Director Challenge: Founder CEO Performance
One of the things that’s particularly difficult in being a startup board member is striking the right balance between supporting a founder CEO and listening to other people from the organization. It is possible to err on either side – [...] Read more
Looking to Redesign Continuations
I have had the same minimal design on this blog for quite some time. But as I am committed to keeping Continuations goind and writing more, I think the time has come for a complete overhaul of the design. I [...] Read more
No MBA Mondays Today
I've spent the past two days in airports and on airplanes. I was hoping to write my MBA Mondays post for today on the flight yesterday. But there was no wifi or power. I punted and watched VCU beat Kansas [...] Read more
Embrace Messy Data (To Reach Internet Scale)
I believe I have discovered an important reason why the government has a hard time making good use of the Internet: people who design systems for the government abhor messy data. They are used to setups in which every record [...] Read more
Two And A Half Wireless Carriers (And What To Do About It)
I wrote about innovation on Android yesterday and today there is already more reason to write about innovation in mobile. This time the news is decidedly mixed. On the plus side, Amazon has opened their Android App Store (despite Apple [...] Read more
Heyzap and Innovation on Android
Much as I admire the well rounded user experience on an iPhone (leaving notifications aside), there are some kinds of innovation that simply aren’t possible on the iPhone today, as it doesn’t let developers hook in deeply enough. One example [...] Read more
NY Times Pay Fence and Kickstarter
Yesterday, the New York Times announced its long awaited pay fence. Today, we announced our investment in Kickstarter. These two represent different models for sustaining efforts that are socially important but are having their previous financial models disrupted by the [...] Read more
Kickstarter
In the fall of 2009, we met the founding team at Kickstarter. Perry, Yancey, and Charles had built a marketplace where anyone could fund and follow creativity of all kinds. We were immediately taken with the team and the idea.We [...] Read more
Airbnb
obama_oj Originally uploaded by charmaine_cooper. When you walk into our conference room at Union Square Ventures, you see the box of cereal on the right on our conference room credenza next to a wifi router and a jar of Jolly [...] Read more
