Posts from June 2017

We are in the midst of a monthly match campaign for The Human Utility which used to be called Detroit Water Project.

The founder of this effort, Tiffani Bell, explains the story of how this project came to be in this eight minute video;

If you want to participate in our match campaign after watching the video you can do so here.

And we are back with this month’s matching campaign to support a good cause.

We are moving away from the big well known causes to some lesser known but important efforts to help people who need our help.

We are going to start with helping people in need pay their water bills and keep clean water flowing to their homes.

The Human Utility helps almost 1000 families in Detroit and Baltimore pay their water bills and avoid a water shutoff.

We are going to match the first $20k of donations that anyone makes to The Human Utility between now and Sunday night (midnight PST). If we fully utilize this match, we will raise $40k which might get another 100 families their water back. That would be awesome.

To donate and have your contribution matched, go here and hit the big blue Donate button and make sure to tweet out your donation so we can match it.

Let’s get some water flowing again.

Being an investor and board member means that you are close to the companies you invest in but not “in them.”. This near and dear relationship creates some interesting challenges for both the management and the investors. One of them is understanding the difference between information/reporting and a real understanding of what is going on in the business.

I often find myself saying “but why?” at board meetings:

• “Revenues are soft this quarter” – but why?
• “MAUs are up 150% over last quarter” – but why?
• “We are going to miss our ship dates” – but why?
• “We expect to decrease our hosting costs by 50% next quarter” – but why?
• “We can’t seem to get any interest in the next round” – but why?
• “We are getting a lot of inbound interest from investors” – but why?
• “We have a lot of turnover in our engineering organization” – but why?

The beauty of working with investors who see a lot and have seen a lot is that they can often help you diagnose the disease by looking closely at the symptoms. But you have to be willing to engage in that exercise and be open to hearing “but why” and be prepared to answer it.

Elon Musk famously posted Tesla’s long term strategy in 2006 and ended the post with “don’t tell anyone.” That has led may entrepreneurs around the world to follow suit and be transparent about what they are up to and why. I think its a great practice for companies to follow. It helps the outside world understand your company and it helps with recruiting as potential employees can better decide which companies they want to work for and why.

Our portfolio Coinbase has been doing that for a while now and Founder/CEO Brian Armstrong just posted the latest version of their “secret master plan” to use Elon’s words.

You should go read the post as I think it does a nice job of explaining where they have been and where they are going. But if you want the quick summary, here are the four steps:

Chris Dixon put this reading list together.

Instead of reading something from me today, maybe everyone can pick one or more posts from Chris’ reading list and learn a bit about tokens.

I believe I have read all of these posts over the past year or so and I agree with Chris that they are all quite good.

I am reminded time and time again that things that sound too good to be true almost always are. There really is no free lunch, in business or in life.

Here are a few examples of things that seem so tantalizing to entrepreneurs and the companies they create but turn out to be just as costly (or more) than the alternative:

1. Taking on debt instead of equity in the hope that it will be paid off in the future with equity sold at much higher prices. Or convertible debt that converts in the future at a much higher price, which is basically the same thing. I have seen this go badly so many times that I now almost throw tantrums when our portfolio companies choose to do this.
2. Raising another round to buy more time to figure out the business model vs figuring out the business model now. “Buying time” is one of the greatest free lunch fallacies of all time. I strongly believe that now is almost always a better time than later to do something.
3. Hiring a service provider (lawyer, accountant, PR firm, etc) who will do your work for free in return for your company’s business later. This sounds great but unfortunately locks you in to using this firm later on when others may be a better choice for your company.
4. A big enterprise company will pay you to modify your software to work “better” for them. Sounds great now, when you need the revenues/cash so badly, but little did you realize that you just outsourced your roadmap to a big company.

I could go on and on, but hopefully I’ve made my point. I encourage everyone to make the hard and painful choices when they have to be made and avoid the free lunch fallacy. It mostly leads to indigestion.

I read Cody Brown’s blog post about getting hacked on Thursday of last week. I feel very badly for Cody and plan to send him some BTC once I get access back to my account. His post helped me avoid his fate.

I woke up Friday morning (central european summer time) and saw a bunch of emails in my inbox suggesting that suspicious activities were happening in my personal gmail account, my mobile phone account, and my two factor service.

I immediately thought “that’s the same attack pattern that Cody wrote about” and I was able to get to Coinbase and have them lock down my account immediately. The good news is nothing appears to have been taken from my Coinbase account although I don’t currently have access to it right now and thankfully nobody else does either.

Without getting into the specifics, I would like to tell everyone five things I learned from this awful experience:

1. Call your cell phone provider and put a “do not port under any circumstances” hold on your phone number. I did this about six months ago and I think it may have saved me. It is way too easy to port a phone number and once a hacker has your number, they have access to two factor codes coming via SMS.
2. Put two factor on everything you can. I did not have it on my old and dormant gmail account which is partially why it was vulnerable. Obviously I have it on there now.
3. Check your password recovery settings on all of your accounts (even old and dormant email accounts) and make sure they are secure accounts (locked down phone numbers (#1) and secure email accounts (#2)). Once a hacker has access to one of your old email accounts, they can impersonate you digitally.
4. Use Google Authenticator for two factor on your phone. I have used SMS and Authy in the past and my research yesterday suggests that Google’s Authenticator is the most secure of the two factor options out there right now.
5. I keep almost all of my Bitcoin in Coinbase’s vault service which requires 48 hours and multiple approvals to make a withdrawal. If the hacker had gotten into my Coinbase account, they would have been able to take my Ethereum and a small amount of Bitcoin, but not most of it. I believe Coinbase should evolve their vault offering to handle all of the crypto assets they support, or possibly make the two day withdrawal/multi-sig feature available to all of their wallet offerings.

I am still a bit shaken up from the experience and a fair bit more paranoid from it. Which is a good thing I’m sure.

I hope my sharing this with all of you helps you make your online life a bit more secure because there are a lot of bad people out there working hard to hack into your accounts and do bad things.

I realize this blog is dangerously close to becoming A Coin Fund instead of AVC, but what can I say? It’s what I am thinking about most of all right now.

Here’s William’s interview with Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik, on the plan to decentralize Kik around a new token called Kin.

Last week on fun friday we discussed the NBA Finals. I went out on a limb and predicted Cavs in seven. The comments were full of predictions, with a slight preference for the Warriors but not a landslide by any measure.

Last night the series kicked off with a drubbing as the Warriors won by 22 points and took every quarter and blew the game open in the third quarter.

It sure makes it clear how good this Warriors team is. My prediction of a Cavs victory looks worse today than yesterday for sure.

Does last night’s drubbing change anyone’s view of how this series will go?