Posts from May 2016

A Nice Way To Celebrate Memorial Day

In addition to remembering those who gave their lives serving our country today, it’s also a nice thing to assist those who made it home and are transitioning to civilian life.

I just backed a Kickstarter project which is attempting to rase the funds to build a “digital library” of educational videos to assist veterans in obtaining the necessary skills to transition to a job in the high growth tech sector.

Here’s the project video. Check it out and if you like the idea as much as I do, hopefully you can support it.

#hacking education

11 Years of the USV Investment Team

As part of the hiring process for our two year analyst position, we asked everyone who has worked at USV in an investment team role to make a two minute video (the same thing we ask applicants to do). We asked them to answer these two questions – when did you join USV and how has your perspective on tech changed since then? Here’s a compilation of all of the two minute videos. In its entirety it is about 25 mins long.

11 Years of the USV Investment Team from Union Square Ventures on Vimeo.

#VC & Technology

Feature Friday: Learn To Code on an iPhone

Hopscotch is a visual programming environment, like Scratch or Blockly, that runs on an iPhone.

If your kids like to grab your phone and watch videos or play games on it, put Hopscotch on your phone and encourage them to make games instead of just playing them.

Here’s a piece from Wired that explains how it works (with some screen shots) and why it is so cool.

You might ask, why should my kids learn to code? And there are many great answers to that but I always like to answer that question by reminding people that instructing machines what to do is becoming an important life skill. And it will only get more important in the coming years. So getting your kids comfortable doing that at a young age is a great thing and Hopscotch is a great way to do that.

#hacking education

Biodigital

I am really into embed codes. I think the ability to take content and software from one app and inject it into another app is one of the coolest things about the Internet.

Biodigital is a 3D visual model of the human body. Think of it as Google Maps for the body.

I’ve had issues with my MCL in my left knee for the past five or six years. I slightly tore it and although it has healed, I still get pain in it from time to time.

So I went into Biodigital today to take a look at what the MCL actually looks like. Here it is:

That’s pretty cool, right?

If you want to get lost in the human body for the next hour, go check out Biodigital.

#hacking healthcare

Vacation Policy

I saw a discussion among our USV portfolio CEOs yesterday in one of the many communication channels we offer our portfolio companies.  The question was about vacation policy.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most of our portfolio companies offer unlimited vacation to their employees and that there is almost no abuse of this policy acros our portfolio companies.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, linked to a post he wrote about his company’s Open Vacation policy a few years ago. It sums this topic up nicely.

#management

Flashback: The Lycos NYC Office in 1995

I was taking the subway uptown yesterday afternoon and as I stepped out of the train I thought I saw the word Lycos on the advertisement on the station wall. Upon closer observation, it was not an advertisement for Lycos, but by then I was already thinking about my visit to the Lycos NYC office in 1995 when I first met Jerry Colonna. It was in the building that sits on the north end of Union Square in a dumpy office with the name Point Communications on the door. Point was a web directory (ie at Yahoo competitor) that Lycos had bought in 1995. Jerry told me that Point was driving a lot of the traffic on the Lycos network and I asked him where they hosted it. He pointed to a closet with a PC sitting on the floor with the back opened and a bunch of wires sticking out. “It runs on that thing”, he said. I thought to myself that one of the top trafficked websites on the entire Internet was running in a closet. That was a different time.

Lycos was a web search engine created at Carnegie Mellon that was turned into a business by the Internet holding company CMGI in 1994/1995. Jerry was working for CMGI at the time I met him and CMGI was quickly assembling a portfolio of Internet assets around the Lycos brand to rival Yahoo. CMGI took Lycos public in 1996 and, according to Wikipedia, in 1999 Lycos was the most visited Internet destination.

But easy come, easy go and Lycos was sold to Terra Networks in May 2000, the first in a series of sales to international owners that led to slow and steady decline of the brand.

But back in 1995, Lycos was in the thick of it. It was the east coast rival to Yahoo, which was the leading Internet brand. If you were selling your website (that’s what you did back then), you shopped it to Yahoo and Lycos. And Jerry was right in the middle of all of that. I was thinking of leaving and starting a VC firm to invest exclusively in Internet businesses (ie websites). At that first meeting, I thought Jerry would be a great partner to do that with. And, after a series of meetings, that’s exactly what we did. But that’s another story, longer, and even more interesting.

