Happy July 4th Everyone
I realize not everyone who reads this lives in the US, but to all those who do, have a happy July 4th. This photo pretty much sums up how I'm going to spend my day today.
Fred Wilson
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Please Spend Our Money
The AVC community has been very generous so far on the Brooklyn Castle project. 69 of you have contributed a total of $5,737 as of 6am on July 3rd. I really appreciate it and it is for a very good cause. However, the Gotham Gal and I have promised a $10,000 match against the AVC community's gifts and so far that is only costing us $5,737. So there is another ~$4300 of the match to be spent. If you would like to spend a bit of your money to spend a bit of our money, you can do that here. Once we get the full $10k of AVC community funding done, the project will be about half funded as these numbers don't include the value of our $10k match. T…
Handing Over Your Company To Someone Else To Manage
Yesterday Zynga announced that Mark Pincus is handing over the CEO job to Don Mattrick. This is not a post about why this will be awesome for Zynga's business and its stock because I don't know Don Mattrick and also because the Gotham Gal and I own millions of Zynga shares and stand to benefit when Zynga's business and stock bounce back. But this is a great opportunity to talk about entrepreneurs who choose to hand their company over to someone else to manage. First, there is a difference between hiring a CEO and turning over control of the business. In Mark's case, and also at LinkedIn and Google, he is retaining a large measure of control…
From The MBA Mondays Archive
In the comments to Valuation vs Ownership, Mike Nolan said: Just today I talked with an entrepreneur developing a SAAS in an educational space. His questioned focused on how to set up his first LLC and be prepared for funding rounds. As usual, I recommend reading past articles on AVC.com for a look at how investors think. Fred's post today could not have come at a better time. Fred – perhaps you could directly address early formation of LLCs by companies to make it easier to interact with investors. Tips for corporate structure, units vs. member interests, etc. Well it turns out there was an old MBA Mondays post that addressed those issue…
Social Networks That Bring People To AVC
According to Google Analytics, these are the top social networks that bring people to AVC I've been tracking this for quite a while and not much has really changed over the years except that Disqus and Facebook have risen a lot in the past year and StumbleUpon has fallen a lot. I think Disqus can drive even more traffic as they refine their discovery algorithms.
Video Of The Week: Jerry Colonna on ThisWeekIn
Back in 1996, at the very start of Flatiron Partners, Jerry Colonna, who started Flatiron with me, introduced me to Jason Calacanis. We hired Jason to do some due diligence for us on a potential investment in Geocities. That's how I met Jason. We went on to buy the first ad in Jason's magazine, Silicon Alley Reporter. Jason and Jerry tell that story at the start of this interview. The really good stuff happens later on when Jerry gets talking about the emotional side of startups and entrepreneurship. This is another long one, 90mins, but if you can find the time to watch it, I think you'll get a lot out of it. I recommend fast forwarding t…
Being Upfront
No feature or fun friday today. I wanted to talk a bit about a feat that my friend Mark Suster has pulled off. He has completely repositioned and rebranded a 17 year old venture capital firm. And I think it is really impressive what he has pulled off. I joined a 17 year old venture capital firm in 1987. It was run by the founding partners who were in their late 50s at the time. I was there for ten years and we struggled mightily to remain relevant with a brand that was, frankly, stuck in the seventies. I eventually left and started a new firm, a new brand, and a new thing. We called it Flatiron Partners. When that blew up, I started a new …
Valuation vs Ownership
I am talking at the PreMoney conference today (via Skype) and I woke up thinking about the challenges facing the VC industry. I hope to talk a bit about this at the conference. Some investors are ownership focused. They want to own 20% of the business but care less about the valuation. Let's take a hypothetical Series A round. An entrepreneur comes to USV and pitches us and we like what the company is doing and we offer $2mm at $8mm pre-money/$10mm post-money. The $2mm buys us 20%. Another firm shows up, a firm that is less valuation oriented, and they offer $5mm for 20% of the business, which works out to $20mm pre/$25mm post. The entrepr…
Bitcoin Bits
Bitcoin has been stable for the past few months after its big spike and fall in early April: Meanwhile Gold (yesterday's Bitcoin) is falling and has been for a few months: That was a bit of a joke about "yesterday's bitcoin" and probably wishful thinking on my part but I can't help but think there is a bit of a sea change going on in investors minds out there. On Monday afternoon, I attended the weekly Bitcoin meetup in "Satoshi Square" which is next to the Abe Lincoln statue in the north side of NYC's Union Square Park. Here's a photo of Charlie Shrem coming to greet me as I arrived. It is truly an "open air market". Folks were buying an…
Crowdfunding Brooklyn Castle
I blogged about this a couple weeks ago so this topic will be fresh in the minds of the AVC crowd. I am super excited about this. There is a documentary about a chess team in the IS 318 middle school in Brooklyn. The film is called Brooklyn Castle and here's the trailer. Please take 2 1/2 mins to watch this right now. Brooklyn Castle Trailer from BrooklynCastle on Vimeo. I'd actually suggest taking an evening and watching the movie. You can stream it on Netflix. So here's the deal. This chess program at IS 318 takes three big trips a year to state and national tournaments, they have a full time faculty advisor, they study at the Marsha…
Smartphone Socio-economics
No MBA Mondays today. I'm obsessed about something else this morning. Benedict Evans has a series of blog posts up showcasing twitter data from a company called MapBox. Here's London (iPhone is Red, Android is Green, Blackberry is Blue): Here's NYC: You can click on those images to blow them up and see them better. Benedict ends his blog post with this statement: the iPhone is more expensive than most of the phones on the market, and this shapes the kind of people who buy it The iPhone has locked up the top end of the market for sure. The rest of the world is on Android (and Blackberry and Windows to a lesser degree). Developers of mob…
A Private Search Engine?
