Juliana Kaplan

ICYMI: Venture capital juggernaut Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) pulled a power move at this year's Tech Week — and it's become the conference's most compelling niche drama. Tech Week, whose current iteration was started by a16z in 2022, returned to New York City this month with a full calendar of events just as the city started heating up for summer. The conference's "decentralized" nature means anyone can throw an event and apply to have it added to the official calendar, provided they follow a set of rules. However, one of this year's new rules has drawn criticism from some organizers and attendees: Official tech week events must use Partiful. "The only official events platform this year is Partiful," the 2025 Tech Week guide says. That's left Luma, a competing events platform popular at previous iterations of Tech Week, out in the cold. Versions of Tech Week's events FAQ document from 2023 and 2024 said events could use either Luma or Partiful. And here's what's gotten tongues wagging: a16z is invested in Partiful, but not in Luma. w Sydney Bradley and Samantha Stokes https://lnkd.in/gnGmQnDN

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GOLDMAN DIVERSITY: Goldman Sachs is killing a significant pledge it made to refuse initial public offering business with companies that had all White, male boards. Wall Street’s leading investment bank had a policy that it would only take a company public in the US or Western Europe if it had two diverse board members, one of which must be a woman. That push had initially been put in place in 2020 with a requirement for at least one diverse board member. “As a result of legal developments related to board diversity requirements, we ended our formal board diversity policy,” said Tony Fratto, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs. “We continue to believe that successful boards benefit from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and we will encourage them to take this approach.” Scoop on Bloomberg News w/Sridhar Natarajan ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/etCFSqz7

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Advertisers are preparing for Meta's new restrictions on data sharing for healthcare advertisers, and some think the impacts will be as dramatic as the iOS14 updates on the direct-to-consumer space. Already, healthcare brands are holding back Meta budgets and finding workarounds, though Meta's guidance on how they're enforcing this policy changes remains spotty. w/Ann Gehan https://lnkd.in/eCJYW_S4

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GM, Disney, Pepsi, and many other big companies are scrubbing #DEI from their annual reports to investors, my new investigation for NPR finds. Walmart, Target, Amazon and others have made headlines for ending some DEI programs — but, my analysis found, many more companies have quietly changed how they talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. At least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" and "DEI" from their most recent annual reports to investors, according to my analysis. I went digging into the new annual reports that companies have been publishing for their investors, and I compared them with what they were saying a year ago. A year ago, all of these companies made references to diversity and inclusion in their disclosures — but in their new reports, all of these companies have rewritten at least some of this language. In some cases, they no longer mention "diversity" at all. (In Google's case, it also rebranded a "diversity" website with the word "belonging" instead.) "Whenever practices change, the folks who drop them silently are usually in the majority," Prof. Shiva Rajgopal of Columbia Business School told me. This is all happening, of course, at a time when President Trump has ordered an end to DEI in the federal government — and for its contractors, which includes many private companies. And many of the companies I identified, including Google, GM, and Intel, are federal contractors. But this erased or softened language also is the latest evidence of how corporate America is retreating from its onetime embrace of DEI. "We have seen companies start to decide that the reward is not necessarily outweighed by the risk anymore," Rebecca Baker of Vinson & Elkins told me. Read my story and listen to me discuss it on UpFirst and Morning Edition:

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American companies are repurchasing their shares at a record pace. U.S. companies have announced $983.6 billion worth of stock buybacks so far this year, the best start to a year on record, according to Birinyi Associates data going back to 1982. They are projected to purchase more than $1.1 trillion worth overall in 2025, which would mark an all-time high. The biggest repurchasers include tech giants Apple and Google parent Alphabet. Big banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley also are leading the charge. Both companies and investors often applaud buybacks because the practice reduces the number of shares available to trade, driving up earnings per share and often boosting stock prices. But the practice is controversial in some quarters, with skeptics contending that repurchases serve to prop up the market at a time of already stretched valuations. You can read the story on wsj.com or on the front page of today's paper. What are your thoughts on corporate buybacks?

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Those hoping for the Commission to give more details on the AI Act's template on model training data were disappointed, as only aggregate data on the feedback received was presented. The discussions on the template will continue, including at the political level, and the intent is still to publish it by Q2. The template will be published in an annex to the Commission's upcoming guidelines on the AI Act's GPAI rules. https://lnkd.in/eGR-BGgy

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Tucked in the House's sweeping tax and spending cuts package is a provision that would block states from enforcing AI regulations for 10 years. Now, more than 100 organizations are pushing back. Academic institutions, employee labor groups, advocacy organizations and more wrote to House leaders saying the law could make big tech companies unaccountable for harms they might inflict on the public https://lnkd.in/eG2rpw7T

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