Recently, Tasklet launched a feature called Task Computer which is a Linux computer in the cloud that can do things for you and automate them.

My wife, The Gotham Gal, is using Task Computer to log into her Instagram account, go to her Instagram Collections, and pull out all of the information from them and populate a series of databases that her agent can then access to book trips and such.

Having a virtual computer side by side with an agent is such a help for non technical people that can't write API calls and that kind of thing.

If you have things in your life you want to automate but haven't found the right tool yet, try Tasklet. It's great.

In about six months, Spencer with the help of my colleagues Nick and Nikhil have completely rebuilt USV's operating system using Claude Code and Tasklet (a USV portfolio company). We have doubled the size of our team at USV without hiring another human.

Spencer published a blog post yesterday about all of this, why, what, and how. You can read it here.

2/ My partner Albert has been thinking deeply about what happens to society when we get Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He wrote a book about all of this called World After Capital, which he started writing over a decade ago.

Today, he published an economic model that starts to lay out the various scenarios for what will happen to society and our economy in an AGI world.

Albert's model is exactly the kind of thing policy makers should be looking at when they start thinking about how to manage the societal transformation that is underway.

Since 1993, the Federal Tax Code has had benefits for buying, owning, and selling QSBS. Currently, there is a full Federal Tax exclusion for the first $10mm of capital gains on QSBS.

Recently, the New York State Senate introduced a budget proposal in which NYS opts out of recognizing QSBS in its tax code. Historically, NYS has recognized the QSBS tax exclusion similarly to the Federal one.

There is a fair bit of misinformation and heat on Twitter about this and I thought I'd explain what is really going on.

Like the Federal government, there are three seats at the budget table in Albany. At this time, only the New York State Senate has taken this position on QSBS. The New York State Legislature, and most importantly, the Governor, have not taken a position on it yet.

So if you've read something on Twitter about QSBS and NYS, I recommend you relax and wait for all of this to pan out before making any rash decisions.

What you can do, if you are a NY founder or startup investor, is to sign onto Tech:NYC's letter to the Governor and the leaders of the Senate and Assembly. They will close signatures at noon ET today (Monday) so you need to act quickly if you want to sign it.

Here is the 60 second video from last year so you can see what I mean. 

This year's Fair will take place at the 168th Street Armory in Washington Heights on April 21st. We are expecting 2,400 high school students who will walk the track meeting engineers, founders, college representatives, and nonprofit leaders and learn about career paths and continued learning opportunities. More importantly, they will see how the coding and AI skills they are learning in their classrooms today can turn into real opportunities tomorrow.

That kind of exposure matters a lot. When students can see themselves in the field, it changes what they believe is possible.

New York City has made a big commitment to computer science and AI education in public schools over the past decade. The CS Fair is one of the places where you can really see the results of that effort. 

If you are part of the NYC tech community, you should get involved. Become a sponsor. Host a booth. Send engineers. You can sign up on this form,  or contact Jennifer, jennifer@gothamgives.org, at Gotham Gives to learn more.

Your team will leave inspired.

I always do.

It is certainly possible and probably quite common to build a successful company with an investor syndicate you don't relate to and don't like. But it is not fun.

The rare thing is to build a successful company with an investor syndicate you love working with. I've had the pleasure of doing this many times in my career. It is what I seek out. It is the primary thing I like about VC and startups. It is what keeps me engaged after all these years.

When vibe alignment happens between a founding team and their investor group, it is magic. It makes it easier to correctly make those five to ten hard decisions that determine the trajectory of a company.

As Michael points out in his terrific and timely post, the institutional revolving door nature of VC right now makes finding vibe alignment harder and many founders just opt for the best financial deal. That's entirely rational behavior.

But it takes all of the fun out of it, unfortunately.

During my Outlook years, I would folder most of my emails and delete the rest so that if I wanted to find an email, I could go look in the folder for it.

When I started using Gmail, I set up the same folders, but quickly realized that wasn't necessary because Gmail search was so good I could just search all of my email and find whatever I needed.

But the truth is Gmail search wasn't that good and like all you I have spent/wasted countless hours trying to find emails that I know exist somewhere in my archives but for the life of me I can't find them.

The arrival of the Gemini logo in the upper right of my browser has changed all of that for the better.

Here are two prompts I did today regarding a multi-family residential property we have owned in Brooklyn for the last ten years:

In this one, I was looking for a proposal we got back in early 2018 for a solar/battery system for the building.

