The Gotham Gal and I have been donating to bail funds for a while now. This Positively Gotham Gal podcast from April 2019 with Robin Steinberg of The Bail Project is a great education into the bail system and why it is so problematic. Now, with protestors around the world being a … | Continue reading
Last December, my friend Brad Feld stopped by to see me in Los Angeles and I proudly showed him my home office with a separate Zoom Room. He looked at me with a quizzical look on his face and said “why don’t you have two screens on the wall?” I asked why and he explained […] | Continue reading
Last December, my friend Brad Feld stopped by to see me in Los Angeles and I proudly showed him my home office with a separate Zoom Room. He looked at me with a quizzical look on his face and said “why don’t you have two screens on the wall?” I asked why and he explained […] | Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned a few times here during the pandemic, I’m very interested to see what behavior changes that we adopted during the pandemic will stick when it eases and which will not. Mask wearing, for example, has been commonplace in Asia for many years but not so in the west. … | Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned a few times here during the pandemic, I’m very interested to see what behavior changes that we adopted during the pandemic will stick when it eases and which will not. Mask wearing, for example, has been commonplace in Asia for many years but not so in the west. … | Continue reading
Today, NYC starts the process of reopening its economy from almost three months of lockdowns to halt the spread of Covid 19. It is time. The city has massively reduced the spread of the virus in those three months. Here is a chart of infections and testing in Brooklyn over the la … | Continue reading
I saw this tweet last weekend and immediately thought “he is right.” So under the theory that late is better than never, I made a donation to The George Floyd Memorial Fund and I am highlighting it to all of you today. This fund was set up by George’s sister to “cover funeral and … | Continue reading
I believe that black lives matter. I understand that the phrase black lives matter speaks to a movement to stop the murders of black people at the hands of the police. I also understand that it speaks to a broader protest movement seeking to reduce the unchecked power of the poli … | Continue reading
I took the day off from AVC yesterday in observance of the moment we are living through. It is a very difficult time. I spent part of yesterday talking to a number of the leaders of our portfolio companies who are trying to find a footing in this moment and provide the right lead … | Continue reading
I woke up at dawn today. The sun was lightening the sky. The birds were chirping. I was reminded of the power of a new day, a clean slate, new opportunities. It is June. After three months of pandemic lockdowns, job losses like I have not seen in my lifetime, and a week of turmoi … | Continue reading
I woke up at dawn today. The sun was lightening the sky. The birds were chirping. I was reminded of the power of a new day, a clean slate, new opportunities. It is June. After three months of pandemic lockdowns, job losses like I have not seen in my lifetime, and a week of turmoi … | Continue reading
I am a big fan of pairing solar panels on the roof with a battery system in the garage. The battery allows you to use the solar power at night when there is no sun. It also provides resilience for power outages and the like. So when I saw this Kickstarter project, I backed it […] | Continue reading
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I am excited about the possibility that technology, particularly mobile computing technology, can supplement the work of manual contact tracing to keep us all safer until a permanent solution is found to this pandemic. But there is a ton of confu … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Coinbase announced yesterday that it will acquire Tagomi to build out its institutional prime brokerage business. This is an important moment in the maturation of the crypto trading business. At USV, we have used Coinbase to transact in the crypto markets an … | Continue reading
I realize that most businesses are suffering greatly in this pandemic. Many have been shut completely. But there are some that are experiencing the opposite situation. They have a growth spurt as a result of this moment. Businesses in food delivery, e-commerce, online education, … | Continue reading
Last night at dinner we got to talking the film Barfly, which came out the year the Gotham Gal and I were married, so a long time ago now. We decided to watch it after dinner with our family and friends we are quarantining with. Well it turns out that Barfly is not available to [ … | Continue reading
On today, Memorial Day, we remember our fallen soldiers. I spent some time today going back over old blog posts I’ve written on this topic and landed on a post I wrote almost ten years ago, when I visited the Normandy beaches with my wife and son. It was a very powerful and movin … | Continue reading
I backed this photo book project today. The creator took photos of the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn during the more than two-month lockdown in March, April, and May 2020 and will produce a photo book. I really like what he says at 1:50min into the excellent project video … | Continue reading
My colleague Matt Cynamon told our partnership last week that the number of jobs on the USV job board had declined from 1,553 to 871 in the past month. So we suggested he share that data and some observations on the USV blog. He did that yesterday. Here is the chart of open jobs … | Continue reading
I’ve been working on getting a fiber internet connection to the home we are quarantining in. With nine of us living and working from home together, we are consuming a lot of bandwidth. And with everyone on our block doing more or less the same thing, the cable internet connection … | Continue reading
I read my friend Nick Bilton‘s book American Kingpin over the last few weeks. It is the story of Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts), the founder and owner of The Silk Road. It is a fascinating story with many angles; drug and arms dealing, entrepreneurship, criminal investi … | Continue reading
So many of our favorite community anchors have shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. And reopening them won’t be easy. Music venues, movie theaters, art galleries, restaurants, performance spaces, maker spaces, conferences, festivals, and bookshops are the places we hang out in, … | Continue reading
I am confident this pandemic will end. At some point, we will have a vaccine, therapeutics, and/or broad based immunity. When that will happen is less clear to me. I believe that at some point, we will be able to resume living and working as we did prior to the pandemic. However, … | Continue reading
I just backed this project and got myself a great hoodie to wear this fall when we hope to be back in NYC. | Continue reading
