2017 – 2023
- I wrote a book: Read Write Own
- NFTs and A Thousand True Fans
- Doing old things better vs doing brand new things
- Computers that can make commitments
- Inside-out vs. outside-in: the adoption of new technologies
- Strong and weak technologies
- Who will control the software that powers the Internet?
- Why decentralization matters
- Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design
- How Aristotle Created the Computer
- Gadgets and Computers
2016
- As [Edwin] Land ultimately recognized, the adoption of his [polarized headlight] system was fatally…
- Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology
- “Steve Jobs supposedly said, returning to Apple, that his plan was to stay alive and grab onto the…
- “Ether is a necessary element — a fuel — for operating the distributed application platform…
- “If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they…
- “The typical path of how people respond to life-changing inventions
- Comma.ai
- The Internet Economy
- What’s Next in Computing?
- If an alien film crew chose to feature our species in a nature documentary, they’d have plenty of…
2015
- Nine reasons screenshots are awesome
- Lessons from the PC video game industry
- It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment…
- Gordon Moore on self-driving cars
- One man came to Mozart and asked him how to write a symphony.
- Keybase: bringing public-key cryptography to mainstream users
- The Babe Ruth Effect in Venture Capital
- Exponential curves feel gradual and then sudden
- Proprietary services vs open protocols
- Improbable: enabling the development of large-scale simulated worlds
- "It all blossomed out of this tiny little seed"
- The idea maze for AI startups
- Come for the tool, stay for the network
- Virtual reality: a new creative medium where the default state is belief
- Stack Exchange
- Skydio
- VC investment vs Gartner hype cycle
- How We Got To Now
- Flow
- The thin edge of the wedge for virtual reality
2014
- "The Not So Global Internet"
- Two eras of the internet: pull and push
- "The dawn of trustworthy computing"
- "This business is like bird spotting"
- "The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI."
- "A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket"
- "There's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation"
- The return of podcasting
- "The Future of Reading Depends on the Future of Learning Difficult to Learn Things"
- We asked for flying cars and all we got was the entire planet communicating instantly via pocket supercomputers
- "The great ideas have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas"
- "A lot of the best tech startups are ideas that have been around for years"
- "A standard protocol for machines to negotiate bitcoin payments for resources"
- "You actually have to remind yourself not to believe"
- Some ideas for native bitcoin apps
- Steve Jobs on problem solving
- "Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal"
- "Bitcoin is the currency the internet deserves and needs"
- As elegantly produced as movies and as engaging as great novels
- Three levels of enthusiasm for technology
- Bitcoin and volatility
- "It's pretty difficult to solve big problems in four years"
- The next twenty years are going to make this last twenty years just pale
- Software eats software development
- The decline of the mobile web
- Oculus
- "We leverage the billions of dollars spent on the consumer mobile phone business"
- "There's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product"
- Full stack startups
- Stored Hashcash
- "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies"
- Four categories of Bitcoin-related projects
- If you asked people in 1989...
2013
- Coinbase
- Some thoughts on startup crowdfunding
- The Internet is for snacking
- The idea maze
- Some thoughts on mobile
- Hardware startups
- Technology predictions
- What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years
- “PCs are going to be like trucks”
- The credentials trap
- The computing deployment phase
- Samsung’s predicament
2012
- Plans are nothing, but planning is indispensable
- The product lens
- Some problems are so hard they need to be solved piece by piece
- a16z
- Agency problems
- The economic logic behind tech and talent acquisitions
- Regulatory hacks
- The rise of enterprise marketing
- Vanity milestones
- Notes on the acquisition process
- The time to eat the hors d’oeuvres is when they’re being passed
- E-commerce startups
- Ten million users is the new one million users
- Shoehorning startups into the VC model
- Capabilities and sensibilities
- How bundling benefits sellers and buyers
- Pricing to the demand curve
- The real strategy behind tiered data plans
- Why the integrated approach to mobile devices is winning
- Firing
- Critics and practitioners
- Equity value
- Different types of risk
- Some thoughts on when to raise money, and the current financing environment
- The experience economy
- When should you give up on an idea?
- Four types of mobile apps
- The default state of a startup is failure
- Blogging to learn
- Is it a tech bubble?
- Incumbents die due to irrelevance or ineptitude
- The risks of being a small investor in a private company
- Outsource things you don’t care about
- Offline first, mobile enabled
- “Meaningful” startups
- There are two ways to make large datasets useful
- Increasing velocity
- Facebook’s response to Yahoo’s patent lawsuit
- Revisited: big VCs investing in seed rounds
- Give away the diagnostic, sell the remedy
- The myth of the overnight success
- Some tips for interacting with the press
- The internet is reshaping our economy from one of huge corporations with lots of jobs to huge platforms with lots of income streams
- Once you take money, the clock starts ticking
- Big timing
- “It is the human friction that makes the sparks”
- Platform distribution risks
- eBay vs Amazon: decentralized vs centralized e-commerce
- Between failure and Facebook
- Some thoughts on the iPhone contact list controversy and app security
- And then, suddenly, it works
- Bedrock programming
- Who should learn to program?
- What’s not evil: ranking content fairly *and* letting public content get indexed
- Chris Sacca on the implied user contract
- Revenue vs margin
- Maximizing capacity utilization as a startup premise
- Building products from improvised user behaviors
2011
- Recruiting programmers to your startup
- What jobs are users hiring your product to perform?
