Steve Jobs' successor is making his mark and trying to keep the Apple magic going. FORTUNE -- In February of this year, a group of investors visited Apple as part of a "bus tour" led by a research analyst for Citibank. The session started with a 45-minute presentation by Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, and the 15 or so investors who attended the session were treated to Apple's unique brand of hospitality: They met in a threadbare conference room in Apple's Town Hall public conference center at the 4 Infinite Loop building in Cupertino, Calif., where the refreshments consisted of "three stale cookies and two Diet Cokes," in the words of one participant. All that, save the meager refreshments, is routine for big public ... Continue reading →

On March 5, 2010, Patrick Buckley was overcome with the desire to build something. Apple (AAPL) had just announced the iPad, and he had an idea: a retro case for the tablet that had the look and feel of a hard-bound book. “In my mind, I needed to have a product and a website ready to go for that launch day,” he says. Buckley, 31, is a serial entrepreneur. He has built add-ons for Web browsers and co-wrote The Hungry Scientist Handbook, which is something like a cookbook for geeks. He’s done a Facebook app focused on high school sports, an early photo-sharing service, and “a mobile analytics platform.” Making an iPad case wasn’t like building a Web app, though. He needed tools. So he ... Continue reading →

Elon Musk leads a life worthy of Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” ad campaign. His tweets are about rockets he just launched. Action heroes model themselves on him. His warm-up was founding PayPal. Stanford held his interest for two days. His other job is reinventing the car. Making $2 billion is what he calls an afterthought. Musk is clearly a man of gargantuan ambitions and abilities. And his ventures make great stories. But do they also make good investments? Two years ago, Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson didn’t think so, at least regarding Tesla. In August 2010 he announced on TheStreet.com that he was shorting Musk’s electric car company, which he dubbed “the next Webvan.” Jackson cited both Musk’s perceived narcissism and ... Continue reading →

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… John F. Kennedy, September 1962 InnovationI teach entrepreneurship for ~50 student teams a year from engineering schools at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. For the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps this year I’ll also teach ~150 teams led by professors who want to commercialize their inventions. Our extended teaching team includes venture capitalists with decades of experience. The irony is that ... Continue reading →

Last August, Google (GOOG) Chief Executive Officer Larry Page fulfilled a pledge made to one of his senior executives, a square-jawed former attorney named Dennis Woodside. Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook had been trying to poach Woodside to make him Apple’s head of sales, but Google had convinced Woodside to stay, in part by promising him greater responsibility at the search company, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. Now it was time to make good. Woodside says he was speaking with board member Ram Shriram when Page asked him to run Motorola Mobility, the company Google had just acquired for $12.5 billion. “He said, ‘I know you’ve been looking for a ... Continue reading →

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me— nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. -Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 Ahhh, the delicious cruelty that is irony! The ineffable loss, the sadness at the sudden realization that this was your own doing — an easily preventable mistake, that harsh painful sensation in the pit of your stomach when you realize that you have no one to blame but yourself . ... Continue reading →

Michael Moritz, the prominent Silicon Valley investor who has backed companies such as Google (GOOG), LinkedIn, PayPal, and Yahoo (YHOO), is stepping back from some of his responsibilities at his firm, Sequoia Capital, and has disclosed to the firm’s investors that he has a rare medical condition. Moritz did not specify the nature of his illness. In a letter to limited partners sent on Monday morning and provided to Bloomberg Businessweek, Moritz wrote, “I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable. I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline. Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of ... Continue reading →