$2 billion in fives and tens

Comments (Archived):

1. Kickstarter, the new five and dime.

   1. well played Jim

   2. You date yourself and made me lol. My grandparents owned and operated one.

      1. Happy to oblige

      2. cool.remember going to one often and it had a soda counter as well–egg creams.next store to the record shop.

2. My favorite slide…

   1. It is very cool that Kickstarter is so distinctly uncommercial.They talk so little about market success.

   2. that’s a good one

3. fives and tens have always been the atomic units of a studio’s finance. its millions are an aggregation of fives and tens.i’m not convinced about consensus art.

   1. To my mind, kickstarter should not be about gaining consensus, rather it should be the final step of a project. Once all the planning, inspiration, execution has become evident – and a market is targeted, then the art is funded and shipped, using KS as a communication and execution platform. To use KS as a popularity contest is to misuse it…to me anyways.

      1. it seems like a popularity contest.

         1. I agree, most of the time it is.

   2. This is an interesting contrarian comment.

4. A trick I learned from John Dimatos at Kickstarter: pledge $1 just to stay updated on the status of a project.

   1. Why do you care about updates if you don’t care enough to support the project?

      1. Can you up the ante later in a project cycle, once you are comfortable the project is working out as planned?

         1. I guess but that is not why I nor I believe, the majority of people’s reason for supportingThis is support from the heart through and through. That’s the power and the magic.

      2. Best practices

         1. Top down academic approach.You want to learn best practices, get involved.Know a few deeply rather than many skin deep is how true knowledge is gained.

            1. I agree. Get involved. Get hands dirty. Get heart & soul & assumptions about startups broken, repeatedly.Survive those processes and you’ll learn more and thrive, :*).

            2. What are the different ways people can get involved in a startup at a low level?

            3. (1.) Go to hackathons. Even if you don’t code, your knowhow could save the team 48 hours of coding the wrong thing:* https://www.startupgrind.co…SIT with the team and roll up sleeves for a few hours; not just be at the demos at the end.(2.) Make a habit of going to a co-working space where startups are based and get interested in what they’re making. Offer to listen to their pitch and provide constructive feedback based on your domain expertise.In your case, I know this is Marketing & Comms which are also very valuable to startups because engineers can always do with Comms pointers.(3.) Be a connector for startups. If you know great mentors who can help them navigate specific problems (legal, engineering, customers etc) put that magic together.

            4. Great ideas. Raises the question of why there isn’t a community site dedicated exactly to some of the above ideas (particularly #3 and “sit with the team”). Seems a structure could be put to this that would benefit all people who would like to get involved in some way with startups.

            5. Incubators have been set-up to connect founders with more resources. Some work, some are distractions from execution.I prefer to “sit with the team” and hack the problem (even if it means committing an entire weekend) rather than only appear for 3-minute demos.It means a deeper insight into WHY they made the choices they did: product use case, technologies used — sometimes because a Raspberry Pi really doesn’t behave so an Arduino’s better or because the devs only know Python so even if it would have been better to do it in Swift the team has to make do with Py — and design evolution.When I’m there from ideation through build and pitch => team always wins one of the Top 3 prizes.When I only pop by for an hour or so to do a few slides as a favor to whoever’s product idea is being built => team doesn’t win anything.Being hands-on makes a big difference.

            6. .Go to Taco Deli on Lamar?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

            7. Haha, brilliant. Yes, fast food franchises are startups too.

            8. .That’s where all the hipsters and entrepreneurs meet in Austin. It is my go to place for meetings with my TechStars mentees. That and Texas French Bread by the University of Texas.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

            9. When Pizzeria Vetri opens at UT Austin let me know how that is. I helped him with his resume (at the request of his father) before he hit the food industrial complex big time.

            10. .They have a good location right off The Drag (Guadalupe) across from UT. I think they are a few months from opening. They will crush it in that location.http://austin.eater.com/201…JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

            11. A few years ago he opened a larger eatery in the suburbs of Philly which I said at the time (to my wife) was a way for him to test a concept and expand nationally. (His father had a small chain of jewelry stalls in malls about 25 of them so it’s in his blood I guess to show the old man he can do it bigger than he could). That was my theory.Anyway, he is closing that place (after 2 years):http://www.philly.com/phill…My guess is that he found it was hard to get quality help in the suburbs and hold it together as opposed to in the city where labor is much different. Labor is not a problem on a college campus either I would imagine.So now what appears to be happening is he is going for a much simpler concept (pizza) where quality, labor and expectations are way different than in a full service restaurant. He will almost certainly roll this out nationally if the Austin place works. Sure it’s a great location however I am sure his rent costs reflect that fact.I missed an opportunity to invest in all of this btw. (Way back in 1997 or 1998 when he started..) One reason was his own father didn’t have confidence in what he was doing he didn’t want to give him any money.

