Here’s something I’ve been trying to say for a year, poorly. Skidelsky in his new book, Keynes: The Return of the Master, says it succinctly: Whenever anything goes badly wrong, our first instinct is to blame those in charge–in this case, bankers, credit agencies, regulators, central bankers and governments. We turn to blame the ideas […]
Is the Time for Angels Past?
In the past month I’ve had two companies that I’ve committed to investing in come back and say a VC has decided to take the whole round. These were the best two deals in my funnel. The next two best companies are asking for non-standard deal terms. I don’t do non-standard deal terms (after twelve […]
Communities vs. Networks
My first job, at IBM, I knew nothing about computers. Why they hired me to design mainframe CP logic, I can’t figure out. Columbia taught Electrical Engineering as a liberal art, so while I graduated able to talk in detail about semiconductor physics and hold my own in a conversation about Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis, […]
It might have turned out badly if I’d been on anything but a Harley
One Wednesday 1am in the years when I couldn’t sleep I wandered into a ramshackle biker bar out route 46 and found a guitarist playing the blues. The guy was like 50 and looked like an accounting professor, but man could he play. I listened until he closed the place down and left on the […]
But, then, why have a website at all?
I’ve been sitting in front of my computer all day, doing general industry research: who does what, who the competitors in specific micro-segments are (i.e. who the ten billion companies competing to be the leading real-time mobile app video advertising social behaviorial targeting data exchange are. OK, that was a bit of hyperbole, but not […]
First Ever Ad Market
I was out with Josh Grotstein–CEO of Motionbox–last week, and got to talking about how the inefficient market design of our current ad exchanges saps liquidity. OK, maybe I was talking about it. Possibly I was ranting*. Josh wisely changed the subject to an episode of 1987’s Max Headroom, featuring the first vision of an […]
On Regulation and Innovation in the Financial Industry
Yesterday President Obama said We started taking shortcuts. We started living on credit, instead of building up savings. We saw businesses focus more on rebranding and repackaging than innovating and developing new ideas that improve our lives. But contrast that with this, from November of last year: The Securities and Exchange Commission this week issued […]
Why Bankers Will Continue to Make Just as Much as They Used To
I can understand the brouhaha over banker pay. Bankers make a lot of money. And the seeming unwillingness of the banks to lie low on the compensation front for even a quarter or two makes me wince. Case in point, this New York Times article: After Off Year, Wall Street Pay Is Bouncing Back Even […]
There’s lots of bad economic news, so much that not much of it breaks through the clutter for me anymore, but this did: Tufts accepts 26 percent of pool, suspends need-blind admissions: The admissions office … stopped practicing a need-blind admissions policy toward the tail end of the process, a decision that affected five percent […]