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 […]
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 […]
Since the iPhone 6s was released last month anyone who has used the device says it feels like magic. Apple – as a platform company – is so far above the competition it’s hard to fully grasp. There are reasons why pushing down on 3D Touch feels better than any device people have ever touched, […]
In tech and in business (and in economics), network effects measure the value of a product or service against the number of people using it. When a network effect is present, the network becomes more valuable to each user when a new user is added. The internet is perhaps the most famous stack with network […]
Podcast with Benedict Evans talking about ‘first brain’ computing, indoor location, and smart devices as ‘mouse cursors for the physical world‘.
We are quickly approaching an era where smartphones, watches and computers are extensions of us as human beings. They predict what we want to buy, when we should be hungry, what type of music we want to listen to, at what time. They even help cars navigate to where we stand, the driver simply a […]
When Tim Cook was interviewed by Charlie Rose after Apple’s mega launch event a few weeks ago, he scoffed at any mention of competitors, highlighting only Google as Apple’s arch-rival. Apple and Google are entrenched in a modern version of the PC war, and are the only two players with relevancy at the operating system […]
In networking there’s a saying called the last mile problem. It goes as follows: the last mile—or ‘edge’—of the network is the hardest to reach. In mobile, distributing intelligence to the edge has posed an even greater challenge. Why? Because mobile users are always roaming, their location constantly changing in relation to the network. The […]