The Full-Body Scanners Will See You Now

In late September 2022, Ryan Crownholm, a 46-year-old entrepreneur from Los Angeles, donned a pair of plush surgical scrubs and hopped onto a stainless-steel MRI table at Prenuvo, a fast-growing chain of body-scanning clinics. Crownholm, the founder of landscaping service DirtMatch, was undergoing an elective MRI, which cost him $2,500 and would generate...

13h

Search Has Its Goliath. Could Richard Socher Be Its David?

On a rare rain-free afternoon this spring, Richard Socher stood atop a hill, surveying the direction of the wind. The wind often interests Socher, the 38-year-old co-founder and CEO of search engine You.com, because in his spare time he likes to fly around on a paramotor, a parachute-like contraption supported by a backpack propeller. We were standing...

15h

Pro Weekly: OpenAI’s Other Model

Welcome back!OpenAI has been the talk of the tech world in recent months, following the release of the ChatGPT chatbot in November and GPT-4, the newest edition of its machine-learning model, earlier this month. Its pace of product releases is impressive, especially from a company that started as a nonprofit research organization. My colleague Jon detailed...

16h

Crypto Company Bakkt’s Make-or-Break Deal

The crypto industry is littered with the corpses of now-shuttered businesses. Among the survivors, at least so far, is Bakkt, a crypto company founded by New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange. But after a previously unreported second round of layoffs earlier this month, a slew of executive exits and the shuttering of its consumer app,...

18h

Google, OpenAI and the Coming Copyright Storm

So here is a question: If you develop some software and train it on random material from the internet to make it smarter, do the creators of that material have any right to the software?What happens if you are Google and you train your software with public conversations generated from a chatbot made by OpenAI, one of your main competitors, which has...

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Gumroad Turns a Profit After Price Hike

Gumroad, which provides tools to creators including landing pages and help with product sales, recorded the largest monthly profits in its 11-year history in recent months after raising prices.Gumroad recorded net income of $82,270 in January, Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad’s founder and CEO, told its crowdfunding investors and creators Thursday in a presentation...

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Startup Banks are in the Hot Seat

We’re three weeks past the start of a once-in-a-generation banking crisis that saw the demise of a core startup institution, Silicon Valley Bank. Neobanks are feeling bullish: They picked up billions in new deposits in what’s been their biggest-ever period of growth. As a result, investor interest in their businesses is picking up again. The winners...

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Private Equity Firms’ Secret Weapon for Big Software Buyouts

When Thoma Bravo was drawing up the financing of its $8 billion acquisition of Coupa Software last year, the private equity giant didn’t turn to a bank, and it didn’t get a traditional loan. Instead, it tapped a group of non-bank lenders including Sixth Street for a relatively obscure type of financing—one that has been making its way into more and...

1d

The Layoff Contagion Is Hurting Us All

Alphabet. Salesforce. Microsoft. IBM. Zoom. Meta Platforms. Amazon. The list goes on. More than 300,000 people laid off just in technology, just in the past year, and the number keeps growing—Disney, Goldman Sachs, Philips, Boeing, Meta (again), Amazon (again), even McKinsey. Seems like everyone is joining the layoff bandwagon. Many, indeed virtually...

1d

Meet The Information’s New Financial Power Brokers

Jamie Dimon won’t run JPMorgan Chase forever, and Marc Andreessen will one day give way to the next generation of investors. The Information has identified the bankers, executives and investors who could replace them by stepping into the upper echelons of the finance industry in the years to come. They are The Information’s New Financial Power Brokers:...

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