I've frequently said on this blog that emergent behavior in a service is a sign to me that the service is scaling into something important and valuable. It is a feature that we look for a lot in our investments. I don't love it when entrepreneurs build services that are too tightly constructed around a single use case. I do love it when entrepreneurs build services that the users can take and do interesting things with.
Here's a short (3min) video where Alex Ljung, founder and CEO of our portfolio company SoundCloud, talks about how that happened in SoundCloud.
Arnold suggested we discuss these ads last week so we are going to do that. But first some background.
Disqus, which is a USV portfolio company, offers a free ad-supported service for both commenters and publishers. Their first ad product is promoted discovery which has been a link oriented product for the past year. Publishers opt into promoted discovery and share revenues with Disqus if they opt-in.
Recently, Disqus added the option for publishers who are running promoted discovery to switch from links to thumbnails. I decided to make that switch and turned on thumbnails a week or two ago. The revenue AVC is making has gone up as a result…
I love the John Hughes film starring John Candy and Steve Martin in which the two of them go to great effort to get home from NYC to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving dinner. I might put it on this morning while the Gotham Gal is cooking in the kitchen.
I thought of that film yesterday as I was coming out of the subway and person after person was coming down the subway stairs with their luggage. On most days you don't see people dragging their luggage into the subway. But the day before thanksgiving is different. Thanksgiving is a day you spend with your family. And so people get on planes, trains, and automobiles and get to their loved ones.…
I was reading a thread on Hacker News this morning and came across this gem of a comment:
One of the consequences of a public transaction chain is the great potential for witch hunts. Here's one of the first examples, but it surely won't be the last.
The backstory here is a couple researchers posted a paper suggesting that Satoshi (the inventor of bitcoin that nobody knows) had done a large transaction with the founder of Silk Road. That was picked up by the New York Times last weekend. Well it turns out that was not what happened. What happened in fact was this.
When things are public, like the bitcoin block chain where all the transactio…
The AVC community will remember back to this summer when we helped to crowdfund a middle school chess team that was struggling to come up with the money to go to the tournaments it had won numerous times over the past decade. That was a huge success for everyone involved. And like most successes, it brought out other similar efforts.
One that I am particularly fond of is at the Park Slope Elementary and Middle School (aka PS/MS 282) in Park Slope Brooklyn. At PS/MS 282, every student learns chess and 50 of the students are selected to represent the school in the state and national championships. Last year, PS/MS 282 won the National Champion…
There's a great Andy Serwer interview of Marc Andreessen up on Fortune. I would recommend everyone go give it a read. Marc expresses many of the same things my partners and I are seeing and feeling right now.
But the ending of the article is really great. Andy asks him why driverless cars are so great when everyone loves owning and driving a car. And Marc answers with this gem:
Ask a kid. Take teenagers 20 years ago and ask them would they rather have a car or a computer? And the answer would have been 100% of the time they'd rather have a car, because a car represents freedom, right?
Today, ask kids if they'd rather have a smartphone or …
Yesterday I received an email from a reader who wanted to know why I was hyping my position in Bitcoin. It's a fair question and one that I feel like responding to publicly as well as privately.
USV does not own any Bitcoin. I don't know for sure, but I suspect my partners own very little, if any Bitcoin. I own a total of 7.39 Bitcoin spread between several hosts.
I own these Bitcoin to be able to use them when I want to try new things. I have purchased approximatly 175 Bitcoin over the years and have spent or given away almost all of it.
I don't have a view on what the ultimate value of a Bitcoin will be nor do I care. I am interested in …
A little over a month ago I went down to NYU Stern and did a public discussion with Richard Florida about the urbanization of tech. This is a 5 minute long highlight reel of that talk. I don’t believe the full talk is online. If it is, I will link to it here.
With everything in the cloud now, it is important to protect your most sensitive information. I like two factor authentication for doing that. Bad people can steal passwords, but stealing your password and your phone at the same time is not as easy. And under the theory that being harder to rob than your neighbor is often enough, I feel pretty comfortable with two factor auth security and use it on as many online services as I can.
But having a dedicated piece of hardware, or a dedicated mobile app like Google Authenticator, for every web service is also a pain.
I've been watching a company called Authy for the past few years attempt to sol…
I blogged about DrawQuest for iPad earlier this year. DrawQuest is the creation of our portfolio company Canvas. Since it launched DrawQuest has been featured several times in the iPad app store and has developed a large community of people who draw the daily quests. The quality and creativity of the drawings is really incredible. Here's a feed of the drawings that have made their way to twitter.
