So much for the technology stock collapse. 

Some of the tech companies worst hit in last autumn's stock market have bounced back to new highs in recent weeks - and what is most surprising is that bounce has shone a spotlight on a group of business software applications that are becoming increasingly familiar to the world's white-collar workers.

It is the old axiom I heard time and again when I worked on Wall Street: "Investors value, first and foremost, growth" (I spent three and one-half years as a currency trader and then mergers and acquisition analyst on The Street between university and law school. Long story. Amazing what a minor degree in physics can do. Requires another blog post).

In particular, Wall Street is betting on apps and technology that are becoming essential tools in a worker's life. Jackson Donahoe, a long-time friend and the managing partner of a venture capital fund in which I am a limited partner, put it this way:


The exact point brought up by Robert Childress, founder of The Masters Conference. Here is a short clip from a much longer interview we did at Legaltech 2019. I will it post next week:

LegalTech 2019: Robert Childress,  founder of The Masters Conference,  on all that $$$ flowing into e-discovery

LegalTech 2019: a chat with Nick Robinson of Microsoft

Jackson noted Google's Federated Learning. We saw a demo last week at the Mobile World Congress. This really needs a detailed post but in brief (and a  very simplified brief at that) :

• distributed machine learning is an approach which enables model training on a large corpus of decentralized data

• Google has built a scalable production system for Federated Learning in the domain of mobile devices, based on TensorFlow.

• You can analyse data and that data never leaves your phone or tablet

• It is one instance of a new approach being developed by several companies of "bringing the code to the data, instead of the data to the code". Only Microsoft does that in the e-discovery sphere right now, but they are about to be joined by another e-discovery provider.

• One of the houghts behind all of this is it addresses the fundamental problems of privacy, ownership, and locality of data.

In the bewildering array of technology vying for a worker's attention, from services designed to handle specific tasks to those which act as broader collaboration and communication tools, as e-discovery becomes such a required platform it is no surprise the money is pouring in. 

As I noted before, I sent two video teams to Legaltech this year and we shot 62 video interviews. But more importantly I sent an additional reporter and her task was simply to find, meet and chat with certain entity attendees: venture capital, private equity, early-stage and finance houses. She logged in 102 business cards and over 75% said they were "looking for new opportunities". The others were there on behalf of client vendors. I do not know if that is a record for investor attendees. It was the first time we did that.

I will close with [xxx] who is a long-time friend who preferred not to go on record:

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Now, time for a    few other selections from Jonathan's  BONG!    from this past week ...