Posts from May 2020

I just backed this project and got myself a great hoodie to wear this fall when we hope to be back in NYC.

We have been looking for ways in which crypto assets can go mainstream. Our interest and investment in Dapper’s crypto games is an effort in that area. So is our involvement in the Libra project.

We also have been involved in legacy mobile and web apps that have built cryptocurrencies inside of them. Kin and Props are two examples of that.

But we are also always looking outside of our own portfolio for examples of ways in which crypto assets can go mainstream.

And I saw yesterday that two subreddits, r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR, have issued crypto assets on the Ethereum blockchain using the ERC20 token standard. The crypto asset associated with r/Cryptocurrency are called Moons. The crypto asset associated with r/FortNiteBR are called Bricks. They are very similar assets but they are not the same.

I don’t play FortNite but I do own cryptocurrencies, so I am a bit more interested in Moons and hope to accumulate them by actively engaging in the r/CryptoCurrency community.

Here is how Moons work.

Moons are a new way for people to be rewarded for their contributions to r/CryptoCurrency. They represent ownership in the subreddit, they are tokens on the Ethereum blockchain controlled entirely by you, and they can be freely transferred, tipped, and spent in r/CryptoCurrency. Claim your Moons in the new Vault section of the Reddit iOS or Android app! It will be rolled out gradually over the next two days and will be in beta testing until later this summer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/gj96lb/introducing_rcryptocurrency_moons/

The new Vault section of the Reddit mobile app now has an Ethereum wallet that can store Ethereum tokens, like Moon. And as you engage in the community, you earn Moons in your wallet.

I think this is an interesting experiment and could bring more users into the crypto ecosystem. I hope to earn some Moons over the next few months and you may want to do the same.

I am confident this pandemic will end. At some point, we will have a vaccine, therapeutics, and/or broad based immunity. When that will happen is less clear to me. I believe that at some point, we will be able to resume living and working as we did prior to the pandemic.

However, I am also confident that we will not resume living and working exactly as we did prior to the pandemic because some of the things we have adopted to get through this will reveal themselves as comparable or better than what we were doing before.

One of the places this is happening is knowledge work which is a growing percentage of the workforce in the US. What we have seen in this pandemic is that knowledge workers have been able to be comparably productive working from home and that has caused many large (and small) employers to consider different work/location options.

Yesterday, Twitter told their employees that most of them can work from anywhere going forward:

News: Twitter will allow its employees to work from home forever. @jack just emailed the company about it. Details here: https://t.co/KvvozuQ8Qn

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) May 12, 2020

A number of our portfolio companies have made that decision already as well:

This week, we rolled out Work from Anywhere.

– Will keep our NYC office as HQ (these are desks at a co-working space)
– Anyone can work from anywhere in the U.S.

— Michael Karnjanaprakorn (@mikekarnj) April 22, 2020

I can imagine large and small banks, law firms, accounting firms, media and entertainment companies, and other knowledge based businesses making similar decisions.

I am not saying that remote work is ideal. There is something very valuable about being able to be in the same physical space as your colleagues. USV will likely keep an office for exactly that reason.

But it is also true that USV is operating incredibly well during this pandemic and we have not (yet) missed a beat.

What this means for large cities where many companies that engage in knowledge work are centered is an interesting question.

I saw this chart this morning on Benedict Evans’ Twitter:

People have been calling the end of SF for long time, but it’s worth remembering just how much the price delta has opened up in the last decade. For many people it no longer matters how driven you are if you can’t afford a second bedroom pic.twitter.com/4suajjd1gS

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) May 13, 2020

That compares two of the most expensive cities in the US (and world) to each other. And as bad as NYC is on the affordability index, SF is way worse.

So when you combine these two situations; large knowledge work hubs getting prohibitively expensive and remote work normalizing, it would seem that we are in for a correction.

What is less clear is where knowledge workers who can increasingly work from anywhere will choose to live (and work). Will cities remain attractive for the quality of life they offer (arts, culture, nightlife, etc)? Or will the suburbs stand to gain? Or will more idyllic locations like the mountains or the beach become the location of choice? Or will second and third tier cities become more attractive? I do not have a crystal ball on this question. I suspect it will be some of all of the above.

But this may become a big deal. Like the “white flight” that happened in the 50, 60s and 70s in a number of large cities in the US. Wholesale movement of large groups of people can have profound changes on regions.

