• It’s not just the GOP who misunderstands Section 230

    Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been rightfully called “the twenty-six words that created the Internet.” It is a valuable legal shield which allows internet hosts and platforms the ability to distribute user-generated content and practice moderation without unreasonable fear of being sued, something which forms the basis of all social media, user […]

  • It’s Even Easier Now to Set up Let’s Encrypt on WordPress with AWS Lightsail

    Amazon’s Lightsail service has made it remarkably cheap and simple for people hosting webpages (including this blog) and simple web applications to get access to high quality virtual private servers (VPS). Beyond the ability to do really stupid things with your VPS powers, my only real complaint with the experience thus far has been that […]

  • Is Gamestop a Win for the Little Guy?

    If you’ve been exposed to any financial news in the last few days, you’ll have heard of Gamestop, the mostly brick and mortar video gaming retailer who’s stock has been caught between many retail investors on the subreddit r/WallstreetBets and hedge fund Melvin Capital which had been actively betting against the company. The resulting short […]

  • Mea Culpa

    Mea culpa. I’ve been a big fan of moving my personal page over to AWS Lightsail. But, if I had one complaint, it’s the dangerous combination of (1) their pre-packaged WordPress image being hard to upgrade software on and (2) the training-wheel-lacking full root access that Lightsail gives to its customers. That combination led me […]

  • Visualizing How Market Volatility Impacts Risk and Returns

    2020 has seen the greatest market volatility in history for American stocks. The roller-coaster ride investors have experienced over the last 6 months included a steep ~33% single-month drop followed by a four-month bull market run taking the S&P500 back roughly to where it started. While not usually so dramatic, volatility is a fact of life for investors. […]

  • What I’ve Changed My Mind on Over the 2010s

    I’ve been reading a lot of year-end/decade-end reflections (as one does this time of year) — and while a part of me wanted to #humblebrag about how I got a 🏠/💍/👶🏻 this decade 😇 — I thought it would be more interesting & profound to instead call out 10 worldviews & beliefs I had going into the 2010s […]

  • Calculating the Financial Returns to College

    Despite the recent spotlight on the staggering $1.5 trillion in student debt that 44 million Americans owe in 2019, there has been surprisingly little discussion on how to measure the value of a college education relative to its rapidly growing price tag (which is the reason so many take on debt to pay for it). While it’s impossible […]

  • Lyft vs Uber: A Tale of Two S-1’s

    You can learn a great deal from reading and comparing the financial filings of two close competitors. Tech-finance nerd that I am, you can imagine how excited I was to see Lyft’s and Uber’s respective S-1’s become public within mere weeks of each other. While the general financial press has covered a lot of the top-level figures on profitability (or lack thereof) and […]

  • How to Regulate Big Tech

    There’s been a fair amount of talk lately about proactively regulating — and maybe even breaking up — the “Big Tech” companies. Full disclosure: this post discusses regulating large tech companies. I own shares in several of these both directly (in the case of Facebook and Microsoft) and indirectly (through ETFs that own stakes in […]

  • Why Tech Success Doesn’t Translate to Deeptech

    Having been lucky enough to invest in both tech (cloud, mobile, software) and “deeptech” (materials, cleantech, energy, life science) startups (and having also ran product at a mobile app startup), it has been striking to see how fundamentally different the paradigms that drive success in each are. Whether knowingly or not, most successful tech startups over […]