Disqus - Latest Comments for hardaway

Re: SXSW PanelPicker®

hardaway — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 20:54:31 -0000

The human behavior club on Clubhouse has done yeoman work during the pandemic. I've been personally helped by people on CH by listening to people with knowledge and compassion speak.

Re: SXSW PanelPicker®

hardaway — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 20:52:48 -0000

These are dedicated people who have helped us get through the pandemic. They are both great speakers and very knowledgeable.

Re: SXSW PanelPicker®

hardaway — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 20:51:13 -0000

Tremendous speaker with great appeal.

Re: Adding Surcharges

hardaway — Wed, 29 May 2019 19:21:38 -0000

I read your post and it's very fair. But there are now only 6 states that outlaw surcharging, as California and New York have had their cases decided by the courts. We think that in the next year or so every state will allow it, simply to level the playing field for smaller merchants with thin margins. (I'm the VP of Comms for SurchX, and we sell a software solution for surcharging that guarantees legal compliance). Here's a resource for you: https://www.surchx.com/top-...

Re: louisgray.com: When the Hometown You Always Knew Could Burn Gets Erased from the Map -- Paradise is Lost to the #CampFire

hardaway — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:23:55 -0000

I Sure wish you wrote
more often Louis. I’ve forgotten what a great writer you are. I’m so sorry about your town.

Re: Aliza Sherman, 53

hardaway — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 19:49:10 -0000

I've known Aliza since cybergrrrl and still didn't know everything in this story. Plus those photos are amazing!

Re: Fifteen Years

hardaway — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 11:21:16 -0000

You were a pioneer in VC blogging, and it was so startling to see an actual post by a VC that I read you assiduously. Over the years I've felt like I know you, although we've not met. (I've met other members of your team.) I am profoundly grateful to you for making it okay for VCs to be transparent. Here's to the next fifteen!

Re: Diversification (aka How To Survive A Crash)

hardaway — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:27:17 -0000

Yes, Fred. I, like you, lost big in the dot com crash. And as a result, I have, like you, 5% of my net worth in crypto. I also own real estate (income producing free and clear). BUT in Arizona I have also lost in two real estate crashes (1989 and 2006) so I lack your faith in real estate.

Re: A Note to Our Customers from Erik Voorhees

hardaway — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:59:27 -0000

Unfortunately, Eric, it's been two days and I still haven't gotten support.

Re: Logic+Emotion: SXSW 2017: Should Age Diversity Matter?

hardaway — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 16:38:45 -0000

I've been talking about this over here : https://www.facebook.com/gr...
And here: https://medium.com/aging-re...
I'm happy to talk anywhere. Sometimes I see ageism directed against me, but sometimes I really don't. I do see it endlessly in my entrepreneur groups, largely populated by middle aged men who have been laid off from tech jobs they've had for 25 years, and found themselves unable to get hired anywhere else.

Re: Stay N Faithful: Faith Journeys: Leaving Mormonism and Religion Cured My Obsession for Pornography

hardaway — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 14:18:56 -0000

When you forbid something, you make it more attractive. When I was bringing up my kids, I tried not to forbid them anything, but to explain what I thought the consequences might be. "Go ahead and try that, but let me tell you how I felt on that" (drugs) , "go to a boy's room if you want, but expect to have sex if you do, even if you don't want it, and I'm not keeping the kid" (premarital sex), and on and on. I never even said anything about porn, because I believe that's largely in the eye of the beholder, except for child porn, which I don't like but I know will continue to exist.

It's not just the Mormons. Watch the evangelicals and you will find that they all preach against adultery and they all slip and do it. Because it's so forbidden.

I love your spiritual journey, because it is taking you to a happier place. And I was a person who liked and respected you when you worked for the Church, too! But you're right. I'm non-religious. So much simpler

Re: What Is Going To Happen In 2017

hardaway — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 16:32:18 -0000

Fred, I think you are going to be right about most of these things, especially about crypto and ease of use. We are all longing for a user-friendly way to secure both ourselves and our businesses.

The one place I think you may be off the mark is in thinking that Facebook and Google have won. The election vitriol has made many people either delete their FB accounts or at least get them off the phone, and that combined with the 3x embarrassment over incorrect metrics that FB had to admit this fall will cause advertisers to be more careful. And don't forget to add the "fake news" stuff to FB's woes. I feel a decline coming on.

Re: Bringing the Magic of Amazon AI and Alexa to Apps on AWS. - All Things Distributed

hardaway — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 20:03:43 -0000

So once again Amazon has started a business within the core business, made from things used by the core business, to provide tools for others. It's a misnomer to characterize Amazon as a "store"; it's a true technology company using the store as its big application. Thank you for writing this.

Re: Trump, Jobs & Tech

hardaway — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 21:57:37 -0000

And yes, almost no one I know would be part of the employment figures. However, my two foster kids, now adults, are part of those figures, working jobs that pay $10-15 an hour, require them to go to work at 3AM or stay up until 2 AM, and necessitate expensive child care services. Their jobs are not good for families, although they'd be considered employed. Every month I make up the $200 they lack to make rent, even though they are working their asses off. It makes me cry that I didn't bring them up to be drug dealers, which was where they were headed. "Going straight" has failed them

Re: Trump, Jobs & Tech

hardaway — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 21:53:23 -0000

Jason I see these people in my entrepreneurship classes, where they come as a last resort. They are already driving for Uber/Postmates/AmazonFlex after being laid off from a senior level IT job in a large corporation. They are not young, and they don't want more leisure time. They want to be able to pay the bills for the lifestyle they had. Uber, at least in Phoenix, works best for retirees or people who have a passion (acting, music, student, whatever) and drive as a side hustle. It doesn't support a family. A success in these peoples' eyes is a dependable 40 hour work week that allows them to pay bills and spend time with family. These people are aged out of working for FB, Google, etc; they are typically middle aged white guys and they pay $700-1000 a month for health insurance because they have pre-existing conditions.

