WIRED June 2022

Launched in September 2020 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, by serial entrepreneur Abdulmajeed Alsukhan and partners Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Albabtain, after just four months Tamara closed $6 million of funding in the largest seed round in the country’s history. In April the startup topped that in style by raising no less than $110 million in a record-breaking Series A round led by global payments provider Checkout.com. Like many ecommerce companies around the world, Tamara is benefitting from the massive rise in online consumer spending that has taken place during the pandemic. Its BNPL solution allows consumers to pay for products in installments, without incurring any interest charges. The company’s revenues come from fees paid by merchants, who have fallen over themselves to partner with Tamara and offer their customers an…

RE: “I’M THE OPERATOR” I was a manager in Uber’s self-driving group at the time of the incident. The company stressed “not having a culture of blame” after the fatality. This rang hollow, given that the people espousing it were likely most at fault. I never imagined that “no blame” would morph into “no consequence” for executives. We as a society are willing to take away four to eight years of life from the most vulnerable person in the situation. Is that justice? Maybe. But to say that not a single executive should’ve been removed over this incident certainly doesn’t seem right. —Former Uber manager There’s a troubling theme in this story that subtly perpetuates a false narrative about the crash: that Elaine Herzberg was partly to blame for her own death.…

IN 2003, VOLODYMYR ZELEN SKY, then 25 and freshly licensed to practice law, formed an organization “to make the world a better place using humor and creativity.” The organization was Kvartal 95 Studio, a production company that has created, among other hits, a sitcom about the zany burden of in-laws. The In-Laws suffered a setback in 2017 when one of its stars was banned from Ukraine for publicly supporting the Russian annexation of Crimea. But it’s Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the president of Ukraine, for which Zelensky, who is now the president of Ukraine, is best known. Stagecraft was practice for statecraft, and he now produces nonfiction video dispatches from the front lines of the war. They serve as field reporting, pleas for weapons, and arias that glorify…

THE WEB WAS BORN to publish documents—in particular, physics papers from CERN, the great laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee, the very first web developer, was employed to do smart information things. But technology evolves … Actually, forgive the digression, but technology doesn’t evolve. Everyone says it evolves, but true evolution includes a whole lot of death. Not all software survives, of course (I’m typing this in Google Docs, not on a Xerox Alto), but as anyone who has investigated the Windows control panels can tell you, there’s a lot of decades-old code in our systems. If people evolved like technology, you’d be 6,000 lizards, 30 chimps, and a couple Neanderthals all glued together with an anguished human face stretched across it as a “visual refresh.” </digression> Anyway, the World Wide Web may…

AS A NERDY, NATURE-LOVING KID growing up in France, Barbara Belvisi daydreamed about how life on other planets might be sustained: giant domes filled with lush plants and exotic flowers like the ones she’d painted on her bedroom walls. But adult life beckoned. Her studies focused on finance and business, and she went on to build a career investing in “deep tech”—venture-capital-speak for companies whose progress relies on bleeding-edge, early-stage innovations in science or engineering. After 10 years in the field, that focus finally brought Belvisi around to, in 2018, realizing her childhood fantasies. As the founder and CEO of Interstellar Lab, Belvisi has set herself the ambitious goal of building inflatable pods that can support life on other planets. “I had to learn a lot about aerospace, life support, agriculture,…

FOR DECADES, THE spreadsheet has been the least sexy form of consumer software. Necessary? Sure. Critical to the drudgery of running a business, doing your banking, or figuring out a financial plan? 100 percent. But exciting, innovative tech? Oh, God no. If you were a hotshot young developer, you flocked to Silicon Valley’s hyper-oxygenated fields, such as AI or crypto or the various legless metaversii. Spreadsheets were gray-flannel-suit territory. This meant that very little effort went into improving this dependable piece of officeware. Yeah, Google put spreadsheets online in 2006 (by buying up a firm that had already done so), and Airtable launched a clever sort of database-and-spreadsheet turducken in 2012. But those were the exceptions. Mostly, startups were content to let Excel and Google Sheets dominate a user base of about…