Posts from June 2020

I got a question this past weekend that kind of stumped me. The question is – are there any really good mail hosts other than Gmail and Outlook?

I realize that Yahoo still operates a mail host as does AOL. And that many of the ISPs offer mail hosting. But all of those feel like 20 year old technology. Of course I could be wrong about that.

I am not talking about mail clients like Superhuman and Hey and others (including Apple and Microsoft’s mail clients). I feel like there has been a lot of innovation in that area over the years.

I am talking about the hosting platform that receives the email, filters out spam, and provides the connectivity to the mail client.

If you know of a modern and reliable mail host that supports the various third party mail clients, I would love to know about it.

If you are reading this on the web, please click on the button that says “Discuss On Twitter” and share your suggestion with me and everyone else who is interested.

If you are reading via email, please reply to this email or go to the web and share it with everyone via “Discuss On Twitter.”

I appreciate the replies!!

Many of us have been working from home or some other remote location for over three months now. We have learned a fair bit about this approach to work and we have more to learn in the coming months. I don’t think we will be done with remote work until the pandemic is over.

It has taught me three conflicting things:

1/ I can be a lot more productive working remotely than many of us believed before the pandemic

2/ Those with kids at home don’t experience the same productivity boost

3/ I can’t wait to be back working together in person

On the first point, I am able to get a lot more done in a day working remotely than I am able to do in the office. I now regularly do days with ten to twelve meetings/calls/videos. I don’t think I was able to do that in the office.

I have also found it easier to find time for work that requires a lot of focus (writing/modeling/analyzing/etc).

And I’ve been much better at keeping my inbox and other communications up to date and current.

And I can do all of that while making time to go biking, do yoga, meditate, etc.

It is a revelation to me how productive I can be working remotely, particularly when our entire team is doing the same.

All of that said, my friends and colleagues with kids at home have not experienced the same productivity boost. They get some of the benefits of working from home, but they also face distractions, double duty, and more. If we cannot reopen schools in the fall, it is going to be a very challenging time for parents.

It is also the case that I miss the feeling of being together with my colleagues. Today we will spend four to five hours on Zoom in our weekly team meeting. It is way more enjoyable doing it in person around our conference table.

Reconciling these conflicting realizations will be the key to what happens when the pandemic ends. I am certain that we will all want to retain some of the convenience and productivity that comes with working remotely. But I am equally certain that we will want to work together again.

I wrote about this project to financially support people who were laid off because of the Covid pandemic back in early April. We also participated in the project and supported a family in the NY metro area back then.

I saw this tweet yesterday:

$1mm in funding, almost 350 families supported, in ten weeks. That’s terrific.

If you want to participate, you do so here.

This is a topic of great importance and one that we in the tech/startup sector have not done a good job with. We wait until a company is ready to go public and then address it. While that is better than nothing, it is not good enough.

The board diversity problem is a symptom of a much broader problem around lack of diversity in founders that get funded and lack of diversity in VC firms. Most startup boards are made up of a few founders and a few VCs. No wonder you have no diversity on the board.

Here are some suggestions for addressing this situation. I am working on this in my portfolio and USV is working on this in our broader portfolio. We are not control investors so this is a process of advocacy and persistence. This post is a part of that effort.

1/ When a startup board is created, there should be two independent seats on it. Day one. I know that will mean that founders will be unable to control their boards early on but these “independent seats” can be nominated by the founders to allay those concerns. And founders should put diverse people (gender, race, life experience, etc) into these independent seats.

2/ VCs should accept observer seats instead of board seats when they invest in companies. Boards don’t need three or four VCs on them. One is often enough. Two maximum. Instead VCs should negotiate for an observer right and the ability to nominate an independent director. And they should nominate diverse people for those seats.

3/ There should be term limits on board seats. Nobody and no investor should have the right to sit on a board forever. I could argue that in some situations, the founder might be the exception to this statement. That does not mean a valued board member should step down. That valued board member can always be asked to serve another term. What term limits do is raise the question about whether a person is the ideal board member for the company for the next few years. Often the answer is no.

4/ We need more resources like The Board List, Athena Alliance, and ELC to surface great board candidates. One of the many problems with boards that aren’t diverse is that they are not well connected to diverse candidates.

5/ We must commit to addressing this issue and make it a priority. Board development in general is not a high priority for founders. They are rightly focused on their company, their products, their customers, and enormous challenges of building a business from scratch. But boards are important. They need to be a priority and a diverse board is a better board for everyone. So we need to increase our efforts here.

Ten years ago the the tech/startup/venture industries started to make gender balance a priority in management teams, boards, and the venture capital industry. While we are not where we need to be, we have made good progress. We can do the same with diversity across the board. We can use the same approaches and the same persistent approach to the issue.

I am committed to making this a priority with the founders and companies I work with and I hope that all of you will too.

I was perusing the crypto markets today and noticed that Tether, the grandfather of all stablecoins, is approaching a $10bn market cap, making it the third most valuable crypto asset after Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I also noticed that USDC, the US Dollar stablecoin that Circle and our portfolio company Coinbase are behind, is approaching a $1bn market cap.

Unlike other crypto assets, the value of stablecoins, particularly “fiat backed” stablecoins, is not theoretical. These coins are backed by fiat deposits of people who have bought them. It is not entirely clear to me how fully reserved Tether is. But USDC is 100% backed by fiat. So that means that almost a billion USD has been paid for and set aside for USDC.

I’ve been spending a lot of USDC lately. I keep USDC at Coinbase and can spend it via the Coinbase mobile app. I’ve settled some golf bets with it, bought crypto with it, and am starting to use to buy crypto gaming assets.

I used to settle golf bets in Bitcoin. I have friends who claim they have tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin from golf bets I settled with them six or seven years ago. And we don’t play for a lot of money. So I don’t do that anymore. Settling in a USD backed stablecoin seems a lot more sensible. The same is true of most commerce and p2p payments applications.

I’m bullish on crypto as most readers know and I’m quite bullish on the stablecoin sector in crypto. I think their utility is just beginning to be understood in the west.

AVC has always been a blog. But over time, it has also become a daily email.

Ten years ago, the average monthly visitors to the website was 100k. Now, it is around 60k.

But over the same ten year period, the daily email subscriber base has grown from 2,500 people to over 30k people.

That is the power of push media. That is the power of an email list.

Our portfolio company Coinbase released an open source framework for crypto asssets to make it easier to list them on crypto exchanges. It is called Rosetta. Coinbase is encouraging blockchain projects to integrate Rosetta so that they can more easily list new assets on the Coinbase Exchange.

But as this Coindesk post outlines, any crypto exchange can adopt Rosetta so this could be something that levels the field for everyone.

Coinbase is putting Rosetta out to the broader community under an Apache license in the hopes that other exchanges will kick the tires on it. “All the code is available, it can be forked, it can be edited, so if there’s another exchange or another project that wants to put their code on it they can do that and also suggest their own changes,” Dalal said. “In a perfect world there are people building on top.”

https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-open-sources-technical-standard-to-streamline-token-listings

Because different blockchains work differently, each crypto exchange needs to build their own interfaces to the blockchains in order to list them. That takes time and slows down listing new assets.

An open source middleware framework like Rosetta should make it much easier for exchanges to list new assets and allow them to support new assets more quickly. This would be great for innovation in the blockchain sector.

Our portfolio company Recount Media, which I have blogged about here before, recently launched an interesting partnership between Recount, Twitter, and brand marketers. They are calling this partnership “Real-Time Recount.”

Recount is a news organization which publishes short-form video news on their owned and operated web and mobile apps, and also on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.

These short-form videos are particularly popular in social media platforms like Twitter.

What Real-Time Recount allows marketers to do is associate with a branded news organization while also taking advantage of the scale and hyper-targeting available on the scaled social platforms.

Ad Age has a good story today about this partnership (behind paywall) and Recount CEO John Battelle has a good post on his blog about it as well.

I like how John summarizes this opportunity at the start of his post:

It’s time to get back to the work marketers used to be really good at: Deciding on the appropriate context in which to engage your audience. And it’s time to pull back from a habit most of you have fallen into: Letting the machines choose your audience for you. Thanks to new approaches which fuse at-scale ad targeting with high-quality editorial product, you can step into this renewed role without sacrificing the reach, precision, and targeting afforded by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their kin.

https://battellemedia.com/archives/2020/06/marketers-have-given-up-on-context-and-our-national-discourse-is-suffering

Since the AdAge article is behind a paywall, I will pull a quote from yours truly to wrap up this blog post:

It won’t be for all advertisers in the beginning, but the ones who are courageous and can think about how to do it in a way that is consistent with their brand and their values, I think they’re going to be rewarded because they will get a lot of audience. They will get it in a [scaled] way, with high frequency and high quality. So, I think that’s one of the opportunities and challenges for The Recount is to bring advertisers along with us. Advertisers are used to being in cable news and linear television. They understand what that is. We’ve got to educate them on how to do it in social platforms, to do it in a way they can be comfortable with.

We have a book club at USV. We read one book together every month and then discuss it over lunch. Today, we are going to discuss Enemy Of All Mankind, the story of the British pirate of the late 17th century, Henry Every.

The book was written by our friend and former USV portfolio company founder Steven Johnson. As is typical of Steven’s work, Enemy Of All Mankind is both a great story and also an object lesson in how single event can have a compounding effect on global politics and economics.

In this case, Every and his crew of pirates siezed a treasure ship belonging to the Grand Mughal that was returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition to making Every and his crew rich beyond belief, the attack set off a global political storm between India and England and resulted in a manhunt to find and punish the pirates.

It is a story about the dominant economic forces of the time (global trade routes) and how a single actor can and did wreak havoc on them. And it is a story about how that moment changed the course of India and England for the next two centuries.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and am looking forward to our discussion of it today. If you want to read it, you can get it on Amazon or Indiebound.