Writing

The title of this online space is "Maximizing the serendipity around you" which comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, and is as much of a universal business rule I've ever heard and followed.To me it means that you [...]  Read more

There has been much debate in the last week over platforms, holes, products and ecosystems.All of it made me think back to my youth, the days of AOL, around 1995-1997. Back then, one of AOL's innovations was a publishing platform [...]  Read more

I was thinking this morning that one way to create a service of real value is to ensure that the way a user experiences that service is commensurate with the value you are trying to deliver to the user. Feels [...]  Read more

There is an amazing wealth of innovation around early stage venture financing, most of which developed in just the past few years.There are new models of creating companies out of innovation: Seed Camp, Y Combinator, Tech Stars are just three, [...]  Read more

"Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. [...]  Read more

The technology industry has a seeming lack of institutional memory - the constant cycle of invention and reinvention while barely looking to the past. It's so optimistic in nature.But we sometimes need to look to the past to sharpen our [...]  Read more

We all want to create or invest in platform businesses - those that enable other businesses or participants to add features, content, build other things into/onto the platform, extract associated but not directly related content therefrom, thereby creating infinite scale [...]  Read more

"Lesson number two: don't get high on your own supply" -- Elvira HancockAt betaworks we try to (over) simplify some key principles (no business development, for example) to operate our businesses, and look for inspiration for those ideas in disparate [...]  Read more

We have a saying at betaworks - "no business development allowed."Of course, it's tongue in check and we don't really mean it (well, maybe we do), but it represents the application of one of our core business scaling principles. Namely, [...]  Read more