Latest news with #uncertainty
TechCrunch
2 days ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Three things veteran planetary health investors look for in a startup
Ask any founder or investor: fundraising is never easy. And in a market with this level of uncertainty, the difficulties are compounded. 'Everyone has to go through fundraising, and it's a relatively challenging market right now,' Kyle Teamey, managing partner at RA Capital Planetary Health, told TechCrunch. 'That's good for a bit of empathy.' Teamey and his colleague Brigid O'Brien, also a managing partner with the firm, know this as well as anyone. They just closed a $120 million fund, their first for RA Capital Planetary Health. In the two years the team was fundraising, the market changed course dramatically. When they started, the ink was barely dry on the Inflation Reduction Act, and global trade was humming along. All of that changed in the past six months. 'All of this is cyclical,' O'Brien said. 'Kyle and I have often talked about this, and thinking about our careers and the highs and lows of the market that we've gone through multiple times.' Both have seen their share of ups and downs in the market. O'Brien started out as an investor at In-Q-Tel and BPH, the mining giant. Teamey, for his part, was a founder in the first clean tech era over a decade ago before becoming an investor at In-Q-Tel and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Over the years, the pair have developed a rubric that helps them decide where to place their fund's money. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW 'We have three screening criteria,' O'Brien said. First on their list is time to market. How quickly can a prospective company begin generating revenue? 'We saw a lot of success in companies, even seed stage companies that were able to do that,' she said. 'We look for companies that can be in-market in less than five years.' Second, they look at product market fit. 'We really want to have some sense that they're building something that people actually want to buy,' Teamey said. 'A common mistake among entrepreneurs is the 'if you build it they will come' mentality.' Lastly, Teamey and O'Brien look for companies that use the money they have efficiently. 'How fast can you graduate from venture capital?' O'Brien said. For many investors, the answer to those questions is usually 'software,' though it doesn't always have to be. 'There's a lot of things that are different,' Teamey said, though he adds that one common misconception — that deep tech startups aren't capital efficient — doesn't add up. 'Capital efficiency can actually be somewhat analogous [to software], but the capital intensity is often very different,' he said. That's part of why the company will write first checks with figures in the hundreds of thousands all the way up to $10 million, with rounds ranging from seed to Series C. 'The name of the round doesn't really matter, right? What matters is, what's your time to market and does their return profile fit our strategy?' RA Capital Planetary Health has written checks to Koloma, which is prospecting for geologic hydrogen, and AM Batteries, which has developed a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing process that promises to slash costs dramatically. AI-enabled recycling startup Sortera also made the cut, as did solar power electronics company Optivolt and energy retailer Bia. It's a wide range of sectors, and the choices were informed by market maps the RA Capital Planetary Health team has been assembling over the last couple of years. The maps help the team 'understand what matters most in a market, what are those adoption barriers, and then what companies can overcome those adoption barriers,' O'Brien said. 'It also helps us inform what are the average time-to-markets.' That detail is top of mind for the team as they navigate the current downturn in the market. 'This won't be the first time or the last time there will be a cycle,' O'Brien said. 'It's not always going to be like rocket ships.' 'There's pluses and minuses of every part of the cycle,' Teamey added. 'If you can figure it out now, you're going to crush it as the markets get better.'
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
It's not too late to spare this crucial intelligence agency
Ellen McCarthy is a former assistant secretary of state and led the Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 2019 to 2021. In a world increasingly defined by uncertainty and great-power rivalry, the last thing the United States should be doing is cutting one of its most quietly indispensable assets: the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. And yet approximately 20 percent of the staff might soon be gone, having either been laid off or accepted deferred retirement. These cuts undermine not just the bureau, but the intelligence and diplomatic posture of the United States itself.
