» An update from DC
22/03/10 03:26 from Cleantech Investing
This past week I and several senior cleantech private equity investors were invited to DC for meetings with Administration and legislative staff to discuss climate and energy legislation. We were there to provide input in meetings wi..
» Diversification, Schmversification: All Correlations to 1.0(-ish)
21/03/10 22:10 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Good set of graphs in a new paper showing how correlations have increased across equity markets in recent decades. In each graph the top line is the correlation with developed markets, the middle line is with developed & emerging combined,..
» GM, California, and America’s Multi-Trillion Dollar Pension Problem
21/03/10 19:28 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Very good piece in current Institutional Investor on American’s multi-trillion pension funding problem. Read the whole thing . What’s the difference between General Motors and California? California hasn’t gone bankrupt. At least, not yet...
» U.S. Rig Count Passes Super-Spike Peak
21/03/10 19:23 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
» Lumber, Redux: Why So Loved in 2010?
21/03/10 19:12 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Just sharing some reading/research I’ve been doing over the incredible outperformance of lumber so far in 2010. It is up 40% year-to-date, a fairly astounding figure. Pine beetle threatens North American forestry ( UPI ) Pine beetle to aff..
» Readings: Pensions, Brazil, Rigged Markets, IPOs, Lumber, etc.
21/03/10 18:58 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
A few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column: Trillion-Dollar Pension Crisis Looms Large Over America ( Source ) Senior economist warns of ‘triple-dip’ threat ( Source ) If the stock market's up, it must be rigged...right? ( Source ) ..
» Boulder Fiber Forever Flash Mob Sunday at 3pm
21/03/10 16:58 from Feld Thoughts
The Boulder Fiber Forever project to bring Google’s 1 Gbps fiber network to Boulder is having a flash mob at the Walnut Brewery (1123 Walnut Street) today (Sunday) from 3pm – 6pm. Come join us, but first go to Boulderfiber.com and ad..
» Yochai Benkler on The Broadband Plan
21/03/10 14:35 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Yochai Benkler is one of a handful of people who our firm regards as inspirators. We've read everything he's written and find ourselves quoting him regularly in meetings. This is a picture of Yochai making a point at our first Union Square..
» Rework is Brilliant
21/03/10 02:41 from Feld Thoughts
I just read Rework , the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals . It’s fantastic. If you are starting a business, or thinking about starting a business, or running a business, or breathing air, this i..
» Hint To Startups – Use Your Domain In Your Email Address
20/03/10 18:37 from Feld Thoughts
On a daily basis, I get an email from someone at a seed-stage startup where their email address does not include their website URL. For example, I just got an email from joesmith@gmail.com for his company CoolThing. I wouldn’t ..
» Blur is Coming
20/03/10 17:08 from Feld Thoughts
I’ve been hinting about a new conference that we’ve been working on with Eric Norlin that complements Defrag and Glue . Eric is about to launch it and the splash page for the Blur Conference is up. If you are familiar with Defr..
» Readings: Oil, Lawyers, Math, Niall Ferguson, Big Lebowski, etc.
20/03/10 09:46 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Milberg Lawyers Leave Jail, Hit Links, Slopes; Reflect on Life ( Source ) Consumers Buy More Efficient Refrigerators, but Keep the Old Ones Humming ( Source ) Will reclusive mathematician accept $1 million prize? ( Source ) Niall Ferguson ..
» Stephen Roach vs Paul Krugman: I'm an Economist! I'm an Umpire!
19/03/10 19:57 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Oh yeah? Well, abacadabra. I'm an umpire! - Bugs Bunny ( Transylvania 6-5000) Last night Stephen Roach on Bloomberg Television proposed taking a baseball bat to Paul Krugman for his recent comments abou..
» Book Interviews
19/03/10 14:57 from Seeing Both Sides
I mentioned in my last post that I decided to write a book about venture capital and entrepreneurship , which is coming out next month (see http://bit.ly/mstrVC ) . In this post, I wanted to answer the question: "Who did you interview?" ..
» Being Fat Is Not Healthy
19/03/10 10:34 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Ben Horowitz has a post called The Case For The Fat Startup on the All Things D blog. I don't agree with Ben's take on this issue but I have enormous respect for Ben and his partner Marc Andreessen. They have started and built multiple suc..
» MIT Entrepreneurship Review
18/03/10 18:46 from Feld Thoughts
A week ago the MIT Entrepreneurship Review launched. Today it’s up on MIT’s home page . The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is a new online publication about entrepreneurship that is produced and written by MIT students dedicated to anal..
» Gist Acquires Startup Weekend Project Learn that Name
18/03/10 14:25 from Feld Thoughts
Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app . There are a lot of fun connections here for me. For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist. If you h..
» The NYC Subway System
18/03/10 12:36 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I've been thinking a lot about the NYC subway system. It was built in the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. It's a lesson in the power of private enterprise to do public good. There were elevated trans..
» Readings: China, Ireland, Water, Traffic, CDOs, etc.
18/03/10 09:12 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
China and Germany unite to impose global deflation ( Source ) Water - The right price can encourage efficiency and investment ( Source ) Ireland’s Epic Boom and Bust ( Source ) Postcard From a Guangzhou Traffic Jam ( Source ) Harvard..
» The Glue Agenda Is Getting Awesome
18/03/10 02:14 from Feld Thoughts
I love the conferences we help sponsor ( Glue and Defrag ). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try ..
» Shimel Blogs on Open Source
18/03/10 01:33 from Feld Thoughts
My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.) When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for int..
» Readings: Eating, End-times, Media, China, etc.
17/03/10 20:33 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Tracking a Century of American Eating ( Source ) Living in the End Times According to Slavoj Zizek ( Source ) How will an RMB revaluation affect China, the US, and the world? ( Source ) World Bank - China quarterly update ( Source ) Mark K..
» Solvate is simple outsourcing for startups
17/03/10 18:48 from Nivi
We like to write about tools that make life better for startups. We've written about Pivotal Tracker , the iPod of project management software. And we recently covered [Startup Digest] , which curates the best startup events in 27 cities. ..
» Peak Oil Demand? Ha!
17/03/10 18:32 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Strongly critical paper out from two economists writing on the subject of peak oil demand. Far from seeing demand peak in the near term in developed countries, the authors argue that demand will grow in developed countries, while growing e..
» The National Broadband Plan
17/03/10 11:00 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I went down to Washington, DC yesterday to participate in an event that celebrated the 25th anniversary of .com. I spoke on a panel (yes a hated panel ) moderated by Kara Swisher and including Aneesh Chopra , CTO of the Federal Government,..
» Readings: Butch Cassidy, Charismatic Megafauna, Credit, Google, etc.
17/03/10 08:43 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
The Economics of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ( Source ) Divide and Diminish ( Source ) The coming wave of personal credit ( Source ) Deficit Builds as Americans Pay Less and Get More ( Source ) Google file system: Evolution on Fast-..
» Aging, Debt, and the End of Innovation
16/03/10 19:43 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Typically provocative new Andy Xie piece out pointing to aging societies as being fundamental to why all economies are steadily catching "Japan disease". Further, Xie goes on to argue that innovation won't save us from debt and death: An e..
» The HGP, or How Government Can Promote Social Bubbles for Fun and Profit
16/03/10 19:39 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
Entertaining new paper from Didier Sornette and others about the evolution of the human genome project (HGP). Specifically, the authors muse about how the interaction of public and private sector actors created a bubble that actually playe..
» Physics Fetishism Can Kill You
16/03/10 19:35 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
I remember in grad school we used to obsess about how economics, computer science and such lacked a "reference discipline" -- you know, something legit, like physics. Here is a new paper on that subject from Andrew Lo at MIT: Warning: Phys..
» Ace Greenberg: Frog and Toad Are Friends at Bear Stearns
16/03/10 19:21 from Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed
This seems like something out of a children’s book, but read/watch this Bloomberg Television clip on for how Bear Stearns managed risk in the bygone days of having Ace Greenberg at the helm. We had 3 people who worked for us. We had Cy the..
» The only reason investors say ‘no’
16/03/10 18:59 from Nivi
This is one of our most popular tweets ever. You never know which tweet will be popular . The tweet isn't exactly true but it's close enough for 140 characters. Exceptions and corrections welcome in the comments .
» New Blog Design
16/03/10 18:40 from Feld Thoughts
As you may have noticed, I’ve got a new blog design, as do my partners Jason Mendelson and Ryan McIntyre . Every year or so I get bored of my blog design and we go through a nice little upgrade. Our good friends at Slice of Lim..
» Another Year Without a Car
16/03/10 14:33 from Who Has Time For This?
I'm getting used to carlessness. As Mark Twain once said , "Be carless in your dress, if you will, but keep a tidy soul." Or something like that. It's all explained here .
» The Google Dependency Index: A List of Public Internet Companies That Must Kiss Google's, er, Ring
16/03/10 00:26 from Burnhams Beat
Wall Street has lots of stock indexes. Everyone knows the NASDAQ and Dow Jones Industrials, but there are hundreds of other indexes for almost every sector and capitalization. With that in mind, I offer the Google Dependency Index, which..
» Standing Cloud Launches Trial Edition
15/03/10 14:45 from Feld Thoughts
Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk's experience with the Pogoplug , he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud. The idea is that technology products should be so easy to s..
» TechStars Data from 2007 to 2009
15/03/10 12:29 from Feld Thoughts
One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.” We encourage every team to do this starting very early in their life. To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of th..
» The Inbox Treasure Hunt: How Not to be a Jerk
15/03/10 09:05 from VentureBlog
I get lots of emails with business plans, PowerPoints, executive summaries each week. I try to give them all a fair read. After all, you never know where you're going to learn about the next Microsoft. But you'd be surprised how often I wi..
» To the integrators go the spoils?
13/03/10 04:31 from Cleantech Investing
Most high-profile cleantech VCs will tell you they're looking for breakthrough technology. The "black swan". The "grid parity". The "unicorns". (Okay, I made that last one up, but it wouldn't surprise you to see some VCs ..
» I’m speaking at SXSW + Holding a SXSW MEETUP
12/03/10 22:26 from Nivi
Naval here. For those of you going to SXSW, I’ll be on the Seed Combinators Panel on Monday March 15 3:30pm. I'm joining Paul Graham , David Cohen , Marc Nathan , and Joshua Baer to talk about YStars, TechCombinators, SeedBoxes, and the li..
» Give tweet a chance
12/03/10 21:22 from Nivi
According to Google Reader, we write 2 blog posts a week. And according to TweetStats we write 73 tweets a week. If you only read our blog, you’re missing the great links we post on Twitter. We take the same care with our tweets that we do..
» CED Venture Conference 2010
12/03/10 18:00 from Feld Thoughts
If you happen to live in North Carolina or regularly attend the CED Venture Conference (the Southeast US’s longest running early stage company financing conference), come say hello to me on April 21st. I’ll be spending the day at the..
» "How to Create a Personal Brand as a Venture Capitalist"
12/03/10 09:36 from VentureBlog
I received an email today from ExecSense Webinars advertising a course on "How to Create a Personal Brand as a Venture Capitalist." That's right, for $250, I can learn "specific ways to use speaking engagements, published articles and soci..
» Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Tyler Tysdal
11/03/10 22:30 from Feld Thoughts
Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital . We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center. Tyler has a neat bac..
» Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know
11/03/10 18:33 from Feld Thoughts
I know I owe everyone a follow up to my post from last week titled The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents . To the many of you out there that emailed me in response, thanks for all of the thought, ideas, suggestio..
» The Awesomeness of a Hackathon
11/03/10 14:06 from Feld Thoughts
Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from..
» The Cashless Exercise
11/03/10 11:07 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Sorry for the inside baseball title, this post is not about net exercising options or warrants. It is about an exercise I've been going through since the beginning of the year. I've always walked around with hardly any money on me. ..
» Lifelock Settles with FTC
10/03/10 16:29 from Who Has Time For This?
Today the FTC announced that Lifelock and the Commission settled claims related to the company's advertising. The action may sound serious and of course the press loves to sensationalize these types of stories. The truth, however, is far di..
» VC Bookworm
10/03/10 12:23 from Seeing Both Sides
"I've decided to write a book," I told my wife over a year ago. She gave me that what-the-bleep-are-you-talking-about look. You may be familiar with your spouse. "You've what?" "I've decided to write a book," I repeated, slightly less con..
» Transitioning From One Job To Another
10/03/10 11:59 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Mark Suster just keeps putting out great stuff on his blog . Last night he posted about the tricky issue of transitioning from one job to another . Mark writes the post from the perspective of the entrepreneur/executive hiring someone who ..
» Some thoughts from MIT Energy Conference and ARPA-E Summit
09/03/10 15:31 from Cleantech Investing
I'm not one to flog corporate green marketing stuff, but in this case I'll make an exception. I can't attest to the validity or accuracy of the presentation, but I've found the numbers being shared by Exelon, and their general attitu..
» The Public Dashboard
09/03/10 12:13 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I really like how Tumblr publishes some key stats publicly every month in their own stylized dashboard. I also like the way they foreshadow upcoming product features: As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a tho..
» It takes more than one intro to get a meeting
08/03/10 16:16 from Nivi
Don't be afraid to get multiple intros to a single investor. Fred Wilson : “One of my favorite VC quotes comes from Bill Kaiser of Greylock. He once said, “when I hear about a company once, I often ignore it, when I hear about ..
» In the Land of Twitter, Blogging is King
08/03/10 14:58 from VentureBlog
As Twitter has risen to prominence, many loud voices have declared it the future of media, the future of journalism, even the future of the free world. I am a fan of Twitter. It is a powerful service that is unbelievably flexible and versa..
» Candid Camera
07/03/10 11:51 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
A couple weeks ago I went down to Miami for Future of Web Apps (FOWA). It was a great event and I highly recommend it to web developers and entrepreneurs. I did a keynote talk and the next day I did a three and a half hour workshop. I knew..
» Monopolies, Retransmission Fees, and Screwing Customers
06/03/10 15:18 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
There's been a battle going on between the "broadcast" TV networks and the cable networks over something called "retransmission fees." Cable networks have traditionally paid for "cable network programming" but not "over the air programming..
» InSITE Talk
05/03/10 10:50 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
InSITE is a group of business and law school students from Columbia and NYU who provide free consulting services to startup companies. I'm a big fan of InSITE for a bunch of reasons but particularly because it is one of the few programs th..
» More diligence and less capital coming for startups (and their investors)
04/03/10 16:03 from Nivi
Thanks to George Zachary , a partner at Charles River Ventures , for sponsoring Venture Hacks this week. If you like this post, check out George's blog and tweets @ georgezachary . – Nivi In my first post, A brief history of your investors..
» Panels
04/03/10 11:43 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Mark Suster , who writes the best VC blog out there right now , has a post about sitting on panels . He gives the following advice: Educate Entertain Discuss and Debate (have a dialog) Build Awareness of your firm/company/brand Make connec..
» “Oil & Gas” need a divorce
03/03/10 19:13 from Cleantech Investing
At ARPA-E, listening to Jim Woolsey talk about the possible important role of natural gas in any effort for both "energy independence" and climate change mitigation in the U.S. It reminds me of a personal opinion I've been sharing with pee..
» [Startup Digest]: The best startup events in 27 cities
03/03/10 16:01 from Nivi
Every day (literally), I get an email from someone asking me to introduce them to investors, advisors, and co-founders. We're building StartupList and AngelList to handle the intros to investors. For intros to advisors and co-founders, I a..
» Standardized Venture Funding Docs
03/03/10 10:57 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
There was a lot of noise in VC/startup land earlier this week about the Series Seed documents that can be used to close a seed round. Marc Andreessen told PE Hub : It’s like open source software. If it’s developed by IBM, there’s no reason..
» “Shift happens”
02/03/10 18:47 from Cleantech Investing
I've stolen the title of this post from a very funny line delivered by Daniel Nocera (MIT, SunCatalytix) at the ARPA-E Summit in DC this morning. Yes, I'm attending the first ARPA-E Summit, and I'm glad I did. It's proving to be one ..
» Rolling Up Your Sleeves and Getting Your Hands Dirty
02/03/10 10:53 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Charlie O'Donnell asked me last week about lessons I learned on my first venture capital investment. I'm not entirely sure what my first investment was but I know what my first board seat was. It was a company called Upgrade Corporation of..
» Sometimes simple is better
01/03/10 22:53 from VC Adventure
John Maggio, CEO of VCIR presenting company Clementine Art , used the following slide to present his company’s financial opportunity (after I told him in a practice session that his original slide was too complicated). Created by his 6-yea..
» Take a moment
01/03/10 15:42 from VCball
The other day at a Founders Round Table event I was approached by an aspiring startup entrepreneur.
We exchanged some tidbits about his business. And I gave him some advise about not worrying too much about burning out his servers fr..
» Entrepreneurship and Social Change
27/02/10 11:48 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I posted about The Blue Sweater recently and said: I have always believed in the power of entrepreneurs and for profit initiatives to change the world. So I am really excited about an event next Thursday night where I get to talk more abou..
» More Patent Nonsense
26/02/10 11:50 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Facebook has received a patent on the idea of "Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network." As if this was a novel idea whenever the patent was filed. Here's a comment I read on the story linked to above : Th..
» Mother in Law Market Research
26/02/10 04:44 from Seeing Both Sides
I'll never forget my first marketing class at business school. Our professor peered at us with an intense glare as he pushed back on our standard, "chip shot" comments. At one point in the class he asked the guy next to me to opine on th..
» The Startup Visa (update)
25/02/10 11:58 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I've written about the Startup Visa movement on this blog before so many of you know what it is all about. For those that don't, it is the idea that anyone who wants to start a business here in the US and can attract a modest amount of inv..
» “Micro-generation technologies are the wave of the future”
24/02/10 20:43 from Cleantech Investing
For some reason, I started looking over an experienced cleantech investor's presentation on distributed generation today. It's pretty fascinating. I'll pull out a few notable quotes and points: "Micro-generation technologies ar..
» StartupList: The first startup gets funded
24/02/10 16:01 from Nivi
We launched StartupList 3 weeks ago and immediately updated you on the day after results (75 new angel applications, 7 startups getting intros to 11 investors). Now we're 3 weeks in and we've got great news. The first startup has been fund..
» Venture Capital in the Rockies Winter 2010 Unveils Promising Growth Companies Ahead of Conference
23/02/10 21:50 from VC Adventure
Twenty Companies Ranging From Seed Stage to Mezzanine Will Showcase Next Generation Technologies from Various Industries at the 27 th Annual VCIR Winter 2010 Conference Denver, CO, February 23, 2010 – The Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Ass..
» Mobile Audio
23/02/10 13:00 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
There's a reason why radio and outdoor (billboard) advertising together became a $30bn to $50bn annual domestic market. When people are mobile, like driving a car, they are not reading, they are not watching video, they are not opening ema..
» TED10 Saturday: Chaos, Lawyers and Avatars
23/02/10 08:21 from Who Has Time For This?
