July 2010
1 post
3 tags
New York City Demands More New Work City!
Tony, Peter and some of New York’s most dedicated freelancers, startups and small teams are building a thriving community, and it’s time to expand. Literally. New Work City started 18 months ago as a shared office for entrepreneurs, and has grown alongside New York’s tech scene ever since. Today they’re announcing an upgrade and new home in Tribeca. Personally, I’m...
June 2010
2 posts
5 tags
WatchDemoing in front of 850 of our closest friends at NYTM was a great time, and the response has been amazing! Thanks, everyone!
April 2010
2 posts
Traffic
Seth Godin’s Flipping The Funnel argues that your company shouldn’t be spending vast sums on advertising, but instead should “Turn your customers into salespeople.” Yeah, well — tell me more, obviously!
He writes,
Here’s a quick example. The chart at right compares Web traffic at Ford.com (which is supported by more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of...
Look Back (just this once)
I love talking with Kevin Prentiss — He spends as much time thinking about sales as I do thinking about software. I basically want to steal his brain and graft it onto my own.
ANYWAY, we both want to grow our companies more quickly, and we both sometimes think we haven’t achieved most anything just yet. But Kevin pointed out how myopic that perspective can be. While I grabbed a pen he...
March 2010
3 posts
3 tags
February 2010
2 posts
3 tags
January 2010
4 posts
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
Funding is Friction
David Rose occasionally shows up in my inbox by way of Columbia’s BVC mailing list. This week he hit a nerve:
The bottom line is that raising money from anyone, including both angels and VCs, is really, really tough. Since only the top 2% of companies looking for angel funding succeed in getting it, that means you have to be one of the top two deals out of a hundred who are looking for the...
Stephen got his green card approved!
December 2009
1 post
Action Oriented Startups
Via Fred Wilson,
I believe that in startups, like venture investing, the cost of making a bad decision is not nearly as great as the benefit of making a good one. So I like action oriented leaders. …
If you are “action oriented” in your hiring, you’ll make more hires and more of them will not work out.
This feels exactly right for startups, and it’s one of the...
October 2009
2 posts
3 tags
September 2009
6 posts
Perpetually Hiring!
We’ve got some awesome projects in the queue at Perpetually. If you’re into innovative uses for the browser, using the full DNS database for something altogether different, and know (or want to learn) Python, please contact me somehow!
Thanks!
We Won!
TechCrunch has labeled this year’s TechCrunch50 as, basically, the triumph of the dull. As one of the companies on stage, let me respond by saying, Thanks! It wasn’t clear we could do it, but we did! And your praise means everything.
Sarah Lacy writes,
I want to see huge audacious failures and huge gaudy wins.
This follows Arrington’s argument a couple weeks back that...
WatchA few folks insisted I put up our presentation from TechCrunch50. I remember getting up on stage in front of 1500 strangers, but somehow I’m now shy about posting this… not that shy, I guess.
One Year Later...
A year ago I left the world of finance and hedge funds in search of something more exciting. While being inspired by Amit and the tech scene in San Francisco, the world was changing back home in New York. While in retrospect the timing was incredibly good, it was really just incredibly lucky. I did a lot of traveling after that. In January, while reading Alan Greenspan’s autobiography on...
August 2009
3 posts
“The problem with many papers is not what they charge for what they do. It is...”
– Truth to…colleagues. Stephen’s column in The Independent
July 2009
1 post
NYTimes Throws Darts
It’s good to know the NYTimes can still treat as news a story where the reporter’s ignorance is compensated for by his own views. Luckily, this article about high-speed trading (an issue I’m slowly forgetting but in which I have a few years’ experience) is scornful in the right direction.
There are two points the author is making, but because they’re treated as one...
June 2009
4 posts
Google App Engine Getting Awesomer
Google App Engine is becoming super exciting! The team recently released “Task Queues”, a utility that allows you to run a slow process independent of web requests, which must always be fast. This is the same basic functionality as Amazon’s Simple Queue Service, but Google’s implementation carries none of the overhead of setting up or scaling large queues of tasks, as SQS...
Time to Take a Deep Breath
New Hampshire has just become the sixth state to allow marriage equality. The lion’s share of debate in N.H., as I understand it, was over whether religious institutions (churches, ministers, etc.) would be obligated under the law to perform and recognize same-sex marriages.
I can only imagine how imposing it must be for a religious institution that honestly doesn’t approve of...
