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.
Update — Startup questionnaires go out this evening (Monday, May 17th). If you don’t receive one and think that you should have, please contact 
It’s time for me to weigh-in again on the beef between Apple and Adobe over Flash versus HTML5. Why is this such a big deal that it seems to be verging on a blood feud? What turned these two companies so ruthlessly against each other that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is writing anti-Flash essays on the Apple web page while Adobe is giving all of its employees free Google Android phones that run Flash?
There are approximately two weeks to go for nominations to the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. With just under 400 companies nominated so far, both in the open and in stealth mode, my goal for the next two weeks is to break 400, making it that much harder to decide on a final 24.