- Trusting platforms
- An internet of people
- Forces that affect whether a large company will buy your product (according to Marc Andreessen)
- Later-stage rounds and “setting the bar too high”
- Three types of acquisitions
- Technology and job creation
- Growth curves of startups
- Always have 18 months of cash in the bank
- Making industries “garage ready” for startups
- Why is enterprise tech so far behind consumer tech? Because it can be.
- The enterprise: buyers versus users
- “Otherwise do something else”
- Business development: the Goldilocks principle
- Some lessons learned
- Owning equity in your company should be as common as owning equity in your home
- Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world?
- What the NYC startup world needs (and doesn’t need)
- Pivoting into a new corporate structure
- The downside of accelerated investment decisions
- The tragedy of the anticommons
- Thomas Jefferson on Patents
- Founder/market fit
- Allocation investing and the social premium
- Notes on raising seed financing
- Accurate contrarian theories
- Options
- Best practices for raising a VC round
- There are two kinds of people in the world
- Inferring intent on mobile devices
- Financing risk
- Apple and the TV industry
- Showing up
- Google’s social strategy
- App store shenanigans
- A few points about the “tech bubble” debate
- Founder Stories
- SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups
- The importance of predictability for platform developers
- Selling pickaxes during a gold rush
- Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.
2010
- The “thin edge of the wedge” strategy
- The interoperability of social networks
- Timing your startup
- Instrumenting the offline world
- You need to use social services to understand them
- Online privacy: what’s at stake
- Some thoughts on incumbents
- The segmentation of the venture industry
- If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough
- Web services should be both federated and extensible
- Converts versus equity deals
- Good bizdev cannibalizes itself
- The bowling pin strategy
- Graphs
- It’s not that seed investors are smarter – it’s that entrepreneurs are
- Competition is overrated
- Builders and extractors
- Pivoting
- Designing products for single and multiplayer modes
- Inside versus outside financings: the nightclub effect
- Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry
- There are three New York Cities
- While Google fights on the edges, Amazon is attacking their core
- Facebook is about to try to dominate display ads the way Google dominates text ads
- Facebook, Zynga, and buyer-supplier hold up
- Old VC firms: get ready to be disrupted
- The tradeoff between open and closed
- Twitter and third-party Twitter developers
- Underhyping your startup
- Size markets using narratives, not numbers
- Capitalism just like Adam Smith pictured it
- Stickiness is bad for business
- Developing new startup ideas
- The importance of investor signaling in venture pricing
- News is a lousy business for Google too
- It’s not East Coast vs West Coast, it’s about making more places like the Valley
- A massive misallocation of online advertising dollars
- Don’t be creative about the wrong things
- Every time an engineer joins Google, a startup dies
- Selling to enterprises
- The NYC tech scene is exploding
- Institutional failure
- Being friendly has become a competitive advantage in VC
- Should Apple be more open?
- Incumbents
- How to disrupt Wall Street
- Techies and normals
- Collective knowledge systems
- Security through diversity
- Shutting down
- The next big thing will start out looking like a toy
2009
- What’s strategic for Google?
- What’s the right amount of seed money to raise?
- Are people more willing to pay for digital goods on mobile devices?
- Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly
- Google should open source what actually matters: their search ranking algorithm
- Anatomy of a bad search result
- Google’s feature creep
- Search and the social graph
- Why did Skype succeed and Joost fail?
- Does a VC’s brand matter?
- Some thoughts on SEO
- The importance of institutional redundancy
- Pitch yourself, not your idea
- Presenting Founder Collective
- How to select your angel investors
- The most important question to ask before taking seed money
- Embrace the medium
- Twelve months notice
- The ideal startup career path
- The challenge of creating a new category
- If Verizon’s Droid is good, that’s bad for the wireless ecosystem
- Dow 10,000 and economic reflexivity
- What’s the relationship between cost and price?
- What carries you up will also bring you down
- Understanding your market
- Man and superman
- The importance of asking people questions
- The problem with online “local” businesses
- Why does it matter that Twitter is supplanting RSS?
- Why content sites are getting ripped off
- Twitter killed RSS (and that’s a bad thing)
- What if online business model innovation is slowing down?
- The new economy
- Online advertising is all about purchasing intent
- Yahoo should invest in products, not advertising
- Software patents should be abolished
- Climbing the wrong hill
- Thanks…
- The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps
- Entrepreneurs need to learn some law
- Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out
- Non-linearity of technology adoption
- Getting a job in venture capital
- Is now a good time to start a company?
- The only college major that matters
- Incubators
- Dividing free and paid features in “freemium” products
- Question from a reader
- Don’t shop your term sheet
- Information is the (other) currency of venture capital
- VC’s care about the upside case, not the mean
- New York City is poised for a tech revival
- To make smarter systems, it’s all about the data
- Thales the Milesian
- function my_exit_payout(…)
- The one number you should know about your equity grant
- Pitching the VC partnership
- Six strategies for overcoming “chicken and egg” problems
- Dividing equity between founders
- Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret
- Machine learning is really good at partially solving just about any problem
- Options on early stage companies
- Ideal first round funding terms
- The problem with tranched VC investments
- Why seed investors don’t like convertible notes
- The myth of the Eureka moment
- Joining a startup is far less risky than most people think
- Founder vesting
- Naming your startup