Reuters
3 days ago
- Business
- Reuters
Gold gains over 1% as dollar, yields ease; spotlight on trade
July 21 (Reuters) - Gold prices gained over 1% on Monday as the dollar and U.S. bond yields weakened amid uncertainty over trade talks ahead of a U.S. deadline of August 1 for countries to strike deals or face more tariffs. Spot gold was up 1.2% at $3,390.79 per ounce at 9:52 ET (1352 GMT). U.S. gold futures were up 1.3% to $3,402.40. The U.S. dollar index (.DXY), opens new tab was down 0.4%, making dollar-denominated gold more affordable for buyers using other currencies, while benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yields hit a more than one-week low. "With the August 1st deadline looming, it brings a level of uncertainty to the market and that certainly is supportive," said David Meger, director of metals trading at High Ridge Futures. The European Union is exploring a broader set of possible counter-measures against the U.S. as prospects for an acceptable trade agreement with Washington fade, according to EU diplomats. On the interest rate front, traders are pricing about a 63% chance of a rate cut in September, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, opens new tab. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the entire Federal Reserve needed to be examined as an institution and whether it had been successful. Talk of earlier than expected U.S. rate cuts is building, with speculation around a possible replacement of Fed Chair Jerome Powell and reshaping of the Fed adding to market jitters, Meger said. Gold is considered a hedge against uncertainty and tends to perform well in a low interest rate environment. Data showed that the world's leading gold consumer, China, brought in 63 metric tons of the precious metal last month, the lowest amount since January. Its imports of platinum in June fell 6.1% from the prior month. Spot silver gained 1.8% to $38.86 per ounce, platinum rose 2.2% to $1,453.17 and palladium was 3.5% higher at $1,284.46.
BBC News
3 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
Jobs still at risk after John Lewis depot in Theale closes
Several John Lewis workers at a delivery site are still facing uncertainty after it closed last company confirmed in March the hub in Theale, Berkshire, would shut.A spokesperson said more than half of the site's 75 workers - who are employed through a trust and known as partners - had found new roles or chosen to retire, but the others were "still going through internal interview processes"."Regardless of their next steps, all partners have been given our full support throughout," the spokesperson said. They said the Theale site had closed because it no longer met the company's needs."This wasn't a decision we took lightly, and we've since worked hard to find new roles for those impacted," they repeated requests from the BBC, John Lewis would not confirm how many people were being made redundant as a result of the company said there would be no noticeable impact for the start of 2024, John Lewis said it was planning workforce cuts over the next five years to save money. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X, or Instagram.
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Building The Anti-Fragile Startup In 2025
Most startups are built for one thing: rapid scale. Raise capital, hire fast, grow revenue, repeat. This playbook has a better shot at working in stable markets with predictable growth trajectories. But when uncertainty hits – economic downturns, supply chain disruptions, AI transformation – these growth-optimized organizations often shatter. A different breed of start-ups is emerging, one that builds what philosopher Nassim Taleb calls "anti-fragile" organizations. Unlike resilient systems that merely withstand stress, anti-fragile systems actually improve under pressure. They use volatility as fuel rather than viewing it as an obstacle to overcome. How start-ups operate when they are anti-fragile resembles how nature looks amidst storms. After interviewing executives who've scaled companies through multiple crises, five core principles separate anti-fragile organizations from their fragile counterparts. 1. Make Vulnerability Part of How You Operate Traditional startup culture worships the myth of the infallible founder. But leaders building anti-fragile organizations do something counterintuitive: they systematically embed vulnerability into their operational DNA. Antonio Silveira, CTO of Attentive, learned this principle while navigating economic turbulence across multiple companies. "When I make mistakes, I address them in my all-hands. I say, 'Hey, I heard the feedback. This was my intent. This is what I learned. This is what we're going to change.' You need to emulate that so others feel like they can keep giving me feedback." This isn't performative – it's strategic infrastructure. When leaders model fallibility during stable periods, they create organizational antibodies against the blame culture that paralyzes decision-making during actual emergencies. Teams that regularly practice acknowledging mistakes develop what scientists call "error recovery systems" – the ability to learn from failure faster than competitors can avoid it. Curtis Anderson, CEO of Nursa, took this to its logical conclusion by requiring childhood photos for internal profiles. "You could scroll through the Slack directory and it was just everybody as a third grader," he explains. "There's something about that visual that makes everyone totally approachable." When people aren't spending mental energy protecting their image, they redirect that bandwidth toward solving problems. 2. Treat Recovery Like Training, Not Time Off Most startups treat recovery as what happens after burnout. Anti-fragile organizations flip this equation, building recovery into their operating system as a performance enhancer rather than a performance penalty. Lorraine Buhannic, Chief People Officer at Headway, knows this firsthand as the mental health platform has scaled from zero to 700 employees in four years. "We have what we call our Olympic performance standard," she explains. "We expect people to do the best work of their careers here, and we want that to feel motivating and galvanizing and not overwhelming and lead to burnout." The Olympic analogy is precise: elite athletes understand that recovery isn't the absence of training—it's training for the nervous system. "One explicit point in that principle is around the importance of recovery. Olympic athletes need to have recovery in order to perform at the highest level," Buhannic notes. At Headway, this translates into structural expectations: flexible PTO policies, therapy sessions openly blocked on calendars, and what Buhannic calls "transparent mental health infrastructure." The sophistication lies in framing recovery as performance optimization rather than accommodation for weakness. Organizations that normalize recovery as operational necessity build sustainable competitive advantages over those that optimize for short-term intensity. 