Writing

The folks at the Tribeca Film festival were kind (or silly) enough to ask me to write something for their Future of Film blog.Which I did - entitled "The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get." I'd been thinking alot [...]  Read more

Lou Reed wrote this line (my favorite lyric ever) in the context of relationships (I think). But it's much more applicable than that.Ideas for new businesses are amazing, wonderful, creative things. What makes ideas so interesting is that they are [...]  Read more

Tim Devane - who we luckily hired last year - wrote an essay about how he, a kid right out of college with little work experience, landed a job. Tim is a wonderful writer, but his top line tips are [...]  Read more

The title of this online space is "Maximizing the serendipity around you" which comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, and is as much of a universal business rule I've ever heard and followed.To me it means that you [...]  Read more

There has been much debate in the last week over platforms, holes, products and ecosystems.All of it made me think back to my youth, the days of AOL, around 1995-1997. Back then, one of AOL's innovations was a publishing platform [...]  Read more

I was thinking this morning that one way to create a service of real value is to ensure that the way a user experiences that service is commensurate with the value you are trying to deliver to the user. Feels [...]  Read more

There is an amazing wealth of innovation around early stage venture financing, most of which developed in just the past few years.There are new models of creating companies out of innovation: Seed Camp, Y Combinator, Tech Stars are just three, [...]  Read more

"Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. [...]  Read more

The technology industry has a seeming lack of institutional memory - the constant cycle of invention and reinvention while barely looking to the past. It's so optimistic in nature.But we sometimes need to look to the past to sharpen our [...]  Read more