder, and CEO is informed that a decision has been made to bring in an experienced manager to be the new CEO and take the company to the next level.

One much-overlooked area in intimate personal relationships is the destructive nature of narcissistic and controlling personalities. We see narcissistic, controlling behavior in politics, business, the media, and entertainment.

According to articles in Medical News Today, a controlling personality is a red flag in any relationship, especially in family relationships. Spouses or intimate partners are often subjected to this behavior in private, in the form of covert abuse and coercion.

Covert abuse covers all types of cruelty, manipulation, and harm inflicted on another person, whether or not that harm leaves physical scars.

So the question is: Why are we, as a society, not talking about this, not educating women about the behavior patterns that are predictors of violence in a relationship?

My guest is Ruth Darlene, Founder and CEO of Women of Silicon Valley, a non-profit company dedicated to helping women break out of a relationship dominated by abuse and coercive control.

On Monday of last week, Capital One announced a data breach affecting an estimated 106 million Credit card customers and applicants. This is one of the largest Data breaches experienced by a large bank. One noteworthy point is that this cyber theft was conducted against data stored in the cloud-hosted by Amazon Web Services. In the past, most cyber intrusions have been conducted against a corporate data center.

Capital One is just one of the many companies that have migrated to cloud services technology to improve performance, deliver software enhancements, and reduce costs by closing down dedicated data centers. But, the heightened complexity and interdependency of applications deployed in the cloud has also introduced some new exposures and vulnerabilities.

While attending the RSA conference in San Francisco this year, I had an opportunity to meet with John Dickson of the Denim Group. John explained how the migration to the cloud-based infrastructure is a completely new concept verses, how apps were developed five years ago. He also discusses the approach used to create cloud applications known as continuous integration, continuous deployment, or CICD. The sheer complexity of the many moving parts in this technology can lead to simple missteps in security, leading to a data breach.

According to a United Nations study by the year 2050, the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion which is 34 percent higher than today. In order to feed this larger, more urban, and richer population, food production must increase by 70 percent. So the question is given the limits of available farmland and water resources, how are we going to meet this increase in food demand?

Agtech Sector Perspective from Roger Royse, Founder Royse Law Firm:

Agtech is not just a movement it’s a revolution. We’ve had an industrial revolution we had an information revolution learn an agricultural revolution right now and as agriculture becomes a tech-enabled business and we’re seeing that come up in a lot of different areas robotics artificial intelligent controlled environment soil health as we were talking about earlier. So the thing that’s been driving all that. Are a couple of things in my world here in Silicon Valley. It’s really been the fact that the venture community woke up to this like I say about six or seven or maybe eight years ago and started investing heavily in this.

On Vertical Farming, Sonia Lo, CEO of Crop One Holdings

Vertical farming is as the name implies a stacked shelving system generally within an enclosed space with artificial lighting but probably the simpler way to think about vertical farming is that it is the transfer of electrons to calories or the storage of electrons to calories because energy is the single largest input and what that really implies is that for the first time ever really agriculture can be segregated from climate and geography. And so anywhere you can generate an electron you can grow food.

This type of vertical farming, that’s very dense, that can be liberated from climate and geography is something that’s a relatively recent phenomenon in the last six to seven years. And that’s been enabled by the advent of cheap LCD lighting and cheap sensors. The unit economics of indoor growing of food has really been enabled by the cost decline and those two input technologies.

Concerned about air quality inside an office or work environment? You could be getting lethargic due to the effects of carbon dioxide by re-breathing the exhaled carbon dioxide in your office. This podcast addresses the build up and effects of Carbon Dioxide, ( CO2) and how Artveola has developed a technology that uses specialized algae and Microfluidics to consume CO2 and produce oxygen. Air quality inside a closed office is emerging as a productivity concern.

My guests are Alina Adams, CEO, and co-founder of Artveoli and Rick Rasmussen, an angel investor and an advisor to the company.