A patent lawsuit can be a deathblow to a startup – whether a patent troll or legitimate issue to be adjudicated, the cost is not only crippling but the uncertainty of outcome makes their business nearly unfundable to outside investors. Ditto finds themselves subject to two lawsuits – one is clearly a patent troll, the other more complex – but whether they’re in the right or not, it puts them in a very tough position. That’s why they’ve taken to Indiegogo to crowdfund help.

Tech conferences aren’t about the content, it’s about the conversation. The conversations in the lobby, the hallways, over meals, across seats. The ability to connect with large numbers of people in an informal setting away from the office. In fact, the personal contact is so good that people travel long distances, mainly by airplane, to get a seat: San Francisco, New York, Austin, Paris, London, Hawaii and beyond. If you attend a few of these you’re sure to grow your network and influence. And you know what else? YOU’RE DESTROYING THE WORLD VIA INCREASED CARBON EMISSIONS.

One roundtrip flight from NYC to SF or Europe creates warming effects of roughly 3 tons of carbon emissions per person. Oh, that’s just the equivalent of 10,000 miles driven in a car. No biggie…

So all these folks tweeting about a greener planet and installing Nest thermostats, there’s one thing you could do that might really make a difference: stop flying as much. Seriously, I know that every event is so important  that in the moment it seems like a great idea to attend but you’re creating a shittier world for my daughter. Since I go to some of these myself i guess I’m part of the problem. Besides trying to cut down on unnecessary plane travel, here’s what I’d suggest:

Conference Organized Should Bake Carbon Offset Into the Ticket Price
Carbon offsets are a market-based solution where you can seek to reduce your carbon footprint not by changing your behavior, but by paying to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. Most of the big tech conferences are pretty inelastic because many attendees are affluent or expensing their tickets. Toss another $100 in there. No one will care.

AllThingsD, TechCrunch, GigaOM, f.ounders, LeWeb, The Lobby, TED, and so on… you game?

I’m a nice guy, right? I generally root for people to succeed, even in situations when I’m skeptical of their plans. And a pat on the back – of encouragement, or a job well done – I know that matters. But I’m sorry, I can’t do it any more. The “congrats” tweets. They need to stop. Often, especially after a tech news event, my Twitter feed is filled with these meaningless kudos. Man, I sound like Gabe Rivera, but hear me out. This isn’t about some cold, hard stoicism where we’re all locked in some mortal confrontation and praise equals weakness. No, rather it’s about three simple types of sin – THE FAUXGRATS

The SuckUp Congrats (“@dickc congrats man, you totally nailed the commencement speech”)
Here someone tries to curry favor and attach themselves to a notable figure via public supplicancy. SuckUp pile ons often occur.

The Humblebrag Congrats (“Zuck congrats on 1B users. Man, I remember 07 when we hit 100m #GoodTimes)

The Undeserved Congrats (“Congrats [company which essentially just went out of business] ! Excited for the next adventure!”)
Hey guess what, I showered this morning. Congratulate me?

Let’s embark together on a Congrats 12 Step Program. First, admit you have a problem. If you go back through my Twitter archives I’m probably guilty of all three. But not recently. You see, I now stop myself if the congrats is meant to aggrandize myself alongside the recipient. And then even if it’s pure, I’ll send an email or post to their Facebook wall. Keep it quiet. On the down low.

Congrats, you made it to the end of this post.

Speaking today at a Wired conference in NYC, WarbyParker cofounder Neil Blumenthal prophesied that “you won’t be able to hire talented people over the next 10 years unless you’re a mission-driven company.” I think he’s right. Some entrepreneurs think “mission-driven” means taking an Uber to a bar at 19th & Valencia, but in actuality it’s what binds teams together during both fruitful and challenging times. 

Is there a market in reverse engineering cookies in order to present a false identity to a website? Ecommerce sites routinely provide various discounts, and potentially even variable pricing, to individuals based on behavioral analysis. For example, if a site sees you visited six times, browsed, but did not purchase, perhaps they’ll pop up a “$10 off today” coupon.

