Raising capital from investors is often a frustrating experience. While part of that frustration will always be present when working on high-risk projects, a lot of the aggravation comes from the lack of clear signposts that allow founders to judge their company’s performance. The reality is, most…

2013 was the most difficult year of blogging I’ve ever had. It felt like everything changed at once. But in fact, it had been changing for long time. Readers, bloggers, the financial system that supports every blog and just about every other aspect of the internet as a whole seemed to hit its…

February 5, 2014 676k shares Real life is the game that – literally – everyone is playing. But it can be tough. This is your guide. Basics You might not realise, but real life is a game of strategy . There are some fun mini-games – like dancing, driving, running, and sex – but the key to winning is…

Brian Rea What’s the best way to recalibrate a marriage as the years pass? I wish I had the answer, because clearly millions of us would like to know. As the editor of the Modern Love column for nearly a decade, I have sifted through roughly 50,000 stories that have crossed my desk. I have noticed…

In the first two parts, we covered the history of the entrepreneurs-to-labor dynamic in the Robber Baron era, and how the pattern is roughly repeating itself in our time. I promised a positive vision of the future in this concluding part. Before I do that, here is a quick visual review of the…

When you examine the 19th century pattern of transformation of an entrepreneurial class into a labor class, which we covered in Part I , the conclusion is obvious: a labor class emerges when privileged knowledge is commoditized and institutionalized in ways that make it basically useless as…

For the last few months, I’ve been cautiously testing a radical-sounding hypothesis on smart people: entrepreneurs are the new labor . Or to put it in a more useful way, the balance of power between investors and entrepreneurs that marks the early, frontier days of a major technology wave (Moore’s…

Faster Louder Ella is no ordinary 16-year-old, and ‘Royals’ no ordinary hit single In pop music, you learn how to wait around. Venues, airports, hotels. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And photo shoots. In mid-July Ella Yelich-O’Connor, now far better known as Lorde, is wrapped in a black dressing gown…

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Complex human societies, includingour own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible webof mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can frayeasily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internalconflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse. Analysis…

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a…

Some blessed, benevolent soul who we only know as YouTube user Eric S has gone and created what will undoubtedly be the best 11 minutes and 38 seconds of your day—a compilation video of the best Vines of 2013 so far. And you're going to wish it never had to end. Given that most of the Vines you see…

Of all the occupational golden ages to come and go in the twentieth century—for doctors, journalists, ad-men, autoworkers—none lasted longer, felt cushier, and was all in all more golden than the reign of the law partner. There was the generous salary, the esteem of one’s neighbors, work that was…

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change. Credit Illustration by Harry Campbell Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and…

How pickup artists promote bad sex, when they're not, you know, promoting rape and stuff. @feministing guest post: http://feministing.com/2013/07/03/guest-post-how-pick-up-artists-promote-bad-sex/

“How will they make money?” is the wrong question Seems like every year we hear about a few new consumer networks raising large amounts of money at high valuations. And right on cue, we hear cynics asking, “But how will they ever make money?” let alone “enough money to justify the valuation.” Just…

VI What a ferocious program, you may say. And how in the world is it, or even a quarter of it, to be put into effect, granted a normal male specimen of the race? Only a fraction of it will be acquired in school, we all admit. Parents are busy, and except in rare cases parents are the worst possible…

T here’s a fundamental assumption a lot of us make about sex that often causes a lot of skewed perceptions about why we’re not getting the sex/love we want. Men have a tendency to make the assumption that sex itself is a need, regardless of who (or what) it comes from. Women have a tendency to…

Chloé Poizat A COUPLE of evolutionary psychologists recently published a book about human sexual behavior in prehistory called “Sex at Dawn.” Upon hearing of the project, one colleague, dubious that a modern scholar could hope to know anything about that period, asked them, “So what do you do, close…

Graham Roumieu IN fairy tales, marriages last happily ever after. Science, however, tells us that wedded bliss has but a limited shelf life. American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings were clear: newlyweds enjoy…

In 2004, fresh off the plane in Beijing, I was asked to judge an English competition for high-school seniors. My two co-judges were pleasantly cynical middle-aged sociologists, both professors at Tsinghua University. After listening to the umpteenth speech about how China used to be poor, but was…

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur . His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College . Please follow him on Twitter @jaltucher . People read TechCrunch because they want to create something, they don’t want…

One of my persistent fantasies used to be of sitting at a sidewalk table at a cafe in Paris. I would be writing with my pen ( la plume de ma tante ) in a notebook ( un cahier ) while smoking a Gauloise. I would not be writing economics. One cannot write economics while sitting at a sidewalk cafe.…

Fone Bone attempts to escape his pursuers by jumping on a small branch, thinking they wouldn’t be stupid enough to jump on. Obviously, he is wrong. I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal…

Credit Illustration by Peter Arkle In July, 2010, Kyle Strode, a forty-six year-old chemistry professor from Helena, Montana, ran the Missoula Marathon. Completing the 26.2-mile distance in two hours and forty-seven minutes, he placed fourth out of thirteen hundred and twenty-two finishers, and won…

The Love Systems Triad is a powerful system to develop sexual or romantic relationships with beautiful women, even if you’re not rich, famous, or goodlooking yourself. It is based on real-world experience from hundreds of thousands of “approaches” and “pickups” - both through “cold approach”…

On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed gingerly out of Eagle, Apollo 11 ’s lunar module, and joined Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility. Looking up, he said, “Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent desolation.” They were alone; but their presence on the moon’s silent, gray surface was the culmination…