Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• A cautionary tale of startup ego and herd mentality

• Where to stay, network and dine in Cannes

• Plus: The dangers around astro-ambitions; an intriguing underworld all over again; and a Hollywood resurrection that actually went well.  

Remember a few years ago when Mark Zuckerberg existed in the public consciousness mostly as a stiff automaton and evil tech overlord? Well, he’s cool now! We’re not talking about Facebook and misinformation anymore: Instead we’re fixated on Zuckerberg’s fresh haircut and how he has seemed to acquire enough new clothes and accessories to fill an Atherton swimming pool, including the streetwear-style black T-shirt and chain necklace he donned for a photo shoot marking his 40th birthday that he posted to Instagram. 

For a long time, Zuckerberg, one of the pioneers of social media, was the butt of social media’s jokes: He used a weird sunscreen, talked about smoking his meat and found himself rechristened as ZuckBot after a remarkably uncharismatic bit of Congressional testimony in 2019. More recently, he’s clearly realized it’ll go better for him and his company if he leans into the internet’s fondness for memes—and serves up the material for them that will make him seem more relatable and personable. Less like an evil overlord, in other words. 

These days, investors might well demand that a CEO possess the skill to harness the Internet in such a manner. It’s good for the share price if nothing else. After all, memes can produce million-dollar stock movements—as we saw again this week when GameStop shares spiked upon the reappearance of Roaring Kitty, the YouTuber who sparked the original meme stock mania in 2021. And I think we can all agree some sizable portion of Tesla’s stock price rests on the meme-ified love for CEO Elon Musk. 

Sam Altman knows what to do with a meme, too. When OpenAI debuted its ChatGPT-4o this week, the voice-powered artificial intelligence tool’s giggling manner drew instant comparisons to the AI from Spike Jonze’s “Her.” Rather than spend time insisting the comparisons were wrong, Altman acknowledged they were correct with a post on X soon after unveiling ChatGPT-4o. 

To me, Altman’s post wasn’t him championing the abandonment of human relationships for digitally artificial ones but rather a tacit acknowledgement that he isn’t totally blind to Jonze’s many warnings about the technology. 

I imagine the most unrepentantly evil overlords would keep insisting that those warnings couldn’t possibly apply to what they’re creating. 

Still, Altman participating in the “Her” memes horrified some people. Brian Barrett at Wired was especially aghast, penning a piece with the headline: “I Am Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie.” 

Maybe why I can’t work up the energy to get super concerned about Altman and the memes is that, as a homosexual, I find it very hard to worry at all about falling in love with a Her. That’s probably short-sighted on my part. Surely, a Him is already in the works someplace.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, regrets his own inability to pull off a chain necklace. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

How Lacework Went From Cybersecurity Stardom to Fire Sale Talks

A couple weeks ago, several of my colleagues learned about a shocking fire sale already underway: Lacework, once touted as the most promising startup in cybersecurity, was selling itself to one of its top rivals, Wiz. The price: just $200 million—a fraction of the $8.3 billion it had fetched from investors in 2021. Then the deal with Wiz fell apart. 

Surely Lacework must be worth at least 3% of what it was three years ago—what the hell? Well, our Aaron Holmes and Natasha Masencras set out to figure out what went wrong at Lacework, and they detail it all in this week’s Big Read, which should serve as a cautionary tale of the startup excesses that defined an era in Silicon Valley. Lacework experienced a carousel of CEOs—six in nearly as many as years—as its biggest investor, Sutter Hill Ventures, tried, futilely, to turn Lacework into the same type of hit it produced with Snowflake, another software startup. 

As Lacework desperately sought to drum up new business, it spent widely on gifts and events to lure in potential clients. At one point, the startup went as far as to license the Barbie brand for a marketing campaign as the “Barbie” film reached the pop-culture stratosphere—even commissioning Lacework-branded Barbie dolls as conference give-aways. 

“We were handing out gifts left and right like Oprah,” said a former Lacework salesperson. “It didn’t matter if we were pitching some low-level security admin with no ability to purchase software in their org. We were that desperate just to get a net-new meeting with anyone who resembled a customer.”

The Top 5

Where the Techies Will Hang Out at Cannes

Whether you’re headed off to the Cannes film festival or Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the ads-and-tech conclave, you’ll arrive at this classic outpost of the rich and powerful and find it totally rejuvenated, with a slew of new luxury hotels, restaurants and excursions. The man who assembled this guide for you, Tristan Rutherford—a Weekend newcomer but a veteran at titles like The Times of London, The Atlantic and Condé Nast Traveler—insists the Underwater Eco Museum is a can’t-miss destination.

Playing: To Hades and Back (Again)

Time has certainly marched on since the midst of the pandemic when Supergiant released Hades, a game about escaping from a land of fictional death that offered a chance to escape the great amount of very real death all around us.

In the Hades-verse, time has quite literally marched directly into the plot of Hades II, the sequel that Supergiant dropped in a surprise early-access release last week. In Hades II, Chronos, the Titan who personifies the concept of time in Greek myth, has invaded the underworld, and instead of striving to find a route out of hell as in the original game, Hades II presents a journey deeper and deeper into it. Definitely play using a controller: It is a complex game, and you’ll perish many, many times. To ward off death as much as possible, keep your Moonstone Axe handy, which can prove particularly effective at clearing away the hordes of the damned. As a fallback, I also recommend the exploding skulls.  

Reading: One Giant Leap, Many Steps Back

For the first time in several generations, we’re living in a golden age of space exploration: Mankind plans to return to the moon before the end of the decade, and reaching Mars increasingly seems like a goal attainable within our lifetimes. Anyone interested in such a future—and particularly those among us helping build toward it—would do well to pick up “Challenger,” a chronicle of the 1986 Challenger spacecraft explosion and NASA’s other mishaps. It provides an impressively detailed warning about how pie-in-the-sky dreams and carelessness can lead to disaster. The book’s author, Adam Higginbotham, a writer for publications such as The New Yorker, Wired and The New York Times, knows how to tell such a tale well and has done so before. His 2020 work, “Midnight in Chernobyl,” told a similar type of story about how human error can lead to fatal consequences. 

I still haven’t gotten one scene from “Challenger” out of my mind, though it’s a moment from the much earlier Apollo 1 fire: When rescuers pried open the doors, they found a handprint outlined in soot on the window—the crew hadn’t died instantly. As much as “Challenger” urges us to proceed with caution as we trek back into the stars, it does deliver plenty of hope that human ingenuity can mostly get us wherever we want to go. Afterall, the Apollo 1 disaster came just 2.5 years before Neil Armstrong kicked up moondust.

Watching: A Bloody Good Adaptation 

The Hollywood IP business seems to lack a vibrant pulse these days. That’s not so much the case for AMC’s “Interview With a Vampire,” though, which quietly returned last week for a second season. Amid the requisite gore and guts, it displays a sense of warm-blooded mirth about itself as Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson from “Game of Thrones”) continues to recount his life story to Daniel Malloy (Eric Bagosian), a wizened journalist he has toyed with for decades. The show knows what century it is in and has shifted the queer subtext in Anne Rice’s original novel to the forefront; moreover, Louis and his ward, Claudia (Delainey Hayles), are now Black. Unlike the work done in many other modern adaptations, these changes feel like natural updates to Rice’s Lestat series, which always had a lot to say about the themes of otherness and alienation. See, a resurrection needn’t be horrific. 

Final Thought

Finally, some Huberman numbers make sense.