“Peer Networks” are bringing new organizational and economic dynamics to every sector — unlocking tremendous opportunity and potential. At the same time, they threaten incumbents in the private and public sectors, and present new challenges for regulators working to protect the public interest. Please join us to discuss the dynamics of peer networks, the opportunities they present to our economies and societies, and the political and policy challenges facing their advancement.
“Peer Networks” are bringing new organizational and economic dynamics to every sector — unlocking tremendous opportunity and potential. At the same time, they threaten incumbents in the private and public sectors, and present new challenges for regulators working to protect the public interest. Please join us to discuss the dynamics of peer networks, the opportunities they present to our economies and societies, and the political and policy challenges facing their advancement.
in a box - conveniently omitting many tough questions and cherry-picking historical examples to fit a pre-determined viewpoint. Johnson’s response is that Morozov’s critique misses many of the nuances of his argument. I don’t have time to write a proper response right now - but my starting point for thinking about this is pretty obvious. I’m describe myself as a “
. So I am hardly an impartial observer. That said, I welcome Morozov’s critique, and find it tremendously useful in shaping and sharpening my thinking.
Today, we announced that USV is investing in Hailo. I am psyched about this for a number of reasons, but primarily because it’s infrastructure that connects people to their city in new ways. What’s most fascinating is that we almost certainly don’t yet know what those ways are. I want to point out one quote from Fred’s interview in the Wall Street Journal. He says:
“We think this is a kind of Trojan Horse to get people using a large network on their mobile phones to actually transact and get real stuff,” said Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures. “From there, I think lots of interesting things can happen. Alone in the taxi cab market, there’s a pretty big business to be built, and the fact that there’s potential beyond that gives us a lot of confidence.”
We talk a lot about backing into your network - in other words, starting with a thin edge of the wedge and ultimately finding a secondary purpose that may in fact be more profound than the first. For instance, we often say “twitter backed into identity” — when Twitter started out, it didn’t start by announcing itself as the de facto identity provider on the web. Instead, it became that after achieving ubiquity in public messaging. Relatedly: a few weeks ago at the election campaign tech / data postmortem event held at google, Oscar Salazar (co-founder of Uber, now founder of Citivox) had my favorite line of the day. He said ”I hate the term ‘civic apps’. All apps are civic. For example, Waze has submitted more pothole reports than all of the other ‘civic apps’ combined.” I love that. A few years ago I wrote about the idea of the Enterprise End-Run, which is related — the idea that we can cause big shifts in enterprise behavior by drawing the change out the back end, rather than pushing it through the front. I just love the idea that the direct approach is not always (or perhaps is hardly ever) the right one. It’s so interesting to think of other areas where this is happening or could happen.
I am bad at email. Maybe everyone is. But I feel like I’m worse than most; or at least worse than I want to be. I feel like my inbox should do a better job helping me find emails that are important. I use Gmail and Priority Inbox, so I don’t mean “important” in that sense (emails from close contacts). By important, I mean things like:
Conversations where “the ball is in my court” (hard to discern programmatically perfectly)
Conversations that I initiated — then the person wrote back — but then I didn’t write back to (similar to #1 but easier to identify, and more important)
Emails that I have not responded to yet at all
Emails from important people, where important takes into account other data such as: twitter followers (total, in common), linkedin connection, etc.
probably a few other smart ways I’m not thinking of right now.
I have been thinking about this a bit after reading somewhere (I think in Venture Deals) that Brad Feld and his partners read and respond to every inbound email every day. That’s pretty impressive. I am not there yet. But I like the idea a lot. So today I did set up a little gmail query to try and help with that: newer_than:1d and is:important This gives me a view of all the emails that I received in the last day. It’s a start. But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t give me is a view of conversations I have not participated in yet. I tried adding a filter such like: -from:me, to try and exclude any threads that I’ve participated in, but that doesn’t do the trick. So I what I see is a list of all the emails that came in today, including every email I sent. Which is not what I’m looking for. I complained about this to Fred the other day, suggesting that there’s still an opportunity to build a product (along the lines of SaneBox or Gmail Meter) that really solves the inbox problem. It’s such an important problem for so many people, and it’s still so far from perfect. His response was that there’s a fear of investing in things that are too close to the core of the email platforms. I am not sure I agree, but it does seem that there still isn’t a perfect solution, so maybe that’s the reason. In summary, I would love to see: a) a simple gmail query parameter that lets me find conversations in which I am not yet a participant (I feel like this must exist!) or b) a smarter view of my inbox — perhaps one that is another kind of visualization besides a list — that takes into account these other important factors. I’d pay good money for that! Update: this query is pretty good: newer_than:7d is:important in:inbox
in a box - conveniently omitting many tough questions and cherry-picking historical examples to fit a pre-determined viewpoint. Johnson’s response is that Morozov’s critique misses many of the nuances of his argument. I don’t have time to write a proper response right now - but my starting point for thinking about this is pretty obvious. I’m describe myself as a “
. So I am hardly an impartial observer. That said, I welcome Morozov’s critique, and find it tremendously useful in shaping and sharpening my thinking.
