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“The one thing that irks me is when people call it a SAFE note,” Carolynn Levy laughs. “It’s just SAFE and it’s not a note.” She gives me a look. This is clearly a common mistake. “We wrote it so it was different from the convertible note, to show that it was equity and not debt, that it was meant to be founder friendly, and philosophically in line with the entire process of raising early-stage capital.”

Levy is speaking to me from her earth-toned home in California and not from the famous citrus walls of the Y Combinator (YC) office, where she wrote the SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) in the winter of 2013. Still, she paints a vivid scene of the days in which the document — the five pages that have now become ubiquitous with raising early-stage venture capital in Silicon Valley — was penned.

Imagine: It’s December of 2013, a mild San Francisco winter. Levy, a UCLA and USF-educated lawyer, had been at YC for a little over a year, working on a two-person legal counsel team that included her husband Jon. Together, they would guide young startups through the complicated legal landscape for early-stage companies — getting incorporated, setting up the right structures to hire employees, fundraising.

Levy’s decision to join YC had been a long time in the making. She first encountered the accelerator in 2006, when a young founder by the name of Sam Altman was part of its initial batch and reached out to her for help with his first startup, Loopt. A few months later, Altman introduced Levy to Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, two recent Cambridge immigrants who were running Y Combinator, a “small family business” that gave young startups enough money for rent and pizza so they could focus on getting their idea off the ground.

"PG [Paul Graham] would say to me, Clevy, we need to fix early-stage financing. If we do that, it will do wonders for the ecosystem," says Levy.

“I’d been working with them and loved what they did. Then, YC got health insurance so I decided to join full-time,” she laughs.

The venture funding landscape that Levy was dealing with was messy. Any legal innovation that had sprouted was like a green bud that had pushed its way through sidewalk cracks. The convertible note was one of these green buds: founders were learning that priced rounds — like seed rounds and Series As — took far too much time, effort, and money to coordinate while they were running their businesses. But they still needed money to grow, and sometimes, they needed a little stepping stone before they sat down to organize a full priced round.

Enter convertible notes. These were loans that founders could get from investors with the promise of issuing them shares later, either at a specific “maturity date” or the next time their startup raised a priced round, whichever came first. The notes gathered interest that was paid back, along with the principal, in the form of shares. Founders could use them to set different terms for different investors. And they were quick and easy to complete.

“It was really inventive,” says Levy. “The convertible notes had come from this structure that already existed, the bridge loan. Startup lawyers had pulled it out to have the convertible note act as its own thing for startups. It was great, so natural. And founders all over Silicon Valley were using them.”

But Levy still believed that there could be something better than promissory notes for founders to raise early money. She explains that while natural solutions can emerge on their own, they are sometimes an indicator for a better structure that can be built in their place. The added work that came with convertible notes — negotiating interest rates with investors, keeping an eye on maturity dates — almost negated their time-saving benefits.

The worst problem of all, says Levy, was a philosophical one. Convertible notes were debt and venture capital was based on equity. They just didn’t make sense together.

“Do you want to start your relationship off with your investor arguing whether interest on your convertible note should be 3% or 10%? Or overthinking about your maturity date and not your startup’s runway? We would see Excel sheets with maturity dates on them with different scenarios showing how much money a founder would have depending on when they converted. Did anyone need that hassle?”

“That is just not good for the ecosystem,” she says. “PG [Paul Graham] would say to me, Clevy, we need to fix early-stage financing. If we do that, it will do wonders for the ecosystem. PG was the inspiration for the SAFE. And I realized that now, I wasn’t at a law firm anymore, I was at YC, and this was something that I could do."

So Levy set herself to work to write the SAFE. First, Levy, Jon, and others like Kirsty Nathoo, YC’s first employee and now its CFO, parsed through the convertible note. They highlighted what they knew founders liked about it — being able to move fast, get money quickly, put off settling on major terms until they were ready, and setting different terms for different investors. Then, they outlined what they felt wasn’t working — the interest rates, the maturity date, the fact that the money was debt.

When Levy finally published the SAFE on YC's website, it was a slim five pages. It was first put into use in YC’s 2014 winter 

, which included Flexport, Cruise, and Abacus, $125K in a SAFE for 7% of each of these companies.

