The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a st … | Continue reading
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, t … | Continue reading
We spent this past weekend in Mexico City at Bright Moment’s NFT Art CDMX. Bright Moments is the premier NFT art “gallery” in the world. I use that term in parentheses because Bright Moments is much more than a gallery but that word is well understood. USV is a member of the Brig … | Continue reading
This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns like this seem to keep happening? At times like this, it helps to have a long-te … | Continue reading
I’ve previously written about The $1k Project for Ukraine, which was launched by my friend, Alex Iskold, five days into the Russian aggression. Since its inception, the project raised more than $10M and helped 10,000 families and 35,000 children. The AVC community has generously … | Continue reading
The Gotham Gal and I just spent the last two weeks in Paris. We have been going to Paris together for around forty years and have had a place there for the last decade. It is a place we can go to get away from it all for a few weeks, connect with each other, […] | Continue reading
One of my favorite things about NFTs is that they contain a mechanism for the artist/creator to collect royalties on all of the sales that happen after the initial sale/mint. The creator specifies the royalty percentage when they initially mint the NFT and the NFT marketplaces/sm … | Continue reading
There are many efforts underway to reduce carbon emissions in order to get to “net zero”. But most climate scientists believe that reducing emissions won’t be enough and we will also need to engage in removing carbon from the atmosphere. There are natural ways to do this like ref … | Continue reading
I have enjoyed collecting NFT art over the last few years and I have very much wanted to display it in a physical space vs just having it online on a profile, like this one. So when we started designing the new USV offices last year we started thinking about NFT screens. We were … | Continue reading
I’ve always been a fan of preventive medicine. I like the idea of medicine that stops us from getting sick. As a child, I was vaccinated for all of the normal things, polio, whooping cough, etc in order to be able to go to school. Growing up I was vaccinated for tetanus and a few … | Continue reading
In the spring of 2014, I walked across the street from our apartment building to our parking garage to get our car and drive somewhere. I can’t recall where I was headed that morning. But as I walked into the garage, I saw two EV charging kiosks had been installed in our parking … | Continue reading
At USV, our climate thesis is about both mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis. One way we can adapt to the climate crisis is by building a more resilient energy supply system. Demand Response is one of many approaches that will be necessary to do that. Demand Response is … | Continue reading
Nuclear power (both fission and fusion) has the potential to provide much of the energy the world needs without the damaging effects of carbon emissions which are warming our planet. And yet nuclear power is politically unpopular in many parts of the world and that has led to a m … | Continue reading
I’ve always been interested in tapping into the “crowd” to fund things that need to happen and that our current institutions can’t figure out how to support. Our investment in Kickstarter back in 2009 is an excellent example of that. In the last thirteen years, Kickstarter has he … | Continue reading
As we all prepare for the fall back to school/back to work season, I thought I’d touch on a topic that has been top of mind for me for the last six months. The covid pandemic taught many of us that we can be productive and our companies can succeed in a fully remote work […] | Continue reading
We like to do a lot of deep dives at USV. We pick areas that we think will present interesting investment opportunities over the next five to ten years and then spend time researching them. We like to talk to lots of experts, academics, investors, entrepreneurs, and industry. We … | Continue reading
Joe Hovde wrote a blog post about AVC last week. He analyzed all of the blog posts on AVC to find trends and other interesting tidbits. He charted the number of posts a month I have written here over the last nineteen years. He observed: he treated the blog similarly to a twitter … | Continue reading
In about a month, an important moment will happen in the world of crypto/web3. The Ethereum blockchain will move from a proof of work consensus mechanism to a proof of stake consensus mechanism. This event is known as “The Merge” in Ethereum land. There are many reasons why this … | Continue reading
When fundraising gets tougher for startups, the existing investors (insiders) will often provide a bridge loan to the company to extend the runway for getting another round done. There is more of this sort of thing happening in today’s fundraising market and I thought I’d share s … | Continue reading
Tech:NYC is the industry association for NY’s tech sector. They play a number of important roles and one of them is to educate and inform about the impact of the tech sector in NY. To that end, they launched a valuable resource last month called Innovation Indicators. Innovation … | Continue reading
We have been watching our portfolio of ~130 technology companies wrestle with this decision for the last two and a half years. Brought on by the covid pandemic and the work from home moment that it created, there has been a sea change in the way that technology companies organize … | Continue reading
Every quarter our firm goes through a process to value our entire portfolio. Those values, on a schedule of investments we publish to our investors every quarter, flow through to our financial statements and capital accounts and establish how much an interest in our partnerships … | Continue reading
I wrote the post at the bottom and linked here when Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in late April. I am relieved that Musk has decided he does not want to own Twitter. I never thought he would be a good shepherd of the Twitter network and maybe now we have the [… … | Continue reading
AVC has been around for nineteen years and it has evolved over the years from a place I’d post multiple times a day to once a day to now once a week. There was a time when there was a vibrant comment community at AVC with many posts getting over a hundred comments and replies. [… … | Continue reading
