Tech Companies Who Strike Deals With Specific Creators Cease Being Neutral Platforms And Are Accountable To Repercussions Beyond Their Own Terms of Service “Neil Young should stay in his lane and j… | Continue reading
Why Being Thankful For Good Fortune Doesn’t Have to Ignore Impact of Effort & Skill “There’s no free lunches,” was the mantra my father repeated to me most often as a kid. I was taught tha… | Continue reading
And Why He Abandoned a Career in Web Ads for Leading Crypto Investing at The Chernin Group Even before my Jarrod Dicker starting tweeting in his “web2 vs web3” style, I gave him shit abou… | Continue reading
Get More Time and More Energy By Being Thoughtful About Your Calendar I’m a believer that one’s calendar is a very true representation of your priorities. If you feel like you’re not getting done t… | Continue reading
Shepherd’s CEO Justin Levine answers Five Questions on how his $6.2m fundraise came about & why it didn’t include me (yet) I love working with great people and as a venture capitalist, am fortu… | Continue reading
Multiplayer games “really gave me the feeling of being socially connected when I was otherwise on my own at home” My sense is that many people in our industry are fundamentally shaped by what tech … | Continue reading
Ellen DaSilva’s Journey, from Banking to Twitter to Hims and Now, Her Own NewCo! Like many relationships these days, mine and Ellen’s began online. But we successfully converted it to an NYC IRL co… | Continue reading
A Career In Startups From Dwolla to DAOs (and how to get whitelisted for the Illuminati NFT mint) When I befriended Alex Taub in 2013 he lived in New York City, didn’t have children, and certainly … | Continue reading
Why Being on a College Campus From 1991–1995 Changed My Life I visited the future and it made me wealthy. Not Biff and Grays Sports Almanac Back to the Future II style, but maybe again, not that fa… | Continue reading
What I learned from my own years building a virtual world “THIS IS GOING TO BE THE 3D INTERNET” a tech reporter boldly wrote. When was this claim made? Not in a 2021 tweet covering Mark Zuckerberg’… | Continue reading
‘Show them how smart you are’ wasn’t a very successful way to make friends Most people think of Imposter Syndrome as expressing itself most simply as “I don’t belong here,” as in “I’m not worthy of… | Continue reading
In 2010, It Almost Disappeared But Then I Put My, Err, Thumb On The Scale “This isn’t Disneyland,” I insisted while challenging our team’s recommendation that we remove the Thumbs Down (Dislike) bu… | Continue reading
Buying Talent Is More Attractive Than Renting In Today’s Competitive Venture Market Imagine getting paid a solid salary to sit around and think up new startup ideas, distracted only by the free foo… | Continue reading
Five Questions With Local Newsletter Author Nick Bastone I love me a good newsletter, especially one that lets us all keep up with local news in a succinct and actionable way. So when The SF Minute… | Continue reading
Sure It Doesn’t Ask Any “Hard Questions” But Maybe It’s Okay To Just Appreciate His Journey I don’t stan. I don’t have heroes or mentors. There are people whom I admire as humans but even then it’s… | Continue reading
How I Give Away My Money. And Perhaps How You Can Too! I still insist that we don’t talk enough about money in our community. I mean really talk — publicly, openly, emotionally. Philanthropy (which… | Continue reading
No Need To “Grab a Coffee and Pick My Brain” Because Here’s What I’d Say… A lot of new venture funds out there these days. People sometimes ask me, “wow, is there still room for new investors?” and… | Continue reading
What Leadership Roles at Facebook & YouTube Taught Rushabh Doshi About Building Product Teams What do I hope happens when I write a blog post? Lots of people to read it? Sure, I guess. But the … | Continue reading
Three Tips For Leaders Who Want To Up Their Recruiting Game Show me the first 20 employees of a startup and I’ll tell you whether it’s going to be successful or not. In my mind there’s no greater i… | Continue reading
Looking For Your Updated Feedback One of the areas I get the most cold emails about are career paths into product management, especially for folks without engineering backgrounds. I wrote my though… | Continue reading
This Has Been My Favorite Question Of Peers In 2021 “So, do you think your job is to win ‘consensus’ deals or find the ‘non-consensus’ opportunities?” This has been my favorite question to ask fell… | Continue reading
How My Attitude Towards Mental Health Changed From My 20s to 30s to 40s 2011 and I was at a low point. Most alarmingly, it wasn’t clear that I could get out of my situation by myself. The mental st… | Continue reading
VCs With Multiple Stage-Specific Funds Are Likely To Rewrite The Existing Etiquette. And What This Means For Founders. Let’s start out by admitting that the question of ‘competitive conflict’ has a… | Continue reading
Don’t Freak Out When Part Of Your Original Hypothesis Was Wrong If you showed me a bunch of random early stage startups and asked me to select the ones disproportionately likely to be successful, I… | Continue reading
Startup CEOs Should Test Strength of Cap Table Every ~6 Months To Know Where They Stand I really liked Jason Lemkin’s “Do You Have a Weak Investor Syndicate” blog post from earlier in the summer. G… | Continue reading
Why The Move to Remote Has Accelerated The Need for New Tools The first generation of SaaS was about single player workflows and data. The second generation added collaboration (aka multiplayer). A… | Continue reading
Why Their Multibillion Dollar Outcome Flipped The Script Pre-2014: Insider Rounds Are The Funding of Last Resort Post-2014: Why Are Insiders Letting This One Get Out? When WhatsApp took $19 bi… | Continue reading
Why I Cringe Every Time I Read This Word I recognize this is an overreaction. But humans have their quirks and one of mine is I cannot stand when the tech biz press uses “oversubscribed” to charact… | Continue reading
Why VCs Are Always ‘Very Excited’ About Your Progress But That Doesn’t Mean Anything Until They Make an Offer My job as an early stage investor includes translation services, specifically helping s… | Continue reading
Things to Remember As You and Your Friends Get Wealthy “Giraffe money.” That’s the phrase which stuck with me from Erin Griffith’s NYTimes article this spring about the latest set of weal… | Continue reading
I Made These Mistakes A Few Times But You Don’t Need To Part of successful angel investing is picking winners. Another part is avoiding picking losers. Before we founded Homebrew I made ~20 or so i… | Continue reading
What I Learned From Working On Conan’s Season #2 and My Own Fears Actor John Lithgow playfully tossed a show at me, boxer Larry Holmes jokingly (I think) threatened to knock me out and actress Jenn… | Continue reading
Why Ken Norton’s Dual Product Management Career Path Can Also Encourage Innovation At Scale “Rising to your level of misery” is how Arthur Brooks frames the trap of being good enough at your job th… | Continue reading
It’s weird to try and help fund people who are going to compete with me, right? Well, I couldn’t be more excited to do just this. The 10 initial Screendoor Venture Advisors Ok, the head… | Continue reading
Teaching my daughter that ‘adventure boo-boos’ are part of life I come from a family of flinchers. Well-intentioned of course but with an instinctual urge to ask “is that safe?” before proceeding. … | Continue reading
Why the next 6–12 months will be the best time in a decade for startups to hire Our YOLO Economy New York Times’ Kevin Roose labeled the new attitude sweeping workers in certain privilege… | Continue reading
Engage your team and understand their needs but craft your “Return To Office” strategy from the top down We’ve backed a wide variety of startups at Homebrew but the CEOs are now all coalescing arou… | Continue reading
Can You Build a Photo Community Which Doesn’t Prioritize Pretty? “Young girls, however, see AR filters primarily as a tool for beautification: “[The girls] were all saying things like, ‘I put this … | Continue reading
How a year of virtual living made me appreciate people more When I tell people I’m an introvert, reactions split into two camps. For those who know me well, it’s pretty much, “Yeah, duh.” But for t… | Continue reading
What happens when your favorite dead product rises again Turntable 2021, pretty much the same product (for now). Usually the first email I open in the morning doesn’t make me scream out “HOLY SHIT!… | Continue reading
In a pre-RATM band, guitarist Tom Morello was shamed by a musician friend about how his guitar strings ran long off the head of the instrument (a now iconic look for him). “‘Cut your strings! What,… | Continue reading
Five Memorable URLs from COVID Season One (aka the last 12 months) March 11th was “COVID Day One” for many folks, or at least when it crossed from “will this be a big deal?” to “this is a big … | Continue reading
You will never be able to take the brand risks, the legal risks, or the partnerships risks that a true startup can Noam Bardin of Waze. Photo: Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images I’d exchanged DMs with Waze… | Continue reading
Advisors can be so much more than social proof and tactical advice “Can we put you as an advisor in our deck? You don’t even need to do anything and we’ll give you equity. It would be a big help fo… | Continue reading
Cognitive Biases Shape Us Beautifully And Tragically If you could only access a single URL on the web what would it be? Not something like Google or YouTube but actually a single static url — so yo… | Continue reading
Lessons on Allyship and Community ✅ IRL Friend. That’s the tweet I employ to signify that I’ve finally met up with someone previously only known to me online. Of course 2020 hasn’t had much of… | Continue reading
Startups Should Work To Make Their Employees Wealthy Not Just Their Founders And Investors Earlier this week a modest deposit appeared in my checking account, one I honestly never expected. You see… | Continue reading
Creator Wellness Will Be A Key Goal of New Products Being a modern creator is, for many, exhausting. The falling economic costs of production and distribution have been replaced by a new set of tax… | Continue reading