Startup Stash - Making Bubbles and Breaking Bounds 🫧

Even international professional athletes are not immune to the barrage of insolent and racist comments on social media. If anything, they’re more prone to abuse by perverted faceless trolls online. 

But athletes are expected to maintain a strong online presence despite such negativity that could worsen mental health. Thankfully, there’s a startup that’s working at blocking such comments from user feeds. GoBubble offers an AI tool to filter out abusive content. 

These filters are unlike the regular feed filters on Twitter or Meta platforms. 

They don’t just block out certain keywords. Instead, the company's Emotion AI technology analyzes user behavior across various forms of media, including text, images, videos, audio, and emojis. By doing so, it identifies and blocks toxic and harmful content without relying solely on keywords or context analysis.

Why can’t Meta or Twitter restrict such abuses? Well, they’ve tried. 

Following the European Championship final in 2020, several black players, including three from the England team, faced torrents of abuse after missing penalties. Both platforms did do some damage control by blurring out the abuses from their feeds, but it took a while. They faced heavy criticism for allowing racist posts to show up in people’s feeds for extended periods of time. 

Interesting Facts: 

• It is a majorly female-run startup. 
• In the 4 years since its launch (in 2019) GoBubble has already gained immense popularity among soccer players in the UK. It is being actively used by athletes in the Premier Leagues and the fourth division in English soccer. 
• Outside of the UK, they’ve also partnered with A-Leagues and Professional Footballers Australia. 
• It’s not just about stopping abusive content but also protecting human moderators from the emotional toll of identifying and blocking such content.

286 companies filed for bankruptcy in the US during the first 5 months of 2023, according to data released by S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

The last time we saw such high filing was back in 2010 when the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession.

There are some pretty big names on the bankruptcy list - Silicon Valley Bank, Bed Bath & Beyond and media disruptor Vice going, to name but a few. Apart from these, 37 companies on the list belong to the non-essential goods industry— making it the hardest-hit sector so far. 

Reasons for corporate failure?

There are wide-ranging factors, but analysts have picked out rising interest rates and supply chain issues as the two biggest reasons that this year has proven particularly difficult to weather for some firms.

What can efficiently suck out the remaining fun from work and hand over more power to your bosses? 

A Noncompete - workplace agreements that limit when and where you can work if you leave a company. These agreements can help bosses maintain control over not just your current job, but also your next.

Why do they exist?

They were initially designed by companies to hedge against top management employees sharing trade secrets with competitors after leaving the firm. They were also created to prevent competitors from poaching top talent. 

But today these contracts are found across all levels and positions. And in most cases they are ridiculously obtrusive to one’s career. Imagine a school teacher being told she cannot work for another school in the district for a whole year after leaving her former institute. Imaging having to switch districts and uprooting your life just to be able to get a job.

In January, the FTC proposed a law banning nearly all noncompetes, arguing that they restrict job mobility, technological development, and wage growth. According to the FTC, a ban would potentially open up career mobility for ~30m Americans — and increase wages by up to $296B annually.

Sadly only few states acted upon it. In May, Minnesota became only the fourth state to ban post-employment noncompetes.

Could these noncompete clauses be adding to employees work frustration and dissatisfaction? 

🐂 Bulls Are Here - We are officially in a bull market as the S&P 500 has risen 20% since its October low, marking an end to the longest bear run since 1948.