The thought for a long time was that banks needed to be too controlled, too regulated to be turned over to the Wild West of the Net. Then the credit meltdown hit, and we saw just how reckless these so-called safe and regulated institutions were.
My husband and I own half a dozen iPods, a Mac desktop, and four Mac laptops. We're clearly fans of Mr. Jobs' work.
Everything about Mark Zuckerberg is pure hacker. Hackers don't take realities of the world for granted; they seek to break and rebuild what they don't like. They seek to outsmart the world.
Dying venture firms are like the walking dead. They can have years of staggering around with stakes in still active portfolio companies, hoping they're still holding a lottery ticket that could put them back in the game. If not, they just slowly wind down.
As smartphones have allowed us to have our computers, emails, social media feeds, and a full surveillance system in our pockets at all times, stories of the law enforcement's unease with that have been popping up in the press. And of course, the ones that become viral videos aren't exactly flattering for law enforcement.
Lesson to would-be fame seekers: It's not really a new world when it comes to celebrity. There are no shortcuts. It's still talent, perseverance and hard work. Even the speed and reach of the Net can't create lasting value and income overnight.
I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I'm a business reporter - that's what I do and what I enjoy - and I don't know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.
Get a lawyer to look at your contract or beware. Because no company - evil or not - is going to do it for you.
The biggest barrier to starting a company isn't ideas, funding or experience. It's excuses.
It's happening: Lou Dobbs' dream come true and Silicon Valley's worst nightmare. We're already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their U.S. educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.
Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.
The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.
You know what works in venture capital? A group of incredibly smart, connected people who have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to make multi-million dollar bets on unproven ideas and inexperienced founders. People who can make decisions quickly, and who spend their time trying to help entrepreneurs make the most of that cash.
When a PR person asks why is it a big deal that they got your name wrong or sent you a pitch on something you would never cover, it's because when you get hundreds of those a day, it's incredibly annoying. It's basically like having telemarketers call you all day long for something you never want to buy.
It's a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
The one thing I didn't do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn't like that kind of journalism, and I'm glad I didn't because that's the business model that's going totally extinct.
As I've written before, China's ability to be the assembly line to the world wasn't where its role in the global economy ended; it was where it began. An ability to make products cheaper than anywhere else gave way to an ability to make high end products more nimbly than anywhere else.
One of the nice things about being a private company is operating without the intensity of public glare. It's hard to grow a company under a microscope of constant second guessing.
If Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand something, it's not defeat. It's not even something he has to accept. It's merely a challenge he needs to engineer his way out of, and that includes human emotions and relationships.
