People have been admiring Apple’s recent stock price run—at the beginning of 2019 Apple hit a year low and has since skyrocketed 65% to its highest point in history. Reflecting on Apple’s strategy to get here, which I wrote about in 2015, I found this gem from John Gruber when he linked to my post […]
In April I wrote a post about startup capital efficiency, before the Uber IPO and WeWork debacle, that was at the top of Techmeme and Hacker News. It’s a worthwhile read for the simplicity of what I communicated at the time. The lesson and takeaway is though they don’t lead with it, investors do care […]
The internet’s next major act will be augmented vision – smart glasses. Svelte, stylish, unnoticeably tech, and capable of delivering a new reality based on what is around you. Today, we are bound by a 6″ screen. Tomorrow, the internet will be all around us, absorbed visually – and invisibly – in ways that make […]
As a medium, audio seems to seize a unique resonance from its listeners. Just as if you ran into an author on the street a certain familiarity would emanate from the settings you yourself constructed out of her words, commonality can breed inside a listener through hearing a person’s words and stories, magnified I’m sure […]
Just as I had no plans to write about Tesla a few weeks back I had zero to write on Uber. But the takes on its IPO have been obscured by tomorrow’s fuzzy reality around autonomous vehicles. Full autonomy and ‘Robo-Taxies’ in the medium term are a total myth. I covered technically in depth […]
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 […]
Last week when Tesla launched its dedicated autonomy ASIC, a lot of the focus was on this new hardware which allowed redundancy and incredibly fast neural processing. Undertaking this hardware development and executing on it during Tesla’s production hell is an unprecedented feat for any company, never mind a carmaker. As I wrote in Tesla’s […]
Since the Model S was released anyone who has ridden in the car says it feels like magic. The model 3 extended on this, arriving late but suggesting Tesla – as a car company – honed an ability to produce experiences far above most others, even though they started from scratch. There are reasons why […]
There are occasionally news events about a startup being acquired for around the money-in after raising large amounts of venture capital. One of the conversations around funding that isn’t really ever discussed much from my experience — and I even mean between founders and their investors — is the discussion of capital efficiency and the […]
A “trapdoor” function in cryptography is one that is easy to perform one way, but is difficult to apply in reverse efficiently. The analogy to a “trapdoor” is something like this: It’s easy to fall through a trapdoor, but it’s very hard to climb back out and get to where you started unless you have […]