... An Anvil For Your Foot?
Note: this is the second leaf in the GoEmerald Living Book titled "Failsafe To Guard Our Customers Against Stolen Strategy, Data and AI works".
In anyone but Thor's hand, his hammer is only a REALLY heavy anvil on top of the holder's foot.
In that way, taking or using something you do not own or know how to use responsibly only leads to damage, not gain. I have never known stolen intellectual property to bring anyone financial "luck", other than short term investors who quickly scale "early subscribers", then cut and run by selling the business entit(y/ies), leaving customers, employees and medium-to-long term investors holding the garbage bag falling apart at its seams.
For our enterprise, public sector and startup customers:
Below are a few tips on demanding accountability during sales pitch from the typical big consulting/ big tech "giants", or that start-up B2B sales person paid for each user they onboard.
These will help you separate charlatans from IRL inventors of the technology and avoid hidden costs or damage from unethical data and AI products/ services:
Define Outcomes: Do not buy the hype, ask for real visible, measurable and repeatable outcomes. Ask for what they will deliver for YOUR ORGANIZATION and do not accept general shiny "success stories" or CEO infomercials from another large company as a direct analogy to your company.
Quantify Risk: You may think risk is lower in working with a larger firm than a small player just recovering from personal and financial attacks orchestrated by larger con-pany partners/ CxOs with billion dollar knives. If you give GoEmerald a chance, we will actually help you evaluate the risk as a starting point so you can make up your own mind at both the board and the CEO levels.
At GoEmerald, we have no interest in charging hourly rates for armies of people to sell you annual outsourcing services or tech tools that you actually do not need, with additional hidden switching costs.
Or, custom built tools that carry no value medium-to-long term for your organization or users. That will not be responsible innovation. Doing it right the first time matters, even if you are taking a short cut and are under pressure - some answers are more right than others.
Demand Consequences: When results are not delivered, hold the other party accountable and create real consequences with pre-defined cost reductions/ other consequences DURING the sales-pitch, not afterwards. Loose contracts always lose.
Demand Ethics Reporting: If your vendor is enabling unethical supply chains, modern day human trafficking, hurting other businesses or their employees when conducting business, your supply chain and business also suffers. Lack of ethics spreads like plague so ask for metric based reporting on not just ESG and financials, but also reporting on how ethical are the chains of hierarchy inside big consulting and big tech organizations. Are they busy stealing IP from others for repackaging and sale to you, or did the employees actually invent what they are claiming to - how ethically sourced are their services or products, where are the employees located and are they paid fair wage? These are some sample questions to ask.
When your values are clear and you are the IRL inventor, the answers to these questions are simple - no matter the size of your organization. We stand by this at GoEmerald.
We look forward to engaging in an honest and transparent conversation with you about how we can help your organization at enterprise, ecosystem and initiative levels.
Below are some ways in which you can engage with us as a customer. Let's collaborate!
PS. We never let a lead go unanswered. If you do not hear from us within 2 days, feel free to DM me and I would love a collaborative discussion. 🙌
PPS. if you are a woman of colour early stage founder, scroll to the bottom of the post for some dark dose of reality about the tech world. It might just save your life.
For Our Clients: Let's Collaborate
for early stage, small business owner women of colour:
Epilogue: A dose of reality in 2024
Warning:
Following content is appropriate for mature audiences.
May be excessively dark or graphic for some audiences.
Rated equivalent of "TV-MA".
Read past this sentence at your own discretion.
After our infringement since 2022, we are seeing big consulting and big tech-bro con-panies (including the con-panies in their partner ecosystem) hiring "copies of Gunjan" in new AI/ LLMs focused CxO roles - sometimes even hiring other Indian women in the role touting DEI progress at the C level. A reminder that a "Richa" is not a "Gunjan" and any CEO who treats brown women as replaceable entities needs to quit now, or take the first time machine back to their job role in 100 BC.
These "Richas" are now hitting original inventors/ small businesses, such as GoEmerald, for corporate espionage through expensive PR firms paid for by their employers, and in-person/ social media stalking to learn how "Gunjan did PR" and "from where GoEmerald's early customers arrived". Unlike big tech companies, we do not aggregate or publish our past clients' data so they will have a tough time filling in gaps. In my experience, tech-bro culture is not limited to US and EU companies, and it is not limited to men. It is a world-wide pandemic originating from big consulting and big tech ecosystems. It also involves many women who are not shy to put their names on other women's' works in return for a CxO title, some form of "top xy" award, picture on the front cover of Time magazine etc, and a DEI gold star for their employers. So by extension, the harm expected from the misappropriated, misunderstood, and unethical AI implementations is also global.
