Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
Headlines have become more and more important because of social media. Once upon a time, headlines were critical because they helped persuade news stand passers-by to buy newspapers. Now of course, most people are likely to ask, “What’s a news stand? What’s a newspaper?” Nonetheless, the importance of headlines remains. The headline is what convinces … Continue reading Have We Reached Peak Headline?
I’m torn about what to write about IfOnly, a new service I ran across last night: http://www.ifonly.com/ IfOnly is an incredibly cool service. It allows you to purchase unique experiences like a group swim clinic for up to 10 of your friends with Olympic champion and TV broadcaster Summer Sanders–a mere $8,000. I immediately looked … Continue reading The Silicon Valley Luxury Trap
One of the biggest VC trends in the past half-decade has been the move towards what people are now calling “platforms.” While the details vary by firm, the common thread is moving from the classic VC model (a small number of General Partners who make investment decisions, market the firm, and help build companies) to … Continue reading Do Venture Capital “Platforms” Make Sense?
Q: What do you get when journalists get paid by the number of pageviews their stories generate? A: The Troll economy. Not to sound like a grumpy old man (though I am) but what passes for journalism has sunk to a new low. As far as I can tell, headlines are now chosen based on … Continue reading The Troll Economy
I firmly believe in the truth of the old saying, “It’s cheaper in the long run to pay for a professional.” It’s an axiom that applies in nearly any situation, from decide whether or not to attempt to fix your own plumbing problems, to dealing with groupies if you’re a young All-Star. Yet while most … Continue reading It’s Cheaper In The Long Run To Pay For A Professional
Mary Meeker is one of the few folks who was a leading figure during the first dot com boom who is still playing a similar role. (Contrast her with Mark Andreesen, who back then was the wunderkind behind Netscape, and today is an elder statesman and VC) That’s actually a good thing, because she continues … Continue reading The Mobile Gold Rush Has Just Begun
One of the most exciting developments to hit the enterprise software world in decades was the rise of SaaS. Companies like Salesforce.com blazed a trail that built enormous amounts of wealth and improved the lives of end-users. Prior to SaaS, most enterprise software was sold based on perpetual licenses, to CIOs and IT departments, with … Continue reading Why “Enterprise SaaS” may soon be a misnomer
My friend Adam Rifkin, who runs the awesome PandaWhale (where I get a ton of my news), recently wrote about the Tumblr acquisition for AllThingsD. It’s a smart and well-reasoned essay, which is well worth reading: http://dthin.gs/113xmz8 His basic argument is that Tumble is valuable because it is a massive interest graph: “Tumblr is one … Continue reading If Tumblr is worth $1.1 Billion, is Pinterest worth $19 Billion
The Business of Software Conference sounds like a phenomenal event. I haven’t attended it, but I did recently run across one of the sessions from their 2012 conference, a talk by Gail Goodman, the CEO of Constant Contact: For those who don’t know, Constant Contact is a publicly traded online marketing company with over 500,000 … Continue reading The one number (45) that explains Constant Contact’s success
In recent months, a host of startups have arisen that help keep me informed about my friends’ information habits. We’ve gone far beyond the days when we could simply follow people via RSS or Twitter…now our RSS readers and Twitter homepages are so choked with information that we generally only view a tiny subset. I … Continue reading The value of a signal is inversely proportional to its frequency