Darrell Silver!

Prashant’s daughter made me the loveliest present ever!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:48:00 -0500

Prashant’s daughter made me the loveliest present ever!

Stephen, Owen and twelve of our closest friends are just back...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:33:00 -0500

Stephen, Owen and twelve of our closest friends are just back from Les Arcs! As a side note, it was interesting how productive I was with Perpetually because of France’s lack of good internet access.

Me & family on the men’s downhill course in Whistler...

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Me & family on the men’s downhill course in Whistler over Christmas. Happy opening games!

Photo

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:21:50 -0500

Mapping a new feature for Perpetually.

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:14:00 -0500

Mapping a new feature for Perpetually.

Funding is Friction

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:13:00 -0500

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 same money…and many of the others have companies that are much further down the path than you are.

He’s looking at fund raising like it’s some sort of goal. Fund raising is a friction to your success. A necessary one, sometimes, but a friction nonetheless. Most technology startups can choose early on to spend time looking for seed money or build a prototype instead. Assuming you could achieve either, in one scenerio you’d end up with no business and some money, while in the other you’d have a tangible product and a hungry market vying to invest in its success.

The time and distraction of the fund raising process must be worth the benefits, right now, to your business. Outside investment is not an achievement or a prerequisite to success. It’s just one of several strategies that can help you out along the way.

Stephen got his green card approved!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:15:00 -0500

Action Oriented Startups

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:35:00 -0500

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 key advantages a company like ours has versus someone much larger. Every person we’ve hired for Perpetually jumped first into a small project that could be completed in about 10 hours. Most often it’s the tip of the iceberg for a much larger idea the candidate will focus on if they’re hired. Joining our team should be a smooth transition with few if any surprises. If the candidate is excited and curious, that’s a very good sign. If they can’t communicate or deliver, it gives us an opportunity to improve early on.

Hiring is a two-way street, and this quick-fail approach has proven to be an excellent way for candidates to learn about how we work and if they want to stay. We’ve definitely found great people, in less time, because of it. It’s exactly how I hope to find talented a front-end person as we start a new search this week.

Halloween Meme: Candy for Strangers The Mission: Give candy to...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:34:00 -0400

James!

Times Square

Peter!

Uptown 1 Train

42nd & 9th ave

Mark!

Stephen!

Halloween Meme: Candy for Strangers

The Mission: Give candy to strangers in exchange for a photo!

Via The WSJ: Andrew Toth has been working on his replica of a...

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:25:00 -0400

Via The WSJ:

Andrew Toth has been working on his replica of a first-class Pan Am cabin for 20 years. He has a huge stockpile of original straws, cutlery and cups and reseals peanuts to match the original.

He sounds like an obsessed camp nutcase! I’m totally inspired!

A dollar bill signed by Michael Moore, from just after he...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:30:00 -0400

A dollar bill signed by Michael Moore, from just after he interviewed a few of us over dinner a few months ago for his new movie, which just came out today. I was supposed to be paid $1 for the interview asked him to sign one of mine instead.

Almost forgot! I absolutely love this photo, and had to wait...

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:21:00 -0400

Almost forgot! I absolutely love this photo, and had to wait until his movie came out to put it up. I also got a dollar bill with Moore’s autograph.

I haven’t seen the movie, but the dinner was fun. Moore’s heart is typically in the right place, so I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with.

Perpetually Hiring!

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:23:00 -0400

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!

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:41:54 -0400

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 Twitter shouldn’t “turn on revenue” because it might prove bad for business.

We started Perpetually.com to be a real business. We have some serious challenges, and approximately none of them come from a lack of funding, competitive edge or market position. We’re going to make a lot of mistakes (hint: we’re making some right now), and we’re going to fix and learn from all of them. We’re going to innovate in increments and we’re going to stumble into huge blue oceans. But we’re never going to “swing for a fences” when rock-solid improvement will serve our customers and business best.

Jason & TechCrunch were nice enough to provide invites to all TC50 companies (“alumni”) from previous years. You know what *I* kept hearing backstage?

Where are they now?

Turnout was like twenty percent at best. Where did everyone go? After the headlines have gone, where does all that swinging for the fences leave you?

We’re running Perpetually.com as a long-term business exactly because we want to change the world. Our opportunities are so big that we’d be idiots to go for broke with every idea. Only someone with no options swings for the fences.

