Continuations

My blog post on Monday about privacy and DRM was read by some as suggesting that we abandon any and all notions of privacy over night. That was not the point I was trying to make so let me try again, this time with an analogy. We secure our homes by closing and (generally) locking the front door. That serves as a demarcation and keeps out a completely opportunistic thief. It does not, however, prevent anybody even remotely determined from entering. For that we rely on some combination of soci...

It is hard for me to believe that I wrote my post “I Want a New Platform” over seven years ago. At the time that post led to our investment in MongoDB, which was then called 10gen. The company was started by Eliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman inside of AlleyCorp, the New York based incubator started by Dwight and Kevin Ryan (Business Insider and Gilt Groupe also came out of AlleyCorp). Kevin had previously been an investor and board member in my own incubator and had become a friend. When he ...

In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to investing. Instead at USV we always ask ourselves “what is different now?” to understand whether the lessons from the past do in fact apply or something profound has changed. This is important because things that failed in the past tend to eventually succeed due to ch...

In the future we can’t have privacy for the same reason that the record labels and Hollywood can’t have DRM and that’s ultimately a good thing. DRM has proven a fool’s errand because it is not compatible with general purpose computing. At some point a song or movie has to be decrypted in order to be played back and short of tamper proof and “trusted” hardware at that moment it can be digitally copied (and even if we had all of that it could be re-recorded or re-filmed during playback). That i...