AP s thoughts and musings
In the life of a startup, you have complete control over two moments: when you start and when you give up. Those might be the only two. Exactly two years ago, I wrote a long post about shutting down Braid, a consumer payments company I d worked on from 2019-2023. I wrote it because I was looking [...]
A dispatch from the wild, vicious world of consumer payments On the day I chose to start writing this, I went to an afternoon showing of Oldboy at Alamo. There’s a quote that’s repeated at least three times: Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; I’d been trying to write a pithy summary of [...]
Sometimes tech turns a corner and it is so weirdly tangible. Perhaps it s the company I keep, but lately I ve noticed a malaise that attaches itself to some conversations. There is visceral uncertainty about the next great wave in consumer tech and it is making us all rather uncomfortable. We all like to have Our Thing, [...]
Thanks to some magic from an awesome friend, all of my old writing from Save Me From B-School is now here, available on this blog. The databases have been merged so the posts flow back seamlessly all the way to January 2009.
My favorite app right now is Yo. It is deliciously controversial, and watching the evolving dialog about whether it is stupid brilliant or stupid stupid is endlessly entertaining. For the uninitiated, Yo is an app for iOS/Android where you can send people a Yo via push notification. There s hardly an interface or even an in-app experience. It s [...]
Sometimes the world/internet serves up an undeniably amazing set of events that one can t help but stand in awe. The Net Neutrality debate has been a topic of much discussion amongst the tech cognoscenti lately, but it has been difficult to find a real-world example that illustrates why it s so important. That is, until last night. [...]
I often think about that Forbes piece Why Best Buy is Going out of Business Gradually that was published nearly two years ago. You probably read it too; as of today it has around 3 million views. The emotion that author Larry Downes generated with that prescient article was overwhelming like a collective we can [...]
Today we announced the Grand St. seed round. We are incredibly excited to be working with some of the smartest investors in hardware, commerce and digital communities around and are delighted to have the opportunity to grow the company and build more dope internets for our community. Much love to our earliest users, customers (!!) [...]
photo credit: Dustin Kerstein I spent about a month last spring working on a hardware concept with a few friends. There was this energy around hardware that was becoming so palpable pg called it The Hardware Renaissance in a recent essay. After talking to many friends going through the same process we realized that for all [...]
Last month Diane von Furstenberg included Google Glass in her New York Fashion Week showcase. The photos showed supermodels in fancy and fashionable clothing catwalking around in Glass, the now not-secret but not yet publicly available Google product. And although there was a lot of commentary around the event itself, I kept waiting for a discussion [...]