Writing

Yesterday three Senators, Democrats Mark Warner (VA) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (MO), put forward new legislation aimed at opening up the markets in web services. Their proposed legislation is called The Access Act and you [...]  Read more

We went to a piano recital last night in Budapest. Gabor Farkas played a number of compositions by Chopin and Liszt. I was particularly taken with the Liszt compositions. The one called “Les Jeux d’eaux de la Villa d’Este” was [...]  Read more

We get feedback from the leaders of our portfolio companies on an annual basis. It helps me get better at what I do and I love it. One area that I am constantly challenged to improve on is accessibility. The [...]  Read more

This morning I will be on a panel at Columbia University about Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the climate crisis as part of a conference on the Green New Deal . In my view UBI should be a central component [...]  Read more

Mark Zuckerberg, in his speech last week at Georgetown University, called social media “the Fifth Estate.” The first three “estates” of society, classically, are the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else. When the printing press arrived during the Renaissance/Enlightenment period [...]  Read more

A few weeks ago my partner Nick and Sam McIngvale, who runs our portfolio company Coinbase’s custody business, did a talk at the CoinAlts conference. In it they talk about the evolving role of custody in the crypto markets, and [...]  Read more

A few weeks ago at the CoinAlts conference in Chicago, I did a fireside chat with Sam McIngvale , CEO of Coinbase Custody .  CoinAlts is a conference focused mostly on the institutional infrastructure around crypto assets — legal, accounting, [...]  Read more

Here we are again in 2019 debating speech online and specifically the case of Facebook. Zuckerberg speaks at Georgetown trying to invoke the civil rights movement and to draw a sharp distinction to China . Warren quickly fires back on [...]  Read more

I remember back in the early 2000s, the direct marketing industry and the tech sector worked with Congress to craft sensible regulations for email marketing. The result was called CAN-SPAM and it was passed into law in 2003. The law [...]  Read more