Month: May 2010

Fred Wilson has an interesting take on the relationship between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist. “I think venture capitalists, first and foremost, need to feel like their job is to make entrepreneurs successful. So I think of venture capital as a service business. The entrepreneur is your client. It’s a very weird relationship because the entrepreneur is not exactly paying you, even though they really are paying you. But they absolutely can’t fire you. In fact, you can fire them. So it’s among the weirdest kinds of service relationships that one could come up with.”

Cellphone-only households are different from their landline-using counterparts. They tend to be younger, poorer, more urban, less white, and more Internet-savvy. All of these characteristics are correlated with political viewpoints and voting behavior.

Duffy “has the greatest degree of integrity of anyone I know in public life. He’s earnest, forthright and smart. The only thing I’ll regret is not having him as my mayor.”

His command is as large as some small cities. He runs it like a factory in another country where there are no civil rights.

Who’s your favorite Founder?” Beck asked Palin in January. “Um, you know, well,” she said. “All of them.

Kundra visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to encourage students there to apply “new international standards for persistent government data (and metadata),” otherwise known as the semantic web or Web 3.0, to Data.gov’s datasets. These standards will make it easier for governmental data to power deep-linked data mash-ups combining various data sources in a consistent way.

No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.

It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.

“Don’t you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?” Winkler said Stan asked. “I can’t get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere.” Stan’s conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.