Posts from August 2021

I am a fan of and a practioner of investing in risky assets. I believe you must take significant risk to earn significant returns.

But I also am a huge fan of diversification when holding a lot of risky assets. It has been easier for USV to get into new sectors, like crypto and climate for example, knowing that we also have large positions in other parts of the early stage tech sector.

When crypto went crazy in 2017 and then blew up, it was mostly a blip in our portfolio values. The same was true in the second quarter of this year when crypto had a big pullback.

This is not an argument against crypto only funds. USV has invested in a number of them and so have the Gotham Gal and I. But I would not be comfortable with a portfolio that was only crypto funds. I like to have a mix of assets, ideally uncorrelated, in our portfolio.

An asset class that I really like as a hedge against early stage tech sector risk is real estate. The Gotham Gal and I own a lot of income producing real estate and it feels very uncorrelated to early stage tech.

But there are many ways to get diversification. If you don’t want to think about your investments, something I cannot bring myself to do, then a stock index fund or a portfolio of stock index funds, and some fixed income funds can get you the diversification you need. But the level of risk taking in that strategy is a lot lower.

But regardless of how you get there, it is very important that you not have all of your eggs in one basket. That basket can drop and then you have a mess.

My partner Albert has been writing a book in public over the last decade called The World After Capital. There have been alpha and beta versions which he has put out there, gotten feedback on, and revised.

Yesterday he tweeted that he has now finished the book and will have it printed. That means I will read it again and you should too.

If you want to read it online, you can do that here.

This project on Kickstarter is cool. A UPS (uninterrupted power supply) for your entire home. I backed it this morning along with almost 2,400 other people who have backed it so far.

You can see the video and back it here.

Occasionally, I will write at USV.com and today is one of those days. I wrote about an investment in a DAO called Bright Moments that we made this week. DAOs are interesting and we plan to do a bunch of DAO investing going forward. You can read the post here.

I saw a statistic from one of our larger portfolio companies yesterday. They have had their offices around the world open for some time now with office usage optional. They are seeing office utilization rates of around “20-30%.” They are also seeing “flexibility” as the number one issue in recruiting new talent.

That was interesting to me because we are seeing a much higher office utilization at USV. We kept our offices open for much of the last 18 months and encouraged a return to the office once we were all vaccinated in early April. On most days, we see about half of our team coming into the office. I think that number was higher in the spring and will be higher in the fall. We also see friends in the VC business and startup world working at our office from time to time and that has been fantastic.

We have also seen that office utilization is much higher for our team members that live in NYC vs the suburbs, which is not surprising. This chart says it all:

We surveyed our portfolio companies last month on the topic of their work environment plans. We got 56 responses which is a tad under 50% of our active portfolio so this data could be off a bit. But it is interesting. Pre-pandemic, 75% of these respondents were fully “in office” with most of the rest using some sort of hybrid model. Very few were fully remote. Now the distribution looks like this:

That is a dramatic change from the pre-pandemic norm. I am sure that there will be some movement back to the office when we get to a new normal, whatever and whenever that is, but no matter what, tech companies have moved away from the “fully in-person” model and that will mean very different office utilization models.

We also asked our portfolio companies about “seat to employee” ratios and got these responses:

For those companies that will continue to have an office, it looks like the average seat to employee ratio nets out around 65%. And that is for the 75% of the respondents that plan to have some sort of office.

At USV, we are taking a contrarian approach to the office. We plan to build a new office that can seat 100% of our employees and we want to be able to host board meetings and other events frequently. We are also looking at other ways to invite the broader “community” to work and be at USV regularly.

But that does not mean we will expect our employees to be at the office every day. We understand that those with long commutes and children or parents at home need more flexibility and we have seen that providing that flexibility builds loyalty and commitment. So we will continue to support that way of working.

Startups and high-growth companies seem to have embraced fully or partially remote models for the most part in an attempt to attract and retain talent and leverage the increased productivity that comes from eliminating long and painful commute times.

But that doesn’t mean an office isn’t a good thing from time to time. It may be that organizations that support startups and high-growth companies, like USV, can step into the mix and be part of that answer. That is an interesting idea to me and one that USV is looking at right now.

I realized a long time ago that the VC’s customer is the founder/CEO/portfolio company and that our investors (called LPs in VC speak) are our “shareholders”. That was a very defining moment for me and has clarified what matters the most in a VC firm.

That said, we take investor relations very seriously at USV and always have.

This is our model:

1/ We are loyal to our LPs and offer them the opportunity to invest with us fund after fund after fund unless something has materially altered the relationship. That is very rare but has happened.

2/ We regularly provide our LPs with a lot of information on our portfolio. We send financial reports including detailed schedules of investments quarterly and we provide detailed one-page writeups on each and every portfolio company twice a year.

