Posts from April 2018

I woke up this morning thinking about disappointment.

My daughter and I went to the final Knicks home game of the season last night, a loss to the Cavs. One of 53 we have endured this season.

The season had started off with expectations of better times. Melo was gone. KP was emerging as one of the best young players in the NBA.

And yet we end the season with less wins and more losses than last year. And it wasn’t because of letting Melo go.

But this post is not about the Knicks.

It is about disappointment.

Life is full of disappointment.

Many things don’t work out the way we hope or plan.

Investments don’t pan out.

People we are excited about don’t live up to our expectations.

A film we are excited to see turns out to be awful.

There are big and material disappointments that can set us back for years or longer.

And there are little ones, like the terrible Knicks, that we should be able to shake off in a good night of sleep.

I think this Knicks thing will take me a few nights to be honest.

It is often tempting to become cynical and lower our expectations to protect us from the pain of disappointment.

But I don’t think we should do that.

I think it is human to hope and expect.

And it is human to feel the pains of disappointment.

We just need to shake them off, get out of bed with a jump in our step, and move forward.

And find something new to get excited about.

And start the cycle all over again.

I was going through my email this morning and opening pitch decks, skimming them, and responding to indicate if they are a fit with our thesis and of interest to me and my colleagues at USV.

Everyone who works in VC or does angel investing does this daily. I probably open and skim 10-20 pitch decks a day and sometimes a lot more.

So on the way to yoga, after making a dent in my inbox, I was thinking if there was an alternative to pitch decks that would be as efficient at communicating the idea (pitch decks really are great at this) that would serve the entrepreneur as well.

I came up with three ideas in my seven minute walk to the gym:

1/ Record a short video (less than three minutes) in which you communicate who you are (or who the team is), what the idea is, and why you are doing it. Post it to Vimeo behind a password and share it via email. We use a technique like this in our analyst interview process and you can convey a lot of information this way but, importantly, you can also communicate who you are and why you are doing it.

2/ Have a friend or colleague interview you in podcast format. Keep it to three to five minutes max. Then post it to a streaming platform like SoundCloud behind a password and share it via email. I like the interview format a lot. It allows you to script the Q&A but provide a lot of personality in the answers.

3/ Write a letter, like the letters some founders and CEOs put at the start of their IPO filings, that explains your vision and why you are doing this. A well written letter can be an incredible sales tool.

The key is finding a format that suits you and that you are comfortable with. The pitch deck is efficient and powerful but everyone uses it and it does not allow you to stand out and be noticed in a sea of pitch decks.

Whatever you do, keep it short. If someone is going through 10-20 pitches every morning in their email routine, you have to get your story across simply and crisply or it won’t get the attention it deserves.

Finally, please don’t punish my good deed of sharing these ideas by flooding my inbox with videos, podcasts, and letters this week. I have a very busy week and am already behind before the week gets started.

And don’t take this blog post as a message to stop sending me pitch decks and replace with one of these alternatives. Pitch decks work fine for me. I like them.

I’m just staying that you can and should be creative and play to your strengths when pitching your company. You have to get noticed somehow.

We have many voice assistants in our lives.

I have Google Assistant on my phone. It is great.

The Gotham Gal has Siri on her phone. It is OK.

We have Amazon Alexa and Google Home in our apartment.

We have Siri on our AppleTV/Siri Remote.

We can talk to our car.

But the honest truth is we rarely use any of them.

The one we use most is the Siri Remote when using AppleTV because it is by far the best way to control that device.

It is not an issue of the quality of the voice recognition on these services. It is great.

It is a question of the relatively weak utility of the experience relative to alternatives combined with not building the muscle memory to use voice assistants more.

I was walking home from the gym this morning and was wondering if we are typical.

So I just ran this Twitter poll:

Do you regularly use a voice assistant in your life?:

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) April 8, 2018

Twitter polls only allow for four options so this is far from scientific and also suffers from the bias inherent in my Twitter followership.

But almost 500 replies in, over 60% replied no.

About 20% say they use a voice assistant regularly in their home.

And about 10% say they use a voice assistant on their phone.

I’m happy to learn that we are not in the luddite category when it comes to voice assistants.

More like the mainstream.

But certainly not in the early adopter cohort which is not small.

It does make me wonder how many of those Alexas and Google Homes are sitting around collecting dust.

In this talk that he gave at the Blockstack Berlin conference last month, my partner Albert argues that privacy is a strategy and not a core value in the information age.

A group of high school students in NYC are doing a gun safety rally in Washington Square Park on April 20th and are funding the rally on our portfolio company, GoFundMe.

The campaign is called NYC Says Enough and you can back it here.

I don’t know these students, but one of them reached out to me via email and I asked him a bunch of questions which he answered to my satisfaction.

So I backed the project this morning and am now sharing it with all of you.

I am closing comments today because I don’t want this post to turn into an acrimonious gun safety debate.

It’s been a busy week on the USV news front. On Tuesday we rolled out our new thesis and yesterday we announced our latest investment, ShopShops.

I was talking to a young woman this week who we are interviewing for our two-year analyst program. I asked her why she was interested in working at USV.

She told me she liked that we posted our investment memos on our blog so that everyone knows why we made the investment, how it fits with our thesis, and why we are excited about it.

