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 first of these two co-posts about the selection process. Next thursday will be the second. Matt's post on today's topic is here and should be read directly before or after this post.
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From the outside, most people think that VCs are just looking for the best ideas that will generate the biggest companies. And that is true. We want to invest in big ideas, big markets, and bi…
Today, Perry Chen announced on the Kickstarter blog that he’s moving up to Chairman and that his co-founder Yancey Strickler will step into the CEO role at the start of next year. Like all things that involve Kickstarter, this is a classic Perry move. Perry and Kickstarter have always done things their way, and today's news is another example of that.
As I reflected on this change, I started thinking about all the things that Perry and Kickstarter have taught me. I believe that entrepreneurs teach VCs and Kickstarter has been full of important lessons for me.
Maybe the most important lesson I have taken from Kickstarter is that you have to …
I'd like to announce something that a few of us have been working on for some time now. My colleagues at The NYC Foundation For Computer Science Education and I are raising a $5mm seed fund to invest in computer science education in the NYC public school system. The Gotham Gal and I have been investing out of this fund for several years, and now we are now opening it up to others who want to participate alongside of us.
Though we call this a seed fund, and we do think of it as an investment vehicle, this is a non-profit entity, 501(c)(3), and any committments to it are tax deductible and you will not be getting any money back from us. But yo…
A few weeks back, I wrote about a study commissioned by the Bloomberg Administration that said the tech sector was the second biggest industry in NYC and was responsible for 262,000 jobs. The comment thread to that post was full of debunking those numbers, particularly for counting media industry jobs in that 262,000 number. So after seeing all of those comments, I reached out to my friends at the Partnership For NYC, which is the chamber of commerce for NYC, and asked them what the right numbers were.
They did some work and published new numbers on their blog yesterday. The Partnership thinks the number of people in NYC working in positions…
I read a book this weekend. It is called The Fall of The Alphas. It was written by my friend and former colleague Dana Ardi. Dana is a corporate anthropologist. She studies what makes management teams work. She has also been a writer, a recruiter, a coach, a VC, and a private equity investor.
There is a change afoot in the global economy that is impacting every institution, every market, and every business. Hierarchies are giving way to networks. At USV we have turned this observation into an investment thesis.
Dana has seen the same change impacting management teams, managers, and the companies themselves. Her book is about this change an…
If a Company is making huge profits this year but will not make any profits in the future, it is worthless in the eyes of an investor. But if it loses money this year and next year and may lose money for a few more years, it can still be very valuable in the eyes of an investor.
Amazon had negative net income in 2012 and pretty much zero net income this year to date. And yet it is worth $166bn in the eyes of investors.
This is because companies are worth the present value of future cash flows, not current cash flows, and certainly not past cash flows.
Amazon is not the only company that is plowing back all of its incremental profits into g…
I was reading the latest Twitter S1 on edgar.sec.gov this morning and saw this tweet embedded in their filing. It made me smile to see that.
That is a great twitter conversation. It is one of my all time favorites. And, as many of you know, I also love KD. His game is pure pleasure to watch. I can't get enough of him. And if you want to see the flag football game in question, you can watch it here.
I will end this feature friday with some embedded music. My colleague Brian made this mix on a plane last week. I've been listening to it since. The A$AP beat that kicks it off is excellent.
I saw this chart on our favorite analyst's blog this morning:
And I thought "that's a shitload of cheap android tablets." 30mm cheap Android tablets in the first six months of 2013?
And of course Benedict was asking the same question I was thinking:
Why are people buying these? What are they being used for? They're mostly in China (that’s the pink bar above) and emerging markets and in lower income groups in the west. And it seems that they're being used for a little bit of web, and a bit of free gaming. Perhaps some book reading. And a LOT of video consumption. In fact, one might argue that for many buyers, these compete with TVs, not iP…
A couple days ago, I saw a tweet by Henry Blodget and replied:
@hblodget @TheStalwart yup. here is the seminal book on that http://t.co/nNGStKDiCy this is not war. surges don't work. open source it
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) October 21, 2013
I am really upset by the problems with healthcare.gov. Leaving aside all the issues with Obamacare, and I hope and pray this discussion does not downgrade into a debate about that, I am very excited about the potential of marketplaces and marketplace economics on the price, availability, and transparency of healthcare insurance. It is way too complicated to buy healthcare insurance today and it costs …
This won't be news to many of you who figured this out a while ago. But USV has a new front door and has had it for a few weeks now. I blogged about the desire for a new usv.com back in June of 2012, when we started thinking about what the new website should be. I framed the problem we were trying to solve as:
We started having the conversation all over the place. We've been having the conversation here at AVC since 2003. But we also have the conversation at continuations.com, aweissman.com, unfinished work, christinacacioppo.com, garychou.com, and on countless tumblrs, twitters, disqussions, and elsewhere around the web.
