Musings of a VC in NYC
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Mike Arrington posted about a secret meeting of angels and super angels in San Francisco the other night. In the post he suggests that they are colluding to keep valuations down, terms intact, and traditional venture capital firms, such as ours, out of their deals. It's the kind of blog post that Mike has become […]
In the summer of 2003, Brad Burnham and I set out to raise a $100mm early stage venture capital fund. We had both been successful VCs in other firms and we had a thesis that the second wave of the Internet was upon us and that large networks were going to get built in this […]
Some interesting developments that we have been working on came public yesterday. Protocol Labs, a company that builds blockchain-based protocols laid out its ambitious roadmap and finally got around to announcing the seed investment USV and others made in it last year. My partner Brad Burnham wrote a blog post on…
The NY Times has a post up this morning about a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Red Hook where they have built a hyperlocal mesh network to service the entire neighborhood, from housing projects to townhouses. Red Hook is a cool place. We were there last night to sample Hometown Bar-B-Que‘s massive beef ribs and a […]
I was watching this Charlie Rose interview with Lena Dunham and I was struck by this line: it’s really intense to be thrust into a managerial position before my time I have seen this a lot in my business and its always your talent for making things that puts you in this spot. And one […]
One of the things I’ve always struggled with as an investor in high growth tech companies is the tension between getting profitable vs growing more quickly. It has become a central tenet of tech growth investing (in both the public and private markets) that growth is more valuable than profitability and you can always…
The Economist has a cover story this week called Peak Valley. The article suggests that Silicon Valley’s lead as a hub for innovation has peaked and other regions are rising. It ends with the concern that innovation more broadly has peaked. I somewhat agree with “the rise of elsewhere” narrative and disagree that…
Protocols are a geeky topic. It’s way more interesting to talk about applications. People will go on and on about why they like gmail or some other email application. But not a lot of people get excited about SMTP and IMAP which are the underlying email protocols that allow the gmail application to talk to […]
I was with some friends this weekend and one of them was talking about an investment committee meeting he attended and there was a discussion at that meeting about some of the threats out there in the macro investment landscape. One of them was “vanishing liquidity” and the significant change in net cash flows from […]
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]
I’ve been telling this fictional story about Dentist Office Software for years to describe why we are so focused on our “networks” investment strategy. Yesterday I told it at a HackNY event we did at the USV office and my partner Albert provided a finishing touch that really drives it home. Since I’ve never told […]
My two favorite tech news aggregators are Techmeme and Hacker News. I visit both multiple times per day for a quick scan of what is going on in techland. They are very different and you can see that in action this morning. Here is the above the fold Techmeme right now (9am eastern): We might […]
The Brave browser team concluded an ICO for their Basic Attention Token yesterday in about thirty seconds. This led to this tweet: The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC’s didn’t even have time to put on a sweater vest. — briantobal (@briantobal) May 31, 2017 Of course…
I love Hackpad. And it's strange because most of what Hackpad does, Google Docs does. And I really like Google Docs. I use Google Docs dozens of times a day. But there is something about Hackpad that I like better than Google Docs for massively open online realtime document creation. Let's not turn that into […]
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]
If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year. You might think that all these big web services are flatlining. We have seen this in our […]
Yesterday Twitter announced that they plan to amend the assignments agreements that they sign with their employees. They call this proposed amendment the Innovator's Patent Agreement. I've been aware of this effort inside of Twitter for a while and I like to call this move the "Twitter Patent Hack" because I think…
I’ve said a bunch of times on this blog that the perfect pitch is a very short intro to provide context followed immediately by a demo. Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, John Britton of our portfolio company Twilio showed how it is done. If you do a lot of pitches, spend the six […]
A hallmark of startup companies, the tech sector more broadly, and certainly our portfolio companies, is that they include equity in their compensation packages for their employees, often all employees. If you work for a tech company, chances are good that you will get options as part of your compensation package. I…
Hi Everyone. Happy 2019. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in. […]
A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?” I answered “Dapps.” If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting […]
I find myself saying this quite often these days to entrepreneurs and their product teams. It's something that I've noticed working with leading social platforms like Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. Services such as these have a large number of their users accessing the service regularly on a logged out basis. I…
Cross Laminated Timber (or CLT for short) is a structural building material that can replace concrete and steel in new building construction. I wrote about CLT back in April and mentioned that the Gotham Gal and I are in the process of making two CLT buildings right now. The paper version of the New York […]
I’m not much for the rear view mirror. I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in. But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) and explain what is […]
I told this story to an entrepreneur last weekend and she loved it. So I figured I should tell it to everyone here at AVC. I was a mechanical engineering major (course 2) at MIT. One of the best classes in the mechanical engineering curriculum at MIT is 2.70, Introduction To Design. And the highlight […]
Six years ago, in the summer of 2008, NYU and Polytechnic University came together to create NYU Poly, NYU’s engineering school in downtown Brooklyn. When I saw the news, I called NYU President John Sexton and asked for a meeting. He agreed and I went down to Washington Square to meet with him. I told […]
The Gotham Gal and I have been fortunate to accumulate signficant capital over the past fifteen years. And the vast majority of it is invested in startups. We get distributions from a sale of one company and within months that capital (after taxes) is invested in more startups (including non profit startups). This has…
I was talking to a friend about AOC’s proposal to increase marginal federal rates to 70% to fund investments in fighting climate change. My friend said he was disappointed that she didn’t propose a top federal rate of 83.25% so that the marginal rate in NYC would be 100%. He was joking but his remark […]
Angel/seed rounds used to be done via priced equity securities, either common or preferred. Then, starting about ten years ago, we started to see convertible debt being used in the angel and seed rounds. By 2010 this was the norm and Paul Graham tweeted this in Aug 2010: Convertible notes have won. Every investment so…
Dan Primack wrote in his friday newsletter: Public market investors have become less willing to leave their comfort zones, and it’s manifesting most obviously in the IPO market.Novel disruption has fallen out of favor, with many preferring more time-tested models like enterprise SaaS and biotech.Peloton yesterday…