Posts from VC & Technology

What Is Going To Happen In 2022

So last year I made a bunch of predictions that with one exception were kind of obvious. I don’t want to do that again, so I am going to list five things that I think will happen this year that most people would not likely agree with.

1/ As the pandemic evolves into an endemic in the first half of 2022, companies will reopen their offices and their employees will largely opt to go back to working together in offices.

I qualified this with “largely” because I don’t think we will go back to everyone in the office again. Companies have become much more comfortable hiring remote employees who don’t live near a company office. Employees have made it clear that they want/need the flexibility to work from home a day or two a week. Some companies have moved to an entirely remote work environment. But I think the dominant form of working will return to “in office, with others” by the end of this year.

2/ Carbon offsets, effectively a voluntary form of self carbon taxation, will take off in 2022 and by the end of the year, we will have a global market in excess of $10bn (up ~10x in 2022).

I think the big unlock will be bridging between the existing carbon offset market and the crypto markets where decentralized finance tools can bring massive innovation and demand to this market very quickly.

3/ K12 systems around the US (and around the world) faced with teacher shortages and desperate to erase several years of learning shortfalls, will increasingly adopt online learning services in the school building in lieu of and in addition to in-class learning.

This may be obvious. I don’t really know. But there are many forms of learning that work in addition and in compliment to teacher-led classes and school leaders will need to be open to using them aggressively to turn around several years of learning losses.

4/ Twitter opens up its APIs and allows anyone to operate Twitter clients that compete with its own.

Now I am going out on a limb. But why not? That would be so amazing if it happened.

5/ As I predicted back in the spring of 2017 [8:30 into this video], only five years too soon, Ethereum’s market cap will surpass Bitcoin’s in 2022. I hope I get at least as much abuse for this prediction as I did for that one.

Ethereum’s merge in 2022, combined with the understanding that productive assets must be worth more than non-productive assets, make this a fairly obvious prediction. But I got it wrong last time, so I surely can get it wrong again.

I hope that 2022 brings us more positive surprises and less negative surprises than the last two years.

Happy 2022 everyone!

#climate crisis#crypto#hacking education#VC & Technology

What Happened In 2021

As is my custom here at AVC, I like to end the year looking back and start the year looking forward.

This post will be the look back and I started by revisiting my look forward into 2021 that I wrote on New Year’s Day 2021.

In my typical optimist fashion, I was dead wrong about how quickly the pandemic would fizzle out. I predicted that vaccines plus immunity from those who had been infected would end the pandemic by mid-year 2021. That was obviously totally wrong and I am sitting here isolating with my own Covid case (seven days in now). I can’t imagine a more appropriate “punishment” for getting that one wrong.

I got the rest mostly right and when I look back at 2021, what I see is a world that is changing before our very eyes; becoming more digital (leading to metaverse fever in tech), less tethered to a job and place to work (and live because of work), warmer, more prone to natural disasters, and tribalizing along different dimensions than what has divided us in the past.

In truth 2021 was a deeply troubling year and no wonder that mental health issues abound among all of us, but particularly our young. Nothing seems right anymore. We must face that and then fix it.

Of course, 2021 was a great year for the financial markets, both stocks and blockchain assets. Even with a big year-end selloff, which I believe was mostly tax-driven (we will see soon if I am right about that), investors who owned tech stocks and blockchain assets saw huge gains in 2021. USV was no different. We had a banner year.

But that also means that it is on us who have benefitted the most to work harder and invest to address some of these troubling issues. We are doing that with our first climate fund, which we have been investing aggressively and we hope to have a second one to invest before the end of 2022. We are seeking to both invest in technologies/companies that can mitigate the climate crisis and that can help us adapt to the changes that are permanent and we must accept that many will be.

I want to return to the pandemic before I wrap this year-end post. Sitting here with a mild case but isolating so I don’t pass it on brings home for me that our society has really struggled to find the right balance between what is right for the individual and what is right for society during this pandemic. We can’t agree on anything. Vaccines, masks, lockdowns, schools, offices, etc. Those who have a high tolerance for risk believe that we have gone way overboard in trying to manage this pandemic when we never could. Those who believe in government, public health, etc, believe that those with a high tolerance for risk are putting all of us at risk. And I think the truth lies somewhere in between. This pandemic is a metaphor for the broader inability of society to find a way to move forward together.

Beyond climate or covid, it is this plague of dissension, doubt, fear, disrust, hate, and worse that is our biggest challenge and one that is very much raging across our world right now. That’s what 2021 brought home for me.

