Should It Be Easier To Sue Influencers for Defamation?; 2025 Was the Year Self-Driving Car Optimism Went Mainstream; a Startup CEO’s Annual Learnings Post; a Podcast Where I Spoke for 43% of the Time; and +++ [link blog]

The Rumor Mill and the Propaganda Machine [Renée DiResta/Agents of Influence] – I never pass up an IRL opportunity with Renee, and we grabbed coffee this past summer after finding ourselves in the same city during family travel. Goodness she is smart and strong I thought leaving the conversation. In this post Renee puts context around the X mob that named and harassed a Brown college student they suspected of being the mass murderer, in which he was not at all implicated.

I’m not on social media much and heard about this incident only because horrifically some powerful folks in the tech community participated (most later deleting their posts). My first reaction was that this was closer to yelling fire in a crowded theater than freedom of speech. Renée discusses how reality has splintered and why consequences have decreased as well. She also touches an interesting third rail:

It’s my controversial opinion that defamation lawsuits should be far, far easier for private individuals who get screwed like this. I just don’t think the law has caught up to the infrastructure. Yes, defamation lawsuits are imperfect, slow, and expensive, and can be frivolously abused. But influencers who falsely accuse a private person of mass murder for clout and profit should face consequences. The legal system is one of the few mechanisms available to impose costs and deter this kind of behavior. The harm is real. Treating human beings as content is depraved. Defamation has always been outside the bounds of free speech, and our marketplace of ideas would benefit from less of it.

Year 5/6 Startup Learnings [Celine Halioua/CEO of Loyal] – Always love builders who periodically take a step back to share. In this case, Celine’s annual Learnings posts. The fifth of these posts includes several notes to chew on. My favorite is “You don’t know someone until they make a mistake.”

Self-driving cars are an unambiguous social good [Mathew Ingram/The Torment Nexus] – 2025 seemed like a big tipping point for Waymo going mainstream and the narrative of an autonomous future shifting another standard deviation in the positive direction. Heck yeah! Mathew writes a great roundup of the benefits here. Of course I agree! I was at Google during their earliest years of work in this space, enthusiastically reading whatever I could about the team’s findings! Then we invested in Cruise’s seed round and got to see another approach starting to work. In 2017 I worried that our measure of ‘safety’ for autonomy would be illogical and emotional. In 2023 I talked about how these might be the most inspirational use of technology in physical spaces that we’ve seen in years. And in 2024, I urged regulators to let more people die to move this space forward.

Dashboards or Pipes? [Gokul Rajaram/via LinkedIn] – Gokul was our colleague at Google back in the day, and in this specific context, our co-investor in Graphite, which was acquired by Cursor earlier this month. The outcome made Gokul recall, and resurface, some advice he’d given the Graphite cofounders about his theory on Dashboards or Pipes. Short post for you to read but the tldr is Dashboard products are used directly and regularly by end users as their primary interface for accomplishing tasks while Pipes products are used in the background, and you need to figure out strategically what you are.

Episode #60: 2025 in Review [The Learning Corner podcast/Precursor Ventures] – For me podcasts are usually escapism – NBA, history, some pop culture, maybe some 1980s pro wrestling. I very rarely listen to tech or tech-adjacent discussion but this pod has always been one that makes it into my queue. They take ~three articles that their firm discussed internally that week and share their thoughts. It also helps that I often agree emphatically with Charles Hudson (we’ve known one another for a very long time) and find that co-host Mia Farnham adds much to the mix. The one I’m sharing here had their first guests – Me! and Peter Walker from Carta.

AND OMG, adding this link I see that I spoke for 43% of the pod. Sorry, not sorry!