Posts from Fred Wilson

It is that time of year again, when the entire crypto sector comes to NYC. It is called Blockchain Week NYC and there are a dozen or more industry events like the Coin Center Annual Dinner, The Third Annual Token Summit, Consensus, Women On The Block, and many more.

There will also be breakfasts, dinners, company sponsored events, etc, etc.

I will be at many of these events, speaking at a few of them, and am excited to see the crypto sector live and in person this week in NYC.

With the crypto winter seemingly coming to an end and spring on the horizon, it is a great time to take stock of the sector and get excited about it again. Except that I never lost my excitement. Sometimes you just need to hibernate for a year and last year was a good one to do that.

Finally, I am so pleased that NYC was able to secure the spot where the crypto industry comes together once a year. It makes sense that crypto would be big here, given the financial services talent, engineering talent, and commercial sensibility that has always been resident in this town.

If only our regulators in NYS would be as excited about crypto as I am and everyone who is coming to NYC this week is.

I wrote this three years ago, on Mothers Day, and I remembered it this morning. So I am reposting it. Happy Mothers Day to all of the mothers out there.

---

It’s Mothers Day, a time to celebrate motherhood and moms. I woke up thinking about the maternal instinct and it’s effect on business.

I was talking to a friend last night about the challenges of working on troubled or failed investments. We were debating whether it is even worth the time to try and save a troubled investment versus moving on and focusing on a new one. This is the endless debate in venture capital. It can be applied to managing people as well. Should you work to develop a talented employee who is struggling or just move on and find someone new for the role?

As we were debating the point on whether to fight for a troubled investment or just move on, the Gotham Gal walked by. And I turned to my friend and said “she never gives up on any of her investments and she has 10x the number that I do.” I’ve cautioned her many times that she can’t fix every company, every CEO, every business plan. But she just keeps trying. It’s why I love her so much.

There is something about the maternal instinct. It’s a powerful thing. It is about protecting and caring for someone or something. It is innate in women and they do bring it with them into the world of business. This is one of many reasons why gender diversity in a team is important. Men and women bring different perspectives and instincts to a situation. Debating it out and finding common ground can be quite valuable.

Surely there is a limit to the maternal instinct in business. You can’t make every hire work. You can’t make every project work. You can’t make every investment work. That’s what I frequently tell the Gotham Gal. But that doesn’t stop her from trying. And I understand why.

Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there. You care for us and we love you for it.

We have had an order in for Tesla Solar Roof Tiles for almost two years, since they were announced back in 2017. Production delays and other issues have meant that we still don’t have them on our roof.

And they are more expensive than a regular roof plus traditional solar panels on the roof. But they look a lot better in my view.

This video explains all of that, and more, along with some helpful cost comparisons.

I really like this project. I hope it reaches its goal and gets funded.

When I started my now ten-year journey down the “let’s teach computer science in our public schools” path, I knew that getting students to instruct machines would open up new methods of teaching and learning. But I did not understand just how powerful that would be.

It is good and necessary to offer dedicated classes in computer science to students. It is even better to use computer science to teach complex concepts in subjects like math, science, art, music, literature and more. When you do both, you can really impact student’s learning and comprehension.

I was in a high school class in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx yesterday. They were doing geometry lessons in Javascript.

They started with a lesson on the translation function and how it could be used to move objects around. This is a photo I took of the smartboard at the front of the classroom as the students discussed how this function works.

After this lesson, the students played a game of Battleship in Javascript with each other on their laptops.

This is a photo of the Bronx Borough President, Ruben Diaz Jr, playing Javascript Battleship with one of the students in the class.

Writing and editing code on a machine allows the student to see how geometric functions (and many other functions) work in a fun and interactive way and takes complex notions and makes them real and tangible to them. This is important and powerful.

I now believe that introducing computer science into the elementary, middle, and high school curriculum will not only help students master computational thinking but it will also help them master many other complex concepts and allow them to be better students and better adults.

Two of the more interesting and “out there” trends in tech are NFTs (non fungible tokens) and virtual celebrities.

So it was only a matter of time before developers started to work at the intersection of them

Virtual celebrities are characters made out of software that exist in games, social media, streaming audio and video, etc who have large and rabid fan bases. Here is an example of one.

Miquela

NFTs are crypto-assets that are unique and can only be owned by one person at a time. A well-known example is a CryptoKitty.

So I find it interesting that today an instagram celebrity (a real one) has chosen to wear an outfit that is actually an NFT and can be sold and owned by one of her fans.

