This past week, my son Josh asked me to explain String Theory to him. That was a tough task because I don't know much about String Theory myself. But with the help of Google and Wikipedia, we worked through most of the basic concepts in about an hour and he had the guts of a five minute talk he planned to give at school the next day. Phew.
The next day I asked Zander, our resident physicist at USV, about String Theory. He pointed me to a TED Talk by Brian Greene. Which I just watched. And Zander is right, if you have 20 minutes and want to get the essence of string theory down, watch this video. It is great.
Panterosa suggested today's fun friday. She sent me this email:
As the 'season' starts here, I wonder how everybody decides which art shows, theater and concerts to attend. It's such a pain to crawl thru event listing in NYC, let alone US or internationally.
I have longed for an art app which can follow artists, galleries, museum, themes and so on, like the Etsy taste map
I have seen a few apps like that but I don't use any of them personally. I do use the Songkick mobile and web apps to keep track of concerts I want to see.
For a broader view of what's going on in NYC, I have long relied on NY Magazine's Fall Preview issue which does a …
Next Tuesday, September 10th, Democrats and Republicans will go to the polls to pick their mayoral candidates for the general election on November 5th. It is possible that no Democrat candidate will get to 40% in the primary and then there will be a runoff.
There are also several independent candidates, including the tech community's very own Jack Hidary.
The Gotham Gal and I have provided financial support to several of the candidates and our giving record is public record. That said, the goal of this post is not to convince any of you to vote for a specific candidate.
What I do recommend is that all NY'ers who read this blog take the t…
When I got back to my office after some time at the beach I found a GeeksPhone waiting for me. Regular readers will remember that I have been eager to try an all HTML phone. The best option right now is Firefox OS and this GeeksPhone is the first Firefox OS phone I have gotten my hands on. I could barely pay attention to anything else in the office yesterday. All I wanted to do was play with this thing.
This post is all about my first impressions. I won’t focus too much on the hardware since there will be a number of handsets made that run Firefox OS. Instead I will focus on the experience of using an all HTML phone.
I’ll give you the punch…
The announcement that Microsoft is acquiring Nokia's handset business is a recognition that Windows Phone and Nokia devices are attached at the hip and are in fact one business not two. It is also apparently a recognition that Nokia was running out of cash and needed to do something big.
So now we have three fully integrated mobile OS and handset companies (Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry) and one fully integrated mobile OS and handset company with an OEM ecosystem that is sort of working (Google). Android is open source so we are likely to see it in various flavors (Amazon Android, China Android, etc) for a long time to come. It is also possi…
It's labor day, a day we celebrate the labor movement and the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the US (from wikipedia). As Obama has said many times, a job is something that everyone needs. It is about pride and self image as much as it is about money.
But we've been losing jobs in the US for years as the manufacturing based economy recedes and relocates and the new industries we are all hoping for are not creating jobs fast enough to replace those that are lost.
The central question, it seems…
There was a consensus in the comments to my post on General Solicitation the other day that I should submit my comments to the SEC.
So I did that this morning. My comment has not been posted publicly, but I suspect it will at some point.
This is what I said:
It is my opinion, and that of those who we do business with, including our securities lawyers, that these proposed rules effectively make General Solicitation a non-starter for startup companies. If the SEC's intention, with these proposed additional rules, is to neuter General Solicitation to the point that it is legal but nobody avails themselves of it, they will succeed.
The full b…
I suspect most of you have seen this by now. It's been coming at me for the past 10 days from all angles. I must have had it sent to me a dozen times and I've come across it in social media another dozen times. But that's because it is spot on and excellent.
This is a 5min edited summary of the talk. For the full thing, go here.
Last night at dinner Jessica and her friends Phoebe and Alex got to talking about the Myers Briggs personality type. Alex asked me a few questions and said to me "you are INTP". She did the same with the Gotham Gal and opined that she was "ENFJ".
So this morning I took a Myers Briggs test on the Internet and sure enough, Alex was right. I am an INTP:
I did a little bit of looking around about INTP and found these two pages, portrait of an INTP and well known INTPs.
That was fun for me so I thought it might be fun for all of us. If you want to play along today on Fun Friday, take the test (it took me about 3-4 mins) and then tell us in th…
The JOBS Act was signed into law on April 5, 2012. This legislation was designed to make it easier for small businesses in the US to raise capital and contained a number of important and valuable changes to securities laws. One of the most promising changes in the JOBS Act is around the concept of General Solicitation.
