Posts from July 2016

Stack Documentation

Our portfolio company Stack Overflow (or Stack as I prefer to call them) has launched something new and interesting today.

It is called Stack Overflow Documentation.

This is what Stack co-founder and CEO Joel Spolsky told me about Documentation a few weeks ago:

The current state of developer documentation is pretty abysmal. It’s spread all over the place, in a million different formats. It’s never complete and rarely includes good example code. Even the best developer documentation is usually on a static website with no community or crowd sourcing features, so it stagnates.
After months of beta testing, we are launching a global, crowdsourced developer documentation section on Stack Overflow that covers everything from programming languages to APIs and frameworks. It will be completely community generated, with all the reputation stuff that made Stack Overflow successful (voting, reputation, tags, community moderation, etc).
When you poke around at the state of developer documentation on the web in 2016, it feels a lot like… developer Q&A before Stack Overflow. It’s fragmented, half of it is out of date, it’s very very uneven in quality, and when you find a bug there’s no way to fix it. We think that applying the mechanics of Stack Overflow Q&A to crowdsourced documentation will make as big a difference in developers’ lives as the original Stack Overflow.

The secret sauce behind Stack’s success is the fact that crowdsourcing information is way better than the top down approach when it is combined with a specific set of tools that make the crowdsourced data super high quality. The latter is what Joel calls the “reputation stuff” (voting, reputation, tags, community moderation, etc).

It makes all the sense in the world that Stack would focus their secret sauce at Developer Documentation in addition to Developer Q&A. So if you are working in Javascript and want to find some documentation or contribute some documentation, go here. If its Docker that’s giving you fits, go here. And for Android devs, this is for you. The entire Documentation section is here.

Developer Documentation is in Beta right now and though it is pretty good already, I expect it will get a lot more complete and a lot more thorough in the coming months. And if you are so inclined, please help make that so.

#Web/Tech

Trashing Tumblr

So Scott Galloway thinks Tumblr was nothing more than a “porn site.”

I think that is a ridiculous comment coming from someone who says ridiculous things.

Tumblr was, and still is, a vibrant social media platform. Just talk to the tens of million of people who have had Tumblr blogs and have gotten tremendous value out of them.

I am one of them.

I just hate jerks who want attention by saying crazy shit, like the current Republican nominee for President.

So I am calling bullshit on Scott Galloway and standing up for Tumblr, which I love and have always loved.

Phew. Now I feel better.

#Web/Tech

Dear Fred

I get so many emails from people who are thinking of starting a company and they share their idea with me and ask me if they should do it. They want my feedback on their idea. These are, for the most part, people I have never met and have no context for. I came across five of them this morning in my inbox. It reminded me of this tweetstorm from last year.

tweetstorm

I understand the need for validation. And part of me wants to tell them “go for it.” I would like to see more people get up the nerve to chase their dreams. But I don’t want to be complicit in that. So most of the time, I just delete the email and move on. Sad, but true.

#entrepreneurship

Some Thoughts On Steem

About a year ago, in the middle of the Reddit soap opera that played out last summer, I wrote a post about how someone could (and would) build something like Reddit on the blockchain.

A number of developers and entrepreneurs have done that and the one that has garnered the most interest is called Steem.

The community is still small and the links are still a bit all over the place. But things are happening at Steem and I think its worth paying attention to.

At the heart of Steem is a tipping system, called Steem Power, based on a crypto-currency called Steem. All of this runs on the Steem Blockchain.

Readers can buy Steem Power with Bitcoin and then they can tip posters who receive Steem Power. Steem Power can be converted into Steem through a mechanism I don’t really understand to be honest.

So unlike Reddit, where posters receive no compensation other than upvotes, on Steem upvotes are done with money.

Steem is traded like other crypto-currencies, and currently has a market cap of $287mm. That feels a little bit ahead of itself (Reddit was valued at $500mm a couple years ago), but markets go up and they go down. We will see where the Steem market cap goes from here.

Another thing that is interesting about this whole model is that Steem can finance itself, the cost of its team, an office, bandwidth, servers, etc by selling Steem vs selling equity.

This is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization model that many blockchain entrepreneurs are following today.

So if you like the idea of Steem, and want to back this company, all you have to do is buy some Steem, some of which you might be buying from the Company. And if you change your mind, you can sell your Steem and move on.

I think Steem is a really interesting experiment that may turn into a really nice business. The Steem founders are experimenting in multiple dimensions at the same time. They are trying a “paid” model vs a “free” model for curating a content discovery engine. That’s interesting. They are using blockchain technology vs some centralized system to build all of this. That’s interesting. They could finance this business via their users vs VC or something else. That’s interesting. And their users can participate in the value creation, if this turns out to be valuable. And that is interesting.