That's often the refrain when I advocate for our portfolio company DuckDuckGo. Most people think Google does a fine job (they do) and don't feel the need for a private search engine. But in the past few weeks, it has become clear to some that private means private from everyone, including the government. If a National Security Letter shows up at DuckDuckGo, there won't be anything to hand over to the Feds because DuckDuckGo does not save search behavior on its users. That's a big deal, as evidenced by their traffic surge over the past few weeks: If you would like to change the default search engine in your browser to DuckDuckGo, you can do…
Video Of The Week: My talk with Sarah Lacy
We've already been discussing some of the things that I said in this talk, but here's the whole thing. It's long, ~90mins, but we covered a lot of ground and if you have some time this weekend, it might be worth putting on the big screen and letting it run while you drink coffee, read, or clean the house 🙂
Fun Friday: Best Entertainment This Year So Far
The idea for today's fun friday comes from Tyrone who wrote this in an email to me this week: fun friday idea: best entertainment this year across the board, albums, films, series, sites, youtube channels etc? For me, the answer is the NBA playoffs (though the result bums me out), This Is The End (the jonah hill exorcism is hysterical), and my favorite records of the year so far are Lysandre, Modern Vampires Of The City, Random Access Memories, Mala, and Isles. What are your favorite entertainment moments of the year so far?
On Corporate VCs
Every once in a while I display some emotion publicly that I regret. That happened last Thursday night on the subject of coporate venture capital. I have written here before on the subject of corporate venture capital. I am not a fan of it. But I do feel compelled to be more precise than I was last thursday. There are two kinds of corporate investments in startups; passive corporate VC arms and active strategic investments. The former is made by well established investment groups like Google Ventures, Intel Ventures, SAP Ventures, Comcast Ventures, and many many more. For the most part, they don't "suck". They can be a good source of cap…
Decoupling Advisory From Custody
I had coffee with a friend last week. He's been working on wall street for most of his career. Over the past few years he has built a fast growing business inside a large asset management firm that allows the largest institutions (pension funds, endowments, insurance companies) to invest with the leading hedge funds without giving them custody. Instead of wiring funds to the hedge fund, they keep custody of their capital and the hedge fund makes the trades for them. This arrangement is both less expensive and more attractive to the large institutions. If another financial crisis hits and the gates come down on the hedge funds again, that will…
Withings Scale
As I've gotten into my 50s, something has occurred that has never been an issue for me, I've put on some weight. Nothing earth shattering but enough to get me focused on my weight for the first time ever. So in the spirit of "you can't manage what you can't measure", I decided to get a scale. And because my friend Naveen is such a fan of the Withings scale, I went for that. The Withings scale is a thing of beauty. It is sleek and looks great in my closet. The scale measures your weight, body fat %, pulse rate, temperature, and CO2 levels in your home. It connects to the wifi in your home and communicates with the Withings app on your iPh…
What Is Strategy?
My post on Product>Strategy>Business Model got a lot of comments and other reactions out there on the social web and from that I realized that many confuse strategy and tactics. And so I thought I would attempt to define strategy in business. I like this definition that I got at wikipedia: Strategic management is a level of managerial activity below setting goals and above tactics. Strategy takes what you want to achieve and develops a plan to get there. From strategy you can develop tactics and implement them. For me, strategy is as much about what you are not going to do as what you are going to do. Also from wikipedia: Strategy is imp…
Parenting
About a month ago, our oldest child Jessica inquired as to the whereabouts of the family videos we took of our kids when they were younger. We looked around a bit and finally found them. We hadn't seen them in years. The Gotham Gal took all the tapes over to the local photo store and got them put onto a set of DVDs, one for us and one each for the three kids. Jessica took the extra step of uploading all of them to Dropbox and inviting all of us to the folder. So we've been watching these videos a bunch in the past month. We've also had the pleasure of having all of our kids home since late May so it has been "family time" at home. It's a rar…
Video Of The Week: Talking With Spencer Ante At SourceDigital13
Earlier this week at our portfolio company Flurry‘s conference, SourceDigital13, I sat down with Spencer Ante and talked about mobile and some other stuff. @boonsri was in the audience and filmed it with her iPhone and posted it to the web. She also edited the video to keep it short. The talk was something like 30mins but this video is just under 10mins.
