Yesterday I dedicated a song on Piki to my friend Whitney. He DM'd me and said "I haven't had that happen to me since the days of call-in radio shows".
Dedicating a song is my favorite feature on Piki. It is generous, fun, and viral.
I did it this morning with my daughter Jessica.
I picked a song
And then at the bottom of the dialog box, I typed in her name
That's all there is to it. She gets notified and ideally comes back to Piki and listens and/or picks some more music for everyone else to hear.
Virality is critical to make a social app spread. But the viral features must also be fun and meaningful. Dedicating a song is both and…
Patent trolls are one of the biggest scourges on the startup ecosystem in the US. The ideal solution, which was recently taken by the country of New Zealand, would be to ban software patents outright. But try as we might, it seems unlikely to happen in the US in the near term.
But that doesn't mean we aren't making headway against the trolls. A couple years ago, we got the America Invents Act which made some substantial changes to the way patents are reviewed and litigated. That bill had a provision (section 18) that allows financial services firms to take litigation over "covered business method patents" out of court and put them through a …
The almost two year long slump is over. I've led a new venture investment for USV, which closed a few weeks ago and was announced last night. The company is Coinbase and my blog post announcing the investment is on the USV blog. The WSJ also wrote about it here.
This hiatus, which I've blogged about a bit on and off, was mostly a result of being very full up with responsibilities for existing investments. I have made twenty investments since the founding of USV in the fall of 2004 (now 21) and have only exited six, so I have had fourteen investments that I am responsible for at USV. I take our responsibility to our portfolio companies higher…
Disqus quietly pushed this out in the past few weeks.
The cool thing is this is interactive, meaning you can click on any of those bubbles and get to the blog post and discussion. I've been doing that every morning in addition to my regular collection of discovery tools.
I think it does a great job of showcasing the diversity and energy of the Disqus community. Well done Disqus team.
I told this story in the comments to saturday's video post, but since not everyone reads the comments and I want this to make it into MBA Mondays, I figured I would turn it into a case study.
In the early days of Tumblr, I used to bug David Karp, the founder and CEO of the Company, about comments. Though I had hacked my tumblog with Disqus, I wanted to be able to comment on other tumblogs and the vast majority of them had no comments because Tumblr did not support them natively. I was fairly persistent in my argument.
But David held firm. He wanted Tumblr to be a positive place on the Internet. The entire design of the service was with that…
The Gotham Gal and I just watched Dick Costolo‘s commencement speech which he gave yesterday at the University Of Michigan. He went back to his time doing improv in Chicago and cited two big lessions he got from that experience; take big chances and be in the moment.
It’s a good talk, brief as these things go, and relevant to everyone working in the startup world. It’s about 17 minutes long.
I talked to Mike Arrington this past week at TechCrunch Disrupt. We covered some fun topics, most of which will be well known to the AVC community. It's just shy of 30mins.
I was hanging with Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of our portfolio company DuckDuckGo yesterday. I was lamenting that I could not replace the Google search widget at the top of my android home screen with the DuckDuckGo search widget. Gabe said "you can use Nova Launcher to do that."
I had not heard of Nova Launcher but immediately downloaded it (and the premium upgrade too). Gabe showed me how to replace the standard google launcher with Nova Launcher. He started to show me all kinds of cool things you can do with Nova (like create new gestures) but I waved him off because my head was already spinning with all the cool stuff that Nova le…
The widget came down on Tuesday night at midnight. The DonorsChoose campaign I called Good Things Come To Those Who Code is over. Here are some stats:
Total Raised: $25,172
Donors: 162
Students Helped: 8,551
I really appreciate the generosity of everyone who participated. The number to focus on is 8,551 students who will have their classroom experience improved in some way because of you.
Here's a list of all the DonorsChoose campaigns I have done on this blog over the years. There have been seven in total since 2007. In total we have raised almost $190,000 in this community for teachers and their classrooms via DonorsChoose. That is fa…
When I've written posts about the stuff I and others are working on to bring more computer science into the K-12 school system, I often hear "let me know how I can help." This post is about how you can help.
