AVC

Nuclear power (both fission and fusion) has the potential to provide much of the energy the world needs without the damaging effects of carbon emissions which are warming our planet. And yet nuclear power is politically unpopular in many parts of the world and that has led to a massive underinvestment in nuclear power over the last fifty years. It will take a much different attitude about nuclear power among the public before nuclear power can remerge as a major source of energy for the world...

In the spring of 2014, I walked across the street from our apartment building to our parking garage to get our car and drive somewhere. I can’t recall where I was headed that morning. But as I walked into the garage, I saw two EV charging kiosks had been installed in our parking garage. I turned around and ran back to our apartment building, went back upstairs to our apartment, and told The Gotham Gal that we were getting a Tesla. I had long wanted an EV but the “how do we charge it in the ci...

We like to do a lot of deep dives at USV. We pick areas that we think will present interesting investment opportunities over the next five to ten years and then spend time researching them. We like to talk to lots of experts, academics, investors, entrepreneurs, and industry. We generally spend a few months on these deep dives and then present them to the rest of the team so that everyone at USV will be somewhat fluent in the topic area and can flag interesting things that fit what is interes...

I have enjoyed collecting NFT art over the last few years and I have very much wanted to display it in a physical space vs just having it online on a profile, like this one. So when we started designing the new USV offices last year we started thinking about NFT screens. We were inspired by these amazing NFT screens in the Bright Moments NFT Gallery in Venice Beach California.So we bought six large displays for the new USV office, three portrait orientation like the photo above and three land...

As we all prepare for the fall back to school/back to work season, I thought I’d touch on a topic that has been top of mind for me for the last six months. The covid pandemic taught many of us that we can be productive and our companies can succeed in a fully remote work environment. But just because you can does not mean you should. In the venture capital business, this has meant making investments in teams we don’t meet face to face. For founders, this has meant raising rounds from their of...

In about a month, an important moment will happen in the world of crypto/web3. The Ethereum blockchain will move from a proof of work consensus mechanism to a proof of stake consensus mechanism. This event is known as “The Merge” in Ethereum land. There are many reasons why this is an important moment for the world of crypto/web3, but to my mind the most important reasons are: 1/ The Merge reduces the carbon footprint of the Ethereum blockchain very significantly. No longer will miners be req...

There are many efforts underway to reduce carbon emissions in order to get to “net zero”. But most climate scientists believe that reducing emissions won’t be enough and we will also need to engage in removing carbon from the atmosphere. There are natural ways to do this like reforestation, soil carbon, biochar, etc but there are also “engineered” approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere. One of the most promising of the engineered approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere is...

I’ve always been interested in tapping into the “crowd” to fund things that need to happen and that our current institutions can’t figure out how to support. Our investment in Kickstarter back in 2009 is an excellent example of that. In the last thirteen years, Kickstarter has helped direct $6.2bn towards creative work that would not have been funded by the legacy institutions that support creative work. That has led to all sorts of interesting projects which are too numerous to mention here....

I’ve always been a fan of preventive medicine. I like the idea of medicine that stops us from getting sick. As a child, I was vaccinated for all of the normal things, polio, whooping cough, etc in order to be able to go to school. Growing up I was vaccinated for tetanus and a few other things. As an adult, I have gotten a flu vaccine every year for almost forty years. And as a result, I have avoided the flu almost every season. Last Friday, I biked over to CVS and got my annual flu shot and t...

One of my favorite things about NFTs is that they contain a mechanism for the artist/creator to collect royalties on all of the sales that happen after the initial sale/mint. The creator specifies the royalty percentage when they initially mint the NFT and the NFT marketplaces/smart contracts collect the royalties on future sales and pay them to the creator. Some forms of creativity have had ongoing economic participation by the creator for many years. In the music industry, there are publish...

Joe Hovde wrote a blog post about AVC last week. He analyzed all of the blog posts on AVC to find trends and other interesting tidbits. He charted the number of posts a month I have written here over the last nineteen years.He observed:he treated the blog similarly to a twitter account before Twitter blew up, and then settled in to a daily posting habit for the next 15 years, slowing down a bit in the last 2.He is correct, AVC was like Twitter in the early days with upwards of four posts a da...

At USV, our climate thesis is about both mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis. One way we can adapt to the climate crisis is by building a more resilient energy supply system. Demand Response is one of many approaches that will be necessary to do that. Demand Response is when consumers of energy voluntarily cut back on energy consumption in reaction to peak demand situations. There are many different ways this is done, and energy companies will often offer economic incentives for the...