I was privileged to participate in Warwick Business School's Entrepreneurial Finance class yesterday. A group of students, some UK-based and some remote, convened in San Francisco to learn more about how startups raise money. My aim was to give them some storytelling ideas. I wanted to drive home that human-centered ...
November 30, 2018
I think lifestyle businesses are massively underrated.
In contrast to a venture-funded business, whose aim is to gain as much value as quickly as possible, a lifestyle business is intended to allow its owners to maintain a certain level of income - and no more. Growth is nice, but it's not ...
November 27, 2018
My nuclear family - the one I grew up with - has four different accents. My mother's is somewhere between New England and California; my dad's is Dutch with some Swiss German and English inflections; my sister has traveled further down the road towards a Bay Area accent; and mine ...
November 26, 2018
Over Thanksgiving, the Washington Post ran a profile of the babysitting startup Predictim:
So she turned to Predictim, an online service that uses “advanced artificial intelligence” to assess a babysitter’s personality, and aimed its scanners at one candidate’s thousands of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts.The system offered an automated “risk rating” ...
November 24, 2018
For a host of reasons, I've decided to go dark on social media for the remainder of 2018. If my experiment is successful beyond that time, I'll just keep it going.
Originally, I'd intended to do this just for the month of December, but as I sat around the Thanksgiving dinner ...
November 23, 2018
If I participated in public markets at all (I don't), I might have gleefully shorted Facebook's stock already. But it looks like it's too late for that to be as effective as it might have been.
As Fred Wilson pointed out today:
Apple is down almost 25% in the last two months.Facebook ...
November 22, 2018
Yesterday, in the afternoon, I collapsed. Everything seemed overwhelming and sad.
Today, I'm full of energy again, and I think there's only one kind of work that matters. The work of empowerment.
Broadly: How can we return to a functional democracy that works for everyone?
Narrowly: How can we make sure this administration ...
November 8, 2018
As a proponent of the decentralized web, I've been thinking a lot about the aftermath of the domestic terrorism that was committed in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue over the weekend, and how it specifically relates to the right-wing social network Gab.
In America, we're unfortunately used to mass ...
November 1, 2018