1) Good reminder that in advertising, amateurs discuss targeting while professionals discuss attribution. A 10 year trend to multi-touch attribution may be ending and a trend back to last-click could begin. Significant implications. 2) I wonder if…

1) US regulatory focus in megacap tech is hilariously misplaced. Broken record, but just so absurd. The “privacy” focus is the best PR jujitsu I’ve seen in a long time. “Apple offers detailed information to anyone signing up to its ads service” while…

“My deepest forecasting belief is that you can better understand the future if you focus on the behaviors that never change instead of the events that might. And those behaviors have a common denominator:” 2) “They follow the path of least resistance…

1) Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” is a great poem and love to see it indirectly referenced in a sell side strategy note. From MS’s Mike Wilson: “We think the mid-cycle transition will end with the rolling correction finally hitting the S&P 500…” 2)…

1) “This is about: What is any individual's or entity's vulnerability to the jurisdiction of an autocracy? Because what we see overwhelmingly is people who end up stealing intellectual property, very often, they have no desire to be stealing…

1) Being flexible and open minded might be the most important quality for an investor. No matter how much “work” one has done or knowledge one has, still a roughly 50% chance of being wrong (at least that’s my base rate). Am actually quite curious to…

1) The expert network transcript services applied to private companies - i.e. venture capital - along with the broad extension of alternative data to VC are having one of the biggest structural impacts on this market I've seen. 2) The combination is…

1) If you are an executive at a company that is hoping to go public via SPAC, the merger has been announced and the SPAC is trading under $10.35, the time to renegotiate (lower your valuation) or make alternate financing plans is now. Especially if…

1) This was a very interesting take. Trying to redirect entrepreneurial and investor energy away FROM rent seeking large internet companies benefitting from network effects TOWARDS "hard tech." Crackdown on property mgmt co's this AM in-line with…

1) My operating hypothesis has been that public cloud would run the overwhelming majority of workloads ever since I heard Eric Schmidt describe what he called “Utility Computing” circa 2010 and then went on to attend my first Reinvent conference a…

1) “Fate, it would seem, is not without a sense of irony.” - Morpheus in “The Matrix” ATT leading to iOS share loss to Android b/c developers start making more money on Android than iOS and prioritizing accordingly would be quite ironic. Unlikely,…

1) Celebrating the launch day for “The Empire’s Ruin” with @BrianStaveley. His best seller to date was “The Emperor’s Blades” which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 12 languages. Hoping this one does even better. 🥂 2) Gwenna Sharpe is a…

1) For whatever reason, I am often asked what I think about various space related startups, especially rocket co’s. This fact is central to my thinking. Starship will enable many new space related industries while making life nearly impossible for…

1) Great charts from @alexdbauer on IOS 14.5+ adoption. Any impact from ATT would have begun in late June. Curious to see how this all plays out. Hilarious that attribution post dual-sided consent has gone up by 27% for Apple Search Ads and down…

1) The irony of today's VC kerfuffle is that Benchmark is one of the firms who is the *least* impacted by the current environment and changes therein. Vanilla growth equity firms will be most impacted while dominant, brand name series A investors…

1) Reasonably confident that almost every venture capital and growth equity firm will have a media property like this in the future. A public presence is increasingly important for deal flow and deal capture. Also - good essay from…

1) LinkedIn feels antiquated and ripe for disruption. Sales Navigator and the flood of absurd InMail’s are an active disincentive to engagement. i.e. LinkedIn clearly believes I am a “Chief Information Officer” so I am constantly targeted with IT…

1) More great stuff from the @ft. This time on superb investors returning external capital. Profoundly believe that peak performance years for a good investor are age 50-70, but many choose to only run their own money during these…

1) Not looking great for grocery delivery in the next 12-18 months using the Marathon capital cycle framework - i.e. logic - but if 1-2 scaled players with good unit economics emerge then the competitive dynamics in e-Commerce will really…

1) The outcomes speak for themselves - closest modern equivalent to the “Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville.” Fascinated to learn that a psychologist, Aaron Stern, became the COO and developed a 450 question interview…