Posts from May 2015

Philanthropy is most often seen as giving money to a cause and that is something we should all celebrate and do within our means to do so. But giving your time is just as important and it is something that way more of us can do.

This weekend I attended the ScriptEd Hackathon in the Google Cafeteria in the Google NYC offices. ScriptEd runs in-school and after-school coding classes in something like 15 NYC public schools.

These schools sent students to the Hackathon where they formed teams and built software projects around the theme of music.

In this photo I took of the event you will see people wearing blue shirts and orange shirts. The blue shirts are the students and the orange shirts are the volunteers.

There were almost as many volunteers as students at this event. Maybe that’s why the hacks were universally so good.

The winning team made a space invaders style game that dropped beats from Soundcloud tracks and the players needed to grab them as they came raining down.

Here is a photo of the winning team pitching me on their project.

I love Hackathons because they teach multiple things at the same time; building something quickly, working in teams, and pitching. That latter thing, explaining what you built, is such an important life skill and these kids are learning it in high school.

If you have some free time that you can volunteer, I highly recommend it. If you want to help kids learn to code, ScriptEd and Teals are two great programs to work with. They are doing important work.

It’s mother’s day and I find myself thinking about my girls, who are not mothers at this time in their lives. And yet they both have been working on projects involving motherhood this spring.

Emily wrote her bachelors thesis on the challenges of balancing motherhood and careers. She called it “Life Sequencing: A Viable Solution To Work-Life Conflict For High-Achieving Women” and it was a thorough investigation of the challenges of balancing work life issues and some possible answers.

Jessica has been making an Oculus Rift based immersive experience for an art show called Dear Mama where young artists are showing work  “in honor of Mother/s, mothering, motherhood: incl. all the shapes that role may take.”

Each, in their own way, are honoring their mother with their work and it is very satisfying for me to see that. Joanne is many things, but first and foremost she is a wonderful wife and mother, and it pleases me to no end to see her fine work reflected in our girls.

I’m also fortunate to have a loving mother of my own. I plan to call her this morning, then head to brunch with Joanne and Jessica, then to Jessica’s show to bask in art about motherhood.

Happy mother’s day everyone.

While I was at Disrupt last monday, I did two TV appearances. I posted this first one, CNBC, on Tuesday. Here’s the second one, on ABC’s Real Biz.

There are two other clips from that interview on YouTube:

On learning to code

On Bitcoin and Wearables

Since moving back from iPhone to Android, the thing that has been the most pleasing to me is the evolution of Google Calendar. It has gotten a lot better and it keeps getting better seemingly every day.

It is starting to understand things about my day that it did not understand before, like people, places, and things I do.

Here are some examples:

In this calendar entry, Google Calendar understands that I am going to this event with Joanne and inserts her photo into the calendar entry.

In this calendar entry, Google Calendar knows where this event is and puts a picture of the place right into the calendar so I know what it looks like.

In this calendar entry, Google Calendar knows where this event is and puts a map image right into the calendar so I know where I’m going.

In this calendar entry, Google knows what Yoga is and puts an image of a yoga mat right into the calendar entry.

And, naturally, I am getting notifications on my phone that are smart like “it’s time to leave for your breakfast in brooklyn.”

It might seem like a little thing to have a smarter calendar but to me it’s so fantastic. I love what Google is doing with this product and it’s a joy to use it.

We’ve been using a tool at USV recently that I like. It is called Survata and it allows to you to create a survey and then target it at whatever number of completes you want. You can target it to respondents in 17 countries “by age, gender, geography, and custom attributes.”

It is helpful for us to get a sense of what is going on in a market quickly. We generally go for thousands of completes and we get results within three to seven days. We have been paying between $1 and $2 per complete which, for us, is not a lot to get some answers quickly.

I am sure there are many services out there that do something like this. It’s not particularly difficult to offer a service like this. But the Survata user experience is simple, easy, fast, and affordable. We like it and are using frequently. I thought I’d share that with all of you.

When you set out to build a great company, it’s hard to know how you are doing along the way. There does come a time when you know you’ve done it. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce, Tesla, etc got there. We know that. And the founders of those companies know that too.

But two years in, three years in, four years in, it’s hard to know how you are doing. The market moves quickly. Customers are fickle. Competition emerges. Trusted team members leave. Your investors flake out on you. And so on and so forth.

So entrepreneurs want something they can hang on to. They wants a scorecard. A number. Validation that they are getting there.

And that thing is often valuation. If the “market” says you are now worth $1bn versus $500mm a year ago and $200mm two years ago and $50mm three years ago, then you are making good progress. The numbers tell you so. And it feels good.

Valuation can also be used to compare how you are doing against your friends. Your YC classmate got $100mm and you got $200mm. You are doing twice as well as she is. That feels good, at least it feels good to you.

