Posts from Fred Wilson

I posted earlier this week on Libra and USV’s involvement in this project

Laura Shin had Dante Disparte of the Libra Association on her Unconfirmed Podcast yesterday.

This is a good and relatively quick way to get up to speed on Libra and how it has been structured.

Jerry Colonna‘s book, Reboot, came out this week.

He had given me the manuscript to read so many months ago that I had to go back and read it again before I could write about it.

So I bought the book yesterday and read it again over the last twenty four hours.

AVC regulars don’t need any introduction to Jerry. I’ve been writing about him, citing him, and telling stories about him since the very start of this blog.

Jerry is my friend, my former partner and co-founder of the first business I ever started, Flatiron Partners, and one of the best people on planet earth.

Jerry’s book is about two things that are really the same thing, himself and his work to help people, mostly entrepreneurs, discover themselves.

Jerry describes this work as “radical self inquiry”:

But the most challenging piece of the formula—indeed, the most important—is the notion of radically inquiring within. I define it as the process by which self-deception becomes so skillfully and compassionately exposed that no mask can hide us anymore. The notion is to recognize that, if things are not okay, if you’re struggling, you stop pretending and allow yourself to get help. Even more, it’s the process by which you work hard to know yourself—your strengths, your struggles, your true intentions, your true motivations, the characteristics of the character known as “you.” The you behind the masks, the stories, the protective but no longer useful belief systems that have been presented for so long as the “you” that you would like everyone to see.

Invariably such inquiry involves getting to know, as the poet Adrienne Rich says, “not the story of the wreck but the wreck itself.” With help, patience, courage, and guidance, we explore the wreck and retrieve the treasure. Knowing how to survive and understanding what it takes to thrive are skills that come from our childhood. Take any random group of entrepreneurs, for example, and do a quick unscientific survey by asking them to raise their hands if they grew up in an environment where at least one parent had disappeared or left or was never present. Most hands will shoot up. Early promotion into adulthood is often painful and equally often a sign of an early promotion into leadership. Probe a bit further and you may find that leaders who have built their company may have unconsciously stacked the team with other folks who experienced such early promotion.

Radically inquiring within allows us to step back and see the patterns of our lives not as random acts of a willful or even vengeful God but as forces that shape who we are. It’s this understanding that will make us not only better leaders but better, happier, more resilient people.

Reboot, the book, is about Jerry’s radical self inquiry to discover who he is and then his work to help others do the same.

He tells his own personal story over the course of the book and also weaves in the stories of others who he has worked with along the way to explain what the work of radical self inquiry is and why it must be done and the rewards that come from doing it. He is teaching by example.

Jerry started his career as a writer and he is a wonderful one. It is a joy to see him go back to those roots and exercise those muscles again.

Let me put it to you this way. You are reading AVC for a reason. Maybe you are an entrepreneur. Maybe you want to be one. Maybe you work for one. Maybe you are investing in entrepreneurs. Or maybe you are married to one. Or maybe your daughter is one. No matter what the reason, you are here at least in part because you are interested in entrepreneurs and the work they do. And so as part of that interest, I would recommend you pick up Jerry’s book and get inside the head of one. It will flip some switches on for you.

Thirty-two years ago, the Gotham Gal and I got married.

We had been together for five years at that time.

We have now been together for thirty-seven years.

A relationship that has lasted almost four decades is a special thing.

There is a comfort, a deep friendship, a mind melding, that develops.

At least three or four times this week, one of us uttered something that the other was thinking but just had not said yet.

We are celebrating the day in Paris, one of our favorite places, and pretty much doing nothing, but of course doing everything. Together.

Last year, during its annual “crypto week”, our portfolio company Cloudflare shipped an IPFS gateway. I wrote about that then.

This year, they have shipped an Ethereum gateway.

It is great to see a very large Internet infrastrcuture provider build and ship crypto gateways.

If you are a small developer looking to create decentralized applications, having a web-scale provider offering IPFS and Ethereum gateways is really helpful.

I expect to see Cloudflare continue to extend the number of crypto protocols they support with their gateways.

And that will be part of what needs to happen to get to a world of truly decentalized applications.

If you are interested in developing on the Ethereum protocol and want to understand how the Cloudflare gateway works, this blog post explains it well.

A new blockchain & cryptocurrency project, Libra, was announced today. Libra has been incubated by Facebook. USV will be one of the founding members of the governing body, the Libra Association. Libra is a stable, fiat-backed cryptocurrency that will launch inside some of the world’s largest consumer-facing applications. We believe Libra has the potential to be the catalyst that brings the entire cryptocurrency and cryptoasset market into the mainstream.

When USV invested in Coinbase in early 2013, our rationale was that digital currencies and digital assets (like Bitcoin and beyond) were a breakthrough technology, similar to TCP/IP, HTTP and SMTP. But we also knew that it would take significant investment in the surrounding infrastructure to make them useful for businesses and consumers, just like it did with the Web back in the 80s and 90s. At the time of that investment, we wrote:

“There is much that must be built on top of of these digital currencies to make them work well enough to support real business at scale”

This has proven to be true. If we look back at the past 10 years since the invention of Bitcoin, we have seen a lot of infrastructure built to support an increasing variety of use cases. But there is still a long way to go.

