This blog has been deprecated. You can now find my personal writings at Sharpermind.substack.com
Author Archives: robmay
What Paul Graham Missed About Wokeness
Paul Graham recently wrote an excellent piece about the origins of wokeness. I agree with pretty much all of it. But I believe it was incomplete. What Graham left out is that – the Right does a very similar thing. To prove my point, let’s start with Graham’s definition of wokeness: What does it mean now? I’ve […]
A CAC Evaluation
One of the biggest mistakes I see junior investors make, particularly when they come from a purely financial background, is they look at numbers in early stage companies as points, or as simple trend lines. I don’t think this works. In the early stages, so much is changing that the numbers don’t tell you that […]
Words Now Speak Louder Than Actions
When I was growing up, there were two common things people said about actions and words. The first was “talk is cheap.” The second was “actions speak louder than words.” For a long time, those statements were true. But today I think we live in a different world, a world where words speak louder than […]
I’m Back
Wow. I can’t believe it’s been 3.5 years since I posted here. I like to write, and have been writing at Investing In AI for a couple years, but my professional and personal lives have been so crazy busy I haven’t gotten around to more general writing. That is about to change again. This blog […]
Are There Diseconomies of Network Scale?
Albert Wegner wrote an awesome post recently on how Innovation Upends Extrapolation. The gist of the post is that it is dangerous to extrapolate a trend into the future when you are dealing with complex systems. One of the reasons for this that isn’t directly mentioned in the post is the idea of “diseconomies of […]
Can Venture Capitalists Be Helpful? Should They?
There is a new “VC Burn Book” going around where founders blast VCs who they feel treated them poorly. This is the kind of thing that crops up from time to time, and I understand why. My single worst experience as an entrepreneur was when a west coast VC, less than 10 minutes into my […]
Read The Paper. Don’t Be A Victim of Algorithms
There are a few lessons I’ve learned in life. The first was about reading hard things. I started my career as an ASIC/FPGA designer, and I often designed chips that had to connect to other integrated circuits. These ICs often had specification documents that described how they worked that were over 100 pages long. I […]
The Counterintuitive Effects of Cancel Culture. How Banning Things Makes Them Stronger
They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. I think about that every time I hear about another protest against a speaker or an idea. If you really want to kill stupid ideas, you should actually let people discuss them publicly. Otherwise, they get pushed to the far corners of the internet filled with other nutjobs* […]
The CUP Theory of AI Defensibility For Services As Software Business Models
I’ve written a bit about “services as software,” one of the models I like best in a world of AI. The gist of the model is that you take a services business where humans used to provide the service and you either use robotics ( if it’s a physical service) or algorithms (if it’s a […]