Reaction Wheel

The juxtaposition in my RSS reader of Kedrosky’s Venture Capital is an Attractive Nuisance, II and Organizations and Markets’ Against Government Subsidized VC seems like a sign for me to comment on something I was striving to ignore. Bloomberg announces a taxpayer subsidized venture capital fund just after the NBER publishes a paper on what […]

Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital approvingly quotes NeoAtOgilvy COO Greg Smith: “No one wants a relationship with their mustard.” But, then, why do people buy the mustard they buy? Why do people persist in buying French’s, Gulden’s and Grey Poupon? Not price: store brands are cheaper. Not quality: no more than a tiny […]

Everybody’s blogging about Vanity Fair’s How the Web Was Won. I found it both boring and too short. Probably because I’m old. The best quote was: I’d rather not talk about it—sorry. From Robert Tappan Morris.

Sometimes things just fall into place. When my friend Greg Yardley gave me a call a couple of months ago and said he had an idea for a new company, Pinch Media, it took me about thirty seconds to make the decision to invest. There’s an old venture capital saying about the things you look […]

This is clearly the coolest thing I have seen this month: RepRap. (via Overcoming Bias.)

Jeff Dachis announced his new venture on Monday: building and consulting on social software for corporations. I worked with Jeff from the mid-90s to 2001 or so when my firm backed Razorfish as it grew from ten people in a single office to 2,000+ in multiple offices around the world. When Austin Ventures asked me […]

Anyone? I mean, after teaching myself TurboGears. Sigh.

This is completely off-topic, so I’ll keep it short. A friend just sent me a copy of the “Shannon” email that’s been circulating for the last many years. The email talks about the dangers of kids being online, how offering any identifying information at all can make them a target for assault or murder. My […]

The Times has an interesting internet-killed-old-media article, Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing. I’m almost old enough to remember when The Times was called The Daily Universal Register, so take it with a grain of salt when I say that these types of articles always strike me as intentionally hyperbolic. The death […]