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Where have you gone, Engine Charlie?
Charles Erwin Wilson, known as “Engine Charlie,” was president of General Motors and later Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower. He is broadly — and incorrectly — quoted as having...
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So Pat McGovern walks into a bar…
Pat McGovern died this week at 76 in Palo Alto totally surprising me because I didn’t even know he had been ill. Uncle Pat, as we called him, was the founder of Computerworld back in 1967 and the year...
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One way (maybe the only way) Yahoo can succeed
Alibaba’s IPO has come and gone and with it Yahoo has lost the role of Alibaba proxy and its shares have begun to slide. Yahoo’s Wall Street honeymoon, if there ever was one, is over, leaving the...
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Entrepreneurism and the politics of hope
I’m an older guy with younger kids so to some extent I live vicariously through my friends, many of whom have children who are now entering the work force and some of those children can’t find jobs....
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The KickStarter Paradox
Among the great business innovations of the Internet era are KickStarter and the many similar crowdfunding sites like IndieGoGo. You know how these work: someone wants to introduce a new gizmo or make...
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The Cringely boys Kickstart Mineserver™, a $99 Minecraft server
x When my three sons, ages 13, 11, and 9 decided to do a summer business together I thought it could be almost anything. After all, they’ve visited three dozen tech startups with me in our RV and...
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Last chance to get a Mineserver™ for Christmas!
It took only two days for our three sons to reach their $15,000 Kickstarter funding goal and visions of building a kit car were dancing in their heads. Almost three weeks later, however, total pledges...
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Why Yahoo is worth less than nothing
A reader pointed out to me today that Yahoo, minus its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes plus cash, is now worth less than nothing according to Wall Street. This says a lot about Yahoo but even more...
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$99 Mineserver: The Devil is in the Details
You may recall my three sons ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall for their $99 Mineserver, a multiuser Minecraft server the size of a pack (not a carton) of cigarettes. On the eve of their...
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Equity crowdfunding finally arrives May 15th: curb your enthusiasm
Back in the spring of 2012 Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the JOBS Act) to make it easier for small companies to raise capital. The Act recognized that nearly all job creation...
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The Cringely boys Kickstart Mineserver™, a $99 Minecraft server
When my three sons, ages 13, 11, and 9 decided to do a summer business together I thought it could be almost anything. After all, they’ve visited three dozen tech startups with me in our RV and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Last chance to get a Mineserver™ for Christmas!
It took only two days for our three sons to reach their $15,000 Kickstarter funding goal and visions of building a kit car were dancing in their heads. Almost three weeks later, however, total pledges...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Yahoo is worth less than nothing
A reader pointed out to me today that Yahoo, minus its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes plus cash, is now worth less than nothing according to Wall Street. This says a lot about Yahoo but even more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
$99 Mineserver: The Devil is in the Details
You may recall my three sons ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall for their $99 Mineserver, a multiuser Minecraft server the size of a pack (not a carton) of cigarettes. On the eve of their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Equity crowdfunding finally arrives May 15th: curb your enthusiasm
Back in the spring of 2012 Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the JOBS Act) to make it easier for small companies to raise capital. The Act recognized that nearly all job creation...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paul Graham’s Legacy
Last week there was a press release you might easily have missed. A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital...
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What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF???
I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month...
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