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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.
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.
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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.
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
MAY 22, 2022
Back in February of last year, I wrote a blog post with the same title and said this about the asset price bubble we were living in and investing in over the last few years: The big question is how does this end? I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and the global economy recovers.
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.
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. First, bridge loans are a bridge to something else. Most commonly they are a bridge to a round of financing with new investors (outsiders).
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
NOVEMBER 15, 2021
We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons: Seed stage is when a company has a good team, a good idea, but has not yet proven product market fit and a go to market model, and has not yet demonstrated a sustainable business model.
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
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.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JANUARY 5, 2021
The Secretary Of Treasury, in his last month in office, is giving us a textbook case of how not to regulate important technology innovation. The issue is “unhosted wallets” and how regulated exchanges and other “hosted wallets” interact with them.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
OCTOBER 12, 2021
A few weeks ago, I wrote about NYC’s Tech Resurgence. I observed that NYC continues to develop as one of the world’s leading centers of tech innovation. And then yesterday, I saw this tweet : NYC startups are getting funded at 2/3 the rate of Silicon Valley startups.
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.
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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
AUGUST 11, 2021
I like to think of investing in new things a bit like a football running play. Imagine you are the running back. You’ve been handed the football and you are looking for a hole to open up and run through. What you really want is some running room beyond the opening.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JULY 18, 2022
Every quarter our firm goes through a process to value our entire portfolio. Those values, on a schedule of investments we publish to our investors every quarter, flow through to our financial statements and capital accounts and establish how much an interest in our partnerships are worth at that time. We have always taken this process very seriously and approach it with a lot of rigor. Every partner is highly engaged with this process.
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.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JUNE 1, 2021
I’ve written a bunch about the globalization of the startup economy. You can start and build a tech company almost anywhere these days. That has been true for at least the last decade. But until very recently, raising capital for your startup was significantly easier if it was located in the major startup hubs, most notably Silicon Valley. I believe the pandemic changed that equation dramatically and USV’s “deal log” is a great example of that.
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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JULY 7, 2021
My partner Albert shared this article yesterday which suggests that the price of carbon will have to reach $150/ton by 2030 in order to create the conditions for the world to get to zero carbon by 2050.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
OCTOBER 12, 2020
Over the last decade, the Gotham Gal and I have moved away from oil and gas in our homes and have installed solar panels for electricity and heat pumps for heating and cooling. It has gotten less expensive to do this swap out as solar and heat pump costs have come down.
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.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
MARCH 28, 2022
So I saw this tweet by Semil Shah yesterday: A friend who works in an industry far from tech startups & VC asked what would be the single article I’d share to read on each topic. Here’s what I sent him: 1/ Startup = Growth by PG: [link] 2/ Competing To Win Deals by Fred Wilson: [link] pic.twitter.com/q7GG2k7UAX — Semil (@semil) March 27, 2022. So I clicked on the link to my Competing To Win Deals post, which I wrote in 2010, and read it.
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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JULY 25, 2022
We have been watching our portfolio of ~130 technology companies wrestle with this decision for the last two and a half years. Brought on by the covid pandemic and the work from home moment that it created, there has been a sea change in the way that technology companies organize themselves to get work done. Ben Horowitz observed this in a piece last week where he described A16Z’s decision to embrace a hybrid model that he called “ HQ in the Cloud.”
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
MARCH 8, 2021
With vaccinations topping 90mm doses in the US and upwards of 75mm doses likely to be injected into arms in the US in March, many companies are starting to think about what a return to the office might look like this summer and fall. I read two great posts this weekend talking about what this all means for knowledge workers and the companies that employ them: Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future – Anne Helen Petersen. We’re Never Going Back – Packy McCormick.
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.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JANUARY 1, 2021
Hi Everyone. Happy 2021. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in. Like our investing, I will get some of these right and some wrong. But having a point of view is very helpful when operating in a world that is full of uncertainty. Let’s start with the elephant in the room.
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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
NOVEMBER 12, 2020
A number of members of Congress sent a letter to the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Tuesday. I have embedded it below but readers via email may need to click here to read it. Letter to the OCC on Fintec… by CoinDesk. These elected officials are correct that way too many people in the US are unbanked or underbanked.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
MAY 7, 2021
Longtime AVC reader Alex Wolf has a Kickstarter project that I think is awesome. She has long been working on a “pattern alphabet” to encode the patterns of nature and life. This project turns this alphabet into cards that can be used by kids in school and at home to learn.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JUNE 12, 2022
I have worked in three venture capital firms in the thirty-six years I have been doing venture capital investing. They have all been small partnerships, between three and seven investing partners, where there is little to no hierarchy amount the partners. There are many models out there for building and managing investment firms. They vary from a single partner to an organization structure that looks like a Fortune 500 company. There is no best way to structure an investment firm.
A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
FEBRUARY 8, 2021
Many/most of you know that a lot of my philanthropic time and energy is dedicated to making sure that all K12 students, but particularly young women and students of color, have access to a high quality computer science education.
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A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC
JULY 19, 2021
Over the last 18 months, the early-stage financing market has seen dramatic changes characterized by these three things: A shift from in-person fundraising to virtual fundraising A reduction in financing process timelines from months to weeks A continued increase in the amount of capital available for early stage companies. I believe that for the most part, these changes will be permanent.
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