They are driven by a pervasive and dangerous ideology that I call "solutionism": an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are "solvable" with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal. Evgeny Morozov, via the New York Times. This is a familiar...
It's cool to do a technology startup. Conventional wisdom has been that employees from big companies get tired of the lack of impact, the bureaucracy and the middle management, and the ones who have smarts and ambition will build their own visions. Since starting a company is so damned hard, the generally accepted...
It's now cliché to claim that gamification permeate all aspects of life; the talk of 2010 and 2011 was that everything seemed to be heading towards cheap, immediate-reward schemes with the subtlety of...
I heard we're in a tech bubble. People have been calling our industry a bubble ever since angels and VCs started putting in a few extra bucks when that entire housing thing turned sour. Well, if the sign of a bubble is simply when optimism trumps pessimism, then all the positive press is...
Opportunities! Learning new things! Massive impact! Changing the world! T-Shirts and foosball tables! Beer and parties! Code ninjaing! There is seemingly an endless number of reasons to join a startup, especially now that so many...
How many times have you heard about stories like Excite having a chance to buy Google, back in 1999, for $1 million? Or, if only someone not named Bill Gates got the rights to distribute MS-DOS for $75,000, Microsoft would have never have gotten off the ground. What if, what if. Hindsight is 20/...
