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...

There is an interesting objection to crypto that goes something like: crypto is all a rip-off because nobody actually needs decentralization which makes things slow and inefficient (“decentralization is a bug, not a feature”). I was somewhat surprised to see this objection from Michael Seemann, a German author, whose criticism of the power of the big platform companies I respect. In a Twitter exchange (in German) he pointed me to something he wrote a couple of years ago as predictions about t...

One of my favorite example of a mindless extrapolation was a headline I saw a few years back that said “By 2100 We Will All Live In Cities” (sadly I can’t find it anymore and failed to bookmark it). It may have been slightly exaggerated for dramatic purpose, but it is easy to find extrapolations that say by 2100 more than 80% of the global population will live in cities. Here is an example from the World Economic Forum:You will readily get there if you simply extrapolate charts like this one ...

I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France. It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). So what’s next after that? The key of course as always will be innovation. The single most urgent piece here is testing. Ideally we can get this to the ...

If you have been following my posts on the climate crisis, you know that I have been supporting various forms of activism. I was pleased to see the massive turnout at the climate strike all around the globe and especially here in New York, where Greta Thunberg will be addressing the UN today. Some people have been pushing back along the lines of “this activism is distracting from the real need which is for innovation;” or “all they want is renewables but we really need nuclear;” or even more ...

Our twins are about to wrap up their first semester and one thing is clear: 30 years after I went, and 20 years after the web exploded, college has barely changed. Sure, students all have smartphones and laptops, but they also carry around big text and heavy textbooks, go to lectures with frontal presentation from professors and take exams in blue books. They go for four years with maybe a semester (or possibly even a year) abroad if they are lucky. They declare a major at some point and the ...

Yesterday I did a fireside chat at our portfolio company Shippo and someone asked the question how a company can continue to be successful and grow over a long period of time. My answer was: continue to innovate. A company that wonderfully represents that spirit is MongoDB. Eliot Horowitz, the co-founder and CTO of MongoDB, just announced in a blog post that MongoDB 4.0 will support multi-document transactions. You should go read the post as it is great, including the epic title “MongoDB Drop...

So I am still away on family vacation and following a self-imposed online diet, but even then it has been impossible to ignore the monster sized vulnerabilities disclosed today known as Meltdown and Spectre. And just to make sure nobody misreads my post title, these are bad. Downright ugly. They are pervasive, exploitable and a real longterm fix will likely require new hardware (one or more extra hardware bits in the CPU). So how can I possibly claim they are good? Here are four different way...

Yesterday Instagram announced that it has 200 million users for stories, which exceeds Snapchat’s 160 million users from their S-1 filing. Never mind that nobody outside these companies knows what those user definitions really mean or how to compare them. This has nonetheless rekindled a debate about copying that periodically arises in the tech industry. For a previous instance, take the outrage over Rocket Internet’s copying of US businesses for Europe and also Asia. If you want to go much f...

HTTP as the underlying protocol of the web allows for decentralized publishing. Anyone can operate a web server and publish their own content. And anybody with a web browser can access that content (subject to governments and ISPs imposing limitations). But as a stateless protocol, HTTP needs a data layer for any application functionality, which until recently was provided by companies such as Google (search), Facebook and Twitter (social), Amazon and eBay (commerce). Because we didn’t know h...