A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 18, 2023

Smartphones have had voice input for over a decade now and yet I don’t know that many people who use voice input regularly. I would guess that maybe 10 to 20% of smartphone users are using voice input regularly. That’s a guess based on absolutely no data other than observing friends, family, and colleagues. However, in the last week I have started to use voice input a lot more as a result of a friend encouraging me to do it.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 10, 2023

I have watched so many leaders over the years in my various roles as lead investor, board member, board chair, investor, and advisor. And one thing I have learned from this front-row seat is that leading from the heart is very powerful. A leader can be the most brilliant product person, strategist, entrepreneur, and business builder, but if they cannot get people to follow them, trust them, and care for them, they will not be an effective leader.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 6, 2023

Last Thursday, three new blog posts hit USV.com announcing our three new analysts: This is our tradition at USV. When someone starts at USV, we ask them to write a post on the USV blog introducing themselves. This helps founders who come to talk to us about their companies understand the folks they will be talking to. Grace joins us from Silver Lake where she was working on their ESG strategy.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

When a new technology comes to market, we often look for “native” applications of that technology. What is a “native” AI application? What is a “native” Web3 application? I have not seen a better articulation of “native” than my partner Albert’s post from 2009 on native mobile applications. He started out by laying out the new primitives that mobile smartphones made available to developers.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

First and foremost, this is not tax advice. I am not a tax advisor and you should never take anything you read here as tax advice. If you read something here that makes you think you should take some tax-related action, please always consult your tax advisor. With that disclosure out of the way, I would like to talk about 83b elections. An 83b election is a choice a taxpayer can make to pay the taxes in full at the time of the grant of an asset that vests over time and would otherwise be taxed a

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JANUARY 23, 2023

I wrote last week that I have started coding again. And I have been amazed at how much easier it is now that I can code and deploy in the cloud without having to spin up anything myself. But the other massive improvement in programming is the “AI assist.” I am working in a Javascript library called jQuery and I don’t really understand its commands and syntax very well.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JANUARY 9, 2023

I read last week that the NYC Department of Education has banned ChatGPT from its networks and devices. I understand that reaction and mentioned the issues that AI/ML create for educators in a post a few weeks ago. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 5, 2022

The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

NOVEMBER 6, 2022

One of my favorite things about NFTs is that they contain a mechanism for the artist/creator to collect royalties on all of the sales that happen after the initial sale/mint. The creator specifies the royalty percentage when they initially mint the NFT and the NFT marketplaces/smart contracts collect the royalties on future sales and pay them to the creator.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 24, 2022

There are many efforts underway to reduce carbon emissions in order to get to “net zero” But most climate scientists believe that reducing emissions won’t be enough and we will also need to engage in removing carbon from the atmosphere. There are natural ways to do this like reforestation, soil carbon, biochar, etc but there are also “engineered” approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

Nuclear power (both fission and fusion) has the potential to provide much of the energy the world needs without the damaging effects of carbon emissions which are warming our planet. And yet nuclear power is politically unpopular in many parts of the world and that has led to a massive underinvestment in nuclear power over the last fifty years. It will take a much different attitude about nuclear power among the public before nuclear power can remerge as a major source of energy for the world.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

As we all prepare for the fall back to school/back to work season, I thought I’d touch on a topic that has been top of mind for me for the last six months. The covid pandemic taught many of us that we can be productive and our companies can succeed in a fully remote work environment. But just because you can does not mean you should. In the venture capital business, this has meant making investments in teams we don’t meet face to face.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 1, 2022

Tech:NYC is the industry association for NY’s tech sector. They play a number of important roles and one of them is to educate and inform about the impact of the tech sector in NY. To that end, they launched a valuable resource last month called Innovation Indicators. Innovation Indicators is a dashboard that shows the latest data on the impact of the tech sector on the NY economy.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 10, 2022

