Author: david

Pit of Vipers

When Robert Altman was given a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars a year or two before he died, (aren’t such awards always a death sentence?) he said to the star-studded audience, “I’m not interested in stories, I’m interested in human nature.” This struck me as bordering on heresy since he was addressing a crowd […]

Hunch.com: Not Ready for Prime Time

I’ve been following Hunch.com for a while since their site offers “personalized recommendations,” a concept I’ve been exploring with Trybe. Hunch’s “topics” are user-generated and they use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make recommendations based on members’ answers to a series of questions like “Can you do 10 pull-ups?” and “Do you live in a city, […]

Air Rage

I can remember a time when people dressed up (not down) to travel. It’s laughable now but it was a sign of the respect people had for the privilege of being able to fly at 600 mph 6 miles above the earth. How times have changed. In today’s NY Times, the business/aviation columnist, Joe Sharkey […]

Creative vs. Marketing

I was struck by a recent article in the NY Times about The Economist (which I used to read in my Wall Street days.) The editor was quoted as saying, “Once you start trying to segment and work out what people might want to see, I think that would be a journey to some type […]

Superstar Entrepreneurs

I went to a seminar not long ago entitled, How to be an Entrepreneur Superhero. A panel of entrepreneurs answered questions in front of a room full of reverential novice entrepreneurs, dispensing the usual homilies on how to be successful: perseverance, focus, obsessive, attention to detail, etc. One had sold his web company for $85 […]

Don’t be a victim

Don’t be a victim. I first heard that admonition from a senior executive when I was at AOL. He was commenting on complaints he was hearing after a big reorg. AOL, like all big technology companies, was prone to massive reorganizations. Some were genuine attempts to manage a company in the throes of hypergrowth in an […]

The Missing 3rd Place

Being part of a community is basic to our nature. At AOL we used to call online communities the “third place” after home and work. Those of us who don’t go to church lack that third place and I know I for one crave it. (Starbucks calls itself a third place but I don’t buy […]

Doing What He Said He Would Do

I went to an event organized by OFA (Organizing for America) last night and David Plouffe, former Obama campaign manager, was the featured speaker. It was refreshing to hear someone so articulate and well informed talk about the complex issues that face our country. It was also a pleasant reminder of the tremendous optimism and […]

A.B.C.

I was having breakfast with a prominent VC a while back and happened to mention that my two partners had done some work for another startup that had gone belly up. “You’ll need a letter from your attorney stating that there are no issues with the code,” he said sternly, adding, “When you meet a […]

Web of One

“We believe in a web of one,” Carol Bartz stated at TechCrunch Disrupt. Yahoo produces thousands of custom versions of their home page to reflect users’ interests and preferences. I was struck by her comment because we all waste too much time trying to find what we’re looking for—online or offline. At AOL, our mantra […]

Startup Alley

I’ll be at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York next week and will post updates from there. Trybe will be exhibiting in “Startup Alley” all day Tues, 5/25. Feel free to drop by and say hello. We’ll be demoing gigmor, our musician matching site, which is in pre-beta and an interactive mockup of the […]

Skate to where the puck will be…

Recently I was having lunch with two tech entrepreneurs and we ended up in a debate about the right target market for startup web sites. I said I was aiming for affluent, well-educated users, not early adopters. I’ve watched plenty of “cool,” “hip” sites go out of business because they couldn’t attract a big enough […]

Matching vs Recommendations

I spoke to someone who described themselves as a CFO-for-hire a while back. After hearing my description of Trybe’s mission, she commented that “there are a ton of recommendation sites out there.” I couldn’t deny that but felt that this didn’t adequately describe our concept. It inspired some thinking about how we are different. I […]

Digital Media

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.” –John Gardner A friend, M, and I were talking about the iPad the other night. I said I thought it was going to […]

Convenience

I used to manage a group of very talented people at AOL that was named “Convenience” by someone more senior than me, likely in a fit of wry humor. It was somewhat embarrassing to hand out my business card at places like Citibank and watch the reaction of senior bankers in blue suits. They immediately sized […]