I am traveling home today from Switzerland, having been there for a week for a few board meetings (and also some amazing skiing in between, notching a life goal I've had since I was a teenager).

Every time I travel to Europe I end up fixated on the fact that the physical infrastructure there is so incredible. There is this combination of both really beautiful old things (castles, buildings, streets, canals, etc.), and really beautiful new things (trains, airports, etc.). And just a general sense of loveliness.

This is especially the case in Switzerland, where the transportation infrastructure is nothing short of miraculous. The trains and trams are basically perfect -- always there when you want them, going exactly where you need, spotless and comfortable, smooth and quiet, with amazing apps tying it all together. You get used to it really quickly, and it's clear how it lays the foundation for an exceptionally high day-to-day quality of life.

Uetliberg train station, overlooking Zurich (credit: jaeschol on flickr)

The common thread that seems to tie together the beautiful old and the beautiful new is a commitment to permanence. When Europeans invest and build, they tend take their time and do it once.

This commitment to permanence also applies to social issues. Generally speaking, the European approach is one of social welfare and a goal of societal stability. A system that is livable, sustainable, and then, relatively un-changing. When things are so lovely and beautiful, why change?

Of course, a commitment to permanence on social issues also means a lack of mobility. Old money has had centuries and millennia to accumulate and calcify; social classes would seem to be more rigid and impermeable. Permanence can have its downsides.

For example, I had lunch with a friend yesterday, who was explaining the dynamics of the real estate market in Zurich. Apparently it is nearly impossible to buy property there -- it's an illiquid market. The reasons for this seem to be: 1/ most of the buildings are long-term assets held by long-term holders. Banks, institutions, old money, etc. And 2/ the structure of the mortgage market discourages re-selling, primarily by disallowing prepayments. In other words, when a housing lender locks in 5% for 30 years, they expect to get the 5% for all 30 years, regardless of who owns the property. Perhaps there are other dynamics at play here as well, but with just these two factors alone, you can get a sense for how this form of permanence results in a lack of economic access and mobility.

The US, on the other hand, rebels against permanence. We prefer change, and optionality. Roads and cars vs. trains and trams. New startups & technological innovation vs. industrial perfection honed over centuries. Social mobility vs. social safety. An endless frontier.

What we end up with, as a result, is a system that is full of excitement and opportunity, but is extremely messy.

I think about my Great-Grandfather, who was murdered in Kiev for being a Jew. And then about my Grandfather who escaped that to come to the US in the early 1900s, an immigrant with nothing at all. And then about my father who didn't go to college but managed to learn a trade (computer programming, in the 1960s) and then start a company through pure hustle and force of will. And now here I am a graduate of a top university and a venture capitalist. That's a lot of change in 4 generations, and is kind of the iconic American story. I'm so lucky because of it.

That's the opportunity side of America. The flip side is risk, and mess. We don't ensure that everyone is basically ok. We don't ensure that our infrastructure is sound and serves everyone well. Ours is a raw fabric, where we encourage and allow for change, but can't make many guarantees.

In the end I just feel conflicted. The European model is so lovely, but potentially so stifling. The American model is so full of opportunity, but so lacking on the fundamentals. I wonder if the right balance can be achieved, and where.

Part of the USV investment thesis is “Access to Knowledge”.  To date, most of our investing in this area has primarily been around consumer learning platforms, like Duolingo, Quizlet, Codecademy, Outschool, Brilliant and others.  These platforms are generally focused on acquiring and internalizing new knowledge.

There is another pillar of the Access to Knowledge thesis which we’ve explored less, but which is equally important: making better sense of the information we already have.  We’re all swimming in oceans of information today, but turning that into useful, actionable, trustworthy knowledge is an elusive goal.  This was the thesis behind our investment in Dune.

One very specific idea with this pillar is the goal of using technology to improve human memory.   I see / hear / read lots of things every day.  Many of them I can recall, many of them I cannot.  I am constantly asking myself questions like: who was that person that said that thing? Or what was that company doing that thing? Or who wrote that article? Etc.

Our digital memory is currently stored in a few places.  Email inbox, chat history, web browsing history, etc. Searching through those using existing tools is about the best we can do to leverage them.  It’s not bad, but it’s incomplete and not always as helpful as it could be.  I personally don’t think it’s good enough.

There are already some good tools in the market here.  I remember back in 2011 when Greplin launched the first integrated personal search.  Today, tools like Command-E and Slapdash offer a modern version of this.  Tools like Heyday and Memex are offering a better view into your browsing history. This feels important. Tools like Grain and Scribe are making video meeting contents indexable (e.g, contributing them to our digital memory footprint).   Tools like Roam Research and Logseq provide an active interface for building a web of memories (disclosure: I’m an angel investor in Logseq). For the right users these tools are magic, but I also think the active note-taking approach isn’t for everyone.