            12. .Nobody around the campus makes a really good, authentic NYC or Jersey Shore pizza.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

            13. Well I guess it has to do with traditionally who opens up Pizza restaurants, eh?A new place opened in the back of a shopping center across from my office. Before the guy opened I walked in and told “mr owner guy” he should put flyers out to our complex because nobody will know he is there. Also maybe walk around with free samples one day. (Same as I told the cupcake place when they opened several years ago. Guerilla marketing.A month later, haven’t seen any samples, haven’t seen any flyers and I know the guy needs business. The cupcake place closed already.Whatever the secret is to NYC or Jersey Shore pizza it’s not guarded and in a vault somewhere. Would seem to be trivial to get a job at a place that sells it for a day and reverse engineer the ingredients and the process. That’s what I did when I opened my first business out of college. Spent exactly a day in a place and asked questions and took it from there.

            14. A-ha, I see. Plus now I’ve learnt you’re a TechStars mentor like William!In London, hipsters hang out around Truman Brewery, Shoreditch at w/e. Financiers are in Mayfair. Devs & starter-uppers are at Google Campus, Shoreditch.

            15. .There is a real estate culture around startups, isn’t there?Filled with energy and vibrancy.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

            16. It’s gotten better. Google Campus did a lot to anchor and base the startup scene.There was a time investors wouldn’t venture to Shoreditch but now several of them have offices in Clerkenwell which is closer to Shoreditch than Mayfair.My VC firm was exactly on Berkeley Square with its gentrified park. The Rolls Royce showroom is literally on the corner of the square. Before that, we were near Harley Street.Mayfair = dress like Park Avenue princess / preppy out of ‘Town & Country’ magazine.Shoreditch = sneakers, jeans, hoodie. URBAN. HIPSTER.

            17. .Dress like your customers?Now, you don’t have to go to the Dale Carnegie course.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

            18. Ever since I was a baby I’ve been a chameleon in how I dress. It’s the external expression of my artistic soul, after all, :*).

      3. He works for Kickstarter, so he’s backed something like 400 projects. That’s how he keeps updated. Also, to learn, as Rich said.

5. Love Kickstarter.

   1. That “also receive two” line is a cunning one – promotes virality. The others also match the theme of virality and optimism. On the non-funded side, we have more evidence that the impression of desperation is something that people avoid from (1), (2), and (5). (4) suggests that specifics are helpful, and (3) that it should be about the product being made rather than the person making it, but those conclusions feel more like reading tea leaves to me than more solid inferences.

      1. Always be serving end-user not your team’s ego / vanity.

         1. It can also denote what type of products are more most funded, or get more money overall.

            1. Relatability.That’s a key element in why some founders / startups / products succeed whilst others don’t.Someone I know recently launched a Kickstarter for a smart bike compass which he pitches as being more user-friendly than iPhone directions and Google Maps.There are lots of people who cycle so they can relate to this problem and to the founder’s cause.There are a lot less people who would, for example, fund a time travel machine because it’s just so far out of our everyday needs.

            2. For the time machine, there’s also the somewhat facetious objection of “if it worked, wouldn’t someone have sent back the blueprints already?” 😉

         2. Actually, let me rephrase my last clause: I’m pretty sure the conclusions are valid, it’s just that the phrases in question aren’t particularly strong premises in support of said conclusions.

   2. Great one. Is there a link for the original article. I will need this for my upcoming book campaign (shhh)…Will I see in London next week?

      1. Data Scientists version of how Georgia Tech compiled that list (for data gurus like Rich):* https://comp.social.gatech….Regular person’s version from Mashable:* http://mashable.com/2014/01…

         1. I’ll just ask you to run analysis on my next crowdfunding campaign before I launch it – k, thanks! 😉

            1. It’s simple.(1.) Speak to people’s hearts.(2.) Yes, your gizmo may be engineering genius like Airbus but …(3.) People can only see the surface and they only care it gets them from A to B in a happy way.The measure of a founder / team is how we make it simple and useful for users whilst being able to see and solve the deeper and harder problems.The best Kickstarter campaigns show+tell their solutions simply.

