As is my weekly routine, I went onto Kickstarter and backed a bunch of projects this morning. One of them was Ghost Pacer, a holographic running partner. Ghost Pacer was created by AbdurRahman Bhatti, an “All-state cross country runner, Princeton-bound engineer, and an avid tinke … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Quizlet put out a “State of Remote Learning Report” this week based on what they are seeing across their global learning platform during the pandemic. Quizlet wrote a blog post about it as well. There are some very interesting data points in the report: Quiz … | Continue reading
I just finished completing a thirty page form for an investment my wife and I are making in a limited partnership. This form is called a subscription agreement. I wrote about the frustration of having to complete this identical form again and again six and a half years ago here o … | Continue reading
I’ve written a bit about our portfolio company Nurx since we made the investment back in 2016. Nurx is a great example of how technology is helping to reshape how healthcare is delivered. With the Nurx mobile app, women (and men too) can find the prescription or home diagnostic t … | Continue reading
I’ve written about the need for smaller form factor smartphones and know a bunch of people who are frustrated by the lack of choice in small form factor smartphones. So I was interested to see this Kickstarter project to bring to market a 3″ Android smartphone that sells for sub … | Continue reading
One of the questions I hear on crypto is “what can I do with it besides trade it?” And that’s a good question because truth be told, there have not been great use cases for crypto other than storing value, sending value, and speculating. But that is changing, as I mentioned in th … | Continue reading
I got this question yesterday and answered via email and thought I’d share that discussion with all of you: I enjoyed your article on Board Diversity (https://avc.com/2020/06/board-diversity/ ) and am planning to implement it at my company. I was hoping to get some guidance on th … | Continue reading
We are now approaching five months into the Covid pandemic in the US. The world is more like six or seven months in. And while we wait for vaccines and/or therapeutics to end it, we are left with social distancing, mask wearing, testing, and tracing. These tools can and do work w … | Continue reading
We are officially in the dog days of summer when vacations and the heat and humidity cause things to slow down. It used to be true that companies would put financing efforts on hold in late July and August and return to “the market” after labor day. In recent years, that summer s … | Continue reading
Playing cards and listening to the blues is the perfect combo and this deck of cards celebrates that. I backed this project immediately when I saw it this morning. It has five days to go and is 70% of the way to its goal. If you love cards and the blues, check it out. | Continue reading
I was in a board meeting for most of yesterday so I did not watch the theatrics on Capitol Hill. William told me that there were many calls for breaking up the big tech companies. So I thought I would repost this which I wrote about a year ago. There have been many calls to […] | Continue reading
Crypto has been on a tear in the last week. Bitcoin is up 18% in the last seven days: Ethereum is up over 30% in the last week: But this isn’t the first time we’ve had a bullish run in crypto since the bear market started in early 2018. If you look at the total […] | Continue reading
Vinod Khosla penned a fantastic blog post this week outlining how a few entrepreneurs have made a material impact on clean energy and reducing our collective carbon footprint in the last decade and how a few more can move the needle even further in the next one. Vinod starts off … | Continue reading
Vinod Khosla penned a fantastic blog post this week outlining how a few entrepreneurs have made a material impact on clean energy and reducing our collective carbon footprint in the last decade and how a few more can move the needle even further in the next one. Vinod starts off … | Continue reading
My friend Brad Feld has updated his excellent book on startup ecosystems called Startup Communities. The updated and expanded book is called The Startup Community Way and it is available for pre-order on Amazon. The book comes out tomorrow so you won’t have to wait long for it. T … | Continue reading
I am a big believer in the saying “you can be what you can’t see.” And I have spent a lot of time and energy finding ways for young people to see careers in science, technology, and innovation so that they can put themselves on a course to have one themselves. I came across a […] | Continue reading
Podcasts have emerged as a major new category in media/entertainment/news/education etc. We have seen huge deals for big podcast hosts like Bill Simmons and Joe Rogan, both of whom did transactions with Spotify for nine-figure amounts. But as Spotify (and surely others to follow) … | Continue reading
The Linux Foundation announced its Linux Foundation Public Health initiative yesterday. They are starting with two open-source exposure alerting apps called Covid Shield and Covid Green. These are two apps that use the Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) infrastructure. The … | Continue reading
I know so many people who don’t have landline phones. They simply have their cell phone and use it for everything. But I also know a lot of people who are working from home (or a rented place, a vacation home, etc) right now and struggling with their cell phone reception and othe … | Continue reading
This animated short film project showed up in my Kickstarter feed this week and I backed it right away. It’s about kids learning to love who they are. It is a message that we all need to hear right now. | Continue reading
I’ve been asked this question a bunch in the last few weeks in response to my post about more diversity on Boards. My answer to this question is simple. A Company should have a Board the day it is formed. The Board should contain one Founder (or possibly two) and at least two ind … | Continue reading
I wrote a blog post last week in which I said: The second quarter of 2020 is now behind us and we will see the data on it soon. I suspect what we will see is a very active venture capital market, quite the opposite of what was initially expected. Well the data is out […] | Continue reading
I’m staring at a pile of paper on my desk that is my stack of things I found on the Internet that I want to read. It’s a bit ironic to write this on a blog, but if I come across something on my computer or phone that is longer than a page or two, […] | Continue reading
Growing up, I thought the price asked was the price. The only decision was whether or not you wanted to pay it. As I moved into adulthood, started hanging out with the Gotham Gal and a bunch of friends, and entered the world of business, I learned that the price was what you agre … | Continue reading
