Posts from Fred Wilson

Our portfolio company SoundCloud is introducing fan powered royalties to share revenues more equitably with musicians.

The streaming music business pools its revenues and pays out based on a mathematical formula. There is no direct connection between a fan and artist. This graphic explains the existing model:

What SoundCloud is offering is that direct connection, explained here.

If you are an artist and you want to get fan powered royalties you can monetize directly on SoundCloud or via SoundCloud’s Repost service which allows you to monetize on SoundCloud and all of the other streaming platforms:

Artists can participate automatically in fan-powered royalties in three ways:

SoundCloud Premier: Premier is our monetization program for Pro Unlimited subscribers. Artists will be notified and prompted to join once they become eligible to monetize. Click here for Premier eligibility requirements. 

Repost by SoundCloud: Repost by SoundCloud is for artists who want to reach fans everywhere by distributing their music to every major music service. There are no eligibility requirements to monetize with Repost by SoundCloud. You can subscribe to Repost by SoundCloud here.

Repost Select: While there are no eligibility requirements to monetize with Repost Select, it’s a program open to select Repost by SoundCloud subscribers via application or invitation only. Click here to apply or learn more.

While the pooling model has worked well to scale the streaming industry, it has not worked well for independent and emerging artists. This bit from SoundCloud’s Fan Powered Royalties page explains it well:

With fan-powered royalties, each listener’s subscription or advertising revenue is distributed among the artists they actually listen to, rather than being pooled. This new model benefits independent artists and empowers fans to play a larger role in the success of their favorite artists. It also encourages the growth of local scenes and the rise of new genres.

Fan-powered royalties benefit independent artists whose fanbases are dedicated to listening to their music frequently. So if a fan only listens to an early-stage rapper from Detroit or an emerging singer from France, most or all of their subscription or advertising revenue will go to those exact artists. 

SoundCloud has always been about the emerging artists and I am glad to see them leading the industry to a more equitable model for revenue sharing.

Our portfolio company Clue announced yesterday that they have received FDA approval for a digital birth control feature.

Clue’s mobile app is used by over 13mm women around the world to track their monthly cycle and this new FDA approved feature, called Clue Birth Control, will be offered as a premium feature in the Clue app.

While Clue Birth Control is not 100% effective, it is an alternative to more invasive forms of birth control. It requires nothing more than regular inputting of the start date of a woman’s cycle.

Here are some comparison’s of its efficacy:

Clue says the product has been shown to be 92% effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy under ‘typical use’ and 97% effective under ‘perfect use’ — referencing the standard research terminology for measuring contraception effectiveness (the latter meaning the product is used exactly as instructed every time the woman has sex vs ‘typical’ use which accounts for some usage slip-ups).

What those percentages mean in practice is that under typical use, eight couples out of 100 would be predicted to get pregnant over a year of use of Clue’s digital birth control. While — in the perfect use scenario — the failure rate would be three out of 100 over a year’s use.

(For comparison, Natural Cycles says its product is 93% effective under typical use and 98% effective under perfect use; while — per the Guttmacher Institute‘s US study — the pill is 93% effective under typical use and 99% effective under perfect use; and male condoms are 87% effective under typical use vs 98% effective under perfect use.)

https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/01/clue-gets-fda-clearance-to-launch-a-digital-contraceptive/

The options available to women to manage their fertility cycle have grown significantly over the last 60 years and that has provided women with more control over their lives. Clue’s digital birth control offering will not be for everyone but it certainly will help some women who cannot or do not want to use more invasive methods.

The last two months have been challenging in NYC. It has been cold, rainy, and snowy. There has not been a lot of sun. And the pandemic has things locked down. I know so many people who have found the last few months very challenging.

At the same time, more and more friends and loved ones are getting vaccinated. I hope to be able to do that soon myself. So there is light at the end of the tunnel, but we are still in the tunnel.

The other thing about the pandemic is it feels like we work all the time as there is little else to do. One one hand it is comforting to have something to occupy the time. On the other hand, working all of the time is not healthy.

The Gotham Gal and I decided to take some mental health time with some of our family and go skiing for a few weeks. I am looking to getting out in the fresh air, sun on my face, wind in my hair, and not working all of the time.

Decompressing is important. I am excited to do it and hope that all of you can find some time to do the same while we wait this thing out.

In less than four months, the Democratic Primary will effectively choose the next mayor of NYC. For those of us who live here, this will be a very important choice. Though the race is partially funded by NYC through matching of small donations below $250, the candidates need more funds to get out their message, connect with voters, and help us make the best choice we can.

If there are candidates you like and want to support, here are some links to the donation pages of the most popular candidates. The Gotham Gal and I have financially supported most of these campaigns.

Andrew Yang

Maya Wiley

Eric Adams

Kathryn Garcia

Shaun Donovan

Ray McGuire

Scott Stringer

Dianne Morales

If you live in NYC and have the means to support the political process, I encourage you to do so and get behind some of these candidates.

I remember meeting Zach Sims and his co-founder Ryan Bubinski back in 2011 when they started Codecademy. Zach was still in college and thinking of dropping out to focus on the Company. I just realized this morning that it has been ten years since then. Wow. Time does fly.

Like many great companies their idea was simple, but powerful.

build the easiest way to learn to code

They did that and they have gone on to build a large and profitable business helping anyone learn to code, get a job, and start a career.

