My friend Chris Burniske told me about this site last week and then tweeted about it last night:

So the answer to the question posed by the name of the website is “not really.”

But that doesn’t mean we won’t be someday.

This chart also shows the issues with highly valued chains like Ripple, Stellar, and NEO.

These chains offer some things, but certainly not decentralized consensus.

It is still very early days in the development of decentralized consensus systems and there is a lot more work to do.

One of the least discussed aspects of investing in startups is the value of the time commitment one makes to a company they invest in.

The money part is pretty simple; you invest capital into a business and get an equity participation in the upside. Both sides of that deal can analyze that transaction and understand it fairly well. Of course neither side knows what the ultimate payoff will be, but one can handicap it.

The time piece of the transaction is way more complicated.

Consider:

1/ The founder doesn’t know if they will actually get the investor to deliver on the promises made to add value and spend a lot of time on the investment. A founder can reference an investor and get a better sense of this but there is nothing written into an investment agreement that binds either party to make a specific time commitment to an investment.

2/ An investor doesn’t know for how long they may need to contribute to an investment. Will it be three years, five years or fifteen years?

3/ A founder doesn’t know how much of their time they will have to spend managing their investor group. Will the group be invasive and annoying or will it be value adding and helpful, or both?

4/ An investor doesn’t know if they will have to shore up a weak team with a ton of day to day support or if the team will be largely self sufficient and only need occasional advice and counsel.

I could continue with these examples but I think you get the idea.

Time is a valuable resource for all parties and it should be a factor that both sides include in the deal making analysis. But it often is not.

A good example of where it is explicitly considered is a late stage financing where a company specifically seeks out “passive capital.” In that scenario, both sides are choosing to largely remove the time equation from the investment analysis and simply treat the deal as an exchange of capital for equity. That is clean and simple and well understood.

Contrast that with a hotly contested seed transaction where a founder has demand for 5x what they want to raise. Every investor is promising to add value to get into the deal. The founder has to assign some value to the time each investor will contribute along with capital but has very little information to do so. The truth about these situations is a few seed investors will massively over deliver and the rest will massively dissapoint.

As an early stage VC who typically invests at the seed and Series A stage, I feel that the time piece of the equation in our deal making is the hardest part to get right. We should price our time into the investment math. We should pay a premium valuation for an investment that will require less time from us. And we should get a discount for an investment that will require a lot of our time.

We do consciously think about this in our deal making but we don’t have a crystal ball and we get this part wrong a lot. I have spent huge investments of time on situations that have not moved the needle for us and likely won’t. And I have been involved in companies that have delivered fantastic returns to us and our partners with very little effort on our part.

If one has time to evaluate the time commitment issue as part of an investment process, it becomes a bit easier for both sides to get this right. A rushed financing makes it harder and can lead to miscalculations on both sides.

Like everything in business (and life), you learn about this by getting it wrong. Founders and investors with a lot of experience understand the importance of this and factor time heavily into their investment decision making. And that leads to a healthier dynamic for everyone.

One of the crypto projects I am most excited about is Filecoin, which comes from USV portfolio company Protocol Labs, which also produced the popular hypermedia protocol IPFS.

In this talk, from the Blockstack Berlin conference last month, Protocol Labs founder/CEO Juan Benet talks about Filecoin, why they are building it, and how it will work.

Jacqueline got me about five seconds into the video with this line “a lifestyle brand for nerds that is dipped in super girly magical girl aesthetics.”

Anything that breaks down the societal norms that girls can’t be nerds is right in my wheelhouse and I backed this project with excitement.

For much of yesterday if you came to AVC, you were greeted with this message:

Long time AVC readers have seen this before and it is a sign that something is awry on the shared server that I run WordPress on at Bluehost.

A number of regular readers reached out offering to help me move to a static platform and I will likely take them up on that.

Until then I can only apologize for the availability issues yesterday.

A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?”

I answered “Dapps.”

If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting decentralized applications (Dapps) we can use.

Our portfolio company Blockstack offers a decentralized platform that developers can build Dapps on.

I have Blockstack’s web client running in Safari on my home desktop and here is a screenshot of some of the Dapps I can run in that environment:

A cool thing about Blockstack is that identity is built into the platform so I am already a user and have a profile in every one of these Dapps because I have a Blockstack identity/profile.

Another ecosystem that is really taking off right now are Ethereum based Dapps.

I use our portfolio company Coinbase‘s Toshi Dapp Browser to access them. Toshi is available on both iOS and Android.

When you launch Toshi, you can put some ETH into it. Toshi has a user-controlled ETH wallet inside of the browser.