3. Build for Learning Speed, Not Just Performance Traditional performance management was designed for industrial environments where roles were stable and best practices were known. Anti-fragile organizations require performance systems optimized for learning velocity rather than measurement accuracy. Doug Dennerline, CEO of Betterworks, learned this lesson painfully during his tenure managing 6,000 people at Cisco. "We used to do bell curve ratings where you were forced to have a top 15% and a middle 75%," he recalls. "They've updated it since, but I still remember how horrific those processes were. You're telling 75% of the population that you're just mediocre?" His solution wasn't to abandon measurement but to reconstruct it around adaptive capacity. "We've tried to create lightweight, in-the-moment points in which managers can give relevant feedback to employees. Schedule feedback along the way, one-on-ones on a weekly basis." Frequency transforms feedback from judgment into coaching. When feedback becomes continuous rather than episodic, it shifts from performance evaluation to performance development. Buhannic at Headway operationalized this through what she calls "contextual competence" – embedding management development within the specific cultural framework of the organization rather than teaching generic leadership skills. In volatile environments, learning velocity matters more than any specific knowledge or skill set. 4. Stop Trying to Resolve Every Contradiction Most strategic frameworks seek consistency and clarity. Anti-fragile leaders have learned to embrace paradox – holding apparently contradictory truths simultaneously and using that tension as competitive fuel. Rajat Bhageria, founder of Chef Robotics, embodies this principle. His path from venture capital to robotics entrepreneurship taught him a crucial lesson: "As an entrepreneur, you have to be irrational. You just keep going even though you're beat up literally every single day. Whereas as an investor, you have to think about what are all the risks and be very risk averse." Rather than choosing one mindset, Bhageria learned to toggle between them strategically. "You have to have the irrationality of a founder, but at the same time you should try to de-risk the business. If you find some fundamental reasons why the business is not going to work, then you should be real about this." This meta-cognitive ability – thinking about thinking – becomes crucial during uncertainty. While competitors get paralyzed trying to resolve contradictions, anti-fragile leaders use them as navigation tools. Lucia Huang, co-founder of Osmind, applies this to technology adoption. Rather than either rejecting or blindly embracing AI, she holds the contradiction: "We have to remember that a lot of our end users are actually quite skeptical about AI and it has a lot of potential to do harm in our space too. So we're trying to approach it with a really cautious, clinician-first approach." While others are stuck in either/or thinking, leaders who master both/and thinking can navigate complexity with nuance. 5. Make Everyone an Experimenter, Not Just a User The AI revolution is creating a fundamental split: organizations treating technology as tools to be deployed versus those developing technology as cultural capabilities to be evolved. The second approach builds sustainable advantages. Huang at Osmind demonstrates the sophisticated approach: ""We've done an AI sprint internally to upskill and up-level our team. We supplied budgets for everyone to experiment with AI. This internal experimentation allows us to thoroughly test and refine AI capabilities before integrating them into our platform, ensuring we deliver proven, reliable tools rather than experimental features." This isn't just individual development—it's building organizational learning systems. When every team member becomes an experimenter rather than just a user, the organization develops distributed intelligence about technological possibilities and limitations. Dennerline at BetterWorks takes this further: "I have been pushing this pretty hard. I let people experiment with it. I pay people bonuses to come up with ways that produce increases in productivity. We had a woman on our India team implement a thing that uses AI to do QA that used to take us four weeks, but now takes us four hours." The crucial insight comes from recognizing that technology adoption is ultimately about human psychology. As Buhannic observes: "People's expectations of work has changed a lot. Managers need to be more than just a person directing work. They're really setting culture." Successful technology integration requires maintaining human agency while augmenting human capability. It's about creating hybrid intelligence that's more powerful than either humans or machines alone. Building for What's Coming Anti-fragile organizations don't just survive disruption; they use disruption as raw material for competitive advantage. They understand something their fragile counterparts miss: in a world of accelerating change, the ability to improve under stress becomes more valuable than the ability to avoid stress altogether. As Anderson puts it: "The future is for the faithful. That's not for everybody. But then you show incremental progress, and you help people understand that each of these points on the line is directionally moving the way that we need it to." This isn't blind optimism. It's earned confidence that comes from building systems designed to get stronger when the world gets stranger. I write about the intersection of AI and performance management for Forbes. I'm the founder of Mandala, an AI Coaching Platform for Managers.
