Today’s post is over at USV, where we announced our investment in Behance.

Today’s post is over at USV, where we announced our investment in Behance.

During the 2008 crisis, I argued that we should take over the big banks and restructure them. Instead, we bailed out the banks with tax payer money and with an unprecedented increase in the Fed’s balance sheet. We did nothing to get rid of banks that are “too big to fail” or to severely restrict their activities (which might lead them to break themselves up). So yesterday, JP Morgan Chase had to announce a $2 Billion trading loss from what they claim was a hedge gone wrong in Credit Derivativ...

During the 2008 crisis, I argued that we should take over the big banks and restructure them. Instead, we bailed out the banks with tax payer money and with an unprecedented increase in the Fed’s balance sheet. We did nothing to get rid of banks that are “too big to fail” or to severely restrict their activities (which might lead them to break themselves up). So yesterday, JP Morgan Chase had to announce a $2 Billion trading loss from what they claim was a hedge gone wrong in Credit Derivativ...

Today’s blog post is over at the USV blog on Etsy becoming a certified B Corp. It all started with this. Congrats to Chad and the team at Etsy on taking transparency and responsibility to the community and making it not just a commitment but also something that is measured.

Today’s blog post is over at the USV blog on Etsy becoming a certified B Corp. It all started with this. Congrats to Chad and the team at Etsy on taking transparency and responsibility to the community and making it not just a commitment but also something that is measured.

Yesterday, I tweeted that Pets.com is back! #fullcircle twitter.com/albertwenger/s… — Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) May 8, 2012with the following picture and got quite a few replies and retweets. Some people saw it as a sign of a potential new bubble (or even the imminent collapse of the same) while others said they were happy users of the service. Those different reactions reflect the importance of approaching a recurrence with an open mind:Just because something has been tried before and fa...

Yesterday, I tweeted that Pets.com is back! #fullcircle twitter.com/albertwenger/s… — Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) May 8, 2012with the following picture and got quite a few replies and retweets. Some people saw it as a sign of a potential new bubble (or even the imminent collapse of the same) while others said they were happy users of the service. Those different reactions reflect the importance of approaching a recurrence with an open mind:Just because something has been tried before and fa...

During the last Tech Tuesday we talked about the syntax of programming languages as part of the cycle on programming. That’s a term you will hear frequently in no small part because when you get it wrong the computer will complain about it with a “syntax error.” Today’s topic is much more elusive and less talked about: semantics or what a program “means.” The “means” is in quotation marks because paraphrasing Bill Clinton, the answer depends on what the meaning of the word “means” is. Yes, se...

During the last Tech Tuesday we talked about the syntax of programming languages as part of the cycle on programming. That’s a term you will hear frequently in no small part because when you get it wrong the computer will complain about it with a “syntax error.” Today’s topic is much more elusive and less talked about: semantics or what a program “means.” The “means” is in quotation marks because paraphrasing Bill Clinton, the answer depends on what the meaning of the word “means” is. Yes, se...

Europe had three elections on the weekend: presidential in France, parliamentary in Greece and regional in Germany. The results are strongly anti-incumbent across he board. In France, Sarkozy is out and Hollande is in. In Greece, the PASOK party went from 160 to 41 seats and no longer has a majority together with New Democracy the other incumbent. And in Germany in the regional elections in Schleswig Holstein, Angela Merkel’s CDU had the worst results since 1950. The results are also strongly...

Europe had three elections on the weekend: presidential in France, parliamentary in Greece and regional in Germany. The results are strongly anti-incumbent across he board. In France, Sarkozy is out and Hollande is in. In Greece, the PASOK party went from 160 to 41 seats and no longer has a majority together with New Democracy the other incumbent. And in Germany in the regional elections in Schleswig Holstein, Angela Merkel’s CDU had the worst results since 1950. The results are also strongly...

I have not been writing nearly enough about many of the cool things that our portfolio companies are doing. To correct that I will start doing Feature Friday posts. The opener is the feed introduced earlier this week by Shapeways. I love activity feeds. They are a fun way to see what’s happening on a site. But more than that, I have come use them in board meetings as way to think about what a company does (even if they don’t yet have a feed). It’s a powerful way to organize one’s thinking abo...

I have not been writing nearly enough about many of the cool things that our portfolio companies are doing. To correct that I will start doing Feature Friday posts. The opener is the feed introduced earlier this week by Shapeways. I love activity feeds. They are a fun way to see what’s happening on a site. But more than that, I have come use them in board meetings as way to think about what a company does (even if they don’t yet have a feed). It’s a powerful way to organize one’s thinking abo...

For a couple of years now I have been complaining to folks in the Harvard administration that the school is woefully behind when it comes to embracing the Internet. So I was thrilled to see the announcement of the edX initiative with MIT yesterday. The two combined with a $60 million commitment will make a formidable force in higher education on the Internet. For people everywhere who want to learn there is an exciting competition starting between some formidable institutions with Coursera (P...

For a couple of years now I have been complaining to folks in the Harvard administration that the school is woefully behind when it comes to embracing the Internet. So I was thrilled to see the announcement of the edX initiative with MIT yesterday. The two combined with a $60 million commitment will make a formidable force in higher education on the Internet. For people everywhere who want to learn there is an exciting competition starting between some formidable institutions with Coursera (P...

I love reading books on my traditional Kindle. I find the eInk display to be easy on my eyes and make extensive use of highlighting. It’s great not to feel tempted to fire up an app or check email while reading which lets me make good progress even on hefty books. But across our family we now have three Kindles with broken screens. At first I suspected that the kids were mistreating the Kindles when they were reading on them. But they insisted that they had done nothing of the sort. Of course...

I love reading books on my traditional Kindle. I find the eInk display to be easy on my eyes and make extensive use of highlighting. It’s great not to feel tempted to fire up an app or check email while reading which lets me make good progress even on hefty books. But across our family we now have three Kindles with broken screens. At first I suspected that the kids were mistreating the Kindles when they were reading on them. But they insisted that they had done nothing of the sort. Of course...

I may have lost a bunch of Tech Tuesday readers with that post on semantics last week, so today I am hoping to gain some back with a much easier topic! We are continuing the cycle on programming by looking at how programs refer to things. Again let’s start by looking at human language. If I say “William Henry Gates III” then I am referring to the co-founder of Microsoft by his full given name. In the right context I could simply say “Bill” and everyone would know who it was. Alternatively, I ...

I may have lost a bunch of Tech Tuesday readers with that post on semantics last week, so today I am hoping to gain some back with a much easier topic! We are continuing the cycle on programming by looking at how programs refer to things. Again let’s start by looking at human language. If I say “William Henry Gates III” then I am referring to the co-founder of Microsoft by his full given name. In the right context I could simply say “Bill” and everyone would know who it was. Alternatively, I ...