It is crucially important to have something to fight for instead of just resisting. Having a long term goal is what keeps us motivated and resilient in light of near term setbacks. Sadly American politics is utterly bereft of a bold vision at the moment (the recent book Abundance falls comically short of its title). A great inspiration for a positive vision of the US today can be found in the original Star Trek from the late 1960s. We are still a long way from some of the extreme technologica...

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...

The latest round of fighting coming out of Washington is disheartening because we all seem to be caught up in discussing the tactics of the trillion dollar coin. All the focus is on a single battle and the objective of the war seems murky at best if not entirely forgotten. Even the less spending versus more revenue versus some mix of the two discussion is almost entirely devoid of actual content. The real question we should be debating is what kind of society we envision ten or twenty years f...

I am thrilled to see Larry Page take over as CEO from Eric Schmidt. In a post a few months back I had expressed my worry that Google was headed the way of Yahoo under too much “professional management” and not enough visionary founder leadership (contrasting it at the time with Facebook). Instead of a list of 6 things that he should do, I believe Larry really only needs to succeed at one: re-establish clarity of vision for the company. The vision I would love to see Google embrace is: Google ...