Mar 10, 2021Crypto Mining might just save our planet…Let me explain. The world operates on incentives. Specifically financial incentives. And currently, sadly, scarily, there are no real direct financial incentives for people to contribute to climate change. It’s a tragedy of the commons. While no one can deny our energy crisis, the only solution is motivated teams who…Cryptocurrency2 min readCryptocurrency2 min read
Jun 26, 2019The Sovereign Protocol War — Part 2Observations on Libra I’ve yet to hear much about In March 2018, before Facebook formally started the Libra project, I wrote that global digital currency is inevitable, the actual war to be won is China vs the rest of the world, and that Facebook was best positioned to defend the…Bitcoin7 min readBitcoin7 min read
Jun 19, 2018Time to Dive Down the Rabbit HoleWhy I’ve decided to start another company. — I’m sincerely grateful to have joined Lightspeed in 2015 and after leading many investments, most still unannounced, it’s time for me to listen to that voice in my head which thinks about building products every day. That is why I’ve personally decided to transition into a Venture Partner role at…Startup2 min readStartup2 min read
Mar 6, 2018The Sovereign Protocol WarHow Facebook, Telegram and startups… may defend us and support the open web instead Blockchain technology will change many aspects of our world for the better. But so far, we’re living in a bikeshedding software utopia, with mostly investor speculation and folks circumventing national currency controls. If a tokenized tree…Bitcoin5 min readBitcoin5 min read
Published inLightspeed Venture Partners·Oct 10, 2017Knowns vs Unknowns — Are you building a successful company or just typing?In a prior life as a CTO, when you asked one of the best engineers on my team if he could build something, his typical answer was “it’s just typing.” He knew what to do; it just took time. But is that what he should be doing? Now as a…Startup4 min readStartup4 min read
May 9, 2017Amazon’s Echo Show & why we may soon see hardware network effects at scaleLast October, I wrote a post about hardware network effects. In it, I outlined an example of a fictitious home security camera that became more valuable as everyone in my neighborhood purchased one. If the cameras did accurate facial recognition, we could grant permission to each other to make sure…Amazon Echo2 min readAmazon Echo2 min read
Published inLightspeed Venture Partners·Feb 14, 2017Skate to where the voice is going…When I was a kid, my computer had a SoundBlaster card. If you were a geek like me, you remember editing your autoexec.bat file to include: @echo off SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\CTSND SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6 What you might not remember is it came with “Dr Sbaitso”, a…Amazon Echo4 min readAmazon Echo4 min read
Nov 1, 2016Halloween is a reminder that photo sharing apps are still brokenWe got together with friends and trick-or-treated around the neighborhood last night. This morning I awoke to see awesome photos of our two boys… via SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook posts, and email. My wife got a different set of photos from last night as well. That feels totally broken. I…Facebook2 min readFacebook2 min read
Oct 26, 2016Thoughts on LivingSocial — From a Guy Who Was There Day 0What I learned is that your job as a founder isn’t to build a product. It’s to build an amazing group of people and a culture which empowers everyone to build products that millions of people love. We should be proud of doing just that. It started in 2007 as…2 min read2 min read
Published inLightspeed Venture Partners·Oct 25, 2016Facebook launches Ambient TV ExperienceOne of the challenges with live streaming content to date has been the waiting room phenomena. A publisher like LifeHacker, or Cheddar*, starts a live stream… and then puts up a countdown timer to wait for people to join the stream. This is a solution to solve their problem as…2 min read2 min read
