Writing

A question I get quite frequently is “What makes a good leader?” One of the most important aspects of a good leader is that they have values. This may at first sound noncontroversial, but we are surrounded today by leaders who [...]  Read more

Pacing in a VC fund context is how much capital the firm is investing in a given period and tracking that over time. I don’t think a VC firm should manage to a pacing number. It should manage to the [...]  Read more

A while back I recorded an interview with Jason Jacobs for his podcast series My Climate Journey . Jason did a great job pushing me on a number of different issues which helped clarify my thinkings (thanks, Jason). Today Jason [...]  Read more

This past summer I read Ben Horowitz’s new book, What You Do Is Who You Are , and I even blogged about it here without naming the book. What You Do is about culture, how you make it, how you [...]  Read more

Early-stage companies are exercises in experimentation, iteration, and figuring things out. You try one thing, it sort of works, but you see a tangential opportunity and go after that. Sometimes that leads to a full-on pivot, other times it leads [...]  Read more

This is a good interview . I learned a lot. Read more

Our portfolio company Kickstarter is running a cool crowdfunding event called Shapeshift that is focused on “bold new products made from recycled materials.” You can see them here and back the ones that are interesting to you. I did that [...]  Read more

Business and personal travel, which we’ve been doing a lot of the last two weeks, is a big producer of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m actually writing this on a cross Atlantic flight. But you can offset those carbon emissions [...]  Read more

Yesterday Google’s paper announcing a first instance of “quantum supremacy” was published in Nature . Not surprisingly for those who have followed the topic there is now a healthy debate around what that actually means. Google was celebrating in a big [...]  Read more