Posts from Weblogs

Subscribing To AVC

For many years, there were three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ X – Follow AVC on X

X revoked the API access that I was using to autopost three or four months ago. I have not been active on that service for almost a year now and have no interest in dealing with it.

So if you are one of the 25.5k followers on X and want to keep getting alerted when I post, I suggest you go with option 1 or option 2 going forward. There is also a new third option that I will talk about at the end of this post.

If you subscribe to AVC via RSS, you are likely using the old Feedburner feed. That has become unreliable and I would suggest moving to the Feedblitz feed which also powers the AVC email delivery.

I finally moved the email delivery off the old Feedburner feed this week when last week’s post did not go out via email. I suspect most of you missed it as a result.

All of this is a perfect example of the fragility of relying on centralized services like X and Feedburner (owned by Google). USV was an early investor in both services and I was a big user of them.

But all things come to an end in the world of centralized services and the challenges of getting AVC delivered to the ~100,000 subscribers reminded me of that last week.

There is a world where services just keep running because they are open source and decentralized. I wrote about that back in June and I am excited about that world to emerge.

AVC is available in the decentralized world and you can subscribe there if you’d like.

So now there are three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ Web3 – Subscribe to AVC on Mirror

If you are using the email delivery method, you are all good. If you are using the old RSS feed or X, I would suggest moving to something else. Or you could just stop getting AVC if that suits you. Many of you already have thanks to X and Google (and me).

#Web/Tech#Web3#Weblogs

Going From One Hundred To Four

Joe Hovde wrote a blog post about AVC last week. He analyzed all of the blog posts on AVC to find trends and other interesting tidbits.

He charted the number of posts a month I have written here over the last nineteen years.

He observed:

he treated the blog similarly to a twitter account before Twitter blew up, and then settled in to a daily posting habit for the next 15 years, slowing down a bit in the last 2.

He is correct, AVC was like Twitter in the early days with upwards of four posts a day, which helped me see the value of Twitter when it launched in 2006. Post Twitter, I moved to posting daily for a decade, and then I have gradually slowed the pace to a post a week in the last few years.

Joe also shows how the topics have changed over the years:

While that is directionally correct, I am not sure the TD-IF methodology he uses is that insightful. I think an analysis of the post categories I used during these eras would be more useful. But he is 100% correct that my interests have evolved over the years and my writing has reflected that.

I enjoyed reading Joe’s post. It is a trip down memory lane for the nineteen years that I’ve been writing AVC. Thanks for doing this Joe.

#Weblogs

The New AVC

AVC has been around for nineteen years and it has evolved over the years from a place I’d post multiple times a day to once a day to now once a week. There was a time when there was a vibrant comment community at AVC with many posts getting over a hundred comments and replies. That’s long gone and now it is just me posting here with some chatter occasionally on Twitter.

As anyone who has tried knows, posting every day is a mighty big commitment. I am relieved to have given that up, gradually, a few years ago.

What is left at AVC is a place where I can write when I have something to say that I want to say out loud. That last bit is important because there are many things I will say privately these days but not publicly. At this stage of my life, AVC is for conversations that are helpful, productive, and constructive. Everything else can happen elsewhere.

The entire catalog of AVC posts remains online and can be accessed in the archives. If anyone wants to see the progression, it is right there out in the open for anyone to see. The comments are there too for the posts that have them.

The AVC archives are a journey through the evolution of social media. From an experiment in the early 2000s, to a happening in the late 2000s, to mainstream in the early 2010s, to a mess in the late 2010s, to something to be incredibly careful with now.

At least that is my journey with social media. I continue to believe that technology that gives everyone a voice, that gave me a voice, is an incredible thing. But like many incredibly powerful technologies, it has to be used carefully or it can create more bad than good.

And that’s what I’m seeking to do here at AVC. Create more good than bad. Use the technology carefully and constructively. It has taken me a few years to land here but I’ve been here for a while now and I thought I’d explain it that I understand it myself.

#Weblogs

AVC Infrastructure

A reader asked me if I had ever written about the infrastructure I use to run AVC. We both searched the archives and could not find a post on that topic.

So here it is:

1/ Content Management System – WordPress – I use the open source software version of WordPress to write these posts and manage them.

2/ Hosting Provider – Cloudways – I have used a number of hosting providers over the years. If you use WordPress, it is fairly easy to migrate from one to another. Cloudways is the current favorite.