Con-panies whose foundational services and tech is built on cultural mis-appropriation, flagrant violation of human rights and theft from early stage founders without extensive law/ political/ legal/ PR/ lobby connections are spinning off unethical AI products/ advisories, under the marketing themes of human-focused tech, sustainability, cybersecurity, data quality, data strategy and responsible innovation. You may think this is limited to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS et al - but just have a look at Salesforce's so called digital twin inspired new foundational tech with a synthetic hallucinating data foundation. Just try evaluating risk from such a system with unexplainable algorithms and immeasurable impact.
How do I know without hacking Salesforce? Because one of my acquaintances who now works at Salesforce lifted the premise for this tech strategy from a dystopian superhero multiverse-focused fictional short story I wrote in a notebook during the pandemic, never published online (let me bold dystopian and superhero). Fiction is fiction for a reason, especially with multiverses (comics geeks know what I mean). Now I just carry around + leave at home random half-truths on pieces of papers and keep an overflowing recycle bin at home at all times to see who comes back with info about contents later. Ironically, I was actually exploring a partnership with Salesforce during the pandemic... moving on, as the mighty Thor would.
These data and AI product sets, hastily put together for release to compete with each other, are accompanied with outrageous claims backed by larger tech partners that can not be met in real life by the architecture of their technology products/ services. I would know because their employees and partner companies came back and used me for colonial research to early-test these products while targeting me for "product improvement" ideas at the same time, under the guise of "be our investor" to cover THEIR legal risk, "switch your SaaS services to us" (again cover their legal risk) etc. Some free cloud credits come with large amounts of opportunity cost for early stage startups, and yes, they also cover someone else's legal risk. It matters which foundational tech (and its ecosystem) you choose to enter with your pilot product.
Employees and executives at these places are stealing IP, "replicating" founder origination stories and even mannerisms/ identities (the next level of identity theft), drying up all grants/ funding sources for original founders to force employment scenarios/ asset sales, or executing cyber-stalking/ gang-stalking/ organized crime campaigns against original inventors to destroy their ability to build companies. The last slap in the face is calling it, "we are teaching you to swim with sharks". If human right violations is business-as-usual for your employees, then an organization is no longer in a business category - they crossed over to an organized crime ring and their employees are nothing more than common thugs, with CEOs nothing more than orchestrating mob bosses with zero ethics.
Many of these companies are creating "modern day slavery" like situations for solo early stage founders to kill their ability to hire and are forcing them into becoming employees at "Deloitte" or "easy marks" by killing their ability to hire to keep taking intellectual property by force. I am a living breathing example of this and am disgusted by it.
I do not see others speaking up about it but I am baffled by what I see passing for "technological innovation" at complete and utter loss of privacy, user rights, data sovereignty and right to ownership. So I am doing something about it with GoEmerald and our new business model.
History has many shiny stories of what passed as definition of business when these con-panies were founded many years ago, but now they are nothing more than empty eggshells with zero ethics, a pool of money from investors who are fed marketing more than facts and non-scalable/ rigid business models. This is NOT the definition of an ethical or a technology business in 2024. Managers with traditional careers who are operating with decades old mentality at Partner and CxO levels inside their own businesses hardly have genuine insight and innovation of their own to shower on their client organizations.
I naively used to look up to shiny stories of "those who made it" before me as an inspiration and even hoped to connect with them for funding/ board member positions. I have recently realized that today those are nothing more than expensive PR/ lobby-support fiction. Superhero comics are likely a much better role model for any young founder these days, compared to a big consulting partner/ big tech exec with a history of aggregating IP and killing off small businesses. Many of the new offerings I am seeing are also aimed at public sector and non-profit organizations who run on tax payer money and have a deeper responsibility to the tax paying residents, not just their board.
Personally, I have never been more clear on what I wanted to accomplish in my lifetime and the more someone harasses me into leaving that path, or drills in their "cancel culture" toxic tactics, the more sure I am of working towards what I want. Along the way, toxic and non-inclusive parties are revealing their true colours.
Inserting LLM-based architectures where they do not belong does not build strong economies and does not bring people together, they increase needless levels of control and increase switching costs.
Ethics is timeless.