The celebrity Johanna Jaskowska is wearing a dress that is actually a unique crypto-asset. It is “the world’s first couture digital outfit on the Ethereum blockchain.” She announced that today on her Instagram channel.

This is Johanna wearing crypto fashion:

I am interested to see if this idea takes off. The worlds of gaming, social media, AR/VR, and crypto are going to get richer and more lifelike over time. So I suspect something like this will eventually work and go mainstream.

Our portfolio company Coinbase has been building an institutional grade regulated custodial service for crypto assets over the past 18 months. It is called Coinbase Custody and it is a qualified institutional custodian which means that investors that are regulated can use it to satisfy their custodial requirements.

Coinbase has been providing safe and trusted custody for crypto assets for most of its seven year history. It has led the industry in developing secure storage of crypto assets. So it is the obvious place for institutions to turn to custody their crypto assets.

Yesterday, Coinbase Custody announced that they now support custody of over 30 of the most popular crypto assets.

Coinbase Custody operates as a standalone, independently-capitalized business. Coinbase Custody is a fiduciary under NY State Banking Law. All digital assets are segregated and held in trust for the benefit of their clients.

If you want to learn more about using Coinbase Custody as your institutional custodial solution, you can reach out here.

I worked for a VC named Bliss McCrum early in my career. He had been on wall street for about twenty five years before getting into VC mid/late career. He loved investing. He taught me technical analysis/charting and a lot of other things about stocks.

I used to ask him “why did that stock go down yesterday?” and he would always respond “more sellers than buyers.”

I loved that response and sometimes would ask him the question just to hear that answer.

What I really wanted to know was the underlying reason for more sellers than buyers. Did the company post weak earnings? Did a competitor enter their market? Was the CFO fired?

But Bliss would never take the bait.

Just “more sellers than buyers.”

His point, I think looking back after thirty years, was that markets are markets and you need to treat them as such and respect them as such. They are not always rational but the supply/demand for the stock doesn’t lie.

This week we are finally getting an Uber IPO. Its competitor Lyft’s stock has been weak post its recent IPO.

I don’t have a view on either stock but we will get to see if there are more buyers than sellers or the other way around.

I think this is a good thing, for those companies, for their shareholders, and for the entire tech and startup sector. We should let markets work. They do their job very well.

Last summer I threw out our twenty year old satellite dish and decided to finally go over the top. I put a bunch of video streaming apps on our AppleTV to replace the “linear television” that we had been getting with the dish.

Almost a year later, I’ve removed all but two of them and the clear winner has been YouTube TV.

YouTube TV is pretty much everything you’d want in a linear television service (except for one thing which I will get to) and the UI is more or less perfect.

The thing I like most about it is that I can run the app with my Google login on all of the AppleTVs in our house plus on our phones and we have the exact same experience, with the exact same library, on all of them.

That seems like a little thing, but after almost sixty years of living with set top boxes that are device specific, it is a big thing.

I’m writing this on my cell phone. Just before starting to write I was sitting in my office thinking that I want to watch the Sixers Raptors game this afternoon but we are going to be uptown at the TEFAF Art Fair.

No problem. I opened the YouTube TV app on my phone, searched for the Sixers Raptors game, and hit the plus sign.

When I turn on any of our TVs in our home, that game will be in the library waiting for me to watch it.

The one app, one subscription, any device thing is pretty cool too. We have a number of AppleTVs in our home but pay for only one subscription.

If you have a ski house, or a beach house, or some other form of second home, you can use your single YouTube TV subscription there too.

So what’s the one thing that’s not perfect about YouTube TV?

They don’t have the Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) on the service. If that Sixers Raptors game was being broadcast on CSN Philadelphia it would not have been on YouTube TV. Thankfully it is the playoffs and it is on ABC.

I talked to a friend of a friend who works at YouTube TV and the RSNs will not sell their content to YouTube TV on a subscriber by subscriber basis. If YouTube TV wants MSG Network on it’s service, it has to pay for it for everyone. And who other than die hard Knicks fans would want to pay to watch the Knicks this year?

So we also have a subscription to FuboTV which seems to have at least some of the RSNs including MSG Network. We have a family plan subscription to FuboTV which allows three of us (me and two of our kids) to have FuboTV in our homes which makes it a bit less expensive to have two streaming services.

I tried a bunch of other services over the last year but I found YouTube TV to be superior in almost every way.

Google did an amazing job with this product. If you put YouTube TV on your televisions (there are a bunch of ways you can do that), you can throw out that set-top box once and for all like we did.

And you will get a bunch of capabilities that you never had with cable. It’s great.