Author: azeeadmin

Like virtually every other major tech company, Microsoft is currently on a mission to bring machine learning to all of its applications. It’s no surprise then that it’s also bringing ‘AI’ to its highly profitable Dynamics 365 CRM products. A year ago, the company introduced its first Dynamics 365 AI solutions and today it’s expanding this portfolio with the launch of three new products: Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, Customer Service and Market Insights.

“Many people, when they talk about CRM, or ERP of old, they referred to them as systems of oppression, they captured data,” said Alysa Taylor, Microsoft corporate VP for business applications and industry. “But they didn’t provide any value back to the end user — and what that end user really needs is a system of empowerment, not oppression.”

It’s no secret that few people love their CRM systems (except for maybe a handful of Dreamforce attendees), but ‘system of oppression’ is far from the ideal choice of words here. Yet Taylor is right that early systems often kept data siloed. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft argues that Dynamics 365 does not do that, allowing it to now use all of this data to build machine learning-driven experiences for specific tasks.

Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, unsurprisingly, is meant to help sales teams get deeper insights into their prospects using sentiment analysis. That’s obviously among the most basic of machine learning applications these days, but AI for Sales also helps these salespeople understand what actions they should take next and which prospects to prioritize. It’ll also help managers coach their individual sellers on the actions they should take.

Similarly, the Customer Service app focuses on using natural language understanding to understand and predict customer service problems and leverage virtual agents to lower costs. Taylor used this part of the announcement to throw some shade at Microsoft’s competitor Salesforce. “Many, many vendors offer this, but they offer it in a way that is very cumbersome for organizations to adopt,” she said. “Again, it requires a large services engagement, Salesforce partners with IBM Watson to be able to deliver on this. We are now out of the box.”

Finally, Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights does just what the name implies: it provides teams with data about social sentiment, but this, too, goes a bit deeper. “This allows organizations to harness the vast amounts of social sentiment, be able to analyze it, and then take action on how to use these insights to increase brand loyalty, as well as understand what newsworthy events will help provide different brand affinities across an organization,” Taylor said. So the next time you see a company try to gin up some news, maybe it did so based on recommendations from Office 365 AI for Market Insights.

Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality glasses have always been interesting technology, but it’s never been clear how the company would move from novelty device to actual viable business use cases. Today, it made a move toward the latter, announcing a couple of applications designed to put the HoloLens to work in Dynamics 365, giving it a real business purpose.

Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s one-stop shop for CRM and ERP, where a company can work on some of its key business software functions including field service in an integrated fashion. The company has been looking at for HoloLens to bring computing power to a group of field workers like repair technicians for whom even a tablet would be awkward because they have to work with both hands free.

For these people, having a fully functioning Windows 10 computer you can wear on your face could be a big advantage and that’s what Microsoft is hoping to provide with HoloLens. The problem was finding use cases where this would make sense. One idea is providing remote assistance for people out in the field to get help from subject experts back at the office, and today the company announced Dynamics 365 Remote Assist.

In this scenario, the worker is wearing a HoloLens either to understand the repair scenario before they go to the site or to get remote help from a subject expert while they are at the site. The expert  can virtually see what the technician is seeing through the HoloLens, and walk them through the repair without leaving the office, even circling parts and providing other annotations in real time.

Microsoft is not the first company to create such a solution. ScopeAR announced RemoteAR 4 months ago, a similar product, but Microsoft has the advantage of building it natively into Windows 10 and all that entails including data integration to update the various repositories with information after the repair is complete.

The other business scenario the company is announcing today is called Dynamics 365 Layout. A designer can create a 3D representation of something like a store or factory layout in CAD software, view the design in 3D in HoloLens, and adjust it in real time before the design goes live. As Microsoft’s Lorraine Bardeen, who has the cool title of General Manager for Microsoft Mixed Reality says, instead of creating cardboard mockups and adjusting your 3D CAD drawing on your computer as you find issues in your design, you can put on your HoloLens and make adjustments in a virtual representation of the layout and it adjusts the CAD drawing for you as you make changes.

Bardeen says the company has worked with customers to find real-world use cases that would save time, effort and money using mixed reality with HoloLens.  They cite companies like Chevron, Ford and ThyssenKrupp Elevators as organizations actively embracing this kind of technology, but it still not clear if HoloLens and mixed reality will become a central component of business in the future. These two solutions GA on October 1st and we will begin the process of finding out.

