GigaOM

Ten Years Later

I have been on the phone a lot today—talking to Katie Fehrenbacher, Stacey Higginbotham, and Chris Albrecht. Surj Patel popped into town, and we had coffee. Call it kismet—or just coincidence—that today happens to be the tenth anniversary of one of the most terrible days of my life: I had to shut the doors on a business that carried my name and, for a while, I thought was my legacy. I loved it so much that I still joke that dating someone was cheating on this thing. I woke up thinking about it, I went to sleep thinking about it. 

So, turning off the lights in the office and pulling the proverbial shutters down one last time was hard. And so was writing a blog post announcing GigaOM’s demise. 

Everyone had their say. Many former colleagues had a chance to express their disappointment with the outcome. My loss was simply mine. No matter what I did, it was hard to truly banish the negativity from my mind. No one quite understands the deep, profound sadness

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Musings, My Essays
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Protocol is live

Protocol, a new online publication from the house of Politico is live. It wants to bring a new dimension to coverage of technology, which has gone from being a curiosity to the necessity to now becoming a foundational part of modern existence. ” Technology is no longer just an industry; it’s a global power center with the sweep and impact of any nation’s capital,” writes Tim Grieve, executive editor of the publication and promises, that they “plan to cover it like one.”

It is a very crowded market that they are entering — Bloomberg/BusinessWeek, Forbes, Business Insider, Wired, C/net, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times are already occupying and taking too much of our attention. And then there are independents such as The Information. Needless to say, it is a bull market for technology journalists.

And talking about journalists, Protocol has hired three of

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Musings, Technology
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A frame of mind

This past weekend, just before everything slowed down for Thanksgiving, I got a chance to reflect on my photographic journey. While it is easy to quantify the technological and social success of a craft such as photography, it is much harder for us to ask what the emotional impact is of creativity and creation.

When I look back at the past four-and-a-half years, I think of photography as a loyal and constant companion. I am quite thankful for the role it has played in helping me deal with a deep sense of loss that came from the shutdown of GigaOM.

We are living in boom times for startups. Every year, more and more entrepreneurs are striking out on their own, trying to find a new opportunity. As an investor, I am fortunate enough to experience the Cambrian explosion of entrepreneurial creativity. However, I have also witnessed many broken dreams and

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Musings, My Essays, On Photography
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How to write a good blog post 

person typing on laptop computer
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

I have been frustrated by the vanishing quality of blog posts, which either are nothing more than marketing drivel, self-promotion passing as intelligence. I can understand that, but I can’t seem to comprehend the laziness of news posts that seem to have the nutritional value of a TacoBell meal. It seems no one remembers or knows what makes a great blog post and how to write them. 

I don’t think what makes a great post has changed. And when cleaning out an old folder on Google Drive, I came across the draft of this email I would send to all new writers and reporters who came to work for us at GigaOm. I thought I would share this – it isn’t doing anyone any good sitting there in a drive. 

In this new new media world, we have to live on one single assumption: every

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My Essays
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8

Sometimes it is hard to forget certain days – like today. Eight years ago, I had a near fatal experience and it changed a lot of things in my life. It changed my outlook on many things. Maybe that is why I think of it as a personal red letter day – a chance to stop and take stock of my life.

I stopped smoking eight years ago. I am still not smoking. I have never regretted anything more than picking up that first cigarette as a teenager, all in the name of being cool, being part of a clique and imitating others. I am not wired to be part of the cool kids, or be part of a herd or good at imitating others. It was a bad idea to try and be someone else.

Addictions are a life long curse and it takes a lot of fear to

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Musings
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Follow The Geeks

Jason Hiner and Lyndsey Glipin are busy writing their book, Follow the Geeks. They are serially sharing the book one chapter at a time — a great idea and if I was to ever write a book, it would be pretty much my preferred mode of writing. The book is about new media innovators and the latest chapter is about me, mostly about my reluctant gamble on Gigaom. Reading the chapter has been bitter sweet as it is full of memories and it has left me with a lot of “what ifs.” It was a reminder that the story of my life is still being written. Thanks Jason and Lyndsey for including me in the book! Read the chapter! 

Musings
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Gigaom’s Culture of Context Lives On

If anything past few weeks have been a big lesson in humility, in understanding humanity and also a reaffirmation that random kindness of strangers far outweighs the preening and posturing of others. Some have written handwritten notes, others have emailed, many have tweeted and messaged, and others sent me messages on Facebook — saddened by the loss of my beloved, letting me know how much they will miss it, and at the same time reassuring me that it was something special. Of all the communiques, the kindest came from my philosopher-scientist friend Steve Crandall. He told me a story about stars:

Stars are funny objects. Most of them are made up of very light elements – mainly hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen burns to helium, helium to carbon and so. There are transitions in the size and structure of the star at points along this path as the internal pressure from different fusion processes balance

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Musings
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You’ve Got (No)Mail

At the end of the classic war movie, Force 10 from Navarone, as explosions go off in the dam and from the outside, it seems nothing has happened and the attempts to blow it up are futile. And then slowly fissures appear and before you know it the dam is breached. For the past few days, the dam of emotions remained intact, but last evening it was breached. Like everyone else on the team, I lost my Gigaom email address.

It is such a small thing in a larger scheme of things, but for some odd reason, that loss ruptured my soul. I don’t know why. I stopped using it a few months ago, accessing the emails perhaps once or twice a week. But it was my address that allowed me to read my RSS feeds. So many of my online accounts were attached to it. My Spotify, my Quip.

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Musings
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Predictions are a risky business

In my life as a professional prognosticator, I have been wrong more often than not.

There was a time when I thought Qwest was going to be the 800 pound gorilla of telecom because they had bet big on IP. Oops! They were a scam wrapped in a scandal. There was that time when I thought Hulu was a clown company. Yup, in the end I was the clown. And not to mention that time when I thought Facebook should sell to Yahoo for $1 billion. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have to smirk at me every time I visit his sprawling campus for me to know that I was wrong — the Facebook stock price does a good job of hitting my hubris in the plexus on a daily basis.

And the worst misreading of the future just might have been my initial take on Amazon, which has gone from being a book seller to the Frankengodzilla of

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My Essays
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