Posts from Current Affairs

On today, Memorial Day, we remember our fallen soldiers.

I spent some time today going back over old blog posts I’ve written on this topic and landed on a post I wrote almost ten years ago, when I visited the Normandy beaches with my wife and son. It was a very powerful and moving experience for us.

I am glad we take a day every year to remember the men and women who lost their lives in service of our country.

And while we can’t all go lay a wreath or march in a parade today, we can take a moment of reflection on their sacrifice and what it has meant for our country.

My colleague Matt Cynamon told our partnership last week that the number of jobs on the USV job board had declined from 1,553 to 871 in the past month. So we suggested he share that data and some observations on the USV blog. He did that yesterday.

Here is the chart of open jobs on the USV job board:

A large number of those 871 open jobs are in a handful of larger USV portfolio companies that are leaning into this moment to build their teams. Many USV portfolio companies have frozen hiring or have tightened it significantly. And there have been reductions in force as well in some parts of our portfolio.

But all is not bleak. Matt ends his post with the following observation:

In our next post we’ll explore some areas where we’re seeing major opportunities for job seekers.

https://www.usv.com/writing/2020/05/how-covid-is-impacting-hiring/

I am hopeful that hiring will start to pick up in our portfolio in the second half of the year as our portfolio companies start to understand where their businesses are now and where they are headed this year and next.

So many of our favorite community anchors have shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. And reopening them won’t be easy.

Music venues, movie theaters, art galleries, restaurants, performance spaces, maker spaces, conferences, festivals, and bookshops are the places we hang out in, enjoy each other, and and connect to art and culture.

But these spaces also have communities of people connected to them, rooting for them, and eager to help them.

Enter Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform for bringing creative projects to life (and a USV portfolio company).

Kickstarter is not charity, although there is certainly a need for charity in this moment. Kickstarter is a platform to engage your community, reward them, and encourage them to support your work.

A few weeks ago, Kickstarter launched Lights On, a call for projects that “sustain your cultural space, event series, creative organization, or independent business”.

If you own or operate a cultural space, a local beloved business, an event series, or some other community treasure and want to engage your community in your reopening plan, Kickstarter Lights On is for you.

You can learn more about it here.

I am confident this pandemic will end. At some point, we will have a vaccine, therapeutics, and/or broad based immunity. When that will happen is less clear to me. I believe that at some point, we will be able to resume living and working as we did prior to the pandemic.

However, I am also confident that we will not resume living and working exactly as we did prior to the pandemic because some of the things we have adopted to get through this will reveal themselves as comparable or better than what we were doing before.

One of the places this is happening is knowledge work which is a growing percentage of the workforce in the US. What we have seen in this pandemic is that knowledge workers have been able to be comparably productive working from home and that has caused many large (and small) employers to consider different work/location options.

Yesterday, Twitter told their employees that most of them can work from anywhere going forward:

A number of our portfolio companies have made that decision already as well:

I can imagine large and small banks, law firms, accounting firms, media and entertainment companies, and other knowledge based businesses making similar decisions.

I am not saying that remote work is ideal. There is something very valuable about being able to be in the same physical space as your colleagues. USV will likely keep an office for exactly that reason.

But it is also true that USV is operating incredibly well during this pandemic and we have not (yet) missed a beat.

What this means for large cities where many companies that engage in knowledge work are centered is an interesting question.

I saw this chart this morning on Benedict Evans’ Twitter:

That compares two of the most expensive cities in the US (and world) to each other. And as bad as NYC is on the affordability index, SF is way worse.

So when you combine these two situations; large knowledge work hubs getting prohibitively expensive and remote work normalizing, it would seem that we are in for a correction.

What is less clear is where knowledge workers who can increasingly work from anywhere will choose to live (and work). Will cities remain attractive for the quality of life they offer (arts, culture, nightlife, etc)? Or will the suburbs stand to gain? Or will more idyllic locations like the mountains or the beach become the location of choice? Or will second and third tier cities become more attractive? I do not have a crystal ball on this question. I suspect it will be some of all of the above.

But this may become a big deal. Like the “white flight” that happened in the 50, 60s and 70s in a number of large cities in the US. Wholesale movement of large groups of people can have profound changes on regions.

