Probably the most interesting exchange on yesterday’s VC Panel at Google I/O was around how investors think about open versus closed systems. Dave McClure got the most memorable line of the day with “Open is for losers." Dave was obviously being provocative on purpose. My own thinking here was captured by comments from Chris Dixon and Brad Feld. Chris pointed out that open is the basis for more overall consumer surplus generation (i.e. more total net benefit to society), while closed is the b...

I am headed out to Google I/O and am really looking forward to it. I greatly enjoy developer-oriented conferences and am looking forward to seeing a bunch of interesting demos in the Sandbox. This afternoon, I will be on a panel. While panels often suck and I have been on my share of those, I believe this one will at a minimum be entertaining – since it has a bunch of people who all speak their minds, including Dave McClure, Chris Dixon, Brad Feld and Paul Graham – and to top it off, the pane...

Probably the most interesting exchange on yesterday’s VC Panel at Google I/O was around how investors think about open versus closed systems. Dave McClure got the most memorable line of the day with “Open is for losers." Dave was obviously being provocative on purpose. My own thinking here was captured by comments from Chris Dixon and Brad Feld. Chris pointed out that open is the basis for more overall consumer surplus generation (i.e. more total net benefit to society), while closed is the b...

I am headed out to Google I/O and am really looking forward to it. I greatly enjoy developer-oriented conferences and am looking forward to seeing a bunch of interesting demos in the Sandbox. This afternoon, I will be on a panel. While panels often suck and I have been on my share of those, I believe this one will at a minimum be entertaining – since it has a bunch of people who all speak their minds, including Dave McClure, Chris Dixon, Brad Feld and Paul Graham – and to top it off, the pane...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

Periodically, I find that a week comes along in which a ton of important stuff on and for the web comes to a boil all at once. This is one of those weeks. Here are just some of the things that I am looking atThe Release of Office 2010 and the fight between hybrid mode (desktop + web) versus online only Facebook’s extraordinarily complex privacy settings and its all-hands meeting to address the issue at the same time as the small alternative Diaspora project gets big time press and becomes a b...

Periodically, I find that a week comes along in which a ton of important stuff on and for the web comes to a boil all at once. This is one of those weeks. Here are just some of the things that I am looking atThe Release of Office 2010 and the fight between hybrid mode (desktop + web) versus online only Facebook’s extraordinarily complex privacy settings and its all-hands meeting to address the issue at the same time as the small alternative Diaspora project gets big time press and becomes a b...

I believe that PDF and Flash will hang around for quite some time. They are too widespread to disappear quickly. But I am excited about the rise of HTML5 and the gradual replacement of these closed formats. For instance, Scribd’s move to HTML5 is one such step. The reason for my excitement is mostly because I don’t like how PDF and Flash often break basic ingredients of the web, such as linking and search (yes, I am aware that there are workarounds, but they are ugly). But there is one additi...

I believe that PDF and Flash will hang around for quite some time. They are too widespread to disappear quickly. But I am excited about the rise of HTML5 and the gradual replacement of these closed formats. For instance, Scribd’s move to HTML5 is one such step. The reason for my excitement is mostly because I don’t like how PDF and Flash often break basic ingredients of the web, such as linking and search (yes, I am aware that there are workarounds, but they are ugly). But there is one additi...

I love learning new things and have written about learning on this blog several times before. But I am also a fan of observing mastery. I seem to remember reading in Gladwell’s Outliers, that mastery requires at least 10,000 hours of doing something. This makes it unlikely that I will achieve mastery in most of the things I am doing outside my professional live. That doesn’t prevent me from deeply enjoying the effortlessness displayed by masters. Three very different recent examples come to m...

I love learning new things and have written about learning on this blog several times before. But I am also a fan of observing mastery. I seem to remember reading in Gladwell’s Outliers, that mastery requires at least 10,000 hours of doing something. This makes it unlikely that I will achieve mastery in most of the things I am doing outside my professional live. That doesn’t prevent me from deeply enjoying the effortlessness displayed by masters. Three very different recent examples come to m...

It is very rare that I find myself disagreeing with Chris Dixon, but the other day Chris tweetedbusiness plan contests are a terrible idea. investors care far more about founders’ bios. make it a bio pitch if you need to have contests.I will be heading up to Boston tomorrow to judge MIT’s 100K competition and have a pretty different take on it. The purpose of a business plan competition is to get students excited about startups, which is – as Roger Ehrenberg points out today – critical to the...

It is very rare that I find myself disagreeing with Chris Dixon, but the other day Chris tweetedbusiness plan contests are a terrible idea. investors care far more about founders’ bios. make it a bio pitch if you need to have contests.I will be heading up to Boston tomorrow to judge MIT’s 100K competition and have a pretty different take on it. The purpose of a business plan competition is to get students excited about startups, which is – as Roger Ehrenberg points out today – critical to the...

Tonight I am giving a talk at the First NYC Digital Learning Meetup. The event is organized by the folks from Startl, which aims to support and accelerate the development of companies that apply technology to enable learner-centered education. I am very much looking forward to speaking, as “Hacking Education” has been a long-standing interest for me. My talk will be about the incredible opportunities that the web represents for learning and education, but also the challenges faced by startups...

Tonight I am giving a talk at the First NYC Digital Learning Meetup. The event is organized by the folks from Startl, which aims to support and accelerate the development of companies that apply technology to enable learner-centered education. I am very much looking forward to speaking, as “Hacking Education” has been a long-standing interest for me. My talk will be about the incredible opportunities that the web represents for learning and education, but also the challenges faced by startups...

Yesterday I read not one but two separate posts about removing features from products (sorry - no links right now as I am on BB only). This is a crucial topic for any software product / web service. In the physical world there are limits to creating monstrosities by piling on too many features. Buildings will collapse if you add too many floors to the top. Planes won’t fly if you load them up with too much stuff. In software the only limits to complexity appear to be what the developers can w...

Yesterday I read not one but two separate posts about removing features from products (sorry - no links right now as I am on BB only). This is a crucial topic for any software product / web service. In the physical world there are limits to creating monstrosities by piling on too many features. Buildings will collapse if you add too many floors to the top. Planes won’t fly if you load them up with too much stuff. In software the only limits to complexity appear to be what the developers can w...

I am on my way to Boston for MIT’s 100K contest finals. One of the wonderful things about participating as a judge in this is that it made me look at plans for businesses that are completely different from the ones I think about every day. Despite not knowing several of the industries well or at all (especially pharma), it was interesting to see how nonetheless certain questions are still relevant, such as how well the team appears to cover the necessary key competencies. I will be looking to...

I am on my way to Boston for MIT’s 100K contest finals. One of the wonderful things about participating as a judge in this is that it made me look at plans for businesses that are completely different from the ones I think about every day. Despite not knowing several of the industries well or at all (especially pharma), it was interesting to see how nonetheless certain questions are still relevant, such as how well the team appears to cover the necessary key competencies. I will be looking to...