Posts from Fred Wilson

One of the biggest challenges for developers building on Ethereum’s market leading smart contract platform/blockchain are the high fees and slow transactions. These issues arise from the fact that the Ethereum blockchain’s current architecture is not particularly scalable.

The Ethereum core developers have been working on these issues for years and there are changes coming in the core Ethereum protocol that will help with scalability. But the broader Ethereum community is not relying entirely on the core developers to address these issues. There are a number of “layer two” solutions that have emerged that will bring very significant increases in speed and lower fees.

One of these layer two solutions, called Zero Knowledge Rollups, is particularly exciting to us at USV and earlier this year we invested in a project called Matter Labs (also known as ZKSync) that has built what we think is the best approach to Rollups on top of Ethereum.

My partner Nick posted today about ZKSync and outlined why we are so excited about this approach. If you are a developer building on Ethereum and are looking for a good layer two solution, you should absolutely read Nick’s post. I would also recommend it for anyone who is invested in or interested in Ethereum as layer two scaling solutions will likely unlock a lot of value in the Ethereum community over the coming years.

I’ve written a bunch about the globalization of the startup economy. You can start and build a tech company almost anywhere these days. That has been true for at least the last decade. But until very recently, raising capital for your startup was significantly easier if it was located in the major startup hubs, most notably Silicon Valley.

I believe the pandemic changed that equation dramatically and USV’s “deal log” is a great example of that. When I look at all of the opportunities we are currently considering plus all of the investments we have made this year to date, what stands out most to me is the location of the founders and teams. It seems to me that about half of our “new deal activity” right now is happening outside of the US. And very little of it is in western Europe where most of our non-US investing has been for the last decade.

This is a big change from where it was just last year and the year before. The emergence of raising money and supporting investments on Zoom has made it possible to have a much broader reach than was possible a few years ago.

What makes it easier for USV is our thesis-driven model of investing. We know exactly what we are looking for in new opportunities in wellness, education, financial services, climate, and crypto and so we can react to opportunities that fit into our thesis pretty much anywhere in the world. And we are doing exactly that.

It takes a long time, at least five years and more likely a decade, to know how changes in the startup economy and venture capital will play out. We won’t know how this move to invest globally will impact returns and founder success. I am optimistic that it will be a positive change for both but only time will tell.

So this is pretty cool. Dirt is a daily newsletter about the entertainment industry. The folks behind Dirt are funding it with a crowdfunding campaign on Mirror using NFTs.

There are three Dirt NFTs you can buy, a single edition called Rainbow Wave, an edition of 30 called Pearl Pink, and an edition of 100 called Pea Green.

I bought a Pea Green just now for .05 ETH:

If you want to join this crowdfunding campaign, make sure you have the Coinbase browser extension or the Metamask browser extension and go here and have fun and support some journalists too.

I am returning to a topic that I have talked a lot about on this blog.

A number of years ago at our annual CEO Summit, we had Angela Duckworth speak to our portfolio about Grit, the topic of her excellent book on the subject. In Angela’s research, she determined that the single greatest determinant of success was not talent. It was grit.

I was reminded of that last night as I watched Derrick Rose lead the New York Knicks to a must-win in game two of their series against the Atlanta Hawks. The Knicks were a mess for the first half of the game and Derrick Rose singlehandedly kept them in the game.

Derrick Rose was the first pick in the 2008 draft and by 2011 he became the youngest NBA player to win the Most Valuable Player award, something he accomplished at age 23. A year later he tore his ACL and he has struggled with injuries ever since.

In the middle of this season, the Knicks acquired Derrick Rose from the Detroit Pistons and soon thereafter he came down with Covid and missed several weeks.

But after Derrick Rose came back from Covid in the last seventeen games of the season, the Knicks won thirteen of those games and landed in fourth place in the East.

And last night, he was the heart and soul of the Knicks. He kept them in the game until his teammates woke up, and he led the team in scoring in a must-win.

