Steve Jobs, Superhero

When I was a kid, I read tons of superhero comic books. I fantasized about superpowers, but the storylines about heroes with massive Achilles’ heels really held my attention the most. They saved the world but had screwed up personal lives, made lots of mistakes, and often acted like complete assholes. In retrospect, l related…

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Hiring Rockstars

In Europe, most sports leagues participate in a system of Promotion and Relegation. At the end of each season, the top three teams in the second league get promoted to the first league and the bottom three teams in the first league get relegated to the second league. This maintains the intensity of games for…

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Follow the Leader

In 1950, my Uncle Ed Kalin opened a small designer furniture store. After years of hard work, he saved up and opened a larger one. Growing up working there, I’d observe him doing things that, at first, were hard for me to understand. First of all, when he walked around the store, he was constantly…

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Looking Bigger

Call it the enterprise startup conundrum: how do you earn legitimacy if no one will give you an opportunity to become legitimate? The enterprise world is different from the consumer world: barriers to entry are higher, switching costs away from incumbents are bigger, and the risks for failure (for both buyers and sellers) are greater.…

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The Big Data Conundrum

As data storage costs plummet, the world is storing data that would be impractical to keep just a few years ago. Think video camera feeds, web logs and GPS tracking information. We used to throw away or sample this data, but now we can store and explore it. In the network forensics market, for example,…

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