May 2012
12 posts
2 tags
Off the Grid (China Edition)
We are about to go on a trip to China and I couldn’t be more excited. I have never been to Asia before and am looking forward to the experience. China in particular has held my fascination since taking Roderick MacFarquhar’s amazing course on the Cultural Revolution in college. And now of course China has been seeing dramatic economic growth with a domestic Internet population that...
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Tech Tuesday: Literals, Constants and Variables
I may have lost a bunch of Tech Tuesday readers with that post on semantics last week, so today I am hoping to gain some back with a much easier topic! We are continuing the cycle on programming by looking at how programs refer to things. Again let’s start by looking at human language. If I say “William Henry Gates III” then I am referring to the co-founder of Microsoft by his...
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Behance
Today’s post is over at USV, where we announced our investment in Behance.
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What's $2B Among Friends?
During the 2008 crisis, I argued that we should take over the big banks and restructure them. Instead, we bailed out the banks with tax payer money and with an unprecedented increase in the Fed’s balance sheet. We did nothing to get rid of banks that are “too big to fail” or to severely restrict their activities (which might lead them to break themselves up).
So yesterday, JP...
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Etsy Becomes a Certified B Corporation
Today’s blog post is over at the USV blog on Etsy becoming a certified B Corp. It all started with this. Congrats to Chad and the team at Etsy on taking transparency and responsibility to the community and making it not just a commitment but also something that is measured.
Wag.com #thistimeitsdifferent
Yesterday, I tweeted that
Pets.com is back! #fullcircle twitter.com/albertwenger/s…
— Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) May 8, 2012
with the following picture
and got quite a few replies and retweets. Some people saw it as a sign of a potential new bubble (or even the imminent collapse of the same) while others said they were happy users of the service.
Those different reactions reflect the...
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Tech Tuesday: Semantics
During the last Tech Tuesday we talked about the syntax of programming languages as part of the cycle on programming. That’s a term you will hear frequently in no small part because when you get it wrong the computer will complain about it with a “syntax error.” Today’s topic is much more elusive and less talked about: semantics or what a program “means.” The...
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Europe at Risk and What it Means for US Startups
Europe had three elections on the weekend: presidential in France, parliamentary in Greece and regional in Germany. The results are strongly anti-incumbent across he board. In France, Sarkozy is out and Hollande is in. In Greece, the PASOK party went from 160 to 41 seats and no longer has a majority together with New Democracy the other incumbent. And in Germany in the regional elections in...
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Feature Friday: Feed of the Future (Shapeways)
I have not been writing nearly enough about many of the cool things that our portfolio companies are doing. To correct that I will start doing Feature Friday posts. The opener is the feed introduced earlier this week by Shapeways.
I love activity feeds. They are a fun way to see what’s happening on a site. But more than that, I have come use them in board meetings as way to think about...
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Excited about edX
For a couple of years now I have been complaining to folks in the Harvard administration that the school is woefully behind when it comes to embracing the Internet. So I was thrilled to see the announcement of the edX initiative with MIT yesterday. The two combined with a $60 million commitment will make a formidable force in higher education on the Internet. For people everywhere who want to...
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Seattle, We Have a (Kindle Screen) Problem
I love reading books on my traditional Kindle. I find the eInk display to be easy on my eyes and make extensive use of highlighting. It’s great not to feel tempted to fire up an app or check email while reading which lets me make good progress even on hefty books. But across our family we now have three Kindles with broken screens.
At first I suspected that the kids were mistreating the...
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Tech Tuesday: Syntax
Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced programming languages by making a series of analogies to human languages. We will continue the programming cycle today by deepening that analogy with regard to syntax. Syntax is the set of rules that describe how you can put together the words of a language to form a sentence. For instance, part of the syntax of English is that we separate words with a space...
