Yochai Benkler is one of a handful of people who our firm regards as inspirators. We've read everything he's written and find ourselves quoting him regularly in meetings. This is a picture of Yochai making a point at our first Union Square Sessions event on peer production. So when I came ... Read more

We are starting work on a redesign of AVC. The current design has been in place for a year or two and we'd like to update it a bit. The "we" is yours truly and Nathan Bowers , a member of this community who has been helping me with the design work on AVC for a few years now. We put a heat map ... Read more

Ben Horowitz has a post called The Case For The Fat Startup on the All Things D blog. I don't agree with Ben's take on this issue but I have enormous respect for Ben and his partner Marc Andreessen. They have started and built multiple successful businesses and all I do is write ch ... Read more

I've been thinking a lot about the NYC subway system. It was built in the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. It's a lesson in the power of private enterprise to do public good. There were elevated transit lines in NYC dating back to the 1870s, but the first u ... Read more

I went down to Washington, DC yesterday to participate in an event that celebrated the 25th anniversary of .com. I spoke on a panel (yes a hated panel ) moderated by Kara Swisher and including Aneesh Chopra , CTO of the Federal Government, Arianna Huffington , and Ken Silva , CTO of Verisign. ... Read more

Yesterday's WSJ had an interesting piece about Alacra 's new Pulse Pro offering . For those that don't know, I invested in Alacra in 1999 via Flatiron Partners and have been on its board ever since. Alacra has been developing and selling information services to the banking, brokerage ... Read t ... Read more

We're getting ready to move and it's time to figure out the phone thing again. This will be the fourth phone decision our family is making in the past eleven years. And in a world that is moving fast, we've had an interesting path. In 1999, we moved back to NYC from the suburbs and picked up a b ... Read more

Today on MBA Mondays we are going to talk about one of the most important things in business, the profit and loss statement (also known as the P&L). Picking up from the accounting post last week, there are two kinds of accounting entries; those that describe money coming into and out of ... Read more

I cringed when I used the "2.0" term in the headline of this post, but I think it's useful. In the past year, when people ask me what I think is interesting in web technology, I often talk about emerging new commerce models. And I point out that two of the most exciting companies to come out of th ... Read more

The Gotham Gal and I don't normally keep much cash in the bank. We like a portfolio of tax free municipal bonds for our cash that is not invested in venture deals, private companies, real estate, and the like. But recently we closed a few transactions that resulted in some cash being wired int ... Read more