Ben Horowitz on a Murder, Genghis Khan, and Corporate Culture

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, thinks that the best way to convey to executives the importance of new employee orientation is through a story about a brutal prison murder.At the WIRED25 Festival in San Francisco on Friday, Horowitz said that when it comes to explaining these concepts to CEOs, the straightforward…

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The Race to Bring Meat Alternatives to Scale

Uma Valeti makes a lot of promises, but one weighs heavier on his mind than others. He’s only got a few years to make good on the pledge he recently made to his daughter. That on the day she graduates high school, he’ll throw a party for her and her friends where they can chow…

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Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on Making Workers More Productive—Or Not

Stewart Butterfield, one of the cofounders of Slack, acknowledged at the WIRED25 conference in San Francisco on Friday that it’s difficult to tell whether the company’s workplace-messaging software actually makes companies more productive.“Economic measures of the impact of productivity in IT investment, for like 35 years or so, have been kind of hard to do,”…

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African AI Experts Get Excluded From a Conference—Again

At the G7 meeting in Montreal last year, Justin Trudeau told WIRED he would look into why more than 100 African artificial intelligence researchers had been barred from visiting that city to attend their field’s most important annual event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, or NeurIPS.Now the same thing has happened again. More than…

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Instagram Will Test Hiding ‘Likes’ in the US Starting Next Week

If you post a picture, and no one sees how many people liked it, does it still exist? Instagram users in the United States are going to find out next week. Months after the company tested hiding "like" counts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland, Italy, and Brazil, CEO Adam Mosseri announced today at…

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Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on the Struggles of Policing the Web

For years, the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare maintained that as a sort of internet utility—providing speed, reliability, and security services to sites around the world—it had no role in moderating content online. But more recently, Cloudflare has stoked controversy by removing support, first for the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer in August 2017 and…

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Here’s How to Watch the WIRED25 Summit Live

Make way for the future. Friday, WIRED25 returns to San Francisco for two days packed with forward-thinking talks and activities by some of the world’s most innovative and influential people.We’ll have climate activists and CEOs, actors and authors, scientists and engineers—plus a guy who can teach you to make the world's best paper airplane. (Check…

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