We have been looking for ways in which crypto assets can go mainstream. Our interest and investment in Dapper’s crypto games is an effort in that area. So is our involvement in the Libra project. We also have been involved in legacy mobile and web apps that have built cryptocurre … | Continue reading
I am confident this pandemic will end. At some point, we will have a vaccine, therapeutics, and/or broad based immunity. When that will happen is less clear to me. I believe that at some point, we will be able to resume living and working as we did prior to the pandemic. However, … | Continue reading
USV has invested in the education sector for a bit more than ten years. We kicked things off with an event we called Hacking Education back in March 2009. We have focused on “direct to learner” businesses and have mostly avoided investing in companies that sell to the established … | Continue reading
I got a lot of feedback on my post yesterday and a bunch of it was around the issue of privacy and whether we really care to keep our personal data private. I think we are increasingly aware of our data and the need to have more control over it and how it is used. […] | Continue reading
We’ve been watching the ESPN series The Last Dance along with something like 6mm other fans who are watching it right now. It is a reminder of how dominant Michael Jordan was in the 90s and what a special player he was. I woke up thinking about the last three minutes of episode 7 … | Continue reading
We’ve been watching the ESPN series The Last Dance along with something like 6mm other fans who are watching it right now. It is a reminder of how dominant Michael Jordan was in the 90s and what a special player he was. I woke up thinking about the last three minutes of episode 7 … | Continue reading
This pandemic has challenged us all in many ways. But it has also provided time for many of us to tackle things we’ve long wanted to do. Today, I would like to blog about an example of that. Kirk Love is well known to many AVC readers. He is also the designer of this blog. […] | Continue reading
One of the great joys of the work I do is I get to watch the leaders of our portfolio companies grow over time. I’ve had a number of moments over the last few months where I got off a call or a meeting and thought to myself “wow, she’s a new person.” Growing as […] | Continue reading
Back when we launched the new AVC (AVC 3.0) and moved away from the Disqus comment system, I heard loudly and clearly that the folks who have left comments here at AVC, via Disqus, from 2007 to early 2020, would like to have their comments displayed at the bottom of all of those … | Continue reading
Learning to code was the thing that unlocked it all for me. I learned to hack in Basic during high school. I parlayed that into a programming job in college, which led to my first job out of college, which then led to a job that helped me pay for graduate school, which led to … | Continue reading
I saw this tweet a few days ago and thought “that’s clever”: On or about May 12th, Bitcoin will go through its third “halvening” in which the rewards for mining bitocin will be cut in half. This will reduce the “inflation rate” of new bitcoins being mined and will also change the … | Continue reading
Food Bank For New York City is NYC’s leading hunger-relief organization. During this crisis, the number of people turning to their emergency food network has increased by 50%. Here are some interesting stats from their website: $1 helps provide 5 meals OR $1/day helps provide 150 … | Continue reading
I got a lot of feedback on my post yesterday and a bunch of it was around the issue of privacy and whether we really care to keep our personal data private. I think we are increasingly aware of our data and the need to have more control over it and how it is used. … | Continue reading
Christina Farr at CNBC has a good post that details the back story of how Apple and Google came together to implement an interoperable system and a set of APIs and SDKs to allow third parties to build exposure alerting apps on their mobile operating systems. Like many in tech, I … | Continue reading
This moment we have been living through over the last two months has put pressure on many companies to figure out how to keep the lights on and stay in business. It has also been a second wind for some companies that have been struggling to survive in difficult sectors like deliv … | Continue reading
This moment we have been living through over the last two months has put pressure on many companies to figure out how to keep the lights on and stay in business. It has also been a second wind for some companies that have been struggling to survive in difficult sectors like deliv … | Continue reading
I wrote a blog post in September of last year arguing that gross margins and operating margins really matter when valuing companies. I argued that “software companies with software margins” are better businesses than tech companies that are not really software companies but a tec … | Continue reading
I was emailing with my friend Harry this past week and we started talking about crypto and the inevitability of a massive crash. I am certain the big crash will happen. I don’t know when it will happen and I think it may be some time before it does. But better safe than sorry. So … | Continue reading
Yesterday, Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef/owner/creator of Prune, a tiny twenty-year-old restaurant in the east village that The Gotham Gal and I and our family have always loved, wrote a piece in the New York Times that really captures the sense of loss we all feel around our favo … | Continue reading
I realize that most businesses are suffering greatly in this pandemic. Many have been shut completely. But there are some that are experiencing the opposite situation. They have a growth spurt as a result of this moment. Businesses in food delivery, e-commerce, online education, … | Continue reading
I wrote about our portfolio company Duolingo’s English Proficiency Test back in August of last year. I have always loved the idea that a company that helps people learn a language can also help people prove their fluency in a language. It is two sides of the same coin. But the ro … | Continue reading
I woke up to this tweet this morning: I went to that blog post and clicked on the link and sure enough someone had swapped out my cap table template from 2011 with their own cap table. I am not entirely sure how that happened and for how long that has been the case, but … | Continue reading
I wrote a blog post on March 12th called Open For Business and thought I would return to the topic. If you search for “vc open for business” on Twitter, you will see almost universal scorn for the idea that VCs are open for business right now. But our experience doesn’t match tha … | Continue reading
You may have seen this short advertisement called Always Open on television over the last few days. It is part of a larger campaign called Stand With Small that Etsy (where I am Chairman and a large stockholder) is running right now to encourage everyone to support small business … | Continue reading