The answer: It depends (on your perspective). I have had some fascinating conversations with folks in both advertising and games about the iPhone. There is an obvious chasm between incumbents who have existing businesses on other phones and folks starting up to target the iPhone. Those with existing businesses usually make an argument along the following lines – by the end of the year there will be 10 million iPhones which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall mobile market (billion...

The answer: It depends (on your perspective). I have had some fascinating conversations with folks in both advertising and games about the iPhone. There is an obvious chasm between incumbents who have existing businesses on other phones and folks starting up to target the iPhone. Those with existing businesses usually make an argument along the following lines – by the end of the year there will be 10 million iPhones which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall mobile market (billion...

Clay Shirky has a great chapter in his book titled “Publish First, Filter Later." The gist is that when publishing was expensive (print a book or newspaper, bind and collate, distribute to reader, etc) there was no alternative to filtering first, i.e. figuring out what to publish. With the Internet, the cost of publishing is essentially zero, so anything can and should be published with the filtering taking place later. The web at large of course illustrates this, but it’s true in specific ar...

Clay Shirky has a great chapter in his book titled “Publish First, Filter Later." The gist is that when publishing was expensive (print a book or newspaper, bind and collate, distribute to reader, etc) there was no alternative to filtering first, i.e. figuring out what to publish. With the Internet, the cost of publishing is essentially zero, so anything can and should be published with the filtering taking place later. The web at large of course illustrates this, but it’s true in specific ar...

One mantra that is often brought up for entrepreneurs is to “fail early” (and some add “and often”). The theory is that if your business is not working it’s better to fold before you have spent a lot of money and try something else instead from scratch. There is not just the money - if you go too long in one direction you build an organization that has inertia in that direction making it difficult if not impossible to change direction. I have certainly seen this happen firsthand many times an...

One mantra that is often brought up for entrepreneurs is to “fail early” (and some add “and often”). The theory is that if your business is not working it’s better to fold before you have spent a lot of money and try something else instead from scratch. There is not just the money - if you go too long in one direction you build an organization that has inertia in that direction making it difficult if not impossible to change direction. I have certainly seen this happen firsthand many times an...

A frequently asked question in panels on startups is whether it is possible to start a company by oneself. The answer is clearly yes and it has been done many times before. But there is a lot to be said for being able to work as a team. There are obvious benefits like being able to better cover the many disciplines required in a startup (for instance, we usually prefer founding teams that have at least one engineer on them). But there is also a more subtle benefit which I call creative differ...

A frequently asked question in panels on startups is whether it is possible to start a company by oneself. The answer is clearly yes and it has been done many times before. But there is a lot to be said for being able to work as a team. There are obvious benefits like being able to better cover the many disciplines required in a startup (for instance, we usually prefer founding teams that have at least one engineer on them). But there is also a more subtle benefit which I call creative differ...

This is my third post on cloud competition. Today I want to address the question of how cloud computing changes competition at the infrastructure layer. A part of the answer comes from yesterday’s post on the changing boundary between the application layer and the infrastructure layer. As infrastructure pushes up ever higher, the lower portions of infrastructure become further hidden and abstracted away. AMD has not had a lot of luck in their effort to compete with Intel and make money at the...

This is my third post on cloud competition. Today I want to address the question of how cloud computing changes competition at the infrastructure layer. A part of the answer comes from yesterday’s post on the changing boundary between the application layer and the infrastructure layer. As infrastructure pushes up ever higher, the lower portions of infrastructure become further hidden and abstracted away. AMD has not had a lot of luck in their effort to compete with Intel and make money at the...

Just announced our investment in 10gen. Fantastic team working on an opensource cloud platform. Look forward to developing scalable sites and apps without having to worry about managing machines ever again.

Just announced our investment in 10gen. Fantastic team working on an opensource cloud platform. Look forward to developing scalable sites and apps without having to worry about managing machines ever again.

Had a great time at OSCON yesterday. Day started with inspiring keynotes by Tim O'Reilly on the challenges for open source and by Chrstine Peterson from the Foresight Institute on Open Source Physical Security. Tim mentioned cloud computing and mobile as the #1 and #2 challenges for open source. Just as open source has made a lot of progress these two new trends threaten to move much of computing onto proprietary and closed platforms. Christine started by pointing out how we had missed t...

Had a great time at OSCON yesterday. Day started with inspiring keynotes by Tim O'Reilly on the challenges for open source and by Chrstine Peterson from the Foresight Institute on Open Source Physical Security. Tim mentioned cloud computing and mobile as the #1 and #2 challenges for open source. Just as open source has made a lot of progress these two new trends threaten to move much of computing onto proprietary and closed platforms. Christine started by pointing out how we had missed t...

This is the second in my occasional series on negotiating. When negotiating a term sheet or a biz dev deal it’s important to keep in mind that the end goal of the negotiation is establishing a partnership. This is very different from say buying a house where post closing you (hopefully) have nothing to do with the seller. For a partnership to get off to a good start it helps for both parties to feel good about the process of the negotiation. I have found that an important ingredient is to set...

This is the second in my occasional series on negotiating. When negotiating a term sheet or a biz dev deal it’s important to keep in mind that the end goal of the negotiation is establishing a partnership. This is very different from say buying a house where post closing you (hopefully) have nothing to do with the seller. For a partnership to get off to a good start it helps for both parties to feel good about the process of the negotiation. I have found that an important ingredient is to set...

Call for Topics (Web 2.0 Expo Workshop): Looking for topics and issues to discuss at a workshop that I am doing with Charlie O'Donnell at Web 2.0 Expo.

Call for Topics (Web 2.0 Expo Workshop): Looking for topics and issues to discuss at a workshop that I am doing with Charlie O'Donnell at Web 2.0 Expo.

As an entrepreneur when you bring you members of your team with you (whether they are part of your management team or advisors), there is always a possibility that someone will say something that you disagree with. As far as I am concerned it’s perfectly fine to have some level of disagreement with a couple of provisos. First, how you handle the disagreement is important. If you try to quelch it in the meeting that’s a very bad sign. If instead you are willing to address it head on and explai...

As an entrepreneur when you bring you members of your team with you (whether they are part of your management team or advisors), there is always a possibility that someone will say something that you disagree with. As far as I am concerned it’s perfectly fine to have some level of disagreement with a couple of provisos. First, how you handle the disagreement is important. If you try to quelch it in the meeting that’s a very bad sign. If instead you are willing to address it head on and explai...