Entrepreneurship

A user emailed us this week asking for a refund. “Your app doesn’t understand my pronunciation. I used Rosetta Stone before and never had to repeat phrases five or six times.” My first instinct was to investigate. Maybe our speech recognition was broken. Maybe there was a bug. So I pulled up her session data, watched her replays, checked every error log. Nothing was broken. The speech recognition transcribed her correctly. She could see exactly what the system heard. She could even edit the text before submitting. ...

I’m shutting down Lorelight. Not because it didn’t work. Not because I ran out of money. But because I realized something that probably should have been obvious from the start. Let me explain. What Was Lorelight? A few months ago, I launched Lorelight—a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform designed to help businesses improve their visibility in AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. The pitch was simple: as more people use AI to find information, brands need to optimize for these new platforms. Lorelight would track your brand mentions in ChatGPT, monitor visibility across AI-generated answers, and help you understand what was driving citations in AI search results. ...