It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We don’t feel especially flattered, in this instance, though – you may have seen a hoax circulating recently, suggesting TriplePoint is a part of the Halo 4 review campaign, and making unprofessional demands of journalists. We don’t represent Halo, nor do we represent Microsoft, and …
Instagram selling for $1 billion dollars generated surprise, and envy. Perhaps people can understand a strategic rationale for Facebook buying it, or competitive impulse, but the befuddlement remains. You can hear the suppressed snicker coming from the mainstream business prairie: they weren’t making money, but hey, for the team itself, hooray! Everyone agrees they’re really nice young …
Financial Times technology reporter Joseph Menn has written a captivating account of “The Hunt for the New Crime Lords that are Bringing Down the Internet” in Fatal System Error (Public Affairs, 2010). ”Cybercrime” is something that for now rings as more terrifying to the imagination than it has yet to be in practice. With some …
The gaming world in the united states has very few large- or medium-capitalization companies that specialize in video games. Waves of consolidation (Maxis, Broderbund) or bankruptcy (3DO, Acclaim) has swept out many of the historic publicly traded videogame companies as capitalism’s creative destruction did not spare gamers. Much of the US-based gaming market …
The virtues of coming to Silicon Valley are obvious: proximity to all sorts of talent, capital, and exposure to cutting-edge ideas. If one agrees with that, the logic holds more strongly the closer that proximity is. Four well known angel investors and founders are going to test that proposition with i/o Ventures, announced …
The Drucker Institute at Claremont McKenna will be celebrating the 100th birthday of famed management writer Peter Drucker on November 19. TriplePoint is a Drucker fanboy, most notably The Practice of Management (1953) which still has many lessons to teach, and The Effective Executive (1966, revised numerous times.) These works have focused on scientific management. …
I’m sad to note that Rannie passed away Sunday afternoon. She was philosophic in the last few weeks, happy with the love her friends, family and new husband David Reid had shown her in the last year. Born in Korea, she was raised mostly in Southern California and was a graduate of UC Berkeley in …
Read together, two recent works on white collar living would suggest there’s been a bifurcation of the white collar class, geographically and demographically. Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City takes as its archetype of economic drive the bourgeois boheman, or “bobo” (a term coined somewhat sardonically by David Brooks’ 2001′ Bobos in Paradise.) The Bobo sips …
Could the geographic proximity of Twitter to Facebook and vice-versa be hurting each other’s development as they shadowbox over how users update status? A good deal of modern American upbringing is teaching awareness of (and mostly resistance to) peer pressure. Fiction has no shortage of such tales, and in quantitative Asch Conformity Experiments we know …