Marketing 2.0 in the EU
From an ab-sol-ute-ly-hi-lar-io-us WSJ article on marketing and understanding the upcoming European Parliament elections:
“We wanted somebody youth could relate to,” says Ans Persoons, who directed the initiative. “So we picked an American rapper, but we wanted him to be European, so we hung a big gold euro sign around his neck.”
May 2009
5 posts
But It's Not Google
Introducing Bing via the NYT:
Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.”
Debating "Marriage Equality"
This WNYC interview with Stephen, David, James & myself came out pretty well, I think. I’ve been getting some great feedback from people so far; would love to hear more.
New York is close (but not close enough) to passing a marriage equality bill that will make gay marriage legal in the state, due in no small part to Gov. Paterson and state Assemblyman Larry O’Donnell. ...
WatchTony B did an awesome job on the Brian Lehrer show last week talkin’ NWC & Jelly!
Totally Out of Context
From an AP story about some sort of lame-o Donald Trump controversy:
Miss California USA can retain her crown after questions arose about semi-nude photographs taken of her as a teenager…
”We’ve reviewed the pictures carefully,” Trump said at a packed news conference at Trump Plaza in New York City.
The other half of this story is much more interesting. One of the...
Pushing for Retail Investors (redux)
I’m excited today to follow up a post of mine from a few months ago. In it I point out how a new set of startups say they are helping retail investors make better decisions, but are in fact basically encouraging bad advice. However, just yesterday TechCrunch reviewed MarketRiders, which, while early, could be everything I hoped for. The site encourages simple, low turnover asset allocation...
April 2009
13 posts
Updating My Dictionary
Don’t mind this post. I’m just marking it as the day Obama officially made “hedge funds” and “speculators” into four letter words. Way too broad a brush, but not without reason. From his announcement of Chrysler’s chapter 11 filing:
Now, while many stakeholders made sacrifices and worked constructively, I have to tell you, some did not. In particular,...
Geocities RIP
On the eve of Geocities’ demise, Fred Wilson has posted a fun piece on his view of the company ten years ago when it was getting started. He writes,
… most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it’s something special.
But there’s something profoundly odd here. It’s been years since Geocities was a...
Go Jelly!
A buddy of mine, Zoltan Olah, has just launched a redesign of iCyte, a web annotating tool he’s been working on for a year or so. With the launch I learned that they found the designer for the project at Jelly NYC. Go go Jelly work-togethers!
More Squatters Are Calling Foreclosures Home
I really hope the NYTimes does many more stories like this one. This experience is shockingly separate from my own:
Anita Beaty, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, said her group had been looking into asking banks to give them abandoned buildings to renovate and occupy legally. Ms. Honkala, who was a squatter in the 1980s, said the biggest difference now was...
“Defense experts were also expecting that Boeing’s airborne laser system, which...”
– Holy crap! A 747 that shoots lasers!?!? (Via NYTimes)
March 2009
11 posts
4 tags
"Stock charts make for excellent virtual roller... →
Ziconic, the developers of AirCoaster 3D, a high speed 3D roller coaster app for the iPhone, has turned the Dow Jones and Apple stock charts into roller coaster tracks that users can download and ride.
Stop the Idiocy!
From a hilarious article in the WSJ tonight about cloud computing:
“I have no idea what anyone is talking about,” said Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison, when talking about cloud computing at a financial analyst conference in September. “It’s really just complete gibberish. What is it?” He added: “When is this idiocy going to stop?”
“Mr. Cuomo said that of the top 20 recipients [of the contentious AIG bonus...”
– Not yet located? Don’t these people have cell phones or a TV? I can just picture a guy in a pinstripe suit hiding behind a filing cabinet as Cuomo comes by in a safari jacket! (Via NYTimes)
Moral Mumbo Jumbo
I was skimming this article on Goldman’s conference call on Friday about AIG and noticed a question from an unnamed journalist at The Guardian. He asks
if GS feels that its collateral requirements put AIG over the edge of bankruptcy and whether GS feels “guilty” about that.
Of course, Goldman’s response, from David Viniar, is dismissive:
This is why we have collateral terms in...
“A rising tide lifts all boats…for those who have boats.”
– Stephen Colbert
WatchJust back from an amazing ski trip this week with Stephen, Owen and 15 others in a Meribel chalet in Les 3 Vallees, France. Check out the awesome snow in Owen’s video of me from Courchevel! More photos on flickr!
“Listen you, when you gave me that money, you said I wouldn’t have to repay...”
– Homer Simpson, tonight.