         2. It would be nice if they showed 3-word and 4-word phrases..

      2. Yes, LDN for Ethereum DevCon next week. Re. “Turing-complete”, a Turing machine is said to be embodiment of an “intuitive notion of an algorithm”.That’s a BIT (pun intended) of an oxymoron. No machine’s passed the Turing Test precisely because no algorithm’s ever been successfully and coherently structured for intuition (emotions, perceptions, subjective and cultural biases).Turing’s equations are actually…incomplete, imo. They’re consistent with probability theory, game theory and set theory but missing the functions for subjective and cultural expressions in language.Yes, Princeton’s Eugene Goostman supposedly “passed” Turing Test and fooled AI researchers and journalists into thinking it was human over 1000’s of questions but I uncovered it was a bot within ONE question.No human — not even an ironic teenager which Eugene was supposed to ape — would answer: “I never tried eating or feel humorous. Is it good?”Plus I made Princeton’s system crash, LOL.

         1. Not that this is saying anything new, but – why design machines to imitate, when they can complement? Diversity of thought is proving desirable in other endeavors (y’know, like entrepreneurship)… and this answers the question in at least two ways. That is, we can let humans do what we’re best at, and cover for computers’ weaknesses the way they do ours; but also, we can keep trying to come up with software to pass that Turing Test in order to gain more insight into how we, ourselves, think.As for the approaches to the Turing Test you describe, I’d agree – they’re trying to copy the canopy but ignoring the roots.

            1. Oh the machines are great at doing grunt work with “Big Data” and narrow use cases like playing chess and other games well.It’s just when people claim AI’s now as intelligent and can think like us, understand language and pass Turing / Ada machine intelligence tests that all sorts of arguments happen in the community.The stupidity of the machines:* https://nplusonemag.com/iss…

            2. Out of curiosity – I know the evolutionary approach to machine learning has tried setting various specific goals, like “get really high Pac-Man scores” (and more serious ones I can’t remember offhand). Has there been any attempt to do this at one step higher – that is, “get a really fast-learning algorithm, as judged by the amount of time it takes to optimize for each of these wildly disparate tests”?(That said, I realize that this test would take rather substantially longer than the previous sorts, simply because it contains a lot of those previous sorts)

            3. No. The machines can only focus on one game and one defined data corpus at a time:* Deep Blue = chess* IBM Watson = Jeopardy* Deep Mind = Atari 2600* Giraffe = chess* Facebook = Go (not solved yet)AI is NOT intelligent like we are. For example, they can’t go from playing chess to doing cartwheels to speaking & understanding Spanish to swimming to playing pretend to being able to tell they don’t like vegetables like 5 year olds can.

            4. Go is getting a lot lot closer.

            5. NONE of the games being used to train AI get us closer to human intelligence.Why not? Because all of them are about zero-sum scenarios. There is only 1 winner in chess, Go, Atari etc. and they’re exercises in mathematical optimization and probability rather than in collaboration and coherency.Human intelligence is based on collaboration and coherency. It’s not zero-sum in the first place and it’s about much more than mathematical optimization and probability.

            6. there is some movement in that direction, I could have sworn, in terms of using Ai to augment people.

         2. Ethereum is quasi-Turing complete. That’s sufficient.

            1. Yes … Only you do know I’m rewriting Turing’s “Can machines think?”, John Nash’s game theory and Hopfield theory, right?When was my first exposure to Cryptography? 11.My teachers made me sit an IQ test. Then the Royal Society sent my parents a letter saying I was invited to Maths masterclasses. They taught us about Turing.

            2. Wow.

            3. One of my first bosses:* https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…Now, it would have been interesting to ask him to think about Blockchain+Bitcoin because he knew more about node theory and Quantum Physics than a lot of people.Sadly, he passed away before Blockchain+Bitcoin took off.