Today, we announced that USV is investing in Hailo. I am psyched about this for a number of reasons, but primarily because it’s infrastructure that connects people to their city in new ways. What’s most fascinating is that we almost certainly don’t yet know what those ways are. I want to point out one quote from Fred’s interview in the Wall Street Journal. He says:
“We think this is a kind of Trojan Horse to get people using a large network on their mobile phones to actually transact and get real stuff,” said Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures. “From there, I think lots of interesting things can happen. Alone in the taxi cab market, there’s a pretty big business to be built, and the fact that there’s potential beyond that gives us a lot of confidence.”
We talk a lot about backing into your network - in other words, starting with a thin edge of the wedge and ultimately finding a secondary purpose that may in fact be more profound than the first. For instance, we often say “twitter backed into identity” — when Twitter started out, it didn’t start by announcing itself as the de facto identity provider on the web. Instead, it became that after achieving ubiquity in public messaging. Relatedly: a few weeks ago at the election campaign tech / data postmortem event held at google, Oscar Salazar (co-founder of Uber, now founder of Citivox) had my favorite line of the day. He said ”I hate the term ‘civic apps’. All apps are civic. For example, Waze has submitted more pothole reports than all of the other ‘civic apps’ combined.” I love that. A few years ago I wrote about the idea of the Enterprise End-Run, which is related — the idea that we can cause big shifts in enterprise behavior by drawing the change out the back end, rather than pushing it through the front. I just love the idea that the direct approach is not always (or perhaps is hardly ever) the right one. It’s so interesting to think of other areas where this is happening or could happen.
I am bad at email. Maybe everyone is. But I feel like I’m worse than most; or at least worse than I want to be. I feel like my inbox should do a better job helping me find emails that are important. I use Gmail and Priority Inbox, so I don’t mean “important” in that sense (emails from close contacts). By important, I mean things like:
Conversations where “the ball is in my court” (hard to discern programmatically perfectly)
Conversations that I initiated — then the person wrote back — but then I didn’t write back to (similar to #1 but easier to identify, and more important)
Emails that I have not responded to yet at all
Emails from important people, where important takes into account other data such as: twitter followers (total, in common), linkedin connection, etc.
probably a few other smart ways I’m not thinking of right now.
I have been thinking about this a bit after reading somewhere (I think in Venture Deals) that Brad Feld and his partners read and respond to every inbound email every day. That’s pretty impressive. I am not there yet. But I like the idea a lot. So today I did set up a little gmail query to try and help with that: newer_than:1d and is:important This gives me a view of all the emails that I received in the last day. It’s a start. But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t give me is a view of conversations I have not participated in yet. I tried adding a filter such like: -from:me, to try and exclude any threads that I’ve participated in, but that doesn’t do the trick. So I what I see is a list of all the emails that came in today, including every email I sent. Which is not what I’m looking for. I complained about this to Fred the other day, suggesting that there’s still an opportunity to build a product (along the lines of SaneBox or Gmail Meter) that really solves the inbox problem. It’s such an important problem for so many people, and it’s still so far from perfect. His response was that there’s a fear of investing in things that are too close to the core of the email platforms. I am not sure I agree, but it does seem that there still isn’t a perfect solution, so maybe that’s the reason. In summary, I would love to see: a) a simple gmail query parameter that lets me find conversations in which I am not yet a participant (I feel like this must exist!) or b) a smarter view of my inbox — perhaps one that is another kind of visualization besides a list — that takes into account these other important factors. I’d pay good money for that! Update: this query is pretty good: newer_than:7d is:important in:inbox
