The Download: metaverse lawyers, and Meta's twitter clone

In 2005, years before Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa came on the scene, two startups--ScanSoft and Nuance Communications--merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Nuance's story is far from unique. In all major industries and technology domains, startups are facing unprecedented obstacles.