HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS SELFIE

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE:

Howard Tullman: Updates on Selfie AI | WGN Radio 720 - Chicago's Very Own

Howard Tullman: Updates on Selfie AI | WGN Radio 720 - Chicago's Very Own

Move Over Social Media. The Age of Your AI Self Has Arrived.

Selfie launches the world's first platform that lets anyone create an articulate and authentic digital version of themselves in minutes.

CHICAGO, IL — 8/4/26 — For the past two decades, the internet has been about sharing content. Selfie believes the next era will be about effortlessly sharing yourself.

Today, Selfie.com officially launched a first-of-its-kind platform that allows anyone to create an intelligent, interactive AI version of themselves—a digital twin that can answer questions, engage followers, and represent its creator online 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Whether you're an athlete, artist, entrepreneur, educator, executive, influencer, or simply someone with a story to tell and share, a Selfie transforms your existing content into an AI-powered version of you that never sleeps.

"The next billion AI users won't build software—they'll build themselves," said Howard Tullman, one of the co-founders of Selfie. "Every major technology wave has changed how people connect. Social media let us broadcast outbound and wait for comments. Selfie lets people have immediate, interactive and responsive conversations with us—even when we're otherwise occupied."

Unlike traditional AI tools that require technical expertise or hours of setup, Selfie automatically builds each digital twin using existing content from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, podcasts, Substack, websites, documents, videos, and more. In just minutes, users can launch an AI-infused version of themselves that reflects their personality, knowledge, tone and communication style, and which can even speak in their own voice.

The result is an always-on digital presence capable of engaging audiences, answering questions, promoting events, recommending products, supporting customers, and creating deeper relationships with followers around the world. Selfie also provides creators with multiple earning opportunities while freeing them up to concentrate on the day-to-day work that they love doing.

From Social Profiles to AI Personalities

Selfie isn't another chatbot. It represents a new generation of personal AI—one where every individual owns a digital version of themselves that grows smarter as new content is created and their Selfie seamlessly interacts with fans, followers, clients and customers.

Instead of static profiles, creators gain dynamic AI companions that continue conversations long after an initial post is published.

Instead of FAQ pages, organizations can deploy constantly updated interactive experts.

Instead of waiting for replies, fans can chat digitally with the people they admire.

Selfie also announced a new referral program designed to accelerate adoption by rewarding creators for introducing their audiences to the Selfie app and platform while generating recurring revenue opportunities.

As AI rapidly becomes part of everyday life, Selfie believes every creator, professional, business, school, nonprofit, and public figure will eventually have an intelligent digital counterpart.

The company aims to make building one as simple as creating a social media account.

"We're not trying to replace social media," Tullman said. "We're building what comes next."

Launched in Chicago around Lollapalooza with more than 1200 initial Selfies up and operating by Andrew and Jon Landan a/k/a “The Landan Twins” who head up Selfie’s marketing team, “what comes next” is already here to stay.

Consumers can create their own free Selfie today at Selfie.com

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

HOW TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

One of the reasons that the failure rate of new restaurants is so high is because - even in cases where new operators are moving into existing locations - so much of the necessary capital investment is required upfront for renovations and/or new construction. You’ve got to build out the entire business before you know if the “dogs” are going to eat the dog food, say nice things to their friends, and keep coming back. A rule of thumb is that a successful restaurant needs to convert about 15%-20% of its customers into regulars if it’s going to make it through the first full year of operations. These required retention numbers may have even increased now because fewer diners are drinking as much as they did in the past so each customer is likely to be less profitable. (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/60-40-restaurant-rule-food-beverage-glp-1-ozempic-wegovy-mounjaro-alcohol/91323202 .)

And, as we all know from the media’s obsession with opening weekend box office results, it’s pretty much the same front-end loaded situation with film studios making expensive motion pictures and then hoping that the crowds show up at the theatres so that the players don’t lose millions of production costs and marketing dollars essentially on Day One. Of course, there are occasional attempts with early screenings and test audience previews to get a reading on viewers’ likely reactions and, in some very costly cases, to actually attempt to shoot additional or alternative scenes and re-edit sections of the films. But as noted writer, playwright, and filmmaker David Mamet once said about fixing others’ failed efforts: “it’s
hard to polish a turd”. Once a movie is in the can, it’s a crapshoot at best as to whether it’s gonna be a triumph or a tragedy. But at least it takes a while for the ultimate reckoning in the film business because movies take years to finance, approve, and actually get made.