We’ve come a long way in 20 years. Google eclipsed all of these “web 1.0” properties as search became the dominant way users accessed the web. Facebook showed that the web was going to be a social experience a few years later. And Apple showed that it was going to be a mobile thing a few years after that. And everything has moved off servers in closets to the cloud. Things look a lot differently now. But it helps to go back and think about how it was back then. It gives some perspective.

#Web/Tech

When Teams Get Hot

Right now the OKC Thunder look unbeatable. They made the Spurs look old and they are now making the Warriors look slow. That’s quite something to accomplish. Let’s see if they can keep this up. It isn’t easy.

I am reminded of the Mets last fall. They went on a hot streak that quickly took out the Dodgers and the Cubs. Then they came back to earth for the series and got beat soundly by the Royals.

How does a team get hot? And how do they stay hot? And is there anything to learn from this phenomenon for teams that operate in the real world?

For the Mets, I think it went all the way back to the walkoff home that Wilmer Flores hit on the last night of July. That combined with the arrival of Cespedes lit that team up and they stayed lit for three solid months.

For the Thunder, something has changed in the playoffs. I’m not entirely sure what changed but I watched a lot of Thunder games this regular season and they were not the same team. Something has changed and very much for the better if you are a Thunder fan like me.

But one thing is for sure. When teams get hot, when they have confidence running through their veins, when they trust each other and know where the other person is going to be great things happen. It’s something to behold.

#Sports

Experiment and Scandal

We are living in a time of great experiments. They are not happening in the lab. They are happening in the real world. And they are being financed by real people. We are witnessing the de-institutionalization of experimentation. We are returning to a time when anyone can be an inventor and innovator. Some of this has happened because of the explosion of venture capital, both in the US and also around the world. Some of this has happened because entertainment and culture has embraced the world of experimentation and innovation (Shark Tank, Silicon Valley). Some of this has happened because the tools for innovation and experimentation have become mainstream and anyone can use them.

I am not thinking of one thing. I am thinking of many things. I am thinking of The DAO. I am thinking of Bitcoin and Ethereum. I am thinking of Oculus getting financed on Kickstarter. I am thinking of the launch of equity crowdfunding for everyone in the US last week. I am even thinking of things like Theranos.

All of these things are great experiments that will produce great benefit to society if they succeed. But by their nature experiments often fail. They need to fail. Or they would not be experiments.

And one of the challenges with the de-institutionalization of experimentation is that some of these failures will be spectacular. Combine that with the idea that these experiments are being funded by real people and the idea that the world of media/entertainment/culture has injected itself right in the middle of this brave new world and you have the recipe for scandal. And scandal will naturally result in efforts to put the genie back in the bottle (Sarbanes Oxley, Dodd Frank). And these regulatory efforts will naturally attempt to re-institutionalize experimentation.

I find myself wishing we could keep the dollars invested and hype down when we do these massively public experiments. But the dollar/hype cycle is a natural part of being human. Some dollars are invested. We get excited about this investment. We talk it up. More people find out about it and more dollars are invested. More of us get excited about this investment and we talk it up more. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat and you get unicorns and distributed autonomous funding mechanisms entrusted with hundreds of millions before anything has even been funded. Eventually some of that gets unwound and the tape is full of red.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for distributed autonomous organizations and the innovation behind them and in front of them. There isn’t much out there that I am more excited about. But I am also very fearful that this could end badly. And even more fearful of what may be foisted on us by well meaning regulators when that happens.

So let’s celebrate this incredible phase of permissionless innovation we are in. And let’s all understand that we will have many failures. Some of them spectacular. Money will be lost. Possibly hundreds of millions or billions. Let’s expect that. Let’s build that into our mental models. So when that happens, we can suck it up, deal with it, and keep moving forward. Because an open permissionless world of innovation that everyone can participate in is utopia in so many ways. The good that will come of it will massively outweigh any bad. But bad there will be. I can assure you of that.

#blockchain#crowdfunding#entrepreneurship#hacking finance#law#regulation 2.0#Science#VC & Technology