AVC

When I was in my early 20s, I had a conversation with my dad. I told him I was against nuclear power because it was dangerous and because it created radioactive waste that we had no idea how to safely dispose of. He replied that there certainly were problems with nuclear energy but that they paled in comparison to those of burning fossil fuels. This was before greenhouse gases and climate change were front and center in my mind and the minds of most people. I was not convinced by my dad’s arg...

A well-known entrepreneur turned VC, who will go unnamed because I am not sure he would want me to share this conversation publicly, once told me “if you remove a founder, you must sell the company within a couple of years or it will start to decline in value.” I don’t entirely agree with that and my experience with it has been different, but it brings up an incredibly important topic about leadership. I like to keep things simple and in my simple mind, leadership comes in two flavors, vision...

I saw this tweet in my feed yesterday and I sent some ETH to India this morning.Here’s the @gnosisSafe Multisig address to donate in ETH/ERC20 to this address. 0x68A99f89E475a078645f4BAC491360aFe255Dff1 "If you want", Plz fill this form so we can reach you for more help and specially if needed for regulatory filings.https://t.co/ZzDrBZYC7p 2/n — Sandeep – Polygon(prev Matic Network) (@sandeepnailwal) April 24, 2021Sandeep followed with a bunch more wallet addresses to use if you want to send ...

With new Covid cases down 30% in the last two weeks and partially vaccinated people approaching 50%, NYC seems ready to start getting back to work. I have been going to the office several days a week for the last two weeks and will be there again today. As my USV colleagues get fully vaccinated, they are joining me and our office is starting to fill up. But our Flatiron neighborhood still feels empty and there is not one good restaurant open for lunch during the week. As we head back to work,...

A trend I’ve been watching for a while now is the use of solar for devices that live outside away from electrical outlets. Last summer, I bought an inexpensive device that keeps snakes away from our yard. It vibrates into the ground like the animals that hunt snakes and scares them away. I don’t really know if it works but we have not seen any snakes since we got it. The device is powered by a small solar device that is on top of it. Installation was basically pushing it into the ground. This...

I was purchasing some domains with Ethereum yesterday and ran out of funds in my wallet and went to Coinbase to buy some more ETH. The price was approaching $3000 and I thought to myself, “the demand side of this network is exploding.” The way crypto-networks work is that the supply side gets built first with incentives to mine, validate, stake, etc. This has been going on for over a decade now. People started mining Bitcoin twelve years ago. The demand side of most crypto-networks has been d...

Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, posted a message to his team yesterday in which he outlined a bunch of changes they are making to the way they run the business. Some will be familiar as others have done similar things (no more politics on the company’s communication channels, no more committees, rethinking the review process). I think it is a good thing to revisit the ways a company does things and make changes when issues arise. And posting these changes publicly so that others can see them an...

Long-time readers know that I am a big Citibike fan. Citibike is the name of NYC’s bike-share program. I have been blogging about it since it launched in the spring of 2013, eight years ago now. I wrote this at the time. Since it started getting warm in NYC about a month ago, I have been Citibiking to work, to home, to dinner, etc. And I must say that the Citibike experience in NYC has gotten a lot better in the last few years. There are now a lot of electric bikes. I don’t use them because I...

I backed this art program for teens this morning. I think summer programs for kids are important and particularly important this summer when we are hopefully beginning to emerge from more than a year of remote learning and social distancing. You can see the video here.

“I like coffee, I like hot sauce, would I like hot sauce in my coffee?” So starts the pitch for this Kickstarter. It’s a good one. Since I like coffee and I like hot sauce, I backed it. Click here and see the pitch.

Last June, I wrote about board diversity and suggested some things we are doing and that you can do to diversity your board. In the ten months that have passed since I wrote that I am pleased to say that we have seen a noticeable increase in board diversity in our portfolio. I have personally stepped off a few boards to make room for diverse board members and I am prepared to do more of that. A number of my partners have done the same. It is that important to me and USV. But I can also tell y...

One of the many things I love about Kickstarter is when a friend backs a project, I am alerted. My friend Kirk went on a binge yesterday and backed a half dozen photo book projects and I followed him on that binge. I thought I’d blog about one of the projects we backed today. NYC is many things, and one of them is a beach town. In the summer, the beaches of south Brooklyn and Queens (Rockaway) fill up with NYers of all ages and ethnicities. It is like the subway, a total melting pot. This pho...