The other day we were on a cross-country flight back to New York and our daughter Summer wanted out of her seat to walk up and down the aisle as many times as we’d let her.

She’s at the perfect age (16 months) where she’s developed her walking skills, gets bored easily, and loves meeting new people.

So we let her out of her seat and she started tottling around the plane saying hi to everyone she could while I watched from a few feet behind, ready to scoop her if someone was bothered. She would stop by nearly every seat and do the queen’s wave to the occupant. Sometimes she would offer them a sticker, or a quick giggle before running away.

In one seat, she saw a dog, pointed to it, and said, “Go-go!” (the word for “dog” in Chinese, roughly). The owner let her touch his dog’s nose, and she squealed in delight.

Summer moves around the world fearlessly. She assumes that if you do want to talk to her, you’ll acknowledge her and say something, and if you don’t want to talk to her, you’ll ignore her. Her default is to seek connection, and she doesn’t overthink it. In fact, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t think at all. She just does whatever she wants to do.

We adults move through the world with a different default assumption: that no one wants to be bothered. I for one am constantly overthinking reaching out to people, including friends:

• I need an obvious reason

• I need something to offer

• I need a clear ask

• I bet they don’t have time

• What if they ignore me?

• What if they don’t like me anymore?

Watching Summer made me question my assumptions about the world. We’ve trained ourselves to believe our bids for connection need to be justified by something.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because we’re considering a move to San Francisco.

There are people there I want to know better. While some are friends I haven’t seen in a while, many are people I’ve followed and admired from afar. I’d genuinely like to meet these people, but I catch myself trying to manufacture the perfect reason before reaching out.

Standing in the aisle, I realized that wanting to know someone better can be reason enough.

I can send the message and let them decide what they want to do with it.

Summer is fearless because she hasn’t learned all of these social calculations. She just does what she wants with no regard for how other people may react. When they decline to interact she simply and respectfully moves on.

So let’s be a little more fearless about connection. Reach out before you have the perfect agenda. Send the DM. Suggest a coffee just because. Vibe out.

If you want it, make the small bid for connection, because connection itself can be enough of a reason.

Maggie

Frontier Tech Roundup — SheFi Edition 🏇

• OpenAI's new Apple Messages plugin lets ChatGPT search your Mac conversations and send texts on your behalf. It runs locally and needs you to grant Full Disk Access, so OpenAI isn't quietly indexing your whole message history in the cloud. The real privacy question sits a layer deeper. If someone you text turns this on, your messages become readable by their AI too, and you never agreed to that. Encryption doesn't help here, because the person you're texting already holds a decrypted copy on their device. For years iMessage felt like a private room, and an AI with a seat in it changes what privacy there even means.

• Moderna and Merck reported that a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in a late-stage melanoma trial, which could open a new way to treat cancer. They sequence the mutations in a patient's own tumor and build a custom vaccine that teaches that person's immune system what to attack. Paired with Keytruda, it meaningfully delayed the cancer's return compared with Keytruda alone. This is the first randomized Phase 3 trial designed to prove the benefit of a personalized neoantigen vaccine, though the companies still owe us the full data.

• A startup called Rainmaker says two drones helped produce an estimated 19 million gallons of extra precipitation over Alaska in a few hours. It flew seven cloud-seeding missions into clouds that were already raining, and says radar picked up seven distinct seeding signatures that its models translate to roughly 45 to 65 acre-feet of added precipitation. The caveat matters: the 19 million gallons is a modeled estimate, and no one directly measured that water on the ground. Rainmaker now wants to point the technology at places like the Colorado River and the Great Salt Lake. We are quietly getting better at making it rain. Read the validation report.

• Lady Gaga is quietly involved in a biotech company that keeps living human skin alive outside the body for over a month and runs AI experiments on it. Her partner Michael Polansky co-founded Outer Biosciences, whose platform pairs donated human skin with automated lab work driven by machine learning, hunting for molecules that affect aging and inflammation. Gaga, under her legal name Stefani Germanotta, sits on the company's board, and Polansky says the original idea came from her. Somewhere along the way, pop stars became biotech operators.