In the advertising world, where social media commentators and trolls lurk every day around every corner of the web, expensive new ad campaigns which suck, offend some segment’s tender sensibilities, or have the “wrong” spokesperson are condemned, roasted and rejected the same day they are released and sometimes (in the case of Super Bowl ads in particular) even before they are widely distributed and shown to the general public.

Millions of production dollars are flushed down the toilet, media buys and expensive marketing commitments are wasted, and – in some especially problematic cases – as  PepsiCo (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now ), Kendall Jenner, and many others have learned   - even more dollars are spent trying to make amends, repair wrecked brands, resurrect reputations, and apologize to millions of people who may not have even seen the offensive material in the first place.

While there are no guarantees or crystal balls in the ad biz, I wrote many years ago about a company called Dumbstruck (www.Dumbstruck.com), an emotion analytics company founded in 2018, that had developed some crucial technology which reviewed, evaluated and analyzed both proposed videos and actually produced ads in order to determine how that content would be received by the target populations and how they would respond to it. (See   
 https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/catch-me-if-you-can.html). The basic idea was to keep offensive and ineffective materials from ever reaching the marketplace. As I said at the time, it’s much smarter to avoid the potholes than to get a great deal on the cost of the tow truck that pulls you out of the ditch.

But in too many cases, while Dumbstruck’s impressive tools (which measure emotional, behavioral and cognitive reactions to displayed material) could highlight the prospective issues and shortcomings of completed videos, actually making those improvements could require costly edits or reshoots that campaign timelines and budgets simply didn't permit. The insights could still inform media decisions and future creative development, but improving the finished asset itself wasn't always practical. The horse had already left the barn. So, the tech worked, but the insights it provided often came too late in the creative process to provide its clients with the ability to cost-effectively fix the problems that its software had identified.

The good news for the clients – but another unfortunate blow for the traditional creative business – is that through a new technology partnership between Dumbstruck and Luma, which operates a multi-modal general intelligence platform based in California, there may finally be a fast, cost-effective and readily available approach the companies are calling Creative Intelligence which combines Dumbstruck powerful insights and observations about which elements of a given ad will work and connect with viewers and which other parts need to be revised, eliminated or enhanced with the AI-infused tools called Luma Agents that Luma has built which permit editors to: (a) implement the Dumbstruck recommendations and changes in real time into the existing video materials without extensive delays or costly reshooting of scenes and (b) even more importantly - and somewhat frighteningly at the same time – to digitally create and add elements, props, environmental effects and even new actors to the video on the fly and in the moment. The new system combines AI rendering abilities with human response data and applies all of this to the content being developed and enhanced. When the content is revised, updated, and improved, it is retested by Dumbstruck to confirm its value, impact, and effectiveness.

It’s actually hard to imagine a more enormous and disruptive offering which is entirely likely to upset the entire ad creation and production industry in short order. If you can write it and envision it, it’s becoming very clear that the actual video materials including all the personnel and props can now be digitally generated in 4K quality in a matter of hours rather than weeks with all of the obvious cost and time savings which that kind of technological advancement offers. What’s more, specific variations of the content can be made at little or no incremental cost to be directed to slices and segments of the overall audience. But the cost-effective abundance of content and the ease of production isn’t really the critical question, which is whether Dumbstruck’s technology determines that the finalized content will get the job done and resonate with the consumers. After all, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to sell something.

If the traditional ad biz wasn’t already plagued by the same basic time crunches, talent costs, and production issues that many other industries are facing as well as also being under new serious pressure from the rise of inexpensive and ubiquitous user generated content (UGC) as well as A.I. slop that are swamping all of the available channels (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/ai-trend-traditional-ad-agencies-creators-influencers/91366965.), the Luma-Dumbstruck technology partnership may be one of the final blows to the old leisurely days of Madison Avenue when who you knew was much more important than what you knew and could do. A long-past time when how a particular ad did for a client was a matter of good fortune rather than careful planning, precise execution, and after-the-fact analysis and accountability.

