Is the rate of adoption of new things getting faster and faster and if so, is this an exogenous feature of technology? I argue the rate of adoption is cyclical and, while fast today for some products, this is neither a good thing for entrepreneurs nor predictive of the rate of adoption in the future.
I am no longer investing in new companies.
The book I wrote with Liz Zalman has been released! We chose an unusual format: we take specific times and events in the life of a startup, times that can cause conflict between founders and investors, and we each give our views on them. We disagree. A lot. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback. Some […]
Generative AIs can do some things better than people: they can code faster in many instances, they can write junior high school level essays faster, they can create detailed images on demand no matter what the demand, and they can write a mediocre sonnet about whatever you want. But it’s still obvious that human intelligence […]
I have always found value in other teachers’ syllabi. I was reminded of this when Henrik Berglund recently shared his excellent syllabus with me. In case anyone else feels the same, here is my current one. I last posted a syllabus four years ago. Much changed during the pandemic. Most notably—at the instigation of Noelle, […]
This is completely irrelevant to the current moment. Enjoy. We build models to see what the future will hold and then tailor our actions to what the models tell us. If the models are accurately predictive then great. But sometimes the models are predictive only because we do what they tell us to do. It […]
My short post a few weeks ago on one of Schumpeter’s ideas lightly suggested you could derive most of modern business strategy from that one idea. I suppose this might technically be true if you are a genius with a lot of extra time, but why reinvent the wheel? Last week I taught my class at […]
Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research IEOR 4998 Jerry Neumann Spring 2019 […]
CC-BY. PDF here. iTunes and the Basis of Competition in the MP3 Player Market “It’s official: the only thing more popular than MP3 is sex.” So said Rolling Stone magazine in 19991: Virtually unheard of a year ago, MP3—short for MPEG 1 Layer 3—is an audio-coding technology that allows digital music files from CDs or other […]
I saw Bill Janeway speak at Columbia the other night. One of the things he said was “pessimists don’t make good VCs.” A truism. This Summer, talking to a younger colleague about the pace and direction of technological innovation I said there was less potentially society-changing technology today than at any other point in the […]