May 2013
15 posts
2 tags
Immigration Reform
I am an immigrant (from Germany). I work in tech (as an investor and previously as an entrepreneur). I support comprehensive immigration reform. That part is pretty simple — it would be hypocritical to argue that something that I have benefitted from tremendously should be less accessible to others. But I have largely chosen to stay out of this particular fight because the arguments on both...
3 tags
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (Book Review)
Ok, so this isn’t so much a review as an exhortation to read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb which I consider one of the most important non-fiction books I have read. Let me start with some disclaimers:
1. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction books, not because I don’t start them but because I don’t finish them. Most aren’t good or important enough and you are often better...
4 tags
Tech Tuesday: Security in Startups
Last week in Tech Tuesday I asked for topics to write about in my series on technology in startups. There seemed to be a fair bit of interest in security, so here we go. First off a disclaimer. As with any general purpose advice, you need to think a lot about what it is you are trying to do. The security requirements for a bitcoin startup are vastly different from those for a social media one.
...
2 tags
Tumblr and Yahoo
It is now official that Tumblr will become part of Yahoo. Marissa announced the news in style with an animated gif. I have been lucky to be part of Tumblr’s journey as an angel investor and as an active blogger on the service since February 2008.
I am excited about the combination with Yahoo. When Marissa took over Yahoo, I expected that acquisitions would play a role in her transformation...
3 tags
University of the People: Support a Student
I first met Shai Reshef, the indefatigable force behind University of the People, at DLD in 2009. Since then I have come to know Shai as someone who cares deeply about using education to empower people all around the world. He is taking quite a different approach from the MOOCs by scaling UoPeople much more slowly and deliberately and working diligently towards accreditation.
The approach has two...
1 tag
Google IO: Google Is the New Microsoft
Two years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Is Google the New Microsoft?” hedging it with a question mark. I think after the announcements at Google IO there can be very little doubt that Google is the new Microsoft.
Here is a short check list. Dominant position in one market that generates huge profits: check. Desire to compete in every large market from payments to games to music:...
2 tags
Defamatory Autocomplete (Information Cascades)
A court in Germany just ruled that Google must remove autocomplete suggestions is they are defamatory. Now at first blush this seems quite silly and Google has taken the position that they are simply reflecting what people are searching for. I don’t think it is quite that simple though.
This is clearly an example of where information cascades are possible and problematic. I have written...
3 tags
Tech Tuesday: Topics to Cover?
The current Tech Tuesday series is about technology in startups. I started the series out with posts on initially choosing and evolving your technology. Since then I have been writing about best practices for growing and structuring your engineering team, with separate posts on hiring and retaining engineers and one on remote team members.
Now that I am eight posts into this series, I am curious...
4 tags
More Misguided Laws Proposed: Science Funding and...
Our elected representatives are busy at work coming up with misguided laws. Leading the charge once again is Lamar Smith, this time proposing to replace peer review of NSF grants with congressional criteria (Congress of course is not exactly known for its scientists). Now that is not to say that we shouldn’t look into how NSF funding works and propose changes to it. For instance, with...
3 tags
Simplify Your Pitch (Keep the Details for Later)
When I was an entrepreneur raising money I tended to make a classic mistake: trying to convey all the amazing things we were doing in great detail. This is a terrible strategy. Why? Because too much detail buries the story of your business and also makes your business seem, well, complex. And investors are afraid of complexity.
Imagine for a moment a pitch that describes in great technical detail...
3 tags
Toward a Better Patent System
Another topic that I have written a lot about here on Continuations are patents and in particular software patents. While there is a lot of reform that I would love to see I have also come to appreciate that sometimes the only way to get there is in small steps. One relatively meaningful step was just introduced by Senator Schumer. The basic idea is to allow for a much fast tracked review of many...
2 tags
Privacy: Sorry, You Can't Have it Both Ways
There is so much happening with privacy right now that it is enough to make my head spin. What is clear though is that individuals, companies and government all want it both ways.
Some parts of government want private enterprise to do a better job of protecting individuals’ information from other individuals and companies. At the same time other parts of government are looking for wholesale...
