Meet Gudiya. She’s an eighth grade student in a public school in Hisar, a small town in Haryana, India. The state of her school is dismal (absent or unqualified teachers, no accountability, no infrastructure), but it’s her best and only choice. Since the pandemic, her school has been shut. There are no classes – none offline and none online. The teachers didn’t have the infrastructure to prepare and deliver instruction online. Independent online education is impractical because Gudiya’s family has no laptop or desktop and her father is the only one with a smartphone, which her two elder sisters share for studying. Her education is at a standstill, and she’s being left behind every single day.

Five days into the new year, and TikTok’s hottest 2021 trend is teens using enterprise software to go viral.

As if the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t already blurred the lines between work and home enough, students and teens are going viral on TikTok after making Notion boards that mimic teen Tumblr feeds. Some users filled their Notion headers with vibey coffeehouse photos or pictures of anime or other characters that inspire them.

What the #$%* is going on with the digital advertising ecosystem?

Where to even begin… Should we start with the upcoming loss of third-party cookies? The bizarre Google & Facebook duopoly teamup against anti-trust action? The rise of online ads as a money laundering & terrorist-funding tactic? Or maybe we should talk about brands’ ever-shrinking ability to attribute ad clicks. Hundreds of millions in provable ad fraud. Disturbing privacy issues that remain unaffected by GDPR or other government efforts.

No wonder a lot of savvy people believe adtech and the entire online advertising industry are due for a subprime-mortgage-style reckoning.

When founders talk about validation, we often engage in wishful thinking. We say that we want to validate an idea, an audience, or a problem, but in reality, we hope to find a way to be sure. We hope to discover a guaranteed win—a surefire way to build a successful business.

There is no such thing.

A business is always a risky undertaking. That’s what entrepreneurship is: an undertaking, an attempt to do something new, trying to create something from nothing.