Group items tagged

"There's a funny pattern of awakening that tends to happen when a technological advancement sneaks up on us. It starts with a mess of confusion. We don't understand the technology or its purpose: "I don't get Twitter. Why would I want to know what you had for lunch?" It then evolves into miscategorization: "The iPhone is actually a pretty crummy phone." We get so caught up in definitions, we almost miss the larger leap that's occurring: "Why would people use messenger apps when you can just text?" Then, finally, we get it: "The iPhone is not a phone at all. It's an everything device. And Twitter is not about lunch. It's about removing the barriers to real-time publishing." While we're busy missing the big picture, a rapidly growing niche of early adopters is diving in. Early adopters don't get distracted by the need to categorize or define the technology. They just use it. And in repeated agenda-less use, the bigger picture becomes clear. This same pattern is happening today with Snapchat. Hang with me. Don't roll your eyes just yet. I'm going to pay it off. I've been a Snapchat doubter for a while now. Like many others, I relegated it to a fad or a niche service for a subset of a subset of the population. I'm beginning to realize I was wrong."

"A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION I don't know about you, but here's what I want to see happen. I want the first tab of my OS's home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app's inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I'll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I'll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos. The next time I'm back stateside, I want my phone to support something like Chrome Apps, but retaining a few useful properties of apps instead of being big, weird icons that just link to websites. I want to sit down at T.G.I Friday's4 and scan a QR code at my restaurant table and be able to connect to their WiFi, order, and pay. Without having to download a big app over my data plan, set up an account, and link a card when it is installed. Imagine if I could also register at the hospital or DMV in this fashion. Or buy a movie ticket. Or check in for a flight. As a user, I want my apps - whether they're native or web-based pseudo-apps - to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles. I don't actually care how it happens. Maybe the OS makers will up their game. Maybe Facebook, Telegram, or Snapchat can solve these pr

"While 2016 is shaping up to be the year virtual reality and the Internet of Things went mainstream, it could also go down in history as the year email's much-touted demise cranked into overdrive. At least, if this week's events are anything to go by. With the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, and a myriad of communication conduits springing up over the past decade, there's little question that people use email less than they once did for personal communications, and when you swing the demographic dial down to teenagers, the shift is even more pronounced. But email has remained in rude health despite the rise in mobile messaging, and this has been in no small part due to businesses - within companies, between companies, and between companies and customers. But things are changing."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon