Curated Intel from the Talent Tech Industry
August 19-25, 2024:
• Waiting for Godot: Survey finds startups take longer to close rounds as funding cliff looms;
• Creating even more confusion: FTC noncompete ban suffers another blow with judge’s ruling;
• Making training easier: Recogni unveils new AI method to slash costs and power requirements;
• Adding street addresses to ads: Bandana lands new $8.5M investment to help hourly workers;
• Improving job ad performance: Readers prefer simpler headlines—unless they are journalists.
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Get both worldclass content and business-building connections at TAtech Europe & The EMEA Job Board Forum. Register right now for the only conference in the EMEA market that is specifically designed both for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and to accelerate the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. Why the rush? Because the conference will be held September 17-19, 2024 in Paris at Cercle National des Armées, and it has a limited seating capacity. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!
Startups Take Longer To Close Rounds, As Funding Cliff Looms
The time lapse between funding rounds for early-stage startups has reached the highest point in more than a decade. That was the finding from a Crunchbase survey of U.S. companies that raised Series A funding and went on to close a Series B. The median time lapse between rounds in 2024 was 28 months — by far the longest span since 2012. The average time between these rounds also hit a high of 31 months this year, which is tied with 2023. For a sense of how fundraising timelines compare, below we charted out both averages and medians for the past 12 years.
FTC noncompete ban suffers another blow
A Florida federal judge agreed to stay and enjoin the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements for a single company’s employment contracts last week, joining a Texas federal court in blocking the FTC’s action ahead of its effective date next month. Judge Timothy Corrigan of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida held that it is “substantially likely” the FTC’s ban presents a major question as defined under the U.S. Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine, due to the ban’s potentially “huge economic impact,” among other factors. The judge also found that Congress did not render a “sufficiently clear expression of legislative intent” to authorize such a ban. Corrigan’s injunction only applies to the plaintiff, Properties of the Villages, and it does not constitute a stay of the rule generally, he said.
Original Source
AI startup Recogni unveils new computing method to slash costs, power requirements
AI chip and software startup Recogni unveiled a novel computing method on Tuesday that could make its chips used to train and run artificial intelligence systems smaller, faster and less expensive to operate. Backed by BMW, Bosch and venture capital firm Mayfield, Recogni develops specialized chips and software to enable AI inferencing - the process of trained AI models making predictions or decisions on new, unseen data. The company said the new patented system, called Pareto, utilizes a logarithmic approach that outperforms existing methods when running large AI models. "It is a huge leap in all of the KPIs (key performance indicators) that influence silicon hardware system design when it comes to AI computing," Recogni's co-founder and VP of AI, Gilles Backhus told Reuters. Current AI models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini, require hundreds of thousands of power-hungry mathematical operations for the simple of prompts on chatbots like ChatGPT. Recogni said that its new system converts these multiplication operations into additions, significantly reducing power consumption while maintaining accuracy.
Bandana lands new investment to help hourly wage workers find good jobs
Most startups are looking to solve a problem inside a business, but Bandana, a New York City-based startup, has a different goal. It wants to help people at the lower end of the wage scale find better jobs with higher wages and good benefits, all while being closer to home to reduce commuting time. Today, the company announced an $8.5 million investment, bringing the total raised to $12.3 million. When we spoke to CEO and co-founder Timothy Makalinao last year at the time of the startup’s seed funding announcement, he described his company this way: “Essentially what we’re trying to do is to create a platform that rejuvenates the working class of America by making it really easy for them to find better jobs, and then in the long term, better livelihoods.”
Readers prefer simpler headlines—unless they are journalists
Researchers from Ohio State University, Michigan State University, and Harvard Kennedy School found that readers prefer simpler headlines to more complex ones, even when the stories are about complicated topics. They reported over 30,000 field experiments across a traditional news source, The Washington Post, and with a storytelling site with uplifting content, Upworthy. In these experiments, actual online news readers were presented with either a simple or a complex headline associated with a news story. They measured headline complexity by considering the use of common words, style, readability, and character count. They then studied which kinds of headlines received more clicks. Readers tended to prefer the simple headlines. In follow up laboratory studies, the researchers found that just minutes after reading the headlines readers were less likely to recognize the phrases in the complex ones. They seemed to just skip over the complex writing. However, journalists—readers who are also expert writers—did not show the same preference for simple headlines.
The Extraordinary Value Proposition of TAtech Europe
Get both worldclass content and business-building connections at TAtech Europe & The EMEA Job Board Forum. Register right now for the only conference in the EMEA market that is specifically designed both for job board and talent technology company CEOs, their direct reports and rising stars and to accelerate the bottom-line growth of their enterprises. Why the rush? Because the conference will be held September 17-19, 2024 in Paris at Cercle National des Armées, and it has a limited seating capacity. Whether your company is a niche or general job board, aggregator, talent marketplace, online classifieds business, programmatic platform, chatbot, conversational AI solution, ATS, recruitment marketing solution, CRM platform, interviewing or assessment system or talent technology consultancy, this event will supercharge your sales and your profits. So, register today and accelerate the success your company achieves, today, tomorrow and into the future!