We are going back in time for this one. This went down before Twitter, Tumblr, Zynga, and a host of other things that happened in 2007. This also happened before I had done a deal with Bijan. Maybe the spanking...
Disqus launched a new homepage this week. You can see it here. Since this community is full of marketers and entrepreneurs and because we are among the most passionate users of the Disqus network, I thought we could debate, disqus,...
I've written a fair bit about the fact that I think we will use our mobile devices (phones, tablets, watches, glasses, etc) to control the more expensive devices in our lives (TVs, car dashboards, refridgerators, etc). I think this mode of user interaction will win out over software solutions built for and running on the more expensive and therefore longer lasting devices we own.
Dan Frommer writes that Apple's decade of blistering growth has, at least temporarily, come to a halt. And you can see that in the stock: Companies are worth a multiple of their earnings and that multiple is directly related to earnings growth rates. When you are growing rapidly, you are worth more.
Almost a year ago now, I wrote about Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site launched in partnership with the USPTO to help them identify prior art in software patent applications. Yesterday Joel Spolsky, Stack's CEO, wrote a great post about how he used Ask Patents to squash a bad software patent applied for by Microsoft.
This is going to be a rant. If you aren't interested, hit the back button now. I am increasingly being spammed in my calendar. People invite me to things I have no interest in attending by spamming my calendar.
We flew down to Williamsburg Virginia yesterday to attend my dad's 85th birthday. He and my mom are in great shape and my brothers and their families were there. It was a great evening. On the flight down, Josh and I read the Jay-Z article in NY Magazine and the review of his new record where the consensus was he "mailed it in".
This week Delaware, where many of the top US companies are incorporated, announced that their corporate statutes will recognize the B Corporation (Benefit Corporation). My partner Albert Wenger, who has been a long and loud champion of the B Corporation,...
It's time for a fun friday again. I'm not sure when the last time we did this, but it's been a while. I've been in europe all week where it has been warm. But I've heard that its been steamy...
crossposted from USV.com] Today, we have joined a large and diverse group of companies, non-profits and consumer advocates in an open letter urging the US government to allow internet and telecom companies to freely report statistics on government surveillance requests. As we've discussed before, standing up for your users is a feature.
I am writing this on my phone in a Hailo cab in London so forgive the typos and lack of links. I will clean this up later. On the flight over from Brussels I read the International Herald Tribune. In today's copy was an opinion piece by Joe Nocera where he explained why he doesn't like (and doesn't use) Twitter.
Back in 2008, we invested in a small team out of SeedCamp called Zemanta. They were located in Ljubljana Slovenia but I met them in London. The following summer I visited the company in its hometown along with the Gotham Gal and our son Josh. I blogged about that trip here at AVC.
I took the overnight flight from JFK to CDG Paris. We arrived an hour late and even though we rushed through the maze of terminals that is CDG, we got to the gate a minute or two before the departure...
There's a piece in the NY Times this weekend about Lyft and Sidecar changing the dynamics in the Los Angeles taxi market. Get ready to read lots more pieces like this in the coming years.
During the OpenCo event/week in NYC a month or so ago, I sat down at cocktail hour at Simulmedia with Dave Morgan and John Battelle. We had a great chat and the folks at Simulmedia edited it down to about...
Our portfolio company Coinbase introduced a new feature yesterday, the ability to buy Bitcoins instantly. I've always thought speed was the single most important feature of any app. And in the case of buying Bitcoin, the four day wait time that was the norm at Coinbase was certainly problematic.
That was my partner John's email response when the news came across our internal email list that the SEC had finally lifted the General Solicitation Ban as they were asked to do by Congress in Title II of the JOBS act. What this means is that folks raising capital can now advertise the fact that they are doing so.
I wrote a bit of a rant a couple months ago about companies that want to run the table on a market. There was only one link in that rant and it was to Benedict Evans who is increasingly becoming my favorite read on the Internet.
My friend and USV portfolio CEO Matt Blumberg has a popular blog called Only Once on which he posts about the challenges and joys of being a CEO (for the first time, thus the name). Matt should be familiar to AVC regulars because I have written about him and his company Return Path many times and he has done several guest posts here as well.
AVC regular William Mougayar is building an education oriented community for entrepreneurs called Startup Management. He soft launched it in the past week. The idea, as I understand it, is to aggregate and tag blog posts about startup management from all around the web and curate them into a community site focused on educating entrepreneurs on how to be better leaders and managers of their companies.
We've got two girls traveling around the world this summer. One has a pocket wifi from Xcom Global (asia) and the other has a pocket wifi from Tep Wireless (europe). I've become a convert to the pocket wifi in the...
My friend Cliff Chenfeld recently appeared on the Media Reporter TV show. Cliff has been in the entertainment business for over 25 years and he talks about the changes he has seen in the music industry, film, sports, and other...
Sometime in the past week, an awesome feature appeared in my Foursquare app. I was checking into our local farm stand at the beach and I saw this at the bottom of my checkin screen: Since I was with the...
I realize not everyone who reads this lives in the US, but to all those who do, have a happy July 4th. This photo pretty much sums up how I'm going to spend my day today.
The AVC community has been very generous so far on the Brooklyn Castle project. 69 of you have contributed a total of $5,737 as of 6am on July 3rd. I really appreciate it and it is for a very good cause.
