Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
Every year, the Yeh family journeys down to southern California for the week of Christmas. I get to visit my ancestral home (Santa Monica, natch), the kids get to see their grandparents (whom they enjoy far more than their parents), and Alisha and I sneak away to Palm Springs for an archetypally American vacation of … Continue reading The Chris Yeh Travel Channel: The Pepper Tree Inn
This morning, I heard the death knell for traditional broadcast television. My 6-year-old, Marissa, woke up called me to the living room. “Daddy, can I watch TV?” “Sure,” I said, reaching for the remote control. “No, not that TV,” she said, “This TV.” She held up the iPad, which the kids have been using to … Continue reading RIP, TV
Is there anything more emotionally potent than someone you really care about and admire telling you, “I’m proud of you?” It feels like I can name many movies where this serves as the emotional climax. Just think of “The Sixth Sense,” where the son tells his mother that his dead grandmother wanted her daughter to … Continue reading “I’m Proud of You”
Few subjects have been more in the news than WikiLeaks; few have been less understood (for example, WikiLeaks is not a wiki!). For a great profile of both WikiLeaks and its controversial leader, Julian Assange, I direct you to the New Yorker, which posted a 12-page masterpiece. Here is the most important paragraph: Experimenting with … Continue reading WikiLeaks’ Fundamental Hypocrisy
We live today in am impatient world. In many ways, that’s good. We’re unwilling to wait for the world to change; instead we go out and change it. But this impatience has a cost. People tend to view startups these days as overnight successes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most successful startups had … Continue reading Impatience Kills Startups
Spectator* sports is meaningless, but fandom gives it meaning. We all want to be part of something bigger. When we find something that connects and uplifts us, does it matter how trivial it might be when reduced to essentials? Singing in a choir. Worshipping in a church. Partaking in a LAN party. In the end, … Continue reading Sport is meaningless; Fandom is meaningful
Hire nerdy business people. Counterintuitive, right? When you think businessperson, you think of a smooth-talking charmer, the opposite of the archetypal “nerd.” But when you’re hiring business people, the most important interview question might be, “Kirk or Picard?” It’s not that they’ll be more fun at hackathons (though that helps). It’s that nerdy = detail … Continue reading Why You Should Hire Nerdy Businesspeople
I often think of my email inbox as a tennis game. Each email that comes in is like a tennis ball, which needs to be volleyed back to my rally partner. The temptation is to simply swing the racket and volley the ball back as quickly as possible. But life is not tennis, and volleying … Continue reading Respond Specifically
It’s no secret that media businesses have struggled with monetization in the Internet era. Journalism, for example, is famously in free-fall. But all the hand-wringing conceals a simple fact: There is a very successful model that has been around for decades, and it still works today. All we have to do is learn from porn … Continue reading What Internet Startups Can Learn From Comics And Porn Stars
I’ve been following the Wikileaks saga with increasing interest, because it embodies a principle in which I firmly believe: Don’t take sides, take issues. People have asked if I’m pro-Wikileaks or anti-Wikileaks. One of my friends said she was anti-anti-Wikileaks. The problem with taking sides is that its rare that sides are drawn up based … Continue reading Don’t Take Sides, Take Issues (How To Think About Wikileaks)