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There is a strange gravitational pull in the AI ecosystem right now. Every founder wants to raise a monster round. A $50 million seed. A $200 million Series A. The kind of fundraise that makes headlines, melts your inbox, and gets your parents to finally understand you have a real job. Ive raised both kinds of rounds. A $12 million one that looked incredible in TechCrunch. And recently, an intentionally small but oversubscribed pre-seed for my new company, Empromptu.ai, where investors fought for allocation like we were handing out Taylor Swift tickets. Having lived on both sides, here is the truth no one in AI land wants to say out loud: A mega round might be the fastest way to screw up your company. The perfection problem When I raised $12 million at my last startup, CodeSee.io, I thought I was winning. Fewer than 30 Black women have ever raised that much venture capital. I thought big money meant big validation. And yes, years later, it was validating. CodeSee.io was Cursor before Cursor was cool. But what people forget is that everything had to be perfect. Perfect product, perfect engineering, perfect marketing, perfect sales, perfect timing. You are signing up for perfection with capital that large. And the second you fall short, the clock starts ticking on the next round, your runway, and your teams morale. Here is what no one tells you until you are already living inside the pressure cooker. A mega round is a contract with the future, not a celebration of the present. You are promising you will grow like a weed even while the world is chaos. In AI especially, half the market is noise and the other half is vaporware. You are still finding product-market-something, but your fundraising number tells the world you are already at product-market-fit. Now your job is not to build truth. It is to build momentum. Markets change, timing changes, and your optimism doesnt pay your investors back. Big rounds push you toward optics instead of output. You start building for the board instead of the customer. The louder the round, the more deafening the expectations that follow. Before chasing a headline-sized round, you need to ask yourself hard questions: Based on your actual GTM enginenot the one you hope to havehow much return can you realistically deliver? Do you have the sales pipeline, category dynamics, and team structure to grow 10 times or even 20 times the capital you want to raise? If an external shock hitsan economic downturn, an AI bubble burst, or a sudden shift in whatever latest metrics investors care aboutdoes your business have the frameworks and adaptability to survive it and still justify your valuation? Raising the stakes Most founders dont run these numbers honestly. We romanticize optimism. But fundraising is not about what you believe your company could be worthits about whether you have the machinery to make that valuation real in the harshest version of the future. A mega round multiplies every assumption you make. Every risk. Every blind spot. And ego makes it even harder. Getting told your company is worth $50 million at the idea stage is intoxicating. Its human nature to want to believe the flattering version of your story. But the best founders know how to put their ego on the shelf long enough to look at their business objectively. Investors dont care how good the number feels; they care whether you can return their fund. Most importantly: AI is changing too fast for giant commitments. Todays hype cycle is tomorrows graveyard. You do not want to be the founder forced to keep shipping an outdated strategy because that is what you raised money for. Momentum is a blessing only if you are pointed in the right direction. If you are not, it becomes an anchor. With Empromptu, we kept the round intentionally small and tight, at least for now. We chose discipline over dopamine. And here is the secret: Small money gives you big freedom. You can pivot. Experiment. Say no. Build weird things. Build the right things. Build your company instead of your investors portfolio theory. Raising less does not mean thinking smaller. It means thinking smarter. You do not need a mega round. You need real progress, real customers, and real clarity. And if you still want the $100 million round, at least go in with your eyes open. Sometimes the most powerful thing a founder can do is grow at the speed of understanding instead of the speed of capital.
