Entrepreneurs and tech executives are widening their gazes outside of developed nations for their next source of growth. Ubiquitous cheap phones and increasingly affordable phone plans such as Jio in India are helping another billion users join the internet. What do those users want though, and how are they the same and different than existing […]
View More Who are the next billion users and what do they want?Category: The Extra Crunch Daily
Huawei sues America as SoftBank spends more money
Today, a bunch of analysis on stories we have been covering the last few weeks. You’re reading the Extra Crunch Daily. Like this newsletter? Subscribe for free to follow all of our discussions and debates. SoftBank wants to spend more billions Three inter-related stories today on SoftBank and its Vision Fund. First, an analysis from my Bangkok-based […]
View More Huawei sues America as SoftBank spends more moneyDragonfly, ethics, and infrastructure spending
Yesterday’s analysis of the ethical tradeoffs faced by engineers working in the Valley certainly lit up my inbox with responses. The general thesis of that piece is that startups and tech companies face more — and worse — tradeoffs as they have migrated from the “purity” of the early internet into more socially and ethically […]
View More Dragonfly, ethics, and infrastructure spendingCan predictive analytics be made safe for humans?
Massive-scale predictive analytics is a relatively new phenomenon, one that challenges both decades of law as well as consumer thinking about privacy. As a technology, it may well save thousands of lives in applications like predictive medicine, but if it isn’t used carefully, it may prevent thousands from getting loans, for instance, if an underwriting […]
View More Can predictive analytics be made safe for humans?How far are you willing to go for growth?
There is a deep dilemma facing startup founders that I think just isn’t brought to light often enough. On one hand, almost all (and I do mean almost all) founders are reasonably ethical people. They can be over-optimistic, they can over-promise, they can be inexperienced around management, but at their core, they want to improve […]
View More How far are you willing to go for growth?Why can’t we build anything? (Part 2)
One of the major themes we are working on these days at the Extra Crunch Daily is trying to understand why America and many other Western nations can’t seem to build infrastructure anymore. The answers are complicated but critical: our infrastructure is decrepit, climate change is intensifying, and population growth will put even more strain […]
View More Why can’t we build anything? (Part 2)Why longer term sheets are better
Recently in a conversation, the length of term sheets came as a topic (I assure you, it was a riveting conversation). The complaint was that a term sheet which had recently been received was too long, and therefore the VC who sent it wasn’t being founder friendly. The travails of successfully raising money! Actually though, […]
View More Why longer term sheets are betterIndia’s entrepreneurial future
Few countries have more entrepreneurial potential than India. It’s home not just to the wave of IT offshoring firms of the 1990s and early 2000s, but also to some of the most interesting unicorn tech startups in the world, including Freshworks, Paytm, Oyo and of course Flipkart, which sold to Walmart last year for $16 […]
View More India’s entrepreneurial futureWith China tariffs delayed, Beijing faces startup dilemma
China is facing a challenging juxtaposition in the coming years: can the government remain in control of business and media while also opening up the country to the knowledge economy? China has uplifted more humans in a shorter period of time than any other country in the history of the planet. That mesmerizing growth engine, […]
View More With China tariffs delayed, Beijing faces startup dilemmaCan we ever evaluate technical debt?
Every couple of months, I talk to an entrepreneur who is interested in building a marketplace for buying and selling app businesses (i.e. the actual IP and ownership of an app or other piece of software). These markets always seem to suffer from a lack of liquidity, and one reason why is that it’s really […]
View More Can we ever evaluate technical debt?Blockchain is solid, in that there is no liquidity
The quality of a financial market is driven by liquidity. Companies want to list on the NYSE, because that’s where the most financial investors in the world are located, and the thicker the market for investors, the better the valuations for companies. The NYSE has “problems” though — its closed most hours of the week, […]
View More Blockchain is solid, in that there is no liquidityTiming and why we’re all VCs
Timing is the single most valuable skill of the modern economy, but I would argue its’s the least understood and also the least practiced. Capitalism is fundamentally about timing, since market competition is about finding opportunities before others. When should you start a company? What company should you start? When should a VC invest? When […]
View More Timing and why we’re all VCs