Posts from 2023

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending (What Happened) and one looking forward to the year ahead (What Will Happen). This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow.

I ended my What Will Happen In 2023 with this advice:

Buckle up, hang tough, and be smart.

What I did not predict in that post, although we had been discussing the possibility internally at USV for several months at the time I wrote it, was the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and several other banks that focused on the startup and web3 sectors.

I feel like that moment, which hit us in March, marked the bottom of the downturn, although it has taken at least the rest of the year to work through the carnage and there is still a bit more to come.

That look-forward post also missed the biggest new thing in tech, Chat GPT, which had initially launched about a month before I wrote it. That was a big miss as 2023 will most certainly be remembered as the year that AI went mainstream with consumers, thanks to Chat GPT and other consumer interfaces to large AI models.

To some extent, these two things are related. The end of the 2022/2023 tech/startup downturn happened when two things came together. The first is the end of a period of rising interest rates that had sent the stock market and broader capital markets reeling. The second is the emergence of a new tech megatrend, AI, which has been developing in front of our very eyes for as long as I have been in tech, so that is over forty years now.

But before something can become mainstream, it takes a consumer interface that allows everyone to see the power of the technology firsthand. That thing was Chat GPT and it will rightly take its place along with the iPhone, Netscape, the Macintosh, and other consumer products that brought a new technology into the mainstream and provided for a wave of technology innovation that followed.

Of course, a lot of other things happened in tech, startups, and web3 in 2023, but these two things are the ones that matter the most. Markets have settled down and are poised to move higher and we’ve got a new megatrend that will drive innovation, investing, and the economy.

So while it was a very difficult year, I also think 2023 was an incredibly important year and sets us up for an exciting new period in tech. More on that tomorrow.

Every year I put together a playlist at the end of the year with some of the new music I found and got into.

Most of these songs are under the radar which is my favorite kind of music.

So I hope you find something new that you like in here.

I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since.

For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first is waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep. The second is waking up early, like 4:30/5am, and being wide awake.

So I’ve been working on those two things.

I still wake up in the middle of the night. My Oura ring tells me that I was up from around 4am to 4:30am last night. What I’ve learned about waking up in the middle of the night is that accepting it and not fighting it is the key to falling back to sleep. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I always wake up with something on my mind. It could be work, it could be something personal, it could be something else. I often work out stuff I’m struggling with in the middle of the night. But now I let it happen and not fuss about getting back to sleep. And I fall back to sleep most nights within thirty minutes.

The sleeping later thing has been harder to crack for me. I wake up with a lot of energy and I want to get out of bed and take on the world. For over twenty years, I have been blogging first thing in the morning when I wake up. I am doing that now. That is because I wake up with things on my mind and I want to work them out and for me, that means writing.

But for the last year, I have been forcing myself to lie in bed instead of jumping out of bed. I started sleeping until 5:30ish last year, I started sleeping until 6ish this year, and recently I have been sleeping until 7ish.

My sleep time has gone from 4-5 hours a night to almost 8 on a good night. I got 7:45 of sleep time last night, for example. I don’t always get that much sleep, but I get it a lot more frequently.

Longer and better sleep has a lot of health benefits. And at age 62, I need all of the health benefits I can get. I want to age gracefully and be mentally and physically fit for as long as possible. Better sleep is part of my plan to be able to do this.

Better sleep comes with some tradeoffs. I don’t have the two hours in the morning when everyone else is still asleep to read, write, and clean out my inbox. So I am writing less and my inbox is a disaster. But it seems like the right tradeoff to make. I moved my workouts to the early evening a few days a week so I no longer workout every morning. That gives me back some time in the mornings that I’ve given to staying in bed longer.

I understand that not everyone can make these tradeoffs. When we had a young family, we got up when our kids got up and we went to bed every night exhausted. A lot of my sleep issues started when our kids were very young. My work schedule is very adaptable and I can do things like move my workouts to the early evenings without missing a beat at work. I am lucky that I have all of this flexibility and I am using it to stay healthy and fit.

My experience over the last two years tells me that sleep habits can change and those of us who are poor sleepers can become good sleepers. I started with a device (in my case an Oura ring) that let me measure my sleep. I find that measuring helps to manage. But ultimately it is behavior change that helps the most.

For me, that meant working out more, eating better, drinking less, and fretting less.

