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 [...]
A few years ago I was obsessed with manufacturing. While I’m not an expert, I have read thousands of pages on the topic and hundreds of articles. In my campaign for Congress, I tried to make jobs, and as a result, manufacturing a cornerstone. All that to say, that this is something I find interesting [...]
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. [...]
There was an article in Wired last month about a woman who seems to remember everything. You could literally name a date from her life and she could tick off hundreds of events from that date. She got a ton of publicity which eventually attracted the Wired mag writer. The article reaches the new conclusion [...]
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 [...]
For the past few years the one thought that has never been far from mind is my “could vs should” debate. Essentially, I think we’ve become a society that has stopped asking if we “should” do something and instead default to if we “could” do it. “Can we get away with it?” has become our [...]
I meant to post on this last week when Friedman’s op-ed in the NYT hit, Start Up the Risk-Takers. Friedman, not surprisingly, beats up on the US autos among others, and says that instead of giving them more money, we should instead turn to venture capital. He proposes giving the top VC’s (top 20%) a [...]
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 [...]
Almost 2 years ago, I mentioned to some folks at Google that they should rethink their branding of Google Reader. For those who don’t use it, Google Reader is their RSS product (and, by far, the best on the market). Most of the people I know don’t understand or use RSS, and I’ve beendumbfounded that [...]
Once you get a fancy iPhone, the next thing you get are some apps. I’m testing one of the apps, wordpress, right now. Blogging from the iPhone? I guess between facebook, twitter, email and blogging from the phone, we’re free to over-communicate. I suppose this is my contribution. On another note, though excited to be [...]
The blog has some new digs. For those of you reading this via RSS/feed reader, click to come back to suryasays.com and check out the sweet new look. Props go to Ben for doing another killer layout. He’s done some great layouts over the years– here, here. But I think this is his best work [...]
P.S. Random chunks. Wondering what LinkedIn does? Watch the video. P.P.S. Incredible article in Vanity Fair on what went down at Bear Stearns. Ridiculously fascinating read. P.P.P.S. What the hell is going on with Iran? The New Yorker tells you. And it’s not exactly going to warm the heart.