On Saturday, Susan and I taught our one day workshop called Learn To Commit for the second time. The event was organized by Makaela Kingsley from the Petricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. We had a terrific group of undergraduate women attend who showed up well prepared and were super engaged throughout the day. Having now taught this twice we will adjust the curriculum based on the lessons learned which includeBuilding your own personal web site is highly motivating. It is surprising...

On Saturday, Susan and I taught our one day workshop called Learn To Commit for the second time. The event was organized by Makaela Kingsley from the Petricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. We had a terrific group of undergraduate women attend who showed up well prepared and were super engaged throughout the day. Having now taught this twice we will adjust the curriculum based on the lessons learned which includeBuilding your own personal web site is highly motivating. It is surprising...

So I admit that I enjoyed watching Lucy, the Luc Besson movie with Scarlett Johanssen as the eponymous Lucy, who by virtue of an inadvertent overdose of a designer drug manages to use 100% of her brain capacity. She turns into a super hero who can control the physical environment by thought. Wildly exaggerated in every which way but entertaining nonetheless. Of course people were quick to point out that the idea that we use only 10% of our brains is a myth in the first place. But there is a w...

So I admit that I enjoyed watching Lucy, the Luc Besson movie with Scarlett Johanssen as the eponymous Lucy, who by virtue of an inadvertent overdose of a designer drug manages to use 100% of her brain capacity. She turns into a super hero who can control the physical environment by thought. Wildly exaggerated in every which way but entertaining nonetheless. Of course people were quick to point out that the idea that we use only 10% of our brains is a myth in the first place. But there is a w...

The magic of markets is that they aggregate information from lots of individual actors into prices. As such they are an amazing coordination mechanism that has done wonders for guiding economies. But prices are also noisy and especially so when it comes to assets and in particular to the share price of companies. This post is a reminder to focus on fundamentals and largely ignore short term swings in share price. The price for pizza is determined by the demand and supply of pizza. Both of tho...

The magic of markets is that they aggregate information from lots of individual actors into prices. As such they are an amazing coordination mechanism that has done wonders for guiding economies. But prices are also noisy and especially so when it comes to assets and in particular to the share price of companies. This post is a reminder to focus on fundamentals and largely ignore short term swings in share price. The price for pizza is determined by the demand and supply of pizza. Both of tho...

Regular readers of Continuations know that I have been writing a fair bit about Basic Income and have also given several talks including Techonomy Detroit and TEDxNY. I started thinking about Basic Income after writing a series of posts about employment towards the end of 2012 and started researching the topic in more depth in 2013. I am thrilled to see that there is now an explosion of interest as can be seen on the following Google trends chartEurope has been taking the lead with a commitme...

Regular readers of Continuations know that I have been writing a fair bit about Basic Income and have also given several talks including Techonomy Detroit and TEDxNY. I started thinking about Basic Income after writing a series of posts about employment towards the end of 2012 and started researching the topic in more depth in 2013. I am thrilled to see that there is now an explosion of interest as can be seen on the following Google trends chartEurope has been taking the lead with a commitme...

Much like everyone else I woke up this morning to the news that David Bowie has passed away. I was not an ardent Bowie fan but had always been impressed by just how innovative he was, not just musically but in his entire persona. He also pioneered the celebrity bond by bundling up his future royalty streams in 1997. What made me fall in love though with Bowie was his opening performance at the Concert for New York City. It is easy to forget but that concert took place less than 6 weeks after ...

Much like everyone else I woke up this morning to the news that David Bowie has passed away. I was not an ardent Bowie fan but had always been impressed by just how innovative he was, not just musically but in his entire persona. He also pioneered the celebrity bond by bundling up his future royalty streams in 1997. What made me fall in love though with Bowie was his opening performance at the Concert for New York City. It is easy to forget but that concert took place less than 6 weeks after ...

My primary phone has been an Android phone for a long time. This is mostly for philosophical reasons as I highly value general purpose computing. The ability to easily execute any code on a device that I have purchased is extremely important. Of course this comes with the potential downside that the device is harder to secure. Last night I discovered for the first time that I had a piece of malware on my phone. It affected only Chrome and was adding links to page content, for instance taking ...

My primary phone has been an Android phone for a long time. This is mostly for philosophical reasons as I highly value general purpose computing. The ability to easily execute any code on a device that I have purchased is extremely important. Of course this comes with the potential downside that the device is harder to secure. Last night I discovered for the first time that I had a piece of malware on my phone. It affected only Chrome and was adding links to page content, for instance taking ...

We just spent two weeks in India traveling to some of the famous tourist destinations including Varanasi, Agra and Jodhpur. It was an intense sensory experience of colors, sounds and smells that this blog post won’t even try to do justice. Instead here are some things that stuck out for me (in no particular order): First, India celebrates Christmas. This came as a surprise to me as India only has about 2% Christians and yet Christmas is a national holiday. There were Christmas decorations in ...

We just spent two weeks in India traveling to some of the famous tourist destinations including Varanasi, Agra and Jodhpur. It was an intense sensory experience of colors, sounds and smells that this blog post won’t even try to do justice. Instead here are some things that stuck out for me (in no particular order): First, India celebrates Christmas. This came as a surprise to me as India only has about 2% Christians and yet Christmas is a national holiday. There were Christmas decorations in ...

Continuing with the Ask Me Anything series, today’s question is about startup stress Part of reducing startup stress is to take time off. And that’s exactly what I will be doing. We are going away for a family trip and there won’t be any updates to Continuations until the second week of January.

Continuing with the Ask Me Anything series, today’s question is about startup stress Part of reducing startup stress is to take time off. And that’s exactly what I will be doing. We are going away for a family trip and there won’t be any updates to Continuations until the second week of January.

There has been a fair bit of coverage of the potential dangers that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might pose for humanity. Here some questions about AGI with my currently best answers. 1. What is the difference between AI and AGI? Artificial Intelligence (AI) can accomplish specific tasks that we historically had a hard time to get computers to do well, such as recognize faces, categorize an image, drive a car, make a robot walk, etc. AI is here today. Artificial General Intelligen...

There has been a fair bit of coverage of the potential dangers that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) might pose for humanity. Here some questions about AGI with my currently best answers. 1. What is the difference between AI and AGI? Artificial Intelligence (AI) can accomplish specific tasks that we historically had a hard time to get computers to do well, such as recognize faces, categorize an image, drive a car, make a robot walk, etc. AI is here today. Artificial General Intelligen...

Natural language is the general purpose “API” for humans and it seems it may become the same for software. Bots are all the rage on several platforms including Telegram and now Slack. Facebook is experimenting with M. There are bots to schedule meetings. Bots to order lunch. And so much more. Our analyst Jonathan has wrote a great post about this development. Many of these bots are being built by new startups that are raising venture capital. This is fantastic news with regard to advancing hu...

Natural language is the general purpose “API” for humans and it seems it may become the same for software. Bots are all the rage on several platforms including Telegram and now Slack. Facebook is experimenting with M. There are bots to schedule meetings. Bots to order lunch. And so much more. Our analyst Jonathan has wrote a great post about this development. Many of these bots are being built by new startups that are raising venture capital. This is fantastic news with regard to advancing hu...