Posts from September 2021

Early in the pandemic, we were all deluged with stories of tech workers, companies, and founders leaving Silicon Valley for Miami and Austin. And that was true. But from my personal experience, they also left for many other places too, including Los Angeles and New York City.

I met with a founder last week who has left the bay area for good and now splits his time between homes in LA and NYC. It is hard to know what cities have been the biggest beneficiaries of the great relocation but I am certain that NYC is one of them.

Here are some tweets I’ve seen in recent weeks talking about this:

Feels like every fourth bay area tech person I talk to is moving to New York.

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 26, 2021

2 mtngs yesterday w/ w coast crypto folks where they proclaimed NY the epicenter of crypto. I guess I've been feeling the activity, but didn't realize it was so conclusively here. if true & if crypto eats internet, there's a path to NY dethroning s valley as epicenter of tech.

— Jordan Cooper (@jordancooper) September 23, 2021

I am not proclaiming the death of Silicon Valley. It is alive and well and will continue to be the epicenter of tech in the US for as far as I can see. What it has lost is the power to hold onto people who don’t really want to be there. One of the most important things the covid pandemic has done to work in the US, particularly tech work, is to make it so that people can work for great companies wherever they want to live. That’s a huge shift and I believe it is permanent.

But that’s not the only thing that’s driving NYC’s tech resurgence. As yesterday’s IPO of Warby Parker reminds us, NYC is now home to a growing number of large entrepreneurial companies that are now public and will remain independent and growing in NYC. They may employ people all around the world, but they are HQ’d in NYC and will continue to be.

And Jordan is correct in the tweet above that NYC is particularly strong in Web3 because of its roots in trading, speculating, DeFi, etc and because of large Web3 software players like Consensys that have been operating here for many years now. And as Web3 is now exploding into the creative class via things like NFTs, DAOs, gaming and more, we will only see NYC’s strengths come to the front and center in the most important new sector in tech.

It’s a great time to be working in tech in NYC. You get all of the benefits of living in this amazing city without the hassles of the commute every day.

I’ll end with a plug for a startup competition that Google, Tech:NYC, and Cornell Tech are putting on called the “NYC Recovery Challenge”.

The challenge will bring together startup entrepreneurs from across the five boroughs to pitch tech solutions for New York’s recovery to a panel of business, economic, and policy experts with the chance of winning cash prizes, technical mentorship, and more.

The top three founders and their teams will be recognized as “NYC RecoveryFellows” and will receive cash awards from a prize fund totaling $150,000. The first-place founder and their team will receive a non-dilutive cash award of $100,000, and two runners-up will each receive non-dilutive cash awards of $25,000. Seven other entrants will be recognized as “Founders to Watch” and will participate, along with the three cash award recipients, in a month-long, equity-free mentorship program — dubbed the “NYC Accelerator” — led by Cornell Tech, Google for Startups, and Tech:NYC advisers. 

If you and your startup want to apply, you can do so here.

Our portfolio company Mirror has been using a “game mechanic” called The Write Race to onboard users to the Mirror service. Mirror is something between a blogging platform, a crowdfunding platform, and a community platform, built for the crypto sector. Mirror is built on decentralized protocols and is a web3 version of all of those things and more.

Users need a $WRITE token to publish on Mirror and the best way to get $WRITE tokens is to join the Write Race that happens every Wednesday 5pm eastern. Anyone who holds a $WRITE token can vote for new users in the Write Race. The top ten vote getters are airdropped a $WRITE token and can publish on Mirror. I earned a $WRITE token a while ago and now publish a mirror image of this blog on Mirror.

Yesterday, Mirror announced that they have expanded this game mechanic to any activity that requires a token. They call it Token Race.

Imagine your DAO wants to admit new members but needs a way to do that. Token Race.

Imagine your DAO wants to distribute funds to worthy crypto projects. Token Race.

You get the idea.

Here is how Token Race works:

To create a token race, a user specifies the address of the ERC20 token contract to use, uploads a list of proposals that they’d like their community to vote on, and specifies the minimum number of tokens members need to hold to be eligible to vote. We take a snapshot of balances, and once the voting opens members get to vote on the various proposals proportional to their wallet balance at the block height of the snapshot. Once the voting period ends, winners are selected based on the highest number of votes. All data is backed up on the Filecoin network and accessible via IPFS (h/t estuary.tech) so even if Mirror goes under, your token races are preserved in the annals of the metaverse.

https://dev.mirror.xyz/dLLIq4Iebg5DLWJbOWa3sU6oQuwbogkmqPnz-ZbzPUg

So if you’ve been looking for a tool to do your own version of the Write Race, look no further. Token Race is here.

I used to ride a Vespa around NYC. I rode it to work and back for about ten years, from roughly 2003 to 2013. I stopped riding it when Bloomberg’s Traffic Enforcement people starting towing it when it was parked between cars on the street (something I had been doing since I started riding it). A few visits to the tow pound will do that to you.

Since then, I’ve been Citibiking to and from work when it is nice out and subwaying when it is not. That has worked fine.

A few weeks ago, I had breakfast with my friend Alex Ljung, who co-founded our portfolio company SoundCloud with his friend Eric Wahlforss. Alex and Eric are back at it with a new company called Dance which makes a beautiful e-bike that is sold via a subscription service, currently only in Berlin, but coming to your city sometime in the future.

I told Alex that I was nervous about riding e-bikes. He told me to get over it and get on one. So I have been doing that, using Citibike’s e-bikes, for the last few weeks.