Re: Understanding VCs

hardaway — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 13:46:19 -0000

This blog is a great example of native advertising, or branded content, or whatever. And so is Mark Suster's. Thank you for calling it out.

Re: Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward

hardaway — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 20:10:53 -0000

Joel, I have loved you since the day you sent me a thank you note for becoming a customer. Do what you must to survive. As an entrepreneur myself, I know what those layoffs feel like. You've been amazing, and I'm delighted that you are going to survive, as I would be lost without you.

Re: Stay N Faithful: What Do You do When You Stop Believing?

hardaway — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 14:08:57 -0000

Jesse, I am so impressed that you have had the courage to confess this. You are such an intelligent person that I thought you might come to this at some point, as many of my friends have. Myself, I'm an atheist. I find that it does not change the way I live my life one bit. I live a life of service, and no one has to tell me or threaten me to do it, I figured it out for myself: you get back from the universe what you put out into it. You can call it the Golden Rule, the laws of karma, whatever, but I understand this without a ceremony or a ritual.

In college, I read Joseph Campbell's "The Myth of the Birth of the Hero," and a poem of Robert Blake's where he says "All religions are one." If you ask me what I believe, that's what I'll tell you.

Re: Surfing the Internet of Things: Industry still sorting out complex network

hardaway — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 15:43:22 -0000

Yes, the Internet of Things is getting big, but Detroit-based Lochbridge is doing integrations for the IOT by first completing the work on the connected car. The first "thing" to be connected was and still is the car. The automotive industry has to move quickly to retain control of the user experience on the connected dashboard, lest Apple and Google wrest it away from them. . Lochbridge's work with OnStar was an early example of what you can do with IOT that could be lifesaving.

Re: No Agenda ListServ Thank You For Subscribing

hardaway — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 18:34:32 -0000

Here! ITM

Re: Knowing when, and how, to pivot (or, why didn’t news apps work?)

hardaway — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 14:50:04 -0000

I use Nuzzel, where I never used a news app before. Reason? Social proof. You're right; we get our news from social, not from "trusted curators."

Re: What Most People Don’t Understand About How Startup Companies are Valued

hardaway — Sun, 14 Feb 2016 12:34:58 -0000

As always, you've given us a very intelligent economics lesson. But in dealing with the economics, you're telling only part of the story. There's more, and it has to do with the nature of humans: because the Fed raised rates and probably should not have just yet, and many people think the rest of the world may go to negative interest rates shortly, lots of folks who've never been to Silicon Valley are scared. We're in a global economy, and people have just figured out that the Fed can no longer save us.

Entrepreneurs are naive and optimistic by temperament. And being in California makes that worse. Many of them started companies that were really pieces and parts of a true solution: for example, food delivery, food ingredient delivery, Postmates, etc. Uber, one of the only truly transformative companies, will eat the lunch (excuse the metaphor) of the food delivery companies soon.

I've never understood the tolerance of VCs for absent business models, and I guess with Twitter they lucked out,because the company went public before that became apparent, but Twitter's lack of a viable business model has now come to roost in the public markets. Very few of the unicorns bothered to go public (easy private money, fear of losing control), and now those decisions will live to haunt them. In the private markets, their largely illiquid stock will still tumble. That's what's happening now.

And then there are the duplicative companies :Evernote and Dropbox and the other cloud solution companies. In an up market, people take a risk of funding the second in a category, but when the shit starts to hit the fan -- and it has started in the external markets (crazy election year, stock market correction, China slowdown, Fed rates) everyone battens down the hatches. It only takes experience with human nature to understand that uncertainty of any kind makes people slow to invest.

Venture funded entrepreneurs live in a particular bubble of their own. They think money is easy to get (the got some) and the spigot should never turn off. They are like kids who think money grows on trees. And they don't realize that their own daddy can also run out of money, and hopefully is a good budgeter, which may mean no new toys for a while.

Accusing VCs, who are a pimple on the ass of global markets, of having any influence on those markets just shows how little basic knowledge of how the world works all these computer science majors have. I am going to argue for a more comprehensive education (including business classes, psychology, political science, economics, and many of the courses now denigrated as useless that teach us how human beings work) for entrepreneurs in the future.

This is the third cycle I've witnessed where the same damned thing has happened. In Arizona, where I live, it's not the tech cycle that moves like this, but the real estate cycle. But it's exactly the same: driven by greed until driven by fear.

Re: Chapter 9 of Follow the Geeks: Read it for free

hardaway — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 21:19:48 -0000

Sorry I just discovered this! What a great way to write/read a book.

Re: Why I Fucking Hate Unicorns and the Culture They Breed

hardaway — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 10:33:21 -0000

Oh, you are a wonderful writer and you must be a fabulous VC Mark. Your companies are lucky to have you as an investor.

Re: Why I've never run ads on Scripting News

hardaway — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 11:13:18 -0000

Oh, I love this. I have never run ads either. I wouldn't have put it as elegantly, but I don't do it because I have indirectly monetized my writing in much more helpful ways than with advertising. Coaching, for example. I think blogs were something special, and weren't meant to have ads. They were meant to share knowledge.