Fortnite has taken the world by storm. In fact, the game is so popular that Epic has released versions for PC, Xbox, PS4, iOS, Android and the Nintendo Switch, making the game about as accessible as possible.

The popularity of the game stems from the general popularity of the Battle Royale genre and popular streamers like Ninja, who have made the game so much fun to watch. But it also comes from the fun, and often fleeting, skins, dances and pick axes the game offers in its Item Shop.

On October 5th, folks interested in the Switch can pick up some extra Fortnite swag.

Nintendo is releasing a bundle that will include an exclusive Fortnite skin, glider and pick-axe, as well as an extra 1,000 V-Bucks. To be clear, 1,000 V-bucks is the equivalent of $10 and won’t get you much from the Item Shop.

Plus, as pointed out by the Verge, Nintendo has offered several different bundles which would allow customers to pick up a Switch for $329 alongside one of a few games. In most cases, those games cost money, whereas Fortnite is a free to play game.

But the Nintendo Switch bundle is the only way to get your hands on the Switch gear that comes with it.

This isn’t the first time that Epic has given out exclusive gear to players using different hardware or services. There is an exclusive Twitch Prime skin, a Sony PS4 skin, and even a skin for Galaxy Note 9 owners.

The Bundle is available for $329 on October 5.

The Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras weren’t kind to the world’s largest media conglomerates, throwing their business models into question, creating whole new categories of content consumption, and bringing online competition to subscription and ad pricing. Many of the media giants from the 1990s and early 2000s remain market leaders with multi-billion dollar valuations, however, and have become active investors in startups as a tactic to help themselves evolve.

Of the traditional media companies that have committed to corporate venturing, there are two distinct strategies: those whose investing seems to be about replacing the historic classifieds section of newspapers and diversifying into a range of consumer-facing marketplaces, and those whose investing is concentrated on capturing an early glimpse (and early equity stake) in startups reshaping media.

Replacing Classifieds, Investing in Marketplaces

Given the first crisis newspaper groups faced from tech startups in the 1990s and early 2000s was the rise of online classifieds sites (like Craigslist) and transactional marketplaces (like eBay and Amazon), the disruption of their lucrative classified ads revenue stream drove their attention to e-commerce.

Aside from Hearst, the major US newspaper and magazine chains – like Gannett, News Corp, Meredith Corp / Time Inc, and Digital First Media – haven’t made many investments in startups. Perhaps the financial straits of most US newspaper companies have left little cash for VC investments that won’t pay off for years in the future.

But in Northern and Central Europe, where news readership and even print publishing remain healthy by comparison, the leading media groups have been aggressively investing in marketplace and e-commerce startups across the continent over the last decade.

Europe’s leading publisher, Axel Springer has made itself an established player in the European startup scene. Axel Springer’s Digital Ventures team has backed marketplaces from Caroobi (for cars) to Airbnb, and their Berlin-based accelerator (run in partnership with Plug & Play) has invested in over 100 young startups, like digital bank N26, boat rental marketplace Zizoo, and influencer-brand marketplace blogfoster. In a move more strategic to its business, the 15,000-employee group made a large investment in augmented reality unicorn Magic Leap this past February as well, forming a partnership to leverage its content IP in the process.

Meanwhile, Norway’s Schibsted, Sweden’s Bonnier, and Germany’s Hubert Burda Media (best know to many in tech for their annual DLD conference in Munich) and Holtzbrinck Publishing are each globally active, multi-billion dollar publishers who operate active early- or growth-stage VC portfolios comprised mainly of e-commerce brands and marketplaces.

The most iconic corporate venture investment by a newspaper conglomerate (or any company for that matter) is without question the $32M check written into 3-year-old Chinese social web startup Tencent in 2001 by the South African publishing group Naspers (founded in 1915). Tencent, now valued around $400B, is Asia’s largest and most powerful digital media company and Naspers’ 31% stake was worth roughly $175B in March 2018 when it sold $10B in shares.

As a result, Naspers has transformed into a holding company that incubates, acquires, and invests in online marketplace businesses around the globe (though it still maintains a relatively small publishing unit).

The challenge for traditional media companies investing in startups beyond the realm of media is that even if wildly successful, those investments neither give them a distinct advantage in media itself nor make their business model like that of a tech company by way of osmosis. These investments can be flashy distractions to make management and shareholders call the company innovative while it fails to actually re-envision its core operations. Investing in Airbnb or BaubleBar doesn’t address the key challenges or opportunities a traditional publishing group faces.

