Disruption: David Pakman's Blog

Lots of debate, lately, about Big Media and their bumpy transitions from analog incumbents to digital providers. Over the past few weeks we have had debates around the proposed PIPA and SOPA legislation, Rupert Murdoch (that bastion of new media savvy) railing against Google as a “pirate” and @fredwilson chiming in on the predictable monopoly [...]

Marissa and I are pleased to discuss our latest investment (and our first one as a team). We are excited to join with fellow firms Kleiner Perkins and IVP in investing in the internet’s standard for measuring influence, Klout. As the internet moves from pages to people, Joe Fernandez‘s vision of the need for “Pagerank [...]

The following is a guest post by my partner, Bryan Roberts. (@brobertsvc) He is one of those legendary VCs who, at about my same age, has invested in many of the most spectacular healthcare companies created over the past decade. He has been the highest-ranking healthcare investor on the Forbes Midas List since 2008. He is [...]

Much of the excitement around internet startups over the last five years has been around social services. From Facebook to Foursquare, from Twitter to Instagram, from Yammer to Zynga, significant investment dollars and entrepreneurial effort has gone towards capitalizing on the fact that we are all linked together by connected devices. These connections present great [...]

On the Saturday night before Father’s Day, I called my three kids together and asked them if they’d like to earn an extra five dollars. My wife and I were having a dinner party at our home that evening, and if they agreed to take baths/showers themselves, put on their jammies, brush teeth and settle [...]

In the job of venture capital, one of the greatest moments I have found is hearing an entrepreneur present a truly transformative idea. We hear exciting ideas all day long, expressed with passion and unwavering belief. But a few times a year, perhaps, I have been lucky enough to hear an idea that is unquestionably [...]

This post will sound terribly self-serving: a VC calling for more IPOs. But hear me out. The massive contraction of IPOs in the tech markets has not just hurt VCs, it has deprived citizens from participating in the largest wealth creation opportunities currently available to us. We know wealth creation in this country is largely [...]

The web is now social. While thousands of sites today have added social features, eventually, every web experience (PC and mobile) will be social in nature, meaning you will participate in some way to make the content more personal and relevant to you and your connected friends and networks. Today we certainly share updates, links [...]

I am fascinated by Xtranormal. This company is pioneering one of the most remarkable trends in peer production: social entertainment. Xtranormal is service that allows anyone to create an animated short. You chose the characters and the setting from a limited selection of scenes, and then you write the dialog. The company renders your text [...]

At least once or twice a semester, I make certain to visit a university and guest lecture in a class or two. I prefer speaking to engineering students, but end up speaking at business schools quite a bit too. I have taught in several “engineering entrepreneurship” classes, many marketing classes and a few digital media [...]