The distortion is exacerbated by the fact that people building profitable companies outside the sphere of the VC dominion have little systemic need to tell their story. VCs, on the other hand, needs the continuous PR campaign to meet their recruiting goals. They can’t just bag a single win and be content henceforth

What I learned from reading “Situational Awareness” is that the next generation of privilege-blind Silicon Valley investors are even more out of touch than expected. It’s really sad and feels like a cosmic joke that the world’s most affluent class of people who legitimately have the resources to change the world for the better are living and thinki... See more

Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.

The web hasn’t had its artisanal moment. Right now, giant, ad-based networks created by six men that everyone begrudgingly uses with diminishing emotional returns, control the vast majority of the web.

She wanted to live frugally, she wanted to have the autonomy to pursue her interests without thinking about money, and this meant she was going somewhere no one wanted to live so rent was cheap.

I think the more likely outcome in B2B will be that point solutions – software products that do one thing – are more at risk from integrated platforms that can more easily bundle point solutions into their platform, making their whole offering more valuable as they do.

He sees the hunger people have for a wisdom and nourishing that algorithms and devices don’t provide—but the humanities can. This is the real crisis in humanities, and it’s reached a boiling point.

I don’t travel as extensively as Dana, but I hear the exact same thing in my online dealings with people. They want something that the tech can’t provid... See more

The only enduring value is in identifying hard problems that face customers you understand, solving that problem better than anyone else, and staying obsessed with serving that customer forever.