I am rooting for Steem. They have some things to get right and watch out for (including the rapid rise in the value of Steem which is concerning) and I hope they take steps to avoid the “dollar/hype cycle” I talked about in this post. That is one of the great challenges with this whole DAO model of starting and building a company. But someone is going to figure this out. The Steem founders have already figured out a few things which I am sure others will now emulate. And that is what is great about experiments, even if they fail. We learn something. And when they are done in public more of us learn something.

#blockchain#Web/Tech

Active vs Passive Investing

When you buy a stock in the public markets, that is passive investing.

When you buy 10% of that public company in the open market and then seek to obtain board seats, that is active investing.

When you buy a REIT, that is passive investing.

When you buy vacant land, build an apartment building, and lease it up, that is active investing.

When you buy a treasury bill and collect interest, that is passive investing.

When you make “hard money loans” to developers, that is active investing.

When you toss some money into an angel deal that others are leading, that is passive investing.

When you lead a seed round and take a board seat, that is active investing.

Both models work, but when you do passive investing, it is best to invest in liquid markets so you can get out when things aren’t going your way.

When you do active investing, you are most likely investing in illiquid markets and you have to invest your time, energy, and intellect to make sure things go your way.

It is hard to “beat the market” when doing passive investing. That doesn’t mean you can’t make good money doing passive investing, particularly over a long period of time.

But like everything else in life, if you really want to make big gains with your investments, you are going to have to invest your time, energy, and intellect as well as your capital.

And that means being an active investor.

That’s how I like to invest and it limits how many investments you can make. It is hard to scale “active investing.”

One of the things I see in the angel, seed, and VC markets is investors and firms trying to scale their investing while pretending to be active investors.

I don’t think that is possible.

You have to either choose to be active and concentrated or passive and diversified. Either model works, but I think you need to be one or the other. It’s not really possible to be both.

#VC & Technology

What Do You Do? What Do You Say?

It’s friday morning and we are waking up to yet another story of a twisted madman engaging in mass murder. We did this last friday.

What do you do? What do you say?

Yes, we should Pray For Nice. They can use our prayers.

And yes, we should give generously to the victims and their families. I did that just now.

But it doesn’t feel like enough. What is an appropriate reaction to these horrors?

And what if you are the CEO of a rapidly growing company who has to stand up in front of the team today at the weekly all hands? What do you do? What do you say?

Do you ignore it because stuff like this doesn’t belong in the office? Should we just focus on our jobs and keep doing what we are doing?

Or do you talk about it with the team? And what do you say?

I don’t even know what to say to all of you. I didn’t know what to say to my friend who is from Nice when I wrote him an email this morning. “I’m thinking of you. I hope everyone you know is OK.” What else is there to say?

There is an epidemic in the world, a sickness that is spreading and afflicting more and more people. It is mental illness. We need to diagnose its cause and treat it. Until we do that, we will be facing more of these mornings.

I think many of us are wondering what we can do to help with that. I certainly am.

#Current Affairs

The State Of The NYC Tech Ecosystem

Matt Turck has penned a “State Of The City” post about where the NYC tech ecosystem is right now. I get asked this question all the time and I haven’t been doing a great job of answering it. I will use some of Matt’s work the next time that happens.

Here’s some of my favorite points from Matt’s post. If you live and work in the NYC tech ecosystem, or care about it, you should go read the whole thing.

NYC as a leading AI Center:

The New York data and AI community, in particular, keeps getting stronger.  Facebook’s AI department is anchored in New York by Yann LeCun, one of the fathers of deep learning.  IBM Watson’s global headquarter is in NYC. When Slack decided to ramp up its effort in data, it hired NYC-based Noah Weiss, former VP of Product at Foursquare, to head its Search Learning and Intelligence Group.   NYU has a strong Center for Data Science (also started by LeCun).  Ron Brachman, the new director of the Technion-Cornell Insititute, is an internationally recognized authority on artificial intelligence.  Columbia has a Data Science Institute. NYC has many data startups, prominent data scientists and great communities (such as our very own Data Driven NYC!).

 

NYC as a home to “deep tech”:

Finally, one trend I’m personally particularly excited about: the emergence of deep tech startups in New York.   By “deep tech”, I mean startups focusing on solving hard technical problems, either in infrastructure or applications – the type of companies where virtually every early employee is an engineer (or a data scientist).

For a long time, MongoDB was pretty much the lone deep tech startup in NYC.  There are many more now.  A few of those are in my portfolio at FirstMark:  ActionIQ, Cockroach Labs, HyperScience and x.ai.   But there’s a lot of others, big and small, including for example: 1010Data (Advance), BetterCloud, Clarifai, Datadog, Dataminr, Dextro, Digital Ocean, Enigma, Geometric Intelligence, Jethro, Placemeter, Security ScoreCard, SiSense, Syncsort or YHat – and a few others.

