We had a very lively and healthy debate here at AVC a while back about gun safety. I am very much in the camp that we need to put a lot more restrictions on what guns should be on the market and how. But regardless of where you are on gun safety, the vast majority of Americas (between 70% and 90% depending on how and who you count) believe that background checks should be run on everyone who wants to buy a gun.
But getting background check legislation passed by the Senate is proving challenging. How is it that 70-90% of Americas support this idea and we can't get the Senate to pass the legislation? Well that is gun safety politics in Americ…
A while back, I posted a video of the week of Avner Ronen on Reuters Tech Tonic. In the comments to that post, the host Paul Smalera invited me to appear on the show and then invited the AVC community to sit in the audience.
Well the taping is today at the Reuters building in Times Square from 5pm to 6pm and the first 25 people to sign up can attend. The link to RSVP is here. Please don't RSVP unless you really plan to attend.
We are going to talk about immigration, regulation 2.0, bitcoin, and a few other things that will be common themes to the AVC community.
My partner Albert shared this line on his blog almost five years ago now. I find myself using it all the time. And it is an important lesson that I have learned in my career.
When something goes badly in your company, for many the initial instinct is to keep things under wraps as much as possible to avoid freaking everyone out. I would argue that it is better to acknowledge the crisis and use it to your advantage.
Change is hard to bring to an organization and a time of crisis is often a perfect time to make some changes that you have wanted to make for a while. It creates a perfect backdrop and context for doing that.
Maybe you are in th…
The Gotham Gal and I took this weekend off and flew down to the Bahamas to see some friends who have a house down here. From the time we landed on friday to the time we return to NYC later today, I have largely been off email. With the exception of writing this post and posting the video yesterday, I have been off of my laptop. I used my phone to text/kik with my kids and use the golf course's android app to figure out distances.
Down time is great. I should figure out how to make it a bigger part of my life. My friend Brad Feld and his wife Amy take regular weeks off the grid. I can see why that works for them.
For the past twenty years, I…
The Dean of the Computer Science and Statistics School (The Bren School) at UC Irvine is Hal Stern. Thirty four years ago in my freshman year at MIT, I was failing Differential Equations and Hal would tutor me as he watched the Celtics games in his room. With his helped I aced Differential Equations and went on to a fine career at MIT and beyond. The least I could do to pay him back was show up and give a talk at his school. I delivered that payback last Monday and it was a lot of fun.
It's a long video, almost an hour, but we cover a lot of topics near and dear to this community. So give it a watch this weekend if you can find the time.
I'm a data geek. I love data. And I love it when companies do interesting things with data, particularly my data.
So a few weeks ago, I was stunned to be told by Foursquare that the ice cream shop I had just stepped into was the most popular place people go to right after the japanese restaurant I had just left. This is a new feature Foursquare has rolled out on Android and I expect will be in the next iOS build.
I call the feature "places people go next" and I think it is awesome. Here's a screenshot I took of my home screen right after I checked into the Shake Shack on Wednesday at lunchtime.
So after a burger and fries, you are either g…
Christina wrote a post yesterday that got me thinking. It's not quite like working together but when a former colleague blogs, you get a bit of that "in the halls" thing that makes working in a group so great. Fortunately, Charlie, Andrew, and Eric all blog too.
Christina makes this point about medallions and monopolists:
I’ve started to believe the leverage in the “sharing economy” will be in opening regulated industries. SF cabs were atrocious because there are too few medallions. (Turns out the medallion holders, keen to restrict medallion supply, were well-incented lobbyists, as any good monopolist should be.) The revolutionary part of …
Twitter announced some new functionality in its Twitter Cards platform yesterday. At the top of the list is "mobile app deep linking". Here's how Twitter explains it:
With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed. To enable this feature, you just need to add a new set of markup tags, explained here.
This might not seem like much, but it's a big deal and something I've been encouraging Twitter and others to do for some time. It is particularly helpful for e-commerce apps where sending someone to a mobil…
There is a growing market out there for content marketing. Not the old fashioned kind where magazine companies would create custom magazines for brands, marketers, and retailers. I am talking about the Internet version in which brands, marketers, retailers and other businesses create blogs, twitter accounts, facebook pages, and the like and then spend money filling those pages with content. Many brands have full time employees creating this content. Others use third parties and even freelancers to do it.
In many ways I see this as the future of online marketing. Instead of paying tens of millions of dollars a year (or more) creating banner …
The AVC community hasn't done a DonorsChoose campaign since the Gotham Gal and I turned 50 and we raised something like $56k in the summer of 2011. I've been looking for a way to beat that and it has not been easy. That's a ton of money to raise in a month on a blog and hard to beat.
But the folks at DonorsChoose and I have come up with something awesome and I am excited to launch it today. For the next month we will be raising money for classrooms in schools that are helping their students learn to code.
