Video of the Week: Bruce Schneier at Google
This talk is about all the stuff we have been talking about and thinking about at USV lately. It’s awesome.
Fred Wilson
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Snowden: Traitor or Hero?
In the spirit of fun friday, I thought we might have a debate here at AVC over the Snowden affair and particularly whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero. My opinion is he's a bit of both, but more hero than traitor. What's yours?
A Table Of Contents for MBA Mondays
For the past few years, I've been using a third party service called Pandamian to power a table of contents for MBA Mondays. They've been awesome to work with but the honest truth is I would prefer to have this thing run natively on AVC and point to MBA Mondays posts on AVC. What I want is something that I expect others might want as well. I want a cloud based solution that crawls my blog regularly and looks for posts that are tagged MBA Mondays (and tagged other things) and then generates the front end code to render a real-time table of contents on my blog that links to the actual posts on my blog. The main reason I want this is to power…
The Grind
People ask me what a day in the life of a VC is like. Each one is different. But they can be a grind. Take yesterday for example. I started yesterday at 8am with a breakfast meeting. I ended around 8:15pm when I wrapped up a pitch meeting in my office. In between those two meetings I did ten other meetings for a total of twelve meetings in a bit more than twelve hours. Of those twelve meetings, one was a three hour board meeting, one was a breakfast meeting with another venture investor, one was a lunch meeting to talk about CS Ed in NYC, four were pitch meetings, one was an interview with a journalist about the future of VC, one was a ca…
Crowdfunding Brooklyn Castle Update/WrapUp
So the Brooklyn Castle Crowdfunding campaign is over. Here is the project page that outlines what happened. If you don't want to click on that, a total of $67,784.99 was raised from 308 donors. Of that total, $57,617.24 went to IS 318 to fund their chess team. $10,167.75 went to DonorsChoose to support their classroom project crowdfunding platform. The AVC community was a huge part of this. We provided the early funding that gets a project off the ground at DonorsChoose. We contributed $13,166 of the total and that came from 127 of you. I want to thank each and every one of you who gave. It means a lot to me and to the folks at DonorsChoose …
Mentor/Investor Whiplash
I've been doing a tour of the summer accelerator programs and a question I get a lot is about the feedback the teams get from the investors and mentors they meet with. They ask me how much should they react to the feedback they are getting advising them to do things differently, pivot, change the product, change the strategy, etc. I call this constant advising/mentoring of early stage startups "mentor/investor whiplash" and I think it is a big problem. Not just with the accelerator programs but across the early stage/seed startup landscape. You cannot meet with a potential investor (me included) or mentor/advisor without getting a lot of fe…
Qualified Small Business Stock
For the past twenty years, the US federal tax code has included provisions that allow startup investors to get favorable tax treatment on the capital gains they earn on early stage investments. These provisions are in Sections 1202 and Sections 1045 of the tax code. I have been in the startup investing business for the entire time that these provisions have been in the tax code and to my knowledge, I have never taken advantage of them. So that tells you something, eiter about me or the provisions, or both. However, given the increasing amount of angel investment activity in the startup sector, I thought it might be useful to post about the…
Video Of The Week: The 2007 Blackberry Shootout
We are going back in time for this one. This went down before Twitter, Tumblr, Zynga, and a host of other things that happened in 2007. This also happened before I had done a deal with Bijan. Maybe the spanking he gave me here was the catalyst to change that. Anyway, this one's a reminder that you may be here today and gone tomorrow (RIMM).
Fun Friday: Discussing Disqus
Disqus launched a new homepage this week. You can see it here. Since this community is full of marketers and entrepreneurs and because we are among the most passionate users of the Disqus network, I thought we could debate, disqus, and decide whether the new positioning and messaging is on point. What do you think?
Chromecast
I've written a fair bit about the fact that I think we will use our mobile devices (phones, tablets, watches, glasses, etc) to control the more expensive devices in our lives (TVs, car dashboards, refridgerators, etc). I think this mode of user interaction will win out over software solutions built for and running on the more expensive and therefore longer lasting devices we own. Until now, Apple's Airplay and Bluetooth were the only good solutions for this kind of interaction. I use both in my home and office and I use them every day. But, as I have written here before, both have issues. Airplay is proprietary and not available on all devic…
Growth Is A Bitch
Dan Frommer writes that Apple's decade of blistering growth has, at least temporarily, come to a halt. And you can see that in the stock: Companies are worth a multiple of their earnings and that multiple is directly related to earnings growth rates. When you are growing rapidly, you are worth more. But living forever and growing forever have something in common. You can't do it. I was talking to the CEO of one of our portfolio companies that has grown at close to 100% per year for the past five or six years yesterday. And we lamented about the law of large numbers. Growing at 100% a year when your top line is in the billions is a lot hard…
Squashing Software Patents
Almost a year ago now, I wrote about Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site launched in partnership with the USPTO to help them identify prior art in software patent applications. Yesterday Joel Spolsky, Stack's CEO, wrote a great post about how he used Ask Patents to squash a bad software patent applied for by Microsoft. I love this image he placed in his post: You win wars one victory at a time. If you want to win a battle or two for the good guys in the war against software patents head on over to Ask Patents and do your part.
