Posts from Fred Wilson

Show me a successful person and I will show you someone who has made a ton of mistakes. That’s how things go. You can’t really learn from your successes. You can try to replicate the wins and sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t. But mistakes – those are powerful learning moments.

I have made my share of mistakes over the years and continue to do so, particularly in new areas where I am not experienced. It’s always a bummer when the mistake comes home to roost and you have losses, egg on your face, a problem, a mess, or any and all of that. You feel terrible, you are angry at yourself and possibly angry at those who were involved in the mistake. I think it is best to own it, fix it if possible, and mostly to learn from it and not make that one again.

There will always be new mistakes to make. It is best not to repeat the ones you’ve already made.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the economics of rooftop solar. Our family has invested in rooftop solar over the last five years in an attempt to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce our electric bills. When you do that in combination with electrification of your heating and cooling (using electric heat pumps vs gas or oil), you can save money and live a more sustainable life.

We have used SunPower solar panels and inverters and they come with a nice analytics service that shows how much of your electric consumption is being generated with solar power.

Here is a chart from our SunPower dashboard that I looked at this morning:

You can see that we generate about 2/3 of our energy consumption with solar. I believe that with some additional conservation efforts, we can get to 75%+ solar.

The installation cost of the rooftop solar was about $24,000 after the federal solar tax credit.

Had we taken a 30 year self amortizing home equity loan to finance the solar installation, we would be paying $1900 a year in principal and interest payments at current home equity rates.

As you can see, Sunpower estimates that we are saving $2854 a year with our rooftop solar, so there is quite a nice profit in rooftop solar at current interest rates if you live in medium to high energy cost locations in the US.

I think there are a number of good business opportunities in and around rooftop solar. For one, making it drop dead simple for a homeowner to finance, order, and install rooftop solar and start getting paid for doing so feels like a winner to me.

Every January, Kickstarter runs the Make 100 program where creators are encouraged to make 100 of something and crowdfund it on Kickstarter.

There are all sorts of great creative projects this year. Check them out.

I backed this one this morning

A number of people have been asking me what I think of the Game Stop situation. This is not really my world. I don’t trade stocks, we hold them. I don’t use Robinhood, though I have an account thanks to my friend Howard. I don’t hang out on Reddit, though I visit it from time to time.

So I have not paid enough attention to this one, but it certainly is fascinating. The generational aspect of this is important. Boomer hedgies getting crushed by young folks self-organizing in social media. It feels like a moment where you realize that the power structure has shifted and things won’t be the same.

The financial system in the US, and in other developed countries, is a rigged system and has been for a very long time. Only big institutions can get into hot IPOs. Only rich people can invest in startups. Many of these rules are designed to protect “widows and orphans” but all they really do is make the rich richer and keep those without money out of the game.

Not anymore. Whether it is crypto (Coinbase) or day trading (Robinhood), the retail investor now has the tools to get into the game and win the game.

The new startup investing is buying into the Ethereum crowdsale. Had you done that in the summer of 2014, you would be looking at roughly 1,000 times your money right now. And that crowdsale was launched by a team led by a 20 year old. Though the SEC and others would like to impose the same rules on crypto that protect the rich and keep out everyone else, that has not happened and I pray that it won’t.

The new hedge fund is the Robinhood army self organizing on Reddit. They can move a stock more easily than the largest hedge fund.

There will be calls to regulate this “madness.” But it is the same madness we have always had. It is just a different crowd in charge.

I do worry that this Game Stop short squeeze will end badly and not only the hedge funds will get hurt. Markets can be brutal. But regulating markets to protect the small investor is not the answer. As we can see, the small investor is often a lot smarter than the large investor.

What we need to do is stop printing money to stabilize the economy. And start addressing the real economic issues that exist on main street, not wall street. Monetary policy is not the answer. Fiscal policy is. That won’t stop more Game Stops from happening. They are a by-product of markets. But it will get the money to where it is needed versus where it is just gameplay.

Last fall, USV raised two new venture capital funds from our loyal and supportive investors. We announced the new climate fund on January 8th and I blogged about it here.

While the climate fund is something new and important, we also raised another early stage fund to invest in the same kinds of companies we’ve been investing in at USV for over 15 years. While it is less newsmaking, it is worth talking about.

And so we did that yesterday on the USV blog and I tweeted about it.

So it is more of the same and also something new at USV. We are excited about both.

I found myself using this hack a few times this week and I thought I would share it. I think many/most of you probably know it, but it is so damn useful that it’s worth sharing it anyway.

If your email is [email protected] and you want to create a new email address that will get email at [email protected], you just put a + and add something. Let’s say you want an email address for a netflix account, you enter [email protected]. To netflix, this seems like a different email address but the mail still goes to [email protected].

This is particularly useful for creating multiple accounts with the same service. Many services don’t let you use the same email address for multiple accounts. So you just add the + and something you will remember and you get around that issue.

This is one of those little things that is super useful and once you know about it, you will find yourself using it quite a bit.

Update: The comments to this post on Twitter tell me that this hack is a gmail feature and is not necessarily available on other email services.

I am returning to a theme that I feel quite strongly about.

I blog on WordPress using a host that I have selected and can move from at any time. WordPress is open source software and I can download it and run it on my own machines if I want to. I don’t. But being able to do that is key.

Medium and Substack and Clubhouse and Twitter, etc, etc are fantastic. They make it drop dead simple for anyone to share their thoughts with the world.

But they are controlled by someone else. You can get kicked off. And when you get kicked off, you lose all of your followers, all of your content. Gone.

I’m not down for that.

Nor should you be.

I am really into the NYC coming back stronger than ever theme and want to support efforts to make that happen.

Today, I backed a project on Kickstarter to support NYC’s largest “board game cafe” called Hex & Co to move into a larger space a few blocks away.

Doing something like this in the midst of lockdowns and social distancing is a bold and optimistic move and I support it wholeheartedly. If you agree, you can support it here.

I have written about our portfolio company Dapper‘s NBA Top Shot game here at AVC a few times now. Think of NBA Top Shot as digital trading cards. It is more than that, but that’s a simple way to think about it.

I tweeted this out today:

I don’t like to sell crypto, but I do like to trade crypto for crypto. I got all of our Ethereum by swapping Bitcoin for it a few years ago, for example.

NFTs (non fungible tokens) are a different kind of crypto asset. They are digital assets like art, trading cards, etc that are issued on a blockchain and as a result are rare, unique, and easily traded.

NFTs, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, can increase and decrease in value over time.

Rookie cards have been traded for as long as there have been physical trading cards. They are a way to speculate on an athlete and their career. This Steph Curry rookie card is listed for $150,000 on eBay right now.

So my purchase of the Tyrese Haliburton moment is a bet that Tyrese is going to have a long and successful NBA career. Hopefully, he will be an all-star someday. That would make my moment increase in value. Will it increase in value more than the 3.33 BCH that I parted with to buy it? Well, that remains to be seen.