Therefore the best case scenario in this strategy seems to be that these companies find enough financial success that they just transition out of the content game and become holding companies for other types of consumer-facing brands the way Naspers has. But even then the path seems uncertain: despite all its other activities, Naspers’ market cap is less than the value of its Tencent shares…it’s not clear that the best case scenario necessarily transforms the core organization.

Investing in the Next Generation of Media

The other track for “old media” giants has been to focus on venture capital as a means to uncover the future of the media business so the old guard can learn from the new generation of media entrepreneurs and react to market changes sooner than competitors. Intriguingly, it is consistent that the conglomerates who have taken this strategy are ones whose operations in television, radio, data, and telecom outweigh any involvement in newspapers.

Bertelsmann, Hearst, and 21st Century Fox have been the most aggressive corporate venture investors in startups working to shape the future of media, whether it be through streaming video services, crowdsourced storytelling platforms, or augmented reality.

With annual revenue over €17B, Bertelsmann is one of the largest media companies in the world, spanning television production and broadcasting (RTL Group), book publishing (Penguin Random House), newspapers, magazine publishing (Grüner + Jahr), and education. Unlike of media companies though, it treats venture investments in media startups as a key division of its company rather than as a side project.

The company’s core Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI) invests across the US and Europe in companies like Audible, Mic, The Athletic, and Wondery (and in funds like Greycroft and SV Angel) but there are also the 3 regionally-focused funds investing in China, India, and Brazil plus the education-focused University Ventures fund it anchors in NYC. Collectively, Bertelsmann teams made 40 new startup investments in 2017 and generated €141M in venture returns, according to their 2017 Annual Report.

The investment arm of Hearst, one of America’s largest publishers with $10.8B in 2017 revenue, has likewise been a major backer of BuzzFeed, Pandora, Hootesuite, and Roku not to mention Chinese language app LingoChamp, live entertainment brand Drone Racing League, VR capture startup 8i, and dozens of other media-related startups. Hearst’s ownership in these ventures makes strategic sense: they provide market insights relevant to the core businesses, offer immediate partnership opportunities, and would be strategic acquisition targets that evolve the company’s position in a changing market.

21st Century Fox and Sky Plc (in which 21st Century Fox owns a 39% stake and is trying to acquire outright) have both made a whole slate of startup investments across the media sector in the last few years. In addition to its $100M investment in live-streaming platform Caffeine (announced on September 5) and similarly massive investment in WndrCo’s NewTV venture led by Meg Whitman, Fox has invested repeatedly in sports-centric OTT service fuboTV, hit newsletter brand TheSkimm, VR studio WITHIN, and fantasy sports app Draftkings with Sky often co-investing or building meaningful stakes in international startups like iflix (a leading streaming video service in Southeast Asia and the Middle East).

Since traditional media giants own extensive intellectual property of hit shows, films, and often exclusive rights to popular live events – not to mention established distribution channels to tens or hundreds of millions of people – there are immediate partnerships that can be signed to benefit both a startup and the incumbent. The incumbents often re-invest repeatedly to build their ownership and deepen the alignment between the companies, which rarely happens when media companies invest in marketplace startups.

Tencent’s always-be-evolving model

The new crop of digital media giants that includes Netflix, Snap, VICE, and BuzzFeed aren’t doing much if any strategic investing. Instead they’re keeping focused on growth of their core product offering. The notable exception is China’s Tencent.

In addition to dominating China’s booming messaging app sector with WeChat and QQ, owning 75% market share of music streaming in China, and being the world’s leading games publisher through its own studios (Riot Games, Supercell, etc.) and its minority stakes in Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, and others, Tencent has taken a strategy of investing often and early in promising digital media startups…and it has its tentacles in everything.

Based on Crunchbase data, Tencent has done over 300 investments in startups. It is likely the most active venture investor in China, where most of its portfolio is concentrated, but also backs Western media startups like SoundHound, Wattpad, Spotify, Smule, and Wonder Workshop.

Tencent can give distribution to these upstarts through its vast portfolio of digital properties and it can keep tabs on what new content formats or business models are gaining traction. It operates from a mindset of perpetually evolving, and trying to snatch up startups whose products could be key assets in the future of content creation, distribution, or monetization. This approach is one both old media giants and the next gen of unicorn media startups should consider.

