I’ve been thinking a lot about ad blockers. I have always resisted using an ad blocker on the view that I value the web and mobile services I use and they need to make money somehow.

But there is a view that ads are unwanted and by opting out of them, you are forcing web and mobile services to come up with a better business model. Of course, I also wonder how many people that use an ad blocker would come out of pocket a couple bucks a month to pay for an ad-free version of the services they use. Pandora has had an ad-free version of its music service for years and I believe (not sure) that only about 5% of its users opt for that.

The idea of taking the business model decision out of the service’s hands and putting it into the user’s hands is interesting. If an ad blocker came with a micro-payments service that automatically paid the web or mobile service the same average revenue per user (ARPU) it was making via ads, that would be cool. That is quite possible with bitcoin and I am expecting we will see something like that emerge in the coming years.

I also think we will see browsers and possibly even mobile phones come with ad blockers built in. Would you swap browsers to get built in ad blocking? Would you swap mobile phones to get built in ad blockers?

One thing is for sure, ad blocking is not going away. If anything, it is growing appreciably.

So, let’s end this with a poll? Do you use an ad blocker, and if so, where?

do you use an ad blocker and if so, where?

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 16, 2016

One of the things I cherish about the AVC community is the civil and intelligent debate that goes on here. It has made me crystalize my thinking in ways that would not have happened without it. I was reminded of that when I read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on Antonin Scalia, in particular this part:

We disagreed now and then, but when I wrote for the Court and received a Scalia dissent, the opinion ultimately released was notably better than my initial circulation. Justice Scalia nailed all the weak spots—the “applesauce” and “argle bargle”—and gave me just what I needed to strengthen the majority opinion.

Debate and dissent are critical. If you can’t cite the opposing point of view on an issue, you may not have thought it through as well as you should.

When I think through all of our investment decisions at USV, it is the ones that we breezed through and got to an answer quickly where we made the biggest mistakes. Some of our best investment decisions started out with a strong dissenter or two, often me. I remember my indignation at the idea that we would invest in a search engine (duckduckgo). But others convinced me that I was wrong and that has turned out incredibly well for us.

Maybe the most important part of the title to this post is the word civil. Without civility (and respect), it is hard to have intelligent debate. Respecting those with opposing views, working to understand them, and listening closely to them is the key. Even if they don’t change your mind, they can reshape how you discuss and present your views. And that can make all the difference in the world.

Brian Armstrong, CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase, published this deck on Friday.

In the deck, Brian argues that the current debate over Bitcoin scaling is an “election” not a “split.”

There is certainly a raging debate in the bitcoin community about how to scale Bitcoin and the value of decentralization versus scalability. That debate has been going on for quite a while and may continue to go on for much longer. But one way or another, Bitcoin will eventually figure out how to scale. The process may be messy, but so is the process of electing a President. That’s one of the main points Brian makes in his deck.

Another important point Brian makes is the need for competition in core development. Since the beginning of Bitcoin, the development of Bitcoin’s core software has been done by a small group of developers who have come to be known as Bitcoin Core. That has led to a dependence that is not entirely healthy. Brian makes the comparison to web browsers where there are four competing browsers, all with more than 10% market share and none with more than 50% market share. Each browser development team competes to bring new technologies to market, some of which eventually get adopted by all of them. And consumers have the choice of which ones to use. That is a much healthier market architecture for sure.

For me, this scaling debate is not really about Core vs Classic or XT or any other version of the core protocol. I suspect in ten years none of them will be used. Much like nobody uses the Netscape browser anymore. This debate is about whether we want a truly diverse and distributed developer ecosystem building, innovating, and maintaining the software at the core of Bitcoin. And I think the answer to that question has to be yes. It’s just a question of how we get there.

The idea of Magic Johnson participating in a panel at a tech conference is pretty damn great in and of itself. But this is an important discussion and this panel captures a lot of great points. It’s long (45mins) but good.