In this one, I was looking for the land survey for the building:

In both cases, these Gemini prompts got me to the exact document I was looking for in less than thirty seconds on the first try.

Before Gemini, I could have spent five or ten minutes looking through many emails trying to find the attached document and maybe would have given up.

If you use Gmail and are not using Gemini to search your emails, you need to start immediately. It's a game-changer.

Like so many of us, the arrival of AI-assisted coding tools has made me a coder again. It's not really writing code, though. It's building stuff with code that is written by AI.

It's fun.

Over the weekend, I made two apps, both of which leverage my interest in music.

I used Claude Code, working in the Terminal app on my Mac, to build this web app that pulls all the music I have recently liked on SoundCloud and makes it available to listen on the web.

I also used our portfolio company Neynar's Studio app to build and deploy a mini-app in the Farcaster and Base mobile apps. My mini app is called Music Casts, and it pulls all of the music links from the people I follow on Farcaster and Base and puts them into a mini app that allows you to listen to them. It looks like this in Farcaster:

It is nice to make miniapps in Neynar Studio because Farcaster and Base offer the deployment surface and user base to give feedback. When I casted about Music Casts, I got a ton of suggestions, and I have added some of them already.

Coding in Claude Code in the Terminal app is more powerful, particularly when paired with a deployment tool. I used a deployment tool called Railway to get my web app live.

If you've always wanted to build software applications but have been held back by a lack of programming skills and/or time to learn, your time has come!

If you want to get started on Claude Code in the Terminal app,here are the instructions to get going.

If you want to build in Neynar Studio, go here.

The next morning this landed in my text messages.

As Seth writes in the story tab of that website:

SETH: “I can do anything I want with software from my terminal.”

FRED: “That's not fire. You can't like grow corn.”

SETH: “I bet you I could. You know what I mean? I'm going to grow corn for you.”

FRED: “That'd be great. Thank you.”

SETH: “I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to show you. And that'll be our first vibe coding project together.”

FRED: “It's a physical thing.”

SETH: “I will buy fucking land with an API via my terminal and I will hire some service to plant corn.”

FRED: “Okay, well that's a little different... you're going to get somebody to grow corn for you. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. Like, you can hire Jeff to come and make dinner for you, but like you can't make dinner.”

SETH: “No, but anything that could be done with technology, I can do now. Anything, which is insane.”

So now, Seth has roped me into his project that he calls Proof of Corn, and we are collaborating in a shared GitHub repo with a goal of growing corn.

He made his point and it landed with me:

This project isn't just about growing corn. It's about documenting what happens when you take AI seriously as a collaborator rather than a tool.

Every decision will be logged. Every API call documented. Every dollar tracked. When we harvest corn in October, we'll have a complete record of how an idea became a reality—with AI as the orchestration layer.

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.

So began my exodus from Twitter, which culminated in a complete departure in May 2024, when I wrote this post.

I've tried all of the decentralized social protocols, Lens, Bluesky, and Farcaster and have been most active on Farcaster, where USV is an investor.

Earlier today, Vitalik Buterin wrote this post using a decentralized social app called Firefly that sends its posts to Lens, Bluesky, Farcaster and Twitter. Vitalik started off his post with this observation:

If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top.

I could not agree more. I believe in social protocols like Lens, Bluesky, and Farcaster.

Both the Lens protocol and the Farcaster protocol have changed stewards this week.

The Aave team, which founded Lens, has handed it over to the Mask team.

And today, the Farcaster founders announced that they are handing over stewardship of the Farcaster protocol (and app) to the Neynar team.

Some will look at these events and say that decentralized social has failed. However, I see it differently. Protocols don't die so easily. They are resilient. And as Vitalik said in his post:

decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social.

I don't know the Mask team but I do know the Neynar team. USV is an investor in Neynar, and we have worked with Rish and Manan for over a year now.

They are the kinds of people that Vitalik was talking about when he wrote that.

If you want to post to X and also decentralized social protocols at the same time, try using the Firefly app like Vitalik does.

No more.

Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. When new users join SoundCloud, they can sync their Spotify or Apple Music library and playlists to SoundCloud. No more cold start problem.

SoundCloud also offers this service, powered by Free Your Music, to longstanding users like me.

I got some great playlists over the holidays, like my friend Steve's annual year-end playlist, the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire (which we saw last week and loved), the soundtrack to Mark Ronson's book (which I read over the holidays), and some Radiohead (we all need Radiohead). So I sync'd them this morning to my SoundCloud.

