I’m going to try something new this week. I’ve been admiring emails by Om Malik, Alexis Madrigal, and Caitlin Dewey, who send daily or weekly lists of links to interesting things to read. (You should sign up for their newsletters — all three are wonderful, in very different ways.)
And my occasional emails have felt a little self centered. I write just a handful of posts every week, after all. And yet each week I come across a lot of wonderful things I’d like to share: great stories written by the VentureBeat team, things I saved to Instapaper, long reads on Medium, links I tweeted, and more.
So I’d like to try sending you a few interesting links in each of my weekly emails. Just a few: I’ll keep it short and limit it to high-quality things you might actually enjoy reading.
The focus will reflect my day job — lots of business technology news — but I might start including some things off that path too. And I will continue to include links to my weekly columns.
Let me know what you think!
Dylan.
Hillary’s Email [Medium]
A minor scandal erupted last week about Hillary Clinton using a personal email server, instead of the official State Department email, for her entire term as Secretary of State. Here’s a really smart take on that. “It’s probably the case that if Hillary Clinton was focusing solely on security, using her personal email with 2 Factor Authentication was probably way *more* secure than using the honeypot mess of IT that is the State Department’s email servers.”
The Year We Broke the Internet [Esquire]
News, or “newsiness”? “We in the media have been struggling for twenty years to solve that riddle, and this year, the answer arrived: Big Viral, a Lovecraftian nightmare that has tightened its thousand-tentacled grip on our browsing habits with its traffic-at-all-costs mentality—veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned.
Much Ventured, Much Gained [Foreign Affairs]
A rare interview with Michael Moritz, one of the most successful VCs in history. “Clarity of thought. The ability to communicate clearly. A great sense of mission. A massive willingness to persevere. A willingness to make painful decisions. Extraordinary energy. And a belief that he or she has embarked on their life’s work. Those are the hallmarks of the truly wonderful entrepreneurs behind the handful of fantastic companies.”
In this episode of VentureBeat’s weekly podcast, Jordan Novet and I do our best to cover for our almost complete ignorance regarding the NCAA in order to have what turns out to be a really interesting conversation with Nik Bonaddio, the founder of NumberFire.
The first thing you notice when you walk in the front door of Hero City is a gleaming, black Tesla. Except the Tesla has been cut in half, lengthwise, and converted into a reception desk.
The second thing you notice is that, underneath the sweeping, high ceiling, in front of the grand staircase up to the second floor, dozens of desks are arrayed, about half of them empty, the other half with young entrepreneurs hunched over laptops, typing away, working on their plans to change the world.
Then — over there on the wall to the right: a giant mural. Two stories high and probably fifty feet wide, it covers one entire side of this giant room. Painted in comic-book style — by DC Comics artist Jim Lee — it features Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Robin. Robin is saying “Holy amazing opportunity, Batman!” Wonder Woman, who is standing next to a group of professionals (a lab coat-wearing doctor, a tie-wearing office worker, and a hard hat-wearing construction manager) is saying “Unleash the Heroes!”
And next to Robin stands a 15-foot-high cartoon portrait of Hero City founder, third-generation venture capitalist, and political gadfly Timothy C. Draper, ripping open his standard-issue VC blue dress shirt to reveal an orange superhero leotard with a Draper logo on it.
Draper, you suddenly realize, kind of looks like Superman — in the portrait as in real life. And damned if he isn’t making the very most of that resemblance.
continue reading: Welcome to Hero City, land of opportunity — and heroic levels of hype
