At Version One, we love marketplaces. Just look at our portfolio, and you’ll understand how important we think marketplaces are to the future of commerce. Over the past year, we have focused much of our blog content on helping marketplace founders build their companies. That’s because we realized that while there is a lot of great information for tech startups, not much of it deals specifically with marketplaces. And anyone building a marketplace company knows that marketplaces face unique challenges – including how to solve the chicken and egg problem with supply and demand and how to monetize when services are delivered offline. To that end, we put together a handbook, A Guide to Marketplaces. It compiles many of the insights we’ve learned from working with great marketplace companies and analyzing the industry. We hope the handbook helps you in your own journey to break down walls in how goods and services are bought and sold. There’s no single way to build and scale a marketplace, but the book can help you figure out your own path to build supply and spark the virtuous circle of supply and demand. Lastly, we’d love to hear if you find the content useful. What should we expand on? Did we leave anything out? Please leave a comment below or reach out to us directly.

During the filming of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", there would frequently come times when the story called for the characters (and in the early days, it was often that bane of Trekkies everywhere, Wesley Crusher, the Platonic Ideal of Dork) to fix some far-future technical problem. Which means said characters had to employ far-future tech. Which by definition hasn't been invented yet. What happened over the course of the series was that they engaged a couple of people to be in charge of continuity and technology, and the script writers would insert into the scripts, "[technobabble here]", leaving the staff TechGeek to insert the proper futuristic-sounding tech gibberish. You know: Stuff that sounds realistically scientific, but is really just verbal handwaving. "Tachyon fields"; "Inertial dampers"; and so on. Welcome to my non-fictional, non-Star Trek, highly-idiosyncratic take on tech, tech-related topics, and sometimes random stuff that's just obliquely related to tech that was triggered by me reading or hearing or seeing something that happened to drift through the wide-open transom of my brain and get stuck there. Some of the items you will see here are funny, some I hope are thought-provoking, some could probably be filed under the hashtag of #DougRant, filtered through what my life-partner calls my "weird perspective". If you enjoy reading them, then they will have served their purpose. So read on and, hopefully, enjoy!

it's a roller coaster but my soul seems to be off the ride scribbled down here ;some poetry , some feelings , some magic spells and my teenager alien thoughts .

Abby and Asher come from a family of witches. When they learn that Brooklyn is a witch as well, the three become fast friends. But Brooklyn wants more than the life she has now. She wants power, popularity and love...and she's willing to do anything to get it. "The Abby Diaries" is written from the perspective of Abby as she watches her brother fall in love with his first girlfriend. This is a supplement for the upcoming novel, "What the Spell" (A Life's a Witch novel).

My son doesn't remember. He just doesn't. And yet, before he was even in kindergarten, he could read. I don't understand the human brain...