Writing

I’m supposed to be in Europe this week to speak at a conference and attend another one, but I decided to stay home, to be safe. I am hearing all sorts of stories of events being called off and flights [...]  Read more

Sometimes things can get overwhelming. Tasks can seem too big to even begin. This, of course, is not true. Every journey begins with a single step, etc. My wife recently pointed me to this great passage by Anne Lamott which [...]  Read more

Last week I wrote about the inherent tension between data portability and privacy , and suggested that one solution would be an exportable “privacy context” that could travel with ported data. Such an approach, however, would require a notion of [...]  Read more

Earlier this week, I spoke at a Justice Department / Stanford conference about antitrust issues in the tech sector . Our panel included Patricia Nakache from Trinity Ventures, Ben Thompson from Stratechery and Mark Lemley from Stanford. If you are [...]  Read more

Last week, the Blockstack team formally rolled out their proposal for a new mining mechanism for the Stacks blockchain called Proof of Transfer (PoX) . In addition to the blog post, you can read the full PoX white paper and [...]  Read more

Last year around this time, I had a major medical scare which shook me pretty hard. The details don’t matter, but the takeaway was that afterwards I felt lucky to have not had a more serious problem, despite a bad [...]  Read more

I am flying home from Europe today (by way of Reykjavik) and as a result, have a lot of time to catch up on things. I have spent the bulk of the day writing up a handful of strategy docs [...]  Read more

I am in the Netherlands this week, catching up the Leap engineering team which is based here in Utrecht, and attending an IoT conference that Helium will be at in Amsterdam. I have always loved it here, primarily because of [...]  Read more

Azeem Azhar has a great post up about the brewing conversation about regulation and the tech industry . There are two main points that stand out to me: 1) In digital systems, ML/AI and data network effects create feedback loops [...]  Read more