Shiny billion dollar marketing campaigns do not fix poorly built foundational tech products that ultimately drown economies and give rise to ill-advised public sector policies, undetected until it is too late.
Just remember, intelligent, self-made and independent women (single or not) are stronger, more resilient than Thor in any universe...
It does not matter if their past employers & associates are in denial/ taking our works and back-dating our breakthroughs,
even assigning our insights to "sayings from Carl Sagan" and dumping them as memes on social media (incredibly offensive form of cultural misappropriation and theft at a whole new level)
self-preservation mode at all costs and shelling out cash to unethical PR firms for defamation/ paying customer service rep professional services folks for utility companies or government bodies to target us for "unjustified debt creation" through random charges not justified on our accounts to force a business sale
dumping sponsorship money on conferences and other groups for purposes of influence to cut us from stage time and silence our voices
unethical security companies monitoring us for stalking and scare tactics "motivating" us to leave town with dark psychology hard tactics
spreading misinformation about our finances or claiming to know about non-existing debts
violating our health data and test results for purposes of profiling and electronic weapons harassment
having our medical professionals recommend us to "go online and have dating relationships with an AI" for colonial research purposes
using corrupt and fake doctors to lie on medical reports claiming we have highest levels of schizophrenia with "danger to ourselves", while also encouraging us to commit suicide by creating the hospital stay as hopeless as possible and make you feel as though you do not deserve human rights, and then forcing us to take anti-psychotics with highest possible dosage hoping for an addiction or to discredit us (I was told this treatment is usually reserved for serious whistleblowers - please always get a second opinion after seeing a privately owned medical clinic, especially one with multiple VC board members that also oversee an "innovation accelerator for startups"! No conflicts of interest there at all, right?)
calling us "Hamas agents" and providing our contact information to extremist or sexually predatory organizations for "prostituting" us on dark web
preying on the homeless people to stalk us and say creepy things for shock value or "jokes"
creating unethical LLM "digital twins" of us and then colonially testing them on us for "what will she do next in this situation" (only thing more scary would be to be an actual employee and be present in their office where they can legally monitor all our activity and run it through LLMs to build "free future AI-employees")
when all fails trying to turn us into a "birther" by putting the creepiest "religious" organizations after us who "influence" women to take up a life of "wifely/ prostitute duties" (luckily, I grew up religious and knew the difference between respectful religious groups and creepy-cults)
charging us double for hotel rooms, then calling con-panies that want our IP and giving them our exact location for triple the amount of money to provide wifi and even physical access to our rooms for physical and digital thefts aka "turn us into Nikola Tesla" who apparently paid for rooms with his patents when his money ran out due to "cancel culture" back in his days - who really knows what happened. In my case at hotels, I PAID WITH MY HARD EARNED MONEY each time and then some, with both assets and human rights violations at what is considered 3-5 star reputable hotels. I was told if I want a "good" room "THEY will have to pay". Who is they, i thought then. Now, I know... a "good room" is one without electronic weapons setup for folks on "modern day slave" list, only if you are planning to open your laptop and do the work, OR take a shower for hidden-camera peeping-Toms, OR have your notebooks physically with you for trade secrets theft while you sleep, OR have good amount of local currency cash on hand instead of credit card. Woke up and calling local Police? Their advice, "Why did you not put a chair under your door?! Or, How drunk were you?!"... okie dokie. I do not drink at all but thanks so much, officer! Also, extra accidental "tax charges" on your credit card statement later if you did call police vs when you did not - why would hotels give the "police surcharge" from their revenue cut... your fault for trying to seek justice or any support at all. PS - I am not even sure the line connected to the actual police from that room or someone picked up and pretended to be an officer - not surprisingly, no reception on your phone. Co-working places with showers, same goes, more or less - I would not recommend for single women based on personal experience)
sending professional pick pockets after us
being treated like a modern day slave to produce free IP for tech-bro companies and virtually every lead being stolen through in-person and cyber stalking
even paying our neighbors for low level harassment tactics to sell our homes and destroying our backpacks to have us "look" homeless (bought an almond muffin at your favorite coffee shop? someone instantly broke in and took all your almonds, or worse, went through your fridge and mixed "whatever drugs that mess with your head" to stop you from thinking straight... oookay... thanks for caring so much about my routine, but I can take care of myself.. It is not until you STOP eating at home that your head clears, along with a hefty credit card bill for this basic right to safety)
and finally, encouraging us to self-deport back to our countries of birth (no, not all brown people were born in "Iran", not that there is anything wrong with that)...
