Selling pickaxes during a gold rush
There is a saying in the startup world that “you can mine for gold or you can sell pickaxes.” This is of course an allusion to the…
Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.
People love to focus on horse races: NYC vs Silcon Valley, Facebook vs Twitter, IPO markets vs private exchanges, the valuation of some…
The “thin edge of the wedge” strategy
Establishing relationships with new users is the hardest part of growing a startup. For consumer products establishing relationships can…
The interoperability of social networks
Google recently added a caustic warning message when users attempt to export their Google Contacts to Facebook: Hold on a second. Are you…
Timing your startup
I never had the opportunity to invest in YouTube but I have to admit that if I did I probably would have passed (which of course would have…
Instrumenting the offline world
In the last decade there have been major advances in storing, analyzing, and acting upon extremely large data sets. Data sets that were…