It’s easy to picture how the SAFE went viral: Anyone familiar with startups knows that YC is certainly not a “family business” any more. The accelerator has invested in 3500+ startups and has a total valuation nearing $1T, with tech industry luminaries like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Twitch, and OpenSea getting their starts there.

A broad range of VCs would come to encounter the SAFE as these companies grew and raised more rounds. In their earliest stages, these companies would be trained to look to the SAFE whenever they thought about early-stage financing. The SAFE’s presence on the YC website made it easy to access for everyone, especially those looking to cut costs on lawyers. Startups that wanted to be like YC companies would use it; investors that wanted to invest like YC would use it.

Shortly after the SAFE was first released in the winter of 2014, 500 Startups followed up with the KISS (Keep it Simple Security) documents, which included an updated convertible note — it did not experience anything near the virality of the SAFE. 

And this virality was not something that Levy had expected at all.

“I guess it was foolish of me not to think it would be so big,” she says. “Suddenly, I was seeing SAFE rounds get bigger and bigger. Suddenly, it was more than just a bit of money before a Series A round. People were doing an entire round with SAFEs. These rounds could give multiple years of runway. The SAFE round was its own discrete thing.”

As SAFEs grew more popular, feedback streamed in. Take 

’s 2017 post on SAFEs, a follow-up to his original blog post criticizing convertible notes. It was not a good idea to push the terms of priced rounds down the line, he wrote. Founders could walk away with far less of their company than they anticipated. Investors would not know what they were signing up for. If founders weren’t careful, SAFEs could build up “like a house of cards” and go into effect all at once. Wilson described it as a “nightmare” and strongly urged that founders do priced rounds from day one.

“If hindsight was 20/20, we would have maybe started with the post-money SAFE to help people understand their ownership more easily," says Nathoo.

“After some time, we decided to look at the SAFE again,” says Levy, and although I don’t ask directly about the criticisms, she nods at me as if she already knows what I’m on about. “We first released it to fit with the behavior around the convertible note, because that was the behavior that was common at the time. Sign a document for the investment now, and decide the terms of the equity later down the line. But people were struggling with their ownership and it was hard to do the math.”

The year was 2018, and Levy’s legal team had grown. Multiple people contributed to the post-money SAFE. While pre-money SAFEs calculated company capitalization without the current SAFE round, making it difficult to understand how much equity investors owned and how much a founder would be diluted, post-money SAFEs calculated capitalization 

 the current SAFE round, making it easier to understand dilution and how much each investor owned. And if a founder had been diligent about tracking the numbers, they would know at all times — no matter how many SAFEs they raised — exactly how much of their company was theirs.

They took the pre-money SAFEs off the website and the new post-money SAFE became the new norm for YC, starting in 2018.

“If hindsight was 20/20, we would have maybe started with the post-money safe to help people understand their ownership more easily,” says Nathoo. "But at the time people were so used to the terms on the convertible note that it just wouldn’t have worked as well. It’s an iterative process, it’s never over, and it’s always incremental.”

To that end, as of winter 2022, Y Combinator started investing $375K in its startups using uncapped MFN SAFEs, in addition to their standard $125K for 7%. "Uncapped" means that investors have no guarantee of the price they’ll convert at when the next round hits and will settle on the same terms that startups grant to future SAFE investors; MFN (most favored nation) means that YC will take the terms of the lowest subsequent capped SAFE. 

One piece of feedback, however, is hard to solve, an existential question that cuts to the heart of the behavior of SAFEs and convertible notes. 

If these convertible securities — debt or equity — only turn into shares at certain conversion moments, what happens if a startup never raises venture capital again?

This wasn’t all speculation. Freelancer network 

 raised a single $1.4M seed round using convertible notes from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. But Toptal never raised another round, so even though it hit nearly $200M in revenue in 2018, investors never received any shares. There had been no liquidation moment. And, by the contracts, it was all fair and square.

Toptal had done what the note didn't anticipate: It had broken the social contracts of Silicon Valley, the type of thing that isn't really something you can write in a clause for. Toptal's story was often contrasted with 

's, which allegedly chose to raise a small equity round — despite claiming profitability — just to convert its investors' convertible notes into shares.

