AVC

Stock-based compensation plans throughout the startup and tech sector are based on “golden handcuffs” – the idea that an employee can’t leave because they would be giving up too much money if they do. I’ve never loved that concept. It feels like staying in a bad marriage for the kids. So I have been involved in a number of efforts to rethink that practice and one of those efforts came to light earlier this week when Coinbase, where I am on the board and compensation committee, blogged about t...

Yesterday’s post has this line in it:I suspect all buy maybe two of those eleven funds have outperformed the public marketsAs you can see, there is a typo there. “buy” should be “but” A number of readers let me know about the typo, which I very much appreciate. But for some reason, I am not all that motivated to change it. I make typos all of the time in my emails and texts and other informal communication. And I am increasingly seeing AVC as another form of informal communication. AVC is me....

My friend Seth Levine and Elizabeth MacBride have written an important book about the changing face of entrepreneurship in the US. It is called The New Builders and it came out this week. You can purchase it at all the places listed here. This bit from the book’s Amazon page explains The New Builders’ message:The dominant image of an entrepreneur as a young white man starting a tech business on the coasts isn’t correct at all. Today’s American entrepreneurs, the people who drive critical part...

Coinbase shipped an important piece of its wallet product portfolio yesterday, the Coinbase Wallet Browser Extension.Wallet extension is great for security as your Wallet’s private keys stay on your mobile app, protected by fingerprints, faceID or PIN. pic.twitter.com/bbg0i7h8zF — Coinbase (@coinbase) May 17, 2021You can download the chrome extension here. If you want to use DeFi apps, buy and collect NFTs, or do anything that requires a crypto wallet in your browser, then the Coinbase Wallet...

I have read more books written by Steven Johnson than any other author. In addition to being a friend and a USV-funded founder, Steven writes about things that fascinate me. And he is a wonderful writer. That’s a potent combination. I am about to embark on another journey with Steven. This one is called Extra Life and it is about how mankind doubled our life expectancy over the last hundred years. But Extra Life is not just a book. It is also a four part TV series airing on PBS that starts to...

Last week I spent three hours with my six partners in a conference room talking through what we are investing in and why. It was a terrific session and I had more “ahas” in those three hours than I have had in many many months. There really is no substitute for sitting together with your colleagues working things out face to face. This week our team met with a founder in Singapore via Zoom. It was midnight in Singapore and noon in NYC. In one hour we learned enough from the founder to be able...

As USV is now about six months into investing our first climate fund, I am starting to see more clearly what climate investing is all about and my partner Albert said something in a team meeting earlier this week that really stuck with me. I did not write it down but it was something like, “we’ve spent two hundred years taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere and what we now need to do is get it from the atmosphere and put it back into the ground.” That...

This public art work speaking to the growing refugee crisis around the world is really great. I backed it earlier this week when I saw my friend Sunny back it.From July to November 2021, a giant puppet of a 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl called ‘Little Amal’ will walk from the Syria-Turkey border, across Europe to the UK, travelling 8,000km to focus awareness on the refugee crisis. The Walk is an international arts festival meets endurance event – the length and sheer size of the challenge is...

May 7, 2021 Longtime AVC reader Alex Wolf has a Kickstarter project that I think is awesome. She has long been working on a “pattern alphabet” to encode the patterns of nature and life.This project turns this alphabet into cards that can be used by kids in school and at home to learn. I backed the project this morning and I hope and expect she will do great with this Kickstarter project. You can see the video here.

Last week, I had to clear my calendar for two days and spend them in doctors’ offices and radiology labs. I developed a kidney stone last week and my doctors and I wanted to understand how large and where it was. The answer is 4mm and it was somewhere between my kidney and bladder as of last Thursday. That may be more information than you need to know. Over four appointments, I experienced how much progress we have made during the pandemic and how much more we have to go before we have a high...

Back in the early 2000s, it was exciting to blog and use social networks to create our own media and move away from the traditional media outlets. That was the pull that got me into blogging and got me investing in Twitter. It was a powerful feeling. But a decade and a half later, it is obvious that we just replaced one type of media company for another and that we don’t really control our own media yet. I have a bit more control over this blog because I run it on my own domain using open sou...

There has been this narrative about investing in VC funds that you have to get into the top quartile (25%) or possibly the top decile (10%) in order to generate good returns. I have heard that for as long as I have been in VC and probably have written it here a few times. Well, it turns out that is not right. Half of all venture funds outperform the stock market which is the benchmark most institutions measure VC funds against. My friend Dan Malven wrote about this on his blog yesterday:A wor...