Innovation and entrepreneurship are becoming my two least-favorite words, mostly because they are being appropriated in ways that are neither innovative nor entrepreneurial. Like in today’s New York Times essay by Tom Friedman. Friedman used to be one of my favorite writers. In Beirut to Jerusalem, when he talked about two sheiks on a flight… Read More
Anyone who reads this blog even casually knows that Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson is one of my favorite bloggers. He somehow writes every day, in an effortless style, and always expresses a clear idea. Yesterday he wrote an essay that was still with me when I woke up this morning, and with me on… Read More
Josh Kopelman observed Friday that e-commerce has changed very little since he founded Half.com: more than half the top-15 media companies did not exist in 1999 while all but one of the e-commerce companies did. Josh concludes that “I believe we’ve seen more innovation… in eCommerce in the last 10 months than we have in… Read More
Two executive MBA students just came by the house to interview me for a class on entrepreneurship. Answering questions about the #1 quality of an entrepreneur, my #1 weakness, my #1 advice, I found myself translating true stories about what has worked for me into aphorisms that felt made up. We have begun to think… Read More
A few comments about Dave McClure’s Sunday post encouraging entrepreneurs under 30 to sell at the earliest opportunity, from someone who was a founder under 30. I won’t go into the full rant, since I already wrote that last year, but can’t help but comment on a few of Dave’s claims. (Dave already knows I… Read More
Fred Wilson yesterday wrote about the analogies between startups and cards or sports, and decided he especially liked poker analogies. He watched his son try to decide whether to fold a bad poker hand, and said that venture investing often involves the same thought process. We’ll I’ve been in that situation too, except I wasn’t… Read More
Over the past few months, Twitterers and TechFlash readers have invented a war between big and small startups, and somehow Redfin has landed on the wrong side of it. I only noticed it last night. The great Josh Petersen of 43 Things compared Adam Doppelt’s fantastic essay on boot-strapping Urbanspoon to a talk Marcelo Calbucci… Read More
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11:30 a.m., some of Redfin’s finest physical specimens have been stripping down to our under-shirts to compete in the 100-pushup challenge. We’ve been faithfully working through the 6-week program, which promises to build anyone into a mini-Schwarzenegger, for 14 weeks. We embraced the macho rhetoric of the 100-pushups website… Read More
As we plunge further into the Great Recession, it’s natural to wonder, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, what the world will look like when we land. Other bubbles have left behind an excess of infrastructure that would later come in handy: railroad tracks, telegraph lines, Internet fiber. What will we have to show… Read More
Redfin published a guest post on TechFlash this morning about how the balance of power has shifted between the idealists in business who advance a company’s sense of mission and the mercenaries who insist on being 100% focused on profits. In many ways it picks up where an old Redfin essay about get-rich-quick-schemes left off…. Read More