The last decade hasn’t been a very good one for venture capitalists, showing poor returns for their investors. There are many reasons for this including over-expansion, poor management, and a dearth of companies going public. Now to make matters worse Congress is trying to take away the VC’s traditional greatest single source of income, called “carried interest” — their piece of the pie, so to speak. That is if there was any pie. I’m not here to defend carried interest, nor to condemn it. My purpose is to point out that the VC industry will just restructure itself to regain any lost income if carried interest is taken away.
Easy go, easy come.
Venture capitalists […]
I want to make a point here, but I need to make it carefully, gently, so as not to rile people up. I’m not here to start a fight, folks, but it seems to me not nearly as many workers are throwing themselves off the roof of that Foxconn factory in China as I would expect.
“The step after ubiquity is invisibility,” my old friend from Apple Al Mandel explained to me years ago. And it’s true. Telephone service was once rare but is now universal and anything truly universal eventually become a commodity. No wonder phone companies no longer make money from long-distance calling nor — as Verizon’s sale of its New England landlines business confirms — even make enough money from local phone service. Now it is all about mobile and thank God for texting and ringtones, the telco execs say… for awhile. Well I think the same thing is about to happen to Facebook — privacy issues or no.
Internet-y as the next blogger, I’d like to point out how 
YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner. Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement: two billion downloads per day just to break even. And this is supposed to be the future of television? Hardly.