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

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 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 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 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

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 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 8, 2022

When fundraising gets tougher for startups, the existing investors (insiders) will often provide a bridge loan to the company to extend the runway for getting another round done. There is more of this sort of thing happening in today’s fundraising market and I thought I’d share some of the things I have learned about setting up bridge loans.

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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

MAY 9, 2022

Tech:NYC is launching a new initiative, Tech Year NYC , which helps young people from underrepresented backgrounds get access to careers in NYC’s fast-growing tech sector. Tech Year NYC is a rollup of several existing city programs into a single point of entry and engagement for tech companies and students. The idea is to make it easier for local tech companies to engage with this population and easier for the students to get access to these pathways to jobs.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 26, 2022

When I read the news a few weeks ago that Elon Musk had offered to buy Twitter, I wrote this: Twitter is too important to be owned and controlled by a single person. The opposite should be happening. Twitter should be decentralized as a protocol that powers an ecosystem of communication products and services. — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) April 14, 2022.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

APRIL 22, 2022

It is Earth Day, a day to celebrate our planet and rededicate ourselves to saving it. I plan to walk and ride my bike, avoid cars, and enjoy being out and about in NYC today. But I’d also like to talk about something that is bothering me. The New York State Assembly and Senate are working to pass a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining.

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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

FEBRUARY 25, 2022

I love using robotics to teach kids to code. A K12 teacher told me many years ago, “when the robot doesn’t do what you told it to do, you know your code is wrong and you need to fix it.” Robotics brings code to life for kids and that’s a great thing. So when I saw this Kickstarter project, Codrone , I backed it immediately. So did 120 other people and so this project is going to come to life.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 20, 2022

I wrote a fair bit last year about the disconnect between how companies were being valued and the fundamentals of those businesses. It seemed to me that many companies, from the founders, to the leadership teams, and the rank and file employees got more focused on raising capital and valuations than the basics of a business (people, product, customers, revenues, profits, etc).

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 18, 2022

A friend sent me this Kickstarter project which is about a public art project highlighting three languages that are at risk of extinction. I backed it and I think you might want to as well. You can do so here. The project ends this weekend so if you want to back it, do so now. USV TEAM POSTS: Nick Grossman — Feb 16, 2022 Ceramic Hanel Baveja — Feb 15, 2022 Mundi’s Series A.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

I wrote about pacing a few years ago. I am a fan of a steady pace, not too fast, not too slow. Sometimes the opportunity set forces you to go faster. As I wrote then: I don’t think a VC firm should manage to a pacing number. It should manage to the opportunity set that it sees. In the last two years, the VC business has been operating at a blistering pace, the fastest I’ve witnessed in my 35 years in the business (including the 99/00 era).

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

Coinbase launched the first in a series of payroll offerings: Proud of the team for continuing to roll out new product innovations at a rapid pace. Our US customers can now deposit a portion of their paycheck into @Coinbase as crypto or USD. Another great way to keep growing your participation in the cryptoeconomy. [link] — Surojit (@surojit) January 31, 2022.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

JANUARY 6, 2022

The stock and crypto markets have started off the year in selloff mode, with the Nasdaq down almost 5% this week and the big crypto assets down almost 10% this week. But this selloff has been going on for a lot longer than one week. It has been going on since early November when the Nasdaq peaked at $16k and BTC hit $67k. Since then it’s been downhill and the biggest carnage has been in the highflying “cloud” stocks.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 14, 2021

After skipping a year last year, USV held its annual team party last night. It has felt great getting back to getting together with friends, family, and co-workers this holiday season. It has meant a lot of rapid testing for me, all negative thankfully, including one this morning. We also had every single team member in the USV office yesterday, which was a first since we fully re-opened in March of this year.

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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

DECEMBER 6, 2021

On Friday, the US jobs report produced a confusing result. From Bloomberg : The jobs report is composed of two surveys — one of employers and the other of households. The employer survey, which determines the payroll and wage figures, showed hiring slowed across industries, including declines at automakers and retail outlets. The household survey, which determines the jobless and participation rates, showed employment surged by 1.14 million people and many came off the sidelines.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

DECEMBER 3, 2021

I backed this project the minute I saw it this morning. The idea of a wall-mounted device like a Nest Thermostat that controls/dims lights and lets you turn up or down your music seems awesome to me. The Nest interface is simple, intuitive, and works wonderfully. Also, the video is fantastic. More like a movie trailer than a promotional video. It’s embedded below on the blog but if you are reading this on email, click here and watch it.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

OCTOBER 4, 2021

Our portfolio company Dapper Labs , creator of CryptoKitties , the Flow Blockchain , and the NBA Top Shot collectible game, is announcing Dapper Collectives today. Dapper Collectives comes by way of an acquisition of Brud , a company that has been developing “community-owned media and collectively built worlds” for the last five years. Dapper Collectives will be led by Trevor McFedries, the founder and CEO of Brud and the co-founder of the FWB DAO.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

Early in the pandemic, we were all deluged with stories of tech workers, companies, and founders leaving Silicon Valley for Miami and Austin. And that was true. But from my personal experience, they also left for many other places too, including Los Angeles and New York City. I met with a founder last week who has left the bay area for good and now splits his time between homes in LA and NYC.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

My friend Mike Masnick , founder and leader of Techdirt , is crowdfunding a new paper on NFTs. I backed the project just now with 0.1 ETH and you can do the same here.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

Yesterday I wrote about NYC’s Citibike system , which I love, and said this: There should be financial rewards for taking a bike from a kiosk that is completely full or nearly full and returning to a kiosk that is empty or nearly empty. There should also be a financial reward for docking an E-Bike in a kiosk where there are no E-Bikes or very few.

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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 15, 2021

I have been doing a bunch of large group in-person meetings in the last few weeks and I must say that it feels great to be doing these large group meetings in person. There is a different energy in the room than on the screen. In order to make everyone comfortable meeting like this, the way these meetings typically happen is everyone provides a proof of vaccination and everyone gets a covid test within 24 hours of the meeting.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

In her decision last week on the Epic vs Apple case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote this: I am not a lawyer, but I read that to say that apps that use crypto rails for payments cannot be blocked by Apple anymore. If so, that is a decision of enormous consequences for the crypto sector and yet another opening for it. That is so f **g awesome.

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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 3, 2021

I backed this project to fund a creator space and coffee shop in Williamsburg Brooklyn this morning. As many companies make the decision to move to hybrid and remote workforces, we will need more of this kind of space to work in. I am excited to see entrepreneurs stepping in and filling that role. And I like to support them when they do. Email readers can see the video here.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 27, 2021

This project on Kickstarter is cool. A UPS (uninterrupted power supply) for your entire home. I backed it this morning along with almost 2,400 other people who have backed it so far. You can see the video and back it here. USV TEAM POSTS: Hanel Baveja — Aug 25, 2021 Mindset.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 25, 2021

Occasionally, I will write at USV.com and today is one of those days. I wrote about an investment in a DAO called Bright Moments that we made this week. DAOs are interesting and we plan to do a bunch of DAO investing going forward. You can read the post here. USV TEAM POSTS: Hanel Baveja — Aug 16, 2021 Measurement in Market Making.

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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

AUGUST 23, 2021

I realized a long time ago that the VC’s customer is the founder/CEO/portfolio company and that our investors (called LPs in VC speak) are our “shareholders” That was a very defining moment for me and has clarified what matters the most in a VC firm. That said, we take investor relations very seriously at USV and always have. This is our model: 1/ We are loyal to our LPs and offer them the opportunity to invest with us fund after fund after fund unless something has materially

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