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Did you know that you can get AVC delivered by email every day? I've had this feature for as long as I can remember. At least seven or eight years. But it seems like it is hidden because not that many people choose to get it this way. You can go here and subscribe via email. I use a service called Feedblitz to power this. The one feature I'd love to see Feedblitz offer is "reply to the daily email and post a comment". That would be killer.
The President's Commission on Fiscal Reform, known as Simpson Bowles because it was led by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, recommended that we find $6 trillion in spending cuts and new revenues to get the Federal Budget to a healthy place. I stopped by the Wharton Economic Summit last week to hear Austan Goolsbee, formerly Obama's Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, give a keynote. In a wide ranging talk that touched on most of the key economic issues facing the US, Goolsbee pointed out that by hook and crook, we have already accomplished half of Simpson Bowles. We might not like the political nonsense around things like the "fis…
A bit over a week ago, I was asked to interview Jack Dorsey at the NYU Entrepreneur Festival. I posted that news to AVC and all of you helped me compose the set of questions I used for the interview. The livestream and archive was/is hosted on an NYU student built service, which is great. That said, the stream has a few hiccups and starts a few minutes in. It's about 50mins long. </p>
One of the biggest problems at SXSW is lack of a good mobile data connection. The carrier networks are overloaded by the sheer density of people using their phones. And the SXSW WiFi is similarly overloaded. This year, there will be a third option. Look for a free wireless service on your phone called We Heart WiFi: We <3 WiFi "Heartspots" @ SXSW 2013 We will be at SXSW demonstrating the potential of "Super WiFi" on March 8-10. Each Heartspot is powered by 100% open wireless technologies — connected to a single gigabit fiber backbone via Super WiFi backhaul links. No cables, just wireless. All using open spectrum. The Heartspots there to giv…
If this book is as short and as good as this video, I am going to love it. You can back the project on Kickstarter and get the book and other rewards. I just did.
The White House and the FCC have recently come out in favor of allowing consumers to unlock their phones. That is a really good thing. Let's hope that the rest of the regulators in this country join them in this stance. I would go even further. I would assert that rooting, jailbreaking, and other actions that users take to gain total control of their device should be entirely legal in this country. Here is why. We need to defend the concept of general purpose computing. General purpose computing is the idea that the owner of the computer can get access to the base computing functions on the device. Rewind to the time of the homebrew comput…
InSITE is one of my favorite organizations in the NYC tech community. They bring together graduate students at various schools around NYC (business, law, engineering, computer science, design and PhD and post doctorate programs in natural sciences and medicine) together for a two year program designed to get these talented people deeply engaged in the NYC startup community. InSITE has been expanding a lot in the past few years and they are working to fund that expansion. That's where Kingpins Night at Bowlmor comes in. Advertised as "New York City’s first and only startup bowling competition. It is a fundraiser and friendly competition for t…
I have been writing MBA Mondays every week since January 2010. There have been roughly 160 MBA Mondays posts to date. It is a substantial body of work. I have no clue how many words I have written on this topic, but it feels like a lot. I am not sure where to go from here. I am spent and don't feel like I have any more MBA Mondays material. I used to look forward to writing these posts every Monday. Now I dread it. So I am suspending this feature for now. Taking a sabbatical. I can't promise they will be back. But I am not sure they are over either. Time will tell.
And now a return to a favorite topic here at AVC – patents, patent trolls, and the urgent need for patent reform here in the US. One of my favorite ideas for sensible patent reform is "loser pays" for the legal costs of the other side. The reality is that patent trolling is a low cost form of shakedown and that there isn't much economic cost on the troll to deter this behavior. If challenged in court, patent trolls win less than 25% of the time. And yet so few of these shakedowns ever go to court because the cases get settled for economic reasons (settlement cost are less than expected defense costs). And these settlements fund the trolls…
Last monday night, I did the annual fireside chat with InSITE, literally with an iPad fire at my side. I talked for about 20 minutes about two areaas I am thinking alot about, pervasive computing and machine learning, and what might be possible at the intersection of the two. After that there was Q&A, and then we went out for drinks at a nearby pub. It's always one of my favorite public speaking events of the year.
