Posts from August 2017

From roughly 1pm ET to roughly 3pm ET today there will be an eclipse of the Sun by the Moon over the US.

I like this map which shows when and where the eclipse will take place:

I spent a half hour this morning on the Internet and learned everything I wanted to know about what is happening and why.

I wonder how the earliest inhabitants of planet Earth must have felt when the sky went dark for a few minutes in the middle of the day.

Mankind has learned a lot about the universe we inhabit over the years and that knowledge is now largely available online for anyone to browse and learn from, as I did this morning. Here’s a study set based on today’s eclipse from Quizlet (a USV portfolio company) which uses their new diagramming feature.

It is a wonderful time to be alive with so much knowledge at our fingertips.

It is my 56th birthday today.

I am spending it surrounded with family and friends on the East End of Long Island.

I came into this year thinking I would dial it down a bit on the work front and spend more time on personal things. But, like many things, the opposite happened and I have worked harder this year than I have in many years.

I have learned how to work differently. More calls and less meetings. This has allowed me to work from anywhere. And that is a blessing and a curse. I work from wonderful places but I still work.

Finding the right balance is hard. I am committed to making more time for other things in my life. But I love my work and the challenges it throws at me. So I find it hard to turn it off.

This blog continues to be a source of purpose and meaning to me. I appreciate all of you who read it and give me feedback on it.

And with that, I am signing off and going for a walk on the beach with my dog to start the day.

This week our portfolio company Cloudflare made news when they made an exception to their long-standing policy of not terminating customers for hate speech and terminated The Daily Stormer.

In this interview with Bloomberg, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince explains why he made that decision and why it bothers him so much that he and other CEOs have that power.

I got feedback from some in the AVC community that the comments on Wednesday’s post were “ugly.”

As many readers know, we have a comment policy at the top of the comment thread and I’ve worked to make sure people know that we try to keep our discussions civil.

Whenever there is a touchy subject, like we had on Wednesday, the comment section lights up and things can, and do, go south.

I took a run through Wednesday’s comment thread just now and while there were some folks stepping out of bounds, likely newcomers stopping by to do their thing, I feel that by and large we kept it civil. Which makes me very happy.

I did leave a few replies for the newcomers asking them to temper down their language and we will see if that works.

I think it is important that we talk about the issues our country faces right now. I have views on them which I’m happy to share from time to time, certainly not all the time, and I’m happy to let the conversation flow. As long as it is civil and respectful. Understanding where the other side is coming from is incredibly helpful. Fighting with each other and calling names is not.

I’m hoping we have got it about right here at AVC now.

As Co-Chairman of Tech:NYC, I get asked frequently to name the issues that matter most to the tech companies of NYC.

On my list, often at the top, is transit. Getting to and from work matters a lot to the employees of the growing number of tech companies in NYC.

And this summer has been a bad one for transit. If you haven’t been stuck in a subway and found yourself late for work, you’ve been anxious about that happening to you.

I take the subway to work a fair amount. It is simply the fastest way to get around NYC. And I like being in contact with the every day people of the city. You really get a sense of NYC in the subway. You see it all. I love it.

So I am in favor of the City making the needed investment, in partnership with NY State, which controls the transit system in NYC, to modernize and upgrade the subways. It would be nice to see our Mayor and Governor figure out how to do something together instead of just fighting with each other. I’m sick of that to be honest and I suspect most NYC residents are.

I am also fine with chipping in a bit more out of my pocket to pay for this upgrade. The Mayor says it will cost our family another $2700 a year to pay for this upgrade. I’m in on that. I do think the wealthy residents of NYC can and should help the city maintain and improve our transit system.

Finally, I would like to see new transit infrastructure built.

I like the City’s effort to expand the ferry system. I am a huge user of the East River ferries and I would like to see them routed up the Hudson to serve the west side of Manhattan too.

My favorite new transit project is the proposed BQX where I am a Board member and advisor. The BQX would provide street level light rail along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront neighborhoods and make it easier for companies and people to locate there as opposed to central Brooklyn and Manhattan where the density of transit options are today.

I would like to see the tech sector in NYC come together and support these transit initiatives. Elected officials need our encouragement and pressure to do these big infrastructure projects. They are expensive and the payoff is long term, well beyond their term(s) in office. So getting them done requires a lot of activation energy and we can and should provide it.

