Eric Schmidt has prodded the Pentagon for years to hurry along its software-buying process.

Today the AI tech investor and former Google CEO is more determined than ever to urge government decision-makers to pick up the pace, but not just when it comes to buying more software for the Defense Department.

Schmidt wants the government to implement his sweeping blueprint to fight what he considers an existential threat to democracy posed by China’s AI plans, an effort that could also bolster his own commercial AI interests.

He says the U.S.’s national security and economic leadership are dependent upon spending billions to procure smarter software, bolster AI research, and build the country’s computer science talent pool. And he says he knows better than the Pentagon itself how to remove the bureaucratic blockades preventing more agile use of AI by the government.

But at the same time, Schmidt’s venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors has invested in companies that have received multimillion-dollar contracts from federal agencies. Some of those investments and contracts — reported here for the first time — were granted between 2016 and 2021 while Schmidt chaired two influential government initiatives, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Work that Schmidt carried out at the NSCAI has made its way into hugely influential legislation: The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which determines government defense spending, contains amendments that reference specific recommendations of the final NSCAI report. If passed, it would authorize $95 million more than requested (and a total of $368.3 million) to fund the activities of the new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Craig Martell, who has publicly said Schmidt all but hand-picked him for the role.

Today Schmidt is among the most influential private-sector voices sowing a sense of urgent concern that the U.S. is losing a battle against China for AI supremacy, and helping lay the groundwork for a windfall of government funding for AI software. He also happens to be one of the most prominent investors in the AI sector.

"Dr. Schmidt has worked across many presidential administrations and with members of congress on both sides of the aisle – his work has and remains bipartisan and focused on supporting the country," said Tara Rigler, a spokesperson for Schmidt's new think tank, Special Competitive Studies Project. "He has been asked to serve on federal advisory boards to provide his advice on pressing technology issues before the country. In line with every other private citizen who has, and does serve on these federally appointed boards, he is an advisor, not a federal decision maker."

The threats posed by an AI-dominant China — from AI-supercharged cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to invasive surveillance tech deployed to monitor marginalized populations and development of fully autonomous weapons — should not be ignored. However, Schmidt’s proposed solution hinges on allocating massive government spending to unregulated AI, some of which could benefit companies he has connections to or directly invests in.

“Conflict of interest [concerns are] right at the center of this — not only with his venture investments,” said Merve Hickok, senior research director and chairwoman of the board for the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a nonprofit AI policy and human rights watchdog.

In response, Rigler said that Schmidt had “complied with all Federal ethics requirements during his service on the DIB and NSCAI.”

To assist in disseminating his ideas in Washington, Schmidt has cultivated a cadre of influential insiders. “When I hear people who know, like Eric, talking about the race with China on the technological side, we’d better get our act together,” former Secretary of State and frequent media commentator Condoleezza Rice said at a D.C. event held in September by SCSP.

Schmidt has spread his message for years among people with direct influence over national security policy and spending.

“Without some type of unified, broad adoption of an AI foundation for the entire department, DOD will soon reach a tipping point after which it will be unable to catch up to its competitors,” Schmidt said in 2018 while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee. Schmidt spoke in a personal capacity, but was chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board and on Alphabet’s board at the time.

A key influencer in Schmidt’s inner circle, Ylli Bajraktari, believes China has told the world exactly how much time its adversaries have to win the AI race. A member of the White House National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee and the CEO of SCSP, he cites a 2017 policy document that stated the Chinese government’s goal of achieving major AI breakthroughs by 2025 and leading AI by 2030.

“We only have one budget cycle to get this right between now and 2025,” Bajraktari told Protocol. SCSP, which got underway in October 2021, is designed to sunset in March 2025 in the hopes of compelling time-sensitive results.

People like Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing Silicon Valley, are listening. “Now, the problem is that China, as Eric Schmidt says, does one of these Chips Acts every year,” Khanna, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said in a Washington Post Live talk in October, suggesting the recently passed Chips Act may not do enough to counteract China’s tech investments.

Influencing policy and funding companies with government contracts

Schmidt stands to benefit from the dissemination of his message. He has taken part in investing more than $2 billion in AI-focused companies, according to data provided to Protocol from analyst firm CB Insights and presented in detail here for the first time.

To combat China’s AI prowess, the NSCAI called on the federal government to prioritize AI and other emerging technologies at the Defense Department, and double annual non-defense funding for AI research and development to $32 billion per year by 2026.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google — seen here at the White House in 2009 — still owns stock in Google parent company Alphabet and has invested in its AI-related spinoffs. Google Cloud stands to benefit from federal investments propping up AI. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Schmidt’s VC firm, Innovation Endeavors, joined funding rounds in 2019 and 2021 worth at least $150 million for military AI software provider Rebellion Defense, CB Insights data shows. While Schmidt led the NSCAI in 2020, Rebellion was chosen to receive up to $950 million in contracts from the U.S. Air Force to help construct its Advanced Battle Management System, a system that incorporates cloud AI and advanced data analytics to deliver tailored information to forces on the battlefield.

Innovation Endeavors also participated in funding rounds totaling nearly $40 million in 2016, 2019, and 2020 for Citrine Informatics, a company that uses AI to pursue the discovery of new chemicals and materials. Citrine scored Department of Energy contracts in 2015 and earlier this year amounting to $3.6 million to develop safe storage materials for waste from nuclear energy production.

Schmidt also sits on the board at AI and quantum computing company SandboxAQ, an Alphabet spinoff that has received funding from the CIA’s tech investment arm, In-Q-Tel. Sandbox and cryptographic security company Cryptosense, a company it recently acquired, are both on a short list of vendors working on a National Institute of Standards and Technology project.

Innovation Endeavors also has ties to encryption AI company Duality Technologies, which was awarded contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency while Schmidt chaired the now-defunct National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence — including one worth $14.5 million in 2021. Team8, a cybersecurity tech incubator partially funded by Innovation Endeavors, joined a funding round in Duality Technologies worth $16 million in 2019.“We have a national, bipartisan priority to win in establishing technology platforms for the globe that we invent, that we drive, that we make money from,” Schmidt, whose representatives declined requests for him to be interviewed for this story, said at the September SCSP event.

