The game of risk

When evaluating new ventures, a lot of energy goes into thinking about the risks involved. I’ve been breaking things down into two major categories, and trying to consider those relatively independently.

The first, execution risk, has been well covered - I especially like this old post from Martin Tobias. In a nutshell, execution risk covers the […]

“Startup 2.0″

Here are the slides from my talk on the impact of the current generation of emerging technologies on the startup, given at the Emerging Technologies in the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia yesterday. The event wrapped up today; by all accounts it was the best value in web technology conferences in recent memory, and I look […]

“Tiger Team Innovation in the Enterprise”

I gave a talk today at the pre-conference CxO breakfast for the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. The group was great; so much discussion that we didn’t make it through all of the material I had planned.
As promised, here are the slides from today’s presentation. We talked so much about each point that I’m […]

Upcoming Podium Pontification

I’m going to be speaking at a couple of related events in March. The Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference on the 28th and 29th in Philadelphia has an interesting array of topics, centered around open source, lightweight architectures and Web 2.0, all with an enterprise twist. On the first day, I’m giving a talk […]

Could Digg create an AdSense for the long tail?

The long tail of content presents an interesting set of problems both for publishers and advertisers. Content in the tail may be seen only a few times a day; if the publisher has a small amount on content in the tail (one blog, for example), that content is:

Not valuable enough to the publisher to justify […]

Cart before the horse

When a company like Yahoo comes out with a cool new horse, it’s easy to get caught up in the technology and its potential, and forget about the product strategy differences between startups and big players.
Looking at the technically innovative startup pitches I’ve heard from this perspective, I can break them down into two […]

Swing for the fences

VC Confidential has an interesting post up today talking about Multiples vs IRR. The closing statement
So, next time you are trying to convince a VC about the merits of your firm, show them how they can make 10x capital on a realistic exit scenario (not how to get a 40% IRR).
reminds me of the importance […]