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Tech Tuesday: Testing
Albert Wenger – Jan 8, 2013
Welcome back to Tech Tuesday. We are still in the process of wrapping up the initial series on programming. In the interim review I had identified a couple of high level questions that had not yet been answered dealing with [...] Read more
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models – Subscriptions
Fred Wilson – Jan 7, 2013
When I got into the venture capital business in the mid 80s, software was sold. You would pay a large sum to acquire a license to the software and then a much smaller annual fee for maintenance and support. Today, [...] Read more
Money Ball for VC
Albert Wenger – Jan 7, 2013
Money Ball was a good movie (I have to admit to not having read the book) with a crucial theme: statistics beats human intuition in complex situations. With the predictions for the 2012 elections we saw the same theme play [...] Read more
Crypto vs (Real) Identity vs Open Society
Albert Wenger – Jan 4, 2013
China is going through a crack down on social media and is apparently now requiring verified real identities online. This is very clearly an attempt to silence criticism and suppress unrest by making it easy to track down who said [...] Read more
A Personal Learning Agenda for 2013: AI and Machine Learning
Albert Wenger – Jan 3, 2013
In my blog posts about employment I have made the point that computers are getting better and better at carrying out tasks that previously required humans. The strongest case in point here are Google’s self driving cars. As recently as [...] Read more
Scuba Certification and the Inverted Classroom
Albert Wenger – Jan 2, 2013
One of our goals for 2012 was to get scuba certified as a family. We took a first run at it in a rushed fashion early in the year but abandoned that effort after a less than pleasant pool dive [...] Read more
Banking and Unbundling
Andy Weissman – Jan 2, 2013
You might be somebody's landlord, you might even own banks, but you're gonna have to serve somebody - Bob Dylan If it is the case that the Internet unbundles things, that the "power of connected networks such as the Internet [...] Read more
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models – Commerce
Fred Wilson – Dec 17, 2012
Commerce has to be the oldest business model. Sell something to someone. Or maybe it was barter back then. In any case, ecommerce revenues topped $200bn in the US in 2011 and are growing at close to 10% annually. Global [...] Read more
Recruiting and Building a Resilient Team: Mission Desire
Albert Wenger – Dec 17, 2012
As a board member I am often actively engaged in helping to recruit new hires to a company. A lot of people have written about the importance of cultural fit. I want to add the idea of “mission desire” to [...] Read more