Mark Pincus writes about a question I too had pondered:

The big dilemma facing most seasoned entrepreneurs today is about leverage. the vc's and other investors get plenty by making multiple bets within large funds. they can be reasonably confident that over their fund's life they can deliver good returns and make good and sometimes obscene money. entrepreneurs have to make totally concentrated bets and wait several years to see if they pay off at all. this gets hard when the rest of your business school classmates seem to make as much in one year managing their hedge fund as you hope to as your final payout if it ever comes.

so where's the leverage? well, you can try to start multiple companies but that is frought with landmines like the fact that over time companies will readjust equity to compensate current employees and investors so you can count that your equity will be highly diluted when you leave. also, you will inevitably dilute your attention to the winner by spreading it across a lot of losers.

you can try to raise a fund and start an incubator (and party like it's 1999:). while this may be great for the investors who get to buy into your companies at founders prices, it is very hard to put a lot of capital to work and now you've reduced your payout to a carry across a relatively small number of bets (as compared to a vc fund).

you can join a vc fund. this seems to be the most popular route for successful entrepreneurs (most recently bill joy going to kp). for some people, this represents a kind of nice, easy retirement. they probably dont last in that business which gets more competitive as it gets more crowded. my problem with that (other than nobody inviting me to join:( is that i'd get frustrated with such a passive role (though some are notoriously not that passive:).

Chris Anderson suggests that "within ten years most TV will no longer come in 30-minute chunks."

In the IP-TV future, where video is pulled on demand from anywhere, I suspect we'll be watching more and more shorter stuff. We're already channel grazing, jumping from one sub-minute video sample to another, so we're clearly comfortable with short stretches of video, even if that's not the way it's supposed to be watched. Why not acknowledge the reality and offer TV in naturally attention-deficit lengths for a generation that's going to watch it that way regardless? Likewise, TV news shows are assembled by stringing together dozens of short items over the course of 30 minutes or an hour; wouldn't it be even better to let viewers pick the ones they want to watch from a menu instead?

Rather than today's peak at 30 minutes, I think we'll see smaller peaks at 1, 2, 10 and 20 minutes (shown). Elsewhere, the time demand curve will smooth out a bit as more shows break the tyranny of the 30-minute multiple. Sports, in particular, could be sliced into dozens of new lengths: full games, highlights, key quarters/innings, last two-minutes, and so on. It's already that way on the web; I suspect it won't be long before TV goes the same way.