AVC

The stock and crypto markets have started off the year in selloff mode, with the Nasdaq down almost 5% this week and the big crypto assets down almost 10% this week. But this selloff has been going on for a lot longer than one week. It has been going on since early November when the Nasdaq peaked at $16k and BTC hit $67k. Since then it’s been downhill and the biggest carnage has been in the highflying “cloud” stocks. The Gotham Gal and I own a few stocks that have been cut in half in the last...

I backed this project the minute I saw it this morning. The idea of a wall-mounted device like a Nest Thermostat that controls/dims lights and lets you turn up or down your music seems awesome to me. The Nest interface is simple, intuitive, and works wonderfully. Also, the video is fantastic. More like a movie trailer than a promotional video. Click here and watch it.

Like most holidays we celebrate, the essence of the Thanksgiving holiday hides underneath our celebration of it. Ask anyone about Thanksgiving, and you will hear about turkey, stuffing, a big meal, family, and maybe football. I’m fine with all of that, particularly the stuffing and family parts. But the thing that I like most about Thanksgiving is the idea that this is a time of year to give thanks. The story I heard is that the first Thanksgiving was done to give thanks to the bounty of the ...

So last year I made a bunch of predictions that with one exception were kind of obvious. I don’t want to do that again, so I am going to list five things that I think will happen this year that most people would not likely agree with. 1/ As the pandemic evolves into an endemic in the first half of 2022, companies will reopen their offices and their employees will largely opt to go back to working together in offices. I qualified this with “largely” because I don’t think we will go back to eve...

I saw two charts last week that showed the same thing:This chart was in the deck I shared here last week called Consumer Trends 2022. It shows that after a big lift in 2020 and a bit of a lull in 2021, the e-commerce trendline is back to its old baseline.This is our portfolio company DuckDuckGo‘s search traffic curve, available here, on a ten-day moving average. You can see after a huge move up in late 2020, it had a pullback in early 2021 and has now gotten back on its normal growth curve. B...

Like many did, we spent much of this weekend watching Peter Jackson’s wonderful documentary of the Beatles making Let It Be, titled Get Back. I enjoyed so much of the film, particularly the music, but the big thing I took away is the power of real partnerships. While this was the Beatles last recording session, what you see in the film are four partners working together creatively and wonderfully. I wasn’t really expecting that and I found it so enjoyable to watch. I have worked in partnershi...

As is my custom here at AVC, I like to end the year looking back and start the year looking forward. This post will be the look back and I started by revisiting my look forward into 2021 that I wrote on New Year’s Day 2021. In my typical optimist fashion, I was dead wrong about how quickly the pandemic would fizzle out. I predicted that vaccines plus immunity from those who had been infected would end the pandemic by mid-year 2021. That was obviously totally wrong and I am sitting here isolat...

The second week of December every year is Computer Science Education Week. It is a week to celebrate efforts to get computer science education into the K12 system around the world, and it is also a week in which schools do events, like The Hour of Code, to encourage students and teachers to get excited about learning computer science. Most AVC readers know that my passion project for the last decade has been getting computer science education broadly available in the NYC public school system....

Over the last month, there has been a ton of debate and conversation about web2 vs web3 with many leading voices raising doubts about web3. Debate and doubt are healthy. And web3 enthusiasts, particularly on Twitter, remind me of missionaries trying to recruit the unwashed to their belief system. Frankly, it is all too much for me. However, the debate is important, the pushback is healthy, and ultimately web3 will have to deliver on its promise which means teams building things that provide n...

On Friday, the US jobs report produced a confusing result. From Bloomberg:The jobs report is composed of two surveys — one of employers and the other of households. The employer survey, which determines the payroll and wage figures, showed hiring slowed across industries, including declines at automakers and retail outlets. The household survey, which determines the jobless and participation rates, showed employment surged by 1.14 million people and many came off the sidelines.So employers ar...

After skipping a year last year, USV held its annual team party last night.It has felt great getting back to getting together with friends, family, and co-workers this holiday season. It has meant a lot of rapid testing for me, all negative thankfully, including one this morning. We also had every single team member in the USV office yesterday, which was a first since we fully re-opened in March of this year. And for our weekly team meeting yesterday, we had everyone around the conference roo...

My friends at The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital have published their annual consumer survey. There are many interesting slides in it, none more than this one.I guess that explains this chart:But back to the consumer survey, there are lots of interesting slides in it and you can get it here by creating a free account to The New Consumer. I strongly recommend doing that and enjoying your coffee this morning mulling over the report.