Hello once again and thanks for spending time with Fast Companys Plugged In.
Fifteen years into the era defined by the iPhone, a question still looms over the consumer tech industry: Whats the next great personal computing device after the smartphone?
The brave new ideas keep on coming. A few have succeededbut as phone accessories, not replacements. Others remain works in progress. Some have already failed in spectacular fashion.
But one emerging device category has been easy to gloss over: the folding phone. No, it doesnt represent a bold gambit to kill the smartphone. It is a smartphone! However, by squeezing the equivalent of a tablet into pocketable form, it also departs radically from the Hershey Bar-shaped touchscreen gadget that Apple pioneered and the rest of the industry cloned as fast as it could.
After six years on the market, foldable smartphones reportedly account for only 1.5% of smartphones sold. At least in part, thats because theyve had a whole flock of albatrosses around their neck. Figuring out how to design ones that are inviting to use when theyre folded upand twice as thick as when unfoldedhas been a challenge. Theyve often been outfitted with less-than-stellar cameras and other sub-flagship components. Hinge robustness and general durability have been open to questions. And all of thats before you get to their price tags, which started at $1,980 with Samsungs original Galaxy Fold and hover in the same imposing vicinity today.
Recently, though, foldables seem to be hitting their stride. My colleague Jared Newman was wowed by Samsungs latest model, the Galaxy Z Fold7. Googles Pixel 10 Pro Fold, shipping next month, is the first foldable to achieve IP68 water and dust resistance. Bloombergs Mark Gurman says the first foldable iPhone is a go for 2026evidence that Apple believes the category is real rather than a fad to be ignored.
The product of seven generations of evolution, Samsungs Galaxy Z Fold7 has overcome many of the early folding Galaxy phones limitations. [Photo: Courtesy of Samsung]
And then theres Honors Magic V5, the newest foldable from one of Chinas major phone makers. Though not for sale in the U.S., it recently debuted in Europe, claiming bragging rights as the worlds thinnest folding phone. Thats only so heady an achievement: It applies to only one color variant (Ivory White), involves beating the Fold7 by just .1 millimeter, and doesnt count the bulbous camera bump, which protrudes from the back of the V5 like a spare tire mounted on a Jeep.
Still, after spending a week or so with a review unit provided by Honor, Im impressed. The price remains steep: In Europe, the phone sells for 1,999 euros (about $2,300). But Honor has overcome many design challenges once inherent to the foldable category. It also has a competitive advantage in its use of silicon carbide battery technology, which allows it to pack more battery density into the phones slender frameshort running time being yet another hobgoblin faced by past foldables. In my experience, even using the phone with abandon over the course of a day didnt drain its battery to anywhere near zero.
Closed, the Magic V5 is a very pleasant Android phone. It runs Honors MagicOS 9, a reskinned version of Android 15 bearing so close a resemblance to iOS that my fingers forgot they werent maneuvering around an iPhone. I thought the brown vegan leather back on the review unit would come off as tacky, but its aesthetics and comfort quickly won me over. Even sheathed in the bundled casealso in brown vegan leatherthe phone doesnt feel any bulkier in my hand than my own cased iPhone 16 Pro.
I was ready to turn my nose up at the Magic V5s brown vegan leather back, but ended up liking it. [Photo: Harry McCracken]
I was also prepared for the Magic V5s cameras to be letdowns, like those on some of the foldables Ive tried in the past. Instead, the snapshots I took with its rear-facing camerasultrawide, wide, and 3X telephonewere in the same image-quality ballpark as those from my iPhone.
Unfolded, the Magic V5 really does feel more like a tablet than a phone. The 7.9-inch screen is smaller than an iPad Mini, but its a boon to any task that feels cramped on a garden-variety phone, from watching movies to reading books to wrangling spreadsheets. Honors multitasking interface makes it easy to have multiple apps on-screen at once: side by side or with some floating in windows. The phone also includes a profusion of bundled Honor appssuch as a caledar, notetaker, and photo gallerythat smartly fill all that real estate with sidebars and other elements that wouldnt fit on a standard phone screen.
Many of the third-party apps I tried did leave me vaguely unsatisfied, though. Only rarely did I detect evidence they were aware they were operating on a larger, folding screen. Way back when Android tablets were first a thing, I groused that they ran smartphone apps that had been merely scaled up rather than reimagined. Today, folding phones suffer from a similar failure by developers to seize the opportunity before themmaybe because their user base remains dinky.
Which brings us to the folding iPhone that will theoretically arrive next year.
According to the rumor mill, that phone may reflect Apples efforts to address lingering folding-phone downsides, such as the obviousness of the crease down the middle of the unfolded screen. (It was readily apparent on the Magic V5, though I didnt find it particularly aggravating even if I forced myself to obsess over it.) Apple could also bring some fresh thinking to the software side: Oddly enough, Split Screen and SlideOverthe iPad multitasking features abandoned in iPadOS 26would serve as a solid foundation for a folding iPhone interface.
As for third-party software, anyone whos already building both iPhone and iPad versions of an app has a head start on tailoring experiences to a variety of screen sizes. That might give a folding iPhone an edge on Android foldables, particularly if developers sense that the device is a hit and its users represent a growing percentage of their customers, even if it starts small.
Whether Ill end up owning a folding phone myself, Im still not sure. But seeing phone makers get serious about them has put me in piqued-interest mode. Thats progress in itself. Its fun to wonder where foldables might be by the time Im ready to talk myself into splurging on one.
Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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TikTok gave us slang like rizz, while X popularized ratio and doomscroll. But according to new research from Florida State University, the newest force shaping language isnt a person or platform: Its artificial intelligence.
