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Aligning purpose and strategy: Cloudflare goes nuclear on patent troll
Nick Grossman – May 26, 2017
Last week, I was in Amsterdam at the Next Web conference, giving a talk about “Purpose, Mission and Strategy” — how companies can strengthen the connection between these to align efforts and make tough calls more easily (will post video when [...] Read more
Some Lessons I Learned from the Dotcom Bubble for the Coming Crypto Bubble
Albert Wenger – May 26, 2017
I spent a bunch of time at Consensus and Token Summit this week. If it wasn’t clear before, we are headed into a crypto currency bubble. Now a bubble isn’t in and of itself a bad thing. In fact almost [...] Read more
Cryptocurrenices: the native business model of attention
Nick Grossman – May 25, 2017
By creating an economic incentive — the cryptocurrency or token — to create a shared open data asset, we now have powerful driver for open data, interoperable through open standards. Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Probability Distribution
Albert Wenger – May 24, 2017
So far in Uncertainty Wednesday we have limited ourselves to looking at examples with only two states of the world and two possible signal values. When I introduced this I explained that these combine to form four elementary events and [...] Read more
Blockstack Browser and Token
Albert Wenger – May 23, 2017
Today Muneeb and Ryan from Blockstack delivered the morning keynote at the Consensus 2017 conference here in New York. They made two important announcements: first the availability of the developer edition of the Blockstack Browser and second the news that there will be a Blockstack Token. To understand the importance of both of these announcements, it useful to look at some of the history of the Internet. Read more
Who Controls our Attention? Separating Aggregation/Discovery from Publishing
Albert Wenger – May 22, 2017
This weekend brought us both a big New York Times piece titled “The Internet is Broken: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It” and a Guardian article about Facebook’s guidelines for content moderators. Both speak to the question of who controls [...] Read more
Vocational Schools and Getting to the Knowledge Age: Finding a Calling
Albert Wenger – May 19, 2017
I recently listened to a talk by David Autor about employment and technology. He praised the high school movement as being incredibly forward looking for addressing the rapid decline in farm employment. When asked about what the equivalent would be [...] Read more
Protocol Labs
Brad Burnham – May 18, 2017
Protocol Labs made a series of announcements earlier today including that Union Square Ventures made an equity investment in the company late last year. We are thrilled to be working with Juan Benet and his team and excited to be able to share some of our thinking here. Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Intro to Measuring Uncertainty
Albert Wenger – May 17, 2017
We have covered a lot of ground in Uncertainty Wednesday but we have yet to talk about measuring uncertainty. While most discussions introduce such concepts as mean and standard deviation early on, I have held off on them on purpose [...] Read more