crises
With Jamie Dimon auditioning for the weather channel, calling for hurricanes, it’s no wonder companies are looking for the keys to the bunker. Memories of the Nasdaq, circa 2000 or the entire market, circa 2008, might make you a bit more frenetic. Who can forget Sequoia’s “RIP Good
burrow
“Does anyone know what JAND is?” Stephen Kuhl and Kabeer Chopra were in Ethan Mollick’s entrepreneurship class at Wharton in 2016 and had no idea what JAND was or what could possibly be contained in the powerpoint professor Mollick was waving in front of the class. It happened to
casper
The cofounders had been meeting at a co-working space for a while. They were thinking through business ideas, but they always kept coming back to mattresses. Philip Krim, Casper’s cofounder and CEO, had started an ecommerce business while he was at UT. The mattress category was surprisingly successful. He
boll and branch
Scott Tannen had promised himself and his family some time off. He had recently sold his online gaming business to Publishers Clearing House when tragedy had struck. He was in the middle of the transition, and his mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She passed away just as he wound
hedge funds
Hedge funds went mainstream like a bankruptcy – very slowly and then all at once. The combination of growing macroeconomic pressure on pensions and the success of a charismatic early hedge fund adopter would help drive trillions of dollars into hedge funds at the start of the century. The transition would
hedge funds
“There was a time when we were the disruptors.” I was having lunch earlier this year with an old friend who had gotten in early with hedge funds, and he was stuck. “We used to go into meetings with company management, elbow our way past sleepy mutual fund investors and
AI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have fully transitioned from academic concepts, to venture capital investment trends to a suffix on the title of an executive in a large enterprise. Just like we ended up with heads of big data or data science, we’re now starting to see heads of
crowdfunding
Crowdfunding promises to redraw the geography of financing and shift its center from institutions toward individuals. The megabanks and institutional investors aren’t going away; they’re just going to have company. The role of individual investors will expand through crowdfunding platforms that promise to match pent up demand with
search
We would love to have better access to data that’s out there. We find it frustrating that we don’t. –Larry Page, via Bloomberg Let’s just unpack that statement for a minute. Larry Page, CEO of Google, sees a meaningful void in the data it collects, and the
News
Some 32% of readers get their news from Google or some other search engine It’s a close follower to the 36% that go directly to a news-media-site or app, but it still exceeds the 29% share held by news aggregators or, as the Pew Research Center likes to call
Is Pinterest the napster of images? Tech circles have bruised themselves wrestling with this question since a sometime photographer and attorney raised it late last month. Kirsten Kowalski, who asked the question and also asked not to be quoted, in whole or in part, made a–to paraphrase–lachrymose parting
The perceived insensitivity of Search Plus Your World. A rousing response from Twitter. Recently accused in a gotcha moment captured by the Wall Street Journal of flouting privacy policies and infiltrating iPhones everywhere. It hasn’t been a good start of the year for Google. But what’s remarkable about