Community, Content, Culture, Education, Entrepreneurship
Anastasia Ashman
2024 Progress Report: The Bigger Picture

Wearing my ‘serial founder exploring starting a company’ hat, I advanced my passion project KIP3.

KIP is a seven-year long passion project to tackle the disinformation problem on social media that makes us poor information citizens and polarized neighbors who cannot take collective action in the face of threats like the climate crisis.

2024 Progress Report: The Bigger Picture
Entrepreneurship, Education, Community, Content, Culture, Tools
Anastasia Ashman
Timely Civic Education Project ISO Peers, ...
It’s a Wikipedia + Wordle for Current Affairs to make better citizens and voters…
A comprehensive project that aims to promote trust and transparency in democracy while combating disinformation and corruption.
The deliverables can be used individually or collectively to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools needed to critically evaluate information and build a network of trustworthy sources.
Timely Civic Education Project ISO Peers, Partners, Sponsors
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Welcoming a babytech unicorn to the family

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Mine is a household of entrepreneurs. My husband Burc and I have both been working in the tech venture and startup world for decades. We’ve done startups together too!

Today the Silicon Slopes Series-B IOT company he joined last year — Owlet Baby Care, which makes a smart sock to measure blood oxygen levels in infants, among other connected nursery products — announced their merger with a special acquisition corporation at a Wall Street valuation of more than $1 billion. That’s a unicorn in Silicon Valley parlance.

Among the new partners Owlet is gaining are some fashion world luminaries like Tommy Hilfiger and the chairman of Tom Ford, Domenico De Sole, who are sure to take Owlet from Utah to the world.

Congrats to everyone who made Owlet a success!

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A good moment for the right vanity press/publishing service

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Publishing friends, authors, business women, entrepreneurs: what do you think of this new initiative from Worth Media?

  • A new pipeline to publishing for their subject-matter expert members to help build and further their careers,

  • an opportunity for people who traditionally have a harder time getting published or recognized,

  • to be released through an imprint/house for an established publisher (Simon & Schuster),

  • and author retains the rights.

My first thought? Vanity press. In a downmarket for publishing.

And then, well, okay. It's a good business opportunity to provide publishing services direct to an underserved information-rich community. And, then, hey maybe better than OK. For everyone involved, including the readers of these books. Read about it here.

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If I were writing the book on 2020, this would be the BLUF

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This is how a book written by the ‘generative journalism” account/“knowledge service in an infodemic” I contribute to would start. I believe that’s called BLUF: bottom line, up front.

What would the first sentence of YOUR book on 2020 be?

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Can a venture studio change the racial dynamic in Silicon Valley?

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Have you heard of venture studios?

They're like movie studios, but instead of producing and releasing movies they create startups ready to scale. A venture studio focuses on just a few ventures and puts more funding into them than you'd see with an accelerator which places many small bets. They also recruit top executives once the existential question of "is this solution commercially viable?" can be answered with "yes".

One venture studio may be a way to solve a longtime problem in Silicon Valley: only 1% of VC goes to black- or brown-founded startups.

The sweet spot of Revitalize Venture Studio, from longtime SaaS entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, is knowing how to get a high-potential startup founded by diverse black and brown founders to product-market fit.

Often these are the very founders that lack access to early seed capital (up to $750K, far beyond most Family & Friends raises) needed to extend the life of their startup to get to product-market fit, which is a necessary stage to attract VC funding for Series A.

I just had the pleasure of meeting Clarence and learning more about his venture studio and want you to take a look at this pragmatic opportunity to support more POC in the Silicon Valley universe.

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