It seems to be that, after a certain point, the utility and success of the SAFE really is contingent on a founder's worldview — how much effort they put into tracking dilution, how closely they read the document when they sign off on terms, and whether they keep their promises to investors, even when they don't have to. 

It's not easy to figure out the exact impact of the SAFE. Most startups do not share these details when they announce their funding rounds. Perhaps most eloquent about the SAFE's impact is Alex Danco, who describes SAFEs as a 

“When a founder and investor shake hands and agree to do a pre-seed round, they are both probably just assuming it will be a SAFE note…If SAFE notes did not exist, the startup and the investors would have to find a deal structure, and hammer out details for convertible debt or a small priced round. That takes communication, which is work; and it takes lawyers, which cost money. But if everyone agrees ahead of time to just meet up at the SAFE note, the cost of getting a deal done goes down, at a pretty critical moment in the startup’s early life.”

Levy says creating new, easy-to-understand documents hasn't been much of a focus for YC, although she tells me that she’s been curious about finding ways to improve mergers/acquisitions and venture debt. Nathoo mentions that she's been interested in making it easier for companies to flip from being LLCs to corporations, and finding ways to help founders and investors in different countries work together. 

It's not all up to YC anymore, Levy emphasizes. She cites others in the ecosystem that have followed suit, naming the NVCA, which released a set of 

, which include templatized documents for priced rounds, including voting agreements, term sheets, and stock purchase agreements.

“We really did put a lot of thought into the SAFE and talked to as many people as possible," says Levy. "I'm happy with it. If you ask me, in hindsight, I wouldn’t have changed a thing."

Levy shares how she wrote the five-page document that underpins much of early-stage venture capital today.

Carolynn Levy, inventor of the SAFE

Things were bad, and were about to get worse. John* could see the wear of recent weeks, the disappointment in the faces of his team. The men and women in the room with him at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA’s research and development center, had spent much of 1991 trying to save the Galileo spacecraft. Nothing was working.

NASA launched the probe two years earlier, with a goal of studying Jupiter and its mysterious moons of fire and ice. It had spent those two years soaring across the solar system, its enormous, umbrella-like high gain antenna in a stowed configuration to protect it from the Sun while the spacecraft swung by Venus. (In space, nothing separates you from solar radiation, and to be that close to a star is a rough business for a little robot.)

Until now, things seemed to have been going well. The Venus slingshot maneuver — in which the planet’s gravity hurled the spacecraft around the Sun — went off without a hitch. After a subsequent Earth gravity assist to build up more speed, Galileo was finally in a safe spot in space, 37M miles away from Earth. But when JPL engineers ordered the spacecraft to open the sixteen-foot antenna, the spacecraft reported that it could not.

Everyone on John’s team, gathered now in one of the lab’s myriad conference rooms, was well aware of the magnitude of the problem. The large antenna was an integral part of this mission. NASA spacecrafts are flying laboratories that carry precision scientific instruments. When building them, scientists spend years working out precisely what is and is not known about the destination, and what experiments might solve those mysteries.

Those experiments collect vast quantities of data, which must be transmitted back to Earth. To do so, it would need to use its giant high-gain antenna. The spacecraft had a second antenna about the size of a coffee can, of course, but it was only good for sending back very simple telemetry data (such as: “No, I cannot open the high gain antenna”).

Maybe there was water in those moons, too. And conceivably a lot of it — entire oceans. And where there is water, there might be life.

They had come so far, sacrificed so much to build this billion dollar spacecraft. There was no flying it back to Earth to repair. John needed his team to find their mojo, and fast, because NASA, the science community, indeed, the world, were all counting on them.

John stood, looking around the room at his team. Engineers young and old stared back. It would take one hell of a speech to get things back on track.

The story of Galileo began much, much earlier than that tense moment at JPL. When NASA’s two Voyager probes flew by Jupiter in 1979, they were supposed to find a few chunks of icy rock circling a swirling ball of hydrogen. At five times the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the Jovian system was too cold for anything all that interesting, aside from Jupiter itself.