In a peer-reviewed study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv, FSU researchers found that AI is influencing not just how we write, but how we speak. After analyzing more than 22 million words from unscripted podcasts, the team observed a surge in terms favored by large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT (delve, boast, meticulous, and garner to name a few), while use of their synonyms remained relatively flat.
The researchers call this the seep-in effect or lexical seepage. Unlike slang spread by subcultures or mass media, this shift originates with an algorithm. In cognitive psychology, this is known as implicit learning, where recurring phrasing and word choices are unconsciously stored in memory. Likewise, language research also highlights a phenomenon known as priming, where exposure to specific words or syntax leads to an increased likelihood of using them later. In just a few years, the chatbots preferred vocabulary has moved off-screen and into daily conversation.
AI may literally be putting words into our mouths, as repeated exposure leads people to internalize and reuse buzzwords they might not have chosen naturally, says Tom Juzek, a computational linguistics professor at FSU and lead author of the study. The deeper concern is that the very same mechanism could shape not just vocabulary but also beliefs and values.
The study teamJuzek, Bryce Anderson, and Riley Galpinanalyzed 1,326 episodes of tech and science podcasts, split evenly between a pre-ChatGPT period (2019 to 2021) and a post-ChatGPT period (2023 to 2025). They drew on transcripts where possible, or generated them with OpenAIs Whisper model, resulting in a dataset of about 22 million words. They then compared per-million usage rates of AI-associated buzzwords against close synonyms to test whether shifts reflected ordinary drift or a distinct AI-style influence.
It was important that this was unscripted language, so we focused on conversational showsLex Fridman, Radiolab, Ologiesto capture something close to spontaneous speech, Juzek says. We explicitly excluded sources such as conference talks or lectures, which are often scripted and may even be AI-assisted.
He explains that LLMs dont inherently overuse buzzwords during pretraining on massive datasets. The effect arises later, during human preference learning. From what we know, raters tend to be young, so ideas about what counts as formal writing may vary, says Juzek. AI model fine-tuning involves tricky trade-offs to achieve usefulness, truthfulness/grounding, and getting high-quality preference data is expensive and hard to obtain. Humans often reward style over substance, so models may pick up polished buzzwords in the process.
A similar study in Germany found near-identical patterns on YouTube, suggesting the phenomenon extends beyond American podcasts to other languages and contexts.
Is AI Standardizing Human Speech?
The implications reach beyond word choice. If OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google fine-tune their models differently, populations could adopt subtly distinct speech patterns. Experts warn this could flatten dialects, erase regional slang, and dampen creativity.
While AI does reflect patterns already present, by amplifying and projecting the highest-value version of those patterns learned from millions of interactions, it dramatically shifts the balance of which language forms dominate, says Moti Moravia, cofounder and CTO of Leo AI. Even though you can set parameters for diversity, the main goal of AI models is to maximize perceived quality.
While speech patterns have always evolved, today the shift is happening with unprecedented speed. AI Models like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude are trained on billions of words through web scraping and are used by millions of people almost every day. If algorithms quietly prune our synonym choices, they could also be narrowing how we frame ideas.
AI systems tend to magnify dominant language patterns, which speeds up their adoption in broader culture. Without continued human input, they could stagnate, replaying the past instead of adapting to the present. The result might be a creative landscape that feels out of sync with realityunless new frameworks are developed to prioritize originality. This is a terrifying future, but we still have time to change this and build in frameworks so that original human creativity is still rewarded, says Trip Adler, cofounder and CEO of Created by Humans.
Likewise, Moravia argues that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will continue to chase higher benchmarks by training on the best data available, optimizing for the metrics they know how to measure. The safeguard, he suggests, is to establish a new benchmarkone that explicitly values diversity in language and beyond. Companies should be incentivized to optimize for more varied outputs in the way models speak. This would be a subtle yet powerful way to encourage AI systems to preserve linguistic diversity rather than unintentionally narrow it.
Holding on to the Human Tone
Juzek cautions that the rise in certain words doesnt prove AI is the sole driver. Many were already trending before 2022, and AI may simply be accelerating an existing shift. It took years before we understood the full mix of benefits and risks that came with social media, and I suspect it will be similar with AI models, he says. Conversations with colleagues tell me that this small tweaks snowball effect may be inherent to gradient descent, the optimization procedure at the core of how the models learn. Understanding that properly will require more foundational research.
Looking ahead, he expects language change to accelerate. Some AI-favored words may fade, much like generational slang, but the larger risk is subtle homogenization.
Culturally, this matters for trust and creativity, Juzek says. Sooner or later, that same uncertainty will reach spoken interactions, for example, phone calls. Arguably, face-to-face conversations remain safe for the foreseeable future.
Work is filled with contradictions and disruptions these days, and the uncertainty can make the workplace feel like a constant emergency. As a result, people are stressed, pessimistic, and pulling back from their organizationsbut they’re not disconnecting from each other.
Our new research shows that, even under tremendous pressure, employees are “quiet connecting”: helping each other regardless of what’s happening at the company level. Organizations would do well to recognize and strengthen these organic bonds because they can serve as a powerful counterforce to widespread employee disengagement.
The Natural Ties That Survive Everything
New research from meQuilibrium’s State of the Workforce Report reveals that people are truly showing up for each other through quiet connecting behaviors. Even as 55% of employees show signs of organizational disconnectwhat some call quiet crackingand 42% report high uncertainty-related stress, connections between colleagues remain remarkably strong.
Among 5,477 employees surveyed by meQuilibrium (meQ), 71% regularly lend a compassionate ear when colleagues face workplace problems. Sixty-two percent actively help coworkers learn new skills or share job knowledge.
