We are fast cruising to the end of the year, and lots of major stories as we close out the rapid news cycle before the holidays.

The nation-state of the internet

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.

Nvidia newsletters

After losing half its value, Nvidia faces reckoning

On

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.

Package: SoftBank and Form Ds

Daily Digest: Technology and tyranny, lying to ourselves, and Spotify’s $1b repurchase

SoftBank’s debt obsession

The disappearing Form D

Japan is cracking down on SoftBank’s revenue

Rakuten has SoftBank in its sights

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

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.

In State Tectonics, an explosive ending for the future of democracy

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.

MIT announces new college of computing with $1 billion commitment

Major news story from MIT, which is going to put

This has been another really busy week.

The death of once high-flying VC funds

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.

China splits the internet while the U.S. dithers

One challenge that is not widely understood remains the

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.

In Bad Blood, a pedestrian tale of heuristics and lies

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