🇬🇧 A Tale of Two Continents: When it Comes to Diversity, Which Way is the Wind Blowing?🇺🇸

Sometimes the news really does write the headline for you. While the UK government just unveiled a £500 million package to grow diverse investors and founders, some of America’s loudest tech billionaires are doing the opposite — publicly promising to punish institutions that stand by diversity, equity, and inclusion.😒

In the UK, the new initiative, managed by the British Business Bank, aims to do what the stats still prove is urgent: just 13% of venture teams here have women in senior roles, Black founders still get less than 2% of total venture capital, and funding for women founders has barely budged in a decade. So the UK’s plan — ringfencing £50 million just for female-led VC funds and £400 million more for diverse fund managers and overlooked founders — is a deliberate statement that inclusion is tied to national economic growth. It says: “We’re not just tweaking the pipeline — we’re investing in the people shaping the pipeline.”💸

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, we’re seeing the backlash reach new heights. Marc Andreessen — yes, that Andreessen — was revealed to have told an elite group chat of AI insiders and Trump advisers that universities like Stanford and MIT deserve to “pay the price” for supporting DEI and immigration, describing them as “forms of discrimination” that are “politically lethal.” This is the same Marc who’s backed Trump’s re-election, and whose inner circle is now increasingly entwined with the administration’s tech policy.🇺🇸

If you want a snapshot of two diverging philosophies, here it is: one country’s government is putting public money on the table to build a fairer market — betting that more women and people of colour at the top means better returns for everyone. The other? Some of its most influential venture capitalists are threatening to defund or destroy any institution that doesn’t align with their views in the culture-wars.😑

While the US drifts towards anti-DEI crackdowns, the UK is inching the opposite way. Ministers are now being urged to pass a new Equality (Race and Disability) Bill that would not only compel big employers to publish disability and ethnicity pay gaps (just like they do for gender pay) but also create a new enforcement unit to stamp out pay discrimination. Crucially, the bill — strongly championed by the Black Equity Organisation (BEO) — would protect whistleblowers who reveal companies trying to fudge or hide their pay gap data. It’s a sharp contrast to the US, where Trump-aligned officials are dangling financial bounties for “anti-DEI” whistleblowers instead. For many campaigners, it’s a reminder that tackling racial and disability pay gaps still hinges on not just reporting — but also on real accountability, transparency, and legal teeth to back it up.😏

🌍 So what?
Talent is global. Capital is mobile. But trust — in ecosystems, in universities, in founders — is fragile. It’s a reminder that progress isn’t inevitable. 

🔗 Read more:

• TechCrunch on the UK’s £500m package for diverse founders

• TechCrunch on Andreessen’s DEI backlash

💼 X is back in the news and we still call it Twitter 😬

Two years ago, NBC ad chief Linda Yaccarino was brought in to rescue Twitter — rebranded as X — from Elon Musk’s scorched-earth takeover. Her mission? Patch things up with advertisers, convince brands to come back, and somehow build Musk’s dream “everything app” without alienating, well… literally everyone.

But here’s how it really went:

• Within weeks, Musk’s own antisemitic tweets drove out major brands like Disney and NBCUniversal — the same companies Yaccarino was hired to woo back.

• His “apologies” were PR disasters — including telling advertisers to “go f*** yourself” live on stage.

• X’s ad business cratered, losing 89% of US ad dollars in just two years.

• Yaccarino’s big “global town square” push flopped: she tried to bring in big-name hosts (Don Lemon, Tucker Carlson) but they bailed after clashing with Musk.

• Meanwhile, hate speech, misinformation, and extremist content surged — capped off by Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, literally praising Hitler last week.

• As for “the everything app”? Still mostly a soapbox for Musk’s conspiracies and culture wars.

📉 Some wins… but a bigger mess

In fairness to Yaccarino, the data shows she did manage to claw back some ad spend. By mid-2025, 96% of advertisers were technically back on X, and spending was up for the first time since the Musk takeover. But scratch the surface and it’s shaky. Reports suggest some big brands only came back after legal threats — hardly a stable long-term plan.