We think about the crypto sector as the intersection of Finance 2.0 (“Money Crypto”) and Web 3.0 (“Tech Crypto”), and what we have seen is that the “Money Crypto” use cases have been the earlier to materialize, especially “slow money” use cases (those that don’t require high throughput):

For consumer use cases (including both Finance 2.0 and Web 3.0 use cases), the biggest barrier to date, beyond technical scalability, has been the rollout of crypto wallets to mainstream consumers. As of today, there is still no mainstream web browser with crypto built-in, no mainstream phone with crypto built-in, and relatively few mainstream applications with crypto built-in. As that changes, crypto assets have the potential to move from being curiosities for enthusiasts to being default internet and financial infrastructure.

Once we have crypto-compatibility built-in to applications, browsers, and phones, many new behaviors and use cases will emerge. The financial system, in general, will become more accessible (smartphone adoption is outpacing bank account adoption globally). Payments can become faster, more reliable and less expensive. Magical new user experiences will be possible due to interoperability and reduced friction, the same way that the Web’s native interoperability unlocked countless new use cases and experiences. And, perhaps most importantly, we will open the door to self-sovereign digital identities (private keys) that are the underpinnings of user-controlled privacy and control of data.

So as we think about the potential drivers for mainstream crypto adoption, a simple, fully-collateralized, cryptocurrency used inside the world’s largest applications, touching hundreds of millions or billions of consumers, is perhaps the most promising one. It is our hope that Libra will serve as a major on-ramp to cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, to the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

USV will be joining as a founding member of the Libra Association, the governing body that will manage both the Libra technology and the Libra Reserve. As one of the initial 20 members of the Association, we will have the opportunity to participate in design and policy choices that will shape the network. It is worth noting that Facebook will be just one equal member of the Association, which was an important factor in our decision to join.

This will be a large and complex undertaking, as there are many unresolved and challenging questions, involving the technology itself (security, privacy, path to decentralization), the regulatory environment, and the nature of the ongoing governance. In some ways, the initial Association resembles a constitutional convention, where the main goal is to draft the long-term governance mechanisms themselves.

To be clear, we view this as both an ecosystem investment and a financial investment. In addition to participating in the governance process at the Libra Association, USV plans to invest in the Libra Reserve, which will provide the stability for the currency. This is an unusual type of investment for us, but we have learned that investing in the crypto sector requires us to explore a variety of new investment structures.

We appreciate that Facebook invited USV to be an initial founding member of the Libra Association and we take our role in that seriously. We will advocate for those things that USV values most: openness, transparency, decentralization, and permissionless innovation. We think that those features will help accelerate adoption within the entire crypto ecosystem — including our many existing investments in the space — and also help Libra succeed in its goals.

This has also been posted on usv.com.

One of the many great things about vacations is reading books. Vacation is the one time that I can really prioritize reading books (as opposed to everything else I read).

I just finished Scott Kupor‘s Secrets Of Sand Hill Road, a book for entrepreneurs about rasing capital from venture firms.

Scott makes the point numerous times in the book that the capital raising process is asymmetric for entrepreneurs in that they do it a few times in their career and VCs do it every day.

That is true for the pitch meetings, the negotiation process, and the post financing relationship too.

What Scott does in this book is break down every part of the process and explain it in plain english so that entrepreneurs can understand what’s going on and why it matters to them.

That last part is important, this book is written for entrepreneurs, not VCs.

Scott uses real world examples, mostly investments made over the last decade by his firm A16Z, to make the lessons he is delivering more “real.”

And he uses spreadhseet examples in one chapter and shows how various events can change the cap table for everyone.

It’s very much a “how to” book, more practical than theoretical.

There have been other books written about this topic, I like Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s Venture Deals, which is on its third edition now.

Jeff Bussgang’s Mastering The VC Game is also great.

You could teach an MBA or undegraduate course on capital raising for entreprenuers with these three books.

It would be a great course.

If you plan to be raising venture capital for your startup and don’t have the benefit of experience or a fantastic course on the topic, I would strongly recommend you pick up Scott’s book, or all three books, and spend some time reading them now or on your next vacation.

The Gotham Gal and I walked into the Musee de l’Orangerie yesterday and found a line of about 20 people waiting to purchase tickets to enter. The Gotham Gal whipped out her phone, went to the Orangerie website, and bought two tickets that were sent to her phone. It took her less than a minute to do it and we walked in. As we were leaving we noticed the ticket line had almost doubled. We shook our heads and made our way to our next stop.

The mobile phone we all have in our pocket or purse can do so many things but one of its superpowers is a point of sale terminal. Increasingly there is no reason to wait in line for tickets to anything. You can just get them on your phone.

I really like just in time ticketing with the phone. I have the NYC East River Ferry app on my phone and whenever I want to take a boat to Brooklyn or Queens, or back, I open up the app, provision a ticket or two if I’m round tripping it, and I’m good to go. I am seeing more and more mass transit systems adopt this approach.

And then there is the NYC subway system which has started to roll out new turnstiles which you can tap and pay at:

I remember the days of carrying metal tokens in my pocket. It wasn’t that long ago!

The smartphone is twelve years old at the end of the month. It is remarkable to step back and think about how much it has changed how we live and work.

Peter Kafka interviewed YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki at the Recode Conference last week.

It’s an interesting discussion about many of the issues facing YouTube and the Internet at large right now.

I saw this project earlier this week and backed it immediately. Solar energy is not easy to adopt. But I have found that once you start, you get into it and keep going.

This might make it easier for some to start down that path.