Let’s End the Myth that Ideas are Worthless
Posted January 2nd, 2011 in Social Web | View Comments
ShareI love Silicon Valley. I love the entrepreneurial energy and the blister and pop of passion being painted into reality every day. But if entrepreneurial density is the Valley’s greatest asset, it can also, sometimes, be its greatest weakness. Conventional Wisdom spreads here like wildfire. A blog post from an influential VC about how to run your startup can go from thesis to gospel truth practically overnight. Because every entrepreneur is ultimately, making it up as they go, there is an incredible and legitimate attraction to insights that seem to give us an advantage. The conventional wisdom gripping the Valley [...]
Keep Reading »The Ultimate List of Lists and 2011 Trends in Startups & Beyond
Posted December 22nd, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
ShareEvery few months, I publish a personal newsletter called the N-List full of links to stories I’ve liked. For the holiday edition, I put together a set of lists on everything from music to startups to social innovation and more. Hope you enjoy it. ** The end of the year is here, which means the twinkle of holiday lights, the deliciousness of egg nog, peppermint, and gingerbread lattes, and the love and joy of friends and family. It also means an absolutely gluttonous smorgasbord of end-of-year lists. We love lists. In a world of never ending information, we love their [...]
Keep Reading »5 Thoughts on Entrepreneurship Inspired by Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”
Posted November 29th, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
ShareLast week, Kanye West released his new album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” and already, the pundits are clamoring to anoint it as one of if not the best hip hop album of all time. Indie music review site Pitchfork gave it a 10 out of 10. Rolling Stone gave it five stars. Review aggregator Metacritic has it clocking in at a staggering 92 out of 100 average across all reviews, a rating usually reserved for the heroic comeback album of an ancient glory (see: Dylan, Plant) or an album from an international artist who, while legitimately great, is so [...]
Keep Reading »Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)
Posted November 19th, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
ShareWith the massive supremacy of Facebook in the social networking space, it’s easy to assume that the door is closed for social network innovation. The reality, however, is that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of how we interact with and derive value and pleasure from our networks. There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests. Thesis 1: The Interest Graph is Different than the Social Graph – In a [...]
Keep Reading »The Personal-Professional Barrier and the “New” Enterprise Market
Posted November 13th, 2010 in Enterprise, Social Web | View Comments
ShareFor most of the rise of web 2.0, the enterprise market has lagged behind the consumer market in innovation. Yet the forces shaping the consumer space — mobile, social, geo, etc. — impact businesses, as well, and there are stirrings of excitement among entrepreneurs at companies like Box.net and Socialcast that are going after the big shifts in the enterprise. The challenge for these entrepreneurs is to build models that coincide with the actual, rather than perceived, state of change in the enterprise, and to locate the true levers of transformation. In a piece published on TechCrunch today, Andreessen Horowitz [...]
Keep Reading »3 Lessons Startups Can Learn from Instagram
Posted October 31st, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
ShareInstagram is one of the hottest new social applications. It’s a photo sharing tool and network that allows users to take photos, apply one of a number of filters, and then distribute it out to their other networks. A week after its release, 100,000 people had downloaded the iPhone app. A week later, the number stood above 200,000. For some comparison, it took super hot, media-loved Foursquare seven months to get to 60,000 users. Their success holds at least three great lessons for new startups 1. The difference really is in the details. There are dozens if not hundreds of [...]
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