The Academy Of Software Engineering (AFSE), located in the Washington Irving Campus near Union Square in Manhattan, has a great program called iMentor. Every AFSE student is paired with a mentor who attends a monthly mentoring session at AFSE. These sessions are highly structured events where the student and mentor get to work together on things and get to know each other. The students and mentors are encouraged to email each other in th…
I sat next to Jim Cramer last night at a dinner put on by some mutual friends. I hadn't seen Jim in a while so it was a great opportunity to take a trip down memory lane. In 1996 or early 1997, my prior firm Flatiron Partners led the first round of outside financing for TheStreet.com. I joined the board and eventually became Chairman before stepping down a decade ago.
When I first met Jim, he was running a hedge fund and blasting posts from his trading desk. This was 1996 and what he was doing was unprecedented. He was publishing in real time his thoughts on what was going on in the markets. On some days, Jim would post three or four dozen t…
Case studies are true stories that teach lessons. And one of the great lessons I got in my career was care of a lawyer named Morty. This is a reblog of a post I wrote in Feb 2007. I thought about it last week in an email discussion with a friend. And so I decided to share it with all of you as part of the MBA Mondays series.
————————————————————————————–
I woke up thinking about Morty this morning. I haven't seen or heard from him in over ten years. But Morty taught me one of the most important lessons about negotiating that I've ever learned.
Morty was Isaak's partner in Multex early on. They put up the initial money to get it started. M…
In the wake of my Return and Ridicule post, I was asked how one goes about finding these services that are ignored and/or ridiculed. And the answer I gave was "if you use them you might realize how powerful they are."
I woke up thinking about that in the context of Kickstarter today. It must be related to the fact that today is the fourth anniversary of Kickstarter's launch. How was it that I was so sure the Kickstarter project would work when it launched back in 2009? Well it was because of what happened on this blog a couple years before that.
The story starts in the fall of 2007. Charles Best, the founder of DonorsChoose emailed me and a…
I bought one of these on amazon at the suggestion of Laurent Eschenauer in yesterday's comment thread. I can feel my 14 year old self re-emerging. I can't wait to play with it. It's also a good excuse to learn a bit of node.js so I can program the thing.
If you want to skip the unboxing and information and go right to the flying part, that starts about 5:40 in.
If you have three minutes more for additional drone entertainment, click here.
In my talk yesterday at Princeton, we got to discussing drones. A young woman asked me what I would use a drone for.
My answer was dry cleaning runs. I want to hand my drone the week's dry cleaning, have the drone fly over to sixth ave and 10th street where our dry cleaner is, drop off the clothes and then return home. When the dry cleaning is ready to pick up, the drone would fly back, get it, and bring it back home.
Of course, if everyone did this, the skies in NYC would be so filled with drones that we wouldn't be able to see the sun. That doesn't feel so great to be honest.
What would you use a drone for?
I am going down to Princeton today to talk to Ed Zschau’s class on entrepreneurship today. Ed asked me what I wanted to talk about. I told him “return and ridicule”.
I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years. We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.
I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you …
Regular readers will recall this great program called TEALS that I've blogged about a few times that brings software engineers into schools to teach CS classes before they go to work. We have hosted two information sessions that have attracted almost 200 software engineers interested in teaching next school year.
We now have ten schools in NYC that have signed on to have a TEALS program in their school. We need 40 software engineers to do the programs in all 10 schools. The last time I checked, there were 24 who had applied. So we need some more applications. The deadline to apply is May 1st. You can apply online here.
Here's a map of the 6…
For those who watched the talk I did with Paul Smalera, some of this will be redundant. Paul asked me why we haven't gotten all of these "no brainer" immigration reform proposals like the startup visa (funded entrepreneurs get to stay in the US and build their companies here), or the STEM visa (graduate degrees in STEM come stapled with a visa), or an end to kicking undergrads out after they graduate.
The answer is that there has been a long standing debate in the US about "comprehensive immigration reform" which involves putting many of the immigrants who are already here on some sort of path to citizenship in return for a committment to s…
Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot.
In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to become a Union Square Ventures portfolio company and in many ways directly led to the creation of Union Square Ventures. My partner Brad who I founded Union Square Ventures with had left the venture capital business temporarily and was involved in the creation of TACODA, having provided the initial seed capital to Dave Morgan, the founder of TACODA.
Dave had…
Clayton Christensen's views on this topic were on display yesterday in the video of the week. For a different take on this topic, read AJ Jacobs' tale of a semester of online learning in todays' NY Times.
