Build your own (site-specific) social graph

Facebook‘s success in building out the social graph is exciting and scary at the same time. Exciting as it has turned social into one of the key growth drivers of the web, scary as one company seems to control the “social infrastructure” that we all want to build companies on. I am pretty sure that […]

Building a company on top of an existing platform – yes, no, maybe?

There has been a lot of chatter about platforms as of late and their moves have mostly been to the detriment of platform developers (Facebook forcing Zynga to use their credit system; Twitter banning third-party apps from inserting in-stream ads or Apple changing their developer agreement to ban use of third-party analytics and services). As […]

Why New York will challenge the Valley for Consumer Internet supremacy

I am spending the month of May working with Albert Wenger out of the Union Square Ventures offices and had the chance to dive deep into the New York Consumer Internet scene in the past few weeks. What I am seeing leads me to believe that this city is developing into a serious challenger of […]

Thoughts on the “studio-ization” of the application business

2 years after its launch the Facebook platform can almost be considered mature and the new belle in application town is Twitter (with apparently already over 11K applications). Due to the very low barriers to entry both platforms have become very crowded in a short period of time so it is time to ask the […]

Thoughts on current opportunities in consumer Internet

After I got asked twice yesterday about where I currently saw opportunities in the consumer Internet space so it felt like good timing to sum up my thoughts on this topic in a quick blog post. Here are the 3 areas that I find the most interesting for the moment: Better targeting and increased accountability […]