Orthogonal SaaS

We’re familiar with horizontal SaaS (functional usage for marketing, sales, customer success, etc. that can be used by companies across a variety of industries) or vertical SaaS (industry-specific software), but what about orthogonal SaaS? This phrase refers to software products that sit at the…

Software is eating the world, but finance already did

What can history teach us?

Alternative Assets: Opportunities and Concerns

One startup trend that’s been quite intriguing over the past year is the emergence (or re-emergence depending on how you see it) of the “democratization of investing.” While retail investors can buy stocks and bonds, access to alternative…

Real Estate Tech and Market Making

Some real estate tech businesses such as Airbnb function like marketplaces — asset light models with reduced operational complexity. While Airbnb does incur costs with things like payments processing and insurance, they play a minimized role in the property experience…

The Services Economy and Supply Composition

Following the 1970’s, the United States shifted to a services-dominated economy. Financial planning, management consulting, pet grooming, haircuts — the economy oriented itself around services. The question I’ve struggled with is how do these…

What Interested Me in 2018

More recently, I’ve been captivated by the history of ideas — how concepts evolve and form within their condition of possibilities. This year, I had more than a handful of thoughts on tech, new business models, startup investing, etc.

Infrastructure for Financial Products

The “AWS of X” metaphor has certainly been overdone, and I know I’m personally guilty of this. It’s been overused because there is a lot of power behind the idea of an enabling infrastructure. Instead of every company having to build their own servers and…

B2B Commerce Optimization

When selling physical products or durable goods to businesses, there are some things companies can experiment with that depart from the typical D2C playbook. For example, one can actually get away with actions like charging more or taking weeks to ship products to a customer’s’…