Posts from Current Affairs

It would be easy to get depressed reading the morning news. Climate change is happening more quickly. The Covid pandemic shows no signs of abating. And there are all sorts of other things that are challenging our way of life.

But on days like today, I find it helpful to remember that science and technology helps us address these challenges.

We understand the carbon cycle and how far it is out of equilibrium. We also have many of the technologies we need to bring it back to equilibrium. And more are being invented every day.

We also understand the Covid virus and how to create vaccines that reduce its severity. And scientists have developed and continue to develop therapies that will do even more to reduce its severity.

Over the course of history, mankind has leveraged science and technology to meet big challenges and overcome them. And we can continue to do that. We simply need the will to make the required investments and societal changes that go along with them.

I am heartened to see both sides of the political aisle in the US came together yesterday to agree to move forward on a $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill.

There are parts of the bill that I don’t like (asking blockchain smart contracts to send 1099s to the IRS seems nuts to me) and parts that were taken out that I think are critical (like building a nationwide EV charging network).

But perfect is the enemy of the good. We have not had a functioning legislative branch at the federal level in the US in a long time. I am hopeful that a bipartisan victory on infrastructure will pave the way towards other bipartisan efforts and the right and left will start talking to each other, respecting each other, and governing again.

I have spent my adult career making deals with people. I have learned that you can never get exactly what you want when you make deals. You must compromise so that both sides can feel that they won. And when you do that, there are many times when both sides do win. If you choose to sit on the sidelines, you almost always lose.

I am happy to see that our elected officials in Washington have decided to get back into the game again.

This morning I was sitting outside of my coffee shop, sipping on a cortado and reading the news on my phone while the NY Times, which I buy for The Gotham Gal every morning, sat folded up next to me. I gave up on mainstream news media two decades ago and have been relying on the Internet for news for a long time now. By “Internet”, I mean blogs, Twitter, and increasingly, email newsletters.

What I was reading this morning on the bench sipping coffee was News Items, an email newsletter by John Ellis. News Items is a subscriber-only newsletter, as opposed to the free stuff you can get on Axios. But you get what you pay for with John. His newsletter is smarter, edgier, and out in front of most anything else out there. The topics that interest John the most are technology (lots of biotech), geopolitics, and finance.

The way John describes it is:

Three baskets: (1) World in Disarray, (2) Financialization of Everything and (3) Advances in Science and Technology. Bonus basket: Electoral politics in the US and around the world. Six days a week, not Sundays.

I paid $3 for the New York Times at my coffee shop this morning. I pay $99 a year for News Items. And I get things every day from News Items that I never get from the New York Times. And I don’t have to read the nonsense that the New York Times churns out non-stop these days.

If you want more news and less nonsense, you might want to give News Items a try. You can do that here.

You can also listen to John five days a week on our portfolio company Recount’s podcast network. He and his co-host Rebecca Darst cover the same news stories that John puts in his newsletter. Here are the most recent episodes:

This public art work speaking to the growing refugee crisis around the world is really great. I backed it earlier this week when I saw my friend Sunny back it.

From July to November 2021, a giant puppet of a 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl called ‘Little Amal’ will walk from the Syria-Turkey border, across Europe to the UK, travelling 8,000km to focus awareness on the refugee crisis. The Walk is an international arts festival meets endurance event – the length and sheer size of the challenge is capturing imaginations even before our heroine’s first step.

I’ve posted the video into this blog post but if you are reading on Mirror or via email, click here and watch it.

I have read more books written by Steven Johnson than any other author. In addition to being a friend and a USV-funded founder, Steven writes about things that fascinate me. And he is a wonderful writer. That’s a potent combination.

I am about to embark on another journey with Steven. This one is called Extra Life and it is about how mankind doubled our life expectancy over the last hundred years.

But Extra Life is not just a book. It is also a four part TV series airing on PBS that starts tomorrow night at 8pm.

Steven told me that when he started exploring the idea of this book years ago, he thought there might be a nice symmetry to launching the book on the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Well little did he know then that we would have our own 100 year anniversary of that event that has shaken our world to its core over the last year.

This book is about much of what has come to dominate our lives in the last year, public health, vaccines, drug trials, etc, etc. But instead of focusing on the here and now, it zooms out and talks about the result of all of that. Which is a 10x reduction in childhood mortality and a doubling of life expectancy.

I am eager to dive into Extra Life. I’ve wanted something to put a hopeful and optimistic context on the events of the last year and here it is. Thanks Steven!

I saw this tweet in my feed yesterday and I sent some ETH to India this morning.

Here’s the @gnosisSafe Multisig address to donate in ETH/ERC20 to this address.

0x68A99f89E475a078645f4BAC491360aFe255Dff1

"If you want", Plz fill this form so we can reach you for more help and specially if needed for regulatory filings.https://t.co/ZzDrBZYC7p

2/n

— Sandeep – Polygon (@sandeepnailwal) April 24, 2021

Sandeep followed with a bunch more wallet addresses to use if you want to send other crypto assets:

Any other ERC20, same ETH Address
0x68A99f89E475a078645f4BAC491360aFe255Dff1

TRC20
TSZMcrQzMLdKrgiMPoe2uQMHLeEpkf2j8E

Cosmos
cosmos1sjrfyxwsvsslt4nzwqm0t6shghvylndxzf9tye

Tezos
tz1dMYz5pcXYXnfH5gjr652iSDq9zc2SrqRi

Solana
Gc6jm5gJVWE5DnjMMgzijghKYQqLTci9hZs7LYHYJs1g

— Sandeep – Polygon (@sandeepnailwal) April 25, 2021

With the pandemic easing in the US, thanks to vaccines, we cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening elsewhere, particularly India.

