June 2018

Checklist for Gathering Competitive Insight From a Demo

Suhail Doshi: Avoid These Seven Temptations as a First Time Founder

Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel, shared a candid assessment of mistakes he made in the first 18 months of the six startups he has founded in “The first 18 months of starting a company: it’s life or death.” Here are 7 key pieces of advice that highlight mistakes first founders typically make.

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Neuromancer

Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

Neuromancer, William Gibson’s  first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction: a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use. I recently re-read it and was struck by how things

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Superstimulus: Refining Online Interactions into Digital Heroin

Attention-selling business models have incentives for fostering unhealthy addictive behavior. They are refining online interactions into the equivalent of digital heroin: experiences that are highly pleasurable, highly addictive, and in the long run seriously harmful. My goal is to offer several perspectives on certain business models that encourage a “race to the bottom” and provide

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Six More from Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design

David L. Akin is the Director, SpaceSystems Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He is also the author of “Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design.” He lists more than 40 laws: I selected ten when I blogged about “Applying Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design To Startups” here are six more that I thought were directly applicable

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