July 2011
13 posts
The feedback on my next book pushed me towards Interpreter of Maladies. I’m 20 pages in, and I’m like… “Where have you been all my life!?”.
Ok, back to reading. Thanks all!
Next Book?
I just finished reading The Remains of the Day. It was excellent, I highly recommend it.
I’m picking my next book to read. One nice perk of getting married is the merger of bookshelves, which means I’ve got great books lying around that I have not read.
I’m deciding between:
Interpreter of Maladies
Middlesex
Flesh and Blood
Anyone want to help me pick? Or is there...
Scope of Job Creation
Dan Primack (@danprimack) wrote a quick stat on job creation in the VC industry:
Groupon, LinkedIn and Zynga hired a combined 11,143 new employees between March 2009 and March 2011, based on regulatory filings. During that same period, the overall U.S. economy lost nearly 1.29 million non-farm jobs.
Lets push Dan’s numbers a bit further:
Facebook has “over 2000 employees”...
“Application developers play a fundamental role in helping people get the best...”
– Twitter Blog: One Million Registered Twitter Apps (via bijan)
When Union Square Ventures invested in Twitter back in 2007, a core part of the investment thesis was the activity in the app ecosystem. Back then, there were a little over 200 apps on the Twitter Fan Wiki, and that was a very large...
Office Hours Booked
Unfortunately the Office Hours I mentioned early today are booked up. If you wanted to meet me and didn’t grab a slot in time, please don’t hesitate to contact me at andrew@sparkcapital.com. I’m sure we can find some time to connect.
2 tags
New Office Hours
UPDATE: these are all booked now. Sorry. please feel free to email me at andrew@sparkcapital.com if you’d like to connect outside of these prescribed OHours.
I’m hosting a set of office hours from 9:00am - 10:30am on Wednesday the 20th in NYC at ‘wichcraft (20th st btwn Broadway and 5th Ave). If you’re intersted in chatting about the New_Hotness in consumer web services...
Android Indemnification
MG wrote an entertaining read about the bidding process for the Nortel patent portfolio. TL;DR: Google and Intel teamed up to bid aggressively for the Nortel patents, but they lost to a consortium of Apple, RIM, EMC, Microsoft, and others. Now Android is in jeopardy because any OEM that builds phones with Android must pay a patent licensing fee to Microsoft.
Software patent should be abolished. ...
Venture for America
A friend of mine, Andrew Yang, is running a very cool organization called Venture For America. The idea is simple, take fresh graduates from school and encourage them towards entrepreneurship in struggling cities like Detroit, where the costs of starting a business are substantially lower. It’s a two-year post-grad program inside a startup, where the primary purpose is mentorship towards...
Poll: has anyone remapped their Caps Lock key? If yes, what did you map it to?
Jobs in the Spark Portfolio
Have you ever considered working at a startup? Spark Capital’s portfolio companies are hiring. There is now a single page that aggregates all the job openings across Spark’s portfolio. While engineers are obviously in great demand, there are many non-engineering openings too. If you’ve ever had the itch to jump to a startup, this page is well worth revisiting every few months.
...
