I ran for Congress, was on reality TV, was once a brand manager, and have worked at various startups. I just finished my book. I'm active on Twitter. Full bio here.
What’s in it for Starbucks? That’s what I’m left with after I’ve digested the big news from last night that Square signed a deal with Starbucks to power their payments. I won’t explain it, because if you haven’t read about it already, you sure don’t care about this post. At first, I was just surprised [...]
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 [...]