Continuations

Salman Khan has a blog post on CNN where he suggests that credentialing can and should be separated from learning. He makes a compelling argument for why this would be desirable:What this will change is the opportunities for the 50-year-old laid-off engineer. He could now show that he still has the analytical skills and brain plasticity to work alongside 22-year-old college grads in a 21st-century job. It would allow the smart, young, single-mother to re-engage with a real career. It would al...

Tonight I am giving a brief talk at a Publishing Point event organized by Susan and Jenny. Here are some notes that I pulled together in preparation, written up as a blog post. At USV one of our big investment thesis is that the internet is resulting in massive unbundling of existing business models and value chains. Newspapers are a great example of this process with different sections, including crucially classifieds, now being unbundled across many different web sites with breaking news on...

During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large steel companies dominating the market (at least until the rise of mini mills which made steel from scrap). The defensibility of scale in the information age is a lot less clear. Why? Because there are companies that are providing scale to others. Am...

Last week I posted a draft outline for my planned book on “The Coming Information Age” with a proposed chapter on the “Unbundling of the Job.” This is an idea that first occurred to me when I attended a workshop at MIT on Work and Value in the Digital Economy at MIT in late 2012. At the time here is what I wrote:Do people need jobs or can we deliver what jobs provide some other way and in a potentially unbundled fashion? The “jobs of a job” include income, structure, social connections, meani...