The Curious Engineer

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Reaction Wheel

reactionwheel.net

helping the workers own the means of production since 1997

Society / politics / economyTech news / industryEssays / personal

’10’15’20’25
Posts
316 from 20 Jul 2007 to 14 Sep 2026
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now and then (5 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 3

  1. 9 11
  2. Reactions to “We Have Learned Nothing”
  3. The Monoculture of Startup Methods

2025 4

  1. The Prospect of AGI
  2. Felice Kincannon
  3. How to Invest in AI
  4. A Look at Growth

2024 2

  1. The Illusion of Acceleration
  2. Resignation letter

2023 4

  1. Discount rates in venture backed startups
  2. Founder vs Investor
  3. AI and the Structure of Reasoning
  4. Spring 2023 Syllabus

2022 2

  1. Trial and Error, Part 1
  2. Addressing Uncertainty, an overview

2021 3

  1. Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You
  2. Embracing Uncertainty in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy
  3. Uncertain decision making and the maximax criterion

2020 3

  1. Productive Uncertainty
  2. Strategy under uncertainty
  3. One Process

2019 8

  1. Startups and Uncertainty
  2. A Taxonomy of Moats
  3. The Mathematical Cost of Winning
  4. Boiling Frogs
  5. Managing Technological Innovation: Industry Analysis
  6. Managing Technological Innovation, Spring 2019 Syllabus
  7. Schumpeter on Strategy
  8. Why do VCs insist on only investing in high-risk, high-return companies?

2018 5

  1. iTunes Case: Technological Innovation
  2. iTunes and the Basis of Competition in the MP3 Player Market
  3. The Complected Bird
  4. Zipcar Fundraising Breakdown
  5. 20 Minute VC with Harry Stebbings

2017 5

  1. Power Laws in Venture Portfolio Construction
  2. Ruling out rather than ruling in
  3. Betting your Beliefs
  4. Venture Follow-on and the Kelly Criterion
  5. On being special in the venture business

2016 3

  1. AR will be startup dominated, VR will not
  2. Disruption is not a strategy
  3. VCdelta now part of Mattermark

2015 5

  1. Strategies Against Systems
  2. The Deployment Age
  3. Neu Venture Capital Investor Update
  4. Power Laws in Venture
  5. Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s

2014 7

  1. Best of Reaction Wheel
  2. Who profits from innovation? Startups or incumbents?
  3. Betting on the Ponies: non-Unicorn Investing
  4. The Lewis and Clark Business Plan Competition
  5. Automated Ad Buying is Already Mainstream, Whether Most Marketers Understand it or Not
  6. Midas List Feeder Angels
  7. Midas List Feeder Firms, 2014 Edition

2013 26

  1. The Immediate Future for Adtech Startups
  2. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous
  3. Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation, MTI Class Two
  4. In Praise of the Business Plan
  5. Teaching Entrepreneurship, class one
  6. Information and Markets 5: Building a Marketplace for Startup Funding
  7. The 44 VCs With the Most AdTech Investments
  8. Adtech Investing Activity
  9. On Corporate VC
  10. Art for Computers
  11. The Seed Round is Dead
  12. Letter to my Senator re US Government domestic spying
  13. Midas List Feeder Firms
  14. You Can’t Learn from Failure, You Can Only Learn from Success
  15. Making Everyone a Data Scientist
  16. Andy Weissman on entrepreneurship, product development and the future of the Internet
  17. A Tool for Open VC Data
  18. A Mechanism for VC Deal Transparency
  19. The Signal and the Noise (Angel Investing 6)
  20. AIPP Data Modeling (Angel Investing, Sidebar 2)
  21. AIPP Data Summary (Angel Investing, Sidebar 1)
  22. Transcending Hobbyism (Angel Investing 4)
  23. How to be Different When What you Sell is a Commodity (Angel Investing 3)
  24. The Work-Work Balance (Angel Investing, 2)
  25. Why I’m Not an Angel
  26. On being an asshole

2012 9

  1. How to kiss your elbow
  2. Your personal data is not worth anywhere near what you think it’s worth
  3. Great Riches and Low Theft
  4. Response to comments: Training VCs
  5. On fixing VC ourselves
  6. Venture Capital Family Tree
  7. That joke’s not funny anymore
  8. Selecting, not filtering: Give me a reason to say yes
  9. VC/Company Investment Visualizer

2011 19

  1. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Not at scale, anyway.
  2. iMapBox
  3. Disruptive innovation, buy vs. build, the most pernicious lie in business, and how to know if you’re fooling yourself
  4. To my friends who died ten years ago i
  5. How I Wrote VCBar
  6. Pace of VC investing by subsector
  7. @VCdelta released. Whoops.
  8. The new adtech is disruptive, and that’s a good thing
  9. Valuation for investors
  10. On failing
  11. Neu VC
  12. The client does not care if you are intellectually stimulated, Kendall, they just want the goddamned sales curve to start moving up
  13. Almost a license to print money
  14. Advertising, the Fallacy of Perfectibility, and the Best Minds of My Generation
  15. Innovators can come from anywhere. VCs, not so much.
  16. Kicking Quora
  17. Don’t let the dumb money lead
  18. The bubble this time
  19. Getting Gold When Buying Iron

