Happy New Year

Happy new year!  Thanks to everyone who reads this blog, encouraged me to keep writing it, or provided feedback and comments on my posts throughout the past year. I’ve had much more fun with this site than I ever imagined when I first put it together last December. So thank you. I’ll be traveling for an MIT research project with my classmate, Paul Artiuch, for the next few weeks. Blogging will likely be less frequent, but if all goes to plan we’ll have some interesting observations and experiences to share. I might also experiment with using the blog as a medium to document and publicize some of our findings, but I’m still trying to work out how this would look. More on

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Shades of Green

TripAdvisor has gone public: Eleven years after it began life above Kosta’s Pizza in Needham, and seven years after it was acquired by Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp. for about $200 million, TripAdvisor is finally gaining a NASDAQ listing of its very own. The company starts trading tomorrow under the symbol TRIP, and it will also be included in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. I briefly worked for TripAdvisor one summer when I was an undergraduate. It was a great place to work. One anecdote always stuck with me. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I heard it from at least two people while working at the firm. The CEO, Steve Kaufer, supposedly hates the shade of green

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