            4. Why and how are Turing and Nash theorems incomplete?They don’t factor in the perception-emotion states of the variables during the games.So then … folks will say, “Ok then! Let’s include some emotion variables in the algorithms” (as Facebook is now doing with its emotion buttons, by the way — and which Twitter will likely copy because they tend to follow FB).However, please note:(1.) “The key challenge here is to establish a standard for what is definitively “happy,” “sad,” “angry” or another state, because right now, many apps and devices that claim to read emotions aren’t drawing from one definitive standard.”* http://techcrunch.com/2015/…And the thing about Maths and algorithm models is…THERE NEEDS TO BE ONE UNIVERSAL DEFINITIVE STANDARD.After all, we can’t have someone in the US saying 8 x 8 = 64 whilst someone in China says 8 x 8 = 46.(2.) Human Emotion: The One Thing the Internet Can’t Buy* http://www.nytimes.com/2015…In any case, in 2009, I wrote some Quantum notation which caused an IBM Deep Computing council member to write, “Twain, you’re a true Renaissance Man! That’s amazing integration!”This was very funny because — just as on AVC and as when I was a banker … folks reading me digitally without having seen me IRL assume I’m a guy — until I share that I am, in fact, female.Ah and my string of Quantum notation is Turing-complete and conforms with Einstein-Schrodinger and Hamiltonians and transforms Hopfield and Nash.I wrote that equation FIVE YEARS ago before Max Tegmark of MIT published ‘Consciousness as a matter of state’ in 2014, wherein he comments on but can’t solve those particular paradoxes.So … those are some of my adventures with Turing since childhood to-date.The possible permutations for:* Cryptography (Twain) >>> Cryptography (Turing);* Game Theory (Twain) >>> Game Theory (Nash);* Graph Theory (Twain) >>> Graph Theory (Euler).So then some people will ask, “Well what about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem?” which points out we can’t possibly work out all the numbers.Well… system COHERENCY is more valuable than having a complete set of numbers, imo.Blockchain+Bitcoin won’t be affected by my algorithms … for now … because the hardware of existing computing devices (PCs, tablets, mobiles, wearables, et al) remains based on Turing-VonNeumann-McCarthy-Hopfield principles of bits and computing power.However, just as 2015’s Blockchain complements the missing protocols of the Internet from 1995 and now 21 tries to be that hardware upgrade …So in the decades ahead when there are better Quantum servers … there’s no knowing how my algorithms will affect the definitions for Blockchain+Bitcoin, trust, identity and valuation.

            5. by quasi you mean?

            6. It means a program won’t run indefinetely in case it’s not fully executing. It’s more practical.

            7. There has to be a stop-loss limit is why.

            8. Exactly.

         3. oyyyy

            1. Haha, oyyy indeedy. One question from Twain and a fundamental flaw in Princeton’s WordNet data corpus, which has been built up since 1985, gets exposed. As does the language understanding of AI.I crashed Elbot back in 2008 with one question too and was the first person to beat the chess game architected by Alan Kay (Apple Fellow), David Smith and others in the Squeak language which is Turing-complete. That was in 2007 so then Julian Lombardi invited me to the Open Cobalt Working Group.In 2012, I asked Amit Singhal, SVP of Google Search, “Will Google’s Star Trek engine have a heart?”Then earlier this year, I asked Google’s Natural Language AI team, “Can Word2Vec do conditional probability — such as the type which exists in the subjunctive tense in the Latin languages for emotion expressions contingent on time and uncertainty?”@wmoug:disqus will get the reference to subjunctivity (which has subjectivity baked in) because he speaks French.Google folks answer to both questions was, “No.”What does that tell us about the likelihood of Google being able to solve the Natural Language problem in AI? Well…they already know AI sector needs a completely new model…Geoff Hinton, Google’s father of Deep Learning, Oct 2014: “IF the computers could understand what we’re saying…We need a far more sophisticated language understanding model that understands what the sentence means.And we’re still a very long way from having that.”Peter Norvig has been clear about Google’s choice of tools (Probability) in his arguments with Noam Chomsky who makes the case for a more generative grammar approach to Artificial Linguistics:* https://www.youtube.com/wat…* http://norvig.com/chomsky.htmlMeanwhile, we have Ray Kurzweil making the case, “You might think that (the frontal cortex where we think, “That’s ironic, funny, pretty”) is more sophisticated but what’s more complicated is the hierarchy beneath them.But the frontal cortex is not quantitatively different really. It’s a quantitative expansion of the neocortex.That additional quantity of thinking was the enabling factor for us to take a qualitative leap and invent language and art and science and technology.”In other words, Kurzweil is saying that quality = quantity and quality is derived from quantity. This is the central argument of “Big Data” and its Probability methodology — as long as we have lots of data, it doesn’t matter what shape / form / accuracy / relevancy of the data is. The sheer magnitude of the data corpus is sufficient.Well…Princeton WordNet is a huge data corpus with lots of great Neural Nets & Probability work underpinning it. Yet, it couldn’t compute after I asked one simple QUALITATIVE question.Norvig vs Chomsky really is the battle between the giants on whether Maths as a language (Probability, Logic, Mechanics, Vector Spaces et al) can model language as a language.I disagree with Kurzweil on this point. Quality is NOT the same as quantity just as causation is NOT the same as correlation, imo.For example, if we click on Twitter’s ♥ or Facebook’s like a billion times does that say “ironic” or “interested”?The quantity of clicks says nothing about the quality of the click.

