Posts from Web/Tech

Fiber To Home

I’ve been working on getting a fiber internet connection to the home we are quarantining in. With nine of us living and working from home together, we are consuming a lot of bandwidth. And with everyone on our block doing more or less the same thing, the cable internet connections we all have are bogged down.

As I understand it, cable internet suffers from a few problems relative to fiber. The bandwidth in cable is usually (always?) non symmetric, meaning the upload speeds are not nearly as good as the download speeds. For applications like browsing the web, that’s fine. For applications like videoconferencing, that’s not so fine.

I also believe that cable bandwidth is frequently shared with your neighbors whereas fiber is usually a direct connection to the telco’s main internet connection. That means if your neighbors are using a lot of bandwidth, that can slow you down if you use cable, but not if you have fiber.

These are things I’ve heard over the years and believe to be true but I am happy to be corrected on Twitter (click the button below) if I am wrong about any of this.

In any case, we are moving to fiber in an effort to make our large group work from home situation a bit better for everyone. And I suspect that I am not the only one doing this right now.

USV has two fiber investments, Ting (owned by Tucows) and Pilot, and I believe that both will see demand for their services increase this year and beyond as we all need and want more bandwidth.

#Web/Tech

Do People Care About Privacy?

I got a lot of feedback on my post yesterday and a bunch of it was around the issue of privacy and whether we really care to keep our personal data private.

I think we are increasingly aware of our data and the need to have more control over it and how it is used.

When people ask me about this, I like to show them this chart:

That is the daily search traffic on our portfolio company DuckDuckGo’s private search engine.

The 65mm searches a day on DuckDuckGo is about 1% of Google’s estimated 7bn searches a day.

But it is also the case that search activity on DuckDuckGo is growing faster than Google’s search activity. If that continues to be the case, then that 1% can grow to something much more than that over the next decade.

People do care about privacy, but the sacrifices we make for privacy must come at a low enough cost that we will make them. As DuckDuckGo has improved its product, more people have used it. The combination of increasing awareness of the issue of data privacy combined with better user experiences for privacy-focused competitors will drive us all to an online experience where privacy has a lot more value to everyone.

#Web/Tech

The Internet

I linked to a post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince the other day. In it, he wrote:

The super heroes of this crisis are clearly the medical professionals at the front lines saving people’s lives and the scientists searching for a cure. But the faithful sidekick that’s helping us get through this crisis — still connected to our friends, loved ones, and, for those of us fortunate enough to be able to continue work from home, our jobs — is the Internet.

The data is kind of incredible. My friend Paul sent me this from Akamai:

– Since the week of Feb 10th, Akamai has seen a 30% increase in traffic in four countries with early lock-downs (China, South Korea, Japan, Italy) vs. RoW.

– Since the week of March 9th as more countries implemented lock-downs, global traffic saw 30% Y/Y growth vs. 3% on average

–  Peak traffic has more than doubled Y/Y to 167 Tbps.

– AKAM execs calling it the “greatest spike in Internet traffic the company has ever experienced”

Cloudflare is seeing similar numbers.

Big cloud providers are investing massively in their infrastructure to keep up.

I was on a Zoom yesterday and the clarity of the picture was remarkable. I thought to myself, “how are they doing this when everyone is using this service?”

And the answer, of course, is that Zoom doesn’t have to provide all of the bandwidth for their service. We all do.

Netflix doesn’t have to provide all of the bandwidth for their service. We all do.

The decentralized architecture of the internet is showing itself off right now. And it is a beautiful thing to behold.

#Web/Tech

Firefox Better Web (with Scroll)

Ad blockers are hugely popular. Close to 800mm people around the world use them to avoid intrusive ads and data collection. I do not use an ad-blocker but I completely understand why one would choose to do so.

And yet much of the media business is supported by advertising. There are a growing number of subscription-based media services, but many people cannot or won’t pay for content and the vast majority of content consumed on the web is advertising supported.

So USV has long felt that a subscription-based ad blocker would make a lot of sense. Ad-supported publications could opt-in to get a piece of the subscription revenue and agree to block ads to the subscribers who have the ad blocker.

And that is why we invested in our portfolio company Scroll which makes exactly that.

And today, Scroll and Firefox are launching Firefox Better Web, which is a service inside of Firefox ($2.50 a month to start and $5 a month in time).

I downloaded the latest version of Firefox this morning and signed up. It went like this:

I signed up by giving my email address and entering my payment credentials.

And then I added the Scroll browser extension and was good to go.

I visited SB Nation and got an ad-free experience.

Which compares to this experience in my Chrome browser without Scroll (Scroll works on Chrome too)

The partnership between Firefox and Scroll makes a ton of sense. Firefox has long been committed to privacy and making the web work better for its users. If you use Firefox try the Better Web service. And if you use Chrome or another browser, you can get Scroll and experience more or less the same thing there too.

#Web/Tech

Videoconferencing's Moment

I am going to spend much of today in my Zoom room participating in several meetings around the country and around the world.

If you look at Zoom’s stock price over the last month, since the outbreak of the Coronavirus, you will see that the market thinks that I am not the only one who will be doing that.

The combination of limiting travel due to Coronavirus fears and the desire to lower carbon footprints tells me that we may have reached videoconferencing’s moment.

Maybe attending a meeting in person is a thing of that past and video’ing in is our future. If so, we may look back at this winter of 2020 as the moment that happened.