 

The Diversification and Broadening of NYC’s Tech Ecosystem:

One way of thinking about New York’s tech history is one of gradual layers, perhaps something like this:

  • 1995-2001: NYC 1.0, lots of ad tech (Doubleclick) and media (TheStreet)
  • 2001-2004: Nuclear winter
  • 2004-2011: NYC 2.0, a new layer emerges around commerce (Etsy, Gilt) and social (Delicious, Tumblr, Foursquare), on top of adtech (Admeld) and media
  • 2012-present: NYC 3.0 – in addition to the above, just about every type of technology covering just about every industry

Certainly, the areas that put NYC on the map in the first place continue to be strong.  New York is the epicenter of the redefinition of media (Buzzfeed, Vice, Business Insider, Mic, Mashable, Bustle, etc.), and also home to many great companies in adtech (AppNexus, Tapad, Mediamath, Moat, YieldMo, etc.), marketing (Outbrain, Taboola, etc) and commerce (BarkBox, Birchbox, Harry’s, Warby Parker, etc.).

But New York has seen explosive entrepreneurial activity across a much broader cross-section of verticals and horizontals, including for example:

  • Fintech: Betterment, IEX, Fundera, Bond, Orchard, Bread
  • Health: Oscar, Flatiron Health, ZocDoc, Hometeam, Recombine, CellMatix, BioDigital, ZipDrug
  • Education: General Assembly, Schoology, Knewton, Skillshare, Flatiron School, Codecademy
  • Real estate: WeWork, HighTower, Compass, Common, Reonomy
  • Enterprise SaaS: InVision, NewsCred, Sprinklr, Namely, JustWorks, Greenhouse, Mark43
  • Commerce infrastructure: Bluecore, Custora, Welcome Commerce
  • Marketplaces: Kickstarter, Vroom, 1stdibs
  • On Demand: Handy, Via, Managed by Q, Hello Alfred
  • Food: Blue Apron, Plated
  • IoT/Hardware: littleBits, Canary, Peloton, Shapeways, SOLS, Estimote, Dash, GoTenna, Raden, Ringly, Augury, Drone Racing League
  • AR/VR/3D: Sketchfab, Floored

 

 

I like the NYC 3.0 moniker. It’s a very different place to start and invest in tech companies than it was even five years ago. Bigger, deeper, broader, and scaling nicely. Just like the companies themselves.

#entrepreneurship#NYC#VC & Technology

The Rise Of Women Leaders

Although we are not where we need to be, it feels to me that we are entering a period where women will be increasingly the choice for leading our companies and our countries.

The rise of Theresa May in the UK is the latest high profile example of a woman being selected to occupy an important leadership position.

In the US, Hillary Clinton is currently the odds-on favorite to win the Presidency.

Imagine the power of the imagery of Angela Merkel, Teresa May, and Hillary Clinton meeting at an important event. That picture will tell a thousand words about the rise of women leaders.

In the tech business, women have rarely been in top leadership positions. But that too is changing. Women hold the CEO positions at IBM, Oracle, HP, Yahoo, and a number of other leading tech companies.

In the largest companies I work with, women hold many of the top leadership positions and these women are extremely talented executives and are likely to end up running companies someday soon.

So from where I sit, I feel we are on the cusp of a new era for women.

None of this changes the specific challenges that exist for women, the conflicts between family and work that are still more acute for women than men, the societal biases that still exist, and the muscle memory that will take time to unwind.

But as a husband and father of three amazing women leaders, it’s a great feeling to see the promised land emerging over the horizon. I am quite confident we will see real gender equality in the workplace in my lifetime.

#management

Sleeping On It

I like sleeping on decisions. I think it leads to better decisions.

I am not in favor of delaying decisions, particularly hard ones. I want to make them and move on.

But making a decision and giving yourself 12 hours to “sit with it” really helps. Sleeping on it does that for you.

It also does something else, which is it lets your subconscious brain work on the problem overnight and you wake up with more clarity than when you went to bed. At least that is how it works for me

So “sleeping on it” literally means sleeping on it as well as buying a short amount of time to sit with the decision and make sure it feels right.

There are certainly times when you don’t have the luxury of taking the night to sit with a decision. In those moments, you need to deliberate with whatever your team is and make the call and execute. These are crisis driven decisions, war time stuff. There is no sleeping on them.

But when you have the luxury of a night to sleep on something, I would encourage everyone to take that time. It really helps.

#life lessons