Schmidt still owns stock in Google parent company Alphabet and has invested in its AI-related spinoffs. As a major provider of cloud computing power and AI tools, Google Cloud stands to benefit from federal investments propping up AI.

Bajraktari, who served as the NSCAI’s executive director while Schmidt chaired the commission, which sunsetted in 2021, suggested Schmidt’s investments are an acceptable, even necessary part of the U.S. government’s integration with the private tech sector — which must happen if America is to prevail in its competition with China.

“I understand the optics of how this looks, but let’s be realistic,” Bajraktari said. “How do we stay ahead and compete against China if we’re not able to utilize our private sector’s expertise and knowledge and advantages in this space?”

Bajraktari added that the NSCAI’s recommendations to Congress were “all high-level recommendations,” rather than suggestions promoting particular companies, products, or services. “None of them advocate for anything in particular, let alone telling DOD you should use this cloud or that algorithm or that thing,” he said.

While keynoting the SCSP event in September, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said he wanted advice from Schmidt’s tech industry cohort. “What we also need from the private sector is to tell us, ‘Hey, you guys are missing things we’re seeing and you’re behind the curve, and here’s how we can help you get ahead of the curve,’” Sullivan said during his speech.

Schmidt also has the ears of top executive and legislative branch officials controlling federal policy and purse strings. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — all Democrats — spoke at the SCSP event.

This year alone, Schmidt gave $1.15 million to Democratic candidates and party organizations, including $365,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $250,000 to the Senate Majority PAC, and $50,000 to the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund, according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by Protocol. Some of Schmidt’s political donations this year came in the form of data and analytics technology and services rather than cash.

A Cold War template for an AI future

While pushing his AI agenda, Schmidt visited Ukraine in September, and perceived the country’s rapid wartime repatriation of government data to the cloud as a model in tech agility the U.S. should adopt.

“Within two days [of Russia’s invasion], every piece of information in the [Ukraine] government was in the cloud out of the country. Boom — shows you how quickly you can move when you're at war,” Schmidt told the audience at the SCSP summit.

Schmidt has admitted fear can be a motivating factor in convincing government leaders to invest in AI research and talent to maintain dominance of U.S. tech businesses. “Whether it’s from a position of fear, or people are afraid of something, or whether it’s a position of leadership, I don’t really care how we get there,” he told an audience at the Center for a New American Security’s Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Summit in 2017.

He’s also looking to the Cold War for inspiration. The think tank Schmidt bankrolls, SCSP, is directly modeled on an initiative funded by the Rockefeller brothers. Launched in 1956, the Rockefeller Special Studies Project buoyed efforts to increase U.S. investment in defense science and technology research by reinforcing a key message it defined bluntly: “The United States is rapidly losing its lead in the race of military technology.”

We have a national, bipartisan priority to win in establishing technology platforms for the globe that we invent, that we drive, that we make money from.

On Jan. 6, 1958, a front-page New York Times article sounded a dire warning: “Unless the United States acts immediately, military superiority — and with it the world balance of power — will shift within two years to the Soviet bloc, a Rockefeller Fund report warned yesterday.”

The cure to preventing further Soviet advancement, the article stated, was a $3 billion annual increase in defense spending recommended in the Rockefeller report.

Schmidt’s SCSP is guided by the same playbook employed last century: convincing government decision-makers to move faster by amplifying fears of the U.S. losing a tech war with national security implications. A 501(c)(3) private foundation, SCSP is a subsidiary of Schmidt’s Innovation Fund, which is funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt and the Schmidt Investment Fund.

“The Rockefeller Special Studies Project has a cold war objective to it as does the Special Competitive Studies Project. How can the U.S. stay on top, how can the U.S. protect itself and lead globally — that’s an undercurrent,” said Barbara Shubinski, a historian who directs the Division of Research and Education at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

On behalf of oil tycoon and presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller, the Rockefeller project assembled a wide range of panelists tasked with addressing the foreign policy, economic, social, and civic challenges that the U.S. would face in coming years.

The message of the Rockefeller Special Studies Project reached the coffee tables and nightstands of a curious American public. Content from its six panel reports was compiled for “Prospect for America,” a 1961 book that sold over 400,000 copies, according to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

“The organization of the Special Studies Project represents a really classic Rockefeller approach going back to the earliest days of Rockefeller philanthropy,” Shubinski said. “There was always a survey, always a committee, always a panel of experts. This was the way that influencers worked at that time.”

Reviving Cold War tropes gives Schmidt’s goal of garnering more government AI investment gravity it may not otherwise have. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

A foreign policy academic by the name of Henry Kissinger, who was serving as associate director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs, brought those influencers together in 1956. The Rockefeller project launched Kissinger’s political career, and he went on to serve as national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Kissinger, a polarizing figure both honored by the Pentagon and reviled as a war criminal, will turn 100 in May. He is a living thread tying the Rockefeller project to Schmidt’s SCSP. Kissinger and Schmidt collaborated on a book, published last year, praising the power of AI.

Kissinger recalled the project’s origin story while speaking via video conference at the SCSP summit, explaining that it came about because “[Nelson Rockefeller] could not convince the president to undertake the expenditures that the panel sought to be taken.”

The 60-year-old Rockefeller project was “a “fitting model” for SCSP, said Bajraktari, who told Protocol, “Towards the end of the [NSCAI] commission, Eric was like, ‘Hey, Kissinger really liked that model because he thought it brought together a bipartisan focus on a competitor in the ’50s.’”

The SCSP is molded in the shape of the Rockefeller project, featuring six panels of experts dedicated to foreign policy, intelligence, defense, economy, society, and future tech platforms. And many of the NSCAI’s cast of characters are now working at SCSP. Along with NSCAI veteran Bajraktari, Schmidt serves as SCSP chair. Robert Work, former NSCAI vice chair and deputy defense secretary under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is on the SCSP’s board of advisers. Several other ex-NSCAI staffers are now at SCSP.

Reviving Cold War tropes gives Schmidt’s goal of garnering more government AI investment gravity it may not have otherwise.

