Above the Crowd

[Note: Update to this post, posted 2/22/09] A few weeks back, a friend mentioned an idea he had heard suggesting that the government consider entering the VC (venture capital) business as part of the overall stimulus plan.  Specifically, the argument was made for the government to provide excess venture capital funding to the green sector.  At first, I assumed this was just one individual’s idea, but the noise level has risen to the point where it is reasonable to assume there is a group pushing or lobbying for this outcome.  Last week, Thomas Friedman jumped on the bandwagon in a New York Times article titled Open Door Bailout .  Friedman […]

Yesterday I met with a cool company named  Slide Rocket  that has a very slick product.  Based on Adobe Flex , SlideRocket has built a web based PowerPoint alternative that some equate more to Apple’s Keynote (plus it has collaboration built in).  One reviewer even said : “The entire interface is, dare I say it, gorgeous. It’s slick, smooth, gentle on the eyes, and all Flash based so everything works as soon as you want it to. If anything, it actually seems to work better than PowerPoint offline.”   Clayton Christensen’s big “aha” in Innovator’s Dilemma is that eventually a product will become over-featured and as a result feature growth will […]

Prominent finance publications like the WSJ and the Motley Fool along with  several bloggers have recently taken shots at Google with respect to their decision to re-price a boat-load of employee stock options.  Just to review the details, in their last earnings call google management stated that they would offer all employees with options that have strike prices above the current price the ability to trade in those options for new ones with a lower strike price.  This affects about 3% of the shares outstanding, and resulted in a one time charge of almost half a billion dollars.  The journalist that take issue with this suggest that shareholders […]