Geek Idol: A Competition to Promote Competitiveness

A couple weeks from now we’re going to start serializing my 1992 book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. It’s the book that was the basis for my 1996 documentary TV series Triumph of the Nerds and ultimately led to this column starting on pbs.org in 1997.

What goes around comes around.

We’ll be serializing the complete 1996 paperback edition which is 102,000 words in length, pumping the book onto the intertubes at around 2,000 words per day. In about 51 days, give or take a bit, we’ll put the entire work on the web with no ads and no subscription fee, just lots and lots of […]

By |November 12th, 2012|2012, Business, Computing, Economy, Education, Entrepreneurship, Industry, Science, Software, Startups, Technology|98 Comments
Read More

Is the U.S. Startup Economy Failing?

As I’ve written here many times before, small companies and especially new companies are what create nearly all of the net new jobs in America, yet a new study released last week by the Hudson Institute suggests the rate of job formation by new firms is down dramatically in recent years, from an average of 11 new startup jobs per 1000 workers at a peak in 2006 down to 7.8 new startup jobs per 1000 workers in 2011 — a 29 percent decline.  So is the startup economy losing its oomph and should we be worried? No the startup economy isn’t losing its oomph but yes, it’s time […]

By |September 20th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Business, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Startups, Venture Capital|94 Comments
Read More

Ticked off: How stock market decimalization killed IPOs and ruined our economy


Well it took me more than the one day I predicted to finish this column, which purports to explain that dull feeling so many of us have in our hearts these days when we consider the U.S. economy. Our entrepreneurial zeal is to some extent zapped. For a decade it seemed we needed to jump from bubble to bubble in order just to drive economic growth — growth that ultimately didn’t last. What happened? Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) went away, that’s what happened.

I wrote several columns on job creation over the last year, columns that explained in great detail how new businesses, young businesses, and small businesses create […]

By |September 5th, 2012|2012, Business, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Industry, Startups, Venture Capital|81 Comments
Read More

The crowdfunding bubble of 2013 part 3 — how to make it successful

This is the third and final part of my series on crowdfunding. In part one we learned how important crowd funding can be for helping tech startups and the economy. In part two we worried about how criminals and con men might game the eventual crowdfunding system when it starts in earnest next January. And in this final part I suggest a strategy for crowdfunding success that essentially comes down to carpe diem — seize the day!

Crowdfunding done right will have a huge positive impact on any economy it touches. But by done right I mean done in a manner that maximizes impact and minimizes both corruption and unnecessary complexity. This […]

By |June 14th, 2012|2012, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Startups, Venture Capital|28 Comments
Read More

The crowdfunding bubble of 2013 part 2 — crooks and con men

Legal crowdfunding is coming, as I explained in the first part of this series. Thanks to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, investors big and small will soon have new ways to buy shares in startups and other small companies. This should be very good for growing companies and for the economy overall, but there’s peril for individual investors from scammers likely to be operating in the early days of this new law.

Most concerns hearken back to the Banking Act of 1933, enacted to bring order and regulation to the banking industry during the Great Depression.  It was the collapse of the banking industry, not the stock market crash, that did most of the damage […]

By |June 7th, 2012|2012, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Startups, Venture Capital|22 Comments
Read More