Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Until recently, $300 million was the highest valuation that digital media companies aspired to. That’s around the price AOL paid for the Huffington Post. Subtract $100 million, and you’re in the ballpark of what NBC Universal paid for Daily Candy and what Turner paid for Bleacher Report. The latest class of digital media companies is…
In 2006, Condé Nast, the New York-based publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, among other magazines, bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit. At the time, social media was just taking off and big media conglomerates were scrambling for a piece of the action. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had recently outfoxed Sumner…
There will tweets. There will be liveblogs. There will be thinkpieces. It’s the GOP debate tonight—and everyone on the Internet will have a whole lot to say. One more way to weigh in: The Washington Post is inviting anyone on the Internet to annotate the numbers, the zingers, the truths, and the lies that make their…
Uber, Silicon Valley’s prized amoral unicorn, is presumed to be a financial titan and a sure-thing IPO in the near future. Which may be true. But one thing that’s frequently missing from the conversation about its inevitable dominance over virtually every facet of our lives is the answer to a fundamental question: Does it make…
The dream of the highbrow internet is dead. This week, the viral aggregator ViralNova was acquired for $100 million dollars. Meanwhile, the Pitchfork spin-off film criticism site The Dissolve ceased operations with an internet_meaningful blogpost entitled “The End.” The divergence between the missions and lifecycles of these two media projects that both launched in 2013…
New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has lost round one against Uber. After locking horns with Uber, De Blasio has backed down from his plan to cap Uber’s growth in New York. Under a new agreement, the city will conduct a four month study on the environmental effects of on-demand car services rather than limiting the number of…
The worst of Silicon Valley is the same, just flipped over and dipped into darkness. Listen, can you hear it? It is the sound of some other company as it hockey-sticks across graphs. It is a rags-to-riches story of a group of hardworking dreamers. It is one elite list after another, ranking everything from creativity…
We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business schools are choosing startup life over Wall Street….
Charlie Hales, the mayor of Portland, Ore., was running a zoning hearing last December when he missed a call on his cell from David Plouffe, the campaign mastermind behind Barack Obama’s ascent. Although Hales had never met him, Plouffe left a voice mail that had an air of charming familiarity, reminiscing about the 2008 rally…
We asked for your nightmare tales of startup employment. Did you ever deliver—sending narratives of woe, scams, drugs, psychotic managers, drinking at your desk and more hookers than a venture capitalist could handle. The One With All the Drugs and Douches K writes: I moved to Silicon Valley as a youthful, totally oblivious woman. I’d…