AI-efficient and flush with capital: 2025 startups and a VC's advice to founders
Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker has some advice for first time founders: raising capital does not necessarily equate to success. After over a decade of investing in early and growth stage cloud and big data startups, Thakker sees some companies 'AI-washing,' and many taking on more funding than they need to succeed, thanks to an abundance of capital in the ecosystem. In an extended interview with CNBC's Kate Rooney, Thakker maps out the possible exits awaiting startups in 2025, including private equity buyouts, public listings, and big tech acquisitions–if they survive. He's deployed capital into the Indian and Israeli startup ecosystems, and he weighs in on the global trade environment's impact on funding flows.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Maruti Suzuki's new 'Dzire' secures 5-star safety rating in India
(Corrects paragraph 3 to say Maruti will fit all its models with 6 airbags by the end of fiscal 2026, not April) (Reuters) -Maruti Suzuki secured a five-star safety rating for its popular 'Dzire' small car, India's transport minister said on Wednesday, marking a milestone for the country's largest carmaker that has for long lagged its rivals in safety. Its upgraded 'Dzire' model, launched in November, secured the highest rating of five stars under India's local safety standard, Bharat New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), the first such Maruti model to hit the milestone. As part of its efforts to catch up to local rivals, Maruti has said it would fit all its cars with six airbags by the end of fiscal 2026, as Indian buyers seek safer options. Smaller rivals Tata Motors and Mahindra already have several Bharat NCAP five-star rated cars in their lineup. "It's heartening to witness mainstream models setting new benchmarks in vehicle safety," India's Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said in a post on X.
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Elon Musk is gone, but DOGE still filled with his current and former employees
While At least 38 DOGE members currently work or have worked for businesses run by Musk, ProPublica found in an examination of their resumes and other records. At least nine have invested in Musk companies or own stock in them, a review of available financial disclosure forms shows. ProPublica found that at least 23 DOGE officials are making cuts at federal agencies that regulate the industries that employed them, potentially posing significant conflicts of interest. One DOGE member tasked with overseeing mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, did so Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up At least 12 remain, on paper, employees or advisers of the companies they worked at before DOGE, a review of financial disclosure forms shows. And at least nine continue to receive corporate benefits from their private-sector employers, including health insurance, stock vesting plans or retirement savings programs. These employment agreements could create a situation in which a DOGE staffer would be shaping federal policies that affect their employer. Advertisement The people behind DOGE are largely men in their 20s and 30s, most of whom bring no government experience to the task. Many of them previously worked in finance. Advertisement ProPublica's list — the largest of its kind by any news organization — allows readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of the people assigned to one of the Trump administration's signature efforts. It comes at a crucial moment, as some of the first-generation DOGE members are leaving the government and a new crop is joining. 'Even though Elon Musk and some of his top officials are shifting their attention to other issues, I see no indication that the DOGE team members who remain will slow down their work to test the legal and ethical boundaries of using technology in the name of improving government services,' said Elizabeth Laird, a director at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology. While Many of its staffers have deleted their public profiles, have wiped the internet of their professional backgrounds or were encouraged by leadership not to discuss their work with friends. At the behest of the Trump administration, the Supreme Court To cast a light on this secretive group, ProPublica began reporting in February on Musk's influence inside the Trump administration, Advertisement Today, we are adding 23 staffers to our tracker, And we are revealing the makeup of the DOGE team at the Defense Department, a group made up primarily of tech startup founders. They are led by former Special Forces soldier turned tech entrepreneur Yinon Weiss, according to a former senior Pentagon official familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Weiss has repeatedly appeared on Fox News pushing the U.S. to do more to support Israeli military operations in Gaza. He did not respond to a request for comment. A White House official praised DOGE in an interview, saying that 'bringing people in from the outside is precisely what this federal government needed after decades of stagnant bureaucrats who allowed the status quo to continue while the American people got screwed.' The White House official said there is 'no need' for the public to know who's in DOGE and asserted that there have been no conflict-of-interest violations. 