In this talk that he gave at the Blockstack Berlin conference last month, my partner Albert argues that privacy is a strategy and not a core value in the information age.

A group of high school students in NYC are doing a gun safety rally in Washington Square Park on April 20th and are funding the rally on our portfolio company, GoFundMe.

The campaign is called NYC Says Enough and you can back it here.

I don’t know these students, but one of them reached out to me via email and I asked him a bunch of questions which he answered to my satisfaction.

So I backed the project this morning and am now sharing it with all of you.

I am closing comments today because I don’t want this post to turn into an acrimonious gun safety debate.

It’s been a busy week on the USV news front. On Tuesday we rolled out our new thesis and yesterday we announced our latest investment, ShopShops.

I was talking to a young woman this week who we are interviewing for our two-year analyst program. I asked her why she was interested in working at USV.

She told me she liked that we posted our investment memos on our blog so that everyone knows why we made the investment, how it fits with our thesis, and why we are excited about it.

That is something we have been doing since the early days and is core to how we approach investing at USV.

You can go back and look at what we were thinking when we invested in Twitter, Twilio, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and pretty much any USV investment.

We don’t write investment memos for the files at USV, something I used to do at earlier VC firms I worked at. We just write them to the world. It puts our thinking out there and it stays there in perpetuity.

So yesterday Rebecca did that for our newest investment, ShopShops.

I like to think of ShopShops as what QVC would be in a global decentralized world where everything is live streamed on our phones.

This graphic from their website explains how it works:

Basically, hosts go into stores and livestream shopping experiences to viewers all over the world who can buy from stores they aren’t able to shop in.

This is a screenshot of ShopShops founder Liyia Wu doing a shopping event for viewers in China.

Time will tell if our investment in ShopShops lives up to everything we are expecting from it.

But I am excited by this idea, this founder, and this investment and I am thrilled we made it and told the world why.

I use Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones when I’m on my desktop and laptop but I prefer the Apple AirPods when I am on my phone. They are small, light, and fit well in my ear.

But I’ve had this nagging issue with the volume on my AirPods when I stream music on my phone (SoundCloud, AppleMusic, YouTube, etc).

The volume from all of those apps is super low when you use AirPods on Android.

I wasn’t walking much in LA, mostly driving with my phone bluetooth’d to my car, and this issue didn’t affect me much.

But since I’ve been back in NYC and walking a lot again, it came back with a vengeance.

So I finally figured out how to fix it, by simply googling and finding this Reddit post.

Here is how you fix it:

1/ Go to the settings app on your Android phone, scroll down to System, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Build Number” seven times. That makes you a developer on Android, always a good thing in my book.

2/ Now when you click on the Settings app, and select System, you will see “Developer Options”

3/ Scroll down to the Networking settings in the Developer Options and turn on “Disable Absolute Volume”

Now you can listen to music and video on your Android with your AirPods at whatever volume you want.

Problem fixed.

I love the Internet and geek stuff like this.

At USV, we are thesis-driven investors. We state clearly and concisely what we want to invest in and, implicitly, decide not to invest in anything else. That is a good thing because, as our partner Rebecca wrote in this post:

The commitment to a thesis is part of the fiber of USV–a shared set of ideas creates a framework that allows us to operate with focus and work on what matters most

Today we are publishing, and committing ourselves to, version 3.0 of our thesis:

USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols.

But this is actually the fourth USV thesis.

When we started USV, Brad and I committed this to our investors (before this was tweetable):

At USV, we will invest in the applications layer of the Internet.

That was an acknowledgment that, in 2003, we had moved beyond what Carlota Perez calls the installation phase and had reached the deployment phase.

But we quickly realized that the applications layer thesis was too big and we needed to narrow our focus. So in 2006/2007, we started focusing exclusively on networks that were quickly amassing large users bases on the web. That was eventually articulated by our partner Brad in this tweet:

USV in 140 characters: invest in large networks of engaged users, differentiated by user experience, and defensible though network effects

— Brad Burnham (@BradUSV) June 8, 2011

By 2013, we knew that the network thesis was long in the tooth and had started adjusting to that fact. We had gotten interested in the blockchain sector in 2011 and had also started building large portfolios in fintech, education, and health care. Our partner Andy finally forced the issue and we went public with what he called “Thesis 2.0” but was actually the third revision.

As the market matures, we look for less obvious network effects,
infrastructure for the new economy, and enablers of open decentralized
data

— Andy Weissman (@aweissman) December 15, 2015

And now we find ourselves again iterating slightly on what we are focused on. And so we turned to the newest member of our partnership, Rebecca, to explain it to the world.

The @usv thesis in its new 3.0 version (but still less than 140 characters) to reflect our current focus: USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. More on why here: https://t.co/ogKFH4DUNZ

— Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46) April 3, 2018

One of the things I like most about Thesis 3.0 is that is a modest adjustment to where we have been with our prior efforts, but we have tightened things up and added a few nuances. Like the prior iterations of our thesis, we have already been investing behind this thesis and you can see elements of it here and elsewhere in our recent investing activity. Notably, the words blockchain and crypto are nowhere to be found in thesis 3.0 but it leads us inexorably there.

Our portfolio company Cloudflare announced a consumer DNS service (a resolver) yesterday.

It was not an April Fools stunt.

If you want to use the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service, then head over to 1.1.1.1 and click the install button.

What you will do is adjust your computer’s settings to change the DNS servers your computer uses to resolve DNS queries (what server address is google.com?).

Here are some mantras from the 1.1.1.1 web page:

Unfortunately, by default, DNS is usually slow and insecure. Your ISP, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Creepily, some DNS providers sell data about your Internet activity or use it target you with ads.

We think that’s gross. If you do too, now there’s an alternative: 1.1.1.1

and

We will never log your IP address (the way other companies identify you). And we’re not just saying that. We’ve retained KPMG to audit our systems annually to ensure that we’re doing what we say.

Frankly, we don’t want to know what you do on the Internet—it’s none of our business—and we’ve taken the technical steps to ensure we can’t.

and

So if you want speed and privacy, install 1.1.1.1 and you will get both.

Happy Easter everyone.

I would also like to wish folks a happy Passover.

My topic today are Easter Eggs. Not the kind that kids find hidden in the back yard, but little features that developers hide in the software applications they build.

I love Easter Eggs in software apps and I encourage our portfolio companies to allow this practice in their engineering teams.

Easter Eggs bring whimsy and fun to software, something I feel that is badly needed and much appreciated by users.

And a good example of an Easter Egg, likely a result of today also being April Fool’s Day, is Waldo showing up in my Google Maps this morning. Well done Google.

I heard the news last night that the $6mm that Governor Cuomo was seeking for K12 CS Education was not included in the final NY State budget. I had blogged about this issue at the start of this week.

UPDATE: It appears I heard wrong and that the $6mm did make it into the budget. If that is the case, then it is great news.

In this short (50 sec) video, NYC Mayor de Blasio explains why this is so important. We need more leaders like him who will put themselves out there on this issue, make it a priority, and fight for it.

I backed this cool pothole art project this morning.

This is the very kind of thing that our portfolio company Kickstarter makes possible.