“Any time you create a new body, you want to think you’re fighting a greater fight,” said Jeffrey Ding, a China AI expert and associate professor of political science at George Washington University, who has spoken to SCSP staff about his research.

“The Cold War analogy is just so present in national security discourse,” Ding said, “that it’s easy to just attach a hook there. It’s more compelling than saying, ‘Keep the U.S. ahead even though it’s already in a good position even if none of us did anything.’ That’s my stance, but it’s hard to get people rallied around that.”

‘We can’t depend on government’

Wealthy industrialists like Rockefeller and Big Tech execs like Schmidt have dabbled in government policy influence-peddling for as long as they’ve had the money and power to do it. But Schmidt’s SCSP group also serves a special purpose: to sustain the efforts of the NSCAI, the short-lived government initiative he chaired.

The NSCAI’s final report, issued in 2021, put China in the crosshairs. “China’s plans, resources, and progress should concern all Americans,” it noted. The report depicted an epic AI battle for individual liberty in the face of a “chilling precedent” created by China’s use of “AI as a tool of repression and surveillance.”

In addition to boosting annual non-defense funding for AI, NSCAI wanted Congress to fund a giant AI research hub, establish new government agencies to cultivate computer science talent, and — of special interest to Schmidt — boost integration with the private sector to accelerate procurement of commercial AI software.

“I would like to take credit that we started building the urgency with NSCAI. Our mission — it didn’t end,” Bajraktari said.

Even though it influenced legislation, Schmidt and others worried some of the NSCAI’s recommendations would sit on the proverbial congressional shelf.

Towards the end of the [NSCAI] commission, Eric was like, ‘Hey, Kissinger really liked that model because he thought it brought together a bipartisan focus on a competitor in the ’50s.’

Thomas Creely, an associate professor of ethics and director of the Ethics and the Emerging Military Technology graduate program at the U.S. Naval War College, who sits on SCSP’s defense panel, supports Schmidt’s approach.

“Eric, through his foundation, decided to fund [SCSP] because it’s too important not to do this,” Creely told Protocol. “We have to come up with ideas and put these before the leaders and thinkers of DOD and the White House and Congress to get their attention that there has to be changes.”

“We can’t depend on government to make the investment. You’ve got to have people who have a sense of patriotism or preserving democracy and national security,” Creely said.

Language of conflict

In Schmidt’s story of the showdown with China, the U.S. is portrayed as a white hat AI hero and China as the AI bad guy.

Earlier this year during a panel discussion at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum, Schmidt referenced Microsoft software that automatically writes programming code, implying it would be inherently nefarious had it been built in China: “Now imagine if all of that was being developed in China and not here. What would it mean?” Schmidt said.

“If you’re going to play the game of policy opiner, it’s very difficult to take a measured stance on China,” said Nathan Myhrvold, who helped launch Microsoft Research — including its celebrated lab in Beijing, whose researchers have contributed to AI advancements for decades.

At the same time that Schmidt questions the ethics of AI made in China, he hopes to woo the people making it.

He co-authored an opinion piece in Foreign Policy in July calling for the Biden administration to build “Team USA” by creating a “million talents program” — a direct allusion to China’s Thousand Talents Program. Schmidt’s idea would eliminate a cap on immigration that he argued disadvantages the U.S. because it blocks entry to skilled scientists and engineers from countries such as India and China.

And he wants computer engineers from China to stay in the U.S. “If we’re busy educating graduate students from any country, and in particular China, unless there’s some massive national security concern, we need to keep them in our country,” he said during a Defense Innovation Unit talk last year.

We can’t depend on government to make the investment. You’ve got to have people who have a sense of patriotism or preserving democracy and national security.

But Schmidt’s nationalistic warnings against AI made in China risk fomenting negative attitudes toward the very AI researchers in China he says the U.S. needs.

Myhrvold questions the logic. “I’m totally in favor of U.S. support for this stuff, but the problem is when you obtain that by scaring people with warmongering and fear and the language of conflict, you have this real problem that you might shoot yourself in the foot,” he said.

Meanwhile, even as Schmidt has implied that AI developed in China is ethically flawed, he’s argued that regulatory guardrails for AI in the U.S. would impede progress in the face of China’s competition.

“Why don’t we wait until something bad happens and then we can figure out how to regulate it — otherwise, you’re going to slow everybody down. Trust me, China is not busy stopping things because of regulation. They’re starting new things,” he said during an interview last year. Schmidt reiterated his antiregulation stance in October when the White House unveiled a nonbinding “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.”

Eric Schmidt, government headhunter

Schmidt’s frustration with what he sees as bureaucratic ineptitude blocking AI advancement in the U.S. has propelled his aggressive efforts to facilitate staffing and financial support for key government agencies he believes need his assistance.

His tech talent nonprofit Schmidt Futures has served as a direct pipeline into the halls of government, including into the Defense Department’s new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), which oversees its adoption of AI and data analytics. Schmidt Futures served as a de facto headhunter, bringing Craig Martell to the chief role, according to Martell.

Martell shared the story while onstage at an October AI tech event, recalling his volunteer work collaborating with people from Google and Amazon at Schmidt Futures.

“The one and only thing I did for Schmidt Futures was help them evaluate the kind of person they want for this job,” Martell said, referring to his current job leading the CDAO. “We were talking about what this job should look like, and then about two weeks later I got an email from the deputy secretary of defense asking me to apply. So I’m pretty sure the whole thing was set up to be a covert interview.”

“Schmidt Futures’ mission is to find and connect talented people to solve hard problems in science and society,” a representative for the nonprofit said in response. "Dr. Craig Martell has participated in our programming but has never been an employee of any Schmidt organization nor received any compensation. Schmidt Futures did not make or participate in any of the DOD’s hiring decisions, was not privy to any of their deliberations, and we learned of his hire from public sources.”

When you obtain that by scaring people with warmongering and fear and the language of conflict, you have this real problem that you might shoot yourself in the foot.

Schmidt Futures also helped staff a key White House-level tech agency. When Politico reported in March that Schmidt Futures indirectly paid the salaries of more than a dozen White House Office of Science and Technology Policy staffers, the nonprofit justified the practice, noting in a blog post that OSTP “has been chronically underfunded, and for decades.”

