A historical collection of our writing.
I am a huge fan of the Lean Startup philosophy (and Eric Ries / Steve Blank who have done so much to evangelize it). Recently, i have been thinking a lot about the relationship between this approach and network effects. For most web services, network effects are the key (only?) sustainable […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I have worried on and off on this blog about the growing reach of Google. But yesterday I was thrilled to see Google take a determined stance on the issue of censorship and – by implication human rights – in China. I very much hope that the team there has the fortitude to stick to […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
My partner Brad put up a great post on the USV blog yesterday, arguing for an independent invention defense against software patents. A while back, I had proposed an alternative, a change in how litigation works. In that post, I wrote that: I have since then changed my view of that. After a lot of […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Brad BurnhamAlmost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No! That’s not what is happening. Our companies are […] Read more
The demand for books, music, news, TV, phone calls is constrained by the time that people have. In a mature market (e.g., the US) that time is growing at best at the rate of population growth (low single digits), but in reality is likely to be shrinking as other online activities (e.g., social […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I am going to my kids’ school this morning to meet with the head of the computer lab, the principal and the district’s main computer person to talk about Scratch (that is assuming it stops snowing!). The school is beginning to take first steps in teaching Scratch and I want to convince them to step […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
