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Tariff Tantrum
In June 1931, Ohio Senator Simeon Fess took the stage at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC. President Hoover was running for reelection, and Assistant Secretary Snyder hoped to rile up the convention of Young Republicans. Senator Fess exclaimed from the podium, “When the American people realize what President Hoover
Ideas from Peter Thiel’s Breakfast Table
Until this week it was never quite clear to a considerable body of intelligent citizens why a sufficient plurality of voters in the United States would flock to a reality television star whose casual relationship with the truth would frame a day of riot, rapine, and insurgency at the Capitol
May Day 1975 - The Day the SEC Invented Discount Brokerages
This is a picture of the New York Stock Exchange in 1975. That’s when the SEC abolished fixed trading commissions and invented discount brokerages. The SEC abolished fixed brokerage commissions on May 1st – ending a 183 year old practice of exchange-mandated commission rates. The market would set the commissions,
Taking Control of Cloud Spending
UBS shared a lesson in understatement last week when analyst Karl Keirstead wrote, “Customer efforts to optimize/trim their cloud spend are well beyond any historical norm.” One could almost hear the frenzied IT staff yanking blue cables out of servers and powering down the racks. Amazon and Microsoft all
SVB - Goin’ to the Chapel?
That was fast. I thought for sure that we would get a tough day followed by a shotgun marriage over the weekend. The FDIC has to appreciate how acute the working capital problem is for the vast network of early stage businesses throughout the country. Something like 75% of venture
Nixon, inflation, and the high price of bad analogies
Oil shock. Prices on the rise. A menace in Russia. The US coming off of one war and supporting the under-dog in another. “The ingredients of the 1970s are already in place,” said Niall Ferguson at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy the other week. Says, Niall: Why shouldn’t it
Economic Hurricanes
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 - Making Everyone Comfortable but the Competition
“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
Sinking into the Casper Mattress Story
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
Pulling Back the Covers on Boll & 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
The hedge fund disruption
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
What happened to 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
AI, ML & the Consulting Problem
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
The Marketplace for Fans & the Superfans that Power Crowdfunding
What happens when we think about Kickstarter and IndieGoGo as fan communities rather than just marketplaces? Funders and founders still congregate in an exchange of money for projects, but a simple qualification introduces us to the superfans who make crowdfunding unique and may stitch the whole thing together. Crowdfunding sells
crowdfunding
Crowdfunding, Adverse Selection, and the Information Problem
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
crowdfunding
Accountability in Crowdfunding - Transparency and Judgement
For all its breakthroughs, crowdfunding has realized a slow accumulation of hard truths. Things don’t always go so well. Production gets delayed. The project founders may not be prepared to handle a boisterous and demanding crowd. And then come the cries of fraud and failure. The excitement over seeing
crowdfunding
What Matters in Crowdfunding
Dalton Caldwell sparked a debate about what Twitter could have been the other week. Like a disappointed uncle, he waxed on about the two paths Twitter could have taken, and how saddened he felt by their decision to become a media property, organized around advertising. But that wasn’t the
crowdfunding
Designing Crowdfunding Markets - Disclosure & Scrutiny
When people think about markets, they think about stocks, trading, indexes, the closing bell. They think about transactions and money trading hands. But markets are as much about money as they are about information. And crowdfunding sites are no different. Information is essential. Without liquid, reliable information, markets function poorly,
search
instrumenting the web, instrumenting people
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
news - not as social as one would think
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
no one wants another facebook - the failure of google+
Google+ is the social network everyone loves to hate. Nick Bilton of the Times brought some equanimity to the discussion and suggested, the most we can assert is that opinions are split. But that won’t help Google build their Facebook-killer, so Bilton aimed to isolate the root-cause of why
pinterest, righthaven, and the surprising varieties of fair use
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
a web of enclosures
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