Sixty percent dedicate time to advise, coach, or mentor fellow workers. Meanwhile, 53% pitch in to help overwhelmed colleagues with their workload. These aren’t occasional gestures; they’re consistent patterns of mutual support that emerge organically, without formal company initiatives.
These instinctive helping behaviors are inherent even among the most disconnected employees. Workers continue showing up for their colleagues even when they’ve mentally checked out from their organizations and supervisors.
The phenomenon persists across stress levels as well. Employees facing high uncertainty-related stress continue quiet connecting at nearly identical rates to their less-stressed counterparts. In some cases, stressed workers demonstrate slightly higher rates of helping behaviors, suggesting that quiet connecting may actually intensify as a natural response to organizational turbulence.
How to Recognize These Support Networks
Quiet connecting operates largely under the radar. It emerges through informal mentoring relationships, spontaneous knowledge sharing, and emotional support during difficult times. They’re the coworkers who stay late to help with a deadline and the colleagues who share expertise without being asked.
Look for the employees others naturally turn to for advice. Notice who provides emotional support during workplace challenges. Identify the informal mentors who take time to develop others’ skills. This is quiet connection in action.
The persistence of these behaviors reveals something profound about human nature at work. Even when traditional engagement metrics fail and organizational trust erodes, resilient peer relationships endure through quiet connecting. These strong lateral bonds may well buffer against the negative impacts of disengagement.
How Managers Amplify What Already Exists
The most effective approach isn’t creating helping behaviors from scratch. It’s recognizing and strengthening the quiet connecting that already exists naturally. The data shows exactly how this works.
Managers who prioritize team mental well-being create environments where quiet connecting flourishes. Employees who report strong managerial support engage in these behaviors at significantly higher rates than those without such support, suggesting that managerial support amplifies natural quiet connecting tendencies.
The multiplier effect is measurable. These supportive managers reduce their teams’ uncertainty stress by 37%. They also dramatically cut disconnect rates, from 78% down to 40% when managers actively support team well-beingeffectively reducing disengagement while strengthening quiet connecting.
Empathetic management doesn’t replace peer support. Instead, it creates psychological safety that allows natural quiet connecting behaviors to expand and become more visible. When managers model collaborative problem-solving and openly discuss challenges, they permit others to do the same organically.
The key is recognizing that managers already shoulder a substantial burden. They engage in these connecting behaviors at dramatically higher rates than non-managers78% versus 53% for mentoring and coaching, and 76% versus 56% for knowledge sharing.
Practical Ways to Strengthen Natural Bonds
Make quiet connecting visible. Create formal recognition programs that celebrate employees who support colleagues beyond their job requirements. Share stories of peer support in team meetings and company communications. By highlighting these organic connections, you can encourage more employees to do the same.
Design systematic opportunities for connection. Don’t wait for organic helping to emerge. Implement volunteer programs, cross-departmental collaboration projects, and peer mentoring systems that give structure to natural supportive instincts.
Train managers to nurture, not manage, peer relationships. Extend check-ins beyond task management to include conversations about well-being and stress levels. Provide mental health first aid training so managers can recognize when quiet connecting networks need additional resources and support.
Strengthen managerial support systems overall. While managers are not therapists, they do have a direct impact on team and individual well-being. Evidence-based, comprehensive resilience training programs help managers strengthen their own well-being and support it in others. Toolkits can also equip managers to better support others.
Address remote work challenges. Remote and hybrid workers experience 27% higher uncertainty stress than their on-site counterparts. They need these quiet connecting networks more than ever. Implement regular informal check-ins, virtual coffee chats, and structured opportunities for casual interaction that can facilitate organic peer support.
The Foundation That Endures
Our research reveals a profound truth about natural bonds in the workplace. While traditional engagement metrics show widespread disconnect and stress, human connection persists. Managers and employees continue creating informal systems that help teams survive and thrive during volatile periods.
But leaders shouldn’t try to control these natural dynamics. Instead, recognize peer relationships and quiet connecting behaviors as vital organizational assets worth protecting and nurturing. Understand that the strength of these informal, organic support networks might be the most reliable indicator of true organizational resilienceand a critical antidote to the negative effects of employee disconnect.
In a world where over half the workforce shows signs of disconnect espite traditional engagement efforts, quiet connecting may be the missing link, if we can learn to recognize it and strengthen it. The foundation of coworker connections is already there, emerging organically as employees self-organize around mutual support. It just needs the right conditions to flourish.
Theres a mountain of evidence that having a sense of purpose is correlated with feeling happy. And while an inanimate object such as the moon cant feel emotions, humans have much to thank our natural satellite for in terms of its purpose. From the tides to seasons to gravitational stability, if the moon were a person it would no doubt feel pretty content.
Even better, our moon is somewhat of an entertainer, putting on a dazzling display every few weeks that we here on Earth call the full moon. And this months full moon is no exception: Septembers “corn moon” will reach its peak illumination on Sunday, September 7.
And if you are lucky enough to live in certain areas of Australia, Asia, Europe, or Africa, you will be graced with a total lunar eclipse.
Even those who live outside those regions can enjoy the show, with a clever solution that bypasses both geography and weather. Read on to discover more about this months full moon and how to see it.
How did September’s full moon get its nickname of the ‘corn moon’?
The Old Farmers Almanac collected and popularized different names for the monthly full moons, immortalizing them in print.
These monikers are apparently based on Native American, Colonial, and European traditions. Septembers full moon supposedly gets the title of the corn moon because this month is traditionally when corn was ready to harvest.
