Startup Stash - The Cousin, The Cook, & Crickets 🦗

Who doesn’t love the classic burger and fries combo? It’s hard to think of a fast-food chain that can’t make a decent burger. 

CaliExpress, a restaurant by Flippy, located in Pasadena, U.S., also offers the routine menu of burgers and fries. But there’s a twist – the burgers are made by robots. Not machines, actual walking robots. Think Michael Sheen as the bartender in Passengers. 

Here's how it operates: 

Customers place their orders at a kiosk. They are then relayed to the kitchen where two robots take charge:

• One of the robots acts as a versatile fry cook, churning out up to 150 pounds of fries per hour and some other recipes like chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks.
• The other robot grinds wagyu beef and grills up to six patties simultaneously.

But despite claiming to be the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant (per their website), the food is not all robot-made.

• At the end, your spices are added by a human hand. An employee does the final salting of the fries, grilling of onions, and assembling the burger.

We can’t really comment on the taste of the food, since taste and experience is subject, as illustrated by the restaurant’s Google reviews. But the blend of technology and culinary makes for an entertaining spectacle for diners. 

CaliExpress isn’t the first of its kind. Other eateries have also been using robots to do the initial prep of food. 

• At Chipotle, a bot from robotics startup Hyphen whips up to 180 bowls per hour, significantly faster than human counterparts.
• Sweetgreen's Infinite Kitchen restaurants boast bots that churn out 400-500 dishes per hour, surpassing human productivity by 50%.

What’s the profile of a unicorn founders? 

A recent study delves into men/women behind the fabled "unicorns" – companies valued at over a billion dollars. 

Surprisingly, it reveals that a significant portion of these founders as what one might call “underdogs”. They come from humble beginnings, often tracing back to top-tier universities. 

The study conducted by Defiance Capital analyzed 845 unicorns and 2,018 founders associated with them, focussing on the U.S. and U.K. markets between 2013 and 2023.

Here are the juicy stats: 

• 70% of unicorns have “underdog founders” (immigrants, women, people of color).
• 17% of them now have a female founder as of 2023.
• 53% have degrees from the top 10 global universities.
• 49% of unicorn CEOs had STEM degrees (64% of female founding CEOs had STEM degrees) and 70% of founder teams have STEM degrees.

The whirlwind of tech IPOs that marked the early days of the pandemic suddenly halted in 2022, as capital streams dwindled due to the Federal Reserve's rate hikes.

Fast forward to now, and the financial tides are shifting once again. Despite the same number of companies going public in the first quarter of 2024 compared to last year, the amount of capital raised has skyrocketed to three times the previous figure, totaling $7.8 billion. Adding to the excitement are the two largest IPOs of the year thus far.

📮 Writing It Up - Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Camila Cabello, and other pop stars' wrote an open letter calling for an AI crackdown. Read it here. 

🖼️ Tweak Your AI Masterpiece - DALL-E will now let you edit your images in ChatGPT. 

🪖 Younger Force - Ukraine lowered its military draft age from 27 to 25, a controversial move as the country tries to bulk up its troops to fight Russia’s invasion.

🛟 Lifeboat For News - Yahoo is buying Artifact, the AI news app from the Instagram co-founders that was about to shut down a few weeks ago. 

👋 The AI Biggies Leaving - The ‘Meta AI mafia’ brain drain continues with at least 3 more high-level employees leaving to strike out on their own.

👺 Fired Founders of "Truth" - Donald Trump’s social media company is suing 2 of its co-founders after shares sunk 21% last week.