Posts from January 2023

I’ve never done a cleanse. But many of my friends and family members have done them. There are various flavors of cleanses but the basic idea is you cut back your consumption of food and drink and replace it with mostly liquid nutrition for anywhere from a day to a month. I believe the most common lengths are in and around one week.

As I understand it, the theory behind the cleanse is it helps your body eliminate all sorts of toxins that build up over time from a poor diet and other unhealthy practices and allows you to reset. I’m told that people feel great when they complete the cleanse.

I like to think of what we’ve been going through in the tech sector/startup land/venture capital over the last year as a cleanse. Things had gotten so nutty, frothy, and out of control that we needed a reset. It was not just valuations that got out of whack, although they certainly did. Cost structures got out of whack. Compensation structures got out of whack. Company cultures got out of whack. Venture capital firms got out of whack.

Things just moved too fast, we lost track of what made sense, and focused on doing more than thinking. Everyone was reacting to everyone and everything. All of this hyperactive behavior was driven by fear of missing out and the idea that the path to success was more, more, more.

So now we have stopped eating all of that bad food and drink and are on a liquid diet of cost containment, extending runways, focusing on unit economics, getting back to deal sizes and valuations that make sense for the long run, and growing profitably.

The first few days of a cleanse are apparently unpleasant. And the last year of the tech downturn has also been unpleasant. Lots of people have lost good-paying jobs. VC portfolios have been marked down upwards of 50% and more. Stock prices of publicly traded tech companies are down between 30% and 80%. It has been hard for many people.

It is my view that we are entering the part of the cleanse where the body has adjusted and is starting to feel better. Everyone is starting to get comfortable in the new normal.

This cleanse is likely to continue for most, if not all, of 2023 but I think it gets easier from here. At least for most people who work in tech and startups.

And when it is over, sometime in the next twelve to eighteen months, possibly sooner, we should all feel a lot better. New technologies are emerging that provide a lot of opportunities to start and build new companies. The pool of talent that is sitting on the sidelines and available to work in these new companies is quite substantial. We are already seeing the seeds of all this being planted now.

For established companies that grew up in the go go years, my mindset is to survive the downturn and invest in new products and services that the market will want when things snap back. Many/most of the companies that I get to work with are doing just that. I think they will be rewarded for getting back to basics, building and shipping new things, and improving their products and services meaningfully during the downturn.

I’ve been through a few down cycles now that I am in my fifth decade in tech/startups/venture capital and while they are all a bit different, they all eventually end and those who survived, invested and built, and improved their market positions materially during the downturn have always been rewarded for that. I see no reason why that would not be the case this time as well.

I wrote last week that I have started coding again. And I have been amazed at how much easier it is now that I can code and deploy in the cloud without having to spin up anything myself.

But the other massive improvement in programming is the “AI assist.”

I am working in a Javascript library called jQuery and I don’t really understand its commands and syntax very well.

So I turned to ChatGPT last week and got back this:

That is like having every line of code commented out so you know exactly what it is doing. Once I understood what the code was doing, it was pretty simple to edit it to do something different.

GitHub also has a service called CoPilot that I have just set up so I haven’t used it yet. They call it “your AI pair programmer” which sounds like exactly what I need. I hope to get it working this week and that will help me even more.

Like all things AI, some will say that machines will replace humans in writing code. I think that could happen, but what certainly is happening is machines are making humans more productive in writing code. AND AI is allowing humans who aren’t very good at writing code to be able to do it much more easily.

The machines replacing humans narrative is powerful. But the narrative I prefer is that AI is making things available that have been expensive and unobtainable for so many. And that is not limited to programming. It is true of so many things.

It has been many years since I’ve written code. I’ve hacked around in HTML and CSS a bit on this blog and a few other places. But I have not actually written an application in a very long time. I think it might be thirty years since I’ve done any real programming.

Over the year-end break, my partner Nick taught me how to use GitHub Codespaces and Netlify to quickly spin up development and deployment environments. I forked his Google Sheets NFT Playlist app and have been making changes to it to suit my needs.

Forking someone else’s application is a lot easier than starting from scratch. I always encourage teachers who are introducing students to coding to start that way. There is nothing more intimidating than a blank screen.

Coding is like solving puzzles. It stretches the mind and causes you to think in different ways. I quite enjoy it and I’m glad that I am doing it again. Debugging something to make it work correctly is also a lot of fun for me.

It is really amazing how easy it is to write and deploy code in the cloud these days. I hope that I will use my new Github Codespace and Netlify accounts to make some fun things this year and beyond.

I read last week that the NYC Department of Education has banned ChatGPT from its networks and devices. I understand that reaction and mentioned the issues that AI/ML create for educators in a post a few weeks ago.

I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves.

However, I would like to suggest that educators embrace these new tools rather than block them.

We are entering an era when AIs will be available to everyone to use to do work, entertain ourselves, and many other things. We cannot put this genie back in the bottle. We need to embrace it.

I think a better approach would be to require students to use ChatGPT to write an essay or at least help write an essay and then have the students compete to see who can leverage this technology to create the best essay. That would teach the students to use these tools rather than pretend they don’t exist.

I own a slide rule that my dad gave me. He used it for many years until calculators emerged. He told me when calculators first showed up, many educators wanted their students to continue to use slide rules. But eventually, they realized that calculators were better and embraced them.

I think the same thing will happen with AIs. So we might as well get busy integrating them into education instead of banning them.