Writing

In my What Is Going To Happen In 2019 post, I wrote: I expect we will see IPOs from big names like Uber/Lyft/Slack, although I also expect those deals will get priced well below the lofty expectations they have in [...]  Read more

Many people who follow tech know that Spotify has filed a complaint with the European Commission regarding the challenges that Spotify has doing business in the iOS app store. I am very sympathetic to Spotify’s complaint. In my post last [...]  Read more

While we wait for the blockchain/crypto technology to scale to the point where it can be the foundation of mainstream consumer applications (games, social media, e-commerce, etc), there is a sector where scalability is a little less important and where [...]  Read more

Startups are generally not funded by just one investor. They are usually funded by a collection of investors; the angel syndicate, followed by the seed syndicate, followed by the VC syndicate. This gives the founder the opportunity to gain insights [...]  Read more

I get asked frequently whether it is better to back the team or the product (the “jockey or the horse”). It is not that simple in my view. When I think about the big wins we have had over the [...]  Read more

Many people in startup land believe that the answer to the challenges around forcing departing employees to exercise vested options is to simply extend the option exercise period to the maximum (ten years) allowed by the IRS. It certainly is [...]  Read more

Elizabeth Warren made news this weekend with her plan to breakup Google, Amazon, and Facebook (and also Apple ). Let me first say that I am sympathetic to Warren’s position. I particularly don’t like the way that Google, Apple, and [...]  Read more

I wrote a bit last Monday about the 60 Minutes piece last Sunday night about getting to gender equity in STEM education. My message in that blog post was that there are many innovators in this sector and not everyone [...]  Read more

I saw Zuck’s post on pivoting to private interactions from public posts yesterday and I had a flashback to Bill Gates’s Internet Tidal Wave memo to his company almost twenty-five years ago. I have always seen a lot of Gates [...]  Read more