You can be a dick and be right
Venture Capital legend Tom Perkins stirred up quite a bit of outrage with his letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal: http://on.wsj.com/1aGMGJy In this editorial (which Perkins presumably dashed off without showing it to any competent public relations professional), he criticizes what he perceives as a rise in unfair criticism of the wealthy. […]
Should entrepreneurs blog?
Keith Rabois touched off a mini-Twitter firestorm the other day when he posted a tweet saying, “I don’t know of a single successful CEO or entrepreneur who blogs regularly.”http://bit.ly/1b0gv4VSadly, as I often note, 140 characters isn’t enough for a …
Will Success Ruin Silicon Valley?
Everywhere one looks, Silicon Valley seems ascendant. Tech companies like Apple and Google are among the world’s most valuable and admired, while tech titans like Larry and Sergey, and Mark and Sheryl are given the first-name-only treatment of offline celebrities. Silicon Valley has even stuck its nose into broader society, helped by the fact that […]
Stop Shooting The Messenger, Silicon Valley
On Sunday, I weighed in on the Twitter board controversy: My argument then was that there is a dangerous tendency on the part of Silicon Valley’s power players to think that those who have achieved less than they (read: everyone) don’t have the right to criticize them. Then I read an editorial by Pando Daily […]
The Hidden Assumptions That Neuter Criticism in Silicon Valley
The contretemps of the day comes courtesy of TechCrunch, where Professor Vivek Wadhwa has published a guest post addressing a Twitter debate he had with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (now how’s that for meta?):http://tcrn.ch/GD0570The controversy began with…
Carte Blanche and the Creativity of Constraint
As Los Angeles native, I can’t help but see parallels between my home town’s industry (movies) and my adopted home’s (startups). Today’s parallel concerns the problem with having too much money. In Hollywood, studios love to work with successful directors. When a director produces a critical and commercial smash, a studio or production company is […]
The Age of the Aging Entrepreneur
I’ve often compared Silicon Valley to “Logan’s Run“–once your Lifeclock hits 30, the system encourages you to “renew”. In the movie, this meant death…in Silicon Valley, it means becoming an angel investor or VC (no comment). After all, this is a place where an investor can say with a straight face, “We love older entrepreneurs! […]
Silicon Valley: The "Ultimate Meritocracy"
My fellow denizens of Silicon Valley are fond of referring to our happy little ecosystem as the ultimate meritocracy. It’s definitely true that in comparison to the rigid and/or corrupt regimes that prevail in other industries and geographies, Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but it is far from perfect. I often joke with the female/minority/over-30 […]
The rise of the bros, and the fall of the geeks
One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was the 1984 classic, “Revenge of the Nerds.” If you haven’t watched it yet, take two hours to do so–yes, it’s available on Netflix: The movie really spoke to me–a guy so nerdy that the kids at my private school for gifted children nicknamed me […]
Sexism in tech is like an onion–it has many layers and makes people cry
The big topic of discussion last week was the fallout from the PyCon conference. At the conference, former Adria Richards, who, at the time, worked in developer relations for SendGrid, heard two conference attendees behind her making jokes about “forking” and “dongles” in the sort of juvenile way that often happens in the tech industry. […]
Silicon Valley Has A Short Attention Span
Sometimes people ask me why I’m always writing blog posts and speaking at events. “Simple,” I say. “Silicon Valley has a short attention span. If I don’t keep my name in front of people, they’ll forget who I am.” If they don’t believe me, I respond with what I like to call the Yahoo test. […]
Speak Up, Silicon Valley
I had an interesting experience at Mega Startup Weekend. I was lucky enough to be invited to help judge the startup pitches at the end of the weekend. It’s remarkable how much a dedicated team can accomplish in just 54 hours.But my most interesting e…
Jeremy Lin, Women in VC, and the Bigotry of Pattern Matching
Jeremy Lin is the talk of the NBA. Sportswriters everywhere are busy cranking out column inches on what people have called the ultimate Cinderella story: The emergence of an Asian-American Harvard graduate, seemingly from nowhere, as one of the NBA’s …
Silicon Valley > Boston (The Data)
I love Boston. I lived there for five of the best years of my life, when I was working at D. E. Shaw & Co., and then when I attended Harvard Business School. If anyone asks, I always tell them, “if Boston had the same weather and career opportunities for me as Silicon Valley, I’d […]
Silicon Valley Posers And The Inevitable Bust
This morning, my friend Erica Douglass wrote about why Silicon Valley is broken, and why she moved away:This conversation was a microcosm of the reason I left the Valley. No doubt, this guy had a good-looking website, and two co-founders who had sign…