What the Voyagers found, however, defied imagination.

Io, the closest large moon to Jupiter, was literally spilling its molten guts into space. Jupiter’s gravity and its interplay with other moons made Io the most volcanic moon in the solar system. Europa, the next moon out, was crystalline and colorful — the jewel of the Jovian system. And Ganymede and Callisto were bronze and speckled, like animal skins or hammered sheets of metal. The ice was there, yes, and the rock, as expected, but with that much gravity and heat, maybe there was water in those moons, too. And conceivably a lot of it — entire oceans. And where there is water, there might be life.

In 1981, after the two Voyager discoveries of a wonderland circling Jupiter, JPL engineers settled on a spacecraft design dedicated to the Jupiter system, studying the planet and its moons in exquisite detail. They would later name it Galileo.

Though Galileo could launch on just about any big rocket, the U.S. at the time had gone all-in on the Space Shuttle, and tied all its high priority missions to the “space truck” as a way of preserving its funding. So it would carry Galileo. JPL in Pasadena, California finished building the Jupiter probe in December 1985, and shipped it by truck to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for launch. The idea was to launch Galileo directly from Earth to Jupiter.

When the shuttle Challenger blew up the following month, however, the fleet was grounded, and NASA drove Galileo back to California, now to launch in 1989. JPL did a few upgrades to the spacecraft in the interim, and Galileo spent the rest of the time in storage waiting for its turn. Then, for the third time, technicians trucked it across the country. This time, it did leave Earth. But because the positions of the planets had changed in that time, Galileo could no longer launch directly to Jupiter. Instead, NASA would fly it to Venus to get a “gravity assist”; the planet would slingshot the spacecraft back to Earth for two further speed-building slingshots.

When engineers send a command to a spacecraft, they get back data on the nature of every part of the spacecraft. In the case of the high-gain antenna, it’s not that a blinking red light said, “STILL CLOSED!” Rather, they received telemetry stating that a screw mechanism that opened the parabolic antenna had not traveled the entire distance necessary to indicate an open antenna.

“The first question was: What does that mean?” John told me in an interview. Was the antenna open or not? There were no little cameras you could point at the dish. To determine how far it had opened, they tilted the spacecraft this way and that to see when it blocked an onboard sun detector, the same way a beachgoer might adjust an umbrella to block daylight. By doing this, with minimal math they could determine precisely how “open” the antenna was.

“As we made the turn, instead of just saying, ‘Okay, it's covered,’ the telemetry began saying, ‘It's covered, not covered, covered, not covered, covered, not covered.’ Corresponding to the rotation, speed, and rate of the spacecraft, it told us that the antenna was not symmetrically out,” he said.

In other words, one or more of the umbrella’s ribs were stuck. John speculated that pins got jammed during the multiple cross-country drives to and from Cape Canaveral. It could also have been that lubricant on the antenna ribs dried. The good news is that they could simply reverse the process, closing the antenna and reopening it, the same way closing an umbrella and reopening it will help it open properly. The bad news?

“We didn't have a reverse control on it,” said John. They had removed it, using its circuitry instead to install another instrument on the spacecraft. “They decided that the risk of the high gain antenna needing to be reversed was not very likely to happen.”

In the conference room that day, John’s team was despondent. Their job was to write commands to send to the spacecraft to try. So far, they had tried tilting the spacecraft repeatedly into the Sun’s full light, heating up the antenna ribs and hopefully loosening things up. But metallurgy from tens of millions of miles didn’t work. Then they tried doing the opposite: tilting the antenna away from the Sun, hoping that by freezing the antenna ribs, it might loosen things up. That, too, didn’t work. They considered spinning the spacecraft like crazy, hoping that centrifugal forces might open the antenna. No good. The team was ready to throw in the towel.

“You’ve got to believe we can do this,” he said. “JPL is really good at these sorts of things. We will solve it. So you can either be sad, depressed, and quit, or you can be part of something that could recover a mission. And you'll look back on this all your life, no matter which choice you make.”

