Iconic Tech Reads
In chronological order, these are some articles / presentations / legal documents that have I've found valuable in contextualizing technology and venture capital today
John Allspaw (Flickr/Yahoo!) and Paul Hammond (Flickr)"10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"
Some have described Agile and infrastructure as an oxymoron: they just donpsilat fit together. During one year we have focused on using agile techniques in three different infrastructure related proje…
The modern world is built on two centuries of industrialisation. Much of that was built by equity finance. Which is built on limited liability
Editorial on bursting of dot-com stock bubble; observes that current sense of despair may be as overdone as last year's euphoria
At Greylock, my partners and I are driven by one guiding mission: always help entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter whether an entrepreneur is in our portfolio, whether we’re considering an investment, or …
A study of Bell Labs offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about.
Where today’s most innovative—and world-changing—thinking is taking place
All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces | Above the Crowd | By Bill Gurley
Earlier this week, I met an experienced head of sales. During our meeting, the candidate shared a simple way of thinking about a startup’s sales process that resonated with me. A startup’s sales evolu…
With more than 80% of venture capital investments occurring in enterprise and with the public markets disproportionately rewarding SaaS companies with huge enterprise value-to-revenue multiples (media…
In those tender days between two-scrappy-founders-in-an-apartment and established business, these burgeoning outfits have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in their future, and that future is f…
How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size | Above the Crowd | By Bill Gurley
This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it. If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence,...
Back in December, when Slack integrations launched, I wrote Clippy’s Revenge about the potential of “smart messaging” to become a new platform. Since then, big players have done much to nurture that…
Product led growth (PLG) isn't just a buzzword—it's an incredibly powerful go-to-market strategy used by companies like Slack, Airtable, Calendly and more.
Venture capital is so familiar in the startup world that everybody tends to forget how it emerged and why it is so focused on financing startups. The reason why venture capital thrives in the digital…
In 1871, Scotland-born Alexander Graham Bell used to experiment with a harmonic telegraph in his Boston laboratory and his family home in Canada. His work as a lone inventor led to an extraordinary…
The memo Sequoia Capital sent to founders & CEOs to provide guidance on how to deal with potential business consequences due to the effects of the coronavirus.
A few years ago, I published a framework I called The Hierarchy of Engagement (Version 1, and updated “Expanded” Version) which synthesized my thinking on how to build enduring consumer products. The…