In this insight we look at what ‘Y Combinator’ is, how it works, who it’s worked with, and how it’s made the news recently.

Startup Accelerator and Venture Capital Firm 

Y Combinator is a well-known startup accelerator and venture capital firm based in the United States. It was founded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston. Y Combinator is often referred to as an “accelerator” because it provides a comprehensive program designed to help early-stage startups grow and succeed.

Y Combinator says it’s so far funded 4,000 startups with a $600 billion valuation.

How? 

Startups accepted into the Y Combinator program receive seed funding, typically in exchange for equity, and participate in a structured three-month program (there are two 3-month programs). During this time, they receive mentorship, guidance, and access to a network of experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts. Y Combinator also provides office space and various resources to support the development of the startups.

The program culminates in a Demo Day, where each participating startup presents its progress and business plan to a large audience of potential investors. Demo Day offers a valuable opportunity for startups to secure additional funding and establish crucial connections within the investment community.

Who? 

Over the years, Y Combinator has supported and nurtured numerous successful startups, including Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart, DoorDash, Cruise, Twitch, Coinbase, PagerDuty, Faire, Brex, Deel, Rippling, reddit, Gusto, Flexport, Dropbox, Razorpay, Scale AI, GitLab, Benchling, Fivetran, Rappi, Checkr, Zapier, Whatnot, Podium, Webflow, Zepto, Groww, Segment, and others.

Its reputation and track record have made it one of the most prestigious and sought-after startup accelerators globally, attracting entrepreneurs from various industries and sectors.

The Goal 

Y Combinator says its goal is to “help startups really take off” and to help them “to be in dramatically better shape 3 months later”. It defines being in better shape as having a better product with more users, and to having more options for raising money.

Influence 

Y Combinator and its founders, such as Paul Graham, have become influential voices in the startup ecosystem. They have shared valuable insights, advice, and thought-provoking essays on entrepreneurship, technology, and startup culture. Y Combinator’s blog and the published writings of its founders have gained widespread recognition and are considered valuable resources for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Expansion and Global Reach 

Y Combinator has expanded its reach beyond Silicon Valley to accept startups from around the world, including international teams, into its program. This global perspective has allowed Y Combinator to tap into a diverse range of innovative ideas and entrepreneurs from different regions, making it a truly influential force in the global startup ecosystem.

In The News 

In May last year, Y Combinator made the news when it sent a letter to its portfolio founders (its ‘who’s who’ of startup successes) entitled “Economic Downturn” which warned them to “plan for the worst” due to an economic slowdown, inflation, rising interest rates and geopolitical unease. The letter painted a bleak picture to startups saying, “it’s your responsibility to ensure your company will survive if you cannot raise money for the next 24 months.” 

Startups

Startups are generally characterised by innovation and high growth potential, but they face funding challenges and rapid cash burn. Despite these hurdles, investors find startups attractive due to their potential for high returns and the opportunity to be part of groundbreaking ventures.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?  

The presence and success of Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator and venture capital firm, highlight important considerations for UK businesses. Startups, with their innovative ideas and high growth potential, face funding challenges and rapid cash burn. However, the allure of startups lies in their potential for significant returns on investment and the opportunity to participate in groundbreaking ventures.

For UK businesses, this highlights the importance of fostering a culture of innovation and embracing the potential for high growth. By encouraging and supporting startups within the local ecosystem, businesses can tap into the vibrant entrepreneurial spirit and benefit from collaborations with innovative startups.

Moreover, it is crucial for businesses to consider the funding landscape and explore ways to support startups. This could involve establishing partnerships or mentorship programs, providing resources or office space, or even considering investment opportunities in promising startups. By nurturing and engaging with startups, businesses can gain access to fresh ideas, talent, and potential future collaborations.

Judging by some of the well-known names listed as being helped by Y Combinator, it’s clearly had some success in helping them but, as all businesses know (and as Y Combinator warned its customers last year), these are very tough economic times that will make it very challenging for today’s startups, and it’s currently more a matter of just focusing on survival for those that can’t raise the necessary funding in the near future.

An American Psychological Association research paper predicts that that as workers interact with AI systems (and rely more on them), this could lead to social disconnection at work, feelings of loneliness, and even insomnia and alcohol consumption.

Work-Related Interactions Being Altered & Creating Social Disconnection

The research, entitled “No Person Is an Island: Unpacking the Work and After-Work Consequences of Interacting with Artificial Intelligence,” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology says that as AI systems are increasingly integrated across organisational functions and into the work lives of employees, the coupling of employees and machines is fundamentally altering their work-related interactions.