It was true JPL was good at that sort of thing. No two missions NASA flew were alike. Every spacecraft was essentially built from nothing, engineered for the specifics of the body about to be explored. A spacecraft at Saturn, where the Sun was a mere dot in space, would have different needs than a spacecraft at Mercury, where the Sun would be enormous. And JPL had by then explored nearly every planet in the solar system. They had orbited Venus and landed spacecraft on Mars. The first American satellite in space? JPL. Solving hard problems was their entire purpose. The lab’s motto said it all: “Dare mighty things.”

John knew it, and John’s team knew it. And his team got to work.

Like many moonshots, their big dreams didn’t work out. In the end, the high gain antenna never opened. Instead, the engineers came up with a different strategy. What could they do with that other coffee can antenna, the little one for the telemetry? An array of three powerful antennas on Earth talked to spacecraft millions of miles away. Was there some way to crank up its sensitivity? There was. First, rather than talk to any single antenna of three, as usual, what if they pointed two antennas at Galileo? They could combine and clean up the data received and pull more signal from the noise. They also upgraded the dish hardware for better reception.

Meanwhile, they rewrote the software on Galileo — literally upgraded its entire computer core from the other side of the solar system — to use super high compression algorithms. And they cranked up the coffee can antenna’s output. They found a way to transmit 1,000 bits per second — six times faster than its previous best. They would lose a third of the mission’s science, but a kilobit was enough: the mission would be saved.

Because of their efforts, Galileo discovered that Ganymede has its own internal magnetic field — the only moon in the solar system to do so. They discovered the nature of the powerful, 330 mile per hour permanent winds that swept across Jupiter’s atmosphere. (For comparison, these winds, unchanged for centuries, are more powerful that the most powerful tornado to ever strike on Earth).

Most critically, Galileo discovered that beneath Europa’s ice shell is, indeed, an ocean bearing three times more liquid saltwater than can be found on the planet Earth. In that ocean are all the ingredients necessary for life. Not just microbes, but complex life. There might be fish down there. There might be sea monsters. In 2024, NASA will launch its next spacecraft to the Jupiter system: Europa Clipper. And it will answer whether, indeed, Europa is habitable.

If one day scientists find life, nothing — not biology, not astronomy, not philosophy or religion — will ever be the same again. And even though Galileo didn’t achieve its mission as intended, it did, indeed achieve something incredibly important.

The astronauts of Apollo 13 never landed on the moon, but the capsule’s amazing rescue transformed NASA engineering culture evermore. Ernest Shackleton never reached the South Pole, but the fact that after losing his ship and all hope of rescue from Antarctica in 1915, he somehow led his men on a 19-month escape from the ice — without losing a single member of his team. Sometimes in the course of exploration, hindsight reveals that the mission objective is far less important than the fact of the mission itself.

And with Galileo, NASA engineers were reminded that as long as they can talk to a spacecraft, they can solve any problem, no matter how seemingly-insurmountable. What makes a moonshot a success isn’t always landing on the moon. Sometimes, it is the marshaling and measurement of tenacity and ingenuity. It’s not always about what happened when the plans worked; it’s about what happened when everything went wrong.

*A pseudonym; because of the sensitivity of his current position at the laboratory, John requested not to be identified.

A 1991 Jupiter mission that went awry shows us that what makes a moonshot a success isn’t always landing on the moon.

Lessons from a failed Jupiter probe

 receiving emotional support from a friend in the past week, compared to 2 in 5 women. Only half of these men also reported feeling satisfied in their friendships. And in 2023, the Surgeon General released an 

 to raise awareness of the nationwide “loneliness epidemic” and its dire implications on our physical health. 

Type “girlfriend” into OpenAI’s new 

 and the first three options all focus on emotional support: “a virtual girlfriend for casual supportive chats,” a “friendly supportive virtual girlfriend offering companionship and conversation,” and “your virtual companion for engaging chats and emotional support.”

With this clear deficit in emotional support, it’s no surprise that Americans are leveraging chatbots like 

 for companionship, friendship, and romance —  especially following the months of isolation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Sharing intimate moments largely over  Zoom, if at all, during that time has had inevitable long-term effects on social norms and health and wellness that we have barely begun to acknowledge or understand. Connecting with a chatbot is a low-stakes, low-investment interaction, but is there enough evidence to believe that it’s an acceptable substitute for connection with real people?

