March 2012
18 posts
“There is a dilemma, to reconcile three time scales: in the short term, the...”
– Matthieu Ricardo
February 2012
32 posts
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The United States of Craiglist
Currently, regions are defined mostly by commuting patterns – they use labor markets to determine “economic areas.” Given the changing nature of work and the workforce – does labor market still make sense? What exactly should be the definition of a metropolitan or other region? What do they mean? How do they work? The Craigslist map is great since it shows how far people are willing to travel...
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Rebuilding Education For Human Curiosity
Education in general and education reform in particular abound in buzzwords. If you follow conversations concerning technology and its place in the realm of education reform, you’re bound to hear about “accountability,” “data-driven assessment,” “the flipped classroom,” just to start. If you venture further into discussions around actual educational...
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Three Ways to Build Resilient Economies
Richard Florida:
…We have to do three things to make our economy and cities more resilient.
First, to increase technological innovation, we need to make the core products of the industrial age—housing, cars, energy—cheaper if we want to fuel demand for the new technologies and industries of the future, from health care and biotechnology to new information, educational, and entertainment...
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Google Mobile's 12 predictions for 2012
More than 1 billion people will use mobile devices as their primary internet access point.
10 days where mobile searches represent > 50% of trending search terms.
Mobile’s role in driving people into stores will be proven and it will blow us away.
“Mobile driven spend” will emerge as a big category.
Smartphones will prove exceptional at driving a new consumer behavior.
Tablets will take...
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Builders and Sellers
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the various job functions that go into technology startups. I have many friends who are product managers, “biz dev guys”, “programmers or software engineers”, developers or designers, marketers, community managers, “VPs of operations and COOs”, etc. Lately, I’ve seen a fair number of “chief creative officers” and “chief experience officers.” This is all,...
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$257m Invested In Collaborative Consumption
Excerpt from an interview with Craig Shapiro on Shareable:
“Ownership won’t go away, but attitudes toward ownership are shifting,” said Shapiro. People have become more concerned with experiencing things, rather than being able to put them on a shelf. This will give way to what Shapiro calls a trend toward collaborative thinking in 2012.
“Big data will be extremely...
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Last Week's Brain Food
“Cashflow Matters” http://is.gd/HHAG9g
I cannot stress enough how important it is to get to positive cashflow as soon as possible. Unless you’re the next Facebook/AirBnB/Name-your-preferred-hot-startup and swim in heaps of venture capital (which to be honest you most likely won’t be - the cards are clearly stacked against you… just look at the stats) having positive cashflow means you are master...
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Natural Growth vs. Forced Growth
“My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” Caterina Fake said. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.” The worst thing a social network can do is force growth, she said.
Source | Graph by Leon Håland
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Start Disrupting Industries →
You either build something that makes the world a better place or you don’t. There are complete industries built on creating arbitrary value for the world (investment banking). And there are complete industries built around innovation and creating value for the world (technology).
If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you...
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
– Albert Einstein (via morganmissen)
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The Three Most Important Ingredients
In the past decade I’ve been an entrepreneur, seed investor and startup board member. During that time, I’ve learned that the three most important ingredients to the success are #1 people, #2 people, and #3 people. The people that join you, invest in you and partner with you ultimately determine your experience, no matter how good the idea.
At my first company, Recyclebank, we had a business...
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Data Jobs Are Hockey Sticking
Soure
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Banks Need a Cultural Redesign
There are 6,000 banks in America, but four national banks dominate. As a society we tend not to discuss financial matters, nor do we have a framework for rational comparison among different bank brands. So, we rely on things like headline interest rates when we choose our bank, while ignoring the footnotes. Or branch proximity, forgetting that we rarely visit them. Bank competition has been...
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Values Will Drive the Next Game Changers
Wolff Olins released a report this week identifying five traits driving game-changing companies. We love data. So we pulled some to tumble.
The report highlighted big companies like Apple, LEGO, Nike and Paypal to illustrate these traits.
Collaborative looks for particular values when investing in startups (like Simple, Codecademy, Skillshare, Kickstarter and Gumroad.) We look for a team with...
“The interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.”
– Richard St. John
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The Education Harvest
As the options for self-education explode, what does a college education mean? And how can we measure what a good education is?
Education is changing, and it’s changing fast. Anyone can put together a personalized educational experience via digital textbooks accessible by iPad, video learning from top university faculty, or peer-led discussion. People of all demographics are gathering their own...
“I don’t know what makes a good business. It seems like it helps to have a good...”
– Alex Payne
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Good Ol' Stock Certificate Designs
Source
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Why We Invested in Gumroad
“Small-in-size offerings with greater-than-large effect” -@shl
Sahil Lavingia has a work ethic, knowledge base and passion for life that I really admire.
While most people have talked about his work with Pinterest and Turntable, I found his ability to conceive, design, develop and launch Dayta, Color Stream, Crate, Rmmbr and other applications most compelling.
He gets sh*t done.
...
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Histoire: A Janitor Designed Nintendo Culture
In 1889, Nintendo’s business was alive and well in Kyoto, Japan. But instead of making Duck Hunt, Donkey Kong and Super Mario, the company produced hand-painted Hanafuda playing cards. During the time playing cards evolved into Wii, the company pivoted to operate taxi cabs and manufactured packets of portioned instant rice, all in search of the next big thing.
It wasn’t until 1964...
“Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again.”
– Aza Raskin, Massive Health
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Don’t Build A Company To Sell, Build It To Last
Getting a giant exit is easy, building a company that is around 100 years from now—that’s really hard, but so much more meaningful.
Last June, Silicon Valley-based startup Evernote closed a round of funding. When describing its business strategy, CEO Phil Libin took a cue from The Social Network and said, “[A billion dollars isn’t cool.] You know what’s really cool? Making a hundred...
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Last week I received an exciting investor update from one of Collaborative’s portfolio companies. This got me thinking about how investor updates might correlate with a startup’s success or failure. Over the last five years, I’ve received close to a hundred of these updates in my inbox, so I took a moment to identify commonalities.
These observations aren’t 100% scientific...
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Taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s original investment letter:
Focus on Impact
If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.
Move...
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“Sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”
– Thomas Edison