I wrote yesterday, about the quarterly numbers for VC investing activity: If this was a student coming home with a report card, it would be straight As. Well, I missed something in the data that was subsequently reported on by PitchBook, one of the authors of the report: Venture … | Continue reading
The NVCA and Pitch Book are out with their Q3 report on the VC industry and what they report is that the VC industry continues to be very active throughout the pandemic. Deal counts and deal values are stable to up over last year. The massive expansion of later-stage private capi … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Numerai, which operates the crowdsourced Numerai Hedge Fund and is the creator of the Numeraire crypto token introduced their latest effort, Numerai Signals, with this video yesterday: | Continue reading
Over the last decade, the Gotham Gal and I have moved away from oil and gas in our homes and have installed solar panels for electricity and heat pumps for heating and cooling. It has gotten less expensive to do this swap out as solar and heat pump costs have come down. My partne … | Continue reading
Over the last decade, the Gotham Gal and I have moved away from oil and gas in our homes and have installed solar panels for electricity and heat pumps for heating and cooling. It has gotten less expensive to do this swap out as solar and heat pump costs have come down. My partne … | Continue reading
I backed Basilica Hudson earlier this week when I saw a friend had backed it in my notifications. Helping a leading upstate arts organization keep going during this pandemic felt like a good thing to do. This morning, I backed a few other similar projects: Dirty Precious: Off Pre … | Continue reading
Most of us have seen some version of this chart that shows how the Covid pandemic has accelerated e-commerce adoption: What is interesting to me is that it has also impacted in person retail experiences. Most restaurants in NYC are not passing out menus anymore. They just have a … | Continue reading
I’m not a fan of business books. I find that you get most of the value from them in the opening chapter and then it is a lot of repetition from then on. But there are some great concepts that one can glean from business books and I’ve often wanted to find an efficient way […] | Continue reading
I explained this last week on a call with some of our investors and I thought it might be useful to explain it more broadly. Most of USV’s big wins have been in companies where we were the first institutional VC to talk to the company or where we had way more conviction about the … | Continue reading
We have been back in NYC for the last month and enjoying the city very much. One of the many things we love about NYC is that we walk everywhere (or most everywhere). I enjoy walking around NYC by myself and listening to music, podcasts, or talking to friends or colleagues on the … | Continue reading
I explained this last week on a call with some of our investors and I thought it might be useful to explain it more broadly. Most of USV’s big wins have been in companies where we were the first institutional VC to talk to the company or where we had way more conviction about the … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Dapper took the ropes off NBA Top Shot this past week and it is now open to anyone who wants to play this super fun NBA collectibles game. I wrote about NBA Top Shot in early August and provided access codes to AVC readers who wanted to get in on the beta. [ … | Continue reading
I’ve written a bunch about Exposure Alerting and its potential to limit the spread of Covid by alerting people when they have come in contact with someone contagious. Back in April, Google and Apple came together to create GAEN, a framework for secure and private proximity data s … | Continue reading
My partner Rebecca wrote about our most recent education investment, Sora, on the USV blog today. We have been investing in learning for over a decade at USV and have built a terrific learning portfolio focusing on companies that are providing services direct to the learner (as o … | Continue reading
My partner Rebecca wrote about our most recent education investment, Sora, on the USV blog today. We have been investing in learning for over a decade at USV and have built a terrific learning portfolio focusing on companies that are providing services direct to the learner (as o … | Continue reading
I have been saying no to podcast requests and will continue to do so. But when Julie Samuels asked me to be the first guest on the Tech:NYC podcast, called Talk:NYC, I had to say yes. We talked about tech, NYC, the current moment we are living through, and a lot more. It’s about … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Helium started shipping a new product called Tabs last week. Tabs competes with Tile and a bunch of other Bluetooth trackers and smart dog collars. But Tabs uses the Helium network (aka The People’s Network) and that makes all of the difference as you can se … | Continue reading
Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan and funder of teaching kids to code. I believe helping young people learn to think logically via coding exercises is helpful to their development in so many ways. So when I came across the NextMaker project on Kickstarter, I backed i … | Continue reading
Our current investing thesis at USV is about expanding access to knowledge, wellness, and capital. We believe that these are core human needs and that opening up access to them is both good for society and also good business. Our approach to these challenges is centered on loweri … | Continue reading
I am in the middle of a week of back to back to back to back all day meetings. Which means I am not responsive on email, which means I am not getting anything done, which means I can’t be easily reached. Which means I am stressed. In times like this, I like to remind […] | Continue reading
I saw that the SEC and the OCC issued guidance on fiat backed stablecoins yesterday. Better late than never. Because fiat backed stablecoins are seeing significant adoption this year. I wrote a post about stablecoin adoption in June in which I said this: I was perusing the crypto … | Continue reading
The Gotham Gal and I spent a good part of saturday walking around NYC. At one point, we walked through the massive and amazing Chelsea Piers complex and saw this plaque: Think about that. In one four year period, the New York Public Library, Grand Central, the subway, the Queensb … | Continue reading
I backed this project today to make large scale public art projects honoring frontline workers. Frontline workers have been and continue to be the heroes of this pandemic. They are out there delivering our packages, stocking our stores, caring for sick people, etc, etc. I really … | Continue reading
I have written extensively on this blog over the last decade and a half about the significant negative consequences that the two large mobile operating systems have on distribution of software. I am strongly opposed to the monopolies that Apple and Google have over mobile apps th … | Continue reading
