I wrote 173 pieces for TechCrunch this year, covering a huge gamut of topics including the rise of China’s technological dominance, enterprise and infrastructure startups, and the changing nature of venture capital. It’s been quite a year!
Without too much ado, here are the top three articles and a couple of honorable mentions.
Subscription is increasingly the default revenue model for software and media, but what happens to consumers when every single service we use requires an annual payment? Subscription Hell, basically. This was a cri de cœur for software developers and media executives to consider the anti-consumer nature of subscriptions, and in a follow-up piece, to consider the high costs of all of these aggregate subscriptions. I think subscriptions are vital for sustainability, but they also have to be aligned with consumer wallets. (1,420 words)
Through a startup called Jobbatical, in-demand and talented workers are increasingly choosing where to work and live based on the amenities that are offered by governments. In the global battle for talent, the governments that do the best in attracting the top experts will see the most economic growth and status increase, which means that mobile talented workers have an unusually strong level of influence on these administrations. Expect to hear more about these changes in 2019. (1,840 words)
This was a retrospective on the deaths of four well-known venture capital funds and what it says about Silicon Valley. A certain era of VC, with big images,
Whoever says that journalism is dead just doesn’t read.
It’s been another year of just insane levels of quality across stories, analyses, essays, books, podcasts and more. And it is another year in which I read way too much, and frankly, forgot pretty much all of it. So I used some Python code (attached at the end) to get a list of all articles that I saved and mostly read in Pocket (1,673 articles this year, a total of 3,279,335 words) and combed through it to find my favorite articles from the year.
There are a couple of caveats before we get started:
This list doesn’t include articles from the New Yorker, which I subscribe to and get on paper, and so don’t store in Pocket. Ditto for the Wall Street Journal.
Some sites like Bloomberg mess with Pocket, and I am too lazy to click through all the links to figure out what the underlying article was. So there is some under-representation from publications that refuse to make it easy to read their content.
I don’t save everything religiously to Pocket, so this is a “best efforts” list, not something comprehensive.
I only selected articles longer than 2,000 words. That’s not to say that shorter-form work isn’t great or important, but a lot of it in my Pocket is breaking news, etc. that doesn’t lend itself well to a “best of the year” list.
For novelists, there is a bright line between speculative and let’s say speculation fiction. In speculative fiction, the author’s goal is to hit the fast-forward button on our thinking, offering us a context to consider the patterns and trends we observe around us and see how they (may) play out. In contrast, “speculation fiction” (or plain old science fiction) just plops us in a whole new world, with no extension from our reality needed or implied.
Dystopias are interesting because they almost always end up on the speculative side of the divide, even when they might otherwise work better as pure speculation. Their authors want readers to meditate on certain matters precisely, and so creating a continuity with today is paramount for believability and thus, reflection. And so Aldous Huxley connects Brave New World through Fordism, and George Orwell brings us to the world of 1984 both through its title and also through a connective history of how the three world powers of his work came to be.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale follows directly from this lineage. Set in none other than Harvard Square, the book analyzes a future America defined by declining birth rates and religious fundamentalism. Women who are capable of birthing children are a precious commodity to be allocated by the government to its most loyal and elite citizens, and the core ideology of the regime is that of the Old Testament.
The novel was originally published in 1985, and Atwood was projecting forward the rise of the Religious Right in the United States and where the policies of that movement could lead if taken to their logical extremes.
The challenge for Atwood though is that creating a continuation between her present of 1985 and the world of her new nation-state known
A very comprehensive overview of one of the largest newsmakers this year. SoftBank is a telco, a venture fund, and owns huge swaths of the infrastructure companies that make smartphones work. So its actions and strategy this year are critical to understand for Silicon Valley. Some great news around their assets like ARM, but a tough debt situation is going to make 2019 a tough year with stocks looking primed to go down.