“You have a number of people who are doing the revolving door between private and public sector,” Hickok, the AI policy and human rights advocate, said regarding Schmidt’s network. “If you’re using that as the revolving door to establish and deepen the relationship for future contracts, for future engagement, then it’s a huge ethics, conflict of interest, and accountability issue.”

But Creely, the military ethics professor, sees it differently. He emphasized the need for the military to rely on the tech industry and its leaders.

“I don’t know what his [Schmidt’s] agenda is, and I would not see a conflict of interest at this point in time,” Creely said. He added that some Pentagon insiders and watchers believe “we have to collaborate with corporations and academia and think tanks in order to stay ahead of our adversaries.”

Protocol data researcher AJ Caughey assisted with data analysis on this story.

Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. Today, a new report shows what founders are really paying themselves, and experts weigh in on how founders can avoid common mistakes when deciding on their salaries. Plus, Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter is “already a bloodbath.”

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

Founder salaries

“How much should I pay myself?” is one of many sticky questions that arise when founding and scaling a company. A new report from accounting provider Pilot shows how 500 startup founders are answering that question.

Know that 46% of founders are making less than six figures. That range was more common among bootstrapped founders, 69% of whom reported paying themselves less than $100,000, compared to 42% of founders who had raised VC funding.

Don’t be a martyr. Three percent of VC-backed founders and 18% of bootstrapped founders reported paying themselves a $0 salary. But founders should pay themselves a living wage that covers their expenses, whether they’re single and living with roommates or paying a mortgage and supporting a family.

• “It can be sort of a flex: How little can you take?” said Joe Du Bey, co-founder and CEO of Eden, a people success software maker.
• That mentality can hurt founders who don’t have as much of a safety net, have families to support, or are paying off student loans, Du Bey said, noting that it “was not on the menu for me to take zero” early on because he had just finished his MBA and had student debt.
• Startup fundraising adviser and former Y Combinator partner Aaron Harris said he’s seen some founders go into debt from not paying themselves, despite raising millions in funding. “No one forced them to do that,” Harris said. “They just sort of had the impression that, ‘I’ve heard I’ve got to starve to win,’ or something like that.”
• Paying yourself too little can create mental stress or distraction, said Susan Alban, operating partner and chief people officer at the early-stage VC firm Renegade Partners. “If it is, that’s a really important wake-up call,” Alban said.

Get help from your board. “Having a board makes this way easier,” Du Bey said. “If we didn’t have a board, I would probably feel weird about it, honestly.”

• Paying yourself can feel “like you’re taking money from your investors and putting it in your own pocket,” but boards can weigh in on salaries that make sense for founders and other executives, Du Bey said.

Remember that salary is only one component of founders’ long-term wealth. Only 2% of VC-backed founders and 6% of bootstrapped founders reported paying themselves $300,000 or more.

• Employees and non-founder executives will often make larger salaries than the founder, though there’s an argument for having other execs’ comp packages lean toward equity rather than cash.
• “Ideally you want your C-suite to have compensation that’s very heavily equity-based, so that their reward is directly tied to company performance,” said Matt Birnbaum, talent partner at Pear VC.
• At the same time, underpaying execs can hurt your ability to recruit talented leaders, which can mean “you’re going to end up wasting [investors’] money in a different way, not on salary, but on a subpar outcome,” Du Bey said.
• And don’t shy away from considering selling some of your shares at a funding round, Harris said. “If you ever talked to a financial adviser and you say 99% of my wealth is tied up in one thing, they’d tell you to diversify,” Harris said.

‘The bird is freed’

Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter is “already a bloodbath,” reports Protocol chief correspondent Issie Lapowsky. Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Thursday night and quickly fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, top policy exec Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.

Musk has reportedly already named himself interim CEO and tweeted Friday that he would wait to form a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints'' before reinstating any banned accounts. It’s unclear how he’ll run the company without several of its most senior leaders (though here’s one idea).

​A MESSAGE FROM BAMBOOHR

No two recessions are alike. In fact, eight in ten workers reported looking for a new job before the upcoming market shift. Learn what HR can be doing to ensure meaningful retention today and in the near future.

Learn more

Careful with the ❤️ reactions?

What counts as workplace misconduct when you don’t have a workplace? A new report from the sexual harassment and DEI training provider Traliant asked 2,000 U.S. workers and found that 27.4% of their leaders haven’t defined a workplace misconduct policy when it comes to hybrid and remote work.

• 57% of respondents said they would consider a colleague asking them out over email, video, or chat to be misconduct.
• “Flirty” GIFs and emojis — such as a kiss, a heart, or a hug — would read as misconduct by more than 55% of employees, Traliant found.
• One in five respondents said they wouldn’t feel comfortable complaining of workplace misconduct at work, with almost 60% expressing doubt that it would remain confidential.

Some personnel news

Anyone else having a bad case of Great Resignation whiplash? It’s hard to keep up with which tech companies are growing, shrinking, floating, or sinking. We’re here to help.

⬇️ Unions said that Standard General LP didn’t alert the FCC of planned layoffs connected to the private equity firm’s $5.4 billion acquisition of the TV broadcasting company Tegna, Bloomberg reported.

⬇️ Elon Musk planned to start layoffs at Twitter this weekend, according to The New York Times, citing anonymous sources.

⬇️ The African genomics startup 54gene’s valuation has been slashed by two-thirds, to about $50 million, in the wake of its CEO departing and the layoff of 55% of its employees, TechCrunch reported.

For more news on hiring, firing, and rewiring, see our tech company tracker.

A MESSAGE FROM BAMBOOHR

In conversations around pay equity and pay transparency, the stakes are high and the responsibility is stressful for HR. Learn how to confidently and capably discuss these topics with everyone from executives and managers to entry-level employees with three important steps.

Learn more

Around the internet

A roundup of workplace news from the farthest corners of the internet.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Here’s how execs can respond to it. (Chief)

What does the VC slowdown mean for young investors’ careers? (The Information)

How to build company culture when your team is remote. (Forbes)

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com.

Good morning! Companies are banking on ESG as a future revenue stream, yet there are no clear rules around how they report results. And that’s a dream scenario for software vendors.

