Three up and coming technology trends whose wave I’d like to ride:

Backend as a Service

Alternative Blockchains

Mesh Networks

More to come on each, but I’ve been taking too long composing those posts in a vacuum, so consider this the intro.

I just got back from a week of vacation, for which I was saving Ben Horowitz’s new book. There has been a lot written about this book already, and I’ll add my name to the list of enthusiastic recommenders. A few thoughts:

1

Nearly every sentence in the book was quotable as some sort of nugget of wisdom, so instead of saving quotes, my annotations were the few words, thoughts, or lessons that Ben kept repeating. I’d call these his themes, maybe.

• “World-class” (executives, employees, teams, companies, skills, products…)
• “Require” (as in, a CEO should require things of her managers, not make them optional)
• “No excuses.”
• Value strength rather than lack of weakness
• Make sure to pay attention to the leading indicators of success and failure

2.

This isn’t necessarily a concept unique to Ben’s book, but one thing he mentioned is that a CEO should be measured on the speed and quality of...

Workflowy isn’t new, it was built in 2010 and was a member of the Y Combinator S10 class. I use their product every day and so I’m intimately familiar with it. As a company, I know less about them. I’ve never met the founders, talked to them, or asked them questions. I was thinking about Workflowy the company the other day and puzzling over what direction I think they might be headed in. To make a long story short, my basic conclusion is that if these guys are ready to cowboy up and focus on growing their userbase, Workflowy has a lot of unrealized potential still in it.
Here is a breakdown of how I came to that conclusion–some things that I considered, and some questions that I still have.

Product

Right now, Workflowy is used by rabid fans who can’t live without the product. I know if it went away tomorrow, I’d be lost…I don’t know what I did before, but now I can’t live without it...

As someone who has spent time in the Chicago tech scene in the past but hasn’t had the ability to stay plugged in recently due to weekly business travel, I need some way to familiarize myself with the current state of the Venture-capitalized tech scene in Chicago. This is my attempt to understand who the players are in the Chicago VC ecosystem by breaking down the vitals for each firm. This is a living document that I will continue to update as I learn more about the Chicago VC Ecosystem.

Methodology:

1. Assemble list of Chicago VC firms. Lots of Googling and comparing different databases to see what I’d missed. Scrape as much info as possible on the firms, their portfolio companies, their partners and staff, their funds, their investment criteria and theses Then, off the cuff, rank the field into one of four groups to prioritize and focus my further research. I’ll get around to all...