Meanwhile, X remains an unpredictable place for brands, a shrinking source of influence for media, and a haven for misinformation. Elon’s personal brand chaos feeds it all: Nazi salutes, conspiracy posts, far-right pandering. Yaccarino’s remit was always too small for the mess she was tasked to fix.😑

And if all that weren’t messy enough, the same week Yaccarino stepped down, Musk was on X livestreaming the launch of Grok 4 — his latest “maximally truth-seeking AI.” But thanks to tech crunch we saw users quickly discovered that Grok’s idea of “truth” seems to mean looking up Elon’s own X posts and news clips for its positions on hot-button issues like Israel-Palestine, abortion, and immigration. Screenshots showed Grok literally referencing Musk’s personal views in its “chain of thought,” raising real questions about whether this is a chatbot that seeks facts — or just flatters its founder. This all comes right after Grok’s latest meltdown: days earlier, it was spewing antisemitic rants, calling itself “MechaHitler,” and forcing X to scramble for damage control. It’s a vivid reminder that when you wrap AI around a single cult personality, you risk building a machine that’s more about serving up the boss’s biases than serving the public good — and the brand chaos spills over to every business he touches.😅

🧨 A revolving door at Elon Inc.

Yaccarino’s exit isn’t just an X story — it’s a bigger pattern. Elon’s senior ranks have been in constant churn across his biggest business, Tesla. In the past year alone, he’s lost senior leaders but also a "friend" in Donald Trump who has threatened to deport him.😯

👁️

As if Elon’s AI outfit xAI didn’t have enough drama — cue Grok’s antisemitic meltdown and “MechaHitler” rants — now comes a new twist: compulsory spyware for staff. Reports say xAI has ordered all employees working on Grok to install a monitoring tool called Hubstaff that tracks websites visited, apps used, mouse movement and more — even on personal laptops if they use them for work. Officially, it’s about “streamlining work” and protecting valuable AI IP. Unofficially, it’s fuelling privacy fears and pushback that this is “surveillance disguised as productivity.” All while the company’s HR stack already clocks tutor hours and tasks in minute detail. For a company that’s fighting trust battles on multiple fronts — from hateful chatbots to truth-bending system prompts — the irony of “maximally truth-seeking AI” built by maximally watched humans is pretty on brand.😒

🔍 So What?

For all the “move fast and break things” bravado, there’s a lesson here about the limits of personality cults in tech. When you tie a business so completely to one volatile founder’s personal whims, you get unpredictable outcomes. Talent turnover spikes, trust collapses, advertisers flinch, and the brand loses its centre. (We could be talking about X, Space X or Tesla here)

Linda Yaccarino’s exit from X (still Twitter to most of us) caps off two chaotic years in which she was less a CEO and more a human shield for Elon Musk’s worst impulses — from advertisers fleeing antisemitic outbursts to Grok’s Nazi fan fiction. Far from reining him in, she often rubber-stamped the circus, defending him publicly while hate speech and conspiracy fodder flourished on her watch. If this was her limiting his excesses, it’s fair to ask: just how much worse would Musk’s empire be if no one was even pretending to keep him in check

In a world where the future of AI, free speech, and online safety is being shaped by the same handful of platforms and billionaires, this isn’t just a soap opera — it’s a reminder: the people around the visionary still matter. We think they should also be diverse because we're seeing increasingly how thigns play our if your put a lot of yes people around a cultish leader (anyone fancy living in north Korea right now)

Sadly it appears no one — not even a seasoned ad industry boss like Yaccarino — can ‘professionalise’ chaos that comes from the top.

🔗 Read more:

• The Guardian on Yaccarino’s resignation

• Politico’s context on Musk’s revolving door

• TechCrunch on how X’s ad business remains fragile

• NBC on the Grok antisemitism fiasco

🪙 The $4 Trillion Chip: Nvidia Hits a Historic Milestone

Nvidia just became the first company ever to cross a $4 trillion valuation — let that sink in.

Shares rose again this week, giving Wall Street its new AI golden child. This time last decade? Nvidia was basically known for graphics cards for gamers. Now, they’re the world’s biggest supplier of the chips powering generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and all your future robot overlords.

Put it in perspective: Nvidia is now worth more than Meta and Alphabet (Google, Deepmind, Youtube etc) combined. The chip company that used to make graphics cards for your gaming PC is now more valuable than two of the world’s biggest ad-funded, data-hoovering tech giants together.

How fast did this happen?

• 2023: Nvidia hits $1 trillion

• 2024: Blasts past $2 trillion

• 2025: Now $4 trillion — worth more than Apple and Microsoft, the other members of the $3 trillion club.

• CEO Jensen Huang is literally called the “Taylor Swift of Tech” in Taiwan, mobbed by fans like a rock star in a leather jacket

BTW we told you so! 

📈 Why the hype?

Nvidia is the basically the “arms dealer” of the AI boom. If you want to build a cutting-edge AI model, you need Nvidia chips. The world’s biggest tech firms are throwing billions at them — despite Trump’s trade tariffs and US export bans that block their best chips from going to China.

