A wrote blog post over on Medium musing on Predictions.| The Gong Show
Quantopian has a big announcement today. The company will manage up to $250 million of investment capital, provided by Steve Cohen. The investment capital will be allocated to members of Quantopian who create successful trading algorithms on the Quantopian platform. The algorithm authors own all their own IP and are paid a royalty if they decide they want to accept investment capital to power their algorithm. The WSJ has more details. My favorite pull quote from the article is where they de...| The Gong Show
We live in a weird new era where I nearly always have full control of what information I share and whom I share it with (assuming I have an indefatigable interest in navigating permissions settings for my various social services), but I have no control over my information once it leaves me. The consumption of my social content is entirely controlled by my followers, not me. This control model is simultaneously intuitive, correct, and disconcerting. A classic example that comes up frequently...| The Gong Show
The Unbiased Algorithm is a Myth: I published another longer read over on Medium. Syndicating here for Tumblr followers and email subscribers. Related lazy-web request: does anyone know a good way to mix together the RSS feeds of Tumblr and Medium so that I don’t have to do these cross posts for my Feedburner email subscribers?| The Gong Show
Corporate Governance: Dictatorships VS Democracy — Medium: I wrote a post over on Medium. It will be my new full time place for long form writing. I’ll probably continue to post more Tumblr-ish content here. Go follow me on Medium.| The Gong Show
I’ve restrained my commentary on the Apple/FBI encryption debate to tweets so far, but I couldn’t find a way to say this in 140 characters, so blog post it is. Digital communication is running a multi-decade inevitable march towards end-to-end encryption. In the beginning when the first ever TCP/IP packets were scooting around the ARPANET, all communication happened in the clear, unencrypted. There were no bad actors on the network; it was just a bunch of altruistic geeks freely routing f...| The Gong Show
Nick Moran keeps a great podcast about VC and startups called Full Ratchet (the name is in reference to a particularly thorny term in venture deals… I hope you never need to face it). He interviewed me a few weeks back, and Part I just went live today. Check it out. Part II coming tomorrow.| The Gong Show
This chart from fivethirtyeight shows a histogram of movie reviews from 5 different sources. The reason they made this chart is to show that aggregated reviews on Fandango are skewed too high and thus untrustworthy (which is an appropriate conclusion). But I find this chart interesting for a different reason. The disproportionate 3.5 star reviews from IMDB and Metacritic caught my attention. My partner Mo once asked my opinion of something by saying, “What’s your rating from 1 - 10 in a w...| The Gong Show
Yesterday I wrote a post showing how companies’ mobile-optimized websites are generally better than their desktop websites when viewed from a desktop browser. It’s a somewhat dramatic conclusion to make given that companies usually have a comparatively rag-tag team focused on mobile-optimized design (all the mobile efforts typically get aimed towards App design instead of mobile-optimized design) in comparison to the richer and more established desktop design efforts. Why would the ...| The Gong Show
When cruising through my Twitter feed on my desktop, I click on links that sometimes drop me on mobile-optimized pages. They are so much better designed than their desktop counterparts. These clicks inspired me to spend 5 minutes exploring the design contrasts at some of the most common sites I use. Wikipedia: Here’s the normal Wikipedia experience in my browser… … and here’s the equivalent mobile-optimized Wikipedia entry as viewed from my desktop browser. --- NYTimes: Here’s the...| The Gong Show
Steven Johnson has an excellent long read coming up this weekend in the NYT Magazine. It’s available online now. Its title says exactly what it’s about: The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t. In short, Napster was supposed to be a harbinger of doom for all creative talent as piracy and digital boogeymen were going to mean the end of any viable revenue streams in the creative industries. Steven explores digital implications for music, movies, books, and television in a pre-Internet c...| The Gong Show
Jonathan Libov of USV and Angela Tran Kingyens of Version One Ventures are collaborating on a mini-series of long reads that they are calling On Digital Healthcare. They released Part 1 today (about Mobile Endpoints) and you can subscribe to updates via email as they are released on their site. It’s terrific, and I’m delighted they’re sharing their thoughts about this meaty and tangled subject with the world. I just finished reading the first installment and found myself eager to leav...| The Gong Show
Nearly all successful modern companies employ some variation of a build-measure-learn feedback cycle. It’s a cycle that iterates as follows: you take an initial position on what your product should be and build it. Then, you measure your target audience’s response and interaction with the product. Then, you analyze your data measurements to figure out where your initial hypothesis was right or wrong and use the learnings from this analysis to inform that next iteration of the product. T...| The Gong Show
About 6 months ago I read Permutation City by Greg Egan. When I put it down, I was glad to be done with it. It wasn’t a gripping read, so despite being relatively moderate length (350 small trade paperback pages), it took me awhile to muscle through it. I don’t usually write reviews on this blog about books I didn’t enjoy much (I don’t see the value in saying negative things publicly about others’ work), so I didn’t blog about it. But this book has really stuck in my mind, ...| The Gong Show
The blog post I wrote earlier this week talking about Sequoia’s investment pacing back around the nuclear winter got far more distribution than I initially expected. It made me curious to look at some more recent numbers about investment pacing. Here is my analysis and conclusions. Investment pace is an interesting quality metric to use to evaluate a venture firm because it’s only valuable if you subscribe to the school of thought that you cannot time markets. If you believe you’re ...| The Gong Show
Brian Chesky, CEO and Co-Founder at AirBnB, recently published 7 rejection letters he received from valley VCs in an effort to raise $150k for a 10% stake in AirBnB during mid-to-late 2008. My own view into that era was already published in an email thread between Paul Graham and Fred Wilson that shows how easy it is to miss deals at the earliest stages (I was in the USV pitch mtg with Fred for AirBnb that is the subject of that thread). Brian’s rejection letters are entertaining alone, b...| The Gong Show
Yesterday I finished Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. It is a great read, well suited for summer. The plot is simple enough to explain spoiler-free: The moon blows up for an unexplained reason. What happens next? It’s a long read, but that’s because it’s actually two books in one. It’s 870 pages. The first two thirds are one continuous story, and the last third is a separate story that takes the result of the first story and runs wild exploring the longer term implications specula...| The Gong Show
My friend John Gannon, Co-Founder and CEO of HireNurture, wrote a book that recently launched called Finding Startup Jobs. John asked me to write the forward for the book, and after reading a late draft I was delighted to contribute. The book is a great fit for people who 1) see the rise of popularity in startups and want to participate, 2) are likely currently working outside the startup industry (perhaps they work in a Wilshire 5000, or possibly a student about to enter the workforce), an...| The Gong Show
This a computer the size of a grain of rice.| The Gong Show
I find it so curious the ways in which the technology we own controls us against our desires, by design. If you buy a new computer and you want to put music from your iPhone into your new iTunes...| Tumblr
The Spawn of craigslist Like most VCs that focus on investing in the applications layer of the internet, I'm fascinated by craigslist. Most commonly, people reflect on the amazing scale of the site...| Tumblr