Today, thanks largely to Dumbstruck and Luma, advertisers can now “know before they go” exactly how their ads are likely to resonate with their target audiences and also have the immediate ability to improve their ads before significant media dollars are spent.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Blind Faith in New Technology Is a Startup Trap. Customers Still Want the Same 4 Things

Buyers want to know what your product or service is going to do for them, plain and simple. The further you move away from that simple desire, the less likely it is to succeed.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Aug 10, 2026

 

We’ve all come to be such rabid believers in the power and ability of all kinds of new technologies that we think that blindly relying on the strength of our tech alone will be sufficient to get us over the goal line. Sadly, this has never been the case. It’s a necessary element to be sure, but never sufficient standing alone to get the job done and acting otherwise is just another trip down Memory Lane to the Field of Dreams where people swear that “if you build it, they will come.” Whom the “they” are is never that clear at the outset and unfortunately, it’s just as likely in some cases to be creditors rather than customers showing up at your doorstep if you’re not careful.

Interestingly enough, this attitude seems to be present even in new business ventures where the driving components for success have little or nothing to do with the underlying operating systems. And I’m not merely talking about the fact that every new investment deck I see these days describes business processes that are always AI-infused and enabled—need it or not. There is so much conversation and excitement about the connectivity that the web now enables—from rapid scaling to customer acquisition to engagement at little cost—that even the entrepreneurs pitching the programs lose sight of the other gating factors and the relatively substantial hurdles that their prospective businesses need to surmount.

Whatever else may have changed out there in the real world, it’s still demonstrably the case that my old formulation still holds. I’m just not that interested in any business which can’t show me in minutes one of the following:

·         How it’s going to save me time

·         How it’s going to save me money

·         How it’s going to make me more productive

·         How it’s going to help me make better decisions

An essential part of the foregoing is the “me” in the heart of it. Buyers want to know what your product or service is going to do for them – plain and simple – and the further your plan or idea moves away from that simple and selfish desire, the less likely it is to succeed.

This is why I was initially intrigued to see a recent PowerPoint deck that was sent to me in reaction to my recent column about venal and shameless matchmakers that describes yet another alternative solution to the failures and other shortcomings of the current online dating models. To be clear, there’s a big, ugly problem here waiting to be solved and a huge audience looking for a better solution than what’s currently on offer. Sixty million Americans still use dating apps, but they’re burning out at a frightening rate with three quarters of them quitting the services within a month. This doesn’t really bode especially well for any dating business pro forma because you lose the losers (who give up) and you lose the winners (who get dates) over relatively short time frames.

The approach that Kindred has come up with is basically to let your community play cupid and find you the right match. It’s all about who you know and who knows you and all those helpful Good Samaritans are gonna drop whatever they’ve been doing and volunteer to help find you a date and/or a spouse. I wish the founder well, as a lot of her proposal is drawn from her own background and painful experiences, but I took this proposal as almost a textbook case of how easy it is to miss some of the most basic selling propositions (what’s in it for me) and how hard it is to motivate relatively uninvolved and lazy people (who will always talk a good game) to actually assist you in building your business when they’re noy even the primary beneficiaries of the service you’re offering and they’re not getting paid.

The basic premise is that you’re building a system of middlemen and women (called here “validators”) and these folks (without consideration) are going to attempt to connect willing daters on the one side with theoretically interested daters on the other side by doing the homework, scouting around for prospects, building out profiles for other people, making intros and “vouching” for their candidates as they are tendered (no pun intended) to the interested daters. Many of those most in need of assistance are the least likely to admit and acknowledge that they need a well-meaning but intrusive third party’s help. Even the neighborhood spinster doesn’t want to be the specimen in someone’s solicitous science project.

Even forgetting about the necessity of reaching almost immediate critical mass on all three sides of this equation, you’re building a business on the premise that people who know likely prospects in their communities are going to undertake this entire new behavior—being a bride and groom broker—in the vague hopes that there’s an acceptable and attractive match out there somewhere for them to connect their friend, neighbor, relative or whatever with. And they’re also willing to assume and bear all the bad news associated with busted dates, bad behaviors, no-shows, and worse and the emotional and pointed repercussions. All for free.

As if. The truth is that nobody today is looking for more work and another time-consuming and tedious job which has all the hallmarks of being thankless as well. Eventually the hope is that the daters will eventually pay the freight for this service and presumably that the validators will have the heartwarming satisfaction of doing good deeds and helping love to blossom. In the early days, ads and events are expected to provide revenues before there are paying customers.

In addition, there is the nasty notion of plenty of existing cost-free alternatives all over the place that already seem to work fairly well for folks. It’s easy as pie to check out a prospect on social media these days and say yea or nay to a fix-up without ever incurring any risk, cost, exposure, discomfort or embarrassment. A good entrepreneur’s job is to find a real pain, make sure that a wide population of potential customers accepts and acknowledges the pain and is ready and willing to pay for the solution, and then to develop an offering that brings all of the interested parties together cost-efficiently and relatively painlessly.

