AVC

Sleep

AVC
Oct 30
I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since. For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first is waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep. The second is waking up early, like 4:30/5am, and being wide awake. So I’ve been working on those two things. I still wake up in the middle of t...

Open Office Hours at NYC Tech Week

AVC
Oct 12
NYC Tech Week is next week. It will be a week filled with events for the tech sector to engage and connect with each other. A particularly great part of tech week is VC Open Office Hours. There are over 100 VC investors signed up to participate next week. Here is how it works: 1/ you select four investors (out of more than 100) that you want to meet 2/ you get up to four twenty minute meetings 3/ you discuss your idea with the investor in hopes of getting them interested enough to take anothe...

The Heist

AVC
Sep 27
On Saturday, September 9th, the Gotham Gal and I arrived at JFK airport after an eight-hour flight from Paris. While waiting for our luggage, I got pushed a notification in my web3 wallet that there was an NFT drop underway that I could participate in. So I clicked on the link, signed the transaction, and nothing happened (or so I thought). So I tried again. Again nothing happened. Frustrated, I turned my attention to the luggage, retrieved it, got in a car, and headed home. On the way home, ...

CEO 360s

AVC
Aug 28
I’ve written about this topic before. It is an important topic and I want to raise it again. Boards often discuss CEO performance without really knowing how things work inside the company. And CEOs often have very little visibility to how they are doing and what the board thinks about their performance. When you work for one person, your boss, it is typical that you will have regular catchups and at least an annual review of your performance (ideally more frequent). But when you work for a gr...

Subscribing To AVC

AVC
Aug 23
For many years, there were three ways to subscribe to AVC: 1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox 2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader 3/ X – Follow AVC on X. X revoked the API access that I was using to autopost three or four months ago. I have not been active on that service for almost a year now and have no interest in dealing with it. So if you are one of the 25.5k followers on X and want to keep getting alerted when I post, I suggest you go with option 1 or option...

Yubikey Authenticator

AVC
Aug 15
I got a new Pixel 7 last week and have started the tedious process of moving over to a new phone. One of the more painful chores in moving from one phone to another is moving the Google Authenticator app and all of the two factor codes to the new phone. My partner Nick told me about Yubikey Authenticator and I converted to it while moving phones since I was going to have to get all new codes anyway. If you use a Yubikey for anything else, switching to Yubikey Authenticator is a breeze. You do...

Helium Mobile

AVC
Aug 6
USV has been an investor in the Helium network since 2019. I have always loved the idea of using web3 technologies to let consumers to “peer produce” a communications network creating a people-powered network. Helium started out powering communications between low-power “Internet of Things (IOT)” devices but with the introduction of Helium Mobile back in May, they are now powering a cell phone network. My friend Stephen started using Helium Mobile last month and so I decided to join him. I si...

Art On The Wall

AVC
Jul 30
I’ve written about this topic a bunch over the years. It is something I’ve been interested in for quite a while. Our homes are filled with big hunks of plastic hanging on the wall that are off most of the time. They look like this: Now that’s a lovely scene. Some nice plants. A cool wood cabinet. A nice lamp. A few books. And a piece of black plastic. Here’s what our family room looks like when we are not watching the TV: That’s a Sony TV with nothing special in it. I have done some work to mak...

The New York Tech Sector

AVC
Jul 26
The New York Times had a piece yesterday suggesting that tech will no longer be a growth engine for NYC and the surrounding metro area as it has been for the last twenty years. I am not going to link to the piece because it is behind a paywall but if you want to read it, you can google “Tech Firms Once Powered New York’s Economy. Now They’re Scaling Back.” I talked to one of the reporters who worked on the piece and told him that their angle was incorrect. But when a publication has their min...

How This Ends (Part Three)

AVC
Jul 17
The venture capital sector has been in a sustained downturn for almost eighteen months. How does this downturn end? Well, it may have already ended, but let’s see about that. We will know for sure in a few quarters. The NASDAQ peaked at roughly 16,000 in November 2021. By June 2022, it was down 33%. It stayed down for all of 2022 and ended the year at roughly 10,500. But this year the NASDAQ is up almost 40%. What is driving this? If I had to pick one thing, I would say inflation and interest r...

Flooding

AVC
Jul 15
I spent a good part of my childhood at West Point, the US Military Academy. I got an email yesterday with photos of the flooding at West Point. My dad and brother used to work in that grey stone building called Mahan Hall. And the same storms that did this to West Point did worse to many parts of New England, particularly Vermont. USV’s climate thesis is to invest in companies and projects that provide mitigation for or adaptation to the climate crisis. Adaptation means accepting that we’ve ma...

Threads

AVC
Jul 7
Like tens of millions of others, I downloaded Threads onto my phone yesterday and signed up. The thing that Twitter has been missing since it killed off its ecosystem over a decade ago is competition. And as we all know, lack of competition is a very bad thing. In governments and in products. Competition keeps you honest. Competition makes you hustle. Competition forces you to innovate. Competition makes you better. So I am thrilled to see some real competition emerge for Twitter. I am also ex...

Bi-Directional EV Charging

AVC
Jul 3
EV sales in the US are on the rise, reaching 7% of all car sales in Q1 2023, up from 4.6% a year earlier. If that rate of growth continues, EVs will be 10% of the US car market by next year. Most people who own an EV charge it at home, using an EV charger. Our family owns a few different models. Here are two of them. The reason we have two chargers right next to each other is one charges our Tesla and the other charges our other EVs. It is like an iPhone and an Android. Each has its own chargi...