I just ran for Congress, was on reality TV, was once a brand manager, and have worked at various startups. I'm still figuring out what's next...
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I love Silicon Valley. Love almost everything about the technology ecosystem. I grew up in New Jersey watching with extreme envy and wonderment as the ‘95-01 boom-bust played out. Like most, I also share a certain reverence for Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, the Valley tends to indulge in one of the less enviable Jobsian traits: the [...]
The best site you (probably) have never heard of. I started playing around on Quora a little over a year ago. In that time I’ve become addicted. However it’s one of these sites that no has heard of beyond Silicon Valley and a few people connected to Valley’ers/obsessed with tech. So let’s talk about it. [...]
Lots of disturbing, horrifying, and bizarre facts out there about the state of the financial services sector of our economy. One of my all-time favorite writers, Michael Lewis, has a great piece on AIG in Vanity Fair. Much more controversially, Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone posts a searing indictment of uber-bank Goldman Sachs. Almost must [...]
I’m gathering up some of the more interesting articles I’ve found across the web over the past month. I’m not actually sure if it adds up to 2 hours of reading, but it sounded good to me. Why pain? Because reading some of these made my blood boil and my a indignation rage. After avoiding [...]
At one point in 2004-2005 I was tearing through a book or two a week. In retrospect, it was a phenomenal time. I’d stay in for hours at a time on a weeknight or weekend and just read. Since my earliest memories, reading has been one of my favorite experiences. For a while, I remember [...]
Back in the day, around age 10, I went door-to-door selling greeting cards, candies, and other random things out of a catalog. We’re talking big money here: I think I made $2 for every item I sold. Things went well until the day I went out to canvas my neighborhood after receiving the newest catalog [...]
One of the reasons I love writing is that forming coherent thoughts ends up changing my mind. And sometimes my behavior. My previous post on what we value ended up being one of those things. We live in a world of insane inattention. For me it started back in 96 with AIM. You can sign-on [...]
Months ago I looked around me at what was going on in the economy and stock market and it literally gave me tightness in my chest. It was hard for me to concentrate on work, or much of anything. Things that I had read about and worried about were coming to life and the pace [...]
Time magazine writes an article this week on “How to Save Your Newspaper.” Their conclusion? Micropayments. Basically, allow people to pay a small fee, like 5-25 cents for every article they read. The dominant platform for this doesn’t really exist since Paypal charges fees too large to make this viable. I used to think that [...]
Up on the Tom Peters site there’s a good note on the “Generation Gap.” The idea is that his generation was handed a functioning business world with solid fundamentals, and that they took it created a world of stilts, which the current generation has now been bequeathed. Today those stilts are being knocked down and [...]
I look around every day and what I see often depresses me. It’s what I fear is still to come. Consistency. In the past consistency meant things getting better, people making more money, things thriving. What I fear, and what I see around me are models failing every where around me. What am I talking [...]
Detroit. Mitch Albom is a terrific writer. Think Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven. Albom has a great way to make characters real, settings come to life, and emotions feel at home within you. He’s a storyteller in the truest sense. Today, I read his latest in Sports Illustrated called [...]
This was a sloppy, not-as-coherent-as-should-be post, and so I’ve rewritten it. We have a lot to be pissed off about. Literally trillions of dollars of (in theory) taxpayer money are being given to corporations to “bail them out.” This after years of lush profits, exorbitant bonuses, and executives living like it was the gilded age. [...]
Romney has a good op-ed that cuts right to it. Here’s another great one. While that’s sad, it at least gives you hope for the future. This just freaks me out. Sigh, this and everything else seems to be going wrong in the country/world. I’d ask for it to end, but these days when I [...]
The Economist (apparently Palin’s favorite magazine) has a good, short article on the credit crisis. This is why those politicians who set the interests of Main Street against those of Wall Street are so wrong. Sooner or later the money markets affect every business. Companies face higher interest charges and the fear that they may [...]