Musings of a VC in NYC
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I read the ESPN piece on Kevin Love and other NBA players’ mental health issues this morning. My son had sent it to me yesterday. The bit about his panic attack during an Atlanta Hawks game, initially disclosed in this piece Kevin wrote on The Players Tribune, was particularly hard to read. Kevin Love started […]
I've recently come back to yoga after a five year hiatus. I didn't realize how much my body missed it. I stopped doing yoga because I couldn't handle the mental aspect of the practice. I struggle with being present mentally for 90 minutes. In fact, I find it impossible. Even as I've come back to […]
Back when we started USV in 2003/2004, we used to see a lot of side projects that had taken off and were turning into companies. We funded at least one such side project, Delicious, which ended up getting sold to Yahoo! a few years later. But I remember that we would see one or two […]
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…
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
I have said many times that early stage VC is a lot like baseball, if you get a hit one out of every three times, you are headed to the hall of fame. And if I look back over my career, and also over the track records of the firms and funds I have helped […]
One mistake I see startups make a lot is getting too focused on what is going on around them. They spend too much time trying to figure out what their competitors are going to do. They watch the next hot startup with jealousy and it reminds them of when they were that "shiny new thing" […]
We were in a board meeting today and the founder/CEO made a comment about a deal he's working on and I said "well you learned that well in school." He smiled and said, "we didn't go to school" (meaning college). I didn't actually know that, but it did not surprise me. I have learned that […]
I spent a lot of time on this blog in the past month exhorting everyone to give teaching tools to the neediest public schools. I did that because education is possibly the most important thing we can do for our world and our children. But I also believe the the public school system in this […]