The bottom line is pretty simple – people don’t change when they see the light, they change, if at all, when they feel the heat and this business feels like well-intentioned cold potatoes and not a hot meal.

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 This Is the Worst Leadership Habit Spreading Through Business Right Now Anger is the new management shortcut. Smart leaders should avoid it.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Aug 4, 2026

One of the many noxious and contagious byproducts of the Trump era—where the Orange Monster rants incessantly in bitter and infantile “Truths” all night—is that everyone’s first reaction these days to anything going wrong is anger followed closely by the assignment of blame to anyone other than themselves. The more trivial the issue, the greater level of “righteous” anger it seems to provoke. Trump is the undisputed master of rage baiting and blame shifting and, sadly, it’s worked far too well for him. After fear, anger is the world’s greatest negative motivator.

To say that today the world is more easily provoked, offended, and pissed off than ever before is an obvious understatement. It seems that everyone you encounter has a list of offenses and grievances which they maintain top of mind and are eagerly prepared to share. We’re seeing it all day long in growing instances of road rage, outrageous abuse and childish behavior in sports, and neighbors confronting and setting upon neighbors for minute and imagined violations of their respective spaces and newly conceived “rights.”

While MAGA may be louder, more detailed and particular, and far more out front with their scripted ailments and fallacious arguments, egged on by the ignoramuses at Fox News, you don’t have to inquire too deeply into the psyche of almost anyone to uncover what has most recently gotten their goat. Maybe people always stewed and squawked, but they were never so outspoken, amplified and broadcast by social media.

Because Trump has turned over every rock to unearth and release scumbags and slimeballs of all kinds, the rest of what were once the normal folks—who had some sense of restraint, courtesy and decorum—now also feel (perhaps in self-defense) that they too have to “get their licks in” whenever and wherever possible.

Facts no longer matter—science, expertise and even reality are debatable—and everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, right or wrong, and sticking to it. In most multi-generational households, it’s easier and more prudent not to have any discussions of verboten issues instead of engaging in useless and unproductive arguments with elders whose minds are already made up and whose heads are stuck in the sand.

As we’ve always known, nothing sells more newspapers or sucks up more media and online time than performative displays and fake hearings by the clowns in Congress and intemperate tantrums by government officials who are clearly more concerned with “hits” and airtime than with any attempts to tell the truth. The D.C. press is a little lost these days because they’re afraid to aggravate Trump and there’s not much hair-raising news being made by the Dems.

Stirring the pot and feeding more lies and poison to their ignorant base is the prime Republican activity in D.C. these days, although there’s a fair amount of fear mongering on both sides of the aisle. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan (of sleazy locker room and sordid shower fame) has already logged more than 100 appearances on Fox News but has never introduced a single bill in Congress in his entire career.

There’s plenty of shame, blame, and damage to go around, but the real harm that’s being done for the long term is that too many experienced business leaders, eager entrepreneurs, and successful sports coaches are internalizing the Trumpist tactics and making manufactured anger a prominent and driving part of their strategy, philosophy and approach to teaching their teams, exciting and encouraging their sales folks, and literally inciting their athletes to all act in an unhealthy, unethical and demeaning manner when dealing with their opponents and competitors. Winning is important but making sure your “enemies” lose is the most important consideration. Forget respect—it’s all about revenge.

This is a page directly torn from Trump’s operating manual: degrading and diminishing the opposition, creating false offenses, attributing evil intentions, and alleging illicit actions—all with the objective of fostering, festering and promoting fear and anger in the troops. This is what we’re seeing implemented by Trump clones and followers in various programs across the country. Coaches teasing, taunting, and angering their charges with press accounts, inflammatory videos, and other media. Trainers telling their charges that working up a good “hate” is great for your game time adrenaline and pumps up your energy. Entrepreneurs telling their team that they need to hate their competition and remember that those “people” are trying to take away their livings and put their families out on the street.

This fundamentally corrupt approach is bad for the mental health of the athletes, which is sad, but where it really hurts is in business. Anger may work overnight, but over time, it fades and can’t be effectively sustained. There are four major reasons why it’s a bad bet from the get-go and needs to be avoided.

First, artificial anger flames out quickly, wears out its welcome rapidly, and accomplishes nothing sustainable.

