I have often said that entrepreneurism is a socially acceptable form of mania. By that, I meant that entrepreneurs, by definition, see themselves as standing apart from the crowd. They take on risks that cause other to quail, drive themselves and their teams to peak levels of performance, and sometimes over believe in themselves and […]
Op-ED
Social vs. Financial: What You Need to Know About the Real Value of a Business
The fraud prevention business grows more valuable by the day. The steady stream of consumer data breaches and the exploitation of stolen data by organized criminals is part of why the global market value of the AI-supported data security industry will hit $17B to $18B by 2023. There’s a lot to be said for building […]
The One Graph That Shows (Again) That Facebook’s Epic Run Has Ended
I mostly write about Crypto. I’ve written about “Why Crypto’s A Growing Threat To FAMGA (a.k.a. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon)”. But that’s in the future. This post is about how after being a massive Facebook’s bull for 8 years, I turned negative in January because of one chart. I’ve written about how I […]
Are Companies Overstepping Their Bounds By Regulating Employee Expenses to Promote Diet or Environmental Choices?
Recently, WeWork announced that employees will not be allowed to expense meals including poultry, pork, or beef, nor will the company pay for meat at any of its events to purportedly reduce the environmental impact of the company. Is this policy overstepping their bounds? Is this a nicely thinly veiled way to reduce expenses in the […]
A Call For US Leadership in Crypto
I work in New York, a city known for finance, in a country known for innovation. We Americans now find ourselves at a moment of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. Despite the […]
Social Networking and Society: It’s Not As Bad As You Think
There has been an outbreak of recrimination and angst about the impact of online social networks on society. One of the early team members at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, decried that “We’ve created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. If you feed the beast, the beast will destroy you.” Sean Parker, another […]
The Next Billion
Big news – we’re raising another billion. Another billion internet users worldwide, that is. In a recent report by GSMA, the total population of internet users is expected to increase from 3.3B in 2017 to 5.02B by 2025. This new set of internet users is going to be a grab bag – many will come from […]
Why Crypto’s A Growing Threat To FAMGA (a.k.a. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon)
The largest U.S. companies by market cap are all tech. That wasn’t always the case: In April last year, I published “The Profound Implications of Five Increasingly Dominant Tech Companies”, which outlined the increasing share of market cap that FAMGA was accounting for of the 100 largest NASDAQ companies by market cap. That trend not […]
Stop Investing in Companies and Start Investing in Brands
Imagine this. A promising new band is ready to start their first world tour. They have managers and found investors who’ve poured millions of dollars behind them based on their potential. After months of planning, the big moment finally arrives. The band takes the stage. But, there are no microphones. They sing their hearts out. […]
Fix The Instagram Algorithm: The Rebel Cry of the Digerati
Instagram made a lot of changes in 2017, from Stories enhancements to follow-able hashtags. But no update was more widely talked about, especially in the blogosphere, than the algorithm modifications, when Instagram fully transitioned from a time-based feed to one that is more Facebook-like, predicting what will be most interesting to users. And this will […]
A Plea for the Future Startups: Overturn Net Neutrality
These days, answers to most questions are a quick internet search away. While there is a certain formula related to algorithms and key words that determines what search results come first, there isn’t a lot of censorship or favoritism in those determinations. For better or for worse, based on the search engine’s criteria, a wide […]