Posts from March 2018

Our portfolio company SoundCloud is the first place most musical artists post their music, the first place most musical artists are offered an opportunity to monetize their music, and the first place most listeners discover new artists and their music.

To celebrate that, SoundCloud is launching the First On SoundCloud campaign:

“First On SoundCloud” kicks off with SoundCloud’s first-ever creator advertising campaign spotlighting 10 groundbreaking artists from across SoundCloud’s global community. Spanning hip hop, electronic and pop, these artists represent the more than 10 million creators heard on SoundCloud every month, and the accelerating global shift toward creators building their sound, their audiences, and their careers directly online.

But there is more. Because SoundCloud is for all artists, there is an opportunity for everyone to participate:

Alongside these featured artists, we’re also giving all creators the opportunity to upload and be heard as part of “First on SoundCloud”. Beginning today, you can upload an original track to SoundCloud and tag it #SCFIRST, for a chance to be promoted across SoundCloud, including:

“First On SoundCloud” playlist: Creators uploading their latest tracks to SoundCloud with the tag #SCFIRST will be considered for inclusion in the “First On SoundCloud” playlist on SoundCloud’s homescreen, giving them global exposure to new fans, plays, likes and follows.

#SCFIRST on social: After uploading a track to SoundCloud with the tag #SCFIRST, creators can use SoundCloud’s seamless Twitter integration to immediately tweet their track with the #SCFIRST hashtag. SoundCloud will be randomly selecting creator tweets and tracks to promote to its millions of social followers.

Fast track consideration for monetization in SoundCloud Premier: Creators uploading content with the tag #SCFIRST will also be reviewed for inclusion in the SoundCloud Premier monetization program which offers creators a leading revenue share and additional promotional resources from SoundCloud.

#SCFIRST in SoundCloud newsletters and blog: SoundCloud will also randomly choose creators who upload their tracks using #SCFIRST for spotlights in SoundCloud’s newsletters and blog posts.

Every day, almost 200,000 tracks are uploaded to SoundCloud, close to 10x any other music streaming service.

So when you upload your next track to SoundCloud, tag it with #SCFIRST, and participate in this campaign.

AVC readers may have noticed that I didn’t blog here yesterday.

That’s because I blogged on USV.com instead, about our most recent investment.

You can read that post here.

Trump’s Justice Department goes to court this week to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner on “anti-competition concerns.”

Like most of the things that come out of this administration, this is a joke.

HBO has 54 million subscribers and spent $2bn on new content last year.

My friend Pat Keane tweeted this out last month:

The Netflix juggernaut: 120 million global subs, 50% of U.S. time streaming, $8 billion 2018 content budget. Competitor content budgets: Apple $1 billion, Hulu $2.5 billion, Amazon Studios $4.5 billion.

— Patrick Keane (@phkeane) March 8, 2018

And what about Amazon? With 80mm global Prime subscribers, they are maybe the biggest threat of them all

This trial is a joke. A waste of taxpayers money. All because our loser President hates CNN. Ugh.

This piece in Recode explains that Cambridge Analytica built an app that 270,000 people used to amass profiles on 50 million people.

That’s not very surprising because we are talking about networks here.

This is a network graph that my colleague Jacqueline made of my twitter network a few years ago:

In our online life, we are connected to a huge number of people.

If I get access to your email inbox, I am going to see emails with thousands of people.

Which is what makes this privacy/data sovereignty stuff so important.

When your data is taken without your knowledge/permission, it is not just your data that is taken.

It is the data of thousands of other people, often the people closest to you.

That sucks.

This is one of the many reasons I am hopeful about an Internet 3.0, a decentralized system with data security and integrity at its core.

This weekend I am going with a slideshow instead of a video or audio embed.

Some of my colleagues at USV have been spending a lot of time with regulators, elected officials, and lawyers helping all of these people understand cryptonetworks and why they are super important and need to be regulated with extra care.

One of the issues that many folks get wrong is the role of tokens in these cryptonetworks. For many reasons, not the least of which being the speculative frenzy surrounding cryptotokens, regulators and others simply see tokens as financial instruments and want to regulate them as such.

So my colleague Nick put together this deck to explain the “centrality” of cryptotokens to the operation of cryptonetworks. He published it on his blog earlier this week. I am republishing it here.

I would encourage everyone to hit the [ ] icon and read this in full screen mode.

I backed this project today which is attempting to build a comprehensive online course on blockchain technology.

Our portfolio company Coinbase launched some much needed tax tools this week.

I used them today to calculate our gains in 2017 and send the reports to our accountants.

The Coinbase tax center is here.

The tools look like this:

I generated all of those reports just now and sent them to my accountant so we can report the 2017 gains on our returns.

Sadly in 2015 and 2016, we had no gains. Some small losses which might offset a few of the 2017 gains, but not much.

2017, on the other hand, was a material year for us. The BCH fork generated real value and we sold some of that. We will be paying taxes on that shortly.

I tell you all of this because gains and losses on crypto trading is taxable income and you should declare it and pay the taxes.

That’s the law and it is important to comply.

When I got into the VC business in the early 80s, the VC/Company relationship was pretty different than it is now.

Capital was hard to come by, VCs commanded terms that would be laughed at today, and once they had made the investment, VCs acted as if they owned the Company (they sometimes did).

The VC/Company relationship was a lot more like the current PE business than the current VC business.

Back then VCs thought their customers were their Limited Partners. They would put on lavish annual meetings, treating their investors to three day events at resorts and such.

Capital was hard to come by for VCs too and so they worked hard to earn the favor of the capital suppliers.

All of that changed, starting in the 90s, when capital became very easy to come by in the first Internet boom.

When we started Flatiron Partners in the mid 90s, I told my colleagues that our customers would be the entrepreneurs and that I wanted to treat our investors as our shareholders.

That was a novel idea at the time, but I have advocated for it ever since and I think it more properly captures the relationship that the best VCs have with their portfolio companies today.

Our portfolio companies are our customers.

At USV, we have a portfolio network of about seventy companies. This group spans 8,000+ employees across more than 10 countries and 20 cities.

We have a dedicated team that services our portfolio and as we have built it, we have been guided by several principles which reflect this “customer” orientation.

We put them up on our website yesterday, they are here.

Go read them and you will see that they reflect the fact that we are here to support our portfolio, not the other way around, we view them as our customers, and their success is our success.

I believe this is as it should be.

Every year our portfolio company Stack Overflow surveys its developer community and publishes the results.

This year Stack had over 100,000 respondents to its survey from all over the world, making this survey possibly the most comprehensive view of the global software developer community.

There is a ton of data here. It’s a 30 minute survey. You can see the results here.

But since many of you won’t click that link, here are some highlights from it:

First, we know that software engineering is a largely white male profession. The data shows that:

If we look at the gender and racial/ethnic mix of the students who answered the question, there is some promising data on racial/ethnic diversity, but less promising data on gender diversity. Efforts like I blogged about yesterday are badly needed to change these numbers.

I found the technology questions interesting.

Javascript is by far the most common programming language.

But Python is the most “wanted” programming language. And Go and Kotlin are rising fast.

Some great news for our portfolio company MongoDB in this survey. Mongo was the most popular non-SQL database and was the most wanted database of them all.

Finally, some data on how important Stack Overflow is in these developers’ work:

Any service where 2/3 of its users visit daily is a big deal. And for developers, Stack is very much that.