Writing

Ain't lost yet, so I gotta be a winner - Paul Westerberg A number of years ago we were fundraising for betaworks. I can't remember if this was the first or second financing, 2007 or 2008, but we'd been out [...]  Read more

Amazon Web Services are defined as "a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform in the cloud.” This definition belies just how profound those sets of services actually are. I remember back in 2008 [...]  Read more

Over the holiday, I was visiting my mother on the upper east side of Manhattan. To get to her place from the subway I needed to cross 86th Street at 3rd Avenue. I've been crossing that street since I was [...]  Read more

My house ain't done, but it's alright, floors ain't level, but I ain't some suburbanite. Who cares about bathroom tiles, straight lines and building codes and Chinese wind chimes. My house ain't done, but it's fine, come out here from [...]  Read more

A few months ago I watched on video a talk by Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University (where I went), called "Beyond the University." In this talk Michael lays out a framework justification for why a broad based liberal education [...]  Read more

There are many examples of online communities, as well as many examples of ways to engage, promote and respect those communities. At USV we think about this a fair amount. But sometimes online communities can surprise you in unexpected ways. [...]  Read more

"But no matter, the road is life" - Jack Kerouac Everyone is, rightly, talking about the wonderful and heartfelt and authentic essay by Macklemore about the incredible year they have had. It's that good, it should be read. It is [...]  Read more

"The context in which makes possible an underlying sense of the way it all fits together despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such" - The Books, "Smells Like Content" I was with a friend the other [...]  Read more