It's going to be a fun friday because I get to interview Jack Dorsey late this afternoon at the NYU Entrepreneurs Festival. The festival is sold out but the interview will be livestreamed here. We plan to go on at 5:30pm eastern. I love interviewing entrepreneurs I've had the opportunity to work with. Last year, I interviewed Dennis Crowley at the first NYU Entrepreneurs Festival and I think it was great. I hope to do as well with Jack today. And you all can help me. Please tweet out the questions you'd like me to ask Jack. Please include two hashtags in your tweet, #askjack and the festival hashtag #nyuef. Thanks for your help and I hope …
This won't be a long post because I'm still not feeling 100%. But I thought I'd share some quick thoughts on the sequester: 1) it is not the most elegant way to make cuts and does feel a bit like taking a sledgehammer to government instead of a knife 2) but cut we must and i'd rather see any cuts than no cuts 3) the defense budget in this country is way too large and full of pork. it is about time we started to cut defense spending. let's hope the pentagon does it intelligently. i think they will. 4) the cuts don't touch entitlements which are our biggest problem. until we tackle them, we won't get anywhere near a balanced budget. 5) i r…
I am under the weather today. Not feeling too well. So instead of posting, I am embedding. I watched this video yesterday and thought it was a really good discussion of where TV is headed. Avner has had a front row seat in his role as founder and CEO of our portfolio company Boxee and his views on the broader TV industry are interesting and very insightful.
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A few months ago, I read about this amazing program called TEALS that allows software engineers to stop by a local school on their way to work and teach computer science to high school students. I thought "what an amazing idea". Fast forward and I am happy to tell you that TEALS is coming to NYC this fall. About a dozen public high schools in NYC have expressed interest and the final group of participating schools will be nailed down in the next few weeks. The way this works is a software engineer literally stops by the school on his or her way to work, teaches the class in partnership with one of the existing teachers in the school, and is…
The Gotham Gal and I have been watching House Of Cards on Netflix. I haven't enjoyed a TV show so much since The Sopranos. It all starts with Kevin Spacey. He is terrific in general and particularly in this show. But that's not the only thing we like about the show. It's about power and intrique in the nation's capital which makes for entertaining plotlines. The characters are strong, the writing is good, the direction is inspired, and the acting is great. The other thing that is great about the show is you can watch all thirteen episodes one after another. We got through two episodes in our first spin. We got through two more a week later…
A few weeks ago, I went down to Wharton, where I got an MBA in the mid 80s, to talk about "being contrarian". My experience with MBAs tells me that they need to be encouraged to think outside of the box and that's what I went down there to evangelize. During the Q&A, which was excellent, way better than the talk itself, I got a question about higher education. Specifically, I was asked what I would do about the "threat" of online education if I ran Wharton. I went to the blackboard, got some chalk, and laid out something that has been rattling around in my mind for the better part of the past few years. I think it is the first time I have …
Yesterday's rant in the comments on HBO vs Netflix and Apple vs Google gave me the idea of a fun friday on brands we love (or hate). Since Kirk tells me I hate too much, I will keep my comments to brands I love. But I am not opposed to hating in the comments. In fact, I think it is fun if it is done respectfully. Sometimes our comment threads here are too nice. And too nice is too boring. Here are a few brands that I love. Blue Bottle Coffee Twitter Doyle Mueser Tell us about the brands you love in the comments.