April 2012
16 posts
1 tag
Identity: A Huge Business Opportunity
Companies across our portfolio are spending a lot of resources on suppressing various types of undesirable behavior ranging from comment spam to outright financial fraud. Much of this could be avoided through a probabilistic identity system. I have written about this idea before, but nobody has cracked the nut on it and the problem has only grown since. The solution to identity on the Internet...
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CISPA: Asking for a Fight
I don’t know whether to be upset or happy about the machinations that went on yesterday and resulted in the House passing CISPA with a 248-168 vote. There were critical last minute changes to the bill that vastly enhance the government’s ability to use the data for things other than national security. Three more incredibly broad areas of use were added to the bill literally last...
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Hacking Society Follow-up
On Tuesday we held a wonderful one day event at the USV offices with the title: Hacking Society. The basic premise was relatively simple. Networks are a emerging on the Internet that are disrupting existing hierarchical institutions. Starting from that premise there were lots of angles to explore, such as what the defining characteristics of these networks are and whether they in turn are new...
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Tech Tuesday: Programming Languages
This is the first post in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming.
Let’s begin with a simple observation: even though various human languages are quite different from each other they cover much of the same territory — the human experience. We have words for food and activities and threats and so on. There are different words in different languages and sometimes even the symbol set is...
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The Bubble and (Misunderstood) Network Effects
Dave Winer last Thursday had a post called “It’s definitely a bubble.” OK, so it was more of a rant than a post but I share the sentiment of his title. The biggest issue that I see in the venture market right now is the assumption by both entrepreneurs and investors that winner-take-all economics apply in pretty much every market and for pretty much every company. With several...
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The Learning Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I was on a panel for the wonderful iMentor organization earlier this week talking about the future of education. Every time I do that these days I emphasize that instead of talking about education we should focus on learning. Because the Internet is revolutionizing where, when and from whom we can learn. Secondary education in particular is where we are beginning to see the first signs of the...
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Twitter's Patent Hack
Years ago I worked with the team at Tacoda on the technology for audience based targeting. Some of my work there wound up in a patent that was sold along with Tacoda to AOL. I don’t know if this patent is part of the patents recently sold by AOL to Microsoft but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. I also worked closely with Joshua on a number of patents filed for by del.icio.us and...
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Tech Tuesday: Programming (Overview)
The purpose of Tech Tuesdays is to provide non-technical employees or founders of startups with background on how technology works so that they can better communicate with engineers and also better understand technological constraints and opportunities. With that in mind I will take a fairly different approach to programming from say Codecademy or Udacity which tackle hands on code writing. I...
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Must Read: Guardian Series on "Battle for the...
I have long been a fan of the UK’s Guardian. They have embraced the internet like no other newspaper publisher. One of my favorite examples of the many great things they have done was the crowdsourced investigation of the expenses of Members of Parliament. Now they are kicking off a seven day series titled “Battle for the internet” that will cover many of the same topics that...
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Publishers Have Only Themselves and DRM to Blame
The Department of Justice earlier this week sued several large publishers and Apple over alleged collusion surrounding the agency arrangement for the sale of ebooks. The legal situation here is quite complicated as should be evident from the fact that Random House which does have agency agreements with both Apple and Amazon was *not* sued. This suggests that agency agreements in and of...
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CISPA
I wrote a blog post last week about the current Privacy Theater in the US, where the government is simultaneously pushing stricter privacy regulations and huge backdoors that would completely undermine privacy. The backdoors come in the form of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA. The folks at Lumin Consulting have put together a good infographic that illustrates how CISPA...
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Some Thoughts on the Instagram Valuation
Andy Baio provided an excellent perspective on Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram by analyzing the price per active user. This analysis shows that at about $30 per user this deal is far below many previous acquisitions. It also indicates that Yahoo’s acquisition of Broadcast.com continues to stand as the most outlandish deal at more than $10,000 per active user. At USV we have...
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Tech Tuesday: Second Survey Says! (With Instagram...
Last week on Tech Tuesday, I ran the second reader survey to figure out what to write about next. I have to admit that I was a bit anxious about the results as I realized that I personally favored one of the topics — an overview of programming. So I was thrilled to see the following chart:
Among nearly 150 responses, an overview of programming received almost half the votes. Somewhat...
