In 2023, Salesforce was reeling. The company was under attack from activist investors with as many as five different firms circling the CRM giant. As activists do, they felt the stock was undervalued and among their demands was to stop spending money on acquisitions. The company had made a slew
The headlines have been full of the craziness of tokenmaxxing as employees compete to burn the highest number of AI tokens to top AI spending leader boards. Microsoft got so fed up with the high cost of developer's use of coding agents, it cut off access to Claude
Hi everyone. I'm writing from the west coast this week. The enterprise AI picture keeps getting more more complicated. Everyone's doing it, but not many companies are seeing results. I dig into why this week. Just a heads up that next week is a work week,
Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston announced he intended to step down as CEO last week, ending a 19-year run with the company he helped found. In 2007, Houston was a recent MIT grad frustrated with the challenge of keeping files synchronized across multiple devices. The story goes
When Mark Twain popularized the phrase 'lies, damned lies and statistics,' he was referring to the practice of using statistics to unduly influence public opinion. These days, you can swap statistics for AI. That’s because tech's big AI execs have been trying to convince the
Welcome back to the latest issue of FastForward, and thanks for reading. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition with a friend, it really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 Lies, damned lies and AI When Mark Twain popularized the phrase 'lies, damned lies and statistics,
You've probably heard about how many big company AI executives have been preaching gloom and doom when it comes to AI replacing jobs, but not everyone feels that way. Box CEO Aaron Levie thinks the math actually works in the favor of workers, and not just because it&
When Jay Kreps was working at LinkedIn in 2010, the industry was just beginning to grapple with what at the time was being called big data. How could you reliably move massive amounts of event data — user activity, system logs, operational metrics — between a growing number of internal systems in
I watched this week’s unveiling of Google’s latest smart glasses with a sense of déjà vu. I was among the early participants in the Google Glass Explorer program back in 2013, an initial experiment in smart glasses that in hindsight was well ahead of its time. I ended
This week on the FastForward on PPN podcast, I spoke with Box CEO Aaron Levie. Please have a look and let me know what you think at feedback@fastforward.blog. And if you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition of FastForward with a friend, it really helps.
When you think about coding, it’s a job that has always demanded a deep understanding of math and logic, but it was never just about the code. It was about understanding the underlying problem, building a software spec to solve that problem and knowing the systems where that software
I wouldn’t blame you for being confused about AI’s impact on jobs. One minute, big tech says AI will replace workers; the next, it’s hiring thousands to implement it. So which is it, or could both be true? Let's start with the premise that AI