I have my friend Sree to thank for introducing me to the writings of Warren Buffet’s longtime investment partner, Charlie Munger. In his excellent book of investment (and other) advice, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Munger offers 10 rules for investment success, one of which has been on my mind lately. Rule number 1: Measure Risk, includes continue…
Lots of ink gets spilled on the mechanics of starting a business (I guess readers and search engines both love “how to” content), but I haven’t come across many accounts of the emotional experience of starting up that feel true or accurate to me. (Marc Andreesen has one of the better posts on the subject, continue…
In his excellent series of blog posts on building and managing technology startups, Marc Andreesen advances (with an oblique credit to Benchmark’s Andy Rachleff) the idea of “product/market fit” as the foundation of startup success. In his view, achieving product/market fit is the only thing that matters to a startup, trumping all other factors like continue…
I spent a bunch of time today (between coughing fits) building screenshots for an application prototype I’m working on. Whenever I try this, I’m reminded how hard it is to build a usable application, no matter how simple it seems at the outset. I don’t claim any great gifts at the discipline, but whenever I continue…
After 3+ years in the trenches on the topic of local + online content and advertising at Judy’s Book, I’m fascinated by the possibilities for what Alex Iskold has called “Life Digital“, a location-specific data and functionality overlay on our physical lives. (I imagine it as an invisible location grid sitting over the entire earth, continue…
I’ve just created a new sidebar widget that showcases my (extremely limited) technical skills. Just below my photo on the right you’ll notice a blue rectangle that reads “Ask Me a Question”. Clicking on this launches a mailto: (assuming you have a local mail client configured), routing any resulting messages to a Gmail account I continue…
I’ve been thinking about new business ideas recently and a phrase from early in my work life keeps popping into my head. The speaker was Jim Barksdale, who ran what became AT&T Wireless after the McCaw Cellular empire was acquired by AT&T. (I worked for a McCaw-funded project called Claircom Communications in the early 1990’s, continue…
As a part of the Judy’s Book wind-down process our core management group (Andy, myself, Dave, Rahul and Erin) did a debrief on our mistakes and lessons learned from the past three years. The full list was too long to cover in one post (if you’re curious, Andy’s been blogging some of the major themes continue…
I’ve received several friendly and sympathetic emails recently offering condolences on the untimely death of a company I co-founded called Judy’s Book. What’s a little hard to explain to the senders (and what I’m trying to sort out for myself) is that I’m not all that broken up about it. In fact, I’m probably feeling continue…
My wife and I have two young kids -Parker (2 1/2) and Josephine (5 months) – so our sleep windows are always randomized by night feedings (Josephine), bad dreams (Parker), coughing fits (both) and the occasional bout of projectile vomiting (both again). With all that going on, we’re both pretty tired most of the time, continue…