The pace of innovation is moving so fast, and so many new doors are opening up – from subscription streaming and esports to voice interfaces and augmented reality – that corporate venture as a core strategy can unlock opportunities for the organization to evolve early, before it ends up being categorized as “old media”.

Coinbase continues to beef up its management team with another new hire in Michael Li, who’s joining the cryptocurrency trading platform as its VP of data. Li spent the last seven years at LinkedIn, most recently as its head of analytics and data science.

“Data will be essential to empowering Coinbase’s mission, and core to company’s strategy to deliver the most trusted and easiest-to-use cryptocurrency products and services,” Li wrote in a Medium post this morning. “I feel privileged to take on this challenging and rewarding new role to start the next chapter of my career.”

“We will be both leveraging existing technologies like machine learning and AI, as well as creating data innovations for emerging blockchain use cases to keep up with the ever-changing industry landscape. I look forward to advancing the company’s leadership position in the crypto industry through the power of data and will share key learnings along the way.”

On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2018, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong opened up about his desire to one day run a public company. For now, Coinbase is backed by private investors including IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32 and Draper Associates. It had raised more than $200 million at a $1.6 billion valuation as of August 2017.

Here’s a look at some of Coinbase’s other 2018 hires:

• Tim Wagner, VP of engineering (July). Wagner was previously a general manager at Amazon Web Services.
• Jeff Horowitz, Chief Compliance Officer (July). Horowitz was the former global head of compliance at Pershing.
• Alesia Haas, Chief Financial Officer (April). Haas joined from New York-based alternative asset management firm Oz Management
• Balaji Srinivasan, Chief Technology Officer (April). Srinivasan joined through the company’s acquisition of Earn.com, where he was CEO.
• Rachael Horwitz, VP of communications (April). Horwitz was formerly a partner at Spark Capital.
• Tariq Meyers, Global Head of Belonging & Inclusion (April). Meyers was formerly the head of diversity and inclusion at Lyft.
• Emilie Choi, VP of corporate and business development (March). Choi also joined from LinkedIn, where she was head of corporate development.

Hulu’s live TV streaming service has hit a milestone number of more than 1 million subscribers. That’s up from the estimated 450,000 CNBC reported at the beginning of the year, and the 800,000 official number Hulu announced in May. But although the live TV audience may be growing, it’s still a small fraction of Hulu’s total subscriber base of 20 million-plus, which includes those who pay for the service’s on-demand programming.

The new figures were first reported by USA Today, in a report detailing Hulu’s Emmy campaign. (The streamer took home four Emmys this year – far behind market leaders, HBO and Netflix, which tied for the top spot with 23 wins apiece, across both last night’s ceremony and the earlier Creative Arts awards.)

Hulu also confirmed the number’s accuracy with us.

This one million subscriber milestone is notable given the fierce competition among live TV streaming services these days.

Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now still lead the space, thanks to Sling’s early mover advantage, and DirecTV Now’s distribution through AT&T’s wireless business. The former had 2.3 million subscribers as of June, per Reuters, while AT&T said DirecTV Now had 1.8 million, as of its last earnings report in July.

Meanwhile, newcomer YouTube TV hit 800,000 around May – a number also cited by The Information in July, when reporting the difficulties in making profits in the live TV space. At the time, Hulu with Live TV was said to be “nearing a million.”

Sony’s PlayStation Vue is trailing the lot with somewhere over half a million – no doubt stymied by its branding, which seems to imply its only for PlayStation owners.

And these are just the major players, too.

There are also a growing number of niche streaming services, ranging from the sports-focused fuboTV to the valued priced cable-like package offered by Philo, which was recently trying to increase distribution through a bundle deal with Pandora. (Hulu has a similar deal with Spotify).

Plus, AT&T quickly capitalized on the Time Warner merger with a second, low-cost service called WatchTV. 

While there are now several skinny bundle options clogging the market, they’re no longer looking like the value they once were. Many – like Sling, YouTube TV, DirecTV Now, and Vue – have recently raised their prices, which feels like a flashback to the cable TV era.

And if you factor in their extras – like expanded storage on “cloud DVRs” (a feature that costs very little to providers, compared with the price for the consumer), extra streams, or premium add-ons – they’re actually more in line with a cable TV bill than ever before.

