Writing.
Essays since 2006, plus a few things first published at USV. Occasional by design. The podcast lives on its own page.
- Where do web standards come from?
I’ve spent the better part of the last six years thinking about where web standards come from. Before joining USV, I was at the (now retired) urban tech incubator OpenPlans, where, among other things, we worked to further “open” technology solutions, including open data formats and web protocols. T...
- Wanted: email apology bot
Maybe we all live in the email anti-Lake Wobegon, where we’re all “worse than average” at email, in our own minds. One problem with email is the giant guilt pile it creates — the psychological consisting of the number of emails you know are in there that you have forgotten about, ignored, or missed....
- OuiShareFest Paris: Venture Capital vs. Community Capital
Photo: Rudy (Loïs) Pignot I am in Paris this week for OuiShareFest, and spoke yesterday morning during the opening session. OuiShareFest is in its third year as a large international gathering of folks interested in the peer/collaborative/sharing/networked society, put on by the community organizat...
- Anti-workflow: to-dos
A while back, I wrote about Anti-Workflow Apps — apps that solve problems for you without forcing you to adopt a workflow that you may never fully be able to adopt. Workflow apps (CRMs, to-do lists, project management tools) are super hard to drive adoption towards, as everyone works differently an...
- Dick Pics and Cable Company Fuckery
John Oliver has become the most important voice in tech policy (and maybe policy in general). His gift, his talent, his skill: turning wonky policy language that makes people glaze over into messages that people connect to and care about it. Last fall, he did took what may be the most boring, confus...
- Failure is the tuition you pay for success
I couldn’t sleep last night, and was up around 4am lurking on Twitter. I came across an old friend, Elizabeth Green, who is an accomplished and awesome education writer — you’ve probably read some of her recent NYT mag cover stories, and it turns out she has a new book out, Building a Better Teache...
- Financial Planning for the 90%
A few weeks ago as I was walking down Beacon Street in Brookline, I happened upon something amazing: The Society of Grownups. The Society of Grownups is a self-proclaimed “grad school for adulthood”, the idea is to give people the tools they need to manage their grown up lives. The primary focus is...
- The Light Inside, The Fire Inside
Last week, a friend passed away after a relatively brief but intense battle with lung cancer. I didn’t know Paul well, but he was very close with a few of my very close friends, and I had spent enough time with him to understand that he was special: he had a light inside of him. A… Continue readi...
- Increasing trust, safety and security using a Regulation 2.0 approach
This is the latest post in a series on Regulation 2.0 that I’m developing into a white paper for the Program on Municipal Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Yesterday, the Boston Globe reported that an Uber driver kidnapped and raped a passenger. First, my heart go out to the p...
- Regulation and the peer economy: a 2.0 framework
As part of my series on Regulation 2.0, which I’m putting together for the Project on Municipal Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, today I am going to employ a bit of a cop-out tactic and rather than publish my next section (which I haven’t finished yet, largely because my whole family has th...
- Web platforms as regulatory systems
This is part 3 in a series of posts I’m developing into a white paper on “Regulation 2.0” for the Program on Municipal Innovation Harvard Kennedy School of Government. For many tech industry readers of this blog, these ideas may seem obvious, but they are not intended for you! They are meant to he...
- Technological revolutions and the search for trust
For the past several years, I have been an advisor to the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This is a group tasked with helping cities consider how to govern in new ways using the volumes of new data that are now available. An adjacent group at HKS i...
- The magic of making hard things easy
I wrote earlier this week about how life is, generally, hard. There’s no question about that. One of my favorite things about the Internet, and probably the most exciting thing about working in venture capital, is being around people who are working to re-architect the world to make hard things eas...
- Everyone is broken and life is hard
That’s a pretty depressing and fatalistic post title, but I actually mean it in a positive and encouraging way. Let me explain. It’s easy to go about your life, every day, feeling like everyone else has their shit together and that the things you struggle with are unique to you. But then, when you ...
- Anti-workflow apps
“Workflow” apps hold so much promise. Whether it’s a CRM, project management tool, to-do list, or some other tool, the promise in each case is to clean up our messy lives and help us be more organized and effective. The problem, though, is that getting people to adopt a workflow is really really ha...
- Finding Flow: writing vs. coding
When I first started to learn programming, about 15 years ago, I remember being surprised at how easy it was for me to get focused and stay focused. I loved (and still love) the feeling of getting lost in a project, and could easily spend hours upon hours “in the zone”. No procrastination, no resis...
- Crowdsourcing patent examinations
Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon at a US Patent & Trademark Office roundtable discussion on using crowdsourcing to improve the patent examination process. Thanks to Chris Wong for looping me in and helping to organize the event. If you’re interested, you can watch the whole video here. I wa...
- Support services for the Indie Economy
Over the course of the past year, I’ve been interviewed a bunch of times about the “peer economy” or the “sharing economy” (Fastco, Wired, NY Times, PBS Newshour), with most of the focus on the public policy considerations of all this, specifically public safety regulations and the impact on labor. ...
- The Professional Amateur
One way I have described myself is as a “professional amateur”. I am both deeply proud and deeply ashamed of that. Let me explain. For basically my whole career, I’ve been learning new fields and professions from the outside-in. While I have an undergrad degree in Urban Studies, which ostensibly ...
- Half, not half-assed
My favorite book on product development and startups is Getting Real, published in 2006 by the folks at 37signals (now Basecamp). If you haven’t read it (it’s freely available online), it’s essentially a precursor to The Lean Startup (2011). Back when I was leading a team and running product and Op...