As we enter 2024, the capital markets have found their footing and are moving higher. The Fed has taken interest rates as far as they want at this time and inflation has come down. It seems that a “soft landing” is likely. That is good news for the innovation economy because healthy capital markets are a necessary support system.

As we enter 2024, the capital markets have found their footing and are moving higher. The Fed has taken interest rates as far as they want at this ti...

I've never done a cleanse. But many of my friends and family members have done them. There are various flavors of cleanses but the basic idea is you cut back your consumption of food and drink and replace it with mostly liquid nutrition for anywhere from a day to a month.

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending and one looking forward to the year ahead. This is the first of these two posts. 

Over the last month, there has been a ton of debate and conversation about web2 vs web3 with many leading voices raising doubts about web3. Debate and doubt are healthy. And web3 enthusiasts, particularly on Twitter, remind me of missionaries trying to recruit the unwashed to their belief system.

We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons.

A number of friends have been asking us how to buy crypto assets. This is not the first time we've gotten this question and it won't be the last. When I first started getting this question, my answer was "open a Coinbase account and buy Bitcoin."

A few weeks ago, I wrote about NYC's Tech Resurgence. I observed that NYC continues to develop as one of the world's leading centers of tech innovation. And then yesterday, I saw this tweet.

Early in the pandemic, we were all deluged with stories of tech workers, companies, and founders leaving Silicon Valley for Miami and Austin. And that was true. But from my personal experience, they also left for many other places too, including Los Angeles and New York City.

I understand that regulators and elected officials need to raise concerns about new technologies and their impact on society. It is their job or at least part of their job. But I am also dismayed regularly by how poorly many elected officials and regulators understand the technologies they are talking about.

Stock-based compensation plans throughout the startup and tech sector are based on "golden handcuffs" - the idea that an employee can't leave because they would be giving up too much money if they do. I've never loved that concept. It feels like staying in a bad marriage for the kids.

A number of members of Congress sent a letter to the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Tuesday (Nov. 10).

Dan Primack wrote in his friday newsletter: Public market investors have become less willing to leave their comfort zones, and it's manifesting most obviously in the IPO market.Novel disruption has fallen out of favor, with many preferring more time-tested models like enterprise SaaS and biotech.

The Gotham Gal and I walked into the Musee de l’Orangerie yesterday and found a line of about 20 people waiting to purchase tickets to enter. The Gotham Gal whipped out her phone, went to the Orangerie website, and bought two tickets that were sent to her phone. It took her less than a minute […]

But maybe the most amazing thing, to me anyway, is that my mom has pretty much stopped using her land line phone. She tells everyone to call her on her mobile phone. For a generation that arrived on planet earth around the same time as the rotary telephone to be abandoning the landline phone in favor of a mobile phone is really something to see.

It can take a leader some time to develop followership, particularly if they are hired from the outside. The team will need some time to figure out this new person, how they operate, and how they feel about them.

Last night CBS 60 Minutes aired a piece about the gender gap in tech and left out a number of important efforts to close the gap. My friend Rob Underwood tweeted this out about that piece: I admire work of my friend @hadip & the org he started, @codeorg.

In the wake of Erin Griffith's piece in the NY Times suggesting that venture capital is toxic for some entrepreneurs, there has been a fair bit of debate about the causes of that situation.

Hi Everyone. Happy 2019. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in.

Decentralization is one of, if not the most, discussed features of the crypto tech stack. In a decentralized system, no single body controls the system. We have most certainly not reached the era fully decentralized systems, but that is what most of the world-class technologists working in the crypto sector are focused on getting us to and I believe we will get there in the not too distant future.

The Pivot is celebrated in startup land. Huge successes like Twitter and Slack are all the results of pivots. So surely pivoting is a good thing, right? Well, I am not so sure. And I certainly don't want entrepreneurs to think that pivoting is the right thing to do when their original idea fails.

One of the most challenging situations in startup/venture capital land is the broken syndicate. It is not a topic that is talked about much, but it is fairly common, particularly for companies that succeed in building a business but falter at achieving escape velocity.

The Economist has a cover story this week called Peak Valley. The article suggests that Silicon Valley's lead as a hub for innovation has peaked and other regions are rising. It ends with the concern that innovation more broadly has peaked. I somewhat agree with "the rise of elsewhere" narrative and disagree that innovation has peaked.

Today is Labor Day in the US. It is a day to celebrate labor, the union movement, and the role of the worker in our economy and our society. I have always struggled with the idea that labor and capital are intrinsically opposed to each other. It is obvious that workers have been taken advantage of by employers since the dawn of an industrialized society and possibly/probably for much longer than that. But does it have to be that way?

Eighteen percent is not a number to be proud of, but 60% growth in two years is. If we continue at that rate of gender diversity growth, the VC business could be gender neutral by the middle of next decade. It would not surprise me if that happens.