Whats the science behind a full moon?
Simply put, a full moon occurs when the Earth is directly between the sun and the moon, which means the entire face of the moon becomes visible as it is bathed in sunlight. The full moon is one of several lunar phases that mark the moons orbit around the Earth.
While the full moon has a peak when it is at its fullest and brightest, it remains full to our eyes for a couple of days before it starts to wane.
When is Septembers corn moon?
Septembers corn moon will be at its fullest on September 7 at around 2 p.m. ET, according to the Old Farmers Almanac. That means the moon will be below the horizon, but it will remain full and bright to our eyes for a couple of days before it starts to wane.
What is a total lunar eclipse?
Colloquially known as a blood moon, a total lunar eclipse happens when the moon passes through the Earths shadow, also known as the umbra, effectively blocking out the light from the sun.
Earths atmosphere filters and refracts the suns light, so although the moon doesnt become entirely dark, it turns a deep red or orange color. Thats because short wavelengths of light, like blue and violet light, tend to scatter more easily than those with longer wavelengths, like red or orange light.
When, where, and how can you watch the total lunar eclipse?
The upcoming total lunar eclipse will take place on the evening of September 78, depending on your location.
It will last around an hour and 22 minutes, according to NASA.
Skygazers located in Asia and Western Australia will have the best seats in the house for this natural phenomenon because they will be in the path of totalitythe zone where the eclipse is most visible.
Other night sky enthusiasts in western Africa, western Europe, and eastern Australia and New Zealand will also get to see the eclipse to some degree.
Unfortunately for moon fans in the U.S., a lunar eclipse is visible from half the Earth, and this one is not going to be visible from North America.
But that doesnt mean the show will not go on. Space.com has your back and is hosting a free livestream and blog with updates of the total lunar eclipse, so you can catch the whole thing live despite geography and potential cloud cover.
The website Time and Date is also covering the event. The curtain rises at 11:28 a.m. ET and totality occurs at 1:30 p.m. ET. The full runtime is 82 minutes.
And never fear if you dont catch this one: The next total lunar eclipse that will be visible from the U.S. is set to occur on March 3, 2026.
Happy moon-viewing! Perhaps thats your true purpose after all.
In my 25 years as an entrepreneur and advisor to owner-led companies, Ive seen too many business owners be consumed by the thing thats supposed to give them independence. They work longer hours and solve complex problems. Their company grows, yet theyre no closer to the life they wanted to create.
To be clear, growth in business is generally a good thing. But it does start to become an issue when you want to be bigger for the sake of being bigger.
Its a problem when theres a voice inside your head saying that if you just get to $100 million in revenue, then youll finally be a big shot: that youll get respect from your parents, your peers, and even the people you do not care about at all.
The power of ego
The subconscious reason youre drawn to bigger is that its exactly what your ego wants. Ego is your worst enemy. Its weak, frail, and emotional. It clouds your judgment by convincing you that bigger is better, pulling you toward it like a moth to a flame. It doesnt know why youre going to the flame, or what will really happen once you get there.
Your ego isnt concerned about risk. It lets you become complacent, distracted, or arrogant. It disconnects you from reality, providing you with bad feedback at the very moment you need clarity most. Ego tells you that your success to date was because of talent, rather than the years of grinding and hard work. Its the voice that discounts the important role that discipline and trial and error play in your success.
Whether your net worth is $10,000 or $100 million, the endless pursuit of more can drag you into a doom loop, a cycle of poor choices, and mounting pressure. Thats why growth for growths sake is always a trap.
The discipline of better
Better companies will grow because theyre better. They compound improvement across the four areas that matter mostbetter teams, better customers, better offerings, and better financials. Growth becomes the outcome of doing the right things, rather than the goal in itself.
Better is a choice. It means shaping your business so it enables you to live in the most rewarding way possible for you and the people you love. Better is about building a better life by design. Not just financially, but across the domains that matter: your health, your wealth, your wisdom, your happiness, and your family.
Better is about building an asset that compounds wealth, where that asset works for you. It is about having a business that excites you, that challenges you, and that you enjoy being part of. It is about being intentional with your effort.
When your focus is solely on growth at all costs, theres no guarantee that it will result in the life you want. In fact, many times, the chase for bigger ends up creating problemswhether thats toxic teams, indifferent customers, mediocre products, or ultimately unprofitability.
The irony, of course, is that when you focus on building better, you often end up with a bigger business anyway. But along the way, you also build freedom, wealth, and happiness.
What a better business looks like
If an owner-led company seeks to become better, what does that mean in practice? A better business needs to inspire its people. It should energize owners, leaders, employees, customers, suppliers, and even those watching from the outside.
A better business needs to earn loyalty. That means creating a real connection with customers so they trust you, stay longer, and become advocates. A better business needs to focus on what it can be the best at. That means striving to offer products that are not only good, but great.
Better businesses also need to be financially strong, and that requires a structure and operating system that can withstand tough times. Most importantly, a better business shouldnt drain the energy of its owner. The greatest energy drains come from poor planning, poor strategy, and the absence of a system to run the business.
In the end, a better business is one that creates value, sustains itself, and gives its owner the freedom to live life on their own terms, not the one that values growth above everything else.
Tesla hasnt enjoyed a lot of good news lately. Just the last few days have brought news of the electric car-makers dimming sales in Europedown 42% in the European Union compared to a year ago, in the face of competition from Chinese rival BYDand a recall in Australia of Model Y SUVs to address a potential software glitch that may cause passenger windows to close with excessive force. In its most recent quarter, the company reported revenue of $22.5 billion, a 16% decrease.