I wrote the post at the bottom and linked here when Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in late April. I am relieved that Musk has decided he does not want to own Twitter. I never thought he would be a good shepherd of the Twitter network and maybe now we have the opportunity to find a better ownership/governance model for it. I understand why the Twitter Board and management team feel they must force Musk to perform on the agreed-upon deal.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 27, 2022

The Gotham Gal and I own five EVs and have been driving electric-powered cars since 2014. I don’t drive gas-powered cars and haven’t for a few years now. We have purchased two Chevy Bolts, two Tesla Model Ss, and one Rivian truck. I love the instant acceleration you get from an EV, I enjoy driving mostly with just one foot due to the fact that EVs accelerate and brake using the accelerator pedal, I like that I can charge my car every night at home (using solar panels on our roofs) an

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 21, 2022

The last six months have been a challenging time for tech and tech startups. Macro events have weighed on the sector, valuations have come crashing down, revenue growth has slowed (or stopped), and layoffs are happening across the sector. Many of the folks I work with are frustrated. The things that were working in their business stopped working and they can’t get it moving again.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 7, 2022

New York Senator Gillibrand and Wyoming Senator Lummis have teamed up to propose a bi-partisan bill that would shift much of the regulatory oversight of crypto assets from the SEC to the CFTC, acknowledging that these tokens are much more like commodities than securities. The details of the bill will be made public today and then there will be a lot of feedback from elected officials, regulators, and industry.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 11, 2022

Investing in founder-led businesses is comforting to me. They have the ability to see the forest through the trees and do what is necessary to evolve the business. Two great examples of this are Microsoft in the mid 90s and Facebook a decade ago. Microsoft had spent more than a decade competing and winning the desktop software market and then Netscape came along and presented an entirely new market opportunity that had both major upside and major downside for Microsoft.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 4, 2022

I went to renew a.ETH domain I own this morning and the gas fees were so high that I decided to come back another time. Ethereum is the most popular smart contract blockchain by far but it frequently gets congested and expensive. Using it to acquire and renew domains, normally a transaction that costs less than $100 USD, is challenging. That is why there are a host of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer one blockchains (L1s) and a number of layer two networks (L2s) that run on top of

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 20, 2022

Investing is humbling. At 60, with 35 years of venture investing experience, I still get most things wrong. Which is why I like to keep things simple. And when I do I am rewarded. My friend Gordon asked me last night how I got into Bitcoin. I told him the story of how I bumped into Rikki Tahta walking through the garment district in NYC in the spring of 2011 and Rikki told me he was working on a Bitcoin startup.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 7, 2022

Electrified cars were greater than 10% of the US market in 2021 and EVs were about 5%. EV sales are growing at nearly 100% YOY and could reach 25% of the US market in a few years. This is good news for the effort to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But there are still challenges for the EV market. Range anxiety and charge times are among the top reasons that consumers avoid EVs.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JANUARY 1, 2022

So last year I made a bunch of predictions that with one exception were kind of obvious. I don’t want to do that again, so I am going to list five things that I think will happen this year that most people would not likely agree with. 1/ As the pandemic evolves into an endemic in the first half of 2022, companies will reopen their offices and their employees will largely opt to go back to working together in offices.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 20, 2021

I saw two charts last week that showed the same thing: This chart was in the deck I shared here last week called Consumer Trends 2022. It shows that after a big lift in 2020 and a bit of a lull in 2021, the e-commerce trendline is back to its old baseline. This is our portfolio company DuckDuckGo ‘s search traffic curve, available here , on a ten-day moving average.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 10, 2021

The second week of December every year is Computer Science Education Week. It is a week to celebrate efforts to get computer science education into the K12 system around the world, and it is also a week in which schools do events, like The Hour of Code , to encourage students and teachers to get excited about learning computer science. Most AVC readers know that my passion project for the last decade has been getting computer science education broadly available in the NYC public school system.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

NOVEMBER 29, 2021

Like many did, we spent much of this weekend watching Peter Jackson’s wonderful documentary of the Beatles making Let It Be, titled Get Back. I enjoyed so much of the film, particularly the music, but the big thing I took away is the power of real partnerships. While this was the Beatles last recording session, what you see in the film are four partners working together creatively and wonderfully.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

NOVEMBER 17, 2021

Are you a New Yorker doing something amazing and could use $200,000 to support your work? If so, you should apply for a David Prize. I have written about this program before so you might remember. But for those who haven’t heard about it, here’s the deal: Here are the most recent cohort of David Prize winners : ? Cesar Vargas : Fighting for immigrants in the armed forces and their right to stay in the U.S. ?

