A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 12, 2020

I just finished completing a thirty page form for an investment my wife and I are making in a limited partnership. This form is called a subscription agreement. I wrote about the frustration of having to complete this identical form again and again six and a half years ago here on AVC. One great thing has happened on this issue in those six and a half years. Many/most subscription agreements are now sent digitally via Docusign or Adobe. That’s great.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Earlier this week I purchased 1% of a collection of five 1985 Nike Air Jordan sneakers using our portfolio company Otis’ mobile app. I paid $330 for ten shares (out of a total of 1000 shares) implying a value of $33,000 for the five pairs, or roughly $6600 each.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 10, 2020

Many founders want to do SAFE note financings for their early rounds to save time and money. My response to that is “let’s do a priced round, we can use a standard financing form we both like, we won’t use a lawyer on our side, and we can close in a week.” ” The key to being able to do that is the availability of standard financing forms. Many venture law firms and also the NVCA have published standard forms on the web. Here are Cooley’s forms.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MARCH 19, 2020

On the first episode of Howard’s new podcast , his guest said, “in panics, all assets are correlated.” ” I suspect that is true to some extent.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 11, 2020

I’ve written a bit about our portfolio company Nurx since we made the investment back in 2016. Nurx is a great example of how technology is helping to reshape how healthcare is delivered. With the Nurx mobile app, women (and men too) can find the prescription or home diagnostic test they need, connect to a doctor who can review the request and write the prescription, and get the medication or test shipped to them at home. No stigma, no wait, no travel.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 8, 2020

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this tweet by my partner Albert: Must read thread on #Masks4All #covid19 [link] — Albert Wenger ????? albertwenger) March 28, 2020.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 27, 2020

I wrote a blog post in September of last year arguing that gross margins and operating margins really matter when valuing companies.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 2, 2020

I am a fan of the slow and steady approach to building a business. I call it “crawl, walk, run.” ” I have seen many founders try the “run right away” approach and it is super hard to make that work. An example of “run right away” would be to raise a $30mm seed round, hire a couple of hundred employees, and go for broke. That mostly results in being broke. Of course, there are examples of founders who did that and succeeded.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 25, 2020

This is a topic of great importance and one that we in the tech/startup sector have not done a good job with. We wait until a company is ready to go public and then address it. While that is better than nothing, it is not good enough. The board diversity problem is a symptom of a much broader problem around lack of diversity in founders that get funded and lack of diversity in VC firms. Most startup boards are made up of a few founders and a few VCs. No wonder you have no diversity on the board.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 18, 2019

A new blockchain & cryptocurrency project, Libra , was announced today. Libra has been incubated by Facebook. USV will be one of the founding members of the governing body, the Libra Association.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 8, 2020

When the pandemic started, the conventional wisdom was that the capital markets would take a beating, including the venture capital market for startup capital. The second quarter of 2020 is now behind us and we will see the data on it soon. I suspect what we will see is a very active venture capital market, quite the opposite of what was initially expected. There are a number of reasons that I think we will see that. First, venture capital firms raise funds and it is our job to put them to work.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 5, 2020

Learning to code was the thing that unlocked it all for me. I learned to hack in Basic during high school. I parlayed that into a programming job in college, which led to my first job out of college, which then led to a job that helped me pay for graduate school, which led to a job in venture capital. That is why I have made getting computer science broadly deployed in the K-12 system in NYC and around the US the philanthropic effort that I put most of my charitable time into.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 7, 2020

One of the great joys of the work I do is I get to watch the leaders of our portfolio companies grow over time. I’ve had a number of moments over the last few months where I got off a call or a meeting and thought to myself “wow, she’s a new person.” ” Growing as a leader takes time, mistakes, failure, feedback, and a lot of work. You don’t magically show up as the CEO and you are good to go. It’s not like that at all.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 18, 2020

So many of our favorite community anchors have shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. And reopening them won’t be easy.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

The crypto sector is in an interesting phase right now. The market has rallied from its lows this past winter and is up a lot in 2019: But Bitcoin now makes up almost 70% of that aggregate market cap. In some ways, Bitcoin is the one protocol that has found lasting product-market fit.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

I was talking to a friend today about company values and how important they are but also how lame so many of them are. I told him that some of my favorite company values come from our former portfolio company Twilio (which in the spirit of full disclosure I am still a large shareholder of).