It’s on Big Tech to save ESG

Big Tech has been quick to try to profit off of the surge in ESG investing.

But the effort faces a major credibility challenge. Now it’s up to the sector to help shore up trust in a concept that many tech companies have adopted as a key cultural tenet, and to persuade other businesses to maintain investment in it.

• For the last several years, opposition to ESG investing seemed like background noise as the effort matured. But as scrutiny over key aspects of the concept intensifies, the increasingly vigorous (and often bad faith) campaigns to discredit ESG and prevent it from becoming a new global accounting standard appear to be gaining steam.

• And now, as businesses float in the regulatory doldrums, the evaluation model aimed at analyzing an organization’s impact when it comes to environmental, social, and governance issues in the same manner as financial performance is in a precarious state.

That’s bad news for the tech industry. The sector has long embraced ESG reporting as a foundation of operations, or sometimes just as a marketing tactic. Still, the industry is banking on the maturation of the concept as a key future revenue stream.

• Unlike quarterly financial disclosures, ESG is not yet an established reporting standard for corporations, though regulations are coming. Without a common standard in place, there’s little ability to actually verify whether corporate statements are accurate or comparable in the same way that financial statements are.
• However, governments around the world continue to move forward with new ESG-focused reporting mandates and guidelines, a move that could add some much-needed stability for businesses, as well as for governments, investors, and end customers.
• But there’s uncertainty as to when that will happen, given the SEC has already delayed its own climate disclosure rulemaking.

Right now, it’s chaotic. The absence of formal guidelines hasn’t stopped businesses from broadcasting their results. But the lack of clarity around what, exactly, these reports and other ranking criteria are based on, along with rampant “greenwashing” efforts, has sowed substantial confusion.

Conservative politicians who oppose ESG goals are pouncing. And as backers work to restore ESG’s credibility, businesses are revamping or flat-out abandoning their strategies; investors are pulling back as the number of new funds plummet amid greater government scrutiny; and Silicon Valley is closing its vaults.

• A plateau in progress is not unexpected and may even be necessary to reestablish ESG’s credibility. But there are troubling developments that threaten to undermine the whole rationale behind the concept.
• For example, behemoth asset manager BlackRock is facing blowback from Republican state attorneys general and treasurers who claim the firm is prioritizing a “woke political agenda.”
• BlackRock and many ESG funds, though, include oil and gas companies despite the obvious environmental impact of their operations. Arguments to include fossil fuel companies more prominently have gained steam, though, as they rake in record profits.
• And with a possible recession looming, it’s unlikely companies will be able to sustain the same level of investment in ESG-related initiatives.

The current struggles are sure to wipe up some of the saliva Big Tech has drooled over the ESG surge. Software vendors will play an important role in helping organizations gather the immense amount of information needed to adequately report on ESG progress.

• That step will get increasingly complicated as businesses look to include data beyond their own operations into areas like the supply chain. Despite Big Tech’s own struggles with overseeing the procurement process, it’s an area where vendors like SAP and Coupa can play an important role. Overall, the market for ESG software is expected to reach $2 billion by 2030.
• And as businesses look to meet loftier climate targets, clean tech should continue to garner ample investment even amid a harsher funding environment.

IT vendors are trying to capitalize on what is a dream scenario for them: a vital cause with immense marketing potential that also promises to be one of the more expensive compliance burdens for businesses in recent memory.

• The information needed to evaluate factors like greenhouse gas emissions, for example, is stored in databases across the company managed by tech providers. Now those same vendors, as well as startups, are building platforms that can span those many storage centers, making analysis easier.
• Beyond corralling corporate information, Salesforce recently unveiled a new carbon credit market, allowing customers to buy what has become an important, but still insufficient, way for businesses to tout environmental progress.

While it’s unlikely that corporations shun their ESG goals entirely, declining investment could ripple through the tech sector, affecting everything from startup funding to how much Salesforce or ServiceNow makes in sales for new ESG-focused products.

The tech industry has long claimed to embrace many of the causes that are central to the concept of ESG. And now it’s beginning to profit from others jumping on board. As momentum around ESG skids, Big Tech has both a moral and business imperative to act.

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Ever since the pandemic put the evolution of everything in hyperdrive, marketers realized the old categories of B2B, B2C, and B2B2C were obsolete. Starting in 2020, our profession embraced the Business to People (B2P) paradigm. Business, fundamentally, is relationships among people. Even in the biggest enterprises, those making momentous decisions are still people.

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​The best of Protocol

Elon Musk’s reign begins. What happens next? — Issie Lapowsky

• Elon Musk’s reluctant acquisition of Twitter leaves several questions unanswered, including whether Musk will take on the CEO role, if “banned-for-lifers” will be invited back, and if users and advertisers will walk away.

Carbon Direct just hired its first head of climate justice. Here’s why that matters. — Michelle Ma

• Christian Braneon, the first head of climate justice at carbon management platform Carbon Direct, wants clients to understand that making a positive impact is about more than just pulling carbon from the air: Deploying carbon removal at scale equitably is crucial. By taking on the role, he hopes other carbon capture removal companies understand that, too.

With Chainguard, a team of former Googlers wants to fix software security — and ‘do it right’ — Kyle Alspach

• Over the course of its first year, Chainguard has emerged as one of the most promising players in the effort to curtail the massive security risks of the software supply chain. But the group faces a rapidly growing threat as more and more attackers seek to use the software development process itself as a vehicle for delivering malicious code.

Chainalysis’ Michael Gronager knows your crypto customer — Benjamin Pimentel

• Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, didn’t know a thing about crypto at one point. Now his company has blazed the trail for on-chain analysis — so much so, in fact, that he thinks Chainalysis’ work could have softened the blow of the crypto crash.

Alan McLachlan, an engineer key to the invention of the PDF, dies at 58 — Lizzy Lawrence

• Alan McLachlan is remembered by family, friends, and co-workers as being humble, talented, vastly knowledgeable, and technically gifted. Throughout his career he focused on firmware, essential software that allows a device’s specific hardware to function, and was essential in the creation of the PDF. He died at home in San Francisco earlier this month.

