Google picked a fight with China, America did not. Eric Schmidt went to North Korea like Nixon went to China. This is telling. Google has the power of a nation state.
The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Sandy Was Global Warming
Wild fires in Greece a few years ago was global warming acting out. Sandy hitting NYC last year was global warming making itself felt. Global warming is a costly proposition. It is cheaper to keep the earth in a good shape.
Dear Mr. President: Time to Deal with Climate Change
Whether you can develop a practical and sustainable strategy to address climate change—specifically, to begin lowering carbon dioxide emissions—will define the success of your new term as president. ..... the potential for global warming over the next decades threatens consequences so dire that they could overwhelm any progress you make toward other long-term economic, social, and political goals. .... will require innovative new technologies and overhauls of the world’s energy, agricultural, and transportation infrastructure. .... The $90 billion in your 2009 stimulus bill for energy projects and research breathed new life into the search for cleaner sources of energy ... transforming our energy infrastructure would take decades .... much of the energy spending in the stimulus bill, suggested one, resembled “pork-barrel politics” to satisfy the immediate need for jobs ..... reduce carbon dioxide emissions and begin stabilizing our climate. ..... the real reason to transform our energy system is to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming. ...... we can no longer wait without risking dramatic upheavals in global security and the health and welfare of hundreds of millions of the world’s inhabitants. ..... global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record 31.6 metric gigatons in 2011. .... It is quite possible that if this is not done over the next four years, it will be too late.
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Blue Filter
A few hours back I used a decidedly blue filter on a picture I shared on Path. It felt wrong.
Monday, January 07, 2013
What After Mobile?
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| Image via CrunchBase |
My venture investing career has three phases all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to internet. The second, at Flatiron was internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.One way to look at mobile is that it is the touch interface, successor to the GUI, Graphical User Interface. When you come from that angle, the question what after mobile has an easy answer.
Natural User Interface, NUI, with all its software and hardware implications.
Paul Graham's Black Swans
Black Swan Farming
the best ideas look initially like bad ideas ..... The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. ..... we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing. .... in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. ...... You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong. .... the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good ..... the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad. ..... The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. ..... how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter. ..... When you pick a big winner, you won't know it for two years. .... fundraising is not merely a useless metric, but positively misleading. ..... We can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. ..... The best we can hope for is that when we interview a group and find ourselves thinking "they seem like good founders, but what are investors going to think of this crazy idea?" we'll continue to be able to say "who cares what investors think?" That's what we thought about Airbnb ..... if you're flying through clouds you can't tell what the attitude of the aircraft is. You could feel like you're flying straight and level while in fact you're descending in a spiral. The solution is to ignore what your body is telling you and listen only to your instruments. But it turns out to be very hard to ignore what your body is telling you. Every pilot knows about this problem and yet it is still a leading cause of accidents...... The reason Google seemed a bad idea was that there were already lots of search engines and there didn't seem to be room for another. ..... I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, would not be able to raise money after Demo Day. I couldn't convince Fred Wilson to fund them
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