It remains to be seen if consumers will opt out of live TV streaming, as a result, at some point further down the road. For now, however, the services are growing as more people cut the cord with traditional TV.

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, has been a controversial project since its debut. The need for the framework has been clear: the payloads of mobile pages can be just insane, what with layers and layers of images, Javascript, ad networks, and more slowing down page rendering time and costing users serious bandwidth on metered plans.

Yet, the framework has been aggressively foisted on the community by Google, which has backed the project not just with technical talent, but also by making algorithmic changes to its search results that have essentially mandated that pages comply with the AMP project’s terms — or else lose their ranking on mobile searches.

Even more controversially, as part of making pages faster, the AMP project uses caches of pages on CDNs — which are hosted by Google (and also Cloudflare now). That meant that Google’s search results would direct a user to an AMP page hosted by Google, effectively cutting out the owner of the content in the process.

The project has been led by Malte Ubl, a senior staff engineer working on Google’s Javascript infrastructure projects, who has until now held effective unilateral control over the project.

In the wake of all of this criticism, the AMP project announced today that it would reform its governance, replacing Ubl as the exclusive tech lead with a technical steering committee comprised of companies invested in the success in the project. Notably, the project’s intention has an “…end goal of not having any company sit on more than a third of the seats.” In addition, the project will create an advisory board and working groups to shepherd the project’s work.

The project is also expected to move to a foundation in the future. These days, there are a number of places such a project could potentially reside, including the Apache Software Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation.

While the project has clearly had its detractors, the performance improvements that AMP has been fighting for are certainly meritorious. With this more open governance model, the project may get deeper support from other browser makers like Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft, as well as the broader open source community.

And while Google has certainly been the major force behind the project, it has also been popular among open source software developers. Since the project’s launch, there have been 710 contributors to the project according to its statistics, and the project (attempting to empathize its non-Google monopoly) notes that more than three quarters of those contributors don’t work at Google.

Nonetheless, more transparency and community involvement should help to accelerate Accelerated Mobile Pages. The project will host its contributor summit next week at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, where these governance changes as well as the technical and design roadmaps for the project will be top of mind for attendees.

Apple has finished wiring billions of euros to pay back illegal tax benefits to the Irish government according to Reuters. Overall, Apple has paid $15.3 billion (€13.1 billion) for the original fine as well as $1.4 billion (€1.2 billion) in interests.

In August 2016 the European Commission ruled that Apple benefited from illegal tax benefits from 2003 to 2014. In particular, the company should have paid more taxes in Ireland — a lot more. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said that Apple’s effective corporate tax rate was much lower than expected.

At the time, many global companies used the Double Irish structure to pay corporate tax on a fraction of your actual profit. Apple claimed that everything was legal, and the Irish government sided with Apple — probably because the huge fine would be bad for business.

European governments lobbied to put an end to the Double Irish back in 2014. Apple moved some of its international cash to the tiny island of Jersey around the same time.

For now, the pile of cash is sitting in an escrow account. Apple appealed the European Union’s decision back in 2016. This process could take up to five years, which means that the Irish government won’t see Apple’s money anytime soon.

If you’ve been following European tax reforms, you know that France, Germany, Spain and Italy were discussing a reform to tax big tech companies based on actual revenue in each European country. This way, tech companies wouldn’t be able to report profit in just one country with a lower corporate tax rate.

But it looks like this reform is now stuck as some European countries disagree with this reform. You need everybody on board to pass this kind of reforms. For this reason, it’s unclear if it’s going to happen at all.

HQ Trivia is gearing up to debut a follow-up to its wildly popular live mobile game show.

Called HQ Words, the company announced this morning they’ll release the Wheel of Fortune-style game in October.

HQ Trivia, which airs twice per day and awards winners as much as $100,000 for successfully answering 12 questions, debuted on the app store last August and was a viral success. The game, usually hosted by comedian Scott Rogowsky (pictured above), spawned a whole cohort of copycats as a result

Its app store ranking, however, has been steadily decreasing in recent months, as pointed out by TechCrunch’s Josh Constine in a recent article on HQ Trivia’s Apple TV app launch. In a response to that article, HQ Trivia co-founder Rus Yusupov hinted at new games in development: “Games are a hits business and don’t grow exponentially forever. HQ has massive early traction and still millions playing daily. Also developing new game formats, one of which we think is really special and complements Trivia nicely. More soon! Until then thanks for playing.”