Your New AI ‘Colleague’ Could Have Negative Effects 

The researchers say that people have evolved internal systems to gauge the quality of relationships with others and these systems have remained effective in a workplace that, just as in primitive tribal communities, prioritised social interactions with coworkers. The advent of digital, asocial AI systems and their incorporation into employee work has, however, threatened to upend the operation of these systems. The research shows that employee interactions with their new AI ‘colleagues’ may lead to an increased need for affiliation as well as feelings of loneliness.

Mixed Consequences 

In essence, the research states that AI interrupting old-style work relationships leads to mixed consequences, i.e. (adaptive) affiliation – more helping behaviour toward coworkers at work, or a feeling of ‘maladaptive’ loneliness which affects employees after work in ways like more insomnia and alcohol consumption.

The research showed that the effects are more pronounced for those with higher levels of attachment anxiety (the tendency to feel insecure and worried about social connections), i.e. they respond more strongly to working on AI systems with both positive reactions, like helping others, and negative ones, like loneliness and insomnia.

Human Consequences Of The “New Industrial Revolution” 

Lead researcher and professor of management at the University of Georgia Pok Man Tang said, “Humans are social animals, and isolating work with AI systems may have damaging spillover effects into employees’ personal lives”. Tang highlighted how “The rapid advancement in AI systems is sparking a new industrial revolution that is reshaping the workplace with many benefits but also some uncharted dangers, including potentially damaging mental and physical impacts for employees.” 

Four Experiments But Consistent Findings 

The research was conducted using four experiments in the U.S., Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia with co-workers and family members offering feedback on the behaviour of subjects. The findings proved to be consistent across cultures, showing that basic human interactions and relationships are changed by overexposure working alone with just AI.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Although AI can be human-like in its responses (e.g., generative AI like ChatGPT), it is not human or sentient (yet). Having too much interaction with AI at work seems to come at the expense of the human social interaction and although it has some positive consequences, it appears to have some damaging consequences in the lives of employees both at work (loneliness) and at home (insomnia and drinking). Ways that businesses could help manage and improve this situation include limiting the frequency of working with AI systems, offering opportunities for employees to socialise, and even offering mindfulness programs and other positive interventions. Developers of AI technology could help by equipping AI systems with more social features, e.g. a human voice, to emulate human-like interactions. How AI impacts on the social, informal, cultural, and ‘softer’ factors at work could, therefore, be another area that businesses need to monitor and manage going forward as AI plays more of a role in daily work lives.

Meta has announced the introduction of I-JEPA, an AI model that generate images that can create the most human-like images so far and is “a step closer to human-level intelligence in AI”. 

Overcomes Previous Limitations 

Meta says that the I-JEPA model is based on its Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun’s vision for more human-like AI and that it can “overcome key limitations of even the most advanced AI systems today”. 

What Does It Do? 

I-JEPA analyses a user-provided sketch and completes the unfinished image by filling in the missing details, e.g. the colour of objects, lighting conditions, and the background in a way that’s incredibly accurate.

Much Better At Filling In The Missing Details 

The ‘Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture’ (JEPA) model’s ‘knowledge-guided generation’ means that it can use its knowledge of the world to fill in the missing details of an image, thereby creating a much better result. This could mean that it will be much more difficult to tell whether an image is human created (real) or has been artificially created by AI. In the past, for example, issues like people in AI-generated images having strange-looking hands with 6 fingers have been one of the ways that ‘deepfakes’ can be spotted. I-JEPA is able to resolve these issues.

Why Is I-JEPA Better? 

Whereas generative architectures learn by removing or distorting portions of the input to the model and tries to fill-in every bit of missing information (even though the world is inherently unpredictable), I-JEPA predicts the representation of part of an input (an image or piece of text) from the representation of other parts of the same input – it predicts representations at a high level of abstraction rather than predicting pixel values directly. It also uses an enormous amount of background knowledge about the world. I-JEPA is, therefore, able to predict missing information in an abstract representation that’s more akin to the general understanding people have. I.e., it’s exceptionally good at analysing and finishing unfinished pictures and making them look real.

Meta says that I-JEPA’s pretraining is also “computationally efficient” and doesn’t involve any overhead associated with applying more computationally intensive data augmentations to produce multiple views.

What Does This Men For Your Business? 

