A recent article in Fortune talked about Wharton, Harvard and other elite b-school ramping up their entrepreneurship programs. I have nothing against MBAs and am a Wharton guy myself (undergrad so I can still talk shit), but this IMO is one of those signs of things getting overheated in startup land. Startups are becoming another career path…

The Indie.vc post on Hacker News had some interesting comments.  Here’s one that caught my eye as pasted below (bold emphasis is mine): The model is a fairly quick development cycle, fast early adopter sales, quick conversion to cash flow positive. Well, that’s a lot of things that have to go right all in a row with only…

So 2015 is off to a good start. I’ve rambled about revenue-based financing and other alternative models to fund tech companies a couple of times on this blog. And today, I saw something called Indie.vc by Bryce Roberts and the OATV team which is an interesting first step.  An alternate model to fund tech companies: Bootstrappers with ambitions that exceed their cash…

So I really enjoyed American Sniper. So did my wife.  And Chris Kyle, the protagonist, who the movie is about makes for an amazingly interesting and heroic character.  And so today, I’ve been kind of obsessed trying to read more about this guy. Because, honestly, I was sort of awestruck. And most of what I…

Saw the movie. Go see it. I’m lucky to have been born in a country that someone like Chris Kyle swore to protect.

I’ve been sitting down with the team to do year end reviews. They are focused on what they did well, what could have gone better, what I did well, could have done better and what the company overall is doing well and could be better at. They’ve been fantastic. And eye opening. There are 3-4…

I was talking to a really successful head of sales at a company that he had built the sales organization from 3 to many before the company exited for over $500 million. And our conversation veered into the philosophical briefly and he asked what motivated me. Although I don’t know him well, I said the…

I just watched the ESPN 30 for 30 on the Detroit Pistons. It’s worth watching. This was a team that wasn’t expected to win versus some powerhouse Celtics, Lakers and Bulls teams. They used a mix of physicality and psychology to change the game and win. It was a great story of a group of…

Yesterday, we released our third Periodic Table of __________ with a focus on the Internet of Things.  Our first two were the Periodic Table of Tech and the second was our Periodic Table of Healthcare. They’ve become a hit and slowly but surely, they’re becoming “our thing”.  I think what works with them is a few things: A lot…

CVS and Rite-Aid have disabled Apple Pay in their stores per recent reports: The reason behind Rite Aid’s and CVS’s moves to disable unofficial Apple Pay support in their stores is presumably related to their participation in Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer group developing its own mobile payments system known as CurrentC. A claimed internal Rite…

I was perusing Hacker News today and saw an article about Airbnb’s $13B valuation. I knew what to expect in the comments but out of morbid curiosity, I dug in and wasn’t disappointed to find the expected comment.  It was luckily further down the thread which means others found it inane as well.  Here it is:…

Tonight, I watched the following shows: All shows about business. I clearly have a problem.

Chet Bozdog, co-head of TMT Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was recently presenting data at their Technology Innovation Summit, and he shared this slide about private companies worth more than $1 billion.  It’s a good looking slide, but it is wrong. By a lot. 40 private companies are valued at $1 bln+ compared…

“When I was at Harvard…” “While working at McKinsey..” “After Goldman…” If you live in NYC, you’ve probably met folks who work this into the first 5 minutes of their conversation with you. It is credentialing at its finest. It is intended to make you think “Holy shit – you went to Harvard. You must…

We changed up the format for today’s newsletter for 4 reasons. We asked for feedback from readers and got some great responses.  My favorite was the following: New format feels too much like ‘The Skimm‘. This was a nice compliment. And the kind of feedback we love to get.