Posts from Fred Wilson

My family has a history of irregular heartbeats, from PVCs to AFIBs. So when I saw my cardiologist recently, I asked him how I could track my beats. I have worn a Holter Monitor a few times and did not want to do that again unless it was absolutely necessary. He pointed me to this Kardia Mobile device which I purchased on Amazon a few weeks ago.

This Kardia Mobile 6L device is remarkable. It delivers a “6 lead” EKG reading into your smartphone by putting the device on your knee and pressing both thumbs on it. I realize that 6 leads is not the same as what you get with a Holter Monitor or an EKG in your doctor’s office. But it is really amazing because it is so easy to use in your own home. It is the size of an Apple TV remote, maybe even a tad smaller. I just email my cardiologist the result and he tells me what is going on without him having to take fifteen minutes or more to see me and without me having to visit his office.

This is just one example of the revolution underway in health care. Driven by advances in technology, a computer in everyone’s pocket, ongoing changes in the healthcare system accelerated by the pandemic, among other forcing functions, we are seeing more and more healthcare being accessed in our homes vs in the doctor’s office.

This does not mean that doctors are needed less. I think they are needed more. But they can focus their time and energy where it is most needed, in providing the care itself vs all of the other things that lead to the care.

This has the potential to both increase access to care and also reduce the cost of it. We will need other changes to the healthcare system for those things to be realized. We will need the healthcare system to move away from a business model based on the provision of care in favor of a business model based on outcomes. We will need the power of the payors to be reduced in favor of the power of the patients. Those changes must be driven by society/politics and they won’t come easy.

But the conditions are ripe for a reshaping of the healthcare system. Entrepreneurs (like the folks who made the Kardia Mobile device) and risk capital can and will be an important force in driving that change.

The Gotham Gal and I are watching Succession after being told by so many friends and family members that we had to see it. We are in season two and last night we watched an episode where Logan Roy tries to acquire a family-owned media business. The selling family, led by the mother, tells him they will do the deal if he names his daughter Shiv as his successor. Logan explains that is not how he does things and that he will name his successor on his time and terms. The mother explains it is a requirement of the deal. And so Logan leaves the meeting without closing the deal.

On his arrival back in NYC Logan hears that the selling family has “caved” and will do the deal without a named successor.

The walk-away move is a bold one and does not always lead to winning on your terms. It can cause you to lose the deal.

But I am a fan of the walk-away move because it shows the other party that you are not going to move on your offer anymore and forces a hard decision instead of endless negotiating, which I personally don’t like.

I am often counseled to keep talking and relax. But I find walking away to be very effective if done at the right time and after being very reasonable until then. It is a very powerful way to send a message.

There are many stories of chefs, bakers, etc cooking from their homes and apartments during the pandemic and now turning that activity into permanent businesses with storefront leases. I’ve backed quite a few projects like this on Kickstarter and found a great one today.

L’Appartement 4F is a couple who baked in their tiny Brooklyn apartment during the pandemic, found a clientele for their products, and now are opening a bakery in Brooklyn Heights.

Email readers can watch the video here.

My partner Albert shared this article yesterday which suggests that the price of carbon will have to reach $150/ton by 2030 in order to create the conditions for the world to get to zero carbon by 2050. The current price of a ton of carbon on the EU’s Emission Trading System is about $60/ton and you can buy carbon offsets for much less than that although you may be purchasing junk credits if you are not careful.

If you bought carbon today at $60/ton and held it until 2030 and sold it at $150/ton, you would get 2.5x on your money and a roughly 11.4% annual rate of return. If you can figure out how to buy carbon for a lot less than $60/ton, then your returns could be a lot higher.

It is increasingly obvious that the world will need to get off its addiction to carbon in order to stave off very serious climate impacts. The path to doing so is fairly clear but will be expensive. This chart from our portfolio company Wren’s website shows how we might get there:

The bet on the price of carbon is a belief that the world will choose to eliminate its addiction to carbon over the next thirty years and that one way or another carbon emissions will become very costly and carbon capture will become very profitable.

If you believe that will happen, you can profit from it by investing in the price of carbon. There are many ways to do that and some will be more profitable than others. But a “macro bet” on the price of carbon feels like one of the strongest ones out there right now.

My friend Gary Ginsberg’s book, First Friends, is out today.

Gary gave me an advance copy a few weeks ago and I have been reading it.

First Friends is a book about US Presidents and their best friends who influenced them in the office.

The book starts with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and ends with Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan. In between, there are chapters about Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and six other Presidents and their best friends.

My favorite chapter was Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo. That is a particularly interesting story and friendship.

If you enjoy history books and/or are a student of the US Presidency, you should grab this book and give it a read.

You can do that here.

I am a fan of wireless charging for my various devices and I am glad that there is a standard, called Qi, for wireless charging that many manufacturers support. This means you don’t need to buy your wireless charging device from Apple or Google, you can buy it from any manufacturer you prefer.

This nice looking small charging device, called Biscuit, is a great example of that:

I backed it this morning on Kickstarter and so can you.

The video is here for email readers.

The Internet was developed by the US Defense Department to create a network that was capable of surviving a military attack. They accomplished that with a design where no part of the system was central to its operation. You can take out any part of the Internet and it will still operate.

When I read the Bitcoin White Paper for the first time, I was struck by the similarity of its design to the Internet.

And we are watching an “attack” on the Bitcoin system right now, in the form of a purge in China.

Over the last three months, the government in China has moved to rid the country of Bitcoin mining. You can see the effect of the purge on the chart of Bitcoin Hashrate:

This is a significant reduction in the processing power of the Bitcoin network and the result has been slower transaction clearing times:

It will take time for miners outside of China to pick up the slack and get the hashrate and transaction times back to where they were, but that will happen. There are economic incentives for that to happen. What would be even better, and could happen, is for this new mining capacity to get built on clean/renewable energy.

I believe the Chinese purge of Bitcoin mining is short term bearish but long term bullish for Bitcoin and crypto more broadly. It shows that a powerful government can take its best shot at a cryptonetwork and the only thing that will happen is capacity will move elsewhere.

Anti-fragility is a beautiful thing to behold.

This should be obvious to AVC readers but I am a fan of short and sweet. Why take two pages to say something you can say in one page? Why take two paragraphs to say something you can say in one paragraph?

This letter to potential investors from the CEO in the Duolingo S-1, which was flipped to the public yesterday, is a fantastic example of that.

Disclosure: USV is an investor in Duolingo and we stand to profit from their IPO. This is not in any way an endorsement of the offering. Investors should read the S-1 and make up their own mind about it.

A reader asked me if I had ever written about the infrastructure I use to run AVC. We both searched the archives and could not find a post on that topic.

So here it is:

1/ Content Management System – WordPress – I use the open source software version of WordPress to write these posts and manage them.

2/ Hosting Provider – Cloudways – I have used a number of hosting providers over the years. If you use WordPress, it is fairly easy to migrate from one to another. Cloudways is the current favorite.

3/ Comments – Twitter Comments Plugin – I have used various comment systems over the years. I am currently using a WordPress plugin to host the comments on Twitter.

4/ Email – Feedblitz – This allows me to send an email out to over 30,000 people whenever I post.

5/ Search – Algolia – Fast and simple site search.

It’s relatively easy to set all of this up and then you are not locked into a service provider. I strongly recommend this approach.