Trump wants to sway SCOTUS on Section 230. Soon everyone else will, too. — Ben Brody

• Through a pile of amicus curiae, or “friend of the court” briefs, former President Donald Trump as well as 16 Republican-led states have made their stance clear: They want the Supreme Court to remake both the First Amendment and Section 230 by allowing states to stop social media content moderation. And more of these briefs are on the way.

The CFPB’s Rohit Chopra wants an open banking ‘race to the top’ — Ryan Deffenbaugh

• The CFPB kicked off a rulemaking process Thursday to give consumers more control over their financial data. The goal, Director Rohit Chopra said, is to “ultimately give more leverage to consumers,” while also speeding up the transition to open banking.

The Bayonetta voice actor saga is obscuring an important conversation — Nick Statt

• The drama between voice actress Hellena Taylor and Bayonetta 3 developer PlatinumGames has been messy, with Taylor stirring controversy by deceiving the voice acting community and beyond about how much she was offered to reprise the main role. The deception overshadows the treatment and compensation issues voice actors face.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.

Britt Sellin wasn’t sure if she was going to retire in 2019. But between ambitious acquisition plans at Cloudera, parents who were getting older, and kids in high school, she knew she couldn’t “do another big year” as the company’s SVP of HR, she said.

Months after she left, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it a tidal wave of new challenges crashed into HR teams. As Sellin reflected on her next career move, she said she couldn’t get her “mind wrapped around another job for that amount of work.”

“You can be on vacation, but you’re going to get a call that somebody died in Brazil, and you don’t have a death benefit. Or you’re doing an acquisition and they wanted to let you know that it’s got to be done in 27 days — those 27 days happen to be over the long weekend you were planning to spend with your family,” Sellin said. “When you sign up for a job, you sign up for that.”

Many of the extraordinary challenges of the last two and a half years have fallen on the shoulders of chief people officers like Sellin, leading some of them to step away from operating roles or leave the workforce altogether.

At the same time, executives and recruiters say there’s a shortage of strategic, business-oriented HR talent prepared to take over as the next generation of senior people leaders. The dearth of great chief people officers is leaving companies scrambling — and in some cases, pulling in HR leaders from nontraditional backgrounds.

“Talented HR professionals in general are in high demand, and there’s just not enough of them,” said Brian Kropp, managing director at Accenture. “One of the biggest lessons that I think CEOs have really had is, great C-level HR talent can make or break a company.”

Pressure from the outside

The last few years have brought a world of macro-level uncertainty, shifting power dynamics, and political tensions, both within companies and in the world at large. Between the pandemic, the economic downturn, and social changes, HR leaders are tired.

“A lot of them have decided, ‘Yeah, it’s been a pressure cooker for a number of years now, and I need to step back,’” said John K. Anderson, managing director in the HR practice of the search firm Allegis Partners.

Talented HR professionals in general are in high demand, and there’s just not enough of them.”

HR leaders have been “literally dealing with the life and death of their employees,” Kropp said. Not to mention taking teams remote; hiring rapidly; planning for hybrid work when employees don’t want to return to the office; facing slow gains around DEI; and supporting employees through everything from social justice movements and U.S. political tensions to inflation, economic downturn, and war.

All of this is pushing senior HR talent to leave operating roles, either for retirement, sabbatical, consulting, or VC jobs. Greg Selker, managing director and North American technology practice leader for the recruiting firm Stanton Chase, has seen many HR leaders opt to go into consulting rather than another operating role.

“A lot of them are stepping away to do something else, taking a break for a year from work, whatever it may be,” Kropp said.

Pressures within the company

Traunza Adams stepped down as chief people officer of the software maker H1 after realizing her “values no longer aligned with working in corporate America,” she said. She still advises startups formally and informally, and while she says she “absolutely loved” being a people leader, she’s not planning a return to an operating role anytime soon.

“Once I stopped working, I realized just how stressful it was,” Adams said. “And how nice it is to not have people depending on you every day and being beholden to people and having to fight for what you feel is right.”

HR also tends to take an outsize amount of flack from employees when things aren’t going well — but when things are going well, HR doesn’t get credit, Sellin said.

“If people liked the culture, they would say the CEO and the founders have done a fabulous job,” Sellin said. “If they did not like the culture, their experience wasn’t good, they blamed it on HR.”

Fighting for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives can be particularly trying for HR leaders. Adams said she had to “continually convince” other executives of the business case for building a diverse team, making employees feel included, and implementing equitable policies.

“That’s just continually an uphill battle,” Adams said. “Industrywide, the gains are small, so you get tired of always trying to convince people of the ‘right thing to do.’”

The grass may be greener

People leaders aren’t just fleeing for more work-life balance when they go to other roles. Tracy Keogh, for example, left her role as the CHRO of HP last year after what she said was an “amazing” decade with the IT giant.

But her transition hasn’t been one oriented toward more work-life balance: Keogh said she’s working just as hard as the chief people officer of Great Hill Partners, a $4.65 billion private equity firm that’s backed companies such as Wayfair, Zoominfo, and Bombas.

“I started my career at a startup, so I have a sensibility around small companies and how to help them,” Keogh said. “Very few people have a role like mine, where they do the inside HR and work with portfolio companies. They’re usually dedicated to one or the other. I really love that aspect of this job.”

Keogh said opportunities are opening up for people leaders in private equity; though Great Hill was founded in 1998, the firm never had a chief people officer until she joined. Keogh is a member of a network of HR leaders in PE. The group recently had to break into regional chapters because it got too big to coordinate nationally.

Chris Tobin, who stepped down from his role as SVP of people at Intercom in July, also said his departure was a long-planned transition away from being a full-time HR leader within a company. Now he spends his time advising entrepreneurs and people leaders at high-growth startups.

Despite the “very atypical and nonstop” demands of the last few years, Tobin said he didn’t leave Intercom exhausted.

“I’m not burnt out. I’m excited to focus on this next phase of my career,” Tobin said.

Hunkering down

Not everyone said they’re noticing a postpandemic exodus of senior HR talent. At a certain point in executive careers, retirements and moves to consulting roles are to be expected. But departures aren’t the only explanation for the tight executive talent market.

