AVC - Page 19
Leadership Matters
Last night I watched the NY Knicks win their fourth straight game on the road in New Orleans. They are now 29-27 and have a fighting chance of being a .500 team this season with only 16 regular season games left. This is essentially the same team that went 21-45 last year. Elfrid Payton, RJ Barrett, Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson, Taj Gibson, and Reggie Bullock were all on that 21-45 team. What changed? The coach is what changed. Tom Thibodeau came in and has instilled an entirely different...
Entrepreneurship In Latin America
It is a little known part of my career, but for a brief period from 1997 to 2001, I was part of a small group of investors who helped to create a startup ecosystem in Latin America. It all started with a company called StarMedia which created a Yahoo-like “portal” for Latin America. My partner Jerry Colonna and I met StarMedia in early 1997 and we brought it to our partners at Chase Capital Partners because we wanted to lead a Series A investment in it. In that Chase Capital Partners meeting ...
My New Metrocard
For years, one of my prized possessions has been my MTA EasyPayXpress Metrocard. It’s a little worn down from a lot of use because it auto refills itself. It is a Metrocard that is connected to a “card on file” and it automatically refills itself so that it always has money on it and you never miss a train because your Metrocard has run out of funds. I’ve had one of these for something like twenty years. And yet many NYers don’t know that this product exists. But last week, I realized that my ...
Funding Friday: Burn Alpha
Emily Segal is writing her next novel called Burn Alpha and she is crowdfunding it on her Mirror blog. I contributed 0.1 ETH to the effort yesterday evening and she is now approaching her 25 ETH goal. $NOVEL Crowdfund If you have an Ethereum wallet, like Coinbase Wallet or Metamask, you can participate in her crowdfunding project here. The rewards are pretty cool as is the premise of the novel. You can see all of that on her blog. If you read this post on my Mirror blog, you will see the crow...
Vaccinations At Scale
There was a day in the last week when four million Americans got a Covid vaccine. That’s more than one percent of all citizens of the US. One in every hundred people in the US got vaccinated on the same day. Think about that! Mayor de Blasio tweeted yesterday that 4.7 million doses of the Covid vaccine have been given out in NYC. Assuming that 2/3 of those have gone into new arms and 1/3 have gone into returning arms, that means almost 40% of adults in NYC have gotten introduced to the Corona...
Tech:NYC's Mayoral Forum
Tech:NYC is the industry association for NYC’s tech sector. I am the Chair of the organization. I am excited about Tech:NYC’s work to bring the ongoing NYC Mayoral race to the tech sector. On Thursday, April 8th (tomorrow) at 4pmET, Tech:NYC will host a webinar with the top mayoral candidates that is open to all NYC tech employees. The candidates participating are Eric Adams, Shaun Donovan, Kathryn Garcia, Ray McGuire, Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley, and Andrew Yang. The forum will be moderated b...
Geothermal
We have a house in the northeast United States where the summers are warm and the winters are cold. We have solar on the roof and we heat and cool this house with electricity. This is the electrical generation/consumption chart for all of 2020 for that house: We produce almost all of the heating and cooling for that house with solar power. How do we do that? We use geothermal energy to heat and cool it. We drilled wells down into the earth and pull water up to heat the house in the winter and ...
Hubspot
I do a lot of “bulk emailing” but I hate sending bulk emails. I prefer to personalize emails and send them one by one so that the recipient understands that the email came from me. What that has meant is that I take Google Sheets full of email addresses and I cut and paste a message into my Gmail for each and every email address. That is incredibly slow, dull, repetitive, and painful. About a year ago, we started using Hubspot for our family’s philanthropic efforts and it was a revelation to ...
Funding Friday: Sentien Audio
I wrote a blog post last fall asking for advice for headphones that don’t go into my ear and allow me to hear ambient noise around me. I got a ton of responses and that led me to bone-conducting headphones. I have been using AfterShokz bone conducting headphones for the last six months and they work well. So when I came upon this Kickstarter project to make a pair of “smart” bone conducting headphones, I got interested. I backed it and went for the reward which I rarely do. I will hopefully g...
Recycling
Most venture capital funds have a “recycling” provision that allows them to sell some percentage of their investments and reinvest those funds back into new investments instead of distributing that capital to their limited partners. There is no standard recycling percentage in the market, but I think 20-25% is fairly common. We do this at USV very aggressively. It allows us to put the entire fund to work and recoup the management fee load. A $100mm venture capital fund will pay something like...
Volunteer At TEALS NYC
TEALS is a longstanding program supported by Microsoft where software engineers assist in computer science instruction in K12 schools. I have been blogging about and advocating TEALS for over eight years now. TEALS came to NYC in 2013 and has been helping kids learn computer science in NYC schools ever since. For many of those years, the software engineers would have to travel to the school building to assist in classroom instruction. But that has changed and now TEALS volunteers can teach re...
Dapper Labs, Flow, and NBA Top Shot
I have written about all of these things here at AVC before. But I am writing again as there is likely to be a bunch of chatter about Dapper, Flow, and NBA Top Shot as the news of a financing round comes out today. Financings don’t really interest me but companies do. And this is a fascinating company. Dapper Labs came out of an incubator called Axiom Zen back in 2017. The Axiom Zen team was looking at interesting things they could build using Ethereum. They contributed to the ERC 721 standar...