Unsolicited Advice

A Thought on My 29th Birthday

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 16, 2012 / 1 Comment

This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease. - Robert F. Kennedy Last year I...
Zuck’s Sweatshirt

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 15, 2012 / 1 Comment

Mark Zuckerberg goes on TV to ring the bell in 5 days and the big question is, will he be wearing his Sweatshirt or will he put on a suit jacket? I’m not planning to invest in Facebook, but if I were, I would be hoping he sticks to his...
Vivisimo Shows You Don’t Have to Sell Fast

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 30, 2012 / Leave a comment

Thanks to the Instagram sale there’s another frenzy of articles and people who want to talk about how VC/Seed funded startups “work”. They want to tell you that startups come up with a good idea, prototype, get funded, create massive growth, and then sell… just like that. This worked for...
Twitter and Patents

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 18, 2012 / Leave a comment

I, like many of the innovative people in the startup world, am very uncomfortable with the way patents are being used today. Market economies succeed because c competition based on usefulness and price. Today, instead of trying to innovate in ways that will increase usefulness or decrease price, too many...
Life’s Risky Business

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 17, 2012 / Leave a comment

I’m doing some work with banks lately and it always impresses me the size and importance of their risk departments. They study counter-party risk (the risk someone you’re doing business will fail), credit risk (the risk that someone won’t be able to pay due to other obligations), market risk (the...
Sometimes It’s Supposed to be Tough

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 5, 2012 / Leave a comment

Note: Did you really expect anything besides a sports analogy today? In sports or in business, winning is why we play the game. It’s for the rush of that moment when we slay our fiercest opponent and get to toast our victory. The thing people talk about less in sports...
The Truth Behind Amazon EC2′s April Fools

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 2, 2012 / Leave a comment

Let’s face it. Sometimes you just need a local server. Perhaps your office is too cold, or you have the urge to pull the cover off and reseat the memory. Or, you might have some data on floppy disks that you simply cannot live without. Because we will leave no...
Focus is an Investment

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ March 26, 2012 / Leave a comment

I was looking at the picture above (which I found on Seth Godin’s blog) and I thought it illustrated well one of my favorite points. I often joke with friends and family that I’m “lazy”. I don’t really see it that way of course, but I get a lot of...
Social Dating Website – The Holy Grail

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ March 23, 2012 / Leave a comment

There were not one but two recent articles that crossed my path recently about online dating. It got me thinking about a subject I’ve come back to at least two different times (one and two), the idea of a social dating site. There is just so much information available on...
Getting a Job Based on Data or Social

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ March 13, 2012 / Leave a comment

The world is full of interesting spaces where the current technology’s days are numbered, but what will replace it is not quite clear yet. Take television, Like many things, the days of the traditional resume are numbered. Take News, Media, or Television as examples that I’ve discussed before. Today, I’ve...