[I really meant to write this in a longer post because it’s arguable and I like to argue. But while this is timely because of the excitement around Pokemon Go, I’m working on something else and only had a few minutes to put it down. Not sure why I’m apologizing for not giving you another 25-page, […]
Disruption is not a strategy
I was at a research lab to talk about commercialization. The presenter put up a slide of some exciting new technologies. The slide’s tagline said these technologies would “disrupt the biomedical industry.” My first thought was that disrupting the biomedical industry–“to interrupt by causing a disturbance” or “to drastically alter or destroy the structure of something”–is probably the exact […]
VCdelta now part of Mattermark
I built the @VCdelta twitterbot five years ago to solve a problem. I needed to keep on top of the companies the firms I respected most were investing in. The obvious way to do that was to keep track of the firms’ portfolio pages. I found it really useful. Other people found it useful too, and […]
Strategies Against Systems
There is one other circumstance, peculiar to human conduct, which stands in the way of successful social prediction and planning. Public predictions of future social developments are frequently not sustained precisely because the prediction has become a new element in the concrete situation, thus tending to change the initial course of developments. This is not true […]
The Deployment Age
A couple of weeks ago James Gross, co-founder of Percolate, had me speak at their Transition conference. I talked about Carlota Perez, her theories, and the transition to the deployment period that we are currently undergoing. The talk, as I remember it, (plus some stuff I had to cut for time) is below. I’ve also added some additional […]
Neu Venture Capital Investor Update
Dear Neu Venture Capital investor, Our frequent informal communications have generally taken the form of late night discussions where you vent your darkest fears about us losing all of your money and in return we rant like The Joker about burning the world down. Because these chats have covered so many topics, from your childhood to our desire […]
Power Laws in Venture
…The more rightward-skewed the distribution is, whether Pareto-Levy, log normal, or some related form, the more difficult it is to hedge against risk by supporting sizable portfolios of innovation projects. The potential variability of economic outcomes with Pareto-Levy distributions is so great that large portfolio draws from year to year can have consequences for the […]
Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s
The history repeats itself crowd thinks that that there must be a bubble sooner or later. “Now?” they constantly ask, “Is it a bubble now?” as if history has to repeat whatever was most memorable about the last time. History may repeat itself, but there’s an awful lot of history that this particular venture capital […]
Best of Reaction Wheel
The other night someone asked me “Have you ever thought about ____?” I can’t believe you’re asking me that, I thought, I wrote a 20 page post on that four years ago. I’ve written 270 posts over the last seven years. Most of them suck, especially those prior to 2010. A few of them I […]
Who profits from innovation? Startups or incumbents?
The idea that only startups can innovate and that incumbents can’t respond is wrong. Apple, obviously no longer a startup, is quick to respond to innovation: just yesterday they put a score of startups out of business with innovative products. Apple was not the innovator, but the products were innovative all the same. And not […]