Continuations

Earlier this week Rebecca posted the latest evolution of the USV thesis. It includes the words “trusted brands” which led some people to ask how an early stage company could already be that. I provided the answer in a tweet in which I wrote that “trusted brands” — have incentives that are aligned with your customers/endusers so you can build trust over the longtermI want to explain that further today and put it in the larger context of Internet business models. During the Dotcom Bubble, there...

I am finally getting around to writing about the third paper in my MIT PhD thesis. The first paper was an empirical analysis of the impact of information technology on firm size. The second paper provided a model for how improvements in information technology can result in hybrid organizations. The third paper is both the most ambitious and also the most theoretical – it attempts to provide a general framework for analyzing communication in organizations. In rereading it I found a fair number...

This is the second post in my little project of self publishing my PhD Thesis. Last week I introduced an econometric analysis of the impact of Information Technology (IT) firm size. This time it is a more theoretical paper that presents a model for examining the impact of different types of IT on the structure of organizations. In particular, it compares having no IT, with centralized IT (think mainframes) and networked IT (think Internet and Intranet). I was particularly happy with how this ...

As previously announced, I have self-published my MIT PhD thesis. Today’s post is about the first paper, which is titled “Information Technology and Firm Size” which – as the rather plain title suggests – examines statistical evidence of the impact of the increased use of IT on firm size. Before starting any analysis of data it helps to have a hypothesis and so the question is should we expect to see larger or smaller firms? Unfortunately, there are many different ways that computers might im...

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...