Skip to main content

< Archive / 2018

August, 2018

Alternative funding may be the best route to a startup ecosystem outside Silicon Valley

I'm asked a fair amount about creating startup ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley. My first startup was founded in Scotland and initially bootstrapped; I was the first employee at another that was founded in Austin, Texas and funded by non-tech angel investors. My third was founded in San Francisco and ...
August 30, 2018

Basic Attention Token is both good and bad - but hooray for Brave for trying something new

I'm quite taken by Brave's Basic Attention Token, which rewards site owners with currency based on the percentage of each user's total attention they have captured. At the same time, I'm also worried about the model. First, the good: by combining BAT with an ad blocker, Brave compensates publishers for the ad-blocking activity of its users. ...
August 9, 2018

I'm really scared.

I have some medical tests today that will help me understand whether I have, or am likely to contract, the condition which runs in my family. I've taken some time and space to help me deal with the emotional impact of this, but it's been easy to run from until ...
August 8, 2018

Stop building for San Francisco

Eric Meyer's post about the unexpected side effects of securing every website is an important read: The drive to force every site on the web to HTTPS has pushed the web further away from the next billion users—not to mention a whole lot of the previous half-billion.  I saw a piece that ...
August 8, 2018

Bad news: there's no solution to false information online

For the last couple of years, fake news has been towards the top of my agenda. As an investor for Matter, it was one of the lenses I used to source and select startups in the seventh and eighth cohorts. As a citizen, disinformation and misinformation influenced how I thought ...
August 7, 2018

Building an Instant Life Plan and telling your personal story

The last couple of months have been full of decision points for me, both personally and professionally. Everything has been on the table, and everything has been in potential flux. Having worked in early stage startups pretty much continuously since 2003, it's possibly been less stressful for me than this level ...
August 2, 2018