June 2010
11 posts
Concert Subscription
Going to concerts is too difficult. It’s not the day of the event itself; that’s fine. The difficulty for me is staying on top of the concert listings channels (typically aggregators) like Oh My Rockness, Tourfilter, and Songkick. I use all three services regularly, and even still, I miss ticket sale dates, or just completely miss a band passing through town because they played an...
Hulu Plus Thoughts
Hulu Plus launched today which is a combo ad-supported and recurring subscription product to get access to more archived shows via more devices (like iPhone and internet-enabled TVs). I have 3 comments:
1. It’s a Netflix competitor more than anything else. The future (perhaps for some users, the present) value of Netflix is on-demand streaming movies and TV shows. I never previously...
4SQ Trending Data from a Weeks Worth of Checkins →
HTML5 and the Write-Once, Run Anywhere Dream
Dan Kantor wrote a piece for Ajaxian about the “write once, run anywhere” dream and how HTML5 is a big step along that path.
Dan’s execution on Extension.fm feels like he reached two years into the future, and pulled an app back in time to show us all what the future of web development could be. In doing so, the tradeoff Dan made was to restrict compatibility to Chrome-only...
Sharing Idle Assets
Brian Chesky (AirBnB CEO) is now “homeless”. He’s living out of sublets in the AirBnB marketplace. It’s a classic example of eating your own dogfood, and I love it. Sam Lessin tried the same thing about a year ago (he described his experiment as on-demand housing that spins up and down similar to EC2 instances in the cloud). But, in the end Sam described his effort as a...
Delegation and Hiring in Startups
Bijan posted today on Delegation in Startups. It’s a great read, and I want to fork off a piece of it here. This is about entrepreneurs with laser-like focus on just one mission VS entrepreneurs who are constantly multi-tasking on various projects.
Some entrepreneurs work only on their own startup 24/7. They pitch a pup tent in the office and make their company their life. By contrast...
4 tags
Web Services with a Social Mission
I said recently in an interview with Roy Rodenstein (co-founder of Going.com):
Because attention is the new scarcity, it’s more important than ever that entrepreneurs work on problems that people genuinely care about, otherwise you will fail to capture users’ attention.
To make the point more directly, I feel that a social mission is an essential part of every consumer-facing web service these...
“I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today....”
– Seth Godin
3 tags
Joining Spark Capital
I’m delighted to announce that on June 14th, I am joining the team at Spark Capital.
I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Bijan and Mo through their presence in the NY tech community and through the numerous co-investments between Spark and Union Square Ventures. They are both great people who are passionate about web services and hungry for what’s next. They are remarkable...