Derrick Rose will never be the player he was at 23 when he could beat anyone off the dribble and score at will. He could have called it quits many times in the last nine years since he won his MVP. But he hasn’t quit, he’s worked his way back and he is leading an NBA team in the playoffs. It is really something to behold.

Not everything goes the way we are expecting it to go. We get dealt bad hands and have to play them. That is way things are in life. There are people out there, like Derrick Rose, who show that you can make the best of a tough situation, keep going, and win anyway. That’s grit.

I am working on a new weekday routine the goal of which is to give me more time to read, think, and meet in person and less zoom meetings and phone calls. I am also mixing up my morning routine and attempting to sleep and work out longer.

The net of all that is I am seeking a new time of day to write and I have not yet found it. I may need to go back to writing first thing in the morning but I am not yet sold on that.

I missed my daily blog post yesterday and finally found some time to write today mid-afternoon.

I really value finding time to write each day so I will figure out how to fit it in, but things might be a bit bumpy over the next few weeks while I sort all of this out.

I was rooting for Phil Mickelson all weekend to win the PGA at age 50. I’ve watched Phil for thirty years and I’ve seen all of the highs and lows and there have been many. He plays the game of golf with a level of creativity that can often lead to problems. He is a risk-taker which isn’t always the best way to approach a golf course.

But this weekend at the PGA, he was simply better than anyone else. He hit the ball as far as players thirty years younger than he is. And he showed off his incredible short game.

We have now seen this a few times, where athletes who are “past their prime” continue to be better than anyone else, at least for a game or a long weekend.

Some of this is due to the better conditioning that today’s athletes are in. Some of it is that they are older and wiser and have been there before and understand how to handle the moment. And some of it is that they are the best of their generation and that level of talent goes a long way.

I think us “old timers” can take some lessons from Phil and other athletes who are outperforming well beyond their prime. We can stay in the game to start. We can figure out what our version of learning how to hit the ball as far as the youngsters is. And we can take comfort in the fact that we have been in this moment before and know how to take a breath, calm down, and make the right decision. And win again!

If I am going to be outside much, I need to wear a hat to keep the sun off my face. My light skin doesn’t react well to the sun. I like baseball-style hats, but I don’t like wearing logos.

So this Kickstarter project got my attention. Fun stylish hats without logos, made with sustainable materials. Right up my alley. I backed it immediately.

Email readers can watch the video here.

Back in the early 2000s, it was exciting to blog and use social networks to create our own media and move away from the traditional media outlets. That was the pull that got me into blogging and got me investing in Twitter. It was a powerful feeling.

But a decade and a half later, it is obvious that we just replaced one type of media company for another and that we don’t really control our own media yet. I have a bit more control over this blog because I run it on my own domain using open source WordPress software, but most people are blogging on Medium or Substack or some other centralized service these days. And the social media platforms, well we know all about them in the wake of recent takedowns. You don’t control your own media platform if you run it on a centralized service.

So a few months ago, I mirrored this blog on Mirror, a decentralized blogging platform. You can view it here.

And yesterday, I claimed @fredwilson on Bitclout with this tweet:

Around that same time, I saw this post on Bitclout:

Here is the thing about blockchains and crypto – the data is public on the blockchain. Nobody controls it other than you with your private keys. And when you put open source software together with that, you get decentralized applications that nobody can mess with, not even the creators of those applications.

I don’t know if Mirror is the new WordPress or if Bitclout is the new Twitter. We will see. But it sure feels like we are back in the early 2000s again, experimenting with decentralizing media. I have the same feeling of excitement I had back then.

As USV is now about six months into investing our first climate fund, I am starting to see more clearly what climate investing is all about and my partner Albert said something in a team meeting earlier this week that really stuck with me.

I did not write it down but it was something like, “we’ve spent two hundred years taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere and what we now need to do is get it from the atmosphere and put it back into the ground.”

That is a simplification of the many technologies and projects that are underway to capture carbon and sequester it, but I am a fan of simple. In investing, the simpler the better for me.