#climate crisis#Current Affairs#VC & Technology#Web3

Consumer Trends 2022

My friends at The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital have published their annual consumer survey. There are many interesting slides in it, none more than this one.

I guess that explains this chart:

But back to the consumer survey, there are lots of interesting slides in it and you can get it here by creating a free account to The New Consumer. I strongly recommend doing that and enjoying your coffee this morning mulling over the report.

#VC & Technology

Partnerships

Like many did, we spent much of this weekend watching Peter Jackson’s wonderful documentary of the Beatles making Let It Be, titled Get Back.

I enjoyed so much of the film, particularly the music, but the big thing I took away is the power of real partnerships. While this was the Beatles last recording session, what you see in the film are four partners working together creatively and wonderfully. I wasn’t really expecting that and I found it so enjoyable to watch.

I have worked in partnerships for most of my adult life, since I was in my mid 20s. I have spent 35 years in three partnerships, all of them “equal partnerships”, the kind where everyone brings their own ideas, they are worked on together, and there is mutual respect and admiration.

Partnerships are not easy. Everyone has to dial back their ego a bit and let others have their say on things. But what you get when you do that is an environment where everyone gets better than they would be on their own. And you can see that in the Beatles work. All of the four Beatles went on to have solo careers, but none of them produced a sustained level of work that the four of them were able to make together.

Watching Paul, John, George, and Ringo work together for a month to make an incredible record was a reminder that when we sacrifice a little bit of our self and commit to a team dynamic, wonderful things can and do result.

#life lessons#VC & Technology

Seed Rounds At $100mm Post Money

We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons:

  • Seed stage is when a company has a good team, a good idea, but has not yet proven product market fit and a go to market model, and has not yet demonstrated a sustainable business model.
  • These investments have a high failure rate. In my experience, roughly half of seed stage investments fail completely, wiping out everyone’s investment, including the founding team’s.
  • There is a lot of dilution from the seed round to exit, in my experience, a seed investor will be diluted by around 2/3 between seed and exit.
  • A power law distribution exists in outcomes in any early stage portfolio and a seed portfolio is no differernt.

So given that I am jet-lagged and got up at 3:30 am this morning, I modeled this out to see how this all works. Here is the google sheet in case you want to look at my model.

Here are the assumptions:

Assumptions:
Fund Size$100,000,000
Number Of Investments100
Post-Money Value$100,000,000
Investment Amount$1,000,000
Ownership1.00%
Average Dilution from Seed to Exit66.67%
Top-Performing Investment Outcome$10,000,000,000
Power Law Number0.75

Power Law Distribution Of Outcomes:

Given those assumptions, a $100mm seed fund that makes all of its investments at $100mm post-money will barely return the fund. And that number is gross, before fees and carry.

Total Value At Exit$133,333,323
Fund Return1.33

Now all of this depends on a few important assumptions.

If you believe your top-performing investment, out of 100 investments, will end up being worth $100 billion, then the numbers change a lot. You end up with a 13x fund instead of a 1.3x fund, before fees and carry.

The dilution from seed to exit also matters a lot. If you believe the dilution from seed to exit is only 50% and your top-performing investment, out of 100 investments, will be worth $10 billion, then you will end up with a 2x fund, before fees and carry, instead of a 1.3x fund (at 2/3 dilution).

There are only several hundred companies in the world with market caps of over $100 billion and roughly a quarter of them have come out of venture capital portfolios in the last thirty years.

So it can happen, but it is very unlikely. In almost twenty years of producing some of the highest performing VC funds in the business, USV has never had a portfolio company become worth over $100 billion. That is a very high bar, too high to expect in your portfolio.

So, in a world where we are seeing more and more $100mm valued seed rounds, one has to ask the question what are the investors expecting? A $100 billion outcome? Doubtful. Less dilution, maybe. A different power-law distribution? Don’t count on it.

I think they are being delusional, comforted by the likelihood that someone will come along and pay a higher price in the next round. But it seems that person may also be delusional. Because when you model things out, the numbers just don’t add up.

I think a strong case can be made for seeds in the low eight figures. If you run that same model with a $20mm post-money value, you get a 6.667x fund before fees and carry. That’s a strong seed fund, probably a tad better than 4x to the LPs, after fees and carry. If you think you can get one of your hundred seed investments to a $10bn outcome, then paying $20mm post-money in seed rounds seems to make a lot of sense.