Like many disruptions, this is both bad and good. Affordability (or lack thereof) and gentrification have been a blight on our cities. If we can reverse that trend, much good will come of it. This may also be helpful in addressing the climate crisis which remains the number one risk to planet Earth. So there are reasons to be excited about this. But wholesale abandonment is terrible. We should do whatever we can to avoid that.

It is early days for this conversation. But it is one we are going to have all around the US, and possibly all around the world. So it is time to start thinking about it.

USV has invested in the education sector for a bit more than ten years. We kicked things off with an event we called Hacking Education back in March 2009.

We have focused on “direct to learner” businesses and have mostly avoided investing in companies that sell to the established education system.

This has been a good strategy and we have assembled a fantastic direct to learner portfolio that includes companies like Duolingo, Quizlet, Skillshare, Codecademy, and Outschool.

We’ve been doing some work to understand this portfolio in the light of this remote learning moment we are in.

This portfolio reaches hundreds of millions of learners all around the world each month. Many learners use these products for free. A small percentage of learners pay. And yet this portfolio will generate close to a half a billion dollars of revenue in 2020.

Another interesting thing about this portfolio is that none of these companies have spent a lot of capital building their businesses. They have all been very capital efficient and most are cash flow positive at this point.

What this tells me is that direct to learner businesses are very attractive. They can serve a very large number of learners very efficiently, they can lightly monetize and yet produce massive revenues because of their scale, and they don’t require a huge amount of capital to build.

We hope to find more businesses like this to invest in as we think we are just at the beginning of rethinking how we want to learn and educate.

If you want to see some of this in action, you should check out Codecademy’s Learn From Home Day tomorrow, May 13th, starting at 10:45am ET. It looks to be a fun day of learning.

We’ve been watching the ESPN series The Last Dance along with something like 6mm other fans who are watching it right now. It is a reminder of how dominant Michael Jordan was in the 90s and what a special player he was.

I woke up thinking about the last three minutes of episode 7 which dropped last night.

Michael is asked if his intensity has come at the expense of being perceived as a
“nice guy.”

He gets pretty emotional and says “Winning has a price and leadership has a price. I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled, I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. I earned that right.” … “Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game. I would not take anything less.” … “One thing about Michael Jordan is that he never asked anyone to do anything that he didn’t do.”

It’s a great piece of television and captures the essence of the man, how competitive he is, and how emotional he is about it all.

It also captures the burden of leadership and what is required to get everyone to commit to each other and be the best that they can be. Leadership is not being liked. Leadership is being respected and followed.

And the last three minutes of episode 7 capture that so well.

This pandemic has challenged us all in many ways. But it has also provided time for many of us to tackle things we’ve long wanted to do.

Today, I would like to blog about an example of that.

Kirk Love is well known to many AVC readers. He is also the designer of this blog. And he is a good friend.

Kirk is also very fond of Kickstarter. He has backed over 300 projects on Kickstarter over the years and he has tipped me off to so many great ones that I have gone on to back. And Kirk has always wanted to do a Kickstarter project of his own.

Well he finally found the time to do that and he has a great project up right now called The Arbus Box. I will let him explain it to you (video link here for email recipients):

I backed it earlier this week. If you want to join me in supporting Kirk’s creative project, you can do that here.

One of the great joys of the work I do is I get to watch the leaders of our portfolio companies grow over time.

I’ve had a number of moments over the last few months where I got off a call or a meeting and thought to myself “wow, she’s a new person.”

Growing as a leader takes time, mistakes, failure, feedback, and a lot of work. You don’t magically show up as the CEO and you are good to go. It’s not like that at all. The authority to make the final call doesn’t mean that you are good at it and that people will line up behind your decisions.

It is a process and like all processes, it requires time and patience. But for those who are committed to personal growth, there is a path.

Two syndromes I see quite frequently are “deer in the headlights” and “I’ve got this.” They are both tell tale signs of a leader who isn’t there yet.

Deer in the headlights is pretty obvious to everyone. The leader just doesn’t seem steady and solid. You can see it in their eyes. I like to provide a leader with deer in the headlights syndrome a lot of support, advice, and constructive feedback. I have seen people go from deers in a headlight to strong decisive leaders in less than a year. It helps to have a gauntlet or two to have to run through. The greater the challenges the deer in the headlight faces, the more quickly they can emerge as a strong leader.

