Moore's Hand

Good technical writing can often seem like magic. It’s not. Over the last seven years, tons of “best practices” have bubbled up from the…

A first-time startup founder friend who’s been an engineering leader but largely stayed away from watering holes like Twitter and HN asked…

Epistemic status: definitely half-baked Here’s an idea I’ve playing with recently: In 5 years most common app features and functionality of…

JavaScript frameworks from 2012 to 2016. Jamstack frameworks from 2017 to 2020. At the start, tools in these areas were mostly created and…

Development economics has a concept of “catch-up growth”. Countries like South Korea and Taiwan reached Western standards of living in two…

Earlier I wrote two traditional types of open source businesses: operating systems and databases. Now let’s get into a more recent emergence…

Yesterday I talked about the Innovation Equation, an outgrowth of something I’ve been thinking about since I took a great econ class in…

A large proportion of the world’s scalable innovation comes from the venture ecosystem — venture-backed startups, plus public companies that…

As I wrote in the first installment of this series, one of my theses about open-source companies is that there are a few defined categories…

My friend Leo is a talented engineer building a software business. He got passionate about a specific area of the user journey and decided…

It’s hard to remember now, but back in the early 2010s when we were all talking about social, local, and mobile, accelerators were pretty…

One of my theses about open-source companies is that there are a few defined categories, and companies belonging to a category tend to…

I grew up eating Indian food, but the first recipe I learned how to cook was a pasta dish. I was 16. I scanned The Joy of Cooking for about…

Decide How To Weight Firm, Partner, and Valuation There are three basic “preferences” when fundraising: firm, partner, and valuation. Some…

As you start traversing the investor network, the interest level in your fundraise can change rapidly. In the beginning stages of a network…

Persuading a firm to offer a term sheet is basically an enterprise sales process. You need to find and persuade a champion, then help them…

Once you get “into the thick of it” you’re going to be quite time-constrained. You’ll need to do everything quickly — iterate on feedback…

The “deck” is one of the most commonly discussed elements of the fundraising process. There’s a lot of discussion on what makes a great deck…

Let’s start with definitions. When I’m use the term “a VC firm” I’m talking about firms that have 6-10 partners, invest out of >$300m funds…

Part of preparing to raise is getting a really good sense of your key potential targets. For Niche Domains, Identify The VCs Who Have Made…

It can be difficult to know if you’re ready to raise when you’ve never raised before. Luckily, there are some good heuristics. Your…

I often chat with first time founders who are raising their seed round. Fundraising is an interesting beast and it has many parts than are…

I’m currently building an forecasting tool using Django, which has led to some interesting explorations of the levels of abstractions Django…

A couple of economics professors at Stanford, Jonathan Levin and Liran Einav, have dived into the econ/big data intersection. Along with a…

In addition to this blog, I’m guest blogging over at Ribbonfarm; Venkat just published my first post, Algorithmic Governance and the Ghost…