The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill (Colorado Bill HB 10-1193) that basically seeks to improve the state’s ability to collect use tax on internet sales. This is a tax that most buyers of the covered products technically should be paying anyway but are rarely collected. Most people think those things they buy online are tax-free when really they were supposed to have paid the tax on their own rather than having it collected by the retailer. As we all know, people rarely do.

Colorado and other states have tried to fix this for a couple primary reasons. The first is simply money. They’d like to collect more revenue. The second is to level the playing field for in-state companies. It’s not fair competition if local companies effectively have to charge buyers more fo...

“I’ve decided to write a book,” I told my wife over a year ago.

She gave me that what-the-bleep-are-you-talking-about look.  You may be familiar with your spouse.

“You’ve what?”

“I’ve decided to write a book,” I repeated, slightly less confidently.

“On what?”

“Venture capital and entreneurship.”

“Why?”

“Well, when I was an entrepreneur, I couldn’t find any good books on how this mysterious capital-raising process worked and how to harness the resources and knowledge of the VC industry to help build my start-up. Now that I’ve seen it from the other side, I want to explain to entrepreneurs how it all works to help them be successful....

Recently an entrepreneur/investor/blogger extraordinaire I admire by the name of Chris Dixon touched on the two general paradigms people/institutions can adopt towards one another when conducting business. He first referenced the transactional/legalistic approach wherein labor is exchanged for money in the form of a contract that is enforced by organizations, (especially the legal system). The other approach is one based on trust, verbal agreements, reputation and is “enforced” (so to speak) by the community. As Dixon points out, the world of startups is overwhelmingly governed by the trust/reputation/community approach. 

Let’s just juxtapose these very different paradigms against the backdrop of the modern American university.  As we’ve established in e...

All eyes are on Toyota’s recall of 8.5 million vehicles due to faulty gas pedals and brakes. The recall has sparked congressional hearings, a probe by the U.S. Department of Transportation, possible criminal charges stemming from a federal grand jury investigation and numerous civil lawsuits, all in the name of driver safety.

This aggressive response to Toyota’s mistakes is appropriate, even though the human toll from its miscues has been, thankfully, relatively modest – 34 alleged deaths and a few hundred injuries. Not to downplay this misery, but in stunning contrast, consider this: More than 100,000 Americans die annually in U.S. hospitals because of avoidable medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which also says that medical errors rank as Americ...

I’ll never forget my first marketing class at business school. Our professor peered at us with an intense glare as he pushed back on our standard, “chip shot” comments. At one point he asked the guy next to me to opine on the case we were discussing, which involved launching a new consumer product. “Well,” my neighbor answered confidently, “I think it will be a hit because I can see my mother-in-law buying it.”

“I see,” replied my professor dryly and then turned to the class with a withering look on his face, “Steve appears to have fallen into that fatal trap of ‘Mother In Law Market Research’ - believing this new product will be a hit just because his mother-in-law likes it. Instead, let’s look at ...

* Nicholas Carson goes deep into Facebook’s founding.

* Private equity firms cheer the return of the “staple.” Critics justifiably shudder.

* Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer: We’re “betting our company” on the cloud. The cloud, meanwhile, declined comment.

* Steve Schwarzman argues against placement agent bans (sure it’s self-serving, but it’s also the correct position). My only quibble is that I wish Schwarzman would have called out corrupt PE pros alongside “corrupt political hacks.” After all, wouldn’t PE p...

* Mark Suster: What’s it like being a venture capitalist?

* Jim McTague: FINRA must heal itself before receiving added responsibilities

* The No Prick Rule: “Hire the good, humble, kind human being first … skill-set second.�

* Morning Call: U.S. futures look flat, London opens higher, European shares climb, the Nikkei gains 0.3% and Hong Kong shares jump nearly 2%.

* Nick Hasell: Have London’s listed private equity firms turned a corner?

* Kevin Kelleher: The spark that could ignite Web M&A

* ABI Research: RFID market to reach $5.3...

Three-month-old Blippy, the Palo Alto-based social network that invites users to share their credit card transactions with anyone interested in seeing them, is beloved by VCs.

Late last year, before the service had registered more than a couple thousand people, it raised $1.6 million from seemingly everyone who could pile into a seed round, including Charles River Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams.

Even investors who didn’t participate think it’s a smart bet, including Jon Callaghan of True Ventures, who recently told me he thinks that Blippy is â...

Steve Anderson has been a number of things in his 42 years: a Stanford MBA, a general manager at Starbucks Coffee, a product manager at eBay, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, a senior director at Microsoft.

Right now, he’s one of the best angel investors in Silicon Valley.

Anderson began investing a pool of individual investors’ money in 2006 under the name Baseline Ventures. Since then, he has provided seed funding to 40 companies, a stunning 8 of which have been acquired. This morning, DocVerse, whose software invites users to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents and that had raised ju...

Recently an entrepreneur/investor/blogger extraordinaire I admire by the name of Chris Dixon touched on the two general paradigms people/institutions can adopt towards one another when conducting business. He first referenced the transactional/legalistic approach wherein labor is exchanged for money in the form of a contract that is enforced by organizations, (especially the legal system). The other approach is one based on trust, verbal agreements, reputation and is “enforced” (so to speak) by the community. As Dixon points out, the world of startups is overwhelmingly governed by the trust/reputation/community approach. 

Let’s just juxtapose these very different paradigms against the backdrop of the modern American university.  As we’ve established in e...