I am super excited about today and woke up in advance of my alarm clock. Why? Because today is the first day of class for the second year of the NYU Stern Course I am co-teaching with Arun Sundararajan (btw, if you are interested in the sharing economy, I highly recommend Arun’s book). I love teaching, which is the reason I originally pursued a PhD. The title of our course is “Tech and the City” (yes, pun on a “long ago” HBO show – we didn’t pick it, sort of a bit like writing a column and ha...

Fred had a good post yesterday about why he considers Y-Combinator the “Best Deal in Startup Land." I believe that also and want to add a key reason for it: An intense focus on making versus planning. By entering Y-Combinator, teams commit themselves to a mad sprint to get something built. Ideally something that works well enough or is far enough along to actually launch before or shortly after demo day. That is a completely different approach from that taken by business plan competitions. Mo...