Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
Author and Time book critic Lev Grossman lets rip with a passionate editorial about the need for novels to NOT BE BORING: The discipline of the conventional literary novel is a pretty harsh one. To read one is to enter into a kind of depressed economy, where pleasure must be bought with large quantities of … Continue reading Write Stuff That Isn’t Boring
My older sister sent this to me via old-school viral marketing: The email forward. Since I couldn’t find a well-formatted version on the Web, I’m sharing it with you on my blog: * * * When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things … Continue reading The Spoiled Under 30 Crowd
Perhaps foolishly, I accepted a journalistic assignment to cover the National Single Cougars Convention tomorrow night (Friday) in Palo Alto. So that I would not have to go by myself, I bought tickets for a few cougar-enthusiast friends. Unfortunately, these friends who will not be named (at least by me) are chickening out, so I … Continue reading Wanted: Cougar Wingmen for Friday Night in Palo Alto
A hot news item out of Silicon Valley is that my old friend Jeremiah Owyang has left Forrester Research to form the equivalent of a rock supergroup by joining Charlene Li, Ray Wang, and Deb Schulz at Altimeter. This is great news for all of those aforementioned rockstars, but it is also a classic example … Continue reading @jowyang and the Circle of Life
Here’s a fascinating little mathematical tidbit, courtesy of an entertaining article about the mathematics of gambling in New Scientist: Suppose you are told you must marry, and that you must choose your spouse out of 100 applicants. You may interview each applicant once. After each interview you must decide whether to marry that person. If … Continue reading How To Make The Right Decision Without Seeing Every Option
Mark Suster keeps knocking the cover off the ball with his posts about the startup ecosystem. Here’s a key passage from his latest:The fact is that most people lack the willingness, ability or nerve to start a company from the very beginning with just an idea or a desire to start a company. These same … Continue reading Why Founders Reap Disproportionate Rewards
Zen Habits has a post up called “The Get-Started-Now Guide to Becoming Self-Employed“ As with most ZH posts, it’s well-written and thoughtful, but that’s not what I’m blogging about. Regardless of what you think or what your W-2 says, you are already self-employed. If you want to be successful, start thinking of yourself as a … Continue reading Becoming Self-Employed? You Already Are!
Jonathan Haidt, the author of the excellent “The Happiness Hypothesis,” has written an essay that explores what Democrats consider a fundamental paradox of American politics: Why do working-class Americans vote Republican, when their narrow economic interests would be better served by the Democrats’ redistributionist policies. Haidt, a self-professed liberal atheist, concludes that there are two … Continue reading Why Moral People Vote Republican
…if Twitter weren’t down. Chris Yeh-ism of the day: “Revolution plays well to early adopters, but the mainstream is looking for solutions, not revolutions.” (from a comment on Oliver Young’s blog)Great insights from Gil Yehuda: Same people plus same process yields same results. To get different results, you need different people, or a different approach … Continue reading Things I Would Have Tweeted…
In a recent post on Growthology, Paul Kedrosky asks why so many B-school students that he meets want to be VCs rather than entrepreneurs. This is my response: *** While entrepreneurship as a whole is a very positive ROI endeavor, the odds are stacked against the individual entrepreneur. Even venture-backed companies only succeed about 1/10 … Continue reading Why The Odds Are Stacked Against Entrepreneurship (vs. VC)