Brandwatch on Twitter says that “chocolates, flowers, and teddy bears” are this year’s favorites

I am a fan of flowers but this year I’m going in a different direction.

What is your go to gift on valentines day?

A month or two ago our daughter Jessica asked us to get 23andMe kits and get our genes sequenced. Jessica wants to add some information from our results to hers so she can better understand her own genetic makeup. So the Gotham Gal and I did it a few weeks ago and we are now awaiting the results.

The 23andMe process requires that you set up a profile on their web service and answer some questions about yourself before submitting the saliva sample for processing. If you wish, you can give them a full health care profile which is almost exactly identical to the interview a new doctor will give you on your first visit (do you/did you smoke, do you/did you drink, are your parents alive, are they healthy, are you allergic to this and that, etc, etc). I went through the entire process and shared all of my medical history with 23andMe in great detail.

So now 23andMe will have a full medical history/profile of me plus my genetic makeup. That’s pretty cool.

I have some suggestions for them as a user.

First, I wish that I could connect my profile on 23andMe with Jessica’s profile on 23andMe as her father. And I wish that I could connect my profile to the Gotham Gal as her husband. In summary, I would like for us to build a family tree on their service so that the work Jessica wants to do can be done automatically by their software. That seems like an obvious thing to do in a service like 23andMe, but I looked around pretty hard and could not figure out how to do that.

Second, I would like to be able to authorize third party services (starting with my doctor’s Patient Fusion service) to access all of this genetic and medical information I have stored at 23andMe. I found the 23andMe API so that’s a good thing. But I could not find a marketplace of third party apps that connect to 23andMe via its API. That would be really useful.

Another thing I would like to be able to do is sync my 23andMe data with my mom’s genealogy data that she keeps on Ancestry.com. I believe she has some basic genetic information there on herself. That would inform my profile in the same way that my data informs Jessica’s profile.

The bottom line for me is that this data (genetic information and medical history) is really powerful stuff. It should not be held in silos. Users should have the power to move it around, connect it up, and share it with their medical providers, family members, and others who can benefit from this data.

This is a big part of our thesis in health care. Users are starting to get control of their own medical data and decide how it will be used and by whom. That will lead to better outcomes for everyone. I am very excited by the potential of what can happen when this is really happening at scale. And that feels like it is right around the corner now.

If you want to get a 23andMe kit, you can do that here.

It sure feels like the long awaited headwinds have arrived and the tailwinds are behind us for now. A friend sent me this chart today.

You could create a similar chart out of many tech sectors right now but SaaS is as good of an indicator of what’s happening out there as any.

I welcome this new environment. You might think “of course you do, you can buy things less expensively” but I would remind you that USV has a portfolio of investments that are unrealized at this point and subject to a chart like that.

I think any benefits we might get from a better buying environment are negated by the impact on our current positions.

The real reason I welcome the tougher environment is that it will make all of us better. We will have to make better decisions.  The market won’t bail us out. We will have to earn our returns instead of being handed them.

And I’m not just talking about investors. I’m talking about everyone working in tech startups. The going is getting tougher. Time for the tough to get going.

I went to the Crunchies last night for the first time. The Gotham Gal was nominated for “Angel Investor Of The Year” and she said, “If by some chance I win and I’m not there to accept, then I would be a jerk.” I agreed with that logic and so we went.

Chelsea Peretti, who hosted, is great. She is very funny. She made fun of tech, SF, and a bunch of other things, but in a good way. I think she is a great choice for host.

Diversity was the theme of the night. The best move was when Slack sent out a number of their female (and african american) engineers to accept one of several awards they won last night. That sent a message to everyone else. If they can do it, so can you. Well played Slack.

But the honest to god truth is most of the winners don’t care about the Crunchies. Not one winner of the big categories showed up to accept their award. So the Gotham Gal would have been in very good company had she not showed up.

And the other honest to god truth is award shows suck. Because there is no single best of anything. No best movie. No best TV show. No best musician. No best comedian. No best VC. No best startup. No best CEO.

