February 2009
13 posts
3 tags
The Budget and Taxes
There is a lot in the FY 2010 US budget and it will take some time to digest. But one thing that is clear right away is that there is a big tax hike coming for folks at higher income levels. I for one have never been upset about paying taxes. That’s probably in part because growing up in Germany my Dad, who was a teacher and — like all teachers in Germany at the time — a...
Government As An Open Process
Upfront: I know much has been blogged (and tweeted) about this recently but I am writing this on the train so no links - sorry! I am on my way to another meeting about the economic future of the city. These meetings have resulted in a series of initiatives announced by Mayor Bloomberg last week. There has been a fair bit of commentary on the substance already, but I would like to address the...
5 tags
Welcoming 10gen's MongoDB Datastore
When we invested in 10gen last year, the team was working on a very ambitious approach to deliver an integrated cloud platform a la Google App Engine. While they made amazing progress on that, it turned out that developer interest was focused around the MongoDB datastore. Instead of having to buy into a complete stack, most folks (at least for now) want to continue using a broad choice of...
5 tags
Non-Linearity
We don’t do very well with predicting the future because we fail to anticipate non-linearity. This is apparent almost anywhere you look. Most people when they hear that the average temperature of the earth might rise by a couple of degrees, seem to have a mental image of a slightly warmer summer and maybe a bit less snow in winter (if you live in a place that has snow in winter). Very...
3 tags
Being Effective as CEO
One of the great privileges of being in venture capital is the ability to observe many CEOs in action — not just at a distance, but close up. One of the lessons I have learned from that is that there are different ways to be effective as a CEO and that very different personalities can make for effective CEOs. I have observed effective CEOs who are technologists and others who are top sales...
4 tags
Rough Start for Obama and Dealing with Setbacks
I was excited about Obama from before the primaries got started. Now his administration is getting off to a fairly rough start and it will be a true test of the man to see how he deals with it. It seems pretty unfair to me that some folks are already loudly proclaiming their disappointment. Given what’s going on in the economy (and the world), it seems unrealistic to me to expect...
6 tags
NY Times Last Man Standing Strategy Is Flawed
Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that described the paper’s strategy as trying to be the Last Man Standing. Nicholas Carr today picked up on that in his post on newspapers today and writes:
Make sure you have enough cash to ride out the storm, trim your spending, defend your quality and your brand, expand into the new kinds of products and services that the web makes possible and...
4 tags
Clickable 2.0
Today our portfolio company Clickable has released version 2.0 of their Pro Product. There are many great features in it, including support for emerging Google ad formats, keyword filtering & bulk edits, and enhancements to the Act Engine.
What I am most excited about though is that Clickable’s conversion tracking is now out of Beta and generally available:
Clickable Conversion...
WatchWith Charlie O’Donnell on Brian Lehrer Live (via Vimeo)
3 tags
Mobile Phone Numbers and Identity
We are spending a lot of time thinking about how identity will play itself out on the Internet. We are constantly running into the limitations of the existing arrangements even when companies from our portfolio are trying to collaborate. While there is definitely movement afoot with Facebook, Google and others extending their authentication to third parties and possibly moving the OpenID...
5 tags
WOBW Banking Bailout
The current approach to the banking bailout is distinctly WOBW — worst of both worlds. Somehow nationalization has been deemed not an option. So we keep running bankrupt banks as private enterprises governed by existing equity holders with all the wrong incentives (worst of private). That in turn necessitates having to regulate operational details such as compensation and lending...
5 tags
Seed Funding Revisited: In Defense of Dabblers
Yesterday’s piece by Claire Cain Miller in the NYT titled Angels Flee From Tech Start-Ups prompted many blog responses, including one by Roger which also got picked up by Bijan.
Here is what it Roger wrote on his blog
Are fewer companies getting funded by angels? Of course. Should all the companies that had previously been funded by angels, many of them dabblers, gotten funded? Definitely...
6 tags
Busting Open the Healthcare Opportunity
Bijan has a post relating his recent overnight hospital stay to some of the big issues with healthcare today. Bijan rightly complains about how hospitals are a black hole for patient data. The stimulus package (PDF) contains a section 9202 titled “Investment in Health Information Technology” which states:
The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall invest in the infrastructure...