If you go to just about any social website and search for user “hunter walk,” there’s a reasonable chance you’ll find me. It just always seemed easiest to employ my real name and its uniqueness meant it was often available. Any site I register with would also see it’s the name in my email address and that my identity corresponded to a number of other sites where there exists proxy data suggesting I’m a good egg (eg in good standing on LinkedIn). So basically I should be trusted on any new site since it’s a very low probability that I’m a fraudster, at least if past behavior is indicative of future. So why does each site start off not knowing a thing about me?

I’m not talking about a Facebook-style federated identify but wondering if there’s a “Username Analysis as a Service” component to fraud prevention, or at least asshole detection. Can a username be valuable in predictive analysis about behavior? For example, do users who purposefully misspell words in their screen name behave better or worse? Are nonsense usernames more likely to be spammers? Can someone who seemingly uses a real name (“Hunter Walk,” “Larry Goodstein,” etc) be trusted because they’re using their name, even though the system doesn’t require it?

Cursory Google search didn’t turn up any academic research on this. Can anyone point me to relevant studies?

In the last 48 hours I’ve seen funding solicitations for the following “Pre-A” financings: Advisory Round, Friends & Family, Seed Alpha, Seed Plus, Seed, Accelerator Round, Traction Round. And I’m probably forgetting a few. Boy we’re getting creative in our fundraising narratives…

On one hand it doesn’t really matter, who cares what it’s called – any smart investor is going to look at real metrics of traction and cap table. You can’t fake the numbers. If your startup is raising its third financing to explore yet another pivot, I know it smells, no matter what fancy name you invent.

But at the same time it bothers me a bit – it’s funding kabuki – and I can’t help but see it as a negative signal for where energy is being focused. Making decks, naming rounds.

What if we standardized on funding like the convention of software releases? Round 1.0, Round 2.0, etc. Each advance in version number represents a change in financing terms. A point release (eg R1.1) suggests more money raised at the same – or substantially similar – terms.

Nah, will never happen. Pardon me, I need to review a deck for someone’s Superhero Beta Round.

I’ve identified three companies each worth north of $50B who should be fighting over ownership of Foursquare. Apple, Facebook and Google? Nope. Visa ($110B), Mastercard ($66B) and American Express ($75B).

Your credit card company has a tremendous amount of data on where you, and the world, shops. Not purchases at the SKU level – they largely don’t know what you bought at West Elm or Cheesecake Factory – but they do know that you spend $350 at a furniture store and $75 at a casual food chain. Now extrapolate this over millions of customers. Using covisitation data they could recommend to me other establishments visited by folks with similar spending patterns. “Hunter, because you enjoy West Elm you might also like SF Modern Design located at 1000 State St.” This would be especially helpful when traveling.

But none of these credit card companies are (a) skilled at building consumer facing applications, (b) upstream of purchase decisions and (c) have place level data for retail establishments. Oh but wait, Foursquare has all of those. By combining with Foursquare, the credit card companies could finally justify and preserve their transaction fees (in the face of competition from other payment options) but working to drive demand to the local retailers. Today they do this in very non-scalable ways such as one-off marketing programs such as AmEx Small Business week.

To take it a step further, this would also give a credit card company the ability power loyalty programs at the retailer level using Foursquare check-ins combined with verified purchases to close the discoverytransaction loop.

Is that a Foursquare-powered credit card in your pocket or is your app just happy to see me?

[When buzzing about this on Twitter, Rakesh Agrawal pointed me to a 2012 article where he feels similarly]

The iOS app store will pass $20b annual runrate this year and yet app discovery is still terribly suboptimal. At first I thought it was merely product limitations that Apple would aggressively move to solve – better search, social discovery, improved ratings system. Then I claimed conspiracy theory – that Apple likes having editorial control and thus the ability to play kingmaker via the featured section. Now I’m thinking something else – something that Jobs might have rejected but could provide billions in high margin ad revenues to Apple: native advertising in the form of promoted apps.