You might ask "why…
In arabian stories, the Genie is a magic spirit that has powers to do things for you. But if you let it out of the bottle, you can't control it anymore and bad things can happen.
I like to think of this story when I think about startups and technologies that have the potential to be big game changers. The key is to get the Genie out of the Bottle because then they (the incuments and establishment) can't put it back in.
Let's look at Airbnb. There are a lot of folks here in NYC and NY State that don't like Airbnb. It's competition for the hotels. It's unpopular with neighbors who don't want unknown people in their buildings. And, it turns ou…
Since the start of AVC, I have read every comment left here. It takes a lot of time and effort to do that, but I think it has been critical to building the kind of community we have here.
It does not scale. Paul Graham advocates doing things that don't scale at the start. He's right. If I had not engaged so deeply in the comments, I don't think this community would have evolved into what it is.
Continuing to read every comment at scale has been very taxing to me personally. Here is what the top of my priority inbox looks like this morning:
Today is a good day. Only ~100 comments to read to get to a non-comment email. Some days that number…
I posted the talk here on Tuesday, but during my delivery I ad libbed a fair bit with some stories which, of course, made the talk a lot better. It's about 15 minutes long.
Arnold's post on Citibike inspired this fun friday.
It got me thinking about what a profound change Citibike has been for me this year. I ride everywhere now. I used to Vespa around town but I haven't had my Vespa on the road for months. A Citibike can get me almost anywhere in lower manhattan in 15 minutes and it is my preferred form of transportation when I am traveling alone.
Is there something that has come along this year and changed things up for you in a major way? If so, what is it?
I saw this tweet from my partner Andy yesterday and immediately clicked through to see what he was talking about
Open science really is a thing. And it matters. http://t.co/Mdq14A7nJ9
— Andrew Weissman (@aweissman) October 16, 2013
He was talking about an announcement our portfolio company Science Exchange made yesterday. If you don’t want to click thru and read about it, I will summarize here.
Science Exchange is exactly what it sounds like, a marketplace for scientific services where you can find the right resarcher and laboratory to help you complete a research project you are working on.
Yesterday, they announced that The Center For …
I got up early, even for me, took a car to the airport, and boarded a flight to SFO to join my partners who have been in SF since yesterday. From the moment I land at SFO until the moment I get on a flight back to NYC early friday afternoon, I will be in meetings or dinners or sleeping.
Our firm makes a twice yearly trek to the bay area. Everyone other than our operations staff comes. We throw a big cocktail party and invite everyone who works at our bay area portfolio companies (if you work for a USV portfolio company in the bay area, I really encourage you to come), we meet privately with a few of our portfolio companies as a group, we me…
I am giving a short talk at the Velocity Conference this morning in NYC. The title of this post is the title of the talk. That's because I am putting the finishing touches on the talk this morning. Since I woke up late (6am), I don't really have time to both finish the talk and do a post in the next hour. So, I'll do both at the same time and in the process publish the talk here so that anyone who wants to can get the gist of it.
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I am an engineer. And so are most of the folks who work in tech ops. The engineer mindset is to build stuff, scale stuff, and make it work reliably and consistently.
When I was at MI…
Next weekend, at the Made In NYC Media Center, there will be a two day hackathon called GameJam NYC in which teams will be formed and compete to build the coolest mobile web games.
This hackathon is sponsored by TreSensa which makes mobile web game development tools and our portfolio company Kik which has a great platform for distributing mobile web games to almost a hundred million users.
If you like to build games and enjoy hacking on things with other similarly minded people, you should check this event out. It sounds like a lot of fun.
I am a big fan of the mobile web game concept. Write once, read everywhere. I think its time has com…
I was a T-Mobile customer for more than a decade from the late 90s until a year or two ago. I really enjoyed the experiece. I didn't know many other T-Mobile customers. That was fine with me.
One by one, my family switched to AT&T. My kids went to AT&T for the iPhone when you had to do that. I am not sure why The Gotham Gal went to AT&T but she did. So I was solo on T-Mobile and managing two bills and two plans. So I joined my family on AT&T. It's been fine, as long as you think $2000 a month for a family plan is OK.
I am going back to T Mobile. Not because AT&T sucks. It doesn't. Not because AT&T costs me a lot of money. It does.
I am goi…
Two weeks ago, in a fun friday that many derided as "no fun" we established that a minority of this community, but a sizeable one, thought that the US would default in its debt obligations as a result of an inability to find common ground in the latest budget fight.
