A historical collection of our writing.
At Union Square Ventures, network effects have been central to our investment thesis for a decade. From an investor perspective network effects are one of the few, possibly the only, source of sustainable competitive advantage in a world where almost everything else can be copied quickly. But we […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
A long time ago when I worked as a management consultant, I did a study for Lafarge which has a huge cement business. The study involved real sleuthing as we were trying to determine the operational capacity of cement plants owned by others and under construction all around Europe. At times I felt […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Last week, I provided a recap of what we have covered so far in Uncertainty Wednesday. To go on from here we need to introduce some more concepts that are usually covered earlier but that I believe will make more sense in the framework that we have now established. The first one of these is […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Yesterday Instagram announced that it has 200 million users for stories, which exceeds Snapchat’s 160 million users from their S-1 filing. Never mind that nobody outside these companies knows what those user definitions really mean or how to compare them. This has nonetheless rekindled a debate […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Disruptive innovations often start out as worse versions of something that already exists. Worse along all dimensions except for one, but one that turns out to really matter because it unlocks a new use case for which the incumbent does not work at all or is not affordable. The PC was slower, had […] Read more
Today in Uncertainty Wednesday I want to provide a big recap of the series which I started last August. The key takeaways so far should be that Reality itself is not directly accessible to us. All we have to go on are observations and explanations. Uncertainty exists because there are limits on […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
