Posts from 2014

My partner Brad, who is the conscience of USV, said something in one of our recent monday team meetings that has been rattling in my brain ever since. It was a throwaway line for him. He probably doesn’t even remember it. But I do.

We were talking about some investment opportunity and one of us turned to him and asked him what he thought. He said, “I generally can’t get excited about anything that is this for that.”

What he meant by “this for that” is Airbnb for boats, or Snapchat for emails, or Dropbox for videos.

What Brad is talking about is derivative works. There is nothing wrong with them, of course. But he was saying that it was hard for him to get excited about them.

We’ve made a few of these investments and some of them have worked out pretty well.Edmodo is Facebook for classrooms. SoundCloud is YouTube for audio.

If you are going to do a “this for that” investment, the first thing you need to make sure is the iconic company (this) is not going to go after this other market (that) themselves. Then you need to make sure the other market (that) is very large. And finally, you need to make sure that the founders are doing the startup for the right reasons.

Nic and Jeff, the founders of Edmodo, were tech administrators in local school systems. They were frustrated with the tools teachers were using to distribute information to their students. So they built a new way to do it, influenced by Facebook for sure, but different in some important ways.

Alex and Eric, the founders of SoundCloud, were musicians and sound engineers. They were frustrated by the tools that were available to them and their friends to put the sounds they were making out onto the Internet. They may have been influenced by YouTube (I honestly don’t know that they were), but their drive to make SoundCloud was most certainly to scratch an itch, just like Nic and Jeff.

The worst kind of “this for that” startup is one where you can tell that the founders have no intrinsic desire to build a solution for a recognized problem, but instead they are opportunists being influenced by the latest hot startup. We certainly try to avoid those sorts of things and comments like Brad’s certainly helps us do that.

My partner Albert gave a great talk at DLD. It’s short (15mins) and I would highly recommend everyone give it a watch this weekend.

In the google maps android app, if you search for a place, you can click the share icon and send that location to anyone via a wide assortment of apps. I did that last night and emailed this to myself.

Buvette

http://goo.gl/maps/7dzMz

I absolutely love this feature and use it all the time. I email places to people, I kik places to people, I text places to people, I tweet places to people.

But for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to do this on the web. When I locate a place on Google Maps on the web and select Share, the only option I get is to share the place via Google+ which is the one way I would not want to share it.

Does anyone know how to locate a place on Google Maps on the web, pin it, and then share it out via a shortlink in email or otherwise?

I am sorry for turning back to back feature fridays into Google Apps help requests, but I love these features and then they go and change them on me and I can’t figure out how to get them back.

One morning earlier this week, I came down early and was working in our family room/kitchen area. My oldest daughter was charging her iPhone in the kitchen and it was randomly playing music. I would get up, turn off the music, and then a few minutes later, it would start again. Eventually I turned off the phone.

A bit later, when my daugher came down, she was in shock, her phone had randomly called dozens of her contacts on its own over the night.

So I took a look at her phone and it seemed that voice control had taken over her phone. I googled around to see what could be done and came up with this support forum thread. It explained that we could turn off voice dialing which we did, so that she would stop randomly dialing her contacts. But we were not able to turn off voice control entirely.

She’s in Park City this week so when she gets back to NYC, she will take the phone into the genius bar and get it fixed. But until then, Siri is controlling her phone. Randomly playing music when she doesn’t want it. Randonly facetiming people she doesn’t want to talk to. It’s a glimpse of the future to when AI goes haywire on us. It is not pleasant.

I told a Rob Kalin story yesterday and I am going to start this post with another one. When Rob left Etsy for the second time, it fell to me to tell everyone what was happening at the company’s all hands meeting. I asked Rob what he wanted me to tell the several hundred employees who would assemble to hear the news. Often there is a story concocted about the founder or CEO wanting to step back, take more time with their family, needing a break, etc. And so I wanted Rob to tell me how he wanted this story told.

Rob said “Tell them you fired me. They will know anyway. You might as well tell them the truth.” So that’s what I did, with empathy, respect, and appreciation for Rob and his work. It went well. The team was happy that I was being straight with them. I then handed the stage to Chad who took it from there and has been doing a great job ever since.

I don’t tell that story to bring up old unhappy times. Although it may for some. I tell it because Rob had the courage to allow me to tell it like it is.

And yesterday Chris Poole told it like it is. With a blog post that is simple, honest, and sad. He made the decision that our portfolio company Canvas has failed. Running out of money is always the thing that brings this moment of reality. But so often an acquihire is arranged, or the company is put on mothballs, or you just stop hearing about the company. The story of failure is buried.

I prefer the way Chris did it. We tried, it didn’t work, we failed.

