A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 30, 2023

I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since. For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first is waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 12, 2023

NYC Tech Week is next week. It will be a week filled with events for the tech sector to engage and connect with each other. A particularly great part of tech week is VC Open Office Hours. There are over 100 VC investors signed up to participate next week. Here is how it works: 1/ you select four investors (out of more than 100) that you want to meet 2/ you get up to four twenty minute meetings 3/ you discuss your idea with the investor in hopes of getting them interested enough to take another m

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

On Saturday, September 9th, the Gotham Gal and I arrived at JFK airport after an eight-hour flight from Paris. While waiting for our luggage, I got pushed a notification in my web3 wallet that there was an NFT drop underway that I could participate in. So I clicked on the link, signed the transaction, and nothing happened (or so I thought). So I tried again.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 28, 2023

I’ve written about this topic before. It is an important topic and I want to raise it again. Boards often discuss CEO performance without really knowing how things work inside the company. And CEOs often have very little visibility to how they are doing and what the board thinks about their performance. When you work for one person, your boss, it is typical that you will have regular catchups and at least an annual review of your performance (ideally more frequent).

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 6, 2023

USV has been an investor in the Helium network since 2019. I have always loved the idea of using web3 technologies to let consumers to “peer produce” a communications network creating a people-powered network. Helium started out powering communications between low-power “Internet of Things (IOT)” devices but with the introduction of Helium Mobile back in May , they are now powering a cell phone network.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 17, 2023

The venture capital sector has been in a sustained downturn for almost eighteen months. How does this downturn end? Well, it may have already ended, but let’s see about that. We will know for sure in a few quarters. The NASDAQ peaked at roughly 16,000 in November 2021. By June 2022, it was down 33%. It stayed down for all of 2022 and ended the year at roughly 10,500.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 7, 2023

Like tens of millions of others, I downloaded Threads onto my phone yesterday and signed up. The thing that Twitter has been missing since it killed off its ecosystem over a decade ago is competition. And as we all know, lack of competition is a very bad thing. In governments and in products. Competition keeps you honest. Competition makes you hustle.

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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

JUNE 13, 2023

The last time I posted was May 23rd , three weeks ago. There was a time when I wrote every day. When I had not yet posted on any day, I felt like something was missing, like I had not yet had my cup of coffee. Clearly, I have moved on from that need to write every day. I don’t think I have ever gone three weeks without posting in the almost twenty years I’ve been writing this blog.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 23, 2023

Back in 2014, USV got subpoenaed by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) over our web3 investing activities. We hired a law firm, answered the subpoena, and that ultimately landed me in public testimony in front of the DFS staff. In my testimony, I explained to the DFS staff that the difference between the US and China is that the US respects the freedom to innovate: REMINDER: ANYTHING THAT CHINA BANS, INVEST IN!

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 19, 2023

This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition. This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird Labs, which I posted about a few months ago. Blackbird is a platform for the restaurant industry to build loyalty/membership and related business models on.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 12, 2023

It has been a long time since I did a Funding Friday here at AVC. I used to do them every Friday. We have funded a lot of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries here over the years. Here are a few examples. L’Appartement 4F Land To Sea There is a new wrinkle in crowdfunding restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bakeries, etc courtesy of USV portfolio company Blackbird, which I recently wrote about.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 4, 2023

I was approached by a company this week that has trained a large language model on all of the blog posts I have written here at AVC. There are 9059 of them for those that are counting. They wanted to offer me a chat bot called “ask Fred.” I told them no thanks. Let me explain. I am totally fine with anyone using all of the content I have produced here at AVC to train their AI models.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 26, 2023

Ten years ago, a small group of folks in the K12 Computer Science Education community in NYC decided to put on a “mock job fair” for high school students who were taking computer science classes in the NYC public schools. That was the start of an annual day of engagement and learning for high schoolers considering a career in tech. Yesterday we got the Fair back in person after three years of not doing it or doing it remotely.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 23, 2023

I am the Chair of the Etsy Board and have been an investor and board member at Etsy since the mid-2000s. It is a company that I love and get great joy from being part of. Last year Etsy quietly launched a feature that has completely changed the way I use Etsy. It is called Etsy Lens. Etsy has millions of items for sale in its marketplace but shopping on Etsy is generally not intent-driven.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 17, 2023

USV’s current thesis is: Enabling trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. [link] That last word is powerful but unfortunately less understood than the other words in that sentence. Protocols have been around forever and are well-understood codes of conduct between people.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 12, 2023

Six months ago, I wrote about Direct Air Carbon Capture and ended with this: I remember hearing that “we’ve spent hundreds of years taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into our atmosphere and we are going to spend hundreds of years taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the ground”. I believe DAC will be a big part of how we do that.

