A great brand is like a great piece of writing. It’s a way of communicating an idea – an aspiration or secret, an insight or a fear – to an audience. It needs to be so obvious by the time it reaches the audience that all they can do is share it and copy it. Last weekend I flew to London with British Airways’s Ungrounded program. We were charged with a design challenge on the […]
Setting the stage Since well before the economic crisis of 2008, American consumers have been making purchase decisions under an evolving value system. The Google “Walk score” became popular among young people looking for apartments, indicating that urban density and efficiency were rising as criteria for where we lived. In 2007, Toyota Prius sales surpassed Ford Explorer sales, demonstrating increased eco-conscious consumers. “Carbon neutral” was the Oxford University Press columnist’s word of the year in […]
I was meant to fly to London next week to participate in the British Airways Ungrounded program, presenting a proposal about access to STEM education for underserved and emergent populations to members of the G8, who are convening in Dublin for their Summit. The British consulate said I couldn’t go. Below is why, verbatim. Note that I provided emails, websites, articles, and all and sundry manners of electronic evidence alongside my application. If this system […]
I had the opportunity to spend last week in Las Vegas, visiting the Downtown Project. Wow. Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, had headquartered the company in Henderson, NV, because of convenience with logistics, and an ability to set up the world class customer service center they have built. Inspired, I have to assume, out of an effort to create a community in Las Vegas that supports Zappos, Tony decided that his next project […]
I’ve always been a fan of Minority Report. The technology felt accessible but futuristic. It planted itself into my imagination, and that of many of my peers. When Spielberg wanted to create a cinematic but realistic 2054, he assembled a group of technology experts and futurists to help him design the interfaces on Minority Report. What came out of it were iconic images, indelible in my subconscious: self-driving cars, touchscreens, gesture-controlled devices, personalized, cookie (or […]
Today I had the opportunity to go to the Apple Store in Palo Alto while waiting for a meeting. Given that I bought my last few Apple devices either online or from friends, I haven’t actually been in an Apple store in a while. It was kind of an eye-opening experience. They have a half-dozen sections of non-Apple products, including cases from Incase, Speck and others, some branded by Marc Jacobs and Kate Spade; handbags by Marc […]
Many people think of seed funding just as “before Series A” — somewhere in between “back-of-the-napkin” and “company-with-employees-and-monthly-revenue”. And, technically, they are right. Under $2M, a company tends to raise debt, a Series Seed, or perhaps a Series AA. But in the context of seed, there is wide variation in both the size of the round, and the type of seed investors which an entrepreneur can choose. The nuance between these is important, so I’ll describe my […]
Biometric keystroke analysis interprets the rhythm and styling of a user’s typing to identify who the user is. Coursera, the Palo Alto-based online education company, has begun offering this technology, coupled with photo verification, as an authentication tool for its users. This will enable the company to offer course certifications for sale through partner institutions. Earlier this month, a few journalists covered this release. They pointed to this as early signs of Coursera’s business model, which has to this […]
Speaking to an office full of YCombinator founders this week, I was struck by how they described what they imagine to be the future of YCombinator. As they noted about the most recent graduating class, many of the top performers in the class had months of recurring revenue, with double digit month over month growth and significant traction. YCombinator is getting more and more mature, and companies are graduating from the three month program with […]
I want to re-define it. Chris Dixon points to this post, which defines “scaling” as: dealing efficiently with events that occur with a predictable frequency. This refers to the type of scale that is described in freshman economics classes. It unpacks the law of large numbers, and has important implications for the way computer scientists design systems. By that definition, a scalable business is one that can be organized in such a way that when […]
Musings 