The Gotham Gal and I own five EVs and have been driving electric-powered cars since 2014. I don’t drive gas-powered cars and haven’t for a few years now. We have purchased two Chevy Bolts, two Tesla Model Ss, and one Rivian truck. I love the instant acceleration you get from an E … | Continue reading
The last six months have been a challenging time for tech and tech startups. Macro events have weighed on the sector, valuations have come crashing down, revenue growth has slowed (or stopped), and layoffs are happening across the sector. Many of the folks I work with are frustra … | Continue reading
I have worked in three venture capital firms in the thirty-six years I have been doing venture capital investing. They have all been small partnerships, between three and seven investing partners, where there is little to no hierarchy amount the partners. There are many models ou … | Continue reading
New York Senator Gillibrand and Wyoming Senator Lummis have teamed up to propose a bi-partisan bill that would shift much of the regulatory oversight of crypto assets from the SEC to the CFTC, acknowledging that these tokens are much more like commodities than securities. The det … | Continue reading
Gotham Gives is a public charity that the Gotham Gal and I started one year ago to complement the family foundation that we have been using to make philanthropic gifts for over two decades. A public charity allows us to raise capital from others in addition to our family’s philan … | Continue reading
Back in February of last year, I wrote a blog post with the same title and said this about the asset price bubble we were living in and investing in over the last few years: The big question is how does this end? I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and […] | Continue reading
Last week we held USV’s annual Portfolio Summit here in NYC. Every year we invite the leaders of our portfolio companies to come to NYC and spend a couple of days with us and each other. However, we were not able to do that in 2020 and 2021 so this was our first Portfolio Summit … | Continue reading
When I read the news a few weeks ago that Elon Musk had offered to buy Twitter, I wrote this: I continue to believe that decentralization is the right long-term answer for a core communications protocol of the Internet and hope that Elon will think about doing just that once he o … | Continue reading
It is Earth Day, a day to celebrate our planet and rededicate ourselves to saving it. I plan to walk and ride my bike, avoid cars, and enjoy being out and about in NYC today. But I’d also like to talk about something that is bothering me. The New York State Assembly and Senate ar … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick wrote a good piece on this topic on his Techdirt blog last week. I particularly like this part: First, let’s look at the world without any content moderation. A website that has no content moderation but allows anyone to post will fill up with spam. Even this tiny we … | Continue reading
I went to renew a .ETH domain I own this morning and the gas fees were so high that I decided to come back another time. Ethereum is the most popular smart contract blockchain by far but it frequently gets congested and expensive. Using it to acquire and renew domains, normally a … | Continue reading
The venture capital business is highly competitive. There is more money out there chasing good deals than most people imagine. It is also true that there are good deals and good entrepreneurs that can't find anyone to invest in them. That is a failure of the system. But this post … | Continue reading
So I saw this tweet by Semil Shah yesterday: So I clicked on the link to my Competing To Win Deals post, which I wrote in 2010, and read it. I often read things I wrote a decade or more ago and cringe at how out of date they have become. Not this one. It […] | Continue reading
Investing is humbling. At 60, with 35 years of venture investing experience, I still get most things wrong. Which is why I like to keep things simple. And when I do I am rewarded. My friend Gordon asked me last night how I got into Bitcoin. I told him the story of how I bumped [… … | Continue reading
There is a lot of criticism of venture capital in web3. Bitcoin did not have or need venture capital. Ethereum did not have or need venture capital. So why would any web3 project need venture capital? It is a good question. In the age of community-funded projects, why would a web … | Continue reading
The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. I am going to try to address that question in this post. First, a caveat. For your first key hires, three, five, ma … | Continue reading
Electrified cars were greater than 10% of the US market in 2021 and EVs were about 5%. EV sales are growing at nearly 100% YOY and could reach 25% of the US market in a few years. This is good news for the effort to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But there are still […] | Continue reading
My friend Alex Iskold ran the 1K project during the pandemic to help families that were struggling with lost jobs/income, etc. I blogged about it here and AVC readers were generous with their support. Alex came to the US from Ukraine many years ago, but he has many friends and fa … | Continue reading
I love using robotics to teach kids to code. A K12 teacher told me many years ago, “when the robot doesn’t do what you told it to do, you know your code is wrong and you need to fix it.” Robotics brings code to life for kids and that’s a great thing. So when I […] | Continue reading
I wrote a fair bit last year about the disconnect between how companies were being valued and the fundamentals of those businesses. It seemed to me that many companies, from the founders, to the leadership teams, and the rank and file employees got more focused on raising capital … | Continue reading
A friend sent me this Kickstarter project which is about a public art project highlighting three languages that are at risk of extinction. I backed it and I think you might want to as well. You can do so here. The project ends this weekend so if you want to back it, do so now. | Continue reading
I wrote about pacing a few years ago. I am a fan of a steady pace, not too fast, not too slow. Sometimes the opportunity set forces you to go faster. As I wrote then: I don’t think a VC firm should manage to a pacing number. It should manage to the opportunity set that […] | Continue reading
Early in my career, I was taught that any team member was replaceable and that as long as you had sufficient time to find a suitable replacement, you would be fine. I have operated on that basis since then, imparted that wisdom to the founders and teams that I work with, and have … | Continue reading