4 tags
Tech Tuesday: Remote Engineers
I have been writing the last couple of Tech Tuesdays about hiring and retaining engineers. One of the questions that comes up a lot in that context is what to do about people who are in other locations. Is it a good idea to have remote engineers? There are people who seem to have near religious believes about this ranging from it can never work to it being the only thing to get anything done.
In...
2 tags
Summer Internships at Ziggeo
It’s not too late to find a summer internship! In fact, my wife Susan and her co-founder Oliver over at Ziggeo are looking for marketing and sales interns for the summer. So if you know of any students who are looking, please send them their way. Thanks!
5 tags
Is the Stock Market High?
The stock market indices are above their pre financial crisis highs. One interpretation of this is that the financial crisis was just that: a crisis of the financial sector that left the rest of the economy largely untouched. Another interpretation is that we are simply looking at the results of way too much cheap money provided by the Fed. The latter is supported by a chart that I saw yesterday...
April 2013
22 posts
5 tags
Dwolla Gets a Check (To Do Away with Checks)
Today Dwolla announced a new financing led by A16Z with Scott Weiss joining the board. The funding will go towards establishing a new office in San Francisco, an expanded presence in New York and much needed additions to the team in Des Moines starting with a lot of engineering hires. I am of course excited about this as an investor but even more so as a user of Dwolla. It already works well for...
4 tags
Tech Tuesday: Retaining Engineers
Last Tech Tuesday I wrote that the companies which do well on hiring engineers are the ones that “prioritize both hiring *and* having a great work environment.” The post went on to talk about some of the best practices in hiring. Today’s follow-up is about creating a great work environment for engineers.
There is obviously a lot that goes into creating a great work environment...
3 tags
Synchronization As A Service
When it comes to files we are beginning to take synchronization as a given. You work on a file at work and through the magic of Dropbox or similar services the copy of that file on your personal laptop winds up reflecting the changes. Increasingly we are expecting the same for applications. For example, when you have read a Direct Message on a Twitter App and then notice that it is still shown as...
2 tags
Your Product Is All There Is
I love meeting with entrepreneurs because most of them are full of optimism and often driven by a big vision. It is then easy to get into a conversation about that vision and how awesome it will be. But therein lurks a great danger and one that both entrepreneurs and investors (myself included) can easily fall prey to. Outside the room nobody really knows or even cares about your grand vision....
4 tags
Movie Mini Reviews: Oblivion and Robot & Frank
I love science fiction movies and recently saw two that couldn’t be more different. Here are two mini reviews:
Oblivion: Oblivion was an enjoyable ride while it lasted but didn’t really stay with me. The production values are off the charts with some particularly stunning visuals of a house situated above the clouds. But the storyline is kind of quite predictable (at least for adults,...
3 tags
Benefit Corporation: Facilitating a New Market
As longtime readers of Continuations know, I have been a strong proponent of the Benefit Corporation. I am therefore thrilled that Delaware, which is the home to almost all venture backed corporations, has introduced Benefit Corporation legislation. This will allow companies to charter or recharter in Delaware and add one or more public benefits as goals that are on equal footing with maximizing...
4 tags
Tech Tuesday: Hiring Engineers
The last two posts on Tech Tuesday were both about growing your engineering organization. Someone wrote to me saying: it’s all well to talk about best practices for organizational design, but we can’t find enough qualified engineers in the first place! So today a post about hiring.
I have been able to observe many companies over the years and even in the toughest markets some have a...
3 tags
California's Right To Know Act
One of the major issues we are struggling with in this flood of data is the question of what data belongs to whom and in particular how much access and control endusers should have over their data (or for that matter what “their” data even means). In California a “Right to Know” bill has been introduced that would require companies to let endusers access what data has been...
2 tags
The Double Edged Sword of Technology and the Need...
If ever we needed a reminder that technology can both make our lives better and more terrifying this week provided plenty of them. Pressure cookers for cooking and bomb making. Fertilizer for agriculture and explosions (sadly also used in the Oklahoma City bombing). Social media for collaborative (re)search and public witch hunts. This is why we need values. Without being guided by strong values...
3 tags
Google Glass: Dangerous Adoption Strategy
I am quite optimistic about the long term potential of augmented reality. But I question whether now is the right time for a top down adoption strategy with a polished consumer product. It seems to me that we are at the hacker and early adopter stage instead.
