Why Did I Invest in Pose?
What a sweet feeling it was last week to see the launch of the photo sharing site Pose, whose application targets shoppers of apparel. If you don’t know it and own an iPhone (soon Android) please check it out. What I’d like to do is tell you the story of how the investment came to [...]
Data is the Next Major Layer of the Cloud & A Major Victory for Startups
Today Factual announced that it raised $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz & Index Ventures. I believe that this is a major new area of growth & innovation for the Internet as Cloud Services start to form deeper & richer layers. Let me explain. For decades the “layering” of technology has allowed us to develop IT [...]
Is it OK to Want to Make Money?
This past October I was honored to be invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company” but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy” since my goal was to slay many of the [...]
What the Past Can Tell Us About the Future of Social Networking
This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This version has a bit extra. Next I’m going to start a series on the “disaggregation of social networking” so stay tuned. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,” the 30-minute video is here [...]
Product Design for Iterative Processes
Everybody has some portion of their life that is repetitive. For these cases we want software that is optimized for massive iteration.I recently wrote a post about design simplicity where I encouraged technology design teams to think about “designing for the novice, configuring for the pro” users. I wrote this post because I feel that too [...]
Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro
I recently wrote about my philosophy of minimalism that “less is more” with the mantra “when in doubt, leave it out.” I’ve had a long-standing rule of thumb in product design, which I call “design for the novice, configure for the pro.” I started saying this back in 2001/02, long before the era of Web [...]
Invest in Lines, not Dots
Everyone seems to be in such a rush to get shacked up these days. In normal times investors will look for “traction” before investing. We want to make sure we’re in love. This sometimes frustrates entrepreneurs who just want to “get back to running the business.” But if you understand it you’ll see that it [...]
What Angel Investing & Florida Condos Have in Common
It’s really hard to zig when the whole world seems to be zagging. One of my favorite quotes I learned in high school was: “Nonconformity is the Highest Form of Social Attainment” It was written as the yearbook quote of the smartest seniors as I was finishing my freshman year. It has always stood with [...]
Why Hulu is the OPEC of Online Video
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. The formation of Hulu was defensive – designed to stop another YouTube or Napster from emerging and causing disruption to the TV industry. The idea was that if you could put up a consumer site that was seen as the best place to consume content then people wouldn’t go [...]
Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You
One of the most influential books of my career is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen. I cannot recommend it enough for people in the technology or media sectors. Many people bandy about the definitions of “disruptive technology” or “the innovator’s dilemma” without ever having read the book and almost universally misunderstand the concepts. Let [...]
The Dumbest Feature Ever Implemented – Bcc
I’m working on a larger series on “scaling sales” that will drop this weekend or early next week so I thought I’d go for a more light-hearted topic today. I’ve always thought about writing a few posts on features in products that drive me nuts. I have a short list of what I consider the [...]
The Future of Television & The Digital Living Room
Dana Settle & I are hosting a dinner tonight (10/20/10) with some of the biggest companies in entertainment to talk about the future of television, film & digital media. Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of CAA will be the keynote speaker. Nobody can predict 100% what the future of television will be so I won’t pretend that [...]
What I *Would Have* Said at TechCrunch Disrupt
What do you get when you combine 7 panelist plus one moderator on to a stage for 30 minutes to talk about a serious topic? Answer: Not much. And that was evident on today’s Angel vs. VC panel.It’s a shame. There are real changes in the venture capital industry and it would have been fun [...]
Revisiting Paul Graham’s “High Resolution” Financing
When I first read Paul Graham’s blog post on “High Resolution” Financing I read it as a treatise arguing that convertible notes are better than equity. As I’m generally a believer in ‘pricing rounds’ I initially didn’t agree with the premise of the post. I just re-read it and on second reflection, I’m surprised just [...]
Solving for Banner Blindness. Solve Media.
I think we’ve all come to accept that “banner blindness” is a real phenomenon. Sometimes you see solutions and immediately know they just make sense. Solve Media is that. In the early days of the Internet as an advertising medium the industry organized to create “standard ad units” for which most media companies would sell [...]
