A more refined yin and yang between "working hard and working smart," is "the hustle and the machine."  Working hard and working smart is a false paradox, because you always need to work hard smart.  The difference in "the hustle and the machine," is an acknowledgement that no matter how much you hustle, there are not enough hours in the [...]

I was interviewed by Howard Lindzon for Stocktwits TV on the recent “Web is Dead” theme started in Wired. If you don’t want to watch the video, the key points were: There is definitely an “appification” going on in the mobile space.  We only live in the “now,” and for right now, given mobile broadband speed, users prefer apps.  This [...]

Special thanks to Aol Ventures (Mike Brown, Jon Brod) for hosting our meetup and to our great panel of speakers: Our speakers were:  Duncan Watts, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, author of Six Degrees  Nihal Mehta, CEO Buzzd, discussing their new viral offers  Greg Galant, Sawhorse Media, on building a viral product: Shoutworthy  Erik Martin, Reddit, “How something goes [...]

Matt Blumberg had some good follow up on Fred’s blog on the topic of “what a CEO does.” I’ve found the bulk of the thread to be helpful but disagree on one point Matt makes: NIHITO (Nothing interesting happens in the office) It could be that Matt is talking about CEOs and my role is different from that, but I’ve been [...]

When I was in business school, we produced about one financial model a week. I often wondered what business school must have been like for one of my mentor’s, Jerry Speyer, who attended the same school, Columbia Business School, in the 1960s. How did they produce spreadsheets on actual spreadsheets? Similarly, my father wrote what few papers he wrote in [...]

The acceptance of imperfection is essential to working in an operational business. In any given task there are always kluges needed or fixes. If everything runs perfectly, it probably means that you’re not in a growth business, and if you are, it means you’re not pushing into “the new” quickly enough. Embracing imperfection and getting comfortable with it is something [...]