By going with an immediate mass market strategy and embracing celebrities I think Google is taking a very big gamble. Let’s keep in...
3 tags
CISPA Yet Again
I have written about CISPA a lot but today is the first important vote on this legislation. If you haven’t done so already, please contact your representatives to let them know you are against this bill. As a reminder it provides for overly broad data sharing between private enterprises and government without any safeguards around how government can use this data.
Now it is easier to be...
3 tags
Boston Bombing
No Tech Tuesday today, I will resume next week. I have many friends in Boston and knew several people who were in the Marathon. Whatever the police may call the investigation, as far as I am concerned this bombing was an act of terrorism. It was designed to kill randomly and instill fear and anger in the population. Our first thoughts and attention should be on victims and their families as well...
3 tags
Guantanamo Bay Is Despicable and Must Go
I was planning to write more on cyber security but then yesterday I read this harrowing letter from a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo). I don’t take his claims about his lack of involvement at face value. It is irrelevant. He has been held for a shocking 11 years and 3 months without a trial. That goes against everything we as a country should stand for.
I wrote in 2010 that “I wish...
1 tag
Foursquare
Lots of good news about Foursquare. You can read about it from Dennis, Bijan, Fred and myself. I love using the new version of the app — go check it out. All feedback on it is welcome!
5 tags
Stop Congress From Making a Bad Computer Law Worse
I have written previously about cyber security and cyber defense topics that have become more acute in the wake of several large scale attacks on banks and other companies. Unfortunately, law makers in DC are reacting the only way they seem to know how: by further broadening laws that are already overreaching and yet ineffective at the same time. In particular the House Judiciary committee is...
4 tags
Tech Tuesday: More Best Practices for Growth...
Last Tech Tuesday, I wrote about growing your engineering organization and the week before that about evolving your technology. Today here are three more best practices for successful engineering growth:
APIs - I will have a lot more to say about how APIs relate to strategy in a separate post, but they are also a key internal tool as you grow even if not exposed to third parties. Having clearly...
1 tag
Ziggeo Now Out of Beta
Susan and Oliver’s startup Ziggeo is now out of beta. Today they launched three simple pricing plans which include a free tier. To let everyone try out Ziggeo, I have set up a “screening room” where you can ask me a question or suggest a blog post for Continuations.
3 tags
Facebook Home
Yesterday Facebook announced “Home,” a homescreen takeover application for Android that makes Facebook your phones primary interaction surface. Here are my initial reactions.
First, this is a smart move by Facebook as an attempt to counter the threat of unbundling that is posed by apps. Competing apps unbundle different pieces of functionality (Twitter for status, Instagram for photos,...
1 tag
Bitcoin: The Wild West Years
Anybody following bitcoin will know that the cryptographic currency had a huge run up recently that has brought with it an increase in fraudulent activities, including a DDoS attack on Mt. Gox and an epic theft of $3.5 million worth of bitcoin described in Felix Salmon’s long piece. I have been skeptical about bitcoin because of the built in deflation and because I have a growing concern...
3 tags
New York City Crosswalks: Safety and Bayes
This morning’s NY Times has a couple of interesting stories. The first is that apparently the rate for bribery in NY State and City legislatures is as low as $20K. But the one that really caught my attention was the headline titled “Crosswalks in New York are not Havens.” Having three children who walk to school in Manhattan, this is a topic very near to my heart.
The article...
3 tags
Tech Tuesday: Growing Your Engineering...
Last Tech Tuesday I wrote about evolving your technology as you grow. As, if not more important, is how you grow your engineering organization. They after all are the ones who need to make the right choices about the technology! Here I have observed three common mistakes: staying flat too long, not investing early on in devops and missing the co-founder to manager transition (if such a transition...
2 tags
The Unbundling of Publishing
Tonight I am giving a brief talk at a Publishing Point event organized by Susan and Jenny. Here are some notes that I pulled together in preparation, written up as a blog post.
At USV one of our big investment thesis is that the internet is resulting in massive unbundling of existing business models and value chains. Newspapers are a great example of this process with different sections,...
March 2013
16 posts
4 tags
We Need Bees, Not Monsanto
A while back I had stopped worrying about bee Colony Collapse Disorder because it had been out of the news for a while. From this morning’s New York Times it seems like I was wrong. Apparently if anything the rate of bee colonies collapsing has accelerated. This could turn into a very serious threat to the food supply for anything that needs pollination by bees which includes many fruits and...
