Posts By John Geraci

Failure As A Strategy For Success

I’m reading a new book called Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. It’s a fantastic book, and if you’re a CEO or CTO of a startup, or an innovator, or anyone who tries new things, you should read it. In the book, author Tim Harford makes the case that trial-and-error, done intelligently, constantly outperformsRead… Read more »

Imagining The Data-Driven City

Yesterday I was talking with Edd Dumbill, who runs the O’Reilly Strata conference, about big data. Edd said, “I think we’re moving out of the phase of data as pretty pictures and into a phase of data as something actionable…. We (at Strata) want to enable companies to become data-driven companies.” That was an interestingRead… Read more »

Watch My “Disruptive Hero” Video

Co-authors Bill Jensen and Josh Klein are interviewing people for a book they’re writing called 100 Disruptive Heroes. As they interview people, they stick the videos up on YouTube for anyone and everyone to see. Last week Bill interviewed me for the book, and here is the resulting video. Admission: I have not actually hadRead… Read more »

The User Experience of New York City

I’m starting to think about cities more and more in terms of user experience. It works pretty well as a metaphor – maybe so well that you don’t even need to call it a metaphor at all. When you’re navigating the city, you want certain things to happen, you want a nice experience, just asRead… Read more »

Joining faberNovel For Some Innovation Fun in NYC and Beyond

If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few months, you’ve probably seen some passing mentions of the company faberNovel and the innovative work they do. I’m excited to announce today that I’m joining them to work as their Head of New York Operations. faberNovel is a very interesting company. (I personally think ofRead… Read more »

Paris, New York & What I’ve Been Doing For The Past Week

Things have been quiet here lately because I’ve been in Paris for the past 5 days, talking to some friends at faberNovel, a very cool company that works in what they call “innovation services”, and also creates co-working spaces. They have their hands in a whole lot of interesting projects and ideas, some of whichRead… Read more »

Can Too Much Money Ruin a New Startup? (Yes)

Last week the new app Color launched, a service that lets you take pictures on your phone and share them with people in your immediate vicinity. Soon after the app debuted to mediocre reviews, it was discovered that the founders had managed to raise $41 million for their first, pre-launch round. Let’s leave aside forRead… Read more »