GPS is a crucial technology for smartphones, but the United States has had a practical de-facto monopoly over the technology. Now, a bunch of countries including China, India, Japan, and the UK are exploring building out their own competitors. That puts smartphone designers like Apple in a bind — does it create separate units for each of these markets, or does it fall behind local players on one of the smartphone’s most valuable features.
Crypto prices have crashed this year, leaving detritus behind. Layer1 has an approach it sees as not only financially-sound, but poised to take advantage of this bear market.
This was my most in-depth, thoughtful article the past two weeks. It’s maybe a little heady, but essentially, the internet is creating the context for a new form of the nation-state. That discussion was in the context of Imagined Communities, a book that is one of most cited of all time in the social sciences and discusses how the printing press was the enabling technology for the first nation-states to form. May try to follow up on this in the coming weeks.
I wrote a series of analyses of Nvidia and some of the challenges it is facing. It’s stock is down nearly 50% in the past two months (!), and it is facing challenges from its own customers, from the crypto crash, and from China. It’s still a unique company, but its massive growth over the past three years looks like it is going to be receding a lot.
Three newsletters about the challenges in US/China relations, plus some other topics. I think the trade conflict will continue pretty much unabated. As I wrote:
Let’s be clear on my position: I expect the trade conflict to get worse, not better. There is not a single issue for Trump that has better optics, political positioning, and broad support than improving the status quo around China trade.
An argumentative essay that largely agrees with Amazon’s process for selecting its HQ2. Such location decisions are almost always the exclusive province of boards of directors, but Amazon did open it up a bit to offer politicians an opportunity to make their pitch. Maybe people didn’t like the process, or thought it was sickening how much cities were willing to fight for jobs (I don’t understand that personally). In the end though, it is great that cities had any input at all on a private corporate matter.
Two final pieces in an experimental column I worked on this month. One of my new goals (pre New Years!) is to do more open-source journalism/analysis, where we do analysis publicly and put our editorial calendar in front of readers for feedback. My hope is to continue experimenting in that vein in the coming months.
Damn good writing productivity this week if I do say so myself. A set of five articles packaged as part of a new content experiment at TechCrunch, a book review, and two more editions of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.
A set of five columns focused on SoftBank’s financial performance and Form Ds, which are the filings that startups typically submit to the SEC when they take venture capital. SoftBank loves debt, but yet has managed to continue to outperform on operating income growth, while startups have been avoiding filing Form Ds in order to prevent journalists from scooping their funding rounds.
This is a new experimental column where I focus on one to two topics for an extended period of time, while also building on feedback from readers. The idea is to get “obsessed” with a topic and do a little bit of open-source journalism, so that readers (who almost certainly know more about these topics than I do) can disseminate their knowledge and help all of us learn more.
The format so far has been focused on the main column, and then a reading docket and some notes on readings to keep readers up-to-speed on my reading. Expect the format to change, but happy to get this first week done.
A book review of Elephant in the Brain, a book that argues that we use self-deception to hide our true motivations — even from ourselves — in order to build social advantages against other people. For instance, when we donate to charities, we
Another busy two weeks (I repeat that a lot). I got the chance to review State Tectonics by Malka Older, cover a few news stories, and host TC Equity, the podcast that talks shop about VC.
Malka Older’s science fiction novel State Tectonics is an incredible romp through the future of democracy and politics. It’s filled with great vignettes, and has a thriller plot line as well. The characters are perhaps a bit underdeveloped, but in the end, people read speculative fiction for the speculation, and State Tectonics offers it in spades.
Major news story from MIT, which is going to put a serious amount of money behind artificial intelligence. This isn’t a crazy extension of MIT’s current capabilities, but I do think it is interesting to see how the Institute’s focus is coalescing around one field.
A major funding announcement for Ribbon, which netted a large slug of equity and debt from investors to try to rebuild the home buying process. The model gets a lot of things right compared to competitors like Opendoor, and now they have the money to go out and prove it.
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Partner, Research at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