2 tags
More Power to the States?
I have started reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (review coming when I am done with it). As an early example of a system that gets better under stress he mentions city states (presumably as they existed in ancient Greece).
At USV we have been thinking about jurisdictional competition as a way to run more experiments during a time of change. We have focused on small countries such as Iceland and...
5 tags
Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer (Book...
While Moonwalking with Einstein isn’t a new book — it was published in 2011 — I only just got around to reading it. The book’s subtitle is “The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” and it uses modern day memory competitions as the hook for examining the history, cultural significance and to some degree science of memory. I highly recommend reading it if...
3 tags
Tech Tuesday: Evolving Your Technology As You Grow
The last two Tech Tuesdays were about choosing technology as a startup. Today we are talking about what to do once you are up and running. Let me start by categorically stating what you should never, ever do: rewrite everything from scratch. There is a terrific piece on why this is a bad idea written in 2000 by Joel Spolsky that you should go off and read right now (Joel is a very entertaining...
2 tags
There is No Free Will (And That's OK)
A couple of weeks ago I heard Brian Greene state there is no scientific basis for free will. It was a powerful statement because he made it quite categorically and tersely. And it really jolted me into thinking about this longstanding philosophical problem that I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about since College. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as I have been...
3 tags
GEL Conference is Back (to Life)
One of my favorite New York City conferences is back after taking a 1-year hiatus. GEL’13 will be on from April 17-19 with Thursday, April 18th being the main day for presentations. Fittingly, this year’s theme is “Back to Life” and GEL is taking place in a much smaller venue than before (so get your tickets soon as they will sell out, also: early bird ends this coming...
2 tags
Happy Pi Day!
It is easy for me to remember Pi Day because it also happens to be Susan’s birthday (Happy Birthday!). The digits of pi have some amazing properties and are fun to explore with kids as a great way of learning about math. For instance, here you can search for any pattern in the first 200 million digits of pi (including say the kids’ birth dates). This year I worked with our son Michael...
3 tags
Google Continuing to Invest in Deep Learning
Google just acquired DNNresearch, a spinoff company from the University of Toronto led by Geoffrey Hinton. The DNN in the company name stands for deep neural networks. As I have been learning from Professor Hinton’s online course, these are networks with multiple “hidden” layers of neurons. A hidden layer sits between an input and output layer. Hidden layers are responsible for...
3 tags
Tech Tuesday: Choosing Your Technologies...
Last Tech Tuesday I offered some very rough guidelines for making technology choices in a startup. I was going to write today about how to evolve that over time, but one of the comments suggested that it would be great to pick something that won’t immediately require a massive rewrite if you hit user growth. So a bit more today on this initial choice. I agree with the suggestion but with an...
1 tag
Your Security Perimeter Is Larger Than You Think
Securing your site or service has become ever more important as the number of attacks is rapidly on the rise. As I have written before on Continuations I am not a fan of overreaching security legislation as a response. If we don’t want to keep these efforts at bay it will help if we do a better job with security. Increasingly that means you are only as secure as some of your key vendors.
In...
5 tags
WeHeartWifi: Getting the Most out of Spectrum
From a purely engineering perspective we can calculate the optimal amount of interference for a particular band of spectrum. We want just enough to achieve coverage. Any more is simply a waste of power. It is that knowledge of a hypothetically perfect solution that leads us down the path of saying that spectrum should be auctioned off with the network built out by the winning bidder. That, and the...
4 tags
Standing Against Excessive Executive Power
Because I consider myself a peer progressive who believes in some role for government and the existence of market failures, I usually don’t agree with Senator Rand Paul. But I strongly support the basis of his filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination: highlighting the excessive powers available to and sought by the President with regard to killing American citizens without due process....
3 tags
The Sequester: Fixing the Federal Budget
I have been wanting to write about the sequester for a couple of days and have been stymied by not knowing where to start because I deeply disagree with both sides. It’s a bit like observing two of our kids fight with each other when both are clearly in the wrong — who do you turn to first? So here is my attempt at blurting it all out in condensed version.
We need to change pretty...