#Current Affairs#Web/Tech

Tech in 2020: Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

Our friend Benedict Evans posted his annual “macro trends” deck this weekend.

You can also download the PDF here.

In the deck, Benedict poses the question “what is the next S-Curve?”

And while he doesn’t exactly answer that question, these two slides are revealing:

There is a lot more in the deck, particularly around regulatory issues in tech and it is well worth a quick skim this morning.

#mobile#regulation 2.0#VC & Technology#Web/Tech

Justworks

I just posted about USV’s investment in Justworks on the USV blog.

I have known Isaac Oates for over a decade and he’s a terrific entrepreneur and has built a great company which offers a fantastic HR solution to small and mid sized companies.

If you don’t love the payroll and benefits solution your company uses, go here and find out how Justworks can change that for you and your employees.

#entrepreneurship#management#Web/Tech

Tech:NYC at the NYSE

Tech:NYC is NYC’s tech industry advocacy group. According to its 2019 Annual Report, Tech:NYC has over 800 member companies representing all shapes and sizes of tech companies in NYC. I am the co-chair of Tech:NYC.

Today, the NYSE decided to celebrate tech startups in NYC (some of whom will eventually make their way to the NYSE) by inviting the leaders of Tech:NYC and some member companies to ring the opening bell.

This tweet has a short video that shows the scene as it unfolded:

Here is a photo if you can’t see the tweet:

If you are a tech company in NYC and want to be part of Tech:NYC, please go here and learn about the member companies, what it takes to become a member, and join.

#NYC#Web/Tech

Stack Today, Stack Tomorrow

Our portfolio company Stack Overflow (which I like to call Stack) is an Internet Treasure. My friend Mark Pincus introduced me to the concept of an Internet Treasure many years ago and I am a fan of the notion.

In my view, an Internet Treasure is a service on the Internet that is wide open, gets better when more people use it, and solves a need that many/all of us have. Wikipedia is an Internet Treasure. Quizlet is an Internet Treasure. Reddit is an Internet Treasure. And Stack is an Internet Treasure. There are many more out there but you get the idea.

Stack has a new leader and his name is Prashanth Chandrasekar. Prashanth wrote a “State of the Company” post yesterday on the Stack blog and I would like to highlight a few sections from it.

First, this is what an Internet Treasure looks like by the numbers:

Across Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, we saw around 10 billion page views from 100+ million unique visitors over the course of 2019.

In 2019, Stack Overflow added over 2.8 million answers and 2.6 million new questions, with over 1.7 million new users joining the community. There are now over 18 million questions and 27 million answers on Stack Overflow, and over 150,000 people sign up for a Stack Overflow account each month, 12 years after we started.

Every day, users answer thousands of questions on topics like cloud technology, container orchestration, and machine learning. There is an ever growing trove of knowledge on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Our community members and volunteer moderators handled almost two million flags to keep inaccurate, abusive, unwelcoming, or inappropriate content off the site and in line with our updated Code of Conduct.

Hundreds of thousands of engineers leveraged the power of Stack Overflow for Teams to better collaborate and ship products faster.

Over 40,000 jobs were posted on Stack Overflow Jobs in 2019. We now have over 1,000,000 searchable profiles of developers who are interested in being contacted about a job on Stack Overflow Talent.

Almost a million developers found new and useful tools after seeing a company advertise on one of our sites. 

New leaders don’t want to sit still. They arrive, take measure of the people and the business, and then make big plans.

And this is how Prashanth is thinking about the future of Stack:

1/ Continue to invest in the community, insure that the Code Of Conduct evolves to mantain the trust and safety of the community, and broaden the number of developers who fully engage in a the community.

2/ Continue improve and invest in Stack Overflow For Teams which allows organizations to use the same tool for internal knowledge sharing as they use for external knowledge sharing

3/ Expand the Advertising and Talent offerings to offer developers easy access to new tools and new career opportunities.

4/ Build and expand the team so that the Company can be responsive to the needs of developers and move quickly to adapt as the developer ecosystem changes.

5/ Stay true to the mission of supporting the needs of developers and technical workers and help them succeed in their jobs and develop their careers.

I am excited to see Stack flourish under Prashanth’s new leadership. That’s what we should want for all of our Internet Treasures.

#management#Web/Tech

Managing Multiple Twitter Handles

Like Mitt Romney and Kevin Durant, I manage multiple Twitter handles. Although neither is a secret handle.

I use @fredwilson for my personal tweets and I use @avc for this blog. I have done that since I joined Twitter in the spring of 2007.

The idea is to keep AVC blog discussions on @avc and leave @fredwilson for other things. That isn’t how it plays out however and on a day with a lot of discussion about AVC posts (like the last two days), I get reactions on both and engage actively on both.

Moving back and forth between Twitter handles on the Twitter mobile app is a breeze. You just add a second profile to the mobile app and you can switch back and forth in the profile view.

I have not found that to be as easy in a desktop browser and so I run two browsers, one where I am logged in on @fredwilson and the other where I am logged in on @avc. If there is a better way to do this, I would love to know what it is.

I know most people manage multiple email addresses, one for personal, another for business, and possibly a few more. I do not do that and use my main email address for everything. So I can’t explain why I don’t do the same on social media, but I don’t. And both approaches seem to work well for me.

#mobile#Web/Tech