May 2012
7 posts
Hiring and the Disaggregation of Labor
Michael Galpert wrote a post on hiring for startups, which he summarized cleanly in one sentence: “Everyone is hiring and nobody wants a job.” In the internet startup world, that says it all.
The problem is exacerbated in the startup world because of the availability of remarkably inexpensive angel capital and the extreme capital efficiency of the early phase of building a product....
Libraries
I stopped by a library (the Boston Public Library at Copley) on my way to work this morning. Some observations:
A library smells like a library. I had forgotten that smell. Papery, but not like money smell or photocopier paper smell… it’s different.
90% of the people I saw there were sitting in front of a computer… either their own or one of the BPL’s computers.
Book...
The Coding World View
Jeff Atwood wrote a controversial post today that’s getting some heat (positive and negative) on HackerNews. His thesis is quite succinctly captured in his title: Please Don’t Learn to Code. Despite the fact that I disagree with his thesis, it’s an interesting and well-written post. I think highly of Jeff, and I understand where he’s coming from. The world does not need...
“DA: You mentioned your vision of where the PC will be on every desk and in every...”
– Hah! Bill Gates steals from Xerox PARC yet again! Mark Weiser pioneered this concept, which he coined “Ubiquitous Computing” in 1988. :)
Bill Gates, 1993, talking about the future. (via cacioppo)
2 tags
Our Investment in Priceonomics
A few vertical marketplaces have their own pricing guides. In cars, Kelly Blue Book has been the industry standard for years, and nearly all car purchases use KBB as a starting reference point. Cars are a high ticket item, a considered purchase, and a fairly liquid market, so it’s not surprising that in an offline world a third-party went through the process of aggregating the data to...
April 2012
6 posts
Bijan Sabet: The Innovator's Patent Agreement →
I think there are only 2 people that follow me who don’t already follow Bijan (hi mom and dad!), but nonetheless, I’m delighted to reblog this post because all of us at Spark are really excited by this IPA proposal by Twitter. If you’re a developer at a startup, talk to your Founders about adopting the IPA in your company too. All innovators deserve a say in the matter when...
March 2012
10 posts
Our Information and The Supreme Court
The NYT has an piece about how all electronic communication devices are banned from the Supreme Court and the impact it has on media reporting. In an age where everyone on Twitter is chatting about the latest touchdown pass in the super bowl within .03 seconds of it occurring in the real world, the Supreme Court’s block on devices means that news junkies will have to wait until the court...
OAuth and Retail Financial Services
I’ve signed up for a couple retail investment aggregation and analysis products recently. They’re a set of services that look at your online brokerage accounts and analyze how you are performing relative to index benchmarks and then make suggestions to improve your performance. My interest in the space is both professional (possible investment) and personal (could be useful to me).
I...
Probabilistic Graphical Models
I started working through the video lectures in Daphne Koller’s Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM) class yesterday. I wrote a bunch last fall about how much I enjoyed Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning (ML) online class. PGM is not technically a sequel to the ML class, but there are a number of overlapping concepts, and all the homework assignments are to be completed in Octave, which is...
Venmo History is Social
After a tweet from @j2labs that said Venmo had a new look and feel, I clicked through to check out the site.
First off, the design is beautiful… but that has always been true… old design and new too are both great.
But the point of this post is that reading my own transaction history was a really nice experience. If you’re a Venmo user, you can see your own history here. It...
PR Nightmare or Opportunity?
Yesterday Goldman Sachs took a big PR hit when an executive at the company resigned in an NYTimes Op-Ed after 12 years of work because he felt that Goldman’s corporate culture had become morally bankrupt. The stories in the Op-Ed of executives celebrating how well they extracted money from the “Muppets” (their pet name for clients) was excruciating, and I’m sure Goldman...
Spaghetti on the Wall
I recently stumbled upon a blog post from Brad Feld in which he announces his initial investment in Zynga in January of 2008. Brad explains how he met the company and his investment thesis, but the most interest part of the post in retrospect 4 years later is where he documents the full catalog of games at the time of posting. Zynga’s games at that time are:
Poker, Attack, Blackjack,...
“A third alarm was ordered as heavy fire appeared, the department said at about 7...”
– From a Boston.com article on the Hilton Bay Back fire and blackout in Boston tonight. I’m quoting it here because this is the first time I’ve ever seen the phrase “official tweets” used as a primary news source.