Alex was right. I love riding e-bikes around NYC. I can see riding them out to Brooklyn and back for meetings, using the new Brooklyn Bridge bike lane.

I still like riding my traditional bike for exercise, something I do three mornings a week, and something I will do when I finish this post.

But for getting around NYC, in the awesome bike lanes that have been created all around our amazing city, I think e-bikes are the way to go. I put in an order for one this weekend.

I’m sold.

My friend Mike Masnick, founder and leader of Techdirt, is crowdfunding a new paper on NFTs.

I backed the project just now with 0.1 ETH and you can do the same here.

Yesterday I wrote about NYC’s Citibike system, which I love, and said this:

There should be financial rewards for taking a bike from a kiosk that is completely full or nearly full and returning to a kiosk that is empty or nearly empty. There should also be a financial reward for docking an E-Bike in a kiosk where there are no E-Bikes or very few.

I got a ton of feedback via email and Twitter that Citibike already offers this via a program called Bike Angels that rewards riders for doing things like this. I know about that program but there are three big problems with Bike Angels that Lyft, the owner of Citibike, needs to fix.

1/ Bike Angels is not part of the core service, available to everyone by default.

2/ The rewards are too small. They need to be increased significantly.

3/ Angels is not a cash rewards program and you cannot take cash out of the system. It needs to be like Venmo.

Basically Angels sucks, but it is directionally correct.

If Lyft fixed all of this and offered attractive cash rewards for moving bikes and E-bikes around the system, it would be a game changer. But Bike Angels is not that. It is not even close to that.

I have written about my love for NYC’s Citibike service many times. This will be one more.

Yesterday I left the USV office at the end of the day and hopped onto a Citibike E-Bike at the brand new kiosk that has been installed in the “no cars” section of Broadway between 23rd and 21st.

I rode that E-bike all the way to Central Park West and 81st Street to get to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. I was able to stay in a bike lane for that entire ride and it took me about twenty minutes.

There is no way I could have gotten from 21st and Broadway to the Delacorte Theater in less than twenty minutes any other way. Google Maps told me it would take 28 mins on the subway and I’d have to make at least one transfer. I did not check Uber, but given how Uber is working in NYC these days, it would have been at least a ten-minute wait just for the car to arrive. It would have likely taken twice as long in a car as a Citibike.

When the weather is good, like it has been in NYC the last few weeks, there is no better way to get around the city than Citibike. The subway is a close second, but there is something about being out and about, a breeze in your face, seeing the sights and sounds of NYC.

The addition of E-bikes has made longer rides, like the one I did yesterday evening, a good option. I generally take the regular bikes to commute to and from work (a roughly ten-minute ride), but the E-bike makes the 60 block trip, or a trip to Brooklyn or back, a decent option.

I do have a suggestion for Lyft, the owner of NYC’s Citibike service.

There should be financial rewards for taking a bike from a kiosk that is completely full or nearly full and returning to a kiosk that is empty or nearly empty. There should also be a financial reward for docking an E-Bike in a kiosk where there are no E-Bikes or very few.

The single biggest challenge with Citibike is the empty kiosk and the full kiosk. And the lack of E-Bikes in many kiosks is also a challenge.

If riders were rewarded financially for taking bikes and moving them to where they are most needed, the distribution of bikes would become more even. And there would be a “cottage industry” of people who ride Citibikes around the city for a living making sure that the bike distribution is optimal.

This would require the Citibike app to be like Venmo, with a wallet that builds up or down over time, and where balances can be transferred out.

That’s not very hard to build in this day and age, and would be a game-changer for the Citibike system.

Back in 2005 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink that was about how our subconscious allows us to make fast decisions that are often as good or better than slow considered decisions.

I was talking to someone yesterday evening about how the venture capital business has changed over the last decade and I explained that we used to have weeks, if not months, to make our investment decisions and now we have days or if we are lucky a week or two.

And I observed that the rapid pace of venture investing and decision making has not, yet, impacted the quality of our portfolio and that it may have actually improved it.

The woman I was talking to said “like Malcolm Gladwell describes in Blink.” And I nodded affirmatively.

There is another thing going on with our decision making at USV, which is that we are regularly taking the time to articulate to each other, and ideally the world at large, what we want to invest in and why.

That work, which we call thesis building, helps us make rapid decisions in the absence of time and information.

It is tempting to mourn the loss of careful and considered investing but from where I sit it seems gone for good, at least for early stage venture capital, so I think it’s a better use of our time to spend adapting to the market, as my partner Brad likes to say, and building the conviction to act quickly and decisively.

I just backed this project to support a festival of street musicians in NYC in late October.

Street bands have been picking up the slack for the last year in NYC, performing for outside diners and more throughout the city. This festival celebrates them and puts them front and center.

Email readers can see the video here.

I have been doing a bunch of large group in-person meetings in the last few weeks and I must say that it feels great to be doing these large group meetings in person. There is a different energy in the room than on the screen.

In order to make everyone comfortable meeting like this, the way these meetings typically happen is everyone provides a proof of vaccination and everyone gets a covid test within 24 hours of the meeting. It is best if the host of the meeting can provide rapid tests so anyone who wants to arrive in advance of the meeting can get tested right there.

It is also the case that in each of the large in-person group meetings I have done in the last few weeks, there have been a few folks on video. I think that is likely to be the new normal for large meetings and it really helps to have great audio and video in the room so the people on the screen feel as much like they are in the room as possible.

But I must say that I am very happy and very relieved to be meeting in person again in large groups. I missed it a lot and I am glad to be back doing it.