Michelle Mouhtis, a licensed therapist and relationship coach, believes it depends on the exact context in which people use AI. While she thinks it can be useful for elderly and homebound communities — or even prompting someone through a 

 while they wait for their therapist to get back to them — using it as a replacement or guide to human connection could prove detrimental.

And Sherry Turkle, American sociologist, author, researcher, and professor at MIT says “Some chatbot users say that a connection to their avatar is ‘practice’ for human connection. But when we talk about it, the conversation turns to how the chatbot is a release from people, a place for more validation and simpler exchanges.

“There is nothing about chatbot interactions that is ‘training’ for the complex and nuanced way that people communicate in relationships.”

According to Mark Minevich of Going Global Ventures, business leaders from every industry — in banking, travel, healthcare, and more — will look to adopt chatbots in 2024.

But much of this enthusiasm around AI comes from people who are either uninformed or who see a benefit in the technology's potential to replace human labor: 

, and even the workforce at large. But this overlooks everything about humans that isn’t quantifiable. As it stands, AI cannot be more than a supplement or tool of support and is something that needs to be closely monitored across all industries.

Using call centers as an example, Minevich says, “If you're emotional and you want to describe your problem — let’s say you lost a job or there's an issue with your bank account and you can't get to it — you cannot have that discussion [with a chatbot] in a way you could with humans.”

We’ve all been there, pressing ‘0’ on the line with the customer service menu trying to get a human to solve the problem at hand. Now, we stand to reach a chatbot or, as Minevich refers to them, a cognitive agent.

"There is no relationship with a chatbot. There is no empathy. When you turn away from the screen, the chatbot doesn’t care if you cook dinner or [die]."

“They can try to give you accurate information and try to be efficient, but I think humans are looking for empathy,” Minevich continues. “You don't know how those systems were designed, how they take your information, and how they score you. [They] are not necessarily dealing with your emotions as they're very bad at [it]. These cognitive agents have very limited — what they call in AI language — sentiment analysis.”

Truthfully, there’s also a large number of humans who struggle with sentiment analysis (the process of analyzing digital text to ascertain whether the emotional tone is positive, negative, or neutral). And, of course, not all emotions fit neatly into just one of three boxes. Arguably, most emotions don’t.

“We expect those agents to give us information that is accurate, transparent, and fair. And that's a lot to assume because the agents are written by data scientists — usually white males, usually having their own pathology — and they're not necessarily fair, accurate, or transparent. So we have to be very careful,” he adds.

If the current chatbots don’t even have the emotional capacity to be empathetic customer service agents, one has to assume — despite the countless Reddit posts debating the best AI girlfriend or the hours logged by AI girlfriend users — it’s currently impossible for them to replicate healthy, human relationships.

Perhaps what these users experience feels good only because they’re paying to manufacture the image of something they desire and haven’t yet been able to accomplish with another person.

“It justifies continual flight from people, conversation, learning the practices that make democracy work. It normalizes calling something that is not a relationship, a relationship. There is no relationship with a chatbot. There is no empathy,” Turkle says. “When you turn away from the screen, the chatbot doesn’t care if you cook dinner or [die].“

Yet we are learning to call what happens between people and the bot a relationship. We are learning to call what it puts out ‘empathy.’”

These “relationships” at their core are similar to that of an unhealthy human-to-human relationship and are built from an underdeveloped understanding of emotions.  “It's a human need to feel seen or heard. That is one of our core human needs,” Mouhtis says. “A chatbot reframes what you’ve shared with them and says it back. It ‘remembers’ everything you say and conflates compliance with ‘emotional support.’

“When you feel someone who is important to you, like a parent or a sibling or a close friend, isn't empathizing with you, seeing or hearing you in your pain and struggle, and they jump right to problem-solving, or they jump to one-upping you or making it about them, it can make you feel even more alone than when you picked up the phone to try and feel less alone,” Mouhtis explains. 

