I remember the day I realized who I wanted to be very clearly. I was sat in the Matter San Francisco garage, watching a panel of entrepreneurs from previous cohorts give advice to the current set of six startups who were about to graduate from the program. As I listened ...
November 30, 2020
As many of you know, I spent a couple of years as west coast Director of Investments at Matter, an early-stage startup accelerator supporting entrepreneurs with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society. Before I worked there, I went through the program as the co-founder of ...
November 28, 2020
Build great things by understanding people really well and serving their needs deeply, not treating them as anonymous numbers on a spreadsheet and turning knobs to see what moves the needle in the way you want.
That's it. That's the post. ...
November 24, 2020
I was awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at nothing, my heart racing. It was a bit like The Queen's Gambit, except instead of a chessboard on the ceiling, there was a kanban board, with a huge backlog of things I knew I'd failed to do.
This morning, ...
November 23, 2020
I want to unlearn the definition of "disruption".
Disruption in the Clayton Christensen sense is all about removing an incumbent business from its perch by reaching an audience it has overlooked and growing from there. It's about building a business by out-competing another business. As far as business goes, it's good ...
November 22, 2020
The question is a trope of the modern age. We were promised flying cars half a century ago; where are they?
Every so often someone even tries to answer that question. Passenger drones, manned quadcopters, and even jetpacks have tried to bring this 1950s vision of the future to life.
The truth ...
November 21, 2020
When she was twelve years old, my aunt escaped from the concentration camp where her mother and siblings were interned. She swam through the sewers, found food, and returned. My grandmother collected snails and cooked them out of sight of the Japanese guards. Around them, people were tortured and killed ...
November 6, 2020
We all know this, but today is life or death for a great many people. The stakes are sky high. I don’t know what will happen afterwards, but I do know I’ve been waiting for today for four very long years.
And I have hope.
If you're an American, you've been bombarded ...
November 3, 2020
This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for October.
This month I've changed my process a little: I save my links to a Notion database, export them at the end of the month, and convert them into a blog post ...
November 1, 2020