Category: Uncategorized
-
Tim Ferris interviews Bill Gurley
Tim Ferris interviews Bill Gurley, formerly of Benchmark. It is a long discussion covering a wide-range of topics interesting to a startup/finance/business nerd like myself. Bill makes a lot of sense, and not for the first time. Also available on Spotify.
-
From Doom to AI
Dallas Innovates has interviewed John Carmack about his new startup Keen (a nod to id Software’s Commander Keen games?) and its work in artificial general intelligence. He’s talking about doing it a bit differently from the AI mainstream (OpenAI et al). Often that it is not the way to go about things, but it will […]
-
Direct relationship or being an arms dealer, streaming edition
Higher interest rates have made technology companies care more about profitability, and less about revenue growth. One area that still remains in the revenue growth mindset (with major losses) is online video streaming. Netflix has become profitable at scale, but the others (Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, HBO Max/Discovery) are losing ca $2-4 billion each per year. […]
-
Eternal truths
I’m slowly reading, after four months I’m not yet finished, the book The Startup Game by William H Draper III. The initial chapters cover the founding of some of the first venture capital partnerships in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, and I’m struck by how much have stayed the same in startups and venture capital. […]
-
Priorities matter
Intel is implementing an across the board salary cut (even for lower employees/managers), while keep paying a dividend to shareholders. Across the board salary cuts might be appropriate if a company is facing bankruptcy, but they are a last resort. If you are paying a dividend, you are not anywhere near a last resort.
-
Focus is freeing
Meta CTO, and very long-time (since 2006) Facebook employee Andrew Bosworth, wrote a one of the best blog posts I read in a long time called Focus. Just read it. There is enormous value in being incredibly focused (and right) and saying no to reasonable things. He also nailed the description of early days in […]
-
Good time to raise
I believe 2023 will be a good time to found a startup in the Nordics and to raise pre-seed or seed capital from venture capital investors. At those stages my sense is that valuations have stabilized and investors and founders are able to on meet valuation and terms. It doesn’t mean raising money for most […]
-
Talking about practical things
When it comes to exciting technology, the experts often start to talk about Innovation (with a big I) and the impact on the future of industries or even humanity. Startup founders more often talk is about the practical challenges of getting a startup and technology to work. How can I recruit and retain the right […]
-
TikTok, the US government and Oracle
TikTok is one of the world’s most popular apps, and the owner (ByteDance) is a Chinese company that acquired an American company (Musical.ly) to partly seed the service. This has led to a very unusual situation. It started with president Trump’s order in 2020 for ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations for national security reasons. […]
Henrik Torstensson's Weblog 