December 2010
9 posts
2 tags
2011 Personal Projects
Having spent a week off the grid and then a few more days slowly settling back in (not so much by choice as due to the blizzard in New York that left us “stranded” in Miami), I feel very much refreshed and ready to tackle 2011. Here are some of the things I want to accomplish in the coming year (in no particular order):
More or less stop using business cards and replace them with one...
3 tags
Going Off the Grid
I am about to do something I haven’t done since becoming “hyper connected” - I am about to go off the grid. I will be traveling to a region sufficiently remote not to have cell phone coverage and there will be no wifi either. I am both excited and a bit nervous about this prospect. The excitement part comes from anticipating that I might relax more, have more time to think...
3 tags
Germany's Successful Labor Subsidy
It’s too soon to know how long Germany’s current apparent economic strength will last or if it is even entirely for real. Nonetheless, there is one interesting aspect of German employment policy that is worth considering because it appears to be working. Germany has the concept of “Kurzarbeit,” which literally translated means “Shortwork.” It is a program...
3 tags
Broadband Access and Innovation
My partner Brad has a post up this morning on the USV blog detailing our view why Internet Access Should be Application Agnostic. This is an important topic as it is central to continued innovation by startups on the Internet (see for instance my post titled Net Neutrality is Critical for Innnovation). Because some people will immediately go off saying things like “don’t regulate the...
1 tag
Email Overload (Apology)
I have sadly reached a point, where two things are happening with email despite my best efforts.
First, I often write very short answers to emails. These answers could easily be perceived as rude even though that is not the intention. I remember that in the past it used to bug me a bit getting these really short replies back from people and now here I am doing it myself. The reason this...
4 tags
Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times
There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns. The two in combination can dramatically reduce the throughput of an intersection. Unfortunately, one of those intersections is between our house and the train station. Most of the time I walk to and from the station, so this does not affect me. The few times that I am...
1 tag
Thinking About Wikileaks
There is so much going on with Wikileaks that it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some of the questions that I am thinking about: Will the cable leaks make diplomacy harder or easier? Is the answer different for the long-term versus the short-term? A foundational question for this is: what is the role of secrecy in negotiations? And more generally in relationship, business,...
4 tags
What I Learned from my Google-Groupon Post
Yesterday’s post about the Google-Groupon deal generated a lot of views and comments and two important lessons.
First, on a “meta” level there was a lesson about blogging. While I had known this to some degree before, for stimulating dialog it is far better to write about a current topic and take a one-sided approach. The important lesson though that I am still learning is...
Google Buying Groupon is a Flawed Idea
On one hand I can understand Google’s aggressive interest in Groupon. Groupon appears to be one of the few companies that has cracked the code on making money from local businesses. Groupon’s revenues are rumored to be around $50 million per month, which is impressive. But there are at least two fundamental compatibility problems. First, Groupon is a feet on the street business...
