Last week, having been inspired by (of all things) this awesome and awful samsung gear commercial, i ordered a Pebble smartwatch. I can’t remember the last time I wore a watch — maybe it was 20 years ago in high school.  My standard line for the past 10 years has been “why do I need… Continue readin...

“It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.” — Joseph Stiglitz, In No One We Trust The week before last, I visited Yahoo! to give the keynote talk at their User First conference, which brought together big companies (Google, Facebook, etc), startups (big ones like USV portfolio com...

A few weeks ago, Brian asked Brittany and me: “do you think it’s better to build your career around skills or around ideas?”. Brittany immediately said “skills” and I immediately said “ideas”.  We argued about it for a few minutes, and ultimately we both agreed that skills and ideas are both importa...

Last night, I had the pleasure of joining Meetup.com GC David Pashman‘s NYU Law class on Internet and Business Law for Technology Companies as a guest speaker.  Over the course of the past semester, David’s students have played the role of internet company General Counsel, working on a variety of le...

Mmmm Continue reading

At USV, we talk a lot about how the landscape is changing, as more entrepreneurs and investors get behind the idea of building networks around problems, communities & verticals.  And that means that we are seeing more competitors in each space we look at, especially compared to what it looked like w...

Saying no to things is something I’ve always been bad at.  I have always been (and to some extent, have prided myself on being) more of a “why not” guy than a “why” guy. This has many of advantages — I’m open minded and I end up doing tons of interesting things w interesting people.… Continue readin...

Andy and I were talking yesterday about how both of us really struggle on email, especially during busy weeks when we’re really focused on something (travel, a project, etc).  I can’t tell you how many emails I start with: “I apologize for the long delay here…” I described it as being afraid of the ...

There are a lot of great insights in Benedict Evans’ most recent report. It’s worth a read. One that stood out to me is this one: Because a lot of our social network lives at the phone OS layer (contacts), and because mobile social may be “sticky like nightclubs, not like banks”, perhaps the switchi...

I’ve been a remote or semi-remote worker for a long time now.  Which has a boatload of pros (flexibility) as well as cons (distance from “the watercooler”). Over time, I’ve tried lots of things to help forge a stronger connection among my distributed or semi-distributed teams.  As you would expect, ...

It’s fascinating to watch the process of business models exploding. What apple did yesterday in announcing free OSX and free iWork apps is a great example of that.  MS has traded on license fees for Windows and Office forever, and for a long time, Apple has followed suit, charging reasonably high (a...

Last week, I traveled to SF, and ended up on a flight with no internet (aaaaaaagh!). And, of course, I forgot to bring the book I’m currently reading. So, I went old school and bought a book at the airport bookstore.  I honestly can’t remember the last time I did that.   Actually, I bought two books...

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of being organized vs. being disciplined.  It’s easy to want to “get organized” — or worse, to spend a lot of time and effort getting organized — but then not actually have the discipline to see it through (this is also known as “systems to cover up symptoms“...

It seems like everywhere I look right now, people are playing hardball.  I.e., taking tough / extreme positions and sticking to them ferociously. The showdown in congress over the budget and Obamacare is one case. The republicans have shown that they are willing to take it to the wall, and the Dems ...

As the federal government shuts down, there is no shortage of predictions about how it will shake out, when it will end, and who will take the blame. Speaking of predictions (how’s that for a segue?), David Eaves (who writes a great blog for those who like the intersection of cities, governments and...

Here’s a plug for Anthony Townsend‘s new book, Smart Cities (which I haven’t read yet but have discussed with him throughout the making).  I can’t wait to get my hands on it, and suspect that it’ll be an enlightening read for anyone watching the “smart cities” / “civic hacking” space. The angle I’m ...

Janelle Orsi has an article in Shareable that should be of interest for anyone following the “sharing economy” (or “peer economy”, or whatever you want to call it). It tackles one of the most difficult and interesting problems facing sharing economy platforms: the relationship (technically speaking,...

I’m here today at the Adaptive Metropolis conference at UC Berkeley, organized by ReBar.  Which, as I suspected it would be, is awesome.  The premise of the conference is how cities, and the way we plan, manage and engage with them, is changing — an in particular, how bottom-up, diy, adaptive, respo...

I’m writing this from a plane en route to Berkeley for what should be an awesome conference: Adaptive Metropolis: User Generated Urbanism.  Among the organizers is my favorite DIY city-making collective: ReBar. Back in 2005, ReBar did something amazing.  They pulled up to a San Francisco parking spa...

Cescalouise and I have started using Wunderlist to keep track of shared to-dos (bills to pay, stuff to buy, etc).  I’ve been a user of Wunderlist for a number of years now and have written about it before. The shared lists in Wunderlist actually seem to be working for us.   Whenever she adds or… Con...