It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions. […]
Kicking Quora
I am now one of the top answerers on Quora in both online advertising and Zen Buddhism. This is a problem. I read once that Tetris’ addictiveness is an unfortunate side-effect of the human brain’s built-in desire to learn. Learning something results in positive stimulus. This is usually offset by the actual need to work […]
Don’t let the dumb money lead
When I don’t invest in a company it’s because (a) I didn’t like the company, (b) I didn’t know enough about the company’s business to actually add any value, or (c) I didn’t like the terms of the deal. But I recently said no to a company where I liked all three of those things. […]
The bubble this time
What is a bubble anyway? A positive feedback loop where the governor is on a time-delay. It’s not necessarily a money thing. It’s just that financial bubbles are easy to spot because price is easy to measure and a graph of the exponential positive feedback followed by the screeching halt (and ensuing positive feedback on the decline) […]
Getting Gold When Buying Iron
“The theory of Induction is the despair of philosophy–and yet all our activities are based upon it.” — Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World Jonah Lehrer writes, in the New Yorker, [A]ll sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: […]
OpenRTB and Architectural Innovation
I sent out a good number of emails on Sunday asking for opinions on OpenRTB. People were mainly dismissive, partly because of the secretive way in which it was concocted, partly because some think Google is better accomodated than challenged, but mainly because the current goals of the spec are slight. After reading the spec, I […]
Old Style vs. New Style VC
Wrote a comment over on David Lerner’s blog on his “Are Super-Angels Extinct” post. He said What I am saying is that some of these superangel funds may structurally resemble traditional VC funds, but they are something altogether different- and more akin to an angel group. My comment was that structure matters. If you set […]
Coinvestor Graph Code
I’ve had a bunch of people asking for the data behind the coinvestor network map and a few asking for the code. It’s actually pretty easy to generate the basic graph from the Crunchbase API. The hard part was cleaning the Crunchbase data, augmenting it with some other data sources and then making sense of […]
Co-evolution and other housekeeping
A couple of weeks ago I wrote something for AdExchanger’s ‘Predictions for 2011‘ series. It needed to be brief, and I wanted to talk about what entrepreneurs will be beta testing two years from now. I made a couple of observations that are pretty obviously true and then ventured this prediction: Towards the end of […]
More VC Coinvestment Visualizations
I’ve always believed that unless you try your hand at something, you can’t really appreciate the people who do it well. That was my motivation in creating the VC Coinvestment Network Map I posted two weeks ago. And believe me, after munging that together I did appreciate the complexity of the process and the expertise […]