Posts from August 2021

I like to think of investing in new things a bit like a football running play. Imagine you are the running back. You’ve been handed the football and you are looking for a hole to open up and run through. What you really want is some running room beyond the opening.

We’ve known for a while that crypto is the next big tech architecture. We’ve known that once the wave breaks on the shore, there will be enormous opportunities unleashed. Like the web. Like mobile. Like the PC.

But what has been hard to see is the opening. It wasn’t trading/speculating, although that has been huge. Coinbase announced yesterday that 68 million verified users. It wasn’t DeFi, although that has also been huge.

What we have been looking for is the consumer opportunity to emerge. Until you have billions of consumers around the world using a technology, you don’t have a new wave to ride. So like the running back, you wait and hope you don’t get hit.

But in the last few months, the opening is emerging. In slow motion. I can see the left tackle move his man off the line. I can see the left guard move his man off the line. And there is running room. The defensive backs are on the other side of the field.

I’ve always thought the opening would be at the intersection of gaming, online communities, and social networks. Why? Because those are the mainstream consumer experiences where geeks tend to be the first adopters.

But it is hard to take on the existing gaming companies with a new architecture. The user experience around new stuff always sucks and who wants to play a game with a shitty UI? It is also hard to take on the existing social nets. Why would someone with a million followers on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter leave those behind for a new social net? So the existing incumbents are the defensive line. They look impenetrable. Until they aren’t. That’s when the opening emerges.

The opening is emerging around NFT experiences, something we’ve been excited about for quite a while now. But not the NFTs that Sothebys sells for $69mm. Not even the CryptoPunk that sells for $7.5mm. 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.

PartyBid is cool. That’s why I wrote about it on Friday. TopShot is cool. And so is Axie. And so is the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But what is cooler is that these NFT experiences are operating at the interaction of gaming, communities, and social nets. And they are not taking on any of the incumbents directly. They are building on top of them all.

I am not saying NFTs are the next big thing. I am saying that consumer experiences built on a crypto stack are the next big thing. I am saying that NFT experiences are showing the way. They are the left tackle that you can run behind into the opening. Where enormous opportunity exists.

It would be easy to get depressed reading the morning news. Climate change is happening more quickly. The Covid pandemic shows no signs of abating. And there are all sorts of other things that are challenging our way of life.

But on days like today, I find it helpful to remember that science and technology helps us address these challenges.

We understand the carbon cycle and how far it is out of equilibrium. We also have many of the technologies we need to bring it back to equilibrium. And more are being invented every day.

We also understand the Covid virus and how to create vaccines that reduce its severity. And scientists have developed and continue to develop therapies that will do even more to reduce its severity.

Over the course of history, mankind has leveraged science and technology to meet big challenges and overcome them. And we can continue to do that. We simply need the will to make the required investments and societal changes that go along with them.

PartyBid is a fun way to collect NFTs with others.

Here are some live parties you can join and bid with others:

Funding Friday has always been about the idea that others might want to fund things that I am funding. Party Bid takes that idea a step further and makes funding things more social and fun. That’s a really neat idea.

Managing a business is about having a plan, sticking with it, and not panicking or looking for hail mary passes. There are no silver bullets or shortcuts to success in life. You need to have a five to ten-year plan and you need to stick with it and execute against it day after day, week after week, year after year.

I was reminded of this watching my NY Knicks navigate the off-season after making the playoffs for the first time in eight years. The Knicks front office stuck with the core of the team, kept all of their young talent, and upgraded significantly at point guard and small forward. They also do not have a guaranteed contract that extends beyond the 2022-2023 season.

I am sure it was tempting to think about accelerating the plan after a season that went better than anyone was expecting. I am sure that they thought about taking bigger risks and going for broke now. But I am glad they did not do that.

Instead, they rewarded players like Derrick Rose, Alec Burks, and Nerlens Noel who were a big part of getting them into the playoffs with multi-year contracts, they got Kemba Walker and Evan Fournier as upgrades at point guard and small forward, and kept all of their youngsters.

That’s a model for how to think about building a business and a leadership team. It is much more likely that you can get a win with a five-year plan than a one-year plan. And you need to build your team over time, developing promising talent, and making smart upgrades when they are required.

There are times when you need to throw in the towel on the plan, blow things up, and execute a turnaround. That usually comes with new leadership at the top and a new five-year plan. But that should be rare and done only when it is clear that the current plan is not working.

When the current plan is working, even better than expected, it is best to stick with it, make incremental improvements here and there, and keep at it.

I mentioned the infrastructure bill here last week. I continue to be impressed by the way Senators and the White House are working across the aisle to get a very big piece of legislation across the finish line. It is not done, but it sure looks like it will get done.

As I mentioned in the post last week, there is language in the initial draft of the bill requiring crypto “brokers” to report gains and losses to the IRS. The Treasury expects this provision to produce upwards of $30bn in new tax revenues over the next ten years.

I personally have no issue with crypto gains and losses being treated the same as stock gains and losses and we have been doing that at USV for quite a while now. But I do have concerns that the way “brokers” are defined in the context of crypto is very different than how it is defined in the traditional financial sector. The language in the initial draft is overly broad, infringing on privacy, and technically unworkable. Crypto industry participants like miners, wallets, smart contracts, and other kinds of hardware and software cannot carry the same obligations as “brokers” like Coinbase and Square Cash.

But here is the good news. The crypto sector has come together to get the language changed in a way that I have never seen before. Everyone in crypto is working together, staying on message, working all of the avenues, and creating the appropriate amount of pressure on the process. And while we do not yet have the language we need, we are getting there and I am hopeful that we will land in a good place.

It is also the case that when a government decides that a sector is an important producer of revenues, that is a sign that it has arrived. Many out there think these new regulations are bad for crypto but I think they are a bullish sign. Crypto is here to stay and is a mainstream industry now.

For these reasons, I think this is a watershed moment for crypto in the US. The industry has come together like never before and is acting in concert, professionally and productively. It is on message and effective. And the government is getting in business with the crypto sector to finance it’s own needs. That sounds like a win to me.