Here's what that looked like:

You scroll down to the bottom of your library on the SoundCloud mobile app and select Import:

You choose what other service you want to import from:

You log into that service, I chose Spotify, and you choose the playlists you want to sync:

And they show up in your SoundCloud library in a few minutes:

Now I am off to listen to Steve's Best Tracks of 2025. You should too!!!!

But we now need an additional "chapter" in the story. An over-the-air update, if you will.

So here it is, with the new chapter in italics:

An entrepreneur, tired of the long waits he is experiencing in his dentist’s office, decides that dentist offices are badly managed. So he designs and builds a comprehensive dentist office management system and brings it to market. The software is expensive, at $25,000 per year per dentist office, but it’s a hit anyway as dentists realize significant cost savings after deploying the system. The company, Dentasoft, grows quickly into a $100mm annual revenue business, goes public, and trades up to a billion dollar valuation.

Two young entrepreneurs graduate from college, and go to YC. They pitch PG on a low cost version of Dentasoft, which will be built on a modern software stock and include mobile apps for the dentist to remotely manage their office from the golf course. PG likes the idea and they are accepted into YC. Their company, Dent.io, gets their product in market quickly and prices it at $5,000 per year per office. Dentists like this new entrant and start switching over in droves. Dentasoft misses its quarter, citing competitive pressures, churn, and declining revenues. Dentasoft stock crashes. Meanwhile, Dent.io does a growth round from Sequoia and hires a CEO out of Workday.

Around this time, an open source community crops up to build an open source version of dental office software. This open source project is called DentOps. The project takes on real life as its leader, a former dentist turned socialist blogger and software developer named NitrousOxide, has a real agenda to disrupt the entire dental industry. A hosted version of DentOps called DentHub is launched and becomes very popular with forward thinking dentist offices that don’t want to be hostage to companies like Dentasoft and Dent.io anymore.

Dentasoft is forced to file for bankruptcy protection while they restructure their $100mm debt round they took a year after going public. Dent.io’s board fires its CEO and begs the founders to come back and take control of the struggling company. NitrousOxide is featured on the cover of Wired as the man who disrupted the dental industry.

A decade later, a Dentist, tired of waiting for the latest update from the DentOps community, decides to vibecode her own custom dental office software product using Claude Code. Even though she has never written a line of code in her life, she keeps prompting, deploying, and modifying the software to meet the unique needs of her office that DentOps never could. She rips out DentOps and deploys her own software suite that she calls Dentsure. Her team loves using her software, and so do her patients.

The one feature that feels really important and powerful to me is "live captions."

Most people are familiar with closed captioning on TVs and in theaters, where the speech is translated into text and shown at the bottom of the screen.

The Display smart glasses have this feature on the lower portion of the lenses. You can turn it on to understand someone speaking your native language better and you can use it for real-time translation of foreign language speakers.

I tried to take a photo of live captions running in my Display glasses but could not figure out how to do that. So here is an image I took from Meta's marketing assets:

I have had moderate hearing loss for at least a decade and struggle to hear in loud environments (busy restaurants, large events, sports arenas, etc). I hear fine in most places but certain environments give me real problems.

I've tried traditional hearing aids a few times and they have not worked well for my issues. I am a personal investor in one startup making advanced AI powered hearing aids that are delivered in eyeglass frames. I am excited to try them when the first units are ready soon and will blog about them then.

But it is also possible that a solution for people like me is live captioning. I am already familiar with captioning and we use it frequently on our TV at home, even for english language TV shows. So the idea of using the same approach to deal with hearing loss is very interesting to me. I plan to take the Display glasses with me the next time I dine at a loud restaurant or big event and see how they work.

I am also excited about using the foreign language translation when we travel overseas. It won't help me speak back in a foreign language but it will certainly help me understand.

Like most technologies when they arrive, live captioning feels "early." The UX around turning it on and off is clunky. For it to work well, it needs to just know when I need it to come on and when I don't. The current version of live captioning only works if you look directly at the speaker. These issues and others make it suboptimal in its current form. But I am confident all of that will improve in time.

But experiencing live captioning in my smartglasses has been an "aha" moment for me. I think the possibilities of this technology are quite powerful and important.

This process is expensive and made worse because the startup typically pays for both lawyers.

This is how it has always been done since I started in the business in the mid-80s, and I have always been uncomfortable with how expensive it is.

So I decided to run an experiment over the holidays.

We committed to lead a round of financing for a company in mid-December. We negotiated a term sheet and signed it before everyone departed for the holidays. I reached out to a law firm that I have used many times for this sort of thing and asked for a quote to handle our side of the deal. The quote came back at $50k.