The CEO is an interesting case when it comes to performance reviews. They manage an entire company and they specifically manage the senior leadership team. They do not have a single reporting supervisor. They report to a Board. And that Board may, like the team they manage, have … | Continue reading
Ameelio is a nonprofit tech company seeking to break the prison communications monopolies and provide free communication solutions for prisoners and their friends and families. They have a Kickstarter project up right now and I backed it today. | Continue reading
The CEO is an interesting case when it comes to performance reviews. They manage an entire company and they specifically manage the senior leadership team. They do not have a single reporting supervisor. They report to a Board. And that Board may, like the team they manage, have … | Continue reading
When the pandemic started, the conventional wisdom was that the capital markets would take a beating, including the venture capital market for startup capital. The second quarter of 2020 is now behind us and we will see the data on it soon. I suspect what we will see is a very ac … | Continue reading
Regular AVC readers may have noticed that after blogging about my once a day routine, I posted twice yesterday. What happened is that I had been planning on blogging about Summer Bridge, a project we’ve been working on for the last few months, first thing Monday morning after the … | Continue reading
NYC’s Summer Youth Employment Program is the nation’s largest youth employment program, historically connecting NYC’s neediest young adults (between the ages of 14 and 24) with a paid work experience every summer. The COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into it this summer and it wa … | Continue reading
My friend Jonathan sent me a couple graphs he made of the content on AVC over the years. Here is how word count has evolved over the years. I started out with short posts, got longer for a while, and am now back to the short post. Here is how post count has evolved over […] | Continue reading
My partner Nick blogged about this Kickstarter project yesterday and I immediately backed it. Second Chance Studio is a nonprofit digital media company that trains and employs formerly incarcerated individuals. You can back their Kickstarter project here. | Continue reading
I am a fan of the slow and steady approach to building a business. I call it “crawl, walk, run.” I have seen many founders try the “run right away” approach and it is super hard to make that work. An example of “run right away” would be to raise a $30mm seed round, hire […] | Continue reading
I’m sitting outside of my favorite coffee shop sipping on a coffee and writing. I do this many mornings. When I walked into the coffee shop this morning I was wearing a mask: I counted all of the people in the shop waiting in line (six feet apart) and waiting for their coffees. T … | Continue reading
I got a question this past weekend that kind of stumped me. The question is – are there any really good mail hosts other than Gmail and Outlook? I realize that Yahoo still operates a mail host as does AOL. And that many of the ISPs offer mail hosting. But all of those feel like [ … | Continue reading
Many of us have been working from home or some other remote location for over three months now. We have learned a fair bit about this approach to work and we have more to learn in the coming months. I don’t think we will be done with remote work until the pandemic is over. It […] | Continue reading
I wrote about this project to financially support people who were laid off because of the Covid pandemic back in early April. We also participated in the project and supported a family in the NY metro area back then. I saw this tweet yesterday: $1mm in funding, almost 350 familie … | Continue reading
This is a topic of great importance and one that we in the tech/startup sector have not done a good job with. We wait until a company is ready to go public and then address it. While that is better than nothing, it is not good enough. The board diversity problem is a symptom of [ … | Continue reading
I was perusing the crypto markets today and noticed that Tether, the grandfather of all stablecoins, is approaching a $10bn market cap, making it the third most valuable crypto asset after Bitcoin and Ethereum. I also noticed that USDC, the US Dollar stablecoin that Circle and ou … | Continue reading
I was perusing the crypto markets today and noticed that Tether, the grandfather of all stablecoins, is approaching a $10bn market cap, making it the third most valuable crypto asset after Bitcoin and Ethereum. I also noticed that USDC, the US Dollar stablecoin that Circle and ou … | Continue reading
AVC has always been a blog. But over time, it has also become a daily email. Ten years ago, the average monthly visitors to the website was 100k. Now, it is around 60k. But over the same ten year period, the daily email subscriber base has grown from 2,500 people to over 30k peop … | Continue reading
Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV. The initial experience with remote work has been mostly positive. The typical comment has been “we are doing a lot better than I expected.” Productivity is up in some p … | Continue reading
Today we have a special guest post. There have been a few guest posts here at AVC. Maybe a half dozen in total. One of my favorites was this one by JLM during the financial crisis of 2008/2009. But this one today may top that gem. It's from our favorite Giant Robot Dinosaur and i … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Coinbase released an open source framework for crypto asssets to make it easier to list them on crypto exchanges. It is called Rosetta. Coinbase is encouraging blockchain projects to integrate Rosetta so that they can more easily list new assets on the Coinb … | Continue reading
My father in law and sister in law were over last night. I am getting more and more bullish on Android every day. I starting carrying an Android phone about a year ago. I made it my one and only phone over the summer. I absolutely love it. My sister in law who is an […] | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Recount Media, which I have blogged about here before, recently launched an interesting partnership between Recount, Twitter, and brand marketers. They are calling this partnership “Real-Time Recount.” Recount is a news organization which publishes short-for … | Continue reading
We have a book club at USV. We read one book together every month and then discuss it over lunch. Today, we are going to discuss Enemy Of All Mankind, the story of the British pirate of the late 17th century, Henry Every. The book was written by our friend and former USV portfoli … | Continue reading
Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV. The initial experience with remote work has been mostly positive. The typical comment has been “we are doing a lot better than I expected.” Productivity is up in some p … | Continue reading