AVC

It has been many years since I’ve written code. I’ve hacked around in HTML and CSS a bit on this blog and a few other places. But I have not actually written an application in a very long time. I think it might be thirty years since I’ve done any real programming. Over the year-end break, my partner Nick taught me how to use GitHub Codespaces and Netlify to quickly spin up development and deployment environments. I forked his Google Sheets NFT Playlist app and have been making changes to it t...

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending and one looking forward to the year ahead. This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow. What happened in 2022 is the bottom fell out of the capital markets and the startup and tech sector more broadly. Back in February 2021, I wrote a post called How This Ends. In it, I wrote:I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and the global economy recovers. Those tw...

I have written many times about the Hour Of Code here at AVC. It is the highlight of the annual Computer Science Education Week which is the first week of December, which is this week. Yesterday Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs’ CIO, and I went with NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks to the Hospitality Management High School in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan to do an Hour of Code with the students there. In the class we attended students were using the Scratch programming environmen...

I’ve previously written about The $1k Project for Ukraine, which was launched by my friend, Alex Iskold, five days into the Russian aggression. Since its inception, the project raised more than $10M and helped 10,000 families and 35,000 children. The AVC community has generously participated. Last week, Russia announced its withdrawal from Kherson and The $1k Project crew is racing to help the next 1,000 families specifically focusing on the liberated territories. This coming winter is going ...

I want to focus this post on the macro environment for tech, startups, web3, and climate because that is where my head is at right now. I believe that sometime in the first half of 2023, the central banks around the world will start backing off the tightening that they have been engaged in as inflation continues to ease and the economy continues to cool. Interest rates will level off in the first half of 2023 and I think there is a good chance of a “soft landing” or a very mild recession in 2...

This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns like this seem to keep happening? At times like this, it helps to have a long-term view of web3 as a sector, not just a forward-looking long-term view, but also some perspective on where we have come from. As longtime investors in web3 and board members (also individual shareholders) of Coinbase,...

We spent this past weekend in Mexico City at Bright Moment’s NFT Art CDMX. Bright Moments is the premier NFT art “gallery” in the world. I use that term in parentheses because Bright Moments is much more than a gallery but that word is well understood. USV is a member of the Bright Moments DAO. Over the course of the weekend, eleven leading NFT artists minted new generative artworks one by one in minting rooms where the collector and the artist saw the work revealed together.Because there wer...

When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it becomes a bit easier. The Gotham Gal and I buy and build a fair bit of real estate on the side and we generally use a “cap rate” of between 5 and 10 when we acquire and develop real estate. That means we want t...

The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves. It is not just language models that are making huge advances. AIs can produce incredible audio and video as well. I am certain that an AI can pro...

I read last week that the NYC Department of Education has banned ChatGPT from its networks and devices. I understand that reaction and mentioned the issues that AI/ML create for educators in a post a few weeks ago.I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it ...

As usual, here are some songs that stuck with me this year. I hope you enjoy it.

Nov 13, 2022 The Gotham Gal and I just spent the last two weeks in Paris. We have been going to Paris together for around forty years and have had a place there for the last decade. It is a place we can go to get away from it all for a few weeks, connect with each other, and enjoy ourselves in a city we love. I’ve thought a lot about why Paris works so well for us to dial it down a bit and focus more on each other for a while. The time zone is a big part of it. The US doesn’t wake up and star...