I do not consider myself done with this journey to improve my sleep. I think I will be working on this my entire life. But I have made a lot of progress, I am sleeping better, and for those of you who struggle with sleep, I can assure you that you can improve your sleep too.

NYC Tech Week is next week. It will be a week filled with events for the tech sector to engage and connect with each other.

A particularly great part of tech week is VC Open Office Hours.

There are over 100 VC investors signed up to participate next week.

Here is how it works:

1/ you select four investors (out of more than 100) that you want to meet

2/ you get up to four twenty minute meetings

3/ you discuss your idea with the investor in hopes of getting them interested enough to take another meeting

4/ nobody should expect to walk out with a commitment to invest

As of this moment (Thursday morning Oct 12th) about half of the available slots are still open. But if you want to participate, you probably should act fast as I think this will sell out by the end of today, certainly by the end of tomorrow.

Go here to participate.

On Saturday, September 9th, the Gotham Gal and I arrived at JFK airport after an eight-hour flight from Paris. While waiting for our luggage, I got pushed a notification in my web3 wallet that there was an NFT drop underway that I could participate in. So I clicked on the link, signed the transaction, and nothing happened (or so I thought). So I tried again. Again nothing happened. Frustrated, I turned my attention to the luggage, retrieved it, got in a car, and headed home. On the way home, I tried again a few times to no avail.

It turns out that each of my failed attempts to mint an NFT was a scam that allowed a thief to eventually take 46 of my most valuable NFTs out of my wallet. I did not realize any of this until I woke the next morning to a text from a friend saying:

did your wallet get compromised? your NFTs from fredwilson.eth were transferred out and sold

That’s when I realized that all of the failed minting activities from the night before were actually me getting scammed.

For much of August, I along with a lot of NFT enthusiasts had been participating in something called “Onchain Summer” which was a rollout of the new Base layer two blockchain from Coinbase. Part of Onchain Summer was a daily NFT drop. You simply clicked on the link in the message in your web3 inbox and went and minted. It was fun and I collected some great NFTs that way.

The message I was scammed with looked exactly like those Onchain Summer messages but was not from the same sender. I should have noticed that but did not. Mistake number one.

The fact that I signed a transaction and nothing happened should have been a sign that something was wrong. Normally when you sign a minting transaction, a new NFT shows up in your wallet. When it did not, I should have sensed something was wrong. I did not. Mistake number two.

The fact that I was signing transactions in the same wallet where I keep my NFTs is also bad practice and I knew it. The best practice is to hold NFTs in a “vault” wallet where you never sign transactions and to have a separate “mint” wallet where you hold nothing but do all of your signing. Mistake number three.

What I was doing by signing those scam transactions was giving the thief access to a number of smart contracts that secured multiple NFTs that I owned. So even though I did not sign 46 scam transactions, the thief was able to take 46 NFTs.

Signing transactions is risky business and needs to be done carefully. I knew that but did not take the required care on the evening of September 9th.

This story has a happy ending. With the help of my USV colleague Nikhil, I have recovered 38 of the 46 NFTs that the thief took from me for a fairly modest sum. As I put it to a friend, it cost me between weeks and months of my personal ETH staking rewards. It was enough to sting and that’s good. It was a lesson that I learned the hard way and it was worth every ETH that it cost me to get them back.

There are a few NFTs that I am not going to try and get back, but I am still trying to buy back these two NFTs that the thief sold to others who are likely unaware that they are holding stolen goods:

Anticyclone #212 currently held by this wallet

WoW #8105 currently held by this wallet

If you recognize those wallets and know who holds those NFTs, I would appreciate an introduction so I can offer to buy them back at their cost.

I do want to thank everyone who sold me back my NFTs (including the thief who we bought quite a few from). Many people sold them back to me at their cost when they heard they were taken from me. I really appreciate that.

I’ve written about this topic before. It is an important topic and I want to raise it again.

Boards often discuss CEO performance without really knowing how things work inside the company. And CEOs often have very little visibility to how they are doing and what the board thinks about their performance. When you work for one person, your boss, it is typical that you will have regular catchups and at least an annual review of your performance (ideally more frequent). But when you work for a group, i.e. a Board, things can get very “squishy” leaving for a lot of guesswork and worse.

Enter the CEO 360.

This is a process whereby the CEO is reviewed by their direct reports and by the Board members and often a few more people (a few skip levels, some investors who aren’t on the board, etc). It is frequently done annually but it could be done more often if the CEO would like that.

