April 2011
11 posts
1 tag
Reasoning from First Principles
There were a lot of really interesting comments to my question about retail trends earlier this week. Thanks to all who contributed to the discussion. As I am thinking about how to organize all of these, I am reminded that it is often (always?) a good idea to try to reason from first principles. In other words, what are the underlying characteristic of the Internet that are driving these...
3 tags
Funding SETI's Antenna Operations
I found out yesterday that due to a lack of funding the SETI Institute has pulled the plug on operating the Allen Antenna Array. Given the recent discovery of potentially habitable planets, the timing of this couldn’t be worse. Just as our view is coming around to there being a higher likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere, we stop looking for it.
Why look in the first place? I believe...
2 tags
Looking for Input On Retail Trends
This Friday I will be meeting with some of the senior management from a major branded retail chain in the US to talk about how the web and mobile are impacting their business. In preparation, I am thinking about key relevant trends. Here are some that are top of mind:
Reaching people via mobile as they are at or near a store (for loyalty, specials, etc).
Ability for people in-store (again via...
3 tags
Getting Started with Arduino (in Praise of...
I am currently reading James Gleick’s “The Information,” which I highly recommend (more on that in a separate post). In it is a wonderful chapter on Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace, which makes it clear how amazing her insights into what we would call programming were by placing them in their historical context. What does any of this have to do with Arduino? Well, I ordered our...
2 tags
The Orders of Magnitude of Talent (Or: Why...
I have always loved the videos illustrating orders of magnitude of scale. It simply seems a marvel that the world around us encompasses all these different scales. It turns out to also be a useful way to think about ability when you are recruiting. Talent comes in orders of magnitude. Before going to recruiting for startups, consider talent in tennis for a moment. At one level I am a decent...
3 tags
Entrepreneur Need-to-Know: Basics Of IP Ownership
I don’t have the time or interest to look at the latest in the Winkelvoss and Ceglia vs Facebook/Zuckerberg sagas. But even just the headlines serve as good reminders that as an entrepreneur you need to know some things about IP law so that you don’t run afoul of it.
In particular, I continue to meet people starting businesses while employed elsewhere without having looked at their...
3 tags
Selection Trumps Motivation (Solving Google's...
While I have a feeling that Larry Page won’t take any of my suggestions (darn), I am happy to see him come out swinging hard. What a welcome contrast to when Jerry Yang took over as CEO at Yahoo. Several people have written that it is a bad idea to have a corporate wide bonus depending on the achievement of social goals. I happen to disagree. Social is pervasive and google is behind, so...
2 tags
The Coming Mobile Commoditization Wars
Tech’s history is somewhat reminiscent of the city of Troy, which when it was discovered was found to have many layers with newer ones built on top of the old ones. In tech as new layers get built the old layers are abstracted away which results in those old layers becoming commoditized. Because once something is abstracted (hidden behind APIs) it doesn’t matter what brand it is, as...
4 tags
The Web STP Challenge: Making APIs Useful
STP stands for Straight Through Processing and is a term that comes from the financial services industry. Wikipedia provides a simple definition
[STP] enables the entire trade process for capital markets and payment transactions to be conducted electronically without the need for re-keying or manual intervention (…)
We need more STP for the web so that we have fewer stove pipe services...
2 tags
Why We Need Better Authentication
In case you missed it, email services provider Epsilon had a massive security breach and a large number of email lists were exposed, including those of several large banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Citi. This is likely to result in more targeted phishing campaigns as it is now in the open who is an actual customer. As a quick aside, it is somewhat shocking how many sites leak this kind of...
4 tags
Options and Startup Common Equity Value (Bubble...
There is something frequently missed in thinking about the value of common shares in startups. These shares are actually options! The Theory A common share in a startup has the same payout structure as a call option. There is a range of outcomes in terms of total enterprise value at exit for which common shares are worth exactly zero. This range is from no enterprise value (shutdown) to the...