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 29, 2021

I backed this project this morning. The Tether Bike Light is “a bike safety device that projects a safe zone around your bike, responds to road users around you, identifying safe and unsafe roads in your city.” I like the idea that “locations of overtakes are recorded to identify safe and unsafe zones in your city to help plan safer routing.” That is very cool.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 27, 2021

Now that we are beginning to see what consumer applications are like in the decentralized web (web3), it is interesting to compare that to what consumer applications are like in the centralized web (web2). It became clear early in the 2000s that the big opportunity in the web would be to build large networks of engaged users. That was USV’s initial web2 thesis: USV in 140 characters: invest in large networks of engaged users, differentiated by user experience, and defensible though network

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 18, 2021

Since 2016, I have been working “half time” at USV and taking half of a partner’s carry. That has allowed me to allocate more time to things like building green buildings with the Gotham Gal, building a philanthropic organization with the Gotham Gal, sitting on non-profit and civic boards, and a few other things. The truth is I still work at least 40 hours a week at USV, probably a fair bit more some weeks, but I still have time to spend on these other things and my partners un

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 6, 2021

A couple of years ago, I wrote about buying crypto in an IRA. I went and did that with an old unused IRA that was sitting in cash and I have 8x’d the value of that IRA in the last 18 months. While my family is fortunate that we don’t have to rely on our IRAs to generate wealth like this, many folks do. Tens of millions of people in the US rely on IRAs to save money tax-free for their retirement.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

Our portfolio company Mirror has been using a “game mechanic” called The Write Race to onboard users to the Mirror service. Mirror is something between a blogging platform, a crowdfunding platform, and a community platform, built for the crypto sector. Mirror is built on decentralized protocols and is a web3 version of all of those things and more.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

I used to ride a Vespa around NYC. I rode it to work and back for about ten years, from roughly 2003 to 2013. I stopped riding it when Bloomberg’s Traffic Enforcement people starting towing it when it was parked between cars on the street (something I had been doing since I started riding it). A few visits to the tow pound will do that to you.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

Back in 2005 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink that was about how our subconscious allows us to make fast decisions that are often as good or better than slow considered decisions. I was talking to someone yesterday evening about how the venture capital business has changed over the last decade and I explained that we used to have weeks, if not months, to make our investment decisions and now we have days or if we are lucky a week or two.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

I just backed this project to support a festival of street musicians in NYC in late October. Street bands have been picking up the slack for the last year in NYC, performing for outside diners and more throughout the city. This festival celebrates them and puts them front and center. Email readers can see the video here.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 9, 2021

At USV, we have a fairly narrow thesis that sets out what we want to invest in, but all of us work across all of our thesis areas. We see ourselves as generalists not specialists. In an environment when everything is moving so fast, that can be challenging, as I wrote about on Tuesday. But there are also great benefits to working this way. As a team, we benefit from working together on everything versus having silos within our partnership and firm.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

I wrote in my 60th birthday post that my late career mantra is less hustle more conviction. It has been working for me and has kept me in the game. But there are times, usually after an opening emerges , when a market moves so fast it is hard to stay on top of it all. I don’t worry about missing out. That’s part of the venture capital business.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 31, 2021

I am a fan of and a practioner of investing in risky assets. I believe you must take significant risk to earn significant returns. But I also am a huge fan of diversification when holding a lot of risky assets. It has been easier for USV to get into new sectors, like crypto and climate for example, knowing that we also have large positions in other parts of the early stage tech sector.

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