Sometimes when I see something that’s written about how startups should proceed written by the folks with a voice and brand – many times people with the capital to fund them – I chuckle. The information asymmetry between what may be risky and unproven and what’s easy to tweet as fact is often large. For […]
Venture Capital is both a fascinating career path for an individual and an integral part of the capital markets way beyond just technology today. Over the years these are the types of anecdotes and myths that I’ve gotten a kick out of. They are painfully obvious to me now, but once weren’t. Because of the […]
The easiest way to be discovered right now in technology and perhaps many fields is to create your own independent blog and write. There is a huge dearth in availability of good, current, first party content today. Seeds of inspiration come to us from interesting places and swirl around us continually as we do our […]
Lately there has been a ton of talk about overambitious startups raising too much money to get to unicorn status. It goes like this: the startup is growing, but in order to grow into its crazy valuation, it needs to pour money into paid acquisition channels and meanwhile its unit economics suck. One reality of […]
In June of this year, I had one of those incredible experiences working in technology where you see or hear something and know that the world has changed. It happened while I was sitting in bed at home, watching Apple’s WWDC conference, having just finished the developer session on a new framework called iBeacon. Later […]
There are tons of startup myths out there. To some extent, startups have a mystique that you don’t really understand until you work inside one. And though, as an industry, tech is so forward-thinking and social, unfortunately its echo chamber often drowns out what’s really important. Many key startup learnings simply aren’t shared. This is […]
You will experience moments of debilitating fear in startups and in life. Fear that hits unexpectedly and with varying intensity. A competitor launches, a deal falls through, or you know what? it’s just been fucking cloudy for the last week, and you don’t feel right. Whatever it is. It will happen. In tech startups when […]
The term “product / market fit” has quickly entrenched in to the lexicon of web startups as a litmus test for having achieved a repeatable, scalable business pattern. This term is so useful, and so ingrained in startup culture today that derivative “fit” phrases have cropped up—e.g. David Lee looks for “founder / market fit” […]
Generally speaking, there’s a major lack of transparency around startup equity in the tech world. Often the people who can write about options and salary are VCs / founders who feel they are too dirty to share or can’t properly obscure individuals and stories. It feels like most conversations about equity and pay stay between […]
In November of 2010, just 9 months ago, I wrote a post on TechCrunch about application layer disruption in telecom and messaging, called Why the Carriers Are Losing Their Voice. At the end of the post I wrote: There is simply no doubt that the future of voice and messaging is with companies innovating at […]