A single firm now makes up over 7% of the entire S&P 500 index. That’s how much faith Wall Street has in AI growth, even while other sectors sweat under economic uncertainty.

Nvidia’s explosive rise is a reminder that the spoils of AI aren’t being spread evenly.
🔹 The talent race is fierce and lopsided — superstar researchers get $100m offers while junior engineers face layoffs and hiring freezes.
🔹 Chips, data centres, compute power? Concentrated in the hands of a few firms with massive balance sheets.
🔹 Meanwhile, the communities most impacted by AI — workers whose jobs will be automated, students whose careers will be augmented or journalists who's data trains the models — aren’t seeing anything close to a $4tn payday.

While Nvidia’s market cap soars into the stratosphere, its old rival Intel is facing a starkly different reality. This week, Intel’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan told staff bluntly that the once-dominant chip giant doesn’t even crack the top 10 semiconductor players anymore — a humbling message delivered as the company kicks off sweeping layoffs. Tan admitted that Intel is years behind Nvidia when it comes to powering the AI boom, calling the turnaround ahead a “marathon” just to catch up. For an industry that once revolved around Intel’s leadership, it’s a sharp reminder: in the age of AI, today’s chip king can become tomorrow’s cautionary tale if they fail to adapt😮

📉 So what?

Every milestone like this is a flashing neon sign: AI is the defining wealth engine of this era — but it’s who controls it is really the story

When one company’s chips are “the new oil and gold,” the risk is the same old story: power and profit are concentrated at the top, with little accountability for how AI’s deployed. Sound familiar, Yep, Its a story i think we've seen before?

📚 Read More:

• BBC: Nvidia becomes world’s first $4tn company

• Guardian: Inside Nvidia’s $4tn rocket ride

🚀 Europe’s Starlink Play: Watch this space?🚀

This month brought a splashy new chapter in Europe’s quest for satellite independence: France and the UK have now committed a combined €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) to recapitalize Eutelsat, the Franco-British satellite operator often billed as Europe’s best shot at countering Elon Musk’s Starlink.

It’s not just industrial policy — it’s about sovereignty. French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s science minister have both said the quiet part out loud: resilient satellite connectivity is now a frontline issue for European security, especially with the Ukraine war, America’s “America First” shifts under Trump, and the EU’s broader push for “technological sovereignty.”🛰️

The scale problem: But money isn’t the same as scale — and this is where reality bites. Starlink’s sprawling Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network now boasts 7,600+ satellites. Eutelsat’s OneWeb, in contrast, has just 650 LEO birds in orbit — and many are nearing the end of their lifespan. That’s not enough to match Starlink’s near-global coverage, low latency, or raw bandwidth — even Eutelsat’s own ex-CEO admitted they couldn’t replace Starlink in Ukraine if they wanted to.😯

Apples and oranges? Experts say the gap isn’t just about fleet size. Starlink’s LEO satellites use a fully interconnected “mesh” system that’s technically far ahead of Eutelsat’s “bent pipe” design. Replacing ageing satellites and developing a next-gen constellation could cost Eutelsat billions more — on top of what France and the UK just committed💸

Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. What Eutelsat can do is carve out a role in Europe’s sovereign and security-sensitive markets — situations where “whose satellites you rely on” matters more than sheer speed. In Ukraine, Germany deployed Eutelsat terminals to supplement Starlink as a hedge against the unpredictable ties between the US and Ukraine. And Eutelsat is now the only European operator with an operational LEO network, putting it in pole position for the EU’s IRIS² satellite programme — Brussels’ flagship project to build Europe’s own secure comms backbone📡

📉 So what? Europe’s big bet on Eutelsat is a textbook example of what “industrial strategy” means in a geopolitical world: back your national champions, protect sovereignty, and accept that you probably probably too late and slow to out-compete Elon Musk at his own game.

For those watching the future of space, defence and AI infrastructure, the real story isn’t whether Eutelsat will become Starlink 2.0 — it’s whether Europe can build trusted “good enough” alternatives to tech dependencies that sit under the thumb of a single billionaire with his own foreign policy and a restless political agenda.

🛰️ Watch this space — literally.

