Musings

I overheard a team of startup founders pitching their company to a venture associate at a coffee shop this week. I didn’t listen for long because I felt bad, but one thing that jumped out at me, even over my headphones, was that the associate was doing most of the talking, which got me thinking. The venture pitch is most commonly described as “person who needs money must convince person who has money to give […]

When I decided to join Craig and Collaborative Fund full-time, it was an incredible opportunity that he was presenting me, but a difficult decision. I was leaving behind an opportunity to build a business with two very close friends. We had been prototyping, had engaged some of our favorite investors, and were mapping out our business plan. I ultimately ended up not pursuing the startup in large part because of a conversation with my fiancee. […]

I was recently diagnosed with an ulcer and a Vitamin D deficiency. Neither of these diagnoses is necessarily chronic or life-threatening, so there isn’t any real cause for worry. But when I went to pick up my prescriptions from the hospital, I was a bit overwhelmed when I took them out of the bag. I decided to distract myself with prices. For these medicines, I paid $29.36 at Walgreens. Curious to find out what the real cost […]

The news of AngelList announcing their syndicates program coupled with this JOBS Act Title II press release is going to make headlines for a while. It’s extraordinarily powerful, and many people will write at length about why. In brief, the most exciting piece for me is: it pushes the influence of investors even further down to the individual level. Put another way: it empowers the individual so much more. There was a point in venture […]

I’m reading George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. The book chronicles the time between 1930 and 1960 when Alan Turing, British mathematician, launched a movement amongst a small group of thinkers that resulted in the creation of the computer. It’s fascinating, if fairly technical, and I highly recommend it. Dyson describes the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which housed Kurt Godel, John Von Neumann, Freeman Dyson, and Albert Einstein. During World War II, […]

Last week, I read this tweet:  Three fastest growing (at least in US) consumer mobile apps are all from Los Angeles based companies — Andrew Weissman (@aweissman) September 5, 2013 He was referring to Whisper, Tinder, and Snapchat. It got me thinking. Consumer applications increasingly rely not on crazy venture financing, expert technical human resources, and a deep infrastructure (though they always seek all of those). Global distribution can happen really quickly for free, and while many mobile […]

This post should be obvious. But this realization surprised me, so it might be useful for you, too. ‘Scale potential’ drives a lot of successful fundraising, non-profit and for-profit. To successfully win a grant from a foundation or donor, a non-profit often has to demonstrate not only the ability to spend efficiently, but also that the solution to problem they are solving is systemic or sustainable, and has scale potential. The ideal impact is both […]

Nobel-winning economist R.H. Coase passed away yesterday. When the crash of 1929 hit, Ronald Harry Coase was an undergraduate student at the London School of Economics, working on a Bachelor’s degree in commerce. Thanks to his professor Arnold Plant, he decided that markets were fascinating, but that he did not want to study the mathematics driving them, but the frameworks – the legal structures. He spent his senior year in the United States, touring companies like […]

The unit economics in carsharing are extremely challenging. I had an interesting conversation with Ezra Goldman yesterday, who made the case that the costs are as follows, in order of cost: – Parking– Insurance– Inventory I’ve heard arguments that Zipcar’s challenges in unit economics resulted from cost-prohibitive insurance. I’ve heard others claim that it was from holding inventory. But apparently a fleet of cars involves high startup costs, but maintenance costs (holding inventory) are actually […]