While the chatbot may talk the talk of a human, it's always going to feel artificial and forced (not all that different than someone spinning therapy-speak into something cold and 

). Participating in a relationship where core emotional needs can’t be functionally met and are unequivocally one-way can lead to a dependency or addiction-like response from the person who may continue to engage with an AI.

It’s also very common to try to seek — and fail to find — connection with the people we care about. “People have narcissistic parents, and they're continuing to interact with their parent hoping for an empathetic response, knowing well and good they're not going to get that response,” Mouhtis says. “It's human nature to want to connect and get the thing that they really need.”

Chatbots will, of course, keep engaging with no regard for or awareness of users' well-being because that is what they are built to do.

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In the United States, AI regulations will largely be handled state-by-state and focus primarily on corporate and federal use cases. Whereas, in the EU, regulations are handled very differently. “The European Act is trying to find out what is risky in an AI system and the risks not only for the business, but for consumers,” Minevich says.

“The extensive model for clearance could be a product itself,” he notes. However, the system is so rigorous, that he also believes it’s limiting innovation and competition.

Even so, the mostly hands-off approach taken by the United States is a recipe for disaster. 

“There are two levels of impact," Turkle says on the dysfunctional social implications of this laissez-faire approach. "Social media algorithms try to secure engagement by getting people angry and then keeping them talking to equally enraged people. That is not teaching skills of listening, empathy, conversation, [or] respect. It is not teaching the skills you need for intimacy and connection.

"And then, AI comes in and offers pretend intimacy — programs that don’t just say ‘I intellectually understand,’ but that profess love and care. What is striking is that over time, and as our culture gets more used to talking to technology, pretend empathy becomes empathy enough.”

Despite listing numerous AI girlfriends, even OpenAI writes in its store’s usage policy “We also don’t allow GPTs dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities.”

Going as far as to forge a one-sided romantic relationship with a bot is comparable to entering and remaining in an unhealthy relationship. “So, technology contributes to a problem that then, technology says it can cure,” Turkle says. That sounds a lot like an empty promise intended to keep users hooked. Do you really need to be treated like that by a machine?

Can companion chatbots actually serve as a replacement or guide to human connection?

Love bug: the limits of AI companionship

At Mercury, we believe the arts have more in common with business than meets the eye. The best artists and entrepreneurs build and iterate on things with skill, creativity, and care.

 — a tradition that dates back centuries and still manages to forge a connection between people.

So we searched high and low for potters who could make the perfect handmade ceramic tea cups for some of the entrepreneurs we’re lucky to have as customers. The nine companies represented in this project come from a diverse range of industries and stages — ecommerce to fintech, pre-launch to Series B. We spent months on the search, enlisting the help of “pottery consultant” 

 and scrolling endlessly through Instagram. Each potter has a brand or visual connection (sometimes both) to the company they’re creating for. And each potter grapples with the business of their pottery differently — as potter Kenny Sing says, “all artists, at least in the beginning, struggle to find the balance between how much it costs to make their art and how much to sell it for.”

is Mercury’s first pottery collection and we’re excited to share it with the world. Join us to get a handle on the shapes, ridges, and grooves shared by both founders and potters.

I'm focused on technology, people, and systems — that's the common thread. Mostly, I solve problems. I'm the most general definition of an engineer. I solve problems so that I don't have the problem afterwards.

 is on a mission to scale natural carbon capture through reforestation. They’re aiding with everything from 

 that help organizations track reforestation efforts.

When asked about his day-to-day work, founder Yishan Wong says that tackling climate change is the largest problem humans have had to solve. The scale of this problem influences how he runs his business. “Half of my job is putting the right people in the right jobs and the other half is getting lots of data to make decisions,” he says.

 completed the tea cup for Terraformation, using a mixture of both wild and reclaimed clay (versus synthetic or unrecycled.) She incorporated an illustration of 

, one of the plants that Terraformation grows on their pilot site in Hawaii, on her 

 style tea cup. Amanda’s love of pottery comes from her love of food, which she considers the primordial source of connection between humans and the environment.

Making and using handmade pottery is the medium I've chosen for talking about the connection humans have with our natural environment. Pottery can say a million, zillion things. Pottery can sometimes get roped into the craft field instead of the art field. But I don't think that line actually exists.

