Continuations

What does it mean to trust someone? Usually, that person (or company, or technology) can take actions that share a bunch of characteristics: the action has a material impact on us, we cannot directly observe the action or judge its consequences relative to alternatives at least until later, and we have an expectation that the other will act in a way that is primarily to our benefit as opposed to their own. One way to tell that trust was involved in a relationship is when we discover that the ...

Today our portfolio company Sift Science announced not only their $30 million Series C, led by Insight Venture Partners, but also several new product offerings. This is exciting because it reveals the team’s larger vision of “Powering Trust Online” and makes that concrete by going beyond payments fraud to address content, promo and account abuse. These products have been developed with customers and are available now (content abuse, promo abuse, account abuse). Sift’s execution is a great ill...

So yesterday the Feds busted the guy behind Silk Road, the marketplace for drugs and other illegal things paid in bitcoin. The indictment reads like a screenplay for a movie or Breaking Bad style television series (not that I watched Breaking Bad, just basing this on the inevitable flurry of tweets about it that I had in my stream). There should be one key takeaway here: law enforcement is easier online, not harder as government would generally have us believe. It is basically impossible to o...