So it makes sense that this week Tesla made a fresh effort to change the story about the brand and its trajectory. It did so with the release of its latest Master Plan, a public document intended to declare its future goals and plans. Its safe to say, not everyone was convinced. Critics complained that, at best, its vague, and at worst sounded like AI-generated buzzword soufflé. (Our desire to push beyond what is considered achievable will foster the growth needed for truly sustainable abundance.”)
While this did not appear to be the conversation-changer Tesla sought, the company is right to try to give the narrative around its business a boost. CEO Elon Musk seemed to acknowledge this when he posted on X that 80% of Teslas value will eventually come from its Optimus robotsa prediction that, while lacking details, was quickly picked up as a sign that he is thinking beyond EVs.
The problem is that Musk has projected similar narratives before: namely, that Teslas future is really about self-driving taxis, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, or a combination of all the above. The narrative hasnt stuck, partly because Tesla isnt really a leader in any of those sectors. Even his latest Optimus prediction was tossed in among what has now become a familiar manic barrage of X posts about a variety of cultural and political issues that have nothing to do with making cars or running a business.
The Tesla Master Plan seemed to be worth only a sliver of the CEOs attention. (And thats despite the company recently granting Musk $29 billion in new Tesla shares in what seemed like an attempt to get him to focus).
A master plan to rule all other master plans
This is actually Teslas fourth Master Plan, and in a way they have all been marketing documents. The first two were written by Musk himself, basically blog posts as impassioned manifestos; the third was a nerdier, benchmark-filled white paper. Each offered a narrative around Teslas mission, its context, its supposedly world-changing implications.
But lately, the Tesla narrative has come from without: the apparent flop of the Cybertruck, the loss of market share for even its more successful vehicles, the endless controversies stemming from Musks DOGE adventures, culminating in his de facto dismissal from President Trumps inner circle.
The upshot is an ongoing case study of a once-mighty but now-tarnished brand. And to be clear, the brands historic strength is significant, and retains considerable loyalty from consumer and investor fans alike. The company is still worth more than $1 trillion, and its shares are trading at around $340, which is right in between a recent range of about $220 in March to $488 last December. It might even get a short-term sales bump from EV shoppers looking to buy before the Trump administration phases out consumer incentives.
The whole sector is in for a challenge once that happens. While Tesla spins its wheels on putting forward a story about that brands next chapter, rivals are racing to define the brand from the outside. Musk, his attention still seemingly divided as he posts constantly on X, flirts with politics, and scraps for a lead role in the AI free-for-all, used to be the lead author of the Tesla narrative. Its a brand that has been defined far less by traditional marketing than by its CEOs endless zeal. With that zeal directed elsewhere, a different Tesla story is taking hold: an EV maker run by a guy who doesnt really care about cars anymore.
I was reading funding news last week, and I came to a big realization: Andreessen Horowitz is not a venture capital fund.
A lot of people are thinking it. So there, I said it.
And its not just Andreessen. Its all the big funds.
They started out as VC. They operate funds that invest in private early-stage companies. But they havent been VC funds for a very long time.
Thats not a knock on their success or influence, both of which are massive.
But to continue calling them venture capital is both disingenuous and damaging to how we understand our industry.
I vote we stop.
VC is not bifurcated. Its two totally different strategies.
First off, its worth noting that all of these firms are legally not venture capital firmsthey are registered investment advisers (RIAs). This means they can, and do, invest beyond early-stage private companies, in things like public companies, crypto tokens, nontraditional assets, and more. Andreessen, Sequoia, Insight, General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, Lightspeed . . . all RIAs. All massive. No longer just VC funds.
They’re big finance with a Sand Hill Road address.
And if you take an honest look at their actual venture strategy, youll also find it isnt really venture anymore.
Since its earliest iterations in the 1940s, venture capital has always meant investing in early-stage companies with the potential to generate alphahigh risk, high reward, uncorrelated with efficient (public) markets.
Its never been about investing in the obvious. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Thats not how big funds invest anymore. Andreessen partner Martin Casados viral tweet last week acknowledged this: Large funds are not picking contrarian bets. Theyre picking consensus ones.
All of them are chasing the same founders, outbidding each other in giant rounds, competing away alpha for themselves and each other.
Theyre okay with this. Their limited partners are okay with this. Theyll make money, presumably, off the beta. They have power, access, and cultural cache.
They are #winning.
But theyre not VC investing.
Make data meaningful again
Meanwhile, all the VC commentators (myself included) are tripping over ourselves about what this all means. My B-school classmate Rob Go wrote about VCs existential crisis (Viva la F!). Sapphires Beezer Clarkson says venture is broken. Carta data guru Peter Walker talks about the bifurcation of venture capital. Eric Newcomer describes it as a break between the haves and the have-nots.
Every VC report thats come out in the last few yearsCarta, PitchBook, Crunchbase, AngelList, all of themshow a few rounds and funds so large that they completely distort the data.
I say its time to split the data in two and analyze both strategies independently.
Remove the mega-funds and youll see a clear, consistent picture of the actual venture ecosystem. Venture capital as its always beensmall, early, messy, contrarian, alpha-seeking.
Analyze the mega rounds/mega funds on their own. Theyre not outliers; theyre their own investment category. I call it consensus capital.
What is Consensus Capital?
I might come back to refine this point in the future. From what I see today, there are four defining factors for consensus capital:
The focus on giant outcomes only: Forget unicorns, their hunt is for trillion-dollar outcomes.
The belief that only one type of founder can achieve such an enormous outcome: the consensus founder, if you will.
Complete price-insensitivity, or a willingness to pay up at the entry point for that one type of founder.
