Equity crowdfunding finally arrives May 15th: curb your enthusiasm

equitycrowdfundingBack in the spring of 2012 Congress passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the JOBS Act) to make it easier for small companies to raise capital. The Act recognized that nearly all job creation in the U.S. economy comes from new businesses and attempted to accelerate startups by creating whole new ways to fund them. The Act required the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by the end of 2012 to come up with regulations to enable the centerpiece of the Act, equity crowd funding, which would allow any legal U.S. resident to become a venture capitalist. But the regulations weren’t finished by the end of 2012. They weren’t […]

By |March 28th, 2016|2016, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Government, Startups|21 Comments
Read More

Avram Miller on the death yesterday of Intel’s Andy Grove

groveAvram Miller, who is my friend and neighbor here in rural Sonoma County, wrote a very insightful post on the passing of Andy Grove. It’s well worth reading.

My own experience with Andy Grove was limited. I knew Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore much better. But I do recall a time when Grove and I were both speakers at a PBS national meeting and sat together. He corrected my pronunciation of the word Zoboomafoo, the title of a PBS animal series for preschoolers.

By |March 22nd, 2016|2016, history, People|7 Comments
Read More

Ginni the Eagle: IBM’s Corporate “Transformation”

IBMI promised a follow-up to my post from last week about IBM’s massive layoffs and here it is. My goal is first to give a few more details of the layoff primarily gleaned from many copies of their separation documents sent to me by laid-off IBMers, but mainly I’m here to explain the literal impossibility of Big Blue’s self-described “transformation” that’s currently in process. My point is not that transformations can’t happen, but that IBM didn’t transform the parts it should and now it’s probably too late.

First let’s take a look at the separation docs. Whether you give a damn about IBM or not, if you work for […]

By |March 22nd, 2016|2016, cloud computing, Companies, Industry, Intellectual Property, strategy|146 Comments
Read More

$99 Mineserver: The Devil is in the Details

IMG_0734You may recall my three sons ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall for their $99 Mineserver, a multiuser Minecraft server the size of a pack (not a carton) of cigarettes. On the eve of their product finally shipping here’s an update with some lessons for any complex technical project.

At the time we shot the Kickstarter video my kids already had in hand a functional prototype. Everything seen in the video was real and the boys felt that only producing custom cases really stood in the way of shipping. How wrong they were!

First we needed a mobile app to administer the server so we hired an experienced […]

By |March 17th, 2016|2016, Business, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets|86 Comments
Read More

What’s happening at IBM (it’s dying)

Corporate-Life-CycleThis is a column I didn’t want to write. Like many of you I am tired of IBM stories and the company that was once an industry leader has become, at best, a poster child for how not to manage the later stages of a corporate life cycle. But because what’s happening at IBM is also happening right now at hundreds of other big technology companies makes it worth covering. So let me be clear: IBM is dying.

Last week a huge round of layoffs hit IBM just as I predicted back in January. The company is releasing as few details as possible. Nobody, for example, knows exactly how big […]

By |March 8th, 2016|2016, Business, Companies, Industry, Predictions|149 Comments
Read More