Second, anger without a concrete objective and a finite end in sight is a waste of energy.

Third, anger may energize and mobilize the team but without hands-on direction leads nowhere.

And finally, while it may be an effective short-term mobilizer, it’s a lousy long-term management tool.

It’s fine to fire up your folks with passion and purpose, and that’s a sustainable foundation to build your business. Having to find someone or something new to hate every week is a tough task, a fool’s errand, and the worst way to lead. A great leader understands that some anger may be inevitable and usable, but he or she works to convert that emotion into constructive energy and real solutions that ultimately address the root causes of the anger.

Howard Tullman joins Lisa Dent on WGN radio to talk about his INC. Magazine column on expensive matchmaking

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Rich, Busy, and Clueless: The New Clients Fueling a $250,000 Matchmaking Boom

Technology has made the matching process ever easier, which has had a mixed impact.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 28, 2026

 

 

In the decades before the scourge of the pandemic, admitting that you met your mate through a marriage broker or an online dating service was generally regarded as a confession of behavior somewhere between despair and desperation. It wasn’t as bad as buying a mail order bride or marrying a pen pal who was in prison for life, but it could still raise eyebrows. Blind dates, hooking up and one-night stands were all deemed to be acceptable youthful behavior and not expected to lead anywhere anyway. But marrying someone you met on Match.com just wasn’t something you bragged about to your friends and neighbors. It smacked of having no other choices and settling for someone equally at wit’s end.

However, Covid-19 gave millions of cellar dwellers and wallflowers permission and the opportunity to actively seek out companionship and even more substantial commitments in online forums and dating services where they wouldn’t have otherwise been caught dead. And to be clear, it was no longer confined to any particular age group or gender. It wasn’t as pristine as Tom Hank’s and Meg Ryan’s romance in You’ve Got Mail, but at least it was no longer perceived as pathetic. But the whole matching process—finding your future on your phone—was never really accepted and always regarded as déclassé.

Technology has made the matching process ever easier and easier which has had a mixed impact. Initial connections were much simpler to secure because there were millions of people in the database, but at the opposite end of the martial spectrum, equal millions of would-be romances and suggested introductions were immediately thwarted by tech-enhanced critical scrutiny and rejections resulting from a quick scan of a prospect’s online persona. There’s a persistent FOMO-like sense among online searchers that a better bet and a more attractive match are just a swipe or two away. So, they keep searching and coming up empty. After all is said and done, the bottom line has never really changed. Many people still think looking for love online is for losers. This persistent attitude and a consistent lack of results have led to user fatigue, disappointment, and large-scale abandonment of the online services. And it’s created a resurgent demand for face-to-face personal matchmaking services.

As a result, and notwithstanding all of the subtle and not so subtle opprobrium, the U.S. matchmaking industry has rapidly expanded to meet that demand. It now numbers over 2,000 “professional” firms of various sizes and of widely different skill sets, experience levels, and even pricing models. This number is, of course, substantially supplemented by “helpful” parents, friends and other family, know-it-all neighbors and yentas, and plenty of intrusive experts at the office.

But the real explosive growth in the business—more than two-thirds of the newer firms—has come from corporate chains expanding nationwide, much like the model of H&R Block. These numerous and readily accessible players occupy (and have actually already overcrowded) the lower segments of the marketplace. Their stated efforts to use technology and now AI to professionalize and standardize a very sloppy, unregulated, and chaotic industry have mainly resulted in dramatic price increases for their basic standardized and turnkey services. These price hikes combined with a Wild West environment without rules or regulations regarding any player’s behavior, promises, representations or performance guarantees have brought the expected onslaught of crooks, con men and scam artists – all enabled by A.I. and the awareness that no civilian, client or customer can ever tell what’s really inside of their black box. High demand, high prices, an ignorant and gullible customer base, and no applicable laws make for an environment ideally suited to cheats and criminals.

But technology has also been inadvertently responsible for the expansion of a singular high-end segment of the match-making business which has thrived in the new environment—especially on both coasts and in D.C.—by offering previously unimaginably high prices for their personalized and customized services. Their specific targets—rarely overtly stated—are tech-created rich nerds looking for love with huge gobs of cash, no time, no class, and no clue as to how to proceed to find a partner.

And there are lots of new mini-millionaires like these being created every day by AI IPOs and the expiration of all manner of lockups and other trading restrictions, especially around crypto deals. They literally have more money than they (or their parents) have ever had in their lives and almost no ability to evaluate which of these firms might make sense for them to employ in their quest.

