Image by Jose P Isern Comas via Flickr I was at a dinner of entrepreneurs last week, several of which, were working in mobile and mobile social. The topic of New York experiencing a tech startup renaissance came up, and though I have always found it compelling, a specific angle was focused on.  We all agreed that the density of [...]

After a wonderful tenure in Local Markets at Google, I’m thrilled to announce that I have joined Polaris Venture Partners as an Executive in Residence in New York.  I’ll be working to identify new investment opportunities of behalf of the partnership, as well as, working with existing portfolio companies. I’ll be employing a mix of hackable business development and hackable investing, [...]

Sam talking about SocialGreat on the Gillmor Gang!

This past weekend, I saw Waking Sleeping Beauty, a film about the Disney animation renaissance that occured from 1984 to 1994, at the Hamptons Film Festival.  The last two years of this period, I was at Disney Imagineering, and can personally attest to feeling exuberance that energized the company as Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Lion King [...]

I’ve long sought a non-chronological publishing platform; something that is the opposite of a chronological blog.  The only non-chronological space I’ve had to date is the left column of this blog.  It’s a place to maintain the fixed elements of my online presence.  And then, I met Spencer and Carbonmade. Carbonmade is an elegant and simple online portfolio platform, but [...]

Starbucks took a risky and creatively destructive step in introducing Via instant coffee packs last week. You may have taking the taste test and picked the traditional brew from the instant, but it’s pretty hard unless you have the most sophisticated of palettes.  I love coffee, and I like Starbucks, but could barely tell. There’s a lot of lip service [...]

An expansion on my previous post, Hackable Business Development, came to me yesterday and is in some way an expansion on these comments I wrote on Andy Weissman’s blog. Several times, VC friends have asked me about the APIs of a companies they were considering investing in.  In each case, I either had built something or played with the XML/JSON/REST [...]