So here's the big news. DrawQuest is now available on iPhone. You can now participate in the DrawQuest community via tablet or phone (and iPod touch). And DrawQuest now includes the ability for a user to create a new quest. Until now, all the quests…
Longtime readers will know this is a topic near and dear to my heart. I did a whole MBA Mondays series on this topic and I followed that up with a Skillshare class on the topic.
So I was excited to see that First Round Capital featured a blog post by Andy Rachleff on this topic yesterday. Andy was a founding partner at Benchmark and knows his way around a startup cap table. Andy included this slide deck in his post and I will reblog it here.
Wealthfront Equity Plan from Wealthfront
You will notice that Andy's plan differs a bit from my plan. But not by much. The important similarities are that Andy and I both encourage companies to no…
Everyone focuses on the price of Bitcoin these days and it is no wonder why. But for Bitcoin to be anything more than a store of value, we need to see a transactional ecosystem develop. When the citizens of the world will be able to buy and sell from each other and from retailers of all shapes and sizes via Bitcoin, then we will have truly realized the potential of a global digital currency.
Furthermore, transactions can help stabilize what is a very volatile currency today. There is an imbalance of supply and demand right now. If there was as much transactional activity as there is speculative activity, there would be more supply of Bitcoin…
I have written about the Fintech Innovation Lab here before. It's one of the first vertical accelerator programs that have cropped up in NYC and its one of the best. They take a handful of promising fintech companies each year and give them introductions to the top execs at the leading financial services companies in NYC.
If you are running a fintech startup and feel like you could use some mentoring, visibility with investors, and above all, some intros to potential customers, you should think about applying.
The application deadline is in three weeks, December 6th. Details and the application page are here.
One of the things I am noticing is the trend to try to solve problems with software instead of dedicated hardware. That makes sense for a whole bunch of reasons, but the biggest ones are that the marginal cost of additional user is almost zero with software and that you can iterate your product much more quickly with software.
Smartphones make this trend possible because we have a hardware devices on us most of the time. A good example of this is the Moves app. Instead of using a device like FitBit, Up, or FuelBad, the Moves app turns your phone into an activity tracker. Right now, Moves eats your battery too much which is why it is not more…
I found this video in my YouTube suggested video feed. It's a Jason Calacanis interview of Ben Milne, the founder of our portfolio company Dwolla. It's a good discussion of why the credit card system is very expensive and why we need something better. Dwolla is trying to create something better.
I got wind of this yesterday in the comments to my SoundCloud post. You can now put a link to media that is embeddable (tweet, image, video, audio, etc) and Disqus will attach the media to the comment. Jim leaked the news in this comment.
So we are going to have some fun with this new feature in the comments. Leave a comment that includes a link to embeddable media and let's see what happens.
I will get us started with some music from David Bowie and James Murphy that I found on SoundCloud this morning. But you are going to have to go into the comments to hear it.
Our portfolio company SoundCloud turned five years old yesterday. To celebrate they posted this 6 minute clip where 5 soundclouders tell their stories. What I like so much about this is that each of the 5 soundclouders have very different talents, very different use cases, and very different stories. Happy Birthday SoundCloud
This isn't the first post I've written with this headline. That was here. But both of the posts are about slide decks I saw.
I was looking at Henry Blodget's Future of Digital 2013 deck this morning and saw this slide in it:
TV is hanging in there admirably. It seems to be weathering the mobile onslaught even better than the desktop web. But the mobile monster is eating everything. The jump from 2012 to 2013 should be terrifying to anyone who has a business based anywhere but mobile. That includes me. Wow.
My friend Howard is in town and he's going to come by my office today to see me. It got me thinking about the good old days at Wallstrip and all the fun we had. And how that led to the avatar I use here and everywhere else on the web. So I am reposting the story of my avatar which I initially told here four or five years ago.
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Orginally posted on Nov 29th, 2009:
I saw this tweet when I got up this morning:
hey @fredwilson – whats the story behind ur avatar?
While longtime readers know it, I figure many of you don't. So here it goes.
Starting about four years ago, Howard Lindzon started commenting actively on this blo…
When I was early in my career, I casually mentioned to an older VC that I had yet to lose money on an investment. He replied "that's not good, you aren't taking enough risk." I have gone on to lose a lot of money over the years. And made a fair bit too.
So one of the things I like to look at when I look at our funds and other VC funds that I am an investor in are loss ratios. You can calculate loss ratios by "names" meaning how many investments ended up being worth zero. Or you can calculate loss ratios by "dollars" meaning how much of the capital invested in the fund went into total losses. Ideally your names loss ratio will be a lot higher…
On friday, as I ate a bowl of soup for lunch, I pulled out two phones, an iPhone and my Android. I opened up the app stores and went to the leaderboards. And I looked at the top free apps on both phones. They were radically different. That got me thinking about the different user bases on these two operating systems here in the US.