I-JEPA appears to be the next “step closer to human-level intelligence in AI” and gives users the ability to quickly create very realistic images from simple sketches while eliminating many of the usual problems that AI image generators have had to date. Businesses using I-JEPA (which is currently in the hands of researchers and developers) can have confidence in the quality of its output for a whole range of private and public/published uses. I-JEPA gives businesses the ability to quickly create a detailed, realistic picture from a sketch can save time and costs, add value, be applicable to a wide range of tasks, avoid the need for large amounts of manually labelled data, and as the researchers say, it can let businesses create “strong off-the-shelf semantic representations without the use of hand-crafted view augmentations”. In short, I-JEPA could be a real game-changer, and Meta making the model available as open source may help to get it widely established as a new industry-standard tool (Meta hopes).

New LinkedIn research has highlighted a shortage within the kind of green skills that are needed to help develop green industries and help it achieve it climate ambitions.

Green Skills Shortage In The Workforce

LinkedIn’s Global Green Skills Report 2023 showed that although the concentration of “green talent” in the workforce is growing, i.e. there is a growing number of workers with a ‘green’ job or who list at least one green skill on their LinkedIn profile, the increase in demand for green skills is outpacing the increase in supply. This has raised the prospect of an imminent green skills shortage that could threaten the development of new industries and slow down efforts to make homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient.

For example, the report shows that worldwide, only one in eight workers has one or more green skills – seven in eight workers lack even a single green skill.

What Is A Green Skill? 

Green skills can be described as the expertise and abilities focused on promoting environmental sustainability. Examples include renewable energy installation and maintenance, sustainable construction and design, environmental engineering, energy efficiency, sustainable agriculture, environmental education, green data analysis, waste management and recycling, green business and sustainability management, and environmental policy and planning.

Green Job? 

Although it’s relatively clear what green skills are, there’s a lack of a precise global definition of what constitutes a “green job”. For example, some see them as jobs in sectors that directly drive the net zero transition, e.g. renewable energy or electric vehicle production, while others see green jobs as simply those with a high share of green-related tasks.

The LinkedIn report makes the point that greater numbers of green skills need to be incorporated in deeper, more impactful ways into more jobs anyway to help us meet out climate goals.

Green Jobs Demand Outpacing Green Talent Supply 

Taking a broad view of what constitutes a ‘green job’, the LinkedIn report illustrates that the growth in the share of job postings requiring a green skill exceeds the growth rate of green skills being acquired by the workforce. For example:

– Between 2022 and 2023, the share of green talent in the workforce rose by a median of 12.3 per cent while the share of job postings requiring at least one green skill grew twice as quickly (by a median of 22.4 per cent).

– The five-year annualised growth rate between 2018 and 2023 shows a similar trend with the share of green talent growing by only 5.4 per cent per year over that period, while the share of jobs requiring at least one green skill growing by 9.2 per cent.

Green Hiring Still Bucked The Trend 

That said, and even though overall hiring slowed over the past year, the LinkedIn research shows that green hiring bucked that trend. For example, while overall hiring slowed globally between February 2022 and February 2023, job postings requiring at least one green skill have grown by a median of 15.2 per cent over the same period.

Some Countries Easier To Get A Green Job With No Green Experience 

LinkedIn’s research shows that although green skills generally aren’t being acquired quickly enough by the workforce, some jobs in some countries provide a better chance of workers getting a green job without prior green experience, e.g. waste management specialists and solar consultants in the UK and US.

It’s also worth noting that some jobs can be regarded as ‘gateway jobs’ to acquiring green skills.

For example, an energy ffficiency analyst works with organisations to understand their energy consumption and develop strategies to reduce it. This role typically involves conducting energy audits, analysing energy data, identifying energy-saving opportunities, and recommending energy-efficient technologies or improvements. They may also monitor and verify the effectiveness of energy efficiency measures that have been implemented.

While this role might require some background knowledge in energy systems, it is also a job that encourages on-the-job learning about energy efficiency and conservation methods, the use of renewable energy, and the understanding of energy policies and regulations.

This position can lead to a deeper understanding and acquisition of green skills, which can be used to move into more specialized roles in the future, such as an Energy Manager, Sustainability Director, or Environmental Policy Advisor.

Challenges  

In addition to the general challenge of a green skills shortage in the workforce, other challenges that could hold back green skills and the transition and green jobs include:

– Those working in fossil fuel jobs are generally paid more than in green jobs.

– There is a lack of investment in reskilling workers.

– There is an apparent lack of equality in green jobs, e.g. green jobs appear to be more the domain of men. There is also a disparity in education, with better educated people having green jobs.

