The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
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Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
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Last night at 3am, our daughter Brieza started crying, Frannie and I woke up, and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I crawled over into my office and started surfing the web. For about two hours, I wandered from thing to thing, and seemed to keep hitting gems, like this classic Paul Graham article on doing what you love, this awesome Quora thread on how Apple keeps secrets, these posts by Joe Kraus on "seeing greatness" and the culture of distraction we're creating (most of these stemmed from McKenna Moreau's twitter stream). And of course I logged my requisite Wikipedia time, reading up on Freidrich Hayek as well as the history of Fascism. A grand tour, indeed. One post that really got me thinking was a Quora thread started by Christina Cacioppo asking "Why does Jane Jacobs garner so much respect?" It got me thinking about why Jane Jacobs is inspiring to me. I read Jane Jacobs for the first time during my sophomore year of college at Stanford. At the time, I was feeling rather displaced and isolated, having moved to the northern California suburbs (as beautiful as it is there, in many ways) from NYC. I couldn't figure out how to engage with the physical and social landscape of the spread out strip mall suburbs of the Valley -- I couldn't see or feel the energy, I couldn't connect with people (physically, emotionally) the way I had grown accustomed to in New York. The whole thing felt really weird and I didn't like it. Then, on a total whim (tagging along with my friend
Last night at 3am, our daughter Brieza started crying, Frannie and I woke up, and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I crawled over into my office and started surfing the web. For about two hours, I wandered from thing to thing, and seemed to keep hitting gems, like this classic Paul Graham article on doing what you love, this awesome Quora thread on how Apple keeps secrets, these posts by Joe Kraus on "seeing greatness" and the culture of distraction we're creating (most of these stemmed from McKenna Moreau's twitter stream). And of course I logged my requisite Wikipedia time, reading up on Freidrich Hayek as well as the history of Fascism. A grand tour, indeed. One post that really got me thinking was a Quora thread started by Christina Cacioppo asking "Why does Jane Jacobs garner so much respect?" It got me thinking about why Jane Jacobs is inspiring to me. I read Jane Jacobs for the first time during my sophomore year of college at Stanford. At the time, I was feeling rather displaced and isolated, having moved to the northern California suburbs (as beautiful as it is there, in many ways) from NYC. I couldn't figure out how to engage with the physical and social landscape of the spread out strip mall suburbs of the Valley -- I couldn't see or feel the energy, I couldn't connect with people (physically, emotionally) the way I had grown accustomed to in New York. The whole thing felt really weird and I didn't like it. Then, on a total whim (tagging along with my friend
Subscribe to The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanBitcoin as Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes.Bitcoin at first was "weird internet money...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Internet's Next Business Model: A Conversation with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
I just released a new episode of The Slow Hunch with Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. Since we invested in their Series C back in 2013, I've watched Matthew and his team build one of the most critical pieces of internet infrastructure—protecting and accelerating vast portions of global web traffic. Our conversation traces Matthew's journey from his early "slow hunch" that the internet was fundamentally broken and needed fixing. We start with his law school days in 2000, when ...
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Those three books are there for a reason:
PHP for the World Wide Web, by Larry Ullman. This is the book that taught me programming. I had taken some in college, but not really focused on it. But this book helped me catch the bug -- I did all the exercises, then moved on to more and more. It kicked me into a (now 8-year old) cycle of self-directed learning about technology, programming, and the web. The best education in my life, by far. So thanks, Larry.
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson. Steven is my favorite writer of all time. He has an unmatched ability, IMO, to tie together phenomena from the worlds of biology, sociology and technology into an amazingly rich, compelling and long-lasting narrative. The title of this blog, "the slow hunch", is drawn from this book (check out the video), and I always feel like he's inside my head with me as I go about my work.
and of course, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is the actual copy I bought back in 1998, and I'm enormously proud to say that it's signed by Jane herself (I met her briefly in 2004, shortly before she passed away).
It's corny, but I like the idea that these people, stories, and values are propping up my work every day. Standing on the shoulders of giants, so they say. So, when I think about the Internet, and the fight for the future of everything, I often think "What would Jane do?" (or maybe, WWJJD). And I think the answer is that she would dig into the nuances of How Things Really Work, make a crystal clear, compelling case for what's great, and organize her fellow citizens to fight against the powerful forces that would change things for the worse. Sounds about right to me.
Those three books are there for a reason:
PHP for the World Wide Web, by Larry Ullman. This is the book that taught me programming. I had taken some in college, but not really focused on it. But this book helped me catch the bug -- I did all the exercises, then moved on to more and more. It kicked me into a (now 8-year old) cycle of self-directed learning about technology, programming, and the web. The best education in my life, by far. So thanks, Larry.
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson. Steven is my favorite writer of all time. He has an unmatched ability, IMO, to tie together phenomena from the worlds of biology, sociology and technology into an amazingly rich, compelling and long-lasting narrative. The title of this blog, "the slow hunch", is drawn from this book (check out the video), and I always feel like he's inside my head with me as I go about my work.
and of course, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is the actual copy I bought back in 1998, and I'm enormously proud to say that it's signed by Jane herself (I met her briefly in 2004, shortly before she passed away).
It's corny, but I like the idea that these people, stories, and values are propping up my work every day. Standing on the shoulders of giants, so they say. So, when I think about the Internet, and the fight for the future of everything, I often think "What would Jane do?" (or maybe, WWJJD). And I think the answer is that she would dig into the nuances of How Things Really Work, make a crystal clear, compelling case for what's great, and organize her fellow citizens to fight against the powerful forces that would change things for the worse. Sounds about right to me.
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