When I was in high school we decided to walk to Ottawa. By we I mean 6 of us who were all in the school’s camping club, which was called Outward Bound and modeled after the Colorado-based program with the same name. We camped year-round, regardless of the season or the weather. One year a […]
Tag: entrepreneur
The Dunbar Number and Tribes, Big and Small
Wikipedia defines Dunbar’s number (commonly cited as 150) as a “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.” Dunbar is director of the Institute of Cognitive […]
More on Hunch.com
I’m seeing more and more written about the emergence of personalization on the web, a trend that has had me pounding the table for over a year. Recently Chris Dixon, a co-founder of Hunch, (which I covered in an earlier post), addressed a comment by an anonymous user of formspring asking (a little contemptuously) why […]
A Crowded World
In last week’s NY Times, David Brooks writes that “In 1952, two-thirds of Harvard applicants were admitted.” Unimaginable in a time when Harvard publishes its acceptance rate as 8%. Incidentally, Brooks’ Op-Ed column is an interesting take on how one of the themes of the movie, “The Social Network,” is Harvard’s shift from a Wasp-dominated old boy […]
We vs. ME
I’m often struck by the contradictions inherent in the powerful messages we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. One example is the emphasis on being thin (especially for women) contrasted with the constant barrage of ads from the food industry marketing foods that will make you fat, (if they don’t kill you first). Another contradiction […]
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, […]
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 […]