Today’s post is over at USV where we are looking for design talent to help us update our identity. Funnily there is a question about our logo on Quora. We are excited to be leveraging Behance’s design community for this update. Participate or let other designers know that they should. We will select and commission five designers. Here is the competition on Behance.

Today’s post is over at USV where we are looking for design talent to help us update our identity. Funnily there is a question about our logo on Quora. We are excited to be leveraging Behance’s design community for this update. Participate or let other designers know that they should. We will select and commission five designers. Here is the competition on Behance.

The Do Not Track discussions that are currently going on are fascinating because they highlight the huge gap between how the internet actually works and how people are talking about policy. Politicians are giving consumers a false sense that there is an easy “on/off” switch for tracking. And industry groups aren’t helping the debate by making it easy to argue that they are using self policing as a fig leave. All of this completely drowns out the difficulty of the underlying problem: our onlin...

The Do Not Track discussions that are currently going on are fascinating because they highlight the huge gap between how the internet actually works and how people are talking about policy. Politicians are giving consumers a false sense that there is an easy “on/off” switch for tracking. And industry groups aren’t helping the debate by making it easy to argue that they are using self policing as a fig leave. All of this completely drowns out the difficulty of the underlying problem: our onlin...

If you have been a faithful reader of Tech Tuesday, you may be asking yourself just how many more posts on Data Structures could possibly be coming up as this is now the sixth such post (including the introduction). The answer is that after today there will be at least one more before moving on to a different subject for now. But that’s not for a lack of material – there is always more to say about data structures. And if nothing else one important takeaway from these posts should be that und...

If you have been a faithful reader of Tech Tuesday, you may be asking yourself just how many more posts on Data Structures could possibly be coming up as this is now the sixth such post (including the introduction). The answer is that after today there will be at least one more before moving on to a different subject for now. But that’s not for a lack of material – there is always more to say about data structures. And if nothing else one important takeaway from these posts should be that und...

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Hacking Textbooks - We Need It” where I pointed out that college textbooks are a $7B annual market in the US alone. I was therefore thrilled to see that California last week passed a law to attempt to create free creative commons-licensed textbooks. Now one might argue that the government should not be spending money to interfere with a private market and I am sure existing publishers of college textbooks will be fighting this legislation. But...

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Hacking Textbooks - We Need It” where I pointed out that college textbooks are a $7B annual market in the US alone. I was therefore thrilled to see that California last week passed a law to attempt to create free creative commons-licensed textbooks. Now one might argue that the government should not be spending money to interfere with a private market and I am sure existing publishers of college textbooks will be fighting this legislation. But...

Today one of our portfolio companies is holding their internal management training in our offices. They have asked me to talk a little bit about my own experience with the challenge of going from being an individual contributor to being a manager. I remember this being a very rough transition for me and it took me quite a long time to get comfortable as a manager. I went from individual contributor to founder and didn’t have the benefit of management training! Looking back the biggest insight...

Today one of our portfolio companies is holding their internal management training in our offices. They have asked me to talk a little bit about my own experience with the challenge of going from being an individual contributor to being a manager. I remember this being a very rough transition for me and it took me quite a long time to get comfortable as a manager. I went from individual contributor to founder and didn’t have the benefit of management training! Looking back the biggest insight...

This is the fifth post on Data Structures as part of my long Tech Tuesday series on programming. And today we finally make it to a structure known as an object. There is a whole literature on so-called object oriented programming, which sometimes seems like a modern idea because of its prominence in the 1990s but really goes much further back than that with programming languages such as Smalltalk in the 1970s and basic object concepts go back even earlier than that. While another approach kno...

This is the fifth post on Data Structures as part of my long Tech Tuesday series on programming. And today we finally make it to a structure known as an object. There is a whole literature on so-called object oriented programming, which sometimes seems like a modern idea because of its prominence in the 1990s but really goes much further back than that with programming languages such as Smalltalk in the 1970s and basic object concepts go back even earlier than that. While another approach kno...

This is the first entry in my Scylla and Charybdis Series of blog posts. In case you missed the introduction, the idea is that startups are hard because you can always err both by doing too little of something but also by doing too much of it. Since I don’t have a lot of time to write this morning, I am picking a particularly easy one: raising money. If you raise too little money the bad consequences are fairly obvious. In the worst case you run out of money altogether and have to shut down. ...

This is the first entry in my Scylla and Charybdis Series of blog posts. In case you missed the introduction, the idea is that startups are hard because you can always err both by doing too little of something but also by doing too much of it. Since I don’t have a lot of time to write this morning, I am picking a particularly easy one: raising money. If you raise too little money the bad consequences are fairly obvious. In the worst case you run out of money altogether and have to shut down. ...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

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...

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...

Since I first wrote about the Benefit Corporation several great things have happened, including New York State passing legislation and Etsy becoming a certified B Corp. Since most venture backed companies are incorporated in Delaware, it would be terrific to see Benefit Corporation legislation passed there as well. Sometimes I have people ask me what problem the Benefit Corporation solves that cannot be addressed simply in the context of an existing C Corp. What it really comes down to is bet...

Since I first wrote about the Benefit Corporation several great things have happened, including New York State passing legislation and Etsy becoming a certified B Corp. Since most venture backed companies are incorporated in Delaware, it would be terrific to see Benefit Corporation legislation passed there as well. Sometimes I have people ask me what problem the Benefit Corporation solves that cannot be addressed simply in the context of an existing C Corp. What it really comes down to is bet...