Disruption: David Pakman's Blog

Last week’s announcement by the Justice Department that they are suing Apple and several of the world’s biggest book publishers for conspiring to keep eBook prices high generated plenty of media coverage. One challenge in wading through this coverage is that most of it tends to be written by…journalists. And some journalists are also authors. [...]

I was completely psyched by Spotify’s announcement of their new play button to embed legal, licensed music into web pages. The web has needed this for far too long, and this is the missing step to enable Spotify to become the universal music platform on the web, allowing us to share songs with each other [...]

The following is a guest post by my partner Brian Ascher in our Palo Alto office. He blogs at VC Waves where this originally appeared. This set of thinking drives many of our investment decisions. If you are not one of these models, you should be. Network Effects are magical.  They are the pixie dust [...]

This post originally appear on NASDAQ on Tumblr. So, you have received a term sheet from a VC to fund your financing round. But you aren’t comfortable with the valuation. So, how do you negotiate? Here are a few pointers: 1) The first is to understand the VC firm’s philosophy on price and term sheets. [...]

My friend and former colleague Greg Scholl sent me an article this week and a provocative quote jumped out of it. Here is the view of Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of one the largest global advertising agencies on the planet, as he shared his view on this year’s CES. Given last week’s SOPA/PIPA debate, I thought Mr. Gotlieb’s [...]

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 [...]

During last ten years of the web, people have focused on scale as proof of value creation. Given that advertising is the dominant business model of the web, it has been presumed that sites which reach web-wide scale are valuable. The presumption was that sites with enormous scale will be able to monetize themselves at [...]

I woke up this morning with a pleasant, warm feeling in my gut about how thankful I am for all the people around me in my life. In particular, I was thinking about the smart, inspiring people with whom I am lucky enough to interact most days. So much of who I am and what [...]