As of January, HQ Trivia was attracting more than 1 million gamers to its live broadcasts. According to Sensor Tower, its app has been downloaded nearly 13 million times.

The company, founded by the entrepreneurs behind Vine, has raised some $24 million to date, garnering a $100 million valuation earlier this year. It’s backed by Founders Fund, Shrug Capital and Lightspeed Ventures.

Billionaire VC Peter Thiel has largely flown under the radar since raising his hand to support Donald Trump’s presidential bid, then working with Trump’s administration to fill some of its many vacant positions. The association made him deeply unpopular in Silicon Valley, though he says people have not shown a “great deal of hostility to me personally . . . it manifests itself in all sorts of other ways.”

Perhaps ahead of the midterm elections, perhaps because he has more recently moved to L.A., or perhaps because he’s simply feeling more talkative, Thiel is starting to open up again about his often contrarian views to particular outlets. Earlier this year, he sat down with Fox Business to discuss his continuing support of Trump. Thiel talked again last week with commentator and comedian Dave Rubin, whose YouTube show, Rubin says, is focused on free speech. (The interview format is for people with “political PTSD,” suggests its trailer.)

This newest chat, which goes on for more than two hours, touches on a wide number of things, but watching it last night, what we found most striking was Thiel’s continued disdain for academia despite his own background as both a Stanford undergraduate and law school graduate. Thiel has plainly been successful. He also formed the kind of meaningful, lifelong friendships that one hopes to find at college. Indeed, in a separate, rare public appearance this year, Thiel debated Reid Hoffman, a former Stanford classmate and longtime friend of Thiel, at a public policy think tank on Stanford’s campus.

Nevertheless, in his conversation with Rubin, Thiel’s answer to why Silicon Valley has become so “left wing” is higher education. Not instability in the White House or tariffs or immigration or tax cuts or disagreements over foreign policy. Thiel, the free market thinker, thinks schools are to blame for Silicon Valley “groupthink.”

If you want to assume for a minute that he is right, then this is a new problem for the region. Thiel volunteered during the interview that Silicon Valley has “shifted a lot over the years.” Namely, he said, when he was a college student in the late ’80s, Stanford was “sort of a very liberal, politically correct place” but Silicon Valley more broadly “was not. It was vaguely libertarian,” he said. “It was a moderate Republican congressional district.” By the late ’90s, he continued, “it had sort of shifted to [moderately Democrat] and, fast forward 20 years, it shifted pretty hard left.”

Investors and founders and employees in Silicon Valley had undergraduate and advanced degrees 20 years ago, as they do now. But that doesn’t factor into Thiel’s explanation of Silicon Valley’s newer leanings. Said Thiel to Rubin of the evolution, “Part of it is it’s probably the most educated part of the country, in terms of how much time people spend in college. And I think one of the downsides of too much education is that you get the most brainwashed. And so it is the most educated can also mean that it is the most brainwashed.”

He doesn’t think the problem extends so much to founders but to the “rank and file.” Said Thiel, “If you’re a really good engineer or if you’re really good at a specific thing, your education doesn’t involve you thinking that much about politics. So it’s not necessarily from deep ideological conviction; it’s often more as a fashion statement than as a question of power.” (Oof.)

Thiel, who is likable in person, has been talking for nearly a decade about the fact that he thinks higher education is overvalued and may actually be a hindrance to innovation. It’s largely why he created a fellowship program in 2010 that encourages young people with big ideas to drop out of college and take a shot at realizing their dreams. And his point that more highly educated people are leaning “left” is correct. According to data released this spring by the Pew Research Center, “In 1994, 39 percent of those with a four-year college degree (no postgraduate experience) identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party and 54 percent associated with the Republican Party. In 2017, those figures were exactly reversed.”

Still, it’s disappointing to see Thiel embrace anti-intellectualism, because it’s blatantly divisive (which is maybe his point), because it’s ridiculous coming from Thiel (who isn’t exactly part of the proletariat), and because the argument doesn’t hold up, particularly given that Silicon Valley has long been home to a highly educated workforce, one that used to vote more commonly along Republican lines.

Did college degrees suddenly drive a broader shift in the other direction? No. But moneyed, educated people feigning a reflexive aversion to “elites” may have, and Americans in Silicon Valley —  and well beyond  — are catching onto the act.

If you missed the interview last week, you can catch it right here.