April 2011
22 posts
WatchA fantastic presentation from Tricia Wang on the cultural shifts occurring in China that open the way for disruption. You really need to step through each slide to appreciate the following formula:
RESTRICTIONS + FREE FOR ALL + DREAMERS = UNIQUE SET OF CONDITIONS FOR INNOVATION
Don’t get caught in these conditions thinking about how to flip a piece of functionality to faceless big co for...
Our Investment in BetaBrand
Two years ago we got introduced to Chris Lindland who, at the time, was running a small clothing company called Cordarounds. He was a one man shop with a hack to run the corduroy on pants horizontal rather than vertical. But, even back then Chris wasn’t content building a company based on a clever story around horizontal cords, he had bigger ideas.
Through his experience with Cordarounds...
“For the first couple of days of the tour, the towns we were playing were in...”
– DMC on the reaction of fans to their opening act, the Beastie Boys.
Whether your customers are club kids at a concert or cubicle cowboys at a big company, real recognizes real.
Either you understand the problems they want solved or you don’t. Either they relate to and get value from the...
“Advertising-backed web services must get large numbers of users and collect as...”
– Marco
important distinction between users vs. customers of consumer facing web services.
“Seeing a guy that didn’t really know how to answer to adults five years ago to...”
– Growing up in Davidville.
“I am not good at tech matters but I have got a lot of people who are. I don’t...”
– Warren Buffet
WatchIf you watch this video profiling the NYC Resistor hacker space closely enough you can see the future.
PS- the video also contains my favorite definition of a hacker: someone who can get something to do something it wasn’t designed to do.
PPS- I’m not a fan of VICE magazine, but their VBS.tv has some really amazing content on emergent cultures.
bit-rank and the Bitly Data Stack
Today marks a big milestone in the life of a little company- Bitly. They’ve released a really killer iPad app called News.me. I’ve been using News.me for a few months now and have seen it evolve from a buggy prototype to a slick news reader to the powerful application that is in the iTunes store today.
There’s a lot to be excited about in News.me. For instance, there are a few...
Give a Damn
The internet surfaced an old ITP profile of Dennis the other day. Clearly it was written while he was still in school. He described himself back then as follows:
My work focuses on finding the intersection between location-based services, social software and user-generated content on mobile devices. I work towards building applications that people can use today - services that help people find...
A Story About Disruption
A small group of students visting from Europe dropped by OATV HQ last week to talk startups, entrepreneurship and venture capital. It was a lively and candid conversation. At one point they asked why so many of our investments were either consumer facing services or commercialized open source projects. As you’ve come to expect from me, I chose to answer their question with a story.
In the...
“i would like to reiterate that i don’t want any profiles of me. i am not...”
– Pulled from a hopelessly stupid profile of Fred Wilson in AdWeek.
In a world of investors breathlessly trying to generate press for themselves, this feels like the right answer. Well said Fred.
Please Think Boldly
On my train ride into the city this morning I was racking my brain trying to figure out what to post today. I read a few articles, flipped through twitter and checked google reader for inspiration. But my brain has been a little distracted and a lot consumed by a check I have to write today.
Its the single largest personal check I write all year and its to a service provider. So, I’ve been...
“Whereas: New York City is proud to be the home of both the powerhouse companies...”
– Awesome.
Risk Taking: It's Not Just for Kids Anymore
Like so many kids these days, I started my first company fresh out of college. Unlike most kids these day, I graduated and started my first company married and with a child.
Startupland has a knack for fetishizing youth and the unencumbered life. Their model seems to be that the world changers are kids, fresh out of school, with no one or no thing to answer to. They talk about Zuckerberg and...
Opportunity in Rejection
Over my break last week I decided to crack the spine on a book that I’ve been meaning to read for some time now- Jay Z’s DECODED. Even though my own history with hip hop ended just before he came on the scene (post ‘93 hip hop lost a lot of appeal to me) I’ve long admired his story which can be summed up in his own lyrics “Marcy to Madison Square”. Growing up in...
“Loura let workers choose between an iPhone or Android or Window Phone 7-powered...”
– Ralph Loura, CIO at Clorox, let employees choose their phone. The results are, um, interesting.
Choo choo…
Vacation #FAIL and the Work/Life Balance Thing
Remember my last post about being bad at taking vacations? Well, greetings from 30,000 feet.
Something came up that required my attention across the country so I pushed pause on my vacation and hopped a flight this afternoon. This wasn’t a total surprise as the potential for a vacation interrupted appeared last week before we departed. As a family we discussed it and as a family we decided...
Vacation Message
I don’t like vacations and I’m really bad at taking them. But my kids are on spring break this week so I’m going to try and be better. Posting here will be light to nonexistent. Wish me luck…
Why I'm Rejoining AngelList
I wrote a little post recently in which I laid out a few reasons for deleting my AngelList account. The response to that post in both the comment section as well as the wider web was enlightening on so many levels. After reading carefully crafted and thoughtful responses from people like Jason Calacanis, who said:
Whaaaaaaaaa……… Wha……………. Wahhhhh!!!!!
and Dave McClure, who so eloquently put...
