Musings of a VC in NYC
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I was catching up on Brad Feld’s blog this morning and saw that he had posted about the “40% rule” for SAAS companies. I was at the same board meeting as Brad and came away similarly impressed by the simplicity of the rule and the logic behind it. Here’s the 40% rule and it is […]
For as long as the web has been around, there have been entrepreneurs trying to build businesses around lists. And I’m having a tough time thinking of any company that has really nailed it in this category. For one thing, there are two modes of listmaking; making lists for yourself (task management) and making lists…
I saw Joe Fernandez‘ tweet a few days ago and thought “he is making an important point.” too many young entrepreneurs talk about vc’s like they’re heroes and their blog posts are scripture — Joe Fernandez (@JoeFernandez) August 19, 2016 VCs are not heroes. We are just one part of the startup ecosystem. We provide […]
Let’s say you are the founder and CEO of a startup and you have now been at it for four years. The company is doing great, you’ve raised several rounds of financing, you have a product in the market that is solving a real problem, you have a bunch of customers, you have a growing […]
Venture backed companies have a strange relationship to positive cashflow. Because they have financial backers who can and do finance losses, they tend to operate in the red for a long time. In the early days it makes sense to burn cash. If you do not have revenues, you can’t generate cash. And if you […]
Yesterday I wrote a post summing up what happened in 2014. In it I promised a post on what is going to happen. What I did not specify was how far forward I am going to look. It’s a lot easier to predict the future without a timeline on it. I think we all know, […]
I'm a bit late with this news about our portfolio company Duck Duck Go but I am super excited about it so I'm posting it anyway. I'll let a tweet tell the story: We received over 1,000,000 direct searches yesterday for the first time ever!duckduckgo.com/traffic.html — duckduckgo (@duckduckgo) February 14, 2012 One…
The day Google+ launched, I sent a friend at Google who was involved in building the service an email requesting an invite. I got the invite late that day and started playing with the service. Here's my profile. I'm not sure if this page is public or you need a Google+ login to see it. […]
Continuing the case method on MBA Mondays, I am going to tell a story about a business model pivot that was not a full business pivot. In the lull between Flatiron and Union Square Ventures, I made a few angel investments and the best one was in a company called TACODA that went on to […]
I've mentioned Bitcoin a number of times on this blog. It is something our firm is watching closely. We thought briefly about making a Bitcoin specific investment earlier this year but ended up deciding to sit on the sidelines for now. We are quite taken with the idea of a currency that is not controlled […]
Stock-based compensation plans throughout the startup and tech sector are based on “golden handcuffs” – the idea that an employee can’t leave because they would be giving up too much money if they do. I’ve never loved that concept. It feels like staying in a bad marriage for the kids. So I have been involved […]
I put the awesome HBO GO app on the family's iPad yesterday and tried to Airplay into our family room TV. I got audio on the TV but not video. I thought I was doing something wrong. So I rebooted everything and tried again. Same thing. So I did a web search on the topic […]
Today we have a special guest post. There have been a few guest posts here at AVC. Maybe a half dozen in total. One of my favorites was this one by JLM during the financial crisis of 2008/2009. But this one today may top that gem. It's from our favorite Giant Robot Dinosaur and it's […]
We have a sign like this in our beach house. We got it in New Orleans many years ago. I thought of that sign when I was on the phone yesterday. I was talking to a person involved in a deal I’m working on right now. He said “you guys are being awfully nice here.” For […]
Last winter John Allspaw joined Etsy to run tech ops. John has written several important books on web ops and is one of the experts in operating large scale web services. One of the first things John did when he arrived at Etsy is work with the dev and ops teams to put in place […]
The news hit yesterday that WordPress has purchased Tumblr from Verizon (which owns it by virtue of its acquisition of Yahoo! and AOL). USV seeded Tumblr along with our friends at Spark in the summer of 2007 and were actively involved in the development of the company until its sale to Yahoo! in 2013. I […]
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire […]
I read Cody Brown’s blog post about getting hacked on Thursday of last week. I feel very badly for Cody and plan to send him some BTC once I get access back to my account. His post helped me avoid his fate. I woke up Friday morning (central european summer time) and saw a bunch […]
My father in law and sister in law were over last night. I am getting more and more bullish on Android every day. I starting carrying an Android phone about a year ago. I made it my one and only phone over the summer. I absolutely love it. My sister in law who is an […]
My friend Steve Kane suggested I take a longer view in my pair of year end posts this year: What, no decade end/decade ahead posts? 😕 — Steven Kane (@stevenkane) December 26, 2019 And so I will. Here are the big things that happened in tech, startups, business, and more in the decade that is […]
The issue of how to tax carried interest, the profit sharing interests that VCs, Private Equity firms, and Hedge Funds receive as compensation for generating returns to their investors, is in the news again. This time it is not a debate at the Federal level, but at the state level. There are carried interest taxation…
The crypto-currency Ethereum completed a hard fork on Wednesday. The Ethereum core developers, after getting a vote of support from the Ethereum community, hard forked Ethereum to “get back” the roughly $40mm of Ethereum that was taken in the hack of The DAO. Hard forks are a bit of a lightning rod issue in the […]
If you were making a list of things that could go wrong on an seed, angel, or Series A investment, you would have to put the co-founder relationship right up there at the top of the list. Not every startup has co-founders. Some just have one founder. In some ways, that is a bit easier […]
Roughly six months ago, I put up a blog post suggesting Android was going to be the dominant mobile phone operating system and that developers interested in the largest user bases ought to start developing for it in preference to iOS. As you might expect, I got a lot of heat from Apple fanboys for […]
As I read this post in the WSJ about the changing nature of VC funding of consumer web companies, I thought that we may be looking at the symptoms and not the disease. As the WSJ notes, VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 […]
We see a lot of metrics on web and mobile apps. Our portfolio companies share their metrics with us, which we keep confidential and do not share with anyone outside of our firm. And companies that are seeking investment from USV also share their metrics with us. We also keep these metrics confidential and do […]
Regulators in China imposed a blanket ban on ICOs over the long weekend. A number of people have reached out to me via email and Twitter asking me what I think about this. I think regulation of ICOs is inevitable and a good thing if done right (ie lightly). The SEC’s comments on ICOs back […]
This chart from eMarketer really brings it home. We have a digital advertising duopoly. The difference between second and third place is massive. I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. I want to see the technology industry adopt new approaches to monetization, ideally not…
A few months ago I posted some data on this blog that showed the growth of homeschooling in the US with almost 5% of K12 students being schooled at home. I wrote at the end of that post: This is a trend to watch and, possibly, to invest in Well, invest in it we did. […]
Warning: This post touches politics. The comments will likely be incendiary and polarizing. Don’t go into the comments if you don’t want to be annoyed or irritated. Many in the tech industry are taking these comments by Hillary Clinton yesterday as an ‘attack on Uber and the tech sector’: Meanwhile, many Americans are…