Entrepreneurship is a mental game

Confidence is crucial, and losing it could cost you everything.

This week, we’re talking:

• Why managing your own psychology is so important in entrepreneurship 🥊 🧠 🥊

• Potential Google breakup to address monopoly concerns 🔎 💔

• DHS collecting biometric data on migrant KIDS 🛂 👶🏻 👦🏻 👧🏻

• The end of GARM might be an opportunity for a reset ❌ 📝

• The end of geofence warrants 🚧 📄

• Democrats are now the ones lobbing censorship complaints at social media 🐴 🇺🇸

• MIT’s AI risk repository 🤖 ⚠️

• When yoga accidentally reveals nuclear secrets 🧘🏻‍♀️ ☣️

My Take:

Managing your own psychology is the most challenging and most important part of your journey as an entrepreneur.

You can't lose confidence in yourself and what you’re building. Which is tough because there will be reasons to lose conviction. Good, sound reasons. You have to absorb all the feedback, pivot sometimes, and even ditch parts of your product or plan that you love. But you can never lose the gut feeling that you’re onto something unique and powerful.

If you lose your conviction that you’re going to win, you’ve already lost. Might as well hang your cleats up and go home.

On the other hand, if you truly believe you’ve got the winning product that your customers actually need, you will sell it more successfully. If you believe you can crush your competitors, you just might.

Winning Founders see no limits. They believe in their vision and pursue it relentlessly, even when venture capitalists, family members, and former colleagues are unimpressed. They wake up at night with a sinking feeling in their stomachs that the whole project could fail – and then get to work first thing in the morning to ensure it doesn't.

Managing your own psychology does not ensure success, but failing to manage your own psychology all but ensures failure.

Remember: if the company goes under, true Co-Founders-for-real die with their gun in their hand. Keep the faith.

🖖🖖🏻🖖🏽🖖🏿

Stories I’m Following:

U.S. Said to Consider a Breakup of Google to Address Search Monopoly via NYTimes 🔎 💔

Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said.

DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children “down to the infant” via MIT Tech Review 🛂 👶🏻 👦🏻 👧🏻

Beyond concerns about privacy, transparency, and accountability, some experts also worry about testing and developing new technologies using data from a population that has little recourse to provide—or withhold—consent. Could consent “actually take into account the vast power differentials that are inherent in the way that this is tested out on people?” asks Petra Molnar, author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of AI. “And if you arrive at a border … and you are faced with the impossible choice of either: get into a country if you give us your biometrics, or you don’t.”

What I’m Reading:

The End Of GARM Is A Reset, Not A Setback by Arielle Garcia via AdExchanger ❌ 📝

Brand safety has been diluted and distorted, and it is now viewed as synonymous with content adjacency. This was a costly error. It has allowed for fear-mongering to the detriment of brands and publishers. It created false friction between brand safety and freedom of speech. As a result, brand safety has become polarized, politicized and weaponized. We have now seen why lax standards and loose enforcement can go horribly wrong for advertisers. But advertisers have the opportunity to reclaim control and redefine “brand safety” to better reflect their own expectations.

The Fifth Circuit Shuts Down Geofence Warrants—And Maybe A Lot More by Orin S. Kerr via Reason 🚧 📄

The new case is about the Fourth Amendment limits of geofence warrants, which are warrants to access location information for users who have opted into having Internet providers retain location history… the Fifth Circuit rules that because the database of geofence records is so large, and because the whole database must be scanned through to find matches, the Fourth Amendment does not allow courts to issue warrants to collect those records. In legal terms, it is impossible to have a warrant particular enough to authorize the surveillance.  The government can't gather these kinds of online records at all, in other words, even with a warrant based on probable cause.

Democrats flip social media ‘censorship’ complaints on Musk, GOP via WaPo 🐴 🇺🇸

Bianca Recto, communications director for the liberal watchdog group Accountable Tech, said social media platforms have “outsize influence to tip the scales one way or another” in an election. And when an owner like Musk makes it “clear that he’s going to use his social platform to support one side,” she said, “the playing field isn’t level.”

MIT researchers release a repository of AI risks via TechCrunch 🤖 ⚠️

Slattery says that the AI risk repository, which includes over 700 AI risks grouped by causal factors (e.g. intentionality), domains (e.g. discrimination) and subdomains (e.g. disinformation and cyberattacks), was born out of a desire to understand the overlaps and disconnects in AI safety research. Other risk frameworks exist. But they cover only a fraction of the risks identified in the repository, Slattery says, and these omissions could have major consequences for AI development, usage and policymaking.

Hot-Launch Yoga: Cobra Pose Reveals Nuke Repose via Federation of American Scientists 🧘🏻‍♀️ ☣️

The Indian Navy has integrated yoga into its training practices for decades, and in recent years it has conducted yoga sessions onboard its warships during port visits as a form of cultural diplomacy. These events, and the social media posts documenting them, occasionally offer fascinating data points about the status of specific military capabilities. In particular, yoga-related social media posts and satellite imagery now indicate that one of India’s oldest naval missiles capable of launching nuclear weapons has likely been retired as the country continues to develop its sea-based nuclear deterrent. 

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