Institutional failure
The TV show The Wire is an incredibly instructive lesson on how the modern world works (besides being a great work of art). The recurring…
Being friendly has become a competitive advantage in VC
Over the last decade or two, the supply of venture capital dollars has increased dramatically at the same time as the cost of building tech…
Should Apple be more open?
It is almost religious orthodoxy in the tech community that “open” is better than “closed.” For example, there have widespread complaints…
Incumbents
Almost every startup has big companies (“incumbents”) that are at some point potential acquirers or competitors. For internet startups that…
How to disrupt Wall Street
Sarah Lacy has a very interesting post on TechCrunch where she argues that the internet is finally starting to disrupt Wall Street. I’d love…
Techies and normals
There are techies (if you are reading this blog you are almost certainly one of them) and there are mainstream users – some people call them…
Collective knowledge systems
I think you could make a strong argument that the most important technologies developed over the last decade are a set of systems that are…
Security through diversity
Someone asked me the other day whether I thought the United States was vulnerable to a large scale “cyber” attack. While I have no doubt…
Shutting down
I’ve seen a number of situations recently where entrepreneurs decided to shut their startups down while they still had cash in the bank…
The next big thing will start out looking like a toy
One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten…