“Worst case scenario we’ll sell to a larger startup or public company for about ~$1.5m per engineer.” Yes, this was the ‘fallback plan’ for many team in the web2 era and they weren’t wrong. Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your…

An AI Safe Harbor Provision Would Create Guidelines For Development & Safety Without Premature Regulations — The conversation around Artificial Intelligence has started to take on a binary quality, rather prematurely, as if we were debating the two sides of a coin rather than a more complex shape. “Let builders build as is” vs “Regulate.” Ironically, both positions are outputs of acknowledging the incredible early power…

Why Tech Companies Avoid Customer Service and the Opportunity That Comes With Actually Engaging Your Users — Thirty years from now when you’re reading my memoir pay attention to Chapter 8 because that’s when I became President of the United States. The populist momentum that resulted in an unprecedented third-party ascension was all based on a single premise: the large tech companies should staff competent, responsive and…

A Ticket From Michael Jordan’s First NBA Game Auctions Big $$$, Adam Sandler Gets Respect (Finally!), and Why Germany’s Envy of Silicon Valley Helped Wirecard Commit Massive Fraud — Ok, just a roundup of some great recent reads. Adam Sandler doesn’t need your respect. But he’s getting it anyway. (Geoff Edgers, WaPo) — Rare sitdown with Adam Sandler featuring this great line from SNL creator Lorne Michaels

Why Lack of Easy Options Made Me Focus On Who I Wanted To Be, Which Paid Off Over Time — In retrospect the fact we were all day trading tech stocks from Stanford’s computer labs probably suggested it was a bit of a bubble, although eToys options did pay for two consecutive Spring Break vacations. I was getting my MBA at the time which in some ways wasn’t just part…

Riffing Off VC Charles Hudson’s Blog Post, Here’s What I’m Trying to Answer — If startup founders sometimes ‘Build in Public,’ is the analogou sventure capitalist motto to ‘Think in Public?’ Anyway, there’s no doubt that the story of the trailing months has been Artificial Intelligence. Over Homebrew’s first decade we’ve always been interested in what we’ve called ‘Applied AI’ (along with Applied CV…

Why I’m Participating in SeedChecks’ “Submit Your Deck” Community — We’ve never believed in hiding. Our email addresses are on our website, and there’s no junior staffer or AI Bot replying on our behalf. A strong Cold Email always beats a weak Warm Email. And we’ve backed successful startups where the relationship began exactly this way. So, yeah, we’re believers…

Things I Learned From a New Yorker Article and How I Got Over My Own Insecurity — Good writers aren’t just skilled in their prose, they have a nose for interesting topics. “Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It,” an article about imposter syndrome in a recent issue of the New Yorker, is an example of a GREAT subject. The type of read where you pause between…

It’s Very Likely That Artificial Intelligence Will Be Worth More In Aggregate Than is Currently Being Invested (Just Unevenly Distributed) — In kindergarten my daughter learned to not ‘yuck’ someone’s ‘yum.’ That is, just because you don’t like something there’s no reason to share that in the moment with another person enjoying it. There’s a lot of yumming AI right now and it’s of course perfectly fine (often helpful!) to challenge…