January 2010
30 posts
User Growth Solves All Problems (or at least some) →
A prominent CEO once said, “Revenue solves all problems.” An overstatement no doubt, but as I look at the landscape, I think of a possible corollary that seems equally true, if not also a bit…
Risk and Doors →
Yesterday I had the good fortune to chat with a group of largely freshman an sophomores interested in tech entrepreneurship from Princeton and Penn.
About 1/3 were computer science majors and te…
Watchallthecoolkids:
funsize:
theinterwebs:
This week on Good Morning Interwebs, Alli and Meghan chatted with Jon Steinberg and Peter Flint of DogpatchNY. Dogpatch Labs was created by Polaris Venture Partners to help entrepreneurs and founders conceive and launch startups. With offices in San Francisco and Boston, the group provides free office space, web access, coffee, and snacks for a small...
WatchGood Morning Interwebs came to Dogpatch on Thurs.
Salinger’s passing reminds me of my mentorship... →
Salinger’s passing reminds me of when I was 15 and first introduced to the world of adult business through my internship at Disney Imagineering. It’s also when I met my first of 3 important…
I’m not sure I prop things on my knee enough to... →
As soon as the tablet comes out, I’m dumping my iPhone and going to use a Blackberry or Nexus One for mobile phone and email. I’m then going to get the 3G tablet, which will be ideal for web…
HTML5 Vs. App →
The google voice iPhone site that launched yesterday shows just how much you can do with html5 and browser side storage on the iPhone. Like the gmail site and techmeme mobiles site before,…
Assumptions can steal your mojo →
As a young man, I had an internship at Sony Retail Entertainment. One day I walked into an executive’s office who had a placard on his desk, facing incomers that read “Assume Nothing.” I’ve always…
Dumping Fios →
We’re moving, and I’m thrilled to be getting out of my Fios contract without a cancellation fee (our new building doesn’t have Verizon Fios, and if that’s the case they let you out). I didn’t find…
Some Breakdowns from 2 Million SocialGreat.com... →
Last week, on roughly January 15th, we crossed the 2 million checkin mark on SocialGreat. We just crossed 1 million checkins around December 9th. We started gathering data for Socialgreat on July…
The curious case of the Black Swan, Dogpatch Lab,... →
Last night, my colleague Ryan Spoon, organized an event for 150 people at Dogpatch Labs SF on Facebook Connect. 13 companies were to present followed by Q&A with Facebook. With 150 people at…
NYC SeedStart (a startup launcher for NYC) →
I’m really excited that Polaris will be one of the partners in Seed Start summer incubator program headed up by Owen Davis at NYC Seed (a branch of the New York City Investment Fund)….
Strategy in Lieu of Business Development →
Someone tweeted or blogged yesterday that business development does not really work for internet companies. (It bums me that I can’t find this tweet and please comment if you know who said it so I…
Dreaming of a Boxee Printer →
I have literally never owned a printer that I have liked. It seems like within months of owning one, three or more of the following issues manifest themselves:
Flashing lights and an inability to…
Business School →
Several friends asked me to blog my thoughts on the decision whether or not to go to business school. It’s actually a question people engage me on all the time, because I think I’m an outlier in…
YelpSquare →
Yelp launched a version of FourSquare’s check-in functionality in the new version of their iphone app last night. This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a friend just days…
Dogpatch NY’s First Event →
We had the Hackers and Founders meetup at Dogpatch NY last night. Was a ton of fun, with some great pitches and conversation. Here’s Peter kicking it off:
I managed…
The Moment of Content Creation →
I had coffee with Geoff Lewis last week, and he made an interesting point: you need to be at the point of content creation if you want to have real influence overinteraction with the content….
Did Conan not read his contract? →
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
The Conan O’Brien situation highlights what I have often found to be the case with contracts and lawyers: you gotta read your own legal documents….
The Post Destination Era →
Peter and I have been meeting lately with a lot of companies that want to become destinations.
Building a destination makes sysiphisus’ task look easy. Stu Ellman had a good post about how…
Real Time Business →
Image via Wikipedia
It’s been almost five years since I left Wall Street and got back into tech. Leaving Wall Street for Google was the right decision for me from an intellectual…
Analoging →
Image by @jonsteinberg via Flickr
I like analogs and analogies. Hollywood producers and agents seem to love them when doing pitches, or actually making the movies: “It’s Dances…
Testing in public →
Image via Wikipedia
I built and tested Photocheck.in in public. If you watched my foursquare or Twitter feeds you saw the app firing.
Some people asked questions and had…
Towards a smart, place guessing Foursquare/Gowalla... →
In geo there are two kinds of location identification, active and passive, and then a subcategory of active.
Active is the checkin model and passive is background tracking like Loopt or Latitude
http://Photocheck.in – Check into FourSquare with... →
I’ve been interested in EXIF data for about 6 months. Every photo you take on many models of smart phones (iPhone, some Androids, etc.) is encoded with the latitude and longitude of where the…