So I said, "screw it" and decided it was time to try something different.

I fired up Google's NotebookLM, which allows users to create "notebooks," which are a large collection of documents that can then be used to run AI queries.

I put a large collection of "closing binders" of investments USV has made over the years, particularly companies I worked on, into one Notebook. I added the signed term sheet to this Notebook.

To create a second Notebook, I pointed NotebookLM at the data room that the startup we are investing in provided for legal diligence. That data room had every legal document the startup had entered into, including those with its employees, since it got started.

When we received the draft closing documents from the startup's lawyer, I added them to the first Notebook and asked for a legal review of the draft documents against the body of legal documents we have signed over the years, and most importantly, against the term sheet we had signed. I asked for a memo that outlined all of the issues with the draft documents and highlighted the most significant ones.

I then turned to the second Notebook and asked a series of questions like "tell me about the structure of the company and its subsidiaries and who is on the board of each of them" and "give me a list of every employee, the stock they have been issued, and all of the agreements they have signed" and "are their arbitration clauses in every agreement the company has signed?" I spent about half an hour asking these sorts of questions and put the answers to each into a Google Doc.

There is one issue that came out of all of this legal work that I need to understand better and possibly change in the documents. I scheduled a call with the company and its lawyer to go over that. Otherwise, I came away from this process confident that the company's legal affairs are in good shape and the closing docs reflect the term sheet we agreed to and mirror the customary provisions and protections USV receives in investments we make.

While this did take about two hours of my time, we did not incur any legal fees. NotebookLM is either free to use, or comes with USV's Google Workspace subscription. I honestly don't know the answer to that.

There is one more thing we can do in the VC industry to make this process even better. We can all agree to use standard docs like the NVCA documents that are publicly available to use.

With standard documents and Notebook Lawyer, prediction number four in my 2026 predictions can easily come true.

4/ A majority of venture capital deals close without lawyers on either side due to standardized documents (like the NVCA ones) and AI tools for review and legal diligence.

All we need is startup founders to demand this. And VCs to have the willingness to say yes.

This VC has already done that.

1/ Gemini passes ChatGPT in terms of DAUs, MAUs, and tokens consumed in the first half of 2026, making Google the king of AI.

2/ The Democrats take control of the House in the Nov 2026 elections, bringing to an end Trump's complete control of the US government.

3/ Smartglasses finally reach product market fit in 2026, but it won't be Meta that delivers the winning approach.

4/ A majority of venture capital deals close without lawyers on either side due to standardized documents (like the NVCA ones) and AI tools for review and legal diligence.

5/ A drunk driver using full self-driving legally challenges a DUI charge and wins.

6/ The SpaceX IPO, the largest ever, marks the market top, and we are in a bear market by year's end.

7/ Despite the loss of tax incentives, EVs and solar adoption significantly inflects in the US, reflecting better economics and utility for consumers and businesses.

8/ Blockchains disappear behind better consumer interfaces that allow users to use, spend, trade, and send tokens without concerning themselves with which blockchain they are on.

9/ An AI-generated song is nominated for Song of the Year in the 2027 Grammy nominations.

10/ The $AVC writer coin 10x its holder base which reaches 10,000 by year end.

Happy New Year everyone. I hope 2026 is a fantastic year.

Here's a top ten list of things that happened this year that really matter.

1/ The end of globalization. The Trump Tariffs represent a fundamental change in trade policy, and if they remain the approach of future White Houses, it will mark a return to protectionism and the end of the Free Trade era in the US, which has been the default policy of the US for my entire adult life. Whether you are for or against this change, it is massive and means that the rest of the world will now have to pay to access our markets in the US, making the reshoring of critical infrastructure possible. One thing I am less sure about but super interested in is whether tariffs can become a significant revenue generator for the US Government, as was the case until 1913 with the introduction of the modern federal income tax system. If tariff income can make a significant reduction or elimination of the federal budget deficit in the US, then that would be another major economic shift (away from deficit spending).

2/ Google got its mojo back. From Waymo robotaxis running wild on the streets of many of the most populous cities in the US to Gemini coming hard after ChatGPT, 2025 was a banner year for Google/Alphabet and a reminder that owning our data is key to owning us.

3/ The left got its mojo back. 2025 started with the left in shambles after being routed in the November 2024 election and ceding all four pillars of government if you include the Supreme Court and you should. But a 34-year-old socialist in NYC showed the way back and Make America Affordable now stands as the counterargument to Make America Great, and prediction markets currently give the left a 76% chance of taking back the House in the Nov 2026 election.