2010 37

  1. OpenRTB and Architectural Innovation
  2. Old Style vs. New Style VC
  3. Coinvestor Graph Code
  4. Co-evolution and other housekeeping
  5. More VC Coinvestment Visualizations
  6. Venture Coinvestment Map
  7. Opm
  8. It’s not about the founders, it’s not about the money. It’s about what you’re building.
  9. Online Ad Tech Curriculum: Links
  10. The future of free media
  11. Startup R&D has replaced corporate R&D
  12. The last days of the ad exchange
  13. Fiddling while Rome burns
  14. Google/Invite acquisition
  15. Is it worth trying to ‘improve’ advertising?
  16. Why isn’t Columbia part of the entrepreneurial community?
  17. Taxing carried interest is nothing but a political circus
  18. Information and Markets, Pork Chop Edition
  19. Hitting the tropopause
  20. A picture worth significantly less than 1000 words
  21. Who Invests in Quantitative Marketing Companies?
  22. How to completely disappear in 45 minutes or less (at least from marketers)
  23. The End to End Principle in Ad Exchange Design (The Thin Exchange, 2)
  24. Everybody’s an ad exchange (The Thin Exchange, 1)
  25. I know it’s a good deal for you.
  26. The long siege of Corbenic
  27. Tweet Congress: we want jobs and innovation
  28. Kicked to the curb
  29. Duck, duck, goose on the demand side
  30. We looked at the man behind the curtain. Then we got bored and looked at something else.
  31. Prepping for a meeting with someone who wants to become a VC
  32. In which we are the protagonists in the low comedy of our economy
  33. If the ad exchanges aren’t exchanges, what are they?
  34. The limits of the exchange analogy in the ad marketplace
  35. Apple acquires Quattro
  36. Open Source the Ad Exchange
  37. Musing on luck & Thank You

2009 64

  1. Pinch and Flurry Merging
  2. Information and markets, 3
  3. Information and markets, 2
  4. Information and markets, 1
  5. CPMs rising?
  6. Ad impressions by month
  7. Better than Panglossian
  8. Not yet Enough
  9. The FCB Grid and its flipside
  10. Being allowed to make your own decisions, right or wrong
  11. Pennywise
  12. Eliminate Advertising
  13. Away from witnesses
  14. AdMob, Google, Apple
  15. VC Investment Amounts
  16. Data consistency sidebar
  17. How to rake it in by screwing your customers
  18. More on Ad Dollars per Hour
  19. The 300%-500% Lift Meme
  20. Those projects that come to nothing
  21. No starting gun
  22. Details, details
  23. Two (More) Hypotheses on Low Online CPMs
  24. Media has always been an attention economy
  25. What is it worth?
  26. You Are Here
  27. Shirky: Advertising Now Priced at its Real Value
  28. Skidelsky on Scapegoating
  29. Is the Time for Angels Past?
  30. Communities vs. Networks
  31. It might have turned out badly if I’d been on anything but a Harley
  32. But, then, why have a website at all?
  33. First Ever Ad Market
  34. On Regulation and Innovation in the Financial Industry
  35. Why Bankers Will Continue to Make Just as Much as They Used To
  36. Theres lots of bad economic news so
  37. New York Times Profitability Solved
  38. What they Want, What they Need
  39. Supply of What?
  40. 50,000,000,000 $20 Bills
  41. Echoing Green: Funding Social Entrepreneurs
  42. Bigger Ads Roundup
  43. You Can’t Brand in a Banner
  44. More Capping
  45. Money to Grow
  46. To Encourage Growth We Need to Invest in Growth Businesses
  47. Return on Venture Money is Not the Bottleneck
  48. Advertising in a Downturn: Other Opinions
  49. Let’s Not Pretend There’s No Problem and There’s Nothing We Can Do About It Anyway
  50. Rent vs. Buy
  51. How to Levitate
  52. I2pi
  53. When I Was
  54. Google Shuts dMarc
  55. Why You Won’t be Able to Reach Me for the Next 150 Hours
  56. Is Advertising Good or Bad?
  57. You Don’t Arb Your Friends
  58. Self Limbing
  59. And then We Approach the Strategic Buyers…
  60. Cap ’em All
  61. If the Neighbor’s Grass Always Looks Greener, Rip out Your Lawn and Plant Wildflowers
  62. John Bell, In the Accelerator, With the Polarizer
  63. Demand is not Just a Function of Price
  64. After-Dinner Ruminations in the Highest Bobcat-Land