Nathalie and I were really glad we had decided to stay to the end. Saturday was a great day. Benoit Mandelbrot Score: 4 balloons I had so looked forward to hearing the inventor of fractals. Unfortunately, he did not deliver. He sat back an..
» We don’t charge companies to present at VCIR
23/02/10 00:04 from VC Adventure
There’s been an extremely lively debate online over the last few months about the practice of charging entrepreneurs to present to VCs. You can see my post on that subject here , one from my partner Jason Mendelson over on peHUB here , Jas..
» “Utility Time”
22/02/10 04:40 from Cleantech Investing
I've heard many cleantech investors say some version of the following: "Don't invest in any company that's totally dependent upon utilities as its customers." The admonishment reflects a basic fact -- utilities move slowly. Ter..
» The Democratization of the TED Conference
21/02/10 22:39 from VentureBlog
Despite my best efforts, there was no way that I was going to actually manage to blog while I was still at the TED conference this year. I don't know how anyone can do it. I suppose that is why there was such an explosion of tweeting at TE..
» The things they say
19/02/10 19:50 from VC Adventure
As promised in my last post on adoption , below are some of the amusing, crazy and occasionally insulting things that people have said to us over the years about adoption. I generally give my friends a lot of latitude around this stuff sin..
» Permissionless Innovation and Patents
19/02/10 16:39 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
My partner Brad Burnham wrote a post today explaining why he disagrees with Nathan Myhrvold's recent Harvard Business Review piece in defense his patent holding company, Intellectual Ventures . In the post, Brad talks about t..
» Nature vs Nurture and Entrepreneurship
19/02/10 10:44 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I went down to Philly yesterday and spent the afternoon with students and faculty at Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, the entity that administers the entrepreneurship major/courses at Wharton and runs a bunch of fantastic "outreach" progr..
» Sending Aardvark Off to Google U.
18/02/10 22:38 from VentureBlog
After a bunch of early speculation , it was announced last week that Google has acquired Aardvark . It didn't surprise me one bit that Google wanted to own Aardvark. Aardvark is completely awesome. And I am going to miss lending a hand in ..
» How Unique Is A Unique Visitor?
18/02/10 10:51 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
I access the web each day from at least seven browsers; Chrome on my macbook pro, Firefox on my macbook pro, Chrome on my windows desktop in the office, Firefox on our "kitchen laptop", Safari on our "kitc..
» TED10 Fri PM: Music and Comedy
18/02/10 04:07 from Who Has Time For This?
Saturday Morning--> Friday afternoon and evening were packed with official TED talks, TED member talks (3 minutes on stage), and entertainment. I'll cover the major stuff here but there were too many short format talks to cover them all. R..
» How to optimize web apps with KISSmetrics
17/02/10 16:03 from Nivi
Thanks to KISSmetrics for supporting our interview with Sean Ellis . If you want an intro to KISSmetrics, send me an email. I’ll put you in touch if there’s a fit. Thanks. – Nivi Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics recently sat down with me to dis..
» SeedStart NYC
17/02/10 11:34 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
For several years, we've been talking on this blog about programs like Y Combinator, TechStars, SeedCamp, and many others. I call them startup accelerators. One thing I've consistently heard is that NYC needs its own startup accelerator. W..
» My experiments in lean pricing
16/02/10 16:03 from Nivi
This guest post is by Ash Maurya , a lean entrepreneur who runs a bootstrapped startup called CloudFire . If you like it, check out Ash's blog and his tweets @ ashmaurya . – Nivi What you charge for your product is simultaneously one of th..
» Don’t read this post
16/02/10 14:12 from Cleantech Investing
Totally whimsical thought of no value this morning: At what point will we start seeing a wave of cleantech startups named with the same kind of randomness as Web2.0 startups appear to be? Mint, Foursquare, Meebo, Swivel, PopJam, StuffBuff,..
» TED10 Fri AM: Microsoft and Google
16/02/10 00:43 from Who Has Time For This?