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Saving the Oceans from Acidification
The reason Continuations has not had any new entries for a few days is that we went away on a family trip to the Virgin Islands. We have done a lot of snorkeling with the kids but in preparation for this trip we started to get Scuba certified. The theory portion of the certification included an extensive chapter on underwater plants and animals, which provided a great reminder of the mind...
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Tech Tuesday: What Next?
So far on Tech Tuesday we have covered basic computing technology (9 installments) and the web cycle (11 installments). That means its time to check in again and see what to cover next. There are at least three big topic areas that I want to get to eventually:
Programming Overview: Includes what programming languages do and how they work, what an algorithm is, different ways of structuring...
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Privacy Theater
I wrote recently about how we are at a time during which lots of little decisions will determine whether we find ourselves in an information utopia or dystopia. There is a lot of legislation in the works both here in the US and abroad that speaks directly to this. In particular, there is a schizophrenic approach to privacy. We are simultaneously getting efforts to provide more privacy in...
March 2012
20 posts
4 tags
Students are Woefully Prepared for Internet Age...
Over the last four weeks I have met with numerous college students and recent graduates who are interested in working for tech startups. I have been surprised to discover how woefully their schools have prepared them for how to find a job in the age of the Internet. The vast majority of thses students do not have their own name registered as a domain, have their Facebook profile as the first...
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Tech Tuesday: Web Browser (Part 2)
Today is the wrap up of the initial web cycle. Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced Javascript as determining the behavior of a web page and interacting with HTML (the content of the page) and CSS (the look and feel). Now it makes sense to revisit the Web Browser, which needs to put all those pieces together to actually display the web page and let the user interact with it. By now it should come as...
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Movie Review: The Hunger Games
This weekend I went to see “The Hunger Games” with our oldest son (12). His twin sister separately saw the movie as part of a friend’s birthday party. For anyone who has been behind a gigantic rock, er, I mean doesn’t have children who are fans of Suzanne Collins’s novel on which the movie is based, here is a brief plot summary. The Hunger Games is set in a...
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Offense is the Best Defense for Startups
Once in a while I find myself in a product or strategy or biz dev discussion at a startup which goes something like: “we are doing xyz to defend against <name of other startup or big company>”. My reaction is to ask whether xyz is also part of what the startup was trying to build in the first place. If the answer is no, then I will argue strongly that they shouldn’t do it...
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Choosing Our Information-Based Future: Utopia or...
We are at a perilous fork in history where many of the choices that we are making now and in the coming years will determine whether we are headed towards an information-based utopia or dystopia. It is not any single choice that matters but rather their cumulative effect and how these choices interact with each other.
Here is how I see the two possible extreme future states of the...
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Tech Tuesday: Javascript
The topic of last week’s Tech Tuesday was CSS, which determines the look and feel of the content of a web page (where the content itself is described in HTML). Today we will learn about Javascript, which is a programming language that lets us control the behavior of the web page (both by itself and in reaction to what the user does). Together HTML, CSS and Javascript determine what a web browser...
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Pornography, Human Trafficking and the Internet
It is easy to dismiss Rick Santorum’s promised war on pornography as more moralizing from a candidate who apparently questions the separation of church and state. But it exposes an important fault line in thinking about the Internet when seen in conjunction with Nick Kristof’s call in this Sunday’s New York Times for Backpage to stop carrying adult classifieds. At issue here is...
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45+10=1 hour (Getting Things Done)
This week I have been trying out a new approach to meetings. Instead of using up the entire time in the calendar for the meeting itself, I am trying to keep the meeting a bit shorter (45 minutes in the case of a previously 1 hour meeting). I then use the 10 minutes afterwards for the immediate follow-up actions that came out of the meeting while the person I met with is still there. Often that...
Song written and performed by our kids for...
