While on family vacation in Europe, the SIM card in my Blackberry broke. I have no idea how that could even happen, seeing how it is a chip on a piece of plastic, but it provided an interesting experiment that I would not otherwise have engaged in! During the first few hours I instinctively (addictedly?) looked at my BlackBerry several times to check for new emails. By Day 2 I was cured of that habit and only looked at my Blackberry when I needed the time (I no longer wear a watch). By Day 3 ...

While on family vacation in Europe, the SIM card in my Blackberry broke. I have no idea how that could even happen, seeing how it is a chip on a piece of plastic, but it provided an interesting experiment that I would not otherwise have engaged in! During the first few hours I instinctively (addictedly?) looked at my BlackBerry several times to check for new emails. By Day 2 I was cured of that habit and only looked at my Blackberry when I needed the time (I no longer wear a watch). By Day 3 ...

Saw Inception on Sunday evening and loved it despite (because?) some its glaring flaws. It is a spectacular mashup of some of my favorite movie elements: philosophy, action, heist, stunning imagery and more action- all on a huge IMAX screen (the way movies are meant to be seen). The philosophy element is about some of the deep unresolved questions around consciousness, free will and our potentially tenuous grasp on reality. The action element is well action including fist fights, car chases, ...

Saw Inception on Sunday evening and loved it despite (because?) some its glaring flaws. It is a spectacular mashup of some of my favorite movie elements: philosophy, action, heist, stunning imagery and more action- all on a huge IMAX screen (the way movies are meant to be seen). The philosophy element is about some of the deep unresolved questions around consciousness, free will and our potentially tenuous grasp on reality. The action element is well action including fist fights, car chases, ...

I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a completely different world and many individuals and almost all institutions are in denial about how ...

I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a completely different world and many individuals and almost all institutions are in denial about how ...

I am on the road in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. It is interesting that OSCON is here again after being in Silicon Valley in 2009. In 2009, I happened to sit down at lunch next to a development officer for the city of Portland who said he was attending because he wanted to make sure they could bring the conference back to Portland! There already are some interesting startups based here, such as JanRain and Jive, which just announced a $30 million funding round, and the city is clearly attracti...

I am on the road in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. It is interesting that OSCON is here again after being in Silicon Valley in 2009. In 2009, I happened to sit down at lunch next to a development officer for the city of Portland who said he was attending because he wanted to make sure they could bring the conference back to Portland! There already are some interesting startups based here, such as JanRain and Jive, which just announced a $30 million funding round, and the city is clearly attracti...

Last night I managed to fix my ReadyNAS NV+ with a replacement PSU purchased from PC Warehouse (bypassing customer support but shelling out a bit over $100). I updated the forums with the relevant links and am happy to once again have a running RAID array for backup at home. More importantly though, this incident made it amply clear that in addition to my local backup I absolutely need a cloud backup as well. Would love to get recommendations on what to use. Ideally, I would like a single pro...

Last night I managed to fix my ReadyNAS NV+ with a replacement PSU purchased from PC Warehouse (bypassing customer support but shelling out a bit over $100). I updated the forums with the relevant links and am happy to once again have a running RAID array for backup at home. More importantly though, this incident made it amply clear that in addition to my local backup I absolutely need a cloud backup as well. Would love to get recommendations on what to use. Ideally, I would like a single pro...

I am glad to see the net neutrality debate raging. As Union Square Ventures and on our personal blogs (AVC, Continuations) we have long been proponents of net neutrality (the USV link is from 2006!). Our own bias here is clear: we are pro-startup and pro-innovation. Both are of course essential to the venture capital business, but we believe they are also the lifeblood of the economy. Surprisingly, a lot of people who argue against net neutrality don’t seem to make the connection to innovatio...

I am glad to see the net neutrality debate raging. As Union Square Ventures and on our personal blogs (AVC, Continuations) we have long been proponents of net neutrality (the USV link is from 2006!). Our own bias here is clear: we are pro-startup and pro-innovation. Both are of course essential to the venture capital business, but we believe they are also the lifeblood of the economy. Surprisingly, a lot of people who argue against net neutrality don’t seem to make the connection to innovatio...

Fred has been posting a wonderful series of MBA Mondays posts that I recommend to everyone who wants to know more about the business side of startups. If you come from the engineering side, it may also help to think about business using engineering principles. My favorite one is the idea of a “single binding constraint." When the execution of a program runs into a hardware constraint, it tends to be a single binding constraint: the program is either CPU-bound, memory-bound or IO-bound but gen...

Fred has been posting a wonderful series of MBA Mondays posts that I recommend to everyone who wants to know more about the business side of startups. If you come from the engineering side, it may also help to think about business using engineering principles. My favorite one is the idea of a “single binding constraint." When the execution of a program runs into a hardware constraint, it tends to be a single binding constraint: the program is either CPU-bound, memory-bound or IO-bound but gen...

So I am finally midstream in migrating off Exchange and onto Google. Email - check (gmail). Contacts - check (google contacts). Calendar - check (gcal). Notes - what no Google notes? Huh? I may be overlooking something obvious here, but it doesn’t seem as if Google has a direct equivalent of notes. Now as it happens, I use notes a lot. For instance, I keep a running list of ideas for blog posts as a note. I have notes for each portfolio company. There are notes for travel destinations. In gen...

So I am finally midstream in migrating off Exchange and onto Google. Email - check (gmail). Contacts - check (google contacts). Calendar - check (gcal). Notes - what no Google notes? Huh? I may be overlooking something obvious here, but it doesn’t seem as if Google has a direct equivalent of notes. Now as it happens, I use notes a lot. For instance, I keep a running list of ideas for blog posts as a note. I have notes for each portfolio company. There are notes for travel destinations. In gen...

Rob Kalin from Etsy has referred to customer support as marketing and Etsy has significantly enhanced its customers support team to cut down response time dramatically. Danny Meyer in his book Setting the Table and the actual operations of his restaurants also makes helping the customer central to the experience. I believe this to be especially important in an age where a customer whose problem is not addressed can tweet and blog about it as I am about to do with regard to my recent experienc...

Rob Kalin from Etsy has referred to customer support as marketing and Etsy has significantly enhanced its customers support team to cut down response time dramatically. Danny Meyer in his book Setting the Table and the actual operations of his restaurants also makes helping the customer central to the experience. I believe this to be especially important in an age where a customer whose problem is not addressed can tweet and blog about it as I am about to do with regard to my recent experienc...

A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial mistake in the process). But as I started to manage people I came to realize that if you want them to try thi...

A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial mistake in the process). But as I started to manage people I came to realize that if you want them to try thi...