Funds so large that they can deploy huge amounts (tens or hundreds of millions) in a single early-stage round.
Again, none of this is a knock. There are great consensus bets to be made, capital itself becomes the moat for some of these companies, exits may be (are presumed to be) sooner than true venture exits, and youll make money off the beta, highly correlated with the growth of the entire category.
Crucially, you can deploy a lot more capital in one go following this strategy than via true venture capital. And large LPs want to move large amounts of capital. To them, the juice must be worth the squeeze.
In other words, none of the above means you wont make money off consensus capital. It just means youre not seeking alpha.
What this means for founders
You might ask: If money is still flowing into startups, who cares what we call it?
Thats fair enough. The problem is, when we talk about these giant funds as if they represent venture capital, we flatten the story of our ecosystem, and mislead non-consensus founders in the process.
Consensus capital goes to founders who have a very particular, very predictable pedigree. They went to a handful of schools, worked at a handful of startups, or built at a handful of AI labs. They are highly discoverable; you can literally set up an AI agent to find them before they raise. Many consensus investors do.
If youre one of those founders, it should be very easy to raise consensus capital. The different funds will compete aggressively against each other, marking up the price of your company, effectively erasing the alpha from their own portfolio.
If youre not one of those founders, its not the end of the world. Sure, it will be harder. But there is an entire generation of alpha-seeking early-stage investorstrue venture capitalists (what Marc and Ben were 25 years ago)who are looking for outstanding non-consensus founders like you.
This also doesnt mean that the two types of capital cant coinvest. You can become a consensus founder even if you lack the pedigree. The easiest (albeit not easy) way to do it is to go through a top-tier accelerator like Y Combinator. Or you can do it through traction and velocity alone.
When you make your business undeniable, consensus capital will follow.
A call for honest labels
Everyone predicting the death of venture capital is wrong. Plain and simple. As long as there are non-consensus founders with a real shot at the Amercan Dream, investors willing to partner with them, and exit opportunities awaiting on the other side, VC will be alive and well.
But only for those who actually follow the strategy.
Let’s call the different funds what they actually are. Let’s create honest taxonomies that help founders find the right capital for their stage and ambition. Lets split the analysis so the benchmarks for traction, valuations, and round sizes are not distorted by the beta-rich consensus crew. Let’s give LPs clarity about what they’re actually buying when they write checks to different types of funds.
And let’s remember what venture capital really is: messy, early, conviction-driven, non-consensus bets on the future.
Austin just got its first official branding in nearly 200 years, and it’s an homage to natural springs, rolling hills, and a city thats emerged as a liberal island in an overwhelmingly red state.
The branding, revealed at a press conference on September 4, includes an official logo for the city, a wordmark, and a set of guidelines for how Austins government will show up online. It was designed through a partnership between the Austin-based agency TKO, which handled an extensive preliminary interview process, and the Austin branch of the design firm Pentagram, which led the actual brand design.
According to Pentagram partner DJ Stout, the process was a balancing act of creating an identity that was both authoritative enough for the city government and representative of the average Austinite. Already the result is generating a firestorm of negative attention on social mediabut Stout says thats completely expected in todays divisive branding reaction ecosystem.
The new logo (left) and the previous city seal [Images: City of Austin]
Input from all over
In the years since its founding in 1839, Austin has developed many fragmented logos and symbols for various departments across the city, but never a cohesive brand system. By 2018, when Austin began considering a unified identity, Stout says there were more than 300 different amalgamations of logos for the city floating around.
Pentagram officially started on the branding effort in October 2024 after winning an initial competition to helm the project. At that point, the city and TKO had already spent several months conducting surveys with citizens, stakeholders, and government employees about how the identity should show up.
One of the main challenges that Stouts team faced in the brainstorming process was a common obstacle when working with bureaucratic organizations: The final look had to pass muster with multiple audiences, often with vastly different opinions and agendas.
[Image: courtesy Pentagram]
Obviously its meant to represent all the Austinites and everybody in the city, Stout says. But [the city] was very clear that our objective was to come up with a solution for the citys needs. Talk about design by committeedesigning anything for city government is the ultimate design by committee.
Initially Stout championed the idea of an Austin star symbol that would nod to Texass iconic lone star while also adding some unique Austin flair to a commonly used shape in place-based identities, similar to Chicagos star logo or even Canadas maple leaf.
However, just from showing these to lots of different groups, audiences felt that anything that smacked of state government did not fit the personality and the attitude of people who live in Austin, Stout says. Austin is a little liberal island, politically.
For a city that lives by the tagline “Keep Austin Weird” and celebrates “hippie” culture, as Stout puts it, the identity needed to tap into a less politically leaning idea.
[Image: courtesy Pentagram]
A logo inspired by nature
Ultimately, instead of referencing Texas at large, Austins new identity is intended as a love letter to the citys natural landscape. Stout was specifically inspired by a movement that started around the time he moved to Austin in 1986 called Save Our Springs, when the local community came together to fight water pollution and advocate for the protection of Barton Springs and the Edwards Aquifer that feeds it.
Barton Springs Pool [Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images]
I would say without a doubt that the reason people love Austin so much is because we have all this beautiful water, Stoutsays. We have Barton Spring[s], which is this giant spring-fed pool; we have Deep Eddy, which is a spring-fed public pool; the Colorado River runs right through Austin. The whole modern city is built around Lady Bird Lake.
[Image: Pentagram]
To reflect those water sources, the logoa stylized Aincludes a flowing blue wave. Its sandwiched by two green lines: One represents Austin as the start of Texass Hill Country, and the other references the urban canopy that covers the city. Even the hue of blue that Stouts team chose was inspired by a local phenomenon nicknamed the violet crown, which refers to the purplish color of the sunset.