I got into technology as a way of leveraging impact. I've always been less interested in software on a theoretical level. I wanted to build stuff. It became a form of self-expression. I didn't expect that I would actually be a founder; in some ways, that was an accident.

Founded by Siqi Chen and Arya Asemanfar, 

 wants to give every startup leader access to financial data and insights. According to Siqi, the obfuscation of finances is “a grand conspiracy” that makes it hard for regular employees to understand business finances.

When Siqi started his first company, he kept a job at the time to pay the bills. “Frankly, the things I've made often haven’t been commercially popular or long-lasting because I build for myself,” he says. Today he is an investor in several companies, including 

, and continues to find ways to give back to the founder community.

’s teacup shows the Runway logo — a natural fit because his pottery often involves bright colorblock — and features his signature, two-finger handle (which he continues to improve on). His inspiration comes from his father, an artist whose postmodern paintings were very “clean,” “geometric,” and “sculptural.” When asked if he considers himself a founder, he says that “this, for me, really came out of personal enjoyment. I had to find a way to keep doing it and to generate enough income from it, so that I could quit my other job.”

Even now, thirty years later, I look at my work and see things that bother me. It tells me what I want to try next week. My handles are still changing. I love the fact that I can come into the studio and spend the time making whatever I feel like making.

I want creators to be able to have full control over their work and the tools to make it happen. NFTs open up avenues for creators to benefit from their work directly through royalties.

Founded by Ilya Komolkin, Alexei Falin, and Alex Salnikov, 

 is an NFT marketplace that has over 2M users and saw over 

Salnikov believes that NFTs and web3 center openness and community, so his team prioritizes community-friendly features. For instance, Rarible’s multi-chain 

 make it easier for users to connect with one another. One of their goals this year is to enable communities to have their own, tailor-made platforms for NFT trading.

 worked on the Rarible teacup and saucer set. Sing often merges tech and art and likes that his work can be experienced both physically (as a usable, handheld cup) and digitally (as pictures and videos). He runs 

 and many of his works feature animation which he crafts with the help of software. The block imagery on the saucer and the chain shape of the animation are a nod to the blockchain technology behind NFTs.

All art is expensive to do, which is why you see a lot of entrepreneurs in any art. A lot of people fall in love with their art, and to sustain it, you have to figure out how to sell it. You can only give your mom so many free pieces.

Mercury’s first pottery collection challenges potters to zero in on an unlikely form of inspiration: the intrepid startup.

Startups through the hands of potters

. Mercury offers banking* for startups — at any size or stage. Founders can access banking, credit cards, treasury, venture debt, and more, and manage their businesses with confidence. Launched in 2019, Mercury is trusted by more than 100,000 startups. 

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

Meghna Rao

Welcome to Pivot, the first print issue of 

, dedicated to all of those times you’ve heard old startup ideas and said: “they used to do 

Pivots are a change in strategy without a change in mission. Your mission might be similar to ones mentioned in this issue: securing generational wealth, getting 15 minutes of fame, getting history-textbook-level fame, making ads easier to buy, staying employable, helping create a culture of writing in Silicon Valley… or finding life on alien planets.

Your pivot might also be similar: going online during a pandemic then moving back offline once things open up, saving your crumbling business from failure by pulling out a small feature and selling it, moving to a new social media network to find a bigger audience.

This magazine is beautiful, but we don’t want to glorify pivots. Pivots are a powerful, challenging tool that should be used wisely.

pivots. We haven’t, for example, covered the startups that pivoted from crypto in 2022 to AI in 2023 or the 2015 “pivot to video” trend that decimated media startups. Good pivots aren’t about trend chasing or hopping around without a mission. They can only emerge from deep inside of yourself, gathered from your observations of the world. They have timing, intention, and strategy on their side.

Maybe your pivot comes to you after a talk with a mentor, a word of advice from a family member, a page in a business book, a scene laid out in a science fiction novel, the sound of spring birds.

Or maybe it comes to you after reading one of the articles in this issue. We hope you enjoy it.

Editor's note for Meridian's first print issue, Pivot.

Editor's note: Pivot

Editor's note for Meridian's first print issue, Pivot.