Posts from 2019

CS Education Week

This week is CS Education Week. There are CS Education week events all around the world, mostly in schools where students will do an hour of coding.

In NYC, where I do most of my CS Education work, there are CS Education week events in many/most of the public school buildings this week.

As I could not be in NYC this week, I went onto Twitter this morning to see what is going on and saw this:

I love Hopscotch Coding. Young students deconstruct the game of Hopscotch into the various moves and then lay out the code next to the Hopscotch game to show how they played it. This teaches students so many important skills at a very young age and doesn’t even require a computer.

Spencer Dinwiddie, the point guard from the Brooklyn Nets, went to PS 196 in Williamsburg and did an Hour Of Code with the students.

Students at this school in Little Neck Queens did coding exercises in English, Math, and Science. One of the great things about CS is that it integrates so well into many different disciplines.

Celebrating CS Education Week in your school or your child’s school is a great thing to do and I encourage everyone to celebrate CS Education week by doing that this week.

#Uncategorized

Algolia

One of the things I am most focused on with the new AVC.com, which is coming soon, is a better search experience.

I have been impressed by how much we were able to improve the search on the new USV.com and the way we did that was by using a site search service called Algolia. So I am going to use Algolia here at AVC as well.

Algolia allows me to customize the search results to improve them. That means I can work on improving the search results here at AVC over time.

There are 8,470 posts here at AVC as of today. That’s a ton of content. And finding the post you remember reading and want to read again, or send to someone, has never been easy.

I hope and expect to fix that soon.

#Weblogs

Getting Tech Into The Boroughs

A number of elected officials tweeted “I told you so” when the news came out at the end of last week that Amazon had taken space in Hudson Yards and will move 1500 jobs there soon.

While the question of what kind of public funded incentives should be used to incentivize the behavior of the wealthiest corporations in the world is a conversation that we must have, the truth is we all lost something when Amazon decided not to build their second headquarters in Long Island City and bring 25,000 good paying jobs to Queens.

Where companies locate does matter. Sure you can take a subway from Jamaica Queens to Hudson Yards and some people will.

But NYC’s large and rapidly growing tech sector remains largely white and asian and centered in lower and midtown Manhattan.

I dream of a day when communities like the South Bronx, Jamaica Queens, Brownsville Brooklyn, and St George in Staten Island can have tech companies as residents and tech jobs will be readily available to the residents of those communities.

A good start is NYC’s groundbreaking CS4All program in which computer science teachers and classes are being made available in every public school building in NYC. Another good start is CUNY’s emphasis on making high quality computer science majors available at many of its twenty five campuses around NYC.

We are well on our way to training the tech workforce of tomorrow which can and should be as black and brown and female in the future as it is white and asian and male today.

But we also must connect the tech sector to the vast part of NYC that exists outside of lower and midtown Manhattan.

And the best way to do that is to create incentives of some sort for large and small tech companies to spread out into the outer boroughs.

There is a fantastic building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard called Dock 72. I have suggested to many of the tech companies that I work with that they move there. Some have taken a subway over there to take a look. But many have told me “I’m happy here in Manhattan.”

Locating in Manhattan is easy. You can recruit employees from New Jersey, Westchester and Connecticut. Moving to the boroughs is a harder decision.

So we need to encourage that behavior. If not tax incentives, then let’s try something else.

But if we leave this to the market to sort out, we will see the next 250,000 jobs created by the tech sector located in places like Hudson Yards and not Industry City.

And that will be a loss of all of us.

#NYC#policy#Politics

Bigger Isn't Necessarily Better

Crunchbase has a story up today explaining that Series A and Series B rounds make up between 25% and 35% of all $100mm+ “supergiant” rounds every year.

That’s interesting but what would be more interesting is to compare the cohort of companies raising Series A and Series B supergiant rounds to the rest of the companies in a given year that raised Series A and Series B rounds.

