We continue to be concerned about the most vulnerable among us and that is where we want to focus our giving right now. To that end, Give Directly has a NYC Covid Fund that will give funds directly to people. Specifically: GiveDirectly is delivering cash to families enrolled in S … | Continue reading
We call it IRL “In Real Life” in the tech sector. IRL is the opposite of the virtual reality/online worlds that we have been reading about in science fiction and slowly building over the past three decades. I have heard a number of people assert that this pandemic, when we are st … | Continue reading
One of the most fascinating things I’ve been watching is how the 80 something USV portfolio companies are adjusting their marketing strategies during this pandemic. It is all over the map, based on the unique situations of each and every company, with some pulling back on marketi … | Continue reading
As policy makers around the world seek to mitigate the economic shock from this pandemic, one less obvious but powerful place to look are working capital flows. Yes we do need direct relief for small businesses like the forgivable PPP loans. We also need things like payroll tax d … | Continue reading
This is the fourth funding friday blog post in which I’ve suggested good causes to contribute to during this pandemic. March 20th – restaurant workers March 27th – health care protective gear April 3rd – feeding people in need Today, I would like to highlight The 1k project. The … | Continue reading
I linked to a post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince the other day. In it, he wrote: The super heroes of this crisis are clearly the medical professionals at the front lines saving people’s lives and the scientists searching for a cure. But the faithful sidekick that’s helping us … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this tweet by my partner Albert: I clicked on the underlying tweet thread and learned that some countries have adopted an approach where everyone wears face masks when they are out and about. That way, if you are infected and don’t know it, you won’t … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this tweet by my partner Albert: I clicked on the underlying tweet thread and learned that some countries have adopted an approach where everyone wears face masks when they are out and about. That way, if you are infected and don’t know it, you won’t … | Continue reading
One of the silver linings to this awful pandemic is that things have slowed down a lot. Not just work. Everything really. I find myself taking more time to do the dishes, work out, meditate, etc. There is less “racing through the day” and more time to do things right and carefull … | Continue reading
There are so many challenges facing us right now that the smaller things often get overlooked. One of those things is summer internships for students who are focused on a career in tech. Many companies are struggling to stay afloat and have canceled all of their summer internship … | Continue reading
As we continue to make our way through this pandemic, I keep coming back to the question of how do we help those in the most need right now. Last week it was our health care responders on the front lines, the week before it was workers in the hospitality industry who are now out … | Continue reading
As Billboard is reporting this morning, our portfolio company SoundCloud is putting up $15mm to support its creator community in this difficult time for musicians. Musicians can’t tour right now. That’s a huge part of their earnings. Many are turning to live streaming and I hope … | Continue reading
My friend Matt Blumberg, who ran USV’s former portfolio company Return Path for twenty years before selling it last spring, got a call from Colorado’s Governor Polis two and half weeks ago asking him to fly out and be the founding leader of an innovation startup to help Colorado’ … | Continue reading
If you have a roof that needs to be inspected but you don’t want people crawling all over your house right now, if you have mission-critical infrastructure that needs to have its regular inspection done but you don’t want third parties in your environment right now, if you want t … | Continue reading
Last week Congress passed the CARES Act which provides a vast array of financial relief provisions to people and businesses in the US. Congress is providing relief to small businesses via a forgivable loan program administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA). The SBA h … | Continue reading
Earlier this week Chris Anderson, who runs TED, hosted a 45min conversation with Bill Gates. I heard a lot about it in the last few days (it has already had 1.2mm views) and this morning the Gotham Gal and I watched it over our morning coffee. What I like about this conversation … | Continue reading
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the US, the people who are stepping up the most to meet this challenge are our country’s healthcare workers. We should do everything we can to help make sure they can work safely during this crisis. So today I am highlighting two fundrai … | Continue reading
I wrote about the idea of buying Bitcoin in your IRA last year. I got a lot of responses to that post and one of them was from the founder of Alto IRA. I set up an Alto IRA, moved my old IRA over to it, and waited. When they had an alpha version of … | Continue reading
Ad blockers are hugely popular. Close to 800mm people around the world use them to avoid intrusive ads and data collection. I do not use an ad-blocker but I completely understand why one would choose to do so. And yet much of the media business is supported by advertising. There … | Continue reading
I have been teaching in one form or another since college. I helped pay for graduate school by teaching other grad students. For most of my life, teaching has meant standing up in front of a group of people and explaining things to them in a large group setting. But, like many th … | Continue reading
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that when this is all over, I can’t wait to go to my favorite restaurants and enjoy their hospitality and food. If they are able to re-open. While many industries are facing difficult times in this crisis, the restaurant and hospitality industry is … | Continue reading
On the first episode of Howard’s new podcast, his guest said, “in panics, all assets are correlated.” I suspect that is true to some extent. When bad news hits, I have seen traders sell quickly, get to cash, and then take some time to evaluate the situation before acting on the n … | Continue reading
We onboarded our new analyst team over the last few weeks at USV. As is our tradition, they have each written a “hello world” blog post on usv.com introducing themselves. They are: David Hannah Hanel I can’t imagine how hard and surreal it must be to join a new firm just as we ar … | Continue reading
I promised to post this once it is live and it went live today. So here it is: | Continue reading
