Continuations

Yesterday I attended MIT’s Roundtable on the Digital Economy. It was a gathering convened by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of Race Against the Machine, to discuss “Work and Value in the Digital Economy.” The gathering brought together an interesting mix of academics, startups, investors (yours truly) and policy experts. I don’t have time this morning for more detailed thoughts, but I came away with a clearer grasp of some of the central questions: 1. Is work actually dimini...

In 1999, which now feels like a very long time ago, I finished my PhD thesis at MIT. I had started working on it following my general exams in 1996 but promptly got very busy co-founding a company (the now defunct W3Health – a story for another day). Running a startup during the week, working on a dissertation on weekends and commuting between Boston and New York is not something I would recommend to anybody. In fact, the acknowledgments to my thesis conclude with:Most of all, I would like to...