That is something we have been doing since the early days and is core to how we approach investing at USV.

You can go back and look at what we were thinking when we invested in Twitter, Twilio, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and pretty much any USV investment.

We don’t write investment memos for the files at USV, something I used to do at earlier VC firms I worked at. We just write them to the world. It puts our thinking out there and it stays there in perpetuity.

So yesterday Rebecca did that for our newest investment, ShopShops.

I like to think of ShopShops as what QVC would be in a global decentralized world where everything is live streamed on our phones.

This graphic from their website explains how it works:

Basically, hosts go into stores and livestream shopping experiences to viewers all over the world who can buy from stores they aren’t able to shop in.

This is a screenshot of ShopShops founder Liyia Wu doing a shopping event for viewers in China.

Time will tell if our investment in ShopShops lives up to everything we are expecting from it.

But I am excited by this idea, this founder, and this investment and I am thrilled we made it and told the world why.

I use Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones when I’m on my desktop and laptop but I prefer the Apple AirPods when I am on my phone. They are small, light, and fit well in my ear.

But I’ve had this nagging issue with the volume on my AirPods when I stream music on my phone (SoundCloud, AppleMusic, YouTube, etc).

The volume from all of those apps is super low when you use AirPods on Android.

I wasn’t walking much in LA, mostly driving with my phone bluetooth’d to my car, and this issue didn’t affect me much.

But since I’ve been back in NYC and walking a lot again, it came back with a vengeance.

So I finally figured out how to fix it, by simply googling and finding this Reddit post.

Here is how you fix it:

1/ Go to the settings app on your Android phone, scroll down to System, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Build Number” seven times. That makes you a developer on Android, always a good thing in my book.

2/ Now when you click on the Settings app, and select System, you will see “Developer Options”

3/ Scroll down to the Networking settings in the Developer Options and turn on “Disable Absolute Volume”

Now you can listen to music and video on your Android with your AirPods at whatever volume you want.

Problem fixed.

I love the Internet and geek stuff like this.

At USV, we are thesis-driven investors. We state clearly and concisely what we want to invest in and, implicitly, decide not to invest in anything else. That is a good thing because, as our partner Rebecca wrote in this post:

The commitment to a thesis is part of the fiber of USV–a shared set of ideas creates a framework that allows us to operate with focus and work on what matters most

Today we are publishing, and committing ourselves to, version 3.0 of our thesis:

USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols.

But this is actually the fourth USV thesis.

When we started USV, Brad and I committed this to our investors (before this was tweetable):

At USV, we will invest in the applications layer of the Internet.

That was an acknowledgment that, in 2003, we had moved beyond what Carlota Perez calls the installation phase and had reached the deployment phase.

But we quickly realized that the applications layer thesis was too big and we needed to narrow our focus. So in 2006/2007, we started focusing exclusively on networks that were quickly amassing large users bases on the web. That was eventually articulated by our partner Brad in this tweet:

USV in 140 characters: invest in large networks of engaged users, differentiated by user experience, and defensible though network effects

— Brad Burnham (@BradUSV) June 8, 2011

By 2013, we knew that the network thesis was long in the tooth and had started adjusting to that fact. We had gotten interested in the blockchain sector in 2011 and had also started building large portfolios in fintech, education, and health care. Our partner Andy finally forced the issue and we went public with what he called “Thesis 2.0” but was actually the third revision.

As the market matures, we look for less obvious network effects,
infrastructure for the new economy, and enablers of open decentralized
data

— Andy Weissman (@aweissman) December 15, 2015

And now we find ourselves again iterating slightly on what we are focused on. And so we turned to the newest member of our partnership, Rebecca, to explain it to the world.

The @usv thesis in its new 3.0 version (but still less than 140 characters) to reflect our current focus: USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. More on why here: https://t.co/ogKFH4DUNZ

— Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46) April 3, 2018

One of the things I like most about Thesis 3.0 is that is a modest adjustment to where we have been with our prior efforts, but we have tightened things up and added a few nuances. Like the prior iterations of our thesis, we have already been investing behind this thesis and you can see elements of it here and elsewhere in our recent investing activity. Notably, the words blockchain and crypto are nowhere to be found in thesis 3.0 but it leads us inexorably there.

Our portfolio company Cloudflare announced a consumer DNS service (a resolver) yesterday.

It was not an April Fools stunt.

If you want to use the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service, then head over to 1.1.1.1 and click the install button.

What you will do is adjust your computer’s settings to change the DNS servers your computer uses to resolve DNS queries (what server address is google.com?).

Here are some mantras from the 1.1.1.1 web page:

Unfortunately, by default, DNS is usually slow and insecure. Your ISP, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Creepily, some DNS providers sell data about your Internet activity or use it target you with ads.

We think that’s gross. If you do too, now there’s an alternative: 1.1.1.1

and

We will never log your IP address (the way other companies identify you). And we’re not just saying that. We’ve retained KPMG to audit our systems annually to ensure that we’re doing what we say.

Frankly, we don’t want to know what you do on the Internet—it’s none of our business—and we’ve taken the technical steps to ensure we can’t.

and

So if you want speed and privacy, install 1.1.1.1 and you will get both.