Good morning Broadsheet readers. Angel City Football Club became the most valuable women’s sports team in the world, AI researcher Fei-Fei Li was valued at $1 billion, and female founders and CEOs wowed the crowds at Brainstorm Tech. Have a great Thursday!
– Best technology. We just finished Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech, and while Broadsheet readers have already heard from San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and Fearless Fund Founding Partner Ariane Simone, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share more stories from the leading women in tech who joined us this week in Park City, Utah.
— Aisha Evans, CEO of Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi business, is later to market than its competitors, whom Evans calls “comrades.” “In technology, sometimes being first is good, sometimes it’s not,” she said in an interview after her onstage session. Still, she called New York the “holy grail” of self-driving cars and expects widespread adoption in the city within a decade.
— Kirsten Green, Managing Partner at Forerunner Ventures, gave a presentation on consumer psychology and generative AI. “People feel overwhelmed or burdened by the amount of information they have and by our hyper-connectivity,” Green explained. The key opportunity for AI startups is to provide relief from that hyper-connectivity.
Stuart Isett—Fortune
— Jenny Fleiss, co-founder of Rent the Runway and former CEO of Walmart’s Jetblack, says her relationship with Rent the Runway co-founder Jen Hyman was crucial to her mental health during the years she was building her business. “The idea that I wasn’t alone because my co-founder implicitly cared as much as I did…that was what kept me so sane while I was working at Rent the Runway and losing my mom and raising three kids,” she told Bonobos founder Andy Dunn onstage.
—Clara Shih, head of Salesforce AI, said many companies are frustrated by the continued untrustworthy nature of generative AI, which can spit out inaccurate information or cause “hallucinations.” Those frustrations are preventing companies from broadly releasing products using the technology.
–Agility Robotics CEO and former Magic Leap chief executive Peggy Johnson said her company’s humanoid robot, Digit, is already working at a Spanx manufacturing plant in Georgia under a contract with logistics company GXO Logistics.
This concludes this year’s edition of Brainstorm Tech. Thank you for joining us until the end.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
Broadsheet is luck’A newsletter for the world’s most influential women. Today’s issue was edited by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.
Also in the headlines
– Angel investor. Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, a dean at the University of Southern California, announced they were buying a controlling stake in the women’s soccer team, Angel City Football Club, in a deal that values the Los Angeles-based team at $250 million, making it the most valuable team in women’s sports. Bloomberg
– A newborn unicorn. WorldLab, an AI research company founded by renowned AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, was valued at over $1 billion just four months after it was founded. WorldLab’s mission is to develop AI models with human-like abilities to process visual information. Financial Times
– Be in the spotlight. Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants and wife of Donald Trump’s running mate, introduced her husband, JD, at the Republican National Convention last night as someone who “approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm.” A source close to Vance, who was once a registered Democrat, said it’s hard to imagine the highly-credentialed lawyer as a politician without a clear ideology. The Wall Street Journal
– Association with ovarian cancer. A new study published in JAMA Medicine suggests that women with endometriosis are four times more likely to develop ovarian cancer than those without the condition, which is estimated to affect more than 11 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 15 and 44. CNN
Influential people:
– Lyft hires communications veteran Terra Carmichael As Chief Communications Officer, AxiosCarmichael most recently served as StockX’s first chief communications officer and previously held communications roles at companies including Eventbrite and Yahoo.
My Radar
Paris mayor dives like an Olympic athlete into renovated Seine The New York Times
The Lambrini Girls are full of feminist rage, but humour is their superpower The Washington Post
More women than ever before are working, but they’re often juggling two jobs. The Wall Street Journal
Parting words
“If they can’t see you, they’ll never see you coming.”
— Leslie Feinzeig, founder and general partner at venture capital firm Graham & Walker, talks about the potential of undervalued founders to invest in