So, in the time-honored tradition of the very best tech promoters and marketers, these poor suckers fall back on the stupidest rationale of all: How can it be bad if it costs so much? Worse yet, there’s clearly a Veblen effect as well which dictates that higher prices for luxury or scarce goods increase the demand rather than reduce it. And finally, there’s clearly a FOMO effect which the high-end and high-priced personal matchmakers make very clear and that is that their time and resources are limited, the number of great men or women out there who are looking is a finite number, and waiting will never get you anything worth waiting for.

The bottom line: the highest-end boutique players in this very narrow field are perfectly comfortable charging rates between $50,000 and $250,000 for their services with no strings and no guarantees attached. They serve executives, high-net-worth individuals, and successful entrepreneurs. And they’re getting these kinds of numbers and growing their revenue every year. It’s all legal for now, but I guess the real question—like so many Trumpian actions these days—is should it be legal?

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Stripe Wants to Buy PayPal. The Real Prize May Be Hiding in Plain Sight

Stripe’s $53 billion bet reveals a brutal truth about the tech Industry.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 21, 2026

One of the oldest ideas in the technology world is that most of the competitive races among new entrepreneurial entrants that are proposing to provide various novel products and services will eventually resolve themselves into markets and verticals dominated by one (or at most two or three) very large and successful players while the rest of the also-rans and wannabes share the crumbs left on the table, until they eventually fold up their tents and pack it in.

It’s a cyclical circumstance in the tech industry and we’re seeing it again today in the AI frontier engine competition with the clear dominance of a few major platform players. Technology is a “winner take all” world driven by several practical and structural considerations that typically drive this kind of concentration conclusion. Some of the key contributing factors to this recurring outcome: demonstrated economies of scale, market-dictated centralization and standardization requirements, the herd mentality of large technology purchasers—believing that you can’t go wrong or lose your job if you’re buying what everyone else is using—and the power of Metcalfe’s Law, which describes and defines the exponential growth characteristics of networks.

And, of course, when you have a passive and forgiving regulatory environment and an utter lack of enforcement of antitrust laws aided, abetted and actively encouraged (if not directly ordered and demanded) by an easily bribed and corrupt administration, it becomes easier and easier to consolidate even traditional industries into the hands of a few powerful players aiming to crush their competitors as we see every day now in the broadcast, entertainment and media sectors. The message to the insiders and the sharks is pretty clear—the gloves are off, join the crooks in the White House in grabbing whatever you can, and worry about the consequences way down the line—if ever.

So, it comes as no great surprise that PayPal, which really started the whole online payments business in 1998, is once again being tossed around and targeted by Stripe. Founded more than a decade later in 2010, Stripe has just made an offer to buy PayPal for about $53 billion, about one third of Stripe’s most recent valuation. More interesting, in the manner of the minnow swallowing the whale, PayPal handled over $1.8 trillion in payments, which completely dwarfs Stripe’s current operations. But with its stock under tremendous negative pressure, PayPal makes a very attractive target for a business like Stripe, which has been trying to consolidate and control the overall e-commerce processing space since its inception.

PayPal was bought in 2002 by eBay and pretty much moldered in the shadows there until it was spun off as its own entity in 2015. Earlier this year, the CEO was fired, the stock being down more than 25 percent, and, more recently, PayPal split itself into 3 divisions—one of which is its rapidly growing Venmo division (acquired by PayPal in 2013) which processed about $300 billion in payments last year. Stripe—which in its own operations is clearly best of breed—certainly sees the Venmo division as a great add-on.

Of course, this would represent a very substantial contraction of the overall consumer payment space even though Apple Pay is growing quickly and other programs like Zelle are also gaining some modest traction. In the old pre-Trump days, this kind of a proposed deal—especially on this scale—folding together the two leaders in the space would be highly suspect from a regulatory standpoint. But in today’s laissez faire environment, you secure the Orange Monster’s blessing (often under the table), and then this kind of deal simply becomes business as usual.