I don’t know enough to say with any confidence that our President is a supremacist.

But he made a cold hard political calculation that paid off for him when he made these horrible people the foundation of his political base and fired them and their hatred up at his campaign rallies.

He can’t throw them under the bus now, even if he wanted to.

This poses immense problems for him, his ability to govern, his administration, and the people who accepted roles in it.

Supremacists are not fine people, they are repugnant and hateful, and they should be shunned by our society.

Instead, for political reasons, if not for other reasons, we have our President asserting their morality.

That isn’t going to work for our President as I am confident America won’t tolerate this.

This is likely to tear apart the coalition that elected him and make it easier for his opponents to fight him at every turn.

And that is a good thing.

The only good thing to come from this horrible moment that we are going through in America.

Brian Armstrong, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase, writes a regular blog in which he talks about a bunch of things; Coinbase, things he has learned, the crypto market, and a bunch more. If you don’t follow Brian, you might want to.

Last week he laid out the entire process he uses to hire executives and it’s a really great post.

Here is the outline of the process:

• Speak to subject matter experts [1–2 weeks]
• Choose the hiring committee [1–2 days]
• Draft the mission/outcomes/competencies (MOC) document [1–2 weeks]
• Source candidates [2 weeks]
• Build the relationship [1 month]
• Evaluate candidates [1 month]
• Close them [1 month]

If you plan to hire executives or are already doing it and would like to see how another CEO does it, I would suggest you go read Brian’s post.

One thing Brian leaves out, likely not intentionally, is the role of board members and investors in this process.

I have seen board members and investors play a valuable and highly engaged role in the “hiring committee” and most certainly in the closing process. I have done this for Brian a number of times and so have Micky Malka, Chris Dixon and Barry Schuler. We are very fortunate to have a great management team and Board at Coinbase and that makes a big difference in running an executive hiring process.

I have been an investor in Coinbase and have worked with Brian for almost five years now. I have watched him grow and develop as a CEO. He takes that very seriously and it shows. Putting down things like your hiring process is a great way to pass on to others what you have learned and get feedback too.

For almost four years, from Jan 2010 to late 2013, I would write a column every Monday called MBA Mondays where I tried to cover the basics of a business education here at AVC.

There are roughly 200 posts in total that I wrote during the time this weekly series was active.

Since many regular readers have shown up since then and may not know about MBA Mondays, I thought I would let all the new readers know about it.

You can see the entire MBA Mondays archive here.

There is a lot of good stuff in there.

Long time VC watcher, writer, and analyst Dan Primack suggested on Friday that the days of VCs trying to out “founder friendly” each other are now over.

It is an interesting observation and was worthy of a reply. The VC industry is highly competitive for the best opportunities and we certainly do try to ingratiate ourselves and our firms to the entrepreneurs who will decide who gets to invest in their companies and who does not. Being “founder friendly” is an important way to do that.

But there is another important participant in the VC/entrepreneur relationship and that is the Company the entrepreneur creates and all of its stakeholders; the employees, the customers, the suppliers, and even the community around the Company.

Having worked with entrepreneurs for over thirty years now, I have developed tremendous admiration for what they do and for the Companies they create. Entrepreneurs are a very special breed of people.

But there are times when interests diverge and what is best for the Company and it’s stakeholders may not be what an entrepreneur perceives to be in their own best interest. This creates a conflict situation and VCs are often caught in the middle of it.

I’ve been there many times and my mantra in those moments is “what is best for the Company?”. It has to be that way and, many times, when it is all over and done, the founder realized it was in fact best for them too.

Of course, reasonable people will disagree about what is best for a Company. That is what Boards are for. They are the bodies made up of reasonable people who can and should debate these issues and find resolution and make the hard decisions.

I reject the notion that being led by its founder is always what is best for a Company. It is often so, but certainly not always so.

Orthodoxy in thinking and believing is quite troublesome. There is no one way to do things and no single truth. You have to figure things out all the time based on facts and circumstances, based on a combination of experience and knowledge. If you do that well, you will get a lot right but never everything right.

I have heard from quite a few founders that they read the book Hatching Twitter and came away thinking that they would not want to work with me. That sucks for me but I don’t regret anything I did or said in the events that were described in that book.

You must try to make the right decisions for what is best for the Company and if that means being labeled unfriendly to founders, so be it.