Analysis and commentary on the business of technology

The Bay Table

The Bay Table: analysis and commentary on the business of technology

Vol. I, No. 3The week of

From ZIRP to SVB to Figma, and the teenagers asking whether college is worth the wait.

Money, manias and the young

In this issue

Leaders

  1. NFTs and ownership

    An NFT buys a receipt, not a picture

    Beeple’s $69.3m collage buys a novel but overpriced receipt for a picture anyone can still see, and buyers should be told exactly what it covers.

    Christie’s auction house on King Street, London

  2. Archegos and the banks

    Margin for error

    Archegos shows that only the banks could see a family office’s leveraged swaps, so the law should make them report what they see.

    Credit Suisse’s building on Paradeplatz in Zurich

  3. Rivian’s listing

    Rivian’s investors are buying a story

    Investors who pay a Detroit-sized price for a firm that has delivered 156 pickups are buying a story, and should demand that the story be audited like a factory.

    A Rivian R1T electric pickup truck

Business & Finance

  1. Student founders

    Most founders should not drop out

    Student debt makes skipping university look shrewd, but the best evidence says successful founders are closer to 45 than 19, so the case for dropping out is narrower than its fans claim.

    Memorial Church at Stanford University

  2. WeWork

    Out of office

    The collapse of WeWork’s flotation is not a failure of public markets but their finest hour: investors read the prospectus and declined.

    A WeWork coworking space on an upper floor of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco

  3. Campuses close

    Universities must itemise their bill

    The class of 2020 is learning that a degree bundles a lecture with a place and a crowd, and universities should now say which parts of the bill they are still delivering.

    Harvard Yard in summer, with its brick halls and lawns

Policy & Regulation

  1. Foreign students and America

    America should keep its foreign students

    America nearly told 1.1m international students to go home over a technicality, and the founders it would have lost are worth far more than the rule’s tidiness.

    The Great Dome of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge

  2. Student loans and the courts

    Congress should fix student lending

    The Supreme Court was right to stop the president cancelling $400bn of student debt alone, and Congress should now fix the lending that created it rather than bill taxpayers.

    The columned west facade of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC

  3. California’s school phones

    California’s phone rule goes far enough

    California is right to make every district write a phone policy and right to stop there, because future founders will need their attention more than their apps.

    Rows of students seated at desks in a classroom

Youth

  1. Teens and chatbots

    Chatbot homework is not a cheating epidemic

    More than half of American teenagers now use chatbots for schoolwork, and schools that treat this as a cheating epidemic are measuring the wrong thing.

    Students at desks in a high-school biology classroom

  2. Anysphere and Cursor

    Cursor’s moat was thin

    Four MIT students built one of the fastest-growing software firms on record, then sold it to a buyer with its own models, which shows how thin the moat was.

    MIT Building 10 and the Great Dome in Cambridge, Massachusetts

  3. Prediction markets

    Kalshi’s age limit misses the point

    Raising Kalshi’s minimum age to 21 would be tidy but beside the point, because the product is a federally licensed sportsbook and its youngest customers are its smallest problem.

    Walls of screens showing live games and betting odds inside a Las Vegas sportsbook

All 32 pieces in this issue

A Klarna office building in Linden, Germany, with the company’s sign above the entrance
Photo: Cherubino / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Klarna and credit

Klarna is a lender after all

Klarna’s listing at a third of its private-market peak shows that buy-now-pay-later is a lender’s business, and its customers and regulators should treat it as one

Leaders ·

Rows of students seated at desks in a classroom

California’s school phones

California’s phone rule goes far enough

California is right to make every district write a phone policy and right to stop there, because future founders will need their attention more than their apps.

Policy & Regulation · Terman ·

Leaders

The United States Treasury building in Washington, DC

Algorithmic stablecoins

Stablecoins should hold the dollar they promise

Congress should stop letting tokens that promise a dollar without holding one call themselves stable, and write rules by what a coin promises rather than by who issues it.

Leaders ·

Business & Finance

A miner holding a canary in a small cage in a coal mine

AI and young workers

Too early to regulate AI over jobs

A Stanford study finds that young workers in AI-exposed jobs are being hired less, which is worth taking seriously, but the evidence is too thin to justify rules against the technology.

Business & Finance · Terman ·

Policy & Regulation

Parliament House in Canberra at dusk, lit against a darkening sky

Australia’s social-media ban

Australia’s teen ban came too soon

Australia’s under-16 ban answers a real collective-action problem, but it fines platforms for an age check nobody has yet shown can work, and should have waited for the trial.

Policy & Regulation · Terman ·

Youth

A card payment terminal showing contactless and chip-and-PIN slots, with Visa and Mastercard stickers

Teen fintech

Teen banking apps buy future customers

Teen banking apps teach money management barely better than financial education ever has, and their real product is a customer who stays past 18.

Youth ·

From the archive

2025

2024

2023

2022

The full archive