A few folks insisted I put up our presentation from...

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:44:00 -0400

A 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...

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:25:43 -0400

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 a long flight, I noticed that when he referenced research from the web he only provided basic information, providing no direct link to the data to which he was referring. So here’s this book, I thought, that’s so critical to our understanding of financial theory and history, and I’m prevented from reading the author’s source material. The problem, it seemed, is that the web is deeply ephemeral. Information readily available one minute is just as easily gone the next.

By March, after some research into this “ephemeral web”, I was hooked. For a few months I worked alone, writing the beginning of a system that could archive web content, giving it permanence. When it became clear how much I didn’t know, I started tapping New York’s tech community: Jelly, New Work City and Python stepped up. I then tried the patience of Stephen, Owen, family, friends and anyone else who might have an interest in helping out. Together, we found some awesome minds in Adam, Carl, Chris, Collin, Erin, Jeremy, Liz, Louise, Mark and Saha.

Today, as a finalist in the TechCrunch50, we launched Perpetually.com. It’s the first public release of The Perpetual Web: A private, permanent and easy archive of any web content that you choose to preserve. I’m super excited about what the team has started. We’re just at the beginning of this thing, and I already can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned in the coming months and years. A new adventure begins!

workatjelly: Jelly! was mentioned in Time Out New York....

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:57:24 -0400

workatjelly:

Jelly! was mentioned in Time Out New York. Thanks Alicia for the heads up!

A new way to prioritize our projects

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:29:00 -0400

A new way to prioritize our projects

"The problem with many papers is not what they charge for what they do. It is what they actually do...."

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 09:56:00 -0400

“The problem with many papers is not what they charge for what they do. It is what they actually do. A vast amount of content duplicates information available elsewhere. In any other industry, we would call this overcapacity. The reallocation of resources that must come, towards investigative journalism and high-value comment and analysis, will be more painful for some newspapers than others, and competition is much fiercer in a multi-platform world.”

- Truth to…colleagues. Stephen’s column in The Independent

NYTimes Throws Darts

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:38:00 -0400

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 the effect is to obscure what’s important. First, and most complex is that innovation in equity trading over the last twenty years (from manual to electronic trading) lowered transaction costs for everyone (a good thing) but also created an arms race where only the biggest banks and hedge funds could compete (a bad thing). It’s a complex balancing act: while investors still pay more to trade than those of us who aren’t in the inner circle, any serious discussion must point out that relative to previous generations of equity trading, everything is cheaper.

Most important, however, is that along with all this automation came an enormous amount of noise in the system: many players, and not just those in the inner circle, trade for the point of trading, and have absolutely no interest in investing. One can honestly debate whether this type of trading has any systemic benefit, but it clearly has occasional cost. A strategy that makes money without investing isn’t actually doing anything useful except making money for it’s creators. Put another way, it hard to see how this kind of trading directly serves the market’s goal of allocating capital.

The second issue, which is entirely separate, is that aside from a technological advantage, in some circumstances the inner circle gets information about trades in the market before everyone else. Any lead on information lets you beat your competitors to the punch, which is fundamentally what this game is all about. It’s also an illegal practice, and the “loopholes” that allow it are both new and already under investigation by the SEC. If I understand these sources correctly, basically the SEC created the problem they’re now faced with fixing.

This article is justifiably cynical about how the likes of Goldman make all their money, but the issues raised aren’t actually advanced by a poorly explained roundup of the situation.

I suffer from my own biases. My starting position (yet to be argued with by any of my friends who still work on Wall Street) is that 50% of the jobs on Wall Street could be lopped off and it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone, except in freeing up a generation of well-educated people to do whatever else it is most of them want to do anyway. Once that’s done, the process could probably safely be repeated a few more times.

Update 8/4: Both of my points above have since been addressed by people who, you know, still do this stuff for a living:

Paul Krugman writes:

… What both say is that private information — the kind of information you get by, say, using supercomputers to place trades 30 milliseconds faster than the hoi-polloi — can be privately profitable but socially ~~useful~~ useless, maybe even destructive.

The SEC is making a big deal about how they’re now looking into “flash orders”. Here’s Chuck Schumer (via the WSJ):

We salute the SEC for moving forward with this ban that will restore integrity to the markets. The agency is absolutely making the right call by stepping up and ending this unfair practice…