Fun Friday: Foursquare Time Machine
Those of you who use Foursquare to database your life can have some fun today. Foursquare launched a cool interactive visualization tool called Time Machine yesterday. Go there, login, and watch Foursquare go back in time and show you all of your movements around your city and the world. For me it was the past four years. Trips I'd almost forgotten came back to life. And at the end, I got this. You can get one too. A few things about that infographic. The placed I've checked into the most, The Coffee Shop, is a place I will never go to again. Sometime in early 2012, I was treated badly by a hostess, and on the way out I vowed never to retu…
Funding Brooklyn Castle
You may have heard about the documentary called Brooklyn Castle in which a team of public middle school kids from NYC win the national high school chess championship. It's a true story and has been written about in the NY Times and elsewhere. A few days ago, a friend sent me this blog post saying that funding cuts in the NYC public school system are putting the IS 318 chess team at risk. At the end of the post, the Diane Ravitch writes: About a month ago, Eva Moskowitz held a fundraiser for her Success Academy charter school chain and raised $7 million Wouldn’t you think that just one of those hedge fund managers would adopt the chess prog…
AR Drone – The Maiden Voyage
I wrote about drones a while back and as part of my exploration of them, I bought an AR Drone on Amazon. It was shipped to my office for some reason and sat there for about a month as I normally cycle or scooter home. But yesterday I decided to Hailo it home and bring the drone home with me. It was good timing as all of our kids are home this week and got to participate in the maiden voyage. Emily and I unboxed it and charged the battery. Then we took it for its maiden voyage in the living room of our apartment. Josh did the flying bit on my android phone, Emily and Jessica did the Instagraming and Vining, and I played prevent defense so th…
Random Inbound Email
I was talking to a friend yesterday about how I process random inbound email and I thought I ought to share this with everyone. So here it goes. I get a ton of unsolicited inbound email from people I don't know. If the mail is from a person, it generally gets into my priority inbox and I see it. I expect that I get between fifty and a hundred emails in my priority inbox every day that are unsolicited and from people I don't know. I do not try to reply to all of these emails. If they are not replied to after three or four days, I archive them and get them out of my inbox. But I do try to reply to at least ten of them every day. And on some…
1984
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.” George Orwell in “1984” hat tip to Maureen Dowd for surfacing this quote in her column yesterday
Blip Enhance For The Internet
I keep thinking back to this comment left on AVC by Mike Nolan a few weeks ago: How about Blip Enhance – a small piece of code that continuously sends false privacy data to Google… Early naval combat in the post RADAR world took two approaches. Minimize your return signal to the enemy, or exaggerate it. The first proved to be a fool’s errand – as each side gets better at trying to remain invisible, the other side gets better at detecting your footprint. The second technology used to defeat enemy radar was to return a bigger radar signature to the enemy…Blip Enhance – fool the enemy radar into thinking you were much larger, and much m…
Video Of The Week: Crowd Lending at Le Web
It's not often that there is a panel discussion where all the entrepreneurs on the panel are USV portfolio companies. That happened last week at LeWeb. The discussion was crowd lending and the portfolio companies on the panel were Lending Club, Funding Circle, and Auxmoney. If you want to understand what is going on in crowd lending and why USV has not one, but three bets in this category, watch this discussion. It's about 30 mins long.
Feature Friday: Standing Up For Your Users
I saw this yesterday and it made me so happy: The list of technology companies allegedly participating in a vast US government surveillance program known as PRISM, which was just reported by the Washington Post and Guardian, is notable for one name that’s not on it: Twitter. When we think of features of services we use, we don't often think of the backbone that the organization behind the service has. But we should. This week has been notable for the firehose of news stories coming out about how our government is spying on us. My partner Brad and I talked about it on the subway ride up to a lunch in midtown yesterday. Brad explained to me …
DIY Data Science In Action
I wrote a post about DIY Data Science back in March. In that post I said that hacking on public data sets and posting about it has the potential to be a big deal in the coming years. I saw a great example of exactly what I was thinking about this morning. Alastair Coote pulled a bunch of turnstile data from the MTA and figured out what the most used NYC subway stations are during rush hour. And he posted his code to GitHub and embedded it on his blog. If I were a high school math teacher, I would take his work and make it a project for my students to work on together. The MTA makes a lot of data available to play with. This kind of stuff i…
Mobile Is Eating The World
Benedict Evans is quickly becoming my favorite Internet analyst. I follow his blog and twitter religiously. This slideshare he posted a few weeks ago is an example of his excellent work: 2013 05 BEA – ’Mobile is eating the World’ from Benedict Evans
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