– There is a lack of incentives, e.g. tax and other financial incentives for companies to pay better wages for green jobs and take on apprentices.

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

As the LinkedIn report points out, “Our ambitious green goals require the rapid proliferation of green skills”. The current green skills gap in the workforce poses significant challenges as the demand for these skills continues to outpace their acquisition. This trend has implications for businesses, governments, and the achievement of environmental and carbon targets. To address this gap, businesses and organisations must recognise the importance of investing in new technologies and creating attractive working conditions to entice workers. Governments, on the other hand, should provide clear incentives for companies to adopt green practices and develop comprehensive policies and programs that equip workers with the necessary green skills.

Closing the skills gap requires a concerted effort to reskill and upskill today’s workforce, enabling workers to learn green skills on the job. Tailored reskilling programs that identify relevant green skills for each role and industry should be developed, along with expanded access to economic opportunities for workers in countries that have been left behind. Collaboration between governments, the private sector, educators, and institutions of higher learning is crucial to ensure that green skills are integrated into curricula across various fields of study.

To tackle the issue, governments should work with the private sector to accelerate skills-based hiring and leverage real-time skills and hiring data for informed decision-making. Identifying gateway jobs that facilitate transitions to other green roles, supporting workers during pay cuts in the transitional period, and creating impactful upskilling and on-the-job training programs are essential. Maximising investments in these efforts and fostering the development of new degree programs catering to specialised green skills are also crucial steps.

Ultimately, it is through the collaboration and commitment of all stakeholders that the green skills gap can be closed, driving the necessary green transformation, and contributing to the achievement of global sustainability goals.

QWERTY Keyboards. Mightier Than The Gun?

In a world where typing has long outstripped writing, few people know the story of how the Qwerty keyboard came about or that famous gun manufacturer Remington was involved

On June 23rd, 1868, the Sholes and Glidden typewriter was patented. This was the first commercially practical device of its kind which had started in 1867 with Christopher Latham Sholes at the helm, flanked by Samuel W. Soule and Carlos S. Glidden. When Soule stepped away, James Densmore filled the void, injecting much-needed finances and pivotal guidance with his visionary insights.

Earlier typewriters used to jam frequently so Densmore’s ‘stroke of genius’ was to scatter frequently-used letter combinations so they were less likely to jam. This was then honed by Sholes into the QWERTY keyboard layout – a design still at the heart of our digital world today. Sholes’ influence extended beyond invention to politics, where he stood out for his integrity.

Interestingly, after countless refinements, his typewriter finally piqued the interest of E. Remington and Sons. This renowned firearm manufacturer, known for their innovation, saw promise in the invention. This aligned with their own core-values of pushing boundaries, as shown when the younger Remington endeavoured to forge a superior gun barrel from wrought iron, according to one of the firm’s origin stories.

John Jonathan Pratt’s ‘Pterotype’ (early prototype of a typewriter) acted as an inspiration for the inventors. This curious device piqued Glidden’s interest, who shared it with Sholes, who immediately saw potential for a more refined machine. However, the road to perfection was long. As Densmore candidly observed, the early Sholes and Glidden typewriter was “good for nothing except to show that its underlying principles were sound”, but it took numerous revisions to create a market-ready product.

When Remington took the reins, the typewriter hit the market in 1874, spawning an entirely new industry. Priced at about $125, it found buyers in various quarters, not least among them, the renowned author Mark Twain.

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter story encapsulates the essence of relentless dedication, innovative thinking and ceaseless improvement, all of which are crucial for modern companies looking to make an impact and establish themselves as market leaders.

If you’re working alone but need to brainstorm, you can use ChatGPT as an effective collaborative brainstorming tool, inspiring innovative thinking and generating fresh insights. Here’s how:

– Set the Context: Open ChatGPT, set ‘New chat’ and introduce the brainstorming topic or challenge.

– Engage in Dialogue: Start a conversation with ChatGPT about the topic.

– Encourage Divergent ‘Thinking’: Ask open-ended questions to generate a range of ideas.

– Prompt for Specific Inputs: Provide clear instructions for focused idea generation.

– Explore Generated Responses: Review and extract promising ideas.

– Iterate and Refine: Have a back-and-forth conversation to build upon ideas.

– Document and Evaluate: Keep track of the most promising ideas (ChatGPT stored your chats anyway).

– Combine Human and AI Creativity: Blend ChatGPT’s ideas with your own insights.

– Validate and Implement: Select the most promising ideas and develop an action plan.