I love it when diverse communities and companies on the internet come together to support a cause. Today it is the fight for net neutrality that I wrote about on Monday. Here is what I saw when I just logged into the Tumblr dashboard, which made me smile Every icon had a “slow loading” wheel on it with a big call to action across the top. If you want to participate with your own site it is not too late. You can easily add the modal window through Javascript. Better yet, if you are on Cloudfla...

I love it when diverse communities and companies on the internet come together to support a cause. Today it is the fight for net neutrality that I wrote about on Monday. Here is what I saw when I just logged into the Tumblr dashboard, which made me smile Every icon had a “slow loading” wheel on it with a big call to action across the top. If you want to participate with your own site it is not too late. You can easily add the modal window through Javascript. Better yet, if you are on Cloudfla...

I have written a fair bit about climate change here at Continuations over the last few years. It is one of those slowly creeping threats that democracy is woefully slow and bad at addressing. So I am excited to see that we are finally getting a hopefully massive rally to spur politicians into action. If you live in or near New York and care about this issue (which should be everyone) come to the People’s Climate March this Sunday! March starts at 11.30am between 65th and 86th on Central Park ...

I have written a fair bit about climate change here at Continuations over the last few years. It is one of those slowly creeping threats that democracy is woefully slow and bad at addressing. So I am excited to see that we are finally getting a hopefully massive rally to spur politicians into action. If you live in or near New York and care about this issue (which should be everyone) come to the People’s Climate March this Sunday! March starts at 11.30am between 65th and 86th on Central Park ...

Recent political research has provided evidence that state level corruption increases the further the capital is from the state’s dominant city. Living in New York and having seen the corrupt mess that is Albany this comes as no surprise. As past readers of Continuations know, I am a supporter of Represent.us and the American Anti-corruption Act. Also, here is a longer post that explains why the influence of money in politics has been growing ever more problematic. If you are a registered Dem...

Recent political research has provided evidence that state level corruption increases the further the capital is from the state’s dominant city. Living in New York and having seen the corrupt mess that is Albany this comes as no surprise. As past readers of Continuations know, I am a supporter of Represent.us and the American Anti-corruption Act. Also, here is a longer post that explains why the influence of money in politics has been growing ever more problematic. If you are a registered Dem...

Today is Labor Day which is meant to celebrate the workers movement (as an aside, in Germany and much of the rest of the world this is held on May 1). That might be a good time to think about what organizing labor might mean in the future. One of the major economic trends we are currently seeing is the breakdown of traditional employment and the rise of labor marketplaces for free lancers, such as Uber, Task Rabbit and WorkMarket (to name just a few). The valuations for at least some of these...

Today is Labor Day which is meant to celebrate the workers movement (as an aside, in Germany and much of the rest of the world this is held on May 1). That might be a good time to think about what organizing labor might mean in the future. One of the major economic trends we are currently seeing is the breakdown of traditional employment and the rise of labor marketplaces for free lancers, such as Uber, Task Rabbit and WorkMarket (to name just a few). The valuations for at least some of these...

I will be the first to admit that I am a sucker for a good listicle. That’s probably a result of being overly prone to making lists myself. I am also not offended by native advertising per se. After all it completely predates the internet. Thumbing through pretty much any fashion magazine or one of the glossy local publications like “Westchester” will make that instantly evident. All of this is to say that I am happy for Jonah Peretti and the folks at Buzzfeed about the recent financing led b...

I will be the first to admit that I am a sucker for a good listicle. That’s probably a result of being overly prone to making lists myself. I am also not offended by native advertising per se. After all it completely predates the internet. Thumbing through pretty much any fashion magazine or one of the glossy local publications like “Westchester” will make that instantly evident. All of this is to say that I am happy for Jonah Peretti and the folks at Buzzfeed about the recent financing led b...

This Wednesday, September 10th, is a day of action to alert everyone about the danger of fast and slow lanes for last mile internet access. I have written a lot about this topic here on Continuations. For the perspective of the CEO of a startup, you can read this great piece by Chad Dickerson from Etsy in Wired. So what can you do? For starters you should sign the Battle for the Net citizen letter. Then, if you have a website or service you should add the modal window to let others know to do...

This Wednesday, September 10th, is a day of action to alert everyone about the danger of fast and slow lanes for last mile internet access. I have written a lot about this topic here on Continuations. For the perspective of the CEO of a startup, you can read this great piece by Chad Dickerson from Etsy in Wired. So what can you do? For starters you should sign the Battle for the Net citizen letter. Then, if you have a website or service you should add the modal window to let others know to do...

Today’s release of the latest version of Foursquare has me super excited. It puts together all of the data and capabilities the team there has built over the last five years to provide the best local recommendations: based on lots of detailed data and knowing your tastes. Dennis's vision for Foursquare has always been to create the best local discovery engine – one that’s personalized just for you – by crowdsourcing bits of information from users all over the world. Today brings Foursqua...

Today’s release of the latest version of Foursquare has me super excited. It puts together all of the data and capabilities the team there has built over the last five years to provide the best local recommendations: based on lots of detailed data and knowing your tastes. Dennis's vision for Foursquare has always been to create the best local discovery engine – one that’s personalized just for you – by crowdsourcing bits of information from users all over the world. Today brings Foursqua...

There have been a number of tweets in my timeline roughly saying: “Ferguson, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine — what is going on with the world?” I don’t know that these can all be reduced to a single underlying reason although the current rate of global change likely has something to do with it. There is, however, one thing they all have in common: an abject failure to recognize each other’s humanity. This failure is all the more frustrating at a time when we should all know that we are inhabiting a roc...

There have been a number of tweets in my timeline roughly saying: “Ferguson, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine — what is going on with the world?” I don’t know that these can all be reduced to a single underlying reason although the current rate of global change likely has something to do with it. There is, however, one thing they all have in common: an abject failure to recognize each other’s humanity. This failure is all the more frustrating at a time when we should all know that we are inhabiting a roc...

This summer I have been blogging less. That’s largely because I have been reading more and also been spending more time thinking about some of my favorite topics. All of this has me more convinced than ever that we need to invest heavily in elucidating the interconnections of knowledge. Way too much of our teaching and learning occurs in highly fragmented pieces. I have written about this before but now I have an idea for what to do about it. I want to help organize knowledge around basic con...

This summer I have been blogging less. That’s largely because I have been reading more and also been spending more time thinking about some of my favorite topics. All of this has me more convinced than ever that we need to invest heavily in elucidating the interconnections of knowledge. Way too much of our teaching and learning occurs in highly fragmented pieces. I have written about this before but now I have an idea for what to do about it. I want to help organize knowledge around basic con...

In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to investing. Instead at USV we always ask ourselves “what is different now?” to understand whether the lessons from the past do in fact apply or something profound has changed. This is important because things that failed in the past tend to eventually succeed due to ch...

In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to investing. Instead at USV we always ask ourselves “what is different now?” to understand whether the lessons from the past do in fact apply or something profound has changed. This is important because things that failed in the past tend to eventually succeed due to ch...