But it isn’t as simple as that. In fact, when you look at the ten-year history of the Company that Zach lays out in this great tweetstorm, you see how hard it is to build something lasting, sustainable, and important.

What is more impressive is that when you read this blog post Zach wrote this week you see that he is just getting started. When building long-lasting companies, it helps to have a mission that really matters. This line from Zach’s post brings it home for me:

Times like these remind us that what we’re doing matters: hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Codecademy every single day to learn the skills they need to find jobs, upgrade their careers, and live better lives.

The world is changing quickly before our eyes, the job market is changing with it. Our educational institutions are trying to evolve to meet the needs of students and employers but it is hard to turn a battleship around. So companies like Codecademy are filling in the gaps, helping people learn the things they need to learn, and building some incredible businesses along the way.

To another ten years!

QR Codes have been with us for as long as there has been a commercial Internet. They were invented in 1994 in Japan for use in the automotive industry. QR stands for “quick response” and a QR code is a barcode that can contain a lot of data and be read very quickly.

But QR codes kind of languished over the last twenty-five years, certainly in the US. They seem to be much more popular in Asia.

I think that all changed during the pandemic. In an era when stores and restaurants wanted to maintain as much social distance as possible, I saw QR codes popping up everywhere. Most of us are now very proficient scanning a QR code on our phone and getting taken to a web page.

I spent some time this morning setting up Nest Protect smoke alarms in our home. The setup process is very slick. You scan the QR code on the back of the smoke alarm and the app does the rest of the work. No more manually typing in MAC addresses or some such thing.

Now that we are all much more comfortable with QR codes, we will see them being used for more and more things. They are a very powerful way to quickly transfer information between a physical object and a phone.

I wrote this in yesterday’s post:

Remote learning is here to stay.

I got a bunch of emails and tweets from parents saying that they want their kids back in school. So do I!!! I think getting kids back in school is the single biggest thing we can do to put the pandemic in the rear view mirror.

I should have been more clear about what I meant by that line.

I meant that when kids are sick, they can stay home and still learn.

I meant that when there is a snow day, kids can stay home and still learn.

I meant that when kids have trouble with their homework, maybe there is a way they can log on and get help.

I meant that summer school could happen anywhere, maybe even at sleepaway camp.

What I meant by “remote learning is here to stay” is that we now understand that learning can move from the classroom to anywhere and back and does not need to be constrained by place and time. That’s a huge thing to learn and I think K12 education (and higher education) will benefit enormously from it.

But I am all for getting kids back into the classroom as soon as possible.

In my Jan 1st post talking about what I expected to happen this year, I wrote:

I think we will see the end of the Covid Pandemic in the US sometime in the second quarter. I believe the US will work out the challenges we are having getting out of the gate and will be vaccinating at least 40mm people a month in the US in the first quarter. When you add that to the 90mm people in the US that the CDC believes have already been infected, we will have well over 200mm people in the US who have some protection from the virus by the end of March.

Seven weeks later, it seems like that is pretty much what is playing out. I have read that about half of the population of the US now has some protection against the Covid 19 virus, either via having had the disease or by being vaccinated at least once. At the current vaccination rate of 1.8mm a day, the number of people who have at least some protection against the Covid 19 virus will be about 70% by the end of March.

What that means is the virus will spread less, infecting less people, and less folks in the hospital or worse. I believe that means a gradual re-opening of the economy throughout much of the US in the second quarter with schools, stores, restaurants, and nightlife coming back. I am sure that precautions will continue for much, if not all, of 2021 because nobody wants to take this lightly after what we have all been through.

If that is in fact the case, and we don’t know for sure that it is, what does that mean for the economy, businesses, tech, and more?

I wish I knew. But I have some suspicions.

As I have written here quite a few times, I believe that habits that we have formed in the last twelve months will stick with us even when we don’t need to use them anymore. I believe work from home has proven to be very effective for some, possibly even a majority, of knowledge workers. E-commerce has delivered (no pun intended) and the gains it has made against in-store retail will not be given back much, if at all. Remote learning is here to stay. So is telehealth.

I also believe that the things we have not been able to do in the last year; travel, be tourists, see live music, live theater, live sports, and all of that will be in more demand than ever. As Joni Mitchell said, “you don’t know what you got until it is gone.” We want all of that back and I think we will embrace being with others experiencing things in the real world with a passion.

But where all of this lands is anyone’s guess. And there are many businesses whose near-term fortunes depend on how the balance of remote vs in-person lands over the rest of 2021.

I also think a re-opening may not be great for the stock market, which was a major beneficiary of the pandemic. The NASDAQ is basically up 100% since March 20, 2020. I wrote a bit about why I think that might be the case last week. I don’t know how quickly a re-opening will impact the stock market, but I do think it could.

But let’s not get negative here. And end to the Covid pandemic and a re-opening of the economy would be about the best thing that could happen to the US and the world and I am becoming more and more optimistic that it will start happening in the second quarter of 2021.

I saw this project while browsing on Kickstarter this morning. I did not realize that many school and government issued computers have virtual backgrounds disabled.

This project is about creating fun and inexpensive physical backdrops for kids who are doing remote learning. I like that idea and I hope you do too.

The video is here if you are getting this via email.