May 2012
28 posts
Everybody Hates Every Redesign Ever
Long before I was investor and board member at Bitly I was a user of the product. I loved it for it’s simplicity, but I invested because of a sea change in behavior that’s reshaping the web. A change from a robot’s view of the web as a series of linked static pages to a realtime networked web that pulses with activity and ideas.
Up until this week, Bitly has been a simple single...
“We’re so young. We’re so young. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I...”
– Keegan
It’s never too late to start.
The World is Your Parking Lot
In 1964 Phil Knight started selling shoes from the trunk of his car at local track meets. Each sale was to an individual. Each individual had a chance to engage with the man behind the brand, to hold the shoes in their hands, to ask questions and to transact right there in the parking lot.
That trunk, that parking lot, that direct interaction between creator and consumer has shaped their DNA....
Watch
People ask, “So, what’s your goal with Heath? Are you going to build it up and sell it? “
But I really like my job. If I sold the company I wouldn’t have the job I like.
How many people do you actually know who have a job they like?
Suffering As a Competitive Advantage
Starting companies is hard.
Building them into sustainable businesses over time is even harder.
Much has been postulated about why one founder flounders and the others emerge as the next Mark Zuckerberg. Some will attribute the difference to smarts, connections, or capital, but a new research report has me thinking it may be something that doesn’t fit into any of those aforementioned...
“The network is rapidly displacing the hierarchy and with it the virtual...”
– Brad
WatchIt was a big week for social networks.
But the term itself seems to have lost some of it’s impact. Over time we’ve come to associate social networks with Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Sorkin and blue pixelated Fonzy thumbs.
This afternoon, at our Foo Health event in Boston, Nicholas Christakis broke me out of that metaphorical mental rut with a session on the role and impact our social...
“What are the consequences to trying? I could f up really bad and lose my savings...”
– KAWS
“We can’t keep designing as we used to if we want people to engage with our...”
– Zeldman
FDIC for Startups
When the banks started melting down in the midst of the 2008 financial crisises, suddenly a little sticker that had been placed at their front doors and teller windows took on new meaning. The sticker contained four letters: FDIC
The FDIC was established in 1934 to protect the customers of its member banks against loss should the bank fail or become insolvent. Next to the four letters on the...
The Hamster Wheel
When VCs get together conversation often tends towards what we’re working on, what companies we’re excited about and swapping lessons learned from building our own companies that help build companies. As the headlines suggest, the pace of activity in our little corner of the world has been accelerating at a pace that many are struggling to keep up with. The metaphor one friend recently...
“The success rate of a first-time venture-backed entrepreneur is about 18%. If...”
– Joe
A Hippocratic Oath For Software Engineers?
Think, for a moment, about the time it takes from when you wake to when you have a screen in your face?
If you’re anything like me that, time has dropped from hours, to minutes to seconds in the last few years. And tho we, as a startup community, celebrate apps as addictive the effects of these addictions are beginning to mark indelible train tracks across the soft tissues of our...
When someone says the word 'pivot', I'm like
runningastartup:
Swear I had nothing to do with this.
“VCs are just sacks of meat with the same cognitive biases as everyone else. They...”
– Who you callin’ rational?
“We used to rely on the public making dumb investing decisions,” one well-known...”
– With greater-fools-as-a-service, things start getting interesting.
via slavin
The Ballerinas of Silicon Valley
Sorry Eric, but I hate the word pivot.
Somehow, over the last year or so Pivot has managed some literary slight of hand in which it has transformed (pivoted?) itself from a verb to a noun. Crossed over from a series of actions taken out of necessity in achieving an objective to becoming the objective itself. From founders to investors there seems to be a carelessness in the air with Pivot being...
“Over the history of the institutional VC business (the past 40 years) the number...”
– Fred 