Calendar Invite Spam
This is going to be a rant. If you aren't interested, hit the back button now. I am increasingly being spammed in my calendar. People invite me to things I have no interest in attending by spamming my calendar. And because email is already a challenge to keep up with, I often don't see the email notifications of those calendar spams and they stay in my calendar and the folks I work with on my calendar see them and get confused. I don't know about all of you, but my online/mobile calendar is sacred. It's my schedule and a number of folks including me and the Gotham Gal work carefully on it to make it accurate, clean, and well organized. Whe…
Mailing It In
We flew down to Williamsburg Virginia yesterday to attend my dad's 85th birthday. He and my mom are in great shape and my brothers and their families were there. It was a great evening. On the flight down, Josh and I read the Jay-Z article in NY Magazine and the review of his new record where the consensus was he "mailed it in". On the one hour drive from the airport Josh played the new record on his phone aux'd into our rental car and we talked about Jay-Z, the songs, and what mailing it in really means. At one point, Josh said "he didn't write this song, he barely raps on it, he just put it on the record". And I explained to him that Jay-…
Video Of The Week: Albert Wenger at the Delaware B Corporation Announcement
This week Delaware, where many of the top US companies are incorporated, announced that their corporate statutes will recognize the B Corporation (Benefit Corporation). My partner Albert Wenger, who has been a long and loud champion of the B Corporation, spoke at the event in Delaware this past week about why this is so important for both entrepreneurs and investors. At 3:39, this is short enough that everyone should give it a watch this weekend.
Fun Friday: Staying Cool
It's time for a fun friday again. I'm not sure when the last time we did this, but it's been a while. I've been in europe all week where it has been warm. But I've heard that its been steamy in NYC where I am headed this evening. So with that in mind, how do you keep cool when the temps reach 100 degrees and it feels like a sauna outside? The obvious answer is air conditioning. But I am looking for other options. I like to go for a bike ride in the early morning, like 6am, when its still bearable out, and I also like to take a walk along the hudson river in the evenings where there is often a breeze when there isn't one anywhere else in …
Transparency Please
[crossposted from USV.com] Today, we have joined a large and diverse group of companies, non-profits and consumer advocates in an open letter urging the US government to allow internet and telecom companies to freely report statistics on government surveillance requests. As we've discussed before, standing up for your users is a feature. As we all move more and more of our lives online and into our phones, the data we are producing — and sharing, whether we know it or not — is growing exponentially. The extent to which we can trust the services we use to steward our data appropriately is a matter of global economic importance. At the same …
Misunderstanding Twitter
I am writing this on my phone in a Hailo cab in London so forgive the typos and lack of links. I will clean this up later. On the flight over from Brussels I read the International Herald Tribune. In today’s copy was an opinion piece by Joe Nocera where he explained why he doesn’t like (and doesn’t use) Twitter. The piece is here http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/opinion/nocera-a-case-against-twitter.html. His two basic complaints are the short bursty nature of the discourse and the hate that is spewed at him on the service. I cannot argue with either observation at face value but when you dig deeper his arguments come up empty for me. Fi…
Back In Ljubljana
Back in 2008, we invested in a small team out of SeedCamp called Zemanta. They were located in Ljubljana Slovenia but I met them in London. The following summer I visited the company in its hometown along with the Gotham Gal and our son Josh. I blogged about that trip here at AVC. In the ensuing years, the founders moved back and forth between the US and Slovenia, encountered significant visa issues, and eventually built a strong business team in NYC and SF and Seattle. So the board meetings have been held in the US for the most part over the years with a few in London as well. The founders decided that it was time to have a board meeting i…
The Joys Of Business Travel
I took the overnight flight from JFK to CDG Paris. We arrived an hour late and even though we rushed through the maze of terminals that is CDG, we got to the gate a minute or two before the departure time and were told we could not get on the plane to Ljubljana. To make matters worse there is only one direct flight from CDG to Ljubljana each day and that was the flight we were on. It was painful to watch it fold up the stairs and back away without us on it. So now we are in the gate awaiting a flight to Frankfurt where will will attempt to race across the airport and catch a connecting flight to Ljubljana from that airport. Anyone who does …
The Sharing Economy
There's a piece in the NY Times this weekend about Lyft and Sidecar changing the dynamics in the Los Angeles taxi market. Get ready to read lots more pieces like this in the coming years. The internet, mobile phones, native transaction systems, and a global network that connects billions of people in real time are changing a lot of things and assets that sat wasting are now going to get activated. None of this is news for readers of this blog. In fact, this is all old news. But I think we are just seeing the start of this trend. Let's look at self driving cars, another topic that the NY Times wrote about recently. Maybe we won't all own o…
Video Of The Week: Talk with Dave Morgan, John Battelle & Me
During the OpenCo event/week in NYC a month or so ago, I sat down at cocktail hour at Simulmedia with Dave Morgan and John Battelle. We had a great chat and the folks at Simulmedia edited it down to about 18mins. It's a fun talk.
