Author: Kanyi

Flip or Last? VC or Bootstrap?

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Essays

Was chatting with a friend about the dynamics of those questions, and wrote it out for myself, so figured I’d share those thoughts here. 1. There is nothing wrong with building a company to flip, per se. A $50 million dollar acquisition is life-changing for an entrepreneur – its often an incredible marginal return on the amount of work you put in, and part of the promise of a start-up dream is, to many, making […]

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Essays

tedr: Mark my words, the bathroom mirror will be the daily Quantified Self interface. (But I’m sure I’ll stand there cold in a towel doing tumblr reblogs too 😉 Screen shot from a Corning video that shows many realistic and unrealistic interfaces of the near-ish future.

Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries

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Essays

You either build something that makes the world a better place or you don’t. There are complete industries built on creating arbitrary value for the world (investment banking). And there are complete industries built around innovation and creating value for the world (technology). If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you have an opportunity to disrupt entire industries. The world doesn’t need another […]

Builders and Sellers

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Essays

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the various job functions that go into technology startups. I have many friends who are product managers, “biz dev guys”, “programmers or software engineers”, developers or designers, marketers, community managers, “VPs of operations and COOs”, etc. Lately, I’ve seen a fair number of “chief creative officers” and “chief experience officers.” This is all, mind you, in companies with fewer than 10 people. It is dizzying, and honestly, I […]

The Quantified Self

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Essays

I had an interesting meeting with a company on Friday who is building some consumer health technology looking to strengthen a person’s core with some cool hardware (can’t speak more about it just yet). During this meeting, we were talking about the recent trend of what is often referred to as the “quantified self”. This trend, as marked by the recent ubiquity (among the tech community) of Jawbone’s UP, Nike’s Fuelband, Fitbit, Basis, Runkeeper, Endomondo, […]