When I open the Toshi browser on my phone, I see a bunch of Dapps I can use:

I like the Twitter-like app called Peepeth, which looks like this inside of Toshi:

But there are hundreds of Ethereum Dapps you can discover and use inside of Toshi.

You do need some ETH to power these apps so if you want to play around with Ethereum Dapps, load up your Dapp browser with ETH before you go.

The bottom line for me is that we are finally seeing some useful decentralized applications being built for consumers on these blockchains.

Right as the market for capital raising and speculating on crypto cools off.

As it always is.

I woke up this morning thinking about disappointment.

My daughter and I went to the final Knicks home game of the season last night, a loss to the Cavs. One of 53 we have endured this season.

The season had started off with expectations of better times. Melo was gone. KP was emerging as one of the best young players in the NBA.

And yet we end the season with less wins and more losses than last year. And it wasn’t because of letting Melo go.

But this post is not about the Knicks.

It is about disappointment.

Life is full of disappointment.

Many things don’t work out the way we hope or plan.

Investments don’t pan out.

People we are excited about don’t live up to our expectations.

A film we are excited to see turns out to be awful.

There are big and material disappointments that can set us back for years or longer.

And there are little ones, like the terrible Knicks, that we should be able to shake off in a good night of sleep.

I think this Knicks thing will take me a few nights to be honest.

It is often tempting to become cynical and lower our expectations to protect us from the pain of disappointment.

But I don’t think we should do that.

I think it is human to hope and expect.

And it is human to feel the pains of disappointment.

We just need to shake them off, get out of bed with a jump in our step, and move forward.

And find something new to get excited about.

And start the cycle all over again.

I was going through my email this morning and opening pitch decks, skimming them, and responding to indicate if they are a fit with our thesis and of interest to me and my colleagues at USV.

Everyone who works in VC or does angel investing does this daily. I probably open and skim 10-20 pitch decks a day and sometimes a lot more.

So on the way to yoga, after making a dent in my inbox, I was thinking if there was an alternative to pitch decks that would be as efficient at communicating the idea (pitch decks really are great at this) that would serve the entrepreneur as well.

I came up with three ideas in my seven minute walk to the gym:

1/ Record a short video (less than three minutes) in which you communicate who you are (or who the team is), what the idea is, and why you are doing it. Post it to Vimeo behind a password and share it via email. We use a technique like this in our analyst interview process and you can convey a lot of information this way but, importantly, you can also communicate who you are and why you are doing it.

2/ Have a friend or colleague interview you in podcast format. Keep it to three to five minutes max. Then post it to a streaming platform like SoundCloud behind a password and share it via email. I like the interview format a lot. It allows you to script the Q&A but provide a lot of personality in the answers.

3/ Write a letter, like the letters some founders and CEOs put at the start of their IPO filings, that explains your vision and why you are doing this. A well written letter can be an incredible sales tool.

The key is finding a format that suits you and that you are comfortable with. The pitch deck is efficient and powerful but everyone uses it and it does not allow you to stand out and be noticed in a sea of pitch decks.

Whatever you do, keep it short. If someone is going through 10-20 pitches every morning in their email routine, you have to get your story across simply and crisply or it won’t get the attention it deserves.

Finally, please don’t punish my good deed of sharing these ideas by flooding my inbox with videos, podcasts, and letters this week. I have a very busy week and am already behind before the week gets started.

And don’t take this blog post as a message to stop sending me pitch decks and replace with one of these alternatives. Pitch decks work fine for me. I like them.

I’m just staying that you can and should be creative and play to your strengths when pitching your company. You have to get noticed somehow.

We have many voice assistants in our lives.

I have Google Assistant on my phone. It is great.

The Gotham Gal has Siri on her phone. It is OK.

We have Amazon Alexa and Google Home in our apartment.

We have Siri on our AppleTV/Siri Remote.

We can talk to our car.

But the honest truth is we rarely use any of them.

The one we use most is the Siri Remote when using AppleTV because it is by far the best way to control that device.

It is not an issue of the quality of the voice recognition on these services. It is great.

It is a question of the relatively weak utility of the experience relative to alternatives combined with not building the muscle memory to use voice assistants more.

I was walking home from the gym this morning and was wondering if we are typical.

So I just ran this Twitter poll:

Do you regularly use a voice assistant in your life?:

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) April 8, 2018

Twitter polls only allow for four options so this is far from scientific and also suffers from the bias inherent in my Twitter followership.

But almost 500 replies in, over 60% replied no.

About 20% say they use a voice assistant regularly in their home.

And about 10% say they use a voice assistant on their phone.

I’m happy to learn that we are not in the luddite category when it comes to voice assistants.

More like the mainstream.

But certainly not in the early adopter cohort which is not small.

It does make me wonder how many of those Alexas and Google Homes are sitting around collecting dust.