We have had an order in for Tesla Solar Roof Tiles for almost two years, since they were announced back in 2017. Production delays and other issues have meant that we still don’t have them on our roof.
And they are more expensive than a regular roof plus traditional solar panels on the roof. But they look a lot better in my view.
This video explains all of that, and more, along with some helpful cost comparisons.
I really like this project. I hope it reaches its goal and gets funded.
When I started my now ten-year journey down the “let’s teach computer science in our public schools” path, I knew that getting students to instruct machines would open up new methods of teaching and learning. But I did not understand just how powerful that would be.
It is good and necessary to offer dedicated classes in computer science to students. It is even better to use computer science to teach complex concepts in subjects like math, science, art, music, literature and more. When you do both, you can really impact student’s learning and comprehension.
I was in a high school class in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx yesterday. They were doing geometry lessons in Javascript.
They started with a lesson on the translation function and how it could be used to move objects around. This is a photo I took of the smartboard at the front of the classroom as the students discussed how this function works.
After this lesson, the students played a game of Battleship in Javascript with each other on their laptops.
This is a photo of the Bronx Borough President, Ruben Diaz Jr, playing Javascript Battleship with one of the students in the class.
Writing and editing code on a machine allows the student to see how geometric functions (and many other functions) work in a fun and interactive way and takes complex notions and makes them real and tangible to them. This is important and powerful.
I now believe that introducing computer science into the elementary, middle, and high school curriculum will not only help students master computational thinking but it will also help them master many other complex concepts and allow them to be better students and better adults.
Two of the more interesting and “out there” trends in tech are NFTs (non fungible tokens) and virtual celebrities.
So it was only a matter of time before developers started to work at the intersection of them
Virtual celebrities are characters made out of software that exist in games, social media, streaming audio and video, etc who have large and rabid fan bases. Here is an example of one.
NFTs are crypto-assets that are unique and can only be owned by one person at a time. A well-known example is a CryptoKitty.
So I find it interesting that today an instagram celebrity (a real one) has chosen to wear an outfit that is actually an NFT and can be sold and owned by one of her fans.
The celebrity Johanna Jaskowska is wearing a dress that is actually a unique crypto-asset. It is “the world’s first couture digital outfit on the Ethereum blockchain.” She announced that today on her Instagram channel.
This is Johanna wearing crypto fashion:
I am interested to see if this idea takes off. The worlds of gaming, social media, AR/VR, and crypto are going to get richer and more lifelike over time. So I suspect something like this will eventually work and go mainstream.
Our portfolio company Coinbase has been building an institutional grade regulated custodial service for crypto assets over the past 18 months. It is called Coinbase Custody and it is a qualified institutional custodian which means that investors that are regulated can use it to satisfy their custodial requirements.
Coinbase has been providing safe and trusted custody for crypto assets for most of its seven year history. It has led the industry in developing secure storage of crypto assets. So it is the obvious place for institutions to turn to custody their crypto assets.
Yesterday, Coinbase Custody announced that they now support custody of over 30 of the most popular crypto assets.
Coinbase Custody operates as a standalone, independently-capitalized business. Coinbase Custody is a fiduciary under NY State Banking Law. All digital assets are segregated and held in trust for the benefit of their clients.
If you want to learn more about using Coinbase Custody as your institutional custodial solution, you can reach out here.
I worked for a VC named Bliss McCrum early in my career. He had been on wall street for about twenty five years before getting into VC mid/late career. He loved investing. He taught me technical analysis/charting and a lot of other things about stocks.
I used to ask him “why did that stock go down yesterday?” and he would always respond “more sellers than buyers.”
I loved that response and sometimes would ask him the question just to hear that answer.
What I really wanted to know was the underlying reason for more sellers than buyers. Did the company post weak earnings? Did a competitor enter their market? Was the CFO fired?
But Bliss would never take the bait.
Just “more sellers than buyers.”
His point, I think looking back after thirty years, was that markets are markets and you need to treat them as such and respect them as such. They are not always rational but the supply/demand for the stock doesn’t lie.
This week we are finally getting an Uber IPO. Its competitor Lyft’s stock has been weak post its recent IPO.
I don’t have a view on either stock but we will get to see if there are more buyers than sellers or the other way around.
I think this is a good thing, for those companies, for their shareholders, and for the entire tech and startup sector. We should let markets work. They do their job very well.
Last summer I threw out our twenty year old satellite dish and decided to finally go over the top. I put a bunch of video streaming apps on our AppleTV to replace the “linear television” that we had been getting with the dish.