'For decades, we've been able to operate without these people's names,' the official said. 'There's no need to know the palace intrigue of who's working in the building.' Musk has defended DOGE's work as 'common sense' and 'not draconian or radical.' He did not respond to requests for comment. Advertisement Musk's retreat from Washington comes after his electric vehicle company Tesla sputtered amid economic turmoil — caused by a mixture of his own How that fissure affects DOGE is yet to be seen, but the White House has already requested $45 million in funding for the group's operations One of Musk's top DOGE lieutenants, Questioned results Whether DOGE has accomplished its mission — to downsize the federal bureaucracy into a more streamlined and effective workforce — is far from clear. Musk initially said the initiative would save taxpayers $2 trillion. He later amended that figure, suggesting in April that DOGE would cut $150 billion from the national debt this year. The $180 billion in savings that Advertisement Still, DOGE has fired tens of thousands of federal workers and To compile our list, ProPublica tracked the industries where DOGE employees previously worked. We looked at the professional experience they brought to government and whether their assignments in DOGE could pose conflicts of interest. ProPublica pored through archived resumes, federal financial disclosures forms, online databases and other documents. We interviewed more than two dozen federal workers, some of whom shared internal agency emails, calendar invites and other material mapping DOGE's activities. We sought comment from everyone listed in our tracker. Most declined our requests. With DOGE entering a post-Musk chapter, here are our core findings: Potential conflicts of interest are increasing. One 25-year-old software engineer helped DOGE shrink the agency's staff even after he was These and other instances of DOGE staffers overseeing government operations that Advertisement The administration has made assessing such financial arrangements difficult. So far, federal agencies have released only DOGE's image as a group of computer engineers isn't quite right. The DOGE 100-plus come from a variety of professions: 29 were executive managers, 28 were engineers, 16 were investors and 12 came from legal backgrounds. A scattered few others previously worked in cybersecurity, design and science. More staffers come from finance backgrounds than any other area. Private equity investor Michael Cole, the founder of Shareholder Capital LLC, has worked at the Department of Agriculture, for example. Cole did not respond to a request for comment. DOGE staffers are mostly young men with limited government experience. Under Trump and Musk, DOGE has become a largely male entity. Of the 109 staff members ProPublica has identified, 90 are men and 19 are women, making the group 83% male. That's a far higher percentage of men than work in the executive branch as a whole, where 54% of staffers are male, according to 2024 data from the Office of Personnel Management. Many are young and inexperienced. More than 60% of the DOGE staffers are in their 20s or 30s. One was 19 when he joined. As a percentage, the number of staffers under 30 in DOGE is about three times as high as in the executive branch as a whole. Of staffers for whom ProPublica has identified ages, 28 are 29 or younger, 35 are 30 to 39, and 36 are 40 or older. The oldest is 67. Few had experience working in state or federal government. ProPublica identified 21 DOGE staffers with previous government roles, including stints at the DOJ and NASA. That means more than 80% joined the government dismantling effort without previously working in government. Those staffers continue to fire longtime federal employees, cut budgets and choke off government programs while protected by an administration that has pushed to keep their maneuverings out of the public spotlight. DOGE's secrecy has been part of its overall strategy, some experts believe, allowing it to obscure its work from government watchdogs and the courts. 'It's harder to stop what they're doing if you don't know what they're doing or who's doing it,' said Faith Williams, director of the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. 'It's not inherently a bad thing these people come from outside the government. It's that they lack any experience in the methods used to uncover waste and inefficiency.'
