Brian Contreras

1 week ago | inc.com | Brian Contreras

President Trump’s wide-ranging slate of country-specific reciprocal tariffs are off the table—for now. The White House announced Wednesday that it’s dialing back all new trade duties to a flat 10 percent rate for at least the next 90 days, except for Chinese imports, which will face a cumulative 145% worth of new duties under Trump.

2 weeks ago | inc.com | Brian Contreras

Some companies penalize their employees for spending too much time on Reddit. Jaime Rogozinski’s extensive Reddit activities helped him land a job. The founder of r/WallStreetBets—the infamous investing forum that orchestrated the 2021 GameStop price pump and was chronicled in the 2023 movie “Dumb Money”—Rogozinski is now trading social media for the C-suite as the new chief strategy officer of Wire Network, a crypto startup.

2 weeks ago | inc.com | Brian Contreras

Crypto is on the come-up. For a while, the technology—which aims to decentralize money and digital assets using cryptographic algorithms—seemed to have lost its luster. Industry darlings such as FTX, Celsius, and Terraform Labs were imploding; the hype for NFTs had dissipated; and scams were omnipresent. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, was turning its attention to a shiny new toy: AI. But with the election of Donald Trump, a partial revival is at hand.

2 weeks ago | inc.com | Brian Contreras

The market might be a mess right now, but it’s still looking like a good time to be an artificial intelligence startup. Just ask Joris Poort, founder and chief executive of the AI physics modeling company Rescale, which today announced a $115 million Series D funding round with backing from some of the biggest names in tech, including chip giant NVIDIA and Taiwanese manufacturing powerhouse Foxconn.

3 weeks ago | inc.com | Brian Contreras

U.S. venture capital is becoming increasingly focused on a select cohort of investment prospects, with artificial intelligence the industry’s clear priority, data released today by the research firm PitchBook shows. The first quarter of 2025 saw $91.5 billion in U.S. venture capital activity spread out across an estimated 3,990 deals, PitchBook’s new data indicates.