🍪 Tough times for Forbes 30 Under 30
Happy Thursday, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta. We’re like your Scooby Doo, out here sniffin’ out all that sweet tech news.
Let’s get to the good stuff.
In the oven this week:
💸 Forbes’ fraudster hall of fame
🗳️ Poll of the week: is Forbes 30 Under 30 still a thing?
🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines
🍫 Chocolate chips: our 3 favorite finds
😂 Snickerdoodles: Thursday memery
FRESHLY BAKED
FORBES' FRAUSTER HALL OF FAME
When you turn 30, there are few things more unsatisfying than knowing you’ll never get the chance to write "Forbes’ 30 Under 30" in your LinkedIn bio.
But lucky for dummies like us, the shame of being a normie is disappearing faster than the money in our FTX accounts. ‘Cause we got another fraud on the list, folks!
Forbes 30 Under 30 could really be called the Frauster 30 Under 30.
This week, it was Charlie Javice that got charged with fraud, after duping JPMorgan into buying her startup for $175 million.
She founded a company called Frank, which helps students by simplifying the financial aid process for college.
Sounds nice, except she told JPMorgan that she had data for 4.25 million customers when she really only had data for 300K.
Somehow, JPM sealed the deal without confirming the existence of said customers and ponied up the dough.
When they finally got around to asking for a customer list post-acquisition, Charlie paid $18K to send over a fake email list.
Small brain move.
Just picture her mapping out the plan like:
The only problem was, JPM emailed the list and quickly figured out the data was all fake.
Charlie then tried to cover up the cover up by paying $104K for some actual data, but alas - time was not on her side.
Now, she gets to join Forbes’ fraudster hall of fame! And boy is she in great company:
Elizabeth Holmes
Sam Bankman Fried
Martin Shkreli
Some of the biggest names in the book.
The whole thing has also turned Forbes into a giant laughing stock:
Forbes is the Jim Cramer of Media.
Never ceases to amaze me.
— Linas Beliūnas (@linasbeliunas)
Mar 12, 2023
Hope she’s got a good product cause she’s definitely gonna need some financial aid now...
POLL OF THE WEEK
IS FORBES 30 UNDER 30 STILL A THING?
Forbes 30 Under 30 might have lost some of its prestige, but we gotta know - do people still care?
Is Forbes 30 Under 30 still relevant?
Sound off 👇🏽 |
COOKIE CRUMBS
BITE SIZED TREATS
Italy is officially the first western country to ban ChatGPT. Its rationale? Data privacy and minors using it. Wonder which countries will follow 👀
When life gives ya lemons, make Lemon8. Lemon8, Bytedance’s new social app, just hit the top of the app charts. It’s a cross between IG and Pinterest and has slid under the radar in the US so far compared to the Bytedance crown jewel (TikTok).
Stanford released a new report on the state of AI. Some nuggets: people in China believe in AI's future way more than people in the US, AI is both helping and hurting the environment, and the US had the most funded AI companies last year by a large margin (3x the number of companies as the next highest, which is China).
Apparently, GenZ wants to work for Google: 16% of US college students and recent grads think of Google as the most attractive employer.
Twitter has replaced their blue bird logo with the dogecoin doge. It currently appears on the top left of the Twitter homepage and on loading screens, and sent dogecoin up 30%. Talk about that engineering #impact.
CHOCOLATE CHIPS
OUR FAVORITE FINDS
SNICKERDOODLES
THURSDAY MEMES
😂
That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!
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