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E-Commerce
The idea of the Queen Bee has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. Youve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone. It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just dont support each other. Maybe the problem isnt the system; maybe its . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely. A zero-sum world The term Queen Bee was coined by Graham Staines and his colleagues in a 1973 article in Psychology Today. The researchers observed a small number of senior women who appeared to distance themselves from other women in heavily male-dominated environments. Even in the original study, the behavior wasnt framed as spite. It was framed as adaptation. These women were navigating environments where there was room for exactly one of them to succeed. In a zero-sum world, survival strategies look a lot like coldness. In the 50 years since, the corporate world managed to turn a situational observation into a personality diagnosis. Yet the newest research makes one thing clear: the Queen Bee stereotype says very little about women, and a great deal about the cultures they are operating in. One of the striking pieces of recent evidence comes from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics. It examined what happens when women leaders distance themselves from other women. The surprising finding wasnt that distancing happens; it was who pays the price when it does. Female subordinates showed lower feelings of belonging, lower leadership ambition, and higher intentions to leave. Male subordinates, by contrast, were unaffected. In other words, when the culture pressures a woman leader to blend in with the dominant group, the cost is absorbed by the women below her. The researchers are clear: the distancing originates not from rivalry, but from discrimination. Women who experience bias early in their careers often learn that aligning with the dominant (often male) culture is the safest path forward. That alignment can look like toughness, or hyper-competence, or refusing to mentor junior women because theyve been taught that visibility is dangerous. It is armor, not malice. When identity becomes a liability A broader 2024 literature review goes further, arguing that the term Queen Bee has become so misapplied that it obscures more than it reveals. The recommended term is self-group distancing, which describes how members of any underrepresented group may behave when identity becomes a liability. The behavior is well documented among racial minorities, first-generation professionals, LGBTQ+ employeesanyone who feels they have something to lose by being too closely associated with their own group. It is not a woman problem. It is a scarcity problem. And the scarcity is real. When leaders tell me about a Queen Bee, I often ask a single question: How many women are in the room where decisions are made? The answer is almost always the same: one, or maybe two. In those environments, it is hardly surprising that some women feel pressure to prove they are different from the stereotype of women as emotional, inexperienced, or not leadership material. Distancing becomes a way to signal, I am not like them. It is not pretty, but it is predictable. What is rarely acknowledged is how differently these dynamics play out when women are no longer tokens. Studies of global organizations show that when women hold multiple senior roles, sponsorship of women increases, not decreases. In firms with women CEOs, the next generation of senior women is larger. Leadership pipelines are healthier. And the Queen Bee patterns that managers fear become almost nonexistent. Put simply: when women stop being the only one, the motivation to distance evaporates. ‘Too soft’ To understand how this works on the ground, consider the experience of a leader. Early in her career, she worked under a woman who had a reputation for being harsh. Colleagues whispered that she was a classic Queen Bee. My client recalls thinking the same, until she learned that this leader had repeatedly been told she was too soft and not decisive enough, feedback her male peers never received. She had built a leadership style around eliminating any sign that could be read as feminine. Her high standards werent meant to sabotage other women; they were meant to make sure no one questioned their competence. This is the part managers often misinterpret. Behaviors that look like ice can actually be fear. Behaviors that look like competitiveness can be self-protection. When conflict between women appears, people leap to the Queen Bee label. The story we tell changes the behavior we see. For managers who want a healthier culture, the task is not to root out Queen Bees. It is to remove the conditions that create them. That starts with representation. When there are enough women in senior roles, solidarity becomes easier than distance. But it also requires clearer evaluation systems, because vague criteria give stereotypes room to breathe. It requires rewarding sponsorship and collaboration, not just individual performance, because people invest in what gets recognized. And it requires noticing the small signals in daily life: who gets interrupted, who gets invited to meetings, whose mistakes are scrutinized. If you believe a senior woman is acting like a Queen Bee, the first question to ask is: What in this culture made distancing feel necessary? When leaders approach it this way, they stop treating womens behavior as a problem to fix and begin treating the culture as a system to redesign. The Queen Bee myth persists because it is simple. But workplaces are not simple, and people certainly are not. The truth is far less dramatic and far more useful: When the hive is hostile, bees protect themselves. When the hive is healthy, they support each other. That means the Queen Bee is not your warning sign about women. She is your warning sign about the workplace.
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E-Commerce
The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacellesthose long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylonsextended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos. Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsensea prop master’s fever dream. But now the math has caught up to the dream. Harold “Sonny” Whitea mechanical engineer and applied physicist who worked on warp drive concepts at NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratoryhas published a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a new design for a warp drive that happens to look a lot like the Enterprise. White told the science and tech publication The Debrief that the resemblance to the twin nacelles of [Star Treks] USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic, but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.” In other words: When White and his research colleagues came up with a design that could bend spacetime but also keep a crew safe inside the ship, the optimal geometry that emerged was twin engine pods arranged around a central habitable zone. That’s the Enterprise. Perhaps it’s because there are only so many ways physics allows you to arrange exotic energy efficiently. Star Trek‘s production designers, working on pure intuition and ’60s aesthetics, accidentally landed on a rare optimal solution. It’s as if someone sketched the ideal car design in 1920 without knowing anything about aerodynamics, and a century later, physics said: “Actually, you were right.” The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation [Image: CBS/Getty Images] The warp drive According to White and his colleagues, the original mathematical model for a warp drive envisioned a spacecraft encased in a continuous, donut-shaped ring of negative energy, a bizarre form of matter that works like gravity in reverse, pushing space apart rather than pulling it together. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed this model in 1994 after watching Star Trek episodes and wondering if the science could actually work. This theoretical geometry could effectively move an object faster than light by deforming the space around it, but his idea came with headache-inducing problems for any engineer trying to build it. White’s breakthrough was simpler. Instead of trying to make Alcubierre’s donut-shaped design work, he asked a different question: What if you broke the energy ring into separate tubes, like engine pods, arranged around the ship? That small geometric shiftfrom one continuous ring to multiple discrete cylinderschanges everything about how the physics plays out inside the bubbles. The math suddenly became manageable. The interior could remain flat and safe. The dangerous forces could be confined to the nacelles, away from the crew. “The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries,” White explains. By organizing the exotic matter into these specific pods, engineers could theoretically maintain a completely flat, calm interior for the ship while the external geometry handles the violent warping of space. But this research doesn’t mean we are going to be kirking and spocking all the way to the Crab Nebula any time soon. Faster-than-light travel remains a theoreticalbut possibleway to travel across the cosmos that depends on many factors, like producing the fuel necessary to make it happen. If it ever happens, it will be generations away. White’s paper, however, provides a mathematical blueprint for practical design and engineering. Once built, his proposed design will result in something that looks like every nerds favorite spaceship. A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA] White’s math dictates that to keep the ship’s internal clock synchronized with the outside world and avoid ripping the pilot apart, the most efficient structure involves arranging these energy tubes around the craftexactly like the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise. A figure from Interior-flat cylindrical nacelle warp bubbles: derivation and comparison with Alcubierre model by White et al., 2025 [Image: White et al./CC-BY 4.0] “I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles basedon a nacelle-like topology,” White says, noting that the new geometry allows for structures that act as modular propulsion units rather than a single, unmanageable energy field. The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Original Series. [Image: CBS/Getty Images] Humanitys hallucinations This phenomenon of fiction functioning as a crystal ball/R&D lab for reality has pervaded civilizations progress since Jules Vernes predictions of moon trips and nuclear submarines. Take Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, who found himself staring at the screen during the pandemic, watching The Expanse, a series that imagines a realistic scenario for humanity spread throughout our solar system. “They have these huge structures in space, and it got me thinking . . . we are not gonna get there the way we are doing things now,” McClelland told me in a interview from 2023. That sci-fi binge-watch led to Evolved Structures, a project where McClelland uses generative AI to hallucinate spacecraft parts that look unnervingly organicas if they were extracted from an extraterrestrial ship secretly stored in an Area 51 hangar. The AI, unburdened by human preconceptions of what a bracket should look like, designs twisted, bone-like metal forms that are a third lighter than human designs but just as strong. McClelland believes it is the only way that we can mass manufacture the future of space colonization. The translation from page to pad is often even more direct. NASA engineer Les Johnson became obsessed with the idea of laser sails after reading the novel The Mote in Gods Eye written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in 1974, which describes a sail that uses photons as a thrust force to move a spaceship over vast distances at extremely high speeds. It made him become an engineer. I had an opportunity to get involved in a project that was looking at different types of propulsion, and this is one that I added to the mix to consider, he told me during an interview for a story on how he and his team designed the largest solar sail ever created. Now the technology is herewe can build these things. And thats been on again, off again part of what Ive worked on for the last 20 years. [Photo: CBS/Getty Images] The list of fictional technologies that are now mundane reality is so long that it is actually exhausting. Sometimes they take a handful of years to become real. Other times decades pass between the dream and the device. In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published a technical paper proposing geostationary satellites to relay communications; 19 years later, NASAs Syncom 3 broadcast the Tokyo Olympics to the U.S., fulfilling the prophecy. Clarke was also to theorize solar sails in his 1964 story “Sunjammer.” Way earlier, in 1933, H.G. Wells imagined video calls on glass screens in The Shape of Things to Come; it took 87 years until the Zoom era made us sick of them. A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA] It’s not the first time this has happened with Star Trek. Saying that the series shaped humanity as we know it today is not an exaggeration. It introduced ideas that, many decades later, resulted in designs and technologies that have moved humanity forward. Not just automatic doors, but mobile phones, touchscreen tablets and interfaces, voice-activated AI assistants, medical scanning devices, and virtual reality. Star Trek didn’t just predict the futureit became the blueprint engineers actually followed to design it. Clearly, theres a pattern here of dreaming up the impossible, putting it on a screen or in a book to entertain ourselves, and then, slowly but surely, our math and our machines evolve until they catch up to the fantasy. It feels like we are not just observing the universe; we are designing it to match the stories we tell ourselves, proving that the most powerful force in physics might just be a good writer’s deadline. Some scientists think we all may be part of a cosmic simulation in some alien computer. Perhaps we are all giant AI, like in Asimovs short story “The Last Question.” Whatever the case is, the fact is that humanity seems to have a peculiar knack for reverse-engineering its own hallucinations.
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E-Commerce
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