Before World War 2, the middle-class in the developed world struggled to afford basic needs. In the post-war boom, standards of living rose dramatically, and people consumed far beyond what they need...
Suppose you launch your new startup and don’t get the traction you were hoping for. How do you know whether to give up or keep going? This is a tough question. There are lots of examples that s...
If you are a founder trying to create a new mobile app or an investor trying decide whether an app has enduring value, it is helpful to separate the ways that people use apps into four categories. 1....
If you are starting a company and wondering why nothing good seems to happen unless you force it to happen, that’s because the world wants to stay the way it is. Customers, partners, and most o...
Startups usually succeed because of a single major product or business innovation. Google is unusual in that they succeeded because of two major innovations: their core search product, and their keyw...
People blog for all sorts of reasons. For me, it is mostly about learning. This wasn’t my original intention – it evolved over time. Now I see blogging as part of a continuous learning pr...
Every week a “we are in a tech bubble” article seems to come out in a major newspaper or blog. People who argue we aren’t in a bubble are casually dismissed as promoting their own i...
Judging from the tech press, you’d think the biggest risk to successful companies is competition. But when you examine the history of technology, incumbents usually decline because the world ch...
With the passage of the JOBS act, it seems that many more Americans will soon be able to buy equity in private companies. I am no expert on the law, but I have been investing in private companies for...
A fundamental principle of business is that you do things in house that you think can give you a competitive advantage and outsource things that you don’t. At an early-stage technology company ...
One of the major trends in tech startups what Fred Wilson calls “Mobile first, web second.” Instagram is a great example of mobile first. They barely had a website – it was all abou...
There is generally a lot of enthusiasm in the startup world these days. But some observers worry that too many startups are working on “features” instead of world-changing ideas. Founders...
I’ve spent the majority of my career building technologies that try to do useful things with large datasets.* One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that there are only two way...
Two common discussions in the startup world right now are 1) the increasing speed at which new apps/websites can gain mass adoption (Instagram, Pinterest, OMGPOP’s Draw Something, etc), and 2) ...
From my March 16 blog post “The myth of the overnight success“: Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hi...
Like many in tech, I believe all software patents should be abolished. That said, I think Facebook made the right move by filing a lawsuit against Yahoo’s patent attack. As I see it, Facebook h...
A few years ago, the trend of companies raising smaller seed rounds combined with the emergence of new seed funds caused many big VCs to create seed investment programs. This triggered a debate among...
Companies that employ the “freemium” business model give away a product or service for free and then charge for additional features. The freemium model has gotten more popular as the cost...
Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but st...
A famous story in artificial intelligence is how the US military developed algorithms to determine whether an image had a tank in it. They used a standard machine learning method: feed the computer a...
Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years about the best ways for entrepreneurs to interact with the press (by press I mean blogs as well as traditional media). - Don’t be afraid ...
From Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle in today NYTimes: Innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, th...
One of the interesting things about having been investing in startups for a number of years is that at any moment you get an inside peek at startups at a variety of different stages. In the course of...
“Big timing” is a phrase I’ve heard a lot lately which refers to people who are “higher ranking” acting disrespectfully toward people who are “lower ranking”...
One of the great unsolved questions in computer science is the P vs NP problem. It is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems - if you solve one of them, you get $1 million and become really famou...
From Jonah Lehrer, Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work (via Stowe Boyd): Building 20 [a scene of incredible innovation at MIT] and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. I...
When your product extends a platform’s functionality, one of the main risks you face is that the platform could embed your product’s key features within the platform – what is somet...
Recently, a friend was trying to recruit a programmer to join his early-stage startup. The programmer had just graduated from college and his impression of startups was shaped mostly by popular media...
Note: The company I cofounded, Hunch, was acquired by eBay in November 2011. I am now an eBay employee. But all the opinions expressed below are my own, and were developed prior to the Hunch acquisit...
1. I’ve heard rumors that lots of apps have been uploading user contact lists for years. One person who knows the iOS world well told me “if you download a lot of apps, your contact list ...
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