Writing

Our portfolio company Kickstarter is running a cool crowdfunding event called Shapeshift that is focused on “bold new products made from recycled materials.” You can see them here and back the ones that are interesting to you. I did that [...]  Read more

Business and personal travel, which we’ve been doing a lot of the last two weeks, is a big producer of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m actually writing this on a cross Atlantic flight. But you can offset those carbon emissions [...]  Read more

Yesterday Google’s paper announcing a first instance of “quantum supremacy” was published in Nature . Not surprisingly for those who have followed the topic there is now a healthy debate around what that actually means. Google was celebrating in a big [...]  Read more

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