A little over four years ago, I tried to get my address book mess figured out. Centralizing everything in FullContact (now known as Contacts+) was a marked improvement, but after years of living with the end result, I realized that storing contact data about a lot of people is a…

“Can you act?” It was the spring of 1994, and those were the first words Tony spoke to me as I walked into his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (because government likes its acronyms just as much as techies do, it’s the EEOB; back then, it was known…

(I originally published this on my blog in 2012; I’ve republished it here in a slightly edited form.) For years, my favorite Michael Lewis piece was his New Yorker magazine article about Shane Battier, The No-Stats All-Star. (I wrote about why that piece spoke to me here.) Then I saw…

From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. …

Last month, I went to prison. Next month, I’ll return. — (Originally published on LinkedIn as part of a series; you can read the entire series here.) A few hours after we arrived at the maximum security prison in Lancaster, Cat Hoke, Defy Ventures’ Founder & CEO, asked us to “step to the line”. Volunteers on one side of the line…

(This essay is based on my keynote talk at Techstars FounderCon on October 18, 2016. I’ll post the video once it’s up.) The United States Census of 1880 came at a pivotal time in U.S. history. It was the last time the Census Office could identify anything resembling a U.S…

I’m in my fifth year of tackling a major personal online project each year. 2012 was passwords, 2013 was document storage (no write-up; I standardized on Google Drive), 2014 was the family photo archive, and 2015 was getting my address book in order. …

I stayed up late last night watching a livestream of a game of Go being played in Korea. I don’t play Go, yet I’m quite certain that I’ll remember last night for the rest of my life. …

One of the joys of running the Partnerships team at GV is watching entrepreneurs tell their story to potential customers. The best entrepreneurs understand that the pitch is a chance to show the customer that they understand the customer’s challenges and have a solution that will impact the customer’s bottom…