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Even the Smartest VCs Sometimes Get it Wrong – Bill Gurley and Regulated Markets

Steve Blank

The tech ecosystem got a rude awakening in May 1998 when the U.S. Justice Department and 20 state Attorneys General brought suit again Microsoft for anticompetitive practices designed to maintain its monopoly in PC operating systems and internet browsers. While tech hadn’t come to Washington, Washington came for the tech industry.

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The Boundaryless Era: the Time for Distributed Teams

ReadWriteStart

It even penciled for Google in 1998, and it still worked well enough that Facebook chose to establish its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in 2004. These are highly-skilled people that make up critical parts of your software development teams. Reason One: Software is Eating the World. Toyota is a software company.

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It’s Morning in Venture Capital

Both Sides of the Table

If you want to understand the details of why this is, I covered it in detail in this post, Understanding Changes in the Software Industry. In 1998 there were around 850 VC funds and by 2000 there were 2,300. In 1998 it was 150 million, 1999 250 million and by 2000 it had crossed 350 million. The Funding Problem.

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Gust Blog - Thoughts on startups by investors that fund them

Gust

And in January I saw that digital music overtook physical media for the first time in 2011, something I expected since 1998. I bought the Diamond Rio mp3 player in 1998. Tim Berry , Founder, Palo Alto Software. Tim Berry , Founder, Palo Alto Software. And what interests me is who makes the money on timing these trends. .

Startup 180
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The Golden Age of the Boston Internet Entrepreneur

Genuine VC

There are a couple classic archetypes of internet/software founders, including the genius college student cooking up something quirky but ultimately disruptive in his dorm room who launches his company straight out of undergrad. Reactions when I told people I was an “internet entrepreneur” ranged from smirks to blank stares.

Boston 206
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How To Predict The Future

Feld Thoughts

There seem to be two schools of thought on how to predict the future of information technology: looking at software or looking at hardware. We needed improvements in video compression and in TCP/IP – the underlying protocol that essentially runs the Internet. I’m going to start by going back to 1994.

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Social Networking (the Shorter Version) Past, Present, Future

Both Sides of the Table

The Bridge Between Online Services & The Internet. It preceded the WWW but then become the onramp to the Internet for newbies. When Time Warner & AOL merged it was widely feared that this would be a monopoly that would control the Internet. For a nanosecond Rupert Murdoch seemed like the smartest guy on the Internet.