In all fairness—and putting aside the fact that this smells like another Lutnick self-dealing special that we’ll only learn about a year from now—the truth is that PayPal may have committed the cardinal Silicon Valley sin of becoming boring and passé, unduly complicated in a world seeking speed, convenience and ease of access; and ultimately being perceived as behind the times, especially when compared to the simplicity of players like Stripe. While we might gripe about the concentration issues, the fact is that PayPal largely brought all this attention and grief on itself. It had a diamond in Venmo buried within a corporate bureaucracy that should have been exploited, promoted, and accelerated. Instead, in a final fit of accelerating its own demise, PayPal split itself into distinct parts that highlighted and identified the old news and the new value embedded within. This wasn’t lost on some of the bankers whose earliest analysis and comments were around the idea that Stripe might very well be able to make more profit and drive more growth for Venmo than PayPal ever could at this point.

Joseph Schumpeter may have died in 1950, but his doctrine of creative destruction lives on. Founders and market leaders aren’t entitled to persist indefinitely and it’s the regular emergence of new entrepreneurial companies with better technology, ideas and resources that eventually spurs change, innovation and growth. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt in the long run to be the second mover rather than the first.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Microsoft’s Massive Xbox Downsizing Signals the Brutal Reality of the AI Revolution

We’re beginning to see the secondary and other follow-on impacts of AI.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 14, 2026

 

Sony’s PlayStation has been the global market leader for years, while Microsoft’s Xbox has been a distant second even after failed attempts by Microsoft to make its games a visible presence in the desktop world, where it clearly dominates the office installed base worldwide. Both Sony and Microsoft missed the migration of gamers to small mobile devices, where Nintendo prospered for a while—even before the phone revolution completely changed the video gaming space.

Now, we’re in the early innings of another sea change where the major tech players in the gaming industry are realizing that they no longer need armies of programmers, designers and developers to build and deliver the next generation of games. This is due to AI, of course, but also because the new games—mainly mobile—will be so lightweight and rapid as a result of the AI enhancements that there will be no need for any kind of bulky and costly game boxes or platform devices. Finally, as is the case across dozens of industries these days, the cost of the chips used in these boxes has been driven skyward by the adjacent and competitive demands of the AI companies for product that has cut into margins and may ultimately result in price increases at the worst possible time.

The latest salvo in this latest war of enforced attrition was last week’s announcement that Microsoft was making major changes in the Xbox video game business which entailed specifically cutting the Xbox workforce by 20 percent—about 1,600 employees now and another 1,200 plus over the next year. More importantly, the company is largely exiting the studio space, where it spent billions on expensive acquisitions not too many years ago.

The personnel growth in the MSFT games division was massive while the overall demand, player base and playtime all decreased substantially. It turns out—as with many other pre-phone and streaming activities—that millions of gamers would rather watch the play of truly talented players on YouTube than be second-rate participants in multiplayer competitions or simply play older games at home by themselves.

As far as the various studios are concerned, a few big ones like Activision Blizzard will shrink but remain, some others will simply be shut down, some are being encouraged to spin off and go off on their own with temporary support and assistance from Microsoft, and a few will remain until they too can be responsibly booted one way or another or quietly sold off to other buyers who right now seem to be few and far between.

But the most important takeaway from this highly visible and intentional effort at downsizing one lagging division to help offset enormous commitments and investments elsewhere in the enterprise—particularly in AI capabilities—is that we’re beginning to see the secondary and other follow-on impacts of the AI revolution. Thousands of Microsoft employees didn’t just lose their jobs because the AI tools could build new games, faster, cheaper and even more compelling than the former workers, they were also directly dismissed because the sales, marketing, manufacturing and promotion efforts of the entire video game division were shrinking and Xboxes were losing share and playtime as the gamers went elsewhere and the old boxes lost their sway and value.

This is only a single example, but I fully expect that we’re about to see many other industries rapidly roiled by similar advancements in process and speed or response time which will permit—in the name of speed, efficiency and massive cost savings, the wholesale elimination of entire groups and departments in businesses which will simply no longer be necessary because all of their functions in the value-creation chain will be substituted for with new AI-infused technologies. I’ll be writing shortly about a staggering combination in the advertising industry that brings together two powerful technologies and will completely upset and reorganize the ad creation business into a faster and cheaper system, which will also create more engaging and effective products.

It’s clear that a new form of M&A is already actively helping to connect and combine disparate companies with tools and services that are addressing common overarching problems in industries like advertising, and it’s also clear that these individual companies aren’t likely to build end-to-end systems by themselves in a timely fashion whether through lack of capacity or all the necessary resources or because they have been so deeply focused on solving their segment of the overall solution that they didn’t realize that a better and more robust and compelling solution could be offered by combining multiple offerings into a single comprehensive process.