A good chunk of my property is landscaped with Ceanothus – a creeping shrub with pretty blue flowers that grows about 3-feet high. Unlike typical shrubs, our species of Ceanothus spreads aggressively across the landscape, creating a large and relatively dense canopy for a hidden world of creatures living beneath[…] Read On
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
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
I’ve resisted watching HBO’s Silicon Valley for years. Another cynic’s view of what Silly Valley has become in the latest bubble seemed too depressing to watch. And make no mistake, we are in a bubble. Not just private equity — ideology too. Having gone through the dot-com bubble, way too[…] Read On
When Amazon Web Services (AWS) lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to rival Microsoft Azure, the ecommerce giant should have just packed it up and called it a day. After all, nobody likes a sore loser. Especially an arrogant one. Case in point: AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who[…] Read On
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
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