I appreciate the crypto community, which is global, stepping up to do this and I encourage anyone with some crypto to participate.

And we finally found something useful to do with DOGE coins.

With new Covid cases down 30% in the last two weeks and partially vaccinated people approaching 50%, NYC seems ready to start getting back to work.

I have been going to the office several days a week for the last two weeks and will be there again today. As my USV colleagues get fully vaccinated, they are joining me and our office is starting to fill up.

But our Flatiron neighborhood still feels empty and there is not one good restaurant open for lunch during the week.

As we head back to work, what will the new normal be?

That is a huge question looming over the commercial real estate sector in NYC and around the country.

According to this NYT piece from last week, the vacancy rate in commercial office space in NYC is almost 20% and that number is north of 15% across the largest cities in the US. And in the face of these historically high vacancy rates, more new office buildings are coming to market increasing the supply of space.

We have surveyed our portfolio companies and we understand that many will reopen their offices this summer and fall, but most will not expect their employees to be back in the office five days a week. Some will not expect their employees to be in the office at all.

I think this Jamie Dimon quote I read in the NYT piece is about right:

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the largest private-sector employer in New York City, wrote in a letter to shareholders this week that remote work would “significantly reduce our need for real estate.” For every 100 employees, he said, his bank “may need seats for only 60 on average.”

We used to have 10,000 square feet in our old office that we left last month. We moved into 6,000 square feet and it feels like plenty. I think many/most companies will feel that way too.

Many of our portfolio companies let their leases expire during the pandemic, as did we. And they are now thinking about what to do going forward. I have a few suggestions:

1/ Take something temporary for the next year or two. Figure out what the new normal is before entering into a long term lease. This is what USV did. We took a nine month sublet to allow us to figure things out.

2/ Shop around and be aggressive in your offers to sublet or lease space. Many landlords will not engage in your bottom fishing. But some will, particularly in the sublease market.

3/ Avoid expensive office buildouts and focus on spaces that are extremely flexible. We have invested in office and conference pods in our sublet to reduce the need for expensive office buildouts. And the Gotham Gal and I made an entire co-working space in Brooklyn with office pods.

4/ Figure out how to integrate remote workers into your office environment. We have been investing a lot more in our conference rooms/video setups. I even suggested that we put some webcams in our office so our remote colleagues could see who is in the office at any time. I am not sure we will do that. Some feel it is creepy. But I think it’s a good idea.

5/ Offer perks to encourage your employees to be in the office. We have been ordering in great food for everyone in the office the last few weeks and everyone seems to appreciate and enjoy that.

I think occupancy expense will be a smaller percentage of our portfolio companies’ P&Ls in the future and those savings can be invested in our teams instead. That feels like a great trade and one that will lead to better companies and happier employees. And that is a very good thing.

There was a day in the last week when four million Americans got a Covid vaccine. That’s more than one percent of all citizens of the US. One in every hundred people in the US got vaccinated on the same day. Think about that!

Mayor de Blasio tweeted yesterday that 4.7 million doses of the Covid vaccine have been given out in NYC. Assuming that 2/3 of those have gone into new arms and 1/3 have gone into returning arms, that means almost 40% of adults in NYC have gotten introduced to the Coronavirus via a vaccine.

As an aside, another 20-30% of people in NYC got introduced to this nasty and deadly virus the old fashioned way and that means that we could have two thirds of adults in NYC with Covid antibodies in their systems.

But returning to the point of this post, we are vaccinating at scale in the US now.

One of my favorite Churchill quotes is:

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

That’s not exactly what is going on here but it is not far from it. While the US got a lot wrong in the first year of Covid and way too many people died as a result, we got one thing right. We bet on vaccines and we have now operationalized the delivery of them.

This is not a political point. The last administration should get as much, or more, credit for vaccines as the current one.

This is about me being proud to be an American once again. This mass vaccination is a beautiful thing to behold. It is breathtaking in its scale and it’s efficacy. It fills me with joy.

There are these news moments that we remember vividly forever. The plane flying into the World Trade Center. The mob breaking into the Capitol. Reagan at the Berlin Wall. Just writing the words, I can see the images in my head.

Our portfolio company Recount Media is all about these moments. Recount captures them quickly and concisely and shares them on social media and other digital platforms so that the world can see what is going on around them.

Today, they are trying an experiment that I am quite interested in. They have taken one of their most-viewed news moments, one they published exactly one year ago today, and they have minted it into a one-of-a-kind digital news moment and are offering anyone the opportunity to own it.

The auction is going on here and I just placed a bid. My goal is not to win this auction, although it is possible that I could. If I do, I will contribute it to a DAO that would allow group ownership.

Recount explains why they are experimenting with NFTs here. I particularly like this line:

So as we approached the one-year anniversary of the Calendar, our first runaway viral video, we thought it would be fun to celebrate that breakthrough in a manner that itself is an expression of our relentless aspiration to rethink how journalism works — its form, function, and economics — in this moment of intense fluidity and flux in digital media.

One of the challenges with digital media is the limited business models available to news organizations. You either sell ads or subscriptions, or both.

Who knows whether minting news moments can help stimulate new business models, but it sure can’t hurt to try. Sticking to the old ways of sharing the news and making a business out of it is not interesting to me. Coming up with new ways of sharing the news and making a business out of it very much is.