My name is Renee DiResta. BD @ Haven. In my past life, I was a Principal at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a trader at Jane Street Capital. I spend time thinking about inefficient markets, apps that solve problems, and what to eat for dinner. I love New York, swing dancing, and Xander and Justin Hileman. Follow me on Twitter - I’m @noUpside.
I don’t update this blog these days, but I’m still writing. Eventually I’ll get around to migrating this site off Tumblr and getting the tags set up in a way that makes sense. But for now: For logistics & supply chain-related content, check out Haven ’s monthly Perspectives series. For things related to tech, startups, and my other interests, follow me on Medium . This year I’ll be writing a lot…
Governor Brown signed SB277 - the vaccine bill - into law on Tuesday morning! This is incredibly significant - California is now the 3rd state in the country to eliminate both the personal and religious exemptions that previously allowed parents to simply opt their children out of required vaccines. ( in the map below, VT should actually be light green; they killed their philosophical exemption in…
So, back in November I blogged about California’s abysmal PBE rates and how this lax state-level vaccination policy is terrible for California kids. Well, since that time we’ve had measles and pertussis outbreaks here, and legislators have really stepped up. Dr. Richard Pan introduced SB-277, which aims to eliminate the “Personal Belief” exemption. I got involved as a…
I’ve watched the rise of “Bloomberg for Startups” companies with great interest. And I want to start by saying they’re dealing with some really difficult data problems. Crunchbase and AngelList, the two best sources for raw data on early-stage companies, do their best to be accurate. But Crunchbase is partially crowd-sourced, so there’s a lot of subjectivity in the…
This was a very busy, exciting, and challenging year. It was year that brought a new facet to my identity: mom, and working mom at that. I want to tell that story as part of a longer post with data viz, though, so for now I’ll simply state that it is both wonderful and very hard. And that my baby still hasn’t slept through the night. I was fortunate to have spent 2014 as part of two great teams.…
Recently we’ve been looking at preschools, and I’ve been increasingly disturbed by the lax attitude and bizarre public policy around immunization here in California. Despite the fact that vaccinations are indisputably important to public health, and that fears that they cause autism have repeatedly been shown to be unfounded , California persists in offering the Personal Beliefs Exemption (PBE).…
Last year in July, I did some preliminary research on the hardware startup ecosystem. The goal was to examine the growth of the sector by looking at funding events, on both the venture and crowdfunding front. This year, for my keynote at O'Reilly’s Solid conference, I wanted to put together a much more in-depth narrative looking at the trends that are shaping hardware, and leading to that…
So, I fell off blogging here for a while (though I still wrote occasionally at O'Reilly Radar ). This is why. I’ve been working on a book with my friend Nick Pinkston. It’s called The Hardware Startup: Building Your Product, Business, and Brand. The first four chapters were just released at O'Reilly Solid . The pre-release stamp is pretty funny - Raw and Unedited! Makes it sound like a…
I just got back from ten days in China - factory tours in Shenzhen! photos and video forthcoming! - and am getting caught up on news. Anti-Foreigner VC Also Supports Hiring Discrimination One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children,…
Conventional wisdom around Silicon Valley is that hardware is hot. Influential incubator founders and VCs have been blogging about their interest in the space, and popular tech blogs are constantly writing about prototyping technologies and hardware startup fundraises. However, there’s been very little in the way of actual numbers or data documenting the growth of the ecosystem. So,…
Two more Dear Abby posts are up! It’s been really interesting to see what people are asking. Last week, an entrepreneur asked me whether taking VC funding is necessary at all . This is an increasingly hot topic, particularly as equity crowdfunding rule changes have the potential to impact the early-funding landscape. Here’s an excerpt: Does every startup need venture funding? Sometimes…
I’ve recently started writing a series of posts for Women 2.0. Instead of picking a topic each week, we’ve been soliciting questions from the community to get at the areas that people feel most uncertain about. We kicked off the new column with a question about diligence: How do you (and the early-stage VC community in general) like to conduct due diligence on the companies you are…
On March 19th, The Economist posted an interesting chart and analysis entitled “Bitcoin’s record price looks like a bubble.” I reworked that chart in light of the market correction (or crash, if you prefer) over the past couple of days Note that the old peak search, around June of 2011, has been completely eclipsed by the volume of searches for “bitcoin” now.…
Venkatesh Rao published a thought-provoking piece on Ribbonfarm today, comparing the deal-seeking masses who use Groupon and Airbnb with a swarm of locusts. It’s a bit of an intense analogy, but the basic premise is that certain aggregator business models are terrible for the underlying businesses, and that platform middlemen are capitalizing on the predatory instincts of deal-seekers: They draw…
It took me a couple of months to get these photos up, but from Dec 22-Jan 6th, Justin and I did the Everest Base Camp Trek. It was incredible. The days were strenuous, the nights were freezing, but we saw some of the most breathtaking mountains in the world, made new friends, and experienced a fascinating culture that thrives despite the inhospitable landscape. We started the trip via a flight…
I believe that the future of government is one of increased transparency and collaborative problem-solving. What gets us there is creating a culture of participation, in which citizens across industries contribute their expertise to help solve our shared difficult problems. In November I got to participate in furthering open government at Code for America’s “Data Deathmatch”…
Two weeks ago, I moderated a data visualization panel at General Assembly ’s new SF campus. The panelists were code artist luminaries Rachel Binx , Mike Bostock , Tom Carden , and Scott Murray . There are plenty of tutorials and how-tos that illuminate the technical steps to produce a specific type of viz, but there’s not much out there around knowing what to do in the first place. So,…
Here’s part II of the Science-meets-startups series I’ve been writing over at O'Reilly Radar ! The biggest problem in science today is the cost of conducting experiment, so this one looks at crowdfunding as a way to supplement experimental funds. Throughout the 20th century, most scientific research funding has come from one of two sources: government grants or private corporations.…
What happens if you were to apply the principles of SaaS to science? I’ve got a new blog post up on O'Reilly Radar that asks that question…below is an an excerpt, go here for the full text. Software as a service (SaaS) is one of the great innovations of Web 2.0. SaaS enables flexibility and customized solutions. It reduces costs — the cost of entry, the cost of overhead, and as a…
Back in July, Nick Pinkston and I were talking about how difficult it was to find businesses that catered to Makers - everything from milling facilities to Makerspaces to places to buy art supplies. With the right keywords, it was occasionally possible to hit on a place on Yelp or Google, but it was consistently easier to find good spots by asking friends in the community. So we decided to take…