I don’t care what your political orientation is, if you want an awesome two hour lesson in leadership watch the movie Thirteen Days.  It’s the story of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis based on the book by May and Zelikow titled The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Amy and […]

To start off the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them the simple question “What Was Day 1 Like?”  Nate responded first: Day one was totally overwhelming.  Overwhelming because we didn’t know what we didn’t know.  It’s one thing when you don’t know how to do something […]

In the last few days there have been a large number of posts about two platform companies – Apple and Twitter.  These posts covered a wide range of perspectives (a few of the better ones are linked to below) but fundamentally came down to the tension between a platform (e.g. the iPhone OS or Twitter) […]

After downloading Skype 4.2, I realized that I could now invite all of my Facebook friends who had Skype accounts to my Skype contact list.  So I did.  Unfortunately the Skype UI for this sucks so I had to go through about 1,000 entries a screen of five at a time unchecking the Facebook friends […]

I was thinking about how to drive CTR’s up via different mechanisms this morning when this email arrived in my inbox. I remembered talking about high CTR email response rates with Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar when we were in DC on our Startup Visa trip at the beginning of March.  I’d forgotten about this […]

Today, Amazon’s 1-Click patent was confirmed following a four year re-examination.  Amazon now has ownership of a highly controversial and very absurd patent which I hope will only be used defensively.  This a classic example of a “business method patent” that should simply not exist.  I continue to wait patiently to see what the Supreme […]

If you live in Boulder, it’s time to help bring the Google Fiber experiment to our awesome city.  A bunch of folks from all over Boulder are working on the Boulder Fiber project to help us become one of the cities for the Google Fiber for Communities project.  Boulder is a perfect city for this.  […]

I have a number of friends who are patent attorneys.  Some have strong negative feelings about software patents that mirror mine while others keep me entertained by arguing both sides of the situation with themselves while I sit around and listen.  One of my friends – let’s call him Sawyer – has very strong negative […]

I’ve been obsessed with the notion of email as the ultimate social network for a while.  I wrote a post in 2007 titled Social Networks In Obvious Places that catalyzed me to thing harder about this as an investor.  I eventually decided that the email address is the ultimate reference id for one’s current online identity […]