Just articles, posts and thoughts that I’ve found interesting falling asleep on the beach while reading a book, anime style art Crooks’ Mistaken Bet on Encrypted Phones (New Yorker) – How European police have cracked “safe” encrypted phones often used by criminals, and the wealth of data it’s provided. Come for the tech story and stay for insight into why cocaine is huge in Europe, how smuggling logistics work, and the slang used to describe murder. The Dangerous Rise of ‘Front-Yard Politics’ (The Atlantic) – Derek Thompson on why obsessing over slogans and words (and the performative display ..read more

Got a lot of reactions to my last post about acquihires (specifically, lack of them) and how that might change the approach startups take to pursuing ‘soft landings.’ Wanted to clarify and respond to some of those questions, backchannels, etc. It’s often ok to just shutdown. I wasn’t suggesting that every founder/team/investors would prefer an acquihire to other forms of wind down, and definitely not that founders always “owe” their investors this attempt. If anything I was trying to emphasize to founders that it’s ok to try a different process, often against the common wisdom. To founders (s ..read more

“Worst case scenario we’ll sell to a larger startup or public company for about ~$1.5m per engineer.” Yes, this was the ‘fallback plan’ for many team in the web2 era and they weren’t wrong. Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your early stage company, you basically created an acquisition outcome floor. I was on both sides of these transactions – buying startups for Google/YouTube and angel investing in high quality technical founders. Sometimes you’d even get lucky and receive stock in the acquirer, which was how I gained pre-IPO eq ..read more

An AI Safe Harbor Provision Would Create Guidelines For Development & Safety Without Premature Regulations The conversation around Artificial Intelligence has started to take on a binary quality, rather prematurely, as if we were debating the two sides of a coin rather than a more complex shape. “Let builders build as is” vs “Regulate.” Ironically, both positions are outputs of acknowledging the incredible early power and promise of the tipping point we’ve reached, but neither incorporate the ambiguity. Fortunately there’s some case law here which might help, and we only have to go back to ..read more

Why Tech Companies Avoid Customer Service and the Opportunity That Comes With Actually Engaging Your Users Thirty years from now when you’re reading my memoir pay attention to Chapter 8 because that’s when I became President of the United States. The populist momentum that resulted in an unprecedented third-party ascension was all based on a single premise: the large tech companies should staff competent, responsive and empathetic customer service departments. a telephone locked inside a clear plastic box, digital art [DALL-E] My YouTube video went viral. Where I picked up a Yellow Pages, look ..read more

A Ticket From Michael Jordan’s First NBA Game Auctions Big $$$, Adam Sandler Gets Respect (Finally!), and Why Germany’s Envy of Silicon Valley Helped Wirecard Commit Massive Fraud Ok, just a roundup of some great recent reads. stack of magazine and newspapers [DALL-E] Adam Sandler doesn’t need your respect. But he’s getting it anyway. (Geoff Edgers, WaPo) — Rare sitdown with Adam Sandler featuring this great line from SNL creator Lorne Michaels “The nature of comedy is you get the audience, you get the money,” says Michaels, SNL’s creator and executive producer. “Respect is the last thing you ..read more

Why Lack of Easy Options Made Me Focus On Who I Wanted To Be, Which Paid Off Over Time a very sad businessman holding a popped balloon, digital art [DALL-E] In retrospect the fact we were all day trading tech stocks from Stanford’s computer labs probably suggested it was a bit of a bubble, although eToys options did pay for two consecutive Spring Break vacations. I was getting my MBA at the time which in some ways wasn’t just part of the DotCom storyline but an epicenter. Our professors were literally rewriting the case studies in real time and my participation in the very first Internet Marke ..read more

Riffing Off VC Charles Hudson’s Blog Post, Here’s What I’m Trying to Answer a group of different robots running a race, digital art [DALL-E] If startup founders sometimes ‘Build in Public,’ is the analogou sventure capitalist motto to ‘Think in Public?’ Anyway, there’s no doubt that the story of the trailing months has been Artificial Intelligence. Over Homebrew’s first decade we’ve always been interested in what we’ve called ‘Applied AI’ (along with Applied CV, Applied ML)— opportunities where the technology itself was being extended and commercialized for a specific purpose (contra ..read more

Why I’m Participating in SeedChecks’ “Submit Your Deck” Community We’ve never believed in hiding. Our , and there’s no junior staffer or AI Bot replying on our behalf. A strong Cold Email always beats a weak Warm Email. And we’ve backed successful startups where the relationship began exactly this way. So, yeah, we’re believers in being accessible and open to founders regardless of whether or not we share an existing network. That’s why I’m participating in SeedChecks, an experience by which you can submit your pitch deck to a group of early stage investors without having to know any of us al ..read more

Things I Learned From a New Yorker Article and How I Got Over My Own Insecurity Good writers aren’t just skilled in their prose, they have a nose for interesting topics. “Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It,” an article about imposter syndrome in a recent issue of the New Yorker, is an example of a GREAT subject. The type of read where you pause between sections to chew on what you just finished. The Imposter Phenomenon, as the original researchers called it (the fact it’s mutated to a ‘syndrome’ is part of its questionable evolution and ubiquity), has been coming up in my communities, m ..read more