When I read Fred Wilson’s very interesting blog post “The Bubble Question“ the conclusion I immediately drew was so this is what inequality looks like. Why did I think that? As Fred indicated in his post, after the crash of 2008, financial policy makers dropped interest rates and made cash cheap, in hopes of stimulating the economy through investment and small business growth. As he describes, the results of that approach were somewhat mixed. I […]
Before shaving with Bevel, I figured I would take a before/after picture, to really scrutinize how well it worked. You can see them below. My face is, to borrow a joke from Twitter, like a Nestlé crunch bar. Nasty. I probably have the curliest hair you will ever see. I break combs at the barbershop, even when I’ve combed my hair beforehand. I had dreadlocks when I was younger, and could shower every day and […]
Single-tasking: I’ve been terrible at it my whole life. Put another way, I’ve been a fantastic — or, at least, relentless — multi-tasker. When I was young, my mother was my math teacher for a year (and my father my chemistry teacher, in fact). During that year, and in years before, I spent the entire math class literally on my feet. I would hunch over to do problems, took notes in my head, and I […]
For those who study networks, weak ties are well-understood as holding the most value in interpersonal dynamics, and as indicators of success. One’s strong ties are the people they are close to, or know well. Weak-ties are the next ring of the circle — in LinkedIn’s words, ‘second-degree connections’. But in referring to theory about weak ties, we tend to think about it narrowly as “friends-of-friends” and stop there. I recently read this Forbes article about applied […]
Lately, a growing number of people have claimed the current seed round, which I take to be between $600K and $2M, is falling out of favor, and I can’t quite wrap my head around what this means. Last year, all the fervor was about the Series A Crunch, and then Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz made waves by calling “Series A the new Series B”, which has borne out in my experience, with plenty of […]
“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” – St. Augustine of Hippo When I first heard that quotation, it resonated deeply with me, and I wanted to investigate why. I’ve recently been saying to myself “Instead of believing it when I see it, I will see it when I believe it” and I think this is a similar idea. One of my favorite subjects in mathematics […]
As originally appears on Progress Report. It is instructive, when thinking about venture capital, to consider a venture firm as a two-sided marketplace. On the one side, the firm is selling its capital to entrepreneurs. It has to demonstrate that the brand, services, and relationships that come along with an investment will have a greater material impact on the business than another firm at a similar (and in some cases worse) price. And so they […]
Fiduciary does not have roots in the words for money or profit or cash. Fiduciary simply means: “of, and relating to, trust between individuals.” coming from fidere, Latin for trust. People say “well, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our X” to justify the need to make more money. The people who are using fiduciary correctly there are referring to an agreement between parties that financial outcomes will be prioritized above all. But most legal agreements don’t say that. […]
Albert Wenger, investor at Union Square Ventures, wrote a piece about the technological ages of human history, and some characteristics of the modern age. This paragraph jumped out at me: Much of what we believe to be true about society is informed by the more recent historical record. But the forager age might be more informative going forward. Why? Because both the agrarian age and the industrial age were fundamentally marked by scarcity. Only the […]
On peer-to-peer platforms, trust and safety is of paramount importance. After all, they are intended as safe spaces on which certain categories of transaction can be made. But trust and safety isn’t perfect anywhere, and particularly not on marketplaces. Uber recently was in the news for one of their drivers having a criminal record without them being aware of it. Thumbtack has thorough automated background checks, but that is a defensible competitive advantage for them, […]
Musings 