Skip to main content

< Archive / 2018

January, 2018

Edinburgh, Austin, San Francisco - a startup tale of three cities

I sometimes tell the story of the three places where I’ve been involved in founding startups. in Edinburgh, the cost of living was low, and I never worried about healthcare. I don’t think I would have founded a startup, or entered this world, without these kinds of democratic socialist protections. But ...
January 31, 2018

On Holocaust Memorial Day

It’s easier than ever to understand how the Holocaust happened. As many have said, it doesn’t start with concentration camps and gas chambers; it starts with scapegoating, labeling certain groups as inferior, and reducing their rights. It starts with bigotry. And standing by in silence, which is a quiet bigotry ...
January 27, 2018

It's two minutes to midnight, for real

For 71 years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has used a clock to represent how close we are to armageddon. Midnight represents the end of human civilization. And today they brought it closer to midnight than it's ever been: just two minutes away. In the United States, Russia, and elsewhere around the world, ...
January 25, 2018

Eventually, every app builds for the web. Here's why.

Snapchat is letting users share some stories to the web: By opening up Stories to the web, Snap envisions a way for content on its platform to go more broadly viral — the way Twitter and Instagram posts have captured real-time news and cultural events. News organizations, for example, could link ...
January 24, 2018

Decentralized paid subscriptions for independent publishers

A real problem that needs to be solved is making it easier to subscribe to independent publishers putting out great, regular content. Online magazines, blogs, podcasts, etc. Independence and autonomy are important, but discovery and ease of use are too. RSS is a pretty ancient technology, but it's in far more ...
January 21, 2018

The news industry needs to wake up and join the web

Emily Bell has a timely opinion piece in The Guardian today about Facebook's ethical responsibility with respect to news: Facebook’s retreat from news, and the complexities of taking responsibility for the type of content circulating on its platform, has many implications for press organisations in the US and Europe, but at ...
January 21, 2018

Bad UX and the Hawaii missile scare

It turns out that the origin of the missile scare that terrified Hawaii the other day was a poor UX choice. Instead of triggering a test alert, a civil defense employee accidentally triggered a real one - which then wasn't rescinded for 38 minutes: Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated ...
January 15, 2018

Facebook is deprioritizing news posts, and that's great!

A lot has been said about Facebook's upcoming changes to its news feed, which will downgrade posts from Facebook Pages and news publishers in favor of people you actually know. Facebook stock fell 4.5% in response: not a lot, but enough to be felt. It's easy to see why they're changing ...
January 15, 2018

This isn't just investing.

It's been a long week of 8am starts and 8pm finishes. It's such a privilege to do this job. When I started, I met a VC investor who told me I'd lose my idealism because I'd realize investing was just moving money around. But that's not what we do. We take ...
January 13, 2018

Seeing pitches as a former founder

I've been seeing a lot of presentations lately as part of the run-up to Matter Eight, and thinking a lot about my experience as an investor vs as a founder. I think there's a longer piece on this that I should write. I actually applied to Matter twice (once with Known, ...
January 11, 2018

Insta capitalism

Fascinating story about Instagram dropshippers by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic: Ganon searches out some lion-themed objects, including the one that he anticipates making the most money from, a gold-plated lion bracelet that he puts on sale for $0. He gives some tips for finding popular dropshippable items, too. He ...
January 10, 2018

Designing consent for the GDPR is onerous - and that's a good thing

PageFair has some really interesting GDPR consent designs: In late 2017 the Article 29 Working Party cautioned that “data subjects should be free to choose which purpose they accept, rather than having to consent to a bundle of processing purposes”. Consent requests for multiple purposes should “allow users to give specific ...
January 9, 2018

Skeptically dabbling in cryptocurrency

I've been pretty cynical about cryptocurrency, not least because of a lot of the community around it. It's hard for me to get excited about something when it presents as bro-fessionally as crypto does. But it turned out over New Year that a $20 joke investment in Dogecoin that I made in ...
January 8, 2018

Changing how I post in 2018

This year, I’m moving back to blogging on a regular basis. Blog posts are shorter than full-length articles, and usually contain some brief thoughts around an issue or a link. I’ve been blogging since 1998, but sadly not in a consistent place, and over the last few years I’ve let ...
January 8, 2018