Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
I had breakfast with a young entrepreneur who was upset that he hadn’t won a hackathon, despite finishing an original, working product with a high degree of difficulty. I asked him to describe what his team had built. “We built an app that lets you annotate equations. Clicking on any of the factors in the … Continue reading How To Win A Hackathon (or an Oscar)
The New Yorker recently ran an essay on the problem of female beauty: http://nyr.kr/1ec2DFd The author, Adelle Waldman, points out how fiction tries to avoid a real examination of the issues: “In a recent essay in New York, the novelist Lionel Shriver argued that “fiction writers’ biggest mistake is to create so many characters who … Continue reading The Problem of Attractiveness
I read Nathan Heller’s latest New Yorker piece, “Bay Watched,” with great interest: http://nyr.kr/17s8pwi Heller writes about the “new” entrepreneurial culture of San Francisco, incorporating interviews with friends like Ben Casnocha, Tyler Willis, Hunter Walk, and more. Heller, who grew up in San Francisco, returns to his home town to examine the results of the … Continue reading San Francisco’s New (Old) Entrepreneurial Culture
On Sunday, I weighed in on the Twitter board controversy: http://bit.ly/1adJT3P My argument then was that there is a dangerous tendency on the part of Silicon Valley’s power players to think that those who have achieved less than they (read: everyone) don’t have the right to criticize them. Then I read an editorial by Pando … Continue reading Stop Shooting The Messenger, Silicon Valley
The contretemps of the day comes courtesy of TechCrunch, where Professor Vivek Wadhwa has published a guest post addressing a Twitter debate he had with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (now how’s that for meta?): http://tcrn.ch/GD0570 The controversy began with a quote that Wadhwa provided to the New York Times for a story on sexism in … Continue reading The Hidden Assumptions That Neuter Criticism in Silicon Valley
Eric Barker advises asking the titular question as a way of assessing whether or not a company is in a state of denial: http://bit.ly/15RCfuP Yet denial isn’t the only reason I can think of for why post-meeting conversations might be more honest than the ones in the meeting. Here are a few other reasons I … Continue reading “Are the conversations after a meeting a lot more honest than the ones in a meeting?”
The great Eric Barker notes that the #1 negotiation principle that HBS teaches its MBA students is being likeable: http://bit.ly/19qRqeG “Here’s the equation for getting what you want. Cutting to the chase: You want to get more. You want more money, a better offer, a better deal; here are the components of what you need … Continue reading “They Need To Like You”: Friendship & Raising a Series A
There’s a lot of agita around the supposed plague of wantrepreneurs–posers who are into being entrepreneurs because it’s trendy, rather than because they want to build real businesses. This Fortune piece is a good representative of the genre: http://bit.ly/1f5EX8n “Wannabe entrepreneurs with laptops hog up the physical and digital bandwidth of the Valley right now,” … Continue reading Why I Don’t Worry About Wantrepreneurs
As the saga of Silk Road plays out, a lot of attention has been focused on the mistakes that Dread Pirate Roberts made that helped the Feds catch up with him. The Verge has a good longform piece on this topic: http://bit.ly/1aQExxL It appears that the current Dread Pirate Roberts (for we all know that … Continue reading Why The Fall of Silk Road and Bitcoin Is Inevitable
Tim O’Reilly, the founder of the O’Reilly media empire, published a great longform essay recently titled, “How I Failed”. http://oreil.ly/19ouE72 It’s a phenomenal read which covers a wide variety of topics, including how O’Reilly sold GNN to AOL for $15 million in stock, sold that stock as soon as the lockup expired for $30 million, … Continue reading Finance Should Be a First-Class Discipline for Startups