            2. Oyyy and then some! Over the years I have wondered if it’d be possible to use Kickstarter to crowd fund the build of an AI or whether the Production Capitalists (Google, Facebook, IBM Watson, Baidu, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton et al) now have too much advantage because they’ve got all the data and built all the tools already, so we may as well hang up our hats because the Information Revolution is done. @fredwilson:disqusHowever, we now know NONE of the Production Capitalists have solved the Natural Language problem in AI because their leading AI researchers have all said some variation of, “We need better models.”Interestingly, I read this bit of research on the ‘Incredible Expanding Adventures of the X-Chromosomes’: “Another important factor in sex chromosome expression is the huge dissimilarity between the information carried on the X and Y chromosomes. The Y has a mere 100 or so genes, and there is no evidence that any of them are linked to cognition. This contrasts sharply with the 1,200-odd genes on the X chromosome. There is mounting evidence that at least 150 of these genes are linked to intelligence, and there is definite evidence that verbal IQ is X-linked. It suggests that a mother’s contribution to intelligence may be more significant than a father’s—especially if the child is male, because a male’s one and only X chromosome always comes from his mother.”* https://www.psychologytoday…Verbal IQ being X-linked has implications for diversity in technology (more women => more intelligent tech?) and also whether we can encode female code for language with male code for logic within the algorithms in an integrated, complementary and coherent way.Importantly, language affects how successful Kickstarter campaigns are worded, advertising, search, recruitment (per the Andreessen Horowitz video @mlbar:disqus shared) and more.So…maybe I will launch a Kickstarter to crowd fund an AI that’s an alternative to the Production Capitalists’ visions.LOL.

            3. Big techcos investing $hundreds millions in AI and chatbots should hire me as a QA tester.:*).

   3. Great slide. I heard an interview on a16z podcast describing similar (same?) findings. http://a16z.com/2015/07/16/…One question I wondered about was direction of causality. I.e. would a well-organized, likely-to-get-funded campaign also naturally tend to use the phrases on the left vs. those on the right? For at least some of these (“later i” “even a dollar”) this seems to be the case.https://soundcloud.com/a16z…

      1. Thanks for sharing. Textio’s work has only recently hit my radars because of these articles.* http://recode.net/2015/09/0…* http://www.fastcompany.com/…Again, the Information Revolution is far from “done”. There’s a whole bunch of data and data insights we still have to find and a whole bunch of tools we still need to invent to deal with that data.Understanding language — whether it’s in a Kickstarter campaign, search result surfacing, advertising effectiveness, why people buy into something, recruitment etc — is one of the hardest problems and biggest opportunities for Machine Intelligence.

      2. Ah and “direction of causality” is the operative word.

6. 5s and 10s feel more sustainable and less beholden to the king.

   1. yuppppppp

   2. It’s good to be King, “Steve Sumners”

      1. Mostly yes but not talking about what’s good for the king. Talking about what’s good for the people.

7. The crowdfunding boom seems to be making entrepreneurs a little more creative, and creative people a bit more entrepreneurial. One of the great things about the current technology environment.I was chatting with an entrepreneur yesterday, with a very zany wearables company, who explained one of the big reasons his really cool product came off was he raised money on IndieGoGo at the same time as his series A. Seems to be a very common story these days.