2008 41

  1. Reconciling Living with Strangers
  2. And I Suggest Using the Linux Kernel Next Time
  3. Whip Deflation Now!
  4. Reckless, Booming Anarchy
  5. Hysteresisia
  6. Low Probability Catastrophes
  7. A Bet on Red
  8. Aieeee! Redux
  9. Investing in the Real Economy?
  10. Output is Welfare
  11. The Fundamental Impossibility of Banking
  12. Start a Company. Now.
  13. Spectrum Wants to be Free
  14. Thoughts on Corporate Venture Capital
  15. On Eating Your Own Cooking
  16. "I Would Give It Eleventy-Million Stars If I Could, And So Would You"
  17. Expressly. You Keep Using That Word. I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.
  18. Dumb Money
  19. Yes, Brands Work
  20. One Small Bug; Centuries of Notoriety
  21. Pinch Media Launches
  22. Meet Our Self-Replicating Robot Overlords
  23. Social Business
  24. Why did Google Apps choose Django and not TurboGears?
  25. Kids on the Internet
  26. I own a lot of cookbooks; A couple I even own for the recipes
  27. Ad Spend Numbers
  28. Handipoints Launches
  29. And then We’ll Teach the Saudis How to Farm
  30. ‘Pimp’ is an Uglier Word
  31. The Feed Kludge
  32. Don’t Do Me Any Favors
  33. A Dollar’s Worth of Wine, and Three Dollars’ Worth of Bubbles
  34. Shoemaker’s Child
  35. The Sky is Falling! Onto the Moon!
  36. Advertising in a Downturn: Case Study
  37. The Google: Inflection Point
  38. Customer Rotation
  39. Another Opinion on Financial Services Advertising
  40. The New Universal Identifier
  41. Drawing the Privacy Line

2007 66

  1. Where to Spend Your Time
  2. Bad News is Bad News and Good News is Bad News Too
  3. Every Hundred Years Media Changes…
  4. Facebook Got Gamed
  5. What is Privacy?
  6. Into the Open, Into the Closed
  7. Matchbox Branding
  8. Conversation
  9. Advertising: More of the Same, More More More
  10. I Don’t Mind Being Friends with Brands, I Just Don’t Want to Have to be Friendly to My Friends Brand-Friends
  11. John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now.
  12. Keep Your Content Close, but Your Friends Closer
  13. The Sense in Irrationality
  14. Turtles All the Way Down
  15. Better than Precious Ointment, Indeed
  16. Just Don’t Look Down the Barrel When the Fuse is Still Smoldering
  17. I Like Being a Contrarian
  18. Home Sales: Trees, meet Forest
  19. Adteractive Acquired?
  20. Fred Wilson on Intellectual Property
  21. Weintraub on Lead Gen
  22. Mortgage Application Data
  23. Dissecting the "Obvious"
  24. So When Does Forbes Apologize?
  25. I Lied When I Said I Would Change
  26. Anybody Have an In With the Nobel Committee?
  27. Two Months of Blogging
  28. Data, Data, Who’s Got the Data
  29. Garbage Out
  30. Thinking About Tomorrow
  31. MacMall Sucks
  32. More Data to Chew On
  33. I’m Not So Lonely I Could Cry… Anymore
  34. Saturday Potlatch
  35. I’m Only a Contrarian Because No One Will Agree With Me
  36. If It Wasn’t Obvious
  37. I’ve Recently Switched from Entrails
  38. If You Don’t Go to Someone’s Funeral, They Won’t Come to Yours
  39. Can Corporate VCs Compete?
  40. Some Data to Chew On
  41. I Can’t Argue with That
  42. Just Don’t Increase my Property Taxes, OK?
  43. Intellectual Property is Not Property
  44. Previous Mortgage Origination Readjustments
  45. Whither Mortgage Lead Gen? More Thoughts.
  46. Do What I Say, Not What I Do
  47. Blodget Thinks Otherwise
  48. ‘Going Where the Money Is’ Is Not a Strategy, It’s the Lack of a Strategy
  49. The Technology/Application Dynamic Feedback Loop
  50. What Happens to Mortgage Lead Gen Now?
  51. Radical Honesty: the New Marketing?
  52. The Knowledge Economy
  53. It’s Fine. Well, Not Really, but Let’s Pretend
  54. Free iPod Leads | Intentionality > Arb
  55. Step 1: Be Absurdly Wrong; Step 3: Prosper!
  56. Heuristic of the Day
  57. And with that…
  58. Win a Free iPod!
  59. I Won’t Even Comment on the Business Press
  60. The Virtue of Being Completely Insensitive
  61. It’s Just Like a Library, So Please Stop Talking to Me
  62. Because We’re Creatives, Not Bean Counters
  63. Everything Looks Like a Nail
  64. What does non-profit mean?
  65. So why not start in two places?
  66. Have to start somewhere