Here's how it works. As you all know, I have been very involved in getting CS education into the NYC public school system. It all started…
The Verge has a post up that says the winners of the If I Had Glass campaign are largely Twitter users with big follower counts and links to a list of all winners. Sadly, my twitter account is not on that list. Back on February 20th, I saw the campaign launch and immediately tweeted this out:
#ifihadglass I would wear them on the subway too
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 20, 2013
I wasn't joking, although it was a reference to Sergey's subway ride. I will wear my glasses on the subway when I get them. If you want to invest in the services that are going to be built for these devices, then you need to own these devices.
Fortunately …
I am into quotes. Always have been. And one of my favorite things about Tumblr is they have a specific post type for quotes:
I find quotes around the web (and mobile) and post them to Tumblr (often with Tumblr's awesome share bookmarklet) all the time. And then they get reblogged. And I reblog quotes I find on Tumblr too.
I don't think there is a better place on the web to share quotes than Tumblr. It's one of the many things I love about it.
Here's a quote I reblogged from yesterday's comment thread onto Tumblr.
I have said many times that early stage VC is a lot like baseball, if you get a hit one out of every three times, you are headed to the hall of fame. And if I look back over my career, and also over the track records of the firms and funds I have helped manage, that is pretty much the hit rate I have seen. By "hit" I mean an investment that returns 5x or better. But of course, many of these hits return 10x or even 100x every once in a while.
So what happens with the other two-thirds? Well that is the part of the startup world that we don't talk too much about. Sometimes an entrepreneur will take an early exit. They will have raised a small a…
Back in the early days of the ATM machine, you could only transact on ATMs operated by your bank. If you were a Chase customer, you needed to find a Chase ATM to take cash out. That, of course, was a pain and the banks recognized it and formed roaming networks. The one I recall best was NYCE, which was formed by NatWest, Chase, Manny Hanny, Chemical, Barclays, Marine Midland, and Bank Of New York.
The same thing has happened with mobile wifi networks. If you are a T-Mobile Hotspot customer, you can often roam on a Boingo network or some other mobile wifi network.
Roaming is a great solution to the problem when multiple businesses offer a p…
I met Nelly Yusupova as we were recruiting software engineers to teach computer science in the NYC schools. She's a software engineer and entrepreneur with a passion for sharing what she knows with others. A few weeks after we met, Nelly came to see me to tell me about a two day bootcamp she runs called TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs.
TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs teaches entrepreneurs how the software design and build process works. Nelly had observed, as have I, that entrepreneurs who are not deeply technical spend too much money, time, and effort trying to get their ideas turned into software products. Many hire the wrong people, get a product…
I recently had lunch with Mark Leslie, a successful entrepreneur and CEO, who now teaches at Stanford and works with startups, often as a board member. He told me about a paper he and a colleague published in Harvard Business Review called The Sales Learning Curve. I read the paper and it articulates something I have seen quite a few times myself.
The paper starts out with this observation:
When a company launches a new product, the temptation is to immediately ramp up sales force capacity to acquire customers as quickly as possible. Yet in our 25 years of experience with start-ups and new-product introductions, we’ve found that hiring a f…
Last month, I pointed to a talk that Nick Grossman gave at Princeton where he laid out the principals of Regulation 2.0. This slide is from that talk.
Regulation 2.0 is a framework that we have been working on with a bunch of others who are rethinking what government means in a networked world. In the Regulation 1.0 world (the one we are in now) regulators are required to give you permission to do things. In a Regulation 2.0 world, as long as you report openly and transparently about what you are doing to the government and everyone else, you are free to innovate and operate. But you are accountable to live up to the rules that are set by th…
One of the secrets of the venture capital business is the magic behind a successful partnership. It is one of those things where the total is way more than the sum of the parts. At USV, I’ve been lucky to work with Brad for ten years, Albert for eight years (starting with his stint as President of Delicious), John for three years (but really for many more than that), and Andy for almost two years.
Each of us brings something different to the partnership and like a winning basketball team (we are also five), each person knows their role and delivers when it counts. Each partner has a hot hand for a while, then cools down, then gets hot again.…
I know we are already a day in and if you had Montana, Belmont, or UNLV in your brackets (like my son Josh did), then you are already behind the eight ball. But March Madness is so much fun that we are going to make it fun friday anyway.
My sentimental pick to go all the way is the Georgetown Hoyas. With Otto Porter Jr leading the charge and a stifling defense that has brought the likes of Louisville and Syracuse (twice) to their knees, I like Georgetown's chances this year.
Speaking of Syracuse, they looked dominant last night. And so did Louisville. In memory of the Big East, my basketball conference (may it rest in peace), I am calling a…
In a comment on yesterday's hobbyist post, Pete Griffiths offered "Do It Yourself Data Science" and I really liked that suggestion for a bunch of reasons.
