Advertising and content have always been bound together - in print, on television, and on the web. Sure, you can skip the ad - just flip the page, or press 'ffwd' on your DVR. But great advertising, as I've long argued, adds value to the content ecosystem, and has as much a right to be in the conversation as does the publisher and the consumer.

I've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.

I like Diaspora because it's audacious, it's driven by passion, and it's very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That's sort of like deciding to build a better search engine - very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure.

The 'old' Internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's 'public pages,' but those represent a tiny fraction of the 'pages' on Faceboo, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning.

'Dependent web' platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo are where people go to discover and share new content. Independent sites are the millions of blogs, community and service sites where passionate individuals 'hang out' with like-minded folks. This is where shared content is often created.

As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you've allotted for vacation.

We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.

The beauty of the innovation that flows from the open web is that no one has to ask for permission, get a credential, or win a Disrupt or Launch award to go prove their idea is worthy. They just... put up a page on the web, iterate, iterate, iterate... and eventually, a Facebook emerges.

Facebook's data trove is enviable, and its moves into nearly every aspect of our lives - from payment to media, will create even more of it. The company also has created a huge base of developers for its platform, but the ecosystem is incomplete compared to vertically integrated OSes like iOS, Mac or Windows.

I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine.

Bitcoin woke us all up to a new way to pay, and culturally, I think a much larger percentage of us have become accustomed to the idea that money no longer comes with the friction it once had.

Government officials and citizens care about many causes - and they all require resources. For example, I am personally passionate about ending the human trafficking that still occurs within our borders.

Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.

Marketing is your battle plan for the sales team - it's about defining the landscape. Marketing is doing cohort analysis and understanding exactly what possible customers are out there. It's understanding not only which customers will respond to what messages, but also how customers will become clients if you include certain product features.

Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it's our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.

One of the fun things about venture capital is you are constantly learning new ideas and strategies from one business and then applying them to others.

Creating a billion-dollar company is hard, but being a truly great leader is even harder.

A deep concern of mine is that leaders in the technology sector have not developed a culture that insists upon courage, honor, duty, and humility - what we might call a culture of virtue.

Great leaders inspire incredible loyalty in their followers and subordinates.

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.

In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.

A policy of knowing your replacement is one of the best ways to drive a growth culture. It anticipates and eliminates the most harmful politics in leadership for an expanding company and instantly sets the right tone for a high-talent, growth-mindset executive team.

One of the most important jobs of a great leader is to attract great talent.