Why do investors care about going after a huge market so much?

“Target big markets”
- Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital

Every entrepreneur has heard this, but what’s a big market and what happens if you don’t pick one? This was illustrated to me on a recent visit to the small town of Americus, Georgia.
Americus is a small town, with a population of 17,041. There’s a quaint downtown area with a few [...]

How To Buy Expiring Domain Names: Lessons Learned

Lessons learned buying domain names
I’ve been in the market for some new domain names lately. It isn’t 1997, and it’s not so easy to score a good domain name anymore. A vast number of domains are taken by people who are using them, planning to use them, auctioning them, or plastering algorithmically generated spam links [...]

Why Amazon’s Facebook Integration Revolutionizes The Recommendations Space

I’ve publicly stated previously that social recommendations generate far higher engagement rates than many other recommendation techniques. When I was at Loomia back in 07/08 we launched a product which was the first Facebook powered social recommendation service for media sites, called SeenThis. It was a widget that you could put on your web site which [...]

Newbie Lessons Learned from Trading Volatility using the VXX and VXZ ETNs

I’ve been experimenting with trading volatility on the stock market using ETNs like VXX and VXZ. I learned a few things in the process, and since a few people were curious about this idea and I thought I’d post my learnings for the curious.

A couple of months ago I realized that I wanted to make [...]

Just in case you wondered where Apple’s revenue comes from

Today, Silicon Alley Insider released their excellent chart of the day for Apple’s latest revenue figures. Note that Apple receives most of their revenue selling devices like the iPhone, not software. But they spend a heck of a lot of software and content (iTunes) in order to stimulate demand and differentiation for their hardware products.
From [...]

Foursquare/Gowalla/Yelp check-in app growth: This is your tenth check-in here, have a free burrito

How do you accelerate growth for checkin-apps? Create a loyalty program for local businesses, and they will promote your checkin app for you AND users will have an incentive to check-in often.

iPad User Tests: Kids, grandparents, moms, and more try it out

I continue to be fascinated with the iPad, which was just released on Saturday. I think this is because it’s a new kind of device — not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. And previous attempts to create a tablet market have failed pretty badly and at great expense. Just 2 days ago, I posted some [...]

The iPad faces the Mom Test

I was on the phone with my mom today and she mentioned she had been to the Apple store to check out the iPad.
I’m a bit of a product geek and so I thought to myself, what a perfect opportunity to see what her perspective is on the highest profile tech product launch in recent [...]

Want to increase employment? Make it easy to start, finance, and grow a startup

Thomas L Friedman wrote a short opinion pience in the New York Times today called Start-Ups, Not Bailouts. It’s worth reading and connects to several other trends I’ve witnessed recently regarding regulation and the startup ecosystem.
A short excerpt: “…Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms [...]

Interesting reading: Clay Shirky on the collapse of complex business models

The Collapse of Complex Business Models
“When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method [...]