AVC

For as long as I can remember, Pier 76 on the west side of Manhattan has been home to the west side tow pound. Some of my worst moments as a NYC resident have been there retrieving a car or a scooter, something I’ve done more than I want to remember. It was pure misery to have to go there and I think that was intentional. So over the last four months on my morning bike rides up the west side bike path, I have been watching the city tear down the west side tow pound and replace it with an urba...

The Internet was developed by the US Defense Department to create a network that was capable of surviving a military attack. They accomplished that with a design where no part of the system was central to its operation. You can take out any part of the Internet and it will still operate. When I read the Bitcoin White Paper for the first time, I was struck by the similarity of its design to the Internet. And we are watching an “attack” on the Bitcoin system right now, in the form of a purge in...

My friend Gary Ginsberg’s book, First Friends, is out today. Gary gave me an advance copy a few weeks ago and I have been reading it. First Friends is a book about US Presidents and their best friends who influenced them in the office. The book starts with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and ends with Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan. In between, there are chapters about Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and six other Presidents and their best friends. My favorite chapter was Richard Nixon an...

I understand that regulators and elected officials need to raise concerns about new technologies and their impact on society. It is their job or at least part of their job. But I am also dismayed regularly by how poorly many elected officials and regulators understand the technologies they are talking about. In particular, I am deeply concerned with how poorly many elected officials and regulators understand blockchains, smart contracts, and decentralized applications and organizations. They ...

Jul 2, 2021 I am a fan of wireless charging for my various devices and I am glad that there is a standard, called Qi, for wireless charging that many manufacturers support. This means you don’t need to buy your wireless charging device from Apple or Google, you can buy it from any manufacturer you prefer. This nice looking small charging device, called Biscuit, is a great example of that:I backed it this morning on Kickstarter and so can you. The video is here. Discuss on Twitter avc @avc Fun...

ENS stands for Ethereum Name Service and it is a decentralized domain name system built on the Ethereum blockchain. You can get domains with the .eth extension by going here, connecting a wallet, and searching and purchasing a domain. I have purchased fredwilson.eth and avc.eth and a bunch of other .eth domains for my family. It does not cost a lot of ETH to register a domain, but you need to remember to go back and renew it as there is no company/registrar operating a business to do that for...

My friend Kirk backed this project earlier this week and I got a notification and checked it out and backed it immediately. I like everything about this project. Finding opportunities for people with special needs to work productively and happily is such a great thing to do. You can watch the video here.

I remember when a friend of mine told me five or six years ago that he had bought some Dogecoin. I thought “what is he doing?” and dismissed it as something silly and or crazy. Dogecoin was initially introduced in late 2013 and 7 1/2 years later it has amassed a market cap of $43bn and is one of the most popular crypto assets in the world. It may be silly and crazy, but it has also been a good investment for my friend and anyone who bought it in the early years. For those that don’t know, Dog...

It is officially summer now and with adult vaccination rates passing 70% in many parts of the US, people are out and about. I’ve heard the term “analog summer” used to describe this moment. If the past 15 months have been a digital lockdown, then the next three months are going to mark a return to analog activities; beaches, parks, concerts, bars, restaurants, nightlife, etc, etc. We’ve already seen the effect of this change in behavior in our portfolio companies, many of which benefited sign...

A reader asked me if I had ever written about the infrastructure I use to run AVC. We both searched the archives and could not find a post on that topic. So here it is: 1/ Content Management System – WordPress – I use the open source software version of WordPress to write these posts and manage them. 2/ Hosting Provider – Cloudways – I have used a number of hosting providers over the years. If you use WordPress, it is fairly easy to migrate from one to another. Cloudways is the current favori...

NYC has a primary next week (June 22nd) in which parties will pick their nominees for Mayor, City Council races, Borough President races, and Manhattan will pick candidates for Attorney General. Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, the primary is the main event. Most of the time, Democratic candidates prevail in the General Election in November. So this is a big election for NYC and everyone who cares about the future of NYC should make it a point to vote in this primary. Early voting st...

This should be obvious to AVC readers but I am a fan of short and sweet. Why take two pages to say something you can say in one page? Why take two paragraphs to say something you can say in one paragraph? This letter to potential investors from the CEO in the Duolingo S-1, which was flipped to the public yesterday, is a fantastic example of that.Disclosure: USV is an investor in Duolingo and we stand to profit from their IPO. This is not in any way an endorsement of the offering. Investors sh...