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The Kickstarter 2017 Public Benefit Statement
Fred Wilson – Nov 20, 2018
Our portfolio company Kickstarter is a Public Benefit Corporation. One of the requirements of a Public Benefit Corporation is that they publish an annual benefit statement outlining how they are doing living up to their PBC charter. This is Kickstarter’s [...] Read more
“There’s a strange woman living in our basement”
Bethany Crystal – Nov 20, 2018
That was the text I received from one of our neighbors on Sunday morning. Apparently, for the second week in a row, my neighbor has startled a woman who appeared to have been sleeping at the top of the stairs [...] Read more
Looking For Syllabus 2.0
Dani Grant – Nov 19, 2018
Becoming a fast expert in a new topic is still a big challenge. There are a lot of open resources available on the web, but finding, qualifying, and navigating them--let alone combining them into a self directed system--is a challenge. In the classroom, the syllabus plays that role. The syllabus is a learning map. There's a big opportunity to reinvent the syllabus for the internet. Read more
Getting Hands-On
Nick Grossman – Nov 19, 2018
One of my favorite things to do is get my hands into something and figure out how it works, whether that’s an app, or a gadget, or a house. For example, over the past few months I have been renovating [...] Read more
The Overpay Critique
Fred Wilson – Nov 19, 2018
It is so easy to look at a headline announcing a deal and say “they overpaid.” I have done that myself plenty of times. It’s a natural emotional reaction. But what I have learned is that you can’t really critique [...] Read more
Recruitment vs. retention in the short-term labor market
Bethany Crystal – Nov 19, 2018
Earlier this year our portfolio company Carta published this comprehensive study on employee tenure in startups. In it, they disclose that, at least among early stage startups, a typical employee sticks around for about 37 months. Or, one month after [...] Read more
World After Capital: UBI as a Moral Imperative
Albert Wenger – Nov 19, 2018
NOTE: I have been posting excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s section wraps up the section on Universal Basic Income (UBI) by addressing a few common objections and arguing that it is a moral imperative. I have already [...] Read more
Pivot or Fail?
Fred Wilson – Nov 18, 2018
The Pivot is celebrated in startup land. Huge successes like Twitter and Slack are all the results of pivots. So surely pivoting is a good thing, right? Well, I am not so sure. And I certainly don't want entrepreneurs to [...] Read more
The artistry of consistency
Bethany Crystal – Nov 18, 2018
Today was a high content-consumption day for me. I spent the morning at the Whitney Museum’s new Andy Warhol exhibit, studying the turning points of his artistic career. I spent the afternoon digging into the life of Gloria Steinem, through [...] Read more