The exit values in VC have increased significantly over the last decade leading to escalating entry values. That makes sense. But the two things that have not changed materially over the last decade are the dilution from seed to exit and the power-law distribution of outcomes in an early stage portfolio.

The failure rates are so high in early-stage investing that the power-law curves are steep. If your best-performing investment, after taking significant dilution, cannot return your early-stage fund, then you are doing something wrong.

Update: I saw this tweet just now and thought that it makes a great addition to this post:

#VC & Technology

Startups Galore

When you look at the recent Q3 numbers on seed and early-stage VC fundraising, you might think we are in the late stages of a VC bubble:

The words I would use to describe the current environment in early-stage VC are “fast and furious.”

And yet the thing that makes me think this could be the new normal and not the late stages of a bubble is the dramatic increase in the number of people who are choosing to work in or form new startups. It has never been easier to start a company, build a team, and build a product. And many people are choosing to do just that.

It could be that we are in an environment where too much money is chasing too many good deals.

#entrepreneurship#VC & Technology

NYC's Tech Resurgence (continued)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about NYC’s Tech Resurgence. I observed that NYC continues to develop as one of the world’s leading centers of tech innovation.

And then yesterday, I saw this tweet:

NYC startups are getting funded at 2/3 the rate of Silicon Valley startups. That’s a huge change from where NYC was even two or three years ago.

It wasn’t that long ago that a NYC-based startup had to agree to move to Silicon Valley to get money from the VCs out there. I think that was still a thing into the latter part of the 2000s. Now a decade and a half later, we see NYC startups raising capital almost as much as Silicon Valley startups.

Wow.

#entrepreneurship#NYC#VC & Technology

Blinking

Back in 2005 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink that was about how our subconscious allows us to make fast decisions that are often as good or better than slow considered decisions.

I was talking to someone yesterday evening about how the venture capital business has changed over the last decade and I explained that we used to have weeks, if not months, to make our investment decisions and now we have days or if we are lucky a week or two.

And I observed that the rapid pace of venture investing and decision making has not, yet, impacted the quality of our portfolio and that it may have actually improved it.

The woman I was talking to said “like Malcolm Gladwell describes in Blink.” And I nodded affirmatively.

There is another thing going on with our decision making at USV, which is that we are regularly taking the time to articulate to each other, and ideally the world at large, what we want to invest in and why.

That work, which we call thesis building, helps us make rapid decisions in the absence of time and information.

It is tempting to mourn the loss of careful and considered investing but from where I sit it seems gone for good, at least for early stage venture capital, so I think it’s a better use of our time to spend adapting to the market, as my partner Brad likes to say, and building the conviction to act quickly and decisively.

#VC & Technology

Generalist vs Specialist

At USV, we have a fairly narrow thesis that sets out what we want to invest in, but all of us work across all of our thesis areas. We see ourselves as generalists not specialists.

In an environment when everything is moving so fast, that can be challenging, as I wrote about on Tuesday.

But there are also great benefits to working this way. As a team, we benefit from working together on everything versus having silos within our partnership and firm.

And as individuals, there is something quite helpful about moving back and forth between domains. It stimulates the mind in ways that going deep and staying deep on one thing cannot.

There are many ways to build a successful investment business. Specializing in a specific domain works well for many firms.

But I personally prefer being a generalist. Being able to meet founders in multiple different sectors back to back to back is really something special. It challenges and opens the mind in a way that really works for me.

#VC & Technology

Staying Plugged In

I wrote in my 60th birthday post that my late career mantra is less hustle more conviction. It has been working for me and has kept me in the game.

But there are times, usually after an opening emerges, when a market moves so fast it is hard to stay on top of it all.

I don’t worry about missing out. That’s part of the venture capital business. Fear of missing out is a counterproductive emotion and I refuse to engage in it.

But I do worry about not understanding what is going on. When you stop understanding things, you are done. There is no way to be a great investor if you have no clue.

It is possible to surround yourself with others who can help you understand what is going on. I do that and I have terrific colleagues who keep me engaged in what’s happening. These colleagues are inside USV and also spread around many other firms too.

But at some level, you have to understand things yourself. Osmosis only works to a point. I find that you have to get your hands on the technology, use it, and feel it to understand it.

And that is the hard part when things go bananas as a market opens up. Less hustle works against you. And you have to find a way to engage in it all. That’s where I am right now.

#crypto#VC & Technology