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I am fascinated by new industries, new business models, new combinations of old, new, and especially odd, and early-stage valuation techniques. This page is as much as resource for me as it is for you, dear visitor.

7/25/19: Best Cities for GamersBest (WalletHub.com, June 5, 2019). Globally, gaming is an over $130 billion industry. Arguably unsurprising with the number of ways there are to enjoy video games in the present day, from consoles by Nintendo, PlayStation and Microsoft to gaming PCs and mobile devices to simply watching others stream on a platform like Twitch or YouTube. And professional esports are projected to have more viewers in total than all professional sports leagues except the NFL by 2021. Read the full story and methodology at WalletHub.com.

7/11/19: We Asked, You Answered: The Top 10 Learning Hacks from edX Learners, blog.edx.org. In short, here they are:

bite-sized learning
seek out relevant content
discuss with other people
simplify and teach
regularity and repetition
find the right time
ask for help
real world practice
don't shy away from mistakes
take notes

Students: Based on my experiences, students don't discuss what they learn with other students (or other people)(3), don't schedule regular sessions to engage with their learning topics (5), find the right time (6), ask for help (7), "do" shy away from mistakes (9), and maybe "do" take notes, but not the right ones or in the right way (10). College students are or have been made to be extremely mistake averse (note I didn't say "risk averse") because their performance in virtually all academic contexts has been elevated to "high stakes," with the understanding that failure is not an option. [By the way, it should come as NO SURPRISE that students will cheat on assignments that are high-stakes (big impact on course grade) with information from previous years' assignments "readily" available (think Greek organization file cabinets).

Instructors: Tend not to deliver their topics in bite-sized learning segments (1), don't always couch their topics in accessible, relevant content (2), promote opportunities for students to discuss with each other (3), simplify (4), and relate to real world practice (8). Hey instructors, if you can't offer relevant content and examples with your topic, this might be a sign that you don't understand your topic very well. And instructors shouldn't be surprised that their students don't understand the topic very well if they haven't encouraged students to discuss it in class. Teach them the topic (or parts of it) in 5 to 7-minute overviews, give them in-class team projects that draw from real world situations to let them "play" with the topic, and then ask them to report to the rest of the class (in a no- or low-pressure scoring environment).

7/1/19: ISTE 2019: Where does computational thinking fit in curriculum? Everywhere. Teaching computational thinking skills doesn't have to come at the expense of well-rounded educations. They can be applied to and found in a number of real-world situations, from music to engineering. Computational thinking is IMHO an absolutely required skill for this century. For everything. It's not so much "computer programming;" it's more like breaking problems into parts, discovering/observing patterns or trends, developing steps to complete a task, and abstracting trends, rules, and observations into generalized rules. That's an entrepreneurial thinker.

6/4/19: How early-stage VCs decide where to invest Wired.com. VCs use various qualitative and high-level quantitative heuristics to evaluate the prospects for an investment. And they generally fall into three categories: people, product, and market (and if you've read any of Marc Andreessen's insights on this topic, you'll know that market is the most important).

5/30/19: Unsafe Notes, AVC.com. Fred Wilson REALLY DOESN'T LIKE SAFE NOTES FOR FOUNDERS! You can get around some of the problems Fred points out by applying a discount (Fred - gasp! - says a 25% discount is OK for your F&F investors) and a cap. The bigger picture is that it's really difficult to apply quantitative rules-of-thumb to early-stage startup valuation. In my New Venture Finance classes we learn how to use multiple techniques to triangulate or even "quadrangulate" early-stage valuations and then incorporate our "gut feelings" into the accuracy of a final estimate. It's a bit sloppy, but you have to do it to be able to negotiate. It's important to have a sense of how much your new venture is worth at any time and to understand how much value achieving any particular milestone will be contribute to your venture's overall worth.

5/3/19: The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program, Vox.com, 5/3/19 - Wow. No mention of the fact that the inspiration for Amazon Prime came from an employee who admired the Costco membership model. You can look it up.