This morning I got together with Tony Wright — one of my favorite Seattle-area entrepreneurs and a deep thinker on the topic of mobile app distribution and user experience design (among many other things). We covered a lot of ground in the discussion, but one idea in particular stuck in my head. On the topic continue…
Disclosure – I’m an unabashed Amazon fan. Not only is it one of the most aggressive, forward-thinking and best-led companies in tech, it’s also the beating heart of the Seattle tech scene. The comments that follow are offered out of deep respect and a sincere desire to see Amazon dominate the *next* decade of the continue…
The global economy is in a long-term path toward disaggregation, a gradual shift in economic power from the enterprise to the individual. This shift is most visible among the most “wired” segments of society — workers on the leading edge of the mobile / social / “indie” revolution. But as Venkat Rao illustrates in his excellent article, continue…
The “great acceleration” of software innovation over the past decade has fundamentally changed the playbook for entrepreneurial success. The new methods are obvious to the current generation of software entrepreneurs — the GenY applicants to Y Combinator and TechStars — but seasoned participants in the old model still struggle to grok how completely the world continue…
Well-meaning normal: “So Founders Co-op is an incubator?” Me (cringing): “Umm, no, I actually hate that word” Why does the word “incubator” make my skin crawl? Here’s why… I’m a word geek, so I’m hypersensitive to the nuances of language, but I firmly believe that words have incredible power: they’re full of latent meanings that continue…
My feed is full of Facebook IPO filing “news”, but the winning quote for the day seems to be this one, from Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to investors: “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services“ Like a lot of people, I love that quote for what it says about continue…
A few weeks ago the New York Times ran a piece about near-record vacancy rates at shopping malls around the country: “Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, continue…
Disclaimer: Entrepreneurship is all about passion: if you’ve decided that selling to local SMBs is your life’s work, I celebrate your choice. This post is for all the entrepreneurs who are currently evaluating local / hyperlocal business ideas, but might be just as happy doing something else. Hi, my name’s Chris, and I’m an online-local-a-holic. continue…