AVC

I have watched so many leaders over the years in my various roles as lead investor, board member, board chair, investor, and advisor. And one thing I have learned from this front-row seat is that leading from the heart is very powerful. A leader can be the most brilliant product person, strategist, entrepreneur, and business builder, but if they cannot get people to follow them, trust them, and care for them, they will not be an effective leader. This is a hard lesson to learn. It is a fairly...

Six months ago, I wrote about Direct Air Carbon Capture and ended with this:I remember hearing that “we’ve spent hundreds of years taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into our atmosphere and we are going to spend hundreds of years taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the ground”. I believe DAC will be a big part of how we do that.I used that quote again on a blog post I wrote yesterday on the USV blog about Noya, a Direct Air Capture company that USV recentl...

I wrote last week that I have started coding again. And I have been amazed at how much easier it is now that I can code and deploy in the cloud without having to spin up anything myself. But the other massive improvement in programming is the “AI assist.” I am working in a Javascript library called jQuery and I don’t really understand its commands and syntax very well. So I turned to ChatGPT last week and got back this:That is like having every line of code commented out so you know exactly w...

Last Thursday, three new blog posts hit USV.com announcing our three new analysts:This is our tradition at USV. When someone starts at USV, we ask them to write a post on the USV blog introducing themselves. This helps founders who come to talk to us about their companies understand the folks they will be talking to. Grace joins us from Silver Lake where she was working on their ESG strategy. Nikhil joins us from Daffy where he was helping to build charitable giving software. Matt joins us fr...

When a new technology comes to market, we often look for “native” applications of that technology. What is a “native” AI application? What is a “native” Web3 application? I have not seen a better articulation of “native” than my partner Albert’s post from 2009 on native mobile applications. He started out by laying out the new primitives that mobile smartphones made available to developers. In the case of mobile, he cited:LocationProximityTouchAudio InputVideo InputHe then went on to say that...

Apr 5, 2023 The first project launched this week on our portfolio company Blackbird‘s platform. It is a friends and family program at a restaurant in Williamsburg Brooklyn called Gertie. Blackbird wrote about it today on their excellent Supersonic blog:Throughout, when you tap Gertie’s Blackbird-powered NFC chip (shown above), wonder awaits. On the first tap, a free cookie sourced from a nearby bakery comes your way. On the second, coffee is on the house. Over time, one-size-fits-many freebie...

I’ve never done a cleanse. But many of my friends and family members have done them. There are various flavors of cleanses but the basic idea is you cut back your consumption of food and drink and replace it with mostly liquid nutrition for anywhere from a day to a month. I believe the most common lengths are in and around one week. As I understand it, the theory behind the cleanse is it helps your body eliminate all sorts of toxins that build up over time from a poor diet and other unhealthy...

First and foremost, this is not tax advice. I am not a tax advisor and you should never take anything you read here as tax advice. If you read something here that makes you think you should take some tax-related action, please always consult your tax advisor. With that disclosure out of the way, I would like to talk about 83b elections. An 83b election is a choice a taxpayer can make to pay the taxes in full at the time of the grant of an asset that vests over time and would otherwise be taxe...

USV is an investor in Bolster, a marketplace for fractional and full-time executive talent for startups and growth companies. This week Bolster launched a daily short (5min) podcast and email with actionable insights and advice from founders, operators, and investors. It is called The Daily Bolster. I did a Daily Bolster episode and it is featured today. I’ve embedded it below and you can watch it here if you are reading AVC via email. The daily email contains a short pull quote from the dail...

Mike Zamansky is the person who got me interested in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC, a cause I have now contributed almost fifteen years of my life to. Our family’s public charity, Gotham Gives, has been funding the work we do in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC for the last decade and a month or so ago, the Gotham Gal recorded a podcast with Mike talking about the early days of our journey into K12 Computer Science, how we met, and what transpired. That podcast is up on YouTube a...

I’d guess that upwards of half of USV’s portfolio companies have changed the name of their company during their lifetime. It is not hard to understand why. Founders start out with an idea and not much more. By the time they have built a product, built a team, and found product market fit, they might be doing something a bit different or a lot different than where they started out. Most often the name change comes in the first few years when the business opportunity comes into clarity and the ...

I saw Dan Primack assert that the venture capitalist’s customer is their limited partners in this tweet about the Citizen app, the recap, and their VCs: I DM’d Dan to let him know that is not the right way to think about the venture capital business. Back in 2005, in the early days of this blog, I wrote this post on the topic.The entrepreneur is the customer and the LP is the shareholder. That’s the only way to think about the venture capital business that makes sense to me.I encourage everyo...