3/ We do two “quarterly calls” a year, one in the spring to review Q4 and Q1 and one in the summer to review Q2. These are now Zoom meetings. We are approaching our summer call which is what prompted me to write about this today.

4/ We do one annual meeting in the fall after Q3 results are out. These used to be in-person meetings in our office featuring several (3-5) presentations from a representative mix of portfolio CEOs. We like to have a wide variety of companies present (by stage, performance, etc) and absolutely do not do a “greatest hits” experience at these meetings. We did our annual meeting over Zoom last year and may continue to do that going forward as it makes it much easier for the portfolio CEOs to present and easier for our LPs to attend. If we do that, I will miss the in-person interaction we have at our annual meeting but also believe making things easier for everyone is very important.

5/ We don’t do splashy meetings at fancy places with our LPs. We believe in substance over form when it comes to investor relations and we believe that our LPs do as well.

The Gotham Gal and I are investors in dozens of VC funds/firms and there are many ways that VCs do this. Some provide little to no information and let the returns speak for themselves. That can work too. But I believe frequency, regularity, and transparency are the key factors to focus on with investors. It has worked well for us.

Today is my sixtieth birthday and I plan to goof off with friends and family all day and night in celebration. If I don’t respond to an email, text, or tweet, well that’s because I’m celebrating.

I’ve been told that turning 60 is a big one and to expect to feel a lot. I will make sure to do that but as many know, it is not my nature to do that. So I will have to work at it.

I have cut back on blogging a lot in the last year. Four posts a week on AVC is now a lot. Many weeks there are only three. I’m hoping that the quality has gone up as the quantity has come down. At least that is the goal.

I’ve caught a second (or maybe third or fourth) wind with my work in the last year. It is a combination of covid, climate, and crypto. The world is changing and there is so much energy being released from these changes that draws me back. At sixty, it is a different kind of work; less hustle and more conviction. I like that.

As the Gotham Gal and I enter our fifth decade together, I am struck by how much we have become one. We often say the same thing to each other at the same moment. A mind meld.

As I told my partner Albert this morning on text, I am a very fortunate person. Life has given me many blessings. I try to give them back as much as I can and AVC is an important part of how I do that.

With that, I am off to have fun with friends and family for the rest of the day.

I wrote about NFTs last week and said this in that post:

But when a party emerges online that anyone is invited to attend and the 500 person group picks up a punk with a party hat and they all change their social network avatar to this, well that got my attention.

https://avc.com/2021/08/the-opening/

Fractional/collective ownership is something we have been interested in at USV for a while. It fits well with our thesis about expanding access. We have an investment in Otis that is providing fractional ownership for collectibles and NFTs.

But there is an important difference between fractional/collective ownership of physical and digital goods.

When you purchase a share of a 1985 Air Jordan collection, as I did, you can’t showcase it in your home or office. It is shared ownership with many others. So it goes to a gallery or somewhere it can be shown publicly. That’s fine but somehow less satisfying than having it in your home or office for everyone who comes to visit you to see.

Contrast that to what happened with the punk. Everyone who bought it put it on their Twitter avatar. They collectively displayed it on their own digital property.

That is because of an important point my partner Albert made in this post a few months ago.

The underlying misconception here is to think that in the digital world copies are indistinguishable from originals. In a trivial sense this is true. Let’s say you copy a digital artwork, you will now have exactly the same bit sequence as the original. But in a much more profound sense it is not.

https://continuations.com/post/645017712412786688/a-word-on-nfts

What NFTs do for digital art (images/Punks, videos/Top Shots, music, animations, etc, etc) is they separate the concept of ownership and the display and consumption of them. The ownership is on a public secure ledger. The display and consumption of them is out in the open for everyone to see and hear and more.

That’s not something that is easy to wrap your head around but it is profound.

I recall when my partner Brad and I were raising our first USV fund, back in 2003, and potential investors wondered about my blogging habit. They asked if I was making a mistake telegraphing our investment thesis for everyone to see, including our “competitors.”

We strongly defended the practice and explained that the benefits of telling the world what we were looking to invest in, and why, strongly outweighed any costs. We explained that telegraphing would bring entrepreneurs to us.

And that turned out to be the case. So many of our top-performing investments over the years came to us because of our telegraphing strategy. It is hard to know who is working on a problem you are interested in. But if you put the word out far and wide, they will find you.

I was reminded of those conversations almost twenty years ago now when I read this post on USV.com by Hanel outlining our interest in measuring carbon. She explains that we have made one investment in that area already and are looking to make more. And she explains why.

I am sure that Hanel has already heard from a bunch of founders working on measuring carbon and will hear from more in the coming weeks and months. That’s excellent and how it should work in our view.