Featured Articles
I’ve written a lot of blog posts over the years. Here are some of the highlights.
Startups & Disruption
40 tips for building a startup after 19 years of success and failure
June 2018 - With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve observed a number of “obvious” mistakes that I and others have made — so I thought I’d catalogue as many as I could here so that others might benefit.
Unbundled
May 2016
In Silicon Valley we’ve used the term “Unbundling” to describe the phenomena of mobile apps breaking apart into multiple separate apps, each essentially providing more focused, single purpose features. Think of the Facebook app being separated into Facebook + Messenger.
I believe this Unbundling phenomena is happening almost universally across all aspects of life.
The Great Unbundling Continues: How LLMs like ChatGPT are Further Ripping Apart Our World.
March 2023
A major update to my original "Unbundling" article. This post touches on how LLMs like ChatGPT accelerate the unbundling meta-trend. Specifically....
Intelligence Unbundled from Biological Brains
Productivity Unbundled from Work
Content Unbundled from Knowledge
Insight Unbundled from Investigation & Research
Tips and Tricks for Building a Great Developer Platform
July 2018
As a serial entrepreneur, strategic adviser, former Head of Product @ Uber Developer Platform, Co-founder of Echo (grew dev platform from zero to 85 Billion API calls a month), co-author of APML, and co-founder of the DataPortability Project I’ve spent my career building products that developers love.
On platforms
May 2017
The only way to scale — and have a chance at becoming part of the fabric of the world — is to figure out the patterns and primitives, expose them as extensible interfaces that are opinionated enough to create consistency but not so restrictive so as to strangle creativity and innovation, provide clear best practices and samples, and let builders build.
On consensus and Tulips
December 2017
The only reason we can own a piece of land or money has value or the queen is the queen is because a sufficient number of people agree that those things are true. All the mechanisms and norms of society only exist because the majority basically agree they exist.