8. Most Pledges, not as in the highest volume was from those level of pledges though, correct?

9. Hard to start these things, but now you don’t ever see it dying.

10. .Truly amazing!Well played!JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

    1. Spoken like a proud Dad. Does everyone know Perfect Daughter just got married? Travel over to JLM’s blog and give him some props, people!

       1. .It was quite the party. The rains came — 17 inches — and then miraculously went. A miracle!There are some other pics here:http://themusingsofthebigre…JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

          1. Four Seasons, damn straight! Congratulations. By the way in the pictures your new son in law looks a bit like a happy version of Brian Roberts of Comcast.http://www.jasonandlizswedd…

             1. .Just as well. I would have wasted the money on a yacht or a new airplane anyway.It was an intimate “little” ceremony — I had a combat engineer platoon with fewer men than the assembled bridesmaids and groomsmen.He is a very nice young man and he will have a hard time keeping up with that girl. She received 11 varsity letters in high school and is on her 3rd startup of which one is her own.http://www.temperowe.com/She is the queen of sleepmasks and has gotten incredible traction. Who knew?I could not possibly be happier. [And so is my wife, infinitely more important.]The wedding had all the cultural richness of Judaism coupled with the Episcopalians including the flying chairs and the crushing of the glass. All of Liz’s friends said, “Who knew that being Jewish was so cool? I want to be Jewish.”JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

             2. I am glad you had it in Austin. Another damn straight. My new brother in law (about your daughter’s age I guess) got married to a “rich” girl from Chicago area. Her father is a lawyer (and also owns a few businesses) so I told my wife at the time “the wedding will be out in Chicago, Dad is a lawyer and he will want to have it there to show off the new couple to his friends”. More of a sure bet than bitcoin to me. They are stunning (picture attached from NYT announcement).Well low and behold the millennial couple has the affair in NY and everyone from Chicago has to schlep out. Can you imagine that? Dad didn’t even get to invite his judge friends or business associates! Worst yet “little black Porsche” was wrong and he hates to be wrong. Glad you set the new couple straight with who is boss in the family!(He is Jewish, she is not…)…

             3. I have to know – did you get lifted on a chair?

             4. .Of course, I was a paratrooper and a pilot — a little chair anxiety?No way.A few of the lifters may have hernias but me? I sailed through it. Lot of fun.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

             5. hahahaha. I really want to see pictures of that

          2. congratulations! pics are very nice, looks like a great event. really great lighting design too, props to the visionary who executed that!

             1. .That would be My Perfect Daughter/The Perfect Wife who is a graphic designer — creative director of Bustle.com in NYC — and very meticulous.The lights were dangling from hundreds of years old live oak trees and there were “vineyard patio” strings of lights across the entire seating area plus the candles on the tables.It had an intimate Old World feel about it.It really was a spectacular night and the band — a Motown band from Atlanta was unbelievable.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

          3. Do you still have the wedding budget/breakdown of all the costs (or does someone have it?)

11. Kickstarter is just a great company. Props to them and the community of amazing pledgers. Happy to be among those stats.

12. A play from the mets playbook…hitting a ton of singles tends to win more games then a few homeruns.

13. The one worry I have about the general public making easy $5-$10 “investments” in projects meant for mass-market consumption is that it provides the entrepreneur with a false sense of buy-in to their future company. In reality it’s only a buy-in to the product, but there’s a lot more to producing, say, a connected hardware device at mass scale than simply the design, a prototype, and a dream.While a seasoned investor might first ask “what is your experience setting up an assembly line in China to reach viable unit economics of your product given only a prototype”, the general public is piqued given only a product concept. In reality, public buy-in is a crucial part of releasing a consumer good, but it is far from the whole picture.

14. Kudos to AVC for seeing the potential and Kickstarter for making giving more accessible to the masses! Onward!

15. this is a big deal fred.the world is a better and different and more expressive place for what kickstarter engendered.they also did something–or proved something else–that I’m gonna post on this weekend. they proved the point that community is the marketplace today. a huge shift not to be under appreciated.congrats to them. congrats to you. and congrats to a world that is a better more collectively supportive place because of them.

16. This is a good example of USV disrupting itself, thinking outside the box, while truly making a difference in the dreams of many! I label this cloud capital and the project advocate is connectivity.Those numbers really supports massive growth – a low buy-in really opens up this platform for massive geo-expansion.Six years – that’s Super Impressive!