The truth is, as Chris explained in his post, that the first product Canvas was a failure. The pivot to DrawQuest came too late, took too long, and now DrawQuest is a succeeding product inside a failing company. I know that Chris is going to try to find a way to keep DrawQuest going. It’s got 400,000 people who use it every month and 25,000 people who use it every day. But it has not monetized particularly well and the Company hasn’t found a good way to inject virality into the product so it can spread without expensive marketing dollars. If you know of a good home or a good steward for DrawQuest, email me. There is a contact link in the footer of this blog that will send me an email.

Chris says he is going to blog about the things he learned from this experience. Chris hates writing. But I think he will do this, as therapy for him, and as a post mortem for him and everyone else. So pay attention to his blog, subscribe to his RSS, or follow it on Tumblr.

Like his post yesterday, I expect Chris will continue to tell it like it is.

My friend Gary said this to me the other day in an email. He wasn’t talking about me but he could have beeen. Last night I went to bed thinking about my work, dreamt about my work, and woke up thinking about my work. It’s been that way for me since I started Flatiron in the mid 90s. To some extent it’s been that way for me since college. Fortunately I have the Gotham Gal and three awesome kids to keep me from going fully into the fire. I spent the past four days skiing wtih my family and some new friends and enjoyed it immensely. If anything I am letting my work sit idle in my brain more these days than I have in a long time.

What Gary was talking about when he wrote those words to me was failure. And when you are your work, your failure at work is personal. Deeply personal. When Flatiron melted down after four great years and one awful one, it was painful. I went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. It was the best thing I could have done. I had been to see coaches but I had not taken the deeper dive into what was driving me. A few years later I was energized and Brad and I started USV.

Failure can sow the seeds of success. It did for me. It did for Mark Pincus when he turned the failure of Tribe into the success of Zynga. It has done the same for countless others. But to get through failure, you need to be able to separate who you are and what your work is.

One of my favorite lines from an entrepreneur came from Rob Kalin. I am sure I’ve shared it here a few times. He said “I am an artist. Making websites is my medium right now” That’s a helpful way for entrepreneurs to think about their work. They are the painter. Some paintings will hang in the MOMA and others will sit gathering dust in a storage room. Not every thing you create will be brilliant. But you can be brilliant while still making work that isn’t, particularly if you understand why the work that wasn’t great wasn’t great.

Jerry ended his amazing post with the observation that “I have to understand this viscerally if I’m going to be of service to my clients”. When your work is servicing entrepreneurs, it is actually pretty easy to “understand this viscerally”. Their failure is your failure. Their success is your success. Their work is your work. But it is not you.

I spent some time analyzing the top tags used to post stories on usv.com. Here is the tag cloud:

There are some redundant terms in the tag cloud (ie startups/startup), so I put the tags into a spreadsheet and cleaned it up a bit.

This data is not what is most interesting and relevant to USV, although it includes USV as a subset. This is what is most interesting and relevant to the community of people who are using usv.com. I suppose our areas of interest and focus impact that quite a bit, but it’s worth noting that this is a larger sample size than just the USV team.

Clearly, things like startups, venture capital, growth, and funding are going to be at the top of the list. That is our business and the business of the entrepreneurs who largely make up the USV community.

But what is more interesting is what interest areas are top of mind. Those are bitcoin, mobile, privacy/surveillance, education, cloud, health, security, and crowdfunding. We think of mobile and cloud as the important enabling technologies of the moment we are in. The rest are markets that we are talking about and thinking a lot about right now.

So usv.com is a good mirror reflection of what is interesting and relevent to USV right now. That’s a good thing.

One of the big european tech conferences starts today. It’s called DLD and my partner Albert is giving a talk there tomorrow. The last big european tech conference was LeWeb and I gave a talk there. You might wonder why we fly across the pond to attend and talk at these events.

The answer, as Sten Tamkivi explains in TechCrunch, is that europe is a great place to invest in startups. Sten lists five reasons that european startups are exciting:

1) Talent

2) New Models

3) 400 million customers

4) Global skills

5) Security and privacy

I agree with all of those but to me the biggest thing is european entrepreneurs have fully made the change from locally focused to globally focused and are mostly now building businesses that can and do serve a global user base from day one.

At USV, we have made nine investments in europe since 2008 when we started investing there. That is roughly 20% of our total investment activity in those six years. Contrast that with the bay area, where we have made thirteen investments during the same period.

It is way easier to invest in europe from New York City than the Bay Area and that is something we have taken advantage of. And I am not sure that Silicon Valley can or will pay a huge amount of attention to Europe. But that is an opportunity for us. And we are taking advantage of it.

There is a part of this interview that’s really great. About 3:40mins into this video Charlie Rose asked Lou about “work” and the next 2 1/2 minutes is a discussion about Andy Warhol, working hard, and being productive as the key to making an impact. I’ve found that to be true in my life as well.