Venture-Capital

Zach Leech had been building products for millions of international users whose voices never reached his Portland office. For three years, his team at Gamma made design decisions based on roughly twenty pieces of English feedback each week. When artificial intelligence finally translated 550 user responses on a Tuesday morning in 2024, Leech discovered patterns that would reshape his understanding of the technology industry’s global impact. The CSV file uploading to ChatGPT contained complaints, feature requests, and bug reports in languages Leech’s team had systematically ignored. German users struggling with workflows that broke during file exports. Spanish speakers requesting collaborative features for months, their requests categorized as “miscellaneous” because no one understood the specific use cases being described. Japanese users developing elaborate workarounds for font rendering issues that suggested fundamental problems with character encoding for Asian languages. ...

My garbage can got repossessed in 2001. I know that sounds absurd, but it perfectly captures the surreal devastation of the dot-com crash. One day I was a young engineer at a hot startup, stock options growing more valuable by the week, new house, first baby on the way. The next day the company vanished, my options were worthless, and we were losing everything—including our municipal garbage service. For months afterward, I drove hours from home for consulting gigs, watching the wreckage of Silicon Valley’s first great bubble. Half the internet companies disappeared within two years. 48% of them, gone. Along with hundreds of thousands of jobs and families like mine. ...