Author Archives: Ron

Today we are announcing the launch of the Startup Genome Compass, a web application designed to aid startups in assessing their performance and benchmark themselves against firms with similar properties.In addition to the introduction of the Startup Genome Compass, we are releasing a second report that goes deeper into analysis of startups; mainly the implications […]

My facebook feed was filled today with links to a post by Tim O'Reilly which itself references this post by John Robb. John theorizes that centralized planning is to be blamed for the recent hurdles the US Economy is facing. The summary of John's hypothesis is as following: The USSR failed because of central economic decision […]

Over the last three months or so I had the pleasure of working with the talented team of blackbox.vc (http://blackbox.vc/) on the startup genome project (SG). The goal of the project is extremely ambitious - to map, model and analyze what makes startups tick, what helps them succeed and why many of them fail. We are […]

There's a lot of buzz lately around Silicon Valley about angel investors, startup accelerators, crowdfunding, business model development and much more. A typical claim is that the VC business model is broken. Another one is that VCs have just not adjusted to the modern needs of their companies. As I am not in the valley, […]

It is a well known fact (or at least strong belief) that most people make very wrong choices with respect to buying insurance products. The majority of people over-insure, that is, pay much more than they should, or just neglect to purchase insurance altogether. This post turned out to be a bit long and somewhat […]

Roughly a month ago I had a lovely brunch with two friends, both currently in the online advertising industry.Our chat touched on many topics, from crazy Halloween parties to China's media agency. If you ask yourself "Huh?", the answer is Yes - they are connected in some twisted way. We finally resolved to talking about […]