I tweeted on friday that our portfolio company Outschool, which offers live K12 classes delivered by real teachers over video, would be offering free classes to those who need them for their kids and can’t afford to buy them right now: As you might imagine, the response to Outsch … | Continue reading
The Gotham Gal and I have been largely self quarantining in our home for the last two weeks and are preparing to continue doing so for a while longer. It’s a bit depressing to be honest and I’ve been looking for ways to get the proper mental state for what could be an extended st … | Continue reading
This reimagination of the card game Old Maid is terrific. I backed it immediately this morning. | Continue reading
I got an email from a well known journalist who covers the VC sector today. He was asking a bunch of VCs a few questions that basically can be summed up “are you open for business?” I answered him with these facts: 1/ We are working on two term sheets for new investments by USV … | Continue reading
My friend Howard Lindzon has started a podcast series called Panic With Friends. It’s about the market meltdown and a lot more. I hope that it turns out to be a short lived series and this panic ends quickly. Episode One was posted today on Howard’s blog. He asked me to do an epi … | Continue reading
Tech:NYC, NYC’s tech industry association (which I co-chair), has launched a daily email digest for the tech sector to keep up with the latest COVID-19 developments in NYC. Here is the first daily email that went out yesterday afternoon. You can sign up for it here. If you are le … | Continue reading
Today is a tough day in the financial markets. Who knows where we will end up at the end of the day, the week, or this month. We’ve already seen the major indexes give up around 20% of their value in a few weeks with today’s down moves at the opening. I’ve seen this movie … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Kickstarter has a showcase up right now called Long Story Short which features a whole bunch of short film projects that are being funded right now. So I went and looked at them and found this one about two wonderful ladies who are 105 and 101. I backed it i … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Dapper (creator of Cryptokitties among other crypto games) has been developing a new blockchain designed for high throughput consumer experiences (like crypto games). That blockchain is called Flow. Today, Dapper is opening up the Flow Playground so that dev … | Continue reading
I’ve written a bit about “crypto adjacent” projects. These are projects that capture some of the aspects/behaviors/benefits of crypto without being full-on crypto projects. One of these “aspects/behaviors/benefits” of crypto that I like is the fractionalization of ownership. I be … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Outschool operates a service that allows any teacher to teach a live class over online video. They offer over 10,000 classes by teachers on almost any subject you can imagine. Over 80,000 students have used Outschool to take classes. Yesterday, Outschool ann … | Continue reading
I’ve learned over the years that many of the most important things start out looking like little things or even laughable things. So if you want to laugh at this news, that will make me very bullish on it. The Marshall Islands announced today that they will be issuing a digital v … | Continue reading
I’ve learned over the years that many of the most important things start out looking like little things or even laughable things. So if you want to laugh at this news, that will make me very bullish on it. The Marshall Islands announced today that they will be issuing a digital v … | Continue reading
Back in 2009, I wrote a post called The Venture Capital Math Problem. I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw this tweet: In that post, I argued that the venture capital business could not sustain more than $20bn a year of new capital coming into it and continue to produce good … | Continue reading
Video of the week is back. This is the first video of the week post since we launched AVC 3.0. I don’t plan to do this every week, but I will do it some weeks. About a month ago, my partner Albert and I took the stage at the Upfront Summit and talked to Erin … | Continue reading
Rocketbook is a serial Kickstarter creator, having done five successful projects already. They make notebooks and note pads that you can write on but also save your work to the cloud. They are back with the Rocketbook Orbit which is a “legal pad” that saves your work to the cloud … | Continue reading
Back in 2009, I wrote a post called The Venture Capital Math Problem. I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw this tweet: In that post, I argued that the venture capital business could not sustain more than $20bn a year of new capital coming into it and continue to produce good … | Continue reading
My partner Rebecca brought an appreciation for and an understanding of marketing to USV and it has made us better investors and it has helped us assist our portfolio companies with their marketing efforts. Rebecca is going on Simulmedia Live tomorrow at 2pm ET to talk about start … | Continue reading
I mentioned it yesterday but given its impact on global health and capital markets, I thought I’d share a few things I’ve read and watched in the past few days that I found helpful (both shared on Twitter by my friend Phil). This is a conversation that was held last week at Johns … | Continue reading
I am going to spend much of today in my Zoom room participating in several meetings around the country and around the world. If you look at Zoom’s stock price over the last month, since the outbreak of the Coronavirus, you will see that the market thinks that I am not the only on … | Continue reading
I am going to spend much of today in my Zoom room participating in several meetings around the country and around the world. If you look at Zoom’s stock price over the last month, since the outbreak of the Coronavirus, you will see that the market thinks that I am not the only on … | Continue reading
These guys have been using Kickstarter, and a bunch of other online platforms, to support their live shows riffing on “campy B-movies.” I love the underground, indie creative community and these guys are a great example of that. I backed this project this morning. | Continue reading
Earlier this week I purchased 1% of a collection of five 1985 Nike Air Jordan sneakers using our portfolio company Otis’ mobile app. I paid $330 for ten shares (out of a total of 1000 shares) implying a value of $33,000 for the five pairs, or roughly $6600 each. This page shows t … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Recount Media is doing some of the finest reporting on the presidential race right now. This 2 minute 16 second video goes back over Mike Bloomberg’s debate appearances in his time as NYC’s Mayor and shows how many of the questions he faces now were in fact … | Continue reading