Valuation is an entrepreneur’s scorecard. It has always been this way in startup land, but it is even more so these days when financings and the valuations are reported every day as the most important news items in the tech blogs. Tech blogs are the stock ticker of startup land. And entrepreneurs and everyone else around them watch the ticker waiting for the next “unicorn” to be printed.

I hate the word unicorn. It’s using fantasy to describe something very much reality. But I don’t want to digress from the larger point I’m making to go down the unicorn rat hole. Just please don’t use that word around me. I will likely throw up and that won’t be pleasant.

This obsession with valuation as the thing that tells you and the world how you are doing has a dark side. And that is because valuation is just a number. Unless you sell your business for cash at that price, valuation is just a theoretical value on your company. And it can change. Or you can get stuck there trying to justify it year after year all the while doing massive surgery to your cap table to sustain it.

And the markets can move on you and one day you are worth $2bn and the next day your are worth $500mm. Did you just mess up by 75%? No. The market moved on you.

The message of this post is don’t let yourself get sucked into a world where a number is your measure of self worth. Because you don’t control that number. The market does. And some days the market is your friend and other days it is most decidedly not your friend.

Measure yourself on whether your employees are happy. Measure yourself on whether your customers are happy. Measure yourself on how much free cash flow your business is generating. Measure yourself on how your brand is known and appreciated around the world. Measure yourself on how your spouse and children feel about you when you come home from work each day. You control all of those things, at least to some degree.

But please don’t measure yourself on valuation. It might make you feel good today. But it won’t make you feel good every day.

I spoke at Techcrunch Disrupt yesterday and several media outlets had crews there. I was asked to speak to a few of them and I said yes. I was on CNBC and ABC News yesterday morning. To my knowledge the ABC News clip is not yet up. But CNBC put up three clips that I believe, in their totality, make up my entire appearance. So here they are in order and sorry about the pre-roll videos in front of all three. I looked for a single clip for the entire interview but could not find it.

It’s easy to dismiss ideas after the first attempt fails, but I don’t think we should do that. Instead we should learn from what worked and what didn’t.

I saw the news that the Mayweather fight was watched on Periscope by many people and thought “that was the same thing that used to happen on Justin.tv.” Justin.tv failed, or actually pivoted into a big success, but Justin.tv did not work as a business. I’m not saying Periscope or YouNow (our bet in that sector) will be successful but if they have learned from what worked at Justin.tv and what did not, they will have a better chance of success.

I’m reading Nathaniel Popper‘s excellent history of Bitcoin called Digital Gold (out May 19, available for pre-order) and he goes all the way back to the mid 90s to tell the story of the development of Bitcoin. In 1997, Adam Back invented Hashcash as an early attempt to create a digital currency. It failed as a digital currency in its own right, but later emerged as the proof of work algorithm in Bitcoin.

It’s easy to look at Bitcoin and say “that came out of nowhere”, but the truth is Bitcoin emerged from several decades of work in cryptography, peer to peer networks, and digital currencies. Satoshi had some breakthrough ideas in his white paper, but much of it was inspired by earlier work done by others.

That’s the way it always is. In tech, in literature, in the arts, and in most everything.

Tomorrow, Ron Conway and I are going to kick off Disrupt NY 2015, with a fireside chat with Kim-Mai Cutler. We plan to discuss philanthropy and civic involvement. I’m looking forward to this talk. I think folks in the tech sector need to embrace philanthropy and civic involvement and I look forward to making the case for that.

I’ve been working in the VC business since the mid 80s. And for most of that time, I’ve felt that the tech sector was surprisingly uninterested and uninvolved in things outside of the tech sector. That’s a great strength of the tech sector, it’s is focused on innovation, making things, and building companies. And it does not get distracted by things outside of that realm.

But we know that the things we make and the companies we build have great impact on those outside of the tech sector. It can be for the good, like building cars that don’t use carbon fuels and showing the auto industry that it can be a good business to do that. It can be for the bad, like automating away jobs that once paid the way for a middle class lifestyle.

It feels to me that our economy and our society is now deeply entwined with technology and being significantly impacted by it. If that is true, I believe it is shortsighted to avoid getting engaged in the discussions and debates about what kind of world we need to work toward. I think one way or another the tech sector is going to get pulled into these debates. It will be one thing if that happens thoughtfully and positively and another if the tech sector is pulled into them kicking and screaming.

Regular readers of this blog know that my partners and I have been involved in these discussions since we started USV over a decade ago. We spend our time, energy, and capital in areas like policy debates, philanthropy, and civic engagement. There are others in the tech sector who do the same. Ron Conway comes to mind as someone who has spent a similar amount of time, energy, and capital on this stuff. And I am thrilled to share the stage with him tomorrow as we discuss these issues.

We go on stage at 9:05am eastern tomorrow. I’m hoping the talk will be livestreamed and you can watch it live. If it is, it will be somewhere like here.