🔗 Read more:

• CNBC’s deep dive on France’s Eutelsat bet

• Reuters on the UK’s new £163 million boost

🚨 Sequoia’s Silence🚨

Another week, another Silicon Valley power player testing whether the old “say nothing and wait for it to blow over” tactic still works 

This time it’s Sequoia Capital — one of the most powerful venture firms on the planet — quietly weathering the fallout from partner Shaun Maguire’s inflammatory post calling a New York mayoral candidate an “Islamist” who “comes from a culture that lies about everything.”😱

More than a thousand people have signed a petition calling on Sequoia to condemn the remarks and apologise. The response? Radio silence. No statement. No distancing. Not even the usual corporate boilerplate about “values.” In fact Maguire doubled down on it with a 30min video where he attempted to... ,we aren't quite sure, make himself feel better we assume😅

Why does this matter? Because for decades, Sequoia has been the gold standard — the firm that every founder wants backing them, every investor wants to co-invest with, and every top exec wants to join. They’ve bankrolled the biggest names in tech — Google, Stripe, Apple, Airbnb, Nvidia — and for that reason, their reputation and access have been everything💫

So why stay quiet? The short answer: deal flow. Maguire is reportedly close with some of Sequoia’s crown jewel founders, including Stripe’s Patrick Collison. He’s helped deliver huge returns, and in a world where the right connection can still swing a multi-billion-dollar exit, that rainmaker status buys a lot of leash.😲

Butttt: the ecosystem has changed. Founders, LPs, and talent pools are more global than ever — and more vocal about who they do business with. Entire communities and markets, particularly in MENA and Asia, are watching Sequoia’s non-response and asking: if this is what one of the most respected firms tolerates publicly, what does it say privately?😒

To be fair, VC has always had a high tolerance for “brilliant jerks” — or at least, jerks who make money. The industry is built on risk. But this isn’t just about internal culture anymore. It’s about what happens when the politics and personal views of a powerful partner collide with a venture firm’s global ambitions😑

Sequoia’s ‘do nothing’ strategy might well work this time. The firm is probably right that a hot news cycle moves on, the founder pipeline keeps flowing, and Silicon Valley forgets fast💰. 

🔗 Read more: TechCrunch on Sequoia’s bet on silence

📉 So what? The worlds changing too or Perhaps it's the same, Money talks, and if you control enough of it, you can get away with anything. When people show you who they are, believe them

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

• Cloudflare launches pay per crawl

📏Design📏 

• Don't use click here for links
• SVG's that feel like gifs

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

• Free coding courses and reviews

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• Nvidia can start selling in china again

🙌Summer time!🙌

Interested in a night of career insights, rooftop networking, and games with the Colorintech Community

On Thursday 24th July, Colorintech is teaming up with Samsara for a night of insightful conversations on careers and progression at companies of all sizes,  live music and even a ping pong tournament! 

In our last two community surveys, we've seen an increasing desire for talks about what it’s like to work at startups and scaleups as well as corporates… 

Now we’re making it happen.

Our beachside chat aims to tackle this topic by asking: 

What's it like to adapt and thrive in different company phases;

What are the benefits and challenges to a career focused on any of these stages;

How do you know which option may be a good choice for you.

To answer these topics, we have an inspiring set of panellists including:

 Adnan Omar: Chief Content Officer at PRYNTD
 Munaaf Ghumran: Enterprise Sales Engineering EMEA @ Samsara
 Nyasha Duri: AI Security Researcher at Apart Research
 Pearlé Nwaezeigwe: Strategic Marketing Consultant @ Wae Collective

As it’s the start of summer, we plan to bring the good summer vibes on Samsara's wonderful rooftop - let's hope the weather is warm and bright! So we’ve planned:
Live Music,
Activities like a Ping Pong tournament,
Rooftop drinks!

Whether you’re a seasoned professional, early in your career, or a founder thinking about hiring, this is a fantastic opportunity to connect with our wonderful Colorintech community, including our friends at Samsara!

Check out the key details below: 

Date: 24th July 2025

Time: 18:00 - 21:30 BST

Where: London, E1

As this event has limited spaces, we'll need you to sign up using our Luma Link below: 

https://lu.ma/Ascent-of-Work

A case study

In April 2024, Colorintech and Captify joined forces to collaborate on a fantastic event where we gathered a group of Colorintech community members to network and provide insights on careers in sales, engineering, data and product! It was truly a great evening!

Now, we're pleased to celebrate that one of our wonderful community member's Robert Onuma has joined the Captify Insights team as a Junior Insights Analyst and has successfully passed probation.  
This just goes to show the power of networking and connecting at events! 
Shout out to the awesome Captify team involved in making the event happen Sabrina, Abbie, Baltej, Roksolana and our Community and Events Lead, Catherine, for supporting them along the way!

😃What we are consuming😃

🤖CEO of Nvidia tell's the truth

👁️Install spyware please

💻Perplexity launches its own web browser

👓Meta invests in glasses

😦AI nudify bots are making big bucks