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Yahoo Facebook Patent Battle: Mobilizing Engineers
If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream...
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Tech Tuesday: CSS
In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to the enduser.
For our...
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Edmodo Platform: Connecting Developers to the...
I love it when a plan comes together. The plan in question is the Edmodo Platform. When we invested in Edmodo in the fall of 2010, the company was just beginning to really grow its network of students and teachers. One frequently asked question was how Edmodo would be able to keep offering its features for free. I remember going to the ISTE conference in 2011 and having several teachers come up...
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The Vibe: Shapeways + Soundcloud = Awesome
I usually take weekends off from blogging, but this one is just too good to pass up: Shapeways and Soundcloud have teamed up to bring out “the Vibe” an iPhone case which comes with a completely custom waveform as its back.
I love this because it shows off the power of the platforms that Shapeways and Soundcloud have created. It also represents a completely unexpected use case for a...
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A Rational Internet Venture Valuations Bubble
There is no doubt in my mind that venture valuations have become incredibly stretched. I have been thinking about why that is and what will come of it.
First off, here are the factors contributing to the stretching of valuations. It starts with the genuine potential for building hugely valuable businesses, which is based on four key factors:
1. The immense possibility for scale on the Internet...
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Heyzap Releases Self-Documenting API
Heyzap’s API announcement is technically yesterday’s news, but there is so much to like here that I figured I would write about it today.
First, they announced this on their newly launched developer blog. Etsy has had a developer blog for some time and I think those are a terrific idea. Engineering tends to be a big part of startups and yet often doesn’t have an external voice....
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Dispatch from London
Very short post as I am about to get on a plane to fly back from London to New York (and Virgin Atlantic does not yet have wifi on its flights). Reading the papers in London and talking to people it is clear that the European debt crisis is very much on everyone’s mind while we at home seem to be enthralled with either the latest startup valuations, or Rush Limbaugh and maybe the Republican...
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Tech Tuesday: HTML
Over the next three Tech Tuesdays we will cover the three essential technologies that together make up the bulk of most web sites: HTML, CSS and Javascript. This is Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser uses these three (which were all retrieved from one or more web servers) to construct a web page. The easiest way to think of how these three make up a page is as follows: HTML is the...
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Oxford Style Debate About Facebook
Earlier today I participated in an Oxford-style debate in London of the motion “Facebook Is Not Your Friend.” I argued for the motion together with Baroness Susan Greenfield. Taking the opposing view were Ben Hammersley and Lewis Iwu. This was a lot of fun as the Baroness and I have very different takes on this subject. She came at it from a neuroscience and cultural perspective...
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Bringing Time Back to the Web (Or: The Struggle...
Evan Williams apparently recently said that there is an issue with all of us being stuck in a kind of “continuous present” on the web (ironically, I can’t find that quote right now). I am certainly stuck in that all powerful present many days. There is so much new output hitting the web every day that one can barely scratch the surface of it, let alone delve into the past....
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Who Is Next After Newspapers?
Yesterday I tweeted out this fascinating chart about what has happened to newspaper advertising revenues:
The chart comes from this blog post by a professor named Mark Perry. In the comments to the post there is a brief discussion that points to the shift away in classifieds to Craigslist and other outlets as a primary reason.
I went to be shortly after tweeting that and couldn’t help...
February 2012
16 posts
3 tags
We Need Peer Produced Mobile App Security
First there was the Path address book tempest. Now there is a concern about apps being able to access photos without permission. It would be a shame if this resulted in more centralized control over apps and longer review processes. What we need instead is some kind of peer produced approach to app security. What I have in mind is something along the lines of what Chris Dixon did with...
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Tech Tuesday: Web Browser (Part 1)
We have now reached step 6 of the web cycle and are back at the web browser. The web browser is receiving an initial HTTP response from the web server. The first part of this response tells the web browser is whether or not the web server is delivering some useful information. That happens via the response status, which will be 200 OK if the HTTP request is being properly fulfilled. The second...