The amazing team at our portfolio company Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems (formerly known as PBXs, which – if anyone remembers – is short for Private Branch Exchange). Most legacy PBXs are incredibly hard to program. For instance, the one we have at Union Square Ventures, has some completely proprietary setup which essentially requires us to pay someone every time ...

The amazing team at our portfolio company Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems (formerly known as PBXs, which – if anyone remembers – is short for Private Branch Exchange). Most legacy PBXs are incredibly hard to program. For instance, the one we have at Union Square Ventures, has some completely proprietary setup which essentially requires us to pay someone every time ...

Yesterday was a fertile day for comments on comments: John Gruber, Bijan Sabet and then Marco Arment all provided interesting food for thought. For starters, I firmly believe that what someone chooses to do on their own blog is and should always be entirely their own decision. It is their property after all and nobody is forced to go there or interact with it. That includes the choices to have no comments at all, to have moderated comments, to allow comments *and* delete them after the fact (...

Yesterday was a fertile day for comments on comments: John Gruber, Bijan Sabet and then Marco Arment all provided interesting food for thought. For starters, I firmly believe that what someone chooses to do on their own blog is and should always be entirely their own decision. It is their property after all and nobody is forced to go there or interact with it. That includes the choices to have no comments at all, to have moderated comments, to allow comments *and* delete them after the fact (...

It is 2010 and while we don’t have jetpacks, it doesn’t seem too much to ask to not have to deal with paper stock certificates. Yet most early stage deals that I see still wind up sending out physical paper certificates. While it may seem like a convenient way to push out the expense of keeping track of certificates to holders, that is not really the case. Whenever a transaction takes place that requires the certificates, such as a secondary sale or an exit, there are people who can’t find th...

It is 2010 and while we don’t have jetpacks, it doesn’t seem too much to ask to not have to deal with paper stock certificates. Yet most early stage deals that I see still wind up sending out physical paper certificates. While it may seem like a convenient way to push out the expense of keeping track of certificates to holders, that is not really the case. Whenever a transaction takes place that requires the certificates, such as a secondary sale or an exit, there are people who can’t find th...

Last week I wrote briefly about my position in the carried interest taxation debate. Since then the debate has gotten a bit more heated with opposing posts by Chris Dixon and James Robinson. Chris argued that this is a matter of basic tax fairness and Jim provided two (new) arguments for how increasing the tax rate on VCs might result in fewer dollars for startups. Jim’s first argument is what economists call “tax incidence." When you tax someone they will lay off part of the tax on their cus...

Last week I wrote briefly about my position in the carried interest taxation debate. Since then the debate has gotten a bit more heated with opposing posts by Chris Dixon and James Robinson. Chris argued that this is a matter of basic tax fairness and Jim provided two (new) arguments for how increasing the tax rate on VCs might result in fewer dollars for startups. Jim’s first argument is what economists call “tax incidence." When you tax someone they will lay off part of the tax on their cus...

There are certain topics that periodically rear their heads, such as privacy. The one that is on my mind this morning is attention. I don’t know whether there really is a deep attention crisis, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that we may well have a problem. Yesterday evening, I was watching my son’s Little League coach (another dad) desperately trying to get and keep the attention of a dozen 10-year old boys. Now that might have always been a hopeless task, but this was a stunning dis...

There are certain topics that periodically rear their heads, such as privacy. The one that is on my mind this morning is attention. I don’t know whether there really is a deep attention crisis, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that we may well have a problem. Yesterday evening, I was watching my son’s Little League coach (another dad) desperately trying to get and keep the attention of a dozen 10-year old boys. Now that might have always been a hopeless task, but this was a stunning dis...

I am meeting with a bunch of folks from a major ad agency today to talk about the future of the web. This is of course one of my favorite topics! Here are some of the highlights of what I am planning to cover:You ain’t seen nothing yet: expect deep transformation of many industries including advertisingA brief history of newspapers as illustration of the forces at workDisruption from unbundling and distributed content generationAdOne (the old one) vs CraigslistIndeed vs traditional job boards...

I am meeting with a bunch of folks from a major ad agency today to talk about the future of the web. This is of course one of my favorite topics! Here are some of the highlights of what I am planning to cover:You ain’t seen nothing yet: expect deep transformation of many industries including advertisingA brief history of newspapers as illustration of the forces at workDisruption from unbundling and distributed content generationAdOne (the old one) vs CraigslistIndeed vs traditional job boards...

I am a huge fan of Dan Ariely’s writing because I believe it makes behavioral economics relevant to every day business decision making. I have just finished the first two chapters of his new book “The Upside of Irrationality” and can already strongly recommend it. Chapter 2 in particular is be a must read for anyone who manages people but in particular for folks who manage engineers. In it, Dan describes a series of experiments involving MIT students building with Legos that are cunningly con...

I am a huge fan of Dan Ariely’s writing because I believe it makes behavioral economics relevant to every day business decision making. I have just finished the first two chapters of his new book “The Upside of Irrationality” and can already strongly recommend it. Chapter 2 in particular is be a must read for anyone who manages people but in particular for folks who manage engineers. In it, Dan describes a series of experiments involving MIT students building with Legos that are cunningly con...

I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable. Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook. The emails were comma separated. Outlook didn’t like that – and popped up a dialog saying something was wrong, including suggesting that I replace commas with semicolons. I copied the email...

I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable. Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook. The emails were comma separated. Outlook didn’t like that – and popped up a dialog saying something was wrong, including suggesting that I replace commas with semicolons. I copied the email...

One of the key arguments for net neutrality is that it fosters independent and rapid innovation at both the transport and application layers. It is instructive to look at a different type of network to see what happens to innovation in the absence of net neutrality. Visa and Mastercard have built dominant positions in payment networks by tightly controlling all aspects of the network, such as what devices can be connected to it and who can issue and process cards. The result has been dramatic...

One of the key arguments for net neutrality is that it fosters independent and rapid innovation at both the transport and application layers. It is instructive to look at a different type of network to see what happens to innovation in the absence of net neutrality. Visa and Mastercard have built dominant positions in payment networks by tightly controlling all aspects of the network, such as what devices can be connected to it and who can issue and process cards. The result has been dramatic...

I was really surprised that Steve Jobs did not announce more cloud capabilities for Apple during his WWDC keynote. It had been rumored that MobileMe might become free and Apple has been investing heavily in data centers. I believe that this is critical for Apple if they want to maintain their currently super impressive position. The iPhone 4 is cool and has some neat innovations but none of them are either absolutely critical for new users or way ahead of other phones. For instance, a front f...

I was really surprised that Steve Jobs did not announce more cloud capabilities for Apple during his WWDC keynote. It had been rumored that MobileMe might become free and Apple has been investing heavily in data centers. I believe that this is critical for Apple if they want to maintain their currently super impressive position. The iPhone 4 is cool and has some neat innovations but none of them are either absolutely critical for new users or way ahead of other phones. For instance, a front f...