I was debating with a friend of mine earlier this week about the future of mass transit and public infrastructure. Naturally, the conversation moved toward autonomous cars and Uber/Lyft. The basic argument, which you can read in stories like Spencer Woodman’s tale from Altamonte Springs, is that Uber and self-driving cars are just going to outright replace public transit.
I think that is completely wrong for several reasons.
First, few large cities can transfer everyone to private vehicles and still maintain any flow of traffic.Continue reading...
One of the quote-unquote negative characteristics of the New York City tech ecosystem that I talked about a few weeks ago is the lack of VCs who will take the lead role in a fundraise. From my count, there is somewhere between 200-300 active VC firms in New York (yes, there is something of that size in the city today — crazy really), only maybe 6-12 are fully comfortable taking the lead in a fundraise.Continue reading...
When I chose to move to NYC from Boston three months ago, it was with serious trepidation. I had spent six years living, working, and learning in Silicon Valley, and despite the growing evidence of New York’s success as a tech hub, SV still remains the king of innovation by any statistic. To be frank, I’m ambitious like many of the people in tech I work with, and I want to run the kingdom, not some outlying New Amsterdam duchy.Continue reading...
I am on an on-going rant about housing prices (take me out to lunch and I will rant gratis). Today again, we have an article in the New York Times talking about a housing “glut” in Brooklyn, due to the construction of thousands of new units in Flatbush.
Glut is a political word. It means that there is too much of a resource, and implies that the price of the good will eventually be priced below the suppliers cost.Continue reading...
Reuters wrote a piece this week on the rising “risk” of a housing glut in South Korea. Korea is one of the few places worldwide where housing prices have only seen moderate growth over the last decade.
This is a good thing.
Yet, reading Reuters, you would be surprised to learn just how terrible it is that housing prices haven’t jumped like they do in Manhattan.
And unlike markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney, South Korea has low immigration and few foreign buyers to stimulate sales and prices.Continue reading...
Last month, I wrote about the desperate waves of venture capital, the concept that VCs are investing far too early into new trends in a race for returns. With the mobile, cloud, and social transformations slowing way down, VCs constantly have to search for other nascent movements — artificial intelligent, machine learning, virtual reality — in the hopes of touching greatness.
So yesterday’s article about Docker caught my eye. Called “A Docker Fork: Talk of a Split Is Now on the Table”, the story gives a brief overview of the acrimonious debate in the Docker community over its support for enterprise, its speed of backwards incompatible changes, and the ecosystem’s roadmap for the future.Continue reading...
I read a lot. And despite my best intentions to try to read less this year, I have continued my article and book bingeing habits. This past summer has been no exception. Here are some recommendations.
The Articles
I have read a couple of great articles this summer that I think are worth spending time with:
“A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment. Trolling on Twitter and other social networks continues to endanger these communities.Continue reading...
VCs are widely perceived to be groupthink aficionados. (What do we invest in? Whatever they are investing in next door!) There is some truth to this notion — clearly, many investments are thesis driven, and intelligent investors are going to recognize the same trends in the marketplace and reach similar conclusions.
One aspect of that groupthink that is lesser noticed is the groupthink among founders. Hundreds of startups don’t just materialize out of thin air — founders have to conceive and build their products.Continue reading...
As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday about Boston, I just moved to New York City to launch (or perhaps more accurately, relaunch) CRV’s presence in the city.
New York City has been written about extensively by investors who have lived here for decades. I just got here — so unlike my piece on Boston — I hardly have the depth of understanding of the local startup scene to write any meaningful analysis.Continue reading...
For those of you who don’t follow me on Facebook, or have somehow managed to convince the LinkedIn gods (i.e. Satya Nadella) to not send you update emails, I have moved to New York City.
I’m super pumped about the move, but as always when I move to new cities, there is a feeling of wistfulness of the places I have been, and the places I might still be. It’s also a moment to consider all of the changes that have happened with startups, technology, politics, and society these past few years.Continue reading...
