I spent the better part of the day yesterday flying from Seattle back to my home in New Hampshire. After a nice visit with my brother and his family, it was time to get back home and get geared up for the sprint to the end of 2016. People often make fun of me for…
Yesterday, I tweeted that it was nice to work in a global business because that meant that I could email my international colleagues “guilt-free” and be productive while leaving my U.S. team alone. Now, I realize I’m in the minority of people who finds relief in being able to do work on the Thanksgiving holiday,…
With news late yesterday that Google would create a parent company for itself, financial and tech pundits started churning their gears to figure out what it all means. Was the establishment of Alphabet merely a way to retain the services of rising star Sundar Pichai who snagged the title of CEO for the new Google…
Fifteen years ago, I co-founded CustomScoop to provide a better media monitoring service. My partners and I were tired of the old-fashioned paper clipping services that would mail news stories sliced from hard copy newspapers every couple of weeks. It was slow, it was expensive, and it was impossible to budget for accurately. CustomScoop started…
With all of the controversy surrounding Uber these days — especially as it relates to government oversight — it was good to see the New York Times Editorial Board take a skeptical view of one of the city’s key anti-Uber arguments. Unfortunately, that good feeling was short-lived as the paper ended up advocating a tax-driven…
LinkedIn provides a valuable platform for individuals to build and nourish professional relationships. I was an early adopter of the service and regularly recommend it to recent graduates as a useful tool to help build their careers. But it’s far from perfect. Although it can help users to surface information about professional connections within their networks, there…
High-tech entrepreneurs suddenly find themselves in an unusual position: the political crosshairs. Candidates usually scramble to align themselves with innovators and job creators — often falling over each other to do so. Over the past two decades, Washington has turned to Silicon Valley for answers and talent. Tech gurus have truly been the darling of…
I often have something on the television in the background while I’m working. It’s a habit I developed working on Capitol Hill 25 years ago when we always had either the House floor proceedings or CNN on the TV’s near our desks. Yesterday, I watched two different shows that coincidentally brought similar issues to mind.
We learned this week that the federal government will be trying a new approach to information sharing. A handful of government agencies will be releasing the results of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests not just to the person who requested them, but publicly on their websites as well. The policy has been dubbed “release to…
Most of us think about taxes when we think about successful businesses. Some of us contemplate basic regulations. But few of us consider just how much government action inspires, influences, and impedes innovation, often unintentionally. As entrepreneurs and investors we need to better understand the role the government plays — intentionally and otherwise. They may…