Was it almost a year ago that I wrote about Google getting into corporate VC? Well, here they come. Reaction among the blogs I follow has been negative. Fred Wilson has the most cogent take, as usual. I worked in corporate venture capital for years. I was skeptical when I was interviewing for the job […]
On Eating Your Own Cooking
Valleywag has an post implying ad agencies don’t practice what they preach: that they don’t spend on search ads for themselves like they do for their clients. I have no doubt this is true. I just searched for “advertising agency” on Google. The paid results are almost all very small agencies. Ad agencies spend very […]
"I Would Give It Eleventy-Million Stars If I Could, And So Would You"
Okay, I’m sure everyone has already seen this, but it made me laugh out loud sitting here alone in the kitchen. The scathingly funny Amazon reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Link Cable, a $500 ethernet cable “made of high-purity copper wire” to “get the purest signal from multi-channel DVD and CD playback.” Yes, a $500 […]
Expressly. You Keep Using That Word. I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.
I’ve been way too busy to post lately. Sorry. But yesterday an email from Forbes landed in my inbox and I had to share. It starts: Forbes is committed to protecting the privacy of its readers… However, Forbes does make available its list of readers who have expressly provided us with their permission to receive […]
Dumb Money
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 […]
Yes, Brands Work
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 […]
One Small Bug; Centuries of Notoriety
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.
Pinch Media Launches
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 […]
Meet Our Self-Replicating Robot Overlords
This is clearly the coolest thing I have seen this month: RepRap. (via Overcoming Bias.)
Social Business
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 […]