Open Source and For-Profit Companies
My friend Dan Levine over at Accel recently wrote the following comment on a HackerNews post about getting paid by for-profit companies for working on open source software:
How many core developers work somewhere besides 10gen? I know there are a few contributors who work on drivers but it seems like nearly all of the contributors work at 10gen.
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of “open...
February 2012
6 posts
Clik
I’m excited to share that Kik Interactive just launched its second product. The first one was the popular messaging app Kik, which continues to have a strong base of devoted fans and is growing quickly. Today, the company launched Clik, a remote for bridging phones to bigger screens. Techcrunch has a good high-level summary.
Clik today is a very compelling demo where you use your smartphone...
Welcome Nabeel
Nabeel Hyatt has joined Spark Capital. I’m delighted by the addition of a talented entrepreneur to our team.
I first “met” Nabeel on a winding trip down the rabbit hole of blogs in early 2007. We traded comments on blogs back and forth before meeting for the first time in person at SXSW that year. I recall being impressed by his depth in the online gaming market, and the way...
“Instagram lets you capture a moment on (digital) film, Foursquare drops the pin...”
– Not my words, but I could not have said it better myself.
robo(h)op « whole brevity thing
</PortfolioPromotion>
January 2012
12 posts
Apple Becomes World's Biggest Maker of Computers,... →
parislemon:
Cue dozens of people screaming bloody murder: “THE IPAD IS NOT A PC!!!!!!!”
Cue millions of the rest of us laughing at those people.
Just as with the move from desktops to laptops, the transition to tablets (or “pads” as Canalys humorously refers to them) is underway.
“But, but, but… it doesn’t have a keyboard!” Yes it does.
“But, but, but… it doesn’t have a physical keyboard!”...
Timehop
Personal data on the web is growing rapidly. More people are spending a greater percentage of their time social networking (time spent per user on social networking sites has grown over 300% in the last two years). Additionally, there are more people coming online for the first time every day, and, based on current usage statistics, 4 out of 5 of those new users will engage with social networking...
Internet... Oh Wow.
Today, the Internet wins.
First, the PIPA/SOPA blackouts and rallies all over the US produced the following outcome (as reported by the New York Times):
[A] senior Senate Republican leadership aide said the Senate version of the bill was dead in its current form, and bipartisan negotiations had begun to revise it considerably. Senators from both parties want to address the Internet piracy...
“We are beginning to see ourselves not just from the inside, as an actor doing...”
– TimeHop in the NYTimes a few weeks ago (belated, yes)
part of the “we live in public” meme, which I’m trying to tease through these days
(via cacioppo)
Stop PIPA/SOPA Protest in NYC -- Jan 18th
Join the NY tech community in a rally outside the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand tomorrow. On January 18th at 12:30PM, the NY tech community is meeting up to protest at 780 Third Ave, NYC, and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to join in.
Senators Schumer and Gillibrand are currently supporters of SOPA, which is garbage. SOPA is dangerous to the growth...
Privacy in Social Networks
Privacy in social networking is inconsistent and thus confusing.
In private social networks (FB, Path, etc…), the only people that should see your content are the people you explicitly permission as a friend.
But if you write a comment on a friend’s photo, that comment will be seen by all of the photo’s owner’s friends… Which could be tens of thousands of...
“Most good things happen without a plan: friendships, falling in love, finding a...”
– » How to Have the Best Year of Your Life (without Setting a Single Goal) :zenhabits (via bijan)
I completely agree with this quote, but would add one piece. You have to put yourself in situations that maximize serendipity in order to have have these wonderful unplanned encounters. And most times,...
7thechelon asked: Hit there! I ran across a blog post stating you had a wicked spreadsheet for employee equity. I looked for it but could not locate it. The blog post Employee Equity: How Much? by MBA Mondays. Did you release it to the public or is it for private use?
How Crowdsourcing is Changing Science →
December 2011
2 posts
November 2011
14 posts
Celebrating Less
I have started reading all the app update messages in the App Store before upgrading my apps to the latest versions. The update messages typically fall into two buckets: 1) minor bug fixes and 2) big major feature pushes with lots of exclamation marks and Unicode stars.
I’ve never read an update message trumpeting that the app now does less than it did before (and nothing else). Makes...
Take This Idea: Console Social Games
Like any good investment idea, timing is essential. I think now is the right time to aggressively pursue social casual gaming on consoles. Why now?
All the major consoles (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3) all have open marketplaces so distribution in the consoles market today is easier than it has ever been before.
The Kinect is the fastest selling CE device ever. It’s a casual interface into an...