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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

APRIL 5, 2023

The first project launched this week on our portfolio company Blackbird ‘s platform. It is a friends and family program at a restaurant in Williamsburg Brooklyn called Gertie. Blackbird wrote about it today on their excellent Supersonic blog : Throughout, when you tap Gertie’s Blackbird-powered NFC chip (shown above), wonder awaits. On the first tap, a free cookie sourced from a nearby bakery comes your way.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 29, 2023

USV is an investor in Bolster , a marketplace for fractional and full-time executive talent for startups and growth companies. This week Bolster launched a daily short (5min) podcast and email with actionable insights and advice from founders, operators, and investors. It is called The Daily Bolster. I did a Daily Bolster episode and it is featured today.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 20, 2023

Mike Zamansky is the person who got me interested in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC, a cause I have now contributed almost fifteen years of my life to. Our family’s public charity, Gotham Gives , has been funding the work we do in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC for the last decade and a month or so ago, the Gotham Gal recorded a podcast with Mike talking about the early days of our journey into K12 Computer Science, how we met, and what transpired.

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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 27, 2023

I saw Dan Primack assert that the venture capitalist’s customer is their limited partners in this tweet about the Citizen app, the recap, and their VCs: Regular reminder that, ultimately, VC funds works for their limited partners, not for their portfolio companies. [link] — Dan Primack (@danprimack) February 25, 2023 I DM’d Dan to let him know that is not the right way to think about the venture capital business.

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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 7, 2023

I’d guess that upwards of half of USV’s portfolio companies have changed the name of their company during their lifetime. It is not hard to understand why. Founders start out with an idea and not much more. By the time they have built a product, built a team, and found product market fit, they might be doing something a bit different or a lot different than where they started out.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JANUARY 31, 2023

I’ve never done a cleanse. But many of my friends and family members have done them. There are various flavors of cleanses but the basic idea is you cut back your consumption of food and drink and replace it with mostly liquid nutrition for anywhere from a day to a month. I believe the most common lengths are in and around one week. As I understand it, the theory behind the cleanse is it helps your body eliminate all sorts of toxins that build up over time from a poor diet and other unheal

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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 17, 2023

It has been many years since I’ve written code. I’ve hacked around in HTML and CSS a bit on this blog and a few other places. But I have not actually written an application in a very long time. I think it might be thirty years since I’ve done any real programming. Over the year-end break, my partner Nick taught me how to use GitHub Codespaces and Netlify to quickly spin up development and deployment environments.

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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

JANUARY 1, 2023

I want to focus this post on the macro environment for tech, startups, web3, and climate because that is where my head is at right now. I believe that sometime in the first half of 2023, the central banks around the world will start backing off the tightening that they have been engaged in as inflation continues to ease and the economy continues to cool.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 31, 2022

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending and one looking forward to the year ahead. This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow. What happened in 2022 is the bottom fell out of the capital markets and the startup and tech sector more broadly. Back in February 2021, I wrote a post called How This Ends.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 9, 2022

I have written many times about the Hour Of Code here at AVC. It is the highlight of the annual Computer Science Education Week which is the first week of December, which is this week. Yesterday Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs’ CIO, and I went with NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks to the Hospitality Management High School in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan to do an Hour of Code with the students there.

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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 28, 2022

When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it becomes a bit easier. The Gotham Gal and I buy and build a fair bit of real estate on the side and we generally use a “cap rate” of between 5 and 10 when we acquire and develop real estate.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

NOVEMBER 15, 2022

This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson. The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns like this seem to keep happening? At times like this, it helps to have a long-term view of web3 as a sector, not just a forward-looking long-term view, but also some perspective on where we have come from.

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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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