Today, in China, Tencent functions as a door to the Internet: it often is the very first app people download when they get a smartphone. It connects them to banking services, games, e-commerce sites, taxis/ride-sharing services, hotel and flight booking services, and much more. This metaphorical door manifests itself in real life in the form of a … Continue reading How Do You Build A Tencent For The West? →

Steve Jobs treated every Apple event like an Apple product: masterful, deliberate, and often times, surprisingly delightful. Every act in a Steve Jobs presentation was calculated to maximize the audience's attention and joy. No one doubted that the products Jobs was going to unveil in each event was going to be anything less than great... but they … Continue reading There’s No Other Way To Put It: Apple Failed →

The Financial Times is usually a terrific source for financial news. It's straightforward, unbiased and most of the time, accurate. Unfortunately, the paper fails to live up to that standard on occasions, such as when it published an article  by Dan McCrum yesterday titled "Bitcoin's place in the long history of pyramid schemes". Being an alarmist … Continue reading Financial Times’ Disgracefully Misleading Article on Bitcoin →

Is Silicon Valley currently in a bubble? Is the party over? Some very smart people are arguing yes. Others are saying no. But what's clear is this: we're at the peak of this ~10 year cycle, and every boom comes with a bust. The players in the game (mainly, VCs and startups) have already began bracing for this cycle's … Continue reading Be Honest With Yourself: How Is Your Startup Actually Different? →

GoPro shares are taking a hit (down 6% to start the week) after Barron's magazine published a report stating the company's stock is likely to fall to $25 a share in the very close future (this would equate to a 29% decline from Friday's closing price of $35.15). As some publications have noted, this is a 44% … Continue reading Investors Are Worrying About GoPro For All The Wrong Reasons →