3/ Comments – Twitter Comments Plugin – I have used various comment systems over the years. I am currently using a WordPress plugin to host the comments on Twitter.

4/ Email – Feedblitz – This allows me to send an email out to over 30,000 people whenever I post.

5/ Search – Algolia – Fast and simple site search.

It’s relatively easy to set all of this up and then you are not locked into a service provider. I strongly recommend this approach.

#Weblogs

Decentralized Media

Back in the early 2000s, it was exciting to blog and use social networks to create our own media and move away from the traditional media outlets. That was the pull that got me into blogging and got me investing in Twitter. It was a powerful feeling.

But a decade and a half later, it is obvious that we just replaced one type of media company for another and that we don’t really control our own media yet. I have a bit more control over this blog because I run it on my own domain using open source WordPress software, but most people are blogging on Medium or Substack or some other centralized service these days. And the social media platforms, well we know all about them in the wake of recent takedowns. You don’t control your own media platform if you run it on a centralized service.

So a few months ago, I mirrored this blog on Mirror, a decentralized blogging platform. You can view it here.

And yesterday, I claimed @fredwilson on Bitclout with this tweet:

Around that same time, I saw this post on Bitclout:

Here is the thing about blockchains and crypto – the data is public on the blockchain. Nobody controls it other than you with your private keys. And when you put open source software together with that, you get decentralized applications that nobody can mess with, not even the creators of those applications.

I don’t know if Mirror is the new WordPress or if Bitclout is the new Twitter. We will see. But it sure feels like we are back in the early 2000s again, experimenting with decentralizing media. I have the same feeling of excitement I had back then.

#blockchain#crypto#Weblogs

Typos

Yesterday’s post has this line in it:

I suspect all buy maybe two of those eleven funds have outperformed the public markets

As you can see, there is a typo there. “buy” should be “but”

A number of readers let me know about the typo, which I very much appreciate.

But for some reason, I am not all that motivated to change it.

I make typos all of the time in my emails and texts and other informal communication.

And I am increasingly seeing AVC as another form of informal communication.

AVC is me. I am human. Humans are imperfect. So AVC should be imperfect.

So there it is. I am letting it stand.

#Weblogs

Most Read Blog Posts On AVC

Last month, I wrote about the value of having a list of the most read posts on a blog. I said I wanted to create that for AVC.

Well, I am pleased to let you all know that we built it and it is now live on the AVC archives page. It looks like this:

I am very happy to see Fake Grimlock’s “Minimum Viable Personality” guest post on the list. I stopped having guests posts quite a few years ago now, but no question that was the very best of them.

The other one that I am happy to see on the list is “Employee Equity: How Much?” I know that post has helped so many founders think about that topic over the years.

This is a dynamic list. It pulls from AVC’s Google Analytics account and it will change over time. But some of these posts will stay on it, like the two I mentioned and probably a few others too.

I hope you all like this new feature. I think it is quite useful.

#Weblogs

Controlling Your Destiny

I am returning to a theme that I feel quite strongly about.

I blog on WordPress using a host that I have selected and can move from at any time. WordPress is open source software and I can download it and run it on my own machines if I want to. I don’t. But being able to do that is key.

Medium and Substack and Clubhouse and Twitter, etc, etc are fantastic. They make it drop dead simple for anyone to share their thoughts with the world.

But they are controlled by someone else. You can get kicked off. And when you get kicked off, you lose all of your followers, all of your content. Gone.

I’m not down for that.

Nor should you be.

#life lessons#Weblogs

Most Read Blog Posts

On the USV website, we show the most read blog posts by author.

Here are mine:

I want to do this for AVC too. I will ask my partner Nick who managed the construction of USV.com how he did that and will see if I can get that working on AVC.

When you’ve written 8,800 posts, there are sure to be some duds and some great ones. It would be nice to showcase the great ones.

#Weblogs

Some Email Stats

I was looking at my Feedblitz dashboard this morning. Feedblitz powers the daily email for this blog.

These are all of the emails/blog posts I have done this month:

As you can see the open rate hovers between a low of 33% (Ghost Pacer) and a high of 45% (Subscription Agreements).

The unsubscribe rate ranges from 0.02% to 0.075% (on my birthday!).

I suspect the click data is not instrumented properly because I can’t imagine that nobody clicks on any links in the posts. But since I am not trying to generate clicks, I don’t really care too much about that.

I don’t view AVC as an email newsletter. I view it as a blog. But it is both and this data shows that lots of people get it that way and enjoy it. That’s great.

#Weblogs