This and more, all just to "cancel" us out and "remove" their own legal risk from intellectual property theft. How dare we approach a competent lawyer!
Such is real life in North America with 2024 tech-bro-inspired "AI" product roadmaps + extremist & non-inclusive group-think corporate values that have not evolved since 100 BC.
This is my real life in 2024, while we also witness on social media, news media and TV, the loudly touted DEI "movements", pride logos, annual CEO photo shoots with "diversely coloured" team members, new NASA Prada-designed space suits, and Fendi business suits. Throw in the lobby groups and we are set up for public policy influence that will scale this locally/ nationally/ globally.
Needless to say, GoEmerald will be taking a very different approach with our business model and governance to ensure we are not enabling such toxic behaviour among our ranks or in the ecosystem we aspire to build.
We still have some actual moral standards left on the planet and it is time to put in the work to scale actual ethics instead of fake PR campaigns + band-aid "damage control" + "revenue at all human costs" tech-bro ecosystems. Currently, all it takes is to initiate a musical chairs game of state officials, CxOs and board members after illegal acts I described above to ensure no one goes to jail and to "protect the brand(s) involved". The world deserves better "leaders", and the human customers deserve much better businesses serving them, than people/ process/ tech/ public policies that knowingly or (worse) unknowingly enable this type of "targeting" and "cancel culture" so easily on both white and blue collar levels.
I have been in situations where I emailed people, never heard back and then my IP was on their site or in hands of their employees because my "modern day slavery handler" used me to market my own IP then cut me off while profiting off it. Yes, this included reputable US/ Canada universities, public/ private companies, late stage startups, even some state departments and crown corporations in Canada (hello BDC, are you done attacking small businesses and then prostituting them as your"staff aug consultants" or has the revenue threshold not yet been met for the year?) .
No one deserves this - this needs to stop. People with founder-spirit were NOT born to be turned into "employees at all costs" so someone with money could cover their legal risk, or kill their ability to ever find a paying client. Cancel culture must be cancelled. The people with ethics need the democracy-given right to BUILD THEIR OWN BUSINESSES without being turned into SLAVES for those afraid of innovation. No, this is not a goal for a non-profit. This is a goal for a for-profit company to re-define how businesses and economies work. This is our goal, at GoEmerald, transform this and borderlessAI.
If you are interested in joining us towards this goal, you can reach us at joinUs@goemerald.ca
Too dark for ya? Scroll to the top and admire the iconic original 1960s image from a Thor comic with him heading off into the space to save the universe. He is a better male role model for anyone than your average tech-bro/ tech-brah CEOs of our time.
Final PS. Toxic PR/ marketing/ public policy advisors/ lobby/ legal/ politician advisory groups/ university-led "research groups"/ non profits connected to political figures/ damage control "musical chairs" swapping of board members and CxOs at unethical companies/ news media owned by big money industries mentioned above/ government vendors and other professional services folks: cue the AI-enabled re-writes in more popular/ higher subscription publications to attack your specific competitors where it hurts, create "ethics" courses, publish cover up stories, double down on "responsible"/ "safety" language in your marketing campaigns, people creating stage-speech-copy for the celebrity CEO product launches with "shocking personal stories", and secretly propagate "cancel culture" even further for the people on your coveted "global operation" secret lists. Bring on the ineffective and cover-up non profits that will further target and harm people harmed by these organizations but will cover your legal risks and keep the political benefactors satisfied plus employed. I expect many hotels to "inexplicably" go bankrupt in coming months, of course after CxOs + boards + investors in the know have cashed out and retied or changed industries. No one with money ever goes to jail for white collar crimes unless their richer friends get mad at them, rest of us are pawns in their frenemy battles - that's an unwritten rule in this universe which even the mighty Thor can not hammer out. Justice is currently just a mirage for the specific no-sliver-spoon-in-mouth person who actually deserves it, and acknowledgement is not for anyone once inducted into "cancel culture" by someone with big money - not even by news reporters. I have NOT stopped seeking justice, I am NOT giving up, and I am NOT suicidal, but I am starting to think that I actually might be in real denial about existence of real life justice in 2024 so I will look up to Thor and try to emulate him for now, along with spirituality, values and everything else my upbringing has offered me. This is not something that "Richas" can copy..... aaaaand, Go!!!
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