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 […]
Category Archives: AI
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 […]
When AI Fails: Welcome To The Real World
In the early days of Talla, one of our data scientists, Daniel Shank, attempted to replicate a popular paper out of Google, on “Neural Turing Machines.” He spent a ton of time trying to get it implemented in the real world, and never could. He gave a public talk about it here, which is interesting […]
Why Technologists Keep Guessing Wrong On the Outcome of Technologies
An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday highlighted that Uber and Lyft haven’t lived up to their promises. Ride sharing was supposed to make traffic better but study after study has shown that it has made traffic worse. The thing no one is talking about is, this is a bigger trend in tech – […]
Beyond AI: Why I Joined The Board of NECSI
Several years ago I read the book “Logic of Failure.” The book is about how poorly humans deal with complex systems. To give you a simple example, when I was in college I had a roommate who didn’t understand how a thermostat worked. There is a time delay between changing the thermostat and changing the […]
Defining The Services-As-Software Business Model For AI
My angel investment in Botkeeper has been one of the most influential in my thinking on how AI strategy is evolving. When new high impact technologies come along, they often shake up status quo business models and because no one understands what business models might emerge on the other side, it’s a wonderful time to […]
The Half Court Ventures Story: What I’ve Learned From 4 Years of Angel Investing
Backupify was acquired in December of 2014. In June of 2015 I made my first angel investment. Along the way, I started a fund with my friend Todd Earwood, and learned a lot about investing. This post chronicles that path. Deciding To Angel Invest The first thing I did post exit was talk to lots […]