If it seems a little quiet over at the old ReactionWheel, it’s because I’ve been working with Colossus magazine over the past year as a contributing editor. I love the people over there and am enjoying both having their help and using them as a sounding board. Also, having deadlines makes me more productive.
The latest is Venture is Dead (Again). It talks about the growing concentration of venture in fewer firms and how that works against what venture is good at. It draws pretty heavily on my old essay Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s.
I’ve written three other things for them over the past year or so, which is a pretty good pace for me:
- AI Will Not Make You Rich (September 2025). I make the case that LLMs are not a revolutionary technology, they are evolutionary. Until they are implemented to do something entirely new, entrepreneurs will have a hard time systematically appropriating their economic value. This draws pretty heavily on Carlota Perez.
- We Have Learned Nothing (March 2026). I was working on something else when I saw, in the business survival stats, that new companies are not now more likely to succeed than they were in the thirty years they’ve been tracking. This seemed weird, what with the rise of lean startups and customer development, etc. So I looked more closely into it, and concluded that none of these entrepreneurship frameworks seems to make any difference at all.
- Invisible Companies (July 2026). Jay Barney is one of my intellectual influences (and he probably is one of yours, whether you know it or not.) I’ve had the chance to hang out with him a bit in Utah the past couple years. We were having lunch and he told me about a paper he had just written with Haiyang Zhang of Harvard. It makes the claim that, contrary to most business strategy thinking, there is a way to compete that is neither Barney-ian or Porter-ian: just be invisible. We three wrote this on that.
Enjoy!