More generally, any application that sits in the web browser, on the mobile phone, on desktop OS, or has API integrations into the services we use could start to play this role.  But getting the product experience right is a challenge.  To date, probably my favorite example is the way google photo will prompt me to check out photos from this day 7 years ago, etc.  I always hit that notification and take a little stroll down memory lane.   There would also seem to be some easy wins here, especially when you start to cross reference memory from multiple sources.  What was the article I read when I was talking to that person?  What was that note I jotted down when I was on that trip? Etc.  But point is: while the high level concept seems to be sitting right there, the ideal product approach still seems to be TBD.

Privacy & security are of course huge issues.  We’re currently comfortable with some forms of our “memory” stored on computers and corporate servers (namely: emails, photos, web history, messages, etc).  But pooling them all together and indexing them does feel like a step up in a way that may make people uncomfortable, and at the very least would require thoughtful approaches to privacy and security.

I think the market for Memory as a Service is potentially huge.  Not just knowledge workers who process information for a living (though that’s a good wedge), but really anyone, if implemented the right way.

For the last 15 or so years, I've been blogging occasionally on this website. Unfortunately, towards the end of last year, I lost control of my long-term domain name, nickgrossman-dot-is (intentionally not linking to it here). This was a dumb mistake; I just missed the renewal notice and someone else claimed it. Painful lesson learned.

At the time, I was bummed but figured it would just be on me to rebuild SEO to the **real** Nick Grossman blog. But, oddly, the new registrant has taken the extra step of republishing fake versions of my old content on the site, presumably in an attempt to retain SEO the old posts. Notably, all of the content has been slightly modified -- just enough, I guess, to sidestep any takedown claims based on copyright infringement.

So, what started out as an annoying and unfortunate situation has taken a turn to something more ugly: at best, an attempt to farm some referral links; in the middle, a shakedown effort; and at worst, an attempt at some kind of slow-motion identity theft.

All of this has gotten me thinking about ways in which the new decentralized media stack can help address some of these problems.

If we look at a platform like Mirror, which is a new publishing platform built on crypto rails, there are two main components: 1) Ethereum for identity and economics, and 2) Arweave for permanent data storage. Much of the attention thus far has been focused on the first prong: economics. Mirror's Ethereum bones mean that potentially unlimited forms of economics can be built into publications. For example: Emily Segal crowdfunded a Novel; Matthew Chaim is experimenting with publishing an album and a number of associated NFTs; and Jarod Dicker is experimenting with channeling economic flows through to authors and inspirations who contributed to new content. Mirror is becoming an incredible playground for the economics of content.

While the focus on economics is really exciting, there has been less focus on the implications of the identity and perma-storage aspects of the stack. Identities on Mirror are Ethereum wallets, and all of the content is archived -- in a verified and permanent way -- in the arweave network.

What that means is that, for every post, there is a blockchain-verified, permanent, immutable, record of who published what, when. Data stored in arweave cannot be changed; it can only be referenced. Every post in Mirror creates a permanent, reference-able, linkage between the identity of the author, the time of publication, and the content of the post. You'll notice that every post has a footer that looks like this:

For my use case of a hijacked domain name and republished fake content: if I had published my original blog on Mirror/arweave, there'd be a permanent record of the real/original content. For that to matter, though, "the internet" would need to learn to trust & reference the archival version of content, not modified copies.

Of course, a version of this exists today with the Internet Archive, which is an invaluable resource (and presumably, the way the new owner of my domain scraped all the old content....). While the Internet Archive is an incredible resource, it has not yet become deeply linked with other forms of publishing and identity on the web. In the case of Mirror, given the native linking between on-chain identity and content, a vibrant ecosystem is much more likely to develop around this kind of verified content.

More broadly, verified content feels like an important primitive in re-establishing trust online. Deepfakes, identity theft, social media bots, etc -- these are all affronts to our sense of reality online, and our ability to trust platforms and people. Just as the economic aspects of Mirror have been at the forefront so far, they have also been for crypto broadly.

While it's true that crypto networks introduce new forms of economics (speculation, payments, crowdfunding, etc) -- the underlying feature that enables them is trust in data. Crypto assets have value because we trust the data systems that generate them. I am excited that we are now starting to explore applying these same concepts to a broader set of online assets -- critically important ones: identity and content.

(note: this post has been cross-posted to Mirror here)