We want to tell you about three trends that are changing America today.

The first is that our country is getting older. You’ll hear things like “10,000 people turn 65 a day” but that doesn’t adequately convey the actuarial drumbeat. There will be 80 million Americans 65 or older by 2035.

The second trend is that most of these older adults will want to stay in their homes. This is called “aging in place” — the desire to live in the house and community you’ve always lived in— not an isolated, age segregated facility.

The third is that older adults…

In geographical space, you can open a hot dog stand with a relatively undifferentiated product, at least compared to other hot dog stands, and have a geographic monopoly.

But on the internet, that hot dog stand isn’t going to stand a chance. On one end, you have Amazon selling very normal hot dogs, at a very good price. They’re what most people are going to buy.

And then you have the really great organic hot dogs, from that speciality online store in Portland. …

2017 ended up being a year of tremendous growth, after what I now realize was a year of terrifying stagnation.

In 2017, I started a new company, moved to a new apartment, fell in love, started seeing a coach regularly (highly recommended), experienced loss, began developing a practice of presence, and more.

In creating resolutions for the new year, I revisited 2017’s resolutions which I hadn’t looked at since I constructed them. Some of them I had surpassed effortlessly, others were completely untouched. But the most important things I’ve done or learned in this last year weren’t on the list.

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There was a time when hardware was the business, and software was the thing that came free. The idea that you could charge money for bits instead of atoms, and build a big business was crazy. Then came Microsoft, Visicorp, Lotus. And the hardware became mostly commoditized.

As a business, what made software great was its zero marginal reproduction cost. You make it once, and the cost is roughly the same if you sell it once or a hundred times.

Networked software was an even more interesting business because it could 1) grow really fast on top of an existing…

The trend within the venture community over the last decade or so has been the notion of “founder friendly” — supporting your founders through thick and thin.

It arose out of a FOMF (Fear Of Missing Facebook): when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg passed over Sequoia because of Sequoia’s relationship with Zuck consiegliere Sean Parker and his previous company Plaxo. Who wants to make some hard decisions in a portfolio company going sideways when that founder might bad mouth you to the next Zuckerberg?

To be clear, there has been a history of experienced venture capitalists completely screwing over inexperienced entrepreneurs (I…

I have a suspicion that there’s a new enterprise weather company to be built. To be completely honest, I don’t know very much about weather. I started reading and asking questions a few months ago. But last time I tried this, I met some great friends and great companies, including Eric at Bayes Impact, Sha and Kalvin at Nava, and Alex. So please, tell me how I’m wrong (or right).

Here’s the idea: there have been three tremendous changes in computational technology over the last decade that have yet to be fully utilized in weather forecasting technology. Incorporating these shifts…

There are some answers that aren’t worth knowing. At least not right now. It might take too much effort to find. The question might be wrong. The world might change. It might be unknowable.

The traditional analytical approach is to “do the work” to understand what you don’t know, piece by piece. To framework the world and to fill in all the details.

But I think this approach doesn’t work with big unknowns, or when you’re trying to make big jumps. It doesn’t work in research. It doesn’t work in startups. It doesn’t work in writing.

Because what you must…

Silicon Valley’s original sin was an act of betrayal. Eight employees left Shockley Semiconductor to found their own company, and William Shockley named them the Traitorous Eight. The newly formed company, Fairchild Semiconductor, was as successful as we can only hope our own ventures are. But it had its own challenges. For one thing, it was funded and owned by corporate East Coast capital. Fairchild Camera and Instrument had provided the initial capital in exchange for an option to outright acquire Fairchild Semiconductor, in what would end up being a short-term bargain for the parent company but severely limited the…