Key Takeaways Founderland is designed by founders for founders, as a smaller, curated alternative to massive trade shows. The festival allows founders to make connections, compare notes, and get in front of people they might otherwise spend months trying to reach. Retailers like Walmart use events like Founderland to discover emerging brands early Most business conferences happen under fluorescent lights in anonymous, cavernous convention halls. Founderland is not most conferences. In fact, its founders, Sean Kelly, Shannon Kelly, and Josh Wand, insist it isn’t a conference at all. They prefer to call it a “founder festival.” Set in the rolling…
Author: Staff Writer
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. Meta’s new AI agent is useful, popular, and a little terrifying Muse’s adoption numbers are growing. The app reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store shortly after…
Some of the guardrails that OpenAI included in its ChatGPT for Teens product don’t work as intended and the chatbot poses an “unacceptable risk” to children, according to a report Wednesday by Common Sense Media.The watchdog group urged OpenAI to restrict the chatbot to adults “until it can offer a safe, developmentally appropriate experience.”OpenAI said the group’s testing doesn’t reflect how the chatbot’s safeguards work.Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children’s use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even suicide.While even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI…
Just because Google and Apple are now calling it Lake America doesn’t mean everyone has to.After President Donald Trump ordered a new name for Lake Ontario, the two U.S. tech giants quickly fell in line, relabeling the body of water on their digital maps.The move sparked a backlash among some users, already unhappy with the companies’ decisions to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on their maps following a previous Trump edict.The controversy and lingering worries about digital privacy have fueled interest in map services that aren’t from Big Tech companies, especially Google Maps, which is…
I became a social entrepreneur at 14, working in partnership with other students to make our high school a more welcoming home to students with disabilities. We saw what the adults did not: Bullying and harassment could not be wished away with detentions and scoldings. The change required students standing up for one another, changing our school culture one relationship at a time. For more than 30 years I have supported over a million young people working to change the world. From a water filtration system that uses garbage and a malaria test that uses enzymes, to a training program…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Notice when volunteering stops. A pattern of silence, sustained across two or three cycles, is worth a direct conversation before it becomes a resignation. Replace the annual “are you satisfied?” survey question with a quarterly one: “What would make you consider leaving?” Track who has stopped requesting stretch projects, who has gone quiet in meetings they used to lead and who has stopped asking about the next year of their role. According to Gallup, 51% of U.S. employees were either actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways If the human is the cost center (like live dealers), AI can replace them with a cheaper, less intimidating and more personalized experience. If the human is the peer or product (like in paper trading or streamer prediction markets), humanity itself becomes the draw and is harder to replace. Ask where the human sits in your product and what is going on in that moment. Is it a moment of delight, or is it a moment of friction? And where does the human add value, as a peer, as competition?…
Merz, former BlackRock chairman in Germany, I believe has a serious conflict of interest. I know, people point out that he is the grandson of Nazi party official, Josef Paul Sauvigny, who joined the SA in 1933. However, if Ukraine loses the war, BlackRock’s $800 billion fund to “rebuild Ukraine” will become one of the biggest losses in financial history. European Business Magazine, February 28, 2026 wrote: “BlackRock is leading an $800 billion investment framework to rebuild Ukraine, focusing on agriculture, critical minerals, energy and infrastructure. They intend to to inject private capital into reconstruction projects in exchange for long-term…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways If a role exists only to notice, collect and deliver information the work already knows, it’s a delay with a salary — not added capacity. Look at the last role you opened, and write down what they’ll actually do on a Tuesday. Separate work that changes the client outcome from the work that only moves information about the outcome. A useful test is: “If this person disappeared Wednesday, would the work stop — or would only the report stop?” If only the report stops, you don’t have a people problem.…
QUESTION: My realtor says the Fed is keeping rates high until the November midterms to punish Trump. He insists inflation has subsided and expects another rate cut to bring mortgage rates down and buyers back. He claims I will have better luck listing the property after midterms. Is there any substance to this argument? ANSWER: No. Your realtor is asking you to stake a financial decision on his political opinion. Where is his evidence that the Fed is setting rates to punish Trump? The Fed makes monetary policy independently of the White House. You can criticize its decisions without inventing…