AVC

Tech:NYC is launching a new initiative, Tech Year NYC, which helps young people from underrepresented backgrounds get access to careers in NYC’s fast-growing tech sector. Tech Year NYC is a rollup of several existing city programs into a single point of entry and engagement for tech companies and students. The idea is to make it easier for local tech companies to engage with this population and easier for the students to get access to these pathways to jobs. Students are compensated for their...

Mike Masnick wrote a good piece on this topic on his Techdirt blog last week. I particularly like this part:First, let’s look at the world without any content moderation. A website that has no content moderation but allows anyone to post will fill up with spam. Even this tiny website gets thousands of spam comments a day. Most of them are (thankfully) caught by the layers upon layers of filtering tools we’ve set up. Would anyone argue that it is “against the principles of free speech” to filt...

Investing is humbling. At 60, with 35 years of venture investing experience, I still get most things wrong. Which is why I like to keep things simple. And when I do I am rewarded. My friend Gordon asked me last night how I got into Bitcoin. I told him the story of how I bumped into Rikki Tahta walking through the garment district in NYC in the spring of 2011 and Rikki told me he was working on a Bitcoin startup. I replied, “a what coin startup?”. And Rikki told me to read the Bitcoin White Pa...

I went to renew a .ETH domain I own this morning and the gas fees were so high that I decided to come back another time.Ethereum is the most popular smart contract blockchain by far but it frequently gets congested and expensive. Using it to acquire and renew domains, normally a transaction that costs less than $100 USD, is challenging. That is why there are a host of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer one blockchains (L1s) and a number of layer two networks (L2s) that run on top...

There is a lot of criticism of venture capital in web3. Bitcoin did not have or need venture capital. Ethereum did not have or need venture capital. So why would any web3 project need venture capital? It is a good question. In the age of community-funded projects, why would a web3 project want to take funding from venture capitalists? Well buried deep in a 66 page blog post on the Flow blockchain by Packy McCormick lies the answer. In a section called Kitty Down, Packy describes the challenge...

Last week we held USV’s annual Portfolio Summit here in NYC. Every year we invite the leaders of our portfolio companies to come to NYC and spend a couple of days with us and each other. However, we were not able to do that in 2020 and 2021 so this was our first Portfolio Summit since 2019. In the three years that have passed since our last summit, we roughly doubled the size of our portfolio, adding 65 new investments. That is 65 founders and leaders that had not been to a USV Summit, and in...

When I read the news a few weeks ago that Elon Musk had offered to buy Twitter, I wrote this:Twitter is too important to be owned and controlled by a single person. The opposite should be happening. Twitter should be decentralized as a protocol that powers an ecosystem of communication products and services. — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) April 14, 2022I continue to believe that decentralization is the right long-term answer for a core communications protocol of the Internet and hope that Elon w...

It is Earth Day, a day to celebrate our planet and rededicate ourselves to saving it. I plan to walk and ride my bike, avoid cars, and enjoy being out and about in NYC today. But I’d also like to talk about something that is bothering me. The New York State Assembly and Senate are working to pass a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining. Here is the most important part of the bill:1. For the period commencing on the effective date of this section an...

Investing in founder-led businesses is comforting to me. They have the ability to see the forest through the trees and do what is necessary to evolve the business. Two great examples of this are Microsoft in the mid 90s and Facebook a decade ago. Microsoft had spent more than a decade competing and winning the desktop software market and then Netscape came along and presented an entirely new market opportunity that had both major upside and major downside for Microsoft. Microsoft reacted by m...

So I saw this tweet by Semil Shah yesterday:So I clicked on the link to my Competing To Win Deals post, which I wrote in 2010, and read it. I often read things I wrote a decade or more ago and cringe at how out of date they have become. Not this one. It is as relevant today as when I wrote it almost twelve years ago. So I am reposting it below:The venture capital business is highly competitive. There is more money out there chasing good deals than most people imagine. It is also true that the...

I blogged about the $1k Project For Ukraine a couple of months ago. Since then over 5,000 families in Ukraine have gotten a $1k gift, no strings attached, to help them survive during this crisis. That is $5mm of direct aid to families in Ukraine. Yesterday, Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, tweeted that he and Jen Rubio will be matching another $2.5mm of $1k donations over the next 48 hours, starting at mid-day yesterday."All” means no need to tweet receipts (or even read this): we’l...

6529 is one of the top NFT collectors in the world and last week he launched the first destination in an Open Metaverse that he is encouraging people to develop along with him. That destination is the 6529 Museum District and you can visit it here. When you arrive you will see this map which gives you a sense of what is there right now.All of these museums are fun to visit, but I particularly recommend: – Genesis – Sunshine Square – Imagined Worlds – General Assembly – ACK Bar I hope you take...