When I first came here as an exchange student at age 16, I fell in love with the US. Compared to my native Germany, I felt a wonderful sense of possibility. That is still the case today for many of the businesses we look at and invest in, but I worry about the future of the US. There appears to be a parallel between the US today and Great Britain at the end of the colonial period in the 20th Century. Great Britain expended its resources on ruling a large empire. Those resources were not avail...

When I first came here as an exchange student at age 16, I fell in love with the US. Compared to my native Germany, I felt a wonderful sense of possibility. That is still the case today for many of the businesses we look at and invest in, but I worry about the future of the US. There appears to be a parallel between the US today and Great Britain at the end of the colonial period in the 20th Century. Great Britain expended its resources on ruling a large empire. Those resources were not avail...

I have been reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody." While I was cringing through the chapter on organizations and transaction costs (which manages to ignore the 70 years of economics of the firm that followed Coase’s paper), I loved the chapters on how personal web publishing is changing the very nature of journalism. In those chapters is a real nugget in a section titled "Fame Happens." Clay gives a great definition of fame as occuring when inbound attention exceeds the ability to...

I have been reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody." While I was cringing through the chapter on organizations and transaction costs (which manages to ignore the 70 years of economics of the firm that followed Coase’s paper), I loved the chapters on how personal web publishing is changing the very nature of journalism. In those chapters is a real nugget in a section titled "Fame Happens." Clay gives a great definition of fame as occuring when inbound attention exceeds the ability to...

Several of the companies in our portfolio have gone through extended and often heated internal discussions about which programming language to use for backend development. In these discussions I have encountered a bunch of arguments that I find myself disagreeing with based on experience. I am presenting these generically even though they are often made with respect to particular languages. The point is that I disagree with the logic of the argument applied to any language. NEW language has a...

Several of the companies in our portfolio have gone through extended and often heated internal discussions about which programming language to use for backend development. In these discussions I have encountered a bunch of arguments that I find myself disagreeing with based on experience. I am presenting these generically even though they are often made with respect to particular languages. The point is that I disagree with the logic of the argument applied to any language. NEW language has a...

A friend of mine likes to say “You never know when you had a good day” by which he means that only time will tell the true impact of a particular event - something that looks favorable on the day it occurs may not turn out to be so and vice versa. This came to mind when I saw this morning that MSFT had called off the YHOO offer. I could see YHOO shares falling dramatically and not recovering and to add insult to injury having MSFT pick it up at a much lower price (or News Corp or someone else...

A friend of mine likes to say “You never know when you had a good day” by which he means that only time will tell the true impact of a particular event - something that looks favorable on the day it occurs may not turn out to be so and vice versa. This came to mind when I saw this morning that MSFT had called off the YHOO offer. I could see YHOO shares falling dramatically and not recovering and to add insult to injury having MSFT pick it up at a much lower price (or News Corp or someone else...

Spent some time today catching up on comments from my crazy Friday. I have already learned a ton from the thoughtful comments – many thanks! (Also thanks to Fred for sending folks over here). Replying to comments by email via disqus is super convenient for short comments. For longer comments, especially ones that refer to other comments or include links, I still need to see the web version, but maybe I will get better at that (hey – just started getting comments!). For some of the long and re...

Spent some time today catching up on comments from my crazy Friday. I have already learned a ton from the thoughtful comments – many thanks! (Also thanks to Fred for sending folks over here). Replying to comments by email via disqus is super convenient for short comments. For longer comments, especially ones that refer to other comments or include links, I still need to see the web version, but maybe I will get better at that (hey – just started getting comments!). For some of the long and re...

I understand that the high price of gasoline at the pump is hitting some folks hard. But the federal gas tax moratorium proposed by McCain and Clinton is a terrible idea for addressing the problem and amounts to the worst kind of pandering. We want people to use less gasoline not more and high prices are the best way to achieve this. Yes, people will drive less and that will mean lower sales at the mall and at restaurants which may further slow down the economy but I believe that’s inevitable...

I understand that the high price of gasoline at the pump is hitting some folks hard. But the federal gas tax moratorium proposed by McCain and Clinton is a terrible idea for addressing the problem and amounts to the worst kind of pandering. We want people to use less gasoline not more and high prices are the best way to achieve this. Yes, people will drive less and that will mean lower sales at the mall and at restaurants which may further slow down the economy but I believe that’s inevitable...

Many of the high growth companies in our portfolio have run into scaling issues. There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between the choice of architecture and organizational scaling. Some architectures lend themselves much better to organizational scaling than others. A horizontal approach with a Data Access Layer, a Business Logic Layer, and a Presentation Layer suffers from a lot of organizational c...

Many of the high growth companies in our portfolio have run into scaling issues. There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between the choice of architecture and organizational scaling. Some architectures lend themselves much better to organizational scaling than others. A horizontal approach with a Data Access Layer, a Business Logic Layer, and a Presentation Layer suffers from a lot of organizational c...

At USV we have been thinking a lot about the nature of competition as the cloud computing era takes hold. The three closely related questions we are interested in are: How does cloud computing change competition at the “application” layer? How does cloud computing change the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? How does cloud computing change competition in the “infrastructure” layer?Application and infrastructure are in quotation marks because they are convenient shorthands ...

At USV we have been thinking a lot about the nature of competition as the cloud computing era takes hold. The three closely related questions we are interested in are: How does cloud computing change competition at the “application” layer? How does cloud computing change the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? How does cloud computing change competition in the “infrastructure” layer?Application and infrastructure are in quotation marks because they are convenient shorthands ...

I am working on a blog post about technology choices in startups, in particular the question that seems to arise in everyone of our companies about which programming language to use. I started writing earlier in the day than I usually do, but found that I had so many thoughts on the subject that I only managed to get halfway through the post. Then I had a 6 hour board meeting followed by two conference calls. Now I have spent the last 20 minutes trying to write the second half of the post and...

I am working on a blog post about technology choices in startups, in particular the question that seems to arise in everyone of our companies about which programming language to use. I started writing earlier in the day than I usually do, but found that I had so many thoughts on the subject that I only managed to get halfway through the post. Then I had a 6 hour board meeting followed by two conference calls. Now I have spent the last 20 minutes trying to write the second half of the post and...

In building a business it’s generally considered a good idea to listen to your customers. The idea is that if your product/site/service is a better fit with customers’ needs you will have more of them. As it turns out though, listening to customers is a lot easier said than done. First, which customers should you listen to? Is it the early adopters or should you try to identify what you believe to be “mainstream” customers? This turns out to be very hard to answer. If you don’t keep the early...

In building a business it’s generally considered a good idea to listen to your customers. The idea is that if your product/site/service is a better fit with customers’ needs you will have more of them. As it turns out though, listening to customers is a lot easier said than done. First, which customers should you listen to? Is it the early adopters or should you try to identify what you believe to be “mainstream” customers? This turns out to be very hard to answer. If you don’t keep the early...