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
If you annoy Trump, he can annoy you back equally, Howard Lutnick says
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, back in Washington after two days helping to negotiate a US-China trade framework in London, said Wednesday that Trump gave his team permission to back off its aggressive stance against China to get a deal done. Lutnick told CNBC in his first interview since the announcement of the US-China trade agreement late Tuesday night that after 25 hours of negotiations over two days with his Chinese counterparts, the world's two largest economies are in a better place now after a series of escalations over the past month. Both countries, accusing one another of violating the terms of the previous deal agreed upon in Geneva last month, had increased export restrictions on various goods. 'The Chinese had these rare-earth magnets and they were slow-rolling it. When they didn't deliver the rare-earth magnets, we put on our countermeasures,' Lutnick said. 'We were at mutual-assured annoyance.' He said the talks were respectful, without any yelling or screaming, and both countries believe the outcome was a win-win. 'But we needed to make sure when they pulled out their card with these rare-earth magnets, we put in ours that said, 'look you just can't do that to America. America's too great, too strong,'' Lutnick said. He said, for example, the Trump administration could have subpoenaed Chinese banks to open their records and 'see all the things they had done wrong.' And he noted the White House placed curbs on ethane exports to China in retaliation. 'Ethane makes plastic. We supply 98% of their ethane. No ethane, no plastic. Imagine trying to run an economy with no plastic,' Lutnick said. 'If you want to annoy us, the United States under Donald Trump is strong enough to annoy you back equally.' Instead, Lutnick said Trump opted to 'go all positive.' 'He created the right environment for us to do a very positive deal with the Chinese,' Lutnick said. He noted that China has agreed to immediately approve licenses for any US company that requests rare-earth magnets, used in a host of electronics, automobiles, contrast dyes for MRIs and jet engines. And in exchange the United States will remove some of its export restrictions, including ethane – but short of powerful AI chips that the administration believes pose a national security threat if China were able to buy them. Lutnick even said the negotiating room at the opulent Lancaster House provided the team a level of familiarity. 'The room we were in, I never felt more comfortable, because every inch of it was gold-leafed,' he said. 'It was the perfect place to negotiate a Donald Trump deal.' Still, Lutnick cautioned, the United States maintains high tariffs on China and a number of remaining export controls. Despite the 'rare-earth card' that Chinese Premier Xi Jinping played, Lutnick said, 'President Trump holds just as many cards, and because he has the biggest economy now, he holds more cards.' The Trump administration will shift its focus on other trade deals now that it has finalized a framework for an agreement with China. Those next agreements could come as early as next week, Lutnick said. 'There are so many coming but when you've got (Treasury Secretary) Scott (Bessent), (US Trade Representative) Jamieson (Greer) and I spending 25 hours locked in a room with the Chinese, we're not really doing the other deals,' Lutnick said. 'You're going to see deal after deal, they're going to start coming next week and the week after and the week after. We've got them in the hopper.' Lutnick said the White House's trade negotiating team is in 'good shape' on trade agreements with a number of countries. Bessent has said the administration is in active negotiations with 18 trading partners after reaching tentative agreements with the United Kingdom and China. Despite many weeks of negotiations since Trump paused his 'reciprocal' tariffs on April 9 — with a July 8 deadline rapidly approaching — the administration continues to promise looming deals with little progress to show for it. Lutnick said Trump is in no rush to make any deals, preferring to hammer out better agreements that benefit American businesses and consumers. 'Good shape isn't good enough for the United States of America. We want great deals that are fundamental for America,' Lutnick said. 'We can get them done. We need to open these other countries' markets. Our farmers, our ranchers, our fisherman, they are going to have just a great time. Our machinists are going to sell a lot of equipment overseas. Boeing always does amazingly well in these deals.' The key factor, Lutnick said, is opening up US exports to foreign markets that impose tariffs and other non-tariff trade barriers such as taxes and export controls that limit American companies' access to those countries. 'This is the key to us: Can we open up our exports and end this nonsense of a $1.2 trillion trade deficit? And that's what we're working on,' Lutnick said. 'We just want to make sure they're the best deal we can possibly make. We don't want to rush. And Donald Trump isn't going to accept the rush. He only accepts the best from us, and we're going to give it to him.'