What would interest me are success rates between the two cohorts. One could measure how many of each cohort are alive five years later. Or one could compare the stock price appreciation over the five year period between the two cohorts.

I have found, and written here, that performance of VC backed companies is inversely correlated to how much money they raise.

There are all sorts of reasons for that, but mostly it is that money is a burden, and anchor, it weighs you down and slows you down.

So I’d like to see the data on these supergiant A and B rounds. I suspect it will be pretty poor.

#entrepreneurship#Uncategorized

AIVC

My friend Fraser took a large number of AVC blog posts over the years and trained an AI model on them.

The result is a blog written by a machine.

You can see it here.

One one hand, it is kind of amazing that you can train a machine to write like someone.

On the other hand, I don’t think I will be out of a job anytime soon.

#machine learning

Digital Money

I was listening to this podcast on the treadmill this morning. It is a conversation between Peter McCormack and Andreas Antonopoulos about Bitcoin, Privacy, Freedom, and a lot more.

At one point Andreas says that we have digital money already, but it is largely debits and credits on ledgers in banks and other financial services companies. He also says that cash is currently only about 8% of global money and that number has been going down steadily over the last fifty years as digital money has taken over.

His point, and it is a good one, is that cash is decentralized money. But money that is registered on a ledger maintained by a corporation that is highly regulated by the government is an entirely different thing.

After listening to the podcast, I bought some more Bitcoin this morning.

#crypto

Practicing Patience

We went to the Knicks Celtics game last night.

For three and a half quarters the Knicks and Celtics played a tight game and the game was tied at 95 with six minutes left when Coach Fizdale called a time out.

The Knicks came out of that time out befuddled and turned the ball over on three straight possessions which ultimately led to 12-0 run by the Celtics and the game was over.

As we walked out of MSG, I was depressed. More losing.

But my son Josh had a different take. Dennis Smith Jr is finally coming out of his early-season slump. Kevin Knox had a good game after taking a beating in the press recently.

Losing is hard. The Knicks are 4-16 so far this season. There is not much joy in the Garden right now.

But I appreciate Josh’s optimism. By the time we had gotten to dinner, some of it had rubbed off on me.

Patience is hard. Being a Knick fan is great practice.

#life lessons#Sports

Grinding

It is tempting to search for the one magic move that will make everything better. A new VP of Sales. A new database layer in your tech stack. A new brand for your company. Moving everything to the cloud. More capital in the business.

But it is rarely one thing that a business needs to succeed. It is often a little bit of everything.

Back in the early days of Twitter, we could not keep the website and API up. We would hire advisors and they would recommend something new and we would try it and we would still go down. It was terribly frustrating and threatened the business.

During this period of instability, Twitter purchased a search engine called Summize. Summize was a small team of engineers, most of whom had come out of AOL.

After we cut the deal to acquire Summize, I asked Jack Dorsey, who was running Twitter at the time, how we planned to integrate the Summize team. He looked at me and said “we are not going to integrate them, they are going to integrate us.” And Jack made Greg Pass, Summize’s engineering leader, Twitter’s engineering leader.

It was interesting to watch Greg and the Summize team tackle the “fail whale.” Instead of searching for a magic solution, they instrumented the entire system and just started rebuilding every part that was about to break.

It was a slow and steady approach. It took time. But within six months (or thereabouts), we had a much more stable system. And after about a year of this approach, we had mostly said goodbye to the fail whale.

Grinding isn’t very satisfying. It is hard to stand up in front of everyone and say “we are going to fix things around here bit by bit with a lot of hard work.” Big flashy moves are an easier sell most of the time. But they don’t work nearly as well and are prone to complete and abject failure.

If given a choice between a flashy operator or a grinder, I will take a grinder every time. It is a much higher percentage bet. It requires faith and patience and the results are sometimes hard to see. But if you look at the results from grinding it out over a long enough time frame, you can see the power of that approach.

#entrepreneurship#life lessons#management