TRW - Issue#61

The future of European Competitiveness / How China is killing innovation / Software with a soul / Electrification of Europe / Raise € with cold email

Sep 15, 2024

Hello there 👋

This is Edo, welcome to the 61st issue of #TRW!

The report on European Competitiveness presented by Mario Draghi this week has been a much-needed wake-up call for Europe. Unfortunately, it received very little media visibility (at least here in Italy) and caught little attention from politicians. Anyway, here's a thread I found particularly insightful, worth a read.

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Let's dive in! 🚀

In Today's Issue 👇

A wake-up call on Europe's competitiveness
How China is killing entrepreneurship
Software with a Soul
The Electrification of Europe
How to raise funds with cold emails

👓 Essays & articles

The future of European competitiveness - a competitiveness strategy for Europe (European Commission)
The button problem of AI - what’s the real reason AI hasn’t yet delivered on its hype? (Every)
Proposed underwater data center surprises regulators who hadn’t heard about it - startup NetworkOcean wants to sink GPUs into San Francisco Bay (ARS Technica)
What if a virus could reverse antibiotic resistance? - in promising experiments, phage therapy forces bacteria into a no-win dilemma that lowers their defenses against drugs they’d evolved to withstand (Knowable Magazine)
Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories - AI is skilled at tapping into vast realms of data and tailoring it to a specific purpose, making it a highly customizable tool for combating misinformation (MIT Technology Review)(€)
Billionaire and engineer conduct first private spacewalk in SpaceX mission - the astronauts went one at a time, each spending about 10 minutes outside the gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon capsule (Reuters)
Meta scraped all public Facebook and Instagram posts since 2007 for AI training - while the admission was made during a public enquiry in Australia, the company’s statement applies globally (9to5Mac)
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger wants to build AI products that are worth the hype - Anthropic’s new chief product officer on the promise and limits of chatbots like Claude and what’s next for generative AI (The Verge)

Found value here? Share ☕Tech Readings of the Week with a friend or a colleague!

Startup Mortality Rates - startup mortality rates rise and fall based on the vibrancy of the overall fundraising market (Fred Wilson)
Who's building the future in Europe? - an ongoing list of companies that I hope will succeed in transforming our physical world (Pia Michel)
The Great Wealth Transfer - a new era in wealth management (
New Economies
)
Software with a Soul - AI’s underestimated frontier (NFX)
The end of the 1 billion active user ad-supported consumer startup - and why highly-monetizing, useful, vertical apps might be the next thing (
Andrew Chen
)
Israeli startups raised $7.8B since October 7, but relocation fears threaten future growth - impressive fundraising numbers are marred by the growing trend of startups moving abroad (CTECH)

📊 Reports & Data

How China has ‘throttled’ its private sector - venture capital finance has dried up amid political and economic pressures, prompting a dramatic fall in new company formation (Financial Times)
Pulse of Fintech H1 2024 - global fintech investments reached $51.8 billion in the first half of 2024, reflecting a continued decline (KPMG)
The Electrification of Europe - startups and VC report 2024 (Dealroom)

📚 Founder's Toolkit

TRW's collection of free fundraising resources for founders!

How to raise funds with cold emails - how come some founders succeed while so many others fail? Because it's harder than you think (OpenVC)
The burn multiple - how startups should think about capital efficiency (
David Sacks
)
MOIC? QP? TVPI? - the investing world is full of acronyms and terms that are foreign to those that haven’t been in the game for years. A glossary of concepts every fund manager needs to know (Signature Block)