I have written extensively on this blog over the last decade and a half about the significant negative consequences that the two large mobile operating systems have on distribution of software. I am strongly opposed to the monopolies that Apple and Google have over mobile apps th … | Continue reading
My friend and former colleague Charlie O’Donnell created a new kind of networking event for the moment we are in. These are virtual networking events designed to “include diverse perspectives in the innovation community.” They are called Circulate. These are curated discussions, … | Continue reading
We have been back in NYC for about a week after being away for the entire pandemic. We were in LA when the pandemic hit and then spent the summer on the east end of Long Island. Like everyone, we have read the horror stories of NYC being a wasteland of homelessness, crime, shutte … | Continue reading
The author Cory Doctorow is out with his third book in the Little Brother series. called Attack Surface, and is crowdfunding the audio book to keep it out of the Amazon/Audible ecosystem. I backed the project this week. | Continue reading
I’ve written about the power of having a really great setup for doing long video meetings. I call it my “zoom room” because it rhymes. I use Google Meet and a bunch of other video services regularly in my Zoom Room so it’s not so much about the video service I use. One of the […] | Continue reading
I have had the great pleasure of working with Matt Blumberg and the senior leadership team of USV’s former portfolio company Return Path (which was sold in 2019) for much of the last twenty years. Matt and many members of his leadership team got the band back together early this … | Continue reading
Something that bugs me about our tax code in the US is that we tax labor more than capital. If you make $100,000 of gains on your purchase of Tesla stock you pay 15% of those gains to the IRS. But if, instead, you earned that $100k of income as a school teacher, you would […] | Continue reading
The comic book community on Kickstarter is so great. This project that I backed today is a great example of the creativity that they express in every project they do. | Continue reading
As many of you know, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are all the rage on wall street right now. SPACs are publicly traded “shell companies” that raise capital in an IPO process and then use that capital to merge with a privately held business. SPACs have been around … | Continue reading
My colleague Hanel wrote an important post on USV.com yesterday. It looks at mental healthcare solutions and compares them to what has happened in online learning in the last decade. USV invests in both wellness and learning and we believe that the way learning has evolved can te … | Continue reading
Our portfolio company Pilot Fiber, which provides the best fiber internet to businesses in NYC, has teamed up with a national telecom provider to offer residential fiber internet in Manhattan. Here’s the way they describe it on their landing page: Pilot has teamed up with a no-BS … | Continue reading
I was looking at my Feedblitz dashboard this morning. Feedblitz powers the daily email for this blog. These are all of the emails/blog posts I have done this month: As you can see the open rate hovers between a low of 33% (Ghost Pacer) and a high of 45% (Subscription Agreements). … | Continue reading
I backed a bunch of projects this morning on Kickstarter and this one really stuck with me. I like supporting young creators who are putting their work out there and seeking funding for it. And I also like the idea of documenting this pandemic in photos so we can remember it when … | Continue reading
In the final presentation session of our Summer Bridge internship program yesterday, an impressive young man told us that he had stayed away from a career in business because he “was not good at numbers.” I stopped him and suggested that maybe he is good at numbers but only numbe … | Continue reading
A trifecta in horse racing is when you accurately predict win place and show. It is when you get three bets correct. We’ve had the opposite happen in 2020. We’ve had three things go wrong at the same time. As my friend David Steinberg said to me last month, we are witnessing 1918 … | Continue reading
A trifecta in horse racing is when you accurately predict win place and show. It is when you get three bets correct. We’ve had the opposite happen in 2020. We’ve had three things go wrong at the same time. As my friend David Steinberg said to me last month, we are witnessing 1918 … | Continue reading
We are finally in an era where an equal role comes with equal pay. This is a very good thing but it comes with some hard lessons. One of them is about pay and precedent. You cannot make a hire and a compensation commitment without thinking very deeply about the precedent you are … | Continue reading
Federal, State, and Local governments are facing massive budget gaps and will need to close them with a mix of cost reductions and new revenues. While this is always hard and has a real toll on people who might lose their jobs or have to pay more in taxes, it is also an opportuni … | Continue reading
Let’s say you are going camping and want to bring a chess set. This cool chess set and board would be ideal. Chess is a great game and this is a great way to play it. I backed it when i saw it this morning. | Continue reading
It’s my 59th birthday today. 59 is a nice number. It’s a prime number. I kicked off the day by getting a cup of coffee and sitting on the beach and reflecting on things. I am taking the day off from work and plan to spend the day with our family. | Continue reading
We use Sunpower solar panels and inverters and they have this cool dashboard that shows us a number of interesting things. This is the percentage of power we are drawing from our solar panels vs the grid since May 1st: This is how much power we are consuming on a given day and ho … | Continue reading
There is a lot of negativity around NYC right now. Bloggers writing sensational headlines. That sort of thing. It makes me want to go out and buy a ton of NYC stock right now. It is certainly the case that many talented people are leaving NYC right now. It is also the case that t … | Continue reading
There is a lot of negativity around NYC right now. Bloggers writing sensational headlines. That sort of thing. It makes me want to go out and buy a ton of NYC stock right now. It is certainly the case that many talented people are leaving NYC right now. It is also the case that t … | Continue reading
I woke up to a dream this morning where I was playing a game that was very similar to Turntable.fm, a failed effort to create a social music experience that had a moment back in 2011 and that I had invested in via USV. In the dream, someone had created a new version of the […] | Continue reading