June 2010
19 posts
1 tag
Foursquare Financing
Yesterday saw the “wire transfer heard ‘round the world,” as Bryce put it in a tweet. Foursquare did indeed close a Series B financing as has by now been widely reported. My job of writing a blog post about this has been made very easy: Dennis wrote a terrific announcement on the foursquare blog, Ben Horowitz from “A16Z” does a great job in his post of describing...
4 tags
Supreme Court in High Gear
The Supreme Court handed down a bunch of rulings yesterday. The two that I find most interesting relate to patents and guns. Both rulings are disappointing, as I am against software patents and for stricter gun control. But they are also not as terrible as I feared they might be. As far as I can tell, on both counts the Supreme Court handed down fairly narrow rulings. The initial analysis...
3 tags
Some Thoughts on the Super Angel Funding...
Paul Kedrosky has kicked off an interesting debate by suggesting we will see a “super-angel crash.” Paul’s initial post resulted in a bunch of strong disagreement in tweets and comments, enough to cause an update to the initial post. While the update says many nice things about “super angels” and a bunch of negative ones about “incumbent vcs,” it ends on...
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Concentric Circles of Angel Investors
First time entrepreneurs who are just getting going frequently ask me about how to find angel investors. I usually tell them about my theory of “concentric circles” of angel investors.
The innermost circle are people who know you and love you and will give you money no matter what (even if you were opening an ice cream store on the South Pole). These are the friends and family...
5 tags
Big Victory for Google and UGC in General
Yesterday, a judge granted YouTube’s Motion for Summary Judgment in the Viacom v. YouTube litigation. This is a major victory for all user generated content (UGC) companies because it strongly affirms the DMCA safe harbor. Congrats to David Drummond and the legal team at Google. Given that Google has been defending Internet freedom on a number of fronts it must feel good for them to score...
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UI/UX: Form Laziness Nuisances
I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable. Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook. The emails were comma separated. Outlook didn’t like that — and popped...
2 tags
Payment Innovation and Net Neutrality
One of the key arguments for net neutrality is that it fosters independent and rapid innovation at both the transport and application layers. It is instructive to look at a different type of network to see what happens to innovation in the absence of net neutrality. Visa and Mastercard have built dominant positions in payment networks by tightly controlling all aspects of the network, such as...
3 tags
Can We Please Get Rid of Stock Certificates For...
It is 2010 and while we don’t have jetpacks, it doesn’t seem too much to ask to not have to deal with paper stock certificates. Yet most early stage deals that I see still wind up sending out physical paper certificates. While it may seem like a convenient way to push out the expense of keeping track of certificates to holders, that is not really the case. Whenever a transaction...
4 tags
A Comment on Comments
Yesterday was a fertile day for comments on comments: John Gruber, Bijan Sabet and then Marco Arment all provided interesting food for thought. For starters, I firmly believe that what someone chooses to do on their own blog is and should always be entirely their own decision. It is their property after all and nobody is forced to go there or interact with it. That includes the choices to have...
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You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
I am meeting with a bunch of folks from a major ad agency today to talk about the future of the web. This is of course one of my favorite topics! Here are some of the highlights of what I am planning to cover:
You ain’t seen nothing yet: expect deep transformation of many industries including advertising
A brief history of newspapers as illustration of the forces at work
Disruption from...
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Twilio Announces OpenVBX
The amazing team at our portfolio company Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems (formerly known as PBXs, which — if anyone remembers — is short for Private Branch Exchange).
Most legacy PBXs are incredibly hard to program. For instance, the one we have at...
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Attention: Attention
There are certain topics that periodically rear their heads, such as privacy. The one that is on my mind this morning is attention. I don’t know whether there really is a deep attention crisis, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that we may well have a problem. Yesterday evening, I was watching my son’s Little League coach (another dad) desperately trying to get and keep the...
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Motivating Engineers
I am a huge fan of Dan Ariely’s writing because I believe it makes behavioral economics relevant to every day business decision making. I have just finished the first two chapters of his new book “The Upside of Irrationality” and can already strongly recommend it. Chapter 2 in particular is be a must read for anyone who manages people but in particular for folks who manage...
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WWDC Keynote and iPhone 4
I was really surprised that Steve Jobs did not announce more cloud capabilities for Apple during his WWDC keynote. It had been rumored that MobileMe might become free and Apple has been investing heavily in data centers. I believe that this is critical for Apple if they want to maintain their currently super impressive position. The iPhone 4 is cool and has some neat innovations but none of...
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More On the Carried Interest Taxation Debate
Last week I wrote briefly about my position in the carried interest taxation debate. Since then the debate has gotten a bit more heated with opposing posts by Chris Dixon and James Robinson. Chris argued that this is a matter of basic tax fairness and Jim provided two (new) arguments for how increasing the tax rate on VCs might result in fewer dollars for startups.
Jim’s first argument...
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Back to the City
We have been living in the burbs since shortly after our third child was born, which makes it easy to keep track. Shockingly we are rapidly approaching a decade there! We are fortunate to have a (near) perfect setup — a 12 minute walk to the train station (which gives me 24 minutes of walking per day guaranteed), the elementary school across the road and public tennis courts around the...
6 tags
Five (Not So) Easy Pieces of Legislation to Help...
A few times over the last couple of months I have been asked what government could do to help startups. I believe there are five different areas that could really make a difference. The first two are specific to the kind of startups that we invest in at Union Square Ventures, but the other three apply across the board. 1. Net Neutrality By this I mean a clear commitment to separating bandwidth,...
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The Carried Interest Taxation Debate
My partner Fred has come out in support of taxing carried interest as income instead of capital gains. I agree with Fred’s position because I do not believe that this change will result in less investment in startups. Taxes generally cause distortions and as a first approximation, taxing something at a higher rate tends to lead to less activity. Sometimes that is the desired outcome. For...
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Learning from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
The Deepwater Horizon accident is a terrible lesson in not testing backup plans. Yes, it is probably impossible to test the various way of trying to stop a well under exact conditions (i.e. with a gushing well), but the constant refrain of “this has not been tried at this depth” is deeply disheartening. That’s like hearing from your operations team that they have only ever...
