Category: Blog Post
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Fortuna and Facebook
In the early consumer web days, venture firms started investing in businesses that looked very different from the kinds of businesses they were used to. Apparently Accel in particular had some problems building conviction in the new crop of startups In the end, “Skype looked too weird to us,” [Kevin]…
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Liberalism and Desire
Immanuel Kant gets a reputation for having an especially austere theory of the good life. Anyone who has taken an intro to philosophy class might point to his argument that one should never lie, even to a murderer at the door, as an example of the peculiarity of his moral…
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Vision Pro
I’m super excited about Apple’s new AR headset, the Vision Pro. I can’t stop thinking about how cool it will be to blow up my computer screen and enmesh it in the world around me. [NOTE: I still haven’t been able to find a way to try a Vision Pro.…
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Tradle
After seeing a bunch of people on fintwit talk about it, I’ve recently gotten into playing Tradle. Like Wordle, Tradle is a daily guessing game. Instead of guessing words, however, you have to guess countries based on their exports with warm/cold feedback based on their location. I’m by no means…
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Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost”
I recently had occasion to read Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost”. Coase’s really radical idea in the paper is the economic symmetry of responsibility in property disputes. According to Coase, when two people’s preferences collide, each is equally responsible for the suboptimal outcome. The chocolate gets in the peanut…
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Philosophy and VC
As I was reading Mallaby’s The Power Law, I was tickled to learn that Paul Graham gave his iconic “How to Start a Startup” lecture in Emerson Hall at Harvard. Although the lecture was for the Harvard Computer Society, it was delivered in the philosophy building. And Graham himself was…
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Sama on AI
I’ve been reading the archives of other blogs in preparation for writing this one. As I was digging around Sam Altman’s old posts (which I will admit felt weirdly invasive), I found a record of his thoughts on AI from about two years before he founded OpenAI. In the post,…
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VC Mythology and Branding
Sebastian Mallaby on the origins of venture capital: Rock and Coyle met Kleiner and his comrades at a San Francisco restaurant for dinner. The visitors from Wall Street understood that the rebels wanted to operate as a team, without Shockley’s suffocating oversight. They further understood that the engineers wanted to…
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*Le Mage du Kremlin*
I recently finished reading Le Mage du Kremlin. It was the runner-up in the big French book contest last year and received acclaim for its literary analysis of Putin in particular and power and politics in Russia more generally. Given the discourse around the book, I was pretty surprised by…
Matthew Mandel 