Feature Friday: Buying Bitcoins Instantly
Our portfolio company Coinbase introduced a new feature yesterday, the ability to buy Bitcoins instantly. I've always thought speed was the single most important feature of any app. And in the case of buying Bitcoin, the four day wait time that was the norm at Coinbase was certainly problematic. Now, if you are a fully verified user, you can buy and sell up to 50 BTC instantly. Bitcoin is a fairly immature technology at this time. The opportunity for entrepreneurs is to build technology, systems, processes, procedures, and a lot more on top of it so that it can become something "normals" will be comfortable using. There are reasons why it u…
Let The Games Begin
That was my partner John's email response when the news came across our internal email list that the SEC had finally lifted the General Solicitation Ban as they were asked to do by Congress in Title II of the JOBS act. What this means is that folks raising capital can now advertise the fact that they are doing so. I have been involved in raising close to ten venture capital funds and every time we do that, we have to be quiet about what we are doing until we've done it. That won't be the case anymore. But the impact of this on the VC business will be tiny compared to what this means for entrepreneurs. Our investment in CircleUp was in some…
Running The Table (continued)
I wrote a bit of a rant a couple months ago about companies that want to run the table on a market. There was only one link in that rant and it was to Benedict Evans who is increasingly becoming my favorite read on the Internet. Benedict wrote a post yesterday that continues this discussion with some important additional points, including: One of the things you're supposed to work out some time in your adolescence is that though you're the star of your own life, you're not the star of anyone else's. Some companies never work this out. And your customers' relationships with you are the only relationships you have as a business and you thi…
Only Once – The Book
My friend and USV portfolio CEO Matt Blumberg has a popular blog called Only Once on which he posts about the challenges and joys of being a CEO (for the first time, thus the name). Matt should be familiar to AVC regulars because I have written about him and his company Return Path many times and he has done several guest posts here as well. For the past six months, Matt has been writing a book about the CEO job in a business that is scaling. I like the way he described the book in an email to me the other day: The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a p…
Startup Management
AVC regular William Mougayar is building an education oriented community for entrepreneurs called Startup Management. He soft launched it in the past week. The idea, as I understand it, is to aggregate and tag blog posts about startup management from all around the web and curate them into a community site focused on educating entrepreneurs on how to be better leaders and managers of their companies. William will also create original content on the site. He describes it as a "Huffington Post" model. There is certainly a need for this kind of thing. If you want to learn about term sheets, you can go to Brad Feld's blog and click on the "term…
Pocket Wifis for the Global Traveler
We've got two girls traveling around the world this summer. One has a pocket wifi from Xcom Global (asia) and the other has a pocket wifi from Tep Wireless (europe). I've become a convert to the pocket wifi in the past year. I used to be a fan of swapping sim cards but these pocket wifis have gotten better recently. The cost has come down and the coverage has gone up. I don't have a complete report from the girls yet. I will get a full download when they are back and write up something with the pros and cons of both. The one thing I know for sure from our trip to Japan is that battery life is the big issue with pocket wifis. If you get fou…
Video Of The Week: Cliff Chenfeld on Media Reporter
My friend Cliff Chenfeld recently appeared on the Media Reporter TV show. Cliff has been in the entertainment business for over 25 years and he talks about the changes he has seen in the music industry, film, sports, and other entertainment sectors. It’s about 30 minutes long and worth a watch/listen.
Feature Friday: Checking In Your Friend
Sometime in the past week, an awesome feature appeared in my Foursquare app. I was checking into our local farm stand at the beach and I saw this at the bottom of my checkin screen: Since I was with the Gotham Gal, I typed in her name and checked in with her. Then she got a notification and clicked on it and she was checked in as well. This Foursquare blog post explains how the feature works. Now Foursquare is going to know more about me and more about my friends so it can make even better recommendations for us and others. I really enjoy when new features crop up in the apps I use every day. It's a reminder that the developers are continu…
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