The wordmark font, a serif called Museo Slab, was chosen both because it feels a little Western, Stout says, and because it offered a more authoritative element for the city government to work with alongside the logo.
The identitys overall aesthetic is predictably simple and corporate for a project with so many voices at the table. (The colorful Los Angeles Tourism logo is one exception.) Still, the Austin logo does manage several clever nods to the features that make the city unique.
[Image: courtesy Pentagram]
Why the internet hates rebrands
Austinites wasted little time voicing their discontent with the identity. A post from the local Instagram account @365thingsAustin has drawn more than 1,000 comments, most of which are resoundingly negative.
Did they make it on Canva?! one commenter asked. [I]t is so bad i want to give it a zero but thats not possible so i give it a 1, another said.
Several locals seem particularly concerned with the cost of the project. Jessica King, Austins chief communications director, said in the press conference that the total cost to the city was $1.1 million. Stout adds that Pentagram and TKO split a total payout of $200,000.
That cost $1.1M?! I could think of so many better ways to spend that money . . . there had to have been some prepping for winter weather that couldve taken place instead of being surprised every year! one commenter said.
Stout is unfazed by the backlash, which he says has become a side effect of working in the industry over the past several years. He points to Pentagrams work on Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and his own rebrand for Loyola Marymount University as two examples of design efforts that received intense pushback when they first debuted but have since been recognized as solid identities.
Its because of social media, Stout says. Back when I first started about 40 years ago, nobody even knew what an identity system was.
In an era when branding has become a hot topic in the internet reaction economy (see: Cracker Barrel retracting its latest rebrand over backlash) its almost impossible to design an identity that the internet will actually celebrate. As for the Austin branding, Stout believes Austinites will eventually come around to the look after the unfamiliarity wears off.
I’ve been a partner for 25 yearsthis is not one of the higher-paying jobs, Stout says. I did it because I love this city, and because I’m from the city, and it really means a lot to me.
As I type, Microsoft Copilot suggests ways to continue, restructure, or even rewrite this very sentence. On the surface, it feels like a small thing, no more remarkable than Gmail finishing an email or Google predicting a searchbut small things can have outsize influence.
Just as the steady drip of water on rock can carve out new channel over time, so predictive text has already reshaped how we write. Research from Harvard has shown that predictive text systems do not just make texting easierthey change the content of those texts, reducing lexical diversity and making our writing more predictable.
This flattening effect is beginning to extend beyond language. Filmmakers have been worried for some time now about the rise of algorithm moviesmovies whose form and content are dictated by what recommendation algorithms tell companies about viewer preferences, instead of by the creative imagination of writers and directors. And if executives arent careful, we can soon expect the emergence of algorithm businessstrategy, operations, and culture flattened out by the rise of LLMs and the race to adopt AI.
AI Models as Consensus Machines
Large language models have become the invisible architects of business strategy. For an increasing number of executives, these AI systems have become default first advisers, strategists, and thought partners. And, as we have already seen with language and movies, this kind of progression can measurably narrow the range of ideas available to us.
Social media is the canary in the coal mine here. Anyone with a LinkedIn account knows that posts from different individuals often sound very similar and that the same ideas are often recirculated again and again. Taken in isolation, this could be seen as a feature of the homogenizing effect of social media algorithms. But the phenomenon is not localized to posts that might be driven by the demands of a recommendation algorithm. Pitches are beginning to sound identical, marketing copy is becoming strangely generic, and if the process continues unchecked, we can expect that the internal documents, analyses, and company strategies will begin to mirror those found in other businesses. In the longer term, we could even see company cultures lose their distinctiveness as differentiating factors begin to blur together.
Smarter Alone, Narrower Together
Generative AI can massively boost performance and productivity. A recent meta-study found, for example, that humans working with AI were significantly more creative than humans working alone.
However, as both that study and a paper in Nature show, while using LLMs improves the average creativity of an individual, it reduces the collective creative diversity of groups. Individuals find their access to new ideas boosted but collectively we end up tapping in to a narrower range of ideas.
The result is that AIs promise of supercharged innovation may actually narrow the frontiers of possibility.
Competitive Convergence
Almost 20 years ago, Michael Porter introduced the idea of competitive convergence. Briefly put, this is a phenomenon that sees companies beginning to resemble their competitors. They chase the same customers in the same ways, their strategies and pricing models become indistinguishable, their operational processes and supply chains end up looking identical.
This process traps companies into a race toward the middle, where distinctiveness disappears and profits are squeezed. With AI, businesses risk falling victim to an accelerated and intensified version of this process: a Great AI Convergence in which operational playbooks, strategic vision, and culture become increasingly generic as organizations increasingly drink from the same conceptual fountain.
AI can optimize efficiency, but it cant capture the human fingerprints that make a company truly distinctive. Your organizations war stories, hard-won lessons, contrarian beliefs, and cultural quirks dont live in any training set. They live in memory, practice, and identity.
And when strategy, messaging, or culture is outsourced to AI, there is a real danger that those differentiating elements will vanish. The risk is that companies will end up losing the authentic, uncommon, and sometimes counterintuitive features that are the vehicle for their uniquenessthe things that makes them them.
The Three Pillars of Business Homogenization
Business homogenization can be broken down into three pillars.1. Strategic Convergence: When Every Plan Looks the Same
Your competitor asks Claude to analyze market opportunities. You ask ChatGPT. Whats the result?
