Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
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Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
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The startups that we invest in at Union Square Ventures are based on delivering an innovative product or service (at least we like to think so). There are also examples of startups that deliver an existing product or service using an innovative organizational design, such as a virtual law firm. Once in a while I run across a company that wants to do both, i.e. deliver an innovative service and at the same time do so with an innovative organizational design. I believe that’s an example of too much of a good thing. Innovation is risky – otherwise more folks would be doing it. If you innovate along too many dimensions at once you are multiplying risk (as startup risk is multiplicative, not additive).
Even within product and service innovation alone it’s possible to be too innovative. I have been spending a fair bit of time looking at what I think of as the post-LAMP stack, which will be hosted / in-the-cloud. It turns out there are a quite a few people working on this and there is tremendous innovation in the pipeline. But based on what I have seen it’s clear that some folks will fail because they are not sufficiently innovative (e.g., automated provisioning of MySQL – nice, but how does that help me build a scalable service?) and some because they are too innovative (e.g., does everything, but has proprietary language, proprietary libraries, etc).
The startups that we invest in at Union Square Ventures are based on delivering an innovative product or service (at least we like to think so). There are also examples of startups that deliver an existing product or service using an innovative organizational design, such as a virtual law firm. Once in a while I run across a company that wants to do both, i.e. deliver an innovative service and at the same time do so with an innovative organizational design. I believe that’s an example of too much of a good thing. Innovation is risky – otherwise more folks would be doing it. If you innovate along too many dimensions at once you are multiplying risk (as startup risk is multiplicative, not additive).
Even within product and service innovation alone it’s possible to be too innovative. I have been spending a fair bit of time looking at what I think of as the post-LAMP stack, which will be hosted / in-the-cloud. It turns out there are a quite a few people working on this and there is tremendous innovation in the pipeline. But based on what I have seen it’s clear that some folks will fail because they are not sufficiently innovative (e.g., automated provisioning of MySQL – nice, but how does that help me build a scalable service?) and some because they are too innovative (e.g., does everything, but has proprietary language, proprietary libraries, etc).
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