Kathy Zwickert retired from her role as chief people officer of NetSuite in 2017, not long after Oracle acquired the company for $9.3 billion. Now she’s on the board of tax software company Avalara, and she’s seen the difficulty of hiring HR leaders from the other side.

Avalara struggled to find a people leader who was qualified, had led an HR organization before, and was willing to relocate to Seattle, Zwickert said. But she attributed the slow recruiting process not to an exodus of HR leaders, but to a pandemic-era hunkering down.

“When the return to the office started happening, people were deciding they didn’t want to and they were going to leave. That was a huge challenge for HR,” Zwickert said. “I think it made [senior HR leaders] more attached to their company. They just felt like they’d been through a war together, and a lot of them are just sticking around.”

Nontraditional CHROs

With strong senior HR talent in short supply, some companies are choosing to hire HR leaders who don’t have HR backgrounds — both from traditional disciplines like legal or finance, and other less intuitive ones like marketing.

“Marketing executives have really been thinking about the customer experience, and how do you create an incredible customer experience,” Kropp said. Marketing leaders can apply the same principles of customer experience to employee experience, “Because at some level, it’s the same thing, right?” he said.

Zwickert even recalled a head of engineering colleague who complained “just nonstop” about the company’s HR leader, to the point where the CEO told him, “Guess what? It’s your job now.”

Zwickert herself went into HR over 25 years ago after starting her career as a CPA, a skillset that she said always gave her a leg up as a people leader. A two-week crash course through the Society for Human Resource Management helped prepare her to handle technical HR issues around compliance, employment law, and EEOC and HIPAA requirements.

When the return to the office started happening, people were deciding they didn’t want to and they were going to leave. That was a huge challenge for HR.”

“I don’t think you need a degree or a master’s in HR to run that function,” Zwickert said. “What’s more important is the ability to listen, the ability to understand the business and what the business imperatives are, and then understand your role in that context.”

Adams said she supports bringing in non-HR leaders, especially from departments like marketing or customer success, to run the people function. The basics that execs need to learn are “the easy stuff,” she said.

But not all people leaders agree that executives from other functions becoming heads of HR is a good idea.

“I don’t think marketers or legal folks should be heads of HR, nor do I think HR should report to the CFO or legal,” Tobin said. “The companies who understand the importance of people, talent, and culture, and how it moves the business forward, are companies that have a bit of a competitive advantage.”

Sellin, too, expressed concern that leaders of other functions think they can run HR programs or departments without any prior experience or knowledge.

Robert David, executive director of the nonprofit Community for Strategic HR Partnership, has noticed rising leaders from sales, marketing, and finance moving to HR. “It’s a way to get to the C-suite. It’s a way to get onto a board, if that’s a goal in your career,” David said. “What used to be seen as old, stodgy, fill out the forms and get benefits, it’s really become strategic and tactical, tying in to all parts of the organization.”

HR ‘academies’ have faded

If CHROs are in short supply, it’s not just because established leaders are staying out of the job market. Some HR leaders say there’s also a lack of upcoming talent.

Compared to some other fields in tech, getting a job in HR doesn’t require much specific education or training, and as a result, many of the field’s professionals aren’t strategic enough to succeed as business leaders, Adams said. Rank-and-file HR jobs can be “really easy,” according to Adams, if you can master the basics of recruiting, putting in human resource information systems, running performance reviews, and ensuring employees have their benefits.

“That doesn’t make you a good leader,” Adams said. “What makes you a good leader is being able to think ahead, and being able to understand what the business actually needs, and being able to understand what employees are looking for, and what they’re going to be looking for two years from now.”

Most people leaders cannot manage the gray areas. They’re very black and white.”

This isn’t new: Over the last 15 or 20 years, the demands of people leaders have grown beyond administrative and compliance work to strategizing for the business. But the talent pipeline hasn’t kept up with these increasingly strategic responsibilities.

At the same time, there’s been a shift away from what Keogh called “academy companies” known for training up-and-coming HR talent. GE was one such company, she said.

Sellin named Cisco and Sun Microsystems — where she worked from 1995 to 2007 — as other companies known to have a strong HR function.

Yahoo, Intel, and HP have all produced an outsize number of successful people leaders who have taken leadership roles at other companies, David said. And younger HR pros are now staying at these companies for only a couple of years before moving on to a startup and learning in a “trial by fire” environment, he added.

Training the next generation

Making HP an academy company was a goal of Keogh’s when she was leading HR. More than 40 of her employees have gone on to head HR departments at other companies, she said.

“A lot of my people got recruited out. There’s HP people all over the place,” Keogh said. “One of the headhunters said to me, ‘We love your people because they can deal with complexity.’”

Keogh isn’t the only CHRO working to develop the next generation of leaders. Tammy Polk, the CHRO of Formstack, said she has her team do yearlong rotations through different specialties within HR: recruiting, learning and development, HR insights, total rewards, benefits and compensation, and HR business partner generalist roles.

Polk’s use of this “rotations” practice has already led to one of her reports being made a director of total rewards at age 28.

“Most people leaders cannot manage the gray areas. They’re very black and white,” Polk said. “They have to manage the gray areas and live in risk, frankly. If you can train people to live in risk, they’re going to be a much stronger business partner.”

Hello, and welcome to Pipeline. I’m Biz Carson, and this weekend I’ll be dressing up as Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” to take my daughter trick-or-treating for the first time. If you need a Halloween costume idea, I’ve included a few I overheard below.

This week in the startup world: investors are quiet quitting, the “Justice League of Security” forms a startup, and investors back their friends running for Senate.

‘Friends and family rounds’ come for politics

In a few weeks, two former venture capitalists, Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, will be on the ballot to run for the Senate. This isn’t necessarily the win you’d think for the venture industry, since neither have really made venture-friendly policies a main part of their platform or their political identities. But that hasn’t stopped the money flowing from Silicon Valley in support of their candidacies.

Both Vance and Masters are receiving donations from their old co-workers in venture capital. Call it a “friends and family round” but for politics.