I would like to redo that poll to see where the community has come in the past two weeks, most of which has been during the government shutdown (a misnomer if there ever was one as most of the government is still operating) and a political showdown in Washington. So here is the same question, slightly reworded:
Will The US Default On Its Obligations This Year?
My view is that w…
Here are some stats for AVC over the past month:
For those who don't want to do the math, desktop is 69%, phone is 23%, and tablet is 8%.
I was surprised that desktop remains so strong. I think my usage of the web is 40% desktop, 40% phone, 20% tablet. But I guess I am out and about a lot more than many people who are office bound during the day.
These numbers are up slightly this year. I ran the same numbers for the 2013 year to date and desktop was ~75% so it is moving down steadily, but not dramatically.
For those who want to know iOS vs Android, mobile visits are about 75% iOS, 25% Android. Not surprising considering who reads this bl…
A few years ago, I was doing some sort of public speaking thing and in the Q&A, a young man asked me for advice for founders who aren't technical. I said, "If you aren't technical, I suggest you get technical" And I meant it. I learned to code when I was a teenager. It wasn't that hard. I think anyone who has the motivation to start a company can find the motivation to learn to code.
Fast forward a few years and I read this story today. Sam Fellig wanted to build a marketplace where folks could buy products that were succesfully funded on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. His wife, who was tired of hearing all his crazy startup idea…
I am a bit surprised by this report, which says that NYC's second largest job sector is tech. According to The Verge, which wrote a post about this report:
Dr. Mandel counts 262,000 well-paying jobs in tech and information, an 11 percent jump since the economy crashed in 2007. The $30 billion in annual wages generated by the tech sector is small compared to the $90 billion in wages paid to the still-dominant financial sector, but tech wages have grown since 2007 while finance wages decreased.
I would have thought the real estate sector was larger (it may be) and it is also a bit surprising to me that tech is bigger than media & entertainmen…
Stephanie Tilenius, who is an EIR at Kleiner Perkins, wrote an interesting post on curated marketplaces last week. She mentions our portfolio companies Lending Club, Etsy, and Kickstarter in her post.
Stephanie argues that the old rules of building marketplaces, that led to big businesses at eBay (where she worked) and Amazon, are giving way to a new set of rules. This line, in particular, got my attention:
Consumers now demand beautifully designed and curated experiences, especially in a mobile-only marketplace.
I agree with Stephanie that marketplaces need to be simple, beautiful, and easy to use on mobile in order to succeed in the worl…
AVC regular Donna White posted this to her Tumblr yesterday:
I'm a crotchety old guy. I worry about all these new companies. I’m glad that they’re easier to start, but the problem is, they’re just as hard to finish as they have always been.
The quote is from Mike Olson in this post.
The thing in Mike's quote that really speaks to me is the difference between starting and finishing. Starting requires an idea/inspiration, a team, some technical skills, the ability to iterate on the MVP and find product market fit. That's hard for sure, but what happens after you find product market fit is even harder. That's called building the company and b…
Bitcoin was in the news this week and once again the association wasn’t all that positive. As I have said publicly, privately, and on this blog numerous times, I think so much of the discussion of Bitcoin misses the big point, which is that at its core, Bitcoin is a technology, protocol, and platform for entrepreneurial innovation.
Bitcoin is simply a transactional commerce layer for the global Internet. And once you wrap your head around that, the opportunities for innovation on top of Bitcoin turns out to be enormous.
But how does it work? Well, its not simple to understand. I think this video does a good job of explaining it.
It's friday and I am going to talk about a feature I have highlighted here before. It's the #Discover tab in Twitter. This feature just gets better and better and recently they overhauled the design to eliminate the noise and bring simplicity and clarity. I like it very much.
You can see that tweets of stories/posts/etc now reveal a short bit of the story. And tweets of photos show the photo in the timeline.
The other great thing is you get relevant news and interesting tweets from your friends comingled, as the screeengrab above shows.
If you use Twitter a lot, as I do and as I suspect many of you do, it knows you very well and does a fan…
My friend Jordy was cleaning out some old desk drawers and came across this today
I met Jordy in 1991, the year Euclid invested in the business he and his partner Ronny started, Upgrade Corporation Of America. I wrote a blog post about the important lesson those guys taught me fairly early in my career.
There is no way Jordy could have had my business card prior to 1991, so that tells me I did not have an email address at that time. I recall Steve Case handing out AOL floppy disks at some tech conference I went to in 1991 or 1992, so I think I got AOL email around that time. I still keep my AOL email address for old times sake. I am fredwil…