This process can be run by the CEO’s coach, an outside facilitator, or someone else. Our portfolio company Bolster offers an excellent CEO 360 at a very reasonable price.

I am often amazed by what I learn from a CEO 360. I frequently see CEOs who are excellent at managing down and run a very solid leadership team but struggle with managing their Board. These CEOs are often seen as weak when in fact they are strong. The opposite is also true. I have seen CEOs who are excellent at managing up but terrible at leading their team and their Boards love them but their team hates them.

What is even more important for everyone is the insights that come from a CEO 360. Like all 360s, they tell the CEO where they are strong and what they need to work on. Armed with that information and a supportive Board and others (coach, mentor, CEO support group, etc), CEOs can take action to get better at their job. Without this information, it is hard to “level up.”

If you are a CEO and don’t do a CEO 360 annually, you should start doing one. And make it a regular occurrence. It will help you do your job better and it will help everyone around you too.

For many years, there were three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ X – Follow AVC on X

X revoked the API access that I was using to autopost three or four months ago. I have not been active on that service for almost a year now and have no interest in dealing with it.

So if you are one of the 25.5k followers on X and want to keep getting alerted when I post, I suggest you go with option 1 or option 2 going forward. There is also a new third option that I will talk about at the end of this post.

If you subscribe to AVC via RSS, you are likely using the old Feedburner feed. That has become unreliable and I would suggest moving to the Feedblitz feed which also powers the AVC email delivery.

I finally moved the email delivery off the old Feedburner feed this week when last week’s post did not go out via email. I suspect most of you missed it as a result.

All of this is a perfect example of the fragility of relying on centralized services like X and Feedburner (owned by Google). USV was an early investor in both services and I was a big user of them.

But all things come to an end in the world of centralized services and the challenges of getting AVC delivered to the ~100,000 subscribers reminded me of that last week.

There is a world where services just keep running because they are open source and decentralized. I wrote about that back in June and I am excited about that world to emerge.

AVC is available in the decentralized world and you can subscribe there if you’d like.

So now there are three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ Web3 – Subscribe to AVC on Mirror

If you are using the email delivery method, you are all good. If you are using the old RSS feed or X, I would suggest moving to something else. Or you could just stop getting AVC if that suits you. Many of you already have thanks to X and Google (and me).

I got a new Pixel 7 last week and have started the tedious process of moving over to a new phone.

One of the more painful chores in moving from one phone to another is moving the Google Authenticator app and all of the two factor codes to the new phone.

My partner Nick told me about Yubikey Authenticator and I converted to it while moving phones since I was going to have to get all new codes anyway.

If you use a Yubikey for anything else, switching to Yubikey Authenticator is a breeze.

You download the Yubikey Authenticator app onto your phone, insert your Yubikey and start scanning QR codes (just like Google Authenticator).

Then any time you need a code, you simply insert your Yubikey into your phone and your codes appear in the app.

You can also put the Yubikey Authenticator app on a laptop or a desktop and get the codes that way which is a great backup solution in case you misplace or lose your phone.

And, when it is time to switch phones, you simply put the Yubikey Authenticator app on your new phone and insert the Yubikey and your codes are there.

Even with all of this goodness, I still keep physical copies of my backup codes in a safe. I am also considering setting up a second Yubikey for the two factor codes I use the most just in case I lose my main one.

When it comes to two factor codes, I think you have to have a plan B and a plan C.

If you use a Yubikey already, consider using the Yubikey Authenticator for your two factor codes.

USV has been an investor in the Helium network since 2019. I have always loved the idea of using web3 technologies to let consumers to “peer produce” a communications network creating a people-powered network.

Helium started out powering communications between low-power “Internet of Things (IOT)” devices but with the introduction of Helium Mobile back in May, they are now powering a cell phone network.

My friend Stephen started using Helium Mobile last month and so I decided to join him. I signed up for Helium Mobile yesterday ($25/month but free during the beta period) and added it as a second SIM on my phone.

Now on the upper right of my home screen, I have two cell networks instead of one:

For now, I am going to use Helium Mobile alongside my primary carrier, T-Mobile, but I do plan to eventually scrap T-Mobile and use Helium Mobile exclusively.

Helium Mobile offers members the opportunity to earn Mobile tokens by sharing your location with the network. They call this “mapping”. I turned that on yesterday and should start seeing Mobile tokens in my Helium Mobile app today.

If you want to join me as a Helium Mobile customer, you can do that here.