• Masters is the former president of the Thiel Foundation, COO of Thiel Capital, and co-author with Peter Thiel of “Zero to One,” so it’s not too surprising to see that he gets a lot of individual support from those in Thiel’s orbit. Masters has received donations from many Founders Fund and Thiel Capital employees, along with well-known Thiel friends Keith Rabois, Joe Lonsdale, and David Sacks. He’s also attracted donations from other techies like Figma’s Dylan Field (a Thiel Fellow), Kraken’s Jesse Powell, Intercom co-founder Eoghan McCabe, Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi, and Atomic’s Jack Abraham.
• Vance is another Thiel acolyte who worked for Thiel Capital and then Steve Case’s Rise of The Rest fund before starting Narya Capital. He hasn’t drawn the same depth of support as Masters has from his former employers, but donors do include Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and former Facebook GC Ted Ullyot. A few folks like Thiel, Sacks, and Kraken’s founder Powell donated to both.

But to actually advance their VC interests, investors are putting their money elsewhere. My colleagues Ben Brody and AJ Caughey worked with the Center for Responsive Politics (the keepers of OpenSecrets.org, which is where I got the above data) to track some favorite money spots for Silicon Valley power brokers.

• “In general, the DNC is still pulling in the biggest totals from Silicon Valley, followed mostly (but not exclusively!) by Democratic candidates and groups,” Ben told me. “There seems to be interest, though, in these specialized groups that are either promoting politically adjacent causes (like abortion rights) or that want to get a particular type of candidate into office, like DigiDems, which raises money to pay the salaries of tech staffers for Dem campaigns.”

• Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee donated repeatedly to the DigiDems group, but it also attracted money from investors like Ron Conway and Chris Saccheri, LinkedIn’s original web developer. “Tech talent’s expensive,” said Kane Miller, the executive director of DigiDems. “These are folks with skills who command higher salaries in the private sector than what we are accustomed to paying in political campaigns.”
• Not to be left out, the National Venture Capital Association’s PAC is smaller in comparison to others, but it attracted more than $350,000 with 83 donations from a who’s-who list of VCs in the Bay Area. Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, Doug Leone, and Bill Coughran all donated, along with KPCB founder Brook Byers and Kirsten Green of Forerunner.
• Bigger checks went to more of the tech industry’s passion causes. A favorite was bipartisan crypto PAC GMI, which saw million-dollar checks from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried.

VCs might not take a “spray and pray” approach to investing, but it’s clear that they’re more willing to distribute their money across many causes and candidates when it comes to electioneering.

For more on how tech’s political giving is trying to bring us more tech, check out Ben and AJ’s story here.

Overheard

“I've never seen VCs make a bigger mistake than generative AI.” ScienceIO founder Will Manidis thinks VCs are about to repeat the mistakes of Web3 and the creator economy by focusing on funding art creation startups and ignoring the impact that it could have on menial data entry jobs: “You will not generate large enterprise value by making everyone a ‘creator.’ Giving everyone in the world the ability to generate Picasso paintings is worth very little.”

VCs are the latest to be “quiet quitting.” Perhaps it’s the end of generational transition at VC firms as we know it, but Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat mused on Twitter that there’s a lot of VCs quietly stepping back after big exits and no longer doing deals: “Maybe because they got rich, or moved away thinking they could stay current without putting in the sweat, built firms so big they spend all their time managing, or see making new investments as beneath them. Maybe because it's hard to start a new journey with a startup that will probably be worth zero (as most are!) when you got spoiled by a megaexit. Maybe it's the fear that it was just luck in the last cycle, and continuing to work at it might reveal that. Get out while they think it was skill...” The litmus test Bahat suggests is to ask a VC when their last deal was — the answer may be telling.

Wealth management or a diaper brand? I wasn’t the only one confused when I saw that (The) Coterie had raised $50 million.

If you’re in need of Halloween costume ideas, the viral Spirit Halloween costume meme provided plenty of fodder. There’s the venture capitalist who has both Brex and Ramp cards, the AI investor who comes with a Substack account, and the unemployed CEO with a $45 million severance package. And while you’re at it, perhaps check your kids’ Nestle 100 Grand bars for an offer letter from a16z.

A MESSAGE FROM SLB

The world is rapidly changing; the scales are imbalanced, and many are feeling the effects. SLB is committed to helping deliver the world’s greatest balancing act—enabling secure, accessible, sustainable energy to meet growing demand.

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Inside track

“Let’s kill the story” exists in shows like Scandal, but the reality of comms is that there are only a few scenarios where you could actually stop a story, says Robinhood’s former PR chief Jack Randall in an interview with Sar Haribhakti on demystifying what good comms does.

If you were thinking of fundraising, you should start now, warns Hustle Fund’s Elizabeth Yin as investors are quickly approaching “the dead zone” at the end of the year.

Is that growth spike a sign of genuine product-market fit? Or is it just the result of market disruption, or worse, plain old hype? Maverix’s Helen Zhang breaks down how to tell these startup-boosting phenomena apart.

Need to know

You couldn’t have missed Elon Musk taking over Twitter, but it’s not only his money that went into the deal. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed that his company also wired $500 million before the deal closed.

There was an IPO this week. And it popped! Mobileye’s return to the market was embraced by investors who sent it up 37% on opening.

Argo AI reached the end of the road. In a shocking closure for the self-driving industry, the Ford- and VW-backed startup announced it was shutting down.

A16z’s crypto fund is reportedly down 40% in the first half of this year, according to the Journal. It’s betting on having a “very long-term horizon,” partner Chris Dixon said.

From Protocol: Have you ever bought a coffee at a café and then suddenly get nonstop emails from them? Square is selling access to your inbox, and no one seems to know if the law cares.

Also from Protocol: Tools for securing the software supply chain have flooded into the market in the wake of the SolarWinds breach. Led by a team of ex-Googlers nicknamed the “Justice League of Security,” Chainguard is taking a different approach from the rest.

Your weekend reading: GoPuff was the startup that was supposed to have figured out instant delivery. After a crazy pandemic and runaway valuations, the legacy of Kozmo.com looms large as its founders are now trying to make the business work, or, as Bloomberg questions, “if the billions poured into it are destined to simply gopoof.”

A MESSAGE FROM SLB

Our planet needs balance to thrive; for the climate, for people, and for nature. Together, we will pave the way to a balanced planet through better practices, innovative technology, and the commitment to help others on their journey across the globe.

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