By insisting the issue with Uber was largely cultural, Swisher ends up affirming the myth that Uber was not only an inevitable but ultimately good innovation, a few bad apples notwithstanding.

If you’re VC funded, then you “need” to spend the money you raised in 18–24 months, and grow 3–5X in that time, which means a base rate of 10+% MoM

Revenue multiples are how much VCs, investors, and ultimately, an IPO and public markets will value each dollar of revenue

how much of a return your company can generate for investors when all three factors align as hoped

The #1 company-killer is lack of market. Andy puts it this way: When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly. This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail.

In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup

We’ve certainly dabbled in the debate of “what is a tech company” but what we never addressed was why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company.

The lessons of Twitter and Facebook, other Internet-scale basic service layers that most of us use, are instructive here. After the honeymoon period is over, and disruptive returns need to be generated to pay off limited partners or satisfy public shareholders, the tensions that these monetization efforts create ultimately seem to separate the motivations of management from those of users and the broader ecosystem. How will Rap Genius–and Marc Andreessen–navigate these questions?

Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance.

What are the risks in assuming that we start from a place of shared values and goals?

When VC firms prize time on site over truth, a lucky few may profit, but civil society suffers.

AI will be the new mobile. Investors will ask management what their “AI strategy” is before investing and will be wary of companies that don’t have one.

I'm talking about optimizing the economy for the velocity of money rather than for the conversion of money into capital. It's going from a growth model to a flow model. Why are we, for instance, taxing capital gains at almost nothing but taxing dividends and earnings so high? That's a tax policy that is meant to favor the extraction of capital and to punish the exchange of things.