So as I finished my soup, I opened up a google spreadsheet and entered the top forty apps in both stores. I then shared with Brian who likes to look at stuff like this, and then I posted a link to it on usv.com so that others could see what we were up to. I am hoping that we can start using our website to publicly…
Albert stopped by the OneEleven accelerator in Toronto after the most recent Wattpad board meeting and sat down for a talk with William Mougayar.
Topics they discussed include how Albert got into Tech, working with entrepreneurs, the USV investment thesis, Tumblr, Foursquare, education, homeschooling, healthcare, Canada, crowdfunding's impact on venture capital, the new USV.com, machine learning, surveillance, privacy and security.
The video is about an hour and half, including intro and Q&A.
Every morning I post a song to the Internet. I have been doing this for at least six years. For as long as I've been on Tumblr.
You all know how obsessed I am about posting every day. It's probably a mortality thing for me. Wake up, be glad to be alive, post something on the Internet. Like a dog marking his spot.
Posting music is a bit different than posting text. Because you can listen to it. It comes alive. It makes you smile, dance, tap, and at times, cry. I cried a fair bit last week as Lou Reed songs filled up my feed for a couple days. We sat shiva with his music.
Friday is particularly special because a group of us have played a gam…
My friend Matt Blumberg
and I are co-teaching a class at Princeton in a few weeks. The subject
of the class is the VC/entrepreneur relationship. As part of doing this
class, Matt and I are doing two posts each in a point/counterpoint
model. Today is the second of these two co-posts about getting along post investment. Matt's post on today's topic is here and should be read directly before or after this post.
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I honestly can't think of a more important topic for VCs. It's pretty important for entrepreneurs as well. But entrepreneurs can build companies without VCs. It's not possible to be a great VC without being reall…
I would like to congratulate Bill de Blasio on his landslide victory in the NYC mayoral race. He will become our next mayor on Jan 1st 2014.
His vision of making NYC a city of opportunity for everyone is laudable and I hope he can deliver on it. But it is easier said than done. The problems facing our economy, our city, and our citizens are deep rooted and not prone to easy solutions. I don't believe old school liberalism will provide the answers. If we want to address the income equality issues, the job stagnation problems, and the crime and poverty that still blights parts of NYC, we must look for new ideas and they must start with educat…
Yesterday evening I got a three minute speaking slot at the NY Tech Meetup and announced the effort we are making to bring computer science to the NYC public school system. If you didn't read about it last week here at AVC, you can click on that link to get a brief description of what we are up to.
I also announced the crowfunding part of the campaign. We recognize that most of the $5mm we are raising to help bring CS programs to NYC public schools will come from a few large donors (most of all me and the Gotham Gal), but we want to make sure that everyone in the NYC tech community and more broadly in NYC can be a part of this.
So if you wo…
I love Hackpad. And it's strange because most of what Hackpad does, Google Docs does. And I really like Google Docs. I use Google Docs dozens of times a day.
But there is something about Hackpad that I like better than Google Docs for massively open online realtime document creation. Let's not turn that into an acronym please.
Yesterday, we created this document on Hackpad. And I embedded it on AVC. You could sit there and watch people from all around the world entering stuff into it, taking stuff out, commenting, adding things, etc. You could see when the folks in asia woke up and started entering in asian companies.
Wikipedia showed th…
Aileen Lee has a really good post up on TechCrunch, in which she analyzes the number of companies that have been started since 2003 that have gone on to be worth $1bn or more.
This is a very useful exercise in the VC business since it is these big wins that produce the vast majority of returns in the business. I am not sure it is that is worthwhile exercise for entrepreneurs since you can bypass the VC business entirely, keep all or most of your company, and sell it for $20mm and have a big personal and financial success. That's another way of saying that focusing on the huge wins is something VCs do, will keep doing, and need to do, but it…
Zach Sims, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Codecademy, was on Colbert this week. There were some good lines. I liked "drop out, turn on, and log in" at 3:40.
[I am getting autoplay complaints. Autoplay is off in the code. So I have removed this embed and you can find the video here]
Sometime this past week Disqus flipped the switch and AVC has been using the beta version of Disqus' mobile embed. I have been using this embed on my Android for a month or so and at first it was hard to get used to clicking into a new tab to comment or read, upvote, and reply to comments, but I came to like that approach a lot better. The mobile embed in its own tab performs a lot better than the embed in the same tab as the main post.
But that's my take. I am interested in what all of you think. If you haven't seen it in action, pull out your iPhone or Android and load this post and go into the comments. You should see a couple comments an…