Blog Archives

Iowa’s Raucous Caucus

And everyone wonders why I’m nervous about self-driving cars. An app that was never tested at scale and nobody was taught to use failed spectacularly. Panic-stricken party officials running around with their hair on fire as phone lines are flooded with calls from reporting precincts. Candidates declaring victory with no[…] Read On

Bubble Logic

I’m struggling to wrap my head around Nasdaq 9,300 – nearly twice the dot-com bubble peak – Apple’s $1.4 trillion market cap, and the notion that the combined value of five west coast companies is higher than the GDP of every country in the world but the U.S. and China.[…] Read On

Software Is So Overrated

Marc Andreessen’s 2011 essay “Why Software Is Eating the World” opened our eyes to a growing trend, that tech companies are disrupting age-old industries and creating high-growth markets seemingly out of thin air or, more precisely, out of computer code.   The Silicon Valley venture capitalist cited several innovative companies[…] Read On

Uber, WeWork and 2019’s Dismal Unicorn IPO Class

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, everybody’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with this year’s crappy unicorn IPO class. Uber, Lyft, Peloton, Slack, Pinterest – they’ve all underperformed post-IPO. WeWork couldn’t even get off the ground with that loony $47 billion valuation, finally ousting CEO Adam Neumann and pulling[…] Read On