Inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price. It seemed too good to be true. On April 13, with reporters from the New York Times and NBC News hovering nearby, Dan Price, the young chief executive officer of Gravity Payments , a Seattle-based credit card processing company, told his staff he was…

Sean Rad, the 29-year-old co-founder and CEO of Tinder, wants me to believe he’s a “romantic”, who is “ready to settle down” and have “lots of children”. In fact, the last woman he shared a bedroom with was his mother, Fariba, when he took her to Rome recently — although he nearly fled after seeing…

In the Innovator’s Dilemma for SaaS Startups , I outlined the path of many software companies, which disrupt incumbents by first serving the small-to-medium business and then move up-market by transitioning to serve larger enterprises with outbound sales teams. I argued this transition is largely…

“At sixteen, son was watching him, mesmerized Respect, not jocking him, was so amazing, besides He came on the stage with lasers in his eyes Walk with me now” — Nas, U.B.R. (Unauthorized Biography of Rakim) I first read High Output Management in 1995. In those days, there were no blogs or TED Talks…

DALLAS -- People snickered in January 2000 when Internet tycoon Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks for $280 million. It was a startling sum for a National Basketball Association team with a perennial losing record and thousands of empty seats at most home games. Not only was Mr. Cuban throwing…

Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in a meeting of creative minds. Moderated by Kara Swisher, executive editor of Re/code. Still haven’t subscribed to Vanity Fair on YouTube? ►► http://vnty.fr/1yNomg4 CONNECT WITH VANITY FAIR Web: http://vanityfair.com Twitter:…

One of our best programmers just came into my office. He's working on a new price list that we're putting into place, and he's on a tight deadline. I need to be able to announce the new rates in three weeks, at the first public demonstration of the application FogBugz 7.0. Implementing the new…

April 18, 2015 Twitter CFO Anthony Noto privately analyzes Facebook I’m surprised that more of the fascinating emails revealed by WikiLeaks about Snapchat have not been publicized. Below is one of my favorites. Twitter’s future CFO Anthony Noto sent a fairly detailed analysis of Facebook’s Q1 2014…

In this week’s magazine , I’ve got a lengthy piece about “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” a new book about rising inequality by Thomas Piketty, a French economist, that is sparking a lot of comment and debate. (Brad DeLong has a useful summary of some early reviews.) I’ll go further into that…

Tuesday, September 7, 2010 Warren Buffett is one of the best sources for financial market quotations and rightly so. In fact, we've even compiled Buffett's top 25 quotes . For Market Folly's quote of the week, we turn this week to the Oracle of Omaha's stance on holding cash: "The one thing I will…

Photographer: Ka Xiaoxi Emerging from a nightclub near Workers’ Stadium in Beijing at 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday in June, Mikael Hveem ordered an Uber. He selected the cheapest car option and was surprised when the vehicle that rolled up was a dark blue Maserati. The driver, a young, baby-faced Chinese…

How should you think about Dell's acquisition of VMware? I mean, Dell is acquiring EMC , and that is reasonably straightforward, as these things go. There are oddities , mostly to do with the debt financing of the deal. But, basically, it's a big levered deal, combining "the industry’s leading…

I predicted in 2010 that @angellist was the vanguard/etf of startups ...it's really just beginning by @naval https://t.co/4rRk3nStn0

Ten years is a long time. When we started First Round in 2005 with the idea to fill the gap between individual angel investing and Series A investing, many on Sand Hill Road dismissed our model as a “cute” novelty. Boy how times have changed. What began as a crazy, contrarian idea has now led to a…

The Weakerthans were a perfect Sunday afternoon in a particularly difficult year that made you feel like everything might be better soon.

The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Credit Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Map by Ziggymaj / Getty When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles…

So one way to insider trade is, you work at a bank, and you advise on mergers, and before a merger happens you meet a guy and write the name of the target on a napkin, and the guy reads the napkin, and then he eats it, and then he buys stock in the target, and he makes money, and then you meet in a…

Given the fact that Alphabet née Google is the second most valuable enterprise in the world, it’s striking to consider Larry Page’s 2014 assessment of the company he co-founded with Sergey Brin: I think we’ve not succeeded as much as we’d like. As you might suspect there is more context in the…

This month’s theme for The Hustle is people who game the system. This is the last of the weekly series. I moved to America four years ago, when I was 22. Since then, I’ve co-founded two startups that have raised ~$90 million in venture capital and have created hundreds of jobs in five different…

For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “ Aujourd’hui, maman est morte .” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French…

As the 50 top executives of the H.J. Heinz Co. walked through the grand entrance to the Four Seasons San Francisco in June, they knew that this year’s Chairman’s Leadership Conference would be like no other. Typically an exercise in team building and strategy setting, the event had a standard…

A t 10 o'clock in the morning, Markus Frind leaves his apartment and heads to work. It's a short walk through downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, but somehow the trek feels arduous. This is not because Frind is lazy. Well, Frind is a bit lazy, but that's another matter. The problem is that he is…

“Where’s the man with the megaphone?” The fair boy shook his head. “This is an island. At least I think it’s an island. That’s a reef out in the sea. Perhaps there aren’t any grownups anywhere.” - Lord of the Flies “I can’t get fired. I can just wait her out.” May 2015 and in a downtown Vegas…

Connecting with investors or executives isn't easy, but is an essential responsibility for anyone in the startup world, especially as the CEO. Here's the trouble: Every investor out there literally has an email inbox full of "requests to connect" messages . In growing Draft , a real money fantasy…

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,…

We are different people at different hours of the day, but an early bird isn’t superior to a night owl. Credit Illustration by Min Heo The idea of the virtuous early bird goes back at least to Aristotle, who wrote, in his Economics, that “Rising before daylight is … to be commended; it is a healthy…

Illustration by Mike Nudelman In 2011, there was a thing smart people around the technology industry used to say. It was that Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter and Square, was going to be the next Steve Jobs. Steven Levy, the esteemed technology journalist, wrote in Wired : "When people talk…

"What’s preventing Google from disrupting your success?" ’s company may be valued at $10 billion, but here in GSB Faculty West 104 on the Stanford University campus he’s being grilled like a newbie on Shark Tank. The three dozen students in this class, called "Disruptive Innovation", are…

Lachlan Donald It’s the question you’re asking yourself…and now, pretty regularly, you’re asking me because my article on leaving school somehow became #1 Google result for “dropping out of college.” I’m not going to give you an answer, because no one can really answer that but you. But I can walk…

(Credit: Wired magazine. ) Time to read: 50 minutes We touched down in Las Vegas only three hours before, but we were already back in the plane and flying home to San Jose on a brisk winter day in December, 2012. Not having to go through security at an airport saves a lot of time. Other than the two…

by Brian DeChesare | Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. - Helen Keller I almost decided not to publish this article. But it…

I get a text from Drake at 12:34 AM. “Where you at? Come to my crib.” The Boy—as much of his team refers to him—is having a party tonight. The guard at the entrance to his gated Hidden Hills neighborhood tells me that Drake has reached his limit on guests for the evening. Even with an invite,…