I laid out my thoughts on this topic a few months ago. There is no question that putting all of these lectures and knowledge online is going to change things. But I am also a big fan of what happens when a teacher and a small group of students get together in a classroom and real personal interaction happens.
When I wanted to understand how blogging tools were going to change things, I took up blogging. Last week I watched a University Pre…
I am not calling this fun friday as I normally do, because what is going on in Boston right now is dead serious.
I am hanging out on Twitter, following a few people who are tweeting out the latest news coming out of Boston. The folks listening to the police scanner and tweeting it out are particularly good to follow. I am also browsing around the web to other places like Reddit and Hacker News where people are discussing the news as it unfolds.
It makes me wonder what everyone else does when big news is happening. Does anyone watch TV anymore? Does anyone use the traditional media sites like NY Times, Boston Globe, NBC, etc?
Where do yo…
This line in the New York Times this morning is interesting:
investigators scrutinized scores of videos and photographs from surveillance cameras from nearby businesses, as well as from marathon spectators’ smartphones and television crews that were filming the Boston Marathon
It made me think of this image from the inaugural ball:
At any major event, people are going to have their smartphones out capturing the moment. They might be taking photos and posting them to social media, they might be taking videos and doing the same thing. Or the images and videos might just stay on their phones.
Who knows whether all this crowdsourced footage w…
I have written about Bluetooth before. I am very bullish on Bluetooth even though its an old protocol that has its challenges. It may not be as potent as Airplay and DLNA but I feel like its ubiquity and familiarity make up for some of that.
I use Bluetooth every day to stream music from my phone to my home entertainment system and my car entertainment system. It works great for that.
And last week, I installed a Bluetooth wireless webcam in the Gotham Gal's office. I was concerned about video quality and latency. And they are both issues, but she using the webcam on her conference table to skype and hangout and it works fine for that. It'…
I don't have a lot to say about what happened in Boston yesterday. But I do want to acknowledge it.
I agree that we should keep calm and carry on. After 9/11, the Gotham Gal made our family get on the subway, go out and about, and not let terror impact our way of life. That was the right call for our family.
But before I carry on, I want to make sure that I, and all of you, have the opportunity to talk about the senseless losses and violence that occurred. It is tragic and terrible.
Continuing the theme of case studies for MBA Mondays, I want to use a milestone that was passed last night to make a bigger point about startups.
I have known Scott Heiferman since the late 90s. He was one of the early NYC web 1.0 entrepreneurs. We were quite friendly with Scott but we were not early investors in Meetup, the company Scott started right after 9/11. Scott and I were at an event together and when asked about something he replied that he viewed Meetup as "a twenty year project." He said that it would take at least twenty years for Meetup to achieve all that he wanted from it and possibly a lot longer. And that he was patient and…
We've been running the Good Things Come To Those Who Code campaign here on AVC for two weeks. We've raised about $12,000 from about 50 folks. That's a lot of generosity from a relatively small number. So thanks to everyone who has given to date.
I think we can do better and get more folks involved so I am going to throw out an incentive:
On September 23rd, here in NYC, we are going to throw a big party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of AVC. I am going to pay for this event and it is going to be open to everyone. It's going to be based on the "Cheers" theme that I've talked about from time to time here at AVC. I am going to tend bar and …
Our portfolio company Turntable launched their second product yesterday, called Piki. I saw this comment about Piki in a blog post and posted it to my Tumblr:
If you imagine Twitter not for tweets but for songs, you'll arrive at something like Piki.
In Piki parlance, a tweet is a pick. You pick a song and post it to your feed.
Here is my piki feed.
I have been using Piki in private beta for several months and it's quite good. I am listening to Piki right now as I write this post.
Piki is publicly available for iOS and the web app remains in private beta for a few more weeks. Android is next.
And sadly, because the music industry makes…
I've written about convertible debt a few times on this blog, most notably here and here. My general take on convertible debt is that its very good for the founders and not very good for the investors in seed and early stage investments and a much better solution in late stage financings, which I mention at the end of the second linked post.
We have a good case study on late stage convertible debt today and I thought we should not miss an opportunity to talk about it. My partner Albert blogged about the $41mm Foursquare financing on the USV blog today. You will note that the investors bought convertible debt. And this is a classic situation …