General Solicitation is the marketing of a securities offering (a fundraise) publicly in the open market. The Securities Act of 1933 (which still governs much of securities law in the US) prohibits "general solicitation" or other forms of advertising in securities offerings pursuant to Rule 506 and Rule 144A which are the two…
My daughter Jessica gave me David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again for my birthday and I've been reading the essay that gives the title to the book this week. This bit has been rattling around in my head since I read it a few days ago:
… so I come out and spot my duffel among the luggage, and I start to grab and haul it out of the towering pile of leather and nylon, with the idea that I can just whisk the bag back to 1009 myself and root through it and find my good old ZnO and one of the porters sees me starting to grab the bag, and he dumps all four of the massive pieces of luggage he’s staggering with and leaps t…
Back in 2008, when I gave my talk at Web 2.0 on the recent history of the NYC tech sector, I said that Red Burns was responsible for restarting the tech sector in NYC when she created ITP at NYU in the late 70s.
The entire slide show for that talk is here.
Many of you know this sad news already. Red passed away this past week. She was an incredible woman who left NYC with the gift of a resurgent tech sector and a community of passionate makers and entrepreneurs. It is her legacy as much as anyone's.
Here are some links to the best posts I've seen on Red this week.
The New York Times
The Gotham Gal
Dennis Crowley
Clay Shirky
Wikipedia
…
I am headed out on a bike ride with my daughter this morning and don't have a lot to say today. But I did read an interesting post by Semil Shah where he outlines what he thinks is going on in the early stage financing markets right now.
He starts with this observation:
Young founders are incredibly influenced by the online brands of certain investors.
And so that's why I post every day, even when I don't have anything to say 🙂
But go give Semil's post a read and do me a favor and have the discussion about his post on his blog, not here. He deserves it and I don't. And I'll make sure to engage there as well today.
This past fun friday was a big success. We found out that roughly half of the folks who answered the poll blog.
I don't know if that is a representative sample (~1,000 answers out of ~5,500 visits on friday), but it is clear that a lot of the people who read AVC blog, at least sometimes.
We also collected a large number of blogs on our hackpad. The hackpad was getting a bit messed up and so I cleaned it up and locked it down. Any additional entries to the hackpad will need to come through me as moderator. That will make sure it remains in good shape going forward.
Finally, Sebastian Wain created an OPML file out of the hackpad. It is avai…
William reminded me that I posted this interview to my tumblr a while back but it had never made it to AVC Video of the Week. So I went back to Charlie Rose's site and figured out how to embed it here. This is a great interview that everyone who reads AVC should watch.
At 35mins, the video turns to Charlie's talk with Aaron Levie. I have not watched that yet, but I plan to and I imagine it is pretty good too.
Arnold suggested we find out how many of the AVC community members blog. So let's do that.
First, here's a poll. I suspect the number of bloggers will be 10% or less of the total audience. But we will see.
Do You Blog?
Next, let's create a "blog roll" of the AVC folks who do blog. I've created a Hackpad where everyone who blogs can add their blog. The format is blog title, blog url, blog author (comma delimited). I've embedded the Hackpad here so we can see it evolve as the day goes on. It is super cool to watch people add their blogs live. It started happening about thirty seconds after I hit publish.
View The AVC Blogroll on Hackpad.
I…
Can't do feature friday this week because Arnold suggested a great fun friday for tomorrow. So we will do feature thursday instead.
I got an update of the Android YouTube app this week and when I launched it, the home screen looked like this:
That is just the first two videos of the "what to watch" feed but you can scroll forever and the recommendations are awesome. After Matt Cohler and Mark Zuckerberg, I got the top 10 Knicks plays of the 2012-2013 season, an Arctic Monkeys video, and a video about a 3D printed prefab house.
This is like the #discover tab on Twitter but for video. It's awesome and I've added the YouTube app on my Nexus7 …
USV is an investor in Twitter so I've been watching the Vine story closely. As AllThingsD reports, Vine continues to grow in the wake of Instagram's video feature launch. Vine is a top ten free app on iOS and top 25 on Android in the US. So the addition of video to Instagram has not seemingly hurt Vine very much.
I've asked my kids and their friends about this and I've observed behavior a bit and that tells me a few things:
1) the social pressure to post something great to Instagram is high among the hyperactive social media teens that make up an important cohort on these services. it's easier to take risks on Vine, where most people have l…
I have found it increasingly difficult to find blogs and blog posts by regular bloggers who are talking about things that are interesting to me. The big aggregators (Hacker News, Reddit, Techmeme) sometimes surface interesting posts, but where do you find about the every day blogger who is writing about tech stuff? The idea of a blog roll seems to have come and gone. I stopped running a blog roll here at AVC at least six or seven years ago.
So starting today, I am participating in a new service operated by our portfolio company Zemanta called Tech Circle. There will be a widget at the end of every post with some links to posts by bloggers wh…
Phil Sugar left a great comment on last week's MBA Mondays about Turning Your Team:
Do not think that the reason you aren't scaling is because you need to bring in outside management. That will kill a team.
This is the biggest worry I have because some will read this and think, I'm not growing what I need to do is turn the team, and that is just wrong.
If you aren't growing, its likely to be a product problem, a strategy problem, or a competition problem. I have rarely seen a management team problem be the reason for lack of growth.