Well, the effect is subtle rather than dramatic. Because the same models are shaping the same executives, the outputs dont collapse into outright uniformity so much as drift toward a narrow band of acceptable options. What looks like independent strategic judgment is often just a remix of the same patterns and playbooks. And so, over time, the strategic choices companies make lose their texture and edge.
2. Operational Convergence: The Automation of Averageness
Companies are already acting on the huge potential that AI has in the realm of operations. For example, Shopify and Duolingo now require employees to use AI as the default starting point for all tasks, and one of the major reasons for this is the prospect of the efficiency gains that AI can deliver.
It is absolutely right that companies use AI to transform operations. But when every company uses similar AI tools for operations, we can expect a drift toward similar processes. Customer service chatbots might converge on the optimal patterns for customer interactions, for exampleand in this convergence lies both danger and opportunity.
The opportunity is optimized efficiency. The danger is that companies lose what differentiates them and drives their unique value proposition. It is essential that leaders recognize this danger so they can begin to think intentionally about authenticity as a potential edge in operations. For instance, it might be worth sacrificing a small level of customer handling speed for a chatbot that delivers quirky and engaging responses that reflect the companys authentic culture and character.
3. Cultural Convergence: When Companies Lose Their Souls
Perhaps the most insidious risk is cultural convergence. When AI drafts your company communications, writes your value statements, and shapes your employee handbooks, it imports the average corporate culture encoded in its training data. he quirks, the specific language, the unique ways of thinking that define your organizationall get smoothed into statistical averages.
Over time, the effect will not only dilute external brand perception but also diminish the sense of belonging employees feel. When people can no longer recognize their companys voice in its own communications, engagement erodes in ways that spreadsheets wont immediately capture.
From Artificial Intelligence to Authentic Intelligence
If AI accelerates sameness, then competitive advantage comes from protecting and amplifying what makes you different. Heres how:
Audit your uniquenessIdentify the knowledge, stories, and perspectives your company holds that no AI model can access. What do you know that others dont?
Create proprietary datasetsFeed AI your unique datacustomer insights, field notes, experiments, failuresinstead of relying on the generic pool of information available to everyone.
Establish AI-free zonesDeliberately protect areas where human judgment and lived experience matter moststrategy off-sites, cultural rituals, moments of customer intimacy.
Adversarial promptingDont just ask AI for answers. Ask it for the contrarian view, the blind spot, the uncomfortable perspective.
Authentic Intelligence
In a world in which every company has access to the same artificial intelligence, the real competitive advantage isnt having AIits having something AI cant replicate. And that can only come from authentic intelligence: the messy, contradictory, beautifully human insights that no model can generate.
AI is the price of admission. Authenticity is how you win.
When you apply sunscreen at the beach, it doesnt necessarily stay on your skin. Some of that sunscreen can wash off when you swim, and the chemicals that shield you from ultraviolet rays end up damaging marine life such as coral reefs, sea urchins, and green algae. Each year, an estimated 6,000 to 14,000 metric tons of commercial sunscreen gets into the ocean. Places like Hawaii and Aruba have already banned certain sunscreens.
A new sunscreen created by material scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, however, doesnt harm corals. And its not a mineral sunscreen either, which are often thick and can leave a white cast on your skin. Instead of using chemical or mineral filters, it blocks UV waves, thanks to the pollen in camellia flowersand it also keeps your skin cool in the sunlight.
The research team was specifically looking at bio-inspired materials as a way to make a more sustainable, safer sunscreen. We were inspired by the natural resilience of pollen grains, which have evolved over millions of years to protect plant genetic material from harsh UV radiation and environmental stress, Nam-Joon Cho, a professor at NTU and the President’s Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, says over email.
Though pollen has been studied in cosmetic science before for its antioxidant or nutrient properties, it hasnt, to Cho’s knowledge, been used directly as a UV shield before. Pollen is unique because its structure makes it capable of filtering out harmful UV rays while being visually transparent; its also biodegradable.
To turn pollen into sunscreen, the researchers processed the inner parts of the pollen shell into a microgel formula, which applies as an ultra-thin layer on the skin. The pollen-based sunscreen also creates a cooling effect because those microgels block UV light while letting most of the visible and near-infrared light pass through, without absorbing them.
Since those wavelengths carry most of the suns heat, less energy gets trapped and converted into warmth on the skin, Cho says. As a result, the skin stays cooler compared to when commercial sunscreens, which absorb more of that heat-carrying light, are used. (Researchers also made a sunscreen from sunflower pollenwhich blocked UV rays but didnt have that cooling effectthough it wasnt as effective in tests.)
In lab tests, the camellia pollen-based sunscreen blocked UV radiation at levels comparable with conventional mineral sunscreens, with an SPF of about 30. In lab tests with corals, commercial sunscreen spurred coral bleaching in just two days, with coral death happening in around six days. But the pollen-based sunscreen didnt harm the corals, even up to 60 days. That was crucial for the researchers. Using pollen, which is already a natural component of ecological cycles, allowed us to design with environmental safety in mind, Cho says.
The pollen sunscreen may be safer for humans, too. It doesnt include nanoparticles such as titanium dioxide or zinc oxide, which sometimes raise inhalation and safety concerns, Cho says. And even if you suffer from spring allergies, the pollen sunscreen shouldn’t bother you. Camellia pollen is generally considered nonallergenic, and when the pollen is processed, any allergenic proteins are removed.
Next, the researchers want to optimize the sunscreen for longer wear and water resistance. They’re also looking at ways to use pollen in all other applications, like drug delivery or food protection. The larger vision, Cho says, is to build a portfolio of bio-inspired, eco-friendly materials that can replace petrochemical-based products in everyday life.
