February 2010
38 posts
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We're looking for an associate
bijan:
We are looking to hire an associate at Spark. The title “associate” means different things at different venture capital firms so let me tell you what it means at Spark. An associate at Spark is part of our investment team in our Boston office. He or she will help our team with market & competitive analysis, process deal flow, due diligence on new investment opportunities, assist our...
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The Morning Benders, Temptation Inside Your Heart...
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Venture Capital, Disruption & The New Media Order
I gave a talk yesterday at the Paley Center for Media to a number of members of the Writer’s Guild of America. The group generally consisted of folks who make or want to make a living by producing content — a job increasingly challenged by the web’s democratizing open platform.
I attempted to explain a little bit about venture capital and its significance in helping fund many...
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How I Unplug
I was asked recently by an amazing organization called Reboot for my thoughts on what the Sabbath means to me in the current always-on, real-time information age. They follow:
We live in a world of endless information flow. Bits and bytes are our food and water. They move back and forth at a deafening pace. In this world of boundless stimulation and interaction, how does one disconnect,...
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Bobby Birdman, You’d Be Surprised
My friend...
“Alas, though, instead of making nation-building in America his overarching...”
– Op-Ed Columnist - The Fat Lady Has Sung - NYTimes.com
Tom Friedman avoiding his usual green rhetoric and actually spot-on in this Sunday’s NYTimes.
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The Morning Benders, Excuses
Clearly I’m on...
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The Morning Benders, Pull Up The Roots (Talking...
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The Cost of American Success
Chris Dixon wrote an excellent post on entrepreneurship the other day that I’ve continued to ruminate on. Chris argues that contrary to popular belief venture-backed innovation could and should actually increase, but we have a systemic cultural problem in that we don’t champion entrepreneurship enough as an American society.
I’ve made the argument before that, damn the numbers,...
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The Morning Benders, Dreams (Fleetwood Mac cover)
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Ask Me Anything
I’ve enabled Tumblr’s Ask feature.
If you’re so inclined, I’m happy to answer and and all questions that I can.
Fire away!
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Community is Organic, not Manufactured
We’ve seen a lot of the web giants attempt recently to move into growing areas dominated early by young upstarts.
Google Buzz has of course been all the rage these past couple days, with it’s Twitter/Facebook-like feed integration into Gmail. Prior to that it was Yelp taking a swipe at FourSquare with their check-in addition. Even Yahoo launched Meme recently to compete with the...
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Grizzly Bear, Boy From School (Hot Chip cover)
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Real-Time Advertising
I attended the excellent AdMeld RTB (real time bidding) conference today. The conference focused on the rapid movement of online ad inventory to real time bidding platforms.
For some time now I’ve been concerned that the glut of advertising inventory available on the web would drive the value of most of that massive long tail of impressions towards $0.
While there is certainly a...
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Take Advantage of Expensive Paper
We’ve recently seen a number of deals where founders/employees and in some cases early investors have taken money off the table in high priced late stage rounds. Yelp - Elevation , Zynga - DST & Facebook - DST are the highest profile recent examples.
These are great deals for the industry, as they provide liquidity and/or growth capital at very attractive equity prices for companies...
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