Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 […]

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 […]

Today I’m excited to announce that I’ve officially joined PJC as a General Partner. I’ve thought about becoming a VC for a long time. In fact, back in 2011 I was talking to my head of Sales at Backupify and we were discussing “doing what you love.” I talked about how what I really loved […]

VCs get a bad rap, but I’ve always enjoyed talking with them. They see a lot of stuff, so, they are great sources of market information. It’s true that they sometimes screw up companies, but I don’t think it is in the way most people assume. It’s rarely that they are greedy, forcing you to […]

One of the favorite parts of modern video games, for many people, is designing their avatars.  I’ve been thinking about this because I’m looking for AI to create an area I call “synthetic social media.”  But so far I haven’t seen any companies in this space.  Since it doesn’t exist, I don’t know exactly what shape […]

I was chatting with someone the other day about customer development and I asked a simple question. Now that customer development has become so common among venture backed tech startups, has it moved the needle at all on outcomes? I don’t have any hard data but, it seems to me that just as many startups […]

More and more often, I am hearing startups talk about “synthetic data.”  I’ve seen my existing startup investments start to use it, and I have seen entire companies formed around it.  So, what is it? Put simply, it is data created by a machine.  Now, why would we do that?  Imagine that you want to […]

A few months ago I spoke on a panel, and I was asked a question that I am always asked about AI and automation – will it kill jobs? And if so, what do we do? The answer I gave surprised many people who said they had never heard an answer like this before so […]

I’ve been blogging since 2003, when I wrote the Businesspundit blog, which I sold in 2008. Then I moved to coconutheadsets.com, but in 2014 moved to Medium, feeling like it provided better distribution for my thoughts. I don’t really like it anymore so I’m moving back here as my primary source of writings. I’m also […]