4/ The end of writing code. I get to sit next to a software engineer in the USV pit, and boy has it been fun to watch Spencer make software. He doesn't write code the way I did when I was his age. He uses agents to generate the code and then stitches software together the way a prefab house is assembled. My partner Albert wrote about the significance of this shift yesterday and it is huge. Albert said, "Coding agents are doing to source code what compilers did to machine code: push the code below the interaction surface". I spent fifteen years working tirelessly to get computer science classes into the NYC public school system and the hardest part was teaching kids new languages that they needed to master to instruct machines. Now they just need one of many coding assistants and an understanding of how to do the stitching. That is a skill we still need to teach, but it is an easier skill to teach and the results come more quickly. Like Instagram made everyone a photographer, AI will make everyone a coder. And that's a great thing.

5/ GLPs are making us healthier. This is not a new trend. GLPs have been with us since 2005. But in 2025, we went from 6% of the US on GLPs to 12% and surveys suggest that 25% of us will be on one by the end of 2026. This is leading to a massive drop in obesity and diabetes, twin scourges of the last twenty-five years, but also massive drops in alcohol and drug addiction, which may also be a factor in the largest one-year drop in serious crime that the US has ever seen.

6/ We soured on our phones. The most significant shift has been the movement to take phones away from kids in schools, and the resulting increase in socialization, play, and more good stuff. But I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our almost twenty-year love affair with the smartphone is over, and everyone I know wants to use it less and reduce their reliance on it. This is bad news for Apple.

7/ Scale is hitting its limits in AI. OpenAI's brilliant move was to use scale over everything else to train large language models. And it worked. We got LLMs that can do magical things. But in 2025 we saw scaling reach its limits and new tricks, like distillation, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, produce significant improvements. The emergence of DeepSeek in January 2025, which was trained on significantly less hardware, was the first shot across the bow in the war between brains and brawn. This is bad news for OpenAI and others who are raising endless amounts of capital to win the scale war.

8/ Sports betting goes onchain. Prediction markets, which started out as a way to speculate on politics, moved into sports betting and went vertical. While neither of the two main prediction market providers is truly "onchain", I expect that they will ultimately move there for many reasons, including cost, speed, finality, and more. What this means is the "house" will be replaced by a trustless decentralized system known as a blockchain, and as we saw with DeFi before, this will lead to better markets that are much less extractive and are 24/7 and fully global. We can argue whether betting is a vice or societal good, but it is a fundamental human behavior that has been with us forever and now it will be onchain.

9/ China is winning the next war. While the White House and seemingly everyone else in the US obsess about winning the AI contest, China is winning the next war, which is electrification (which, by the way, is what powers AI). China installed over 300 GW of solar in 2025, bringing its solar installed base over 1 TW by year's end. The US, by contrast, is expected to deploy about 300 GW of solar over the next five years. For anyone who thinks this is about climate change (it is), this is mostly about economics. It costs about $0.05 per KW to generate electricity with solar at current manufacturing economics, and it costs between $0.05 and $0.10 per KW to generate electricity with natural gas. China is building a less expensive energy generation system than the rest of the world. This is bad news for the US.

10/ Streaming won. It probably won a decade ago or more, but in 2025 we saw Netflix beat a bunch of legacy studios in the bidding war for Warner Brothers/HBO. Owning the end customer is generally the better business model. When you can own the production and the end customer, you win.

OK, that is it for the rearview mirror. Tomorrow we will look at the road ahead.

By the latter part of that decade, we had come to believe that the credit card system, and the interchange fees that make up much of the cost of the credit card system, is eventually going to go away.

Since then, we have had an active investment thesis that we called The End Of Interchange.

We use Notion AI to maintain a thesis description based on past meeting notes, emails, and internal discussions related to the topic. Our current thesis description says:

Origin

USV has had a longstanding interest in the end of the interchange/credit card system and the move to stablecoins and bank-to-bank direct payments.

Core Thesis

The credit card interchange fee model—where merchants pay 2-3% per transaction—is vulnerable to disruption from:

• Stablecoins enabling near-zero-cost value transfer

• Bank-to-bank direct payments (ACH, FedNow, etc.) with identity/security layers

• Pay by Bank platforms

• Adding cryptographic identity layers to ACH

Open Questions

• Will stablecoin rails win, or retrofitted ACH/bank rails?

• How do fraud and reversibility concerns get addressed?

• What's the timeline for meaningful interchange compression?