And the idea that there is an anathema to me. Which is why I’ve never been to a Crunchies even when I was nominated.

I know I sound like a grump. Award shows are entertainment. People like them. And last night was entertaining thanks to Chelsea and Jordan Crook, who is also quite funny and talented.

But the final thing I will say on this is the reason why award shows exist is because all of the work that everyone does who aren’t nominated and don’t win. So entrepreneurs all over the world are the reason Techcrunch even gets to put on this show. Bill Gurley said as much last night in his gracious and wonderful acceptance speech. And he is right.

There are a number of companies that have user bases in the millions and operate public networks that encourage their users to share their opinions on everything. These companies face an interesting and challenging issue which is that their users are loud and vocal right inside their product about changes that are being contemplated or that have been made. Operating a business like this presents a unique challenge and opportunity to leverage this feedback channel but not become hostage to it.

I believe that one of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s greatest strengths is that they did not let themselves become hostage to the feelings of their user base. They did what they thought was in the best interest of their users and their service. The first time I saw this was the rollout of the news feed. I don’t recall when that was but I believe it was nine or ten years ago now. The users were furious about the new interface and the revelation of “too much information” being presented and shared in it. The Facebook team hung in there and stayed the course and today the Facebook news feed is possibly the most powerful user interface on the Internet.

Etsy, a company I am on the Board of and have been an investor in for ten years now, has always had a very lively community discussion board system for its sellers (and buyers). The sellers who hang out in this community service have often been critical of Etsy’s product and policies. Sometimes these boards turn very hostile and I have watched Etsy struggle with how to both internalize and manage this feedback. On one hand it has made Etsy more sensitive and responsive to the needs of its seller community (which is a very good thing and at the core of why Etsy works) but it has at times made Etsy defensive and hesitant to make necessary changes to its product and policies. I think the Etsy team has gotten to a good place over the years on this issue but it took a lot of learning and a good deal of pain to get there.

Of course, the reason I am choosing to write about this now is the latest uprising of the Twitter user base over the algorithmic feed. The hashtag , #riptwitter, conveys both the power of the community and the hostility that it can take towards a company. 

I have been a private (before leaving Twitter’s board) and public (long after) proponent of adding an algorithmic news feed to Twitter. I know that many users and most of the hard core users prefer the reverse chronological order of the Twitter timeline. I don’t and never have. My favorite feature on Twitter is “what you have missed” and I am in love with and completely dependent on gmail’s priority inbox. For some of us, having a service surface what is most important to us is incredibly valuable. For others, it is an invasion of their control and ability to determine that for themselves. It is like conservatives and liberals. There is no right way to view the world. There are many ways and we have to appreciate that what works for some of us doesn’t work for others.

Twitter has had the technology to provide an algorithmic feed for years. They acquired a company called Julpan in the fall of 2011 which had much of the tech that was necessary to produce an algorithmic news feed. Twitter’s technology in this area is much better today than it was four or five years ago. And maybe that is why they have waited so long to roll it out. But they could have, and I would argue should have, rolled it out years ago. And, of course, they could have and should have (and will) release it with an option to keep reverse chronological order as the default timeline for those who prefer it.

Gmail doesn’t force priority inbox on its users. You can get everything in your inbox or just what gmail thinks you want to see. I prefer the latter but many don’t. 

So those Twitter users who were tweeting #riptwitter last week should chill out and understand that the company is not going to take their believed reverse chronological timeline away from them. And Twitter should both respect and acknowledge these loyal and passionate users (which Jack did) and should also have the courage to do what is right and frankly long overdue.

Finding the right balance between listening to your users and becoming hostage to them is hard. When you operate a large and public channel for these users, it is even harder. Being a CEO requires great listening skills, the ability to really hear and internalize opposing views, and then, ultimately, the courage to make the decision and go with it. That is true in terms of managing your team and your company and it is also true in terms of managing your user base.