• Stripe told investors that the singularity began on January 1, 2026, and says it has run the company on that assumption ever since. The line landed in an investor letter released alongside Stripe's acquisition of OpenRouter, which Axios reports was worth more than $8 billion. Stripe says 88% of the Forbes AI 50 now build on its platform, and its revenue from AI and crypto companies has more than doubled in a year. Whatever you make of the framing, the $8 billion deal behind it shows Stripe putting real money on intelligence becoming the next thing worth owning the pipes for.

• Data centers have moved from a niche infrastructure topic into a bipartisan fight over electricity prices and water use. Axios reports that roughly $130 billion of US data-center projects have already been delayed by political pushback, with campaigns in several states now running against new facilities. A private Senate Republican memo even warned that anger over data centers could cost the party a key Ohio Senate seat. The physical layer underneath AI is becoming an election issue.

• People spent more than $1 billion through stablecoin cards in a single month for the first time. July set a record for stablecoin-linked card spending, according to figures cited by RedotPay, which now expects annual spending to reach $50 billion by 2028. The fastest growth is in Latin America and Africa, where stablecoins solve real problems around cross-border payments and unstable local currencies. This is the quiet adoption story I care about far more than another token launch.

• Bitcoin crossed $80,000 for the first time in over three months, up roughly 28% on the month. The interesting part is why. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled the government's long-dated bond buyback program to calm a bond market where 30-year yields had climbed to their highest since 2007, and the dollar slid to a three-month low right after. Capital rotated into scarce assets, with gold and Bitcoin both rallying hard. This is what people mean by the debasement trade. When deficits keep swelling and the Fed is boxed in by inflation, a fixed-supply asset becomes a logical place to protect what you have. That is the core reason I am bullish on Bitcoin, and plenty of serious investors are landing in the same place. Once you understand what is happening with the deficit and with rates, the surge starts to make basic sense. Here is Reuters on the rally.

• Dolly Parton died this week at 80, and her legacy runs far past music. Her father never learned to read or write, so in 1995 she began mailing free books to children in her Tennessee hometown. That grew into the Imagination Library, which had gifted more than 304 million books across five countries by the end of 2025. She also gave $1 million to COVID research at Vanderbilt, where scientists say her money funded early work behind Moderna's vaccine, and later gave another $1 million to pediatric infectious-disease research. She spent decades proving something worth holding onto: literacy is leverage. What a life.

SheFi Global Events 🌎

Stay connected with SheFi around the world. From meetups and summits to workshops and special partner events, this is where you’ll find the can’t-miss gatherings happening across our global community.

08/28 Belgrade: Co-working & CV Clinic with Sol Sisters: RSVP here

Join us for a chill morning with the Sol Sisters community.

09/23-30 Sicily: Roots & ReFi: RSVP here

Our global ambassador Julia is hosting a retreat in Sicily for women in the blockchain and AI space this September. We’ll spend 4 days in the picturesque fishing village of Scopello, on the edge of the Zingaro nature reserve, and 3 in Ragusa, the southeast tip of the island. We’ll visit the olive groves on the land GrowFi and RiFai Sicilia have purchased for regenerative farming funded by regenerative finance, and spend long days exploring Sicily, eating well, swimming, sailing and plenty of other activities.

The retreat will have a positive sum effect on both the participants and the environment! Find the information here and reach out to Jul directly if you’re interested.

Telegram group: https://t.me/+ao2ltFamsgRmMjVi

Crypto Events 🌎

Going to ETHCC, Token2049 or Devcon? Join our Global Events Telegram Chat: https://t.me/shefisummit

• 08/28 Haymarket: ETHSydney - Not Dead Yet: RSVP here

• 08/29 Los Angeles: Solana Summer House: RSVP here

• 09/10-19 NYC: UN Blockchain Week Conference 2026: RSVP here

• 09/14 Los Angeles: CryptoMondays Culver City Los Angeles Meetup: RSVP here

• 09/17 Los Angeles: LA Fintech Connect Happy Hour: RSVP here

• 09/19 Miami: Agentic Day Hackathon: RSVP here

• 09/29-10/02 Washington DC/NYC: The Future of Money, Governance, and the Law: RSVP here

• 10/08 San Francisco: InTheRoom: Trust, Presence & Connection - #SFTechWeek: RSVP here

• 10/16 Washington: Groundwork: RSVP here

• 10/19 Florianópolis: IslandDAO v5: Florianópolis Brazil: RSVP here

• 11/17-18 Florida: EthWomen Florida: RSVP here

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