Almost a year later, I’ve removed all but two of them and the clear winner has been YouTube TV.
YouTube TV is pretty much everything you’d want in a linear television service (except for one thing which I will get to) and the UI is more or less perfect.
The thing I like most about it is that I can run the app with my Google login on all of the AppleTVs in our house plus on our phones and we have the exact same experience, with the exact same library, on all of them.
That seems like a little thing, but after almost sixty years of living with set top boxes that are device specific, it is a big thing.
I’m writing this on my cell phone. Just before starting to write I was sitting in my office thinking that I want to watch the Sixers Raptors game this afternoon but we are going to be uptown at the TEFAF Art Fair.
No problem. I opened the YouTube TV app on my phone, searched for the Sixers Raptors game, and hit the plus sign.
When I turn on any of our TVs in our home, that game will be in the library waiting for me to watch it.
The one app, one subscription, any device thing is pretty cool too. We have a number of AppleTVs in our home but pay for only one subscription.
If you have a ski house, or a beach house, or some other form of second home, you can use your single YouTube TV subscription there too.
So what’s the one thing that’s not perfect about YouTube TV?
They don’t have the Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) on the service. If that Sixers Raptors game was being broadcast on CSN Philadelphia it would not have been on YouTube TV. Thankfully it is the playoffs and it is on ABC.
I talked to a friend of a friend who works at YouTube TV and the RSNs will not sell their content to YouTube TV on a subscriber by subscriber basis. If YouTube TV wants MSG Network on it’s service, it has to pay for it for everyone. And who other than die hard Knicks fans would want to pay to watch the Knicks this year?
So we also have a subscription to FuboTV which seems to have at least some of the RSNs including MSG Network. We have a family plan subscription to FuboTV which allows three of us (me and two of our kids) to have FuboTV in our homes which makes it a bit less expensive to have two streaming services.
I tried a bunch of other services over the last year but I found YouTube TV to be superior in almost every way.
Google did an amazing job with this product. If you put YouTube TV on your televisions (there are a bunch of ways you can do that), you can throw out that set-top box once and for all like we did.
And you will get a bunch of capabilities that you never had with cable. It’s great.
John Buttrick has been a partner at USV for almost a decade. He mostly focuses on financial services but also does a few other things for us.
In this chat with John Siracusa, John talks about how he ended up at USV, our investing thesis, and a number of financial services investments he has made and manages for us.
I backed this film project this morning. It looks great.
Entrepreneurship and startup investing is a long game. It requires patience, resilience, capital, commitment, and much more.
But even so, the average life of a venture capital investment is seven to ten years. It is rare for it to go longer than that. But it can happen.
Yesterday marked the end of an almost twenty-year relationship between me and what was once a startup and is now a fairly large company called Return Path. We announced yesterday that Return Path is being acquired by Validity.
My former venture capital firm, Flatiron Partners, that has not been actively investing since 2000, made its final investment in Return Path in mid-2000. I joined the board shortly after that and have been working with the founder and CEO Matt Blumberg ever since.
In many ways, this company and this entrepreneur define my career more than any other. Matt and I stuck with this company and each other for almost twenty years and in the process built an incredibly trusting, supportive, and, ultimately, profitable relationship.
We had partners in this long game. Brad Feld and Greg Sands joined the board a year or two after I did and they are among my closest friends in the venture business now. And we have had incredible independent directors like Scott Petry, Jeff Epstein, and Scott Weiss. The management team has turned over something like a half dozen times in twenty years but a few leaders have stuck it out including Jack Sinclair, George Bilbrey, and Ken Takahashi. All of these people are responsible for an incredible journey that I have gone on for the last twenty years with this company.
Matt and I have been through a lot together. We had a least four or five near death experiences when we should have lost the company but did not. We had a deal to sell the company fall through the night before the closing. We sold lines of businesses, we bought lines of businesses, we did several large reductions in force, we did several big expansions. We hired and parted ways with many executives.
Through all of that, we celebrated with each other, yelled at each other, cried with each other, annoyed each other, frustrated each other, and supported each other. Matt has made me a much better investor. He has taught me so much about supporting entrepreneurs, building and leading a great board, and hanging in there against long odds for a very long time.
When you see me do something, say something, explain something, here or elsewhere, my approach and philosophy comes from my experiences and nowhere did I get more experience than my time working with Matt and Return Path. So if you are getting any benefit from me, you are getting that benefit from Matt too.
I hope to work again with Matt and his team on another company or two or three. Hopefully they won’t all take twenty years.