Like many disruptions, this is both bad and good. Affordability (or lack thereof) and gentrification have been a blight on our cities. If we can reverse that trend, much good will come of it. This may also be helpful in addressing the climate crisis which remains the number one risk to planet Earth. So there are reasons to be excited about this. But wholesale abandonment is terrible. We should do whatever we can to avoid that.

It is early days for this conversation. But it is one we are going to have all around the US, and possibly all around the world. So it is time to start thinking about it.

Food Bank For New York City is NYC’s leading hunger-relief organization.

During this crisis, the number of people turning to their emergency food network has increased by 50%.

Here are some interesting stats from their website:

$1 helps provide 5 meals

OR

$1/day helps provide 150 meals every month

I just donated some money to help feed people in need in NYC. If you want to join me, you can do so here.

Christina Farr at CNBC has a good post that details the back story of how Apple and Google came together to implement an interoperable system and a set of APIs and SDKs to allow third parties to build exposure alerting apps on their mobile operating systems.

Like many in tech, I have been interested in exposure alerting (which we used to call digital contact tracing) since this pandemic started spreading around the world. I have always believed that these little computers we carry around with us can help solve many challenging problems and this sure feels like one of them.

But I was concerned about the need for interoperability, privacy, and security. I told everyone who I talked to about this problem in February and March that I felt like Apple and Google had to implement something in their mobile operating systems for this to work. And I was deeply concerned that would not/could not happen.

But it did. And when I heard the news, I was so pleased. Difficult times can make for interesting bedfellows.

This tweet cited in Christina’s story is great:

Apple and Google’s APIs are coming on May 1st and I hope to install an exposure alerting app that runs on them on my phone as soon after that as I can. I hope all of you join me in doing that.

You may have seen this short advertisement called Always Open on television over the last few days.

It is part of a larger campaign called Stand With Small that Etsy (where I am Chairman and a large stockholder) is running right now to encourage everyone to support small businesses during this downturn.

This 2 1/2 minute video explains the idea in more detail:

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this tweet by my partner Albert:

I clicked on the underlying tweet thread and learned that some countries have adopted an approach where everyone wears face masks when they are out and about. That way, if you are infected and don’t know it, you won’t spread the virus to others. It requires everyone, or most everyone, to adopt this approach, which is why they call it Masks4All.

So I went to Etsy (Disclosure: I am the Chairman of Etsy and own a large amount of stock) and bought some face masks for my wife and me from a number of Etsy sellers. These are not medical masks. They are fabric masks, some with filters, some without filters. And we have been wearing masks when we leave our home ever since.

In the following days, every time we would go out to the market or for a walk, we would notice more and more people wearing masks. We are in Los Angeles right now and I would guess that at least half of everyone out and about in LA right now are wearing masks in public. It could be even more than that.

Last week, federal and state and city government officials started recommending wearing masks in public and we started to see even more people wearing masks.

Around the same time, Etsy started to see a lot of people coming there to find and purchase fabric masks. So they put out a message to all of their sellers (they have over 2.7mm sellers) asking them to make fabric masks if they can sew and work with fabric. And they massively increased the number of sellers making masks and the amount of mask inventory on Etsy.

If you go to Etsy and search for face mask (or mask or fabric mask or something along those lines), you will see this:

You can drill down and find the right kind of mask for you, your kids, your parents, or whomever you want to buy one for.

I like this story for a lot of reasons. For one, it shows that tens of thousands of individuals can come together and quickly ramp supply of something that everyone wants to buy right now. We don’t have to be reliant on a single large supplier. Second, by using fabric masks, we leave the medical mask supply for the healthcare workers which is critical right now.

And maybe most importantly, masks can become personal. Mine is different than yours. Maybe I have a bunch of them for various moods, days, times of day, etc. Like t-shirts or hats.

If we are going to be wearing masks in public for a while, we might as well treat them like any other item of clothing we wear, make sure they are comfortable, fit well, and look good too.

And Etsy is a great place to shop for things like that.

As we continue to make our way through this pandemic, I keep coming back to the question of how do we help those in the most need right now. Last week it was our health care responders on the front lines, the week before it was workers in the hospitality industry who are now out of work.

This week, I’m drawn to this huge GoFundMe campaign that Apple, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Leonardo DiCaprio launched yesterday to raise money for World Central Kitchen and Feeding America, two large charities who run food programs for the poor and dislocated.

When things go wrong, it is always those with the least who suffer the most. So I am helping this campaign get to its $15mm goal. If you want to join me, you can do so here.