I thought the internet panic over the new TSA pat-downs and body images was a bit of an overreaction. It turns out that the pat-down may be much better than the alternative, going through the back scatter imaging system. It seems the science is very untested on the risks of this system, and those risks could be quite real.

Check out this letter from concerned scientists to the government urging more testing.

Some key points they make:
– people compare the level of radiation to exposure in a chest x-ray or cosmic rays. But this is a totally different radiation. By design it doesn’t penetrate the skin — so while a chest x-ray just flies through you, this all just stops in the skin.
– all the analysis compares the dosage … Read More »

When I founded my first company, I referred to myself as “founder and CEO”, and in retrospect, I believe it was a mistake. Were I to do it over again, I would de-emphasize my founder status.

The benefit of keeping the founder title accrues more notably to more junior founders: if the company grows and over time people are hired above you, it offers ego compensation to keep that founder tag on your business card alongside “product manager”, if you’ve effectively been demoted from VP of Product. This seems less relevant for a CEO, who should get sufficient ego out of that title alone.

The reason I think it was a mistake to emphasize founder status is that I was essentially implicitly trying to say I was better than the other, non-founder employees. That I was special, and … Read More »

Anyone who knows me well always points me to new deals that look like Swoopo – I have a weakness for things that are clever. A lot of these new deals aren’t great venture investments, some might be good “lifestyle” businesses, but most of them prove to be neither great nor good. In the end, maybe a bit too clever.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the thesis of “entertainment commerce” is a compelling one – buying on eBay was once a thrilling experience where people ended up buying stuff they didn’t need just for the fun of the chase, or overpaying because they couldn’t stand to lose the bidding war. These days, buying on eBay seems a chore to me, and I suspect it does for most users. But the idea of making shopping fun – a mix … Read More »

Jeff Atwood’s (@codinghorror) blog about the movie “Groundhog Day” got me thinking much more deeply about A/B testing, a powerful tool in a set of tools that enable a new generation of nimble startups to compete effectively against the big Internet players.

For example, Match.com is stuck on a decade-old architecture and would be hard-pressed to create dozens of unique traffic funnels and ruthlessly tune them to extract optimal performance from each acquisition channel. Hence, the window is open for new competitors who can use these tools to develop products from the get-go.

But what are the limits of iterative optimization?

Split testing is, in my view, no substitute for product vision.

Human beings are probably the ultimate result of great product development through split testing – evolution is one giant iterative experiment. Unfortunately for Internet startups it took millions of years for … Read More »

For CEOs, especially first timers, one of your most difficult tasks will be hiring truly great executives. There is no substitute for experience in hiring. I learned this the hard way as a first time entrepreneur with absolutely no hiring expertise. And yet, after hiring more than 100 people – and making a lot of mistakes – by far my best executive hire was my last one: David Yu, now CEO of Betfair.

The key lesson? If you are a young entrepreneur you need to surround yourself with investors, advisers and executives who are experienced and talented, especially when it comes to hiring other top executives.

An engineer will have a body of work that can be evaluated and tests that can be given. Technical talent can be evaluated for the first 90 days and replaced if they disappoint. However, … Read More »

Other bloggers, most notably my partner David Skok, have written extensively about building a sales and marketing machine for a SaaS business.  This, in our Matrix view, is the true revolution enabled by SaaS — the ability to unseat the traditional enterprise sales process and its multi-year sales cycles, multi-year implementations, and direct enterprise sales forces for a more efficient sales and marketing machine, and an environment where the best ideas and products (and not necessarily the best salesman) wins.

I recently invested in a great fast-growing SaaS startup called Huddle.    Here I will lay out an element of their model that I think is working especially well, and one area of challenge for … Read More »

In my journey to transform myself from an entrepreneur into a Venture Capitalist, I’ve been surprised how many new things I’ve had to learn how to do.  Often asked how the transition is going, I know I should just answer “Great!” but find myself giving the $10 answer to a ten cent question instead, and the punchline always seems to be “this job is a lot harder than it looks!”

One of the main changes in mindset is that I really need to get out and spend time with a lot of people.  Being an entrepreneur fit well with my private nature — I could work in peace on my own business, and measure my success through the standard metrics of results.  In venture, on the other hand, it’s really hard to invest in the best entrepreneurs if you don’t have … Read More »