Editor's note: The following is the fifth profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, Tabs founder Ali Hussain here, and Craft founder Ilya Levtov here. When an executive at Replit suggested that Cecilia Ziniti seemed distracted by artificial intelligence, she was not an engineer working on the coding startup's AI products. She was its general counsel. The executive told her 'You're a great GC and good at business development ' but it seems like maybe your head's not in it because you're so into this AI thing,'' Ziniti recalled in an interview with Crunchbase News. By then, Ziniti had spent roughly two decades working as a lawyer at companies such as Amazon, Cruise and Anki. She had never learned to code. She had not ever founded a company. And she had not worked in the same sort of technical or product roles that many venture-backed software founders have....
Environmental well-being. Human agency. Transparency. These are just a few of the ill-defined principles commonly listed in ethical frameworks for artificial intelligence (AI), hundreds of which have now been released by organizations ranging from Google to the government of Canada to BMW. As organizations embrace AI with increasing speed, adopting these principles is widely viewed as one of the best ways to ensure AI does not cause unintended harms....
It has become alarmingly clear that the Covid-19 pandemic is threatening womenâs careers. In September 2020 alone, 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce, compared to 216,000 men. Furthermore, one in four women are considering either leaving the workforce or reducing their work hours. A stream of advice has suggested how working mothers can work from home with kids, manage work/life boundaries (or lack thereof), and handle anxiety over school decisions. Yet when we interviewed working mothers about these challenges this summer, we learned how many have taken it upon themselves to address the challenges theyâre facing, rather than their employers and managers stepping up and getting involved....
The first week of business school was an introduction to a world of new concepts. Just as the foundational coursework was coming to an end, we took on a daylong deep dive into case studies examining ways of ensuring corporate wellbeing. As a physician leading the wellbeing program for the largest health care provider in the Mid-Atlantic region, this was a pleasant departure into familiar territory....