“I’ve got this” is more problematic. The leader acts like they know what they are doing, but they don’t. And everyone around them knows it except them. I like to provide a leader with “I’ve got this” syndrome with a lot of tough love but that is usually not enough. The answer to “I’ve got this” is usually failure of some sort, often a very significant one. The key is to be there for the failing leader in that moment and help them get through the failure and come out of it with self awareness and a desire to address the issues that have gotten in the way.

These are just two of the immature leader syndromes, but they are two very common ones I have seen.

I believe that most people have the capacity to be leaders if they want that for themselves. I also believe that leadership is a skill that you never stop learning. And I believe that it requires self awareness, courage, and deep empathy.

Sitting at a table and watching a skilled leader work is quite a sight to see. And watching someone grow into that person is one of the great joys of my work.

Back when we launched the new AVC (AVC 3.0) and moved away from the Disqus comment system, I heard loudly and clearly that the folks who have left comments here at AVC, via Disqus, from 2007 to early 2020, would like to have their comments displayed at the bottom of all of those old blog posts.

That was not an easy thing to do because I wanted to migrate all of those comments out of Disqus into the AVC WordPress database so that we have full control over them and how to display them in the new AVC.

Disqus was super helpful in getting the comments out, but we ran into a number of issues given that massive number of comments. There were 459,000 comments left on AVC in the “Disqus era.” Think about that.

Here is an email the team at Storyware, who did the work, sent me explaining their process. They also migrated the comments on GothamGal.com and completed that last month.

At first we tried to use the official Disqus Plugin to migrate your comments, but their plugin resulted in errors each time we tried to process a batch of comments. We then looked at writing a custom migration script for the exported XML file that you obtained from Disqus. With nearly 500k comments, your migration file was 397.3 MB in size. This massive file wasn’t efficient for testing migration scripts so we tabled this, knowing that we would be migrating a small set of Disqus comments for GothamGal. 

The GothamGal export from Disqus turned out to be 27 MB, much smaller in size. We used her export file to then develop a CLI tool to process the XML file and migrate the comments into WordPress. This tool worked well, but it relies on holding a lot of items in memory: an array of the Disqus threads (your posts), an array of your Disqus comments, and an array of processed comments that we can use for associating parents with children. This same script just couldn’t handle an export file that’s the size of the one generated for avc.com. 

To run the Disqus to WordPress migration for AVC, we developed a plugin that allowed us to perform the following steps:

1/Process all of the threads in the XML file, and store them in a new database table. These threads are needed for grabbing the URL associated with each comment, which can then be used to associate each comment with a post in WordPress. 

2/Process all of the Disqus comments in the XML file and also store these in a new database table, which we can use to gradually migrate the comments into WordPress. We did still have to break the huge AVC Disqus export file into 16 pieces in order to save the comments from the XML file into the database 🙂

3/Use a Laravel-esque Queue system to run batches of migrations in the background, processing 5,000 comments with each batch. We used the WP Queue package from Delicious Brains for the basis of this functionality, and then created a REST endpoint for triggering the Queue to process. 

Storyware plans to clean up the plugin and release it as a developer tool in the near future. 

This turned out to be a pretty big project that took their time and my expense to get done. But I want to honor all of the work that the AVC community put into the comments and that has now been done.

You can see what a long comment thread looks like at the bottom of the infamous Marketing post from 2011.

We have noticed in the migration logs that some comments didn’t make it through because of changes in the associated post’s URL after publication, but the overwhelming majority of all your comments were migrated without issue. I do not plan to fix that. I don’t believe in letting perfect becoming the enemy of the good.

I am relieved that this is now complete. I hope you all are as well.

Learning to code was the thing that unlocked it all for me. I learned to hack in Basic during high school. I parlayed that into a programming job in college, which led to my first job out of college, which then led to a job that helped me pay for graduate school, which led to a job in venture capital.

That is why I have made getting computer science broadly deployed in the K-12 system in NYC and around the US the philanthropic effort that I put most of my charitable time into. I really believe that learning to code can put you on a path of opportunity.

So I was excited to see that our portfolio company Codecademy, which helps anyone learn to code online, has a program to provide 100,000 displaced workers a free subscription to their Pro product.

Here is how it works. For every Codecademy Pro membership that is bought, the company is donating 5 to displaced workers.

So far, that has resulted in 50,000 “scholarships” for displaced workers. And I am confident they will reach their goal of 100,000 scholarships for displaced workers.

If you are a displaced worker and want to learn to code for free, you can apply here (need to login first).

And if you want to learn to code and support five scholarships by doing that, you can do that here.