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JUNE 30, 2020

I got a question this past weekend that kind of stumped me. The question is – are there any really good mail hosts other than Gmail and Outlook? I realize that Yahoo still operates a mail host as does AOL. And that many of the ISPs offer mail hosting. But all of those feel like 20 year old technology. Of course I could be wrong about that. I am not talking about mail clients like Superhuman and Hey and others (including Apple and Microsoft’s mail clients).

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strategy

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 9, 2020

I linked to a post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince the other day. In it , he wrote: The super heroes of this crisis are clearly the medical professionals at the front lines saving people’s lives and the scientists searching for a cure. But the faithful sidekick that’s helping us get through this crisis — still connected to our friends, loved ones, and, for those of us fortunate enough to be able to continue work from home, our jobs — is the Internet. The data is kind of incredible.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 7, 2020

One of the silver linings to this awful pandemic is that things have slowed down a lot. Not just work. Everything really. I find myself taking more time to do the dishes, work out, meditate, etc. There is less “racing through the day” and more time to do things right and carefully. We clean the house on Sundays and it takes the two of us almost three hours and while I can’t call it enjoyable, there is a certain satisfaction from doing it well and doing it right.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 13, 2020

As policy makers around the world seek to mitigate the economic shock from this pandemic, one less obvious but powerful place to look are working capital flows. Yes we do need direct relief for small businesses like the forgivable PPP loans. We also need things like payroll tax deferrals and other relief from the CARES Act. We also need our capital markets to work so actions like the Fed is taking are necessary and important.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 23, 2020

Podcasts have emerged as a major new category in media/entertainment/news/education etc. We have seen huge deals for big podcast hosts like Bill Simmons and Joe Rogan, both of whom did transactions with Spotify for nine-figure amounts. But as Spotify (and surely others to follow) lock-up top podcast content to strengthen their subscription offerings, we stand to lose something awesome about podcasts which is the ability to listen to them for free on any platform we choose.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JULY 24, 2020

I am a big believer in the saying “you can’t be what you can’t see.” ” And I have spent a lot of time and energy finding ways for young people to see careers in science, technology, and innovation so that they can put themselves on a course to have one themselves. I came across a series of books for kids called The Steamchasers on Kickstarter today.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 20, 2020

I wrote a blog post on March 12th called Open For Business and thought I would return to the topic. If you search for “vc open for business” on Twitter , you will see almost universal scorn for the idea that VCs are open for business right now.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 12, 2020

USV has invested in the education sector for a bit more than ten years. We kicked things off with an event we called Hacking Education back in March 2009. We have focused on “direct to learner” businesses and have mostly avoided investing in companies that sell to the established education system. This has been a good strategy and we have assembled a fantastic direct to learner portfolio that includes companies like Duolingo , Quizlet , Skillshare , Codecademy , and Outschool.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 22, 2020

I wrote about our portfolio company Duolingo’s English Proficiency Test back in August of last year. I have always loved the idea that a company that helps people learn a language can also help people prove their fluency in a language. It is two sides of the same coin. But the road to success with the English Proficiency Test has been hard.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

About ten years ago, I started asking why were weren’t teaching computer science to every student in the NYC public school system.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 23, 2020

I realize that most businesses are suffering greatly in this pandemic. Many have been shut completely. But there are some that are experiencing the opposite situation. They have a growth spurt as a result of this moment. Businesses in food delivery, e-commerce, online education, telehealth, remote work, and cloud infrastructure are examples of such situations. I’ve seen event driven growth spurts over the years. A plane lands in the Hudson and everyone heads to Twitter to see it.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 19, 2020

I read my friend Nick Bilton ‘s book American Kingpin over the last few weeks. It is the story of Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts), the founder and owner of The Silk Road.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 31, 2019

My friend Steve Kane suggested I take a longer view in my pair of year end posts this year: What, no decade end/decade ahead posts? — Steven Kane (@stevenkane) December 26, 2019. And so I will. Here are the big things that happened in tech, startups, business, and more in the decade that is ending today, in no particular order of importance. 1/ The emergence of the big four web/mobile monopolies; Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 10, 2020

This is the fourth funding friday blog post in which I’ve suggested good causes to contribute to during this pandemic. March 20th – restaurant workers. March 27th – health care protective gear. April 3rd – feeding people in need. Today, I would like to highlight The 1k project. The 1K project was built by Alex from NYC, Minda from Seattle, and a group of over 20 volunteers consisting mostly of tech founders.

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