Continuations

Yesterday evening our son and I were taking a train back from Long Island on the LIRR and the trip was a great illustration of how decrepit our infrastructure is. About four minutes before train departure there was an announcement that the train was running on time. All good and we were looking forward to getting some work done on the train. Then three minutes before departure, i.e., just one minute later, a different announcer came back on to say that the train was at least 15 minutes delaye...

Capital is no longer scarce. This is an assertion I made a while back in my post “Land, Capital, Attention: This Time it Is the Same.” Today I want to elaborate on that a bit. Estimates put global investible capital at north of $100 trillion. Global GDP by comparison is around $80 trillion and as an approximation global gross output is likely around $160 trillion. It is important to keep in mind that the capital needed to just operate a steady state economy is meaningfully less than gross out...

I have written a fair bit about inflation in the past, starting with a post about inflation versus deflation during the financial crises in 2008, which I then followed with three posts in 2009. We are now finding ourselves in 2014 and so far there are no signs of inflation. That would seem to say that Paul Krugman had this one right and people who were worried about inflation had it wrong. Then again that would be a classic case of a turkey argument where we confuse an absence of evidence (it...

Excited to announce our investment in Skillshare today. You can read some other posts about it here: Michael and Malcolm from Skillshare, Fred, and Jenna Wortham in the New York Times.

Today we announced our investment in Heyzap. Jude and Immad are building some fabulous widgets, feeds and APIs to let folks put games everywhere. For instance, you can now find a few games in the right side bar of this blog. With Heyzap it took less than 5 minutes to pick the games and embed them. I started with some skiing games – my way of “staying in shape” during the summer time. Especially focused on avoiding trees. For additional coverage see Fred’s post, Techcrunch and Venturebeat.

Excited to be announcing our investment in Shapeways and the relocation of the company’s headquarters to NY. You can read more about it on the Shapeways blog and over at the NY Times. The founders Peter, Marleen and Robert are relocating from the Netherlands – welcome to NY!

Today’s post is over at the USV blog, announcing our investment in Wattpad. Wattpad is an amazing community for sharing and reading stories. Go read the blog post or watch their video.

Last week I wrote briefly about my position in the carried interest taxation debate. Since then the debate has gotten a bit more heated with opposing posts by Chris Dixon and James Robinson. Chris argued that this is a matter of basic tax fairness and Jim provided two (new) arguments for how increasing the tax rate on VCs might result in fewer dollars for startups. Jim’s first argument is what economists call “tax incidence." When you tax someone they will lay off part of the tax on their cus...

I am very excited to be working with Joshua again. You can read (a bit) more on the Union Square Ventures blog about our investment in Tasty Labs.

Today’s post is over at the USV blog, describing why we invested in Clue, which provides a period tracking and fertility app.A big thanks also to Susan and Katie for helping me understand the importance of Clue.