Friday Afternoon --> John Underkoffler Score: 7 balloons Fun demo of the hand-gesture UI developed at MIT Media Labs that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. Blaise Aguera y Arcas Score: 8 balloons Very cool demo of Microsoft technology th..
» A note to Colorado technologists – Attend Glue!
15/02/10 23:37 from VC Adventure
I’m reposting a note from Eric Norlin , our partner in both the Glue and Defrag conferences which really struck a chord with me. While Foundry invests across the US, we’re based in Colorado and do our best to support the local startup ecos..
» A valuable reminder on green building materials
15/02/10 17:32 from Cleantech Investing
Like many of my cleantech investor colleagues, at one time or another I've ended up spending some significant time on opportunities in the green building materials space. Green building markets in the U.S. are expected to triple by 2..
» TED10 Thu PM: David Byrne, Laser Shield, Suspended Animation
14/02/10 13:24 from Who Has Time For This?
Friday Morning --> David Byrne Score: 5 balloons David Byrne of Talking Heads fame gave an interesting talk about the impact of spaces on music -- how the elements of different musical genres can be traced back to the spaces in which that ..
» Some Interesting Facts About Chatroulette
14/02/10 12:36 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
We had a very interesting discussion about Chatroulette here last week. Since then, reporters at the NY Times got the founder to talk and they posted the email exchange here . Here are some interesting facts from the NY Times piece: The fo..
» TED10 Thu AM: Science, Needles and Nukes
14/02/10 02:55 from Who Has Time For This?
Thursday Afternoon --> Thursday morning was a celebration of reason -- my favorite part of the program. Michael Specter 8 (out of 10) balloons Michael Specter is a New Yorker journalist who lambasted the anti-science movement. He wrote the..
» Thoughts On Buzz
12/02/10 11:13 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Reece asked me in the comments the other day what I thought about Buzz . I told him I hadn't had the time to turn it on and play with it. I did that later in the day and have been using Buzz for a couple days. So here goes Reece. I'll stat..
» TED10 Wed PM: Making Good Food Choices
11/02/10 23:04 from Who Has Time For This?
Thursday Morning --> Carter Emmart Score: 5 (out of 10) balloons Carter is Director of Astrovisualization at Hayden Planetarium. He shared some cool renderings of the universe. Phil Kaplan then had 3 minutes to pitch Blippy - -a Twitter fo..
» TED 10 Wed AM: The Need for More Skepticism
11/02/10 17:51 from Who Has Time For This?
Wednesday afternoon --> Strong sessions today, and I enjoyed a string of great encounters with Bill Gross, Mark Zynga, Daniel Kahneman, Michael Shermer and Scott Kurnit. Daniel Kahneman Score: 9 Balloons The opening session, Mindshift, sta..
» What's Your Founder Superpower?
11/02/10 15:04 from Genuine VC
If you ask any VC what they look for in an investment opportunity, they’ll tell you that the people are at the top of their list. Extraordinary companies can’t be built without extraordinary entrepreneurs, especially at the earliest stages..
» Startl Design Boost and Startl Accelerator
11/02/10 11:47 from A VC : Venture Capital and Technology
Startl is a very interesting new project based here in NYC. It's a startup accelerator (like Y Combinator, TechStars, Seedcamp, etc) but focused entirely on entrepreneurs working in education. It's a non-profit backed by the Hewlett, MacAr..
» TED 2010: What the World Needs Now
11/02/10 03:36 from Who Has Time For This?
I'm here in Long Beach, CA blogging my fourth TED conference. My objective is to once again provide a road map of the TED talks so that, as the TED talks are published, you can be sure to catch the best ones. In past years I've done this f..
» Some thoughts on adoption
09/02/10 22:22 from VC Adventure
I don’t often write about very personal topics on this blog (although hopefully my personality shows through in my writing some) but with my wife 8,500 miles away adopting our third child (2nd adopted child) I thought that I might take a p..