Albert Wenger
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A Rational Internet Venture Valuations Bubble
So it is entirely rational given the Internet environment to see a dramatic stretching of the valuations for market leaders with network effects. It does, however, not bode well for aggregate returns for the venture capital asset class:
Tech Tuesday: How The Web Works (Overview)
As promised at the end of last year’s Tech Tuesday, we are starting this year with a cycle on how the web works. Just as a reminder, Tech Tuesday’s aim is to require no previous knowledge other than what has been covered before. So this overview m…
Sharing: One Network (To Rule Them All) Or Network Of Networks?
Sites and apps that essentially delegate their sharing and hence ultimately their discovery primarily or entirely to Facebook are missing the opportunity to build a network of their own with features that work best for their participants. In such a…
Republic, Lost And United
The possibility of a Constitutional Convention is not the only reason that I came away feeling energized after reading Republic, Lost. The other is that Larry Lessig has a strong track record of not just writing about things but making them better.…
Tech Tuesday: No Computer Is An Island (Networking)
It is funny how quickly we take things for granted that didn’t exist just a few years back (obligatory reference to Louis C.K. rant about appreciating technology). Today the thought of using a computer that’s not connected to a network is almost un…
The B Corporation
What I love about this initiative is that it is an example of the kind of values based re-design that I believe we need. It is not an add-on or single product standard (eg fair trade coffee) but rather a comprehensive approach down to the legal foun…
Tech Tuesday: Of Bits And Bytes (Binary Number System)
On computers it has become the norm to group bits into groups of 8 bits which together are known as a “byte.” One byte can hold the numbers from 00000000 which is of course also 0 in decimal to 11111111 which is 1*128 + 1*64 + 1*32 + 1*16 + 1*8 + 1…
Tech Tuesdays: Computing’s Building Blocks (Overview)
Welcome to Tech Tuesdays! This is the first installment and as I had promised I am not assuming any prior knowledge other than as an enduser of computers. Instead we are starting with the absolute basics. Every computing system has to provide in …
How Schools Destroy Learning
Couldn’t resist an attention grabbing headline here after spending yesterday morning with my daughter on the kind of homework that just completely takes the fun out of learning. In geography her class is learning about latitude and longitude. As h…
If You Need To Raise Money, Get Your Financing Done ASAP
At first blush it makes little sense for early and even growth stage company financings to be driven by the cycle in the public markets. After all, if you are doing a Series A, B or even C financing it is usually with the expectation that the compa…
Intellectual Ventures Called Out
Tags: nathan_myhrvold intellectual_ventures intellectual_property
Make Your Service Underdetermined To Achieve Internet Scale
I have written previously that given the huge scale of the Internet, services that might historically have been considered a feature can now be companies. There is a critical success factor though to achieving Internet scale that I think is being …
The Unbundling Of Product Discovery From Commerce
I am thinking of this as the unbundling of discovery from commerce. There are sites as svpply and services such as OpenSky that are explicitly targeting this unbundling. More playful approaches such as Polyvore and Pinterest are also part of this …
From the Locus of Computation (Chromebook) to the Locus of Control (?)
Google’s announcements of Chromebook and subscription pricing offer a great opportunity to reflect on where we are in the history of computing. It is all too easy to think of this as something radically new, when it is simply the latest entry in a …
Getting Your Cash (Which is King)
Many years ago (during my consulting days) I was working on a project for a small German airline that was trying to compete with Lufthansa on a few routes. We quickly discovered that the company was hemorrhaging cash despite having relatively full …
Selection Trumps Motivation (Solving Google’s Social Problem)
While I have a feeling that Larry Page won’t take any of my suggestions (darn), I am happy to see him come out swinging hard. What a welcome contrast to when Jerry Yang took over as CEO at Yahoo. Several people have written that it is a bad idea t…
Why We Need Better Authentication
So why are we so afraid of these breaches? For two reasons: first, because single factor authentication is common on the web and is fundamentally broken. Second, because there is still a lot of “offline” authentication that can result in meaningfu…
Options and Startup Common Equity Value (Bubble Talk)
There is something frequently missed in thinking about the value of common shares in startups. These shares are actually options! The Theory A common share in a startup has the same payout structure as a call option. There is a range of outcome…
NY Times Pay Fence and Kickstarter
Yesterday, the New York Times announced its long awaited pay fence.
The Linear Interpolation Fallacy
Fancy scienceimifacation about growth and value.