![]() Female founders are now on pace to receive as much as $40 billion. Through the first three quarters of 2021, female founders in the tech market saw more than $30 billion in investments, which is over increase of over 82% from 2020, and already the highest number ever. Finally, that imbalance seems to have taken a big hit, as investments into female-founded companies absolutely exploded during the pandemic, with both deal count and deal values reaching new highs over the past year, according to a report from Pitchbook. That could possibly be changing, though, if 2021 is any indication. Whatever you want to chalk that up to, be it sexism or simply the insider nature of the tech ecosystem, there has been a big gap for a long time. But journalist Lee said it is an entirely different endeavor when company leaders are framing stories with their own point of view.Investments into companies started by women exploded in 2021, reaching over $30B for the first timeĬompanies with female founders have notoriously had a tough time raising funding in Silicon Valley. Most media, like NPR, receives financial support through corporate sponsorship or advertisements. "People are like, 'There can't possibly be any good content coming out of a company,' and there are folks, admittedly in the technology business, who say, 'Oh, all reporters are completely unfair,'" she said. Wennmachers said articles written by the tech industry can co-exist with those by the news media. While companies issue press releases all the time to highlight their achievements, Watson says stories that appear to be news articles can trick readers into believing they are written from an unbiased perspective. In other words, the site could give itself exclusive interviews or insider access, making big announcements through its own publication. "What I am more worried about is the way they are welding access as a tool of power," she said. Watson says she does not see an existential threat to the journalism industry in the new publication, as much as an opportunity to snub the media. Yet online publishing platforms like Medium have long featured the kind of cheery takes on tech that Future now delivers. It was written by Joshua Browder, founder of an app marketed as "The World's First Robot Lawyer." A lawyer for cryptocurrency exchange Uniswap penned a 3,000-word article selling the idea of "decentralized finance." "We are taking a pro-stance toward technology," she said.Īrticles on the site include a piece about how the legal system should rely more on software. She dismissed criticism that the site looks like a public relations front. Neutrality was never the goal of Future, said Wennmachers. "That is not the environment that Andreessen Horowitz or any other VC is used to," Watson said. The tough coverage has intensified since then, with more journalists, researchers, political leaders and the public questioning tech's role in the siege on the U.S. "I think that's a huge turning point."Īnother turning point came in 2016, following the presidential election in which misinformation, spread on social media, played a critical role. ![]() "It changed our entire relationship with technology," Watson said. Reviewers went from describing the iPhone as "sexy" to examining something tech optimists like to ignore: how new tech products and social networks may exacerbate the ills of society. ![]() There was a time, in the early 2000s, when it was easy to find stories in the tech press that fawned over startups pledging to change the world and product launches promising to change everyone's life.īut something changed a few years after the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Watson wrote in a paper for Columbia Journalism Review. Both offer a "go direct" approach that lets speakers and writers get their messages to the public, while circumventing the media. ![]() It follows Andreessen Horowitz's investing heavily in two other efforts, the live-audio app Clubhouse and newsletter startup Substack. "If you're celebrating cutting out the media, then you're giving powerful people aircover to thumb their nose at impertinent questions that you, too, would probably like the answer to," wrote independent tech journalist Eric Newcomer in his newsletter, noting that Silicon Valley's latest publication "does make it easier for Andreessen to get his message out without facing questions from prying reporters." Others question the publication's intent. Technology Clubhouse May Be Social Media's Future. ![]()
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