Hats off to Maureen Dowd at the New York Times for the creative idea of interviewing Twitter founders Biz Stone (great name, reminds me of fishing guide Jack Trout) and Evan Williams in 140-character format. Excerpt: I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors
I found this post today on the Infectious Greed blog which features the transcript of a Steve Jobs deposition in what, judging by the questions, appears to be an option-backdating matter. I encourage everyone to read a deposition now and then, so they can get a concrete feel of
In talking about web 2.0, we often think about ideas like mass collaboration, a participatory web, the web as a communication platform, and generally speaking The Wisdom of Crowds in building and establishing knowledge. I'm a big believer in the power of functional (or wise) groups to
As part of my company's focus on the media industry, I sit on a few industry groups where I have the opportunity to spend quality time with senior media and publishing industry executives. Like any CEO, I have a natural tendency to believe that my company is, if
IPO
In the third IPO in April, language education provider Rosetta Stone went public this week, raising $112.5M. The IPO priced at $18, and the stock ended its first day of trading at $25.12, a 40% rise. As one banker said to me: "this shows that investors are
VC
What if you went to the doctor's office with a sore wrist and she proposed bandaging your ankle? That's how I feel about the government's proposal that venture capital be regulated along with other private capital pools including hedge and private equity funds. See
VC
Thanks to this story in today's Mercury News, I noticed that Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index showed a welcome and rather surprising uptick in 1Q09. The index, produced by the University of San Francisco Entrepreneurship program, has tracked venture capitalist confidence since 1Q04 and hit its all-
Cloud
Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a new member of the Amazon web services family designed to help users process vast amounts of data using the divide-and-conquer parallel processing approach made famous by Google's MapReduce and as implemented in the Apache Hadoop project. Background
Silicon Valley
Check out this article in the New York Times that overturns Silicon Valley conventional wisdom about failure. Per a Harvard Business School working paper, which looked at several thousand venture-capital-backed companies from 1986 to 2003: * First-time entrepreneurs had a 22% chance of success * Already-successful entrepreneurs had
It's all happened so quickly. * I've become my parents, * SQL has become Cobol, * and Oracle has become CA Things were different back in 1985, when I, fresh from Berkeley, VAX/VMS documentation in hand, rode the 51 bus to Alameda where my first real employer, Ingres,
We've had major interest in our upcoming webinar on the Google Book Settlement and unprecedented downloads of the related white paper, Google's Settlement with the Publishing Industry: Opportunites and Strategies for Publishers, written by Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media and available for download without giving
Silicon Valley
I just heard about this index today, the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index, which measures the confidence of Silicon Valley venture capitalists on a scale from 1-5. In 4Q08, the index hit its fifth consecutive quarterly new low at 2.77 out of 5. The index was started
