Reaction Wheel

Colossus recently published my essay on the seeming ineffectiveness of the startup methods introduced over the last 20-odd years. It got a lot of reaction. Some of it was emotional, as you'd expect: people have devoted a lot of time and energy assuming th

Colossus magazine published my new essay today: We Have Learned Nothing. It talks about why, after 25 years of punditry on how to better build a startup, entrepreneurs are no more likely to be successful than they were. You should read it! Part of what I

Paul Kedrosky notes that the AI labs have implicitly given up on their current technology leading to AGI. But they are still hoping a breakthrough they don't yet have will do it: continuous learning. Kedrosky quotes a Bloomberg piece Paywall that quotes a

Felice Kincannon was my boss, my mentor, and a friend. She passed away in April of this year. Felice shied away from publicity, so there is little written about her. If she knew I was writing this she would have sternly, flatly told me not to. But she als

I've been a huge fan of Patrick O'Shaughnessy since I was on his Invest Like the Best podcast. Patrick asks good questions and, in a world that now abounds with answers, the most valuable people are the ones who can ask the best questions. Back in May, Pa

I do not see how one can look at growth figures like these without seeing them as representing possibilities. Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia's or Egypt's? If so, what, exactl

Is the rate of adoption of new things getting faster and faster and if so, is this an exogenous feature of technology? I argue the rate of adoption is cyclical and, while fast today for some products, this is neither a good thing for entrepreneurs nor pre

I am no longer investing in new companies.

For some ten years I have advised students in my entrepreneurship class to use a 40% discount rate in their lifetime value calculations. Every semester someone decides to take advice they found on the internet and use a much lower rate. It does seem like,

The book I wrote with Liz Zalman has been released! We chose an unusual format: we take specific times and events in the life of a startup, times that can cause conflict between founders and investors, and we each give our views on them. We disagree. A lo