Company building is not this simple, but I do like to think about it terms of two stages. Getting the pro…
Interesting blog post on how EA's FIFA game franchise got off the ground.
My son and his friends play lots of Xbox games and they play lots of Xbox sports game. But FIFA is their favorite. It is the game they come back to again and again and it is the game they play year round.
I have this theory, based on a sample size of one (my son Josh), that FIFA for Xbox is responsible for the surging interest in football (which we call soccer) here in the US.
All of my kids played youth soccer but they never loved playing the game. They all went for basketball as their game of choice. So they didn't really learn soccer by playing it.
But Josh has l…
Last month I made a brief visit to Slovenia and while I was there I did an interview with RTV Slovenia. I have tried for the past twenty minutest to figure out how to embed the video on this blog but I cannot figure it out.
So if you want to watch a five minute interview with me on Slovenian television, click here.
If any of you are brighter than me and can figure out how to embed the video here, let me know in the comments and I will do that.
Update: Tom Sella hacked this player together for us so now this video is embedded here at AVC. Thanks Tom!
Gary Chou taught me a trick a year or so ago that I have now used a bunch of times with fantastic results. Email out an invitation with a link to an RSVP form in Google Form and get an automatic spreadsheet of results in Google Spreadsheet.
Here's how you do it:
1) Create a Google Form. I like three text fields; name, email address, and if you are bringing someone
2) After you have completed the form, grab the link by clicking the send button which generates this box
3) Then compose an email with a link to that RSVP form and ask everyone who is coming to fill out the form. That will take them all of twenty seconds to complete.
4) In the …
This has been a theme of mine since Roelof Botha put it in my head a few years ago. He said that entrepreneurs should approach building a company with the same passion that they have for building a product.
I've been thinking about scaling the team a lot this week. There are parts of building the team that are like designing and shipping a product. And there are parts of building the team that are like growing the service over time.
Putting together the initial team, creating the culture, instilling the mission and values into the team are all like designing and building the initial product. It is largely about injecting your ideas, values,…
At the bottom of this post you will find a map and a table of AVC visit activity by geography for the past twelve months.
You could look at this data two ways. AVC is dominated by US visitors. That's true. 63% of visits come from the US. Or you could say that this is an international community wtih about 1mm visits a year coming from outside the US. Both are true.
Everyone is welcome here at AVC. But we do use english as the language of choice in this community. And so english language speaking countries dominate. The bounce rates are highest and the visit lengths are shortest in the countries that aren't english native. That makes sense to…
For years I've been proselytizing Android. Part of it was that I did not like the "closed" environment that Apple created around the iPhone and the iPad. I don't want to get into a big debate about open vs closed here. We've had that debate ad naseum. I personally like the ability to get an unlocked phone, put what I want on it, and so on and so forth. Another big part of my enthusiasm for Android was that as an investor in the web and mobile web, I badly wanted at least a two horse race in the smartphone OS world. I didn't feel comfortable that Blackberry or Microsoft would get there (Blackberry largely has not, and Microsoft, while making a…
A serial entrepreneur I know tells me "you will turn your team three times on the way from startup to a business of scale." What he means is that the initial team will depart, replaced by another team, which in turn will be replaced by yet another team.
I have been closely involved with over 150 startups in my career and since roughly 1/3 of the startups we back get to real scale, that means I've seen the "startup to scale movie" over fifty times in my career and I can tell you this – my friend is right.
The people you need at your side when you are just getting started are generally not the people you will need at your side when you have …
As I was biking this morning, I was behind a black Ford truck that was delivering papers. I got to thinking that this was a very expensive way to get a paper to a reader. The driver's time, the depreciation on the truck, the gas, the printing press, the paper costs, etc. And that got me to thinking about what I would do if I was Bezos and just bought a business with a big cost structure around printing and distributing a physical product.
And speaking of Bezos and Amazon, I just read this Nicholas Carr post about the slowing growth of e-books relative to physical books. This jumped out at me:
E-book prices have not fallen the way many expec…
Tyrone sent me a link to this video sometime in the past week and I watched it yesterday morning. These are two fascinating guys talking about fascinating things. I enjoyed it very much. It's about 50 mins long so a good candidate to put on the big screen and play while you do other things. Thanks to Airplay and Chromecast, that's getting easier and easier to do these days.
When our kids were born, some of our friends and family gave them savings bonds. I think we still have those savings bonds somewhere in a file in my office. I should check on them.
What are this century's savings bonds? Bitcoins, of course. I have a friend who gives Bitcoin at Bar/Bat Mitzvahs. I love that move. I plan to do it myself.
So how does one give Bitcoins? Via our portfolio company Coinbase of course.
It's this simple.
1) Go to Coinbase and open an account
2) Connect your checking account to your Coinbase account like you do at Paypal
3) Buy Bitcoin and store them in your Coinbase account
4) When its time to give Bitcoin, yo…