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
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.
A deep dive into New York City’s new cybersecurity ecosystem initiatives. The city wants to be one of the global hubs for the industry, since most of the major customers that use this software are based locally. These sorts of initiatives are tricky to get right, but the hope here is that the combination of an incubator, education initiatives, sales accelerators and co-working/community space can catalyze the industry against other leading cities like Boston, Washington DC, and Tel Aviv.
Two more editions of the TechCrunch Equity podcast, with discussions on crazy valuations, Softbank (it’s always about Softbank), as well as the disappearance of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the ethics of taking capital from one of the world’s most notorious human rights abusers.
This was an in-depth look at the failures of four well-known VC firms in Silicon Valley. All four were widely popular with the press, and all four have all but ceased to exist just a couple of years later. What happened? The essential story here is that there really aren't all that many similarities. Much as the families of Anna Karenina are each unhappy in their own ways, each of these funds faced different issues which caused their undoing. Crazily enough, some of these funds may still turn out to have blockbuster returns.
One challenge that is not widely understood remains the on-going bifurcation of the internet, with U.S.-based companies like Google and Facebook running one side of it, and China-based companies like Tencent and Alibaba (and other lesser-known companies) running the other half. This was something of a revision of an article I wrote four years ago, which said that the internet was fragmenting. It is indeed fragmenting, but not into dozens of separate units, but essentially two.
Another week, another mixed bag of news. Trump continues his tariffs spree, but also some continued news from Silicon Valley. Some weeks are just like all other weeks.
A book review of one of the most widely-discussed books published on Silicon Valley in some time. The story of Theranos is now widely known due to the work of John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal, and this is the complete story with a bunch of details filled in. For such an important book on business ethics though, I found the book to be a bit pedestrian — for all of the fraud (and there are heaps of it), it’s hard to really feel that anyone individually was the victim from this terrible story. A lot of rich people lost a lot of money though, so maybe they should do more than one phone call to write a $125 million check. Maybe.
A bit of a deeper dive on what is going on at Techstars, which has now expanded to 44 different programs on six continents. It really is interesting to see a startup accelerator expand so rapidly to so many different verticals, and grow at times just as fast as the startups it is backing.
This is a quick news story, but one that has deeper significance. Google is pulling back from unilateral control over the Accelerator Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which I think is the right move, but one that comes so late in this project’s life cycle that I wonder if it can rebuild the bridges with the web development community.
This week was busy with the Apple event as always, but also Mobile World Congress Americas, where it is clear that 5G is starting to become a mainstay concern for telcos across the world.
Two pieces on the challenges of 5G. The first is an analysis around Apple’s use of 5G in its popular line of iPhones. The company made no announcements this week, and that’s the challenge for Apple given the timing of its product launches, particularly around China. China will have commercial 5G service late this year to early next year or so, but the next edition of the iPhone likely won’t come out until September. That may seem like little time, but in the highly-competitive, mature smartphone industry, a few months may be just enough of a gap to allow another company to steal market share in one of Apple’s most important growth markets.
On the other side of the world, a city north of San Francisco has voted to effectively block the rollout of 5G small cell technology into residential neighborhoods over medical and health fears. While the science is reasonably absolute that cell phone antennas have no link to health outcomes, what’s crazy here is that 5G antennas will typically broadcast less radiation than the towers they are replacing. Whatever health effects were there before, there should be even less going forward. It’s another example of the strange dichotomy within the country’s leading innovation hub.
Summer is finally over, and I’ve had lots of travel the past few weeks to Seoul, Tokyo, and SF. TechCrunch just hosted the largest Disrupt ever, with thousands of attendees streaming across Moscone last week. I got to interview some amazing people, and the videos will hopefully come in the next edition of this review.
With work on internal projects and travel, writing slowed down to a crawl in August, which is why this review hasn’t been posted in some time. That said, some great news stories from August, plus some analyses as I walked and talked around San Francisco.
Benchmark is one of the most storied firms in Silicon Valley, and certainly the news from the public markets this past week has fit with that history. The venture fund is the lead owner of two of this season’s IPOs, with Elastic being a great example of what Benchmark has been discussing for some time: the need for companies to go public on an efficient timeframe. The startup has had huge growth, limited capital fundraised, and yet, is managing to go public in just about 6 years.
While traveling to SF on Labor Day, I penned this mini-screed about why certain founders do better than others. A bit controversial, although I don’t think it is wrong, the simple answer is that hard work really does make the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t. Entrepreneurs in other countries like China and India viscerally understand that, and their work ethic is one reason why America is facing an innovation crisis.
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.
-China-6123.jpg?ref=dannycrichton.com){kind=link}