This post is for everyone who thinks venture capital is an easy business. I'd like to dispel that notion. Here are short term and long term returns for the venture capital business over the past ten years compared to the public equity markets in the US. These numbers don't include the internet bubble of the late 90s, so they are just for the past ten years. What jumps out at me is there are no venture capital returns in this set of numbers that break double digits. When I got into the business in the mid 80s, I was schooled that you needed to produce at least 20% annual returns net to the limited partners to stay in business. The ten ye…
Long title. Short post. Daring Fireball says: The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity. "Designed" being the important word in that quote. Because we aren't done designing user interfaces. I think we are just getting started. This piece in Wired got my head nodding because I am experiencing it every day on my Android phone. I find myself typing less and less on Android because the voice recognition is so damn good. And the type ahead p…
I have written before about open spectrum and the need for a new spectrum policy in the US. Spectrum policy is back in the news because the federal government is soon going to make a bunch of decisions about spectrum that is coming back from the broadcast TV operators. Our policy for the past thirty years has been to sell the spectrum to the highest bidder and let the goverment pocket the money. This is short term thinking of the worst kind. The incumbent duopolist carriers are always the ones who can afford to pay the most money for the spectrum and they have no incentive to innovate on what they do with the spectrum. So it goes mostly unde…
Like last week's post on mobile revenue models, gaming isn't a revenue model itself, but it does offer a number of interesting revenue models and is worth discussing in a post in this series. This is the last post in the revenue model series, which is based on the peer produced revenue model hackpad we created at the start of the series. Gaming is interesting because there are a number of revenue options that game developers can choose from when thinking about how to make money from their game. The hackpad lists the following: View Gaming on Hackpad. There is still a sizeable business in selling a version of the game to the game player. Th…
AVC regulars know that I am a long time Android user and a big fan of the Google mobile OS. A few months ago we turned on Google Now for our USV Google Apps account and I started getting Google Now on my phone. At first, I didn't pay much attention to it. It's not in your face, which I like. But last week, I got my first mobile notification from Google Now. I was at an event in SLC at The Leonardo. I had a dinner meeting in my calendar at 6:15. At roughly 6pm, Google Now sent me a mobile notification that I needed to leave because the place I needed to be at 6:15pm was a 9 minute drive. I was impressed. That's value add. Then I started u…
I sat down with kbs+ Ventures late last year and they produced this interview which I think came out well. This video is part of a series on Creative Entrepreneurship that includes a book on the topic. The book is available for a free pdf download here.
Today we are going to talk about a new feature right here on AVC. It's been running for a day or so, so some of you may have already noticed it. Right next to the comments link, there is a new link that says "disqus commenter breakdown". It looks like this: If you click on that you will get an alternative view of the comment thread – broken down by the most active commenters. You can scroll down, find the commenters you enjoy most, click on them, and read what they have to say. Like many of the hacks featured on this blog, this was built by Kevin Marshall. He built it on top of the Disqus API. I like applications that offer an API to devel…
There was an interesting conversation in the comments to my Retention post that I thought I'd highlight. I can't figure out how to look at frequency and recency data in google analytics by UV as opposed to total visits. So this analysis is probably flawed. If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know in the comments. But assuming the analysis is not totally flawed, the loyal readership of AVC is between 200k and 400k out of a total of 1.7mm unique visitors last year. That means only 10% to 25% of the total visitors are regulars. That's not particularly great retention from what I can tell. But I sure do appreciate all of you loyal r…
Yesterday as I was getting off a plane, I saw this tweet on my phone and replied to it: @jwklemanski yessssss @sai_tools @stevekovach — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 12, 2013 Jason probably tweeted that news at me because of the HBO No Go post from last August in which I expressed my exasperation that I could not airplay the HBO Go content from my iPad to my TV via AppleTV. So that nuttiness has been addressed by HBO. Nicely done HBO. But there's more to ask of them. It would be nice if the HBO Go app came pre-installed on connected devices like AppleTV, Roku, Boxee. It would also be nice if HBO Go supported AllShare so Samsung user…
I guess this should be a Feature Friday post but I write my posts based on what I am thinking about first thing in the morning and this is what I am thinking about right now. I just went to Twitter like I always do first thing in the morning and this is what I saw in my timeline: Right at the top of my timeline, Twitter is telling me that my friend Mark is active again on his Mediaeater handle. And they follow that with the suggestion that I tweet at him. This is the first time I've seen this kind of messaging from Twitter. And I like it. If you go back to my 30/10/10 post, you will see that most web services and mobile apps only get 30% o…
The last two categories in the revenue model hackpad (mobile and gaming) are not really revenue models, they are sectors that have interesting revenue models worth discussing in this series. Today we will discuss mobile and next week we will discuss gaming. Here is what we filled out for mobile in the revenue model hackpad: View Mobile on Hackpad. Mobile offers revenue opportunities that the web does not for a few reasons. First, the downloadable app/app store model makes selling your software much easier on mobile than it is on the web. In 2012, almost $7bn of apps were sold in the iOS and Android app stores. Most of these purchases are b…
As some of you know, we have had an activist in residence at USV for the past year. His name is Nick Grossman and he has helped us to understand the public policy implications of the rise of networks that we are so actively investing in. The idea of a VC firm having an activist in residence has also produced outrage among those who dismiss the power of peer networks in our society. Another sign of the coming Apocalypse? Venture capital firms now have “activists in residence”? This bio suggests so civic.mit.edu/users/nickgros… — Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) February 7, 2013 One of the topics we have been thinking about and working on wit…
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