What's great about having these constantly evolving and updating thesis descriptions is that they help us monitor news and company formation activities and allow us to be proactive in reaching out to founders to get to know companies working in an area we are deeply interested in.

We also link every potential investment to one or more of these thesis areas to make sure that our investing activies are aligned with the areas we are most interested in.

We have always deeply believed in thesis-driven investing at USV. For many years, we did this in a very unstructured way based on lots of debate and discussion. With the advent of AI and the ability to add structure to unstructured data, we are moving to a more structured approach to thesis-driven investing that opens up a lot of possibilities for us. It is very exciting to me.

A bunch of these songs are under the radar which is my favorite kind of music.

So I hope you find something new that you like in here.

Dance Away by fredwilson

Listen to Dance Away, a playlist curated by fredwilson on desktop and mobile.

https://soundcloud.com

1/ Train a virtual board. Pick ten to twenty real people (alive or dead) and collect all of their public speaking, public writing, and all that has been written about them, train an AI on them, and then ask them questions you would ask your board.

2/ Train a virtual CMO. Pick a bunch of the top CMOs and collect all of their public speaking, public writing, and all that has been written about them, train an AI on them, and then use this as your CMO.

3/ Train a virtual CFO. Pick a bunch of the top CFOs and collect all of their public speaking, public writing, and all that has been written about them, train an AI on them, and then use this as your CFO.

I would imagine there are startups out there that are building tools to make this sort of thing easier to do. I have not personally talked to any of them, but I am sure they exist.

But in all of the cases that I heard, the founder used one or more of the popular large language models (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Qwen, etc)

If you don't have the advisors you need, this is one way to address that.

In an excellent longish essay on GenX in T Magazine, Amanda Fortini writes:

The consensus, particularly among elder Gen X-ers .. is that the endpoints were mysteriously revised, but no one seems to know why or when or by whom .....many hold that the real Gen X range is 1961 to 1981 — beginning when fertility rates declined, soon after the Food and Drug Administration’s 1960 approval of the birth control pill..... Still, a 2017 Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies article placed Gen X at 1965 to 1984, recasting four years of millennials as Gen X-ers, in part because “using 20-year age spans for each generation” makes it “easier to compare them.” It also renders much generational theorizing meaningless.

While I largely agree that this generational theorizing can be pretty meaningless, it is fun. And so is Amanda's essay, particularly if you are GenX. My friend Pat called the essay, "my so called life". That cracked me up. If you were born between 1961 and 1984, you should read it. It will be at least a fun trip down memory lane, and maybe more, for you.

I likely am a baby boomer. If growing up in a Leave It To Beaver household is the measure, that was me and my family. And it was warm, safe, healthy, and happy. I believe I am a boomer because of that.

The Gotham Gal, on the other hand, grew up in the classic 70s household where the kids would come home to an empty house and had the run of the place. And everything else too. I believe she's GenX because of that.

Does any of this matter? I don't think it matters much. But there are cultural differences between children and their parents and charting them and understanding them can be helpful to marketers and anthropologists. And for the rest of us, it sure can be a lot of fun.

For me, it was a way to move from being an engineer to an investor. And as such, it was super valuable. As an education, not so much. It did lead to MBA Mondays, which was a ton of fun to write. But I digress.

There are a few occasions in business school that were "aha moments" for me. One was in a class called "Speculative Markets." The professor explained that speculating and hedging were two sides of a trade. And that there would not be hedging without speculating.

I had never considered that. It made me think.

Speculating has a dirty quality to it. One thinks of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems or George Soros making billions betting against the British Pound. How can speculation be good?

Hedging is different. A farmer in Iowa needs to hedge the risk of a bad winter so she can keep the family farm she inherited from her parents. How can hedging be bad?

And yet you need one to exist for the other to exist. That's powerful. At least it was for me at the young age of twenty-four.

I thought of all of this when I read Murtaza's thoughtful musings on writer coins this morning. In it, he writes:

Part of the difficulty is philosophical: journalism is a public good, not a speculative asset.

There it is. The dirty word. Reading that makes me feel bad.

And yet, what if he had written this?

Journalism is a public good and we should invest in it.

Reading that would make me feel good.

Investment needs speculation.

If you make an investment and you can't sell it, no matter what the price, then you are way less likely to make it.

If you make an investment and there is a highly liquid market that allows you to exit the investment any time you want in a nanosecond, then you are way more likely to make that investment.

If journalism needs investment, then, sadly, it also needs speculation.

That is how it is.

As icky as it feels at times.