Musings of a VC in NYC
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Today Apple is going to announce three new iPhones. One of them should be a small form factor like the old SE. Apple discontinued the iPhone SE at the tail end of 2018 and has stated that the next iOS update will not run on the old SE hardware. I have a number of friends […]
The current draft of the Senate Tax Reform Bill would tax stock options and RSUs upon vesting. Currently, stock options are taxed upon exercise and RSUs are taxed upon release of the underlying shares. This is a HUGE deal to everyone who works in companies that partially compensate their employees with these two…
The patents that Yahoo! is suing Facebook over are a crock of shit. None of them represent unique and new ideas at the time of the filing. I supect they all can be thrown out over prior art if Facebook takes the time and effort to do that. But worse, Yahoo! has broken ranks and […]
I got an email from the CEO of one of our portfolio companies last week. It asked a very basic question, but one that I don’t recall being asked before: I need to know if any of your LPs include ………. entities/interests. The CEO asked his VCs because questions were coming up internally and he […]
Back in February of last year, I wrote a blog post with the same title and said this about the asset price bubble we were living in and investing in over the last few years: The big question is how does this end? I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and […]
It’s 2020. Time to look forward to the decade that is upon us. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Bill Gates, is that people overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade. This is an important decade for mankind. It is a decade in which we will […]
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 are in the middle of one of the great asset bubbles of modern times. It has been brought on by the easy money policies of central banks around the world aimed at weathering the global Covid 19 pandemic. Interest rates are near zero or negative in most developed economies and asset prices have gone […]
Today's guest blogger needs no introduction. Joel Spolsky one of the best bloggers out there. He also runs one of our portfolio companies, Stack. And his approach to management is unorthodox at times but amazingly effective. I asked him to tell us a little about how he does it. I think you'll enjoy this post, […]
I was a T-Mobile customer for more than a decade from the late 90s until a year or two ago. I really enjoyed the experiece. I didn't know many other T-Mobile customers. That was fine with me. One by one, my family switched to AT&T. My kids went to AT&T for the iPhone when you […]
Entrepreneur: I plan to launch a better streaming music service. It leverages the data on what you and your friends currently listen to, combines that with the schedule of new music launches and acts that are touring in your city in the coming months and creates playlists of music that you should be listening to […]
obama_oj Originally uploaded by charmaine_cooper. When you walk into our conference room at Union Square Ventures, you see the box of cereal on the right on our conference room credenza next to a wifi router and a jar of Jolly Ranchers. It is there because we are big Obama fans? Nope. The cereal box is […]
I remember back in the mid 90s, I used to say with some pride that I had not lost money on any of my VC investments. Then one day, someone told me “then you are not taking enough risk.” I ended that streak of not losing money on VC investments in the late 90s in […]
I got an iPad for our home when the wifi version first came out. I used it for a day and then wrote a post about the iPad on the iPad. I was not very enthusiastic about the device. At the end of the review I said: Over time it may turn into a mainstream […]
I don't disagree with PG when he says that Facebook's IPO performance (or lack thereof) has the potential to impact valuations in startup land. I think it will be particularly impactful on the late stage and secondary markets where most of the IPO valuation speculation is happening. But let's put Facebook's current…
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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…
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 […]