Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation, MTI Class Two

This is the second post about the class on technological entrepreneurship I’m teaching up at Columbia.  Class one was an introduction to the why of entrepreneurship, as well as an outline of what the course will be. Class two dives right into innovation theory. The main goal is to start them thinking about innovation in […]

In Praise of the Business Plan

I’m all lean startup, just like you. I love being efficient and building things and MVPing them and getting out of the building. I love setting up analytics and iterating and learning and experimenting. All of that stuff is awesome. I recommend it to the founders I work with, I teach it in the class […]

Teaching Entrepreneurship, class one

This semester is the third time I’m teaching a class at Columbia University’s engineering school. It’s called Managing Technological Innovation, but it’s part of the entrepreneurship minor so I’m teaching it as a class on how to start an innovation driven enterprise. I’m learning a lot. Not least that I don’t really know how to […]

Information and Markets 5: Building a Marketplace for Startup Funding

Yesterday an entrepreneur asked me what I thought about AngelList’s syndicates. I said something like “the best founders will still go straight to Sequoia and USV.” He said he had recently been on Sand Hill Road and that’s exactly what the the VCs he had talked to out there had said: that the best entrepreneurs […]

The 44 VCs With the Most AdTech Investments

The venture capitalists with the most un-exited AdTech companies. [Edit: After the initial post of this, several people sent me some more companies to add. A couple of these companies I don’t consider ‘adtech’–as noted, there’s not a bright line, but I haven’t counted search, marketing tech, or marketing info companies–some just don’t have investors […]

Adtech Investing Activity

My friend Jonathan Mendez of Yieldbot asked me a question about the pace of adtech investing so I pulled together some numbers. I also posted some of them in response to a question on Quibb, so I figured I might as well throw the numbers into Datahero and explore. I used my own list of […]

On Corporate VC

I know I’m a bit late to this, but I just ran across Fred Wilson’s comments about corporate VC from two months ago. “I am never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to do that again,” he said of investing with corp VCs, because “they suck.” Why do they suck? “They are not interested in the […]

Art for Computers

I was reading with interest the New York Times piece on The School for Poetic Computation (via an @aweissman tweet). The idea of the school is worth thinking about: the idea that art, culture, and work subvert each other. That they play off each other. That, indeed, using the tools of progress for play instead […]

The Seed Round is Dead

[Edit: Wow, I totally missed this piece by Jeff Jordan a couple of weeks ago–The Series A Round is the New Series B Round. Different responses to the same underlying phenomenon, but since the title is echoed here–both being cliche references to the “new black” thing–I want to point to it.] This morning I talked […]

Letter to my Senator re US Government domestic spying

I was saddened to find out the US government is spying on all of us, all the time. I guess some cynical part of me always believed that, but actual confirmation of it still felt like a kick in the teeth. I just sent my Senator this email. You can find out how to contact […]