AVC

I am a fan of and a practioner of investing in risky assets. I believe you must take significant risk to earn significant returns. But I also am a huge fan of diversification when holding a lot of risky assets. It has been easier for USV to get into new sectors, like crypto and climate for example, knowing that we also have large positions in other parts of the early stage tech sector. When crypto went crazy in 2017 and then blew up, it was mostly a blip in our portfolio values. The same was ...

I have been doing a bunch of large group in-person meetings in the last few weeks and I must say that it feels great to be doing these large group meetings in person. There is a different energy in the room than on the screen. In order to make everyone comfortable meeting like this, the way these meetings typically happen is everyone provides a proof of vaccination and everyone gets a covid test within 24 hours of the meeting. It is best if the host of the meeting can provide rapid tests so a...

My partner Albert has been writing a book in public over the last decade called The World After Capital. There have been alpha and beta versions which he has put out there, gotten feedback on, and revised. Yesterday he tweeted that he has now finished the book and will have it printed. That means I will read it again and you should too. If you want to read it online, you can do that here.

I backed this project to fund a creator space and coffee shop in Williamsburg Brooklyn this morning. As many companies make the decision to move to hybrid and remote workforces, we will need more of this kind of space to work in. I am excited to see entrepreneurs stepping in and filling that role. And I like to support them when they do. You can see the video here.

I just backed this project to support a festival of street musicians in NYC in late October. Street bands have been picking up the slack for the last year in NYC, performing for outside diners and more throughout the city. This festival celebrates them and puts them front and center. You can see the video here.

Back in 2005 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink that was about how our subconscious allows us to make fast decisions that are often as good or better than slow considered decisions. I was talking to someone yesterday evening about how the venture capital business has changed over the last decade and I explained that we used to have weeks, if not months, to make our investment decisions and now we have days or if we are lucky a week or two. And I observed that the rapid pace of venture...

In her decision last week on the Epic vs Apple case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote this:I am not a lawyer, but I read that to say that apps that use crypto rails for payments cannot be blocked by Apple anymore. If so, that is a decision of enormous consequences for the crypto sector and yet another opening for it. That is so fucking awesome.

I saw a statistic from one of our larger portfolio companies yesterday. They have had their offices around the world open for some time now with office usage optional. They are seeing office utilization rates of around “20-30%.” They are also seeing “flexibility” as the number one issue in recruiting new talent. That was interesting to me because we are seeing a much higher office utilization at USV. We kept our offices open for much of the last 18 months and encouraged a return to the office...

At USV, we have a fairly narrow thesis that sets out what we want to invest in, but all of us work across all of our thesis areas. We see ourselves as generalists not specialists. In an environment when everything is moving so fast, that can be challenging, as I wrote about on Tuesday. But there are also great benefits to working this way. As a team, we benefit from working together on everything versus having silos within our partnership and firm. And as individuals, there is something quite...

This project on Kickstarter is cool. A UPS (uninterrupted power supply) for your entire home. I backed it this morning along with almost 2,400 other people who have backed it so far. You can see the video and back it here.

I wrote in my 60th birthday post that my late career mantra is less hustle more conviction. It has been working for me and has kept me in the game. But there are times, usually after an opening emerges, when a market moves so fast it is hard to stay on top of it all. I don’t worry about missing out. That’s part of the venture capital business. Fear of missing out is a counterproductive emotion and I refuse to engage in it. But I do worry about not understanding what is going on. When you stop...

Yesterday, USV sent 500 ETH to the Bright Moments DAO and we got back one million Bright Moments DAO (BRT) tokens into our wallet. This is the third time USV has invested in a DAO and we will blog about the other two in the coming weeks. These are token transactions denominated in ETH and ERC-20 assets with no other paperwork. All governance is done inside the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). In the case of Bright Moments, the DAO voted on our transaction over the weekend and appr...