I think data science and machine learning (I know they are not the same thing) are going to be a very big part of tech innovation in the coming years. And I also know that putting powerful tools in the hands of "everyman" produces more innovation than can happen when the tools are limited to mathematicians and scientists.
The blogging revolution in publishing is a great example of this. Once everyone could have a printing press, we got to see many important developments that did not and w…
One of my favorite posts in the past month came from Chris Dixon. It is short and sweet, just the way I like a blog post. In the post Chris lays out three constituencies to the startup economy; business people, engineers, and hobbyists. And he makes the point that hobbyists are a great lens through which to see the future.
I love Paul Bucheit's edict to "live in the future". I totally agree that is the best way to find the things that will turn out to be the next big thing. Being a hobbyist is a great way to live in the future. And so I try to play around with all of this stuff in order to wrap my mind around it. You should too.
Chris lays …
Last month I wrote a post mentioning that we have an activist in residence at USV. And I write a lot here at AVC about the policy stuff we have been working on. It might seem to some that we are more like policy think tank or adovacy organization than a venture capital firm. I think that is somewhat true. We make a lot of early stage investments and we work hard with those companies to help them succeed. But if you hung out at USV, you would see that we spend a lot of time on policy stuff. And that begs the question "why do you do that?".
The short answer is that Brad, who I founded USV with a decade ago, has felt from day one that policy an…
One of the mistakes I often see in business is short term thinking vs long term thinking. It struck me over the weekend when I saw this tweet:
Last quarter, Samsung’s net profit from its mobile division alone exceeded Google’s total profit from all operations (including adwords).
— dustin curtis (@dcurtis) March 14, 2013
Sure Samsung is making a killing on handset sales right now. So is Apple. That goes to their bottom line and then onto their balance sheet. And apparently Google isn’t making any money in mobile.
Today.
But when I think about who is developing the strongest franchise in mobile, it is obviously Google. They have gmail on…
My longtime friend Alesandro Piol and his colleague Maria Teresa Cometto have been working on a book project to document the rise of New York City as a tech hub. They researched the book together and Maria wrote it over the past year. The book is called Tech And The City and is now available on Amazon (free for Amazon Prime members on your kindle).
I read a mostly final version of the book a month or two ago and then wrote the foreward.
The book does a very good job of explaining why New York City was not a participant in the early phases of the technology revolution and why it has come on strong in recent years. It also documents the lead…
In a couple weeks we are going to kick off a month long DonorsChoose campaign here at AVC. We haven’t done one since August of 2011, when all of us raised $56,000 to celebrate The Gotham Gal and my 50th birthdays.
I will explain more about this new campaign we are going to do when it launches on April 1st. But in preparation for the campaign, I would like to remind everyone why DonorsChoose is so great. This profile of James Walter Doyle explains exactly why investing in teachers and their classrooms is so important.
Sometime in the past week here at AVC, it was suggested we do "back in the day" for fun friday. I like that idea and so here we go.
I did most of my programming in college, at MIT. And I wrote most of my code on this thing, a DEC VT100.
This thing was a workhorse. I spilled coffee on it. I got muffin crumbs in it. I took out my frustration on it. And it just kept going and going.
It was hooked up to a VAX-11. We ran all the data acquisition and data analysis work at the MIT Dept Of Ocean Engineering Water Tunnel Laboratory on it.
That was over thirty years ago. In fact, this summer will mark the 30th anniversary of my graduation from co…
There's an interesting project that launched on Kickstarter this week. The creator of the cult TV show Veronica Mars and the lead actress have launched a project to make The Veronica Mars Movie. In one day, the project has raised $2.5mm (as of 6:15am eastern). This is $500k more than the project goal of $2mm meaning the film will be shot this summer. It is also the largest film project on Kickstarter ever. The previous biggest film project on Kickstarter was around $800k.
This project is interesting in a number of ways. First of all, it shows that film projects can raise real budgets. I know you can make a film on $800k. But when you can rai…
I often wish we could do business on a handshake.
I've been thinking about it more and more these days. We negotiate a sophisticated set of documents when we invest in a company and for the most part, those documents never come into play. Many times when things go badly, we rip up the documents and decide what to do based on an honest discussion among the interested parties. When things go well, all we need are the stock certificates.
I am not suggesting USV is going to start doing deals on a handshake. We have investors and we have a responsibility to them to act responsibly.
But if I were an angel, I might do things differently. There …
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the TEALS program in which software engineers help teach CS classes in NYC high schools on their way to work. The response to that post was incredible. We got 140 software engineers to express interest and over 100 attended the first information session early last week. We are off to a great start with this program in NYC already. Thank you everyone who has raised your hand to help with this effort. It is really gratifying to see so many people giving back.
We have scheduled two more information sessions. The next one will be at Union Square Ventures at 6pm on March 20th. If you would like to attend this ses…