Susan and I went to Burning Man this year for our first time. We had a wonderful experience together with our friends Cindy and Robin (who is an experienced Burner and acted as our guide). There are many justified criticism of Burning Man and the festival will likely to have to change substantially over the coming years (a subject for a future post).Today I want to write about the absence of prices at Burning Man. Once you get to Black Rock City, everything is free (well, not everything, as i...

The dominant position of companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon is sure receiving a lot more attention these days. There is critical media coverage, including in traditionally pro business publications such as the Wall Street Journal “Can the Tech Giants Be Stopped?” and Bloomberg “Should America’s Tech Giants Be Broken Up?” There is also the Democratic Party’s “Better Deal” memo which focuses more broadly on the negative effects of corporate power. And then of course there is the Europea...

If you have looked for your car recently in a big parking lot and had trouble finding it you can be forgiven. All modern cars look alike. In fact, if you photoshop the grille of one maker onto the car of another and it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference as this work by Jalopnik demonstrates Yup. That’s a Kia with a BMW grille. So why do I bring this up? Because yesterday Twitter announced that it was replacing the star icon with a heart for favoriting. This too seems to me driven by a...

While thinking about my talk at the On Demand Conference today in New York, I stumbled upon a tweet which quotes a Bloomberg piece on Baidu’s Robin Lee (the CEO):To Li, the math is simple. While search advertising is big, the services and retail market is much bigger. The initiative will “definitely” eclipse search revenue over time, he said. In cities like Beijing, the vision is already taking shape. Click an application on your smartphone and someone will stop by your home to wash and walk ...

Tonight I will be participating in a panel discussion about Universal Basic Income. One of the key arguments for UBI is that we need to decouple people’s ability to meet their basic needs from traditional work because of the rise of automation. This is the case I make in my TEDx talk. But there is another way of framing the problem that has been on my mind. It starts with my contention that the current transition is as profound as the ones from the forager age to the agrarian age and from the...

With the NASDAQ going above 5,000 for the first time since the year 2000 valuations in tech are once again on everyone’s mind, mine included. It has been a long period writing here on Continuations that I have thought valuations were too high and they have only gone higher since. All the arguments I provided back in 2012 are still true and in particular the line that “rates of return available on many other investments are at historic lows” – this is especially true for interest rates. Very l...

I took last week off from blogging for family reasons which means I sat out a big wave of posts about Uber. Don’t worry, I am not going to rehash that particular discussion. Instead, I want to point out what I believe the big questions are that should be asked of all companies in this sector which includes two USV investments (Hailo and Sidecar). Here are two questions: 1. Are drivers genuinely independent contractors? A legitimate concern here should be that the level of control that comes f...

I have written before that it is OK to worry about the effects of automation on work. One frequently encountered response is that this worry is wrong, that having it is committing the Lump of Labor fallacy. Marc in particular has been bringing it up a lot, including on Twitter, in a blog post, and a recent interview. But this is a red herring. One can legitimately worry about the transition even if one believes that the Lump of Labor fallacy is in fact a fallacy. So let me posit for a moment ...

So I have been meaning to write more about what is happening to labor and capital as we transition from industrial society to information society. To do that well I need lay some groundwork first though by talking about the idea of a production function. A function as you may recall from math is something like f(x) = 3x + 1 which takes a value (here x) and transforms it into a different value (here into 3x - 5, so that f(1) = 4, f(2) = 7 …) A production function then is the mathematical abstr...

I am sympathetic to Uber’s basic argument that surge pricing is the market at work as (a) nobody is being forced to take an Uber and (b) raising prices puts more Ubers out on the street. On Saturday evening, close to the height of the storm I had to go to the Upper East Side to pick up one of our kids. I quickly decided to take the subway which was running on time and only cost $2.50 each way, even though that meant I had to walk about a dozen blocks in the storm. As an avid skier and lover o...