Elia Insider

In my lifetime — at least in the part of my lifetime I can remember — there has never been such a big debate about what to do with the economy. I believe very strongly that economic success is all about positive thought. I said quite some time ago on this very blog that fear [...]

I live in Oregon. In the election in March we passed two new tax increases, one on people making $200,000 or so per year or more and another on all businesses. The business tax raised the minimum and also passed, for the first time in state history, a revenue (sales) tax. I contend that the [...]

This thing ain’t over. The Dow crossed 10,000 a few weeks ago? Big deal. It means nothing. Unemployment is over 10%. Commercial real estate defaults are rising. The nation’s personal debt is still sustainably high. As I wrote in July, this will be a W recession, not a standard V, and we need to batten [...]

I just read a fantastic blog post by Venture Capitalist Bill Gurley on the less than free business model. What does this mean? In short, it’s when you get paid by the company instead of the company paying you. Mr. Gurley talks about this in terms of Google’s strategy, that rather than pay Google to [...]

There was a great spitting contest a few weeks ago that I greatly enjoyed. It went something like this: a company named Mint, a web-based personal financial manager a la Quicken, was purchased by Intuit for $170 million. Jason Fried, a well-known bootstrap proponent who runs 37 Signals, said that it’s too bad that the [...]